Is Life a Kind of Test?

To answer that question with Yes is to assent to a certain cosmic model. God sets the creature a test—e.g., that tree in Paradise. Humanity fails. Humanity is expelled from the Garden. We’re now undergoing the second test. Succeed: heaven. Fail: hell.

No. I’m not trying to belittle the Judeo-Christian-Muslim faiths—or any other. The great myths can be (and are) understood in very sophisticated ways. A more sophisticated rendition of that model is to view God creating humans and giving them free will. Without it, surely, they would be little more than automata (as Descartes, for instance, described animals). Are animals undergoing some kind of test? Surely they are not. They do not have any kind of choice. Therefore free will is an integral element of the model, indeed sufficient to support a test-model. We don’t need paradises, forbidden fruit, temping snakes, expulsions, or any other of the vividly painted machinery of the creation myth. The mere presence of genuine agents, thus agents with consciousness and free will, is good enough. For that model to work we don’t even need a material realm. There are angels within these traditions, said to be pure spirits—but also endowed with freedom. And, sure enough, some of them rebelled. Let me introduce you to Lucifer. The only environment they require is that of Mind.

The more subtle aspects of that question begin to emerge at this point. The creation of free agents, as such, does not automatically mean that God intends to test them. The intention clearly is that the agents will have choice. And with that power of self-determination given, all that flows from it is, of course, necessarily known by an omniscient Creator. Therefore God gives his creatures freedom, and other necessary concomitant abilities, like consciousness—and the rest is up to the creature. Here also rises another ghost, the Problem of Evil. Does the gift of free agency mean that God approves all of the evil that such agency produces when it abuses its freedom? This conundrum creates another question: Is knowledge equivalent to approval? No. Obviously not. We create all kinds of new “freedoms” legislatively—knowing full well that some will abuse them; knowing that does not demand omniscience; therefore penalties are also put in place for abuse, or let’s just call them consequences. Acts have consequences. That is also inherent in the concept of choice.

Let’s look at that word more closely. Choices are directional—in a kind of higher dimension. Choosing the good leads to light, development, and greater powers; choosing the bad leads to darkness, deterioration, loss of powers. If all choices had the same consequences, freedom of will would lose all meaning.

Is Life a Kind of Consequence? Well, that question may be closer to the truth if we take life to mean life here on earth. If I make the wrong kind of choices and find myself in a desolate space—and an angel with a flaming sword blocks the way back—well, that’s a problem, isn’t it. But am I being tested? Not in the least. I’m just experiencing consequences, limits. I can make better choices the next time I act. If I experience this life as a test, one cause of it might well be that I, ah, volunteered, manner of speaking.

P of E Revisited

Fate insists that I use initials in this post today. My earlier title was “S, SM, & S.” A quite reflexive thought arises often lately, namely that modern technological civilization is the root of evil. But then I always hastily correct that by saying, “Before that arose came slavery—and, look, a mere 161 years ago it still held black people in bondage within a day’s driving distance from here.” This sequence of thoughts, repeating, has caused me to label it as Slavery, Satanic Mills, and Such. The last phrase is a stand-in for the longish rest of my inner rant. It begins by saying that ours mirror the late Hellenistic times. That era had its slavery in spades although fossil fuels were neither drilled nor mined. But the Hellenistic age had its mass culture and its decadence. And in those days arose varieties of very chaotic religious impulses known collectively as Gnosticism. The next reflection is that in periods like that a kind of self-assertive valuation of the human combines with a sense of anguish at mushrooming evils. In Gnosticism this took the form of pushing off the blame for everything onto the quasi-divine Demiurge. I’m Okay but Things are not. And if only I can hold that idea firmly and effectively in mind, know it, in other words, then I am saved—hence the name of that belief from the Greek for “knowledge.” In our times that view is expressed by raising Victimhood to a high status; our demiurge turns out to be the System.

But the slogan points to a lot more, not least “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” thus the fact we rarely reflect upon, namely that life—at least above the level of the vegetative order (excusing the Venus flytrap for the moment)—exists by destroying other life. Every time I shudder at yet some other facet of modern civilization and the process starts over, eventually I revisit P of E. You have been on tenterhooks to know, haven’t you. The Problem of Evil, of course.

(If “tenterhooks” now bothers you, in turn, I hasten to explain that they are clothes pins, tenters having once been wood frames on which to fasten lines on which to hang cloth for drying. Tenters have been replaced by a combination of the garage and the house in our day—except for those stretch-frames down in the basement by the ironing board.)

But back to P of E. In the East Hinduism, and Buddhism to a lesser extent, adopted vegetarian approaches to diet consistently enough, these arising from a kind of troubled realization that there is a problem out there—and that it might be deeply built into the very Creation itself.

But when Hellenistic times finally wind down—and they do—the real switch that takes place is to stop blaming the demiurge and to look within. Then we get the doctrine of the Fall. That’s where my inner process usually ends. A fallen world explains much better why we might all be in this dimension, thus, in a way, out of place. But if we are then surely each and every one of us must carry the blame directly, not by inheritance from careless Adam, careless Eve. Christianity did not evolve in the direction of vegetarianism. Is that because Greek philosophical culture, honed to a fine edge by the clever sophists, made careful distinctions between humans (don’t eat) and lesser breeds without the law (eat some but not horses, dogs, or nightingales). But I wonder if in some other dimension the souls of wheat and rye will threateningly swarm around me in the future for having eaten thick slices of bread every morning for breakfast as far back as I can think.