Apparently, I’m an Atheist Because I Don’t Want to Believe in God

14Feb07

The saga continues. Before I even got started responding to his points in detail, Jack Mielke has given up. For reference, my previous post about this is here, where I respond to some of the points he made in a 40-page PDF (you can find it here). Jack accuses me of closing my eyes to evidence, being irrational, knocking down straw men and much else besides. His counter response to my previous post can be found here. He writes:

I am predicting you will disregard my last paper just as you have the first. My intention was to expose your rejection of theism is being based on personal prejudice and not rational thought. My hope was to remove intellectual stumbling blocks and see Christian theism in a different light. My goal was to challenge your thinking, and now I can walk away knowing these things have been accomplished. Go ahead, ridicule me on your website! Persist in grasping at straws to remain an atheist. Continue to misrepresent my position! At this point, I care little whether you post this second PDF file or not. You are clearly determined to ignore evidence, no matter how compelling. You are clearly determined to embrace atheism, even if you must ignore all the obvious problems with it. I gather that many confirmed atheists like yourself will derive much pleasure out of debunking my arguments and intentionally suppress the actual content. To those who are committed to atheism, you have shown that no evidence will ever suffice, which is most unreasonable.

He disagrees with my conclusions, and therefore concludes that I must have made them on false premises (my “misunderstanding” of his arguments). This says more about him than about me. I decided to take Jack’s first response seriously, even though it contained some major flaws out of personal ignorance, not the least of which is the false assertion that there is no evidence for evolution. Perhaps I shouldn’t have responded, but instead chosen to ignore it. However, I appreciate reader feedback, so I felt that when someone put so much effort into responding (even though I found the arguments in the response to be irrelevant or wrong) I should at least make an effort to take it seriously. Perhaps that was a mistake. In the email he sent me with his second response, he wrote:

I feel very sad for you, Simen. I was hoping we could have some honest discussion, but the fact that you were so anxious to make it public made me suspicious. It’s clear to me what your intentions are now, so I see no need to continue what proves to be a fruitless endeavor. I will expend my energies on those who actually want honest dialog. It’s clear I will not find it here.

He accuses me of being dishonest and questions my intentions. This isn’t an argument, it’s an ad hominem attack. He makes claims about my reasons to reject God. Apparently, it’s not because I looked at the same evidence as he did and came to a different conclusion, but because I disregarded the evidence because I don’t want to believe in God. Well, Mr. Mielke, that is crap and you should know better. I don’t question your motives. I sincerely believe you are after the truth (more than you apparently think of me), but I also believe that you’re kept away from it because of a deluded belief. I haven’t questioned your personal motives. You are the one who degraded this discussion into personal attacks. I haven’t questioned your honesty, only your arguments. You’re probably an honest believer, you just happen to believe in something I find no evidence for and consequently don’t believe. If you were just a troll, I trust you wouldn’t have gone to the effort of writing 40-page response, and then respond to my response with another 25 pages. You assured me that you had no intention of getting personal, and I chose to believe it. Now, that’s just what you do. It says more about you than it does about me.

Let’s have a look at what Jack actually spends the rest of his time on, besides going on about my dishonesty and other personal characteristics.

You claim that I am trying to pin “all” of the modern society’s problems on evolution. This is was an unnecessary extrapolation. [...] My point is that when evolutionary thinking took over the thinking process, it poured gasoline on the fire. The problem of evil was still there, but once evolution theory became the dominant view, evil actions increased by a multitude.

Yes, it was an exaggeration. That’s because of Jack’s own exaggeration. He claims that evil actions increased by a multitude because a scientific theory became the dominant view. That’s an extreme exaggeration. It also completely disregards all the evils of the past. The trouble is that both our population and our technology has advanced. If you compare percentages of population that were victims of various atrocities of the past with current events you’ll gain a more accurate picture than by comparing pure numbers. Besides, our technology has advanced. I see no reasons why the people of the past wouldn’t have been equally evil, or even more so, than the people who live in the present if they had access to today’s technology. We now have weapons that can wipe all life from earth. The people of the past didn’t have access to these kinds of weapons, and that is why they didn’t use them, not because they were somehow less evil than us. Yes, with power comes responsibility. As expressed in numerous common quotations, power means responsibility and that is why most people dread it.

In fact, one of the atheist’s primary complaints against theism is that, assuming an all-powerful, all-good God exists, He should take care of the problem of evil. Don’t you see how inherently contradictory your logic is? Simen – this is a demand for justice from an authority!

Let me now explain something about the problem of evil. The problem of evil only works against god concepts where God is said to be all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, such as the Christian God. The supportes of this class of gods claim that whether God is good is not open to personal opinion. This requires an objective moral standard; it’s incompatible with moral relativism or subjectivism, for if my opinion that God is evil is worth as much as your opinion that God is good, it’s just a matter of personal preference. The problem of evil shows that the position that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and objectively all-good leads to a contradiction. I agree that if morality isn’t objective, this is an unconvincing argument against the existence of good. However, the fact is that Jack’s position is the kind of position that the problem of evil shows leads to contradictions. This isn’t contradictory logic. Jack is saying that because I believe authority is not the only way to have morality, I’m not justified to think that God should fix the problem of evil. However, I’m not assuming that when I’m talking about the problem of evil. The problem of evil is stated on Jack’s premises, namely that morality is objective and comes from authority (i.e. God), not on my premises, so it’s not a contradiction! Here’s a conscise description of the problem of evil fom the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally
   perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all
   evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate
   all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the
   power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or
   doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

You can see here that it has the premise that God is morally perfect. It doesn’t make sense to say that someone is morally perfect if morality is subjective or relative: all you can say is that “God conforms perfectly to my view of morality”, which isn’t a sound argument unless everyone has the same view of morality. By analogy, it doesn’t make sense to say that a certain food tastes perfectly, because everyone’s taste differs slightly and there is no objective standard by which to measure it. The problem of evil is stated on Jack’s premises, so it’s only to be expected that it would not hold if you replaced his premises with mine.

In light of this, this comment is obviously misguided:

You deny that fear of authority is an incentive to be moral, and you see no need for a God to establish moral laws and enforce them, then you turn around and claim that such a God is immoral because He doesn’t bring justice and solve the problem of evil! Your demands have competing goals, so they cancel themselves out. What do you actually want here?

As I showed above, the problem of evil is stated on Jack’s premises. The section quoted above disregards this fact. There is a difference between my position (you don’t need fear of authority to be moral) and accepting a premise (God must enforce authority to be all-good) for the sake of argument. The problem of evil is reductio ad absurdum: you assume the opposite of what you try to prove, and show that it leads to a contradiction. In this case, you assume that God exists and has a certain set of properties, and show that God cannot exist with those properties.

Also, I didn’t deny that authority is an incentive to be moral, only that it’s the only incentive to be moral.

The reason why you do not see people arguing that there must be God for an objective standard of taste in food is because there is no ethical judgment in such matters. Even biblical theology makes no claim that taste in food is a moral subject. Quite the contrary: the Bible mentions that God created all these things for us to enjoy, with no moral conditions being placed on how one perceives the taste of a particular food. However, when you make ethical judgments about murder, theft, Christian intolerance and so on, you have steered into a matter where matters of personal taste are insufficient grounds to issue such a complaint.

Jack here says that ethics is an area where personal taste is insufficient ground to make a complaint. He doesn’t say why. I can only assume it is because he hesitates to accept the conclusion that there is no inherent evil. We want to believe that eating babies is wrong regardless of personal taste. We want to believe it would still be wrong if the instincts of all humans told them it was right, that if all societies had moral codes that said eating babies was right, it would still be wrong. I want to believe that, too. However, we shouldn’t just accept it without argument.

Your argument about objective morality and God also falters in that you do not understand why God’s will considering morality is to be considered authoritative. You are attempting to argue that morality is either independent of God or God’s will determines what is moral. You are leaving one very necessary element out of your discussion: the character and nature of God.

If goodness flows from God’s nature, it just changes the dilemma: is good part of God’s nature because it is good, or is it good because it is part of God’s nature? If you take the first horn, morality is independent of God’s nature. If you take the second horn, morality is still arbitrary, only God no longer has control over it. If God’s nature dictated it, God would have to command that theft and abuse is good. Jack admits that God has no control over His nature: You are trying to present a God whose will determines His nature: it’s the other way around. So morality is still arbitrary, and God’s will is determined by God’s nature. By extension, God’s will is arbitrary; he doesn’t have any control over his will. God has no free will! How can God be all-powerful yet have no free will?!

After some more about the nature of God, Jack says God has the right to take life. This is a double standard. God has the right to do anything, but humans have not. If God has the right to do evil things, by all means should he do them, but that doesn’t mean their not evil.

God seems fond of genocide, for example.

You cannot tell God what He can do with His own property. Your life is dependent; His is not. Your life is contingent, His is not. God is life, and the author of it. Human beings receive both their life and their continued existence from God. If God commands the taking a life (or even many lives), this is His right because everyone’s life is both dependent upon and contingent upon Him. As the author of life, only He has the right to take it, or command it to be taken. If a person is the author of life, only then do they have the right to take it of their own volition.

If God’s command is the definition of morality, then this is wrong regardless of whether the Lord has the right to do something or not. When God commands that murder is evil, murder is evil regardless of whether your name is God or Simen or something else. It makes absolutely no sense to say that God is good if you aren’t using the same definition of morality. Why should humans strive to keep a standard of morality when God does not?

Per the above quote, since God has created us, He has the right to do anything. Torture, theft, adultery, murder, lying, you name it. If God has the right to do these things, and does some of them (e.g. murder), then He isn’t someone to admire. In fact, he’s a royal bastard.

Jack goes on to consider some of the alternative moral systems I mentioned. He complains about how they contradict each other:

Simen, I want to respect you for rational thinking, but do you realize that all your suggestions so far are now contradictory to this goal? Moral realism contrasts with relativist theories! Which position are you actually arguing for? Who’s side are you on? It seems that you offer whatever allows you to excuse your rejection of God, even if one tool contradicts the other! I know you want to rid yourself of God, but why do you espouse ideas and offer suggestions that are mutually exclusive and even in competition with each other?

If you read my previous post, you will see that I only suggested these moral systems as alternatives to morality from God. I didn’t actually argue for any of these. I only used them as examples of moral systems that do not depend on God. Of course some of them contradict each other. I didn’t say that all these moral systems are correct. Some of them rule out others. I only said that they’re examples of moral systems without God. Jack says moral realism is compatible with Christianity:

If anything, moral realism provides a basis (or at least a support) for the Christian position, since its definition includes: “a view about the existence of moral facts (they do in fact exist), and a view about the nature of moral facts (they are objective: independent of our cognizing them, or our stance towards them.”

That may be. But moral realism doesn’t require a god. To argue convincingly that for their to be objective laws of nature, there must be a creator, you must show that the laws of nature we know depend on a creator. To do this, you must prove that there is a creator, which is what you were trying to do in the first place. If you accept that moral realism is a valid moral system, you must accept that a valid moral system doesn’t necessitate a creator.

Why can’t morality be equal to whatever our instincts tell us is right or wrong?

Morality cannot be equal to whatever our instincts tell us because our instincts are not objective
either.

This is built on the assumption that morality must be objective. I wrote about this above. This is an assumption that is unfounded, and while its negation leads to some consequences we perhaps don’t like, that’s just falacious appeal to consequences.

Why can’t morality be equal to social concensus?

Everybody’s agreement on an issue doesn’t necessarily make something right. If everyone in the world believed that 2+2=5, that would not make it so.

True, but 2+2 = 4 is an objective truth. Again, built on the “objective morality” assumption that is still unfounded.

Or some as yet undiscovered laws akin to the ones in mathematics or physics?

This suggestion is special pleading. Why are you appealing to some “as yet (unknown or) undiscovered laws”? Just to prolong the argument? Just to allow room for other options that don’t involve a God? Simen- think! The problem of the “as yet (unknown or) undiscovered” is part of your basis for rejecting theism! Yes, I will allow that you supplied examples of mathematics and physics, but that still does not excuse your attempt to run to some undiscovered source or as yet unknown source rather than consider the theistic view of morality. I admit that I have added the word “unknown” but this does not distort or change the intention of your statement.

The phenomena (at least some of them) that the laws of physics describe were known before the discovery of the physical laws. Newton observed gravity and assumed there must be some law governing it. If you observe signs of objective morality (whatever those signs are), it is reasonable to assume that there is some law governing it. Now, physics describes what is. It is much more difficult to describe what ought to be. An interesting objection to moral realism that Jack didn’t raise is the is-ought problem: you can’t go from an is (say, a law discovered by the scientific method) to an ought, as in “this is how things ought to be”.

You can raise this objection about divine command theory too: how do you go from an is (“this is what is good”, according to God) to an “ought”?

Michael Martin has suggested that objective morals can exist without a God, yet he provides no solid basis for such a view, and neither have you.

Actually, the problem of evil shows that either God doesn’t exist, or He isn’t like Jack thinks He is, or objective morality doesn’t exist.

It’s not my job to prove you’re wrong – it’s your job to prove you are right. It is irrational to ask me to disprove something that you have never proven in the first place.

What have I asked you to disprove? You are the one asking me to disprove God’s existence, a claim you haven’t proved!

You accredit social instincts, a built-in understanding of morality and even guilt feelings to evolution. First of all, how does fall into the category of empirical evidence? The Christian position teaches about the existence of a conscience, put there by God. Guilt feelings, a moral conscience, and social instincts also are found in the Christian view of the conscience.

OK, for the pedants out there: humans exhibit behavior when doing certain actions (those they peceive to be against morality) that indicate a feeling of guilt. This can be empirically studied. Whether the Christian view includes this is irrelevant. The point is that it is a built-in brake that hinders us from indulging in immoral behavior. It doesn’t work always, but it works often for the majority. Those it doesn’t work for at all are usually labeled psychopaths.

To suggest that this is “empirical evidence” for your view is a statement made from philosophical assumptions, not actual empirical evidence. The existence of a conscience is not just your evidence to claim.

it is true, this says nothing about the existence of God. It does show that humans can behave morally without a fear of authority, though. Incindentally, that’s what I set out to prove.

in my previous post, I linked to Daylight Atheism’s post Little-Known Bible Verses: God Creates Evil. It suggests that the word ra is used in similar contexts to mean “moral evil” and therefore should be translated as such in Isaiah 45:7, which goes like this (KVJ):

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil [ra]: I the Lord do all these things.

Jack argues that this is wrong, and supports other translations of this word in this context, such as “disaster” or “calamity”. But anyway, aren’t these evils? Even if this verse doesn’t say that God creates evil itself, it does say that God creates something that’s evil. Here are some quick definitions of “disaster” and “calamity” found via Google:

calamity: n event that brings terrible loss, lasting distress, or severe affliction; a disaster: A hurricane would be a calamity.

catastrophe: a state of extreme (usually irremediable) ruin and misfortune; “lack of funds has resulted in a catastrophe for our school system”; “his policies were a disaster”

Even if we accept this wording, it seems like God does introduce some evil to the world himself. This can be witnessed by natural disasters that happen regardless of whether humans do evil or not.

In my previous post, I asked how anyone can interpret God’s word but God Himself.

Again, definition of terms is at the heart of your argument. The definitions of the word “interpret” are also varied, and they contain both objective and subjective meanings. First, I will give the word “interpret” as its defined SUBJECTVELY:
Create an image or likeness of
The act of interpreting something as expressed in an artistic performance (aka a painter’s interpretation of a sunset, a musician’s interpretation of Bach)
Now the OBJECTIVE meaning:
To explain the meaning or words to a person who does not understand them; to expound; to translate
unintelligible words into intelligible ones; as, to interpret the Hebrew language to an Englishman.
To explain or unfold the meaning of predictions, vision, dreams or enigmas; to expound and lay open what is concealed from the understanding
To decipher.
To define; to explain words by other words in the same language

This is pure pedantry. Let me rephrase the question, then: how do you know that your explanation is the correct one?

Further, Jack tackles the issue of sex. In my previous post, I said that comparing sex before marriage to drunk driving is a bad analogy because humans don’t have a natural drive for drunk driving, but they do have a natural drive for sex.

I acknowledge that people have a natural drive for sex. However, this argument is again adding an unjustifiable extrapolation. My wife fills that need and satisfies that appetite, just as I fill that need for her. Just because a person has a natural drive for sex, that does not sufficiently argue that any and all expressions of sex are valid. This is an unjustifiable conclusion.

No, it doesn’t, and I never said it did either. I only said the analogy was wrong, not that, say, rape is right just because the perpetrator couldn’t control him (or her) self. But the analogy is still wrong.

The Bible fully sanctions regular sexual activity WITHIN CERTAIN PARAMETERS. That is where the matter gets complicated, isn’t it? The sex drive is natural, and its fulfillment is to be met within the marriage relationship.

I was born a year before my parents married. They went on to have two more kids after they married, and they’re still married. According to Jack, this is wrong. I shouldn’t even be here, because my parents did something God doesn’t want them to. What they did didn’t harm anyone. I can’t see why this is wrong.

Jack holds that sex should be restricted to marriage. He brings up issues like divorce, abortion, sex crimes and adultery, ignoring the many healthy relationships that occur outside of marriage. This is an old fashioned view many Christians don’t share today. My mother told me about what her grandmother had to say about this: she had used an analogy about shoes. When you buy shoes, you try them on to see if they fit before you buy them. Similarly, you should “try out” your partner before you marry to know if you “fit”.

Divorce isn’t inherently bad either. It’s much better with a divorce than for all parts to live miserably together for the rest of their days just because they married. People change. The fact that some divorces go bad doesn’t mean all do.

Finally in his response, towards the end, Jack starts to ramble on giving me all kinds of negative characteristics:

I never asked you to be impressed; I asked you to give me a fair hearing. After reading your responses, it became clear that you have not done so. You lifted ideas out of my refutation and isolated statements away from the total argument. You ascribed ideas or arguments to me that were never intended, and careful objective analysis would’ve shown this. Regularly, your answers failed to grasp the full intent of my arguments. Repeatedly, you extrapolated ideas that went way beyond the data I supplied.

It is clear you have an agenda to protect, and you obviously don’t want petty things like facts, academia, sound reason or existential reality to threaten your atheism. This is my last correspondence with you, as you have shown me that I am wasting my time. I wanted you to honestly consider the challenges I have raised, but now I have no confidence that you will truly try to understand my position. Do you as an atheist claim to be moral person? You argue that atheists can be moral, reasonable and decent people, and yet even your approach to this discussion has provided little evidence for such a claim.

I should probably address this directly to you, Mr. Mielke. I must point out that it was you who got personal. I have done my best to attack your arguments. You can say that I misrepresented and misunderstood, but you can’t say that I lowered myself down to your level of personal attack. I’m quite disappointed. You assured me in your first email that you had no intention of getting personal. Here, let me refresh your mind:

Please realize up-front that I have no intention of getting personal; I simply want to enjoy some meaningful dialog with you. I am trying to get inside the mind of the atheist and discover why they reason as they do.

I see that you have reached some conclusions about why we think as we do, Mr. Mielke. Yet they’re based on your personal opinion on me, on your anger because you feel that I intentionally misrepresent your arguments and because you distrust my integrity, you generalize and project this onto atheists in general. Well, Mr., I have one thing to say to you: shut up!

You imply that I’m not a moral, decent or reasonable person. This you do on the basis of your disagreement with me and your false assumptions. This shows more about you than it does about me. I have no interest in talking to people who lower their standards to personal attacks. It only shows that you have no real arguments to back up your claim when you feel the need to attack the person rather than the cases they try to defend.

This has been an experiment. It has failed. I’ve had all kinds of things thrown after me. However, I choose to think that this is not a general tendency of Christians but rather a tendency of Jack Mielke. I trust that other Christians have the decency to focus on the message rather than the messenger.

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