The Case against the Atheist Methodology to Knowledge - the Apophatic versus the Reductive, humility versus pride.

 

Just as most regard Eighteenth-century Hume as killing the Enlightenment project by his radical scepticism, so most thinkers would acknowledge Fourteenth- Century William of Ockham’s nominalism was harmful to Western thought.  Hume as a sceptic destroyed his own side so to speak by proving the impossibility of true empirical knowledge.  The Roman Catholic philosopher Ockham struck a terrible blow to metaphysics and the philosophical realism upon which religious faith is founded.

What have we lost as a result of Ockhamite nominalism?  It is understood that universals both in terms of secular classifications and the higher level universals of metaphysical realism are incompatible with the reductionism of nominalism.  When nothing really belongs to a class or species in the earthly realm and metaphysical universals such as love, beauty, goodness and truth are seen as speculative fantasy, access to meaning is cut off.  As humans no longer able to participate in identity (now just an arbitrary classification) or in the higher realm (now imaginary), we are ourselves reduced to mere atomistic individuals devoid of meaning and any telos.

For as long as we exist and think in such a paradigm fundamental beliefs that make full existence possible are inaccessible to us.  Instead religious belief and the spiritual life themselves become arbitrary and blind leaps of faith for each isolated individual.  In the consequent nihilist maelstrom, that must be seen as the final result of the nominalist cancer, meaning can only be achieved by an individual assertion of the will.  That is an underlying connection between arbitrary faith in Protestantism and the arbitrary assertion of purpose in Twentieth Century existentialism. 

Traditional religious faith stood in a different intellectual world, more intellectually rich, far less arbitrary and part of a collective human tradition of thought and spirituality.  It operated according to an ethos of humility.  This humility or recognising what one does not know goes back at least to Socrates and his assertion that true knowledge is that I know nothing.  It was followed through by the apophatic theology of the Church Fathers, in particular Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint Gregory of Nyssa.  Centuries later, Nicholas of Cusa would defend a doctrine of ignorance in the face of the hubristic claims of Renaissance Humanist thinkers. 

This humility or recognising our finite minds cannot fully comprehend divine Truth can also be seen at work in the Oecumenical Councils.  Dogma is a word much misused today.  When the Church met in Council it did so on the basis the faith and Christian Truth could not be reduced to a series of assertions.  Rather, all the Church could do was reject the heretical, that which undermined the Truth handed down from God via the Apostles.  So the Councils themselves followed the via negativa of apophatic theology.  For example, we cannot define the mystery of the Incarnation, but the Church was able to assert Arius had fallen into heresy because if Christ were not fully God as well as fully Man, Man could not be fully redeemed.

 What began to go wrong could really only take place after the Great Schism.  With the Pope’s supreme authority on doctrinal matters the Western Church moved towards a more declaratory and propositional theology.  It did not take long for a more propositional and reductive approach to theology to manifest.  Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the same century as the Great Schism, began to make syllogistic arguments for the existence of God.  Most significant was his reduction of the meaning of the crucifixion to satisfaction theology.  Christ died as a payment for our sins to God as a vengeful feudal overlord.  All the nuances and depth of Christian understanding of the crucifixion as part of the Tradition of the Church was lost as individual thinkers began to make theological assertions based on arguments thought up as individual thinkers with finite minds.  Of course the Pope himself would become the authority on dogma over and above the full Tradition.

In such a climate Ockham became possible.  It was his reductionism that we see at work in Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Western atheism.  Indeed atheism in the Western sense is only really possible where a culture has taken a wrong turn into a strange cultural aberration.   Being inside the paradigm we cannot see how pathological and dehumanising it is in reality.  

In the most prosaic and ordinary setting we find Ockham’s reductionism at work:  Ockham’s Razor!  This is the idea that the simplest explanation for the cause is the true explanation.  Of course this can be helpful, but it bears no relation to reality.  Often an effect results because of the coalescing of multiple causes.  Often a more complicated cause is the reason for something happening.  There is a certain logic in avoiding wild speculation, but Ockham’s Razor also prevents us from being able to recognise multi-faceted, higher and more complicated causes.

How has that manifested?  Roman Catholics claim the Pope is the sole authority on doctrine.  The Protestants rely on sola scriptura.  Holy Tradition, as continues in Orthodoxy, takes all into account, the Bible, the Church Fathers, the liturgy itself.  This reductionism has led to a trap for the Western mind, until we became so rationalist that we pulled down our inheritance.  In thought, Rene Descartes declared he would only accept what his finite mind could justify rationally, not recognising that there was a great accumulation of wisdom that his mind would never be able to produce, in politics this collective knowledge was termed the “wisdom of the ancestors” by Burke.   Descartes even attempted in an act of intellectual hubris to “prove” the existence of God through rational argument.  So much for the apophatic theology in the West.

In politics we saw revolution, regicide and sacrilege.  A spirit of prideful rebellion began to plague the West.  A Luciferian animus prevailed and was the ethos behind the secret societies that would foment revolution and atheism.

The reductionist Westerner thought he understood man by stretching his lifeless cadaver out and dismembering his body to see inside.  The most important aspect of the human that animated him, his soul manifested as the person was forgotten and Man was reduced to a machine – the simplest and sole explanation in true Occamite methodology.  Hence the possibility of Darwinism, reducing life to a base cause.

This hubris is fed by the technological power that the scientific method achieves.  This in itself though is Promethean.  It is about power, control and exploitation.  In the end as we see today with A.I. it becomes dehumanising.  Deep thinkers of the contemporary philosophical tradition from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Ellul have written powerfully on the ethical questionability of advancing technology as its takes on a life of its own, enframing us and reducing us.

The fallacy of this reductive spirit is to reduce everything to the lowest explanation so that the most important aspects of the world are invisible to us – the cosmos as a theophany, Man as the Imago Dei, the possibility of participation in the Divine.  We have lost the understanding that life and knowledge are part of a collective tradition within which we make sense of our particular lives.  The very opposite of the Cartesian obsession with individual verification.

In the end, as the Jesuits would say, it all ends in the absurdity as is emphatically demonstrated by the inverted world of today’s West.  Even gender is no longer clear.  The objectivist scientists do not understand they are the reason biological reality is being denied.  You cannot have biology with any meaning without the transcendental.  Gender has a metaphysical aspect.  A woman acts and moves in a feminine way because of her feminine spirit, not just because of the mechanical operation of her biology.

This is all down to a Luciferian rebellious pride.  An assertion of my individual understanding over long tradition.  It means we only understand the most base causes.  We are blind to higher meanings.

The clear absurdity that the scientifically minded who pride themselves on their objectivity are blind to is that they have argued for a random and arbitrary world.  They have an unquestioning faith in the laws of science such as physics, but they have no reality in a random world of chance.  The atheists believe the most simplest explanation of evolution and survival of the fittest can explain love, art, religion.  They do not realise that what their philosophy reduces to mere accidents in our evolutionary story are the highest aspect of life’s meaning and what it is all for – the telos.  Through the human personality, his energies, we can recognise that is the most important part about him and that therefore the most important and highest aspect of existence is the person, or rather Three Persons in harmonious and loving relationship.  Communion and love between persons is the highest point leading to participation in divine energies, not survival of the fittest.  Apply Ockham’s reductive razor though and you are left with the lowest and most trivial explanation.

Neither can the scientist ever overcome his contradictory faith in laws of physics that he can never prove, as David Hume so powerfully demonstrated.  The scientific method can never predict the same rules will apply tomorrow, because he rejects God.  Everything is random and arbitrary.  The ideological scientist is even forbidden by his dogma to posit an Aristotelian Prime Mover, let alone the Person of the Logos as that which holds together the laws of the cosmos, ensuring everything does not disintegrate into chaos.  In contrast the true scientist rather than the adherent to scientism, understands that like the Church Councils he can only say what is not true, he can never fully define what is true.  A spirit of humility applies to true science too.  Quantum physicists are ready to take Platonism seriously.

And so in contrast to the hubristic claims of the humanists, the empiricists, the rationalists we can only return to a full and meaningful life if we adopt an approach of knowing ignorance in humility.  Only if we recognise our limitations and that the full Truth is infinitely larger and higher than we can comprehend will we come anywhere near to Truth. That does not mean we know nothing.  We have the accumulated spiritual experiences that feed into Holy Tradition.  We also have our own personal spiritual encounters that we are able to make sense of within the wisdom of Holy Tradition.  We cannot claim to know it all or assert that what the Church has understood by revelation, by Scripture, by the lives of its saints, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is irrelevant because my finite mind cannot comprehend it.  Instead in a spirit of humility, recognising our ignorance, we must come home to the Church and its Tradition through personal encounter, which is centred on love.