disenchantedbunny.

Often atheists question theists about ‘faith’-based knowledge. A common retort is that atheists are also in faith about something or other. While this piece of “no you are!” reasoning is common, there are many variations. Hypothetical examples include but are not limited to rejoinders like (circle correct example):

‘You have just as much faith in evolution / your two hands / reason / postmoderndeconstructivisticdialogue / porn / science / no god (/ antimatter deities) / other’

The nice part about this is that if you haven’t already committed yourself to some untenable epistemological position, atheism doesn’t really have to entail anything of the sort. Weak atheism, as it is commonly touted, is merely the default position held by an individual who hasn’t yet found any reason to believe in god.

Weak atheism is part of a basic sceptical stance that refuses to accept beliefs on faith alone – whether evidence based, realist, verificationist, Nietzschean, or whatever we want to label the tenets of our positions. Such scepticism holds that faith is not a viable or reliable true belief forming practice.

Dennett is making this point when he talks about most theists not really believing in a god, but more ‘believing in belief’.

When translated in this manner, the “no you are too!” defence is often saying (to the weak atheist):

‘You have just as much faith in your not-having-developed-faith’

I’ll let you decide whether this is blatant circular reasoning or just a conclusion that is completely counter to where the premises lead.

By the time we’ve developed the ability to read, speak and differentiate between ourselves and others, culture has taken hold. That squishy grey mass in our brains drastically reshapes and remoulds its neural pathways quite drastically during our first decade. As machines who have evolved to learn, the environment that we find ourselves in shapes not only the information that we have access to, but the possible means by which we can encounter it. Knowing what we know now about cognitive development, it’s almost unbelievable that Freud could have had such insight with such little evidence (comparatively, of course): Freud’s Oedipus Complex is to cognitive studies what Copernicus’ heliocentrism was to Newton. We know now that the scope and possibilities available to us for the rest lives can be already predetermined to a large extent at a very early age.

The first episode of South Park’s 13th season not only acknowledges the implicit marketing strategies of so-called ‘tween’ culture, but subtly underlines the parasitic tendency of Christian culture to tap in to and appropriate our most general biologically motivated inclinations.

Sex sells. This is a well-worn advertiser’s slogan, the justification of many advertising campaigns across the ages. Only in recent decades, however, has it been increasingly popular to market sex to a presexual audience who are yet to understand such experiences. Sex does sell. But sex sells better when the target audience is already acquainted with the fundamentals of sexual desire by the time when their bodies are equipped to be influenced by such campaigns.

This understanding is taken (amongst many, many others.. *cough* Funtastic *cough) up by those who produce magazines like Australia’s Total Girl (and the American equivalent, Cosmo Girl) – and of course, as emphasised by the recent South Park, the wide-world of child entertainment embodied by Disney, including such teen icons as The Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus and the High School Musical franchise. According to the allusions of the South Park episode, the supposedly explicit message of sexual conservatism (falling alongside the joys of consumerism) is masking the implicit sexual undertones that permeate the plethora of dolls, songs and advertising campaigns marketed at these pre-pubescents. Selling the notion of sexual conservatism so thoroughly is getting these developing teens to think about and desire sexualisation, while avoiding the undertones of molestation that would otherwise be associated with an explicit marketing tactic (think, for example, of the outrage often caused by parents who deliberately dress their 10 year olds to look ‘sexy’).

Considering the ignorance at which many fundamentalist groups approach sexual education, the damage that such ignorance can cause to individuals and families is no surprise. One only has to think of abusive ministers and priests, or barbaric genital mutilations that can occur. But even the less extreme cases like Ted Haggard’s repressed homosexuality lead one to conclude that these sexual policies might be bit irresponsible.

But this implicit sexual advertising has been promoting the Christian faith from the very outset. In his thoroughly derisive book The Antichrist, Nietzsche pointed out that the very Christian tendency to deride bodily desires and functions as dangerous has been (rather counter-intuitively) one of the reasons that the religion has spread so prominently. The in-your-face anti-sexuality campaigns involved in conservative religious preaching produces even greater sexual desires. Denying our basic functions instead of harnessing them, Christianity has produced beings who build up such a resistance against their bodies that these thoughts are always eating away at their minds – more so than a healthy teenager who isn’t scared to jack it a few times a week – thus reinforcing the belief that such thoughts are dangerous and reinforcing allegiance to the religion.

At one point, the ‘Christian Union’ at my university put up posters with ‘SEX’ written in large bold letters, across half the page. Apparently, they were advertising a campaign to get people to think responsibly about sex. It wasn’t the first thought that came to the minds of people walking past. Not all publicity is good publicity. The so-called ‘new atheist’ movement (Dawkins et al) has also been criticised of throwing believers into a position of either/or: deny any shred of religious experience until it becomes verifiably credible, or recognize the supposed arational nature of their beliefs and move closer to the fundamentalist way of thinking about these things.

Not everyone can be sceptics. Foster doubt where you can. There is no point having expectations that will never be achieved – or worse, lead some to the opposite of what you aim.

The Fray – You Found Me

I found God on the corner of 1st and Amistad
Where the West was all but won
All alone, smoking his last cigarette
I said, “Where you been?” He said, “Ask anything.”

Where were you, when everything was falling apart?
All my days were spent by the telephone that never rang
And all I needed was a call that never came
To the corner of 1st and Amistad

Lost and insecure, you found me, you found me
Lying on the floor, surrounded, surrounded
Why’d you have to wait? Where were you? Where were you?
Just a little late, you found me, you found me.

But in the end everyone ends up alone
Losing her, the only one who’s ever known
Who I am, who I’m not and who I wanna to be
No way to know how long she will be next to me

The early morning, the city breaks
And I’ve been calling for years and years and years and years
And you never left me no messages
You never sent me no letters
You got some kind of nerve taking all I’m worth

Why’d you have to wait, to find me, to find me?

—————————————————–

In the song ‘You Found Me’ (thankfully for sceptical fans of their music, one of the most boring songs on the album), The Fray have performed the age-old trick of asking a question and then assuming that it has been answered by definition of it being asked. Let me explain.

Every believer, unless they’re die-hard fundamentalist crazy, goes through some period of doubt and uncertainty in their belief. And it is quite understandable as to why this should be so. The picture that the first verse paints of modern society (the ‘west’) is one where deities do not belong to nations, cultures or sects. Reformation has come and gone, and in the modern world different aspects of holy texts hold different weight even in the tightest of communities. One Nation Under God slides to the question of ‘which god’? The concept of a god is ‘all alone’, separated from the communal bonds that held it in place for so long (Paul’s understanding of how to spread these memes is surpassed by no-one else in history). Even deities end up alone in the end. Secularism is the starting point of modern education.

The chance meeting on the street shows the nature of modern belief: one-on-one. Mentioning ‘Amistad’ not only conjures up images of the modern notion of freedom of the individual (even, of course, choosing one’s own deity), but the Spanish word loosely means ‘friendship’. Religious belief now rests in the hands of the individual, and the social structures of church and family play less of a role in the formation of individuals than they ever have (not that it shouldn’t be even less – but that’s besides the point).

So when something terrible eventually befalls someone of faith – in this case, losing someone who knows you better than you know yourself – the famous problem of evil occasionally arises one way or another. What kind of loving, omnipotent deity can only offer ad hoc support, after the event? What comfort is there in knowing that you can lean back on faith, now that the worst has already come and past us by? God sure does work in mysterious ways.

But the question here is only one of method, not the deeper metaphysical one that has perplexed most pontificating creature from the early Greeks to us: the problem of consistency between the attributes of omniscience and infinite love. God = all powerful, not really caring enough to help? Or, God = all loving, but not powerful enough to help out? You all know the drill. Wow, tension.

But the chorus drones on and on with ‘you (presumably his god) found me’, and the opening line is the prominent ‘I found god’ (For anyone who knows the very basics of writing an essay, this means a lot). It was nice of him to stop by, but why did he wait so long? Oh, but a necessary condition of being able to question his methods of finding me is that he exists – I didn’t ask why he never found me, but why he’s so shit at it. Method becomes unimportant; God exists, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to question his methods of assistance in the first place.

Sigh. Catch 22: he exists if it seems he does, he exists if it seems that he doesn’t. The reason that it seems like god doesn’t exist sometimes is because god necessarily exists!

It’s not that this style of argument can’t work. For example, the proposition ‘I am using a sentence in English’ becomes necessarily true once asked: the very act of bringing this thought into existence makes its truth logically necessary.

The sleight of hand occurs when we move away from the serious question (the problem of evil) by an analysis of the attributes of the very being that is being called into question. This sort of ontological magic trick dogmatically presupposes that existence can be guaranteed not only without good reason (i.e. mysterious ways), but against the very evidence of pointless suffering that show its attributes to be seemingly conflicted. In the example cited above the individual’s act of thinking/saying presupposes the proposition’s necessary truth, but here, the only act involved is prior belief in a god, a stand-alone proposition that is devoid of any act but itself. Whereas in the first example the requisite is in the doing, the argument inherited from Anselm merely presupposes what it sets out to show. Questions of faith go unanswered, belief stands on its own head to show how tall it is.

It seems quite obvious to me why the ontological argument has only ever convinced people who are already convinced. But ‘just a little late’ is by definition too late for an all-loving, all knowing, all powerful deity.