What are we to make of life's gratuitous goodness, excesses of meaning & surpluses of beauty?
Nihilism's Atheodicy Problem
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Over against any mere social constructivism or sheer biological reductionism, either which may devolve into a vulgar nihilism ...
We witness a delicate interplay between the wisdoms of our explicit timeless traditions & tacit innate dispositions (connaturality, illative sense, tacit dimension, intuition of being, abductive facility).
It's those wisdoms which foster life's deepest value-realizations, where our encounters with life's gratuitous goodness, excesses of meaning & surpluses of beauty bolster, inductively & empirically, one of our most irresitable intuitions & compelling abductions - that of the Ens Necessarium.
It's not that a truly virtuous triadic inferential cycling coupled with understandably disaffected dispositions can't lead us into epistemic despair & existential dread, into excruciatingly painful bouts of doubt ...
It's only that few ever stay thus situated because we're surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses to an almost inexplicable resiliency of the human spirit & transcendence of "the" human situation. We love the saints in our midst & become what we love - resilient.
The nihilists thus encounter an atheodicy problem, i.e. unable to explain all of life's surpluses of beauty, excesses of meaning & gratuitous goodnesses.
What might finally adjudicate any given competition between theodicies & atheodicies?
That won't derive from any nonvirtuous inferential cycling of abductions & deductions.
Rather it will be gifted by an irreducibly triadic cycling that's been inductively grounded historically - in both the accumulated wisdom of our great traditions & phylogenetic evolutionary inheritances, which aren't just propositional but dispositional, not just informative but performative, not paralyzed by angst, debilitatingly, but eminently actionable, existentially.
This all requires a leap of faith, to be sure, that our existential orientations correspond to some transcendental imperatives. That leap remains forced & vital and normed by live options.
But, for the most part, that leap has already been forced upon and made and those options most viable have already been determined - not mostly by individuals in solipistic isolation, but - by humankind over the aeons in communal reverie.
Take the road less travelled by at your own peril.