The Credibility of Love

Truth, Intuition and the Foundation of Life

After all, whatever one’s philosophical views, so long as there is such a thing as truth there must be some truths that don’t have to be grounded in anything else.  —Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos

Albert Einstein called Kurt Gödel the greatest logician since Aristotle. In 1900, at an international congress of mathematics, the preeminent mathematician David Hilbert had confidently declared that every mathematical problem had a solution, that every mathematical claim could be proved or disproved. He challenged the next generation to resolve some of the unproven theorems. In 1931, Gödel made a discovery—a mathematical theorem—that shook the foundations of modern assumptions about truth and reason as dramatically as had Einstein’s own intellectual earthquake called relativity theory. Gödel proved that in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be truths that we cannot prove. “Every mathematical procedure is based on something that is not provably true.” No mathematical system is possible that can prove its own foundational axioms. We can know things in math that we cannot prove. 

Exactly how relevant his incompleteness theorem is to religious matters is disputed. Gödel himself wrote in 1963 that “It was to be expected after all that my proof would be made useful for religion sooner or later, for that is doubtlessly supportable in a certain sense.” What he did confidently believe based on his discovery was that “Humans will always be able to recognize some truths through intuition that can never be established even by the most advanced computing machine.”

Thomas Nagel is neither a mathematician nor a man of faith. In the epigraph above, he is simply drawing attention to the fact that if we believe in any truth at all, that truth never establishes itself. Wherever we arrive in our quest for truth, we have to begin, a priori, with faith in reason, or the evidence of our senses, or scriptural inerrancy, or the witness of a real Spirit. In wanting an absolutely unimpeachable foundation, we may play the game for a while, like a patient mother with a child. Why do I have to go to bed? Because it’s nighttime. Why is it nighttime? Because it’s dark outside. Why is it dark? Because the sun went down. Why did the sun go down? Because I’m your mother. Now go to bed. All “whys” lead to infinite regress—unless we acknowledge at some point a non-negotiable maxim with which we choose to address this universe of perplexity and mystery. 

Theologian Hans von Balthasar writes eloquently of the one reality behind which no “why” can ever emerge. It is love. What he calls the “why-lessness of love” is something most all of us have experienced. To put a reason behind our love is to make it contingent. Those blue eyes that entranced us may fade, the child’s sweetness may change to rebellion, the shared interests may diverge, the friend bound to us in loyalty may betray and the mother’s affection may be clouded by the ravages of age and time. Yet love endures and transcends the particulars. If there is a why behind the love, then love disappears with the why. In which case, Kierkegaard tells us, the love was never love. 

Balthasar concludes that in this universe of scientific reasoning and theological grappling, in our fractured lives desperate for assurance, solidity, and firm foundations, “love alone is credible.” In particular, Balthasar is referring to a life and death one cannot make sense of in any other terms—that of the Christ. The unparalleled credibility of that one life was essentially the message of the angel to the questioning Nephi. One could not give words to the meaning of the Christ. One could only call him “the love of God” and depict his birth, his life, his teachings, and his death for his friends. His life and death were the irrefutable witness to a love the world had not known.

When Nephi later experienced the holy fire of that love, he likened it to “the consuming of his flesh.” Along that path to the beatific vision, how do we ground our own search for a comparable beatific vision? To what truths do we meanwhile orient ourselves, like trail markers along a fog-enshrouded mountain?

The sociologist Peter Berger notes that certainties are in shorter supply than ever in our secular age. He makes an appeal that we attend to what he calls the plentiful “rumors of angels” that abound in and around our lives:

“I would suggest that theological thought seek out what might be called signals of transcendence within the empirically given human situation. By signals of transcendence, I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality.”

Berger suggests as examples the order we intuit behind the world’s disorder, the power that is always illusory, and the child’s laughter that points to truth. 

We may take those signals as mere hints and suggestions of transcendence. Or, as Gödel suggested, we may take such intimations as truths we are willing to claim because our experience of them is a non-negotiable reality. Our confidence in those rumors is, for us, “whyless.” When Paul tells the Galatians that “The fruits of the Spirit are peace, joy, love,” he seems to me to be doing what Nagel referred to: he is naming three truths “that don’t have to be grounded in anything else.”

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Artwork by Nigel Peake.