The Question of Extraterrestrial Life (less than) Definitively Settled

I am inclined to think that there is no life on other planets. I have heard repeatedly the statements about the sheer size of the universe and the correlative theoretical quantity of planets, among which it is as near a statistical certainty as possible that many can support life and consequently that one does. Yet precisely this mathematical certainly disinclines me to believe that there is life beyond Earth. I am not saying that there isn't or that it would bother me if there were; only that I am choose not to suppose that there is.

The reason is, therefore, clearly not rational. It is not, however, strictly speaking irrational, which would imply a failure to rationally derive an argument for a proposition. Instead, it is contrarational. Having divined and accepted the rational argument that there is life on other planets, I formulate my belief in conscious opposition to that. What justifies such a contrarational position? It is precisely that beauty, joy, sublimity (or some other vague and subjective term) exist in contrast to rationality.

Again, this is not to say that the rational cannot be beautiful or incite joy or embody the sublime. It merely acknowledges what has been a well recognized feature of art and literature and romance and life. The human spirit is enlivened more by the unpredictable, the unexplainable, and the impossible-but-actual than by the reasonable. Serendipity and providence. Mad, stupid, consumptive, doomed love. Fantasies and phantasmagoria and psychosis.

I believe in a beautiful God, one Who transcends and can therefore contradict reason. The notion that this foolish Deity could have created a world which by its very nature speaks to the mathematical certainty of life on other plants and then refuse to populate any planet but this one fills me with an inexplicable joy in the mere possibility of it. I will rejoice in a God who creates and saves the inhabitants of other worlds as well, but until I know otherwise I prefer to be seized by the sublime belief in a universe that must and a God who flouts such necessity.

"Reason and Revelation"

During the course of my adventure into the 1880-1881 issues of the Gospel Advocate, I have chanced upon a number of amusing articles. I have particularly enjoyed some of the marital advice contained therein. It has, at one and the same time, a kind of amusing antiquity and a certain timelessness. I had something of the same reaction when reading an article by F. D. Srygley titled "Reason and Revelation." (I regret that I do not have the exact date for the purpose of more accurate citation.) Srygley, who was very nearly the subject of a recent term paper of mine, wrote the article to correct a misprint in his "Missionary Spirit vs. Missionary Plans" which said that "the Bible was given to supplant human judgment." Srygley clarifies:

It is far more reasonable to conclude the Bible was given to supplement, not supplant, human judgment. In fact, this is the only view of the matter which will comport with reason.

My immediate reaction to that was pronouncedly negative, given my belief about the fundamental nature of Scripture. Nevertheless, as I read on I was struck by the way he expressed this belief. His language in several places (particularly when presented out of context as I am about to do) has a ring of orthodoxy - dare I even say Orthodoxy - that appealed very directly to me.

It is the province of the Bible to supply what reason cannot furnish.

The axioms which constitute the foundation and beginning of revelation are wholly without the scope of unaided reason. To the mind enlightened by revelation these principles are clearly axiomatic, but to the mind destitute of inspired light they are darkly incomprehensible.

If the Bible does not occupy ground beyond the reach of human reason, it is not a revelation. Can it in any sense be considered a revelation to tell a man what he already knows?

In the article, Srygley develops the idea of complementary provinces of reason and revelation such that they form a mutually exclusive but "harmonious whole." He reacts to two opposite and equally dangerous extremes. Some make reason all sufficient and revelation only a marginal improvement on reason:

...they seem to consider the Bible only a better guide than reason concerning matters of which both have jurisdiction.

Others reject reason altogether in a perverse pietism:

Some seem to think a total rejection of human judgment an indication of great fidelity to God.

Srygley rejects both of these. Reason and revelation both have their root in God. They must each have their ordained purpose. To reject either outright or even to diminish either is to reject or diminish God. One can just as easily reject reason as proper to the human person as he can reject the Bible as the revelation of God. "Both sins are rebellion against things of divine origin. Both proceed from a common cause." This whole philosophy gives Srygley a very healthy view of the role of Scripture in my opinion. I certainly reject the idea that the Bible is somehow synonymous with revelation - something Srygley would undoubtedly affirm - but when it comes to questions of the Bible and science or logic, I think Srygley hits the mark:

To talk about a conflict between science and the Bible, is about as sensible as to apprehend an actual quarrel and assault between one's manhood and boyhood.

God never explained in the Bible what man by reason could find out. There can never be a conflict between the Bible and geology because the Bible proposes to give no light upon the science of geology.

In the end, however, Srygley still comes out with a position on the adequacy of reason that I cannot endorse. "Human judgment properly cultivated, like revelation correctly interpreted, is absolutely safe as guide on all matters in its jurisdiction." This sentiment was enough to make me suspicious (especially because I know that Srygley is part of a tradition that sees the "correct" interpretation of revelation as being dependent on the powers of human reason), but where he finally concludes was enough to make me recoil.

Where reason is guide at all, revelation never interferes to offer a more excellent way. In fact, I apprehend that it is absolutely impossible for God by revelation to give a light superior to reason on themes within the scope of human judgment.

I agree with Srygley that reason has its proper province. I even support that it is ultimately reliable within that province (though I would say it was functionally reliable while Srygley would say its reliability is unqualified). What I cannot agree on is that God's self-revelation is in any sense restricted by human reason. I not only affirm that God's revelation can overrule, overwhelm, and even contradict human reason, this is one of the fundamental realities of the faith as far as I'm concerned. Revelation is the light which is superior to reason, even regarding things which reason purports to have grasped.

I suppose the real difference is that Srygley has confidence that what reason apprehends is in fact reality. I am more skeptical about our ability to adequately apprehend reality by the means of reason. Reason, for me, is only competent to allow us to function within reality. Reality cannot be circumscribed by reason. After all, God is real.

The Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, pt. 1

Because of the overwhelming number of quotes that I wanted to share from G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, I feel it prudent to split this up into multiple entries. Here are some quotes from the early portion of the book that I found thought-provoking:

"What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there?" Which is another way of stating the problem: "How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?"

"I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it." Which is to say, "When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion...I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."

Responding to the assertion that it is enough (or even noble) that a man should believe in himself: "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." Moreover, "A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason."

"Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

"If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat."

"You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons."

"Exactly what does breed insanity is reason." This is, in fact, the contention of the whole early part of the work. "This chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what actually is the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void." This is exlpained more artfully: "The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite...The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." From which he concludes, "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

This one is almost painful for me to think about with too much effort: "...a small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large."

Discussing the simplicity, all-sufficiency, and distasteful of materialism, he writes, "Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out...He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world." He continues, "For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion." And concludes, "But the point here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both, but feels to both the same objection. Its approximate statement is that if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much of a god. And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk. The deity is less divine than many men; and (according to Haeckel) the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than the whole."

"Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies." To which he adds, less amusingly, "Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice."

"The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman."

"He has always cared more for truth than for consistency." I hope this is someday said of me.

On the paradoxes of Christianity, of which I am so fond, he observes, "It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man."

"The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid...He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health."

Continuing on mysticism, he compares it to the sun: "The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility." Rationalism, quite the opposite, is more like the moon. "Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world."

I will conclude with what I can only describe as poignant geometry. If there can be such a thing, this is it:

"Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers."