Response
to Dr. Roger Olson
11/9/07
Many of you may already have
seen the recent anti-atheist
screed by one Dr. Roger Olson, a professor of theology at Baylor
University. Some
of you may even have
noticed some of the
problems with it. Well, I noticed all
of the problems with it and will enumerate them in short
order.
First,
to show how
completely honorable I am being, here is Dr. Olson’s complete text,
uninterrupted
by me:
Atheism's
Moral Philosophy Not Consistent with Baylor's Mission
Oct.
17, 2007
I
feel sorry for atheists. They are so much in the minority in
American society and they are bound to feel some marginalization if not
persecution.
Christians
should be the last people
to persecute anyone -- including atheists. But that doesn't mean
Christians
have to accommodate atheism as they tolerate and love atheists.
We
have to recognize atheists' full
freedom to believe God does not exist, but we don't have to embrace
atheism as
a social good. In fact, I would argue that atheism has no redeeming
social
value.
Atheism
undermines values. How? Let's
look at care for others. Yes, an individual atheist might care for
other
people. But when have you heard of an entire atheist organization
serving the
poor, the sick or the hungry?
So
far, at least, atheists haven't
demonstrated their concern for others in any organized way.
But
more importantly, atheism
undermines values such as care for others because it cannot explain why
anyone
should care for others. If there is no God or anything at all above
nature,
then nature is all there is. The law of nature is survival of the
fittest. Why
help the less fit survive unless there is a God who loves them because
they are
created in his image?
What
argument can atheism marshal against
"might makes right"?
Many
atheists argue that caring for
others can be encouraged based on self-interest.
But
what answer can an atheist give
(that is consistent with atheism) to the question, "What if I figure
out a
way to be personally happy and fulfilled while oppressing other
people?"
There
is no answer to that without
appeal to someone transcendent to whom we are all accountable.
And
atheism has no answer to social
Darwinism -- the idea that society should not help the weak because
it's
nature's way to weed out the less fit.
Helping
the weak goes against nature
and if nature is all there is, well, why should we fight it? A person
might
choose to, but not because of any transcendent, objective obligation
(such as
that all persons are created in God's image).
Not
only does atheism undermine
values; it also undermines meaning. I'm talking about meaningful
reality --
life with meaning and purpose.
German
theologian Hans Küng wrote
Does God Exist? An Answer for Today. In it, the maverick Catholic
thinker
argued that atheism can provide no basis for "basic trust" in the
meaningfulness of reality.
The
only logical option for the
atheist is nihilism -- belief that nothing has any objective meaning or
purpose.
Küng
admitted that atheism is a
rational "basic choice" and it cannot be proven wrong in any kind of
absolute way.
But
most atheists demonstrate their
basic trust in the meaningfulness of reality by being outraged at evil
and
injustice, thereby demonstrating that atheism cannot be lived out
consistently.
What
makes something evil or unjust
if nothing like God exists -- if nature is all there is? Only
subjective choice
either by an individual or a society. But that can change and it often
does.
Without God, the social prophet has no way out of relativism.
Baylor
and universities like it exist
to promote objective values and meaningful existence.
For
them atheism is not benign, but
the enemy -- even if atheists themselves are not.
Finally,
let me repeat that I have
nothing against atheists as persons and neither does Baylor University.
But
in my opinion, they are people of
character and virtue in spite of their philosophy of life -- not
because of it.
Excited? I
thought
so. Here follows my point-by-point
response.
"I
feel sorry for atheists. They are so much in the minority in
American society and they are bound to feel some marginalization if not
persecution."
These
first two points are
presented as an expression of
tolerance but are no such thing.
They
are an attempt to 1)
place yourself
on the moral high ground, and more importantly 2)
reframe atheists as a minority in the power
sense, rather than merely in the numerical
sense. Yes,
obviously, atheists are statistically a minority of the
population — but this is
not all that the word minority
is
used to mean. We
often, for example, describe women
as a
“minority,” despite the fact
that there are numerically more women than men. Why is
this?
Because,
societally speaking, men have more
power — so minority
has a
connotation
beyond the numerical. Conversely,
millionaires are a small percentage of the population — but
have you ever heard
anyone refer to millionaires as a “minority?”
No — because
millionaires have more power
than non-millionaires. Now,
since atheists are, on the whole, more
intelligent than theists, and possess the sizable advantage of
believing things
that can be proven in place of things that are made up out of whole
cloth, it
would be inaccurate to look upon atheists as a minority
in the power
sense — yes, theists have more political
power, due to the fact that we live in a democracy and you guys
comprise a
numerical majority — but when there is an argument, we win,
period. But you
open by talking about atheists as
if we’re handicapped
or
something — as
if we lack
something that you
have, rather
than the other way
around.
"Christians
should be the last people to persecute anyone
-- including atheists. But that doesn't mean Christians have to
accommodate
atheism as they tolerate and love atheists."
First
of all, I
noticed that you say Christians “should
be the last
people to persecute
anyone,” instead of “are.” This
is, of course,
because if you said “are”
it would be just about the least
true statement of all time — and since the rest of the piece is
about how
religion makes people more
moral, I
guess we’re done here. But
what the
hell, I’ll keep going. Your
prescription here is basically that religious people should
refrain from
full-out attacking atheists in the street — and we’re
supposed to be, what,
grateful for your magnanimity? (Hey,
wait
a minute… You
don’t say “religious
people,” you say “Christians,”
so I guess
that means you’re also implicitly applying the
“tolerate but don’t accommodate”
principle to all the people who are religions
besides Christianity
too, huh?
But I understand that you couldn’t very
well open an essay by announcing that you feel
sorry for
Jewish
people.
Yeah,
that’s some
nice moral high ground you’ve got there.)
The
“no accommodation” clause
clearly means that you’re free to keep
voting for lunatics who want to base all the laws on religious
bullshit, tying
the hands of science teachers, and perpetuating the idea that gay
people are
mentally ill, so what do you even mean by “tolerate and
love?” If
you can fuck with us by voting, you have
no need to be openly mean to us in person, so you are conceding
nothing.
This
is like a Jim Crow
supporter thinking
he’s a great guy because he still smiles at Black people on
the sidewalk.
"We
have to recognize atheists' full
freedom to believe God does not exist, but we don't have to embrace
atheism as
a social good. In fact, I would argue that atheism has no redeeming
social
value."
Holy
shit, you’re right! Atheism
has no redeeming social value! How
can I possibly get out of this one?
Oh,
wait, here are three
ways I can get out of this one: “Not
believing in Santa Claus has no redeeming social value,”
“Not believing in Leprechauns has no redeeming
social value,” and
“Not believing in the Loch Ness
Monster has no redeeming social value.”
In
fact, I can come up with a lot more than three
of those. The
point, of course, is that no
shit
the absence of a belief in a
made-up thing does not inherently have “redeeming social
value.” No-one's arguing that it does.
"Atheism
undermines values. How? Let's
look at care for others. Yes, an individual atheist might care for
other
people. But when have you heard of an entire atheist organization
serving the
poor, the sick or the hungry?
So
far, at least, atheists haven't
demonstrated their concern for others in any organized way."
No, I haven’t heard
of an entire atheist organization doing
that. Know why? Because
why the fuck would
there even be
an “entire
atheist
organization?” The
only thing that
organizes us is the fact that we don’t believe what you
believe, so this is
like saying that there should be conventions for people who don’t
like Star Trek. What
would they
do — hang out and talk about
things besides
Star Trek? As for
demonstrating
our
concern for others,
we are doing that simply by being
atheists, since religion fucks over a lot more people than it
helps.
Concern
for many types of
people — gays and
women, for example — is inherent in the fight against organized
religion, and for
many atheists, the fact that they don’t like how religion
treats those people
is a big part of how they got to be atheists in the first
place.
But
since the only group
of people you
specifically brought up is the poor, we’ll bring party
politics into it and say
that we demonstrate our concern for the poor by fighting against
the party that fucks them over the most, which happens also
to be the same party that religious people vote for,
mainly because it also
fucks over the people that you guys explicitly want
to fuck over, which brings us back to gays and women.
Oh,
and in case you’re going to bring up
helping the poor through “faith-based initiatives,”
guess what? The
impetus for those has dick-all to do with
religion, and they’re just a means of abnegating governmental
or broader societal
responsibility in favor of privatization, the point of which is not to
help the
poor but to make rich people even richer, but they do it through the
“faith-based” route so no-one notices and so it will turn
into an argument about
religion instead of about privatization, because more people are on
their side
when it’s an argument about religion.
If
you really care so much about the poor, how about you stop letting
these
assclowns trick you into fucking them over?
Oh,
right — because your religious faith is
blinding you to the fact that
this is what’s happening. Hey,
maybe
atheism does
have
“redeeming social
value” after all!
"But
more importantly, atheism
undermines values such as care for others because it cannot explain why
anyone
should care for others. If there is no God or anything at all above
nature,
then nature is all there is. The law of nature is survival of the
fittest. Why
help the less fit survive unless there is a God who loves them because
they are
created in his image?"
I’ll
start by
pointing out that the last question implies
that, although we
are good people
just because we’re good people, you
are apparently only a good person because you want a reward from
God.
That
being said, this
paragraph rests on a
false dilemma — namely, it assumes that caring
for others
is not itself a part
of “fitness” as it concerns adaptation via natural
selection. But it
is. Human beings
evolved the capacity to care for others
because it helped
us to work in teams and plan for the future — if it
hadn’t, then it wouldn’t be
the case that human beings care about others, but since we do, that
means it
did. One of the
many things human beings
did as a result of this, by the way, was invent a made-up thing called
God to
try and ensure that people behaved themselves.
Now,
obviously, not all human beings are nice to all
other human beings
all the time — if we were, there’d be no problems,
and the bit about inventing
God wouldn’t have been fucked up by assholes.
Of
course, this explanation makes no sense if you
don’t believe in
evolution — but if you don’t believe in evolution,
then why cite “survival of the
fittest” as a real
principle that
humanity must work to counteract?
In
any
case, this whole paragraph only makes sense if you have no idea how an
atheist
thinks — in short, we care about people because caring about
people is nice, and
we don’t need to believe that there’s an invisible
man in the sky to know what
“nice” means. And,
by the way, neither
do you. As many
atheists have pointed
out, religious people don’t actually
get their morality from their religions — they only think
they do. If they
really got their morality from their religions, then they would not
have
possessed the ability to modify their religions over time to make them
less
crazy. Why is it
that you don’t still
stone people to death for working on the Sabbath?
Because
you figured out that it was bullshit,
even though your holy book says you should do it.
Conclusion:
your ideas about what is or
isn’t
nice originate from something other
than your religion (the accurate ones, at least).
"What
argument can atheism marshal
against 'might makes right'?"
This
one: no,
it
doesn’t.
We
certainly didn’t need
religion to figure out that just because someone can beat you up, that
doesn’t
mean he’s right. We
figured that out on
the playground in kindergarten. The
proof that
we
figured that
out, by the way, is the fact that we are currently fighting against you
even though you outnumber us
numerically and control the government.
Why
are we doing this? Because
you’re not right, even though you are
“mighty.” Oh,
and you know who’s really shitty at
marshaling arguments against
“might makes right?” Religious
people. If you
don’t
believe us, go ask a Spanish
Conquistador.
"Many
atheists argue that caring for
others can be encouraged based on self-interest. But
what answer can an atheist give
(that is consistent with atheism) to the question, "What if I figure
out a
way to be personally happy and fulfilled while oppressing other
people?"
There
is no answer to that without
appeal to someone transcendent to whom we are all accountable."
No,
we don’t
argue
that “caring for others can be encouraged
based on self-interest” — we argue that it evolved based on self-interest,
because that's how things evolve. If
something
didn’t involve self-interest (or
more accurately, the self-interest of your genes — which
is why, for example, your body is still trying to get pregnant or
impregnate
someone even when that’s the last thing you want to happen)
at some point, it
wouldn’t be a trait now. Once
again, a
religious person has confused a scientific descriptive
argument with an ethical prescriptive
one — e.g., this is like saying that the Law of Gravity encourages
you to push people off of tall
buildings, when all it
does is inform
you that if
you do, they will fall. As
for people who
figure
out a way to be
happy while oppressing other people, why don’t you tell us,
since you’re
the ones who
are oppressing other
people? Since you
have apparently
figured out a way to justify this that is consistent with religion, we
should
have no trouble figuring out a way to not do this that is consistent
with atheism. I agree,
however, with your
last sentence above — minus
the word
“transcendent.” It
is indeed the case
that there can be no morality “without appeal to someone to
whom we are all
responsible,” and that someone
is one
another.
Honestly — I'm
an
atheist, so if I
don’t care about people, then why am I bothering to write
this? I’m
not
getting paid, and I am clearly smart enough that I could be using my
talent to do some stupid shit where I’d make a lot of money
instead of this,
if I so chose. Advertising,
maybe? You know I could trick people into
buying a bunch of useless crap.
But I don’t. Or, for
that matter,
look
at religion vs. atheism
itself — it is clearly
more socially advantageous to be religious, so if I wanted to, I
could just
pretend to be religious, and become the most eloquent and persuasive
religious
person around, and I’d probably be working for the
government now and be
rich. But I
don’t. Virtually no atheist does. Why? Because
from an ethical standpoint, we don’t like the way
you guys fuck with people
who don’t deserve
it, and from a conceptual
standpoint,
even though we might have evolved reason in order to remember which
berries
were and weren’t poisonous, we’re stuck with it
now, and so we can’t help noticing
when something makes no fucking sense at all — at least, some
of us can’t.
"And
atheism has no answer to social
Darwinism -- the idea that society should not help the weak because
it's
nature's way to weed out the less fit.
Helping
the weak goes against nature
and if nature is all there is, well, why should we fight it? A person
might
choose to, but not because of any transcendent, objective obligation
(such as
that all persons are created in God's image)."
Our
answer to “social Darwinism” is that it actually
has
nothing whatsoever to do with Darwinian evolution, and is merely a
term invented by rich
assholes who
wanted an excuse to keep being rich assholes (guess what party they
belonged
to?). Poverty is
not “nature’s way to
weed out the less fit,” because poverty is inherited
socially, not passed on
genetically. If
someone wins the
lottery, does that mean that their genes
are the most desirable? Helping
the weak does not
go against nature,
and I can prove it, thusly: since nature is
all there is, and people do
help
the
weak, that means it doesn’t
go
against nature. As
for who does or
doesn’t get weeded out, try asking a woman who
she’d rather have kids with — a
guy who has compassion for the weak, or a guy who goes around shooting
the weak
in the face. Did
she pick the first
guy? Well, I guess
that means the guy
who goes around shooting the weak won’t be having any kids,
or at least not any
who get cared for enough to grow up to be good people themselves, hence
becoming romantically desirable themselves (I realize women also like
rich guys, but all I set out to establish here is that altruism is
frequently selected for). Really,
this is like junior-high science-class stuff
here — or it would
be, if
you would fucking let us
teach it. The
reason we “fight” nature
is because nature is frequently a pain in the ass: hence,
glasses and contact
lenses, contraceptives, cures for diseases, and airplanes.
"Not
only does atheism undermine
values; it also undermines meaning. I'm talking about meaningful
reality--life with meaning and purpose."
This
sounds great, but it
barely means anything. If
the “values” you’re talking about include
beating the shit out of gay people, burning witches at the stake,
robbing people
of happiness by teaching them to hate their own bodies for no reason,
and
imprisoning Galileo, then we’re very proud indeed to be
playing a part in the
grand tradition of undermining them.
Our
lives have meaning because we’re alive and we say they do,
and our lives have
purpose because we have dedicated them to fighting you.
Or,
to a somewhat less inspiring extent,
because we do fun stuff sometimes, which is totally cool as long as
you’re not
hurting anybody. Plus, even you, and lots of other religious
people, figure
out in non-religious ways that stuff has meaning and purpose all the
time. For example,
do you think that the works of
William Shakespeare have meaning and purpose?
Okay,
and does it say that they do in the Bible?
Well,
then apparently you
figured this out
independently of religion.
"German
theologian Hans Küng wrote Does
God
Exist? An Answer for Today.
In
it, the maverick Catholic thinker argued that atheism can provide no
basis for 'basic trust' in the meaningfulness of reality.
The
only logical option for the
atheist is nihilism -- belief that nothing has any objective meaning or
purpose."
Okay,
we’ve been over
this before, but you know what else
“provides no basis for basic trust
in the meaningfulness of reality?”
The
absence of a belief in Santa Claus, Leprechauns, the Loch Ness Monster,
etc. The reason we
don’t believe in
those things isn’t because we think a lack of belief in them
leads to “trust in
the meaningfulness of reality” — it’s
because we’re smart and figured out they
don’t really exist, which we kind of couldn't help doing, on
account of the whole “smart” thing. Actually,
we guess,
that does bespeak a certain “trust in the meaningfulness of
reality,” in the
sense that we acknowledge the Law of Non-Contradiction, i.e., that a
proposition
and its mutually exclusive reverse cannot simultaneously be true, e.g.,
either
Leprechauns exist or Leprechauns
do
not exist, but Leprechauns cannot simultaneously exist and not exist. So
maybe you should be
pissed at agnostics
instead. As for
nihilism, you are making
too much and too little out of the word “objective”
there. All that a
lack of objective
meaning means is
that human existence isn’t being evaluated by an all-knowing
external
observer. Would it
matter to the rest of
the Universe if we destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war?
No.
Would
it matter to us? Yes. Hence,
we really, really
do not want this to
happen. Oh, and we
also don’t know where
the fuck a religious nut gets off telling us what “the only logical
option” is. When we
want to know
about
our logical
options,
we’ll ask someone besides
a guy who decided to believe
that some book about not touching the skin of dead pigs and
volunteering your
daughters to be gang-raped by an angry mob written by some random guys
who were
two steps removed from being fucking cavemen is the be-all and end-all
of human
existence, thanks.
"Küng
admitted that atheism is a
rational "basic choice" and it cannot be proven wrong in any kind of
absolute way.
But
most atheists demonstrate their
basic trust in the meaningfulness of reality by being outraged at evil
and
injustice, thereby demonstrating that atheism cannot be lived out
consistently."
Really? Atheism
can’t
be proven wrong? Well,
no shit, because
proving atheism wrong would necessitate proving the existence of
God.
You
needed an obscure
German philosopher to
tell you that there’s no proof of the existence of God?
Probably
not, so I’m guessing this is only
here so you can work in the word “choice,” to try
and characterize atheists as
people who chose
to stop believing
in
God because we’re pissed-off malcontents or something,
instead of people who figured
out
that there’s no God because
we’re smart. Did
Küng “admit” that
disbelief in vampires is a “rational choice” too?
Because
if he did,
we’d like to send him a
thank-you note, seeing as how we happen not to believe in vampires, and
are so
relieved to finally have this “choice” validated.
And I think I’m safely ahead on points by
now, so my response to your assertion that being outraged at evil is
inconsistent with atheism is simply “Go fuck
yourself.”
"What
makes something evil or unjust
if nothing like God exists -- if nature is all there is? Only
subjective choice
either by an individual or a society. But that can change and it often
does.
Without God, the social prophet has no way out of relativism.
Baylor
and universities like it exist
to promote objective values and meaningful existence.
For
them atheism is not benign, but
the enemy -- even if atheists themselves are not.
Finally,
let me repeat that I have
nothing against atheists as persons and neither does Baylor University.
But
in my opinion, they are people of
character and virtue in spite of their philosophy of life -- not
because of it."
We
have already been over the
fact that you are making too
much of the “objective/subjective” distinction.
Subjectivity
is not scary
to us, because we realize
that things have actually
been
subjective all
along,
whereas you
are only just now
beginning to suspect that they might be.
There
are, of course, situations where objectivity
exists, and we
acknowledge a lot more of them than you guys do — e.g., it is objectively
true that man and apes evolved from a common ancestor, it is objectively
true that
the
planet is more than 6,000 years old, it is objectively
true that Noah’s Ark
didn’t
really happen, etc. Your
“if” up there
is simply a fact to us, and we can see evidence of this just as clearly
in your
ways as we can in ours. Yes,
absolutely,
the choices of individuals and societies do
change — which is how you
guys
decided
to stop stoning adulterers, burning sacrifices, and keeping slaves,
even though
your magic book says the same exact stuff about those things as it did
back in
the day.
This
is
also, by the way,
presumably why you directed this screed only
at atheists, rather than indiscriminately at atheists and
all the religious people who are different
religions from yours. Once
upon a time, as you well know, there would have
been no difference
to you — a heathen was a heathen. Despite my crack about it earlier, I don’t think you really
“feel sorry for” Jewish
people — or even for, say, Buddhists, despite the fact that
Buddhism has no
“objective” creator God in the way that your
religion does. As
long as somebody has some kind of
unsupportable belief and calls it a religion, apparently,
you’re cool with
that — and guess what? That
means you’re
admitting that your objective
beliefs
are really subjective. We
don’t know
what you mean by “social
prophet,” but if it means philosopher,
then sure, he has “no way out of relativism.”
And,
as I’ve
shown a few times here,
neither does the regular
“prophet,” since he’s just a
philosopher who’s fooling himself into thinking
he’s something else. Even
if there were
a God, it
would still
be the case that all the stuff religious people believe he wants them
to do was
made up by humans, and
even if
you believe that this part or that part of the Bible was dictated by
God, those
are a lot of the parts
you guys
have since softened up on, of your own accord — yet you are still
just as convinced
that you’re doing the “right” thing.
But
of course, this is only a problem for ethics.
Science,
as we’ve explained, is a
different matter altogether. If
you like objectivity
so much, you
should try letting us teach it — maybe even
in one of those universities you think we’re the
“enemy” of, when we’re
actually the only thing keeping them from being burnt to the ground by
religious people.
Anyway,
Dr. Olson, by way of
closing, I’m happy to tell
you that I partly agree with your last point.
You
are indeed correct that we atheists are not people of
character and virtue because
of our
atheism — we were people of
character and virtue first,
and
this
is what has enabled us to become atheists.
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