Rewiring, continued

Posted on Apr 25th , ’21 by Vincent

Retirement is not a thing that you can illustrate in a short narrative. What strikes you at first is the novelty, the new-found freedom. At a later stage you might look back nostalgically: to have lost touch with colleagues, to find a gap in your life where team spirit used to flourish. And so on.

At the latter end, where I’d put myself now—soon to become an octogenarian—you have a whole life to look back on. There comes a stage where you have neither hopes nor ambitions for the future. Let my life continue exactly as it is, accepting that time will erode my body and mind like an old penny worn smooth. (We don’t see such things any more but I’ve found an image that matches childhood memory.) We may be blessed enough to recognize in ourselves a choice: to fade joyfully, or grieve angrily at our losses. To some of us, such a choice may not be offered. What kind of cruel world is this?

In any event, all creatures are bound for a common destination, in which our present uniqueness is dissolved. Death Don’t Have No Mercy: thus spake the Grateful Dead. And then the really big question is “Why is there anything at all?” If retirement is a seemingly endless opportunity for self-indulgence, this is where I like to go, a kind of backpacking adventure, loaded with guidebooks to strange locations; with intent to send regular despatches for publication here and discussion with readers.

At which point I offer these words:

The question how come anything as opposed to nothing is one that stretches human beings to their limits: they reach out but never attain the answer. Some of the answers are self-evidently unsatisfactory. For example, if God is the answer to the question “How come everything?” then he is not included in that everything. God cannot be an object competing for your attention among other objects in the universe. God and the universe do not add up to two. Nor does God make the universe out of anything; for whatever God’s creation may be it is not a process of making. Nor does God interfere in the universe, since He would have to be an alternative to, or alongside, what He was interfering with. Being the cause of everything, however, there is nothing that He is outside of. Hence there is no feature of the universe which indicates that it is God-made. What God accounts for is that the universe is there instead of nothing. Of course this is a point at which a philosopher might ask: “How come God in the first place?” But by definition He must contain within himself the reason for His own existence: it is not possible for Him to be nothing. Since He is not part of the universe, though, God must therefore be in everything that happens and everything that exists in the universe.

I got the above from the later pages of Darwin’s Angel: an angelic riposte to “The God Delusion”, by John Cornwell. Amazon tells me I bought it in October 2010, paying full paperback price. What made me do that? Anyhow there it is on my shelves and it’s only now that I’ve got round to properly reading it. I was puzzled at first that the author takes so much trouble to defend millennnia of religious culture from the depredations of Richard Dawkins, who I thought hardly deserves such critical attention. But Cornwell takes extraordinary pains to tackle him point by point. He concludes that Dawkins himself has become a fundamentalist. Just as creationists are wilfully blind to the multiplicity of fossils and geological layers, he’s wilfully blind to most of Christianity, selecting its fundamentalist fringe as representing the whole.

The book’s journey proves fruitful for an intrepid reader who sticks with it. For me, the above excerpt provides a worthwhile destination. Cornwell is passsionately Catholic to the point of being its fierce critic. He’s not a maverick outlier like Eric Gill, but an academic strong enough to wrestle the precious idea of God from the grasp of unworthy preachers. In particular, I like the way he reconciles the yearnings of the heart with clear-sighted reason.

Next post: perhaps on the Journals of Kierkegaard. Perhaps not.