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Knowledge and truth - it's a Catch-22

By Mark Christensen - posted Monday, 30 August 2010


Christopher Hitchens is no atheist - he just thinks he is.

The title of his recently published memoir, Hitch-22, reflects his hard-won realisation that “it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties”. Having once adored Oscar Wilde’s reasoning that “a map of the world that did not show Utopia would not be worth consulting”, the eminent contrarian has apparently given up the “fantastically potent illusion” of social justice, contemplating instead the “shipwrecks and the prison islands to which the quest has led”.

Confronted by such an epic sense of unfairness, Blaise Pascal, more than three centuries ago, recommended the dread be managed by betting in favour of God’s existence. Hitchens, heroically modern and irreverent, but no less troubled, backs the alternative.

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Both wagers are contrived, and ultimately futile.

The idea that knowledge cannot be grounded in objective truth is not new.

Socrates proclaimed a paradox: an unexamined life is not worth living, yet wisdom comes from accepting we effectively know nothing.

David Hume argued it’s only instinctive extrapolation of the past, “custom acting upon the imagination”, that causes us to naively believe nature operates in a completely deterministic fashion. His radical scepticism was confirmed empirically in the 1920s, when Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg used quantum phenomena to demonstrate the so-called laws of physics do not hold true in the sub atomic realm. The basic building blocks of reality, at least when they’re not being observed, are best described as random wave functions.

More recently, social critics have queried the legitimacy of Western civilisation itself, pointing out that the truth about the truth means all hitherto moral and economic progress, dependent as it is on tangible goals and notions of control and authority, is the product of a grand deception.

Postmodernism, even before it was thus named, has always threatened our arrogant mind. Socrates was put to death for supposedly corrupting others, while Einstein refused to accept quantum theory, rebutting with the very unscientific response that an “inner voice” informed him that God “does not throw dice”.

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Unknowingness is also derided as self-contradictory. How can one claim the absence of capital-T truth only to then argue it amounts to an ideology capable of explaining reality?

It’s a Catch-22, as Hitchens, somewhat begrudgingly, notes. There is no way to prove life is a by-design mystery. Expecting cognitive traction is equivalent to asking for proof infinity is real. Merely posing the question confirms you are already halfway down the rabbit hole to cerebral oblivion.

The essential weakness of Postmodernism is its failure to explain why, if there are no answers, humanity is endowed with the wonders of reason and language. Is God a sadist, equipping us with nifty tools, an insatiable curiosity, only to then set us off in search of a non-existent quarry?

There is a believable twist on this otherwise absurd scenario.

For a thousand generations the West has presumed its purpose is to solve the big issues. Does God exist? What is truth, love, virtue?

But what if this is misguided? What if human redemption is somehow tied to the more modest, wickedly subtle question of why it is we cannot answer such questions? What if our magnificent responsibility involves appreciating we cannot define existence or the self?

Though this mind-blowing proposition can’t be verified, its self-evident character can be coloured and shaped somewhat by painting a picture of what happens when we defy reality and systematically strive for what can’t be fully conceived.

The anguish and frustration, the blood, sweat and tears, of millennia of religious, imperialist, democratic and now scientific over-reaching, sustained by a misplaced optimism in reason, is that vast work of art. There are no literal answers, only a painful appreciation of our ignorance embodied in the meta-narrative that is our collective past.

Or, as Hitchens writes: “It is not so much that there are ironies of history, it is that history itself is ironic.”

To appreciate such, our consciousness must first let go of reason, as intellectual dogma and irony cannot co-exist.

This is where religion fails. Since the truth is intrinsically free and beyond identity and rules, exclusive doctrine will always sum, in the end, to a hapless paternalism.

Let’s say Jesus walked on water and rose again. For such events to have lasting value, for them to be authentic and heart-felt, they must be rendered intellectually meaningless. Revelation is simply a reminder that divine truth is “like catching water in a net”, as Christian writer Val Webb puts it. It is ultimately vain and foolhardy, akin to believing marriage vows or a wedding ceremony can engender love, to testify an orthodoxy built upon the transcendental is sufficient or infallible.

Hitchens and his allies won’t enlighten religious types if they themselves are defined by a similar unenlightened, self-important need to know.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins recalls (his emphasis) an encounter where certain “theologians were defining themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had declared by fiat that it could not”.

Regardless of whether his colleagues were using divine ineffability as a shield for their existential fear and doubt, it’s irrational to employ aggressive reasoning against those deluded and dispirited by unchecked rationalism. The black-and-whiteness sees Dawkins practicing the very fundamentalism he wants others to be free of. The British biologist needs to land a winning bet just as much as the confused theist.

Hitchens is right to allege religion poisons everything and could well bring civilisation undone. The big historical picture now crafted, claims and counter-claims to the truth are no longer progressive. It’s up to each individual to take the final step themselves; to be righteous, not argue about it or demand others be corrected. The end of history marks a divine milestone for humanity: acknowledge the truth cannot be controlled or expressed as a formula for salvation, or perish in the resulting conflict.

Despite his professed affinity for irony, Hitchens’ deeply wounded psyche refuses to completely surrender the teleological. The secret hope of a definitive solution obscures the final dots to be joined between the emancipating implications of Hitch-22 and his own personal ideology-fuelled, learn-from-being-wrong odyssey. Frustrated more than humbled, he bears the contradiction of retaining one last hopeless cause, atheism.

Ambitiously defiant, Hitchens presses on blindly, eager to solve the enigma wrapped within the mystery, hoping one day to understand why history is ironic, why life will forever remain unknowable.

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About the Author

Mark is a social and political commentator, with a background in economics. He also has an abiding interest in philosophy and theology, and is trying to write a book on the nature of reality. He blogs here.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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