IN HIS LAST DECADE, the Catholic priest St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) labored steadily on his Summa Theologica (Summary of Theology). He never finished it. Yet it is his most famous and important work, and it summarizes a sizable portion of Christian theology at the time. A significant part of its fame rests on its five arguments for the existence of the central Christian deity we’ll just call God.1 It has always puzzled me that one would have to argue for the existence of God (or any other deity, for that matter). A being of the magnificence of God would be obvious to the most casual observer. But of course, such a view doesn’t take into account the Fall—the original sin of Adam and Eve. Except there never was any Adam or Eve (humans evolved) and therefore there was no one to do the original sinning and hence no original sin. And anyway, it would be profoundly immoral to punish billions and billions of humans for an act done in understandable ignorance, especially since Adam and Eve were suckered by God into sinning, that is, eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (read chapter 3 of Genesis, verses 2–7). No moral god would do such a thing. Hence, there was no sin, original or otherwise. So there wasn’t a Fall. So, I ask again, why would it be necessary to argue for God’s existence?
However, it is easy to justify arguing for the existence and mysteriousness of our mysteries from chapter 10. Not everyone knows about them, and some of those who do (for example, mathematicians) frequently deny that the mysteries are excellent beauties. Yet, as we have seen, the mysteries do exist and are indeed beautiful. Given this, it is important that everyone know about them.
But the mysteries seem unable to help you live your life. They won’t help you achieve your dreams or cure your illnesses, they won’t help your children and loved ones, they won’t get you a new car or a promotion, they won’t even make you aware of their existence. But we know now that it is not only permissible to ask but required of us to ask: how much do the deities hovering over and around planet Earth actually help us live our lives? The answer is: no more than Chance itself. As discussed in chapter 12, the entire burden of living a happy and good life falls squarely on our own shoulders. When it comes to living the good life, we couldn’t be more alone.
The mysteries are not as powerless to help us live better lives as it might appear. Beyond the beauty and awe suggested in chapters 10 and 11, there are other reasons why everyone should know about them.
As we’ve seen, the excellent beauties from chapter 10 are not a palliative for angst. Indeed, they can cause angst; I have seen them do so. We now know, for example, that they stand opposed to the Enlightenment ideal. The excellent beauties represent limits of science and rationality. Could accepting that science and, indeed, reason are sometimes powerless improve our lives? It certainly could.
The excellent beauties suggest not only that some things are not understandable, but that nothing is fully understandable, if for no other reason than that full understanding requires understanding any given thing’s complex relationships to every other thing in the universe, no matter how large or small or how abstract. This suggests that we should adopt a new epistemic attitude toward what we think we know. I call this new attitude the provisional epistemic attitude. This is the attitude that any thing we know is known by us only provisionally. Certainty is provisional.
The provisional epistemic attitude says that we have to live with ignorance. We have to keep going, keep making decisions, even though we know that we don’t know all that we need to know to make the decisions, or even, sometimes, any of what we need to know. We have to live in ignorance. Of course, we try to keep ignorance at bay. And it is right that we do this (probably). But we need to be humble in our judgments of our efforts.
The provisional epistemic attitude also says that we should all explicitly learn to live with randomness, with probabilities. The universe we live in might not obey fixed laws at its deepest levels, or indeed at any of its levels—all laws might be statistical in nature, even Einstein’s laws. Our universe might not have a well-organized hierarchal structure, for example, with biology supervening on chemistry which in turn supervenes on physics. The universe might be a jumble; our world might dappled, as Cartwright argued.2 It is obvious that the universe is not chaotic, of course (obvious now, provisionally). But it is equally obvious that it is not well behaved. We must live in this in-between universe. Of course, we like it when we find laws (or what seem to be laws). And it is right that we look for them (probably). But we need to be guarded in our judgments of how strong, how universal, such laws are.
Part of my claim here is that the provisional epistemic attitude should be adopted because it is true, . . . provisionally. Another good reason to adopt it is a pragmatic one: given what we know about ourselves and the world (that is, that we and it are full of surprises), the provisional epistemic attitude secures the maximum amount of stability available for us while providing the flexibility needed for the surprises.
But there is even more. I think that adopting the provisional epistemic attitude could lead to:
a friendlier acceptance of uncertainty,
a lighter grasp on all our knowledge,
an ongoing openness to change,
an willingness to instigate change,
an active search for the failure of all generalities (including the ones is this book),
a willingness to question everything (even this statement),
and finally, less epistemic arrogance.
Adopting these seven would, I believe, make the world a better place. . . . But I only hold this belief provisionally.
Given all that has been presented in this book, we are now free to take a leap of explicit self-reliance, facing squarely the truth that haunts us every second of our lives: we flourish or die depending on what we do. From here, our path is clear. We can point the remnants of our religious proclivities in a new direction, in the direction of the mysteries explored in chapter 10, directly experiencing a world that is shockingly strange, even perverse, and that thereby directly changes us into participators of the perverse—knowing and yet not comprehending the beautiful mysteries that lie at the core of our existence.
Beauty and a genuine chance at survival await those of us who both contemplate the mysteries and at the same time realize that religion itself is a product of human evolution. The One Billion will claim that a better chance of survival awaits those who stop seeking distant horizons and instead focus on the challenge of dealing with a future of perhaps twenty-five billion humans on planet Earth and all their . . . stuff! . . . ignoring utterly any mysteries, religious or scientific, and indeed ignoring anything that does not help with this pressing task.
I wish the One Billion Godspeed. As for me, the sheer perversity of the universe beckons, and, its beauty filling my eyes, I cannot turn away.