On Having Your Crock and Bleating it Too

Most of the quotes in the previous post are from W. Norris Clarke's The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic. Not much time this morning, but I'd like to touch on a somewhat unrelated passage from the same book: 

Thus either God exists, or I am absurd. 

That's the choice on offer, so don't pretend otherwise. If it's the latter, all we ask is that you be intellectually honest and consistent: have the courage of your absence of convictions. For in the real world, God or absurdity

is the basic option that confronts me, if I am willing to go to the depth of the human condition.

(In case you were wondering why atheists are so painfully intellectually shallow, generally even prior to their self-confessed spiritual shallowness.) 

But underneath both forms of shallowness is pride and signaling. Ironically, the conspicuous confession of atheism is always a signal of intellectual superiority -- for example, yesterday's commenter, who went out of his way to tell us that "deity" is a term we use when we "just don't understand reality." The implicit point, of course, is that he does understand reality. Signal received!

But how? By virtue of what principle? And other rhetorical questions.

Many people today are afraid of facing up to this radical option [God or absurdity], and so are content to live on the surface of life...

There's nothing wrong with being shallow, on the assumption that we exist in a universe devoid of depth, i.e., with no vertical dimension. 

Now, even when I was an atheist I was always attracted to the depth -- even repulsed by shallowness -- but not yet deep enough to be cognizant of the inconsistency. Nevertheless, "It can be shown"

that there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible...

Petey calls the latter "having your crock and eating it too." But in reality -- the reality for which our commenter claims to be the champion --  

it is finally up to each one of us either to accept his or her infinite-oriented nature as meaningful and revelatory of the real or as an opaque, illusory surd.

So, we are free to use our intelligence to choose the ultimate unintelligibility of mind, life, and existence, but that's not only an expensive signal, it's a fatal one: we had to destroy the mind in order to save the mind.