Why We Should Worship Absurdity

Charting the sublime inhumanity beyond the lifeworld’s vanities

AI-generated image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

If you think that God exists, you probably credit the deity for all the order we find in nature.

God would be the architect who planned everything to perfection. He’s why logic, mathematics, and science work. He commanded forms and patterns into being. He’s why planets orbit nicely around stars, why time allows events to happen, and why organic life emerged.

By contrast, all the disorder would be blamed on the Devil. Entropy is the Devil’s fault, and Satan’s temptations brought human sin into the world.

But even in theological terms, this is all wrongheaded. It’s a simplistic, blasphemously human-centered, exoteric conception of God, unworthy of any seeker after truth.

As the presocratic philosopher Protagoras said, “Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.”

We are the source of order in the universe, in that our conceptions and simplifying models define these things into being, by arbitrarily abstracting from their unfathomable interrelations with everything else.

Consider, for instance, a pebble. You know what a pebble is, right? It’s just a little rock. That’s how we perceive and think of it. We view pebbles as small because we compare them, say, to mountains, and we view them from our temporally limited vantage point. That is, our conception emphasizes how pebbles are across a span of only eight decades, to match the human norm we take for granted.

The pebble you hold in your hand, however, is far more than that because that pebble was once part of Pangea and more broadly the Earth which in turn formed from the solar disk of gas that condensed unimaginably long ago. No one understands what a pebble really is unless you hold in mind the inhuman time scale in which the pebble is continuous with its much earlier manifestation as star dust.

The same point applies to every limited form and bit of order that our concepts duly organize in our library of useful knowledge. We segregate those forms by emphasizing some of their apparent differences. The dictionary is full of partial understandings that are helpful to us. None of them, however, amounts to the total concept of everything everywhere all at once.

Yet only that total concept would be wholly realistic. Only the unsayable name of everything in its relation to everything else would do justice to the universe’s neutrality to our distinctions between order and disorder, here and there, then and now, big and small, good and bad, and so on.

The natural order that matters to us is too parochial to be God’s handiwork. That order derived from the absurd disorder of quantum fluctuations, perhaps residing in a black hole in a higher universe within a multiverse of all possible universes.

What, then, should be assigned to God?

Think of it this way. In sociology and phenomenology there’s a concept known as the “lifeworld” (in the original German, Lebenswelt). The lifeworld is the world we take for granted, the one that’s been humanized in the act of interpreting what’s out there, or of assimilating stimuli at least implicitly to our cognitive capacities, inclinations, and affordances.

As Britannica says, the lifeworld is ‘the world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life, as sharply distinguished from the objective “worlds” of the sciences, which employ the methods of the mathematical sciences of nature; although these sciences originate in the life-world, they are not those of everyday life.’

When we needn’t give things a second glance because we’re overly familiar with them, or when we don’t perceive something for the first time as though we were still a child who’s naïve about it, we’re living mentally in the lifeworld. When we feel comfortable as clever mammals because we think we understand generally how things around us work, and how we can achieve our goals, we’re occupying the lifeworld, the world as it’s been processed by our human ways of life.

What lies beyond our lifeworld? The absurd, that which is irrational and meaningless because, we presume, it hasn’t yet been understood in our terms. The Latin root of “absurd” means something that’s out of tune, uncouth, and ridiculous. The image is one of a disharmonious sound, or of a quantity that can’t be expressed as a rational number (this being the mathematical sense of “surd”).

Now, the lifeworld is mundane and trite, whereas the absurd is shocking, apocalyptic, and holy.

Whatever’s been humanized in being mentally restricted by our mammalian proclivities has been belittled. God, therefore, is the absurd, which is to say that we’re under an existential obligation to revere that which is inhuman.

In Romantic terms, the absurdity of being — of the unimaginable totality of all things in their interrelations, and the preposterous unions of disorder and order, here and there, and then and now — is the sublime grandeur of nature. That astonishing vastness is sacred and it’s a suitable product or essence of divinity. This means that we intuit that the wild universe is far more important than any of us, that it will obviously outlast us, and that its astronomical scope makes a mockery of human expectations.

The absurd, then, is distinct from the terrestrial minimizations that characterize our conceptions in the mundane lifeworld. These conceptions are the spells we cast; they’re the formulas that delineate the collective trance we enter to remain sane in the face of the universe’s inhuman scope.

As the source or essence of the absurd, God is the subject both of esoteric, mystical religion (which is virtually atheistic), and existential analysis. “God” is properly a name of the unnameable, a word for the alien enormity of being that’s forever beyond the lifeworld’s artificial comforts.

It should go without saying, but the theistic personification of God only reduces the absurd and the sublime to the lifeworld’s familiar terms. Theism, then, is the ultimate blasphemy, and the deity of the monotheist’s exoteric boasts is rather the Devil, according to the insights of an upgraded, philosophical, or mystical perspective.

To say that God is a loving, smart person who designed and built the universe is to humanize God, to think of “him” as a mere agent operating within a prior environment. The absurd incoherence of that belittlement speaks to the need for a higher deity, for one that isn’t captured by any such vain projection of ours.

The higher deity, the one beyond the Western religions’ Frankensteinian Demiurge is more humbly thought of in pantheistic terms. The atheistic naturalist’s impersonal deity — which in its totality is perfectly absurd, as in inhuman — is the whole of nature that at some early, quantum stage of cosmic evolution transcended space and time and therefore mindlessly brought itself into being from chaos. Somehow the natural order must be mystically indistinguishable from that chaos too since the one came from the other.

What, then, would the world be like if we worshipped the absurd rather than the tribal golems we invented? What if we recognized the profound difference between the real world’s inhumanity and the Luciferian/humanistic ambition to transmute God/inhuman absurdity into our parochial terms and civilizational constructs? What if we became alienated from that ambition or appreciated its vanity and futility? What if we came to view our models and all the comforts of the lifeworld as ersatz artworks that mimic nature’s cosmic orgy of production? What existential game, then, would we be fit to play?