Why There are No Philistines in Foxholes

Myth-making and the existential leap of faith in life’s meaning

Can we stop pretending our core convictions are mere beliefs, thoughts, theories, assumptions, interpretations, posits, or opinions?

You assume that squirrels are good climbers, you think it will rain tomorrow, and you opine that rock music is better than pop. But your core philosophy about the nature of reality or of the origin of all natural beings isn’t just another thought you happen to have.

We can live without our empirical beliefs, but not without our presumption about what the world is fundamentally like or our trust that it will go on as it has before. If we’re characters acting out our roles on a stage, what’s the stage?

Did a god create everything to test our faithfulness? Or did the universe somehow emerge from nothing, in which case there’s no divine plan? Will we live on somewhere after our physical bodies decay? Or is earthly life absurd because we all die the same no matter how we’ve lived?

Take away our conception of the stage, as it were, and we, too, disappear because the story of our life no longer makes sense.

We can reason our way to controlling or to working with mundane things in our environment. We can test our assumptions about the factors that pop up in our life’s routines. We can check for patterns in what we perceive.

Yet the human mind didn’t evolve to answer philosophical or religious questions. Of course, we can do our best in those fields of inquiry, stretching our mind, and overextending our cognitive tools such as logic, science, and intuition. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think our core philosophizing is just another day at the office. Whether we explicitly ponder philosophical matters or only implicitly guard our prejudices and traditions, the conceptions that matter most to us are practically sacred, as far as we’re concerned.

Which conceptions are sacred? The ones that would give you hope in your moments of dying.

As you’d reassure yourself or assert your core identity, lying there on your death bed as you lose your bodily functions and as the lights go out, you’d realize that most of what we pretend to care about — living with so many compromises under a system of social conventions — has been perfectly trivial and farcical all along.

Thus, you wouldn’t waste your last moments with mere theories or opinions. You’d have no one left to impress, no more lies to tell. Assuming you’d retain some control over your mind in those last moments, you’d try to think about what mattered most to you in life. At least, those core thoughts would dictate your final fears or state of calm. And what sets the stage for that last pedestal you’d erect in your mind is your core philosophy.

What is that sacred philosophy, if it’s not a product strictly of perception, reason, or emotion? All that remains is for that saving grace to be a story. Not just a tall tale, mediocre fiction, or work of gossip, but a myth. The ancients treated this kind of conviction as a sacred narrative, as a myth that brands the culture and reveals its ethos which gives meaning to those people’s lives. And narrative’s sacred solely because nothing is left to comfort us when we’re suffering greatly or dying.

Contrary to the proverb, there are atheists in foxholes. But there are no Philistines in moments of tribulation, no uncultured persons who are content with bureaucratic mundanity and rational exactitude. No one endures great hardships without turning to some myth, and by “myth” I’d include philosophical naturalism and a so-called scientific theory of everything.

What’s our stance towards the myths that matter most to us? They’re what we yearn to be true, even as we can only take an existential leap of faith that they’re not products of sheer folly. Or if these stories — these pretensions, prejudices, or vainglorious audacities — are foolish, we suspect they’re the best we could have done, under the circumstances of life’s absurdity, and they redeem our suffering by making our hardships meaningful in a way that preserves our identity. We suffer as the persons we are, and ultimately nothing else matters to us but how our mortality can be vindicated.

There are roughly two kinds of life myths, though. While they all serve us, they can do so either by giving us center stage or by emphasizing the stage itself. The former stories turn us into prima donnas. Those are the archaic yearnings of the world’s many religious theists.

The latter stories are more about the environment than its protagonists. These stories tend to be philosophically or scientifically styled, and they’re the myths that atheists and some mystics treasure.

The superiority of atheism to theism comes down to the aesthetic fact that in the modern world, atheists have better taste in the literary art known as myth-making.