So What?

What Does it Mean to Prove God Exists?

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I wonder whether tacit knowledge might help with the perennial debate about the existence of God?  Although atheists sometimes concede God's existence is not in principle provable, my usual experience, especially online, is a demand for proof.

Crawford, in his book The case for working with your hands, tells the story of his father, who was a physicist, making the claim that it is possible to untie a double knotted shoelace by pulling on one end.  Mathematically this is true, or so Crawford claims.  The point is though in real life, you cannot untie a double knotted shoelace in this way.  The problem is the physical properties of the lace have a bearing on what can be done with it.  Whilst mathematically it might be possible, physically it is impossible because shoelaces are made of something.

So, let us assume I have a proof of God's existence.  How do I know it is in fact a proof?  The rules that determine a scientific proof demand we strip a problem down to its basics, ignoring the realities we encounter when things are apprehended in our lives rather than through our heads.

This claim that only formal proofs are valid, gives away the reality of the radical atheist's position.  It is in essence a requirement for control.  It is not a free encounter with reality but one that is determined by prior ideological constraints.  It is an assertion of imperialism over and against the radical call to freedom.  We are told to sacrifice what we experience as true, to a particular partial understanding of our world.  The point is formal knowledge alone is not sufficient to make a chair or mend a motorbike, lat alone encounter God.

But there is a sense in which radical atheists are right.  if you really want proof of God, you need to do what the scientist does.  Scientific proof requires many hours in the lab, applied to getting experiments to work, in the sense of providing reliable results.  Usually this requires the application of significant technical expertise.  Without this dedication we would have no science whatsoever.

What I find difficult to understand is that anyone who wants proof of God, needs to apply themselves to it, in just the same way as the scientist applies herself in the lab.  It's all very well demanding proof but a little odd to condemn those who claim to be believers as having no proof, when you are unwilling to do what is necessary to find out for yourself.

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• Tacit Knowledge (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

Tacit Knowledge

The problem raised in my last post, is the difference between formal and tacit knowledge.  The power of formal knowledge is in its universality.  It is true for all times and all places.  

The trouble is nothing is true for all times and places.  Reality has a habit of flipping real instances on their head.  So, we may know how a machine should work but knowing why this particular machine isn't working, is an entirely different matter.

Human systems are similar.  We may know a lot about human behaviour and psychology and yet we often find ourselves completely unable to read a real situation, particularly one involving us personally. 

But the dispassionate observer is not guaranteed read a particular situation fully.  There is always more to know.  We encounter tacit or intuitive knowledge, where we see the patterns even if we have difficulty explaining what it is we see.

Tacit knowledge is found through observation and experience.  Formal knowledge is no short cut to tacit knowledge and might be a barrier.  Ultimately, we have tacit knowledge if we are able to perceive things in the round, as a whole.

This song has always amused me as it highlights this distinction:

   

Working with Your Hands

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I am reading The case for working with your hands: or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good by Matthew Crawford.  I'll possibly review it later but here's a passage, from page 91:

Countless times since that day, a more experienced mechanic has pointed out to me something that was right in front of my face, but which I lacked the knowledge to see.  It is an uncanny experience; the raw sensual data reaching my eye before and after are the same, but without the pertinent framework of meaning, the features in question are invisible.  Once they have been pointed out, it seems impossible that I should not have seen them before.

This is a common observation and many people will recognise it.  But it is also something we don't necessarily acknowledge as a matter of course. 

To put it negatively we often fail to pay attention and it is being attentive that is at the core not only of working with our hands but also of spirituality.  Indeed, spirituality is essentially paying attention.  You can have something pointed out to you but someone must have paid attention at some point in order to be able to point it out.  Paying attention is hard work, often the experience of being stuck leads to someone paying attention to some detail after hours of frustration.

Paying attention is at the core of prayer.  When we pray, it is not God who is revealed to us but reality through God.  I think it was Anthony de Mello who said something like, asking God to reveal himself is like asking a knife to cut itself.

Prayer is about encountering reality, as it is, independent of our plans and strategies.  It is not hectoring God about what we need in order to do our thing, but simply being aware of what is there and needing our attention.  Indeed the god who needs to be hectored is no god, just a fantasy.  God is never revealed but always reveals.

In my other blog, Exploring Ecumenism, I have frequently visited the idea of conversation and its power to transform.  The mistake we make in too many religious debates, is to expect the world to be final and perfect.  What we find is a world not of unchanging perfect entities but of many things in relationships, in conversation, imperfect, sometimes free, sometimes imprisoned, extremely complex and always stumbling across new things.  This is what makes the universe the place where we encounter life, because all is in relationship with God.

We are conscious beings and it is through prayer our consciousness becomes disciplined enough to apprehend the genuinely new amongst the pointless frustrations of our fantasies.

The Devil as Fundamentalist

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Ok, I can't resist commenting on de Mello's quote in my last post. Two points:

The obvious application is to fundamentalist interpretations of scripture. I'm not saying all fundamentalists make this error but it must be difficult to avoid it.  If you believe in the truth of something sight unseen then it follows you cannot possibly understand it.  However, I think this cuts both ways and also undermines the position of those atheists who insist on proving the existence of God.  Faith is something that is lived and their absolute dependence upon proof substitutes proof for life.  It is of a piece with the insistence on the priority of method over people, I mentioned only yesterday.

Second, I had a phone call the other day.  Would I be able to prepare a topic for our local interfaith group on the theme of spirituality?  Yes, I said warming to the idea of an in-depth exploration of John Wesley's spirituality.  So, you'll do the spirituality of Jesus, then?

Ahhhh ...  My first thought was I didn't think Jesus had a spirituality.  My second thought was to revisit my dissertation study of Matthew's account of the temptations, 4:1 - 11.

As I considered this, I noticed something I hadn't noticed before, after many years of reflection on that text.  Isn't it fascinating that the first story of the adult Jesus in the first book of the New Testament totally debunks a fundamentalist approach to scripture?

Here comes the devil (who is not the hammer horror character of some overwrought imaginations but an angel who is a stickler for doing things right).  His job is to help Jesus face up to his responsibilities as the Messiah.  He does this by reference to Scripture.  Each time Jesus has to fend off his fundamentalist interpretation (based on Israel's contemporary expectations) with his own radical interpretation. 

Jesus does not walk away from that encounter with a scripture based plan - he has rejected all the standard messianic expectations and trusts to what happens on the road.  He trusts as it were to living his life.

If we have to believe in a devil, the devil as fundamentalist fits the bill nicely.

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• Mission and Spiritual Direction (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
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On Belief in Scripture

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I came across this from One Minute Wisdom by Anthony de Mello, page 118:

There was once a student who never became a mathematician because he blindly believed the answers he found at the back of his math textbook - and, ironically, the answers were correct.

This is beautiful and it is difficult to add anything that will improve upon it.  So I won't.

Sheffield Street Art

I went to a very small book launch last night.  Sheffield Street Art is a set of images by Hedley Bishop and Jim Lambert.  I believe it is possible to purchase it on Ebay but I can't find it.  I suggest if you would like to purchase it (£5), you follow the link and leave a comment.

I am impressed by the amount of street art that's around us in Sheffield.  Perhaps the best known street artist in Sheffield is Kid Acne (bottom left above), who has an exhibition currently at the Millenium Galleries.  (On until 23 October upon which date this link will presumably die.) 

My favourite artist is Phlegm (top left above) who has a fantastic piece of work not far from where I live at Riverside.  This can be found on a website called Sheffield Street Art, which just to confuse everyone has nothing to do with the book and although it features some of the same artists covers mostly different works.

The book was expensive to produce and so won't make much money.  The authors are hoping to use the proceeds for a future 'Pictures of Sheffield Old and New' publication and they hope the proceeds from that will be substantial enough to go to the Alzheimers Society.

Homocide: A Year on the Killing Streets

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I've just finished reading Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, one of the script writers for the television series, The Wire.  This book is the result of a year's placement he had with Baltimore's homicide police in 1988.

I found this passage, which struck me as apt for its time and for the present day.  It comes towards the end of the book (page 635) where Simon is writing about his time on placement in retrospect.  He writes of the changes he's seen in the Baltimore police since 1988:

I came to realise that there was something emblematic here: that in postmodern America, whatever institution you serve or are served by - a police department or a newspaper, a political party or aa church, Enron or Worldcom - you will eventually be betrayed.

It seemed very Greek the more I thought about it.  The stuff of Aeschylus and Sophocles, except the Gods were not Olympian but corporate and institutional.  In every sense, ours seems a world in which individual human beings - be they trained detectives or knowledgeable reporters, hardened corner boys or third-generation longshoremen or smuggled eastern European sex workers - are destined to matter less and less.

Simon wrote these words in 2006 and I think they reflect exactly the situation we find ourselves in today.  We have seen it in the financial crisis, MPs' expenses, News International and the various scandals that have rocked the police in London.  And we've seen it in the riots and the response of decent people to the riots, who have lost any sense of the gains made by previous generations whereby bullets are not fired at crowds, whatever they are doing (except in N Ireland during the Troubles).

It is partly a cult of the young.  It seems inconceivable experience might count for anything.  Short term funding schemes mean communities cannot build a resource of people who know the area and its history.  They are recruited and after 3 years have to move on.  As there is no career structures, the best move onto other things so few garner experience over a lifetime's career.  This is reflected in all walks of life; we are told it is foolish to assume you are in a job for life.  Who can say this is not true?