I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with
atheists.
You might wonder why. You might say, “People have to be open to the voice of God, or they hear nothing at all. ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear,’ said the Lord. A man whose ears are already shut
gets nothing — and, if we follow the Lord’s example — should get nothing, for he does not
unite his hearing with any measure of faith. And without faith, it is
impossible to please God.”
Even secular common sense accepts this. “A man convinced against his will remains an unbeliever still,” goes the axiom.
So why bother to talk to people whose minds
are already made up? A fair question.
I have had my own reasons. Mostly I wanted to understand what draws a person to atheism, and how do they think about life and themselves so that they are drawn to it. What does it offer them
by way of resources for life? How does it help them locate meaning and morals,
for example.
And I genuinely wanted to know all that. I wanted to understand their attraction to their
beliefs from the inside. I wanted to gain a sensitivity for how it feels to
embrace the idea of a world without God — not when one is distracted and
in the throes of contending against Christianity or some other theism, but how
one feels in one’s own private moments, when one contemplates one’s own atheism
in its own right, and seeks to integrate it with one’s own life plans.
The Difficulty of Diving
But that’s not easy to do.
It’s not exactly that atheists won’t help you with that, it’s that in most cases it seems they can’t. The
problem is that they don’t use atheism in the way that other people apply their
beliefs — they don’t use it to structure their lives or to create coherent
patterns of meaning and purpose for themselves. They primarily use it to fend off those who tell them their lives
should have such structure, purpose and meaning, to neutralize the very search
for meaning itself in favor of a sort of unrestricted and undefined “freedom”
to do whatever it is they really happen to want to do.
For them, atheism is not a way of structuring life or ordering thought: it’s a way of repelling the need to
structure life at all, and resisting all necessity of ordering subsequent
thought. Its real purpose is to reduce all ideologies to a level nothing, following which complete anything can be taken afterward. “Once
God is gone,” it says, “I get to live the way I want.”
Of course, that’s not the way it’s presented. Atheism self-presents as simply a vigorous effort to reject God. Behind
it may be an urge for this sort of undefined freedom, but it’s rarely a
well-thought-out urge. It’s more of a gut-level impulse.
The Deep Logic of Atheism
This makes it very hard to examine — not just for people like me but even for the atheists themselves. To get rid of God
is atheism’s first goal: but its second (and generally undeclared) goal is to
free the atheist from any feeling he has anything more to examine at all. It’s
pure negativity at the front, and rear-loaded with avoidance of self-awareness.
However, that’s certainly not to suggest that second goal is even possible. Atheism has a whole bunch of very serious further
moral, ontological and social implications. As Dostoevsky famously said, “If
God is dead, everything is permitted.” Everything. So whether atheism thinks
deeply about its own implications or doesn’t, those implications are going to
loom in the background anyway. As Richard Weaver famously said, “Ideas have
consequences.” You can have an ideology without understanding the consequences, but you can’t have it without the danger of the consequences.
When the ideology is practiced, the consequences will follow. The only way to avoid that is not actually to
practice your ideology at all — just profess it, but live inconsistently
with it. Still, the only way safely to do that is to know the consequences. It’s the only way to avoid them.
Be that as it may, I’ve found that atheists are usually uninterested in chasing such
consequences down, and totally averse to living consistently with them. It
seems they tend to stop at the point of perceiving their freedom to be granted,
never asking, “But what am I now being freed to be or to do?” The answer comes
back, “Anything you want.” And for most, that seems to be all they want of
their atheism. Further entailments are just not welcome.
Flashes of Rage
So I’ve found that very many of them get very angry when you push them to follow through on the logic of rejecting God. They
say, “There are no further implications: I just don’t believe,” as if such a rejoinder leaves them
any help at all in sorting their lives, making sense of morals or locating
purpose. After doubt, all of that is simply to be left random, it seems.
But what if we don’t leave it random? What if we do press atheism further than its
mere visceral rejection of belief, and ask what its implications are for the
lives of those espousing it?
The atheists I talk to staunchly refuse to do this. They become adamant that it is simply not possible to ask more of atheism
than that it refuse belief in God; at the same time, they all assert that
atheism is the only rational, healthy, realistic or reliable foundational
belief for a thinking person, and they all tell me I would be wrong not to
convert to their view. But what is wrong about believing something incorrect in
a world in which “everything is permitted”? What kind of foundation belief
permits no further building at all? And why should a person seek such a thing,
if afterwards he only finds himself stripped of all resources but his own
animal impulses as a basis of forming his life? There is something
embarrassingly inadequate about their stock rejoinders, and I think the
creeping realization of this is what accounts for their flashes of anger.
Inconsistencies
A final thought about the implications of atheism. Even though it rationalizes no specific belief at all in things like
meaning and morality, this does not suggest that an atheist cannot choose to
act like a conventionally good person. A great many do. Some of my
interlocutors are rather nice people, actually. Some not so much, of course.
But that’s the point. When atheism voids the field of any markers for meaning or morality, it leaves the atheist without
any objective reason to choose one over the other. An atheist might arbitrarily choose to be a very
moral person. Or she might arbitrarily choose to be an immoral wreck. The
problem is that within an atheistic worldview there are no resources to point
to the former as any better than the latter. An atheist is equally “good” as a
humanitarian or as an ax-murderer: atheism itself has no opinion on that, even if some individual atheists choose to
have one.
Conclusion So Far
I want to stop here, because this post is already getting too long, yet I’ve got considerably more I have to say
about my experiences talking with atheists. Really, what I was asking them
to do was to take themselves seriously — so seriously, as a matter of
fact, that they would actually be able to trace out the rational implications
of their own rejection of God.
You might think they’d want to think deeply about their worldview, they’d want to embrace it more consistently, and that
they’d be grateful for the conversation, and for any help they could get in
taking atheism to the next step. But, of course, they generally weren’t. In
tomorrow’s post, I want to share with you two very simple lines of
questioning I followed on my investigation. I’ll tell you what the results
were too.
From my observation of (friend or not so friend) aetheists I have concluded some additional items. Some of them simply reject religion because they found it, or observed it for others, to be a useless tool that did not produce the needed results when truly needed. E.g., healing, personal or observed abuse cessation, perceived social injustice without remidiation, observed lack of significant differentiation between believers and unbelievers, and so on. And if this is combined with not having had a religious upbringing and the perceived inconvenience of religious obligations, thought processes, and no directly seen intervention to punish the evil doers then this most likely can produce or confirm an atheist. In other words, the atheist in general would need a very direct and observable linkage of divine intervention in the world, not something they feel they have to second guess at.
ReplyDeleteI'm certain you're right to say that some initial personal tragedy, failure, anger, or sense of betrayal or loss most often precipitates one into atheism in the first place, much more often than an intellectual conviction. A comparison of famous atheists suggests hatred of fathers has a high correspondence too (Vitz, 2013). There are various motives one can have for adopting atheism. What I wanted to discern was how one lived with one's decision AFTER becoming an atheist — what would hold one there, and how one sorted out an integrated, rational view of life based on that preliminary decision, so as to go on. How does one live based on atheism: that was my question. As you can see, that’s something beyond the mere initial incentive. Perhaps I need to make that clearer.
Delete
DeleteI understand but think that what you are looking for is already implicitly contained in what I mentioned as far as that type of person is concerned. If that person is atheistic for the reasons given then that is a permanent condition and not really open to debate for them. The reason, as I mentioned, is simply that there has been no apparent divinely inspired midcourse correction or remidiation. There is therefore no reason to rethink atheism as a permanent world view ever. There may be a more casual category of atheist that may be amenable to rethinking but I have not come across one.