Optimistic Nihilism

by David Landers

  Now, one way in which I wouldn’t be like Jesus, though, is to insist that you believe in me—in the absence of any legitimate evidence—to be saved. That would be narcissistic; what kind of deity would glorify one of the most detestable of human traits?

  No, for me, one’s access to eternity would be weighed much more heavily on, for example, how good she was to other people; I’d be relatively forgiving about lapses of faith. To create a mind that’s curious, skeptical, and logical—then condemn it for working correctly—would be absurd. No, I wouldn’t be like God; I wouldn’t be “a terrible character” who is “obsessed” with worship and punishment.24 I would actually be merciful and loving. I’m not even sure if Hell would be necessary. Limbo would be sufficient, at worst.

  This is why my greatest concern about dying is not Hell. I’m too confident there is no such place. If there does turn out to be a transcendental spiritual entity of any sort, of course it wouldn’t be so ridiculous. My biggest fear is that there is no transcendence at all. Just carbon, dopamine, physics, and chemistry. Stardust, I’m told.

  * * *

  1 Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith (p. 79). New York: W. W. Norton. The rest of Sam’s discussion cited here comes from chapter 3 of the same book, titled “In the shadow of God.”

  2 Ehrman, B. D. (2008). God’s problem (p. 129). New York: Harper One.

  3 Hall, D. K., Mathews, F., & Pearce, J. (1998). Factors associated with sexual behavioral problems in young sexually abused children. Child Abuse & Neglect, 22, 1045-1063.

  4 Matthew 18:20.

  5 Different versions of the sentiment have been expressed by many, from Epicurus to Woody Allen.

  6 Freud, S. (2011). The future of an illusion (W. D. Robson-Scott, Trans.; p. 52). Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino. (Original work published 1927).

  7 Shaw, B. (1952). Preface on the prospects of Christianity. In Saint Joan; Major Barbara; Androcles and the lion (p. 418). New York: Modern Library.

  8 Packard, E. (2008, January). Cancer survival not linked to a positive attitude, study finds. Monitor on Psychology, 39(1), 14.

  9 The Future of an Illusion, p. 85-86.

  10 Barber, N. (2011, February 17). Does religion make people happier? Are atheists actually happier? [Web blog post “The human beast” for Psychology Today]. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201102/does-religion-make-people-happier

  11 Boseley, S. (2013, January 10). Americans ‘are sicker and die younger’ than people in other wealthy nations. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/10/americans-sicker-die-younger

  12 Schopenhauer, A. (2008). On the sufferings of the world. In E. D. Klemke & S. M. Cahn (Eds.), The meaning of life: A reader. (3rd ed., p. 53-54). New York: Oxford University Press.

  13 Smith, T. B., McCullough, M. E., & Poll, J. (2003). Religiousness and depression: Evidence for a main effect and the moderating influence of stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 614-636.

  14 American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., p. 166). Washington DC: Author.

  15 Benson, H. et al. (2006). Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer. American Heart Journal, 151, p. 934-942.

  16 The God Delusion, p. 63.

  17 Bremner, R. H., Koole, S. L., & Bushman, B. J. (2011). “Pray for those who mistreat you”: Effects of prayer on anger and aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 830-837.

  18 Solomon, R. C. & Higgins, K. M. (2000). What Nietzsche really said (p. 88). New York: Schocken Books.

  19 Quote from the “Serenity Prayer,” popularly attributed to American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (b. 1892). However, there’s controversy regarding to what degree Niebuhr’s version was original, some attributions of authorship apparently going all the way back to Aristotle; see, e.g., Goodstein, L. (2008, July 11). Serenity prayer stirs up doubt: Who wrote it? The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/11prayer.html

  20 Epstein, G. M. (2009). Good without God (p. 148). New York: William Morrow.

  21 Flemming, B., Jackson, A. (Producers), & Flemming, B. (Director). (2005). The god who wasn’t there [Documentary film]. US: Beyond Belief Media.

  22 Isaiah 65:17.

  23 The Future of an Illusion, pp. 86-87.

  24 Physicist Stephen Weinberg in: Denton, R. (Producer & Director). (2004). The atheism tapes (Steven Weinberg episode). [Television documentary miniseries]. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Meaning—er, I Mean Sanctity of Life

  He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. “Do you want my life to be meaningless?” he shouted … from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally, “I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you your sins. How can you not believe that he suffered for you?”

  — Albert Camus, The Stranger

  AGNOSTIC THEISM—the doctrine that there is some sort of god but its nature is unknowable—seems to be replacing more dogmatic theisms these days, presumably due to the natural intellectual maturation of the masses, facilitated by ready access to eye-opening education through cable television and the internet. The proclamations of the agnostic theists are becoming somewhat cliché: “I believe that there is a god, but not the God in the Bible!”; “I’m spiritual but not religious!”; or “I just believe there’s a cosmic energy that binds us.”

  In conversation, we often announce our spiritual-but-not-religious stance with a sense of pride and conviction—almost glee at times—as if we’ve figured out what the Christians have missed: the supernatural, some sort of eternal existence, and a spiritual life without the irrationality and oppression of the Bible.

  But somewhat unsettling to me—and I am speaking from experience, having been very spiritual but not religious myself in the past—that sense of pride and conviction also has a dramatic, defensive feel to it, eerily reminiscent to that of a Christian speaking at a funeral about how the deceased is now with angels and whatnot. Certainly, the defensiveness stems from different versions of the same wishful thinking, that we are more than the Big Bang and evolution—but part of us, somewhere deep down—suspects it’s not true. The agnostic theist has the same fears and needs as the Christian, but his intellect and education have whittled away the stupid stuff. But, just like the Christian, he still can’t face the prospect of absolute mortality. So, he clings to whatever hope his modern intellect can possibly endure. His intellect has corralled him into a corner, forcing him to make a claim to immortality that is difficult to discount, even by modern standards, because it’s not really clear what his claim even says.

  “Dr. Landers, why not leave these people alone?”

  Because I believe it’s critical to acknowledge that trading in God for some more ambiguous Energy that Binds Us doesn’t solve many of the fundamental problems of Christianity. Most relevant for my book, it does nothing to address the magnitude of our suffering, the likes of “forcing the child to beg for the abuse to stop while perpetrator continues laughing.” Subscribing to the Energy that Binds Us merely shifts responsibility from God/Jesus and places it elsewhere. If Bible God is not real but the Energy is, well, the Energy is now the one who is cruel, apathetic, or incompetent. Whatever’s in charge, its approach to running the universe is wholly unacceptable, and our attempts to respect and defend it are insensitive and offensive. As far as I’m concerned, fuck you, too, Energy that Binds Us! Only when we regard Nothing as in charge can we truly be in touch with reality, and therefore fully authentic and respectful of existence.

  It’s been challenging to find people who seriously entertain a universe wholly devoid of transcendence
. There seems to be a bit of a belief gradient even among atheists, some engaging in what almost feels like some sort of camouflaged spirituality. And it’s not just laypeople. Towards the end of the highly recommended and otherwise sound The End of Faith, Sam Harris—one of the “Four Horsemen of the Atheistic Apocalypse”—argues that

  the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death. While there is much to be said against a naive conception of a soul that is independent of a brain, the place of consciousness in the natural world is very much an open question. The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present … Consciousness may be a much more rudimentary phenomenon than are living creatures and their brains.1

  That passage literally startled me; I had to re-read it several times to make sure I was consuming it correctly! But yes, I feel that Sam is committing a leap of faith that is not qualitatively different than that of the agnostic theist, or even Christian: That is, just because I don’t have a soul doesn’t mean that my consciousness is necessarily going to die. Such notions are simply the atheist’s Heaven, motivated by the exact same Beckerarian fear of mortality that feeds formal religion, different only in that the behavior is more sustainable in a more educated, skeptical mind.

  I don’t enjoy singling anyone out, especially Sam, whom I regard as an ally. He’s obviously intelligent and he seems really friendly, if not sweet, at least for a famous atheist writer. Heck, he’s kinda handsome. But, he goes on to defend his notion of a non-biological consciousness by asserting “And there appears to be no obvious way of ruling out such a thesis experimentally.” Italics added.

  This is the mantra of the faithful, a violation of the most fundamental tenet of science and logic—precisely what you had just spent much of the rest of your great book criticizing! The tenet is that we can’t make a claim that cannot be tested, then imply that the burden of proof lies on our opponent’s side. My point: Until we have good evidence that consciousness continues after death, logically we have to assume, or at least be prepared for the possibility, that it doesn’t. And we don’t have good evidence that it does. I don’t think we have any evidence at all, the closest thing being those ridiculous ghost shows on the otherwise awesome Discovery Channel. So, just like with Jesus, we have to resort to hope and faith.

  One more jab and I’ll leave Sam alone. Two paragraphs after asserting that there’s no way to rule-out a non-biological explanation for consciousness, he discusses the exercise of conducting experiments on meditation and prayer and so on to help better understand consciousness. Sam then asserts “Such an enterprise becomes irrational only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical evidence.” Again, I have no desire to embarrass or humiliate anyone, but I was forced to discuss this in detail because it so exquisitely illustrates how even the most intelligent, educated, and open-minded people on Earth can also suspend their reason to defend against the fear of annihilation and nihilism.

  Sam’s in good company. Even Richard Dawkins confuses me in The God Delusion when he argues that his “Darwinism”—which I had assumed was the purist of evolutionary accounts of existence—should not be associated with nihilism.2 I find the assertion confusing because I don’t see how Darwinism can’t be associated with nihilism! Mustn’t the purist evolutionary account necessarily be nihilistic, at least to a degree?

  Granted, the word nihilism has myriad connotations; it’s not clear how Richard’s using the term. (I tried to telephone him for clarification, but his secretary said he was out on some sort of hippie love-in with Sam Harris, sacrificing grain to the moon or something.) He seems to be primarily arguing that a world devoid of spirituality does not have to be a world devoid of joy—a point with which I wholeheartedly agree. However, at one point he suggests that he, too, believes in some sort of transcendence.

  Richard shares a letter of protest sent to him by some doctor who writes with a “tormented” tone (indeed, uncannily similar to the judge I’ve quoted above from Camus’s The Stranger). I don’t need to reproduce the doctor’s letter in its entirety here, as I’m more interested in Richard’s response to it. Basically, the doctor had attacked Richard’s Darwinistic position as unacceptable because it destroys hope and must therefore lead to distress and destruction. Richard responds, defending himself as not nihilistic, at one point by stating that the doctor is confused when he accuses Darwinism of “teaching that we … are annihilated when we die.” Richard never elaborates what he himself believes happens when we die, but the clear implication is that it’s something distinguished from annihilation. Now, I’ve seen enough of Richard’s work to convince me that he doesn’t believe in an afterlife of any sort, so I have to assume that he’s referring to how we can survive through our good works and memories of us and such.

  When I consider the permanence of my best works and fondest memories, I reflexively feel somewhat assured and warm inside—but only fleetingly. The comfort feels somewhat superficial and dramatic, and ultimately gives way to nagging feelings that I am—once again—being emotionally defensive against a harsher reality. It feels like I’m making a last-ditch effort for some semblance of immortality, all other attempts up to this point having failed: God, god, The Energy that Binds Us, and Sam Harris’s disembodied consciousness-thing.

  When I scrutinize the situation as openly and as honestly as I can, I end up finding little solace through my legacy. So sadly, even those more meaningful impressions that we do make on others will not survive for very long, in the grand scheme of things. I personally don’t feel that I have a rich library of memories of most of my own grandparents, and I have literally no memories whatsoever of their parents. The people of two to three generations prior are well down the road to total annihilation. Critics will cite the gifted and talented people throughout history who have been able to change the world in a measurable way, but of course their numbers are infinitesimal relative to the rest of us, and even they’ve only changed the world; they haven’t saved it, or themselves, for that matter. And of course, we have to acknowledge that there will be no memories of any sort eventually: Even if the human race does not prematurely destroy itself through war, overpopulation, or other ecological catastrophe, the earth will eventually be devoured by the cosmos. It’s a matter of time before all evidence that humans ever existed is gone.

  These thoughts are sad and quite uncomfortable; I honestly don’t enjoy thinking about them myself. Part of me wants to exclude them from my book, but I can’t, because this is what my book is about. Indeed, in my book about atheism, I am forced to assert that I actually agree, begrudgingly, that “Darwinism … is inherently nihilistic … and [it means that we] are annihilated when we die” (or shortly thereafter).

  What happens if we take this plunge? It’s hard to tell; most of us are so afraid that we’ll be overwhelmed with sadness and despair that we avoid even entertaining such views as viable perspectives at all. We fear that we’ll either spiral into a deep depression or lose control and run amok in the streets, raping and pillaging to make the best of what time we have left, since nothing really matters.

  On the contrary, entertaining the notion can be profoundly edifying and liberating. Sure, it will be dark and depressing at times—as it should be—but the dark parts don’t have to consume us. The truth may even enrich our lives in ways that the fantasies cannot.

  Just as commonly as Candide is cited in books about atheism, Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus is often referenced in essays on the meaning of life. As a tribute, I’m going to cite Jeffery Olen’s discussion, as he wrote the first philosophy textbook I ever picked up, Persons and Their World.3 Unfortunately, I didn’t read the final chapter from whence this came until many years had passed after I first bought the book in community college.

  Recall that Sisyphus was the crafty Greek king who tricked the gods into releasing him from Greek hell, for which he was subsequently punished by having to roll a giant stone
up a mountain for eternity, as each time he reached the summit, the stone would roll down the other side. Jeffery explains that Camus likened the human condition to the myth because, in the grand scheme of things, “our actions here on earth are as futile and pointless as the eternal task assigned to Sisyphus.” He elaborates that Camus believed that “A world without God is a world without hope—for either an afterlife or a life in this world with ultimate meaning.” If this most nihilistic assessment of reality is accurate, would life even be worth living?

  Jeffery believes that Camus would say that it would:

  Since experiences are all we have, let us have as many as we can. Let us also live them heroically … without any hope or regret, without any illusions about their ultimate significance. Let us live them with the sense that we, and not any God, are the masters of our fate, and let us live them in revolt against false answers to the problem of life … That Sisyphus is an absurd hero to Camus is not surprising. What is surprising is this. Camus imagines Sisyphus happy as he walks down the mountain to begin pushing the rock back up. Why? Because he has made his own fate. And because he can scorn the gods and his own situation. And because he can continue to experience all that is around him. And because he can go on without hope and regret. In short, because he fully understands his situation yet goes on.

  So there it is.

  For the first time in my life while studying and contemplating purported venues to a meaningful existence—from Christianity’s God to our own legacies—I finally don’t feel the nagging tugs of emotional defensiveness. I finally have something I can sink my teeth into and abide by without doubt, à la cogito ergo sum.

  Life is not about faith or obsessing about the future, whether with hope or anxiety. It’s about simply existing, with courage, honesty, and authenticity. These philosophers seem to believe that “What is the meaning of life?” is a silly question. There is no objective meaning to, no extrinsic purpose of, and no legitimate transcendence from the human condition. The most meaningful experience starts with facing this meaninglessness courageously!