Thoughts on the Tao Te ching 25

Poem 25

There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.

It flows through all things,

inside and outside, and returns

to the origin of all things.

The Tao is great.

The universe is great.

Earth is great.

Man is great.

These are the four great powers.

Man follows the earth.

Earth follows the universe.

The universe follows the Tao.

The Tao follows only itself.

Commentary

Who knows what came before the beginning of the universe?  In these big questions theoretical physics, philosophical theology and spirituality-meditation are paradoxically similar or parallel.  In psalm 110 we read:

A prince from the day of your birth 

on the holy mountains;
from the womb before the dawn I begot you.

According to Christian tradition this psalm foretells the birth of Jesus which, according to the psalmist, was preordained from before the beginning of the universe or from before the initiation of time.  In other words, this psalm like the Taoist poem attempts to describe the mystery of the origins of the universe.  The Taoism poet puts it in equally paradoxical and poetic terms:

There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

Alexander Vilenkin contends that the Big Bang wasn't a one-off event, but merely one of a series of big bangs creating an endless number of bubble universes.  In this model, there is neither a single Big Bang nor a single beginning.  Instead the universe continually goes through oscillating cycles of expansion, contraction, collapse and expansion anew. (See HERE) 

Of the above three accounts, one could contend that The Taoist poet offers us a Taoist take or Taoist myth of creation; that the Biblical author offers us a Jewish take or Jewish myth of creation and finally that Alexander Vilenkin offers us a scientific take or scientific myth of creation.  Here, obviously, I am using myth in a particular sense and certainly not in its usual sense of an unfounded or false notion or contention.  I am using the word "myth" in the sense that humankind always needs to propose a meaning and an explanation for the existence of the world in which he lives as well as a meaning for his own life.  Fair enough, the first two accounts may be pre-scientific, allegorical or metaphorical or even literal efforts at explaining existence in ancient times - however, they are legitimate efforts even if somewhat fanciful.  I use the term "scientific myth" in a similar way, that is, as a modern presentation of the meaning and significance of life in the twenty-first century which will itself appear more than a little pre-scientific to thirtieth century humankind.  Myth for me represents any valid and authentic attempt at explaining the meaning of life in any particular culture at any particular time, in any particular context.  Now re-read the first stanza of our Taoist poem above. 

There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.

One of the best attempts to link theoretical physics and spirituality/meditation is surely that of Dr Fritjof Capra's classic The Tao of Physics (1975) wherein Dr Capra argued that Theoretical Physics could be reconciled with Eastern Mysticism.  Near the end of this book, the author summed up his motivation in the following words: "Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both."

The interpretation of a literary text is a complex process that involves much learning and not a little intuition.  A good reader of a text is aware of its many layers: literal, allegorical, metaphorical, poetic, aesthetic, historical, linguistic and structural and so on and so forth.  It is when the reader insists on reading the text at any one level solely that problems emerge.  As we have seen from the recent horrific massacres wrought by a fundamentalism of one kind, literalism can lead to sheer terrorism. Needless to say, fundamentalism in "-isms" of all kinds from fascism to communism to scientism can and will lead to the same bloody conclusion.

Finally, let us read the above poem reflectively letting a word or phrase suggest itself to us as a mantra for a five or ten minutes reflection.

Namaste, friends. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 4

Tao Te Ching

Poem 4

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don't know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

Commentary

Wells are central to community just as water is central to life. Civilizations grew up around water, around rivers and lakes and wells. What could be more natural?  Indeed water is the source and summit of life.  Indeed, it is worth calling to mind that, depending on age, sex, health and weight, the human body is made up of anywhere between 55 - 75 % of water.  On a physical level water slakes our thirst.  In the Gospels, as in the Scriptural texts of all religions, water as an element and as a symbol features centrally.  One of the more popular of the stories relating to Jesus is that of his encounter with the woman at the well, where Jesus promises the woman "living water," a water that has the promise for the drinker that he or she will never get thirsty again.  Within traditional societies the well was the focal point of the very community because everyone had to go there to draw water.

The Woman at the Well by Carl Heinrich Bloch

Language works in a wonderful way by pushing its boundaries beyond its physical referents in order to attempt to describe abstract and theoretical concepts.  One might call this faculty within language the thrust to metaphor.  And so language pushes the word "heart" into more abstract territory to come up with a formula like "the heart of the matter" to express a more complex thought.  And so language always forces itself beyond its physical boundaries to embrace higher and loftier thoughts; ideas and experiences on many levels that must be explained.

There is a most famous and equally popular Christian spiritual classic based on Liberation Theology called We Drink From Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People by the Catholic theologian of note Gustavo Gutiérrez, a classic well worth reading and pondering.  Once again it is about the wells of inspiration that give a whole people hope.

"Void" refers to "a completely empty space."  Emptiness is, once again, one of a binary pair; its polar bedfellow being the idea of "fullness."  Being empty seems to invite being "filled up."  Or to put it another way, how can I know what fullness is unless I know what its contrary is, namely, emptiness. Our poem above invites us to see the emptiness of the Tao, or indeed our own emptiness which shares in that ultimate emptiness, as inviting an "infinity of possibilities." The notions of inspiration and enthusiasm are indeed also linked insofar as these words also imply a filling of the emptiness within.  The Latin root "inspirare" means "to breathe into," while the root of the word enthusiasm is to be "filled with the divine."  Hence, the notion of "void" is not one of total sterility, a conclusion we might jump to rather superficially at first glance.

The word "void" used above reminds me of a related word, namely "abyss." An abyss is "a deep and seemingly bottomless chasm."  It is a word that appears in much religious and spiritual writing like that of "void."  When speaking of mysticism, we often used both these words in an attempt to describe a mystical experience.  The psalms speak and pray and meditate about "deep calls onto deep" as in Psalm 42:7 where we read: "deep calls onto deep at the sound of your waterfalls.  And your breakers and your waves have rolled over me."  This is pure poetry like the poem above from the Tao and its implications are similar  to that insinuated by the above quoted poetic lines. Nietzsche says somewhere that when one gazes long enough into the abyss that the abyss stares back into you. Unfortunately, Nietzsche's abyss does not promise a polar opposite or possibilities of creativity, and, like its author, his words are redolent of depression and negativity.  For Nietzsche, it appears to me, the abyss calls us to our destruction, unlike its function in mysticism where it is preparatory for being filled with the divine, that is, with meaning.

The mysterious or mystical Tao is at once hidden and present - here we have our polarities or binaries or pairs of opposites again.  And again the line "older than God" is somewhat mind-blowing.  It seems to suggest that any human notion of God is always redundant as it can never capture whatever the source of meaning to and in life may be.  Even all the various religions, with all their various dogmatic formulas, fall far short of capturing whatever God may or may not be.  Hence the Tao must surely be older than any conception possible of God.

Journal of a Soul 75

Of Living and Dying

"Live in the Now" - that's the lesson of Meditating on Death

“None of us gets out of life alive” is a quotation that remains in my mind.  I even remember the occasion of my first hearing it way back in the early 1990s.  I was listening to a radio programme by the Irish journalist Colm Keane on the subject of “Death Row” in some penitentiary in one of the southern states of the USA.  Our intrepid journalist interviewed a convicted murderer, who was placed behind a protective glass screen.  I remember that this man showed absolutely no remorse for the murders he had committed and saw life as being just a sort of game which one played; a game where it did not matter if one broke the rules as long as one got away with it.  In fact, the prison guards called him, “the animal.”  I remember the hair standing upright on my neck as I listened to this cold, unfeeling, rational, and obviously very intelligent man, express his thoughts and feelings on the crimes he had committed and on life in general. However, he expressed in eight short words the very heart of the human predicament – our temporality or our transitoriness on this minuscule planet that is a mere dot in the infinity of space. This state of affairs, when it hits home in the thinking and feeling and self-conscious human being, is exactly what we mean by the adjectives “existential” or “existentialist.” In short, our mortality lies at the heart of what essentially existentialism boils down to.

Freud used to say that the real repression in humankind was that of the base sexual desires that were deeply rooted in the dark pit of the unconscious.  However, Jung and others since have pointed out most wisely that the ultimate or real repression is that of death.  In one sense, this repression is a survival mechanism.  After all, the denial of death allows for egocentric humankind to push forward against all opposition – coming from either others or nature – to amass property, wealth and acquisitions of all kinds.  One might say, in quite a convincing sense, that all culture is created in the face of death – a sort of myth of significance and permanency in the teeth of the very impermanence and transitoriness of life itself.

Daffodil, Easter 2014

Here is where a philosophy of life comes in on the one hand and where the spiritual and religious traditions on the other have had some insightful things to say.  Admittedly religions in their more structural, authoritarian, hierarchical and indeed forbidding senses have been all too doctrinaire in their tenets and often murdered many who opposed them throughout the course of history.  However, here I am referring to a more devotional and spiritual model or aspect of such religions.  It is arguable that when religions lose vital contact with what the philosopher Eric Voegelin, called their “engendering experience” (or spiritual source or originating vision) they become monolithic, heartless and forbidding structures capable of dehumanising others.

The novelist, literary critic and professor of philosophy Umberto Eco opined that we read literature to learn how to die.  That notion is perhaps a bit one-sided.  I prefer to say that we read literature in order to learn how to live and die.  Living and dying are, in fact, the two sides of the one coin and are somehow paradoxically inextricably linked.  To be a living being is to be a dying being.  Essentially, death and dying are consequences of The Second Law of Thermodynamics or of the results of what’s called entropy.  A thorough understanding of this concept is beyond me as I have little background in Physics, but I can grasp some of its intentions and implications.  To my mind, Walter E. Requadt explains entropy very well for the ordinary person in the street in his wonderfully thought-provoking and stimulating blog called “The Happy Iconoclast” by invoking “Murphy’s Law”:

Unless we constantly insert new energy into a house by maintaining it, painting it, repairing it, the structure will eventually but inevitably be levelled to the ground. Its molecules will move from a lower level of randomization, from structure, to a higher level of randomization, towards unstructured debris.

Entropy is the reason why paint peels, why hot coffee turns cold. Furthermore, entropy is the reason why investments have a pre-ordained inclination to go sour -- unless we enhance success by inserting into the investment system additional energy in the form of strategy, work, calculated risk or other forms of energy. Entropy ensures that sugar, which becomes more randomized when it is dissolved in water, will not reconstitute itself in the crystalline form -- unless we apply heat energy from outside the system and evaporate the water.

Wherever we look, whatever we do, we must be acutely aware of the immutable laws of thermodynamics, especially the easily overlooked Second Law: Entropy. This fundamental law of physics ranks with other fundamental manifestations of the universe such as gravity, time and electromagnetism.

Anything that can go wrong not only will go wrong, it must go wrong, as decreed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (See here: The Happy Iconoclast)

To say that we humans die is to say that we like the entire flora and fauna of the earth are subject to the inevitability of the various laws of the universe, and most essentially to the law of entropy.

Along similar lines, Stephen Hawking told his biographers (Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science by John Gribbin and Michael White, 1992), who had once been Ph.D. students under his direction, that he had never succumbed to anger at life when he was stricken down with motor-neurone disease because essentially life was just chance anyway, and that it all boiled down to the randomness of nature – that is, to the chances involved or the probability of one’s parents meeting and then in the combinations of genes allocated by nature to your particular embryo.  These were, to say the least, random.

Professor Stephen Hawking

While Hawking likes to style himself an atheist, this stance is quite akin to that of a Buddhist spirituality (which some say is not religious anyway) that states that all suffering is caused by our attachment to things animate and inanimate.  All meditation practices and wisdom learnt therefrom and from study, and indeed from life in general, all help us to break free from such suffering by learning detachment. In other words, this is the implication of what is known as the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism that can be stated in simple terms as:

1.  Suffering exists: dukkha. (Life is unfair essentially, with much chance involved – Hawking’s position)

2.  Suffering arises from attachment to desires. (Wishing that things were different – that I shouldn’t get Motor Neurone disease and so on). It is called either samudaya or tanha in the various traditions and is the vain desire to have and control things. 

3.  Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases. (When I cease to be attached to unfulfillable desires or even fulfilled ones). The end to suffering is called nirodha. It is achieving Nirvana, which is the final liberation from suffering. The mind experiences complete freedom, liberation and non-attachment. It lets go of any desire or craving. It is an attaining of dispassion.

4.  Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the Eightfold Path

It is important to note that in the Eastern religions, to meditate on dying and death is no mere negative action.  Nor is it a particularly morose one.  Only at first sight does it appear to be such.  Once one has meditated on either dying or death one comes from one’s sitting with a renewed commitment to living life more fully, and more especially living it more fully in the now.  To realise that truly life is fleeting and that we all end up either “six feet under” or being cremated is to deeply realise that the only answer is to live life more fully, more intensely by being aware of the sheer importance of living fully in the now.  After all, now is all we have.  In a sense, neither the past nor the future exists because the first has ceased to be and the second has not yet come.  In a deeper sense, all that exists is the present moment or the now.  In fact, conscious life is just that – an awareness of the abiding present or the passing now. (Or, as I look at these previous words anew, why not write "the abiding presence of the passing now"?

Picture of a Poppy I took April 2014

 Meditating on dying and death should never bring us down into the pits of despair because its real message is to deeply value and live in the enduring present.  Obviously, I don’t mean by this combination of words that everything stays the same or that nothing changes.  What I mean is that we only can really live in the now of time as it moves – that’s what I mean by the enduring present.

We read in the Tao Te Ching:

If you realise that all things change,

There is nothing you will try to hold on to.

If you aren’t afraid of dying,

There is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future

Is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.

When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,

Chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

(Tao Te Ching, verse 74, Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell)

In summary, then, we have two choices and the choice recommended by all spiritualities worth their salt is to choose life not death everyday of our lives by practicing living in the now.

Journal of a Soul 56

Body and Soul

A walk in Marley Park, Dublin, April 2014

"Body" and "Soul" are categories with which we are all too familiar.  Certainly, within the Roman Catholic dispensation. Building on Greek philosophy (most especially the work of Plato and Aristotle), the early Christians and the somewhat later Church Fathers promulgated a strong philosophy and theology, or if you like a philosophical theology*, that differentiated very strongly between the two categories. The soul, which is by nature good, inhabits the body, which according to St Paul, whom some scholars see as being as much the founder of the church as Jesus himself, is "the Temple of the Holy Spirit."  Building on the theology of St Paul, St. Augustine would adjudge the body as being simply the root of all evil.  And so over centuries there emerged a philosophy and theology that demonized the body and sanctified the soul.  

This rather radical disjunction of body and soul was accepted right down through the ages and is still central to both orthodox and unorthodox Christian belief, indeed to mainline theist belief.  The body dies and the soul lives on in another spiritual world, another realm. Now, needless to say, I am not arguing strongly on one side or another here.  I am merely stating the facts as they are, facts which hopefully I will build my reflections on somewhat later in this post, and perhaps in further posts.  My preferred method of reflection in things spiritual is always phenomenological, never reductionist or positivist, as anyone who has been a reader of my posts will know.  It's just that I like to get the basic facts straight first before proceeding. 

When René Descartes came along in the early seventeenth century, his "cogito ergo sum," a philosophical position worked out painstakingly through the crucible of intellectual doubt, argued that the mind (the mental) was radically different to the material (the body) and that they somehow interacted through the strange workings of the Pineal gland.**  Now, needless to say, this is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies that claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the physical world.

That is a very brief outline of the historical background.  Whatever we human beings are in our full humanity we are certainly both mental (spiritual) and material (body).  Modern thinking would argue for a holistic approach where both mental and bodily aspects of who we are are inextricably linked.  While they can be differentiated to enable reflection on the mystery that is the human being in his/her totality, they simply cannot be radically separated as in either mainline Christian theology or in radical Cartesian dualism.

More Questions than Answers: Mind, Soul and Self

I like to describe myself as a spiritual person with a deep interest in Christ and the Buddha, who believes that there is a spiritual aspect to the life of the planet and to all sentient life, and most especially to human life. Indeed, phenomenologically I experience life as miraculous in the sense in which the transcendentalist/realist poet Walt Whitman put it in his eponymous long poem:

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass–the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.

Marley Park, April, 2014

In other words, what I am arguing for here is the sheer mystery or wonder or magic with which the experience of living presents the conscious mind.  To offer simplistic, and especially reductive, answers to the meaning of life is to my mind the height or depth of arrogance and hubris. While no easy answers exist to the following questions in a clear rational sense, nonetheless these questions are valid for every thinking and feeling human being.  Let me pose the questions here - questions that are existential in tenor, questions which invite the listener to listen, reflect, ponder, wonder, expand his/her thought, stretch or flex their cognitive powers or simply invite the questioner to listen in silence and meditate on the experience.

• Is the Mind the same as the Soul?
• Is the Mind the same as the Self?
• Is the Self the Soul?
• What is the Mind?
• What is the Self?
• What is the Soul?
• Where does Personality fit into all of this?
• Is the Self the same as our Identity?
• Who or what defines Who we are?
• Is Identity a psychological phenomenon solely?
• Is Identity a sociological phenomenon solely?
• Is Identity a psychosocial phenomenon more correctly, then?
• Has Identity got a Spiritual dimension?
• Has Identity got a Religious dimension?
• What is the difference between Religion and Spirituality?
• Have the Natural Sciences anything to say about our Identity or about any of the above questions?
• What is the difference between the Natural Sciences and the Human Sciences?
• Where does the Truth lie? In the Natural Sciences or in the Human Sciences?
• Or more correctly, does it not lie in dialogue between both areas of exploration?
• Is Truth singular, i.e., "The One Truth" (Ultimate and Objective)?
• Is the Truth plural, i.e., "The many truths of knowledge" (Relative and often Subjective)?
• Can/does the Soul live on after Death?
• Can/does the Mind live on after Death?
• Can/does the Self live on after Death?
• Why are these questions so important for humankind?
• There are billions of people who believe that these questions are important.  Why?
• Does an animal have a Mind?
• If the Mind = the Soul, then could not an animal be said to have a Soul?
• Why couldn't an animal live on after death so?
• Do animals have a Personality or a Self or an Identity?
• Is a self-conscious Self a Soul?
• Is a non-self-conscious Self, i.e., an animal a Soul?

Obviously, if we wish to explore the above questions systematically we will have to do some pains-taking work of research into the origins of each term, their historical usages from culture to culture and then go on to offer a descriptive definition of each.  Once that's done we should then have to discuss and debate each question in a systematic way. Obviously, one could never tackle all such questions in one post, one chapter or even one book.  However, what I am about in this post is to give the reader a flavour of the breadth, depth and height of the questions posed by any worthwhile philosophical anthropology.

Analytical or positivist philosophers like A.J. Ayer would say that these questions are practically all invalid as they ask questions about things that are mere hypotheses and absolutely strange ones at that.  They are in no way verifiable or falsifiable and hence completely meaningless and therefore redundant questions. Those questions, he argues, simply make no sense at all as they refer to the mere idle speculation of of less rigorous philosophers.  Bertrand Russell says somewhere that to ask such metaphysical questions as I have done above is as ludicrous as asking is there a tea-pot orbiting the sun or any sun out there in space?***

Flowers, Marley Park, April, 2014

Of course, we are perfectly well within our rights to counter Russell, and indeed Ayer who was one of his early students and followers, by stating that in an existential and in a phenomenological sense human beings find that they actually do ask these questions. Indeed, I would argue that there is something within us driving us to ask these questions. In a sense, I believe that our two analytical philosophers are in fact being somewhat disingenuous because they are treating human beings as mere cognitive entities, or as entities that can only ask certain linguistically logical questions, that somehow human beings are not allowed to engage in a meta-linguistics or in a meta-meta-linguistics and further even in a metaphysics. Why not?  In this regard, I have always been inspired by that great metaphysical question asked by Heidegger, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" ****

The Scottish empiricist David Hume was an early atheist who not alone denied the existence of the soul but also of the very notion of a self, an entity that he defined as a mere "bundle of perceptions."  This is alright in theory or in logically worked out clinical thought, but humanity is more than logic or rationality.  Humanity also entails feelings, affectivity, moral and ethical impulses, and indeed much that is non-rational, even irrational.  One might counter Hume and his followers phenomenologically with a statement such as the following: "No client attends a psychotherapist, analyst or counsellor and says 'I am suffering from a bundle of perceptions crisis.'  S/he implicitly, if not  at times explicitly, believes that someone called the Self actually exists."  In other words both client and counsellor know that the self as a phenomenon exists because of their experience.  In all of this, I sometimes take heart that the great Victorian theologian and philosopher John Henry Cardinal Newman***** wrote somewhere that the human being "knows more than he is aware of," and that while he never used the term "the unconscious," he certainly would have been most aware of intuition, feelings and so on, much of which was not accessible to clinical reasoning, though it could always be reflected upon and thought about "after the fact."  Newman saw spirituality and the world of religious experience as being very much part of our overall human experience, though once again only amenable to reason "a posteriori." 

Indeed, if we were to take the Analytical and Positivist philosophers literally we would simply have no literature at all, and indeed I believe there would be no place in such a literal world for Arts of any kind.

Marlay House, once owned by David La Touche, M.P. and first governor of Bank of Ireland

The human being is way more complex than some scholars might allow.  That's why we need a philosophy like that of Socrates, a philosophy that always asks the hard and searching questions, that always asks "why" of everything and keeps asking even at seemingly inappropriate times.

I have spoken before that what is important for our study of the nature of humanity is a philosophical anthropology that looks at that nature from as wide a perspective as possible, that seeks the truth from every possible area of knowledge and does not arrogantly arrogate all truth to its own narrow province like the logical positivists and analytical philosophers do.  Phenomenologically and sociologically, Religion even has something to say about human nature. Perennial philosophy as well as all the other approaches in philosophy, and all the various theologies have much to contribute, too.  The Natural Sciences must always be tempered and balanced by the Human Sciences so as to do justice to "the phenomenon of man," in all  his/her complexity, that is the complete and essential nature of the human person.

In this sense, dear reader, what our anthropology must explore is the "more" that is in humanity rather than the "less."  The easy way out of deep thinking and reflection is often the lazy way of seeking to reduce humankind to the least it can be.  

Endnotes 

*Now the very early Christians would have had very little learned theology.  After all, theology emerged as a reflection on their lived faith experience over the ensuing centuries after Jesus' death and resurrection.  The great Greek and Roman Fathers of the Church and the early Church Councils like Nicea and Chalcedon all co-operated to promulgate various learned theologies (note the plural here, in later centuries a rather solidified central core of orthodoxy emerged, and some even subscribed to one theology or way of looking at things spiritual and religious) built upon the foundations of Greek philosophy mainly.  I have mentioned "philosophical theology" in my text above as it is an area where the two overlap rather foundationally, and obviously I am using this twentieth century term rather anachronistically here.

** "Substance dualism is a type of dualism most famously defended by René Descartes, which states that there are two fundamental kinds of substance: mental and material. According to his philosophy, which is specifically called Cartesian dualism, the mental does not have extension in space, and the material cannot think.  Substance dualism is important historically for having given rise to much thought regarding the famous mind–body problem. Substance dualism is a philosophical position compatible with most theologies which claim that immortal souls occupy an independent "realm" of existence distinct from that of the physical world." See article on Dualism in the WIKI here.

 ***The WIKI describes Bertrand Russell's argumentation on this matter thus: "Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong. Russell's teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God" See here.

**** I have discussed Heidegger's famous question in many posts in various blogs I have written over the years.  Here is a review I wrote of a book with this very title by Leslek Kołakowski: here.

*****The great Victorian scholar, theologian and philosopher John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1090) was perhaps one of the greatest prose stylist of his era.  Much of his prose writings appeared on various curricula in English literature around the world for decades because of its sheer precision and essential beauty.  He was an original thinker, steeped in ancient history, the classical languages of Greek and Latin, the writings of the Fathers of the Church, Church history and contemporary issues in science and philosophy and much else besides.  Indeed, he had one of the subtlest of minds of his time, well able to dialogue with, as well as argue with the Darwinians of his day.  He was also a founder of a University, named the Catholic University of Ireland, which preceded UCD and wrote a classic on the philosophy of education called The Idea of a University.  His most erudite book and the subtlest of his philosophical/theological works is undoubtedly his Grammar of Assent which shows a most amazing insight into not alone why it is reasonable for humans to believe in God, but also shows a profound understanding as to how a human believes at all.  In short, after Rev Professor Jan Walgrave, O.P., I have argued in a paper I wrote some twenty years ago that Newman's approach to belief was one of "phenomenological investigation."  In other words, Newman was very much ahead of his time in describing the complexity of the phenomenon of humanity.  However, Newman's majestic Oxford University Sermons, written in his late thirties to early forties before his conversion to Catholicism, remains my favourite book from the great Victorian scholar for its beauty and simplicity of language and most essentially for its sheer authenticity.