The Hubris of Atheism
Last week Tricia and I were watching EWTN’s World Over program. The guest they had on the show was Dr. Francis Collins,
a leading geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project. The topic was faith and science and they discussed Collins’s journey of faith, which began when he was a couple of years shy of 30 years old. Up until that time he was an avowed atheist but he had to confront in his medical practice, the phenomenon of faith in the face of suffering and death. He began to realize that his position as an atheist was one of profound hubris and presumption.
He recognized that if he considered all of the possible knowledge in the cosmos, the existing body of knowledge yet possessed by humanity would be a small fraction of the whole. Even further, when he considered the body of knowledge that he personally possessed, relatively speaking this would be an infinitesimally small portion of even the existing known body of knowledge. Thus, he found that to make a negative assertion about the existence of God with such a small amount of understandinng, that atheism was an untenable position and that he had now much work to do in order to fairly investigate the claims of faith.
Honest atheists also recognize that atheism is a prior commitment of the will rather than something to which one comes to the conclusion of via dispassionate rational reflection. John Courtney Murray, in The Problem of God, Yesterday and Today, says it this way:
Atheism is never the conclusion of any theory, philosophical or scientific. It is a decision, a free act of choice that antedates all theories (95).
Thomas Dubay points out that Jean Paul Sartre said something similar:
…Sartre considered that atheism is a radical decision that one makes. He did not even try to construct a rational justification for this decision (Faith and Certitude, 206).
I think that Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin, and promoter of this atheistic materialism provides a most honest admission of this. In a retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books, says:
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
Atheism is at root an act of the will that requires immense hubris. You will be hard pressed to find an atheist argue against belief in God who does not succumb to the fallacy of snob appeal. In other words, he will assert the inadmissibility of “reasonable” people’s belief in anything beyond the material world because it is by definition superstition. As an aside, the irony is that superstition is associating causes to effects without any rational justification. Philosophical serendipity as the explanation for the order in the cosmos is by that definition, superstition.  Any way, the undemonstrated assertion that faith is unreasonable is ubiquitous.
There seem to be very few reasonable arguments in favor of atheism, rather most are emotive reactions, sometimes anger, often fear. It is fear of many things. It can be fear of moral demands, of having one’s intellect discredited by atheistic peers, or even of being taken advantage of based upon a caricature of faith.
For example, Lewontin above fears a Voluntarist distortion of God. Carl Sagan provides another indication of fear of belief. A number of years before he died, Sagan exchanged a series of letters with a priest from the Christophers (I think it was; if anyone knows of a link to the letters please post it in the comments), motivated by the priest’s criticism of the Sagan’s faith in the existence of extraterrestrials but not in God. At the end of the discussion, Sagan seemed to reveal his precommitment to atheism (or sometimes agnosticism I understand) as a fear of being taken advantage of if he accepted anything on faith. This is, of course, a gross misunderstanding of faith but it echoes Beck’s fear.
When one has an emotive reason for rejecting the human condition, which is a natural openness to belief, to trust (just audit for a moment your daily activities and see how far you would get if you were consistently skeptical of everyone and everything you encountered), then he cannot be convinced even that the earth is not flat. One can see clearly about philosophical and religious matters only when one softens his heart and opens his mind. Faith demands humility and deep faith demands it most deeply.
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This is also evidenced by what atheists call themselves – “Free Thinkers” and “Brights.”
I know as a former atheist that there is a certain amount of pride in being an atheist where you feel you just must be smarter than others, especially to those church goers. You are one the Eng lightened ones who has escaped myths and live in a world of pure reason.
Comment by Jeff Miller — May 10, 2007 @ 6:35 PM
“Pure reason”: ah yes, as if that were possible. Garbage in, garbage out.
As it happens, however, the presentation of God in the West has probably done a great deal to provoke the decision for atheism in some people:
http://www.philthompson.net/pages/library/riveroffire.html
Comment by Fr. Greg — May 10, 2007 @ 6:44 PM
Fr. Greg,
I am disappointed to see you link to such a distortion of Western thought. It is a common mistake of some Eastern Christians to lump all Western thought into one undifferentiated lump and thereby fail to make proper distinctions and to properly understand the thought which they are criticizing.
While I will agree with you that modern atheism arose in the West it is associated not with Western thought per se, but with a strain of thought that traces its way back to Ockahmist Nominalism and Voluntarism. Nominalist Voluntarism is the defective philosophy that Luther and Calvin appropriated and the distorted theology of God that they propagated was the caricature that the Enlightenment moderns rebelled against.
The treatments of St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas that I have read that attempt to retroject Luther’s and Calvin’s views into their writings are anachronistic and themselves tinged with Nominalist presuppositions.
It is time for the Church to breathe again with both lungs. A more charitable mindset and a reading of Catholic and Orthodox interpreters of the Latin Fathers who address these mistaken notions would go a long way toward helping to heal the sad division between our Sister Churches.
May the Lord give you Peace and all good!
Comment by David — May 10, 2007 @ 9:24 PM
Dr. Collins lectured to us when I was in medical school. This is great to hear his journey of faith. Thanks.
Comment by dadwithnoisykids — May 11, 2007 @ 8:11 AM
David:
I usually hesitate when posting that, because of the polemics, but there is a point there which needs to be made, and one that Western Christianity as a whole, Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative, needs to hear, and must hear, if indeed the Church is ever again to fully breathe with both lungs.
Comment by Fr. Greg — May 11, 2007 @ 10:06 AM
Well, I am an agnostic, to the extent that I understand that the scientific method can only answer scientific questions (this seeming truism seems necessary to repeat)and is only one method of knowing. However, given all the religious iconography on this blog, am I to take it that we are intended to believe all the business about the virgin birth and the parting of waters, and in a god who is so petty (and so otherwise unemployed, having made the cosmos and all its wonders) that He has time to police my thoughts and words, take time out to help me find my car keys, note down for later judgement the number of instances that I swear and is (I say “is” since God is timeless…) also quite complacent about institutions such as slavery to the point of leaving detailed instructions about whom to enslave and whom not?. This version of god is patently ridiculous. People become atheists because the field of motivations and achievements claimed by the god of the pentateuch and the new Testament is frankly abhorrent, not to mention inconsistent. So far, the only quarrel I have with atheists is that they can explain everything AFTER the creation of life most satisfactorily, but they cannot explain the “spark” as it were. I am quite ready to believe that God set things up, started off evolution and left us to get on with it, but in that case, this is not a god who is going to be micro-managing my life, and keeping tabs on –or even caring- how many times I pray, or even whether I do and to whom/what I pray. Much less is this a god with such a juvenile sense of humuor that he would allow one of his best servants (Abraham) to terrorise his son and almost kill him, right up to the punchline. Er, any speculation as to the family dynamic chez Abraham after that charming little incident? Yet this same son is supposed to obey and reverence his homicidal father, under pain of death (check the commandments.) No, how does this make sense to any of you? This god who gives instructions to invading armies to “leave nothing alive?” Leviticus is endlessly instructive in these matters, but so is much of the Old Testament. Indeed, telling me that Jesus modified the harshness of the Old Testament doesn’t help much, as you are suggesting that your infallible, omnipresent, omniscient god CHANGED HIS MIND! This becomes dizzying. Shouldn’t He have known that He was going to change His mind and forestalled such an eventuality? Doesn’t changing His mind contradict his omnscience and his infallibility. If free will has the capacity to limit God’s power to intervene in our affairs, then He is hardly all powerful at all, is He? When are you going to address these issues for those of us who are still wondering about this?
If the Bible is the Word of God (and, if God meant it for the whole of humanity,) why give this important information only to a few desert tribes seven thousand years, no, two thousand years, no eight hundred years ago? and then leave the rest of us to squablle interminably about it thereafter? Why is the word of God contradictory in places, if it is all true and all infallible? And why should women listen to God since God was clearly not talking to us, and moreover didn’t care about us, as he was/is quite able to contemplate our various subjugations, rapes, stonings and etc.? I shall not bother quoting the relevant texts, but they certainly exist and can be looked up. I do not quite see on what basis you can expect me to believe that your God, even when my attention is turned to the God of the New Testament, is loving and generous and merciful, when reading the Bible fills me with more horror than the average horror movie. I have been told that these texts are not to be taken literally. Does that mean that Lot did NOT offer up his two blameless daughters to the mob that had wanted to make whoopee with his two visitors? And if not, what is the moral/allegorial meaning/point of that story? Is the Bible all allegory, and in which case in what sense is it “true” or the “word of God?” Why did God, who was so concerned to leave laws regulating everything, what to eat, how to make war, who to conquer, etc., neglect to leave us instructions about nuclear weapons,–after we got through the arrows and swords stages– which He should surely have known we were about to invent? New Testament: Why would God–in the person of Jesus–heal ONE person suffering from a disease and leave everyone else to suffer? Religious people really cannot have it both ways. Is the fact that Jesus turned up to a wedding and provided free booze a cause for celebration, and a particularly probitive exhibition of his powers? If Jesus is God, then basically, God killed himself (Jesus) in expiation of our sins against himself. Could he not have just forgiven us without the intermediate rigmarole? Why would he condemn little babies to hell, or even purgatory, when all they’ve done is be born and neglect to be baptised? How is this their fault? I mean, you can’t even pull out the “free will” pass here. What free will do babies have?
And why should we condemn Judas, Pontius Pilate et al, if they were just acting out their bit parts in God’s script? (If they hadn’t done what they did, the whole Resurrection deal would have been a bust, which would have meant that Christianity would also have been a bust, etc.) Why are we meant to condemn them? Is God against all moneychangers, and what do we do about banks in that case? And so forth. You can appreciate the difficulties that those of us who are listening to the exchangs between the believers and the non-believers have.
It doesn’t help that all of you claim not only to have the truth, but the WHOLE TRUTH and the ONLY TRUTH. Obviously, all of you cannot be right at the same time. Indeed, from this perspective, all of you except one group must, obviously, be wrong. Would you be able to postulate the criterion by which we decide that your version of events/truth is better than any other, as it is all “revealed?” Take a moment to imagine listening to believers in Zeus, or in Allah, or in Sun worship. How would you sort out which of these are telling the “Truth?” They are all gone, now, anyway. Why would God choose to tell you truths that He didn’t tell the ancient Greeks? Egyptians? Sumerians? etc. Is your humanity, as compared to theirs, so self-evidently superior and self-justifying that even God has to be biased in your favour?
All of you are telling us to believe because you said so. That things are true because you believe them. That God loves you (what makes you special?) and will love me too only if I believe what you believe (seems a bit unjust to me), but what if you are wrong, and the other fellows are right?
Either the Bible is the literal word of God (in which case count me out, I’ll take my chances with the opposition) or it is not, in which case it is a piece of literature like any other, open to interpretation, parsing or just being ignored. The “sacred texts” of whichever religion, do not, by themselves, invalidate the possibility of a God-Creator, but they certainly serve to a) alienate b)disgust c)de-convert those of us who feel that whilst science does not have all the answers, at least it does not, like religion, prohibit us from asking questions.
In the final analysis, the real challenge facing the religious is not the atheists: it is people like me. Whilst we think that the atheists may be missing out on something important, we are SURE that the religious have missed out on everything important. Religious people (with your bombs, and your troubling capacities to kill in the name of God) frighten us. The Atheists, at least, do not threaten to bomb anyone, nor do they attempt to tell us that we are doomed to eternal torment for the crime of exercising our minds. There aren’t any atheist suicide bombers. No atheist clinic bombers. They can be as evil as anybody else, but they do not do so on the basis of their atheism, or claim that NOT believing in God gives them a mandate to tell everyone else what to do. You say that the atheists are intellectually arrogant: maybe so. On the other hand, how much more arrogant is it to suppose that the secrets of the Universe have been revealed to only you (or your relevant prophet), only once, and come with conditions of thought and behaviour that are suspect at best and immoral at worst?
I apologise if I don’t always remember to capitalise “God” and “He/His/” pronouns, but that itself the problem. Is God petty enough to care about my grammar, punctuation and spelling and if He does not, why should anyone else? Why is this even a question?
Comment by Sojourner — May 11, 2007 @ 10:38 AM
Fr. Greg – I do not think that this particular link presents anything that needs to be faced because it is so mistaken for the reasons that I mentioned above. What does need to be faced by the West is the real issue that the link misses. It is not Western theology but Western method that needs guarding. The fundamental risk associated with Western thought is its over reliance on analytical thinking together with the methods developed beginning with Descartes that gives great capacities with techne. The ability to control and manipulate the world brings with it a great temptation to see oneself as self sufficient. This combined with Ockham’s Nominalist Voluntarism paved the way to modern atheism based upon a mechanistic/materialist world view. However, this distortion does not discredit the mode of thought. Abuse does not demand disuse.
It is true that Eastern thought does not tend towards reductionism, because it does not use a reductive method. Thus, it does not tend to mistake the reality of the world for the fragmenting knowledge that Western thought has led to. However, neither is Eastern thought free from its own distortions; and since the late 19th century many Eastern theologians have become affected by Nominalist forms of thought themselves (I am think especially here of His Eminence John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon.
For an effective theology, both forms are needed. The holistic, integrating Eastern mind must be wedded to the Western analytical technique so that we can study in detail the parts and then understand the parts as a greater whole. This was John Paul the Great’s contribution to theological method. Intellectually, then the two lungs also are necessary to help us avoid these unpaid bills that have cropped up since Our Sister Churches succumbed to the temptation of divorce so many years ago.
Sojourner – you have presented a plethora of valid difficulties but difficulties do not justify doubt. We have difficulties in many areas of science (for example in quantum physics) but they do not cause us to doubt the reality that they attempt to explain. The difficulties you cite suggest that you have not read Catholic treatments of these difficulties. Many of them do not reflect Catholic beliefs and so must be seen as little more than straw men.
The biblical problems that you bring up are problematic only if one demands a dichotomous approach to interpreting Divine Revelation. This does not accord with Catholic exegetical hermeneutics, even going back to the very beginning of the Church 2000 years ago. If you would like a place to begin to see that there just might be a reasonable response to your difficulties, could I recommend G.K. Chesteron’s Everlasting Man.
Comment by David — May 11, 2007 @ 11:19 AM
Sojourner, if you’re still around – I would make two suggestions as you refine your objections to Christianity:
- Focus on the person of Jesus Christ as He is presented in the four Gospels. Look at how he responds to the various types of people He encounters. Consider whether He speaks the truth, cares for the poor, sets free slaves… and consider how His memory inspires others to do the same. Yes, Christians screw up at times – but stay with me, stay focused on the person of Jesus. Is what Jesus says and does good, in your (admittedly highly developed) moral sense?
- Examine your own experience and ask yourself this: Do you prefer a Creator God who set the world in motion long ago and has no person dealings with creation, or do you really want a God who’s motivated to intervene – e.g. end slavery, stand up for the oppressed, help you find your car keys, etc.? Do you want a God who expresses that He cares about you, other people, the planet – or not?
David – Can you comment or direct me to a post defining once again what Ockham’s voluntarism/nominalism is? I keep losing that thread of the arguments you present in that vein ’cause I can’t remember exactly what Ockham got wrong… Thanks.
Comment by Kathleen Lundquist — May 11, 2007 @ 2:42 PM
Kathleen -
Good points.
Sorry about the undefined references. Here are a couple of posts that explain the aspects of Nominalism and Voluntarism in Ockham’s thought to which I am referring (Tale of Two Freedoms and Tyranny of Relativism). Here is a pretty good popular article on the subject.
Comment by David — May 11, 2007 @ 2:58 PM
Sojourner
I won’t even attempt to try to address all the many inconsisitencies you have found in the Judeo/Christian traditions and faiths. I am not qualified and frankly (being a mother of four) don’t have the time.
What I will say is this – If you seek Truth and Love then only one thing is required of you in order for all these stumbling blocks and questions which bother you to be removed. Openess. Let yourself be open to it. If you are genuinely open and seek Truth and Love with child like vulnerability then all will be well for you.
Now, I know to a rational, thinking person such as yourself that sounds like a bunch of silliness and goobley-gook but it’s the best I can come up with. Ultimately – It IS a leap of faith! But in order to satisfy all these nagging questions you must make the leap first…then the answers will come…
Peace – Kris
Comment by kris — May 13, 2007 @ 6:41 AM
Kris,
I might clarify that I believe that you meant “apparent” inconsistencies. And when you say that one must take the “leap of faith” you are not suggesting that reason must be set aside (in the sense that faith might demand that one believe something that truly contradicts reason) but that in the words of St. Augustine, you are saying that “I believe that I might understand.” In other words as a fruit of grace, faith elevates and perfects reason and allows one then to see what might seem opaque to someone approaching the matter through reason alone.
It is important to confirm that while faith goes beyond reason, faith can never truly contradict it.
Thanks for the comments for Sojourner.
Comment by David — May 13, 2007 @ 1:45 PM
David – You are FAR more educated in these areas than myself! Thank you for saying much more eloquently than me what I was trying to get at! All I know is that before my conversion I too had many nagging questions. But after I let go of my pride, I was able to see the Truth so clearly then. I am amazed now, at how much rational sense all these things DO make. But I don’t believe that that would have been possible if I had not first “put my guard down” and allowed myself to see things with eyes wide open. Does that make any sense? Thanks – Kris
Comment by kris — May 14, 2007 @ 9:29 AM
Another thing – I notice that often people want to be right more than than they want truth, and that this is the major stumbling block to understanding. If we are not really willing to see the Truth than it can be very hard to see it no matter HOW obvious it is!
Comment by kris — May 14, 2007 @ 9:33 AM
Hi Kris – I didn’t mean to ignore you. The last couple of weeks have been very busy and I have not had time to get to the blog. Your points do make sense to me and I agree with you. An obstinate will (even when we do not recognize it as such) can stand in the way of seeing and accepting the obvious.
Comment by David — May 22, 2007 @ 11:37 AM