Moslems and some Christians use divine inspiration, or faith, to get around the argument. In the more extreme, Muslim version, God decided in advance who would have faith and who not. He created unbelievers in such a way that their minds would be hardened against faith in Him, and for the “sin” of being created that way, he intends to burn them forever. It’s all set forth very explicitly in the Koran.

However, Christians who imagine themselves more sophisticated than the rest, apparently never having read the bit in Matthew 18:3 about the impossibility of entering the kingdom of heaven except as a little child, have more “complex” arguments. One such is Paul Wallace, who set forth a version thereof at the website of Religion Dispatches.

Wallace begins with the well-worn argument that, if you don’t believe in God, you’re really just a religious horse of a different color. In his words,

The atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are often not more than mirror images—inversions—of the theisms they negate.

By that logic, if you don’t believe in fairies, you belong to the “anti-fairy cult,” and if you’ve never read Virginia’s letter, and lost faith in Santa, you’re a zealot in the “anti-Santa” religion. Winston in Orwell’s “1984,” was presumably a fundamentalist religious fanatic because he insisted he only counted four fingers instead of five when his torturer held up his hand.

Wallace is just warming up, though. Citing Yale theology professor Denys Turner, he explains that, if you don’t see the fifth finger, you’re just not trying hard enough:

Turner also writes that, very often, the theisms attacked by atheists are not very interesting; therefore, the atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are not very interesting. Why this is so is not clear; perhaps it is because in many cases theism was abandoned before it was allowed time to develop into something of substance.

He then focuses on the version of the argument presented in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion -

In The God Delusion, Dawkins presents his central argument against the existence of God in the fourth chapter. His thinking goes something like this: The universe is a complex thing. Therefore the God of the Christians, who, Christians say, made the universe, must be at least as complex as the universe God made. Therefore we are left with an even bigger problem than before: Who made this ultra-complex God? A hyper-complex megaGod? It makes plain sense, according to Occam’s razor, to stop before we get to the first God. The complex universe is enough. Ergo, in all likelihood, God does not exist.

This argument, which boils down to Well, who made God, then?, assumes that God is a thing like any other thing. It assumes that God must exist in the same way the moon exists, in the same way Dawkins himself exists. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his now-infamous review of The God Delusion, Dawkins seems to think that God is “a celestial super-object or divine UFO,” a creature like other creatures, only bigger and smarter: a kind of überthing, but a thing nonetheless.

But nowhere does Dawkins get outside of himself and ask, Is my assumption that God is a thing like any other thing really necessary? On what is this assumption grounded? Where did it come from?

I’m no fan of Dawkins. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I was not enthralled by his quasi-racist anti-American ranting about the “U.S. Taliban” and overt bigotry against Christian fundamentalists in The God Delusion. Be that as it may, his argument doesn’t depend on God being a thing like other things. It only requires that God is a thing, as opposed to nothing. Nowhere does Dawkins suggest that God is a thing like other things, but merely that, whatever sort of thing he is imagined to be, if He is the creator, he must necessarily be more complex than that which he created. As a result, whatever kind of a thing believers of whatever stripe might imagine Him to be, the argument that He must exist because otherwise the remarkable physical world we see around us could not exist becomes absurd. It is assuming something more complicated to explain something less complicated. It doesn’t solve anything. Wallace, however, demures:

What is at issue here is, Dawkins refuses to examine the ground on which he stands: science itself. That is, Dawkins may change his mind about evolution, but nothing will change his mind about science. He will never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth.

Here we see the familiar portrayal of “science” as a religious belief. In fact, it is nothing of the sort, but merely a systematic way of discovering and acquiring knowledge. There is nothing mystical about the word “science” at all. It is simply one way of reasoning about what is true. Continuing with Wallace:

He will never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth. Perhaps he thinks the success of science makes it a self-evident choice when it comes to grounding his worldview; what he does not and will not consider is the very real possibility that science is so successful precisely because it is so limited. To reject this possibility out-of-hand is nothing but intellectual laziness. Dawkins is dogmatically rigid and fixed in place. He is a fundamentalist.

Fine. Science is limited. However, Christian fundamentalism, an “easy target,” is also limited. Dawkins just wasn’t aiming high enough. Forget the Christians as “little children” meme. If you want to “see through” his argument, it’s going to take some serious mental gymnastics. Wallace describes the process in terms of four levels of “God-talk,” with the third being the most important. Let’s let him explain:

The third level is the most difficult but the most important. This is second-order negation, or the inversion of the inversion. Here we would say, “God is not a fire, but God is not a not-fire either,” and “God is not love, but neither is God not-love.” God transcends the (human-based) distinction between love and not-love.

Also on this third level is found the insistence, made for centuries by theologians throughout Christendom, that God transcends the distinction of being and not-being. Therefore, if we use the conventional definition of existence, God does not exist. Our category of existence does not apply to God. Put another way, the word “exist” cannot be used univocally of things and God. These are artificial categories imagined and used by human beings; they are manifestly not divine attributes. In the end, to speak correctly, there are no divine attributes. Which means that God is not distinct from creation, nor is God not-distinct from creation. That is, in God there is no distinction at all, nor is there non-distinction. No affirmation or denial properly applies to God.

Or, in other words, God is neither a thing or nothing. This very convenient for believers, because it puts their God out of reach of logic. By the same token, I can say that fairies, Santa, or the Great Green Grasshopper God are neither thing or nothing, and no one can prove they don’t exist.

But atheists say that Christianity is false, that God does not exist. Asking them to defend their position in light of mature theology is doing nothing but taking them for their word and respecting their intelligence.

So atheists are wrong because, like Winston and his four fingers, they can’t imagine an entity that is neither a thing nor nothing. Wallace assigns them the task of disproving the existence of that entity, but without using language, because that would be too deceptive, and without reasoning, because that which is outside the union of “thing” and “nothing” is also outside the realm of rational argument. If they fail then, voila, the existence of God is proved! Of course, the author realizes he’s walking on thin ice. He admits as much:

Also, one may say that negative theology is content-free and useless because it nullifies the use of rational thought. In a sense this is a valid argument. But one can go beyond negative theology while bearing in mind its lessons. In fact, negative theology constitutes the central nervous system, if you will, of the entire Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Dawkins so happily and ignorantly mocks. In this work, Thomas employs analogical language in order to speak freely of God’s attributes without the possibility of confusing them with the attributes of, say, fire or kingship or love or being.

Since it’s obviously impossible to believe in an un-thing, the author, after assuring us that God is neither thing nor nothing, is suddenly speaking of Him as an object with attributes. I, and I daresay anyone else who speaks English fluently, would call an object with attributes a thing.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of negative theology: It cleanses the mind not only of assumptions about God, but of idols (like science, say) that can so easily replace God.

Again assigning some mystical quality to “Science.”  As noted above, science is just systematic reasoning.  What the above amounts to is the claim that anyone who dares to use their brain as something other than inert stuffing for their skull is an “idolater.”

We are required to have faith in no thing at all; only then will our faith have any chance of finding its true home in God.

There are, of course, different flavors of this “no thing.” The author should take care that he has faith in the right “no thing.” If it turns out that the Moslem “no thing” is the real one, he’ll be spending quadrillions and quintillions of years sizzling in hell, and that’s just for starters. I will leave that to the competing “no things” to sort out among themselves. Poor, deluded atheist that I am, I am left by all these arguments in direr straights than before. I will certainly end up frying in the afterlife regardless unless, without relying on logic or language, I somehow manage to figure out what “no thing” is, and that with alacrity, I being no longer the youngest. I gather from what the author is telling me that this will only be possible by virtue of reading Thomas Aquinas and a voluminous stack of other religious tomes. I suspect that such fare may not really be the path to divine enlightenment. Rather, it seems more likely that the author has been left in more or less the same condition by reading his own pile of books about religion as Don Quixote was left by reading a pile of books about knight errantry. Miguel de Cervantes provides a detailed psychological description in the first chapter of his famous account of that gentleman.

While I strongly suspect that Wallace is as deluded in matters of religion as Don Quixote was touching knights in shining armor, I am content to let him believe whatever he chooses as long as he accords the same right to me, and does not conclude, as so many others have done in the past, that his “no thing” requires him to burn people, or launch wars against those who believe in other “no things,” or fly airplanes into buildings on behalf of the “no thing”, or that the state should serve as an interpreter of the will of the “no thing.” As long as we’re clear about those things we should be able to coexist.

…we should be careful of accepting the continual and continued accrual of transgressions against our bourgeois (i.e., Judeo-Christian) morality; at some point, just as termites can destroy a house by eroding its foundation in silence right until the moment, without warning, the house collapses, each small piece torn out of our moral fabric makes the collapse of our consensual culture more likely.

and (from a different post),

Our modern Western Culture and Civilization are emergent structures that rest upon a Judeo-Christian G-d; while religion may not be necessary for any one individual to behave in a moral manner, it has not yet been shown that any society can behave morally without religion.

Such ideas are common, but I have never heard them expressed by anyone who isn’t a Jew or a Christian. There is good reason for that. What the author is actually suggesting is that it’s necessary for us all to pretend we believe in one of those two religions, regardless of whether they are actually true. That’s something that all discussions of such issues as whether civilizations need a particular religion to survive, or whether religion is a force for good, or whether human behavior will be negatively or positively affected by the absence of one religion or another have in common. They all beg the question (and routinely ignore it) of whether or not the religion in question is actually true. What the author is really suggesting is that truth doesn’t matter. We must allow him and his co-religionists to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us, not because they are true, but because they are useful. I beg to differ. It seems to me more reasonable to base our actions on the truth than on falsehoods.

Proponents of the author’s idea are usually aware of this apparent absurdity in their argument at some level, but it’s a minor difficulty to them because, after all, they believe in the religion themselves. They commonly deal with dissenters by simply declaring that they are immoral. For example, again quoting the author (referring to the recent debate between Tony Blair and Chris Hitchens about whether religion is a force for good),

Finally these kinds of debates will always predispose to the victory by the Atheists for a few relatively simple, and therefore unacknowledged, reasons. First, the believer in G-d must, of necessity, admit to himself that such a belief can never be fully grounded in reason; the connection of faith to the irrational parts of our minds are implicit when not made explicit. We use terms like ineffable to make such a connection more acceptable to our reason but ultimately our belief is fueled and preserved by our awareness that it is based upon a mystery at the heart of existence. The Atheist has no such handicap. He is able, using his reason, to convince himself that Atheism has nothing to do with his irrationality. This exhibits, more than anything else, how adept homo rationalis has become at the grand arts of self deception, rationalization and intellectualization. By doing away with G-d, the Atheist has effectively replaced Him with man, without having to countenance his own arrogance.

In other words, the author is telling me that, if I don’t accept his irrational faith in the “mystery at the heart of existence,” and dare to use my brain, which his G-d has presumably given me to serve as something other than a convenient stuffing for my skull, to actually think about whether a God exists or not, I am guilty of the sin of “arrogance” if I come to the “wrong” conclusion, and decide that there is none. Again, the question of whether God really exists or not doesn’t matter. To avoid the charge of “arrogance,” I must somehow find a way to force myself to believe in something that I am perfectly convinced is a fantasy, more or less in the same way that Christian clinics “convert” homosexuals into heterosexuals. What could actually be more arrogant than the claim that anyone who dares to think is “arrogant” if they come to conclusions that happen to differ from those of the author?

There are many instances of similar silliness in the rest of the article. For example,

Yet if we do not privilege the Judeo-Christian ethics that are the underpinnings of our unconscious morality, we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality, i.e. I take what is yours and do what I want because I can and my god sanctions such behavior. In other words, once we have jettisoned our G-d, we have disarmed intellectually in the war with another’s god.

Where to begin? By arguing that we should “privilege Judeo-Christian ethics,” the author argues for the elimination of any wall of separation between church and state and in favor of a theocracy. That may be where the “progress of civilization” has been heading in Iran, but the same is most definitely not true of the United States and the western democracies, to our great good fortune. I, for one, have no desire to return to the days of Metternich and the Holy Alliance. We can count ourselves lucky if those days are behind us for good.

Judeo-Christian ethics are hardly the underpinnings of our unconscious morality. Rather, our unconscious morality, an evolved trait in our species, is the underpinning of Judeo-Christian ethics, which are merely one example among many of how an innate behavioral trait can be expressed in creatures with large brains. What does the author mean by “Judeo-Christian ethics?” That we should not suffer a witch to live? (Exodus 22:18) That homosexuality is an abomination? (Corinthians 6:9-10) That a man has an obligation to produce a child with his brother’s widow, and, if he refuses, his sister-in-law is to spit in his face in front of the elders. (Deuteronomy 25:5-9)? What about the killing of heretics, approved by St. Augustine, or the innumerable holy wars approved by a long line of popes? If not, what, exactly, are we to understand by the term “Judeo-Christian ethics?” Presumably they are only those bits and pieces of the morality set forth in the Bible or Torah that the author, inspired by his “ineffable awareness guided by a mystery at the heart of creation” agrees with.

How is it that, without Judeo-Christian ethics, “we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality,” if they seek to take what is ours or otherwise molest us? How about the answer of nuclear weapons? How is it that we are prohibited from defending ourselves unless we can answer one bogus belief with another? There is no better “intellectual armament in the war with another’s god” than to simply point out the obvious; that their god and their transcendental morality are both fantasies.

Again quoting from the article,

Once we have, as a culture, fully adopted an ethic of Just Do It as the apotheosis of our morality, we are helpless against those who wish to Just Do It in ways which are inimical to us.

In other words, unless we allow the author’s version of Judeo-Christian morality to be stuffed down our throats, we somehow implicitly accept “an ethic of Just Do It.” How odd that, somehow, other primates exhibit moral behavior in spite of the fact that no rabbis or priests have ever been found among them. Most of us, including myself, will not follow an ethic of Just Do It because, like other primates, the predispositions that give rise to morality are hard-wired in our brains. If it ever occurs to me that I need some logical reason not to adopt an ethic of Just Do It, I need only recall that creatures who practiced that ethic in eons long past failed to survive. We atheists have the same emotional attachment to survival as everyone else.

Again, the author has so bamboozled himself with morality that he believes that one is somehow prohibited from defending himself unless he can give a moral reason for doing so. If we cannot point out some moral reason for our attackers to avoid such behavior, we are “helpless,” and apparently constrained to stand idly by as they slaughter us. He doesn’t realize that morality preceded both religion and reason, not the other way around. His reasons are mere after the fact rationalizations. It’s as if one couldn’t enjoy sex without first having a reason. Continuing from the article,

The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger.

Yes, the wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to a danger, but not the one the author thinks. The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger of trying to apply morality to the governing of large states, or to the relationships between them, period. What would he have us believe? That the zealots of secular religions like Communism or Nazism were any less puritanical than the past and current zealots of the traditional spiritual ones? Is it really credible that they had a Just Do It ethic? Please! Look at the history of Stalin’s great purge trials, or the fate of the dissident generals in Germany after the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, or read a few accounts of the Great Cultural Revolution in China. These were all quintessentially moral phenomena, and the mayhem they caused was entirely akin to the Christian slaughter of witches, or their countless wars over trivial differences in religious doctrine, or their repeated mass murders of Jews. No, my friend, what we should have learned from the wreckage of the last century is the absurdity and destructiveness of our continued attempts to apply human morality in situations for which, given its real origins, there can be no reasonable expectation that it would be in the least applicable, or result in any other outcome than more wreckage.

There are consequences to basing our actions on lies, religious or otherwise. The wreckage will continue until we learn that.

UPDATE:  The author of Shrink Wrapped immediately deleted a comment I left on his site challenging his post.  Interestingly, intolerance of dissent is a traditional characteristic of both Christians and psychoanalysts.

And perhaps, if we should with attention mind the lives and discourses of people not so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the magistrate’s sword, or their neighbor’s censure, tie up people’s tongues; which, were the apprehensions of punishment or shame taken away, would as openly proclaim their atheism as their lives do.

Atheists have generally been a minority with “different” beliefs, and, as such, a predictable outgroup in a species, such as our own, with an innate tendency to hate, ostracize and despise outgroups. Specious “good-sounding” reasons have always been invented to justify that hate, and Locke had his own, but the Amity-Enmity Complex has always been the real reason. Fortunately, we have been making encouraging progress towards gaining an understanding of human nature in recent years. There is some hope that society at large will finally grasp the significance of the Complex and its disastrous role in promoting the war and violence against minorities that has been so ubiquitous in human history. Perhaps the day will come when most of us will be able to immediately recognize irrational manifestations of ingroup-outgroup behavior, and ostracize and condemn those who fail to control that most destructive aspect of our nature instead of their victims. However, that day has not yet come, and so we remain on the treadmill of trying to stamp out each of the potentially infinite ways in which the Complex can manifest itself as if it were something new under the sun. We invent new names for each of them as the evil they cause becomes intolerable, whether racism, or anti-Semitism, or xenophobia, or homophobia, never seeming to realize that they all have the same root cause, and new isms and phobias will always be waiting just around the corner to take their place until we finally tear up the root itself.

So it is with atheists. Things being as they are, we too must fight our own little piece of the battle in detail. Billboards are one recent manifestation of that struggle. The Friendly Atheist notes a typical reaction to them, in this case from Marcia Segelstein at OneNewsNow:

I guess I just don’t understand. Christians (along with Jews and Muslims) gather in groups to worship. Atheists don’t gather not to worship, so why seek out members? What’s there to be a member of? And why should atheists care about stopping worshippers who are just “going through the motions”? Do they think they might get their hands on money once pledged to churches?

Trying to tear down the belief system of the world’s foremost religion — Christianity — is what seems intolerant to me. Placing prominent ads declaring the birth of Christ to be a myth seems downright hostile. To my mind, these campaigns feel defensive, as though atheists are weighted down with chips on their shoulders, or feel left out of some club.

Well, Marcia, atheists gather in groups for the same reason other people with like interests gather in groups; because we are by nature social animals.   The billboard campaigns certainly are defensive, and rightly so.  If you still don’t understand why, read Locke’s remark above about the “magistrate’s sword,” or peruse the history of Spain under the Inquisition.  If you think “it can’t happen here,” Sinclair Lewis wrote a book with that title that might interest you.  There is nothing hostile about disputing Christian or any other religious beliefs.  Is it really unimportant whether we base our lives and actions on the truth or not?  If the truth is important, how are we ever to approach it unless we are allowed to think about and discuss it?

(Hitchens) appeared to win over the audience, which voted two-to-one in his favour following the debate, which argued the motion “be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world”.

With all due respect to the former Prime Minister, this one must have been like shooting fish in a barrel for the likes of Hitchens. It’s hard to argue that Christianity has been “a force for good in the world” in light of the tens of millions who lost their lives in the religious wars it inspired, or the institutionalized intolerance and bigotry it has been responsible for, or the hundreds of thousands of innocent women hung or burned as “witches” in Europe during the Middle Ages, or its promotion of the mass torture of “heretics,” or its repeated massacres of Jews and other religious minorities. As for Islam, it is not the predominant religion in North Africa, or Syria, or Turkey, or parts of Europe because it is a “religion of peace,” but because it was imposed by force. Anyone with any doubt about whether it is a “force for good in the world” in spite of its bloody history, its institutionalized oppression of women, and its rejection of the separation of mosque and state must have been asleep since 911.

It doesn’t really matter, though. What does matter is whether these religions are true or not. If one of them is true (and they can’t both be true at the same time because they are mutually exclusive), then the question of whether it’s a “force for good” becomes moot. We then become the subjects of an absolute tyrant with a smiley face, and we can like it or burn in hell for billions and trillions of years, just for starters. As Hitchens puts it, “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.” Edward Fitzgerald summed up our situation in similar, but more poetic terms, in his fanciful “translation” of the Rubaiyat. Don’t let the prospect depress you, though. For reasons set forth by a simple French priest named Jean Meslier in his Testament more than two and a half centuries ago, and improved on very little in the intervening years, the chances that we will sizzle in hell forever for the pleasure and edification of the elect are rather slim.

As I do not believe in supernatural beings myself, what surprised me about all this was not the fact that there are many contradictions in the Bible, but Ehrman’s claim that this historical-critical approach to it has been taught to most of the graduates of our religious seminaries for the better part of the last century.  Most of our clerics are well aware of the facts, accept them, but, for one reason or another, have decided not to pass the word along to their flocks.  In Ehrman’s words,

…the basic views that I’ve sketched here are widely known, widely taught, and widely accepted among New Testament scholars and their students, including the students who graduate from seminaries and go on to paster churches. Why do these students so rarely teach their congregations this information, but insist on approaching the Bible devotionally rather than historical-critically, not just in the pulpit (where a devotional approach would be expected) but also in their adult education classes? That has been one of my leading questions since I started writing this book.

Ehrman is a refreshing author to read.  He comes from an evangelical Christian background, but eventually became an agnostic, although not, as he claims because of any doubts about the divine authorship of the Bible.  Unlike some of the “new atheist” authors, he doesn’t write with his Amity/Enmity Complex on his sleeve.  In reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, for example, one often gets the impression spittle is literally flying off the pages as he rants about the “American Taliban” of evangelical Christians, getting so carried away in the process that he repeats an urban legend about how James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, had  told the U.S. Congress that protecting the environment was not important because Jesus would come back soon.  Ehrman, on the other hand, not only does not condemn Christian belief, but claims that the realization that the authorship of the Bible is human rather than divine need not undermine those beliefs.  In his words,

Some readers will find it surprising that I do not see the material in the preceding chapters as an attack on Christianity or an agnostic’s attempt to show that faith, even Christian faith, is meaningless and absurd. That is not what I think, and it is not what I have been trying to accomplish.

I have been trying, instead, to make serious scholarship on the Bible and earliest Christianity accessible and available to people who may be interested in the New Testament but who, for one reason or another, have never heard what scholars have long known and thought about it.

I suspect many evangelical Christians will agree with my own conclusion that this is rather an understatement of the degree to which the conclusion that the Bible is not only not divinely inspired, but full of contradictions, undermines Christian faith.  To believe that is to believe that, for more than a thousand years, God stood idly by and did nothing in particular to prevent generations of clerical charlatans from bamboozling his moral flock regarding matters that would have a critical bearing on their fate in the hereafter.  It is to believe that, 2000 years after the time of Christ, one can be a Christian, independently of any reliable information about what the man actually said and what his appearance on earth actually meant, just by making things up as you go along. 

I personally prefer to apply Occam’s razor.  The simplest explanation for all these Biblical contradictions is the conclusion that Christ was just another Middle Eastern soothsayer, like legions of others who flourished in the region for hundreds of years before and after his death, differing from them only in the fact that he was the most successful of them all.  It’s unsettling and a little scary to think that the great majority of the human beings on the planet actually believe in imaginary super beings. It’s more or less equivalent to the realization that we’re inmates in a giant asylum. 

It didn’t take Darwin to reveal all these religious impostures for what they are.  Meslier did a perfectly adequate job of it in his Testament more than 250 years ago.  The writings of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the rest are really just afterthoughts.  In spite of all their repetition of the obvious, our religious disconnect with reality continues unabated.  If we set any value on our own survival as a species, apparently it will be necessary for us to somehow find a way to become more intelligent.

It’s been interesting to watch the reactions of the secular true believers as the evidence for innate human behavior, including moral behavior, accumulated over the years until continued denial became untenable. At first, like the old behaviorists, they reacted with rage and fury, demonizing such ideas as heresies associated with racism, fascism, etc. When the intellectual dams finally began to break, acceptance of innate behavior was led by “liberal” clergymen of the secular religion, who assured the flock that it really didn’t challenge their most cherished beliefs at all. Why, the whole idea had been “invented” by E. O. Wilson and, after all, he was one of them.

Their rationalizations have been entirely similar to those of the liberal clergy of traditional religions, who have, for example, rationalized the contradiction between the Book of Genesis and scientific fact by claiming that the book is allegorical. According to their apologetics, the days in Genesis are really “eons” of time, the firmament is really the “sky,” etc. Similarly, the secular clergy hold forth about the exemplary behavior of bonobos and assure the flock that belief in “the good” isn’t threatened at all by the fact that morality is a manifestation of traits that evolved in the distant past.

In their way, the fundamentalist clergy are more rational than their liberal brethren. There can be no accommodation between scientific fact and religious faith. If there is a God, he would not have bamboozled his children with obscure allegories. If the Bible is not literally true and the inspired word of God, the basis for faith disappears. And in their way, the old behaviorists who fulminated against the original sin of innate morality were right, too. It is the iceberg against which the Titanic of secular religion has foundered. The academic apologists of the Steven Pinker school are merely rearranging the deck chairs. Like Christianity and Islam, the secular religion will continue to be with us as a force for obscurantism into the indefinite future. However, it has become every bit as irrational to believe in “the good” as it is to believe in “the god.”

Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.

The pope would do well to reflect on the record of the church he represents before he starts inveighing against “atheist extremism.” For example, it was responsible for the expulsion of Jews from the very country he was speaking in, not to mention his home country of Germany, as well as France, Spain and Portugal.  It was responsible for countless pogroms against Jews throughout its bloody history, murdering hundreds of thousands of them in massacres in Germany and many other European countries.  Other than that, it was directly responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of women as “witches,” countless bloody acts of repression against religious minorities, and the butchery of millions more in the wars it directly inspired.

As for the Nazis, the pope would do well to read “Mein Kampf.”  After all, it was written in his mother tongue.  In it Hitler invoked God many times, claiming, for example, that in fighting the Jews, he was doing the “Lord’s work.” 

The political right has a tradition of bigotry in matters of religion, most recently revealed in the prevailing fashion of blaming atheists for Nazism and Communism.  If the Nazis were atheist, how is it that Hitler constantly invoked God in his writings and speeches?  How is it that the millions of little memorial brochures the Nazis sent to the families of fallen soldiers with a picture of the deceased on one side always had Christian symbols and verses on the other?  Why did Nazi belt buckles and medals carry the inscription “God with us?”

Both Nazism and Communism were secular religions, differing from earlier versions only because they were unwise enough to promise heaven on earth, rather than pie in the sky when you die.  They were recognized as such by numerous contemporary writers, who often spoke of Communist and Nazi leaders as so many popes, bishops and priests. 

The Nazis and Communists didn’t murder because they were atheists.  They murdered because they were Nazis and Communists.  That remains a major distinction between atheists and Christians.  Atheists have never murdered simply by virtue of the fact that they don’t believe in God.  Christians have murdered millions by virtue of the fact that they do.

Jewish Expulsions in the Name of Christianity

In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

Hawking’s latest won’t be released until tomorrow, and I hesitate to commence panning him until I’ve read it, but this story smacks of a well-managed publicity stunt. In the first place, it’s a virtual carbon copy of the great urban myth about the exchange between the great French mathematician, Laplace, and Napoleon (hattip Wiki):

Laplace went in state to Napoleon to accept a copy of his work, and the following account of the interview is well authenticated, and so characteristic of all the parties concerned that I quote it in full. Someone had told Napoleon that the book contained no mention of the name of God; Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with the remark, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.’ Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy, drew himself up and answered bluntly, ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.’ (“I had no need of that hypothesis.”) Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, ‘Ah! c’est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses.’ (“Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.”)

Well, it’s not really that well authenticated, but it still captures the substance of Laplace’s thought on the subject accurately enough.  In the second place, if that’s really all Hawking’s got, he was beaten to the punch by the brilliant Frenchman Jean Meslier in his Testament by more than 250 years:

Is it not more natural and more intelligible to deduce all which exists, from the bosom of matter, whose existence is demonstrated by all our senses, whose effects we feel at every moment, which we see act, move, communicate, motion, and constantly bring living things into existence, than to attribute the formation of things to an unknown force, to a spiritual being, who cannot draw from his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and putting anything in motion.

Indeed, all of the best arguments of the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, appear in Meslier’s work, along with much else besides.  As an infidel myself, I fail to see what, if anything, Hawking is contributing to the discussion, assuming he’s being quoted accurately.  After all, how do physical laws prove anything?  Laws can have no disembodied existence of their own, floating around in nothingness.  If they don’t apply to any real thing, then they cease to exist themselves.  If they do apply to something real, it still begs the question, why do the real thing(s) exist to begin with?  We’re still left to wonder, “How did all this stuff get here?”

The hypothesis that innate mental traits or “human nature” plays a significant role in mediating human behavior has been around since long before the days of Darwin. However, beginning in the 1960’s with the popular works of thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz and continuing with the publication of “Sociobiology” and “Human Nature” by E.O. Wilson in the 1970’s, recognition of the significance of innate behavior gained a much wider acceptance. Such ideas were, however, a direct threat to the ideological orthodoxies then prevailing in the academic and professional communities. Those communities reacted in the time-honored fashion of human “in-groups” in all ages to this challenge from the “others;” with hatred, irrational hostility, and demonization. I will discuss the manifestations thereof in a later post. For now, suffice it to say that, unlike differences of opinion over whether Christ was the real or adopted Son of God, controversies over the factors that impact human behavior can be informed by the observation of repeatable experiments. In a relatively short time, the ideological orthodoxy of the 60’s and 70’s regarding human nature was buried under a mountain of facts. In the resulting paradigm shift, culminating only in the last decade or so, the profound impact of the innate on human behavior has finally gained general acceptance.

In a sense, however, the old defenders of the faith in “nurture, not nature” were right. The hypothesis of innate human behavior was a direct threat to their whole belief system. Then as now, by their own admission, the expert communities in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and related fields occupy ideological ground that is substantially left of center. They are predominantly, if not exclusively, characterized by an implicit or explicit belief in legitimate, objective good, more or less vaguely characterized by terms such as “human flourishing” and “human brotherhood,” and by a perception that they should play an active role in guiding the rest of us towards “the good.” However, once the significance of the innate on human behavior has been accepted, it follows that the evolutionary origins of these aspects of our nature must be accepted as well. It is quite obvious that they did not evolve because they had a “purpose,” and that “purpose” was to promote “human flourishing” in a world radically different from the one in which they evolved. It is also quite obvious that they evolved for reasons that had nothing to do with promoting the ideological goals of self-described “liberals” in the 21st century. Those facts have and will continue to have a highly corrosive effect on the belief system of the academic and professional experts who specialize in the study of human behavior, and particularly those who focus on that aspect of our behavior that comes under the general heading of morality.

In previous posts I have discussed the impact of all this on the thought of nine representatives of this expert community who were the keynote speakers at a recent conference on “The New Science of Morality.” As we have seen, all of them, whether explicitly or not, recognize “the good” as a real, objective, thing in itself, independent of what goes on in the brain of any individual human being. As any good Christian or Moslem could tell them, there is no logical basis for this faith of theirs in “the good.” The fact that they believe in it anyway is a testimony to the power of the emotions associated innate human morality in creating the perception of something real where none exists.

The result has been a kind of remarkable doublethink. The role of the innate on human morality is accepted, but it comes with the chimerical belief that, against all odds, those innate qualities of the human brain can be adjusted at will to achieve the kind of “human flourishing” that is the goal of latter day ideologues. The phenomenon was clearly in evidence at the Edge Conference. The keynote speakers all revealed their perception of “the good” as a real thing, and several of them spoke of morality as an adjustable tool for achieving “the good,” going so far as to speak of this form of toying with innate human behavioral traits as “moral progress.” There was an atheist who based his argument on the real existence of moral good on his own capacity for pious indignation, and a professor of psychology who asserted that morality exists to promote the better working of “the system” in the 21st century. A great deal of attention was paid to experimental evidence of innate human “kindness” and “niceness,” and commensurately little to the possibility that hatred, aggression, and demonization of “others” might also be behavioral traits with innate origins. It will be recalled by those who were around at the time that these were the aspects of human behavior that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who were generally recognized by the professional community at the time as the most significant and articulate proponents of the importance of innate factors in human behavior through the 60’s and early 70’s, wanted to draw attention to. It turns out that, as far as innate influences on human behavior are concerned, they were right, and the professional community of experts was wrong. Under the circumstances, it would seem unwise, if not foolhardy, to dismiss their hypotheses about those aspects of human behavior that aren’t “nice” out of hand.

One finds grounds for optimism that the prevailing illusions about “moral progress” will not be supportable for long in the remarks of the three speakers whose remarks we have not yet discussed. For example, psychologist Paul Bloom discussed experiments designed to explore the emergence of innate “niceness” in very young children and even babies, before such behavior can be taught or acquired via culture or environment. Among other things, he described the ability to infants to distinguish “good guys” from “bad guys” as early as six months of age. He notes work by others that points to the conclusion that “kindness” is “part of our hard-wired inheritance.” However, he is not quite so optimistic. As he puts it:

Our minds have evolved through processes such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. We should therefore be biased in favor of those who share our genes at the expense of those who don’t, and we should be biased in favor of those who we are in continued interaction with at the expense of strangers. Also, there is now a substantial amount of developmental evidence suggesting that this kindness that we see early on is parochial. It is narrow. It is applied to those that a baby is in immediate contact with, and does not extend more generally until quite late in development.

After citing some experimental work in support of this conclusion, he continued:

This shouldn’t surprise us. Maybe it’s even better than we could have expected. The dominant trend of humanity has been to view strangers – non-relatives, those from other tribes – with hatred, fear and disgust. Jared Diamond talks about the groups in Papua New Guinea that he encountered. And he points out, for an individual to leave his or her tribe and just walk into another, strange tribe would be tantamount to suicide.

It is noteworthy that Diamond, who is nothing if not politically correct by the standards of the current time, could have so casually written something like this. If he’d said it 45 or 50 years ago, anathemas would have reigned down from him on all sides, and he would have been dismissed as a heretic. As for Bloom, he continues,

So there’s a puzzle, then, because the niceness we see now in the world today, by at least some people in the world, seems to clash with our natural morality, which is nowhere near as nice. How did we end up bridging the gap? How have we gotten so much nicer? Note that I’ve been focusing here on questions of our kindness to strangers, but this question could be asked about other aspects of morality, such as the origin of new moral ideas, such as that slavery is wrong or that we shouldn’t be sexist or racist. These are deep puzzles.

It seems a great deal less puzzling to me. It can only be puzzling if you ignore the obvious fact that, as human culture and human knowledge have expanded and these new kindnesses have emerged as the ancient, innate and virtually unchanged human emotions associated with moral behavior have found expression in the new environmental context, new hostilities have evolved right along with them. The kindness of the French revolutionary proponents of human rights came with the guillotine, and the kindness of the universal brotherhood of Communism came with the deaths of tens of millions of class enemies. Now we see the kindness Bloom seems to so admire in our own day associated with furious hatred and hostility directed by the political left at the members of the Tea Party movement, representing a substantial proportion of the citizens of the United States and openly expressed desires for the deaths of prominent political opponents like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

Psychologist David Pizzaro discusses the influence of emotions in shaping what may seem at first glance to be judgments based on reason, focusing on the role of disgust. As he put it:

We’ve shown that disgust sensitivity, that is, people who are more likely to be disgusted, over time end up developing certain kinds of moral views. In particular, we’ve shown that not only are people more political conservative if they’re more disgust sensitive, but they specifically are more politically conservative in the following ways: they tend to adhere to a certain kind of moral view that the conservative party in recent years in the United States has endorsed, that’s characterized by being against homosexuality and against abortion.

Pizzaro goes on to consider the emotional component of liberal as well as conservative beliefs, thereby obliquely undermining the notion that they are logically consistent and legitimate. As any medieval churchman could have told him, such thoughts lead to heresy. We must hope they will do so in the future as they have in the past.

Philosopher Joshua Knobe begins his talk as if he’d been asleep for the last half century:

So far we have been talking about questions in moral psychology. So we’ve been talking about the questions: How is it that people make moral judgments? Do they make moral judgments based on emotion or reason? Is it a capacity that’s just learned or is it something that’s innate?

However, he goes on to describe recent work by philosophers that entailed leaving the ivory towers of pure reason and actually conducting experiments. The result:

But what’s really exciting about this new work is not so much just the very idea of philosophers doing experiments but rather the particular things that these people ended up showing. When these people went out and started doing these experimental studies, they didn’t end up finding results that conformed to the traditional picture. They didn’t find that there was a kind of initial stage in which people just figured out, on a factual level, what was going on in a situation, followed by a subsequent stage in which they used that information in order to make a moral judgment. Rather they really seemed to be finding exactly the opposite.

What they seemed to be finding is that people’s moral judgments were influencing the process from the very beginning, so that people’s whole way of making sense of their world seemed to be suffused through and through with moral considerations. In this sense, our ordinary way of making sense of the world really seems to look very, very deeply different from a kind of scientific perspective on the world. It seems to be value-laden in this really fundamental sense.

These, too, are conclusions that are fundamentally at odds with the notions of objective good and “moral progress.”

It would seem, then, that based on the sample we have been considering, while comfortable orthodoxies still prevail in the world of “expert” opinion about morality, general acceptance of the fact that innate, emotional components play a very significant role in moral behavior must inevitably undermine those othodoxies as long as freedom of inquiry prevails. There is room for optimism. Heretics will appear, as they always do, and will start doing experiments and studies of brain function that will demonstrate and establish the less “kind” aspects of human moral behavior. It is to be hoped that this happens sooner rather than later, and when it does, the “experts” will realize that attempts to foster “human flourishing” by manipulating human moral behavior are not only doomed to failure, but will continue to be extremely dangerous, as they always have been in the past.  If we really want to flourish as a species we would do well to finally learn to understand ourselves.  After a long struggle with obscurantist ideologues, we have finally gained general acceptance of the significance of the innate in human nature, but we seem to balking at the next logical step.  We have a marked preference for studying the “nice” and “kind” in human behavior, and ignoring the “not so nice.”  It is time we pulled our heads out of the sand, because unless we thoroughly understand the darker side of our nature, we will have no chance of controlling it.  In a world full of nuclear weapons, the need seems rather obvious.  It’s hard to flourish if you’re dead.

• Morality depends for its existence on innate predispositions hard-wired in the human brain.
• The features of the brain responsible for morality exist because they evolved.

It follows from the first of these assumptions that morality, with its inherent categories of good and evil, has no objective, independent existence of its own. In other words, good and evil do not exist independently as other than mental constructs, nor would they continue to exist absent a mind capable of giving rise to them. As a consequence of this, good and evil cannot be derived or identified logically or scientifically as things in themselves, nor can they in any way acquire validity or legitimacy in their own right.

These conclusions seem counterintuitive to creatures like ourselves because good and evil seem real. We are wired to perceive them as real, presumably because they are most effective in promoting our survival when they are perceived as real. However, their only reality is as emotional responses derived from innate features of the brain. These emotional responses are present in nascent form even in human infants. They evolved in times utterly unlike the present for the sole reason that they promoted the genetic survival of individuals during those times. They can possess no intrinsic or transcendent validity or legitimacy not based on those origins, and it is questionable whether they even continue to promote our survival in the context of the modern world.

There is no such thing as “moral progress.” There can be no progress unless there is some goal towards which one progresses. In the case of moral progress, that goal can only be to approach the “real” good and move away from “real” evil. For that to happen, “real” good and “real” evil must necessarily have an independent existence and legitimacy of their own, but, as noted above, that is impossible. What we describe as “moral progress” is merely the expression of the evolved mental traits responsible for moral behavior in the context of rapidly changing human social organization, culture, and technological advances. The evolved mental traits in question themselves have changed little if any in the process.

It is interesting that conservative religious believers find it much easier to understand the reasoning behind and accept the above hypotheses than the type of people who attended the Edge conference. They, of course, base the legitimacy of their moral claims on the existence of a God. Remove God, and they have no trouble perceiving the fact that those who continue to claim that there can be such things as real good and real evil are sitting out on a limb with no tree attached to it.

In contrast, none of the academics and scientists at the Edge Conference, or at least none I am aware of, would argue that real good and real evil derive from a Supreme Being. In spite of that, they come from an ideological milieu that is heavily invested in the belief in its own moral superiority. Individuals in that milieu routinely refer to the actions and beliefs of others as “moral” or “immoral,” indicating acceptance of some moral standard that is applicable to everyone, and not just themselves. I am not aware of anyone among them who has explicitly rejected the notion of “moral progress.” However, if morality is the expression of evolved traits hard-wired in the brain, this presumption of moral superiority becomes indefensible. The extreme reticence of those at the conference to face these implications is quite evident in the remarks of the nine keynote speakers.

In later posts I will comment on the remarks of each of those speakers in the context of my own understanding of morality.