Thanks for your comment, and good to hear from you. A little odd that it’s on a post that’s over 3 years old. I wonder what prompted it?

I think conceiving of God as external to us is an error and leads to the insolubility of the problem of evil and to the reasonable doubts you describe. I find my lights in Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Max Stirner, and Ernst Juenger. Several of my recent posts relate Juenger’s “conception” of God, which is also my own. Eckhart said God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. It could also be said that God is more us than we are ourselves. Angelus Silesius wrote “Thou art the I in me . . .,” and also “God cannot be without me.” Hence the significance of Jesus’ teaching that we are “sons of God.” The son is equal to the father. As Jesus said “Before Abraham was, I am,” I am prone to say “Before Jesus was, I am,” or even “Before God was, I am.”

I’ve tried to do a little reading on atheism lately. I noted the argument that infants are born atheists, as they have no conception of God. I might respond to that that infants also have no conception of dying.

Also, I don’t think that belief in God or Intelligent Design solves the problem of giving meaning to life. Unless you already believe in some normative vision, how do you distinguish between a good God, a morally neutral god, like those the Greeks and Norse believed in, and a very powerful Devil who, for his own inscrutable purposes, isn’t making life hell just at the moment? The mere fact that a very powerful being created you and wants you to do certain things doesn’t tell you whether doing those thing is good.

Jeff, it seems your last comment itself assumes a dichotomy that is questionable. I can understand why someone might look at the world around us, “red in tooth and claw,” and find it easier to believe that it wasn’t designed by an Intelligence, let alone a benevolent one. On the other hand, Jesus taught that “The Kingdom of God is within you” (incidentally, the title of one of Tolstoy’s books). You recognize that if things matter to us, then they matter. But if all we are are our physical brains, and if therefore things only matter for the duration of our physical brains, then it seems they don’t really matter. Our desire to live our lives honorably would seem to be of no more moment and would seem to matter no more than our momentary desire to eat lunch. Our sense that things matter would then appear to be, on this hypothesis, an illusion inside our heads.

Some people seem to think that it’s somehow more noble and courageous to conceive of existence in a way that posits no reward for virtue other than virtue itself. But as I’ve said elsewhere, I have my doubts about personal immortality in the way it’s generally conceived. This isn’t a matter of comforting myself and others with dreams of the hereafter. It’s a matter of honoring what I perceive to be real and indeed most real. It’s a matter of honoring the noblest impulses in myself and others, and recognizing that they come from somewhere and that I didn’t on my own invent them out of thin air.

I’ll grant you one thing though: no argumentative “proof” for the existence of God by itself convinces anyone that God exists.

NOTE: I’m actually responding to John’s reply of Oct. 26, at 5:17 p.m., currently no. 13, but the system won’t let me put this reply there.

I reject your dichotomy. You’re essentially positing a choice in which there’s a world/universe or something with a creator of some sort, some kind of god, which has purpose and direction and in which things “matter” and a world without that creator/god in which “nothing we do matters and that everything we do is futile and vain.” But those aren’t the only options.

I find it much easier to believe in a universe without a creator/god, one which arose by random quantum or something fluctuation than in a designed universe. But I also think all sorts of things matter and that what we do is not inherently “futile and vain.” We endow the substance. It matters because we make it matter. And if it doesn’t matter, in some cosmic sense, because no overseeing or creative intelligence cares, so what? If things matter to us, then they matter.

Bruce: The name of God is fraught with centuries of conceptual baggage. Some of these historical conceptions are good and true, some are bad and false. Only by the light of reason can we discern which is which.

I personally have found my “conception” of God to be illuminated by the writings of Angelus Silesius. A couple examples from memory:

“Man, if thou something love, true love thou dost not know; God is not this or that, so let the something go.”

“Love is like unto death. It kills my every sense. It breaks my heart in me, and takes my spirit hence.”

“God nothing is at all; and if he something be, Only in me it is, he having chosen me.”

So I may be among the “us” who don’t think it much matters whether one consciously inserts “God” into the conversation or ascribes to Him the meaning of life.

The point as it relates to this post and this comment thread is this: Do we think what we do and intend in life matters? If we do, is this compatible with a completely materialistic worldview, with the notion that existence is abjectly purposeless and that nothing but random dumb “luck” explains everything that is? And as I suggested before, if we really in our heart of hearts truly believed that nothing we do matters and that everything we do is futile and vain, life would be exceedingly hard to live — a lot harder than it actually in fact is.

It feels like you keep trying to insert God into the conversation. Some of us don’t think it matters. You can search for meaning in life and spend your whole life doing so – or you can find it right in front of your nose.

What has the insertion of God into Frankl or Tolstoys search for meaning actually done for Frankl and Tolstoy? Did it make any manifest difference to their lives?

“Yet man is born unto trouble/as the sparks fly upward.” Job, 5:7 KJV.

Jeff, when I said “you” ask why the world needs to make sense I was referring to Bruce’s comment. I think I hit reply to the wrong comment.

My remark about “every living thing around us . . .” and about “self-preservation” was pretty random and unclear. What I was getting at was something similar to an argument C.S. Lewis once made: generally we don’t find in nature desires which have no corresponding basis in reality. If thirst exists, generally water exists somewhere also. The desire of things to preserve themselves (although — and this seems important — each and every living thing is actually changing and “dying” every day) suggests that the desire isn’t completely futile and vain.

I see why you might characterize what I said as “solipsism,” and I’m not offended in the least. I know you’re serious about this too. I was thinking about this last night, and thinking about how I might make myself clearer. I remembered Tolstoy’s Confessions (available online). There came a point in his life when, despite his rampant success in life, he became paralyzed by the awareness of his own impending and inevitable death and that of everyone and everything he loved. What’s it all for, and how could he go on living, he asked himself, and found it for a time agonizingly difficult to do so. Victor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, as I recall talks about much the same thing.

It may seem presumptuous to extrapolate from my experience and that of Tolstoy and Frankl and others to everyone else, but because it’s not based solely on my own experience I don’t think it’s solipsism. The suggestion is, and I again recognize it may sound awfully presumptuous, that if a man didn’t have a conscious or unconscious sense that life ultimately has sense and meaning (although it may be impossible for him to fully understand and articulate that ultimate sense and meaning) it would be intolerably difficult for him to go on living.

Well said. I do recognize that theistic evolution and ID are not the same. In fact, I remember from back in my Catholic days that the Catholic Church takes the position that theistic evolution is not necessarily incompatible with the belief that God creates the world. That is, we could have “evolved” from apes, but if we did God had a hand — or rather the hand — in man’s emergence. The Church, however, as I understand it doesn’t take a position on whether man did in fact evolve from apes, while affirming that science is a very good thing and does not conflict with “Faith.”

I’ve become less, not more, fundamentalistic since my Catholic days.

My original comment on Althouse, my reiteration of that comment on Popehat, and my post here are not so much reactions to a perceived threat to belief in God (though there is undeniably a bit of a culture war going on here) as a reaction to what I perceive as an overreliance on what others tell us about what “science says” and the outright dismissal without a hearing of dissenting viewpoints based on purported biases. You seem more informed than most and therefore more entitled to an opinion, and I appreciate that.