Hermeneutic Heretic

Michael Gerson - What Atheists Can’t Answer - washingtonpost.com
So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: “Obey your evolutionary instincts” because those instincts are conflicted. “Respect your brain chemistry” or “follow your mental wiring” don’t seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: “To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I’m going to do whatever I please.”
… Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

In a way, this is a very good way of limiting the sense in which atheism is like religion. It needs to deal with the essentially amoral stance that the moral good is simply epiphenomenal to the material existence. That is the only rational description of the human condition: because of whatever configurational properties of our body/mind, we tend to agree on certain principles of good (with enough variation to confound assumptions of grand design). An amoral or immoral actor in a system of moral actor is equivalent to the ‘freeloader’ individuals against whom evolutionary forces tend ward off the ‘moral majority’ across most species. They exist as individuals but are not evolutionarily successful enough to take over (the species where they did presumably did not breed to tell the tale). How can an atheist call a thief or even a murderer immoral, if all this person has transgressed is a temporally agreed consensus against such action? The answer, of course, is correctly that he or she cannot. But instead of arguing that morality and good do should be a deliberate act of the individual most atheists refer to a version of secular humanism which refers to the authority of common humanity (and all the values associated with it; cf. e.g. Arendt invoking the concept of animal pity in connection with the Eichman trial). There is nothing wrong with that only it is no different than referring to God as the authority (particularly since while theists rely on interpretation of the good word by human rather than divine mediators). With secular humanism, God is not necessary. There are many religious cultures where the moral good is not exclusively sanctioned by a deity. But there is no good reason to assume that secular humanism is common to all humanity any more than religious belief is. It is simply an easy substitute for divine sanction. Morality as choice and non-judgmental attitude to ‘freeloader-behavior are simply too scary (although they in no way preclude an allegiance to legal order sanctioning against freeloader-behavior). Giving a human actor freedom to choose badly (even at the expense of others) is not something that’s easy to advocate. But, at least, as the atheists argue, we do not need fear as the basis of moral behavior. And how else can we describe rationalistic religious conviction as described in the concluding paragraph of the column?

None of this amounts to proof of God’s existence. But it clarifies a point of agreement — which reveals an even deeper division. Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature — imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of “liberation” is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

The concluding analogy is noteworthy in the context with the current preoccupation with the ‘culture of life’ where death and suffering are to be avoided at all cost (a conviction shared by secularists and theists alike).

An parallel (and much more passionate) argument was made by  Scarecrow that:

it strikes me as odd to claim as a moral advantage the inability to see that what his President has done (and Gerson has justified) in his God’s name is, on moral grounds, only barely distinguishable from the acts of the crazed religious zealots who, in Allah’s name, flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, except for the fact that the Christian had enough firepower to kill 100 times more people than the Islamists.

Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail
If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return.

But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop us, unobserved, doing and planning acts of selfish unkindness against others, as so many of us do – for example – in office politics?

What is to stop us, in the privacy of the home, taking advantage of the goodness of others more generous than ourselves? Who will ever know?

Who would have thunk it that the person to get closest to this whole New Atheism would be the right-winger Peter Hitchens of all people, writing in the Hitler-supporting Daily Mail of all rags. He skirts the issue of ‘Atheism is just another kind of faith’ rather artfully, perhaps thanks to the privileged access he has to the other Hitchens’ background, but he gets it right about the constant debate what is a greater source of ‘evil’ faith in God or no God. (It, of course, is ‘faith’ in general. It is rather hard to commit evil without faith in one absolute or another, the occasional psychopath notwithstanding. One of the more deadly absolutes seems to be the faith in the sanctity of human life, probably because of the definitional indeterminacy of both ‘human’ and ‘life’ (and ’sanctity’ too when it comes to it).

But P. Hitchens even hints at the much more interesting source of faith and religious action, viz social cohesion (more but not that much more than peer pressure). All religion has a social dimension, and, as Milgram has shown so incisively (also see Bauman on the holocaust), it is with reference to social authority that unpleasant acts find their most inventive representations.

Not to be too nice about Hitchens, he does resort to the annoying kind of middle-class agnosticism that declares uncertainty about the less palatable sections of the scripture while spouting the sickeningly sweet belief in something greater and better out there.

For all I know, Christopher is absolutely right – my prayers are pointless and a meaningless oblivion awaits. But if he is right, what a dispiriting, lowering truth it is.

This kind of polite agnosticism is no good to anyone. Personally, I am a complete atheist with respect to any possible God so far or yet to be conceived by the religious mind. There is no faith or reason involved in this, the possibility of faith in the flying spaghetti monster simply displaces the possibility of any seriously revered deity (the only good argument Dawkins and his buddies bandy about). I am, however, agnostic when it comes to science. I am pretty sure that 2+2 is indeed 4, but I wouldn’t stake anyone to the cross over saying that it is really 6. The mathematical regularities (’laws’) of the universe are too neat for my taste and I know too much about the processes of scientific discovery to sacrifice at its altar. I am even more agnostic about what I see with my own four eyes or conceive of with my brain. If somebody wants to find a circularly defined God(dess) in this space of doubt, be my guest.

And finally, my world coming slowly to the upside up state I prefer it in, Hithens cannot help but descend into the nasty Daily Mailism that makes me instinctively recoil from the gentle elderly couples I see sharing pages of this rag on trains hurtling through this sceptered countryside.

They [inner city thugs, termed practical atheists] would never behave like that, surrounded as they are by the invisible web of ten centuries of Christian law and morality, which still protects the nicer parts of our country.But it is the application of what they preach, the worship of self and power.

Faith and belief can be and often are restraints on this arrogance of power. They offer the possibility of justice where human society fails to provide it – as it almost always does fail.

It is almost as if he hadn’t read himself. Faith is no good as a restraint of action (didn’t he say the same thing only a few paragraphs before). With respect to evil, the only safe inner conviction I know of is utter moral relativism. Proper moral relativists have no time for evil on a grand scale because they are too busy working out all the variables of difference. It is when they glimpse shimmering fata morganas of certainty that the world is in real danger. (As to the interesting small evil of petty self-interest, moral relativists are probably no better than anyone).

What he speaks of nicer parts of this country he is referring to the savagery of conformity that places everyone in their place (foreigners with tans preferably on the outside of it) defined by the social propaganda of fiction found in Wodehouse, Dad’s Army and other faded reminders of post-Edwardian aesthetic.

If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.

This ‘faith-vacuum’ cliché is a fitting conclusion to this journey of near self-discovery Hitchens undertakes.  It is not, on its own, an uninteresting hypothesis. Is there something in the human make up that requires certain mental, bodily and social configurations typically described as faith? If so, what do they look like, what is there purpose and are some faiths better than others in fulfilling that purpose? But even if we postulate some sort of ‘faith universal’, it is still not a good argument for the existence of God. It is merely an instance of Voltairian hypocrisy: “I don’t need to believe in God but I like it that my servants do lest they steal from me.” A world built on this premise may lend itself better to idyllic depiction but seems of no deeper virtue than the “pre-medieval savagery” dispensed in the “harsher parts of our great cities” by the “strong, violent people” whose darker complexion and difference is so instinctively afeared by many of Hitchens’ readers (if not by himself).

The problem, to repeat myself, is the reliance on virtue, goodness, and life as transcendent absolutes (of God or upbringing) rather than a considered choice. It may not result in much real-world difference and possibly in no difference at all but I would prefer that those who matter make a conscious decision to consider others less human as a matter of practical expedience rather than spend time justifying that denying someone’s humanity (in the sense of equal rights to those one expects of herself; in the same sense that armies justify killing) as part of an absolute truth. If for no other reasons than that the parameters of expedience are more easily changed than faiths on which individuals and nations have staked their sense of self-worth.