Why Atheism Fails

I mentioned in my most recent post (Diary of a Part-Time Shut-In, Excerpt#1134) that my aimless internet surfing found me grinning at an atheist YouTuber behind a formidable desk “making what I assume he considered an equally formidable case”. In the video, he criticized a fairly famous Christian apologist. Doesn’t matter who. Let’s just say the target in question wasn’t my favorite personality among the cadre of apologists running the debate circuit. This particular apologist was more the high school coach slash history teacher in a hurry than the measured, literary scholar who chooses his words carefully. At any rate, the virtual encounter brought back memories of those debates I used to engage in with both amateurs and professionals alike.

That pastime was decades ago, and I’ve since moved on. However, I must confess the critique the atheist YouTuber employed here provoked a salutary grin, and, so grinning, I wondered how foolish I too had appeared those many years ago fixating on particulars most everyone else couldn’t have cared less about and regarded as a waste of time.

I decided these sorts of critiques the young atheist YouTuber engaged in, while perhaps persuasive to the young free thinker lacking discernment, required a bit of perspective. In an effort to discourage the misguided, I immediately began composing a post to address atheism outright. In the process, I realized I’d need to establish a few things without sounding pedantic or condescending. Gradually realizing that was less likely the more I wrote, I ended up redrafting for weeks, consulted an old philosopher friend with a master’s in philosophy, and after receiving his high praise, nonetheless returned to the drawing board another eleven times in an attempt to shrink what stretched out to eighteen pages down to five. I settled for nine. I hope you will too.

My case is not about which position is more accurate or true or right, though. Not really, anyway. Rather my case is about perspective. Discussions are irrelevant in light of the inevitable and unprovable premises each must adopt in order to maintain any position at all. What philosophers say about the value of debate, for all their academic clout, demonstrates their naïveté of human nature. Instead, those who wish to persuade must abandon semantics and look to the power of narrative. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Since any good story deserves a good beginning, let’s start there.

Premise, Plot, and Narrative

No. I’m not drafting an outline for a novel. Rather I’m listing the ingredients required to defend a philosophical world view and persuade others of its truth and value. Let’s tackle the last one first: narrative.

A lifetime ago, before I began writing fiction, I enjoyed reading from philosophers. I particularly relished those books that included critical thinking primers. Don’t ask me why, but to break apart an argument and analyze the merits of its individual components, or to segment the premises and conclusion of a syllogism, for example, struck me as akin to solving a Rubik’s Cube or some other puzzle or riddle.

At the same time, I began to discover that while facts were instrumental in determining the accuracy of a claim, facts weren’t always as well received as well presented, glossy, feel good nonsense. Misinformation and half-truths, in the hands of a wordsmith, often garnered just as many, if not more, adherents than did the cold hard truth.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society; it is only important to the individual. – Vladimir Nabokov

Narrative is far more influential than any graph or chart, more compelling than any argument or philosophical posit. Good narrative evokes our emotions, inspires, and ignites our sense of purpose. Novel per chapter, season per episode, characters and their responses to conflict awaken our empathy and tug at our heartstrings. The old adage bears repeating – there’s truth in fiction. Whereas facts alone are mere curiosities, facts within a narrative change our hearts and shape our minds.

I’m not alone with this sentiment. Novelists, filmmakers, pastors, politicians, opportunists, even the PR department for any given scientific organization knows better than to dull or vex the general public with a series of measurements, statistics, findings, and calculations. Instead, they employ the persuasive power of narrative.

Canvass the entire spectrum of media. The bait and switch by the press, doctoring the spin, selecting which stories support its themes and refusing to run the stories that undermine it, all are instrumental in shaping the narrative and influencing society.

Advertisers don’t waste their time trying to separate us from our money by appealing to our powers of deduction. Instead, they utilize the thirty seconds they have to exploit our desire for prestige and our fear of obsolescence.    

The Premise is Everything

We must acknowledge an inconvenient reality, namely that regardless what we believe, the opinions we hold dear are rooted in sentiment, not logic. Logic, critical analysis, and rational thought are useful for gauging consistency within an already established system. However, logic can’t tell us whether any given system is true. Logic can tell us only whether a series of claims within a given system are compatible with one another.

Banking is like religion: you have to accept some rather dicey things simply on faith, and then everything else follows in marvelous logic. – Robertson Davies

Consider our monetary system. This system hinges on the participation of its citizenry, on our shared presumption or attribution of a given currency’s value. The currency itself has no intrinsic or inherent worth apart from the cost of the materials used to produce it – paper, ink, metals. Rather we ascribe a monetary value to the currency in order to exchange it for various goods and services. But without this shared attribution, the system collapses.  

Other systems as well, such as various systems of thought, while crucial to our lives, offer nothing in the way of proof. For example, in philosophy, five major assumptions most of us never consciously think about allow us to navigate life even though no evidence, per se, for their validity is forthcoming.

1.  Trying to validate or prove logic or mathematics is to argue in a circle. An infinite regress results, since the basis for such systems are the components within said systems.

2.  Metaphysics has to do with claims such as Minds exist other than my own or The external world is real or The past wasn’t created five minutes ago with the appearance of age, all of which are practical, essential assumptions bereft of evidence to support them. Belief to the contrary would render us catatonic.

3.  As for ethics, you can’t prove whether the Nazi scientists in the concentration camps did anything evil as opposed to the scientists in Western democracies. Additionally, though we all agree slavery is an evil, neither debate nor consensus can determine this truth since, not so long ago, slavery was ubiquitous and considered acceptable.   

4.  Aesthetics. What is beautiful, good, and worth pursuing cannot be scientifically argued or proven. Even the value one places on a given work of art is arbitrary.

5.  Lastly and perhaps most notably, science itself can’t be justified by way of the scientific method. Science is permeated with assumptions, which are likewise based on previous assumptions. Trying to prove one by referencing another, again, triggers an infinite regress. Scientists must presume things so that they might further demonstrate the alleged validity of subsequent things. Note: this isn’t a criticism of science. Nor does it invalidate science. It’s just a reality of the limitations of systems. (List courtesy of a 1998 debate between William Lane Craig and Dr. Peter Atkins, hosted by William F. Buckley Jr.)

Aristotle nailed the whole predicament over two thousand years ago. He called these premises First Principles, otherwise known as a priori or First Cause. These deep-seated presumptions act as the bedrock or the linchpin for our opinions on nearly everything.

Altering these presumptions (these First Principles), or having these First Principles altered for us, can be a shock to the system, to one’s mental constitution, sometimes proving intellectually traumatic. On a certain level, we intuitively know this. Which is why you can provide statistics, graphs, arguments, and evidence until all the cows have milked themselves and yet the person confronted with your particular position, when it impugns his own position, will typically merely double-down, demanding that your sources are suspect, that the motivation or the organization behind the survey or the study or the research you’ve presented must be unreliable or corrupted, and so on.

When put into perspective, the insistence by which we maintain a position is satirical in light of its underlying premise. An irony is at play, a sort of inevitable special pleading fallacy for one’s cause or paradigm without regard for the unsupportable standing of said position.

Imagine wanting to remove a tree by trimming only the branches or preventing early onset of Alzheimer’s leading to dementia by spending eight hours per day watching television or running your wrecked car through a car wash. These efforts no more address the issues they pretend to target than debating capital punishment without first asking one another precisely what policy or principle (if any) we regard as cruel or just or valuable to society and why. While we’re at it, we might wish to likewise ask ourselves what qualifies as cruel or just or of value. Whichever way we define those concepts, they’re the unassailable presumptions for the opinions that follow therefrom.

These premises, often unbeknownst to us, determine our take on everything including abortion, animal rights, crime, euthanasia, capital punishment, drug policy, energy, poverty, the environment, military spending, education, and more.  

… when there is a conflict of visions, those most powerfully affected by a particular vision may be the least aware of its underlying assumptions – or the least interested in stopping to examine such theoretical questions when there are urgent “practical” issues to be confronted, crusades to be launched, or values to be defended at all costs. – Thomas Sowell  

In his book A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, the brilliant economist Dr. Thomas Sowell shows how our vision for humanity can be reduced to two opposing premises within the context of political philosophy. These visions account for what Sowell calls the “silent shapers of our thoughts.” I maintain that the phenomenon extends beyond mere politics, since these opposing positions stem from our premises about human nature and human capabilities, how the world works and why we do what we do.

One example I might offer addresses why we go to war with each other. One position, based on a premise (what Sowell calls the constrained vision), is that people are inherently flawed, selfish, impulsive, irrational, brutal, cruel, corruptible, and likely to stay that way.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers:

It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies – ills as well as good propensities. This results from the imperfection of the Institutor, man.

The opposing position, likewise based on a premise (the unconstrained vision), is that while maybe we start out as selfish and so on, this condition isn’t fixed. People are malleable and capable of becoming potentially good and rational. The only reason we go to war is because of religions and corrupt governments. They create paranoia and fear which leads us to war.

This unconstrained vision is often summarized in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous quote: “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”

In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off. – Thomas Sowell

Such views, however faithfully maintained by often sincere people on both sides, while diametrically opposing one another, can’t be invalidated on their faces. One could arguably find logical inconsistencies within each system, but, again, even if one were to demolish the other’s view, that wouldn’t necessarily cause that person to abandon his demolished view. Instead, such a challenge is more likely to raise his ire, stir his sense of righteous indignation, etc.

To be fair, both parties presumably want what’s best for humanity. The problem is that these opposing visions dictate how to achieve this end. Once again, an infinite loop is at play, an informal question begging fallacy: which proposed remedies are best depends on one’s diagnosis, which, in turn, is based on one’s premise.

The Plot Thickens

We return to the model we examined earlier – the proposed system of function or thought. This is where one spots the chink in the armor, namely by identifying the inconsistencies within a given system. This is what I dub the plot hole. Storytelling demands a consistent thread of non-contradictive motivations, actions, and consequences. In other words, the story must provide its own internal logic. Failure to provide this causes a discerning audience to insist your story is unconvincing or riddled with plot holes.  

This is generally why those who convert to one religious faith over another, or abandon religious faith altogether, don’t do so due to a graph or a study or a body of research or a philosophical argument but rather something in their lives that derails their narrative and changes their premise – the death of a loved one or some other personal experience both poignant and often difficult to convey. In other words, an event, usually traumatic, that exposes the inconsistency within the system, the fracture within the internal logic, the plot hole within the story.

In Dr. Thomas Sowell’s case, for example, he was a staunch Marxist beginning at the age of 19 and remained a Marxist during his stint in the Marine Corp. Harvard following thereafter didn’t talk him out of it. Nor did his time at Columbia getting his masters, nor did his education at the University of Chicago earning his doctorate change his mind.

Instead, it wasn’t until he got a job working for government at the U.S. Department of Labor and discovered first hand that government was not the solution but rather the problem. Not only did the department he interned for not care whether its policies benefitted the public. Its principal concern was job security, which required that no one challenge the efficacy of its policies. Only then did Sowell realize Marx had gotten it wrong. Government couldn’t solve society’s ills.

The brilliant Christian apologist and Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft has pointed out, perhaps partly to his chagrin, that during his lectures, despite his persuasive arguments in favor of belief in God, he knows of at least two people in the audience who became believers at the mere mention of the genius composer Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. In other words, despite his appeals to logic and argumentation, it was an appeal to the subjective that changed these two individuals’ hearts.

I recently saw a story about a self-identified militant atheist who became a mother for the first time. When looking upon the face of her new baby girl, she instantly abandoned her atheism, concluding love is far more than the sum of its material parts – neurochemicals in the brain, motherly instinct to protect and to nurture, etc. Love, she concluded, is far greater than the four walls of our materialistic cell. Her love for her child bespoke of the transcendent.

Please note that these anecdotal sketches I’m providing here, these submissions of snap shots of what constitutes persuasion, are almost exclusively subjective, and by subjective I want to be clear. I absolutely mean our like or dislike of feta cheese or funk music or the feel of cashmere. I do not mean whether Austin is the capital of Texas. That’s an arbitrary, albeit agreed upon, fact, the discovery of which is unlikely to challenge our world view or our ideology.

Whatever we assume, gentle reader, whatever premises to which we cling, often unbeknownst to us, including whether to believe in God or to believe no God exists, they are presumptions, all. Do not fall for the atheist’s pretense that his refusal to believe stems from his superior intellect, an adherence to a principle, his own brand of critical thinking, or a scientific stricture.

Long before Moses descended Mount Sinai, the consensus among the hearts of humankind was, and remains, that God, in whatever form, transcends the material world, supersedes what qualifies as exhibit A through Zed in a court of law. Hence why I invoke the comparison to love.

When the Russian cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, the first human launched into space, after having peered out at the stars, returned and irrelevantly decried, “Well, I looked and looked and looked, but I didn’t see God,” he might as well have presented himself before the packed auditorium with his fly open.  

Imagine disassembling the first four stroke combustible engine and declaring, “Well, you say Nikolaus August Otto invented this thing, but I don’t see him anywhere among these engine parts.” The Newton of today might have likewise failed to distinguish cause from observed phenomenon. We can imagine such a Newton declaring, “Gravity doesn’t exist. Apples are simply heavy. That’s why they fall.”

That the modern atheist draws from such material to produce his objections is evidence of a deteriorating standard for what qualifies as worthy of consideration.

Likewise, this whole conceit by the atheist to say the believer bears the burden of proof is wrong right out the gate. Indeed, one could just as easily argue that the contrary is true. After all, the atheist is insisting on arbitrary criteria God must surmount that this same atheist would never dare apply to his own life for fear of significant disruption.

In fact, if the atheist applied this same criterion to life, to society, to his closest friends, to his own regimen, that he applies to the question of God, the atheist’s life would come to a screeching halt.

With this in mind, I’ve had to invent a neologism for the pathology of atheism. I call it intellectual schizophrenia, trademark pending. Consider how much our confidence has been shaken and our trust betrayed within the past year alone by various systems of power and institutional authorities, from science and government to finance and media. Yet most of us still exercise varying degrees of faith in these same institutional authorities, despite the evidence of abuse, duplicity, corruption, and fraud.  

Not surprisingly, atheists typically don’t insist that our faith in these systems is unwarranted or irrational or must be abandoned. On the contrary. Meanwhile, ironically, these same atheists eagerly apply insurmountable criteria to the question of God, criteria, again, they’d never apply to the faulty institutions upon which they rely, principally because said institutions would utterly collapse under the weight of such scrutiny.

Our history of the world is replete with governments duping their citizenry, slaying their detractors, and propagandizing their youth. Science is full of missteps, prolonged errors, dissent within its own ranks, and even fraud. And while all but the fraud leads to progress and a better understanding of how things function, if you ask a dozen theoretical physicists to define a black hole, you’ll get fifteen different definitions. Nothing wrong with that. But something to keep in mind when an atheist tells you science is the definitive source for truth.

Unfortunately, because science is helmed by humans, it will never be the definitive word for anything beyond what the Overton window deems fit for consumption. As for the premises, plots, and narratives regarding virtue, God, art, beauty, passion, meaning, and the good, recognizing their elusiveness as part of their appeal goes a long way to understanding the value of additional abstractions, truths that can be neither taught in academia nor proven in a lab – faith, hope, and love.