I think, therefore I believe

The little matter of attribution first: St Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) paraphrased so many aphorisms first uttered by St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) that it’s often hard to know where credit is due.

Whenever that’s the case, I’ll attribute their words of wisdom to AA, just to be on the safe side.

This is a disclaimer designed to forestall accusations of ignorance likely to come from pedantic readers wishing to take me down a peg – pedants love soft targets after all.

So here are two seminal adages I’ll attribute to AA not to play favourites. First, “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but rather, I believe so that I may understand.” (Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam.)

Second, AA’s definition of culture as “faith seeking understanding”. (Fides quaerens intellectum.)

Many a subsequent thinker has correctly interpreted these epigrams as affirming the primacy of faith over ratiocination as a pathway to God. Many a subsequent Protestant thinker has used that unassailable position to advance into a minefield strewn with blanket denials of intellect as a tool of approaching God.

When the sublime Russian pianist Maria Yudina said, “Music is my way to God, although I know other ways exist too,” her admirers, me included, applauded her wisdom. All roads may or may not lead to Rome, but many roads definitely can lead to God. However, if music is allowed to act in that capacity, why should the mind be disqualified?

Notice that both statements by AA specify understanding, cultural or intellectual, as the desirable product of faith. Faith is the be all, but it doesn’t have to be the end all.

It can be though. Many people are no more capable of grappling with theological arcana than they are capable of decorticating a Bach fugue. Such people just say “I believe” and leave it at that. I respect such staunch believers (even though most of them are Protestants), a feeling they don’t invariably reciprocate.

“We can’t understand God”, they say, and they are right. As I say too often, a higher system can understand a lower one, but not the other way around. Yet we can seek understanding, in the hope that such a quest can lead us to faith or raise us to its new height and greater refinement.

We may not be able to rationalise, but we can always post-rationalise. Isn’t this roughly what AA meant?

This brings to mind apocryphal stories involving Archimedes’s bathtub, Newton’s apple and Mendeleyev’s dream. Archimedes was said to be taking a bath when he realised that submerged objects displace water equal to their volume. Newton was supposedly hit on the head by a falling apple, which gave him a headache and a grasp of gravity. And Mendeleyev is said to have seen his periodic table in his dream.

People who peddle such fables usually forget to mention that the three scientists then spent innumerable days of hard slog, trying to express their flashes of inspiration in a scientifically intelligible form.

Similarly, Galileo once said that God created the universe as a book written in the language of mathematics. But it was people like him who realised this and translated that divine book into the concrete realities of geometrical shapes, algebraic formulas and trigonometric relationships.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

For a believer, faith is to religious understanding what a hypothesis is for a scientist. When a physicist embarks on a search for yet another sub-atomic particle, he starts from an act of faith. He has to believe that particle exists, and that belief inspires all his subsequent experimental work. It’s his faith, aka hypothesis, that opens a door through which he can enter the world where his sub-atomic particle may reside.

In exactly the same way, theological thought hides behind a closed door that can only be opened with the key of faith. This is another way of paraphrasing AA’s epigrams.

All this is basic stuff. Only especially obtuse Protestants will reject such notions, insisting on solo scriptura and all such nonsense. Why think if the Bible says it all? Quite.

But the Bible says not only “turn the other cheek”, but also “I came not to send peace, but a sword”. It says “love thy father and mother”, but also “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

How do we reconcile such mutually exclusive statements, Mr Obtuse Protestant? Any way we choose, is it? You have your interpretation, I have mine, and either of us is either right or wrong. We are both entitled to our opinion.

It’s this sort of solipsistic anarchy that predictably turned the Reformation into the anteroom of atheism. But now I’m going to enrage my Protestant friends even more, by pushing the analogy between faith and hypothesis a bit further.

A scientist possibly doesn’t seek an exorbitant research grant because he is sure that particle exists. He thinks it may or may not exist, and he doesn’t mind spending a lot of time, effort and money to find out one way or the other.

In the end, he may not prove that particle exists, the same way he can prove that molecules exist. However, looking at the behaviour of other particles, he may detect some irregularities that can only be explained by the presence of another particle in close proximity. He is therefore sure that particle exists, because only its existence can explain all the pre-established facts.

That’s how the planet Neptune was discovered in 1846. Noticing odd un-Newtonian deflections in Uranus’s orbit, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier concluded they could only be caused by the presence of another planet nearby. German astronomer Johannn Gottfried Galle then found Neptune within one degree of the predicted location.

Proceeding in a similar fashion, an agnostic may set himself the intellectual task of proving or disproving God’s existence. Yet such proofs can’t possibly exist, if by proof we mean the irrefutable, laboratory-standard outcome of a forensic investigation. By any sensible definition of God, he is transcendent and hence beyond human understanding.

However, even though our agnostic will be frustrated in his search for proofs, he’ll be rewarded by a discovery of numerous indications. He’ll stumble on any number of facts that can’t be ascribed to any other source than God.

Music may certainly be one of them, and that’s what Yudina meant when identifying her art as a pathway to God. Anyone who fails to hear God speaking through, say, the slow movements of Bach’s Italian Concerto or Mozart’s K488 is lost to faith or, for that matter, music.

Music aside, only the presence of God can explain things that are manifestly beyond the reach of natural science. What’s a mind? What’s a thought? Why are objects like wheat stalks, tree leaves or even our fingers structured according to the golden section?

(By the way, so is most music, Mozart’s specifically, even though one can’t see the composer making protracted calculations to that effect by moving his quill along lined paper.)

A man can thus come to believe God by a simple weighing of intellectual pros and cons, eliminating all possibilities but one. As that great theologian Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

Messrs Anselm and Augustine would reject this line of thought out of hand, and perhaps they would be right. But I’m not so sure. I rather agree with Yudina or, to cite a more authoritative religious source, Blaise Pascal, who said many sage things in spite of being a Jansenite.

Pascal wrote in his Pensées, echoing a similar thought in Jeremiah, “You would not seek me if you had not already found me.” (“Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé”). It shouldn’t matter whether one seeks with one’s heart, as Jeremiah put it, or with one’s mind.

The very desire to seek God, by whatever means, proves that God has already touched the seeker with a gift of grace. AA spoke the truth, but theirs wasn’t the whole truth. No one’s is, except God’s.