Kierkegaard the Fool

I find K.’s final position to be thoroughly contemptible and delusional at best and there is a certain irony in his reasoned argument for unreasoned belief. However, he makes a couple of insights. He anticipates Gödel’s absolute destruction of the possibility of a complete system by mathematical proof. He also fairly successfully argues against the possibility of an objective route to or proof of God. And insofar as his goal was to argue for an ideology that facilitates a fulfilling life, his route might very well be the quickest path for many, albeit at the expense of a higher risk of being unprepared for a rapidly changing world and a much higher risk of being factually incorrect about the universe. The rest of K.’s arguments completely collapse once the presumption of the existence of God is removed.

For example, the supposed paradox of faith is clearly not a paradox at all in the absence of a divine presence; the particular is never higher than the universal, there never was a justified teleological suspension of the ethical, and all we witness in a case like Abraham’s is just as K. says we do in the absence of faith, viz. Abraham is a murderer. In modern cases where a parent hears the voice of God and murders their children, the murderer is locked up, and hopefully is given the mental treatment that they need. Other terms like infinite passion, can be recognized as the unfounded exaggerations they are.

Should the presumption of God’s existence be so quickly dismissed? Absolutely. Evolutionary theory is a much more parsimonious explanation of biological diversity. Cosmology and physics have let us glimpse a universe orders of magnitude greater and more awe-inspiring than the puny world in the biblical account. Modern science so clearly has much more tremendous explanatory power than any religious belief system claims, including the existence of religious belief itself, which has been successfully modeled epidemiologically, affected by direct manipulation of the brain, and even explained by evolutionary psychology as a group cohesion generating mechanism that helped some groups out compete others.

The existence of God raises many more questions than it purports to answer. The origin of an incomprehensibly complex being actually existing like the Judeo-Christian god is a more difficult question to answer than the origin of the universe. Even simpler theories like the uncaused cause are internally inconsistent (if everything has a cause, so must the ‘first’ cause), and godly attributes like omnipotence are likewise internally inconsistent, i.e. could God heat up a burrito so hot that he couldn’t eat it? Of course there are further problems to take issue with. Not the least of which is the inability of K.’s reliance on subjectivity to justifiably differentiate belief in Judeo-Christian god from any other belief system theistic or otherwise. However, the largest danger is the extent to which it inevitably feeds sectarian strife by eliminating the only common ground, viz., objectivity.

in response to:

Existentialism: Basic Writings

&
Concluding Postscript, Part Two