Variations on an Ontological Theme.

Mr. Doubt. Sir, I have the time, for my stop is the end of the line. Convince me of something. Convince me of God, I am bored by the news of politics, Wimbledon fortnight is not for another half-year, and the general hubbub dazes me.

Mr. Roundabout. Sir, it is not within my powers simply to convince you 'pon a train journey of the deepest question in existence. Although I may be able to bubble the cauldron stew with a little applied fire. Let us propose an experiment, as Monsieur Descartes, to what extent are you willing to believe a thing?

Mr. Doubt. My answer will not be satisfactory, for in truth I and all others believe many things which are most inaccurate. For example, I believe it is half past seven in the morning but I appreciate that, in objective terms, those words mean nothing whatsoever. They do not quantify a quantifiable thing: the rotational voyage of our planetary body, but they symbolise for our convenience where we are in respect to our daily affairs. So too I recognise that my belief I am somewhere between Chatham and Bromley is really but a form of gauging, for what is a Chatham and what a Bromley? I am as much on earth as the polar bear.

Mr. Roundabout. Let us test the truth and stress the truth. Are you certain that you exist at least?

Mr. Doubt. To the extent that I may claim certainty of anything, yes, I claim it of that fact, though what exactly I am perhaps no one can answer. Is my existence truly dream stuff? A consortium and assemblage of I know not what? Atoms alone? Alas to be a particle!

Mr. Roundabout. Then let us with Descartes dismiss all else as illusory, even me, but dwelling on your certainty provide for the fact that you are a real and extant being. Now we must consider God and the definition of God. Beginning with a very crude notion, would you say that God in order to be God must be the most intelligent being in existence, and the most powerful?

Mr Doubt. I would say so, but I anticipate problems.

Mr. Roundabout. Well given that definition, and provided only you certainly exist, we know at one and the same time that God exists and you are Him.

Mr Doubt. That is not my idea of God.

Mr. Roundabout. And why not?

Mr. Doubt. I suppose, for one thing, my idea of God is someone other than myself.

Mr. Roundabout. But we have already admitted that there is nothing certainly true but yourself.

Mr. Doubt. Why then do I perceive a wealth of things beyond myself?

Mr. Roundabout. Either because they have some reality to them also, or because the perception originates within you. Indeed this latter argument might be very fruitful, for it would show how very omnipotent a god you are. It may be that, being God, you take a half-holiday in eternity by voluntarily forgetting your own divinity.

Mr. Doubt. You are only being comical now.

Mr. Roundabout. Perhaps I am being comical but I cannot think that I am only being such, the argument is fulfilled by the admission and definition. It seems to me that the definition I provided of God is not adequate for you.

Mr. Doubt. It is adequate but I do not think it sufficient. It is true certainly, but it is not the whole truth.

Mr. Roundabout. What is the whole truth?

Mr. Doubt. I would say: 'God is a being, the most intelligent and the most powerful, because supremely intelligent and supremely powerful.' Now that is a difference, for if I alone exist I may be the former but not the latter.

Mr. Roundabout. If you alone exist it may be that you are both, though for a spell you choose not to know it.

Mr. Doubt. Laughs.

Mr. Roundabout. I am serious. How could you be anything else if you alone certainly exist? Your existence must fill the infinite space of existence supremely in every way.

Mr. Doubt. Is that necessary?

Mr. Roundabout. I think so.

Mr. Doubt. But we cannot say it is certainly necessary simply by the former admission which was, namely, that I can only be certain of my existence in this world.

Mr. Roundabout. Of course, this Cartesian foundation of our debate is a description of feeling, we have no doubt. But because we are human beings, and everything in which we are concerned is involved in feeling, it is a very good foundation and we will proceed from it. I do think this follows from the premise, but in order to show as much I will ask of you a question. What is the utility of  a premise in the first place?

Mr. Doubt. I believe it is to make a beginning of a discussion.

Mr. Roundabout. Certainly, therefore it does not function in and of itself but, on the contrary, its whole purpose is to provide a basis for secondary deductions. Without these secondary deductions it is not a premise at all, so that whoever will browbeat Descartes for his deductions, while they admire his premise, are in error. There is no premise without its deductions.

Mr. Doubt. I see, and you are now preparing to offer me your deductions I gather?

Mr. Roundabout. I am. When I say that your existence proving alone certain to you, and even grant that very certainty for a truth, I do make the boldest of claims that you must certainly be God, and that, in very truth, to say you are the most intelligent and powerful being in existence is identical with saying you are Supremely intelligent and Supremely powerful.

Mr. Doubt. I cannot see how that follows.

Mr. Roundabout. It is very simple. If you alone exist, and we have granted the fact, then there is nothing which you are not. Nothing which is perceived by you, nothing which is deduced, nothing which is imagined, nothing which appears by chance, nothing which is taught or learned or created, or follows by absolute logic, is anything but yourself. All these things you are, with no exception, that is a necessary truth. It is a fact which follows the premise.

Mr. Doubt. I begin to grasp your meaning, although, to quote Henry V in that excellent film Becket, when he addressed the renowned martyr, I think there is something not quite right with your reasoning.

Mr. Roundabout. I am not surprised you feel that way, as I am similarly convinced there is something not quite right with what I say, but I must correct you in one respect. There is nothing wrong with my reasoning, I trust. I think what I say follows very truly and naturally. The problem is in the supposition, the premise. I will correct it eventually, but not till the very end, for I assure you that the result is frankly identical. We are led to the last conclusion the same, that God exists.

Mr. Doubt. It is an unique course you follow, to convince me of the same truth by a false premise.

Mr. Roundabout. A single hair divides the false and true, but where? In our minds. If, in our eccentric ways, we can be led to the right answer by apparently incorrect methods, it is of no matter. In such a way I often provided a correct answer as a boy to questions of mathematics, with apparently incorrect calculations. We enter into this world as into a vast and pitch black cave system, with only instinct for a very faint torch, and anon the moisture dripping from the stalactites extinguishes it. All confidence, all certainty, all methods, all apparatus, are only other kinds of torches, but be not complacent of anything. Faith is the impulse of instinct, it has guided us always, and always will. Arrogance engenders almost as a self-defence mechanism, and comes by too little adventuring inside the mind.

Mr. Doubt. That is well said, yet I fancy I have two objections to your theory, though they may seem to you banal, still they are objections.

Mr. Roundabout. I should be glad to hear them.

Mr. Doubt. Well in the first instance you are assuming existence is infinite, and that this infinity can be applied to human terms such as intellect and power. In the second instance you contend that this existence can be considered as a single thing, whereas I believe most people consider existence to be a gigantic array of separate things. The unity is only in our minds, for convenience sake, we call it 'the universe' for we cannot name all its parts in a breath.

Mr. Roundabout. These are good objections and I suppose one must consider the nature of any single thing in the first place in order to answer them. Consider a single pebble taken up from the beach. It seems to me that, by your logic, what is really taken up into the hand in this case is an immeasurable quantity of separate things. I say immeasurable instead of infinite for in mathematics and physics generally they confound the one with the other. This is all very well, but it is incumbent on you to say why and how these multitudinous parts to the pebble are separated. Can you explain, for example, the nature of their separation, and how interaction occurs across their voids?

Mr. Doubt. I suppose I would have to answer you by propounding a theory of space, which I do not feel knowledgeable enough to do. All that occurs to me at once is that there is a three dimensional framework of emptiness within which the matter operates.

Mr. Roundabout. And by emptiness do you mean complete emptiness and total void? A true vacuum? That being the case how could anything survive inside it without destroying its essential nature?

Mr. Doubt. I cannot say, but I trust that physicists consider carefully all the things they theorise.

Mr. Roundabout. I am sure they do, but it is only those who look into physics from the outside who think its doctors have a complete insight into the universe. Max Born himself said, 'I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy', and this is true to the extent the scientific method can be harnessed. How could it be otherwise? Yet beyond the empirical, Sir David Attenborough once said regarding God that he could not help wondering if he lacked the senses to perceive Him, as blind termites had lacked the senses to see him looking down into their colony. It is the business of science to rigorously scrutinise that which can be scrutinised: the immediate presence of the world before us. But whether a man thinks the universe finite or infinite, there is no question of its vastness, so that by all candid admission only an infinitesimally diminutive amount of it could ever be studied with adequate rigour. That is why science cannot pronounce judgement as to the existence of God, as scalpels cannot fell trees.

Mr. Doubt. I understand you, but why then do you take on trust an infinity and an unity which science cannot validate?

Mr. Roundabout. Because both logic and emotion seem to me to point to that direction. Faith and hope should not be dismissed for frivolous deceivers, they both of them can be frivolous and deceiving of course, but so too can much empirical fact. Without faith and hope human life is simultaneously worthless and insupportable. Therefore, in the name of the truest fulfilment of these vital emotions, mankind incline to the belief in God. For once purpose is attributed to existence entire it is attributed to us also, so hope and happiness are caused; but if it remains unattributed to existence entire it must of necessity remain unattributed to us, so defeat and despair are caused. That is the essence of Pascal's wager, the call to positive doctrine.

Mr. Doubt. I do not doubt this for the main motive in theistic belief, but I cannot agree it is a forceful reason for such a belief. I might wish to be immortal but that does not make me so.

Mr. Roundabout. Certainly not, but that is an unreasonable belief. For a man to think himself immortal is fundamentally to disprove his own definition, whereas of course the definition of God is fulfilled and perfectly accordant with an infinite and eternal existence. The hope therefore in God is a reasonable hope as the definition befits the thing.

Mr. Doubt. That may be true theoretically but practically it seems improbable. How can there be so vast and unifying a being to a universe which seems, by all observation, to  be devoid of life and inert?

Mr. Roundabout. That is a matter of logic. I have explained why hope and faith are both necessary and reasonable, but that they each require fit definitions for fit objects in order to be true. Yet when it comes to the logical case for theism there is even more impulsion. For while hope and faith draw up a treaty of belief in infinity, so as to prepare a fit object for their energies, logic ratifies it by a careful reflection upon nature. Ten divided by three does not yield an infinite answer but an immeasurable answer because the measurement system is flawed. Nine times in ten when infinity as a word is used it is used incorrectly to mean recurring to a point we cannot reach, or repeating on itself due to some flaw of calculation. The real meaning of infinity is not finite, which also means not limited. Now such a thing cannot be said of any common object in our experience, a lemon, a stone, a person, a bird, for it is incumbent in the definitions of these things that they should be designated from other things. Yet this is untrue of the universe, wherein nothing is designated apart from itself. So by the simple definition of the word we should believe in that infinity which faith and hope desire and logic recognises.

Mr. Doubt. I agree the word is suggestive of your theory but perhaps the word is in error and perhaps the science experiments, showing everywhere the limitations of existence, are in the right.

Mr. Roundabout. But how could the science experiments have ever shown anything else? There can never be an experiment conducted on the whole of infinity, only on quadrants of it, but that does not make the universe other than it is. On the contrary, surely the notion of a limited universe is the damaging concept to science, for it implies that all energy and so all truth is confined within a bubble of objects and reason, and that beyond the bubble is the contradiction to all their efforts: nothing.

Mr. Doubt. You begin to prevail on me but I am bound to say my nature is against you, I cannot shake the feeling that  you are dealing in word play only, but when I think physically about your propositions I return inexorably to whirling balls of gas and hurtling lumps of rock.

Mr. Roundabout. Why so, when we had previously only admitted your own subsuming existence as real?

Mr. Doubt. Well suppose we do not admit as much. I agree that subjectively speaking there is nothing more convincing to me than my own existence, but at the same time I am aware that a person is a very hazy object indeed, made up of chance characteristics such as a name and language, which might have been very different in another time or place though the body remained identical, whereas everyone truly believes that Halley's comet is plain and simply Halley's comet, a hurtling asteroid.

Mr. Roundabout. And how comes Halley's comet to be of so unimpeachable a reality? How do we come to accept Halley's comet more than ourselves?

Mr. Doubt. Through perception I grant you. Edmond Halley saw it through his eyes, but Halley is dead while the comet is observed at regular cycles.

Mr. Roundabout. Is reality then a matter of longevity to you?

Mr. Doubt. I daresay, I daresay.

Mr. Roundabout. Then suppose a man dreams about Topsyturveydom for a week and another about to-morrow's dinner for a night, has the former more reality than the latter?

Mr. Doubt. No, I must say no.

Mr. Roundabout. Then what is it about Halley's comet that impresses you with its reality? Is it the fact that it does not have the power to retort that it is a really very dreamy thing after all?

Mr. Doubt. My argument is that I cannot see how one can reasonably subjectivise mineral in the way you seem to be doing.

Mr. Roundabout. If you would prefer a practical example I could suggest, quite reasonably, that all the atoms in your body are subjectivised mineral, or should I say rather that all mineral is objectivised life?

Mr. Doubt. You approach the heart of the matter, and I am glad for we begin to approach the fictional London. How can you, even granting infinity to the universe, and as you say drawing up its treaty with hope and faith, then ratifying it with logic, while supposedly justifying it for the sake of science and all rationality, still how do you make of all this a God? Why cannot it be one vast interminable cosmos, with life for a strange incident in certain of its places?

Mr. Roundabout. Again I will not deny the support of hope and faith, wishing this to be so, for as I said I cannot attribute purpose to a universe which is not living. This purpose is vital to all human endeavour, for without it we must admit to being a thing for the sake of it, to doing something simply in order to do it, which is anathema to me as well as, I believe, to the studies themselves. Yet you ask me a reason and I will give it to you in one word: experience. Experience or sensation relates everything to every one of us. True it is mediated by exterior objects, but that mediation only alters the kinds of experience, never the nature of experience itself. The nature of this experience in itself is self-supporting and is the entirety of what we human beings call existence. Without this experience the universe could only be accountable as a blind and rocky wasteland, but with this experience how can we doubt that it is anything but a Being, a living Being of supreme magnitude? It is the same principle of unification as I applied in pure materiality. If there is this quality of experience to existence, then I must endow it to the totality, for certainly we perceive that its parts already possess it; and then, and then, taking altogether, I am brought about to the conviction that there is this infinite being of which we heard tell in the legends and hymns of old.

Mr. Doubt. Your point about atoms being objectivised life interests me, for I have often wondered as to the human body being this rolled out dough of carbon and water, and whether the mysterious unification of its elements is that thing the theists call a soul.

Mr. Roundabout. Indeed, and the physicists have their own names for the mysteries they never will solve.

Mr. Doubt. The God of the gaps?

Mr. Roundabout. My dear fellow, the God of the gaps is scientific atheism. The gaps are not in science, the gaps are in infinite philosophy, which can be prettily filled by physics, chemistry, and biology, as they put a little mortar in the pyramids of Giza. No one wishes to dock a man of his living.

Mr. Doubt. So where and in what sense does this great universe we call the Lord fulfil His divine being. Where is His brain?

Mr. Roundabout. Everywhere and nowhere, forget location and temporality, this observable universe is a molecule in the Pacific; and this may we be glad of indeed. For we are never away or apart from God, and the great religions when they break free of worldly dogma are all declaring the same thing: we have purpose, for God has purpose. The great ecstasy of our concentrated knowledge of Him is the product of religious art, and the great merriment of our less focussed knowledge of Him is secular art. As the Psalmist says, everything is shewing forth His praise.

Mr. Doubt. And you say I am myself this very same living being of supreme magnitude? It's the best offer I've had all day.

Mr. Roundabout. I do say so, but I repeat the ontological premise was wrong. We must not start with you alone but with everything unified. Yet the nature of monistic absorption is such that, even starting with you or even starting with me, we end with God, the Alpha and the Omega. All roads lead to Rome.

Mr. Doubt. And see, my sandwich lies unopened, and here is London Victoria. Perhaps I will wander into a church to-day. There again, I recall I promised Trevor a pint. Farewell good sir!

Mr. Roundabout. Farewell, farewell.

Bystander. Excuse me, but I couldn't help overhearing your little chat. Do you think next time you could keep your nasty views to yourself?

Mr. Roundabout. Certainly, madam.

 

La fin.