Wrestling with God

Chapter 2 - The Question of Compatibilism

"The fact, regardless of context, is not evil; it is mere (terrible) actuality. It is the attitude to the fact that has a moral or immoral nature."

- Jordan Peterson(1)

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A woman named Joanna lives in my neighborhood. She is about ninety years old. I know from past interactions with her that she is a kind old lady who believes in God and lives a very religious life. I passed by her house recently and thought about those characteristics. The thought then popped into my mind: Isn't the same kind of nice, old lady living in Afghanistan somewhere?

Afghanistan itself is somewhat of an arbitrary designation, but one can read Khaled Hosseini's now-classic book The Kite Runner(2) to gain perspective on what it's like to live in that war-torn country post-9/11. But even intuitively, we can know that there is a handful of "nice old ladies" in neighborhoods across the world. They may believe strongly in Allah or Brahman (both translated as "God" in Arabic and Sanskrit, respectively), or in no higher being at all (although less likely, statistically(3)).

If true, then one must reconcile this fact with one's own beliefs: do others have to hold the same truth as me, to be good? If not, how accurate is my truth - are the things we hold most dearly to be true, that differ from other's beliefs, mutually incompatible with those other beliefs?

Before that question can be adequately approached, we need to zoom out and look at how exactly we find truth.

Science and Progress

Progress is a positive thing. As Noam Chomsky pointed out, the United States treated women and racial minorities as second-class citizens, by law, less than a century ago.(4) It is certainly a step in the right direction that we no longer live in that reality in the states. And yet, America's Original Sin, that of slavery, still reverberates through our national psyche, especially as concerns race relations. And how could it not? Hundreds of years of the slave trade will naturally have long-lasting consequences. Hopefully we will continue to see progress toward true equality and the moving away from the prejudices of the past. Sam Harris holds the hope that in the future, one's race will matter as much as one's eye color or hair color. That is to say, that it won't, and that race designation becomes completely arbitrary.(5) 2020 didn't seem to point us in that direction, as the George Floyd murder led to exasperated battles of racial tension. The police officer who kneeled on Floyd's neck for nine minutes, Derek Chauvin, was recently convicted for the murder. One can only hope that this brings healing as justice was carried out, instead of only representing a temporary pause in strained racial relations.*

* More on race relations, including discussion of the events of 2020 and more recently, can be found in the Interlude of this book.

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Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but declined. His reasoning was that he was too naïve in politics. He also gave further justification for continuing his scientific work instead, saying, "Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."(6) This response from Einstein, to an offer of great power, shows two things about the physicist: he had a notion of eternity and the everlasting, and was humble as regarded his own capabilities (in this case, as a politician). Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote much of Einstein's humility in Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007). That humility, Isaacson argued, stemmed from Einstein's ability to see that he could not possibly know enough to claim a firm grasp on underlying reality. And this from inarguably one of the smartest humans to ever live!* Einstein was not above calling himself naïve in certain areas of knowledge/experience, and even in his area of expertise (physics) he acknowledged where his understanding was lacking, as Walter Isaacson details in his biography of Einstein: