Undermining Our Mines

We like to think that common sense and common values provide a solid and unquestioned foundation, so that even the most obtuse and cerebral academician might find some conversation possible with Joe at the bar. Real life always intrudes and leaks the helium from almost any metaphysical balloon. Most of us find unconscious comfort in the belief that deep down inside, we are all the same. But are we, and how can we know?

In an interview with Salon.com, Richard Dawkins said:

"[The] child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected."

But like the stranded Antarctic scientists in "The Thing", how can we tell who is carrying the infection, or even the nature of the infection? Using Dawkins insidious logic, once we are infected we no longer have the intellectual capacity to recognize the disease. Dawkins impales himself, and latter day Western civilization, on a pike with two sharp ends. If human beings are susceptible to "bad logic" and the virus alters our perception and understanding of the world, then we cannot know truth unless it is pure empirical fact. There is no meta-anything, only observation and prediction, stimulus and response.

Once rationalism becomes unhinged from objective truth, we can no longer discern the difference between good thoughts and bad thoughts. If the code with which we process our information has itself been altered, then how can truth be known? If truth cannot be known, then how does Richard Dawkins know that his own mind has not been infected with a sinister viral agent, causing him to place blind faith in naturalism and rendering his soul incapable of knowing God? Who is fooling who?

In his classic book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

The new rebel is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore, he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus, he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then writes another book, a novel, in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then as a philosopher that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts. Then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality, and in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

Once we doubt our doubting machine, no doubt we will lose our minds. Perhaps the virus was consumed long ago in some primordial garden, and we have never recovered from the deadly effects. Without a transcendent super-rational Being as a reference, how can we know one way or the other?

By calling religion a disease passed on from generation to generation, Dawkins cleverly discounts any need to discuss the matter. It now goes without saying: the poor chaps are simply deluded and out of their minds. Their rational being has been infected and distorted by parental implants; their worldview has been altered in such a way that they cannot escape from their imaginary God unless... Unless what? Unless they worship Dawkins? Like Frazier in Walden Two, he is very smug about his ability to discern the truth, but who plans for the planner? Or using his own metaphor, who determines which virus is healthy DNA and which virus is malignant?

Strident atheism has replaced reasonable discourse with cheap shots. Why bother with discussion and debate when an ad hominem slam against all who have faith will do the trick. Let us go further and do the Spartan thing; take the children away from their infected parents so that they can be raised in a healthy and rational environment by benevolent Master Planners. Let us outlaw churches and their bilious ideologies so that the plague can be brought under control and ultimately purged from human consciousness.

Oh my! I forgot, we tried this already, in two different flavors, Stalinism and Maoism. Well, mistakes were made, as with all scientific experiments. We need to learn from our failures and try again.

Letter to a Popular Atheist, Part Two

In response to my essay Letter to a Popular Atheist posted March 25, many readers objected to my assertion that atheism cannot defend an objective moral standard, but must borrow from a legacy of theistic culture. Some readers concluded (with indignation) that I was accusing atheists of being immoral; many simply restated Harris' assertion that mankind does not need an Imaginary Friend to tell us what is right and what is wrong.

When Jesus confronted the Pharisees, He accused them of failing to understand the heart of the law in spite of their intricate understanding and practice of the law. They had an epistemology but no ontology. This imaginary friend, who appeared in the flesh, did not come merely to explain the moral law, but rather, to identify Himself AS the law, as the way, the truth and the life.

Common sense and consensus, self-evident truths and social order, these are the atheist's evidences that morality can exist without a moral lawgiver. If God has knowledge of good, but good is an intrinsic property of reality independent of God, then we do not need God in order to know good. This is quite different than saying God embodies good, that good derives from the nature and being of God. God's transcendent and eternal nature are the ground of good, beauty, truth, virtue and all moral attributes. It isn't that we need an Imaginary Friend to tell us what is right and what is wrong, but the very existence of good derives from God's nature (just as evil derives from the absence of His nature.) Only in an eternal context do moral attributes possess weight or significance.

The Darwinian justification for ethical behavior reduces all that is good and noble to survival instinct. It amuses (and saddens) me that Darwinists become outraged when a theist states that there is no ontological basis for atheistic ethical behavior; their own system of value has been drained bloodless by determinism. Whence the outrage? The human heart yearns for more than perpetuation of the genetic code, and yet the Darwinist interprets ethical behavior as mere plumage in a courtship ritual. These mechanistic explanations of human value consume themselves like the ouroboros. Human beings are reduced to merely this or merely that, where even outrage has no foundation other than a violation of social norms or propriety.

The problem with atheistic morality is that it ultimately becomes a circular pragmatism. If it works, then it must be right. What is right? That which works, i.e., that which insures the survival of the human species and the maximization of human happiness. So why do I want to maximize human happiness, why not simply maximize my own happiness? Wouldn't this also be moral? Wouldn't the survival of a particular class or race be equally desirable? Survival of my family, or clan, or organization would also increase the likelihood of my own survival and personal fulfillment. Why would this be less moral than extending Darwinian love to the entire species, or even to other species? Regardless of where we draw the line of sanctification, whether we worship ourselves, family, clan, race, species or Mother Earth, we cannot escape personal death and non-existence. So what is the point of the perpetuation of a molecule?

The Darwinist can talk about the empirical mechanism of natural selection, but fails to explain the existential meaning of it. The Darwinist defends this as rational, but all this really means is that he can provide a materialistic explanation of the origin of ethical behavior. In the spirit of David Hume, this sleight of hand is also circular: that which is empirical is knowable, that which is knowable is empirical. The only exception is the statement "that which is empirical is knowable". It is one thing to say that we are genetically or socially compelled to behave in a certain way; it is quite another to say that we SHOULD behave that way. The Darwinist can only say that we SHOULD because we are predisposed or compelled by firmware.

Sam Harris either misunderstands or intentionally misrepresents ethical theism. He, like many atheists who have responded to my previous essay, believe that theists need a Big Daddy to tell them what to do. This view recasts the demeaning Freudian interpretation of the super-ego, and presumes to set the ethical atheist above this childlike state. Ethical atheists have therefore transcended the need for such a crutch and behave ethically on the basis of reason and evolution. Even this hierarchical view of human development implies some external reference by which to measure our presumed advancement from primitive totemist to exalted neuroscientist. Did we design the yardstick by which we have exalted ourselves? How convenient. The ethical theist believes that moral law exists as a property of being itself, because it is part of the nature of God Himself. That is the reason these truths are self-evident.

Human thought begs for an end to infinite regress, circular justification and the despair of self-definition. As Augustine said, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

Letter to a Popular Atheist

This post was originally published on March 25 at The American Thinker.


In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Sam Harris, an outspoken atheist and author of "Letter to a Christian Nation" once again presents the case that the moderate believers shield the fundamentalists from public criticism and analysis. Although much of his diatribe against faith is simply a regurgitation of historical atheism, this one idea is a new twist on the Enlightenment. Harris presents the case that if we take the Bible literally and fully, that the God of the Old Testament would be rejected outright by any thinking person. In his editorial supporting Congressman Pete Stark, he likens him to a modern day Cicero:

"Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham — the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo."

Harris' complaint is that honest public discourse on the subject of faith is forbidden for political and social reasons, and that it is time to call faith what it is -- a delusion. It isn't clear to me just who is preventing Dr. Harris from exercising his First Amendment rights, but obviously he feels threatened by the forces of Medieval Darkness. Popular culture and popular media are much more likely to condemn James Dobson than Sam Harris; nevertheless, Harris hopes to rally the broad base of closet atheists to speak out and denounce all religions as pathological mythology. Go for it, Sam.

Let's assume for a moment that Harris is correct, that is, believers are delusional and misguided, faith is false, God does not exist, and the greatest threat to human survival is the irreconcilable conflict between the major world religions and their inflexible and delusional beliefs. What then is the basis for his desire to save humanity from itself? At the end of his screed, Harris says:

"There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know."

So what does it mean to be ethical, or especially spiritual, with an atheistic worldview? The underlying premise of Harris' disdain for believers is that delusional beliefs threaten the existence of mankind. What are these "better reasons" for helping the poor, feeding the hungry, and defending the weak? How does empiricism support the concept of compassion? From an evolutionary point of view, what is the advantage of helping the poor, feeding the hungry or defending the weak? Nietzsche had a more rational answer for a God-less world, and his atheism was at least intellectually honest. The superman does not need an objective moral standard -- he makes his own and imposes it on the weaker. So it is that Harris falls by his own words; he pretends to know things he does not know. He does not know what is good or what is evil; he only knows what is socially normative. He does not know anything spiritual, because the spirit is imaginary, or at best a mental construct.

Francis Schaeffer said that secular man can only live in the lower storey (secular world) by borrowing from the upper storey (spiritual world). In other words, atheists can only talk about ethics because they are immersed in a social structure sustained by the "mythology" they reject. They borrow ethics from God and then claim that these ethics exist without a transcendent law-giving God to uphold them. What the atheists cannot explain is how they justify their ethical standards. What does it mean to say that compassion is deeper than religion? Perhaps we should adopt the behavioral model and realize that in a world without God, compassion does not really mean anything, just like freedom and dignity. Maybe compassion is behavioral conditioning and has evolutionary value, but if so, we can hardly call this deep. It is worse than shallow, because it is something we pretend to know which we do not really know. We only respond to stimuli.

I agree with Dr. Harris that compassion is deeper than religion. Compassion is as deep as God, and begins and ends with God. It cannot be any deeper or higher than that. Perhaps Dr. Harris should talk to Jesus; if I am not mistaken, I think He had a distaste for religion as well.