Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Do we exist?

The first paragraph of Paul Johnson's The Quest for God outlines the consequences of whether or not one believes in God.

"...If God does exist, and if in consequence we are called to another life when this one ends, a momentous set of consequences follows, which should affect every day, every moment almost, of our earthly existence. Our life then becomes a mere preparation for eternity and must be conducted throughout with our future in view. If, on the other hand, God does not exist, another momentous set of consequences follows. This life then becomes the only one we have, we have no duties or obligations except to ourselves, and we need weigh no other considerations except our own interests and pleasures..."

As clear and concise as this statement is, it omits an important consideration. Mere belief in a Supreme Power does not automatically assume the survival of the soul after death, nor does it automatically follow that the universe created by that Supreme Power has a moral dimension. As far as I know, only Christianity has built into its tenets the assumption that God is good, that He wishes us to be good, and that he gives us the choice of whether to be good or not. Thus we earn our place in his heavenly abode or we spurn it. Of course the underlying assumption is that there is such a thing as "good," and this assumption has been challenged in recent years by certain schools of philosophy.

The first chapter of Genesis presents a brief chronology of how God created the cosmos. It's a chronology not much at odds with current scientific convention. Both cosmologies postulate a sudden burst of creation far in the past in which time and space came into being, energy and matter following in its wake. Before that event there was neither time nor space, but a Singularity, in modern parlance, "And the earth was without form and void," as the bible puts it. The details of "The Big Bang," as it was dubbed by Frederick Hoyle, are subjects of debate, but if we interpret 'light' to be energy, and 'darkness' to be matter, then the statement that "God divided the light from the darkness" would only be objectionable to a scientist for its poetic nature and its lack of mathematical rigour. There is no room for poetry in modern science, while the Bible says little about mathematics, Genesis confining itself to a brief comment on the relationship of the heavens to the calendar.

But there is another creation story in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, the familiar one of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the serpent and so on. These chapters are more like a fable than a sober cosmology, with an even larger, a dominant poetic dimension. Does that mean we shouldn't take it seriously?

Interesting as it is, let's skip over the description of Eden and the rivers flowing out of Eden and concentrate on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is where the fable gets serious. In the midst of beauty and innocence is something else, something that doesn't really belong in such an idyllic paradise. Adam and Eve are enjoined by God not to eat the fruit of this tree or they will surely die. What could that word, 'death,' mean to beings who had no experience of it, who had no acquaintance with evil?

One is moved to ask why God put it there, and the answer is obvious. Without a knowledge of evil we can have no awareness of good. It is as if we have a moral singularity here.

At any rate, Adam and Eve chose to eat of the fruit, and it was that choice that exploded the singularity, the paradise where all was peace and harmony. Not until then the world that we know, the REAL world, where existence is a constant struggle, where death is never far away and is in any case inevitable, where we never really know what is around the next corner, actually comes into being. It is a hard world, our powers are insufficient to guarantee our safety, bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. As somebody once said life is like a movie where we have come in halfway through. We will never see the ending, but we have to figure out what's happening as quickly as possible... because we are in the movie. We are participants, not mere watchers on high. But it was through the choice of Adam and Eve to partake of that knowledge that caused the creation of the world we are all familiar with. They set it all in motion. God merely acceded to their wishes.

In modern science such a belief would be absurd, but in Platonic science it wasn't absurd at all. Platonists theorized a hierarchy of universes, all connected to each other and yet separate. Our universe is flawed, all things are imperfect copies of a more ideal state existing in a higher dimension. In our universe there is no such thing as a perfect triangle. All triangular things down below are imperfect copies of a perfect template in that higher dimension. Adam and Eve would fit into that sort of cosmology with no difficulty, as perfect templates of which we mortals are but poor copies.

Whether you believe in it or not, this system of thought has grandeur and beauty.

Naturally, as poor copies we must seek guidance to navigate through our brief spans, we seek ways of improving the odds of getting through it with our souls intact. Christianity proposes that there is a solution. As Aquinas put it in the introduction to the Shorter Summa, "...To restore man who had been laid low by sin, to the heights of divine glory, the Word of the eternal Father, although containing all things in His immensity, willed to become small." He took unto Himself our "littleness."

This is the fundamental belief of Christian doctrine, that God came to earth as a man, suffered and died for our sins, bearing a message of hope. Atheists of all ages reply that this is preposterous, yet this belief transformed the world.

Why did Christ come to earth? To redeem the choice made by Adam and Eve. And yet, I'm not sure if we have ever gotten that original story right. Not being a scholar, I'm on pretty weak ground here, but so what. My intent in all of these essays has been to show that belief in God, in an immortal soul, in a grander universe than what can be perceived by our senses is imminently reasonable, but so far I have not brought overt religious doctrine into the discussion, not wanting to outrage the sensitive souls of any atheists who might come across this blog. I guess it's time to cross the Rubicon, and now that I'm retired I hope to be more regular in my postings.

Getting back to Genesis, the implication is that it was the very decision of Adam and Eve to take on the knowledge of Good and Evil that caused the REAL world we know to come into being. This seems even more preposterous than the Gospels' account of a resurrection but I hope to show it is not unreasonable at all-- or at least it's no more unreasonable than the fact that we exist. Atheists always forget how preposterous that is.



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