A daughter’s questions, a father’s answers

1. Is God real?
2. If he is real, did he really create the world?
3. Is there proof that God is real?
4. Are the people in the Bible real? Did they live?
5. How do we know we’re real and the world is real, that it isn’t an illusion or game, like when I play with my Barbies and create a world in my head?
And these last two are connected and require some of her explaining.
6. Nothing is nothing, so if there’s nothing there’s nothing. If there’s nothing, how can there no be nothing? (I believe what she meant was, since the universe had a beginning, how do we even understand what there was before there was even a spacetime for there to be nothing in. Also, how do you bridge the gap from there being nothing, a nothingness that is so nothing that it can’t even contain emptiness, to there being something. If there really was nothing, how could it give rise to something? I believe her question was along those lines. How do we comprehend the concept of a state outside the universe of space and time and how do you go from that state to the current organized state of existence, space, and time.)
7. If everything didn’t just appear, where did it come from? (This is really a continuation of her previous question. I believe it stems from her dissatisfaction with the explanation that “it just happened, we can’t explain or understand that part of it, it’s just there; there isn’t a reason, as such, we can only observe what did happen”. Her question implies and assumes a dissatisfaction with the explanation that the universe “just appeared”, there is no teleology to be studied; you just have to take it and what it unfolded to be as a given. I think another way of stating her question, based on her talk with me, is “Why is the universe the way it is? Is there any reason?”)

So that was an interesting night. They weren’t simple questions, they were big enough and smart enough to merit more than simple yes and no answers. So I did my best to give her a basic primer in theology, philosophy, cosmology, and theories of Biblical interpretation rather than just answer the questions. I gave her a sample of the best alternative answers people have given to those questions and let her mull them over.
She’s engaged in some conscious worldview building, which I appreciate. Her most basic question that she wanted to consider was the most fundamental. Is there any reason for why things are the way they are, or not? If not, then you’ve just got to deal with a senseless, mechanistic, nihilistic universe that was born by chance, became what it is by chance, you were born by chance, and you and the universe will also eventually cease to be by chance. So it may be amusing to see how it all works, but there’s no great purpose or destiny or path or reason for anything to be discovered. You just have to take the world for what it is, because there’s nothing else it’s supposed to or could be. We can describe the way it works, but there’s no intention, it’s not for anything. It just is, and what it is and what happens in it is the result of arbitrary forces that have no explanation. They have a description, but no explanation. Because explanation implies intention, and blind physical forces have no intentions.
I couldn’t be honest in my conversation with my daughter without admitting that that was one possible option. It’s a good explanation too, in its own way, because it covers all possible cases. You don’t need any other explanations, it doesn’t leave room for them. It’s very thorough, it has very large explanatory power and application, and it’s consistent. That makes it a good answer. It may not be a pleasant answer, but intellectually it’s compelling because of its thoroughness and consistency. And a lot of people have put work into finding a way to build a practical approach to life out of it (with mixed results, admittedly). And since it’s an explanantion she’s likely to hear a lot in her life, I wanted to make sure she didn’t dismiss it out of hand without considering its merits. I don’t think you can avoid nihilism, no matter what you believe. Because at some point you’re going to struggle with it, at least emotionally, even if you don’t assent to it intellectually (much as you will struggle emotionally with the need for meaning and purpose even if you intellectually conclude that there ultimately isn’t one). The tension between the dueling answers and reactions to that question are part of the fabric of human life.
My daughter, for her part, decided she wasn’t convinced by nihilism. Understandable. There aren’t a lot of child nihilists, especially among children who haven’t experienced a lot of arbitrary suffering. Among children who have been crushed and abused and psychologically and emotionally crippled by a hard and unforgiving world, you understandably find some more nihilistic perspectives. Suffering, especially apparently unjust or pointless suffering, often seems to us like a rebuke to the very idea of purpose or meaning in the universe itself. She finds the world to be full of goodness and meaning, so she isn’t putting much stock in nihilistic explanations. That’s understandable. So that’s brick one in her search for answers to life’s big questions.

Afterword:
Of course, you can argue that humans are just the sort of creatures whose success and thriving depends upon their ability to both see and comprehend the world and maintain their ability to believe in structures of meaning and purpose. That that’s our adaptation that allows us to survive and grow in power the way we do. We can see and understand the world, but we can also invent fictions and constructions of meaning that let us apply that knowledge in our own lives and cooperatively.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re true, only that they work and make us succeed, so we have to act as if they were true. We’re just the sort of creatures that need to act as though the world had meaning and purpose to build the kind of lives we build. In a way, that would make life a kind of cosmic joke on us, because we’re obligated to act in a way that doesn’t reflect true reality but is necessary for our life in that reality. It’s a joke in our favor, at least, you could argue. But our continuing success and mental stability depends on preserving those illusions/fictions/constructions.
I mean, we can gain all the scientific knowledge and power we like, but if we can’t operate as people, who have a fundamental need for meaning, relationships, intelligibility, justice, etc and exist primarily in a world of concepts and ideas and story and intelligence and purposes and intentions (in a physical world that often defies those needs and rebukes our search), then that doesn’t really get us anywhere. We still have to be functioning people to make use of any of that knowledge and power. We can’t live as functioning humans outside our world of intention and purpose. We need to be in that world to make use of our knowledge of the material world.
And so it’s at least possible that that conflict, between nihilism and meaningism, is inevitable, baked into what we are. And maybe nihilism is the true underlying reality, but we can never actually live in that reality without undoing what we are (and losing our primary advantage in that world). In which case, we’re presented with a world that we can never be truly honest with ourselves about, and that’s the joke. Maybe that’s just the sort of funny things we are.

It certainly dovetails with the history of philosophy. You’ve got the teleological view of the universe, then the rise of modernism and materialism, asserting that as the primary or true reality (motivated by the immense amounts of power understanding of the material world gained us and losing interest in what a teleological approach to the universe and ourselves gained us, which was really just a more stable and balanced soul/being), the hope that we could live without the teleological perspective (the world of mind and meaning) and just replace it with sonething built from the “real” foundation, the eventual collapse of those rationalistic efforts into skepticism, nihilism, and existentialism, and the eventual disillusionment with rationalism and the turn to post-modernism.
Rationalism failed to pay dividends for most people, so we built a sort of conscious illusion to replace it. Let’s enjoy the practical benefits of materialism, but let’s pretend and live in our actual lives like it’s not true. Let’s have a bifurcated approach to reality. We still have to live as people, inside the world of meaning, but we know it isn’t real. So let’s just find a way to live with that.
And I think that’s why in Europe there’s been a big return to magic and superstition. And in America there’s been a huge erosion of confidence in authority and big turn toward our modern versions of magic: psuedoscience, alternative medicine, spiritualism (in much less defined and structured forms) all the stuff that stands outside the traditional rationalistic and scientific structure and speaks more to our instinctive experience of life and thought.
It’s very understandable. People just haven’t been able to live in and make sense of the way they’re asked to live and think in the world the materialists, rationalists, and nihilists have given them. But they feel like they should, and they can’t deny all the results of the power the materialists have gained by their approach. So they’re trying to maintain a two level approach, paying lip service to one while living more in the other. And gradually they’re losing confidence even in the supposed power and benefits of materialism (partly because they’ve never had to live without them; it’s easy to assume you can skip medically treating your kids and use some nice smells instead if you’ve never been in the position of not living behind that wall of protection where you have no defenses and really need and want to know if there’s something that will really work).
And I don’t want to overstate the value of nihilism. Nihilism isn’t what gave us all these material benefits, it was a side effect, an unintended result. It’s the world of meaning, our belief in consistency and intention and intelligibility that made us capable of learning everything we did. Nihilism was the end result of the Enlightenment, not the source from which it sprang. And I also think nihilism is a natural emotional and intellectual reaction to the reality of suffering. We know from psychologists that the beliefs that nihilism and pure materialism engender tend to result in psychological dysfunction. And whether it’s true or not, if you want to escape from depression and isolation and uselessness, you often have to convince yourself, against your better judgment (or at least act like) those beliefs aren’t true. I know this from personal experience because I find nihilism terribly convincing. But it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, and it often results in depression. And often my intellectual side traps me in my depression because I’m able to argue my nihilistic viewpoint so convincingly to myself as being quite appropriate.

Buddhism itself is a kind of non-theistic post-modernism. It assumes that life is pain and that there’s no good explanation for it, that’s just what the world is, but on a practical level there are things we can do and choose to believe to avoid or remove that pain. So what do you want, a consistent explanation and understanding of the world that makes sense of why everything is the way it is, or do you want to feel better? And that’s what Buddha says he can provide, a way to live in this life of senseless pain that will make it more liveable and bearable. Buddhism didn’t need the enlightenment or scientific materialism to come to that same end, it got there purely on what people could already see and feel and understand on an elemental level.

So in that sense the rise of Western scientific thought isn’t really necessary for the subsequent movement to nihilism or post-modernism. Buddha (and frankly many others) got there way ahead of that. So you can get to post-modernism and nihilism without science qnd materialism, and you can get to science without nihilism and strict materialism (which we know because we did, they arose afterward in our modern rationalistic tradition). In fact the main consequence intellectually of strict materialism seems to be a self-defeating nihilism and schizophrenic post-modernism. So the result of the philosophies that science engendered has been the end of belief in science. Whereas the end result of teleological thought in the Western tradition was the university, philosophy, and science.

Teleology causes you, as a human, to grow and thrive and leads you to believe that the universe is consistent and ordered and intelligible, and so the philosophers sought to understand it and themselves. And so we got the whole Western tradition. Buddhism understandably did not lead to modern science because it presents the world as painful and arbitrary and incomprehensible and offers primarily a practicum for surviving it, not a theorum for making sense of it. That’s not to say Buddhism is wrong, only that such an outlook does not naturally lead to philosophy of a type that leads to modern scientific understanding.

One thing I wonder very much is whether our post-modernism will eventually collapse entirely into a new kind of restored pre-modernism. A genuine fading of rationalism and a return to the old pagan days. We are in our private lives, but it’s hard to say if we’ll keep at it consistently enough to erode our big institutions. One of the key differences between pagan ideas about the world and the Jude-Christian/Greek philosophical tradition that became dominant over them was a shift from a view of the world as cyclical and arbitrary to view of the world as procedural and intelligible. The pagan gods were very capricious, and humans were typically small playthings at the mercy of the whims of those gods. Time was a wheel that went round and round, repeating itself, grinding each generation away. In Eastern thought, life itself is a cycle of birth and rebirth even at an individual level. Why we’re born into that cycle isn’t clear; it’s just our fate.

Even the great heroes of the Iliad are ultimately just poor pawns in a capricious battle between the gods, and eventually they meet the same end as all who came before them, victims of unhappy accident and cruel fate. Odysseus, meeting his once great friend Achilles in the underworld, finds him despondent about the fate of mankind. Achilles is the greatest among the dead, but he laments that he would rather be a slave on Earth than a king in hades. All his heroism came to nothing in the end. Even if the gods are taken as symbolic (and they were, even then, by many people, some Platonic dialogues virtually assume it as the default position). But it is still the fate of mankind to live out the repetition of the cycle of being that those gods represent. Whether they’re literal or personal isn’t really the point. We’re still just pawns in the capricious war between the forces that the gods represent.

So life doesn’t give us great choices. It requires us to live in the world of teleology, but refuses to give us the answers we want in the material world. And when we encounter suffering and hardship and betrayal and chance and loss of meaning, our whole idea of the universe is shaken. Because the fundamental answers to our questions, why is the universe the way it is, is there a purpose, does my life have purpose, why are we born, and what happens when we die, can’t be discovered in the material realm. For all the amazing tools we have at our disposal for gathering scientific knowledge, knowledge about the world and ourselves, we live daily in a very different world of intentions and stories and concepts and ideas and purposes and meaning and information, none of which strictly exist in the material world. We can’t seem to quite comfortably unite the two so they form a consistent whole that preserves both. Usually we settle for reducing everything down to one or the other, or more schizophrenically trying to hold both uneasily in separate parts of our mind at the same time, a balancing act where we try to keep matter and antimatter separate, lest one eradicate the other.

The advantage of the split approach is we don’t have to fully submit ourselves to either and can enjoy the benefits of both. Or at least that seems to be the idea. I think it’s fully possible we share, rather, in the problems of both and contain within ourselves an inherent contradiction that is constantly threatening to make nonsense of both. But people are used to inconsistency. We easily switch hats to materialists when it suits us and dob the garb of mystics when it seems most convenient.

By not quite acknowledging supernature, we can maintain our independence and power. There’s nothing bigger than us we don’t understand or control that we have to submit to. We leave room for us to be god and judge our gods and fashion them as we wish, because they aren’t quite an objective reality, just a nice thing we entertain for our our amusement and pleasure and meaning.

By not quite acknowledging the hegemony of materialism, we leave room for ourselves to invent and immerse ourselves in our private meaning and a world of intelligence (that makes sense). Our lives are nihilistic, arbitrary, purposeless blips, accidents of physics, inevitable playacting of chemicals, life perpetuating life until it doesn’t. We can enjoy the metaphysical hauntings of love and truth and art and meaning that make up human life and indulge our instincts, even though we know on some level that they’re wrong and don’t give us real information about the world and its true nature, or ours.

It’s hard to say if this constitutes being the supermen of Nietszche or not. I think he would wish us to be more intentional, to properly face killing our gods and living with the consequences, to realize what it means, and then find a new way to live in whatever universe we find ourselves in. I think he would see post-modernism as the failure of the whole project, a failure to come up with a new life that results in the worship of a reanimated corpse puppet of God. I don’t think acting like God is dead so we can do what we want but needing to pretend like God isn’t dead so we can keep living our lives because we can’t survive otherwise really constitutes the victory of the overman. It’s a rather bloodless parody. And it’s hard to see it surviving long in the face of more red blooded philosophies that actually accept what they believe and have some conviction and are willing to submit themselves to their god, whether nature or supernature. Still, I could be wrong. Perhaps post-modernism is really the best of both worlds.

I do think I misunderstood Kierkegaard, or perhaps he was misrepresented to me. His ideas about nihilism as being essentially unavoidable and faith as the bridge the takes you beyond it once struck me ad very post-modern, in a bad way. Wishful thinking. Willful irrationality. But I think he was really just making a point about the nature of reality and human life. In life, you can’t escape the threat of nihilism, if you live long enough. Eventually you’ll see things that challenge the structures upon which your sane concepts of the universe are built, eventually you’ll find them tested and not be able to directly prove that you’re correct. You can’t really prove, in the best way, that you or anyone exists, that your life means anything, that goodness is goodness or beauty is beauty or that life really amounts to anything or is intelligible. It’s just not possible.

We’re not gods, so we can’t observe the world except from the tiny limited corner of our life and mind. And that corner itself is always changing and lacks permanence. We don’t have access to the viewpoint that will let us see where our consciousness exists, where our ideas exist, where meaning exists, where nature and supernature touch. The Bible is quite clear that no one has seen God. No one has seen Plato’s forms. No one has seen the laws of logic. No one has seen a mind. We’ve seen a brain, we’ve experienced a mind by encountering it with our own. But we haven’t seen a mind. And we never will. They don’t exist in the same sense, in the same nature. I think Kierkegaard is just admitting this fact.

So how do we bridge the gap between what is seen and unseen? And his answer is: faith. Not irrational faith, because we do experience all these things, specifically in the realm of the mind and our actual existential experience. They rule and define our experience of existence as much or even more than our actual material existence, because it is only by them that we become aware of and learn about our material existence. But we cannot see them. Having used them to learn about our material existence, we become convinced that our existential experience is, in fact, dependent on our material existence, that it is ontologically prior if not epistemologically prior.

And we wonder, since the mind does not seem to exist, strictly, within the material, whether it exists at all or is not just some curious byproduct, an illusion. And we have no good way to prove that it isn’t. Because those things can’t be seen. So the question is, do we have confidence in what we cannot see? If we don’t, what then can we have confidence in, if what we cannot see is ultimately all we have and are? I cannot see myself or my knowledge and understanding except by my inner eye.

It’s quite a pickle. Kierkegaard, as well in their own way some existentialists, have characterized the solution as a leap, or a turn toward. We cannot make the bridging of the gap necessary, inevitable, easy, a non-problem, because we cannot make the unseen seen. How then shall we trust any of the products of our consciousness? How shall we know whether we are any different from a madman, seeing ghosts and demons, inventing strange logics, and inhabiting an imaginary world? How are our ghosts and hauntings any different if they do no exist in the “real” world? How shall we sufficiently prove to ourselves the reality of any of the things upon which our sanity and happiness and meaning depend?

Kierkegaard and various existentialists try to offer some hope (being human and so cravenly unwilling to let go of such things). I have to take the argument of many existentialists as essentially being that we can fool ourselves into believing life is meaningful (and this is the postmodernist’s hope also). No, there is no meaning or purpose or sense in anything, but we can find and invent it even if it isn’t. It won’t be Meaning, but it might be meaning. And if you can just content yourself that that’s all there ever was (a private, temporary illusion to sustain a fragile, mortal creature through the burden of its conscious existence), then maybe you’ll feel fine about it.

I don’t think Kierkegaard is so skeptical, though. I think he does think that meaning is real, supernature is real, but because it can’t be seen we can’t resolve the question of its existence and nature the same way we would if it were something that could be plainly seen. We can approach it, experience it, theorize about it, deduce, question. But ultimately, it’s a thing that is unseen, so we must approach it by faith, by aligning our choice and confidence in how we approach life in alignment with it, trusting that it is, in fact, real and determinate of our existence. We really can’t prove we’re not a brain in a jar or living in a hologram or in a diabolical Cartesian illusion. I can’t even prove that 2+2=4 in a purely material sense (which is truly problematic). I don’t even understand and can’t see how I get from one moment to the next, how I proceed through time. But I do. And, as Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. Or at least seem to be. And he meant it in a purely non-material sense.

So faith, according the Keirkegaard, is something we all have and engage in constantly, whether we do so consciously or not. His experience of faith is simply that of faith that has become conscious, that has met its test and challenge and decided to endure in spite of that challenge.

Possibly the greatest challenge to regaining faith in our postmodern world is our own unwillingness to lose it.