Impossible Atheism

If there were good grounds for atheism, they would have to be found in philosophy. But the philosophical arguments for atheism seem, even at first glance, relatively weak. And, as one ponders further, the situation worsens considerably, even to the point of absurdity. This is not the fault of unbelieving philosophers, however, for they can hardly be blamed for their impotence. After all, the subject matter of their denial—the Infinite Source of Existence—is, in an important sense, beyond the scan of human reason, which renders any firm conclusions about God’s nonexistence rationally impossible. And, to make matters worse, in denying any transcendent ground of rationality, as any orthodox materialist must do, the very weapons of their warfare dissolve into dust.

One may be tempted to think that the realm of physical science is relevant to the atheistic task, but that would be to commit a grave category error. The reasons for this should be obvious to everyone, but apparently they are not, since, for example, people seem to think the statement, “I believe in science,” is a meaningful riposte to the question, “Do you believe in God?” Whatever it is these people are referring to when they use the word “science,” it is not to the methods of inquiry and patterns of inference used by scientists in their theorizing about the physical features of the universe—methods and patterns that, by my lights, only make sense within a universe that is indeed Creation. Perhaps it is a god named “Science”? Or, more probably, they have mistaken God with a capital “G” for a mysteriously undetectable physical law that was once used to fill gaps in our scientific understanding but is no longer a necessary postulate, thanks to advances in theoretical physics and the application of that much-beloved explanatory principle: Occam’s Razor. In any case, clearly there is much confusion out there, and one would hope that such confusion would engender humility and open-mindedness, not smug internet memes and hopelessly ridiculous generalizations about “religion”—but, alas. (See David Bentley Hart's magisterial The Experience of God for much-needed clarity on what "God" means.)

So, I say, it is within philosophy that the atheist must seek support for his views, and, truly, the human mind can conjure arguments pointing away from God. But, then again, the construction of such arguments requires faith in the principles of reason, and, to repeat, those principles seem not to have any firm foundation in an honest atheist metaphysic. Why, for example, should one trust one’s innate rational intuitions, if those intuitions are the purely accidental result of an essentially non-rational and purposeless mechanical process of evolution by natural selection which only directly “selects” those traits that enhance chances of survival? A major point made by evolutionary scientists is, after all, that natural selection "selects” what works, not necessarily what is best or optimal (e.g. the panda’s “thumb”). How can the atheist be confident that our brains don’t just get the job done so far as survival and reproduction are concerned but still fundamentally misrepresent reality? Is it that if we were to misrepresent reality, we would not survive? Why assume that? It is pretty obvious that plenty of nonhuman animals get by quite well without a clear idea of what the world is really like, perhaps without any ideas at all. So long as something in the brain of the gazelle triggers her to run away from the lion, it doesn’t really matter what she believes about him. (Alvin Plantinga develops this thought in a number of places. Here's a popular level treatment.)

Moreover, there are plenty of decent arguments pointing toward God, arguments that do not constitute proofs but are, I think, more powerful than anything the atheists have produced. So even if the atheist could somehow defend his confidence in reason (which he can't), he still would be left with something of a philosophical stalemate (at best).

In the end, however, philosophy can only take us so far, and I believe it is no place to seek a foundation for any belief about ultimate reality. The rational mind, after all, is wholly dependent on the inarticulable deliverances of what Pascal calls the "heart". It is with the heart that we converse with realities too deep, too essential, too exact for words. The heart is the wellspring of first principles and the place of deep connection with reality. I am convinced that every human heart hides an ineradicable knowledge of God: the mind may plot against it; the mouth may gainsay it; the virtual worlds of our own creation may divert our attention from it; but nothing short of the abolition of man can remove it.

Little Goodnesses

And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
   (Matthew 25:40 ESV) 

I wonder if one of the chief roots of the modern problem of meaninglessness is not, say, lack of self-esteem or weariness of pain but pride. We believe it is our calling to create the greater good, to save the world. But isn't that God's arena? We are not gods, though I seem to recall reading about a mischievous serpent who promised us that we could be. And occasionally we perceive our non-divinity and despair. "My life is meaningless because I can't do anything worthwhile." The problem here seems not to be our inability to do things of worth but our failure to appreciate what is of worth for us to do.

Our calling is a humbler one than what we have so arrogantly assumed: it is to be faithful in the little things, to establish the lesser good, to perform the good deeds that are before us. A bottle of water for a thirsty gardener, a helping hand for an ailing old timer, a nod and a smile for a fellow grocery shopper, a dollar bill for a bell ringer, a listening ear for a grieving friend, a skipped meal, a missed episode, a simple prayer instead of an aspiration to a grand one. Little stuff. EASY stuff.

(Inspired by http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/58168.htm)

The Truth about Knowing

I have spent quite a lot of time, likely an inordinate amount of time, thinking about knowledge and skepticism, and, at the end of the day, knowledge always wins in my mind. As it does in the minds of most other sane human beings, even philosopher-human-beings. But what is interesting to me is that the spoils of this victory aren't actually reaped because of some imperforate argument from reason against skepticism. More on that in a moment.

A common skeptical argument aims to show that since I can't know that some strange hypothesis (e.g. that I am dreaming right now or that I am a bodiless brain in a vat being stimulated by diabolical super scientists to believe that I have a body and live in Southern California or...) is false, I don't really know anything at all. René Descartes is of course the most notorious presenter of this argument (and also perhaps the one most duly noted for his failure to answer it). The trouble with this kind of argument is that it very easily induces a kind of intellectual trance. It invites the unsuspecting undergraduate into its cozy little Tumnusian den, and, after what seem like a few brief moments, she awakens to find herself locked in a world of confusion and doubt with seemingly no way to get back home before the queen of that twisted world comes and claims her mind forever.

But, thanks be to God, ninety minutes pass, and she is back in her world (which may not be real but is at least familiar) of text messages and status updates. The spell is broken. But how was it broken? David Hume would say that "custom (or habit)", nature herself, has asserted itself and forced the formerly bamboozled youth to ignore the flawless demonstration of her ignorance and to go on living the life of a presumptuous commoner. But I say Hume is wrong about that. Not because I think that I can prove I am not dreaming or that I am not a brain in a vat or [name your favorite skeptical hypothesis], but because I believe that there are more ways to know than only by reason. In fact, we only know things by reason in a roundabout way, through inferential processes which are ultimately based on knowledge that is known by heart. Everyone, even the skeptic, assumes an entire battery of basic principles in forming their arguments for this or that conclusion - truths of logic, mathematics, the external world, other minds, the past, ethics.

Skeptical arguments will never be answered by rigorous argument because the skeptics are right! Reason, as they understand it at least, is unable to account for our knowledge that we are not massively deceived. Since reason is thus impotent, they conclude we do not know anything, but they are wrong about that! "We know," as Michael Polanyi says, "more than we can tell" (The Tacit Dimension [1967], 4). Or Pascal:

We know the truth, not only through reason, but also through the heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to challenge them. The skeptics, who have only this for their object, labor uselessly. We know we are not dreaming, however powerless we are to prove it by reason. This inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, and not, as they claim, the uncertainty of all our knowledge.

For knowledge of first principles, such as space, time, motion, number, is as firm as any we derive from reasoning. Reason must use this knowledge from the heart and instinct, and base all its arguments on it...Principles are felt, propositions are proved; all with certainty, though in different ways. And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of its first principles before accepting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before receiving them.

This inability must serve, then, only to humble reason, which would want to be judge of everything, but not to attack our certainty. As if reason alone were capable of teaching us! Would to God, on the contrary, that we never had need of it, and that we knew everything by instinct and intuition. But nature has refused us this good. (Pensées, S142/L110, Roger Ariew translation, Hackett, [2005], 31)

My Brain Made Me See It

Did you know that things happen in a person’s brain while he is having a religious (or mystical) experience? Did you know that many smart people think that, since things happen in a person’s brain while he is having a religious experience, his experience is nothing more than a brain phenomenon with no external source or cause or referent?

Did you know that things happen in a person’s brain while he is having a sense experience? Did you know that the same smart people who think that religious experience is nothing more than a brain phenomenon because things happen in a person’s brain while he is having one don’t think anything analogous about sense experience?

It seems that to be consistent with their proposed reason to reject out of hand any and all religious experiences, these people should reject out of hand any and all sense experiences. But obviously that’s to court radical skepticism, and nobody (except maybe a few contrarians who are forced to live either as practical hypocrites or as madmen) wants to do that. So, to be charitable to these apparently inconsistent religious skeptics, let’s try to find the real reason they believe religious experiences to be “all in the head.”

The real reason, I suspect, is probably better thought of as an assumption. The assumption is that the only possible way for human beings to experience external reality is through the senses. I say it is an assumption because it is typically taken for granted, not argued for. But how might the religious skeptic defend this assumption?

Well, she might say that sense experience is the only way that anybody has ever really experienced external reality, and, so, it is safe to assume that it is the only possible way to experience external reality. But that would be to beg the question in a rather obvious way: she is assuming that no one has ever really experienced reality in a non-sensory way. The mystic would beg to differ!

A better argument would be like the one offered by Michael Martin in his book Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990), which goes like this: one way to distinguish genuine perceptions from illusory ones is to check them against each other for consistency. While reports of sense experience inevitably vary from person to person, there is almost always agreement among them at a deeper, more fundamental level. One would expect that if people are experiencing the same reality, they would report similar things about it. And, when it comes to reports about sense experience, people do report similar things. But not so with religious experience, asserts Martin. He says that, whereas reports about sense experiences include superficial dissimilarities but fundamental similarities, the exact opposite is true about religious experience. Some people report experiencing the divine as wholly other, others as identical with everything. Some people report experiencing the divine as benevolent, others as full of wrath. And so on. (Actually not “and so on.” In fact, the examples given here are mine; he doesn’t give any concrete examples of dissimilarities, rather just a few vague references to contrary religious truth claims.) So, according to Martin, since reports concerning the divine differ so radically, they are best explained as purely neuropsychological phenomena, not as experiences of divine reality.

Yet, Martin’s argument suffers from major defects. For one, he is far too quick to conclude that seemingly dissimilar religious experiences are actually fundamentally different. Mystics through the ages have been emphatic about their inability to convey the true nature of their experiences in words, and, as is to be expected when one is attempting to communicate the essentially ineffable, one is liable to fall back on basic background assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality in attempt to translate one’s experience into comprehensible language.

A fortiori, recent work by neuroscientists Eugene G. D’Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg [1] reveals that there is a common core to mystical experience.

The essential point in understanding the phenomenology of subjective religious experience involves a sense of unity of reality at least somewhat greater than the baseline perception of unity in day-to-day life (253)

Moreover, D’Aquili and Newberg highlight what they take to be “the most important mystical state, Absolute Unitary Being, or AUB.”

AUB is a state described in the mystical literature of all the world’s great religions. When people are in that state they lose all sense of discrete being, and even the difference between self and other is obliterated. There is no sense of the passing of time, and all that remains is a perfect timeless undifferentiated consciousness. When such a state is suffused with positive affect, there is a tendency to describe the experience, after the fact, as personal. Hence, such experiences often are described as a perfect union with God (the unio mystica of the Christian tradition), or else the perfect manifestation of God in the Hindu tradition. When such experiences are accompanied by neutral affect, they tend to be described, after the fact, as impersonal. This likely results in generating concepts such as the abyss of Jacob Boeme, the Void, or Nirvana, of Buddhism, or the Absolute of a number of philosophical traditions. There is no question that whether the experience is interpreted personally as God or impersonally as the Absolute, it possesses a quality of transcendent wholeness without any temporal or spatial division whatsoever (253).

It seems overwhelmingly likely, therefore, that while devotees of various religious and philosophical doctrines might describe their mystical experiences in diverse ways, their experiences are (at least very often) quite similar.

On a related note, Martin is clearly not interested in considering the notion that there might be a lot more to reality than what is sensuously detectable. How can he be so sure that people don't report experiencing different things because they are experiencing different things? Maybe some experience God whilst others experience angels or demons or some other finite but insensible things. I don’t raise this in order to suggest that this actually happens, but it does seem that Martin would do well at least to consider it. Indeed, though I might be slipping into uncharity at this point, I venture to suggest that Martin’s arguments are simply halfhearted attempts to prop up his basic assumption that non-sensory perception is impossible.

The facts, as I see them, are these: (i) any argument raised against the possibility of veridical mystical experience can be raised with equal force against the possibility of veridical sense experience, and (ii) Martin-style attempts to fault mystical experiences for being hopelessly inconsistent with each other are undermined by the empirical findings of D’Aquili and Newberg concerning the common phenomenological core of mystical experiences across cultures and metaphysical traditions.

A final point of D’Aquili and Newberg is that those who have experienced AUB – among them sophisticated, formerly materialist, scientists – are virtually certain that their AUB experiences reflect ultimate reality more faithfully or fully than their ordinary sense experience does. Granted those are just their subjective reports and perhaps we should take them with a grain of salt, but these folks do have the advantage of having experienced both AUB and “baseline reality” (that is, the world as experienced through the senses) and without hesitation insist that AUB is fundamental. “This being the case,” they continue,

it is a foolish reductionism indeed that states that, because hyperlucid unitary consciousness can be understood in terms of neuropsychological processes, it is therefore derivative from baseline reality. Indeed the reverse argument could just as well be made. Neuropsychology can give no answer to the question of which state is more real, baseline reality or hyperlucid unitary consciousness often experienced as God (256).

My conclusion, therefore, is simply that there aren’t any good reasons to rule out the notion that people actually can and do experience God - or, at least, that the common reasons that I consider above fail the task. The question of whether or not there are any good reasons to think that anybody actually has experienced God I leave for another time or, perhaps, for another person.

1. See “The Neuropsychological Basis of Religions, or Why God Won’t Go Away,” Zygon 33 (1998): 187-201. Reprinted in Louis Pojman and Michael Rea, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (6th Edition). Boston: Wadsworth, 2012: 247-257. Page numbers refer to the Pojman and Rea volume.

Boethius on Man's Faulty Pursuit of Happiness

"Alas, how blind are men who stumble
along the wrong path!
They hope to find gold and jewels
hanging in trees.
They cast their nets wide and fish
on the mountaintops,
or they try to hunt for wild goats
out on the sea
Oh, they know where to dive for pearls
and where the murex dwells
the source of our precious purple dye.
They can find shellfish
but they cannot begin to locate the good
that looms high up
over the earth on which they tread
They are hopeless fools
in endless pursuit of money and fame.
When they have reached
their worthless goals they will come to know
how far they went wrong."

-Lady Philosophy in Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy

Aristotle's Ethics

Meditate on these if you please:

"Men's conception of the good or of happiness may be read in the lives they lead" (Nicomachean Ethics, I.3).

REACTION: this is philosophy undetached from lived life and, perhaps, an improvement on the method of Socrates who went around asking (and annoying) people what they thought the good (or the pious or virtue or justice or...) was. You act in accordance with your deepest beliefs. So, you want to know what you really believe, look to your actions. Scary.

"As one swallow or one day does not make a spring, so one day or a short time does not make a man blessed or happy" (NE, II.2).

REACTION: in a culture of quick fixes and instant gratification, this truth is especially tough. You mean I have to commit myself to being good long-term? Just like any other art (painting, writing, music making, surfing), deliberate practice is necessary for substantial improvement.

"Moral virtue is concerned with pleasures and pains. It is pleasure which makes us do what is base, and it is pain which makes us abstain from doing what is noble. Hence, the importance of having a certain training from very early days, as Plato says, so that we may feel pleasure and pain at the right objects" (NE, II.2).

REACTION: I once heard a philosopher (David Horner, I think it was) say something like this: you're gonna do what you wanna do unless you've got a good reason not to. In other words, we naturally act in accordance with our desires, and it takes a really solid reason to convince us to abstain from things we believe will give us pleasure. The only reason I can think of that is strong enough for such work is a conception of the good that excludes the action in question and is deeply entrenched in one's belief structure.

"Most people, instead of acting, take refuge in theorizing; they imagine that they are philosophers and that philosophy will make them virtuous; in fact, they behave like people who listen attentively to their doctors but never do anything that their doctors tell them. But a healthy state of the soul will no more be produced by this kind of philosophizing than a healthy state of the body by this kind of medical treatment" (NE, II.3).

REACTION: theory is probably not good in itself. I'm not a pragmatist, but what good is theory...or, better, what good is a theorist if he doesn't act in accord with his theory?

"There are many different ways of going wrong; for evil is in its nature infinite,...but good is finite and there is only one possible way of going right. So the former is easy and the latter difficult; it is easy to miss the mark but difficult to hit it" (NE, II.5).

REACTION: genius and a common insight to many moral geniuses - Jesus and G.K. Chesterton come to mind. Variety does not equal virtue. Chesterton: “There are many, many angles at which one can fall but only one angle at which one can stand straight.” Maybe this is part of the explanation of why it is so easy for us evil folks to be creative in dreaming up evil scenarios. To be sure, evil is commonly louder and more provocative than the good, but it is also available in more varieties...all the varieties just happen to suck.

"We must also note the weaknesses to which we ourselves are particularly prone, since different natures tend in different ways; and we may ascertain what our tendency is by observing our feelings of pleasure and pain. Then we must drag ourselves away towards the opposite extreme...In all cases we must especially be on our guard against the pleasant, or pleasure, for we are not impartial judges of pleasure" (NE, II.9).

REACTION: good advice. It's easy to avoid doing what would pain us to do anyway; it's also easy to pat ourselves on the back for not doing such undesirable bad things. But attend to the bad things that are pleasurable, and there you shall have your battle.

Thanks Aristotle.

Good and Evil (part 1)

Many of my students seem to think that the existence of goodness is somehow dependent on the existence of evil. They have vague intuitions, that is, that the existence of evil is somehow necessary for the existence of good. Call this the “Metaphysical Necessity View” (MNV). Students often employ this sentiment, or something akin to it, in their attempts to defend God against the charge that the existence of evil (or evil of certain sorts, degrees, or amounts) is logically inconsistent with the existence of God (or at least casts considerable doubt on the idea that God exists). I think these students are wrong: they are wrong both about good and evil and to try to defend the existence of God on such grounds. Another, much more plausible, view lurking in the neighborhood of MNV is what I’ll call the “Epistemic Necessity View” (ENV). This position concerns not the existence of good and evil but knowledge of the existence of good and evil. According to ENV, it is impossible (for humans anyway) to have knowledge of the good without having knowledge of evil too. This position, as I say, strikes me as much more plausible than MNV, though it too seems to me to be mistaken.

The following are some vague thoughts of my own on the matter. My hope is that in the process of writing out these thoughts my (and perhaps even your) understanding of these issues will begin to sharpen.

For this blog, let’s deal with MNV. The advocate of MNV suggests that goodness and evil somehow need each other. Statements like this often contain some offhand remarks about “yin and yang,” though, as of yet, no one has explained to me how that is supposed to help. So, do good and evil need each other? Are they somehow mutually dependent? I don’t know of any good reason to side with mutual dependence folks here. In fact, it seems to me that MNV is among the least plausible theories of good and evil on offer – though perhaps not quite as bad as the “explanation” that good and evil do not exist at all but rather are, say, social constructions or mere subjective feelings about things that have no real connection to the world an sich (“in itself”).

One promising way to criticize MNV is to think about its implications, chief among them that if MNV is true, then it is impossible for there to be a world that is purely good, a world where good exists and evil does not. Is it really impossible for there to be such a world? It doesn’t seem so, at least not to me. Indeed, I have a strong intuition that it is possible for there to be a purely good world. But if there is such a possibility, then MNV is false. It’s an easy argument.

1. If MNV is true, then it is impossible for there to be a purely good world
2. It is possible for there to be a purely good world
3. Hence, MNV is false
   

I see no reason to reject number 2 except that it conflicts with MNV, but to use MNV as a premise in an argument for MNV is clearly question begging, so that won’t do. What other reason might one give for the impossibility of a purely good world? ...I can’t think of any. (Can you? If so, please share!) So I think it’s reasonable to assume that MNV is false.

(Moreover, if one is a theist – especially a Jewish or Christian theist – then one has another powerful reason to reject MNV: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” [Genesis 1:31]. I’d say that pretty much rules out MNV too. Of course, quoting Scripture probably won't satisfy the agnostic inquirer, but it certainly carries a lot of weight with believers. And why prefer the evidential standards of one who admits to not knowing [cf. agnostic] to the standards of one who thinks she does?)

So much then for MNV…See a future post for a discussion of ENV.