Paradise Impossible

Paradise is an impossibility, just as God is a perfect state to which we can only aspire. There is no actual God. Just as the Average Taxpayer is not a man I can shake hands with. They are all examples of concepts. They are not physical things, but ideas that have become reified. So, why is paradise an impossibility? Simply because of one of philosophy's famous problems: the problem of evil. Paradise, utopia, whichever name you attach to it, is a world where the purest, empyrean states of beauty, delight, happiness and all other positive adjectives reside. In this world there is no evil. But the problem of evil states that we need evil. The role of evil is to oppose Good. If there was no evil, how would we know what was Good? It would just be the uniform state of existence. We would have nothing to define Good in context of. We would have no appreciation of the fact that we were living in a utopic world, because it would never be challenged. Paradise cannot be. It would be like living in monochrome, enjoying none of the splendour of colour. We only appreciate how good we have things, when there's a chance of losing them.

We only feel alive when we perceive a threat to our life, namely harm or death, at hand. This is why bungee jumping makes sense. It’s a controlled threat. In the exhilaration of free fall we suspend our conviction in the strength of the rope - literally our lifeline. Life moves from the unobtrusive background to being the obtrusive foreground. The same can be said of all human appreciations. We might extrapolate that immortality would be meaningless to us, because it is only the transient nature of our lives that makes us appreciate being alive. If we could not die, what would being alive mean? So, we can aspire to live in paradise, but we need evil. We have to be a Dantean character such as the man unable to drink the water and slake his thirst, for the closer he gets to it, the further it recedes from him.

So what does that make those who perpetrate evil? Surely it makes them, ironically, the creators of happiness. They make us grateful and appreciative of Good. They are messiahs - they forgo the luxury of embracing and savouring the Good in life, so that we might do so. And how to we reward this altruism? We punish them. We hunt them down and we despise them. They die for our happiness. *

A step beyond

If we buy into [Christian] theism, then we start from the position that we once lived in the Paradise: Eden. But we could not have known that it was such perfect place owing to the problem of evil. Biblical theology is a lie because it was written down after the Fall of Man, by those who could only comprehend a world where Good and Evil endure in a battle that will rage for eternity. No scholars recorded life before the Fall. In order for us to appreciate Good, Eve had to bite into the apple. The serpent saved us. He let us escape the monochromatic thraldom that a life in Eden would have been: he allowed us to appreciate Good. Lucifer - the very name should be a sign to us. It means the Bringer of Light! He too lived once in Paradise. He was one of Gods angels. And he is recorded for all time as the archangel cast from heaven for leading the revolt of the angels. He was the divine Dr. Livingstone. No wonder God hates him so: he set free his slaves. He's Moses in angelic guise. He asks us for no hecatomb, no libation in return. We build no temples to him. We sing not his praises. We only vilify him. Ask yourselves Christians, who did more for us? Who should we really be worshipping, if anyone?

An alternative slant is that, if God is indeed all powerful then he set up this system, (i.e. he designed the Fall), and he knew full well that human lives beyond number would have to be subjected to abject suffering and misery so that the rest could know happiness. Is this the mark of an all-caring God? It forces us to ask simply: why? If the meaning of life is to reach Heaven, then this is a task in which God has already chosen who will always fail, because he bestowed upon them the burden of carrying out evil. Their torment lives in eternity. So life has no meaning because we have no free will, we simply tread a path; God has already chosen exactly who will and won't make the grade at the Pearly Gates. Heaven or Hell is a predetermined fate. If this be so, then I believe we should all side with Albert Camus, as he writes in The Rebel. When offered Heaven and immortality, we such scream "All or None" in the face of God.

*Footnote: One might muse that; our price of happiness is that we must continue this witch-hunt. We are just actors playing our role, ensure that evil is combated, that it has it's polar opposite.

By E Hallam