Atheism is as atheism does

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, atheism, theism

In a long email conversation with a prominent physicist, I made the case that atheism was of necessity incomplete. He understood that science is also of necessity incomplete (discussed below). He eventually had to concede that agnosticism is a more logical stance than atheism. Of course, I had hopes that he would become a theist, even a Biblical theist; that is, a Christian. But we take what we can get.

Stephen Hawking, probably out of irritation that so many people would ask him about God, spent the last decade or two of his life trying to prove mathematically that universe needed no beginning and no God. Oh, he had to acknowledge there was the Big Bang, and it was a beginning of sorts. But he tried to make it a natural consequence…but of what? Knowing only what came after, and nothing that might have come before, he could only rely on what we observe. His various, and hard-won, hypotheses about an "origin without an origin" were all seen to be circular reasoning.

In graduate school I had a fellow student, an atheist, who liked to talk about philosophy and religion (perhaps "obsession" is a better term than "like"). He believed firmly in science, and, using the term "believe" in the common sense, not theologically, so do I. I showed him passages in the Bible that outlined an "experiment" he could perform. The result of the experiment would be certain subjective experiences that could be had no other way. Should the experiment fail, he could then claim that the Bible was false. I won't go into "the experiment" here; it is based on the Gospel booklet, A Simple Way to Touch the Lord. My friend was very resistant. The integrity of his worldview was on the line. Months passed. In a desperate moment, he tried "the experiment". He became a Christian as a result. A year later he struggled against his faith. He even claimed to me that there was a different method to achieve the same results. Later he confessed that he had lied, and settled into his Christian life. Helping me share the Gospel with someone, he once said, "This is very real!"

Before discussing the book at hand, I must give some definitions in practical terms:

• Theist – Someone who believes there is a God to whom we can relate personally.
• Deist – Someone who believes there is a god who is indifferent about us.
• Nontheist – Someone who doesn't believe in any god, and makes no big deal of it.
• Atheist – Someone who knows, if there is a God, this God doesn't like the atheist's lifestyle; therefore the atheist claims there is no god, and that neither can there be.
• Militant Atheist – Also "Evangelical Atheist"; someone who demands that theism (and perhaps deism) be abolished.

As an aside, the Beast of Revelation, often called "the Antichrist" (a term the Bible never uses), is going to be a militant atheist, even the chief of all militant atheists. And he'll have real power to back it up.

Ravi Zacharias, formerly an atheist and now an ardent Christian, evangelist, and apologist, wrote The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists to rebut the claims made in a small book by Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation. Mr. Harris sees himself as the spearhead of a movement to defy, deny, and destroy the faith of Christians, and of people of any faith. He claims to use reason to combat faith. Ravi Zacharias shows that Harris's "reasons" are unreason, his claims are false, and his arguments hollow.

I won't go into much detail here. It is best to read it for yourself. The End of Reason is small, just 77 pages, including six or seven pages of notes. However, I cannot resist touching a few of the points the author makes.

Firstly, regarding morality: There is a question that Zacharias would have asked atheist philosopher Bertrand Russel (known to other philosophers as "dirty Bertie"), "In some cultures people love their neighbors, and in others they eat them. Do you have a personal preference either way?" (paraphrased from p.29). We know "culture" is composed largely of customary behaviors that members of the culture understand. But people in one culture may find practices in another culture immoral or reprehensible, or even evil. Is cultural relativism the only standard for morality?

I recall the great struggles of "the Sixties" on American college campuses. A common watchword was, "You can't legislate morality!" If you only think of morality as regards who sleeps with whom, there is a little bit of a valid point there. However, is stealing immoral? Is cheating on a test immoral? Is perjury immoral? Properly speaking, we legislate nothing but morality!

Who decides what is moral or immoral? Who decides between good and evil? The story in Genesis about the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is instructive. Before partaking of that fruit, the couple had relied on God to learn what to do. They had the Tree of Life, and their standard of behavior was to spread more Life. They were barred from the Tree of Life after they partook of "the other tree." One imagines God saying, "If you fall out of fellowship with Me, you are on your own, to determine what is good or evil." The later delivery of the Ten Commandments set up a standard even for those who are "on their own."

The cultural morality of the United States was originally based on the Ten Commandments, particularly on the matters of conduct in Commandments 6 through 10. In American society in general, that was mostly overthrown after 1970. Even though economic prosperity has been generally increasing (with some notable hiccups!), emotional and spiritual hollowness has followed right along. In this moral vacuum, churches, synagogues and other religious institutions retained moral teaching based on their faith. Now Sam Harris and others want to complete the hollowing-out of American moral fiber. But without God's commandments, who decides what is good, what is evil? Of course, for Harris, religion is evil. Hardly anything else is.

Zacharias makes these points beginning on page 30 (again I paraphrase and condense):

• To say such-and-such a thing is evil presupposes there is something good.
• To say there is good and there is evil presupposes a moral law to distinguish evil from good.
• A law must have a lawgiver.

Knowing by long experience that people are inconsistent and fallible, where are we to find a consistent and righteous lawgiver? It must be God. Harris argues against just this point, but his reasoning is circular, as Zacharias shows clearly. Then Zacharias goes on to show that we can't have free will without suffering. I see free will as "the stone so heavy even God cannot move it." We can choose to follow God, or not. The consequences are our responsibility.

As Dennis Prager puts it in several places in both volumes (so far published) of The Rational Bible, "The theist has to account for the existence of evil. The atheist has to account for the existence of everything else." The Genesis story shows free will in action. The rest of the Bible shows what God does to restore fallen humanity to unfettered fellowship with Him. The last two chapters of Revelation describe the glorious result.

A final moral point: use and abuse of power, which is a big political football today in America, being the basis of a feeble attempt at the impeachment of the President. On page 34 I find this:

"Isn't it ironic that when Islam is in a position of power, Islamic beliefs are forced on everyone, and when atheism has the upper hand, atheistic beliefs are enforced on everyone? Only in Christianity is the privilege given to both believe and to disbelieve without any enforcement."

From this and many evidences we must conclude, not that Biblical faith is more moral than other religious attitudes, but that Biblical faith, both Jewish and Christian, is the only route to moral living.

A second big issue is human worth. The Old Testament is the first scripture to assert that all persons have equal value to God. In the basic Noahide Law (before the Levitical Law), it is stated, "Whoever sheds man’s blood, / By man shall his blood be shed, / For in the image of God / He made man." Our worth is based on our origin as the image of God. Thus whoever murders must be judicially killed. Human worth is not imparted by other humans, but by God. The slogan "Black lives matter" of recent ilk is based on the perception that, in the eyes of some, not all lives have equal worth. Setting aside the Marxist organization that uses this slogan to terrorize America, we who belong to God respond, "Yes, indeed, all black lives matter, along with all the rest." When we also say, "So do all unborn lives," though, we run afoul of the great evil of legalized abortion. Zacharias touches on this, but it is not his main point. To follow his lead, I will only say that abortion is not an appropriate method of "family planning." To assert otherwise is to be complicit in millions of murders every year.

The primary indicator of a culture's view of human worth is the matter of war and mass murder. Atheists point to the Crusades, during which much slaughter resulted from supposedly "Christian" knights and princes attacking Muslims and Jews in and around the Holy Land. Hardly anyone pays attention to the actual character of medieval Catholicism, which hid behind the banner of Christ, but was dramatically anti-Christian. Popes were typically atheists under a Christian cloak, the "wolves in sheep's clothing" that Paul warned of in Acts 20:29. Boniface VIII was a little worse than most, of whom it was said, "He entered like a fox, ruled like a lion, and died like a dog." Another Pope signed a death warrant for an entire province in France because of the Waldenses ("valley men", a non-Catholic Christian tradition) that lived there.

The Twentieth Century has been unparalleled in its pursuit of warfare. Who started the two World Wars? Don't just say the easy thing, "The Germans." It was German rulers who had assumed an atheistic, or at least, antisemitic worldview. What Kaiser Wilhelm II began (gas chambers for Jews was his idea), Adolf Hitler tried to complete. Both sought extermination of all Jews. Hitler also sought extermination of Christians; it is little known that as many Christians died in the death camps as Jews. The total dead in the Holocaust comes to 17 million.

Who else was officially atheist? Stalin and his successors, Mao Tse-Tung, and Pol Pot, who are responsible for 15-20 million, 60-100 million, and 3 million deaths, respectively.

So I close with this question. If Sam Harris were made Emperor of North America, what would result? Very possibly a holocaust to end all holocausts! Almost 75% of Americans claim to be Christians. That's 240 million. If they won't kowtow to official atheism, must they be killed? The Bible has an answer: when The Beast of Revelation comes to power, everyone must renounce every other god and take his mark, or be barred from buying or selling. Why build gas chambers when you can simply deny the "universal credit card" to anyone who won't swear fealty to you? They'll all starve soon enough.

These matters just touch on a few things in The End of Reason. The atheist worldview is shown to be not just immoral, as we've discussed above, but inconsistent. I'll end by touching on the limits of scientific knowledge, all of which were discovered in the Twentieth Century, though there were hints earlier.

1. Quantum Uncertainty. Often called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In its simplest version, the more accurately you know the location of any object, the less accurately you are able to measure its velocity, and vice versa. This is why there is diffraction of light through openings, for example. It is also why you can't have a computer program that simulates exactly what any portion of the Universe will do, because, firstly, you can't make the measurements needed to set up the simulation.
2. Quantum Superposition. Originally called Schrödinger's Undecidability, exemplified by the thought experiment of the Cat in a Box. A quantum event that has a 50% chance of happening in the next hour will result in the death of the cat. Just before the end of the hour you are asked, "Is the cat alive?" How do you decide? You cannot without opening the box.
3. Systemic Incompleteness. Two principles proved by Kurt Gödel showed that it is possible (usually easy) to ask questions under the aegis of a mathematical system, which cannot be answered adequately using only the tools available within that system. The entire structure of science, which is based on mathematics, is thus incomplete and cannot be made complete. So far, when scientists have run up against a "wall" in their mathematical understanding, someone has ingeniously produced an extension of mathematics that increases the size of the system and allows problems that were formerly unsolvable to be solved; answers that could not be answered, became answerable (by the way, this is a good argument for the immaterial Soul). Soon or later this will come to an end. At the moment, of 23 "questions" stated by David Hilbert in 1900, eight have been resolved, some in the "no you can't prove that" direction; nine are "partially resolved"; two are too vague for anyone to make any progress upon; and and the remaining four (plus a 24th discovered in Hilbert's papers after his death) are so far quite mysterious and unresolved. But, hey, only 120 years have passed, No?

Faith in science alone is less reasonable than faith in a God who made us and made science possible.

Ethics predates us

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, primatology, morality, atheism, theism

An experimenter enters an enclosure containing an ape, and sets down two small boxes. If the ape puts one on top of the other, it is rewarded with a carrot. It soon learns to stack boxes, happily eating the carrots. Then the experimenter leaves and goes into an enclosure nearby containing another ape, which has been able to see this whole procedure. The ape soon sets one box upon another, and happily receives a carrot to eat. After a few repetitions, the experimenter returns to the first enclosure, presenting the same two boxes. This time, when the ape stacks them, it receives a grape. Several repetitions yield several grapes. Now the experimenter returns to the second ape. This one immediately stacks the boxes, so the experimenter presents a carrot. Angrily, the ape rejects the carrot. Clearly, it wants a grape.

The sense of "fair play" is not unique to humans.

Observations of apes and other primates "in the wild" confirm not only the sense of fair versus unfair treatment, but also social morals. In one instance, two families of baboons came upon a small fruiting bush. There was not enough fruit for both families. Rather than fight or even confront each other, both families ran off in opposite directions. This is but one of many, many indications that the Hobbesian notion of "nature red in tooth and claw" is quite wrong-headed.

Even further. You may have seen the Disney movie in which Akela, the alpha wolf, misses a kill, and the troop turns against him. This doesn't actually happen, among either wolves or apes. Even when a "beta" displaces an "alpha", the deposed leader is not exiled. In fact, when an animal has become ill or disabled, its fellows help it. For example, an ape dying of infection is comforted by other apes, who groom it more than usual and bring food. And the internet is full of pictures and videos of cross-species animal adoptions and "friendships", between dog and cat, sow and puppies, and the gorilla Koko with her pet kitten All Ball. The Tarzan stories, in which an ape adopts a human infant, would not resonate with anyone if adoption were not a common occurrence.
Most human adoptive parents do a good job raising the totally unrelated child. So do most cross-species adoptive "parents".
Social consciousness and altruism are not unique to humans.

Primatologist Frans de Waal has studied chimpanzees and bonobos, and the striking differences between them, for decades. While bonobos (formerly "pygmy chimpanzees") are more peaceable, both species of ape display ethical and moral behavior. Of course, moral lapses result is fierce chastisement, in both species, but, then so do moral lapses among humans. Think how you were raised. Maybe your parents spanked you, and maybe not, but "time out" and other forms of correction still train the conscience, and it is well known that parents who eschew all forms of "punishment" raise spoiled brats.

In his book The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, de Waal demonstrates that the conscience is not only a human attribute: all social mammals (and perhaps all mammals) show evidence of having a conscience to be trained. Don't we speak of a psychopath as someone lacking a conscience? In spite of parental training and other social sanctions, a psychopath behaves amorally. Whatever mental "organ" it is that makes most of us into rule-keepers (at least most of the time!), is absent in a psychopath. If we had no innate tendency to "goodness", however defined, no training method could make us capable of goodness.

The author's thesis is that morality predates religion. As an atheist, he distances himself from "neo-atheists", or "evangelical atheists" (who are actually anti-theists). He recognizes that nearly all of us have the "God-shaped hole" (a paraphrase of Pascal), such that, as Voltaire said, "If there were no God, we would have to invent him." Of course, many evangelical Christians claim that the God-shaped hole is universal, but to my careful observation over many years, I would have to say, not entirely. There are some quite contented nontheists (a word I prefer to "atheist").

The impetus to write the book arose from responses to a blog posting by the author, "Morals without God?" He realized he would have to explain himself further. Many folks did get his point, but some, particularly neo-atheists, missed it. He does not desire to drive God or religion out of society. Indeed, he spends half a chapter outlining the three Twentieth Century attempts to do so, by Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong. Stalin's effort resulted in at least 15 million killed; Pol Pot's attempt killed 3 million; and Mao topped them all, killing more than 100 million Chinese. The anti-religious effort he doesn't mention is that of Hitler, who attempted to exterminate one particular religion. In doing so, not only 6 million Jews were killed, but so were nearly 6 million Christians, plus tens of thousands of homosexuals and other "undesirables" (in Hitler's view). Yeah, it is true that misapplication of religion has led to many killings, but the greatest evils arose from trying to eliminate religion. This exposes the mis-aiming of the anti-theists. They clearly hate religion, and any one of them could become another Pol Pot or Mao as a result.

de Waal posits that small pre-agricultural bands of humans didn't need religion, that religions arose along with the need to manage large populations. Since I sharply distinguish between faith and religion, I mostly agree: faith is all about how the individual relates to God or gods, while religion is all about organization of the faith-full. The larger the number, the more organization is needed, which is why I prefer smaller churches. The trouble is, religion also provides hierarchy, rites and rituals, all human-created structures in which the faith-less can fake it, to the point that many churches are simply social clubs with barely a nod toward a mostly absent deity.

The book is full of fascinating research findings, that illustrate how other animals, not just us humans, display compassion, fairness and altruism. Dogs know when they are treated fairly, or not; elephants try to help a fallen comrade, whether a relative or not; and one story tells of a camel that was beaten savagely, frequently and unfairly, that meekly bided its time, and when alone with the drover, bit the top off his head! Self-defense is a moral value also.

de Waal picked bonobos to compare with us, because physically they more closely resemble early human ancestors such as Ardipithecus. Bonobos are more slender than chimpanzees, have longer legs and can more nearly walk upright. Whether "Ardi" also had the peaceable nature of bonobos is unknown. We need to constantly recall that, not only do we have millions and billions of years of evolution leading up to us, but so do bonobos, and chimps, and parakeets and oak trees. The hominin family tree branched from other apes around 7 million years ago, while bonobos and chimps probably branched from one another 4-5 million years ago (the moist forests in which both live are notoriously bad for fossil preservation). Which ape diverged most from that extinct ape species of 7 million years ago that gave rise to all three of us? The human, the bonobo, or the chimpanzee? I think it is more like the 3-legged stool. We all diverged about equally, in different directions.

We can say that our behavior is some mixture of both bonobo and chimp behaviors, plus some additions (not many). But a chimp scholar might make the same claim, that chimp behavior is some mixture of human and bonobo, with some additions! And so forth. The singular added factor for humans is our ability to function in larger and larger groups. de Waal makes a good case that religion has facilitated that ability. He hopes that morality can gradually be disentangled from religion, because he has also shown that we are moral, or at least have moral ideals, whether or not we are religious. He does not propose a different organizing principle. His book gives us all much to ponder.