I’m talking about nature as a universe that creates itself from chaos with no divine input. As such, nature’s mindlessness is the source of all beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, luck and misfortune. What we unconsciously don’t like about nature is the ultimate pointlessness of its creative endeavors.

Descartes was trying to disprove skepticism using mathematical standards of proof. Skepticism as a belief presupposes the existence of thoughts. But there’s no need to take mathematical certainty as the standard. If the skeptical scenarios (such as the scenario in which the universe is a computer simulation) make no difference, it’s pragmatism that’s doing the work in making skepticism hard to take seriously.

Pragmatists assume there’s an external world, since that’s the most useful way of making sense of our experience. Descartes had trouble breaking out of his solipsistic starting point, since he had to rely on a proof of God’s existence to bring back the external world. Like solipsism, theism counters the horror of godless, absurd nature, but only by retreating to an anachronism.