The Knife-Edge

In the 1991 movie City Slickers Billy Crystal played a bored-with-life salesman whose son's school was hosting a day in which fathers came in to talk about their jobs.

When Crystal's turn came up he launched into the following description of modern life notable for the way in which it illustrates the emptiness so many experience:

Value this time in your life, kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices. It goes by so fast. When you're a teenager, you think you can do anything and you do. Your twenties are a blur.

Thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money, and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?"

Forties, you grow a little pot belly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud, one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother.

Fifties, you have a minor surgery - you'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery.

Sixties, you'll have a major surgery, the music is still loud, but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway.

Seventies, you and your wife retire to Fort Lauderdale. You start eating dinner at 2:00 in the afternoon, you have lunch around 10:00, breakfast the night before, spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate soft yogurt and muttering, "How come the kids don't call? How come the kids don't call?"

The eighties, you'll have a major stroke, and you end up babbling with some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand, but who you call mama.

Any questions?

This is a parody, of course, but the life it parodies is very real for millions of people. What's the point of it? Amidst unprecedented affluence moderns are spiritually empty.

Physicist Steven Weinberg described the human predicament like this:

The worldview of science [naturalism] is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson.

We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions.

At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

And there's not much room for meaning on that knife-edge between wishful thinking and despair.

When man is reduced to little more than the product of physical, economic or social forces one of the first things that must be given up is the notion that our lives have some purpose, that there's some compelling reason why we're here.

Unfortunately, if the only reason we're here is that the unfeeling universe somehow belched us up and will soon swallow us back up again then our lives are, in Shakespeare's words, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

But man can't live without meaning, which is why, even though he may insist that naturalism is true, he can't live consistently with it. Naturalism is a worldview completely incompatible with our deepest longings and with the way our psychology is constructed.

Yet people prefer it to the theistic alternative which offers a basis for meaning and for hope. They'd rather live in a state of despair and spiritual inanition than concede that theism offers a more liveable alternative.

And make no mistake, it's not that there are better arguments for the truth of naturalism and so we should have the intellectual honesty to bite the bullet and accept it. There are, in fact, no good arguments for it. It's simply a metaphysical preference.

As Friedrich Nietzsche put it in The Gay Science, what decides against belief in God now is one's taste, not his reasons.