Setting aside matters of truth and falsehood, are we not better off believing? Broadly speaking, atheists seem to fall into two camps on this matter. There are disappointed disbelievers, those who would like to believe in God but find themselves unable. Then there are those who find the very idea of such a being to be an outrage. Among the latter camp, Christopher Hitchens famously compared God to Kim Jong Il, ruling the universe like his own North Korea. We ought to count ourselves lucky, Hitchens said, that such an entity does not exist outside the human imagination, because the only appropriate response to it would be fury and rebellion.
I happen to count myself among the disappointed disbelievers, which is why I was interested in the attempts of Harris and Botton to salvage some religious splendor for the secularists. So I was only more disappointed to find Rosenberg’s insistence that such efforts were hopeless far more convincing than the efforts themselves. During an email exchange with Rosenberg, I asked him which camp of atheists he fell into. His response acknowledged my impulse: “There is . . . in us all the hankering for a satisfactory narrative to make ‘life, the universe and everything’ (in Douglas Adams’s words) hang together in a meaningful way. When people disbelieve in God and see no alternative, they often find themselves wishing they could believe, since now they have an itch and no way to scratch it.”
This post on kishōtenketsu, an Asian style of plot structure that doesn’t require conflict, is interesting enough in its own right to be worth checking out, but in this context, I would also recommend it as a parallel illustration of how, in a similar way, the meta-narrative we’re all accustomed to, the one that situates meaning out there somewhere, external to us, created and validated by a cosmic authority, is itself a limited, and limiting, way to conceptualize existence.