Bill Harris on CRC-Voices passed along a fascinating piece from the NYTimes blog: “Navigating Past Nihilism” by the chair of Philosophy at Harvard.

A few initial thoughts:
1. There is always a frame of reference problem we have with noting this conception of “the good”. Multiple “goods” have simultaneously existed throughout the world of course. Europe was such a “cave” but so was China. What life in a place like CA offers is living compressed between China, Europe, Africa, Pre-european America, etc. This context pushes the questions about the existence or our capacity to know the universal, hence Nihilism.

2. Existence is ultimately its own justification. That’s part of the reason I push articulating the gospel as resurrection opposing the age of decay.

3. He is very much on to something not so much in advocacy but in the author himself become an example of how people are trying to be post-nihilistic. People create their own caves and paint on the walls. It is a justification for the evolutionary-biologist etiology for religion. We need the cave so we make it ourselves. We fear the nihilism so we decide to be meta-narrative agnostic and paint pretty pictures on the wall only now imagining ourselves sophisticated and so always, only half knowing that we really are making up these stories ourselves.

4. Thoughts on the book of Ecclesiastes came flooding in. There are hints of Qoheleth in this piece. The best we can do is enjoy whatever sop God throws at us…

5. His third paragraph is grippingly dead-on. This is the world I live in in California. I know places and caves where this is not the case, but his description here of the concept that “God is dead” is correct. If “God” is understood as that foundation upon which a society is built, then that God is no more at least as we draw our political/cultural boundaries.