At a threshold

What does it matter if there’s no God?

At The Threshold is a series of theological/philosophical testimonials by students and practitioners of world faiths. It was recommended to me by another Substacker, Martin Nguyen, and one of the films in the series features his views and his conversion to Islam. The first one that I have viewed without his recommendation is entitled Begin with the End and is a view of eschatology through the eyes of an Austrian Jew who now heads up a University Department in Scotland.

Begin with the end. Funnily enough, that sounds counter-intuitive. We would not start watching a film or reading a book at the end. We wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise by knowing how the story ends. We relish the excitement and tension of waiting to see what happens. But when we reserve a package tour, we do want to know about the end. We want to know what grade of hotel we can expect and whether we can see the sea from our window. Whether we will travel first or second class, and what types of meals we can expect. And the reason for the difference between these two expectations, a book, and a package tour, is that we buy the book explicitly because we don’t know how it ends, whereas we will part with our money for the holiday only once we do know how it ends, and provided there are actionable guarantees that say exactly how it ends.

What about life then? Do we live our lives with edge-of-the-seat excitement to know what happens next? Agog to know what the next page will bring? And what of the last page? The final dénouement. Some are unsure what the dénouement is. That is a matter for the next world. Que sera, sera. Others anticipate it. They think they already know how this life ends. Others still—so I am told—are so sure of how it ends, they want to advance the apocalypse as quickly as they are able. And finally there are those who live by YOLO: you only live once, and this is it.

Judith Wolfe, whose testimonial Begin with the End contains, is visibly lost for words at one point, in contemplating the possibility, the theoretical, theological possibility that after death there is nothing. That all our hopes are founded on a God who doesn’t exist.

A few years back now, the BBC conducted a trial for a new medicine to combat back pain. It now falls within the general scope of what is called the placebo effect, whereby the participants, having been split into groups given the new drug and a placebo, but not told which, are asked to report on progress with their pain. They learn in the end that, instead of some of the group receiving a pain-reducing medicine and some a placebo (the effect is most noticeable in trials involving pain), all the subjects had received sugar pills. What was remarkable about the trial was that, even after the trickery had been revealed to the participants, many continued to experience an improvement in their pain situation.

Scientists tell us that there is no complete understanding of the placebo effect. Moreover, it is more pronounced among children than among adults. Why that should be is something I cannot speculate about, except to say that it is reported to be thus. So, is there a life after death? Is it the life that comes after death, with this part just being some kind of dress rehearsal or preparation or conditioning or whatever? Like a screen test for a film?

Wolfe is right about one thing: the point at which we will definitively know whether there is or isn’t an afterlife will be such that we can neither correct our beliefs up to that moment nor advise those still living of our discovery. And that makes life that bit different to a book or a package holiday: once the end is reached, there is no returning to the beginning. It is that fact that makes the existence or God or otherwise irrelevant. It justifies Voltaire’s contention that, if God had not existed, we would have needed to invent Him. The reason is that it is living this life in the belief and expectation of an afterlife that brings a purpose and a mode of interaction to our existence here that speaks against the selfish pursuit of self-betterment as our purpose here. And because of the impermeable—or almost impermeable—divide between this life and the next, belief on this side of the divide will, by the time of death, have served its purpose regardless of whether there is or isn’t an afterlife.

Some argued in the BBC trial that they had been wrong to dupe the participants. The response to that was, well, they suffered less pain as a result. Were they really duped, or did their belief dupe them into a better quality of life? And if that’s so, what’s wrong with that?