In a recent issue of the Catholic house organ Commonweal, Eman McMullin wrote: "Five centuries ago, the peoples of the West almost universally believed in a Creator God.  Today, belief in God has ebbed.  How did this change come about?"   Michael J Buckley offers a surprising answer to that question in a new book on the rise of modern atheism.  The author argues convincingly that the roots of atheism reach back to the seventeenth century, when Catholic theologians began to call upon philosophy and science—rather than any intrinsically religious experience—to defend the existence of god.  He traces the sources of the change to the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who met the new challenges to theistic belief not by calling on Christology or religious experience but upon philosophy.

"What happened to Catholicism is what happened to America," notes Pat Buchanan in a recent World/NetDaily commentary.  "Both passed through a moral, social and cultural revolution that has altered the most basic beliefs of men and women.  There has been a 'transvaluation of all values.'  What was considered scandalous or immoral not long ago—promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality—is now considered progressive.   It says everything about our age that, were a judicial nominee in America to echo the views of John Paul II on human life, the Democratic Senate would unanimously filibuster his nomination to death and denounce him as an extremist."

Although religious fundamentalism has actually increased in recent decades, a 2003 Harris poll of adult Americans showed that only 84% believe in the survival of the soul after death.  Of these believers, 63%—including 75% of all Christians—expect to go to heaven, only 1% expect to go to hell, 6% expect to go to purgatory, 11% expect to go somewhere else, and 18% don’t know.  I cite these statistics because I believe that the notion of what happens after death is the pivotal issue in philosophy and religion, and that the rejection of transcendence deprives almost 20% of our population of any essential meaning or purpose for the life-experience, which is tantamount to nihilism.

Actually, I would like to know the results of another kind of poll—a hypothetical challenge that involves a conscious individual choice. It would be posed somewhat like this ...

Suppose that at your death you have to make a voluntary choice between the following options:

Option 1 (Nothingness). You may choose that, effective immediately, your proprietary awareness, including all memory of your life-experience, will be permanently erased.  Your "consciousness-of-self" will, in effect, return to the nothingness from whence you came.

Option 2 (Somethingness). You may choose "psychic continuity" in a form or mode that is presently incomprehensible to you, and that can only be revealed by choosing it beforehand.

Which option would you choose?

When I tested out this reality check on my old friend Scot, a retired Chemistry professor, his initial response was: "Inasmuch as the second option requires an uninformed opinion, I would have to choose Option One."  He then countered with the question: "Would you be willing to purchase an automobile on that basis?"  (Scot has since come around to the realization that, since he doesn't really believe in hell, the odds for "Somethingness" seem eminently more favorable.)  I suspect that most people are far less stoic on life-and-death matters and, given the choice, would opt for "continuance" over nothingness—come hell, fire and brimstone, or eternal suffering.  If one is predisposed to appreciate the values of the physical world, he or she is likely to see these values as imparting meaning and purpose to human life, as well as intrinsic to the essence of reality.  Such people tend to be idealists; they view their purpose as transcending finite existence.

Response from a philosophical discussion group I'm participating in has been mixed thus far.  One long-time member accused me of being "so desperate for religion" that I want to elevate it to the intellectual level of philosophy.  (Nice try, but it's not what Essentialism is about.)  Another called my challenge "unfair", insofar as having to make such a choice would either "punish believers" or "deceive non-believers".  But what is unfair about a voluntary choice?   What is it that believers are supposed to believe in, and what determines the strength of their faith in that belief?  Accounts by those who claim to have had "near-death experiences" would suggest that such a challenge is not beyond the realm of possibility—whether confronting us at the instant of death or as an apotheosis of our values in life.  Quite a few of these revived individuals report having had to choose whether to return to their physical existence or remain in their disembodied state at some stage of their experience; and while I remain agnostic regarding NDE and other mystical experiences, I think a survey of the general population focusing on these two options would be a revealing test of the average person's belief system.

We all come into this world involuntarily with no choice in the conditions of our birth and immediate post-natal experience. The vast majority of us find this life well worth enduring, despite hardship, anguish, pain, and the inability to know what lies beyond.  It's no accident that man is the only animal equipped to contemplate his fate and discriminate among life's values.  We choose to persist in life, not only because we are biologically wired to survive and flourish but because it is our conscious will to do so—because we find value in the experience.  One could say that our will to survive is the primary expression of existential value and, therefore, that were we to have a choice to continue in any form thereafter, it would be only natural to choose affirmatively.  If this is true, then I submit that it represents the core of one's belief system.

Institutional religion preys on this belief by infusing it with dogma that is then imposed on the faithful as an institutional credo.  Ministers, priests and rabbis preach to their parishioners that they are "free to believe", so long as what they believe is sanctioned by the orthodoxy. Since philosophy has traditionally been immune from such external authority, it is ideally suited to the analysis and synthesis of cultural beliefs.  It has become quite apparent, however, that the move toward cultural humanism in our postmodern era has encouraged philosophers to regard any concept of transcendence as "irrational", hence not worthy of intellectual study.  A review of the works of major non-theistic philosophers since Descartes in the seventeenth century—including Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Engels, Nietzsche, Pierce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida—will show that they are all non-transcendental empiricists with a predominantly humanistic socio-cultural agenda.

As the anonymous author of the LifeNotes  website reminds us, "If anything in life is an empirical certainty, it is the fact that it leads to death. If you believe that your existence may end at physical death, you are accepting the idea that 'nothing' may follow death, and you are by definition accepting the possibility that 'nihilism' is correct.  Once we realize that the acceptance of nihilism is a necessary consequence of our humanistic beliefs, or non-beliefs, we will be able to decide for ourselves if the conclusion we have bought into is what we really believe.  Until we understand the true nature of 'nothing', we may well have difficulty appreciating 'anything', let alone a philosophy of transcendence."

Most people who believe that humans are physical beings whose consciousness is a product of, and constrained by, the physical laws of the universe, exhibit a conscious or subconscious determination to avoid the logical conclusions that follow from such a belief.   Most human beings find it difficult to think about the possibility that their existence may end at death, an event they feel somehow protected from by the fact that it lies in the "future".  Almost all humans refuse to contemplate the logical consequences that may follow death without life after death. If we cease to exist at our death the logical conclusion is that the void that follows death consumes and annihilates not just our future, but our entire lives, past, present, and future. It is extremely difficult—perhaps impossible—for human beings to comprehend a void that replaces all that is, a true "nothing".   Some consider any concept of transcendence "pie in the sky" ideology with historical links to paganism and religious superstition.  Yet, the very nature of human existence cries out against a conclusion that life itself may be meaningless.  Why should meaning take on such importance to a creature whose essence is no more than an inexplicable flicker of consciousness that begins and ends in nothingness?

The inference that only objects that exist can have a past and future associated with them—that once the individual ceases to exist, he or she is reverts to nothing and has no past except as an object of history—is the rationale for existential philosophy based on the "European Nihilism" defined by Nietzsche and popularized by Sartre in the last century.  I think the relevance of nihilism to the cessation of individual life is unavoidable and poses a profound challenge to the philosophical community—one that raises serious questions about the value of any non-subjective philosophy that portends to be a source of moral or intellectual enlightenment.

It is a gross misconception of our age to equate Theism with belief in a personal deity or an anthropomorphic Creator.  It is an even greater miscarriage of philosophy to subordinate conscious sensibility to empirical reality, thus denying the immanence of a transcendental reality.  Because a supernatural source is disallowed, the nihilist must identify and support a 'ground of being' within the natural world.  He may choose matter, energy, or quality for ultimate reality, but not spirit, deus, or soul.  I see the thrust of philosophy today as a futile effort to make nihilism credible.  There is no extension of consciousness beyond death, except in the "collective" or socio-biological sense, and the nihilist may not posit a primary cause save for natural causation in accordance with the laws of physics.  The nihilistic movement is an effort whose mission I believe is doomed to failure.  I say this because 1) the public at large—indeed every individual—intuitively demands a supernatural reality, 2) the rejection of alternatives is depressing and foreboding, and 3) nihilism is no more rational than the theism, vitalism or spirituality it seeks to replace.  While sociologically nihilism is culture without values, fundamentally it is a life without a soul.

The practical successes of technology over the last two centuries have engendered strong support for scientism, a situation that has not favored philosophical development.  By and large, what passes for philosophy these days is more accurately labeled socio-political pragmatism—a potpourri of evolutionary anthropology, utilitarian ethics, and logical positivism (often disguised as semiotics or semantic language games).  One value-based philosopher whose novels enjoy a loyal cult following has coined the term "philosophilology" to describe the modern-day academic approach to the subject.  Basically, it means being concerned with the "bibliography" rather than the "substance" of philosophy, and it refers to the modern practice of applying comparative analysis to the various '-isms', while disparaging ideology and adding nothing significant or new to the advance of philosophy.

Martin Gardner in his WHYS of a Philosophical Scrivener writes that for scientists and ordinary persons who have not studied philosophy, truth is based on the "correspondence theory".  He gives us the illustration of someone withdrawing a playing card from a 52-card deck that has been shuffled and spread out face-down on a table. Beside the card is a sheet of paper on which is written, "This is the queen of hearts".  Gardner then asks: "What does it mean to say that the sentence on the paper is true?"  The ordinary person will say that it is true if, in fact, the card is the queen of hearts.  But this statement says nothing about how to decide whether the sentence is true or false; it defines only what it means to say that it is true or false.  The simplest way to know for certain is to turn the card over.  But what if we can't see what's on the other side?

For those who accept the correspondence theory of truth, science is a statement that corresponds to the world's structure—in other words, that conforms to physical laws that have been validated by empirical testing.  Charles Pierce calls this praxis "fallibilism"—the doctrine that we have no sure way of knowing whether any belief about the world is absolutely true or not.  We can't see what's on the other side.

There is a popular analogy often used by Religion professors to demonstrate how reasoning from a finite perspective is inadequate for revealing the truth about God.  Four blind men, the analogy goes, come upon an elephant in the wild.  Since the men have never encountered an elephant, they grope about, seeking to understand and describe this new phenomenon.  One grasps the trunk and concludes it is a snake.  Another explores one of the elephant's legs and describes it as a tree.  A third finds the elephant's tail and announces that it is a rope.  And the fourth blind man, after feeling the elephant's side, concludes that it is, after all, a wall.  Each in his blindness is describing the same thing—an elephant.  Yet each describes the same thing in a radically different way.

Those who study the complex coherency of the physical universe have often likened it to the work of an Intelligent Designer—an analogy which by itself is neither an endorsement for an anthropomorphic Creator nor a testimony of religious faith.  For the Essentialist, the theory of evolution is quite compatible with a supernatural source.  Scientific educators, however, find this concept threatening.  They see intelligent design as a thinly veiled version of Creationism, whose supporters believe the earth was made by God exactly as chronicled in the book of Genesis.  Persuaded by this myopic reasoning, educators in some states began to label textbooks on Evolution with a qualifier that read: "Evolution is not a proven theory".  What kind of message does that send to young students on their first exposure to the biological sciences?

Regrettably, our current preoccupation with materialistic reality has made it extremely unlikely that we shall see a re-emergence of spiritual values in our lifetime.  Contemporary philosophy hangs on the coat-tails of scientific objectivism and is therefore compelled to explain intellect as a coincidental byproduct of an evolving biological world.  As a consequence, Sartre's existential "hole in the heart of Being" has been transplanted in the heart of man's culture—namely, the nihilism that pervades intellectual discourse as we enter the twenty-first century.  So long as we persist in believing that there is nothing new under the sun—that there is no reality apart from the physical world, that there is no primary cause or ultimate purpose in life—philosophy is dead in our time, and we are doomed to fulfill Nietzsche's prophecy of a culture without belief, a life without soul.

--HP             

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