On the subject of deism or theism, no one knows anything at all: it is all smoke and mirrors.

The professional philosophers (but I don't know how much of a living one can make doing that or even if there are such people in this age) have classified our sources of knowledge. That is, how we come to learn things, whatever they be. Among these is what is called "recourse to authority" or, more simply, "ask someone who knows." I often wondered if I am an authority on anything and concluded that I would classify myself as a guru on:

1. How to buy things for a business on the cheap.
2. How to get tickets to the Stat Opera in Munich.
3. How to finish the interior wood trim (casing) on windows even when the walls are neither even nor plumb.
4. How to remove cedar clapboards so they can be used again (well, at least most of them.)

As one gets older one is increasingly amazed at how few experts there are on anything. On the subject of deism or theism, no one knows anything at all: it is all smoke and mirrors. In spite of protestations to the contrary, not one person in our universe knows a whit more about this than anyone else, and certainly not more than you. Just imagine: nobody knows any more than you do about this; you are the expert. Less is known about this subject than people know about economics, where it is generally recognized that indeed nobody knows anything at all. There is nobody with any secret trove of information--nobody...

So you can't ask anybody because nobody knows. Nobody has any special knowledge, any private knowledge or revelation. Those who claim they have are either liars or charlatans or both. They want something from you, either your money or your power. It's best to be careful in giving away either; both wells can run dry.

You can't ask me. Aside from the fact that I finally know the meaning of life, there isn't much I can add to the discussion that will make you a happy person. I am only a deliverer of fact, an unrelenting pragmatist, an unrepentant humanist. There is no "good news," only news.

Something happened during the survival/evolution of the human species that makes it difficult for us to accept "I don't know" as an answer. It's as if we would rather be fooled and lied to than face uncertainty. And to this most difficult of questions, which is best simplified as "Why is there something instead of nothing?" comes the most frustrating of answers: nobody knows.

With one exception all the rest is mind games, sort of a semi-intellectual mental masturbation. And none of it results in long-term satisfaction, let alone relief. If anything could be proved it wouldn't be called "faith," would it? For faith is belief in the intrinsically unbelievable. That exception--apart from the idiocy that passes itself off as serious cerebration--is the search for evidence of extraterrestrial influence on human affairs, so-called divine intervention.

The phenomenon referred to as "miracle" is what might be called hard evidence for otherworldly "interference" in the affairs of people kind. But the concept of miracles has been considerably cheapened--consider the TV preachers...In spite of the theoretical impossibility of proving the negative, it is clear that there are no miracles. Not an iota of evidence supports the role of any extra worldly being in human affairs. Much is still unexplained. But that is the wonder: what a dull world if we understood everything! We perhaps never shall.

Humans have an overwhelming tendency to think that their kind is something special, more than just an evolutionary step just beyond the step before us, that some kind of quantum barrier divides us from the rest of the primates. But consider. It seems that once a species starts down a path where one characteristic provides some significant survival value, that road is traveled to the very end. So if what we call intelligence was profoundly important to us naked apes, then the brighter among the bright had an advantage. Evolution has provided no short-necked giraffes, no miniature elephants. There seems to be a minimum brightness level if people, excepting perhaps politicians, are to function.

The ultimate problems with dabbling seriously in theism or deism are twofold. First, the dabblers can't leave well enough alone. Associating with all that purported power, they are tempted to borrow some for themselves. And thus, inevitably, abuses follow. Not only do the professional deists/theists (otherwise known as the clergy) borrow some of the power they conjure up to control the foolish faithful, but, as if trying to maintain balance in their bizarre universe, they create anti-deities, the antitheses of their gods: fallen gods, defective god, gods gone bad. Both their gods and anti-gods are created in their own images. So with this bizarre parity created from whole cloth we have access to the two great cop-outs of our civilization: "It was god's will" and its brother, "The devil made me do it." Both are easier than taking responsibility for our own actions and behavior.

We are indeed alone, we apparently have no purpose, no noble goal. We are the result of stellar evolution, then chemical evolution, and finally biological evolution. In the end we must look to ourselves for ourselves. There is nothing else. That's how it is.

--Thomas Kelly

This article is from Religious Humanism, Journal of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, Vol. XXVI. No. 3, Summer, 1992. Thomas Kelly teaches in the School of Medicine of the University of Maryland, in Baltimore.