Evidence II: Russell's Tea Pot

There is a hope that becoming an atheist solves many philosophical problems and that the solutions proposed by atheism do not create any greater difficulties.  A popular atheist argument is known as Russell's tea pot.  Bertrand Russell argued he could assert that there was a tea pot some place between Mars and Earth so small that no telescope could detect it.  And given this assertion, no one would be required to believe in the tea pot, because there is no real evidence, just assertion.  Notice, however, that the tea pot cannot be shown not to exist.

This argument is designed to show that if a thing cannot be proven or disproven to exist, the burden of proof falls upon those who assert its existence.  Hence, because God cannot be proven or disproven, the Christians, who assert his existence, must show that he exists.  But they cannot, so the atheist is acting only sensibly.

If you say this argument is wrong, then every assertion is true until proven false.  You must believe in unicorns, UFOs, and telekinesis, because we cannot disprove these things.  Or, at least, if you believe in God, you have no recourse to say that such things do not exist, because you believe in an equally unproven thing.

The weakness of this argument is apparent in its assumptions.  A sensible person, it argues, is one that does not believe anything until evidence is presented.  Yet what could be a more fragile assertion than love?  To be completely sensible, love becomes a contractual agreement, in which true love is measured by how certain requirements are met.  Love is reduced to its components, and if not verifiable, it is delusional.  To embrace Russell's argument is to give up on love itself.  But love does not hit at the heart of most atheists, who often believe that free thinking is the greatest human virtue.  And besides, maybe love is the exception; love without a little delusion is no fun.

The strongest assertion of Russell's argument is that we can logically deduce reality from evidence, and that this deductive reasoning is true.  In a word, he asserts we have intelligence.  But one may ask the question, what evidence do we have for intelligence?  How do we tell the difference between sanity and insanity?  We can use only our intelligence to explore the question, but this is precisely the problem we wish to explain.  Using intelligence to explain itself at best produces a circular argument.  Therefore, brought to its logical conclusion, Russell's line of reasoning argues against the concept of human intelligence.

This argument might be useful to show the nonexistence of God if God were just another material object in the universe.  But like intelligence, God is metaphysical, separate from physical reality but nevertheless a real part of it.  So if God requires evidence, so does intelligence.  Atheism, at least the scientific variety, cannot be comfortable with that.

Reading the Bible the first time

I picked up a Bible the first time as an atheist.  I wish I could say I wanted to be convinced by Christianity.  Instead I read it as any other book, except with added significance, because this was the book of my tradition.  My father had read it, my grandfather had read it, and his father, etc.  It was an attempt to connect to a past I did not know.  I felt a comfort in picking up a book my family had always known.  Each generation had identified itself by picking up this book, and interpreting it in its own unique way.  As part of the latest generation, I had every right to interpret the Bible too.

I saw the Bible as a worn out traveling trunk.  It didn't contain anything anymore, but it was wonderful to think of the places it had been and what it had seen.  There was no reason to use it as anything other than a way to see into the past and to marvel at how it had shaped history.  But it was only a hollowed out book, its cover more meaningful than its contents.

I started at Genesis, as every amateur does, thinking that because it was just any other book, I would read it cover to cover.  My goal was to read it without the restraints of taking it literally.  With Genesis this is easy to do, because it is mythological.  We can view these stories as something like the bedtime tales we learn as children.  Except, these are stories about the beginning of the world.

I read Genesis much more quickly than I anticipated I would, but at some point in Exodus I gave up.  My mistake was to assume the rest of the Bible was so easily dismissed.

My struggle with atheism

There are many reasons that a person may become an atheist.  A person may have experienced great suffering in the world.  They may have been personally injured by a parent or someone they associate with God, like a priest or a pastor.  They may have lived through some natural disaster convincing them that there is no room in the world for a loving God.  These are emotional arguments for disbelieving in God.  There are also intellectual or philosophical reasons for becoming an atheist, reasons of morality or ideology.   One of the most popular types of intellectual atheism is based in scientific reasons.  If you think there is a disagreement between religion and science, and you pick science as the winner, then you will be an atheist.

Each of these arguments for atheism requires a different response.  Each of type of atheist would have a different conversion story if they chose to become Christian.  I am lucky that I have not had great pain in my life, and I never experienced the emotional trauma required to reject God.  My personal struggle with atheism came from scientific arguments, and therefore this is the only type of atheism that I can personally comment about.  This is not to say that I don't think there are good arguments against each type of atheism, but that, if I speak with any authority at all, it is only against scientific arguments.

Evidence I: An atheistic critique of religion

There is often a disdain for the supposed dichotomy present in religious scientists, who must wall off their faith from their science when it comes to standards of belief  Science, in its truest skeptical form, requires all ideas to be questioned and all answers to be corroborated by good evidence.  Faith, on the other hand, is said to be embraced because we are told to by tradition, evidence not factoring into the equation.  Theology, or its twin cousin, philosophy, is often criticized because we can believe almost anything.  Without evidence, all is up for grabs.

I frequently used this argument to defend atheism.  And it is hard to argue against, but it is not bulletproof, because within it, there is an inherent assumption that there is no evidence for any religion.  There is, of course, plenty of evidence for religion.  It could even be said that there is too much evidence, because each religion has its own.  The problem is that all of this evidence cannot be true, because it blatantly disagrees with itself.  At first glance, the only way to evenly evaluate all of this contradicting evidence is to declare it all equally invalid.

I was convinced this reasoning was right, and in fact, the only moral reasoning.  To pick one religion's evidence to be true seemed arbitrary, and picking Christianity would be giving my culture and personal heritage undue significance.

I reiterate these arguments because they were convincing for me and they shaped my rejection of Christianity.  I felt I was safe, because I was being fair.  Upon meeting God in heaven, I could pull a Bertrand Russell and say, "Well, God, you should have given me more evidence."  It would be God's fault.

An atheistic view of science and religion

When I was an atheist, a great problem for me was the intersection of religion and science.  No where was this intersection so lucid than in the creation stories of the Bible, which clearly contradict what we know by science.  The only way to embrace both Genesis and evolution, then, is to rob one of its explanatory power.  But how does one continually affirm a limp and useless source of knowledge?

I could, for convenience, weaken science or Biblical creation only partially.  Where they disagree, one would be declared winner.  Yet once I have taken that step, how could I disagree with an alternative theory that draws that line in a different place?  What makes me so special that I could feel comfortable knowing I was right?  For me, this was a direct path to relativism, because to adopt a weakened source of truth is to adopt them all.  The only way to be rational is to throw out one or the other, and I was not about to give up on science.

At the time, I played tuba at a church on Sunday mornings.  I enjoyed myself and found the sermons interesting, although I seldom agreed with them.  One particular morning, the pastor talked about his understanding of science and religion.  Below is an email I wrote shortly after his sermon.  It is still very interesting to me now, because it encapsulates my thinking at the time so well.  And I would struggle deeply to find the error in my thinking.

Lay down your shovel

I can remember one of the first moments when I began to doubt my own atheism, and it was not due to a theological argument, but to great literature.  Here it is, from Steinbeck's East of Eden:

Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful.

Samuel wrote to Joe, sayings, "I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you'd take a cookie on a full stomach.  But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother.  Your last letter only made her think you are not well.  Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup.  She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache.  It worries her.  Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven't even got a shovel yet."

The unanswered question

"Pilate said to him, 'What is truth?'" (John 18.38, RSV).

The evangelist is, unfortunately, silent regarding Jesus's reply.  The question is left unanswered.  In fact, it is startling how quickly the text moves on.  Pilate tries to render his innocent verdict, but is persuaded, deliberately, by the crowd instead.  The unanswered question is followed by an example of its opposite.

Light

A favorite metaphor for God during the Middle Ages was light.  Many of these metaphors still make sense, but some, like St. Thomas Aquinas' idea of light "illuminating" the air, do not survive our current physics.  We now understand that light travels even in a vacuum, not least between our sun and our own planet.  But this concept of light tells us a different lesson about God.

It is often difficult to see how God and evil can exist in the world.  How can God, who is infinite good, allow evil to remain?  If good and evil are two opposing forces, like the two ends of a magnet, then God's goodness would indeed push away all the evil in the world.  But evil is not the opposite of good, it is the lack of good.  So where pure evil exists, there is a complete vacuum of good.

God's infinite goodness does not attempt to fill the voids on his own.  He does not need to, because he can transcend them.  He penetrates through the vacuum and shines His goodness upon us, and if we are willing to follow Him, we begin to fill the voids.  This is God's grace.  God transcends and uses evil in order to teach us, so that we may become saints.

Existence

Philosophical arguments for God are only useful for understanding the Deist God.  The Deist God is the god of philosophy, capable of providing the foundational support for Truth and purpose.  Even St. Thomas Aquinas only tries to prove this tiny sliver of God, showing the wealth of what we can reason about God purely from this infinitely small section of knowledge about him. 

One of these reasonable assertions is that God is existence.  His essence is his existence, as Aquinas says.  He is the act of existence, itself.  In other words, as we look around and see that anything at all exists, we are seeing God.  He is present to all things because he is the present act of them existing.  If something exists now, then God is there in that act of existence.

Many philosophers get stuck at this tiny piece of God and see no reason to proceed into the Judeo-Christian understanding of God.  Surely there is a need to establish Truth, but how can one make the leap that this God is interacting with the world, that we may pray to him, and that he knows us personally?  We need revealed truth.

It is interesting, though, how God identifies himself to Moses.  Although the early Jews probably had no concept of the abstract idea of God's essence, God nevertheless identifies himself this way.  He says, "I am who I am".  His ancient name means, "I am".  Here we see how right Aquinas is.  "God is" is the most fundamental, yet complete, understanding of God.  To create an analogy that God is "love" or "truth", while true, in some way diminishes God.  The sentence, "God is" simultaneously tells us something about God and identifies him, because he is simultaneously the cause of everything and the presence of everything.  He simply "is" everything, in every possible meaning that we can understand that concept.

What is astounding is that we can know this both by human reason (Aquinas) and revealed scripture (Moses).  They both agree.  And while that does not prove the God of Abraham is the right conception, it certainly throws out many other Gods, namely those of every ancient, pagan polytheistic religion.  Our understanding of the world is only complete in a monotheistic God, who tells us "I am".

Self-contradiction

Peter Kreeft, in a lecture series about St. Thomas, acknowledges a common philosophical mistake about God:

"Another attack on the meaningfulness of Aquinas’s concept of God is this: Some say that the concept of omnipotence, or infinite power, is self-contradictory, and therefore meaningless. They ask whether God can make a rock bigger than He can lift, and if you say yes, then they say there can be something bigger than even God’s power can lift, so God is not infinitely powerful; but if you say no, then they say there is something God can’t do, so again His power is not infinite.

"But the linguistic confusion is in that question, not in the concept of God that the question questions; for “a rock bigger than infinite power can lift” is a self-contradictory concept, but “infinite power” is not itself a self-contradictory concept. So the simple answer to the question is: No, God can’t make a rock bigger than He can lift any more than He can make anything else that’s self-contradictory and therefore meaningless."

If you don't accept this answer, then you don't have a problem with God, you have a problem with the notion of self-contradiction.

Agreement

I think that everyone can agree that, if a god exists, they would like to believe in that god, and that, if no gods exist, they would not like to be mistaken and needlessly believe in a false god.

Most of us probably also agree that no one has it all figured out.  Each of us is aligned and unaligned with reality in our own unique way.  Our intelligence is limited, but we cannot live life without claiming that some things are true and others are false, and therefore each of us will inevitably be wrong in our claims in some way.  In other words, our beliefs do not make reality.  Instead we are constantly vigilant to align our beliefs with what is immutably real.