Issue number 1

Installed: 01-5-2000

The Church of Atheistic Suspension of Hypostasis

(or non-existentialism is not a way of life)

"I think therefore I am" - Descartes.

Is this necessarily true? I think not. It is certainly true that you cannot be certain of anything which is beyond your personal experience. Anything else is just hearsay along the lines of "Does a falling tree make a sound when there is no-one to hear it?" Can we be so certain of things within our own experience though?

Imagine for yourself a panorama of darkness. Into this void, this unending night, sprinkle the grains of light that make up the stars of a galaxy. Pick out a single speck, and zoom in. Orbit this star with planets. Zoom in. Choose a planet, and allow it an atmosphere. Give it deep blue oceans, great land masses with crisp mountain ranges, sweeping hot savannas, and life.

There are beings on your planet. Intelligent, active beings. Humans if you so wish. Each day, they go to work, building great cities, loving their families, dreaming their dreams. They don't know that they don't exist, that they are nothing more than a figment of your imagination. Picture their greatest philosopher announcing to his admiring acolytes that "I think therefore I am." How wrong could he be? You think therefore he is!

It would also be possible to write a complex computer program to simulate this imagined world. The inhabitants would be no more than combinations of electrical impulses, but they would still believe themselves to exist, to have life, to be free, but only because they were programmed so to do.

Now concentrate on your own world, wherever that is. Be sure, though, never to forget your imagined world, or millions would die! Are you really so sure that your surroundings exist? Could it just possibly be the creation of some poor fool reading a pathetic web-page? You may think (or believe that you are thinking) that when you experience something, it must be happening, but what if you were just programmed that way? To think, when hit, that it hurts, even when there is in fact no material substance there to either perform the action, or to be hit? Your thoughts are pre-ordained.

We cannot prove our existance with any degree of certainty. It all must come down to personal faith. Rewrite Descartes: "I experience thought so I believe I am." The experience of consciousness suggests that something at least exists to create the world, thus "I think therefore something exists." "There is but one God - nothing else!"

So, do you exist? Hello? Is there anybody out there?

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