I Can Trust My Reason, Just Not That Much...

In my post of October 21, "Seeing Through the Paradox" I shared why it is easy for me to prioritize my reason (and desires) over God's commands using the Parable of the Royal Wedding Feast as a text.  In this post, I'll come at it from the other direction, that our reason alone isn't reliable enough to be our sole source of wisdom for making life decisions.  Let's start with a quote from my favorite thinker:

But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.  Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments p. 37 (Hong edition)

Kierkegaard's point is that a paradox arises because our desire (or passion) to know overwhelms our reason's ability to deliver the goods.  As a result, we allow our reason to walk us out on logical limbs which often break (often unbeknownst to us). 

Kant makes the same point in a different way. His epistemology (theory of how we know what we know) included what he called antinomies which are logical contradictions demonstrating the limits of our reason. For Kant, ironically one of the enlightenments most prominent cheerleaders, the punchline is that our senses only have access to appearances (the phenomena) and not to ultimate reality (the noumena). The upshot is that our ability to comprehend the world is useful navigating our world, but it is not a reliable witness of our ultimate physical world.

To unpack these antinomies a bit, we experience the world in terms of quantity (two eggs for breakfast) and duration (how long it takes to eat our breakfast).  Applying this to how we look at the world, our desire to understand ultimate things drives us to take the concepts we use to understand our world, such as quantity and duration, and apply them to ultimate things.  As a result, we draw conclusions using inputs from our limited vantage point (quantity, duration, etc.) as if our view had no limits, from what is often termed a "God's eye" view. It's then easy to get wrapped around the axle of questions such as "did time have a beginning, or "could God make a rock so large he can't lift it", which end up not making much sense. This becomes the "view from nowhere", that is we're confused but don't know it.

Even as far back as Kant then, our commonsense picture of the world was showing some nasty cracks.  By the time Einstein was through with us there was no picture at all.  After Einstein, matter and energy are just two modes of the same (and only) thing.  Universe Today puts it this way, "light and matter are just aspects of the same thing. Matter is just frozen light. And light is matter on the move". I have no idea how to picture this, or what it means, but if this is indeed what is left of our commonsense world, then our world of stable "things" (the cup on the table) is now only an appearance, a refraction created by our minds.

Our reason (and therefore common sense) isn't any more reliable by itself at understanding ultimate spiritual realities than it is at understanding ultimate physical reality.

As a way into this, let's pick up the Book of Job towards the end, after Job has repeatedly demanded that God appear in court to provide testimony regarding why Job's suffering is commensurate with his sins.  Apparently having heard enough (30 plus chapters of it) God finally arrives on the scene. However, he doesn't answer Job but turns the tables and questions him by asking: "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?  Gird up now thy loins like a man, answer thou me" (Job 38:2-3). 

Next, the Lord asks Job where he was when he (God) laid the foundations of the earth, or when he tamed Leviathan, the symbol for chaos.  These rhetorical questions make the point that Job, with his puny understanding, not only couldn't do God's great works, but also couldn't even understand them. My reading is that God didn't answer Job's question because Job wouldn't have understood the answer if the Lord had tried to explain it to him.  Job's desire to understand was overwhelmed by his reason's ability to comprehend spiritual things (why he suffered) just as Kant's antinomies describe our reason's inability to understand our ultimate physical world.

It is true that many of God's commandments are straightforward and make perfect sense.  "Thou shalt not kill (murder)", or "Honor thy Father and Mother" are examples with which most would readily agree.  But others seem much less obvious such as tithing a significant portion of one's income, attending Church on Sundays or living a chaste life. These are cases where we are more likely to get in trouble.

The Savior may have wrapped many of his teachings in paradoxes to point to these limitations. Consider for example, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matt 11:28-30). Yokes were harnessed to oxen so they could drag a plow all day and were so painful that they couldn't be used on smarter animals such as horses.  And isn't a burden by definition heavy or at least not light? Or consider, "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it" Matt 10:39.  On the surface this doesn't even make sense. 

One could reasonably ask why our earthly sojourn isn't structured such that the right decisions about how to live were obvious.  If so, we could still make mistakes either through thoughtlessness or by willfully preferring the bad over the good, but if we had unerring reason, over time we would correct towards perfection.

Perhaps our experience is structured as it is to encourage us to develop a personal relationship with God who promises us that we will live more joyful lives if we trust him by making covenants and then follow through and keeping them.

Making the point a different way (that developing relationships with us is God's priority), think how different your relationship with your parents would have been if you had just popped out of the womb as a fully formed adult. Your parents would just be two more people, peers of a sort, though people to whom you would owe a special debt. Rather, you came into this world completely helpless and would not have survived had not your parents nurtured and loved you, thereby shaping you (for good or ill) into who you are. In the process they became and remain the most important relationships in our lives.

Just as with our earthly parents, obeying our heavenly parents becomes a self-reinforcing loop. As we follow the commandments our joy grows and our trust and love for them increases, we become more faithful, the loop continues to reinforce itself making us even more confident in the Lord and his path. 

The Lord seemed to teach this lesson to Moroni when he responded to his concern that poor writing skills would be the cause of future generations not believing in his prophetic writings by saying: "...the Lord spake unto me, saying: Fools mock, but they shall mourn; and my grace is sufficient for the meek, that they shall take no advantage of your weakness; and if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them (Ether 12:26-27)".

"Making weak things become strong unto them" has more than a faint whiff of paradox itself.  The power (or strength) would come from learning the very truth, that when push comes to shove between my desires and following the Savior, I'll experience more joy by following him.  His yoke is indeed easier. As we follow him, we'll avoid the joke we make sometimes when explaining a serious mistake by saying, "well, it seemed like a good idea at the time".  Jean Renoir's character Octave put it even better as their social world collapsed due to human folly in the 1930's classic "Rules of the Game", "The truly terrible thing about this life, Monsieur, is that everyone has their own reasons".

Further, as we follow him by serving others to build a Zion society, we also learn the importance of relationships with our fellow travelers. This is something the secular world is just starting to realize.  In the midst of all our wealth, there may has never been a time when so many have felt so alone as evidenced by our high rates of depression.

Perhaps this is why the Savior said, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself". (John 7:17) The Lord is here making clear that knowing the truth comes with living God's laws.  The Book of Mormon Prophet Alma taught the same when he encouraged those that want to know the truth to "experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith" (Alma 32:27).   The writer of the Proverbs said, "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5).

But no one summed it up better than the Savior.  As he started gathering disciples immediately after his baptism, two of John's disciples asked him where he lived and he replied, "come and see", which they did.  The following day, the Savior found Philip "and said unto him, Follow me".  Philip then finds Nathanael, telling him "We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the Prophets did write". Whereupon Nathanael asked, "Can there any good thing come out of (the tiny backwater) Nazareth"?  Philip replied, "come and see" (John 1:37-46).

He did and so should we.