The faint, almost silent voice of the heart

Giulio Prisco
Turing Church
Published in
5 min readApr 6, 2017

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I spend a lot of time studying modern science, especially fundamental physics, and trying to find faith there. Of course my quest is doomed from the start: the brain can, at most, find ways to suspend disbelief, but belief can come only from the heart.

I’ll resist the intellectual temptation to define what I mean by “heart” — words could only be inferior to reality, and you already know what the heart is.

In his autobiography “Undiluted Hocus-pocus,” Martin Gardner says that his faith “is based unashamedly on posits of the heart, not the head.” The brain sees no proofs of God or of an afterlife, but Gardner’s heart tells him that:

“For me God is a ‘Wholly Other’ transcendent intelligence, impossible for us to understand. He or she is somehow responsible for our universe and capable of providing, how I have no inkling, an afterlife.”

Look at the top image. You and all the people you love, your family and your pets and your friends, and all the people you don’t love (why not?), and the billions of people you don’t know, are among those beautiful flowers. The majestic snowy peaks far away suggest transcendent answers to the heartaches of life, and a future life for all those impermanent, beautiful flowers, but your mind can’t go there.

Your heart can go there, and bring back vague dreams and faint memories of answers. But the faint, almost silent voice of the heart can’t persuade the brain.

Sometime we are tempted to blame science — we just know too much science to believe. But science itself says we don’t know much — and that’s the best we can do to suspend intellectual disbelief. Compared to the “Thing Itself” (h/t Kant), our science is as primitive as the science of our grandfathers.

Why, then, did your grandfather believe in God and you doubt? The answer, I think, is that also your grandfather doubted. And his grandmother too. Awake in the dark night of the soul, they questioned their faith and thought perhaps it was only wishful thinking. Just like you. And I.

It’s a shallow faith that never questions itself — or the other extreme, an exceptionally deep faith beyond most people’s reach. I believe most deeply religious persons are almost paralyzed by doubt, and never fully able to accept the faint, almost inaudible answers of the heart.

The kind of faith and hope that we can find in science, philosophy, and abstract theology, is easily shattered by doubt. Faith in God and hope in resurrection only get you through the night if they come from deep inside the heart. We should believe and hope with the heart.

Don’t ask me how — I don’t know how. I am stuck with intellectual versions of faith and hope, which don’t keep me warm at night. I have some good books, but one can’t “learn” faith and hope from books — it’s not that easy.

However, I wish to recommend an exceptional book: “My Bright Abyss,” by Christian Wiman. The author, a renowned poet, doesn’t worry too much about my longed for, but never found, scientific path to faith.

Here and there Wiman notes that quantum physics suggests that “there is some other reality much larger and more complex than we are able to perceive,” and

“[The] whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication — even as, maybe even especially as, our atoms begin the long dispersal we call death.”

“It is not that conventional ideas of an afterlife are too strange; it is that they are not strange enough,” says Wiman in a passage that echoes Gardner’s “mysterian” theology. Then he hints at our role in God’s plan. “We are facets of a work whose finished form we cannot imagine, though our imaginations, aided by grace, are the means — or at least one means — of its completion.”

But the book is not about science, or philosophy, or theology. “My Bright Abyss” — a moving poem written in sober and essential prose — is about perception and “a poetics of belief, a language capacious enough to include a mystery that, ultimately, defeats it.”

Wiman believes “that we have souls and that they survive our deaths, in some sense that we are entirely incapable of imagining,” and in a “God not above or beyond or immune to human suffering, but in the very midst of it, intimately with us in our sorrow.”

“To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.”

Wiman’s book will not teach you how to believe with the heart — no book can do that. It won’t give you instant hope and happiness, or zen-like peace, but it will show you what the title promises: a frightening, painfully bright abyss.

“But if you find that you cannot believe in God, then do not worry yourself with it,” is Wiman’s advice to non-believers. “No one can say what names or forms God might take, nor gauge the intensity of unbelief we may need to wake up our souls.”

In this beautiful fractal image by Sven Geier I see a brain, and a heart inside the brain, emerging from a fractal mathematical algorithm. Similarly, both the brain and the heart emerge from the fabric of God’s creation, but the heart is inside, closer to God.

I’ll go back now to my hopeless (but interesting and fun) quest for intellectual, “scientific” faith, because that’s the best I can do at the moment, perhaps part of God plan for me. But I keep hoping that God, in whatever name or form, will wake up my soul one day.

This post (written in December 2016) is dedicated to the memory of our sweet beloved doggy Sacha. She went to the Rainbow Bridge on December 11, 2016.

Cover image from pexels.com, image from Sven Geier.

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Writer, futurist, sometime philosopher. Author of “Tales of the Turing Church” and “Futurist spaceflight meditations.”