“The Tremendousness Of Our Improbable Existence””

Peter Lopatin reviews 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:

[T]he solution comes to [the protagonist] in the book’s final chapter, when the star atheist realizes that “to be human is to inhabit our contradictions . . . to be unable to find a way of reconciling the necessary and the impossible.” In the face of that primal inability, and of the “brutality of incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides . . . we try, as best as we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence.” Like the asymptotic relation in which a straight line approaches a curve to which it will be tangent only at infinity, “we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we?”