An Unanswerable Question

How religious language helps us ask our deepest questions.

It seems to me that the mantra by which some Christians dismiss tough questions about God — that he “works in mysterious ways” — says less about the nature of the Divine and more about our own human limitations. His ways, presumably, are not a mystery to him but to his followers, and, as Wittgenstein once wrote, “That whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence”. Religion is by no means the only house in which unknowability lurks in the basement. As Roger Scruton writes in his wonderful essay Effing the Ineffable:

“Every enquiry into first principles, original causes and fundamental laws, will at some stage come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid?”

The answer, he suggests, always comes back to this:

“And the answer is that there is no answer — or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock. And yet we want an answer. So how should we proceed?”