I know, I know—guest essays go out on Wednesdays, not Tuesdays. But I’ve got great offerings backing up on me, and Keith Parsons is way too good to let one of his essays go to waste. Enjoy!
WHY GOD NEEDS ATHEISTS
When you stop to think about it, the existence of atheists should be puzzling for theists. After all, for the theist, unlike the deist, God is not supposed to be a distant creator, a being who gets the creation going and then absconds. Rather, the theistic God is supposed to be constantly involved with his creation, and especially concerned with human beings, their welfare and activities. Indeed, God supposedly loves us and one of his greatest benefits to us is knowledge of his existence and his love. One would think, then, that God would reveal himself to us in some fairly obvious way, that so important a truth would not be withheld from us or made difficult to get.
Some religious thinkers, such as the philosopher Alvin Plantinga have claimed that God has indeed implanted within each of us a sensus divinitatis, an innate awareness of God's existence. Why, then, are there atheists? Well, perhaps some people have allowed sinfulness to corrupt and disrupt that natural awareness, and therefore are responsible for their own blindness. However, if your only evidence that atheists are guilty of a self-induced impairment is that they do not, in fact, perceive God, then such a charge is obviously based upon circular reasoning. Atheists do not detect God because sin has corrupted their God-detecting faculties, and we know that those faculties are corrupted because atheists fail to detect God.
In general, if someone is unable to sense what I and others sense, I should be able to discover some somatic or psychological defect, objectively discernible and demonstrable by unbiased medical or scientific means and perhaps correctible with appropriate interventions. If someone cannot see what I see or hear what I hear, then perhaps he or she is color blind or suffers from an auditory defect. No one has shown that atheists suffer from such a defect. No MRI or CT scan has revealed damaged God-receptor organs or anything of that nature.
If, then, there is no reason to suspect an impairment, then perhaps the problem is that some people have not learned to see. Since Kant, at least, we have known that perception is not the passive reception of sense-data, but an active interpretive interaction with the world. As with learning to speak another language, we have to visually interpret as well. Perhaps the adumbrations of God's presence are rather subtle, and we have to learn to identify them.
Much of education, in fact, is learning to see. A novice looking through a microscope often cannot see the details of cellular structure; they have to learn to see. A physician can learn to look at a skin discoloration and see melanoma. A paleontologist can see a fossil remain where others would only see a nondescript pebble. So, maybe we atheists have to be taught to see God, and such attempts, of course, have often been made. Behold the starry heavens and the majesty of the Himalayas. Listen to Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. View the great Gothic cathedrals that make stone soar for the glory of God. See?
Speaking personally, I have experienced these things, and I have felt overwhelmed by their depth and beauty, but it was their depth and beauty I discovered, not that of some putative deity. I have also patiently read the supposedly holy scriptures to see if I was uplifted and inspired. Some of it is great. When God speaks to Job in thunder from the whirlwind, silencing all merely human speakers with poetry of unsurpassed splendor, I know that I am hearing some of the greatest words ever written. Other parts of the so-called Word are squalid, cruel, silly, ugly, and ridiculous. Tom Paine said that much of the Bible is more plausibly regarded as the word of a demon than the Word of God. He was right. So, I am afraid that I cannot find God in scripture.
When asked why God has not made his presence more manifest, some theists answer that if God's existence were too obvious, bad consequences would follow. Nobody will attempt to steal a catalytic converter when a cop is standing right there. If God is the cop and is obviously watching, we would be good out of prudence, not due to genuine moral goodness. So, if there is to be genuine moral goodness, goodness for the sake of goodness, then God will have to maintain some epistemic distance. The struggle with temptation has to be a genuine struggle; sin has to be a real possibility if we are to get any credit for resisting it. Rewards and punishments cannot be too obvious if we are to do good disinterestedly, and not for what we can get or to avoid a whipping. A nanny God would never give us the independence we need to develop the autonomy of genuine moral agents, so God cannot be too obvious.
On the other hand, though, unbelief is generally considered a sin. St. Paul certainly thought so (Romans 1:20). Jesus himself says that the world's sin is unbelief in him (John 16:9). If unbelief is a sin, then those who do not believe cannot have a legitimate excuse. Unbelief cannot be a perfectly reasonable option, because, clearly, you cannot blame somebody for being reasonable. If, then, those who do not believe are without excuse, then it must be that unbelievers have sinfully and irrationally rejected what they really know or easily could know to be so. So, once again, it seems that God's existence must be known or at least easily knowable if unbelievers are to be held culpable.
How do theists tread this fine line? How can God's existence not be so obvious as to preclude genuine morality instead of mere prudence but obvious enough so that unbelievers can be rightfully damned for their willful and sinful unbelief?
The way out of this dilemma is to admit that conscientious unbelief is not sinful but meritorious. Any God worth worshipping will be one who respects the honest unbeliever whose convictions are the ones that clearly, by his best lights, appear to be right. Maybe, if God respects honest conviction, David Hume will make it into heaven, but Blaise Pascal, who attempted to gamble his way in, will not.
In fact, if God does exist, he will value atheists because we serve a vital role. What role do atheists serve? We serve the same role as the opposition party, i.e., keeping a vigilant check on the party in power and not letting them get carried away by their more radical members into unreasonable and unproductive extremes. We blow the whistle when extremists such as Christian nationalists try to impose theocracy. We remind believers of the deep truth that their freedoms are secure only when we all work to make everyone's freedoms secure.
To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
But the value of atheism goes much deeper than that. I take it as obvious that the existence of God is not obvious. Sorry, Paul, but it just isn't. There is no universal sensus divinitatis. Neither is it obvious that any particular purported revelation is the uniquely correct one. As usual, Mark Twain expressed it with pith: "Mankind has discovered the one true religion. Lots of them." Another of the great incisive wits of the nineteenth century, Ambrose Bierce, put it like this: "Infidel: In New York one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does." Put simply, true religion, if such exists, does not come wearing its credentials like medals.
Even more basically—except for purely subjective affirmations, like, "I have a headache"--truth is never something that can just be declared on the basis of personal authority. If a supposedly holy prophet says that "God is one" (or three, or whatever), it is not blasphemous but absolutely necessary to demand, "How do you know?" No one, not even God, has a right to expect that a truth will be accepted just because it is announced. It follows that a God who respects truth will welcome challenges and debate, because that is the only way that even divine truth can be established. God will therefore welcome skeptics and encourage them to state their case as strongly as possible.
But aren't believers supposed to have faith? However one conceives of faith and its role, faith cannot be a leap in the dark, but has to be a leap towards the light, and what is light and what is darkness has to be argued out.
Of course, this is where religious apologists jump in to offer the purported justifications and supply the credentials. A religious apologist is an advocate; like a lawyer, his or her job is to make a case for a client. Religious apologists realize this; one of the more popular works of apologetics is titled Evidence that Demands a Verdict. On this legal analogy, atheists are the opposing counsel. Atheists put the claims of apologists under the microscope and subject them to intensive and minute analysis. Both sides go into considerable detail, just as trial lawyers do. To see just how detailed, check the recent two-volume The Resurrection and its Apologetic, by Michael J. Alter. Alter provides a meticulous examination of every apologetic claim and counterclaim about the resurrection. For anyone interested in these arguments, this work is and will remain indispensable. The evidence does indeed demand a verdict, but it will be one that apologists do not relish.
The upshot is that, like the accused in the criminal justice system, religious beliefs do not come wearing their guilt or innocence on their faces. If God cares about truth, then, like a judge who cares about justice, he will allow both sides a full and fair say. If religious claims win in the end, it will be due to winning the arguments and not threatening unbelievers with dungeon, fire, and sword. I conclude that a God who cares about truth (And if he does not, why should we care about him?) will welcome and value unbelievers and strongly disapprove of any attempt to silence them. So, God needs atheists. We keep him honest.
Over the years, I have encountered critiques of theism or theistic argument by, among others, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, Antony Flew, Kai Nielsen, Wallace Matson, Paul Edwards, Michael Martin, J.L. Mackie, Anthony Kenny, William L. Rowe, Richard Carrier, Graham Oppy, Anthony O'Hear, Richard Gale, Howard Sobel, J.L. Schellenberg, J.C,A, Gaskin, Nicholas Everitt, and Robin Le Poidevin. I regard many of their arguments as cogent and some decisive, so I am quite willing to play the apologists' game and argue things out before the Court of Reason. I'm game. Let's get it on.
One problem: Religious apologists and their critics—whether atheists or apologists for other religions—have been going at it hammer and tongs for centuries and centuries. And they always will. In this trial of the centuries, no clear verdict has ever been reached. Given this history, John Hick—in my not so humble opinion the top philosopher of religion of the twentieth century—has argued in his magisterial An Interpretation of Religion that we must accept religious pluralism as an irreducible fact. Of course, some religious apologists believe that they have nailed down their case so thoroughly that the continued intransigence of unbelievers can only be due to moral turpitude and intellectual dereliction. Some atheists make exactly the same charge going in the other direction. The conviction that one is the sole possessor of ultimate truth and that all others are children of darkness is an idea that has soaked the world with blood.
Hick asks that you be honest with yourself and admit that there are people just as smart, just as serious, just as ethical, and just as informed as you are who believe differently than you. Perhaps what we need, then, is to stop trying to bludgeon each other into submission but try a different approach. Hick does not go for a trite relativism but boldly affirms pluralism. Relativism says that no one is right. Pluralism says that everyone is right—to an extent. Atheists are right that it is perfectly reasonable to see the universe in naturalistic terms, that is, as neither having nor needing a supernatural or transcendent aspect. It is physics all the way down. No creator need apply.
On the other hand, those for whom the transcendent is an undeniable and fundamental element of experience attempt to understand and relate themselves to that transcendent. We call these diverse efforts to respond to the transcendent the religions of the world. Each is a culturally and historically delimited effort to understand a reality that cannot be fully encompassed. Some philosophers balk at the idea of a reality that transcends literal description, but this is not a bizarre or unprecedented idea. Mystics in all ages and of all traditions have said that the divine can be encountered but not fully explicated. Indeed, we have poetry, music, and art to express what eludes literal description. Yet even poetry, music, and art are not enough. Many things, good and bad, cannot really be understood until you have experienced them yourself. Again, some philosophers have opposed the idea of the ineffable, but they are wrong.
Further, the holy or sacred is something that cannot be claimed or appropriated by anyone. Early twentieth century religious scholar Rudolf Otto in his classic The Idea of the Holy, says that the sacred is a core concept of all religious traditions from those of preliterate societies to today's "great" religions. Mircea Eliade in his equally classic The Sacred and the Profane shows how all religions ritualistically create sacred times and spaces. Even atheists like me have had encounters with the numinous and responded with awe and wonder, though, as I say above, I located that sacredness in the world itself. The sacred, then, can be encountered in many different ways, but just how you approach it will be shaped by contingencies of history and culture and the limitations of language.
Consider, then, that the sacred, the holy, the numinous, the transcendent—whatever you want to call it—is a common property of humanity, Homo religiousus, encountered by all but fully possessed by none. In that case, the wise thing to do is to stop trying to clobber each other in every encounter, but to disagree when we must and learn when we can.
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What a remarkable exposition! Thank you for this. We’re but the Presidential candidates to be asked, as was done in a prior primary years back (but without follow ups), if they believed the Bible to be the literal word of god. With follow ups- Are the gods of Hindus , or Mohammedan’s genuine, and then version of the creation of Eve is real, which lies. It would amuse. If not enlighten.