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3/6/09
Dear 1585:
Thank you for replying. Do
you mind if we continue our correspondence? It
is rare enough that I get to have a
civil, meaningful intellectual conversation with another Christian. But a civil, meaningful
intellectual
conversation with an atheist? That
is
too tempting to pass up, not to mention the joy that comes from working
to reconcile
you with God. I
understand from your
“Frequently Misused Terms” section that you are
open to the idea of God and
even wish that there is a God. I
will provide
you, to the best of my ability, with the arguments needed to convince
you that
there is a God. And
I will do so without
personal attacks. Personal
attacks are analogous
to the use of torture in interrogations. The
people that use these are not effective in
achieving their desired ends, give themselves a bad name, and only
serve to
give their target audience a reason to hate them. Though
having said that, I will admit that I
am not perfect and sometimes do not live up to the standard I have set
for
myself. If you feel
I have offended you
in any way, please let me know and I will immediately apologize for the
offense. Also,
please keep in my mind
that I'm not an expert in Christianity. I
am still learning every day. There
are
many things about my faith that I do not understand, namely how a man
could
gather two of every animal into a wooden ship built far beyond what we
could
build today, but I understand enough that God must
exist. I will also
keep
an open mind and consider your arguments against my faith. I’m sure
there’s a quote in the Bible that
backs that sentiment up, but I’m not nearly well versed in
the Bible as I
should be. Nevertheless,
as I understand
it keeping an open mind to ideas different from my own is part of
loving my
neighbor as myself, so until I’m provided with scripture that
says otherwise I
will give your arguments the same thought as I would expect you to give
mine.
I should have clarified in my last email that when I said “I
am a Christian Apologist” and opened with the argument that
nothing comes out
of nothing I did not mean to imply that this argument alone proves that
Christianity is right. I
merely wanted
to establish the basics—that God exists. And
then move on to proving this God is
Christian. I'll get
back to you on that
argument after I do some research.
I don't know what nothing would be... for now I
regard it as
the supernatural—as in being above my natural
understanding—or the
metaphysical, if you prefer. You’ve
gotten
my interest risen in this “spacetime” stuff and
that it behaves in certain
ways. Do you have a
link or a book in
mind that goes more in-depth? I’m
always
interested in learning more about the universe.
You
asked me if I believed if God was a divine force like
love. This view
doesn’t make sense to me
because love is an ideal. Ideals
only
exist within a mind and are represented in one’s actions. As C.S. Lewis put it,
“Many people find [this philosophy]
attractive because it gives the emotional comfort of believing in God
and none
of the consequences... You
can switch it
on when you want, but it will not bother you [with morality].”
Speaking of morality how would you, as an atheist,
define
it? If you do not
think it exists, and
our “morals” are a collection of our instincts
overpowering one another, then
let me offer you this to think on. I
am
walking home and see a frightened kid running from a guy with a knife. I have two instincts in my
mind now: one is
the herd instinct and it tells me to confront the guy with the knife,
the second
is the instinct for self-preservation because I don’t want to
get knifed. Disregarding
which of the two instincts are
stronger, there is a third voice that advocates for the one that
upholds the Cardinal
Virtues and attempts to suppress the desire to run away. They are, according to C.S.
Lewis: prudence,
temperance, justice, and fortitude. In
other words, it tells me to stop being a pussy and stand up for the kid.
You may have noticed that I do not quote the Bible
and that
instead I invoke C.S. Lewis. I
do this
because I think it’s circular logic to attempt to prove
something that the
Bible says by pointing at the Bible itself. It’s
like trying to prove the existence of
Superman by pointing at a comic book. You
won’t accept anything that the Bible says
until I establish its legitimacy and I won’t do that until I
prove the
existence of God. Besides
like I said
earlier, I don’t know nearly enough scripture to be able to
teach someone its
morals.
All the best,
David
P.S.: I am happy as
all get-out that Obama won the election. I
was simply mortified that someone like Sarah
Palin could have been a heartbeat away from being Commander-in-Chief. I too find it strange to be
elated about our
government.
David:
I
am glad to hear from you again. I
never intended the Reader Mail section to
be a forum for ongoing debates, but then, I never ruled it out either,
and
since you took the time to write to me again, and since your
concerns—or
rather, your misconceptions about atheism—are common ones,
I’ll go ahead and
address your second e-mail as best I can.
You open by remarking upon the rarity of “a
civil,
meaningful, intellectual conversation with an atheist.” I hope what you mean by
this is that you
simply don’t know or interact with many atheists, rather than
that we are
typically unwilling or unable to engage in such conversations. Because if it is the
latter, I’m afraid I
can’t let that go without pointing out that it is flatly
untrue. Though
there are lots of different types of
people who are simply “not religious,” those who
actually bother to
self-identify as atheists are, in my experience, far more willing to
engage in
philosophical debates than the average person—and not only
about religion, but
about virtually anything. I
am not
alleging that this is a result of atheism, but rather the reverse: it
was
putting this original personality trait into practice that first caused
us to
question, and eventually reject, religion.
(In the cases of atheists who are the children of
other atheists, yes
they may technically have been “raised atheist,”
but this largely just means
being raised with a premium placed on philosophical inquiry, evidence,
the
scientific method, etc.—to say nothing of the extent to which
such personality
types, and indeed the intelligence that usually attends them, are
heritable
genetically. Since
our position is
simply the absence of your
position,
there is no way for us to have “dogma” in the same
sense—i.e., our “dogma” is
simply explanations of the flaws in your
dogma, and hence not dogma.)
Now, please don’t worry, based on the space
I just devoted
to that point, that you have “offended” me. I do not get
“offended” per se.
The way I see it, there are claims I believe to be
true, and other
claims that I believe to be false, and when someone makes a claim that
I
believe to be false, I explain what I believe to be the problem with it. I think that placing too
much emphasis on
what is or is not “offensive” clouds the fact that
what is really at stake is true vs.
false. For example,
although racist beliefs are indeed “offensive,” it
is even
more important to point out that they are not
true. Simply
labeling a claim
“offensive” does not provide anyone with a reason
not to believe it—only with a
reason not to say it out loud.
The fact that you devoted the space you did to
announcing
that you are prepared to apologize if you offend me, and will not use
personal
attacks, to me highlights the flaw in how you are coming to these
questions: You
seem to think that these are matters of (to employ the traditional
metaphor)
the heart rather than the head. It
was
very kind of you to specify these things, and personally
I appreciate that, but technically, what you specify and
what I appreciate on this level has nothing to do with which one of us
is right. If you
claim A and I claim B, and either A or
B must be true, then the claim that is true will still be true
regardless of
whether we converse politely or whether you call me a devil-worshipper
and I
call you a retard. It
will be more
pleasant for us to argue the first way, but this is irrelevant to the
worth or
lack thereof of our respective positions.
It is, of course, also true that other people are
reading
this, and that those readers will have strong impulses to want to believe the person they feel they
like better.
This is, as I
have just said, not a valid reason to believe someone, but it is the
way the
world works. It is
also an example of a
situation where—to touch upon the concerns from your fifth
paragraph—what you
regard as your “morality” (your argumentative
politeness) conveniently happens
to be in your self-interest.
Does this mean that I think, as you asked, that
morality
does not exist? Of
course not. This is
a common misunderstanding between
people with religious views of human existence and people with
scientific
ones. When we posit
evolutionary
explanations for a certain trait, religious people often interpret that
as
meaning that we think the trait in question is an
“illusion” or “doesn’t really
exist.” Take
love, for example. I
believe that there is an evolutionary
explanation for love (because, obviously, I believe that there is an
evolutionary explanation for everything
about human beings, which necessarily includes love).
We evolved a chemical response to a certain
combination of physical appearance, common interests, etc. This happened because it
increased the odds
that the male and female concerned would work together for a while,
which
increased the chances of survival of their offspring (which got more
food, more
protection, two pairs of eyes watching them instead of one, etc.). In other words, the people
whose brains were
set up this way outcompeted the people whose brains were not set up
this
way. Does this mean
I think love “does
not exist?” No. Plainly, it exists, and I
experience it just
as does any other human, and this is only the explanation for why it does.
There is also an evolutionary explanation for
why my body needs Vitamin D to survive—does the fact that I
believe this mean
that suddenly my body doesn’t need vitamin D anymore, and my
bones won’t get
screwed up if I don’t get enough?
No. My
body still works the same
way regardless of what facts I have or have not learned, and so do my
psychological needs (psychological needs simply being brain chemistry,
and
hence actually part of the body).
There is also no reason
why a trait that evolved for one reason needs (in either evolutionary
or ethical terms) to continue to be used that way. Gay
couples
experience love just as M/F couples do, and this has nothing directly
to do with raising offspring (just as it doesn't in the cases of M/F
couples who choose not to have any). So the capacity for
morality
may have evolved as a bet-hedging quid
pro quo
instinct, but that doesn't mean that's what it still is, or needs to
be, or "should" be. That would be like saying that, because
we
evolved the capacity to run in order to get away from lions, we
shouldn't ever run marathons because there aren't any lions after us.
In short, the problem with your question (“If you do not think it exists, and our
“morals” are a collection of our instincts
overpowering one another…”) is
that these positions are not actually mutually exclusive. Morality exists, and it is a collection of our instincts
overpowering one
another. We have
evolved a distaste for
murder, punching random people in the face, etc.
Some people do not have as much of a distaste
for those things as others, and we regard those people as having
something
“wrong with” them (you may believe that there is
something wrong with the soul of a
sociopath, whereas I believe
there is something wrong with his brain,
but we agree that this is not the way people are “supposed
to” be). There
are some visions of morality that
radically depart from the instincts of the majority—for
example, a religion
that believes that it is just as wrong to swat a fly as to kill another
human—but these tend to have an uphill battle in terms of
disseminating their
ideas. Instinct, of
course, is a vague
ballpark that can be significantly influenced by argument and the
influence of
argument on custom. A
thousand years
ago, almost everyone regarded slavery as, if not necessarily morally good, at least morally excusable
and “normal.”
Now, we regard it as horrible on a par with
rape and murder. Currently,
vegetarians
who believe that killing a pig or cow for food when other food is
readily
available just because the pig or cow tastes good is morally
indefensible are
increasing their ranks at a significant rate.
Maybe in 200 years the entire human race will look
back on you and me as
monsters for eating meat, just as we look back on slaveowners, and
maybe not. What
does my instinct tell me about
eating meat? Well,
I am not proud of it exactly, but neither do I regard it as a
“big
deal” in the grand scheme of things.
I
have some vague moral math going on that could be influenced by
argument one
way or the other. The
moral positions of
the human race are currently in flux on lots of other issues too, like
gay
rights and the death penalty. In
all of these debates, both
religious and
“logical” arguments are regularly
made in support of both sides.
The problem with your C.S. Lewis example is that it
reduces
morality to “being brave enough to do the obvious right
thing” vs. “being too
scared to do the obvious right thing.”
This is, of course, a problem because moral issues
where there is an
“obvious” right thing that everyone agrees upon are
a slim minority. Elections
and wars are not waged over the
question of whether you should run into the burning building to save
the baby.
Right now, I am spending my one day off from work
indoors
writing a painstaking response to some guy I don’t even know
in defense of a
position of which I will almost certainly not convince him, even though
outside
it is the first warm and beautiful day we have had in over four months
and I
could be playing Frisbee with my friends in the park.
Does this make me a hero?
Perhaps to atheists it does (I am so devoted
to the truth that I place it above my own happiness).
Conversely, to Christians, it makes me seem
even more twisted and villainous (I am so against God that it has
perverted me
away from positive, “normal” human emotions and
desires). What do I
think? Well, all I
can say is that remaining indoors
to write this all day is simply what I have chosen to do. To assume I know why I have chosen to do it would be to
assume that I understand my
own psyche well enough to answer every question about why I do things. Some questions about
myself I can answer
easily enough (“I eat because I am hungry,”
“I watch 30 Rock because
it makes me laugh”), but not all.
I could point out that it would have bothered
me if I had gone outside to
play Frisbee instead, thereby getting into that old argument about
whether
altruism actually exists…
But then
again, I received your second e-mail some time ago, and am only
responding
today, so clearly there have been many other
days on which it did not bother me
to
do something else—and yet, for some reason, today it would
have. There could
be moral explanations for this
(“on a day when I was not in the mood to write, I would have
written badly, and
so done less good because my writing would not have been as
persuasive”), or
these explanations could only be my retroactive attempts to come up
with a
reason for what I already did just because it was what I happened to do.
Am I saying that there is no such thing as Free Will? No, just that it may make
more sense to apply
that term to the big picture instead of the small ones: as a general
rule, I
think religion is both factually false and harmful to society, and so I
choose to write things that
will
convince others of this. But
why do I
end up doing this on one particular day instead of another? I have no idea.
You asked how I, as an atheist, would
“define”
morality. I
actually define it the same way you
do—it is our
beliefs about what is right and what is wrong.
What I think you meant to ask was where I think it comes from.
And the only
difference between us in the respect is that you think
you got it from scripture, but actually you didn’t. If you really
got your moral beliefs from scripture, you would think that it was
wrong to eat
shellfish, that people who worked on Sunday should be stoned to death,
and that
it was okay to own slaves as long as those slaves were not the same
religion as
you. Certainly, some scripture agrees with your moral
predispositions (just as some
scripture does with my own), but
you can say this about anything. Some of the moral positions expressed in
the Qu’ran or the Bhagavad Gita would coincide with your own
as well—as, for
that matter, would some of the
moral
positions espoused in a Jane Austen novel or on a randomly chosen
episode of The Simpsons.
At this point, I have digressed into philosophy on
the
nature of morality, and am not really talking about the non-existence
of
God. This is
because, frankly, your
second e-mail did not really address the vast majority of the points I
brought
up in my first response. You
had
initially opened with the “nothing from nothing”
argument, to which I returned
a number of valid counters, and now you appear to be changing the
subject to
the nature of morality. I
was happy for
the opportunity to explain where we atheists get our morality from
(actually,
it’s where everyone gets their morality from—you
guys just don’t know it), but
as for the existence of God, I’m afraid we really
can’t progress on that front
until you address the arguments from my previous e-mail. And, to be blunt, I really
don’t think there
is any way for you to do so. If
the
existence of God—much less the specific God of any
religion—could be proven
with logic, then someone would have done this by now, and all the
“logical”
people like me would believe in God (because, if proven, then God would
just be
a part of science, like if we discovered a giant, all-powerful animal
of some
kind).
You seem to have derived a glimmer of hope from the
fact
that I am “open to the idea” of God, and
“even wish” that there were a
God. These things
are indeed true, but
please do not misunderstand what they mean.
It would be equally true to say that I am
“open to the idea” of Bigfoot,
and “even wish” that there were a Santa
Claus—in other words, I will be
perfectly happy to believe in the existence of Bigfoot just as soon as
someone
produces some evidence that he exists (ditto the Loch Ness Monster, el
chupacabra, Leprechauns, etc.), and I think it would be cool if there
were a
Santa Claus (ditto Superman and Jedi Knights).
You spoke of attempting to “reconcile [me]
with God,” but I am not mad at
God, just as I am not mad at
Bigfoot or Superman. You
and others like you have posited that a
certain thing exists, and I and others like me do not believe that it
does—that
is all. It is not
an emotional matter
(at least, not for us).
You say you are not an “expert in
Christianity,” but it
would little matter if you were. It
is a
bunch of stuff that people have made up, and so it would be no
different from
being an “expert in” Lord of the Rings or Star
Trek—i.e., it would mean only
that you have memorized a great deal of things that other people have
made
up. It is not
necessarily pointless to
do this, of course. For
example, I am an
“expert in” Shakespeare, and the events of
Shakespeare’s plays are “made up”
too (though often based on history,
as was the Bible). The
fact that they
are made up does not mean that they are not brilliant, or do not have
valuable psychological
insights to impart about what it means to be human, and even moral ones
about
how to live. But
unlike in a religion, I
do not need to believe that there literally
existed a weaver named Bottom whose head was temporarily
replaced with that
of a donkey by a magic spell (although I do
believe, because it is confirmed by many other reliable sources and
does not
conflict with any other facts, that there literally existed a Roman
dictator
named Julius Caesar who was assassinated in the Capitol on the Ides of
March). I could be
the foremost Shakespeare scholar
in the world, and this still would not qualify me to overrule someone
who
points out that there are no such things as Fairies (and as for the
historical
plays, I do not actually get my
history from Shakespeare—for example, Richard III was
probably not as bad a guy
as Shakespeare, who was living under a queen descended from his
enemies, made
him out to be… but it is still a great play).
You are clearly brighter than most of the Christians
I have
argued with. Your
point about Superman
comics is an accurate example of circular logic, and the fact that you
comprehend Lewis’s quote about the problems of defining God
as love (which I,
as Lewis, was making fun of doing,
by
the way—please re-examine my last e-mail) and could use it
appropriately in an
argument is also impressive. I
do not
understand why you are choosing to use your intelligence in defense of
an idea
you must surely know somewhere deep down is absurd.
Thanks Again,
—S.G.
P.S.: The book I
recommend as far as understanding spacetime and so forth is the same as
it was
in my last e-mail, The Universe in a
Nutshell by Stephen Hawking.
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