Why You Won’t Find the Meaning of Life
The “meaning of life” business is booming despite the recession. After eviscerating Jim Holt’s new meaning-of-life tome in an Asia Times Online review, I felt sufficiently saturated with antibodies to watch Terrence Malick’s Oscar-nominated existential epic Tree of Life on pay-per-view. Giggles overcame me after about half an hour.
As G.K. Chesterton said (actually, he didn’t quite, but should have), if you stop believing in God, you’ll believe in anything. For all their self-righteous scientism, atheists turn into the soupiest spiritualists when it comes to problems like birth and death. Malick’s silly flick wants to project the problems of a 1950s Texas family onto a cosmological backdrop, with images of the birth of the universe, or whatever. It so pretentiously idiotic that I wrote off the $4.99 I had paid to Time Warner Cable in short order.
Woody Allen had it down pat in Antz. An ant on a couch tells an ant psychiatrist, “I feel so insignificant!,” to which the ant psychiatrist replies, “That’s a breakthrough. You are insignificant.” I’m not out to proselytize, but the choice is digital: either the Maker of Heaven loves you, which makes you significant, or the idea of a Creator God is as of the same ilk as Richard Dawkins’s Flying Spaghetti Monster, in which case you are insignificant. In the latter case, get over it.
A lot of people want to have it both ways. They don’t want to be religious (that is, to accept that God makes specific and serious demands on them) but to be “spiritual,” that is, to feel good about themselves without any sense of obligations. What unites Malick and Holt in their spiritual quest is a common starting point in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Before Malick was an auteur he was a philosopher, and published a university press translation of one of Heidegger’s books. Holt’s current book — no doubt a bestseller by now — begins with Heidegger’s famous question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” The trouble is that Holt doesn’t get the joke; he doesn’t even understand that it was a joke in the first place.
I don’t mean to spoil your morning by getting technical, but in case you care about the issues, they are summarized in my Asia Times Online review:
In the first pages of his new book, Jim Holt misquotes my old professor, Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser:
“Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?” a student asked him one day. To which Morgenbesser replied, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied.”
Morgenbesser actually said: “If there was nothing, you’d also complain.” There’s a world of difference, as we shall see, between “not being satisfied” and “complaining”. Part of the difference, of course, is the unmistakably Jewish irony directed at the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a member of the Nazi party. Heidegger’s famous question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” is the opening challenge of the German philosopher’s famous essay “What is Metaphysics?” and the jumping-off point for Holt’s peroration through the mysteries of Creation.
But there was a deeper point to Morgenbesser’s quip. To brandish Nothingness against Being is not an analytical procedure, but a complaint – specifically, the Devil’s complaint about Creation. Since the philosopher Parmenides taught a generation before Socrates, philosophers have confronted a paradox: We can neither think nor speak of “Nothing”, for the moment we employ the term, we are speaking or thinking about a thing, namely “nothing”. One can’t get at “Nothing” directly; one can only sneak up upon it through such things as boredom, violence and perversion.
As Holt quotes Heidegger:
“The question [of Nothing] looms in moments of great despair when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time. … The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems to hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.”
Every German schoolboy (but few American writers) would recognize in Heidegger the voice of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who tells Faust:
I am the spirit that denies!
And justly so; for all that time creates,
He does well who annihilates!
Better, it ne’er had had beginning;
And so, then, all that you call sinning,
Destruction, – all you pronounce ill-meant, -
Is my original element.Mephisto is a manifestation of the primal chaos which envies the light, and seeks in vain to restore this chaos:
That which at nothing the gauntlet has hurled,
This, what’s its name? this clumsy world,
So far as I have undertaken,
I have to own, remains unshaken
By wave, storm, earthquake, fiery brand.
Calm, after all, remain both sea and land.Faust observes that the Devil can do no harm in the large, and so engages in petty acts of destruction. “Go find something else to do, strange son of Chaos!” the philosopher scolds.
That is why Morgenbesser’s actual joke – “If there was nothing, you would also complain” – is as insightful as Mr Holt’s misquotation is misleading. Holt doesn’t get the joke; he doesn’t even understand that it is a joke to begin with. The question betrays the character of the questioner, both in the case of Heidegger and Holt. A predilection for Nothing is metaphysical nonsense, but it has an existential meaning: It is the complaint of the bored, the jaded, the jealous, the perverted against life. Goethe’s act of genius was to personify the metaphysical impossibility of Nothingness as a spiritual craving for Nothingness, in the stage personage of the Devil.
Heidegger’s accomplishment was to derive categories we usually associated with religion (“Dread,” “Care,” and so forth) from a purely secular framework, that is, an ersatz religion. Unlike Malick and Holt, Heidegger was as clever as he was corrupt morally. His existential solution was to join the Nazi party and promote Hitler as head of the University of Freiburg. To his credit, he wasn’t a particularly effective Nazi, but he never apologized. Heidegger knew perfectly well that he was playing the role of the Devil, who counterposes perversion and violence to creation.
It annoys me no end when the likes of Holt or Malick promote Heidegger’s existentialism to look for human significance in a universe without God. Yes, you can be spiritual without being religious, but if you are Martin Heidegger, then Adolf Hitler was your spiritual compass. I don’t mean to suggest that all the Heideggerians are bourgeois-bohemian Brownshirts — of course not. There’s nothing in this sort of vapid spirituality, though, to discourage you from becoming whatever you feel like being, including a Nazi, as Heidegger’s own sad case attests. No, I am not accusing the born-again Heideggerians of being crypto-Nazis, just of being silly and boring and incompetent.
For those of you who are looking for the meaning of life: You won’t find it, and the proof that you won’t find it is that you are looking for it, as I demonstrated here. Join a bowling league, learn stir-fry cooking, or build model cars instead.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
- Dennis Prager on Higgs Boson: ‘Only If There is a God Does Their Discovery Matter’
- What is the Definition of God?
- 6 Varieties of the Agnostic Experience
Image courtesy shutterstock / Alfonso de Tomas
A bad movie by a non-theist is not an argument for the existence of God – although I suppose it’s as good an argument as any other. Rather than lumping all atheists in with some incompetent film maker, take a look at some atheist advocacy, such as God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens or even Penn Jillette’s God, No. (I haven’t read Dawkins, but one need not read every book on atheism to understand there is no God.)
As the Woody Allen bit from Antz suggests, your significance is a matter of mental attitude not scientific fact. A psychiatrist is more likely to improve self-esteem than belief in a non-entity.
It is surprising how many conservatives, while being anti-authoritarian with respect to government, are willing to accept the unfathomable concept of an invisible, all powerful, all seeing, all knowing supreme being with a plan for your life. To quote John Stossel, “Give me a break!”
Look at it this way: if there is no God, then you have spiritual anarchy. American conservatives are anti-authoritarian, but that does not mean that they want government to be abolished, since the vacuum would just be filled by the most ruthless.
Just the same, if there is no God, then what is legal is what is moral. Humans decide laws, so that means might makes right. Just the same, humans — even powerful ones — are suggestible and corruptible (unlike God), so such an all-powerful government will escape its initial boundaries for whatever “greater good” it defines. If one can escape the security forces and get by without its benefits, then the atheist’s power is broken; their philosophy holds no force unless they expands their reach and try to amass more power so as to be inescapable.
But they will not take the place of God, since they are corruptible merely by being material beings, not perfectly just and fair.
Besides, the only punishments atheists can inflict are earthly ones, not eternal ones. That means a powerful atheist can get away with an awful lot of atrocities.
Your argument is flawed, in that it can be applied to a world with a God as easily as to a world without.
Or more accurately, a world with a God who doesn’t express Himself immediately with lightning bolts.
In case you don’t see it: a man is perfectly capable of sophistry to justify his worldly actions. If God does not immediately contradict him, then his sophistry must be correct!
“American conservatives are anti-authoritarian…”
American conservatives gladly took part in sending the American economy and government finances to hell by using authoritarian power to confiscate private wealth and use it for political purposes. Yes, Obama and the Democrats are far worse…but it would be a rather poor argument for conservatives to make, that because of their strong religious beliefs, they are less bad than the Democrats. Still bad, but not quite as much.
“…escape the security forces…Atheist power is broken…”
Uhhhh…..sorry to disappoint you, but their is no atheist conspiracy trying to take over the world. We really don’t care what you believe…I’m not kidding, we truly don’t care.
“Besides, the only punishments Atheists can inflict are earthly ones…”
That is small comfort when you are being tortured. Also, religious tyrants do it all the time. This additionally implies that religious tyrants can inflict eternal punishment as well as earthly punishment.
If you frequent this sight then you know that anytime the subject of God comes up in any way that there are those who REALLY REALLY do care that someone, anyone believes in God. The ad homonym attacks fly swiftly and furiously.
Lenin. Mao. Pol Pot. Please.
And Bob – Hitchens is merely the smartest of the new atheist quasi-intellectuals like Harris, Dawkins, et al. He’s still reliably wrong. Jillette? Meh. Lately he’s forgotten to even be entertaining.
Hitchen’s was, rather. presumably, he’s seeing the errors of his philosophy. Or not.
I came to peace with it this way:
I do not know if God is real. I am also a huge fan of astrophysics and cannot escape Einstein’s desire to “know the mind of God”. Is it God the creator of everything? Or God the creator of man, which, by extension, if He’s the creator of everything, he is therefore also the creator of man by default.
However, as science progresses, and I still think physicists are pretty good at self-critiquing, at least, based on the many articles I’ve read and shows I’ve watched, and I don’t think they categorically dismiss a Creator of some kind.
We have learned, fairly recently, that humans are all the products…that is, we possess all the ingredients made by the explosions of certain types of stars known as novae and supernovae. Certain elements are made only in those events…most in fact.
But more to the tangible, I have found myself at odds with the notion of a Creator but have found the Bible to be a very good guide on human behavior and how to cope and how to be content, as well as how the law should be written and administered. The ten commandments is a very good foundation though it has been argued that they are older than the story as told in the Old Testament. To that I simply say, “So what? It doesn’t diminish their validity to me”. If they were given to Moses by God, so be it. If they were first written by ancient Egyptians and adopted by Christians, that’s fine too. I’d like to think they were handed to Moses because it has a certain elegance to it but regardless of how they were adopted by the faith, they are very good guidelines. Very.
The stories as told in the bible are, to me, the best morality examples there can be. So much so that in the 1960′s TV sitcoms like The Andy Griffith Show would paraphrase them with a brief, homey, folksy half-hour version.
The clay-mation series “Davy and Goliath” also did that but more directly and intentionally, of course. I can’t see the harm in that.
But at the very base of it, I also find that national socialists disregard traditional law and think themselves superior and thus, ignore certain laws while demanding specialized versions of other ones. This is arrogant and brutish. I think it’s also juvenile. When you ask a leftist, “What’s wrong with the existing law?”, they will expound til the sun burns out about this detail and that. But when you explain that the law already covers it, they get fussy and start vibrating.
Yeah, maybe the bible is the word of God and who am I to deny it? I really wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to say it’s not. But at the same time, denying it to be His word doesn’t obviate its validity in society. There is something in there for all and our system of laws isn’t said to be based on Judeo-Christian sensibilities for nothing. But again, this is where leftists have trouble.
They deny the law based in true justice and fair treatment and want all laws to have catacombs and blind corridors to confuse and decoy. They detest the simplicity of “Thou shalt not kill” as they complain about “conditions”. Further guidance can be found in the bible. The basic concept is simple enough. Strangely, while they want to behead Bush, they claim the moral superiority to have fish and trees and lizards a place over humans.
Moral relativism has been around as long as people have. The bible probably addresses it and I’ll have to speak to a bible scholar to get the right verse, or someone here will most likely provide it. I know I’ve heard it before. But, with no basis or solid footing to go by, the leftists seek to make morality an ambiguous concept.
So I say, I’ll stick to the teachings of the bible, thank you. It’s a very good guide and I’ve seen none better. The Constitution and Bill Of Rights simply outline that which is already established. Stray from it at your own peril…..and they have.
For me the best morality example is a leaf.
…”but one need not read every book on atheism to understand there is no G-d.” Actually, that’s not my understanding, and I was brought up by atheists. ‘Comrade’ Mom came to Christ hours before meeting Him, with a visible, unmistakable joy taking place when asking Jesus to come into her broken, dying heart. In contrast, my father, a vigorous disbeliever and hedonist, wept moments before he left this world for the next.
Don’t want any “unfathomable concept of an invisible, all powerful, all seeing, all knowing supreme being with a plan for your life,” well, everyone has a choice whether or not to believe, “did G-d really say…” I guess you’ve made yours.
Good luck with that.
I can give you three quick arguments, two for the existence of God and one for the existence of an immaterial soul.
Kalaam Cosmological Argument:
1. Everything that begins to exist has an external cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe has an external cause.
#2 has quite strong scientific support, and has also philosophical arguments in favor of it. It is relatively uncontroversial. #1 is for me very persuasive, because if you deny it, then it would mean that anything can come into being, from nothing, with no cause. It’s the most successful assumption in the history of science, and Law of Biogenesis (life comes only from life) is a corollary to it. I don’t see any compelling reason to deny it, yet it is the most used route to escape the conclusion (“the universe came from nothing, by nothing and for no purpose” as one atheist philosopher put it).
Moral Argument:
1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore God exists.
Since you already accept #2 because of the all the evils that world religions have wrought, I’ll defend #1: I can see only three possibilities how morals could exist objectively (independent of the human mind, true whether or not anyone believes in them): moral platonism and the nature and will of God.
A few years ago I held to Moral platonism, now I don’t see it as a viable option: how “justice”, “good”, “evil”, “courage” and so forth could simply exist, as an abstract ideas floating somewhere? Secondly, if they exist that way, it’s wildly improbable that a blind process with no purpose or goal could produce beings (homo sapiens) that could behave according to these abstract objects? Thirdly, even if they exist, they have no binding power over human beings. In the end, it doesn’t matter if they exist or not, they have no enforcer. The classical form of theism holds that God is all-good, in addition to these other qualities you mentioned.
Free Will:
1. All material things are bound by the laws of physics.
2. All existing things are made of matter.
3. I exist.
4. Therefore (by #2 & #3) I’m made of matter.
5. Therefore (by #4 & #1) I’m bound by the laws of physics.
6. If I’m bound by the laws of physics I have no free will
7. Therefore I have no free will.
So, a materialist concept of human beings seems to deny the existence of free will, which is absurd. It is almost at par with denying that I exist. The denial of free will also makes it impossible to make moral demands, due to the “ought implies can” problem (If I cannot do it, I’m not obligated to do it, and determinism denies that I can make a choice on the matter, removing all moral obligations). I really like to affirm that I exist, and #1 seems too plausible to deny, so I relax #2 and say that I have an immaterial soul that is not subjugated to the laws of physics, giving me libertarian free will.
With #5, it doesn’t matter whether your concept of the laws of physics is deterministic or indeterministic: a free choice means that you can choose between A and not-A independently of external causes, determinism means that previous states determine your actions and indeterminism means that we cannot know which you will take, and you’re not making the decision anyway.
There are other arguments made by people much smarter than me. Of course, I don’t expect that you’re convinced by these, because in most cases people don’t come to God on the basis of arguments. This post is only to make the case, that God is an option for thinking people, and desire for hope, meaning, purpose and love should be the reason why people seek God.
Advocating smaller or limited government is not anti-authoratative. It is more like this: It is hot outside. Do you want to wear a shirt, a sweater, or a coat?
This is a peculiar interpretation of Heidegger: “Heidegger’s accomplishment was to derive categories we usually associated with religion (‘Dread,’ ‘Care,’ and so forth) from a purely secular framework, that is, an ersatz religion.”
Heidegger discusses those moods in a few places (some sections of Being and Time, and he discussed the mood of boredom in a course a couple years later), a small fraction of his complete works. When I look at the secondary literature on Heidegger, the authors are interested in Heidegger’s comments on ontology, technology, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, and others. I haven’t come across anyone using Heidegger to propose a secular religion. They might be out there, but they’re not in the top 100 books about Heidegger sold by Amazon.
We all know Heidegger was a Nazi, but I don’t know anyone that reads him for his political insights. Heidegger is primarily studied for his original work on ontology. To dispute Heidegger’s contributions to philosophy because of his political affiliations, is like denying the uncertainty principle because Heisenberg tried to make an a-bomb for Hitler. One deplores their behavior, but ad hominem attacks on their science or philosophy only tell us about the attacker, and nothing about their work,
Malick was an early translator of Heidegger, before he went into film, four decades ago. I’ve been a fan of his movies for years, but I have not found a single place where he, or anyone who has worked with him, mentions his intent to “promote Heidegger’s existentialism to look for human significance in a universe without God.”
In the AT article, you confuse Heidegger’s lecture “What is Metaphysics?” with his Introduction to Metaphysics course. It’s the latter that starts with Holt’s question. Holt has the facts right, you have them wrong.
You create a straw man, and then attack it. How silly, boring or incompetent is that?
I reviewed a bit about Heidegger on Wikipedia (I know, I know) before writing this comment. He clearly wasn’t a moral man, having affairs and so on, ergo, no wonder he made nice with the Nazis. (It wasn’t impossible for him to refute and repudiate them, even if he were an adulterer–but I think it clearly less likely.)
He said he tried to save the university, and that was why he became a Nazi (this was a part of the reason he became a Nazi) but obviously, he was a clever fellow who played both ends against the middle, and (more or less) lived till he died. God will sort him out, of course–we don’t have to.
I do know that Heidegger said of language that it was the “House of Being”, and I think that quite significant. Our culture is swamped with the callous, cruel, and quite often obscene language we see in our “popular” films and music.
So our “House of Being”, linguistically, seems to be the House of Hell, otherwise known as the Kingdom of Noise–an apt description of so much of our modern culture.
An Préachán
Why is it we need to define the meaning of Life. Its hard enough to provide security, safety and peace for your family, to insure your word and actions do not betray yourself or your friends, to assist the people around you that need it, to look after the ill and incarcerated, to instill values in your children, and stand against tyranny and injustice.
If an individual is actively involved in LIFE, the meaning is self evident.
Exactly. And it is through engagement with life that we see God. It is immediate and unthought. Thinking begins to cloud the perception, and while it satisfies the mind, it is not a pure experience of God. I plant a seed in the ground. I look at the sky to see if it will rain. I brush my grandaughter’s hair. I nail a board to a post. I feed the dog. All these are like prayer, because they connect us to God. If we try to define Him, He recedes and becomes an idol. The atheists believe that God is something we thought up and therefore they say we worship and idol. But the knowledge of God came before there was ever a theology of Him.
Conceptual meaning cannot exist or be perceived without life. So it’s a trick question. Without life there is no meaning.
No need to duck.
So far over your head, there was no chance of you ever being hit in the head with the point of the film.
But to then go on and prove your ignorance by snarking against something you didn’t even come close to having a clue about, that is the real arrogant foolishness.
What is the meaning of the color blue?
What is the meaning of the letter “M”?
What is the meaning of life?
As they stand, these are all peculiar questions, or, more correctly, are not even questions at all. By assigning context we might turn them into legitimate questions. For instance I might tell you that if I tape a large letter “A” to my door that means you are free to enter, but if I tape up an “M” you are to leave at once without even knocking.
With the question, “What is the meaning of life?” it becomes more difficult to place it in a context that would give it meaning. That’s not to say it couldn’t be done, though it’s highly unlikely that this would be a metaphysical context. To ask the question, as is often done, with no context at all is to do nothing more than make sounds with our mouth or make marks on paper while simultaneously falsely believing that we are actually asking a question.
Existentialist and Heidegger argued the primacy of non-existence, and that existence is a subjective, irrational product of the human mind. Rand successfully argued this line of “thinking” perpetuates a logical fallacy–she termed it a stolen concept. Non-existence only has meaning as the absence of existence. That is, the concept of non-existence rests on the reality of existence and the concept of existence. So how can existence, therefore, not exist in reality within the context of the argument. Widespread academic acceptance of such baloney indicated the death of modern philosophy and the rejection of reason.
It is not such a stretch to see the lack of rationality in Nazism–irrationality is its very core and depended upon a conscious rejection of rationality. Heidegger and other existentialist have a lot more to answer for than their passing Nazi dilettantism. Malick should be ashamed to associate himself with a philosophy that perpetrated such evil.
We perceive God because we see that there is order in the universe. How could there be order in the universe if there were no God? The human mind cannot conceive of utter disorder. If you try, you will also perceive yourself in the foreground observing it, therefore there is order even there. Therefore we acknowledge the existence of God. The next step is to try to know Him. “God, are you there?” So we have religion.
The best book by far about the meaning of life is the book “Seth Speaks” by Jane Roberts. Forget everything else.
Actually if you really are interested in finding our real place in the universe there is a new book out at Amazon Kindle (short easy read) that’s called Mary in the Window: The New Book of Mary Magdalene. Interesting read about supposed revelations from someone who was visited by Mary and he points out exactly the same thing, we really don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of the Universe.
Without God – the Judeo-Christian God – then life has no meaning. If there is no creator then the natural world has no purpose or meaning. If there is no entity outside of the natural world to define the natural world, then that natural world has no meaning. Mankind cannot discern the meaning of life because he is part of the system and the syttem itself does not provide its own meaning.
As Jean Paul Sartre once said: Without a fixed reference point, all other points are meaningless.
Man cannot find the meaning of life in himself. However, God has revealed the meaning of life to the world through the Bible.
It’s interesting that you choose to quote Jean Paul Sartre, an atheist Marxist, in your argument to “prove” the existence of God. Satre said we are “free” because there is no God to direct or prescibe our actions. He was right in that regard, but I never understood why he believed in Marxism. The fact is that there is no necessary connection between atheism and collectivism. See, e.g., Ayn Rand for more on this point.
There is no God. In fact, those who say they believe in God have to resort to nonsensical abstract concepts such as all knowing, all seeing, all caring, omnipotent, creator of the universe out of nothing, etc. No one really can conceive of any of these things, let along explain them to others. (We can imagine knowing/seeing/doing anything but not knowing/seeing/doing everything.) Now days, more people posit some type of vague “God,” saying He is love, feelings, consciousness, etc. Just more nonsense. Love is love, and the idea that some omnipotent being “loves me” makes no more logical sense than suggesting a person could “love” a microbe or an ameoba.
The universe is both organized and chaotic. The existence of organization does not prove God any more than the existence of chaos disproves God.
We should believe in that which we can verify through our senses and intellect – not some fuzzy concept we can’t even articulate with terms anyone can really understand.
“Love is love, and the idea that some omnipotent being “loves me” makes no more logical sense than suggesting a person could “love” a microbe or an ameoba.”
Theists believe God is a person. Love is always a personal relationship, so your point about “loving” a microbe is well taken. You may have a hard time understanding why God should love you specifically, but that’s not a weak objection. Well, he does, if you give Him a chance.
“We should believe in that which we can verify through our senses and intellect – not some fuzzy concept we can’t even articulate with terms anyone can really understand.”
Just for your information (and to other atheists who have a superiority complex with regard to epistemology), logical positivism is dead. Verification principle cuts away too much “legit” knowledge (historical, non-experimental sciences) and theorising (history of the electron, “we cannot really posit an entity that we cannot even in principle observe” “if it makes sense of the observations and predictions of electromagnetism we should try that route”, today’s example would be dark matter/energy which cannot be observed directly but a good argument can be made for them) and is self-defeating. Point that principle towards itself: how can you verify trough your senses that the verification principle is true? Of course you cannot. What we should say is that experimental sciences are good and proper ways of getting knowledge, but they are not the only ways.
On Sartre, he was struck by the existential aspects of atheism: no Good or Evil, no purpose, no meaning. He could not live that way (because no human being can), so he chose to believe in Marxism, not because it was “better” or “worse”. Many people absolutise politics or science, because human beings have to “believe in something”. Read The Plague by Albert Camus, or The Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostoyevsky. Both are serious books about the existence of evil and purpose.
I quote Sartre exactly for the reasons you mention. He – as the article mentioned – was a existentialist but even he realized that without an outside point of reference then their was ultimately no meaning.
As to Sartre and the concept of being “free”: Whether he believes in God or no, man is not free. Whether I believe in gravity or not is irrelevant. If I jump off a building gravity will still overrule my demand for freedom.
In another vein,how is man free? Is man free to choose his own actions? Modern science, psychology, and sociology will argue against that point.
God is incomprehensible. That is the point of being God. His love is even more incomprehensible, which makes it all the more wonderful.
As to chaos and cosmos (order), God created the universe ex nihlo (out of nothing). He created order and disorder.
God is very articulate in His revealed Word. He does not explain everything but His Word is sufficient for man. The created cannot always fathom the Creator.
Glad you have a supply of anti-bodies, enough to risk your sanity watching securlar salvation suggestions. Your adventure reminds me of an errant, viz., terribly mixed up period of my life. At that time I visited such gurus of all types in a typical university town and that meants full of students wanting to believe anything (particularly sexy), except in transcendence. Well, I bit into that apple and noticed it was strangely chewy. There was a worm in it and in my mouth (that did literally happen once as a child), all of which I took as “divine” proof that apple biting is dumb, although postmodern.
There is a literal sense latent in Woody Allen’s humorous uttering. Relative to the divine infinity, we finite beings are truely “insignicant”. And that might be the beginning, from our side, of salvation. But salvation is not our work, even if we may cooperate. If an apple must be used as imagery, then it is golden. Your previous references to a “covenant” indicates a way beyond all other ways, even the way of the Tao.
The Judeo-Christian god does not come into existence until just a few thousand years ago…before that are ten thousand years of Mystery and pagan religions. The biggest source of Judeo Christian belief is Zoroasterism, from which is borrowed mono theism, angels, good and bad cosmic forces in battle, the Devil and judgement day. There are stories borrowed from Phoenician culture about floods and rituals, incorporated into Old Testament, which then spills into the new Testament. Today’s religions evolve over time, but their beginnings are in the heavens.
Since ancient times we observed stars and heavens and for good reason; it is how we navigated (and still do) from one location to another, told us when to plant crops, told us when winter would arrive and lead into springtime. We honored the stars and planets and respected their movements since our lives and existence depended on understanding them.
Over time we added labels and named them, personalized their movements, labeled times and seasons. We developed complex societies, which fed a need for more complex religious beliefs and rituals, which expanded to include morals and ethics, and attributed them to god.
This can all be traced from our earliest astrological achievements tens of thousands of years ago and evolved into religious beliefs we see around us today.
The meaning of life is no different today than when earliest ancestors brushed their children’s hair and made sure they understood movements of stars and planets so they could be fed and kept warm. We look to the heavens for answers because that is where answers were found the last hundred thousand years.
I would urge you to read “Eternity in their Hearts” by Don Richardson. He makes a very strong case that monotheism is the base religion in every culture. Even those people who have added and believe in a pantheon of gods acknowledge that there is only one creator God. The Greeks knew Him as the “unknown god” which opened a door for Paul to introduce Him to them. Unfortunately the most common view of God among Christians looks a lot like the ethereal impersonal unknown god of the Greeks than the Living God of Scripture. “All we like sheep have gone astray.”
The existence of many religions does not mean that all of them are false. Does not follow logically, and if this is question begging then your argument is valid but you’re not convincing others.
There has been many different forms of atheism over the years. They are not compatible with each other, so there must be God. I like the conclusion of that argument, so much that I smuggled the premise onto the comma.
# 14 alex
“The Judeo-Christian god does not come into existence until just a few thousand years ago…before that are ten thousand years of Mystery and pagan religions.”
And your proof for that statement is…????
Dear Mike 2, I have introduced my “exalted” status as a retired professor of philosophy, not for you, rather in order to communicate the wrath of my professional disdain to Alex and those who argue as he does. He has failed to make the simplest of distinctions and used this failure to set a trap for you. That is either dishonest or ignorant, neither of which I find acceptable. I will be as succint as I can. The space of a comment allows no adequate disertation!!
Failed distinction: The ontological status of a reality vs. the temporal moment of its appearance in history for some people. The God of Judeo-Christian religion is, conceived by philosophizing theologians, infinite, eternal and transcendent of all finitude, hence also of time. The very BEING of an infinite reality, whom we name “God” (actually both Judaism and Chrisitianity use different terms at different times, though meaning the same) is not historical, and per definition! Now to the other side of the distinction:
At some POINT in time this God opened himself (called revelation) to some humans as the God of their people, the Jews, if said people accepts and holds to a “covenant”. The founding of said “covenant” was an appearance of the Infinite Divinity into history and is the source of Judeo-religion. Said “point in time” is open to historical research which can establish when the God of the Covenant came to appear historically FOR his chosen people. Although, sloppy in use, one can metaphorically speak of the coming to be of God’s “existence”. On reflection, although term is poorly used to refer to the time when Jews (or would it be better to say “Hebrews”?) responded to said revelation.
The Christian religion has also its starting at a POINT in history with the appearance of the Incarnation in Jewish/Roman history leading to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. This HISTORICAL deed extends the “covenant” relation to God to a universalized “People of God”. Christianity begins in Judaism and the common starting point is the “covenant”. Because of this generative relation, I prefer to speak of the Judeo->Christian God. Christian theologians through the ages have philosophically conceived God as eternal, infinite, etc., i.e. as ahistorical. This is the common ontology of God. But, of importance for Alex’s education, the God of Chrisitanity as appearance in history too can loosely be said to have come into (historical) “existence”, however much the expression is misleading.
The notion of the coming into “existence” of the Judeo->Christian God reflects a poor philosophical usage by Alex leading to a deceptive formulation of the problem and causing you, Mike 2, unnecessary woe. If Alex does not agree with my wrath directed at him, let him answer my critique. If no answer is forthcoming, I hope that indicates that Alex will drop that part of his objections to the appearance of the Judeo->Christian God.
For those of finer thought, I am aware of the difference between Jews and Christians in their respective conceptualizations of God. I insist here, in opposition to Alex’s false historization, only in the eternal, infinite and transcendent BEING of God as shared by both religions.
Professor, alex has also made a false statement in the light both of history and the traditions of many peoples all over this world. The Bible clearly identifies God as the Creator of all things. There was none before Him. Most peoples around the world have a tradition of a creator and that this world is a creation. These traditions go way back into the mists of time. For example, every Native American group that I am familiar with has in its tradition a creator of all things. Most other indigenous peoples around the world have the same tradition in one form or another. You make a good point about revelation.
Yes, Hegel’s way of expressing this was that the love of nothingness is a manifestation of the “unhappy consciousness,” from Plato to Descartes and more recently and openly to Nietzsche. Even if they succeed in annihilating all of being they will not be happy because their longing for annihilation is rooted in unhappiness itself.
I liked Woody Allen’s movie, “Crimes and Misdemeanors”.
Also, Groundhog Day has apparently been the subject of more sermons from more denominations than any other movie (http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228088/movie-all-time/jonah-goldberg). One analysis sees the groundhog as a stand in for Jesus. One doesn’t find that in Cecil B. DeMille.
“Join a bowling league, learn stir-fry cooking, or build model cars instead.” I would also add to that list listening to Mozart all day, which I do everyday. Thanks Mr. Goldman.
Life mostly sucks and then we die.There is no god,the universe’s mechanisms are a farcical stew of pointless and endless catastrophic events;institutions are prostitutions;history a record of injustice war and massacre; and human beings, especially progressives,latent totalitarian filth. However, all is not lost;living without god means no legitimacy for anything, which empowers us to a frightening degree.Without divine sanction laws and social conventions are contingent only on our assent and cooperation(which amounts to fear of social/state punishment).Without god there is no master;this means that there is no real legitimacy for the existence of government and society,which can be seen as a stage for continuing the abuse and oppression of corrupt dominant groups.That’s why our”culture” constantly attempts to find meaning through such farces as existentialism and equality,social justice and the “arts”because these frauds obfuscate the issue,preventing a salutory mass nihilism from taking root and blowing up this sewer of a society sky high.When god is dead;everything is possible,including cutting the throat of the oppressor: whether an abusive boss,husband,wife,bureaucrat,government thug crony capitalist,teacher priest,politician,CEO,and other corrupt authority figures.Better to distract people by encouraging them to look for nonexistent meaning instead of finding liberation through random acts of targeted, justifiable violence.Besides, there is no profit in real nihilism(as oppossed to faux nihilism like post modernism)therefore,let’s propagate the fantasies of hope and meaning,and let’s keepthe plutocracy making money and money is the true religion of society.Blood trumps money however, as Spengler said,and when the individual’s desire for vengeance and justice becomes empowered by the realization that death is as pointless and absurd as the other cosmic pheomena the fear of death,will lessen, God and meaning will truly die,and people will discover that blowing up society and those who control it is a lot more satisfying than enjoying a nice pot roast;when that happens Everything will truly become possible!
[em]when the individual’s desire for vengeance and justice becomes empowered by the realization that death is as pointless and absurd as the other cosmic pheomena the fear of death,will lessen, God and meaning will truly die,and people will discover that blowing up society and those who control it is a lot more satisfying than enjoying a nice pot roast;when that happens Everything will truly become possible![/em]
Um, somebody might want to keep an eye on deguello…
If you can believe in God you can believe in anything.
Yeah, Jill. We all know the only things that exist are things we can perceive.
I’m not out to proselytize, but the choice is digital: either the Maker of Heaven loves you, which makes you significant, or the idea of a Creator God is as of the same ilk as Richard Dawkins’s Flying Spaghetti Monster, in which case you are insignificant.
Binary is a better word here, cuz you can trade in zeros and ones without electricity. Just look at Abraham, he started the whole thing nearly 4,000 years ago.
***
Secularists won’t admit it, but when you have a belief system built around a godhead, whether that God actually is up in the clouds sporting a long beard, flowing robes, harps and all that, he still exists. Imagine billions of Judeo-Christians, both alive and dead, both believers and the secularists among them who absorbed the belief system through culture, all looking up to the sky all at once, wondering, asking questions and giving themselves answers.
That’s God, and he exists.
My thermodynamics professor once asked us what was the color of water…
He also used to say often that science answers the how questions and not the why questions.
Something is better than nothing.
See? I can play at philosophy too. Although “Something is better than nothing” at least comports to the gut feeling I’ve had whenever I was in danger of falling into despair. Trust your gut. More philosophy. This is fun!
Spengler, you make me laugh, you make me sing!
I could not disagree with you more!
And especially not with the Holts and Malicks ‘selling their book’!
The priests, the professors, the philosophers- they are blind, they are ignorant, they couldn’t explain their way out of a wet paper bag- yet we turn to them in search of the most important questions?
I am increasingly grateful that I don’t speak University.
Useful in certain situations, true, but such techniques seem to hold the same trap as religious language. Like using a screwdriver to turn a nut.
The educated seem incapable of asking the most basic of questions.
So busy poring over incomprehensible tomes, searching for the secret knowledge, tying their pretzeled semantics into useless knots, unable to ask:
What is it we are seeing?
How does it work?
What is it’s function?
Whyfore: where does it go next?
I’m neither religious nor atheist, spiritual nor agnostic.
I am, by your lights, the dregs; castigate me as you will, milord,
but the Meaning of Life can be known.
It is simpler than you realize, and vast, vast.
We may not be able to know it, because of scope, but we CAN measure it.
It is quantifiable. Technological augument may also be possible. Telescopes merely magnify inherent talents, no?
So many confuse the issue, by speaking of two seperate phenomena- “God” and “Heaven” are my terms- as if they were the same thing.
They are not. These tapestries can be impossible to unravel, until we begin asking the mechanical questions posed above.
What you feel and speak of are quite real; however the descriptions are somewhat lacking. I seek to remedy that.
Such elusive concepts are not mere tricks of language or the brain;
forgive me, angry atheists, but I cannot condescend to the snobbery that every known culture has made the exact same mistakes about the exact same observations- gods, ghosts, spirits, heavens, hells, revelations- and that all of them simply ‘made it all up’. Or neural misfire, or whatever.
I can’t use such slippery abstracts as ‘God’, either,
although I do understand what you’re saying. It is in you.
Vague penumbra, unfortunately accomplish nothing but blatulation- itself a function.
I demand that the mechanisms be defined.
If we don’t know what it is and how it works,
then we are as blind and ignorant as both priests and professors;
they can’t explain how God works either. Or What he is. Or WHY.
It is knowable, and wondrous.
I hope to define the mechanics- like asking ‘why’ an engine works-
and I am so far behind.
Eviscerate me. Mock and scorn.
I AM insignificant, weak and ludicrous scum, a beggar-
yet our billions are like ants, each with but a drop of experience-
and those billions become an ocean of wisdom, with but one purpose: to bring life, vibrant and bright, to the emptiness.
You, dearest, are immortal- you will someday teach the suns to sing to one another on multiple harmonies, a divine Spark, leaping across the void, being cast upon the fertile worlds so that Life, glorius Life will seed!
Better to read “Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space” by Genz for something useful and insightful about nothingness, specifically, vacuum.
Of course, the book argues that a vacuum is not nothing!
The preposition that everything started from something external is a property of the human mental apparatus and our wet hardware. Frankly, 100,000 ill-structured words on the subject by an incomprehensible philosopher is not worthy of my time.
Neither offers much guidence on how to live one’s life.
We could always try Pascal’s Folly- you know, “Try lying”!
How did you get here? You were born.
But that’s really not what you want to know.
You’re looking for clues.
The real question is, What Next?
There is more, much, much more.
I just deleted a magnum opus going into great detail as to how death works- the physical mechanics, and why.
The answer to the Meaning of Life is found in “Where are we going?”
That answers what you’re doing here in the first place.
However, I don’t want to disrespect the privilege of Spengler’s forum.
Let me just repeat that there is much more. You’ll find out, soon enough.
Are you in for a treat! Well, most of you.
As to what God is, let me answer that briefly.
It’s a primate phenomenon, seperate from the bio-electromagnetic mechanics of life and death.
We are, after all, social ‘animals’. It is our deepest instinct.
As Frankel of Auschwitz said, to Belong is deeper than mere sex, power, money, or hunger. It underlays them, in fact. Where is my place?
We have all been babies. The first thing we respond to is faces.
We have all been children. We respond to parents, and adults.
We are all, here, adults. We must live with others.
Our deepest neural wiring is formed by this.
It is in our blood, our cells.
We put a voice, a Face, on this deep wiring.
We all wired, pretty much, in the same way.
We have stories that we may talk about these instincts.
We learn by stories.
Stories about people.
These stories guide us as we live together.
Stories about this deep something we feel moving us from inside.
Some, filled with feeling, see the Hand of the Increate in all things.
The Face of the the Father of the People: that is God.
‘God’ is another way of saying ‘my People’.
There was a reason all peoples have their own gods.
Of course he was the Highest. The Alpha of alphas.
He is the Aggregate of our group identity.
Another way to speak, in a simple way, of primate hierarchies.
Let us not be angry or confused.
They only speak of what is in them.
They simply use a different language; all one need do is translate.
Make it easy.
Whenever they say God, simply translate it as: my Herd.
The Herd loves you, the Herd will punish you!
It is the will of the Herd, we need the Herd.
The Heard made you, you will live on in the Herd.
See? Easy!
Nicely done: religionsalso the secular ones)are for sheeple.
Professor of quantum physics at Cambridge University, Dr. John Polkinghorne:
“Ladies and gentlemen…if you look at the early picoseconds of this universe and analyze just one contingent, the expansion and relation to the contraction, do you know how precise that had to be? It would be like taking aim at a one-square-inch object at the other end of the universe twenty billion light years away and hitting it bull’s eye. Gentlemen, there is no free lunch. Somebody has to pay.”
Dr. Frank Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University:
“When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them.”
We ALL offer ourselves as ‘sheeple’ to some ‘god’ of our choosing, everybody has an altar inside their heart devoted to something or someone. The difference is how it plays out, it will either sustain you or not. Just play your hunch, follow your own star, and hope you’ve put your money on the right ‘herd’ by the end of your life.
And allow the rest of us the same choice.
A hard, caustic tone to most of your columns, sir. You are a very bright man, but please add some compassion to the finger-shaking righteous pose.
An older and wiser man once told me
“Just do it,
Don’t ask impossible questions!”
Funny, because I am pretty sure that I do know the meaning of life. It is to grow, to mature, to become more tomorrow than I am today. Of course, this guy couldn’t figure it out because he doesn’t recognize our true purpose for life, which is to become children of God. But growing is something that every living thing does, at least until it dies. As animals, even if we are not growing taller, or fatter, our cells are continuing to reproduce, grow, and die. It is the very a scientist gives to life, whether single celled organisms, a plant, or something as complicated as a human being.