Wrestling with God

Chapter 3 - Persistence and Pragmatism

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky(1)

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Humans are unique among mammals in several ways. In discussing their uniqueness, one has to start with the general fact of consciousness – we are able to think about our thoughts for instance (reflexiveness), and we know that we are conscious. Other animals don't seem to have this level of cognitive depth.(2)

Fyodor Dostoevsky is acclaimed for his ability to penetrate the human psyche. Arguably his greatest work, The Brothers Karamazov, was penned toward the end of his life and was meant to be the first in a trilogy, but he passed away before the other two could be written.(3) The Brothers Karamazov is outstanding for several reasons, most notably because Dostoevsky expertly plumbs the depths of the question: Does God exist? Through the dialogue and personality profiles of his characters, Dostoevsky presents solid "evidence" for both sides of the argument.* The author also provides great commentary on the inherent contradiction of man and his motives. The following passage is exemplary, from the lips of the atheist Karamazov brother Ivan:

I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one's heart prizes them.(4)

* According to the standards of his day, of course. And we cannot expect anything more – even if a work persists to our time and shows its greatness by doing so, we cannot expect an author from the past to have held our modern understandings of science, religion, ethics, etc. And this is not to say that the past understandings were useless – after all, the book was useful at its time, survives, and still we can still relate to it in many respects.

Explaining the characteristics of human beings is often non-linear and even non-sensical. The following section contains several elements of humankind in an order that may seem choppy and unordered. But then, so often is the mind of man.

Humans

We have large brains, limited only by the size of our cranium, which is limited by the size of the female birth canal. In Genesis, God said that because humans ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, there would be pain in childbirth(5) – there would be a big brain coming out of the birth canal now! We have round eyes which are far-seeing and dynamic. This is opposed to slanted eyes, as in cats, which are slanted so as to specially detect lateral movement.(6)