Clinging to nihilism

I'm going to quote and comment on some statements in David Benatar's The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (Oxford 2016). 

Debates about the existence of God are interminable, and I cannot hope to settle them here (39). 

Of course, there are those who remain resolute in their belief in either resurrection or the immortality of the soul. In this sense, at least, the issue is unresolved. However, merely because a view has (even vast numbers) of adherents does not mean that it is a reasonable position worth taking seriously. Thus, while I cannot pretend that my comments constitute a full refutation of their view, I do not intend to engage any further with the beliefs that we are immortal in in either of these senses (144).

I'm struck by Benetar's intellectual impatience. That would be understandable if he had something better in the offing, but Benatar has such an acidic outlook on life that he deems it an unmitigated tragedy that anyone even exists! Given that frame of reference, wouldn't just about anything be a huge improvement over his dyseptic, despairing antinatalism? Why not invest more effort into investigating the evidence for Christian theism? Does he have something better to do with his time? Why does he cling to nihilism for dear life? 

However, human nature tends to abhor a meaning vacuum...Arguably, the most ancient and also the most pervasive of the coping mechanisms is theism and associated doctrines. Many theists believe that even if our lives seem meaningless from a cosmic perspective, they are not in fact so. This, they say, is because we are not an accident of purposeless evolution, but rather the creation of a God who endows our lives with meaning. According to this view, we serve not merely a cosmic purpose, but a divine one.

This is a seductively comforting thought. For that reason alone, we should be suspicious of it, given how easy it is for humans to believe what they would like to believe.

A related objection notes that not merely any divine purpose would give us the kind of meaning we seek (36-37).

i) While it's true that not just any divine purpose would give us the kind of meaning we seek, that would only undercut the theistic "coping mechanism" if, in fact, the actual divine purposes are of that unenviable kind. So how is that hypothetical observation germane unless there's some reason to think that would be the case? 

ii) There is, moreover, a difference between a meaning vacuum and the kind of meaning we seek. Existence would still be meaningful rather than vacuous even if it's not the kind of meaning that some people seek. Need it be equally meaningful for everyone to be meaningful for anyone? 

iii) How many Christians believe our life seems to be meaningless from a cosmic perspective? Is that really their viewpoint and experience–or Benatar's? 

Many people have raised the objection that theism cannot do the meaning-endowing work it is purported to do here. For example, it has been suggested that serving God's purposes does not suffice, as this makes people "puppets in the hands of a superior agent" or mere instruments to the goals of God. 

The theist could say say, there is no problem in being a means to any end set for us by such a God; better to be a means to a supreme being's beneficent purpose than neither to be an end of cosmic significance nor to have any (cosmic) purpose at all. 

The problem with such a response is that, insofar as it provides any reassurance about life's cosmos meaning, it does so by providing a hand-waving account of what that meaning is. The account is as mysterious as the ways in which the Lord is often said to move. We are told that serving the purposes of a beneficent deity provides (cosmic) meaning to our lives, but to be told that is not to be told what those purposes are. "Serving God's purposes" is a placeholder for details that need to be provided.

When the details are provided, however, the results are unsatisfactory. If, for example, we are told that our purpose is to love God and serve him, we might reasonably ask why a being as great as God is said to be would possibly want or need the love and service of humans at all–let alone so badly that he would create them to serve that purpose. If loving and serving God is our purpose, the act of creating us sounds like that of a supremely narcissistic rather than a supremely beneficent being. This alleged purpose is thus unconvincing (37-38).

i) I don't know how Benatar (or Ayer) is using "puppets". What's the precise point of objection? 

ii) It's not a question of what God needs. If God is the supreme good and source of all finite goods, then loving and serving God is equivalent to loving goodness and acting accordingly. 

iii) Perhaps Benatar thinks that to say our purpose is to serve God or serve his purposes implies that humans are only a means to an end: God uses us to achieve his goals. We are pawns on a cosmic chessboard. Pawns are expendable. You sacrifice a pawn to checkmate your opponent. Something like that.

If so, this assumes that humans are simply instrumental to the realization of God's purposes rather than the object of God's purposes. If, however, God's purpose is that humans , or at least a subset of humanity, enjoys eternal felicity, then we don't exist primarily to facilitate God's objective; rather, we are the intended beneficiaries of his designs. 

iv) Likewise, we don't have to know God's purpose for our lives to benefit from his purpose for our lives, assuming that's a beneficent plan. To take a comparison, consider a father who takes his young son on a camping trip. The purpose is to have a shared experience. His young son may not be privy to the details of the excursion. And his father can contrive enjoyable pursuits for his young son which his son lacks the imagination and ability to contrive on his own. His son needn't be told ahead of time what fun plans his father has in store for him to find their time together meaningful. Indeed, an element of surprise might make it more enjoyable. His father's goal isn't separate from their time together; rather, that is the goal.

By the same token, Christians discover God's purpose for their lives by…living. It's not something they need to know in advance. They find out by experience. That's how it works. These aren't separable things. 

Another possible suggestion is that our purpose on earth is to prepare us for the afterlife. That does not explain what the purpose of the afterlife is. If it is eternal bliss, it might be thought not to require any further end. However, if religious doctrine is to be believed, then for a great many people, the afterlife is not a final good but rather a final bad–hardly the sort of meaning people yearn for (38-39).

i) Must it be eternal bliss for everyone to be eternal bliss for anyone?

ii) A bad end is meaningful if that's their just desert. 

Even in the best-case scenario, it is hard to understand why God would create a being in order to prepare it for an afterlife, given that no afterlife would be needed or desired if the being had not been created in the first place. It is much like a parent creating a child for the purpose of that child's having a satisfying retirement. Satisfying retirements are worth aiming at if one already exists, but they hardly provide grounds for creating people who will have such a retirement. The sort of meaning that the afterlife provides cannot explain why God would have created us at all (39). 

But that's a reflection of Benatar's thankless, venomous antinatalism. In a "best-case scenario," God makes rational beings out of sheer generosity, to experience happiness. Benetar acts as though, since a nonentity can't desire happiness, that it's better never to exist than to be happy.  

As all this illustrates, it is not easy to specify a divine ordained meaning that convincingly and non-circularly explains the cosmic meaning of human life in a way that affirms rather than demeans humanity (39). 

The blind irony of an antinatalist who frowns on "demeaning humanity". 

Upton Sinclair famously remarked that it "is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". It is similarly difficult to get somebody to understand something when the meaning of his life depends on his not understanding it (39).

What's the value of understanding that life is worthless? What's the point of promoting that outlook? 

Imagine you were to visit a country in which the evidence of repression is pervasive: There is no freedom of the press or expression; vast numbers of people live in squalor and suffer severe malnutrition; those attempting to flee the country are imprisoned; torture and executions are rampant; and fear is widespread…When you muster the courage to express skepticism, citing various disturbing facts, you are treated to elaborate rationalizations that things are not as they seem. 

It would be wonderful if North Korea were led by an omnibenevolent, infallible, and incorruptible ruler, but if it had such a leader, North Korea would look very different from the way it does look. The fact that many people in North Korea would disagree with us can be explained either by their vested interests in the regime, by their having been indoctrinated, or by their fear of speaking out.

Not all of earth is as bad as North Korea, but North Korea is part of "God's earth"; so are Afghanistan, Burma, China, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, and Zimbabwe, to name but a few appalling places for many to live…My point is that they all occur within the jurisdiction of a purportedly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God (41-42).

i) That's just rehashing the problem of evil. It makes no effort to engage Christian theodicies.

ii) Moreover, the comparison is tendentiously one-sided, as if life on earth is unmitigated evil with no compensatory goods. 

iii) Why does Benatar cling to nihilism? He clutches nihilism to his breast. Don't you dare take my misery away from me! I live to be miserable! That's my purpose in life!  

Consider, first, the denial of our mortality. One form this takes is belief in physical resurrection at some future time. If this belief were true it would make death a kind of suspended animation rather than annihilation. Assuming that the resurrected person would either not die a second time…this promises a kind of immortality.

Perhaps more common is the belief in an immortal soul. The comfort sought here is that though our bodies may die, we shall continue in some–preferably blissful–disembodied state despite our corporeal death and decay. 

Such beliefs are instances of wishful thinking. We have no evidence that we shall ever be physical resurrected or that we shall endure as disembodied souls after our physical deaths. Religious texts may speak of these phenomena, but even when they are not waxing poetic and metaphorical, they do not constitute evidence. Indeed, it is much more reasonable to believe that death is annihilation of the self (142-43).

If there's evidence that the texts are true, then that's evidence for the truth of what they say.

Are we really to believe that decomposed, cremated, atomically incinerated and ingested bodies are to be reconstituted and reanimated? The challenges in understanding the mechanics of this dwarf even the other notable problems, such as the logistics of physically accommodating all the resurrected (143).

I don't see any difficulty in principle. A body is a specific organization of matter. God can recreate a particular body by reproducing that particular pattern of atoms and molecules. A body is a concrete exemplification of an abstract pattern. God has the power to replicate a specific configuration of atoms and molecules. 

These practical problems do not confront the belief in an immortal soul, but that belief faces no shortage of other problems. We have plenty of evidence that our consciousness is a product of our brains. When we are given general anesthesia–administrated to our physical bodies and affecting our physical brains–we lose consciousness. When our brains are deprived of oxygenate or when we suffer a sufficiently powerful blow to the head, we similarly lose consciousness. It seems unlikely that consciousness, so vulnerable even during life, could then survive the death and decay of our brains (143-44). 

i) Of course, those are cliche-ridden objections to dualism. But it's not as if dualists are speechless in the face of stock objections. On the one hand, based on the receiver view of William James and the filter view of Aldous Huxley, physicalism and substance dualism are empirically equivalent.

On the other hand, there's positive evidence (e.g. veridical near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, terminal lucidity, apparitions of the death) that the mind can function independent of the body, so that tips the scales in favor of dualism. 

ii) So long as the mind is coupled with the brain, that coupling will affect transmission–in both directions We'd expect that given interactionist dualism.