Thursday, March 11, 2010
Atheistic Incoherency Redux
I asserted in a recent post that atheism is baseless because of a fundamental incoherency in its principle argument: God doesn’t exist because of the presence of suffering and evil. When pressed to explain what bearing suffering or evil have on the basic ontological question of whether God exists, the characteristic response is that because God does not intervene (or at least appears not to intervene) to prevent or to mitigate the suffering/evil problem, He therefore does not exist. Thus the atheist’s argument reduces to: God doesn’t exist because He’s not as nice as I think He should be. Stated another way: God isn’t because He is (just in a way contrary to how Kenneth Copeland says He is).
Like I said: Incoherent.
Needless to say, there are some atheists who take issue with this claim. One such objector was the blogger David B., with whom I enjoyed an intriguing exchange. I won’t reproduce the entire exchange here (if you’re interested, read the comments attached to my post “Mutual of Omaha and the Marlin Perkins Theodicy,”) but I think there are portions worth highlighting.
His first objection: “Loving fathers don’t starve their children to death if they can avoid it.” Applying this objection to God, we get: “A loving God doesn’t starve His creatures to death if He can avoid it.” Look familiar? It should. It’s the “God isn’t as nice as He should be” argument yet once again. This sort of argument pops up so frequently, you’d think this is the only weapon in the atheist’s arsenal. And, most likely, you’d be right.
What intrigues me all the more, though, is the atheist’s propensity for making unwarranted assumptions in order to support his assertions. Here there are at least three. Can you spot them? I’ll give you a moment.
[Theme from “Jeopardy” plays here.]
Finished? Good. Let’s compare notes.
The first is that when one of God’s creatures starves to death, God is the One causing the starvation. But we have to ask ourselves: Is it that He actively starves His creature to death or that He passively allows His creature to starve to death? Or is there any reason for supposing God should be involved at all? Perhaps starvation is merely a logical necessity, born from the fact that there is a practical limit to the availability of foodstuffs, and that this availability is not uniform.
And perhaps it is not God who is to blame for allowing someone to starve to death, but ourselves. As compelling as the image of a victim of starvation may be, the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing about it; we merely mutter “Oh, isn’t that a shame?” or some such platitude and go on our merry way. We see the ads on television virtually every day: Just thirty cents a day to save the life of a suffering child. Yet—and be honest—do you call the 800-number on the screen and send a donation? Do you even know anyone who does?
The second assumption is the qualifier: “If He can avoid it.” This begs the question: How do we know what God can and can’t avoid?
The answer that springs to mind is that if we define God as an omnipotent being, then there’s nothing he can’t do. But does it necessarily follow that because of God’s omnipotence that when one of His creatures starves to death this is something He could have avoided? To avoid is to take steps to eschew the results of a certain sequence of events. Inasmuch as taking the steps or not taking the steps is a matter of volition, the avoidance of the creature’s starvation is then simply a matter of God’s choice. Whatever reasons God may have to choose to avoid or not to avoid, these are not self-evident, and so are known only to Him. To know what reasons God has in mind to avoid or not to avoid the death-by-starvation of one of His creatures is therefore to know the mind of God, which—unless He actually tells us what is on His mind—is something no one can do, atheist or theist. The only way of knowing for certain what God had in mind when one of His creatures starves to death is if He descends from Heaven and says something like, “Yeah, I could have avoided the guy’s starvation, but I didn’t like him very much, so to heck with him.” This would satisfy David’s objection, but it would also kind of toss his whole “there’s no God” thing right out the window. Talk about your Pyrrhic victories!
Okay, so what’s the third assumption? That death by starvation is a bad thing (that is, an unloving one, and hence a bad one). This assumption is less obvious than the first two, but at its base it’s still an assumption because it’s a claim that is made without any effort expended to show how the claim is valid.
Is starving to death objectively bad? Unpleasant, doubtlessly, since having gone hungry a time or two myself, I have an idea what starvation is like (once, for instance, I fasted for forty days; a thoroughly unpleasant experience, I assure you); further, we need only look into the eyes of some emaciated, swollen-bellied victim of starvation to understand the experience is agonizing.
But are we to argue that what makes starvation bad is its unpleasantness? Surely not all things that are unpleasant are necessarily bad. Like pulling an abscessed tooth, or passing a kidney stone. Unpleasant, yes, but better to be rid of the tooth or the kidney stone. So if not all unpleasant things are necessarily bad, how are we so certain about starvation?
Perhaps, then, it’s the severity of the unpleasantness that makes starvation bad. As agonizing as passing a kidney stone might be, surely the agony is nothing in comparison to that of a prolonged event such as starvation. But how much severity is too much? Is there an objective standard somewhere that determines how much severity of unpleasantness is required to make a thing bad, something on a scale of death-by-sex-with-Dallas-Cowboy-cheerleaders on the “not so bad” extreme and death-by-Sarlacc (the creature from Star Wars that digests its victims over a 1000-year period) on the “really bad” one? And where, exactly, would death-by-starvation fall on such a scale? Isn’t this a matter of opinion, then, rather than fact?
As much as we might wish to agree that death-by-starvation surely can’t be considered a good thing, we’re still stuck if there’s no proper rationale for determining what, if anything, makes it bad in its essence. Is it bad in an absolute sense, always bad in all times and in all places? Is it generally bad but maybe sometimes good, depending upon circumstances? Is it merely bad in a relativistic sense, that is, bad in one man’s opinion and good in another’s? Again, how do we know for certain?
Perhaps, though, it’s not the starvation that’s bad but the dying. Maybe it’s bad because death is bad. But this, too, is only an assumption—that death is the end, and when you’re gone, you’re gone. After all, the finality of death is a matter of some debate; just put an atheist and a theist into the same room and listen to them argue about it.
A fortiori, it doesn’t seem to make much difference whether the atheist is right that death is the end or the theist is right that death is only the beginning. If the atheist is right, death can only be bad if living mattered in the first place, but it’s hard to see how living matters if life is only the accidental offshoot of an accidental universe, which is the only means at our disposal for explaining our existence if there’s no Creator. A living being starves to death—so? Did he matter? Who says? And when the atheist retorts “I say he mattered!” this only begs the question: How do we know the atheist matters? He’s only an accident, too. Are we to assume that life matters, even if we can’t explain how it does? Another unwarranted assumption. Or, if the theist is right that death is only the end of our physical existence and not the end of our spiritual existence, then death might actually be a good thing, regardless of whatever horrors might enjoin to bring it about.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that death by starvation is okay. Maybe it isn’t. I’m just asking how for certain we know it’s not only not-okay, but genuinely bad. Additionally, I would ask how we know that because God is surely capable of intervening to prevent the death-by-starvation of one of His creatures, He should intervene to prevent it. Is God morally obliged to prevent the death-by-starvation, and if so, how do we know?
The logic underlying this assumption is flimsy, because, as assumptions go, it’s not particularly well-thought out, being a reaction on an emotional level rather than a rational one. There’s nothing wrong with emotion per se, but I find its presence here rather ironic, considering the argument comes from someone who thinks atheism is a rational enterprise. Perhaps it’s only an emotional one; that certainly seemed to be my state of mind in those days when I was telling myself I was an atheist.
Very possibly, there’s even a fourth assumption: Should we even concede that God is to blame for the starvation or that starvation/death is inarguably bad, there remains one further question: Does this demonstrate that God is unloving?
Consider, for instance, that in certain parts of the Muslim world, when a 14-year-old girl is attacked and raped, not only is her rapist executed for committing the rape, the 14-year-old girl is often executed as well, for the sin of fornication. Oftentimes the means of execution is death by stoning, and even sometimes one of the participants in hurling the stones at her is the girl’s own father.
Please understand that I am not defending this practice. Personally, I find it beyond outrageous—particularly from those who purport to worship a god who is wise, just, compassionate, and merciful. In my view, executing a girl whose only crime was her failure to fight off her attacker is the antithesis of wisdom and a bastardization of justice; it is neither compassionate nor merciful, and manifestly so. But I am not a Muslim. The ones hurling the stones, to say the least, see the matter differently.
But what of the father who participates in his daughter’s execution? In such a case, is he a loving father, or an unloving one? Perhaps he would argue that he indeed loves his daughter, but that he loves his religious faith more, and thus has a higher moral duty to participate in his daughter’s stoning rather than to prevent it. Perhaps, as he hurls the stone towards his child, he reassures himself that this is the right and proper thing to do; that his daughter’s death is the correct atonement for her sin of fornication; and that by participating in this way in his daughter’s death he is actually ushering her into Paradise. Does his heart, then, keen in joy for his child’s deliverance? If so, then, perhaps we should argue that loving fathers actually do allow their children to die, under certain circumstances. However visceral our reaction that this sort of thing simply does not happen, are we stating a fact, or only in our opinion?
But it’s not merely the unwarranted assumption that makes the atheistic world view untenable; there’s also the bad logic. And there’s plenty of it.
One such example comes from baptistmessenger.com, in which an atheist identifying himself as William offers up the following absurdity qua metaphysical claim: “Atheism IS the default position, my friend. Theism is the belief in a god or gods. Add the suffix ‘a’ to the root word and you’ve added ‘without’. So (a) theism means (without) belief in a god or gods. An infant doesn’t believe in a god or gods, so they are atheists.”
Hooboy.
(And never mind that “a” is a prefix, not a suffix. Far be it from me to argue that bad grammar is bad logic.)
Honestly, though, I have to wonder: do atheists really think this sort of nonsense is reasonable, or do they just stop at the first bit of sophistry that comes their way and refuse to consider the matter any further? I suspect the latter. After all, atheism is incoherent because the arguments that support it are incoherent.
Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t grasping at straws to hold onto our belief systems can easily see what’s wrong with William’s argument: While it is certainly true that babies are born without the belief that God exists, they are also born without the belief that two and two make four, without the belief that wolverines make good house pets, and without the belief that Parkay has the taste of real butter. Babies don’t believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Yahweh, Zeus, Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, you, me, William, or that natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation is all you need to change a cow into a whale. The reason why babies don’t believe in these things is because babies are born without any beliefs at all.
The problem for the all-babies-are-atheists argument, however, is that atheism is itself a belief, and so is one of the things babies don’t believe in. To say that one particular belief that babies don’t have should be our default position—over all the other beliefs that babies also don’t have—is an arbitrarily selective argument, and is thus absurd; there is simply no conceivable reason for choosing the one sort of belief over all the others. There is only the good excuse: William wants to claim that atheism should be our default position, and it doesn’t really matter to him what argument he chooses to warrant the claim. Perhaps God doesn’t exist because Parkay doesn’t have the taste of real butter, and if God were real, it would, and since babies don’t believe in the great buttery flavor of Parkay, maybe that is why all babies are atheists.
What is at fault here is a poor definition: atheism is not the lack of belief in the existence of God; it is the belief in the lack of a God. The atheist does not simply lack the belief that God is; he believes that God isn’t.
This, in turn, leads us back to my discussion with David, who apparently takes some issue with my definition of atheism. “We atheists,” he says at one point, “are almost never absolutist in our nonbelief in God. I do not claim certain knowledge that there's no God. Nor do most atheists.”
University of Texas philosopher J. Budziszewski comments in his essay “The Second Tablet Project” that the reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist is that he won’t even be honest with himself, let alone be honest in the philosophical underpinnings of his world view. David’s comment is a case in point: William’s definition of atheism notwithstanding, or David’s, any atheist who is not absolutist in his belief is not an atheist. Anyone who only thinks that God may not exist is not an atheist, and is only kidding himself by saying otherwise.
Our discussion on this point is worth repeating in some detail:
Yours Truly: And all atheists are absolutists, as are all theists. To the question: Is there a God? There are three possible answers: Yes, absolutely (the theist's position); No, absolutely not (the atheist's position); and I don't know (the agnostic's position). Any atheist who is not an absolutist is not an atheist, but an agnostic who only thinks he's an atheist.
David: Maybe that how YOU define atheism. But it’s certainly not how people who call themselves atheists generally use the term. But I'm not interested in arguing semantics with you. Feel free to think of me as an atheist-leaning agnostic or simply a non-theist if you like.
Yours Truly: I agree. By and large (and this seems to have been the case in my own flirtation with atheism), atheists do not generally use the word 'atheist' to mean someone who says unequivocally that there's no God, but only that there's probably no God. But that's agnosticism, not atheism. I suspect that most people who call themselves atheists are really only agnostics. There's nothing particularly wrong in doubting that God exists (other than that He does), but I do think there's something altogether wrong with calling oneself an atheist when the word does not apply.
This is one of the many reasons I finally decided atheism is wrong. It is a not particularly well-thought-out philosophy. So when guys like Richard Dawkins tell us that Darwin allowed him to become “an intellectually fulfilled atheist,” they're only kidding themselves—and us as well.
This is a crucial point, so it’s worth repeating. An atheist does not say that God probably doesn’t exist, any more than a theist says that God probably does. The theist says “God is”; the atheist replies “No, he isn’t.” These are absolutist positions. The probably-does/probably-doesn’t positions fall under the domain of agnosticism. To borrow William’s strategy of pointing out the meanings of words one root at a time, “agnostic” is derived from the Greek a “without” and gnosis “knowledge.” Therefore, an agnostic is someone who lacks the knowledge to answer the question definitively, hence his use of words like “probably.”
To repeat, atheism’s principle weakness is that its philosophical underpinnings are incoherent. I’ll end this post with a lengthier quote from the Budziszewski essay:
[Both theist and atheist assume] that the universe is causally and rationally patterned: this causes that, that explains this, such-and-such is a reasonable explanation of so-and-so. But what right has the atheist to this assumption? Why should there be any patterns whatsoever? If the universe just is, then why shouldn’t the things in it just happen? There is no reason to expect them to yield to reasoning, no explanation of why they should even have an explanation. Moreover, we are not out of the woods even if we do find patterns in the universe, for if these patterns too just are, then there is no warrant for assuming that they are more than local, accidental, superficial, inconsistent, and ephemeral. The sun may not rise tomorrow morning. Fire may not burn this afternoon. Two plus two may equal now four, now six, now one. For me, conception may not be caused by sexual intercourse (that seems to be how some teenagers think). Even if today I am myself, next week I may be someone else (that is how postmodernists think). So why should the natural law have even the force of prudence, much less oughtness? Why should there even be logic? Why should I “watch out” for anything? How could I?
How, indeed?
Like I said: Incoherent.
Needless to say, there are some atheists who take issue with this claim. One such objector was the blogger David B., with whom I enjoyed an intriguing exchange. I won’t reproduce the entire exchange here (if you’re interested, read the comments attached to my post “Mutual of Omaha and the Marlin Perkins Theodicy,”) but I think there are portions worth highlighting.
His first objection: “Loving fathers don’t starve their children to death if they can avoid it.” Applying this objection to God, we get: “A loving God doesn’t starve His creatures to death if He can avoid it.” Look familiar? It should. It’s the “God isn’t as nice as He should be” argument yet once again. This sort of argument pops up so frequently, you’d think this is the only weapon in the atheist’s arsenal. And, most likely, you’d be right.
What intrigues me all the more, though, is the atheist’s propensity for making unwarranted assumptions in order to support his assertions. Here there are at least three. Can you spot them? I’ll give you a moment.
[Theme from “Jeopardy” plays here.]
Finished? Good. Let’s compare notes.
The first is that when one of God’s creatures starves to death, God is the One causing the starvation. But we have to ask ourselves: Is it that He actively starves His creature to death or that He passively allows His creature to starve to death? Or is there any reason for supposing God should be involved at all? Perhaps starvation is merely a logical necessity, born from the fact that there is a practical limit to the availability of foodstuffs, and that this availability is not uniform.
And perhaps it is not God who is to blame for allowing someone to starve to death, but ourselves. As compelling as the image of a victim of starvation may be, the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing about it; we merely mutter “Oh, isn’t that a shame?” or some such platitude and go on our merry way. We see the ads on television virtually every day: Just thirty cents a day to save the life of a suffering child. Yet—and be honest—do you call the 800-number on the screen and send a donation? Do you even know anyone who does?
The second assumption is the qualifier: “If He can avoid it.” This begs the question: How do we know what God can and can’t avoid?
The answer that springs to mind is that if we define God as an omnipotent being, then there’s nothing he can’t do. But does it necessarily follow that because of God’s omnipotence that when one of His creatures starves to death this is something He could have avoided? To avoid is to take steps to eschew the results of a certain sequence of events. Inasmuch as taking the steps or not taking the steps is a matter of volition, the avoidance of the creature’s starvation is then simply a matter of God’s choice. Whatever reasons God may have to choose to avoid or not to avoid, these are not self-evident, and so are known only to Him. To know what reasons God has in mind to avoid or not to avoid the death-by-starvation of one of His creatures is therefore to know the mind of God, which—unless He actually tells us what is on His mind—is something no one can do, atheist or theist. The only way of knowing for certain what God had in mind when one of His creatures starves to death is if He descends from Heaven and says something like, “Yeah, I could have avoided the guy’s starvation, but I didn’t like him very much, so to heck with him.” This would satisfy David’s objection, but it would also kind of toss his whole “there’s no God” thing right out the window. Talk about your Pyrrhic victories!
Okay, so what’s the third assumption? That death by starvation is a bad thing (that is, an unloving one, and hence a bad one). This assumption is less obvious than the first two, but at its base it’s still an assumption because it’s a claim that is made without any effort expended to show how the claim is valid.
Is starving to death objectively bad? Unpleasant, doubtlessly, since having gone hungry a time or two myself, I have an idea what starvation is like (once, for instance, I fasted for forty days; a thoroughly unpleasant experience, I assure you); further, we need only look into the eyes of some emaciated, swollen-bellied victim of starvation to understand the experience is agonizing.
But are we to argue that what makes starvation bad is its unpleasantness? Surely not all things that are unpleasant are necessarily bad. Like pulling an abscessed tooth, or passing a kidney stone. Unpleasant, yes, but better to be rid of the tooth or the kidney stone. So if not all unpleasant things are necessarily bad, how are we so certain about starvation?
Perhaps, then, it’s the severity of the unpleasantness that makes starvation bad. As agonizing as passing a kidney stone might be, surely the agony is nothing in comparison to that of a prolonged event such as starvation. But how much severity is too much? Is there an objective standard somewhere that determines how much severity of unpleasantness is required to make a thing bad, something on a scale of death-by-sex-with-Dallas-Cowboy-cheerleaders on the “not so bad” extreme and death-by-Sarlacc (the creature from Star Wars that digests its victims over a 1000-year period) on the “really bad” one? And where, exactly, would death-by-starvation fall on such a scale? Isn’t this a matter of opinion, then, rather than fact?
As much as we might wish to agree that death-by-starvation surely can’t be considered a good thing, we’re still stuck if there’s no proper rationale for determining what, if anything, makes it bad in its essence. Is it bad in an absolute sense, always bad in all times and in all places? Is it generally bad but maybe sometimes good, depending upon circumstances? Is it merely bad in a relativistic sense, that is, bad in one man’s opinion and good in another’s? Again, how do we know for certain?
Perhaps, though, it’s not the starvation that’s bad but the dying. Maybe it’s bad because death is bad. But this, too, is only an assumption—that death is the end, and when you’re gone, you’re gone. After all, the finality of death is a matter of some debate; just put an atheist and a theist into the same room and listen to them argue about it.
A fortiori, it doesn’t seem to make much difference whether the atheist is right that death is the end or the theist is right that death is only the beginning. If the atheist is right, death can only be bad if living mattered in the first place, but it’s hard to see how living matters if life is only the accidental offshoot of an accidental universe, which is the only means at our disposal for explaining our existence if there’s no Creator. A living being starves to death—so? Did he matter? Who says? And when the atheist retorts “I say he mattered!” this only begs the question: How do we know the atheist matters? He’s only an accident, too. Are we to assume that life matters, even if we can’t explain how it does? Another unwarranted assumption. Or, if the theist is right that death is only the end of our physical existence and not the end of our spiritual existence, then death might actually be a good thing, regardless of whatever horrors might enjoin to bring it about.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that death by starvation is okay. Maybe it isn’t. I’m just asking how for certain we know it’s not only not-okay, but genuinely bad. Additionally, I would ask how we know that because God is surely capable of intervening to prevent the death-by-starvation of one of His creatures, He should intervene to prevent it. Is God morally obliged to prevent the death-by-starvation, and if so, how do we know?
The logic underlying this assumption is flimsy, because, as assumptions go, it’s not particularly well-thought out, being a reaction on an emotional level rather than a rational one. There’s nothing wrong with emotion per se, but I find its presence here rather ironic, considering the argument comes from someone who thinks atheism is a rational enterprise. Perhaps it’s only an emotional one; that certainly seemed to be my state of mind in those days when I was telling myself I was an atheist.
Very possibly, there’s even a fourth assumption: Should we even concede that God is to blame for the starvation or that starvation/death is inarguably bad, there remains one further question: Does this demonstrate that God is unloving?
Consider, for instance, that in certain parts of the Muslim world, when a 14-year-old girl is attacked and raped, not only is her rapist executed for committing the rape, the 14-year-old girl is often executed as well, for the sin of fornication. Oftentimes the means of execution is death by stoning, and even sometimes one of the participants in hurling the stones at her is the girl’s own father.
Please understand that I am not defending this practice. Personally, I find it beyond outrageous—particularly from those who purport to worship a god who is wise, just, compassionate, and merciful. In my view, executing a girl whose only crime was her failure to fight off her attacker is the antithesis of wisdom and a bastardization of justice; it is neither compassionate nor merciful, and manifestly so. But I am not a Muslim. The ones hurling the stones, to say the least, see the matter differently.
But what of the father who participates in his daughter’s execution? In such a case, is he a loving father, or an unloving one? Perhaps he would argue that he indeed loves his daughter, but that he loves his religious faith more, and thus has a higher moral duty to participate in his daughter’s stoning rather than to prevent it. Perhaps, as he hurls the stone towards his child, he reassures himself that this is the right and proper thing to do; that his daughter’s death is the correct atonement for her sin of fornication; and that by participating in this way in his daughter’s death he is actually ushering her into Paradise. Does his heart, then, keen in joy for his child’s deliverance? If so, then, perhaps we should argue that loving fathers actually do allow their children to die, under certain circumstances. However visceral our reaction that this sort of thing simply does not happen, are we stating a fact, or only in our opinion?
But it’s not merely the unwarranted assumption that makes the atheistic world view untenable; there’s also the bad logic. And there’s plenty of it.
One such example comes from baptistmessenger.com, in which an atheist identifying himself as William offers up the following absurdity qua metaphysical claim: “Atheism IS the default position, my friend. Theism is the belief in a god or gods. Add the suffix ‘a’ to the root word and you’ve added ‘without’. So (a) theism means (without) belief in a god or gods. An infant doesn’t believe in a god or gods, so they are atheists.”
Hooboy.
(And never mind that “a” is a prefix, not a suffix. Far be it from me to argue that bad grammar is bad logic.)
Honestly, though, I have to wonder: do atheists really think this sort of nonsense is reasonable, or do they just stop at the first bit of sophistry that comes their way and refuse to consider the matter any further? I suspect the latter. After all, atheism is incoherent because the arguments that support it are incoherent.
Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t grasping at straws to hold onto our belief systems can easily see what’s wrong with William’s argument: While it is certainly true that babies are born without the belief that God exists, they are also born without the belief that two and two make four, without the belief that wolverines make good house pets, and without the belief that Parkay has the taste of real butter. Babies don’t believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Yahweh, Zeus, Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, you, me, William, or that natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation is all you need to change a cow into a whale. The reason why babies don’t believe in these things is because babies are born without any beliefs at all.
The problem for the all-babies-are-atheists argument, however, is that atheism is itself a belief, and so is one of the things babies don’t believe in. To say that one particular belief that babies don’t have should be our default position—over all the other beliefs that babies also don’t have—is an arbitrarily selective argument, and is thus absurd; there is simply no conceivable reason for choosing the one sort of belief over all the others. There is only the good excuse: William wants to claim that atheism should be our default position, and it doesn’t really matter to him what argument he chooses to warrant the claim. Perhaps God doesn’t exist because Parkay doesn’t have the taste of real butter, and if God were real, it would, and since babies don’t believe in the great buttery flavor of Parkay, maybe that is why all babies are atheists.
What is at fault here is a poor definition: atheism is not the lack of belief in the existence of God; it is the belief in the lack of a God. The atheist does not simply lack the belief that God is; he believes that God isn’t.
This, in turn, leads us back to my discussion with David, who apparently takes some issue with my definition of atheism. “We atheists,” he says at one point, “are almost never absolutist in our nonbelief in God. I do not claim certain knowledge that there's no God. Nor do most atheists.”
University of Texas philosopher J. Budziszewski comments in his essay “The Second Tablet Project” that the reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist is that he won’t even be honest with himself, let alone be honest in the philosophical underpinnings of his world view. David’s comment is a case in point: William’s definition of atheism notwithstanding, or David’s, any atheist who is not absolutist in his belief is not an atheist. Anyone who only thinks that God may not exist is not an atheist, and is only kidding himself by saying otherwise.
Our discussion on this point is worth repeating in some detail:
Yours Truly: And all atheists are absolutists, as are all theists. To the question: Is there a God? There are three possible answers: Yes, absolutely (the theist's position); No, absolutely not (the atheist's position); and I don't know (the agnostic's position). Any atheist who is not an absolutist is not an atheist, but an agnostic who only thinks he's an atheist.
David: Maybe that how YOU define atheism. But it’s certainly not how people who call themselves atheists generally use the term. But I'm not interested in arguing semantics with you. Feel free to think of me as an atheist-leaning agnostic or simply a non-theist if you like.
Yours Truly: I agree. By and large (and this seems to have been the case in my own flirtation with atheism), atheists do not generally use the word 'atheist' to mean someone who says unequivocally that there's no God, but only that there's probably no God. But that's agnosticism, not atheism. I suspect that most people who call themselves atheists are really only agnostics. There's nothing particularly wrong in doubting that God exists (other than that He does), but I do think there's something altogether wrong with calling oneself an atheist when the word does not apply.
This is one of the many reasons I finally decided atheism is wrong. It is a not particularly well-thought-out philosophy. So when guys like Richard Dawkins tell us that Darwin allowed him to become “an intellectually fulfilled atheist,” they're only kidding themselves—and us as well.
This is a crucial point, so it’s worth repeating. An atheist does not say that God probably doesn’t exist, any more than a theist says that God probably does. The theist says “God is”; the atheist replies “No, he isn’t.” These are absolutist positions. The probably-does/probably-doesn’t positions fall under the domain of agnosticism. To borrow William’s strategy of pointing out the meanings of words one root at a time, “agnostic” is derived from the Greek a “without” and gnosis “knowledge.” Therefore, an agnostic is someone who lacks the knowledge to answer the question definitively, hence his use of words like “probably.”
To repeat, atheism’s principle weakness is that its philosophical underpinnings are incoherent. I’ll end this post with a lengthier quote from the Budziszewski essay:
[Both theist and atheist assume] that the universe is causally and rationally patterned: this causes that, that explains this, such-and-such is a reasonable explanation of so-and-so. But what right has the atheist to this assumption? Why should there be any patterns whatsoever? If the universe just is, then why shouldn’t the things in it just happen? There is no reason to expect them to yield to reasoning, no explanation of why they should even have an explanation. Moreover, we are not out of the woods even if we do find patterns in the universe, for if these patterns too just are, then there is no warrant for assuming that they are more than local, accidental, superficial, inconsistent, and ephemeral. The sun may not rise tomorrow morning. Fire may not burn this afternoon. Two plus two may equal now four, now six, now one. For me, conception may not be caused by sexual intercourse (that seems to be how some teenagers think). Even if today I am myself, next week I may be someone else (that is how postmodernists think). So why should the natural law have even the force of prudence, much less oughtness? Why should there even be logic? Why should I “watch out” for anything? How could I?
How, indeed?
Labels: atheism, problem of evil, problem of suffering, Sarlacc, theism, theodicy
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Mutual of Omaha and the Marlin Perkins Theodicy
An atheist once proffered what he thought was a valid objection to the existence of God: In the arctic, he noted, polar bears face a sere environment; there’s not a lot to eat, and due to the polar bear’s size, it needs to eat a lot. Worse yet, a female polar bear has to find not only enough food for herself but for her cub as well.
So, imagine, said my atheist acquaintance, a polar bear on the hunt for food. Suppose she finds a seal pup. If the polar bear is successful in her hunt, she and her cub will eat, but the baby seal will die. If the baby seal manages to escape the polar bear, then both she and her cub will starve. Why, oh why, said the atheist, would such a thing ever happen in a universe created by a loving God? What kind of God would allow it?
Atheists seem to revel in this kind of argumentation. With a big “Aha! Gotcha!” grin on their faces, they lay it out before the theist, ready to deride or otherwise tear apart any response the theist might make. After all, they figure, there’s no way to formulate a defensible response—either the theist will argue that Got thinks it’s okay for baby seals to die or that He thinks it’s okay for a polar bear mama and her cub to starve to death. Either way, it’s a lose-lose situation, and either possibility undermines—so says the atheist—the notion that God loves His creation.
I try not to characterize people as stupid simply for saying things I disagree with. As one who at one time had his own flirtation with atheism, I know that it’s not stupidity that underpins the atheist’s world view. As Ron White said, “You can’t fix stupid,” and the fact that I went from theism to atheism and back to theism suggests that at one point or other, my world view went from broke to fixed. Thus, stupidity was never a relevant issue. It most certainly didn’t apply to my atheist acquaintance. Still doesn’t.
That being said, the God-doesn’t-exist-because-either-bears-or-seals-end-up-dead ploy is just so insufferably brain-dead stupid that it doesn’t even qualify as an argument. Ontologically speaking, it is incoherent.
What kind of God allows the bear/seal scenario? There’s the obvious answer: the kind of God Who would allow such a thing.
Virtually every argument against the existence of God I’ve ever come across—no, strike the “virtually,”—the question posed concerns itself with God’s nature, not His existence. The very question itself, “What kind of God…?” presupposes that there IS a God; it is merely a question of the kind, to wit, the kind that allows suffering to exist, as opposed to the kind that would prohibit it.
So if Kenneth Copeland or Jesse Duplantis or Creflo Dollar, Jr., preach that there is a God who loves us, the atheist is only kidding himself when he offers the lose-lose scenario to suggest that God is merely a figure of their imaginations. The scenario has no bearing whatsoever on whether GOD loves us, but whether God LOVES us, and even if the scenario were in any way valid, the atheist still hasn’t said one word as to whether the presence of suffering necessary negates the possibility that God loves us despite whatever suffering we endure. Isn’t it at least possible that God loves us anyway?
This simple intuition is, in point of fact, empirical. The idea that one might love without intervening in suffering is part of our daily experience. For example, when my kids were learning to ride bikes, I did my best to teach them the how, but as any father knows, there comes a point when dad has to let go of the bike and let the kid proceed on her own, knowing full well that she might topple over and hurt herself. And in my case, that’s exactly what happened, and more than once (I have three daughters). For anyone who argues that because I didn’t dive head-first under my kid so she wouldn’t scrape her knee that I didn’t (and don’t) love her, I can only say that he and the horse he rode in on know exactly what he can do about it.
I know for a fact: I love my child, and yet there were times when I didn’t intervene to prevent her suffering.
Oh, yeah? says the atheist. Well, I’ll bet you at least picked your kid up from the ground. You hugged her and put a bandage on her knee. You at least showed signs that you love your kid. Why doesn’t your all-loving God ever do anything like that?
So the atheist’s argument subtly shifts (as all atheist arguments are wont to do, by the way); from God’s existence, to why He allows suffering, to why He doesn’t mitigate suffering. Asking an atheist to make up his mind about why he says there’s no God is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, and oftentimes just as messy. But I digress.
The answer, of course, is that sometimes He allows suffering and sometimes does not. Sometimes He doesn’t mitigate suffering, or at least appears not to, and sometimes He does. So God does mitigate suffering, at least at times, just never in a way to satisfy an atheist. (This, of course, is the atheist’s problem, not God’s, for the simple fact that whatever answer is given, the atheist will elect not to be satisfied with it.)
From the theist’s perspective, however, God sends comfort, often and in many ways. He is rest for the weary. He is a cool spring for those who thirst. He is a right good help in times of trouble. He is my shepherd, Who makes me to lie down in green pastures, Who leads me beside the still waters, Who restores my soul, Whose rod and staff comfort me, and Who, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is with me. Therefore, I will fear no evil, which, as near as I can tell includes suffering. (Really, someone needs to write all this down. Oh, wait, someone already has.)
The atheist simply denies all this, not because he must, but because he wants to.
“WANTS” to? the atheist sneers testily, at the insinuation that his wholly arbitrary worldview is wholly arbitrary. I could say just as easily that you believe in God for the same reason. You just WANT to believe in God, and so “see” His handiwork all around you.
Perhaps, I reply. But just as it’s possible for one to love without preventing suffering, it’s also possible for one to love without mitigating it either.
Don’t believe me? Here’s my handy-dandy two-word response. It not only answers the question regarding mitigation, but suffering in general, and even refutes the aforementioned incredibly stupid bear/seal scenario. Ready? Okay, here goes:
Marlin Perkins.
I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in.
Yup. Good old Marlin “Just as the tigress protects her cubs, Mutual of Omaha provides you the security you need through life’s uncertainties” Perkins.
For those of you too young to remember such things, there was a time when television was broadcast over analog airwaves rather than digital signals. There were no satellite dishes, nor even cable. For that matter, there was barely any TV—just two channels, plus a third if you had a UHF converter box. On Sundays, after the football game (yes, singular), there was a nature program called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, hosted by the curator of the St. Louis Zoo, Marlin Perkins.
“Welcome,” Marlin Perkins would say. “Today we’re headed down to sunny Venezuela to observe the mighty anaconda.” And off the camera crew would go, jiggedy-jig, where they would find a hungry anaconda resting quietly in the crook of a high tree branch, waiting for lunch to come ambling by.
“Uh-oh!” Marlin Perkins would whisper. “Here comes an unsuspecting capybara, and the hungry anaconda has him in his sights.”
A capybara, must you know, is the largest member of the order Rodentia, roughly a 130-pound hamster. Good eats, according to the anaconda. And so, as Marlin and company sat with baited breath, the capybara would titter into range, and the anaconda would slump off the tree branch and fall on top of the capybara, wrapping its massive coils around the capybara as it struggled to escape, slowly and brutally crushing it to death before swallowing it whole. Rather a nasty way to die, one would suppose.
Yet, during the entire episode, Marlin Perkins never once bothered to call out a warning to the capybara that it was about to be eaten. He never rushed to its rescue. He did absolutely nothing to intervene. Nor did he bother to whip out his tranquilizer gun (he almost always seemed to have this handy) and anesthetize the poor capybara to ease its suffering while the anaconda cruelly crushed it to death. He never sent flowers to the capybara’s widow, either. Nope. He just sat there, never even lifting a finger.
Question: Do you suppose that Marlin Perkins failed to prevent the capybara’s demise because he didn’t love animals? Let’s see—reptile curator of the Saint Louis Zoological Park in 1928; director of the Buffalo Zoological Park in 1938; director of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago from 1944 to 1962; director of the St. Louis Zoo from 1963 to 1970; host of Zoo Parade, 1963; host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom from 1963 to 1985; founder of the Wild Canid Survival and Research Center, 1971, a wolf sanctuary instrumental in breeding wolves for eventual re-placement into their natural habitats. Oh, yeah, there’s a guy who clearly had no love whatsoever for animals. He only devoted sixty years of his life to them.
But the fact remains: the anaconda killed the capybara, and Marlin Perkins did not intervene, nor did he do anything at all to lessen the capybara’s suffering. Despite this fact, I never once heard anyone accuse Marlin Perkins of not being an animal lover. No one decried him as indifferent. No one ever characterized his inaction as reprehensible. Most importantly, no one—absolutely no one—ever, EVER, speculated that maybe Marlin Perkins didn’t exist.
Now see here! cries our snarky atheist in outrage. There are at least TWO problems with that argument. For one, Perkins never intervened because he wasn’t SUPPOSED to intervene. His job was to observe animals in the wild, and his function as a naturalist was specifically NOT to intervene so he could see and record how animals interact with one another. Are you saying that God is only some divine naturalist, sitting in a director’s chair behind a camera crew, merely observing when the polar bear kills the baby seal or the anaconda eats the capybara or when the school bus full of eight-year-olds rolls off a cliff killing everyone on board? That’s ridiculous! Why does he even NEED to see something like that, anyway? Isn’t he supposed to be all-wise and all-knowing? That means he supposedly already knows whether the anaconda will eat or starve, so why does he bother making an observation for an outcome that he himself has already foreseen? As for the second problem, no one ever disputed the existence of Marlin Perkins because Marlin Perkins was a real person! SOMEONE was director of the zoo in Buffalo in 1930. SOMEONE hosted Wild Kingdom. And that someone was Marlin Perkins. No one in his right mind would claim that Marlin Perkins never existed!
Well, to answer the first objection first, no, I am NOT saying that God is just an impartial observer. I am merely pointing out that when someone chooses not to intervene in the suffering of others, there are other possible explanations than to say he just doesn’t care or that he doesn’t exist. Maybe, as you point out, it’s his job NOT to intervene. Or maybe he has other reasons that are unknown to the rest of us. In any case, the Marlin Perkins theodicy demonstrates that it is still possible for someone to love the very individuals whose suffering he chooses not to prevent or mitigate. Marlin Perkins loved animals, yet did not stop the anaconda from killing the capybara. What I AM saying is: I do not know the specific reason, if any, why God might not intervene to prevent suffering at any given moment; what I DO know is that the atheist does not know the specific reason, either. Maybe God has a reason not to intervene. Maybe He has already intervened, but in a way that I don’t recognize or that the atheist chooses to ignore. Or maybe God just doesn’t care—despite the myriad attestations throughout the body of revealed scripture that He does.
As for the second objection, I should point out that Wild Kingdom went off the air in 1985. Since then, millions of people have come along who have never in their lives seen or heard of Marlin Perkins. None of those people have any empirical evidence whatsoever that Marlin Perkins was real. Despite whatever personal testimony that any of us who have seen Marlin Perkins can give to assure them that the man did actually live and breathe, at the end of the day their only real option is to take our word—or not. Being in their “right minds” has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Pshaw! dissents our atheist. For anyone who doubts the existence of Marlin Perkins, let him Google the name. Why, I’ll bet there are .wmv links galore for Wild Kingdom out there, and bios aplenty for Marlin Perkins. Given the wealth of evidence that is available on the internet alone, one would have to be a completely out of one’s gourd to continue to disbelieve.
Not exactly. Whatever evidence one may find concerning the existence of Marlin Perkins, for anyone born after 1985, the evidence is not empirical, but merely historical. In that case, their only recourse is abductive reasoning; they infer his past existence not by traveling back in time and observing him directly, but by inferring his existence from a study of artifacts and records.
And what’s so wrong with that?
Absolutely nothing. Abductive reasoning is perfectly legit. I’ve never met Napoleon, yet I believe the man existed, because I’ve seen paintings of him and have read history books recounting his accomplishments and have seen documentaries on television describing the events of his life in vivid detail. Still, at the end of the day, I CHOOSE to believe that Napoleon was a real person but am not COMPELLED to do so. I “know” that Napoleon existed because, as St. Augustine observed, all knowledge is an assent to belief. One simply observes some bit of data and makes the choice to believe it or disbelieve it. Again, being in one’s “right mind” is not germane to the process. Not all “right-minded” people (whatever the term actually means) believe or disbelieve the same things.
So what’s your point?
My point is that in order to believe in the existence of Marlin Perkins, there is no prerequisite requirement that you should first have to meet him eye to eye. The testimony of others will suffice, as will the historical record, provided you feel the testimony or the record is reliable. Note, however, there is absolutely no standard anywhere as to what constitutes “reliable.” What is reliable for one may seem unreliable to another.
But, like I said, no reasonable person, seeing all the available evidence, would try to deny that Marlin Perkins existed.
Because there are so many people who say they saw him with their own eyes.
Right.
And all the historical records attesting to his existence.
Right.
So only a closed-minded dimwit stubbornly denying the evidence before him would say absolutely that Marlin Perkins didn’t exist.
Right.
You do realize that many people believe in God—millions who claim to know Him on a personal basis. You do realize that over ninety percent of all people believe in God or in some other higher power. You do realize there are documents and artifacts and records galore all attesting to God’s existence.
Not at all. If there were valid evidence for the existence of God, I would believe in him, but there’s not, so I don’t.
Or maybe you’re only a closed-minded dimwit stubbornly denying the evidence before him.
Hey! What about all that “I don’t call ‘em stupid just because I disagree with ‘em” nonsense?
Fair enough. I’m only discussing the possibility.
Besides, you’re forgetting the crucial point.
Which is?
No one’s ever seen this God of whom you speak. I would think that would support the notion that there’s no God at all.
We established that the face-to-face isn’t necessary. But even if it were, history tells of eyewitness accounts. You say you’ve never seen God, but there have been—and are—scores of others who say they have. Like Moses. Or Elijah. Or Christ, who claimed to be His very son.
Get real! Those are reliable sources, however you construe the word? How do you know that Moses or Elijah or Christ ever existed?
By the same abductive inference that leads me to believe in Napoleon.
Are you serious? The source materials attesting to Napoleon probably outnumber all references to Moses, Elijah, and Christ together, a hundredfold or more.
But it is not the quantity of sources that matters, but their quality, their reliability—and “reliable” is a relative term, solely a measure of how one “feels” about the data in question.
So?
So we’re back at square one. Fact is, we never left it. Whether one believes in the existence of Marlin Perkins, or Napoleon, or Moses, or Elijah, or Christ, or even God—it is a matter of what one chooses to believe, as all belief ultimately is. It is a matter of accepting certain data and of rejecting certain other data. There is no more basis for saying that God does not exist than for saying that Marlin Perkins did not exist—it depends upon what data set one chooses to ignore or to accept.
Yet note, there is a disproportion in reciprocity: although there is no basis for the non-existence position, there IS a basis for the pro-existence position. Abductive reasoning allows us to “know” that Napoleon existed, and this knowledge is just as reliable as our knowledge of Marlin Perkins.
Furthermore, abductive reasoning is only one sense in which we have knowledge of God. There is another, more fundamental sense in which we may know God, most commonly subsumed under the tradition of Natural Law. It is the sensus divinitatis, the spontaneous awareness of the reality of God, which each and every one of us has, including the atheist. Unlike the bear/seal scenario, such awareness constitutes an ontologically coherent argument.
Thus my atheist acquaintance can only make the observation: in the wild, sometimes bears eat and seals die; other times, seals escape and bears starve. What does this have to say about the existence of the One who created both the bear and the seal, and what does it have to say about His nature? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Which, by the way, is atheism’s entire stock and trade.
So, imagine, said my atheist acquaintance, a polar bear on the hunt for food. Suppose she finds a seal pup. If the polar bear is successful in her hunt, she and her cub will eat, but the baby seal will die. If the baby seal manages to escape the polar bear, then both she and her cub will starve. Why, oh why, said the atheist, would such a thing ever happen in a universe created by a loving God? What kind of God would allow it?
Atheists seem to revel in this kind of argumentation. With a big “Aha! Gotcha!” grin on their faces, they lay it out before the theist, ready to deride or otherwise tear apart any response the theist might make. After all, they figure, there’s no way to formulate a defensible response—either the theist will argue that Got thinks it’s okay for baby seals to die or that He thinks it’s okay for a polar bear mama and her cub to starve to death. Either way, it’s a lose-lose situation, and either possibility undermines—so says the atheist—the notion that God loves His creation.
I try not to characterize people as stupid simply for saying things I disagree with. As one who at one time had his own flirtation with atheism, I know that it’s not stupidity that underpins the atheist’s world view. As Ron White said, “You can’t fix stupid,” and the fact that I went from theism to atheism and back to theism suggests that at one point or other, my world view went from broke to fixed. Thus, stupidity was never a relevant issue. It most certainly didn’t apply to my atheist acquaintance. Still doesn’t.
That being said, the God-doesn’t-exist-because-either-bears-or-seals-end-up-dead ploy is just so insufferably brain-dead stupid that it doesn’t even qualify as an argument. Ontologically speaking, it is incoherent.
What kind of God allows the bear/seal scenario? There’s the obvious answer: the kind of God Who would allow such a thing.
Virtually every argument against the existence of God I’ve ever come across—no, strike the “virtually,”—the question posed concerns itself with God’s nature, not His existence. The very question itself, “What kind of God…?” presupposes that there IS a God; it is merely a question of the kind, to wit, the kind that allows suffering to exist, as opposed to the kind that would prohibit it.
So if Kenneth Copeland or Jesse Duplantis or Creflo Dollar, Jr., preach that there is a God who loves us, the atheist is only kidding himself when he offers the lose-lose scenario to suggest that God is merely a figure of their imaginations. The scenario has no bearing whatsoever on whether GOD loves us, but whether God LOVES us, and even if the scenario were in any way valid, the atheist still hasn’t said one word as to whether the presence of suffering necessary negates the possibility that God loves us despite whatever suffering we endure. Isn’t it at least possible that God loves us anyway?
This simple intuition is, in point of fact, empirical. The idea that one might love without intervening in suffering is part of our daily experience. For example, when my kids were learning to ride bikes, I did my best to teach them the how, but as any father knows, there comes a point when dad has to let go of the bike and let the kid proceed on her own, knowing full well that she might topple over and hurt herself. And in my case, that’s exactly what happened, and more than once (I have three daughters). For anyone who argues that because I didn’t dive head-first under my kid so she wouldn’t scrape her knee that I didn’t (and don’t) love her, I can only say that he and the horse he rode in on know exactly what he can do about it.
I know for a fact: I love my child, and yet there were times when I didn’t intervene to prevent her suffering.
Oh, yeah? says the atheist. Well, I’ll bet you at least picked your kid up from the ground. You hugged her and put a bandage on her knee. You at least showed signs that you love your kid. Why doesn’t your all-loving God ever do anything like that?
So the atheist’s argument subtly shifts (as all atheist arguments are wont to do, by the way); from God’s existence, to why He allows suffering, to why He doesn’t mitigate suffering. Asking an atheist to make up his mind about why he says there’s no God is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, and oftentimes just as messy. But I digress.
The answer, of course, is that sometimes He allows suffering and sometimes does not. Sometimes He doesn’t mitigate suffering, or at least appears not to, and sometimes He does. So God does mitigate suffering, at least at times, just never in a way to satisfy an atheist. (This, of course, is the atheist’s problem, not God’s, for the simple fact that whatever answer is given, the atheist will elect not to be satisfied with it.)
From the theist’s perspective, however, God sends comfort, often and in many ways. He is rest for the weary. He is a cool spring for those who thirst. He is a right good help in times of trouble. He is my shepherd, Who makes me to lie down in green pastures, Who leads me beside the still waters, Who restores my soul, Whose rod and staff comfort me, and Who, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is with me. Therefore, I will fear no evil, which, as near as I can tell includes suffering. (Really, someone needs to write all this down. Oh, wait, someone already has.)
The atheist simply denies all this, not because he must, but because he wants to.
“WANTS” to? the atheist sneers testily, at the insinuation that his wholly arbitrary worldview is wholly arbitrary. I could say just as easily that you believe in God for the same reason. You just WANT to believe in God, and so “see” His handiwork all around you.
Perhaps, I reply. But just as it’s possible for one to love without preventing suffering, it’s also possible for one to love without mitigating it either.
Don’t believe me? Here’s my handy-dandy two-word response. It not only answers the question regarding mitigation, but suffering in general, and even refutes the aforementioned incredibly stupid bear/seal scenario. Ready? Okay, here goes:
Marlin Perkins.
I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in.
Yup. Good old Marlin “Just as the tigress protects her cubs, Mutual of Omaha provides you the security you need through life’s uncertainties” Perkins.
For those of you too young to remember such things, there was a time when television was broadcast over analog airwaves rather than digital signals. There were no satellite dishes, nor even cable. For that matter, there was barely any TV—just two channels, plus a third if you had a UHF converter box. On Sundays, after the football game (yes, singular), there was a nature program called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, hosted by the curator of the St. Louis Zoo, Marlin Perkins.
“Welcome,” Marlin Perkins would say. “Today we’re headed down to sunny Venezuela to observe the mighty anaconda.” And off the camera crew would go, jiggedy-jig, where they would find a hungry anaconda resting quietly in the crook of a high tree branch, waiting for lunch to come ambling by.
“Uh-oh!” Marlin Perkins would whisper. “Here comes an unsuspecting capybara, and the hungry anaconda has him in his sights.”
A capybara, must you know, is the largest member of the order Rodentia, roughly a 130-pound hamster. Good eats, according to the anaconda. And so, as Marlin and company sat with baited breath, the capybara would titter into range, and the anaconda would slump off the tree branch and fall on top of the capybara, wrapping its massive coils around the capybara as it struggled to escape, slowly and brutally crushing it to death before swallowing it whole. Rather a nasty way to die, one would suppose.
Yet, during the entire episode, Marlin Perkins never once bothered to call out a warning to the capybara that it was about to be eaten. He never rushed to its rescue. He did absolutely nothing to intervene. Nor did he bother to whip out his tranquilizer gun (he almost always seemed to have this handy) and anesthetize the poor capybara to ease its suffering while the anaconda cruelly crushed it to death. He never sent flowers to the capybara’s widow, either. Nope. He just sat there, never even lifting a finger.
Question: Do you suppose that Marlin Perkins failed to prevent the capybara’s demise because he didn’t love animals? Let’s see—reptile curator of the Saint Louis Zoological Park in 1928; director of the Buffalo Zoological Park in 1938; director of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago from 1944 to 1962; director of the St. Louis Zoo from 1963 to 1970; host of Zoo Parade, 1963; host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom from 1963 to 1985; founder of the Wild Canid Survival and Research Center, 1971, a wolf sanctuary instrumental in breeding wolves for eventual re-placement into their natural habitats. Oh, yeah, there’s a guy who clearly had no love whatsoever for animals. He only devoted sixty years of his life to them.
But the fact remains: the anaconda killed the capybara, and Marlin Perkins did not intervene, nor did he do anything at all to lessen the capybara’s suffering. Despite this fact, I never once heard anyone accuse Marlin Perkins of not being an animal lover. No one decried him as indifferent. No one ever characterized his inaction as reprehensible. Most importantly, no one—absolutely no one—ever, EVER, speculated that maybe Marlin Perkins didn’t exist.
Now see here! cries our snarky atheist in outrage. There are at least TWO problems with that argument. For one, Perkins never intervened because he wasn’t SUPPOSED to intervene. His job was to observe animals in the wild, and his function as a naturalist was specifically NOT to intervene so he could see and record how animals interact with one another. Are you saying that God is only some divine naturalist, sitting in a director’s chair behind a camera crew, merely observing when the polar bear kills the baby seal or the anaconda eats the capybara or when the school bus full of eight-year-olds rolls off a cliff killing everyone on board? That’s ridiculous! Why does he even NEED to see something like that, anyway? Isn’t he supposed to be all-wise and all-knowing? That means he supposedly already knows whether the anaconda will eat or starve, so why does he bother making an observation for an outcome that he himself has already foreseen? As for the second problem, no one ever disputed the existence of Marlin Perkins because Marlin Perkins was a real person! SOMEONE was director of the zoo in Buffalo in 1930. SOMEONE hosted Wild Kingdom. And that someone was Marlin Perkins. No one in his right mind would claim that Marlin Perkins never existed!
Well, to answer the first objection first, no, I am NOT saying that God is just an impartial observer. I am merely pointing out that when someone chooses not to intervene in the suffering of others, there are other possible explanations than to say he just doesn’t care or that he doesn’t exist. Maybe, as you point out, it’s his job NOT to intervene. Or maybe he has other reasons that are unknown to the rest of us. In any case, the Marlin Perkins theodicy demonstrates that it is still possible for someone to love the very individuals whose suffering he chooses not to prevent or mitigate. Marlin Perkins loved animals, yet did not stop the anaconda from killing the capybara. What I AM saying is: I do not know the specific reason, if any, why God might not intervene to prevent suffering at any given moment; what I DO know is that the atheist does not know the specific reason, either. Maybe God has a reason not to intervene. Maybe He has already intervened, but in a way that I don’t recognize or that the atheist chooses to ignore. Or maybe God just doesn’t care—despite the myriad attestations throughout the body of revealed scripture that He does.
As for the second objection, I should point out that Wild Kingdom went off the air in 1985. Since then, millions of people have come along who have never in their lives seen or heard of Marlin Perkins. None of those people have any empirical evidence whatsoever that Marlin Perkins was real. Despite whatever personal testimony that any of us who have seen Marlin Perkins can give to assure them that the man did actually live and breathe, at the end of the day their only real option is to take our word—or not. Being in their “right minds” has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Pshaw! dissents our atheist. For anyone who doubts the existence of Marlin Perkins, let him Google the name. Why, I’ll bet there are .wmv links galore for Wild Kingdom out there, and bios aplenty for Marlin Perkins. Given the wealth of evidence that is available on the internet alone, one would have to be a completely out of one’s gourd to continue to disbelieve.
Not exactly. Whatever evidence one may find concerning the existence of Marlin Perkins, for anyone born after 1985, the evidence is not empirical, but merely historical. In that case, their only recourse is abductive reasoning; they infer his past existence not by traveling back in time and observing him directly, but by inferring his existence from a study of artifacts and records.
And what’s so wrong with that?
Absolutely nothing. Abductive reasoning is perfectly legit. I’ve never met Napoleon, yet I believe the man existed, because I’ve seen paintings of him and have read history books recounting his accomplishments and have seen documentaries on television describing the events of his life in vivid detail. Still, at the end of the day, I CHOOSE to believe that Napoleon was a real person but am not COMPELLED to do so. I “know” that Napoleon existed because, as St. Augustine observed, all knowledge is an assent to belief. One simply observes some bit of data and makes the choice to believe it or disbelieve it. Again, being in one’s “right mind” is not germane to the process. Not all “right-minded” people (whatever the term actually means) believe or disbelieve the same things.
So what’s your point?
My point is that in order to believe in the existence of Marlin Perkins, there is no prerequisite requirement that you should first have to meet him eye to eye. The testimony of others will suffice, as will the historical record, provided you feel the testimony or the record is reliable. Note, however, there is absolutely no standard anywhere as to what constitutes “reliable.” What is reliable for one may seem unreliable to another.
But, like I said, no reasonable person, seeing all the available evidence, would try to deny that Marlin Perkins existed.
Because there are so many people who say they saw him with their own eyes.
Right.
And all the historical records attesting to his existence.
Right.
So only a closed-minded dimwit stubbornly denying the evidence before him would say absolutely that Marlin Perkins didn’t exist.
Right.
You do realize that many people believe in God—millions who claim to know Him on a personal basis. You do realize that over ninety percent of all people believe in God or in some other higher power. You do realize there are documents and artifacts and records galore all attesting to God’s existence.
Not at all. If there were valid evidence for the existence of God, I would believe in him, but there’s not, so I don’t.
Or maybe you’re only a closed-minded dimwit stubbornly denying the evidence before him.
Hey! What about all that “I don’t call ‘em stupid just because I disagree with ‘em” nonsense?
Fair enough. I’m only discussing the possibility.
Besides, you’re forgetting the crucial point.
Which is?
No one’s ever seen this God of whom you speak. I would think that would support the notion that there’s no God at all.
We established that the face-to-face isn’t necessary. But even if it were, history tells of eyewitness accounts. You say you’ve never seen God, but there have been—and are—scores of others who say they have. Like Moses. Or Elijah. Or Christ, who claimed to be His very son.
Get real! Those are reliable sources, however you construe the word? How do you know that Moses or Elijah or Christ ever existed?
By the same abductive inference that leads me to believe in Napoleon.
Are you serious? The source materials attesting to Napoleon probably outnumber all references to Moses, Elijah, and Christ together, a hundredfold or more.
But it is not the quantity of sources that matters, but their quality, their reliability—and “reliable” is a relative term, solely a measure of how one “feels” about the data in question.
So?
So we’re back at square one. Fact is, we never left it. Whether one believes in the existence of Marlin Perkins, or Napoleon, or Moses, or Elijah, or Christ, or even God—it is a matter of what one chooses to believe, as all belief ultimately is. It is a matter of accepting certain data and of rejecting certain other data. There is no more basis for saying that God does not exist than for saying that Marlin Perkins did not exist—it depends upon what data set one chooses to ignore or to accept.
Yet note, there is a disproportion in reciprocity: although there is no basis for the non-existence position, there IS a basis for the pro-existence position. Abductive reasoning allows us to “know” that Napoleon existed, and this knowledge is just as reliable as our knowledge of Marlin Perkins.
Furthermore, abductive reasoning is only one sense in which we have knowledge of God. There is another, more fundamental sense in which we may know God, most commonly subsumed under the tradition of Natural Law. It is the sensus divinitatis, the spontaneous awareness of the reality of God, which each and every one of us has, including the atheist. Unlike the bear/seal scenario, such awareness constitutes an ontologically coherent argument.
Thus my atheist acquaintance can only make the observation: in the wild, sometimes bears eat and seals die; other times, seals escape and bears starve. What does this have to say about the existence of the One who created both the bear and the seal, and what does it have to say about His nature? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Which, by the way, is atheism’s entire stock and trade.
Labels: atheism, theism, theodicy
