Of God and “Why.”
It all begins with the lack of an explanation, or so they say.
God, people long ago believed, resided in the sun. God, they then proclaimed, lied in the forces of nature that lead to life and its proliferation. God, many now say, is difficult—practically impossible—to understand, yet He is here and now. Theists from many different backgrounds all face the heat with regards to this point: whatever humans haven’t figured out, God will occupy.
A specific example: historically, chemists used to attribute the very basis of organic chemistry to a “vital force” driving such reactions—until Wöhler heated ammonium cyanate and found urea in his little vials. Another little hiccup in the big debate over God.
I have the inkling that they do not realize how similarly their arguments resonate with those they criticize. “How can the following coexist?” they ask: God and suffering, God and unanswered prayers, God and war, God and death, God and evil, the list goes on. Then, the theists, ever-in defense of the faith, reply with any among: God’s infinite wisdom trumping human thoughts and wants, man as moral agent and the difficulty of comprehending a completely deterministic universe, specific beliefs about the afterlife, specific experiences concerning the afterlife, and so on. A particularly loopy argument I witnessed was this one: “Something cannot come from nothing,” the priest began. “That would make sense in an axiomatic universe, but this is not the case,” the physicist replied. Then, a middle man by the name of Deepak Chopra rectified the argument by uniting both views under the statement: “Nothingness is the very womb of Creation.” Very beautifully said, but I think neither of the two was fully content with the verdict.
My humble little belief is that those who speak too much and too fast do so in order to wow the crowd with semantics and syntax. Congratulations to them when they win their debates. However, they and we miss out on a little something: that man asks “why.”
Man asks why. He does not ask for causes, but reasons. Ask me what causes suffering, and I’ll tell you: prostaglandins, heartbreak, poverty, irresponsible politicians, nerve impulses, the like; a psychologist could tell you much more. But ask me why suffering exists, and I wouldn’t be able to give a clear-cut answer. I would subscribe to one of two possible beliefs: in a God who permits it or a universe in which the very concept of suffering is itself senseless.
But why (sorry) does man ask why anyway? Man, in these moments of anguish or dejection (or simple curiosity), is not looking outwardly for the answers, but inwardly. Keep asking why and you’ll end up nowhere. I’m sure your professor in philosophy has already squeezed the Socratic silence out of you. There is nothing we can say at the end of it all, nothing to satisfactorily answer the question why.
And that is the very point.
“What smites us with unquenchable amazement is not that which we grasp and are able to convey but that which lies within our reach but beyond our grasp; not the quantitative aspect of nature but something qualitative; not what is beyond our range in time and space but the true meaning, source and end of being, in other words, the ineffable.”
-Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel, Man is not Alone
If you ask me, God begins right where words end. I think Rabbi said that, too.
Notes
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thisisausername reblogged this from sometimeskaren and added:
Very nice. I missed his writings. :)
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averyisarat liked this
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sometimeskaren reblogged this from sanmigueldj and added:
my friend, DJ. Read read read.
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sanmigueldj posted this
