What If God Disappeared?

When I watched the first few seconds of this video some weeks ago, I didn't appreciate it. But now that I've watched it completely through...

Religion and the Law

In response to a column by David Harsanyi in the Denver Post, letter writer Martin Voelker rightly points out that "churches aggressively push their arbitrary 'divine' rules into U.S. laws." How? Many religious people want to outlaw abortion, restrict or outlaw birth control, ban pornography (however defined) and limit naughty language, legally discriminate against homosexuals, etc.

After that Voelker gets off track. He claims that churches "reap billions of public dollars for their tax-exempt enterprises." But this confuses a subsidy with a tax break. If we're going to have non-profits for any sort of ideological advocacy, then the rules must be extended to religious groups. However, religious groups should have to play by the same rules as everyone else. (Ultimately, I think all groups should be "tax-exempt," which would eliminate problems associated with those rules.)

Voelker also quotes a line from an atheist ad: "Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings." But the religious will shoot back that the likes of Hitler have misused science. Natural science is applied, specialized knowledge, and the proper application of science depends on a sound philosophical foundation.

However, Voelker does suggest that, in the broader sense, ethics can be a science; he writes that "we must negotiate what constitutes acceptable ethical behavior based on observations we can agree on." This is a little ambiguous; agreement does not demonstrate ethical behavior -- the goal is to agree on what is true. For a start on that, I recommend such works as the recent book by Tara Smith.

The Theist's Sneer

Burt Prelutsky writes:

Human beings like to believe they're totally rational creatures. To take an extreme example, atheists are convinced they can prove that God doesn't exist. This is a particularly fascinating phenomenon because among those who believed in God’s existence are such brainy people as Albert Einstein, Rene Descartes, Albert Schweitzer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Sebastian Bach, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Thomas Aquinas, John Milton, Michelangelo, Herman Melville and even the deeply cynical Graham Greene. While representing the opposing point of view, we have the likes of Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Bill Maher. And yet, any number of atheists who have to take off their shoes in order to count up to 11 are absolutely convinced they're right.

If theists are so convinced they're right, why do some of them resort to such smear campaigns against atheists?

Prelutsky suggests that, if you're smart you believe in God, whereas if you're unserious (or worse) you don't. He substitutes an appeal to authority for an argument, yet he neglects to mention the serious authorities for atheism. (He likewise neglects to mention the various tyrants, racists, and murderers who have invoked God's name.)

Prelutsky's attack on atheists is gratuitous given his main topic: a criticism of global-warming alarmism. Indeed, his attack undermines his main case. Can Prelutsky prove that human-caused global warming doesn't exist? Many smart people claim it does, while many unserious people claim it doesn't. Why does the onus of proof apply in one case but not the other?

Most disturbing is Prelutsky's attack of the view that people are rational. Yes, he's criticizing those who feign rationality without displaying it. But his comment, in the context of his ad hominem attacks, betrays a deeper cynicism toward human rationality as such. Arguing against the belief in God, he suggests, can be no more consequential than taking off one's shoes. But what does that say about people who claim to have rational reasons for believing in God? Maybe that's why he punts on the reasons, invoking the authority of his own side while sneering at the other.

Atheism Is Not a Religion

Often we hear religious apologists claim that atheism is just another religion, and that one must have "faith" to be an atheist just as one must have faith to worship Jesus.

But atheism is not a positive belief system at all. It merely rules out belief in God and the supernatural. Atheism is no more a religion than "a-Santa-Claus-ism" is. It is possible and desirable for an atheist to build a system of beliefs rooted in the evidence and integrated by reason. Such beliefs do not compose a religion, either, nor are they expressions of religious faith.

Religious pluralism -- the ability of people of many faiths or no faith to live together in harmony -- rests on the idea that people can reach some common ground beyond religion, a common recognition of facts and reason available to each of our natural faculties. What happens when no such common ground exists?

A recent letter in the Free Press illustrates the problems:

The barriers to truth on this issue regarding prayer by government officials are primarily psychological, not logical. Most of the confusion is born from a misunderstanding of proper "church" and state separation, along with two logical impossibilities -- actual neutrality in government and genuine religious pluralism. Both assertions are nonsense. ... [A]theism actually presupposes and surreptitiously relies on theism to even have the appearance of cogency.

In other words, absent a common ground of reason, people of each religion must attempt to enforce their faith by law, to the extent of discouraging (by means unstated) other religions. The word for such a system is theocracy.

Are Secularists Responsible for Islamic Terror?

I nominate the following quote for the Stupidest Argument of the Year award:

[The] extreme form of Western secularism is exactly what is alienating traditional Muslims and pushing them toward militant radicalism. Islamists such as Osama bin Laden actually make their case against the United States and the West on the grounds that our cultures have abandoned Christianity!

From bin Laden’s perspective and that of his allies, the conflict is between Muslim-led forces of monotheism and morality against Western forces of atheism and immorality. Though he refers to the U.S. as a Crusader state, his arguments clearly show that he believes the West is intent on imposing atheistic and pagan values on Muslims, not Christianity.

Kurshid Ahmad, the influential Pakistani leader of Jamaat-i-Islami, says, "Had Western culture been based on Christianity, on morality, and on faith, the language and modus operandi of the contact and conflict would have been different. But that is not the case." The assertion that the international campaign of political leaders against Muslim terror is a battle between two opposing forms of religious fundamentalism is patently false.

This argument is similar to one that Dinesh D'Souza makes. The writer, Steve Hagerman, is correct that the fundamental clash is not between Islam and Christianity. It is between theocracy and liberty. Sure, if the United States lived under a Christian theocracy, it might not be targeted by Islamic terrorists, because the United States would become just another third-world slum.

But what, exactly, is Hagerman's point? That we should act as crazy as the Islamists so that they no longer attack us?

Objective Standard Versus New Atheists

Appropriately, it was not the Christians who devastated the so-called New Atheists, but the Objectivists.

In his article for The Objective Standard, "The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists," Alan Germani reviews the ethical theories of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins.

In brief, Hitchens holds that ethical knowledge is innate and Harris clings to intuitionism, while Dennett and Dawkins turn to evolutionary programming. The first set of ideas collapse to personal subjectivism, while the evolutionary claims collapse to social subjectivism. For details and key quotations, please read Germani's entire article.

The Christian critics of the New Atheists point out, quite correctly, that without God they are unable to formulate an objective ethics. Of course, with God all the Christians can formulate is an ethic that combines deistic, social, and personal subjectivism. Ultimately, it is a grand clash of subjectivists of different stripes.

What is needed is a morality rooted not in the alleged pronouncements of God, nor in the arbitrary pronouncements of men, nor in the alleged insights of some inner sense or intuition. Instead, we need a truly objective morality rooted in the facts of human life.

Probability and God

London atheists purchased bus advertisements stating, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

This is a poor message on a number of levels. Christians would dispute the notion that they "worry" about God's existence; they would claim that they rejoice in God's existence. Similarly, they would argue that they enjoy their lives because of their connection with God. The advertisement suggests that that the most important aspect of God, if he existed, would be that he makes us worry and not enjoy our lives. Christians will sensibly respond that such a message says more about the atheists than it does about God.

The fundamental question is whether God exists. Here too the advertisement fails. First, if "there's probably no God," then that means God may exist. What is the probability? Is there a 20 percent chance of God? A 49.9 percent chance?

Interestingly, Richard Dawkins helped fund the advertisement. I was surprised to read the following segment from the AP's article:

Dawkins said that as an atheist he "wasn't wild" about the ad's assertion that there was "probably" no God.

[Campaign organizer Ariane] Sherine said the word was included to ensure the posters didn't breach transit advertising regulations, which stipulate ads should not offend religious people.

I don't know whether the buses in question receive tax subsidies. If not, then they are within their rights to set advertising policy. If so, then the policy constitutes government censorship.

Offhand, I don't see why religious people would take more offense at the claim that "there is no God" than the claim "there's probably no God."

However, the notion that God's existence may be subject to probabilities is absurd. A probability is a measure of human ignorance and inability to perfectly predict the future. To take the obvious examples, if I flip a coin, the probability of getting heads is one-half; if I roll a die the probability of rolling a three is one-sixth. I can know that there is a die, and I can know by testing it that its weight is evenly distributed and its sides smoothly cut.

God is something else entirely. To say "there is a probability that X exists" is to say that we know of cases in which X does exist, and cases in which X does not exist, and in a given set of circumstances X exists some fraction of the time. For example, "there's probably no beetle of a certain type living in this tree," because we've evaluated a bunch of trees and found the beetle only in a minority of them.

To talk about a probability of God existing is to take the concept outside of the context that gives it meaning.

The claim that God exists is arbitrary. It is based on no evidence, and the very concept of a supernatural God is absurd. The proper response to such a claim is to reject it, not pretend that it somehow falls within the scope of probability.

You Are Not Alone

COCORE will purchase eleven Colorado billboards stating, "Don't believe in God? You are not alone," the Rocky Mountain News reports.

COCORE is "an umbrella organization of 11 groups ranging from the Boulder Heretics to the Humanists of Colorado." I wanted a bit more detail, so I looked up the organization's web page.

The Colorado Coalition of Reason consists of various groups listed at its web page. It also has a reading list that, while interesting, serves as a reminder that atheism is not a positive philosophy. Atheism means merely a lack of belief in God (and by extension a supernatural realm), which hardly implies that any of a particular atheist's positive beliefs are correct. It matters far more what you believe in.

Gazette Slights Atheists

The generally-thoughtful Gazette of Colorado Springs gets off track in a recent editorial. While there's much wrong with the piece, I want to focus on one particular paragraph:

This column has advocated religious liberties for atheists, citing case law that defines atheism as just another religion - as in just another unproven and forever unprovable belief. This column has applauded a federal court ruling that forced prison wardens to allow prisoners an atheist study session. The court allowed the study session for the same reason wardens allow Bible study meetings: atheism is a religion, therefore subject to protections and restrictions of the First Amendment.

Notice the subjectivism inherent in this view. The editorial presumes that religion is superior to atheism, yet all religious beliefs boil down to "unproven and forever unprovable" beliefs. In other words, the point of religion is not to get to the truth, but to promote some particular and entirely arbitrary position. Later, the editorial explicitly invokes ignorance to "justify" religious beliefs. This shows an irony common among Christians. Christians blast atheism as subjectivist and relativistic, yet many of these same Christians ultimately rest their case on subjectivism and relativism (and all of them implicitly do so).

What is needed is an alternative that is neither faith-based nor subjectivist, but based on the objective facts of reality. True, we don't know everything about reality, but we can know a lot, and we can continually expand our real knowledge. With the advances particularly of Aristotle and Ayn Rand, we have available to us an objective moral foundation.

As for the First Amendment, atheism is not protected because it is "just another religion." That amendment states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." The principle is that the government ought neither promote nor hinder religion. Instead, the government's job is to protect individual rights. Freedom of conscience is the broader principle inherent in the First Amendment, and this properly applies to all ideas, not just religious ones. However, while it's wrong for government to force the religious to finance non-religious ideas, the First Amendment expressly limits government support for religion.

If There Is No God

Dennis Prager's "new" article, "If There Is No God," recycles a variety of bogus claims about atheism, yet at least it grants, "[I]t is not possible to prove (or disprove) God's existence." However, if it is not possible to prove something, it is not necessary to disprove it. Arbitrary claims should be dismissed out of hand. Nevertheless, because claims about God involve absurd metaphysical presumptions, it is possible to disprove God's existence.

Without God, Prager asserts, "there is no good and evil," "there is no objective meaning to life," "[l]ife is ultimately a tragic fare," and so forth. Of course this is complete nonsense. Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, which rejects supernaturalism, shows that good and evil are rooted in human life and its requirements and that one's life, properly lived, can be meaningful and joyous.

Moreover, supernaturalism deflates to the same subjectivism that Prager criticizes; good and evil become dependent on the whims of a supernatural being, and "objective" comes to mean adherence to arbitrary doctrines. A better title for Prager's article would have been simply: "Projection."

'Imagine No Religion'

At least The Denver Post's Electa Draper has written about something other than a religious group or theme. She has turned her attention to the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which has purchased a Denver billboard stating, "Imagine No Religion."

The following segment of Draper's article gave me an exasperated chuckle:

Passer-by Joseph Sanchez, 23, said the billboard didn't upset him but that he doesn't agree with it.

"I'm not really big on organized religion, but I love religion," Sanchez said. "It's important for people to keep religion somewhere in the back of their mind but not to take it too seriously."

The ultimate effect of pragmatism on Americans is that many of them no longer take ideas -- any ideas -- seriously.

Unfortunately, FFRF's message is a bad one. The group explicitly refers to John Lennon's song "Imagine," which anticipates global socialism of "no countries" and "no possessions."

We don't have to imagine the consequences of Marxism: we need merely look to the Soviet Union and Maoist China, which slaughtered scores of millions.

The absence of religion is no substitute for the presence of a rational, this-worldly morality rooted in the requirements of the individual's life and mind.

Perkins vs. D'Souza: Miracles

Greg Perkins continues to show why Dinesh D'Souza's Christian apologetics fails. I've reviewed his first post, regarding the alleged harms of atheism. In his second short essay, Perkins explains why miracles are impossible.

Perkins offers a nice summary of the nature of causality and its validation. He explains especially well the fact that miracles do not merely refer to something unusual and unexplained; they refer to something supernatural:

We are not talking about just any improbable happening, and not even something which violates our current understanding of the world as expressed in scientific laws, like D'Souza tries to argue. The entire point of miracles is to provide evidence of divine intervention, and surprises which may only reveal a current lack of understanding can't accomplish that: by that measure, even the tricks of magicians would count as miracles. Indeed, much of what we enjoy in our modern world would have been considered miraculous in previous times, from vaccines and medications, to cars, and the Internet and on and on. Yet none of these prove or even suggest a possibility that there is a God. No, a meaningful miracle is not merely something which would violate the laws of nature as we currently understand them, but something which would be a violation of any such law we could ever discover. That is, it would have to be a violation of lawfulness itself.

The epistemological criticism is that miracles require a leap into faith beyond reason rooted in sensory evidence. Before people knew what caused lightning, many religionists said God caused it. The appropriate answer was, "I don't know what causes it -- yet." The metaphysical criticism is that supernaturalism, upon which miracles are based, contradicts the law of causality.

Perkins vs. D'Souza: Alleged Harms of Atheism

Greg Perkins is writing a series of essays for NoodleFood criticizing Dinesh D'Souza's Christian apologetics. In his first essay, Perkins refutes D'Souza's claim that atheism is responsible for the horrors of socialism.

Perkins argues:

[A]theism is not itself an ideology; there is no such thing as an "atheist mindset" or an "atheist movement." Atheism per se hasn't inspired and doesn't lead to anything in particular because it is an effect -- not a cause -- and there are countless reasons for a person to not believe in God, ranging from vicious to innocent to noble. ... [W]hat would a committed Communist and an Objectivist have in common -- regarding what they do believe, why they believe it, how that leads them to live personally, the sort of social system they would strive for in government? Nothing. They are polar opposites in principle and practice, across the philosophical board. ...

The important contrast is not atheism vs. religion, but rather rationality vs. irrationality.

Perkins goes on to argue that totalitarian regimes fundamentally reject and drive out rationality.

Perkins relies on the same distinction to undercut D'Souza's claims about the benefits of Christianity:

Besides trying to tar his opponents with the worst atrocities in history, D'Souza regularly tries to give Christianity credit for mankind's positive strides. For instance, he argues in an op-ed that "Christianity has illuminated the greatest achievements of the culture" such as the rise of science, human rights, equality for women and minorities, ending slavery, and so forth. That "when you examine history you find that all of these values came into the world because of Christianity." He contrasts Christianity and atheism, saying that these advances arrived in Christendom and by the hands of Christians -- not atheists. And he uses this to score extra points in debate by asking his opponents what atheism has to offer humanity, other than the chance to undermine all that progress.

Once again, such a comparison is fundamentally confused. Recall that atheism is not itself an ideology and therefore doesn't lead people to do anything in particular -- good or bad. So again we need to approach the issue in terms that will actually shed some light. The illuminating question to consider is: What does reason offer humanity over faith?

Obviously Perkins's essay is not the final word on the matter, but it is an excellent short essay on the subject that merits broad readership. D'Souza has been an effective debater against the "New Atheists," but his positions are fundamentally flawed, and Perkins is going far in pointing this out.

Americans Wary of Atheists

The good news for atheists is that they're more popular than Scientologists (a fact for which they can thank God for Tom Cruise). A new Gallup poll (via Paul Hsieh) reveals U.S. attitudes toward "religious and spiritual groups." While 52 percent of the population views Scientology negatively, a mere 45 percent so view atheism.

I guess the good news is that 54 percent of the population has a positive (13 percent) or neutral (41 percent) view of atheists. I can live with neutral, because, as I've pointed out previously, atheism is not a positive philosophy; it does not indicate what a person does believe. Thus, without knowing the particular views of an atheist, it is impossible to form a positive or negative evaluation of that atheist. (The rest of the categories indicate a philosophical orientation, except the one for "Jews," which can indicate both a religion and an ethnicity.)

For the same reason, the high negative rating is troublesome, as it indicates a prejudice. Just as most Christians in the U.S. are basically good people, so are most atheists. Indeed, some of the finest people I've ever met are atheists. Yet many people view atheists negatively because they are taught by various Christian leaders that atheism is synonymous with socialism, subjectivism, Peter Singer, etc., which is simply not the case. All of the atheists that I personally know support capitalism, individual rights, and objective morality.

Michael Medved's Anti-Atheist Bias

If somebody claimed that a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Mormon, or member of any other mainstream religion, was not qualified to hold political office merely by virtue of that religious affiliation, regardless of the broader moral and political beliefs and statements of the candidate, the critic's claims would be laughed off as silly prejudice. While it's true that Mitt Romney's Mormon religion hurt his candidacy, it's also true that Mike Huckabee's slights against Mormonism hurt Huckabee's candidacy.

But, in the world of Christian political apologetics, Michael Medved can grotesquely misrepresent the nature of atheism and claim with a straight face that no atheist should be elected president. Medved writes:

Actually, there's little chance that atheists will succeed in placing one of their own in the White House at any time in the foreseeable future, and it continues to make powerful sense for voters to shun potential presidents who deny the existence of God. An atheist may be a good person, a good politician, a good family man (or woman), and even a good patriot, but a publicly proclaimed non-believer as president would, for three reasons, be bad for the country.

I agree that there's little chance of an atheist being elected as president any time in the near future. But Medved's reasons for why that's a good thing are absurd.

Medved's first error, contained in the quoted paragraph above, is to presume that atheism is a unifying doctrine; atheists, by his lights, recognize and support "their own." But atheism is not an ideology. It does not indicate what a person believes. It indicates only one thing that a person does not believe. I have more in common with many Christians than I do with some atheists. I could develop a long list of Christians that I would support politically over a list of particular atheists.

So what are Medved's three reasons?

First, he claims that an atheist president would suffer "hollowness and hypocrisy at state occassions." "For instance, try to imagine an atheist president issuing the annual Thanksgiving proclamation. To whom would he extend thanks in the name of his grateful nation –-the Indians in Massachusetts?" Yet I've heard atheists give very powerful, highly moving talks. On the topic of Thanksgiving, Craig Biddle writes, "Rational, productive people -- whether philosophers, scientists, inventors, artists, businessmen, military strategists, friends, family, or yourself -- are who deserve to be thanked for the goods on which your life, liberty, and happiness depend." While Biddle's strong criticisms of religion would not be appropriate for a president's speech, his answer regarding whom should be thanked could be appropriately adapted to a presidential address. To take another example, Alex Epstein has written a moving tribute to America's veterans.

Second, Medved claims, an atheist could not connect with the people. Medved writes:

[E]mbrace of Jewish or Mormon practices doesn't show contempt for the Protestant or Catholic faith of the majority, but affirmation of atheism does. ... A chief executive who publicly discards the core belief in God that drives the life and work of most of his countrymen can never achieve that sort of connection. A president with a mandate doesn't have to be a regular church-goer, or even a convinced believer; but he can't openly reject the religious sensibility of nearly all his predecessors and nearly all his fellow citizens. A leader who touts his non-belief will, even with the best of intentions, give the impression that he looks down on the people who elected him.

But holding that a person's belief in God is unwarranted is not the same thing as "looking down" on the person. For example, Ayn Rand was an atheist, and yet she held and expressed enormous respect for the American "sense of life" and for the common sense often displayed by the American public. Indeed, often Rand was most critical of the atheistic (and socialistic) elite.

The difference between atheists and religionists is, in this context, hardly more significant than the difference among peoples of different religions or different political ideologies. For example, as an atheist, I think that Catholics are wrong to believe in God. But when I was a Protestant, I was taught as a child that Catholics will burn for all eternity in Hell. (Only some people in my church held that view.) Obviously, the tensions between people of different religions can be much more severe than the tensions between atheists and religionists. To take another example, the differences between Barack Obama and conservative Christians are enormous.

Finally, Medved argues, atheists cannot win the war against Islamist terrorism. "[T]he ongoing war on terror represents a furious battle of ideas and we face devastating handicaps if we attempt to beat something with nothing." Here Medved makes two errors. First, he assumes that atheists believe in nothing, which is ridiculous. Again, atheism does not define one's positive beliefs. Second, Medved supposes that religionists are better-equipped to take on the terrorists. But Bush has failed to stop terrorist advances precisely because of his faith-based war, which places altruistic nation-building ahead of American defense. Numerous publications by the Ayn Rand Institute point to the problems with Bush's approach and the path to a rational alternative.

Americans should not elect an atheist because he or she is an atheist, any more than Americans should elect a Christian because he or she is a Christian. Instead, Americans should elect somebody who understands the nature of individual rights and is prepared to defend the rights of every American, regardless of religious belief.