Although I had vowed to give the subject a much needed rest, I feel compelled to show due respect to those who objected to my post claiming that atheists are exhibiting vincible ignorance in failing to acknowledge the existence of God.
The most common complaint registered by my critics was that I failed to make an argument for my position. What they mean, I suspect, is that I failed to make a universally accessible argument—one that is based on premises that both theists and atheists could accept. Had my intention been to persuade atheists then such criticism would be justified. My argument, however, was a theological argument made for a specific audience: my fellow Christians. This should have been clear from my opening assertion:
I wish Christians would recognize just the opposite: We have to abandon the politically correct notion that atheism is intellectually respectable.
Even this is too broad, though, since my intended audience is limited to those Christians who believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. In other words, to those who agree with the claim made by St. Paul that “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”
I knew that there would be some Christians who do not view the Bible as authoritative—I was just surprised by the ones who took this position. For example, my friend Rod Dreher says, “it seems to me that Carter goes too far here.” Similarly, my former First Things colleague Michael Liccione claims:
What Hart recognizes, and Carter does not, is that atheism is sometimes motivated by moral passion. That passion can be immature and anthropomorphic, but by no means is it always base. And even when it is base, it often arises from unreflective outrage about real wrongs people do in the name of God. We cannot simply assume that atheism is motivated by a desire to escape divine judgment or indulge in base sexual passions. Paul may well have been right about many pagans of his time, but I don’t think we need or should read him as condemning all atheism as a moral failing.
Liccione’s first claim is clearly misplaced since I said in my original post, “Even as a fervent believer I can acknowledge that skepticism and atheism can be inspired by the reasons Hart lists. But I fail to understand how that makes them noble, precious, or necessary traditions.” It is not that I do not recognize that atheists may be “motivated by moral passion” but rather that I find that excuse unpersuasive and Biblically unsound. Having noble motives for a position does not make it inherently respectable, much less justified.
I am also completely unpersuaded by the claim that Paul wasn’t really talking about atheists of our day. Liccione seems to veer dangerously close to the claim—most often made by Christians who want to defend homosexuality—that Paul is making a culturally relative claim rather than a universal acknowledgment of reality. For obvious reasons, this interpretation has not gained much traction throughout Christian history. If Paul’s statements in Romans are not applicable to the New Atheists, then they will be justified in standing before God and claiming, along with Bertrand Russell, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.”
Another of my Christians critics is Bill Vallicella, one of my favorite philosophers, who makes an even bolder claim:
Paul appears to be doing [in Romans 1] what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing: you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are ‘homophobic’ or ‘Islamophobic’ or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc.
Joe Carter does the same thing.
I’ll admit that I expected better of Bill than to accuse the Apostle Paul, the greatest theologian in history, of being an “ideologue” who resorts to mere “ad hominem attacks and psychologizing.” Because orthodox Christians generally don’t make such a claim, I won’t spend much energy explaining why I—and most every other Christian in history—disagree. Suffice to say, I side with the guy who had a warrant from God to speak on His behalf. Paul has the authority to make the claim because he is speaking for the one who put the psyche in psychologizing.
As I will be the first to admit, my brief post was an argument from authority: Paul, speaking on behalf of God, claims that failing to recognize that which is readily accessible by general revelation (i.e., the existence, eternal power, and divine nature of the Creator) are guilty of vincible ignorance.
If you believe that Paul is an authoritative source, then you should find this argument persuasive. If you believe Paul is not an authoritative source, then you have no reason to accept this argument—and no reason to accept orthodox Christian theology.
So my atheist critics and I agree that they have no reason to be persuaded by my conclusion. Still, I’m rather disappointed that their attempts to prove me wrong are based on such weak claims. For instance, Razib Khan, whose writings I enjoy even when I disagree, gets off to a shaky start in his rebuttal:
Let me do a substitution on the part I have emphasized: While there have always been people who deny the existence of Allah, it has not been a prominent view among intellectuals, much less a serious alternative to Muslim theism. [emphasis in original]
I suspect this is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum, though I fail to see what is so absurd about the claim. If a Muslim had written a post directed to his fellow Muslims claiming that atheism is not prominent in the intellectual history of a culture whose dominant influence has been Islam, then I would be hard-pressed to find such a claim objectionable. Muslims and I will disagree about the substance of special revelation, but I think they would agree with me—and St. Paul—that atheists have no warrant for their rejection of God.
Khan’s second point is a bit more defensible:
For much of the history of the West there were strong social sanctions against public expressions of atheism. And quite often the sanctions were not simply matters of ostracism, they were of capital consequence.
As an intransigent defender of individual religious liberty, I am certainly sympathetic to this claim. But I’m not sure it helps his case. Atheism and Christian theism were on equal footing during the era of the Roman Empire (early Christians were even charged with atheism). How then did Christianity become so dominant that it became the intellectual foundation of an entire civilization while atheism remained a minority belief?
Atheists can probably create an extensive lists of rationalizations for this historical fact—some of which may even be persuasive. But they will have a harder time explaining why, if atheism is such an intellectually respectable position, that it failed to gain much of a foothold in the West. Perhaps they can claim that Christians—having a belief in an afterlife—had reason to die for their view of truth while atheists—having everything to lose—chose to hide their beliefs rather than defend them with their lives. This is plausible, though certainly not flattering to claim that atheism would have been more intellectually dominant if more atheists had had the courage to die for what they believed.
Still, as Khan notes, the martyrdom of atheists ended in the West around 1700. Why did atheism not gain more traction after the rise of religious liberty? Why was it dismissed as unserious even during the Enlightenment? And why, after 310 years, is the best that it can add to our intellectual heritage the rantings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris?
Finally, Khan points out that in “India and China many intellectuals have long been skeptical of theism.” True enough. However, as an unrepentant believer in the exceptionalism of Western Civilization I have to say, “So what?” I’ve always contended that atheists are on firmer ground if they embrace the mysticism of the East rather than pretending that the culture goods of the West that are rooted in theism (i.e., science, religious liberty, universal human rights) are compatible with atheism.
Which brings me back to my original point: While Christians should show respect and tolerance for atheists, the concept of atheism is not something that we should—much less are required—to treat as a serious alternative to theism.
On an individual level we should still engage in apologetics that clear away the underbrush of rationalizations that prevent atheists from recognizing that which, as St. Paul said, they cannot not know. But we should not be cowed into accepting the legitimacy of atheism as an intellectual project when it has never done anything to warrant such status. Atheism should be treated like other philosophical beliefs that are untenable and absurd.
Consider, for example, how we treat the strong form of idealism—the idea that the material world is an illusion and that the ultimate nature of reality is the mind or ideas. You’ll be hard pressed to find many Christian who think idealism is a concept that we have to consider as intellectually respectable, much less on par with theism. The reason is that if we recognize that anyone who starts with idealism cannot formulate an internally coherent worldview. It’s easy to claim, for instance, that the bus speeding toward you is a mere illusion; it’s much harder to deal with the real world implications of being run over by such an “illusion.”
Atheism is similarly impotent to create a worldview that meets the minimum standards that are required in order to be deserving of our respect. This is a fact that, until recently, was almost universally acknowledged, not only by Christian thinkers but also by those who disagreed with us (e.g., Enlightenment intellectuals). And it is not like the situaion has changed. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an atheist who can explain the implications of their worldview in way that is internally consistent and coherent. Many cannot even understand that difference between the statements “I, an atheist, believe X” and “X is belief that is compatible and consistent with my belief in atheism.” Indeed, I’ve never even seen one make a legitimate attempt to do so in a systematic manner, much less with the rigor and depth that matches Christian theology. Atheists are like vandals who know how to tear down a cathedral but cannot build one themselves—at least not without borrowing from the intellectual heritage of theism.
So I am firmly convinced by reason and legitimate authority that my claim about atheism being vincibly ignorant is true. Nevertheless, I am open to reconsidering that position based on stronger evidence to the contrary.
Since my argument is addressed to Christians, perhaps one of my fellow Christians will take up the cause and explain both why (a) St. Paul is in error and (b) why atheism is as intellectually respectable as Christian theism.
May 20th, 2010 | 9:44 am
[...] Also: Vincible Ignorance Revisited Comments [...]
May 20th, 2010 | 10:49 am
It’s at least refreshing that you admit much of your original set of posts was based on a (fallacious) appeal to authority. As I pointed out earlier, Judaism is every bit as much a part of Western Civilization as Christianity yet religious Jews by definition reject Jesus’ claim to be the son of God. All this goes to show the appeal to authority is indeed fallacious as many people who you would probably consider intellectually respectable deny the authority of some of the very passages you quoted above.
The problem with your post was the use of the term “intellectually respectable.” Intellectually respectable does, in fact, imply that atheists are making an error that is recognized as such by a broad community of intellectuals or scholars. What you mean to say is that you and many of your fellow Christians personally disagree with atheists’ claims about the world. So why not just write it that way instead of using the Dawkins-esque rhetoric you did use?
As to the question of why Christianity overtook atheism in Europe, one obvious candidate is that Christianity (like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and many other major religions) creates a sense of community among its followers. Atheism simply does not have the same way of drawing people together. You will note that none of this has to do with whether atheism is correct or not: only that it does not serve the need that many people have for social cohesion in their lives.
That said, the decline of religious belief in Europe seems to coincide with greater prosperity and higher levels of education. Moreover, as someone who seems to subscribe to the “God of gaps”, you might note that there were many more gaps in understanding and knowledge in antiquity than in the modern world. Mysterious subjects like earthquakes, the origin of species and various diseases were explained by supernatural religious explanations because no better explanation was then available. The onset of scientific progress and the search for scientific explanations of the world seems to correlate with religious belief gradually declining.
May 20th, 2010 | 11:27 am
Mark It’s at least refreshing that you admit much of your original set of posts was based on a (fallacious) appeal to authority.
You appear not to understand when an appeal to authority is fallacious. As I’ve said, my post is directed to those for whom the authority in question (St. Paul/the Bible) should be considered authoritative. To those who do not recognize those authorities the argument has no force and is not intended to persuade them.
As I pointed out earlier, Judaism is every bit as much a part of Western Civilization as Christianity yet religious Jews by definition reject Jesus’ claim to be the son of God.
True enough. But the Psalmist makes a similar claim to Paul so religious Jews have as much reason to reject atheism that I do.
All this goes to show the appeal to authority is indeed fallacious as many people who you would probably consider intellectually respectable deny the authority of some of the very passages you quoted above.
Did you even read my post?
The problem with your post was the use of the term “intellectually respectable.” Intellectually respectable does, in fact, imply that atheists are making an error that is recognized as such by a broad community of intellectuals or scholars.
Yes, and history supports that claim. Just because we’ve lowered the intellectual standards to the point where “anything goes” does not mean that atheism is now intellectually respectable. Such respectability has to be earned, and atheism has not laid such a foundation of respect.
What you mean to say is that you and many of your fellow Christians personally disagree with atheists’ claims about the world. So why not just write it that way instead of using the Dawkins-esque rhetoric you did use?
No, what I mean is that atheism is incompatible with reality. Although some people might find that offensive, it is an idea with a long and distinguished intellectual history.
As I’ve said, I’m open to people providing an argument for why atheism should be considered intellectually respectable. I’m eager to see some attempt such an effort.
You will note that none of this has to do with whether atheism is correct or not: only that it does not serve the need that many people have for social cohesion in their lives.
Duly noted.
That said, the decline of religious belief in Europe seems to coincide with greater prosperity and higher levels of education.
Let’s not confuse “higher levels of education” with either advanced technological sophistication or increases in college graduation rates. While there may be more people in Europe now with a university diploma they certainly aren’t as educated—in the classical sense of the term—as their ancestors. (Nor, should I point out, are Americans.)
Moreover, as someone who seems to subscribe to the “God of gaps”, you might note that there were many more gaps in understanding and knowledge in antiquity than in the modern world.
Actually, I don’t subscribe to the “God of the gaps” concept. (http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/01/07/does-god-live-in-the-gaps/).
But your second point is quite erroneous. Every significant scientific discovery exposes new areas of our lack of understanding and knowledge about the natural world. That is, as they say, a feature and not a bug. Science is a process of continual exploration, not a quest to achieve some end of all natural knowledge.
Mysterious subjects like earthquakes, the origin of species and various diseases were explained by supernatural religious explanations because no better explanation was then available.
Really, when was this? That hasn’t been true since the birth of my religion, circa 3 B.C.
The onset of scientific progress and the search for scientific explanations of the world seems to correlate with religious belief gradually declining.
You really should read up on the history of science. Scientific progress, as Rodney Stark pointed out the other day in his interview, came about because of presuppositions that are rooted in Christianity. It is clear that no other worldview—especially atheism—was able to lay the foundation for the process of scientific discovery. The fact that so many people today seem to think that science and atheism are compatible on a fundamental level shows that we are more ignorant about this point than any age since the Enlightenment.
May 20th, 2010 | 11:28 am
joe,
first, thanks for responding.
second, i’m on a shaky internet connection an airport, so the brevity of the response.
the muslim reference was analogy. my point is that religious liberty which obtains in the lands of the west does not obtain in most muslim lands, so the paucity of atheists in muslim lands is partially a function of economists might term an institutional framework. what is operative in muslim lands was operative in the west for a long time.
second, 1700 is the outer bound. the british isles was relatively forward in its espousal (or at least its de facto enforcement of) religious liberty. obviously the same is not true of the rest of europe, which lagged. and even in england there were strong non-capital sanctions which curtailed religious liberty (see the gordon riots of the late 18th century). down into the 19th century prominent british whig families such as that of charles darwin’s switched from dissenting affiliation to anglicanism because only with religious orthodoxy could they gain purchase among the elites. and i’m sure you’re aware that religious orthodoxy requirements excluded many dissenters, believers or not, from institutions of higher learning.
in other words, the “natural experiment” is much newer than you’re suggesting here.
as for why christianity succeeded, and atheism didn’t, in the roman empire. i don’t think that atheism and christianity are equivalent. christianity, like hinduism, confucianism, buddhism, islam, etc., encapsulate a whole civilization. atheism is simply a negation of theism. it is a much narrower intellectual argument, while the religious presuppositions of a civilization are more complex and beyond the ken of this discussion. i assume that any sufficiently advanced pre-modern civilization was always going to be religiously grounded for a host of reasons. i also believe that humans are naturally wired in their psychology to accept supernatural claims. i admit that for most people atheism is profoundly unnatural and unintuitive. this is a descriptive matter for me, as i find supernaturalism hard to comprehend as plausible in any way, and always have. but i acknowledge as a factual matter that in the domain of intuition i’m in a very small minority.
a final point:
And why, after 310 years, is the best that it can add to our intellectual heritage the rantings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris?
as i imply above, atheism and christianity aren’t really rivals, because atheism is a narrow and spare assertion about the nature of the universe. christianity is a system of thought and civilization which is much more complex. but even in that case, dawkins, hitchens and harris are not the preeminent defenders of the atheist position in terms of rigor, they’re just the most populist.
in any case, there’s a lot in joe’s post to disagree with, but i’ll have to leave the discussion now to catch a flight. but i want to highlight one point:
I’ve always contended that atheists are on firmer ground if they embrace the mysticism of the East rather than pretending that the culture goods of the West that are rooted in theism (i.e., science, religious liberty, universal human rights) are compatible with atheism.
eastern civilizations have traditionally had much more religious liberty than the west. in fact, liberty of personal religious belief has been pretty normal for most of human history. the emphases on particular orthodoxies, and state imposition of those orthodoxies, is a fixation prominent among followers of the abrahamic religious, and especially christianity (judaism and islam are famously more orthopraxic). so it seems rather strange to claim religious liberty as an innovation of the west and christian civilization.
May 20th, 2010 | 3:48 pm
I was most insulted by your assertion that the existence of a Christian God is so obviously true that atheists who fail to accept it are willfully ignoring the truth.
The Christian concept of God has been around for 2,000 years, spreading out to Europe and after a few hundred years. It came to the Americas with the European settlers, but has still made relatively little headway in Asia.
In short, the vast majority of humans who have ever lived have not shared your beliefs. Most people were pagans, or Hindus, or Buddhists. There are thousands of gods and deities that have come and gone throughout time.
The fact that you think yours is not only true, but so obviously true as to make disbelief immoral, is a sad commentary on your narrow understanding of the world.
I can picture you in Athens two-thousand years ago. “Any person who denies the existence of Zeus is vincibly ignorant.”
May 20th, 2010 | 4:57 pm
Chris,
The assertion being made apparently that the authority of St. Paul on all matters theological is indisputable. Any one who disputes this is ignorant, but, fortunately, not invincibly so.
And St. Paul said that any idiot knows perfectly well that the existence of creation itself is sufficient to prove beyond all doubt that the only way to avoid the eternal torment you deserve by virtue of having committed the sin of being born is to accept that all the Gods you have been told about don’t exist accept for one, and that he had a son who he arranged to have sacrificed to some other demigod who went bad.
Personally, the more closely I look at “creation,” the less interested I am in meeting it’s creator.
May 20th, 2010 | 5:47 pm
@Snippet
Paul said that all that can be known of God, his divinity and infinite power, can be seen from the things he has made. Paul does not say that any other attributes of God can be discerned in the same way. They can be known only by revelation.
The authority of Paul in those letters included in the scripture is indeed indisputable, because he spoke with the authority of God.
May 20th, 2010 | 6:51 pm
Oliver,
Quit being credulous. There have been thousands of people throughout history who have laid claim to revelation. That’s the one truth we know… That some people are predisposed to thinking they’ve had some form of revelation from god.
There is just one problem and that’s the problem of miracles. David Hume left open the possibility for miracles to occur and be reported; however, he offers various arguments against this ever having happened in history:
* People often lie, and they have good reasons to lie about miracles occurring either because they believe they are doing so for the benefit of their religion or because of the fame that results.
* People by nature enjoy relating miracles they have heard without caring for their veracity and thus miracles are easily transmitted even where false.
* Hume notes that miracles seem to occur mostly in “ignorant” and “barbarous” nations and times, and the reason they don’t occur in the “civilized” societies is such societies aren’t awed by what they know to be natural events.
* The miracles of each religion argue against all other religions and their miracles, and so even if a proportion of all reported miracles across the world fit Hume’s requirement for belief, the miracles of each religion make the other less likely.
Despite all this Hume observes that belief in miracles is popular, and that “The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder”.
The facts are this Oliver. The people who laid claim to these truths of Christianity? They lived thousands of years ago in a time, as Hume puts it so eloquently, when society was more often than not ignorant of the real causes of sickness, earthquakes, bad weather… When society was “ignorant” and “barbarous”.
That’s why you don’t hear of miracles happening any more… Besides, why does god create these laws of the universe and nature, and then suspend them when he wants to do another miracle? Seems more likely to me that when a “miracle” occurs, it’s not really a suspension of the natural laws of nature but a misreading of the event by the by stander who was witness to the “miracle”.
May 20th, 2010 | 9:18 pm
“Mysterious subjects like earthquakes, the origin of species and various diseases were explained by supernatural religious explanations because no better explanation was then available.
Really, when was this? That hasn’t been true since the birth of my religion, circa 3 B.C.”
Well speak for your religion if you want, but Christians have certainlky not hesitated to blame supernatural forces for natuary disasters inthe past 2000 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake
“Did God have anything to do with Katrina?,” people ask. My answer is, he allowed it and perhaps he allowed it to get our attention so that we don’t delude ourselves into thinking that all we have to do is put things back the way they were and life will be normal again.”
–Charles Colson
May 20th, 2010 | 10:09 pm
As I’ve said, my post is directed to those for whom the authority in question (St. Paul/the Bible) should be considered authoritative.
Indeed, so therefore your appeal to the Bible (and the first half of your current blog post) does not count as an argument in favor of the proposition that atheism is not intellectually respectable.
While there may be more people in Europe now with a university diploma they certainly aren’t as educated—in the classical sense of the term—as their ancestors. (Nor, should I point out, are Americans.)
This was in response to my noting a correlation between higher levels of education and higher rates of atheism. This correlation may well have been at work even in the golden times you cite, though. Thomas Hobbes was concerned enough about accusations that he was an atheist to burn some of his personal papers: Hobbes also created the first English translation of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War and had a first-rate classical education. So did David Hume and John Stuart Mill (Mill had read much of the classics in original Greek and Latin by age 11) who were both probably agnostics at the least.
As to the claims about science, the God of gaps and the Enlightenment, I pretty much disagree with everything you wrote above. The Bible is full of claims of miracles, resurrections, the virgin birth and other supernatural occurrences (and the modern Catholic Church continues to subscribe to modern miracle claims and the usefulness of exorcism, although with admirable restraint): much of the Enlightenment started with a deep suspicion of these sorts of claims. David Hume (another person who was an agnostic if not an atheist: fear of criminal charges probably caused him to use some restraint in his writings) was particularly unyielding in his criticism of miracle claims. It’s quite a case of shifting goal posts to say that not only does this not contradict Christian theology but is actually the result of Christian theology.
As for your claim about not subscribing to the God of gaps, most of your arguments against atheist materialists seem based on the notion that atheists do not have a convincing explanation for consciousness. That is the typical form of a God of gaps style argument — to point to a limitation of a way of thinking and then to propose that God adequately fills in that gap.
May 20th, 2010 | 10:27 pm
Even 9/11, an event that you would THINK would have a pretty clear logical (that is not to say, “defensible”) cause was attributed by at least one high profile spokesperson for Christianity (Pat Robertson) as being a God-caused event … punishment for our excessive tolerance of homosexuality.
William F. Buckley Jr. himself was open to the possibility that that event may have been evidence that God chose to temporarily “release his protection.”
So, at least a few Christians missed the memo that catastrophes were no longer supposed to be understood as the product of the will of God(s).
May 20th, 2010 | 10:30 pm
LOL, the very same Chuck Colson… Well read below…
Charles “Chuck” Wendell Colson (born October 16, 1931) is a Christian leader, cultural commentator, convicted felon (convicted felon and then reformed Christian I take it, how convenient), and author of at least 20 books, including several that have been recognized with ECPA Christian Book Awards.
As former Special Counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973, he is noted for being the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related charges. He was commonly named as one of the Watergate Seven, but was never charged with, or prosecuted for, any crime related to the Watergate break-in or its cover-up, although he did plead guilty to obstruction of justice in another case. He converted to Christianity in 1973, and the following year served seven months of a one-to-three year sentence in Alabama’s Maxwell Prison
May 20th, 2010 | 10:31 pm
@Oliver
Paul said that all that can be known of God, his divinity and infinite power, can be seen from the things he has made.
He made (as Darwin famously pointed out) a certain type of wasp that deposits eggs in the bodies of paralyzed, but still living, hosts, whose flesh is consumed by the hungry larvae after they are born.
If nature … “creation” … tells us anything about God, it is often not pretty.
May 20th, 2010 | 10:33 pm
An additional point about the spread of Christianity in Europe is that Christianity is a meme that is ready-made to propagate rapidly. Christianity promises an eternal afterlife in bliss if you have genuine faith in the tenets of the religion and also threatens everlasting torture if you reject those tenets. It has the additional feature that the faithful are under some kind of obligation to convert others to the faith. Once you have a critical mass of Christians, it’s not at all surprising that this faith rapidly spreads among people with various pagan or animist beliefs. Christianity is an appealing idea.
By contrast, atheists are not generally out to convert others to their way of thinking. Dawkins has a bit of an evangelical streak about him but that is pretty unusual for most atheists — even Hitchens admits he really is not out to convert anyone. Atheism also doesn’t promise salvation of any kind or threaten anyone who rejects their beliefs.
Add this to the point I made above about how atheists don’t form cohesive communities centered around their beliefs and it’s not at all surprising that Christianity takes off the way it does. Atheism does not inspire people or bring people together any more than the Standard Model in particle physics does — and it’s not meant to.
May 20th, 2010 | 11:26 pm
just a few comments.
1. in reply to mr. chris bell, i’m not sure mr. carter means to argue specifically for the existence of the “christian” god in the above post, his appeals to st. paul and his personal convictions notwithstanding. i suspect he would agree that the first question to ask on this topic is whether or not “God” exists; a secondary question would be whether or not this “God” is revealed through christianity.
he would, of course, agree that the implications of any answer to the first question should be explored as fully as possible. he states as much.
2. as to whether atheism is intellectually respectable, for reasons too numerous to list, i agree with mr. carter: the atheist is like a man sawing off the very branch on which he sits. moreover, the atheist’s creed is certainly not “noble,” as mr. hart claims.
i will leave a defense of theism and a critique of atheism for another time.
3. while atheism as a worldview is not intellectually respectable, atheists may very well be. however, my experience is that atheists don’t ask enough questions, for all their pride in being skeptics.
4. mr. carter states that internal coherence is a valid criterion by which to judge worldviews. i happen to agree with him. yet many people i know don’t seem to care if their beliefs are coherent…. those of us who believe that coherent worldviews are more likely to be true (and that worldviews should be coherent at all) need to defend our position, not simply assume it. of course, it wouldn’t be very hard to do so, assuming our interlocutor is sane and can follow logic.
5. i think a careful reading of mr. carter’s critics (liccione, vallicella, and khan) shows that they presume much.
May 20th, 2010 | 11:50 pm
I had not idea that atheists had a creed. Count me out on that. I had the strangest idea that atheists merely do not believe in any gods. Since most who consider themselves believers don’t believe in most gods, it’s not a huge step to not believing in the last one.
Had my intention been to persuade atheists then such criticism would be justified. My argument, however, was a theological argument made for a specific audience: my fellow Christians.
If you aren’t trying to persuade, you might consider using the word “cheerleading” or “propagandizing”. I think “agitprop” is a fine old term that fits the approach of attacking those you do not agree with while trying to reinvigorate those on your side without much concern about whether the arguments are valid or defensible.
May 21st, 2010 | 12:16 am
What’s left of Joe Carter’s argument seems to be an exercise in question-begging. The argument is that atheism is not intellectually respectable because it has not been considered intellectually respectable in certain times and places Joe Carter chooses to focus on. And Joe focuses on these times and places (Western Europe from perhaps the time of Charlemagne until the French Revolution) because it is in those places and times that Christianity is held in the highest regard.
The modern intellectual world gets little respect from people like Joe precisely because of its secular nature and rejection of the concept of faith or revelation.
Joe asks for an argument as to why “atheism should be considered intellectually respectable.” The burden of proof is surely on him though, and by his own admission, he has not made the argument (aside from preaching to the choir of fellow Christians). The fact that atheism is accepted among great numbers of people at the elite levels in academia does create a presumption in favor of its respectability. It does not prove atheism is right nor does it even prove atheism’s respectability: it merely creates the rebut-table presumption of respectability.
This does not even address Joe’s unproven assertions that atheism is “silly” or “absurd.”
May 21st, 2010 | 3:55 am
Atheism, according to Joe Carter, is not intellectually respectable, has no coherence, indeed, is inconsistent with reality.
And yet, he states that we should show atheists ”respect ” and ”tolerence”. What does this mean? If atheism is so pernicious, wouldn’t the only charitable position be to do the opposite?
Does he mean that we should respect and tolerate atheists, as people, EXCEPT for their atheism, or tolerate and respect them in EVERY aspect of their lives, including when they’re professing their atheism?
Joe Carter, agree or disagree, normally “says it how it is”. This type of talk, of ”tolerance” and ”repect” seems suspiciously like vacuous diplomacy speak.
May 21st, 2010 | 4:33 am
Bret Lythgoe Does he mean that we should respect and tolerate atheists, as people, EXCEPT for their atheism, or tolerate and respect them in EVERY aspect of their lives, including when they’re professing their atheism?
The former. It would be uncharitable to judge people solely on their intellectual failings (I certainly hope people don’t judge me solely on mine). I believe we should recognize that their lack of epistemic virtue in this area does not mean they are completely lacking in tolerable or respectable qualities.
Fortunately, most atheists are better than their beliefs (i.e., they haven’t turned into Nietzschian monsters) and their inability to live by the logic of atheism is evidence that they are not hopeless causes. For this reason, we should cultivate our relationships with them based on the aspects of common grace that we share with them.
This sounds much more condescending than I intend. But it’s 4:30 am right now and I can’t think of a less inflammatory way to “say how it is.” ; )
May 21st, 2010 | 4:54 am
Joe Carter: That does clarify it. Thanks, and get some sleep!
May 21st, 2010 | 5:40 am
As a former Christian, I have some sense of why you need to feel that skeptics are silly, deluded, ignorant, irrational, damnable, and undeserving of respect. I had similar views myself at one point, so I can’t complain too much about being on the receiving end now.
And if calling us names makes you feel better, that’s certainly your prerogative, but when you co-authored a book on persuasive communication in the style of Jesus, I have to wonder if this is really what you had in mind.
In this case, I think your argument will tend to have a dividing effect on your fellow Christians. For some, it will bolster their view that we doubters have nothing of any worth to say, and the result of that will be a retrenchment and withdrawal from engagement with unbelievers. Frankly, I’d have a hard time counting that as a bad outcome.
But more progressive and liberal Christians will probably recoil from the notion that doubt or ignorance is inexcusable and utterly deserving of damnation. Many of them will even feel the urge to make some effort to distance themselves from your position, out of embarrassment to be associated with it. And I could be happy with that result as well.
May 21st, 2010 | 8:37 am
Joe, you’ve had a series of posts that consist of atheism-bashing. Why? You have invented a straw-man morality for us so you can attack us through it and ignore any comments that show that you are mistaken. A Christian might think you were bearing false witness.
May 21st, 2010 | 9:04 am
What you fail to realize Joe is that the morals and ethics derived from Christianity is one set of relativistic beliefs, and the morals and ethics derived from Islam is a whole other set. The ones an atheist might propose is again, another set of relativistic morals and ethics.
ALL of the morals and ethics in play today are relativistic in nature and were thought up by someone at some point in history. What happened though is that certain groups of people, ie Christians, Muslims, etc, simply took the already accepted moralities of the day and said that a god told them that this was the way to live. As time moves on we are challenged with new moralities that come into play as the complexity of civilization increases and that’s how it works…
Your claims that atheists will “spin off into logical oblivion” is the most ridiculous argument, unless I misread you, that there is. Atheists are good people for the most part and they are no different than believers in whatever religion you want to use. Theists are just as able as atheists or deists to do bad things.
What’s interesting is that people use Christianity, Islam, etc as a fall back position when caught red handed all the damn time.
“Forgive him judge, be lenient, he’s a good Christian boy/girl/person” Cherie Blair, Tony Blair’s wife, JUST the other day gave some guy who deserved a harsher sentence a very lenient sentence because he claimed to be a born again Christian… If it had been an atheist I shudder to think what her thinking would have been.
May 21st, 2010 | 10:42 am
Hi Joe,
I’m sympathetic with your viewpoint on atheism. A good recent book that sees atheism in the same light is “The Making of an Atheist” by Jim Spiegel. If you don’t have a copy, let me know and I’ll send you one.
May 21st, 2010 | 1:05 pm
I guess I should go write a book called “The Making of a theist. In it, I could show how the way their made is from inculcating our youth in religious dogma and scaring them into belief like most of us are/were when we were young… “If you don’t get your act together son, God’s not gonna be happy with you and he’ll throw you in a pit of fire for eternity.”
Come on Chris! You can’t seriously think that the basis of atheism is immorality, or a desire to deny god just because the person in question doesn’t like the morality and ethics espoused by a Christian say, or an Islamic believer.
In a world still filled with SOOOOOO much mystery, why do you think it is that humans believe with ABSOLUTE certainty that they have DEFINITIVELY answered the question of the ORIGIN of ALL things? Does it NOT strain credibility to actually believe that though we don’t possess a complete understanding of our own brain function, let alone millions of other things, that we have somehow MASTERED the maintenance of our immortal souls (which are as of yet still unprovable)? Does that even SEEM logical?
Yet here we are, with a majority of the world’s population believing in one doctrine of faith or another, because they think that they are SO complex that there just HAS to be something more. Because there is SO much in the world, AND in the universe that has yet to EVEN be discovered, let alone UNDERSTOOD… Religious folk would rather have these mysteries remain, because it’s much easier to observe a tree than it is to discover photosynthesis, chlorophyll and the life cycle of individual types of trees. Throughout history, EVERY mystery that has EVER been solved has turned out to be… NOT magic (which is the default claim of all miracle witnessing proponents)… Science has PULLED back the curtains on the Wizard of Oz COUNTLESS times, and MUCH that the world claimed used to belong to the supernatural, and by extension god, has been shown to have more natural explanations… Yet faith is still a virtue, except when it’s faith associated with people like the Muslims who flew the planes into the buildings in NYC and Washington…
Faith is the denial of observation, so that BELIEF can be preserved.
May 21st, 2010 | 1:25 pm
I’ll second SauerKraut in all he says. My favorite definition of faith is “the will to believe, DESPITE the evidence”. If you need to have faith in proposition X in order to maintain it, then we can reasonably infer there exists strong evidence against X, and weak or no evidence for X.
Also, “organized religion = structured superstition”.
May 21st, 2010 | 1:30 pm
Chris, thanks for the reference to “The Making of an Atheist.”
I can’t say I find the idea of the book all that interesting, though. It seems to be an exercise in armchair psychology — an ad hominem exercise of trying to determine why atheists think as they do rather than assess the validity of their arguments.
It is interesting to note that in the “Customers who bought this item also bought” part of the amazon.com page, there are two books by William Lane Craig and one by Christopher Hitchens’ brother responding to atheist arguments. For a position that is apparently not “intellectually respectable,” a lot of believers feel the need to explicitly address and counter the arguments put forth by people like Hitchens (e.g. one of Craig’s books is called “God is Great”).
May 21st, 2010 | 1:40 pm
atheists — along with every one else — have a creed because nonbelief in god has logical implications, whether acknowledged or not.
more simply, every person has a worldview — a set of consciously- or unconsciously-held answers to questions such as death, time, justice, virtue, reason, freedom, beauty, and truth, inter alia. any one person’s system of answers may or may not be internally coherent, to different degrees.
to illustrate, let’s put aside the question of god’s existence for a moment. why do we believe what we believe about death? justice? reason? minds? matter? scientific laws? moral laws? that anything can be known at all? free will? an experience of the sublime? love? forgiveness? social justice? rape? abortion? self-sacrifice? just war? greed? concupiscence? evil? epistemology? mathematics? logic? ugliness? architecture? wisdom?
spend enough time honestly asking these sorts of questions and you’ll likely begin to think — and live — like socrates. which is not a very bad place to start.
May 22nd, 2010 | 12:01 pm
[JC] “Atheism is … impotent to create a worldview…”
Atheism exists as a concept only because of the existence of theism. We would have no corresponding notion otherwise. So while it is true that a lack of belief in deity per se may have no intrinsic power to create, I would have thought that particular truth was both obvious and trivial.
“You’ll be hard-pressed to find an atheist who can explain the implications of their worldview in way that is internally consistent and coherent.”
I assume the implication of the lack of a particular belief X would be that you are not bound to the necessary implications of belief X.
But perhaps you had another sort of atheist in mind. If you were specifically referring to affirmational atheists (sometimes called “explicit” atheists) I’m probably about as solidly in that camp as you’ll find. My view is that all the gods humans have worshipped have been the product of human imagination, and all have equal status as fable and myth.
I’m not aware of anything inconsistent or incoherent in that, but I would certainly be willing to consider arguments to that effect.
May 23rd, 2010 | 2:36 am
Bravo Nick! Not just well said… but well said!
That’s the phraseology I’ve been looking for for a long time! Lays it all out as plain as day… Not that many theists would see the clarity, but there it is as plain as day.
I’m in your camp I think (with a bit of assuming on my part). Can see a god as a possibility but that’s as far as I can go anymore. I’m just good for goodness sake and because it makes me feel good to be that way.
No need for me to be good just because a god may be standing over my shoulder, with me living in fear of him while at the same time praising him. It is as Hitchens eloquently put it… “The essence of sadomasochism”
Keep spreading the good word, and that good word being logical and reasoned argument.
Atheism leaves me and a lot of other people with less, key word less, cognitive dissonance in our lives.
Wake up theists! You don’t need the bulls…! You’re giving your hard earned dollars to a tax free institution that is fleecing its flock weekly of money that could do you a lot more good than the church staff that lives off your goodwill.
May 24th, 2010 | 11:46 pm
Why was commenting closed on the original “Vincible Ignorance”?
May 25th, 2010 | 12:27 am
Why was commenting closed on the original “Vincible Ignorance”?
Comments automatically turn off after about two weeks to prevent spam. I’ve opened them back up on that post.
May 26th, 2010 | 12:11 am
I appreciate it, but it may have been for naught. Some may have been secretly relieved. D’oh!
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