Perspective: “It Is What It Is” Vs. “I Am Who Am”
By JOHN G. BOULET, MD
(Editor’s Note: Dr. Boulet is a pediatric emergency room physician. He notes that his father, a World War II ace fighter pilot who was a POW in Germany, was a longtime Wanderer reader.)
- + + In any effort to evangelize non-Christians, we must begin with a better understanding of their perspective, which perforce pertains to their perception of reality.
A comprehensive overview of how adherents to non-Christian religions, or of self-described agnostics or atheists, view reality, is beyond my purview here; but we will attempt to provide a fair appraisal of a worldview that is so alien that we Christians must take a step back just to begin to see where we are “invisible to ourselves” — or where we make underlying assumptions that are quite often categorically rejected and viewed as being quite bizarre by the unconverted. We cannot take anything for granted.
We might begin our discussion with the realization that reality itself is up for grabs. We Christians believe that reality is, simply, “what is”; a supposition which is founded on the assumption that there is such a thing as truth, or an objectively identifiable essence — things in themselves, as they are in their immutable, non-fungible being. Thomas Aquinas speaks of this well in his discussion of the “unicity” of God and the “eminent existence in God of all perfections found in creatures.”
Yet, one of the premises of modernism is that there is no truth; or, at the least, that what is true for one person is not true for another; and that there are no universal truths pertaining to all persons in all times and places. This is the rejection of what philosophers call metaphysical realism; a rejection that results in the atomization of humanity to simply individuals whose only relation to other people is of one’s choosing and not of obligation. Duty to others, and above all to God, is anathema to modernity.
Pontius Pilate, of course, comes to mind: “Pilate said to Him, ‘What is truth?’ ”: John 18:38.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in his address on the day before the conclave that elected him to the See of Peter, famously decried the “dictatorship of relativism” which is the result of the refusal to believe that there is such a thing as truth that is truth for all men in all ages.
The Book of Genesis beautifully addresses the issue of the unicity of mankind in its account of the creation of man, and by its assertion that man is made in the image and likeness of God, whose own unicity is asserted as the Unitary Author and Foundation of all existence.
Agnostics assert an incapacity to “know” the truth of God; atheists assert their capacity to know with certainty that God does not exist. For purposes of this essay, I will group these people in the discussions that follow. I will address non-Christians afterward, though partly in reference to how their own beliefs fall into categories that are best regarded as being sub-categories, functionally, of agnosticism and atheism.
Any perusal of scientific literature will show quickly several thematic elements that adherents to the god of “Reason” and “Empiricism” purport to uphold. The unchallenged underlying supposition of any “reputable” science is, first of all, that God does not exist, or that if He does, He is irrelevant because He has no place in “our” reality.
Physics literature nonetheless is replete with mind-bending descriptions of the peculiarities of the material universe, such that in the final analysis physicists must admit of the deeply non-understood nature of reality.
The last century’s contest for describing reality either in Relativistic (as in Einstein’s theories) or Quantum Mechanical (Niels Bohr’s child) terms is only the latest in a long history of the human mind, on its own, utilizing only reason unaided by Revelation, coming to grips with the nature of “what is.”
There is indeed Mystery at the heart of reality, which any self-respecting atheist and empiricist will insist must continue to yield to “progress” (I am thinking here of G.K. Chesterton), such that we “know” that “someday” in the distant future, we humans will have a complete grasp of all that is and will ourselves be able to construct at will any new realities that we care to, including eternal life and eternal endless successions of universes for us to inhabit. In other words, the underlying supposition is that we aren’t “god” yet, but that “progress” will someday make us so!
Physicists have never truly answered even the most basic of proofs of the existence of God — the First Un-caused Cause. If we peruse websites such as phys.org, or one of a myriad of other such sites geared to at least an educated audience of non-physicists such as myself, we will come across, over and over again, this nagging sense that, “The more physicists know, the less they know.”
Reality at the quantum level is so weird that it literally is reduced to series of mathematical formulae which themselves are admitted by their brilliant authors to be incomplete in many ways. And there is no explanation for “why” anything at all exists.
Begging The Question
The search for why anything exists at all has focused lately on imbalance in positive versus negative neutrinos, which is only the latest iteration of hundreds of years of scientific inquiry which only ever begs the question, “Why?” Why are there imbalances in neutrinos to begin with? For that matter, where did neutrinos come from? And so, the ever-receding horizon of inquiry devolves into a throwing of the hands into the air, a shrug of the shoulders, and the exclamation “It’s a mystery! Somehow!!”
I have more than once personally conversed with non-Christians who subscribe to the “Gospel of Somehow,” meaning that whenever I press for answers to “how” things exist and are the way they are, invariably the final common denominator of an answer is, “Somehow . . . ! Somehow quantum physics is the real explanation for why we have the illusion of free will, or even why we have truly free will! Somehow!!”
Or, in a faint attempt to “explain,” into nothing more than soulless mathematical formulae — reducing all of existence, including human beings, to supposedly tautological mathematically irrefutable inevitability. By that reckoning, “I” (or what I perceive to be myself) am nothing more than a collection of mathematical equations that “create” and act upon each other. “It’s that math that did it, Ma!! I didn’t choose to steal those cookies from the cookie jar!!” How absurd.
Of course, never minding that so many scientists ridicule Christians for daring to assert the mystery at the heart of Christ Himself, of the Triune God who is One, and of the Eucharist. Many science papers are not shy about admitting to “mystery” in whatever it is that is being investigated; but only with the unspoken assumption that all “mystery” is only for the time being, until the next great discovery.
Also, various branches of the life sciences are similarly guilty of advancing the horizon of knowledge of how life functions, and positing evolution as the supposed panacea “explanation” for the myriad diversity of life, and for how we humans supposedly arrived on the scene recently in the four-plus billions of years in the physical history of our planet.
Time itself, of course, is the illusion. So long as one argues that there is purpose to existence at all, one might argue that time as a relevant “thing” actually began when humans were created — and that everything else before mankind was temporally irrelevant to the purpose of the universe to begin with.
Some theologians, usually Bible literalists, posit that the Earth really is only 6,000 or so years old, and that every artifact that is dated before then was created already-old; such a view most likely is a difference without a distinction from what I would consider to be the standard Catholic view, which is that the universe was created for man and, prospectively speaking, for his salvation for the purpose of glorifying the Creator. But that is another essay, and for another day.
Ultimately, of course, any valid theory about how we humans came to exist at all devolves not so much into ridiculous diagrams purporting to show “evolution” of one life form into another, as into the physics of life. Biologists might suppose that “ontology recapitulates phylogeny,” but physicists insist that they have the last word, pointing out that there would be no ontology if it weren’t for colliding particles and quanta and force fields, whatever those are.
And so, then, the issue is framed: How it is that so-called particles and energy (whatever they are) somehow traversed a supposedly inevitable trajectory from Big Bang to Shakespeare. This is the famous “the monkey composing Shakespeare” theory that supposes that seemingly random events can generate such an absurdity. Materialists are left supposing that, in fact, Shakespeare himself was nothing more than the inevitable consequence of the Big Bang; that his appearance after billions of years of “evolution” was inevitable because of abstruse mathematical formulae that themselves, for committed materialists, become “god.”
Shakespeare, therefore, is not a “who,” but an “it”: a purely natural phenomenon whose inevitability could have been projected at the moment of the Big Bang, with sufficient mathematical formulae, of course. Nor, for that matter, do “you,” dear reader, exist as a free-willed person.
(As an aside, I am reminded of a scene near the climax of the movie Mary Poppins, in which George Banks exclaims to the elderly banker who just defrocked him, “When all is said and done, sir, there’s no such thing as you!!” George Banks is thereby accusing the elderly banker as having submitted the whole of his being to the slavery of money-making, without regard to the spiritual reality of personal reality.)
Evolution itself — even if it were true — would necessarily have to be explained in terms that physicists and mathematicians would be willing to accept — i.e., nothing more than colliding particles and force fields governed by supposedly irrefutable mathematical “reality”; never mind we don’t even know the faintest what a “particle” or a “force field” is in its essence. Yet physics literature is replete with these terms, as though they were known things — “force fields” and “particles”; the truth is that the assumption of these things as “givens” is a farce.
A Weird World
And never mind that, as noted above, there is never any explanation from the physicists for the Big Bang and its sequelae, unless one is buying into theories that new universes are forever erupting from black holes, or that there is an infinity of universes determined at every point at which quantum physics dictates that there is a “choice” made by particles to do one thing or another, as in the double split experiments, and such as in the famous Schroedinger’s cat experiment that posits that a cat is simultaneously alive and dead until the observer looks into the box where the cat is.
(I recommend Anil Ananthaswamy’s book Through Two Doors at Once as being at least comprehensible to the non-physicist, to get an idea of just how weird reality would seem to be in the world of theoretical physics.)
That is, unless the physicists are willing to postulate, as their entire view of reality, simply: “It is what it is.” A view that postulates that there is nothing personal about reality, that “particles” and “energy” simply “are” — “They are what they are,” one might say in the committed secularist’s Book of Exodus. (Denying the “I AM” His just due, of course.)
And so, then, the real debate with atheists and materialists is: “It is what it is” versus the “I Am Who Am” of the Book of Exodus. Reality, then, is either personal, or coldly impersonal, and “we” — you and I, dear reader — exist as figments of our own quantum particle imaginations conjured out of the mathematical formulae that supposedly govern all of life and all of everything that ever was or will be, amen.
And to such a view of reality — impersonal — I have a quick rejoinder: It’s a cop-out. And I accuse all materialist-atheist “agnostic” nonbelievers of cowardice for their decision to live life thus. Because it is a shirking of the responsibility of living our lives purposefully and intentionally. Oh, yes, of course, these materialist-atheists imagine themselves to be great “humanists,” somehow always making “right choices” to be caring and loving — as though they themselves set the standard in their personal lives for god-like behavior, all the while denying any possibility that there ever could be any god but our collective selves. Self-worship is a very popular lifestyle choice.
And consequently, responsibility seems to be something anathema and poison to the “modern” mindset that excuses any and all behavior choices — such as to practice homosexuality, or to get an abortion — as “inevitable,” and “not my fault.” There are ready-made excuses for any sort of lifestyle decision, such as infanticide, and even for eugenics, though never worded so.
Sanger The Prototype
And as for eugenics, indeed, I would argue that the committed materialist or atheist who is determined to live life without reference to an almighty God will have to admit that they are all in favor of “culling the herd.” Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was the prototype of the mindset that would weed out “inferior” people.
I would argue that many materialists-atheists, if not all, are proponents of what I would called “directed speciation” — i.e., controlled breeding of future humans. The scientific methods brought to bear upon these efforts now boast soon-to-be-unlimited control over the genetic traits of all children who are allowed to exist at all, even in embryonic form; with weeding out “inferior” babies by abortion or infanticide. (This, too, touches upon Mary Poppins’ George Banks’ assertion early on in the movie of the need to “mold the breed.”)
Beyond considerations of humanism and its attendant horrors, which also would deserve an entire essay of its own to examine properly, psychologists get into the mix, too, asserting, as many have, that humans have only the illusion of free will; and that humans do not have what they call “agency” — or truly a transcendent free will that is not simply the manifestation on the macroscopic scale of the collisions of particles and energy, and of mathematical equations that committed materialists/atheists must — must — believe is the sum total of reality that simply “is what it is.”
Atheists who are not willing to go so far as to admit the logical conclusion that humans have no free will if there is no God, always rely on the “somehow” arguments: “somehow” these quanta and particles and energy “somehow” create genuine free will. Yeah, right. Give me a break. These atheists are divinizing humanity, and justifying their faith in the “humanist religion” — we become our own “god” in this scenario, just as Satan promised Adam and Eve. Just don’t ask atheist-humanists to believe in the actual God — the “I am who am.”
That would be getting a little too personal for them, and might make them uncomfortable. Considering the possibility that there might be a god other than the one looking out from the mirror.
And, so that’s what this whole debate ultimately is about — admitting that we humans don’t know it all; that we never will know it all; that we can’t make it all up out of the thin air of humanism; and that we are totally contingent upon the Higher Power, the “Love that moves the Sun and the other stars” (Dante’s Paradiso, conclusion, XXXIII: 45).
