Voice of New Americans: Mortimer Adler: Great Thinker and What He Thought About God

When I was a teenager, growing up on a small farm in southern Missouri, I had a most unusual hero-Mortimer Adler. Most kids-and even most adults in my community-had never heard of Adler. But I knew him as one of the main editors of the most fascinating set of books I could imagine-the Great Books of the Western World series. I was captivated by his massive work The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought. This two-volume set (two very thick volumes) within the Great Books series is the introduction for the Great Books series that provides a panoramic and comprehensive view of 102 of the great ideas of Western civilization. Their list of the 102 greatest ideas includes such concepts as art, beauty, being, courage, democracy, education, family, God, good and evil, happiness, mind, religion, sin, time, truth, will, wisdom and on the list goes. For each idea, the editors write a comprehensive essay surveying what the great thinkers have said about that concept and then they present an outline of topics related to the idea, complete with cross-references on what all the great thinkers in the Great Books had to say about that idea. What a treasure house for thought!

Although I did not realize it at the time, Mortimer Adler (1902-) is one of the most famous scholars and broad thinkers in our day. He was director of the Institute for Philosophical Research, chairman of the board of editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica and served as a professor at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He is famous as an educational reformer. Russians will appreciate the fact that his Great Books series includes both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

Adler reminisces, "In my preadolescent years, I was taken by my mother and my maternal grandmother to religious services in a Reform synagogue on Saturday mornings, but without any effect on my mind or soul. The inoculation did not take, or the patient was too intransigent. The dose may have been too slight."

Adler regarded the Jewish Orthodox customs of his father "as an anomaly, a vestige of the old country that he could not shake off, but totally out of place and meaningless in the world in which we were living ... we observed the Jewish holy days on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but only my father fasted on the latter day. For me, they were two days that I did not go to school."

In college Adler became, by his own description, "a pagan-and a somewhat rebellious one at that." Then gradually Adler began to change. "It was through my study of philosophy, not through religious observances and rituals, that I became interested in God-as an object of thought, not as an object of love and worship. It was the God of Aristotle and Spinoza, not the God of Judaism and of Christianity."

Adler became a serious student of the great Jewish theologian Maimonides and of Thomas Aquinas who specialized in arguments for God's existence. Although he sharply criticized the arguments of Aquinas, he came to believe in God as a philosophical deduction. Finally, after many years of thinking about God-since 1943-he published a book entitled How to Think About God in 1980. He still claimed to be a pagan (one who does not worship the God of Christians, Jews or Muslims) writing for pagans in which he defended the existence of God.

Adler concluded as a philosopher that there were sound logical reasons to believe in God's existence. His reasoning went something like this (this is my summary, not his):

1. Since something cannot come from nothing, there must be something-or someone-who has existed forever.

2. Since personal cannot come from non-personal, the universe must have a personal Being as its source.

3. Since intelligence cannot come from non-intelligence, the universe must have an intelligent, personal Being as its source.

4. This Being is necessarily infinite (without limitations), eternal (no beginning) and uncaused.

5. It can be further argued that this Being is perfect in every way-perfect and unlimited in power (omnipotent), unlimited in space (omnipresent) and unlimited in knowledge (omniscient).

But Adler believed that he could not philosophically demonstrate the goodness of God-His benevolent love for those He created, a Divine Person who hears and answers prayers and forgives our sins. This would involve a "leap of faith." But he made it clear that this "leap of faith" was not a leap that moves from "insufficient reasons for affirming God's existence to a state of greater certitude in that affirmation." This leap of faith is the move from a philosophical belief that God exists to a personal belief in God as a real Person with whom I as an individual can relate through prayer and worship. It is the realization that God has told us what kind of Person He is-that He is loving, kind, good, merciful, the Creator of the universe, and that He desires to know and to be known by us.

For Adler this "leap of faith" occurred in March 1984 after a period of prolonged illness, following a trip to Mexico in February. Day after day as he lay in the hospital he had been praying the Lord's Prayer with real meaning. An Episcopal rector came and prayed with him in the hospital and Adler convulsed with weeping. Suddenly he realized he was no longer thinking of God as the conclusion of his philosophical reasonings, but he was truly believing in Him, praying to Him. He wrote to the rector and explained, "With no audible voice accessible to me, I was saying voicelessly to myself, 'Dear God, yes, I do believe, not just in the God my reason so stoutly affirms, but the God to whom Father Howell is now praying, and on whose grace and love I now joyfully rely."

In the years following he reflected much on the God he now followed. In 1991 he wrote Truth in Religion in which he insisted that any valid religion that claims to be truth, has to be compatible with truths that are known in other fields as well, such as history, science and philosophy.

Mortimer Adler-philosopher and educator-came to know God as a personal Being and not just a deduction resulting from philosophical reasoning. Our challenge today is to consider the evidences surrounding us which affirm the existence of the great, infinite (unlimited), personal God-the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Dr. Daryl McCarthy is telling story about Mortimer Adler, the great thinker, during English classes in the Russian - American Club

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