A bit ago, ironically during a time the Chronicle staff had coined “Spirituality Week,” I was encouraged to write a piece in defense of atheism. Needless to say, such a position in the patriotic Puritan heritage of America is going to be slightly controversial. In Utah especially, the term atheist and antichrist are often confused as synonymous. The point is that a published declaration of atheism is likely to be met with some contention. The responses I received were many and varied. However, none of the responses I received were as troublesome as the one I received from my father.
You see, parents like to indulge their children with empty gestures of praise. But growing up opens our eyes a bit. We see through the veneer of unconditional love and see clicking behind those caring eyes the clockwork of a manufacturer.
After a child is born, parents seem to have mistaken it for a glob of putty?without any distinct form or purpose yet, it is their responsibility to mold this glob into some sort of useful and respectable shape. And when we children have grown up a bit, when our thoughts betray tradition, and our individuality begins to shine in all its radiant obscenity, our parents become reflective?”What did we do wrong?” “What did we not teach her?” Or, in my case, the impenetrable silence of my father pleads, “Why can’t you find a place in your heart for God?”
For my father, and for clarification, I’m going to make a slight amendment to my previous column. I do believe in God. I also do not believe in God. And, given other circumstances, it may even be the case that I reserve judgement on the existence of God. Sound paradoxical or, at the very least, perplexing? I suppose it is. Life itself becomes a bit perplexing when we become emphatic about our labels.
Philosophically speaking, the definitions of atheist, theist and agnostic are (and should be) a bit more complicated than in casual conversation. A theist is, in this respect, someone who believes that the evidence and arguments for the existence of God make his existence more likely. An atheist is someone who, conversely, believes that such evidence and arguments make his existence less likely. And, finally, the popular agnostic, has the task of justifying that both positions are equally tenable and somehow balance each other out (a juggling act I would love to see performed even reasonably).
Furthermore, as long as God himself/herself/itself requires some qualification, I would like to press the point further and insist that one cannot even make an intelligible claim about one’s “position” (be it atheist, agnostic, or theist) until the elusive Deity has been reasonably defined.
God, as Nietzsche so divinely articulated, is dead. He is no longer the omni-perfect being He was 400 years ago. The advent of science has, like it or not, required theists to incorporate (and sometimes dramatically revise) their definition of God. He is no longer necessarily even a he?though I do believe his actual gender should be the least of our philosophic concerns. I cannot stress how many people I have met who have merged the success of science with the miracles of a god?people who believe, and quite plausibly, that a god created the universe following the laws of science. Evolution is no longer a devilish conspiracy. To some, it is the very method a god used to create humankind.
Furthermore, I have yet to meet one person who believes steadfastly in each particular dogma of her religion. Having myself been raised LDS, I am more familiar with certain controversies surrounding that religion. How do people assimilate blacks not being given the priesthood? There are a dozen explanations. Some claim the church would have lost popularity had it made such a bold political statement. Others claim it was merely a prejudice of the time. Still yet, there are those few mormo-Nazis who believe that God was, in fact, at one time a bigot.
On a broader scale, how many stories within the Bible do people just not talk about? And, if pressed, how many of them simply admit, “You know what? I just don’t think that happened.”
God is as elusive as art. What appeals to some does not necessarily appeal to others. People pick and choose which paintings they prefer, which poems move them, and which films they consider cinema and which films they consider the equivalent of Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster slop.
However, if someone were to walk up to you on the street and ask if you believe in the existence of art, your reaction may be somewhat bewildered. You’d likely answer “yes” or “of course” given that you have encountered the term before and it seems to have some sort of contextual meaning. However, this question is virtually aimless and the answer purports nothing more than it seems that art exists in some way. It does not, in any way, help to qualify what is meant by art.
The problem is less nonsensical if someone actually points to something and asks, “Do you believe that is art?” At this point, you have some frame of reference on which you may begin to conceptualize art.
The problem with the concept of God is the same as with the concept of art. Without any frame of reference, or qualification of meaning, the question, “Do you believe in God?” is as useful as asking people if they’ve ever encountered art.
It is in this respect that I must believe myself to be a theist, an atheist and perhaps even an agnostic. I am inclined to believe that most others are in the same confused position. If someone, unlikely though it may be, were to walk up to me and point to her shoe and ask me if I believed it were God, I must admit myself an atheist. The evidence and arguments I have encountered make much less likely the notion that a pair of shoes is God.
Similarly, but of more importance, if someone presents me with an absolutely unaltered version of the Judaic-Christian deity, I can pleasantly agree to being deemed an atheist (given the problems of god and suffering, and a dozen others, asking me to believe otherwise would be like asking me to believe, against all reason, that the world is flat).
On the other hand, and as my father has done, if someone asks me if I believe in some sort of meaning which transcends human understanding, or some force which binds the universe together, or some other Star Wars/hippyish philosophy, I can very safely, given the fact that we are contingent beings with a remarkable gift for reason (something many accept as universal) admit, even shamelessly, that I am a theist.
Likewise, if someone were to construct an account of the Judaic-Christian God which disregarded obvious inconsistencies and assimilated this being into a more accessible, reasonable deity, it is likely I could concede to being a theist.
You see, if someone conceives of God even in the most general of terms, a proposed atheist may turn out to be a theist. Inductive reasoning is not the same as deductive reasoning, yet there is no denying that we live our lives faithfully committed to the likelihood of probability. Perhaps God, then, is merely probability in some sense?a force which continues to make intelligible our future.
Many of the most devout atheists are likely to believe in God if he is defined as such. Likewise, anyone who has not merely absorbed without doubt everything they have been taught is, in a very real sense, an atheist.
Tolstoy once said, “A man may be a Catholic, a Frenchman, or a capitalist, and yet be a freethinker; but if he puts his Catholicism, his patriotism, or his interest, above his reason, and will not give the latter free play where those subjects are touched, he is not a freethinker. His mind is in bondage.”
I think it is safe to say that a man may be an atheist, a theist, or an agnostic, and yet if he is so infatuated with these labels that he forgets how to think critically, his mind is also in bondage.
So, for my father, I concede God may very well exist, but he is more likely a pair of Nike shoes than a small
white dove who transforms water into wine.
Chris welcomes feedback at: [email protected].