Theists and atheists agree on all kinds of things: sanity break continued

The airwaves, the internet, and the bookstore are full of people heaping abuse on each other because they do not see eye to eye on matters of belief and disbelief. Atheists and theists piling on each other. It sells.

I enjoy a cage match as much as the next person, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s important, for the sake of the truth no less, to affirm something that will never sell a book or get you an invite on a talk show: theists and atheists agree on all kinds of things.

It is not difficult to prove that atheists and theists agree on essential matters. Furthermore, since I’ve spent countless hours of my life speaking with but not abusing people with whom I sharply disagree – of course, I do not always succeed – I figure it ought to be possible to model civil debate in the blogging world.

Of course, what counts as civil is in the eyes of the beholder. A civil debate I once had, in high school, went like this. A friend of mine was on a philosophy kick. He had discovered solipsism and was enjoying its pleasures. There he was, berating me for believing in odd things like God, external reality, any reality at all.

“How do I even know that YOU exist?” he challenged me. I had no idea what to say in reply, but I instinctively knew what to do. I walked up to him and punched him in the gut. “Don’t worry,” I said. “That comes from an entity whose existence you deny. Nothing to get upset about.” He was mad as a hatter. Still, something in his eyes told me he knew I had responded in kind.

A few days ago, I challenged Chris Hallquist, an eloquent atheist who makes mincemeat of apologists on a daily basis, to respond to a question or two. He was kind enough to reply. So, in fact, was Duane Smith: you can read our exchange here.

Before I address the incredible Hallq’s response to my questions, I wish to emphasize a couple of things I’ve said before. I don’t expect Chris to agree with my points, but they may help him to understand where I’m coming from.

(1) Atheists, that is, those who passionately doubt God, are servants of God. They knock believers out of their complacency. In a paradoxical way, they are believers. They are asking the right questions, which is 90% of knowledge.

(2) Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin. If strong enough and sincere, faith leads to doubt before doubt leads back to faith again. This is called a circolo virtuoso in Italian. The opposite of a vicious circle.

(3) The absence of faith is not doubt. It is saying, “God doesn’t care,” therefore, “I don’t either.” The non-caring folk: these, and these only, are the enemies of God in this world.

Now, since Chris has the word “care” written all over him, I don’t consider him to be an enemy of God, or my enemy.

My problem, after reading Chris’s reply, is to find something to disagree about. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. Here are the questions I asked:

(1) Is there a need for a difference-maker beyond the human individual or a human collectivity, depending on the circumstances? If so, what kind of need?

(2) What is the difference between Beckett’s view of the human situation [which is premised on the need for a Godot, whether or not Godot exists], and that of an atheist?

Chris responds with the following:

[With respect to] the former, I take for granted that external reality exists, and makes a difference (one). There are also facts about us that go beyond what we think about ourselves, and those make a difference (two). Maybe abstract objects could make a difference too, though I've never been quite sure what to make of the abstract objects debate (for those who are as uncomfortable with the phrase "abstract objects" as I am with "difference maker," basically the idea is that things like propositions and mathematical truths have some independent existence of their own in a way that is different from that of material objects but is nevertheless very important. Beyond that, don't ask me, I don't understand it either).

The “for granted” diction is interesting. A theist might jump on that, twist it a bit, and say, “granted by whom?” In consideration of Gödel’s theorem and the like, it’s not clear how one can grant these things without appeal to a second-order hypothesis. But since external reality exists and makes a difference for Chris, the next question might be – in the words of Emmanuel Lévinas (a student of Husserl and Heidegger): “why, under an empty sky, do you continue to hope for a good and sensible world?”[1]

Chris also notes that there are facts about us, beyond external reality in the banal sense, that make a difference. No solipsism here. The amount of common ground between Chris (an atheist) and I (a theist) is extensive. More extensive than that between a Brahmin or Buddhist mystic on the one hand and an atheist like Chris or a theist like me on the other – and I don’t think either Chris or I are outliers in the categories we belong to.

It even looks as if Chris believes (is that the right word?) in something like personal identity, a non-reality according to Theravada Buddhism (Hume also tended in this direction, if memory serves). Furthermore, we both probably take for granted an epistemological framework which has no need, to say the least, of a mystical concept of memory like the one reincarnationists assume. Chris and I therefore are at odds with 60% of the French according to recent polling data. But that doesn’t make us wrong, does it?

Chris also notes that there are “abstract objects” such as mathematical truths that are rumored to have an existence independent of an individual or human collectivity. These too might be considered difference-makers, though he is “uncomfortable” about the idea of “abstract objects.” He remarks, with the mixture of disdain and humility one expects from a good analytical philosopher, that he doesn’t understand the idea completely.

“Abstract objects” like mathematical truths and scientific laws do pose a problem for atheists. My high school physics teacher, an atheist, put it this way. He was a nuclear engineer, and we would meet in his lab at the UW-Madison (the high school I went to was in effect a lab school, no longer in existence, of the UW). He overheard us talking about God and such, and ventured the comment: “I don’t believe in God, and have plenty of reasons for not believing in God, but I am struck by the perfection of the laws I study. The law of gravity states that the force of gravity is proportional to the product of two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the point masses. It’s very interesting that the distance between the masses is exactly squared. I know. We’ve measured it over and over again. It might have been, not 2, but 2.1, or 2.00000001. But it’s not. I don’t have an explanation for that.”

In my earlier post, I suggested that:

The atheist, it seems to me, opts for what has been called the Stallone/ Schwartzenegger/ Eastwood ending to Waiting for Godot: Didi and Gogo get tired of waiting for Godot and they hunt him down instead. When they corner him, they pump him full of lead for making them so miserable all this time. The world is a better place without slime like him.

But Chris takes another tack:

If Godot = God, though, I would suggest an alternate ending to the play: "Dude, they must have been putting us on about this Godot guy, we got punk'd."

You know what? I completely agree with that. In many a circumstance, that statement expresses my sense of reality. Countless passages in the Bible speak of and speak to the same reality. Psalm after psalm confronts the reality of the absence of God. Two entire books of the Bible, Job and Qohelet, describe the experience of waiting for Godot to show up in one’s life, or looking for Godot’s justice in the universe, and coming up empty. Jeremiah is so peeved at one point that he uses stronger language than Chris does. Chris knows himself to be punk'd by Godot. Jeremiah goes further. He compares his Godot to a sexual abuser (Jer 20:7-8). Someone else put the question while hanging from a cross.

There are many people I consider to be God’s enemies. Some of them have the audacity to portray themselves as defenders of the faith. What about Chris Hallquist?

May he continue his task of pointing out the inanity and stupidity of wannabe apologists of the Christian faith. In so doing, he is a true defender of the faith.

---

[1] Emmanuel Lévinas, “Loving the Torah more than God,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (tr. Sean Hand; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 [1955]) 143.

Comments

[Justin (koavf)]

John,

Be hot or be cold, right?

Hume was a proto-"bundle theorist." It is a kind of non-theory of personal identity that is so-called because we can 1.) only know the world through our sensory experience, and 2.) we cannot sense the thing that is sensing. Therefore, we are a "bundle" of sense perceptions and personal identity is basically like an empty bag in which these experience interact with one another. Thus, identity is almost like a jellyfish, but even more immaterial.

Hume's understanding of the mind was that we have an arrangement of mental "furniture" that are arranged in a way that makes a kind of sense to us, but there is no objective best way to arrange these ideas.

-JAK

[JohnFH]

Justin,

your explanation turned my mind to jelly. Perhaps Hume was onto something, but I don't like the feel of it, and prefer to stay away.

[Justin (koavf)]

John,

Reviewing my explanation, I suppose it can be bewildering. Hume's explanation of identity was similar to the Buddhist rejection of a personal soul, if that helps any.

There is no thing that you can sense who is sensing all your perceptions. That is to say, I can sense the chair in which I am sitting, the cold air around me, and even individual parts of my body, but I can't sense me myself. I can't sense a "soul" or "identity" behind all of those perceptions, therefore there is nothing behind them all. A "person" is merely a set of such perceptions or a series of desires that arise and disappear, but there is no constant behind all those desires.

This is the key for the Buddhist rejection: there is no constant, unchanging thing, and this is a part of a larger cosmology about change and causality. For Hume, his skepticism about the soul is predicated upon his epistemology: if we can only know things because of our senses, we can never know our selves, because we can't sense them. Since you cannot see, hear, feel, smell, or taste a soul, we cannot know that such a thing exists.

I hope that helps, but I can understand how you might not be interested in further investigation.

-JAK

[JohnFH]

Now I get it. I don't like it, but I get it. There is at least a grain of truth in the position. Personal identity is, per observation, relatively, but not absolutely constant.

[eclexia]

I appreciate this post. It gets at the heart of (1) why I don't like most "apologetics" (if every uncertainty has to be addressed and defended to prove my case, it ends up fake, stilted and faulty) and (2) why I don't argue with other people of different faiths, even when I think they're wrong. (I appreciate people who can argue well, I just can't do it)

Because, I get what they're saying. And sometimes, we're asking the same questions. How do I defend or answer a challenge to my faith, when that challenge is one I am already aware of, and which ends up being part of the shape of my trust? It's that trust, then, which makes me look nuts to people who don't share my faith. But, that trust (and continuing to trust when things don't make sense) is core to my beliefs, even though, if I'm wrong to trust God, then I'm being taken for the gullible ride of my life.

I have a Buddhist neighbor. He and I agree on a lot of things, even though fundamentally, what we do with those things (and the lens we look at those things), is very different. I've said that he connects the dots differently than I do (and sometimes I think part of our difference is that he DOES connect the dots in a certain way, whereas I end up not being able to connect all the dots and then I rest in that being okay), but we are looking at and acknowleding the same dots. Sometimes those "dots" that we connect differently (or that he connects and I don't) are ones that it is hard to find other believers to even acknowledge. I don't know if that makes sense--it's always hard for me to put into words how posts like this resonate with me.

Related post I just read:

http://10outof10.blogspot.com/2007/11/thanissaro-bhikkhu-no-self-or-not-self.html

Maybe interesting, who knows?

-JAK