The title of William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies also contains a deep truth about man’s nature. For “lord of the flies” is the translation of the ancient word Baal-zebub, one of the names of Satan in the New Testament. In Golding’s gripping tale, a planeload of English schoolboys marooned on an island degenerates into murderous savages. Golding shows that the evils of society at large stem from the heart of man himself, which is under the domination of the lord of the flies. Perhaps the predicament of modern man was best summarized by G. K. Chesterton in a letter to the London Times, which had invited people to write on the subject “What’s wrong with the world?” Chesterton answered, “Dear Sirs, I am. Yours truly, G. K. Chesterton.” The evil is in man himself. Man’s only answer to this problem is to try to program evil out of man by behavioral conditioning. But he thereby reduces man to the level of a laboratory rat, coaxed into the programmer’s behavior pattern by rewards and punishments.
Second, there is the problem of disease. Modern man lives in constant fear of killers like cancer, heart disease, and leukemia. You probably have loved ones or friends who have been taken or incapacitated by such diseases, for which no sure cure has been discovered. And what of those born physically deformed or mentally retarded? Is there no release for them? With no hope of immortality, life is often painful and ugly because of such scourges.
Third, all of us confront the specter of aging. Old age is inevitable—unless we die young. It often brings feebleness of body and mind. A visit to a geriatric home where so many elderly are cast away and forgotten can be very depressing. I am saddened by films that depict the life story of a hero from his youth to his old age or death. By condensing the hero’s life into the space of a couple of hours, the film brings home to us the fleeting nature of life. The contrast between the vigor of youth and the feebleness of old age is often shattering. If man is not immortal, that is all he can look forward to. Is it no wonder that the elderly are often brushed aside, since they remind us so powerfully of our future and of the transitoriness of life?
Fourth, there is death itself, the great and cruel Joker who cuts down all men, often unexpectedly in the prime of life. Bertrand Russell once remarked that no one can sit by the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God. But when I was in Paris, I met a young American minister who had been trained in seminary and worked in counseling dying children. What would Bertrand Russell have said to those children? I wondered. What could he say? Too bad? The cruelty would be unimaginable. If there is no immortality, then the capriciousness of death is a tyranny of the bitterest sort.
Confined to this life alone, modern man is set upon by the pressures of life and plagued by his own evil, disease, old age, and ultimately death itself. Historian Stewart C. Easton concludes,
Thus man is penned within his earthly world; his life began with a birth before which there was nothing and will end with a death after which there is nothing. . . .
Death marks the end of all the life he will ever know; and though there may not be much left to enjoy on earth, it is better than nothing. . . .
Thus modern man is hag-ridden by fear and worry, in spite of all the pleasures that his society through its ingenuity and industry provide him.4
Thus, truly, modern man in killing God has unwittingly killed himself as well.
Eiseley does not seem to realize the depth of this tragedy. He seems to regard man’s quest for scientific knowledge as somehow providing significance and value to man’s life. When the Orphan cries, “Why?” it is science who answers back. Science has itself become a sort of religion. Its high priests are the scientists, who speak with the authoritative word to man’s questions. But this will never do. Without God, science itself becomes meaningless. Man’s search to understand himself and the universe is ultimately without significance. Nor can scientific knowledge provide man with moral values. Eiseley is shocked at the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau. But if there is no God, then no moral standard exists to condemn such acts. Nor can science overcome the absurdity of life caused by death. Science cannot prolong life forever. It is noteworthy that Eiseley never returns to the question of death, which was awakened in him as a child, to show how science answers this problem. For it cannot. The religion of science has no answer to man’s deepest questions.
The point is that man’s being the Cosmic Orphan is not an exhilarating adventure. It is the final tragedy. It means that man is the purposeless outcome of matter, time, and chance. He is no more significant than any other animal, and is destined only to die. Therefore we weep for him.
What makes his predicament doubly tragic is that man is in a certain sense naturally oriented toward God and immortality.5 For man alone possesses what anthropologists call “openness to the world.” This means that man is not totally determined by his environment; rather he is free and can create new possibilities that are not immediately at hand in nature. Animals do not have this openness to the world. They do not perceive their environment as fully as man does, but fix their attention on their immediate surroundings. They are also bound to the world by their innate instincts, or drives, which determine how they will perceive the world and how they will act. But in man innate instincts are not so specialized or strong. He can think about the options confronting him and create new alternatives. He considers the whole world, which for him is not just an environment. In fact, man is open beyond the world. Every level he reaches, he surpasses. He strives beyond every finite level towards an unknown goal. Man is oriented toward the infinite, for any lesser goal would not satisfy his endless striving. In this sense, man is oriented toward God. Only in the infinite being of God can man’s fundamental striving be fulfilled. I am reminded of Augustine’s words, “You have made us for Yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in You.”
But not only is man oriented toward God—he is also oriented toward immortality. Only man considers and anticipates the future. Animals live only in the present, but man in his expectations, his fantasies, his dreams looks to the future. He hopes that even if he is not happy now—well, tomorrow may bring better things. But this consciousness of the future brings with it a terrible drawback. He alone, among all living creatures, anticipates his death. This results in an odd paradox: man hopes for the future, yet at the same time he knows that the future brings death one step closer. This paradox suggests that just as it belongs to man’s nature to know of his own coming death, so it belongs to his nature to hope for life beyond death. The hope for immortality thus seems to be as peculiarly characteristic of man as his orientation toward God.
But if there is no God or immortality, then not only is man a Cosmic Orphan, thrown into existence without purpose; he is also the victim of a colossal and cruel joke. His thirst for those realities that he so desperately needs to give significance and value to his life, but which he tragically lacks, is built into his very nature as man. God and immortality—the very realities toward which man is oriented—are precisely the realities that do not exist. The predicament of modern man is not simply that he is an orphan, but that he is an orphan oriented by nature toward the very things he needs but cannot have.