I recently finished reading Hans Kung's Does God Exist? After 800 pages, Kung finally answers "yes" to the question.
Kung's title is perhaps the most insistent of what I call "ultimate questions," those queries which have troubled people all through time. Pursuing the answers has moved people to do incredible (and sometimes monstrous) things, so we usually conclude that these questions evoke what is noble in our character. We may be wrong about that.
I was, as a teenager, a serious Catholic boy contemplating a career with the Trappist monks. Ultimate questions were the meat-and-potatoes of my being. When the religious impulse died, I was taken over by the romantic impulse, becoming a sort of casual John Keats, a noble character who asked and faced the essential questions of life.
I searched various philosophies and religions for answers but came up dry, and this bothered me a great deal for a long time. Only much later did I realize that the problem was with the questions themselves. The form of a question is important because in large part it shapes the answer. Large amorphous questions can only generate large amorphous (and, in the end, unsatisfying) answers. This is the way ultimate questions work. In fact, ultimate questions don't really look for answers at all. They instead symbolize a romantic urge for order in a world that too often appears frenzied and aimless. I don't think people who seriously ask these questions really want answers, that is, closure. Asking "What is the meaning of life?," not finding the answer, is the meaning of life to those interested in ultimate questions.
To me, at least, a good question is one that constantly leads us back to actual life, to testing and verifying the surrounding world. Richard Feynman, the physicist, once suggested that we would all do better if we learned to live without the open-ended questions because physics, at least by what it shows now, indicates that they won't be answered. I agree fully. Far from crippling us, this uncertainty can revive us, provoke us to find out how things work in a way that is consistent, through science, and attached to the material universe in which we reside, the only home we can definitely say is ours.
In the BBC production of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the giant computer Deep Thought has come up with the answer to a question posed earlier, namely, "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" Its answer is 42. When his listeners express dismay (they've waited 7-½ million years for this answer), Deep Thought gives them some good advice. It's not the answer that's at fault but that they didn't know how to ask the question. Now that they have the answer, they need to go find the question. Our physical universe is like 42; it is our answer. Our duty is to find questions that fit the answer. Ultimate questions don't do this; science does. Let's get down to the microscopes and computers.
Winter
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