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The Atheist and the Acorn
This starts with a joke. Not a particularly good one, but perhaps the novelty will save the humor. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it told.
An atheist is arguing with a priest as they walk through a grove of trees. “How can you believe in a God who created such a disordered universe? Look at these mighty oak trees. See the tiny acorns they produce. And yet the massive pumpkin grows on a feeble vine. If I had designed the world that situation would be corrected, let me tell you.”
Just then an acorn falls from the oak and taps the atheist on his noggin. “Imagine” drawls his companion “if that had been a pumpkin.”
The humor here (and I hope you’ll pardon my analyzing the joke. Perhaps with a better one I’d worry about squandering it) the humor lies in the atheist who is so confident that he knows how the universe ought to be ordered. He has a clear aesthetic view that fails to take into account some practical implications.
The Argument For and Against the Existence of God by Design
I doubt that particular conversation ever actually took place but I have seen similar arguments made. The blood vessels in the eye go in front of the retina where they inevitably block some percentage of the light. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to run the blood vessels along the back of the retina so you don’t get the “down in front!” effect? Maybe; maybe not. The system really is a wonder for oxygenating the eye, and it blocks only a small percentage of the incident photons. (I speak only from second-hand knowledge, mind you; I’ve never given the matter much study myself.)
The general form of the argument seems to be: “Nature works in this way. It would work better if instead, it worked this other way. Therefore a rational God did not design this.” And a general counter-argument. “Nature actually works better the way it does because of this reason you have failed to consider.” Either way, I don’t find it very convincing; you can swap the argument and counter-argument to the opposite positions as well. Both the atheist and the theist, in making their arguments, are assuming that they know all functions a given thing has and can deduce all reasons that the Lord might have constructed that thing that way.
I bring it up to illustrate two closely-related principles that one must keep in mind when reasoning about the Almighty:
- God is smarter than I am.
- God is also wiser than I am.
The Good Lord who stretched out the giraffe’s neck presumably had a good reason for doing so. Possibly it was for some overriding engineering concern. I think it more likely that He did so because he takes joy in the delight children get from seeing such an absurd animal. Not a value that many of us science types generally worry about, but that’s that second principle for you. The Good Lord has his own purposes that are better than the ones that you and I hold. In the end, that sort of design objective is hardly a thing that could be proven, at least on this side of the grave.
Arguing With the Almighty Himself
If one were to argue design with God, however, the general argument would take on a different form. “Nature works this way. It would work better if instead, it worked this other way.” (Therefore…? What exactly would one hope to gain by gainsaying the Almighty?) God would respond “No, this is the best configuration because…” and there would follow a series of reasons and counterarguments that would settle the matter. A God who knows the end from the beginning will have weighed every competing concern and derived the optimal solution. That is, He’d respond if He felt the need to justify His reasons to you in the first place. Job got several chapters of “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth?”.
That lack of an answer is deeply unsatisfying to us as readers. You let the man’s kids die; the least you can do is explain why to him. Job though, Job takes it as a complete answer. He doesn’t argue; he apologizes for demanding an answer in the first place.
I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees You.
Therefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.
Why? The answer to that question comes from the first chapter of the book, but not from the story, from something that Job said after he had lost everything.
Then Job arose, tore his robe, and shaved his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped. And he said:
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
And naked shall I return there.
The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”In all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong.
Everything — the money, Job’s health, his children — everything was given to him by the Lord. None of it was immutably his; he enjoyed all the gifts at the pleasure of the Lord. There’s no higher court, no standard of justice, no celestial insurance company to make him whole after the Lord removes those gifts. It’s easy to assume that His justice reflects our own ideas of justice when we’re talking among ourselves, but the holiness of God allows no quibbling. Job here reverts to the usual reaction of man when confronted with the reality of the Living God; stark, raving terror. All our sophistries fade away like snowflakes in a rainstorm when we’re forced to acknowledge the actual, living presence of God.
The Implications of Infinity
If one is going to consider the nature of God, then it’s probably best to consider God on God’s own terms. If God is infinite, then reasoning about a god that is not infinite won’t actually tell you about the Lord. If you start with the assumption that God is confined by the Laws of Physics then you’ll never understand anything about a God who isn’t. I touched on the point briefly when discoursing on my opium dreams.
If God is in fact infinite, then you’ve got to reason about Him as if He’s infinite in order to get anywhere. If he’s infinitely intelligent then it’s not enough to just say that you’re likely to lose any sort of game of cosmic riddles. You’re measuring your finite IQ against his infinite IQ, and any finite quantity is less than an infinite quantity. But once you start talking about God as if he’s infinite there are whole debates that just sort of melt away.
For instance, evolution. If the Lord spoke the Earth into existence literally as it’s described in Genesis chapter 1 then He could have done it precisely that way. Any amount of clever biologists discoursing on fossils and DNA doesn’t change that. An infinite God can speak whatever he likes into the fossil record just as easily as He could have spoken its absence in. Alternately, perhaps he ran evolution like a computer simulation to see if you could get whales back out of land mammals, or maybe he just let the Earth run for an epoch and said ‘Let there be ponies now.” If God is infinitely powerful and infinitely intelligent then we have to acknowledge the possibility that He did things any old way He pleases and never mind what we’d have chosen.
We’ve established a means, do we have a motive? Why not? God, judging from the Bible, values the salvation of people rather highly. Suppose he set up the whole pageant of evolution in order to reach a single biology grad student in North Carolina. Seems like an awful lot of work, doesn’t it? Again, we’re thinking about infinity here. It’s just as easy for Him to do it that way as any other. If I have infinite money on hand, I can pay the national debt just as easily as if I can pay for an ice-cream cone. Infinity dollars minus 20 trillion works out to the same thing as infinity minus two bits; it’s still infinity.
As such I’m never much bothered by questions of atheists and acorns. From either side of the question, it’s nothing but a plausibility argument. We can play our games with wisdom and logic but we ought to do so with a certain amount of humility. One may argue with the Almighty, one would be foolish to expect to prevail. There’s no possible example, experiment, theoretical, hypothesis, what have you that can prove God exists unless God allows it. The question always — always — always resolves to the one Christ offered to Peter:
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
Peter answered and said, “The Christ of God.”
In the end, that’s the question that matters.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
We’ll have to disagree with that conclusion.
Since this forum can be a little impersonal, I’ll say something about where I am coming from. I became an atheist as a college freshman, largely because it dawned on me that there was no omnibenevolent being looking out for me (which I childishly used to think). What I made of my life was up to me and no one else. It was both terrifying and bracing at the same time. That dash of cold water lead me to philosophy, and eventually back to the Catholic Faith of my youth. But I retain a good respect for atheists, who I prefer to mindless religious believers who go through the motions, following the safety of the herd, rather than grappling with the unsettling implications of atheism. Of course, today, there is also a herd of atheists (Ricochetti excepted of course!), who are afraid of the implications of the existence of God. It can cut either way.
I argue vigorously on questions of philosophy and religion because I am ultimately arguing with myself. I still find Enlightenment-style atheism attractive and don’t want to kid myself into religious belief. So if I argue strongly here, it’s not because I don’t think atheism is irrational or doesn’t have merit, exactly the opposite. It deserves careful and thoughtful consideration. My Catholic hero – St. Thomas Aquinas – thought nothing less.
Jim,
You seem to have described some sort of moral constructionism, the idea that what is right and what is wrong is decided by society. I don’t subscribe to moral constructionism myself. But that seems to be what you are presenting. Currently, I am a non-theistic moral realist.
Maybe I disagree with Camus. Most of us do what we need to do to stay alive due to an instinct we inherited. Those organisms that did not have a desire to stay alive long enough to have children did not pass their genes onto the next generation. So, we are the descendents of those who had “selfish genes.”
Nevertheless, what if I found out that, in a scientific sense, my life has no meaning? I would still desire to live. I would still prefer pleasure over pain. I would still desire companionship and approbation. Nothing would change.
I understand. Thanks for the background.
My wife is a liberal Christian. Whenever I have communicated to her my non-belief in God and especially my non-belief that Jesus rose from the dead, my wife has responded that “You are taking away my hope.”
So, I can understand why my wife (and others) don’t want to become atheist. Why believe that when one dies, that is all that there is? Why believe that a serial killer and a heroic policeman both meet the same end? Why believe that our bodies are like extremely complex machines?
There are probably other reasons why people maintain their religious beliefs in the face of doubts, reasons I have not mentioned.
Not at all. I think God is a fact testified to by creation. That’s the point of the traditional arguments for God – they start from creation and demonstrate not only His Existence, but also His Nature as uncreated. God is not a brute fact hanging out there at all.
Now I’m not asking you to accept those arguments here. I’m just pointing out that they are there, and an atheist is perfectly justified in demanding those arguments and submitting them to his reason before he accepts the existence of an “uncreated God.” If he doesn’t find them convincing, so be it.
Similarly, I think the atheist needs more than just the bare assertion that “moral facts are uncreated.” He needs to offer arguments for the existence of these uncreated facts, and an explanation why these facts in particular can exist uncreated.
A possibility here is that the uncreated moral facts really aren’t facts at all. They are just illusions we tell ourselves to give our lives meaning. A charge religious believers must take seriously is that they believe in God only because they are terrified of living in a world without God. A similar charge against an atheist is that he believes in uncreated moral facts only because he is terrified of living in an amoral universe. In both cases, simple assertions won’t cut it. We need reasons to believe that God on the one hand and morality on the other aren’t simply illusions.
I’m in the converse boat. My wife was raised Northern Baptist in a not particularly religious household. I was philosophical but not religious when we got married. She has been an agnostic since I’ve known her and “doesn’t have a religious bone in her body” in her words. We don’t discuss religion much because she’s not a philosophical type either.
Sure. But the argument that the universe exists, therefore God exists is a hypothesis. You are correct. I don’t find this argument convincing.
I don’t think that God gets us out of this dilemma.
If someone asks “Is torturing puppies right or wrong?” You might say, “Torturing puppies is wrong.” When asked “Why is it wrong?” You might respond in a variety of ways. Perhaps you say that torturing puppies is wrong because torturing puppies causes unnecessary suffering and causing unnecessary suffering is always wrong.
The response could be “well, how do you define unnecessary?” And so it would go endlessly until you say, “God opposes the torturing of puppies. Therefore, torturing puppies is wrong.”
But then the response could be, “But why should I obey God’s commandments?”
Eventually, one is going to have no further explanation. Either torturing puppies is wrong because God said it is wrong (and disobeying God is wrong) or torturing puppies is wrong, period.
At some point we reach the end of our ability to explain the existence of these moral facts, these dos and don’ts, these rights and wrongs.
Neither the theist nor the atheist will be able to convince Charles Manson not to do his evil deeds.
This is the famous Euthyphro dilemma. The answer is that what God says is right and wrong isn’t independent of the nature of His Creation, but part of it. God created man such that man fulfills his purpose by caring for and loving dogs rather than torturing them, and dogs such that they are fulfilled by being loved rather than tortured. God’s commands are a sort of user’s manual for using our nature properly, not arbitrary dictates of a celestial tyrant.
The problem with atheism is that it typically denies this sort of teleology. Talking of “purpose” and “fulfillment” is strictly forbidden. So the only option, if we want to keep morality, is to view it as abstract rules slapped onto the otherwise amoral universe described by science. Where and how these rules come from, and why they are what they are, no one can say. This is how we end up with uncreated moral facts hanging out there.
That’s because Manson was an evil and irrational man, not because morality can’t ultimately be explained. Let’s not let the vicious be our standard of judgement.
We can discuss the Euthyphro dilemma. But that was not my intent. My point was that no matter whether you say, “X is wrong because X is wrong” or “X is wrong because God says X is wrong,” there will still be a question that can’t be answered. For example, someone could say, “Why is disobeying God’s command wrong?” One would have to eventually say, “It just is wrong to disobey God’s command.” At some point, no further explanation is possible.
Atheism can discuss causes, effects, purposes and so on. I guess we are talking in such abstract terms it is hard to understand what your objection actually is.
God by itself doesn’t assist us with morality either. Only when the concept of God is combined with an asserted commandment by God along with the assumption that it is always morally correct to obey God’s commandments does any sort of morality emerge.
Yes. Manson was evil and irrational. I agree.
So, let’s assume that I think that God’s commands are always just and good. This doesn’t really put in a place that is different from the non-theist moral realist.
Both the theist (the believer in God) and the non-theist think that somethings are right while other things are wrong. Then the hard problem of determine which actions are right and which actions are wrong comes in.
I don’t think the God believer has any advantage in this case.
Sally is married to John. John is gambling away all of the family earnings at the casino. Sally wants to divorce John. Should Sally divorce John?
Some God believers say yes while other God believers say no because these religious believers disagree as to what God’s opinion is regarding divorce. Same with homosexuality. Same with mowing ones law on the Sabbath. Same with donating lots of money to people in Africa verses paying for ones daughter’s piano lessons.
Morality is hard. God does not make it easier.
I must have written my last comment poorly. My point was that on my view morality is written into our nature by God. God’s commandments are not necessary to establish morality (they are necessary for salvation, but that’s a different thing). I understand that on your view, morality can only arise through the arbitrary assertion of someone – in the atheist’s case, by the atheist asserting uncreated moral facts, or in the theist’s case, the assertions of God. I am contrasting that view with my view, which holds that morality does not arise from the assertions of anyone, God or anyone else. It arises from nature, although ultimately from God as nature’s creator.
My understanding of nature permits this, because I recognize teleology as a real aspect of nature, a benefit of which is that morality is already “built in.” The typical modern atheist rejects teleology, although it is not necessary to do so to be an atheist, and so can’t see any other way to introduce morality other than some sort of command by God or man.
This is an explanation of why human beings have a moral sense or how human beings are capable of distinguishing right actions from wrong actions. But it does not explain why action X is right or wrong any more than the existence of a moral fact explains why that moral fact exists as opposed to some other moral fact.
As I see it, nature isn’t always moral. Nature is “red in tooth and claw.”
That is why I am a non-natural moral realist instead of a natural moral realist.
Persuaded by Russ Shafer-Landau, I am a non-natural moral realist. Peter Railton is a natural moral realist. But I have not read much of his work.
To say that God placed a moral sense on the hearts of mankind doens’t help us determine whether Sally can divorce John as John gambles away the family earnings. It is simply an assertion that God exists, God is the author of morality and that God provides human beings some moral sense, some knowledge about what is right and what is wrong.
Those are a lot of assertions.
I agree that God does not make things easier. I don’t think that was ever His purpose. If anything, He makes them harder. The Cross and all that.
And I agree that religious believers say all sort of things claiming it is God’s command. Sort of makes you wish God had established one enduring, authoritative voice to sort through all the noise, doesn’t it?
Yes. Anyone can claim to have received word from God.
So, this is why I am not persuaded that the atheist is at a disadvantage regarding morality.
The “moral facts” are not only not created, they may be imaginary, depending on how the argument is going.
Man, you atheists have to keep track of a lot of stuff.
In his defense, mammalian teeth are hard to pull off. Be glad humanity didn’t evolve from koalas.
NSFW Video about Koalas
It does on my view of moral action. I define a “good” moral act as an “a rational act freely chosen that is in accord with the purposes of human nature.” We can read teleology in nature and draw moral conclusions from it. It is a moral realism grounded in nature. My problem with your moral realism is that it is ungrounded. But I do wonder, on your view, how you distinguish genuine moral facts from illusions that only appear to be moral facts.
An atheist could take the same position even as you and the atheist disagree as to what the purpose of human nature is. As I see it, human nature is a mixed bag containing of goodness and badness.
By ungrounded you mean that my moral realism isn’t based on God. I don’t see that as a problem.
I think we have to use reason, experience and the ability to understand the positions of others.
Now, you might not find that sufficient. But you don’t have any tools available to you that I don’t have. You might think that God has told you things about morality or about human nature. But you could be wrong about that. If so, your morality is built on quicksand.
When atheists and believers discuss God, they often have the same conception of God in mind: the highest of all existing beings. Both of their arguments presume this definition. I think the atheist’s position is very easy to argue given this definition. The believer’s position is more difficult.
This definition of God puts God alongside all other beings, albeit higher than all of them. But what if God is the origin not only of creation, but of existence itself? This was asked by Tillich I believe. Does God, even if he is real in some way, exist, if he is the source of existence itself? Can the traditional arguments of atheists be acknowledged as true in some way even by believers?
Such an atheist and I could have a fruitful discussion as to what conclusions we can draw from nature about human purposes. Most atheists today, (and I suspect you are one), forbid teleology however.
No, I mean what I said: Not grounded in nature.
That doesn’t answer the question. It’s not about how you understand the position of others, but how you distinguish genuine moral facts from illusory moral facts.
How do you define teleology?
Many atheists believe that human beings have a nature. But that human nature consists of both good and bad features. For example, the thirst for vengeance among human beings is part of human nature, a product of our evolution. But this thirst for vengeance can, in some circumstances, hinder our efforts to act morally.
Those are the tools that I use to distinguish between moral facts and illusory moral facts: reason, experience and the ability to understand the circumstances of others.
My point is that you don’t have tools available to you that I do not have available to me. You might think that God gave you insight into human nature and human purpose. But you could be wrong. If you are wrong, then your morality, which is grounded on this understanding of human nature and human purpose, could also be wrong.
God as conceived by traditional theology (e.g. Thomas Aquinas) is not an existing being alongside other existing beings, just higher than all the others. God is Being Itself or, if you like, Existence Itself. Asking if God exists is like asking if water is wet. Well, yeah, it is, but not in the same way other things are wet.
To address an earlier point about the so-called universality of moral laws: How universal are they, really, among all of humanity? What moral judgements actually are common to all peoples and all times? I’m curious if there are any. We could say “Do not kill another human being without just cause”, but there are a lot of escapes from that, not the least of which is that the notion that people outside of one’s close tribe even fully qualify as human beings in the first place is comparatively rare and recent in human history. It’s rather telling that even Native American nation names each mean “Human Being” in their own languages, and so exclude those outside of their respective nations from that definition. This of course does not even touch on the “just cause” issue, which is too slippery to dissect here.
One could go through issues of property, theft, marriage, children, and hosts of other issues, but still keep coming back to the question of “human being”, and not move past it – throughout most of human history, the outgroup never treated as fully human, and so is denied, to varying degrees, protection under moral laws. This makes claims to universal morality across peoples and cultures, while not entirely wrong, certainly quite limited.
This is more apparent when it comes to the treatment of animals. The question was posed “why is it wrong to torture puppies?” Well, we have some sort of inbuilt empathy response to pain witnessed in other creatures (why is this?), but also more practically we like dogs. I’m not sure nematodes get anywhere near the same empathy, even if at a modern abstract level we agree that torturing them too must also be immoral. We feel less compunction about chickens too. And for that matter cows. And frankly the level of empathy we feel for other animals, and the strength of our convictions that torturing them is wrong, we should all admit is often tied to their usefulness to us – after all, how many here would hesitate to strike a spider?
Again, the argument for universal morality runs up against limits.
This does not even address higher order concerns, a problem Tom Holland tackles acutely in his book Dominion.
A God existing outside of creation is fundamentally impossible to prove or disprove by mere deduction from within creation, unless that God interferes with and intervenes in that creation to make himself known. In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, God declares himself “I am”, which is a bit different than saying “I exist”.
Is there any conceivable miracle which would convince an atheist of God’s existence? Which would logically force one to acknowledge God’s existence? I can’t think of one. Anything you can imagine could be explained by an atheist as some sort of unknown or advanced technology, or something like that. (You know, like if some dead guy came back to life after 3 days, it could be some kind of alien intervention with cellular sized time machines injected into the cells of the corpse…) This brings up the question exactly how we are to define a miracle. It’s a tougher question than it sounds like at first. What imaginable occurrence would be inherently undeniable as a miracle?
Well, it would have to be an occurrence that somehow undeniably defied scientific explanation, or God speaking directly to them in an unmistakeable way. In the case of the former, someone really determined to not see what they do not want to see would still not see it, and even in the case of the latter we can easily picture the Scrooge response (indigestion to blame). If someone does not wish to believe in something, then one will find reasons to not believe in it. And by extension, if one only wishes to see miracles of a certain type, then one will quite likely tend to dismiss considering things outside that expected type as possibly being miracles.
Consider the following: we have not met and you do not know what I look like, but we have arranged to meet, and at some crowded locale. I’ve given you a description of what I look like, but not full details, and you have in you mind’s eye a model. But the place is very crowded, and your eye as it scans the crowd is going to more readily pick out people that fit your model. You could easily see me but dismiss me because the real me doesn’t line up quite enough with your model. Not until I tap you on the shoulder would you notice me, but even then you might find my appearance odd enough that are still not convinced it’s me. Now imagine that you were not looking for me at all, but I was in the crowd trying to get your attention – you still might ignore me or not even see me, even if I was doing something quite odd and abnormal. Or you might still look at me, see that I’m obviously abnormal, and then dismiss me as a crank.
What you are describing is how different groups of human beings in different times, places and circumstances have behaved and perhaps what they believed about right/wrong behavior.
But a set of moral facts would not simply take a survey how human beings currently behave or have behaved in the past, but would instead provide a framework for determining which actions would be considered right actions and which actions would be considered wrong actions.
Also, moral facts could be categorical. For example, “One should never eat a squirrel.” Or moral facts can be defeasible. For example, “One should never eat a squirrel unless one is near starvation.”
Now, you can get 9 moral realists in a room and you can ask them, “Do moral facts exist?” All 9 would likely say, “Yes,” or else one would wonder why they call themselves moral realists. But if you asked these 9 people, “What are the moral facts?” You might get 9 different responses. One of the 9 might even say, “I am not sure. But I do believe that moral facts exist.” Sort of like if you ask someone “Does intelligent life exist on other planets? Someone could say, “Yes,” without knowing on which planet intelligent life exists.
Teleology is the view that purpose (or Aristotelian final cause) is a real aspect of nature. Teleology was read out of nature at the start of the modern era.
I agree we all have the same tools. I also agree I could be wrong; I’m hardly infallible. Nor do I think belief in God gives special insight into human nature or human purpose unavailable to non-believers. It’s not magical.
What I do think is that atheism typically involves premises that, ultimately, make if very difficult to develop the realist view of morality you propose. At least beyond a raw assertion of the reality of uncreated moral facts. You seem to make that case with your analogy (in a later comment) between belief in moral facts to belief in intelligent life on other planets. No one knows which planets intelligent life is on, just as no one can tell the difference between genuinely real moral facts and illusory moral facts. And just as there is no point in discussing which planets intelligent life is on, since we have no way to tell, there is no point in discussing which moral facts are real and which are illusory. In the end the decision of what the real moral facts are is just as arbitrary as which planets on the other side of the galaxy have intelligent life.
Why is teleology important in the existence of right verses wrong or moral facts?
If God exists than God could issue commandments to some subset of the human population or to all of the human population. But this would not necessarily mean that those commandments are morally good.
One could similarly say that no one knows what actions God believes are moral or immoral.
Evening Climacus,
We can hope that there is intelligent life on other planets, it would be a first:)