Atheists at a Cricket Match
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The trouble is foxholes have become the perfect place for an atheist to set up shop, make himself comfortable. I don’t know when it happened but somewhere along the line the so-called Problem of Evil became the heart of the atheist rationale. For Christianity through the middle ages there was no such thing as the Problem of Evil. Sure, there was evil and it caused problems but it didn’t cause problems for God. It certainly would never be trundled out as proof that God did not exist. But nowadays if a person wants to shrug and show you just how stupid the idea of a Supreme Being is all she has to do is mention the Holocaust or tsunamis. With senseless shit like this going on, how can there be an all-powerful and all-loving God somewhere out there? It all seems so Q.E.D.
Not even a lack of miracles is taken to be as strong a defeater of theism. After all, maybe miracles hide from unbelievers. Maybe God averts disasters and heals undiagnosed tumors all the time. How would we know? There is nothing more convincing to us of the nonexistence of God than a senseless death. Children killed in earthquakes or wars – what sort of cosmic sadist would allow that? Who is really convinced that Job’s family being restored to him can make all of his suffering hunky-dory? Epicurus was aware that the existence of evil has serious implications on the nature of God. The result was that either God is evil or impotent since there very clearly is evil in the world.
If we accept that this reasoning is sound, what are we left with? Atheism seems to be an insistence on living rationally. We must deny the existence of God because we find evil in the world. We must accept that there is no meaning to our existence since this would demand a purpose behind existence, and how can there be a purpose to the chance existence of randomly acting matter?
An atheist in a foxhole makes a great deal of sense to me; especially if he has just seen one of his comrades liquefied by an exploding shell. This seems like a rationally justifiable position. What I can’t quite fathom is an atheist at a cricket match. A happy atheist has to be the strangest thing in the world. What is after all the meaning of a cricket match? Surely if there were ever an absurd thing it’s sports. All of those people cheering and shouting as if it all had some kind of eternal significance. In some heavenly future will we be able to look back on that day in the stands and at athletic play that meant so much? Not if atheism is true. So what is it that is going through the mind of the atheist sports enthusiast? My best guess is that the poor chap is acting against his own reasoning. He’s acting as though what he is doing somehow has lasting significance. He seems to be living as though he were in fact not an atheist and the universe is not a meaningless place. That he will never die and the memory of his life in all its numberless vivid details will never be obliterated from the universe.
Or consider it this way. Someone asks you, How’s your beer? Well given the fact that I will eventually die and stay dead forever I guess you could say that it is tinged with a great deal of bitterness.
Or, constantly staring death in the face, how can we be happy? How can we even go through the countless trivialities of life, to say nothing of enjoy ourselves at a cricket match?
Atheist existentialism is a crock if ever there were. When Camus opts against suicide he is rather arbitrarily acting optimistically. But why should he? Isn’t he simply choosing some rather bourgeois moral notion on which to construct his life? I know atheists who are almost religiously environmentalist, for instance. Every life is sacred. Every species matters. A world without a panda would be a terrible place. But why is this so? How do we know this is right? Isn’t the sun going to explode at some point and make all species on earth extinct? “He who dies this year is quit for the next.” Why should another billion years of tooth and claw existence be better than ending all this senseless suffering sooner rather than later?
I also had an atheist friend tell me I should suggest to my children that life never ends. Our bodies become the soil that grows into grass and that whole circle of life crap. Of course at some point the universe will become a very dark cold place and nothing much will be growing then. If current scientific models are correct. Talk about your cold comfort.
The point for me is simply that atheists don’t really live much differently from theists. They are optimistic about our situation in the cosmos. We can do things to make the world a better place. We don’t have to worry about death because we all live on. Life is eternal. Forget the fact that this is all built on fog and smoke.
We shouldn’t be too quick to say that the atheists ought not to live as they do. But what we really cannot escape suspecting is that the atheist really lives no more rationally than those religious fundamentalists he or she rails against. The religious person will talk about faith as though that speech makes some sort of sense, when in fact it may be as groundless as the atheist’s optimistic view of the value of biological life. But is one really in much of a stronger rational position? Does either offer good evidence for the way they conduct their lives being rational? I’m sorry if I can’t see it.
It seems to me that the atheist and the theist really don’t spend much time reflecting on why they feel the way they do about the universe and our place in it. Their sense of what it all means is assumed from the outset. It isn’t put into words. And Freud is no more convincing than Augustine about why we should do what we are supposedly called to do. We either owe it to our fellow human beings to try to make life better or we owe God obedience. Why? In short, don’t ask.
As far as I can see the atheist with his science really has no room to attack the fundamentalist. He who is without irrationality may cast the first stone. Perhaps this is why there have been so few true atheist philosophers in the history of the west. Philosophy keeps knocking up against the infinite. It is hard to be sure there could not be a God when you are convinced that there is something infinite. Giving trillions of minds and an infinite amount of time, couldn’t we human beings build a Supreme Being? It’s something to think about.
The fundamentalist should also be patient with the atheist when he turns out to be a bad philosopher. Richard Dawkins doesn’t think much of Anselm’s ontological argument, which he seems not to understand. He calls it a parlor trick. But he seems to think a great deal of Bertrand Russell’s actual parlor trick of the Orbital Teapot thought experiment. But if a person can’t tell the difference between the infinite and a finite teapot I don’t suppose I’ll be able to help them see the error of their ways. Suffice it to say that a God and a teapot are far from the same thing. The character Casaubon understood this in Foucault’s Pendulum, a book Umberto Eco wrote some twenty years before Dawkins decided to Rottweiler away at alleged delusions of God’s existence.
This is precisely what philosophy is for, though we have forgotten it: philosophy humbles us before what have proven perennially insoluble problems. How shall we live? What is the meaning of life? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the basis of knowledge? These questions are not parlor tricks. They have been worked on by some of the greatest minds the world has ever known. Only a fool could think he has all the answers or is free of all delusion.
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The trouble is foxholes have become the perfect place for an atheist to set up shop, make himself comfortable. I don’t know when it happened but somewhere along the line the so-called Problem of Evil became the heart of the atheist rationale. For Christianity through the middle ages there was no such thing as the Problem of Evil. Sure, there was evil and it caused problems but it didn’t cause problems for God. It certainly would never be trundled out as proof that God did not exist. But nowadays if a person wants to shrug and show you just how stupid the idea of a Supreme Being is all she has to do is mention the Holocaust or tsunamis. With senseless shit like this going on, how can there be an all-powerful and all-loving God somewhere out there? It all seems so Q.E.D.
Not even a lack of miracles is taken to be as strong a defeater of theism. After all, maybe miracles hide from unbelievers. Maybe God averts disasters and heals undiagnosed tumors all the time. How would we know? There is nothing more convincing to us of the nonexistence of God than a senseless death. Children killed in earthquakes or wars – what sort of cosmic sadist would allow that? Who is really convinced that Job’s family being restored to him can make all of his suffering hunky-dory? Epicurus was aware that the existence of evil has serious implications on the nature of God. The result was that either God is evil or impotent since there very clearly is evil in the world.
If we accept that this reasoning is sound, what are we left with? Atheism seems to be an insistence on living rationally. We must deny the existence of God because we find evil in the world. We must accept that there is no meaning to our existence since this would demand a purpose behind existence, and how can there be a purpose to the chance existence of randomly acting matter?
An atheist in a foxhole makes a great deal of sense to me; especially if he has just seen one of his comrades liquefied by an exploding shell. This seems like a rationally justifiable position. What I can’t quite fathom is an atheist at a cricket match. A happy atheist has to be the strangest thing in the world. What is after all the meaning of a cricket match? Surely if there were ever an absurd thing it’s sports. All of those people cheering and shouting as if it all had some kind of eternal significance. In some heavenly future will we be able to look back on that day in the stands and at athletic play that meant so much? Not if atheism is true. So what is it that is going through the mind of the atheist sports enthusiast? My best guess is that the poor chap is acting against his own reasoning. He’s acting as though what he is doing somehow has lasting significance. He seems to be living as though he were in fact not an atheist and the universe is not a meaningless place. That he will never die and the memory of his life in all its numberless vivid details will never be obliterated from the universe.
Or consider it this way. Someone asks you, How’s your beer? Well given the fact that I will eventually die and stay dead forever I guess you could say that it is tinged with a great deal of bitterness.
Or, constantly staring death in the face, how can we be happy? How can we even go through the countless trivialities of life, to say nothing of enjoy ourselves at a cricket match?
Atheist existentialism is a crock if ever there were. When Camus opts against suicide he is rather arbitrarily acting optimistically. But why should he? Isn’t he simply choosing some rather bourgeois moral notion on which to construct his life? I know atheists who are almost religiously environmentalist, for instance. Every life is sacred. Every species matters. A world without a panda would be a terrible place. But why is this so? How do we know this is right? Isn’t the sun going to explode at some point and make all species on earth extinct? “He who dies this year is quit for the next.” Why should another billion years of tooth and claw existence be better than ending all this senseless suffering sooner rather than later?
I also had an atheist friend tell me I should suggest to my children that life never ends. Our bodies become the soil that grows into grass and that whole circle of life crap. Of course at some point the universe will become a very dark cold place and nothing much will be growing then. If current scientific models are correct. Talk about your cold comfort.
The point for me is simply that atheists don’t really live much differently from theists. They are optimistic about our situation in the cosmos. We can do things to make the world a better place. We don’t have to worry about death because we all live on. Life is eternal. Forget the fact that this is all built on fog and smoke.
We shouldn’t be too quick to say that the atheists ought not to live as they do. But what we really cannot escape suspecting is that the atheist really lives no more rationally than those religious fundamentalists he or she rails against. The religious person will talk about faith as though that speech makes some sort of sense, when in fact it may be as groundless as the atheist’s optimistic view of the value of biological life. But is one really in much of a stronger rational position? Does either offer good evidence for the way they conduct their lives being rational? I’m sorry if I can’t see it.
It seems to me that the atheist and the theist really don’t spend much time reflecting on why they feel the way they do about the universe and our place in it. Their sense of what it all means is assumed from the outset. It isn’t put into words. And Freud is no more convincing than Augustine about why we should do what we are supposedly called to do. We either owe it to our fellow human beings to try to make life better or we owe God obedience. Why? In short, don’t ask.
As far as I can see the atheist with his science really has no room to attack the fundamentalist. He who is without irrationality may cast the first stone. Perhaps this is why there have been so few true atheist philosophers in the history of the west. Philosophy keeps knocking up against the infinite. It is hard to be sure there could not be a God when you are convinced that there is something infinite. Giving trillions of minds and an infinite amount of time, couldn’t we human beings build a Supreme Being? It’s something to think about.
The fundamentalist should also be patient with the atheist when he turns out to be a bad philosopher. Richard Dawkins doesn’t think much of Anselm’s ontological argument, which he seems not to understand. He calls it a parlor trick. But he seems to think a great deal of Bertrand Russell’s actual parlor trick of the Orbital Teapot thought experiment. But if a person can’t tell the difference between the infinite and a finite teapot I don’t suppose I’ll be able to help them see the error of their ways. Suffice it to say that a God and a teapot are far from the same thing. The character Casaubon understood this in Foucault’s Pendulum, a book Umberto Eco wrote some twenty years before Dawkins decided to Rottweiler away at alleged delusions of God’s existence.
This is precisely what philosophy is for, though we have forgotten it: philosophy humbles us before what have proven perennially insoluble problems. How shall we live? What is the meaning of life? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the basis of knowledge? These questions are not parlor tricks. They have been worked on by some of the greatest minds the world has ever known. Only a fool could think he has all the answers or is free of all delusion.
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