Faith as the Cornerstone of Knowledge, Science, and Medicine

The philosopher Aristotle’s extant works have come down to us in what appear to be a series of often obtuse lecture notes. Some of his most famous include the six books of logic that compose what came to be known in the Latin West’s Middle Ages as the Organon, or the Instrument. They are as follows:

• Categories - A metaphysical classification of everything that exists into 10 categories
• On Interpretation - How to translate everyday language into logical propositions
• Prior Analytics - Syllogistic logic. The closest to modern mathematical logic
• Posterior Analytics - The nature of knowledge, in particular scientific knowledge. The relation of inductive and deductive reasoning
• Topics - On dialectic, or the art of arguing to find truth (as opposed to arguing to persuade, the domain of rhetoric)
• On Sophistical Refutations - Discusses several logical fallacies

Unlike the modern conception of logic which attempts to be more agnostic to reality, Aristotle’s logic is grounded in a firm metaphysics that connects it to everyday life and objects. To the modern reader, it probably seems odd to include the Categories as a book of logic. However, syllogistic logic is primarily concerned with fitting predicates, or adjectives, to objects. Rephrased, it is about determining what categories or genus’ objects belong to. For example, we might state that “all bluejays are birds”, and “all birds can fly”, and from this conclude that “all bluejays can fly”. Here we are deducing that the type of thing known as a “bluejay” is in the category of “things which can fly”.

The Categories describe the 10 highest categories an object can belong to, such as substance (wood), quantity (six), or action (walk). Continuing the above example, as a bluejay is a physical being, it would ultimately be a kind of substance. The classification of concepts and things into categories is the ground which syllogistic logic about everyday objects resides on, as the underlying concept behind any given word must belong to one of these 10 categories, although exactly what those categories are is somewhat up for debate.

Warning: This section is somewhat technical. The reader who finds it less interesting is invited to skip or skim over it.

Far from being obscure or irrelevant, metaphysics can rear its ugly head even for students contemplating the nature of modern mathematical logic. Modern logic is based on the idea of logical atomism, the idea that a proposition can be reduced to the truth or falsity of its individual elements. For example, the statement “p and q” can be reduced down to the truth of p and q individually. If both p and q are true, then the overall statement is true. In any other case, it is false. We can also consider the statement “not (p and q)”, which has the following truth table:

p	q	not(p and q)
F	F	T
F	T	T
T	F	T
T	T	F

Here T is taken to represent truth, and F to represent falsity. This particular form of proposition is considered “universal”, as it can be used to construct any other kind of proposition, such as “p or q”, “p and q”, and “if p then q”. In terms of boolean circuits like the kind your computer uses for computation, it is instantiated by a NAND gate, which can be used to create any other kind of logical gate.

Let’s consider the “material implication” form of proposition, “if p then q”, or \(p \rightarrow q\). From the perspective of standard mathematical logic, this is taken to be equivalent to “not (p or q)”. It has the following truth table:

p	q	\[p \rightarrow q\]
F	F	T
F	T	T
T	F	F
T	T	T

This table may be fine for implementing logic gates in a computer, but if we apply it to everyday circumstances, we quickly run into problems. Consider the statement “If the sky is green, then the moon is made of cheese”. Here p is “the sky is green”, and q is “the moon is made of cheese”. Both p and q here are false. Therefore, according to the above table, this implication is true. Therefore if you wake up tomorrow morning and the sky is green, the moon will be made of cheese.

This example suggests that logical atomism, while useful in some domains of mathematics and engineering, is not strictly true. There are some ways of attempting to resolve this issue. One is to reintroduce the modal logic introduced by Aristotle in his Prior Analytics by using modifiers such as necessity to truth claims. Here the above statement might not be regarded as true in its modified form, as if the sky is green, it is not necessarily the case that the moon is made of cheese. But now we no longer have an austere and purely mathematical logic, but one which must take into account the natures of things. To determine whether to apply the predicate of necessity, we must consider what kind of thing the moon is. We can say it is false that the moon is necessarily made of cheese because it is not essential to the nature of a moon to be made of cheese. In fact, considering the nature of being a moon, it is very unlikely for one to be made of cheese. If we believe that things do not have essential natures which determine their qualities and tendencies, there is no sense in talking about what the moon is necessarily made out of, because in principle it could be anything. And so we are brought back to the study of being itself, or the study of what is necessary for anything to exist at all, which is metaphysics. And often metaphysics describes the unthinking assumptions we bring to bear on other fields of study - as we have just seen, even logic is no exception to this.

Returning now to Aristotle, the Posterior Analytics is particularly interesting for the basis it gives for all science, where “science” here is given the more classical meaning of a body of knowledge, as opposed to the more narrow modern association with natural science. The formula he presents will be very familiar to students of mathematics - a body of knowledge begins with axioms which cannot be proven. These axioms are then used to deduce further facts. Note the connection here between deductive and inductive reasoning. Inductive reason is the process by which we use many empirical observations to infer a fact. We might then take this fact to be axiomatic. One example can be given by Newton’s third law of motion, which was initially derived from a series of observations consistent with its statement that all mechanical forces produce an equal but opposite force. Once formulated, we can check this law against future empirical observations. We can also use it and Newton’s other laws of motion to make further deductions, such as the conservation of momentum. We can then compare these deduced facts with empirical observation. This describes classical mechanics in a nutshell.

These assumed facts derived from inductive reasoning may also later be deduced from more fundamental facts themselves obtained from empirical observation. This can be done for classical mechanics by deriving Newton’s laws of motion from rules of quantum mechanics, which themselves may be inferred from experiment. But here too we must assume the first principles of quantum mechanics. And the epistemology is a little different. The average person may be capable of performing experiments to validate Newton’s laws of motion, at least somewhat (you could actually argue it’s not actually possible to confirm them experimentally, as Newton’s first law imagines zero forces acting on an object, an impossibility in our universe. But we’ll ignore that here). Most people, however, are not in a position to perform such experiments for quantum mechanics, which often require complex and specialized equipment. So our first assumptions here are not for most of us really scientific, but social. We must assume to some degree the correctness of the work done by particular scientists, and by the people who have conveyed their work to us.

Another example can be found in modern cryptography, much of which is based on so-called hardness assumptions. One of the most famous is the factoring assumption, that given two large enough random primes \(p\) and \(q\), it is difficult to factor \(N = pq\) by finding \(p\) and \(q\). It can be proven mathematically that certain schemes such as RSA encryption are secure if this problem cannot be broken for sufficiently large values. This assumption in part relies on mathematical knowledge, as it can be made based on a deep understanding of the relevant number theory. But it is also in part a social assumption, as it is considered safe to assume its difficulty primarily because many competent cryptanalysts have tried to break it. The degree to which one trusts a hardness assumption in cryptography relies on an interplay of mathematical knowledge and social trust, particularly since there are some cryptographers who are incentivized to keep any breakthroughs they make private, such as those who work for certain government institutions. And ultimately we also need to trust that public cryptanalysts such as those working in academia actually are making a good faith effort to break these assumptions and aren’t just sitting around being lazy all day or playing World of Warcraft instead, and that they will outwork those who might keep their cryptanalytic advances private.

Of course, as a process of doing science, Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics is fairly idealized. Reality is often much messier, with different people discovering mutually contradictory observations or deductions which may take years if not decades to resolve. And as individuals, we are each likely to hold a composite of mutually contradictory assumptions and beliefs about the world that we haven’t yet sufficiently considered. But as a description of what a more-or-less complete body of scientific knowledge looks like, I believe Aristotle was correct. And his view also captures a very intuitive and universally true feature of knowledge gathering - you cannot prove or believe anything unless you first make an assumption about what is axiomatically true, without proof. And there is a more critical assumption here common to all science that we must make first, which is that the world is knowable at all, and that the sense data we receive in daily life at least to some degree corresponds to reality.

Though the view may have declined somewhat since the height of New Atheism in the early 2000s, it is often taken for granted in popular culture that faith and science are two opposing forces. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As we have just established, faith is strictly necessary for science of any kind.

The process of knowing the world is always a subtle dance between refining one’s assumptions and checking how those assumptions and the inferences they lead to match the reality we observe. We assume something about the world, and see what conclusions and actions this assumption leads us to. When it leads us to a seemingly false conclusion, or an action which is not fitting, we revise our assumptions until they produce true conclusions and actions fitting to our circumstances. We might posit that this is often how religious faith is produced. We can imagine an agnostic skeptic reading the Quran and, over time, testing how he would act if he believed that this book was the direct word of God. If he finds that such actions are conducive to living a flourishing life, and that he more and more comes to conclusions and insights which correspond with reality, he may over time incorporate parts of the Quran and the Islamic faith into his own set of personal beliefs. Over time, he may be so convinced that he commits entirely to the Islamic religion, and makes its precepts the first principles by which he evaluates everything else in his life. It can, of course, be debated whether or not such a person’s new beliefs are correct. But the process being described here is fundamentally a rational one.

This is not in principle very different from the process we described earlier in our description of modern physics. Physicists make observations to infer general rules which they use to make deductions. Here our proposed religious skeptic makes observations about the world that he believes lines up with the first principles he knows are considered correct in Islam. For example, he might observe that alcohol can have a destructive effect on people, that people’s lives are often improved by prayer, and that the universe appears to have a oneness to it, suggesting a creator. And when he lives his life according to the principles of Islam, he finds that it improves notably as he abstains from alcohol, develops a prayer life, and forms what he perceives to be a relationship with God. This might be what one would expect to happen if Islam were true.

Simply because this process is not expressed in terms of mathematics does not render it any less logical, as logic can be used in any domain in which we wish to determine the truth or falsity of propositions. Of course, the process of converting to a religion may at times be irrational - someone may convert for any number of not-quite rational reasons, one of the most common being that they fell into a group of friends or found a significant other of that faith, and in the process allowed themself to be influenced against their better judgement according to other criteria (being influenced by the companionship of others, it is worth noting, is not necessarily irrational when it is balanced by other factors, and tempered by a desire for truth). Of course, falling into a social consensus is also one of the most common reasons people, even professional scientists, accept many mainstream scientific beliefs. Another reason common to belief in religious and scientific systems might be faith in an institution, such as the Catholic Church, or medical peer review.

We might illustrate this process further with a simple example of applied mathematics. Suppose I woke up one morning and decided to test the assumption that 1=2. By adding 1 to each side of this equation, I further conclude that 2=3, and by subtracting 1 we have that 0=1. By a process of induction, I then realize that every whole number is equal to every other whole number. In fact, there is only one number, which is every possible number. I then look at my two arms, and realize that I have only one arm, which is of course also three arms. Distressed by this new information that I both have too many and not enough arms, I consider financial solutions to this problem, and I open my bank account. With relief, I notice that I have $75 in my bank account, which is the same as $100,000,000. I make an appointment with my doctor, telling him that something is wrong with my arms. When the time comes to drive over, I walk out to my car. However, I have a new problem. I have one car, which is the same as zero cars. I therefore cannot drive to make my doctor’s appointment. As I sit in my house’s driveway, forlorn, I consider that perhaps it is not true that 1=2. I then adopt the assumption that 1 does not equal 2. This solves many of my problems. I conclude from this experience that it is true that 1 is not equal to 2.

Today, most people’s views of science as well as ethics are implicitly influenced by the legacy of positivism. This philosophical project in the early 1900s attempted to firmly base scientific knowledge on empiricism and get rid of the presumed superstitious influence of metaphysics. All human knowledge was to be based on measurable sense data or on logical proof. This, of course, is self-defeating. The claim that knowledge is based on observation or logical proof and not metaphysics, is itself a metaphysical statement about the nature of knowlege. The positivist project too required a first princple. What was this principle taken on? Faith. This faith is all-too-common to those who reject everything outside of what we can observe physically.

Mainstream modern biology has several axiomatic assumptions which have seeped into popular culture, such as:

• All life is the result of random genetic mutations chosen by natural selection (Neo-Darwinism). The purpose an organism is designed and optimized for is to pass on its genetics. Anything which occurs after this is not taken into account much by evolution. Thus we are not optimally designed for our environment.
• Human technology is an alternate design path to biological organisms. The cell is essentially a bag of fluids.

Such beliefs consistently emphasize the inferiority of nature compared with the human intellect and its products. Far from being optimized for our current environment, our bodies decay under the influence of the sun, the source of all life and the most constant part of the earth’s environment over billions of years. This necessitates the chronic use of sunglasses and sunscreen, symbolic of man’s triumph over and alienation from nature. These are fundamentally the assumptions of a secular and atheistic world that regards human existence as being an accident, rather than a world which sees evolution as the product of an intelligent meta-design which carefully crafted the laws of physics so that man would be perfectly instantiated as a microcosm of the universe, as expressed by the famous Catholic mystic and medieval healer St. Hildegaard von Bingen. Further, it is a worldview which has extreme difficulty expressing ignorance, as this would require humanity to humble itself in front of a greater power - whether that power is God or simply nature.

What might some alternative assumptions look like?

• All life is the result of evolutionary processes more complex than we currently understand to produce organisms perfectly adapted to their environment, using laws of nature so subtle and intricate that even now we barely understand them.
• Human technology is strictly inferior to nature’s design, and at its best poorly imitates it.

These are more than mere unsupported assertions. In his 2001 book Life at the Cell and Below the Cell Level biologist Gilbert Ling presents no less than 5 detailed lines of experimental evidence decisively refuting the sodium-potassium membrane hypothesis. For the uninitiated, this hypothesis along with the dilute solution cell membrane theory forms the theoretical basis of all modern cellular physiology, which is firmly grounded in biochemistry. In one experiment he performed in the 1960s, he poisoned a cell so that it had virtually no energy with which to maintain a single pump, yet he still found a standard sodium-potassium concetration gradient with potassium mostly in the cell and sodium mostly outside of it, in contradiction to the Second Law of Thermodynamics (given the assumptions of contemporary biology). If Ling is correct - and I believe he is - all of modern cellular physiology, including everything taught in medical school, is fundamentally wrong. What is Ling’s alternative hypothesis? That the biological cell is a semiconductor made out of proteins and polarized water molecules. Note that such a semiconductor, being carbon-based, uses less energy than the silicon-based semiconductors in your computers. Thus, at least in terms of energy usage, your body is a strictly superior version of the technology used inside your laptop. Ling first presented evidence for his theory after disproving the sodium-potassium membrane hypothesis in the 1960s.

This further implies that the fundamental mechanism of hormones acting in a cell is not the typically considered lock and key mechanism of a molecule fitting into a reception, but one of long-range resonance occurring through water. It suggests, as Schrödinger wrote in his famous book What Is Life?, that the biological cell is built on negative entropy which restricts the motion of molecules and so creates order, in contrast to the current standard physiological model of working through the random bounces of molecules in a dilute intracellular fluid. And it further implies a greater significance for quantum mechanics in biology, as quantum coherence has more room to work in a more motion-constrained environment, which further suggests that weak electromagnetic fields and light may be more significant to biology than is commonly accepted. It might seem unbelievable that modern science could be so wrong for so long. Of course, this disbelief is primarily an expression of faith in certain social institutions.

The idea of the religious fanatic opposed to considering any opposing evidence is a well-known trope in our society. This is the case of someone so committed to their first principles that they refuse to evaluate whether or not they are really correct. However, we have shown above that the epistemic foundations of belief in a religion are really not so different to those of belief in a body of natural science. Thus it is not surprising to see that scientists also have difficulty re-evaluating their first principles, to a degree which rivals if not exceeds that of many individuals committed to their own religion. This provides a sociological parallel by which we might understand the medical and scientific communities’ failure to reject the sodium-potassium membrane pump hypothesis over the past half century. I know only of one rebuttle to Ling’s refutation of modern cellular physiology, a paper which he addresses in his aforementioned book - and even then it addresses only one experimental line of evidence. It seems as though Ling’s alternative hypothesis has not been adequately considered because it is assumed to be false based on scientific consensus. Indeed, the dilute cell fluid membrane theory has been so thoroughly discredited in the relevant literature that I do not believe it can be regarded as more than a sometimes-useful abstraction, no different than the ancient and medieval system of humors.

I should note at this point that in spite of my protestations I am not asking the reader here to necessarily believe these heterodox scientific ideas are correct with such a brief exposition, but to consider whether the process by which they have been excluded from popular conciousness and much of mainstream science has been a rational one, and to consider what assumptions must be behind it. The less-than-rational suppression of scientific ideas has a long history, the most famous example being when in the 1600s the hierarchy of the Catholic Church defended scientific orthodoxy by putting Galileo under house arrest, back when the Church was the arbiter of correct science. This undistinguished mantle has since fallen to the US government and the modern peer review system, which exists to evaluate new science under the terms of the old. Ultimately it is only with the careful discovery and examination of the beliefs underlying our decisions and thought processes that we can do real scientific work.

It is of course manifestly not the case that religious belief as it is commonly regarded is required to do good scientific work. However, I would argue that correct religious belief is conducive to doing good science. And the reason it is so, is that we live in a world in which God exists. And when you believe something which is true, it is easier to see other things which are true. The least true and least rational religious belief is that of atheistic materialism, and so in the long run it produces the worst science, all other factors being equal. These effects are most profoundly felt in the fields of natural science which are closest to spiritual matters, such as psychology, biology, and medicine, all fields which grapple with the partly spiritual nature of the human person, whether or not this aspect of humanity is acknowledged by their practitioners. On the other hand, sciences which do not deal so directly with the human person, such as mathematics, cryptography, and physics, may be less affected and will continue to function fairly well (the applications of these fields and their impact on society may on the other hand fare differently). This is more or less what we see in our current society.

One very common symptom of having lost all connection between spirituality and science is the derangement of overprioritizing the randomized clinical trial (RCT). Such studies are, of course, a useful tool when properly contextualized. When they are heavily prioritized over intuition, anecdotal experience, or the study of mechanisms, however, they express not merely a supposed commitment to hard-nosed rationalism but also to a degree of faith. Specifically, this view expresses a lack of faith - which too requires making assumptions - in the individual human person to be connected to and to determine truth. The fundamental thing in this view which allows science to progress is not the individual’s creativity and insight, but a set of rules and procedures defined by scientific institutions which allow our knowledge of nature to progress in spite of the irrationality of the individual. This is despite the fact that scientific institutions as they exist now only became a reality in the wake of World War II, after many important scientific advancements had already occurred. One of the most pivotal advances, special relativity, came from a patent clerk unable to get a job in academic physics. Even earlier, some of the key fundamentals of electromagnetism came from the 19th century Royal Institution in London… from one of their janitors, Michael Faraday.

The RCT mindset ignores the fact that science is fundamentally a creative process. Reality, being unfathomably complex, must be compressed into a few salient dimensions for it to be comprehensible to us. Someone’s detailed description of their walk through a forest might have points of interest for the study of nature, but it would lack one of the key features of natural science - discernment of what is significant. However, determining which features to focus on necessarily requires aesthetic judgements. In this manner science is very similar to the creative arts, and cannot be divorced from the human mind’s intrinsic capability to experience beauty. In the traditional monotheistic view stemming in part from ancient Greek philosophy, Goodness and Truth as transcendentals are exactly identified with God - a claim which can be proven through rigorous metaphysical argument. As a general heuristic, we perceive those things to be most beautiful which are most true and most good. In this view, therefore, science is only possible because of our connection with God. The view which takes the randomized clinical trial as fundamental, on the other hand, is based on downplaying if not outright denying this connection. The phrase “There is no evidence” is always, in some way, an expression of faith. Far from being the core of a rational point of view, it represents the abdication of rationality in favor of a superstition which treats institutionalized science with the same awe that certain indigenous tribes might reserve for rain dances or astrology.

Historically the field of natural science most closely related to the spiritual life is that of medicine. Just as the goal of spirituality is the health of the soul, so too the goal of medicine is the health of the body. We might expect, then, that in an age dominated by secular materialism, medicine is the science which has failed the most severely. This is, in my view, very clearly correct. Chronic disease has skyrocketed in the past century to a degree unprecedented in world history. As one example, the National Cancer Institute claims that around 40% of people in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime - at the turn of the 20th century, cancer was considered to be much less common, and its rate of incidence is now projected to increase. Autism rates have also skyrocketed, also according to the CDC up over 300% in the past few decades. It is very popular nowadays to claim that this spike in chronic disease is the result of improved (or overzealous) methods of diagnosis, or the result of people living longer on average to get modern chronic illness. This, however, is not an assertion which is supported by the historical data. Rather, it is an assumption that is read into the historical data before being read back out of it. It only makes sense if you first assume that historical incidences of disease must have looked similar to those we see in the modern era. But this is not necessarily the case.

The intellectual foundations of modern allopathic medicine were developed during the industrial revolution, sponsored by industry titans such as Rockefeller - before this in the United States, doctors were not typically well paid or respected, a fact lamented by many practitioners of their day. The economic realities of the time had a key role in shaping the newly reformed science. Just as the factory was composed of individual workers each with their own roles to play, so too was the body composed of individual organs where each played a unique role. And just as the worker can be studied and improved as an individual, so too can the components of the body, leading to the specializations of modern medicine such as optomology or heptology. This view, however, is not necessarily supported by empirical evidence, which could just as easily be interpreted in light of the irreducible connectivity of the parts of the human body. It is, once again, an assumption that is read into the science before it is then read back out of it. And naturally, it will also shape the kind of research that is funded and done.

Again according to the CDC, over 10% of Americans over the age of 12 are on some sort of antidepressant. This means that every time you see a teenager or adult, there is a greater than 1 in 10 chance they have decided that they are unable to function without artificially altering their brain chemistry. This also connects to steadily increasing rates of severe anxiety and depression in our society. Once again you could make the argument that these rates of anxiety and depression were really common throughout history, and perhaps also that we have overdiagnosed in the modern era. Maybe so. But this again is an interpretation of the historical data. And the way you interpret this data will depend critically on the assumptions you bring to bear on it. If you assume that the era we live in is uniquely blessed with modern medical science, you may be more inclined to believe that chronic disease was just as bad in the past (even though we have little direct evidence that this was the case - again for chronic disease and not for acute infections), and that we are simply better now at dragging people’s lives out. If, on the other hand, you believe that, in addition to some good and beneficial advances in medical technology, the 20th century also heralded some very bad choices and tendencies with respect to how we see ourselves and live our lives which negatively impact our health in ways modern allopathic medicine is badly equipped to handle, you may be inclined to think that our medicine has actually regressed in some ways.

As might be obvious by now, I am more inclined to the latter view. The point of this article is not to detail the reasons why I believe this is the case, as it would take far too long. But I would like to sketch some of the assumptions I have adopted that have gotten me to this belief, which I have found quite directly to have improved my life and brought me to a closer sense of what I believe is true and real. A few years ago I came across a biology paper examining the release of beta-endorphins, a natural opiod, in the human body in response to direct sunlight on the skin. The authors opined that, unfortunately, such a mechanism made it more likely people would get addicted to sunlight and thereby get skin cancer. Opiods are the same class of substance that makes heroin addictive. It apparently did not occur to the researchers who wrote this paper to ask why nature designed our bodies to make us addicted to sun exposure like heroin, blithely assuming that this must be a strange design flaw brought to us by billions of years of evolution, rather than question the assumptions which led them to such a bizarre conclusion.

The Greek word for “sin” is hamartia, meaning to “miss the mark”. In Christian ontology, all things in the physical universe are perfectly good, except for our own wills which are corrupted and tend towards violating our own natures. Our nature is to be rational animals. Therefore for us to sin is to be irrational. The word hamartia is very apt - we are the only beings in the physical universe which can in this sense “miss the mark” by not properly fulfilling our own natures. In essence, to follow your own nature is to be what you are as fully as you are capable of doing. And this is linked to obeying a human nature which has an objective existence. Without such a - very real - abstraction such as human nature, there would be nothing that we are, and so nothing that we could aspire to or care about being. In other words, we would have no guide for our own behavior, and thus no ethics.

Much is made in some Catholic circles of the contraceptive mentality, used to describe couples who fear having many children and adapt their behavior accordingly. This framing, however, is myopic. The root issue of contraception is not about how many kids someone has. It is about a fear of natural consequences. This fear leads to a disconnect from nature which is also an avoidance of one’s own human nature. We see the consequences of this all around us - people who never leave their houses except to commute, chronic avoidance of the sun, UV-blocking windows and glasses, bundling up unnecessarily in cold weather, wearing rubber shoes that disconnect us from the earth, the substitution of reality with video games, and the replacement of robust outdoor play and athleticism with treadmills and bicep curls. In other words, our culture fears reality. And the root of this fear comes from a rejection of God, Who is the most real being in existence and is in fact, while being distinct from the physical universe, Existence itself. It should not be any surprise then when many couples fear that sexual intercourse, an act evolutionarily designed to produce children, might actually fulfill its intended purpose.

What might sound first principles look like for medicine, science, and life in general? As a fairly convinced Catholic, I have my own views on this. In Luke 18:25, Jesus says in what is now a famous passage that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God”. Clement of Alexandria in his Stromateis, written in the second century AD, has an interesting twist on this passage. He quotes it as saying “a camel will pass through a needle’s eye sooner than a rich man will become a philosopher”. In the ancient world, “philosopher” had a broader meaning than it does today, where it is often consigned to the ivory tower as an object of irrelevance to daily life. To be a philosopher then meant to embrace a way of life endorsed by a specific school, such as the Platonists, Stoics, or Epicureans. Some schools like the Peripatetics, the followers of Aristotle, were also deeply involved in natural science. To do philosophy was not merely to know, but to do as well. And quite literally, the word philosophy means “lover of wisdom”. In the Christian faith, Wisdom is identical to the divine Word or Logos of God, the first principle of all things through whom God created the entire cosmos. This divine Word is no other than Christ Himself, Who is Truth incarnate as man on earth. Thus, to be a real philosopher is to love Christ, in whom the unity of all truth is found. In other words, it is to be a Christian.

Continuing along the same line as Clement, what does Christ say is the necessary demeanor for one who loves wisdom? “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”. There are few things I can think of as contrary to the spirit of childishness than is an overcommitment to certain ways or lines of thinking. Indeed, one of the central tensions of the Gospel narratives derives from the stubborn inflexibility of the thinking of some of Judea’s religious leaders.

In my view, this marks one of the most important attributes of a well-tuned mind, which is the ability to adopt or discard assumptions about the world as their likely truth or falsehood becomes apparent. Children are exceptional at this because they have not yet adopted the belief that they understand how things work. In my experience, it is rare for someone to keep this talent into adulthood, and relearning it can be very painful. This reveals another flaw of the “evidence” based mindset. The so-called evidence, without proper care and trimming, accumulates in the mind like so much dead weight. Over time it suffocates the imagination, and renders its victim incapable of original thought. The individual over time loses an existence of its own, and becomes the slave of whatever it has already consumed.

In Wisdom 7:15-22, we read of the Word Himself:

“May God grant that I speak with judgment and have thoughts worthy of what I have received, for he is the guide even of wisdom and the corrector of the wise. For both we and our words are in his hand, as are all understanding and skill in crafts. For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements; the beginning and end and middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts, the powers of spirits and the reasonings of men, the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots; I learned both what is secret and what is manifest, for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me.”

In Catholic theology, the way to avoid sin and perfect the soul is not primarily through personal effort, although cooperation and even great sacrifices and difficulty are often necessary. It comes rather through a kind of non-action, through the acceptance of the grace of God, which is offered freely, both through the sacraments and at God’s will.

Our modern culture around health is, I believe, gripped by a kind of physical parallel to Pelagianism, a 5th century Christian heresy which held that humans could attain spiritual perfection by their own choices and will, rather than by trusting in and receiving help from God. This is analogous to the rhetoric about physical health which is now drummed into our heads day and night. If you don’t exercise and eat right, buy the right foods and the right gym subscription, your body will fall apart. If you can’t lose weight, your main problem lies with your own willpower. And if as a society we cannot solve the scourges of cancer, obesity, and other chronic illness, this too is a problem of the will. We need more funding and more scientific genius allocated to develop new knowledge, chemicals and techniques to resolve all of our problems. Then we shall be free of disease. Then, finally, we will achieve a triumph of the will over nature.

My beliefs are somewhat different. While human intervention and ingenuity is often needed - medicine will always be useful as a profession, and care for the weak and vulnerable is an essential part of being human - perhaps what we need most is not ingenuity, but submission to nature and by extension to our own human nature. Perhaps our medical crises will improve once we acknowledge our existence as rational animals and in doing so reconnect with the natural world - by eating locally, connecting with the earth, experiencing directly the cold of winters, reducing unnatural lighting, and by more chronically absorbing in-formation from the almost sole source of energy and biological structure on earth, the sun. And properly understood, this comes not from effort, but from a lessening of effort, because it requires relaxing into what we are at a fundamental physical level, just as in marriage it requires more effort to not have children than it does to have them.

And when we direct the body rationally, in a way suited to our current conditions and ends, we live more in accordance with our natures as rational animals, which in turn brings us closer to Christ, Who is the source and summit of all rationality and of all nature.

I am not presenting evidence here to back up these beliefs, although I think that quite a bit of it exists. That isn’t really the point I’m making. The point is how adopting these assumptions might prompt you to interpret the evidence that is available, and how this further would impact your life. The truth of a belief cannot be disconnected from the effects it has once you’ve adopted it. And those effects can be inferred and experienced regardless of how much support you have seen for an idea.

To quote C.S. Lewis: I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.