A Question About Agnosticism

An agnostic about the existence of God says that he cannot know whether or not there is a God, so it is sensible to withhold judgment on the question. Assuming one is agnostic regarding God, yet does not believe that entities like space aliens, ghosts, leprechauns, fairies, etc., exist, then the question arises of why disbelieve in the latter and not the former? If the agnostic answer is that space aliens et al are clearly man-made fictions, then well and good. (Putting aside for argument's sake that examining the origins of religion also show it as a similar man-made fiction) I wonder if there is another factor at work in not disbelieving in God.

Note that space aliens, ghosts, leprechauns, fairies, and the like are of little importance to men. They interfere in our affairs for good or bad, but only to a limited extent. Not so God. God made the world, gives to life morals and meaning, and provides an afterlife for us. Unlike the leprechaun and his counterparts, God is of utmost importance to men. God, if real, is fundamental to the universe and our lives.

Is the agnostic's hesitance to disbelieve in God due to the fundamental importance attached to God?

God's importance is of a philosophical nature. To disbelieve in leprechauns is to - at no great cost - exclude them as a reason for one's good or bad luck or just as a curious creature from one's understanding of reality. Is the philosophical importance attached to God an impediment to disbelief for an agnostic who does not believe there are leprechauns? The existence of leprechauns is intellectually easy to dismiss. Perhaps for some the existence of God is not so intellectually easy to dismiss solely because fundamental intellectual matters are by definition attached to His existence and with that comes the unpleasant realization that these important matters would be dismissed with Him - which is nihilism; but not being nihilists, they settle on agnosticism. In other words, the importance of an alleged supernatural being is related to withholding disbelief in it. "Afterall, God is important, so maybe He exists." Is it rational to hold that one unimportant supernatural being does not exist but an important one may or may not exist?

I raise this question because I often sense this is implicitly in what agnostics argue. Then again, maybe it is just me reading too much into their positions. I don't know.

If one is agnostically stopping short of disbelief in God as a result of this supernatural being's importance, here is a thought experiment that might clarify. Imagine a leprechaun, not as a mere mischevious and secretive magical creature, but instead imagine the leprechaun is the creator of the universe, giver of life and morals. Then the leprechaun becomes God.

Is withholding judgment on the existence of that God rational? Hardly. Same for any God, goblin, or ghost. The point is, the importance or non-importance to mankind of any supernatural beings is not important in reasoning to the conclusion that there are no such beings.

Theologians from Space

From this story about the flight of a group of objects that are unidentified is an insightful tidbit of how alike are those who believe in the sci-fi paranormal with those who believe in God:

The eerie extra-terrestrial crafts were hovering in the night sky over the town moving in different directions before eventually shooting straight up into the atmosphere.
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Phil Hoyle, from UK-based UFO Investigation Unit, said the way the UFOs had moved indicated a form of intelligence.
He said: "If these objects were circling one another you would have to rule out that they were fireworks.
"If they were dodging and darting around each other it would indicate intelligent movement."

So not only does the "intelligent design" argument work to offer proof of God's existence, it offers proof of... space aliens! How scientific! (Nevermind that objects darting around each other could be caused by non-intelligent movement.)

Actually, a 'space alien' use of the I.D. argument would be a pretty good reductio ad absurdum of the Christian position - problem is, the "UFOlogists" applied it to their "field"!

Then again, this should not be surprising. That a religious believer can look at the universe and take the identity and cause-effect that inheres in it as proof that it is a "design" which implies an "intelligent designer" of a supernatural nature, and that someone like Mr. Hoyle can see unidentified lights moving in the night sky and can assert their movement is "intelligent," eloquently demonstrates how similar these two mentalities are. Neither has independent proof of their various "intelligent designers." Both argue for their "intelligent designers" from ignorance - they do not know how to explain the phenomena they are concerned with so they posit other-worldly "intelligent designers" as the answer. Both concoct untestable but impressive-sounding rationalizations to believe what they want to believe.

If Mr. Hoyle was alive before men developed knowledge to build fuel-propelled, electronically-lighted aircraft and saw objects in the night sky (like some natural phenomena appears in our day and then gets reported as "UFO's") would he say, "They are angels, proof of God!"?

Most probably.

The Christian Sick "Moral Teaching" of the Day

Just a little while ago I got in my truck and because there is nothing else on the radio, turned on the local Christian AM station and heard host Chuck Bentley on his show "Moneylife" talking about the topic of suffering in the context of job loss and hard financial times. (I should point out that I missed some of the minor details in the following because I had to pay attention to traffic.) So Bentley read from the Bible a letter by Paul about the sufferings and persecutions he went through as he spread the Christian religion to others. Bentley's point was that this was important because Paul's example showed other Christians how to "suffer well" when they have to. I think, okay, fine, when times are tough one has to cope with it, perhaps to the point of finding strength within oneself one did not even know was there. What does anyone need a guy on the radio to point that out for? Well, it got better... or should I say, worse? This is religion after all.

Bentley then related a story about an older man who lost his job and the pastor went to see him. The older man said that as he lost his job he had no fear or worry because he "knew" that God was there watching him and this is part of God's plan so it will all work out in the end, or something like that. So here Bentley gets to his point: God has us suffer so we can be an example to others of how to suffer well.

Beliefs like that are imaginary rationalizations to help religious believers cope. This gives them a positive attitude, no doubt, so they can persevere. Meaning, as well, is projected on their suffering so it seems more than just a loss without reason. But more important, what does that rationalization really mean? Would one do to one's own children what God did to His "children" - make them suffer so they are good examples to their siblings of how to suffer well?

Imagine your child comes to you all distraught with a tale of how his life is suddenly turned upside-down in some way and you say to your child, "I love you and I know you are strong and can suffer well until you make things right again. By the way, I am responsible for turning your life upside-down. I did it so that you can serve an example to your brothers and the other children of how to suffer well. Be comforted by that until you make things right again."

Should the response to that parent be heaping on him praise and love - or is it perhaps time to call social services (to say nothing of a psychotherapist)?

I do not think I need to articulate just how irrational and immoral that parent is. It should be pretty evident. If, however, God does that same thing it demonstrates how wise and wonderful He is and how good it is to believe in Him.

I do not know who is more morally and psychologically depraved: a God who acts like that or Chuck Bentley who praises and worships that God.

D'Souza's Absentee Answer

In the opening of Dinesh D'Souza's column, An Absentee God?, his admission of being baffled by a debating opponent caught my interest by making me admire his intellectual honesty and determination to find an answer eventually, even if I would disagree with him. As it turned out, however, D'Souza would have been better off not attempting to answer his opponent, whose position he probably helped.

In my debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens... he raised a point that I did not know how to answer... Hitchens' argument bothered me.

Here's what Hitchens said. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let's say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man's horrible condition. After all, cave-man's plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn't really care.

Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, "It's time to get involved." Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn't bother with China or Egypt or India. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere. It took another thousand years or more for this message to get to places like India and China.

Here is the thrust of Hitchens' point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?

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[Erik] Kreps noters [sic] that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born in the 100,000 years before Christ came to earth.

"So in a sense," Kreps notes, "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population, so even though 98 percent of humanity's timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption."

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Suddenly savage man gives way to historical man. Suddenly the naked ape gets his act together. We see civilizations sprouting in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and elsewhere. Suddenly there are wheels and agriculture and art and culture. Soon we have dramatic plays and philosophy and an explosion of inventions and novel forms of government and social organization.

So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this but no one has offered a persuasive account. If we compare man's trajectory on earth to an airplane, we see a long, long stretch of the airplane faltering on the ground, and then suddenly, a few thousand years ago, takeoff!

Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being or force reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.

So paradoxically Hitchens' argument becomes a boomerang. Hitchens has raised a problem that atheism cannot easily explain and one that seems better accounted for by biblical account of creation.

Excuse me? If atheism cannot easily explain something - man's recent progress - then the Bible easily explains it? That is a convincing answer? Perhaps for a Christian who reasons in circles, not for an atheist, though. The simplicity of "God caused it" is not a persuasive account, just an easy, imaginary answer.

Actually, D'Souza does not answer Hitchens question, but does answer a question that Hitchens did not ask.The question was not, why was there no progress for so long in mankind's span on earth? That, D'Souza answered. Nor was it, what happened when and after God finally intervened? D'Souza answered that also. The question, however, was why did God wait so long to intervene in man's life on earth and only in ancient Israel? That, D'Souza has not offered any answer to. One can say at its best D'Souza's answer is a lame excuse for God's intervention when it was - that only a small fraction of men missed out on it, but in the larger picture it was for the good of the greater amount of men - whatever the reason was for it not happening sooner.

What D'Souza thinks is an answer is flawed, anyhow.

Hitchens often asks this question and uses the 100,000 year figure of man's existence as a minimum that anybody has to accept, based on the science. This excludes the science-rejecting Biblical literalists who claim the earth itself is only 5,000 or so years old. Hitchens actually accepts the science that man has been around for much, much longer than 100,000 years. So what happens to D'Souza and Kreps' arithmetic based on science that man has been around for 500,000 years, say? Then how do they explain God's timing?

If they can say God's timing was nearly "perfect," with two percent of all men missing out on it, can D'Souza also claim with consistency that an intelligent designer made the universe? If He made a universe of fine-tuned, irreducible complexity, that same intelligent designer's intervention in man's existence failed by two percent. Two percent should fall well outside the quality specifications tolerance of such a supremely intelligent designer.

Furthermore, D'Souza does not answer Hitchens as to why God allowed 1,000 years to pass before His Word spread across the earth after Its arrival.

Man suddenly developing knowledge is a "historical miracle"? If a miracle is a violation of natural law, how does the correct use of the human mind qualify as one? "Because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software." (Never mind the dearth of knowledge in subsequent religious societies.) D'Souza offers that non-answer to Hitchens' question of "what kind of a bizarre God acts like this?" If anything, he elaborates on it! By D'Souza's admission, 98% of human existence passed by on a primitive level before God intervenes with the gift of knowledge. (Wait - isn't there a story about God and a forbidden tree?)

What D'Souza's "answer" consists of is merely recasting Hitchens' very question as a statement, albeit in Christian terms: "it is a miracle according to the biblical account of creation," and he is satisfied that he refuted Hitchens.

D'Souza and Kreps think they nailed Hitchens: "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population." Besides the fact that biblical scholarship has proved that the records of God's relationship with man are indeed unreliable despite God's intention, why would an omnipotent, omniscient, intelligent designer allow His intervention into man's existence and its timing be dependent on man's circumstances? If He is responsible for the sudden surge in man's knowledge at this specific point in time, He could have made that happen sooner, like at the beginning of man's existence. Is that expecting too much from a fine-tuning, intelligent designer? Why would He do otherwise - which is what Hitchens' was asking!

Hitchens is not the one who threw a boomerang at himself, D'Souza.