A Touchstone Proposition
What seems to be true of a frame of reference or of both sorts of worldview, whether existential or encyclopedic, is that some proposition or claim lies at the heart of them. One philosopher, William H. Halverson, has described such a proposition—whether that proposition is implicit or explicit—as a touchstone proposition.8 Examples are not hard to find. At the core of naturalism, for instance, is the idea that matter is all there is, while theism claims that there is a wise and good Creator. According to Halverson this divide between naturalistic and non-naturalistic worldviews is the fundamental one. He contends:
It may be helpful to bear in mind from the beginning, however, that one theme that underlies nearly all philosophical discussion is the perpetual conflict between naturalistic and nonnaturalistic world views. A naturalistic world view is one in which it is affirmed that (a) there is only one order of reality, (b) this one order of reality consists entirely of objects and events occurring in space and time, and (c) this one order of reality is completely self-dependent and self-operating . . . . Any world view that denies any of the above-stated tenets of naturalism, then, may be termed nonnaturalistic.9
Other examples include nihilism, which has at its heart the notion that nothing matters. Islam provides one more instance with its claim that Allah alone is God and that Muhammad is his prophet.
But what exactly is a touchstone? A touchstone is a piece of quartz that can be rubbed against what is claimed to be gold. The chemical reaction that follows will show whether the specimen of ore is real gold or fool’s gold. The touchstone proposition acts as a gatekeeper to the house of knowledge—or so it is hoped. What we count as knowledge has to pass the quality control of the touchstone proposition. Of course, and here’s the rub, our chosen touchstone may be astray with the result that we are really in the dark but do not know it. John Warwick Montgomery tells an instructive story that makes the point.
Once upon a time there was man who thought he was dead. His concerned wife and friends sent him to the friendly neighborhood psychiatrist. The psychiatrist determined to cure him by convincing him of one fact that contradicted his belief that he was dead. The fact that the psychiatrist settled on was the simple truth that dead men do not bleed, and he put him to work reading medical texts, observing autopsies, etc. After weeks of effort, the patient finally said, “All right! You’ve convinced me. Dead men do not bleed.” Whereupon the psychiatrist struck him in the arm with a needle, and the blood flowed. The man looked with a contorted, ashen face and cried: “Good Lord! Dead men bleed after all!”10
The wrong touchstone proposition or presupposition, “I am dead!”, can keep us from reality. Put another way, some frames of reference may leave us puzzled, like the young man I met some years ago. He had a real interest in history. So he studied all the evidence he could for the claim that Christ was raised from the dead. He read a book by the lawyer Frank Morison.11 Morison started off his project as an agnostic but ended as a believer in the resurrection. Having read Morrison’s Who Moved The Stone?, he concluded that Jesus had indeed come back from the dead. But he did not believe in the possibility of life after death for anyone else. I asked him, “How come?” He replied that he also believed in a chance universe in which freaky things could happen like a one-off resurrection.
In relation to our question “Has Christianity a worldview or frame of reference?” we need then to look for a touchstone proposition, or better still, a cluster of such, at its heart—but with this proviso. It may turn out that Christianity has a frame of reference or a worldview in the existential sense, but isn’t one. It may turn out that Christianity intellectually considered in the first instance is not a worldview, but the interpretation of a slice of human history and with it a claim that the ultimate destiny of us all hangs on what happened in that history and our response to it.12
Pascal’s Pensée No. 12
One thing a frame of reference must do if it is to have any plausibility is to give some account of being human in which we can recognize ourselves. Remember one of the criteria I introduced earlier was this: a worldview needs to provide a framework of meaning in the light of which we can live in the actual world we experience and that makes sense of the experience of ourselves. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is a fascinating read and exhibits an extraordinary intellect.13 But I am left wondering what light it throws on the phenomenon of ourselves.
I read my first book by a philosopher when I was a teenager. It was Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (“Thoughts”). It was a marvelous read then and still is. One of Pascal’s thoughts stands out:
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.14
Does Christianity really understand human nature? Pascal thought so. Was he right?
What then does it mean to understand human nature? At the very least this: I need to be able to recognize myself (especially my longings and discontents) in this frame of reference with its touchstone proposition/s. Perhaps a list of questions will help to highlight what needs to be understood.
(1) C. S. Lewis of Narnia fame wrote, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”15 If as Lewis suggests we find in ourselves desires that nothing in this world can satisfy, could this be a clue that we are really made for another world beyond this one? In a letter to a younger aspiring academic, Sheldon Vanauken, Lewis asked:
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or, if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (“How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!”) In Heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something about us which is not temporal.”16
(2) Why is it that we so hunger for more life—some of us so much so that we are trying to become immortal by melding with the machine to evolve into a new species that can cheat death? As Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.”17 Others hope that at a future date they can be revived from their cryogenic resting places and have the ravages of their terminal illness or ageing reversed.
(3) Why is it that we fall short of our own standards of behavior? What led Nobel prize-winning author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his The Gulag Archipelago to maintain, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every heart—and through all human hearts”?18 And what led philosopher Bertrand Russell to lament, “It is in our hearts that evil lies, and it is from our hearts that it must be plucked out”?19 Do the words of St Paul resonate with our own moral experience? “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. . . . For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out” (Romans 7:15, 18a).
(4) Why are we such paradoxical beings? Pascal expressed the paradox in these terms: “What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!”20
(5) Was Jewish thinker Martin Buber right to describe the human predicament in this vivid contrast: “In the history of the human spirit I distinguish between epochs of habitation and epochs of homelessness. In the former, man lives in the world as in a house, as in a home. In the latter, man lives in the world as in an open field and at times does not even have four pegs with which to set up a tent”?21 Our postmodern context underlines Buber’s point. Some of our contemporaries have given up the search for pegs. For example, Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer maintain: “Since Darwin, we know that we do not exist for any purpose.”22
(6) What fuels the contemporary quest for spirituality? Is it a growing sense of homelessness? In the swinging ’60s Harvey Cox wrote a best seller called The Secular City. He argued that the secularization of Western culture has brought freedom. Traditional religion was now passé. But some thirty years later he wrote: “Today it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction.”23 What Cox had not allowed for back in the ’60s was a deeply seated human hunger for the transcendent—that is to say, the need to connect with something or someone bigger and more lasting than ourselves. And so what do we now see? The quest for the transcendent currently takes a myriad of forms from interest in the Dalai Lama to Wicca to astrology to scientology to tantric sex. As Bono of U2 sings, we have still not found what we are looking for.
(7) Is it time to revisit Augustine’s famous opening to his Confessions, the first Western autobiography? Augustine wrote in the form of a prayer: “because you [God] made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”24 It was also Augustine who maintained that although there is truth to be found outside the Bible, there are some premises for thought that can only be found within it.25 Without these premises for thought we cannot really understand who we are, let alone the wider world in which we live.