On certain atheist confusions

Over at the Corner, resident atheist John Derbyshire appears not to know the difference between objective and subjective truth and certainty. One has to excuse him; it's a fairly new-fangled philosophical distinction, having only been brought into full clarity by St. Thomas Aquinas a mere 750 years ago. Gotta give these atheists time to catch up, you know...

In all seriousness, the claim of Christianity (in contrast to the claims of moral relativism) is that there are certain moral principles that are eternal and unchanging, and therefore when one culture says, "This is moral," and a different culture says, "This is immoral," it is entirely possible that one of them is right and the other is wrong. The Wahabbite culture simply is grossly more evil than is fundamentalist American Church of Christ culture, because the fundamentalists come a lot closer to getting it right. When multiculturalists condemn Nazi-ism, in apparent rejection of their own principles of toleration and of refusing to privilege one culture above another, they are indeed being inconsistent; but it's the Nazis-are-evil part they have right, not the all-cultures-are-equal part. But that's because there are right answers and wrong answers and the answer is determined by God's opinion not by human cultures.

And the denial of that fundamental principle constitutes a fatal heresy that ultimately will bring destruction upon any culture that denies it.

But the question of whether a right answer exists, is quite separate from the question of whether any given person knows the right answer. Muddle-headed people like Derb (or even great philosophers like Descartes and Kant) have always been prone to the silly-assed assumption, "If we can't nail down a provably correct answer to a question the way we can with a physics question, then the question must have no right answer." So Descartes tries to find a way to get a provably correct answer to the core questions of metaphysics; and in another corner one finds certain fundamentalists leaping to the conclusion that since the Bible is revealed by God and God knows the answer, then therefore the conclusions drawn (by however questionable logic) by the fundamentalist from Scripture are also revealed by God and infallibly correct; while yet another clique, including Derb, tells each other theology must have no right answers because people disagree about it. Yet all the while St. Thomas sits there saying the same thing he said three-quarters of a millenium ago, with his usual common sense: theology is, objectively (i.e. from God's point of view), the most certain of all sciences, because God knows the right answers and can't possibly have them wrong. But theology is, subjectively (i.e. from our point of view), the most uncertain of all sciences, because the topic under question is one that transcends human understanding and is therefore by far the most difficult for human beings to deal with.

And the denial of the fundamental fact that it's harder to be sure you've got the right answer in theology than in any other field of inquiry, also constitutes a fatal heresy, and will also ultimately bring destruction upon any culture or sub-culture that denies it.

This is very closely related to an objection to Christianity that goes back at least to John Stuart Mill. This is the objection that when Christians say, "God is good," they aren't saying anything meaningful, because anything God does is always excused by Christians. What Mill and his successors fail to understand is this:

There is, in practically all human beings, a strong sense that there are certain things that are intrinsically good and other things that are intrinsically evil. But people disagree on which are the things that are good and which are evil. Now there are, broadly speaking, two possibilities here:

1. The basic instinct that some things (like what the Nazis did) are really evil and other things (like what Mother Theresa did) are really good, is valid; but human beings are very bad at figuring out which things are which. This is the Christian answer: there is a right answer to the question, but people, being fallen and sinful, are really bad at figuring out what the right answer is. When a responsible Christian says, "God is good," he means, "There's a real right and a real wrong and God's on the right side," not, "My personal ideas of what are right and wrong represent a standard with which God is obliged to comply." Furthermore the Christian means, "If what God appears to be doing violates my ideas of right and wrong, then either I am confused about what God is doing or else my ideas of right and wrong require correction." Which means that responsible Christians' ideas of what it really means to "love" are lifelong works in progress; we are, if we are responsible Christians, always revising our opinions as our knowledge of God gets deeper. It is an interesting question to ask how people who do not believe in a universal standard of right and wrong go about testing their own opinions in order to refine them.

2. There is no right answer; morality is an illusion, a mere social construct. (Lots of atheist philosophers have tried over the years to show that even though there is no God and no universal standard of morality, there are still objective standards of right and wrong; but I know of no such boot-strapped moral construction that does not begin with a petitio principii. For example: right and wrong are valid because they lead to the survival of the species. Um, and why should I be morally obliged to care about the survival of the species? Or take Kant's Categorical Imperative. All you have to say is, "I don't buy it -- you gonna do sumpin' 'bout it?")

One of the reasons that I'm a Christian is that if you adopt the first choice, you can live that choice out with a reasonable amount of self-consistency. The obvious conclusion is that you should take moral questions seriously but humbly: there's a right answer, and I need to find it, but the odds are I don't know it yet or at the very least do not yet grasp all its implications. And you can live that way without being constantly in flagrant violation of the principles you claim to believe.

But I don't know anybody who takes the second route and genuinely lives it. I"ve never met an atheist, or even a multiculturalist, who didn't just go off on anybody who was so unfortunate as to violate the rules said atheist felt were really right or wrong -- such as "intolerance," a crime of which all fundamentalists are guilty by multiculturalist definition. For example, Philip Pullman, author of the Golden Compass series, is a militant atheist with an open agenda against the Church, a man whose books are intended to encourage people to despise the Catholic Church for having attempted to impose its moral code upon others -- but he can't make it through an interview without complaining, for example, that C. S. Lewis's attitude toward women, as embodied in the Narnia books, is contemptible and immoral. Um, by what standard, exactly, if not Pullman's self-privileged personal prejudices and preferences? And if that's the standard Pullman is working from, why should anybody who doesn't happen to have Pullman confused with God pay the slightest attention to Pullman's prejudices rather than employing his own? And why, if it's wrong for the Catholics to expect Pullman to live by their rules, is it fine for Pullman to condemn Lewis for not following Pullman's rules? (Bertrand Russell is another classic example of precisely this form of flagrantly narcissistic self-contradiction.)

You see what I mean? In fact, the very people who most deny the existence of a moral code that is binding on all human beings whether they realize it or not, are in my experience the people most prone to the following "empirical proof" of atheism:

1. If there were a God, and he were good, then he would behave himself morally.

2. But the evidence shows plainly that the universe is not at all run the way that I personally, with my omniscient knowledge and my eons-long font of experience and my unquestionably unsullied personal moral purity and my objectivity perfectly undisturbed by personal loyalties or cultural presuppositions or subconscious agendas, think it should be run.

3. Therefore God doesn't exist, and by the way if he does exist, then he can go to hell because I hate him because he's a real jerk.

Having wandered far off topic I'll put an end to my ramblings at this point rather than trying to pull it all back together and to pretend I knew where I was going all along...trailing off into silence...le mani... al caldo... e... dormire.