21st-century Christian Philosopher

Back and Forth

“Faith is dangerous,” says the atheist. “It’s trail of blood through history is a well-known fact.”

“Oh yeah?” says the apologist, “Then explain the bloody history of Communist atheists!!” And then they go on to cite that in a century communists had killed more people than were killed in millenia by religions. Like the Inquisition on speed.

To which the atheist counters: 1) communists are religious, and 2) the abuse by communists cannot be traced back to their atheism.

They contrast this by maintaining that a theist–and more to the point: a Christian–may kill as an act of following that faith.¹

This argument can be very convincing unless you’re watching for the sleight of hand. I’ll have to admit, I don’t always see the trick at first. But I usually catch up.

What I plan to discuss in the following sections is 1) the theistic faith is comparable in claim #2, and that these claims for atheism do not tend to be “fair” in application.

Simple Belief

First of all, no one kills another on the simple belief that there is a God and he cares about you. Even if you believe that he cares about people of your kind, specifically, there is still at least a small leap that has to be made to “God cares for me, but others are useless, so I can and should kill them.”

Now I’ve always felt that this objection had value, but I wasn’t able to put it to work as more than a pendantic stipulation. However, repetitive musings on this quibble have focused my mind on what larger issue that it points to.

Given that stipulation, theism is equivalent to atheism in that nobody is likely to kill as a direct result of either. Of course the counter is that theism isn’t just theism, in most cases. Generic theists are so often identified as deists, that the Deists come to claim them as their own. So theism has content. In the case of the Hebrews, the Torah and Tanach and, to some degree, the Midrash. And Christians have the Gospels and Epistles.

The “simple case” begs to be broken into specific cases. Simple theism is academic and does not exist out in the wild. But in real beliefs there is content. The Bible tells how God told the children of Israel to drive the Canaanites from their land. So from there, you can see how people would get the idea to kill people based on faith.

Except it doesn’t work that way, either. Even granted that God told the Israelites to drive people from the valley because he is giving the land to them as fulfillment of his promise. It is not directly conclusive that God is directing you to do anything. It can make one perhaps more likely to believe that God might in your case. But with counters like Paul’s statement that we do not fight wars “according to the flesh” with weapons “not of the flesh”, it still is not flat out evident or even basic that God is calling you to do so.

It has something to do with our Faith, but it is not as a direct result of it.

…And Remorse

Now almost on cue, I feel sludge of dread pouring over me at having thought this. It sounds like so little to say about so much. It sounds like a difference that makes little difference. Surely the lives of people warrant more than just some convenient side-stepping?!

And it is this emotional reaction, and my lament that I may be wrong, that has kept me from looking at this any further. But as far as the argument goes, if we curl over at this point in shame, sorrow and remorse, you likely do not see the atheists walking away, arms raised in victory.

But on the other hand, victims of Communism were still killed en mass by atheists. Not a-any-unbeknownst-to-them-religion-ists, but a-theists. If it is a sin for me to try to get God off on any technicality, then the force of the atheist argument is not that they have points, but how strong those points are.

We must weigh coldly the amount to which stipulations apply to either side. Should we find that atheist arguments are just as thin.

So here we have fact #1. I’ve never accepted it as a fact. I have reasons for doubting that “secular religion” is anything but a dodge by atheists selling their “product”. But I can still argue as if it were given. So I will.

Secular religionists are religionists not theists. Thus, under “religion” it is possible for people to fall in the realm of “disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings” and still believe in things that get people killed in bunches.

The sudden switch to “religion” is a bit of sleight of hand. But as tasty as that morsel sounds, I’ll leave that to a future time, unless it cuts back into the conversation.

Godlessness

What is “atheism”? If we are to know that the murders of the Communists didn’t directly flow from atheism, then we need to know what the limits of atheism are. Atheism is simply “disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings” (dictionary.com).

Darned if they aren’t right! From that definition, I can hardly tell how I would be compelled to kill people for that. But then again, it is maintained as entirely content-less.

Atheism, broadly defined, it is the absence of belief in the existence of any gods. atheism.about.com

Lower on the page, answering the question: “Does Godless Atheism Have Implications for One’s Philosophy or Ideology?”

Atheism, which is the mere disbelief in the existence of gods, has no inherent philosophical or political implications. ibid

This, I refer to as “content-less”[^2]. So it has no content. It is the “disbelief” or as most atheists request “lack of belief”. “No inherent philosophical implications.”

However, link on the sidebar is kind of questionable: “Atheist Activism & Politics”. What is there to be “active” about as an atheist? I don’t see it in a disbelief; I don’t see it in a lack of belief. So despite that there is no direct path from simple atheism to “activism”, such a thing can exist. Atheists, it seems, are not content to be simple atheists.

Deny Everything

First of all it’s kind of cheap ploy to compare a system with content to a system without content. There are implications in Christianity, moral and otherwise. It’s what makes me feel great shame or remorse that I am wrong on this issue. It’s the guilt card that can only be played on a system that promotes moral guilt.

And it does nothing more than confirm what I already suspected about faith vs. doubt: It’s easier to doubt and find fault, than to have faith and build. That is ultimately why, although I employ skepticism rather readily, I don’t find consummate value in it.

So I’m not surprised that they’re innocence is easier to maintain. If you hold that nothing follows from simple disbelief, then, how much more could a pogrom follow from it. It can’t.

It’s not something especially admirable of atheists, its just something that if it’s true in the general case, it’s true in the specific case. It’s a trivial exercise from the clause of easy deniability that they’ve dealt themselves.

But is easy deniability the response we want on the subject of hundreds of millions of people slaughtered for non-theistic causes? Isn’t that really in the neighborhood of the stipulation that I could only advance once I saw it pointing to more relevance?

The Witness of History

Also, it’s pretty trivial that no government would ever be defined in strict accord with atheism. Here’s where the work of specific atheists comes into play. Let’s lasso everyone who showed more doubt than their peers and the prominent “myths” of that society. Thus the rationalists who rebelled against the monarchy in France, and the generic theists that founded our country are forward indicators of the value that atheism (as a trend) would bring.

Thus atheism is not seen as a lack of belief, but a historical development. It’s the source of the boast that used to be more common among atheists about religion going the way of the dodo. But it’s not really content-less, and again the development of the Communists occur in history and counter the claim that incremental atheism has been a source of anything.

It also never fell within the bounds of being “traceable directly to their atheism”. So thus, historical progression “toward” atheism is lauded as representative of atheism despite any direct traceability to it, but we sidestep historical developments we don’t like so much. Because they don’t follow directly from a content-less definition of atheism. With each step in the “progression” not coming directly from their atheism.

Which leaves the idea that some doubt is good. Some self-doubt is good. My theology of self-doubt comes from the Bible. The content of Christianity also councils against “self-righteousness”. We are told to examine ourselves. I do not find glib Christianity ideal Christianity.

From here, the atheistic counter can only sound a bit like, “well if a little doubt was good, more ought to be better!” But they would never do that, outside of arguing the historical progression, because that would be a general claim with consequences that had to be defended.

For everything I can think of that they don’t have a solid guide for–where the individual atheist must “find out for themselves”–I can cite scripture where it is more clearly laid either in relief against the Law, or in relation to the mission of Christ.

Q: What would a state of ultimate doubt look like?

A: Is there a reason to have such a state?

Is there such a thing as a historical progression? Might that be many things mixed together into one jumble, where the “essence” is simply abstracted and promoted?

Again, to advance something, there needs to be a claim: The atheist brand cleans whiter than the competing brands. Any such claim could never be a direct consequence of a disbelief. Instead it is the consequence of a belief.

It’s not something I like to talk about. In fact, it invites all sorts of pictures of the type of man I am into my head. I can see some reactions. Faith is so precious, and the entire basis of salvation among we evangelicals that we kind of make it into our part of the bargain to erase doubt from our minds.

In fact, it is one of the door-opening questions of our ilk that goes “Do you knowwhere you would go if you died today?” The resolution of this sequence is that you say the prayer of salvation and you, at the end, know.

So in my moments of doubt, I actually would answer the question theway a total unbeliever would. Again, this makes me uneasy to talk about it. The case that I can be back to square one in moments of doubt, just because I don’t know where I’m going, scares me a bit.

In case anybody’s wondering, I already know a good bit of the quotes you can throw at me. I even know how it all can be blamed on my meddling with “deceptive philosophy” which takes “after the traditions of men”. I mean after all, “philosophy” is kind of in my name and it is“forbidden” by Colossians 2:8, right? And, don’t be fooled that that isthe most I can throw at myself in these instances, either. In fact, I can turn this post into a litany against my doubting flesh.

I have another plan, though. I want to talk about what I realize inthese moments. I revisit similar themes, and those themes (I believe,through the ministry of the Holy Spirit) draw me back to God. I findmyself like the apostles in John 5, I have nowhere else to go.

I could call this an illustration of the principle that I am in Jesus’ hand, and not even I can tear myself from his grip. On the other hand, I could call it persistent delusion or even a “meme” (if I believed in memes, that is).

But let’s start out with a reference to a post that actually illustrates the “value” of atheist moments to me (and perhaps you) if there were any. Some people think I just play at things. I thinkHoratio might have thought so. He conveyed that opinion to me (here). And I’ve never been certain that the casual unbeliever reading Answering the Many Creeds Question (Sort of…) was completely convinced that I wasn’t just strawman-ing the whole thing.

But, I think that one can start to see that, I’m at least trying to be honest when I talk about how I would see things on the other side. I find myself on that other side sometimes.I ended that post as follows:

[W]hen I lean back and wonder how I would ever cross the line again, it comes to me clearly that I could likely only be an unbeliever again by believing in something else, by investing inanother model and its promises. And because I lack the ability to see what that would be, I definitely lack the ability to answer how I know it is the case and none other.

I still am convinced of what I wrote. And this conviction that I have about the solving the Many Creeds question for myself (here)is what has given me the confidence to make the argument that I did.And it is my sincerity (whether or not you believe it) in approaching the argument, which makes me believe that I have done the question service. (Whether or not I answered it.)Because in this, I ask whether this principle is a good “heuristic”?(I apologize for what might be a strange word.) How well does this form of argument work in a wide field? How likely is it that applying thisrule produces something that coheres with the entire body of thought. (Here again, you might notice where disparate vs. consistent thinking shows itself again.)

I’ll continue this in Godless Heuristics (next).

It says you’re a Fundamentalist Christian. You don’t sound much like a fundamentalist Christian to me. In your last post, you have a section called “No God Either” and you’re talking about how human life has no value. What’s going on here?

(As I’m getting no comments at the moment (original date: November 10th, 2004), I thought I’d supply my own.)

Because I understand that some people would be confused about what I’ve been saying the past couple of posts. I am a fundamentalist Christian, but I also am a self-styled philosopher. I say in a previous post, that it is easy for me to believe in value, because I believe that value is set by the Objective Observer, God.

It requires no additional maneuvers to add belief in value to belief in God—in fact it coincides with what we understand as the details of value. Value is an opinion of worth that lives in the beholder.

What I try to outline in my second-to-last post is that constructing objective value for the unbeliever is harder, because using similar rules to (and dodges of) atheism, we can construct an Invincible Ignorance argument which denies value based on lack of evidence and wide disagreement.

For the progressive in our society, evolution is a simple fact. I’m not talking about firmness of belief, or whether they are willing to question it. I’m talking about the simplicity with which they take it into their worldview. It is, to some degree, compartmentalized.

If we are primates, what is the nature of primates? If we are animals, what is the nature of social animals?

Do not the males of a social species vie for dominant status? Yet, the progressive thinks dominance and status something to be rooted out. And he or she thinks that showy male behavior is a backward trait. It’s just silly, something we need to root out.

Is it not one of the distinctives about primates that they are sexually dimorphic? Yet the progressive thinks that we should rise above the sexism of brutes. “There is no gender” says one type of progressive.

Are not many animals territorial? Is it not true that the “sweet song” of the birds in the trees is simply the refrain of, “Get out of here! This area is mine! Don’t make me come over there! You’ve been warned! Get out of my yard!” Yet the progressive says “property is theft” without stopping to consider how deeply ingrained in us that “theft” is.

And yet it is the progressive who is most likely to say that others are absurd for not being able to embrace the fact of their animal nature. Who are they fooling? They can’t even look the beast in the eyes.

Faced with the items on the menu, they want to ask for another menu. “No thank you, I’d like a different human nature, please.”

So let me get back the main point of this post: I want to illustrate to people the evolution that they forget so easily in their narrative of Ascendant Man v2.0. Cultural “evolution” was furthered the most by transcendent, catholic faiths, which in the face of the visible inequality of man asserted the theoretical equality of man, consistent of their view of overcoming the flesh. Today’s progressive has co-opted the course of overcoming the flesh, without even an understanding of how or why, and a partial doubt that it can be done.

Meanwhile, the atheist communists have killed 100 million of our species throughout the 20^th century, because fellow humans refused to de-stratify themselves and surrender property to the group, as if that could be expected of any animal. This is not a general charge against atheists. Just because I have an atheist living next to me, does not mean that I need to fear being dragged to a re-education camp or purged. All I mean it to say is that some atheists are drastically naive about their own worldview.

One note, I should make here is that some view evolution in harmony God. I am not really challenging this view. I deal with the concept of creator-redundant evolution, or evolution that makes any creator redundant.

Next: The Black Box Brain

My last entry talked about the “value code word” and the relation between value and religion.

I wrote about a woman that seemed disturbed that somebody would say they voted from “moral values” in last week’s election. The issue of values seems always to invite[¹] (#fnote1) the question, “Whose values?”

It’s a good question.

This one talks about something that I call A-value-ism. The idea is that there is no such a thing as value outside of human thought.

I propose an idea of A-value-ism. It is the cognate of Atheism. In other words just as Atheism is a simple lack of belief in God, avaluism is a lack of belief that things have innate value—or that value is a fuzzy concept that should be viewed akin to the Logical Positivists, that is a meaningless cipher.

Some of you are convinced already. You’re on your own from here. Skim down or stop reading as you please; almost all of the rest of this is a challenge to valuism.

No God Either

The case proceeds by assuming that the common conclusions of Atheists are correct and will make a parallel case based on the soundness of the following principles.

1. It is a lack of belief, not a belief, and so therefore does not need to be supported with argument.
2. It makes no specific claims and therefore the burden of proof falls on those who want to prove value. (This itself is not a claim, however much it resembles one.)
3. Nobody has ever seen a value—price tags do not count. They are statements of an existing supposition of value.
4. Ancients write about values, as well as “the Good” and a bunch of other ideas that express a personal preference for unseen things.
5. Humans disagree so much on what has value, if anything did. That we cannot be clear that we are speaking about any one thing.
6. Value is a pseudo-objective projection of personal preference. It runs similar to the statement that “Nickelback rules!” from a fan, suggesting that one’s musical tastes are better than those of another.
7. The universe is a big, scary place. (Boo!)
8. Wishing doesn’t make it so. The number of people who innately believe something doesn’t make it so.
9. Any fuzzy notion that can kill a great number of people is dangerous and best abandoned.
10. By Ockham’s razor (or the Common Atheist interpretation) the negative claim should be preferred absent positive evidence.

I really rest with points 1 & 2. As long as I maintain ignorance—some would maintain that’s an invincible ignorance—and refuse to put forward a claim. What I’m saying in points 7 and up will become evident below.

But from here, I would guess that I can suggest how many millions of people have been killed for not sharing the same values as others. All deaths of the Church and Crusades can be put in here.

But as well, Marxist revolutions of Russia and China, the atrocities of Pol Pot, and even ethnic cleansing currently around the world, can be put on the shoulders of the notion of one person judging human life according to his or her values. And if we cannot decide whether or not to place Hitler’s dead at the feet of religion (wrong) or scientism (right), we can still put them at the feet of having a value in the “aristocratic principle of nature” and value Hitler placed on tribal culture.

Are we dying for a basic confusion about our natural world? (9)

How many people have died for other people’s values?

But that should only worry us if people had a value.

Modern Construction

Modernists have tried to assemble an idea of the value of a human life because we prefer to live. I think that is a fact whether or not we believe that humans have value, actually. That has to do with the ability to parse sentences, and has nothing to do with whether we actually have value. Much of what humans say, if I am to understand the Logical Positivist urge, is meaningless and emotional. The problem starts when we project our preferences out into the world.

The universe is a big scary place (7), believing that humans have value is attractive in the face of a universe which belies that idea. But it can’t really be established and our preference for our life may be counteracted with the preference of a vast number more for our death. So my value as a human being is at best questionable.

The idea that I have any value outside of someone’s preference would require an objective standard. And again we have no evidence that such is the case. So I think that we should require all subsequent discussions about “innate human value” to start with the assumption that there is none, because via #10, it is preferable, more reasonable, etc.

In fact, arguing that human’s have value is bizarre in the face of all the deaths caused by the unnatural concept of value. Perhaps the expression of objective value is nothing but the intolerance for a different preference, as it appears it has operated such a way in the past. It seems doubtful that we should ever trust the impulse that lead to the Inquisition, Crusades, Stalinist purges, Pol Pot, and the deaths of 9/11.

Modern Construction, v 2.0

Okay, let’s take another run at it. Some want to say that it is a way to mitigate between claims of value. But do we really want to mitigate between claims of imaginary creatures? And if we do, what about those who do not? Mitigating is one preference, fighting it out with bloody weapons is another. Saying that we’re all trying to mitigate is ignoring what many in the world are trying to do. So again, the preference to mitigate seems to accept, at base, an idea of human value, where each person’s claim has as much value as it can hold.

But if we get real and translate value back to preference, then we find that popularity of preference is about all the value that we will ever be able to get a claim to hold. That is, a popular preference is more likely to have people fight for it as an outward expression of value, than an outnumbered value which seems to degrade the more popular preference.

Preference fully explains”value” in an economic setting. I have a preference for the way to spend my time. People have a preference for whose hard work has value to them. The more people who are willing to buy my product as an expression of their preferences, the more products I can buy that indulge my preferences, the more time and capital I might prefer to spend producing that product.

Now, my economic rival may prefer that I not squeeze him out of the market, fairly or unfairly. He may also prefer that I not buy the time of certain skilled workers to kill him. But in a real world any of these three outcomes can help me indulge my preferences. Thus we see how it can be a real competitive advantage, used with discretion, to realize that the value of other people’s lives, when they do not provide an ends to our preferences is entirely a fiction.

People tend to put value on the death of other individuals as well. The dollars paid to a hit man or the military belie the idea that the death of others does not have a preferential value.

But wait! Is there no case that the people who provide the means for us to indulge our preferences have value? Well, I never said they didn’t. People who provide us the means to express our preferences are very valuable to us. We prefer them to live, because replacing them is an unsure thing.

But what is this to the Militant anti-Westerner who sees my very preferences as imperialistic or the height of decadence? He may prefer my death to the challenge to his sainted value. He may find me an infidel or a dupe of capitalists to be removed in the jihad, revolution of the people, or retribution of their slain.

I prefer to live, sure. And that may be something to someone who shares my “values”, but my ability to live depends on what I or others are willing to forgo to keep me alive and what the opposition will forgo to kill me. If we prefer butter, we might not have guns. And if other prefer guns to butter and our death to our life, well (who can doubt that) that’s the way things go.

1. not beg see Begging the Question “prompt” might also be a acceptable choice.