This post is not written to make the case that atheists should not be unbelievers nor is it an attempt to denigrate them or their personal beliefs (or unbeliefs?). It is also not an apologetic nor an attempt at evangelism. I’m writing to explain why “I can’t go there” with atheism, nothing more, nothing less.

In summary, atheism simply is not, as William James put it, a living option for me.

• I can’t subscribe with integrity to a professed rational philosophy that is based on a self-refuting principle, i.e. the Verification Principle.
• I have never believed religion or science were enemies. Even as a child despite what anti-science religious people claimed I saw their easy compatibility and complementary natures. Atheists aren’t going to fare any better in convincing me than those folks.
• To be an atheist would require moral nihilism if I’m to be consistent: the logical result of “facing up to reality” or “growing up” to face of an “indifferent” universe devoid of meaning. That’s nihilism and I regard it as evil.
• I refuse to sacrifice my morals (secular humanism notwithstanding). Science and reason are painfully inadequate for assessing the important things in life and of being human: Love, Justice, Wisdom, Knowledge, and Truth. Avoiding error at all costs just isn’t worth that sacrifice.

If you care for an explanation, please, read on.

Evidently Faithful

Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize just as I did that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

–Morpheus, The Matrix

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

–Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Atheists define faith as the straw man of “belief without evidence.” I say straw man because it is a reductive definition that ignores its truer and stronger reality in the lives of believers such as myself. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines faith thusly

faith |fāTH|

noun

1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something: this restores one’s faith in politicians.
2. strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.

• a system of religious belief: the Christian faith.
• a strongly held belief or theory: the faith that life will expand until it fills the universe.

For a believer, faith is first and foremost trust. Trust in God, trust in the truths you hold dear, in Church, and so on. It is an act of will not mere belief for “even the demons believe—and shudder.” (I will discuss this further elsewhere.) But “belief without evidence” sounds unreasonable and gullible and all the rest of it which is why that’s the preferred definition employed by critics. It fits their narrative. Problem is asserting the Verification Principle, that belief must be supported by evidence, is itself a belief that must be believed without evidence which I find not a little ironic. To wit:

In the late 1960s the noted biochemist and atheist Jacques Monod claimed that the “ethic of knowledge” must be the foundation of all moral and intellectual claims. He declared that it is unethical to accept any ideas that fail to adhere to the “postulate of objectivity.” In other words it is morally wrong to accept any claims that cannot be verified in principle by “objective” scientific knowing. But, then, what about that precept itself? Can anyone prove objectively that the postulate of objectivity is true? Here Monod was much more honest than the new atheists [e.g. Dawkins]. He admitted that an exception must be made for the postulate of objectivity. The ethic of knowledge is itself an “arbitrary” choice, not a claim for which there could ever be sufficient scientific evidence. Faith, it seems, makes an opening wide enough for atheism too.

–Haught, John F. (2010-11-05). God and the New Atheism (p. 5). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

So we have a self-contradictory requirement for atheist orthodoxy: in order to never believe without evidence we must first believe that never believing without evidence is always ethical, right, and true…without evidence! (By definition, a postulate is accepted without evidence.) So:

Why self-contradictory? Because scientism tells us to take nothing on faith, and yet faith is required to accept scientism. What is remarkable is that none of the new atheists seems remotely prepared to admit that his scientism is a self-sabotaging confession of faith. Listen to Hitchens: “If one must have faith in order to believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished” (71). But this statement invalidates itself since it too arises out of faith in things unseen. There is no set of tangible experiments or visible demonstrations that could ever scientifically prove the statement to be true.

–Haught, John F. (2010-11-05). God and the New Atheism (p. 17). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

But this is not only self-contradictory, any attempt to support scientism via experiment is circular. So the very core of atheism, the “ethic of knowledge” is a self-contradictory claim on which the entire enterprise rests. Now I don’t know about you, but I tend to be skeptical of self-contradictory logic. Just saying.

Cut Shaving with Occam’s Razor

Occam’s razor (also written as Ockham’s razor) is the English equivalent of the Latin lex parsimoniae—the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

–Albert Einstein

I used to think the razor was all the proof atheists needed. I found it hard to argue against since Occam’s Razor is quite rightly a guiding principle in science. Hard to argue against, that is, until I actually looked it up. When I realized that it is an assumption, a rule of thumb, not a law of truth, I became quite angry. I hate being hoodwinked.

The problem isn’t with science of course; the problem is that life is not a set of competing hypotheses or explanations with the simpler one to always be favored. Haught uses the example of a published book that can be explained on many different levels all independent and true but noncompeting. The common sense of it blew me away.

Consequently, when the new atheists examine phenomena as labyrinthine as religion and morality, they are fully satisfied if they can pare their explanation down to purely physical or biological terms. The outcome is about as illuminating as my telling you, the reader, that in order to understand this page it is enough to know that it came from a printing press. After all, doesn’t Occam’s razor specify that there is no point in looking for deeper explanations if simpler ones are available?

–Haught, John F. (2010-11-05). God and the New Atheism (p. 86). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

Personally, I think there’s more to it than a printing press. It’s worth noting that if one was ignorant to the existence of writing an author would be deemed unnecessary to explaining the existence of the book never mind the significance of the writing. The printing press would be “sufficient” to explaining the page. This is the reductive myopia of always trying to reduce life to science.

Now You be a Good Boy

I’ll just quote here. Haught does it right.

So, having first tried to convince us that the main point of biblical religion is to provide moral edification, and, second, having demonstrated that it has failed miserably in doing so, Dawkins’s third and main task is to point out that in fact most of us do not stoop so low as to make the Bible the source and inspiration of our moral lives anyway. In this way he intends to emancipate morality completely from religion. In fact, however, Dawkins strays off course on all three counts, starting with his opening premise. Even though many theists may agree with Dawkins that morality is the main point of biblical religion, it is not. The main point is to have faith, trust, and hope in God. Morality is secondary, and the principle underlying biblical ethics is that our conduct should be shaped with respect to others by the trust that God’s promise of ultimate liberation will eventually come to pass. When we fail to trust in a compelling and noble vision of human and cosmic destiny, we then make conduct the main point of religion. The result is hypocrisy, self-salvation, perfectionism, and the crushing of life out of people. These attitudes and actions come under severe criticism by the prophets, Jesus, Paul, and most Christian theologians. Because he is wrong on the first claim in his argument, Dawkins cannot defend his second and third points either. Having acquired his most striking theological comments from the likes of comedian George Carlin, humorist writer Douglas Adams, and The Skeptic Magazine, Dawkins’s discussion of morality and the Bible is a remarkable display of ignorance and foolish sarcasm. [Something I see often, esp. on Twitter!] I do not enjoy speaking in such a blunt manner about any writer, but not to do so here would be evasive. What is most lamentable about Dawkins’s discussion is that it completely misses the moral core of Judaism and Christianity, the emphasis on justice and what has come to be known as God’s preferential option for the poor and disadvantaged. To maintain that we can understand modern and contemporary social justice, civil rights, and liberation movements without any reference to Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jesus, and other biblical prophets makes Dawkins’s treatment of morality and faith almost unworthy of comment.

–Haught, John F. (2010-11-05). God and the New Atheism (pp. 67-68). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

I’m was shocked at claims that to be atheist or anti-Christiantity is to be anti-slavery. The ignorance that shows to the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements deep religious roots is astounding. I am an American black man and my people have persevered through centuries of slavery because of our faith. How do I know this? Because we say so! To make comments about anti-slavery is profoundly ignorant to both history and the facts and represents a towering disrespect for the hard earned human dignity we have fought for in this country. And this is just slavery, let’s not mention the Catholic Worker movement or even the dissension and debate believers are having about the LBGT community’s humanity.

Just to give you a taste of that ignorance, I’ll quote the prophet Isaiah. It’s worth it to note that Isaiah is prophesying against the wickedness of social injustice and reprobate sacrilege despite the fact that the Jews were following the observances required by Jewish Law to absolve sin and maintain righteousness. Also note that women and children had little status in such a patriarchical society.

Isaiah Ch 1:1-5, 11-17, 21-24

The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

The Wickedness of Judah

2 Hear, O heavens,
and listen, O earth;
for the LORD has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
3 The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.
4 Ah, sinful nation,
people laden with iniquity,
offspring who do evil,
children who deal corruptly,
who have forsaken the LORD,
who have despised the Holy One of Israel,
who are utterly estranged!…

11 What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the LORD;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
12 When you come to appear before me,
who asked this from your hand?
Trample my courts no more;
13 bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—
I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
14 Your new moons and your appointed festivals
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
15 When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
16 Wash yourselves;
make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
17 learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow…

The Degenerate City

21 How the faithful city has become a whore!
She that was full of justice,
righteousness lodged in her—
but now murderers!
22 Your silver has become dross,
your wine is mixed with water.
23 Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves.
Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the orphan,
and the widow’s cause does not come before them.

I love the prophet Amos as much as Martin Luther King did so I’ll burden you with it. Note again that justice is the true marker of faith not mere observances. Please note as well that people sold themselves into slavery for defaulting on debt.

Amos Ch 2

6 Thus says the Lord:
For three transgressions of Israel,
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals—
7 they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,
and push the afflicted out of the way;
father and son go in to the same girl,
so that my holy name is profaned;
8 they lay themselves down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge;
and in the house of their God they drink
wine bought with fines they imposed.

Amos Ch 5

21 I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
24 But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. [Oft quoted by MLK]

And to think these men wrote centuries before Jesus walked the earth.

Finally, let’s look back at Jewish Law concerning slavery. Remember this is a world where unmarried women and children are little more than property. Slaves in the wider world were often nothing more than chattel. Relatively speaking for such a primitive culture, this passage is nothing short of amazing:

Exodus 21

1 These are the ordinances that you shall set before them: 2 When you buy a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person, without debt. 3 If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. 4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. 5 But if the slave declares, “I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out a free person,” 6 then his master shall bring him before God. He shall be brought to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him for life.7 When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. 8 If she does not please her master, who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt unfairly with her. 9 If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. 10 If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. 11 And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out without debt, without payment of money.

The Bible is awash in passages such as these. The prophets were not shy about justice. Not bad for Iron Age primitives.

So What the Hell is the Point?

This passage is great. Haught just lays it out.

In this respect the new atheism is very much like the old secular humanism rebuked by the hard-core atheists for its mousiness in facing up to what the absence of God should really mean. If you’re going to be an atheist, the most rugged version of godlessness demands complete consistency. Go all the way and think the business of atheism through to the bitter end; before you get too comfortable with the godless world you long for, you will be required by the logic of any consistent skepticism to pass through the disorienting wilderness of nihilism. Do you have the courage to do that? You will have to adopt the tragic heroism of a Sisyphus, or realize that true freedom in the absence of God means that you are the creator [not simply a holder, but creator] of the values you live by, an intolerable burden from which most people would seek an escape. Are you ready to allow simple logic to lead you to the real truth about the death of God? Before settling into a truly atheistic worldview, you would have to experience the Nietzschean Madman’s sensation of straying through “infinite nothingness.” You would be required to summon up an unprecedented degree of courage if you plan to wipe away the whole horizon of transcendence. Are you willing to risk madness? If not, then you are not really an atheist. Predictably, nothing so shaking shows up in the thoughts of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Apart from the intolerance of tolerance, which we noted earlier, and the heavy dose of Darwinism that grounds many of its declarations, soft-core atheism differs scarcely at all from the older secular humanism that the hard-core atheists roundly chastised for its laxity. The new soft-core atheists assume that, by dint of Darwinism, we can just drop God like Santa Claus without having to witness the complete collapse of Western culture—including our sense of what is rational and moral. At least the hard-core atheists understood that if we are truly sincere in our atheism the whole web of meanings and values that had clustered around the idea of God in Western culture has to go down the drain along with its organizing center. Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre, and perhaps several of their postmodern descendants, would have nothing to do with the vapid skepticism that fails to think atheism through with perfect consistency. “If anyone has written a book more critical of religious faith than I have, I’m not aware of it,” declares Sam Harris. My students might not be so sure. Has Harris really thought about what would happen if people adopted the hard-core atheist’s belief that there is no transcendent basis for our moral valuations? What if people had the sense to ask whether Darwinian naturalism can provide a solid and enduring foundation for our truth claims and value judgments? Would a good science education make everyone simply decide to be good if the universe is inherently valueless and purposeless? At least the hardcore atheists tried to prepare their readers for the pointless world they would encounter if the death of God were ever taken seriously. They did not form a project to kill God since they assumed that deicide had already taken place at the hands of scientism and secularism. But they wanted people to face up honestly to the logical, ethical, and cultural implications of a godless world.

–Haught, John F. (2010-11-05). God and the New Atheism (pp. 21-23). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

Apparently, this is unclear to some who mistakenly think that I am saying you must be nihilist in order to be an atheist. Not so. I’m saying that if I believe something, I really believe it. I will go where reason leads, and as the passage above demonstrates, it leads to a dark place. If the universe is indeed pointless, that is, there is no answer to the question “What is the meaning of existence?” then abstract concepts like Good and Evil are like infinity. They don’t exist in the “real world.” So why should I be “good?” I know kids in the ghetto who don’t see themselves living past 18 so they rationally behave as people with no hope: societally destructive nihilistic attempts to eek out what little pleasure and happiness they can in the little time they have. When the strong victimize the weak, that’s just the way things are. Change them if you can and if it suits, but there is no overarching reason to do so.

I assume most contemporary atheists take ethics and morals as givens, but if it’s really just matter and energy then ethics and morals are the realist’s equivalent of unicorns and leprechauns. Nice ideas that are pleasing but are not real. There is no evidence or experiment that can prove their existence. Hitches claims that things without evidence of their existence can be dismissed without it. So why not dismiss morals or ethics, esp. when others can’t force you to accept them?

If I determine what’s ethical and good and moral then the recriminations of Hitchens and Dawkins on religion are absolute nonsense. Hypocritical nonsense at that. There is no experimental evidence that religion is evil. There are only objective events in a billions of years old causal chain that are deemed evil. There’s only evidence for Hitchen’s view for Hitchens (and you if you agree with him of course). But I’m under no moral compunction to agree. I can claim the slaughter of millions is “good” even “natural” and be on equivalent moral footing with Mr. Dawkins. Natural selection is the only perogative of evolution is it not? What objective moral standard would make my claiming child rape is good, wrong? Why? Who died and made Richard Dawkins God?

And this is why I am not an atheist.

When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear.

James, William (2011-03-23). The Will to Believe : and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (pp. 16-17). Kindle Edition.

The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.

― Thomas Aquinas

Contraception, the Catholic Church, the President and Politics:

Hour 1

The Obama administration announced last month that it would require religious hospitals, colleges and other institutions, like those affiliated with the Catholic Church, to provide health care coverage for contraception.  The decision has ignited a passionate debate over religious freedom, the conscience exemption and the rights of women to control their own health care. On one side are those who say that because the Catholic Church opposes birth control, it should not be required to cover it and that the administration’s attempt to require they do so can be seen as an intrusion of the government into the affairs of religious groups. On the other side are women’s health care advocates who say that women employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have the same rights to contraceptive coverage as other women and that allowing women to control their own bodies in accordance with their own beliefs is an example of religious liberty.  Not surprisingly, the issue has become a highly political one in this election year. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lashed out at the administration for seeking to curtail religious freedom, Newt Gingrich called the decision a war against religion, and Rick Santorum accused the Obama administration of being “hostile to people of faith, particularly Christians, and specifically Catholics.” We’ll look at all sides of the decision and how it is influencing the 2012 presidential campaign with SALLY STEENLAND of the Center for American Progress and author MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS, who writes for The National Catholic Reporter.

Listen to the mp3

Listen:
Download audio file (020912_100630.mp3)

(Via Radio Times.)

Evidence is powerful in our society. We live in a postmodern world that practically worships it. We exalt science, where material evidence is the sine qua non, as a major source of truth in our world. It is necessary, more or less, in our American justice system to convict a person of a crime.  But evidence is not the equivalent of truth. It points to it the truth.

Some atheists in their religious worship of evidence forget this. Being unable to prove something exists isn’t proof it does not exist. And our world provides ample evidence for why this is a foolish idea. If I ate French toast alone for breakfast two Tuesdays ago, I simply can’t prove to you that I did in fact do so. The evidence has long since disappeared. This dearth of evidence has absolutely no bearing on the fact that I did indeed eat French toast. Any cop will tell you how wide is the chasm that exists between what you know and what you can prove. So if someone comes along and insists that I did not eat French toast because I could offer no evidence, a normal person would find this ludicrous and/or insulting (by the implication I’m a liar).

The only time evidence becomes necessary, rationally speaking, is when one party attempts to convince another party of a truth or reality that first party accepts. A free mind is not under any compulsion to accept any proposition without evidence. So I don’t have many kind words for intellectual shell games that glibly attempt to absolve people of the responsibility to be intellectually honest. I believe in God. If an atheist insists that there is no God, fine. People can believe what they wish, it’s a free country. But if she demands I believe the “truth” of her claim, well, I’m going to demand proof. And the claim that I’m the one with the burden proof is just a glib attempt to change the subject. She is the one making a claim that in her mind I should accept. Thus, she has the burden of proof attendant to her demand.

I believe in God for subjective, personal reasons. God is a Reality in my life. I can no more prove this reality than I can prove the love I have for my wife and son, yet I still love them. And you would be a fool to question this for lack of “evidence.” My love is no less real than Newtonian physics. I have no burden of proof because I already have all the proof I need. I trust my powers of reason, my experiences, my heart, and, slowly, my intuition. I have no desire to convince others, atheists in particular, that I am “right.” That’s neither my wish nor my purpose. My purpose is to prove to myself through a deep commitment of faith and a life well lived that what I say is true:

Love God. Love people. Prove it.

Well, not all the cards. As I wrote once, the reason Apple does the things it does is to please us, the consumers. We demand a new iPhone every year that must be better and cheaper. We insist that a thousand dollars is too much for a state of the art computer. We want bigger TVs and external hard drives and slim cameras. And we, almost without exception, fail to care when our demand for more iPads drives Apple to double its orders, driving Foxconn to push more overtime, driving poorly-maintained ventilation systems to their maximum, driving a spark to ignite an aluminum-dust explosion. It’s not our problem, it’s Apple’s or it’s Foxconn’s or it’s China’s. Very reassuring.

One dreamer quoted in the NYT article says: “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.” Yes, and at the same time, it would transform Apple into a bankrupt company. A conflict free iPhone would cost far, far more and would in all likelihood not be as well-built. Apple knows this. The system we and they have in place works, unfortunately, at least for everyone but the workers coated in N-hexane. And at a twelve to a hundred thousand dollars a pop, they aren’t worth rocking the boat for, especially when you’ve got record profits coming in.

Just don’t forget that we’re in that boat too. Unlike many other companies whose profits come largely from ads, enterprise products, or components, the vast majority of what Apple makes comes straight out of a consumer’s pockets, more or less willingly. More than any other mega-corporation you and I deal with on a daily basis, we are fully in control of our contributions to this company. We’re part of this. Some would say the biggest part.

(Via TechCrunch » apple)

The truth is, the average Android user is not the same as an average iPhone user. iPhone users surf the web more, they’re more willing to buy software, they’re more willing to install and use apps…

You can say that it’s elitist or arrogant to argue that iOS users are better customers than Android users. But you can also say that it’s the truth.

(Via Daring Fireball)

Apple has 2/3rds the share of industry profits while it has garnered only 5% in market share.  Why would I want to go after market share in this scenario?