Diagnosing the Problem: Atheists
From my perspective, the problem with atheists is summed up in three words: undeserved intellectual haughtiness.
There are two main ways I can break down this accusation, and both these ways depend on an attitude which I have observed among atheists.
Intro to the First Attitude
The first attitude that I have observed among atheists is that, though they will never say it aloud, most atheists genuinely think themselves to be intellectually superior to theists.
That is, many atheists genuinely believe themselves to be more rational than theists.
By more “rational,” I specifically mean: 1. being less self-contradictory in one’s beliefs, and 2. being more justified in one’s beliefs.
Basically, the attitude can be summed up by the fact that most atheists think that being an atheist, i.e., lacking in belief in God, is a sufficient condition in and of itself to make a person a “good (rational) thinker.”
This is demonstrably false—atheists are not, on average, any more rational than the average theist. That is, atheists contradict themselves no less than theists, and aren’t more justified in their beliefs than theists. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the average atheists still believes in morality and free will, even though there is as much evidence for these things as there is for the existence of God.
Intro To The Second Attitude
The second attitude, is that many atheists genuinely live under the impression that atheism is ground-breaking.
That its somehow impressive to not believe in the idea of “a man in the sky.” (I use this phraseology deliberately, not because I believe theists define God as “a man in the sky,” but because I believe atheists do).
In other words, this attitude basically constitutes a demonstration of the fact that most atheists only operate on a very reductionist, simplistic understanding of theology and use that misunderstanding as the basis for their rejection of God.
Second Glance: First Attitude
This is the attitude of believing that a simple lack of belief about God is a qualification for being a “good thinker.” By “good thinker,” I mean a rational one—by which I mean, in turn, a thinker whose beliefs are generally more justified and self-consistent than those of an irrational thinker. However, this attitude is demonstrably false, on account of the fact that the average atheist still clings to many beliefs which are irrational in their own right.
Firstly, as a general principle, the simple rationality or irrationality of a particular starting belief held by a person is not, in and of itself, a sufficient indication of the fact that the other subsequent beliefs held by that same person are also self-consistent and well-justified beliefs. Hence even if we assume that the starting belief (or disbelief) of an atheist is a self-consistent and well-justified belief, i.e., is a rational belief (or disbelief), we still could not know anything about the rationality of the subsequent beliefs of the person.
The atheist, for example, may be characterized as a person who, for the sake of argument, has at least one rational belief—the belief that it is epistemically valid to withhold assent to a proposition for which there is no compelling evidence (i.e., the belief that agnosticism is the only fair position to take in response to the proposition that posits the existence of God). Again, for the sake of argument let us say the defining belief of the agnostic atheist is rational, i.e., it is a self-consistent (non-contradictory) and well-justified belief. That still wouldn’t mean that any other belief that the agnostic atheist may hold is equally as rational. Many agnostic atheists, for instance, will withhold assent to belief in God but continue to believe in notions that have as little to no evidence as the idea of God. Many agnostic atheists will continue to believe in the idea of objective morality, for instance, despite the fact that there is no better evidence for the existence of objective moral values than there is for the existence of an objective God. Many agnostic atheists will also continue to believe in the idea of free will, for instance, even though there is no better evidence for the existence of free will than there is for the existence of God.
Of course, I can already hear the atheist say: belief in God, and belief in morality and free will are NOT the same. But what’s the argument to support this objection?
It seems to me that the only difference between God, on the one hand, and objective morality and free will, on the other hand, is that whereas with morality and free will there is an internal intuition, a feeling, that seems to give us a certain sense of the realness of morality and the realness of free will, there is no such internal sense of intuition that seems to give us certainty about the realness of God.
However, this is obviously untrue.
There are many people who have claimed to feel God (in fact, that’s why many people are theists)—does that mean God is real?
Also, there are many people who don’t feel a sense of morality—sociopaths and psychopaths—does that mean morality isn’t real? I’m sure many people exist who don’t feel a sense of freedom in their lives (people who feel like their every action and thought is not of their own making, i.e., people with severe dissociative disorder)—does that mean free will is not real?
Clearly it seems to me that feeling is not a good standard for determining what’s true or not, given the wildly contrary conclusions it can lead us to. The truth-value of whether God is real, whether morality is real, and whether free will is real is not a function of what we feel is real—it is a function of reason.
Ultimately, the average atheist is a person who rejects belief in God, but who clings to belief in morality and free will, and who, as a result, is no less irrational than the theist who believes in all three (for there is no immediate compelling evidence to believe in any of the three, at least not from the sources which the average atheist recognizes as legitimate, i.e., the scientific community which increasingly recognizes free will as an illusion, and morality as merely a set of pro-social evolutionary instincts [and therefore not at all obligatory in the way that “morality” was traditionally thought of as).
Ultimately, the average agnostic atheist still clings to the belief in morality and free will merely out of feeling, no different than how the average theist clings to the belief in God. If the atheist was truly more rational than the theist, then he would apply his agnosticism to all things which have little to no compelling evidence–this would include not just God, but also morality and free will.
If the atheist is not willing to do this, then he should drop the pretence of being more rational than the theist, and accept that faith/feeling is sometimes valid in determining the truth of certain matters. Doing this, he would open the door to accepting the validity of belief in morality, and free will (things he already believes in), as well as the validity of belief in God.
Second Glance: Second Attitude
This is the attitude of thinking that the absence of belief in God is ground-breaking; specifically, it is the attitude of believing that it is ground-breaking to not belief in a “magical man in the sky.”
This attitude has three main constituent components–the first sub-component is an intellectual prejudice, the second sub-component is an emotional prejudice of intellectual self-satisfaction, and third sub-component is an emotional prejudice of moral self-satisfaction. The first sub-component is composed of a reductionist, over-simplistic view of God—the belief that God is a figure like “Santa Claus,” a white, bearded magical man who punishes the bad and rewards the good; the second sub-component is composed of a naively prideful belief that rejecting this obviously ludicrous, reductionist, straw-man version of God is somehow an impressive intellectual feat; the third sub-component is composed of pridefully using one’s own perceived moral superiority as a basis for denouncing the praiseworthiness of God.
First Sub-Component
The first sub-component is an intellectual prejudice on the part of the atheist. By this, I mean to say that many atheists often predicate their rejection of God on a very simple-minded characterization of God, a characterization of God that is not universally representative of the conception of Divinity. When atheists reject the existence of God they don’t reject “God,” they reject a caricature of God—“God, the sky daddy.” A rejection of God’s existence predicated on such an exclusive fixation with theological strawmen is emblematic of an unwillingness to give the God hypothesis a fair chance. (This is not to say that the conception of God as a “Sky daddy,” doesn’t exist out there—in fact, in the West this conception might very well be the majority conception among fundamentalists. However, such a conception of the Divine is not the only conception, and if the atheist was really interested in pursuing the Truth behind the God Debate, the atheist would have to consider all conceptions of Divinity, not just the parochial conceptions of God that left him with a bad impression of theism).
Second Sub-Component
The second sub-component is an emotional prejudice on the part of the atheist, regarding their a feeling of intellectual self-satisfaction. This is sometimes painfully obvious with the way atheists talk–or perhaps simply just the most toxic atheists (Richard Dawkins). The pride and haughtiness that drips from each word when they describe the folly that it takes to believe in the anthropomorphic conception of God is palpable. However, atheists like this make it sound as if though rejecting simple minded conceptions of Divinity was at all impressive. No sophisticated theist, no educated theologian, really defends the strawmen that the New Atheists are trying to take down. It seems silly, therefore, for popular atheists to to sound so proud in their rejections of such strawmen.
Third Sub-Component
The third-sub component is an emotional prejudice, regarding their own feeling of moral self-satisfaction and corresponding moral contempt against the figure of “God”. By this, I mean to say that the many atheists often predicate their rejection of God on a very simple-minded characterization of morality. That is to say, many atheists use the reductionist notion of God as a “magical man in the sky,” in conjunction with their own preconceived moral biases in order to concoct a negative moral portrayal of God, and frame him as the “angry sky daddy,” and/or the “megalomaniacal, genocidal tyrant.” Atheists do this maneuver all the time in an attempt to morally judge the caricature of God they have made in their minds, and in so doing get the supposed moral high ground on God in order to feel justified in either: 1. renouncing his existence, or 2. renouncing his praiseworthiness.
Put simply, the third sub-component of the second attitude of the atheist is a combination of the pre-existing irrational clinging to a belief in objective morality, discussed in the Second Glance: First Attitude section of this post, with the derisive reductionism atheists exhibit toward the idea of God as part of the first sub-component of the second attitude of the atheist. It is, in short, the culmination of all the mistakes the atheist has made up to this point (with the exception of the second sub-component which covers the entirely independent flaw of inordinate intellectual pride).
In any case, this particular grievous sub-component follows the following basic structure:
- If God exists, and yet there is so much evil in the world, then God must not be worthy of worship, either because he is downright evil for allowing evil to exist, or because he is not all-powerful and therefore not great enough to inspire worship. More blatantly, of course, He could simply not exist, and therefore not be worthy of worship on account of His nonexistence.
Put simply, any God that would allow such evil is evil himself or otherwise not worthy of worship (whether because he is not all-powerful, or because he is not all-good, or simply because he is not real).
This argument does not necessarily reject the existence of God (after all, God could still exist in light of all the evil in the world, but just turn out to be evil or not all-powerful), but it does necessarily reject the praiseworthiness of God (since no God that is any of the possible three alternatives—unreal, evil, or impotent—is, seemingly, worthy of worship), and more often than not this is precisely the goal of atheism.
Atheism, after all, cannot prove absolutely that God does not exist beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it can at least seemingly provide a good reason for believing that even if He did exist, He wouldn’t be worthy of worship. Therefore, more than rejecting the existence of God, I consider rejecting the praiseworthiness of God the overarching attitude that motivates atheism.
That is, it’s not metaphysics that motivates people to become atheists, it’s morality. In other words, it’s not so much abstract ontological discussion which pushes people toward scepticism and disbelief, but, more often than not, a deep-seated moral intuition that the existence of evil in the world presents a contradiction with the notion of an all-good God.
This attitude, despite appearances to the contrary, is ill-equipped to put a dent in the notion of God.
Let me explain why: when the atheist denounces the praiseworthiness of God on the basis of morality, what he is basically doing is denouncing the praiseworthiness of God on the basis of his morality. In other words, the atheists holds God hostage to his sensibilities, and judges the merit of God based on whether it conforms to his approval.
This, of course, presents us with immediate problems. Firstly, on what basis can the atheist justify his moral sensibilities? What standard of morality is he using to make this evaluation of God? we may find, ironically, that many of these moral sensibilities cannot be justified in virtue of anything, or in fact, presuppose that morality exists in a purely secular, materialistic worldview.
In order to demonstrate my point consider the following video. I am not a Christian, nor do I particularly like this guy’s style of Christian apologetics, but the video is short and to-the-point on the matter at hand, so I thought it would be a good resource to add here:
The atheist in the video is clearly ill-equipped to handle the objection the Christian apologist throws at him, and it’s simple to see why. Appealing to morality to denounce the praiseworthiness of God (or His relevance in your life), requires a standard of morality which atheism in and of itself does not provide. Now, unlike the Christian apologist in this video I am NOT making the claim that you need God to have a standard of morality, but I am claiming that God can and does provide a standard of morality for theists while atheism, in and of itself, carries no standard of morality with it. Therefore, theism has one advantage over atheism: it helps people account for the existence of morality, while atheism leaves people stranded on the issue of whether morality is real or not. (Let me put it simply: I’m not arguing that morality derives from religion either, but I am arguing that morality is not just something we can assume to be true without further metaphysical speculation. In order to appeal to morality the atheist is going to need a justification for his belief in the morality he is appealing to, and more often than not atheism is not equipped with the adequate metaphysical worldview required to give such a standard of morality).
All in all, the attitude of the atheist reminds me of the following meme(s):
Who says rape, slavery, child abuse, and genocide are wrong? Isn’t this just a subjective opinion of yours? Rape, slavery, child abuse and genocide may suck for the victims of these actions, but they might be incredibly fun for the perpetrators of these actions. Who’s to say which side has priority, and why? Why are the victims more important than the perpetrators? To imply that the victims are more important than the perpetrators you’d have to have a conception of objective morality than can be the impartial arbiter between the victim and the perpetrator. But atheism, in and of itself, doesn’t have this. An educated atheist can choose to study ethics in order to provide an answer, but I don’t think this would help much, for reasons I will discuss with my commentary on the next meme.
This meme further drives the point home. What exactly is this thing you call “evil”? Why is it “evil”? Is it “evil” because it brings suffering (utilitarianism), or is it “evil” because it violates a certain, universal ethical principle which compels us to respect other human beings with respect (deontology), or is it “evil” because it prevents us from becoming the best versions of ourselves and leading the best versions of our lives (virtue ethics)? Is it one of these (value monism), any combination of these (value pluralism), none of these (alternative ethical theories)? Even if you had an answer, would everyone else have the same answer (not once in the history of philosophy have philosophers reached a consensus on objective morality)? Even if everyone else had the same answer, would it matter? Couldn’t a person with enough power just ignore whatever ethical belief systems you had, and do whatever he wanted–including rape, child abuse, and genocide? That is, even if something could be proven to be “objectively evil,” it clearly would make little difference in the state of affairs of the world: rape, child abuse, and genocide would still occur. What then, precisely is the difference between a world where morality exists and a world where morality doesn’t exist–exactly zero.
The point is this: this thing you are appealing to in order to defy the praiseworthiness of God is called “morality,” and it is not a very solid concept. The concept of morality, more often than not is merely based on an intuition, a mere feeling, not really different from a leap of faith, and very similarly to the concept of an anthropomorphic God, it is just as phantasmagorical. A world with God and a world without God would look just the same, just like a world with Morality and a world without Morality would look just the same. What does this say? Well, it seems to point to the fact that God as well as Morality doesn’t exist. If this is true, then you can’t use the latter to undermine or defy the former, that would be like trying to disprove the existence of a square circle by appealing to the existence of a phoenix.
And what is this feeling and intuition based on? More often than not, the feeling of what is moral is just a regurgitation of whatever the culture they were raised in says is moral. In other words, morality is just a product of arbitrary cultural consensus.
Of course, an atheist can rebut that everything I have said thus far pertaining to the third sub-component is besides the point. The atheist might say:
“I don’t need to denounce the praiseworthiness of God, I just need to show that he is not real (or that, at least, it’s not rational to believe that He is). So, the question of whether or not He would be praiseworthy if He existed is irrelevant, because He doesn’t exist (or we have no good reason to suppose He does). Why? Look at all the evil in the world. If God is defined as all-good and all-powerful, all the evil in the world must suggests, at least as a possibility that He is not real.”
The argument, then is predicated on a probabilistic rejection of God on the basis of perceived evil, and more specifically on the perceived contradiction between God’s descriptor as all-powerful and all-good and the existence of perceived evil.
I, however, do not believe there is any such contradiction.
My rationale is this: what does it mean when we describe God as “all-good,”? Does it mean that God conforms to our moral conceptions of good and evil, or perhaps does it mean something else entirely? Maybe God is good not in a moral sense, but in an aesthetic sense, i.e. in a sense that exists beyond the moral dichotomy of good and evil. Perhaps when we say God is all-good we mean it like we describe a beautiful sunset, or a waterfall, or a rainbow, something which possess no moral value whatsoever yet is unequivocally recognized as “good.” Perhaps God is Himself devoid of moral goodness or moral evil, but possesses an aesthetic goodness which surpasses/transcends the relevance of either.
On a more straightforward note: maybe moral goodness itself is a false concept. Maybe God is not “good,” because the concept of goodness is false and therefore cannot inhere on anything. Maybe “morality,” is nothing more than useful fiction for the control of human behaviour, and therefore nothing more than an artificial concept with no ultimate significance. That is, maybe words like “good” and “evil,” don’t really describe anything true about the world.
Lastly, I’d like the atheist to consider the possibility that God may not be a personal, anthropomorphic entity. So often in the God debate we presuppose a euro-centric conception of God, and forget alternative theories as if though they were somehow not worthy of discussion.
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