Letters from Le Vrai

A Letter to an Evangelical Acquaintance

2012-02-01T17:03:00.001-05:00

Hi [Friend] -

Recently I was browsing through my ‘library’ at home and saw the copy of The Purpose-Driven Life you got me for Christmas several years ago, along with the note about my own search for meaning in life. I actually did read the book, even though I knew something about Rick Warren then; and I found his book to be a sort of rehash of what I had been taught and what I experienced growing up in my own church, Grace Gospel Chapel in Allentown, PA.

You were right that I was searching for meaning in life; but having thoughtfully considered and rejected the world-view of my youth, I could no longer go back to it. For a long time I fought against it; but what I’ve come to realize now is that I outgrew it.

My life’s path has gone something like this: liberation => disorientation => despair => nihilism => affirmation. I’ve also come to realize that this path was necessary for me. Even the period of nihilistic despair was a necessary transitional stage for me. And since I now view existence as a state of continual and possibly eternal flux with no end goal, no ultimate meaning or purpose, and no divine or other supernatural sanction, I accept the fact that both meaning and purpose are moving targets for me; my life has many ‘meanings’ and ‘purposes’ - many projects of my own devising. And I evaluate others on the extent to which they can endure life in a meaningless world because they organize a small portion of it themselves.

My approach to life, my philosophy - like Nietzsche’s - is an experimental one, and not just a theoretical one. If my life could be said to have a goal at all, it would be the desire to be that type of person who takes into himself and redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence, which is really a religious affirmation of life at bottom - life whole and not denied or in part. I can truthfully say, with Nietzsche, that “if we affirm a single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all of existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation, all eternity was pronounced good, redeemed, justified and affirmed.” And I have to say I’ve had many moments in life where I have ‘trembled with happiness.’

So I thought I’d give you this book for Christmas, since it does a really good job of summing up how I came to be where I am with my world-view. The author is an atheist, but he’s not one of the infamous ‘New Atheists’ who are quite vocal and unabashedly critical of religion. He’s actually a practicing Buddhist himself. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, I would at least suggest the preface, which lays out the antithesis between our two world-views, and in that way you could have a basic but better understanding of where people like me are coming from. Also good, though, is the chapter “Ethics as Human Ecology,” which does a good job of explaining how and why atheists can be good without a God to legislate or sanction morality.

And if you plan on throwing it out, please give it back to me because I could always use an extra copy! All my books are essentially my notebooks, and many of them fall apart from use. Lol.

Merry Christmas, and I wish a happy and healthy new year for you, [Husband], and the kids!

[Juno]

Deepak Calls the Kettle Black

2011-10-16T07:50:00.005-05:00

In what is almost always an exercise in irony (and a lack of awareness thereof), Deepak Chopra excoriates Richard Dawkins and his latest book, The Magic of Reality. The book is geared towards younger readers; this is just one of the many problems Chopra has with the book.

Now, I haven't read this latest effort by Dawkins, but I have a generally favorable view of the man; but my point in this post isn't to correct any misunderstandings or misconceptions Chopra may have about it. My goal is just to contrast and compare Chopra's view of reality with the generally accepted scientific view.

Generally speaking, Chopra claims that Dawkins has taken the magic out of reality. Chopra, of course, represents the real reality; and for a steep price, you can experience this through one of his retreats.

Now, one can be skeptical of the vehemence with which Chopra attacks Dawkins, especially in the light of the fact that Chopra has his own book to promote - one he co-wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, appropriately named War of the Worldviews.

In Chopra's book, Mlodinow writes:

"While science often casts doubt on spiritual beliefs and doctrines insofar as they make representations about the physical world, science does not -- and cannot -- conclude that God is an illusion."

I agree that the scientific method can't disprove the existence of God. But it certainly casts an overwhelming amount of doubt upon its existence, especially if this God is alleged to act in the physical world.

And this is precisely what Chopra claims for his notion of spiritual reality. The many pricey programs and retreats on his site claim to do what medical science (including psychiatry) does: physical and emotional healing.

I admit that there is some support for the therapeutic effects of meditation and yoga on the human brain and body - and these were measured using the scientific method. There is no need to posit any spiritual entities or causes for them.

Chopra chides Dawkins for claiming that "to discover what is real, we use our five senses"; in support of his rebuke, he rightly claims that quantum mechanics and Eintstein's theory of relativity challenged what the five senses told us about reality. However, both quantum mechanics and relativity theory make predictions about reality, and both have been tested and subsequently confirmed through various experiments.

But what about Chopra's notion of a spiritual reality with spiritual causes? The following quote is taking from an interview with Chopra in 1995:

Quantum healing is healing the bodymind from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong. So quantum healing involves healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body.

Do not adjust your set - that feeling of vertigo you have is due to the fact that you've just eaten some tainted word-salad.

But, ridicule aside, none of what he just said is anywhere near the consensus of actual physicists. Here is the opinion of one prominent physicist:

Quantum physics is claimed to support the mystical notion that the mind creates reality. However, an objective reality, with no special role for consciousness, human or cosmic, is consistent with all observations.

And by "observations," he means actual, repeatable, controlled experiments with no pre-conceived notions about consciousness.

So it's not difficult to see that Chopra speaks confidently of that which he not only knows nothing about, but that which he really can't know anything about. What can it possibly mean to experience something not manifested at the sensory level? Chopra doesn't know. He merely asserts. He can't truly "know" anything without his senses. And he talks about "consciousness" as if it's the best known thing in the world. He criticizes Dawkins for not taking into consideration what those philosophers and neuroscientists involved in consciousness studies have to say about it. For instance, he says:

How microvolts of electricity and neurochemicals flying across synapses produce the entire world is a deep mystery, often referred to as the hard problem in consciousness research.

If by "produce the entire world" he means produce the entire world of our subjective consciousness, then he's correct; but none of the scientists he mentions believe that our mind/brain produces the world outside of our conscious experience, what most people call the "objective" world, or "objective" reality.

His boldness puts me in mind of Nietzsche's critiques of consciousness and the "will," especially with regard to Schopenhauer's conception of it in his The World as Will and Representation, which is very similar to the common Hindu understanding. Nietzsche's thought even seemed to anticipate the work of researchers like Daniel Wegner of Harvard, or wrote a very intriguing book called The Illusion of Conscious Will, where he casts serious - some say definitive - doubt on both our conceptions of consciousness and will. I'll quote Nietzsche at length on the subject:

Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Innumerable mistakes originate out of consciousness, which, "in spite of fate," as Homer says, cause an animal or a man to break down earlier than might be necessary. If the conserving bond of the instincts were not very much more powerful, it would not generally serve as a regulator: by perverse judging and dreaming with open eyes, by superficiality and credulity, in short, just by consciousness, mankind would necessarily have broken down: or rather, without the former there would long ago have been nothing more of the latter! Before a function is fully formed and matured, it is a danger to the organism: all the better if it be then thoroughly tyrannized over! Consciousness is thus thoroughly tyrannized over and not least by the pride in it! It is thought that here is the quintessence of man; that which is enduring, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him! Consciousness is regarded as a fixed, given magnitude! Its growth and becoming are denied! It is accepted as the "unity of the organism "! This ludicrous overvaluation and misconception of consciousness has as its result the great utility that a too rapid maturing of it has thereby been hindered. Because men believed that they already possessed consciousness, they gave themselves very little trouble to acquire it and even now it is not otherwise! It is still an entirely new problem just dawning on the human eye, and hardly yet plainly recognizable : to embody knowledge in ourselves and make it instinctive, a problem which is only seen by those who have grasped the fact that so far our errors alone have been embodied in us, and that all our consciousness is relative to errors!

Nietzsche has much more to say about consciousness and the will, but this passage is long enough and should suffice. Another thing Nietzsche valued was the development of the scientific method - properly understood - and not the fruits of the scientific endeavor in particular. Nietzsche is a severe skeptic, and believed that every claim and presumption, no matter how sacred or hallowed, should be taken to court and investigated. He even famously said that "convictions are prisons."

But it seems that Chopra and those like him use the method(s) of introspection, meditation, and Yoga; and Dawkins - and scientists generally - uses the method of introspection, "extrospection"- if I may coin an awkward term - hypothesis formation, intersubjective hypothesis testing, as well as a rigorous skepticism in every step of the method. While Chopra's methods may make a person feel subjectively better, and in some instances improve their emotional and physical health, they don't necessarily get us any nearer to reality, which is what Chopra criticizes about Dawkin's new book. Scientists value and rely on their method because the employment of it produces a coherent picture of the world and makes prediction and control possible - indeed, it makes life possible. All the mystical, truly subjective (as opposed to intersubjective) experiences, intuitions, epiphanies, and dream-insights are typically unique to the individual who has them. And like I said, while it might make that particular person feel better, it doesn't necessarily reflect reality - which is what Dawkin's is trying to instill in the youngest of minds.

On 'The Creation Story for Atheists' - A Review of a Review

2011-10-10T17:12:00.003-05:00

The Discovery Institute, the main think tank of the Intelligent Design movement, has an article posted on its site titled, "The Creation Story for Atheists."

Instead of pointing out the irony in a movement that refuses to name the 'designer' in its hypothesis for the complexity of biological life - but has no problem posting all sorts of articles claiming that the Christian god is that designer - I want to address the article itself. It is a review of a book about religion and evolution called God and Evolution: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews Explore Darwin’s Challenge to Faith.

In keeping with the Intelligent Design movement's history of opposing the scientific theory of evolution for religious reasons, the author of the article leads with this lengthy paragraph:

Here’s what we’re up against today: Two out of three college biology teachers call themselves atheists or agnostics, as do ninety-five percent of the biologists in the National Academy of Sciences. Of the leading scientists involved in evolution, eighty-seven percent deny the existence of God, and ninety percent reject any purpose in evolution. The reason is easy to find: Darwinian evolution, “the creation story” of atheists, now operates “as the normal stance of science.” In high-school and college textbooks, Darwinian evolution is taught as a blind, heartless, purposeless, unguided process that makes any spiritual explanation of life superfluous. This is our current tax-funded orthodoxy enforced by court orders. Worst of all, what is “almost universally taught in textbooks” is that man himself is the unintended byproduct of blind material forces. Is it any wonder that our culture is sinking into nihilism?

Now, as I was reading this, I was thinking Amen! to most of it - at least until the last sentence.

She's correct: evolution implies an unguided natural process; and human beings are an unintended outcome of this 'blind' material process. Where I think she goes wrong is when she concludes that all of this leads to nihilism. But first, we need to ask ourselves if our culture really is sinking into nihilism. Many people throw the word around pejoratively without defining what they mean by it - or possibly even understanding it.

Nihilism, as I understand it (and which is based primarily on a Nietzschean reading), is a psychological state that results from the realization that the natural process of perpetual change aims at nothing; that there are no values intrinsic to the world; and that there is no metaphysical unity behind this process that is in continual flux. Additionally, having realized the aforementioned delusions about reality, one admits to oneself that this is the only life there is, without recourse to after-worlds or divinities; additionally, one can't endure the thought that this life is all there is.

Now, most people who throw the word "nihilism" around think this is a permanent or indefinite state. However, I agree with Nietzsche that nihilism is a transitional state. Nihilism is the necessary consequence of the devaluation of values we've previously held. In other words, when we realize that the values we've relied upon to guide our lives are no longer tenable - or even possible - we experience a sense of disorientation, and oftentimes even despair. That feeling of despair is nihilism.

But is it permanent? For some, yes. For someone who is not compromised by mental illness, suicide can be the necessary consequence of a 'perfect' nihilism. Aside from self-destruction, a nihilist could seek to effect the destruction of everything about the world that outrages him. Perhaps this is what the author has in mind. Perhaps her formula might look something like this: scientific materialism => atheism => nihilism => moral catastrophe.

Of course, the common conception of nihilism usually evokes two abominable and dangerous ideas: lack of meaning, and lack of value. I would imagine that, in most people's minds, a nihilist who lacks or denies purpose or meaning probably won't lead to moral ruin, at least not on a societal scale; however, a lack of value - especially a lack of metaphysical value (that is, value grounded in God or some other other-worldly realm) - would make most people assume that such a nihilist has not only abrogated all traditional values, but is also actively encouraging others to slouch towards Gomorrah.

But let's unpack this a little bit. First, it's a fact that it does not logically follow that atheism is the inevitable result of scientific materialism or, as is feared most by the religious - the theory of evolution. The author even mentions two of the most prominent scientists who are also Christians: Francis Collins, an evangelical; and Ken Miller, a Catholic. However, she says of them:

In answer to Miller, David Klinghoffer warns that Darwinism makes the idea of God’s image in us incomprehensible, something that leads to “moral catastrophe.”

Francis Collins, head of the BioLogos Foundation, claims that the biological world looks exactly like the product of Dar win’s “undirected process,” and that only through faith do we recognize this apparent lack of design as “deceiving.” On this point Collins is refuted by St. Paul in Romans 1:20: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”

There are two things here I want to point out first. One is the reference to 'moral catastrophe' again. I would think the fact that there are sincere religious believers who also accept evolution would be a sort of 'proof of principle' to people like our author here. Not so.

The other thing I want to point out, and which is related to the first, is the author's use of scripture to 'refute' Francis Collins. Religious fundamentalists can't accept different interpretations of scriptural facts. Many times - and in this instance - they think that merely citing a verse is enough to refute an assertion. It's not unlike those bumper stickers or T-shirts you see that say, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!"

But this leads us to ask: where is the nihilism? Where is the so-called moral catastrophe? I don't know if any practicing scientists are nihilists, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that close to none of them are murderers, rapists, thieves, or saboteurs - nor are they actively encouraging any of this behavior in others. Chances are they're no better or worse than their religious neighbors. So it would seem to me that anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that our society is not in the midst of a moral catastrophe, or slouching towards Gomorrah.

What is equally obvious is that religious fundamentalists consider things like homosexuality, gay marriage, perceived socialist tendencies - like universal health-care or taxing the rich more - to be signs of moral catastrophe. But since the term 'moral catastrophe' reeks of hyperbole, let's check the dictionary. My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines 'catastrophe' as: a momentous tragic event ranging from extreme misfortune to utter overthrow or ruin.

It would seem to any reasonable observer that our society is clearly not in a state of catastrophe - moral or otherwise (with the exception of the current 'Great Recession' being an instance of extreme misfortune, possibly).

So I propose a new, more appropriate, less histrionic term for what our society is experiencing; what with all the loosening or transformation of traditional social mores:

Moral Evolution.

Was Thomas Jefferson a Christian?

2011-10-02T08:06:00.003-05:00

Aside from the fact that Thomas Jefferson edited out of the New Testament all miracles and suggestions of Jesus' divinity, is it still possible to call him a Christian? Well, certainly not in the Tea-vangelical sense of Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, or other prominent conservative politicians. But it may not be accurate to call him an atheist, at least not in the sense that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are.

Below are some relevant passages of a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to John Adams on August 15, 1820. Was Jefferson religious? Was he a Christian? Both sides of the Culture War claim Jefferson as one of their own, but the actual truth of the matter may be a little more complicated than either side would like to admit.

When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke...

At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it. He told us indeed that `God is a spirit,' but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter.

All heresies being now done away with us, these schismatists are merely atheists, differing from the material Atheist only in their belief that `nothing made something,' and from the material deist who believes that matter alone can operate on matter.

A single sense may indeed be sometimes decieved, but rarely: and never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning. They evidence realities; and there are enough of these for all the purposes of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

So, based on my reading (and not just of this one letter), it seems Jefferson was religious - in the sense of viewing morality as something sacred, or as a 'natural law' - but it also seems as if he was a pragmatic agnostic.

An interesting, but purely speculative, question would be: if Jefferson were alive today, with all of our scientific advances - before evolution by natural selection, before the discovery of DNA, before particle physics and relativity - would he still be a pragmatic agnostic, or an atheist, or something else entirely?

A Ride in the Existential Death Cab

2011-09-17T07:58:00.003-05:00

I can't say I know much about the band Death Cab for Cutie, other than the fact that the singer is married to one of my crushes, Zooey Deschanel. But a recent article in Christianity Today claims that they are "one of the most coherent and articulate representatives of naturalism on the American music scene today."

I don't know that they get much air play on the Top 40 stations, at least not like artists such as Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Usher, J-Lo, etc. Of the aforementioned artists, the only one that comes close to broaching existential topics would be Lady Gaga - if you can get past the in-your-face fashion statements that tend to distract more than draw one in.

After investigating some of the lyrics from Death Cab for Cutie, I would say I have to agree with the author when he says that "they provide an intelligent challenge to Christians considering the ultimate question of man's purpose and existence." Intelligent, yes; but only in relation to some of the other lyrics produced - for instance, the pure hedonism of Britney Spears singing "If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?" or Usher saying "Keep downin' drinks like there's no tomorrow, there's just right now, now, now." But let's examine Death Cab's insights, vis-à-vis this article.

The article's author lays out his plan, which is to show that the band's efforts

chart a progression through the different manifestations of our culture's naturalism, from romantic despair, to near nihilism, to the rejection of these troubling questions entirely as unanswerable and even dangerous. At the end, with no answers in sight, it is the examined life that is no longer worth living for the naturalist.

The article's author is a sophomore studying English Lit at Bryan College (whose motto is "Christ Above All"); so we can assume that he is about 19 or 20 years of age. So I think we need to take into account this fact, and the fact that he attends a highly-ranked Christian college. His treatment of his subject is thorough and well-analyzed, and his writing is polished; but the two factors noted above will obviously have an influence on his relationship to his subject. But this is true of me as well; I am an atheist who went to a private liberal arts college (though I grew up in an evangelical culture, and even believed myself to be a born-again Christian through most of college).

In brief, the author charts the band's progress first with this

The message of the song (and the album) is that life is short and difficult with no ultimate meaning, but if we can just huddle together, we may find some cure for our loneliness and despair. There is no heaven or hell, just the body heat of another mortal to keep us warm.

and

To put it cynically, love is two dying animals distracting themselves enough from the reality of their condition that they can live out their short years, relatively untroubled. Christianity provides another way, but it is important to realize just how powerful this need for companionship and connection is, even in the absence of any higher deity. Where there are no gods, humans will build them from each other.

But why put it cynically? For several years now I've been meditating on the nature of existence. I've observed the devoutly religious, the moderately religious, the thoughtful secularist, the staunch secularist, and the true hedonist. Whether we like it or not, we humans have an innate desire - dare I say instinct? - to seek out or at least experience our lives as having meaning.

The question that keeps posing itself to me is: for what are we living? Granted, this is neither a new epiphany nor an original thought. But I do mean we; if I could ask everyone what they were living for, what drives them, etc., I would. I find the question - and subsequent answers - fascinating.

Obviously the religious - devout or moderate - are going to answer that the meaning of their lives resides in God's hands; God assigns a meaning to each individual life - or at the very least, the mere fact that they are valued by God is enough. Secularists - particularly secular humanists - are likely going to respond that their lives revolve around other human lives, and, indeed, all of humanity. Some even push the envelope and include all sentient life in their circle of meaning. But these are very general, Ivory Tower-type of terms. People may hit on these when they sit back and reflect over a cup of coffee or tea, but what drives them on a day to day basis? Why live today?

For most people, there are more pressing concerns that, while maybe not immediately identified as constituting the meaning(s) of their lives, occupy most of their time and energy: e.g., raising children, pursuing a career, etc. These people, being so busy with the typical rat race, surely enjoy the fruits of the arts - at least in a hedonistic way, as an escape, a temporary respite from the grind. And there are those, like Death Cab for Cutie, who make art. But we probably have to ask: do they make art to escape or evade the inner desire for meaning, or do they make art to satisfy it?

I contend that those who enjoy art enjoy it for hedonistic reasons: it gives them pleasure; it provides them with an escape, a temporary respite from the question of existence - which is the question of meaning. This question is commonly thought most difficult and pressing for those of us who are secular. I think this is largely correct. For me, having come from a fundamentalist Christian background, the formula runs something like this: liberation => disorientation => despair => nihilism.

Now, I think there are some tangents and waypoints along this path. After extricating oneself or being liberated from one's religious upbringing, there will most likely be a period of disorientation, if not in terms of morality (we won't suddenly start robbing and killing), at least in terms of meaning (if there's no God, what does it all mean? what's it all for?). But depending on when in life this period of disorientation takes place, one can repress or otherwise ignore the problem of meaning, typically by immersing oneself in a more hedonistic lifestyle (and that doesn't necessarily mean the Charlie Sheen lifestyle!). This period could last for years - maybe even for an entire lifetime.

If the disorientation is faced squarely, however, then a creeping despair can take root and spread throughout one's entire life, until nothing gives pleasure - even those things that used to give the most intense and satisfying pleasure. Furthermore, one may come to the conclusion that real values aren't even possible - and that leads one into gaping maw of nihilism. And, of course, nihilism can lead either to suicide or an all-consuming, irreparable hatred of all existence.

And, of course, since this article is in Christianity Today, we have this:

Christianity provides another way, but it is important to realize just how powerful this need for companionship and connection is, even in the absence of any higher deity. Where there are no gods, humans will build them from each other.

Now, this is truer than the author probably realizes, and a bit ironic, too. We secularists obviously think that the Christian God was built out of the human psyche as well. So for us, this is no real insight. And for those of us who are free from the tyrannizing guilt and shame of Christian morality, we have no problem building our own gods from each other. The problem frequently lies in just what those gods should be.

But without any hint of irony, the author says, "but what cruel and fickle gods our relationships make." Cruel and fickle are two words that can describe the Christian God; and it is probably best encapsulated in the Christian's own bromide of "God answers all prayers; it's just that sometimes the answer is No." Sometimes?

Christians don't have an easier time with their relationships either. There are Christian psychologists, Christian marriage counselors and, yes, Christian divorces. Perhaps we can cut the author some slack here, being only 19 or 20 years of age, and not having experienced the world yet.

The author closes with the following thoughts:

It is much easier to assert that there is neither problem nor solution, than to live knowing that a solution might be out there, somewhere. They have given up on the questions themselves and are therefore missing the terrifying but cleansing answers behind them.

As I suggested before, there are different ways to approach the meaning of existence once one has been liberated from a dogmatic morality and world-view. Here the author suggests denial as being the route Death Cab ultimately ends up with; and I would agree with the author that many people in our culture do in fact end up employing "hedonism and naval gazing" as ways to assuage the feeling of existential emptiness and pain.

But the author seems ignorant of, or simply doesn't mention, the depth and breadth of thought that existentialism brings to the realm of aesthetics. The two the come to mind for me, and which happen to be two antipodes, are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Schopenhauer, following along similar lines as Christianity and Buddhism, experienced the world as nothing but suffering, with desire being the cause of this suffering; so just as the Buddhist seeks a pacific Nirvana, and the Christian seeks "blessedness," Schopenhauer sought a similarly tranquil respite through what he perceived as the objectivity or disinterestedness of art, where we lose ourselves in it, and forget our individuality. Or to put it another way: with no individual, there's no individual left to suffer from existence. But this is a more nuanced description of 'ignoring the problem' that Death Cab allegedly does.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, sees nihilism as a necessary transitional stage between a life-denying, dogmatic morality such as Christianity (and even Buddhism - which is life-denying, but not dogmatic) and a Dionysian, affirming, deifying embrace of existence as it is, without subtraction or exception. If one is strong enough to endure and overcome a period of nihilism, one can begin to create for oneself one's own table of values, one's unique individuality, one's own meaning. However - and I also agree with Nietzsche on this - 99% of the population simply isn't strong enough for it.

But how invigorating, how exciting, how dangerous would be the following affirmation of life to those who are strong enough:

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

How clear and fresh is the air around those words! The person who can utter those words without reservation is that "type of spirit that takes into itself and redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence!"

Closed Minds vs. Open Minds

2011-09-14T18:10:00.002-05:00

The flagship blog of the Intelligent Design movement published a post recently claiming that the Christian actually has an open mind, whereas the atheist has a closed mind. Let me address, and attempt to rebut, each claim in turn.

It is interesting that devout/militant atheists, like I once was, seem to have no doubts about their philosophical commitment and worldview.

While I can't speak for all atheists - and I wouldn't use the terms 'devout' or 'militant' to describe myself, either - I can say that I do have doubts about my philosophical commitment and world-view. Once we get beyond the everyday, practical issues of how to live and what to do, there are some interesting and compelling reasons to be skeptical about the naturalistic world-view (and of all world-views in general) - but these are rather esoteric, up-in-the-ivory tower type of considerations.

What I as an atheist am certain about is that the Christian world-view is false. Why am I certain? I come to the issue from the opposite side as this blog's author - I was a born-again Christian turned atheist. Just as this blog post's author says he found the Christian world-view more satisfying, I found the 'atheistic' world-view more satisfying. I could put it a different way: is an Intelligent Designer possible? Yes. Is the Deist god possible? I'm open to the idea, but that hypothesis would need to have some kind of evidence significant enough to overturn the current scientific cosmological paradigm. Does the god of the Abrahamic religions - or the gods of the Hindu religions - exist? Almost certainly not.

My reasons for this conclusion are too many to list in just one blog post. But my point is that I, as an atheist, do not summarily reject all other hypotheses with a closed mind; however, once I have considered the evidence and arguments for a particular world-view (in this case, Christianity), and found them wanting, I can confidently dismiss all subsequent arguments for it unless they provide me with new arguments or evidence to consider. So far, Christians haven't provided sufficient evidence or new arguments to convince me otherwise.

and they will tell you that there is absolutely no question that materialistic processes can explain everything.

This is not my view. There may be some working scientists and philosophers out there who do claim this, but I have doubts that human beings will be able to explain everything. Two majors areas of current dispute are: the nature of human consciousness, and the beginning of our universe (if it even has a beginning). We could say that naturalistic scientists believe that materialistic processes can explain everything in the natural world, but make no claims about a supernatural world, if such a thing exists. But there may be an epistemological limit to what humans can discover, given the fact that we are a part of the natural fabric of things, and don't enjoy an Archimedean perspective from which we may come at these problems from all angles. And as far as figuring out the nature of human consciousness, there are some scientists and philosophers who believe that it is in principle impossible, because we're trying to figure out the brain - using the brain.

I therefore put myself in the camp of legitimate skeptics, as a former mindless Dawkins clone with a bunch of Hitchens, Harris and Matzke thrown in for good measure.

This seems to be an odd thing to say. First, he claims to be a 'legitimate skeptic.' But my experience of Christians who claim to be skeptics - and this comes from my personal experience growing up in an evangelical church, as well as continuing relationships with those I regard as intelligent, well-read Christian acquaintances - aren't nearly skeptical enough.

A Christian skeptic might question the veracity of the biblical account of Christ's death; but once they are shown a quote or two from Josephus, they are satisfied, and they feel bolstered in their faith because they have 'supporting evidence.'

But true skepticism doesn't end with a dogma. This author may have been a skeptic before, but now that he's a Christian, he literally can't be truly skeptical about his faith - or else he will cease to be a Christian. Dogma is dogma - you either believe Christ is the son of God or not. You're either 'saved' or you're not.

Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, spoke about skepticism:

One form of honesty has always been lacking among founders of religions and their kin: they have never made their experiences a matter of the intellectual conscience. "What did I really experience? What then took place in me and around me? Was my understanding clear enough? Was my will directly opposed to all deception of the senses, and courageous in its defence against fantastic notions?" None of them ever asked these questions, nor to this day do any of the good religious people ask them. They have rather a thirst for things which are contrary to reason, and they don’t want to have too much difficulty in satisfying this thirst, so they experience "miracles" and "regenerations," and hear the voices of angels! But we who are different, who are thirsty for reason, want to look as carefully into our experiences as in the case of a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We ourselves want to be our own experiments, and our own subjects of experiment.

Making oneself into an experiment is, to me, the ultimate consequence of skepticism. This requires a high tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. My understanding of the Christian world-view - and, again, this is coming from someone who grew up in it, and whose parents are still in it - is that it is characterized by a desire for being and not for becoming; for permanence and not for change. The Christian may be able to tolerate these things on a small scale, on a day to day basis in terms of the inconsequential vicissitudes of their daily life; but the Christian cannot tolerate these things in an ultimate sense - as if life itself were only becoming and not being; only change and not permanence.

So, just as Christians say that the person who commits an atrocious act but claims to be a Christian isn't a true Christian, I have to say that this blog's author isn't a true skeptic - at least not according to my definition.

The really interesting thing is that my liberation from the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris-Matzke nihilistic stupor in which I lived and suffered for so many years was to a great extent the result of my interest in science, mathematics, and engineering.

This quote puzzles me even more. If this blog's author has actually read Dawkins, Harris - and especially Hitchins - he would know that these thinkers are anything but nihilistic, and their mindset is definitely not one of stupor. Maybe this blog's author experienced 'naturalism' as a nihilistic stupor, but that would be his fault, not the 'New Atheists' and not the naturalistic world-view. Maybe this blog's author needs the emotional comfort religion - especially Christianity - provides. Having come from that background myself, and having left that 'certainty' of eternal life after death and a heavenly father who watches over me, I can empathize with the author. Unfortunately, I can't respect it.

It's also interesting to note that, even though the official stance of the Intelligent Design movement is that they refuse to identify the Designer, bloggers for the Intelligent Design movement regularly invoke not just any old Designer, but the God of the Christian Bible. But that's a post for another day.

On Evangelicalism and Militarism

2011-05-02T10:33:00.002-05:00

One of the many things I have trouble wrapping my head around, when it comes to American evangelical Christianity, is the high correlation between America's armed forces and the Christian faith.

Prima facie, this correlation seems to go against everything Christ (and to a lesser extent, all New Testament writers) preached against. Turn the other cheek? Love and pray for your enemies? Judge not, lest ye be judged?

Since I believe Christians are human just like everyone else, I can understand and appreciate their desire for revenge and recompense for atrocities like 9/11. But the Christian claims to be something different, a 'new creation,' and is commanded to distinguish himself from the rest of the world. Jesus certainly did when he refused to fight back against both the Romans and Jews of his time.

But on a certain level I completely understand the Christian's desire to 'serve his country' - especially if he thinks he's serving a Christian country. But there is one issue I think the Christian solider needs to address: collateral damage. It's one thing to be able to identify the enemy who has attacked you and then try to eradicate him or neutralize him with as much force as is necessary. But it's quite another - and non-believers understand this as well - to be able to justify or rationalize collateral damage.

How does the Christian do this? I don't know. How can they? In many times in combat their actions will lead directly to innocent casualties. At a minimum, they give their assent to and are part of an organization (i.e., the military) that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds or even thousands of innocents; in which case, they indirectly contribute to or condone such killing.

It's one thing to take upon oneself the risk of one's own death - "those who take up the sword shall perish by it" - but how does the Christian justify the deaths of innocent villagers in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or the innocent spouses and children of those who are actively fighting us - unless they adopt Osama bin Laden's philosophy of guilt by association? But even that brings us back yet again to the basics: is God the judge of the world, or not? Should the Christian love his enemies, or not?

Should the Christian even serve in the military, or even pledge allegiance to the flag of our nation (Exodus 20:4-5)?

Centurions for God

2011-03-22T17:38:00.002-05:00

Religious Right solider and former Nixon "hatchet man" (he went to federal prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal) Charles Colson is marshaling a force of über-Christians called The Centurions.

I'm fairly familiar with Charles "Chuck" Colson. I read his book, The Body: Being Light in Darkness, which I also made a Christmas present to my mother when I was in college - Colson was and is one of her favorite authors.

I was born into born-again Christianity; fortunately I went through a crisis of faith in college (I read Colson's book and all of C.S. Lewis' books in an attempt to establish a redoubt of my tottering belief) and came out fully "secularized." However, it wasn't until about 6 years after college that I finally self-identified as an atheist. And I remain one.

Chuck Colson wants to establish a movement - or what he views as a counter-movement to the secularization of America - that will spread Religious Right fundamentalism, or at least mitigate what he sees as the lamentable fact that the "inerrancy of the Bible and Jesus’s role as the only path to salvation aren’t being taught — not in schools and not in churches."

Though it may sound like self-flagellation, I try to regularly read Colson's column at Christianity Today; not because I respect him as a thinker or writer, but because he is respected enough by evangelicals country-wide to have his own column in the evangelical movement's flagship publication. In other words, I like to know what the enemy is thinking and doing.

Aside from the obnoxious - but not necessarily controversial - proselytizing and holier-than-thou brow-beating this movement will undoubtedly engender, Colson definitely sticks to the fundamentalist line on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. But, being a former fundamentalist myself (in name, if not in spirit), I have to ask how he and so many other evangelicals can justify the type of activism in which they engage.

This type of evangelical ideology seeks to utilize the force of the State to enforce their morality. They want to legislate their morality. They aren't satisfied with merely attempting to persuade, cajole, or intimidate nonbelievers into becoming believers (or at least having nonbelievers refrain from committing what they consider to be "sins"); they want to make it punishable by law to do these things. If I may put on my armchair psychologist's hat for a moment: they aren't satisfied that nonbelievers will be punished in the next world (and for all of eternity) - they also want nonbelievers punished in this world. Their susceptibility to ressentiment and their lust for vengeance is almost unquenchable - if I may quote myself.

But it's fair to ask them how they arrive at this conclusion. Where in the Bible (specifically the New Testament) does it promote political activism? Where in the Bible does Christ encourage his followers to try to implement laws in order to get the masses to live "Christianly", so to speak? Where in the Bible does Christ exhort his followers to turn the Roman Empire into a Christian Empire?

On the contrary - according to my lights, the New Testament commands the opposite. Christ himself said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. And Paul - Jesus' "hatchet man", you might say - said that everyone should be subject to the governing authorities. And what's more, Paul said that whoever rebels against the established authority is really rebelling against God Himself, since God is in control of everything.

But evangelicals want to make same-sex marriage and abortion illegal - they want to use the machinery of the State to satisfy the demands of their idiosyncratic morality. But whatever happened to being in the world, but not of the world? Even if we consider these evangelicals as being of one mind with our Founding Fathers - many of them are Tea Party supporters - same-sex marriage and abortion neither pick their pockets nor break their legs, to put it in a Jeffersonian vernacular. This seems to go against their alleged reverence for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

As a secular person, I obviously consider a secular government preferable and necessary. But evangelicals should as well; after all, freedom of religion and freedom from religion theoretically guarantee that a committed Christian won't have to submit to Sharia law, for example. Do they not realize this? Or do they feel like they have the numbers to ensure they never have to worry about it? In which case they are being somewhat Machiavellian - and therefore not very Christian-like.

Two recent polls have given me some relief from the depressing vision of a political Christianity (and not just a cultural Christianity): this poll indicates that religion may become extinct in at least 9 Western nations. And this survey says that America is becoming less Christian. Personally, I have trouble believing the latter.

But I would like to pose two questions to Pharyngula readers:

1) Is Colson's Centurion movement something we secular people should be worried about?

2) If it is something to be worried about, then how do we counter it?

I'd love to hear some opinions.

The Credulity of Americans is Unquenchable

2011-03-21T11:32:00.005-05:00

An evangelical pastor and his wife are making money off their 11 year-old son's book about his near-death experience. If you think I sound cynical, you're correct; unfortunately, it seems there are far too few Americans who share my skepticism.

But first, a little background about the story: the son, Colton, was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery for a burst appendix. Upon coming to, the boy recounted how "he had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus." He said he even noticed that Jesus' eyes were a sparkly blue. (Now, keep in mind that Jesus was a Jew, and while it's not impossible for him to have blue eyes, the boy's description more closely mirrors the typical Anglophilic portrayal of a long-haired, pasty-white Jesus with a goatee. Also keep in mind that Colton was only about 4 years-old when he had his "vision." Do you think the images of Jesus he had seen up to that point would portray Jesus as a typical Jew of his day, or as an Anglo-Saxon hippie with blue eyes?)

Colton's 163-page book has sold astonishingly well: there are currently more than 1.5 million copies in print, and it is on the New York Times best-seller list for two weeks now. Clearly many Americans have a strong need for this type of feel-good rubbish.

What's not clear is whether he actually had a near-death experience, per se - I haven't read the book (I refuse to spend money on it), and this article in the NYT isn't clear; it merely says that he woke up from surgery and claimed he had died. Colton's parents believe him, of course. They believe him so much that they published this book for him. And although Colton's father says he was simply hoping for the publisher to break even, and that he plans on giving away most of the royalties, he is in fact keeping some of the money for "home improvements." Well, there's a nice plus. But as a Christian - and as a pastor - wouldn't that money be better spent for the poor, the homeless, the sick, or other Christian goals?

Now, every parent wants to believe their kid. No parent wants to intentionally belittle and condescend to their child. And, given the parents' religious faith, it's easy to see how they are inclined to credulity.

But isn't it more likely that something else is at work here? I mean, when you become a Christian, you make a commitment to a set of beliefs, a dogma, and the nature of a dogma is that you can't doubt it and believe it at the same time. For example, a Christian can't claim to be a Christian and doubt that Jesus was the son of God, or that he was raised from the dead. That's the essence of being a Christian - at least from an evangelical point of view. And the typical believer can't venture too far into the exegetical disputes over literal versus metaphorical interpretations; the theological ground there is too shaky - the fate of his eternal soul depends on it!

So the temptation to believe what would otherwise be met with a healthy skepticism and gentle patronization (e.g., if Colton woke up and said he died and met Alexander the Great), is so strong as to blind one from the more obvious explanation. The parents, of course, claim that Colton made reference to things that "there's just no way he could have known." The example they give is that the mother had had a miscarriage but never told Colton about it; but Colton had referenced it directly. This is a common refrain among those who have had near-death experiences.

But we know that our brains absorb a lot more stimuli via our senses than our "conscious minds" can register. I don't intend to get into a discussion of consciousness - other than to say that no one really knows how to explain it yet - but there is literature out there documenting research and experiments related to human perception and human memory - but all too few people read this stuff.

And for all you parents out there - how many times have you been surprised at something your child has repeated to you that you were convinced they never could have known? How many times have you heard them parrot something that you swore they couldn't hear or couldn't understand?

What's particularly sad is the effect this experience will have on Colton himself, as well as the effect his book will have on other credulous families with children. For his part, Colton, 7 years later, "now plays the piano and trumpet, is fascinated by Greek mythology, listens to Christian rock and loves Nebraska football." That seems innocuous enough; but listen to what he says about his book: "“People are getting blessed, and they’re going to have healing from their hurts...I’m happy for that.”

He's happy that people will believe a delusion as long as it makes them feel better. We are breeding generations of children who will gladly accept a lie instead of truth, so long as it makes them feel good. But one day, at some point in their lives, they will have no recourse to any real resilience in times of real crisis; they're used to digesting the superficial bromides and platitudes our culture relishes. They won't be able to digest a truly harrowing physical or psychological experience.

And don't get me started on the further dampening of scientific curiosity and thinking this type of anecdote permits - and almost encourages.

And you know that if Colton were born a Buddhist, he would have seen the Buddha; if he were born a Muslim, he would have seen Muhammad; and if he were born a Hindu, he would have seen Krishna - or any of the other myriad deities in the Indian pantheon.

Stories like this one, especially when presented uncritically in a venue such as The New York Times, makes me truly pessimistic about the future of humankind.

An Atheist's View on Abortion

2011-02-24T17:58:00.005-05:00

On the drive home from work tonight I was behind a pickup truck that had a rather large white sign with red letters that read: "ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN" taped to the inside of his back window. In addition, he had a bumper sticker with a picture of a smiling infant and a Bible verse, Jeremiah 1:5. For those who don't know, this verse reads in part: "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." I've seen this before; and one of my colleagues cited this verse as the main reason she attends anti-abortion rallies each year in Washington, D.C. But on bumper stickers - and the mouths of fundamentalists - only this first clause of the sentence is ever cited.

On the face of it, it would seem that the Christian - in her mind - has a relatively strong justification for her position of opposing abortion. However, it's been pointed out by others that, not only is God talking specifically to Jeremiah, but the context refers to Jeremiah's calling as a prophet. The context of the verse has nothing to do with abortion. But I don't want to dwell excessively on this particular fact; most agnostics and even liberal Christians can see that this is a stretch. I'd like to talk more about the philosophical and scientific aspects of abortion.

There is much ambiguity and dispute between various Christian sects regarding the "soul." The first problem is that Christians have no idea what a 'soul' is. What is it made of? How is it attached? What are its mechanisms? As someone who was raised in a fundamentalist church, I would say that the consensus - if it could be said that there is one - is that the soul is immortal but not eternal. That is, the soul is created at conception, and will live forever - either in Heaven or Hell - but it's not eternal, which would imply that it has neither beginning nor end. In most Christian thought, God (or the Trinity) is the only eternal one. In other words, the human soul isn't eternally existing like God, but is created at the moment of conception; but it will also survive the death of the physical body - to spend forever in either Heaven or Hell.

That said, let's consider some practical implications. If - as is implied in Jeremiah chapter 1, verse 5 - God somehow knew us before we were born, what could that possibly mean? How could he know us? We only come to know us gradually throughout childhood, eventually developing a coherent, consistent sense of self. In what sense does God know us? Presumably only half of us is formed - i.e., our genetic blueprint. But what about the 'nurture' side of us? That hasn't been formed yet. That results from our life experiences; and obviously we haven't had any life experiences before we were born.

Of course, if - as many, if not most, theologians believe - God is outside of space and time, and presumably sees 'time' as one big frozen block; i.e., He sees past, present and future as one, then God might know us in the sense of knowing our entire lives - past, present and future. In that sense, God would truly know us before we were born. That's really the only way the Christian could make sense of it. If I'm wrong, then by all means let me know.

Yet this notion, it seems to me, would present all sorts of thorny ethical problems for the believer. The most obvious one - and one theologians have debated for centuries, and still are debating - is the concept of predestination: if God knows the future, then he already knows who will end up in Heaven and who in Hell. Indeed, proponents of this theory even cite the Jeremiah verse in question. And some New Testament verses provide strong support for it as well - see Matthew 22:14 and Ephesians 1:3-5.

But how would a non-believer make sense of the soul? Well, first of all, the non-believer probably doesn't believe in souls. The non-believer probably believes that the soul - or mind - is ultimately the brain, a physical organ. Exactly how the mind is the brain is still up for debate, but the consensus among philosophers and scientists is that material processes give rise to the subjective experience that most people would associate with the 'soul.' But here we need to distinguish between the Christian's 'belief' in an immaterial, categorically different soul, and the atheist's 'belief' that the mind is the brain.

The Christian bases her belief primarily on scripture - i.e., what she believes is a direct revelation of God, the Creator of Souls - and her personal intuition. Non-believers possess that same intuition - which they believe is a product of our evolutionary heritage - but also come to their conclusion that souls don't exist based on evidence from the sciences - primarily neuroscience. Anyone who has taken the time to read books by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazziniga, or V.S. Ramachandran - or even summary articles in popular media venues such as Scientific American and Science Daily - is quickly presented with some difficult and puzzling questions about the nature of the self and consciousness.

Phenomena such as split-brain experiments, anterograde amnesia, bizarre results of various types of brain damage, or even mental illnesses such as schizophrenia all seem to present an intractable problem for the believer in souls, namely, if the soul is separate and independent from the body (and has 'free will'), then why can't the soul overcome these difficulties?

Non-believers believe that the Self (i.e., the mind/brain) develops over time through the genetically-determined growth of the brain as well as the brain's interaction with its physical and social environment. The Self is 'conscious'; that is, it is aware of itself, it has desires, it feels pleasure and pain, as well as all gradations in between these two poles. And this is where a non-believer's view of abortion comes in.

Since the non-believer believes that the Self is the brain, then the non-believer can provide a demarcation between Self and non-Self: the nervous system. Feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose a viable nervous system. Without a nervous system, not only are pleasure and pain not felt, but there is no Self to do the feeling. We could say that this is the baseline test for abortion - if you abort something that doesn't have a fully-developed nervous system, then you are not aborting a Self. You are not aborting a person.

I don't believe anyone out there is pro-abortion. Unless you're a psychopath, you value life over non-life, existence over non-existence. Obviously, women aren't getting pregnant merely with the intention of aborting a fetus. So the decision to abort is not a whimsical, capricious, or malicious decision (the potential immaturity and impetuousness of some teenagers notwithstanding). What is usually being weighed here is the strife of an unwanted pregnancy versus bringing a human being into the world. So we should have a method for weighing the needs and desires of the adult human versus the non-existent needs and desires of a potential adult human, assuming he even makes it to adulthood. (He's like the sea turtle hatchling scrambling to get to the ocean before the sea birds get him.)

And this is where I believe the non-believer stands on firmer ground than the believer. The non-believer can present empirical, non-emotional, experience-based evidence in support of a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy that is deemed to be inimical to her life's intentions and plans - and well-being. The non-believer can present the image of an actual person, with a history, with life experiences, with memories, with intimate and complex social relationships, and with a refined capacity for pleasure and pain, versus a non-Self with no memories, no life experiences - and indeed no capacity at all for pleasure and pain. The believer falls back on - what? - 'scripture,' on personal feelings, on intuition?

The truly gray area for the non-believer, in my opinion, is pregnancy terminations beyond this demarcation line. When does a fetus begin to feel pain? Does the nervous system have to be fully-developed? Partially? If so, which parts? Etc. But even if we could say that the nervous system is most likely registering pain, we can't really say for certain that the Self of the fetus is experiencing it - or that there really is a Self there to be experiencing it.

But given the track record of the life sciences, the non-believer can possess a more justified confidence that these things will be sorted out with the development of new technology and new research methods.

God as a Cognitive Prosthesis

2011-02-18T16:25:00.000-05:00

Atheists and believers aren't so different. For both, ideas about how to live their lives in both the short term and long term literally just pop into their heads; but the believer thinks these ideas come from God. But both still have to determine which ones to follow - they both have to use their best judgment. Even though he's God, he's not any clearer than what arises from the subconscious of the atheist.

(My) Atheist Philosophy

2011-02-18T16:10:00.003-05:00

This ain’t your grandfather's atheism - unless his name is Friederich Nietzsche. And it is in this spirit that I am writing this post.

Many nonbelievers have called upon the New Atheists and others to put forth a coherent secular philosophy to counter the prevailing and longstanding theistic hegemony. I can understand and appreciate this desire, especially here in America, where religious conservatives have been emboldened by the aggressive Tea Party movement and the popularity of media personalities like Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

But as someone who has been a naturalist and an atheist for over a decade, who had grown up in an evangelical church and home, and who has kept tabs on the culture wars, I don't believe this will work. Atheists, secularists, nonbelievers - whatever you want to call us - are not a homogeneous group. Near as I can tell, the only thing we have in common is a lack of belief in gods, and specifically the God of the monotheistic religions.

However, I believe there is a wide range of thought on other issues: politics, ethics, economics, culture, etc.; though it might be fair to say that most of us support a classical liberal society, with equal rights, democratic government, etc. And we might even agree on a general moral system, though there is heated debate as to whether we can - or even should - try to discover and promote a rational or objective foundation for it.

But the crux of the issue, though it fades and reappears now and then, is the idea of meaning, or purpose. Ultimately, what many of us are calling for is a way of living without religious belief that counters nihilism. I personally believe that what really turns people off to atheism is fear - fear of letting go; fear of having to decide on life for oneself, of having to attempt answers to profound questions, of being responsible for the character and direction of one's life; in short, the fear of having to ultimately stand alone in the universe and affirm one's life - and all of life - nonetheless. The religious believer is largely relieved of this responsibility; though perhaps you could argue that they aren't really relieved of it, since they still have to 'interpret' what they are given - God isn't so clear as people make him out to be.

Like Nietzsche, I don't deny the arguments of the active nihilist - there is no ultimate meaning or purpose. The universe is indifferent to humans and their desires. But, also like Nietzsche, I believe there are ways to create our own meaning and purpose - or meanings and purposes, if you like. But success in this endeavor presumes a strong nature, a willingness to let go, a desire to revere oneself, and an imaginative, adventurous spirit - to “dance near abysses,” as Nietzsche put it. And here it seems that trying to put together a coherent secular philosophy is bound to fail: everyone is different. We are not all "created equal," though many of us may believe that we should all be considered "equal before the law."

I believe we need to incorporate the spirit of the great scientific (in the broadest sense) thinkers of our species - many ancient Greeks, Galileo, Einstein, etc. - into the character of our greatest modern philosophers and seekers of knowledge. Of course, we're not talking about academic philosophers; we're talking about a way of life, a way of being (Nietzsche called them free spirits). Anyone can be a philosopher in this sense. You could consider yourself to be the artist of your life, pursuing a vision that may be always changing, elusive - but you are nevertheless the artist trying to the best of his ability to capture and honor the reality he experiences.

The New Atheists have been criticized - by proponents and detractors alike - for not having or presenting a full grasp of the philosophical issues in this culture war. They claim that what is presented in New Atheist books like “The Moral Landscape,” “The God Delusion,” and “Breaking the Spell” is a simplistic, watered-down, sophomoric version of the fruits of some of the greatest philosophical thinkers our species has produced. I agree - but not in the way you’d imagine.

I would contend that what the New Atheists offer is not a “simplistic” version, but a “simplified” version: not only have the counter-arguments to and refutations of the most significant “proofs” for the existence of God been done, and done well (there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, in other words), but the majority of the “herd” - as Nietzsche put it - is simply not receptive to dry, academic wrangling over the meaning of words or the forms of definitions. So in this way the New Atheists are merely tailoring their writing to their target audience.

If we need to do anything, we need to leave the true believers behind. It's been my experience that the true believer can't be swayed. Experience shows that, when pressed, the dogmatic ideologue (and I mean any dogma) will only redouble his efforts at maintaining his dogma. There may be those who will be swayed, but they were on the fence anyway: in some reflective hour, reading a book, walking their dog, or riding the subway home, they will quietly admit to themselves that they don't believe. And though they might not publicly disavow belief, at least they won't take it to the ballot box or the latest Tea Party rally.

It seems to me that what we nonbelievers need to do is decide on a general strategy, as opposed to a formal philosophy. What I mean is, do we want to engage believers in order to convert them (or de-convert them, if you will)? I for one don't engage in discussions/debates with believers to convert them; I engage in these discussions to understand why they believe as they do. It's part curiosity, part due diligence - what I learn from these discussions will help me come up with ways to counter the prevailing psycho-religio-moral atmosphere, if I may coin an awkward phrase. That said, it's still a work in progress!

Or are we, at a minimum, interested in keeping believers from legislating their morality - whether on the Federal, State or Local level? As much as I enjoy reading the banter and bickering in the Comments section of blogs like Pharyngula, I believe one-on-one debating is largely ineffective. You will never win (because the opponent will never concede, even if you feel you've won - this isn't chess), and you will most likely not convert, especially if employing ridicule. Don't get me wrong, employing ridicule can be a pleasurable exercise, but it rarely, if ever, accomplishes the goal in mind.

So, what do we think? Given my beliefs about atheism, I know we won't all think alike. But can we come up with an outline of a strategy? Should we? Is there any consensus? Why do we do what we do? Why do we write, blog, debate, protest, etc.?

Nietzsche was primarily an esoteric moralist, notorious for his criticism of democracy and "equal rights." In Beyond Good & Evil, he said:

Are these coming philosophers new friends of "truth"? That is probable enough, for all philosophers so far have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be truth for everyman - which has so far been the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations. "My judgment is my judgment": no one else is easily entitled to it - that is what such a philosopher of the future may perhaps say to himself.

So where do we go from here? Do we bid each other adieu - so to speak - and part company, each going her own way, choosing and fighting her own battles, creating her own life in isolation like Zarathustra - come what may in the larger politico-cultural arena?

Or - what?

The Teachers of the Purpose of Existence

2011-02-15T17:59:00.003-05:00

Deepak Chopra has an article on CNN's website called Science and spirituality should be friends.

My initial thought was: why? But as I read the article, it made me think of some thoughts by Nietzsche. But before I get into that, I want to point out a few things.

First, he says that interest in organized religion has declined, not because of the "rather noisy campaign by a handful of die-hard atheists to demote and ridicule faith," but because of Charles Darwin's dangerous idea of evolution.

However, I'm tempted to think that it has been the result of the efforts of "noisy atheists" to promote Darwin's essential idea that has resulted in science's ascendancy over traditional religious dogma. After all, Darwin published his idea 150 years ago; atheists since then have promoted it and made it accessible to a wider audience.

Next, Chopra says that the exodus from traditional religion has resulted in people seeking a "spirituality based on personal experience, with an openness to accept Eastern traditions like meditation and yoga as legitimate ways to expand one's consciousness." I don't mean to nitpick, but isn't all spirituality and religion based on "personal experience"? Does it make sense to talk about spirituality and religion - or anything of human concern, for that matter - without regard to personal experience?

At any rate, he says that scientists have a growing interest in "consciousness." This is undeniably true; the philosopher David Chalmers and scientists like Christof Koch are explicitly pursuing a "science of consciousness."

But Chopra has a much different - and really, unjustifiable - idea about human consciousness. Whereas the former view consciousness as a function of the physical brain, or a property of the universe subject to the same laws of physics as everything else, Chopra postulates consciousness not as an emergent property of the "physical" cosmos but as a near-supernatural entity. He asks, "Was mind also born in the same place outside space and time?" That is a property theists ascribe to God.

Chopra's gripe seems to be that scientists are bogged down in a materialism that "rules science." Well, that is what science is based on. As Tom Clark of the Center for Naturalism says: "Science doesn't presume the natural-supernatural distinction; it generates it by dividing what works from what doesn't."

Then Chopra notes that the "physical building blocks of the universe have gradually vanished; that is, atoms and quarks no longer seem solid at all but are actually clouds of energy, which in turn disappear into the void that seems to be the source of creation." I'm not sure contemporary physicists would characterize the basic building blocks as "clouds" of energy, but you can see where he's going with this. He's attempting a New Age "God of the Gaps" argument: since we don't really know the characteristics of the basic building blocks of the universe, it must be this mysterious, magical thing called "consciousness"!

Chopra then goes on to say that "it is becoming legitimate to talk of invisible forces that shape creation - not labeling them as God but as the true shapers of reality beyond the space/time continuum." Not among serious scientists it isn't. At least, not in the way Chopra thinks it is. What Chopra is doing is trying to make room for a metaphysically-privileged force/entity called "consciousness." But current research doesn't warrant this overreaching by Chopra. He's filling this alleged gap with his new "god" of "consciousness."

The penultimate fallacy in his article is when he says that "either atoms and molecules are smart, or something makes them smart." Well, not necessarily. It's as if Chopra has never heard of emergence. Or, if he has, he's not mentioning it in order to advance his spiritual agenda.

But the main fallacy is presented at the end of his article: he says that "we are conscious beings who live with purpose and meaning. It seems unlikely that these arose form a random, meaningless universe." Well, yes, we are conscious beings. And of course we desire to live with purpose and meaning. And this gets us to the title of my post. Why do we strive to live with purpose and meaning?

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche starts off with a section called "The Teachers of the Purpose of Existence." In it, he basically claims that "man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists: his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life - without a faith in reason in life."

Nietzsche claimed that the teachers of the purpose of existence actually "promote the interests of the species" because they promote exactly this faith in life, this image of meaning and purpose, whether or not it's actually true. Nietzsche says this "instinct for the preservation...erupts as reason and as passion of the spirit. Then it is surrounded by a resplendent retinue of reasons and tries with all the force at its command to make us forget that at bottom it is instinct, folly, lack of reasons."

This is also obviously true. But human beings can live without ultimate meaning and purpose: I'm living proof. I should say, however, that I distinguish between "ultimate" and "proximate." I have come to the conclusion that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life, but at the same time I create my own meaning and purpose. My meaning and purpose is not preordained by any other being, but is specific to my psycho-physiological constitution.

What I mean by this is that each of us has a different personality; at a minimum, we could say that some of us are more introverted whereas others are more extraverted. Similarly, some of us are more active and energetic than others. And so on. My meaning and purpose in life is determined by my personality and physiology. It has to be right for me.

But my gripe with the Chopras of the world is that they contribute to the overall denigration of science by unjustifiably asserting that science is impotent, and that the things we most care about as humans can be found in a non-human plane, a supernatural or categorically-privileged magisteria. The problem is, if that's the case, then human striving is all for naught because we are striving for something that in principle can't be obtained.

Putting our hopes in other-worldly forces or beings is not only foolish, but downright inimical to life. Creating our own meaning and purpose, and embarking on our own idiosyncratic projects requires that we deal with reality as we experience it, without postulating all sorts of superfluous entities and powers.

Is Atheist Unbelief 'Rational'?

2011-02-14T12:17:00.006-05:00

I just read an article on Christianity Today's website titled Unreasonable Doubt. The main point of the article (which is itself a reaction to the popularity of the so-called "New Atheists") seems to be that those who call themselves atheists do not arrive at their conclusion as a result of a process of rationality; instead, their cognitive functioning is "impaired" by sin, thus causing them to reject the Christian God as a result of poor reasoning and/or emotional reasons.

The article's author begins by citing a few non-believers who have made comments about their not wanting Christianity to be true (in addition, I assume, to their other reasons for being atheists). He quotes a prominent philosopher (Thomas Nagel) as saying, "I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that." But my considered response to this is: so what? Or, What's the point? I don't want the God of the Bible to exist either, but that's because I, like Thomas Jefferson, read his horrific human right's record and recoil in horror. As an aside, I grew up in a born-again Christian home and church; and once I started to dis-believe, if you will, I desperately wanted Christianity to be true: I didn't want to lose my chance for a life after death, or a "big brother God" who is constantly looking out for me and protecting me, or the prospect of seeing my loved ones again after we've all passed on, or to think that I didn't have free will. But I've reached the point in my life now (I'm 39) where it would take a truly extraordinary "miracle" to get me to believe in the Christian God.

But really, what's the point? Even if a person loses his belief in god (not just the Christian God) for psychological or emotional reasons, it doesn't follow that the author's hypothesis is therefore true. The author doesn't cite why the philosopher Thomas Nagel doesn't want God to exist, and an initial Google search by me yielded nothing of relevance. I'm familiar with some of Nagel's work, but mainly his ideas about consciousness (What Is it Like to Be a Bat?). I'll keep looking; but I've already stated my reason why I wouldn't want the Christian God to exist.

The author attempts to bolster his hypothesis by citing the fact that the New Atheists simply rehash traditional arguments against the existence of God. New Atheists offer traditional arguments because they feel they've already been well-argued, so there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. However, the discipline of science continues to offer explanations for gaps previously filled by God; but Christian dogma literally can't change, else it will cease to be Christian. So the New Atheists can offer a simple rehash of past philosophical arguments - which they feel have not been sufficiently refuted by theists to date - and move on to what the scientific method is continually telling us about human nature and Nature in general.

The author says that his suggestion is potentially offensive to unbelievers. I'm an unbeliever, and while I can't say I take offense to it - I understand the limits of human reason and the powerful effects of emotion on our cognitive processes - I have to say that it's just wrong, and needs a rebuttal in the marketplace of ideas.

The author then says, "According to Scripture, the evidence for God is overwhelming." And I say: well, of course! But I can also say that the Qur’an says the evidence for the exploits of Mohammed is overwhelming; or that the Vedas say that the evidence for their explanation for the origin of the world and its gods is overwhelming; or that the Iliad shows that the evidence for the Greek gods is overwhelming; or that...well, you get the picture.

But since the author is a dedicated Christian, I know he doesn't believe any of those other holy books. Why not? Like all serious Christians (or believers of any religion, really), they engage in special pleading: well, my god is the one, true God. But how do they know? Well, their holy book tells them so...and round and round we go. So, while citing scripture will help edify the faithful, it will really do nothing to convince the skeptic.

But then the author gets into the meat of his hypothesis: he quotes the apostle Paul as saying that unbelievers "suppress the truth by their wickedness." In other words, it's a willful disbelief, a not wanting to face the facts of the matter. The author is only partly right when he says that, "obedience and humility lead to insight and understanding." Humility? Yes. Obedience? Just the opposite! Christians have a vested interest in not questioning or doubting God - obedience is exactly what God wants. Obedience says, "Thou shalt - or else!" Humility says, "I believe X, but I could be wrong." Christians can't say, "I believe Christ died for my sins, but I could be wrong." That's the one thing they can't doubt. To doubt this is to exclude oneself from being a Christian.

The believer claims to have a hold on truth, and not just his truth, but Truth with a capital T. His skepticism, his inquiry, has come to an end. His mind is no longer open to alternatives. He is not free to entertain options because he would thereby forfeit his claim to the Truth - which is the perfect word of the Creator, Master and Sustainer of all there is! The believer is now like God, knowing what is good and what is evil. The New Atheists - and those with a scientific mind generally - don't claim to know absolute truth; indeed they don't believe absolute Truth exists. They have only varying degrees of confidence and probability, and they believe that the Christian God probably doesn't exist.

So now we must ask: in light of all this, who is more susceptible to self-deception, the believer who has a vested interest in such concepts (his eternal life depends on it!), or the unbeliever with no vested interest in rejecting these concepts?

To me, the obvious answer is that the believer is more susceptible to the incomparable emotional pressure of eternal damnation if they don't believe. Incidentally, why is belief so important? Why does the Creator, Master and Sustainer of all there is care more that people believe in Him than that we humans treat each other well? At any rate, if a believer truly believes that the fate of his eternal soul hangs in the balance, can he really conduct a dispassionate assessment of the issue?

I want to talk about a couple of other things the author brings up. First, the author cites Paul Johnson's book, "Intellectuals," which purportedly claims that "some of the most celebrated thinkers in the modern period...were moral wrecks." I have not read this book. Actually, I had no idea who Paul Johnson was. But I did a Google search, and I found it interesting that Christopher Hitchens - one of the über-atheists the author criticizes - wrote an article about him. This article speaks for itself - it is very cheeky, as Hitchens himself might say - but here is a blurb from it:

"Johnson has made a career as an especially bilious and persecuting moralizer. His disgraceful book "Intellectuals," a foul-minded assault on the Enlightenment, laid a feverish stress on the private lives of secular and rationalist intellectuals. Rousseau was not only 'vain, egotistical and quarrelsome,' but he 'enjoyed being spanked on his bare bottom.' Ibsen 'would not expose his sexual organ even for the purpose of medical examination.'"

If Hitchens' quotes are accurate, this does not imply to me that these thinkers were "moral wrecks." After all, are they known to have stolen, murdered, or raped? Were they known to have defrauded others? If not, then the author has some very confused ideas about "morality."

Your average atheist is as moral or immoral as your average Christian. Is Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or Daniel Dennet a moral wreck? What does it mean to be a moral wreck? Do they steal? Murder? Rape? Defraud? What about the Christian "moral wrecks" - Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker, and Kent Hovind? Actually, so far as we know, the former are more moral than the latter - at least according to Christian ethics.

Second, he says that, for those who are not dogmatic in their beliefs, he is open to rational discussion. But isn't the Christian dogmatic? Don't they have to be? Aren't the principles of Christianity "incontrovertibly true" for the Christian? Can the Christian articulate what reason, evidence or argument would make him change his mind? It seems to me that for a believer, "keep an open mind" means "keep your mind open until you except the truth - my truth."

As Nietzsche said in The Gay Science: "Those who feel 'I possess Truth' - how many possessions would they not abandon in order to save this feeling! What would they not throw overboard to stay 'on top' - which means, above the others who lack 'the Truth'!"

Applying the Intellectual Conscience to One Man's "Theology"

2011-01-28T11:15:00.006-05:00

The following explanation of Christianity was taken from here. Its author is a former high school chemistry and physics teacher in my home state of Pennsylvania.

I'm going to ask the questions this seemingly well-educated man should have been asking before he wrote his thesis here. My comments will be in brackets.

"God created man to be His friend. [First, a simple 'why?' We might want to do a little philosophical analysis here: why would an allegedly perfect being - where perfect means 'being complete, lacking nothing' - create something to be his friend? Indeed, a perfect being wouldn't create anything at all.]

God has other friends. The angels, but angels do not have our free will. [How does he know this? How could he possibly know this?]

The Trinity also make good company, but though They have different jobs, The Trinity think exactly alike. They are, after all, one Being. [If they think exactly alike, then why distinguish between them? Why have a "trinity" at all. Has the author never thought of these questions? And, again, how does he know this?]

This friendship, like any other, requires a conscious effort from both parties. God wants man to accept the hand of friendship freely [How does he know this?], which means he can also refuse it.

In short, He had to give man a free will [Philosophers have dealt with the subject for centuries and the consensus is that, even sitting in your armchair, you can tell that a free will in the sense the author requires is logically impossible. Nietzsche noted that a thought comes when 'it' wants, and not when we want it to. More recently, Sam Harris noted that I, as the subject of my experience, cannot know what I will think next or do next until a thought or intention arises. In other words, we literally have no control over our thoughts and actions - in terms of initiating them - and, therefore, no free will in that sense. And in the past 20 years or so, our understanding of how the human brain works, especially when subject to brain damage that can, in some instances, completely change personality, inhibit any intentions by a person, or even cause people to do things they can't refrain from doing - i.e., against their will - has provided empirical evidence that the mind is the brain, which is a physical organ subject to the laws of physics, and therefore subject to cause and effect, and therefore there can be no 'self' outside that chain of cause and effect that can alter that chain without being altered itself.], our tendency to think ourselves in charge, our human pride.

If we accept it, this friendship lasts for eternity, a condition we call heaven. [So, if we agree to be God's friend and flatter Him, he will reward us, otherwise it's eternal torment? Doesn't seem too fair to me.]

If we refuse this hand of friendship, however, because we are immortal [how does he know? Has someone he knows come back from the dead and told him?], we exist forever in a state of isolation we call hell [Hmmm...he seems to be sugar-coating this a bit. I don't think "isolation" is a good translation of "wailing and gnashing of teeth," or swimming in a "lake of fire," do you?]

God also had to do something to show us how much He wanted that friendship and that this friendship was His doing, not ours [So have we been pre-programmed to want a friendship with God? What about free will?].

That something was the voluntary death on the cross of Jesus, One of the Trinity and part of Himself. [But why would God execute someone who didn't do anything wrong, who wasn't guilty? Should we be doing that in our justice system? If I kill someone, should the authorities execute you in my place? And of course the whole atonement is a farce anyway - presumably Jesus is eternal, immortal, perfect, all-powerful and all-knowing - remember, the Trinity thinks exactly alike - then going through 'death' is like us being bitten by a mosquito, or even less. Now, if God ordered Jesus to be permanently stripped of his divinity, and truly become human - in essence only losing 1/3 of the Trinity - then I would consider that a fairer deal to atone for my 'sins'. Literally sacrificing his divine Son for the billions of humans who will have died by the end of the world - when is that again? - would be a good deal. If I have the prospect of an eternity in hell, then so should Jesus. But Jesus never really had that prospect.]

We commit a lot of sins and cannot atone for most of these. For example, suppose you kill someone. How can you ever atone to that man’s family, let alone the victim? Our acceptance of Jesus’ Atonement pays for this sin and worse in God’s eyes. [See my notes on the above paragraph.]

The payment also puts us in God’s debt, which is precisely where He wants us, because God has important jobs and satisfying relationships for everyone who accepts this hand of friendship. [Again, how does he know this? And why is willingly becoming someone's debtor when you become their friend a good thing? And what does being in His debt have to do with having important jobs and friendships? Is that psychologically healthy?]"

Again and again I encounter the same thing: either a lack of critical thinking, or a lack of an intellectual conscience (a conscience behind the conscience), or critical thinking and the rudiments of an intellectual conscience, but a neurotic clinging to the patently implausible and pervasively unhealthy.

Review of "The Moral Landscape"

2011-01-16T16:08:00.013-05:00

I want to review Sam Harris' latest book, The Moral Landscape, in which he attempts to argue "how science can determine values." He wants to show that the traditional and long-entrenched view that the domain of scientific knowledge is limited to merely describing the physical world - and that religion is the sole arbiter of value and meaning - is wrong. He is also arguing that the largely secular notion that morality is all relative is wrong as well.

After reading the book, I read several critical reviews, and they all seem to follow a similar tack. But before I get to that, I want to cite Harris in a rather lengthy response to his critics. In it, he gives a concise summary of his argument:

"Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life."

The main criticism of Harris is that he is violating 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume's famous "is/ought" distinction which, briefly stated, means that the discipline of science can tell us where we came from and what we are (for the most part), but this knowledge cannot tell us what we should do. Another way to put it is to say that there is an inviolable distinction between "facts" and "values." As modern philosopher Owen Flanagan says in his book, The Problem of the Soul, "Saying 'This bowl weighs 10 pounds' makes sense, as does saying 'He is dead.' But when we say 'This bowl is beautiful' or 'It is bad that he is dead' - where is the beauty or the badness?"

While most of Harris' critics view him as committing this fallacy, Harris himself claims that he is not "simply claiming that morality is 'fully determined by an objective reality, independent of people's actual values and desires.'" And he acknowledges that a long evolutionary history has made us the type of species we are, with our peculiar physical and psychological values. However, elsewhere in his book he says that a scientific account of human values is not the same as an evolutionary account. What are we to make of this apparent contradiction?

Well, first of all, he believes that a Darwinian account of human nature is too narrow a focus for determining what he considers is the standard of value for our species: human well-being. Unfortunately for Harris - and everyone else who has ever thought about it - a tidy definition for something has multifarious and even ambiguous as 'well-being' has proven itself elusive. Nevertheless, Harris says "Evolution could never have foreseen the wisdom or necessity of creating stable democracies, mitigating climate change, saving other species from extinction, containing the spread of nuclear weapons..."

There are three issues here: one, how do we define 'well-being' or 'flourishing'; two, why does Harris believe science can tell us what human well-being is; and three, why does Harris think science can tell us why we should value well-being?

Harris readily admits that there can be competing definitions of human well-being; and further, he admits that these competing definitions can be equally valid - that is, equally moral. These are the many peaks on his 'moral landscape.' To push the analogy a bit further, he sort of argues that there is a baseline of misery that every human being would wish to avoid - we could call this the horizontal base of the landscape. The competing views of human well-being make up the various peaks and, according to Harris, "there will be right and wrong ways to move toward one peak or another."

Harris believes science - specifically neuroscience - can tell us what human well-being consists of. Basically, he says we can identify the neural correlates of human happiness, pleasure and satisfaction, as well as human misery, pain and angst. To me, he seems to be arguing not that morality is an objective property of the universe like the spin, charge and mass of subatomic particles, but that, since we can tie specific actions (and, more importantly, the consequences of those actions) to actual brain states and other physiological facts of human beings, then in that sense they are 'real' or 'objective,' and we can therefore exercise our judgment within and across cultures. He further argues that we are all similarly constituted such that we can, with confidence, say that what's good for one brain is good for another - at least for most things that matter.

But is this really a good argument in support of his claim that science can determine human values? Is there a bait and switch going on here?

In his book "Beyond Good & Evil," Nietzsche said that every philosopher so far has sought - and thought he found - a rational foundation for his philosophy. Harris obviously thinks he has as well. But I think he falls short. Not only can Harris not define human well-being (and as mentioned above, he even admits that some competing definitions are equally valid and moral), he hasn't really given us concrete examples of his 'science' in action - he merely asserts, with confidence (because he is a neuroscientist), that science can determine human values. So, really, he wants us to trust him.

What Harris seems to be doing is arguing for a type of utilitarianism or consequentialism, where the moral worth of an action is based on whether or not it maximizes the apparent well-being of as many people as possible. Harris says on page 28 of his book: "As we come to understand how human beings can best collaborate and thrive in this world, science can help us find a path leading away from the lowest depths of misery and toward the heights of happiness for the greatest number of people."

But if this is what Harris is arguing for, why did he feel the need to write his book in such a way as he did? Others have argued for the same thing, and more convincingly, in my opinion. Harris cites contemporary philosopher Owen Flanagan as an intellectual ally and pre-print collaborator. But I find Flanagan's account - which is a chapter called 'Ethics as Human Ecology' in his book "The Problem of the Soul" - to be much more convincing and thorough. In fact, I'd take Flanagan's 54 pages over Harris' 191 any day.

The consensus seems to be - and for good reason - that the sciences can certainly inspire and inform our ethical endeavors, but cannot be used as a final, authoritative stamp of approval on a code of morality. I can understand and appreciate Harris' desire to come up with something that combats the smug certainty of religion's centuries-long moral hegemony, as well as the spineless moral relativism of some of our cultural elite (though there are far more of the former than the latter, at least in America). But I came away from Harris' effort feeling like he was preaching to the converted, especially with his chapter titled "Religion." We've heard it from him before, both in "Letter to a Christian Nation" and his much better book "The End of Faith."

Unfortunately, I can't offer a route through the Scylla and Charybdis of our ethical discourse. On the one hand, having divisive figures like Harris come out with books that simply preach to the converted isn't going to reach a wider audience - the people who need to engage in an honest appraisal of the issues aren't even going to pick up the book. On the other hand, philosophical treatises in the manner of Immanuel Kant or David Hume - or even Bertrand Russell - aren't going to convince the man on the street either. Besides, Nietzsche suggested over a hundred years ago that "reasons" don't really work against something like the self-righteous certainty of Christianity, which is so affect-laden to begin with.

But at least efforts are being made, critiques and discussions are happening, and hopefully this will spill out beyond the confines of academia and into the streets of 'the rabble,' as Nietzsche affectionately referred to us!

Morality Lesson: Intentions vs. Consequences

2011-01-02T11:19:00.003-05:00

Most of us, Christian or otherwise, judge the morality of others by their intentions. For example, former president Jimmy Carter (and, more recently, Christine O'Donnell) said that, because he felt lust for other women, he had already committed adultery in his heart, even though he had never acted on it.

Nietzsche, however, claimed that this was not always the case, and that there was a time in human history when the morality of a person was based on the consequences of his actions alone, and not on his intentions. Additionally, he claimed that, in the context of human history as a whole, this was a rather new development, and he claimed that it started with the Israelites. Without getting into an in-depth discussion of Nietzsche's moral philosophy - something that would really warrant a book-length tome - I want to focus on the intention/consequence dichotomy.

Since we here in America are still basking in the fading glow of the holiday season, let's use an example that you could easily encounter on any street in a large city - like Manhattan, for instance: Let's say that John is a man in his 30's who recently lost his job, his home, and his wife - and he has no family to which he could turn for support. He is now living on the streets of Manhattan because no one will hire him - not only is he homeless without access to a shower or clean clothes, but the economy is still in the worst recession in memory.

However, let's say for the sake of argument that all John needs is $1,000 to get him back on his feet and put his life together - enough to give him a fresh start and enable him to find cheap housing so he can clean himself up for a job search, etc. John is walking the streets of Manhattan, soliciting for handouts. It's been tough, because John is a fairly good-looking man, he's relatively young, in good physical shape, and his clothes aren't really that dirty yet (too dirty to get a job, but not dirty enough that someone would think he's destitute) - so people don't believe he's really homeless. They think it's a scam.

And then along comes Frank, a middle-aged, "self-made" entrepreneur whose net worth is counted in the tens of millions. Frank believes he owes nothing to his genetic endowment, society, political organization, or the age in which he lives - he believes everything he has is entirely his own possession and not subject to be taken away by anyone's wish or whim - no one else is entitled to the fruits of his labor. It's cold, so he's wearing a long Armani top coat. In his right pocket is a copy of the Declaration of Independence; in his left pocket is a copy of Atlas Shrugged - abridged version.

As Frank comes upon a melancholy John, he begins to think that this would be an opportunity for him to both increase his feeling of power as well as the sum of pleasurable feelings over disagreeable ones. What I mean is, and what Nietzsche thought was the case, is that "we benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent upon us in some way; we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours."

Basically, you could say that, by being benevolent toward those less fortunate, you raise yourself up in the eyes of others as well as yourself. You are giving out of your abundance. Your cup runneth o'er, etc. In terms of feelings, you might feel good by helping someone. It is a pleasurable state of mind. I've long thought that this is what happens with most people when they help the poor, etc., whether they realize it or not. But in our case, let's assume that Frank is motivated by the former and not the latter.

Frank reads John's sign saying he needs $1,000 to get his life back on track, asks him if this is indeed the case, and, having received a reply in the affirmative, hands over 10 $100 bills to John and continues on his way without saying anything further. John does indeed get his life back on track and all's well that ends well.

There is no dispute that Frank helped John, helped him completely and precisely in the way he needed to be helped. Let's further assume that all of Frank's money was legitimately earned, no one - not even animals - was harmed in the earning of this money. Not only has Frank succeeded in increasing the total sum of "good" in the world (something you could attribute to a form of Utilitarianism), you could also include the pleasurable, or positive, feelings within Frank himself in this sum.

Let's assume that we know Frank's motivation - we know he helped John for selfish reasons. It wasn't simply out of the goodness of his heart, or from "fellow feeling." It wasn't the holiday music being piped out of the store near where John was standing, it wasn't because Frank had seen It's a Wonderful Life the night before, and it wasn't out of respect for any religious doctrine - Frank is an atheist. It was simple self-interest - just like John Galt.

Can we consider Frank to be a moral person? If not, why not?

What is it Like to Be a Dog?

2010-12-30T17:55:00.014-05:00

I am a professional dog trainer. Specifically, I train dogs to guide those who are blind. Each month, the organization I work for teaches up to twenty-four blind students (many of whom have had dog guides before) how to work with and care for their new dog guide. Recently, I had the unfortunate opportunity to pick up a dog from one of my organization's graduates who passed away. The dog was a German shepherd, an intensely loyal breed. The dog and his now-deceased master were together for a little over seven years.

Now, most pet owners who have had a dog for seven years know what it's like to lose a beloved pet that has been part of the family for that long. However, a dog guide is more than just a pet: under Federal law, a dog guide can go anywhere its master can go: they go to the supermarket, the local Starbucks, the bank, the post office, the library, and the workplace. They spend much more time with their master than pet dogs do - nearly twenty-four hours a day. Additionally, dog guides - as near as we can tell - develop a unique sense of responsibility for their master, further deepening the bond between human and canine.

Where am I going with this, you might be thinking? Well, when I brought the deceased graduate's dog back to my organization, and into my kennel, the dog seemed to simply pick up where he left off seven years ago: he merged relatively seamlessly back into the pack - not the same pack he was in seven years ago, but a pack just the same. He played, asserted his dominance, sniffed, drank water from the trough - all the things he did seven years ago with a different group of about twenty dogs.

What about his master? What about the person who fed him and loved him for seven years? What about the bond they shared for seven years, guiding his master everywhere - proud when his master praised him effusively for avoiding a car coming out of a driveway, remorseful when he brushed his master's arm against a parking meter when he was distracted by another dog? The dog shows no sign of depression. He's active - playful, even. He's socializing with other dogs. By all accounts he seems normal.

I am intensely interested in - obsessed with, really - human consciousness. It is probably the most bizarre - and intractable - phenomenon in the natural world. The 17th Century philosopher René Descartes sort of kicked things off, in terms of consciousness studies. He's the guy who said he could doubt pretty much everything about the world except himself - his consciousness. He famously said, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. From this, he basically concluded that there are two kinds of stuff: material stuff, and thinking stuff; or, material and immaterial - body and mind. It's called dualism. Since then, modern science - and neuroscience in particular - has disabused most scientists (and nearly all philosophers) of the notion of dualism. In other words, the mind is the brain: consciousness arises from material brain processes. Serbian-born American philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a paper back in 1974 called, "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" Hence the title of my blog post. In this paper, he suggested that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism."

But to step back from the abyss of philosophical inquiry for a moment, consciousness is the thing all of us laypeople are most familiar with (or so we like to think). Each of us has the experience of what it's like to be us; we have a subjective point of view. Additionally, we have thoughts, emotions, and visceral feelings of pain and pleasure. I know what it's like to be me and I assume, based on observations of your actions and the knowledge that you are a human being like me, that you know what it's like to be you. Many times I can guess what you're thinking or feeling based simply on your actions or body language.

But what about a dog? The relationship between humans and dogs goes back, presumably, for thousands of years. That's thousands of years of human beings observing dog behavior. So pet owners - and especially dog trainers - enjoy a level of confidence in determining what a dog is thinking or feeling. Now, modern neuroscience has grown by leaps and bounds in its understanding of how the human brain works, but not so much with the canine brain. However, given an evolutionary understanding of life and some inductive reasoning, as well as millennia of intimate human-canine interaction, humans can be fairly confident in their conclusions about the dog's mental capacities and limitations.

Still - and this might be an obdurate anthropomorphic tendency in me - I find it baffling when a dog like this German shepherd comes back after having lost its master, acting as if nothing has happened. For me, it raises a lot of questions: what is the nature of canine memory? Do past memories intrude into the dog's consciousness the way our memories sometimes do? Does he dream about his master? If he does, does he remember them in his waking state? Is a dog condemned by nature to be stuck in the present?

A more interesting question would be: would it be better or worse if human brains were structured like canine brains, living in an eternal present?

Neuroscientists have been working on - and making steady progress with - what are called the Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Now, describing the neural correlates of consciousness doesn't yet offer a robust theory of consciousness - and may never, in fact, achieve such a thing, but understanding these neural correlates is a step toward such a theory.

Maybe someday we'll actually know what it's like to be a dog.

A Parable for the Holidays

2010-12-22T10:46:00.004-05:00

Two prehistoric men, Gorbag and Khuzdul, are sitting around the fire at the entrance to their cave, enjoying the bounty of the morning’s hunt.

“This mammoth tenderloin is delicious,” says Gorbag.

“Yes, I agree,” says Khuzdul. “It is a gift from Scrod.”

“What is Scrod?” wonders Gorbag, perplexed.

“He is the Creator and Sustainer of all there is,” responds Khuzdul, solemnly.

“I don’t understand,” says Gorbag.

“Well, he created you, and me, and this mammoth,” says Khuzdul, plainly.

“How do you know this?” asks Gorbag.

“I have seen it in a dream; Scrod spoke to me,” offers Khuzdul.

“In a dream?” asks Gorbag, in an incredulous tone. “You mean those things we see when we sleep?”

“Yes,” replies Khuzdul, “where all things are possible, and the dead live on...”

“The dead live on?” asks Gorbag. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” says Khuzdul, “but dreams show us another world - so there must be a life after death.”

“This is most distressing,” says Gorbag. “All sorts of improbable and even impossible things happen in dreams. For instance, sometimes when I awake, I recall that I was flying high above our cave and the steppe and all the world; yet no matter how hard I try, I cannot make myself fly when I am awake.”

Gorbag pauses for a moment, picks a strand of coarse mammoth hair from between his crooked teeth and turns again to Khuzdul.

“Have you seen this ‘Scrod’ when you are awake?”

“No,” replies Khuzdul. “But I’m sure He exists.”

“So,” says Gorbag, “you can’t tell me Scrod exists as surely as you or me, or your beautiful woman, Shagrat - or even your two offspring, Radbug and Othrod?”

“Well, no, not exactly, but - “

“Then why should I believe you?” asks Gorbag, finally.

“Because I believe in Him,” says Khuzdul, “and you should, too.”

“But if I tell you that there is a a group of suckling boars without their mother just over the hill, you would rightly ask me for proof,” says Gorbag.

“Of course!” says Khuzdul.

“And if I told you that rubbing an otherwise poisonous herb on your sabre-toothed tiger wound would heal you perfectly, you would want to know if it’s worked on others,” says Gorbag, “or more likely, you’d want me to try it first.”

“Absolutely!” replies Khuzdul.

“So if you tell me that you believe in this Scrod, you must first show me that he exists,” says Gorbag.

“Why?” asks Khuzdul, indignantly.

“Now don’t get defensive, Khuzdul, I’m just making sure you’re being reasonable; being unreasonable in this world can get you killed,” says Gorbag. “Lions, tigers, and bears - oh my!”

“But isn’t it enough that I’ve seen Him in my dreams, and that I know He exists?” says Khuzdul, with a hint of desperation.

“But how do you know, Khuzdul?” replies Gorbag.

“Well, uh, I, I mean - I’m not sure. I have very powerful feelings whenever I see Him in my dreams,” says Khuzdul. “I feel that it’s all true.”

“I feel a lot of things, Khuzdul,” says Gorbag, “but rarely, if ever, do any of them amount to knowledge.”

The two men paused for a moment, lost in thought, robotically chewing and gnawing on the connective tissue of their whooly mammoth ribs, the hiss and crackle of the fire a comforting backdrop and counterpoint to the brutish and arduous existence of Mesolithic life.

“Don’t worry, Gorbag,” says Khuzdul, “I’ve managed to convince others of our tribe to follow Scrod, marshaling an impressive contingent.”

“Oh?” says Gorbag.

“Scrod appeared to me in another dream,” says Khuzdul. “Tomorrow we will enter a neighboring tribe’s valley and claim it for our own. It is overflowing with all kinds of animals fit for consumption - boars, goats, deer, mammoths - and fruits, nuts and berries sweet to eat, as well as land and fields meet for great events and festivals.”

“Festivals?” asks Gorbag.

“Yes,” says Khuzdul. “We will celebrate Scrod’s faithfulness and the bounty He will provide. We will thank Him for delivering us from our harsh life and questionable ways.”

“At the expense of a neighboring tribe?” asks Gorbag.

“Thus Scrod wills it,” pronounces Khuzdul.

Of the many feelings Gorbag has had, of the many types of fear he’s felt, for the first time he felt a new fear...

And this fear would not dissipate.

Free Will & Responsibility: A Brief Case Study in (mostly) Layman's Terms

2010-08-30T11:53:00.021-05:00

Johnny stood impatiently at the curb edge, poised to rush across the busy intersection after his best friend, Billy. They had become fast friends after only a few weeks at training camp, and they have been inseparable since. Now Johnny sees Billy receding further into the distance; he knows it would be bad for him to try and cross now - the light is against him - and those cars and trucks are large and noisy.

Johnny is not being physically restrained, he is free to leap into traffic if he wants to. Nor is Johnny mentally deficient in any way. But he's been taught that vehicles are something to avoid, though he doesn't really understand that they can kill him. You can see he's itching to go, that he's mulling over the decision in his head, gauging traffic - should I stay? should I go? - how long do I have to wait?! At just about the point where he can't take it anymore, the light changes in Johnny's favor and he's free to cross. He does so with a mixture of caution and delight that he can now, at last, be able to catch up to his best friend, Billy.

It would seem that Johnny has a genuine choice - to cross the street against traffic (and risk getting killed), or to wait for the light to change and cross safely. It seems to us that his choice is free - he is not being physically held back (though even if he were, he could still make the choice to cross, he just wouldn't physically be able to), and he is not under any psychological compulsion to stay put - he has the same mental capacities as his peers.

So the question is: is his choice really free? To put it a bit differently: does Johnny have free will?

Most of us would answer yes - Johnny has free will, and he can choose equally between two real choices. If he chooses to cross the street against traffic, he could just as well have done otherwise - he could have decided to stay put and wait for the light to change.

But if this scenario seems a bit odd, that's because it is: both Johnny and Billy are dogs being trained to guide the blind and visually impaired. I am an instructor for The Seeing Eye - the oldest existing dog guide organization in the world - and for almost eight years I've been training dogs for guide work and observing dogs in pack-like scenarios (up to 20 dogs at a time) in our kennels.

Each dog is trained for four months, and I work with each dog each day during that time. As a pet owner and dog trainer, it would be easy for me to anthropomorphize my dogs. And as every dog lover knows, dogs even seem to be more human than some humans we know. And they definitely seem to deliberate and make choices, for good or ill.

Now, this case study is most definitely not meant to "prove" that free will doesn't exist (nor is it a lesson in training a dog to be a guide for the blind). I simply want to present, by way of analogy, a different way of looking at the problem of free will. Of course, the first step really should be getting people to even view it as a problem in the first place. It seems to me the vast majority of us take it as axiomatic that we have free will; it seems like the most obvious and most accessible thing about ourselves and our mental processes. Setting aside the more technical - and some would say pointless - philosophical arguments for the time being, what would it actually mean for us to say that our will is "free"?

Well, most people would say that, when confronted with a choice, they are able to deliberate in such a way that they could imagine themselves taking any number of options. For instance, in our example above, let's suppose that Johnny and Billy are human beings. Johnny can imagine himself crossing the street against the light - not without a good bit of anxiety at the thought of getting hit by a car - or he could simply endure the frustration of having to wait for the light to change in order to make a safe crossing. At the moment Johnny is thinking about what to do, he feels he has as much ability to cross as not to cross. It's simply a matter of making a decision to do one or the other, weighing all the factors. Johnny can take the risk of getting injured or killed in order to catch up to his friend, or he can take the risk of not catching up to his friend by deciding to wait until the light changes - who knows, by that time Billy could be long gone.

If someone were to tell us that our thought process in regard to decision-making is like a mathematical formula, or like a computer program with lots of inputs and if/thens, etc., we would surely say that they were mistaken. We are not computers, we don't run like mathematical equations - there's more to us than that. We may strive to have our decision-making run with the precision and accuracy of a computer program or formula, but we can always buck the system and choose whatever we want.

I said I wasn't going to present any philosophical arguments regarding free will; but I will paraphrase a couple dead white males on the topic. A human being can surely do what she wants, but she can't determine what she wants. In other words, each thought has a cause or causes, and each cause has a cause of its own, and so on. In order for me to say that my will is truly "free," there has to be some point along that chain of causes where "I" interject with my own, non-caused cause. Otherwise - theoretically - you can trace that chain of causes back to the point where it no longer makes sense to say that "I" chose anything.

But where does that un-caused "I" come from? Most religiously-oriented people would say that it is our "soul" that chooses. The more secular among us would say that it is our "spirit" or our "consciousness." The religious view of human beings is too common and too obvious to elaborate on. Besides, most people with a Judeo-Christian background don't believe dogs have "souls" per se anyway. The secular view is probably best summed up by what's known as libertarianism - the philosophical position as well as the political position (with a capital "L" - think Reason Magazine, John Stossel, etc.). The current Director of Programs of The Atlas Society, William Thomas, wrote an article for their website back in 2006 titled, "What Is the Objectivist View of Free Will?" I won't go into what is meant by "Objectivist" here, other than to say it gave birth to the Libertarian movement. The article, however, gives voice to the key intellectual underpinnings of libertarian thought. Mr. Thomas says that, "We observe [free will] through introspection, the inward perception of our own conscious processes...our free will resides, most basically, in our ability to direct our conscious attention."

Thomas calls this ability "focus," and the choice to focus is "the choice to think." For now, I will set aside the more philosophical problem of what it could possibly mean for "me" to direct my conscious attention. The question lying in wait for us here is similar to the question on every toddler's lips when confronted with the proposition that God created the universe: who created God? In our case, we would need to ask, "How does the 'me' direct its attention?" or "What causes the 'me' to direct its attention this way or that?" Neither the religious believer nor the libertarian has a clear answer to this question. Ayn Rand (the intellectual architect behind Objectivism and, hence, libertarianism) herself suggested that that is a question for the hard sciences to answer. Ayn Rand died in 1982, and the mind sciences have come a long way since then - but that is most definitely beyond the scope of this case study.

Thomas makes a few points that I believe are applicable to dogs as well as humans. For instance, he writes, "After all, if free will is false, how can anyone choose to change his mind on an issue?" and "Free will is simply a human capacity for action." In my work as a dog trainer - and specifically in training dogs to guide the visually impaired - I am responsible for training dogs to "think." In fact, part of my job is to train dogs to "intelligently disobey" a command if the dog thinks it will lead to danger for itself or its handler. As an example, and without going into too much unnecessary detail, I condition dogs to respect traffic. What I mean by this is that while I can't teach a dog that a car can kill it - indeed, no one really expects dogs to understand the concept of death at all - I can teach dogs to avoid them in certain situations; e.g., when a blind person is trying to cross an intersection.

I see dogs change their mind all the time. I see, on a daily basis, a dog's thought process. I can see by their body language what they are most likely "thinking." Every day I see dogs like Johnny (I don't use the dogs' real names for privacy reasons) deliberate and choose. Of course, since dogs can't speak human language, I have to rely on body language and behavior; but dog guide trainers - and dog trainers in general - are confident in their assessments of dog "thinking" because of literally thousands of years of human-canine coexistence.

But does this mean that dogs have free will? Most people say no. Why? Well, most people say that only humans have free will. But why do most people say this? Well, as I said before, most people believe in some sort of "soul" that is categorically different from what a dog has. And if they don't believe in souls per se, they at least believe that nature has produced humans as the crowning achievement of evolution and has endowed humans with a capacity that the rest of the "animal kingdom" simply doesn't possess.

But Charles Darwin postulated - and the scientific community has overwhelming concluded since then - that the tree of life is more like a bush than a tree, and definitely not like a ladder with humans at the top. Consciousness and free will (if there is such a thing) could certainly have evolved in a different species, and consciousness may have indeed evolved in other creatures - we simply have no current way of knowing this.

Regardless, most people view the difference between dogs and humans as an unbridgeable gap. Based on my experience, I view the difference between dogs and humans as one of degree and not one of kind. Dogs clearly have the capacity to choose between real options, as humans do. Dogs and humans both respond in a similar way to a system of rewards and punishments that condition their respective behaviors. Dogs and humans modulate their behavior in anticipation of these perceived rewards and punishments. In the dog training world, this is known as Operant Conditioning. Animal trainers conceive of two types of conditioning: operant and classical. In classical conditioning, a stimulus elicits an automatic response - think of Pavlov's dogs and their conditioned reflex of salivating at the presentation of a visual or auditory stimulus, instead of just food.

Operant conditioning, on the other hand, is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. Subjects "voluntarily" alter their behavior based on the perceived consequences (by contrast, classical conditioning can be thought of as "involuntary" behavior). Our criminal justice system is premised on a similar type of conditioning. And this leads us to the real concern over free will: if we don't have free will, then how can we be moral? William Thomas, along with most Libertarians and almost all religious believers, offers the following lament in his article: "If our actions are not up to us, then we have no moral responsibility for them." But do we need to be concerned with the actual existence of such a faculty as free will, if our society is already set up to modify the behavior - in a moral way - of its constituents?

Thomas ends his article with, "There can be no effective guidance of human action, nor a satisfactory scientific account of human behavior, without taking into account the inescapable fact of free will." Dogs can be effectively guided in their behavior without us believing they have free will, while still believing - and witnessing - their deliberation and choices. If we were to take human free will out of the equation, and view the comedy of existence without that presumption, the comedy of existence would still play out the same: we would see humans modifying their behavior based on the perceived consequences of a system of rewards and punishments, just like dogs.

And I think that free will is far from being an inescapable fact of reality. In fact, when we think about it, its existence if far from being settled, and its importance far from being properly considered.

Which Christianity should rule our "Christian" Nation?

2010-08-29T09:26:00.009-05:00

This weekend in D.C., Glenn Beck gave voice to what used to be a fairly fringe element in our society, but which has been growing in prominence - no doubt in part to leading politicians and media outlets such as Fox News. His rally, called Restoring Honor, emphasized what that not-so-fringe element believes:

"Something beyond imagination is happening," he told participants who packed the National Mall in Washington. "America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness."

Unfortunately for Beck - or for any religious believer - is that no one can really agree on which God is meant. Of course, the Beckites will say it is the Christian god, but even then, which Christian god is meant? Is it Beck's Mormon god? Is it Thomas Jefferson's god?

Thomas Jefferson denied the divinity of Christ and rejected the Old Testament god as "a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." To support Jefferson's view, I offer the following Old Testament verses:

Exodus 21:7 provides guidelines for an Israelite's selling of his daughter into slavery.

1 Samuel 15:2 gives just one of the many disgusting examples of the LORD ordering the murders of women and infants. I don't think I need to state more...

Numbers 31:16 provides probably my favorite Old Testament atrocity. In it, Moses - mouthpiece of God - orders his soldiers to kill all the women but to keep the young virgins for themselves. Aw, what a guy.

Thomas Jefferson seemed to venerate Jesus as a great moral teacher. I disagree. If the sayings attributed to Jesus are accurate (or even true) - and that's a big IF, considering they were written by zealous believers in a pre-literate, superstitious time - they don't seem to show a man of exemplary moral character, and the moral formulation he is arguably most famous for - the Golden Rule - has been present in many cultures not related to Christianity, and even predating it.

Aside from the Old Testament atrocities, maybe we can turn to the Ten Commandments. Should that be the basis for ruling our Nation? Let's see:

1. Have no other gods than God
2. No graven images
3. Don't take the Lord's name in vain
4. Keep the Sabbath holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. Don't murder people
7. Don't commit adultery
8. Don't steal
9. Don't bear false witness against your neighbor
10. Don't covet your neighbor's stuff

OK. So, we should probably discriminate between "guidelines for living/morality," and "law" backed by the force of the State. If we're going to use the Ten Commandments as law, as many people in this country believe should be the case, we already have 3 of them codified: murder, theft, and perjury (which is what I'll assume "bearing false witness" means). For most of the others, I don't believe most people would think it's a good idea to fine or imprison people for making or having statues of other gods and things, nor for being envious of your neighbor's hot wife or plasma flat-screen TV. Likewise for not being able to work on Sunday, not honoring a sexually-abusive father or mother, or sleeping around - although if you enter into a legal contract like marriage, you will most likely be ordered to pay up if you cheat on your spouse.

So maybe the Ten Commandments aren't the best guide for ruling the Nation. Author and atheist Sam Harris wryly notes that the Ten Commandments - written by the hand of the supreme master of the universe himself - is not the most articulate moral document there is. The Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism appears to be a saner, more comprehensive approach to morality than the Ten Commandments - or Christ's teachings. After all, what did Christ - or Christ through Paul - teach?

Matthew 5:18-19 gives us: "For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven..."

So apparently Jesus is urging us to keep the Old Testament law. I mean, either he means "until heaven and earth pass away," or he doesn't, right? And Matthew 5:27-32 gives us "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."

Now, if Christians really believed this is good guidance, then there would be a hell of a lot more one-eyed, one-handed politicans in public service.

To be fair, Jesus also said - in Matthew 22:36-40 - "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

OK. So that's a little better. But what about a Christian's involvement in secular government? Should a Christian be trying to change the Nation's laws at all? Let's see what the apostle Paul says in Romans 13:

"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor."

Now, this CERTAINLY doesn't sound like the religious right we've known for so long here in America, does it? They claim our authorities are not only corrupt, but sinfully depraved; that we shouldn't even have to pay taxes, etc.

And who can forget this little gem by Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14: "...As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church."

But what if Islam should gain the ascendency in America? As we've seen with the infamous "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy, there are many Christians who don't countenance religious freedom or freedom of assembly for Muslim - how much less for a Muslim-based government!

It could happen. Unfortunately, either could happen...

Facts to Face

2010-08-26T11:17:00.009-05:00

I went to the New Jersey State Fair this summer and saw, among other things, a few religiously-oriented booths. One of them - The Gideons - gave me a tract called, "Facts to Face."

The first verse cited was from the book of Romans - chapter 5, verse 12: "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered the world..."

Strangely enough, it made me think of the evolution-creationism debate. There are those who accept the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection; there are those who reject it out of hand because the Bible tells them so; and there are those who try to find a middle ground where they can accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and still claim to be a true Christian. The current Director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland - Francis Collins - is one such person.

Here are a few quotes:

"I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God's intentions in creating the universe."

"[Evolution] may seem to us like a slow, inefficient, and even random process, but to God—who's not limited by space or time—it all came together in the blink of an eye. And for us who have been given the gift of intelligence and the ability to appreciate the wonders of the natural world that he created, to have now learned about this evolutionary creative process is a source of awe and wonder. I find these discoveries are completely compatible with everything I know about God through the Scriptures."

The problem, as you may or may not have guessed (and maybe you haven't, because I haven't seen this problem brought up before), is that the whole purpose of Christ is undermined by evolution. How? Think about it - the Bible tells us that God created Adam and Eve and that they sinned - and somehow all of humanity, every single person born since, has inherited this sin. Now, there are two obvious problems here: if we can't take the Bible literally in one point, as in the Genesis account (and as Collins wishes to), then how can we take any of the other things in the Bible literally? How do when know when to take something literally and something figuratively? Now, true believers will say that the Holy Spirit or some such thing makes it clear to each individual believer; but you definitely can't tell from the text. Actually, a clear reading of the text would incline one to take it literally. The other problem is this idea of an inheritance of a "sin nature." What is the mechanism by which this nature is inherited? Is it in our genes? Will scientists one day be able to pinpoint the "sin gene"? The Bible doesn't tell us what the mechanism is - it simply says that's how it is.

Getting back to the less obvious problem - the problem of reconciling the Biblical account of creation with the theory of evolution - the apostle Paul, the mouthpiece of Christ, apparently believes that God literally created Adam and that Adam literally sinned. At least that's what Romans 5:12 says. More tellingly, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:22 that "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive." Are we to take these verses figuratively? Paul goes on to say that's precisely why Jesus needed to come into the world - to be a guiltless sacrific and atonement for the sins of humanity, as introduced by Adam.

To my knowledge, Jesus himself is curiously silent on the matter. At least, he doesn't mention Adam by name, or the action of original sin itself. But he does reference another biblical-historical figure of dubious standing - Noah. He says in Matthew 24:37-38:

“But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark."

The story of Noah and the flood has it's own insurmountable problems, but Jesus clearly believed he existed and that the flood happened. Why not Adam and Eve?

So it looks like Christians who want to be "true believers" (whatever that means; ask ten believers and you get ten different answers) have a choice to make: to follow Jesus and listen to Paul - based on their alleged, Holy Spirit-inspired, actual words - or give up Christianity altogether and possibly for the first time face the facts of reality.

Spirits in the Time of Cholera

2010-08-24T07:27:00.020-05:00

Does anyone wonder why fantastic stories like spirit-possession, giants roaming the earth, dragons, corpses rising from the dead, and various other phantasmagoria aren't widely disseminated and believed in today's world?

Is it really any wonder that all of these types of stories WERE widely disseminated and believed in a pre-historic (in an organized, methodological sense), pre-scientific time?

A team of medical scientists have just published the first serious epidemiological study on spirit possession - and its link to mental and physical illness - in post-civil war Mozambique.

It has been the epistemological and metaphysical heritage of humanity to explain natural and personal forces of nature in terms of "spirits." All sorts of supernatural beings have been postulated to explain the apparently inexplicable. The operative word here is obviously "apparently." It is my opinion that the greatest achievement of humanity has been the development of the scientific method. What used to be inexplicable has been explained - sometimes at the expense of common sense or intuition (e.g., heliocentrism, evolution via natural selection).

Broadly speaking, science is a "systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories."

Now, as one who maintains a naturalistic world-view (barring enough convincing evidence otherwise), I also maintain that the scientific method evolved along with humanity and is, of course, prone to error. As Nietzsche says in The Gay Science:

"Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the species, include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It is only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late that truth emerged - as the weakest form of knowledge."

Elsewhere Nietzsche comments on the origin of logic, which is a staple of the scientific method:

"How did logic come into existence in man's head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished..."

All this being said, almost everyone today agrees that "error" has been phenomenally reduced throughout the history of humanity. We not only have well-understood and demonstrable explanations for those things that made enormous emotional impacts on early humans (e.g., natural forces like thunder, lightning, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.), but also for things that the vast majority of us have neither a need nor desire to understand (e.g., quantum physics, etc.).

As a side note, I have to say thank goodness for the Greeks, at least the pre-socratic thinkers like Anaximander who "made bold inquiries; he questioned the myths, the knowledge of the old, the heavens, and even the gods themselves. He was wholly rational in his approach and his quest was to derive natural explanations for phenomena that previously had been ascribed to the agency of supernatural powers...His account of meteorology constitutes a most innovative proposition. Though only partially correct, it is the first recorded attempt of a scientific explanation of the weather in the history of mankind."

Tribal humans around the world today, still living in a pre-scientific, pre-historical milieu, are still given to supernatural explanations for the events and forces that impact their daily lives. But modern civilization, for the most part, has dispensed with these erroneous but understandable delusions. Most of modern civilization doesn't readily believe stories like a woman turning into a pillar of salt, or a man being swallowed whole by a whale and coming out alive, or a primitive wooden ship filled with two of every "kind" of animal - including, presumably, the dinosaurs - surviving a global, several-month-long deluge.

If only Jews, Christians and Muslims could incorporate a rigorous intellectual conscience into their world-views; then humanity could breathe a little easier, sleep a little more soundly, and feel, along with Nietzsche, that "at long last the horizon appears free to us again...at long last our ships may venture out again...all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again..."

Epistemology, Part II

2010-08-21T07:56:00.012-05:00

In Part I of this blog post, I talked about Donald Miller's - and religious believers in general - utter lack of an intellectual conscience.

There are a few more points I'd like to make that I didn't include in the previous post. Miller says, "Who knows anything anyway?" Miller is the intellectual heir (though certainly not in any rigorous sense) of a long line of philosophers - religious and otherwise - who have argued for skepticism with regard to human knowledge. In its strongest sense, skepticism is the idea that human beings can't truly know anything. Related to this, the skeptic says that we must doubt every alleged instance of knowledge. Unfortunately for the skeptic, asserting that there can be no knowledge is itself a knowledge claim. How does the skeptic know there is no knowledge? Exactly.

Lay skeptics, if you will - like Miller - argue for skepticism because they point out - and rightly so - that human beings are capable of making mistakes and errors. But this is almost too obvious to state. But what the skeptic is trying to argue is that if human beings can't have "certain" knowledge, then there can be no knowledge at all - at least not through the function of human reason. This is where they sneak in the idea of "knowing" through faith, a bastardization of terms if there ever was one. But as they're doing this, they drag in a truckload of additional epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological baggage without providing the requisite justifications for them. For example, they claim faith is a valid source of knowledge (an epistemological claim) because God (a metaphysical/ontological claim) is the source of faith, and God is perfect (another epistemological claim). But when the believer says that we can't really know anything, how can they claim to know anything about the mechanism of faith, or the existence of God, or his characteristics? (Of course, here they usually assert the authority of the bible, but that is a circular argument par excellence: How do you know there is a God? The bible says so. Who wrote the bible? God did. Etc.)

But we don't need complete certainty to claim justification for true beliefs. I don't need to prove for certain that God doesn't exist in order for me to believe (and demonstrate) that it's probable that he doesn't. It would be more difficult for me to demonstrate that the god of the Deists doesn't exist - mainly because "it" doesn't have as many characteristics as the Christian god that are capable of being refuted with logic and sound reasoning. You can think of knowledge as residing along a continuum or spectrum, from possible to probable to certain. As the level of convincing evidence rises, the more certain we are that our belief is true. My problem with a religious believer like Miller is that he claims to have experienced God but cannot - or refuses - to explain the process by which he has had this experience, and how he knows it's real. And it's not that he simply "knows" he has experienced God, he is "certain," and his hubris exceeds that of most scientists in most areas. For example, Miller says things like the following:

"Penny is living proof that Jesus still pursues people."

"[Christian spirituality] cannot be explained, yet it is beautiful and true."

At least a scientist, in his given field, has a significant amount of evidence accumulated in that field, as well as corroborating evidence from other fields as well. Science is a unifying discipline. But let's get back to Penny for a moment. I will quote this anecdote at length because it's worth it.

Remember, Miller claims in the book that “Penny is living proof that Jesus still pursues people.” But we’ll see that Jesus has some highly controversial methods. He had met Penny at Reed also, and they became friends because they were both “ridiculously insecure.” Apparently Penny had an unusual experience while studying in France, where she met one of Miller’s other friends, Nadine. He claims that Penny wanted nothing to do with religion. But her and Nadine hit it off because Nadine was very interested in Penny’s past. As a result of their blossoming friendship, Nadine’s type of Christianity became intriguing to Penny and they would have many conversations about it. Penny started reading the bible with Nadine, and they would eat chocolate and smoke cigarettes together while reading. Then one night, Penny was “pretty drunk and high,” and claimed to have heard God speak to her. He allegedly said, “Penny, I have a better life for you, not only now but forever.”

Now, it seems to me that hearing voices is a rather dubious thing, and typically coincides with a psychotic break with reality. In fact, just pages before, Miller had given Penny’s background and mentioned that her mother was in fact a paranoid schizophrenic now living on the streets of Seattle where she refuses help from anyone. Of course no one can prove that Penny didn’t hear a voice speak to her; and of course no one can prove that it wasn’t God’s voice. I’ve personally been high and drunk at the same time, too, in college, but I’ve never heard voices. It did, however, feel like I was floating on air as I mingled with the other students at the fraternity party. But I digress. Additionally, Penny also mentioned that, a couple of nights later, presumably sober, she got down on her knees and prayed to God. She says she had already come to believe that Jesus was God, though she says she doesn’t know how she came to that conclusion. She says it wasn’t like doing math or anything, she just “knew inside that He was God.” And she asked God to forgive her.

Now, this Penny episode goes back to the issue of intellectual conscience. Not only does Miller believe Penny's story, he cites it as living proof of Jesus' work in the world. The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways, no? A person with an intellectual conscience would chalk that up to hallucination and self-deception. It is almost too ridiculous to even talk about. And there was a time when I would laugh and go about my business; but with the rise of religious fundamentalism in the world, I feel compelled to do my part, however small, to combat irrationality and attempt to bring back a taste for intellectual conscience. The stakes are just getting too high.

In regard to intellectual conscience - or lack thereof - I should note that the mainstream evangelical establishment, as exemplified in the flagship journalistic endeavor of the movement, Christianity Today, had this to say about Miller's book:

"Spirituality combines deep self-examination—;Who am I, and how am I living?—with a call to integrate with the world outside the self. True spirituality is never merely about the self, but about the experience of the self in the world with God.

This true spirituality is what readers respond to in Donald Miller. His essays are personal, yes, but not solipsistic. They may resolve too quickly, but to their credit, they often do so by calling readers to greater sympathy with others, deeper faith in the love of God, and more patience during trials of discipleship. They tell of the self in the interest of community concerns. They are ultra-casual in tone, filled with the clutter of informal conversation. But that very style and tone draws evangelicals who can relate to Miller's story of faith.

Miller's books describe the experience of being evangelical in a manner that echoes the feelings and thoughts of thousands of evangelicals today. And because he is careful not to reject the faith, he helps readers—especially culturally conflicted young evangelicals—recover it. His books encourage a certain amount of Christian navel-gazing, but only long enough to get the fuzz out."

And:

"He is also neither irreverent nor bohemian—at least, not much. But for mainstream evangelicals today, Miller is a bridge to an irreverent, bohemian world. His work is framed with bohemia—a road trip, a pint of beer, an occasional curse word—but filled with explicit longing for Jesus. He never takes on basic Christian tenets or evangelical priorities such as biblical authority and spreading the gospel, but he asks just enough questions, with just enough gravity, to attract readers who have similar reservations about their faith culture. He's a sotto voce critic of evangelicalism, telling anxious audiences that it's okay to question the faith, yet keep it."

It truly makes me wonder if these reviewers actually read the book, the whole book, especially with regard to the Penny anecdote. The first reviewer said spirituality requires deep self-examination. Clearly it's not deep enough.

Also not deep enough is Miller's understanding of other religions, especially Buddhism:

"It never occurred to me that if Christianity was not rational, neither were other religions. There were times I wished I was a Buddhist, that is, I wished I could believe that stuff was true, even though I didn't know exactly what a Buddhist believed. I wondered what it would be like to rub some fat guy's belly and suddenly be overtaken with good thoughts and disciplined actions and a new car."

I'd like to let Nietzsche (in The Antichrist) tell Miller about Buddhism, and how it compares to Christianity:

"I hope that my condemnation of Christianity has not involved me in any injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of adherents: Buddhism. Both belong together as nihilistic religions...but they differ most remarkably...Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity: posing problems objectively and coolly is part of its inheritance, for Buddhism comes after a philosophic movement which spanned centuries. The concept of "God" had long been disposed of when it arrived. Buddhism is the only genuinely positivistic religion in history. This applies even to its theory of knowledge (a strict phenomenalism): it no longer says "struggle against sin" but, duly respectful of reality, "struggle against suffering."

Of course, I doubt very much that Miller would allow himself to read a book called "The Antichrist."

Finally, what most religious believers do, when they can't establish a truly respectful place for their beliefs in the world, is resort to the shelter of faith where no one can touch them. Unfortunately, this provides further confirmation that religious belief eventually comes down to self-deception and wish fulfillment. People who have "deep convictions," as Miller calls them, with regard to religious beliefs, need their convictions. In Miller's own words:

"I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story."

"The truths of the Bible were like magic, like messages from heaven, like codes, enchanting codes that offered power over life, a sort of power that turned sorrow to joy..."

"But even more than that, to be honest, I wanted to know who I was."

"I never asked to be human."

"It was wonderful because I forgot my problems."

"I need wonder. I know that death is coming."

"I need wonder to explain what is going to happen to me...I need something mysterious to happen after I die. I need to be somewhere else after I die..."

"I need to know that God has things figured out..."

"I need for there to be something bigger than me..."

"I think I realized that if I walked up to His campfire...I think he would tell me what my gifts are and why I have them, and He would give me ideas on how to use them. I think He would explain to me why my father left, and He would point out very clearly all the ways God has taken care of me through the years, all the stuff God protected me from."

There are many more ludicrous things in this book, but I really don't think I have the patience to get through them all. In the final analysis, this book is a sermon to the choir. But it's also a telling testament to the persistent, pervasive and obdurate nature of religious belief, and the foundation and justification it lays for dangerous acts.

Epistemology! Epistemology! Epistemology!

2010-08-15T14:48:00.027-05:00

I'd like to give a review (polemic?) of influential evangelical author and public speaker Donald Miller's book, Blue Like Jazz.

But first, I'd like to lay my ideological cards on the table at the outset: I am an unabashed atheist who has cultivated a strong intellectual conscience, something Donald Miller in general - and religious believers in particular - sorely lack. I am sympathetic to Nietzsche's lament when he wrote back in 1882 in The Gay Science:

"I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this 'great majority.'"

Elsewhere in the same volume Nietzsche states:

"One sort of honesty has been alien to all founders of religions and their kind: They have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. 'What did I really experience? What happened in me and around me at that time? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will opposed to all deceptions of the senses and bold in resisting the fantastic?' None of them has asked such questions, nor do any of our dear religious people ask them even now. On the contrary, they thirst after things that go against reason, and they do not wish to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. So they experience 'miracles' and 'rebirths' and hear the voices of little angels!"

And as we'll see in Miller's memoir, his book is rife with this kind of intellectual laziness (resistance?). What's more, he and his friends and acquaintances even hear the voice of God! And we'll see how badly Miller himself thirsts after things that oppose reason...

My main gripe with Miller's memoir, and his evangelism, comes down to epistemology. Epistemology can be defined as: "the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind?"

Now, I normally wouldn't be so concerned with a book like this, but this literary effort, and his public speaking, is irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst. To make things clear, his purpose in writing this memoir is more than just mere pedestrian voyeurism. As he states on page 239: “I want you to know Jesus too. This book is about the songs my friends and I are singing.” On the next, and final, page, he continues: “If you haven’t done it in a while, pray and talk to Jesus. Ask Him to become real to you....I can’t think of anything better that could happen to you.” With that out of the way, you can understand the stories he relates in this book in their proper context. He wants Christianity to be updated for a modern taste - he wants it to be cool to be a Christian and to love Jesus.

However, this in itself doesn't present any egregious problems; the biggest worry with Miller and his ideological commitment is when he writes, on page 111: "I would die for the gospel because I think it is the only revolutionary idea known to man." Clearly, in theory if not in practice, the radical Muslim element in the world today seeking to combat Western values and implement Sharia law are ideological kin to Miller and his ilk. Of course, he may not be speaking literally. But throughout the book, Miller and his friends claim to literally hear the Vox Dei, and even see Emily Dickinson:

"I would talk to myself sometimes, my voice coming back funny off the walls and the ceiling...I would read the poetry of Emily Dickinson out loud and pretend to have conversations with her...and I asked her if she was a lesbian. For the record, she told me she wasn't a lesbian. She was sort of offended by the question, to be honest. Emily Dickinson was the most interesting person I'd ever met. She was lovely, really, sort of quiet like a scared dog, but she engaged fine when she warmed up to me. She was terribly brilliant."

To be honest? Is he really being honest here? Now, to be fair, the excerpt above comes from a time in his life when he was painfully lonely, and he said he was "pretending" to have a conversation with the storied poet. However, what are we to make of something like this:

"I tell you of Emily Dickinson because it reminds me of the first time I thought, perhaps, I had lost my mind in isolation. I know now it was an apparition of loneliness, but I cannot tell you how very real it seemed that evening in Amherst [where Dickinson lived]."

Friends, here is where principles of epistemology come into play, as well as the concept of an intellectual conscience. He claims he knows that his vision of Miss Dickinson was an apparition. How does he know? He doesn't say. We can safely assume, however, that his metaphysical world-view doesn't allow for ghosts - only gods.

But how does he know what he claims to know? That's a matter of epistemology. By what criteria does he judge that the Emily Dickinson apparition was unreal, but that the voice he and his friends hear is the voice of the one true God? That's a matter for intellectual conscience as well. Here's Nietzsche on the subject, speaking to a fictional moralist who claims that his conscience speaks with moral authority:

"Why do you consider this, precisely this, right?

'Because this is what my conscience tells me; and the voice of conscience is never immoral, for it alone determines what is to be moral.'

But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And what gives you the right to consider such judgment true and infallible? For this faith - is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your conscience? Your judgment 'this is right' has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. 'How did it originate there?' you must ask, and also: 'What is it that impels me to listen to it?' You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer's commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to your conscience. But that you take this or that judgment for the voice of conscience - in other words, that you feel something to be right - may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and simply have accepted blindly that what you have been told ever since your childhood was right."

I should note here that Miller was raised Southern Baptist. Like Miller, I, too, was born into born-again Christianity, and the better part of my adult life has been characterized by an at-first subconscious and, later, conscious, effort to extricate myself from my religious upbringing. I'm 38 years old; Miller is 39. Somehow the two of us have arrived at diametrically opposed views about the universe in which we live. I attribute this difference to an intellectual conscience; or, in Miller's case - a lack of it.

At this point, I'd like to present a representative sample of Miller and his friends' epistemology and intellectual conscience (or lack of it) in action:

“I could sense very deeply that God wanted a relationship with Laura.”

“I feel like He is after me.”

“I feel as though I need to believe.”

“My dislike for institutions is mostly a feeling, though, not something that can be explained.”

“I could feel that God was answering my prayer so I went.”

“It is the nuttiest youth group you will ever see, but that is what God said to do.”

“I could feel God’s love for him.”

“I knew it was true. I could feel that it was true.”

“I felt like God was saying that if I had faith she would marry me.”

“I am certain it was the voice of God because it was accompanied by such a strong epiphany.”

As you can see from this sample, Miller et al. claim knowledge via feelings. Feelings, sensations, intuitions - all of these may in fact have strong emotional tones to them, but that doesn't qualify them for knowledge. I particularly like the last quote, and it's particularly ironic in that Miller's friend-turned-Christian, Penny, had a mother who was a paranoid schizophrenic. Does Miller not realize that paranoid schizophrenics hear voices and have strong epiphanies? Of course he does. Does he realize that their hallucinations don't correspond to reality? Of course he does. But how does he know that his and his friends' hallucinations are not of the same class? He doesn't.

Miller gives himself away with regard to his attitude toward an intellectual conscience when he writes:

"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove that He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove that He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything."

Who knows anything anyway? Is that a reason to simply give up? If you're willing to die for something, as Miller claims he is, don't you owe it to yourself - and to society at large - to NOT give up? Intellectual conscience demands that we "scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment," to quote Nietzsche again. And if you can't come to an adequate resolution or conclusion, then living in a civil society demands that you practice agnosticism!

Refusing to engage an intellectual conscience is irresponsible; refusing to do so while being willing to die for an ideology is outright dangerous.