God as a mathematical construct

My fellow friars have taken to calling attention to my habit of providing definitions of things.

Two definitions of which I am particularly proud are my definitions of “love” and “value.”

The love definition I stole from John Joe Lakers, who used it hundreds of times in his writings (though he preferred the term “intimacy”): love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement. Since I believe in the Marriage Encounter statement, “love is a decision,” which means that love is a behavior which you can choose or not choose, I have removed the term “passionate,” even though John Joe moved it from second to first place in his formulation. Passion is not under our control. Respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness are under our control. They are behaviors. But we don’t control emotion. Unless there is passion, you don’t have love—but you can’t manufacture passion on demand.

After decades of recalling my grad school teachers define a “value” as “a conception of the desirable,” I developed one that I like better: a value is a statement that one thing is better than its alternative. The word “statement” in that definition is empirically observable.

So recently I faced the issue of answering Pilate’s famous question, “what is truth?” Here is my answer: truth is the story as God would tell it. I could just as well have said “truth is the story as the gods would tell it.” In that statement, God (the gods) is functioning like a mathematical construct.

From high school geometry I recall a definition of a line as something that has no diameter, but extends into infinity. A plane has width and height but no depth. There are no such things in reality, but the concepts are useful.

You don’t have to believe in God to use God (the gods) as a construct in thinking about things.

We are learning, in these days of “fake news,” that the same event can generate conflicting stories. Was the January 6 event a mob action inspired by a U.S. president, or was it a mob action infiltrated by leftist agitators to make that U.S. president look bad? Who can tell?

The Congress has rejected forming a commission to try to get some consensus on the true story, but even if they had formed a commission, it would still have been possible to cling to the opposite of what the commission would conclude.

This is nothing new. What is a courtroom other than a way to try to determine which of two conflicting stories is true? And we know that just because a jury of twelve peers can be wrong, there is no human institution that can with metaphysical certainty state that one story is true and its opposite is not true. Only God (the gods) can do that, God (the gods) as a mathematical construct.

Truth is out there somewhere—the story of what actually happened is out there—but only God knows what it is. And yet it is worth pursuing, even unto death.



The Postmodern Critique

I listen, occasionally, to commentators like Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levine. I don’t listen to them enough to be sure I hear them accurately. But I hear them criticizing the academic world for destroying morality and truth itself.

It is true that university professors can gain popularity by making shocking statements. Messrs. Limbaugh and Levin are playing that game themselves. But condemning the entire profession because of the foolishness of some of its practitioners throws the baby out with the bathwater. I suspect that what Limbaugh and Levin see is some version of what academics have come to call “postmodernism.”

Postmodernism is the train of thought that began shortly after World War II with what sociologists call “Critical Theory,” led by German academics such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno. I state their position this way: any time you hear someone claiming to speak the truth, watch out, because they are angling to get power over someone else.

That could be heard as a statement that there is no such thing as truth, which is of course absurd. “All statements are false, including this one.” An alternative is to say, no one can know the truth because truth-speakers are always angling for power.

That is what John Joe used to label “a hollow voice of protest.” The post-modernists are protesting the misuse of truth-language, but they offer nothing beyond their protest. We can’t get along in this world without truth. We can’t do journalism without truth. Journalists are giving their lives for it. Dictators do everything in their power to control their stories and outlaw competing stories.

To say “truth is the story that God would tell” keeps alive the hope that some stories are closer to the truth than others, even though no story can capture it absolutely, just as no geometric plane in the real world is without depth.

Courtrooms and judges and juries are good enough to get by on while we try to live together, provided of course that they are not manipulated by one side. So are peer-reviewed scientific research papers and the thousands of journals that meta-analyze them.

All my life I have lived by a statement of John Duns Scotus, one of the great figures in the Franciscan intellectual tradition: “In the course of human history, the knowledge of truth always advances.”

Yes, I say. God knows that.



An aside on evangelization

I have been reading three of Pope Francis’s encyclicals: Evangelii Gaudium (2013), Laudato Si (2015), and Fratelli Tutti (2020). The first of these is a call to share our faith courageously.

It has always been difficult for me to initiate conversations about faith issues. The grandchildren in a family I have been close to for years reach college age, and I say nothing to these young people. What is wrong with me?

Recently I found myself very tentatively beginning a conversation—toe in the water—with one of them. “Is there a Newman Club on your campus?” Maybe, I hoped, that would lead us to talk about more important things.

Then I asked myself, why not just ask “What does God want you to be doing?” We don’t have to share a particular orthodox definition of God. I’ll just let the term “God” function the way it does in my definition of truth.

Can’t wait to try it.