Perhaps my pessimism is more fundamental than my atheism, and perhaps my perversion is more fundamental than either.

I suppose that I am something of an impure atheist. To be sure, my personal distribution of probabilities over ontological possibilities would give by far the largest probability to a kind of disenchanted atheism, to the view that the nature of reality issue what physics says it is, and nothing more. But at least one other and darker possibility does lurk in my mind, which is that there is an Owner of All Infernal Names (“OAIN”), a creator of the universe for whom that universe is a gigantic theater-stage of cruelty, a generator of suffering off of which It feeds and thrives, a being that allows good in the world only either so that we might more completely experience our deprivation thereof, or to raise our hopes so as all the more completely to dash them in the end.

My subjective probability attributed to the likelihood of there being an OAIN fluctuates (to my discredit) following my mood more than anything that could be strictly characterized as evidence between one-in-a-million and one-in-twenty. As for the probability that there is a God, the benevolent, worship-worthy entity that the followers of the Abrahamic faiths believe in (or at least believe that they believe in), that stubbornly sticks right in the same place at an infinitesimal above zero. (And dear hippie mommy-goddess worshipers, I find the object your adoration no more likely than the patriarchal sky god you wish to replace, even if I do find Her even sillier.) Were I to be more scientific about matters these probabilities might change some, but given the preponderance of suffering over happiness in the world, I’m sure the OAIN would still be many, many orders of magnitude more likely than Its benevolent mirror-image.

I ought perhaps to note that every so often there are little events that take place in dreams or at the edge of consciousness, little bits of weirdness and imagined cruelty that attach themselves to sensations to which pleasure seems inadequate as a description. Here is a dream I had in the early morning hours a few months ago. I am looking through an open door into a physician’s consulting room. A pretty young woman has just disrobed and is sitting on an table, apparently waiting for an examination. A nurse enters and gives the young woman an injection. The young woman gasps as the needle slides in. “It is a paralytic,” says the nurse. “We need you conscious but incapable of motion.” There is a pause before the nurse matter-of-factly resumes her explanation. “You are material for our experiment now. We do not know what if anything will be left of you when we are done. The doctor will see you shortly.” As the drug takes its full effect the young woman can manage a last fearful vocalization, something between a whimper and a moan. With that strange half-strangled sound comes my moment of ecstasy, married as I emerge from dream into waking to the thought that if anything feels like participation in the divine, it is this.

That is one such moment. There have been a few others, not many, but they are quite vivid. And I see no reason to treat them as any less revelatory about the nature of reality than the moments of ecstatic vision religious believers claim to have for themselves.

And that fact, dear reader, is why my discussion above isn’t just a case of Iago Faustus, pessimist and pervert, offering Too Much Information about himself. It will turn out to have meaning when we discuss new versions of Pascal’s Wager.