15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
Genesis 2:15-17 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Genesis 2:15-17 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
6 Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. 7 But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
Crucifixus est dei filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est.
Et mortuus est dei filius; credibile prorsus est, quia ineptum est.
Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile.
[The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed--because it is shameful.
The Son of God died: it is immediately credible--because it is silly.
He was buried, and rose again: it is certain--because it is impossible.]
Tertullian
The believer does not seek to understand, that he may believe, but he believes that he may understand: for unless he believed he would not understand.
Anselm
It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work. ... We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.
Points
- There are a number of distinguishable yet related terms that I will use to indicate the natural world as we humans know it at this point in post-Enlightenment, secular history, including life, human existence, reality, and nature.
- I’ll try to stick to the term “life” in the sense of modern, human existence in a world largely (though not exclusively) experienced through the lens of science.
- There are three possible alternatives to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”
- Life is meaningless
- Life is its own meaning
- Life’s meaning is disclosed from a source outside itself
- There is a possible fourth alternative: why would you ask such a stupid question? :-)
- I suspect it isn’t because of the nature of personhood itself.
- While dogs may live their lives with their snouts to the ground following a scent for reasons beyond their kin, because of human brain development and our ability to conceptualize both our own death and the death of all things as an abstraction, it seems reasonable that humans must ask the question.
- Evolution would seem to dictate that a species of animal that responds in more or less effectively to the imminent threat of death would be selected over animals that are oblivious to such threats and that this would apply to humans just as it would to any other animal.
- Because of our ability to abstract and imagine the inevitable death of all things, the threat of death is always imminent to humans even if suppressed from conscious awareness.
- I know it is always shaky to argue that the absence of proof is a point in an assertion’s favor but one only has to pop a blown up paper bag on a jet taking off at the point of highest strain on its wings and consider the reaction of the people around you to see that the brain may do a good job at suppressing the fear of death but its always just around the corner. (And you’ll have a lot of time to think about it in jail! :-) )
- Quote: Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself
- Quote: In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death, but for someone thirty-two the time between Now and Then is ordinarily so vast, so boundless, that it's no more than maybe a couple of times a year, and then only for a moment or two and late at night, that one comes anywhere near encountering that second person and in the state of madness that is the second person's everyday life. Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
- Quote: The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
- The biblical, if mythological, response might be that we ask the question of the meaning of life because in eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge we did not literally die on “that day” (as the biblical citation above states) - but lost our animal-like innocence and became uniquely aware of the mortality of all things we value. And so we taste death on a daily basis ever since long before the last day of our biological life.
- First Alternative: Life is meaningless
- This is Nihilism. I’ve known and conversed with a large number of skeptics, atheists, secularists, and those of other religions, but I do not believe I’ve ever met a Nihilist. (Some bishops, on the other hand, based on a close reading of Church history, have given me pause… :-) )
- Second Alternative: Life is (or contains) its own meaning
- The first flavor of this interprets “Life” as “Life as a whole,” as in, “The meaning of life is life.”
- The second flavor of this will choose some aspect or aspects of life as revealing the meaning of all of life. For example, “Love is the meaning of life,” or “Friends and family are the meaning of life,” or “Productive work is the meaning of life,” or “Serving the poor is the meaning of life.”
- Third Alternative: Life’s meaning is disclosed in life by something that is beyond or transcends life.
- If one grants the above, I think four conclusions and an observation can be drawn.
- The First Conclusion: If life is considered natural, then anything that transcends life must be - by the simple meaning of the word natural - super-natural.
- The Second Conclusion: Not just the third alternative, but all three alternatives require supernaturalism because life itself does not contain the necessary evidence required for choosing the alternatives of immanent meaning or meaninglessness based on reason alone. [Note: maybe the problem is ultimate meaning. Maybe transient meanings subject to mortality are sufficient without requiring ultimate meaning.]
- The Third (Tentative) Conclusion: I am convinced that belief in the supernatural is sufficiently coherent and grounded in human experience that it is not nonsense. As to whether it constitutes knowledge about which true assertions can be made or belief, I am leaning towards knowledge
- The Fourth Conclusion: As all we have available to us is the natural world (that is, human experience as understood in a secular, naturalistic, and scientific way, the only available means of encountering, sharing and enacting the supernatural meaning (if such meaning is real) disclosed or revealed within the natural world are metaphors, symbols and rituals in which the “stuff” of natural life is that which is the better known part of the metaphor and that which transcends natural life is the lesser known (allegedly) disclosed by the metaphor.
- An Observation: The Christian flavor of the third alternative
- Orthodox Christianity in the institutional church (as first tolerated by, and then patronized by, and finally enforced under pain of death by the Roman empire) came to accept the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God as the “wormhole” connecting the supernatural to the natural.
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