t requires a solution.

To the mentality that assumes, more or less consciously, that we must of
necessity find a solution to every problem, belongs the argument based
on the disastrous consequences of a thing. Take any book of
apologetics--that is to say, of theological advocacy--and you will see
how many times you will meet with this phrase--"the disastrous
consequences of this doctrine." Now the disastrous consequences of a
doctrine prove at most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it
is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which
suits us best. The identification of the true and the good is but a
pious wish. In his _Etudes sur Blaise Pascal_, A. Vinet says: "Of the
two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is
not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced,
but it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only of the
senses; it is intellectual. It is not only for the _soul_; it is for the
_mind_ that happiness is a necessity. Happiness forms a part of truth."
This last proposition--_le bonheur fait partie de la verite_--is a
proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of pure reason. It
would be better to say that truth forms a part of happiness in a
Tertullianesque sense, in the sense of _credo quia absurdum_, which
means actually _credo quia consolans_--I believe because it is a thing
consoling to me.

No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that
it exists, whether it console us or not. And reason is certainly not a
consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent
serenity and Epicurean _ataraxia_ conceal so much despair, said that
piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene
soul--_pacata posse mente omnia tueri_. And it was the same Lucretius
who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils--_tantum
religio potuit suadere malorum_. And it is true that religion--above all
the Christian religion--has been, as the Apostle says, to the Jews a
stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals foolishness.[29] The Christian
religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, was called by
Tacitus a pernicious superstition (_exitialis superstitio_), and he
asserted that it involved a hatred of mankind (_odium generis humani_).

Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most genuinely
rationalistic age in the world's history, Flaubert,