Letter #270: There's a There There

But the Truth is In Here

Spunch.

I won’t try to match the loveliness of your last letter because I would first have to climb a mountain and I’m just too tired. But you strike at the very heart of the conundrum.

I was once enjoying a cigar with the wonderful Dennis Prager. He was saying that he believed in God for purely rational reasons. Because of that, he said, he could not believe that God loved us. He could not make rational sense of that idea. I asked, “Why did he create the world then?” And Dennis, always honest, thought for a moment and answered, “I don’t know.”

For me, God’s love is the answer to the famous Liebniz question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” What’s more, in its fabulous super-abundant beauty, creation seems to express not only that love but a goodness beyond our capacity to comprehend.

And yet. Who could read the stories out of Texas this week, the horrific tragedy of so many children and others washed away in the flooding Guadalupe, and fail to understand that nature is also this? This, and diseases that strike the innocent? And death itself that comes for us all? Anyone who responds with a reflexive pious bromide about original sin or free will or anything else, is simply not grappling with the situation in its gut-twisting, brain-baffling immensity.

But an answer — some seed of an answer — has to be found in the human heart. That’s where the beauty is. Because it isn’t beauty at all until we experience it. That’s where the tragedy and injustice are also. Nature has swept away countless children and never shed a tear. The tears are ours, the outrage is ours, because the beauty and love are also ours. And only if our joy and suffering reflect the image of some real but mysterious creator do they have any meaning at all.

It’s not that man is the measure of all things. It’s rather that he is the measure of something — something invisible that actually exists — or he is nothing at all: a mere series of chemical and electrical impulses, some of which feel good, some of which feel bad, all of which end suddenly and forever.

That latter notion — nihilism — is out of keeping with every other experience we have. In every single instance where proof is available, we are capable of translating the mysterious Out There into a responsive In-Here analogue that consistently behaves as we expect it to behave. We are able to know that the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, and so they are. Why should we think this ability suddenly vanishes when it comes to matters of the spirit?

If madness is the inability to see reality rightly, and if a corollary of atheism is that reality can’t be rightly seen, then over the last 500 years, Western civilization has grown materially smarter while simultaneously losing its collective mind.

Love, Dad