The Divine Sting: God Is Unimaginably Great

By Frederick Bauer

Are beliefs in God and in the soul merely relics of pre-scientific superstition? After all, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuriesthe so-called age of sciencewe know that science can be proven by its fruits: its helped us split the atom and put men on the moon. Religious faith, on the other hand, couldnt accomplish these feats. This conflict leaves modern-day Christians challenged by materialist atheists who claim that faith in God has been discredited by modern physics and psychology.

The Divine Sting answers their challenge. Contrary to what most Christians think, belief in God and the soul need not remain matters of religious faith. In fact, it is the atheists themselves who ignore Einsteins shocking revelation about modern sciencethat the physical universe, including the human body and its brain, have never been observed. We have rather only observed mental effects whose source we can only guess at. Atheists naive claims about scientific observation are themselves nothing less than an article of anti-scientific faith.

By integrating facts traditionally segregated into categories of philosophy versus theology versus modern science, The Divine Sting will assist you in discovering for yourself how to convert faith in God and belief in the soul into solid, impregnable, and justifiably certain science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491778029

Frederick Bauer

Frederick R. Bauer is an associate professor of philosophy at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he has been teaching there since 1967. Besides his PhD in philosophy, he has an MA in psychology plus four years of post-graduate seminary training in theology, canon law, and Scripture.

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Copyright © 2016 Frederick Bauer.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Brief Outline or Overview

Warning

Preface Notes

Chapter One Who Are The Believers?

Chapter Two An Inference from Science about Language: It Doesn’t Exist.

Chapter Three Truth and Systems

Chapter Four Faith and Sensation

Chapter Five Flesh and Blood: One? or Many?

Chapter Six What Can (Should?) a Catholic Believe …?

Chapter Seven Conclusions of One Plain Catholic

Chapter Eight Why? Honestly, now!

Appendix Notes

Dedicated to Paul of Tarsus and Therese Martin

whose words have inspired me,

And to Nancy, whose tangible presence is my greatest pleasure

Great is the Lord and highly to be praised;

His greatness is unsearchable.

(Psalm 145)

FOREWORD

This lucidly written and intellectually challenging book takes up a timeless question in an unabashedly untimely way. In this sense, it is a book that is unabashedly out of season. At a time when public intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens popularize pop science and trained scientists like Richard Dawkins make public pronouncements of the all-explanatory powers of science, Frederick Bauer has the temerity to argue that reason itself demands that we recognize the fundamental reasonableness of belief in God, the human soul, and human immortality.

But Bauer does not stop here. Fighting fire with fire, he goes so far as to make the case that the very existence of the twin powers of human reason and human science provide reasonable evidence for the individual person’s belief that he is an immortal, spiritual creature. Turning the polemics of our new public atheists on their heads, Bauer dares us to wonder how a person can exercise his created reason without the initial—and ongoing—support of a perfect Divine Mind that vivifies and sustains human reasoning in all of its forms.

Bauer is not taking up entirely new and previously untouched questions; nor does he claim to be. Thinkers as diverse as Plotinus, Philo of Alexandria, Henry of Ghent, and Bernard Lonergan (to name only a few) previously raised many of the same questions that Bauer does. Yet Bauer approaches these questions in an undeniably and unmistakably unique way. Twenty pages into Bauer’s argument, the reader cannot help but notice that he is seeing a particular mind with particular questions and a particular way of thinking at work here. That is one of this book’s true charms. Bauer’s argument may be unthinkable apart from the running conversation he carries on with his two principal interlocutors, Rene Descartes and William James. But his argument is his argument, not Descartes’s or James’.

As a consequence, everyone will find something important to disagree with in this book. This writer, for instance, remains unpersuaded by Bauer’s rejection of the existence of collective wholes and his unwillingness to accept the existence of real, existing essences. However, that is to the book’s credit. On its deepest level, this book zeroes in on the actual act of human cognition and on the strengths and limits of language’s ability to capture the truth about human cognition. To the extent that his book does this, and does this well, Bauer has done both himself and his reader a genuine service.

Marc D. Guerra

Dept. of Theology

Assumption College

DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface Notes. (P-N’s)

Chapter One. Who Are the Believers? Preview. A. The Current Crisis for Catholics. 1.1 Christopher Hitchens. 1.2 Religion and Peace. 1.3 Who Has ‘Science’ on Their Side? 1.4 Descartes and Modern Science. 1.5 The ‘Glory to Come.’ 1.6 The Meaning of Life. 1.7 The 21st Century ‘Scientific’ Assault on ‘Religion.’ B. The Solution: Reversing the Aim of ‘Science.’ 1.8 Using ‘Science’ Against Atheists. 1.9 Pope John Paul II’s exhortation. 1.9 Pope John Paul II’s exhortation. 1.10 Saint Thomas Aquinas. 1.11 Why Saint Thomas’ Belief-System is So Valuable. 1.12 A Major Error in Saint Thomas’ Philosophy. 1.13 A ‘P.S.’ about the ‘Essence’ Distinction. 1.14 The best way.

Chapter Two. An Inference from Science about Language: It Doesn’t Exist. Preview. A. Why Science About Language Is Important. 2.1 Language. 2.2 Religion, Science, and Just Plain People. 2.3 Magical Shorthand for ‘Many Persons.’ 2.4 Born Beliefless, Humans Are Learners. 2.5 A ‘Thought Experiment.’ 2.6 What Are You Doing? 2.7 A Major Role of Language: Tradition or ‘Handed Down’ Knowledge. B. Revelation? 2.8 The Ascension, 2012. 2.9 The first absolute fact: If you can read it, you can understand it. 2.10 You’ll have to ‘prove it’ to yourself! 2.11 What’s the point? 2.12 The Number-One, Most-Important Truth vis-à-vis Revelation. 2.13 Further Conclusions. 2.14 Revelations are Complete Thoughts. 2.15 Traditional Theologians. C. Introductory Facts About Reading. 2.16 The Monumental Oversight of (Most) ‘Theologians.’ 2.17 And About Reading. 2.18 The Process of Reading is Always the Same. 2.19 Everyone Must Do His or Her Own Reading. 2.20 A Logical Inference. 2.21 Why Today’s ‘Scientists’ Can’t Recognize The Truth About Reading. 2.22 The Big Question. 2.23 The Astounding Answer. 2.24 The great advantage of this proposal: simplification. D. Today’s Scientists Ignore What’s Already Discovered. 2.25 Start With Everyday Common Sense. 2.26 What Some Ancestors Discovered About ‘Language.’ 2.27 The ‘Linguistic Turn’ and Materialism. 2.28 The Greatest Demonstration of the 1900’s. E. Ockham’s Razor Applied to Language As Such. 2.29 As Such. 2.30 A Conclusion About ‘Language.’ F. The ‘World’ of Language-Fictions. 2.31 Indispensable Fictions. 2.32 The One and the Many. 2.33 Indispensable Language Fictions and This Book. 2.34 How are Spoken & Written Language Related to Each Other? 2.35 How Did Spoken Language Begin? 2.36 When Did Written Language Begin? 2.37 Again, How are Spoken & Written Language Related? 2.38 The law of association. 2.39 Summarizing. 2.40 Blind Faith and the Ockhamist Challenge. 2.41 To Whom It May Concern … 2.42 Real Self-Contradictions. 2.43 Transition to What Follows.

Chapter Three. Truth and Systems. Preview. A. Truth: Its First-Principle Foundation. 3.1 Aristotle and First Principles. 3.2 What Aristotle Didn’t Notice. 3.3 The True Foundation for ‘Higher Learning’ is Common Sense. 3.4 The Divine Sting: God’s Two-Track Deception. 3.5 What Seem to be Words … 3.6 It Seems Like Magic! 3.7 Who Is Right? No, Whose Belief is True? 3.8 Common-Sense About Truth Must Begin With … B. Truth: Its Meaning. 3.9 A Book Could Be Written 3.10 First, Recognize that Truth Names a Logical Fiction. 3.11 Traditional Logic/Method is Based on Models and Fictions. 3.12 Descartes Broke the Tradition. 3.13. A Question: 3.14 What if All ‘Ideas’ Have the Same Source? 3.15 The Magic of ‘Language Learning.’ 3.16 What Does True Mean in This Text? 3.17 My ‘Common-Sense Principle.’ C. Three Tests or Criteria for Truth. 3.18 Truth and Reality. 3.19 Quintalism: a Five-Item Worldview. 3.20 Why Aim for a Grand Unifying Belief-System? 3.21 Theories About Truth vs Criteria/Tests for Truth. 3.22 Why the Definition vs Test Distinction is so VIP in ‘Science.’ 3.23 Three Tests or Criteria. 3.24 Intuition Must be Well-Informed, Part of a System. 3.25 The Myth of Distinct Disciplines: Why It’s A Massive Impediment. 3.26 The ‘Distinct Disciplines’ Myth is Useful but Outdated Pretending. 3.27 The Two-Truth Heresy. 3.28 The Pragmatist Theory About Truth. 3.29 Contradictions: Real or Only Apparent? D. Switching Mindsets. 3.30 A Second Common-Sense First Principle. 3.31 This Chapter: Article Two of This Author’s Epistemology, 3.32 Go For the Jugular! 3.33 Switching Mindsets. 3.34 An Illustration of ‘Switching Mindsets.’ E. Some Conclusions re Truth and Systems. 3.35 St. Augustine & ‘the Inner Teacher.’ 3.36 There’s More To It Than That vs Ockham’s Razor. 3.37 Do headaches, As Such, Really Exist? Or … 3.38 Headaches Are As Real As Colors, Sounds, etc. 3.36 Are Pains Bad? 3.36 Expand the ‘Big Question.’

Chapter Four. Faith and Sensation. Preview. A. Sheer Brute Logic. 4.1 What Is Believing? 4.2 No One Has Ever Seen Bread or Flesh, Never Tasted Wine or Blood. 4.3 The ‘Divine Sting.’ 4.4 A Classic Example of ‘Sheer Brute Logic’: Thinking vs Sensing. 4.5 Another Approach to this Crucial True Premise. 4.6 Arguments From Authority. 4.7 Lip Service to the Truth. 4.8 Consistent Reference vs Switching Reference. 4.9 Unclear or Fuzzy Reference. 4.10 Different Answers to What-is-seen? 4.11 The four possible referents. 4.12 The Process of Elimination. 4.13 Descartes’ View of the Divine Deception. 4.14 The God-Planned Revelation of ‘the Divine Sting’ Deception. 4.15 A Side-Ways Glance at Solipsism. 4.16a Part of the Elimination Argument, Briefly. Interlude About Mind-Switching Reference. 4.16b The Elimination Argument Extended. 4.17 A consistent hallucination. 4.18 Dawkins and Mass Hallucination. 4.19 Saint Thomas’ Faith-Driven Compromise-Distinction. 4.20 Most Contemporary Thomists 4.21 A Three-Dimensional Visual Field or TVF. 4.22 Why Everyone Must Learn About Mindset-Switching. 4.23 James and a Catholic Biologist Against Darwin. 4.24 If Color, Then God. 4.25 Conclusion.

Chapter Five. Flesh and Blood: One? or Many? Preview. A. More on the Current Crisis for Catholics. 5.1 Who Will Do the Unifying? 5.2 The Catholic Tradition. 5.3 Contemporary Catholic Universities and Colleges. 5.4 MacIntyre’s Solution. 5.5 The Obvious Indispensable ‘Right Solution.’ 5.6 Improving Their Philosophy. 5.7 An Example of the Need for ReShaping. B. Some of the Many ‘One and Many’ Problems. 5.8 The Many ‘One or Many?’ Problems. 5.9 A Complete Thought: the Most Important One-but-Many. 5.10 A Practical Illustration of How Important ‘the One & the Many’ is. 5.10 A Practical Illustration of How Important ‘the One & the Many’ is. 5.11 Is ‘the Church’ One? or Many? 5.12 ‘Public Opinion.’ 5.13 TVFs versus Sense-Data. 5.14 Berkeley: Learning What-Sensations-Come-Next. 5.15 A Note Vis-à-vis James’ description … 5.16 Illations/Conclusions from the Above Premises. C. Descartes: Modern ‘Science’ and Dualism: #1. 5.17 Are You One Thing or Many? Or Do You Have a Brain? 5.18 Scientists Create Models. 5.19 Why Are So Many ‘Scientists’ Inconsistent? 5.20 Was James the First ‘Scientist’ to be Consistent? 5.21 Descartes, Father of Modern Science, Was First. 5.22 Was Descartes Right? Here’s YOUR Crucial Decision: 5.23 The Solution: Two-Track Thinking. 5.24 Bosons and Models. 5.25 Life-Movies. 5.26 Today’s Berkeleyan-Idealist ‘Physicists.’ 5.27 And Berkeleyan Biologists. 5.28 Quantum Theory Turns ‘Scientists’ into Madmen. 5.29 Or Can Biologists Help Here? 5.30 Does Any Flesh and Blood Exist? D. Descartes: Modern ‘Science’ and Dualism: #2. 5.31 Chapter Four is Assumed. 5.32 The ‘subjective-objective’ trap. 5.33 Objective and subjective are relative terms. 5.34 Descartes’ Atomism: What’s Life? Part A. 5.35 Descartes’ Atomism: What’s Life? Part B. 5.36 Don’t Overlook Computer Technology. 5.37 VIP! Apply the Above to Flesh and Blood. 5.38 Aristotelian-Thomist Catholic Philosophy. 5.39 Back to Flesh and Blood. 5.40 What Is It That Thinks? 5.41 Descartes’ Traditional Answer to What Thinks? Addendum to Chapters Four and Five.

Chapter Six. What Can a Catholic Believe? A. About What God Does. 6.1 God Does Just About Everything. 6.2 The Longer Answer. 6.3 God Does Alone Much of What It Seems We Do. 6.4 God Keeps Those Electrons Orbiting. 6.5 God’s Hands or Ours? 6.6 Occasionalism. 6.7 God Creates All the Sensuous Beauty of Our Lives. 6.8 God Deceives Us for Good Reasons. 6.9 God Gives Us a Drive to Understand. 6.10 God Helps Us Discover What’s True. 6.11 The Challenge: Habit. 6.12 Call that ‘the method of elimination.’ B. About What We Human Beings Can Do. 6.13 We Can Believe Whatever We Want. 6.14 A Thesis: ‘the Church’ Does Have a Philosophy. 6.15 We Are Morally Free to Believe What We Honestly Conclude is True. 6.16 A Warning Against Rationalizing. 6.17 Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman. 6.18 Do You Have a Body #1? 6.19 What Are You? 6.20 Can you see your self? 6.21 God Reveals Every Thought, Even About What We Are. 6.22 You Are An Immaterial Conscious Being. 6.23 Are Angels and Humans Different? 6.24 What Else Must God Reveal? 6.25 Truth About the Past: History. 6.26 Are We Responsible for What God is Doing? 6.27 Distinguish Causality and Responsibility. 6.28 More re Occasionalism, Not Causal Interaction. 6.29 Our Best Intuitions re Praise and Blame. 6.30 Do You Have a Body #2? 6.31 Is the Triune God Three Distinct Persons? 6.32 In the Shoes Of … C. Confirmation: Why IS There a Blind Spot? 6.33 What Exists? 6.34 Get Used to Logical Fictions. 6.35 Paragraph#6.34 Illustrated by Nothing. Complete Thoughts Versus Names. 6.36 Beguiled by Names, i.e., by Words. 6.37 The Five-Concept/Idea Model for Psychology: Built with Fictions. 6.38 God Planned Blind-Spots, That’s Why. 6.39 Random Evolution or Divine Design? 6.40 Why Is Your Decision About Blind Spots So VIP? 6.41 Did Jesus, the Son of God, Have a Human Body? 6.42 But Spirits Can Have Full-Body Sensation. 6.43 Incarnation: Did Jesus Have a Human Soul? 6.44 Double Consciousness? 6.45 Humanly-Created Models. 6.46 Helpful Analogies re ‘Double Consciousness.’ 6.47 Attention.

Chapter Seven. Conclusions of One Plain Catholic. A. Seeking the Truth About ‘the Church.’ 7.1 Be Guided by the Meaning of the Words. 7.2 The Common-Sense Tradition. 7.3 Analysis of Meanings = A Tour of an Individual’s Mindset-System. 7.4 Every Catholic Christian is an Individual: No groups. 7.5 Christianity and the Church: 7.6 A Saintly Convert’s Confession. 7.7 What Did Blessed John Henry Mean by The Church of Rome? 7.8 What Did Blessed Newman Mean by Christianity? 7.9 Reduction to the Absurd. 7.10 The ‘Bottom Line’ Question must always be: What exists? 7.11. Individuals’ Obligations to Each Other. 7.12 No Universal Concepts; Instead, Group Concepts. 7.13 It is Possible to Agree on the Truth About The Church of Rome. 7.14 P.S. God Without Religion? 7.15 Again, What exists? is the Basic Question for Each Individual. 7.16 The Plus and the Minus of Thomism. B. The Truth About Nature. 7.17 Being Sufficiently Educated for the 21st Century. 7.18 Four major worldviews. 7.19 Matter: Three Different Meanings. 7.20 More About Phenomenalism. 7.21 James’ Razor Sharp Distinction. 7.22 Understand Now Why Be Guided by Meaning is So VIP. 7.23 Kohler Illustrates 7.22. 7.24 Objective vs Subjective. 7.25 Einstein and Berkeley? 7.26 Movies and TV. 7.27 How Many ‘Worlds’ There? One? Two? Three? 7.28 Get Used to Two ‘Worlds’ of Your Own. 7.29 Evidence and Faith. 7.30 Saint Thomas’ Great Contribution. 7.31 Saint Thomas’ Inconsistency. 7.32 Thinking Better About Faith. 7.33 Why Should Everyone Think Hard About Solipsism? 7.34 Evidence: The Primacy of Consciousness or the Subjective. 7.35 The Hidden Skeleton in the Quantum Physicists’ Closet. 7.36 Einstein’s Nonsense All the Same. 7.37 Scientific Theories are Imagined Guesses. 7.38 Faith and the Physical Sciences. 7.39 The Above is Only an Introduction re Nature. 7.40 N.B. Do not Confuse Science with Science. C. Seeking the Truth About God’s Presence. 7.41 Does God Exist? The ULTIMATE ‘CAUSE?’ Question. 7.42 Common-Sense ‘World’ or ‘Nature’: Premises for What God Does. 7.43 Why can Myopia be a Special Gift From God? 7.44 Reminder. Recall the Two Meanings of True. 7.45 How to Use Ockham’s Razor to Learn the Truth About Reality. 7.46 Applied to Physical Bodies, e.g., the Brain. 7.47 A Clarification or Note re the Reductionist Answer. 7.48 The Common-Sense Notion of a Cause. 7.49 ‘Scientific Laws’ Do Not Equal Causes or Answer Question iii, Why? 7.50 Hume’s Attack on Cause, Causality, or Causation. 7.51 More About Hume’s Attack on Modern Physics’ Forces. 7.52 Do Forces—or Energy—Exist? 7.53 Updating Saint Thomas to Solve the Quantum Enigma. 7.54 A List of Physics’ GAPS. 7.55 God’s Three-Fold Presence.

Chapter Eight. Why? Honestly, now! A. Why Do You Believe What You Do? 8.1 Why Do You Believe It’s Caused by Dark Energy Rather Than by God? 8.2 What Evidence are Your Answers to Those Questions Based on? 8.3 Which is Harder to Believe: the Trinity or Quantum Physics? 8.4 The Assumption of Honesty. 8.5 Why Aren’t You a Solipsist? 8.6 More People Should Imitate Einstein and Others. 8.7 Honestly, Now! Why Do Experts Disagree So Much? 8.8 Scientists Are Not Different From Theologians. 8.9 Why Disagreements? Not Because Only Some Are Good Mathematicians. 8.10 Oversight #1: Why Disagree’rs Are Able to Understand Each Other. 8.11 Oversight #2: Everyone Does ‘Experimenting.’ 8.12 Why It is Essential to ask, What Does That Mean? B. Why the True Answer Matters 8.13 For the Moment, Maybe Knowing the whole Truth Doesn’t Matter. 8.14 But Then Again, It Should Matter. 8.15 What About Animals? 8.16 An Exercise in Understanding. 8.17 No Understanding = No Morality. 8.18a No Free Will = No Morality. 8.18b No Free Will = No Morality. 8.19 What Means Free Will? 8.20 Before Quantum Physics Changed Everything 8.21 Why James Would Have Welcomed Heisenberg. 8.22 James and his Decision to Believe in Free Will. 8.23 Once More: Your ‘Two Worlds.’ (Think About a Computer.) 8.24 The Need for an Inner Model. 8.25 Finally, No God = No Morality. 8.26 Jefferson: God and a ‘General’ Moral Sense. 8.27 Specific Beliefs About Morality: True and/or False! 8.28 Can Anyone Tell You Whom You Must Love? 8.29 Kant’s Great Clarification. 8:30 8.30 Conscience Vis-à-Vis Objective Norms of Morality. 8:31 The Altruistic Obligation to Seek the Truth. 8.32 A Third Reason for Honestly Seeking Truth. 8.33 A Fourth Reason: the Reward if We Find the Truth.

Appendix-Notes.

BRIEF OUTLINE OR OVERVIEW

Preface-Notes. Instead of a continuous preface to The Divine Sting,* these are a set of brief notes that serve as an argument for the major contention announced in Preface-Note 2: Since the only worldviews or belief-systems that exist in the entire universe belong to the individual thinkers who have them, what follows will present one individual’s integrated worldview or belief-system. (*A sting is a deception, normally used to deceive crooks. In the context of this book, all of us, good and bad alike, are its targets, as explained in a later chapter.)

Chapter One. Introduces the current ‘crisis’ for Catholics: atheists, emboldened by the amazing discoveries collectively referred to as modern science, argue that these modern discoveries prove that religion is a relic of pre-scientific superstition. This opening chapter names some of today’s best-known atheists, but then it goes on to argue that modern discoveries—or ‘science’—do just the opposite. Science furnishes the best evidence-based arguments for God and for the immortal human soul. QU: Who, then, is taking things ‘on faith’? AN: Atheists.

Chapter Two. After distinguishing thought from language, this pivotal chapter uses everyday common sense and the testimony of such great thinkers as Plato, Saint Augustine, and John Locke to defend the claim that every human thought comes directly from God. Once that truth is understood, it becomes evident that every thought that comes, it seems, from reading the Bible, the Koran, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Aeterni Patris, is actually coming directly from one and the same source: the hand of God. Thus every thought should be regarded as a possible revelation. This enormous simplification, reached by an application of Ockham’s Razor, helps to remove the greatest impediment to human individuals’ acquisition of a true understanding of the universe and their own place in it: the myth that religion and science have distinct origins.

Chapter Three. Each of us, as we go through life, encounter countless thousands of different opinions about ‘everything under the sun.’ Many of those opinions or beliefs are true, but just as many are false. How can we sift the truths from the errors? In fact, what is the difference between a truth and an error? This third chapter introduces the many distinctions needed to understand what truth is and how to recognize it.

Chapter Four. This and Chapter Five are twin presentations for the Divine Sting. This chapter uses Descartes’ discovery of the function of the central nervous system—the brain plus the various nerves fed by the five external senses and the proprioceptive neurons—in our sense experience of color, sound, odor, etc. This discovery, once accepted, makes it possible to grasp a basic truth about ‘scientific’ claims about the physical world, including our own bodies and our own brains: those claims are about things that have never been observed. ‘Scientific’ views about them are guesses or hypotheses based on the only evidence anyone has for any opinion, namely, what William James called our own, private, personal, subjective streams of consciousness.

Chapter Five. Since we do not observe whatever physical things exist, we can only infer their nature. Saint Thomas’ teaching about the Holy Eucharist makes it easy to understand why the modern discoveries about atoms and the quantum-physics laws ‘governing’ their behavior lead inexorably to the conclusion that the never-observed, merely-inferred physical world is not only strange, but more strange than our predecessors and most of us can imagine.

Chapter Six. Begins the task of applying Descartes’ and other modern discoveries regarding our human selves to the two great Christian mysteries: the Trinity and the Incarnation. It also inquires further into issues about the physical world, if such a thing exists. Among those issues are the following: causality, the similarity or difference between humans and angels, how to interpret theories of psychology that are based on different models, etc.

Chapter Seven. Explores three major questions. What is the Church? What is the truth about nature? And what is the truth about God’s existence and omni-presence?

Chapter Eight. Shows the connection between human understanding, free will, morality, and the moral obligation to seek the truth. Honestly.

Appendix-Notes. Reprises of the text’s highlights, plus some afterthoughts.

WARNING

If you convert to the kind of thinking urged in this book, your life may very well undergo a radical upheaval, based on what are regarded as ‘scientific facts.’ Descartes was the first person who converted to this new kind of thinking. He did it partly by reading about and adopting the new discoveries by Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, and others, all of whom advocated and relied on empirical experiments to support their theories about the physical world. He did it partly by carrying out his own experiments, not only, e.g., by studying raindrop-created colors, but especially by studying the central nervous system of cadavers. Those experiments, in turn, led Descartes to his radically new theory about the human mind and how we know.

I regard Descartes as the most important revolutionary thinker of modern times, perhaps of all time. His (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy—first philosophy is a synonym for what, in 2014, is called metaphysics—was outlined in Part Four of his earlier (1637) Discourse on Method. The reason for noting this is to make it clear that Descartes did not merely provide a Grand Unifying Theory of the world; he also included in that unifying theory an instruction about how to use our human minds—the minds needed for understanding any theories whatsoever—when our goal is the acquisition of absolutely certain and true knowledge/theories about the world. Here is how one of Descartes’ biographers, Richard Watson, described the significance of Descartes’ philosophy vis-à-vis its impact on contemporary, 21st century thinking:

René Descartes’s Discourse on Method was published in 1637 and his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641. Both books have been in print ever since. Descartes’s mathematical method and mind-body metaphysics have directed the course of Western philosophy and science now for three and a half centuries. I remarked in the introduction that our whole Western culture—both humanistic and technological—is Cartesian to the core. So it is not surprising that Descartes’s ideas also set the agenda for the twenty-first century, for a great battle. The results of that battle will lead to the greatest revolution that humankind will ever undergo. That battle is the last battle for the human soul … (Cogito, Ergo Sum: a Life of René Descartes, p.327)

Take the adjective, revolutionary, seriously. Anyone familiar with modern European philosophy would understand the connection between Descartes and the bloody twentieth-century political revolutions inspired by the philosophy of Karl Marx. Just as there would have been no Marx without Hegel, there’d have been no Hegel without Kant, and no Kant without the ‘Rationalists’ and ‘Empiricists’ inspired by Descartes. But …

But the most important revolution now is not being fought with guns and bombs. The most important revolution going on in 2016 is the revolution that Watson refers to, the great culture war going on everywhere on our planet, specifically, the war of secularists against religion. Take religion to refer to the two things Descartes thought he could prove by ‘scientific’ reason: the existence of God and the immortality of the human soul. If Descartes were alive today, I believe he’d have only to update and expand the revolutionary Grand Unifying Theory he presented in the books he wrote during his relatively brief, fifty-four-year lifetime.

But Descartes is no longer with us. He has gone on to the next stage of human life. What he cannot do, I have attempted to do in this book, namely, to expand and improve his first philosophy or metaphysics as well as his psychology or theory about how the human mind works. In other words, I will explain how modern discoveries about the universe we live in show that Descartes made only one huge mistake. He claimed that God cannot deceive us. But that is precisely the most astonishing truth that most people have not yet learned: God deceives the h out of every last one of us. The modern discoveries about the universe we live in show that J.B.S. Haldane was right: Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. Or, if the universe itself is not queer, the truth about it is at least stunningly unexpected.

Let me add that, for anyone familiar with the theories presented in the recent past, the idea of ‘revolutionary theory’ should be familiar. I refer to the one Kant had in mind when he used the phrase, Copernican Revolution. He was referring to the mind-quaking change undergone by Copernicus and, after him, by anyone who, for the many early years of their life, believes that the earth is solid, fixed, and unmoving, and that the sun literally rises in the morning, travels across the sky, and disappears from sight at sunset, and who then discovers the astonishing truth. Kant was referring to the upheaval that should* occur when a naive individual learns that the earth is a massive rock that spins on its axis every twenty-four hours while it simultaneously speeds around the sun, covering an average distance of 7,108 miles every hour. (*That it doesn’t occur for most of us is because few ever really think about it. Pause a moment and try to ‘feel’ the impact of that fact: this is not motionless, solid earth we’re on, it’s like a huge, gigantic, heavy round rock, taking us spinning-free in empty space, not held up by anything or anyone, and going faster than any ‘ordinary’ jet plane.)

Kant’s philosophy should create a similar revolution in the thinking of anyone who buys into it. What Kant did was to push the thinking of his predecessors about colors, sounds, odors, tastes, and bodily sensations further, onto the realization that the ‘world’ each of us experiences is totally private, because it is composed of those very sensations instantly organized by our mind into a life-movie that has spatial and temporal dimensions. The conclusion many at first drew from Kant is that none of us has any way of finding out what the real, ‘noumenal’ world outside of—or external to—our mind is like. However, his most famous ‘pupil’ was the reader named Einstein, the reader who partly defended Kant but who also declared that we can succeed in discovering what’s ‘out there.’ In fact, Einstein went so far as to say, the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

More than fifty years ago, the idea of psychological or theoretical revolutions involving what we usually call scientific facts was popularized by Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 best-seller, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Since then, the word, paradigm, has come into common use, together with the allied concept of paradigm shift. The Wikipedia discussion of Kuhn’s thesis and of the various interpretations—and misinterpretations—of it forms a most convenient introduction to ideas that lie at the center of The Divine Deception and its focus on switching mindsets.

Most of all, Kuhn’s thesis applies as much to the thinking of individuals in ‘the humanities’ as it does to the thinking of those in ‘the hard sciences.’ In fact, for those who take off their ‘separate, autonomous disciplines’ blinders, it even refers to the type of religious conversions that William James described in his collection of brilliant lectures titled The Varieties of Religious Experience, namely, the conversions studied by theologians.

Be cautious, therefore.

But honest.

PREFACE NOTES

Preface-Note 1. What follows will present a Catholic Christian philosophy. An integrated philosophy. That is, an integrated worldview or belief-system.

Preface-Note 2. Since the only worldviews or belief-systems that exist in the entire universe belong to the individual thinkers who have them, what follows will present one individual’s integrated worldview or belief-system.

Preface-Note 3. Since the only mature philosophies or belief-systems that exist in the entire universe belong to the individual thinkers who have toiled to achieve them, what follows will present one individual Catholic Christian’s mature philosophy.

Preface-Note 4. In 1990, then-Pope John Paul II published Ex Corde Ecclesiae or Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, a lengthy essay about the type of education that Catholic institutions of higher learning should provide. But, though the pope stressed the need for the integration of all important truth or truths, his essay is permeated with the greatest impediment to that integration, what we can call the Myth of Distinct Disciplines. Along with that goes the Myth of Special Methods. By way of illustration, consider Paragraphs 16 and 17, two comments on the following sentence that precedes them: "In a Catholic university, research necessarily includes (a) the search for an integration of knowledge …"

16. Integration of knowledge is a process, one which will always remain incomplete; moreover, the explosion of knowledge in recent decades, together with the rigid compartmentalization of knowledge within individual academic disciplines, makes the task increasingly difficult …

17. In promoting this integration of knowledge, a specific part of a Catholic university’s task is to promote dialogue between faith and reason, so that it can be seen more profoundly how faith and reason bear harmonious witness to the unity of all truth. While each academic discipline retains its own integrity and has its own methods, this dialogue demonstrates that methodical research within every branch of learning, when carried out in a truly scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, can never conflict with faith. For the things of earth and the concerns of faith derive from the same God.

Preface-Note 5. The only learning, knowing, and integrating activities in the entire universe are those exercised by individual learners, knowers, and integrators. But, in the same way that it is customary to refer to all seven billion individual human inhabitants of this planet with a single phrase, viz., the human population, it is customary to mentally group individual learnings, knowings, and integratings and to use such phrases as those that the Holy Father used, viz., the explosion of knowledge, academic disciplines, and Catholic universities, as verbal symbols for those mental groupings.

However, readers of the Holy Father’s words should be warned against being seduced by such mental groupings and against thinking they represent real, non-mental groupings. In other words …

Preface-Note 6. Any individual knower or learner who believes there are real, non-mental entities called the explosion of knowledge or academic disciplines or Catholic universities is an individual who believes in myths, that is, an individual who mistakenly believes that there are extramental group realities represented by the group concepts signified by those words.

Preface-Note 7. Application #1: Today is January 1, 2013, and the preceding notes apply 100% to me, the Catholic Christian individual who will present to you the system of beliefs described in the pages that follow.

Preface-Note 8. Application #2: The only individual learning, knowing, and integrating you are 100% responsible for is your own. Therefore, you must always be on your guard against believing something that you have little or no evidence for, that is, on your guard against believing what is not true but actually false.

For instance, you can be forgiven if you believe that I was writing these prefatory notes on January 1, 2013. I lied. Deliberately. It is not as if you have 0% evidence for believing it, because—like all the thoughts that come to you as you read on in the pages that follow—it seems to correlate with the printed words your eyes are scanning. And if, as we all do, you routinely internalize ‘what other people tell you,’ you can say, I believe the notes were written on January 1, 2013, and my evidence is that the author said they were. (It’s now January, 2016, and I’m final-editing The Divine Sting.)

The ramifications of this application #2 are nearly infinite. It is customary for Catholic Christians, e.g., Saint John Paul II, to make the distinction between ‘faith vs reason’ a synonym for ‘believing what God has revealed via scripture and tradition’ vs ‘believing what can be known by reason.’ Do you really believe that he wrote an essay titled Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities and that I cited him correctly? That’s faith! Faith, namely, that I am telling you the truth in this book. I never met Saint John Paul II, I’m not certain he didn’t have someone else write a draft that he only promulgated in his own name, but I still believe he was its sole author.

I believe it entirely on the basis of what I have heard from others or from what others have written.

In fact, nearly everything that I will write in this book represents what I have learned via words, words, and more words. From others. However, I am 100% responsible for deciding which of the thoughts that have come to me via others’ words I will believe are true thoughts and which are false.

William Clifford wrote an essay entitled The Ethics of Belief. He argued that It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Though William James agreed that we have a moral obligation to try to learn the truth, he recognized how vague is the idea of insufficient evidence. In the thirteenth of his Lectures to Teachers, he observed, the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, ‘words, words, words,’ must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. And in The Will to Believe, he added, Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith. Will you take my word for the claims in this paragraph? If you do not repair to a library to check the truth and accuracy of my citations, doesn’t that mean you’ll accept these claims on faith? On ‘insufficient evidence’?

Preface-Note 9. Why is the sky blue? Every critical thinker determined to learn the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, will try to learn the true answer to that question. The internet has an ample supply of words, words, and more words to help critical thinkers learn a few of the different answers to that question. But the critical move is deciding which is true.

Preface-Note 10. But no one in this third millennium CE will ever know the true answer to Why is the sky blue? unless they are in the habit of imitating Rene´ Descartes and making certain that their psychological knowledge of how the mind works is as well developed as their familiarity with what physicists believe about the sky and the rest of physical nature.

Unfortunately, at the present time, most well-educated, would-be critical thinkers take it on faith that strict or hard science relates only to the physical world, which largely explains why they do not know the true answer to the big question Descartes focused on, How do you know? Only those who understand how the mind works, that is, only those whose psychology is as up-to-date as their faith in what physicists, chemists, and biologists claim as true, will be able to answer the Cartesian question, How do you know?

Because most well-educated, critical thinkers accept—on faith—what others have written, one of the most important things every serious learner, knower, and integrator must understand well is "Where do your thoughts come from when you are reading?"

Do you know the answer to that question? The true answer? How do you know it’s the true answer?

You. If you’re a critical thinker, you must know what thinking is. You’re doing it, aren’t you? If you’re a critical thinker, you must be existing right now. Aren’t you? How do you know that, if you’re thinking, you must exist? Can you say—think!—I am thinking, therefore I must really exist?

Or are you taking your thinking and existing on faith?

Do you know that you can’t take them on faith without doing both?

You.

Yes, you!

P.S. or Postscript. In one of his final sets of class lectures, William James, history’s greatest psychologist, cited lines from the text he was using. Those lines sum up why genuinely scientific psychology—about the mind and how it works—will offer the final truth about theories that purport to tell us the nature of the physical world:

But all philosophic thinkers have admitted, and we also must feel, that mind is something central and essential. After all, it is only through our consciousness that we know that there is any matter. Matter is only known in terms of mind … (Manuscript Lectures, p.392)

And, for those who have been fortunate to discover critical truths at each of the necessary preliminary stages in their personal climb to the pinnacle of insight, the final step may be like what it was for me, the discovery you can read about in Chapter Five, section nine (5.9). It was the discovery that the concept-&-word tradition must be replaced by the meaning-&-sentence model implicit in Descartes’ Meditations. See Chapter Three, section twelve (3.12).

CHAPTER ONE

Who Are The Believers?

… the exegete and the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences. (Pope John Paul II)

Preview. This chapter explains why, in this third millennium, Pope John Paul II’s exhortation to ‘keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences’ is important for everyone: exegetes, theologians, scientists, etc.

A. The Current (2015) Crisis for Catholics

1.1 Christopher Hitchens, God rest his soul (we pray), wrote a book that was published in 2006 with the title, god is not Great. The subtitle of this book, God is Unimaginably Great, says that this book disagrees with Hitchens. Or at least with what his title and subtitle say.

Why the qualification, at least with what his title and subtitle say? The reason is simple. There is a great deal of what Hitchens believed that no decent human being, and especially no decent Christian, would disagree with. He believed and wrote that many of the things some human beings, specifically some of those who think of themselves as Jews, Christians, Muslims, and even Buddhists, did to other human beings ‘in the name of religion,’ were horrifying evils. We (editorial or fictitious ‘we’) wholly agree.

But Hitchens’ subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything, over generalizes. Everything? Nonsense! What’s more, these horrifying evils—objectively speaking—are not, by themselves, evidence for what Hitchens sets out to prove, namely, his double faith that i) God does not exist and that, even if God does exist, ii) God is not great. The only thing shown by the horrifying deeds that he records is that countless human beings—not religion, since it does not exist—have inflicted countless amounts of suffering on other humans and that they did it ‘in the name of religion.’ It leaves open the questions, Does God exist? and Is God great?

Begin with Does God exist? (The other question presupposes a Yes answer.) Hitchens wrote about the fact that many people believe God exists and that there is a life hereafter awaiting them because it gives them comfort. He recalled a headmaster telling his youthful charges, You may not see the point of all this faith now. But you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones. Hitchens recalled his reaction: Again, I experienced a stab of sheer indignation as well as disbelief. Why, that would be as much as saying that religion might not be true, but never mind that, because it can be relied on for comfort. How contemptible. (p.4)

The idea that people cling to a belief in God and immortality because it helps them feel more optimistic about life is a common one. For instance, the late Ernst Mayr, a well-known expert on evolution, was asked in 2002 why he thought people familiar with evolution retained a dogmatic faith in God. He answered I personally refuse to discuss evolution with any religious person, because some of my friends, my closer friends, have been very religious. They got a lot of strength and consolation from their religion. The last thing in the world I would want to do is weaken the faith of these people. (Dreyfus, C., New York Times, Apr. 16, 2002, p.D-2.)

1.2 Religion and Peace. As a matter of fact, comfort—the peace that comes from confidence that the future will end well—is one of the most pervasive themes in the Christian Scriptures. A reference to peace appears at the beginning of Saint Luke’s gospel: The Orient from on high has visited us, to shine on those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:27-28) According to St. John, the first words Jesus spoke to his apostles after his resurrection, when he suddenly appeared in their midst, was Peace be to you. (Jn 20:19) In fact, it was also the second thing he said to them a moment later.

And Saint Paul, in his letters, repeatedly wished ‘Peace’ to his readers. Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope and in the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13) In conclusion, brethren, rejoice, be perfected, be comforted, be of the same mind, be at peace; and the God of peace and love will be with you. (2 Corinthians 13:11) Peace be to the brethren, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 6:23) Grace be with you, and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:2) And may the peace of Christ reign in your hearts; unto that peace, indeed, you were called in one body. (Colossians 3:15)

Just how strong was the peace and comfort Saint Paul himself drew from his faith can be seen in the following words:

For I reckon that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come that will be revealed in us … If God is for us, who is against us? He who has not spared even his own Son but has delivered him for us all, how can he fail to grant us all things with him? … Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or hunger, or nakedness, or danger, or the sword? … For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:18-39 passim)

But does the psychological feeling of comfort and peace that comes from a strong belief in God and human immortality prove God and immortality? Most people would say, No. Believing something does not make it so. Children believe in Santa Claus, but that doesn’t prove that there really is a jolly old man running a toy factory at the top of the world. (A note. Interestingly though, William James thought that, although it is not sufficient proof of God and immortality by itself, the connection between such beliefs and such feelings offers valuable insight into the workings of the human psyche, an insight that should not simply be dismissed. Particularly if it serves as one part of a larger case for God and immortality. End of note.)

1.3 Who Has ‘Science’ on Their Side? Hitchens was not, like Charles Darwin, an agnostic, that is, someone not sure whether there is or is not a supreme being named God. He was an atheist who believed that, unlike believers whose belief is belief and rests on faith, he had reason and science—and the emotion of horror?—on his side. For instance:

And here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science or reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. (p.5)

The implication is clear. According to Hitchens, those who believe God exists and that humans are immortal do not merely ignore science and reason; they believe things that contradict science and outrage reason. What’s more, ‘religious’ people do not respect free inquiry and open-mindedness. The bulk of Hitchens’ book is a collection of his reasons for rejecting whatever has been put forward as evidence or proof in favor of the religious beliefs of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Mormons, Christians, etc. His book’s Chapter Five, for instance, is titled The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False.

But Hitchens was wrong. It is possible to be open-minded and to believe in God and human immortality. Moreover, the claim in what follows is that science and/or reason itself is the best proof, not only that we are immaterial and immortal beings created by an unimaginably great and powerful God, but that in all of our reasoning, scientific and otherwise, we are totally dependent at every moment on an unimaginably intelligent Divine Mind. In other words, this book will use science against those who use science to attack religion.

1.4 Descartes and Modern Science. The argument here, against Hitchens and those like him, is that they are believers who rely a great deal on undeclared faith. They are inconsistent, being unwilling or unable to push ‘scientific’ facts to their obvious conclusions. They have not learned how to use the God-given gift of common-sense philosophy to recognize the scientific* truth which the great revolutionary thinker, Rene Descartes (1596-1650), was the first to discover, namely, that no one has ever observed anything heavenly such as a star, ever observed anything botanical such as a shrub, or ever observed anything animal such as a squirrel. (*Unless I am mistaken, thinkers in the far East who carried out endless debates about the nature of reality and knowledge did not rely, as Descartes did, on physiology and the role of the brain and the rest of the nervous system, i.e., on the type of facts customarily referred to as ‘scientific,’ as the basis for their arguments.)

The surprising truth is that no one has ever observed anything physical, material, or bodily. Not their own body or anyone else’s. There may not even be anything physical, material, or bodily, which means that whoever believes in such things relies on their own personal faith in these ‘unseens.’ As Chapter Four below will explain, Descartes used ‘scientific’ discoveries to prove the existence of God and immortal human souls. He was incredibly bold and confident about his grand unified theory, philosophy, worldview, or belief-system. At the end of the first published outline of his system, he offered this challenge:

Finally, if there are still people who are not sufficiently convinced of the existence of God and of their soul by the arguments I have proposed, I would have them know that everything else of which they may find themselves more sure—such as their having a body, there being stars and an earth, and the like—is less certain. (Discourse on Reason, Part Four)

Moreover, if what Descartes wrote to the father of Christopher Huygens was an honest report of his own state of mind, he was acutely aware of the difference between mere faith and the certainty of proven or what’s regarded as ‘scientific’ knowledge:

I think I know very clearly that they [our souls] last longer than our bodies, and are destined by nature for pleasures and felicities much greater than those we enjoy in this world. Those who die pass to a sweeter and more tranquil life than ours; I cannot imagine otherwise. We shall go to find them some day, and we shall still remember the past; because we have, on my view, an intellectual memory which is certainly independent of the body. And although religion teaches us much on this topic, I must confess a weakness in myself which is, I think, common to the majority of men. However much we wish to believe, and however much we think we do firmly believe all that religion teaches, we are not commonly so moved by it as when we are convinced by very evident natural reasons. (Philosophical Letters, 134-5)

This ‘weakness’ is, of course, perfectly common-sensical. All of us instinctively trust what we have evidence for, more than we trust something we have to take on blind faith. Saint Thomas himself composed the four books of his Summa Contra Gent(il)es with the realization that he had to rely on ‘unaided-by-divine-revelation human reason’ (philosophical science) and not on the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures if he hoped to persuade non-Christians to accept his conclusions about God and the soul. And about our human destiny, that is, about what Descartes called pleasures and felicities.

What are those pleasures and felicities?

1.5 The ‘Glory to Come.’ Nothing is more important than to realize that the peace sought by Christians depends entirely on belief about the future, that is, on belief about what is yet to come. Moreover, nothing is more important than to realize that the future referred to stretches far, far beyond the weeks, months, and years between the present and the day that a doctor signs one’s death certificate. It refers to the future called eternity.

The time remaining before death may be full of suffering of every sort. Not even an unimaginably horrific death by crucifixion can take away the deep, underlying peace described above, peace that comes from confident hope about a future beyond this life. Saint Paul approached the Christian idea of peace in his letter to the Roman converts cited earlier: For I reckon that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come that will be revealed in us. Notice the list of sufferings he had in mind: tribulation, distress, persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger, the sword, and death itself.

QU: What did Saint Paul mean by the glory to come? AN: No one will really know who has never had any other kind of experience than what William James called normal waking consciousness. In fact, the only reason anyone can know what normal waking consciousness means is because they’ve experienced it. Rocks and trees have no experience. Even if squirrels do have it, they’ll never have any way of self-consciously realizing it.

In fact, no experiences can literally be ‘put into words’; only those who have had and remember them can fully understand it when others try to describe them with words. No one, blind from birth, will ever fully know what seeing is the way that a sighted person does. To know what an experience is like, one must have personally enjoyed it. James makes the point this way:

No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind. (Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVI)

Nevertheless, we can try to understand what Saint Paul meant by the glory to come by reflecting on experiences that we think might be somewhat similar. In this case, an excellent way to approach what Saint Paul had in mind is to study the two chapters in James’ book which are entitled Mysticism. In them, he describes a series of experiences. He begins with experiences that are just a bit ‘out of the ordinary’ but which readers are most likely to have had. He ends with the kind of experiences that are relatively rare, so rare that many people simply don’t believe the reports are genuine.

The most usual type of different, altered states of consciousness are those brought on by drinking or inhaling intoxicants. Alcohol is the most common. James himself experimented by inhaling nitrous oxide gas.

But there is another type of ‘out of the ordinary’ experience that many people enjoy in moments when something they are already familiar with ‘suddenly hits them’ with an extraordinary force. My favorite example is a report that Victor Frankl included in the story of his time in a Nazi concentration-camp:

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature. In order to make myself clear, I am forced to fall back on personal experience …

We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp … Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way↓an honorable way↓in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of infinite glory.’

(V. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 2nd ed., pp.55-57)

In his dialogue, The Symposium, Plato long ago put into the mouth of a priestess named Diotima a description of another ‘revelation.’

He who has been instructed thus far into the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty—and this, Socrates, is that final cause of all our former toils, which in the first place is everlasting—not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; in the next place not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, nor existing in any other being; as for example, an animal, whether in earth or heaven, but beauty only, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things.