Abstract
Tolstoy, in his autobiographical work, “A Confession,” reports how, when he was fifty and at the height of his literary success, he came to be obsessed by the fear that life was meaningless.
At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life, as though I did not know what to do or how to live; and I felt lost and became dejected. But this passed, and I went on living as before. Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to? At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and irrelevant questions. I thought that it was all well known, and that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution it would not cost me much effort; just at present I had no time for it, but when I wanted to, I should be able to find the answer. The questions however began to repeat themselves frequently, and to demand replies more and more insistently; and like drops of ink always falling on one place they ran together into one black blot.’
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References
L. Tolstoy (1940) “A Confession,” reprinted in A Confession, The Gospel in Brief and What I Believe, The World’s Classics, No. 229. Geoffrey Cumberlege, London, UK.
See, e.g., E. R. Bevan (1932) Christianity, Butterworth, London, UK, pp. 211–227. See also H. J. Paton (1955) The Modern Predicament. George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London, UK, pp. 103–116, 374.
See, for instance, L. E. Elliott-Binns (1952) The Development of English Theology in the Later Nineteenth Century. Longman, Green & Co., London, UK, pp. 30–33.
See Plato, Phaedo, in Five Dialogues, Everyman’s Library No. 456, E. P. Duton, New York, NY, p. 189, para. 99.
Leibniz (1934) On the ultimate origination of things, in The Philosophical Writings of Leibniz (M. Morris, trans.), Everyman’s Library No. 905, E. P. Duton, New York, NY, p. 32–41.
See Leibniz (1934) The Philosophical Writings of Leibniz (M. Morris, trans.), Everyman’s Library No. 905, E. P. Duton, New York, NY, pp. 8–10, para. 32–38.
To borrow the useful term coined by Professor D. A. T. Gasking of Melbourne University.
See, e.g., J. J. C. Smart (1957) The existence of God, reprinted in New Essays in Philosophical Theology (A. Flew and A. Maclntyre, eds.) S.C.M. Press, London, UK, pp. 35–39.
That creation out of nothing is not a clarificatory notion becomes obvious when we learn that “in the philosophical sense” it does not imply creation at a particular time. The universe could be regarded as a creation out of nothing even if it had no beginning. See, e.g., E. Gilson (1957) The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, UK, pp. 147155; and E. L. Mascall (1956) Via Media. Longmans, Green & Co., London, UK, pp. 28 ff.
In what follows, I have drawn heavily on the work of Ryle and Toulmin. See, for instance, G. Ryle (1949) The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson’ s University Library, London, UK, pp. 56–60, and so on, and his article, If, so, and because, in Philosophical Analysis, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY (1950) (Max Black, ed.); and S. E. Toulmin (1953) Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Hutchinson’s University Library, London, UK.
See references listed above.
L. Wittgenstein (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, UK, Sect. 6.44–6.45.
L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 46. See also R. Otto (1952) The Idea of the Holy. Geoffrey Cumberlege, London, UK, esp. pp. 9–29.
Contemporary theologians would admit that it cannot be proved that the universe must have had a beginning. They would admit that we know it only through revelation. (See Note No. 9) I take it more or less for granted that Kant’s attempted proof of the Thesis in his “First Antinomy of Reason” (I. Kant [1950] Critique of Pure Reason [N. K. Smith, trans.], Macmillan and Co. Ltd., London, UK, pp. 396–402) is invalid. It rests on a premise that is false: that the completion of the infinite series of succession of states, which must have preceded the present state if the world has had no beginning, is logically impossible. We can persuade ourselves to think that this infinite series is logically impossible if we insist that it is a series that must, literally, be completed, for the verb “to complete,” as normally used, implies an activity that, in turn, implies an agent who must have begun the activity at some time. If an infinite series is a whole that must be completed, then, indeed, the world must have had a beginning, but that is precisely the question at issue. If we say, as Kant does at first, “that an eternity has elapsed,” we do not feel the same impossibility. It is only when we take seriously the words “synthesis” and “completion,” both of which suggest or imply “work” or “activity” and, therefore, “beginning,” that it seems necessary that an infinity of successive states cannot have elapsed. See also R. Crawshay-Williams (1957) Methods and Criteria of Reasoning. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, UK, App. iv.
See, e.g., Is life worth living? (1950; BBC Talk by the Rev. John Sutherland Bonnell), in Asking Them Questions, Third Series (R. S. Wight, ed.), Geoffrey Cumberlege, London, UK.
See, e.g., R. Otto (1952) The Idea of the Holy, Geoffrey Cumberlege, London, UK, pp. 9–11. See also C. A. Campbell (1957) On Selfhood and Godhood. George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, UK, p. 246; and H. J. Paton (1955) The Modern Predicament, McMillan, New York, NY, pp. 69–71.
For a discussion of this issue, see the eighteenth-century controversy between Deists and Theists, for instance, in L. Stephen (1902) History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. Smith, Elder & Co., London, UK, pp. 112–119,134–163. See also the attacks by J. Toland and M. Tindal on “the mysterious” in Christianity Not Mysterious and Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature, resp., parts of which are reprinted in H. Bettenson (1967) Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp. 426–431. For modern views maintaining that mysteriousness is an essential element in religion, see R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, esp. pp. 25–40, and most recently M. B. Foster (1957) Mystery and Philosophy. S.C.M. Press, London, UK, esp. Chs. IV. and VI. For the view that statements about God must be nonsensical or absurd, see, e.g., H. J. Paton, The Modern Predicament, pp. 119–120, 367–369. See also Theology and falsification (1955), in New Essays in Philosophical Theology (A. Flew and A. Maclntyre, eds.), S.C.M. Press, London, UK, pp. 96–131.
Stephen Neill (1955) Christian Faith To-day. Penguin Books, London, UK, pp. 240–241.
It is difficult to feel the magnitude of this first sin unless one takes seriously the words “Behold, the man has eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and is become as one of us; and now, may he not put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever?” Genesis iii, 22.
How impossible it is to make sense of this story has been demonstrated beyond any doubt by Tolstoy in his famous “Conclusion of a Criticism of Dogmatic Theology,“ reprinted in A Confession, The Gospel in Brief and What I Believe, no. 229, The World’s Classics (1940), Geoffrey Cumberlege, London, UK.
See The Nicene Creed, The Tridentine Profession of Faith, The Syllabus of Errors, reprinted in Documents of the Christian Church, pp. 34,373, and 380, resp.
See, e.g., J. S. Whale, The Protestant Tradition, Ch. IV., esp. pp. 48–56
See J. S. Whale, The Protestant Tradition, Ch. IV., p. 61 ff.
See “The Confession of Augsburg,” esp. Articles II., IV., XVIII., XIX. XX.; “Christianae Religionis Institutio,” “The Westminster Confession of Faith,” esp. Articles III., VI., IX., X., XI., XVI., XVII.; “The Baptist Confession of Faith,” esp. Articles III., XXI., XXIII., reprinted in Documents of the Christian Church, pp. 294 ff., 298 ff., 344 ff., 349 ff.
See, e.g., his An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Eddington Memorial Lecture).
See, e.g., the two series of Gifford Lectures most recently published: H. J. Paton, The Modern Predicament, pp. 69 ff.; and C. A. Campbell, On Selfhood and Godhood, pp. 231–250.
R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 9.
F. Dostoyevsky (1953) The Devils. The Penguin Classics, London, UK, pp. 613,614.
L. Tolstoy, A Confession, The Gospel in Brief and What I Believe, p. 24.
See, for instance, J. S. Whale, Christian Doctrine, pp. 171,176–178, and so on. See also S. Neill, Christian Faith To-day, p. 741.
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Baier, K. (1992). The Meaning of Life. In: Jecker, N.S. (eds) Aging And Ethics. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0423-7_1
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