Monotheism was not a mere mathematical reduction of many gods to one God. That might have economised on temple building, but it would not have transformed the human condition. What did transform it was the discovery of a God beyond the universe. This idea, and this alone, has the power to redeem life from tragedy and meaninglessness.
People err in thinking that polytheism and monotheism are two species within the genus religion, variants of the same thing. That is not so at all. The gods of polytheism, in all their buzzing, boisterous confusion, were within the universe. They were subject to nature. They did not create it. They may have been stronger than human beings. They were certainly longer lived; they were immortal. But they were within the universe, and therefore in principle they could not give meaning to the universe.
The same is true for science, whose subject is the interrelationship of things within the natural world. There is a great deal of difference between giving a climatological explanation of rain, and explaining that rain is the work of the Aztec god Tleloc, the Persian god Tishtrya, Taki-Tsu-Hiko in Japan, Imdugud in Assyria, and so on through an impressive cast list of gods and goddesses of inundation. Science is not myth, myth is not science, but they are both explanations of some phenomenon within nature in terms of other phenomena within nature. In this sense, myth is proto-science. Science displaces myth.
But neither yields meaning, since meaning is only provided by something or someone outside the system. So, the rain falls on the righteous and wicked alike. The innocent and the guilty starve together in times of drought, and drown together in a flood. In ancient times the gods were at best indifferent, at worst actively hostile to humanity. Scientists like Jacques Monod and Steven Weinberg say the same about nature today, and within their own terms of reference they are right. Nature is sublimely indifferent to who we are and what we deserve. There is nothing moral about it; it carries no meaning within it. Myth and science in their different ways tell us how the parts are related. They cannot tell us what the totality means.
Only something or someone outside the universe can give meaning to the universe. Only belief in a transcendental God can render human existence other than tragic. Individual lives, even within a tragically configured universe, may have meaning, but life as a whole does not. Bertrand Russell was right. Take God out of the equation, and we are left with unyielding despair. On this he was more honest than most of his successors.
Can we prove life has a meaning? Clearly not. Imagine two people reflecting on the course of their own lives. One looks back and sees a mere series of events, with no connecting thread. The other sees a coherent narrative. Her life has a meaning. It can be told as a story. To be sure, she knows that there were distractions, setbacks, false turns, long periods in which nothing significant happened. But looking back, she can see that she was drawn to a calling, falteringly at first but then with ever-increasing confidence. The two people inhabit the same world, but they live different kinds of lives.
Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved. Consider trust. There are people whose attitude to the world is confident, positive, hopeful. They trust others. From time to time that trust is betrayed. They learn to be more circumspect. They find that certain individuals and types are best avoided. But they see these as exceptions. They do not lose their fundamental trust in people. Equally, though, we can think of people who, perhaps never having had in childhood a loving, stable relationship, see every human interaction as a potential threat. They view others with suspicion. Their assumption is that human beings are unreliable. They let you down. It is always wrong to trust and dangerous to love. All the proofs in the world will not get them to change their mind. For them to be able to trust will require not evidence, but healing – something not unlike a religious conversion.
That is at a personal level. The same applies across a broader canvas. Take history, for example. There are those who see no meaning in history whatsoever. They see it in terms of Joseph Heller’s graphic description, ‘a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind’.10 But there have been others – notably Tolstoy in War and Peace – who believed that beneath the surface of events a larger plan was unfolding, of which the participants in history were unaware.11 The prophets believed history was a drama about redemption. For Christians it was about salvation. For the heroes of the Enlightenment it was a narrative of progress. These are not disagreements about the facts of history. They are disagreements about the interpretation of the facts of history.
We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists. But neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge. We cannot prove that the hope is truer to experience than the tragic sense of life. Almost none of the truths by which we live are provable, and the desire to prove them is based on a monumental confusion between explanation and interpretation. Explanations can be proved, interpretations cannot. Science deals in explanation. Meaning is always a matter of interpretation. It belongs to the same territory as ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics. In none of these three disciplines can anything of consequence be proved, but that does not make them insignificant. To the contrary, they represent three of the greatest repositories of human wisdom.
Often the different stances people take towards the human condition are incommensurable. No proof, no evidence, no court can decide between them, because people have different views as to what counts as proof, what constitutes evidence and which is the appropriate court. It is no more possible to show that one is true, the other false, than it is possible to prove the truth of optimism against pessimism, science against art, prose against poetry, courage against a play-it-safe, minimum-risk approach to life.
But the idea that it does not matter which we choose could not be more wrong. A life without trust or love is, most of us would feel, an impoverished thing, missing out on a range of experiences that have been held by poets and philosophers to be supreme expressions of our humanity. Life without meaning is a fearful prospect. Albert Camus, who believed that there was no meaning and that life is absurd, argued in The Myth of Sisyphus that the fundamental question of philosophy is, ‘Why should I not commit suicide?’ It is possible to live without meaning, just as it is possible to live without music, a sense of humour, or the courage to take a risk. But it cannot seriously be argued that the loss of meaning is not a loss.
* * *
Beliefs that lie too deep to be proved are best understood as framing beliefs. Like a frame, they are not part of the picture, but they give it its shape, its outline, its orientation. Every individual, and every culture, has framing beliefs that determine their fundamental stance towards the world. Those beliefs shape the way we see things, how we talk about them and the way we respond. Usually we are not conscious of them, precisely because they are frames, not part of the picture itself.12
One of the most significant framing beliefs is the one assumed by science: the idea that the universe is governed by certain immutable laws. As David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, the truth of this principle can never be proved. The fact that certain phenomena have occurred a million or a billion times does not entail that they will do so next time. Bertrand Russell illustrated this by life as it seems to a turkey. Every day it is fed by its owner. Being a scientific turkey, it concludes that this is a rule of nature. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving it discovers the difference between probability and certainty.13 This, the so-called ‘problem of induction’, is insoluble. Science rests on the faith that, in Einstein’s words, ‘God does not play dice with the universe’. It cannot be proved, but it works.
There are many other unprovable framing beliefs, and they have perplexed philosophers since humans first thought systematically about such things. Is there really a world out there, or are there only our sense impressions? Are there other minds? Do we have free will? Has the universe existed for billions of years, or did it come into existence five minutes ago, together with false
memories and evidence? These are staple topics of any introductory course of philosophy. Framing beliefs – that there is an external world, and other minds, and free will – lie beyond the scope of proof. Nonetheless, they are what give meaning to the chaos of experience.
I said that it is possible to live without meaning. But it will be a strange, foreshortened, defensive kind of life. We know this because of the historical parallel. The world as conceived in the twenty-first century by the new atheists is recognisably the world of ancient Greece in the third pre-Christian century, the age of the Stoics, Sceptics, Cynics and, above all, the Epicureans. Epicurus, and his Roman disciple Lucretius, believed that the material world is the only reality, that the world is made of atoms that simply reconfigure over time, and that the gods have no interest in the affairs of humankind. The Epicureans are the ancient counterparts of the new atheists in their reductive materialism and their hostility to religion. They held that there is no soul, no life after death, no meaning to history and no transcending purpose to life. The Epicurean formula for happiness is to maximise pleasure while minimising risk.
Here, roughly, is how an Epicurean would advise us to live. Do not make emotional commitments. Seize the day and harden yourself against a darker tomorrow. Do not pledge your life in marriage or suffer the burdens of bearing children. There is only one life, so there is no point in foreclosing your options or spending your time raising the next generation, for by the time your investment bears fruit you may no longer be here to see it. Do not get involved in public life: it is stressful and creates envy. Do not spend too much time on others: they seldom repay your efforts or even thank you for them. What matters is you. The others can look after themselves and if they cannot, that is their problem, not yours. Spend your time with friends. Live simply. Get used to solitude. Know that the highest form of freedom is the consciousness of necessity, and the highest form of knowledge is to know that we know nothing. Do not ask what life is for. Live it day by day. And when it becomes burdensome, end it at a time and place of your choosing.
This is a sane response to a universe without meaning. But it is also the symptom of a civilisation in advanced decline. Individuals can live without meaning. Societies in the long run cannot.
I end this chapter with the story of a man I never met, but whose life’s work inspired me. His name was Viktor Frankl. Born in Vienna in 1905, he was deported with the rest of his family to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in 1942, and spent the next three years in extermination camps, among them Auschwitz and Dachau. He and one of his sisters were the only members of the family to survive.
Already a distinguished neurologist, he preserved his sanity in the camps by observing his fellow prisoners, as if he and they were taking part in an experiment. He noticed the various phases they went through. The first was shock and complete disillusionment. The Nazis began by dehumanising the prisoners in every conceivable way. They took from them everything that gives people a vestige of humanity: their clothes, shoes, hair, even their names. They seized Frankl’s most precious possession, a scientific manuscript containing his life’s work. Frankl says that at this point, ‘I struck out my whole former life.’14
The second stage was apathy, a complete dulling of the emotions. People became automata, hardly living, merely existing from day to day. It was then that Frankl asked the fateful question. Is there any freedom left to a person who has been robbed of everything: dignity, possessions, even the power of decision itself? The Jewish victims of earlier persecutions had been given a choice: convert or die. During the Holocaust there was no choice. What remained once you had lost everything there was to lose? Frankl realised that there was one freedom that can never be taken away:
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.15
The freedom that remained was the decision how to respond. Frankl survived by constantly observing others and helping them find a reason to continue to live. One of the most deadening conditions in the camps was what he called ‘futurelessness’, the total absence of hope. Frankl recalls, ‘A prisoner marching in a long column to a new camp remarked that he felt as if he were walking in a funeral procession behind his own dead body.’16
Two of his fellow inmates were contemplating suicide. By conversing with them, he was able to get each to see that they had something still to do. One had published a series of books on geography, but the series was not yet complete. A task awaited him. The other had a daughter abroad who loved him devotedly and longed to see him. A person awaited him. In both cases, what was essential was the realisation that there was something to be done that could be done by no one else.17 This became the core of an insight Frankl was to turn, after the war, into a new school of psychotherapy. He called it logotherapy, from the Greek logos, meaning ‘word’ in the broadest sense – the spiritual dimension of human life, that which endows life with a sense of purpose. He summarised his teaching in the title of his most famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning.
Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, Frankl argued. But to preserve meaning in desperate circumstances we must be able, or be helped, to do a number of things. First is the refusal to believe that we are victims of fate. We are free. Within limits, we are the authors of our lives. Second is the knowledge that there is more than one way of interpreting what happens to us – more than one way of telling the story of our life. Third, Frankl insists that meaning lies outside us. It is a call from somewhere else:
In the last resort, man should not ask, ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ but should realise that he himself is being questioned. Life is putting its problems to him, and it is up to him to respond to these questions by being responsible; he can only answer to life by answering for his life. Life is a task. The religious man differs from the apparently irreligious man only by experiencing his existence not simply as a task, but as a mission. This means that he is also aware of the taskmaster, the source of his mission. For thousands of years that source has been called God.18
To find meaning in life is to find something we are called on to do, something no one else can do. Discovering that task is not easy. There are depressive states in which we simply cannot do it on our own (‘A prisoner cannot release himself from prison,’ says the Talmud about depression19). But once we have found it, our life takes on meaning and we recover the will to live.
Frankl’s psychotherapy is part of a wider conception I call the ethics of responsibility.20 The word ‘responsible’ is related to response. It is an answer to a question posed by another. Responsibility is not something that comes from within, but is always a response to something or someone outside us. In The Responsible Self, Richard Niebuhr writes, ‘Responsibility affirms: God is acting in all actions upon you. So respond to all actions as to his action.’21 He adds, ‘We are most aware of our existence in the moment, in the now, when we are radically acted upon by something from without, when we are under the necessity of meeting a challenge with an action of our own, as is the case in every important decision.’22 The responsible life is one that responds. In the theological sense it means that God is the question to which our lives are an answer.
Frankl rescued lives by helping people find a reason to live, a reason that comes from outside the self. This is, if you like, a secularised version of Abrahamic monotheism, which began with a divine call. Frankl’s faith, which is mine, is that the search for meaning constitutes our humanity.
So, to summarise: Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning. Meaning is not accidental to the human condition because we are the meaning-seeking animal. To believe on the basis of science that the universe has no meaning is to confuse two disciplines
of thought: explanation and interpretation. The search for meaning, though it begins with science, must go beyond it. Science does not yield meanings, nor does it prove the absence of meanings.
The meaning of a system lies outside the system. Therefore the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe. The belief in a God who transcends the universe was the discovery of Abrahamic monotheism, which transformed the human condition, endowing it with meaning and thereby rescuing it from tragedy in the name of hope. For if God created the physical universe, then God is free, and if God made us in his image, we are free. If we are free, then history is not a matter of eternal recurrences. Because we can change ourselves, we can change the world. That is the religious basis of hope.
There are cultures that do not share these beliefs. They are, ultimately, tragic cultures, for whatever shape they give the powers they name, those powers are fundamentally indifferent to human fate. They may be natural forces. They may be human institutions: the empire, the state, the political system, or the economy. They may be human collectivities: the tribe, the nation, the race. But all end in tragedy because none attaches ultimate significance to the individual as individual. All end by sacrificing the individual, which is why, in the end, such cultures die. There is only one thing capable of defeating tragedy, which is the belief in God who in love sets his image on the human person, thus endowing each of us with non-negotiable, unconditional dignity.
2
In Two Minds
For this reason a higher culture must give to a man a double-brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-science: lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable of being shut off: this is a demand of health.
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Page 4