ANTITHEISM AND MORALITY
2008; Wiley; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-9191.2007.00282.x
ISSN1467-9191
Autores Tópico(s)Biblical Studies and Interpretation
ResumoSomething which always was and which always will be created something else, the universe, because it could (and maybe wanted to) and cares about us. The something, in addition to the above description, is also all-powerful, all-knowing, and good through and through. This is a generalized version of the theist's belief system. There may be a few details addable and, in some cases, one or more of the more personalized aspects may be modified or perhaps even discarded, for example, all-knowing, or good through and through (or all-beneficient which is a version of that). To deny this conjunction of claims is easy enough as it requires only believing that one is false. The denier becomes at worst only a heretic (merely an unbeliever of some key element in the cherished story.) The agnostic takes the stance that many or all the elements are either unproven or even unprovable. The agnostic need not hold that any are actually false. The agnostic indeed can ignore the whole business as a tempest in someone else's teacup. The atheist, on the other hand, needs to argue for the unenviable position that every element in the theistic conjunction is false, or at least every element that might matter to a theist is false. Fortunately, this job is made somewhat easier than it looks at first sight by the observation that all the personalized properties are irrelevant if the something does not exist at all. So the atheist needs only to show either that nothing always was and will be, or that even if there was always something it did not create anything (where “create” means intentionally manipulated itself or something else). There are several approaches that the antitheist can take––an antitheist is one who actually espouses atheism and would try to convince theists of the error of their ways. A mere atheist might think, or even write, as in a diary or a well-worked manuscript to be left in a locked desk drawer these words but would never broadcast them. An antitheist cannot wait to do so. Antitheism comes at the end of a long skeptical path. The evident evils of theism have recently convinced me that atheism is as much a cowardly belief system as agnosticism if one suffers the dangers of theism silently. Theists' aggressive conversionism needs to be met by active rejection not merely continual turning of yet another cheek. The preferred antitheist's approach would be a direct proof that no eternal entity could exist, or that even if one cannot prove that no eternal entity could exist one could prove that it could not create anything intentionally. Neither of these routes is readily open inasmuch as whatever there is might always have been (in one form or another) and might always be (in one form or another). That said the only issue might be what to call this everlasting stuff. So one man's universe is another man's god, and the rest of the discussion is one of semantic aesthetics. The second approach to the denial of the theist's central claims is to argue for the irrelevance of creation to anything that happens to be. If one can account for anything (chosen randomly) without resort to intentional creation, then by modus tollens (denial of the consequent implying the denial of the antecedent) one establishes that the claim that God created it becomes problematic; the causal link that makes the consequent (created thing) evidence for the existence of the creator becomes moot. Now being moot does not establish that God does not exist; it only establishes if we run out all the interesting suspects that God serves no useful explanatory purpose. One may then conclude that true or not, the concept is useless, and then on other grounds that it is pernicious, and then, on yet other grounds, without substantial evidence. That is, what remains is a pathological allegiance (belief) in a useless, proofless, pernicious concept. Theism and its opposites are primarily exercises in epistemics. The primary aim is to vindicate a set of beliefs––on the one hand, beliefs that extoll the virtues of a supernatural being, or regimen, or form of spirituality, or other world view, or on the other hand, the denigration of these claims as excessive, wrongheaded, or dangerous. So, in this spirit, in the next three sections I am going to take up my claims that theism's claims are useless (because false), proofless (because there is no theory of proof that supports those claims), and finally, pernicious, because holding such claims is dangerous to oneself or others. Theism's claims are usually cast as useful in three roles: (1) as explanatory of the way things are; (2) as footings for effective prayer, which is laying the groundwork for god's or the gods' intervention in the everyday events of human beings' lives; and (3) as a foundation for knowing what is moral and what is immoral. The first role, as explanatory, was presumably very useful (or at least useful enough) during the long period before the advent of science in Greece (and even a little earlier in Egypt and Babylon) in antiquity and Galileo and Newton's unraveling of the big picture. Once science's explanatory role replaced theology in the big picture, the smaller parts quickly followed so that in less than 400 years nearly everything has an alternative satisfactory explanation and nearly nothing (or really nothing) is left for theism to explain. The occasional alleged miracle indeed dramatically illustrates how little an explanatory role might still be left for the entities of theology. The other role, as foundation for effective prayer, needs only two kinds of counter arguments to show that it is footless. First, there is the fact that theists primarily pray for God's intervention and often also on opposite sides of issues usually with no real telltale outcome. It is not, I think, that they do not know how to pray (they look like they do) or do not have clean enough hands (then it might never matter whether they pray or not), but that the gods (if they exist) do not care, cannot do inconsistent things, or just cannot intervene because powerless. More likely, of course, is that there is no one there. The second counter argument is that it often does not matter what one prays for, since the outcome of ordinary events is the anticipated thing that science reliably does predict. That being so, prayer serves no useful purpose, save psychologically, or perhaps as a public demonstration of devotion to the devout. This form of utility proves nothing beyond our ability to deceive ourselves as well as others. But this self-deception might also be thought to be valuable in itself (as some of my critics have claimed) and have much to recommend for itself and that one should be mindful of this. And, of course, I do see how valuable it is to one's self-esteem and self-love to rest them on fairy tales of virtuous devotion to the divine. One critic put the objection this way: “Only my belief in God (or a god in some deistic sense) gives my life meaning and provides sufficient defense, a nearly impregnable citadel, against being overwhelmed by the throes of catastrophic living or at least during this [sic] periods of catastrophe that seem to mark most of human life” (Marvin Kohl, private correspondence). I think one must agree that this form of self-protection has value, maybe enormous value in insulating the believer from the pains of truth. It is better to believe a lover is faithful, that some dear one absent is alive, that the future will be better than the past, and, indeed, that one will live forever at the right hand of God, but as a defense of the utility of belief this may serve, but not as evidence that the beliefs are well founded much less actually true. It is true that it is easier to face death if one thinks it is just a moment of losing a body and gaining eternity, but that might serve as a incentive to do the foolish and the foul. It should be obvious that such self-deceit is a slim foundation for the virtues of theism. As a system of belief theism crucially depends on the existence of a Supreme Being, even if only a minimalist version like a Prime Mover, a first cause, or a Big Bang. Finally, the view that prayer has as its primary function extolling the virtues of the One God, the Supreme Being, the source of all that is good, and so on. Nothing about this view shows that prayer is useful––what it shows is that the belief in the existence of a First Cause, a Supreme Being, a personal God, leads many to worship the object of that belief without the least tendency for such devotion to be the cause of its actual existence. Proving the claims of theists, or even disproving them, has always been a problematic matter. What makes it problematic is that we really have no good idea of what we would be looking for if and when we are looking. When I was very much a beginner in such matters, I had a philosophy professor, Fritz Marti, with whom I argued pretty incessantly about this subject. He took spiritual matters very seriously and had discussed them at great length with Ernst Cassirer, Paul Tillich, a classmate, and John Wild, a colleague. He specialized in post-Kantian German Idealism and thought, as he put it, “God was not a thing.” I, on the other hand, did not have any settled idea about what God was and our disagreement came down to this: I thought it not impossible that I might meet God just around the corner, entity to entity (or even face to face), whereas Marti thought that impossible, and although he surely thought the existence of God more likely than I, thought an encounter unfathomable. Part of the problem is that we were working with different views of what there is and part of the problem was that we had no common idea of proof for the existence of something. I was basically a verificationist, and a sense verificationist at that. I was, as any conceptualist, willing to accept numbers and concepts as mental entities in minds, and even the insubstantiality of scientific laws which nevertheless exist in virtue of their effects, but I was not willing to accept the separate existence of insensible non-performing entities. Ye shall know them by the traces they leave––no traces, no thing. Marti thought that the conceptual entity was all the existence the supernatural had to have in order to count, because the traces that it left were there in consciousness, and that was sufficient. I thought not then and think not now because I think like a number, or a law, there has to be something which is the same in every context. Without that, it is a conceit to say that my idea of God is like yours and at any rate we are focused on the same being. Precisely that is what is at issue and it is the most egregious begging of the question to identify two ideas as being about the same thing when they may only share the same name and nothing else because there is nothing else. So commonality of proof is the initial condition for a satisfactory communion of belief. But commonality of proof between the theist and the non-theist is a daunting goal. The theist, often though not always, appeals to faith to bolster his problematic belief in the existence of an unobservable entity and challenges the non-theist as an unbeliever. Those who lack faith are drenched by the theists in the odor of evil, as if faith or belief is so reliably the touchstone of what is real that they appropriately substitute it for evidence. This really lies at the heart of what otherwise might be a healthy debate between antagonistic theories; the theist has already ceded the ground of objective proof to the opposition and has grabbed instead the impregnable ground of blind faith. If faith substitutes for evidence, then what the non-theist lacks is not evidence but faith and hence there is as the only cure embracing a belief in God, and the other relevant unobservable entities, as an act of faith and never as a conclusion from evidence. Tertullian, in the end was right––one believes because it is absurd and those who do not embrace absurdities have no reason to believe or have faith as substitutes for evidence (much less proof). Philosophers have preferred to grapple with arguments for the existence of God, like St. Anselm's, St. Thomas', and Descartes' proofs, I believe, because such exercises hold out the promise that the disputes will be conducted in and be settled by the standards of evidence and argument common to science and logic. But what actually results from such encounters is that whether or not the arguments for the existence of God count as producing knowledge the theist considers himself as fully justified in maintaining his beliefs based on faith anyway. So the theist has all the arrows in the relevant quiver and the non-theist has none because the theist's aim in arguing is conversion of the other; vindication not self-discovery. Where there is no doubt, there can be no insight; no questions no answers, nothing mentally new. The most promising approach to settling the relevant issues of the validity of theological belief would be to settle on common standards of evidence. Not surprisingly, the committed theist embraces a whole panoply of non-standard evidentiary materials––miracles, revelation, extrasensory perception, prophesy, grace, and sacred literatures direct or nearly direct from God (or some allegedly close and well-positioned emissary). The non-theist is thus faced with the additional task of debunking the validity of these avenues of special access to the truth. This, in itself, is a nearly full-time task. Hume undertook in his essay On Miracles part of the work and gave up the whole project possibly because it seemed vast and profitless, and surely because like the Dialogues on Natural Religion these debunkings were unlikely to be works of wide distribution. The debunking work cannot be done in the same wholesale way that showing the invalidity of an argument or form of argument can. Each miracle, each revelation, each sacred text, each instance ot grace, or speaking in tongues requires its own puncturing––the work is endless and the candidates numberless. There is no central argument bureau to negotiate with, no way of settling what will count and what will not, and anything ignored is sure to be touted by some believer as the “real” evidence. When the path is faith first, knowledge later, the intermediate steps––the evidence––is primarily rhetorical. They are not the basis of the belief or belief system but merely extensions of it. So even though one ignores all these special accesses at one's rhetorical peril, it seems to me that there is no alternative for the non-believer. What the theist must first do––since it is he who makes a claim for the existence of something beyond immediate sense––is to propose a method of determining truth, or existence, or effectivity, that the non-theist agrees to and then proceed together to test whatever claims either wishes to make. Inasmuch as the only theist submissions that fit that challenge are the various intellectual arguments for the existence of God, the non-theist can safely ignore all the special pleading associated with present miracles, prior revelations, and ancient texts. A few words, however, about ancient texts. Actually one needs rather to say allegedly sacred texts generally because some, like the Book of Mormon, are of relatively recent vintage (and I have had a couple sent to my office just in the past few years [which I must confess to not keeping and wish now I had so I could have them around as reference works]). Some of course are quite famous and known in one form or another to nearly everyone, while others are rather obscure like the writings of the Rosicrucians. Some are actually rather difficult to come by, which considering that they are supposed to be the word of God or one of God's elect one would have thought the wider the publication the better. I think it is sufficient to cite the Old and New Testaments of the Bible as cases in point for the faulty provenance these books bring with them. They were clearly written over a period of time, surely by several authors, and none of the words of God are in a language other than the scribes. The authority for the truth of the words and commands contained therein are those of the alleged author. Of course God could have chosen such a vehicle to communicate His truth but second editions, revisions, wholly new texts, addenda, surely suggest the work of lesser hands. But even granting that one such compilation of the word of God has God's imprimatur, what is most interesting, valuable, and significant to us is its guidance to us––our human marching orders––laid out for us to follow either for its own sake, for God's sake, or as a ticket to a better life, or indeed a good or better post-life. These strictures surely will be ones we can follow, even if with some difficulty, but it turns out that, as with other sweeping generalizations, they are either always when taken together internally inconsistent as a set, and when taken individually can lead to direct contradictions with other such strictures. Whatever “honor thy father and mother” may turn out to mean, it surely implies a kind of obedience, yet parents have often (of course not always) ordered offspring to do what elsewhere God says they should not. Probably any two positive universal action generalizations will wind up with inconsistent applications (let me leave this topic for elsewhere). If this means the word of God requires interpretation, one might fault the author for making the books too hard or the beings to read them too dull. One might offer as a counter-argument the claim that atheism is in no better shape in trying to prove its claim that no god exists and the atheist indeed would have to admit that he does not have available a proof that gods are impossible, and surely cannot prove a negative universal claim any other way. But this fact does not produce despair in the atheist nor should it inasmuch as nothing material hangs for the atheist on God's non-existence. The best argument the theist has for believing that God exists is Pascal's Wager because it ups the stakes on erroneously failing to believe. The counter to this is simply even if God did exist there is no evidentiary link between this fact and an afterlife, an eternal bliss missed. One must bet on too many improbabilities to grasp at the Wager's belief fork. There are various ways in which ideas can be pernicious. One way is to get in the way of other clearer thinking, or more efficient thinking, or more effective thinking. Another way is by encouraging one to think along lines that lead nowhere––that dead end in the mind like exitless mazes, or that lead to mounds of incommunicable fantasy. Yet a third way is to lead one to do evil. And although I would like to talk about the kind of epistemic morass that pernicious ideas involve, my aim here and in the rest of this article is to discuss the perniciousness that is of the evil deed. There are some preliminaries to get out of the way. I am going to suppose here that we all think that the words “right,”“good,”“ought,”“wrong,”“bad,” etc. are meaningful even if it is not always plain what they mean in a given context.11 Cf. Baumrin, Stefan, “ Becoming Moral,” Philosophical Forum 37 (Fall 2006): 321– 32. I am going to specify for the purpose of this discourse that “evil” means unnecessarily wrong or unnecessarily creates bad consequences. There is also the tone to evil that it comes from something done deliberately or at least from something avoidable. A second matter that I am going to specify, though I would be happy elsewhere to defend it independently, is the fact that acting on principle is not necessarily right and the consequences of acting on principle are not necessarily good. Put another way: invoking as a defense of doing something the stance that one, after all, acted on principle is an inadequate defense in two respects––first, the principle must be agreed on between the parties as a good principle to act on, and second that any consequences flowing from such action are necessarily good because one acted on principle. Even though I can imagine parties agreeing that some principle was a good one to act on, I cannot imagine anyone vindicating the negative consequences of acting on a principle that led to disastrous results by an appeal to acting on principle. It might pass as an explanation, but not as a justification unless one could successfully argue that there was nothing else one might have done. For example, consider that in the 1980s the U.S. government adopted as an explicit policy the arming of insurrectionists in Afghanistan among poppy-growing rural Muslims against the Soviet supported socialist government in Kabul which had as central parts of its program the advancement of women, and universal education. The justification proffered by the United States for its policy and adhered to during and after this ultimately successful insurrection was that it was facilitating and defending religious freedom against the evil forces of Godless communism. When, eventually, also in the name of religion, the Taliban defeated all of the insurrectionist groups, established a Muslim government intent on the imposition of Shari'ah on the Afghanistan population, that government eliminated universal education and universal suffrage among its first public acts. A reasonable observer in retrospect might assess support of religious freedom in this matter as a misguided policy and anyway a disastrous one for the United States, for Afghanistan, and perhaps ultimately, for everyone. So, what then is the antitheist's real gripe with theism? It is, in a phrase, the justification of doing evil by invoking the words of an allegedly sacred source. For the theist there are sacred books, sacred sayings, and sacred personages. For the antitheist there are none of these; and this denial need not solely be based on an atheistic foundation. Whether or not God exists, there are no vetted texts, holy words, or sacred persons. The case having not been made out definitively that there is a God or that there is at least one and it cares for or about us, the antitheist is entirely free to deny the existence of the sacred, and to go his or her own way. Once the bogus claim to the direct authority of the Almighty is set aside, most of what passes for God's word turns out to be either silly, opaque, counterproductive, self-contradictory, distastefully archaic, or plainly inhumane. When Moses descends from Mt. Sinai with the word of God, he finds the people he left worshipping a golden calf, and he sets about, in the name of God, and righteousness generally, to slay 40,000 people. Well, even if the text exaggerates, slaying anyone for this “sin” is excessive and plainly evil. My challenge, as an antitheist, is for the theist to show that an action of this sort is morally justifiable. If not, then any excessive punishments for any misdeeds which violate the letter or the spirit of the sacred text(s) are warrantless, and with it the whole edifice of ecclesiastical law––Hebrew, Christian, Muslim, and of course any other creeds that want to sign on to the theistic righteousness of bloodbaths––collapses. But the perniciousness of acting on the authority of a sacred text to do what would be otherwise wrong, is only specially the province of the theist because it forms so much of the bedrock of the belief system that he or she brings to moral decision-making. If the frame of reference right after what is in plain sight is the sacred trappings through which one must view the road ahead, then it is no wonder much error, and much suffering has and will occur. But the error is deeper and more widespread than just reliance on sacred texts, and sacred words. That reliance gives one a superficial justification for doing evil in the name of God (or worse yet in pursuit of one's place in the afterworld)––there is yet acting on principles which do not have the holy imprimatur. We can readily admit that if an act is performed and the consequences appear, on the whole or thoroughly, good that the act was probably right and if it did so more than any other that could have been done in the same circumstances, then its claim to being right is mightily strengthened. Would it matter that the act was not done in furtherance of some principle of action? It just emerged for the agent as the right thing under the circumstances. Suppose there was a principle that the agent could have applied to the situation that would have yielded inferior results, would its claim to rightness be elevated because it was done on principle or would its having been done on principle be irrelevant? I think it is pretty obvious that having been done on principle adds nothing to the rightness of the act if it is right, or mitigates the wrongness of the act if it is wrong. The conclusion is that acting on principle is irrelevant to the value of an act. But, if that conclusion is correct, there is a surprising corollary, namely that deliberately acting on principle is always wrong and is only right, if ever, when the results of acting on principle are the same as the results would have been had one not done so. Of course, one either acts on principle or not and it might be virtually impossible to tell whether acting on principle and acting on intuition or calculation would have given the same or even largely the same results, but that is an epistemic problem that faces any comparative evaluation of the path chosen versus any other. The general argument can be summarized in this way. There are no principles of action guaranteed by a superior power to lead to right action or best results. Acting on any principle runs the risk of doing the wrong thing for a bad reason (acting on principle), so one ought only act on a direct calculation (aided by experience and intuition) when moral action is called for. Principles when they are at their best are marks of one's past successes in making such decisions. Other people's principles may mark their successes or their wishes for the actions of others. Hence to act on principle is wrong; to act on principle and knowingly cause unnecessary pain, death, or destruction is pernicious. The evil done is not cleansed by invoking the justification of its being a principled action. The primary objections to the views expressed above are, it seems to me, three. First, there is nevertheless a God, and if God wanted you to do something it would be the right thing to do and you ought to do it. Second, some principles, established by careful arguments, are thoroughly justified and action done in accordance with them is always right, whether or not the consequences are always the best that could have occurred; for example, the categorical imperative, the principle of utility, the golden rule, never lie, and always keep your promises. Third, acting on one's own experience and assessment will frequently give rise to wrong acts, or bad consequences, and anyway everyone or nearly everyone is infected with the bad commandments of theism, or one's mother, or the state and so how is one able under such circumstances to do the right thing, or produce the best or close to the best consequences? The first objection––more like a set of objections all depending on the hypotheticals: if God existed, if he pronounced his wishes, and if he did and we knew what they were, and if there were punishments he attached to their disregard or disobedience. Well it is a fine set of hypotheses but not more than that. There is no real evidence that any of them is true and enough evidence to the contrary. Moreover, here on earth at least God seems to be a rather indiscriminate slaughterer if we are to attribute any control or foresight to his behavior. So I think the first objection needs a lot of work and as it has been worked on for some considerable time there is no reason to suppose a more detailed response is now called for. The second objection is rather more complex in that there are many candidate principles vying for attention. Some are entirely general, like the categorical imperative, and some are very specific, like “never lie.” Each of the candidates has its own problems. The categorical imperative establishes permissibility, but does not mandate specific positive actions. The principle of utility, however formulated, involves either unimaginable calculations or mere rough and ready estimates to steer one's way though the plethora of one's future possible paths. “Never lie” and “always keep your promises” are easily open to counterexamples and hence do not stand on their own without the ground of the exceptions included (as in unless you do not want to hurt someone's feelings). The golden rule offers little guidance without a lot of self-reflection, and the negative golden rule is very good at preventing wrong action but entirely inert in plotting positive action. I trust this summary of the problems with general (or universal) rules or principles in moral philosophy will suffice inasmuch as this is all old news.22 Cf. Baumrin, Stefan Bernard, “ The Shoes of the Other,” Philosophical Forum 35 (Winter 2004): 397– 410. The third set of objections, I think, requires much less telescoped treatment. The truth underlying the third kind of objection is that many people, perhaps most, are ill equipped to think things through on their own and do a reasonably adequate job of it. This is true despite a lot of education (even non-theistic education) and easy access to data, and often enough expert advice in the very areas that decisions need to be made. Nevertheless, we make mistakes. We often do the wrong thing. We often fail to maximize good consequen
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