When atheists think the understand religion...

I occasionally read an article out loud for my wife while she is busy with our daughter.  It lets us read together and gives my daughter some time listening to words.   I chose 'Religion for Everyone' to read to them, and the result was pure comedy.

I don't want to make fun at this article because I am sure the author was sincere.  But it is obvious he has no idea what 'religion' really is.  He is a convinced atheist, but he longs for the Old-Time Religion that he supposes brought us together as a community.  So his solution is to 'learn from religion' and create secular copies of the pieces that built the communities of the past.  In the article, he mostly uses the 'genius' of the Catholic Mass as his starting point.  It appears he has only read about the Mass, however, and never really stepped inside a church during the liturgy.

For instance, his understanding of the Eucharist is foreign to any mass-going catholic.  He supposes that we come to mass (physically) hungry, making us primed for lessons about life (the homily), so that when we greet our neighbors (Sign of Peace), we do not judge them.  We then partake in a meal (the Eucharist) and in our satiated state give our fellow parishioners a pat on the back and grow together.  Then drawing on a fairly spurious history of the early mass, he supposes the secular version is an "Agape Restaurant', where a community groups comes together to share a meal without prejudice.  This lofty goal is achieved by splitting up families and friends at the tables and asking neighbors questions like, "What are your fears?", which are from a script lying on the table.  No, I'm not making this up.

Beyond the question of "who would ever want to do this?", he missing something else completely.  He supposes that the success of a religion is built upon liturgies and rituals and not the stuffy doctrines.  But it is entirely the opposite.  The liturgies only make sense if they are proper reflections of the doctrines.  The mass is pointless unless Jesus was the son of God who gave his body and blood in sacrifice.  Baptism is pointless unless its action removes the stain of Original Sin and brings us into the community of the church.  The evidence for this misunderstanding is clear when the author makes statements like, "Religions know a lot about our loneliness."  No, it is God who knows a lot about our loneliness, and when we turn to Him as a community in the liturgy, only then is there a chance that we can properly align ourselves.

I honestly wish the author luck.  I hope he has a chance to establish his restaurants and build his temples, because when they are empty, it will hasten the end of this post-modern notion that religion is just a set of empty liturgies.

Ethics and Morality III: The Alternative God of Love

In “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist” Joel Marks, an ethicist writing in the New York Times, argues that although it may appear to us that they exist, morals are a complete fiction.  He motivates his objection to morality with the Euthyphro.  As he explains, this Platonic dialogue challenges us with the dilemma, “Do the gods approve of something because it is pious, or is something pious because the gods approve it?”  

This question exposes the fabric of morality and ethics.  If we suppose that piety is higher than the gods (however many there may be), then we are forced to admit that there is some greater authority than the divine.  Hence, the gods themselves would be superfluous to questions of morality.  Any divine revelation would be mere divine opinion.  On the other hand, if the gods are the sole author of our morals, then morality is a puppet of the gods.  Morality itself would be arbitrary and merely compulsory.  At the command of Zeus we could be in a world in which murder, abuse, and lying are blessed acts.  That is a frightening world.  Hence, the Euthyphro dilemma forces us to choose between a morality in which the gods are superfluous or one in which they are our capricious tormentors.  We react to the gods with apathy or dread.

Prof. Marks tells us that these innate reactions are important.  “We have an intuitive sense of right and wrong that trumps even the commands of God,” he assures us.  In other words, we can judge the gods, and in that way Prof. Marks chooses the apathetic view.  Yet if gods are not needed for morality, then atheism seems a logical next step.  And, as I have previously written, Marks argument is that if there is no divine, then there can be no place for morality to exist either.

Is dread of the gods a better choice?  Plato does not think it is logical.  In his dialogue Socrates challenges the young Euthyphro, who on his way to condemn his father, with the above dilemma.  Out of respect for the gods, Euthyphro chooses the view that piety must be what the gods approve.  But Socrates shows that a thing that is pious cannot be pious merely because it is approved by the gods: an approval is passive in nature but piety is an active property of a thing itself, so, Socrates argues, piety cannot be the result of any approval.  By the end of the dialogue, Euthyphro is made a fool by Socrates, who shows him that if he cannot point to the true essence of piety, he has no basis for his supposed piousness.  

Consider, though, the nature of the gods in Plato’s cosmos.  The gods inhabit a divine realm that is little different from the realm of the mortals.  They are ‘higher’ than humanity only in the sense that they have complete dominion over the earth.  The gods bicker between themselves and disagree violently.  Zeus, their leader, is only first among equals.  Hence piety cannot have its source in any one god.  This is why Euthyphro must suppose pious things are approved by all the gods.

Plato, for all his wisdom, was unaware of Jewish theology, that the divine is one omnipotent, omniscient God who is the source of all things, unique in His supreme unity.  God Himself is one, rather than divided among gods.  God’s will is perfect rather than fickle.  Moreover, this God is not a being; He is being itself.  He creates ex nihilo and exists outside time.  The God of the Jews shares his godliness with the Greek gods only in the faint sense that He is above humanity.  

Returning to the dilemma, we find that in His unity, this Jewish God presents an alternative solution for Euthyphro: God simply is piety.  This is to say that God is the complete and total source of piety.  God and piety are two words for the same thing under different facets.  And if we examine the dilemma more closely, we see that piety is not unique.  Socrates could have challenged Euthyphro with similar questions about the source of truth, love, justice, goodness, or morality itself.  And in a similar way, we would find that God is truth, that God is love, etc.

Of course this idea is not new; it is orthodox Christianity.  In the Gospel of John, we find that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (14:6).  John speaks in his first epistle that, “He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (4:8).  This language fills the Bible.  Yet these concepts are more than just biblical axioms.  St. Thomas Aquinas, in his fourth way of rationally knowing God, appeals to the good, true and noble in humanity and shows that they must flow from a source that holds their perfection.  And this source can only be what we call God.

Examining again the problem of Euthyphro in the light of the alternative Christian understanding of the divine nature, we see that the perceived dilemma vanishes.  We find a problem only when we anthropomorphize God into another being or disconnect morality from its source.  Marks’ search for morality is really a search for God.  His innate rejection of a capricious God is misplaced, because his intuitive sense of morality can only have its source in God himself.

Moreover, the above solution to Euthyphro’s dilemma has a corollary that confirms our common sense: love is divine; morality, how we love, is divine; justice, the application of love, is divine; piety, the love of God, is divine.  In a word, to love is to taste God.  Love is, literally, a miracle.  This is why we seek to experience true love.  If we have considered the full theological implications of God being love, then when we tell someone we love her, we are telling her that we meet God in her presence.

This is the common sense notion that an atheist must deny.  Marks denies it by supposing God is another being whom he can judge.  Other atheists deny it by supposing that love has a meaning in a purely material universe.  This brings us to the irony of atheistic ethics.  The atheist denies the existence of God but must appeal to love in order to motivate his ethics.  This love can ultimately never inspire us, however, because it lacks the divine substance that makes it real.  So an atheistic ethics borrows inspiration from the true sense of love that resides in God, completing the irony.

Of course Marks, and likeminded atheists, are sincere.  They see no evidence for God, but wish to establish a reasoning for being good without Him.   Yet, returning to St. Thomas, in the exercise of establishing a universal ethics, the atheist finds his evidence for God.  The atheist tastes God in his love of the good and just.  This is not scientific evidence, but evidence that is even more powerful because it reaches into the heart.  

Ethics and Morality

As a rebuttal to my previous comment, my friend endorsed an atheist response to the Joel Marks's Ex-Moralist article.  In his blog Why Evolution is True, the ecologist Jerry Coyle argues that Marks did not truly give up morality.  Instead he switched to a utilitarian morality and merely called it something different.  I don't agree.  In the following reply, I suggest that Marks gave up on morality because his atheist philosophy demanded it.

Sometimes it helps for me to start at the beginning.  What is the purpose of defining morality?  Why go through the trouble?  It seems to me that morality is important because there are times when we simply do not know the right action to take.  Sometimes we must rely upon something outside ourselves to tell us what to do.  Our internal compass -- our instinct, our heart, or our head -- fails us.  Morality tells us what to do at these times.  Yet there is also ethics, and both ethics and morality instruct us how to act.

Although both are valuable, I see ethics and morality as distinct.  What separates them is that ethics change and are debated while morals are eternal.  We cannot deny that each of us has times when we disobey even our own rules.  We rationalize them away or we try to forget them.  The moral rules are those which we can never deny or rationalize into nonexistence.  We must accept them.  Morality becomes most needed precisely at the moment one wishes to ignore it.  To make this point clear, consider being accused of something "unethical" versus "immoral".  The latter has a feeling of inviolable transgression that the former lacks.  Or to put it more succinctly: ethics suggests, morality compels. 

I make this distinction because I do not think Prof. Coyne or Sam Harris, whom Coyne mentions, is talking about morality.  They are talking about ethics.  Consider this section from Coyne's post: 

"[Prof. Marks] may not call [vegetarianism] the 'right' thing to do, but it’s what he sees as a way to increase well being.  And that’s exactly what Sam Harris sees as 'objective' morality." 

To be fair, I have not read Harris, and neither Coyne nor Marks wrote in order to define a complete system of ethics, but consider what is here.  They propose that we should act in ways that increase well-being.  That sounds good, but it is easily rationalized away.  If I am selfish and place a higher weight upon my own happiness, then I am justified to act selfishly because my well-being is most important.  Yet we also feel that would be wrong.  (I can give personal testimony to this sin.)  Hence the idea -- that we should act to increase well-being -- is an idea in ethics.  To motivate, it requires some external moral standard that tells us we should not value ourselves so highly. 

I don't think Coyne would be satisfied with that argument.  He would say, I think, that he possess an innate morality which tells him to act humbly.  This morality is guided by the "head" and the "heart". 

"[Prof. Marks's] 'head' is his secular and rational consideration of what consequences actions can bring.  If some consequences are more desirable than others, as in factory farming, that’s not much different from morality.

"His 'heart' is his evolved feelings about the right thing to do.  That is the part of our morality instilled in our ancestors by natural selection." 

He supposes morality is a combination of choosing what is more desirable rationally and judging his choices based on his internal feelings, which have emerged from evolution through natural selection.  So for him, the ultimate external moral standard is based in the natural process of adaptation.  It changes and evolves, and hence it is not truly objective.  (Notice objective becomes "objective" in the quote above.)  Dawkins calls this the "changing moral zeitgeist" in The God Delusion.  But there are problems with such a moral standard. 

Morality is not an abstract idea that we discuss to make us feel better about our actions.  It gives us a basis for truly judging our actions and the actions of others.  Ideally, it should give us a standard by which we construct our laws.  And in this latter way, morality becomes action.  We ruin people's lives by throwing them in jail (or worse) for not conforming to the moral zeitgeist.  We feel we are justified in administering this discipline because they have offended a morality that not only applies to us, but to them as well.  For example, we would all agree that thieves and murderers  are immoral and should be punished. 

And so here is the problem: if we suppose that morality evolves, then how can we justify punishment of immoral acts?  How do we guarantee these wrong actions are not, in fact, just the next step in the evolving moral zeitgeist?  How do we avoid punishing the more evolved actions outside our current morality?  Given the unreliability of our individual moral sense, as I mentioned above, we cannot depend on it.  Toward an answer Dawkins proposes that "the zeitgeist may […] move in a generally progressive direction, but […] it is a sawtooth not a smooth improvement" (p. 308, The God Delusion).  But this is not satisfying: why is the zeitgeist not generally regressive instead? 

Fundamental to Dawkins's argument is that today we know and understand more than our ancestors -- we have discovered more truth.  Therefore we are more likely to construct a proper understanding of right and wrong.  But we cannot know this with certainty.  We can only trust that the zeitgeist is guided by an invisible hand.  Dawkins, Harris, and Coyne would say, circularly, that this is the hand of evolution.  But if evolution is the author of our changing moral sense, we cannot then use our moral sense to judge what truth evolution has given us.  Hence an inner, evolved sense of right and wrong can never provide an objective standard of morality. 

I think in his "anti-epiphany", Prof. Marks peers behind the curtain of the morality argued by Dawkins and Harris and sees the circularity.  The invisible hand disappeared.  He sees no basis for compelling anyone to act in a right way, because "right" doesn't have a real meaning.  Moreover, he has no alternative.  There is no atheistic argument for morality that is not fundamentally circular in the above way.  And that is why he no longer believes in morals.  He can only suggest an ethics from the basis of his internal compass.  (At least, then, he still has a job.) 

But there is an alternative solution that embraces the invisible hand, the teleology, of our moral development.  This solution acknowledges moral guidance as one of the divine attributes, because only God can satisfy our quest for an objective morality.  And it does not require us to redefine words with perfectly good definitions.  But that is for another post.

A path toward moral relativism

Yesterday, just before going to bed, I ran across this essay by ethicist Joel Marks on the New York Times called "Confessions of an Ex-Moralist".  I found it to be a refreshing look at the moral implications of atheism, and I commented on Facebook that it was nice to read a "serious" atheist.  A friend took exception to my comment and wrote:

What exactly do you find 'serious' about this? If anything, I find it almost exactly not serious. This guy sounds like an atheist who at some level wishes he just could be a believer and make all the tricky stuff go away. I think teh kidz call this a faithiest.

I wrote a reply in which I tried to express the logical reasons of this particular atheist's choice of moral relativism and why it was important to understand it.

I doubt that I am unique here, but it often feels as if morals are real, i.e., that there is an objective right and wrong.  When someone has wronged me, it feels as though his action was not just wrong for me but for him as well.  And I would like to think that, at times, I am truly justified in my anger toward someone else.  So if I feel so strongly about a moral reality, then why?

One answer, I suppose, is that morals do not exist as we would feel they should.  Instead of morals, the argument goes, each of us merely has preferences.  Morals themselves are an illusion or, at best, are an emergent property formed out of the complex interactions of our subjective preferences.  Either way, morals do not have real authority.

Regardless of whether that particular argument is true, Prof. Marks is convinced that his atheism demands that it is true.  He explains why here:

"A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset […] But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? […] Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?"

As a humanist, he finds truth in the inward feeling of beauty one sees in a sunset (what his friend calls God).  But it is the experience between man and sunset that he finds transcendent, not the sunset itself.  As an atheist, he knows this is not really God, but like his friend he did "adamantly affirm the objectivity of right and wrong".  Yet at his "anti-epiphany", he realizes that there is a duality between his friend's belief in God and his belief in morals.  As man is to sunset, man is also to lie.  He supposes that he should be as amoral as he is atheist.  And in that case, morals do not exist any more than God does.

What is so "serious" about this atheist is that once he realizes that his philosophy demands that he give up an important aspect of his life -- morality is important to an ethicist -- he does so without question.  Moreover, I find it commendable that he focuses on the questions of atheist morality instead of the more worn out question of whether atheists are moral.  I find the notion of a relative morality absolutely fascinating because it raises a huge list of questions.  Prof. Marks covers some in his essay: Are any acts not permissible?  How does one deal with disagreement?  How does one escape moral nihilism?  What are the societial implications of such a philosophy?  How can we rely on an instinctual morality when it is so unreliable?  Each of these is a hard question, and hence I don't agree that it as an easy way out.

Whether evolution via natural selection is a counter-example to Thomas's Fifth Way

Thomas Aquinas famously shows that the existence of God may be shown through five ways.  The fifth way is sometimes called the teleological argument or the argument from design.

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

Thomas begins with the rational principle that all things that act toward an end must have been designed to act toward this end.  Hence, if we find that there are ends, that agents act "as to obtain the best result", then we must agree that these agents' actions had a designer.  Thomas finds such agents in nature, agents that lack intelligence yet act in ways that are obviously "aimed" as, famously, "the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer".  Here Thomas is supposing these agents are programmed to act, they do not decide for themselves, e.g., birds fly south due to their DNA, not out of free choice.


Thomas focuses on nature and so his argument has lost some influence among modern man, who would more easily (and scientifically) attribute the ends of nature to natural selection and evolution.  To stay with the analogy, even a dumb archer will guide an arrow given enough time and motivation.  For example, Richard Dawkins argues that

Thanks to Darwin, it is no longer true to say that nothing we know looks designed unless it is designed.  Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance.  And among these eminences of pseudo-design are nervous systems which -- among their more modest accomplishments -- manifest goal-seeking behavior that, even in a tiny insect, resembles a sophisticated heat-seeking missile more than a simple arrow on target (p. 103, God Delusion).

Evolution is undoubtedly true, and natural selection is the most likely scientific explanation for the way in which we ended up with complex organs like nervous systems.  But I doubt that evolution by natural selection is a valid counter-example to Thomas's fifth way.  Such arguments miss the deeper philosophical point contained within Thomas's argument.


Thomas remarks that at least some natural, unintelligent agents act to obtain the best result.  They do not end up acting at random (fortuitously), but in a way that best suits them.  It is the notion of best that implies a designer, even given evolution as the method of achieving that result.  For example, a dumb archer may eventually be trained to aim at a target, but it is a rational impossibility that a dumb archer chooses his target.  He shoots where he is told.  His notions of best are external, decided by a more able mind.  So if we wish to argue against Thomas's divinely driven nature, we cannot point toward evolution because it does not provide a definition of best.  It does not aim the arrow of nature, it merely propels it.  


To make this point clear, consider what one may say is the best human organ, the brain.  In his lecture notes on Aquinas, Peter Kreeft writes

I think Aquinas would say that evolution is an excellent example of cosmic design, evidence for God. He’d say the arrow of evolution flies to the target of human brains only because it’s guided by the intelligence of a divine archer. Aquinas would not be among the anti-Darwinian fundamentalists today. I think if he saw the atheist bumper sticker of the Christian fish with the word Darwin in it, he would not understand the intended irony, he would interpret it as an argument for theism (p. 20, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas). 

Using Dawkins's words, that there are bodily "eminences", we actually argue for God's existence. If we suppose that the action of our grey matter is the pinnacle of evolution, then we must concede to Aquinas that there is a designer, aiming the arrow of evolution toward human intelligence.  (God is the intelligence designer not the Intelligent Designer.)


A proper counter-example could be formed if it could be proven that there is no notion of best.  Instead, there are just flavors and variations, each equally valid.  So Thomas's archer may hit the bullseye, or he may avoid it, but we cannot rationally suppose one target is better than another.  This is a post-modern critique of Thomas.  But such an argument is not only fatal to Thomas's fifth way, but fatal to science as well.  Science needs best too, because it tells us truths about the physical world; it needs a best hypothesis.  Without best, the flat Earth and the round Earth become equals, and science would become a glorified database of physical occurrences.


This is why science is indebted to Aquinas and his fifth way.  He justifies the otherwise arrogant claim of scientific truth by telling us why we have intelligence: because our minds, made in the image of God's omnipotence, are ordered toward reason.  And in that humble way, we may find truth.

Skeptics and Believers: Lecture 1 - Religion and Modernity

The material for this course begins at the enlightenment, or the scientific revolution, and it examines what religious and nonreligious thinkers have thought from then to the present time.  The great question that is posed is, "Can religion be modern?"  The first lecture gives an overview of Prof. Robert's attempt to answer to that question.

Prof. Roberts defines Modernity in its more philosophical sense.  The movement of Modernity is toward a greater substitution of the "authority of reason" for the Medieval "authority of faith".  He identifies Modernity with ideas of progress and the universality of reason.  Modernity innately supposes that man will be unified under reason and that, somehow, mankind itself is on a slow journey to this unification.  At the same time, man does not need God or religion to achieve this final goal, because every step is built with the human intellect ordered by reason.  By this definition, Modernity is not so much atheist as it is agnostic.  The Modern god is an outside observer.

With that definition of Modernity, it seems impossible that religion can be modern.  To be religious supposes that God is both necessary and essential for life.  So while various religions may absorb features of Modernity, they can never truly be modern.  This is only my prediction of Prof. Robert's conclusion, but I am very interested in what place he finds for religion in a Modern world.

After defining Modernity, Prof. Roberts gives an overview of the course.  He has chosen to explore the questions of religion and reason throughout time, focusing on what philosophers have thought.  We will hear from Descarte, Hume, Kierkegaard, Kant, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and others.  For this lecture, we are only given the standard nuggets of argument for which they are famous.  But he ends the lecture on a curious note.

At the end, he wants to describe the importance of philosophy.  (Afterall, what use is his lecture if we do not fully appreciate what philosophy is.)  He turns to Focault.  Philosophy, he says, is a practice of thought.  It is a testing of ideas.  This exploration of ideas, if it is deep enough, verges on the spiritual.  Philosophical inquiry, he says, is important because it allows us to change our ideas.  In fact, it impels us to change our ideas.

That definition sounds very appealing.  But if I did not know any better before I listened to these lectures, I would have put philosophy aside and forgotten about it.  Imagine if we said that the importance of science is that it is possible change our ideas about physical reality?  Imagine if we got upset because science dictated to us the nature of the world and felt oppressed by science because we could not form our own understanding of nature.  What good would science be?  But indeed it is that dictatorship that gives science its usefulness.  If science gives us truth, then we can only accept the reality it presents us, we cannot argue. Likewise, philosophy is only useful if it is a real source of truth.  It is important to be able to seek new ideas and change our understanding of the world, but only on the journey toward truth. If God exists, then positing his nonexistence is an ultimately useless exercise.  Freedom is useful only in the service of truth.  It is not an end unto itself.

So instead, if we are to continue further, we must suppose that philosophy is a exploration of the nature of reality every bit as concerned with truth as science.  With that, we can see how religion and reason are not so opposed to each other.  They are both an exploration and response to what is true and real.  Otherwise, they are pointless.

Skeptics and Religion: Beginning thoughts

I have been hoping to learn more about atheism and religion for a long time.  Although any conversion requires an evaluation of the religious landscape, I have never gone through a systematic evaluation.  And now I have a great opportunity to do that.

An atheist friend of mine often raises objections to religion and faith on Facebook, and I have certainly linked to several critiques of atheism.  Facebook was not built for weighty theological and philosophical discussions, and so often those discussions were not as useful as they could have been.  So in a spirit of dialogue, we have decided to seek out a common vocabulary by listening to lectures on skepticism and religion.  These lectures (I hope) will offer a survey of religious belief and its criticism.  What I hope to gain is perspective.  I want to understand why people have had different views from the perspective of those views.  In other words, it is usually not enough for me to understand the criticism of a worldview.  I also want to hear and understand why it is that a worldview exists.

Our first lecture series is called Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition.  These lectures are given by Professor Tyler Roberts, who is himself a skeptic.  The second lecture series is called Faith and Reason: The Philosophy of Religion by Professor Peter Kreeft, an outspoken Catholic apologist.  I hope that these two sets of lectures will give us both points of view.


To begin the discussion, I have some questions I hope are answered by Prof. Tyler over the course of the lectures:

• Will he frame the religious narrative as a search for truth or as the slow triumph of human thought?
• What does he believe is the purpose of philosophy?
• Can he explain love and the intellect from a skeptical point of view?
• Under the skeptical mindset, what stops one from becoming a nihilist?

The final question is the one that I am most interested to learn about.  Is nihilism inevitable if there is no God?

My friend's commentary can be found here.

Theology on Tap: "The Siren Song of Science"

Reflections

I gave the following talk in May.  I was horribly nervous, mostly because as I stood in front of the microphone and looked out into the crowd, I realized it was the first time I had publicly professed my faith.  But it was worth it, if only for the huge swell of calm that poured over me after I finished the talk.  This was a chance for me to form my ideas into something coherent, something understandable.

But it was also a chance for me to find my limitations.  My nervousness was not only a sign of being a novice, but also of being unconfident.  Why the lack of confidence?  Because in some parts I could only form a first-order approximation of what I wished to express, unaware of the secondary or tertiary meanings.  So for instance, when I wanted to talk about the inconsistencies in the Bible, I meant to say that there are passages in the Bible which do not easily agree with one another.  The finding of the empty tomb is the canonical example.  But I did not mean to suggest that the Bible is filled with incompatible passages, unable to be reconciled by anyone but the Catholic hierarchy.  I meant to imply only that finding the real meaning of the Bible is very difficult, so difficult, in fact, that many atheists see this as a sign that Christianity cannot be right, because it cannot put forth a coherent set of Biblical axioms.  But this very real difficulty is not troubling to most Catholics because of sacred Tradition.  I wanted to say this argument in as few words as possible, and so I called this difficulty "inconsistencies".  There is probably a better word.  

What this tells me is that I have to be more Bible literate.  I have to have a better appreciation of where my faith comes from.  So I have started to read Fr. Raymond Brown's Introduction to the New Testament again, beginning with the epistles of St. Paul.  Beginning with St. Paul is important, because, in my haste to reject Protestant Christianity, it is easy to have a distaste for St. Paul.

But what I also came to understand was that I have a fundamental hunger for philosophy, not the fake philosophy of the Internet age, but true metaphysical thought.  I want to know philosophy in the sense that it is the love of wisdom, a love of understanding.  I had begun this journey with St. Thomas Aquinas, who achieved the height of Medieval thought, but who drew upon Aristotle.  That leads me to Plato and Socrates.  In other words, I want a knowledge of classical thought.  So I am beginning to read Plato and Aristotle in that hope that, with this basis, I can feel more comfortable with my own understanding.  Again, I want to know where my faith comes from, and in many ways, it comes from the ancients.  The church often holds up Socrates as a man who, although pre-Christian, is in heaven.  I have a lot I can learn from him.

A working definition of Truth

Scientists discuss their work in elaborate ways.  They invest vast amounts of time and intellectual resources toward writing papers and creating presentations.  Often the organization of work takes as many hours to produce as the original work itself.  There is a reward, however: the more effort put into a paper, the easier it is to understand, the more precise the results, and the more convincing the argument.  But their effort would all be pointless if none of them believed their own arguments.  Instead, each scientist believes they are uncovering a previously hidden part of reality.  Science seeks to discover, not to interpret.

We often take this idea about science for granted, but it is profound.  It implies that when a scientist speaks about atoms, he does not mean that, for him, atoms are a good way of understanding physics, but that there are atoms and the universe is made of them.  To disagree is to be mistaken.

Consider the alternative.  If each of us was allowed to have our own understanding of physics, how could we communicate, how could we make progress?  It seems absurd to suggest that there can be no certainty about the physical world.  Yet, without Truth, we are forced to embrace this absurdity.  Truth is what lets us talk about the real world.  It implies there is a right understanding of reality.  It implies there is something to discover.  But it is uncompromising, because it also implies that we can, at times, be utterly wrong.

This is my working definition of Truth.  There is a reality, and we can discover it.  There is a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, and these words have a meaning beyond mere feeling or interpretation.  It may be difficult to find, but it is there.

Intention

My intention in becoming an atheist was never to do harm to a certain faith or to rebel against a society which sought my conversion or for any other vindictive reason.  It was an effort to rid myself of all superfluous beliefs and their unnecessary baggage.  I attempted to reconstruct a tabula rasa, and strongly held to the conviction that I would not believe anything that I could not see with my own eyes or understand with my own mind.  This is a task undertaken only by those who feel they have the intellect to withstand a full frontal assault from reality.  I felt safe within the intellectual fortifications of the university, which, in its clean room of thought, had already declared war on ignorance and continually won virtually every battle.

Or so I thought.

Go to church

The earliest memory I have of anything related to church is leaving.  Being dragged, in fact, away into the parking lot.  I don't remember specifically what happened, but if my mother is to be believed, I had caused some trouble in Sunday school.  I do remember Sunday school, specifically coloring pictures of Jesus and his disciples, always with sandaled feet and continually in the presence of sheep.  Their faces always seemed serious, and I could never figure out exactly why.  These pictures were not like the books I colored in school.  Even at this age I was a contrarian, so if there was some hint of seriousness in my activities at Sunday school, I acted out.  No doubt, it was for this reason that I was being dragged home.

I do not want to project false, romantic ideas back on my childhood, but I can't help but feel a tinge of what would later lead me toward atheism.  In church, I remember feeling stifled.  The air was thick with condescending looks.  And the word "arbitrary" comes to mind.  Why did we go to this big room and sing boring songs and talk about Jesus?  Jesus was boring, absolutely boring.  There were about a billion better things I could to do than go to church.  Even just thinking of those three words, "Go to church," creates ill flashbacks in my mind.

My family moved often when I was growing up, so there was never a chance to settle into one particular church.  But even when we become more stable in Cincinnati, we seemed to switched churches often.  I remember my parents were fond of a particular church in California, and they wanted to find a replacement.  I don't think they ever did.  So from an early age, I was made aware of a variety of worshiping styles.  Perhaps this led me to think of church as arbitrary.  If God is universal, why doesn't everyone do it the same way?

I struggle to remember anything specific.  It all seems like a wash now, and it was over quickly.  I do not remember when or why, but we stopped going to church, because, as my mother said, "I acted up too much."  She was probably right, I did.  So from the time I was about six or seven until college, I rarely stepped inside a church.  My parents tried, after they rediscovered their faith, but there was no way they were going to get me to go to church.

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".