讀書時間 (1) - 珍惜頭腦仍然清醒的時間

 《當呼吸化為空氣, 一位天才神經外科醫師最後的生命洞察》

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

// 牧師讀經的時候，我突然發現自己在發笑。經文說的是一位感到挫折的耶穌，他比喻性的言語被追隨者以字面意義去理解：

During the pastor's Scripture reading, I suddenly found myself chuckling. It featured a frustrated Jesus whose metaphorical language receives literal interpretation from his followers:

耶穌回答說：「凡喝這水的，還要再渴；人若喝我所賜的水就永遠不渴；我所賜的水，要在他裏頭成為泉源，直湧到永生。」婦人說：「先生，請把這水賜給我，叫我不渴，也不用來這麼遠打水。」(約翰福音 4:16)

Jesus answerd and said to her, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."

... ... 這其間，門徒對耶穌說：「拉比，請喫。」耶穌說：「我有食物喫，是你們不知道的。」門徒就彼此對問說：「莫非有人拿甚麼給他喫麼?」

...Meanwhile, the discriples urged him, "Rabbi, eat." But he said to them, "I have food to eat of which you do not know." So the disciples said to one another, "Could someone have brought him something to eat?"

是這一類明顥嘲弄以字面理解一切的聖經段落，使我經過長時間的疏離後，帶我回到基督教。大學畢業後的那段期間，當時我對神與耶穌的概念變得十分薄弱(說得客氣點)。當我遊歷鋼鐵般無懈可擊的無神論時，攻擊基督教的主要武器就是後者在實證上不堪一擊。顯然，開明的理智給了我們一個更合乎邏輯的宇宙。顯然，奧坎的剃刀將信仰者從迷信乾淨地割離。神的存在沒有證明；因此，信神不理智。

It was passages like these, where there is a clear mocking of literalist readings of Scripture, that had brought me back around to Christianity after a long stretch, following college, when my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous. During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Chrisianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely Occam's razor cut the faithful freee from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God. 

雖然我成長於虔誠的基督教家庭，祈禱和讀經是每晚的例行公事，但我更像大多數愛好科學的人。我開始相信：現實世界的物質觀點的可能性，還有，最終屬於科學的世界觀，將可賦予我們一個完整的形上學，完全免除過時的觀念，如靈魂、神、身著長袍的蓄鬍白人男性之類的。二十歲期間，我花了頗多功夫試圖為這個偉業建構一個框架。然而，問題終於爆發：以科學當形上學的仲裁者，不只是將神逐出這個世界，愛、恨、意義也一併遭到放逐 --- 換句話說，明明不是我們所生活的世界。這倒不是說，如果你相信有意義，就必須相信神；而是說，如果你相信科學不能證實神，那麼你幾乎有義務做出以下結論：科學不能證實意義，於是，生命本身並無任何意義。換句話說，存在性的主張毫無重量可言；所有的知識都是科學的知識。

Although I had veen raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only Hod from the world but also love, hate, meaning --- to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That's not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge.

然而，悖論在於科學方法論是人造產物，無法企及永恒的真理。我們建立科學理論以組織、操弄這個世界，以化約現象為可處理的單位。科學的根據是可複製性，是製造出來的客觀現象。儘管科學因此發展出很強的能力，以論述關於物質與能量，卻也造成科學知識在人類生命的存在性，直覺性的本質上無從發揮。因為人類生命是獨特的、主觀的、無法預測的。科學也許提供了最有用的方式，去組織實證性、可複製的數據，但是與此能力相倚的，卻是科學所無能領會，人類生命最中央的層面 --- 希望，恐懼、愛、恨、美、嫉妒、高尚、脆弱，奮鬥、愛苦、德性。

Yet the paradox is that scientific methdology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As stromg as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

介於這些核心嚮往與科學理論之間，永遠都會有道鴻溝。沒有任何思辨系統可以囊括人類經驗的總體。形上學的王國依然是天啟的疆域。而無神論只能在這些論據上成立。

Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. The realm of metaphysics remains the province of revelation(this, not atheism, is what Occam argued, after all). And atheism can be justified only on these grounds.

……我返回基督教的中心價值 --- 犠牲、救贖、寬恕 --- 是因為我發現它們使我不得不信。聖經在正義和慈愛之間、在舊約和新約之間有種張力。新約說，你永遠做得不夠好：善是目標，而你永遠無法符合準。 我相信，耶穌的主要信息是慈愛勝過正義，沒有例外。

... ... Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity --- sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness -- because I found them so compeling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trump justice every time.

不只如此，可能原罪的本來信息並非「時時抱著罪惡感」。可能更接近這樣的想法：「對於什麼是善，我們都有個概念，而我們無法時時做到。」可能這才是新約要傳達的信息。即使你的概念像《利未記》一樣定義分明，你也無法那樣生活。不只是不可能，根本是瘋了。

Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't "Feel guilty all the time." Maybe it is more along these lines:"We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time." May be that's what the message of the New Testament is, after all. Even if you have a notion as well defined as Leviticus, you can't live that way. It's not just impossible, it's insane.

關於神，我沒有任何明確不疑的說法，那是當然的，不過，人類生命基本事實，則確實令人信服地對立於命定論的盲目。何況，沒有人，包括我在內，將認識論的權威性

賦予天啟。我們都是講理的人 --- 天啟還不夠。即使神對我們開口了，我們仍會貶之為幻覺。

About God I could say nothing definitive, if course, but the basic reality of human life stands compellingly against blind determinism. Moreover, no one, myself included, credits revelation with any epistemic authority. We are all reasonable people --- revelation is not good enough. Even if God spoke to us, we'd discount it as delusional.

那麼，我想知道，志向遠大的形上學家可以做什麼? 放棄? 幾乎如此。

So what, I wonder, is the aspiring metaphysician to do? Give up? Almost.

奮勇朝唯一的真理前行，同時承認此事毫不可行；或說，正確的答案可能獲得，核對答案本無可能。到最後，毫無疑問，我們每個人都只能看到全局的一部分……人類知識是單一人承裝不了的。它生於人與人、我們與世界間建立的關係，卻依然永不完備。真理來自高於這一切的地方，正如那個星期天讀經的結尾：

Struggle toward the capital-T Truth, but recognize that the task is impossible --- or that if a correct answer is possible, verification certainly is impossible. In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture....Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, as at the end of that Sunday's reading.

撒種的和收割的一同快樂。俗語說：「那人撒種，這人收割。」這話可見是真的。我差你們去收你們所沒有勞苦的；別人勞苦，你們享受他們所勞若的。(約翰福音4:36-38)

the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that "One sows and another reaps." I sent you to reap what have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work.