Jostling for Moral High Ground: The Courage of Atheists and Theists

The other day, Cliff Martin over at OutsideTheBox offered an interesting blog post about atheists who take the high moral ground and argue that it takes more courage to be an atheist than it does to be a theist. Martin invokes William James to suggest that, at least for many theists, it would be easier and less courageous for them to give up their faith.


The original post and the ensuing exchange not only touches on elements of William James’ philosophy that have been explored earlier on this blog and in my philosophy of religion class, but raises an interesting and important question: Who, if anyone, can claim the moral high ground of courage in the ongoing debates about theism?

My own view is that no one can. Or, perhaps more accurately, my view is that the answer depends on contextual factors—both in terms of the environment in which the individual atheist or theist takes their stand, and in terms of the individual’s own intellectual and religious journey. And since it’s hard to be sure of these things when talking about someone else, we should be hesitant about judging another person’s courage, whether they’re theists or atheists.

One belligerent critic on Martin’s post, Larry “The Barefoot Bum,” quickly shot back that “publicly denying the trivial, infantile superstitions of a large majority of the population — especially when those people tend to react with extreme and brutal violence when their infantile superstitions are denied — does require a bit of physical courage.” While I have little sympathy for Larry’s quick dismissal of theism as trivial nonsense—and while he clearly exaggerates the danger of overt violence faced by atheists (at least in the US and Europe)—there is, it seems to me, a germ of truth in his remarks.

The other day I had a conversation with a student of mine, clearly from a conservative Christian background; and as we talked it became clear that she was struggling with the ways in which my introductory philosophy class was challenging beliefs that were strongly normative in her community. She found some of the arguments we’d been looking at in the class quite convincing, but if she followed her intellect on these matters she’d have to make a choice. Should she be quiet about her disagreement with her community on fundamental matters, at the cost of undermining the authenticity of her relationships? Or should she be honest and public about her disagreement, at the cost of risking more overt rejection and alienation? That the issues raised in the class forced such a dilemma created a kind of meta-level dilemma—a conflict between intellectual integrity and loyalty to her community of origin.

At least some atheists have gone through a personal intellectual journey along these lines. That is, they have encountered arguments that not only challenge what they’ve been taught, but that cut to the very center of their community’s organizing worldview. It takes courage to face such arguments, since they might put one in a dilemma like the one my student confronts. And at least some atheists come to their atheism because they have honestly wrestled with these challenges to their faith—at which point it takes courage to be true to their beliefs at the risk of being alienated from their community.

Of course, atheists are not alone in confronting these sorts of challenges. In the former Soviet Union, devout theists faced serious costs for seeking to live out their faith openly. To a lesser extent, theistic academics in secular universities often face—if they are public in their profession of faith—the risk of being quietly judged as an adherent to “infantile superstition.” But certainly in the U.S. today, you are more likely to face this challenge growing up in a religious home and courting atheism.

But there is another issue here—and this is the real issue at stake in Martin’s post. The courage which Martin’s atheist friend touts as being a hallmark of atheism can be usefully understood in relation to Walter Stace’s his famous essay, “Man Against Darkness.” At least at the time that he wrote the essay, Stace believed that the weight of the evidence, especially the evidence coming from the sciences, clearly supported the view that the universe is at root a place without purpose or intelligence, a reality governed fundamentally by blind mechanism and chance.

Stace took this to be a growing realization of the modern era, an irreversible trend in our intellectual understanding of the world that forces us to confront a dilemma that earlier generations didn’t need to face. The question, for Stace, was what we should do in the face of this intellectual realization that we exist in an essentially blind and meaningless universe that cares not a whit for our endeavors or values. While he doesn’t frame this question in terms of courage, I think it’s fair to interpret his view as follows: It takes more courage to face what you think is the truth, even if it’s a truth that makes the reality you face far bleaker than you wish it were, than to retreat into comforting illusions that, on an intellectual level, you think are false.

Now I agree with Stace about this. Furthermore, I believe that many atheists have gone through a spiritual/intellectual journey that looks just like this. They have found themselves faced with the dilemma Stace describes, and have decided to do away with what they’re convinced are just comforting illusions. The problem, as I see it, is that many of these atheists universalize their own spiritual/intellectual journey and so presume that intelligent theists have faced the same dilemma, conceived in the same terms, but made the opposite choice.

What William James does, in “The Will to Believe,” is present the fruits of his own spiritual and intellectual journey. Just like Stace’s journey, it leads to a dilemma, a forced choice—but a different one than the one Stace confronted. For James the nature of reality is far more ambiguous, far less clear in its implications, than what Stace (at the time) took it to be.(I say “at the time” because, later in his career, Stace became interested in approaching mystical experience empirically, and the conclusions he reached on the basis of that work are not quite the same as those he embraced in “Man Against Darkness”).

Stace looks at the empirical world and is convinced that a materialist worldview is the only kind that maps well onto the facts. James, by contrast, is convinced that a range of worldviews map onto the empirical facts—and what distinguishes a materialist worldview from others that map onto the facts is that the materialist worldview posits no facts beyond what can be ascertained empirically. Other worldviews, while just as consistent with the facts, posit realms or domains of reality beyond what is empirically knowable.

James thinks that refusing to embrace what is empirically unknowable amounts, for practically purposes, to disbelief. Here, it is important to remember that James is a pragmatist about belief, in the sense that the meaning of your belief is given by the impact it has on what you DO. If you actively pursue some kind of spiritual alignment with a supposed transcendent level of reality, then you are a believer in practice. And given this pragmatic perspective, the one who withholds belief withholds this practice every bit as much as the one who actively disbelieves.

In short, there is a pragmatic attunement, James thinks, between the person who endorses a materialist worldview and a person who simply holds that we shouldn’t believe any empirically unknowable propositions. Pragmatically speaking, both are materialists—and so both are pragmatically rejecting worldviews that map onto the facts but add new levels of meaning to the facts by reference to realities that transcend them. (By the way, I am not at all convinced that James is right to wholly collapse agnosticism into atheism in the way he seems to—but for his purposes I think a complete pragmatic alignment isn’t necessary in any event).

James’ question is whether we have an epistemic duty to refuse to believe in the transcendent and so (pragmatically speaking) be materialists. It is from this standpoint that we must understand his comment to the effect that “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truths if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.” James thinks that the rule to refuse to believe beyond the empirical evidence is just such a rule, and hence irrational.

For James, the wellspring of religion is a distinctive kind of experience that seems to put one in touch with a transcendent good but which might just be a non-veridical product of psychological and neurological forces. Empirical evidence, he thinks, cannot tell us how to interpret these mystical states of consciousness. So do we trust these experiences, given that they cannot be verified? Or do we adopt a skeptical stance?

James doesn’t answer this question. Instead, he rejects the view that we are required to adopt the skeptical stance in the absence of sufficient evidence. Instead of being required by some rule of proper thinking to never believe beyond the empirical evidence, James thinks that when we confront alternatives that are equally consistent with the evidence, one of which goes beyond it and the other not, we are led to a position in which reason cannot guide us. Hence, we are ultimately forced to choose among rival passions: the fear of being duped, or the hope aligning ourselves with a truth that makes the universe more meaningful than empirical investigation alone can support.

This is the dilemma that my spiritual/intellectual journey has taken me to—and it is, I think, the journey that Cliff Martin’s journey has taken him to as well. And for those on such a journey, the decision to believe is a decision to resist a very real fear in order to live in hope.