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Sunday, December 18, 2011

Questions for an Atheist

For most of a week I have tried to seriously and respectfully offer some repsonse to the comments of an atheist. I have admitted to struggling with my own doubts. I have not offered anything near a clinching argument that God can and must exist. On the other hand, I do think that the atheist position is also one with more than a few weak points. It is that which I would like to address as I close this series out.

One glaring issue is the question, "If there is no God where did all of this come from?" I think that it is only fair to ask, "if a perfect, self sustaining, eternal God is ruled out as source and creator, how then does one explain the eternity of matter?" Matter is constantly in flux and something which constantly changes does not have to exist. Why then does it exist? If the universe could 'just be' why is it impossible to think that a Divine Source could 'just be'?

By extension, on what grounds does an atheist determine that God is answerable for His failures? If there is no God then certainly there is no morality. (This is CS Lewis' main point) I do not deny that many atheists are moral and that some atheists have been humanitarians. This is no personal attack on them. However, it is an attack on the idea of moral right and wrong in a world of blind chance and accident. On what grounds does morality exist? While we may have personal preferences, we can not say anything is moral or immoral. Atheist too often speak in a way that assumes the condition of a world where there is a God and there is a moral core. [I am glad of this. If atheists were consistent then the world would be a worse place.]

I am no scientist, but I have read numerous books which raise interesting questions. One of them is the Law of Thermodynamics. In simplest language, things tend to run down, to disintegrate. How is it that evolution creates advances if the world is running down? Another question, how does evolution create an ape which can do physics, higher math, or create a symphony? The ability to stay alive and avoid saber tooth tigers hardly seems sufficient reason to explain the brain's leap to that level of function. There are additional, more complex questions (like the multiple mechanisms involved in evolution which raises questions on how it can work). None of them prove there is a God, but they certainly raise some doubts about doubting!

Probably the most interesting, to me, is the question of dissatisfaction. If the natural world is all there is, why is their such an aching and longing in the human soul? Why are we never completelysatisfied? From whence the desire for God? The atheist may respond, the desire for God is no proof there is one. This is true, but it is certainly evidence which cannot be brished away. We are hungry, food exists. We are thirsty, drink exists. We are tired, sleep exists. We are lonely, people exist. Most every need/desire has a fulfillment. Why would a world devoid of God generate, spontaneously, a need for God? Why do some of us feel a need to worship, if there is nothing there?

There are so many other questions which should cause an atheist to ponder: why is there beauty? How did joy come to be? What of the bonds which draw us together? I think that the atheist position has plenty to answer for and it is difficult to hold with surety.

Once more, I am not saying any of this proves God is, but it does prove that a sincere atheist has his/her own set of issues to wonder about. It is simply not smarter or more courageous to doubt God. It is not more human or humane to reject the idea that He exists. It is not more logical or rational to posit a Godless universe, here because it is, which somehow generates by sheer accident lower life forms which then, by sheer accident, developed into antelopes, aardvarks and ants (just to name the A's). I have my doubts, but an atheist should, too. And if it is possible (even probable) that there is a God, all sorts of things follow.

As for Jesus, His resurrection also enters the mix. Strange goings on indeed, if the world is not the creation of an unseen God! So I will continue, in my deeply flawed way to try to know, love,  and serve the Lord and await the Day of Unveiling.

6 comments:

  1. Jeff, thanks for your note earlier and for all the effort you've put into this. You have, as you say, devoted a great deal of time and space on your blog to addressing some issues and even risked frustrating some of your readers in doing so. I appreciate your willingness to try to engage with a point of view opposed to your own.

    I am going to respond, not for the sake of prolonging the discussion but because (1) I never like to evade a serious question and (2) while the questions you pose of the atheist position are well known, I can't know if your other readers have ever heard anything like reasonable answers from atheists, so I will attempt to offer some, as food for thought. I have no more interest in persuading people not to believe than you are set on trying to argue someone into belief; indeed, I often urge Christians to throw themselves into their Christian practice with everything that is in them. Only then can they be satisfied, finally, as to whether its outcome answers their expectations.

    (When I tried to post this, the web site said it was too long, so I'll have to split it into several posts.)

    "If there is no God, where did the universe come from?" Christians ask this of atheists, while atheists ask where God came from, whereupon they are told that God didn't have to come from anywhere, but the universe did. The two sides would seem to be at an impasse. Still, it is reasonable to ask, even if religious belief were ruled out altogether, why there is something rather than nothing.

    In our current state of knowledge, the best answer is probably "I don't know, and neither do the religious." I read a dissent on String Theory in Scientific American last year whose author said it seems to promise everything and deliver nothing; whether that is true, I know far too little to say. What I do know is that it is hardly an answer to say "We can't explain a material cause of the universe; therefore, there is nothing but to conclude that it was made by an immaterial spirit." That is, indeed, a grammatical English sentence, but it adds nothing to knowledge and explains nothing--any more than, in the days before we knew what caused AIDS, it was an "explanation" to attribute AIDS to spirits of the dead, as was done by some African witch doctors. That too was a grammatical English sentence, but it told us nothing.

    We atheists often suspect that what the religious believe in is really a "God of the gaps"--that is, "God" is basically a code word that stands for "whatever science has not yet found out." But even if someone somehow convinced me that science would never satisfactorily account for the universe's origin, I would still be left wondering how an immaterial entity could create and manipulate anything physical. In other words, faith in a God as Creator must involve believe in at least two things: that He is there at all, and that, having no physical mass or energy, He could create and move things that did. I can think of no reason to believe any such thing, and I think that if Christians, not thinking of the implications for their faith, were told that someone's house had been knocked down by an "immaterial tsunami," they would be equally puzzled and wonder what such a statement could possibly mean, if indeed it meant anything at all. I wonder the same when I am told that galaxies, with their immense mass, were caused by an immaterial spirit. (Te be continued)

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  2. (Continued)

    But the question then arises, on the part of many believers, how we skeptics can presume to judge questions of right or wrong, if there is no God. My immediate answer is very simple: where do right and wrong come from for *God*? This almost always causes believers to either blink in surprise or gasp in indignation, as though any reasonable person ought to understand that the question was settled already, but I can't see that it is. I readily grant that my mere say-so about morals can have no binding claim on my neighbor, but I don't see how the problem is solved for a Supreme Being. Why does *He* call things right or wrong, and why do *we* agree to call what he does "good" (other than the fact that we are afraid He will destroy us if we persist in disagreeing)?

    Does good have its own inherent meaning, such that God is merely the best interpreter, teacher, and practitioner of it? If so, it is anterior to God, and He is not its origin. Does good, on the other hand, exist for no reason than that God makes it up out of His own head? If so, how is God any better off than the predicament of which believers warn me: that I will be forced to make up my own standard? Isn't that what He has done? What's arbitrary (i.e., purely self-generated without regard to an exterior standard) for one is arbitrary for another. How does God transcend this merely because He is bigger and more powerful than we are? I have never met a Christian who could give a satisfactory answer.

    In other words, God is in the same boat I am. If He can make up his own right and wrong, so can I. If no one needs to listen to me, they don't have to listen to Him, either--the difference being only that I don't have lightning bolts at my disposal. If his commandments are indeed best, their innate value must depend on value in itself, not on its mere origin in God's mouth--any more than my neighbor ought to listen to my advice, no matter how wise or well meant, for no reason than that it came from me.

    In the end, again, the chief difference between God and me seems to come down to the lightning bolt. And that has nothing to do with right or wrong.

    Apparently not having considered this point, believers often make comments to the effect that, lacking belief in God, one may as well revert to savagery. You seem to reflect that line of thought when you say, in your post, that you are glad atheists are not consistent, or the world would be a much worse place.

    It seems to me that the religious are treading on delicate ground here. My answer, and I think it is obvious from history, is that religion is saved from its own worse excesses by modernity; when religion was in charge, one result was threatening Galileo with instruments of torture and another was the Salem Witch Trials. Where religion is in charge today, one result is an autistic boy being smothered to death under a blanket by his mother and his pastor as they try to exorcise him, not understanding autism, and another is a 61-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia being publicly beheaded, as happened this week, for "witchcraft." And if these responses seem like cheap shots, I would remind you that C.S. Lewis poses the question, perhaps in "Mere Christianity," whether, if we believed in this day that witches really existed, it would in fact be right and proper to impose extreme punishments on these "filthy quislings" (his words).

    So it seems to me that argument can cut both ways. If a believer professes himself glad that atheists aren't consistent, I am equally glad that in the west, at least, the religious no longer have the courage of some of their convictions. Otherwise, we would have, as we did in Colonial times, people being fined or put in the stocks for neglecting church attendance or arrested for riding on Sunday (which actually happened to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson when they went driving out in their carriage on a visit to Vermont). (To be continued)

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  3. (Continued)

    Believers also raise questions about the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a problem for evolution, but honestly (and I readily admit that my knowledge of science is quite spotty--which is why I subscribe to Scientific American, though I don't always get what they are saying), such questions must be based on a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If evolution is somehow refuted or impaired by the Second Law, so is the birth of a baby, this year's crop harvest, and the fact that there is unbearable heat in the Sahara, despite the fact that the universe is slowly running down. Evolution does not depend upon a *net increase* in energy (which, I believe, would violate another law of thermodynamics) but simply identifies a temporary *concentration* of energy--just as there is a finite amount of water in the world's oceans and yet we still see waves of terrifying height and power, but no one is arguing that the net volume of water on earth has been increased thereby. As to evolution itself, I can quote no one better than evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (who, you may know, was also a devout Orthodox Christian): "Nothing in biology makes sense without it."

    Still, many believers ask, what about the unexplained and unquenchable longing that we all feel? Mustn't that prove there is a God who alone can fill this need, just as food satisfies our hunger? I'm not sure it does, and honestly, it strikes me as a tad silly to suppose that a longing proves the existence of its object. Now it's true than when "The Firm" was being filmed here in 1993, I "longed" to meet Jeanne Tripplehorne, and to my amazement, I *did,* purely by happenstance, when she and I both walked into the Schnuck's at Union and McLean at the same moment, but I wouldn't try to erect that into a theory. If that seems as if I am not taking the point seriously enough, my response is that the whole thing strikes me as an attempt to make respectable what may be, at bottom, nothing but wishful thinking.

    But aren't there, after all, deeper and more serious longings than the desire to meet a movie actress, and how do we account for them? Certainly there are. Every year, I read through an old set of books available only online. The books are volumes of a not-very-good novel published around 1830. I reread them because I wish very much that I really knew people like a particular set of people who are part of the story in these books. They strike me as wise and admirable in an overall way that no other group I have ever met has, in real life (though I readily acknowledge that the folks I met at St. Andrew's, as a group, were among the kindest and most gracious I've ever met).

    In any case, will I ever meet such a set as in these books? It's not impossible, certainly, but my mere longing for it doesn't mean it must happen. Such reasoning, honestly, strikes me as rather obviously defective on its face. (To be continued)

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  4. (Continued)

    I have read most of C.S. Lewis's apologetic works and respect his intelligence a great deal, though I must also point out that comments in Lewis's own writings were among the things that led to thoughts arising in my head that resulted in atheism. For instance, in "Out of the Silent Planet," discussing the ousiarchs, he notes the mistake some races had made in worshiping the ousiarchs themselves instead of their Creator, "by fatal but not inexplicable misprision, not realizing how far above them the stairs even of created being extended." Indeed. That made me realize, eventually, that we, perceiving only in three dimensions of space and one of time, could have no way of knowing if a "spiritual" being we encountered was merely a remarkable but still created being or the Infinite Creator of all.

    Lewis also made an observation that I have never forgotten. I think it's in "Surprised by Joy" that he says that in his skeptical youth, he adopted the common attitude toward religion, that it was "a mere farrago of nonsense, a sort of habitual error into which man was endemically prone to blunder--while ours [Christianity] by a fortunate exception, was exactly true."

    Exactly. I heartily wish Lewis had pondered that more. My point is that while atheism may seem shocking and even offensive to some believers, it is *the same attitude they have already toward other religions.* No Christian is in serious doubt that Joseph Smith's golden tablets, or the Native American legend of a giant raven hatching humanity out of a giant egg, or an airplane being saved from crashing because a passenger saw a vision of Sai Baba, are complete and utter nonsense; no Protestant has any misgivings for a moment as to whether the martyred St. Denis really picked up his severed head and walked several miles while the head preached to observers along the way. Our common sense tells us at once that such tales are not only rather ridiculous but hardly worth investigating by any serious person.

    But when it comes to Jesus walking on the water, all of a sudden, the tune changes to "Oh, but *this,* of course, must be true--after all, we're talking about *Jesus* here! Of course all that *other* stuff is nonsense, but this is the *Bible*!"

    I can only say that I take the Christian's attitude toward all other religions and apply it to everything--with no special exceptions. I told you in a note the other day that if I have any principle amounting to a religion, it is that A is A. Well one corollary of that, for me, is that hokum is hokum. It is one thing to admire Jesus's teachings. It is another to believe that someone rose from the dead, an event that does not occur in reality. Or, if one is willing to believe that, he may as well also believe the report of a witness at the funeral of Caesar Augustus, who "saw" Augustus's spirit rising from the funeral pyre to be received into heaven by the Olympian Gods. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. (To be continued)

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  5. (Continued)

    But there is one final point. You ask why, if there is no God, some still feel like worshiping, and here of course you are being too kind and discreet to point out that I, an atheist, have already admitted this to you as a present personal experience. Of course I can't account for it and don't know what its outcome may be. It is certainly remarkable. As I explained to friends recently, it was as if I were in a nicely decorated room, with its various furniture, hangings, bric-a-brac, and so forth and suddenly happened to touch a wall sconce or something and felt a sensation of compelling warmth, sweetness, and power. And yes, it does evoke feelings of worship and adoration. One thought that keeps coming back to me is to wonder, what if all the things I hold to be abstract principles are in fact personified in one Mind? So one might say that at present, I am haunted by such a possibility, though not in a way that evokes foreboding or dread, but as if I were being wooed.

    I do not deny the reality of my feelings, but I do believe there an important divide between the rational way of looking at things and the religious way. It could certainly be said that we live in a strange world and may meet with uncanny experiences. The religious often think that the skeptic must be suppressing his feelings about such experiences and cutting himself off from a part of his own humanity. I reply that the skeptic is simply being scrupulous about distinguishing between feelings and beliefs.

    I know, from what reputable scientists say, that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. I *believe* that extreme weather events like Irene are likely to grow more frequent and more severe as a result. I *feel* that civilization will fail to respond appropriately and that large parts of the planet will become simply uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

    The first sentence is knowledge, based on fact. The second is a projection based on what I take to be a reasonable inference from the facts. The third is my personal feeling based on what I think is true of the ways humans often respond to strange and uncomfortable matters. The first sentence is beyond dispute. The second is reasonable, though it could be mistaken. The third is arguable and not improbable but, again, could be proven wrong by events.

    The religious person too often makes no such distinctions and seems almost proud of the fact that he does not. If anything, he seems to disdain them and view religion as a license to excuse himself from rigorous thinking. (To be continued)

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  6. (Continued)

    In August, a year ago, I drove 90 miles Pinson Mounds State Park which, as you probably know, contains a collection of mounds built by Native American cultures of the Middle Woodland Period, 2,000 years ago. I came to one that is 72 feet high and is the second-highest such mound in the United States. It was in use at the time of Christ and is thought to have been built for a priestly caste who used it to make astronomical observations. Wooden steps lead to the top, where there is an observation platform. The rest of the mound is overgrown with trees and shrubbery.

    I approached it alone, in the afternoon, and as I did so, I thought of the description of the ruined palace of the ancient Roman king, Latinus, which impressed witnesses with an uncanny air, "Awful with the sanctity of elder days" (this passage, I think from Virgil, is mentioned in C.S. Lewis's "The Problem of Pain"). I had a strong sense of something "haunting and severe," and as I climbed the steps, felt as if I were going up to be "judged" by something. When I got to the top, I had a very strong feeling that suggested that everything one had ever done or said in life was a grievous error and that there was nothing to do but to either turn around and go in the opposite direction or else throw oneself from a great height in despair.

    Lingering on the platform, I also had a very strong sense that there was something formidable and powerful at work. It was as if there were some great motor humming, such that if one put out one's hand haphazardly, he might draw it back with his fingertips missing. I didn't feel anything actually malevolent, but had a feeling "This is not to be trifled with."

    Eventually, I went back down to ground level and continued hiking through the site. When I reached an ancient burial site a short time later, I felt a feeling similar to what I had felt at the top of the mound, though not as strong.

    At the end of my visit, I returned to the little museum they had on the grounds and asked the staff if they had ever been to the top of the mound and if they had sensed anything strange. They replied, "You better believe it. A group came here last year with divining rods and went up there and when they came back down, they said the rods had begun moving of their own accord and they felt something uncanny there. They said they never wanted to go up there again."

    I ascended the mound again three months later, with my son. Neither of us felt anything.

    The difference between a believer and an unbeliever is this. The unbeliever acknowledges his experience and draws no conclusions, since there is really nothing to draw from.

    The believer, in my observation, takes his feelings as revelations, publishes a pamphlet about them, announces the formation of a new sect, solicits members, begins elaborating on his original "revelation" and constructs a whole story, including the supposed names and lineages of the ancient priest-astronomers who practiced there, and guides other visitors to the site, who begin to claim that they had miraculous experiences.

    I guess a lot of it is just human nature.

    In any case, these are some observations offered in response to your questions, and hopefully, they may furnish food for thought. Again, I appreciate all the time you have taken to address the issues that have come up in our discussion. Best wishes for your continued work.

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