In a time when the debate between religious believers and secular non-believers seems to be growing towards a fever pitch, I find myself drawn more and more to the task of expounding on the positive aspects of the world-view known as naturalism.

I call it a fever pitch because recent books penned by unabashed atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, have brought to the forefront of public discourse a heretofore taboo dialogue regarding the nature, aims and relevance of religious belief. Even CNN has been running a series ominously titled "God's Warriors". The series began last night with a look at so-called Jewish warriors; and over the next two nights they will be examining Christian warriors and Muslim warriors, respectively.

I watched last night's episode, and I should say that it does a good job of at least bringing to the public's attention the type of thinking that is behind the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; however, I think the show spent too much time on an Olympics-style "up close and personal" type of format. They delved more deeply into the specific circumstances of certain individuals and families, and not deeply enough into the underlying ideological and political beliefs driving the conflict. I imagine that the next two episodes will be more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a needful program, but I'm just indulging in a little Monday morning quarterbacking.

The criticism leveled at Dawkins, Harris, et. al., is that their approach is acerbic and divisive - and even somewhat evangelical, in its own way - and that ridiculing believers will only serve to strengthen their already impregnable redoubt of belief. I have leveled this same criticism; but I also believe that it is a necessary evil, so to speak. I think it's true that ridicule will almost never disabuse a true believer of her beliefs, however ridiculous those beliefs may be. But, at bottom, I consider the pejoratively-called New Atheists' effort to be a necessary opening salvo in exposing the nature, aims and relevance of religious belief in America. I believe it's been a long time coming, and if the implicit gag order regarding religious belief which has held sway over public discourse for so long has to be repealed through acerbic vitriol, then so be it.

Having outgrown a fundamentalist - though not particularly evangelical - church into a completely secular, naturalistic view of the world, I know how intellectually and emotionally arduous it can be to break free of a cultural and familial shibboleth such as religious belief - especially monotheistic belief with it's claim to absolute truth and the adherent's unqualified obedience.

My goal in this post is not to delineate the differences between religious faith and evidence-based empiricism and rationality (i.e., the endeavor of science). I intend to deal with the most salient and relevant issue facing someone who lacks belief in the supernatural: the most difficult thing to overcome, and the most persistent criticism leveled at non-believers, is the idea that existence is meaningless and empty without a belief in God.

In this regard, I'd like to use the 19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as a sort of foil. I've always found Schopenhauer to be one of the more straightforward philosophers - which is unusual for 'professional' philosophers of his time, especially the German philosophers. Additionally, I am sympathetic to his affinity for the Upanishadic and Buddhist philosophies of India, which he rightly regarded as springing from a desire to understand and eradicate human suffering, despite their dubious metaphysical musings. Schopenhauer himself indulged in some specious metaphysical musings, especially in his work The World as Will and Representation. I think he had many things right, but there are some things, at least in my opinion as a metaphysical naturalist, that he had wrong.

But I want to focus on his thoughts about existence - human and otherwise. One of his essays was titled "The Emptiness of Existence"; and despite its seemingly nihilistic tone, it is difficult for a naturalist to argue with his most basic conclusions:

This emptiness finds its expression in the whole form of existence, in the infiniteness of Time and Space as opposed to the finiteness of the individual in both; in the flitting present as the only manner of real existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constantly Becoming without Being; in continually wishing without being satisfied; in an incessant thwarting of one’s efforts, which go to make up life, until victory is won. Time, and the transitoriness of all things, are merely the form under which the will to live, which as the thing-in-itself is imperishable, has revealed to Time the futility of its efforts. Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value.

Aside from his claim that the "will to live" is imperishable, his assessment is nearly identical to the Buddha's original diagnosis of human existence. When Schopenhauer talks about the Will as being the "thing-in-itself", he means to say that the Will is the ultimate reality, and that a human being is a temporary manifestation of this Will; but by doing so, he also imputes purpose or intention to it, something which we naturalists understand doesn't exist in nature as such: nature simply is, and it has no ultimate purpose. Humans have purposes, but that's not the same thing as saying that nature as a whole has a purpose.

But, as with the Buddha, he notes that existence is characterized by both incessant change and the automatic, ineradicable arising of innumerable desires. This is undoubtedly true. What we call the 'present moment' is so infinitesimally short - for example, as soon as a word is spoken, as soon as the sound waves enter our ear and are registered in the brain, it already belongs to the past. Sure, we remember words that have been spoken, and strings of words we call sentences, but they exist only in our memory - they no longer belong to this thing we call the present:

What has been exists no more; and exists just as little as that which has never been. But everything that exists has been in the next moment. Hence something belonging to the present, however unimportant it may be, is superior to something important belonging to the past; this is because the former is a reality and related to the latter as something is to nothing.

I like his idea that, from a human perspective, the present moment is 'superior' to something belonging to the past or to the future. Humanity, generally speaking, has always been concerned with living in the moment; carpe diem and all that. Indeed, it is the primary imperative of Zen Buddhism. We've all been admonished that dwelling on or bemoaning the past is a waste of time at best and downright unhealthy at worst; and that pining for an uncertain or indeterminate future is a similar misuse of valuable time. Our choices, our actions - the things that create our future - exist only in the present moment. By 'future', I mean the circumstances in which we eventually find ourselves, the way points along our lives - and not necessarily our personalities or characters; though clearly our choices and actions contribute to them.

So we naturalists learn not to harp on about the past, or to get caught up in the many machinations related to future concerns. Of course, this is easier said than done. For many, if not most, this is a Herculean task. Some may eventually succeed in this endeavor, while some may never get it. And of course most of us are everywhere along the spectrum. But naturalists don't worry about past 'sins' or the fate of their soul after death because naturalists don't believe in sin or souls or life after death. To a naturalist, these concepts don't refer to any reality.

As we delve further into the psyche of Schopenhauer, he begins to get more and more pessimistic:

In a world like this, where there is no kind of stability, no possibility of anything lasting, but where everything is thrown into a restless whirlpool of change, where everything hurries on, flies, and is maintained in the balance by a continual advancing and moving, it is impossible to imagine happiness. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual becoming and never Being is all that takes place. First of all, no man is happy; he strives his whole life long after imaginary happiness, which he seldom attains, and if he does, then it is only to be disillusioned; and as a rule he is shipwrecked in the end and enters the harbour dismasted. Then it is all the same whether he has been happy or unhappy in a life which was made up of a merely ever-changing present and is now at an end.

Again, it is undoubtedly true that life is characterized by constant change, and that human beings continually strive for happiness; but it is disingenuous to say that no one is never happy. It's true that if all one is concerned with is superficial happiness - enjoying a good meal, having a good romp in the sack, a delicious piece of chocolate or a fine wine - then of course as soon as those desires are satisfied new ones arise and the wheel rolls on. And not everyone attains the same type of happiness, or finds happiness in the same objects or pursuits.

But can happiness be an abiding state of being, as opposed to a temporary state of mind? Here's where I think a religious believer and a secular non-believer cross paths. Both recognize that human beings can be characterized as fountains of desires; that this constant 'chasing after the wind' keeps one in a more or less continual state of agitation or perturbation; and that both seek to position themselves in relation to desires such that these desires lose their force. I would argue that they both aspire to be in the position Susan Blackmore describes:

The same is so for all desires. I want another helping of chocolate pudding. In fact there either will or won't be enough left for me. The desire will or won't be gratified. When it happens one way or the other I will go on paying attention either to the full tummy, yucky with chocolate or to the slightly emptier one with only one helping. Either way will be fine. The funny thing about paying attention is how everything really seems to be fine whether the desires are fulfilled or not.

Gradually this approach to desires transforms them. They don't go away but they stop driving you. It is as though, simply by paying attention, they lose their force. And you don't feel less alive but more so.

To most Westerners, this state of being seems almost impossible to attain. It is very Zen-like or Taoist in its approach. The goal is not to live without desire - that may very well be impossible - but to live in a right relation to one's desires such that one is not torn apart by them. Since it is impossible for human beings to quell the fountain from which desires spring, we must compose ourselves in such a way that we stand in an endurable relation to our desires.

The naturalist sees that all of existence - all human thought and activity, all of nature, from the subatomic to the cosmic - is in a state of flux. We understand that the satisfaction of simple desires leads to the craving for more and complicated desires, and that the course of one's life is largely determined by the nature of the desires one pursues - professionally, personally and spiritually.

There are many spiritual practices designed to accomplish this, from the simple yet difficult practice of Zen or the Taoist 'going with the flow', to more elaborate disciplines. Even the monotheistic religions essentially teach their adherents to channel their desires onto one object: God himself.

So while all naturalists share the common conviction that nature is all there is - there is nothing supernatural about existence - they employ different methods for achieving abiding happiness. Many attempt to lessen the force of desire, to be less driven by it; there may be some who capitulate and give themselves over to their desires, to be possessed by them; and there may be some who see this whole endeavor as pointless or impossible and try not to think about it too much.

But whatever their attitude toward desire, they understand and accept - though they might not be happy about - the fact that there is no recourse to any supernatural being or power or force in the universe to which they can appeal or entreat, and in the end they are thrown back on their own existence, their own resources, and must navigate their own way in the world.

But that is not a bad thing; and it is ultimately not all that different for the believer in the supernatural.








Technorati tags:

naturalism, God's Warriors