Waxing Long and Argumentatively

It seems that our last issue, Do “Selves” Live on After Dying? was quite a hot topic. Among the responses on the forum was one about information theory and the (hypothetical) possibility of translating the entire works of Shakespeare into an “alphabet” consisting of distinct odors or aromas. Therefore, when Hamlet asks his immortal question “To be, or not to be?” this may well be a mixture of the odors given off by garlic, onions, and clove, so long as we understand that a given odor corresponds to a given letter. How do you spell “h-a-p-p-y”? Why “lemon – orange – daffodil – daffodil – apricot,” of course. How else? The point of the post was that translation from one medium to the next does not necessarily mean difference in identity; we exist in the mind of God and thus are indelibly inscribed on “the hard drive at the back of the universe”: we shall not get lost in translation nor suffer discontinuity.

While the forum offers some truly compelling discussion, some of the most interesting correspondence happens in the privacy of e-mail as readers share their thoughts directly with me. One such reply came from a long-time friend from high school who teaches American History to unsuspecting teenagers and has been on this mailing list for some time now. In my first paragraph, she pointed out some areas where the initial set-up for my argumentation could be seen as weak, putting critics on the defensive from the onset. She followed up with some supporting reasons why the opening paragraph might be viewed in this way and my reply back to her turned into a near newsletter in itself. As iron sharpens iron, so too do we often expand and develop best when placed under scrutiny, whether friendly as in this instance or painfully from the criticism of an antagonist. For these reasons, treating these possible objections seemed pertinent to our conversation from the previous issue and what follows will be more or less an attempt to re-create our exchange, or at least provide adequate treatment to the objections found therein. Perhaps these reservations crossed your mind as well, as is not uncommon when room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation occurs. For that matter, sometimes I lose sight of the individual trees for the forest: I am focused on my destination and do not always watch so carefully where I am stepping at any given moment. After all, since I know the final destination to which I am heading, you should too, natural mind reader that you are. :)

My friend began by examing the sentence: “If, for example, religious faith is a fallacy and is simply untrue, why then do people with such convictions seem healthier and happier on the whole?” She points out the possibility of arguing (in my own paraphrase): “Yes, but that could merely be evidence of the placebo effect in which people taking nothing more than sugar pills nevertheless revive because of their faith in the power of that pill. Just as people who are surrounded by loving family have been shown empirically to be healthier and happier, could not the belief in some kind of non-existent (but nevertheless strongly believed-in) deity also give us this sense of health and happiness?”The second sentence she critiques is similar: “Why does religious expression exist the world over, and, according to anthropology, characterize even the earliest civilizations?” This time, the possible weakness comes down to an apparently utilitarian sense. We have religious expression in the earliest civilizations: what about prior to them? Did the earliest civilizations cultivate religion as a means of structuring and ordering the increasing numbers of persons with which they dealt? In other words, did religion evolve over time as a particularly expedient way to organize cultures? There could be a further Marxist-like analysis of history here as well in which religion is seen as the opiate of the masses, and not merely an opiate, but one administered quite intentionally by a controlling elite. In all of these instances, civilization may merely have landed upon religion as an efficient means of organizing masses of people, both in the more positive light of utilitarianism as well as in the more cynical sense as the means a powerful oligarchy employs to control and ultimately exploit the masses.

Finally, the sentence that she felt easily might be weakest of all was: “When it comes to religious faith in general, the majority of the world’s population holds some belief or another regarding the spiritual realm, life after death, and a Higher Power or higher powers.” She suggests that this statement can be seen as holding no great value however true, for if expressed in an argument it essentially says that “people have faith because people have faith” and is thus viciously circular. In other words, we might appeal to the fact that so many people believe in God as a means of justifying our own belief in God and therefore it might simply be the case that more and more people come to believe simply because more and more people come to believe. We have uncovered nothing provable about God by this statement; at best we have discovered a fact about human psychology. A point that she did not bring up, but that we will, is that even more than possibly being viciously circular, this statement if expressed as a means of argument could be seen as committing the material fallacy of ad populum: a thing must be true if (most) everybody believes it, must it not? After all, as teenagers, we have probably been known to utter at least once, “But Mom! Everybody else gets to go out on Monday nights!” Accordingly, we might simply be saying: “But Mom! (Most) everybody else believes in God, so He must exist!” And if we really mean business, we might indignantly stamp our foot. This fallacy can be reviewed in more detail at Dr. Robert Harris’ page Material Fallacies 2. Therefore, with her objections raised and one of our own added, we will attempt to bolster these statements, tighten up their premises, and return them to the original grove of trees from which they have been plucked. Hopefully when we are finished, they will stand straighter and much more solidly with their fellows in the forest. So then, let us proceed.

“If, for example, religious faith is a fallacy and is simply untrue, why then do people with such convictions seem healthier and happier on the whole?” The objection, as you recall, was that when patients are given sugar pills, they often improve simply because they believe that these placebos are real medicine. If people who are guided by a sense of religious faith or conviction are in fact representative of a placebo effect—a possibility that likely has not escaped the notice of anyone who has ever seriously doubted—then what may we say about the nature of belief? Let us first uncover our assumptions before we proceed. What would make religious faith a fallacy? We are assuming, by bringing up the possibility that faith might be untrue, that what makes faith true is if God exists and what makes it false is if He does not. That premise may seem obvious, but it was not made explicit and we do well to lay all our cards out on the table before playing our hand. So then, if God exists religious faith is validated but if God does not exist religious faith will have proven a lie according to our implicit assumptions here. Someone else might suggest that religious faith would be unaffected by whether God exists or not—that it was itself true even if God were false—but for our purposes, we are not interested in splitting hairs to that degree. We are operating within a more traditionally Christian conception of religious faith and as such, our faith would be invalidated if God happened not to exist. Conversely, if God does exist, to the degree that our faith accurately reflects Him is the degree to which our faith is valid. We might argue differently in another place, but this is not another place and here we are assuming a Christian conception of the universe.

Now then, we could try to prove that God exists by our question: “If, for example, religious faith is a fallacy and is simply untrue, why then do people with such convictions seem healthier and happier on the whole?” However, the question in and of itself is not a proof, it is merely a question. Trying to prove the existence of God explicitly is a most difficult if not impossible task, so our line of argumentation probably should be more pragmatic. That is, we will not try to prove that God is real. We will rather look at what it might mean to believe in God if He does not exist. In order to frame this question, we will need to assume that when we ask, “If, for example, religious faith is a fallacy and is simply untrue, why then do people with such convictions seem healthier and happier on the whole?” we have somehow been able to demonstrate that God does not exist. If we accept the evidence we were using when asking the question, we are still left with the fact that people seem healthier and happier by holding on to what we now know to be a false belief. What is gained by believing and what is gained by adhering to the truth that God does not exist?

In The Portable Jung, lovingly edited and assembled by the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, is found the essay “Stages of Life.” Our quotation will be an extended one, for gaining the perspective and insights of an eminent psychologist is not generally something that happens every day. Jung writes:

We know in our thought experiment that God does not exist. Do we also know that life after death does not exist? Let us say that we do: that without God, not only is religious faith false but so too is the possibility of any kind of life after death. So we are now living in a universe in which there is no God and no life after death. Is there any particular reason why we should remain committed to these truths in this instance? What would these truths profit us and why would they be valuable? Now of course, knowing that there is no God and that there is no life after death might make closing our eyes and pretending next to impossible. If, however, we met other people who either did believe or who were adept at pretending, is there some reason why we should disabuse them? Would it be to their benefit or ours or in some other way preferable to know these truths or would such persons be better off if we simply left them to their peaceful slumber? It has been claimed that telling the truth is always better: is it? Jung has told us that psychologically speaking, persons who believe that there is something more beyond the grave are better adjusted for the event of their own deaths and those of their loved ones. Is there some compelling reason why the twin truths that there is no God and no life after death should be held so sacred that we seek to rip holes in the daydreams of others? What has it cost those persons to go to their graves placebo effect firmly in place? What (if anything) does it suggest about us if we feel we simply must tell them the truth? Are we noble to decree: “You get one shot so you had best make the most of it: grow up, stop living in a fantasy world, focus on this life before it is gone!”

We are assuming a great deal if we assume that we know there is no life after death, for in the real world outside of our hypothetical argument, no matter how close to the brink we may have come, those of us reading these words have not passed beyond the veil never to return again. Likewise, we assume a great deal if we assume there is no God, for while His existence may be almost impossible to prove, it is equally difficult to disprove. Yet some believe and some do not. Let us then ask the persons who have faith that God does not exist and that there is no life after death where this faith of theirs derives. Let us take the committed atheists of the world and put them upon the inquisitor’s seat and ask them, “How can you be so sure that there is not a God? How can you be so certain that there is no life after death? Can you prove either of these things? What is your greatest argument? Where is your evidence?”

The answer to the question of evidence will likely be an appeal to outrage or to silence. The outraged answer goes something like this: “Many claim that there is a God and that He necessarily is ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived.’ Those apologists also claim, along with Descartes, that such a Being must be good, because to be a deceiver would imply a lack of some sort and ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ could not be lacking in any way, but rather be utterly perfect. If such a Being were all-powerful, He could stop the atrocities of the world. If a Being were all-good (or all-loving), He would want to do so. If He were all-knowing, He would be aware. But He does not stop the atrocities of the world, therefore, if such a Being does exist, then He is either not all-loving, all-powerful, or all-knowing—if He is even any of the three.”

This line of thought is quite the argument. Yet we might do well to ask ourselves a few questions as we poke and probe around inside the faith of the atheist. First, has this argument said that there is no God? No. Some have concluded from these premises that therefore (dot, dot dot) God does not exist. Yet to infer this is to bring in a conclusion that was found nowhere in the premises. If our argument is going to be logically valid, the conclusion will necessarily be contained in the premises, for that is how deductive argumentation works. If we say p or q (p v q), not p (~p), therefore q (∴ q), our conclusion q was also found in our starting premise. In order to make this form of deductive logic work to prove that there was no God, however, we would have to fill in a few missing premises: “If God is not all-loving, He does not exist at all,” and “If God is not all-powerful, He does not exist at all” and “If God is not all-knowing, He does not exist at all.” Maybe we would not use those particular premises, but to arrive at the conclusion that God does not exist based on the argument that an all-powerful, all-loving, and all-knowing God cannot be all three at once is to infer more than what is stated in the premises, even if it does happen to turn out that no God exists at all. It would be like solving a math problem like 2 + 2 = 7: we correctly say that this solution is invalid given what we mean by “2 + 2” and “7.” Two “2’s” contain “4” already, but nowhere can an additional “3” be found to arrive at the answer “7” and if we do wind up with a “7” we will need to go back and add either “3,” “2 + 1,” “1 + 1 + 1” or the equivalent to validly arrive at “7” in our answer. Likewise, in an argument, we cannot come out with more than what we put in and call the argument valid.

In other words, if I said: “Sally is my friend. She is nine years old. She comes over on Tuesdays at noon.” Then I told you, “Therefore Larry is being mean to Betty.” You would probably say, “Huh?” The reason is that nothing was contained in my original premises about Larry, Betty, or the relationship they share. In order to come out with that kind of conclusion, we would have to have had that content in the premises. I would have to have said, “Larry is mean to all the women he knows. Betty is a woman Larry knows. Therefore, Larry is mean to Betty.” You could say, “Yes, I see. It necessarily follows that if Larry is mean to all women he knows and if he knows Betty, then he is mean to her.” You can only get out what you pour in with deductive logic: we cannot arrive at a God who does not exist based on the premises of our argument in which we question His ultimate nature.

So then, we have not been given an argument about the existence or non-existence of God. What we have been given is an argument reflecting the psychological state of the person framing it. He or she is saying in effect, “If I were God and I were all-powerful, all-loving, and all-knowing, then I would not allow suffering. But suffering does exist. Therefore, since suffering does exist and since I would not allow it if I were God and I was omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient, then God must in fact not be all three of things either. After all, I would not do those things and God should not either.” Much like our sentence, “If, for example, religious faith is a fallacy and is simply untrue, why then do people with such convictions seem healthier and happier on the whole?” we have proven nothing about the existence of God; we are ultimately only appealing to human sentiment. At this point, we may be inclined to cry “Unfair!” For that matter, we might be correct in doing so, but logically speaking, what goes for one goes for the other.

So then, we have not been given an argument about the existence or non-existence of God. What we have been given is an argument reflecting the psychological state of the person framing it. We were not asking whether God was good or not that I recall, or asking the person what he or she would do if he or she were God, but were rather seeking a demonstration as to the basis of this faith in the nonexistence of God. But what of the person who asks in total sincerity: “How can there be a good God when there is so much hell on earth?” What can we say to that? This person has obviously suffered pain in the world. The cause of this pain may have something to do with the expectations this person holds or it may be the result of personal tragedy and a sense of disillusionment after all that one has hoped for and dreamt about has been snatched away in an instant. Yet what does this kind of reaction ultimately reveal about the belief of that person? Would one be angry with a God one did not believe existed in some respect? Most often, such a person really does believe in God on some very deep level, but is deeply hurt, disappointed, bitter, cynical, or any number of other related ills. It may be that such a person has only tried to punch holes in the beliefs of others because he or she wants so badly to heal and to feel the same hope that others appear to possess. With such persons, we should not spend long arguing about God; rather, we should simply try to understand them and to the degree that we can, wrap an arm around their shoulders and wipe away their tears, perhaps even as we shed a few of our own. Impeccable arguments are not a requirement for love: so long as we keep in mind that the argumentative blade slices both ways equally well, we can remain unshaken in our faith while giving others the freedom to reason for themselves recognizing that this is often more a cry of the heart than an exercise of the intellect.

Recall that we started off with some possible objections introduced by my friend. Let us pick up with the second of these before circling back again to this topic: “Why does religious expression exist the world over, and, according to anthropology, characterize even the earliest civilizations?” The problems here, as you may recall, were several: first, did religious expression characterize people prior to civilization? Second, what if religious expression evolved as a most efficacious means of organizing and structuring society? Third, what if religious expression were a means of the powerful few exploiting the servile many?

My rationale for speaking of “earliest civilizations” in the last issue was an intentional one, for it avoids the controversies associated with the various cosmologies including evolution without external cause, theistic evolution, old earth creationism, and young earth creationism, along with any other possible metaphysical views that could be expressed. Regardless of our views about how civilization came to be, we can all agree that exist it does and that it is apparently (according to anthropologists) of fairly recent origin—somewhere around 10,000 years ago, perhaps 6,000 if we claim young earth creationism as our launching point. Now then, in regard to the question, “Did religious expression exist prior to civilization?” my response would be to ask one of my own: “How would we know?” Prior to civilization, we have no recorded history and no method of determining whether or not it has ever and always been a human impulse to engage in religious expression. We can make conjectures, of course, though how much they will profit us is a matter of opinion. It would be entertaining to speculate, but if we indulge ourselves here, we shall end up hopelessly detoured. Thus, we will let temptation pass and answer with a shrug of our shoulders, admitting “I do not know.”

Now then, if we inquire as to whether or not this religious impulse happened to be among the most efficient ways to structure society, we must ask what makes that question a feasible one. In other words, if the answer to that question should happen to be true and organizing a society around a religious impulse did prove to be, if not the best, then among the better ways of structuring society, how is it that it became a structuring unit in the first place? In other words, there would have to have been an impulse there in order for that impulse to form a point of cohesion. In fact, that may even be the answer to our question above about whether or not human beings were given to religious devotion prior to civilization, though it is possible that somehow the aggregation of persons awoke or created some such inclination. If we admit to this much, we almost have to say that at the very least, the potential for religious expression had to have always been there and in some way been fundamental to human development.

Our answer to the exploitation of the religious impulse as a means of control may be answered in much the same way. It is certainly possible that within these civilizations, the spiritual impulse was always a means of subjugation. But in order to use something as a tool for subjugation, there must first be something that can be exploited. It is a bit like temptation: I cannot tempt you to eat green beans if you loathe legumes of all types: the impulse has to first exist to be subjugated. So too with the spiritual impulse. If there were no personal element there—no psychological need, if you prefer—there would be nothing to exploit. Where does that inclination toward spirituality arise? From the need to find meaning in a world without any? If so, then perhaps we should close our eyes and pretend if we can, for as Jung suggests, we will be healthier and happier because of it. But what if this need that is so primal and so basic arises from that God-shaped vacuum about which Pascal was always waxing philosophic? His famous wager holds true for me. It says in effect, “Consider carefully: What do you win and what do you lose? If you believe there is something and you happen to be wrong, you have lost nothing and gained a pleasant two weeks’ stay in Jung’s house of falling mortar. If, on the other hand, you believe there is nothing and you are wrong, you may very well lose something (what is lost depending, of course, on what the truth turns out to be).

There is most likely more that can or ought to be said about the matter, but at the moment, further commentary is evasive. Thus, we shall move on to the final point of contention: “When it comes to religious faith in general, the majority of the world’s population holds some belief or another regarding the spiritual realm, life after death, and a Higher Power or higher powers.” Here the problem was one of circularity—people believe because people believe—and we added the possibility of an ad populum fallacy. We shall begin by saying that if the world over, religious faith of one form or another exists, that is at the least an indication that faith is a rather important element of life and one that we should think twice before dismissing. That does not necessarily make religious faith true, but consider the alternative. If there is nothing, then why not close our eyes and pretend if we can? The house that will collapse on our heads in two weeks is going to collapse whether we affirm or deny. We may as well live in peace. But considering that the world over, religious faith of one form or another is existent, just as from the earliest records of history, religious faith of one form or another was present, this presents a pretty compelling case that there is something fundamentally human about believing. It makes a very strong claim for our psychological state as a human being, whatever else it may tell us. Maybe this is an evolutionary adaptation supplied by no outside agency, but let us go back to Jung and his falling house: nature was at least kind enough to bestow on her children a naïve belief to make their short stays on earth more bearable. Nothing is really lost by believing, for when the house falls the lights go out forever, all belief—whether true or false—goes down together with it.

We have virtually no testament that there is nothing more beyond the grave except arguments from silence, doubt, and scorn. The argument from silence can be summarized as follows: “I have inclined my ear to the heavens and I heard birds singing. I looked for God in the pool and I saw but my own reflection. I cried out to God and a flock of pigeons scattered. There is no God. There is only silence: an empty sky but for flying creatures and an empty earth save but sticks and stones and fellow man and beast.” Opposite this argument from silence, we have widespread evidence of an apparently spontaneous belief, or at least one that is very prevalent and seems to happen quite naturally. As the good doctor says in G.K. Chesterton’s excellent short story The Trees of Pride: “I had something against me heavier and more hopeless than the hostility of the learned; I had the support of the ignorant.” And in fact, at the deepest levels, we have to almost consciously suppress the inclination to hope and to believe in something more; we almost have to learn to become sophisticated and refined: we have to let cynicism buff us by degrees and jadedness steal away our resolve. Only silence suggests that there is nothing, yet hope, life, and the widespread pervasiveness of religious expression and belief form a growing whisper that mankind is somehow wired otherwise. What is this pride—this snobbery—that causes us to scorn those who believe and to speak of others as infants in the nursery? We have been taught this kind of pseudo-intellectualism; it is not natural or ingrained, for as children and young adults most of us at least desired to believe until someone we thought more sophisticated showed us the error of our ways. Or else life itself has taught us to be unaffected and to hurt rather than to be hurt: “you gotta be hard, you gotta be tough, you gotta be stronger. You gotta be cool, you gotta be calm, you gotta stay together.”

It is true there are those of us who are inclined to doubt by our very natures. But why do we doubt? We doubt because we want so badly to believe, to have something to hang onto, not so that we can sit up on high and scorn the pathetic sheep milling about below us for their philistine and imbecilic superstitions. Silence and conformity to the crowd taught us this kind of delicious cynicism, not our doubts. Silence, because nothing in nature suggests that we are correct (except—and this is the point—an empty heaven and an empty earth), and conformity to the “in” crowd because we wish to see ourselves as refined and sophisticated, an expression of superiority that is in itself the conformity of sheep incognito. Perhaps there is even something within ourselves that likes being god.

Archive note: See also Sounds of Silence on the discussion forum regarding this newsletter.

Our premise in Do “Selves” Live on After Dying was that we cannot point to any kind of provable “self” in the life we now lead, yet lead life we do, voting, as it were, by our next breath. And if we cannot point to a thing that nonetheless is very much a reality, a bit of humility is called for in making dogmatic pronouncements—especially in the negative—of God or any life to come. Nature seems to have bestowed upon mortals a spiritual inclination of some sort, testified to by the widespread pervasiveness of religious belief. This element may be wish-fulfillment with sugar-filled placebos and has admittedly been exploited, but the fact it has been exploited is but further attestation to its existence. This sense may only be the result of natural selection unaided or unguided by anything beyond itself, for there may be no God or other being(s) in the universe outside of the evolutionary process. If so, when the house falls on our heads, the house, our heads, and the beliefs contained within them all perish alike, whether those beliefs happened to be true or false. Psychologically speaking then, we are at least healthier and happier closing our eyes and pretending if we can and there seems to be no special reason why we should have such a high commitment to these truths, if this is the case, that we would wish to disabuse others. Yet we who would seek to disabuse others often came to our conclusions that there is no life after death, no God, and no supernatural anything precisely because we heard nothing: no notes from on high, no voices from the deep, nothing one way or another except utter silence and the staccato rhythm of our own restless hearts. We also found ourselves in good company, for we discovered it is fashionable to discount faith and we can feel smug and superior when we do, a bit like a god, in fact. Our smugness and the silence appear to be the primary reasons we write Humean essays—or even Freudian ones, for that matter.

Yes, there is only silence for us all. But there is also the deep propensity of persons untampered with to believe and that may be the ever-so-slight whisper of God calling to us from out of the deep. At the least, such a sound is louder than silence, as deafening as the latter may sometimes be.

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