This is part 12 of my series ‘There and Back Again: An (A)Theist’s Tale’. This series tells you my story of losing faith and the slow journey of finding it again but not quite in the same way as before.
Part 12 explores the question: 'What is Truth?' - why this question matters and why it is fundamentally misunderstood in the Western world.
You can find the rest of this series under the 'There and Back Again: An (A)Theist's Tale' tab at the top of the screen.
6,800 words
Image by Sepp from Pixabay
“Perhaps no one has ever been sufficiently truthful about what ‘truthfulness’ is.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche[1]
“Always question the question.” Certainly in terms of my intellectual life, this is some of the best advice I’ve ever been given. The profound truth that every question is also an answer. Behind every query, there lies a million confident conclusions about how everything is already meant to fit together. The traveller may query whether the road before him corresponds to the one marked on his map, but only because he already assumes he is turned to the right page.
Perhaps it is no surprise I was so quick to take this advice to heart given my multi-cultural upbringing. Growing up between worlds each as confident in its map as the other, it didn’t take a particularly observant teenager to notice the myopia on display. While politics in the UK was frequently bogged down by arguments over the correct balance between the need to ‘get things done’ and respecting the rights and privacy of citizens, my favourite DVD store in Shanghai disappeared within the space of a day after all the occupants of a 5-hectare plot of land were evicted and the plot summarily marked for redevelopment. I witnessed countless stressed Chinese parents anxiously filling up their children’s free time with extra academic after-school classes in the hopes of ensuring a bright future, while my British parents’ main concern was not academics, but ensuring their homeschooling children could still take part in sports, music and drama. “What is the balance between individual liberty and getting things done?” “What is the best after-school academic programme for my child?” A whole picture has already been painted before you even reach the question mark.
I cannot remember when I first heard the question “What is truth?” or even when I began to reflect on the topic. All I know is that by the time I was beginning to think deeply about life’s big questions, I had already decided that this was one of them. More than that, it was probably the biggest. The answer to this question in particular carried with it the ultimate reward. Only by answering this could I hope to discover the meaning of life, our reason for being, and come to the fruition of life’s spiritual quest.
That is, until I began to question the question.
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“If philosophy had the power to establish incontrovertible truths, immune to doubt, and if philosophers were as a rule wholly disinterested practitioners of their art, then it might be possible to speak of progress in philosophy. In fact, however, the philosophical tendencies and presuppositions of any age are, to a very great degree, determined by the prevailing cultural mood or by the ideological premises generally approved of by the educated classes. As often as not, the history of philosophy has been a history of prejudices masquerading as principles, and so merely a history of fashion. It is as possible today to be an intellectually scrupulous Platonist as it was more than two thousand years ago, it is simply not in vogue.”
-David Bentley Hart[2]
“They [philosophers] pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic…while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an ‘inspiration’, generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event – they are one and all advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most part no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, which they baptize ‘truths’.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche[3]
For most of my life, I believed the question ‘what is true?’ was interchangeable with the question, ‘what is ultimately real?’ When a belief corresponded with reality, it was true; when it didn’t, it was false. Like almost everyone then, I began to conflate the truth with objectivity because reality too was objective. This didn’t necessarily mean I thought the truth must be provable. I recognised we live in a hall of mirrors. A world where our cultures, languages, birthplaces, biologies and very humanity distort and limit our capability to see reality in its fully ‘true’ and ‘objective’ state. But I nevertheless believed that with the right approach, the truth was discoverable to any who approached it.
Christian that I was, my commitment to this quest was total. I exposed myself to the most insightful, uncomfortable and offensive ideas of my ideological enemies. I refused to credit any apparent mystical experiences within psychologically suggestive settings. I searched out the worst of my fellow man’s suffering and dared to ask God ‘why?’ I was confident that my faith in Jesus Christ – the Way, the Truth and the Life – could survive the flames. And for many years, my instinct seemed well-founded. I’d held my deepest convictions to the fire of cold objectivity and found they did not burn. That is of course, until they finally did.
The revelation that I was probably an atheist was in no small part a recognition that I could no longer accept Christianity as true on these terms. While arguments could be made for the theistic idea of God, it was much harder to rationally make the jump from a theistic God’s existence to the specifically Christian message being true. My understanding of God rested on subjective assumptions like the Bible being God’s Word and my Christian spiritual experiences being reliable interpretations of the Divine. But such subjectivity belonged to the ephemeral world of appearances, mere instincts you couldn’t argue to from scratch. For all its merits, I couldn’t convince myself anymore that following Jesus Christ was a discoverable universal imperative that was really real in a fundamental way.
Yet, it wasn’t long before I began to recognise the same problem within atheism. While it seemed to provide a rationalistic account of reality, not just totally comprehensive, but discoverable by all regardless of tradition and accident of birth, the same problematic ‘metaphysical jump’ lay between atheism and its irreligious corollaries as between theism and Christianity. This supposedly universally discoverable worldview did not produce uniform results. It was perfectly plain from my childhood in atheistic China that ‘atheism’ could hold very different forms, values and ethics when unmoored from its Western Christian roots. Atheists – Chinese or Western – relied just as much upon contingent instincts and unverifiable assumptions as everyone else.
I had reached an impasse. I still believed truth was out there to be discovered, but with each passing month I began to wonder whether I could ever find it through my quest for knowledge and facts alone. The harder I looked, the more complicated the truth became. Perhaps my fickle human reason could never hope to comprehend reality in all its fullness?
A change of approach was required. I had tried the way of mind; now I must try the way of the soul. Convinced that I could no longer hope to think my way out of this world of projection and illusion, I concluded that if the truth could not be discovered through reason, perhaps it could through experience. While previously, I had sought to comprehend the truth, now I endeavoured to connect with it. In this new quest, I was much inspired by the words (incorrectly as it happens) attributed to St. Gregory of Nyssa[4]: “Concepts create idols. Only wonder comprehends anything.” Abstract theologies and rationalised principle were all very well and good, but words and ideas are mere shadows of reality. We feel reality long before we decide we know anything about it.
I needed a vehicle – something ‘that worked’ – to help me make this tangible link with the Real. Luckily, I had one ready to hand. After all, there was undoubtedly a certain familiarity in this new approach to the truth. Connecting with the divine had always been a fundamental part of the charismatic Christian tradition of my youth. It too accepted that it was not enough just to know about God; you had to experience Him. ‘Relationship not religion’ was this tradition’s anthem as it encouraged me to move beyond the world of concepts into the mystery of the divine embrace. Indeed, on multiple occasions throughout my youth, I had profound spiritual experiences, so much so that even at the height of my atheist doubting, I never lost my marked sense that there was something spiritual about reality at its deepest level.
But this didn’t mean I was content to simply return to the Christianity of my past. Truth for me was still wrapped up in the question ‘what is real’. And throughout my years within the charismatic Christian tradition, I had always wrestled with a gnawing doubt: how can I know any of this is real? At the heart of my concern lay my recognition of an uncomfortable truth. My tradition had cultivated within me not just the desire to experience God, but the anxiety too. Rejection is difficult at the best of times, let alone when it seems to come from the Almighty Himself. I was only too aware of how my own insecurity to encounter God might incline me within spiritually suggestive environments to manufacture God’s presence and exaggerate a touch from the Almighty.
Yet, unlike some, I never came to the conclusion that my spiritual encounters were all therefore just hype and hysteria. Though I was on my guard against psychological suggestion, I couldn’t in good conscience simply dismiss all my own religious experiences as wilful delusion, many of which occurred without any additional ‘hype’ at all. Neither though was I comfortable returning to a tradition which played so close to the line between divine facilitation and manipulation. Now hoping to discern reality more clearly through feeling rather than knowledge, it was paramount I had feelings and experiences I could trust. I would have to find another road, one immune to insecurity’s machinations.
And so I turned to the Christian apophatic tradition of silence and contemplation. This tradition simultaneously symbolised the rejection of both my previous rationalism and charismatic seeking-after experience. I began to fast weekly, sometimes even days at a time. I worked my way through the sayings of the Desert Fathers and read the most dramatic Christian biographies I could find. I replaced my old morning habit of Scripture-reading followed by prayer, and instead began a more meditative form of devotion focussed on the memorisation and recitation of Scripture as well as sitting in silence. Having essentially substituted the Unknowable God for Reality, I was sure it was only a matter of time before this new contemporary mystical approach would bring me back to the Truth beyond reason and hype.
Except I wasn’t connecting. In all my practices, I was thoroughly disengaged from everything I was doing. I felt less the impassioned monk contemplating the numinous, more the dispassionate observer, intellectually curious but nonetheless remote. While fasting had previously been a very fruitful spiritual exercise for me, I now found on multiple occasions that I spent my fast days procrastinating, looking for any excuse to postpone intentional times of prayer, meditation and contemplation. I told myself I wanted to meet with God, but every time I stopped to pray, sit in silence, or read Scripture, it was almost as if I was just trying to get it over with. What’s more, outside my days of fasting it was even worse. For years I had kept up a daily habit of Scripture reading and prayer, yet now I struggled to find time to pray and sit in silence before God two days running let alone every day. Why despite my intellectual enthusiasm for this new quest did I simultaneously experience this immense spiritual lethargy. Why was so much of me unwilling to follow? Discouraged at the lack of results, my perseverance ran thin until the practices dropped off one by one.
Once more my quest for Truth had reached a dead-end. It had now been over two years since the onset of my spiritual crisis, and I still felt no closer to a resolution. My dalliance with a vintage mystical regimen had felt like an honest attempt to simultaneously find the truth and salvage my fragile Christian faith from an intellectual world disenchanted by science and rationality, but I began to wonder if I was merely keeping my existential crisis on hold.
Perhaps I could try asking a different question?
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“We cannot be rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition. Why not accept it?”
-John Gray, Straw Dogs, 80-1
“Given that the universe is what it is – however you understand it – what are you going to do about it? How have you personally decided to respond? What story have you decided to live by? Where or not you know it, you are already living by a story you are telling yourself.” 200
-Richard Holloway, Stories We Tell Ourselves, 200
“I mean by a true myth a story, or a description, that is not literally true but that nevertheless expresses and tends to evoke an appropriate attitude towards the subject of the myth.” 235
-John Hick, The Fifth Dimension, 235
I began to suspect I was asking the wrong question nine months into writing this blog series. A good Christian friend had come to visit me and, unaware of my recent crisis of faith, asked me: “Do you find it easy to hear from God?” I grimaced. This was a question rooted in the charismatic tradition my friend and I had shared. But as far as I was concerned, I had moved on from this spiritual neediness, this insecure necessity to ‘hear’ from God. I had a more emotionally mature theology now. I didn’t need to hear God’s voice to know He was there.
But instead of rebuffing my friend, as I instinctively wanted to, something made me pause before I quietly replied, “Hear God’s voice? I can’t remember the last time I tried to listen.” With those words, I was hit by a sudden wave of clarity: everything I had been about to say was a lie. It’s not that there was no substance to any of the rebuttals racing to the tip of my tongue, but they concealed more honest truths.
Behind my confident, erudite critique lay a soul still reeling in the aftermath of a world turned upside down. I’d spent years devotedly seeking God only to find all my spiritual experience and earnest fervour seemingly powerless against the steady application of my own cold, indifferent scepticism. The God who talked; the God who cared; the God who cried; the God who died – He was all so fragile, so open to question and doubt; full of holes and contradictions. I needed a God simultaneously beyond feeble subjectivity yet safe from objectivity’s dispassionate, icy, probing fingers.
Desperate for a sense of grounding in a disorientated world, I had turned to the God of pure Ontology. A God to be theoretically pondered but always kept safely at a distance. A spirituality of transcendence without communion, of spirit without flesh. A Platonic Ideal to be aspired to yet never grasped, revered but never loved, talked about but never to, believed but never followed. In this moment, I recognised my enigmatic spirituality of silence was much more than an intellectual response to the limitations of reason. It was the emotional reaction of a bruised, traumatised heart, unwilling to draw close enough to listen.
I don’t think it a coincidence that the above occurred just a week before I finished writing about my loss of faith (Part 2: Paradigm Shift). Originally, I had anticipated this would speak of a mind convulsed by the alarming recognition atheism’s arguments had finally breached its defences. It came then as quite the surprise to find myself writing instead about a rebellion from within. Reading through my journal from the months prior to my existential crisis, I was struck by just how much on numerous fronts my heart was grappling with a potent cocktail of negative emotions around Christianity’s vision for life. Frustration at the boundaries placed around sex, disillusionment that Christian self-sacrifice was worthwhile and making the world a better place, confusion around spirituality and religious experiences, and growing obstinacy towards obeying the God I professed to love. What if the arguments hadn’t breached the defences but had instead been let in?
I had always been a believer in that deepest of post-Enlightenment convictions that humans are essentially rational. What set humanity apart from all other creatures was our capability to reason. But it was now clear to me that reason was the servant, not the king. Arguments might justify our orders, but the commands themselves proceed from the arbitrary will of our irrational sovereign: that is, our Author.
Each of us lives at our Author’s pleasure. Subjects of the Fundamental orientating all that we call reality. Characters in a story which defines the contours of our existence, informing us what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’, what is ‘honourable’ and what is ‘shameful’, what is ‘wise’ and what is ‘foolish. Actors repeating lines already given, walking the boards of a stage we did not necessarily choose or desire. Fortunately for the story, the human actor is a creature of sentiment. Before too long, the set has grown familiar and dear, and she will have it no other way.
Nonetheless, no Author can take its protagonists fully for granted. There is more than one play on show in our cosmic theatre, and even the grossest sentimentality isn’t impervious to envy particularly when paired with the corrosive powers of disillusion and cynicism. And I was no different. Despite my immense sentimental affection for Christianity and its Author, I now appreciated the truth of what had happened: I had been wooed by another story.
The Irreligious tale that drew me came in two parts. First there was the atheistic tale, the story of a disenchanted world, devoid of meaning or purpose. Indeed, this was the anti-story – a cautionary tale against our human propensity to interpret life as a story in the first place.
No one put it better to me than Christopher Hitchens in his classic atheistic polemic, God is Not Great. Of all the arguments he made, one in particular lodged itself disconcertingly in my mind. It was his diatribe against religious solipsism: the belief “that the universe is preoccupied with one’s own fate”[5] and that “my personal fortunes are of absorbing interest to a supreme being.”[6] As Hitchen’s highlighted, the religious are frequently quite biased in what happenstances they choose to attribute to the Divine. It is relatively common to hear a Christian say ‘God heals’, no doubt because they have witnessed or heard a few miraculous stories of medical recovery. Yet, rare is the Christian who says ‘God kills’ even though by the same logic that is a far greater certainty. Or as Hitchens himself put it:
‘There but for the grace of God,’ said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, ‘go I.’ What this apparently compassionate observation really means—not that it really ‘means’ anything—is, ‘There by the grace of God goes someone else.’”[7]
It’s all very well smugly believing your life is a manifestation of your God’s miraculous power, but what have you done except cherry pick from a series of randomly connected incidents to project your desired image. Indeed, why do you boastfully assume that you are even the main character in the first place? Who’s to say you aren’t yourself a mere pawn – ‘there but for the grace of God goes someone else’. How robust will your story prove when tragedy strikes and the nice little story arc you built for yourself turns out to be a path into emptiness?
The perceptive reader will notice this was the aggressor sallying forth against the walls of my Christian soul when its defences were finally overturned. How could the Christian story be anything other than mere fiction fluctuating upon a bedrock of indifferent reality? Was God merely a convenient, well-meaning plot device to make sense of the cacophony of random events, relationships and initiatives coming together in a disordered mess to form the patchwork of my life? There was nothing objectively special about the Bible, my ‘spiritual’ encounters or all the other things which made my Christian faith feel real. Only confirmation bias and wish fulfilment.
Nonetheless, perhaps the battlements would have held but for the second part of Irreligion’s tale. While Hitchen’s anti-story gave me a roadmap for understanding the cosmos, it didn’t tell me anything about why and how I should live. Fortunately for me, ever since I was a small boy, the romantic tale which permeates the West had been quietly planting itself in my soul. The simultaneous excitement and tragedy of a life lived only once, duty-bound to grab every opportunity to expand my self-hood to every conceivable corner of wondrous experience. What fulfilment might I realise if I cast off the restrictions of my authoritarian Divine Author and instead embraced this new play with its promised happy ending of exciting, vainglorious possibility? What is youth after all but a life full of potential, and old age but a life constrained to an ever-shrinking horizon? Why not then live as a youthful pilgrim on this Earth, never content to settle long enough to turn the exotic mundane, the beautiful ordinary, or the exciting predictable. Why hamper it then with the old-fashioned virtues of loyalty, faithfulness and perseverance, and instead not embrace the new virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, and disruption? Why couldn’t the life lived to the full be the life most fulfilled?
For many years, the seeds of this story had lain relatively dormant and benign in my heart. How could it hope to grow with my Christian worldview suffocating it? My life was to be lived, not in the service of my Self, but of my Creator. “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.”[8] These were the solemn words of my creed. If fulfilment was to be found in chasing after experience, then it was not to the wondrous I was called, but to the awful, the tragic, and the miserable. “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”[9] Yet all of a sudden, watered by the rains of disenchantment, resentment and intriguing possibility, these seeds began to germinate, surging to the surface of my heart. It wasn’t long before this ‘enemy within’ opened the gates to my Christian soul and the atheistic host assaulting its walls came rushing in.
But for the deep roots of my Christian faith and a new environment more hostile to my emancipated Irreligious inclinations, the Christian story of my life may have been uprooted altogether. Instead, after a turbulent few months, my Irreligosity rooted itself quietly alongside my Christianity, such that the two became intertwined and even sometimes quite indistinguishable. If my quest for truth had reached a dead-end, it was only because I was paralysed by indecision, unable to choose which story I would be true to. I’d left the garden to grow, hoping nature might make for me the decision I refused to make.
It now seemed unequivocal. Truth must be a story. All my reflections pointed squarely in one direction: any suggestion that I came to the truth through reason and argument must be false. Facts and figures, stats and logic, arguments and critiques – all can speak the truth. But dishonesty may still wear the cloak of truth when the thoughts of the mind obscure the real workings of the heart. We do not come to our core understanding of the world through intellectual study but through the bedrock of formative experiences which shape the loves, hates, aspirations and desires of our hearts. Evidence must be interpreted. It must always be weaved into a story.
For a while then, I thought I had cracked it. In interrogating the question, ‘what is true?’, I seemed to have finally arrived at a better question: ‘what story will you be true to?’. But there was a snag. I soon despondently realised I couldn’t escape the original question. My claim the only truth that mattered was finding a story to be true to only sidestepped the fundamental issue: was any of it actually real?! Indeed, I embarrassingly realised that not only was my apparent solution no more than a complex rebrand of the ‘live your truth’ mantra already heard across the West, but it also wasn’t news to anybody. As atheists like American psychiatrist, Irvan Yamal, have long been pointing out:
“We humans appear to be meaning-seeking creatures who have had the misfortune of being thrown into a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life and to perform the tricky manoeuvre of denying our personal authorship of this meaning.”[10]
So what if humans have a tendency to create meaning and interpret the world through stories! Hitchens himself accepted that we can’t help but be solipsistic, imagining ourselves as heroes in marvellous tales. This doesn’t make any of these meanings and interpretations fundamentally real or true.
However much I was now convinced we couldn’t help but live by a story, I couldn’t shake the inescapable conclusion of the anti-story that to pretend this metaphor was not mere illusion but ‘the truth’ was deluding myself. Words and expressions, however eloquent, are not solid ground. For something to be really true, it had to be more than just a good story.
Once again, I was back at square one. I’d failed to answer the question through reason or pseudo-mysticism, and now I’d failed to avoid the question through stories. Unable to answer or avoid the question, the only option left was to question it.
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“…to speak of spirit and the good as Plato did meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective itself, the basic condition of all life”[11]
-Friedrich Nietzsche
“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story.”[12]
-G.K. Chesterton
I still can’t forget that picture. I was nine months into my existential crisis, working for a UK charity supporting Christian Iraqi refugees in Jordan. One day, flicking through an old photo database, I happened upon what at first seemed a sweet family photograph. That was until I noticed the blood. Gunned down in their living room, this ‘sweet family’ were in fact lifelessly sloped on their now torn-up sofa. Most of the dead looked younger than me, ordinary teenagers in crop tops and jeans, the sort I might pass in any modern shopping mall. ISIS had carried out this massacre for the simple fact that this family and their teenage daughters were Christians. I didn’t look at the photo too long. I was worried what else I might notice.
My evangelical Christian tradition had always warned me against cultural Christianity: going through the religious motions without any spirit or life, reliant on the thinking, experience and holiness of others. Real Christianity was a religiosity born, not of a dutiful upbringing or unthinking tradition, but of a conscious decision and heartfelt dedication. Commitment was not measured in mere labels but in ardent passion and active devotion.
So when I finally did get the chance to travel to Jordan and meet some of the Iraqi Christian lucky enough to escape, I was more than a little perturbed to find that instead of passionate, born-again believers, they all for the most part fit my definition of ‘cultural Christians’. But for the crosses and the fact that every second person’s name was Josef (‘Joseph’) or Maryam (‘Mary’), there wasn’t much about them that struck me as exceptionally or enthusiastically ‘Christian’. Theirs was a faith of routine and ritual, of praying, fasting, giving alms, and receiving the Eucharist – all at the appointed time. They were Christians, not because of some euphoric divine experience or particular enthusiasm that Jesus was their Personal Lord and Saviour, but quite simply because they followed in the footsteps of their parents, grandparents and every generation going back centuries who had been Christian.
These were hardly the modern-day saints I’d expected to find. Nonetheless, it was these mundane, outwardly unimpressive people who, by and large, had faced death and exile rather than renounce the faith of their ancestors. Having lost my faith, I certainly wasn’t inclined to die for it anytime soon. But even at my most devout and fervent, would I have had the reserves of faith to face the terrorist’s bullet over the apostate’s confession? I wasn’t so sure.
Soon enough, my whole cultural vs. born-again Christian paradigm had gone. Not only did it now feel totally inadequate in its assessment and unjustified in its judgement, but I soon began to realise its blatant hypocrisy. From its preference for informality to its rejection of arbitrary tradition to its anti-authoritarian emphasis on personal choice, was my evangelical, born-again Christian tradition very different from the wider Western culture surrounding it? Not only that, but why did I believe that true faith must be owned and worked out individually? Because that’s what my parents, pastors and evangelical tradition told me. These Iraqis may have been ‘cultural Christians’, but so too in fact was I.
As the popular saying goes, a fish doesn’t see the water it swims in. Or to paraphrase Nietzche and put it more philosophically: ‘Perspective is the basic condition of life.’ I had spent my entire life within a consciously anti-cultural Christian tradition, all the while blind to how it was itself so very cultural. Until I saw the fishbowl, I could never appreciate the anti-culture for the culture it really was. It would be some years later though before I noticed the much larger tank I swam in.
The unspoken premise of the modern worldview is this: subjective experience is fundamentally un-real. But the idea is anything but modern, stretching back at least as far as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Until we leave behind our false reality and transcend our darkened world of mere shadow, we will never see the Truth in all her glory. No wonder then that ever since Plato, all the West’s great philosophies and religions have striven for this transcendence. Regardless of the ‘How?’ – whether through rationalism or empiricism, revelation or mystical contemplation – we have always endeavoured to cut through the un-reality obscuring our vision and so behold the Truth in all its marvellous objectivity.
Even post-modernity’s reaction against this mission for transcendence has done little to alter this assumptive framework. By emphasising the ‘lived experience’ of the world of appearance and discrediting the notion humans can ever be impartial, post-modernism hasn’t led us to reevaluate our understanding of truth, merely to disregard our quest altogether. Subjective experience remains as fundamentally un-real in post-modernism as in all previous philosophy. It is precisely because a person’s beliefs have no objective reality that each is to be tolerated. Who knows what’s true?
But there is also a third option: nihilism. Plato didn’t just expect to find reliable knowledge in the world outside the Cave. He expected to find the Good itself. When you discover the Truth, you will know how to truly live. Nihilists then are those disappointed Platonists who, upon leaving the Cave, discover the promised knowledge without the promised Good. They hoped the Truth would give them purpose, but instead left empty-handed. The Truth fills their brain but leaves their hearts untouched.
But what if Plato – and all our subsequent tradition – have taken the wrong lesson from the Allegory of the Cave? What if we’ve been looking at truth completely upside down? It was time to question the question: What if truth has nothing at all to do with what is real? And so I did the nonsensical: I started looking for the truth in subjective perspective, ‘the basic condition of all life.’ And with this, I finally began to see the water.
Truth lies, not in transcendence, but trust. We do not find the truth; we place our confidence in it. The truth is not some nice abstract noun patiently waiting in the ethereal objective realm to be discovered. The search for truth finishes before it even starts. When we are born, we have no time to ask whether our mother’s arms or the glare of the light are really real. Thrust into this unimaginably large and overwhelming word, we grasp and grope in desperation, longing for someone or something we can depend on. It is not the world which becomes more complicated as we age; it is our own relation to it as our bonds and networks of trust expand, diminish and grow ever more intricate.
In every other conversational space outside philosophy, we instinctively recognise this is what we mean by ‘truth’. A person is truthful, not because they are infallible, but because they are dependable and trustworthy. We may well pardon the truth for being mistaken, but we can never forgive it for duplicitous betrayal. Lies draw our indignation, not merely because they are incorrect, but because they are falsehoods masquerading as truths. We do not like being duped. And with good reason.
Deep down, we recognise truth goes hand-in-hand with power. The power of any authority lies, not in coercion, but legitimacy – our willing, even enthusiastic acceptance. Thus, where trust leads, obedience soon will follow. We obey because we trust. So, when a truth proves faithless, it is much more than an intellectual headache. You have been cheated, exploited and used. Though you have paid the cost, the promised reward failed to materialise.
No wonder then that language – the medium of truth – is inescapably political. More than definitions, words have implications. They are not containers of knowledge so much as ammunition in the never-ending struggle between the myriad Authors, tangible and intangible, vying to shape our perspective on the world and weave us into their story. This is obvious from politics itself where verbal battles rage over whether a gathering was a ‘party’ or a ‘working lunch; an off-the-cuff remark, ‘racist’ or merely ‘impolite’; a payment, a ‘bribe’ or ‘miscellaneous outgoing’; a policy, ‘cruel’ or a ‘necessary evil’; a conflict, an ‘invasion’ or ‘special military operation’. But the power games continue even into the mundane. When my wife and I argue over whether our baby is crying because he’s ‘anxious’ or ‘attention-seeking’, our seemingly petty domestic row is merely a skirmish in a much grander ideological war over parenting philosophies. To win the war of words marks the first step on the road to uncontested authority.
The doubters of traditional religious truth are known as Sceptics for good reason. Their perspective on the truth is not characterised by any particular intelligence or stupidity but by a particular distrust. They are not alone in appreciating the effectiveness of the scientific method, witnessing the suffering of all natural things, and noticing the Divine’s apparent hiddenness. But they alone are willing to speak distrust to Heaven’s power. They will have no part with the Almighty’s Authority. They will cry “Smite me down!” before they ever deign to bow the knee. Such pernicious mockery erodes the pillars of any Authority faster than any stuffy argument.
But insofar as we are all beholden to Truth, we are all Sceptics. There is no distinction between atheist or theist; monotheist or polytheist; East or West. Because each one of us lives in submission before the Apogee of our Trust, we must likewise live with suspicion towards all those other gods desiring our sacrifice. Each may promise us Heaven in their own way, but are we ready to count their cost of obedience?
I now finally understood why we cannot be rid of stories. We cannot write them off as helpful illusions precisely because, as Chesterton pointed out, they are truer than any book of science or metaphysics. Yes, they ignore the inconvenient and bypass unhelpful complications, but in so doing, they mimic the only reality we ever experience: our conscious perspective of living. Like our stories, our consciousness only has time for the characters and plotlines relevant to the bigger picture. Most of the overwhelming quantity of sensory data flowing through our brains is labelled ‘irrelevant’ and ignored. And by bringing certain characters, traits, virtues, styles, lessons, resolutions and behaviours to the fore, stories aid our consciousness in what is perhaps its primary purpose: determining where we pay attention. They are our mental roadmaps for living, or as Chesterton himself puts it:
“The gentleman of fiction may not copy the gentleman of real life; but the gentleman of real life is copying the gentleman of fiction.”[13]
Hitchens anti-story that life is ultimately senseless, without plot, climax or resolution may be right. Indeed, I think there is much wisdom in urging us to pay attention to the entire story we’re living, inconvenient and awkward plot holes included. But just like the anti-cultural Christianity of my youth, Hitchens and those who follow him fail to notice their own hypocrisy. How indeed does Hitchens in God is Not Great most effectively make his point about the ultimate mirage of our storytelling? Whether recounting the time he was proclaimed to be an incarnation of Sai Baba or telling us about a mining accident in West Virginia, Hitchens rams home his disillusioning point through the use of anecdotes and stories of course! There is nothing peculiarly factual about the tale that life is just an arbitrary coming together of happenstances in an unfeeling cosmos. The anti-story is a story like any other, just as pliable to the dramatic mind as any romantic or enchanted tale. As any viewer of Game of Thrones can tell you, even a tale which emphasises the anticlimactic, crumbling irrelevance of the plotlines we build can be fantastically gripping. After all, there never was a rule that a story must leave you with warm, fuzzy feelings.
Of course, Hitchens never presumed to think we could live without stories. He recognised the strength of our solipsistic instinct to imagine ourselves as heroes in marvellous epics. Yet, I now recognise his exhortation for us to nevertheless remain vigilant to the story’s ultimate illusion, not as the erudite argument of a rational mind, but as the preacher urging his flock not to go astray. For, as any devout Buddhist can tell you, to train your mind to perceive what seems most real as merely a figment of your imagination…well, that is an altogether religious undertaking.
Now I finally recognised my error, or rather, my gullibility. I’d been duped. As all-encompassing as it strives to be, objectivity’s anti-story cannot escape being yet another form of consciousness, another (ir)religious story telling us where to pay attention and what to ignore. To distrust subjective perspective and seek my salvation in faithful objectivity; to devote myself to the mystical quest to become the very thing I sought: objective rationality; to train my mind with a discipline familiar to any disciple to reject all prejudice, fancy, sentimentality and fondness – without realising it, these had been the stipulations of my creed, the sacrifices I believed I must make to discern the Truth. Of course, there is nothing wrong in submission and sacrifice. But the implications of this realisation were clear. I wasn’t going to leave this life of trust simply by leaving Christianity behind.
-The End-
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Penguin Books, Trns. By R. J. Hollingdale, 1973, pg. 88
[2] David Bentley-Hart, The Experience of God, Yale University Press, 2013, pg. 46
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pg. 18
[4] The precise phrase, ‘Concepts create idols. Only wonder comprehends’ is an aphorism coined from Gregory’s thought (and certainly true to it) by Jurgen Moltmann, the great German Reformed theologian.
[5] Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Allen & Unwin, 2007, pg. 270. URL: https://bidoonism.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/christopher-hitchens-god-is-not-great.pdf
[6] Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, pg. 75
[7] Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, pg. 76
[8] I Corinthians 6:19b-20a (NIV)
[9] Matthew 25:40 (NIV)
[10] Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients, 2001. URL: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/22212-the-gift-of-therapy-an-open-letter-to-a-new-generation-of-therapists-an
[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pg. 14
[12] G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, Sage Software, Albany, Oregon, 1996, pg. 101-102. URL: https://agape-biblia.org/orthodoxy/GKChesterton-Heretics.pdf
[13] G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, pg. 107
