Wrestling with Religion

The 2001 film cartoon Monsters, Inc . imagines a corporation of monsters that feed off scaring children through doors that are portals to their bedroom closets. This is a variant on the motif of the monster under the bed. In both cases, a presence is felt but never seen. It’s the opposite of the refrigerator light that seems to be always lit. Just as we never see the light off, children in the cartoon world never see the monsters. They can never confirm or disconfirm the existence of beings who exit through magic portals whenever closet doors are  opened. Despite their ontological indeterminacy, the monsters do frighten children. They power Monstopolis with juvenile screams, so there's clearly a psychic drain caused by the children’s belief in monsters. But if monsters are unfalsifiable, why should children believe in them at all? Why scream needlessly? Shouldn't they imagine more pleasant unfalsifiable creatures in their closets? Shouldn't they imagine, say, magica...

Blase Pascal (1623-1662), was a mathematician, physicist, and inventor who, after his conversion to Catholicism, paradoxically professed rational agnosticism and (to him at least) reasonable faith. In his Pensees , he demonstrates with math-like arguments the futility of trying to understand the cosmos: “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (199). We hang short-sighted between two abysses, the unfathomably large and the unfathomably small. What can we do then, he asks, “but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end?” (199) It's impossible, Pascal says, to know “a hidden God” (427) immune to philosophical proofs such as argument from natural order. If God exists, He is infinite. Just as the last number of an infinite series cannot be known to be odd or even, so God cannot be known by finite beings. He “is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limi...