Now, for a little change of pace. I am reading, just now, an absolutely fascinating book by Paul Fussell that I stumbled upon a few weeks ago, and since it looked interesting I sent away to Amazon for a copy. It’s entitled The Great War and Modern Memory. It it is not so much a history of the First World War as an account of how that war affected modern culture; indeed, it explores the way that many of the things that we take for granted culturally had their origins in the Great War (as it used to be called before a second came along to top the first). What particularly interests me in this post is the way that, in the midst of the first truly modern industrial war, “primitive” thinking, especially at the front lines, began to make a reappearance.
I had never heard of Paul Fussell before, so I’ll just point you to the Wikipedia entry if you haven’t heard of him before either. He died this year, which is why, I suppose, that a new illustrated edition of The Great War and Modern Memory was published, which is why I came to hear of it and him. The fourth chapter is called “Myth, Ritual, and Romance,” and in it Fussell explores the way that myths and rituals came to dominate the minds of so many men at the front. Stories of angels, or even the presence of Christ figures, and the language of baptism and resurrection and being born again were part of the texture of the life of soldiers mired in the brutal slogging match in which millions were killed in a blighted landscape on which, even today, you can still trace the patterns of war.
As Fussell says:
That such a myth-ridden world could take shape in the midst of a war representing a triumph of modern industrialism, materialism, and mechanism is an anomaly worth considering. [140]
I suspect it is more than just an anomaly. Indeed, it strikes me as providing some insight into the origins of religion, and even though it is possible now to discover the origins of some of the rumours and legends that sprang up in the midst of the strange and almost unreal conditions of life and death in the static trench warfare that seemed to the men fighting it that it would go on forever, and swallow generations of young men in their turn, it seems to have produced conditions in which myth, ritual, legend and superstitious belief flourished. Recent research into developed societies in which religion is still a dominant force seem to indicate that religion is likely to flourish in conditions of stressful uncertainty. Thus, countries like those in Scandinavia, where social democracy had been the rule since the Second World War, are much less religious than the United States (in particular), and the difference seems to lie in the insecurity of people in the United States, where many live at or just below the poverty line whilst others prosper, and where reliable medical care is available only to those who can afford it. With decaying inner cities and a lack of opportunity for a significant proportion of the population, religion, superstition and conspiracy theories are rife.
These conditions of insecurity, senseless violence, and hopelessness were paralleled by the conditions of those who were fighting and dying in their thousands and hundreds of thousands on the Western Front. “Big pushes” and artillery barrages that consumed millions of shells in a few days, the stench and discomfort of the trenches, where lice infested men’s bodies, and rats grew sleek off the bodies of dead soldiers in No Man’s Land, days spent in idleness and nights in feverish activity, repairing trenches and battlements, rescuing the wounded (who often cried out in desperation for days on end), and patrols sent out in useless forays in the dark: this was the context in which superstition and legend, rumour, and speculation were rife.
Angels of Mons
The Angels of Mons, for example, a story which it was widely thought unpatriotic to question, has a known source. The angels were believed to have appeared on the battlefield and to have shielded the British retreat from Mons had its origin in a story by Arthur Machen, “in which the ghosts of the English bowmen dead at Agincourt came to the assistance of their hard-pressed countrymen by discharging arrows which killed Germans without leaving visible wounds.” (141)
But here’s the strange part. Apparently Machen was embarrassed by the misunderstanding, but, says Fussell:
he was assured, especially by the clergy, that he was wrong: the angels — in some versions angel bowmen — were real, and had appeared in the sky near Mons. [142]
Myth-making was in full swing, and those who dealt in myth affirmed that the myths were real! However, not only were new myths created, but much older myths were assimilated to the experiences of those at the front. Especially powerful were stories of crucified soldiers, like the story of the Crucified Canadian:
The usual version relates that the Germans captured a Canadian soldier and in full view of his mates exhibited him in the open spread-eagled on a cross, his hands and feet pierced by bayonets. [143]
Fussell points out that the image of the crucifixion was always accessible to those at the front because of the existence of many physical calvaries at French and Belgian crossroads, and, of course, to assimilate their sufferings to the crucified Saviour was one way in which soldiers’ experience could not only be explained, but, in a sense, dignified.
This last point often struck me when, on the Sunday before Remembrance Day (11 November), we often sang (in church) Awkwright’s famous hymn, “O Valiant Hearts,” which makes this identification explicit:
O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame;
Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war
As who had heard God’s message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave,
To save mankind—yourselves you scorned to save.Splendid you passed, the great surrender made;
Into the light that nevermore shall fade;
Deep your contentment in that blest abode,
Who wait the last clear trumpet call of God.Long years ago, as earth lay dark and still,
Rose a loud cry upon a lonely hill,
While in the frailty of our human clay,
Christ, our Redeemer, passed the self-same way.Still stands His cross from that dread hour to this,
Like some bright star above the dark abyss;
Still, through the veil, the Victor’s pitying eyes
Look down to bless our lesser Calvaries.These were His servants, in His steps they trod,
Following through death the martyred Son of God:
Victor, He rose; victorious too shall rise
They who have drunk His cup of sacrifice.O risen Lord, O Shepherd of our dead,
Whose cross has bought them and whose staff has led,
In glorious hope their proud and sorrowing land
Commits her children to Thy gracious hand.
I can myself testify to the emotional weight of that hymn sung in the context of remembrance. (It is sung to a very plangent melody, which you can hear here.) The idea, not only of sacrificial death, but also of the comforting presence of the risen Jesus, which was a common tale told by soldiers, has very strong associations, and can be deeply moving when considering the deaths of fallen comrades. I have seen grown men cry when singing this hymn.
Fussell quotes from a letter written by Wilfred Owen, one of the most outstanding English war poets, to Osbert Sitwell, about training troops in England:
For 14 hours yesterday I was at work — teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha. [quoted 146]
Which, as Fussell points out, is an outstanding piece of prose. But the easy identification of the soldier with Christ, and his sufferings with the pains of Golgotha, is apparent. Mythical language is the only language that makes sense when the rest of the world seems mad.
What is interesting about this is the all but inevitable tendency to resort to myth when under great stress. Consider the position of primitive man, for whom the world, largely unknown, must have been a terrifying mystery, and the tendency to tell stories that would both provide the opportunity for emotional release, but would also provide what must have seemed an element of control over uncontrollable forces. If it was possible for such myth-making activity to arise in the conditions of trench warfare, when the men, driven from behind by the Staff and having nothing before them except the blasted landscape of No Man’s Land, even though the fighting men came from societies in which scientific reason was the most predominant form of thought, and the materials and tools they used were the outcome of greater knowledge about the world than had ever been possessed, the propensity for devising storied escapes from reality must be exceedingly strong.
It is thus easy to see how religious language gets its purchase over the lives of believers. Life is, very often, a cruel, uncertain affair. This is one reason that some people take the new atheists to task for speaking as though everyone lives in comfort, and all we need is to celebrate the wonders of the universe, and the particular beauties and profundities revealed by science. I am reminded that in his book Wings of Illusion, John Schumacher suggests, I think, though he does not say it outright, that consciousness is a protective mechanism that shields us from the brutal reality of life. We exist, he suggests, in a state of mild hypnotic trance most of the time. We are infinitely suggestible, and, as Schumacher points out, “suggestibility has been a central feature of the human mind since the dawn of the paranormal belief imperative.” (41) And he goes on a bit later to say:
Illusion works best in the form of paranormal self-transcendence. It provides high-quality untruth which gives us a reassuring sense that we are part of something other than chaotic nonsense and meaninglessness.
(Here is where minimally counterintuitive stories, spoken of by contemporary science of religion, fit in.) Thoreau once said that most people live lives of quiet desperation. What myth and story telling do is to allow us to escape this state once in a while. “In a manner of speaking,” Schumacher says, we
escape from freedom and reality in order to arrive at a set of beliefs that will enable us to perceive the world as having order, purpose, and meaning. [45]
One of the problems with this, of course, is that the “high-quality untruths” that we devise to provide this meaning and purpose, which may have worked their magic for the men on the front line, in ordered social conditions that are not so chaotic and challenging, as, for example, being trapped in the midst of a great war, have a tendency to impose those untruths on those who can neither accept them as helpful untruths, nor see them as anything but an intrusion into lives which they attempt to live in accordance with the best information and reason available to them.
Perhaps a key point that is made in Fussell’s chapter on myths, rituals and romance is the remark that it came to be thought unpatriotic to deny that there were angels during the retreat from Mons that shielded the British troops from harm. When myth becomes prescriptive in this way it ceases to answer the questions that are currently being asked, and is imposed, rather than bubbling up in an organic way from within the lives of people themselves. It is then that myth becomes an impediment to full life, because it is an artificial structure, often from a distant past, with no obvious relevance to the present. The myth of the dying and rising god, for instance, found a ready application in the conditions of life on the Western Front, but it is not obvious that it can simply be applied to the lives of ordinary people living out their lives in routine types of activities in factories or fast food joints or supermarkets. These life conditions should have stories of their own, if stories there must be. To impose the stories, and try to make them fit conditions other than those which gave rise to them, will not succeed in providing the kinds of high-level untruths which may be needed to make life tolerable in otherwise intolerable situations — which may explain some of the febrile earnestness of those trying to retail such stories to others.
Of course, I am just playing with ideas here, but the point seems to me important. One thing that clergy do is to try to make the stories fit the situation of their parishioners. This is not such an easy thing to do, for first century stories, in general, have no application, without major revisions, to people who live in the 21st century. What happens, instead, is that the stories tend to become fixed in historical time, so that they do not present themselves as high-level untruths at all, but as high-level truths which must be believed to be true in order to derive benefit from them. It is not surprising that, in the process, people should become concerned about the fact that others refuse to accept the stories as meaningful or useful at all, so that a kind of uneasy standoff exists between those who “believe” and those who do not. The problem lies in the pretence that we are dealing in genuine historical truths, and the perfectly natural processes of myth-formation are lost in minute disputes as to what must be believed. The fact that these disputes have institutional representation, as well as being embodied in physical monuments and other cultural artifacts, also has the effect of betraying the psychological work that myth-making has traditionally done in the psychological economy of individuals and society. This is perhaps where New Age religion comes in, for this is contemporary myth-making energetically at work, but of course the problem is that even New Age religion has a tendency to adopt age-old institutional forms of objectification, supposing that its imaginings truly reflect the deep structure of reality, as things like “quantum spirituality” attest.
This post does not have an obvious conclusion, because it is a fairly desultory consideration of a few ideas generated by reading Paul Fussell’s very attractive study of the Great War and its follow-on effects in Western culture. One of those effects, I think, is to have placed a big question mark over religious belief and theological speculation. After the madness that was the carnage on the Western Front (and elsewhere too, of course), the comfortable certainties of religion, already called into serious question by the rapid advance of science in the 19th century, could only survive by means of revision and attenuation. That religions are regaining their confidence, notwithstanding the continuing advance of science, may have a something to do with that advance itself, and the insecurities that have been produced by a world in a constant state of change, not to speak of the economic uncertainties that global economies have produced. Those who are concerned about the dangerous effects of religion in the contemporary world should perhaps explore more closely the relationship between the apparent demise of liberal theology and the contemporaneous flourishing of fundamentalist certainty. That Ken Ham’s lucubrations sound as dotty as some of the front line myths of the Great War is possibly a sign that people find modern life as meaningless and as threatening as those whose lives were put in question by experience of the sheer madness of life in a constant state of war.
A most wonderful and thought-provoking post Eric.
As you have probably realised by now I approach this play of ideas from a naturalistic direction. When Schumacher says we :
he is peeling back the carpet and revealing our deepest wants.
I’m convinced that the nature of our abductive thinking obliges us to seek causes. We start from noticing an ‘effect’ and then try to find the preceding ’cause’. We try and establish order out of what we notice (ignoring huge amounts of ‘stuff’ that is filtered out), and what we notice becomes meaningful. Because we keep finding meaningful ‘stuff’ we abduce that there must be a ‘purpose’ producing it. And then, when we are in the trenches or other threadbare situations we elaborate what little we notice to fulfil that human hunger for order, purpose, and meaning.
When times are less stressful, and there is less risk to life and limb, we try to satisfy our existential hunger with distractions such as buying new gadgets, bigger houses, recreational drugs, and voyerism of other peoples’ troubles (such as soap operas, romances, thrillers, etc.)
I’ve often argued that ‘we atheists’ shouldn’t feel obliged to propose comforting rituals and ceremonies for the recently de-godded. I have come around to the view that perhaps ‘we existentialists’ need to put more effort into providing supportive stories (parables?) for the people leading ordinary lives of quiet desperation. Just don’t make the stories prescriptive.
And of course many governments have mastered the technique of manufacturing imaginary crises, precisely in order to spread supernatural beliefs that can increase their revenue and power.
I am using this quote as an excuse to introduce this video from UK Channel 4 showing how easily an atheist can be convinced she has had a conversion to god experience. I’m not sure if this link will work. For those of you not in the UK, Derren Brown is a kind of British equivalent of James Randi. The programme lasts an hour, and there is no easy way to cut it down, as the relevant demonstration is spread throughout the programme.
A very thought provoking post, Eric.
It would be interesting to see if there are correlations in superstition related to the living conditions of solders in other wars. Which solders had it worse would of course be difficult to quantify, as technology simultaneously improves living and medical conditions with the ability to inflict injury, but I suspect the idea that fear and uncertainty are major motivators in religious and paranormal belief would be supported. I found the US military still steeped in religion when I served not 10 years ago, but not nearly as extreme as the stories in your post.
There is perhaps something to the “no atheists in foxholes” trope, though not in the absolute terms the religious would have us believe.
Drat, Haggis, that video is not available here in Canada. I should like to have seen it.
Eric, try http://brokensecrets.com/2010/09/27/how-to-watch-blocked-internet-videos/
Alternatively, google “how to watch videos blocked in your country”. I can’t tell you what will work for you in Canada, for obvious reasons – you’ll just have to try it out. The programme is both amazing and scary – the subject was selected at the beginning precisely because she was found to be less suggestible than several other self-confessed atheists. Derren then chats to her for 15 minutes (in what he explains to the viewer, but not her, is a very carefully structured way), leaves the room, and we then see her have a “revelation” which reduces her to tears. It is quite breathtaking, and an insight into how evangelists and cults can recruit members.
Myth-making is a habit to which atheists are not immune. How else is it that atheists so fervently embrace notions such as that our universe popped into existence without cause, out of no prior existent entities some 14 billion years ago, that living plant and animate organisms magically synthesized from atoms of just the right kind without intelligent cause, that consciousness and creative decisions are spectacularly generated by animal organisms possessing nothing other than matter of the same substance as rocks or water. And these myths pass for “science” supported by tax-funding in civilized cultures around our globe in the 21st century.
There’s really no faith that requires more faith than the no-faith faith. Humans are not really rational creatures, just rationalizing creatures, who wish to appear rational to themselves and their fellows who agree with them. That applies especially to all atheists, agnostics and skeptics.
*Sigh*…
If you really want to learn, you could start by reading “The Greatest Show on Earth” by Richard Dawkins (don’t worry, he’s not “strident” or “militant”), or “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry Coyne. Scientists and atheists don’t have “faith” in their findings, they believe them to be provisionally true, based on empirical evidence, and scrutiny by other scientists. They don’t “fervently embrace notions”, they propose hypotheses, or models, and then test to see if they work. Most of us have read the bible, some have even had a go at the koran. Do us the courtesy of reading some basic science before setting up any more strawmen to knock down
Or perhaps you’re just a drive-by troll…
How is proposing a god who exists without cause any better? What have you gained? Gods are by nature unpredictable beasts and don’t do much for helping us negotiate a complex world. I would also suggest reading Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” to help understand how mind is not needed for design. This doesn’t mean its true (although it very likely is), but that it doesn’t require faith (unlike god) to accept it.
I have read enough of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, et al to understand just how little “in their findings, they believe them to be provisionally true, based on empirical evidence, and scrutiny by other scientists.” Dawkins estimates that it is 99.999% certain that there exists no creator of the universe. That does not sound very “provisionally true” to me. In fact, it embarrasses fellow atheist Michael Ruse in its arrogance. These atheists write with a passion that demonstrates how “fervently” they embrace their metaphysical materialist notions. Richard Dawkins’ speech in the Washington, DC mall rally last spring expressed the same. So did his speech in the the atheist conference in Ireland in 2011.
Yes, as scientists they do propose hypotheses, or models, and then test to see if they work. And yes, they do “work” on the assumptions of a metaphysical materialist cosmology, if one is prepared to grant a total absence of responsible agency — which strikes me as an irresponsible posture for any human who prefers to hold anyone accountable for our apparently free moral choices (which I think we must in a civilized society).
Yes, there is evident micro-evolution (e.g., the manipulative and natural interbreeding of plants and animals to generate new varieties of dogs, cats, wheats, corns, flies, etc.). To argue that such micro-evolutionary empirical evidence constitutes scientific warrant for a macro-evolutionary model of a naturalistically generated biosphere strikes me as a leap of faith larger than any embrace of the historical facts of Jesus’ career and the implications of those facts to who he was and what he did.
To argue that the complexities of the smallest living cell or of the cosmos as a whole were generated by the blind operations of the laws of physics and chemistry over billions of years strikes me as a leap of faith required not by the data, but by allegiance to a metaphysical materialist cosmology that is not adequately warranted by the empirical evidence. I find Lawrence Krause’s imaginations of a spontaneously generated cosmos and hard-determinist human behavior amusing but unconvincing. If his determinist model is true, then it’s trivial — he must have had no agent-causation choice in embracing it (and I must have had no agent-causation choice in rejecting it).
Yes, I have no difficulty to grant that our cosmos is likely some 14 billion years old. That does not imply that its characteristics were naturalistically generated. I’m convinced that responsible information science indicates otherwise.
Dismiss me as a troll if you like. That’s your free choice. You’d not be the first atheists to do so.
How is your position any more wishful thinking than any other? You didn’t answer my questions about what your position gains you. Why is your position better? You are simply arguing from incredulity; you can’t imagine how unguided change takes place so therefore it can’t. Not very convincing. What puts the brakes on microevolutionary change to prevent speciation? Why is genetic continuity present between all living things if they are not related? How does evolution, unguided evolution, prevent the acquisition of consciousness?
“How is proposing a god who exists without cause any better? What have you gained? Gods are by nature unpredictable beasts and don’t do much for helping us negotiate a complex world.”
First let me comment on the last sentence quoted here.
How do you know: 1) there are any or more than one god when you say, “Gods are…and don’t do…”; 2) what their natures are; and 3) what they do? I gather that you really don’t believe that any gods of any sort actually exist, right? I gather that what you really mean to say is something like: “Gods as described by various theists are…and don’t do…” Of course that’s a very different proposition than the one you articulated.
It seems clear to me that for the careful reflective thinker, atheism is in principle indefensible. Sure, anyone can believe and assert as true that no transcendent being (e.g., creator of the cosmos, of time, of space, of persons, of objective moral realities, etc.) actually exists. But in order to provide warrant for the claimed truth of such a belief and assertion one would at least need to: a) provide a defensible description of such a being (in principle impossible for an atheist); b) provide a defensible adequate warrant for the belief that there presently exists exactly zero evidence in favor of the belief that there actually exists at least one such being; c) plus adequate warrant for the belief that at any time in the past or future or throughout infinite space there is/ was/ will be exactly zero such evidence in existence. In short, the careful reflective atheist would need to claim omniscience — hardly something I (or likely any other Internet posters) wish to claim.
Generally, when I have shared these observations with atheists in person or in electronic dialogue, they have retreated to agnosticism. Of course some refuse to do so. That’s their choice and I respect their right to make it. Such a choice strikes me as not particularly rational.
It also seems clear to me that for the careful reflective thinker, agnosticism is in principle indefensible. Sure, anyone can believe and assert as true that no one can know anything at all — complete agnosticism. But surely, such a belief and assertion is self-contradictory, hence not worthy of further consideration.
As an alternative, sure, anyone can believe and assert as true that no one can know anything at all about the existence, nature and behavior of some transcendent being or beings (e.g., divine creator[s?] of the cosmos, of time, of space, of persons, of objective moral realities, etc.) — partial agnosticism. But surely, such a belief and assertion is equally self-contradictory. How does the partial agnostic know this about God reliably: that He is so radically different from other things that the partial agnostic claims she can know? How does the partial agnostic know this about God reliably, e.g., that God, were He to exist, would necessarily be unable or unwilling to reveal Himself at any given time or place to any given others for any possible reasons? The partial agnostic is asserting too much knowledge about a being that she asserts she can know nothing about. The partial agnostic’s difficulty may simply rest on her faulty theology, rather than on anything else. Hence this position too is not worthy of further consideration IMHO.
Generally, when I have shared these observations with agnostics in person or in electronic dialogue, they have retreated to skepticism. Of course some refuse to do so. That’s their choice and I respect their right to make it. Such a choice strikes me as not particularly rational.
Now it seems clear to me that for the careful reflective thinker, skepticism is a defensible position that carries certain moral obligations. Skepticism is quite distinct from atheism and agnosticism in that skepticism sincerely leaves the door open to the real possibility that a transcendent being (e.g., creator of the cosmos, of time, of space, of persons, of objective moral realities, etc.) might actually exist and might actually be knowable by humans to some extent at least. Actually given the potential consequences of one’s choices on these issue, it seems clear to me that the careful reflective skeptic carries a moral obligation to bend every effort to seek an adequate answer to such potentially momentous issues. Sadly too many skeptics with whom I’ve discussed these matters in person or in electronic dialogue have refused to pursue such momentous issues. That’s their choice and I respect their right to make it. Such a choice strikes me as not particularly rational.
Since this post is already too long, let me save for next time my response to “How is proposing a god who exists without cause any better? What have you gained?”
I welcome any and all responses to the above.
Are you suggesting that your position is also wishful thinking? I suggest that it might well be at some points at least.
I’m not suggesting that the limits of my imagination constitute the limits of reality as you suggest. Nor am I suggesting that microevolutionary change prevents speciation as you suggest. I am noting that the the empirical data concerning our biosphere is limited to generation (naturally and by intentional manipulation) of varieties within species. This data is then unscientifically extrapolated to “genetic continuity present between all living things,” and then to all material things (e.g., that via “unguided evolution” the atoms of rocks and water generate living plants and animals including humans). That notion is an unscientific myth IMHO. I see that as a “no-faith faith.”
As to your question: “How is proposing a god who exists without cause any better? What have you gained?” let me invite you to respond to the following:
Do you agree that:
1. Out of absolute nothingness, absolutely nothing arises spontaneously;
2. Thus if something exists now (I believe something does), then something must have existed from eternity;
3. Then the question arises: what is that “something” that must have existed from eternity?
From the above, that “something” taht must have existed from eternity might be the material cosmos.
However, I’m convinced that the cosmic empirical evidence clearly indicates that the material cosmos has NOT existed from eternity. Instead it seems evident to me that the empirical evidence clearly indicates that the material cosmos has existed for some 13.8 billion years. To me this implies an eternal creator of the cosmos.
Anyone can chose to reject that implication at will. I readily allow that choice and I respect their right to make it. Such a choice strikes me as not particularly rational.
I’m convinced that the cosmic empirical evidence concerning many dimensions of the cosmos and the nature of a simple living cell provide far more evidences of intelligent intentionality than the requirements of the SETI program to recognize extraterrestrial intelligence that might wish to communicate with our planet. Forensic science routinely collects evidences of intelligent intentionality in seeking to solve crimes. Forensic science does not imagine spontaneous unguided events as atheists routinely do. An “unguided change” from no material cosmos to an actual material cosmos some 13.8 billion years ago, is not scientifically warranted by the empirical evidence IMHO. Also an “unguided change” from inorganic atoms to a living cell is not scientifically warranted by the empirical evidence IMHO. Rather, these notions strike me as myths.
“How is a god who exists without cause any better?” you ask. My view strikes me as better accounting for the empirical data we have concerning the origins of our cosmos and first life (at least). “What have you gained?” you ask. I think I’ve gained a more rational worldview.
Does this make sense?
No, too much assertion and very little evidence.
You do not understand science, if you think common descent is not based on science. You don’t understand evolution, if you think natural selection is not able to guide change within populations. You claim to have read Dawkins and Dennett, but you haven’t understood what they have written.
Do atoms need to be intelligently guided to form the diversity of molecules found in the universe? Are natural processes such as concentration, temperature, atomic structure sufficient to explain molecules?
Trying to make analogies between human agency and god agency is completely unwarranted. We know how humans make things, we have no idea how gods would.
You may reject design without an intelligent designer, but that does not mean that it has not been shown to be possible.
Your choice not to interact with my arguments does not impress. Nor does assertions of what I don’t understand. Nor does appeals to your preferred authorities. I could easily employ the same strategies. IMHO, so doing is not respectful dialogue.
That metaphysical naturalists agree with each other on their common myths is not surprising, nor does such a large consensus demonstrate empirically that those myths are in fact true.
Yes, I agree that “natural selection is able to guide change within [certain] populations.” That’s what I mean by micro-evolution. For this we have empirical evidence. I named such when I mentioned “Yes, there is evident micro-evolution (e.g., the manipulative and natural interbreeding of plants and animals to generate new varieties of dogs, cats, wheats, corns, flies, etc.). To argue that such micro-evolutionary empirical evidence constitutes scientific warrant for a macro-evolutionary model of a naturalistically generated biosphere strikes me as a leap of faith larger than any embrace of the historical facts of Jesus’ career and the implications of those facts to who he was and what he did.”
Unfortunately, you have not interacted with this argument. You merely castigate me as not understanding science. There are hundreds of professional scientists who also reject as untenable the myth of common descent of all the material cosmos, including the biosphere. I gather you wish to dismiss them also as not understanding science. You can choose to do so if you wish. IMHO, so doing is not respectful of science as a discipline.
Yes, I have read some (not all) of Dawkins and Dennett, but have disagreed with much of what they have written. Perhaps some of that disagreement is because I haven’t understood them, perhaps not. Understanding someone and agreeing with them are surely two very distinct functions even among rational thinkers.
You assert: “Trying to make analogies between human agency and god agency is completely unwarranted. We know how humans make things, we have no idea how gods would.”
Can you understand how these two sentences contradict each other? If you really have no idea of how a creator could make something, then how can you assert that analogies between human agency and the agency of a creator is “completely unwarranted”? If you are actually an atheist, then how can you assert anything about what a creator might do? You seem to enjoy setting up strawmen as much as Haggis accused me of doing.
I do not completely “reject design without an intelligent designer” as you assert. Sure, some design (e.g., crystalization, e.g., snowflakes) is possible without direct crafting by an intelligent designer. That does not imply that this is actually what happened in the crafting of our cosmos or of first life, nor have you offered any empirical evidence to warrant the myth that this is indeed what happened in the distant past.
E.g., I do not understand the complex design of my laptop (hardware and software), nor do I need to do so to use it for my purposes. But for me to believe that the process by which my laptop came to be was a purely natural process such as crystalization, would indeed be irrational. I’m satisfied that the belief that the complex design of our universe and of a simple living cell came to be was a purely natural process is equally irrational.
Let me ask again:
Do you agree that:
1. Out of absolute nothingness, absolutely nothing arises spontaneously;
2. Thus if something exists now (I believe something does), then something must have existed from eternity;
3. Then the question arises: what is that “something” that must have existed from eternity?
You can choose to ignore these issues if you wish. IMHO, so doing is not respectful dialogue.
Haggis, the Derren Brown video was amazing! It’s great that Natalie took it so well and took something positive out of it; I could imagine the subject being horribly upset, either by the experience itself or the discovery that it was just Derren messing with minds. Interesting stuff. Derren always seems borderline ethical and yet comes across as having basic integrity (but then he presumably projects whatever he wants to project…). It’s impressive that people are still thoroughly fooled by him, even though presumably most participants these days have watched his shows and know that you can’t believe anything he says.
“Something” has existed for all time – could as easily be the universe as it could be your god – so what? Still no evidence for your assertions and just repeating your misunderstanding of science and ignorance of evidence for common descent doesn’t make your conclusions any more correct. How did your god create the universe and living things and why did it do it? Come back when you can answer those to questions.
Glad to see you grant that “Something” has existed for all time. But when you suggest that this “could as easily be the universe” you seem to be too quick to dismiss all the empirical data that indicates this myth to be false. Please don’t claim respect for a scientific perspective on that one. Just because an eternal universe is logically possible (since it is not self-contradictory) does not suggest that it is scientifically probable or even plausible in the face of current empirical data on the matter. Which one of us is “misunderstanding of science and ignoran[t] of evidence” on this matter?
I sense no need to attempt to explain how someone designed my laptop or why. Similarly, I sense no need to attempt to explain how someone created our 13.8 billion year-old universe or why. I sense no need to meet such demands as a condition for participation in this discussion.
It seems you prefer to avoid the balance of my argument so far. It seems repetition of my argument is fruitless in this case. If you are either unwilling or unable to deal with a short list of challenges, why should I pursue further dialogue? Your strategy is reminiscent of Richard Dawkins’ repeated unwillingness to debate some of his most articulate critics. It seems Dawkins prefers to preach to his atheist choir. Too many atheist websites pursue the same strategy. So much for claims to seek rational solutions to debated issues.
You came back without explaining how your god created, why it, created, or even what it created. You fail. You have no argument. You have no evidence. If you had you would have provided some. Empirical data for god – is that what you are claiming?
Common descent is a fact. The evidence is freely available, but you choose not to accept it. You choose not to explain your alternative because you can’t. Evolution can explain how organismal diversity arose, but you are unable to offer anything but the same old tired anti-evolution nonsense. If your theory cannot predict, then it is useless. Come on, please just a little tidbit of your vast knowledge of how your god made the first cell. I won’t tell anybody else. Was it really mud and spit?
Al, you are getting your misguided information from William Lane Craig, aren’t you? Pity. Christian apologetics won’t help you understand science.
Michael, I realize that Richard Dawkins recommends mocking, sarcasm and ridicule as a pro-atheist strategy. I find that strategy to be intellectually barren, personally disrespectful and rude.
Your demands that I or anyone else explain how or why someone else did anything (e.g., create a cosmos or living cells) are equally intellectually barren IMHO. To imagine that absolutely nothing created a cosmos out of absolutely nothing some 13.8 billion years ago or created living cells out of the atoms of rocks or water strikes me as an exercise in myth-making, regardless of how popular such myths are in the metaphysical naturalist community. Anyone can label such myth-making as “science” but it clearly is not an exercise in openly collecting the relevant data and seeking the best possible explanation for it. I fear that the metaphysical naturalist community is too truncated here by their ideology to deal honestly and openly with the data.
Instead I have referred you to the wealth of empirical evidence that indicates our universe being some 13.8 billion years old. Yet you dismiss this as “no evidence.” Instead, you hypothesize an eternal universe — hardly consistent with that wealth of empirical evidence.
Since some years prior to William Lane Craig’s first book I have argued with atheists that:
1. Out of absolute nothingness, absolutely nothing arises spontaneously;
2. Thus if something exists now (I believe something does), then something must have existed from eternity;
3. Then the question arises: what is that “something” that must have existed from eternity?
The relevant empirical evidence convinces me that this “something” was not a material cosmos that could not create itself. Rational reflective thinkers need to look elsewhere, even if that is outside their preferred metaphysical naturalist box.
Since that time (some years prior to William Lane Craig’s first book) I have argued that no empirical evidence can even establish scientific method as a sound epistemology, though on my preferred worldview I consider it as such with appropriate limitations.
Since that time I have argued that no empirical evidence can establish an objective foundation for moral decision-making, such as all rational creatures must assume to exist in order to make credible moral judgments of their own and others’ thoughts and actions, whether they agree or disagree with anyone else about these. It interests me that the metaphysical naturalist community tends to root morals in some subjective community consensus. Yet when they don’t agree with some larger community consensus (e.g., on legalizing physician-assisted death in Canada) they do not hesitate to judge that community consensus to be “wrong.” How so?
Since that time I have argued that atheism and agnosticism are not rationally defensible, as per my discussions above, which you have chosen to ignore, perhaps to your own intellectual peril.
From the above observations it seems clear to me that the “something” that created the cosmos and at least first life must also be rational and moral. You are free to reject that implication if you so choose. To label that choice as “science” would be inappropriate IMHO. If you so choose, you are even free to embrace Peter Atkin’s thesis (just over a year ago in debate with William Lane Craig) that absolutely nothing exists — since the positive and negative forces of the known cosmos cancel each other out. To label that choice as “science” would be inappropriate IMHO. I note that Peter Atkin is listed #16 on this website’s roster of “25 Most Influential Living Atheists.” Might you regard Peter Atkin’s thesis on this point as “nonsense”? I would.
I note that macro-evolutionary common descent of the biosphere has never been scientifically observed, regardless of how many scientist believe that it actually occurred at some time in the distant past — based on analogy with contemporary scientifically observed micro-evolution, skeletal and micro-biological similarities between plant and animal organisms, etc. Believing that “Common descent is a fact” requires a huge leap of faith such as I and hundreds of professional scientists are not prepared to make. A myth is still a myth no matter how many people believe it to be fact.
Projection Al, you do it well. Please stop describing the problems with your own belief system and pretending they are mine. You keep trying to replace science with wishful thinking.
Biology and Psychology spend much of their time explaining how and why agents do things. The fact that you cannot do this for the agent you claim does odd jobs around the universe – a mutation here, a galaxy there – indicates that your premise lacks merit.
The only defensible systems are no gods or gods that do everything. Your hybrid view requires you to tell me exactly which activities gods performed or are currently performing.
You should be able to distinguish between what nature does and what gods do. if you can’t, then why tell me you can?
You keep repeating that common descent is wrong, but you can’t answer the simplest question – if variation and natural selection or even drift can lead to change within populations, then why can’t they lead to speciation? What limits change?
If living things are chemicals, then why couldn’t chemistry lead to life? Again what is stopping chemicals from replicating themselves or their carriers? These are questions you must answer. I have seen the Discovery Institute list – the few biologists signed faith statements to teach at podunk bible colleges effectively canceling their meager science credentials. If you claim to know the answer before you start looking or ignore evidence contrary to your predetermined answer, your science is crap.
Just asserting that a god has always existed doesn’t solve anything. It is just an assertion and nothing more. That our universe might have been “born” 13.8B years ago, says nothing about what existed before. I don’t know, but if you don’t believe in common descent because you claim no one has observed it, then why would you believe a god created the universe? I know you weren’t there to see that!
You observe: “If living things are chemicals, then why couldn’t chemistry lead to life?” Please explain how they actually do. If you can’t, is this myth anything more than “wishful thinking”? It’s clearly not science, since it has never been observed. Or have you seen it happen? Please tell. Simply suggesting it as a logical possibility doesn’t solve anything about macro-evolution. It doesn’t make it true. Your premise “lacks merit.” You have offered zero defense for your belief that no creator of the cosmos or of first life exists. It strikes me that perhaps you haven’t done so because you can’t do so. Yet in your ideology you believe this myth to be true. Why?
A friend of mine (bestman at our wedding) was named Scientist of the Year some years ago, by the World Health Organization. He accepts that an actual God created the cosmos and first life. Have you any such credential in science?
I have a PhD in biology. You on the other hand know one scientist – I am so impressed. I only know hundreds and I work with them every day. At least you admit that evolution is possible without your god’s helping hand – even abiogenesis is. Now tell me why is it impossible without your god? Is your god sticking pseudogenes rendered inactive by the same transposable element into apes and humans just to confuse us?
I’m impressed with your PhD in biology. I can imagine that you have been quite thoroughly socialized in the worldview of metaphysical naturalism which so dominates that discipline these days.
Reminds me of a 9-hour conversation on these matters I had some years ago with a Professor of Brain Biology who had spent the first half century of his life in East Germany. Though he hated communism with a passion, he still embraced the metaphysical naturalism in which he had been trained. He too admired Richard Dawkins’ books.
My PhD is in philosophy. I have never counted how many scientists I know. Seems you don’t know much logic or metaphysics if you imagine I know only one scientist or that no creator God exists. I’m not impressed. Basing your life on the myth that no creator God exists strikes me as requiring more blind faith than I can muster.
Have any of your atheist friends ever been awarded Scientist of the Year by a global organization? You and all your atheist friends may well be wrong. Think about it. The Kansas Cit Chiefs are thinking about it these days. Their reality is putting a lot of things in perspective.
Dismissive attitudes of disdain provide zero solution to your problems of accounting for the creation of the cosmos some 13.8 billion years ago (according to current relevant empirical data) or of first life (which should be of interest to biologist like you). They only serve to heighten the whiff of atheist myth-making.
Its over. I have learned absolutely nothing from our exchange. I had hoped you you could tell me something about your god, but you obviously can’t. How can you believe in something you know nothing about?
I’m glad to hear you say, “I had hoped you you (sic) could tell me something about your god…” I’m sorry that you “learned absolutely nothing from our exchange.” I alluded, perhaps too briefly and too gently, to our creator God’s intelligence (as indicated in the incredible design of our cosmos and simplest living things) and morality (as the only available foundation for our assumptions of objective morality), but you chose not to pick up on these. I can understand why you might have so chosen: it seems atheism has no way to deal with such dimensions of our everyday real world.
When I read “How can you believe in something you know nothing about?” I ask, and how do you know that? Sounds to me like another case of the common Fallacy of Hasty Generalization.
Before you beat a hasty retreat from this dialogue, please indulge me in a brief account of an exchange between my micro-biologist son Jonathan and me at the Taj Mahal just over 10 years ago. He and I had just heard a guide point out the incredible craftsmanship of the nine lotus flowers in the top row of 84 semi-precious stones each, plus the nine lotus flowers in the lower row of 64 semi-precious stones each, on each of the eight marble screen or “jali” panels highly decorated with dado bas-relief, intricate lapidary inlay and refined calligraphy panels which borders the tombs of Shah Jahan and his third wife (his favorite) Mumtaz Mahal who died at 38 while birthing her 14th child.
So I asked Jonathan something like, “Suppose someone were to point out to you that there are various deserts in India that have sandstorms from time to time, and since these grains of sand all need to land somewhere, might they not just as well land in this configuration of all these lotus flowers of semi-precious stones or even the Taj Mahal as a whole, and that the stories of some 20,000 craftsmen working some 22 years to build this are mere myth believed by the uninformed, would you find such a proposal scientific?”
Jonathan replied immediately with passion something like, “Oh Dad, I know exactly where you are going with this. In all my years of studying biochemistry and microbiology never once was I even tempted by the scientific facts I observed to imagine that even the simplest living cell came to be without some intelligent designer intentionally crafting it to work. And the simplest living cell is vastly more complex than Darwin ever could have imagined or than this whole Taj Mahal complex with all its buildings and gardens, etc.” The past 15+ years Jonathan has worked as a professional microbiologist with several dozen scientists in several disciplines. Likely some of them also embrace a metaphysical naturalist worldview as you have chosen to do. Within that box, I can see how it makes sense to its true believers. The relevant empirical data convince me otherwise.
Perhaps you should try to correct the information science math of “Programming Life” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00vBqYDBW5s and ask yourself if this Christmas you still want to follow King Herod as he tried to kill baby Jesus. Perhaps you prefer the Santa myth, though even that has some interesting historical factual roots.
With your PhD in Biology, you can choose to flee from the inconvenient truths in the “Programming Life” video too. Of course, you can choose to ignore these as you have my references to objective morality that this website appeals to in judging Canada’s lack of legalized physician-assisted death. You’ve already dismissed without evidence or argument my references to design in the cosmos and in the genesis of first life. Small wonder that you “have learned absolutely nothing from our exchange.” Learning requires some level of honest openness to some paradigm shift. In my past dialogues with metaphysical naturalists I have found such openness sadly lacking. So much for appeals to scientific method.
I could tell you a great deal more about our creator God’s intelligent and moral activity and nature if you were to manifest some honest openness to hear about such. Instead you chose to shut down the dialogue. That’s your choice, and I respect your right to make it. It simply does not impress me as a rational choice. You’re right, I really can’t teach you what you refuse to learn.
Have a Merry Christmas anyhow. Let’s chat again any time you’re ready. You can reach me at aah1@mts.net.
Al H. This really is quite pathetic, you know. It’s been said again and again, but it’s not a good argument, even though your son apparently thinks it is:
It is simply not a matter of random things coming to be, as though sand from a sand storm should shape themselves into the Taj just by chance. Natural selection is a filter though which chance mutations are selected, and the adaptational outcome indeed seems to be designed, though there is no designer necessary for the complex variety of life on earth to have come to be as it is. Indeed, the complexity of the present world of life is as nothing compared to the 99.9% of life forms that are now extinct. Indeed, as Stephen Jay Gould points out, there has been a reduction in the variety and complexity of life over the billions of years during which life forms have been evolving. The argument you have just made shows that you simply do not understand evolution, as does the youtube video to which you link us.
Moreover, not only are you wrong about this, but it is simply wrong to suppose that someone who rejects the idea of a creator is likely to stand with a tyrant like Herod. While there is absolutely no evidence for the slaughter of the innocents as imagined by the writer of Matthew’s gospel – and Herod was hated enough that had there been such an occurrence it would no doubt have been reported – neither is there any reason why, had there been, a morally aware humanist should stand with such a tyrant in doing such a deed. This is just silliness compounded by silliness! There is no foundation for morality in religion, especially if you give a thought to the vastly different moralities that have been produced by different religions. Morality is an evolved cultural capacity of human beings, and there is no reason to think it otherwise. That does not mean that morality is not something about which we can reason, for we can and do. We give reasons for believing that some things are right and some things are wrong. We do not always agree, but that does not mean that reasoning about them is an empty activity, as anyone with the slightest familiarity with moral philosophy would know. That you don’t know demonstrates your ignorance in this respect, not the soundness of your opinions.
Also, the suggestion that scientific method should lead to the kind of open mindedness that you are encouraging Michael to adopt is anything but scientific. You are asking him to accept ancient stories as though they were true. There is no reason for doing so. Religious beliefs are a dime a dozen, and no one religion can plausibly claim to be speaking the truth. There simply is no basis for it. That means that religions are essentially on a level. They are imagining a world in which certain values are being laid down by supreme or other paranormal or supernatural beings. There is no reason for supposing that such beings exist. Nor is there any reason for thinking that the values recommended by one such imagined being are to be preferred to the values recommended by another such imagined being. You must ask Plato’s question. Does God command things because they are good, or are they good simply because God commands them? The answer is obvious. If God commands us to kill indiscriminately and for no reason, there is no reason for believing those acts good. But we know this how? Because values are the product of human intelligence and concern.
So, yes, the argument really is over if all you can come up with are these lame excuses for arguments. You must do much better than this.
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I expect you could describe a lot of things you think your god is like, but I suspect you could not give any good reasons to think these things are likely correct.
Okay, here are a rather large raft of conclusions unsupported by data or argument. I get the picture. You and your atheist friends prefer not to dialogue with others who do not agree with your conclusions.
Your appeal to natural selection is irrelevant to the creation of first life. So is your appeal to extinct species. Did you not read my posts?
Your cavalier dismissal of Matthew’s report of the slaughter of the innocents is a Fallacy of Argument from Silence. For King Herod to kill some 20 infants in a small Palestinian village would hardly make major waves for historians of that period such as Josephus writing many decades later. How do you know better than contemporaries what actually happened? Still I should likely not have mentioned King Herod. I apologize for my indiscretion in so doing.
Naturally you believe that morality is culturally evolved. That belief is inherent in metaphysical naturalism. Unfortunately it hand-cuffs cultural reformers, such as those who challenge slavery and human trafficking in the past and present or those who seek an end to female gender-selective abortions or chemical weapons or those who argue for human rights, etc. Even metaphysical naturalism might disappear with further cultural evolution — who knows?
Dismissing me as ignorant proves nothing other than your own opinion of me.
You seem to have no interest in rational discussions of Plato’s Euthyphro question. You already claim to have this dilemma sewed up. You may well have no interest in the difference between moral ontology (the basis or foundation of moral values) and moral epistemology (how we come to know those moral values). It seems clear to me that material entities (e.g. sub-atomic particles that constitute the material cosmos) are impotent on the task of generating valid moral values. It seems clear to me that valid moral values cannot exist (ontologically) without God.
In my view God’s goodness is not arbitrary as you seem to suggest. Instead, God’s moral nature is the paradigm of goodness, regardless of how humans may evaluate His actions on the basis of their own subjective moral preferences. Of course there are innumerable flawed conceptions of God and morality and I’m not obligated to defend any of them except my own.
IMHO kindness is good because that’s the way God is; cruelty is evil because it is inconsistent with God’s nature. E.g., rape is evil because it is inconsistent with God’s nature. Unfortunately what we call rape happens all the time in the animal kingdom with no moral difficulty. And since atheists regard humans as animals they have no moral ontology foundation for objecting to rape. My atheist logic prof argued that we criminalize rape simply because we don’t like it, but there is nothing really wrong with it in itself. Further, he argued (as does Lawrence Krauss, #11 on your list of most influential living atheists) that all human choices are causally predetermined by antecedent material factors. Do you agree?
On the contrary, I see rape as cruel, not kind, hence inconsistent with God’s nature, hence forbidden by God, hence it is objectively morally wrong — not merely subjectively so via cultural evolution. Thus Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma is resolved IMHO. God is neither arbitrary nor subject to some moral code outside His nature. Sadly it seems most atheists either never read such discussions or chose not to understand them. Hence they tend to repeat Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma as an unresolved objection as you just did.
You choose not to dialogue with me merely because we disagree. I respect that choice, but do not regard it as rational.
Merry Christmas anyhow.
Al, you say:
No, I didn’t say that I would not dialogue with you, but you must do better than to pull old chestnuts from the fire. For example, you must have noticed that Matthew and Luke have almost entirely different birth stories. In Matthew, the “holy family” flee to Egypt, for fear of Herod. In Luke they go up to Jerusalem where Jesus is recognised as the saviour of Israel. If Herod was looking for the child to kill him, as in Matthew, they would not have gone to Jerusalem, as in Luke. You simply can’t take these stories as historically reliable. And I do acknowledge that the absolute beginning of life on earth is still a mystery (although one that is being increasingly explored by science), but that from that point on the development of the complex life on earth is quite adequately explained by evolution, which is not a random event, but a causal one, based on adaptation by means of selection. So, in all, I’m trying to tell you that you need better arguments than the ones you have provided so far.
As to God and morality. It’s nice that you can so easily dispense with the Euthyphro by merely identifying values that we all recognise as good — say, kindness, for example — with God’s nature. This doesn’t do any more to ground kindness than morality as a culturally evolved social practice. The question of the “ontology of morality” as you like to call it cannot be settled unless we know how we come to know what is right and wrong, good and bad. Since no one has privileged access to their god — there being so many of them, for one thing — it is impossible to ground morality in God. You need to find another way.
So, it’s not that I refuse to dialogue. I simply refuse to dialogue at this level. You must provide knock ‘em down arguments for your point of view, and I don’t think you can. If you think you can, you must do better than this. The things that you say may seem self-evident to you, but they don’t to a lot of people, so, if you want to convince, you must provide convincing evidence for the faith that is in you. So far, I haven’t seen any. Anyone who claims that there is a god, and that god has spoken to us, has the burden of proof, and so far you haven’t met it.
For some reason, I missed this post, which I think is splendid and thought-provoking, as well as Al H’s ramblings and lucubrations, beneath whose bullying tone of certitude – something that he mistakes for actual argument – lies a profound and quite possibly senile emptiness. I, too, am an admirer of Fussell’s book, which I read years ago, and I wonder if you know the poetry of David Jones, who wrote one of the greatest books to come out of World War I, ‘In Parenthesis’ (other of the ‘great’ WWI books are Ernst Junger’s splendid ‘Storm of Steel’ and Frederic Manning’s ‘The Middle Parts of Fortune’). Jones was Britain’s last great Catholic poet and also an extraordinary painter – he converted to Catholicism after the war, as I recall, partly under the influence of the the engraver Eric Gill, with whom he worked, but largely, I think, because Christianity allowed him to make some sort of sense of what he and so many others had been through (he suffered from ‘shell shock’ for the rest of his life): his works, both poems and paintings, are imbued with Christianity, but not in the prissily dogmatic and moralising way that makes much of T.S. Eliot’s later work, for me at least, nearly unreadable. There is a genuine honesty of sensibility that suffuses Jones’s work, and doesn’t merely shine through fitfully; and a quality, also, more obvious in his paintings, of rapt attention that gives to his subjects a strange, metaphysical intensity. There is an extraordinary late poem, ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’, set in a Roman miltary camp in Galilee around the time of the supposed birth of Christ. It has a despairing grandeur and beauty, and I regard it as one of the greatest middle-length poems in English of the twentieth-century. I once performed it, here in Japan. Jones is a poet and a painter who is very relevant to what Fussell and you are talking about – as, I think, is Junger, who after WWI was an active member of Germany’s political right, though he never supported Hitler and in the late thirties published an extraordinary little book, ‘Auf den Marmorklippen’ (the English translation, ‘On the Marble Cliffs’, by Stuart Hood, is, alas, long out of print), which is a kind of allegory of how Hitler gained power (the Nazis weren’t pleased by its publication, but Junger was too famous a patriot for them to touch), but which is remarkable, also, for a strange and, to me, moving mysticism about nature and (as in Jones) about comradeship. Junger also eventually converted to Catholicism… Alas… But, again, I do ind it hard to be overly critical of those who, like Jones, have been through experiences of great suffering and find in religion something that helps them to live. The biologist (and atheist) Lewis Wolpert, I suspect, would think the same way, judging from his remarks on how religion helped his son, who was undergoing considerable mental suffering.
Eric, you say:
Al H wrote: I much appreciate your granting that the origin of first life is a “mystery.” You are the first atheist I’ve encountered on this site that is prepared to recognize this weakness in your view. I have encountered a rare few other atheists elsewhere who are so appropriately humble.
A few days late, but still.. admission of ignorance is not a weakness. It is certaqinly not a problem for atheism, well not for this atheist anyway. The fact is that nobody knows how our universe originated, whether they are theists or not. Some theists argue that the existence of the universe is more likely if God exists, or that it is the best explanation, but, more likely as compared with what, or a better explanation than what? Theists seem to think that in the absence of any competing explanation, then Theism wins by default, but that is ludicrous. It would be like the police arresting a man on suspicion of murder, based solely on circumstantial evidence, then charging him with murder because there was nobody else in the frame!
Good post Eric, by the way.
Mike, thanks. Al H won’t be replying to your comment. He’s been dismissed from class. He simply went on and on and on without really responding to anyone, so it was time to cut him loose. Anyway, precisely the point. I don’t consider the statement, “I don’t know” as a weakness. If we don’t know far better to say so. Then there is a possibility of learning more. This, indeed, is the presupposition of rational argument. We begin with the null hypothesis, and then work from there. That’s as old as Socrates. Al H can’t seem to get that point, and therefore argues with undeserved certainty. All our arguments must be tentative to a degree, because we could be wrong. But religious people can’t be wrong, not really, for all their vaunted humility. It becomes a bit tiresome after awhile.