I consider myself somewhere between an agnostic and a spiritual agnostic. Agnostic being "I don't know what", and spiritual agnostic being "I believe something's out there, but I don't know what."
This isn't one I came to overnight. I thought about it for many years, and even now I go back and forth. I do not have proof for my beliefs. There is nothing I can point to where I can say "This is unassailable proof." I have things that seem suggestive to me of a greater spiritual life. I am disinclined, for example, to dismiss all near-death experiences as mere biological events, or that all religious experiences were simply the result of personal delusions or primitive superstition. Others may be inclined to do so, and that is their prerogative, but it is not mine.
My life has been filled with a great deal of existential distress. It is not a pleasant experience. A lot of this I can attribute to my own issues with anxiety, where I worry about things simply because they might happen, or they might be true. I worry that my family doesn't love me because I don't know that they do. I worry I might get brain damage tomorrow because I have no way of knowing I might not. Life may be meaningless, because I have no way of knowing that it is.
These all may seem like very different issues, but they are all rooted in the same thing, and that is the fear of uncertainty. With uncertainty, my imagination takes flight, in the most unpleasant way possible. All my greatest fears and worries become equally viable, for I have no convincing reason to believe they are not.
Recently, I have begun reading a book about dealing with such anxiety. The book does not seek to allay my fears of these various uncertainties happening, for it knows it cannot do that. Rather, it asks me to accept the uncertainty, and live my life in the best way I can, right here, and right now. I suppose I have taken that as the basis for my spiritual beliefs as well.
I have no proof for my belief. I would argue that no one does. The Atheist and the Christian both have their arguments, and both can be perfectly compelling, but in the end all they are is words on a paper. Words which can carry great meaning, but even then that meaning is limited by the restrictions of our human minds. Existence being the widely complex thing that it is, I am skeptical that any of us can look at issues of metaphysics and somehow come at something that is true. Plato uses the argument of the men trapped in a cave, making their pronouncements about the world based solely on the shadows they see on the cave wall. I would argue we are in a similar situation.
Our everyday beliefs are all, at their core, uncertain. We cannot be sure that anything we feel or experience is true. We cannot be certain that we have loved ones. For all we know we may be living in a matrix-type environment where all of our relationships are artificially constructed. Perhaps our loved ones don't really love us, but merely convince us that they are. We can argue and provide reasons to argue that our loved ones love us, but in the end there is never any way to be certain. When faced with that we have two options: we can either choose to live in a fearful uncertainty, forever wondering if they love us or not. Or we can make a leap of faith and believe that they love us, though we may not be certain. We believe this not because we have compelling evidence that it is true--we will never have such evidence. Rather, we believe it because, by believing it, we inform our actions, and make our interactions with those we love all the more meaningful.
The same applies for any belief system, be it nihilism, or Christianity, or anything else. We truly don't know. We are faced with a vast, expansive universe, and our own ability to understand it is at most a pinprick to the whole of existence, if it is even that. Philosophers may debate as they have done for hundreds of years, each believing themselves to be correct. Am I to assume that all philosophers but one are deficient in some way? Or shall I assume that many different philosophers have different beliefs not because some are smarter than others, but because they all are, by virtue of their different selves, taken to believing some things are true, and other things not?
I don't know. That is the point. Life is vast and uncertain.
Life may very well be meaningless. There may be no self, no soul, and no afterlife. Love may be simply a convenient construct, and compassion a cruel illusion. None of us may have any inherent worth. We might not. But we don't know.
Similarly, life may be full of meaning. Love and beauty may not be merely concepts, but true and real things. We may all have dignity and be worthy of compassion and love, not simply because we are told that, but because it is inherent to our being. We may have purpose, and our actions in this world may mean something beyond the cruel intransience of our physical existence. We don't know. But it might.
I choose to believe that it might. Not because it is true, because as I have said, I do not know it to be true. But because it gives me life. It fills me with a sense of meaning and purpose. It makes my interactions with other human beings meaningful, and enjoyable. It makes love and compassion feel like something transcendent, and invaluable, rather than incidental. It changes myself into a better human being.
We can argue this and that for as long as we can stay awake. We have done so for the last 2000 years, and if we manage to survive another 2000, I daresay we will continue to argue these things further. But at some point, we need to stop arguing. At some point, we need to be willing to step into the world and carry a belief with us, even if the belief is simply that we cannot be certain. Not because we're necessarily right, but because at some point we need to go outside and live.
So here is what I think. If I am right, if what I believe is true, then I will live a happy and fulfilling life and move on to the next as best prepared as I can be. If I am wrong, then at the end of my life I die having lived a life as happy and fulfilling as it could be. Either way, it can provide for me happiness in this life, which nihilistic sentiments routinely fail to do.
As I write this, it is a beautiful day outside. The sky is blue, birds fly above me, and the world is set into its various rhythms. If believing what I believe makes the day that much more beautiful, and if believing otherwise makes the day less, and if I have no compelling evidence to believe one or the other, then why not believe what makes the day more beautiful?
No comments:
Post a Comment