Will there be cavemen in heaven?

or: Further defining ‘Dunnoism’

Although The Simpsons is much funnier than anything in the Bible except the Story of Lot, it shares with that Good Book the useful feature whereby carefully-selected excerpts can be used to support absolutely any argument.

Thus, I invite you to Springfield’s Sunday School, where Bart and Milhouse are plaguing their teacher with all manner of vexing questions….

Milhouse: Will there be cavemen in heaven?
Sunday School Teacher: Certainly not!
Bart: Uh, ma'am? What if you're a really good person, but you get into a really, really bad fight and your leg gets gangrene and it has to be amputated. Will it be waiting for you in heaven?
Sunday School Teacher: For the last time, Bart, yes!

[etc etc – until some time later…]

Sunday School Teacher: [very tired]...the ventriloquist goes to heaven but the dummy doesn't.
Bart: What about a robot with a human brain?
Sunday School Teacher: [at the breaking point] I don't know! All these questions! Is a little blind faith too much to ask!?!

Theology essentially amounts to lifelong attempts by all sorts of very clever and venerable people to formulate answers to questions which first occurred to them when they were eight years old.

Sure, you can put a hat on it and call it a fancy name, like ‘the problem of pain’ or ‘the Euthryphro Dilemma’, but the great thing about most of the really challenging theological questions is that they are very simple, and thus the simple way that children state them is usually the best:

Why does God let babies be born handicapped? Why are there so many other religions and how come people are always the same religion as their parents? Why did God make mosquitoes and man-eating sharks? Why did God allow Hitler to kill so many people? Why did God create the dinosaurs? (Great answer to that one here, by the way) Will there be cavemen in heaven?

Despite the utter failure of countless generations of Sunday School teachers, university theologians and Popes to come up with even remotely comprehensible answers to any of the great childish questions, surprisingly few are prepared to admit that they simply ‘dunno’, and, as we have discussed elsewhere, instead prefer to articulate their cluelessness with the “Mysterious Ways” get-out card.

The plain fact is that no religious doctrine can withstand a good barrage of childish questions without serious cracks appearing. Fortunately for religious continuity, very few people lead examined lives after the age of eight.

But those who do lead examined lives tend to split at a childish age into two camps: those who think there must be something wrong with the questions, and thus become publicly staunch but privately doubt-riddled Defenders of the Faith (or at least of some particular idiosyncratic sect of the Faith); and those who think there must be something wrong with the doctrine.

Materialists fall into the latter camp almost to a man. For the materialist, the childish questions about cavemen and dinosaurs and children killed in tsunamis are easy to answer. In the time and space scales of the universe, the believer’s preoccupations with homocentricity and what might ‘happen’ to ‘him’ after his death appear not so much outrageously hubristic as pathetically optimistic.

However, the believer does have one advantage over his heathen brother:

When it comes to the really big question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, he has an answer (admittedly, he has to invoke Causa Sui to answer the follow-up question, “Then where did God come from?”).

‘Why is there not nothing?’ is the head-spinning, scrotumtightening, three-o’clock-in-the-morning Nausea-inducing unanswerable question par excellence.

Some materialists prefer to assert that since existence is the ultimate brute fact, the very question is meaningless. Others prefer a good, honest ‘dunno’.