Conclusion
Conclusion
In contemporary culture, discourse about God has become deeply impoverished. Speaking of his fellow professional philosophers, William Desmond observes, “The most important question, the most fascinating question, the most enigmatic question, makes us squirm—squirm though we wear the unmoved mask of agnostic indifference.” Most philosophers today do not wish to raise the “most important question”—the question of God. For example, Marietta McCarty’s bestselling How Philosophy Can Save Your Life: Ten Ideas That Matter Most is silent about the idea of God. Instead, the “ten ideas that matter most” turn out to be simplicity, communication, perspective, flexibility, empathy, individuality, belonging, serenity, possibility, and joy. Of course, these ten ideas cannot ultimately save anyone’s life, and we can hardly retain “serenity” and “joy” in the face of the eternal annihilation that we would face if there were no God. The American writer and activist Grace Paley commented in an interview near the end of her life, “The moment I take my last breath everything will end. Bye-bye—in fact, farewell.” Paley assumed that she would be annihilated, utterly swallowed up into the everlasting passage of time. This worldview is commonplace today in what Carlos Eire, in A Very Brief History of Eternity, terms with subtle irony the professional “thinking class.”
Given this situation, some philosophers have taken to trying to explain how a human life that leads to everlasting annihilation is nonetheless endurable. In his bestselling The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, Alex Rosenberg accepts that logical rigor compels atheists such as himself to conclude that “death is the end of our existence” and that “individual human life is meaningless, without a purpose, and without ultimate human value”—as is the entirety of human history. He still thinks that we can make it through the day, often quite contentedly.
If Rosenberg is right in his premises, at a basic level it does not matter how we live; all human actions converge on the not-so-distant horizon line of life’s fundamental meaninglessness, and today “let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither,” and “let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless” (Wis. 2:8, 11).
A similar positing of the fundamental purposelessness of our existence appears in the work of Rosenberg’s fellow atheist and Duke University colleague Owen Flanagan. Flanagan urges us to find meaning by pursuing lives of self-sacrificial love even though we know that, inevitably and without the slightest doubt, we will soon be annihilated forever. Death is seemingly not a problem for Flanagan, since he considers it to be merely a return to nonexistence. But once we have existed and have known and loved others (and have in turn been known and loved), our death does not just involve a mere return to nonexistence; it is also an everlasting destruction of the personal communion that we once enjoyed, a destruction that renders all of our relationships null and void forever. The net result then is the same as that which we outlined above: Rosenberg’s and Flanagan’s premises render human existence absurd and indeed horrific on the most fundamental level. Rosenberg and Flanagan have arrived at their positions by assuming that Hume, Kant, and modern science have once and for all ruled out even the question of God’s existence.
By comparison with Rosenberg and Flanagan, many popular scientists today are still interested in the classical demonstrations of God’s existence, if only out of eagerness to expose these demonstrations as fraudulent. In a “Contrarian Theological Afterword” to his highly entertaining The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report, for example, Timothy Ferris describes the “cosmological proof” as claiming “that any hierarchy of existence requires some overarching state of existence, that of an extant God.” Instead of a transcendent source of all finite being, which is what the cosmological proof actually entails, Ferris imagines the “cosmological proof” as demonstrating a hierarchy of beings, with God as merely the supreme being on the scale. He complains, “The cosmological proof has enjoyed a long reign, due in part to the sentiments of thinkers who regard the origin of the universe as a problem inaccessible to science.” He supposes that the question is what produced the material universe, whereas in fact the real question is how to account for finite, contingent existence. Even if we discovered that the universe was produced by another universe, this problem—the inability of contingent being to account for its own existence—would remain in full force.
Without grasping the real question of being, therefore, Ferris asks, “Why, for instance, must we think of existence as a slippery slope, such that divine intervention is constantly required to prevent things from sliding down into the despond of nonexistence? And is causation really so deep a precept of nature as to render God requisite?” Certainly, with respect to the real question of being, being is not “a slippery slope” that one can “slide down.” The real problem is how contingent actuality could possibly be. For Ferris, the “cosmological proof” simply “pastes the tag of ‘existing’ on things, then asserts that the existence of any being requires the existence of an ultimate being.” But this assumes that “being” is a mere concept, a mere predicate that one “pastes” onto things. Ferris concludes that “we would clearly be better off if we left God out of cosmology altogether”—not recognizing that his real opponents are glad to do so, since cosmology properly deals only with intraworldly causes. He takes one last jab at the cosmological proof: “Feeble indeed is a machine that requires the constant intervention of its designer to keep it running.” If only he knew that the proponents of the demonstrations of God’s existence entirely reject this Deistic god.
Richard Dawkins is perhaps the most well-known scientific critic of the demonstrations of God’s existence, but he is notorious for his failure to grasp them. Dawkins summarizes Aquinas’s first way as being based on the logic that “something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.” He summarizes the third way as positing that “there must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.” He summarizes the fifth way as saying that “things in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been designed.”
How could Dawkins have arrived at such distortions? To be the first mover is not simply “to make the first move.” The third way is about ontological possibility and necessity, not about the need for something nonphysical to explain physical things. The fifth way is about teleological order, not about mechanistic design. Regarding Aquinas’s rejection of infinite regress in the first and second ways, Dawkins suggests that one could end the regress more neatly by hypothesizing “a ‘big bang singularity,’ or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading.” The view that one can end the regress by adding yet another finite cause or motion—such as “a ‘big bang singularity’”—shows that Dawkins has failed to understand Aquinas’s argument. Dawkins appears to think that Aquinas is arguing simply to a Deistic “God” who stands within the order of finite beings. Rather, the real crux of Thomas’s argumentation is how to account for motion/change in beings in which there is an evident admixture of potency and act, for which reason they cannot account for their own actuality. This is why, for Thomas, essentially ordered causal chains come to rest not just in a first mover but in a first mover who is “put in motion by no other,” that is to say Pure Act.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow begin their The Grand Design with the claim that “philosophy is dead.” Their understanding of the philosophical demonstrations of God’s existence, however, is next to nothing. Remarking that Aquinas “employed Aristotle’s ideas about the order in nature to argue for the existence of God” (although Aquinas credits the fifth way to John of Damascus), they compare Aquinas’s argument to that of an unnamed eighteenth-century Christian theologian who absurdly claimed “that rabbits have white tails in order that it be easy for us to shoot them.” They then imagine themselves to be resolving matters when they reach the conclusion that “because there is a law like 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. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” But not only would the law of gravity by itself be something rather than nothing, but also the notion that the demonstrations of God’s existence hinge on the need for something “to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going” fails to comprehend anything about the real demonstrations and what they show. It envisions “God” as simply one supreme being among beings rather than the source of all finite actuality; it envisions God’s creative and ongoing gift of being as simply the starting of a cosmic motor.
Not only in popular science but also in contemporary humanities God is too often imagined as something like the Great Pumpkin, beyond rational discourse. For example, in her Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Martha Nussbaum appreciatively discusses the University of Notre Dame’s efforts to construct “a distinctively religious campus that is also a place of genuine inquiry and debate.” But her discussion of how to renew the “cultivation of humanity” in modern universities—how to nourish students’ “ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others”—all too predictably never mentions the need for university professors and students to discuss the topic of God’s existence. Surely, however, the question of whether there is a God will be integral to answering what “humanity” is and what human cultivation and critical thinking involves.
As Brad Kallenberg points out, Wittgenstein provides a reason for doubting that the demonstrations of God’s existence can make sense within a secular framework. Kallenberg summarizes Wittgenstein’s concern: “How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God? Practice gives the words their sense.” In other words, when we hear someone express belief in “God,” we do not know what kind of “God” (or “god”) is at issue. For Kallenberg, it is a mistake to suppose that “arguments about God’s existence require no special attending behaviors to get their point.” Such “special attending behaviors” include “the practice of prayer or praise.”
I agree that whether or not we pray may make a difference in how we respond intellectually to the demonstrations of God’s existence. But the reasoning of the various demonstrations—like that of the various critiques of these demonstrations—is open to being assessed by Christian and non-Christian, theist and nontheist. They do not depend for their logic on faith or prayer. Appreciatively summarizing Aquinas’s view, which I share, John Haldane states that “even those who do not already have an idea of God are in a position to determine that God exists simply by reflecting on the natural order”—even if such rational reflection is profoundly aided by grace and thus by prayer.
Given the importance of reasoning about God, the notion that “God” means solely what individuals experience it to mean—a notion that is widespread in popular spirituality today—must be rejected. Deepak Chopra claims that “‘God’ is an empty term except as it finds expression through the revelations of all the saints, prophets, and mystics of history.” If Chopra had argued simply that we need to pay attention to the saints, prophets, and mystics rather than solely to philosophers (or to theologians for that matter), then his point would be well taken. Pascal and Newman likewise make clear that demonstrative reasoning is secondary for real human connection to God. But to say that “‘God’ is an empty term” except as experienced in divine revelations is mistaken, since “God” has a meaning available to reason rather than solely being available to private religious experience.
Not surprisingly, the seeming refutation of the demonstrations has caused serious problems for Christianity in the West. As Fergus Kerr has pointed out, “A main reason for the decline of church-going in Western Europe . . . is that people take it for granted that no such proofs are available.” For such people, belief in God is utterly irrational, a by-product of the naive simplicity of previous evolutionary stages. Roger Scruton comments that a growing number of people in the West imagine that belief in God is “a sign of emotional and intellectual immaturity.”
Julian Baggini’s work exemplifies this position. For Baggini, “Belief in the supernatural is belief in what there is a lack of strong evidence to believe in.” He proposes that the acceptance of little or no evidence for a belief is what primarily differentiates believers in God from atheists. In his view, therefore, believers in God are such because they accept beliefs “that lack or are contrary to evidence, experience, or logic”: “religious belief postulates the existence of entities which we have no good evidence to believe exist.” Baggini points to two biblical stories about faith: Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22) and doubting Thomas (John 20). The assumption here is that these biblical stories, shorn from their context, display believers’ commitment to irrationality in their relationship with God. Baggini imagines that he has shown that “it is disingenuous for believers to put forward arguments to support their beliefs.”
On the contrary, the knowledge that God exists is still available to all who are willing to consider what Scruton calls “the topic of contingent being” and the puzzle of “being qua being.” And as David Hart emphasizes, the true irrationality is on the side of unbelief, since it turns existence and consciousness into a surd: “it makes sense to believe in both reason and God, and it may make a kind of nonsensical sense to believe in neither, but it is ultimately contradictory to believe in one but not the other.” Thus, rigorously thinking through the logical consequences of his atheism, Alex Rosenberg admits that “the ‘thoughts’ in the brain can’t be about anything at all, either things inside or outside the brain. The brain doesn’t store information that way. Rather, it stores information about the world in vast sets of input/output circuits that respond appropriately to one another and to their environment.” Of course, Rosenberg is convinced that he knows quite a good deal about reality—even though his “thoughts” are no more than neural circuitry. He remarks, for example, “There is no reason to doubt atheism. What we know about physical and biological science makes the existence of God less probable than the existence of Santa Claus. And the parts of physics that rule out God are not themselves open to much doubt. There is no chance that they will be revised by anything yet to be discovered.”
This is sheer nonsense, since there is no “physical and biological science” that could ever even possibly “rule out God.” God is the infinite source of physical and biological things, but God is neither embodied nor detectable in any way by the empirical methods of scientific inquiry. Rosenberg’s remark that “parts of physics . . . rule out God” shows how widespread metaphysical ignorance has become, so that such a claim could even be uttered by a philosophy professor at a major university. The seeds for this crop of ignorance were planted long ago. As John Courtney Murray noted in 1964, “The fixed philosophical attitude today is to say that a natural theology is impossible, that it is impossible for human reason, beginning only with the data of experience, to construct a valid doctrine of God.” And there is nothing particularly new in this philosophical attitude; modern sophistry has its ancient predecessors. The biblical book of the Wisdom of Solomon describes the sad quandary experienced by persons who believed that “we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been; because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air” (Wis. 2:2–3). Reflecting on modern skepticism, Murray complains that despite its claim to be more rational than belief in God, skepticism “calls an arbitrary halt to the movement of the mind.” This it certainly does, not least by refusing to confront seriously the puzzle of “being qua being.”
As a Christian believer, Murray adds a further observation: “How odd of God it would have been had he made man reasonable so that, by being reasonable, man would become godless.” How odd indeed, and as Murray recognizes, God did no such thing.
. William Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 17.
. See Marietta McCarty, How Philosophy Can Save Your Life: Ten Ideas That Matter Most (New York: Penguin, 2009). McCarty grants that there are eternal truths, though so far as I know she does not mention God. She states that “eternal ideas do exist untouched by time. These pure concepts are true for all time and in all places, concepts such as Love, Truth, and . . . Flexibility. . . . While the physical world shifts to and fro, non-tangible ideas remain the same—Joy, Friendship, Equality—and as philosophers we must reevaluate our understanding of them through reflection and dynamic conversations” (ibid., 105).
. Antonio Monda, Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Random House, 2007), 127. Most of the interviews with famous cultural figures that Monda records in his book (with some exceptions, such as the interview with Elie Wiesel) are discouraging, not least with respect to the level of ignorance about “God.”
. Carlos M. N. Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 224.
. Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 19, 314. See also Andrew Melnyk’s A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). See Edward Feser’s response to eliminative materialism in his The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008), 166–267; as well as David Bentley Hart’s superb chapter on consciousness in his The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
. See Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). See also his Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) and Self-Expressions: Mind, Morals, and the Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Regarding the question of whether life has a “meaning” without God, Julian Baggini’s Atheism: A Very Short Introduction offers an Epicurean response not likely to include self-sacrificial love: “What most people want is companionship, a job they enjoy, and sufficient money for a good quality of life. Given all those things, life seems meaningful enough, since that overall package is a good in itself” (Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 65). For the point that there can be no good and evil (no objective moral standards) without God—a point accepted by Alex Rosenberg but not explicitly by Baggini, who advocates for moral consequentialism—see David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
. See S. L. Frank, The Meaning of Life, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), esp. chap. 4. For the origins of nihilism, see Desmond, God and the Between, 21.
. See, however, Rosenberg and Tom L. Beauchamp, Hume and the Problem of Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
. Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 306.
. Ibid.
. William Lane Craig’s The Kalam Cosmological Argument (New York: Macmillan, 1979) takes as its starting point the fact that the universe began to exist (the Big Bang). Without rejecting the “Kalam Cosmological Argument,” I find Aquinas’s first and second ways to be markedly superior because they do not rely on the claim that the universe cannot have always existed. For support of the “Kalam Cosmological Argument,” see Garrett J. DeWeese and Joshua Rasmussen, “Hume and the Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment, ed. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 123–49. Mistakenly, Craig argues for God’s temporality once God has created: see William Lane Craig, “Timelessness and Omnitemporality,” in God and Time: Four Views, ed. Gregory E. Ganssle (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 129–60.
. Ferris, Whole Shebang, 306.
. Ibid., 308.
. Ibid., 310.
. Ibid., 311.
. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 77.
. Ibid.
. Ibid., 79.
. Ibid., 78.
. For the same view, presented as an analysis of the “cosmological argument” but in fact a grave distortion of Aquinas’s first and second ways, see Baggini, Atheism, 94–95. Baggini supposes that the argument’s own principles should lead us to posit a cause for God, and he notes that the argument (even were one to imagine that it worked) only arrives at the greatest being among beings. For criticism of Dawkins on this issue and other ones, see Hart, Experience of God, 20–23; Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Thomas Crean, OP, A Catholic Responds to Professor Dawkins (Oxford: Family Publications, 2007); Ian S. Markham, Against Atheism: Why Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris Are Fundamentally Wrong (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2008); Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). See also the critique of “fundamentalist atheists” (268) offered by Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), as well as Aidan Nichols, OP, “The New Atheism and Christian Cosmology,” in The Beauty of God’s House: Essays in Honor of Stratford Caldecott, ed. Francesca Aran Murphy (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 205–19, and James Le Fanu, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (New York: Pantheon, 2009). As Ward comments, “Although they are not by any means the only arguments for God’s existence, Thomas Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways in which one can prove that there is a God’ are perhaps the best known. Dawkins claims that they are easily exposed as vacuous, and he does so in just three pages. This would be a very impressive achievement, except that he does not in fact deal with Aquinas’ Five Ways at all” (Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, 102).
. Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.2.3.
. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Random House, 2010), 5.
. Ibid., 163.
. Ibid., 180. The same misunderstanding is found in Baggini, Atheism, 95: “God is invoked to explain what we cannot currently explain. . . . In this case God has retreated to behind the blue-touch paper that started the universe going. Such a God is fast running out of places for believers to hide him.” This is fortunate because such a God is not the God in which Christians believe.
. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 278.
. Ibid., 300.
. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 85e, cited in Brad J. Kallenberg, “Praying for Understanding: Reading Anselm through Wittgenstein,” Modern Theology 20 (2004): 527–46, at 528.
. Kallenberg, “Praying for Understanding,” 527.
. Ibid., 543.
. J. J. Haldane, “Atheism and Theism,” in J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 84–167, at 141. With regard to the significance of grace even for human reasoning, Thomas Joseph White, OP, remarks that
Aquinas himself, who is not pessimistic about the human capacity to arrive at knowledge of God, notes the effects on the intellect in its concrete historical exercise by the draw of disordered passions, the cupidity of the heart, ignorance and laziness, the difficulty of the subject matter, and the weight of received opinions that are erroneous. . . . To claim that we have natural capacities for philosophical knowledge of God, then, implies that these capacities exist as properties intrinsic to the soul, even in its state of fallenness without grace. This does not mean, however, that we can employ them properly in our fallen state without the agency of the grace of Christ, or even flawlessly with such grace. (White, “‘Through Him All Things Were Made’ [John 1:3]: The Analogy of the Word Incarnate according to St. Thomas Aquinas and Its Ontological Presuppositions,” in The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God?, ed. Thomas Joseph White, OP [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011], 246–79, at 276–77)
. Deepak Chopra, God: A Story of Revelation (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 1. Indebted to Hindu tradition, Chopra identifies four paths to God: devotion, understanding, service, meditation. In his view, the particular religions have collapsed under the weight of historical particularity. The four paths, however, remain just as open as ever, and “each of us must undertake the inner journey of our own choosing” (ibid.). It is the fourth path that most fascinates Chopra and serves him as a proof of God’s existence:
We are conscious beings who want to know where our awareness came from. Only consciousness can understand consciousness; hence the long tradition of the inner journey. The saints and sages of the past were Einsteins of consciousness, explorers into the nature of reality. They were testing the soul hypothesis, and if these explorers came back with the same findings, century after century, culture after culture, why not give their findings credence? (ibid., 276)
Chopra argues that our consciousness is a movement within the divine consciousness, although his language is somewhat ambiguous here (and arguably still allows for divine transcendence): “We are essentially divine, because God is just another name for the origin and source of consciousness. . . . If God’s mind is an infinite version of our mind, all our thoughts are movements within the divine mind” (ibid., 277). For a better version of this approach to God from the experience of consciousness, see Hart’s Experience of God, chaps. 4–5.
. Fergus Kerr, OP, Theology after Wittgenstein, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 1997), 191–92. In Kerr’s view, “a belief in the existence of God that is arrived at independently of any moral or affective considerations, including pre-reflective responses to the world, though it may engage philosophers’ attention, is unlikely to have much to do with the realities of religion” (ibid., 192). Much depends on what he means here by “the realities of religion.”
. Roger Scruton, The Face of God (London: Continuum, 2012), 1. See, for instance, A. C. Grayling’s statement that “when a religion is adopted in later years the impulse for it is almost wholly emotional rather than rational; proselytising of teenagers and adults typically targets loneliness, confusion, failure, grief, anxiety and depression as opportunities for conversion. The psychological support given by the fellowship thus offered is attributed by the convert to his newly formed relationship with that religion’s deity” (Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism [London: Bloomsbury, 2013], 68). By contrast, Scruton defines the “religious person” as
one who experiences the deep need to give thanks. . . . His need to give thanks is not circumstantial but metaphysical. It is rooted in the experience of being itself, in his way of understanding what it is to be. Being, for the religious person, is a gift, not a fact. It is through understanding this that we overcome our metaphysical loneliness, and understanding may require privation and suffering, through which we discard the dross of our own distractions. Hence the world, and the objects contained in it, come before the religious consciousness as the signs of another perspective—the perspective that has “given these things to me” (Face of God, 171)
See also Scruton’s The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), chap. 8.
. Baggini, Atheism, 32.
. Ibid., 32–33; cf. 76–77. For the same view, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 330: “What, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting evidence.” A. C. Grayling likewise argues that
having faith—holding beliefs and accepting doctrines either without evidence or in the face of countervailing evidence, which most religious people actually regard as a virtue—directly controverts canons of intellectual integrity. “Faith” is not a respectable or admirable thing; having been so long paraded as a virtue and worthy of respect, the truth is otherwise: its critics have no compunction in saying that it is irresponsible, lazy and too often dangerous. (God Argument, 69)
For Grayling, Christian Scripture obviously counts as no evidence, but this strikes me as a belief that itself lacks evidence. Like Dawkins’s, Baggini’s understanding of Christianity appears to be quite limited. For example, not appreciating that in order to be united to God we need to love, Baggini presents the Christian God as a petty tyrant who demands worship and threatens us with hell. Baggini agrees that “we should be good” (Atheism, 35), but this seems to him to be a requirement that can be rather easily accomplished. He imagines that for religious believers who see “this world as a kind of preparation for the next,” “life isn’t really valuable in itself at all” (ibid.). For responses to this kind of argument, see David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). See also McGrath, Dawkins’ God, 88–118.
. On the meaning of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac and of Jesus’s wounds, see Scruton, Soul of the World, 181–82.
. Baggini, Atheism, 98–99. In his view, “The atheist may begin with the basic laws of logic, such as the principle that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. But the believer often begins with a conviction that God exists that is even stronger than the logician’s belief in their first principles. This belief trumps all reason” (ibid., 106–7). Actually, the metaphysics of certain demonstrations of God’s existence begins with “the principle that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time.”
. Scruton, Face of God, 166–67. Scruton criticizes the efforts of some strands of analytic philosophy to deny that being is intelligible as being. He goes on to say, “Being presents us with unified individuals, and therefore with plenitude; it presents us with truth, and therefore with knowledge; and it presents us with goodness, and therefore with the end or purpose of the world. These are a priori features of being, and ways in which being makes itself known to us” (ibid., 168).
. Hart, Experience of God, 19.
. Rosenberg, Atheist’s Guide to Reality, 195. For the argument that strict materialism rules out the possibility of knowing “truth,” since our knowing is nothing more than a neural phenomenon, see Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: A Philosophical Defense of Lewis’s Argument from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003). See also Michael C. Rea’s thesis that philosophical naturalism is able to ground neither realism (the view that objects exist independently of our minds) nor materialism: Rea, World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
. Rosenberg, Atheist’s Guide to Reality, 275.
. John Courtney Murray, SJ, The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 74. He adds that the darling of the academy in the 1950s and 1960s, Karl Marx, despite his fierce commitment to atheism, never took seriously the task of defending it intellectually or understanding the arguments against it. Murray observes,
Here and there he [Marx] argues in the vein of the Academy—against the notion of creation, for instance. He only succeeds in making it clear to his reader that he did not even understand the state of the question. For instance, he confuses the problem of the duration of the world with the problem of its contingency. For the greater part, however, he is content simply to accept the proposition, which he took immediately from Feuerbach, that religion is fantasy, that God is the creation of man’s own imagination. (ibid., 106)
. Or as Edward O. Wilson puts it:
We were created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millions of species in Earth’s biosphere. Hope and wish for otherwise as we will, there is no evidence of an external grace shining down on us, no demonstrable destiny or purpose assigned us, no second life vouchsafed us for the end of the present one. We are, it seems, completely alone. And that in my opinion is a very good thing. It means we are completely free. (Wilson, Meaning of Human Existence, 173)
Amazingly, Wilson thinks that the result of knowing that there is no God will be a new freedom to pursue the unity of the human race, in care for each other and for the earth. In his view, the crucial thing is, although human activities now threaten to destroy the earth’s ecosystem, “Human beings are not wicked by nature. We have enough intelligence, goodwill, generosity, and enterprise to turn Earth into a paradise both for ourselves and for the biosphere that gave us birth. We can plausibly accomplish that goal, at least be well on the way, by the end of the present century” (ibid., 176). Humans have been plagued by bad governance, “tribal organized religions,” and “tribal conflict,” but once the idea of God and other blind faiths is gotten out of the way, things can develop well. Ultimately, of course, everything is meaningless; the entirety of human history will be but a blip on the cosmic screen.
. Murray, Problem of God, 96.
. Ibid., 76. Murray takes up Wisdom 13 and its portrayal of the Hellenistic philosophers who studied the things of nature but could not find their Creator; as Murray notes, these “ancient scientists” are “ancestors of a long lineage today grown vast in number” (ibid., 83). See also Gustave Weigel, SJ, The Modern God: Faith in a Secular Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 32–33. After describing the dominant naturalistic worldview with its rejection of any God or life after death, Weigel observes, “In the academy and on the stoa this vision of life and divinity is taught. Its prophets believe in it, and they proclaim it as the good news of salvation. The journals of thought accept it and give it first rights in their pages. Any other theology is given tolerance but not approval” (ibid., 33).