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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page014.htm

Wonder About Despair

I think I am having some kind of break-through.

I was reading recently, I cant even remember where, about how, for
the ancients, philosophy begins in wonder, but for the post-moderns,
philosophy ends in despair; the wonder of Socrates and Plato and
Aristotle; the despair of Pascal and Kierkegaard and Sartre.

It suddenly hit me in a Yahoo religion room chat the other day when
someone said, "Well, if there were some all powerful all knowing all
loving God who created the world and us, then don't you think such a
God would make us aware of all this and believers without doubts if
such awareness and belief is necessary?"

Well, I began to wonder about despair. I said, "Yes, of course!
Precisely! Eureka!" Since it is an obvious fact that we do NOT know,
we are NOT certain, well, perhaps that fact tells us a great deal.
Perhaps there is some important reason for this absence. Perhaps the
most obvious fact of science and religion is precisely that veil of
uncertainty, seeing "through a glass darkly", and not knowing even as
we are known! Why is their Gödel's incompleteness and Heisenberg's
uncertainty?

Heidegger said that this is the most important philosophical
question: "why is there anything at all rather than simply nothing."
Why is there a universe and why do I find myself in that universe?
Camus said the most important philosophical question is whether or
not to commit suicide at any given moment. Perhaps these two
questions are really two sides of the same coin. We really owe a lot
to the ancient Jain religion for the concept of anekantavada, "many-
pointed-ness," that there is no one single point of view, that every
attempt to put the truth into words is but a partial expression of
the truth. Shankaracharya wrote a prayer which begins "O Thou, from
whom all words recoil!"

Sometimes the strongest evidence is what we can never see and the
soundest testimony is what we can never hear. Absurdity is in
partnership with truth, at least in mathematics, in reduction ad
absurdum. The fool DOES say in his heart "there is no God" during the
first part of the theorem.

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