A few months ago my faith was destroyed, split asunder, scattered. Doubts emerged–and they prodded, pulled, irritated, tortured me. They were itches left un-itched, blisters left to fester. I had wounds that I neglected, opting for a quasi-spiritual revivification of my faith–as if self-induced emotional states and perhaps semi-delusional meditation could answer the specific, the concrete, the purely intellectual issues that threatened my faith.

I have realized now that the only way to properly face intellectual doubts is with a ready intellect, an open and free mind, a willingness to plunge oneself into the abyssal darkness. There is, of course, a fear that accompanies such a plunge–that is, a fear of losing one’s faith for good, a fear that an honest look, an unbiased and humble request for the veil to be pulled back, to see what lies beyond the unfettered drapes, may reveal an empty pedestal, an absence of the divine. And this was my worry. I had grown tired of doubt, of suffering through the nights, the bouts of darkness that swayed my heart and soul back-and-forth through tormentous conditions of gloom and light. I had to wrench dry my sopped mind–it was far too bloated, and there was fear of utter ruin, of a nihilism that threatened to reduce my world, my conception of reality, to senseless shambles, to a mere deterministic materialism, a purposeless cosmos of cosmic dust churning in the dark sea of space with no explanation for its very being.

I filed through the leaves of philosophical and historical tomes. Scholasticism became a shining beacon for me, and has undoubtedly aided me in my quest for truth. I like to see myself, in retrospect, as akin to a madman who, after a lengthy slumber upon some archaic mountaintop set below an ancient moon’s dying crest, awoke with a new dream, a prophetic revelation–a gift from the gods, a realization of transcendence. Though, in all honesty, I perhaps could be likened more to a self-babbling idiot who did not understand, in his moments of spiritual dryness and unresolved contemplation, how to distinguish between a skeptical assertion and an actual reason for unbelief.

This post, however, is not meant to explain in comprehensive detail, how I returned to faith. I will briefly touch on a very small but significant realization of mine that has opened the door to a much more mature faith. This is the realization that naturalism is blatantly false, absurd, and purely magical. I am surprised how many so-called “brights” and “academics” espouse this worldview. Such a belief is entirely doctrinaire, and only reveals, on the part of the naturalist, his willingness not to extend himself beyond his own self-asserted inexplicable and arbitrary cosmic boundaries which, in some way, contain all of physical reality. In fact I have become increasingly convinced that naturalism is fiercely irrational, and those who think otherwise have not truly spared a parcel of intellectual activity towards the underlying assumptions they are implicitly adopting in order to justify such a worldview.

As we will see right now, the naturalist’s worldview is in fact wholly unjustified. Let us transition into a general exposition of the principle of causality and its applicability to the matter at hand. At every moment all material things rely on a cause in esse to sustain them in being. There are of course causes in fieri. These are causes which explain how something temporally comes into being (like how a sculptor brings an ice sculpture into being), but we are concerned solely with causes in esse which tell us how something continues in being. The ice sculpture is brought into being by a temporal cause, that is, the sculptor. But the sculpture is also, after being brought into being, sustained in being by a plethora of causes continuously supplying its being. Without the coldness of the air the ice sculpture would melt. Without the ice’s molecular structure, the sculpture would become formless. The same goes for its atomic and subatomic structure–without its structure on these fundamental levels, the sculpture would cease to exist. In short, the sculpture, after being brought into being, has to be sustained in being at every moment by a series of simultaneous causes. If the coldness of the air were to go away, for instance, the sculpture would cease to exist. And one can follow any in esse cause down a causal chain of other dependent causes: the ice sculpture is sustained in being by the coldness of the air, which is sustained in being by its molecular density, which is sustained in being by its overall molecular structure, which is sustained in being by its atomic structure, subatomic structure, electromagnetism, gravity, the weak and strong forces, and so forth and so on.

This principle of causality, however, is not just applicable to ice sculptures, but to every material thing in physical reality. Every physical thing’s existence, its continual being, is dependent on a wide range of varied causes in esse, acting here and now, at every moment, supplying being to the things we see, touch, smell on a daily basis. Nothing in the natural world has its ontological ground in itself, rather it always points to ever-deeper levels of reality for its existence. But if this is true of all material things, that is, if this is true of the material reality as a whole, then admittedly, we must say that material reality, in itself, demands a cause in esse. Any appeal to some primordial material substrate or some sea of under-girding fluctuating energy, only posits the material to explain the material. But why should such a fundamental material level afford an exception to this principle of causality? Why should we think it is any less dependent for its continual existence than the incalculable amount of other material things we witness in the universe? There is no reason to think that the chain of material causality in esse arbitrarily stops inexplicably at a specific (or perhaps desired) level of physical reality. Such a suggestion only reveals one’s stubbornness to go beyond the purely physical realm.

This all demands that the universe, all material things, material reality as a whole, must depend on a cause beyond itself to supply its being. That is, the very existence of material reality points to the transcendent. One can take the classical skeptic’s approach of shooing away the ontological problem by claiming that the whole of physical reality exists inexplicably, causeless, as a brute fact. That is, one can arbitrarily forego the principle that he has consistently applied to everything else in existence, in order to preserve his naturalism. This is fideism at its finest, an over-zealousness, an irrational attachment to the doctrines of a worn out and exhausted naturalism. One may, however, as mentioned earlier, try to save naturalism by positing the fundamental cause of all being as some bedrock material thing (be it energy or some subatomic level). But such an appeal is really an appeal to something inside the the entire system of physical reality. We are trying to seek a cause for material reality itself, the whole project of the physical realm. The appeal to a physical realm within physical reality to explain physical reality implicitly admits that there is no cause outside of the physical reality to explain its own being. But this is precisely what we’re trying to do, to find a cause outside of physical reality. And an appeal to some level or realm within it will only elicit the question “what sustains that physical level in being?” At this point the skeptic may just call such a physical level a brute fact. But this is no different than the skeptic calling the whole material reality a brute fact. This is no more rational than the claim that material reality as a whole exists as a brute fact, because it is essentially saying that, fundamentally, material reality rests on a material level within itself that inexplicably exists–in other words, material reality inexplicably exists. Why suppose this? There is no reason to at all.

We must ultimately appeal to something outside of the material project to explain its continual being, a cause beyond mere matter, energy, space-time. All physical reality derives its existence from prior causal members. The entire chain of physical reality is merely derivative in respects to its existence. But if the whole causal chain is derivative, then it must derive its existence from something which does not derive it from anything else. To have a derivative chain of being, but no non-derivative source of all being, is like having a series of moons reflecting the light of the sun, but no sun from which they’re reflecting light. It is purely irrational. In a causal chain in esse, then, we must arrive, out of logical necessity, to a transcendent reality which just has its existence in itself, which doesn’t derive its existence from any prior cause.

Of course what I’ve described thus far is highly polemical and not nuanced enough to act as a complete argument in favor of transcendentalism. I have merely displayed, in a vague manner, the truths to which I have arrived. I will not, at least in this post, seek to explain the divine attributes of the ultimate cause in esse. I just wanted to show that physical reality points to a transcendent reality. This realization immediately permeates our world with a mystical vibrancy. Naturalism becomes a cowering philosophy, and the supernatural dimension of reality becomes as obvious as the color blue. And suddenly, once assumed religious truths become more prominent, more likely one may say. Mankind’s alleged invention of gods, God, and God-made-flesh, seems all the more natural–as if the ancients understood the obvious explanatory poverty of material reality, the demand for a transcendent explanation for all material reality. With great shock too, the beauty of Christianity becomes baptized and drenched in a metaphysical fire, now securely fixed on the fundamental and logically necessary cause of reality, the transcendent. Christ crucified becomes all the more mysterious, Christ as Eucharist becomes all the more esoteric, Christ as God becomes all the more beautiful–in their mysteriousness is born, through the backdrop of transcendentalism, newly-made contours. They are now defined, made real, made plausible one might say. Their shadows, once hazy, have become sharp and contrasted, nearly actual figures–no longer dim reflections. The intellect opens the mind to the transcendent, to God. And such an open door slowly conditions one to the reality of divine experience. That is, that the divine, the transcendent, has touched ground here in this world. That we have witnessed a merging of spheres, a reality reaching below itself. And this is what all the great religions tell us, that God has reached down to man. Christianity, in its radical nature, however, attempts to go further–to posit that God has become man. If this does not shock you, or perhaps burst the strictures of a once safe and closed-off notion of reality, then you have yet to spare a fraction of attention honestly admiring the strange and disturbing nature of such a claim. Indeed, contemplation of the Christian mysteries, should infatuate you with a truly wonderful sublimity beyond imagination. God has become man. Be very afraid, for the source of our being has broken bread with us. Be very afraid.