On Immorality & Atheism

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The notion that atheists are immoral because they claim godlessness is tripe. There is no reason to suggest that a person is immoral because they don't believe a certain god, or any gods exist. Such a conclusion is hopelessly illogical: where's the connective tissue between the propositions "I don't believe in God/gods" and "disbelievers are immoral"? Something has to fit between those two propositions, otherwise concluding disbelief equals immorality is a categorical confusion and a lackluster syllogism, at best.

At worst, the implication that people can only be moral if they believe in a God/gods makes believers terribly dangerous people to associate with: are they suggesting that it's only their belief that restrains them from psychopathic rampages, and all manner of hideous crimes?

And what are we to make of pre-Judaic times, before the alleged giving of the 10 Commandments? Were people just given to their impulses with no thought to consequences? Were human beings wantonly viscious with no capacity for restraint until God burned a few words in stone? The fact is: people are moral despite their beliefs, and even without beliefs, because morality is part of our organising instincts and our efforts to promote the survival of ourselves and others.

Your morality is not a cape you are given by some God; it is part of your human composition and does not depend a whit on what brand of religion you choose to adopt.

A History of God: Reflections & Review P. II

In Part 1 of this series, I provided a brief overview of the purpose behind Armstrong's book: to examine the evolution of the idea of God within the three major monotheistic religions of the world: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  I also noted that Armstrong's historical scrutiny of the monotheistic conceptions of God comes by way of the documentary hypothesis, a source theory of biblical interpretation that seeks to arrange chronologically the inconsistent and independently authored texts of the earliest books of the bible.  Given the seemingly independent perspectives within the books of the Torah--and subsequent Old Testament books--the documentary hypothesis suggests that a series of redactors (editors) prepared the disparate documents into the forms we've come to know as the Pentateuch.

Citing Armstrong's interpretive tools goes a long way in helping to understand why she comes to some of the conclusions she does.  If it is true that the Pentateuch is a patchwork of originally independent narratives that have endured (who knows how many) redactions, then the traditional Christian perspective that the bible is wholly reliable can reasonably be questioned: reliable in its original, unedited form?  Reliable because of its redactions?  And how do we know that those who undertook to edit the original manuscripts were reliable people?  What constitutes 'reliability' in a religious context when dealing with scripture? At what point does having 'faith' that the scriptures are reliable cease to be an acceptable premise?  And further to those questions, if the writings of the major world religions can be questioned as to their reliability, can those religions themselves be questioned as to their reliability on the whole?  That is, if the religions of the book are questionable on a literary level, what aspects of that religion are reliable at all?

I won't be pursuing answers to those questions in this series, but suffice it to say that they are reasonably important questions, and the content of Armstrong's book certainly gives me pause to consider searching out reasonable answers.

But enough of my preamble!  On to the reflections and review.

Introduction (pp. xvii - xxiii)
I have read Armstrong's introduction to A History of God a few times before reading the actual book.  There are several instances within those (roughly) 7 pages that resonated very deeply with me.  For example, Armstrong, right out of the gates, admits to her childhood belief in God as an implicit or "unquestioned" assumption, but because of the arid pomposity of the religious definitions that surround the notion of 'God' she cannot meaningfully state she had faith in God:

"There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.  I believed implicitly in the existence of God; I also believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the efficacy of the sacraments, the prospect of eternal damnation and the objective reality of Purgatory... God, on the other hand, was a somewhat shadowy figure, defined in intellectual abstractions rather than images."

 Like Armstrong, I had my own implicit belief in God when I was a child.  I recall demanding I be brought to church when I was eight.  At the same age, I was baptised, though I know I had no real understanding of the religious significance of that event.  A few years later, I sat in the back of my dad's car reading my bible while he and his girlfriend ran errands at a local plaza.  When they returned to the car, I plucked up my courage and asked my dad what he would think if I became a priest and taught people about God.  His response was disheartening to a child of 12: "Do what you want.  Just don't talk to me about it."  This was the same response I received from him when I was 16 and told him that I had become a "born again" Christian.

All this is to say that, like Armstrong,

"As I grew up... I began to be moved by the beauty of the liturgy and, though God remained distant, I felt that it was possible to break through to him and that the vision would transfigure the whole of created reality."

Disappointment is germane to most people's lives, however, and Armstrong did not experience that transfigured reality.  "Eventually, with regret," Armstrong writes, "I left the religious life..."  As did I, and with many, bitter, emotional struggles.  But having pursued her religious studies as much as she did, Armstrong was unwilling to put away her passion to understand religious reality:

"My interest in religion continued... and I made a number of television programs about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience."

And having scoured the depths of religious history, Armstrong came to an unoriginal, yet beautifully expressed conclusion about the nature of religious experience and activity:

"Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to.  Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done.  It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity... Throughout history, men and women have experienced a dimension of the spirit that seems to transcend the mundane world.  Indeed it is an arresting characteristic of the human mind to be able to conceive concepts that go beyond it in this way."

It must be said, however, that although religion has been, and probably will continue to be an activity integral to human participation in the world, the rise of scientific savvy is a formidable challenge to the religious-minded.  For if "meaning and value in life" can come from ancestral liturgies and ancient doctrines, then the continual increase in understanding and factual comprehension science continuously provides may overtake religious devotion.  Certainly knowing the factual details of reality does not detract from life's meaning and value, but should reinforce it if those meanings and values are true.  Certainly deriving one's meaning and value from what is actual and demonstrable will grip people's minds with at least as much fervour as the meaning and value in life that non-demonstrable, non-natural claims have traditionally held.

Whatever the case may end up being, there is no historical precedent that even remotely recommends a religionless future.

"...religion is highly pragmatic... it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound. As soon as it ceases to be effective it will be changed--sometimes for something radically different."

Thus notions of God are entirely provisional: they evolve just as much as people and their cultures do.  The success of monotheisms such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has not been in having precise knowledge of the divine so much as it has been that the monotheistic religions have been able to adapt culture to their creeds.  Previous to monotheism religious motifs were subject to the suasions of culture.  And indeed, so-called "pagan" religions continue to develop along the lines of the cultures and people-groups practicing them.  Monotheism, however, dictates culture by enforcement of creeds: you cannot be a 21st century Christian without holding dear certain creeds.  You can, however, be a raging pagan, polytheist, or religious pluralist in the 21st century even while brushing-off ancient dictates.

This, of course, makes me wonder why people prefer to be directed in their beliefs, rather than choosing what to believe.  The cafeteria Catholic (pejorative, but apt term that that is) is still beholden to certain essentials, or he isn't a Catholic.  Period.  The smorgasbord pagan is really only expected to choose what he will.  And both the Catholic monotheist and the pagan pluralist enjoy an absolutist sense of reality: they both believe that they are wonderfully right, and that others are woefully wrong.

Be that as it may, such concerns are somewhat allayed by Armstrong's right observation that

"Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration."

The import derived from conversations about God seems to be purely personal.  Given that, it really doesn't surprise me that somewhere along the historical line, the concomitant notion of a "personal God" was recognised in the fact that people conclude their notions of God wholly subjectively: no two people have the same experience of the same idea.  'God', the abstract, is concretized differently in each person.  Thus God-talk is strained at best, and tests credulity not only at worst, but inevitably.

As is proper, Armstrong should have the last word here:

"All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties.  Yet monotheists have all been very positive about language at the same time as they have denied its capacity to express the transcendent reality.  The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a God who--in some sense--speaks.  His Word is crucial in all three faiths.  The Word of God has shaped the history of our culture.  We have to decide whether the word "God" has any meaning for us today."

A Reflection On Morality #1

Anyone following my blog will already know of the large swath of atheist literature in the intellectual marketplace these days. I personally find that quite exciting because I don't think the Christian life can be lived out without thoughtfully considering philosophies that oppose it. A person who never encounters philosophical objections to their Christian faith does not have a blind faith so much as a blind knowledge and crippled ability to relate to those of different worldviews.

Undertaking to read as much of the New Atheist's literature as I can during the 2009 year has resulted, quite logically, in many difficult challenges to what I believe. In some cases, what I believe has been altered dramatically. For example, I used to believe that a person could not be truly moral in any ontological sense if they lacked belief in God. I don't believe that any longer for the simple reason that it is empirically demonstrable that our social inclinations as a species demands a pre-existing moral framework, belief or not. Hence there are a good many atheists who are morally upstanding individuals, and many Christians with the moral leanings of sociopaths.

If such is the case, Christians do not have an ethical high-ground whereby their religious views trump the moral efforts, reflections, inquiries, and formulations of non-believers and secularists. We're on level ground if we admit that morality is innate to the human species, whether a person believes or not. What a Christian does have is a presupposed grounds for the origins of morality: the Holy Trinity. Whereas the atheist, secularist, or anti-theist may presuppose morality in light of social Darwinism and the organising practices that necessarily come about to maintain a community, or nation; in effect, morality is an accretion of social contracts meant to ensure the survival of the species.

Despite the claims of the New Atheists that faith is a "mind-virus" (a term coined by Richard Dawkins), if we're on level ground to examine moral action, at what point is there any reason why atheists and Christians cannot work together to effect a more harmonious existence with each other? What logical reason is there then for someone like, say, Sam Harris to call for the eradication of religion, to attack it vehemently in an effort to help religion "slide into obsolescence" (The End of Faith, p. 14)? How does the eradication of one spectrum of human existence justify the continuance of another spectrum of human continuance? In other words, how does the destruction of religious worldviews justify the on-going disbelief in atheistic philosophy? What moral harmony is accomplished, what help to the surival of our species is acheived through obliterating faith, and religious hope?

*Thanks to Parenting Beyond Belief for the picture.

Nathan Jacobson Speaks

You listen.

Interview With Terry Eagleton

The Rationalist Association recently published an excellent article detailing Terry Eagleton's philosophical differences with Ditchkins (a portmanteau of the celebrity atheists Dawkins and Hitchens).

For those who are interested in reading about religion's cultured (you know: fermented!) despisers it is a fairly heady, but excellent and worthwhile read.

Enjoy!

Stenger's Failed Hypothesis P. I

Victor J. Stenger is professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii. He has also written several respected books. One of which is his treatise on the non-existence of God, God: The Failed Hypothesis (How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist).

I am not able to write on the details of scientific research, so on that account, I can confess that Stenger definitely has an edge on me. However, his intended purpose -- to show from science that God does not exist -- runs headlong into an area I can makes heads-or-tails of: theology and philosophy.

Now, to be sure, Stenger has done an excellent job laying out his case. In short, Stenger reasons from physical data that the universe looks just as one would expect if God were non-existent. By way of Karl Popper's doctrine of falsifiability (essentially, an assertion can be shown to be false via physical tests/experimentation), Stenger moves to show God as an unverifiable assertion; that is, God cannot be shown to exist through the use of modern scientific methodologies and applications. To quote Stenger:

"The thesis of this book is that the supernatural hypothesis of God is testable, verifiable, and falsifiable by the established methods of science." [1]

Falsifiability seems to be a reasonable guideline at first glance. But when one really takes a good look at falsifiability, it is a principle, or assertion, which itself cannot be falsified. For example, (from the Wikipedia link above) "all men are mortal" is an assertion which cannot be falsified because no amount of physical data can deny that statement. By contrast, however, an experiment can be rigged to show that "all men are immortal" is definitely falsifiable; visit a morgue and the falsifiability of "all men are immortal" is self-evident.

The doctrine of falsifiability on the other hand, is a notion that cannot be tested and shown false because it is a strict, or pure existential statement. That is, untestable due to being non-empirical. This agrees with Popper's original intent for falsifiability: only empirical statements are subject to falsifiablity because philosophical and metaphysical assertions are irrefutable by definition.

To boil this down a bit:

1. Statements that imply, or assert anything to do with actual existence are empirical statements, and therefore testable.

2. The statement that "God exists" asserts the actual existence of a divine superpower, therefore God must be detectable by scientific method.

3. If God cannot be detected, he does not exist. If he can be detected, then we can enjoy the knowledge of his reality.

Stenger's use of falsifiability is commonplace amongst scientists. But my problem with it is simple: why are scientists drawing from the purely existential assertion of falsifiability to justify empiricism? And what happens if we consider assertion itself a form of data? How can you test the falsifiability of the data of the nature of assertion? To put it another way, what data shows assertion to be falsifiable?

Perhaps I'm playing a linguistic game. If I am, I'm not intending to. But I think I'm concerned about Stenger's premise of falsifiability. It is a self-referrential, self-confirming methodology. On that basis, it becomes a severely biased premise that ultimately affirms itself, and automatically excludes anything that does not fit within its pre-established parameters. In effect, it does the very thing that people say they don't like about the followers of the three monotheisms: reason itself to be right above all other ways of knowing.

Given the problematic use of falsifiability, Stenger launches into atheological arguments against the existence of God. He often accuses theists of having definitional problems within their premises and, while doing so, regularly misdefines the position of theists and the premises they use to comprise their arguments.

More, Stenger seems to think that science alone is rigorous in its demands for properly supported ideas, and not just blindly accepted assertions.

"What history shows is that science is very demanding and does not blindly accept any new idea that someone can come up with. New claims must be thoroughly supported by the data, especially when they may conflict with well-established knowledge." [2]

As with science, so with theology and philosophy. Any cursory reading in church history, or the history of philosophy will reveal the same ardent striving for reliable support that science demands in modern times. Methodologies may have changed in some ways, but the demand for supported ideas and reasoned conclusions has not changed at all. So Stenger's implied accusation that other disciplines do blindly accept new ideas is defied by the historical divides between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, Platonic and Aristotelian schools, Augustinianism and Thomism, Cartesian dualism and monism, pyrrhic skepticism and fideism, etc. Stenger has concluded too hastily that science stands out in history in any way when it comes to examining data to arrive at a conclusion.

_____________________

[1] Stenger, Victor J. God: The Failed Hypothesis (How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist) Prometheus Books, NY, 2008, p. 29
[2] Ibid., p. 28

Offering Offense

In the world of debate, people cling passionately to what they believe they know. What they believe they know often becomes the platform for what they believe others should know and believe. But not everyone believes what they know. An atheist doesn't believe in God, even though he may know the traditional articulations for the existence of God. Similarly, a theist doesn't believe in the non-existence of God, even though he may know the premises for the denial of the existence of God.

Both the atheist and the theist have at their disposal a portfolio of arguments eager to defend their respective positions. Neither side considers the other side to have convincing arguments. So both claimants come to the table with fixed, resolute, and irreversible conclusions. In most cases, that places both parties in a position of 'offense' at the other before a word is spoken, or a word written.

Richard Dawkins wants to believe that people of faith have nothing cogent to offer to the cultural conversation on God, thus they can only be relied on for being offended. In fact, he thinks 'offense' is the only thing believers have left to offer.

Is he right?

Initiating Conversation

I'd like to take this opportunity to front-page a comment I made to TAG-Photos on another section of this blog. There has been some decent, earnest conversation between us here, and it would be nice to have wider input from the rest of the readership here, too. TAG's comments will be in red, and mine in black.

"Theistic evolution is a theory such as evolution and the big bang. They are all theories in the big picture."

Theistic evolution in one sense is a theory, you're right. However, what 'theory' usually means in the scientific field is 'a non-falsified, repeatable test that confirms a hypothesis' (a loose definition). Given that, evolution is not a 'theory' in the colloquial sense (i.e., a proposed idea); it is a repeatable experiment that confirms a hypothesis.

But just to complicate things a little more, the naturalist philosopher (archaic term for 'scientist'), David Hume, put forward a revolutionary principle that states that an unrestricted general conclusion cannot be the basis for all concluding knowledge on an item of study and experimentation. Which is to say that once you know something from repeated experimentation, that doesn't guarantee that you will arrive at the same conclusion through the same experiment in all circumstances. And as we know from quantum physics and the Uncertainty Principle, testing often biases the results at an elemental level because all measurement interferes with what's being measured. Hence nothing is known with absolute certainty.

At first glance this would seem to agree with your sentiment that "they are all theories in the big picture", but in admitting this it places you squarely in the position of not being able to defend decisive conclusions like, "There are no experiments that we as mere mortals can do to prove or illustrate points of creationism." For if the zero-point is that right belief depends on "the amount of weight you personally put on the given evidence" then we can reliably suggest that more mathematical proofs, such as Kalam's Cosmological Argument, terminate the opportunity to disbelieve: determine a point that doesn't exist, disambiguate an actual nothing, count to one (with all infinite variables between nothing and one).

The point is that science, Scripture, logic, math all assume a starting point for what is based on the fact that something is. Denial of that is absurd. Thus, we can determine an actual point where something had to have been 'created' or somehow initiated into being; it is scientifically and logically impossible to believe otherwise.

With that in mind, we can now calmly disagree together with your original statement that "The only proof of creationism is the bible, that I am aware of. There are no experiments that we as mere mortals can do to prove or illustrate points of creationism."

Anticipating your reply.

Updated Reading List

I'm currently working on two books. I thought I'd recommend them since they are both excellent reads, and well-thought-out. Here they are:

Oh, How the Mighty Hitchens Falls...

Watch here as Dinesh D'Souza slams a mental cudgel upside Christopher Hitchens' head. The debate is long and humorous, but intense and very intellectually rewarding.