Does Santa Exist? A Review

I am a philosopher who is interested in all things Christmas. In fact, I am currently finishing my own book on the topic—The Myths That Stole Christmas: Seven Misconceptions That Hijacked the Holiday (And How We Can Take It Back)—which is due out next year (and is available for pre-order now.) I was, therefore, basically morally obligated to read and review Eric Kaplan’s new book “Does Santa Exist?”. Although Kaplan is not a professional philosopher— he’s a comedy writer in Hollywood – he does have philosophical training from Columbia and UC Berkeley. What’s more, he’s worked on some of my favorite shows – Futurama, The Simpsons, Flight of the Concords—and he writes and is a producer for The Big Bang Theory. Reviewers even said that the book was hilarious. Needless to say, I was quite interested in seeing what Kaplan would have to say in a book entitled “Does Santa Exist.” I decided to read the book and release what I was sure was going to be a glowing review on the day before St. Nicholas day.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t have been more disappointed.

Setting the Stage

Kaplan begins by suggesting that most of us are “of two minds” when it comes to Santa; we believe both that he exists and that he doesn’t. “No, I don’t think so,” I thought. Some people may wish that Santa exists and know that he doesn’t, but no one really believes that he both does doesn’t. You believe as a kid, your bubble gets burst and then you don’t. You may talk to children as if he exists, so as to not assuage their belief. But no adult actually believes he exists.

At first, I thought Kaplan was simply not carefully making such distinctions—maybe a funny joke will come later about it—so I gave him a pass. But it turns out that he really does think that people embrace this contradiction— we believe both of Santa exists and that he doesn’t. And that it is only one of many “paradoxes” that, Kaplan’s suggests, the real world presents to us. And so he subsequently launches into numerous approaches for dealing with such paradoxes.

“Okay,” I thought. “Although Santa’s existence is not one of them, there are some interesting paradoxes out there that deserve a comical treatment. Let’s see where this goes.” I was hopeful.

Don’t Pick on Logic; It Will Be Your Undoing

But then he dove headfirst into an amateurish takedown of the entire enterprise of logic. In fact, when it’s convenient, Kaplan suggests, we can simply ignore what logic tells as we try to ascertain the truth about the world (specifically, ontological truths regarding things like Santa’s existence). Why can’t Santa both exist and not exist? Whose logic to tell me what to think?

Why can the basic truths of logic be willfully ignored? According to Kaplan, because of things like the liar’s paradox: A proposition like “this sentence is false” can neither be true nor false. But while such paradoxes are interesting, and some do not yet have a satisfactory solution, they in no way entail that logic should be abandoned or that it can or should be ignored when we wish in our quest for ontological truths. For example, at best, the liar’s paradox shows that the universal statement “all propositions have a truth value” is false by providing a single counterexample. But it does not follow from this that no proposition has a truth value, or that we can rationally assign any truth value to propositions that we like. It certainly does not entail, as Kaplan suggests, that life is filled with true logical contradictions—with things that are both true and false in the same respect and at the same time.

Now, to defend Santa’s existence, one might try to redefine what it means for something to exist. For example, the economy exists—but not like my desk exists (you can’t point to it). The economy exists more like a force or a concept. In the same way, you might say that Santa exists—as a kind of ideal or force of generosity. So Santa doesn’t exist like my desk does but he does “exist” like the economy does. Okay, that’s fine. But we don’t need to poo-poo logic to make this point; this is not a violation of non-contradiction; Santa still doesn’t both exists and not exist in the same respect and at the same time. All we need to do to make this point is to clearly define our terms.

Kaplan’s amateurish take down of logic then continued as he equated trusting logic with Logical Positivism—the 20^th century movement in philosophy inspired by the early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Logical Positivism suggested that only propositions which refer to physical states in the world (and are thus verifiable by, say, observation or a science experiment) are meaningful or true. Of course, the problem is, by its own standard, that statement is neither meaningful nor true because is not verifiable. So Logical Positivism is no good. Okay; again, this may be true. But to use logic (to, for example, discover ontological truths) or to realize that logical contradictions are meaningless nonsense, one need not embrace logical positivism. So Kaplan’s criticism rings hollow.

To boot, Kaplan completely neglects the obvious paradox that haunts his entire book, including his takedown of logic. He is presenting an argument for why you should reject logic when, of course, the basis of all argument is logic. All arguments assume the validity of the basic logical axioms and rules. So he is using logic in an attempt to show that you shouldn’t trust logic. So, if his argument works, we shouldn’t trust it or its conclusion. Even if he is just suggesting we should not trust it sometimes, one can simply ask “so, why should I trust it when you use it?”

This paradox haunts all criticisms of logic and is damning; it’s not one that you can simply “embrace” as Kaplan does other paradoxes. Logic is fundamental to all communication and persuasion; we can’t do without it; everyone embraces its fundamental truths (e.g., nothing is both true and false, everything is identical to itself, if P entails Q, and P is true, then Q is true) intuitively. Like all others, Kaplan’s “take down of logic,” simply amounts to an ad hoc rationalization aimed at justifying him in selectively ignoring logical arguments that generate conclusions that he doesn’t like (but that has no way to refute).

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Kaplan might insist that you can use logic to realize that logic is bunk—like a ladder that one climbs to reach a destination and then kicks away because it is worthless once you get there. But this is the same move that the early Wittgenstein used when he realized that he had used philosophical language to arrive at the conclusion that philosophical language is meaningless. And this is a move that Kaplan himself dismisses as completely unsatisfactory. Like the early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists, Kaplan simply doesn’t realize that his argument refutes itself.

Mysticism, Mysticism and More Mysticism…And Comedy

Worse still, Kaplan then launches into a lengthy defense of mysticism (mainly the Buddhist and Hindu variety), including the notion that one should embrace—and even think justified – realizations that come to one in a drug-induced haze. I’ve already argued elsewhere why such experiences cannot justify religious beliefs – or any beliefs for that matter. Most certainly, as an alternative to logic as a way of figuring out the way the world is, mysticism falls flat on its face.

To his credit, however, Kaplan eventually gets around to criticizing mysticism as well. At times, it seems he even admits that the platitudes of mystics are meaningless. As they might say about Santa: “it’s not true that he exists, but it’s also not true that he doesn’t exist – and neither is it true that he both does and does not exist.” And he most certainly recognizes the paradox invoked by their continual pronouncements that those who make pronouncements really have no knowledge. According to Kaplan, this is as damning to mysticism as he thinks the liar’s paradox is to logic.

Interestingly, he goes on to propose a third approach to discovering truth and dealing with the paradoxes that life presents us. That approach is comedy. At this point I was back on board; I too know that mysticism is a bunch of hooey and I also think that comedy is an effective way of making political and philosophical points (see The Daily Show and The Colbert Report). But, at this point, I’m sure you’re asking the same thing I was: What could it possibly mean for comedy to be an approach for discovering truth or resolving paradoxes? I’d love for comedy to be such an approach—but what would that even mean? And I would love to answer your question by carefully laying out what his approach is.

But I can’t…because he didn’t.

In the midst of explaining a few jokes – most belonging to Sarah Silverman and one from Monty Python (The Cheese Shop Sketch) which sadly were the only things I had laughed at so far—one can get a vague notion about how comedy can help you laugh at paradox. But I still have no idea how comedy is somehow an alternative to logic and mysticism when it comes to truly dealing with paradox or discovering truths about what exists. I mean, I guess it helps to laugh at paradox, if you just want to ignore it. So there’s that. But I don’t think that is what he was shooting for.

Ok…so, he doesn’t clearly articulate his own theory. But Philosophers have been doing that for centuries, so I can’t hold that against him too much. After all, this book is supposed to be funny and I hadn’t really laughed yet. Maybe everything so far has been a big set up for a hilarious joke. “Let’s see where this goes next,” I told myself.

Unfortunately, this is when he really went off the rails.

That One Came Out of Left Field…But It’s Here

As he continues, it becomes clear that the entire project was just his way of articulating why he embraces Kabbalah—or at least his particular variety of it. In a way, the title question of the book “Does Santa exist?”, is just a veil for asking the question “Does God exist?” and answering it with “Yes, if by ‘God’ you mean what a Kabbalahist means by ‘God’: ‘The Limitless’.” (Incidentally, that isn’t what anyone else actually means by “God,” and the conception of “The Limitless” is so ill-defined, the notion that it exists isn’t even false—it’s just non-sense.) He does eventually bring it back around to the book’s title question; for Kaplan, Santa is one of the “faces” of the Limitless (the gentle one that apparently is sometimes depicted as having a long white beard). So indeed Santa does exist—but, again, only if “Santa” means what he (but no one else) means by “Santa.” (See, all we needed to do was clearly define our terms.)

Now, I’m not going to waste my time debunking Kabbalah. Others have already done that for me. Besides, it comes in so many different varieties that it’s impossible to pin down what it even is. In a nutshell, it’s a religious pseudoscientific variety of Jewish Mysticism (that proclaims to be non-religious and scientific) that, like Scientology, is very popular in Hollywood. (Instead of Tom Cruise, Kabalah has Madonna.) It’s no surprise that Kaplan, a Hollywood writer who comes from a Jewish family and was enamored with mysticism from an early age, has fallen for its trap. To his credit, Kaplan himself admits that on some days (what I would consider his good days) he knows that it’s just hokum. But it seems that most days (his bad ones), he truly believes in it. (This “I know Kabbalah is bunk but I still believe” duality seems to exist in others as well.)

So at this point, I’m angry at myself for wasting any time and/or money on Kaplan’s book—and at everyone who posted a link to it on my Facebook wall insisting that I should write this review. (You know who you are!) But the experience was good for three things.

(1) It helped me realize that philosophers who make philosophy understandable for a lay audience don’t get enough credit; it’s much more difficult than it seems. Kaplan after all is a professional writer, and yet even I – a professional philosopher – had trouble understanding his points and following his train of thought. Making philosophy understandable to non-philosophers is hard work.

(2) I’ve argued elsewhere (with my colleague Ruth Tallman) that arguments for God’s existence are the same kind of ad hoc rationalization that one might give if one actually believed in Santa. In a debate between a theist and a “Santa Clausist,” you would quickly lose track of which arguments were for which magical invisible man. In Kaplan’s book, I have found a real world example that proves my point.

(3) Most importantly, however, it helped reinforce something I’ve argued for a long time: belief in Santa Claus promotes credulity; and the longer one believes the more credulous one is likely to be. A 43-year-old adult writing a book that uses his own variety of mystic pseudoscience to actually defend Santa’s existence couldn’t be clearer evidence that I am completely right about this.

So steer clear of literal belief in Santa, kids; it’ll rot your brain!

Copyright 2014, David Kyle Johnson

Kyle's book, The Myths That Stole Christmas, is now available for pre-order.