So, for what purpose do we have reason? And is it worth occupying oneself with art, science, philosophy, technology, just to eat, drink, reproduce, and die? Of course not.
In school at this same time I was learning the basics of Darwinism. The basic law of the animal world, I was taught, is the struggle for survival. The strong devour the weak. Those who adapt, survive, and those who don’t, perish. And man, too, is an animal, isn’t he? This means that among humans the basic law is the same: the strong devour the weak; those who adapt, survive, and those who don’t, perish. It then follows, that the accommodating careerists are the most normal of people, and morality is just a fabrication of the weak, made up to console them in their weakness. Yet what if I don’t want to live without morality, only filling my own stomach and taking away my neighbor’s portion? Why the devil would I want such a life? I thought incessantly of suicide, but kept waiting for something and putting it off.
Then I had a revelation. Once, while reading that same textbook, Principles of Darwinism, I came upon a certain passage on coal, about how the ancient vegetation that formed coal absorbed lots of solar energy, and that’s why coal releases so much heat. A sudden spark illuminated my mind. How is it that in nature everything is so interconnected, so well thought-out? Can that
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really be by accident? Now, if a man doesn’t look after his garden, the garden will die. So how come in nature no one looks after things, but everything is in its place, everything reasoned and wise? We need oxygen, so plants make oxygen for us. Plants need humus, so animals die and their decaying bodies provide humus.
From that moment, I concluded that nature was created by a higher intelligence, God, in other words. But this belief was still far from Christianity or any other religion.
“Of course, God is creator of all in the universe,” I thought, “but that still doesn’t mean that people could see Him or that He could give them some sort of commandments. Can we fathom the soul of an ant? Can an ant understand us? In religions, man has simply tried to comprehend God in human terms.”
Then I began to reason somewhat differently. Of course, the difference between man and God is infinitely greater than the difference between an ant and man. And it’s true that an ant can never comprehend man, just as man cannot conceive the psychology of an ant. But man did not create ants. He himself, the same as ants, was created by God. So why couldn’t God understand His creations? After all, to understand something does not mean to become identical with it. So just maybe, religion is a case of God coming down to man’s level to show him how he ought to live, so that humanity would be better off. The same way we tell children that they shouldn’t play with matches.
In a similar fashion I came gradually to approach the notion of immortality. Well, fine, we die and our body rots, but what about our thoughts and feelings? Surely it cannot be that our thoughts and deeds, our commands to our body, our will and mind, originate in the dead gray matter in our heads— matter which we have named, the composition of which we know and can discuss. What is thought, after all? Something immaterial. You can’t touch or weigh it. And how can something material create the immaterial?
Then I considered that we have something in us that does not decay, because it is not subject to decay. And that this something neither dies nor is born, because birth and death are material categories. Can that which cannot be felt, weighed or measured be born? Are molecules born and do they die?
I no longer believed the theory of evolution.
“Evolution exists, but within certain limitations,” I decided. Certain muscles can be developed with protracted, regular exercise. But no matter how long you flap your arms, even for a million years, they will never become wings—that I could not believe. That would be a miracle, and what miracles can there be without God?
I was now ready for religion, but which was the true one? For truth must be singular, and there are many religions.
Valerii Leviatov, My Path to God
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Together with the appearance and development of my belief in God and immortality, I was becoming more and more drawn to Christianity, largely under the influence of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.
I was struck by The Humiliated and Insulted, the first novel by Dostoevsky that I read. Everything I had read prior to that seemed either a saccharine depiction of life, or hopeless despair. While here I saw a life full of suffering, people who were humiliated and insulted; yet when I turned the last page, I was filled with joy. These degraded and abused people were not alone; they loved each other and helped others like themselves, or even those more humbled than themselves. These people did not place their faith in any bright future for society, but in God; they loved not society in the abstract, but people as they were. Life was difficult for them, but they were not unhappy.
What makes man unhappy? Wanting something for himself that he is not granted. Others, who also want something for themselves, don’t let him have what he wants, and they in turn also suffer. But what if you are able to forget yourself? To uproot your selfishness, and to make the happiness of others your purpose in life? If your guiding principle becomes not “take,” but “give,” then your happiness will depend on how much good you give others. And this depends, not on fate, but upon you yourself. And misfortunes won’t be able to make you unhappy, because your own injuries won’t matter to you.
With a guiding principle such as this, a person can be happy in the face of any social injustice, inequality, and so on. He won’t be bothered by the fact that others live better than he does—he will be glad for them.
And then I realized that this way was the only true way to universal happiness and the kingdom of good that I had dreamed of since childhood. Since it’s not society that is bad, but man himself, then however many revolutions you have, it will only be like running in place. The have-nots envy the rich, take their wealth from them and themselves become the rich (“he who was nothing has become everything”), society once again is divided along the lines of rich and poor, and so on forever. Because the very desire for equity is founded on selfishness: a person thinks that he has not received his fair share and undertakes to establish equity. Yet when every person will be glad, when he can give more to another than he takes for himself (as parents are happy, when they give the tastiest bits to their children)—that’s when true justice will come into being. And this universal happiness will not be dependent on universal well-being. Material well-being has never made people happy. But they can be happy in poverty. That’s why the teaching that presumes the establishment of a paradise on earth together with the attainment of universal abundance is utopian. The maxim “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is wrong. It will never be possible to satisfy man’s unbridled desires (recall the fable “The Fisherman and the Fish”).