Many women experience a disruption of their childhood happiness when they grow older and people in society value them based on how they look. One of my female friends told me, “At the age of eleven, breast size became a pressure. Girls would harass each other over who was able to fill out a bra and who could not.”
When I was in eighth grade, I was sitting in science class with the other students, waiting for the teacher to show up. Sitting in the back of the class was a girl who some called “flat-chested.” In front of all the students, another girl yelled across the room at her, “If you didn’t have feet, would you wear socks? Then why do you wear a bra?”
Most young children are not as self-conscious about their appearance as teenagers and adults. Most three-year-old girls experiencing the innocence of childhood are more carefree than a teenage girl who is picked on because of the way she is dressed, or an aging supermodel who has to compete with younger supermodels constantly flowing into her industry. Boys can also become painfully self-conscious about their appearance. When I was three years old, I did not hate my Asian eyes, but my youthful innocence was shattered when I grew older and people insulted me because of my race.
If we contemplate our lives, we may remember an experience, or series of experiences, that disrupted the harmony of our youth. Perhaps our parents were divorced, and this shattered the happiness and innocence of our childhood. Perhaps it was the death of a family member, and this made us painfully aware of human mortality. Perhaps it was puberty or being bullied. Philosophy, religious traditions, and scientific evidence all agree upon a basic fact of the human condition: achieving a new and heightened awareness about our world can cause us to feel confused and disillusioned, like a metaphorical eviction from paradise. To quote the old adage, “Ignorance is bliss.”
Ignorance may seem like bliss during the harmony, happiness, and innocence of our childhood, but when we make peace with the problem of human existence and learn to live in harmony with the mystery of life and death, we can achieve a higher bliss than ignorance. Although philosophers, religions, and growing scientific evidence reveal the possibility of a higher bliss than ignorance, we will question if this is true by first exploring something rarely talked about today: the wrath of Greek gods.
The Greek gods Poseidon, Zeus, and Hades were brothers. After Zeus overthrew his father, the titan Cronus, the brothers drew lots to decide who would rule the various parts of the world. Zeus gained dominion over the sky, Hades became ruler of the underworld, and Poseidon became lord of the ocean. In the Greek epic poem the Iliad, Poseidon says, “The world was split three ways. Each received his realm. When we shook the lots I drew the sea, my foaming eternal home, and Hades drew the land of the dead engulfed in haze and night and Zeus drew the heavens, the clouds and the high clear sky, but the earth and Olympus heights are common to us all.”7
To understand why so many ancient Greeks worshipped these gods, imagine living in Greece three thousand years ago. Imagine having no scientific explanations for why earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters happen. Furthermore, no one has ever seen a virus because the microscope has not yet been invented, so when a plague kills a large number of people in your city, you don’t know why it happened. You don’t even know what causes lightning and thunderstorms.
Now imagine you are a kind and generous person, living in ancient Greece, who takes care of your family and provides for your community. Suddenly, without any warning, a massive earthquake destroys your house and kills your child. How would you explain the destruction of your house, death of your child, and cause of the earth shaking beneath your feet? Why did these bad things happen?
A feature on the landscape of our shared humanity, something we all have in common, is that we ask why when bad things happen to us. But why do we ask why? When the September 11 attacks occurred, causing thunderous explosions and the sky to fill with smoke, we do not know of any other species that debated “why did this happen?” When a murder or mass shooting occurs, the people affected by the tragedy, along with many not affected, will ask why. The question “why did this happen?” results from humanity’s craving to understand underlying causes. I use the word “underlying” because this craving searches for causes that go beyond the immediate range of our senses.
Not only do we want to know the underlying causes of tragedies, but we also want to know the underlying causes of natural phenomena. When I was a child I asked countless questions such as “why does it rain?” and “why does the sun go away at night?” Children possess innate curiosity that leads to these kinds of questions. When our nomadic ancestors lived on the harsh African savannah, their craving to understand underlying causes allowed them to make complex connections between cause and effect, empowering them to control many aspects of nature. For example, the question “why did this happen?” allowed our early ancestors to discover the underlying causes of fire, empowering them to create fire and use it for light, warmth, and protection.*
When a plant sprouted from the ground, the question “why did this happen?” allowed our ancestors to comprehend how plants grow when seeds are put in a certain kind of dirt. If they planted seeds in the right kind of soil, they could create and control their own food supply. When Sir Alexander Fleming noticed a mold had inhibited the growth of bacteria in a Petri dish, the question “why did this happen?” began an intellectual journey that allowed him to discover penicillin. Asking “why did this happen?” can be extremely useful for human survival, but this question can also be dangerous.
To understand this danger, we must recognize a basic fact about the human condition: human beings yearn to know.** We need answers that help us make sense of our world. When bad things happen to us, we search for explanations. These explanations can assume many forms.
For example, when a tragedy happens and people say things such as “everything happens for a reason” or “God works in mysterious ways,” these vague answers serve as explanations. Or when people say a tragedy was caused by “fate” or “bad luck” or “bad karma,” these are also explanations for the underlying cause of the tragedy. When people say crime is caused by “evil” or “original sin,” they are trying to explain the underlying cause of crime. When people say human behavior is a product of “nature” or “nurture” or a combination of both, they are trying to explain the underlying cause of human actions. As far as we know, no other species searches for scientific and religious explanations for the underlying causes of events. We do not know of any other species that debates concepts such as fate versus luck, the existence of evil, or nature versus nurture.
Like two arms emerging from the human body, science and religion both emerge from humanity’s yearning to know—our craving to understand underlying causes. Like two arms searching for objects in darkness, the arms of science and religion search for answers in the mysterious world around us. Human beings are unusual, because all other animals seem at peace with the causes of nature. When scientists observe their behavior, other animals exhibit a deep connection with nature that many human beings aspire toward. Other animals can better protect themselves in the future if they observe a catastrophe and learn what to avoid next time, but they don’t search for underlying scientific and religious explanations that transcend what they can observe.
Our craving to understand underlying causes gives us an immense survival advantage, because it makes us want to know at a deep level why harmful and helpful things happen to us. This makes us more effective at preventing those harmful things and creating the conditions for those helpful things. Because our yearning to know is so powerful, if we do not have enough evidence to find accurate answers for how our world works, we can feel tempted to invent an explanation. This is why ancient Greeks explained the existence of lightning by saying Zeus hurled lightning bolts across the sky. This is why every ancient culture had mythological explanations for the forces of nature.
When our ancestors lacked the scientific evidence to arrive at accurate answers for how our world works, their craving to understand underlying causes tempted them to create stories that