timeimmortal

It would seem that the trend of my attracting atheists is continuing unabated. Not that this comes as a surprise…Nicholas was followed in due time by Barefoot, who was followed in due time by another gentlman named Kipp. I suppose, with all the traffic I’ve been attracting from Barefoot’s various disciples, it’s only inevitable that this succession will continue unabated, and that’s fine with me.

The discussion with Kipp has, thanks to the articulate and thoughtful contributions of Peter Sean Bradley and, more recently, Yursil, brought to light a number of interesting points which I think are worth expanding upon, and I intend to turn at least some of what has been written in the discussion for a now-stale post on the site into one or more articles, beginning with this one.

I find that it tends to be the trend with atheists that they each have their respective “pocket ace” upon which all, or at least a goodly portion, of their arguments are based. The trend is rather akin to the stereotypical image of the Friday night pickup line — every guy has his “tried and true” opener, and doesn’t deviate from the formula.

For Dr. Machel, whom I refer to at odd times, the pocket ace was the “evil perpetrated by the Church”. As a foundation for an argument goes, this is actually a fairly insecure one, because it is of course reliant on being able to establish, with a high degree of certainty, that the Church — either the Catholic Church specifically, as was the case with Dr. Machel, or the Christian churches of the world in general — has perpetrated the largest acts of evil, killed the most people in the most horrible ways, and so forth. In short, it’s a numbers game.

And like any numbers game, the numbers are either for you or against you. Dealing with Dr. Machel was easy, then, because the numbers are ultimately against him. That’s not to say that the Church has not perpetrated many acts which could, objectively, be described as sinful or evil. The Church is both a human and divine institution, and as with any other human institution or human being, that human component of the Church is prone to weakness and struggles with concupiscence.

The part of the Church that is divine often has to drag the part of the Church that is human back to the truth, and to righteousness, kicking and screaming. This is reflected in Church teaching in a number of ways which, unfortunately, are misunderstood by many in the world, especially atheists…but also by many Catholics. One example of Church teaching in this regard is the doctrine of infalibility, which is predictably misunderstood by many to be a rhetorical “biting of the thumb” at the rest of the world, a flippant statement of certitude by the Church in which we claim that we can never be in error even when we are.

In truth, doctrines like infallibility reaffirm, as Mark Shea so excellently words it, that “every man who ever occupied a bishop’s chair was a sinner (and, we might add, it is a matter of historical record that many were fools as well.) Yet all this is exactly what the Spirit’s gift of infallibility is given to the Church to amend. For infallibility is a special gift given by God to the Church in her weakness, not bestowed on her for being especially clever or strong. If we want to get the hang of it, we have to imagine the Church, not as an ace student who letters in football, gets all the girls and never has to study, but as a character in a farce who is guided through life miraculously (by the good graces of his fairy godmother) and who (only through those good graces) is preserved from walking into walls or off cliffs. Thus the term is, if anything, a confession of failure, blindness and ineptitude on the part of the Church. That is how the Church sees her gift of infallibility. For she holds with gratitude to the promise which Christ gave her, that He would lead her (often by the nose) into all truth; not that she would figure truth out because of her brilliance. For truth possesses her; she does not possess it.”

For the commentator I knew as Nicholas, the pocket ace was his various attempts to portray the Creator as, in his words, “bungling and inept”. The basis for such arguments typically points to things like genetic defects, apparent “jury-rigged design” in organisms, cancer and other diseases, and so forth. Fundamentally, it is an issue of theodicy, and ties in (albeit incompletely) with what some call the “problem” of evil.

I make a point of scare-quoting the word “problem” because really, the “problem of evil” is not so much an actual problem at all as much as it is an attempt by those who advocate their atheism because of it to capitalize on the theological ignorance of the average believer. The re-wording of the problem of evil to include the problem of the existence of suffering functions in much the same way, and I am sure most of us here have heard the question before:

“Since evil/suffering exists, then either God is evil/cruel, or else God must not exist.”

The real problem here, though, is not that evil and suffering exist, because an attentive reading of Scripture will reveal that both evil and suffering do, in fact, exist in God’s great Creation, and indeed that suffering, especially, was a part of God’s plan for humanity’s salvation. How can suffering prove that God does not exist, or is cruel, when Christ (one in being with the Father in the blessed union of the Trinity, remember) Himself came to suffer?

But one need not appeal only to Scripture — which is an appeal that atheists will, of course, reject out of hand — to refute the whole issue of the “problem” of evil. Read a little bit of Gottfried Liebniz (a 16th German mathematician and philosopher) and one will find equally valid arguments with which to refute both the assertion that theodicy is any sort of theological “problem” and also the assertion that the designer was “bungling and inept”.

For someone like Barefoot, the pocket ace is at least presented as being about rigorous epistemology. Of course, that qualifying word “rigorous” typically gives away the game quite early on — the real issue at work here, even as the discussion ranges into Popper and notions of falsifiability, is a sort of quasi-positivism that I tend to call “crypto-positivism” (a term I admit I have rather shamelessly cribbed from Dr. Denis O. Lamoureux).

Typically, or so the argument goes (this was especially true with Barefoot), something only has meaning if a method by which it can be falsified can be posited. This draws directly on Popperian reasoning, which stipulates, basically, that a theory can never be held to be proven — it can only be disproven. Which is fine as far as most scientific theories are concerned: theories which endure against being disproven over an extended period of time and which seem to provide a reasonable explanation for a particular event or process become the accepted wisdom…but are, of course, always open to being re-understood, modified, or changed if the need for such alterations should arise.

And that mentality, in and of itself, is a good one — it is not infused with the aforementioned crypto-positivism.

Where that mentality goes astray, as was the case in recent discussions on this site, is when it begins to believe that unless we can posit a way by which we might falsify a concept, theory, or belief, that concept, theory, or belief is meaningless. This is basically a Popperian re-wording of the classic positivist view that unless something can be empirically quantified, it has no meaning and/or does not exist. And much the same as with classical positivism, this crypto-positivism is invalid, and it is invalid for the same essential reasons.

If a hammer is wholly useless as a tool for, say, the molding and shaping of glass, that does not mean that the glass, or the hammer, is meaningless — it simply means that as a tool in the context of glasswork, a hammer is not the appropriate tool. Or, in a more general sense — as I said before — “the inability of a tool to perform a certain task required of it does not render the task itself meaningless. If the concept of God cannot be falsified, then it is not the concept of God that is meaningless, but the tool called falsification that is inadequate to the task.”

In the same way, the concept of epistemological rigor can be applied in a way that is crypto-positivistic, which was certainly the case when Barefoot was attempting to classify non-scientific epistemic methodologies as “rococo” (essentially: arbitrary, instances only of “making shit up”). The easiest challenge to this manner of thinking is, of course, to point out that many things which even atheists accept as being real — especially the concept of love — are not concepts which can be subjected to a “scientific” level of rigor.

As I’ve noted before, “the responses I get to [that assertion] range from slanging to rote contradiction, usually, and in this most recent case of a debate with an atheist the issue came up of the falsifiability of love; the hypothesis that a certain person loves us, or that we love a certain person, is falsifiable —- in the sense that people can act in ways which run contrary to what is considered “loving”. That is to say, people can present us with actual evidence that they do not love us.

For a guy like me, that’s just fine — I’ve no particular objection to believing in love, in the same way that I have no particular objection to believing in God. Indeed, in my view, if I say I believe in one, I am explicitly saying that I also believe in the other — Deus caritas est. But what if I were the sort of person who rejected faith as a credible basis for truth?”

Peter had even more to add to the idea, noting that “if we applied [Popper's theory of falsification] to love, we would see the application of game theory in a way inimical to human flourishing. Each partner would have an “exit strategy”, they would be selective in sharing information, they would engage in opportunistic breaches.

But since we recognize dysfuntional marriages, we can recognize the opposite. Those marriages are based on something other than a scientific approach. That approach, as you note, has more to to do with Deus Caritas Est than game theory.”

Ultimately, then, the crypto-positivistic attitude leads to a denial of ability to ever know, while at the same time claiming to know. It renders one, fundamentally, incapable of knowledge and blind to that reality — one is then prone to make such wild claims as this: “We can know there is no God—in the sense of “God” as defined by billions of people—as well as we know anything. I know there is no elephant in my living room—even though I haven’t checked behind the couch in the last ten minutes.”

Which of course brings us back to the issue of rigor in epistemology. I cut the discussion with Barefoot off before I could get in to the discussion of formal theological epistemic frameworks, such as incarnational theology, nor did I have time to get into the discussion of infallibility, which, as mentioned, is as much an admission of guilt on the part of the Church as it is the standard by which we are able to say anything with certainty.

And I think what is most damning about the Church, in the eyes of someone who believes that everything with meaning is necessarily falsifiable, is that the Church can and does speak with certainty — the opposition to religion almost takes on a tone of “how dare they?” in its articulation. And unfortunately, that’s an exceedingly shaky foundation upon which to base any anti-religious argument, because it is ultimately nothing more than applied petulance.

And in a way, it is based also on a fundamental academic dishonesty. Anyone who claims to be a champion of falsification should be able to realize that what falsification ultimately means is that, as mentioned before, nothing at all can be proven — including the assertion that God does not exist. Falsification as an analytical tool gives us no ability whatsoever to determine the possibility of whether or not God exists. A true advocate of Popperian falsification, then, should — were he or she truly intellectually honest — never self-identify as atheist. By definition, he or she should self-identify as agnostic.

That someone like Barefoot self-identifies himself as being explicitly atheistic is, then, fundamentally dishonest on a rational, intellectual, and academic level.

The most recent commentator on the site, Kipp, chooses as his pocket ace the concept of youth indoctrination into religious tenets. And that’s a fair basis to begin with, but it also quickly crumbles under heavy analysis and reason. What’s dangerous about the way Kipp applies his line of thinking is that everything must be made to fit that mold, and he is essentially incapable of understanding religious believers apart from that framework.

He thinks he has me pegged — thinks he’s got me and my faith development arc completely figured out. Clearly it is the case that I’m just one more merrily indoctrinated youth who has returned to Mommy and Daddy’s faith, the faith they taught him. The fact that he gets it wrong every time he tries to guess — with any increased level of specificity — what my faith development looked like in its progression doesn’t seem to deter him. The important point for Kipp is that I’m a Catholic and so were my parents; clearly it must be the case that I am fully, completely indoctrinated — no other option exists.

Of course, if I had obeyed the indoctrination that my parents gave me, then one of two things which are not true would currently be true: either I’d be practicing my faith in the Eastern Rite of the Church, as my father did and does (which I do not), or I’d be flirting with apostasy and universalism, as my mother does.

Yet I am doing neither of these things. Which, I suppose, is just further evidence of my indoctrination.

All sarcasm aside, though, the fact that many believers in the world are believers because that’s how they were raised (and therefore could be considered to fit the technical definition of “indoctrinated”) does not automatically mean that the beliefs in which they were raised are necessarily false. Put more succinctly, the atheistic viewpoint is not automatically confirmed just because some people go to church “because that’s what Mom and Dad did.”

As Kipp himself notes, there are many things in which we are “indoctrinated” by our parents, and by other teachers. He makes an example of mathematical principles, which is a reasonable example indeed…and notably, mathematical principles are not false simply because they are taught to us in a manner that might well be described as “indoctrinating”. Regardless of the exact method by which we learn math, mathematics itself remains a collection of valid principles — it remains, basically, true. The same may well hold true for religion — it may actually be the truth, even if its believers can’t articulate very well-thought-out ideas why they believe that which they do. If they believe in something true, they do well on that basis alone.

Even the Bible admits the need for the faith to be gifted to us by others, just as surely as it is gifted to us by God. The question becomes, then, what we do with the faith that others teach us. The question becomes, then, “what do we do with the faith we are taught?”. For some people, simply being raised in the faith is enough — they are content just to believe. But of course, some believers aren’t content just to believe, and people like that (myself, for example) have to ask questions about their faith. They begin to challenge and study their faith, begin to desire to probe its depths and discover its intricacies.

And believers who do that inevitably spilt into two camps — either they continue to discover new things about their faith that validate their beliefs, or they begin to find that they are drifting away from the faith in which they were raised. Which, of course, raises the issue of conversion.

Peter said it best, I think, when he noted that while “conversions are not the norm…they are not as rare as you may think. If you travel around St. Blog’s – the informal Catholic interest sector of the internet – you will find an inordinate number of converts from a diversity of backgrounds, including atheism, such as the Curt Jester. I have already mentioned some famous atheists who converted to Catholicism, including Mortimer Adler and Alisdair MacIntyre, but there are many others.

Significantly, a fair number of conversions to Catholicism require the convert to break with the deep Anti-Catholic prejudices that they had been raised with as childen of the Evangelical, Lutheran and Reformed Christian traditions. I hope that you will not deny – although you probably will – that these traditions have a long history of equating the Catholic Church or the Papacy with the “anti-christ” and preaching that Catholics are idolaters and semi-pagans. For such people to convert often means a difficult sundering of their family and cultural backgrounds, which I hope you will concede – but you probably won’t – requires a rejection of strong religious and cultural indoctrinations. In short, while you assert that religious indoctrination “explains” religious commitment, the evidence is that people can and will seek out a religious commitment because they believe it to be true despite their childhood religous indoctrination.”

This fact can be expanded to the broader case of indoctrination itself — because the fact that conversions occur, and the fact that people ask questions of their faith and seek the hard answers from it, puts to lie the notion that all believers are, essentially, indoctrinated. The processes of delving into religious traditions more deeply, of delving into their teachings with greater detail, and/or of moving between religious traditions are all examples of ways in which believers (and there are a goodly number of them who do this) “break out” of that youthful “indoctrination” and come to believe for their own reasons.

Now, to be fair, some believers find at the outcome of their questions that they are beginning to move away from the faith, or at least that is what they claim. Whether that is actually the case or not is uncertain. Certainly, in my own experiences, those people I know and/or have met who have let their faith fall by the wayside have not done so for reasons grounded in particularly solid logic or reason, but have done so because their own thinking has become distorted. To a man and woman, it seems their understanding of faith is that it is meant to be “easy”, that it is meant to be “comfortable”. When they come up against a tenet of the faith that might require them to suffer, they selfishly choose to reject the faith in whole or in part rather than attempting to find the truths behind why the faith posits the doctrine that it does.

Peter explains this phenomenon a little more directly when he notes that “if the “major” reason for religious belief is personal “comfort,” then what about all those other beliefs that are “uncomfortable” for religious adherents? For example, I am a divorced Catholic. As a consequence, I am called to a life of chaste singleness because the alternative would be fornication or adultery. I can’t say that my situation is particularly “comfortable”, particularly in a world that doesn’t think that fornication or adultery is wrong. If I was into “comfort”, I’d apostatize, but I don’t because it is “truth” and not “comfort” that is my “final cause.”"

And as I have said, it has ultimately been those for whom “comfort” is a final cause that tend to apostasize from their faith background, whatever it may be. The specific issue that causes the break will differ from person to person, but ultimately the process followed is the same: the faith teaches one thing, but the person’s own personal desires demand the opposite. There are only two ways to reconcile that, one of which is to elevate one’s personal desires over the learned tradition of the faith, and the other of which is to accept the learned tradition of the faith and surrender one’s desires unto it.

Interestingly, the issue of love, and especially romantic love, serves as an example here, because a not dissimilar choice is faced by any and all of us who have chosen to commit ourselves to one person, and only that one person. It stands to reason that we will meet, in our lifetimes, other people to whom we feel a measure of desire — both as a function of human nature and as a function of concupiscence, that temptation is to be expected. And when it arrives we will be faced with the same essential type of choice: we can either elevate our personal desires over our commitment to that one person and engage in an oppotunistic breach of the arrangement, or we can elevate our commitment over our desires and remain monogamous and faithful to our loved one.

In the example of romantic love, the correct choice is easily discerned. Commitment and fidelity take priority over personal desires. Why, then, would we assume that we are being the more enlightened and mature person when we apply the opposite attitude to our religious faith when our own desires come into conflict with its tenets? And equally, is it any surprise, when our societies adopt the attitude that elevates personal desires as the norm in regard to religiosity, that increasingly we see the pursuit of personal desires becoming the moral norm as well?

Indeed, as Yursil noted, “We don’t need to delve into specific denominations to determine the absolute need for an objective moral truth in this day and age. This need for rejecting the nihilistic attitudes of today is a common message of all real holy people in different faiths, including his Excellency, Pope Benedict XVI.

The alternative is akin to bringing a baseball bat and ice skates in a soccer match: non-sensical chaos.” This is as true of morality as it is of anything, and if there is one common thread to be plucked at in the above chronicle of atheistic argumentation, it is that in each case the atheist in question has lost sight of objectivity, and thus of reason…even though each of them would be loathe to admit it.

At any rate, this article has gotten entirely too long, and I think I shall put it to rest for the moment. I’m almost certain to have more to say in the coming days, but this serves as an adequate starting point for now. I seem to be assembling my own personal Summa Theologica as the years progress, and as atheist after atheist attempts to rattle my faith to no avail. But for the fact that I am being called to marriage, I would be highly tempted to join an academic priestly order so that I could pursue such efforts on a more full-time basis.

But it’s pretty fun in its current form, an afternoon distraction on the ol’ blog.

~ by Kenneth on July 11, 2007.