A reader sent me a link to a passel of aphorisms by the philosopher Mortimer Adler. They’re not aphorisms per se, just aphoristic extracts from larger works. Although the world abounds in maxims, bon mots, wisecracks, zingers, and putdowns, the Benevolent Order of Transdimensional Raccoons recognizes only one Aphorist.
Adler was a bestselling author who brought philosophy and theology to the masses, or what a widely ignored unpopularizer such as myself bitterly dismisses as a popularizer. He was such an effective Catholic apologist that he convinced even himself to enter the Church at age 97.
Here is one with which we agree wholeheadedly:
More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.
However, if I were going to express that sentiment, I’d want to sneak in a sharp object and then twist it, and maybe sprinkle some salt into the wound.
I'd also want to preserve a little space for the victim of the aphorism to put two and two together and convict himself. An insultaining aphorism needs to sting. Or bite. Or leave a mark. For example,
Unbelief is not a sin but a punishment.
Or,
The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.
Back to that first and most consequential question: God or no God, meaning or nihilism, O or Ø. Any schoolboy armed with rudimentary logic can prove God exists, but it takes a real vulgarian to prove he doesn’t:
If one does not believe in God, the only honest alternative is vulgar utilitarianism. The rest is rhetoric.
Nor can you simultaneously reject God and exalt man, for
Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.
In the end, it’s
Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.
Except chance must be parasitic on order; the converse is not only impossible and unthinkable, but can very well end in outright tenure.
But I AM SOMEBODY! Precisely. The question is, how and why? Says who? By virtue of what principle are you different from a worm or a stone? What is a person, and what is its principle? Here’s a hint:
For God there are only individuals.
Are you an individual? Or only a race, a class, a gender, a “sexual orientation”? For we could turn that aphorism around and say: only for individuals is there God (the Christian God, to be precise, i.e., the God who assumes human nature).
One last gag from our official Aphorist:
The sole proof of God is His existence.
No, this is not a tautology, because God is that in whom existence and essence are not two: God’s essence is to exist, which is another way of saying necessary being. Everything else is unnecessary, or at least pretty much uncalled for.
The bottom line for me is that God must exist, even while I remain agnostic with respect to the existence of myself, or rather, I take my existence on faith.
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