68 We go on living, in the final analysis, because we do not know why we are here to live. Unknowing, or hazard, is as vital to man as water.
69 We can imagine the non-existence of any existent object. Our belief that it does exist is partly assured by the fact that it might not have done so. Behind the shape, the mass, there stands always the absence; the ghost of non-existing.
70 Just as the atom is made of positive and negative particles, so is each thing made of its own existence and non-existence. Thus is ‘God’ present by being absent in every thing and every moment. It is the dark core, the mystery, the being-not-being of even the simplest objects.
71 Erigena: God is eternally partially self-ignorant. If he knew all of himself, he could define himself. If he could define himself, he would be finite. But all he knows of himself is what he has created. What is created is his knowledge, what is potential is his mystery: mysterious in him and to him.*
All this applies equally to man.
72 The ubiquitous absence of ‘God’ in ordinary life is this sense of non-existing, of mystery, of incalculable potentiality; this eternal doubt that hovers between the thing in itself and our perception of it; this dimension in and by which all other dimensions exist. The white paper that contains a drawing; the space that contains a building; the silence that contains a sonata; the passage of time that prevents a sensation or object continuing for ever; all these are ‘God’.
73 Mystery, or unknowing, is energy. As soon as a mystery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy. If we question deep enough there comes a point where answers, if answers could be given, would kill. We may want to dam the river; but we dam the spring at our peril. In fact, since ‘God’ is unknowable, we cannot dam the spring of basic existential mystery. ‘God’ is the energy of all questions and questing; and so the ultimate source of all action and volition.
ATHEISM
74 I do not consider myself an atheist, yet this concept of ‘God’ and our necessary masterlessness obliges me to behave in all public matters as if I were.
75 Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.
76 I live in hazard and infinity. The cosmos stretches around me, meadow on meadow of galaxies, reach on reach of dark space, steppes of stars, oceanic darkness and light. There is no amenable god in it, no particular concern or particular mercy. Yet everywhere I see a living balance, a rippling tension, an enormous yet mysterious simplicity, an endless breathing of light. And I comprehend that being is understanding that I must exist in hazard but that the whole is not in hazard. Seeing and knowing this is being conscious; accepting it is being human.
2
HUMAN DISSATISFACTIONS
1 Why do we think this is not the best of all possible worlds for mankind? Why are we unhappy in it?
2 What follow are the great dissatisfactions. I maintain that they are all essential to our happiness since they provide the soil from which it grows.
DEATH
3 We hate death for two reasons. It ends life prematurely; and we do not know what lies beyond it.
4 A very large majority of educated mankind now doubts the existence of an afterlife. It is clear that the only scientific attitude is that of agnosticism: we simply do not know. We are in the Bet Situation.*
5 The Bet Situation is one in which we cannot have certainty about some future event; and yet in which it is vital that we come to a decision about its nature. This situation faces us at the beginning of a horse race, when we want to know the name of the winner. We are reduced at worst to guessing it with a pin and at best to forecasting it intelligently from the evidence of past form, condition in the paddock, and all the rest. Most serious gamblers know that their interest is better served by the second method; and it is this method we should use when we come to wager on the race between an afterlife and a total extinction. We have two horses, but of course three choices, since we can argue that it is best not to bet – that is, to remain agnostic.
6 To Pascal, who first made this analogy with the bet, the answer was clear: one must put one’s money on the Christian belief that a recompensatory afterlife exists. If it is not true, he argued, then one has lost nothing but one’s stake. If it is true, one has gained all.
7 Now even an atheist contemporary with Pascal might have agreed that nothing but good could ensue, in an unjust society where the majority conveniently believed in hellfire, from supporting the idea, false or true, of an afterlife. But today the concept of hellfire has been discarded by the theologians, let alone the rest of us. Hell could be just only in a world where all were equally persuaded that it exists; just only in a world that allowed a total freedom of will – and therefore a total biographical and biological similarity – to every man and woman in it. We may still disagree on the extent to which man is determined in his behaviour by exterior circumstances, but that he is not partly so determined is irrefutable.
8 The idea of an afterlife has persistently haunted man because inequality has persistently tyrannized him. It is not only to the poor, the sick, the unfortunate underdogs of history, that the idea appeals; it has appealed to all honest men’s sense of justice, and very often at the same time as the use of the idea to maintain an unequal status quo in society has revolted them. Somewhere, this belief proposes, there is a system of absolute justice and a day of absolute judgement, by and on which we are all to be rewarded according to our deserts.
9 But the true longing of humanity is not for an afterlife; it is for the establishment of a justice here and now that will make an afterlife unnecessary. This myth was a compensatory fantasy, a psychological safety-valve for the frustrations of existential reality.
10 We are ourselves to establish justice in our world; and the more we allow the belief in an afterlife to dwindle away, and yet still do so little to correct the flagrant inequalities of our world, then the more danger we run.
11 Our world has a badly-designed engine. By using the oil of this myth it did not for many centuries heat up. But now the oil-level is dropping ominously low. For this reason, it is not enough to remain agnostic. We must bet on the other horse: we have one life, and it is ended by a total extinction of consciousness as well as body.
12 What matters is not our personal damnation or salvation in the world to come, but that of our fellow men in the world that is.
13 Our second hatred of death is that it almost always comes too soon. We suffer from an illusion, akin to that of the desirability of an afterlife, that we should be happier if we lived for ever. Animal desires are always for an extension of what satisfies them. Only two hundred years ago a man who reached the age of forty was exceeding the average life-span; and perhaps two hundred years from now centenarians will be as common as septuagenarians today. But they will still crave a longer life.
14 The function of death is to put tension into life; and the more we increase the length and the security of individual existence then the more tension we remove from it. All our pleasurable experiences contain a faint yet terrible element of the condemned man’s last breakfast, an echo of the intensity of feeling of the poet who knows he is going to die, of the young soldier going doomed into battle.