I wrote this as a response in the comments of this post, but I was on such a roll that I thought it warranted its own post.
Just because I don’t believe in god doesn’t mean I don’t believe life has meaning. It does. There is meaning in our relationships and our passions and everything we do that brings joy to ourselves and others.
I love life, too. So much so that I don’t concern myself with what it will be like when I cease to have consciousness. I doubt I will much care at that time.
In the meantime, I want to make the most of my life and my relationships, without worrying about my loved ones going to hell for eternity, without denying rights to people who are attracted to the same gender, without supporting a belief system that causes guilt and shame over basic human feelings and desires. I could go on. I have read so many stories of people who were hurt emotionally by their religious beliefs. One can blame it on poor interpretation, but at some point one must ask, “How can an all-powerful, all-knowing god let us flounder like this? How can He let so many people get it wrong? Why couldn’t He be a bit less ambiguous about what He wants from us?”
I much prefer to be free of that and really enjoy LIFE. Enjoy nature. Enjoy my family. Enjoy my passions.
I am not afraid of death. Maybe that makes me unusual. But, I believe that it is those who live in fear of death who are not really living.
It’s not that I am happy that I will die. It’s just a fact that I can’t change, so it’s not worth my time to worry about. I am too busy trying to enjoy life in the time I have and loving every minute I have with the people I love because I know I won’t see them after they are gone.
Not believing in god does not make me love life less or love my children less. On the contrary, it makes me love those things MORE than I did before because I know that I don’t have an eternity to get around to it.
Dear Charity,
Thank you for your awesome answer. You are a good person. I really appreciate your candor, your grace, and your honesty. (What follows is a reply to the WHOLE of what you’ve said thus far, not just the fragment in the post above.)
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ON GOD’S WILL; HIS ‘PLAN’
I am a Christian who does not believe God wills everything. A weak God wills everything; a truly powerful God does not. Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian, said it well: God is so powerful he can be completely powerless (the manger, the cross) and still be God. I am not one who would state that God has a Plan, at least one that is evident in the death of an infant. He may have a Plan, of course, but I would never presume to know what it is, or that tragedy A or horror B is part of his Plan. I merely mentioned a Plan because you implied one when you referred to the death of your friend’s infant, and how you, as a theist, might make sense of that death.
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ABOUT THE UNCARING UNIVERSE
Indeed, the universe is uncaring, as you said, because it is not a living thing. It is indifferent; it generates nothing but sorrow for those who suffer so intensely. But I think you’re fooling yourself a little bit when you say that the life of a little boy who lived but 6 months has “meaning” to his mother. Indeed, it does: it is a meaning she creates and imposes on that life — by faith. The universe gives her nothing; she WILLS meaning into the life of her child, and into her own life. It is a faith move; the “meaning” does not exist “out there” in ANY objective sense. Finding meaning is, without doubt, a religious act. She “makes sense” of her child’s life and death, and her ensuing despair, by choosing to believe certain things the universe cannot and does not provide.
Forgive the quotes that follow, but they’re germane to our discussion. I submit them because if we’re going to discuss what a godless universe REALLY looks like, we need to be brutally honest about it. What follows first comes from Roger Lundin’s awesome book, “Believing Again”; Professor Lundin draws the following from Kate Chopin’s novel, “The Awakening”. Here’s Professor Lundin:
‘One night, after having been present while a close friend gave birth to a child, Edna [Pontellier] speaks [anxiously] … to the physician who delivered the baby. …The doctor grasps “her meaning intuitively,” and responds by explaining that her troubles have to do with the fact that “youth is given up to illusions,” which are “a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race.” Were they to see life as it truly is — as a senseless struggle for survival that ends in a sinister slide to death — women would never willingly endure the pain of bringing children into the world. According to Dr. Mandelet, “Nature takes no account of moral consequences,” which he calls the “arbitrary conditions which we create.” Edna can only nod in agreement with this cynical wisdom, because she concedes that her life has been a “dream,” and it might have been better for her to have gone on sleeping, secure in her illusions to the end of her days.’
If we take a strict materialistic view of the world — in other words, a scientific one, purely secular — any “meaning” your friend found in her baby was really nothing but certain sensations in her brain; the baby triggered various stimuli that touched the pleasure centers of her brain. Grief is nothing but the cessation of those sensations. And without the stimulations in those pleasure centers, reproduction would most likely cease. The “meaning” is just an illusion, a coping mechanism framed in an arbitrary moral framework that is also an illusion.
Have you ever read the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, that great Catholic? She’s a writer who understands suffering; she’s a Christian who does not sugar-coat reality with the quaint fictions we all tell ourselves. In fact, orthodox Christianity is unflinching in its gaze at reality: it stares at suffering without escapism. After all, those who reject Christianity because of its seemingly irreconcilable belief in a loving God and a world that suffers, do so because it is EASIER; the rejection is an escape from what they believe is a worldview too painful. But Christians like O’Connor do not run away; they look at life and understand, truly, what death must mean. In fact, ALL Christians realize that if Christ IS dead, their faith is vanity. But I mention O’Connor because of what she really focused on. One writer put it this way:
‘[S]he understood an inherent, apodictical truth: modern man has closed his existence, “annihilated the cosmos by contracting reality into himself,” and created a “new world” formed in Hegelian second realities.’
I am arguing that atheists who claim to have found “meaning” in the cosmos, and in their lives, are only deluding themselves with “second realities.” They comfort themselves with thoughts that are ultimately solipsistic: all that matters is that they find their own meaning, no matter how incongruent, or fanciful, or distant from what IS. They are locked up alone, with no two meanings alike. Even mere “survival of the species” is tossed up as some form of comfort, when it is both comfortless and meaningless: survival is just mitochondria on a blind, selfish march toward nothing.
ON TRAGEDY AND THE ‘AWFUL’
Let me ask you this: Why was the death of a 6-month-old child an “awful thing that happened”? What do you mean? The universe began by chance; it is expanding and contracting by blind laws, by blind inertia. The likelihood is that your friend’s baby’s death was inevitable, predestined; the result of mere fate. How can it be awful? And where did you get this sense of moral rectitude? After all, you’ve declared a particular death “awful”? Really? Who says? Why is it awful? What standard do I use to reach that conclusion? Where did that standard –that measure of what is good versus what isn’t — come from if it does not come from the universe? And isn’t your sense of outrage just a rattling of your DNA, something you can’t help because it is Nature’s way of keeping things going?
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ON THEODICY, THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
Permit me to note that you’ve presented a theodicy. If God is all-powerful, he could stop suffering. If God is all-good, he would stop suffering. Since suffering continues, we can conclude that God is either not all-powerful or not all-good — or he does not exist at all.
But Christianity rarely if ever describes God as all-good or all-powerful. How it does describe God is in a much broader way: God is omniscient. God is all-knowing. (You mentioned this.)
So, then, a Christian would offer to those who complain about a life filled with sorrow and suffering this question: How SHOULD an omniscient God stop suffering? How MUST an omniscient God behave? How MUST he stop evil?
Here is the truth IF there is an omniscient God Who loves everyone (note that I said IF):
Omniscience knows what it is like to be raped and murdered; it knows what it is like to be bludgeoned and burned. And it knows what it’s like to rape and murder, to bludgeon and burn. Omniscience knows what it’s like to be executed in a gas chamber at the same instant it knows what it’s like to open the valve that spews gas on praying Jews in that same gas chamber. Omniscience knows what it is like to behead, and what it’s like to be beheaded. Omniscience knows what it’s like to drown, and what it’s like to swim desperately toward one’s drowning child. Omniscience has been burned alive, and it has stood screaming helplessly on the sidewalk outside a burning tenement where a child is dying a horrible death.
God has been a murderer, and he’s been murdered; he’s raped, and he’s been raped. He’s diagnosed cancer, and he’s died from cancer.
And, allegedly, he loves the murderer as much as the murdered. He loves the Nazi as much as he loves the Jew. He loves the baby as much as he loves the driver of an 18-wheeler who accidently kills that baby.
How, pray tell, does an omniscient God STOP EVIL from happening? Here’s an answer. Maybe God IS STOPPING evil right now, and the ONLY WAY omniscience can stop evil is exactly as we see life unfolding today. Maybe to stop evil it requires that, instead of ALL Jews dying in a Holocaust, only six million must die. Maybe instead of 30 children on a bus dying a mile down the road, a six-month-old baby dies in a freak accident.
And perhaps to stop evil and suffering the way most atheists seem to demand — right now! — God (if there is a God) would have to INSTANTLY annihilate us all, or perhaps even something far worse.
If life is fallen, like Christianity says; if it is in disarray from sin, how do you fix it? How do you repair it — and what is the BEST way to fix it? Imagine the world is like a sweater, pulled inside out by sin. OK. Do we fix it by destroying it? Do we fix it by throwing it away? No. We fix it by doing violence to it: we pull it outside out. Doctors sometimes cure people by making them sicker. Sometimes healing comes through amputation. Sometimes healing comes from breaking a bone that has already seemingly mended. How would omniscience fix a sick, dying world? And what about war and crime? Is it not true that sometimes peace comes from a sword, a gun? How do we know what we see today is NOT God intervening?
Wasn’t it Aristotle who described “God” as the “unmoved Mover”, the First Cause of all things? Such an idea does little for me, even if true. But the great rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, cognizant of this idea that God knows ALL suffering more completely than any one who suffers, rightly described God not as the Un-moved Mover, but as the Most-moved Mover. Indeed, there can be no better description: God is the all-suffering God, suffering more intensely than any soul. And yet he is a God who hides that suffering; who does not lord his grief over us. He is not the sort of God who says to a grieving mother “Stop crying. You ain’t seen nothing.” No, instead he affirms her grief; he weeps with those who weep, he groans with those who groan.
But Christianity’s gospel message is really this: that God’s suffering has been revealed — once. His sorrow, his very heart, is on display, for his omniscience hangs him on a cross. It kills him. It buries him. He would rather be in hell with us than heaven without us. And yet that is not all of the gospel, for the good news is that his sorrow is overcome by his love, and his joy. The good news is that he does not blame us for his sorrow, nor does he blame us for our sin and subsequent suffering. He blames himself. He even submits to our capital punishment, and he takes the blame even for that. Finally, at long last, we can fully grieve — and rejoice — with him, for we know, in part, that he knows our despair and our hope.
You were an excellent friend to your grieving friend, Charity. All any Christian can do as a Christian is “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.” You did exactly the right thing; you are a loving soul. In my opinion there is much cruelty in Christian witness; people MAY mean well, but their words often burn. But if your friend was seeking solace in Christ, that’s OK, no? And if God DOES make the lion lay down with the lamb, even after the lion has eaten that lamb, that’s OK too, right? If there is a God, surely it’s OK if he indeed finds the silver lining in any situation, good or bad, isn’t it?
But I wonder if I could ever tell a little boy that there was no explaining his mother’s sudden death, murdered in a drive-by shooting. I wonder if I could ever tell a grieving little boy what an atheist tells me I MUST tell him: that he will NEVER see his mother again, there will be NO justice for those who murdered her, that she and her murderer will never be known, or seen, or heard from again. I don’t see how I could tell him to love life, to love nature, to enjoy his friends. I don’t see how I can help him if I tell him that life is inherently capricious; that the universe does not care, that life has no borders. That all is mere accident (or the result of mere fate). That beauty is an illusion; that youth is given to telling itself second realities; that morality itself is naught but a coping mechanism arbitrarily conceived.
It is THIS, Charity, that I protest against. But I also protest against atheism’s many conceits. Atheism claims that it is rooted in reason and theism unreason, when both are actually rooted in faith; and yet atheism turns a blind eye to that fact. Atheism claims to be free of the temptation of telling itself comforting little fictions, when in fact atheism can only comfort itself with fictions. And yet, somehow, it denounces Christianity for being nothing but a fiction. Atheism claims to look at reality unflinchingly, without a theist’s rose-colored glasses. But atheism is blind to its own rose-colored worldview.
I thank you, Charity, for letting me respond as broadly as I have. I have no war with you. I have nothing but fondness for you in my heart. You are generous of spirit, and strong of heart and mind to hold such a conversation. I appreciate you very much.
All the best, dear Charity.
PS. If you are interested in my complete argument about the problem of evil (it’s quite unique and original), I urge you to read this series. If you are interested in how I come to the conclusion that atheism is not based on reason or empiricism, then please read my “A Letter To Christopher Hitchens.” And if you want to see what I do with the speed of light — that it has wild implications regarding knowledge and God’s existence — please see my essay, “At The Speed Of Light: Faith, Existence and Atheism.” I think you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised.)
Good post. I agree, especially with this part “I believe that it is those who live in fear of death who are not really living.”
By the way, Charity (and Mike aka Monolith TMA), I wholeheartedly concur with your assertion that “it is those who live in fear of death who are not really living.” Apparently this is a point of agreement between atheists and Christians. The latter, of course, believe Christ’s death and resurrection relieve us of that fear; the former, apparently, believe that when St. Paul asks “Oh, death where is thy sting?” the answer is that there is no consciousness after death whatsoever, and hence no sting.
Peace to you.