By Adam Dahmer–
Having read recently that chronic sleep deprivation can significantly shorten the human lifespan, I have come to the disappointing conclusion that, unbeknownst to me, I really wasn’t kidding when I joked that law school is killing me. In light of this fact, I guess it’s time I start evaluating the fundamental concepts of existence – like God, for instance. Is He real? If so, who is He? Why does He not smite my enemies to ash-heaps, and exalt me above my unworthy peers, as I so often ask Him in prayer? Why is He a “He”, anyway?
I don’t have the time or space to answer all of these questions at once, and I don’t pretend to have anything even remotely resembling the “perfect” answer to any one of them, but I’ll give it a try. After all, a lack of expertise has never stopped me from opining before now.
As so often with these articles, I’ll begin with an anecdote. Not too long ago, I overheard a Christian and an atheist in a heated debate about the existence of God. They were having trouble finding common ground, but it occurred to me that they were saying more or less the same thing. The Christian was arguing that there must be a God, for how else could one explain the existence of the Universe? As with all things, there simply had to be an initiating force.
The atheist was counter-arguing that this was not proof of God, because the Christian had misunderstood the nature of existence. Time and space were integrally linked, he argued, both to one another and to existence as we know it. There could therefore have been no “initiating force” to cause the universe, because without the universe, there would be no time or space in which that force could have existed to begin with.
The Christian retorted that it was a long standing doctrinal principle of the Christian faith that God transcended material existence, dwelling outside of both time and space. She could therefore claim, she said, without logical contradiction, that she could concede the exclusion of God from the universe without negating the existence of God.
The atheist replied that this was nonsense, avowing that existence itself was exclusively material on the basis that things immaterial were not discernible to the senses, and therefore could not be proven to exist at all.
The Christian admitted as much, saying that ultimately, the believer in God had to rely for justification upon faith, and those ineffable proofs which were communicable by Providence only to the immaterial self – the soul. The atheist somewhat reflexively professed his belief that there was no such thing as a soul, after which both of them, resigned to the fact that the argument was unwinnable, parted ways – each one inwardly lamenting the absurdness of the other’s worldview.
So, what does this all mean? I’m not entirely sure, but the Buddha might be. No, seriously. Many Buddhists, particularly in the Mahayana tradition, strive in their religious practice to achieve Nirvana. Western pop culture tends to associate Nirvana with the Christian heaven, or with the music scene of 1990’s, but the actual meaning is much different.
Nirvana means a state of being in which there is no suffering. And yet one of the central tenets of Buddhism is that existence is suffering.
Nirvana can also be defined as a state of perfect selflessness. And yet, without the self, there is nothing left to perceive the perfection of that state. That brings us to the final definition of Nirvana: non-existence. That definition handily unites the theological perspectives of our earlier interlocutors, the Christian and the atheist. If, as the Christian says, God is perfection, and as the Buddhist says, perfection is non-existence, then God is non-existence.
So, does that mean the atheist wins? Not necessarily. Saying that God is non-existence is, at least semantically, a bit different than saying God is non-existent. In fact, recent advances in quantum physics are showing that possibly, “non-existent” is non-existent, which linguistically seems obvious, but is revolutionary in its possible implications. It would seem that nothingness, the absence of everything, and immateriality, the mere absence of matter, are not interchangeable terms.
According to some theoretical physicists, the seeming void that surrounds entities that we perceive with our senses at the level of Newtonian physics as matter might itself be brimming with energies on the verge of existence, but which do not physically exist. They come and go too quickly to be noticed, or exist in multiple locations simultaneously without really existing anywhere. This idea of vacuous dynamism, as I understand it, could revolutionize the way in which human beings perceive not just physics, but metaphysics! It could reconcile Nirvana, Heaven and post-existential oblivion in ways that are satisfactory to believers in each of the three!
Then again, perhaps I’ve misunderstood. Ah well. As earlier established, I’m dying anyway. In the context of cosmic, geological, or even human history, I’ll soon be nothing. Or everything. Or maybe God.
Photo by Sasha Perez/The Louisville Cardinal
