Fools Give You Reasons, Wise Men Never Try

 

Fools Give You Reasons, Wise Men Never Try

In the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, there’s a song titled “Some Enchanted Evening.” The song is about falling in love. It comes when the lead male character Emile has seen the lead female character Nellie and fallen in love with her. He sings to her about having seen her “across a crowded room.” The song includes this line: “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” The line refers to falling in love at first sight. I don’t really believe in love at first sight. I knew the two women with whom I have fallen in love for a long time before I fell in love with them. I was more than surprised when they fell love with me. I still find it rather hard to believe that they did. And I thank God that they did, for they have made my life richer and more worth living than it would have been without them. Love is what makes life worth living. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

Yet I believe that the line “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try” applies in more contexts than falling in love. It’s true there, but it has much more truth as well. Thank you Oscar Hammerstein II. It is a profoundly true statement about love; but, perhaps surprisingly, it is also a true statement about faith in God. See, people have been trying to give reasons for believing in the reality of God for a very long time. Thomas Aquinas tried to do it through reason, though he didn’t even really rely on his proof for his faith in God. In our world today, countless numbers of people have rejected the reality of God because the reality of God so vastly exceeds the puny realities of human reason. They believe, so it seems, that you cannot accept the reality of anything that isn’t reasonable, of anything the truth of which you can’t prove or disprove through the scientific method. Of anything for which there are not purely rational reasons.

It’s true. You can’t really reason your way to God. You can reason your way to the question of whether or not there is an ultimate cause of all that is. You can reason your way to the question of an uncaused cause from which everything else proceeds. Aristotle did that a very long time ago. You can’t, however, reason your way beyond the conclusion that there must be an uncaused cause because otherwise nothing would exist. But “must be” and “is” are not the same thing. Reason leads most people today to atheism. At best, it can lead you to agnosticism, to thinking there must be something at the beginning but not knowing whether there ever was an uncaused cause or not.

Acceptance of the reality of God is not rational, but it is not unreasonable. You can get to that point of agnosticism, then make what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” One can choose to have faith that there was and is an ultimate cause of all that is, namely, that God is real. Then you can proceed to live on the basis of that faith. Many of us have done that. Perhaps, in a way, every person of faith has done it.

But faith in God doesn’t actually arise in a cerebral vacuum. There are existential reasons, though not rational ones, for accepting faith in God. One of those reason is that human beings have believed in some kind of supernatural reality for as long as there have been human beings or for at least as long as human beings have left any record of themselves. Every human culture that we know of has or has had some kind of faith system. Every human culture that we know of has had some kind of belief in some transcendental reality beyond the reality we perceive with our usual senses. Such acceptance of a reality beyond normal reality is a perfectly human thing to do.

Moreover, a great many humans have, over the millennia, had personal experience of such a transcendent reality. That’s not true of everyone, but it is true of a lot of us; and it always has been. Things happen in life that, as far as the person having the experience can tell, come from beyond ordinary reality. I once felt myself lifted up as sunk to my knees in grief over the death of my wife when I could not possibly have done it myself. The force that lifted me has to have come from beyond me, and I trust that it did. Years later that same wife appeared to me as I was driving to have the dog that had been hers and mine put down to end his suffering. She’s not God of course, but that experience I had of her appearing to me is, or at least I can trust that it is, an experience of a reality beyond this reality breaking into this reality if only very, very briefly. Believing in such a transcendent reality is not rational in the sense that you cannot reason yourself to it, but it is not irrational either.

Yet, of course, a conviction of the reality of some transcendent plane of being that we usually call God does not prove that that plane of being is real. About the reality of God, fools give you reasons, wise men never try. Reason has little or nothing to do with faith in God. Which does not make God unreal or irrational. It just means that God transcends human reason. Having faith in God has no reasons, at least not in the sense of your being able to reason yourself to it. No one has ever truly reasoned their way to faith in God. Wise men and women don’t try for reasons. They don’t need them. They believe because to them it is just right to believe. They believe from experience not from reasons.

So no. Belief in God isn’t reasonable, but it isn’t irrational. It is human. There is something about us humans that drives us to it. That makes us long for it. Sure. We can deny whatever that is. We can ignore it. We can live, more or less, without it. But that doesn’t make it unreal for those who feel it. For those who heed it. To strive for connection with transcendent reality is a existential thing for us humans to do. It is part of who we are. Reasons? No thanks, at least not rationalistic ones. Experience? Absolutely. Trust? Absolutely. Being fully human? Absolutely. I only wish that more people in my rationalistic culture got it. You can’t reason your way to God. You can reach out for God, and you can trust that God is reaching out for you. May it be so.