Psychology Topic and Mode Rationale Assignment

The Universe Next Door

James W. Sire

Sire, J. W. (2020). The Universe Next Door. InterVarsity Press.  https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780830849390

The clock work universe Chapter 3

IF THEISM LASTED SO LONG, what could possibly have happened to undermine it? If it satisfactorily answered all our basic questions, provided a refuge for our fears and hope for our future, why did anything else come along? Answers to these questions can be given on many levels. The fact is that many forces operated to shatter the basic intellectual unity of the West.1

Deism developed, some say, as an attempt to bring unity out of a chaos of theological and philosophical discussion which in the seventeenth century became bogged down in interminable quarrels—even religious wars—over what began to seem even to the disputants like trivial questions. Perhaps John Milton had such questions in mind when he envisioned the fallen angels making an epic game of philosophical theology:

Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d

In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high

Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,

Fixt Fate, Free will, Foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.2

After decades of wearying discussion, Lutheran, Puritan, and Anglican divines might well have wished to look again at points of agreement. Deism to some extent is a response to this, though the direction such agreement took put deism rather beyond the limits of traditional Christianity.

Another factor in the development of deism was a change in the location of the authority for knowledge about the divine; it shifted from the special revelation found in Scripture to the presence of Reason, “the candle of God,” in the human mind or to intuition, “the inner light.”3 Why should such a shift in authority take place?

One of the reasons is especially ironic. It is linked with an implication of theism which, when it was discovered, was very successfully developed. Through the Middle Ages, due in part to the rather Platonic theory of knowledge that was held, the attention of theistic scholars and intellectuals was directed toward God. The idea was that knowers in some sense become what they know. And since one should become in some sense good and holy, one should study God. Theology was thus considered the queen of the sciences (which at that time simply meant knowledge), for theology was the science of God.

If people studied animals or plants or minerals (zoology, biology, chemistry, and physics), they were lowering themselves. This hierarchical view of reality is really more Platonic than theistic or Christian, because it picks up from Plato the notion that matter is somehow, if not evil, then at least irrational and certainly not good. Matter is something to be transcended, not to be understood.

But as more biblically oriented minds began to recognize, this is God’s world—all of it. And though it is a fallen world, it has been created by God and has value. It is indeed worth knowing and understanding. Furthermore, God is a rational God, and his universe is thus rational, orderly, knowable. Operating on this basis, scientists began investigating the form of the universe. A picture of God’s world began to emerge; it was seen to be like a huge, well-ordered mechanism, a giant clockwork, whose gears and levers meshed with perfect mechanical precision. Such a picture seemed both to arise from scientific inquiry and to prompt more inquiry and stimulate more discovery about the makeup of the universe. In other words, science as we now know it was born and was amazingly successful.

At the same time, of course, there were those who distrusted the findings of the scientists. The case of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is famous and, in a quite distorted form, is often cited today as proof of the antiscientific nature of Christian theism. In fact, Galileo as well as other Renaissance scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) held fully Christian worldviews.4 Moreover, in Bacon’s words, knowledge became power, power to manipulate and bring creation more fully under human dominion. This view is echoed in modern parlance by J. Bronowski: “I define science as the organization of our knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the hidden potential in nature.”5 If this way of obtaining knowledge about the universe was so successful, why not apply the same method to knowledge about God?

In Christian theism, of course, such a method was already given a role to play, for God was said to reveal himself in nature. The depth of content, however, that was conveyed in such general revelation was considered limited; much more was made known about God in special revelation. But deism denies that God can be known by revelation, by special acts of God’s self- expression in, for example, Scripture or the incarnation. Having cast out Aristotle as an authority in matters of science, deism began to cast out Scripture as an authority in theology and to allow only the application of “human” reason. As Peter Medawar says, “The 17th-century doctrine of the necessity of reason was slowly giving way to a belief in the sufficiency of reason.”6 Deism thus sees God only in “Nature,” by which was meant the system of the universe. And since the system of the universe is seen as a giant clockwork, God is seen as the clockmaker.

In some ways, we can say that limiting knowledge about God to general revelation is like finding that eating eggs for breakfast makes the morning go well, and then eating only eggs for breakfast (and maybe lunch and dinner too) for the rest of one’s life (which now unwittingly becomes rather shortened!). To be sure, theism assumes that we can know something about God from nature. But it also holds that there is much more to know than can be known from nature and that there are other ways to come to know.

BASIC DEISM

As Frederick Copleston explains, deism historically is not really a “school” of thought. In the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries more than a few thinkers came to be called deists or called themselves deists. These thinkers held a number of related views, but not all held every doctrine in common. John Locke (1632–1704), for example, did not reject the idea of revelation, but he did insist that human reason was to be used to judge it.7 Some cold deists, like Voltaire (1694–1778), were hostile to Christianity; some warm deists, like Locke, were not.8 Some, like Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), believed in the immortality of the soul; some did not. Some believed God left his creation to function on its own; some believed in providence. Some believed in a mildly personal God; others did not. So deists were much less united on basic issues than were theists.9 Moreover, as we will see later on, some forms of popular deism, such as moralistic therapeutic deism, are thought of by some people as fully Christian.

Still, it is helpful to think of deism as a system and to state that system in a relatively extreme form, for in that way we will be able to grasp the implications various “reductions” of theism were beginning to have in the eighteenth century. Naturalism, as we shall see, pushes these implications even further.

Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge. . . . Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.18

As in theism, the most important proposition regards the existence and character of God. Warm deism—such as that of Franklin, who confessed, “I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence” —retains enough sense of God’s personality that Franklin thought this God “ought to be worshipped.”10 But cold deism eliminates most features of personality God is said to display. He is only a transcendent force or energy, a Prime Mover or First Cause, a beginning to the otherwise infinite regress of past causes. But he is really not a he, though the personal pronoun remains in the language used about him. He does not care for his creation; he does not love it. He has no “personal” relationship to it at all. Certainly he did not become incarnate in Jesus. He is purely monotheistic. As Thomas Paine said, “The only idea man can affix to the name of God is first cause, the cause of all things.”11

A modern deist of sorts, Buckminster Fuller, expressed his faith this way: “I have faith in the integrity of the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call ‘God.’”12 But Fuller’s God is not a person to be worshiped, but merely an intellect or force to be recognized.

To the deist, then, God is distant, foreign, alien. The lonely state this leaves humanity in, however, was not seemingly felt by early deists. Almost two centuries passed before this implication was played out on the field of human emotions.

In cold deism the system of the universe is closed in two senses. First, it is closed to God’s reordering, for he is not “interested” in it. He merely brought it to be. Therefore, no miracles or events that reveal any special interests of God are possible. Any tampering or apparent tampering with the machinery of the universe would suggest that God had made a mistake in the original plan, and that would be beneath the dignity of an all-competent deity.

Second, the universe is closed to human reordering because it is locked up in a clocklike fashion. To be able to reorder the system, any human being alone or with others would have to be able to transcend it, get out of the chain of cause and effect. But this we cannot do. We should note, however, that this second implication is not much recognized by deists. Most continue to assume, as we all do apart from reflection, that we can act to change our environment.

To be sure, deists do not deny that humans are personal. Each of us has self-consciousness and, at least on first glance, self-determination. But these have to be seen in the light of human dimensions only. That is, as human beings we have no essential relation to God—as image to original—and thus we have no way to transcend the system in which we find ourselves.

Bishop François Fénelon (1651–1715), criticizing the deists of his day, wrote, “They credit themselves with acknowledging God as the creator whose wisdom is evident in his works; but according to them, God would be neither good nor wise if he had given man free will—that is, the power to sin, to turn away from his final goal, to reverse the order and be forever lost.”13 Fénelon put his finger on a major problem within deism: human beings have lost their ability to act significantly. If we cannot “reverse the order,” then we cannot be significant. We can only be puppets. If an individual has personality, it must then be a type that does not include the element of self-determination.

Deists, of course, recognize that human beings have intelligence (to be sure, they emphasize human reason), a sense of morality (deists are very interested in ethics), a capacity for community and for creativity. But none of these, while built into us as created beings, is grounded in God’s character. None has any special relationship to God; each is on its own.

Here there is a distinction between warm and cold deists. Deism is the historical result of the decay of robust Christian theism. That is, specific commitments and beliefs of traditional Christianity are gradually abandoned. The first and most significant belief to be eroded was the full personhood and trinitarian nature of God. Reducing God to a force or ultimate intelligence eventually had catastrophic results. In fact, as we shall see, not only naturalism but nihilism is the final result. Were the history of worldviews a matter of the immediate working out of rational implications of a change in the idea of the really real, a belief in an afterlife would have immediately disappeared. But it didn’t. Nor did a belief in morality; that took another century. So warm deists, those closest to Christian theists, persisted in the notion of an afterlife, and cold deists, those further away, did not.

In deism human reason becomes autonomous. That is, without relying on any revelation from the outside—no Scripture, no messages from God via living prophets or dreams and visions—human beings have the ability to know themselves, the universe, and even God. As John Locke put it, “Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason has nothing to do.”14

Because the universe is essentially as God created it, and because people have the intellectual capacity to understand the world around them, they can learn about God from a study of his universe. The Scriptures, as we saw above, give a basis for it, for the psalmist wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). Of course, theists too maintain that God has revealed himself in nature. But for a theist God has also revealed himself in words—in propositional, verbalized revelation to his prophets and the various biblical writers. And, Christian theists maintain, God has also revealed himself in his Son, Jesus—“the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). But for deists God does not communicate with people. No special revelation is necessary, and none has occurred.

Émile Bréhier, a historian of philosophy, sums up well the difference between deism and theism:

We see clearly that a new conception of man, wholly incompatible with the Christian faith, had been introduced: God the architect who produced and maintained a marvelous order in the universe had been discovered in nature, and there was no longer a place for the God of the Christian drama, the God who bestowed upon Adam “the power to sin and to reverse the order.” God was in nature and no longer in history; he was in the wonders analyzed by naturalists and biologists and no longer in the human conscience, with feelings of sin, disgrace, or grace that accompanied his presence; he had left man in charge of his own destiny.15

The God who was discovered by the deists was an architect, but not a lover or a judge or personal in any way. He was not one who acted in history. He simply had left the world alone. But humanity, while in one sense the maker of its own destiny, was yet locked into the closed system. Human freedom from God was not a freedom to anything; in fact, it was not a freedom at all.

One tension in deism is found at the opening of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732–1734). Pope writes,

Say first, of God above or man below,

What can we reason but from what we know?

Of man what see we but his station here

From which to reason, or to which refer?

Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known,

’Tis ours to trace him only in our own.16

These six lines state that we can know God only through studying the world around us. We learn from data and proceed from the specific to the general. Nothing is revealed to us outside that which we experience. Then Pope continues, He who through vast immensity can pierce,

See worlds on worlds compose one universe,

Observe how system into system runs,

What other planets circle other suns,

What varied being peoples ev’ry star,

May tell why heav’n has made us as we are.

But of this frame the bearings and the ties,

The strong connections, nice dependencies,

Gradations just, has thy pervading soul

Looked through? or can a part contain the whole?17

Pope assumes here a knowledge of God and of nature that is not capable of being gained by experience. He even admits this as he challenges us as readers on whether we really have “looked through” the universe and seen its clockwork. But if we haven’t seen it, then presumably neither has Pope. How then does Pope know it is a vast, all-ordered clockwork?

One can’t have it both ways. Either (1) all knowledge comes from experience and we, not being infinite, cannot know the system as a whole, or (2) some knowledge comes from another source—for example, from innate ideas built into us or from revelation from the outside. But Pope, like most deists, discounts revelation. So we have a tension in Pope’s epistemology. And it was just such tensions that made eighteenth-century deism an unstable worldview.

Deism’s ethics in general is founded on the notion that built into human nature is the capacity to sense the difference between good and evil. Human reason is not “fallen” as in Christian theism; so when it is employed by people of good will, it results in moral discernment. Of course, human beings are free not to do what they discern as good; evil then is a result of human beings not conforming to their inherent nature.18

So much for human good and evil. But what about natural evil? Natural events—floods, hurricanes, earthquakes—bring disaster, massive pain, and suffering to many. Deists do not consider either human reason or the universe itself to be “fallen.” Rather it is in its normal state. How, then, can the normal universe in which we experience so much tragedy still be good? Isn’t God, the omnipotent Creator, responsible for everything as it is? Doesn’t this world reflect either what God wants or what he is like? Is God, then, really good?

While it is probably unfair to charge deism itself with the confusion illustrated by Alexander Pope, it is instructive to see what can happen when the implications of deism are exposed. Pope writes:

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good;

And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.19

This position ends in destroying ethics. If whatever is is right, then there is no evil. Good becomes indistinguishable from evil. As Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) said, “If God exists, he must be the devil.” Or, worse luck, there must not be good at all. For without the ability to distinguish, there can be neither one nor the other, neither good nor evil. Ethics disappears.

It is surely necessary to point out that not all deists saw (or now see) that their assumptions entail Pope’s conclusions. Some felt, in fact, that Jesus’ ethical teachings were really natural law expressed in words. And, of course, the Sermon on the Mount does not contain anything like the proposition “Whatever is, is right.” A deeper study of the deists would, I believe, lead to the conclusion that these early deists simply were inconsistent and did not recognize it.

Alexander Pope himself is inconsistent, for while he held that whatever is is right, he also berated humanity for pride (which, if it is, must be right!).

In pride, in reas’ning pride our error lies;

All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.

Pride still aiming at blessed abodes;

Men would be angels, angels would be gods. . . .

And who but wishes to invert the laws

Of order sins against th’ Eternal Cause.20

For a person to think of himself more highly than he ought was pride. Pride was wrong, even a sin. Yet note: a sin not against a personal God but against the “Eternal Cause,” against a philosophic abstraction. Even the word sin takes on a new color in such a context. More important, however, the whole notion of sin must disappear if one holds on other grounds that whatever is, is right.

If deists were to be consistent to the clockmaker/clockwork metaphor, they would be little interested in history. As Bréhier has pointed out, they sought knowledge of God primarily in nature as understood in the growing content of natural science. The course of Jewish history as recorded in the Bible was largely dismissed as legend, at least partially because it insisted on God’s direct action on and among his chosen people. The accounts of both Testaments are filled with miracles. The deists say miracles can’t happen. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), for example, produced The Life and Morals of Jesus, better known as The Jefferson Bible. His popular version excluded narratives of all the miracles. By such a procedure the Bible became largely discounted as giving insight into God or human beings or, especially, the natural order. Jefferson became the judge of what could be true or worthy of belief. At best the biblical narratives were illustrations of divine law from which ethical principles could be derived. Then, too, H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768) attempted “to reconstruct the life and preaching of Jesus with the tools of critical history.”21 And John Toland (1670–1722) argued that Christianity was as old as creation; the gospel was a “republication” of the religion of nature. With views like those, even the specific acts of history are not important for true religion. The stress is on general rules. As Pope says, “The first Almighty Cause / Acts not by partial but by gen’ral laws.”22 God is quite uninterested in individual men and women or even whole peoples. Besides, the universe is closed, not open to his reordering at all.

Nonetheless intellectuals, historians, and philosophers with a basically deistic bent were, as Synnestvedt says, “fascinated by history.” He cites major works by seven major deistic scholars, including a History of England by David Hume (1711–1776), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), and Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794).23 All these “histories” are, of course, based totally on the autonomy of human reason; none of them appeal to perspectives derived from revelation. As a result they display a wide variety of interpretations of the meaning and significance of human events.

Because, unlike Christian theism, there is no orthodox deism, each deist is free to use reason, intuition, tradition, or whatever squares with his or her view of ultimate reality. Deists’ core commitments will thus reflect their personal passions or, in common parlance, what turns them on—the flourishing of their individual personal life, their family life, public life. Early deists such as Franklin and Jefferson took public welfare as a key commitment. Others like Paine combined their commitment to public life with a passion for their own personal freedom (and the freedom of everyone in the commonwealth) from the dictates of religion. But the more a deist becomes divorced from allegiance to a personal God, the less religious mores and traditional goals characterize their core commitments. As a result, societies themselves become more pluralistic and less socially cohesive. Thus the tie between deism as a worldview and freedom as a personal and social goal inspired the bloody violence of the French Revolution and spurred on the development of democracy and eventually the vast cultural diversification of American society. Each year the Western World, especially America, becomes more pluralistic than the year before.

MODERN DEISM

As can be seen from the above description, deism has not been a stable compound. The reasons for this are not hard to see. Deism is dependent on Christian theism for its affirmations. It is dependent on what it omits for its particular character. The first and most important loss was its rejection of the full personal character of God. God, in the minds of many in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, kept his omnipotence, his character as creator and, for the most part, his omniscience, but he lost his omnipresence (his intimate connection with and interest in his creation). Eventually he lost even his will, becoming a mere abstract intelligent force, providing a sufficient reason for the existence of the universe whose origin otherwise could not be explained. The spectrum from full personality to sheer abstraction is represented by a variety of deistic types. We have already noticed the differences between warm and cold deism as represented by early deists. Now we will examine some modern forms and introduce new labels for them: (1) sophisticated scientific deism, (2) sophisticated philosophic deism, and (3) popular deism of which moralistic therapeutic deism is a particular illustration.

Sophisticated scientific deism. A cold deism continues to thrive in some scientists and a few humanists in academic centers across the world. Scientists like Albert Einstein, who “see” a higher power at work in or behind the universe and want to maintain reason in a created world, can be considered deists at heart, though no doubt many would not wish to claim anything sounding quite so much like a philosophy of life.24

It’s hard for me to believe that everything out there is just an accident. . . . [Yet] I don’t have any religious belief. I don’t believe that there is a God. I don’t believe in Christianity or Judaism or anything like that, okay? I’m not an atheist. . . . I’m not an agnostic. . . . I’m just in a simple state. I don’t know what there is or might be. . . . But on the other hand, what I can say is that it seems likely to me that this particular universe we have is a consequence of something which I would call intelligent.

Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking also leaves room for a deistic God. The fundamental laws of the universe “may have originally been decreed by God,” he writes, “but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it.”25 His rejection of a theistic God is clear. Actress and New Age leader Shirley MacLaine once asked Hawking if there is a God who “created the universe and guides his creation.” “No,” he replied simply in his computer-generated voice.26 After all, if the universe is “self-contained, having no boundary or edge,” as Hawking suspects is true, then there is no need for a Creator; God becomes superfluous.27 Hawking therefore uses “the term God as the embodiment of the laws of physics.”28 Hawking is not alone among scientists and other intellectuals in holding such a view.29

Sophisticated philosophic deism. In 2004 Antony Flew (who died in 2010), a long-time vocal atheist and opponent of Christian theism, declared himself a deist. His change of mind came from his growing sense that a variety of arguments, from those of Aristotle to the fine-tuning of the universe, are really compelling. As he put it, “he simply had to go where the evidence led.”30 God, for Flew, has most of the “classical theological attributes.” Though he rejects the notion of special revelation from this God, he is open to its possibility. The authenticity of this move by such a formerly convinced atheist has been questioned, but the evidence for it is rock solid.31

One of the clearest exponents of a more humanistic warm deism is Václav Havel, the playwright, public intellectual, and former president of the Czech Republic. The defining characteristic of Havel’s worldview is his understanding of prime reality, his answer to the first worldview question. Havel uses several terms to label his answer: Being, mystery of being, order of existence, the hidden sphere, absolute horizon, or final horizon. All these terms suggest a cold deism. But there is nothing cold about his experience of this sheer Being. Havel, for example, ponders why, when he boards a streetcar late at night with no conductor to observe him, he always feels guilty when he thinks of not paying the fare. Then he comments about the interior dialogue that ensues:

Who, then, is in fact conversing with me? Obviously someone I hold in higher regard than the transport commission, than my best friends (this would come out when the voice would take issue with their opinions), and higher, in some regards than myself, that is, myself as subject of my existence-in-the-world and the carrier of my “existential” interests (one of which is the rather natural effort to save a crown). Someone who “knows everything” (and is therefore omniscient), is everywhere (and therefore omnipresent) and remembers everything; someone who, though infinitely understanding, is entirely incorruptible; who is for me, the highest and utterly unequivocal authority in all moral questions and who is thus Law itself; someone eternal, who through himself makes me eternal as well, so that I cannot imagine the arrival of a moment when everything will come to an end, thus terminating my dependence on him as well; someone to whom I relate entirely and for whom, ultimately, I would do everything. At the same time, this “someone” addresses me directly and personally (not merely as an anonymous public passenger, as the transport commission does).32

These reflections are close, if not identical, to a fully theistic conception of God. Surely some Being that is omniscient, omnipresent, and good, and who addresses you directly and personally, must himself (“itself” just doesn’t fit these criteria) be personal.

Havel, too, sees this. And yet he draws back from the conclusion:

But who is it? God? There are many subtle reasons why I’m reluctant to use that word; one factor here is a certain sense of shame (I don’t know exactly for what, why and before whom), but the main thing, I suppose, is a fear that with this all too specific designation (or rather assertion) that “God is,” I would be projecting an experience that is entirely personal and vague (never mind how profound and urgent it may be), too single-mindedly “outward,” onto that problem-fraught screen called “objective reality,” and thus I would go too far beyond it.33

So, while Being manifests characteristics that seem to demand a commitment to theism, Havel avoids this conclusion by shifting his attention from Being (as an objective existent) to himself (as a reflector on his conscious experience). What Havel does draw from this experience—to very good advantage, by the way—is that Being has a moral dimension. Being, then, is the “good” ontological foundation for human moral responsibility.34

Popular deism. Popular deism is popular in two senses. It is both a simple, easygoing belief in the existence of an omnipotent, impersonal, transcendent being, a force or an intelligence, and it is a vague belief held by millions of Americans and, I suspect, millions more throughout the Western world.

In its cold versions, God is simply the abstract force that brought the world into existence and has largely left it to operate on its own. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that many well-educated people, especially academics and professionals, would acknowledge the probable existence of such a being but would largely ignore his existence in their daily lives. Their moral sensitivity would be grounded in the public memory of common Christian virtues, the mores of society, the occasional use of their own mind when dealing with specific issues, such as honesty in business, attitudes to sexual orientation, and practices. They live secular lives without much thought of what God might think. Surely a good life will prepare one for life after death, if, indeed, there is such a thing.

In its warmest versions, God clearly is personal and even friendly. University of North Carolina sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in 2005 published a massive study of the religious beliefs of teenagers. Their conclusion was that most of these teenagers adhered to what they called moralistic therapeutic deism. They summed up this worldview as follows.

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.35

God, ultimate reality, in this view makes no demand on his creation to be holy, righteous, or even very good. “As one seventeen-year-old conservative Protestant girl from Florida told us [the researchers], ‘God’s all around you, all the time. He believes in forgiving people and whatnot and he’s there to guide us, for somebody to talk to and help us through our problems. Of course, he doesn’t talk back.’”36 When asked what God is like, a Bryn Mawr College student drew a big smiley face and wrote, “He’s one big smiley face. Big hands . . . big hands.”37 This form of deism is certainly not limited to youth; it is, I suspect, very much like that of their parents and adult neighbors.

AN UNSTABLE COMPOUND

Enlightenment deism did not prove to be a stable worldview. Historically it held sway over the intellectual world of France and England from the late seventeenth into the first half of the eighteenth century. Then its cultural significance declined. But few, if any, major shifts in worldview disappear completely. Deism is indeed still alive and well.

What made and continues to make deism so unstable? The primary reasons, I think, are these:38

First, autonomous human reason replaced the Bible and tradition as the authority for the way ultimate reality was understood. Everyone could decide for themselves what God was like. Once the concept of God was up for grabs, there was no stopping his being reduced from the complex Christian theistic idea of God to a minimal, simple force or abstract intelligence. The gradual slide from a full-blooded Christian theism was thus inevitable; what replaced the biblical God was a variety of gods, each with fewer and fewer features of personality.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, is the intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas throughout Europe during most of the eighteenth century. An important element of the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution. Authority, especially religious authority, was rejected in favor of what unaided reason could establish on its own terms. Romanticism in the early nineteenth century provided a counterbalancing reaction, rejecting the dominance of reason alone and stressing the place of feelings and the human spiritual response to nature. Postmodernism has offered an even greater challenge to Enlightenment reliance on reason, though the world of scientific investigation continues apace, seemingly little affected.

Second, autonomous human reason replaced the Bible and tradition as the authority for morality. At first autonomous reason and traditional morality tracked well together. The human mind exposed to the surrounding culture assumed that, for the most part, those cultural values were in fact reasonable. In the early years, deists placed confidence in the universality of human nature; people who used their reason would agree on what was right and wrong.39 This eventually turned out to be a false hope. However universal human nature may be, in practice people do not agree on matters of good and evil or what constitutes “good” behavior as much as the early deists thought.

Third, deists rejected the biblical notion of the fall and assumed that the present universe is in its normal, created state. As Pope said, “whatever is, is right.” One could derive one’s values from clues from the natural order. One clue was the universality of human nature. But if whatever is, is right, then no place is left for a distinctive content to ethics.

Fourth, since the universe is closed to reordering, human action is determined. What then happens to human significance? People become cogs in the clockwork mechanism of the universe. Human significance and mechanical determinism are impossible bedfellows.

Fifth, today we find even more aspects of deism to question. Scientists have largely abandoned thinking of the universe as a giant clock. Electrons (not to mention other even more baffling subatomic particles) do not behave like minute pieces of machinery. If the universe is a mechanism, it is far more complex than was then thought, and God must be quite different from a mere “architect” or “clockmaker.” Furthermore, the human personality is a “fact” of the universe. If God made that, must he not be personal?

So historically, deism was a transitional worldview, and yet it is not dead in either popular or sophisticated forms. On a popular level, many people today believe that God exists, but when asked what God is like, they limit their description to words like Energy, The Force, First Cause, something to get the universe running and often capitalized to give it the aura of divinity. As Étienne Gilson says, “For almost two centuries . . . the ghost of the Christian God has been attended by the ghost of Christian religion: a vague feeling of religiosity, a sort of trusting familiarity with some supreme good fellow to whom other good fellows can hopefully apply when they are in trouble.”40

In what was to follow even the ghost of the Christian God disappeared. It is to that worldview we now turn.

The Silence of Finite Space Chapter 4

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you were drawn while the white faces recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt in your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, an unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.

JOHN UPDIKE, “PIGEON FEATHERS”

DEISM IS THE ISTHMUS between two great continents—theism and naturalism. To get from the first to the second, deism is the natural route. Perhaps without deism, naturalism would not have come about so readily. Deism in its warm eighteenth-century versions has become almost an intellectual curiosity, handy for an explanation of the foundation of American democracy, but not much held today. Other than Christian theists, there are few today who explain our situation as an indication of God’s providence. Deism’s sophisticated twentieth-century versions are mostly cold and limited to a few scientists and intellectuals and to those who, while they say they believe in God, have only a vague notion of what he, she, or it might be. Naturalism, on the other hand, was and is serious business.

In intellectual terms the route is this: In theism God is the infinite-personal Creator and sustainer of the cosmos. In deism God is reduced; he begins to lose his personality, though he remains Creator and (by implication) sustainer of the cosmos. In naturalism God is further reduced; he loses his very existence.

Swing figures in this shift from theism to naturalism are legion, especially between 1600 and 1750. René Descartes (1596–1650), a Christian theist by conscious confession, set the stage by conceiving of the universe as a giant mechanism of “matter” which people comprehended by “mind.” He thus split reality into two kinds of being; ever since then the Western world has found it hard to see itself as an integrated whole. The naturalists, taking one route to unification, made mind a subcategory of mechanistic matter.

John Locke, a Christian theist for the most part, believed in a personal God who revealed himself to us; Locke thought, however, that our God-given reason is the judge of what can be taken as true from the “revelation” in the Bible. The naturalists removed the “God-given” from this conception and made “reason” the sole criterion for truth.

One of the most interesting figures in this shift was Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751). In his own day La Mettrie was generally considered an atheist, but he himself says, “Not that I call in question the existence of a supreme being; on the contrary it seems to me that the greatest degree of probability is in favor of this belief.” Nonetheless, he continues, “it is a theoretic truth with little practical value.”1 The reason he can conclude that God’s existence is of so little practical value is that the God who exists is only the maker of the universe. He is not personally interested in it nor in being worshiped by anyone in it. So God’s existence can be effectively discounted as being of no importance.2

It is precisely this feeling, this conclusion, which marks the transition to naturalism. La Mettrie was a theoretical deist but a practical naturalist. It was easy for subsequent generations to make their theory consistent with La Mettrie’s practice, so that naturalism was both believed and acted on.3

Behavior does indeed fuel intellectual development. In fact, if we take seriously the last phrase of the definition of worldview in chapter one (“foundation on which we live and move and have our being”), we could label La Mettrie a full-fledged naturalist.

BASIC NATURALISM

This brings us, then, to the first proposition defining naturalism.

As in theism and deism, the prime proposition concerns the nature of basic existence. In the former two the nature of God is the key factor. In naturalism it is the nature of the cosmos that is primary; for now, with an eternal Creator God out of the picture, the cosmos itself becomes eternal—always there, though not necessarily in its present form, in fact certainly not in its present form.4 Carl Sagan, astrophysicist and popularizer of science, has said it as clearly as possible: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”5

Nothing comes from nothing. Something is. Therefore something always was. But that something, say the naturalists, is not a transcendent Creator but the matter of the cosmos itself. In some form all the matter of the universe has always been. Or so naturalists have traditionally held. Some more recent naturalist philosophers and astrophysicists, however, reject the logic that holds that something has always had to be. The universe may rather have originated out of “a singularity at which space-time curvature, along with temperature, pressure and density, becomes infinite.”6 Space and time (all we know of reality) come into being together. Moreover, nothing spiritual or transcendent emerged from this cosmic event. It makes no sense to say there was a before before the singularity. In short, matter (or matter/energy in a complex interchange) is all there is. Ours is a natural cosmos.

ATHEISM, AGNOSTICISM, APATHEISM

Atheism is a bold philosophical claim that no God/god exists and that we can know the claim to be true. Agnosticism, in its strong form, is equally bold—the philosophical claim that we cannot know whether God exists. (I’ve examined the evidence and have concluded we cannot know whether God exists or not.) In its weaker form, agnosticism may simply indicate a lack of knowledge of whether God exists or not. (I don’t know whether God exists or not; I’ve never looked closely at the evidence.) Apatheism (combining “apathy” and “theism”), a term coined in 1972 by sociologist Stuart D. Johnson, holds that whether God/gods exist is simply an irrelevant question. (Why should I care whether God exists or not? The answer to the question has no practical relevance to my life.)

The word matter is to be understood in a rather general way, for since the eighteenth century, science has refined its understanding. In the eighteenth century scientists had yet to discover either the complexity of matter or its close relationship with energy. They conceived of reality as made up of irreducible “units” existing in mechanical, spatial relationship with each other, a relationship being investigated and unveiled by chemistry and physics and expressible in inexorable “laws.” Later scientists were to discover that nature is not so neat, or at least so simple. There seem to be no irreducible “units” as such, and physical laws have only mathematical expression. Physicists like Stephen Hawking may search for nothing less than a “complete description of the universe” and even hope to find it.7 But confidence about what nature is, or is likely to be discovered to be, has almost vanished.8

Still, the proposition expressed above unites naturalists. The cosmos is not composed of two things—matter and mind, or matter and spirit. As La Mettrie says, “In the whole universe there is but a single substance with various modifications.”9 The cosmos is ultimately one thing, without any relation to a Being beyond; there is no “god,” no “creator.”

This proposition is similar to proposition 2 in deism. The difference is that the universe may or may not be conceived of as a machine or clockwork. Modern scientists have found the relations between the various elements of reality to be far more complex, if not more mysterious, than the clockwork image can account for.

Nonetheless, the universe is a closed system. It is not open to reordering from the outside—either by a transcendent Being (for there is none) or, as I shall discuss later at length, by self-transcendent or autonomous human beings (for they are a part of the uniformity). Émile Bréhier, describing this view, says, “Order in nature is but one rigorously necessary arrangement of its parts, founded on the essence of things; for example, the beautiful regularity of the seasons is not the effect of a divine plan but the result of gravitation.”10

The Humanist Manifesto II (1973), which expresses the views of those who call themselves “secular humanists,” puts it this way: “We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural.”11 Without God or the supernatural, of course, nothing can happen except within the realm of things themselves. Writing in The Columbia History of the World, Rhodes W. Fairbridge says flatly, “We reject the miraculous.”12 Such a statement, coming as it does from a professor of geology at Columbia University, is to be expected.

What is surprising is to find a seminary professor, David Jobling, saying much the same thing:

We [that is, modern people] see the universe as a continuity of space, time, and matter, held together, as it were, from within. . . . God is not “outside” time and space, nor does he stand apart from matter, communicating with the “spiritual” part of man. . . . We must find some way of facing the fact that Jesus Christ is the product of the same evolutionary process as the rest of us.13

Jobling is attempting to understand Christianity within the naturalistic worldview. Certainly after God is put strictly inside the system—the uniform, closed system of cause and effect—he has been denied sovereignty and much else that Christians have traditionally believed to be true about him. The point here, however, is that naturalism is a pervasive worldview, to be found in the most unlikely places.

What are the central features of this closed system? It might first appear that naturalists, affirming the “continuity of space, time, and matter, held together . . . from within,” would be determinists, asserting that the closed system holds together by an inexorable, unbreakable linkage of cause and effect. Most naturalists are indeed determinists, though many would argue that this does not remove our sense of free will or our responsibility for our actions. Is such a freedom really consistent with the conception of a closed system? To answer we must first look more closely at the naturalist conception of human beings.

While Descartes recognized that human beings were part machine, he also thought they were part mind; and mind was a different substance. A great majority of naturalists, however, see mind as a function of machine. La Mettrie was one of the first to put it bluntly: “Let us conclude boldly then that man is a machine, and that in the whole universe there is but a single substance with various modifications.”14 Putting it more crudely, Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) wrote that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.”15 William Barrett, in a fascinating intellectual history of the gradual loss of the notion of the soul or the self in Western thought from Descartes to the present, writes:

Thus we get in La Mettrie . . . those quaint illustrations of the human body as a system of imaginary gears, cogs, and ratchets. Man, the microcosm, is just another machine within the universal machine that is the cosmos. We smile at these illustrations as quaint and crude, but secretly we may still nourish the notion that they are after all in the right direction, though a little premature. With the advent of the computer, however, this temptation toward mechanism becomes more irresistible, for here we no longer have an obsolete machine of wheels and pulleys but one that seems able to reproduce the processes of the human mind. Can machines think? now becomes a leading question for our time.16

In any case, the point is that as human beings we are simply a part of the cosmos. In the cosmos there is one substance: matter. We are that and only that. The laws applying to matter apply to us. We do not transcend the universe in any way.

Of course we are very complex machines, and our mechanism is not yet fully understood. Thus people continue to amaze us and upset our expectations. Still, any mystery that surrounds our understanding is a result not of genuine mystery but of mechanical complexity.17

It might be concluded that humanity is not distinct from other objects in the universe, that it is merely one kind of object among many. But naturalists insist this is not so. Julian Huxley, for example, says we are unique among animals because we alone are capable of conceptual thought, employ speech, possess a cumulative tradition (culture), and have had a unique method of evolution.18 To this most naturalists would add our moral capacity, a topic I will take up separately. All of these characteristics are open and generally obvious. None of them imply any transcendent power or demand any extramaterial basis, say the naturalists.

Ernest Nagel points out the necessity of not stressing the human “continuity” with the nonhuman elements of our makeup: “Without denying that even the most distinctive human traits are dependent on things which are nonhuman, a mature naturalism attempts to assess man’s nature in the light of his actions and achievements, his aspirations and capacities, his limitations and tragic failures, and his splendid works of ingenuity and imagination.”19 By stressing our humanness (our distinctness from the rest of the cosmos), a naturalist finds a basis for value, for, it is held, intelligence, cultural sophistication, a sense of right and wrong not only are human distinctives but are what make us valuable. This we will see developed further under proposition 6 below.

Finally, while some naturalists are strict determinists with regard to all events in the universe, including human action, thus denying any sense of free will, many naturalists hold that we are free to fashion our own destiny, at least in part. Some, for example, hold that while a closed universe implies determinism, determinism is still compatible with human freedom, or at least a sense of freedom.20 We can do many things that we want to do; we are not always constrained to act against our wants. I could, for example, stop preparing a new edition of this book if I wanted to. I don’t want to.

This, so many naturalists hold, leaves open the possibility for significant human action, and it provides a basis for morality. For unless we are free to do other than we do, we cannot be held responsible for what we do. The coherence of this view has been challenged, however, and is one of the soft spots in the naturalist’s system of thought, as we will see in the following chapter.

This is, perhaps, the “hardest” proposition of naturalism for people to accept, yet it is absolutely demanded by the naturalists’ conception of the universe. Men and women are made of matter and nothing else. When the matter that goes to make up an individual is disorganized at death, then that person disappears.

The Humanist Manifesto II states, “As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body.”21 Bertrand Russell writes, “No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.”22 And A. J. Ayer says, “I take it . . . to be fact that one’s existence ends at death.”23 In a more general sense humankind is likewise seen to be transitory. “Human destiny,” Nagel confesses, “[is] an episode between two oblivions.”24

Such statements are clear and unambiguous. The concept may trigger immense psychological problems, but there is no disputing its precision. The only “immortality,” as the Humanist Manifesto II puts it, is to “continue to exist in our progeny and in the way that our lives have influenced others in our culture.”25 In his short story “Pigeon Feathers” John Updike gives this notion a beautifully human dimension as he portrays the young boy David reflecting on his minister’s description of heaven as being “like Abraham Lincoln’s goodness living after him.”26 Like the seminary professor quoted above, David’s pastor is no longer a theist but is simply trying to provide “spiritual” counsel within the framework of naturalism.

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship”

Notice the similarity between the deist and the naturalist notion of how we come to know. Both accept the internal faculty of reason and the thoughts human beings come to have as givens. From a cosmic standpoint, reason developed under the contingencies of natural evolution over a very long period of time. From a human standpoint, a child is born with innate faculties which merely have to develop naturally. These faculties work on their own within the framework of the languages and cultures to which they are exposed. At no time is there any information or interpretation or mental machinery added from outside the ordinary material world. As children grow, they learn which of their thoughts help them understand and enable them to deal with the world around them. The methods of modern science are especially helpful in leading us to more and more profound knowledge of our universe. Human knowledge, then, is the product of natural human reason grounded in its perceived ability to reach the truth about human beings and the world.27

We should notice that I have used the word truth to describe the end result of human reason when it is successful. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries few would question its propriety. As Aristotle said in the first lines of his Metaphysics, “All men desire to know,” meaning “All human beings desire to know the truth, that is, the way reality really is.” Naturalists today, especially scientists and ordinarily educated people, may continue to think this way. When most people say that water is hydrogen and oxygen, two parts to one, they think they have accurately described its chemical makeup; that’s what water is. More philosophically minded modern naturalists are content to say that we can learn to describe what we take to be reality in language that allows us to live successfully in the world, but no one can know what something is. There is a rift between words and things that cannot be bridged.28 We will see how this plays out in chapter nine on postmodernism. What is important to note here is that naturalists ground human reason in human nature itself.

Ethical considerations did not play a central role in the rise of naturalism. Naturalism rather came as a logical extension of certain metaphysical notions —notions about the nature of the external world. Most early naturalists continued to hold ethical views similar to those in the surrounding culture, views that in general were indistinguishable from popular Christianity. There was a respect for individual dignity, an affirmation of love, a commitment to truth and basic honesty. Jesus was seen as a teacher of high ethical values.

Though it is becoming less and less so, it is still true to some measure today. With a few twists—for example, a permissive attitude to premarital and extramarital sex, a positive response to euthanasia, abortion, and the individual’s right to suicide—the ethical norms of the Humanist Manifesto II (1973) are similar to traditional morality. Theists and naturalists can often live side by side in communal harmony on ethical matters. There have always been disagreements between them; these disagreements will, I believe, increase as humanism shifts further and further from its memory of Christian ethics.29 But whatever the disagreements (or agreements) on ethical norms, the basis for these norms is radically different.

For a theist, God is the foundation of values. For a naturalist, values are constructed by human beings. The naturalist’s notion follows logically from the previous propositions. If there was no consciousness prior to the existence of humans, then there was no prior sense of right and wrong. And if there were no ability to do other than what one does, any sense of right and wrong would have no practical value. So for ethics to be possible, there must be both consciousness and self-determination. In short, there must be personality.

Naturalists say both consciousness and self-determination came with the appearance of human beings, and so ethics, too, came then. No ethical system can be derived solely from the nature of “things” outside human consciousness. In other words, no natural law is inscribed in the cosmos. Even La Mettrie—who fudged a bit when he wrote, “Nature created us all [man and beast] solely to be happy,” betraying his deistic roots—was a confirmed naturalist in ethics: “You see that natural law is nothing but an intimate feeling which belongs to the imagination like all other feelings, thought included.”30 La Mettrie, of course, conceived of the imagination in a totally mechanistic fashion, so that ethics became for him simply people’s following out a pattern embedded in them as creatures. Certainly there is nothing whatever transcendent about morality.

The Humanist Manifesto II states the locus of naturalistic ethics in no uncertain terms: “We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing no theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stems from human need and interest. To deny this distorts the whole basis of life. Human life has meaning because we create and develop our futures.”31 Most conscious naturalists would probably agree with this statement. But exactly how value is created out of the human situation is just as much up for grabs as is the way we ought to understand the origin of the universe.

The major question is this: How does ought derive from is? Traditional ethics, that is, the ethics of Christian theism, affirms the transcendent origin of ethics and locates in the infinite-personal God the measure of the good. Good is what God is, and this has been revealed in many and diverse ways, most fully in the life, teachings, and death of Jesus Christ.

Naturalists, however, have no such appeal, nor do they wish to make one. Ethics is solely a human domain. So the question: How does one get from the fact of self-consciousness and self-determination, the realm of is and can, to the realm of what ought to be or to be done?

One observation naturalists make is that all people have a sense of moral values. These derive, G. G. Simpson says, from intuition (“the feeling of rightness, without objective inquiry into the reasons for this feeling and without possible test as to the truth or falseness of the premises involved”),32 from authority, and from convention. No one grows up without picking up values from the environment, and while a person may reject these and pay the consequences of ostracism or martyrdom, seldom does anyone succeed in inventing values totally divorced from culture.

Of course values differ from culture to culture, and none seems absolutely universal. So Simpson argues for an ethic based on objective inquiry and finds it in a harmonious adjustment of people to each other and their environment.33 Whatever promotes such harmony is good; what does not is bad. John Platt, in an article that attempts to construct an ethic for B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism, writes,

Happiness is having short-run reinforcers congruent with medium-run and long-run ones, and wisdom is knowing how to achieve this. And ethical behavior results when short-run personal reinforcers are congruent with long-run group reinforcers. This makes it easy to “be good,” or more exactly to “behave well.”34

The upshot of this is a definition of good action as group-approved, survival-promoting action. Both Simpson and Platt opt for the continuance of human life as the value above all values. Survival is thus basic, but it is human survival that is affirmed as primary.35

Both Simpson and Platt are scientists with a consciousness of their responsibility to be fully human and thus to integrate their scientific knowledge and their moral values. From the side of the humanities comes Walter Lippmann. In A Preface to Morals (1929) Lippmann assumes the naturalists’ stance with regard to the origin and purposelessness of the universe. His tack is to construct an ethic on the basis of what he takes to be the central agreement of the “great religious teachers.” For Lippmann, the good turns out to be something that has been recognized so far only by the elite, a “voluntary aristocracy of the spirit.”36 His argument is that this elitist ethic is now becoming mandatory for all people if they are to survive the twentieth-century crisis of values.

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods; they need only common sense. They have only to commune with themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, to consult their visible interests, to consider the objects of society and the individuals who compose it, and they will easily perceive that virtue is advantageous, and vice disadvantageous, to such beings as themselves. Let us persuade them to be just, beneficent, moderate, sociable, not because such conduct is demanded by the gods, but because it is a pleasure to men. Let us advise them to abstain from vice and crime, not because they will be punished in the other world, but because they will suffer for it in this.

Baron D’Holbach (1723–1789), “Common Sense”

The good itself consists of disinterestedness—a way of alleviating the “disorders and frustrations” of the modern world, now that the “acids of modernity” have eaten away the traditional basis for ethical behavior. It is difficult to summarize the content Lippmann pours into the word disinterested. The final third of his book is addressed to doing that. But it is helpful to notice that his ethic turns out to be based on a personal commitment of each individual who would be moral, and that it is totally divorced from the world of facts—the nature of things in general:

A religion which rests upon particular conclusions in astronomy, biology, and history may be fatally injured by the discovery of new truths. But the religion of the spirit does not depend upon creeds and cosmologies; it has no vested interest in any particular truth. It is concerned not with the organization of matter, but with the quality of human desire.37

Lippmann’s language must be carefully understood. By religion he means morality or moral impulse. By spirit he means the moral faculty in human beings, that which exalts people above animals and above others whose “religion” is merely “popular.” The language of theism is being employed, but its content is purely naturalistic.

In any case, what remains of ethics is an affirmation of a high vision of right in the face of a universe that is merely there and has no value in itself. Ethics thus are personal and chosen. Lippmann is not, to my knowledge, generally associated with the existentialists, but, as we shall see in chapter six, his version of naturalistic ethics is ultimately theirs.

Naturalists have tried to construct ethical systems in a wide variety of ways. Even Christian theists must admit that many of the naturalists’ ethical insights are valid. Indeed theists should not be surprised by the fact that we can learn moral truths by observing human nature and behavior, for if women and men are made in the image of God and if that image is not totally destroyed by the fall, then they should yet reflect—even if dimly—something of the goodness of God.

First, the word history, as used in this proposition, includes both natural history and human history, for naturalists see them as a continuity. The origin of the human family is in nature. We arose out of it and most likely will return to it (not just individually but as a species).

Natural history begins with the origin of the universe. Something happened an incredibly long time ago—a Big Bang or sudden emergence—that ultimately resulted in the formation of the universe we now inhabit and are conscious of. But exactly how this came to be few are willing to say. Lodewijk Woltjer, formerly an astronomer at Columbia University and later director general of the European Southern Observatory, spoke for many: “The origin of what is—man, the earth, the universe—is shrouded in a mystery we are no closer to solving than was the chronicler of Genesis.”38 A number of theories to explain the process have been advanced, but none have really won the day.39 Still, among naturalists the premise always is that the process was self- activating; it was not set in motion by a Prime Mover—God or otherwise.

How human beings came to be is generally held to be more certain than how the universe came to be. The theory of evolution, long toyed with by naturalists, was given a “mechanism” by Darwin and has won the day. There is hardly a public-school text that does not proclaim the theory as fact. We should be careful, however, not to assume that all forms of evolutionary theory are strictly naturalist. Many theists are also evolutionists. Evolution has, in fact, become a far more vexed issue among both Christians and naturalists than when this book was first written.40

A theist sees the infinite-personal God to be in charge of all natural processes. If the biological order has evolved, it has done so by conforming to God’s design; it is teleological, directed toward an end personally willed by God. For a naturalist, the process is on its own. George Gaylord Simpson puts this so well he is worth quoting at some length:

Organic evolution is a process entirely materialistic in its origin and operation. . . . Life is materialistic in nature, but it has properties unique to itself which reside in its organization, not in its materials or mechanics. Man arose as a result of the operation of organic evolution and his being and activities are also materialistic, but the human species has properties unique to itself among all forms of life, superadded to the properties unique to life among all forms of matter and of action. Man’s intellectual, social, and spiritual natures are exceptional among animals in degree, but they arose by organic evolution.41

This passage is significant for its clear affirmation of both human continuity with the rest of the cosmos and special uniqueness. Yet lest we conclude that our uniqueness, our position as nature’s highest creation, was designed by some teleological principle operative in the universe, Simpson adds, “Man was certainly not the goal of evolution, which evidently had no goal.”42

In some ways the theory of evolution raises as many questions as it solves, for while it offers an explanation for what has happened over the eons of time, it does not explain why. The notion of a Purposer is not allowed by naturalists. Rather, as Jacques Monod says, humanity’s “number came up in the Monte Carlo game,” a game of pure chance.43 And Richard Dawkins, one of the more vocal of neo-Darwinian evolutionists, confirms this: “Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.”44 Any intentionality is ruled out as a possibility from the beginning.45

In any case, naturalists insist that with the dawn of humanity, evolution suddenly took on a new dimension, for human beings are self-conscious —probably the only self-conscious beings in the universe.46 Further, as humans we are free consciously to consider, decide, and act. Thus while evolution considered strictly on the biological level continues to be unconscious and accidental, human actions are not. They are not just a part of the “natural” environment. They are human history.

In other words, when human beings appear, meaningful history, human history—the events of self-conscious, self-determining men and women— appears. But like evolution, which has no inherent goal, history has no inherent goal. History is what we make it to be. Human events have only the meaning people give them when they choose them or when they look back on them.

History proceeds in a straight line, as in theism (not in a cycle as in Eastern pantheism), but history has no predetermined goal. Rather than culminating in a second coming of the God-man, it is simply going to last as long as conscious human beings last. When we go, human history disappears, and natural history goes on its way alone.

Each individual is free to choose whatever goal or commitment he or she wishes. Most naturalists are an integral part of a particular cultural community and orient their personal lives within the norms of their community. But there is nothing in the naturalist worldview to require this, and rebels to any society-given notion of the good life cannot reasonably be criticized for their rebellion to social norms. Still, while naturalism provides no rational justification to act selflessly, naturalists often choose to serve their community or promote a purely secular human flourishing. Naturalists will not, of course, choose to live in order to please any God or gods.

NATURALISM IN PRACTICE: SECULAR HUMANISM

Two forms of naturalism deserve special mention. The first is secular humanism, a term that has come to be both used and abused by adherents and critics alike. Some clarification of terms is in order here.

First, secular humanism is one form of humanism in general, but not the only form. Humanism itself is the overall attitude that human beings are of special value; their aspirations, their thoughts, their yearnings are significant. There is as well an emphasis on the value of the individual person.

Ever since the Renaissance, thoughtful people of various convictions have called themselves and been called humanists, among them many Christians. John Calvin (1509–1564), Desiderius Erasmus (1456?–1536), Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599), William Shakespeare (1564–1616), and John Milton (1608–1674), all of whom wrote from within a Christian theistic worldview, were humanists, what are sometimes today called Christian humanists. The reason for this designation is that they emphasized human dignity, not as over against God but as deriving from the image of God in each person. Today there are many thoughtful Christians who so want to preserve the word humanism from being associated with purely secular forms that they signed a Christian humanist manifesto (1982) declaring that Christians have always affirmed the value of human beings.47

I would like to claim that the coming of modern secularity . . . has been coterminous with the rise of a society in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true. . . . [A] secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Society

The tenets of secular humanism are well expressed in the Humanist Manifesto II.48 Secular humanism is a form of humanism that is completely framed within a naturalistic worldview. It is fair to say, I believe, that most who would feel comfortable with the label “secular humanist” would find their views reflected in propositions 1 through 6 above. Secular humanists, in other words, are simply naturalists, though not all naturalists are secular humanists.

NATURALISM IN PRACTICE: MARXISM

Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, one of the most historically significant forms of naturalism has been Marxism.49 The fortunes of Marxism have ebbed and flowed over the years; the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has left only a few “officially” Marxist countries. Nevertheless, for the better part of the twentieth century a huge section of the globe was dominated by ideas that stemmed from the philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883). At the current time, though communism as an ideology seems down and out, many ideas of Marx remain influential among social scientists and other intellectuals in the West. Even in eastern Europe the former communists, somewhat chastened and professing a commitment to democracy, seem to be making a political comeback.

It is difficult to define or analyze Marxism briefly, for there are many different types of “Marxists.”50 Enormous differences exist between Marxist theories of various kinds, ranging from thinkers who are humanistic and committed to democracy in some form to hardline “Stalinists” who identify Marxism with totalitarianism. There is another huge difference between Marxist theories of all kinds and the reality of Marxist practice in the Soviet Union and other places. In theory, Marxism is supposed to benefit working people and enable them to gain economic control over their own lives. In reality, the bureaucratic rigidities of life under communism led to economic stagnation as well as loss of personal freedom.

Although Marxism has generally claimed to be a scientific theory (as in the name “scientific socialism”), this claim has not been generally accepted. It is in many ways more helpful to think of Marxism as a kind of humanism, though of course most humanists are not Marxists. While Marxist humanism has characteristic themes of its own, Marxism and secular humanism, as forms of naturalism, share many assumptions.

All forms of Marxism can of course be traced back to the writings of Karl Marx. The question of who are Marx’s “true heirs” is bitterly contested, but the more humanistic Marxists can certainly point to some important themes in Marx’s writings. In one of his earliest essays, he says clearly that “man is the supreme being for man.”51 It is from this humanist theme that Marx deduces his revolutionary imperative to “overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being.”52

Marx arrived at his humanism through an encounter with two important nineteenth-century philosophers: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1830) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Hegel’s philosophy was a form of idealism that taught that God or “absolute spirit” is not a being distinct from the world but a reality that is progressively realizing itself in the concrete world. For Hegel this process is dialectical in nature; that is, it proceeds through conflicts in which each realization of spirit calls forth its own antagonist or “negation.” Out of this conflict a still higher realization of spirit emerges, which in turn calls forth its negation, and so on. This philosophy is in essence a highly speculative philosophy of history. For Hegel the highest vehicle for the expression of spirit was human society, particularly the modern societies that were coming to fruition in the capitalistic states of nineteenth-century western Europe.

Feuerbach was a materialist who was famous for asserting that human beings “are what they eat” and that religion is a human invention. As Feuerbach saw it, God is a projection of human potentiality, an expression of our unrealized ideals. Religion functions perniciously, since as soon as we invent God we devote ourselves to pleasing our imaginary construction instead of working to overcome the shortcomings that led to the invention in the first place. Feuerbach extended his critique of religion to Hegel’s philosophical idealism, seeing in Hegel’s concept of “spirit” yet another human projection, a slightly secularized version of the Christian God.

Marx accepted Feuerbach’s critique of religion wholeheartedly, and atheism remains a part of most forms of Marxism to this day. However, he was struck by the fact that even if Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel is right, Hegel’s philosophy may still contain truth. If Hegel’s concept of spirit is simply a misleading projection of our human reality, then the dialectical process Hegel described may be real, just as a film when projected may give an accurate picture of the reality that was filmed. It is only necessary to “turn Hegel right side up” by translating Hegel’s idealistic talk of spirit into materialistic talk of concrete human beings. Once we realize that in Hegel we are seeing a projection or “film,” we can interpret his view in a way that makes it true. History has proceeded through conflict in which the contending parties create their own antagonists, and this series of historical conflicts is “going somewhere.” The goal of history is a perfect or ideal human society, but it is misleading and confusing to call such a society “spirit.”

Marx does call himself a “materialist,” and in some sense he certainly is one. Despite this, Marx hardly ever talks about matter. His materialism is historical and dialectical; it is primarily a doctrine about human history, and it sees that history as a series of dialectical struggles. Economic factors are the primary determinants of that history. Since human beings are material, their lives must be understood in terms of the need to work to satisfy their material needs.

Marx believed that human history began with relatively small human communities organized in family-like tribes. Private property is unknown; a kind of primitive or natural communism holds in which individuals identify with the community as a whole, though these communities are poor and unable to allow their members to flourish. As societies develop technology, gradually a division of labor occurs. Some people in a society control the tools or resources the society depends on; this gives them the power to exploit others. Thus out of division of labor and consequent control over the means of production social classes emerge.

For Marx social classes are the dialectical antagonists of history rather than Hegel’s spiritual realities. History for Marx is the history of class struggle. Since the demise of primitive societies, societies have always been dominated by the class that controls the means of production. The process by which the material goods society requires are created is the key to understanding society. This process is termed by Marxists the “base” of society. A particular system for producing material goods, such as feudal agriculture or industrial capitalism, produces a particular class structure. On that class structure depends in turn what Marx calls the “superstructure” of society: art, religion, philosophy, morality, and most important, political institutions.

Social changes occur when one system of production “dialectically” gives rise to a new system. The new economic base comes into being within the womb of the old superstructure. The dominant social classes of the old order of course try to maintain their power as long as possible, relying on the state to maintain their position. Eventually, however, the new economic system and the emerging class become too powerful. The result is a revolution in which the old superstructure is swept away in favor of a new political and social order that better reflects the underlying economic order.

The history of capitalism illustrates these truths clearly, according to Marx. Medieval feudal societies created modern industrial society, which is its dialectical opposite. For a long time the feudal aristocracy tried to hold on to its power, but in the French Revolution Marx saw the triumph of the new middle class, who controlled the means of production in capitalist society. However, the same dialectical forces that led to capitalism will also destroy it. Capitalism requires a large body of propertyless workers, the proletariat, to exploit. As Marx saw it, the economic dynamics of capitalism will necessarily lead to a society in which the proletariat are more and more numerous and more and more exploited. Capitalist societies become more and more productive, but wealth is more and more narrowly distributed. Eventually the concentration of wealth leads to a society in which more is produced than can be purchased; overproduction leads to unemployment and more suffering. At last the proletariat will be forced to revolt.

For Marx the revolt of the proletariat will be different from any previous revolution. In the past, one social class overthrew a rival oppressing class and became in its turn the oppressor. The proletariat will, however, be the majority, not a minority. They have no vested interest in the old order of things, so it will be in their own best interests to abolish the whole system of class oppression. The material abundance created by modern technology makes this a real possibility for the first time in human history, since without such abundance, struggle, competition, and oppression would inevitably break out in new forms.

The new classless society that will emerge will make possible what Marxists call “the new socialist individual.” People will supposedly be less individualistic and competitive, more apt to find fulfillment in working for the good of others. The “alienation” of all previous societies will be overcome, and a new and higher form of human life will emerge. This vision in many ways parallels the Christian vision of the coming of the kingdom of God, and it is therefore easy to see why some have characterized Marxism as a Christian heresy.

One can also easily see why this vision of Marx was appealing to so many for so long. Marx had a deep understanding of the human need for genuine community and for fulfillment in work. He was sensitive not merely to the problem of poverty but to the loss of dignity that occurs when human beings are seen merely as cogs in a vast industrial machine. He looked for a society in which people would creatively express themselves in their work and see in their work an opportunity to help others as well as themselves.

It is by no means clear that at some point changing conditions will not rekindle interest in Marx. Some theorists, for example, worry that in the United States there is an increasing gap between an economic elite and the great mass of people who are stagnating economically, and that this increasing inequality may make Marx’s theories relevant once more.

However, there are also hard questions that Marx does not convincingly answer. One crucial set of questions deals with the reality of life under communism. How could a theory that seems so committed to humanistic liberation produce the dehumanization and oppression of Stalinism? Part of the answer here surely lies in the changes that Vladimir Lenin introduced into Marxism. Marx had predicted that socialism would develop in the most economically advanced societies, such as England and the United States; and he had little faith that true socialism would be possible in a backward country such as Russia. Lenin believed that if society were rigidly controlled by a monolithic Communist party, this would compensate for economic backwardness. So many Western Marxists committed to “democratic socialism” argue that Leninist-style Communism was a heretical form of Marxism and that Marx’s own ideas were never given a fair chance.

Nevertheless, even if one ignores the reality of life under communism and the horrors of the Gulag, there are many respects in which Marx’s ideas appear vulnerable. One crucial concern is his faith that human history is moving toward an ideal society. Having abandoned any religious belief in providence, as well as Hegel’s belief in absolute spirit as underlying history, Marx has no real basis for this expectation. He bases his own hope on empirical study of history, particularly his analysis of economic forces. However, many of Marx’s predictions, such as his claim that workers in advanced capitalist countries will become increasingly impoverished, have been far off the mark. Can any social scientist—Marxist or non-Marxist—accurately predict the future?

A second problem for Marx concerns our motivation for working toward the future society, especially when we recognize that this society is by no means inevitable. Why should I work for a better society and try to end social exploitation? Marx rejects any moral values as a basis for such motivation. As a naturalist, he views morality as simply a product of human culture. There are no transcendent values that can be used as a basis for critically evaluating culture. Yet Marx himself often seems full of moral indignation as he looks at the excesses of capitalism. What is the basis for Marx’s condemnation of capitalism if such moral notions as “justice” and “fairness” are just ideological inventions?

Two final grave problems for Marx lie in his vision of human nature and his analysis of the fundamental human problem. For Marx human beings are fundamentally self-creating; we create ourselves through our work. When our work or life activity is alienated, we are alienated, and when our work has become truly human, we will be human as well. Greed, competition, and envy all arise because of social divisions and poverty; an ideal society will eliminate these evils.

The question is whether Marx’s view of human nature and analysis of the human problem go deep enough. Is it really plausible to think that selfishness and greed are solely a product of scarcity and class division? Is it really possible to make human beings fundamentally good if we have the right environment for them? Whether we look at capitalist or professedly socialist societies, the lesson of history would seem to be that humans are very inventive in finding ways to manipulate any system for their own selfish benefit. Perhaps the problem with human nature lies deeper than Marx thought. And this problem may expose a problem with his view of human beings: are we purely material beings?

Marx was certainly right to emphasize work and economic factors as crucially important in shaping human society, but there is more to human life than economics. Certainly many young people in the most economically advanced countries struggle with finding meaning and purpose for their lives. Marxism, like all forms of naturalism, has a difficult time providing such meaning and purpose for human beings.

THE PERSISTENCE OF NATURALISM

Naturalism has had great staying power. Born in the eighteenth century, it came of age in the nineteenth and grew to maturity in the twentieth. While signs of age are now appearing and postmodern trumpeters are signaling the death of Enlightenment reason, naturalism is still very much alive. It dominates universities, colleges, and high schools. It provides the framework for most scientific study. It poses the backdrop against which the humanities continue to struggle for human value, as writers, poets, painters, and artists in general shudder under its implications.53 It is seen as the great villain of the postmodern avant-garde. Nonetheless, no rival worldview has yet been able to topple it. Still, it is fair to say that the twentieth century provided some powerful options: Christian theism is experiencing a rebirth at all levels of society and Islamic theism is posing a challenge just off stage.

What makes naturalism so persistent? There are two basic answers. First, it gives the impression of being honest and objective. One is asked to accept only what appears to be based on facts and on the assured results of scientific investigation or scholarship. Second, to a vast number of people it appears to be coherent. To them the implications of its premises are largely worked out and found acceptable. Naturalism assumes no god, no spirit, no life beyond the grave. It sees human beings as the makers of value. While it disallows that we are the center of the universe by virtue of design, it allows us to place ourselves there and to make of ourselves and for ourselves something of value. As Simpson says, “Man is the highest animal. The fact that he alone is capable of making such a judgment is in itself part of the evidence that this decision is correct.”54 It is up to us then to work out the implications of our special place in nature, controlling and altering, as we find it possible, our own evolution.55

All of this is attractive. If naturalism were really as described, it should, perhaps, be called not only attractive or persistent but true. We could then proceed to tout its virtues and turn the argument of this book into a tract for our times.

But long before the twentieth century got under way, cracks began appearing in the edifice. Theistic critics always found fault with it. They could never abandon their conviction that an infinite-personal God is behind the universe. Their criticism might be discounted as unenlightened or merely conservative, as if they were afraid to launch out into the uncharted waters of new truth. But more was afoot than this. As we shall see in more detail in the following chapter and chapter nine on postmodernism, within the camp of the naturalists themselves came rumblings of discontent. The facts on which naturalism was based—the nature of the external universe, its closed continuity of cause and effect—were not at issue. The problem was coherence. Did naturalism give an adequate reason for us to consider ourselves valuable? Unique, maybe. But gorillas are unique. So is every category of nature. Value was the first troublesome issue. Could a being thrown up by chance be worthy?

Second, could a being whose origins were so “iffy” trust his or her own capacity to know? Put it personally: If my mind is conterminous with my brain, if “I” am only a thinking machine, how can I trust my thought? If consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, perhaps the appearance of human freedom which lays the basis for morality is an epiphenomenon of either chance or inexorable law. Perhaps chance or the nature of things only built into me the “feeling” that I am free but actually I am not.

These and similar questions do not arise from outside the naturalist worldview. They are inherent in it. The fears that these questions raised in some minds led directly to nihilism, which I am tempted to call a worldview but which is actually a denial of all worldviews.

ZERO POINT: NIHILISM CHAPTER 5

If I should cast off this tattered coat,

And go free into the mighty sky;

If I should find nothing there

But a vast blue,

Echoless, ignorant—

What then?

STEPHEN CRANE,

THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES

NIHILISM IS MORE a feeling than a philosophy, more a solitary stance before the universe than a worldview. Strictly speaking, nihilism is a denial of any philosophy or worldview—a denial of the possibility of knowledge, a denial that anything is valuable. If it proceeds to the absolute denial of everything, it even denies the reality of existence itself. In other words, nihilism is the negation of everything—knowledge, ethics, beauty, reality. In nihilism no statement has validity; nothing has meaning. Everything is gratuitous, de trop—that is, just there.

Those who have been untouched by the feelings of despair, anxiety, and ennui associated with nihilism may find it hard to imagine that nihilism could be a seriously held orientation of the heart. But it is, and it is well for everyone who wants to understand the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to experience, if only vicariously, something of nihilism as a stance toward human existence.

Modern art galleries are full of its products—if one can speak of something (art objects) coming from nothing (artists who, if they exist, deny the ultimate value of their existence). As we shall see later, no art is ultimately nihilistic, but some art attempts to embody many of nihilism’s characteristics. Marcel Duchamp’s ordinary urinal purchased on the common market, signed with a fictional name, and labeled Fountain will do for a start. Samuel Beckett’s plays, notably End Game and Waiting for Godot, are prime examples in drama. But Beckett’s nihilistic art perhaps reached its climax in Breath, a thirty-five-second play that has no human actors. The props consist of a pile of rubbish on the stage, lit by a light that begins dim, brightens (but never fully), and then recedes to dimness. There are no words, only a “recorded” cry opening the play, an inhaled breath, an exhaled breath, and an identical “recorded” cry closing the play. For Beckett life is such a “breath.”

Douglas Adams’s cosmic science-fiction novels picture the situation for those who seek an answer to human meaning in computer science. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish Adams tells the story of the universe from the point of view of four time travelers who hitchhike back and forth across intergalactic time and space, from creation in the Big Bang to the final destruction of the universe.1 During the course of this history a race of hyperintelligent, pandimensional beings (mice, actually) build a giant computer (“the size of a small city”) to answer “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” This computer, which they call Deep Thought, spends seven and a half million years on the calculation.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.

And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program.

And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense. Sadly, however, just before the critical moment of read-out, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons to make way—so they claimed—for a new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of discovering a meaning for life was lost for ever. Or so it would seem.3

By the end of the second novel, the time travelers discover that the “question itself” (the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything) is “What is six times nine?”4 So, they discover, both the question and the answer are inane. Not only is forty-two a meaningless answer to the question on a human level (the level of purpose and meaning), it is bad mathematics. The most rational discipline in the university has been reduced to absurdity.

By the end of the third novel, we have an explanation for why the question and the answer do not seem to fit each other. Prak, the character who is supposed to know the ultimate, says this: “I’m afraid . . . that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe.”5 (Physics students will detect here a play on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, where the position and momentum of an electron can each be known, but not with precision at the same time.)

So we can know the Answers—like forty-two—which don’t mean anything without the Questions. Or we can have the Questions (which give direction to our quest). But we can’t have both. That is, we cannot satisfy our longing for ultimate meaning. To read Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Eugène Ionesco, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and more recently, Douglas Adams is to begin to feel—if one does not already in our depressing age—the pangs of human emptiness, of life that is without value, without purpose, without meaning.6

But how does one get from naturalism to nihilism? Wasn’t naturalism the enlightened readout of the assured results of science and open intellectual inquiry? As a worldview, did it not account for human beings, their uniqueness among the things of the cosmos? Did it not show human dignity and value? As the highest of creation, the only self-conscious, self-determined beings in the universe, men and women are rulers of all, free to value what they will, free even to control the future of their own evolution. What more could one wish?

Most naturalists are satisfied to end their inquiry right here. They do in fact wish for no more. For them there is no route to nihilism.7

But for a growing number of people the results of reason are not so assured, the closed universe is confining, the notion of death as extinction is psychologically disturbing, our position as the highest in creation is seen either as an alienation from the universe or as a union with it such that we are no more valuable than a pebble on the beach. In fact, pebbles “live” longer! What bridges led from a naturalism that affirms the value of human life to a naturalism that does not? Just how did nihilism come about?

Nihilism came about not because theists and deists picked away at naturalism from the outside. Nihilism is the natural child of naturalism.

THE FIRST BRIDGE: NECESSITY AND CHANCE

The first and most basic reason for nihilism is found in the direct, logical implications of naturalism’s primary propositions. Notice what happens to the concept of human nature when one takes seriously the notions that (1) matter is all there is and it is eternal, and (2) the cosmos operates with a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system. These mean that a human being is a part of the system. Though they may not understand the implications for human freedom, naturalists agree, as we saw in proposition 3 of chapter four: Human beings are complex machines whose personality is a function of highly complex chemical and physical properties not yet understood. Nietzsche, however, bites the bullet and recognizes the loss to human dignity: Human beings are simply deluded about having free will.

Still many naturalists try to hold on to human freedom within the closed system. Their argument goes like this. Every event in the universe is caused by a previous state of affairs, including each person’s genetic makeup, environmental situation, and even the person’s wants and desires. But each person is free to express those wants and desires. If I want a sandwich and a deli is around the corner, I can choose to have a sandwich. If I want to steal the sandwich when the owner isn’t looking, I can do that. Nothing constrains my choice. My actions are self-determined.

Thus human beings who are obviously self-conscious and, it would appear, self-determined can act significantly and be held responsible for their actions. I can be arrested for stealing the sandwich and reasonably required to pay the penalty.

But are things so simple? Many think not. The issue of human freedom goes deeper than these naturalists see. To be sure I can do anything I want, but what I want is the result of past states of affairs over which ultimately I had no control. I did not freely select my particular genetic makeup or my original family environment. By the time I asked whether I was free to act freely, I was so molded by nature and nurture that the very fact that the question occurred to me was determined. That is, my self itself was determined by outside forces. I can indeed ask such questions, I can act according to my wants and desires, and I can appear to myself to be free, but it is appearance only. Nietzsche is right: “the acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculating mechanism.”

If one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual [human] action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice. To be sure, the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition; if the wheel of the world were to stand still for a moment and an omniscient calculating mind were there to take advantage of this interruption, he would be able to tell into the farthest future of each being and describe every rut that wheel will roll upon. The acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculating mechanism.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The problem is that if the universe is truly closed, then its activity can be governed only from within. Any force that acts to change the cosmos on whatever level (microcosmic, human, macrocosmic) is a part of the cosmos. There would thus seem to be only one explanation for change: the present state of affairs must govern the future state. In other words, the present must cause the future, which in turn must cause the next future, and so on.

The objection that in an Einsteinian universe of time-relativity simultaneity is impossible to define and causal links are impossible to prove is beside the point. We are not talking here about how the events are linked together, only noting that they are linked. Events occur because other events have occurred. All activity in the universe is connected this way. We cannot, perhaps, know what the links are, but the premise of a closed universe forces us to conclude that they must exist.

Moreover, there is evidence that such links exist, for patterns of events are perceivable, and some events can be predicted from the standpoint of earth time with almost absolute precision, for example, precisely when and where the next eclipse will take place. For every eclipse in the next fifteen centuries the exact shadow can be predicted and tracked in space and time across the earth. Most events cannot be so predicted, but the presumption is that that is because all the variables and their interrelations are not known. Some events are more predictable than others, but none is uncertain. Each event must come to be.

In a closed universe the possibility that some things need not be, that others are possible, is not possible. For the only way change can come is by a force moving to make that change, and the only way that force can come is if it is moved by another force, ad infinitum. There is no break in this chain, from eternity past to eternity future, forever and ever, amen.

To the ordinary person determinism does not appear to be the case. We generally perceive ourselves as free agents. But our perception is an illusion. We just do not know what “caused” us to decide. Something did, of course, but we feel it was our free choice. Such perceived freedom—if one does not think much about its implications—is quite sufficient, at least according to some.8

In a closed universe, in other words, freedom must be a determinacy unrecognized, and for those who work out its implications, this is not enough to allow for self-determinacy or moral responsibility. For if I robbed a bank, that would ultimately be due to inexorable (though unperceived) forces triggering my decisions in such a way that I could no longer consider these decisions mine. If these decisions are not mine, I cannot be held responsible. And such would be the case for every act of every person.

A human being is thus a mere piece of machinery, a toy—complicated, very complicated, but a toy of impersonal cosmic forces. A person’s self-consciousness is only an epiphenomenon; it is just part of the machinery looking at itself. But consciousness is only part of the machinery; there is no “self” apart from the machinery. There is no “ego” that can stand over against the system and manipulate it at its own will. Its “will” is the will of the cosmos. In this picture, by the way, we have a rather good description of human beings as seen by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. To change people, says Skinner, change their environment, the contingencies under which they act, the forces acting on them. A person must respond in kind, for in Skinner’s view every person is only a reactor: “A person does not act on the world, the world acts on him.”9

The nihilists follow this argument, which can now be stated briefly: Human beings are conscious machines without the ability to affect their own destiny or do anything significant; therefore, human beings as valuable beings are dead. Their life is Beckett’s “breath,” not the life God “breathed” into the first person in the Garden (Genesis 2:7).

But perhaps the course of my argument has moved too fast. Have I missed something? Some naturalists would certainly say so. They would say that I went wrong when I said that the only explanation for change is the continuity of cause and effect. Jacques Monod, for example, attributes all basic change—certainly the appearance of anything genuinely new—to chance. And naturalists admit that new things have come into being by the uncountable trillions: every step on the evolutionary scale from hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so forth in free association to the formation of complex amino acids and other basic building blocks of life. At every turn—and these are beyond count—chance introduced the new thing. Then necessity, or what Monod calls “the machinery of invariance,” took over and duplicated the chance-produced pattern. Slowly over eons of time through the cooperation of chance and necessity, cellular life, multicellular life, the plant and animal kingdoms, and human beings emerged.10 So chance is offered as the trigger for humanity’s emergence.

But what is chance? Either chance is the inexorable proclivity of reality to happen as it does, appearing to be chance because we do not know the reason for what happens (making chance another name for our ignorance of the forces of determinism), or it is absolutely irrational.11 In the first case, chance is just unknown determinism and not freedom at all. In the second case, chance is not an explanation but the absence of an explanation.12 An event occurs. No cause can be assigned. It is a chance event. Not only might such an event have not happened, it could never have been expected to happen. So while chance produces the appearance of freedom, it actually introduces absurdity. Chance is causeless, purposeless, directionless.13 It is sudden givenness—gratuity incarnated in time and space.

But as Monod says, it introduced into time and space a push in a new direction. A chance event is causeless, but it itself is a cause and is now an integral part of the closed universe. Chance opens the universe not to reason, meaning, and purpose but to absurdity. Suddenly we don’t know where we are. We are no longer a flower in the seamless fabric of the universe, but a chance wart on the smooth skin of the impersonal.

Chance, then, does not supply a naturalist with what is necessary for a person to be both self-conscious and free. It only allows one to be self-conscious and subject to caprice. Capricious action is not a free expression of a person with character. It is simply gratuitous, uncaused. Capricious action is by definition not a response to self-determination, and thus we are still left without a basis for morality.14 Such action simply is.

To summarize: The first reason naturalism turns into nihilism is that naturalism does not supply a basis on which a person can act significantly. Rather, it denies the possibility of a self-determining being who can choose on the basis of an innate self-conscious character. We are machines—determined or capricious. We are not persons with self-consciousness and self-determination.

THE SECOND BRIDGE: THE GREAT CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

The metaphysical presupposition that the cosmos is a closed system has implications not only for metaphysics but also for epistemology. The argument in brief is this: if any given person is the result of impersonal forces—whether working haphazardly or by inexorable law—that person has no way of knowing whether what he or she seems to know is illusion or truth. Let us see how that is so.

Naturalism holds that perception and knowledge are either identical with or a byproduct of the brain; they arise from the functioning of matter. Without matter’s functioning there would be no thought. But matter functions by a nature of its own. There is no reason to think that matter has any interest in leading a conscious being to true perception or to logical (that is, correct) conclusions based on accurate observation and true presuppositions.15 The only beings in the universe who care about such matters are humans. But people are bound to their bodies. Their consciousness arises from a complex interrelation of highly “ordered” matter. Why should whatever that matter is conscious of be in any way related to what actually is the case? Is there a test for distinguishing illusion from reality? Naturalists point to the methods of scientific inquiry, pragmatic tests and so forth. But all these utilize the brain they are testing. Each test could well be a futile exercise in spinning out the consistency of an illusion.

For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God— deceiving or nondeceiving, perfect or imperfect, personal or impersonal. There is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers. They “arose,” but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?

Charles Darwin himself once said, “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”16 In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my origin is to be trusted.

Here is a curious case: If Darwin’s naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin’s own theory of human origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or set of propositions to be true.

C. S. Lewis puts the case this way:

If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.17

What we need for such certainty is the existence of some “Rational Spirit” outside both ourselves and nature from which our own rationality could derive. Theism assumes such a ground; naturalism does not.

Not only are we boxed in by the past—our origin in inanimate, unconscious matter—we are also boxed in by our present situation as thinkers. Let us say that I have just completed an argument on the level of “All men are mortal; Aristotle Onassis is a man; Aristotle Onassis is mortal.” That’s a proven conclusion. Right?

Well, how do we know it’s right? Simple. I have obeyed the laws of logic. What laws? How do we know them to be true? They are self-evident. After all, would any thought or communication be possible without them? No. So aren’t they true? Not necessarily.

Any argument we construct implies such laws—the classical ones of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle. But that fact does not guarantee the “truthfulness” of these laws in the sense that anything we think or say that obeys them necessarily relates to what is so in the objective, external universe. Moreover, any argument to check the validity of an argument is itself an argument that might be mistaken. When we begin to think like this, we are not far from an infinite regress; our argument chases its tail down the ever- receding corridors of the mind. Or, to change the image, we lose our bearings in a sea of infinity.

But haven’t we gone astray in arguing against the possibility of knowledge? We do seem to be able to test our knowledge in a way that generally satisfies us. Some things we think we know can be shown to be false or at least highly unlikely—for example, that microbes are spontaneously generated from totally inorganic mud. And all of us know how to boil water, scratch our itches, recognize our friends and distinguish them from others in a crowd.

Almost all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God insofar as He interests us—it is not in our inmost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us. Blasted by the curse attached to acts, the man of violence forces his nature, rises above himself only to relapse, an aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having instigated them. Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career, I cannot, at any price, retain my identity: whatever residue I retain must be liquidated; if, on the contrary, I assume a historical role it is my responsibility to exasperate my faculties until I explode along with them. One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

Virtually no one is a full-fledged epistemological nihilist. Yet naturalism does not allow a person to have any solid reason for confidence in human reason. We thus end in an ironic paradox. Naturalism, born in the Age of Enlightenment, was launched on a firm acceptance of the human ability to know. Now naturalists find that they can place no confidence in their knowing.

The whole point of this argument can be summarized briefly: Naturalism places us as human beings in a box. But for us to have any confidence that our knowledge that we are in a box is true, we need to stand outside the box or to have some other being outside the box provide us with information (theologians call this “revelation”). But there is nothing or no one outside the box to give us revelation, and we cannot ourselves transcend the box. Ergo: epistemological nihilism.

A naturalist who fails to perceive this is like the man in Stephen Crane’s poem:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

“It is futile,” I said,

“You can never—”

“You lie,” he cried,

And ran on.18

In the naturalistic framework, people pursue a knowledge that forever recedes before them. We can never know.

One of the worst consequences of taking epistemological nihilism seriously is that it has led some to question the very facticity of the universe.19 To some, nothing is real, not even themselves. People who reach this state are in deep trouble, for they can no longer function as human beings. Or, as we often say, they can’t cope.

We usually do not recognize this situation as metaphysical or epistemological nihilism. Rather, we call it schizophrenia, hallucination, fantasizing, daydreaming, or living in a dream world. And we treat the person as a “case,” the problem as a “disease.” I have no particular quarrel with doing this, for I do believe in the reality of an external world, one I hold in common with others in my space-time frame. Those who cannot recognize this are beyond coping. But while we think of such situations primarily in psychological terms and while we commit such people to institutions where someone will keep them alive and others will help them return from their inner trip and get back to waking reality, we should realize that some of these far-out cases may be perfect examples of what happens when a person no longer knows in the common-sense way of knowing. It is the “proper” state, the logical result, of epistemological nihilism. If I cannot know, then any perception or dream or image or fantasy becomes equally real or unreal. Life in the ordinary world is based on our ability to make distinctions. Ask the man who has just swallowed colorless liquid, which he thought was water but which was actually wood alcohol.

Most of us never see the far-out “cases.” They are quickly committed. But they exist, and I have met some people whose stories are frightening. Most full epistemological nihilists, however, fall in the class described by Robert Farrar Capon, who simply has no time for such nonsense:

The skeptic is never for real. There he stands, cocktail in hand, left arm draped languorously on one end of the mantelpiece, telling you that he can’t be sure of anything, not even of his own existence. I’ll give you my secret method of demolishing universal skepticism in four words. Whisper to him: “Your fly is open.” If he thinks knowledge is so all-fired impossible, why does he always look?20

As noted above, there is just too much evidence that knowledge is possible. What we need is a way to explain why we have it. This naturalism does not do. So the one who remains a consistent naturalist must be a closet nihilist who does not know where he is.

THE THIRD BRIDGE: IS AND OUGHT

Many naturalists—most, so far as I know—are very moral people. They are not thieves; they do not tend to be libertines. Many are faithful husbands and wives. Some are scandalized by the personal and public immorality of our day. The problem is not that moral values are not recognized but that they have no basis. Summing up the position reached by Nietzsche and Max Weber, Allan Bloom remarks, “Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.”21

Remember that for a naturalist the world is merely there. It does not provide humanity with a sense of oughtness. It only is. Ethics, however, is about what ought to be, whether it is or not.22 Where, then, does one go for a basis for morality? Where is oughtness found?

As I have noted, every person has moral values. There is no tribe without taboos. But these are merely facts of a social nature, and the specific values vary widely. In fact, many of these values conflict with each other. Thus we are forced to ask, Which values are the true values, or the higher values?

Cultural anthropologists, recognizing that this situation prevails, answer clearly: Moral values are relative to one’s culture. What the tribe, nation, social unit says is valuable is valuable. But there is a serious flaw here. It is only another way of saying that is (the fact of a specific value) equals ought (what should be so). Moreover, it does not account for the situation of cultural rebels whose moral values are not those of their neighbors. The cultural rebel’s is is not considered ought. Why? The answer of cultural relativism is that the rebel’s moral values cannot be allowed if they upset social cohesiveness and jeopardize cultural survival. So we discover that is is not ought after all. The cultural relativist has affirmed a value—the preservation of a culture in its current state—as more valuable than its destruction or transformation by one or more rebels within it. Once more, we are forced to ask why.

Cultural relativism, it turns out, is not forever relative. It rests on a primary value affirmed by cultural relativists themselves: that cultures should be preserved. So cultural relativism does not rely only on is but on what its adherents think ought to be the case. The trouble here is that some anthropologists are not cultural relativists. Some think certain values are so important that cultures that do not recognize them should recognize them.23 So cultural relativists must, if they are to convince their colleagues, show why their values are the true values.24 Again we approach the infinite corridor down which we chase our arguments.

But let’s look again. We must be sure we see what is implied by the fact that values do really vary widely. Between neighboring tribes values conflict. One tribe may conduct “religious wars” to spread its values. Such wars are. Ought they to be? Perhaps, but only if there is indeed a nonrelative standard by which to measure the values in conflict. But a naturalist has no way of determining which values among the ones in existence are the basic ones that give meaning to the specific tribal variations. A naturalist can point only to the fact of value, never to an absolute standard.

This situation is not so critical as long as sufficient space separates peoples of radically differing values. But in the global community of the twenty-first century this luxury is no longer ours. We are forced to deal with values in conflict, and naturalists have no standard, no way of knowing when peace is more important than preserving another value. We may give up our property to avoid doing violence to a robber. But what shall we say to white racists who own rental property in the city? Whose values are to govern their actions when a black person attempts to rent their property? Who shall say? How shall we decide?

The argument can again be summarized like that above: Naturalism places us as human beings in an ethically relative box. For us to know what values within that box are true values, we need a measure imposed on us from outside the box; we need a moral plumb line by which we can evaluate the conflicting moral values we observe in ourselves and others. But there is nothing outside the box; there is no moral plumb line, no ultimate, nonchanging standard of value. Ergo: ethical nihilism.25

But nihilism is a feeling, not just a philosophy. And on the level of human perception, Franz Kafka catches in a brief parable the feeling of life in a universe without a moral plumb line.

I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: “I ran through here while you were looking the other way.” The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. “I suppose I really oughtn’t to have done it,” I said. The watchman still said nothing. “Does your silence indicate permission to pass?”26

When people were conscious of a God whose character was moral law, when their consciences were informed by a sense of rightness, their watchmen would shout halt when they trespassed the law. Now their watchmen are silent. They serve no king and protect no kingdom. The wall is a fact without a meaning. One scales it, crosses it, breaches it, and no watchman ever complains. One is left not with the fact but with the feeling of guilt.27

One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil—and that they have the illusion of moral judgement beneath them. This demand follows from an insight formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment that it believes in realities which do not exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind”

In a haunting dream sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries, an old professor is arraigned before the bar of justice. When he asks the charge, the judge replies, “You are guilty of guilt.”

“Is that serious?” the professor asks.

“Very serious,” says the judge.

But that is all that is said on the subject of guilt. In a universe where God is dead, people are not guilty of violating a moral law; they are only guilty of guilt, and that is very serious, for nothing can be done about it. If one had sinned, there might be atonement. If one had broken a law, the lawmaker might forgive the criminal. But if one is only guilty of guilt, there is no way to solve the very personal problem.28

And that states the case for a nihilist, for no one can avoid acting as if moral values exist and as if there is some bar of justice that measures guilt by objective standards. But there is no bar of justice, and we are left not in sin, but in guilt. Very serious, indeed.

THE LOSS OF MEANING

The strands of epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical nihilism weave together to make a rope long enough and strong enough to hang a whole culture. The name of the rope is Loss of Meaning. We end in a total despair of ever seeing ourselves, the world, and others as in any way significant. Nothing has meaning.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in a parody of Genesis 1, captures this modern dilemma:

In the beginning God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, “Let Us make creatures out of mud, so mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.

“Certainly,” said man.

“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And he went away.

his may first appear to be a satire on theism’s notion of the origin of the universe and human beings, but it is quite the contrary. It is a satire on the naturalist’s view, for it shows our human dilemma. We have been thrown up by an impersonal universe. The moment a self-conscious, self-determining being appears on the scene, that person asks the big question: What is the meaning of all this? What is the purpose of the cosmos? But the person’s creator—the impersonal forces of bedrock matter—cannot respond. If the cosmos is to have meaning, we must manufacture it for ourselves.

As Stephen Crane put it in the poem quoted in the opening of the first chapter, the existence of people has not created in the universe “a sense of obligation.” Precisely: We exist. Period. Our maker has no sense of value, no sense of obligation. We alone make values. Are our values valuable? By what standard? Only our own. Whose own? Each person’s own. Each of us is monarch and bishop of our own realm, but our realm is Pointland. For the moment we meet another person, we meet another monarch and bishop. There is no way to arbitrate between two free value makers. There is no monarch to whom both give obeisance. There are values, but no Value. Society is only a bunch of windowless monads, a collection of points, not an organic body obeying a superior, all-encompassing form that arbitrates the values of its separate arms, legs, warts, and wrinkles. Society is not a body at all. It is only a bunch.

Thus does naturalism lead to nihilism. If we take seriously the implications of the death of God, the disappearance of the transcendent, the closedness of the universe, we end right there.

Why, then, aren’t most naturalists nihilists? The obvious answer is the best one: Most naturalists do not take their naturalism seriously. They are inconsistent. They affirm a set of values. They have friends who affirm a similar set. They appear to know and don’t ask how they know they know. They seem to be able to choose and don’t ask themselves whether their apparent freedom is really caprice or determinism. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong. For a naturalist it is the examined life that is not worth living.

INNER TENSIONS IN NIHILISM

The trouble is that no one can live the examined life if examination leads to nihilism, for nobody can live a life consistent with nihilism. At every step, at every moment, nihilists think, and think their thinking has substance, and thus they cheat on their philosophy. There are, I believe, at least five reasons that nihilism is unlivable.

First, from meaninglessness nothing at all follows, or rather, anything follows. If the universe is meaningless and a person cannot know and nothing is immoral, any course of action is open. One can respond to meaninglessness by any act whatsoever, for none is more or less appropriate. Suicide is one act, but it does not “follow” as any more appropriate than going to a Walt Disney movie.

Yet whenever we set ourselves on a course of action, putting one foot in front of the other in other than a haphazard way, we are affirming a goal. We are affirming the value of a course of action, even if to no one other than ourselves. Thus we are not living by nihilism. We are creating value by choice. From this type of argument comes Albert Camus’s attempt to go beyond nihilism to existentialism, which we will consider in the following chapter.30

Second, every time nihilists think and trust their thinking, they are inconsistent, for they have denied that thinking is of value or that it can lead to knowledge. But at the heart of a nihilist’s one affirmation lies a self-contradiction. There is no meaning in the universe, nihilists scream. That means that their only affirmation is meaningless, for if it were to mean anything it would be false.31 Nihilists are indeed boxed in. They can get absolutely nowhere. They merely are; they merely think; and none of this has any significance whatsoever. Except for those whose actions place them in institutions, no one seems to act out their nihilism. Those who do we treat as patients.

Third, while a limited sort of practical nihilism is possible for a while, eventually a limit is reached. The comedy of Catch-22 rests on just this premise. Captain Yossarian is having a knock-down theological argument with Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife, and God is coming in for a good deal of hassling. Yossarian is speaking:

[God] is not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.

Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His system of creation?32

After several unsuccessful attempts to handle Yossarian’s verbal attack, Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife turns to violence.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife screamed suddenly, and began beating him ineffectually about the head with both fists. “Stop it!” . . .

“What the hell are you getting so upset about?” he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”33

Here is another paradox: In order to deny God one must have a God to deny. In order to be a practicing nihilist, there must be something against which to do battle. Practicing nihilists are parasites on meaning. They run out of energy when there is nothing left to deny. Cynics are out of business when they are the last ones around.

Fourth, nihilism means the death of art. Here, too, we find a paradox, for much modern art—literature, painting, drama, film—has nihilism for its ideological core. And much of this literature is excellent by the traditional canons of art. Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Samuel Beckett’s End Game, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Francis Bacon’s various heads of popes spring immediately to mind. The twist is this: to the extent that these artworks display the human implication of a nihilistic worldview, they are not nihilistic; to the extent that they themselves are meaningless, they are not artworks.

Art is nothing if not formal, that is, endowed with structure by the artist. But structure itself implies meaning. So to the extent that an artwork has structure, it has meaning and thus is not nihilistic. Even Beckett’s Breath has structure. A junkyard, the garbage in a trash heap, a pile of rocks just blasted from a quarry have no structure. They are not art.

Some contemporary art attempts to be antiart by being random. Much of John Cage’s music is predicated on sheer chance, randomness. But it is both dull and grating, and very few people can listen to it. It’s not art. Then there is Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” a brilliant though painful story about an artist who tries to make art out of public fasting, that is, out of nothing. But no one looks at him; everyone passes by his display at the circus to see a young leopard pacing in his cage. Even the “nature” of the leopard is more interesting than the “art” of the nihilist. Breath too, as minimal as it is, is structured and means something. Even if it means only that human beings are meaningless, it participates in the paradox I examined above. In short, art implies meaning and is ultimately nonnihilistic, despite the ironic attempt of nihilists to display their wares by means of it.

Fifth, and finally, nihilism poses severe psychological problems for a nihilist. People cannot live with it because it denies what every fiber of their waking being calls for—meaning, value, significance, dignity, worth. “Nietzsche,” Bloom writes, “replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition.”34

A younger and an older waiter are closing a “clean, well-lighted” bar for the night. When the young waiter leaves, the older lonely waiter thinks to himself:

What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

Nietzsche ended his life in an asylum. Ernest Hemingway affirmed a “lifestyle” and eventually committed suicide. Beckett writes black comedy. Vonnegut and Adams revel in whimsy. And Kafka—perhaps the greatest artist of them all—lived an almost impossible life of tedium, writing novels and stories that boil down to a sustained cry: God is dead! God is dead! Isn’t he? I mean, surely he is, isn’t he? God is dead. Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish he weren’t.

It is thus that nihilism forms the hinge for modern people. No one who has not plumbed the despair of the nihilists, heard them out, felt as they felt—if only vicariously through their art—can understand the past century. Nihilism is the foggy bottomland through which we modern people must pass if we are to build a life in Western culture. There are no easy answers to our questions, and none of these answers is worth anything unless it takes seriously the problems raised by the possibility that nothing whatever of value exists.

Beyond nihilism- Existentialism Chapter 6

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. I leaned back and closed my eyes. The images, forewarned, immediately leaped up and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. . . . I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being.

ROQUENTIN IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, NAUSEA

IN AN ESSAY PUBLISHED in 1950, Albert Camus wrote, “A literature of despair is a contradiction in terms. . . . In the darkest depths of our nihilism I have sought only for the means to transcend nihilism.”1 Here the essence of existentialism’s most important goal is summed up in one phrase: to transcend nihilism. In fact, every important worldview that has emerged since the beginning of the twentieth century has had that as a major goal. For nihilism, coming as it does directly from a culturally pervasive worldview, is the problem of our age. A worldview that ignores this fact has little chance of proving relevant to modern thinking people. Existentialism, especially in its secular form, not only takes nihilism seriously, it is an answer to it.

From the outset it is important to recognize that existentialism takes two basic forms, depending on its relation to previous worldviews, because existentialism is not a full-fledged worldview. Atheistic existentialism is a parasite on naturalism; theistic existentialism is a parasite on theism.2

Historically, we have an odd situation. On the one hand, atheistic existentialism developed to solve the problem of a naturalism that led to nihilism, but it did not appear in any fullness till well into the twentieth century, unless we count a major theme in Nietzsche that quickly became distorted.3 On the other hand, theistic existentialism was born in the middle of the nineteenth century as Søren Kierkegaard responded to the dead orthodoxy of Danish Lutheranism. Yet it was not until after World War I that either form of existentialism became culturally significant, for it was only then that nihilism finally gripped the intellectual world and began affecting the lives and attitudes of ordinary men and women.

World War I had not made the world safe for democracy. The generation of flappers and bathtub gin, the rampant violation of an absurd antiliquor law, the quixotic stock market that promised so much—these prefaced in the United States Dust Bowl 1930s. With the rise of National Socialism in Germany and its incredible travesty of human dignity, students and intellectuals the world over were ready to conclude that life is absurd and human beings are meaningless. In the soil of such frustration and cultural discontent, existentialism in its atheistic form sank its cultural roots. It was to flower into a significant worldview by the 1950s.

To some extent all worldviews have subtle variations. Existentialism is no exception. Camus and Sartre, both existentialists and once friends, had a falling-out over important differences, and Martin Heidegger’s existentialism is quite different from Sartre’s. But as with other worldviews, we will focus on major features and general tendencies. The language of most of the propositions listed below derives from either Sartre or Camus. That is quite intentional, because that is the form in which it has been most digested by today’s intelligentsia, and through their literary works even more than their philosophic treatises, Sartre and Camus are still wielding enormous influence. To many modern people the propositions of existentialism appear so obvious that people “do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.”5

BASIC ATHEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM

Atheistic existentialism begins by accepting naturalism’s answers to worldview questions 1 (prime reality), 4 (death), 5 (knowledge), 6 (ethics), and 7 (history). In short: Matter exists eternally; God does not exist. Death is extinction of personality and individuality. Through our innate and autonomous human reason, including the methods of science, we can know the universe. The cosmos, including this world, is understood to be in its normal state. Ethics is related only to human beings. History is a linear stream of events linked by cause and effect but without an overarching purpose.

In other words, atheistic existentialism affirms most of the propositions of naturalism except those relating to human nature and our relationship to the cosmos. Indeed, existentialism’s major interest is in our humanity and how we can be significant in an otherwise insignificant world.

The world, it is assumed, existed long before human beings came on the scene. It is structured or chaotic, determined by inexorable law or subject to chance. Whichever it is makes no difference. The world merely is.

Then came a new thing, conscious beings—ones who distinguished he and she from it, ones who seemed determined to determine their own destiny, to ask questions, to ponder, to wonder, to seek meaning, to endow the external world with special value, to create gods. In short, then came human beings. Now we have—for no one knows what reason—two kinds of being in the universe, the one seemingly having kicked the other out of itself and into separate existence.

The first sort of being is the objective world—the world of material, of inexorable law, of cause and effect, of chronological, clock-ticking time, of flux, of mechanism. The machinery of the universe, spinning electrons, whirling galaxies, falling bodies and rising gases and flowing waters—each is doing its thing, forever unconscious, forever just being where it is when it is. Here, say the existentialists, science and logic have their day. People know the external, objective world by virtue of careful observation, recording, hypothesizing, checking hypotheses by experiment, ever-refining theories, and proving guesses about the lay of the cosmos we live in.

The second sort of being is the subjective world—the world of mind, of consciousness, of awareness, of freedom, of stability. Here the inner awareness of the mind is a conscious present, a constant now. Time has no meaning, for the subject is always present to itself, never past, never future. Science and logic do not penetrate this realm; they have nothing to say about subjectivity. Subjectivity is the self’s apprehension of the not-self; subjectivity is making that not-self part of itself. The subject takes in knowledge not as a bottle takes in liquid but as an organism takes in food. Knowledge turns into the knower.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast—or else there is nothing more at all.

Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Naturalism had emphasized the unity of the two worlds by seeing the objective world as the real and the subjective as its shadow. “The brain secretes thought,” said Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, “as the liver secretes bile.” The real is the objective. Sartre says, “The effect of all materialism is to treat all men, including the one philosophizing, as objects, that is, as an ensemble of determined reactions in no way distinguished from the ensemble of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table or a chair or a stone.”6 By that route, as we saw, lies nihilism. The existentialists take another path.

Existentialism emphasizes the disunity of the two worlds and opts strongly in favor of the subjective world, what Sartre calls “an ensemble of values distinct from the material realm.”7 For people are the subjective beings. Unless there are extraterrestrial beings, a possibility most existentialists do not even consider, we are the only beings in the universe who are self-conscious and self-determinate. The reason we have become that way is past finding out. But we perceive ourselves to be self-conscious and self-determinate, and so we work from these givens.

Science and logic do not penetrate our subjectivity, but that is all right because value and meaning and significance are not tied to science and logic. We can mean; we can be valuable; or better, we can mean and be valuable. Our significance is not up to the facts of the objective world over which we have no control, but up to the consciousness of the subjective world over which we have complete control.

Atheistic existentialism is at one with naturalism’s basic view of human nature; there is indeed no genuinely transcendent element in human beings, but they do display one important unique feature. To put it in Sartre’s words, “If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and . . . this being is man.” This sentence is the most famous definition of the core of existentialism. Sartre continues, “First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.”8

Note again the distinction between the objective and subjective worlds. The objective world is a world of essences. Everything comes bearing its nature. Salt is salt; trees are tree; ants are ant. Only human beings are not human before they make themselves so. Each of us makes himself or herself human by what we do with our self-consciousness and our self-determinacy. Back to Sartre: “At first he [any human being] is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made him what he will be.”9 The subjective world is completely at the beck and call of every subjective being, that is, of every person.

How does this work out in practice? Let us say that John, a soldier, fears he is a coward. Is he a coward? Only if he acts like a coward, and his action will proceed not from a nature defined beforehand but from the choices he makes when the bullets start to fly. We can call John a coward if and only if he does cowardly deeds, and these will be deeds he chooses to do. So if John fears he is a coward but does not want to be, let him do brave deeds when they are called for.

From proposition 2 it follows that each person is totally free. Each of us is uncoerced, radically capable of doing anything imaginable with our subjectivity. We can think, will, imagine, dream, project visions, consider, ponder, invent. Each of us is monarch of our own subjective world.

We run into just such an understanding of human freedom in John Platt’s existential defense of B. F. Skinner’s naturalistic behaviorism:

The objective world, the world of isolated and controlled experiments, is the world of physics; the subjective world, the world of knowledge, values, decisions, and acts—of purposes which these experiments are in fact designed to serve—is the world of cybernetics, of our own goal-seeking behavior. Determinism or indeterminism lies on that side of the boundary, while the usual idea of “free will” lies on this side of the boundary. They belong to different universes, and no statement about one has any bearing on the other.11

So we are free within. And thus we can create our own value by affirming worth. We are not bound by the objective world of ticking clocks and falling water and spinning electrons. Value is inner, and the inner is each person’s own.

The objective world considered in and of itself is as the naturalist has said: a world of order and law, perhaps triggered into new structures by chance. It is the world of thereness.

To us, however, the facticity, the hard, cold thereness of the world, appears alien. As we make ourselves to be by fashioning our subjectivity, we see the objective world as absurd. It does not fit us. Our dreams and visions, our desires, all our inner world of value runs smack up against a universe that is impervious to our wishes. Think all day that you can step off a ten-story building and float safely to the ground. Then try it.

The objective world is orderly; bodies fall if not supported. The subjective world knows no order. What is present to it, what is here and now, is.

So we are all strangers in a foreign land. And the sooner we learn to accept that, the sooner we transcend our alienation and pass through the despair.

The toughest fact to transcend is the ultimate absurdity—death. We are free so long as we remain subjects. When we die, each of us is just an object among other objects. So, says Camus, we must ever live in the face of the absurd. We must not forget our bent toward nonexistence, but live out the tension between the love of life and the certainty of death.

Here is how an existentialist goes beyond nihilism. Nothing is of value in the objective world in which we become conscious, but while we are conscious we create value. The person who lives an authentic existence is the one who keeps ever aware of the absurdity of the cosmos but who rebels against that absurdity and creates meaning.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “underground man” is a paradigm of the rebel without a seemingly reasonable cause. In the story the underground man is challenged:

Two and two do make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice. She isn’t interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies. So a wall is a wall, etc., etc.

The walls referred to here are the “laws of nature,” “the conclusions of the natural sciences, of mathematics.” But the underground man is equal to the challenge:

But, Good Lord, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if I have my reasons for disliking them, including the one about two and two making four! Of course, I won’t be able to breach this wall with my head if I’m not strong enough. But I don’t have to accept a stone wall just because it’s there and I don’t have the strength to breach it.12

It is thus insufficient to pit the objective world against the subjective and point to its ultimate weapon, death. The person who would be authentic is not impressed. Being a cog in the cosmic machinery is much worse than death. As the underground man says, “The meaning of a man’s life consists in proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”13

Ethics—that is, a system of understanding what is the good—is solved simply for an existentialist. The good action is the consciously chosen action. Sartre writes, “To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good.”14 So the good is whatever a person chooses; the good is part of subjectivity; it is not measured by a standard outside the individual human dimension.

If I’ve discarded God the Father, there has to be someone to invent values. You’ve got to take things as they are. Moreover, to say that we invent values means nothing else than this: life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning you choose. In that way, you see, there is a possibility of creating human community.

The problem with this position is twofold. First, subjectivity leads to solipsism, the affirmation that each person alone is the determiner of values and that there are thus as many centers of value as there are persons in the cosmos at any one time. Sartre recognizes this objection and counters by insisting that every person in meeting other persons encounters a recognizable center of subjectivity.15 Thus we see that others like us must be involved in making meaning for themselves. We are all in this absurd world together, and our actions affect each other in such a way that “nothing can be good for us without being good for all.”16 Moreover, as I act and think and effect my subjectivity, I am engaged in a social activity: “I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man.”17 According to Sartre, therefore, people living authentic lives create value not only for themselves but for others too.

The second objection Sartre does not address, and it seems more telling. If, as Sartre says, we create value simply by choosing it and thus “can never choose evil,” does good have any meaning? The first answer is yes, for evil is “not-choosing.” In other words, evil is passivity, living at the direction of others, being blown around by one’s society, not recognizing the absurdity of the universe, that is, not keeping the absurd alive. If the good is in choosing, then choose. Sartre once advised a young man who sought his counsel, “You’re free, choose, that is, invent.”18

Does this definition satisfy our human moral sensitivity? Is the good merely any action passionately chosen? Too many of us can think of actions seemingly chosen with eyes open that were dead wrong. In what frame of mind have the Russian pogroms against the Jews been ordered and executed? And the bombing of Vietnamese villages or the Federal Building in Oklahoma City or the targets of the Unabomber? What about the terrorist leveling of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001? Sartre himself has sided with causes that appear quite moral on grounds many traditional moralists accept. But not every existentialist has acted like Sartre, and the system seems to leave open the possibility for the Unabomber to claim ethical immunity for his murders, or for the perpetrators of the events of 9/11 to glory in the nobility of their cause.

Placing the locus of morality in each individual’s subjectivity leads to the inability to distinguish a moral from an immoral act on grounds that satisfy our innate sense of right, a sense that says others have the same rights as I do. My choice may not be the desired choice of others though in my choosing I choose for others, as Sartre says. Some standard external to the “subjects” involved is necessary to shape truly the proper actions and relationships between “subjects.”

Ordinary naturalists can choose to commit themselves to their families or neighbors, their communities or country, the environment or the world. They need not display overarching egotism or selfishness. But full-blown atheistic existentialists have already committed themselves to themselves. If they are indeed committed to this Sartrean notion of human selves making themselves who they will come to be, they are the monarchs and bishops of their own Pointland. Since they themselves make themselves who they are, they are responsible only to themselves. They admit they are finite beings in an absurd world, subject to death without exception. The authenticity of their value comes solely by virtue of their own conscious choices.

Before we abandon existentialism to the charge of solipsism and a relativism that fails to provide a basis for ethics, we should give more than passing recognition to Albert Camus’s noble attempt to show how a good life can be defined and lived. This, it seems to me, is the task Camus set for himself in The Plague.

A SAINT WITHOUT GOD

In The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Dostoyevsky has Ivan Karamazov say that if God is dead everything is permitted. In other words, if there is no transcendent standard of the good, then there can ultimately be no way to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, and there can be no saints or sinners, no good or bad people. If God is dead, ethics is impossible.

Albert Camus picks up that challenge in The Plague (1947), which tells the story of Oran, a city in North Africa, in which a deadly strain of infectious disease breaks out. The city closes its gates to traffic and thus becomes a symbol of the closed universe, a universe without God. The disease, on the other hand, comes to symbolize the absurdity of this universe. The plague is arbitrary; one cannot predict who will and who will not contract it. It is not “a thing made to man’s measure.”19 It is terrible in its effects—painful physically and mentally. Its origins are not known, and yet it becomes as familiar as daily bread. There is no way to avoid it. Thus the plague comes to stand for death itself, for like death it is unavoidable and its effects are terminal. The plague helps make everyone in Oran live an authentic existence, because it makes everyone aware of the absurdity of the world they inhabit. It points up the fact that people are born with a love of life but live in the framework of the certainty of death.

The story begins as rats start to come out from their haunts and die in the streets; it ends a year later as the plague lifts and life in the city returns to normal. During the intervening months, life in Oran becomes life in the face of total absurdity. Camus’s genius is to use that as a setting against which to show the reactions of a cast of characters, each of whom represents in some way a philosophic attitude.

M. Michel, for example, is a concierge in an apartment house. He is outraged at the way the rats are coming out of their holes and dying in his apartment building. At first he denies they exist in his building, but eventually he is forced to admit it. Early in the novel he dies cursing the rats. M. Michel represents the man who refuses to acknowledge the absurdity of the universe. When he is forced to admit it, he dies. He cannot live in the face of the absurd. He represents those who are able to live only inauthentic lives.

The old Spaniard has a very different reaction. He had retired at age fifty and gone immediately to bed. Then he measured time, day in and day out, by moving peas from one pan to another. “‘Every fifteen peas,’ he said, ‘it’s feeding time. What could be simpler?’”20 The old Spaniard never leaves his bed, but he takes a sadistic pleasure in the rats, the heat, and the plague, which he calls “life.”21 He is Camus’s nihilist. Nothing in his life—inside or out, objective world or subjective world—has value. So he lives it with a complete absence of meaning.

M. Cottard represents a third stance. Before the plague grips the city, he is nervous, for he is a criminal and is subject to arrest if detected. But as the plague becomes severe, all city employees are committed to alleviating the distress, and Cottard is left free to do as he will. And what he wills to do is live off the plague. The worse conditions get, the richer, happier, and friendlier he becomes. “Getting worse every day isn’t it? Well, anyhow, everyone’s in the same boat,” he says.22 Jean Tarrou, one of the chief characters in the novel, explains Cottard’s happiness this way: “He’s in the same peril of death as everyone else, but that’s just the point; he’s in it with the others.”23

When the plague begins to lift, Cottard loses his feeling of community because he again becomes a wanted man. He loses control of himself, shoots up a street, and is taken by force into custody. Throughout the plague his actions were criminal. Instead of alleviating the suffering of others, he feasted on it. He is Camus’s sinner in a universe without God—proof, if you will, in novelistic form that evil is possible in a closed cosmos.

If evil is possible in a closed cosmos, then perhaps good is too. In two major characters, Jean Tarrou and Dr. Rieux, Camus develops this theme. Jean Tarrou was baptized into the fellowship of nihilists when he visited his father at work, heard him argue as a prosecuting attorney for the death of a criminal, and then saw an execution. This had a profound effect on him. As he puts it, “I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people. . . . We all have the plague.”24 And thus he lost his peace.

From then on, Jean Tarrou has made his whole life a search for some way to become “a saint without God.”25 Camus implies that Tarrou succeeds. His method lies in comprehension and sympathy and ultimately issues in action.26 He is the one who suggests a volunteer corps of workers to fight the plague and comfort its victims. Tarrou works ceaselessly in this capacity. Yet there remains a streak of despair in his lifestyle: “winning the match” for him means living “only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!” So, writes Dr. Rieux, the narrator of the novel, Tarrou “realized the bleak sterility of a life without illusions.”27

Dr. Rieux himself is another case study of the good man in an absurd world. From the very beginning he sets himself with all his strength to fight the plague—to revolt against the absurd. At first his attitude is passionless, detached, aloof. Later, as his life is deeply touched by the lives and deaths of others, he softens and becomes compassionate. Philosophically, he comes to understand what he is doing. He is totally unable to accept the idea that a good God could be in charge of things. As Baudelaire said, that would make God the devil. Rather, Dr. Rieux takes as his task “fighting against creation as he found it.”28 He says, “Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.”29

Dr. Rieux does exactly that: he struggles against death. And the story he tells is a record of “what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”30

I have dwelt at length on The Plague (though by no means exhausting its riches either as art or as a lesson in life)31 because I know of no novel or work of existential philosophy that makes so appealing a case for the possibility of living a good life in a world where God is dead and values are ungrounded in a moral framework outside the human frame. The Plague is to me almost convincing. Almost, but not quite. For the same questions occur within the intellectual framework of The Plague as within the system of Sartre’s “Existentialism.”

Why should the affirmation of life as Dr. Rieux and Jean Tarrou see it be good and Cottard’s living off the plague be bad? Why should the old Spaniard’s nihilistic response be any less right than Dr. Rieux’s positive action? True, our human sensibility sides with Rieux and Tarrou. But we recognize that the old Spaniard is not alone in his judgment. Who then is right? Those who side with the old Spaniard will not be convinced by Camus or by any reader who sides with Rieux, for without an external moral referent there is no common ground for discussion. There is but one conviction versus another. The Plague is attractive to those whose moral values are traditional, not because Camus offers a base for those values but because he continues to affirm them even though they have no base. Unfortunately, affirmation is not enough. It can be countered by an opposite affirmation.

It may be that in the last two years of his life Camus recognized his failure to go beyond nihilism. Howard Mumma, the summer pastor of the American Church in Paris, recounts private talks with Camus during these two years in which Camus gradually came to feel that the Christian explanation was true. He asked Mumma what it meant to be “born again” and whether Mumma would baptize him. The baptism did not take place, first, because Mumma considered Camus’s childhood baptism valid and, second, because Camus was not yet ready for a public display of his conversion. The issue was not resolved when Mumma left Paris at the end of summer, expecting to see Camus again the following year. Camus died in an automobile accident the following February.32

Since I have been coming to church, I have been thinking a great deal about the idea of a transcendent, something that is other than this world. . . . And since I have been reading the Bible, I sense that there is something—I don’t know if it is personal or if it is a great idea or powerful influence—but there is something that can bring meaning to my life.

Camus, in Howard Mumma, Albert Camus and the Minister

HOW FAR BEYOND NIHILISM?

Does atheistic existentialism transcend nihilism? It certainly tries to—with passion and conviction. Yet it fails to provide a referent for a morality that goes beyond each individual. By grounding human significance in subjectivity, it places it in a realm divorced from reality. The objective world keeps intruding: death, the ever-present possibility and the ultimate certainty, puts a halt to whatever meaning might otherwise be possible. It forces an existentialist forever to affirm and affirm and affirm; when affirmation ceases, so does authentic existence.

Considering precisely this objection to the possibility of human value, H. J. Blackham agrees to the terms of the argument. Death indeed does end all. But every human life is more than itself, for it stems from a past humanity and it affects humanity’s future. Moreover, “there is heaven and there is hell in the economy of every human imagination.”33 That is, says Blackham, “I am the author of my own experience.”34 After all the objections have been raised, Blackham retreats to solipsism. And that seems to me the end of all attempts at ethics from the standpoint of atheistic existentialism.

Atheistic existentialism goes beyond nihilism only to reach solipsism, the lonely self that exists for fourscore and seven (if it doesn’t contract the plague earlier), then ceases to exist. Many would say that that is not to go beyond nihilism at all; it is only to don a mask called value, a mask stripped clean away by death.

BASIC THEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM

As was pointed out above, theistic existentialism arose from philosophic and theological roots quite different from those of its atheistic counterpart. It was Søren Kierkegaard’s answer to the challenge of a theological nihilism—the dead orthodoxy of a dead church. As Kierkegaard’s themes were picked up two generations after his death, they were the response to a Christianity that had lost its theology completely and had settled for a watered-down gospel of morality and good works. God had been reduced to Jesus, who had been reduced to a good man pure and simple. The death of God in liberal theology did not produce among liberals the despair of Kafka but the optimism of one English bishop in 1905 who, when asked what he thought would prevent humankind from achieving a perfect social union, could think of nothing.

Late in the second decade of the twentieth century, however, Karl Barth in Germany saw what ought to happen when theology became anthropology, and he responded by refurbishing Christianity along existential lines. What he and subsequent theologians such as Emil Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr affirmed came to be called neo-orthodoxy, for while it was significantly different from orthodoxy, it put God very much back in the picture.35 It is not my goal to look specifically at any one form of neo-orthodoxy. Rather, I will seek to identify propositions that are common to the theistic existential stance.

Theistic existentialism begins by accepting theism’s answers to worldview questions 1 (prime reality), 2 (external reality), 3 (human beings), 4 (death), 6 (ethics), and 8 (core commitments). In short: God is infinite and personal (triune), transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign, and good. God created the cosmos ex nihilo to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system. Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, gregariousness, and creativity. Human beings were created good, but through the fall the image of God became defaced, though not so ruined as to be incapable of restoration; through the work of Christ, God redeemed humanity and began the process of restoring people to goodness, though any given person may choose to reject that redemption. For each person death is either the gate to life with God and his people or the gate to eternal separation from the only thing that will ultimately fulfill human aspirations. Ethics is transcendent and is based on the character of God as good (holy and loving). As a core commitment Christian theists live to seek first the kingdom of God, that is, to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

This list of propositions, identical to that of theism, suggests that theistic existentialism is just Christian theism. I am tempted to say that is in fact what we have, but this would do an injustice to the special existential variations and emphases. The existential version of theism is much more a particular set of emphases within theism than it is a separate worldview. Still, because of its impact on twentieth-century theology and its confusing relation to atheistic existentialism, it deserves a special treatment. Moreover, some tendencies within the existential version of theism place it at odds with traditional theism. These tendencies will be highlighted as they arise in the discussion.

As with atheistic existentialism, theistic existentialism’s most characteristic elements are concerned not with the nature of the cosmos or God, but with human nature and our relation to the cosmos and God.

Theistic existentialism does not start with God. This is its most important variation from theism. With theism God is assumed certainly to be there and of a given character; then people are defined in relationship to God. Theistic existentialism arrives at the same conclusion, but it starts elsewhere.

Theistic existentialism emphasizes the place in which human beings find themselves when they first come to self-awareness. Self-reflect for a moment. Your certainty of your own existence, your own consciousness, your own self-determinacy—these are your starting points. When you look around, check your desires against the reality you find, look for a meaning to your existence, you are not blessed with certain answers. You find a universe that does not fit you, a social order that scratches where you don’t itch and fails to scratch where you do. And, worse luck, you do not immediately perceive God.

The human situation is ambivalent, for evidence of order in the universe is ambiguous. Some things seem explicable by laws that seem to govern events; other things do not. The fact of human love and compassion gives evidence for a benevolent deity; the fact of hatred and violence and the fact of an impersonal universe point in the other direction.

It is here that Father Paneloux in The Plague images for us an existential Christian stance. Dr. Rieux, you will recall, refused to accept the “created order” because it was “a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”36 Father Paneloux, on the other hand, says, “But perhaps we should love that which we cannot understand.”37 Father Paneloux has “leaped” to faith in and love for the existence of a good God, even though the immediate evidence is all in the other direction. Rather than accounting for the absurdity of the universe on the basis of the fall, as a Christian theist would do, Father Paneloux assumes God is immediately responsible for this absurd universe; therefore he concludes that he must believe in God in spite of the absurdity.

Camus elsewhere calls such faith “intellectual suicide,” and I am inclined to agree with him. But the point is that while reason may lead us to atheism, we can always refuse to accept reason’s conclusions and take a leap toward faith.

To be sure, if the Judeo-Christian God exists, we had better acknowledge it because in that case our eternal destiny depends on it. But, say the existentialists, the data is not all in and never will be, and so every person who would be a theist must step forth and choose to believe. God will never reveal himself unambiguously. Consequently each person, in the loneliness of his or her own subjectivity, surrounded by a great deal more darkness than light, must choose. And that choice must be a radical act of faith. When a person does choose to believe, a whole panorama opens. Most of the propositions of traditional theism flood in. Yet the subjective, choice-centered basis for the worldview colors the style of each Christian existentialist’s stance within theism.

As in atheistic existentialism, theistic existentialism emphasizes the disjunction between the objective and the subjective worlds. Martin Buber, a Jewish existentialist whose views have greatly influenced Christians, uses the terms I-Thou and I-It to distinguish between the two ways a person relates to reality. In the I-It relationship a human being is an objectifier:

Now with the magnifying glass of peering observation he bends over particulars and objectifies them, or with the field-glass of remote inspection he objectifies them and arranges them as scenery, he isolates them in observation without any feeling of their exclusiveness, or he knits them into a scheme of observation without any feeling of universality.38

This is the realm of science and logic, of space and time, of measurability. As Buber says, “Without It man cannot live. But he who lives by It alone is not man.”39 The Thou is necessary.

In the I-Thou relationship, a subject encounters a subject: “When Thou is spoken [Buber means experienced], the speaker has nothing for his object.”40 Rather, such speakers have a subject like themselves with whom to share a mutual life. In Buber’s words, “All real living is meeting.”41

Buber’s statement about the primacy of I-Thou, person-to-person relationships is now recognized as a classic. No simple summary can do it justice, and I encourage readers to treat themselves to the book itself. Here we must content ourselves with one more quotation about the personal relationship Buber sees possible between God and people:

Men do not find God if they stay in the world. They do not find Him if they leave the world. He who goes out with his whole being to meet his Thou and carries to it all being that is in the world, finds Him who cannot be sought. Of course God is the “wholly Other”; but He is also the wholly Same, the Wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.42

So theistic existentialists emphasize the personal as of primary value. The impersonal is there; it is important; but it is to be lifted up to God, lifted up to the Thou of all Thous. To do so satisfies the I and serves to eradicate the alienation so strongly felt by people when they concentrate on I-It relations with nature and, sadly, with other people as well.

This discussion may seem rather abstract to Christians whose faith in God is a daily reality that they live out rather than reflect on. Perhaps the chart in table 6.1 comparing two ways of looking at some basic elements of Christianity will make the issues clearer. It is adapted from a lecture given by theologian Harold Englund at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s. Think of the column on the left as describing a dead orthodoxy contrasted with the column on the right describing a live theistic existentialism.

When put this way, the existential version is obviously more attractive. Of course, traditional theists may well respond in two ways: first, the second column demands or implies the existence of the first column and, second, theism has always included the second column in its system. Both responses are well founded. The problem has been that theism’s total worldview has not always been well understood and churches have tended to stick with column one. It has taken existentialism to restore many theists to a full recognition of the richness of their own system.

An existentialist’s stress on personality and wholeness leads to an equal emphasis on the subjectivity of genuine human knowledge. Knowledge about objects involves I-It relationships; they are necessary but not sufficient. Full knowledge is intimate interrelatedness; it involves the I-Thou and is linked firmly to the authentic life of the knower. In 1835 when Kierkegaard was faced with deciding what should be his life’s work, he wrote,

What I really need is to become clear in my own mind what I must do, not what I must know—except in so far as a knowing must precede every action. The important thing is to understand what I am destined for, to perceive what the Deity wants me to do; the point is to find the truth for me, to find that idea for which I am ready to live and die. What good would it do me to discover a so-called objective truth, though I were to work my way through the systems of the philosophers and were able, if need be, to pass them in review?43

Some readers of Kierkegaard have understood him to abandon the concept of objective truth altogether; certainly some existentialists have done precisely that, disjoining the objective and subjective so completely that the one has no relation to the other.44 This has been especially true of atheistic existentialists like John Platt. It is not that the facts are unimportant but that they must be facts for someone, facts for me. And that changes their character and makes knowledge become the knower. Truth in its personal dimension is subjectivity; it is truth digested and lived out on the nerve endings of a human life.

When knowledge becomes so closely related to the knower, it has an edge of passion, of sympathy, and it tends to be hard to divide logically from the knower himself. Buber describes the situation of a person standing before God: “Man’s religious situation, his being there in the Presence, is characterized by its essential and indissoluble antinomy.” What is one’s relation to God as regards freedom or necessity? Kant, says Buber, resolved the problem by assigning necessity to the realm of appearances and freedom to the realm of being.

But if I consider necessity and freedom not in worlds of thought but in the reality of standing before God, if I know that “I am given over for disposal” and know at the same time that “It depends on myself,” then I cannot try to escape the paradox that has to be lived by assigning irreconcilable propositions to two separate realms of validity; nor can I be helped to an ideal reconciliation by any theological device: but I am compelled to take both to myself, to be lived together, and in being lived they are one.45

The full truth is in the paradox, not in an assertion of only one side of the issue. Presumably this paradox is resolved in the mind of God, but it is not resolved in the human mind. It is to be lived out: “God, I rely completely on you; do your will. I am stepping out to act.”

The strength of stating our understanding of our stance before God in such a paradox is at least in part a result of the inability most of us have had in stating our stance nonparadoxical. Most nonparadoxical statements end by denying either God’s sovereignty or human significance. That is, they tend either to Pelagianism or to hyper-Calvinism.

The weakness of resting in paradox is the difficulty of knowing where to stop. What sets of seemingly contradictory statements are to be lived out as truth? Surely not every set. “Love your neighbor; hate your neighbor.” “Do good to those who persecute you. Call your friends together and do in your enemies.” “Don’t commit adultery. Have every sexual liaison you can pull off.”

So beyond the paradoxical it would seem that there must be some noncontradictory proposition governing which paradoxes we will try to live out. In the Christian form of existentialism the Bible taken as God’s special revelation sets the bounds. It forbids many paradoxes, and it seems to encourage others. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, may be an unresolvable paradox, but it does justice to the biblical data Among those who have no external objective authority to set the bounds, paradox tends to run rampant. Marjorie Grene comments about Kierkegaard, “Much of Kierkegaard’s writing seems to be motivated not so much by an insight into the philosophical or religious appropriateness of paradox to a peculiar problem as by the sheer intellectual delight in the absurd for its own sake.”47 Thus, this aspect of theistic existentialism has come in for a great deal of criticism from those holding a traditional theistic worldview. The human mind is made in the image of God’s mind, and thus though our mind is finite and incapable of encompassing the whole of knowledge, it is yet able to discern some truth. As Francis Schaeffer puts it, we can have substantial truth but not exhaustive truth, and we can discern truth from foolishness by the use of the principle of noncontradiction.48

What logic does is to articulate and to make explicit those rules which are in fact embodied in actual discourse and which, being so embodied, enable men both to construct valid arguments and to avoid the penalties of inconsistency. . . . A pupil of Duns Scotus demonstrated that . . . from a contradiction any statement whatsoever can be derived. It follows that to commit ourselves to asserting a contradiction is to commit ourselves to asserting anything whatsoever, to asserting anything whatsoever that it is possible to assert—and of course also to its denial. The man who asserts a contradiction thus succeeds in saying nothing and also in committing himself to everything; both are failures to assert anything determinate, to say that this is the case and not this other. We therefore depend upon our ability to utilize and to accord with the laws of logic in order to speak at all, and a large part of formal logic clarifies for us what we have been doing all along.

Alasdair MacIntyre, Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic

Theistic existentialism took two steps away from traditional theism. The first step was to begin to distrust the accuracy of recorded history. The second step was to lose interest in its facticity and to emphasize its religious implication or meaning.

The first step is associated with the higher criticism of the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than taking the biblical accounts at face value, accepting miracles and all, the higher critics, such as D. F. Strauss (1808–1874) and Ernest Renan (1823–1892), started from the naturalistic assumption that miracles cannot happen. Accounts of them must therefore be false, not necessarily fabricated by writers who wished to deceive but propounded by credulous people of primitive mindset.

This, of course, tended to undermine the authority of the biblical accounts even where they were not riddled with the miraculous. Other higher critics, most notably Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), also turned their attention to the inner unity of the Old Testament and discovered, so they were sure, that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses at all. In fact, the texts showed that several hands over several centuries had been at work. This undermined what the Bible says about itself and thus called into question the truth of its whole message.49

Rather than change their naturalistic presuppositions to match the data of the Bible, they concluded that the Bible was historically untrustworthy. This could have led to an abandonment of Christian faith in its entirety. Instead it led to a second step—a radical shift in emphasis. The facts the Bible recorded were not important; what was important were its examples of the good life and its timeless truths of morality.

Matthew Arnold wrote in 1875 that Christianity “will live, because it depends upon a true and inexhaustible fruitful idea, the idea of death and resurrection as conceived and worked out by Jesus. . . . The importance of the disciples’ belief in their Master’s resurrection lay in their believing what was true, although they materialized it. Jesus had died and risen again, but in his own sense not theirs.”50 History—that is, space-time events—was not important; belief was important. And the doctrine of death and resurrection came to stand not for the atonement of humankind by the God-man Jesus Christ but for a “new life” of human service and sacrifice for others. The great mystery of God’s entrance into time and space was changed from fact to myth, a powerful myth, of course, one that could transform ordinary people into moral giants.

These steps took place long before the nihilism of Nietzsche or the despair of Kafka. They were responses to the “assured results of scholarship” (which as those who pursue the matter will find are now not so assured). If objective truth could not be found, no matter. Real truth is poetically contained in the “story,” the narrative.

It is interesting to note what soon happened to Matthew Arnold. In 1875 he was saying that we should read the Bible as poetry; if we did it would teach us the good life. In 1880 he had taken the next step and was advocating that we treat poetry in general in the same way we used to treat the Bible: “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. . . . Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”51 For Arnold, poetry in general had become scripture.

In any case, when theistic existentialists (Reinhold Niebuhr, Rudolf Bultmann, and the like) began appearing on the theological scene, they had a ready-made solution to the problem posed for orthodoxy by the higher critics. So the Bible’s history was suspect. What matter? The accounts are “religiously” (that is, poetically) true. So while the doctrine of the neo-orthodox theologians looks more like the orthodoxy of Calvin than like the liberalism of Matthew Arnold, the historical basis for the doctrines was discounted, and the doctrines themselves began to be lifted out of history.

The fall was said not to have taken place back there and then in space and time. Rather, each person reenacts in their own life this story. Each enters the world like Adam, sinless; each one rebels against God. The fall is existential—a here-and-now proposition. Edward John Carnell summarizes the existential view of the fall as “a mythological description of a universal experience of the race.

Likewise the resurrection of Jesus may or may not have occurred in space and time. Barth believes it did; Bultmann, on the other hand, says, “An historical fact that involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable!”53 Again, no matter. The reality behind the resurrection is the new life in Christ experienced by the disciples. The “spirit” of Jesus was living in them; their lives were transformed. They were indeed living the “cruciform life style.”54

Other supernatural doctrines are similarly “demythologized,” among them creation, redemption, the resurrection of the body, the second coming, the antichrist. Each is said to be a symbol of “religious” import. Either they are not to be taken literally or, if they are, their meaning is not in their facticity but in what they indicate about human nature and our relationship to God.55

It is here—in the understanding of history and of doctrine—that traditional theists most find fault with their existential counterparts. The charge is twofold. First, theists say that the existentialists start with two false, or certainly highly suspect, presuppositions: (1) that miracles are impossible (Bultmann here, but not Barth) and (2) that the Bible is historically untrustworthy. On the level of presuppositions Bultmann simply buys the naturalist notion of the closed universe; Bultmann, although usually associated with the neo-orthodox theologians, is thus not really a “theistic” existentialist at all. Much recent scholarship has gone a long way toward restoring confidence in the Old Testament as an accurate record of events, but existential theologians ignore this scholarship or discount the importance of its results. And that brings us to the second major theistic critique.

Theists charge the existentialists with building theology on the shifting sand of myth and symbol. As a reviewer said about Lloyd Geering’s Resurrection: A Symbol of Hope, an existential work, “How can a nonevent [a resurrection which did not occur] be regarded as a symbol of hope or indeed of anything else? If something has happened we try to see what it means. If it has not happened the question cannot arise. We are driven back on the need for an Easter event.”56

There must be an event if there is to be meaning. If Jesus arose from the dead in the traditional way of understanding this, then we have an event to mean something. If he stayed in the tomb or if his body was taken elsewhere, we have another event and it must mean something else. So a theist refuses to give up the historical basis for faith and challenges the existentialist to take more seriously the implications of abandoning historical facticity as religiously important. Such abandonment should lead to doubt and loss of faith. Instead it has led to a leap of faith. Meaning is created in the subjective world, but it has no objective referent.

In this area theistic existentialism comes very close to atheistic existentialism. Perhaps when existentialists abandon facticity as a ground of meaning, they should be encouraged to take the next step and abandon meaning altogether. This would place them back in the trackless wastes of nihilism, and they would have to search for another way out.

THE PERSISTENCE OF EXISTENTIALISM

The two forms of existentialism are interesting to study, for they are a pair of worldviews that bear a sibling relationship but are children of two different fathers. Theistic existentialism arose with Kierkegaard as a response to dead theism, dead orthodoxy, and with Karl Barth as a response to the reduction of Christianity to sheer morality. It took a subjectivist turn, lifted religion from history, and focused its attention on inner meaning. Atheistic existentialism came to the fore with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as a response to nihilism and the reduction of people to meaningless cogs in the cosmic machinery. It took a subjectivist turn, lifted philosophy from objectivity, and created meaning from human affirmation.

Siblings in style though not in content, these two forms of existentialism are still commanding attention and vying for adherents. So long as those who would be believers in God yearn for a faith that does not demand too much belief in the supernatural or the accuracy of the Bible, theistic existentialism will be a live option. So long as naturalists who cannot (or refuse to) believe in God are searching for a way to find meaning in their lives, atheistic existentialism will be of service. I would predict that both forms—in probably ever-new and changing versions—will be with us for a long time.