A Day in My Life

I must admit. Despite my efforts to live according to Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life, I sometimes slip. For those who may not know, JP is a genius – a professor, psychologist, writer, and lecturer extraordinaire. One of his rules is to clean up your room. Sounds elementary, does it not, old boy? However, it’s packed with profundity. He elaborates. Before you begin trying to change the world (which could potentially make matters only worse), start with the small things, things you can change without potentially harming others.

In other words, dust your furniture before you picket Walmart. Look. I get it. Walmart has either absorbed or bankrupted tons of five and dime stores, forced ma and pa shops to retire early, and killed a bzillion department and variety stores across the country. That’s what the cutthroats call competition. Granted. But Walmart meanwhile pays its employees poorly and cares only about satisfying its shareholders.

Like the banks during the 2008 government bailouts, Walmart is too big to fail now. Yes. Walmart is subsidized by the government. While donating millions to charities to reap the tax deductions, and while guaranteed a safety net in the form of ole Uncle Sam’s ready checkbook backed by the Federal reserve and our tax dollars, Walmart pays its employees what a teen on a scooter would struggle to live on. Many of its employees, who can’t survive on such wages, utilize the government food stamps program they’re eligible for. And don’t get me started on Amazon.

But even if you clean your whole room, move on to your entire apartment or house, spreading that involvement, as JP suggests, to your family, friends, neighborhood, and community, I don’t believe, short of a revolution, we can reduce, much less eliminate, the corruption, kickbacks, and bribery between government and big corporations no matter how many riots or peaceful protests we participate in or sponsor. Call me a fatalist in this one regard, but the swamp is overrun with alligators. And the alligators have bigger guns.

Besides, we’ll always have idiots electing fellow idiots to rule us like tyrants. I try to ignore all that and focus on my fellow man. The individual. The trick is figuring out how to help in a more immediate way without getting arrested. I am a practical anarchist after all.

What keeps my anarchist tendencies subdued and exclusively theoretical, however, is that despite my contempt, nay, my abhorrence, for government, Dennis Prager, who is by no means an anarchist, said something that has never left me. While pointing to his chest: “The problems in this world begin here.”

Of course Mr. Prager wasn’t suggesting that he was personally responsible for all the problems in the world. It’s a metaphorical, symbolic gesture. We, each of us, are the reason for unease, unrest, and the evil, yes, the evil in this world. It’s far more practical, far more productive, though far more difficult, for me to look inward at my own imperfections, my own selfishness, before calling out the sins of others. Nonetheless, it’s the only way civilization will survive.

Jordan Peterson cites a play called “The Cocktail Party” by T.S. Elliot. A woman tells a psychologist about her unhappiness. She tells the shrink she hopes her suffering is her own fault. The therapist asks why. She says because if it’s the world, she’s doomed. She can’t change the world. But she can change herself.

If we extrapolate my vision for the country and follow its inevitable conclusion, it’s the novel Animal Farm all over again. I’d never want to bring about such mayhem, let alone the subsequent return to what we already have in America. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Fortunately, I’m happy. Often delighted. Grateful, even. Frequently blissful. Occasionally euphoric. While I’m not entirely content, certainly not always, contentment can be a trap. It can induce apathy, make you soft. Instead, I’m still driven, hungry. Apart from my occupation, I keep myself busy pursuing passion projects, autodidactic causes, even hobbies as if they’re avocations.

Nevertheless, in honor of that personal pledge to myself about improving my own circumstances before demanding change from the rest of the world, this past Veterans Day, I cleaned out my car.

I know. Sounds trivial. And irrelevant. But we must start somewhere. At least a year had elapsed, and the trash had piled all the way from the floorboard to the seats. In the process, I filled up two tall kitchen sized trash bags and found my umbrella!

This ten-minute job gave me time to ponder something C.S. Lewis wrote. That’s right. I’m a walking treasure trove of insight. Step right up, folks! Now citing Incredible Quotes by Great Thinkers. Paraphrasing, and I’ll probably butcher the idea, life should imitate art. In other words, live the best version of your life, live as if your actions are influencing others. Okay. Now I’m just extrapolating Lewis’ idea. Fair enough.

But let’s keep going. What deeds would you perform? What is, after all, art in its purest form? Which actions are most noble? Wouldn’t you pull over to help someone whose car broke down? Would you not hand a homeless person a sandwich? Would you not, when confronted, tell the truth?

With that in mind, I wondered what my life would look like in review over the course of these past, say, five years. What would I confess to my priest? What had I accomplished? I earned and saved some money. Check. I progressed further into my language learning lessons. Check. I severed ties from a friend of over 30 years who during that time had never learned how to be a friend. A painful check. But what did I do beyond setting up a monthly pittance to charity or making a few small donations toward an otherwise free service I already utilize?

Sure. Over the past five years, I lost some weight, read some good books, bought some nicer clothes. And sneakers. Mustn’t forget sneakers. I didn’t sit still, didn’t waste the past five years playing video games. Fine. But how can I not only make my life better but improve the lives of people around me as well? On second thought, I just noticed my vehicle registration sticker has expired.

Speaking of life imitating art, I recently watched my favorite Korean nymph on YouTube (with whom I’m secretly in love) as she figuratively led her subscribers by the hand throughout her vlogging day. First rising from her bed in a cute, apricot onesie, she reminded me, stretching her arms, of flower petals unfolding. After her morning yoga routine, she broke her fast by eating what is fit for only fairies or wood elves. Her walk through a Korean shopping mall, with minimal makeup apart from the smear of violet glitter along her eyelids, inspired awe from the lens.

Call my writing bruised, smug, pretentious, hyperbolic, prose aubergine. I care not. Label me an ingratiating simp with my cloak at the ready should a damsel require this errant knight to facilitate her walk over a water puddle, my lady, but the simile that makes me smile broadest is her as a breathing sculpture of artisanship, pedestal or no.

Whether under the artificial light of the fluorescent bulb or basking in the brilliant sun, a sheen slips in and out of her black hair like the gloss on her matching black leather jacket and jodhpurs. The tender but unflinching eye at home among her plants and paintings, the lean look of confidence in public amid pedestrians and street vendors, she’d be as at home strutting along a fashion runway as seated at the feasting table among the Olympian gods. She, my dear reader, is the epitome of life imitating art.

I recently clicked on her live YouTube stream as she intermittently performed yoga while responding to comments being posted in real time by fellow simps. I took the opportunity to type. “Hey, beautiful! So how many men have proposed to you today?” As she read it aloud, her smile intensified the brightness level of my monitor by two hundred percent. Then she laughed long and softly.

Eventually, she wound down her day in a bath far too censored by bubbles, porcelain, and meticulous editing, but I saw enough to confirm my suspicions. Asian women, unlike Western women, generally don’t deface their flesh with tattoos like a vandal would a wall. The East’s long and rich history is steeped in time-honored traditions, conventions, class, discretion, propriety. Rarely will you find their beautiful skin forever stained with what I pejoratively refer to as body graffiti.

Analyze the following as you see fit, but her YouTube vlog got me thinking about how I’d catalogue my day to my readers exclusively via the printed word. Obviously, the two mediums are wholly different. Nor would my day intrigue the same audience. Nor am I quite as sexy as she. Come to think of it, the whole enterprise would be as droll as watching me brew coffee, which, incidentally, would typify one of my many yawn-inducing activities. That and seated at my desktop to browse the web, read, and write, while listening to music over my Bluetooth, none of which makes for visually inspiring or stimulating content.

Alas. Our interests, the Korean nymph and me, diverge at dawn and wind down at the end of the evening in different hemispheres. Nonetheless, I thought I’d try my hand at chronicling my daily routine for the illumination or amusement of others.

Rushing now. I awake super early, drive to the gym in the dark, spend an hour at a brisk walk on the treadmill with no one there apart from the gym staff, during which I watch – on my phone and with earbuds – Netflix’s Japanese reality show Terrace House with the Japanese subtitles on. This is to improve my listening and reading comprehension of the Japanese language.

I return home just as dawn begins its chase where I shower with Dr. Squatch’s soap (more about this in a future blog post entitled Upgrading One’s Life).

After which I dress in my olive thermals and Pikachu house slippers and brew (you guessed it) a pot of coffee. Then I lie abed, sometimes with my miniature dry board and a marker, and go over one or two of my three language-learning apps (LingoDeer, Doulingo, Busuu) on my phone, studying various scripts or alphabets or grammar lessons – Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, even a bit of French if I’m feeling frisky. On rare occasion, Latin.

No. I’m not a polyglot. No. I’m not fluent. Just intrigued, in some sense inextricably so. In another sense, my study is entirely calculated. By that I mean I’ve discovered that such study engenders greater insight into grammar and diction. Consider, if you’re taught a different way to conjugate (or agglutinate) a verb, or a new way to express an idea with entirely different symbols or word arrangement, you gain not only a newfound appreciation for your native language but an insight into how language best functions and how ideas are most effectively conveyed. You thereby gain a deeper understanding of practical communication, which, in turn, lends itself to better writing. That’s my working theory anyway.

After either reading from one of half a dozen books on my Kindle app while listening to music on either Spotify or Pandora, or working on a chapter for my new manuscript, I eventually dress to run a few errands.

On my way to buy more sneakers, it dawns on me that I haven’t had a massage in twelve years. I head over to a massage therapy spa in town and approach the receptionist. “Hi there.”

She’s a young woman and, judging from the naked left hand, single. Her voice is almost inaudible. “What can we do for you?”

I tell her I’d like to set up an appointment for a massage, but I stipulate, “Can I ask a huge favor, though?”

She produces a lilting, staccato-like hum; a nondescript interrogative, as if she can’t decide whether to unseal her lips to say, “Huh?”

“It’s just that I haven’t had a massage in ages. I don’t really know the protocols. Is it too much to ask that my masseuse not be a man?”

She looks nonplussed. “Well, we usually pair female associates with female clients, but I can ask. Is there any particular reason?”    

“I just don’t want a man touching me.”

“I see.”

“I’m a little homophobic.”

She tilts her head and narrows her brows. “A little? But isn’t it either one or the other? I mean, you either are or you aren’t, right?”

“Not for me. I’m probably about thirty-five percent homophobic, to be fair.”

She grins. “Thirty-five percent? How do you figure that?”

“Well, I recently, accidentally, came across a photo of two men kissing. They were good looking men, too. But I was instantly nauseated. I nearly lost my lunch. It’s a gut reaction. I can’t help it.”

Now the receptionist is smiling.

“Whereas watching two or more women – being intimate with one another is – what’s the word?”

The receptionist was sitting forward with her elbows on the desk and her chin on her palms. “Exciting?”

I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s a safer adjective than the one I was going to use, yes.”

At a client’s warehouse, I’m approached by a gentleman who knows my boss. He asks me to give his regards and we get to talking. The gentleman’s arthritis recently flared again, and I thought, “Health? The topic is health? This is down there with mortgages and sports and whether it looks like rain. Beam me up, Scotty!” Instead, I expressed what I thought was an appropriate level of concern for a mere acquaintance who wants to get the hell out of there.

I suddenly, not for the first time, wished I lived in a world with more interesting people, those who enjoyed talking about important stuff. Ideas about truth and honor and God and literature and psychology and music and languages. But I’m stuck in a world with people who rarely deal in the abstract, who are uncomfortable conceptualizing things, who can’t see beyond their immediate surrounds. They’re far more at home with the tangible, the tactile, physical, material world. Materialists! Can’t stand them.

Later that afternoon, at another warehouse of another of our clients, I say hello to a few of the employees. They’re all guys. One asks me whether I’ve seen any good movies at the theatre now that they’re reopening. I take the opportunity to tell a perverse joke I heard and reworked from a highly offensive British comedian. I enjoy amusing and sometimes even shocking acquaintances if I can get away with it. “Not really,” I say. “I quit going to the cinema long before the whole COVID thing.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I assume a serious expression. “The last time I went to see a movie was with my sister. I can’t remember the name of the movie. But the gratuitous sex was out of control. Eventually, everyone in the theatre had to turn around and tell my sister and me to stop.”

Mark Twain called this grotesque humor, laughing at what gives us unease, at what we feel guilty laughing about. The employee’s reaction encapsulated this conflict. Brows shaped into a V. Knees bent so that he partly crouched. The whites of his eyes overly exposed. A forearm over his mouth to muffle the laughter. Like Dracula without the cape in the throes of hysterics. Not as satisfying from my end as watching a woman laugh, especially when she throws back her head as if in ecstasy. But that’s probably any hetero male, amateur comedian’s secret desire.

After work, for the twenty minutes I spend eating dinner at the dinner table, I might watch twenty minutes of YouTube on my laptop. Once I plunge the dishes into the hot water in the sink and notice my windows darkening, I might write a few hundred words toward a blog post I’m drafting, such as this one, for example, until my mental energy wanes. Then I’ll brush my teeth and set my laptop on my bed to play an ASMR video on YouTube quietly in the background while I roll over and fall asleep.

And this, gentle reader, is where we close out A Day in My Life. Me unconsciously shaping translucent Zzz to drift upwards and be minced into confetti by the ceiling fan. The laptop plays on its back behind me. The soothing whisper of some sweet young woman purrs as she pretends to apply shaving cream to the bottom half of the camera lens. This no doubt represents my beard in this barber shop role play point of view scenario, a scenario I neither participate in nor witness but whose audio I have vaguely incorporated into my dream.

Yet at some point the barber dissolves, and the gorgeous Korean nymph I secretly love appears. Her face leans in inches from mine. She grins playfully, and I see a flash of metal. She sports a thin, unobtrusive ring running parallel to the natural grooves of her bottom lip. As she speaks, the metal kisses her top lip, just below what the anatomically savvy call Cupid’s bow. Over and over, she repeats, again and again, one of the few phrases, slowly and softly, I know in Korean: “안녕히 주무세요,” (annyeonghi jumuseyo; good night).

Why Atheism Fails

I mentioned in my most recent post (Diary of a Part-Time Shut-In, Excerpt#1134) that my aimless internet surfing found me grinning at an atheist YouTuber behind a formidable desk “making what I assume he considered an equally formidable case”. In the video, he criticized a fairly famous Christian apologist. Doesn’t matter who. Let’s just say the target in question wasn’t my favorite personality among the cadre of apologists running the debate circuit. This particular apologist was more the high school coach slash history teacher in a hurry than the measured, literary scholar who chooses his words carefully. At any rate, the virtual encounter brought back memories of those debates I used to engage in with both amateurs and professionals alike.

That pastime was decades ago, and I’ve since moved on. However, I must confess the critique the atheist YouTuber employed here provoked a salutary grin, and, so grinning, I wondered how foolish I too had appeared those many years ago fixating on particulars most everyone else couldn’t have cared less about and regarded as a waste of time.

I decided these sorts of critiques the young atheist YouTuber engaged in, while perhaps persuasive to the young free thinker lacking discernment, required a bit of perspective. In an effort to discourage the misguided, I immediately began composing a post to address atheism outright. In the process, I realized I’d need to establish a few things without sounding pedantic or condescending. Gradually realizing that was less likely the more I wrote, I ended up redrafting for weeks, consulted an old philosopher friend with a master’s in philosophy, and after receiving his high praise, nonetheless returned to the drawing board another eleven times in an attempt to shrink what stretched out to eighteen pages down to five. I settled for nine. I hope you will too.

My case is not about which position is more accurate or true or right, though. Not really, anyway. Rather my case is about perspective. Discussions are irrelevant in light of the inevitable and unprovable premises each must adopt in order to maintain any position at all. What philosophers say about the value of debate, for all their academic clout, demonstrates their naïveté of human nature. Instead, those who wish to persuade must abandon semantics and look to the power of narrative. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Since any good story deserves a good beginning, let’s start there.

Premise, Plot, and Narrative

No. I’m not drafting an outline for a novel. Rather I’m listing the ingredients required to defend a philosophical world view and persuade others of its truth and value. Let’s tackle the last one first: narrative.

A lifetime ago, before I began writing fiction, I enjoyed reading from philosophers. I particularly relished those books that included critical thinking primers. Don’t ask me why, but to break apart an argument and analyze the merits of its individual components, or to segment the premises and conclusion of a syllogism, for example, struck me as akin to solving a Rubik’s Cube or some other puzzle or riddle.

At the same time, I began to discover that while facts were instrumental in determining the accuracy of a claim, facts weren’t always as well received as well presented, glossy, feel good nonsense. Misinformation and half-truths, in the hands of a wordsmith, often garnered just as many, if not more, adherents than did the cold hard truth.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society; it is only important to the individual. – Vladimir Nabokov

Narrative is far more influential than any graph or chart, more compelling than any argument or philosophical posit. Good narrative evokes our emotions, inspires, and ignites our sense of purpose. Novel per chapter, season per episode, characters and their responses to conflict awaken our empathy and tug at our heartstrings. The old adage bears repeating – there’s truth in fiction. Whereas facts alone are mere curiosities, facts within a narrative change our hearts and shape our minds.

I’m not alone with this sentiment. Novelists, filmmakers, pastors, politicians, opportunists, even the PR department for any given scientific organization knows better than to dull or vex the general public with a series of measurements, statistics, findings, and calculations. Instead, they employ the persuasive power of narrative.

Canvass the entire spectrum of media. The bait and switch by the press, doctoring the spin, selecting which stories support its themes and refusing to run the stories that undermine it, all are instrumental in shaping the narrative and influencing society.

Advertisers don’t waste their time trying to separate us from our money by appealing to our powers of deduction. Instead, they utilize the thirty seconds they have to exploit our desire for prestige and our fear of obsolescence.    

The Premise is Everything

We must acknowledge an inconvenient reality, namely that regardless what we believe, the opinions we hold dear are rooted in sentiment, not logic. Logic, critical analysis, and rational thought are useful for gauging consistency within an already established system. However, logic can’t tell us whether any given system is true. Logic can tell us only whether a series of claims within a given system are compatible with one another.

Banking is like religion: you have to accept some rather dicey things simply on faith, and then everything else follows in marvelous logic. – Robertson Davies

Consider our monetary system. This system hinges on the participation of its citizenry, on our shared presumption or attribution of a given currency’s value. The currency itself has no intrinsic or inherent worth apart from the cost of the materials used to produce it – paper, ink, metals. Rather we ascribe a monetary value to the currency in order to exchange it for various goods and services. But without this shared attribution, the system collapses.  

Other systems as well, such as various systems of thought, while crucial to our lives, offer nothing in the way of proof. For example, in philosophy, five major assumptions most of us never consciously think about allow us to navigate life even though no evidence, per se, for their validity is forthcoming.

1.  Trying to validate or prove logic or mathematics is to argue in a circle. An infinite regress results, since the basis for such systems are the components within said systems.

2.  Metaphysics has to do with claims such as Minds exist other than my own or The external world is real or The past wasn’t created five minutes ago with the appearance of age, all of which are practical, essential assumptions bereft of evidence to support them. Belief to the contrary would render us catatonic.

3.  As for ethics, you can’t prove whether the Nazi scientists in the concentration camps did anything evil as opposed to the scientists in Western democracies. Additionally, though we all agree slavery is an evil, neither debate nor consensus can determine this truth since, not so long ago, slavery was ubiquitous and considered acceptable.   

4.  Aesthetics. What is beautiful, good, and worth pursuing cannot be scientifically argued or proven. Even the value one places on a given work of art is arbitrary.

5.  Lastly and perhaps most notably, science itself can’t be justified by way of the scientific method. Science is permeated with assumptions, which are likewise based on previous assumptions. Trying to prove one by referencing another, again, triggers an infinite regress. Scientists must presume things so that they might further demonstrate the alleged validity of subsequent things. Note: this isn’t a criticism of science. Nor does it invalidate science. It’s just a reality of the limitations of systems. (List courtesy of a 1998 debate between William Lane Craig and Dr. Peter Atkins, hosted by William F. Buckley Jr.)

Aristotle nailed the whole predicament over two thousand years ago. He called these premises First Principles, otherwise known as a priori or First Cause. These deep-seated presumptions act as the bedrock or the linchpin for our opinions on nearly everything.

Altering these presumptions (these First Principles), or having these First Principles altered for us, can be a shock to the system, to one’s mental constitution, sometimes proving intellectually traumatic. On a certain level, we intuitively know this. Which is why you can provide statistics, graphs, arguments, and evidence until all the cows have milked themselves and yet the person confronted with your particular position, when it impugns his own position, will typically merely double-down, demanding that your sources are suspect, that the motivation or the organization behind the survey or the study or the research you’ve presented must be unreliable or corrupted, and so on.

When put into perspective, the insistence by which we maintain a position is satirical in light of its underlying premise. An irony is at play, a sort of inevitable special pleading fallacy for one’s cause or paradigm without regard for the unsupportable standing of said position.

Imagine wanting to remove a tree by trimming only the branches or preventing early onset of Alzheimer’s leading to dementia by spending eight hours per day watching television or running your wrecked car through a car wash. These efforts no more address the issues they pretend to target than debating capital punishment without first asking one another precisely what policy or principle (if any) we regard as cruel or just or valuable to society and why. While we’re at it, we might wish to likewise ask ourselves what qualifies as cruel or just or of value. Whichever way we define those concepts, they’re the unassailable presumptions for the opinions that follow therefrom.

These premises, often unbeknownst to us, determine our take on everything including abortion, animal rights, crime, euthanasia, capital punishment, drug policy, energy, poverty, the environment, military spending, education, and more.  

… when there is a conflict of visions, those most powerfully affected by a particular vision may be the least aware of its underlying assumptions – or the least interested in stopping to examine such theoretical questions when there are urgent “practical” issues to be confronted, crusades to be launched, or values to be defended at all costs. – Thomas Sowell  

In his book A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, the brilliant economist Dr. Thomas Sowell shows how our vision for humanity can be reduced to two opposing premises within the context of political philosophy. These visions account for what Sowell calls the “silent shapers of our thoughts.” I maintain that the phenomenon extends beyond mere politics, since these opposing positions stem from our premises about human nature and human capabilities, how the world works and why we do what we do.

One example I might offer addresses why we go to war with each other. One position, based on a premise (what Sowell calls the constrained vision), is that people are inherently flawed, selfish, impulsive, irrational, brutal, cruel, corruptible, and likely to stay that way.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers:

It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies – ills as well as good propensities. This results from the imperfection of the Institutor, man.

The opposing position, likewise based on a premise (the unconstrained vision), is that while maybe we start out as selfish and so on, this condition isn’t fixed. People are malleable and capable of becoming potentially good and rational. The only reason we go to war is because of religions and corrupt governments. They create paranoia and fear which leads us to war.

This unconstrained vision is often summarized in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous quote: “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”

In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off. – Thomas Sowell

Such views, however faithfully maintained by often sincere people on both sides, while diametrically opposing one another, can’t be invalidated on their faces. One could arguably find logical inconsistencies within each system, but, again, even if one were to demolish the other’s view, that wouldn’t necessarily cause that person to abandon his demolished view. Instead, such a challenge is more likely to raise his ire, stir his sense of righteous indignation, etc.

To be fair, both parties presumably want what’s best for humanity. The problem is that these opposing visions dictate how to achieve this end. Once again, an infinite loop is at play, an informal question begging fallacy: which proposed remedies are best depends on one’s diagnosis, which, in turn, is based on one’s premise.

The Plot Thickens

We return to the model we examined earlier – the proposed system of function or thought. This is where one spots the chink in the armor, namely by identifying the inconsistencies within a given system. This is what I dub the plot hole. Storytelling demands a consistent thread of non-contradictive motivations, actions, and consequences. In other words, the story must provide its own internal logic. Failure to provide this causes a discerning audience to insist your story is unconvincing or riddled with plot holes.  

This is generally why those who convert to one religious faith over another, or abandon religious faith altogether, don’t do so due to a graph or a study or a body of research or a philosophical argument but rather something in their lives that derails their narrative and changes their premise – the death of a loved one or some other personal experience both poignant and often difficult to convey. In other words, an event, usually traumatic, that exposes the inconsistency within the system, the fracture within the internal logic, the plot hole within the story.

In Dr. Thomas Sowell’s case, for example, he was a staunch Marxist beginning at the age of 19 and remained a Marxist during his stint in the Marine Corp. Harvard following thereafter didn’t talk him out of it. Nor did his time at Columbia getting his masters, nor did his education at the University of Chicago earning his doctorate change his mind.

Instead, it wasn’t until he got a job working for government at the U.S. Department of Labor and discovered first hand that government was not the solution but rather the problem. Not only did the department he interned for not care whether its policies benefitted the public. Its principal concern was job security, which required that no one challenge the efficacy of its policies. Only then did Sowell realize Marx had gotten it wrong. Government couldn’t solve society’s ills.

The brilliant Christian apologist and Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft has pointed out, perhaps partly to his chagrin, that during his lectures, despite his persuasive arguments in favor of belief in God, he knows of at least two people in the audience who became believers at the mere mention of the genius composer Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. In other words, despite his appeals to logic and argumentation, it was an appeal to the subjective that changed these two individuals’ hearts.

I recently saw a story about a self-identified militant atheist who became a mother for the first time. When looking upon the face of her new baby girl, she instantly abandoned her atheism, concluding love is far more than the sum of its material parts – neurochemicals in the brain, motherly instinct to protect and to nurture, etc. Love, she concluded, is far greater than the four walls of our materialistic cell. Her love for her child bespoke of the transcendent.

Please note that these anecdotal sketches I’m providing here, these submissions of snap shots of what constitutes persuasion, are almost exclusively subjective, and by subjective I want to be clear. I absolutely mean our like or dislike of feta cheese or funk music or the feel of cashmere. I do not mean whether Austin is the capital of Texas. That’s an arbitrary, albeit agreed upon, fact, the discovery of which is unlikely to challenge our world view or our ideology.

Whatever we assume, gentle reader, whatever premises to which we cling, often unbeknownst to us, including whether to believe in God or to believe no God exists, they are presumptions, all. Do not fall for the atheist’s pretense that his refusal to believe stems from his superior intellect, an adherence to a principle, his own brand of critical thinking, or a scientific stricture.

Long before Moses descended Mount Sinai, the consensus among the hearts of humankind was, and remains, that God, in whatever form, transcends the material world, supersedes what qualifies as exhibit A through Zed in a court of law. Hence why I invoke the comparison to love.

When the Russian cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, the first human launched into space, after having peered out at the stars, returned and irrelevantly decried, “Well, I looked and looked and looked, but I didn’t see God,” he might as well have presented himself before the packed auditorium with his fly open.  

Imagine disassembling the first four stroke combustible engine and declaring, “Well, you say Nikolaus August Otto invented this thing, but I don’t see him anywhere among these engine parts.” The Newton of today might have likewise failed to distinguish cause from observed phenomenon. We can imagine such a Newton declaring, “Gravity doesn’t exist. Apples are simply heavy. That’s why they fall.”

That the modern atheist draws from such material to produce his objections is evidence of a deteriorating standard for what qualifies as worthy of consideration.

Likewise, this whole conceit by the atheist to say the believer bears the burden of proof is wrong right out the gate. Indeed, one could just as easily argue that the contrary is true. After all, the atheist is insisting on arbitrary criteria God must surmount that this same atheist would never dare apply to his own life for fear of significant disruption.

In fact, if the atheist applied this same criterion to life, to society, to his closest friends, to his own regimen, that he applies to the question of God, the atheist’s life would come to a screeching halt.

With this in mind, I’ve had to invent a neologism for the pathology of atheism. I call it intellectual schizophrenia, trademark pending. Consider how much our confidence has been shaken and our trust betrayed within the past year alone by various systems of power and institutional authorities, from science and government to finance and media. Yet most of us still exercise varying degrees of faith in these same institutional authorities, despite the evidence of abuse, duplicity, corruption, and fraud.  

Not surprisingly, atheists typically don’t insist that our faith in these systems is unwarranted or irrational or must be abandoned. On the contrary. Meanwhile, ironically, these same atheists eagerly apply insurmountable criteria to the question of God, criteria, again, they’d never apply to the faulty institutions upon which they rely, principally because said institutions would utterly collapse under the weight of such scrutiny.

Our history of the world is replete with governments duping their citizenry, slaying their detractors, and propagandizing their youth. Science is full of missteps, prolonged errors, dissent within its own ranks, and even fraud. And while all but the fraud leads to progress and a better understanding of how things function, if you ask a dozen theoretical physicists to define a black hole, you’ll get fifteen different definitions. Nothing wrong with that. But something to keep in mind when an atheist tells you science is the definitive source for truth.

Unfortunately, because science is helmed by humans, it will never be the definitive word for anything beyond what the Overton window deems fit for consumption. As for the premises, plots, and narratives regarding virtue, God, art, beauty, passion, meaning, and the good, recognizing their elusiveness as part of their appeal goes a long way to understanding the value of additional abstractions, truths that can be neither taught in academia nor proven in a lab – faith, hope, and love.