Idol Hours
When you see the abomination
Standing where it should not be
The phone in your hand
Where prayer should be
Come out of her, my people
Put your phone down and talk to me
Be separate, be clean
And you will be sons and daughters to me
Not at the table, dears,
Not at the dinner table.
1. Assume the best arguments for Atheism include one or more of the following:
a) the Argument from Evil
b) alleged defects in religious scriptures
c) alleged contradictions between divine attributes
d) negatively, the claimed absence of sufficient valid evidence for theism (where “valid” is often taken to mean “scientific”).
It is not necessary to assume that all of the above arguments are good. (Indeed, claims (c) and (d) are in significant tension with each other, since without good evidence for any specific divine attributes, a fortiori there cannot be evidence for contradictory attributes.) Minimally, the claim is only that if ALL of (a)-(d) fail, it is unlikely that one can reasonably be highly confident that Theism is false.
2. Note that every one of these arguments requires doing some theology to assess its validity:
(a) requires constructing a concept of “God”, and using it to make “predictions” (or really “retrodictions”) about what God would do.
(b) requires reading said Scriptures, and figuring out the best interpretation of their meaning. Note that when deciding between 2 possible interpretations of a text, even in non-religious contexts it is usually more rational to select the interpretation with fewer defects (principle of charity).
(c) requires constructing the most plausible concept of “God”, using either natural theology (evidence from Nature) or revealed theology (evidence from putative divine revelation).
(In particular, note that no divine attribute should be added to the list without there being, at least provisionally/hypothetically, one or more reasons to think God would, if he exists, have that attribute; and the precise phrasing of the attribute should be tailored to those reasons. Thus, the analytic philosophy habit of discussing various divine attributes apart from their contextual justifications, is fruitless and silly, because removes from the discussion any reason—apart from mere logical consistency—to accept one formulation over another.)
(d) requires understanding sufficiently what various religious people take as evidence for God, prior to assessing its validity. And note that this is not just one type of thing, but rather a plurality of widely divergent kinds of sources of belief. Being rationally highly confident of (d) requires showing that ALL such evidences are bad!
3. Like other intellectual endeavors, theology is a skill. It can be done either well, or poorly. If it is done poorly, then one might well wrongly draw out implications, that a more competent handling of the subject would not deduce.
This is for the exact same reason that e.g. a person making an “intelligent design” argument that some feature could not have evolved, would need to have some knowledge of biology and Darwinian evolution. If they have errors in their understanding of biological evolution, this could well lead to them incorrectly identifying such features.
4. From 1-3, it follows that it is impossible for a person to reasonably be highly confident of Atheism, unless they are either:
i) good enough at theology to reasonably trust their own theological judgements, or else
ii) they believe in Atheism on the authority of some other person(s) who does meet criterion (i).
It certainly does not follow that an atheist would have to be highly interested in every aspect of theology, no matter how technical or unrelated to the epistemic justification of Theism. The theological competence required to assess the validity of religion, is not exactly the same as the theological competence useful for a religious practitioner. But a certain sort of genuine and deep (non-superficial) competence in the domain of religious philosophy is nonetheless required, to evaluate said arguments.
5. It is essentially impossible to become an expert at a subject, if you have contempt for everyone who does it, and you are unwilling to learn the subject in any significant detail.
It is also difficult to become good at studying theology when your main goal in studying it is to derive a contradiction, so as to refute theology. This is because, in EVERY intellectual subject (including math, physics, biology…), progress arises by confronting apparent conflicts among truths, and then identifying a more comprenensive viewpoint which resolves the conflict. Proceeding immediately to dismissing the entire subject, short-circuits this process in a way that makes acquiring genuine expertise impossible.
6. It is also highly unlikely for the contemptuous person described in 5 to disbelieve in religion on the basis of a good argument from authority, as such individuals are likely to select authorities on the basis of them being good at rhetorically expressing contempt, rather than on the basis of them being good at theology, as described above.
7. Nothing above rules out that there might be people who are rationally justified in being highly confident of Atheism.
However, 4-6 above show that the set of such justified atheists is going to be nearly completely disjoint, from the set of atheists who express great contempt for all religion, especially if their dismissal of religion relies heavily on rhetorically expressing such contempt.
8. One possible loophole in the above would be if the emotional reaction of contempt happens only AFTER the atheist first acquires sufficient theological expertise to become highly confident of atheism on rational grounds. (Just as, it is not an ad hominem fallacy to insult an opponent, after providing a logical refutation on other grounds.)
However, it is highly suspicious if this contempt appears:
A) soon after a deconversion from a fundamentalist religious tradition, or
B) prior to the age of 20, or
C) in a person who has not closely studied philosophy of religion (at least as a hobbyist) for at least 1 decade.
From a sociological perspective, such contempt is more likely to be a rhetorical maneuver, designed to shore up hidden doubts, rather than a considered and expert response to the full state of the evidence.
Furthermore, even if the contempt appears later in time from the rational justification of a person’s Atheism, it will still have the psychological tendency to prevent valid theological reasoning in the future, downstream of that contempt. Thus, as soon as the person becomes contemptuous, their degree of justification will naturally tend to corrode and decay over time, as they begin to rely on it more.
This might not be so big of a problem if their initial reasons were completely unimpeachable. But it means they lose the benefits that might otherwise have accrued from a greater increase in maturity and understanding over time. (One could easily imagine a scenario where that greater understanding would undermine the original arguments against religion, but the person never learns this because they are frozen in their understanding at a particular point.)
9. One could try to make a parallel argument concerning religious believers. But an important difference is that most religious epistemology makes unapologetic use of arguments from authority, parallel to (ii). Being religious because you have faith in God, and you trust some specific religious authorities appointed by God to be doing theology well, is not IN GENERAL a self-undermining attitude, in the same way that contemptuous atheism is. (Again, that doesn’t mean the authority is actually good, just that the attitude is not self-refuting.)
(Though there might well be parallels with respect to certain specific arguments for religion, e.g. arguments against evolution by people who don’t want to learn about evolution.)
An atheist making a general objection to religious epistemology would need to be based on circularity rather than self-defeat. But circular arguments can often be turned into valid chains of reasoning by finding some alternative justification for one of the premises. In particular, the theist does need some reason to believe in God’s existence that isn’t just a bare “trusting God that he exists”! But there are many candidates for such reasons, which people who do good theology know about.
10. The atheist with contempt will probably respond to this post by making a comparison with some totally bunk subject like Astrology or Homeopathy, and trying to make the case that religion is parallel. I don’t think this parallel works. In order to know that Astrology or Homeopathy is bunk, you certainly do NOT need to be an expert in reading people’s charts or the exact details, but you do need to be conversant with the main ARGUMENTS for why they can’t work, which largely come down to arguments about physical causality that are widely accepted throughout the sciences by people with a wide variety of philosophical views. The arguments are largely disconnected from the details of precisely how to use these systems (even though, in principle, a sufficiently amazing argument based on the empirical details could in principle overcome the causal details).
The arguments against religion are (if taken seriously) much more involved and subtle than this—as can easily be seen by making an even cursory effort to follow what the smartest philosophers (including professional atheist philosophers!) say about the topic.
This post is more exploratory than something I am confident of. The medieval scholastics had a concept called the “convertibility of transcendentals” (CoT), in which certain terms (e.g. “good”, “true”, “one”, “real”) are all in a certain sense interconvertible with each other. In this post, I wish to explore the implications of this idea.
Sometimes we use the phrase “a good X” to mean an X that is more fully an X. A good drawing of a circle is one which is more uniformly round (closer to being a perfect circle) than a sloppy circle is. This depends on the prior judgement that you actually wanted the drawing to be a circle rather than something else (e.g. an oval, or an outline of a pumpkin). That is one sense in which goodness might be considered subjective; yet it is not inconsistent with saying that when we see an object as good we are seeing something objectively true about it, nor does it commit us to saying that all ways of perceiving objects are equally fruitful and meaningful.
From a hypothetical imperative perspective, whenever you want an X as an X, then what you want is a good X, which is the same as a true X. (Although we are more likely to say “good” when X-ness is a matter of degree, and more likely to say “true” when it is a yes/no question. In this linguistic sense, goodness is more subjective than truth.) CoT takes this usage of the word “good” as being a clue about the nature of what is categorically good, i.e. that which we morally ought to want.
Scholastic definitions: Goodness is being, insofar as it is capable of being willed. (Just as truth is being, insofar as it is capable of being known.)
CoT commits one to the surprising claim that everything that exists is good, simply because it exists, even though it does not deny that some things may, on top of that, also be (truly) bad. (Linguistically, a true evil is an evil that really is evil; one could even call it a good example of an evil even though we would probably balk at calling it a good evil!) More precisely and less paradoxically, each thing is a good X for some value of X, but this is compatible with it being both bad for itself under another (and more important) description Y, and also bad for other things in the universe; hence good for us to condemn, eliminate, or reform.
For example, a good thief is somebody that fully succeeds in being a thief. (E.g. if you hire a thief but he gets caught and has to return the goods, he has failed to steal anything in the desired sense.) In this respect:
good thief = true thief = real thief.
If we make a moral critique of theft (and we should) it can only be because by being a good thief, he thereby fails to be a good member of society, and thus also fails to fully actualize his nature as a human (a rational social animal), which is more essential to him than his nature as a thief. Thus:
good thief => bad man = false man = fake man.
Sin is then, the fact that humans can act as if they were not humans.
Taken to the extreme, damnation is the possibility that by becoming permanently attached to sin, a human being could eventually cease to be human in some crucial respect, thus making happiness impossible for them (insofar as they cannot fully cease to be a sort of thing that can only be happy by being human, even as they fail to be human).
On the other hand, Heaven is the fulfilment of human personhood, which (in the Christian account of virtue) essentially includes union with the divine. This is, among other things, a statement about the best (most good, most true) meaning of the word “person”, namely that personhood is a way of being in the divine image.
Persons have intellect and will. CoT implies that these faculties are (or at least ought to be) in harmony. Just as truth is the goodness of the intellect, so too, goodness is the truth of the will. CoT thus puts reality in an essential relation to personhood.
The convertability of transcendentals, if true, makes Theism more plausible, and vice versa. God is analogous to a person, in that he has something analogous to intellect and something analogous to will. However, unlike us, his intellect just is truth, and his will just is goodness. Also, in God these two faculties are the same as each other. God is the only being that has existence in himself; in other words the only being that is completely a being. Hence, by CoT, there is also a sense in which only God is good (cf. Mark 10:18). Other beings are said to be good only insofar as God shares his being with them, which is creation.
To be created, is nothing more nor other nor different, then to be known by God (as other than God). To be created, is nothing more nor other nor different, then to be loved by God (as other than God).
A Naturalist is somebody who believes that reality (the Universe) is convertable with truth (“Science”), but that it is not convertable with goodness (“Fiat lux!”). Naturalism in this sense makes it exactly half way towards Theism. Therefore, Naturalism is only 50% true and 50% good.
Since persons have both intellect and will, a Naturalist is necessarily alienated from their own personhood, and internally divided against themselves. If they allow their Naturalism to influence their self-image, then they will regard their morality as false (hence not really moral). Alternatively, to the extent that they cannot allow their Naturalism to influence their self-image (and arguably humans are mentally incapable of fully accepting all the implications of Naturalism) then they regard what they take as true to be bad for their self.
Hence Naturalism is unavoidably bad for us, since it is incompatible with full human flourishing. From the Theist perspective, this is a convincing intellectual (not just pragmatic!) argument that Naturalism is also false (since for the Theist the deepest reality is always good).
But from a Naturalist perspective, this doesn’t count as an argument that Naturalism is false. Since the Naturalist believes that the deepest reality cares nothing for goodness, and hence there is no good reason why believing the truth cannot be bad for us.
Yet almost all Naturalists instinctively assume that if Naturalism is true, it must also be good to convince others it is true, and healthy for society to reject beliefs incompatible with it. And indeed, if Naturalism were true, I believe it would be less bad to believe it than to believe a pious falsehood, even at the price of being divided against oneself. Since “good” in reference to the intellect means “what the intellect seeks”, i.e. the true. Also, a false belief cannot be a worthy foundation for society since a person with false beliefs will systematically act imprudently, in ways that are harmful to others (because their data is bad). So I would want to believe Naturalism if it were true, although perhaps this only implies that even Naturalism wouldn’t be capable of causing me to stop believing in something that amounts to the CoT.
Some additonal linguistic evidence for CoT:
* English speakers use the words “right” and “wrong” to refer both to true/false and good/bad.
* We also use the word “belief” both to refer to thinking that something is true, and to our beliefs about morality.
Imagine a Mind whose imagination is Mathematics, whose desire is Ethics, whose perception is Reality, whose will is Causality, whose empathy is Consciousness, whose selfhood is Love.
Since everything that exists depends in every way on this Being, the name God seems appropriate. Furthermore, since Math, Ethics, etc. are abstract realties that presumably still exist if anything at all exists, then God’s existence alone is sufficient to make all of these things exist. Thus, it seems that God could logically exist apart from anything physical existing. However, if anything physical does exist, it does so only by virtue of God’s will. Thus no being is completely separate from God, the way that two physical objects can be separate from each other.
However, since we are not necessarily ethical or loving, and do not ourselves have divine power over everything, it seems clear that we cannot speak of ourselves as being the same self as God, but rather should regard ourselves as a different self. This self must be loved by God because God is Love. It thus becomes clear that we are dealing with the God of Classical Theism, not Pantheism. Such a conception God has been stripped of all limiting Anthropomorphisms, but it can still be seen that human beings, in some limited way, reflect God’s own nature, since we ourselves have imagination, desire, perception, will, empathy, and selfhood.
Such a being is clearly completely distinct from the gods of Polytheism, who are born and die, have limited goodness and power, etc. There might well be beings in some other world who are higher and better than we are, but they themselves, if they had a more direct perception of this unlimited Being, would themselves worship and adore this holy source of all goodness. And any human who worships and adores a single God as the sole source of reality would be believing in the same Deity, however mistaken or inadequate their concept of God might be in other details.
Now, suppose a Naturalist denies the existence of any such God. He must nevertheless believe in at least Reality, Math, and Consciousness on pain of logical contradiction, and if he rejects Causality and Ethics he is at least denying his own basic human categories of thought. So let us suppose he accepts them all, if not in a Platonic sense, then at least as qualities of individual entities. Then the one additional step he needs to take to become a Monotheist is to accept that these features of reality are ultimately unified in one and the same entity. This is plausible for the same reason that unification hypotheses are more satisfying in physics, and because otherwise we would have to ask why these categories all exist separately–what causes them to cohere together into one universe?
After such an aridly intellectual conversion, it is quite possible that he or she will still not recognize that God is Love, until learning the further fact that this Being was Crucified under Pontius Pilate in the first century, for each person. This is an absurdity and a scandal, but now there is historical data and we need not rely on philosophy alone. It is the most vivid expression in history of the paradox that God’s will suffers events to occur, that are not in accordance with his own desire. It teaches us that Evil is God’s suffering. This includes, but is not limited to, the evil things which we humans choose to do to ourselves and each other. And if God allows himself to suffer, then that suffering must somehow be redemptive, capable of bringing good out of evil. Apparently God wills for the triumph of good over evil to involve a historical process, rather than simply making a static Just Cosmos in which everything is flawless and perfect from the beginning.
If God is Love, then God must love God, and thus even though God is singular, relationships are still at the core of his being somehow. The doctrine of the Trinity is congruent with this, even if it cannot be logically deduced from it. (This perhaps also explains the puzzle of why God would create something else, when his own Being was completely perfect already.) We can now understand why the Crucified Man could both say he was God, and also pray to God as his Father… which is lucky for us, since without submission to a God above him, he could not have become himself a complete Man. Nothing could be more repellant than a human with nothing higher than himself to look up to, but Jesus was not like that! Similarly, the Spirit who testifies to Jesus and personalizes his redemption to each believer, may itself be regarded as a loving relation in that same union.
Since we are separate from God, and do not always make choices in accordance with his will, it seems at least logically possible that some human beings will reject Redemption and will instead to be content with remaining wicked. Since such wickedness is not really in accordance with our highest nature, such a state of being is necessarily going to involve suffering, and if human beings live forever it will involve eternal suffering.
On the other hand, those who place God at the center can expect to be blessed by the contemplation of the holy Divine Love through eternity. Since human beings are social in nature, this bliss would necessarily also involve participation in a harmonious society will all of the other blessed beings. And since human beings are physical in Nature, their fulfilment requires not just this, but also the Resurrection of their bodies from the dead.
The rest is details.
Just an administrative note. We are working on upgrading WordPress to a much newer version. It is possible that the blog content will not be available for a few minutes to a few days as we work through this process, so don’t be alarmed.
