Horror Vacui
"There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God, made known through Jesus Christ."
-- Pascal, Pensees
This is incredibly honest, as Pascal often is: there is a hypothetical something, which, given its certain truth, becomes an unshakeable axis about which our entire world can freely revolve without flying apart. God is the proverbial perpetual motion machine that solves all our problems; it's the hypostatic idea of unity that provides order, the ground of an unshakeable happiness. The naturalist heresy is to suppose that the world is already orderly, without needing any extraneous help. But clearly it sometimes seems disorderly, and this needs accounting for; even naturalism needs an answer to the problem of evil. The answer usually given is that the semblance of disorder is the product of our expectations, and that our evils are symptomatic of our ignorant grasping after the impossible. It's the toughest of medicines to swallow, but the fact that it proposes an end to evil makes it, in a sense, at least as grandiose as anything religion has ever offered.
But notice that it leaves something out: the very notion of 'apparent disorder' presupposes a divergence between appearance and reality that simply cannot be swallowed without lapsing into dualism, back into the old pit of real versus ideal, skepticism versus solipsism, and all the other evils of philosophy. The Devil is back again, just when you thought you'd vanquished him. Must we simply accept his existence, whilst continually trying to shoo him away? Or is there another way? The only other solution I can see is, as usual, is the Buddha's: accept error, suffering, evil as your bedrock, and build the temple around it.
-- Pascal, Pensees
This is incredibly honest, as Pascal often is: there is a hypothetical something, which, given its certain truth, becomes an unshakeable axis about which our entire world can freely revolve without flying apart. God is the proverbial perpetual motion machine that solves all our problems; it's the hypostatic idea of unity that provides order, the ground of an unshakeable happiness. The naturalist heresy is to suppose that the world is already orderly, without needing any extraneous help. But clearly it sometimes seems disorderly, and this needs accounting for; even naturalism needs an answer to the problem of evil. The answer usually given is that the semblance of disorder is the product of our expectations, and that our evils are symptomatic of our ignorant grasping after the impossible. It's the toughest of medicines to swallow, but the fact that it proposes an end to evil makes it, in a sense, at least as grandiose as anything religion has ever offered.
But notice that it leaves something out: the very notion of 'apparent disorder' presupposes a divergence between appearance and reality that simply cannot be swallowed without lapsing into dualism, back into the old pit of real versus ideal, skepticism versus solipsism, and all the other evils of philosophy. The Devil is back again, just when you thought you'd vanquished him. Must we simply accept his existence, whilst continually trying to shoo him away? Or is there another way? The only other solution I can see is, as usual, is the Buddha's: accept error, suffering, evil as your bedrock, and build the temple around it.