Where are the honest anti-atheists?

[inverarity]

Sigh. Someone sent this to me:

Where are the honest atheists?

Oh look, another article full of anti-atheist straw men. It is not possible to produce an argument against atheism that wasn't old before any of us were born, but they do keep trotting them out whenever someone publishes a book.

One of these days I'll catalog them. My favorite is the one I call the "I didn't get a pony for my birthday" argument: that's the one I frequently hear from the very religious who are convinced that every atheist actually knows that God exists, but we're just angry at him for one reason or another, so we pretend not to believe to spite him.

Most anti-atheist arguments are either projection or outright logical fallacies. Damon Linker's argument, above, is not really new, but I admit he's put an interesting spin on it, so I'll call it the Lovecraft Argument: basically, he is saying that atheism is, if true, a horrible and bitter truth that must necessarily leave atheists terrified and alone in the face of an uncaring universe.

He starts with another common logical fallacy:

It's quite another to claim, as these authors also invariably do, that godlessness is not only true but also unambiguously good for human beings. It quite obviously is not.

This is the "Church makes people behave argument," often formulated with slightly greater sophistication in anthropological terms to argue that humans, at least at some point in their cultural evolution, need religion in order to become civilized. Even some atheists believe this — supposedly, we "needed" religion in the past but now we can chuck it because we don't need fear of gods to make us behave. Except they figure some people still do need fear of gods to make them behave, hence the argument that religion is a net good if it gives less morally-grounded people a reason not to go on killing sprees or steal old peoples' pensions. I haven't ever seen any evidence that those who are inclined to do such things are much impeded by religious beliefs, but I suppose now and then fear of hellfire might have deterred a few sins. Whether this makes up for the negatives religion brings into the picture is a much longer debate. So, getting back to Mr. Linker:

If atheism is true, it is far from being good news. Learning that we're alone in the universe, that no one hears or answers our prayers, that humanity is entirely the product of random events, that we have no more intrinsic dignity than non-human and even non-animate clumps of matter, that we face certain annihilation in death, that our sufferings are ultimately pointless, that our lives and loves do not at all matter in a larger sense, that those who commit horrific evils and elude human punishment get away with their crimes scot free — all of this (and much more) is utterly tragic.

He then goes on to cite Nietzsche, Camus, and other buzzkills as examples of "honest" (and miserable) atheists. (As opposed to super-religious rays of sunshine like Leo Tolstoy.) How can you possibly find joy and meaning in life if God didn't make you a special immortal snowflake who is more important than every other not-human atom in the universe? How can you face the stark terror of knowing you're going to die if there isn't a light at the end of a tunnel on the other side?

It's actually not that hard. I will not claim to have invested a lot of thought into formulating a complicated philosophical reason d'être for myself as a bulwark against the apprehension of my own mortality, because I honestly do not feel any existential angst about not having a continued existence after I die, nor do I need to believe in an afterlife in order for what I do and experience now to have meaning.

To reject religion does not merely entail facing our finitude without comforting illusions. It also involves the denial of something noble. It is perfectly fitting, Larkin seems to say, for an atheist to lament his lack of belief in a God who bestows metaphysical meaning on the full range of human desires and experiences.

You only lament it if you felt a need for a "metaphysical" meaning for your desires and experiences. There is no reason why you should feel such a need.

Now, do I see the attraction of believing there is a benevolent omnipotent deity who loves each and every one of us individually? And that after we die, it will be Board Games Night forever in heaven? Or less flippantly, that all the horrible, evil things that happen in this world, all the misery and pain and suffering that no human agency can ever end, all the injustice that can never be addressed, will somehow be made right? That there is justice in the universe and we aren't just allotted a random portion of good and bad over which we have no control and no appeal? Of course I see the attraction. It's a very pleasant thing to believe — probably even more pleasant if your own cup of sorrow is overflowing.

But. There are lots of things I'd like to believe. I'd like to believe I am twenty years old again. I'd like to believe I have super powers. I'd like to believe the economy will start booming this year and global warming will turn out to have been a big mistake — those silly scientists!

The fact that it would be very comforting to believe something is not an argument to believe it.

If that makes me seem like a gloomy gus, per Damon Linker's argument, I can assure you that believing in god wouldn't make me particularly more optimistic. I know plenty of cheerful atheists, though, and an awful lot of bitter and miserable religious folks. It's pretty self-evident that religion is no balm for most people, and lack of it does not, in fact, bring nihilism and despair to those who have faced the awful truth.

tl;dr version: Damon Linker is a wanker.

Comments

[tealterror0.livejournal.com]

My favorite response to arguments like that is probably this.

I will not claim to have invested a lot of thought into formulating a complicated philosophical reason d'être for myself as a bulwark against the apprehension of my own mortality, because I honestly do not feel any existential angst about not having a continued existence after I die, nor do I need to believe in an afterlife in order for what I do and experience now to have meaning.

I like all of these, but especially this from (ironically, if you don't know his actual views) Nietzsche:

If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

EDIT: And this, from one of my favorite animes, Kino's Journey:

The world is not beautiful. Therefore, it is.

[shinygobonkers.livejournal.com]

"
If atheism is true, it is far from being good news. Learning that we're alone in the universe, that no one hears or answers our prayers, that humanity is entirely the product of random events, that we have no more intrinsic dignity than non-human and even non-animate clumps of matter, that we face certain annihilation in death, that our sufferings are ultimately pointless, that our lives and loves do not at all matter in a larger sense, that those who commit horrific evils and elude human punishment get away with their crimes scot free — all of this (and much more) is utterly tragic."

Yeah, must say, I do believe all of these things, and none of them is a downer for me. It's just...reality. The sky is blue, this is how it is, so what?

What I do find horrifying is the idea that we are all subject to the whim of some omnipotent BEING who gets to decide the ultimate fate of everyone by its own standards of morality, who claims to 'love' people but only if they obey it and only it, and damnation to anyone who has other ideas or who feels drawn to a lifestyle that it has not approved of, who demands that we waste so much of our limited lifespan worshipping it because, despite its overwhelming power, its ego just demands daily/weekly worship, pointless rituals to show us again and again how much power and control it has over our lives, who demands we give up things that we might enjoy, things that make us happy so as to show our obedience to it...

I have absolutely not the slightest inclination to believe in the existence of any kind of diety, but even if one were to exist, even if someone was to prove beyond a doubt that a God is real...if that God were such as most religious fundamentalists insist...I would rather choose 'damnation' and 'hell' that to follow that sort of nonsense.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Well, the really big flaw in the argument that "God must exist because a Universe without him is too depressing to contemplate" is that, put simply, the Universe doesn't dance to our tune. A proposition is objectively true or false in reality regardless of our desire for it to be true or false. If there was, right now, a Mammal-Killer asteroid heading toward the Earth, investments in space-capable nuclear missiles and orbital fortresses might help us; whining about the unfairness of the Cosmos won't do a particle of good. And if it's going to hit us too soon for us to defend against it or survive its effects, well, tough, that's just the way things turned out for us.

The sheer childishness of "God must exist because I want him to!" boggles my mind. As you said, there are a lot of things I wish were true, but some of them are impossible and the others are attainable only through hard and intelligent effort, rather than merely wishing.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

By the way, while I do not believe that an afterlife is necessarily real (or unreal: there's not much evidence to support either point of view), I do not see why such a belief must be tied to a belief in a god or gods. I can conceive of metaphysical systems in which there were gods but no afterlife, or afterlives but no gods, or both, or neither.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

Wow, he's absolutely right.

As an atheist I believe, contrary to the Bible, that the world moves while the Sun remains still. Naturally this means I am constantly absolutely terrified that the contents of the Earth will topple off as the Earth hurtles around the universe along with the planets.

Without God my whole world is left hurtling through empty space. It's a nightmarish vision, yet it is the only one my atheist brain can accept. My only hope for happiness is if the Church can correct my heretical little mind...


*Ahem* or not...


Taught a class about the Copernican Revolution recently. It seems to me that atheism is as big a paradigm shift for some modern Christians as heliocentrism was for Christians in the past. They are looking at the exact same evidence, but they cannot grasp why someone would interpret it entirely differently from themselves.

To be a little more charitable though, Bertrand Russell thinks atheism is pretty miserable too:

“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."
- Bertrand Russell, "Mysticism and Logic"


Funnily enough though, the writer completely misunderstands Nietzsche's "Parable of the Madman" which is actually an attempt to get atheists to understand why religion is important. In his parable, the only person who is upset is the madman. Everyone else is just dumbfounded and confused. The madman is ranting at the people in the marketplace, who are all atheists, trying to get them to understand how terrible the death of God really is. None of them seem to understand. And here, we have this reviewer trying to do the same thing. Trying to insist that people revert back to the old paradigm which, for more and more of us, is now unthinkable. "Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?" Well, yes Madman, we are, but that's no big deal really. God might not be there to hold us in orbit, but we've got gravity to do that...

everything old is new again.

[mistressdi.livejournal.com]

Here's my opinion: Some are born with faith. Other's weren't. I fall into the latter category.

I don't mind people believing in whatever they want to believe. Keep out of my way, don't tell me how I should believe, because that faith thing - can't do it if I don't have it.

I have not rejected current religion nor the past's mythology.
I simply am too busy marveling at the color of the sun through our atmosphere to care.

Re: everything old is new again.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

I don't agree that faith or lack thereof is an innate quality. It's a way of looking at the world, and like any worldview, the majority of people will cling to the one they grew up with.

Re: everything old is new again.

[w-wylfing.livejournal.com]

Right. Faith cannot be simply an innate quality that people are born with or not, because the proportion of believers varies wildly by nation, racial/ethnic group, and time period. That kind of variation just couldn't happen, and certainly couldn't change so drastically in one population in just a few decades, if faith was purely innate.

That said, I'd buy that there's some physical quality that makes spirituality or religion more attractive to some people than to others--but I can't accept that having faith is purely based on our physical beings. It's clear to me that the sociological context is a huge influence on whether people "believe" or not.

[momofquacker.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU! When i mention I do not believe in a god/God/gods, people try to figure WHY. Am I mad at god for my daughter dying? (the death of my daughter is a whole other can of worms. Telling a grieving mother that "God needed another angel" or some such BS is *not* helpful!) No, though really, the death of my daughter was just another confirmation, to me, that there is no "loving God", though I had quit believing in the magical man in the sky long before. I tried doing the Christian thing, but I always had too many questions that just could not be answered by common sense and I was made to feel bad for questioning, or better yet, interpreting parts of the Bible differently than other people.

Am I miserable without a god to worship or anything? no. Now, I do have a belief that when we die, a part of us does remain in some way. Whether you want to call it a spirit or a soul, or simply whatever 'magic' substance makes us who we are, or simply the atoms that formed us rearranging in some new way to be the world around us, becoming part of the plants and air and soil and animals.. in some way, we are still around to give comfort to those we leave behind. I 'pray' to my daughter, my mother, my grandmother.. those who have passed before me. In this way, you might call me a pagan. Whatever you want to call me, I don;t rely on someone in the sky to change my fate for me- it is up to me to make the best of this world, and each situation i encounter in it.

[ray243.livejournal.com]

Haha, seems like people clearly cannot understand that people who were never exposed to Christianity can become atheist.

Not to mention there are a few countries that have Buddhism as their most popular religion. I wonder if people living in Taiwan and Hong Kong are suffering because their religion do not accept the notion of god.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Usually the anti-atheists don't count Buddhists as "atheists" (even though technically Buddhists don't believe in a deity), because it's still a religion with a model for determining correct behavior, a metaphysical framework explaining the universe and the meaning of life, etc.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_silverfox/]

Many years ago one of my co-workers told me it was easy to prove that God exists.

Me: Really how?
Him: Well, everybody is born with the same amount of energy ...
Me: Really? How do you prove that?
Him: Why if they weren't, that'd be unfair and God would never be unfair.
Me: Yes, but I don't believe God exists, so why wouldn't it be unfair? You've just proven that God exists, if God exists.

He had no more to say to that.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the Born-Again who once argued in circles insisting that I couldn't really be an atheist because I had never actually "rejected God."

Me: "Why would I reject something I don't believe in?"
BA: "But if you haven't rejected God, how can you be an atheist?"
Me: "Why. Would. I. Reject. Something. I. Don't. Believe. In?"
BA: "But if you haven't told God, 'I reject you,' you haven't actually turned your back on Him, so you must still believe in your heart."
Me: "But I don't believe in God."
BA: "Then why haven't you told Him you reject Him?"
Me: ....

[http://users.livejournal.com/_silverfox/]

Oh, my co-worker was nothing like that. He did hear and understand what I said and we got on very well both before and afterwards. I'm not sure what I'd have done with your Born-Again, though - either screamed or cried with frustration, I suppose ...

[kerneyhead.livejournal.com]

I will say this, in the past religion served a purpose i.e. it was linked with survival. If you look at buffalo dances or rice ceramonies or whatever, you see technology being passed on and young people in particular taking it a bit more seriously because it is sacred knowledge. If nothing else, it probably increased the hunting success percentage a few points.

The fact that it is also transmits the tech that keeps alive may be the point.

Somewhere along the line, it became worship of leaders, be they Pharoh or King the idea that these people had divine sanction and were on the right hand of God was pretty common.

At that point it was, keeping you alive because said leader often had power of life and death. It was keeping you oppressed but it was keeping you alive. But it was no longer tied to the natural world.

Then we got to a point where it became about escape, either through 'enlightenment' or 'heaven'. It became less tied to reality.

Basically at this point religion has little to do with reality.

At this point it makes me wonder if we've reached a point where one of my favorite religious terms, koyaanisqatsi, may apply. It translates to roughly, life so f-cked up that radical change is inevitable.

[indigo-mouse.livejournal.com]

I don't think of myself as an atheist. While I don't believe in a deity (most days), I also am not passionate about my non-belief.

I figure if the Judaic God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob exists, then I wouldn't want much to do with him (he is kind of an asshole). The Christian pantheon (I have never understood how the Father/Son/Holy Ghost plus Mary and all the saints wind up being monotheism), makes pretty much no sense to me. Islam is pretty close to the other two, so if I wanted to get away from that old man with the white beard, then I'd have to look into Buddhism, Hindu (do they actually convert people? I wonder) Wicca, or Shinto. None of those seem all that appealing.

Some days I think there might be a deity, but it wouldn't be something that would be knowable, so perhaps I'm an agnostic on my off days.

Well

[ext-1700572.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Well, I'm a Hindu, which is cool, cos I don't need to do anything.
I do believe in God, but I don't care if other people don't, as long as they don't try to "convert" me, because it won't work.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

I feel for the guy. I cried when I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I'm sad (I got over it, but yes, when I go back and think about it, it's still a bummer) that we don't ever get to experience Hogwarts, or Oz, or Wonka's chocolate factory, or any number of wonderful fictional places that enriched our childhoods. So yes, if your religion's concept of an afterlife Paradise is one you love, then it hurts when they convince you there's really no such place.

The part I don't get is where the non-existence of the God and Heaven as depicted in the Bible is supposed to be bad news. God as described in the Old Testament is a pretty horrific being to imagine having omnipotence over everything on Earth and beyond. He's jealous and proud of it. He floods the world. His chosen patriarchs Abraham and Moses repeatedly have to talk him down from destroying the people he chose to be his special blessed ones. He intentionally hardens humans' hearts against him, so that it will give him an excuse to show off his superpowers by slaughtering innocent children. Do people WANT to be at the absolute mercy of THAT?

If you read my bookposts, you know that this year I'm including the whole Bible, and the more I read, the more it sickens me. If that God existed, my own ethics would require me to fight him with everything I had, and I kinda figure I'd get whupped beyond anything I could fathom.

So, yes. No *benevolent, nurturing* higher power to protect and comfort me? That's sad. No grumpy old white guy who smites everyone with lightning bolts when he scowls, and who brings about the horrors of Revelation? Very good news.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Modern Christians usually invoke a variety of apologetics - the Old Testament isn't meant to be taken literally (except for the parts that are), Jesus rebooted everything with the New Testament, or various case-by-case rationalizations for why God didn't really harden Pharoah's heart, the Midianites totally deserved it, etc.