Letter to a Friend

Dear John,

You write of holocausts. I know. How could I not know? "Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek'd against his creed." I will never not understand why someone cannot bring himself to believe.

But let's put belief to one side for a moment. Whether theism is true or false, I can't look away from the conceptual thinness of what the philosopher John McDowell calls "bald naturalism," which simply affirms that natural-scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge there is, without addressing (or, rather, while refusing even to admit) the obvious epistemological tensions that confront the relationship of empirical content to experience.

There is another kind of intelligibility, one those sympathetic to bald naturalism (Daniel Dennett, for instance) attempt feebly to explain away by, as McDowell puts it, giving "perspicuous descriptions of the material constitution of, say, perceivers, in such a way as to make it intelligible that things composed of mere matter can possess the relevant complex of capacities." This intelligibility is what McDowell refers to as "a 'How possible?' question," which "expresses a distinctive kind of puzzlement, issuing from an inexplicit awareness of a background to one's reflection that, if made explicit, would yield an argument that the topic of the question is not possible at all." It is this kind of question that has been asked by the Pre-Socratics, Leibniz, and Heidegger—why does anything exist at all, rather than nothing? "To respond to a 'How possible?' question of this kind in, so to speak, engineering terms, with a perspicuous description of the requisite material constitution, would be plainly unhelpful; it would be like responding to Zeno by walking across a room."

In a slapdash reply to an article I published at Slate, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne provides just such a response. First, he pretends that the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" means "How did the universe come about?" And so he has an answer: the Big Bang. I confess I find this somewhat cute, as if I had asked a child why there is money and he had answered, "Because there are ATMs."

(See also Lawrence Krauss's insipid pop-cosmology book A Universe from Nothing; Krauss claims that Leibniz's question is no longer pressing because our universe might have sprung from "quantum fluctuation." This prompted David Albert, in his review for the Times, to ask, "Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?")

As McDowell acknowledges, "investigations of the 'engineering' sort might be fine for other questions." But if "How possible?" questions have purchase, they clearly concern the preconditions for existence as such, and science stops short at existence. Coyne shares with his fellow dogmatic-materialist hierophants an inability to appreciate what is meant by "nothing" and "something." What's at issue is not the temporal beginnings of the universe but the being of the universe, and everything in it. That's why I say the question lies outside the scope of the natural sciences; it is a question about that which is definitionally outside the scope of the natural sciences.

For the neo-Darwinians, "evidence" is the only name of God. But to embrace a picture of the world as merely given to empirical inquiry is just to refuse to feel the force of the entire history of philosophy since Plato. It seems to me a far more primitive metaphysics than any offered by theism.

As I say, none of this forces theistic belief on anyone. McDowell is no theist, nor is Thomas Nagel, whose Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False was reviewed with barely concealed prejudice. I confess I think the incoherence of naturalism a good argument for theism, but I also acknowledge that that could just be a conceptual limitation of the particular animal we are. Still, it's inarguable that naturalism can't advance beyond a "it just is" dismissal of the relevant questions that's no less a form of faith than Christianity.

You refer to Marilynne Robinson and others who have a fairly sophisticated understanding of these matters as "crypto-believers," for it seems to you that people so smart and well-educated couldn't possibly believe such nonsense. But Robinson is an old-school Calvinist. I don't think that her reluctance to talk about her faith in much detail is an indication that she doesn't "really" believe in the incarnation and resurrection. Rather, it is perfectly in keeping with John Ames's argument in Gilead that "Calvin is right to discourage curious speculations on things the Lord has not seen fit to reveal to us." Those you call crypto-believers just seem like believers to me, but believers who understand that, as Origen wrote, "Jesus too is many things, according to the conceptions of him."

As for "ordinary" believers, neither I nor Robinson nor other "crypto-believers" view them as "simpletons." David Hart points out that ordinary people always have at best a sketchy notion of the things they believe in—ask your average atheist about particle physics some time. And as he also points out, a lot of seeming simpletons are savvier theologians than you'd think.

You mention the Enlightenment's martyrs, burned for their various heresies. They were perfectly right to say there's no man behind the curtain. But the best of the theistic traditions have never said there was. God isn't an entity among others, taking up space like the rest of us. I'm willing to think that Jesus is one way of talking about him, and I'm willing to look upon those who have experienced his grace with epistemic charity, rather than assuming I know something they don't.

As for me, much of the time I follow Geoffrey Hill: "not believe, hope." Belief is overrated, but it's something I aspire to. To believe in Christian salvation is absurd. And, I think, rather noble.

In friendship, mr

Michael Robbins is the author of two collections of poetry: Alien vs. Predator (Penguin) and The Second Sex (coming from Penguin in September). He teaches creative writing at Montclair State University.