As a kid growing up in Presbyterian churches, I grew accustomed to singing the same hymn with every service.  It was called the doxology, and I can still sing it from memory:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Praise Him all creatures here below.
Praise Him above ye heavenly host.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

This isn’t the only doxology, but it’s the one that was being sung in the churches I attended, 1980’s St. Louis, Missouri and 1990’s Los Altos, California. Eliminating a few outliers, it’s been over twenty years since I was in a church service and expected to join in singing this song.

My six year old daughter started asking me some questions about God recently, and I suddenly felt like singing her the doxology.  I had to explain to her the meaning of “all creatures here below”,  and “ye heavenly host”.  Then there was the usual gyrations around a meaningful explanation for “Holy Ghost”.  In the end, I’m not sure how much she understood, which bothered me because I had initially thought the doxology was a good introduction.  This is a case of what I call “summary sickness”:  the short form is more confusing than the long one.  This disease is endemic to philosophy and religion.  In short form, even the Krebs cycle is more easily grasped than the Westminster Shorter Catechism (which isn’t even all that short by Netflix standards).

Still, her questions sparked me to think about faith for only the 1,000,000th time in my life (it generally happens more than once a day).  Years ago, I told myself it was time to give up.  It’s an obstinate addiction though.  All sort of things can make me reconsider.  If you remember high school chemistry, you might remember electron orbitals.  Like an electron in its orbital, you can say with some statistical certainty that I’m in one place or another, but you can’t tell for sure without looking.  But looking perturbs the system.  There’s no way of knowing where my “faith electron” might actually be; even I don’t know.

One religious philosopher insisted it wasn’t enough for beliefs to be passed on from one generation to the next.   Faith was to be worked out, in fear and trembling, by each generation, starting from scratch.  This jives with my own interpretation of the greatest commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”.  With all my mind?  If you insist, then it surely isn’t enough to take the word of my predecessors alone.  Is faith something that can work for me?  Is there still a guttering flame, or only the smoke left behind by a flame snuffed out?

If faith is a belief in the unseen, then we run into problems here in the Age of Reason.  But if we don’t perceive the universe directly, rather through our sensory organs, we’re in trouble all the same.  You have to include the brain, its structure and biases too; it interprets and colors the sensory input.  Descartes’s error was in supposing a brain could exist in a vat in the first place.  It would seem that performing objective science on the unseen is a fast fail, but is objective science using our senses intellectual quicksand as well?

Lev Shestov illustrates.  Suppose we collect drops of water every day for years, analyze them in a laboratory, and draw conclusions about water in general.  Have we given an objective foundation to our understanding of water, or only those droplets we collected?  Before you deny the point, consider the possibility that all water was collected from a particular stream, and at a particular time of day.  Is that objective enough?  Even if you generalize to a large number of collections, the collections will never approach the analysis of all water.  It is the action of science to observe and generalize about what our senses tell us.  There is still an action of faith here.  This faith deals in that which is observable with our own imperfect senses, and is more satisfying than studying the invisible, but is a kind of faith nonetheless.  Remember that evolution was a fraud until it wasn’t.  Science is littered with reversals.

On some mornings, I cry in my car.  It can happen at other times of day, but almost always in the morning.  I theorize that my mind starts its day fresh, undistracted, and with a clear view of the world and all its complexity.  I cry because ‘complexity’ can be something more miserable.  Far more miserable.  Then, the rest of the day becomes an exercise in distracting myself from that thought.  If we’re froth bubbling on a rock hidden in space, what does any or all of this mean?  Where are we going?  Are we just aiming to spread?  Is that a morally and intellectually satisfying goal?  Are we even supposed to be considering that, or was consciousness a vicious mistake of nature?

Dr. House believes, “…all this isn’t simply a test.” But if I accept that, what is it then?  In my dreams, all my life, I am being tested.  The method changes, but the dreams do not.  Do I want to be taking the test?  Does it comfort me to think that someone or something is hovering over us, ready and waiting for the right moment to get involved?  Are there examples throughout history of such involvement?  Can I fantasize that God is imperfect, but still out there?  In the Age of Reason, it would seem that science-fiction is becoming the new doctrine of the unseen.

Still, what is the nature of my misery?  Can I cooly address it, declare victory and move on? I’m allowed to think selfishly about my quality of life, my happiness.  I don’t need to have a bulletproof theodicy, do I?

Regarding the Book of Genesis, I’m guessing that most people would say Eve ate of the Tree of Life.  This isn’t correct.  The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil were both in the middle of the garden.  I was once booted out of a bible study for pointing out that Eve hadn’t even been created when God told Adam not to eat of the latter (I suppose we are to assume that the First Man was much better at remembering and relating such instructions to his spouse than modern man).  The Tree of Life was fine for eating.  For all we know, Adam and Eve played nerf football under the Tree of Life, while God lay in the grass nearby heckling their throwing skills.  Hey, it was paradise!

No, they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Then they fell and were exiled.

I have to wonder what kind of parent abandons His children over a single act of disobedience, a sentiment that I imagine has been felt by many before me.  When Adam and Eve became like God, knowing the difference between good and evil, there may have been nothing left for God to do except to teach them how to be gods themselves.  Being alone and forced into self-reliance comes with much suffering.  Suffering can come with wisdom.  The paths in front of us are legion now.  We began our wandering long ago, and, if I insist on intellectual honesty, I should conclude we are still completely alone.   Others may have a faith in the unapprehended; with my health problems, I can’t afford to do the same.  Is it possible that I’ve been written out of God’s will by a loophole?

All who wander are not lost, but are they any wiser?