A Speculative Moment

Note: this is what I call Philosophical Fiction. It's speculation, it is fun, but it is not to be taken as a sincere search for the way things are, just a fun contemplation on the way things might be.

If there is a meaning to life, I do not think that it would be a meaning for us. We create hammers for a purpose so they have a purpose for us, but not for themselves. Computers are created to serve certain purposes for us, but they themselves have nothing to aspire to. Likewise, given the lack of a clear meaning for our lives, I should think that if there is a meaning to life it is not for us, not something that we aspire to, but something that we fulfill simply in the course of doing what we naturally do.

And if there should be a meaning to life, I would think that it lies in our diversity of experience and natures. Life produces a multitude of unique characters. Life can be thought of as a kind of arthouse, producing unique natures.

I think that the most persuasive theodicy I have ever encountered is the Irenaean theodicy. Making pain a part of the design is more effective than making pain a flaw in the design since the former does not force us to imagine an incompetent designer.

You Have to Give Up

Notice the Fingers Remain Separate

Over the course of a few weeks, I found myself wanting to officially leave behind the atheist label and re-enter the theist camp. I had been wondering about questions of epistemology and, without denying that evidence for the existence of God was sorely lacking, found that I wanted to place faith in him all the same and began to think that it would not be unjustified if I did. I cannot deny that there were a lot of emotional and non-rational reasons I found myself wanting to return to God, but I refused to actually return until I had settled the issue of what a rational faith in God would actually entail.

It all stemmed from a realization I had: given that determinism is true, every event in your life could be considered ordained by God so long as he arranged the particles of the universe at at least one moment in time. From there, I speculated as to what is meant by a “soul.” If we accept determinism then we also accept that the human body is no less a part of the motion of particles in the universe, and that while we have a will we do not have a will that transcends the workings of the Great Machine, which meant that any idea that life was a test or that we were going to judged according to our success or failure in any particular area had to be abandoned since all of our successes and failures could ultimately be traced back to an act of God. What then is the self, I wondered, and I came to the conclusion that the self, if it was anything, was something that could be called “I” that was tied to the motions of my body but that, nonetheless, transcended the universe.

From here I had a view of the cosmos I found that I could believe in: the universe as a work of art and as a refinery, that every tragedy and every triumph was ordained by God through natural processes for the means of creating a diversity of souls. Souls which would otherwise be perfectly equal and homogeneous, could be given diversity by in some way causing their nature to be determined by the natures of the meat machines on earth. Since they would transcend time, their nature would be determined by the entirety of the machine's life, not any one particular instance, and there would be no reason to suppose that eternity operated according to its own timeline as though we had to wait for the body to die for the soul to be released. Life, then, was all about experiences. Experiences that defined us and, somehow, our eternal souls.

The fact that the world had numerous competing views of God would no longer be an issue, since I simply said that all ideas of the ineffable were, by nature, wrong. Nonetheless, I did not need to get rid of religion altogether, I could say that religions sprang up because they were deterministically ordained by God to spring up as they served his purpose of refining our natures.

God is transcendent. Our souls are transcendent. So the lack of scientific evidence is irrelevant for them. It would be impossible to have any kind of sensible evidence, or even any kind of sensible notion of these things. Since they transcend our universe, they transcend our thoughts. Whether they're nonexistent or super-existent, the universe would look the same to us. And from this basis, with God and selves safely beyond anything we could possibly understand, the concept of 'faith' finally began to make sense. Faith is trusting in something incomprehensible, unknowable, and non-rational. It was not a contradiction of reason, it was a moving-beyond, it was traveling into territory where our reason would not do us any good.

With this conception, it would be impossible for me to ever gain ground in a debate with a skeptic, since by my own account God was not existent. But at least I had something I thought I could believe in. Besides, if I came to such a belief and someone else did not, by my account, both of us came to our respective beliefs through the arrangement of particles ordained by God. I no longer needed others to believe as I did for me to be reassured about the fate of their souls.

Everything was falling into place. But I waited. I wanted to examine matters from all the angles. I wanted, if necessary, to be able to write a book explaining my transition. I refused to take the decision lightly. [EDIT: although you may not be able to tell by this blog. Reading through it the next day, much of it seems sloppy. I wrote early this morning before sleeping]

And what I found was that such an idea produced a change in my everyday life. In the course of a day I was in constant anxiety over facts. That is, I was in anxiety about the the fact that I was putting my weight on a step that I had no reason to believe was there. This took the form of anxiety over my nature as a human being (am I a transcendent soul? Or am I just a meat computer?) most of the time, other times it would be the fact that I was starting to define myself in relation to something that I knew I had no reason to believe was there; but neither of these corresponding ideas had to be present, at almost all moments of the day I had a palpable sense of wrongness, anxiety, and insecurity even without a thought accompanying the feeling. The worse part of it all, though, was that every everyday occurrence was accompanied by a feeling that there was something not to be trusted in it, that there was some devastating fact lurking in the shadows that would invalidate everyday life.

It was the little things: talking to my girlfriend on the phone, cleaning up a back room, doing a little exercise. I couldn't shake the feeling that all of these things would be somehow invalidated, and I do not even know what I mean exactly by “invalidated,” except that I would somehow see that my typical responses to these occasions would seem inappropriate if I just discovered some new fact that lurked out there somewhere.

It all reached a head one night as I lay in my bed. I realized that I had made knowledge, certainty, facts, and reason into enemies. This would not stand, I lived in a world composed exclusively of facts, I could not survive making them my enemy. As I lay there thinking, I realized that I had overlooked the obvious.

God was outside the universe, outside existence, whether that meant he was transcendent or nonexistent. That meant that from my point of view, he wasn't there. And, if my idea about souls was true, then it did not matter a single iota if I believed in them. All my ideas were aiming at some idea of epistemic justification, but I did not even really believe in epistemic justice to begin with, due to my ethical nihilism. God had given me no real reason to believe in him, and presumably that either meant that he did not exist or that he did not particularly want me to believe in him.

And from there the world started to make just a little more sense again. I could act in everyday life without feeling as though I were participating in something low and broken. I am not even certain I can put it in sensible language, it was all stomach acid and nerves that I was interacting with. So, to resort to cliché, I had to give up a heavenly mind to experience any earthly good.

For what it is worth, there is nothing about this that contradicts, at least, Christian thought. 1 John 2: 15-17 makes that clear to me, anyway.

It seems to me that, given the situation that we are in, we have to give up. We just have to give up. Give up on God, give up on objective ethics, give up on souls. That is not to say that all of these things are not actually in some way out there, simply that we are not in a position to know anything about them. And while there may be other possible explanations, if we only consider the possibility of us being the creation of a transcendent being or the possibility of the universe containing everything necessary for its present state, then in both cases we may as well just go about our lives since either God has not seen fit to show himself to us or there is nothing for us to be shown.

And with that, I think it's time to step away from religious thought for awhile. Not forever, but for now. I remain, for the time, an atheist. I end my thought on the subject with this thought for now: where we previously might have lived in faith, now we can live in hope. You can hope there's a God. You can hope there's a heaven. You can hope that there are souls. That has not been taken from you, these hopes are still available. You can choose to turn the hope into faith, if you like, but if you're anything like me you won't function well looking at the world that way. For those people with characters similar to mine, we must just live in hope. Once you do that, you can set some of those unanswerable questions aside for awhile, and focus instead on the little mundane questions that must be answered daily, the little stupidities that make life worth living.

And if there is a God, trust Him to manage His own will.

The Obscurity of God and the Nightmare Box

Original Posting

It’s something that goes beyond life-after-death. What’s in the box is proof that what we call life isn’t.

Our world is a dream. Infinitely fake. A nightmare.

One look, Rand says, and your life—your preening and struggle and worry—it’s all pointless.

The grandson crawling with cockroaches, the antiques dealer, Cassandra with no eyelashes wandering off naked.

All your problems and love affairs.

They’re an illusion. “What you see inside the box,” Rand says, “is a glimpse of the real reality.”

-Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

Let me start with a statement that I shall make no effort to argue for or defend. If you disagree with this statement, there is no need to even bother coming up with a rebuttal, you can simply disagree and move along. The statement is, as you read this right now, being furiously debated all across the internet as it is.

Humanity, as a species, has no good evidence to support the belief that God exists.

Now, this is not necessarily evidence against his existence. If God is, as many theists believe, omnipotent and omniscient, then it would not be difficult for him to avoid providing us with evidence of his existence. Unlike natural forces like gravity or natural occurrences such as combustion, God would be capable of resisting observation and obscuring himself. Indeed, if you agree with my above statement, and also happen to be a theist, I do not see how you can avoid the conclusion that God is obscuring Himself.

God, if there is a god, is a reclusive god.

Now, you may object that God has not really been silent, but in fact has revealed himself to us at various times and in various ways, most notably through prophets and holy texts. Even if one accepts a particular sacred text as the word of God, the fact remains that it should not be very difficult for him to give each and every one of us a personal chat wherein he explains himself as best as the truths of his nature can be simplified for human language, the fact remains that it is not necessary for modern humans to rely on 2000 year old records if God is indeed omnipotent. In other words, it is possible for him to give each of us our own personal revelation, but instead we are expected to rely on the records of revelations he gave to long dead prophets and teachers.

Even if he does speak to us, he is only whispering. For what reason would God whisper, if that is indeed what he is doing? Or for what reason would God be silent, if in fact humanity has never received any kind of revelation? Disregarding the atheistic answer, which is perfectly valid but does not make for a very interesting discussion, the most likely explanation is that it is God's will that he not be clearly known or clearly grasped.

Which leads me wondering why God would not want to be clearly known or clearly grasped. What is it that God gains or avoids by keeping us in the dark about his existence? If God is obscuring himself, to what end is he doing it?*

God, in most traditional conceptions, has desires, but never needs. Humanity has needs, though. I have a suspicion that the obscurity of God is best understood as being for the sake of humanity instead of being for the sake of God. To flesh out my suspicion as to why God must obscure himself, I turn to a subplot of a book I really happen to like.

In Chuck Palahniuk's 2005 novel Haunted, one of the stories concerns a device called The Nightmare Box. The box ticks, and while it is ticking it is just an antique oddity. Then it stops ticking. When it stops ticking, a person can lean their weight against the box, move their left eye to a lens, hold onto two handles, and press a button. After that, your life no longer matters. You give up college, you give up your career, you take out your jewelry, you no longer care if cockroaches crawl through your clothes, and you no longer see the need to keep your long, pretty eyelashes. You give up on life. It is no longer worth the effort.

Why?

Because the Nightmare Box shows you a glimpse of real life. It shows you that there is a more real life, and it shows you that this life you are living in right now is an illusion. None of your struggles, goals, dreams, or fears have any real significance, they are all just a part of a make-believe world. They are fiction. So you just give up. You stop bothering to make anything of your life because, well, why try to build a life here in the world of illusions when there's a real world out there somewhere?

Now, this is fiction, and this is human motivation filtered through the mind of one particular author. You can decide for yourself; if you knew, not believed, that there was a real heaven out there and that our world and our existence was artificial and unreal, could you continue living as though life mattered? Could you continue valuing your education, your career, your home, your appearance, your art, or anything else that you believe makes your life worth living if you found out that your whole existence was the equivalent of a video game or a novel? Entirely fictional.

Maybe you could. Maybe you could not. That requires introspection to determine.

Even if you could continue living your life, though, it would never be the same. It is one thing to simply come to the conclusion that life is an illusion; one can cope with that by remembering that this would also make us an illusion, therefore the world is still real to us. It is another thing entirely to come to the conclusion that life is an illusion, but also have something real to compare your illusory life to. The world would begin resembling a cartoon, it would no longer create the sense of weight and significance necessary for us to continue seriously living our lives. Even if you could continue living your life, everyday would be a struggle to stave off a nihilistic infection of the spirit.

What does this have to do with the obscurity of God?

Go read your Bible, and you will find a description of a God who oftentimes simply appears to be a human writ large. He is an almost relatable figure, although He is often offensive to our modern sensibilities. Nonetheless, in the Bible, God cares about the things that human beings tend to care about. He provides a code of laws, he gets involved in warfare, he gets involved with politics, he is jealous, he seeks glory, he has an opinion on good sex as opposed to bad sex. This is a God who is very concerned with what we concern ourselves with.

Now ask yourself if this sounds right? Are we not told that God is beyond humanity? Transcendent? Almost incomprehensible to us?

Imagine if you met that incomprehensible God. That God who is so far removed from what we care about, that he would make our entire lives seem insignificant by his presence. There is the first real entity you have ever encountered, and he simply is not concerned about the petty problems and your petty values that you concern yourself with. There He is: a Nightmare Box for the whole world.

Why do I say that he would be a Nightmare Box for the world? Because after being in His presence, it would be impossible for you to continue caring about anything in your life. How can you submit taxes after having an encounter with God, with all his apathy toward taxes. How can you form a relationship with another person, they are bound to seem like a shadow or a parody of a personality after having encountered God. How can you keep working your mundane job, knowing that it will not get you any closer to that extraordinary real world?

You may here object that I have fallen into utter speculation. After all, how do I know that God will not care about taxes? And how do I know that God's personality would be so deep as to make all other personalities appear shallow as a puddle? And how do I know that you would not be able to keep working because your only concern would be to grow nearer to that real world?

To this I would simply say that the search for meaning and the search for significance and value is one of humanity's most basic drives. To encounter something (someone?) who is literally more real than our world would cause our hearts to pour out. In our lives, as I believe I have discussed previously, we are responsible for creating our own meaning and our own value. In the presence of God, there would be no need for such an act of the will. The sense of meaning would be drawn out of us as soon as we see how fictional our world seems in comparison to Him. We may not all love Him, but it would be impossible to deny his significance. Although, I must admit that it is possible that he would be concerned with taxes, I suppose I just really hope that he is not.

And then what would happen?

I think humanity would screech to a halt. With such certain knowledge of God, all we would ever be concerned with would be God. We would all become like monks, devoting our lives to this entity, because nothing else would seem to be worth our time. Everything earthly would feel like trudging, we would feel like we were just playing a role or playing make-believe. Nothing would be able to create a sense of importance or significance in us. Once you encounter something that matters as much as God does, it would be impossible to feel that anything else matters.

Our earthly life would wilt.

So, if God is obscuring himself, I think that it is because he wishes to preserve this human world. He is obscure, so that by remaining mysterious he keeps us able to regard our own world as being worth living for.


*It should be noted that I am here making the very unwarranted assumption that God must be acting toward some end. This is an anthropomorphism. We believe that humans act toward some end, which causes us to impose that human trait upon God. My other presupposition is that, if God is working toward a goal, that goal is something that human beings would find valuable. It is possible that God's true end would simply be baffling to us because we would never think it worth seeking.