As mentioned in my last post, I was graciously asked by Randal Rauser on his blog recently to provide a synopsis of a few paragraphs to run in his series “Why I am an atheist” (or not a Christian. The series has been interesting and has elicited testimonies from Justin Schieber, Counter Apologist, Jeff Lowder, Ed Babinski and others. I have since asked Randal to return the favour and he has gladly accepted, furnishing me with a much more lengthy expression of the reasons for his Christian belief. For those who don’t know, we had a debate on Reasonable Doubts about the historicity of the Nativity accounts.
Randal’s account follows:
I am an unapologetic world-realist (and the chances are that you are too). This means that I eschew the idealist’s claim that the only things that exist are minds and their conscious states. Mind you, I cannot demonstrate that the idealist is incorrect. And I don’t dispute the fact that the idealist may be rational to retain belief in idealism. But don’t expect me to follow him. For me, belief in an external world that corresponds to my sense perceptual experience is an ineluctable conclusion. Mind you, world-realism isn’t a belief based on evidence since, as the idealist loves to point out, the evidence of conscious experience confirms idealism no less than realism. (In other words, the evidence underdetermines the matter.) Instead, philosophers recognize this belief in the external world as a properly basic belief. This means that absent defeaters (that is, concrete reasons or evidence) to think realism is false, I am (and you are) perfectly justified in thinking it true. Moreover, if realism is true, then I (and you) can know it.
But enough about the external world. Let’s now shift our attention to that realm which lies beyond the world of sense experience which philosophers refer to as metaphysics. Metaphysics refers to the ultimate constituents of reality, the most basic building blocks, the fundamental furniture, the so-called primary colors, the point at which you can go no further in your analysis of what is. At the heart of every account of metaphysics is what philosopher Roy Clouser calls “the divine”. Mind you, by “the divine” he simply means that which is understood to be unconditionally, non-dependently real. It is important to understand that by this definition, every metaphysical system has a stopping point of explanation which functions as “the divine” in that system. For example, when Bertrand Russell quipped that “The universe is just there, and that’s all”, he identified the universe as the stopping point of explanation, and thus for Russell the universe is the divine. (If you remain loathe to speak of atheists confessing belief in the divine, you are welcome to substitute another term like “the really real”.)
At this point I can now bring together this observation about sense perception and properly basic belief with my own beliefs about the divine. All my life the belief that the divine is an agent has been a natural, basic belief. Perhaps it is not as immediate and undeniable as belief in the external world. Certainly other rational individuals insist that for them the divine has never been an agent. But for most of my life, from the time snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef to witnessing the birth of my child to standing in Sagrada Familia to the experience of goodness and mercy in others to the inescapability of teleology – from eyes that are for seeing to lives that are for helping others – I find time and again I am drawn with an undeniable immediacy to the belief that the divine is an agent. And thus, we are, most emphatically, not alone.
But what should I think about the nature of this agent? Has it (or he or she?) spoken? Does it (or he or she?) expect anything of me? If so, what is it?
I was born into a Christian home. This provides my starting point for thinking about the divine. Some folks who are born into a Christian home find that experience has driven them away from the Christian description of the divine. To take an extreme example, two weeks ago I met Nate Phelps, the gregarious and friendly son of the “God hates fags” Pastor Fred Phelps. Today Nate is an atheist, and one can’t help but think that his nasty father had no small role in Nate’s journey to atheism.
But in my case my experience being reared in a Christian home has provided good reasons to continue to understand the divine in accord with Christian truth-descriptions. Consequently, I retain the belief with which I was raised that Christianity provides the most accurate set of beliefs and practices for understanding and relating to the divine, culminating in the claim that the divine was and is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.
This account will be very unsatisfactory to some who have persuaded themselves that our most basic metaphysical commitments must always be conclusions from the weight of evidence and argument. “You’ve locked yourself up in your Christian beliefs!” they retort. “Set aside all your beliefs and follow the evidence where it leads!”
Those kinds of protests remind me of a key moment in Bill Clinton’s masterful speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention when he observed,
“One of the greatest chairmen the Democratic Party ever had, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself. But, as Strauss then admitted, it ain’t so.”
Clinton’s right, of course. It ain’t so. And any politician who fancies himself born into the cabin he himself built is merely deluding himself with a naïve narrative of rugged Enlightenment individualism.
Alas, the protestations of my interlocutor strike a similar chord. I’m not “locked” in my Christian, theistic beliefs any more than the committed atheistic naturalist is “locked” in his. Each of us needs a place to stand as we consider how the world seems to us. To be sure, we all need to aspire to be rational and open-minded, but none of us can really step out of our particular place to adopt a view from nowhere from which we can build the cabin into which we shall be intellectually born.
But doesn’t this make things even worse? Doesn’t it mean we’re all ultimately locked away in our self-justifying towers of personal perspective? No, the worry is unfounded. As I noted above with regard to world-realism, this belief is rational, justified and (if true) may constitute knowledge, so long as there are no serious defeaters to it. (Much more would need to be said regarding the nature of defeaters and the rationality of individuals and doxastic communities, but that is a conversation for another day.) The same is true for each of our metaphysical starting points, whether we call ourselves theistic Christians or atheistic naturalists or anything else. And this leaves each of us not locked in a self-justifying tower, but rather with an open invitation to a round table of discussion above which is written, “Come, let us reason together”.
For more on my intellectual biography see my essay “The Prayer that Prayed Me,” in David Marshall, ed. Faith Seeking Understanding; Essays in Memory of Paul Brand and Ralph Winter, (William Carey Library, 2012).
For more on my apologetic reasoning see my book The Swedish Atheist, the Scuba Diver, and Other Apologetic Rabbit Trails (InterVarsity, 2012).
In analysing this piece, I must remind myself and the readers that Randal has put his faith down here to be analysed, but I hope that I can be respectful of his offer to do so, and ask that readers and commenters are likewise respectful of Randal and his testimony. By all means let’s be critical, but not to the point of rudeness or lack of civility.
So Randal has produced a large enough piece here but without, with all due respect, an awful lot of substance, philosophically speaking. By this I mean that he has kept his argument count to a minimum. He starts by claiming a properly basic belief in the correspondence theory of truth, or at least that there is something out there, and thus I assume he is saying that we can in some way access it (more, perhaps, than Kant in his denial that we can know the thing-in-itself). Most of the meat, though, is contained in this paragraph:
At this point I can now bring together this observation about sense perception and properly basic belief with my own beliefs about the divine. All my life the belief that the divine is an agent has been a natural, basic belief. Perhaps it is not as immediate and undeniable as belief in the external world. Certainly other rational individuals insist that for them the divine has never been an agent. But for most of my life, from the time snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef to witnessing the birth of my child to standing in Sagrada Familia to the experience of goodness and mercy in others to the inescapability of teleology – from eyes that are for seeing to lives that are for helping others – I find time and again I am drawn with an undeniable immediacy to the belief that the divine is an agent. And thus, we are, most emphatically, not alone.
So he has a properly basic belief that the world is ‘divine’, imbued with agency. His conclusion, which is pretty big, is reached by appeals to several things:
- the beauty of the world
- goodness and mercy in others, such as people helping others
- teleology, such as the eye that sees
And that really is it. The problem for Randal is that, even given the brevity of such a task, this is simply not enough to derive a belief in God, for me at any rate. The beauty of the world can be explained in many ways (as I explained here), and many would conclude a subjective understanding of such beauty. I am not sure positing God to undergird it has any value. It also doesn’t very well explain all of the ugliness of the world: shit stained toilets in a slum; favelas where rape takes place next to burning litter; wolves tearing a caribou to death; a meteorite wiping out billions of organisms in a horrific explosion. Hardly beautiful.
And the same can be said for 2). Yes, it’s easy to posit God as underwriting goodness and mercy, but whenever we see evil, suffering (rape, torture, carnivorousness etc) it is suddenly humanity’s fault in some way. Goodness and mercy = God. The antitheses = something else to blame and explain it away.
Now some of you might not like this (h/t Honest_John_Law). It is truly disgusting. But utterly natural.
Now can you sit there and watch that all, quite unaffected, and say, “God designed that. God is all-loving, and that really is the best he could possibly do. I love God.”
Watch it. Watch it again. Watch it as the buffalo is having its hind ripped out alive as safari-going onlookers laugh about prolapsed anuses. Is that the goodness and mercy Randal is talking about? Is that the teleology which is so evident? Those eyes to better see the prey, catch it and eat it alive with those well-designed teeth? Or is that the arms race of evolution which predicts such eventualities. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and we may intuitively be repulsed by it, but shit happens. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Either God designed it that way or that is how life competes for resources. You choose.
I know which is more plausible. The best designed in conception, bar none, nothing, no entity, nada. Perfection designs that brutality? You can’t blame me, I didn’t design that. And it happened before ‘The Fall’. No, God has a lot to answer for.
Oh, and we pretty much know how the eye evolved.
As for the rest of Randal’s piece, I think it can be best summed up by deferring to John Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith. His book on the topic, by the way, is superb. I have been really pleasantly surprised by how much I am getting from it. And the case is so very strong. On what basis does Randal’s faith survive that critical analysis whilst all the other faiths do not? And is it not rather suspect that he has the same belief as his parents – is their familial and intellectual / cultural baggage?
