From the mail:
Thanks for the kind advice re: the dark. I’m 50 later this year, so my mood could be something to do with that. I do find it wearisome that paradoxically the only reasonably secure epistemic conclusion is that we will never garner any sure knowledge re the Big Questions this side of the Mortality paywall. I do consider this an evil and was gratified to see you say so in a blog post a while back. We are doomed to aporia! How frustrating! And in a world where so many seem so sure –leftists, rightists, revolutionaries, conservatives, secularists, believers, et al. ad infinitum.
Your “this side of the Mortality Paywall” was a stroke of stylistic brilliance. And surely no one could say that the price of admission to the ‘content’ on the Far Side is cheap even if said ‘content’ is priceless.
“We are doomed to aporia.” Yes. There is no way (ἄπορος , á-poros) forward by knowledge this side of the Paywall. Epistemically, we are at an impasse. I am glad we agree that in this life we are and will remain ignorant about the ultimate whence, whither, and wherefore, and that this ignorance is evil. There are of course dogmatists of various stripes who insist that we are not ignorant. You and I hold that their seeming surety, whether by dogmatic affirmations of God and the soul, the inerrancy of Scripture, the infallibility of the Roman Catholic magisterium, etc., or dogmatic denials thereof is a mere seeming. Their convictions simply reflect their overpowering doxastic security needs. Unable to face objective uncertainty, they manufacture subjective certainty. Their critical faculties are swamped by their need for security in their beliefs. That they are subjectively certain cannot be denied. What can be doubted, however, is whether their subjective certainty connects them to reality.
The intellectually mature learn to live with doxastic insecurity. A salutary upshot of acknowledged doxastic insecurity is that it makes people tolerant. (Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism.) Although toleration has limits, without it there is no high civilization: what you get instead is, for example, the repressive inanition of Islamist theocracies such as the one that has been stifling the people of Iran since 1979.
There is no way forward by knowledge this side of death. This leaves faith as a mode of reality-contact. Although I cannot know that I will survive my bodily death, I can reasonably believe (have faith that) I will. (Similarly and mutatis mutandis for the rest of the Big Questions.) Suppose I do survive. Then my faith will have given me contact with reality. And if I don’t survive, it won’t matter that I held a false belief. I can’t be in error if I am not there to be in error. I can’t be pained for having been wrong if I don’t exist.
Besides, I will live better in the here and now if I do believe I will survive than if I don’t believe I will, or believe the opposite. So that’s my answer to my correspondent in a nutshell. The way forward re: ultimates is by faith. Of course a number of things I have stated or presupposed above, such as that faith is inferior to knowledge, can and ought to be questioned. Disagreement and contention, even unto bitterness and bloodshed, may ensue. There is no avoiding these additional evils born of ignorance. But they can be mitigated if we can learn to be tolerant. The space of tolerance and civilization, however, is defended by blood and iron.