Michael Novak recently asked me: “Am I right in saying that atheists have no one to thank, [unlike] Jews and Christians [who] do thank and praise God for so many good things?” In light of our national holiday tomorrow, I thought I would take up his question here.
The problem for the nonbeliever is not that there is no one to thank for our good fortune but that there are more targets of gratitude than we can possibly acknowledge.
God does have the advantage of being a centralized receptacle for thanks, but is otherwise quite flawed as an object of gratitude, in my view.
I am indebted every day to human ingenuity that I could not possibly replicate on my own. I live on the 15th floor of an apartment building—a remarkable situation! Within this marvel of engineering, I have electricity, clean water, protection from the elements, and now, the internet, that miracle of knowledge aggregation that gives individuals more power than anyone has ever before possessed. Humans created all these wonders through tireless, loving, and patient empirical observation and experimentation.
I give thanks for the centuries-long development of limited government and to our Founding Fathers who created the most flexible and stable written constitution yet devised. As a secular conservative, I am particularly grateful for the free market system that supplies America’s cornucopia of goodies, an accomplishment that the current financial crisis in no way discredits.
But there are elements of my good fortune that are not the product of human effort—such as the facts that I a citizen of the United States and not, say, the Congo; that I was born with a sound body; and that the laws of nature work as they do. Do I need a God to account for those windfalls? In the first two cases, definitely not. I accept without discomfort the massive role of randomness in the distribution of benefits and handicaps; the alternative—that they represent deliberate judgment–is too horrible to contemplate. Were I to thank God for my extreme luck in being born into a society where people do not routinely massacre each other, I would have to explain why I deserve this happy outcome, whereas those millions of individuals who are not so fortunate in their birthplace do not. Likewise, if God is responsible for my healthy physical constitution, I would have to explain why he allows thousands of innocent children to be born with painful and sometimes fatal birth defects while sparing me.
Coming up with such explanations, in my view, requires either narcissism or the torture of reason. Most believers seem oblivious to the solipsism entailed by their thanking God when their cancer goes into remission, say. But the problem remains: Why did God save you and let the patient in the bed next to you die? The results are no more satisfactory when a conscious effort is made to supply rationales for such disparate outcomes. Typical candidates include: It is actually a gift from God to be born with half a brain, you just lack the capacity to understand his mysterious ways; or, how dare you presume to judge him, you cringing worm?
As for the fact that we live in a universe of extraordinary precision and regularity, I cannot begin to explain how that came to pass. And neither can the religious, other than by a fiat without any empirical backing. I trust that science will gradually push back the limits of our ignorance, but it may be that such matters are beyond human understanding.
Tomorrow, however, we can all be grateful for the wondrous stability and prosperity of America, and for the fact that we live in a society where people no longer kill each other for their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
Again, another attack post – my understanding was that this blog was not supposed to be yet another where America’s religious heritage is trashed. Nope.
Don’t take Mr. Shuller’s criticism personally, Heather — it’s practically a model of witty repartee compared with his riposte to Ann Althouse.
I honestly can’t get my head around someone who could read Ms. MacDonald’s wonderfully gentle post here and consider it an “attack post.” (Of course, I have trouble understanding how people who are in a 90% majority in this country constantly claim persecution.)
In the spirit of the holiday, here’s the poem my six-year-old wrote in class yesterday:
Really
Thankful for
Mom and Dad
Family, friends, food, fun!
I think he gets it.
Indeed.
I’ve always been more attracted to the “thankful for” aspect of the day than the “thankful to”. The word “grateful” is remarkably versatile : it can be supplied with both a subject and an object, or one without the other.
Thank you, Ms Heather.
The problem for the nonbeliever is not that there is no one to thank for our good fortune but that there are more targets of gratitude than we can possibly acknowledge.
Well said.
As a Christian, I must say I am offended by Michael Novak’s narrow and ignorant remark. Of course being grateful does not have to be contingent on
believing in God. I also hear sometimes that people can’t be moral or have values without a belief in God. I find that attitude narrow and self satisfied. I do believe in God — but I think all people can be capable of a moral vision … and profound gratitude. Happy Thanksgiving!
I will thank Earth and Nature – for nurturing me and my fellow humans. This life is fragile, and it is my good fortune to be alive on this planet at this time.
Regarding your question about whether you can trust luck to the fact that you were born into a universe in which the physical laws we understand are true: string theorists are now seriously speculating a multiverse in which the resident universes don’t all obey the same laws. Impossible to prove from this universe, of course, but…. it means that you just got lucky by being born into this one. Another +1 for probability, another -1 for intervetionist god!
Interesting post and blog. While I’m a unitarian who doesn’t consider myself atheist, I attend church with many people who do. Oddly enough whether or not a member believes in God seems pretty unimportant in my congregation and discussions on his/her existance don’t take place very often. As politics and religion are both of high interest to me I look forward to reading more posts on this new blog.
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Andre T. most Christians don’t claim persecution… and your 90% number is unsupportable. Like most issues… just because someone says they “believe in God” doesn’t make them a Christian or even a true believer just like Obama saying he’s going to cut 95% of Americans taxes make him a supply-sider.
Sarah Palin caught a lot of shit from the “secular right” and the left — because of her beliefs. Here’s the OED’s definition of “persecution”: “To seek out and subject (a person, group, organization, etc.) to hostility or ill-treatment, esp. on grounds of religious faith….” (OED Draft Revision 2008) Also look at the No on Prop 8 crowd here in CA. They do loves them some Mormons.
There is a movement away from religious toleration — specifically of those in the Judeo-Christian worldview. Not tomorrow or even 20 years down the road, but it’s not long before we’ll be the minority (especially when it becomes less fashionable — the 90% will drop drastically when belief actually has a cost).
All that being said… I’m struck by the religious tone of the posts here. Hume’s post on debate sounds as fundamentalist as Jerry Falwell.
“Andrew” whoops! And I don’t think Heather Mac’s post is attack in the least — just for the record. Great poem by your 6-year old btw.
Tomorrow, however, we can all be grateful for the wondrous stability and prosperity of America, and for the fact that we live in a society where people no longer kill each other for their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
Amen!
I always wonder why so called “believers” cry when their loved-ones die? If they’re sure they’re going to heaven for eternity, then why cry? In fact, “believers” should be happy when loved-ones die, becuase then they’re with Jesus? If someone truly believes in God and heaven then everyday should be wonderful becuase you know you’re going to paradise when you die.
Excellent post. But really, this is easily done: Thank the cook!
Tomorrow, however, we can all be grateful for the wondrous stability and prosperity of America, and for the fact that we live in a society where people no longer kill each other for their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
I don’t know……sometimes I wish I had the power to condemn heretics to burn.
I consider myself a liberal (although more in the “classical” sense), but all of your posts here are very good. It is heartening to see conservatives that understand the need to emphasize that religiosity is not a necessary condition for conservatism. In fact, it may be sufficient for its demise.
Keep it up, and ignore people like Shuller. One could only interpret Heather MacDonald’s post as an attack if one supports wholly guarding religion against any criticism, no matter how light or (and this next word is important) true. And a person who supports that is not only stupid, but cowardly. (That’s what an attack reads like Mr. Shuller.)
Add my “Amen” to those of the others.
Your piece is very interesting and I think you explain very well thanksgiving from the secular stand point. I think religious people cannot claim Thanksgiving as a holiday for believers only.
My objection are with your arguments againts God. I am a christian so I can oly speak from its point of view, as I understand it.
Bad things happen in this world and God allows that to happen. Faith and Christ teachings are there for us to use them to live through them, not to prevent them.
I agree with you about the wonders of science, the inventiveness of human beings and the randomness of this world. All of them are great arguments for and against God. The answer to that is a matter of faith, and faith like love can’t be measure, explain or proven.
What we need is tolerance for different points of view and tolerance about each others efforts to convince one another of our beliefs. There is nothing wrong about that. We need to avoid labels and codemnations if we fail. Happy Thanksgiving!
Thank you Heather, for clarifying a most reasonable and humble sense in which we should all be thankful! Always a pleasure to read your measured, solid prose.
Agreed with those who think Gerry Shuler should lighten up, and be thankful himself for the religious tolerance embedded in this nation’s fabric that allows him to pracice his religion (and allows me to abstain from any such practice.) We would both be rather uncomfortable in, say, Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Turbo: What you see as a movement away from religious toleration (specifically Judeo-Christian), we secularists see as simply an erosion of the Judeo-Christian near-monopoly on public morality. We see it as a leveling of the playing field, if you will. That it represents a lessening of Judeo-Christian influence may be saddening to you, but viewing it as “persecution” is just silly. It’s like the Left complaining that they are “persecuted” because talk-radio is so successful.
Also, Hume and others may indeed have a vibe of “certainty” in their posts, (which you call “religious”). But note that Hume and others have no supernatural commitments….secularism is close kin with naturalism, and I suspect that Heather, Derb, Razib, and Walter are all philosophical naturalists. (Please correct me if I am wrong!).
What most naturalists find unsatisfactory about religions and religiousness is the empircally basesless reliance on the purported supernatural realm to provide existential meaning and moral grounding. “Certainty”, or lack thereof, is secondary to these concerns.
But, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I will say that I am truly grateful that Mr. Turbo, Mr. Shuler, Ms. MacDonald, myslef, and others are all free to speak our minds without fear of real reprisal or actual persecution.
🙂
As someone from a family of evangelicals who understands the history of religions re colonialism, slavery, land grabs, exterminations, etc., belief or non-belief does not come easy. It is fraught with lots of questions, maybe it is abstract!
So often the atheistic perpective posits the arguement that organized thesitic religion is fundamentally flawed because it doesn’t adequately account for global human suffering. It is still partly an assumption that it should. An individual’s faith in God or belief in a higher power has little to do with proving why “certain people” experience suffering.
The atheistic perspective often points to the atrocities of genocide, disease and famine in third world countries as evidence of why God doesn’t exist. These are certainly horrific examples of suffering endured by humans and we all grapple to understand why it exists. But the last time I checked human suffering is still the world’s greatest common denominator. No one escapes it. So to point to examples or suffering in one place says nothing about human suffering in another place. Faith in God marks the begnining of a mortal mind’s attempt to bring understanding and clarity to such vexing issues.
“Likewise, if God is responsible for my healthy physical constitution, I would have to explain why he allows thousands of innocent children to be born with painful and sometimes fatal birth defects while sparing me. Coming up with such explanations, in my view, requires either narcissism or the torture of reason.”
What I find equally narcissitic is the diefication of human ingenuity. If faith in God fails to explain the randomness of human suffering, why can’t science and reason fill the gap and bring it to an end? Precisely, it cannot. If scientific experimentation and reason and observation where sufficient in it’s explanations of prosperity versus human suffering, there would be no need for Faith. God would have died yesterday.
I. LOVE. THIS. BLOG.
Thank you for representing the atheist right, or center right in such a clear, cogent manner. Glad I found this place. Looking forward to reading more!
I would agree with A-Bax on the leveling of the playing field comment. But Floyd’s comment that Sarah Palin only received criticism for her strong faith seems completely out of touch with reality to me. Just peruse Andrew Sullivan’s list of “odd lies of Sarah Palin” – this was a woman who lied reflexively and couldn’t keep a story straight, and had nary a thought on the most pressing issues concerning our country that didn’t seem to be straight from the AEI/Heritage/Weekly Standard playbook (which they were, essentially). And yet Mr. Turbo holds up her religion as the sole reason she was persecuted. When Andrew T. mentioned “90% of the country feeling persecuted”, that is the type of thought he was referring to, utterly astounding reality free assertions.
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We can certainly be grateful without a God, but I’m not sure we can without there being free will. If the universe is a machine, and my parents helped me because they are cogs, why would I thank them? If I’m a cog, whether I’m grateful or not is out of my control, so it’s not really gratitude.
MacDonald’s post assumes free will, but such a position is at odds with science, no? Could one argue that a belief in free agency is not truly secular?
Essay… Please read what I wrote and argue from that. I said “because of her beliefs” — a far cry from “Only” because of her beliefs. There were cultural and religious attacks on her — as well as legitimate concerns about her experience. To pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. If you don’t like her fine, but dislike her for the right reasons.
ABAX… relying only on the empirical as a source of knowledge requires faith. Was the Earth round only after 1492? Did planets not exist until the Mayans, et al. saw them and measured them? I will grant you too many Christians are too “convinced” of their own inerrancy (i.e. — their interpretation of Scripture, etc.) We could argue forever (or at least until we’re worm food) about “empirically baseless” whatever…. We’ll definitely have to agree to disagree there as the arguments are already well laid out. (Dead horses and all that).
Also… morality… to say that there is only (or even mostly) a religious component to public morals the last few hundred years or so is patently ridiculous. There are many “rational” non (as opposed to “un”) scriptural reasons for a government to favor traditional marriage in the tax code, etc (as but one example). “Thou shalt not commit murder” is a Bible verse — and is also CA Penal Code 187. Ditto — much of the specifics of Deuteronomy were written for a specific people at a specific time. A lot of the general principles from those same verses are good public policy to this day (others are not applicable to a modern globalized economy obviously) including equal protection, due process, etc. etc.
Persecution… I wrote that in reference to those who were lambasting Palin because of her religion (Not ONLY Essay!). Christians are not being persecuted on the whole — though I think there might be an increase in the coming decades if we become marginalized. I’m often silly — but not as you say. 🙂
The thing that scares the religious about “natural philosophers” is that when there is the lack of any absolute standard (as distinct from absolute rules) a lot of people usually die. No fear of anything greater than oneself is a great recipe for hubris. Irreligious government has killed vastly more people — just in the last 100 years or so than any religious impulse. Read Professor R.J. Rummel’s “Death By Government”.
Read this. Probably the best thing I have read on the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Philosophical-Classics-Norwegian-Sciences/dp/0486440117/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227880267&sr=1-2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id2Ik4whVr8
I would suggest that every self-proclaimed atheist who has or has not commented on this blog, listen to what Ravi Zacarias says about the existence of God. He is essentially asking the question, “How do we arrive at moral law if there is no moral law giver?” It is a question or origins that atheists need to be prepared to answer.
I believe most western atheists really aren’t opposed to the notion of an omnipresent God. The opposition seems to be against a Judeo-Christian God.
Historically speaking, you dislike what people have done in the name of religion. So do I. And I self-indentify as a Christian. So how does that prove or disprove the existence of God???
Floyd R. Turbo: “Irreligious government has killed vastly more people — just in the last 100 years or so than any religious impulse. Read Professor R.J. Rummel’s ‘Death By Government’.”
I think that this argument assumes that the question is framed in terms of whether a government should be religious or irreligious. The real question, in my mind, is whether a government can be rational or irrational, with the religious impulse being but one breed of irrationality (along with such things as communism, naziism, etc.) Simply because a government is atheist is no guarantee that it will be rational. (See, e.g., communist governments.) And, by the same token, the fact that a government is NOT atheistic does not mean that it is rational or desirable or less amenable to atrocity than atheistic ones necesarily will be.
Also, the statement about “Irreligious government killing vastly more people just in the last 100 years or so than any religious impulse” is additionally questionable – beyond the confusion between irreligious and irrational – as it often assumes that the Nazi government was irreligious and the deaths of that regime are properly lain at its feet of irreligious government. Nothing can be further from the truth. The Nazi ideology was steeped in religion and the religious impulse (among other elements, such as nationalism).
I would reflect on his point, as you have summarized it (I have better uses of my time than watching 8 minutes of an apoligetic preacher) by first noting that he is working from analogy, which is a logical falacy. In other words, just because he calls the moral impulse a “law” does not make it one, and if there is a need for a “lawgiver” whenever there is a “law” it does not follow that there needs to be a giver (i.e., intelligent presence) of the moral impulse in humans simply because in the analogous situation, all laws are preceeded by lawgivers.
I would then question whether there is a such thing as a “moral law”, except in the most vague and ill-defined manner, in humans. In history, killing the following has, at one point or another, been termed “morally acceptable”: homosexuals, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, polytheists, idolaters, witches, Canaanites, disobedient children, heretics, etc., etc., etc. So where, again, is the moral “law”??
Finally, I would point out that the human animal evolved to live in social groups. And the “moral law” which this personal talks about is nothing more than the result of evolution working; those humans ancestors who developed the “moral sense” were better able to live in these social groups and were more successful in reproducing and their offspring were more likely to possess this same moral sense (both as a matter of their genetic heritage and their socialization.)
So it is truely not a challenge to answer that question.
I can’t speak for any other western atheist, but I’m opposed to a believe in all of them, the “Judeo-Christian God” being no exception.
I both dislike the bad that they have done in the name of religion and the belief in religion, itself, as I believe that the bad is inherent in the belief (at least to some extent.) Neither of which proves or disproves the existence of any god. But even if religion was nothing but sunshine and rainbows, it still wouldn’t mean that there is a god.
Turbo: We were both probably combating straw-men verisons of our true respective positions, so you’re right that we should probably “agree to disagree” about the role of empiricism in the establishment and testing of knoweldge claims.
There is, I think, a sense of “faith” involved when relying on primarily empirical standards: we have faith that the world will continue to be ordered, and that phenomena (if not “neumena”) are basically intelligble. But…..there are two big ways in which this sort of “faith” is so different from relgious faith that we might consider using different terms for them. 1) A la Quine, should the results of our tests and inquiries begin to show that the world is NOT ordered as we have become accustomed to, we would bite the bullet and begin to consider giving up this supposition. (I.e., we could, as a result of new empirical data, GIVE UP ON the emiprical method itself, conceivably). 2) The sense of “faith” that an empiricist has in these point-of-departure suppositions is analogous to the status of axioms in an inferential structure, and thus lacks the emotional component that “faith” has in the religious context. For the religious, “faith” is a gift, a spiritual undercurrent, and a bulwark against the many, many bits of data floating in which seem to directly contradict the content of their relgious commitments.
Morality: I agree with you that there are many non-religious potential bases for morality, but I hesitate to describe the bulk of them as “rational” (in the French Revolutionary, or Marxist sense). I subscribe to the evolutionary-psychological view that our sense of morality is a by-preduct of us having evolved in highly social groups, with finely-tuned sensitivity to reciprocity (or lack thereof) and built in cheater-detection devices, etc., etc. Morality arose from the cognitive arms race that came from our ability to decieve one another and our concommitant ability to ferret out such deception (among other considerations). I hesitate to call this “Rational” with a capital R, but it certainly seems intelligible and amenable to empirical scruntiny.
Finally, on your last point(s):
“when there is the lack of any absolute standard (as distinct from absolute rules) a lot of people usually die.” A-Bax: The Inquisition had absolute standards, as did the Aztec priests, as do Bin Laden, et al. All these big-time killers of men appealed to some kind of absoulte standard (the will of Jehovah, the will of Huitzilopochtli, the will of Allah, respectively).
“Irreligious government has killed vastly more people — just in the last 100 years or so than any religious impulse.” A-BAx: You really sure about that “any” in there? Can I included ancient African relgions, current religions of Southern India, or of the New Guinea highlands? You owe it to yourself to become familiarized with the way the human religious impulse has been expressed throughout most of history, especially non-Western history.
It’s not a pretty sight, and, my guess is that the religious impulse has been responsible for more death than has the naturalistic impluse by a few orders of magnitude.
“How do we arrive at moral law if there is no moral law giver?” It is a question or origins that atheists need to be prepared to answer.
I’m happy to answer that. Where shall we start? How about with evolutionary psychology? For example, incest. It’s a taboo in every culture, some say ordained by God as evil. But there is strong evidence that it’s an evolutionary trait that is hard-wired into the brain. I don’t refrain from raping my sister because God said so. Rather, the very idea is… icky – a psychological reaction. Likewise, species do not generally kill on another except in warlike circumstances – defined as “you threaten me” – be it physically or for dominance. Sound familiar?
Since Immanuel Kant answered this question two centuries ago, I think atheists will probably do just fine.
Heather, thanks for a great column. It gets lonely out here on planet earth, surrounded by all these GOD fearing people who simply cannot not imagine a world without a god directing us. It´s too bad because earth, the United States and smart, inventive and principled people are much more interesting and inspiring than god.