...or, an ode to Wittgenstein.
From time to time, I see diaries on the rec-list that attempt to discuss religious or spiritual topics, such as the existence of God (or, more often, the non-existence of God), attempts to philosophize about the nature of ethics, attempts to find meaning in the world, and so on. I used to engage in discussions of this sort, but then I figured out the meaning of life, and I don't worry about it so much anymore.
Yes, I said it. I have the answer. After a strict Southern Baptist upbringing that left me, shall we say, unsatisfied, I turned to science as my surrogate "religion." Science is still the way I make a living, and I still believe it to be the best way to gain information about the world, but the idea that it could ever fill my God-shaped hole vanished pretty quickly in college. You see, unlike many of my fellow science geeks, I decided I needed to round out my Biochemistry major with some humanities courses, and so I took philosophy as a minor. It was in a course called (rather generically) "Contemporary Philosophy" that I became acquainted with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular his (to me at least) most important work, the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (which can be found in its entirety here).
To be sure, I'm not an expert, and any "real" philosophers out there (or probably more accurately, philosophy professors) may think my analysis is overly simplistic, but to me, the take home message of the Tractatus regarding religion can be summed up by the final line:
7 Of what we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.
Leading up to this statement, Wittgenstein lays out the basis for what can be said in a logically perfect language, and comes to the conclusion that the fundamental questions of what is ethical, what is good, whether God exists, and whether life has meaning are themselves nonsensical.
6.52 We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.
6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)
6.522 There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.
He further expands on this idea just prior to this section with the statement that best fits my own idea of "the mystical."
6.44 Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
That is to say, anything that happens in the world is by definition not divine or mystical, but the only thing that really is mystical is the existence of the universe itself. Any meaning or sense of the world must therefore lie outside of the world, but given that we cannot express sensible propositions about that which lies outside the world, we must pass over it in silence.
Again, I make no claim to novelty in this analysis, and I may be way off base in my reading of these passages, but they do give me some comfort in that trying to figure out the great question of "why" is utterly futile.
Which brings me back to the title of this diary: The nature of God is inexpressible, and therefore impossible to discuss in a language that we can understand. It is this realization that is the answer to the question. Once this realization is reached, the existence or non-existence of God becomes a moot point. I suppose this is the classic definition of agnosticism, with the caveat that even the contemplation of the existence or non-existence of God is itself nonsensical.
Now, put that into practice and try to convince the next batch of Jehova's witnesses or Mormon missionaries of these profound truths (but don't tell them that Wittgenstein spent the rest of his post-Tractatus career refuting these ideas.)