Math, Morality, and Mystery: Natural Varieties of Transcendence

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Tilburg University

Math, Morality, and Mystery

Drees, W.B.

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Naturalism and Beyond

Publication date:

2016

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Drees, W. B. (2016). Math, Morality, and Mystery: Natural Varieties of Transcendence. In N. H. Gregersen, & M. Stenmark (Eds.), Naturalism and Beyond: Religious Naturalism and Its Alternatives (pp. 153-165). [8] (Studies in Philosophical Theology; Vol. 59). Peeters.

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STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY

59

SerieSeditorS

Willem b. drees (tilburg), stephan van erp (leuven), douglas Hedley (Cambridge)

AdviSory BoArd

l. boeve (leuven), V. brümmer (utrecht),

i.u. dalferth (Zürich & Claremont, Ca), J. Greisch (Paris), m.t. mjaaland (oslo), C. richter (bonn), C. schwöbel (tübingen), s. sorrentino (salerno), J. soskice (Cambridge), m. stenmark (uppsala), C. taliaferro (northfield, mn).

editoriAl Profile

Philosophical theology is the study of philosophical problems which arise in reflection upon religion, religious beliefs and theological doctrines.

NATUrALISm AND bEYOND

rELIGIOUS NATUrALISm AND ITS ALTErNATIvES

edited by

N

ielS

H

eNrik

G

reGerSeN

& M

ikAel

S

teNMArk

Peeters

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Naturalism and Beyond: Religion and the Varieties of Naturalism, Niels Henrik Gregersen and Mikael Stenmark . . . 3

Part I. Naturalism in Philosophy and Culture

2. Naturalism as a Cultural Phenomenon, Charles Taliaferro . . . 17 3. De-Humanizing Naturalism, René Rosfort . . . 31

Part II. Religious Naturalism: Programs and Problems 4. Religious Naturalism and Its Rivals, Mikael Stenmark . . . 59 5. What is the Question for which Religious Naturalism is an

Answer?, Frederik Mortensen . . . 85 6. Religion as Coping: Christianity in Antiquity and in an Age of

Science, Troels Engberg-Pedersen . . . 103 7. Reframing Transcendence: Ground-of-Being Theism and

Reli-gious Naturalism, Wesley Wildman . . . 123 Part III. Naturalism and Transcendence

8. Math, Morality, and Mystery: Natural Varieties of Transcend-ence, Willem B. Drees . . . 153 9. The Relevance of Transcendence: In Search of a Theory of

Religion, Carl Reinhold Bråkenhielm . . . 167 10. Pantheism versus Panentheism: A Feminist Approach,

Gitte Buch-Hansen . . . 185 11. Naturalism with Transcendence: A Postmodern Covenant,

Lars Sandbeck . . . 209 12. Naturalism in the Mirror of Religion: Three Theological

Options, Niels Henrik Gregersen . . . 227 About the authors . . . 259 Index . . . 261

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CHAPTER EIGHT

MATH, MORALITY, AND MYSTERY: NATURAL VARIETIES OF TRANSCENDENCE

Willem B. Drees

‘Transcendence’ most often intends to refer to God, a divine being ‘up there’, distinct from the natural and human world. Given that the spatial metaphor implicit in ‘transcendence’ seems hard to hold onto in our understanding of the cosmos, how else could the term be understood? Might ‘transcendence’ be intelligible within a secular and naturalistic framework? In the following contribution I will explore three non-religious contexts in which one might use the notion ‘transcendence’: mathemat-ics, morality, and the persistence of an unexplained residue in our explan-atory efforts. These fill the concept ‘transcendence’ with meaning, though none of these options seems sufficient to underpin a classic theistic understanding of ‘transcendence’.

1. Matematics: Plato’s Heaven or Abstraction From Pratices

Mathematics is odd, if one comes at it from an empiricist mind set. Pure circles, triangles, cubes and the like do not exist, nor do imaginary numbers, Lie groups or Bessel functions. Nonetheless, we can make well-defined claims about their properties, and argue about the truth or falsity of various mathematical claims. We can even make mathematical existence claims such as that there is (or that there is not) an even number that is not the sum of two primes (Goldbach’s conjecture). The fact that we currently don’t know which option is correct, doesn’t undermine the conviction that either there is such a number or there isn’t one and the conviction that in this case the truth is not dependent upon human preferences.

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154 NaTuraLisM aND BeyoND

between our propositions and mathematical reality. Mathematicians explore a pre-existing world, and make discoveries. roger Penrose can be taken as a contemporary advocate of such a view.1

As an ontology, this ‘Platonic’ reality is so distinct from material real-ity that it is hard to envisage ‘where’ it might be. and if one dismisses this as a non-problem, given the categorical difference between material reality and this Platonic reality, a second problem arises: how do we, material beings, have access to those non-material lands? ‘Mathematical intuition’, the possibility to make ‘observations’ in this Platonic realm, would be a remarkable addition to the experiential, causally mediated repertoire we are supposed to have. a Platonist ontology of mathematics seems too remote to fit the epistemic challenge how mathematical knowl-edge is acquired and developed.2_{A different but somewhat related}

prob-lem is how it might be possible that mathematics is useful for the physical world, if it is categorically distinct, dealing with abstract entities rather than material objects and natural processes.

A quite different view of the nature of mathematics is constructivist in kind. Leopold Kronecker is supposed to have said that God made the natural numbers (1, 2, 3 …); the rest is the work of humans – “‘Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschen-werk’, which was the poetic expression of his belief that the only legitimate mathematical objects (on the side of number systems, geom-etry was not included) were those that could be reduced to natural numbers.”3_{Mathematical objects are human creations, a conceptual}

world that is ‘up to us’. Constructivism was developed in the early twen-tieth century by Herman Weyl and Luitzen e.J. Brouwer. But if mathe-matics is our construction, why don’t we see much more variation? Why do mathematicians agree on mathematical constructions, across cultural, linguistic and ideological differences? If we would ever encounter extra-terrestrial mathematicians, we should expect them to have a different notation, but fundamentally the same mathematics. unlike social and cultural products such as languages or legal systems, where there is far

1_{Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and The}

Laws of Physics (oxford: oxford university Press, 1989).

2_{see, for instance, Philip Kitcher, The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (Oxford:}

Oxford University Press, 1984), 102; Mark Colyvan, An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2012), 10f.

3_{Dirk J. van Dalen, L.E.J. Brouwer – Topologist, Intuitionist, Philosopher: How}

Math-ematics is Rooted in Life (London: springer, 2013), 232f.

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MaTH, MoraLiTy, aND MysTery 155

more variation, mathematical constructivism has to do justice to the universality of mathematical insights. They seem to be necessary.

Both approaches offer a possible way of understanding transcendence. The Platonic view has a transcendent reality of abstract entities, ready to be explored. a constructivist lacks such a transcendent ontology, but our experiences with mathematics as universal suggest a notion of transcendence in the process of mathematical abstraction.

Let us go back to the beginnings of human mathematics. The basics of counting and measuring are clearly to be found in the practical life of early hominids, as counting is useful when sharing food and keeping track of enemies, and in trade and agriculture. one of the simplest instances of Pythagoras’ formula, namely 32_{+ 4}2 _{= 5}2_{has been}

discov-ered early in human history as a way to create effectively straight corners. Much later, through abstraction and reflection, a general form was dis-covered. it would be this process of abstraction and reflection, which goes well beyond the concrete practical situation where it has its humble human beginnings, that generates mathematical insights. a remarkable feature of our reality is that those abstract insights turn out to be appli-cable to many other situations as well. apparently, natural processes have many features that are structurally the same.

Thus, though upon a constructivist view we are not endowed with a distinct type of perception or intuition (as needed upon a Platonic view), humans can come up with genuine mathematical knowledge developed by abstraction, generalization and idealization from the natural. Tran-scendence would not be about an ontologically distinct realm, but rather reflect the possibility of abstraction from concrete processes to structures that in their abstraction are ‘universal’ in kind. The play of imagination allows for mathematical constructs that have no straightforward real-world applicability.

The philosophy of mathematics is a scholarly profession in itself, which I will not delve into here,4_{but this analogy serves as an}

indica-tion that one need not abandon a naturalistic and pragmatic understand-ing of human behavior (countunderstand-ing, measurunderstand-ing) to consider the possibility of universal concepts that go beyond specific situations, and in that sense are not factual but ideal or transcendental. Might one make a similar argument for values that have their origins in human practices

4_{See, again (note 2), Colyvan, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics, and}

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but that have some higher, ideal of transcendental status? That is the topic of the next section.

2. Universal Values as an Unavailable Transcendental Perspective?

Upon a naturalistic perspective, pro-social behavior has its roots in enlightened self-interest, whether of the individual or of the ‘selfish’ genes. Biologists and others have come up with evolutionary explana-tions for support given to children, nieces and nephews and other kin (same genes), support given to one’s partners (a shared project, though if one can mobilize the other and nonetheless do less than one’s fair share, it is even better - cheating co-evolves with sociality); support given to neighbours (direct reciprocity) and to the larger community (indirect reci-procity, group selection). it all seems ultimate enlightened self-interest, unconsciously pursued.

What about values in this world of interests? Is there any place for reasons in such a world where mechanisms that guide behavior are selected for in accord with ‘ultimate’ evolutionary success that in itself need not be moral in character?

ronald Dworkin, american philosopher of law, argued in his Justice

for Hedgehogs (2011) and in his more popular Religion without God

(2013) that values have an objective existence as entities categorically different from ‘facts’, the knowledge that science, history, and common sense deals with. Not that he defended their existence in a transcendental realm of a spatial nature; that would treat those values as if they were a peculiar type of facts, entities that can be located in space and time. For him, the central point was that any argument that seeks to come to a moral conclusion needs a moral premise (as David Hume already noted, an insight that has become known as the is/ought distinction).5_Dworkin

combined this observation about the inescapable need for moral assumptions if one draws moral conclusions with a deep seated convic-tion that there are moral truths.6_{Torturing children is wrong – and not}

just wrong according to our cultural preferences. if there are some moral truths, and those truths cannot rest upon non-moral premises alone, there must be something objective about values; they must transcend (or be

5_{David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 3, pt.i, sec.1.}

6_{ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University}

Press, 2011), chapter 2, 23-39; Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-vard university Press, 2013), 16-21.

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categorically different from) all descriptive and theoretical truths as uncovered via the sciences and similar disciplines.

As with mathematics, a moral ‘Platonist’ has the transcendence of val-ues, relative to human practices and interests, built into the worldview right from the start. There were moral truths before there were sentient beings; value precedes knowledge of values. However, as with mathemat-ics, skeptics might wonder what kind of spooky existence that could have been, independent of any mental and social life, which upon a naturalistic and pragmatic view, is where we make value judgments.

One option, which I consider mistaken, is to suggest that the evolution-ary process itself delivers value, for instance by giving rise to greater complexity, first with the rise of multi-cellular organisms, and later among the vertebrates the rise of complex neural systems, to pick two transitions that are of great personal interest to humans. However, con-temporary bacteria and viruses have equal status as fruits of a long evo-lutionary process. The suggestion that evolution delivers value seems to miss something essential, as it fails to discriminate between that which we consider valuable (or, according to Dworkin, that which is valuable) and that which is the current outcome of a long evolutionary process.

However, one might seek to argue that within the evolutionary process, under very particular conditions of social life and intellectual skills, something has become possible – something that Philip Kitcher called

The Ethical Project.7_{evolution has delivered more than was ordered.}

Means have been used for new purposes. Fingers did not evolve to play a piano, but they can be used to play the piano. intelligence and com-munication, brains and language will have been useful for the four F’s that are essential for survival as individuals and as a species: feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproducing. once intelligence and language evolved, they may have been used in other tasks as well. This ‘more’ that was delivered allows morality to be genuinely moral, for our intelligence allows us to reconsider our own behavior. We may discover that we are ‘naturally’ inclined to treat men and women differently. However, by becoming aware of this we can also act against that which comes ‘naturally’. Communication may also contribute. imagine that once an offended hominid asked a fellow hominid: ‘Why do you behave thus?’ In the presence of others he or she was challenged to justify the behavior in question with arguments that would be recognizable and acceptable to the others, and thus, to formulate general principles justifying his or her

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behavior. in many incidents of this kind, natural behavior guided by enlightened self-interest may have become reconsidered, intentional behavior. The social context of our lives may have pushed towards uni-versality and accountability, hallmarks of morality, and towards law rather than individual preference.

We are occasionally open to reasons, to argument. since ideas spread faster than genes, culture may develop enormously. There is no reason to assume that the biological basis would always overrule the effects of culture. Thanks to the emergence of culture as a second type of heritage, alongside the genetic one, and thanks to the capacity for reflection and to the impulse to public justification, we are not victims of our evolution-ary heritage. We are biological beings, but as these particular biological beings we have a moderate amount of freedom with respect to our genetic drives. We therefore also have responsibility.8

Philip Kitcher traces this development in far greater detail, in a series of chapters he combines as ‘an analytical history’.9_{In passing, he}

con-nects the development of pro-social behavior to the rise of punishment and to belief in an unseen divine ‘enforcer’. However, treating moral injunctions as divine commands is rejected; one cannot escape one’s own responsibility by claiming to have obeyed orders from a higher com-mander.10_{Kitcher argues that there is, occasionally, ethical progress;}

examples include the abolishment of slavery, the admission of women to education, and the acceptance of various sexual orientations. and if there is progress, there seems to be ‘an idea of ethical truth’.11_However,

Kitcher thinks we can and should do without the concept of ethical truth.

To salvage the notion of ‘objectively better than’ that occurs in these claims and counterclaims, we do not need any concept of ethical truth. it is enough to recognize which kinds of changes would be progressive or regressive.12

8_{richard D. alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (New york: De Gruyter, 1987);}

Willem B. Drees, Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 205-210.

9_{Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project, 17-170.} 10_{ibid., 167-170.}

11_{ibid., 178.}

12_{ibid., 210. italics in the original. Kitcher makes a similar move in his analysis of the}

development of science, in Philip Kitcher, The Advancement o Science: Science without

Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (New york: oxford university Press, 1993), in

response to the post-Kuhnian historical relativism about science, though without the exten-sive ‘analytical history’. Here too, the emphasis is on piecemeal improvement, on multiple criteria, and successful comparative measures of progress (a is better than B) without access to ‘the truth’.

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Making one step beyond the piecemeal and comparative approach of Kitcher in terms of progress (a is better than B) without a sense of ‘ethi-cal truth’, one might treat this as a modest vision of ethi‘ethi-cal truth as elu-sive but approximated. We are practical beings, who measure, count, evaluate and judge – and in doing so, we reach beyond the practical and approximate values and ideas that seem to be universal and timeless, transcendent relative to the world of facts and social practices.

The religious vocabulary associated with such moral transcendence might be that of a divine commander, revealed insight, and hence morally speaking a divine command theory. such a divine command view is rejected by Kitcher, and if we take a similar pragmatic and naturalistic stance, we should follow him on this. However, a different, more con-genial use of religious language is considered in the work of Stewart Sutherland, God, Jesus and Belief: The Legacy of Theism (1984) as the view sub specie aeternitatis, that is, the view from the perspective that is not a particular perspective, and thus not serving a particular self-interest. (and any self-interest is, by definition, particular.) Thus, someone con-templating a modest job as a school teacher is told that if he does it well, “you will know it, your pupils will know it; and God will know it”.13_It

is the final part – the ‘God will know it’, that lifts the considered course of action to a higher plain. sutherland argues that it is not accidental that the language of theism is used; it serves well. “The language of theism embodies, offers and protects the possibility of a view of human affairs

sub specie aeternitatis.”14_{He points to two beliefs or hopes involved,}

namely that one may transcend the particulars of an individual, commu-nity or age, and furthermore that the ultimate context in which our behavior is to be judged is against values that are beyond ‘the outlook of mankind’ and particulars of the species.

These features are somewhat reminiscent of the universals of mathe-matics, though in mathematics the ability to build consensus among those with expertise is far greater than in the moral domain, where cultural and individual differences are more common and persistent.15

13_{stewart r. sutherland, God, Jesus and Belief: The Legacy of Theism (oxford: Basil}

Blackwell, 1984), 87. Quoting a play by robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons.

14_{ibid., 88.}

15_{By the way, the analogy with math is also considered by sutherland, e.g. when}

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3. Mystery

Science is successful; much is explained or might be explained with the progress of the various disciplines. Will understanding ever be exhaus-tive, or is there a remnant of unanswered questions? I will argue that there always are such questions, though not always the same, as knowledge advances.

Basically, scientists find traces and clues – and seek to understand the past or the inner workings of organisms or galaxies. in that process, we answer questions and pass on other questions. There is a huge division of labour among scientists and disciplines.

an architect who constructs a building decides to use concrete. He may have knowledge of the forces that this concrete will be able to with-stand. if someone would ask why the forces are as they are, the architect might refer us to an engineer who studies material sciences. This engineer should be able to inform us about experiments and the relevant theory, about the wear and tear of the materials concerned, and their relations to chemical bonds between the various materials. Perhaps the engineer even knows from which geological deposit the sand and cement have been taken. However, if you go on asking how those layers came to be there, the engineer will refer to a geologist. The geologist can tell a story about the erosion of mountains and sedimentation of sand and stones by rivers. Perhaps the geologist can discover that the sand used was part of a particular mountain range, and perhaps even that the same material was already deposited on a sea floor long before. However, if one continues by asking where the silicon and oxygen come from, the chemical ele-ments making up sand, the geologist will have to say that these were there when the earth formed. For further questions, he will refer to the astrophysicist. and the astrophysicist can answer many questions, about the formation of elements out of hydrogen in the interiors of stars and during supernova explosions, and the way these elements are distributed in the universe and may get included when a solar system forms. How-ever, this explanation assumes that there is already hydrogen as the mate-rial out of which stars are formed. When we go on with ‘historical’ questions we come to theories about the earliest stages of the universe, to the turf of the cosmologist.16

16_{The image of passing on questions has been inspired by a lecture by Thomas H.}

Huxley, “on a Piece of Chalk”, explaining the whiteness of the cliffs of Dover, chalk’s rela-tive softness, its composition and properties by pursuing physical, chemical, biological and geological lines of inquiry, showing how they all fitted together: Thomas Huxley, “On a

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This, in a nutshell, is typical of science. scientists answer questions belonging to their domain of expertise, while passing on other questions, about the things they take for granted in their own work. even if our current questions are answered by future theories, new questions emerge in the context of new theories. For instance, the inflationary model in cosmology solves many questions regarding the universe as observed, but does not explain why the universe is such that inflation happens; some assumptions are always made. The reach and convergence of explana-tions is impressive, but explanatory success does not exclude further questions. again and again, questions emerge at the limits of scientific understanding. Particular questions may be resolved, but the ensuing deeper understanding will have other elements that are assumed rather than explained.

Questions remain even if physics and cosmology agree one day on a theory explaining all known phenomena in a unified, coherent way. imag-ine, a single article, a single formula answering all our questions. But the article is on a piece of paper; the formula consists of symbols. Thus, there is no answer to the question: Why does reality behave as described here? it is as with a drawing of the Belgian artist rené Magritte. it is a careful drawing of a pipe, a pipe used for smoking tobacco. underneath it, he has written ‘Ceçi n’est pas une pipe’ – ‘This is not a pipe’. and he is right. it is an image of a pipe. one cannot fill the image with tobacco. if one would attempt to light the image, something else happens than when one lights a pipe. There is a difference between an image, how accurate it may be, and reality. This is also the case for a good scientific theory. However accurate the theory, the question remains why reality behaves as it does (and as described in the theory).

There is a traditional philosophical question: Why is there something rather than nothing? And there are similar philosophical questions that arise due to science, but are not answered by science. Why is mathemat-ics so effective in describing reality? Why is reality such that we can work well with theories that are incomplete and even wrong? An example of a wrong but still most useful theory is Newton’s theory of gravity, which was superseded by einstein’s Theory of General relativity. Living with incomplete and probably mistaken theories is our predicament, since we do not yet have a theory integrating quantum physics, gravity and

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space-time. it is a mistake to inflate problems and puzzles to mysteries, which would perhaps only be open to a religious answer. such an approach would be forced into further retreats again and again. However, the success of science in solving puzzles and problems can itself evoke questions. How can human science be so successful? What does that say about humans and what might we thus surmise about reality?

There are various ways of dealing with such persistent questions. it is told that the American president Truman had a sign on his desk saying ‘The buck stops here’. in a company or administration one can pass on hard decisions to persons higher up, but the president cannot avoid responsibility. scientists, however, do not have to make a choice. They may have to live with the insecurity of unanswered questions. a political decision or dogmatic answer is neither necessary nor adequate. religious people do not have to cut this Gordian knot either. They ought to be will-ing to recognize that our explanatory quest is open ended. The physicist Charles Misner expressed this well:

Saying that God created the universe does not explain either God or the Universe, but it keeps our consciousness alive to mysteries of awesome majesty that we might otherwise ignore, and that deserve our respect.17 We always work within the limitations of our concepts and ideas and within the limitations of our existence. We will never see the universe ‘from the outside’, from the perspective of eternity, but always from within. That is also a problem when we speak of God; we are within the universe while we attempt to speak about something that is conceived to be more encompassing. our language about a ‘beyond’ need not be meaningless, but our theology does require agnostic restraint if we are not to fall into an arrogant and unwarranted religious certainty.

The more we know, the more we may become aware of the limitations of our knowledge. De docta ignorantia (About learned ignorance) was the title of a book of Nicolas of Cusa, a cardinal in Europe in the fifteenth century. The scientific road to knowledge has shown itself to be very successful; we have learned more than Nicolas of Cusa could have expected. But that does not need to result in the arrogant conviction that we can explain everything without any residue. on the contrary: through science we are confronted with fundamental questions concerning the nature and ground of our reality. Why is there a reality? Why is reality the way it is? Thunder is no longer a voice of the gods, nor a mystery.

17_{Charles W. Misner, “Cosmology and Theology”, in Cosmology, History, and}

Theology, eds. W. yourgrau and a.D. Breck (New york: Plenum Press, 1977), 95.

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But that does not exclude wonder regarding the reality of which both we and thunderstorms are a part. To the contrary, in the end existence remains a mystery.

Perhaps we should shift from question about origins to a question about the actuality of existence. With this rephrasing of the cosmological question, the nature of a possible answer also shifts away from a causal concept of the creator, as the sole pre-existing being. an alternative might be to think of the answer in more immanent terms – as the Ground of existence, which gives actual existence to the possibility described in the successful scientific theory (see the contribution by Wesley Wildman, this volume). Just as a reference to God is not an explanation, a reference to the Ground of existence too is more a place-holder for the open-ended character of human knowledge than an answer. But as a way of thinking about the divine, the role envisaged for such a Ground of being is some-what like the role axioms have in a mathematical system: the axioms don’t cause the various theorems to be valid, but they do ground those theorems and thus legitimize them.

The persistence of questions if one accepts a naturalist view informed by the natural sciences, may lead some to a sense of gratitude and won-der about the existence of our world. This wonwon-der or puzzlement about the contingency of existence, and perhaps also of order and intelligibil-ity, is something that receives an answer of some sort from faith in a transcendent God who endows the world with existence and order. How-ever, the move would not be from science to faith, as if such a God were the conclusion of an inference to the best explanation of the natural world.

4. Beyond the Three Varieties of Transcendence: A Ground of Being

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It may seem attractive that the notion of transcendence can be under-stood in terms of mathematics or morality, but there is a downside: the argument might be understood more appropriately as an argument for the non-existence of God. in an article on arguments for the existence of God, with special consideration of anselm’s ontological argument, J.N. Findlay has pointed out in 1955 that precisely because of the nature of the argument, God is not placed with (contingent, empirically real) entities that have genuine existence but rather with mathematical entities and other conceptual truths, that have no claim to existence. as Findlay wrote:

it was indeed an ill day for anselm when he hit upon his famous proof. For on that day he not only laid bare something that is of the essence of an adequate religious object, but also something that entails its necessary non-existence.18

This regards mathematical truth – even if there is no triangle, it is true that triangles have three angles. Precisely because one can suspend the question whether triangles exist, one may have mathematical conclusions of universal validity. and if one had triangles realized in material form, they wouldn’t be perfect – and hence, they would not be triangles in the mathematical sense. Triangles don’t exist in the actual world. Findlay’s challenge also regards the moral perspective advocated by Sutherland – precisely because viewing our choices sub specie aeternitatis is not a perspective that could be said to exist, might it function as a major regu-lative notion.

The third, cosmological, approach is more material, in that it traces the sequence of explanatory theories. However, here the consequence is that this type of transcendence (mystery) is epistemic rather than ontological. Perhaps, however, the more general questions that do not so much fit in the sequence of theories but rather stand separately, such as the question why something rather than nothing, might allow for a more ontological answer – though not as an inference to the best explanation, but as an option for those who already has assumed a theistic perspective. a some-what less dualistic notion of transcendence might be to speak of God as Ground of Being. This softens the ontological dualism of God and crea-tion. i found a most inspiring poetic expression among aphorisms in The

Aristos of John Fowles:

18_{J.N. Findlay, “Can God’s existence Be Disproved?” in New Essays in Philosophical}

Theology, eds. antony Flew and alisdair Macintyre (London: sCM, 1955), 54.

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MaTH, MoraLiTy, aND MysTery 165 The white paper that contains a drawing; the space that contains a building; the silence that contains a sonata; the passage of time that prevents a sensation or object continuing forever; all these are “God”.19

Upon such a view, God need not be envisaged as the creator ‘in the beginning’, billions of years ago. God can be taken to create and sustain natural existence and its order at all times and places. But this is hardly an answer to the mystery of existence; it merely relocates it.20

19_{John Fowles, The Aristos, rev. ed. (Falmouth: Triad/ Granada, 1980), 27.} 20_{This paper originated as a contribution to the Centre for Naturalism and Christian}

Semantics conference “The Varieties of Naturalism and the Problem of Transcendence, Or:

religion and the re-enchantment of Naturalism”, held at Copenhagen university, april 29-30, 2011. another chapter along the same lines, “The Divine as Ground of exist-ence and of Transcendental Values: an exploration” had appeared in andrei Buckareff and yujin Nagasawa, Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the

Divine (oxford: oxford university Press, 2016), 195-212. some ideas i discussed

previ-ously in other publications of mine, especially in Willem B. Drees, Religion, Science and

Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1996), Drees, Religion and Science in Context: A Guide to the Debates (London: Routledge, 2010), chapters 5 and 6, and the