A Crisis of Faithlessness

I'm starting to think there might be a God

As you promised me that I was more than all the miles combined
You must have had yourself a change of heart like
Halfway through the drive
Because your voice trailed off exactly as you passed my exit sign
Kept on drivin' straight and left our future to the right

…

And I'll dream each night of some version of you
That I might not have, but I did not lose
Now you're tire tracks and one pair of shoes
And I'm split in half, but that'll have to do

—Stick Season (great song!).

The movie Pan’s Labyrinth tells the story of a young girl named Ophelia. She’s in fascist Spain, with the father who adopts her being an abusive piece of human debris, fighting on the side of the fascists. Extreme violence is common. Ophelia does not have friends; she has little solace beyond the books that she enjoys.

In the movie, Ophelia experiences interacting with a faun in a magical labyrinth. The faun instructs her to carry out certain tasks, claiming that this will allow her to escape to a magical place where she’ll be a princess. She does the tasks, but towards the end of the movie, while interacting with the faun, she is shot and killed. During this scene, we see things from the perspective of another character, who does not see the faun. The end of the movie shows a loved one weeping over Ophelia’s corpse, while she has seemingly been whisked off to paradise, interacting with magical beings.

There are two readings of the movie, one tragic, one hopeful. The hopeful reading is that Ophelia is actually whisked off to paradise where she lives out her days in bliss. On this reading, the faun is real and Ophelia has come across real magic. The tragic reading is that the supposed magic is just what happens when a young girl with an overactive imagination is exposed to the brutality of the world. Ophelia’s paradise is not real, on this reading—it’s how a broken child makes sense of a tragic world, before eventually she is killed. On the second reading, the story is the ultimate tragedy.

I saw this movie recently, and coincidentally, at the same time, I was reflecting on theism. And I was taken aback by just how much it reflected my perception of the dispute over the truth of theism. Atheism doesn’t have to be a hopeless view—one can, in theory, believe that everything is awesome and yet that atheism is true. But I don’t believe that. The universe is, by and large, a tragedy—nearly every being who has ever existed has lived a vanishingly short life of extreme suffering. If planet Earth was the only planet in the universe, it would almost certainly not have all been worth it.

The suffering in nature is beyond comprehension—trillions of beings suffer and die in ways that go beyond decent contemplation. I haven’t spent very much time in my life hungry, but I remember one particularly vivid incident when I ate only minimally for two days. The misery was quite extreme—the hunger gnawing at me was enough to take all the joy out of those days. And yet my fate of being a bit hungry for a few days—bad enough to thoroughly outstrip the joys of even a typical week—is nothing compared to what nearly all beings have ever experienced. There are, with little doubt, many quadrillions of beings that have starved to death since the beginning of life on earth.

Nothing good comes out of this; it’s just the workings of an indifferent Darwinian universe. When animals have their limbs slowly ripped apart by the sharp jaws of a predator, this is, on such a view, nothing beyond a tragedy. The story does not have a happy ending. Even if humans establish a glorious intergalactic civilization, that will be of minimal comfort to the quadrillions of pointless victims who have experienced more suffering in their short lives than you or I will ever know.

On such a view, the animals tortured and killed in factory farms will never have a happy ending either. The chicken whose skin melts off from the boiling water that it’s dumped in; the pig who is roasted alive; the cow who is repeatedly artificially inseminated before being viciously killed; each of their deaths will go entirely unavenged, serving no greater purpose, achieving nothing of value. Each of them is an utterly pointless tragedy.

Like in Pan’s Labyrinth, there is a reading on which reality is a pointless tragedy, in which those who die are really dead and are never coming back. On this view, we construct fictitious religious narratives to make up for the horror and banality of ordinary life. There is no God, there is no faun, and there is no magical labyrinth.

There is another view proposed by the theists. On this view “everything sad will come untrue,” for “heaven, once attained, will work backward and turn even that agony into a glory.” The horrors and tragedies we experience will take up only a few decades—0% of our infinite existence—and will, in the end, serve a greater purpose, enabling us to experience the infinite joy of basking in the infinite glory of God. This view says that the Labyrinth is real—that Ophelia’s life is not a pointless tragedy.

For almost my entire life, I have found the first view ridiculously obvious and the second view ridiculous. Even when I was just a young child, when I pondered how many things sucked, it seemed obvious that there was no God. In my view, believing in God was like walking into a house where you see one of the rooms had just collapsed, killing 20 children, and declaring that the builder must have been perfect.

I examined the standard arguments for theism of people like William Lane Craig and Ed Feser and didn’t find any of them particularly convincing. Learning philosophy only solidified my conviction that most of these arguments—especially the moral argument—just don’t work. The problem of evil always seemed to totally settle the issue of whether there was a good God. That a good God was incompatible with the scale of evil seemed like the most obvious thing in the world—about as obvious as the fact that I have hands.

But as I got older, I learned more philosophy. And when I did, I discovered new puzzles—ones that I had no easy solution to. Puzzles like why there’s psychophysical harmony, why I exist, and why the vast sequence of events required for anything interesting to happen occurred. I met Dustin Crummett—one of the most reasonable people I’ve ever come across—who was both an effective altruist and a Christian. Most Christians have metaphysical or moral views that I regard as loony, but Dustin didn’t—and he had various extremely convincing arguments for theism.

It was only a few months ago that theism began to seem to be a live option—something that’s not obviously false. I don’t know what it was—my critics might say wishful thinking—but while reading Andrew Hronich’s book arguing for universalism, it occurred to me that the picture of reality that he sketched could conceivably be one that a perfect being would create. Contrast this with the view of, for example, Calvin, who claimed “hell is populated with babies not a cubit long.” A world like this would not be created by any being who is remotely good—on Calvin’s view, as Hart says, “the choice to worship God rather than the devil is at most a matter of prudence.”

I still didn’t find theism plausible. But it at least seemed like the type of thing that could perhaps be true. A view in which God allows us to suffer in ways that serve the greater good—yet pays us back 100-fold in the afterlife—could be right. While most views of God struck me as obviously incompatible with perfection, a God who so loves the world that he’s unwilling to turn his back on even the most sinful or reprobate—one who wants to redeem all—does not.

I still had to grapple with the problem of evil. Theists say lots of things about evil. Most of these things are shallow and fail to grapple with the breathtaking reality of evil. Perhaps free will can explain the evil that humans choose, but it cannot explain why God allows a world where children starve, where tsunamis and hurricanes kill innocent people, where even the most virtuous people succumb to death, after old age slowly grinds them down, reducing their minds and body to shadows of what they once were. It cannot explain the faun who dies in a forest fire, slowly burning to death in agony and terror, never understanding why she must endure such a cruel fate. It cannot explain why God equips people with such evil inclination—why God, for example, equips so many men with a desire to rape, leading to the horrific crime of rape being perpetrated against a substantial portion of humanity.

I think there are some things that a theist can say about why God allows evil. None of these are especially plausible, though. Evil is a great mystery, on account of its breathtaking scope and horror. Perhaps we can only get the faintest sense of why God allows evil, for the horrors of the world do not admit of any easy explanations.

But reflecting on the problem of evil led me to think that there might be a solution. In the article linked above I gave some brief sketches of what such a solution might look like. None of this was enough to solve the problem of evil, but it was enough to make it seem more conceivable that there could be a reason for evil, even if we don’t know what it is.

But though evil is a great mystery for theism, as I reflected more, I realized there are also great mysteries for atheism. Mysteries like the ones I listed before: why I exist, why there’s psychophysical harmony, why we have moral knowledge (and knowledge of other things like induction), why the universe is finely tuned, why the laws that govern the universe apply to the things in the universe, why there is consciousness, and so on. While theism had just one great mystery, atheism had many. And while none of these mysteries are anywhere near as great as the mystery of evil, perhaps they are enough collectively to make theism more plausible than atheism.

Studying philosophy, I found numerous puzzles that seemed impossible to resolve. Yet theists had easy answers to all these puzzles. When I studied personal identity, I found that the best view was best explained by theism. Same with anthropics and our knowledge of the non-natural. Numerous philosophical puzzles go away easily if one posits a God of infinite power, knowledge, and goodness.

Reflecting on these, I was uncertain, and I still am. There are so many mysteries for the atheist, yet the theist has one mystery that outstrips them all—perhaps the grandest mystery in the universe. The argument from evil is such a powerful argument that it would be fatal against almost any other view in philosophy—yet theism explains so much that the cumulative case for it would be enough to prove almost any view in philosophy.

I don’t know what to think. There’s so much evidence on both sides—so many great mysteries for each view. Maybe now I’m something like an agnostic, though I probably lean towards atheism. I feel rather like I did when I saw Pan’s Labyrinth: there is a way to interpret reality such that everything is grand and wonderful, yet another way, just as plausible, on which everything is a tragic farce—on which all is for nothing.

Perhaps when I die, I shall be reunited with all of my loved ones, each basking in the beatific vision, each of whom have experienced exquisite bliss and love. Perhaps it will be revealed that there is a loving God who cares about me and designed the world for a grand purpose, in which all people will flourish. Or perhaps God is a fiction, one created by the overactive human imagination, too innocent to cope with the horror of the world.

I do not know if Ophelia’s Labyrinth is real. I can only hope that it is.