EVFT

The following is a transcription of a speech given by Dr. Dick Connolly on December 18, 2009 at the EVFT Holiday party:

It is, I suppose, customary to begin a talk like this with a comment or two about atheism and Unitarianism, maybe even a joke. Religion is, after all, or at least ought to be, a laughing matter. Sometimes I think religion would be more appealing if only it were treated with more humor. Puritans, however, are not funny (except to others). But then having John Calvin and the likes of Jonathan Edwards among one’s founders is not conducive to laughter. (I’m a descendent of Edwards, by the way; but that’s another story.) Atheism and Unitarianism are united by at least one fundamental dogma, pointed out some years ago by the great American critic and journalist H. L. Mencken, who, when asked to describe Unitarianism, said that it had only one fundamental dogma, which was that there exists at most one God. With that I have no disagreement. I just don’t think it goes quite far enough. I believe that atheism is a more plausible view and would like this evening to give you some idea of why I think so.

I could say I’m a born again atheist; perhaps I could point to some pivotal experience in my life which caused this conversion, some dreadful influence that religion or organized religion had on me which turned me from it forever. But, unfortunately, my life is not that dramatic. Moreover, I’m rather skeptical, as you might imagine, of born again experiences. Curiously, that is likely rooted in my own religious background in the traditions of Roman Catholicism. I was born into a New York Irish Catholic family, fresh from the old sod. As an Irish Catholic American, with nuns and priests on all sides of the family, I don’t recall what it was like not being a Catholic. My wife, an American Baptist by upbringing, says I’m still a Catholic and still think like one. And she’s right. I divided the world into Catholics and non-Catholics. I saw no need to make finer distinctions among the heretics. Oh, I knew there were Jews and Baptists and Episcopalians and Congregationalists and Lutherans and even evangelicals and fundamentalists (although they were only in the movies where I came from). But to my Notre Dame subway alum mind, what was essential to all these groups was that they weren’t us. A mixed marriage was when a Catholic married one of these other people. Race wasn’t even on the radar screen. I mean I was a Yankee fan and rooted against Jackie Robinson every September!! I was even an alter boy, and like every young Irish lad, for a time in college I thought about becoming a priest. The great 19^th century Catholic convert John Henry Newman said there were only two alternatives: Catholicism and atheism. All the rest were on the way to the one belief or the other. That captures nicely my own frame of mind.

Now I wouldn’t want to argue for that view, but I think it fair to say that Newman’s view of things at least described the religious terrain as I lived on it. I suspect that makes me a certain kind of atheist. That great non-believer, Bertrand Russell, once wrote that Catholics who became atheists make different kinds of atheists than Protestants who became atheists. Protestants who became atheists tended to become free thinkers, maybe anarchists or libertarians. Catholics joined the labor movement, became Fascists or Communists. There’s a story here, but for another occasion. There’s a joke told in Ireland that may be appropriate. A tourist, driving through civil war torn Northern Ireland, came upon a militia checkpoint. He didn’t know whether it was a Catholic or a Protestant checkpoint. The checkpoint guard pointed a gun at him,

“Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?”

“I’m neither, sir. I’m an atheist.”

“But are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?”

Well, I’m a Catholic atheist. In many ways I still do think like a Catholic. But that, too, is for another time. But my Atheism does not stem from any deep, psychologically crippling effect of an oppressive Church. I actually found the Catholicism of my youth invigorating and intellectually liberating. My three sisters, on the other hand, were not so blessed, if I may be excused the expression. I suspect that has something to do with gender roles. In any case, I was encouraged to think about religion, to read, to discuss, to come to grips with the main ideas of religion, ethics and such. I was a serious and committed Catholic during a time of great vibrancy in the Catholic Church. We had our Pious XII, Hitler’s Pope as he has since been called, but our great papal hero was John XXXIII, whose equal we have yet to see. I was brought up, intellectually speaking, reading G. K. Chesterton, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Graham Greene, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton and other Catholic intellectuals. It was an intellectual environment which encouraged clear thinking and admired the life of the mind. The Catholicism of my youth showed little of that anti-intellectualism that, sad to say, has become so much a part of the contemporary American religious scene. We are, as Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, would say, rational animals and our well-being is achieved in the exercise of those rational faculties which make us human. Even salvation was conceived in intellectual terms. Our reward in heaven was the vision of God, the beatific vision; the big stare, as one of my seminarian friends called it. It is the culmination of the human drive to know the first causes of things, the theological capstone to intellectual virtue.

In any case, in the context of the kind of Catholicism in which I was raised, it was no sin to doubt, to raise questions, to critically examine or to see difficulties in the faith. Moreover, the sorts of things that apparently bother many Christians in this part of the world seemed no obstacle at all. Take evolution, for example. Not only did the Catholicism of my youth raise no doubts about evolution, but one of my favorite Catholic writers, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, made evolution a center piece of his theology. (I am convinced now that his view of what evolution says is fatally flawed, but I didn’t think that at the time.)

As for so many others, my college years changed all this. I entered college in 1962, fairly well entrenched in my faith. I attended an Episcopal college, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. I soon became an active member, even an officer, in the College Newman Club. (Sadly, by the way, many Catholic students today think the Newman club has something to do with the New Man of the New Testament rather than with that great English Catholic of the Victorian Age. Yes, the barbarians are at the gate!) Then I ran into philosophy and nothing has been the same since. I took first a general philosophy course and a course in philosophy of religion from Professor Howard Delong. Howard introduced me to the work of a contemporary American philosopher, Walter Kaufmann, raised in Germany, whose main scholarly fame is as an interpreter and translator of the works of Nietzsche. But it was not Nietzsche that captured my imagination; it was what Walter Kaufman had written about religion in two books, Critique of Religion and Philosophy and Faith of a Heretic. Those two books and my later exposure to David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion spoiled me forever. They simply made me see religion in general and Christianity in particular in an entirely new and more critical light. Christianity in particular and theism in general slowly came to be simply incredible to me.

My views of religion have changed and, I hope, matured since then, but it is fair to say that they have not altered in fundamental ways. In a paradoxical way, my beliefs have not changed that much since my Catholic days. My disbelief is, I think, a gradual maturing of those very commitments to the rational life that I had been imbued with as a youth.

This whole business is all very complicated; the arguments can become very complex. However, I don’t want to use this occasion to deliver a lecture on philosophy. Rather what I would prefer to do is to state, even if dogmatically, what I think, with only a bit of a hint as to why and leave some opportunity for us to engage in discussion.

There is much that could be said about specific theistic religions, much that could be said about the credentials of the Bible or the Koran as the Word of God. However, I will focus on what unites these great theistic religions, the belief in a personal God, who exhibits providential control over the world, who created the world, who is supremely good and who is a fit object of worship. This is the God whose existence I wish to deny. This is the central concept of God in the Western tradition. There may be other concepts of God, but I’d rather not be compelled to take aim at a moving target. I can tackle only one God at time. That’s enough, I take it.

In the history of philosophical and theological thinking, there have been many attempts to provide evidence or proof of God’s existence. But the argument that seems to have been the most popular and most influential is the so called argument from design. For reasons that should become clearer later, I would prefer to call it the argument from order to design. It is an argument with a long history. Clear versions of it can be found in Aquinas (it is the fifth of his five famous proofs we get introduced to in introductory philosophy courses). But its hey day was in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when the notion that the world is essentially like a machine, governed by mechanical laws, was so very popular. The classic formula can be found in William Paley’s famous comparison of a watch and the world of nature. If we were to come upon a watch, we would immediately conclude that it must have been designed. No operation of either chance or other natural forces could have brought about this curious, perfect adaptation of means to end. For Paley, the world of nature (his favorite example is the eye) exhibits this same curious adaptation of parts to whole so as to bring about some end. If the watch was caused by design, then by all the rules of analogy, the world of nature must have been brought about by design as well. Similar effects must, after all, have similar causes. It follows, at least with a high degree of probability, that nature too is brought about by the design of an intelligent mind, one like a human mind but “proportioned to the grandeur of the work.”

This argument has a number of advantages over other, more metaphysical, arguments. In the first place, it is a relatively simple argument and thus is open to appreciation by nearly anyone, not only the theological elite. Moreover, if it works, it does provide reason for believing in the existence of something like the God of traditional theism. Presumably, God’s wisdom must be vastly superior to man’s to account for the amazing intricacy of his work. Secondly, as is true of the works of human design, we can learn something of the mind of the creator by studying his creation. And thirdly, as any of us cares about the fruits of our labor, it would seem likely that God would exhibit providential care for his creation as well. So from a religious point of view, the argument has a good deal to be said on its behalf. However, the argument is seriously flawed, as David Hume showed with great skill in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Time does not permit a full discussion of Hume’s critique, but a few of the main points can be noted. In the first place, the analogy is not an especially strong one. What the world of nature and the world of machines have in common is that they both exhibit order. The argument would lead us to believe that it is only order by itself that leads us to the conclusion that the watch is designed, but that is not so. We conclude that the watch is designed because we have had prior experience of things like watches which we know to have been caused by design. It is that past experience of similar cases which justifies the inference to a watchmaker. As Hume would have it, all causal inference is tacitly based on appeal to the general features of our experience.

However, universes are simply not as plentiful as watches. Think of it this way. Suppose the old proverbial ignorant savage came upon our watch. What would he conclude? Not having experience of anything like a watch, he might not know what to conclude. He might conclude that it was alive if it were still running, for example. More than likely, he would do as we have done and attribute the watch to a God. You have, I hope, seen the film “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” But what should he have concluded, if he were rational, but uninformed about things like watches? Well, nothing. Having no past experience upon which to draw, he should conclude that he has no idea what the cause of the watch is, or even if it has a cause. Well, we are to the universe as our savage is to the watch. We should remain silent.

Secondly, think about what it is about machines that causes us to conclude that they are designed. Better yet, think about how an anthropologist sets about deciding whether a particular object is or is not manufactured. Artifacts, unlike what occurs naturally, show the marks of being tooled. When I tour our engineering labs, I have no idea what all those contraptions are or what they are for. But, I conclude that they are designed, not because they exhibit order, but because they show the marks of having been tooled. Again, mere order, in the absence of other information drawn from past experience, tells me nothing about the cause of order or if that order even has a cause.

So, the argument from order to design, construed as an analogical argument, is not a very strong argument. The analogy upon which the argument is based, comparing the natural order to a machine, is simply a weak analogy. Hume makes another point which, in certain respects, is even more devastating as it gets at the heart of his charge that the argument is anthropomorphic. If one assumes that the analogy upon which the argument is based is a strong one, what conclusions does the theist want to draw, besides the one that the universe is designed? There are several other conclusions that are fundamental to traditional theism.

1. The universe is designed by one being.
2. The universe is designed by the being that created it.
3. The universe was created from nothing.
4. The designer of the universe is a purely spiritual being and is not a material or physical being.
5. The designer is all good, all-powerful and all wise.

But if the analogy is strong, that is, if the universe is enough like human artifacts to justify the inference from order to design, these other, equally central conclusions do not follow. For example, with respect to machines and human design, the more complex the machine, the more likely it was designed by a number of persons; the more likely that there would be a division of function, perhaps it was made by a person other than its designer. Furthermore, we have no experience of design which brings something into being from nothing, but rather things are created from pre-existing material whose existence is independent of the activity of design, as I might design a house and make it from wood. Moreover, this independent material must already exhibit an order independent of my design if I am to make anything at all from it. All design which culminates in creation in the human realm necessarily involves some use of the body to manipulate building materials. Even literary creations must at least be spoken or written, both of which involve the body. And finally, no conclusion regarding the infinity of the deity can be drawn from any such argument. Even if there were only one such designer and creator, all we would be entitled to conclude would be that this being must be sufficiently good, powerful and wise to have created the world as we experience it.

So if the analogy between artifacts and nature were a strong analogy and we stick to the principle that similar effects have similar causes, then what we ought to conclude from the argument is that there are many gods with different functions who have bodies and created this world by rearranging pre-existing materials. As Hume so nicely put it, “Behold the cosmogony of ancient times brought back before us.” So, contrary to its defenders intent, what this argument actually supports is some ancient form of polytheism, hardly a welcome outcome for theists!

The usual response to this is that Hume is overlooking the fact that divine design is totally unlike human design. Well, perhaps so, but then the defender of the argument is between a rock and a hard place, as Hoosiers would say. The analogy is either a strong one, in which case polytheistic conclusions follow, not theistic ones, or the analogy is remote, in which case no conclusions can be drawn at all. You can’t have it both ways.

Perhaps the most distressing consequence of Hume’s critique is that the moral attributes of the deity are equally difficult to fathom with the resources of the design argument. One could talk about the problem of evil for a good long time. How do you square the goodness and omnipotence of God with the evil and suffering in the world? Either God is not all good (since he obviously allows evil he could easily have prevented) or he is not all powerful (since he is unable to eliminate evil). Theists have a whole battery of responses to this problem. Free will is probably the favorite. Evil is the result of human choice. If God were to prevent evils that result from human choices, then we would only be automatons. Moreover, unless there are evils in the world (dangers to be faced, suffering to overcome, etc) there could be no virtue (no courage, no patience). Therefore, for all we know, this is on the whole a better world for the evil that is in it. A world without evil would be a world without free beings capable of developing and exercising virtue.

This rebuttal has its flaws and its complications, few of which we can get into here. However, the main difficulty can be appreciated, even if we accept them. All they show is that the existence of evil can be shown to be logically consistent with the existence of the God of traditional theism. They do not in any way explain or justify the inference to the existence of God from what we can know about the world. The point can be made this way, in the spirit of the design argument itself. On the basis of our knowledge and experience of the world, supposing the world has a cause and that this cause bears some remote analogy to intelligent design, is the attribution of the traditional moral attributes of the deity the most plausible hypothesis? I don’t see how this could be supported. Indeed, John Henry Newman, whom I mentioned earlier, did not make use of the design argument in his defense of the rationality of religious belief for just this reason. The design argument, he said, at best teaches us of God’s power and wisdom, but nothing of his justice or mercy, which things are of the essence of religion. Newman, as it turns out, read his Hume and was aware of the limits of the design argument in particular and of natural theology (the effort to provide evidence from nature about God).

Perhaps the most common question which traditional theists ask us atheists has to do with morality. Without God, what do we base our moral decisions on? If there is a moral law, must there not be a law giver? Shades of this argument can be found in hosts of Christian writers, most notably C. S. Lewis, who defends a position like this in his Mere Christianity. It is, however, a weak and confused argument whose flaws were exposed centuries ago by Plato.

In his dialogue The Euthyphro Socrates is depicted as on his way to his trial at which he will, among other things, be charged with impiety. Outside the court he meets Euthyphro, a self styled expert on matters religious. In his customary way, Socrates inflates Euthyphro’s ego by expressing his good fortune. He does not know what piety is and was therefore expecting to have a difficult time defending himself. Now that he has met the great expert on piety, whom he trusts will instruct him about the nature of piety, he feels invigorated. In the course of the dialogue, several different definitions of piety are proposed and Socrates proceeds to show flaws in all of them. I will focus on only one definition.

Euthyphro defines piety as what is pleasing to or dear to the gods. For our purposes I will revise the interchange a bit. Suppose we say that that which is moral is what God commands. (Correlatively, that which is morally wrong is what God prohibits.) Socrates poses a question at this point. Are things commanded by God because they are moral, or are they moral because they are commanded by God? If it is the former (which, by the way, is what Euthyphro agrees to), then we are in effect conceding that morality is not determined by divine command. God commands certain things because he knows that they are moral; morality is thus independent of God’s will. Morality does not, therefore, depend on belief in or beliefs about God. On the other hand, if you say that things are moral simply because they are commanded by God, then two things follow. First of all, God’s commands are completely arbitrary, his having no reason for issuing the commands he issues. (If he had a reason, then whatever that reason would be might serve as a moral standard independent of God’s indorsing it with his will.) Secondly, God’s commands cannot themselves be good and we have no reason for praising him for his goodness. As Hume might say, it would make no sense to ascribe moral attributes to God. Either horn of the dilemma creates problems for the traditional theist. Morality, therefore, cannot be said coherently to be based on belief in God or beliefs about what God commands.

In short, I see no good reason to think that God exists. While there are many more arguments for God’s existence, only one of which we have even mentioned, I do not think that any of them establishes even the probability of God’s existence. But am I not guilty of fallaciously arguing that since there is no proof of God’s existence, then that constitutes proof of or evidence of God’s non-existence? Well, in a manner of speaking, yes. But such arguments are not always fallacious. Let me explain by returning to the argument from design.

The argument from design can be looked at as an analogical argument, as I did earlier. However, it can also be looked upon as an explanatory argument, what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation. Understood as an explanatory argument, the design argument goes something like this. It is a fact about nature (think here especially of biological systems) that it exhibits order and pattern. What is the best explanation of this order? When the options are, as they were until Darwin, chance or design, clearly, design was the better explanation, the better explanatory hypothesis as it were. The pivotal role of Darwin in this debate is that he proposed a third alternative, descent with modification from common ancestors by natural selection. Darwin’s hypothesis is by far the best explanation, compared to design or chance. It is better than design because, as Stephan Jay Gould has pointed out in an essay entitled “Senseless Signs of History”, organisms show evidence of their historical descent from earlier forms of life. The best evidence for evolution’s superiority over design is not the perfection of the adaptation of an organism to its environment, but the imperfection of that fit. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, he would not have used a collection of parts generally used for other purposes. Optimal design is what one would expect, if the world were designed by an infinite God. But we don’t find optimal design. We find, instead, structures that are jury-rigged from components made available by historical circumstances. This is where bad knees and lower back pain come from, for instance. It is also where one of Gould’s favorite examples, the panda’s thumb, comes from. From descent with modification from common ancestors, that is what we should expect. That is not what we should expect from divine design. Therefore, the naturalistic explanation of the order of nature is a better explanation of the evidence than the hypothesis of intelligent design.

But does all this establish atheism? Isn’t it still possible that there is some God “directing” evolution, even though the process itself proceeds by purely naturalistic principles? Well, that’s possible. But it’s also possible that my car is really directed by little gremlins, even though they operate through the laws of mechanics. But such bare and fanciful possibility is not a sufficient reason for belief. We are justified in denying the existence of my mechanical gremlins because they play no explanatory role in understanding how my car works. By the same argument, God’s existence plays no explanatory role in understanding how our world works. We live by such explanatory, probabilistic arguments. As the great mathematical physicist LaPlace said when asked where God fit in his universe, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

*Dr. William R. Connolly is a professor of philosophy at the University of Evansville.