Why The Good needs God
This started out a couple of years ago when
one of Feliz’ students, Yvonne Plowright, gave us a talk on whether it was
possible to ground ethics without the concept of God, concluding that you could. Feliz commented that it was a shame that
since we are mostly atheists – and a survey showed that about 80% of academic
philosophers these days profess atheism – there was a rather one sided
discussion and we could do with someone to express the opposite view. It’s been on my conscience for some time
and finally I decided to have a go at it.
The title isn’t quite right though.
I’m not going to argue that the good needs to be grounded in some
religious concept, like the ten commandments, because that implies that we
don’t know right from wrong ourselves and need to be told or instructed, and I
don’t believe that. It’s more that the
good, and God turn out to be aspects of the same thing, and that the concept of
the good leads you to the concept of God.
I used to think that belief in God was a
personal choice. When I did, for the
record, I sided with the majority, the atheists. And I wouldn’t have tackled a topic like
this in a philosophy gathering because if it is just a matter of personal
choice then philosophy has little to contribute. And most people who do express an opinion
do seem to see it as a matter of choice.
On the side of God, those who believe often stress the importance of
faith, in other words that there is no compelling reason for it, it’s a leap in
the dark, and can only be explained as given by God’s grace. On the atheist side, militant atheists like
Richard Dawkins, who may be firmly convinced of his atheism, sure that he is
right and that his opponents are in the grip of a delusion, nevertheless when
you get down to it clearly express a belief in atheism, materialism and so
on rather than a sure knowledge of it.
For example, Dawkins belief that evolution can explain everything is not
based on the fact that it can, but that it is the only materialist explanation
he can think of so it must be right, because only a materialist explanation (I
use that word uneasily, because I don’t really know what it means) is
acceptable. In other words belief in
materialism is what guides Dawkins, it is a presupposition and not a result.
What I want to argue, and what I have come
to conclude simply through study of philosophy, is that you can come to a
proper knowledge of the concept of God.
It’s not strictly a proof, as in the medieval proofs of the existence of
God. If you take these strictly as
proofs, they contain a fatal flaw, which you can see for example in Descartes’
version of the ontological proof. I can
conceive of a perfect being, says Descartes, and for a perfect being not to
exist would consist in an imperfection, therefore perfect being must
exist. In other words, existence is
part of the notion of perfection, so this is a deduction, a kind of syllogism. The problem with this is that it makes God
(perfection) a result of reason, and if God is a result of reason then he is
also dependent on it, not independent, or to put it another way, he’s a figment
of your imagination, and you have proved exactly the opposite of what you
wanted to prove. The absolute in
Descartes is the cogito and God is
dependent on and subordinate to that. But there’s another way of looking at
it. Take the phrase “nobody’s perfect”,
something we have probably all said at some time so presumably it has meaning. But where does that notion of perfection
come from? It can’t be from experience,
because we just said nobody’s perfect, so you can’t point to an example of
perfection and say the rest of us are imperfect in relation to that one perfect
being. But for the notion of
imperfection to make sense there must nevertheless be an idea of perfection,
even though we have never experienced it.
That more platonic procedure is
the one I’m going to follow here, and I’ll show you a proof of the existence of
God that is not based on deductive reasoning but which neverthelsss is
necessarily true.
I’ll say more about that later but first I
wanted look at the notion of truth, which is of course central to
philosophy. It’s fashionable nowadays
to say that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and there are good reasons
for saying that if you work within the paradigms of modern philosophy. At the same time though, it is logically
absurd. If you say there is no
absolute truth, then what is there?
Either there is no truth at all, in which case there is certainly no
point on doing philosophy and arguably no point in any kind of communication at
all, or there is some truth but it is somehow less than absolute. So does the notion of relative truth make
any sense? If we take relative to mean
partial, then something that is partially true is also partially untrue, and
something that is untrue, even partially, cannot be a truth, so that doesn’t
seem to make any sense. Or if you say
that something is relatively true meaning that it is true in relation to something
else, but not necessarily in its own right, then you have to ask what is the
truth of the thing is it relative to.
Is that absolute, or is its truth in turn relative to something else? And is there then an infinite chain of
relatives, or does the chain stop somewhere when we reach an absolute? If the chain is unending they you are back
with the notion that there is no truth, but if it does stop then you have found
the absolute. There doesn’t seem to be
any other option so either the truth is absolute, or there is no truth. If there is no truth we might as well all go
home, so I’ll stick with the notion that there is truth, and that it is absolute,
so we need to look for the absolute.
The absolute may be unfashionable, but
there are plenty of examples of it in modern philosophy. One of the great divisions in modern
thought is that between fact and value, the is and the ought – and never the
twain shall meet, because you can’t derive an ought from an is. And of the ought, you can say that it is
not, because there is no point saying something ought to be if it already
is. It makes sense then to say that
philosophy should deal only with what is, because if it is interested in truth,
how can you have a truth of something that doesn’t exist, that is not? So philosophy becomes centred on what is,
the empirical, or what is purely logical, but not on what ought to be.
Of course there is a big problem with this
which is that if philosophy is restricted to the logical and the empirical it
can’t say anything of any value, so it needs some connection to the
“ought”. It often does this through
“premises” which are notions that are not logically necessary or observable
facts, but which seem to be uncontroversial and serve as a starting point for
philosophizing and enable it to make a connection with the real world. There are many examples, happiness (Mill),
life (Hobbes), Reasonableness (Kant), the self (Descartes). These then function as the absolute, the
premise of your philosophy which gives truth to the rest of it. All the rest is true only in relation to the
premise.
You can summarise it in a diagram, or
rather a couple of lists:
Ought Is
Value Fact
Good Neutral
Non-being Being
Metaphysics Facts
and deductions
Absolutes: Results:
Life (Hobbes) Social
Contract
Happiness (Mill) Utilitarianism
Reason (Kant) Rationalism
Freedom (Sartre, Descartes) Existentialism
DNA (Dawkins) Biological
determinism
Now, there are four things I think worth
noting about this picture.
Firstly, philosophy is done on the right
hand side of the page, and the absolute lies outside of philosophy proper, on
the left hand side, the side of non-being. The absolute is just a premise, a starting
point which doesn’t get examined, which is very odd because the absolute is the foundation of truth which surely ought to be the prime focus of
philosophy.
Secondly, this absolute is very weak. It’s just a premise or assumption and you
can simply deny it. For example, if
you say to Hobbes, “I don’t care if I live or die” you take away his basic
premise and his entire philosophy collapses.
All he can do is accuse you of lying, and maybe you are, but some people
would make that claim in sincerity, and in the face of that Hobbes has no response and the whole edifice of his philosophy comes tumbling down. It’s unsporting of course to do this and a
good student accepts a philospher’s premises and focuses on the reasoning that
follows, and attacking the premises is rightly seen as unproductive and
negative; but the fact remains that the philosophy cannot exist without them
and they are the foundation of its claim to truth, the most important point in
any philosophy worthy of the name (“love of truth") and if they are inadequate, then
this is a very important and significant finding.
Thirdly, these versions are all
abstractions, e.g life in general, happiness in general, and not any particular
life or happiness. Because of this it
is axiomatic that they will end up in contradiction, and a Socrates would
quickly show this. Example? Let's take Hobbes. For Hobbes, life is the absolute and this
means we all value life above all else.
This means we must want longer life and in order to achieve this we need
security and rule of law to protect ourselves.
In order to have rule of law we have to have government and to have
government there has to be a territory over which government can exert control,
in other words the state. In order to
establish that you need men at arms who are willing to risk their lives to
establish that rule of law. But you
said that life is the absolute, which means that nobody would risk it in
defence of the state, so either the state couldn’t come into existence, or , because
it does in fact exists, it proves that life is not the absolute. QED.
I don’t say that because I want to pick a fight with Hobbes, but simply
to illustrate with an example the notion that an abstract conception of the
absolute will lead into contradiction
Fourthly, there are many absolutes, and
of course that can’t be. Because they
all look as good or bad as each other it is tempting to conclude that there is
no one absolute, which many and perhaps most students of modern philosophy do conclude,
but as I have said that is problematic because it leaves you without any truth
and with no basis for philosophy at all.
Now, let’s take a look at the right hand
side of the page, and try to imagine a world where you have only what is, not
what ought to be. There is a strong
element within analytical philosophy in particular that wants to do this. Ayer for example says that only things that
can be observed or things that can be deduced are capable of being true, and
anything else that doesn’t come under either heading is “metaphysical” and
meaningless. He take this from Hume, of
course, and Wittgenstein if I understand him rightly takes a similar view
though instead of dismissing the left hand side as meaningless, he concedes
that it does have meaning, but says that philosophy can’t say anything about
it. He’s a mystic in other words,
rather than nihilistic like Ayer, but
it’s really based on the same understanding.
The first question you can ask is what
would a language that consisted only of expressions of matters of fact and
relations of idea be like? Don’t you
think it would be rather dull? If it
can’t express anything of value, can it express anything at all? Would there be any point in learning such a
language? I don’t think there
would. So, first point, without the
notion of the good, of value, language itself would disappear, because there
would be no point to it, nothing to express.
Second, a simple point, you can note that
without the notion of the good, there could be no economy, because the things
we trade are goods, things of value and without value there is no economy, so
another key aspect of civilization would disappear.
Thirdly you can ask the empiricist who
wants to ground truth in facts, how can you have facts without value? Facts may look like neutral things, data,
but they are much more than that, they are data that are interesting, or have
value. It may seem like a subtle distinction but it's not. For
example, if I say that 7% of the population of Scotland own 84% of the land,
well, it looks like arithmetic, just numbers, objective data – but you
immediately perceive that I have an agenda.
You don’t know what it is yet, probably some lefty notion to do with
land reform (and in fact 7:84 was the name of a left wing theatre group in
Scotland in the seventies), but you do know that I have marshaled the fact for
a purpose. Actually all facts are like
this and the idea that you can study facts and proceed from the facts to
conclusions is false. You need to have
some notion, something you want to investigate, some hypothesis, something of
value, before any facts will exist for you and without that interest facts
simply don’t exist. Even science can't
draw conclusions directly from data, it has first to propose a hypothesis and
then look for facts that confirm or deny it.
So you can say to the hard-nosed empiricist that his beloved neutral
objective facts themselves simply can’t exist without there first being some
notion of value, without the good. The
notion that facts and deductions (Hume’s “matters of fact” and “relations of
ideas”) are the only things that have meaning, and that anything else is
metaphysical and meaningless is the exact opposite of the truth. Actually deductions and data have no meaning
of their own and any meaning they have is borrowed from the metaphysical: only the metaphysical has meaning. Deductions need premises if they are to
lead to anything meaningful and the premises as we have seen lie on the side of
metaphysics, and facts simply don’t exist unless someone shows an interest in
them, thinks they are of value, and value also lies on the side of metaphysics.
I don’t want to labour the point. If you try to imagine a world without the
notion of the good, you can discern what actually depends on the good and can
only exist because of it, and the answer turns out to be everything, certainly
everything to do with what we think of as civilization, and arguably literally
everything. Without the good, without
value, nothing exists, not even a simple fact, let alone the trappings of
civilization, language, art, government, a cup of tea…. Everything depends on the notion of the good.
So you may ask where does this notion of
the good come from and in particular can if come from nature? Can it somehow evolve? Well, if it evolved from nature it would be
the same kind of entity as nature. If
nature is being, what it gives rise to must also be being, but the good is
really its opposite, because as we have seen value is non-being and sits on the
metaphysical side of the page. Civilization
is the opposite of nature and the things that distinguish it can only exist
because of the notion of the good.
The good is the cause of civilization, and if it is its cause, it can’t
also be its result, and it can’t be a result of nature because it is its
opposite. It can no more evolve from
nature than consciousness itself can be a product of matter – the
neuroscientist’s dream – because as a subject it is the very opposite the
object and is its ground, so it can’t also be its result.
If the good is not produced by nature, we
must say then that it exists independently of it, and this means that it is real.
It is also absolute, as we have seen, because everything else results
from it. Hegel calls it the Absolute
Idea, or simply The Concept, not any particular concept but conceptual thought
in general. Hegel’s use of terms like
Idea, Concept, Notion and the like can be confusing – certainly confuses me –
but one thing that he is clear about is that the key term The Concept is the
same as the Greek notion of the Logos, which means something like reasoned
thought in general but is usually translated simply as The Word, so when John
writes “in the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God” this is the Logos,
and is the same as the concept of the Absolute Idea, the Notion that allows
our culture to exist. The
Logos is divine, it is God Himself, and it is God in this sense who makes civilization
possible, who accounts for the remarkable fact that we all take for granted,
because it comes so naturally to us, that we can actually communicate with each
other at all. The Logos is the power of discrimination in general, the basis of conceptual thought, the knowledge (if you want to speak allegorically) that Adam gained when he ate the apple, of good and evil. And because atheists generally think of God as a being, or a concept, that you can choose to believe in or not as you prefer, it is worth stressing that the Divine Logos is not itself a being or a concept, but something much more, the ground of all being, that which makes it possible for individual beings and concepts to exist, and is not an optional idea but a necessity.
Now, the good has a structure. Because it exists, it must have four
causes, because everything that exists must have a material, efficient, formal and
final cause. This is Aristotle’s theory of causality, which
you are probably all familiar with but perhaps it’s worth just going over it
again. I like to think of the example
of a building. According to Aristotle,
if the building exists all four causes must also exist. The material cause is the building
materials, bricks, mortar, wood, whatever, the stuff it is made of. The efficient cause is the builders,
because the materials don’t arrange themselves and there has to be an input of
energy before they can come together to make the building. The formal cause is the architect, because the
builders can’t work without a plan, something that defines the shape of the
building. The final cause is the user,
because you wouldn’t build a building without a purpose. Each of these four is essential and if any
one is missing, the building couldn’t exist.
If you have builders, materials and a plan, but no purpose, then no
building, because there wouldn’t be any point… and so on for the others; but if you have all four then nothing else is
needed so they are both necessary and sufficient conditions.
In the case of the good, these causes are
the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance and justice in that
order. We can represent the good as a
circle, and the virtues/causes as its quarters. It’s critical to understand the relation of
these parts to the whole, and two points in particular. Firstly, the cardinal virtues are independent
of each other and cannot be expressed in terms of each other, just because each
is a different type of cause. But,
secondly, while they are independent of each other, each is entirely dependent
on the whole. It’s not as if you could
collect say wisdom, courage, and temperance, and then say you only need justice
and you will have the whole set and will have created the good. It’s the other way around. Each virtue or cause exists only as a
moment (to coin a Hegelian term) of the absolute and has no existence
independently of it. As Aristotle
said, a hand cut off from a body still looks like a hand, but without its
relation to the body it used to be part of it no longer has meaning. The cardinal virtues only have meaning as
part of the good as a whole. So for
example, risking your life looks like courage, but it only has that meaning if
it is done for the sake of the good and if it is done for some other reason –
showing off for example – its really foolhardiness, and not a virtue.
Now there are a few features of this model
that are worth pointing out. Firstly,
the notions of cause and necessity it contains are rather different from those
you more commonly encounter in philosophy.
If a modern philosopher says something is necessarily the case, he is
usually referring to deductive necessity, the kind of logic you find in
mathematics, and if he talks of cause he means force, like a billiard ball
forcing another to move in a certain way by imparting its momentum, a kind of
bottom-up pressure, pushing from behind.
Here both cause and necessity have a different sense, although one quite
in accord with normal language. The
four causes of the good are essential.
The good cannot exist without them and because it does exist the four
causes must necessarily exist, but this is not a deduction in the mathematical
or purely logical sense. It has to do
with the relationship of the parts to the whole, which is a necessary one and
therefore causal, but the causes are not bottom-up forces working together to
force the good into existence from below or behind, but elements that must be
present. Because the good can’t exist
without them you can say that they are the necessary causes of the good, but it
is a different and more subtle notion of causality than the modern one.
You can also say that if the truth is the whole, as this model implies, then you can only express the truth in a systematic way, because you have to show how the parts and the whole relate to each other. That means philosophy must be systematic. That's another unfashionable idea - so 19th century - but if the truth is the whole, it is unavoidable.
You can also say that if the truth is the whole, as this model implies, then you can only express the truth in a systematic way, because you have to show how the parts and the whole relate to each other. That means philosophy must be systematic. That's another unfashionable idea - so 19th century - but if the truth is the whole, it is unavoidable.
This simple picture is the beating heart of
what I call real philosophy, to distinguish it from modern philosophy which is
called philosophy but which doesn’t actually contain any truth, something you
will surely have noticed at some level if you have studied it, and certainly doesn't love it. Hegel has another name for real philosophy and calls it "speculative", a potentially misleading term which has nothing to do with speculation
in the ordinary sense. A better name
perhaps would be Idealism, recognition of the logical primacy of ideas, because all true philosophy is idealism, and
materialist philosophy is a contradiction in terms.
Now, that will do for now as a summary of the positive side of
the absolute. Let’s look at it from a negative point of view. If you want to defend
atheism you need to show why this picture is wrong. Specifically you need to show
1 .
That the good is not real
2 .
That the cardinal virues are
not independent but can be derived from eachother or from something else.
If you can do that you will have given
atheism a philosophical grounding which it doesn’t have at the moment, so
there’s a big opportunity, and I’ll follow you gladly if you can do it. I don’t much want to be a believer and may
aspects of religion (human sacrifice? cannibalism?) sit uneasily with me.
But it has never been done and I don’t think it ever will be.
Modern philosophy does in fact and quite
consistently argue that the good is not real, and that the cardinal virtues can
be derived from each other, but not because it has a thought-out critique of
these ideas, but because it is unaware of them. Like Descartes in his stove, it starts from
scratch and with scant reference to the philosophy that came before it.
The basic idea of modern philosophy is that
the good can be “explained” or “defined” (it amounts to the same thing). After all if you can’t define something
then it looks like you don’t know what it is, and that is anathema to a modern
thinker. We explain things by showing
what causes them, so to explain or define the good is to show that it is caused
by something else, for example happiness.
If the explanation succeeds then the notion of the good becomes
redundant, because you can always replace it with what it really means,
happiness. The good is just an
epiphenomenon, a shorthand, but the true reality is its deeper cause, whatever
you think that is. This is what is
meant by “explaining something away”.
In explaining the good, you make it disappear. It’s a kind of vanishing trick. By implication, the good isn’t real, it’s
more like an illusion, and this view is held implicitly by virtually all modern
philosophy.
So modern philosophy is reductionist in
terms of the good in general and you can further divide it in terms of which of
the four causes the various practitioners reduce it to. Take John Rawls for example. The good is barely mentioned at all in
his A Theory of Justice, and where it is it is immediately reduced to (meaning replaced with) the just, its final cause. This is then immediately reduced to fairness, which replaces the concept of justice for the rest of the book. Fairness is a category
that belongs to reason (because of its appeal to universality, reason being the
faculty of the universal) and reason with its virtue of temperance is formal
cause. This means that by implication
Rawls is arguing that the notion of the cardinal virtues is wrong because he
thinks that you can derive one, Justice, from another, Temperance. But has he proved it? Not at all, and in fact it is obvious that
justice and fairness are by no means the same thing. Justice is meted out by the state and
involves vengeance and punishment, neither of which have anything to do with
fairness. You might as well say of a
building that the people who use it (its final cause) are produced by the
architect (its formal cause). They
aren’t and the architect can’t do anything without a client who wants a
building for a purpose. Both are
essential to the process and play their separate part, and to say that only one
matters is ridiculous and the simple response to Rawls’ identification of
justice with fairness is that it is wrong.
You can’t derive justice from reason and if Rawls had paid attention to
classical philosophy he would know that. His entire "Theory of Justice" is in fact nothing of the sort, it's a theory of fairness, and justice is completely absent from the book, replaced everywhere by fairness. Actually it’s not just justice which is reduced to reason by
Rawls. The other virtues also
disappear and Reason becomes the only virtue, the only truth. Rawls in other words, in common with most
modern thinkers, is a rationalist, meaning that he thinks that the truth is to
be found in reason, or that reason is the absolute. It’s as if the architect said “you don’t
need the client, you don’t need the builders and the materials – you just need
me”. I know some of them are a bit
like that, but you can see the problem.
The majority of modern philosophers make
the same mistake as Rawls. They are
rationalists, because they believe in Reason and think that everything else is
derived from it. Certainly Kant would
fit into this (Rawls is really just Kant minus the interesting bits)
as would Mill. The problem with this
view is not that reason is wrong, but that it is wrong to take it as the
absolute, because that is to abstract from the three other causes of the good
each of which is equally essential.
There’s another group though that goes
further and reduces the good to efficient cause. Thinkers like Sartre notice reasonably
enough that reason can’t produce any particular virtue because it depends on
generalisation, and also again reasonably enough react against the
proscriptive, dry moralizing of the rationalist which is all about self denial
and self control – because of course this is the virtue of reason – and says
that actually the absolute is just the individual who is free by nature. This comes from Descartes and the notion that
self- consciousness is the one thing that is independent of the outside world
and depends only on itself, but it is developed into the philosophy of
existentialism by Sartre and others.
What matters for this way of thinking is not what I do but whether I do
it freely or not and that is the only real virtue. Rationalist morality is seen as a way of
drawing comfort from the presence of rules and regularity, which means denying
the essential and scary Angst-inducing fact of your existential freedom, and so
you see a connection between this way of thinking and the cardinal virtue of
courage. The connection is also there
at a deeper level because here we are delving into efficient cause, the
question of what motivates us, and the existential answer is our freedom, and,
subtext, our constant struggle for recognition. The good in simple terms is reduced one
more phase, from the rational to the free.
And this is wrong, not because we are not free, but because this freedom
is only one of four moments of the good and because it is false to say that
this freedom is itself the absolute.
And finally there is one more group of
thinkers, not really philosophers but very popular, who go the final stage and
reduce the good to the material cause, which they understand to be DNA. All other virtues for such thinkers are
results of impulses generated by our (selfish) genes. This is the notion that the good is a
result of nature, and that any virtuous behavior can be understood as a result
of pressure on the organism to do that which favours the survival of the
species. This is like saying that the
materials a building is made from cause its design. Materialists really believe this and think
that DNA causes us to have the shape we do, but this is impossible because DNA
is the same in every cell in the body, so it can’t explain why one cell differs
from another. Biologists counter that
genes within dna are switched on and off by other factors, which may be true,
but if so then the other factors are not the DNA so you cannot say that it is
the DNA that causes the shape and you need to understand how the other factors
are operating independently of the DNA.
Of course, if you could demonstrate that DNA creates and accounts for
not only our shape but our culture, wants, language, ethics and so on you would
have done something that effectively demolished the classical model and would
show that only material cause matters, but the truth is that this certainly has
not been done, and it would seem for logical reasons that it never could be
done. It is still a belief powerfully
held by many.
So the arguments of modern philosophy do
rest on the notion that the good is not real, and that the cardinal virtues are
not independent, but only as assumptions and not because they have been able to
prove this is true, or even are aware of the implied criticism they are making of the classical model. It’s worth reflecting a bit more on the
notion of reality implied by this. What
is real? The sense being used here is
that what is real is self-subsistent.
Something that is real is not a result of something else, but stands on
its own as an independent being. If
the good is real in this sense, we can ask what else is real? The answer is profoundly counterintuitive: nothing. Why?
Because everything is a result of the absolute, everything owes its
existence to the Logos, and without the Logos nothing would exist. It seems strange; after all, the objects we encounter every day
seem to be self-subsistent, to have an independent reality. I’m pretty sure this table in front of me will
still be the same if I come back next week, so its self-subsistence seems OK. But its being depends on someone
understanding it as a table, and everything we know about it is conceptual,
therefore without the Concept, it doesn’t exist. This strange result was well
understood by Plato, who famously argued that phenomena are not real and that
the forms – the concepts by which we apprehend them – are the true
reality. One of Hegel’s more puzzling pronouncements in the Phenomenology, that “reason is the
certainty that it is all reality” also makes sense in this context, because not
only is reason (in the sense of the Logos, rather than logic, the Kantian faculty of reason) the absolute, but
also everything else is a result of it, is dependent on it, so has its reality
only in relation to that absolute. That
is just what the notion of the absolute means: everything else is relative to
it. The Logos actually is all reality,
the only reality, and what goes for the Logos also goes for God, because they
are the same thing.
Because this conclusion is so
counterintuitive it is easy to brush it aside, and you can view modern
philosophy as a kind of a conspiracy to ignore this inconvenient
conclusion. Prior to Descartes the
notion that phenomena are not real was a defining feature of philosophy in general
and it was understood that this mystery was at the centre of philosophical
thought. Since then there has been instead
a dogged holding on to the common sense idea that appearance is reality, an
idea which is hubristically called “enlightenment” when it is actually the
opposite, a return to prephilosophical darkness. It’s a kind of tyranny of the majority, a fingers-in-the-ears-singing-la-la-la group denial, a hope that by sheer force of numbers we can make the
inconvenient truth that appearance is not the same as reality go away, if we only wish it
so with enough conviction. Instead we should face
up to the fact that it is our common sense that it at fault and that actually
without the metaphysical we are nothing, quite literally: we
don’t exist. The metaphysical, the Logos, is not only real, it is the ground of all reality and anything else
that exists does so only as a result of the Logos, or, if you like, by His Grace.
