Oh, those New Atheists! Standing on their soapboxes in Hyde park, speaking in public, writing books - just like the Christians, except in a ratio of what? About 1:10,000? No, not that much. I don't know of any atheists who have their own networks preaching atheism 24 hours a day. And the last time I tuned in Relevant Radio, I didn't hear any atheists talking. And I only know one or two publishers who specialize in atheistic writings, compared to maybe a couple of thousand in the US alone. But that's no excuse! Those rude atheists are actually standing up in public and arguing in favor of their beliefs, of all things! In public! Where do they get the nerve? Who do they think they are, Trained Profesional Theologians.

You also forgot to mention that their arguments are simplistic. They demolish the arguments of the ancients in a paragraph or even a sentence and don't even address the polished efforts of modern theologians. Theology has not stood still since the 1900s! Theologians have very nearly patched every hole in the once-hallowed arguments of their forebears and as soon as they finally get the last one or two loose threads nailed down they will triumph over the New Atheists once and for all.

That's if there's any civilization left after the atheist's depredations, of course. It seems those terrible men dare to tell people that they are mortal and the universe doesn't even know they exist. Thank God my great aunt Gertrude isn't alive to hear that! Er...

But take heart - the New Atheists are sure to descend into immorality and nihilism. After all, why have morality at all if life, nature and history are not moral? To enable groups of people to live productively together? What good is that? What has living in cooperating groups ever done for anybody, besides enabling trading and the division of labor that enables us to read and write these words without knowing how computers work, let along how to build one while eating regularly, wearing clothes, living indoors and enjoying a life style that would have made King Midas weep with envy? I mean, have morals just for that? How pathetic. Better to freeze alone in a snowdrift! If you never have anything to do with people you hardly need morality, do you?

My advice: don't even try to argue with such people. All they have is knowledge (as well as the word knowledge) when what the world really needs is simple faith that God made us 6,000 years ago, condemned us all to death because Eve ate a fruit, drowned all but eight people in the Flood and then took pity on us and sent His Son to die in our place instead so that some or all of us could maybe be saved. Atheists, old or new, will never have those comforting beliefs!

P.S. Blaise Pascal was an excellent mathematician who didn't do so well as a philosopher. He should have stopped at "I think, therefore I am" and the evil demon who might be putting thoughts into his head while he slept.

Nietzsche was not, as you claim, 'the only truly honest atheist in the history of philosophy'; her was merely the only truly religious atheist in the history of philosophy. In fact, he was not even that; the domesticated doomsayer and counter-factual theist is a fiction of Christian apology. He would have diagnosed your denial of 'a third option' as yet another system of Christian nihilism, the ghost of Truth and Goodness buoyed up on the fetid under-currents of hatred, chaos, and despair.
To put it precisely: Christianity has a tendency to admit of only one valid perspective, the grandest one possible: God's own. There is no independent human vantage point; that must be subsumed under God's own Truth. Everything is tied in God: value, meaning, morality, truth. God is everything, and without, God, nothing. As the materialist vision of science expanded, this picture became yet starker: without God, all there is to the God's eye view is the world as described by science, the one of mindless forces, and energy, and matter, and nothing of value or goodness or beauty. There is only one possible perspective, for the Christian, and from it one sees either God, meaning, value, hope; or the vast desolation of spacetime, inhabited but briefly by ignorant and foolish humans. From this perspective, it is either Christianity or nihilism. But it is a Christian perspective. One may accept nihilism as an athiest, but only by retaining the theistic assumption that there is only one real perspective. And there is no reason that an atheist should do that. An atheist can see, as enjoined to by Nietzsche, a plurality of perspectives, not least of all the basically human one, in which such things as knowledge, freedom, and peace have immense value. David Hume was not a dishonest atheist; nor was Bertrand Russell or Bernard Williams. Nietzsche himself tried to overcome nihilism by creating his own set of values, which in places diverged quite strongly from those of the 'basically human perspective' I just outlined above. These atheist thinks simply didn't accept certain theistic premises: in other words, they were fuller, more irrelgious, and, perhaps, more honest atheists.

To Dave Mullenix,

It is by now a common place for so-called New Atheists like Dawkins to get important descriptive facts about history and about religion wrong--like they've never seriously studied the subject. You seem to have absorbed this tendency. For after your P.S., you manage to mistake Pascal for Descartes--something no one with even a passing acquaintance with the philosophy of religion, the history of thought, or the history of mathematics would ever do. Perhaps before you pile one ad hoc assertion upon another you might be bothered to get the most elementary facts straight.

"The battle is still between nihilism and theism. There is no third option."

So you assert. I'm not familiar with your definition of nihilism. Accepting that I have a limited life and that the earth will eventually be destroyed does not make me nihilist. I do not have to imagine that there is an afterlife or that I have a soul to reject nihilism.

Developing my question from your explicit put-down of the title and your accusations about atheism that are not inherent in atheism, I must ask, why are the just-so scenarios of theists valid? What makes them defensible when they are unsubstantiated?

Mussolini describes fascism as relativism par excellence. He noted that relativism was a radical theoretical construct in Germany, one which might herald its military revenge. In Italy, he said, they were relativists by intuition. From the fact that there are no true categories of men and things each person was right to construct his own ideology and to enforce it with all the might of which he was able. Mussolini's notion fits, of course, with Nietzsche's lionization of Genghis Khan (the fabled "blond beast" of his writing). And how could Nietzsche lionize Genghis Khan? It wasn't due to his fondness for the toleration or his embrace of multiple perspectives but his rejection of all theoretical/philosophical/ideological perspectives in favor of will to power--what Augustine calls libido dominandi when describing the Romans of old. Nietzsche didn't write to encourage us to adopt yet another new perspective that appreciated more perspectives. He didn't write to encourage a new way of thinking. As the historian of philosophy Donald Palmer puts it--he wrote to subvert thought itself--hence his carelessness concerning such basics of rational thought like the law of noncontradiction. So Nietzsche would think a philosophical perspective that embraced a plurality of perspectives--especially one that did so on normative grounds--as servile as the morality he wished to reject.

On other matters, it's not at all clear that Hume was an atheist. His work--whether or not he intends it this way--is clearly a reductio ad absurdum refutation of empiricism. He seems to be aware of this. In one of his letters he writes that he never intended to reject the principle of causation but rather to show that the principle could never be established on empiricist grounds. Moreover, Hume's argument against miracles (which is certainly not the same as an embrace of atheism) has been demonstrated to be logically fallacious. It is circular at best and stands in self-contradiction with the rest of his thought, at worst. As for Bertrand Russell, it's as if all his philosophical abilities desert him when he writes Why I Am Not A Christian. That work certainly is not taken seriously by contemporary, analytic philosophers of religion. It's arguments are both caricatured and wildly dated.

Dave: You're confusing Pascal with Descartes.

Gosh, Dave, i am glad red yur comment. I am a real dope believer and all that, butt even i,in my ignerncwe, new that DayCartes was the 1 who sed. Je pense donc je suiis and not Blaze Pascal. But I dint know that tyhe world was made 6,000 years ago. I thought it was maybe a coouple of million or somethning. Like right after the dynosours was made.

Aisia said "Nietzsche himself tried to overcome nihilism by creating his own set of values, which in places diverged quite strongly from those of the 'basically human perspective' I just outlined above."

It is true that, without God, there are possibilities other than nihilism. We can create perspectives, values, norms, and impose them on the universe. To do so is to engage in pure fantasy. It is an act of will. (Let's leave aside the troubling political implications of accepting the idea that each person can and should create his or her own system of meaning and then impose it on the world - including other people.)

As such, however, it is not beyond argument. The mere fact that a system of meaning is subjective, willful, composed entirely of fantasy, does not remove it from judgment and criticism. Rather, the self-created ethics and meanings of the New Atheists simply take the debate to another stage: Aesthetics.

Very well, let's do that. New Atheists are committed to an empty Universe that nonetheless has such-and-such a scheme of meaning, purpose, morals. We Theists are committed to another scheme, one based on tens of thousands of years of human tradition, one that is universal to the human species, one that has been tried and tested around the globe for as long as human culture has existed. By Arnold's Test-of-Time standard, or by any reasonable aesthetic, contemporary religions are not merely worthy, they are sublime. Against this the New Atheists propose an empty universe with amateurish systems of meaning that amount to little more than a soup of skepticism spiced with a dash of epicureanism. Bleh.

The Universe of Christian theology is exciting and fun, and the Universe of the New Atheists is pretty boring. By such considerations, who would want to be a New Atheist? You know who: Kids who find great fun in kicking down and destroying the good things that other kids have built. Remove Christianity from the picture, though. What fun is New Atheism then? There's nothing to do in that Universe. It's a yawner.

@Paul: To say "it's not clear at all that Hume was an atheist" is a bit misleading. While not perfectly clear, it is certainly a strong assumption that he was at worst an atheist and at best an agnostic. However, that does nothing to take away from your analysis of his work, which I think is pretty much spot on. The only thing I will add is that I think Reid is more accurate in his prescription to Hume's arguments when he says what Hume really shows is that the "way of ideas" (the notion that we have intermediate mental objects of perception [an idea shared by both rationalists and empiricists]) is the real problem in early modern philosophy.

I've enjoyed reading the comments.

"The battle is still between nihilism and theism. There is no third option."

I too think this is going a little further than it needs. While I agree that the alternatives (e.g. utilitarianism, or Camus' absurdism) make for a pretty thin gruel, they do offer more a more substantive answer to the question of "Why bother?" than nihilism does.

(BTW I'm curious. Are you purposely echoing Peirce's "Fixation of Belief" or is that a happy accident?)

Dave,

All of those values you apparently take for granted, yet none of which has its historical origin in atheist thought, need constantly to be defined, refined in context, and defended (living in cooperating groups, living productively, enjoying a lifestyle, etc.). One cannot be a serious thinker and take it for granted that there is, to begin with, a moral (as opposed to biological) survival imperative at all. One certainly cannot take for granted that cooperation is always (or ever) better than conquest, or that such a vague notion as "cooperation" can be asserted as a moral value without begging every important question about, e.g., whose laws will organize and protect our cooperative efforts, what lifestyles are morally defensible, and so on and so on. I do not see how an atheist can answer such questions, except to do so arbitrarily. I'm afraid you reinforce Oakes's point for him very well: The New Atheism uncritically asserts a set of "human" values, while unwittingly destroying the intellectual foundations for those values. Nietzsche, on the other hand, was not so naive.

Draw a four-box matrix on a piece of paper. Across the top edge if the matrix mark the two columns Can Be Proved and Can Be Disproved. Along the left edge of the matrix mark the two rows Created Fro Nothing (ex nihilo) and Always Existed (ab aeternum). Now in each of the four boxes write the word No.

In other words, the proposition that the universe was created cannot be proved, nor can it be disproved.

And the proposition that the universe has existed from eternity cannot be proved and cannot be disproved.

There, I just save you a lot of trouble working through St. Thomas' discussion on this topic. I think the matrix summarizes his position.

Now the universe WAS CREATED, but man knows that because God revealed it to us. But the powers of our natural reason cannot reach that conclusion. A Christian may BELIEVE that the universe was created, but he doesn't KNOW that as a fact.

It is impossible to scientifically prove the existence of the Big Bang. Cosmologists estimate when the Big Bang happened using mathmatical models and celestial observations ("scenarios?"). The most recent observations peer deeply into the history of the universe so many billions of years. From that oint, mathmatical calculations extrapolate the Beginning at so many more billions of years earlier.

We know from Aristotle that a line can be divided into an infinite number of parts, provided that the resulting parts are of equal length.

We know from Einstein that space and time are convertible.

Hence, it is possible to divide in half the distance in time between the observed age of the universe and its mathmatical age. We can divide the result in half again and again, ad infinitum, without reaching the Beginning Of Things.

Thus, it is impossible to empirically prove the Big Bang. It is also impossible to philosophically prove it.

If God wanted the universe to always have existed, He could have decreed so. He didn't do that. We "know" that He created the material universe ex nihilo because of revelation, -- but not because of philosophy or science.

Dave - I think the evil demon whispering to Pascal as he slept must have been Descartes. And, good luck on all that nifty cooperation as you stand on your own soapbox insulting with sarcasm the vast majority of your fellow men without the slightest idea what they actually believe. It is as though you've read a children's book or two and believe you are now such a learned scholar that you can dismiss without consequence the wealth of understanding developed by learned scholars who've devoted their their lives to that purpose, and in a spirit of humility which causes them to exercise care and diligence, because they are well aware that untested assertions might well be wrong. Grow up, man, and know what you are dismissing.

Seems the children of the light are always eager for the coming brotherhood of man as long as it doesn't include those they're currently surrounded by.

Did Dave just confuse Pascal with Descartes? That's very funny, considering.

What's so difficult about the New Atheists is that they really don't want to meaningfully engage. Their arguments, rather than probing, are cheap and shallow and devoid of facts.

They misrepresent and present "factoids" as truth. Their fatal flaw is that they are closed to really learning.

They have a Protestant proof-texting about their argumentation. They look for bits of information and quotes to back up their conclusions.

Serious inquiry would start with a question, and then consider ALL data in context.

Thank you for the observant essay, Father Oakes. I apologize on behalf of the internet for all the vicious silliness that will now follow. These pieces mentioning atheism typically generate circuses of mad frothing, accusation, and dismissal, as you are probably aware ("I speak from experience").

But as they attack, remember the silent majority.

I appreciate the earnest atheists challenging us to give an account for our hope -- independent of the actual quality of the challenge. What a boon it would be for a Nietzsche to be among us! One prefers thoughtful challenges, of course, but even the basic ones are instructive to the faith in a remedial way.

What remains intolerable, however, is the attitude, the approach, the condescension of the unstudied atheist's rhetoric. "Puffed-up braggarts" is well put. There is an intellectual disconnect in our conversation with them. For charity's sake I am willing to assume much of the blame lies with us. We speak of different subjects on different levels. But the problem in communication is assumed in their haste to be our ignorance or credulity or something we theists just somehow missed. Add the distance, anonymity, and amorality of internet discussion and all the ingredients are there for repetitious bickering. The mere mention of atheism is a catalyst for rancor, as this comment thread (and blog-hyperlinking) will soon prove.

I, for one, appreciate the presentation of your binary formula. The idea of "no third option" is useful, and there are subtleties to be explored. Unfortunately you will not get subtlety from us. The atheists of cyberspace will choose to take umbrage at being called nihilist rather than take your (and Nietzsche's) challenge to heart.

Nonetheless, keep supplying erudition and wisdom to the vast readership who do not take part in this discussion and who do not respond positively or negatively. We intuit the notions you ably describe, but we have not the wit to articulate or the training to ground them in the rich tradition of those who came before us, thinkers much smarter than us all. We are here, and we are listening.

1 Peter 3:15

It is not clear to me why we should accept that 'there is no third option'; that we have to choose between nihilistic atheism (amongs all the different forms of atheism in existence) and Biblical theism (amongst all the different forms of theism). Isn't this a type of logical fallacy known as 'the false dichotomy? I agree that, like Hoyle, we form our personal networks of beliefs into 'scenarios' that are coherent to us and meaningful to us as individuals, but the fact that the writer's mental scenario has only two options in it doesn't mean that mine must, too. There are two types of people in the world: those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don't...

It seems to me that there =must be= revelation from God.

If we do not believe that God has revealed himself to mankind, our arguments for, and against, God, serve us primarily in two ways:

(1) What seems to be the best summary statements regarding the world we observe? (This is the realm of primarily the atheistic argument.)

(2) On what grounds do we codify a moralistic behavior for mankind?
A few thoughts in this regard:
(a) The atheist might reply; "Who cares. This is not my job, and I'm not interested in that." To this I reply, "Oh, but you will be, soon enough."

This thought needs more explaining. But it won't be long until the atheist starts sounding a bit "theistic" in his communication of such things. "Kids, the reason we want to be honest is because it worked well for dad and mom, your grand parents, and the generations before them." Play this out 200 years from now, tell me that it will not take on a religious form. For instance, I have no idea how monogamous marriage will remain in "the code." But what is, and what is not, in "the code", becomes =the= debate, does it not?

(b) The theist must admit that we too are interested in influencing - not necessarily controlling - human behavior, primarily moralistic behavior.

(c) If theology is to the point where revelation from God, is no longer at the heart of the matter, and we regard "our stories" as mere mythology, and a "means to an end," we need to speak openly about this. As well, we need make this common knowledge in our local congregations.

This quote from Blaise Pascal speaks to me:
"We understand nothing of the works of God unless we take it as a principle that He wishes to blind some and to enlighten others."

In order to believe that to be true I must believe other people are going to receive things from God that I may not. This sucks, because now I have to consider much harder whether or not I am going to believe them. It also requires of me to be dependent upon them to some degree. Hence it is not all about my own personal abilities to discern, or more importantly, to have a precisely similar revelation bestowed upon me.

In fact, this is the only way I can get to accepting and believing in the revelation events proclaimed in the Bible. For this argument, consider only the Christ event - leave Genesis out of it for the moment. The Christ event is the heart of Christianity anyway. If this did not really happen in a manner close to that which is stated in the Bible, and proclaimed in our tradition, then it is only metaphor and myth. The story is then a mere tool. It is a "means to an end". If this is what we believe then we need to state this openly. What is this "end" of which we are primarily concerned?

I enjoyed Dave's rant. Aside from confusing Pascal and Descartes (has any atheist actually read Pascal?), I found it clever, fun, and not bereft of valid remarks. But then, since my own rebuttal of the New Atheism (Truth Behind the New Atheism) was published a few years ago, I've been confronted with so much semi-literate gibberish on the subject that I'm inclined to give folks like Dave the benefit of the doubt.

Dave, the New Atheists are a blessing. Not to atheism, at least not in the long run -- not after the present herd of positivist young pups begins to teeth and becomes ready for Pascal -- but to Christianity, to which many of those pups will I expect one day return. And I know I've found "Dizzy Dawkins" a blessing on a personal, intellectual level. One can hardly complain about an opposing pitcher who lobs 55 mile an hour fast balls over the heart of the plate, as if he expected the catcher's glove to explode on impact.

Nor does it hurt for them to challenge our sins, which it is always healthy to have done.

The distinction between scientific facts and the scenarios in which we understand them is useful and important. After that the article seems to veer off.

I am not at all convinced that undermining believe in God necessarily undermines science.

"This atheist scenario undermines science itself. If the 'knowledge' delivered up by 'science' only serves to puff up a pathetic animal doomed to die in an uncaring universe, why bother with science anyway? If the search for knowledge is nothing more than a vain attempt to puff oneself up like some miles gloriosus in a Falstaffian comedy, what’s the point?"

This is a terrible argument. Humans - either by purpose or accident (depending on your belief) - are innately curious and derive great satisfaction from discovery, accomplishment, and knowledge itself. Furthermore, regardless of a Christian or Athiest narrative THIS existence is temporary so any effort to learn is ultimately futile. From the Bible we know that this world will end and it's implied that earthly knowledge will be irrelevant when we are joined with Christ. Yet even devout Christians encourage secular education.

Scientific inquiry is an inescapable part of human nature and no fatalist philosophy will ever change that.

I suppose Buddhism could be considered a third way, inasmuch as it is neither theistic nor nihilistic; the goal of life is enlightenment (satori) through conformity to an objective moral cosmos (dharma). Buddha was silent on the question of God, declaring His existence to be a distraction from the unum necessarium.

Of course, it goes without saying that the "atheism" of Buddha has little if anything to do with the kind of atheism under discussion here. But for anyone who wants to embrace an atheism which does not logically entail nihilism, Buddha is perhaps the only route of escape. Strip man of being made in the image of God, and he becomes merely an image of the nihil from which he came, an "accidental collocation of atoms" in the words of Russell, or a "useless passion" in the words of Sartre.

If one dreads such a dreary and hopeless narrative but does not want to relinquish atheism, Buddhism is the way to go. And upon becoming "buddha", that is, upon becoming "awake", one will be in a better position to contemplate the existence of the big G.

"This Catholic priest held that if the universe is expanding, it must have begun as a “primeval atom.” Hoyle frankly admitted that his refusal to accept this obvious-seeming conclusion stemmed from his own personal philosophical/theological reasons"

The history of science is littered with examples of "obvious-seeming conclusions" which turned out to be incorrect. And it wouldn't surprise me if Lemaître had his own personal theological reasons for proposing a theory which looks a lot like creation ex nihilo. But in science, it doesn't matter why someone proposes a theory, or who proposes it. What matters is how well it can be supported.

The basis of science is recognition of the fact that we are vulnerable to errors of perception and reasoning. So science places a premium on theories which are testable, falsifiable, and which generate descriptions of what we should and should not see if the theory is true. Only the best-performing theories are considered robust (and that hardly includes the various Big Bang theories at this time) and even the most robust theories are held open for revision or rejection if new information should come to light.

Faith, on the other hand, is the commitment and leap-of-trust to belief with a level of confidence beyond what would be warranted by reason and evidence. Faith and reason are not merely independent foundations of belief, they are toxic to each other. If you hold a belief in proposition X on the basis of faith, then that forecloses any need to investigate, challenge, and test proposition X. And if you believe X based on evidence or reason, that renders faith totally superfluous. It also means you have no commitment or loyalty to X, which means you stand ready to discard it if it should turn out the reasoning was defective, or if the evidence lends more support to a different theory.

It has become popular of late to claim that science and reason are wedded to theism, and that they each support the other, and that atheism is somehow irrational anti-scientific nonsense. It used to be understood how reason and faith were mutually antithetical (see Luther), but with science, humans have been able to accomplish amazing things in a remarkably short period of time, compared to what was accomplished by religions over many centuries. So science has come to be seen as the gold standard of perceptive thinking, and apparently that's a measure of prestige that many theists would like to attach to their own beliefs--even if it means admitting by implication that simple faith is simply not good enough any more.

Dear Nick:

I don't know about you, but for my money I'd take Saint Francis of Assisi and the abolition of slavery over a heliocentric universe and quasars anyday, with no offense to brother sun or sister quasar. And no matter how much funding from the NSF, science never could produce a saint or a moral insight. So if I had to choose between religion and science I would choose religion; better to live under a geocentric universe as a moral giant than to live under a heliocentric universe as a moral troglodyte. But I don't have to choose between them. The Logos whom I adore is also the principle through which all things have come into being, including the physical laws governing the universe. I can have my cake and eat it too, can't I?

Hi Jordan

The several historians of philosophy who have contributed here will know that it’s problematic for those who follow theistic religions to claim ‘moral insights’ and recognise 'moral troglodytes'; Plato clearly set out the dilemma in ‘Euthyphro’. Until the late 20th century, the regime in South Africa justified apartheid on the basis of a religious text.

This might be a good time for everyone to take a deep breath and then read Fr. James Schall's "The Regensburg Lecture" which includes the text of the lecture itself.

If atheism is true, it does seem strange that humans, as far as we can tell, have, for the most part, believed in a god or gods. One reasonable interpretation would be that such a being or beings really do exist.

The New Atheists don't see it that way. Dennett, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, believe that the vast majority of humans, who ever lived, were delusional, regarding supernatural occurrences.

This view seems to ignore the empirical facts. They seem to imply that they have exaustively examined all of the religious systems of the world, read and interpreted all religious testimony, and found it wanting.

If this is true, they should provide the rest of us with their research.


Another issue that they seem to blithely dismiss, is how to explain how we know so much. Science has been incredibly successful, but only because it discovers the truth. Why on earth should mere cosmic accidents, such as us, be able to discover truth?

Having said that, one can believe that truth exists, morality exists, and be a consistent atheist. They could argue that they're simply applying Ocham's razor to a belief in the supernatural. They could say that truth can be found, because we found it, morality is real as well, but then state we have not found any need to say these things arose from a God. This is a stretch, but it could be done.

"It has become popular of late to claim that science and reason are wedded to theism, and that they each support the other, and that atheism is somehow irrational anti-scientific nonsense. It used to be understood how reason and faith were mutually antithetical (see Luther), but with science, humans have been able to accomplish amazing things in a remarkably short period of time, compared to what was accomplished by religions over many centuries. So science has come to be seen as the gold standard of perceptive thinking, and apparently that's a measure of prestige that many theists would like to attach to their own beliefs--even if it means admitting by implication that simple faith is simply not good enough any more. "

Actually, Nick, that's a re-write of Western history from the atheist perspective. No one in the Christian world prior to Luther presumed that faith and reason were opposed to one another. While the discoveries of science have been useful, people were making reasoned and reasonable arguments based on observation long before Copernicus and Newton ... who were believers themselves. Aristotle and Plato lay the philosophical foundation St. Thomas Aquinas built on; early Church Fathers such as Iranaeus and Justin Martyr were as much empiricists as rationalists. It was Thomist philosophy that taught the universe was ordered and comprehensible, and that it was a proper and fitting use of the intellect God gave to man to analyze its operations. (That's why Science arose in the West, rather than the East.) I'm afraid the opposition of reason to faith is simply another "just so" story secularists tell themselves to indulge their feelings of intellectual superiority.

Overseas,

I'm professionally trained in the history of thought. And I'm far from willing to acquiesce in your claim. The Enlightenment notion of benevolence is clearly parasitic upon the Christian notion of agape. And agape belongs peculiarly to Judeo-Christian religion. No benevolence without agape. No agape without Christianity. Part of Nietzsche's brilliance lies in the fact that he understood the way in which Enlightenment moralism was still living off of Christian religious capital--though we must add that Enlightenment benevolence is but a dim reflection of Christian charity. Why, if God is dead, Nietzsche asks us, should we consider benevolence or generosity as a better way of being in the world than, say, the sort of brutal will to power instantiated in the likes of Genghis Kahn? You note rightly that social ills such as apartheid have been justified by religious texts. But abolitionism was originally a religious and theological position (anyone who has researched the abolition of slavery in England and the U.S. with any diligence knows this). Mussolini, whom I paraphrase above, notes the connection of moral relativism to fascism--fascism just is moral relativism, he suggests. Put another way, if you are a fascist, then you are a moral relativist. That's Mussolini's formula (one about which he's quite right). But, of course, the theistic religions all reject moral relativism. They therefore reject the moral relativism of the likes of Mussolini--a moral relativism which the the pet doctrine of genocidal tyrants from Mussolini to Genghis Khan. Also, as C. S. Lewis notes, the Golden Rule (a positive injunction) is an improvement over the prior negative injunction--and the positive injunction is unique to the gospels. The negative injunction appears in other religions and philosophers. The positive form does not. Let's face it--most Christian philosophers have been willing to learn from what seems them true in other systems of thought. The lack of generosity on the other side is rather stunning--no moral insights or benefits from religion. Really? Ever heard of hospitals?

Convictions on whether or not science and a religious world view are compatible are often fairly entrenched. As a theist who loves science, I find either/or certainty personally unconvincing. Those who firmly believe the contrary will not give a rat's elbow about what I think. This divergence of views is not going to go away, and that's fine, as long as both sides are free to come to and hold that position they find most persuasive without constraint.

In the meantime, I am perfectly content to see what develops. If we are annihilated when we die, then the other side wins. I guess. If not, then I could be right. Death is the ultimate experiment. Until then, the argument will continue into any future I can surmise.

Best,

Richard

Why such animosity towards atheists? I've read all the comments and they are very passionate and seem sad, don't they?

Science and other atheist pursuits have provided every moral insight, every invention, everything that is good around us. Loving one's neighbor is not a divine inspiration. It is a statement of moral intuition or utilitarianism or even enlightened self-interest.

Why do we need gods or faith? Why bother? It is people who have created the beauty in people. A flower is not intrinsically beautiful. A thought is not intrinsically right or wrong. We give meaning to everything around us. No gods necessary. Everything good and right is explicable via nature and our own internal inspiration.

All the animosity towards atheists is, in my opinion, misplaced. We are not subjecting theists to anything. We are freeing you to be anything. No constraints placed on you by gods or hell or ancient texts. Be whatever you can be!

I've read of very few moral saints or popes or bishops. I've seen little or nothing admirable about religion. If a person is good, then it is not a god that made her/him good any more than an atheist is intrinsically good or bad.

This god of the gaps that sits in smaller and smaller areas that science doesn't explain is not helpful, not useful. The love you feel as you build your temples is the love of people and of your self. Build temples to that beauty, that love....not to gods. The result is much more satisfying.

Whether your god has eight arms or holds the keys to hell or is nothing but an ephemeral "first cause", be free!

The "Big Bang" was actually first proposed by Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaitre (1894-1966), a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, and professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic University of Leuven. He called his discovery the "hypothesis of the primeval atom." His argument for an expanding universe had a significant influence on Einstein.

I enjoyed the discussions. IMO, acceptance of the Doppler effect observed from far away galaxies, and the relationship of further distance with higher speed, is quite consistent with a universe dating approx. 15 Billion years back, existing in a single point mass. Now that does not PROVE the existence of a "Prime Mover"; but acceptance of an initial single point, very high temperature, very large mass at a point in time, by Occam's razor makes the existence of a Prime Mover ("Let there be light!") very reasonable to me; and the alternate scenario that the massive, high temperature singularity just "happened", and then "just happened to explode" seems unlikely. But then, I like St. Thomas Aquinas.
TeaPot562

Edward.
I strongly disagree with you ( and the theist comments). that the athiest is married to nihilism.

the universe is 13 billion years old..yet not once have I felt hopeless for not remembering most of these past 13 billion years...why would the next 13 billion years cause me to live a hopelessness? so we live and die on some planet in the corner...why place such a negative value on that? We assume this senerio is somehow devoid of meaning and value . As an atheist I find my value and meaning in doing exactly what I was ment to do...be human. Atheists find meaning and value in the same things a theists....we enjoy stimuli of the 5 senses... sex food sleep love peace....both theist and atheist would find no value/meaning in life if it didnt include theses things.....we would both be nihilist then, yes?

I am atheist, yet I feel a deep sense of connection and intimacy with nature, animals, humans. I t makes me feel good to help people and make them feel good and loved. I find deep meaning in being part of this universe, being made from the elements of exsploded stars. being able to see the universe from a single-point-perspective for a short lifetime.... Even if my life is short with no afterlife punishment...I still feel a deep urge to help and love other people.
Hurting other people causes me great internal distress.
When I see babies and cute kittens...sometimes my eyes get watery.
Is this nihilism? I dont need a God to feel these deep meaningful connections to life and existence

[Jordan Bissell] "if I had to choose between religion and science I would choose religion"

Presumably that would be a reflection of a value system which places a higher priority on "the good" than it does on "the true". I can understand the sentiment which might motivate such a choice, but such a sentiment would not qualify as rationality, however laudable it might be in other respects.

"But I don't have to choose between them. The Logos whom I adore is also the principle through which all things have come into being, including the physical laws governing the universe."

Until there is a rational demonstration of that, that would be an article of faith. Of course, you can choose faith, but that *is* choosing between them.

[Bret Lythgoe] "If atheism is true, it does seem strange that humans, as far as we can tell, have, for the most part, believed in a god or gods. One reasonable interpretation would be that such a being or beings really do exist."

That would certainly be an interpretation, but its reasonableness remains undemonstrated. Humans have been at least as prolific in concocting fabulous creatures, such as manticores, griffins, mermaids, centaurs, werewolves, dragons, hippocampi, elves, goblins, fairies, pixies, gnomes, ogres, pookas, titans, hydras, cyclopes, trolls, unicorns, brownies, bunyips, gargouilles, harpies, gremlins, satyrs, vampires, genies, chimeras, lamias, minotaurs, gorgons, ghouls, nymphs, leprechauns, dryads, sirens, zombies, incubi, succubi, and snallygasters, but that doesn't make it reasonable to conclude such creatures really exist--especially since we know from direct experience that humans imagine things, love telling fantastic stories, and aren't above making stuff up. That information alone gives us an amply sufficient account of where all those creatures most likely came from.

"The New Atheists ... believe that the vast majority of humans, who ever lived, were delusional, regarding supernatural occurrences."

That, or gullible, or deceptive, or innocently mistaken, or wishful, or indoctrinated, or too speculative in the face of too-little information, or any of the other myriad paths to error which are universal and well-known throughout humanity. Such factors can easily account for the profusion of myths and legends which abound wherever you find humans, and as such they seem much more likely than the possibility that some people have actually have had real encounters with supernatural beings, but always in a way which leaves no real evidence.

"Science has been incredibly successful, but only because it discovers the truth."

What science reveals is probabilities. Given multiple competing testable hypotheses, good scientific rigor can tell us much about which ones are the most likely to be true. Doesn't mean the leading hypothesis *is* true, because the truth might not have been among the hypotheses under investigation. But even so, being able to weed out large numbers of less-likely hypotheses has been very productive for constraining our investigations towards the ever-more-probable.

There are two problems here.

First, I don't think Hoyle is correct in the way he talks about scenarios. At any given time, it may be the case that the evidence supports two seemingly equally respectable scenarios. However, over time, evidence starts to accumulate and one theory will have likely done a better job than another of predicting that new piece of evidence. The discovery of background radiation in 1948 gives the Big Bang theory much more support than any competing explanation for the origin of the universe.

Second, this article lacks any actual argument about the truth or falsity of the existence of God. The desire to fit everything into one overarching narrative is understandable but it isn't always necessary or feasible. You can't explain weather patterns by talking about quarks and it isn't clear you would ever want to. Nothing said here successfully argues that atheists are wrong. Merely that Oakes would personally be inclined to be a nihilist if he didn't believe in God. Nothing about whether that belief is either true or justified.

The Enlightenment notion of benevolence is clearly parasitic upon the Christian notion of agape. And agape belongs peculiarly to Judeo-Christian religion. No benevolence without agape. No agape without Christianity.

Aristotle came up with the notion of benevolence long before it entered Christianity, in part through the influence of Aristotle's works themselves.

If you can show a secular Enlightenment philosopher who wrote about the concept of benevolence and was much more "parasitic" upon Christianity than Aristotelian or other non-Christian ethics, I'll reconsider.

If atheism is true, it does seem strange that humans, as far as we can tell, have, for the most part, believed in a god or gods. One reasonable interpretation would be that such a being or beings really do exist.

Humans, for most of history, have believed in witchcraft, folk medicine men, conjurers and magicians of various sorts, and a spirit world in which the spirits of one's ancestors or other representatives of the supernatural lived in trees, water wells, caves and mountains and sometimes in people's homes.

Fortunately, we threw off most of this nonsense during the Enlightenment although you can still go to many societies where these beliefs are still typical. Indeed, the authors of the Bible believed in this kind of world. Most people who have looked at the evidence supplied by modern science do not. This suggests historical beliefs are not necessarily a good guide to the truth.

[Tony Layne] "Actually, Nick, that's a re-write of Western history from the atheist perspective. No one in the Christian world prior to Luther presumed that faith and reason were opposed to one another."

So, you're saying that the notion was completely novel with Luther and had no precedent whatsoever? If true, that would be an interesting tidbit of history. But I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a quote which I thought pre-dated Luther which characterized faith as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." And isn't the quote "For those with faith, no explanation is necessary. For those without, no explanation is possible" generally attributed to Aquinas?

And even if the idea of the dichotomy between reason and faith did originate with Luther, that doesn't mean he was wrong, and the idea clearly didn't die with him.

"I'm afraid the opposition of reason to faith is simply another "just so" story secularists tell themselves to indulge their feelings of intellectual superiority."

So when you have an apparent fact which is compellingly supported by evidence, how does that not render faith in that same apparent fact utterly redundant and useless? What could the faith possibly add?

And what is the "leap of faith" if not leaping over the gap between that which is supported by sense and reason, and that which is hoped for? In what sense is such a leap rational?

Nick and Whatever are right. The notions of value and meaning which require atheism, as Jordan put it, to logically entail nihilism is dreadfully confused. Whatever, or anyone else, of any religious or non-religious persuasion whatsoever, can feel and enjoy 'a deep sense of connection with animals, nature, humans'. Such moments of meaning as these require no mediation or validation by a deity - they are just there, as a part of the richness of human experience. True, science has not found any values or meaning written into the fabric universe, but the idea that such things could be so written is an absurdity, an immense category mistake. Science can analyse the genetic, the molecular structure of the woman I love until the research grants run out, but it can never tell me I am mistaken or dishonest in loving her. As I have said, I believe this warped picture is born of a tendency to admit of only one perspective, and subsume all others - the human perspective included - under it. Not that any of the theists here, too pleased to keep on shaking their heads in arrogant dismay at mine and other's naive lack of nihilism, has been willing to engage with my criticism.

As for Christianity and morality, I may be wrong, Paul, but I simply cannot believe that people just didn't give a damn about other people until Jesus told them too. I certainly do give a damn, and even if I owe that fact to Jesus and his apostles, I don't give half as much a damn about that as I do about, well, other people. 'Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else', to use C.S. Lewis for my own ends. Giving a damn about other people is the first and last thing, and the reasons I do so will always be somewhere in the shabby middle. As for the claim that religious people tend naturally to be moral giants, non-religious peoplem troglodytes, is the worst kind of argumentative propaganda, never mind that Thomas Paine's was the first tract published against slavery in America (yes, of course he was a deist, but The Age of Reason could sit quite happily beside The God Delusion) or that Albert Camus fought for the French resistance.

As for science and religion, I share Nick's dislike of faith, in the pejorative sense, as unwarranted uncritical belief. I do not, however, believe this to be the only form of faith there is, and the only foundation for religious belief, and so do not belief that science and religion are quite so opposed as Nick makes out.

1 Bob 3.7.1

Philanthropia and agape are very different. To illustrate. You will look long and hard in Aristotle for "love thy enemy: do good to him who persecutes you." It's simply not there.

Best,

Richard

You will look long and hard in Aristotle for "love thy enemy: do good to him who persecutes you." It's simply not there.

The issue was Enlightenment ethics and how it allegedly steals from Christian theology without acknowledgment. Loving one's enemy does not, as far as I can recall, figure into any of the major Enlightenment works on moral or political philosophy. If you can point to a secularized Enlightenment thinker who made use of this idea, I'd be interested to know.

(This leaves aside the question of whether or not loving one's enemies is actually a good or noble thing. But the first issue is whether or not this idea found its way into Enlightenment thinking removed from its Christian foundation.)

Hi Paul

If both a defence and a condemnation of slavery can be based on a certain religious text, then this text doesn’t seem like a good guide to ethics. I agree with you that apartheid is a ‘social ill’ but people have been reading religious texts for centuries and took them to be consistent with the institution of slavery. If we now read them differently it’s because we’ve changed our mind already.

If Christian philosophers have been willing to learn from what seems good in other systems of thought, then whether running hospitals is a good thing may not depend on whether God says it is good. If God issues a command because it’s the right thing to do anyway, do we need to obey because it’s the right thing to do or because it’s God's command? If we obey a divine command just because it comes from God, then how do we know that we’re doing the right thing, or that God is a good person rather than a bad person? If God orders genocide, is genocide good? Whether the answer is ‘no’ or whether the answer is ‘yes’, the Euthyphro challenge to religiously-based ethics stands for about 2,500 years and is notoriously difficult to wiggle out of; the costs are enormous either way.

So, I think that subscribing to a religion is either irrelevant to doing ethics or an impediment to acting morally. Just think ‘9/11’. Unfortunately, it does sound right that for good people to do bad things it takes religion.

Mr. Welch,

You mistake a deliberate (in the sense of deliberative) rejection of atheism for animosity towards atheists. But even if you detected outright hostility towards atheism per se that would not be the same as hostility towards atheists--to say so would be to commit the fallacy of equivocation, wherein you've taken two modally discrete propositions to mean the same thing. I'm sure you must hold higher regard for rational thought than to so carelessly commit such an easily detectable fallacy. Moreover, Oakes wrote the piece which then immediately received--on a theistic website, mind you--two hostile replies from atheists. So you've really got the situation backwards. If you were on track, the real question is why the hostility from atheists such that they feel compelled to invade a website of a journal within the Judeo-Christian tradition and bash everything the majority of readers here believe. Why do you detest theists so--and feel compelled to interpret defenses of their beliefs in a venue that is their own, in reply to being bashed by insensate and unreflective comments as hostility to you?

The point that I wanted to make is that Christianity had its own font for the idea of agape independent of Aristotle, the thought of Jesus and the Jewish scriptures, scholars, and prophets, who were preaching charity and justice for the oppressed before Aristotle was ever born. Of course there was a fusion of Christian and Greek ideas later, through the mediation of the Eastern Greeks and the Islamic thinkers. No one who knows intellectual history would deny it. But there are things about Christian ethics which are very alien to Greek humanism. I speak as a Christian Classicist.

As for the idea that the Enlightenment "stole" from the Christians or anyone else, I don't believe that ethical and moral ideas can be stolen. They are the common heritage of humanity. It is no great issue for Catholic theologians, for example, whether the Enlightment thinkers imported their morality from the Christians or not, since Catholic tradition posits a natural law, a morality implicit in the nature of humanity, which reason can discover independent of revelation. This is why I am utterly unsurprised to discover myriads of atheists and agnostics who are fine people.

The Enlightenment, however, did not arise in a vacuum, and in spite of the fact that many Enlightenment figures were reacting against Christianity, there are many points of similarity between Christian ethics and the various ethical ideas articulated in the Enlightenment, and it is very hard to believe that that is utterly accidental. I don't.

The relationship between the liberal secularism that grew out of the Enlightenment and Christianity has been endlessly debated. Jurgen Habermas, though not a believer, is convinced that everything of substance in our culture has its roots in Christianity, and Koch and Smith (in the Suicide of the West) list Christianity as the first and most important font of modern secularism. These ideas are fiercely contested by many, though to me the Christian elements in liberalism (the brotherhood of humanity, importance of conscience, the dignity of every person, etc.) are clear enough.

Loving your enemy makes sense only if we are all the beloved children of God. Nietzsche saw it clearly. Somewhere he appositely writes, "Without Christianity, why should I love my neighbor? After all, he isn't very loveable, you know."

Best,

Richard

Mark and Aisia,

You both ascribe the most naive and simplistic interpretation to my words. That seems uncharitable to me. Mark has an incredibly anachronistic reading of Aristotle. Aristotle did value generosity and magnanimity and friendship. And I did not say anything to slight him. However, there is a sense in which in generosity and magnanimity, the exercise of these virtues, for Aristotle, redound to the greatness of the one who displays them--they are not exercised simply for the sake of the recipient of a generous or magnanimous act. But it's not just agape that you won't find in Aristotle. You won't find anything like almsgiving there.

Moreover, I'm a professional in the history of thought who can tell you that my position is not considered out there. A good many colleagues in the field within which I work share this position. So I wouldn't disregard it as the crazy ramblings of an untrained mind. I'm not going to recapitulate an already well defended position within the history of thought. But the idea that Enlightenment ideals concerning science and benevolence live off the religious capital of Christianity is by now a commonplace.

Aisia mentions Lewis. Lewis was once asked what was unique to Christianity, that was absent from any other system of philosophical or religious belief. His reply: "Grace." It's hard to comprehend modern notions of benevolence--which differ vastly from pre-modern notions of generosity--without the advent of the Christian notion of grace--which, in context, was part of the point Lewis wished to make. And Lewis himself proffers the argument that the Golden Rule in the positive sense (Do to others as you would have them do unto you) is unique to Christianity. And modern notions of benevolence are at least as much about what we should render to others, in charity, as it they are about negative version of the Golden Rule (do not do to others what you would not have them do to you), which predates Christianity. Nietzsche understood this--it's all over his writing (most especially in Beyond Good and Evil). I think Mark and Aisia have yet to take Nietzsche seriously--or the scholarship of Rodney Stark or David Bentley Hart, among numerous others.

[Aisia] "As for science and religion, I share Nick's dislike of faith, in the pejorative sense, as unwarranted uncritical belief. I do not, however, believe this to be the only form of faith there is, and the only foundation for religious belief, and so do not belief that science and religion are quite so opposed as Nick makes out."

Just to clarify, I'm saying reason and faith are independent, incompatible, and mutually exclusive foundations of belief. A belief can only rest on one to the extent it does not rest on the other. Strictly speaking, that is no more a disparagement of faith than it would be a disparagement of love to say that it, too, is not rational. There is a great deal about the human condition which falls outside of the deliberately-constrained discipline which is reason, and it is our values which provide the basis for evaluation, not our capacity for logic.

[Paul] "Oakes wrote the piece which then immediately received--on a theistic website, mind you--two hostile replies from atheists. ... the real question is why the hostility from atheists such that they feel compelled to invade a website of a journal within the Judeo-Christian tradition and bash everything the majority of readers here believe"

My focus here is more on the justifications of theism. I have no basis for a reasoned discussion with theists who attribute their belief to an act of sheer faith, or to direct revelation from a god, or to some mystical experience, or spiritual clairvoyance, or angelic alien abduction, or appeals to theological authority, or emotion, or tradition, or any of the other rationally-inaccessible bases of belief. But there are some theists who hold that their view is in harmony with science and reason. I happen to disagree, but at least our shared emphasis on reason gives us a common framework for discussion.

As I see it, this is an advocacy website, available to the global public, which offers a moderated forum for well-mannered responses, so I don't really view my posting here as an invasion. If the web administrators would like to exclude any posts merely for expressing a different viewpoint, they certainly have that right and capability, but I suspect they rightly appreciate that excluding reasonable disagreement would be seen as a lack of confidence in the reasonableness of their own position.

Mr. Oakes,

A person such as you should know that there are no black and white issues. There is absolutely a middle ground between nihilism and theism, and that is real atheism. The purpose of atheism is not to disprove the existence of god, but to say that god is improvable and given the most likely of all scenarios, unlikely to exist.

While you have made a very elegant argument, you did it by twisting quotes and logic to fit your own purpose. You made the fundamentally flawed supposition that everyone fits neatly into one of a finite number of mutually exclusive ideologies. People and their psyches by extension are not bits in a computer that can only be set to one or zero. While I have met nihilistic atheists, I have met very moral atheists. I have also met theists who rejected the notion of morality or values in general - at the very least by their own actions, which usually speak much louder than words.

You can go own deluding yourself - or you can face the truth. There probably is no god, so stop worrying about it and get on with your life. It is very liberating and far more fulfilling.

Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe wrote a remarkable little book called The Cosmic Life Force in which the main subject of interest was the utter impossibility of even such a fundamental building block of life as an enzyme coming into existence as a result of random forces. Hoyle explicitly claimed that the reason he didn't believe in the BB theory was that there was not enough time available in the life of the universe to allow such an event to occur. I know nothing about chemistry and so cannot critique his technical arguments, but his explanations are very enlightening. The reason enzymes are so important is that they are able to finely tune chemical reactions. Without this fine tuning, the kaleidoscopic varieties of life would be impossible.
To digress a little, I am in the midst of reading The City of God, and St Augustine had some very interesting things to say on these topics in chapters 4, 5 and 6 of book XII. I've been reading and rereading them for the last few weeks, but I can only take a little at a time or my head explodes.

Paul, I am sorry, I have to say that you are right, my charity failed me, and hope you will forgive me. I understand now what you are saying: not that compassion began with Christianity, but that Christianity was first to set up active, searching compassion as an ideal. Happily granted. I would be interested, as a side issue, in what exactly it is you mean when you say that the Enlightenment owes to Christianity 'its ideals concerning science'. But I must say I have a problem with you rhetoric: why is the Enlightenment, 'living off the religious capital of Christianity' rather than just 'influenced by Christianity'. The analogy to debt suggests that the borrowed ideals must be paid back, that the Enlightenment was dishonest, indeed criminal, to keep them. And I see no reason why this should be the case: once a contribution has been made to the history of thought, it remains for ever to be analysed and evaluated, embraced or dismissed. One needs no divine sanction to value Lewis's 'Grace', nor the scientific ideals of truth. One may simply say: grace matters to me, truth matters for me. Perhaps certain stories that we may tell about our ideas no longer make sense without God, but the ideals themselves may stand.
As for some of your more personal attacks: I would rather you refrained from making quick and careless judgements about how seriously or otherwise I take the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. What I have read of him I have taken perfectly seriously, if critically, and am interested in understanding more. In my experience it is usually Christian apologist who, as, unfortunately, Father Oakes has done here, fail to take Nietzsche seriously, insisting on a cartoon of a Christian atheist, one who accepts the false and inherently theistic dichotomy between God and nihilism this article endorses. As a historian of thought yourself, I assume you know better. As for your remarks about hostile responses, I'll admit my opening post was rather hostile. But I hardly bashed 'everything the majority of readers here believe'. To set the record straight, this article attacked my own beliefs. I responded to it as an act of intellectual selfdefense, to criticise what I thought was mistaken in its attack. I took a hostile tone, I am afraid, because I was aggravated by the article's use of bad, tired arguments concerning the relationship between atheism and nihilism. The characterisation of Nietzsche as 'perhaps the only truly honest atheist in the history of philosophy' is not only mistaken, but also rather arrogant, and much too common. It was not Christianity I was attacking, but bad Christian apologetics: a reasonable thing for me to do, as there are few better ways to assist in the creation of good Christian apologetics.

Dave, I don't mean to be rude, but you might explore the history of the Jesuit order before telling one of their more distinguished members to let you set him straight on what to believe and how to live.

The Jesuit Order has been a friend to science for a long time. The most brilliant specialist in the intellectual history of Europe at my college (and one of the premier Kierkgaard scholars in the world) would unfailing tell his classes that for three centuries the Jesuits were the premier scientific organization in Europe. The Jesuits loved science, and they were instrumental in developing it. it.

Science has been generous in recognizing the contribution of the Jesuits to their fields. Thirty three craters on the visible side of the moon are named after Jesuit scientists, including Clavius, a topographic star of Kubrik's movie 2001.

Moreover, Jesuits have traditionally received some of the world's most rigorous intellectual training in their college years, and one of the most authoritative histories of the order is entitled Men Astutely Trained. In keeping with his tradition, Father Oakes is currently writing a book on evolution and philosophy entitled Radical Naturalism, parts of which have been published in First Things. He has clearly thought at length about the issues you raise. Considering the auctoritas of the corrigendus and the insouciance of the corrigens, I doubt you will persuade him.

Best,

Richard

How typically tiresome. Yet again, someone with an invisible friend who just happens to know how to run everyone else's lives tells atheists what they "must" conclude about morals, and is entirely unconcerned that his reasoning, like his invisible friend, doesn't match simple observed reality.

I'll live in reality, thanks. When I want fantasy, I read fiction.

Mark & Nick: You point out that humans clearly have a propensity to believe all sorts of crazy things, but that doesn't make them true, so, analogously, beilef in a god or gods, even though believed in by many, may not be true either. Fair point. I've never concluded that, just because most of humankind believes or believed in the supernatural, that, therefore, the supernatural must exist. That would be fallacious. However, it may mean something. One must assume that it (belief in the supernatural) provides some advantage, otherwise, why has it persisted?


Just because one can cite examples of clearly false (or at least we think so) views, like witches, goblins, faries, etc., does not mean that a god does not exist. One must examine belief in a god or gods on their own merits, to determine whether they're credible.

Also, its simply an historical fact that empirical science, arose out of a Christian culture. Belief in God, who created the cosmos in an orderly way, prompted the emergence of scientific discovery. This does not prove that Christianity is true, of course, but it suggests that one ought to investigate it further, because it could indicate its truth. It's significant that of all the beliefs you cited, NONE of them produced or contributed to empirical science.

One could argue that, just as we possess vision, and our occipital cortex interprets what really exits, analogously, we possess religious areas of our brains, to put it simply, in the temporal lobes, that experience reality of God. Now, one can have visual hallucinations, but that doesn't mean, of course, that all sight is an illusion! similarly, one can have religious hallucinations, but that does not mean that all religious experiences are illusory.


With respect to atheism, I know that there are honest, sophisticated atheists, who are convinced that God (or Gods) do not exist, because of all the suffering in the world. The suffering simply is incongruent with a religious outlook. They believe, on the basis of their reasoning, that morality exists, but not God, due to the suffering. This view deserves tremendous respect. Often these people are tempted to believe, but, because of their integrity, cannot.

"Also, its simply an historical fact that empirical science, arose out of a Christian culture. Belief in God, who created the cosmos in an orderly way, prompted the emergence of scientific discovery."

It is a historical fact that empirical science grew by leaps and bounds in Western Europe. To frame it as empirical science arising out of Christian culture is what one might call a Just So story. The Greeks and Romans had their share of scientific advances as did the Chinese, Indians, Persians and Arabs. The Mongol invasions threw the rest of the Eurasian continent into disarray while sparing Western Europe from the worst -- it is an accident of history that the Mongols turned back at the gates of Vienna.

The point here is that if you want Christian culture to take credit for the advances of the Enlightenment, you need another Just So story to account for Christian Europe's horrible backwardness up until the time of the Mongol invasions. It is also undoubtedly the case that the Bible is full of miracle stories that violate the laws of science -- it posits a world that is very much unordered where water can turn into wine and where humans call walk on water and part the seas.

"You both ascribe the most naive and simplistic interpretation to my words. That seems uncharitable to me. Mark has an incredibly anachronistic reading of Aristotle."

Paul, there is nothing uncharitable about what I wrote -- I asked clarifying questions of your comment and you chose not to address those questions. So I'll ask them again. You speak of "the Enlightenment notion of benevolence." Specifically, whose notion are you talking about? And where specifically is this notion "parasitic" upon the Christian notion of agape?

As for my "anachronistic" reading of Aristotle, I have to say this really is uncharitable. Nowhere did I say that Aristotle's ethics would line up perfectly with modern ethics. I simply said that Aristotle's notion of benevolence provides a basis for thinking about modern ethical concepts of benevolence that, in my opinion, is much more important than that supplied by Christian theology. Modern ethics need not parasitize Christian theology.

Here's another way of putting my position: "The divine revelations contained in the Bible are neither necessary nor sufficient to make moral progress from an Aristotlean or Classical starting point to a modern or Enlightenment-era morality."

If no one wants to disagree with that, then there really is no disagreement between anyone else and me. If someone does want to disagree with it, an argument or a citation to the relevant Enlightenment text with its necessary (but obscured) foundation in divine revelation would be appreciated.

[Bret Lythgoe] "Just because one can cite examples of clearly false (or at least we think so) views, like witches, goblins, faries, etc., does not mean that a god does not exist."

I'm not even saying that all those creatures do not exist. What I'm saying is that it is overwhelmingly likely that they were the fanciful products of human imagination, but just because something is made up, doesn't mean that it is impossible for it to exist at some point, somewhere in the universe. But in a way, being unseen poses a bigger problem for gods than it does for mere fanciful creatures. Gods are typically characterized as having immense power, while also craving human worship (which, I have to say, is an odd thing for an immensely powerful being to need). So why are theists reduced to having to rest their case on testimonials and apologetics? Seems like a being with vast cosmic power ought to be able to provide something a bit more convincing on its own behalf.

"One must examine belief in a god or gods on their own merits, to determine whether they're credible."

Ah yes. You touched on this theme before:

"The New Atheists ... seem to imply that they have exhaustively examined all of the religious systems of the world, read and interpreted all religious testimony, and found it wanting.
If this is true, they should provide the rest of us with their research."

What this criticism seems to imply is 1) there is no such thing as a generic conception of a god, so each and every of the many thousands of gods humans have proposed must be examined on an individual basis and accorded equal consideration, and 2) it is incumbent upon atheists to provide the demonstration for every single god description to show what makes it impossible, because 3) somewhere, in some remote corner of the world, there just might be a god description which is "credible"--something which it is possible to believe in.

I can't speak for the "New Atheists", but my answer would be 1) the notion that there is no generic concept of a god would mean absolutely anything could be called a god. That would be an easy way to defeat atheism (I proclaim my toaster a god, you accept that my toaster exists, therefore you believe in a god) but all that would really accomplish is to drain the god word of all meaning. 2) It is not rational to believe in every logically non-contradictory proposition, pending somebody providing a definitive disproof. That is a sure formula for incorporating a great deal of error into your collection of beliefs (another word for it would be gullibility). For a belief to be rational, it should rest on rational support. And 3) it is not necessary to hunt down every god description because humans are interconnected, and if a convincing god description or argument were to be thought up anywhere, presumably it would not remain remote or hidden for long.

Nick touches on an atheistic idea that I don't understand. As one of my friends, an agnostic I think, put it, "If God existed, he would do more to let me know." I can only wonder what level of evidence would be necessary.

As a theist, I believe a convincing description has not remained remote or hidden, though there are continuing disagreements about the details. But then, what would you expect from a group of sentient beings so limited in their abilities. Indeed that recognition is the first step in my beliefs. I know that I am not a god. There's not a whit of the omni anywhere about me, except perhaps in my free will.

Theology; Arguing about the color of the flippers of the loch ness monster.

Only religiots take theologians seriously.

Too good to pass up. Dave writes: "A person such as you should know that there are no black and white issues." Yes, the world is divided between those who believe there are black and white issues and those that don't. Thanks for clearing that up.

But Dyz, there are so many of us and so few of you. Why do you think evolution brought that about?

Atheism is unwarranted uncritical belief.

[Mike Melendez] "Nick touches on an atheistic idea that I don't understand. As one of my friends, an agnostic I think, put it, "If God existed, he would do more to let me know." I can only wonder what level of evidence would be necessary."

It's a classic logic problem. The existence of atheists disproves the existence of any god with all of the following properties: 1) it wills that we should all be aware that it exists 2) it knows how to make its existence known to us all, and 3) it has the ability to make itself known to us all.

Many theists are not happy with the idea of diminishing their god's knowledge or power, so most of the classical answers have focused on item one--eg. 'God "will" make us all aware--eventually' (which raises the question of what is accomplished by deferred revelation), or 'that's why God sent me to preach at you, brother' (lame) or 'it was logically necessary for God to remain hidden from some of us in order to preserve free will for all of us' (as if making an informed choice somehow negates the possibility of a "free" choice--whatever "free" means in that context). And there have been others, but the main strategies have been to try to put all the blame on the unbelievers, or to justify why it would be in keeping with the will of a god that some of us should be unbelievers.

"As a theist, I believe a convincing description has not remained remote or hidden,"

That's how theism typically works. If you believe first, then you will become convinced. But rationally, that's backwards.

"There's not a whit of the omni anywhere about me, except perhaps in my free will."

I don't know what free will is, unless it is simply an admixture of determinism and randomness.

Nick writes, "It's a classic logic problem."

To an extent, Nick is correct, but there is a niggling problem with his first premise: the use of the word "should". Not that the word is wrong, but the conclusion reached does not match it. My conclusion is that any god that exists does not force belief on anyone, as proven by the existence of atheists. Take the "should" out and Nick is logically correct, except that no religion that I know of believes in such a god. That was what Joe Carter was talking about in "Vincible Ignorance". Put another way, I've yet to hear a definition by atheists of a god that I could believe in. To that extent I agree with them.

This atheist scenario undermines science itself. If the “knowledge” delivered up by “science” only serves to puff up a pathetic animal doomed to die in an uncaring universe, why bother with science anyway? If the search for knowledge is nothing more than a vain attempt to puff oneself up like some miles gloriosus in a Falstaffian comedy, what’s the point?

This seems a bit like asking why one would ask a rhetorical question. We do science because we're curious. We search for knowledge because we can.

Nihilism is theism's child, not atheism's.

Well said Larry. Someone here, at least, takes Nietzsche seriously.

If there were no God there would be no atheists, and there's an end on it!

"This atheist scenario undermines science itself. If the “knowledge” delivered up by “science” only serves to puff up a pathetic animal doomed to die in an uncaring universe, why bother with science anyway?"

This is an example of the Ad Hominem Tu Quoque fallacy -- to show that one's argument is inconsistent with one's actions and then to imply that this undermines the argument. It is a fallacy for the simple reason that the only way to undermine an argument is to present reason or evidence against it. That's leaving aside the question of whether the implicit premise -- all (consistent) atheists are necessarily nihilists -- is correct. Even if the premise were correct, the validity of science is not undermined in the least.

Other fallacies on display elsewhere in this thread include Appeal to Common Practice and Appeal to Consequences of a Belief.

Mark & Nick: It's just an historical fact that, in western europe, empirical science arose and flourished. In the areas you cited, Mark, you're right, many scientific achievments took place. But, based on an objective assessment of the facts, the scientific revolution took place only in western europe, that was dominated by Christian belief. One of Christianity's tenets is the belief that the cosmos is God's creation, so its good, and worthy of study. Also, the world is rational and orderly. These beliefs are highly conducive to science emerging, and folurishing. Does it ''prove'' theism, particularly,christianity is true? Of course not. But it shows the lie of those who tiresomely claim that science and christianity are ''incompatable'' or ''at war''. They're not. If they were at such war with each other , science never would have arose out of a christian culture.


Religious experiences are had by those with no evidence of mental illness. One cannot, rationally, Nick, dismiss them a priori. Part of taking an empirical approach to any issue, which is the basis of science, is to examine, in an impartial way, the experiences of others, and judge each case on its own merits. Many religious experiences are had by philosophers, physicians, scientists, people who cannot automatically be dismissed as kooks. Part of discovering truth, is to examine all claims, and, after a rigorous, objective inquiry, they're determined to be false, fine. But you seem to accept the notion that, any supernatural claim isn't worth investivating. That's not a scientific approach, I must say, with respect.

Bret, I don't dispute that a scientific revolution took place in western Europe over the past 500 years or so. My suggestions were 1) being invaded by Mongols as China and the Muslim world were (while Western Europe was spared) probably impedes scientific and cultural progress and 2) your attribution of scientific progress to Christian culture is a Just So story and you need yet another Just So story to account for Western Europe's relative backwardness prior to the Marco Polo journey and the Mongol invasions.

The point is that Christianity and invading hordes of Mongols are just two of many possible explanations for the course of scientific progress over the past 500 years.

I wouldn't say Christianity is "incompatible" or "at war" with science. I would say there is tension, though, and to deny this is to simply sweep big chunks of the Old and New Testaments under the rug. The Bible says Jesus made water turn into wine. Science tells us this alchemical nonsense. And it is not enough to resolve this tension by saying the laws of science were temporarily suspended in Roman Palestine 2,000 years ago.

Because once you've made that concession, you have to start granting that various other alleged conjurers, holy men, sorcerers and practitioners of voodoo might actually be on to something. And that position is indeed an affront to scientific inquiry since -- to the best of our knowledge -- these people are all frauds (and your religion would tell you something similar for those who come from heretical or non-Christian traditions). So you have to appeal to one particular divine revelation in order to resolve the tension here. I invite you to do so but then we cannot pretend that granting the authority of one certain revelation over another comes from a scientific mindset. It is by definition outside the realm of science. And it is in tension with the idea that the universe operates under fixed and unchanging laws that can be understood by humans.

Mark: If theism is true, that means that God created the universe. If God possesses the attributes of omipotence and omniscience, then he can supercede any scientific law that exists. It's not unreasonable to believe that. However, a better explanation could be that any "miracles'' that are supposedly incongruent with what we know scientifically, are not really ''violations'' of nature, but reflections of our own rudimentary scientific understanding.


In other words, "miracles'' are really part of nature, part of God's creation, but because of our limited science, they only appear to be incompatible.

Take quantum physics. It seems to contradict logic, in many respects. An uneducated person would be forgiven for concluding that it's no more rational than alchemy. But the best approach to this, I think, is to conclude that we don't have the whole picture. Once we have a better understanding, of how to synthesize quantum physics, with the rest of the sciences, it will start to make sense.

Analogously, the more we understand the findings of science, it's reasonable, that what we call ''miracles'', will really be a coherent part of the scientific world.

This requires faith, and I understand why you would be reluctant to accept things on faith. But let me ask you this Mark: do you believe that other people have minds? Well, of course what a stupid question, right! So, prove it. Maybe, everyone but yourself is a complicated robot, that only seem to have a mind. You accept, on faith, that others have minds. I do too.

Perhaps a more realistic example will do. Do you believe your car still exists in the parking lot when you're not directly observing it? If so, why? What's your evidence? You believe, on faith, that it's still there.

My point is, your lack of faith is restricted to belief in a god. That's certainly your right. But is it not a little inconsistent to have have in all these other areas? You accept, on faith, that a scientist is right, claiming such and such. But how do you know? Were you there? Did you do the observations and deductions yourself?

I'm not sure I see it mentioned in previous comments, but it's worth correcting the mistaken idea that "If God is 'our most enduring lie,' science is inevitably founded on that same lie."

Actually, God is founded on science, not the other way around. One of the many functions that gods have served is as explanation for natural and historical events. Science doesn't need God, and this should be obvious. God, however, needs science.

"Today, one can hardly find more puffed-up braggarts than those noisy New Atheists currently mounting their soapboxes in Hyde Park..."

Oh, I don't know about that - one certainly seemed to have appeared here to write an absurd article. It's such a shame that the author and those like him are so utterly incapable of seeing the world from any perspective but their own. Leave it to apologists to assume that their world view is the only one that can offer meaning & fulfillment, and that the only alternative must be utter despair. How many times must it be explained that there is more to life than infinte, cosmic relevance? Why must every decision we make be of vital importance to all the universe for all time in order for any signifigance to exist? They say that we non-believers must invent false meaning in order to make sense of the world, but it seems to me that we are the ones who appreciate the only true meaning of life there is, while the theists hide away behind their imaginary idea of super-meaning.

Atheism is not base on reason but blind emotion. They believe something because they want to believe it, not because they have evidence for it.

This is a very frustrating thread. I would have to write a book to take up all the points that need addressing. I feel like a man who has been handed a toothbrush and told to render spic and span the streets of New York.

To make a proper intellectual case in this cramped forum is impossible, so I will simply make an illustrative comment or two and offer some reading which can shed light on the discussion.

First the idea that we can jump from Aristotle to the Enlightenment and subsequent secular ethics without considering the mediation of Christianity.

A few points about Aristotle's ethics. Aristotle believed that some races were superior to others. He argued that the Europeans (the wild men to the north of Greece) had spirit but no brains. For him, the Asians had brains but no spirit. The Greeks had an abundance of both, and so it was just for Greeks to conquer and rule over barbarians. Not only did he support Greek imperialism, but he offered a principled defense of it.

Aristotle believed that some men with strong backs but weak minds were slaves by nature. It was right that their intellectual betters should rule over them (tlhis was for their own good, mind you, since they couldn't figure out their best interests on their own) and employ them as living tools for the convenience of their masters.

Aristotle believed that men were superior to women--he was one of the most important theoreticians of patriarchy in the history of the world. Women, unlike slaves, had rationality, but it was the flawed rationality of a growing child and they need men to look out for them.

Aristotle thought that a democracy run for the interests of the many rather than everybody was the worst of all governments because the interests of the best were subordinated to those of the worst. He believed in equality, but equality for equals. And not all people were equal. He took a very dim view of ordinary people like potters and sailors voting.

We could go on but that will serve. There was a long trail awinding between those positions (typical of intellectuals in antiquity) and modern liberal democracy, but Christianity introduced ideas which eventually overthrew ancient ideas of hierarchy. Granted that Aristotle's ideas here were to persist for a long time in Christian culture, Paul's declaration that in Christ all were equal and that all souls had the intrinsic dignity of children of God was a ticking time bomb that eventually blew the old structure of inequality to flinders. Some moderns recognize this. Stephen Pinker has written that we should reject the idea of human dignity, because it is religious in origin, and substitute that of human autonomy instead (if he thought about it carefully he would realize that we should get rid of that too because it has its root in the idea of the free will of a soul in choosing to accept or reject God).

For the idea that Christian Europe was horribly backward until Marco Polo brought us news of the enlightened Chinese empire, those who have read their Milione know that Kubla Khan was quite interested in Europe. He asked Polo many question about the political and legal system in Europe, and wrote a letter to the Pope asking him to send 100 Christian scholars learned in the seven liberal arts.

After the fall of Rome Christianity split into two halves. The Eastern Empire had and maintained a high culture until it fell in 1453, though internal dissention and attacks by both Western Christians and Moslem armies did its civilization no good. The libraries of Byzantium were the greatest treasure trove of the ancient Greek and Roman texts in the world. Both Islamic and Western intellectuals profitted immensely from the Christian scholarship and bibliophilia of the East.

In the West, the empire suffered a systems collapse because the structure of civil government fell apart due largely to the feuds and wars of insufficiently Romanized (or utterly barbarian) Germanic and Celtic tribes. Christianity provided the cultural glue that eventually made the renaissance possible, especially when Christianity allied with strong rulers like Pepin and Charlegmagne to restore some degree of political unity and order, producing conditions under which education and the life of the mind could reassert themselves. Without qualification one can say that it was the Church, particularly the monks, that preserved literacy and learning in the West. Period.

This is not to say that there were no barbarities or other horrors in Medieval Europe. But for heaven's sake don't believe everything you see in Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Mel Brook's History of the World.

One of the most powerful stimuli to the Western revival was the acquaintance of Western scholars with the brilliant Islamic culture of Spain and the East. The Latin scholars were shocked at how far ahead of them the Moslems were in mathematics, philosophy, and science. Yes, science. The Moslems (THEISTS) were one of the most powerful contributors to the development of science in human history, and Westerners who study their accomplishments (which continued well into the early modern period) are generally stunned. When Medieval Christians learned of the achievements of their religious rivals, they began a massive catch up program, mostly in the years after 1000 A.D. Monastery school were wide spread and the Church began to charter universities in the great cities (try Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Paris) open to both churchmen and laymen alike. There was colossal translation projects rendering important Islamic writings into Latin, the scholarly language of Europe.

The idea that science didn't develop in the West until the Renaissance and beyond is widespread but simply wrong. For a scholarly exposition of the scientific contribution of medieval Christian thinkers see the book God's Philosophers by James Hannam. Hannam is also the founding father of a blog and discussion forum called Quodlibeta (google it). The multiple bloggers discuss the intersection between science and religion at length in fascinating depth and variety, and the forum is a gold mine of discussion, often spirited, by some of the most intelligent and well informed persons on the Web. Do yourself a favor and go into the archives. I have learned a vast amount on the subject of the intellectual foundations of Christianity or science and religion, and you may too. Some of the contributors, by the way, are historians of science or working scientists. Incidentally, most of them are neo Darwinian evolutionists.

For the best book on the complementarity of science and religion I know, see Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen M. Barr, a professional physicist and frequent contributor to First Things. The book is profoundly illuminating, in my view a thing of beauty.

I could say much, much more, but this is enough. At least. For now.

Best,

Richard

Please allow me to make a correction to my previous long post.

Aristotle's treatment of government by the many is much more complex than I suggested. Aristotle divides government into government by one, the few, and the many. Those governments are best which are under law and in the best interests of all. The best government, and only an apparent exception to the foregoing rule, is the government by one man who is the outstanding person in the polis in virtue, almost godlike in his superiority, who rules in the interest of all. The worst government is the government of one man who rules for his own selfish interests, a tyrant.

Aristocracy or rule by the best under law for the interest of all is a good form of rule, while the rule of a few for their own interest is a perversion of aristocracy that is not good government.

Rule by the many is problematic, because of the danger of ochlocracy or mob rule for self interest of the worst. But a balanced constitution involving all to the degree that is appropriate to their intrinsic ability, under law, in the interest of all, with the practical predominance of a solid middle class, the so called politeia, is the best government that is likely to be attained in the real world. The principle of hierarchy is still vital and the masses are still at the bottom of Aristotle's scale of value. But in the politeia, they have their place, for example on juries.

Best,

Richard

To the proposition that modern science had its roots in Christianity, I suspect there is going to be a great deal of historical interpretation on both sides of that argument, but it seems to me that even if the proposition is granted outright, that is not enough to establish that science could never have taken root in some alternate non-Christian setting (as there are indications it did), or that it retains any dependence on Christianity (or it would be hard to explain why science flourishes today in non-Christian regions), or even that such a historical connection early on in any way ensures that there will be perpetual harmony between science and Christianity. Modern chemistry may have had its early roots in alchemy, but the two quickly diverged and chemistry would later help to demolish the credibility of alchemy.

My understanding is that many of Europe's earliest geologists were Christian Biblical literalists. It appears at least some of them were motivated to research the physical evidence because they had every confidence it would provide unmistakable confirmation of a young Earth and a world-wide flood. But for the sake of mounting a compelling case, many of these men decided to operate as if they were impartial researchers, working only with objective evidence which could be verified by anyone. But what they found turned out to be starkly incompatible with a literal Genesis.

So it may have been Christianity which motivated such men, and it may even have motivated them to adopt an impartial approach and to set their beliefs aside while doing research, but that didn't stop the evidence from leading to conclusions at odds with longstanding Christian beliefs, by which point Christianity was powerless to change the conclusions. So then it was Christianity which either had to accommodate itself to the findings of science, or to mount political opposition to them. The former approach has led to a liberalization of Christianity which reduces many of the Bible stories to metaphor or simple human error, and the latter approach has had no enduring success, because science now flourishes around the globe, so any regional pockets of Christian resistance are now simply bypassed by progress elsewhere.

To bring this back around to the article which kicked off the discussion here, the overarching Christian narrative used to be one of a creator god who made everything and placed us at the center of his creation. A personal god who was extremely close to us, in our heads even, tracking our every thought, talking with us individually, even coming to live with us for a while, so the story goes.

But thanks to science, we now know we live in a universe which probably contains a trillion galaxies at least, and it could easily be orders of magnitude greater. And if you had a scale model of our own galaxy one million miles in diameter, our sun would be about the size of a mustard seed on that scale. And our little speck of a planet has about one millionth the volume of our sun. And our planet had no humans at all for more than 999 / 1000ths of its history. So even if one wishes to credit Christianity with having fostered early science, science has given us a picture of a universe which has rather awkward implications for the central importance of humans portrayed in the Christian scenario, and it appears it is now Christianity which is struggling to hang onto a shrinking spot in the overarching cosmic scenario.

Richard,

I appreciate your detailed response. I'll make a few quick points. First, you didn't directly address my stated claim: "The divine revelations contained in the Bible are neither necessary nor sufficient to make moral progress from an Aristotlean or Classical starting point to a modern or Enlightenment-era morality."

I was careful to note that I am not treating Aristotle as dogma -- the fact that he believed in the racial superiority of the Greeks or was a male chauvinist doesn't really hurt my argument at all. Epicurus, on the other hand, was an egalitarian. You claim that the path from Aristotle to modern principles of liberty and political and moral equality is a winding one: I don't see any evidence for that. Epicurus' own writings as well as logic run against this notion -- it does not take any huge moral or logical leap to go from tribalism to cosmopolitanism. It's astonishingly simple, actually.

As to history, I think we can both agree that Western Europe declined substantially after the fall of the Roman Empire. The fact that it took over 1,000 from the height of Roman civilization for Europe to start making real intellectual, cultural and scientific progress strikes me as salient. There is very convincing evidence that China (which I never called an "enlightened" empire -- I'm sorry to say this is a strawman on your part) exceeded Europe in the realm of technology. Two obvious examples are gunpowder and the horse collar which were invented in China and only slowly spread to Europe.

It's certainly true the Mongols were very curious about Western Europe. The reason is simple: they wanted to conquer Europe and possibly forge an alliance with Europeans to fight against the Muslims. The Mongols had an extensive spy network stretching all the way to England and were very knowledgeable about Europe. By contrast, even well-educated Europeans appear to have been extremely provincial and ignorant about the Far East at the time.

You seem to concede quite a bit by pointing to Islamic influence in European science and math. The argument I was addressing was that science arose out of a "Christian culture." You appear to agree that this isn't really accurate. So then we broaden the claim to "theistic culture." Now, once you are convinced that not only the ancient Greeks and Romans but also the Indians and Chinese made quite a few advances in science and math, we'll have to broaden it further to "cultures where religion is prevalent." Which, of course, includes every culture on the face of the earth. The force of the argument is substantially weakened by these ad hoc revisions.

"In other words, "miracles'' are really part of nature, part of God's creation, but because of our limited science, they only appear to be incompatible."

This runs directly against the notion that the universe is well ordered and obeys certain fixed laws. If it were possible for a human to turn water into wine, we would probably have observed someone doing so by now and would be able to study the process using scientific methodology. Not only has no such person turned up but the laws of physics -- which have been repeatedly studied and replicated under controlled conditions -- tell us it is impossible unless you create or release some huge quantity of energy to create carbon (and other) atoms out of oxygen and hydrogen and configure them in the right sequence to create a wine-like solution.

I stand by my previous statement: believing that someone can turn water into wine is completely incompatible with scientific methodology and the results of applying that methodology to the world. Accepting the idea that water can in fact turn into wine (without huge exchanges of energy followed by an extraordinary sequence of chemical reactions as mentioned above) as compatible with a world operating on fixed rules is scientific nihilism.

"Do you believe your car still exists in the parking lot when you're not directly observing it? If so, why? What's your evidence? You believe, on faith, that it's still there."

The faith we talk about when we discuss religion involves divine or mystical revelation. That certainly is not involved when I am asked to believe that my car is still parked in the parking lot when I turn my back. Of course, it could well not be if someone steals it. The idea that objects exist even when I'm not directly observing them is an assumption, not a matter of faith. This assumption -- aside from many other good reasons for accepting it -- has great practical consequences. For one thing, it allows scientific inquiry. It does not require the acceptance of a divine authority or entity.

There seems to be this common notion that the findings of modern science make any belief in christianity obsolete. That the bible asserts that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and all animals were specifically created by God, and these notios have been contradicted by the findings of modern science.

But no educated christian believes that one must read the bible literally. The bible has never been meant to provide scientific insight. It is a holy book, meant to provide spiritual insight, and some historical insight. Some might conclude that this view is an ad hoc defense devised recently, to protect christianity from being refuted.


Not true. Galileo, a devout Catholic, as well as a brilliant scientist, asserted, famously, that the "bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go''. In other words, the bible never was meant to provide scientific insight. Also, he was not alone in this view, it was a common one then. If it wasn't, the scientific revolution would not have arose, because all would just rely on their bibles.

In addition, Augustine (354-430CE) the ancient christian philosopher, argued that the bible should not be read literally.

No educated christian has claimed that the findings of modern science contradict the bible or christian teachings, unless one is willing to read the bible literally.

One can accept the teachings of christianity, and the bible, (but one must read it and interpret it in a sophisticated non-literal way) and accept the reality of biological evolution, that the universe is about fourteen billion years old, and so on. There is no conflict.

True, there are fundamentalist christians out there who accept a literal reading of the bible, and do not accept the findings of modern science, but theu represent a small minority of christians.

And, no one has made the simplistic claim that christianity ''caused'' the scientific revolution. The latter, was, no doubt, a result of complex factors. Christianity provided an environment that was conducive and compatible with science's emergence. What the precise causal factors were between christianity and science, will require further research.


Finally, it seems that the atheist is commited to the notion that the universe "caused'' itself. Or, that there have been an infinite number of universes, and ours just happened to be one that was conducive to life emerging. How, precisely, is this view more credible than the notion of a powerful being creating it?

Mark: Science is an ongoing process, that has not provided us with ''final'' answers. If God exists, and if he's the creator of all, then he could supercede any scientific regularities that exist in nature, for his own purposes. It's not an argument against this to say that no one has done it before. Well of course not, only God did, for his specific purposes. The notion that the universe is well ordered is a result of many observations of it being ordered, in other words, it's an inductive conclusion. By it's very nature, inductive arguments (unlike deductive ones) are never certian. there's always the possibility that subsequent observations will cotradict previous ones. It's simply not true that if something is possible that we would have "already discovered it''.


At the end of the nineteenth century, it was widely claimed, that physics was finished, there were no more great discoveries to take place!!

With the findings of modern physics, previous "certianties'' are out the window.

You talk about "fixed rules'', in science. I disagree. There are conclusions, based on large numbers of observations, that incline us toward certain theories of how the world works. But these theories are ALWAYS, in principle, capable of revision, The ''fixed rules, or laws'' that you speak of, are only theroretical constructs, that may be true, but are based on, and make sense of, the empirical observations we make. No one, could have predicted the emergence of quantum theory. And if scienists thought that all of physics has been fouou out, they were wrong, and some open minded ones were motivated to search further.

This is not ''scientific nihilism''. The latter would be the ridiculous belief that scientific methodology is inefficacious in finding truth. My positon, in contrast, is that since science is an unfinished process, future discoveries (like evolutioary biology superceding special creation), might render what we term ''miracles'', actually explicable using the scientific method.

You're right, religion deals with divine or the mystical. My point was that "faith'', a belief in something that's not based on evidence, is not restricted entirely to religion. We have faith all the time. The point of the car being in the parking lot, when you're not observing it, is you're in an analogous perdicament to the religious believer. When you're no longer observing your car, you have NO EVIDENCE that it's still there. Nontheless, like a norma person, you have faith it's still there, even though you have no basis for it. You call this an assumption, it means the same thing. My larger point is that, why the double standard? If faith is ok in some areas of life, why not others (specifically religious faith)?

Dear Mark,

Conversations like this are never ending, in part because they are driven as much by the heart as by the head. Go to Quodlibeta, sign up, and debate to your heart's content with a horde of very bright and well informed people who will treat you courteously and in friendly fashion, since you are civil, and take you seriously.

One of the most stalwart debunkers of atheist misconceptions about the history of Christianity there is an exceedingly keen atheist named Tim O'Neill. If you like a good tussle, try the Dark Ages or backward Christians trope on him. In short, they are stimulating and informative people, and they listen to, and practice, reason.

As for how we got from antiquity to modernity, I would highly recommend one more book, a sprawling tome by the Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor entitled A Secular Age.

The idea that that since miracles would seem to be impossible according to physical laws (as we now understand them--science IS open ended), they can't occur at all has always seemed to me to be especially non persuasive. If ex hypothesi an infinite allcompetent intelligent power created the world and its laws through an act of will, he can at will suspend them. The Jews of Jesus' day understood perfectly well that men don't walk on water, the dead don't rise, and water doesn't turn into wine. That's why they were astonished and terrified when they saw it happen. But as Jesus said of the salvation of the rich, for men it is impossible, but for God all things are possible. And as for possibility itself, Aristotle observed that if it happens, it's possible. I know that you deny my protasis, but to argue that it's false because of your supposition that nature is causally closed begs the question. I also know that when you read this you will be itching to respond. Go to Quodlibeta.

Best,

Richard

[Bret Lythgoe] says:
"no educated christian believes that one must read the bible literally."

As has been said by several leading Biblical literalists; to say the Bible is not literally true is to say that the Bible is literally untrue. I rarely agree with Biblical literalists, but I think they have a point there.

If you toss out Eve, Adam, the Garden, the forbidden fruit, the walking, talking serpent, the Fall, the world-wide flood, the Ark, the just-so story about where rainbows came from, and so on, how do you know where to draw the line between metaphor and reality in the Bible? Did God really halt the rotation of the planet, and even move it backwards a bit? How about the parting of a sea? Talking donkey? What about the Christ stories? If the Fall was metaphorical, then why would we need a non-metaphorical savior figure? If the Christ stories were really allegories, that might explain why hardly anyone noticed it when a god visited our planet, but maybe the god part was only a metaphor as well.

"One can accept the teachings of christianity, and the bible, (but one must read it and interpret it in a sophisticated non-literal way) and accept the reality of biological evolution, that the universe is about fourteen billion years old, and so on. There is no conflict."

So Christianity teaches that sophistication is a good thing? Because I'm pretty sure I've heard a very different opinion from other Christians. But if what you are saying is that it will always be possible to interpret the Bible such that there is no conflict with any scientific finding regarding reality, doesn't that basically mean the Bible has nothing to say regarding reality?

"True, there are fundamentalist christians out there who accept a literal reading of the bible, and do not accept the findings of modern science, but they represent a small minority of christians."

Is that how you can tell they are mistaken? Because last I heard, Christianity itself was a minority viewpoint.

" it seems that the atheist is committed to the notion that the universe "caused'' itself."

I don't know how the universe came about. I know the idea of self-causation is a violation of our very conception of causality, so I wouldn't go along with that. But I'm one of those oddballs who thinks it is okay to say that you don't have the answer when, in fact, you don't have the answer.

"If God exists, and if he's the creator of all, then he could supercede any scientific regularities that exist in nature, for his own purposes."

That would seem to imply he has some purpose--some plan or scheme that he has devised to bring about by indirect means what, presumably, he could not, or would not accomplish by direct means. But I have to say, a that plan which involves setting up the universe with regularity and consistency just so that he could intercede and violate that very regularity and consistency seems a rather odd sort of plan.

"My position, in contrast, is that since science is an unfinished process, future discoveries (like evolutioary biology superceding special creation), might render what we term ''miracles'', actually explicable using the scientific method."

So will they still be miracles then?

"My point was that "faith'', a belief in something that's not based on evidence, is not restricted entirely to religion. We have faith all the time. The point of the car being in the parking lot, when you're not observing it, is you're in an analogous predicament to the religious believer. When you're no longer observing your car, you have NO EVIDENCE that it's still there. Nonetheless, like a normal person, you have faith it's still there, even though you have no basis for it."

The belief that the car is there 1) is based on a reasonable extrapolation of prior information--which does count as evidence, and 2) is, tentative, proportional in confidence, and readily modifiable given new information.

The fact that a belief can be wrong does not make it faith. Indeed, part of what makes a reasonable belief reasonable is the recognition that it can be wrong. Faith is when you commit to belief despite the evidence being insufficient to warrant belief, and in some cases in spite of evidence which would warrant unbelief.

Hi Nick: It's understandable that you have the view that you do, but the bible has to be read intellegently, which means one must have the knowledge and skill to determine what can be read allegorically, and what can be read literally. One must take into account the original language it was written in, ancient hebrew, for the ''old testament'', greek for the new testament, try to determine who the authors were, what historical evidence suggests concerning their intent , and so forth. It's an arduous process. But the bible simply was never meant to be a scientific text. If it was, it failed miserably. The fundamentalist christianity, that you refer to, where the bible is read literally, has never been part of the mainstream of christianity. Sophistication is highly valued in christian intellectual circles. The literal interpretation charge against christians is one big, fat, strawman fallacy. In a nutshell, the bible provides spiritual insights, not scientific ones.


God, being creator of all, can make nature any way he wishes. what we call miracles, or the ''breaking of the laws of nature'', is a distortion, based on our limited understanding.

There seems to be this odd notion, among atheists, that God should not have created the universe fourteen billion years ago, or allowed animals to evolve. but who are we to say how he should have done it? Seems a little presumptuous to me.

My point in bringing up faith was that faith, or belief in things without evidence is a common part of life. Of course, my point was NOT that one can have faith in anything, one must as you put it Nick, extrapolate from good reasons or evidence, in the case of the car that's not directly observed. but this is precisely what's done vis a vis belief in God. One has faith in his existence, even though he cannot be directly seen, or be directly intuited, based on other evidence. That's what the whole reason and faith tradition has been about, Nick.

I sent a comment earlier, but it appears to have not gone through. Nick, there has been a long tradition of not reading the bible literally. If a work was meant to be read allegorically, and one instead reads it literally, one will completely misinterpret the text as is the case with christian fundamentalists.


If God created the universe, he can do whatever he wants, whether that's making regular physical laws, or intervening to produce miracles.

I'm of the view that since science is an unfinished project, what we call "miracles'', will be explicable scientifically. They still are from God, but we will understand better how they coherently fit into the natural sceme of things.

Back to bible interpretation. One must take into account the original language it's written in, hebrew with the old testament, greek with the new, and attempt to decipher what the best interpretation is. It's my view that it was never meant to be taken literally, throughout.

Concerning faith: my point was that we have faith all the time in life. I'm not proposing that one can have faith in anything. Your comment is precisely on: the belief that the car is still there, when you're not directly viewing it is a reasonable extrapolation from the evidence. Analogously, belief in God is an extrapolation reasonably derived from evidence as well.

Nick notes that he is a biblical literalist. My limited experience says this is common for atheists. On that point they agree with Christian Fundamentalists, as Nick also notes. Nick starts with the same evaluation as the rest (and vast majority) of Christianity does, if it is fully literal, it is not true. The curious thing is that he concludes that the bible is false whereas the majority of Christians conclude that the bible in not fully literal. Consider Ockham's razor on these conclusions. I recommend to him the last chapters of Augustine's Confessions on that point as regards Genesis. Then he might read the rest. Augustine spent his life seeking Truth.

@aisia

Of course there is a plurality of perspectives but what is important to remember is which perspectives are internally coherent and realistic. What you are describing here, the position held by new atheists and to some extend by russell, is nothing short of self-imposed delusions. What these thinkers represent is a type of selective hyperskepticism. They choose what suits them and ignore what doesn’t, oblivious to the intellectual degeneracy their constructs actually lead to.

This third perspective you are trying to describe is reminiscent of some sort of post-modern fad. An incoherent collage of ideas if you like. The problem is that it’s unintelligible and devoid of any meaning whatsoever. The OP is correct to some extend for pointing out the inability of the vast majority of atheists to take their beliefs seriously and truly understand what they represent. They choose atheism yet they simultaneously try to hijack the ideals of Theism. Seeing you trying to reinvent philosophical categorization and historicism to salvage their ideology (a possibly yours) simply will not cut it. Certain realities are inescapable… No, one can live an honest and fulfilling life as an atheist and russell was a prime example. His quote pretty much sums it up:

"I am ashamed of saying this, but we need Christian love"

That alone nullifies the claim that he was a fuller type of atheists but it does to some extend make him look at least a tad more honest.
He was honest about reality but not about his ideals.
Ps. atheism is not an irreligious position by the way.

I recently defended the whole atheism equals nihilism nonsense too.

http://advocatusatheist.blogspot.com/2010/05/does-naturalistic-atheism-equal.html

It seems there is a willingness to overlook the definition of nihilism and conflate atheism with it because from the theist point of view they possibly couldn't see how it could possibly be otherwise.

I call this an unwillingness to engage the material and learn the difference, quote mining doesn't help, along with the added propensity of semantic manipulation to change meanings of words which are unrelated to thereby allow one to conflate their meanings more easily.

[Bret Lythgoe] "...the bible has to be read intelligently, which means one must have the knowledge and skill to determine what can be read allegorically, and what can be read literally. One must take into account the original language it was written in, ancient hebrew, for the ''old testament'', greek for the new testament, try to determine who the authors were, what historical evidence suggests concerning their intent, and so forth." It's an arduous process.

Okay, well, you claim one must do all these things, but other Christians claim otherwise. From an outsider's perspective, I don't see who's to say which, if either of you, is right. And after you go through the arduous process of translating and tracking down obscure authors many centuries ago, let's say you are able to determine that one author did mean for one passage containing a miracle to be read literally. In your view, would that be all that's needed to establish it happened? If so, why wouldn't the same standard apply to every old passage which was intended literally from every other religion? If not, what did that exercise actually accomplish?

"But the bible simply was never meant to be a scientific text."

I think there have been some people who never got that memo.

"The literal interpretation charge against christians is one big, fat, strawman fallacy. In a nutshell, the bible provides spiritual insights, not scientific ones."

Let me guess, it's a big fat strawman fallacy because the millions of self-identifying Christians who *do* interpret the Bible literally aren't *true* Christians. (do I hear bagpipes?)

"There seems to be this odd notion, among atheists, that God should not have created the universe fourteen billion years ago, or allowed animals to evolve. but who are we to say how he should have done it? Seems a little presumptuous to me."

I have doubts that 14 billion year figure is going to hold up, but I assume you would be equally fine if the figure were 20 billion, or 100. Or even trillions. The sticking points with evolution are 1) given the very large number of life forms which preceded us, what reason do we have to think that it all happened expressly for the purpose of bringing us into being. Something about that seems a tad egocentric. And 2) given the haphazard history of life on Earth, with countless meanderings, catastrophes, and extinctions, to use evolution to create us intentionally would either require endless tinkering and adjusting along the way, or perfect foreknowledge of how the universe would play out from the very beginning. The former would suggest that God carefully sculpted the track of life to give it every appearance of being chaotic, haphazard, and largely aimless--which would seem to be more consistent with a god which was trying to conceal itself--and the latter appears to be functionally indistinguishable from determinism.

"My point in bringing up faith was that faith, or belief in things without evidence is a common part of life. Of course, my point was NOT that one can have faith in anything, one must as you put it Nick, extrapolate from good reasons or evidence, in the case of the car that's not directly observed. but this is precisely what's done vis a vis belief in God."
"belief in God is an extrapolation reasonably derived from evidence as well."

I have heard many times that there are good reasons for, and evidence supporting, belief in God. All I've seen so far is flawed arguments which would only convince the convinced, and evidence which is hidden or private. I have to wonder why the lame stuff is trotted out so often if there is better stuff available.

[Mike Melendez] "Nick notes that he is a biblical literalist."

I think the literalists make a fair point that if X is not true in a literal sense, then in a literal sense, X is not true. That would accord pretty well with my understanding of what "literal" means.

"Nick starts with the same evaluation as the rest (and vast majority) of Christianity does, if it is fully literal, it is not true. The curious thing is that he concludes that the bible is false whereas the majority of Christians conclude that the bible in not fully literal."

If the majority of Christians agree that the Bible can be rendered true by substituting other meanings to stand in place of the words given, then the curious thing is that they haven't bothered to write that preferred meaning down so that they could have at least one version of the Bible which actually says what they want it to say.

Nick, Thanks for the elucidation of your approach to literature in general. I've found the same absolutist approach in other atheists. My world view has a little more gray in it. Given that portions of the bible are poems, history, advice, philosophical musings, visions with uncertain symbolism, and even short fiction with moral themes; given that it was written by many authors over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, gray seems the best approach to me. That atheists agree with Christian Fundamentalists on the premises surprises me, even if atheists reach an opposite conclusion.

And the reason that the majority of Christians don't just write down one version to say "what they want it to say" is simple. We don't believe we have the right. Instead we work hard to figure out what it means.

Thanks Nick for your intelligent, thoughtful response. As Mike pointed out, the bible is a compilation of different types of writing. So one must try to ascertain the author's intent which is not an easy process, but one must, as Mike points out, view it in a nuanced way.


It has always astonished me that anyone would choose to view the bible as a scientific text. But, yes, there are christians who do. My best guess is that they are not educated regarding what science is, its methodology, and purpose.

There are good reasons for believing in God. If one examines Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century italian theologian, one will see find his ''five ways''. Nick, please consider reading and studying them, and let me know what you think.

To not believe in God, means that you have to believe that the unuverse arose as a result of unintelligent, purposeless causes. This requires, I must, submit, more faith than I'm capable of. And this is important. I've found it ironic that atheists have given as their principal reason for not believing in God, that they cannot accept it on faith, and yet, they must therefore be committed to believing, since there's no evidence for it, that the universe always existed (which is improbable cosidering the evidence for the big bang theory), or that it arose ''uncaused'', or that there are an infinite number of universes, and our universe is the rare, or only one where intelligence arose. What is your opinion of the multiverse theory, Nick? This requires a lot of faith, more faith, I would submit, than is required of any theist, christian or otherwise.

Which brings me to another point. What motivates this faith? It cannot be the evidence, since there is none. the atheist simply has no coherent, evidence based answer for how the universe arose, WITHOUT INTELLIGENCE. Two other motivators, for atheism, present themselves: the problem of evil, is the first.

Clearly, this world is full of terrible things. Why so much suffering? I wish I had an answer that's satisfying. I don't. Possibly, it's the price we pay for free will, but this still doesn't explain natural disasters. I don't know. It bothers me profoundly. The evil is gratuatous and unnecessary, from my very limited ignorant standpoint.

The second motivator is wish fulfillment. Religious people are often, and not enitirely without justification, charged with believing because they want to. So do atheists. Some personality types need to believe in God, and some personality types need to believe in atheism. Perhaps they fill happier believing they're not being ''watched'' or judged by a cosmic tyrant.(This can be solved by believing in a God of Love).

You mention your difficulty accepting the notion of God creating through evolution. There are no logical problems here. God may have choosen evolution as the best option for allowing creatures to be as free and capable of growth as possible. If God is outside of space and time, indeed if he created these things, then he would be able to know what happens to us all, but we could still have been given free will. This seems problematic, but there's no inherent contradiction.

My guess is that, we often consider belief in a God and evolution as incompatible because we've been conditioned to, because there were, and are, fundamentalist types who created loud noise.

The reason, or one of the reasons one doesn't consider all of the other forms of ancient literature(although, it would be best to read the great works of religion, and philosophy and compare and contrast them with the bible, to see who's right) is there's not enough time in the day! Moreover, the bible is seen in the context of church teaching, which teaches, in addition to the bible of Jesus's resurrection, and provides a plausible account.But if you're after certainty, Nick, you're not going to find it here, or anywhere.


Not even in science. Science is constantly in revision, based on new evidence. Also, YOU AND I do NOT do the empirical, direct work of science. We rely on mediators, the scientists themselves, to do that, and we trust, or have FAITH that they're telling us the truth. I d have no doubt they are, but it's still MEDIATED knowledge, not as good of knowledge as if I directly experienced it. Which means religious experiences, for the person having them are the best forms of knowledge, because you rely only on yourself, no mediator.

[Mike Melendez] "... Thanks for the elucidation of your approach to literature in general. I've found the same absolutist approach in other atheists. My world view has a little more gray in it."

Does that gray extend even to parts of the Bible which propose that God and Jesus were real, or do you tend to be more absolutist on points like that?

"That atheists agree with Christian Fundamentalists on the premises surprises me, even if atheists reach an opposite conclusion."

I can see merit to both sides. I agree with the literalists that a liberal reading of the Bible leads to the squishiness of subjecting the supposed word of God to human politics and changing literary interpretations with no consensus or clear standards for determining which parts are real and which parts are exaggeration, error, metaphor, or outright fable. And I agree with the liberalists that a literal reading of the Bible leads to patent nonsense that is easily shown to be false.

"And the reason that the majority of Christians don't just write down one version to say "what they want it to say" is simple. We don't believe we have the right."

Why would you have any less right to write yourself a Bible than people from more primitive ages?

"Instead we work hard to figure out what it means."

Can't agree on one version, eh?

[Bret Lythgoe] "There are good reasons for believing in God. If one examines Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century italian theologian, one will see find his ''five ways''. Nick, please consider reading and studying them, and let me know what you think."

I think they probably sounded more convincing back in the thirteenth century. The argument from motion, for example, was clearly framed with the idea of motion being a property of an object, which would make sense in a universe laid out on a Cartesian grid. But in the relativistic universe we appear to live in, motion is not to be found in the properties of an object, but only in the relationship between objects. If two pool balls approach each other in space with their centers of mass moving directly towards each other, when they bounce there is no absolute reference to say whether ball 1 imparted its motion to ball 2, or vice versa, or whether they each swapped their respective motions along that axis. And in a relativistic universe, an object "at rest" on the floor experiences acceleration, while an object in free fall does not.

The argument from causality, on the other hand, never should have flown. Any argument which includes premises which are contradicted by the conclusion is an argument which cuts its own foundation out from under itself. If God exists and does not need a cause, then there has to be something wrong with the premise that anything which exists must have had a cause. Beyond the logical problem, we don't know yet whether it really is impossible for matter or energy to spontaneously appear in our universe. There are pretty strong indications that we do have causeless events (adding up the energies of the particles coming out of spontaneous atomic decay, we find no surplus from a causal event), and it is now considered a possibility that we live in a soup of virtual particles which come into existence briefly in pairs which then normally merge to cancel each other and drop out of existence--but perhaps not always. And in the big picture, if we assume the impossibility of added matter and then extrapolate the observed expansion of the universe backwards to a single point, that yields a time frame which appears to be too cramped for some of the things we are seeing. But that timeframe could be increased greatly if novel matter is appearing in the universe. A mass accumulation rate totaling one hydrogen atom per cubic meter per billion years, for example (very likely below our current detection threshold) could increase the age of the universe to many orders of magnitude greater than what we get for reverse extrapolation alone. The assumption that matter cannot be added to the universe might turn out to be like Lord Kelvin's mistaken assumption that no heat could possibly have been added to the interior of the Earth--when he calculated a maximum age of the Earth which fell more than 95% short of the mark.

The argument from contingent being views certain rearrangements of matter as "coming into" and "going out of" being, even though no matter was created or destroyed, and from that makes the leap that there could have been a time when nothing at all existed. In the first place, that looks like a composition error. In the second place, the argument only posits there *could* have been a time when there was nothing, and then proceeds as if it was nailed down that indeed there was a time when there was nothing. The logical problems aside, we don't know what space-time is, and it might be that space-time is an extended property of matter-energy--in which case, there would have been no time when there was nothing, because with nothing, there would have been no time.

The Fourth way is basically a wholesale lifting of Plato's fanciful and unfounded notion of the Realm of Forms, and appears not to grasp that perfection only means absolute conformity to a standard. And if the maximum being embodies the maximum of all attributes, that would be a perfect self-contradiction (perfectly good and perfectly evil, for example).

And the Fifth way was based on Aristotelian physics in which objects strive towards goals. That view of physics has long-since been discarded, so the Fifth way has been adapted into arguments from seeming design (which rest on our being able to distinguish something designed from something not designed to arrive at the premise-undercutting conclusion that there is not anything which was not designed). In either case, this not an argument so much as an analogy (humans are designers / directors of things, so we can imagine there is a designer / director of human designers) with an arbitrary cutoff (there is a designer designer, but there is no designer designer designer, because... well, just because).

Ultimately, Aquinas was trying to explain the difficult to understand by invoking the impossible to understand, and then slapping a god label on it, and making it an exception to the very premises by which he arrived at this god thing in the first place. This approach would appear to be not very productive or informative, and only avoids defeating itself by propping itself up with circularity. And why Christians in particular have found such arguments for god-labeled abstractions appealing is beyond me.

"To not believe in God, means that you have to believe that the universe arose as a result of unintelligent, purposeless causes."

It is entirely possible not to commit to either belief. In my own case, I haven't yet seen anything which I would consider a telltale marker that the universe was the result of intelligence, but I'm not saying it's impossible, and even if intelligence was involved, we know there are non-god forms of intelligence.

"I've found it ironic that atheists have given as their principal reason for not believing in God, that they cannot accept it on faith, and yet, they must therefore be committed to believing, since there's no evidence for it, that the universe always existed (which is improbable considering the evidence for the big bang theory),"

I'm not committed either to a start point or the lack of one. But I would say the evidence for a Big Bang is, at this time, ambiguous. We have some observations which would seem to be compatible with a Big Bang scenario, and others which seem to contradict it. As scientific models go, it is still towards the speculative end of the spectrum and its track record of successful predictions has been pretty thin. To me, it looks like a theory with problems, in its present form.

"or that it arose ''uncaused'', or that there are an infinite number of universes, and our universe is the rare, or only one where intelligence arose. What is your opinion of the multiverse theory, Nick?"

I haven't heard about any hard evidence for it. I don't even know that it generates any testable predictions. It might help to account for some oddities, but it could be incorrect and still do that.

"This requires a lot of faith, more faith, I would submit, than is required of any theist, christian or otherwise."

I don't know when or how our universe began. I'm not even sure it makes sense to ask how, since our explanations of how are bound up with our notions of causality, and causality is time-dependent. It might be like asking, what happened before time to bring time into existence, but there would have been no time before time, and no passage of time in which to have causality as we know it. So it does not require faith to say "I don't know". I do, however, strongly suspect that we humans did not figure into the origin of the universe in any respect. Anthropocentric explanations say, I think, more about us and our egos than they do about the universe.

"Two other motivators, for atheism, present themselves: the problem of evil, is the first."

The problem of evil only has application against a tiny minority of gods. Atheists have equal unbelief in war gods, malevolent gods, and well-meaning limited gods, for which the problem of evil is no problem at all.

"The second motivator is wish fulfillment. Religious people are often, and not entirely without justification, charged with believing because they want to. So do atheists. Some personality types need to believe in God, and some personality types need to believe in atheism."

I used to believe that God was real. I also used to believe that Santa Claus was real. As I learned more, in both cases, I lost belief simply because I reached a point where I was no longer able to keep myself convinced they were real.

"Perhaps they feel happier believing they're not being ''watched'' or judged by a cosmic tyrant. (This can be solved by believing in a God of Love)."

I can easily concoct a god with qualities which would have enormous appeal for me. But that would still provide no rational basis for believing it was real.

"You mention your difficulty accepting the notion of God creating through evolution. There are no logical problems here."

Just as there are no logical problems with evolution having been guided by Earth spirits. But the added supernatural element in either case appears to be entirely superfluous.

"If God is outside of space and time, indeed if he created these things, then he would be able to know what happens to us all, but we could still have been given free will. This seems problematic, but there's no inherent contradiction."

I don't know what free will is, unless it is just a mixture of determinism and randomness.

"My guess is that, we often consider belief in a God and evolution as incompatible because we've been conditioned to, because there were, and are, fundamentalist types who created loud noise."

I suspect it's been the hardest on those who want a personal, loving, caring, communicating, daddy-god. The advances of science have probably posed little difficulty for deists and people for whom their god was kind of a cold, remote, inhuman, disembodied abstraction anyway.

"The reason, or one of the reasons one doesn't consider all of the other forms of ancient literature... is there's not enough time in the day!"

The same might be said of reading the Bible, particularly if it is as arduous a process as has been described here.

"Moreover, the bible is seen in the context of church teaching, which teaches, in addition to the bible of Jesus's resurrection, and provides a plausible account.

If the Jesus stories are just metaphors anyway, what is there that needs a plausible account?

"But if you're after certainty, Nick, you're not going to find it here, or anywhere."

I'm on the side of questioning, in case that wasn't clear by now.

"Not even in science."

Especially not in science. Recognition of the possibility that we can be in error is one of the foundation pillars of science.

"Also, YOU AND I do NOT do the empirical, direct work of science."

We certainly could if we wanted to. It doesn't take special powers. And there is no shortage of cases of critical contributions in science coming from people who were not professional scientists.

"We rely on mediators, the scientists themselves, to do that, and we trust, or have FAITH that they're telling us the truth."

We provisionally depend on them to be truthful about their findings and how they arrived at them--pending fully independent replication by others. But even if their findings are confirmed, that doesn't mean we have to accept their theoretical interpretation of their findings. It could be that another theory will do a better job of accounting for their data.

"I d have no doubt they are, but it's still MEDIATED knowledge, not as good of knowledge as if I directly experienced it. Which means religious experiences, for the person having them are the best forms of knowledge, because you rely only on yourself, no mediator."

I've known cases where I've had misperceptions, so direct experience isn't infallible either, and in any case, independent confirmation is something to be desired. But yes, if I had what seemed to be a direct and unambiguous encounter with a god, then I would have a pretty solid rational basis for believing a god existed. And I see no reason why a human encounter with a god would be impossible, if a god existed. But without an objective component, all reports to that effect fall into the category of hidden or personal evidence--which those of us who have never met a god are under no obligation to accept uncritically.

Nick: The existence of Jesus is historical, better documented than the existence of Julius Caesar. Who he was, is the issue at hand. But for an atheist, I would think Jesus is fairly irrelevant. With no god, "son of god" has no meaning. Do you also reject the historicity of Jesus?

Nick: You seem to be unconvinced by Aquinas's arguments. My guess is you cannot be convinced. In other words, you seem completely commited to an atheistic, or, at least, agnostic worldview. This is entirely understandable. My guess is, and you can confirm or disconfirm this, that you've had some or many bad experiences with religion. That is, you've been hurt in some way.


This influence of bad people or bad experiences on our beliefs cannot be denied, in fact, I believe that they play a much larger role in forming our belief systems than rational arguments. We often ''use'' good arguments to support our beliefs, to give them some respectability. However, we still would believe them, even without the arguments. Such is the flawed human condition. We all are guilty of this.

Aquinas is considered by many, not just religious folks, as being one of the greatest philosophers whoever lived. You're not convinced. But my guess is you don't want to be convinced. These arguments, of Aquinas, are solid. But, yes, some components of them rely on aristotilian physics, which has obviously been superceded by Newtonian and Enstienian physics. But his argument from contingency, deserves serious consideration.

often people are atheists because it allows them to be completely free of moral contraints. I'm not saying that this is true in your case Nick, but it plays a role.

Either the universe was/is the product of some intelligence, or it wasn't. If it wasn't, then, somehow, the universe arose from chaotic purposeless processes. This does not seem plausibe to me. Intelligent effects, come from intelligent causes. The midevial thinkers, that you presumably think have nothing to offer us, pointed this out.

Philosophically, knowledge is best if it's completely unmediated, since there's less room for error. Hence, directly experiencing it is better than relying on someone else, of course, one could be decieved by one's senses, or deluded. But it should give you pause Nick, that so many, millions, at least, of highly intelligent people, scientists, physicians, etc., have had religious experiences. None, as far as I can tell, have had experiences of santa claus.


Which brings me to this pattern, that you seem to exibit, of viewing religion in a hyperliteral way: the bible must be read literally, encounters with God are no more plausible than belief in santa claus, etc. The Christian tradition of theology, which you seem woefully unfamiliar with, has, over the centuries, devised sophisticated arguments for God's existence. These arguments continue to the present day, with thinkers such as Keith Ward, Richard Swinburne, among others, who point to a plethera of evidence, that can best be explained by appeal to God's existence.

[Mike Melendez] "The existence of Jesus is historical, better documented than the existence of Julius Caesar."

Really. And this wealth of historical documentation, you've seen it yourself, or did someone tell you it exists and you simply believed it?

"Who he was, is the issue at hand."

The point I was pursuing was whether the Jesus stories are to be read literally, or as metaphor, but I guess that also gets to who he was.

"But for an atheist, I would think Jesus is fairly irrelevant. With no god, "son of god" has no meaning."

The contention that it is not intelligent and reasonable to read the Bible as an entirely literal work raises the question of whether *any* part of it should be treated as literal truth. The Jesus stories are, presumably, the focal point of Christianity, so they seemed a logical extremum point to test whether even they should not be regarded at literal truth.

And in case it's not clear where that was going, if the entire Bible is not to be considered literal truth, then the next question would be, in what way should it be considered true? On the other hand, if there are parts of the Bible which are not to be regarded as literal truth, and other parts which are, then the question becomes, how are these parts to be distinguished from one another?

"Do you also reject the historicity of Jesus?"

There is a great deal about the Jesus stories which looks like typical myth. So if the question is whether I think the Jesus character, as described in the Bible, was ever actual, I would say I think probably not. But if the question is whether mythologizing could have taken place around a real person or composite of several persons who maybe led some people and got in trouble with the authorities, I think that's entirely possible. So it depends on how different an actual Jesus, or collection of Jesi, can be from the Bible Jesus and still qualify as the same Jesus.

Nick: You have the right contrast. Truth and literal truth are not necessarily the same thing. But perhaps you can't see that. Pick any of Jesus' parables and point to where the literal truth might be in them. Then consider the point Jesus was trying to make. Is there truth in that? Language is a wonderful thing and part of its wonder is its flexibility. "The kingdom of God is like ..." Unless I'm mistaken that's the textbook definition of a metaphor, whether you choose to believe in the kingdom or not. Sometimes "reductio ad absurdum" only gets you absurdities.

Fr. Oakes does well to boil the old argument down to a binary. It's a one or a zero. God or nothing. Jesus the Truth or Jesus the liar.

I've been on zero and I've been on one.

From the vantage point of one, everything makes sense.

From zero, nothing makes sense.

I choose one.

I realize there is a lot of emotional investment for everyone considering our beliefs are an integral part of who we are. So, my question is meant to be irenic: I don't fully understand the philosophical underpinnings that derive meaning from atheism--how is this coherent? I understand that atheists can live a life of meaning, and value, etc., and have good reasons for doing so, but it seems as if meaning is boiled down to some type of philosophical construction, which is then circular (we have meaning because we create meaning, we create meaning to have meaning). I'm not trying to offend anyone. I simply don't understand the philosophical basis for meaning that isn't a construction. That's fine is someone thinks it's relative (e.g., that theism is also a construction), but that's still circular—if meaning is constructed, then why do we construct it? And if meaning has to be constructed (and doesn't just exist), then is there any real meaning? And, does the fact that we can even create meaning, or depend on it, point to the truth of an objective meaning outside of us?

Again, I'm not trying to be offensive, I just have never read anything convincing from a philosophical standpoint. It's true that maybe I can't be convinced, but if a position is true, it's true, and would at least help me understand how the dots connect in a coherent manner.

Nick: I think that the evidence for Jesus's historical evidence is about as good as you're going to get. We have the canonical gospels, of course, all of the other gospels, that failed to make it into the offical canon, Paul's epistles, and Josephus, a jewish historian, making reference to jesus. To deny his existence, or to believe that "Jesus'' represents a compilation, or composite of different people, shows that you're unfamilar with the historical data. Moreover, in Paul's epistles, there's reference to 500 individuals witnessing the resurrection of Jesus. this would be a very risky thing to make up. And, we have no evidence of anyone refuting this alledged occurrence. unless one is completely commited, on an a priori basis, to a naturalistic metaphysics, one cannot blithely dismiss this incident.

You stated also that you find Aquinas's five ways unconvincing. his first way has to be viewed from the standpoint of potency and act. That is, either something is actually in a state, or potenially in a state. The only way that it became actual, is by becoming that way after an encounter with something that is actual. It could not have become actual by itself, since that would entail that it be in an actual, and potential state, in the same respect, which is impossible. This ''way'', I will concede, may have been superceded by Newtonian physics. But Newtonian physics does not render belief in God obsolete, in fact Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived, believed that God was necessary for matter to behave the way it does.

With respect to Aquinas's second way, the idea of causality, is entirely legitimate. No being can be the cause of itself, otherwise, it would have to wxist prior to itself, which is impossible. Ultimately, one reaches the First Cause, which is God. God cannot be caused, because God is the creator of causes.

Aquinas's third way is perhaps his most convincing. Any being that did not exist at one point, and will cease to exist at a later point, is contingent. This means that it's dependent on a being, ultimately, that is not contingent, which would be God.

You state that the fourth way, derivived ultimately on Plato, is not credible. We see that there are gradations, of good, better, and best. We see in the sensory world, good things, better things, the implication is that there must be a best, which Aquinas calls God. How is this false, exactly?

His fifth way is not necessarily entirely dependent on Aristotle. As Anthony kenny has pointed out, this ''way'' could be convincing as long as it can overcome or show that, even though Darwin is correct, there's still order in the world.

There's a lot of very elegant, flowery, showy writing in First Things; but the emphasis is on showy elegance, not substantial ideas. The emphasis is always on proving everyone else is ridiculous ... except the Church. But this is the great sin of the Church: Vanity and Pride.

The fact is, there IS a third way, say, between deism or Church-ism, and nihilism. The fact is, Science does not utterly destroy any possibility of some kind of hope for the future, for some kind of larger meaning. Looking around us at Nature, we can derive various Naturalistic ideas, about what the physical universe allows, or "wants." Among other things, living beings want to continue to live. And science helps us do that.

As far as Ultimate meaning? Live ... and discover and grow. Today, part of science is belief in "progress"; which includes, more than a mere hope, the realistic expectation, that as we discover more and more about nature, we will discover more and more about whatever destiny it is, that the structure of the universe favors. So that we will discover gradually in effect, its master narratives; its "goals" for us. The meaning of our lives.

This we do, in science, very gradually, and with great humility; not by huge and showy pronouncements of our own presumed holy perfection or wonderfully superior religion and spirituality and Church, here and now.

[Bret Lythgoe] "Nick: You seem to be unconvinced by Aquinas's arguments. My guess is you cannot be convinced."

I would hope I would never allow myself to be convinced by an argument so long as it appeared to me to be defective.

"In other words, you seem completely committed to an atheistic, or, at least, agnostic worldview."

My commitment is to reason. At this point, it looks like the most reasonable explanation of where all the gods of humanity came from is humans themselves. But that conclusion could be overturned or revised with new information.

"My guess is..., that you've had some or many bad experiences with religion. That is, you've been hurt in some way."

I enjoyed being a Christian. It gave me good feelings and I have happy memories of it. There was a lot about it that didn't really make sense, but when I was young, I was able to rest on my confidence that adults knew what they are doing (ha!) and I felt sure I would come to understand in due time. My understanding did develop, but not in the direction I anticipated.

"Aquinas is considered by many, not just religious folks, as being one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived."

The stature of the person making an argument matters less than the merits of the argument. Aquinas may have done remarkably well given the material he had to work with, but even we lesser thinkers of today have the benefit of information he could not have dreamed of.

"These arguments, of Aquinas, are solid. But, yes, some components of them rely on aristotilian physics, which has obviously been superseded by Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. But his argument from contingency, deserves serious consideration."

Such consideration is how I arrived at the view that there were problems with that argument.

"often people are atheists because it allows them to be completely free of moral constraints. I'm not saying that this is true in your case Nick, but it plays a role."

Yeah? How does that work? Let's say you wake up one day and decide you want to be free of all godly restraints. Would you think "hey, if I just stop believing in God, then he will simply disappear and I'll be free to do as I please without any consequences"? Wouldn't you have to be really dumb or totally insane to think that way? (For what it's worth, I was told the same thing back when I was Christian, and I have to admit it didn't occur to me either what a stupid notion it was until I actually became an atheist.)

So, no, considerations of morality had no role whatsoever in my loss of belief. But I will admit, having spent some time on the outside, I've come to find the idea both appalling and repugnant that the highest form of moral virtue is supposedly unblinking robotic compliance with any order believed to come from a god. I now feel the Abraham character made the wrong choice when he decided to comply with the command to slay his son, and I hope I've become the sort of person who would refuse to obey an unjustified order like that. Even if it came from a god.

"Either the universe was/is the product of some intelligence, or it wasn't. If it wasn't, then, somehow, the universe arose from chaotic purposeless processes."

I'll agree that if intelligence was not involved, then purpose was not involved, but I'm not clear where you got the idea that the only two possibilities are intelligence or chaos. Indeed, if everything about this universe is the product of intelligence, then where did you get your sense of chaos from?

"Intelligent effects, come from intelligent causes. The medieval thinkers, that you presumably think have nothing to offer us, pointed this out."

Pointing at a claim doesn't make it true. Is an individual atom an intelligent effect? Is it intelligent just because it has properties? Is it demonstrable that it is an effect, or is that part assumed merely because it exists? If you think God exists, and if you think God is not an effect, presumably that means you accept that existence without having been caused is possible.

"it should give you pause Nick, that so many, millions, at least, of highly intelligent people, scientists, physicians, etc., have had religious experiences."

Truth is not decided by ballot. And mystical experiences have been interpreted a great many different ways, and not all of them religious. Mystical experiences are also positively correlated with bodily deprivations, certain medical conditions, and psychoactive substances, so the evidence is suggestive that they are organic in origin.

"The Christian tradition of theology, which you seem woefully unfamiliar with, has, over the centuries, devised sophisticated arguments for God's existence. These arguments continue to the present day, with thinkers such as Keith Ward, Richard Swinburne, among others, who point to a plethora of evidence, that can best be explained by appeal to God's existence."

Sophistication doesn't ensure freedom from defect. In many cases, it only adds complication which helps to conceal defects. But you are correct that I am unfamiliar with this plethora of evidence--if by evidence you mean something more objective and substantial than personal testimonies and holy figure sightings.

"I think that the evidence for Jesus's historical existence is about as good as you're going to get. We have the canonical gospels, of course, all of the other gospels, that failed to make it into the official canon, Paul's epistles, and Josephus, a jewish historian, making reference to jesus."

Setting aside the questionable authorship of the gospels, the unaccounted delay in writing them, and that church itself considered most of the gospels of that period untrustworthy and useless and destroyed a great many of them, there is an obvious problem with using Christian writings to prove the truth of Christian writings--especially when even the surviving writings include stories of what Jesus did when there were no witnesses present.

Josephus does indeed mention several Jesuses, but only two of the passages are generally thought by Christians to refer to the Biblical Jesus. One is the briefest mention of him as the brother of James, and the other is the much more effusive Testimonium paragraph, widely considered inauthentic to some degree, and perhaps entirely--which might explain why we haven't been able to find any place where the early church fathers so much as mention it. But even if it was genuine to some degree, it was written a generation after the supposed time of Jesus and is unreferenced, so it carries all the force of hearsay. And in the same work, Josephus also wrote of Hercules, who is widely regarded as mythological now, though that was apparently not the prevailing opinion back then.

Tacitus is usually the other main non-Christian citation offered as proof of a historical Christ. In his Annals, he includes one scant reference to: "Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate" Again, there are no references given, and this is even later than Josephus, so he could easily have just been repeating something he heard. And my understanding is that Tacitus too mentions Hercules several times in the same work.

"To deny his existence, or to believe that "Jesus'' represents a compilation, or composite of different people, shows that you're unfamiliar with the historical data."

That could well be, but I'm guessing that if you knew of any impartial record of Jesus better than Josephus, you would have mentioned it.

"Moreover, in Paul's epistles, there's reference to 500 individuals witnessing the resurrection of Jesus."

Yes, Jesus appearing before crowds is a recurring theme. He is followed around by multitudes, people congregating in great gatherings to hear him speak. He supposedly grew famous abroad, and his fame not only reached Pilate, Herod, and all the chief priests and their scribes, but they considered his direct challenge to their authority so great a threat that they would all participate directly in his persecution and execution--or so the story goes.

So what did all these priests and scribes write about Jesus at that time? What is the official Roman account of these disturbances, or the way the officials handled them? What did historians and chroniclers living in that region at that time write about this famous, controversial, and revolutionary figure? Indeed, what do we find recorded by anyone at all, in any land, regarding Jesus written during the time he was supposedly working his wonders and rocking the crowds at the height of his fame? Anything? There's a god walking around on this planet creating an uproar, and we can't find one single person back then who thought that might be an interesting thing to jot down?

"And, we have no evidence of anyone refuting this alleged occurrence."

Just how would a refutation of something like that go? "I personally wasn't there and I didn't see anything?" Did Paul include any testable specifics?

"You stated also that you find Aquinas's five ways unconvincing. his first way has to be viewed from the standpoint of potency and act. That is, either something is actually in a state, or potentially in a state."

The example Aquinas chose was motion. But motion and potentiality are relative to the frame of reference. So an object can be in motion and not in motion at the same time according to two equally-legitimate frames of reference.

"This ''way'', I will concede, may have been superseded by Newtonian physics."

Relativity was really more Einstein's thing.

"But Newtonian physics does not render belief in God obsolete, in fact Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived, believed that God was necessary for matter to behave the way it does."

Newton also had a passion for alchemy. Smart people make mistakes too.

"With respect to Aquinas's second way, the idea of causality, is entirely legitimate. No being can be the cause of itself, otherwise, it would have to exist prior to itself, which is impossible. Ultimately, one reaches the First Cause, which is God. God cannot be caused, because God is the creator of causes."

The assumption that there are no uncaused things or events cannot be confirmed because we have no practical way to tell the difference between something which has no cause, and something which has a cause which we cannot detect. But if you say God exists and does not need a cause, then that is an explicit rejection of the assumption that no thing can exist without a cause.

"Aquinas's third way is perhaps his most convincing. Any being that did not exist at one point, and will cease to exist at a later point, is contingent. This means that it's dependent on a being, ultimately, that is not contingent, which would be God."

Um, okay I'm pretty sure that was not Aquinas's formulation. In fact, that's not so much an argument as a claim (the existence of a being X which may not exist strictly implies the existence of a being Y which cannot not exist). To make it an argument, it needs to be shown how the very possibility of the non-existence of X would necessitate the necessary existence of Y.

By Aquinas's formulation, the contingent being argument rests on the first cause argument--which is itself on shaky ground. And the contingent-being extension of the first cause argument rests on the notion that the possible non-existence of a contingent thing establishes there was a time when there was the simultaneous non-existence of all contingent things--and I don't see how it establishes that at all.

"You state that the fourth way, derived ultimately on Plato, is not credible. We see that there are gradations, of good, better, and best. We see in the sensory world, good things, better things, the implication is that there must be a best, which Aquinas calls God. How is this false, exactly?"

Which is "better", a hatchet or a marshmallow? One would be better if you were looking for something to add to a cup of hot chocolate, the other would be better for getting into an unopened can of beans. "Better" is like "closer", it is a comparison which is meaningless without a reference point, goal, or standard, and there is no universal or necessary standard for evaluation. You can't even judge one standard "better" than another without reference to a third standard. If all meanings of better and best are relative and contingent, then it isn't apparent how such relativity establishes the existence of something which is absolute and not contingent.

"His fifth way is not necessarily entirely dependent on Aristotle. As Anthony Kenny has pointed out, this ''way'' could be convincing as long as it can overcome or show that, even though Darwin is correct, there's still order in the world."

Darwin laid out a non-supernatural model of how we could have seeming order in living things. For the Fifth way to be convincing, it needs to be shown that there is order in the world which cannot be accounted for by anything but a god. There are things for which we don't yet have an account, but we've had many such gaps in our understanding before which we were later able to fill, so it seems premature at this point to conclude there is a god lurking in any of the remaining gaps.

[scott] "I don't fully understand the philosophical underpinnings that derive meaning from atheism--how is this coherent? I understand that atheists can live a life of meaning, and value, etc., and have good reasons for doing so, but it seems as if meaning is boiled down to some type of philosophical construction, which is then circular (we have meaning because we create meaning, we create meaning to have meaning)."

Meaning is the way we describe things and their implications, including what is important about them to us. We can connect such representative abstractions to the physical world and thus create meaning, and we do it because it is a compact and useful way to store information. This shape leaf means itchy rash. That sort of cloud means storm. Messing with that animal means death. And so on. And we can sometimes convey these representations to each other, which spares us much work and risk, and it gives us something to talk about. Atheists can generate and communicate meaning same as anyone else. They just don't have a category for meaning received from a god.

When theists say their faith gives their life meaning, what they typically mean is they enjoy and depend on the feeling of being valued and being considered important by someone--and not just any someone, but an enormously great someone. It's understandable why some people might crave that feeling, especially if the valuation they feel from other humans isn't enough for them, but it isn't a rational basis for belief.

"does the fact that we can even create meaning, or depend on it, point to the truth of an objective meaning outside of us?"

Where there is no mind, there is no meaning. Meaning exists only within the mind which sustains it. That would be the case even if there is a god. And if the lack of a god means we are intrinsically without purpose, meaning, and value, then presumably, a god would also be intrinsically without purpose, meaning, and value.

Hi Nick: It's a pleasure interacting with someone who has such a strong commitment to reason. It's my view that, no belief is worth possessing, if it cannot withstand rigorous logical analysis.

But where did "reason'' come from? Is it from God, or is it merely an accidental product of a directionless, purposeless, entirely contingent evolutionary process? If it's the latter, why should we trust it? As an analogy, suppose you were given information from a source you knew to be arbitrary, and executed by purely accidental processes. Would you trust it?

Read Alvin Plantinga, a Christian Philosopher, and highly respected, for why an undirected evolutionary process cannot produce intelligence that's trustworthy, and let me know what you think.

You seem to have complete faith in reason. So do I. We have no choice, except to fall into the darkened postmodermist pit. But it's still a faith. But we're stuck. To attempt to decipher whether reason is reliable, one must necessarily use reason to do so! So we're left with faith that reason works, and we have no ultimate metaphisically secure, indubitable, foundation for it. So we accept, yes, on faith, that reason works, but it may all be illusory. So we both have faith in reason. So, in your view, it cannot, your rhetoric aside, be faith per se, that's objectionable, (since you have faith in reason), but certian types of faith. I would agree. I don't have faith in santa, the easter bunny, etc. One must only have faith in things that have a reasonable basis.


You seem to be of the view that reason poofed into existence one day in our evolutionary past, commanding our worship, so to speak. It came no doubt from evolutionary precursers, but it ultimately came from nothing intelligent. With all due respect, this strikes me as a whopper of a myth.

Concerning your dismissal of Jesus's existence, well, virtually no scholar, religious or atheistic, believes this. This doesn't make you wrong, of course, but when scholars speend their lifetimes studying the new testament, and they declare the belief in jesus's nonexistence to be highly implausibe, maybe they're wrong, but we would be wise to listen.

You seem to believe that the histoical records are insufficient to justify a belief in Jesus's existence. We have the four gospels, the epistles of paul. These were written not long, after Jesus's death, within the first century in fact. Compare this with Socrates. Do you believe in his existence? If you're consistent, you would not. After all, the sources for his historical existence are no better than jesus's. We have Plato's dialogues (written years after his death) Aristophanes Clouds, Aristotle's metaphysics, and Xenophon. One could pick apart all of them, in fact they often present conflicting views of Socrates, more conflicting than the gospels do of jesus.

Or, take Thales, the socalled "first philosopher''. What sources do we have of his existence? Aristotle's metaphysics. But no one doubts his existence.

@above: I am very sorry this has come so late, and I hope, though without much conviction, that it is not too late. I had despaired of anyone seeing fit to respond to my arguments. Anyway, I of course concede there are important, indeed unavoidable questions to be asked about which perspectives are credible and coherent, and which are not. I have no truck with the slide from perspectivism of this variety to relativism of philosophical horror-story variety. But I would contest your characterisation of any worldview that both accepts atheism and rejects nihilism as incoherent. I don't see the grounds you have on which to draw it. I will venture to guess that you might cite, for instance, the gap between scientific view, of my family's being collections of molecules, and the humane view on which they are loving human beings who hold tremendous meaning. But I have covered this before. There are not two separate and contradictory views of, on the one hand molecules, and on the other marvelous will'o the wisps of 'loving' and 'meaning'. There is simply the fact of my family mattering a great deal to me, and displaying behaviours which I, quite reasonably, take a certain attitude towards and value immensely. There is no incoherence: simply a surprising contrast between two different but equally reasonable perspectives on the same thing. It is a difference only of degree between my seeing this chair both as a piece of wood and as a place to sit on. With that said, I do not wish to overplay the happy coherence of my worldview: it is still a deeply confusing thing, with plenty of incongruity. But that is no bad thing: it simply signals the need for philosophy in my life, which I thoroughly recognise. There are articles lambasting Russell for his inability to hold down one particular atheist worldview, moving madly from idealism to realism to logical atomism and beyond. But this is no fault: that is simply what being a philosopher means. Christianity, after all, is hardly in perfect coherence either: the philosophical Christian will always be struggling with the problem of pain, or the problem of religious language, and rightly so.

"Martin McPhillips says:
Fr. Oakes does well to boil the old argument down to a binary. It's a one or a zero. God or nothing. Jesus the Truth or Jesus the liar."

Well said, Martin. With two clear viewpoints, only one can make sense. Sure, there are thousands of variables, but wash away the meaningless ones and the two choices become clear.
I recently heard a speaker sum up the consequences of these two choices.

A. You DO believe in God, and he DOESN'T exist. You look a little foolish when you die, but have led a happy existence.

B. You DON'T believe in God and he DOES exist. You not only look like a fool, but you wasted your life on earth and are tormented for eternity.


I think it's fair to go with the safe bet on this one. I'm with Martin. Put me down for 1.

" If the “knowledge” delivered up by “science” only serves to puff up a pathetic animal doomed to die in an uncaring universe, why bother with science anyway? If the search for knowledge is nothing more than a vain attempt to puff oneself up like some miles gloriosus in a Falstaffian comedy, what’s the point?" I agree completely. I would take it a step further and say, why reproduce at all. If the universe is random and hollow, whats the point?

Well said. People are atheists for different reasons though. Some people turn to atheism after a traumatic event of series of events because they cannot imagine a God would allow certain things to happen. I think everyone can relate to that, no matter who you are we all have doubts sometimes. If faith was easy to acquire we would all have plenty of it.

The fact is, there IS a third way, say, between deism or Church-ism, and nihilism. The fact is, Science does not utterly destroy any possibility of some kind of hope for the future, for some kind of larger meaning.

I think there is something that many people might overlook when they are arguing whether there is a God that started everything or is there just science. Why can't it be both?

Clearly everything around us had to have started somewhere, whether you believe in one theory or the other. Our simple technologies and sciences of the day have proven that there is a better than good chance that the universe started with the "big bang theory". However, that starting point had to be created by something. The only logical explanation, is that God did start it all, but maybe the way we (imperfect humans) interpret our holy writings is not as perfect as it should be.

I think God is unknowable by us - we can only know some of His/Her qualities. Therefore, the simplest answer to how it all started is to say: no matter how far back you try to go to show a beginning, something had to start all and that point was created by the "Creator".

"If the “knowledge” delivered up by “science” only serves to puff up a pathetic animal doomed to die in an uncaring universe, why bother with science anyway? If the search for knowledge is nothing more than a vain attempt to puff oneself up like some miles gloriosus in a Falstaffian comedy, what’s the point?"

Because it makes people feel better to pretend they are doing something worthwhile and meaningful.

For example, I hear things like "well, finding a cure for cancer is very meaningful!" a lot.

Well, people with cancer are going to die anyway. I don't see how extending someone's lifespan ultimately makes a difference when they are just going to cease to exist anyway.

My grandma died of lung cancer. Had she had been treated, she would most likely have passed away from old age or some other infliction by now. If atheism is true, she no longer exists in any way. She has no memory of anything that happened in her life. It ultimately wouldn't have mattered whether she was cured of her cancer or not. It would have ended the same. Any other people she may have interacted with or influenced had she lived longer are also going to die and cease to exist with no memories of her or anything else.

It's odd how it's so important to extend people's lifespans, except when the reality of their eventual death sets in. Extending lifespans suddenly becomes unimportant when a person's lifespan can only be extended for a few more years with treatment. It's a "waste of money" or "meaningless" people will say.

But does it ultimately matter whether someone lives 15, 30 or even 50 more years versus 2? It all ends the same. It is only delaying the inevitable.

If we simply cease to exist when we die, I think it is absurd to say that doing some things (such as finding cures for cancer or helping orphans) are more meaningful or worthwhile than others (such as collecting toenails, being a suicide bomber, or playing World of Warcraft so much you forget to eat and starve to death).