Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“One possible reason is that these beliefs are endemic to human culture and therefore predispose us to their adoption.”

“So that someone who has truly resisted these cultural impetuses their entire life is suddenly incapable of resisting them at a time when, near death, you would expect them to be less affected by societal pressures than at any other time in their life?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“You make it sound as if these beliefs can never fail to provide comfort but what about our Extreme Unction recipient? You think he wanted to confront what he had done? Wouldn’t such a person be better comforted by the belief that what follows death is a complete nothing? Nothing by nature entailing no need to confront one’s senseless slaughter of children?”

“People are petrified of nothingness. Repentance and groveling they can deal with more easily I think. Maybe this fear of a complete nothing, not true belief, was his motivation. Besides, the papers said that although an atheist, he was raised Catholic meaning his last-minute belief may have been nothing more than him reverting, in his darkest hour, to an emblem of his simpler youth and drawing comfort from that. So I’m not ready to concede that he experienced true belief, though of course he may have.”

“What do you believe?”

“As I just said, I have no way of knowing what he was truly experiencing.”

“No, I mean what do you believe on the general subject?”

“I leave work early on Fridays to avoid sundown and this isn’t a hat.”

“Right, so you’re just being devil’s advocatey when you say these things. You would say that, if true, the atheist in the foxhole doesn’t so much adopt these beliefs as his eyes are pried open to the truth when spurred on by the extreme circumstances. You would say that the reason so many humans have this belief in God or an afterlife, and not other unsupported beliefs, is that their belief is justified by objective, even if unknowable, truth, which they somehow feel or know on some level. Of course, someone would answer that the belief is so popular and widely accepted not because it contains any truth but rather because it is an excellent source of comfort in a cruel world. You might, in turn, answer, as I’ve hinted, that all sorts of beliefs offer or would offer similar or even greater comfort yet they are not adopted with a fraction of the frequency as this belief. You might also add that the belief is often held by those to whom it is unlikely to offer any comfort and by still others whom you would expect the belief to actively discomfort. You could argue from these facts that this type of belief is therefore to some extent ingrained in humans. And to this, someone might respond that even if the belief was ingrained in us, that would not serve as the slightest assurance that the belief is grounded in or otherwise reveals truth . Moreover, this person might say, the things you proffer in support of the idea’s ingrained nature constitute mere circumstantial evidence. It may very well be, as you said, that a God belief et cetera is such a major part of our cultural structure and history that it predisposes us to its adoption in such a strong way that it makes the belief seem native and inborn. Which naturally raises the chicken/egg question of why the belief holds such a prominent place in human cultural history. Which place your opponent might grant but only before pointing out that as humans and their culture have evolved, the belief has rightly weakened. Adding that a seemingly strong majority of recent great thinkers have been atheists, or at least agnostics. That the scientific method currently reigns supreme and unchallenged and that one must never forget that there is, after all, no credible proof in support of the belief. To this last objection you could respond that the seeming lack of proof is, in and of itself, a form of proof of the belief ’s truth value. After all, can your opponent name another belief that has persisted for so long and so consistently in the absence of any empirical support? At which point your opponent may very well get fed up and ask if you’re one of those creeps that doesn’t want schools teaching evolution. Evolution, he would say, proves definitively that no single entity created man, discrediting any and all opposing fairy tales like the one found in Genesis. The obvious response being that if there was a supreme being, a being who possessed consummate omnipotence, perfection, and beauty, we would expect him to operate in a certain way. We would, for example, expect that if such a being was to create a race of something called humans it would be done in a celestially and appropriately complex way such as the method described by Darwin. We would also expect that the universe containing those humans would not function in a mechanistic Newtonian fashion but would instead be the bizarrely complex and counterintuitive Einsteinian slash Heisenbergian maelstrom we’ve discovered. In other words, the discovery of increasing complexity in any form is evidence of God not its opposite, not least of all because it makes the accident called life seem even less likely without a guiding force and all those other intelligent-design-type notions. All that you would surely say, and all that your opponent would respond. Back and forth, forth and back, with seemingly no legitimate means for choosing between the two opposing worldviews. Isn’t that the situation we now find ourselves in Toomie, my high-I.Q. compatriot? Is the situation hopeless or can we, by employing reason, determine which is the better view? I cannot imagine two people such as you and I failing at this. Thus am I prepared to stay in this room, for weeks if necessary and with the occasional delivered cheesesteak, in order to, with your help, definitively answer this most important question once and for all. You with me?”

“First things first.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning some day I may be willing to sit down with you and hash all this out but right now it is far more important that we discuss Jalen Kingg’s case and formulate a successful strategy for saving his life. That first thing has to come first.”

“First? What could be prior to this question? Can we truly know anything before answering this question?”

“Yes, because this ultimate question you’re talking about is meaningless at the moment. Not to mention that I and countless others have already answered it.”

“Not the way I’m talking about.”

“Maybe not, but to our satisfaction, and that’s the only truly important aspect of the question.”

“You find this kind of activity and these kinds of questions unimportant? You?”

“To a large extent yes. Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others. In a few days, a bungled mess of a person, a child’s brain in an adult, who has from birth been mercilessly tortured by circumstance will be killed unless you and I use our minds, and all other advantages that were given to us by mere accident, to stop the killers. In service of this goal I’m more than willing to spend the days of thought you’re talking about. But I would no sooner, under these circumstances, engage in what you propose than I would in endless games of tic tac toe.”

“Ah but what about tic tac dough ?”

“Same answer.”

“Fine, I’ll assume there’s no God for now and accordingly devote all my intellectual energy to our project.”

“Good, but I fail to see the connection.”

“Well if I were to conclude that there is a benevolent God who reigns over a blissful afterlife then why would I possibly put so much effort into trying to keep Kingg here with the living, where he has experienced nothing but abject misery and where if we are successful he can expect a whole lot more of the same in his rancid cage. That would be like an attorney pleading with a parole board to keep his client incarcerated. Better he should be released to take flight with an angelic brain in place of his current, faulty instrument.”