| The Aardvark Christmas Lecture......Atheism and the Meaning of Life | for everyone |
Having returned from a sojourn to the Langedoc-Rousillon region of southern France which I described previously as my annual 'pilgrimage' I will try to elucidate what I actually meant by that.
I go away every year in early December partly because it is cheap to visit locations in the northern hemisphere 'off season' when there are far fewer fellow visitors around; and partly by some miracle for which I have no explanation, it also coincides with my birthday, which I have always taken as an auspicious portent of future promise and now a great comfort in my old age.
My reasons for going on these 'pilgrimages' is to recharge my psychological batteries and accommodate the ever present urge to discover new sources of cheap booze.
On the latter front this trip was an abject failure, France is not a cheap place... especially now that Sterling is so weak vis-a-vis the Euro.
This happenstance necessitated me fleeing to Spain at one point where the 'good life' is still relatively un-costly, but there were other reasons for that too, which I won't go into just now.
One defining factor of the 'pilgrimages' is that they are hardly ever to the same place, this years destination was inspired by a longstanding interest in the Cathars the heretical gnostic cult that was expunged by the inquisition initiated by Pope Eugene III in 1147.
So this is an account of some thoughts I had in Pays Cathare where by execution and massacre the Cathars were annihilated by the Catholic Church.. and so their breed of gnostic dissent was brutally stamped out in a frenzy of medieval totalitarianism.
This had me thinking about the role of religions in genocide more widely and the threat of fundamentlisms of one kind or another to people of goodwill.
Although they held what to me seem some rather odd notions, I think the Cathars certainly qualify as people of goodwill and what happened to them was truly appalling.
This post is however not about Cathars or catharism, anyone interested in this fascinating heresy can follow the links on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism.
What I want to raise here is something rather different.
It is the absence of religious belief I am interested in here, that is atheism as an ethical and moral counterbalance to religious belief and how it represents the arguments of 'naturalism' with other 'supernatural' world views, or faith postions.
My thesis is that atheism is a more coherent basis for morality than religion, because it demands personal responsibility in the face of finitude, rather than eternal salvation as the reward for goodness in this life. The implication being that any morality predicated upon personal (and eternal )advantage is not particularly moral at all, not in any meaningful sense of the term.
It is I think possible to be an atheistic fundamentalist too and therefore I would preface these thoughts with a disclaimer.
Atheism is not or should not be a dogmatism, but neither is it agnosticism, it is quite clear in rejecting the notion of God, but at the same time admits of the possibility that it could be wrong?
For many years now I have held the belief that if we are wrong about the existence of God we run the risk of being wrong on just about everything.
However, being right about this obviously does not imply the inverse, i.e. that we are right about everything, just that the argument is stronger because it's first principles are sound.
Whilst there is only space here to address Christianity, I believe the same principles apply to all religions equally and therefore atheism rejects not only the Abrahamic religions, but all supernatural belief systems everywhere and throughout all human history.
Having said that, as I indicate above... there is no certainty in my view that some new discovery will not render atheism fallacious and illusory, but even then I would argue that a betting man would still back atheism as the safest option even when confronted by God. Providing God does indeed have the characteristics of love that we are told is his true nature, the atheist should be safe on judgement day. He or she might say to God "you chose to give me the gift of reflective self consciousness and the power to make choices, so I chose not to believe in you."
We might also ask why an all powerful, all knowing and all loving God would be so insecure as to care whether we as individuals believe in him or not.
Essentially we have a dispute here between naturalism and supernaturalism which has often been characterised as a conflict between 'science' and 'faith'.
I think this is a false dichotomy however, science is only one particular form of rationalism that grew out of the 18th century Enlightenment and has it's own elements of 'faith' otherwise known as paradigms.
Even if physics has been extraordinarily successful at describing our universe, in ways that allow practical applications of it's supposed 'laws' to be ubiquitous across our modern world.... if not necessarily universally applicable across the entire universe/multiverse(?).
What we are talking about here is the nature of evidence and proofs for the existence of God, the stuff of theology and the driving force behind the search for the meaning of life.
The first stumbling block in the atheist search for meaning is I think nihilism... or the notion that life has no valid meaning at all.
This is in my view a misreading of atheism and ultimately I think an intellectual dead end.
As Sartre makes clear, meaning in life is determined by the choices we make, there is no need of (and indeed no place for) God in this understanding of how meaning is created in the process of living our lives.
Existentialism as portrayed by Sartre is therefore a form of naturalism where our existence precedes our essence and not the other way around
We cannot escape the dilemmas of choice according to Sartre and therefore the evaluation of evidence is fundamental to human consciousness.
We weigh up the pros and cons of this action vis-a- vis other actions and make decisions in every waking moment, we cannot avoid it.
This is a basic equality in human life (and indeed the lives of other animals) which fundamentally disconfirms all professed elitism and the recognition of that fact is in reality a political act.
Elitism implies predestined privilege which the existential humanists would reject as absurd.
Atheism is also another way of describing humanism and is in turn a branch of rationalism and naturalism.
It is a world view built upon ideas that have existed at least since the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers of the 5th century BC.
They were the proto-scientists summed up in Wikipedia thus:-
The
Pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological
explanations for the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more
rational explanations.
Many of them asked:
- From where does everything come?
- From what is everything created?
- How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature?
- How might we describe nature mathematically?
Herein lies the roots of modern atheism (and science) and the search for evidence for our theories of the meaning of life.
I have previously touched upon this awakening of rationality in my blog on Democritus (Multiply 9 November 2008).
Atheism in it's many forms and versions is based upon the principle that there is no prime mover, no God and no ultimate designer of the universe.
It has been confronted by Christian theologists and philosophers in various ways across the ages. There are essentially three arguments for the existence of God.
There is for example the cosmological argument which now essentially asserts that the Big Bang which is said to have created the universe was the design of God.
He created it as act of divine will.
Those sorts of First Cause arguments date back to both Plato and Aristotle and later in Christian theology they are particularly associated with Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE).
Again according to Wikipedia
The cosmological argument could be stated as follows:
- Every finite and contingent being has a cause.
- Nothing finite and contingent can cause itself.
- A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
- Therefore, a First Cause (or something that is not an effect) must exist.
The atheist would want to say I think that the finite conception of the universe is only an assumption and there is no compelling evidence that proves it to be true.
However even if it is true this does not justify belief in a First Cause, because what can be said to have caused that?
The cosmological argument is trapped in a process of infinite regression by it's own logic, if God caused the Big Bang, what or who caused God? In other words the cosmological argument cannot account for God without positing a cause that is greater than God.
A second argument for the existence of God is the Teleological argument. Based on the Greek word telos which means 'end' or 'purpose' and as our old friend Wikipedia expresses it:-
Although there are variations, the basic argument can be stated as follows:
- X is too complex, orderly, adaptive, apparently purposeful, or beautiful to have occurred randomly or accidentally.
- Therefore, X must have been created by a sentient, intelligent, wise, or purposeful being.
- God is a sentient, intelligent, wise, or purposeful being.
- Therefore, God exists.
The teleological argument likens God to a watchmaker, but as the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume has argued, we only can compare God to a watchmaker because we know what watches are for, we don't know this about the universe and therefore the argument in his view fails.
George H. Smith in his book Atheism: The Case Against God, points out what he considers to be a fatal flaw in the argument from design
Consider the idea that nature itself is the product of design. How could this be demonstrated? Nature, as we have seen, provides the basis of comparison by which we distinguish between designed objects and natural objects. We are able to infer the presence of design only to the extent that the characteristics of an object differ from natural characteristics. Therefore, to claim that nature as a whole was designed is to destroy the basis by which we differentiate between artifacts and natural objects. Evidences of design are those characteristics not found in nature, so it is impossible to produce evidence of design within the context of nature itself. Only if we first step beyond nature, and establish the existence of a supernatural designer, can we conclude that nature is the result of conscious planning. (p. 268). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._SmithThe obvious anthropomorphism of the teleological argument is another factor in it's apparent weakness, suggesting God is like some paternalistic craftsman and I would argue that actually leaves only the third explanation for the existence of God the so-called 'ontological argument' to be considered.
The ontological argument is associated with Saint Anselm (1033-1109) and later with Rene Descartes (1569-1650) whose 'I think therefore I am' maxim is an expression of this ontological view of the world.
Going back to St Anselm, Wikipedia summarises his arguments in this way:-
- God is, by definition, a being greater than anything that can be imagined and is the cause of all things, but is not bound causally by anything (otherwise God would be ontologically dependent on something else which would in turn undermine "its" greatness).
- Existence both in reality and in imagination is greater than existence solely in ones imagination.
- Therefore, God must exist in reality: if God did not, God would not be a being greater than anything which can be imagined.
All it says it that if God does exist, he must exist because he cannot be conceived of if he didn't.
The ontological argument received much criticism and was rejected by Thomas Aquinas and therefore by some Catholic theologians.
It has also received its share of criticism from non-Christians: atheist English philosopher Bertand Russell noted of the argument that "it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than to find out precisely where the fallacy lies." From a philosophical point of view this is a devastating critique of the ontological argument.
Or as Australian philosopher Douglas Gaskin (1911–1994) has criticised the ontological argument in the sense that;-
- If we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing.
- Therefore, God does not exist.
If there were a God and all religions are expressions of his nature why is there so much disagreement between them about what constitutes evidence for his existence?
On the other hand if only one religious view is the correct one, how would we know which one it is?
To briefly return to the Cathars who were brutally exterminated by other Christians, if they were closer to the truth of God... does it mean that this truth was also annihilated by Catholicism, but if the Catholics were correct what happened to the mercy of the all forgiving father?
This really is the crux of atheism and it's dispute with theism.
The problem of evil means that either God is uncaring and therefore not merciful, or unknowing and therefore not omniscient.
Failing either of those possibilities by stating that God has no power to prevent these massacres and pogroms means therefore he is not omnipotent, all of these propositions raises valid doubts about the existence of God in my view.
But as I indicated above I may be wrong and am open to being convinced of the error of my ways with any proofs that seem to hold water and that is this year's Christmas message of the Church of Aaran Aardvark.... Namely that it is highly improbable that God exists and that there is no evidence to support the proposition that there is in fact a God in heaven nor anywhere else.
Hence all religions are human constructs with no independent existence in nature, save in the imaginations of men. For the athiest the responsiblity of intelligence implies a morality for which no excuses or apologetics exist, a stunningly beautiful aloneness that ends in death, although in terms of physics and cosmology death it seems is actually impossible. But that is another blog I think.
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