Faith-Based Atheism

 

Religious beliefs are remarkably various. Taoists, Rastafarians, and Christians have as many differences as similarities, and there are many Christianities. But there only seems to be one atheism. It asserts on the basis of reasoned argument that belief in God is irrational. The "new atheists" - Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, for example - pit reason against faith, and declare for reason.

     But there is more than one way to skin a god, and there are many ways to be an atheist. I'm an atheist, but the exclusive reliance on reason in atheism strikes me as impoverished, unfortunate, and self-deluded.

    After all, even if we simply define 'atheism' as the denial that God exists, this claim itself has  corollaries and entailments of the largest scope. Atheism pictures the universe as a natural system, that is, a system not guided by intelligence, and not traversed by spirits: a universe, among other things, that yields to scientific explanation, because it consists of material objects operating according to physical laws. Atheism is taken up, in short, as part of a whole stance toward the universe, a theory of everything.

   Belief and unbelief do not simply consist of a particular claim and its negation, but of different whole pictures of the world, from its most general organization to the particular character of each event. Such world-pictures cannot themselves be shown to be true or false by science, or indeed by any rational technique. They are all matters of faith, stances taken up by finite creatures with regard to the infinitely rich surround. One does not produce reasons for such things; one lives them.

    I propose an unreasonable and modest atheism, an atheism that relies not on supposed proofs and the lack thereof, but on a sense of the way the world is: an atheist faith.

 

Belief

   Belief is, at its core, an emotional commitment to some claim or view. A creature without any desires or feelings would be incapable of making any judgments. An argument might bring someone to a commitment. But in order to believe you must do more than look at the argument, you must decide to live according to its results.

    I think of the universe as a natural system. I think of it, on the basis of my own pointedly finite experience, as the scene of both evil and good, as a morally indifferent thing. It isn't bent on saving me, or damning me: it just is. Its truth sits outside me and within me: leaves me struggling to understand: makes every interpretation provisional. I find comfort in that as well as pain, wonder as well as loathing. That's my experience, and my atheism is a reflection of that experience, a way of keeping faith with it. But it's not an argument; it's an interpretation.

   And in trying to be true to my experience, I'm trying to be true to its sources. The arguments come later. Religious people often give arguments - Saint Thomas Aquinas famously gave five - but it could not be more obvious that the belief comes first, originating in family, social and institutional context,  desire and need. The arguments are rationalizations.

   This is true, I am saying, of atheism , or at least my atheism. It's what my parents believed. It gets by in my social world, where professions of religious faith would be impertinent. I'll listen to arguments, but this contest is not taking place, really, at the level of arguments. It's taking place at the level the lives of each of us, in their connections with each other.

    That the atheist believes because of a neutral examination of arguments and the believer because of arbitrary emotional commitments is false, and it's merely the atheist's form of self-congratulation and other-disqualification. It is itself a mere self-serving dogma, and claims to have done what no person can do: abandon her own particularity and the burden of deciding what to believe.

    That's the reason, too, that I'm not an agnostic. I am making my way through an extremely complex world, and I commit myself with some hesitation to my sense of where I'm at. I want to declare myself. I want to take a leap of atheist faith.

    I want to take responsibilty for my beliefs, both the possibilities I embrace and the possibilities I foreswear.

   Now religious people have often offloaded the burden of their choices on institutions, by reliance on the Church's authorities and dogmas (thus the Protestant Reformation). But atheists are only too willing to offload their beliefs on "reason" or "science," without acknowledging that they are making a bold claim in the face of utterly insufficient data. Religion at its best treats belief as a resolution in the face of extreme uncertainty. I want an atheism that does the same, that displays what we might call epistemological courage.

 

Faith and Reason

   I live in York County, Pennsylvania, where I've put several children through the school system. This county was the site of the most interesting of the court cases about teaching intelligent design in high school science classes: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The curriculum had mandated a little disclaimer that natural selection was a theory, and that it faced the rival scientific hypothesis that life was designed intentionally. The questions were fairly straightforward: is intelligent design a scientific theory, and is it a plausible rival of evolution for the purposes of curriculum? The judge in the case, John E. Jones, answered that it is not, and not.

     But though intelligent design is not a scientific theory, because it does not derive from observation, it is genuine rival of the theory of evolution. The idea that the universe is ordered intelligently is taken up on the grounds of religious faith, not science, a fact about which its proponents are merely dishonest. Indeed, in pretending that Jesus and his disciples were a little group of scientists, the folks who insist on teaching intelligent design managed to betray their own religious vision fundamentally.

   But though creationism is no science, intelligent design and natural selection bring with them entirely different senses of what the world is; roughly, they cannot both be true.

    That's precisely why so many fundamentalist Christian parents in this very Christian area are uncomfortable with evolution. Darwinism is not atheism. But it carries with it a set of presumptions and implications that many believing people find simply irreligious. It immediately strikes them as incompatible at the most fundamental level with their deepest commitments, because it takes a naturalistic approach to the origin of humankind; we are not created in the image of God, but as mutated monkeys.

   If the new atheists are anything like right about what science is, the believers' discomfort is well-justified. Natural selection rules their picture of the world, as it were, out of court.

    Faith, let us say, is belief in radical excess to the evidence, or even in some cases against the evidence. Indeed, Kierkegaard (who defined faith as belief "held fast in passionate inwardness") liked Christianity not because it was well-justified, and not in spite of the fact that was insufficiently justified, but because it constituted a paradox: that the eternal God had appeared in time and died. That's not just difficult to explain, he said; it is entirely contradictory. By any reasonable measure it simply cannot be true. But that's why believing it called for total passion over the course of a lifetime, why it was a great if perverse human task.

    Now if a believer rejects rationality, you can't persuade him by showing him that his reasons are bad; he admits as much, or more. There's no use having an argument with a person who rejects argumentation. The contest between faith and reason is a standoff.

     Because atheism brings with it a whole interpretation of the whole universe , it is itself belief radically in excess to reasons that may be given for it. It is a structure of deductions, inductions, abductions, and observations. But is rests on something which no duction or scientific method can give it.

   Consider, for example, the principle of non-contradiction: that if some claim is true it is not also false. Kierkegaard, we might think, denies that, and in fact there are whole schools of philosophy that reject it. Now logic cannot show that the principle of non-contradiction is true: it presupposes that principle in its every formula. And though we might start with other axioms, we have got to start with some axioms - principles which are accepted without demonstration.

    As William James urged, science too rests on a set of presuppositions: about the value of truth; about the suitedness of the world to empirical investigation; about the relation of the scientist to the world. These are not things that science discovers; they are suppositions on which it rests.

    So the contest between science and faith, while it's a real rivalry, is a contest between two faiths. Daniel Dennett tries to show that religious faith is itself an outcome of natural selection. This would no more bear on its truth than would the opposite claim, that belief in natural selection is best understood as a lapse of faith.

    This leaves the curricular question hanging. I'd like to see it acknowledged in the science classroom - which is, I hope, an interaction among human beings and not a strict regime of censorship - that many or most of the students have been taught differently and perhaps believe differently. I'd even like to see the differences discussed, and respect paid to those who dissent. This is part of social context of science, as much as would be a discussion of the struggle between Galileo and the Catholic Church. Indeed, our schools and homes are places where a similar struggle is happening right now.

    That's interesting. That's teachable.

   There is a place in a science class for a discussion, for example, of how science has changed our view of the world. And there is a place for a discussion of how it is changing our view of the world right here, now, in York County, Pennsylvania.

 

Burden of Proof and the Effects of Religion

    It is often said that believers have the burden of proof, and that that since theists claim that God exists, while atheists merely fail to make that claim, theists must produce some positive reasons. But first of all, whether a claim is positive or negative depends on how it's formulated. And second, burden of proof is something that someone actually carries in an actual argument, in a social situation. Bishop Berkeley denied the existence of matter, and held that this world was a set of ideas in the mind of God. But he knew that since he was denying something that most everyone believed, he was obligated to try to prove his point. That you deny the existence of something, then, hardly entails that the other guy has the burden of proof.

   In a situation in which God's existence seems obvious or self-evident to some or most people, while it seems massively implausible to others, an argument about burden of proof is merely interminable.

    But the heart of the case of the new atheists, or the heart of their rage, rests on the historical effects of religion. The new atheism in some sense arises with the destruction of the World Trade Center by religious fanatics, and with the reaction to it by the Bush administration, which some folks think also reflected a kind of religious fanaticism. Hitchens argues that religion has retarded progress and knowledge at every turn for millennia, that it is militant ignorance.

     Of course, people have done horrible things to one another for religious reasons. They've instituted dark ages, sanctified their racism or sexism, slavery and genocide. But I suggest to you that we are not in a realistic position to assess the overall effects of religion in human history.

    The idea of "religion" as a distinct zone of or institution within a wider culture really only dates from the modern era in the West. If one were trying to assess the effect of ancient Egyptian religion on ancient Egyptian culture, or of Lakota religion on Lakota culture, one would merely be confused: you don't have that culture without the religion; the two are not distinct. And if you can't isolate it, you can't gauge its effects.

     Even in modern Western culture, trying to figure out what is and what is not an effect of religion is fraught with difficulties. Were the abolitionist or Civil Rights movements effects of religion? Hard to say. What has been the effect of religion on the theory and origin of democracy, among political philosophers such as Locke, or among the founders of the American republic? It is an incredibly complex question, as numerous recent volumes on the issue attest. For that matter, what does reason itself owe religion? The amazing edifice of medieval logic was reared by monks, and Francis Bacon developed scientific method as a testimony to the goodness of God.

   And as an argument for atheism, the question of the effects of religion seems largely irrelevant. Even if belief in God has had by and large negative effects - even if, indeed, it has had only negative effects - that would not show that it's false.

 

Arguments

    There are squadrons of argument for and against the existence of God in the Western tradition. For example, since "God" is defined as the most perfect possible being, and since a being that exists is better than a being that doesn't, God exists (the Ontological Argument). Or: can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it? If he can, he's not all-powerful, because he can't lift the rock. If he can't, he's not all-powerful, because he can't create it. These, I think, have the quality of gamesmanship. They're fun, but surely not at the heart of anyone's real belief.

   That does not hold for the two most interesting arguments, one on each side: the argument from design and the problem of evil.

    The argument from design is, roughly, that the universe displays an order and beauty that is like the products of human intelligence, but on an incomparably greater scale. Everything from a mountain range to the human eye to the laws of physics displays directedness toward ends, and proceeds on aesthetically or morally satisfying principles, and the whole is incomparably beautiful. It must have a cause which makes these features possible.

   Indeed, this is precisely the position of the advocates of intelligent design. It's no scientific theory; it is an expression of love for the world.

    The problem of evil, which found its greatest statement in David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published in 1779), is perhaps better thought of as the problem of undeserved suffering. As Leibniz remarked, if this world is the creation of all-powerful and perfectly-good God, then it is the best of all possible worlds, because God wills the good and whatever God wills is actualized. But this is world in which children get caught in the crossfire, in which famines or genocides take whole populations, in which tsunamis drown alike the good, the bad, and the in-between.

     These arguments are best thought of as two sides of the same coin: they both derive their beliefs about God from the world, and they both mark fundamental truths about our experience.

     Hume demolished the argument from design as thoroughly as any interesting philosophical argument has ever been demolished. In fact, in pointing to the ugliness, dissonance, stupidity, and pain in the world, the problem of evil is itself a reply to the argument from design.

    But there are replies, as well, to the problem of evil, or "theodicies." One plausible version is known as the "soul-making theodicy," a version of which I draw from the contemporary philosopher John Hick. It begins with the oldest move in the book: a universe that includes creatures with free will is better than a universe without them. Indeed, without free will, the universe need not be created at all: God could find out or accomplish nothing unless some events and things were genuinely unpredictable. This world is a proving ground for free souls.

    Free will boils down to the ability to choose good and evil, and in a genuinely free situation, people will sometimes actually choose evil, and bad things will happen. We are the makers of our own souls.

    But of course, many bad things happen that are not the result of anyone's free choice; again, consider natural disasters. Now the soul-making theodicy points out that in order for the universe to constitute a moral proving ground, it has to be governed by mechanical physical laws. Only in such a universe can we predict the consequences of our actions and thus assess them morally.

     A world in which God deflects bullets before they hit children strikes us, offhand, as a better universe than this one. But notice, in a universe like that, it's not wrong to shoot at children. You can't hit the little tykes anyway, so you might as well chase them around with your UZI.  Natural disasters and other unintended nightmares of suffering are the inevitable result of mechanical laws. This might leave us with the question of whether there might be nicer or more forgiving laws of physics, but that is a ridiculously obscure question.

     At any rate, though the problem of evil expresses the cause of my atheism, I acknowledge that it can be answered. For my belief, I'm thrown back on my own responsibility.

 

Commitment to a Mixed Universe

    Genuinely bad things have happened to me in my life: one of my brothers was murdered; another committed suicide. I've been degraded by addiction and mental illness. And I've watched horrors unfold all over the globe. My sense is that this is not the best of all possible worlds, that there is genuinely unredeemed, pointless pain. Some of it is mine.

   By not believing in God, I keep faith with the world's indifference. I love its beauty. I hate its pain. I think both are perfectly real. This seems to me more or less like the kind of world you would get with no moral guidance, no omnipotent maker.

   I do not see any reason to suspend judgment: I'm here, and I commit. I'm perfectly sincere and definite in my belief that there is no God. 

    I can see that there could be comfort in believing otherwise, believing  that somehow all that  suffering and death all makes sense, that everyone gets what they deserve, and it all works out in the end. But to believe that would be to betray my deepest experiences, my real commitments. That's why I am an unreasonable atheist.

 

Crispin Sartwell