Back in 2006, at the height of Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion much ado, Terry Eagleton wrote a singeing review of Dawkins’ work in the London Review of Books, the first line of which gives some indication of his general impression of it:
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
Stephen Hawking is no Richard Dawkins, and by that I mainly mean Richard Dawkins is no Stephen Hawking. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Hawking has indeed read the Book of British Birds. But that doesn’t mean Hawking sounds good when we read him on theology. In a decidedly Dawkinsian moment, yesterday’s Guardian published an interview in which Hawking compared heaven to a “fairy story” for “people afraid of the dark.”
You had a health scare and spent time in hospital in 2009. What, if anything, do you fear about death?
I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
It’s the usual critique of religion-as-wish-fulfillment, coupled with Hawking’s philosophical materialism. But, as usual, the usual arguments are well and ready for a response. Those acquainted with Ivan Karamazov will recall his apparent belief that if there is no God, anything is permitted. One can hardly imagine a scheme for wish-fulfillment as comprehensive as that made possible by atheism. And second, if heaven is merely a fairy story peddled to believers to console them from fears and earthly suffering, why, we should ask, does the Christian tradition place so much emphasis on the possibility of hell?
May 16th, 2011 | 4:44 pm
“why, we should ask, does the Christian tradition place so much emphasis on the possibility of hell”
Most Christians place little to no emphasis on hell. If a Christian does happen to be the hellfire and brimstone type, hell only applies to people he doesn’t care about and rarely, if ever, interacts with. You’ll never meet a Christian who thinks his child, mother, or father went to hell.
May 16th, 2011 | 5:10 pm
Jeremy,
It’s hard to know, and hard to know if we can know, whether it’s true that “most Christians place little to no emphasis on hell.” A lot of that emphasis happen as part of one’s inner spiritual life. More to the point, though: Since Hawking is critiquing Christian tradition, it seems fair to come back at him with the teaching of Christian tradition, which has consistently emphasized the possibility of hell since the start of the Church.
May 16th, 2011 | 5:25 pm
Jeremy: “Most Christians place little to no emphasis on hell.”
I take it, Jeremy is not a Christian or he would not speak so sweepingly. Just to take one point, I’m Catholic (rarely fire and brimstone) and I’ve heard many priests tell of the difficulty of ministering to relatives who wanted assurance that their loved ones had a chance, in spite of how they lived their lives. We believe, that except for extraordinary cases whom we label Saints, only God knows. Of course, I have also heard eulogies certain of the eternal status of the deceased, but not from any priest. We do have our dreams but it’s not the dark we are afraid of.
As to Hawking, so much for “knowing the mind of God”. Then again, maybe he was referring to his own mind.
May 16th, 2011 | 5:44 pm
“…if heaven is merely a fairy story peddled to believers to console them from fears and earthly suffering, why, we should ask, does the Christian tradition place so much emphasis on the possibility of hell?”
Funny you should ask – I just wrote about this earlier today:
http://rustbeltphilosophy.blogspot.com/2011/05/word-to-wise-orwellian-is-not.html
The wish-fulfillment thing is pop psychology, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a real psychological bias that lends itself to religious belief and that explains ideas like hell.
May 16th, 2011 | 6:04 pm
“Those acquainted with Ivan Karamazov will recall his apparent belief that if there is no God, anything is permitted. One can hardly imagine a scheme for wish-fulfillment as comprehensive as that made possible by atheism.”
Since Dostoyevsky wasn’t an atheist, I’ll dismiss his straw-man version of an atheist as easily as you dismiss Hawking.
May 16th, 2011 | 6:52 pm
One can hardly imagine a scheme for wish-fulfillment as comprehensive as that made possible by atheism.
It seems to me that discovering for a fact that there is no God would get most people nowhere. If it were the case that if God did not exist, you could get anything you wanted, that would be a different story. But the thought of everything being permitted doesn’t give me a thrill and make me say, “Wow, if only!” How much exactly is there that the average person wants that he or she could actually get if everything were permitted? Even if there are no moral consequences to one’s actions, there are still consequences. If I want an expensive new computer system and I try to get it by credit card fraud, I could still get caught and sent to prison. I really don’t imagine that the average theist has a secret desire in his heart for God not to exist so he or she could do all the bad things that are now forbidden? The idea of everything being permitted in a brief lifetime can’t possibly compare to eternity in paradise.
Hell seems to me a no brainer. If one is going to be good all one’s life and obey all the moral rules, what is the incentive if the consequences of doing so are no different from the consequences of acting as if everything were permitted?
I am not sure why it is newsworthy when Hawking makes a remark like this. He is one of the most brilliant physicists who ever lived, but other highly brilliant physicists (Albert Einstein, Steven Weinberg, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Paul Dirac, Francis Crick, Richard Feynman, Peter Higgs, Leonard Susskind) were or are atheists. The same is true of scientists in other fields. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, one of the most intelligent and humane individuals one could hope to encounter, is an atheist.
May 16th, 2011 | 7:08 pm
Let’s set aside atheists who write books, proselytize, and pontificate about atheism as a special case. Why is it that theists who have a “simple faith” in God are considered admirable, but atheists who have a “simple non-faith” are expected to keep quiet about it until they master two-thousand years or so of philosophical arguments on the matter and can debate Terry Eagleton?
May 16th, 2011 | 8:03 pm
It’s my view that, whether Hell exists, or not, we should hope it doesn’t.
And, we don’t need Hell, to persuade people to be good. A properly enlightened view, would entail being good, or moral, for its own sake.
David: one can cite brilliant people, on both the Theist/Atheist divide. (consider Descartes, Aquinas, William lane Craig, Newton, all believers in an afterlife).
May 16th, 2011 | 8:18 pm
The wish-fulfillment charge is correct to the extent that the human desire for God is universal (or very nearly so). Even atheists cannot help desiring God, which is why the humbler among them have always in some sense mourned their lack of consolation. See Thomas Hardy, “The Impercipient,” perhaps the most moving expression of unbelief ever written. It is a shame that so many contemporary atheists, particularly of the blogging variety, never deign to express any solidarity with the God-hungry human race. Without such solidarity, what idistinguishes the atheist from the pharisee in the parable, who rejoices that he is not like other men?
May 16th, 2011 | 8:44 pm
David Nickol wrote:
Hell seems to me a no brainer. If one is going to be good all one’s life and obey all the moral rules, what is the incentive if the consequences of doing so are no different from the consequences of acting as if everything were permitted?
The incentive is to be what one was created to be, and to better know the person who created us that way. Christians are called to obey the moral rules out of love for God, and as a way to love our fellow human beings -loving is its own reward.
May 16th, 2011 | 9:13 pm
It seems to me that discovering for a fact that there is no God would get most people nowhere. If it were the case that if God did not exist, you could get anything you wanted, that would be a different story.
When I was an atheist, I enjoyed reading books from the “science” section at the local big-chain bookstore.
These books all had one thing in common: what they were actually peddling were promises – of immortality and of Utopia. Some of them came right out and said that we were very close to having this or that knowledge that would save us.
One book talked about how the end-cap of our genetic material would be altered and we’d live forever. Another would talk about how we’d download our personalities into some sort of mechanical structure and we’d live forever. Some got out-and-out religious, claiming that we’d find the secrets of forever by the time “Singularity” comes.
Not only would we live forever, we’d do it in a perfect society. One without limits, without pain, without restrictions.
One would think that after all the promises the scientific community made in the 19th century – all of which went so horribly, horribly awry in the first part of the 20th century – they’d stop making promises. But then what would be left?
May 16th, 2011 | 9:16 pm
Y’know, Dawkins may not use the vocabulary of theology, but he actually does address the arguments pretty well. I’ve seen two different websites (one by an actual philosophy professor) that completely misunderstand his “747 Gambit”, for example.
May 16th, 2011 | 9:26 pm
@Brian,
Hawking took a jab without any proof behind it, though as an atheist one might think that proof would be all important to him. In “The Brothers Karamazov”, Dostoevsky examined the contrast among several disparate viewpoints without resolving them satisfactorily. Consider the Grand Inquisitor. You can see him as an indictment of the Catholic Church or as an example of where religion can lead you, if you are not careful. But then resolution of the issue wasn’t Dostoevsky’s end goal. He was trying to get his readers to think; to think about issues where material proof does not come to hand. Hawking, for whatever reason, was telling his readers what to think and not very convincingly.
@David Nickol
You do not persuade though you do make your biases known. I have no idea why you think being a “brilliant scientist” gives one any particular advantage when thinking and acting morally. As to consequences, there are numerous examples of those who get away without consequences for decades stocking up billions of other people’s money for their and their family’s use. On what basis can an atheist condemn them? An atheist can be a very moral man, but it can’t come from a lack of belief in God let alone be reasoned based on material evidence.
@Eli:
I read your blog post and found nothing enlightening in it, though you said it nicer than Hawking did. There’s something to that. Psychology, in spite of MRIs, remains a soft science.
May 16th, 2011 | 9:40 pm
@Kevin Staley-Joyce
“It’s hard to know, and hard to know if we can know, whether it’s true that ‘most Christians place little to no emphasis on hell.’”
We can know if this is true or not. Christians produce thousands of books, blogs, sermons, tv programs, and newspaper articles. By reading these, we can know what things concern their them and their Christian communities. One would imagine that an eternal punishment would be of paramount concern. Do you get the impression that hell is a paramount concern when you view the vast majority of Christian media? Certainly not from left-wing Christians. And from right-wing Christians, the deficit, gay-marriage, and abortion seem to get a lot of talk than eternal punishment.
May 17th, 2011 | 12:38 am
Jeremy,
As I said, the main matter Hawking supposes to engage here is the historical teaching of Christianity, which certainly–over 2000 years–teaches that hell is more than mere myth. Sure, pop culture and Christianity Lite don’t emphasize hell, owing to the undying appeal of positive thinking. There’s also the matter of personal conscience. While fear of hell is just barely enough of a rationale for avoiding sin, it’s hard to see how any serious Christian would fail to think on it in some interior way, as the end to be avoided–separation from God.
In fact, fear of hell seems not limited to Christians, or even religious folks more generally. We’ve all heard secular folks mutter things of the likes of “oh, I worry I’ll go to hell for doing this.” It always makes me cringe, but also seems to indicate that ultimate accountability is a rather deep-seated human insight, even among the nonreligious.
On the matter of the Dostoevsky quote (which has, I’ll admit, many forms and interpretations despite being a worthwhile idea on its own), I certainly agree, as reason demands, that atheists can be good people, and can form consciences. But a form of wish-fulfillment about ultimate accountability seems still to be an issue. Sure, you can fear the earthly consequences of evil acts, but doesn’t it change your moral compass if the ultimate fear of hell is completely off the table?
May 17th, 2011 | 4:12 am
Did those who reject not see that the heavens and the earth were one mass and We tore them apart? That We made from the water everything that lives. Will they not acknowledge? [21:30]
When Our signs are recited to them, they say, “We have listened, and if we wish, we could have said the same thing. This is nothing but tales of the ancients!” [8:31]
The one who says to his parents: “Enough of you! Are you promising me that I will be resurrected, when the generations who died before me never came back?” While they both will implore God: “Woe to you; acknowledge! For God’s promise is the truth.” He would say, “This is nothing but tales from the past!” [46:17]
When Our signs are recited to him, he says: “Tales of the ancients!” [83:13]
May 17th, 2011 | 8:35 am
It’s interesting that the commenters who have discounted the “God doesn’t exist so I can do anything I want” argument have referred to financial sins. It is pretty obvious that what atheism has “liberated” people to do is to sin sexually without guilt and encouraged them to deny the real-world consequences of sexual sin. The consciense that bothers atheists, which they claim is inherent (and maybe it is), doesn’t seem to refer to sex. I have yet to hear of an atheist legislator who says, “I would really like to vote for same-sex marriage because it’s humane, but my conscience tells me not to.”
May 17th, 2011 | 8:38 am
Kevin Staley-Joyce –
Not much.
And that’s not just an opinion, there’s good evidence for that statement. See, e.g.:
As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. – The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker
Now, presumably, God and hell (and/or the fear thereof) didn’t go away that day. But the police did. Which had a stronger influence on people’s behavior?
As H. L. Mencken said, “People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.”
May 17th, 2011 | 8:47 am
Paul Shonk –
Humans desire meaning, certainly – and belief in God provides that for many.
Many atheists do find meaning, however, and disagree that gods can provide it… and so don’t see anything to ‘mourn’.
May 17th, 2011 | 8:49 am
The really disappointing thing about this is that our culture has accepted a situation in which totally ignorant people can say absolute nonsense about religion.
We don’t ask priests questions about astronomy and we don’t ask geologists questions about medicine, but anybody can mouth off about religion — as if it’s all just a matter of opinion and it doesn’t make a difference if you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Dawkins, Hitchins, Dennett, Harris, etc., are demonstrably ignorant of religion, but they get a national platform for their views and sell lots of books.
The really funny thing is when they get all upset at actresses who campaign against vaccines.
May 17th, 2011 | 8:57 am
Blake –
Examples, please? Relevant quotes would be helpful.
Examples, please? (Note: “the scientific community” isn’t a monolithic bloc any more than ‘the religious community’ is. Such an argument can all-too-easily be turned around…)
May 17th, 2011 | 9:05 am
Mike Melendez –
(Ahem.) I disagree.
May 17th, 2011 | 9:18 am
“‘Those acquainted with Ivan Karamazov will recall his apparent belief that if there is no God, anything is permitted. One can hardly imagine a scheme for wish-fulfillment as comprehensive as that made possible by atheism.’
Since Dostoyevsky wasn’t an atheist, I’ll dismiss his straw-man version of an atheist as easily as you dismiss Hawking.” –Brian Westley
Brian, aside from the fact that your statement is illogical, one must also consider that many atheists and former atheists have publicly declared that one strong objection to the thought of God was their indignation at the thought of being judged by anyone (Lee Strobel admitted as much). Dismiss Dostoyevsky if you like, but it would seem his observation was based on atheistic anecdotes.
Secondly, it is absurd to make the claim that one’s insights on a particular issue are invalid unless one is a proponent of the view. That’s like saying a person can’t judge rape or murder to be wrong unless you’ve done either of those acts yourself. Ridiculous.
If you had cancer, would you refuse to be treated by a world renowned oncologist merely because he has not had cancer himself?
The point being made is that Hawking would rightly be skeptical of arguments against something in physics made by someone who has no training or done no research in the field. Similarly, it would be fine and dandy for Dawkins, Hawking, or his ilk to speak of matters theological, had they actually become well-informed on the topic. As a holder of a degree in that field, I can tell you Dawkins, at least, has not.
I’ve not read enough of Hawking to make a judgment on his competency.
May 17th, 2011 | 9:44 am
The opening page of this site has interesting take on hell or to be specific,judgement.
Czeslaw Milosz writes “Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death. The huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed,cowardice, murder we are not going to be judged.”
RAY INGLES-Yesterday I was going to respond to one of your posts but ran out of time. The post I wished to respond to had to do with me using the word “mustard” instead of “muster” and you pointing this error out to me.
As I was struggling to come up with a response to the main body of your post It occurred to me that I could at least respond to the “mustard” part of your post. Here it is; “I relish your corrections”. Well worth the wait I’m sure.
May 17th, 2011 | 9:49 am
Crowhill –
Demonstrate it, then. For each. (Dennett in particular.)
May 17th, 2011 | 10:18 am
Ray,
How is it possible to demonstrate it to you when you suffer the same affliction?
May 17th, 2011 | 10:27 am
“Those acquainted with Ivan Karamazov will recall his apparent belief that if there is no God, anything is permitted. One can hardly imagine a scheme for wish-fulfillment as comprehensive as that made possible by atheism. ”
I am acquainted with the argument, but then, it seems to me as very poor one. I mean why will morality depend on the existence of a God to start? Is morality just the set of capricious norms dictated by God or is something objective we can discover by reason (just because christians have kidnaped natural law theory doesn´t mean they invented or that the theory depends on their mithological preferences). Actually I think the reverse of Dostoyevsky dictum is more likely to be true: “If God exists everything is permited” (at then end, is just about what the priest or writter of of the sacred book says God want us to do…)
And of course, if the reason theists act morally is because the fear of some omnipotent punisher, it is sad and an indication on how weak theist based morality is. One will expect that acting morally is something you do for a commitment you have with goodness itself, not for fear of punishment.
May 17th, 2011 | 10:57 am
Blake –
These books all [emphasis added - ed.] had one thing in common: what they were actually peddling were promises – of immortality and of Utopia.
Examples, please? Relevant quotes would be helpful.
How come you increasingly respond to all my arguments with these crazy demands that I provide ever-more-extensive documentation? First it was ever-more-comprehensive explanations, now you want not only a detailed bibliography, but quotes?
How about this: go down to your nearest Barnes & Noble and check out the science section for yourself. Try it with an open mind: you might actually learn something – about the science section at your local bookstore, or even about yourself.
May 17th, 2011 | 10:58 am
Ray — it’s been done numerous places. Try The Last Superstition by Feser, or if you want something short, here’s a NYT review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/books/review/19wieseltier.html
But if you know anything about religion, just read Dennett. His ignorance pops up all over the place.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:09 am
Examples, please? (Note: “the scientific community” isn’t a monolithic bloc any more than ‘the religious community’ is. Such an argument can all-too-easily be turned around…)
Again I must direct you to the “scientific community” as defined according to the transcripts of the Dover, PA “evolution trial”.
In dismissing the “intelligent design” argument as a viable alternative to real scientific theory, the argument was made that there is a cohesive scientific community, with a recognized hierarchy and membership rolls, and this club does not recognize the “intelligent design scientists” as part of their club.
The argument was not based on the intelligent design guys’ methods. The argument was, specifically, that there is a scientific community, and that the men who claim that “intelligent design” is or could be a scientific theory are men who are not recognized as having standing within that community.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:42 am
@Kevin Staley-Joyce
“Sure, you can fear the earthly consequences of evil acts, but doesn’t it change your moral compass if the ultimate fear of hell is completely off the table?”
Hell increases fear, but it doesn’t create a moral standard. I still have to ask which moral standard it is I have to follow. Then you have the question of which hell? Islamic hell? Fundamentalist-Protestant hell, in which everyone goes to except people who share their beliefs. (Catholics are in this fictional hell, as fundamentalist Protestants don’t believe Catholics are even Christian.)
Morality stands apart from fear. As one writer remarked, “morality is what you do when no one is looking over your shoulder”.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:49 am
Mark – It’s stupidity, not ignorance, that’s incurable. If you want to contend that I’m too stupid to understand what you have to say, then okay, I’ll have to live with my limitations. (Of course… by that very fact you can’t condemn me for not understanding you. You can only lament, and ask God why It made me stupid.)
If, however, you actually meant the word “ignorance”, then it’s a simple matter of educating me.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:58 am
Sergio Méndez wrote:
Is morality just the set of capricious norms dictated by God or is something objective we can discover by reason?
How could reason bind us morally? What could we owe it? And note that if morality originates in God, that doesn’t necessarily make it capricious. Could it not be that God issues moral dictates that conform with the nature of the universe that He created, that conform with his own essence?
One will expect that acting morally is something you do for a commitment you have with goodness itself, not for fear of punishment.
‘We love because he first loved us.” – 1 John 4:19
May 17th, 2011 | 12:04 pm
@Ray
Read the thoughts in your pointer. Interesting discussion but somewhat misplaced. Cooperation in itself is a neutral thing. What we cooperate on is what morality judges. As many note, we humans have found a wide range of behaviors to cooperate on. This is frequently used to argue for a position on sexual morality different from the prevailing norm. Indeed, the sexual revolution in America was based on changing that norm. Cooperation is neutral. So cooperation is not morality. Yet that is the whole basis for your argument: tech (certainly morally neutral) allows greater cooperation (I argue morally neutral) leading to greater safety. Of course, many secular moral arguments turn on what should be safer, generally unaware that others are made less safe. So, no, I am not convinced.
Now, being a Catholic, I find the concept of natural law amenable. But I don’t believe there will ever be a “science” of natural law. We instead discover it and unravel it through things that science has no tools for addressing. The prime example is free choice, which is by definition unreproducible. Indeed, science turns on our ability to make choices. Free choice is assumed for science to exist.
Back to technology, I agree that technology has made wider cooperation easier. That same technology, through cooperation, has made mass murder possible on an industrial scale. You can argue those situations are rare outliers. I would refer you to Nassim Taleb.
May 17th, 2011 | 12:10 pm
“And of course, if the reason theists act morally is because the fear of some omnipotent punisher, it is sad and an indication on how weak theist based morality is. One will expect that acting morally is something you do for a commitment you have with goodness itself, not for fear of punishment.” –Sergio Mendez
Sergio, I think it can be fairly said that most theists act morally–or strive to–because when you love someone (God) you strive to show that love with deeds.
However, anyone who thinks that the fear of punishment is not a valid or necessary means of enforcing standards of behavior is living in a fantasy world. If you believe punishment is immoral, then by extension you must oppose human civilization itself, which has always relied on legal systems and punishment to maintain even the most basic level of order.
Spend a week teaching in a classroom. You quickly find appeals to use the carrot (mercy, decency) will work for some, but fail utterly for a significant number of others. Even the stick fails to curb the behavior of some.
No, we can believe there is a Hell because the Son of God spent more time talking about Hell than anyone else in the Bible. He also made it clear people freely choose it, and God doesn’t wish for anyone to end up there, but He respects our free will.
May 17th, 2011 | 12:21 pm
Those acquainted with Ivan Karamazov will recall his apparent belief that if there is no God, anything is permitted. One can hardly imagine a scheme for wish-fulfillment as comprehensive as that made possible by atheism.
Well except it’s really not. OK, say “anything is permitted”, that doesn’t really tell you what you should do. Yes maybe the phrase immediately strikes the image of letting go of all rules and just launching into the the biggest party-mode antics ever done in human history….but that’s only a first reaction. Yes the day you declare the end to your diet you may eat a tub of ice cream but you probably won’t eat a tub of ice cream every day from then on out. Most likely you’re probably revert to a pretty normal eating pattern.
Of course if you dig into the argument a bit more, it too is wish-fulfillment. It’s basically saying we need God to exist not because he does but because if he doesn’t exist either us or, more likely, our stupid neighbors will feel free to start blasting the music all night when we have to go to work in the morning!
Mike
Hawking, for whatever reason, was telling his readers what to think and not very convincingly.
Errr well, actually
1. Hawking was telling us what he thinks, not telling us what to think.
2. Hawking wasn’t telling his readers anything, he was being interviewed.
And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who don’t buy the pop Christian view of heaven. Two weeks ago I was chatting with a woman who as conviced that her recently departed dog was playing in heaven, waiting for her to get there. I felt no need at all to challenge this view, but at the same time if you asked me what I felt I’d have to say I doubt it.
Judy
It is pretty obvious that what atheism has “liberated” people to do is to sin sexually without guilt and encouraged them to deny the real-world consequences of sexual sin.
1. To the degree you have ‘real-world consequences’ (and I’m sure by ‘real-world’ you didn’t mean to imply the religious world is an ‘unreal’ one….or did you???) for sexual sin then atheism has no relevance. If hitting on another man’s wife gets you clocked in the jaw by him, well your lack of belief in an afterlife isn’t going to make your face swell any less afterwards.
2. We do seem to have the odd fact that the ‘Bible belt’ seems to generate quite a bit more ‘sexual sin’ than the ‘atheist belt’ (not that we have much of one in the US).
Kevin
Sure, you can fear the earthly consequences of evil acts, but doesn’t it change your moral compass if the ultimate fear of hell is completely off the table?
Actually mathematics and economics can address some questions of infinities. For example, suppose I had a piece of paper that said whoever owned it would get $1 a year, starting in 5 years, forever. How much would this be worth? You might answer it’s worth an infinite amount. After all if you add up all the years @ $1 it adds up to an infinity. But in reality it’s not, even if you place just a tiny bit of more importance on being able to enjoy the present versus the future the present value function will collapse that ‘infinite sum’ down quite quickly. The problem with the idea of religion as social control….aside from the rather casual indifference to valuing truth over usefulness….is that in order for it to work it requires one to value the future equal to the present.
But the human mind is practically hard wired to value the present consumption over possible future consumption. This is why the grocery store sells you a small bottle of Coke for $1.25 at the check out line when just a few minutes ago you passed a giant two or three liter bottle for $1.50! Only a rather forward thinking type person can ‘uncollapse’ the present value function. But such a forward thinking person will probably already avoid lots of questionable activity (cheating on the wife, robbing the bank etc.). To make matters worse, Christianity, at least pop Christianity has the old ‘get out of jail free’ card….basically have as much fun as you like but repent before you die and there’s a good chance you may ‘get away with it’.
Before you think I’m downing religion too much, consider what I’m saying may actually be a positive for religion. Do you really want religion’s purpose to be a ‘useful lie’ to keep people from raping and stealing?
Crowhill
Dawkins, Hitchins, Dennett, Harris, etc., are demonstrably ignorant of religion, but they get a national platform for their views and sell lots of books.
Hitchins I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. He is probably better read on Christianity than most self-proclaimed Christians today. The others I suspect are better versed on a more ignorant type of Creationist-Christian than they are more subtle ideas among Christian theologians….but then creationist-type Christians are hardly in short supply.
Sergio
I am acquainted with the argument, but then, it seems to me as very poor one. I mean why will morality depend on the existence of a God to start? Is morality just the set of capricious norms dictated by God or is something objective we can discover by reason…
I’m a bit of a skeptic of philosophy…..I think we may be able to discover morality ‘by reason’ but few people are moral because of their reasoning skills. I think its very rare that we are confronted with a really difficult moral issue that we must apply ‘reason’ to discover an answer. More common we encounter cases were morality is pretty clear but also pretty optional in many cases and our response is based on the habits we’ve developed. Do I pick up that $20 bill from the floor of the Mac machine and put it in my pocket or walk into the branch and ask the teller if she can locate the person who dropped it? For example. We may develop these habits by ‘fairy stories’. For example, an Eastern type of ‘fairy story’ might imagine your decision on the $20 to earn you points in some type of mystical Facebook type Karma game that decides where your next life will be. A Christian fairy-type story might envision God as some type of Santa writing down what good you did or didn’t do with that $20. These types of ways of thinking may be useful and helpful even though they aren’t exactly true.
May 17th, 2011 | 12:26 pm
In dismissing the “intelligent design” argument as a viable alternative to real scientific theory, the argument was made that there is a cohesive scientific community,
But Blake, that has nothing to do with religion! Intelligent Design advocates are just advocating a particular scientific theory, isn’t that what they keep telling us? That the scientific community dismisses ID is of no more importance to the relationship between science and religion than saying the scientific community has dismissed the idea of ‘space ether’ ever since Einstein.
May 17th, 2011 | 12:29 pm
No, we can believe there is a Hell because the Son of God spent more time talking about Hell than anyone else in the Bible.
I recently had a similar discussion elsewhere (on Vox Nova) and I am repeating something I wrote there.
If you check out the entry for Gehenna in John L. McKenzie’s Dictionary of the Bible, you’ll find he points out that the depictions of final judgment and punishment in the Synoptics use the language of contemporary Judaism. He says,
He reviews imagery found in John and the Epistles of Paul and concludes
St. Paul does not mention Hell once. Is this a failure on his part to understand the afterlife, or is McKenzie correct that when Jesus spoke of fiery pits and such, he was not describing a place, but rather using contemporary imagery meant to convey theological concept rather than describe a place.
As I mentioned in the other discussion, even in my Catholic education back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was said that Hell was not a place, but a state, and that a Hell for dogs could be nicely combined with a heaven for fleas.
May 17th, 2011 | 12:33 pm
Crowhill – Oh, come on. From your link:
That’s just puerile. People can disagree about facts (like, e.g., the existence of gods) while agreeing about values. Would you really accept this kind of argument if it came from an atheist?
If this is a representative example of attacks on Dennett’s positions… well, I wonder if Dennett every prayed Voltaire’s prayer.
May 17th, 2011 | 12:43 pm
Blake, I don’t think I can adequately address what you say until you answer the questions I posed here, in the comment labeled “May 13th, 2011 | 10:07 am”.
May 17th, 2011 | 12:49 pm
Re The Blank Slate by Pinker as quoted by Ray.
And yet in other places those same police would be the ones doing that damage. I think Mencken had it wrong. To be sure, we have the wild among us who are only restrained by force, direct or implied. At times, that might be ourselves. But what force should that be and what behavior should be restrained? That is the heart of morality.
May 17th, 2011 | 1:02 pm
Boonton is replying to my comment notes
1. Hawking was telling us what he thinks, not telling us what to think.
My mistake, he was telling us what we think, that we are “afraid of the dark” and that we believe “in fairy tales”.
2. Hawking wasn’t telling his readers anything, he was being interviewed.
Next, you’re going to tell me that no one reads The Guardian. ;^)
May 17th, 2011 | 1:03 pm
Mike Melendez –
I didn’t phrase things solely in terms of cooperation in the sense of ‘teamwork’, you know. I was referring to cooperation in a rather broader sense than that.
We’ve still got quite a ways to go, of course. But I haven’t seen too much evidence that the ‘art’ of religious morality is any further developed (see below).
Well, I would refer you (again) to Steven Pinker. I didn’t call things like that ‘outliers’ – I pointed out, a la Pinker, that their frequency and intensity is going down.
May 17th, 2011 | 1:23 pm
” We do seem to have the odd fact that the ‘Bible belt’ seems to generate quite a bit more ‘sexual sin’ than the ‘atheist belt’ (not that we have much of one in the US).”
Clearly, Christians are more virile than atheists.
May 17th, 2011 | 1:41 pm
Mike
My mistake, he was telling us what we think, that we are “afraid of the dark” and that we believe “in fairy tales”.
We aren’t? We don’t? The dark is undeniably scarey (which is not the same thing as saying the dark merits us being afraid…..a lesson we all have to teach most children). And we certainly all do believe in some type of fairy tale….(the woman expecting that her dog is playing in heaven probably does understand, at some level, that her concept is a bit of a theological fairy tale).
May 17th, 2011 | 1:46 pm
Artaban:
“If you believe punishment is immoral, then by extension you must oppose human civilization itself, which has always relied on legal systems and punishment to maintain even the most basic level of order.”
But I never said I consider punishment immoral. I said I consider it a very weak reason to believe and act moraly (which by the way, is not always equall to obedience, following your class room example). I also think don´t consider religion a very good way to actually know what is morally good or right (regardless if it is a “practical” method to enforce morality). I don´t think the love of a deity or anyone is good enough reason to found a moral theory. I think more than “love” (of a deity or other beings) you need to recognize the implications of rationality and the rights and obligations beings endowed with it have.
May 17th, 2011 | 1:47 pm
Sean, I don’t know that Christians are more virile than atheists, but I suspect they sin more—or at least, they recognize and call it sin. Do atheists sin at all (in their own estimation)? If we rely on self-reporting of sin, would atheists do so?
May 17th, 2011 | 2:00 pm
How about comparing, say, incidence of out of wedlock birth? Or divorce?
I suspect the ‘atheists are sinful’ meme isn’t about about Christians being more honest about their own sins but dishonest about them. How many Republicans bedded down with mistresses thinking “I am not Bill Clinton”? (Not to say that Republican = Christian…..but then Bill Clinton doesn’t = atheist either).
May 17th, 2011 | 2:11 pm
@David Nickols and “you’ll find he points out that the depictions of final judgment and punishment in the Synoptics use the language of contemporary Judaism.”
1) David, the glaring problem with that claim is that the Gospel of Luke, one of the Synoptics, was written BY A GENTILE CHRISTIAN, for gentiles.
2) Secondly, regarding the claim of “omission” in Pauline theology, it is interesting that Luke, who personally knew Paul and spent quite some time traveling with him, still includes Jesus’ teachings on Hell. Paul is a fallible human being. Jesus is not fallible. Yes, it’s quite possible–indeed in this case likely–that Paul’s omission was a mistake.
3) Any person that puts Paul above the Gospels has lost his right to claim to be a Christian. Gospels–and the teachings of Jesus–must and do trump any other authority figure in the Bible.
4) Yes, some of the imagery Jesus uses is done to convey in terms we understand something we haven’ t experienced, and Hell is a state of separation from God. But tell me, what “theological concept” do you think Jesus is conveying when He repeatedly uses the word “eternal” in relation to it?
May 17th, 2011 | 2:14 pm
I think more than “love” (of a deity or other beings) you need to recognize the implications of rationality and the rights and obligations beings endowed with it have.
How does reason endow us with rights?
May 17th, 2011 | 3:15 pm
Sergio: “But I never said I consider punishment immoral.”
Really?! Then what was behind your statement “Actually I think the reverse of Dostoyevsky dictum is more likely to be true: “If God exists everything is permitted”?
Rape is permitted? Murder is permitted? What do you expect people to think when you say something ridiculous like “everything is permitted”?
As to your disdain for Love as the basis for morality, I would ask a question. If you said to your girlfriend, “The guide for my actions is going to be a set of obligations and rights, not love…” how long would it take for her to dump you?
You ask people to “recognize the implications of rationality and the rights and obligations” and I’m thinking it won’t curb evil or sin one bit. Love doesn’t stop with mere “rights and obligations”. It doesn’t do the bare minimum required to abide by the law. Love produces saints. “Rights and obligations” produce robots and begrudging slaves.
May 17th, 2011 | 3:17 pm
@Artaban
“No, we can believe there is a Hell because the Son of God spent more time talking about Hell than anyone else in the Bible. He also made it clear people freely choose it, and God doesn’t wish for anyone to end up there, but He respects our free will”
Christian apologists sometimes bring up the concept of “free will” to defend a particular position. You try finding the free will theory in the Bible. Where was free will when God hardened Pharaoh’s heart?
Also the idea that hell is something that people choose is hogwash. It’s both logically inaccurate and biblically inaccurate. No one would choose eternal torture. Did the rich man in the parable choose to go to hell?
Finally, if God respects our free will on going to hell, doesn’t that make him a bad father, if we are his children? We would never respect our daughter’s free will if she wanted to stay inside a burning building.
May 17th, 2011 | 3:48 pm
Christian apologists sometimes bring up the concept of “free will” to defend a particular position. You try finding the free will theory in the Bible. Where was free will when God hardened Pharaoh’s heart?
You can look at that verse a couple of different ways and I won’t get into them, but that one example hardly contravenes the Biblical premise that we do have free choice, without which the concepts of sin and disobedience would make no sense.
“But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
- Joshua 24:15
May 17th, 2011 | 3:51 pm
David, the glaring problem with that claim is that the Gospel of Luke, one of the Synoptics, was written BY A GENTILE CHRISTIAN, for gentiles.
Artaban,
First, according to modern scholarship, the Gospel of Luke was based on the Gospel of Mark and Q, so it would be expected to be similar in content to Mark. Second, to the best of my recollection, according to modern scholarship (as opposed to Christian tradition), all of the synoptics were written by gentiles for either a gentile audience or a mixed audience.
Gospels—and the teachings of Jesus—must and do trump any other authority figure in the Bible.
All scripture is taken to be inspired, so it makes no sense to choose one book of the New Testament over another. One might just as correctly say that any person that puts the Gospels above the Paul has lost his right to claim to be a Christian. Paul was, after all, an apostle. In fact, Paul is the only apostle from whom we have any direct communication.
I think it is pretty widely agreed that Hell is a state of separation from God. What McKenzie is saying, and it makes sense to me, is that the imagery Jesus uses to describe final separation from God is not a “physical” description of Hell. It is imagery meant to convey the idea of separation from God.
But tell me, what “theological concept” do you think Jesus is conveying when He repeatedly uses the word “eternal” in relation to it?
A very quick search yields “eternal fire” twice in Matthew and “eternal punishment” once. That’s it for the New Testament. I think McKenzie pointed out Matthew 10:28: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” One belief Jewish Apocalyptic thought was that the consequence of hell was not eternal suffering, but annihilation, which this verse seems to describe.
I wonder what eternal meant to Jesus and his followers. I am not saying that to quibble with every word you mention. I am saying it because in another discussion on this topic, someone raised the question of what time meant in terms of the afterlife.
I think one really has to assemble all the pertinent verses from the New Testament dealing with punishment after death and see what can be gleaned from them taken together. Obviously sayings attributed to Jesus are very important, but as I said, it is not just the Gospels that are taken to be the inspired word of God. Some parts of the New Testament can’t be less inspired than others.
May 17th, 2011 | 4:11 pm
Jeremy, this is the last time I’m going to do the hard work for you…
Free will is all over the Bible. If we didn’t have it, it would have been impossible for Adam and Eve to disobey God. There are passages all over the Bible concerning our ability to freely choose–even choose things that destroy us.
Just a few:
1) Deuteronomy 30: 19-20 “…I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. CHOOSE life, then…”
2) Joshua 24:15 “Now, if it is bad in your eyes to serve YHWH/Jehovah, CHOOSE for yourselves today whom you will serve…”
3) Matthew 7: 13 “The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who CHOOSE that way.” (also pokes some pretty big holes in your claim “the idea that hell is something that people choose is hogwash. It’s both logically inaccurate and biblically inaccurate.”) Who is biblically inaccurate, Jeremy?
Jeremy, use common sense. People choose things that are ultimately bad for them all the time; drugs, excessive alcohol, bad relationships. Sin blinds our ability to think and feel clearly. Finally, in Matthew 25: 31-46 Jesus intimates that those who mistreated fellow human beings CHOOSE Hell.
When God “hardened” Pharaoh’s heart, he simply amplified a feeling/decision Pharaoh already made. He didn’t override his will.
“We would never respect our daughter’s free will if she wanted to stay inside a burning building.”
Yeah, but what would call a father who demanded his daughter live with him perpetually when she didn’t want to? Easy…a tyrant. God can’t create a being that experiences bliss apart from what is good, that’s why they suffer.
May 17th, 2011 | 4:22 pm
Finally, if God respects our free will on going to hell, doesn’t that make him a bad father, if we are his children? We would never respect our daughter’s free will if she wanted to stay inside a burning building.
Jeremy,
The question occurs to me why a loving God would allow a finite human being working with very incomplete information to make a decision that had infinite consequences. If human beings choose hell of their own free will, doesn’t there have to be some kind of “informed consent”?
If life after death really goes on forever—if we are to spend an infinite amount of time in heaven or hell—the consequences are staggering. There’s the old bit about an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing all of Shakespeare. Well, given an infinite amount of time, a single individual who randomly hits a typewriter key once every billion years will eventually produce not just all of Shakespeare, but everything else ever written and everything that could possibly have been written but wasn’t. And after that, there would be an infinite amount of time left to spare.
May 17th, 2011 | 5:32 pm
I’m not sure atheists really can laud their own views so much. In my experience, it seems that despite their profession of reason, they seem to latch on the worst aspects of religious experience as a replacement.
Calvinists turn into biological determinists.
Crusaders into internationalists or ideologues.
End-timers into Transhumanists, as if hooking ourselves up to a computer is any way to live forever.
Monks argue about open source software and lock themselves into MMOs all day.
They sure talk a lot of about reason, but for someone like me between both worlds, they look like people who open pandora’s box and stuff hope back inside it before tossing it into the sea.
May 17th, 2011 | 6:29 pm
Sergio
if the reason theists act morally is because the fear of some omnipotent punisher, it is sad and an indication on how weak theist based morality is.
YOS
Why, those sniveling weaklings! Not like us uebermenschen, eh?
But see Ray Ingles’ item about the Montreal police strike and in re: original sin. (He seems to think that it illustrates something about hell rather than the weakness of belief in hell by criminals in our secular age.)
+ + +
Boonton
Intelligent Design advocates are just advocating a particular scientific theory, isn’t that what they keep telling us?
YOS
Both advocates and opponents of intelligent design delight in equivocating on the meanings of the terms. There is a scientific theory that states that certain kinds of biochemical structures cannot be accounted for by means of the struggle for existence among conspecifics. This ought to be no more controversial than the theory that certain kinds of motion cannot be accounted for by the theory of universal gravitation. See Maxwell’s equations for details. The ID fallacy annexed to this is the notion that if Darwinian natural selection fails, the only alternative is theokinetics. That is, if the specified complexity cannot be accounted for by Α it [i]must[/i] be due to intelligent Ω. But there is always Β, Γ, Δ, etc.
For the most trenchant criticisms of ID — or at least of the drawing of metaphysical conclusions from a mere physical theory — it would be best to consult classical Thomistic philosophers; e.g.,
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/11/trouble-with-william-paley.html
+ + +
Jeremy
You try finding the free will theory in the Bible.
YOS
Why do fundamentalists insist that all things must be in the Bible in naively-literal fashion. The Bible is no more a philosophy textbook than it is an astronomy textbook.
Jeremy
Where was free will when God hardened Pharaoh’s heart?
YOS
Where was Jeremy when God invented literature, poetic imagery and figures of speech.
Jeremy
Did the rich man in the parable choose to go to hell?
YOS
Yes. He who wills the means wills the end. The man who lives profligately with no thought to income or expense has chosen to become a bankrupt. The man who eats without regard to portions or calories has chosen to become fat. Even if the direct choice was the jelly doughnut or the red sports car.
Jeremy
Finally, if God respects our free will on going to hell, doesn’t that make him a bad father, if we are his children?
YOS
“Look what you made me do!” cried the teenager. “You should have stopped me!”
Perhaps you have an imperfect understanding of [i]liberum arbitrium[/i]
May 17th, 2011 | 6:34 pm
Boonton
I think we may be able to discover morality ‘by reason’
YOS
A good Catholic doctrine. I’ll see the “Dostoyevsky wasn’t an atheist” defense someone made and raise him a Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, et al., all of whom were.
[b]Quaestio:[/b] Whether atheists can behave morally.
[b]Obj. 1.[/b] It would seem atheists cannot behave morally because as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in “Existentialism is a Humanism” that “there disappears with God all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men.” .
[b]Obj. 2.[/b] Further, Friedrich Nietzsche, in “The Twilight of the Idols,” wrote “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads.” [stipulated: Fred thought giving up Christian morality was a good thing. The superman, like Leopold and Loeb, makes his own morality.]
[b]Obj. 3.[/b] Further, as Richard Rorty wrote in “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,” “For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question ‘Why not be cruel?’ – no noncicular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. … Anyone who thinks that there are well grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question – algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort – is still, in his heart, a theologian or metaphysician.”
[b]Obj. 4.[/b] Also, Alex Rosenberg, in “The Disenchanted Naturalists Guide to Reality,” asserts that naturalism denies the existence of objective moral value, of beliefs and desires, of the self, of linguistic meaning, and indeed of meaning or purpose of any sort. All attempts to evade this conclusion, to reconcile naturalism with our common sense understanding of human life, inevitably fail, and we just have to learn to live with that. A belief in meanings and purposes is what puts us on a “slippery slope” to religion.
[b]Sed contra.[/b] St. Paul writes in Romans 2, “For it is not those who hear the law who are just in the sight of God; rather, those who observe the law will be justified. For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law unto themselves… They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts…”
[b]Respondeo:[/b] The contentions that non-Christians or non-theists in general can know the good by right reason has been Church doctrine for near 2000 years, while the argument that they cannot has been proposed by atheist philosophers of the past two scientific centuries either as a reason for existential despair [Jean-Paul] or as permission to visit whores without feeling guilty [Fred]. From Nietzsche’s POV it is no coincidence that Dawkins, Hitchens, and the others who think they can have Christian morality without the Christ are Anglophones, “flatheads” as he called them. But Church doctrine assures us that they are indeed capable of knowing the good.
+ + +
Boonton
We do seem to have the odd fact that the ‘Bible belt’ seems to enerate quite a bit more ‘sexual sin’ than the ‘atheist belt’
YOS
Boonton would also be shocked!, shocked, I tell you! to learn that there are more sick people in hospitals than elsewhere.
May 17th, 2011 | 6:36 pm
Artaban:
“Really?! Then what was behind your statement ´Actually I think the reverse of Dostoyevsky dictum is more likely to be true: “If God exists everything is permitted´?
Rape is permitted? Murder is permitted? What do you expect people to think when you say something ridiculous like “everything is permitted”?”
It has nothing to do with punishment being wrong or right.What I was trying to say is that, under theirsm, morality can turn to be whatever somebody says that God told them is moral. So if God told them to kill their son, for example, that is moral (thinking of course in the Abraham story with Isaac). Sounds like murder, isn´t it?
“As to your disdain for Love as the basis for morality, I would ask a question. If you said to your girlfriend, “The guide for my actions is going to be a set of obligations and rights, not love…” how long would it take for her to dump you?”
I am not sure what to make of this. I guess you don´t mean I have moral obligations only to my romantic interests, so I guess you are using the term “love” in a more broad sense. I can understand how empathy for our fellow human beings cand help us develop moral sentiments. But “love” understood that way is not going to tell us what is specefically moral, what are those obligations are. I think reason is more effective tool for that and I think it is better to live your live with conduct code you actually UNDERSTAND.
Ken:
If you actually want to understand the role of reason (and the importance of reason in defining moral obligations) I suggest you to start reading Plato and Aristotle. Or even, many christian theologians like Aquinas.
May 17th, 2011 | 6:48 pm
Hitchins I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. He is probably better read on Christianity than most self-proclaimed Christians today.
And yet he still manages to not understand even the basic tenets, somehow.
Maybe it’s because he believes there is such a thing as “rational” – that is, he believes that it is possible for man to live on facts and logic. Being blind to the “irrational” side of his own self – the part that trusts, “takes on faith”, relies on assumptions, and embraces things that are downright silly – he sees that (and apparently only that) in Christians.
I thought it was interesting that the last few times I’ve read anything Hitchens wrote, he referred specifically to the indignity of losing control over his body. He seems to be offended by this, by the fact that the human body and the processes of living (and dying) are uncontrollable, undignified, grotesque. I almost get the impression that it’s the first time he has ever seriously had to confront the reality of not being in control of his life and his body – oh, sure, we’re all aware that some things are beyond our control, but yet so many of us find ways of not believing what we know to be true, don’t we?
May 17th, 2011 | 6:52 pm
But Blake, that has nothing to do with religion! Intelligent Design advocates are just advocating a particular scientific theory, isn’t that what they keep telling us?
That’s irrelevant to the argument I was responding to, and it’s irrelevant to the argument I was making.
The question was whether or not there “is” such a thing as “the scientific community”. There is.
May 17th, 2011 | 8:50 pm
Blake,
Maybe it’s because he believes there is such a thing as “rational” – that is, he believes that it is possible for man to live on facts and logic. Being blind to the “irrational” side of his own self – the part that trusts, “takes on faith”, relies on assumptions, and embraces things that are downright silly – he sees that (and apparently only that) in Christians.
And yet what is ID and creationism but an attempt to make faith something totally rational as well while neglecting this ‘irrational’ side?
Re: Barnes & Noble
One book talked about how the end-cap of our genetic material would be altered and we’d live forever. Another would talk about how we’d download our personalities into some sort of mechanical structure and we’d live forever. Some got out-and-out religious, claiming that we’d find the secrets of forever by the time “Singularity” comes.
Yea you’ll find the Singularity book in the science section, but it’s pretty much on the speculative side of the science section….(I’m more partical to science books that explain something new or seek to deflate things that get out of hand…..like Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change by Bob Seidensticker….or maybe the history of science). Might this simply be less about science making up its own ‘religious promises’ but you seeking religious promises, gravitating to the closest thing you could find in the ‘science section’ of B&N only to then stumble upon what you’re really looking for in the religion section?
May 17th, 2011 | 9:26 pm
@Artaban
I’m not advocating a purely Calvinistic approach to scripture — you’re right in that human choice does play a role in the Bible.
Free will doesn’t just mean choice, it means choice that is free from certain kind of constraints. Why would God need to have hardened Pharoahs heart if he already made the decision? Again, no where is this modern day concept of free-will asserted in scripture, which basically says God lets people freely choose, and that’s why there is suffering.
There’s another verse, although I can’t remember the location, but talks about God putting the fear of himself into people. In this sense, God draws people toward him. But there is another verse in Romans where God gives people over to a reprobate mind.
May 17th, 2011 | 9:34 pm
YOS –
Well, there seem to be fewer atheists in prison than in the general population, so maybe it’s just the atheists who don’t get caught.
May 17th, 2011 | 9:36 pm
@Ye Olde Statistician
I think you need to reread the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus. At the end, the rich man asks to at least go and warn his brothers about hell, as apparently the brothers didn’t believe in hell despite the prophet’s teaching. On the other hand, to use your example, you won’t find anyone who doesn’t understand that eating too much will make you fat. Some modern theologians have reinvented hell as this alternative lifestyle — as if people choose to reject heaven and want to be eternally tortured (like C.S. Lewis in the Great Divorce.)
May 17th, 2011 | 10:00 pm
Sergio Mendez wrote:
If you actually want to understand the role of reason (and the importance of reason in defining moral obligations) I suggest you to start reading Plato and Aristotle. Or even, many christian theologians like Aquinas.
Sergio, their argument is that because God is the author of reason, his laws are discoverable by reason. They are not capricious. They are reasonable because he is reason himself.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:37 pm
Sergio
under theirsm, morality can turn to be whatever somebody says that God told them is moral. So if God told them to kill their son, for example, that is moral (thinking of course in the Abraham story with Isaac). Sounds like murder, isn´t it?
YOS
Sergio has discovered that mountebanks and deceivers can take advantage of people and defy the Ecumenical councils, Church Fathers, and (for the Western Church) the Pope. He has explained clearly why David Koresh was a monster, and even why one should be wary of the ever-multiplying Protestant sects like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Bible-Thumping Storefront Church; but he has not laid a glove on the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or other Traditional Churches.
He can even take the story that encapsulates the Jewish rejection of human sacrifice — the only folk in the Syriac Civilization to do so — and think it is an actual command to kill one’s eldest son. Recall that to sacrifice your first-born on great and high occasions was pretty much the norm from Phoenicia/Canaan all the way to Carthage. The Greeks and Romans practiced infant exposure; and the Roman paterfamilias had the power of life and death over his children as long as he lived (even if the children were themselves adults). This left Tacitus to report as one of the traits that made the Jews strange and abominable to the Romans that “they do not kill their children for any reason.”
So if everyone else is doing it, and at the commands of their gods, how do you get the Hebrews to stop doing it? Their God has to tell them to stop, and under circumstances that drive home its importance.
May 18th, 2011 | 12:12 am
Well, there seem to be fewer atheists in prison than in the general population, so maybe it’s just the atheists who don’t get caught.
Or it could just be that there’s more advantage to claiming to be Christian, regardless of one’s faith.
After all, real Christians are by definition trustworthy.
Of course, there are lots of possibilities.
It could be that atheists are more likely to commit the sort of white collar, upper-class crimes that are less likely to be prosecuted.
Or (and?) maybe their mommies have enough cash to settle the whole thing “quietly”…
Or maybe our society has just fallen into the habit of legalizing whatever things atheists on the whole like to do, for instance killing babies. (Certainly the punishment for possessing the sort of drugs inner city kids are more likely to possess is far more serious than possessing the sort of drugs upper middle class suburban kids are likely to posses.)
May 18th, 2011 | 12:15 am
Yea you’ll find the Singularity book in the science section, but it’s pretty much on the speculative side of the science section….
I’m disappointed that you won’t give consideration to my suggestion.
Are you one of those that argues to win, instead of arguing to think, or arguing to learn?
May 18th, 2011 | 12:35 am
you seeking religious promises, gravitating to the closest thing you could find in the ‘science section’ of B&N only to then stumble upon what you’re really looking for in the religion section?
I doubt it; I found the fantasies repugnant enough that it jarred the cognitive dissonance a bit.
The “Singularity” fantasy in particular was disturbing to me; it reminded me of the “Left Behind” series, except with a giant gap instead of the punishing of the sinners. What happens to the sinners in your side’s fantasy? Where do they go? They’re not there at the end, so are they converted, killed, excluded?
But what makes the various “immortality” fantasies creepy IMO is they’re not presented as fantasies, or as fiction. Science “really is” going to cure disease, grant eternal life, create a perfect society, and transcend every limit known to man any day now. There’s no limits. It’s all not only inevitable, but right around the corner.
Two hundred years after they first started promising, they’ve had to change all the words they used (because every time they commit atrocities in the name of The Promise, they contaminate their reputation) but they still keep promising, don’t they?
May 18th, 2011 | 12:40 am
Hell increases fear, but it doesn’t create a moral standard. I still have to ask which moral standard it is I have to follow
And yet every single religion in the world has some variant of the Golden Rule…except humanism/Unitarian Universalism (whose primary innovation, or “selling point”, appears to be a guiding philosophy that provides loopholes by which the Golden Rule may be safely circumvented. It’s no coincidence that the same ideology that gives us the idea that there’s nothing wrong with having one standard for “experts” and “elites”, is also the ideology that most staunchly defends abortion and other forms of human violations in the name of narcissism.)
May 18th, 2011 | 1:15 am
I got as far as typing “Stephen Haw” in Google, when the first suggestion that popped up was “stephen hawking” and the second was “stephen hawking no heaven.” All the man has to do is make an off-the-cuff remark and it precipitates a crisis of faith.
May 18th, 2011 | 6:39 am
The “Singularity” fantasy in particular was disturbing to me; it reminded me of the “Left Behind” series, except with a giant gap instead of the punishing of the sinners. What happens to the sinners in your side’s fantasy? Where do they go? They’re not there at the end, so are they converted, killed, excluded?
I’m kind of skeptical of the Singularity idea, even if its true, though, it’s not a religious ‘moment’. Whether or not it happens it’s no my place to kill ‘sinners’. If it is possible to actually live in some type of virtual world, it would seem then that sinners would be their own worse enemies as they would essentially be living with themselves (but then they do that anyway, ever read “No Exit”?)
But what makes the various “immortality” fantasies creepy IMO is they’re not presented as fantasies, or as fiction. Science “really is” going to cure disease, grant eternal life, create a perfect society, and transcend every limit known to man any day now. There’s no limits. It’s all not only inevitable, but right around the corner.
In respect to curing disease, science has gone a great ways towards that. In terms of stopping aging, I have no idea if its possible. I suspect what they would discover is that cancer and other diseases are somewhat ‘asymtopic’….as you get older their odds go up greatly and they get more and more aggressive. But again you’re not really quoting the ‘science section’ but the Singularity book…..which is one guy whose basically a technological optimist. Have you actually read anything else from the science section rather than just Ray Kurzweil?
Even if you did cure all disease and stop aging your immortality is only a relative one. Every year you have such and such chance of a fatal accident. If you take common causes of death off the table (cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc.) you just increase the number of fatal accidents (live more years, you get more ‘lottery tickets’ whose prize is a plane crash, a car crash, your TV falling into your bathtub etc.). Even if you got an Ian Banks type of ‘post scarcity’ society where tech. makes it hard to even die in freak accidents, well you still got the whole heat death of the universe which is a mortality for anything based on matter (that would be bodies or some type of giant computer).
May 18th, 2011 | 7:31 am
Blake,
Or it could just be that there’s more advantage to claiming to be Christian, regardless of one’s faith.
?
It could be that atheists are more likely to commit the sort of white collar, upper-class crimes that are less likely to be prosecuted.
Probably not. Recall the CIA guy who was a huge Opus Dei member who nonetheless spend decades selling secrets to the USSR. Recall Bernie Madoff was known as a wounderful friend to various Jewish charities and causes.
More likely IMO is that most atheists come to their atheism after a period of serious thought about the subject. In contrast many Christians are Christians by ‘default’….they take the religion they were raised with and assume they will be it unless they get around to thinking about it and discover to do something else. Hence many criminals, who mostly aren’t people who’ve thought a lot about applying ethics to their lives, are simply people who’ve never bothered to think about religion enough to even consider reject it. Hence since most people aren’t raised atheist, they have an advantage in that they actually cared about religion enough to make a decision about it. That mindset, IMO, is more likely one that will rule out rather ‘easy’ moral issues like “don’t steal, don’t rape”.
Or maybe our society has just fallen into the habit of legalizing whatever things atheists on the whole like to do, for instance killing babies.
Well:
http://www.abortionno.org/Resources/fastfacts.html
Not sure you can really use ‘no affiliation’ as a proxy for atheist, you probably can’t. (Without going to the original source, I’m going to guess the percentages add to more than 100% because respondants were allowed to identify with multiple religions….). Either way you got nearly 90% of abortions being done on women who choose to self identify with a major US Christian religion of some sort which implies they probably had at least some minimial exposure to that faith rather than just being a straight up atheist (Jewish women I’m excluding here because you do have some Jewish people who identify themselves as Jewish but also affirm a belief that there is no God). The reason abortion isn’t ‘safe, legal and rare‘ isn’t because the abortion clinics are clogged with women wearing Christopher Hitchens t-shirts.
May 18th, 2011 | 8:14 am
Blake –
“Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone, but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.” – Ethan Allen
I think you’ll find that Hitchens doesn’t thing of himself as superhuman. But even then, there’s a difference between things that are non-rational and ‘irrational’. I don’t have to have a particular reason to prefer ice cream to pie, I just do. There’s no particular rational reason for that, but that doesn’t mean the preference is contrary to reason.
Take ‘trust’, for example. Are you really going to say that evidence has no part in establishing trust?
May 18th, 2011 | 8:23 am
AB –
“Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other ‘sins’ are invented nonsense.” – Robert A. Heinlein
Most atheists don’t put it so pithily, but in my experience most atheists use that standard in practice. And they do consider themselves to sin, and work for forgiveness or atonement where possible.
May 18th, 2011 | 8:32 am
Blake –
You offer a suggestion, but you don’t seem to want to back it up. If you want to demonstrate it, go find a book in the science section that doesn’t seem like it would have anything to do with ‘utopian visions’ and show that it nevertheless contains utopian language.
You said “all” the books in the science section had such language, and that you weren’t seeking it out. Should be fairly simple to demonstrate.
May 18th, 2011 | 9:37 am
“He can even take the story that encapsulates the Jewish rejection of human sacrifice — the only folk in the Syriac Civilization to do so — and think it is an actual command to kill one’s eldest son. ”
But my point is not about God´s command in that particular story. My point is about the reason Abraham accepted it in the first place is, without questioning. As you said, human sacrifice was a common practice, and it was religiously motivated. If Gods commands me to kill my son, I will do it without hesitation; after all, is the will of a deity. That logic is what I have a problem with it. And that logic is precisely what is exalted by many commentators of that biblical passage: “A test for the faith of Abraham”. On the contrary, I will call it “a testimony of the foolishness of divine command theory”.
May 18th, 2011 | 9:49 am
“Sergio, their argument is that because God is the author of reason, his laws are discoverable by reason. They are not capricious. They are reasonable because he is reason himself.”
That is certainly NOT true when speaking of Aristotle or Plato (Both accepted the idea of a God, but not a rule giver. In the case of Aristotle it was more an impersonal being that is the first cause o everything). I am not even sure that is the case of Aquinas either.
May 18th, 2011 | 11:05 am
“More likely IMO is that most atheists come to their atheism after a period of serious thought about the subject. In contrast many Christians are Christians by ‘default’….they take the religion they were raised with and assume they will be it unless they get around to thinking about it and discover to do something else.”
Boonton, in my experience, most atheists do give serious thought to the subject, but I’m also confident saying there is often an event (death of a loved one, crime/disease, abuse by parents, etc.) that serves as the trigger for the thought. For most atheists I’ve known or read about their decision is highly, highly colored by a visceral emotional reaction to that event. Very rarely is it a matter of coldly rational deliberation.
Additionally, five years of teaching theology would lead me to strongly disagree with your claim that most Christians “are Christians by default”. Quite the opposite. Most Christians have really struggled with the core questions (Recognizing the reality of evil, is God good? Does He exist? Was Jesus just a human being?, etc.). In Catholic high schools, at least, those are addressed specifically in the curriculum, and students are exposed (for a semester or year) to other religions.
Finally, that “women with no religious affiliation obtain 23.7% of all abortions” is interesting, because it either indicates a percentage feel enough guilt about the act–and recognize it’s incompatible with their religious beliefs–that they don’t want to report their religion, or it possibly shows atheists/agnostics get abortions in greater proportion than other groups (i.e. they are less than 10% of the general population, but may be getting 23.7% of the abortions).
@ David Nickols: “All scripture is taken to be inspired, so it makes no sense to choose one book of the New Testament over another.”
Have to disagree with you there. It is Church teaching that the Old Testament can only be fully understood in light of the New Testament. Additionally, we find the Jesus, the Apostles, and Paul all arguing against your point. Christ corrects the Pharisees interpretation of Scripture on several occasions, calls Himself the fulfillment of the Law and prophets, all while saying not one iota of the Law will pass away until He remakes heaven and earth.
Paul, Peter, etc. in Acts and elsewhere say portions of the Law no longer apply because of Christ (circumcision, dietary restrictions, etc.). There was still a purpose for God originally ordaining those things (health/hygiene in the ancient world), but they are no longer necessary.
As far as your examination of the word “eternal” and the frequency and intent of its use, you need to bear in mind Jesus also used synonyms for that word, therefore multiplying his point and strengthening the literal interpretation in this instance.
You may have only found “eternal” used twice in relation to Hell, but you overlook that He also described Hell as a place where “the worm does not die”, used the synonym “everlasting” in relation to it. Furthermore, Revelations says Hell lasts “forever and ever”.
May 18th, 2011 | 11:09 am
Ray
“Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone, but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.” – Ethan Allen
Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem seems to say that reason will always be incomplete….and he uses reason itself to prove it!
May 18th, 2011 | 11:16 am
I’m not saying anyone on these boards ascribes to what I’m about to say, but I know people who do…It’s interesting that some people who reject the existence of God on the grounds that Hell might be eternal have no problem with the thought that there is no life after death. In other words, they accept everlasting death.
So in their view, once you die, that is eternal, but heaven forbid Hell might be everlasting. They have a problem with the thought of a person being punished eternally for “finite actions”, but not with the thought that a murderer committed an act that permanently and irrevocably annihilated a human being. Seems like a crime with infinite consequences to me–if the atheists are right.
I just find that an interesting logical disconnect or hypocrisy among a certain brand of atheism.
May 18th, 2011 | 11:16 am
Sergio, my mistake. I meant to refer to only Christian theologians like Aquinas. My point again is that there is no conflict in Christianity between reason and morality. God’s laws do not reflect an arbitrary will.
May 18th, 2011 | 11:34 am
Artaban –
You’re comparing apples to Buicks.
There’s a slight ambiguity in the way you phrased things, but I’m going to assume you didn’t mean that atheists have no problem with murder itself, right? Atheists can and do think murder is a bad thing.
Your claim appears to be that atheists are untroubled by the idea that ‘murder is forever’, right? But thinking that is the case is not the same thing as ‘not having a problem with it’. Indeed, it makes murder a very bad thing, since it ends a life permanently. An agent that does something permanently and eternally negative does something evil.
But that is entirely consistent with ‘having a problem with’ the idea of hell. In that case, it’s not a ‘brute fact of nature’ as a conscious agent consciously condemning another agent to a permanent and eternal punishment.
But no one -atheist or theist – is claiming that murderers are infinitely good, right?
May 18th, 2011 | 11:39 am
Boonton –
That’s how its often presented, but that’s not really what the theorem says.
It shows that no finite set of axioms can encompass all of number theory. You can create a system that includes Godel’s ‘unprovable statement’ as an axiom, no problem. That system will also contain an unprovable statement, but you can add that to your list of axioms ad infinitum.
May 18th, 2011 | 11:53 am
Artaban,
I don’t think that if life is finite, death is eternal. That makes no sense to me. For whom is death eternal? Not for the dead person, who ceases to exist at death. A living person can experience eternal life, but a dead person cannot experience eternal death, since death is non-existence, and the non-existent can’t experience their non-existence. Eternal existence makes sense. Eternal non-existence is meaningless.
There is no conceptual problem with an atheist acknowledging that a murder annihilates his or her victim irrevocably. For the atheist murderer, though, this does not amount to an infinite offense. The idea of a human committing an infinite offense seems absurd to me. Murder is, of course, the ultimate crime in many respects, but since murder victims would not have been immortal had they not been murdered, they are not losing something infinite. They are losing a finite amount of their finite lives.
I don’t know why anyone would reject the existence of God on the grounds that hell might be eternal. One would just reject the existence of hell, or the idea that punishment is eternal.
It still remains a puzzle to me how a finite creature could merit infinite punishment (by which I mean everlasting physical torture, which many people consider to be what hell is all about).
May 18th, 2011 | 12:08 pm
Ray,
You are quite correct that I’m not claiming atheists approve of murder. I suppose I should have used the word “accepting” instead. Many can somehow accept that a murderer commits a negative eternal action, but cannot accept that people freely choose the eternal state we refer to as Hell.
Who is this “conscious agent consciously condemning another agent to permanent and eternal punishment”?
It’s not the Christian God. The New Testament clearly states “God wills all men be saved”. This is the same God who said, “How I longed to gather you like a mother hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings…but you would not have it.”
People choose Hell. For God to force Himself on them would be a denial of their free will.
May 18th, 2011 | 9:52 pm
Artaban –
Does God give people the choice of annihilation, of ceasing to exist? Most Christian philosophy holds that God literally holds people in existence, that without God’s active effort anything – everything – would just ‘poof away’.
If hell is really that bad – like eternal fire, say – then God is literally holding people’s feet in that fire, no?
May 18th, 2011 | 10:39 pm
Ray, hell’s existence doesn’t mean God has forced them into it. If God is good, then inasmuch as people choose evil they are choosing to separate themselves from God. And if God ultimately allows them to make their choice . . . well then what is separation from goodness but “hell”?
May 19th, 2011 | 7:57 am
I think you’ll find that Hitchens doesn’t thing of himself as superhuman. But even then, there’s a difference between things that are non-rational and ‘irrational’.
You don’t even seem to understand what I’m saying.
Of course Hitchens doesn’t think of himself as a superhuman. But his atheism is clearly tied in with his denial of his own place in the universe. He says – repeatedly, loudly, with great vigor – that he is nothing, he is a speck, he is random, he is meaningless. But as it is actually happening that he is dying, it astonishes and offends him. He doesn’t seriously see himself as meaningless, a speck, random – and yet, his beliefs will allow no other meaning. All that is left is cognitive dissonance: he says one thing but doesn’t feel that it is true, and so he writes about this experience of actually seeing proof that all that he has claimed to “know” has, in fact, been true all along. He really is nothing. He really is just a body, and bodies fail. What do you do with that?
Well, if you’re an atheist, you do nothing with that. It doesn’t matter, right? Which leads us to the question of why should anyone care to read anything Hitchens writes about the process of disintegration and how his intellect interacts with his dying body, anyway?
The answer is that life isn’t meaningless. Hitchens can’t prove it, but he’s feeling it. He just doesn’t know what to do with it yet, and that is why people read – to see what he’ll make of it.
May 19th, 2011 | 8:19 am
Ken,
Then people are allowed to change their mind after spending some time in hell no?
I mean the ‘low brow’ Christian way of viewing it does seem a bit like “Let’s Make a Deal”. In this very tiny sliver of time called ‘life’, half of which for most people is spent being immature and just trying to figure out how to get by, you have to make a few snap decisions “Curtain number one is the ‘Christian curtain’, number two is the Jewish one, three is the Muslim, four is atheism….choose now!” that are irrevocable for all of eternity. If that’s really how it is it’s a bit too coy to say God isn’t choosing anything, only us.
May 19th, 2011 | 8:39 am
Ken – If hell is eternal, then there’s no choice to leave it, right? And God keeps people in existence, in what’s alleged to be the worst possible torment, forever – actively maintaining that state.
May 19th, 2011 | 11:13 am
Boonton,
Hebrews 9:27 says “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” I’m not a fundamentalist, so I don’t believe that God judges everyone on whether they come to believe the Christian gospel and live accordingly. I believe that some see the truth of the gospel and turn away, sealing their doom, but that many, many others for one reason or another hear the words of the gospel but not its truth. God judges their hearts, just as he judges the hearts of Christians. None of us can earn our salvation, but we all choose between good and evil in a million ways.
Ray, who knows whether hell is an eternal state, or a way station to non-existence. But a just God has the right to punish evil.
May 19th, 2011 | 12:03 pm
Ken –
What is the purpose of punishment?
May 19th, 2011 | 12:09 pm
Ray, what is the purpose of justice?
May 19th, 2011 | 1:44 pm
We wouldn’t consider justice without mercy. Saying stealing is wrong is one thing, saying a 12 yr old boy who stole a candy bar should serve a 50 year prison sentence is totally unjust.
Likewise this conception of justice that grants infinite punishment for finite crime does seem to be missing something essential…especially if, after 999,999,999 years you had been firmly convinced that it was wrong of you to cheat on your wife for 10 years while on earth. I suppose this may make sense if your life is your only opportunity to change and afterwards the thing that’s ‘you’ is kind of frozen so if you died an evil SOB you’ll be an evil SOB even after trillions of eons of ‘punishment’.
But then is that a life as in ‘afterlife’? To never change, learn, grow?
May 19th, 2011 | 2:37 pm
Boonton, I don’t think God sentences proverbial 12-year old boys to hell for proverbially stealing candy bars; I think adults with their eyes wide open make moral choices, and those have consequences. And punishment might make someone decide that the crime wasn’t worth it, but since when does it have the power to convince anyone that the crime was morally wrong?
May 19th, 2011 | 3:07 pm
Then people are allowed to change their mind after spending some time in hell no?
CS Lewis wrote a speculative fiction called “The Great Divorce” in which he depicted purgatory and hell as the same place – depending on whether you ever leave or not.
There’s a bus that leaves regularly, any time you want to go. But in order to actually enter heaven, you have to open your mind to the way things are – instead of trying to make things be the way you think they ought.
May 19th, 2011 | 3:12 pm
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t but that doesn’t really get to the grit of the matter:
1. ‘Eyes wide open’ or not, it’s hard to compute infinite punishment as just for a finite crime.
2. If a person is convinced that they were wrong….either as a result of a punishment or simply because after thinking about it for eons one may ‘change their mind’…well then can you leave hell or not?
May 19th, 2011 | 3:51 pm
Ken, I asked first! :)
May 19th, 2011 | 4:15 pm
Ray, my answer is in my question. Justice calls for punishment when wrongdoing is done. And the wrongdoer doesn’t get to determine what it is!
May 19th, 2011 | 4:18 pm
Blake
There’s a bus that leaves regularly, any time you want to go. But in order to actually enter heaven, you have to open your mind to the way things are – instead of trying to make things be the way you think they ought.
I read that book too, pretty good. Also good was the quip a friend once told me that hell was being gathered around a table with a fantastic feast but our arms are straight forward and we can’t bend them so we can never bring the food to our mouths. On the other hand, heaven is exactly the same place but we feed each other.
Both images are nice but they are not the primary image provided by many Christians where your life is a clock that’s running down and if you don’t ‘open your mind’ by the time that runs out, its over and done with period.
May 19th, 2011 | 5:31 pm
[...] Also, check out the conversation about Stephen Hawking’s comments over at First Thoughts. [...]
May 19th, 2011 | 5:35 pm
Boonton wrote: “it’s hard to compute infinite punishment as just for a finite crime.”
Unless you belong to one of the Christian denominations that understands hell not as “endless in time” but rather as a state “outside of time”.
There is a difference.
May 19th, 2011 | 7:49 pm
Ken –
Sure, justice is ensuring that appropriate rewards and punishments are received. Got it.
Now… what is the purpose of punishment?
May 19th, 2011 | 9:41 pm
The purpose of punishment is to punish, of course. :-) For us that also has a purpose like warning other potential wrongdoers away from the same crime, or rehabilitating the criminal, which I assume is what you’re getting at.
But note that word “also.” First and foremost, punishment gives the wrongdoer what he deserves. And if hell allows the man caught in it no way out, why does he deserve one? What better does he deserve for choosing evil even when mercy is offered?
May 20th, 2011 | 8:26 am
Does your model really work, though, Ken? Most people don’t believe animals have free will, and yet they punish animals who misbehave. Sure seems like deterrence is the intent there.
Even with humans, if the primary purpose of punishment is retribution, then considerations like ignorance (‘I didn’t know she was there when I backed up the van’) or insanity would seem to make no difference. But in practice, people seem to want punishment to be inflicted only in cases where it would reasonably have a deterrent effect. If someone didn’t intend harm, and wasn’t acting with negligence, then most people seem to conclude that there’s no need to file charges. And if on the other hand someone is insane, then punishment is no deterrent and dealing with the insanity is the primary concern, not retribution. (Of course, because of this, there’s motivation for sane malefactors to pretend to be insane to escape consequences, but that’s a separate issue.)
More, most people accept that punishment corresponds to intent, not results – to the degree of responsibility involved. It’s generally agreed that the deliberate, premeditated murder of one person (first degree murder) should draw a harsher punishment than an unpremeditated crime of passion that kills two (say, an adulterous spouse and their lover, second degree murder), which in turn should draw a harsher punishment than the negligent killing of several (manslaughter). Even though more people die, less punishment is imposed.
If punishment is about what people ‘deserve’, and not deterrence, then why does intent matter?
May 20th, 2011 | 9:36 am
“I read that book too, pretty good. Also good was the quip a friend once told me that hell was being gathered around a table with a fantastic feast but our arms are straight forward and we can’t bend them so we can never bring the food to our mouths. On the other hand, heaven is exactly the same place but we feed each other.”
Yes, but my anecdote had a point.
The reason you can’t change your mind once you’re in Hell is because you’re in Hell. If you had control – or the power to choose – it wouldn’t be Hell.
The trick is knowing what you can choose and what you can’t. That’s where people get hung up.
When Lewis wrote The Great Divorce (not a particularly good book IMO, certainly not his best, however much I like the metaphor of the bus from purgatory) he was trying to explain a concept. Sin is not an innocent person getting tricked into an unjust epic cosmic torture chamber. Sin means hanging on to that which makes the sinner (and usually everyone else) miserable. Sin is about clinging to illusions, to false gods and false beliefs, to desires even when they’re hurtful and wrong. Sin is about denying or trying to deny the cost of what one does or what one wants. Sin is that which estranges a person from God, from life, from love, from happiness.
May 20th, 2011 | 9:55 am
Ray, I thought I’d answered this objection in my second paragraph above. And who could know a man’s intentions better than God? God doesn’t punish arbitrarily, or in a one-size-fits-all fashion.
Given that we have free will (not wholly, but God takes that into account. Psalm 103:13-4: “The LORD is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him. For he knows how weak we are; he remembers we are only dust”), we really just reap what we sow. Since God is good, if we choose evil, we’re choosing to separate ourselves from God. And complete separation from good is hell.
May 20th, 2011 | 12:03 pm
The reason you can’t change your mind once you’re in Hell is because you’re in Hell. If you had control – or the power to choose – it wouldn’t be Hell.
It’s been a while since I read the book but the impression I had was that the people in hell could choose, and some even edged kind of close to coming out of hell but ultimately fell down because of their own immaturity and shortsightedness. Nonetheless, if you’re going to have linear time I had the impression that at least a few of these characters could transition out of hell.
This leads to another interesting question, could those in heaven choose to leave? I suppose the ‘out’ will be the claim that heaven is so wonderfully awesome that no one would want to choose to leave…but leaving that aside is the choice there or not?
Sin is not an innocent person getting tricked into an unjust epic cosmic torture chamber. Sin means hanging on to that which makes the sinner (and usually everyone else) miserable. Sin is about clinging to illusions, to false gods and false beliefs, to desires even when they’re hurtful and wrong. Sin is about denying or trying to deny the cost of what one does or what one wants. Sin is that which estranges a person from God, from life, from love, from happiness
This I have no problem with at all believe it or not. In fact it makes all the sense in the world to me. But one aspect of human nature that seems undeniably good is our ability to create. We create stories, arguments, ideas etc. and even create our selves (every time we change our mind or learn something new we literally create a new self that’s different from the old self). If you said that death is final in the sense that we can no longer create after that, from a material perspective that’s certainly true. Hitler’s last chance to do anything good or bad came right before the bullet entered his skull. If things were left there then all well and good but with an afterlife you now bring time back into it. It implies Hitler, after the bullet entered his skull, is either walking around saying to himself he should have killed more Jews or is saying he was all wrong about killing Jews. Can he change? Can he stick to his guns for a billion years but then decide what was he ever doing, he was hopelessly wrong?
If you say the afterlife is about a ‘you’ that’s basically frozen from your last moment on earth then the eternal aspect seems to make sense. If you were an SOB a reanimated you frozen as a SOB doesn’t deserve anything nice. But being ‘frozen’ isn’t a life. Whatever that is isn’t a human life…(this is somewhat akin to my thoughts on reincarnation…..so what if I was General Lee in an earlier life? I can’t remember being General Lee so for all real intents and purposes Lee died when he died and is still dead). Being ‘outside of time’ does have a nice modern ring (esp. nice that it fits with Einstein and time being but a dimension and all)….but I wonder if that’s a bit too much of a ‘nice ring’. ‘Afterlife’ implies a distinction between ‘Before’, if you have before and after….well two points always define a line and if you got time in a line you’re not ‘outside of time’ but right smack in linear time.
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