The Loss of Values - Article Example

According to the philosopher Aristotle, human beings are, by nature, political animals: they are inextricably tied into vast networks of social relationships that extend beyond any means of measurement. Metaphysical poet John Donne accentuated this point by saying “No man is an island entire of itself”, suggesting that every human being must, by his nature, value some things as much as he values his own life. Because this fact is common to all human beings, the loss of one’s values can occur to anyone at any time. In my own experience, even animals experience the loss of values; when my brother carelessly knocked over a bird’s nest, the parents mourned the death of their three eggs, smashed on the ground. They flew in circles, hours on end, trying to understand where the nest, and the eggs which it contained, had gone. But loss need not be of a value of a concrete thing: it can be of an abstraction, an ideal, that once lost can rarely be fully regained. We should not expect to hold on to concrete things, for as Mitch Albom warns in his international bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, “Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent” (Albom 103). The loss of an ideal can potentially be far more devastating than of the concrete things, and even of those human individuals that surround us. We live and connect to reality through our minds, and a fundamental change in that realm has the power to change everything else in one’s life. For much of my life, religion and my belief in God were among the top in my hierarchy of values, standing above all other ideals that I could name explicitly. It had been this way for as long as I could remember, spending time in Church, getting to know the Scriptures, and the minutiae of theism. My faith shaped the entire mindset that I experienced the world with: it provided the structure to my perceptions and the basis for my normative judgment. Unshakeable, unbreakable faith is a curious phenomenon: something which cannot, by definition, be proven wrong, by whatever means. Such faith denotes those things which one is absolutely, perfectly certain cannot be otherwise. This is how I felt about the teachings of religion and the God that it spoke of. With theism rooted so profoundly in my life, how could it be extricated? On December 26, 2004, news emerged that a massive earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean had spawned a tsunami that inundated communities with waves reaching as high as one hundred feet in the air. Over 280,000 people, from eleven different countries, perished under the waves and because of the decontamination of natural resources that followed (Boulanger). The tsunami and its aftereffects constituted the second deadliest earthquake in all of human history, and, by far, the most devastating natural disaster in my lifetime. Watching it unfold on television, with bodies stacked like bricks in the hot sunshine, struck me as the most horrific loss of life imaginable. Images of emaciated and malnourished children, women, and men occupied my mind for the following weeks. The problems that arose for me, dealing with these thoughts, was not with the humanitarian response to the disaster (which seemed lackluster from the beginning), but with how an all-powerful, all-loving God could allow (or purposefully perpetrate) such an atrocity. My theistic worldview, like a square in a circled hole, could not accommodate the unspeakable horror and suffering unfolding a world away. With this contradiction, and the masses’ suffering more apparent than the existence of God, I lost my faith. Unfolding only one day after Christmas, the disaster revealed to me, for seemingly the first time, not only the incalculable suffering in those affected countries, but around the world. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair summed it up nicely by saying that there is the equivalent of a “man-made preventable tsunami every week in Africa”, referring of course to the ten thousand people who perish daily from malaria and AIDS (Shekhar). Of course, although the tsunami was deeply tragic, so too is the colossal loss of human life throughout much of the world, on a daily basis. All of these issues seemingly deserved more support from the world’s enthusiastic donors to the region, who “open up their coffers for these disasters”, even though “the ongoing toll from malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis is much larger than these one-time events” (Butler). How is it that these events, taken together, shook my faith so much as to jar it completely loose? Theologians have been discussing the so-called problem of evil for thousands of years. Formally verbalized, it is the seeming contradiction between the existence of evil and suffering with an all-knowing, all-powerful, and benevolent God. The problem of evil inspired Voltaire’s seminal Candide, a work which satirizes the optimism of philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz’s optimism and thought that ours is the “best of all possible worlds” (Voltaire 1). Just as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake put Leibniz’s view out of favor, so did the 2004 tsunami destroy my belief in the le meilleur des mondes possibles thesis (Franklin), or that a benevolent God could exist. After all, how could the God of Revelation permit such a thing? Theologians have long attempted to answer the problem of evil with theodicy, but, in my estimation, have failed. There is no utility that trumps the immense suffering and evil in our world. There could never be anything of more value to a benevolent God than the happiness of His creation. But ultimately, my loss of faith led to some unpleasant consequences: a cynicism about human nature, pessimism about the world around me, and nihilism about all values that isolated me from my family and friends. I developed an unhealthy skepticism in which everything seemed false, along with a subjectivism that made sense in the absence of God, where anything could be true. I fell into an ethics of egoist hedonism, where, in the absence of any kind of divine justice, everything seemed without meaning except in relation to my sensuous pleasures. Politically, my nihilism manifested itself into anarchism and socialism. After living through this time of profound change in my life, through loss and bereavement, things began to change. I took up philosophy as a means of flushing out my confusion regarding how to view the world. Although I never fully retreated back to religion, with the problem of evil yet unsolved, the movements I naturally made after such a loss were essentially reversed to a more productive state of affairs. I rejected my previous cynicism, pessimism, and subjectivism, while retaining a healthy amount of philosophical skepticism. My atheism has past not completely, leaving me with a variety of deism that finds compatibility with the prospect of worldly evil. God is now a force completely indifferent to the dealings of mankind. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it is the only necessary one. All things happen, according to another one of Leibniz’s rules, for a reason, or for a cause. This, the principle of sufficient reason, means that nothing occurs uncaused or without reason. My faith has been restored through philosophy, albeit not faith in a divine being that communicates with prophets or exercises judgment or becomes jealous. I retain faith in the orderliness of nature: the principle that of particular things I may be certain in my knowledge and correct in my values. The most significant loss that I have experienced in my lifetime has been my loss of faith in the God that had structured and gave meaning to my life up until that point. Although I have now regained faith in terms of a belief in the goodness of human beings, the understandability of nature, and the principle of sufficient reason, my faith in an omnibenevolent deity no longer exists. The beliefs I hold, even today, still reflects the problem of evil as a proposition that renders me unable to conceive of a sufficient reason why a being that is all-powerful would allow such evil and suffering on Earth. Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie puts it this way: “The little things, I can obey. But the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose for yourself. You can’t let anyone—or any society—determine those for you” (Albom 155). To let anyone else determine what these values reflect is a betrayal to one’s Self. This event in my life was bittersweet: it allowed me to reassess and find new values, while doing away with the old ones that I now found inadequate. The sudden loss of my religious faith, I believe, opened my mind to a new view of reality, and an ability to think philosophically. Works Cited Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Lifes Greatest Lesson. New York: Broadway Publishers, 2002. Boulanger, Olivier. The Toll of the Tsunami on the 26th December. 27 January 2005. 22 January 2008 . Butler, Declan. Agencies fear global crises will lose out to tsunami donations. 13 January 2005. 22 January 2008 . Franklin, James. "Leibniz’s solution to the problem of evil." Think: 5 (2003): 97-101. Shekhar, Raj. Tsunami: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. 13 February 2005. 23 January 2008 . Voltaire. Candide. Dover Thrift. Dover: Dover Publications, 1991. Read More