Hear my prayer, Thou God who does not exist. How great Thou art, my God! Thou art so great That Thou art just idea.

The fire behind these opening lines of Miguel de Unamuno’s “The Atheist’s Prayer” lies in his reduction of God to a mere idea. Ironically, it has always seemed to me that the strength of Christianity’s position comes, not from its ideas about God, but rather from the deeply moving experience of God that Christian men and women have in their lives.

There was a period of time in my life where I thought my faith was undergoing a crisis of “intellectual doubt”. Having been raised in a Christian family since the day I was born, the endless heretical questioning I undertook was very distressing to me. In an effort to put my mind at rest, I began to explore different works of philosophy and theology. From these explorations, I learned a great deal of information, and acquired a fascination with the multitude of ways in which people view the universe they live in, but my faith was not miraculously restored. Slowly I began to realize that the problem went deeper than a simple intellectual crisis. My problem was that I did not know God, and had never truly know God in a personal way. God was merely an idea to me.

It wasn’t until I got around to reading Kirkegaard for an class on existentialism that I finally found a Christian perspective that seemed to have some resonance for me on an emotional level. Kirkegaard’s hatred for “rational theism,” the method of looking at God through logic and other forms of structured thinking, is what drives his philosophical ramblings (and his intensity at lest equals that of “The Atheist’s Prayer”). Kirkegaard viewed this kind of thinking as dangerous, because it turned the individual away from a relationship with God, and in its place encouraged a relationship with Christian doctrine, or the search for an objective “proof” of Christianity. In Kirkegaard’s eyes, the idea of forming a rational Christian doctrine is impossible, since Christianity by its very nature is not an intellectual experience but an emotional one. Making a doctrine out of Christianity, he argued, changes it into another philosophy altogether.

My fascination with Kirkegaard led me to (at least) two realizations. First, I had a whole new understanding of what Christianity was. Secondly, I realized that I could not honestly call myself a Christian, because I lacked the requisite emotional relationship that provides the foundation for the Christian life. I believed that God probably existed, but I did not feel much connection with him, and to think of Jesus Christ as a human “son of God” was still bewildering (as it had been in my days of “intellectual doubt”). In addition to all of this, I was now fascinated by the whole idea of the subjective realm of experience. This opened up an interest concerning the different ways that God is and has been experienced. I began to read Joseph Campbell, and study many different religions. As a result of these explorations, I began to question to absolute authority of the scriptures. (Keep in mind, I had questioned things like this before, but in a more detached manner). After all, weren’t the scriptures simply the subjective religious experiences of a handful of men from a particular time and culture? Why can’t we have our own Bible, written by inspired men and women from our own time and culture?

The most difficult issue, of course, has always been building a stronger relationship with God in my own life, and continually questioning the principles on which I was raised to see if they are relevant with what I have come to understand as the truth. Miguel de Unamuno’s poem ends this way:

I suffer on account of Thee, Thou non-existent Deity. For if didst Thou really exist, Then would I too in truth exist.

I have come to a point where I believe in the existence of the “non-existent Deity,” and the more I understand of his ways and his nature, then, unlike our praying atheist, the more I do exist.

As I mentioned in a previous essay, I became fascinated with existentialism in my first year of college, and, in addition to Kirkegaard (who interested me primarily because of his Christian perspectives), I was also quite intrigued and inspired by the portions that we read from Being and Time by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger questioned the nature of being, and concluded that humans possess a very special kind of being (thus we get a special name, Dasein). The essence of Dasein is not the same as the essence of other objects such as chalk, tea bags, etc. For these objects, their existence– their being placed within space and time– is a direct result of their essence– what they are, and in the case of objects generally what they are used for. For Dasein, the opposite is true. Dasein, being conscious of its existence, is free to choose its own essence, and its temporal existence is merely the passage of space and time in which this essence is created. This accounts for the uniqueness of death in human life– it is the completion of Dasein’s essence.

Based on these interpretations of the nature of being, Heidegger creates a complex philosophical system (featuring a plethora of “invented” words which can admittedly get irritating) which organizes the role of time (the past, present and future) in the development of Dasein’s essence. Heidegger separates authentic from inauthentic Dasein based on the way an individual relates to his or her past, present and future. Although Dasein is limited by the past it was “thrown” into, its future is not determined by those events. An authentic Dasein takes responsibility for its past, insofar as it recognizes itself as having been the maker of all past decisions, even when in the context of something it could not control. The “call of conscience” is adhered to by authentic Dasein in the sphere of “the now,” or present time. Here Dasein moves away form the inauthenticity of the “They,” who as a group find various ways to avoid facing the reality of death and the consequent change in living mind-set that would follow. Finally, the authentic Dasein is full of resolve concerning the future, meaning that it considers carefully which of the many possible future actions it will take, knowing that this decision will help change the past and present of its essence, which, as mentioned before, is completed at death, the “final possibility.”

To me, a meaningful religious conversion is much like what Heidegger refers to the “call of conscience,” since it is a decision on the part of the individual to take their life, whatever shape it may be in, and turn it towards a more positive direction so that their essence (soul?) might be changed for the better. Of course, Heidegger’s theories are less likely to involve an outside deity.

In class, we studied Being and Time in conjunction with the film Harold and Maude. This is perhaps what brought Heidegger’s ideas out of abstraction for me, and consequently got me excited about them through the application to these fictional personalities. I find Heidegger’s theories full of humanity, and an appreciation for the gift of life, with its freedoms and possibilities (despite its hardships).

Another writer, whose works I have studied for the past year or so, are those by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. I was introduced to his novels through a reading of The Man in the High Castle in a science-fiction oriented class. But previous to this I had read a great number of his short stories. Dick’s specialty is in the ultimate metaphysical questions of human existence, such as what is the nature of reality? What is sanity, and what is madness? What does it mean to be human? In The Man in the High Castle, Dick tells of a universe where an alternate history has occurred– the Nazis have won World War II. Throughout the book, there is a fictional novel is which is popular among the characters in the real novel, entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This book represents our reality, where the Nazis have lost. The writer of the fictional novel, of course, is a version of Dick himself. The characters in the book realize at the end that they are not real, that they are characters of a novel, and exist in an alternate history that never happened. This kind of toying with reality is typical fare for Dick. However, this playful attitude is sometimes replaced by a more serious tone, as in the story I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon. Here, the loss of reality leads to complete psychosis in the main character. In a different story, another of the less serious examples, a scientist accidentally animates one of his shoes, a brown oxford, and has a hell of a time getting it back. This is one of many Dick stories where the nature of consciousness is questioned.

Philip K. Dick is meaningful to me for several reasons. To begin with, he is a first-rate philosopher whose strikingly original ideas are presented in an entertaining and accessible form. More importantly, his study of how the world is perceived differently by various kinds of consciousness is often touching and illuminating. His writing also has this characteristic of sticking up for (or at least recognizing) the downtrodden, which I like. He was a mysterious man, in many ways quite downtrodden himself, who continually walked the fine line between mysticism and madness, and presented his simultaneously tortured, profound and divine vision of the world through the modern genre of science-fiction.

anonymous