The Self-Referencing Problem

 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen 1:1)

By Stephen W. Hiemstra

A key principle in ontology—the study of existence or being—starts with the realization that everyone has a religion. A religion provides an explanation as to how things knowable and unknowable come together systematically. Ignoring the problem is another option, but it carries the price of increasing anxiety and eventually leads to an existential crisis—a self-implosion—because uncertainty and risk pose real problems that can be delayed, but not ignored.

Self-Referencing Problem

At the heart of the existential crisis is a mathematic principle known as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Kurt Gödel (1931), a Czech mathematician, who was born in 1906, educated in Vienna, and taught at Princeton University. His theorem states that stability in any closed, logical system requires that at least one assumption be taken from outside that system. If creation is a closed, logical system (as having only one set of physical laws suggests that it is) and exhibits stability, then it too must contain at least one external assumption (Smith 2001, 89). This is why computers cannot program themselves and why depressed people are advised to get out of the house and do something outside their normal routine. The stability of the universe depends on the assumption that God exists because he created it.

The Incompleteness Theorem is a system requirement for stability. When a system only references itself, it is inherently unstable. Any perturbation (disturbance) of the system renders the system dynamically unstable, which is a self-referencing problem. Any reference outside the system offers stability to the entire system.

An example of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem can be taken from economics. Stable, international trade provides an external reference point that stabilizes prices within a particular country’s economy. When international trade becomes unstable, this instability is immediately transmitted within the country’s price structure. The same effect is present when a bank fails—the financial status of depositors is immediately undermined and panic ensues. This is why banking regulators are quick to intervene and provide liquidity. The self-referencing problem is real and immediately destabilizing when change occurs.

Religion Not Optional

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem suggests why religion is not optional. It is foundational to everything that we think or feel. Having no religion—claiming none—is not an ontological option unless one is willing to accept anxiety, depression, and/or medication. The frequent assertion that religion is a preference, not a requirement,  is an ill-informed position.

A better position is to consider one’s options. If one has a problem with Christianity, then what options are available be used to replace it? Claiming none is to put one ontologically at risk of self-implosion—an existential crisis—this is why narcissists are at high risk of suicide. A substitute should be better option, not one that places one at risk.

Augustine’s Confessions

One person who seriously considered the options was Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), whose confessions pictured God as interested in the well-being of individuals and is believed by some to have initiated Western Civilization.

Augustine came to faith at the age of thirty-two having struggled with sin and gave up his career as a teacher of rhetoric and his betrothal to a younger woman so that he could be ordained as priest. His conversion to Christianity is remarkable, not only because of the things that he gave up, but also because he actively considered the Manichean philosophy and because of the active influence of his Catholic mother, Monica.

Augustine’s struggle with sexual passions caused him great anguish before his conversion and the story of the conversion of Victorinus, a fellow professor of rhetoric in Rome weighed heavily on him. Augustine writes:

“Now when this man of Yours, Simplicianus had told me the story of Victorinus, I was on fire to imitate him: which indeed was why he had told me. He added that in the time of the Emperor Julian, when a law was made prohibiting Christians from teaching Literature and Rhetoric, Victorinus had obeyed the law, preferring to give up his own school of words rather than Your word, by which You make eloquent the tongues of babes.” (Foley 2006, 142, 147)

These are not the words of a stoic philosopher. Augustine writes like a man in chains to his sin saying: “Thus I was sick at heart and in torment, accusing myself with new intensity of bitterness, twisting and turning in my chain in the hope that it might be utterly broken, for what held me was so small a thing.” (Foley 2006, 167).

Augustine wrote this account of his conversion:

“Such things I said, weeping in the most bitter sorrow of my heart. And suddenly I hear a voice from some nearby house, a boy’s voice or a girl’s voice, I do not know, but it was a sort of sing-song, repeated again and again, ‘Take and read, take and read.’” (Foley 2006, 169)

Augustine borrowed a book of scriptures from his friend, Alypius, and opened it randomly coming to this verse: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy.” (Rom 13:13) Convicted of his sexual sin, he took this passage as a word from God to him personally and went to his mother to announce that he was a Christian (Foley 2006, 160).

Augustine’s biographer Peter Brown (2000, 157) writes: 

“The Confessions…is not a book of reminiscences. They are an anxious turning to the past. The note of urgency is unmistakable. [Augustine writes} Allow me, I beseech You, grant me to wind round and round in my present memory the spirals of my errors…It is also a poignant book. In it, one constantly senses the tension between the ‘then’ of the young man and the ‘now’ of the bishop.”

Augustine’s influence on the church has been enormous. He not only started one of the first monasteries, his student, Martin Luther, helped start the Protestant Reformation about a thousand years later.

References

Brown, Peter. 2000. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Orig pub 1967). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Foley, Michael P. [editor] 2006. Augustine Confessions (Orig Pub 397 AD). 2nd Edition. Translated by F. J. Sheed (1942). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Smith, Houston. 2001. Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief. San Francisco: Harper.

The Self-Referencing Problem

Also see:

The Face of God in the Parables
The Who Question
Preface to a Life in Tension
Other ways to engage online:



Author site: http://www.StephenWHiemstra.net
Publisher site: http://www.T2Pneuma.com

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