Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between Guelph,
Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school English,
Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer in the
Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
His latest book, Don’t Throw Out Your Bible,
from which the essay below is excerpted, should be available
by the end of the year (2022). His monograph, A Christmas
You Can Believe In, is available on request as a PDF
file from graphikos@gto.net.
If,
like D. H. Lawrence, we choose not to read the universal order
as purposeful design, then like Macbeth, after we have strutted
and fretted our brief hour upon the stage we must come to
see life as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.
Only “the immense night . . . will remain at last eternal,
holding everything in its silence and its living gloom.”
Such
a view, depressing though it is, need not make us bad people
– for certainly we can be moral, ethical, decent people
without professing any religion – but neither does such
a view give us any compelling reason to be good. Indeed, if
we were inclined to evil, such a view could justify an urge
to live out Dostoyevsky’s inference that "without
God . . . everything is permitted." For without God,
we find ourselves all on a level playing field, where all
the rules are arbitrary and none of them is binding, because
all authority is arbitrary and no one has any inherent authority
to compel anyone else’s obedience.
But,
you may object, the Enlightenment’s ‘social contract’
theory envisions a society ordered according to the laws of
nature, recognizing the evolutionary tendency of species like
ours to be social animals. In a sense that’s true, but
the laws of nature – in this case, animal and human
nature – do not prescribe how we ought to behave; they
only describe how we do behave, and only when we happen to
behave that way.
But
those same laws also reveal a “nature red in tooth and
claw,” in which anti-social behaviour is just as common.
So without a God who prescribes what is right and what is
wrong (even if only implicitly by those descriptive laws),
the so-called moral laws of nature have not an ounce of obligation
in them. If there is no God, the only conclusive argument
against anarchy is brute force – might makes right.
And
yet we do have – or at least most of us have –
a sense of right and wrong. And while we may disagree about
some of the details, most of us seem to feel that the distinction
between right and wrong is not entirely arbitrary. We instinctively
recognize a sense of ‘ought’ – what Kant
called the ‘categorical imperative’ – the
feeling that everyone, including ourselves, ‘ought’
to do the right thing, that is what we ought to do would meet
the standard of universality. But for such a sense of ‘the
right thing’ to have any force, there must be a compelling
rationale. If I feel compelled by a sense of ought, and if
my following it is not just the result of conditioning or
expedience, then no matter how I rationalize it, my gut is
telling me that I live in a purpose-driven universe. And whether
I like it or not, that implies a Purposer.
But
a divinely given purpose that ends with our death would be
a shoddy sort of purpose indeed. If good and evil come at
last to the same end, with neither reward nor reckoning, then
the rules count for little and we may break them with final
impunity.
Which
is why Ivan in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
asserts that “There is no virtue if there is no immortality.”
Actually,
most of us, whether we are aware of it or not, conduct our
lives more or less as if such a God really exists, that is,
as if we really do live in a purpose-driven universe. Most
of the people I know, whatever their views on religion, find
happiness in building their lives around purposes that are
good, worthy and useful. And we pursue those purposes with
reasonable prospects of success. But even our best-laid plans
may go astray. And when they do, some devastated souls will
infer from their failure that the universe is “full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” and then proceed
to destroy their lives by anger, cynicism, drugs, alcohol,
violence, self-neglect or even suicide.
Our
survival depends on certain happy coincidences, serendipitous
pairings of need and fulfilment. Our bodies crave food and,
serendipitously, food awaits us in the world about us. Our
hearts crave love and, serendipitously, love awaits our finding
it in those we meet. So if our souls crave significant purpose,
why may that fact not also point to a purpose that likewise
awaits our discovery? Hungry tummies and nourishing food,
empty hearts and fulfilling love, aimless souls and significant
purpose: perhaps we ought not to dismiss such serendipities
as ‘mere’ coincidence.
In
the end it comes down to a choice. Believing in the divine
Purposer is a choice; not believing is also a choice. But
if a seemingly purpose-driven universe is what we need in
order to make more satisfying sense of our lives, perhaps
that’s a clue that the Purposer may indeed exist. Of
course, this line of reasoning proves nothing about the truth
of ‘that hypothesis’ – except that, like
our guy with the coffee filter, it has some reasonable grounds.
