The Apology of Martiro: Part 10 of 10

Finally, if you have truly retained an open mind from your "careful and deliberate study," then you should avoid making pronouncements about the Christian faith that imply an unwillingness to consider the possibility of arguments you have not yet come across—or perhaps ones you have considered but have rejected for poor reasons. In the words of Charles Peirce: Do not block the path of inquiry!

Several years ago I was approached by two Mormons who asked to come inside my home and speak with me about their religion. For over two hours we debated the tenets of the Mormon faith and whether or not its claims could be reliably justified. By the end of that two hours, they had presented several arguments for Mormonism that I had never heard before. Yet, I still remained unconvinced. Exasperated, one of the Mormons said to me:

 "How can you reject all of these arguments that we have just presented to you? You were admittedly unfamiliar with them when we arrived and yet you reject them without ample time to consider their merits. Should you not withhold judgment until you are able to reflect on every argument in greater detail?"

To his impassioned plea I responded:

"If I am to withhold judgment until every possible argument regarding your faith has been made and rejected, I must delay judgment on all matters of all faiths everywhere. I must be equally open to accepting the tenets of Islam and Christianity, of Hinduism and Janism. I must adhere to all religious doctrines and systematically go through each and every one refuting their claims. Rather than analyzing claims from a position of disbelief, I should advocate belief in all claims as the default position until they can be proven false. Is this what you are advocating? Is this what you believe?"

After a few moments of awkward silence, the two Mormons left without engaging me in the customary prayer of reception that typically marks the conclusion of their conversion attempts. I have thought about that meeting many times in the ensuing years and the requests that those two men laid upon me. It is in some ways similar to the request that you are making now. While you do not seem to be advocating a default position of belief, you are asking me to withhold judgment of Christian claims until not only all arguments are heard, but also all potential arguments. Considering that even after a lifetime of study one would be unlikely to come across all possible arguments for the validity of Christianity, are you suggesting that no one is permitted to cast doubt upon its claims? If so, then could not the same argument be used for the claims of countless other religions? If not, then what makes you think that I am unwilling to consider the possibility of arguments that I have not yet come across? I know that there are other arguments out there. There are also countless arguments "proving" the truths of Islam that I am unaware of. Should I withhold pronouncements about the Islamic faith as well? While I may never be able to consider every apologetic argument, the main ones are apparent to anyone who engages in even a cursory study of the subject. Of the most frequently cited arguments, I have found none that adequately withstand the same level of scrutiny and critical thought that I apply to every other area of inquiry in my life. That is not to say that I will not one day stumble across an argument that erases all doubt from my mind through a series of unassailable rational proofs. But have you ever asked yourself, if God's message is so obvious and so important for Him to convey to man, would it really require all of the complicated arguments that have been designed to prove it? After countless millennia of sincere and honest men all wrestling with the questions of God's existence and identity, yet arriving at answers as varied as the personalities of each, does this seem like a God that even wants to be known?

This response is not written to you. Although your critique of my initial post provided the catalyst for a more thorough explanation of my disbelief, nothing herein is conveyed for your benefit. There is nothing I can say and no refutation I can give that will make you change your mind on this subject as is apparent by your adherence to faith. That is the problem with faith. It starts with a presupposition and then looks for corroborating evidence to validate it. This is the very antithesis of the Scientific Method and a direct affront to how we go about determining truth. This post is written for every other person who may have encountered these doubts within their own mind but has been unwilling or unable to express them out of fear of condemnation. The pursuit of truth is not something that anyone should be afraid of...it should be something we embrace. My only goal when I started down this path of inquiry was to arrive at an accurate understanding of the world by looking at evidence and using reason. My position is not so rigid as to be unaffected by new information as it is not bound by any dogma. If God is able to present Himself in a way commensurate with every other facet of reality constituting the world around me, then I will readily recognize his existence. Until that time, I am not only justified in my disbelief, but am required to do so if I am to be intellectually honest. And that is the one thing in all of this convolution that I am certain of. I may never find the answers I seek or convince others of my true motivations, but I know that my journey is a virtuous one all the same. It is on the shoulders of giants that I look out into the vast distance before me so that I might peek just over the horizon. Somewhere out there is the truth of which I seek...and if you'll come with me, I promise you'll always be in good company.

A short clip from The Atheist Experience weekly broadcast from Austin, TX. Host: Matt Dillahunty

The Apology of Martiro: Part 9 of 10

Eighth, when you say, "Such a man is unwilling or unable to accept reality on its own terms and live his life accordingly, preferring instead to rely on religion as an anesthetic to make sense out of an otherwise very uncertain world. It is a crutch. It is a narcotic," do you mean to assign this as a criticism to all believers, or only those who have a very weak faith and in fact to rely on religion as an anesthetic? If the former, I can think of quite a few believers throughout history who faced a much harder reality than you or I could even imagine. Take Bonhoeffer, for example. And, at a theoretical level, I would add that accepting Christianity doesn't remove the uncertainty from the world. The need to trust God presupposes that uncertainty, so it very clearly can't eradicate it.

If you rely on faith as an acceptable means of understanding our world then you are anesthetizing yourself from reality. Far from those with weak faith most egregiously committing this error, I would argue that as one's faith increases so too does his or her misunderstanding of reality. Facing hardship probably induces some people to gravitate towards faith because it helps makes sense out of an otherwise chaotic world and justifies their experience. Bonhoeffer's trials were likely made somewhat easier in his own mind by believing that his suffering was unavoidable and that his life was being used for a greater good. This still has no bearing on whether or not any of that is true. I never claimed that accepting Christianity removes uncertainty from the world, only that those who ascribe to its doctrines use them to attempt to anyway. After all, didn't you know that everything happens for a reason?    

The Apology of Martiro: Part 8 of 10

Seventh, shouldn't we expect that a God who is Logos and is responsible for giving us the imago Dei, by which we have intellect and will, will not demand blind faith? If it is part of Christianity's greatest commandment—straight from the Old Testament and accepted by Jesus himself in the Gospels—that we should love him with all our minds, shouldn't this be intellectually significant? It strikes me as rather disingenuous for you to say that Christianity involves surrendering our reason. Some of the greatest philosophy and science, not to mention the university, has come to us as a result of Christianity. Only if you conflate Christianity with Christian fundamentalism can you "in good faith" reject faith's relation to reason.

When I was a Christian, I used to draw a distinction between faith and blind faith. I felt that faith was believing something to be true after first building a rational bridge to get me halfway there. For example, I believed the world was created by God because I could look around me and see that the world exhibited order to it. I could use my mind to understand mathematics, explore the bounds of my creativity, and reason through logical absolutes to help give me a better understanding of everything I experienced. Even though I didn't fully understand how any of this worked, I believed that there must be a higher power that had given me these gifts. I accepted this on faith.

Conversely, blind faith meant simply believing any random claim that was made about anything. Accepting that Zeus threw lightning bolts from high atop Mount Olympus would be a claim accepted on blind faith and all such notions were summarily rejected. But as I began to reflect on the merits of accepting something on faith, I noticed that this method of inquiry still shared a unsettling trait with its blind counterpart. Both faith and blind faith were not, as I had once believed, different in kind but rather only in degree. It was only when I realized that even if faith were not blind it still meant believing things for which I had no evidence that the line between the two began to blur. I realized that in no other area of my life did I apply such a standard. In my understanding of the human body, nature, physics, etc., I always used reason and evidence as a means of determining truth. Yet in the one area of my life where ultimate truth is concerned, I was being told that evidence is not enough. Faith was required.

My mistake was in believing that truth was subject to my desire to know it. It was an error that sacrifices understanding for the promise of assurance and conflates hubris with enlightenment, all under the guise of a supposed humility rooted in faith. Faith promised me a comprehensive understanding of my world when the weight of evidence had not yet provided me with the answers I was seeking. The thought of admitting ignorance on many of the fundamental questions of our existence was anathema to me and faith was a way to avert this dilemma. It was not until I realized that it is acceptable to admit to myself that I don't know all of the answers that I was finally able to cast aside the false promises of faith. Reason and evidence may never be able to provide me with all of the answers I am looking for but this does not mean that I should simply fill in the missing pieces with unsupported claims. I should simply admit that I don't know and keeping searching.

The Apology of Martiro: Part 7 of 10

Sixth, your acceptance of the Euthyphro dilemma really shows how insincere or superficial your study of apologetics really was. Countless Christian philosophers have pointed out that this is a false dilemma. It is not the case that the good is good independently of God, as a standard to which he is subject. It is also not the case that whatever God wills is good simply by divine fiat, which would make the good arbitrary. Rather, God is the good—God is goodness. Goodness is neither arbitrary nor a standard independent of God's nature. God is the standard.

                                               

Personal attacks have once again reared their ugly heads. My insincerity notwithstanding, perhaps we can debate the problem of Euthyphro's dilemma on its own merits rather than mine. I simply disagree with your contention that this is a false dilemma. Asserting that "God is goodness" seems like a esoteric way of averting the question at hand, yet it also suffers the same  problems of any other faith-based claim. Namely, you have made an assertion without evidence. "Good" is not personified in anything but is instead a concept we use to determine how we are to behave towards one another. It is completely dependent on the human experience. If all humans ceased to exist, so too would the concepts of good and evil since there would be no one to experience these things.

Attempting to make the argument that God is the good and this goodness is thereby a part of his nature also suffers from the same problem of the Cosmological argument. The most obvious question to ask is "Did God choose His nature?". If so, we are once again confronted  with the first horn in Euthyphro's Dilemma. If not, the second. All we have managed to do is once again push the question back a single step without getting any closer to an answer.

However, I have a more primal objection to your claim that "God is goodness" that relates to the Moral Argument for God's existence. If God is truly the standard of good, why does he advocate so many things in the Bible that are simply not good? One has only to turn to the Old Testament to find countless stories of God advocating murder, infanticide, rape, and slavery. In the New Testament we do not see this side of God as much, but we still have stories of Paul advocating slavery when he commands slaves to "obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling" Eph 6:5. Would this not have been a perfect opportunity to condemn slavery as being wrong in all times, in all places, for all people? Some Christians will attempt to make exceptions for these verses by claiming that read in the proper context, God is not advocating slavery but rather making some other point. This is patently absurd. There is no context. There is no context in which the owning of another human being is ever considered permissible. And when someone starts attempting to justify atrocities out of an unwavering belief that God's commands are somehow justified by His inherent nature, they are on a slippery slope of moral ambiguity.