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A Christian meditates on atheism
In the thread, “More mysteries of Darwinism,” E. from Florida said that the whole Darwin versus God issue is of no interest to him, since he is comfortable with his atheism and has no need for a God. That set off quite a bit of discussion in that thread and its follow-up. I then posted “The inescapable relevance of Darwinism,” in which I said: “Darwinist atheism is not simply a neutral truth that people are free to believe or not to believe. It is an expansive creed, seeking to dominate and transform society and suppress traditional beliefs.” Now Kristor has a further reply, arguing that E. is a “particularly pure and principled embodiment of the atheist position,” whose comments are well worth pondering.
Kristor writes:
The connection between atheist Darwinism and politics is logical, tight, and important. Politics just is the social discourse about what first principles shall be carried into practice, and how. The question of Darwinism is therefore unavoidable, however tiresome or uninteresting the conservative atheist E. may find it. For if Darwinism is true, Christianity is false, and to the extent that the West has been informed by Christianity, it too is false, and not worth defending. Why sacrifice anything for a falsehood?
But if atheism and Darwinism are true, then neither are any other cultures worth defending, either—including the modern post-Christian atheist societies of Europe and North America. This because, in the materialist, atheist, Darwinian world view, history unfolds not for reasons good or bad, but happenstantially, and—in the final analysis—as a species of chaos (as, i.e., not a history at all, properly speaking). In the Darwinian universe, there can be no such thing as an objectively bad outcome; rather, whatever happens simply happens, and all outcomes are morally equivalent, because all are morally empty. From atheism, moral relativism and its corollary, the liberal insistence upon equality, both follow as a matter of logic. If everything is morally empty, there is no basis for any judgment about cultures or people, and their equality is just a fact, so that there is no point to exerting oneself in support of any particular culture, people, or idea.
Thus moral relativists can’t justify doing anything at all. This weakens them. Carried into practice, relativism and egalitarianism result in the moral equivalent of the heat death at the thermal end of history, when there is nowhere any remaining concentration of energy to perform work. The enervation of the West deriving from its loss of faith is expressed concretely in the increasing timorousness of European men that Lawrence has so often noted. Not only are they incapable of heroic sacrifice pro patria, they often cannot muster the vim to defend even their own bodies. The likelihood is then that they will fall before energetic moral absolutists such as Osama bin Laden. As Lawrence has pointed out, the determining factor in a contest of wills is moral spirit; those who feel their cause is just are more vigorous in its defense and propagation.
So the debate about atheism and Darwinism is crucially important to the survival of the West. The West can be saved only if it can find in itself something objectively good, and thus worth defending. This can happen only if the West decides after all that atheism is false, and that the religious core of the West, Christianity, is true. If Christianity is true, then the West, which is its most thoroughgoing historical instantiation so far—until recently we called it simply Christendom—is simply the best culture on Earth, closer than any other to the realization of Divine Truth. This makes it worth dying for.
No such sea change will be possible until the philosophical credentials of the Christian worldview are rehabilitated, and the atheist critique thereof demolished. Traditionalists interested in the survival of the West must therefore continue to press the Christian—or, at least, the theist—apologetic, as an integral part of the quotidian political combat with liberalism. We can’t put our critique of Dawkins on hold while we are busy with Obama and Osama; these three struggles are different fronts in the same war.
In the Traditionalist struggle with liberalism over first principles, E. is actually quite useful to the Traditionalist side, for he is a particularly pure and principled embodiment of the atheist position, and serves therefore as a living reductio ad absurdam. E. writes:
“If you need a reason for your presence, then you need a God or gods. If you can accept that there is no reason for it all, then Darwinism and atheism are just fine. God fills a void, but if you don’t feel you have a void that needs to be filled, then you don’t need a god.”
E. feels no need to understand the reasons for existence. In effect, then, E. feels no need to understand anything at all. Is this not the apotheosis of the liberal position, the nominalist position?
Lawrence asks E., “how [he would] react to someone who declared that people who think that there are racial differences in intelligence have a “need” to look down on people of other races.” More directly, we could ask E. for his reaction to someone who declared that atheists have a “need” to disbelieve in God. As an atheist, E. could have no other reaction to such a statement, or for that matter to any statement, than his answer to Lawrence’s rhetorical question about racial differences: “OK.”
For E. is absolutely correct that if you want to treat as reasonable any part of the world, including yourself, you have to believe in God. (“If you need a reason for your presence, then you need a God or gods.”)
If there is no ultimate reason for the world, no surpassingly reasonable First Cause which is itself necessary—which, i.e., cannot possibly fail to exist, so that it needs no cause and thus need not, and cannot, be explained—then when you get right down to it, the world is unreasonable through and through, and reasoning must therefore be impossible.
Therefore no thoroughgoing atheist can argue that he can have anything rational to say; rather, everything he says or does that pretends to reasonableness will constitute an unprincipled exception. The practical effect will be that his entire life, as concretely lived, will be a lie, a contradiction; will be, and feel, deeply wrong. He will be caught in neurotic conflict, an irresolvable cognitive dissonance that reaches deep into his guts: his animal nature will prevent him from running his life as if atheism were true and nothing really mattered, while his atheism will prevent him from any whole-hearted confidence, and thus from a full-blooded and unequivocal engagement with any part of his life. That will put integrity forever out of reach, and with it any possibility of joy, peace or contentment. Irony will be his best hope. Trapped in unreason, all the positive values of his life will be to him little more than a bitter sham, for he will remember always that in the end, you work hard, suffer, and die—nothing more.
It is hardly surprising that believers are in general psychologically healthier than atheists. Atheism is bad faith. Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, not noticing it is only disease that wants medicine.
Clearly, then, atheism is self-refuting: if it is true, it cannot be understood to be true, or supported with any arguments; for it makes of all thought mere noise, and all thinkers fools. Thus atheism is the apotheosis of irrationality, and theism the forecondition of thought. This is perhaps why EO Wilson is so ready, in the dispute between theists and orthodox Darwinists, to let bygones be bygones: if the dispute keeps up in earnest for very much longer, the fundamental irrationality of his position will become unavoidable to Wilson himself, and he will be forced (if he is a true scientist and an honest man) to admit his profound ignorance, thus greatly undermining his intellectual authority—which he might for pecuniary reasons be loath to do.
We should grant E. at least the great respect due to consistency. He mounts no counterarguments, because he can’t. Despite his apparent condescension toward those impelled to believe something they can feel confident is true (NB that he has no criticism of this same impulse in himself, which contravenes atheism even as it motivates his commitment thereto), he is amiable, perhaps because he has thought things through well enough to realize that a Darwinist cannot justify being nasty or upset about anything whatsoever. That’s pretty impressive, compared with such as Hitchens and Dawkins, who wax so wroth for no reason they can under their hypothesis rationally adduce.
LA wrote to Kristor:
Your paragraph following your quotation of E. was very difficult at first, then I realized that you were simply characterizing and paraphrasing what he had said. I hadn’t realized the profundity of what he had said.
Kristor replied:
You know, I had been working on that essay for a long time before I realized how exactly E. had nailed it. His one sentence summarizes almost everything we theists at VFR have said in critiquing atheism. “If you need … reason …, then you need … God.” That about says it, no?
- end of initial entry -
LA replies:
This is a profound meditation by Kristor. I don’t claim to understand it all. Certain passages require re-reading until their meaning comes out.
But is it possible that Kristor is over-interpreting E.? Kristor feels that E. has taken a principled atheist position (“If you can accept that there is no reason for it all, then Darwinism and atheism are just fine”) that leaves him incapable of valuing anything. But is this really true? Cannot E.’s statement be understand as saying that he accepts existence (including his own existence) as it is, and that he doesn’t trouble himself about ultimate ends or higher meanings, but that he still values that which he values (presumably including his own and others’ existence) and accepts his own valuations as something natural or inherent to himself without needing to relate them to something larger? In other words, it’s not just that E. accepts his existence without worrying about its justification; he accepts his own valuations of things, his likes and dislikes, without worrying about their justification. And therefore he is capable of valuing and is not the principled nihilist that Kristor says he is. I’m not taking this position but putting it forth for the sake of discussion.
Steven Warshawsky writes:
With all due respect, I believe that Kristor begins his analysis with one tautology, one meaningless statement, and one non sequitur:
“For if Darwinism is true, Christianity is false, and to the extent that the West has been informed by Christianity, it too is false, and not worth defending.”
The tautology lies in the first part of this sentence, which follows from the definitions of the terms Darwinism and Christianity. Darwinism rejects the idea of God; Christianity (like most religious traditions) is rooted in the idea of God. Consequently, if one is “true”—by which Kristor presumably means, it accurately represents the natural universe that exists independent of our individual minds (i.e., God “really” exists, and would continue to exist even if every human on earth were gone)—then the other is “false” ipso facto. However, this tautology tells us nothing about the actual truth values of Darwinism or Christianity.
The meaningless statement lies in the next part of the sentence. It is an important historical fact that Western civilization “has been informed by Christianity.” However, it is meaningless to say that, assuming Christianity is “false” in an objective sense, this makes Western civilization also “false.” How can a civilization that has existed for thousands of years and been the cultural life blood of hundreds of millions of people be “false”? What does this mean? The people, the buildings, the farms, the factories, the books, the art, the music, the religious rituals—it all has existed, and continues to exist, regardless of the “truth” of Christianity. This mode of thinking strikes me as a form of radical philosophical idealism.
Lastly, the non sequitur lies at the end of the sentence, that if Christianity is “false” in an objective sense, then Western civilization is “not worth defending.” This statement is preposterous. Regardless of the truth value of Christianity, Western civilization is worth defending because it offers its inhabitants a superior way of life than competing civilizations. An objectively superior way of life, as demonstrated and measured by how real people live their daily lives (that’s why, if given a free choice, most human beings prefer to live the way we do). The achievements of the West, and the freedom and prosperity and beauty it offers its inhabitants, are not mere ephemera that are dependent in some logical or metaphysical sense on the “truth” of Christianity.
Yes, the West is confronting a vigorous existential challenge from the Muslim world, as it has at various times since the birth of Islam. We are living in a time when the Muslim world has grown stronger, due to population growth, economic development, and technological progress, and now is reasserting itself against the West. Let’s be clear, this is not a “philosophical” challenge based on ideas. This is a cultural challenge based on violence. Whether the West is up to the challenge is an open question. I don’t know the answer. But I disagree with Kristor that, at bottom, it depends on the West “deciding” that Christianity is “true.” (Whatever this means in practice; Kristor’s argument is at a very high level of abstraction.) Rather, to be blunt, it depends on enough Westerners deciding that it is better to kill Muslims, as necessary, than to give up their own way of life. To oppose the evils of Islam does not require believing in Christianity.
Kristor replies:
Responding first to Lawrence: yes, surely it is possible for E. to value things. But to the extent that he does, he is departing from his atheist principles. Aesthetic and moral evaluations of experience are the sine qua non for the thousands of decisions we must make each day in order to live. Each such evaluation is an effective assertion by E. that he himself, and therefore also derivatively his feelings about things, are important, are worthy of his own allegiance, and of his sacrifice. The deferral of gratification so essential to economic progress is motivated by just such feelings of importance; so is self-defense; so, even, is eating. E. wouldn’t even be able to get out of bed in the morning unless he thought it was more important to do so than not, and that his feelings about such things somehow mattered.
The problem for E. is that these indispensable judgments that he and his experiences matter are necessarily unprincipled exceptions to his basic Darwinian conviction that in fact nothing does matter, that all outcomes are morally and aesthetically equivalent, because all are in truth—i.e., irrespective of how E. may himself feel—empty of objective moral and aesthetic value. This is why his philosophy is at war with his animal nature, with his own body. If he is really a principled Darwinist, E. must say “OK” to anything that happens. This he cannot possibly do, and live. The greater his fidelity to his philosophy, the more obvious is its absurdity. For in the final analysis he couldn’t even bring himself to say, “OK,” unless he felt that his assent was important. Darwinism says it isn’t; that the world doesn’t give a damn about him. Why then should he? His Darwinism can give him no reason. All E. can say is that, willy nilly, he does give a damn.
This is why atheist metaphysics inevitably gives rise to a moral philosophy founded on power, and nothing more. If morality is in no sense transcendent to my own preferences, so that it is not at all a problem for the world at large if those preferences run my behavior absolutely unchecked, then all other persons are reduced to nothing more than means to my ends, and I may use or abuse them as I wish. Take away morality and all that’s left is struggle.
The problem for the atheist is that struggle is most successful where motivated, and atheism provides no transcendent motivation. On the contrary, it systematically destroys all motivation. The logical consequence of Darwinism is nihilism. You can stave it off with wine or work or children, but any thoroughgoing and careful Darwinist must end with nihilism. And nihilism is extremely depressing. The nihilist must cope with difficult times believing that his life is nothing more than a slurry of dead pebbles jumping about aimlessly. In time of great trouble, a philosophical or religious conviction of our transcendent significance and value can nerve us to the struggle, improving our chances for survival, serenity, prosperity. That’s why, despite what they may say to the contrary, almost no one is really a nihilist in practice. Nihilism has negative adaptive value, because it rejects the idea of value. [LA replies: Kristor may be correct, but I’m not persuaded that he is. I think he’s reading more into E.’s position than is warranted from E.’s very short comment. E. said that he doesn’t feel the need to look for a reason for his existence. That statement only pertains to the fact of his existence. It doesn’t pertain to the things that, as an existing person, he cares about. His attitude could read as: “Well, I don’t know why I’m here, and frankly, I’m not concerned with that question. However, I see that I exist, and that this existence of mine is enjoyable while it lasts, and I value the things that enhance my existence and reject the things that don’t.” Why couldn’t he have the position I’ve just described, without his having to be the metaphysically tortured, conflicted being that Kristor describes?]
Steven Warshawsky points out that Darwinism and Christianity contradict each other by definition. Yes; this doesn’t stop a lot of Christian Darwinists from thinking they don’t, so I thought it worth mentioning. He is correct also that the mere fact of a contradiction between Darwinism and Christianity tells us nothing about the truth of either doctrine. But establishing that truth was not my objective in the first paragraph of my essay, which is what Mr. Warshawsky has criticized; I established it later.
Mr. Warshawsky argues that it is meaningless for me to say that the falsehood of Christianity would render Western civilization also false, to the extent that it is Christian; for there is more to the West than Christianity. There are farms, and sidewalks, and art, and stuff, and these are neither true nor false. They simply exist, and do so, he argues, whether or not Christianity is true.
There is indeed more to a civilization than its religion, and material things have no truth value. But material things that are human products are implementations of ideas that do have truth value. A culture is a set of ideas that organize activities which produce artifacts. And the religion of a culture is its quintessence. Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were once the heart of Christendom and of a high civilization. Their Christianity was then deleted, and despite the survival of the old olive orchards and the Hagia Sophia, they became a different sort of civilization altogether, and much worse.
Mr. Warshawsky is correct that the virtues of the West are not dependent on the truth of Christianity. They depend rather on a conviction of the truth of Christianity, which until very recently provided philosophical support for shared Western convictions about the correct way to run a society. It made the Western project fundamentally credible. But if we believe in Darwinism, then we believe that the question of what might be the correct way to run a society is simply inapposite to reality.
Convinced Darwinists can have no rational argument for their own cultures and against sharia; and this will disincline them to struggle against it. If Darwinism is true, why exactly is it a problem for a Christian land to go Muslim? And if there is no problem with going Muslim, then why should we not all convert to Islam, so as to prevent bin Laden from his attacks? Simple, no?
If we converted, bin Laden’s attacks would cease. This belies Mr. Warshawsky when he says, “[the challenge of Islam] is not a “philosophical” challenge based on ideas. This is a cultural challenge based on violence.” No. The Viking challenge to Britain was a cultural challenge based on violence. The Vikings didn’t care what god the Britons worshipped, they just wanted women, land, and loot. The Muslims, like the Marxists, are the opposite: they don’t care about loot, they want infidels dead or converted. If this is not a philosophical struggle, nothing is. Don’t get me wrong, they’ll enjoy the economic boot of our conversion. But even if we were dirt poor, they’d still want to convert or kill us, as they are now doing to the Sudanese Christians and pagans.
True it is, as Mr. Warshawsky says, that the defense of the West does not absolutely require Christianity. The Hindus have defended themselves against Islam. But a Darwinist society can offer no reason—no principled reason—to do so. It cannot argue to its own people that it should be defended. This will hurt their morale. And in such contests, morale is terribly important.
If the West is to survive, it must want to. If the West is to want to survive, it must believe that its survival is better than the alternatives. Thus to believe in its own superiority, inherent worthiness, and importance, the West must believe something other than Darwinism, which insists that nothing is important, worthy or superior.
We could, to be sure, reject Darwinism in favor of some non-Christian dogma, like Hinduism. But this would be far more difficult than resuscitating the Christianity still everywhere dormant among us (even atheists and Jews celebrate Christmas, for heaven’s sake). My hunch is that if the fundamental absurdity and impracticality of Darwinism became widely understood, we’d see another renascence of Christian faith, and Western confidence. Should that happen, I rate our chance of prevalence against Islam—not so much in this century as in this millennium—much higher.
LA replies:
First, I have no idea what Steven Warshawsky means when he says Kristor engages in a tautology. He doesn’t define tautology in the present context and doesn’t show how Kristor’s statement is one. Generally I think tautology is a word people throw around much too easily. For example, Ann Coulter uses it several times in “Godless,” repeating the oft-heard argument that natural selection is a tautology, and therefore false, but she doesn’t show what this means, and leaves the impression that she herself has no idea what it means. Like “racism,” I think that when people charge “tautology,” they ought to define what they mean by it and show how the statement they are criticizing is indeed a tautology. Otherwise their argument is likely to go over the heads of nine out of ten readers, including mine.
More importantly, Mr. Warshawsky says that Kristor’s statement, “[If] Christianity is false, [then] to the extent that the West has been informed by Christianity, it too is false,” is meaningless. To say the statement is meaningless betrays a surprisingly materialistic view of civilization. Mr. W. writes:
How can a civilization that has existed for thousands of years and been the cultural life blood of hundreds of millions of people be “false”? What does this mean? The people, the buildings, the farms, the factories, the books, the art, the music, the religious rituals—it all has existed, and continues to exist, regardless of the “truth” of Christianity.
Mr. W.’s view of Western civilization reminds me of Woody Allen’s monologue near the end of “Manhattan,” after his girlfriend leaves him and he’s feeling very sad, in which he lists the things that make life worthwhile to him: Willie Mays, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Flaubert, Chinese food, his list goes on and on. These items are just there, reduced to cultural commodities, lacking any connection to any larger meaning. In this list of what makes life worthwhile, Allen has inadvertently revealed the emptiness of his own view of existence.
I feel that Mr. W. has done something similar here. He reduces Western civilization to a list of concrete things, as though that’s what makes a civilization. True, a civilization does consist of concrete things: roads, telephone lines, homes, schools, libraries, churches, office buildings, corporations, police forces, courts, armies, governments. But at the core of the civilization is a vision of truth, without which those things would not have come into existence. I would go beyond Kristor and say that if Darwinism with its radically reductive view of existence is true, then not only Christianity, but all the spiritual, philosophical, aesthetic, and transcendent values that gave birth to classical, Christian, and modern Western civilization would be untrue, whether we’re talking about the Greek idea of an inherent order in nature that reflects the divine, so that natural law is “both descriptive of natural processes and normative for the ordering of human society” (H.B. Parkes), or the Greek idea that excess (hybris) brings on retaliation (nemesis), leading to the belief in justice as a balance of social forces, or the Hebrew revelation of the creator God who made man in his own image and likeness, or the Hebrew prophetic idea of man living under God and unfolding God’s purpose through history, which in turn gave birth to the idea of social progress, or the Christian revelation of God who becomes man in order to lead men back to God, or the liberal idea of man as having inherent rights as man, or thousands of other understandings of existence that, if the Darwinian materialist view of mankind is true, are false. Amazingly, Mr. W. imagines that the entire spiritual basis of Western civilization could be eliminated, and Western civilization would still be seen as based in truth and would still be practically defensible.
Kristor writes:
Your description of Woody Allen’s essentially empty recitation of the items that fill his good life, that he values? That sort of empty recitation is the sort of good life which an atheist may blithely attain. He can enjoy Louis Armstrong and Chinese food, but there can be for him no transcendent cord binding it all together “Transcendent cord binding it all together”—is this not almost a literal aetymological translation of “religion?”
LA replies:
Yes, that’s exactly how that monologue in “Manhattan” struck me when I saw it in … 1979. 29 years ago? As he was giving that list, the immediate meaning was, these are the good things in life, that make life worth affirming, life is good. But there was something deeply off about it, and I don’t know if Woody Allen the screen writer, as distinct from Woody Allen the character in the movie, was aware of it. Instead of his treating, say, Mozart as this great thing. it was more as if Mozart, Willie Mays, and the other worthies he mentioned were cultural commodities, cultural consumer items, in a world without truth. And that’s nihilism. Nihilism doesn’t deny values. It just denies that they’re tied together into anything.
Kristor writes:
Lawrence writes:
[E.’s] attitude could read as: “Well, I don’t know why I’m here, and frankly, I’m not concerned with that question. However, I see that I exist, and that this existence of mine is enjoyable while it lasts, and I value the things that enhance my existence and reject the things that don’t.” Why couldn’t he have the position I’ve just described, without his having to be the metaphysically tortured, conflicted being that Kristor describes?
He could. Indeed, this is how we all live our lives, to some extent. One can’t wait until one has attained perfection of knowledge in order to make quotidian decisions; rather, our philosophies must perforce be cobbled together on the fly, and so we must learn to put up with a certain amount of philosophical messiness in our view of the world. But if E. is philosophically serious and consistent, so that he is uncomfortable with ignorance and cognitive dissonance, he will try to think through the logical consequences of his atheism. Sooner or later, that process must end with a more or less tortured nihilism—or else, with abandonment of atheism. It is the latter outcome that theist apologetics is interested to produce in E.
I agree also with you that if Darwinism is true, all the animating ideas of the West are nonsense; the Greek, the Hebrew, the Christian, the North European liberal. You put that beautifully. I would add two things. First, Christianity involves all those core animating ideas you mention. To reject it root and branch, as atheism must, is to reject all of them root and branch; for they are all fully present in Christianity.
Second, if Darwinism is true, one of the other important Western ideas that must be nonsense is Darwinism. If Darwinism is true, then our ideas, such as Darwinism, are nothing more than arrangements of dead material objects, and cannot, therefore, as Mr. Warshawsky has pointed out, have any truth value. If Darwinism is true, it is nonsense.
John D. writes:
The H.B Parkes quote you that wrote into your revision was intriguing and prompted a search on him (or her?) only to come up nearly empty, with the exception of his book Marxism an Autopsy. Is that where the quote originates? It’s a good one. I’m also very fond of your description of justice as a “balance of social forces”. I’ve several times attempted to meditate on more profound (or even accurate) meaning of justice, only to create for myself a good thumping headache. This thread is definitely a keeper. Thanks for the alert on your revision of it.
LA replies:
That’s Henry Bamford Parkes, and I discuss his “Gods and Men: the Origins of Western Culture” in my “Reading list” which can be clicked on under “Featured Articles” on the main page. If you have more questions on him let me know.
Today we use the word justice in a very different sense than the ancients did and this leads to basic misunderstandings. When we use justice, we usually mean it in the criminal jsutice sense, in which the guilty is convicted and the innocent is acquitted, or in the social justice sense of equality of outcome. The Greek pre-Socratic philosophers used it in the sense of a balance of opposing forces in nature. The following is copied from my marginal notes in Gods and Men at p. 188:
Heraclitus’ idea of justice is really profound. The balanced tension of opposites is justice. If either side oversteps its bounds, it must be punished. Here is justice that doesn’t mean equality. For example, the employer and employee are not equal, the employer naturally has more power than the employee. But if the employer oversteps his bounds and uses his greater power to exploit the employee, that is injustice.
This idea of a balance of forces was then applied to ethics and politics. In Plato’s Republic, which is one long conversation devoted to the question, “What is justice?”, Plato (through his mouthpiece Socrates), in order to get at the idea of what is justice in man, starts by asking what is justice in the polis, in society. He says that justice is the property of a society whereby each element of the society is doing the work proper to its nature: the wise rule the city, the energetic defend the city, and so on.
Having developed the idea of justice in society, Plato then applies the same idea to the soul of man. Justice in man is that condition in each faculty of the human soul is doing the work proper to itself, and is not doing the work that it should not be doing.
So justice in the classical sense means much more than “Did I get treated fairly,” or “Is their economic equality?” It means an organic, intrinsic order in man and in society.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 20, 2008 10:54 AM | Send
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