beyond wishful thinking 11us how we are to achieve eternal life, it must suggest at least the be-
ginnings of an approach to how we are to live, given our mortality,
our manifest human nature or the human nature that we can bring
about, our fundamental needs and desires, and the intractable limits
to what we can hope to discover about the world and about our place
within it.
Th e problem of existential groundlessness can be restated simply: all
attempts to ground an orientation to existence in an understanding of
the world tend to fail. To say that they must forever fail would be to
make an unjustifi able claim about the future of human insight and ini-
tiative. What we have to instruct us is the history of our struggles to
deal with the threat of existential groundlessness, in the space in which
philosophy passes over into religion.
Consider three families of eff orts to manage this threat. Th ey are the
three major spiritual options, dominant over the last two millenniums,
that I explore in the next three chapters of this book. Th e consequences
of this survey can be succinctly summarized. Th e better the news, the
less reason there is to believe it. Th e more credible the news, the less
satisfactory it is as a response to the perplexities and anxieties motivat-
ing the experience of existential groundlessness.
Th ere appears to be an adverse sliding scale, which opposes our de-
sire to see things as they are to our search for encouragement as well as
for guidance. Moreover, even the more credible positions on this slid-
ing scale, the ones that least require us to assent to the unbelievable, are
unsatisfactory; if they do not tax our credulity, they nevertheless make
light of our powers of re sis tance and self- transformation.
Th e most encouraging, and the least believable, news is that we have
a friend in charge of the universe. Th at is the news delivered by the Se-
mitic mono the isms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Our friend made
both the world and us. He did so out of an abundance of his creative,
life- giving love. We are formed in his image. Not satisfi ed to make us,
and stand aside, he has a plan for our salvation. In the implementation
of that plan, he may even, according to one version of this narrative,
have become incarnate in a man a couple of thousands of years ago. He
calls us to eternal life and to participation in his being and requires that
we change how we live and deal with one another. A community of the
faithful will uphold and spread this good news.