Take Two: Ariel Sightings and Atheist Faith

Reposted here is one of my earliest blog posts, from back in October 2008. It's worth revisiting for the "Ariel Sighting" alone, I think. Enjoy!

A few days ago, as my family was getting loaded into the car for a thrilling afternoon of shopping, we all noticed a bird dropping on the rear driver’s side window—a mostly white SPLAT with, of course, the requisite dribbles (now dry).

Actually, I should say that my wife and I noticed it, as did our five-year-old son. My daughter, who is two, didn’t notice it until a little while later, as we were driving away from a visit to Goody’s Department Store.We were pulling out of our parking space when my daughter shouted out, “Ariel!”

I glanced around and saw no obvious images of the Little Mermaid, but my daughter is good at spotting them even when I don’t. A few months ago, at the airport, her Ariel radar proved to be especially keen, and whenever she cried out “Ariel!” or “Mermaid!” I would eventually (after looking around for a few minutes), find some tiny Little Mermaid bookmark in a shop window or an Ariel backpack disappearing around a corner (attached to the back of a flouncy five-year-old with pigtails).

But this time I could see nothing of the sort. “Where?” I asked.

She pointed insistently out her brother’s window. I looked out across the parking lot, in the direction she had indicated, but saw nothing…until I abruptly realized she was pointing at the window.

To be precise, she was pointing at the bird poop. And as I looked at it, the splat of excrement took on a new meaning. I could see Ariel rising in the water, her hair streaming behind her, her fish tail lost in a roiling swirl, clearly about to be transformed into legs. The poop bore a remarkable resemblance to the scene from Disney’s The Little Mermaid in which Ariel is rising to the surface of the ocean just after visiting with the sea witch, as her wish for human legs is in the process of coming true.

And I thought to myself: “Too bad it doesn’t look like Our Lady of Guadalupe. Then I could remove the window, laminate it, and sell it on e-Bay for $28,000.”

Instead, when we stopped to fill gas, I went after the Ariel image with the blue window washing liquid and squeegee courteously supplied by the gas station. In moments, Ariel was no more.

The lesson, of course, is this: bird poop is always forming patterns. Most of the time these patterns don’t match any to which we’ve attached special significance. Sometimes they match ones that are deeply important only to two-year-olds. And, every once in awhile, they’re going to match images that someone, somewhere, invests with religious meaning. The same is true, of course, of patterns in toast and chocolate drippings.

And so, when it just so happens that an image imprinted in toast looks like the Blessed Virgin, it really doesn’t make any more sense to view this as a sign from God than it does to view Ariel-in-bird-poop as a sign from Triton the Sea King.

But many religious people are hungry for signs of this sort—tangible images which we can see or touch or (God forbid) taste. They long for a world in which God shows up not just as a quiet presence in a moment of meditative prayer, but in more straightforwardly empirical ways.

Of course, there is a long theological tradition which claims that God does show up in the empirical world all the time because the very existence of the empirical world in all its wonder and mystery is a constant manifestation of the divine. Such a theological view has no need for Virgin Mary sightings, because the entire created world in every aspect is a constant testament to the glory of God. (I should note that this tradition of thought, although it needn't exclude talk of miracles, is very different from the tradition of religious thought which is fixated on miraculous suspensions of natural laws).

But this idea that the empirical world is an ongoing manifestation of the divine is a WAY of seeing the world—and there are other ways to see it, too. A religious worldview offers one set of glasses through which to interpret and understand the meaning of our ordinary experience. But there are non-religious worldviews that do this, too. So long as these worldviews do not call upon us to reject or deny empirical facts or the best understandings of the patterns by which the material world works (in the way that, say, Young Earth Creationists do), there is nothing in the empirical evidence that will force us to prefer one such worldview to another. There may be more broadly philosophical reasons to favor one general worldview over another, but the empirical data by itself is “polysemitic”—that is, able to be invested with alternative fundamental meanings.

And this means that the embrace of a broadly religious worldview will always be a matter of choice and hope, not a matter of certainty. But many are uncomfortable with living in hope. For a variety of reasons they long for a certainty that is impossible to have, at least in this world we live in.

We see this hunger for certainty not just among the religious, but also among many atheists, who insist that their naturalistic worldview—according to which the world we encounter through our senses and through scientific investigation constitutes all that there is—is an incontrovertible truth established by the empirical evidence. But it should be plain that the question, “Is there more to reality than meets the eye?”, will not be answered by pointing out that I cannot see more to reality than meets my eye. Empirical evidence cannot settle the question of whether there are orders of reality beyond the empirical one.

But the hunger for certainty leads many to look for empirical evidence that confirms in some way their worldview. And this is why so many cling to Virgin Mary sightings. They want something in the empirical world that settles the question of what, if anything, lies beyond the world. The problem, of course, is that nothing will really do this trick. Even if the heavens parted tomorrow and a booming voice declared to the entire planet, “I AM,” it would still be possible to be an atheist. After all, the manifestation might be the work of space aliens (or the result of a freakishly rare confluence of natural events that produced a sonic boom which, by virtue of our tendency to discern anthropomorphic patterns in natural events, we interpreted as the words “I AM”).

In short, to look for proof that your way of seeing the world is the right one by pointing to images of the Blessed Virgin in a grilled cheese sandwich is just shifting the problem of interpretation down one level. The image in the grilled cheese is itself polysemitic, and to treat that image as the deliberate product of a transcendent God is to offer one possible interpretation among many.

In the words of the theologian John Hick, “the true character of the universe does not force itself upon us, and we are left with an important element of freedom and responsibility in response to it…I would suggest that this element of uncompelled interpretation in our experience of life is to be identified with faith in the most fundamental sense of that word.”

If there is a God, he hasn’t created a universe in which His presence is unambuously attested to, perhaps because such an uncompromising testament to His presence would stifle our development as autonomous selves. And if there is no God, then nothing in the universe cares enough about us to make the fundamental nature of reality manifest to us. And so we are left with the “element of uncompelled interpretation” that Hick identifies with faith.

In other words, even the atheist has faith when we get to the most basic level of interpretation. I would argue that even agnostics have faith in this sense, insofar as some kind of implicit worldview is needed in order to live one’s life in any kind of coherent way. At least on an implicit or practical level, we make a decision about what the world is like at its root. And it’s just that, inescapably that: a decision. It's a decision that ought to pay attention to the facts. That is, we should make sure as best we can that our interpretation fits with the facts.

But I am sceptical of anyone who claims that only one worldview, or one kind of worldview, will offer such a fit.

Baby's Big Adventure

I recently mentioned to my wife, Ty, that our new dog Max is kind of like Buddhist meditation on legs. When I said it, I was thinking about how I’m drawn into the present moment when he plunks his big black head on my lap. My usually racing mind stills itself, and for a little while I’m existing in the Now, just experiencing the presence of this furry Other. Worries and preoccupations fade away, and I get some inkling of what Buddhists mean when they talk about “mindfulness.”

But a couple of weeks ago, Max helped to give us all a different lesson, an “ethico-religious” lesson about responding to change and loss. With the help of Max and some good friends, we were all reminded of how minor tragedies can be transformed into something lovely and delightful.

You see, Max decided to turn Izzie’s home-made baby-doll, Baby, into a chew toy. He gnawed off her hair and punched some holes into the fabric on the side of her head.

This wasn’t wholly surprising, given Max’s penchant for chewing on things. It took us awhile to figure out that he wasn’t limiting himself to what we’d inadvertently left lying around on the floor. He was actually lifting the lid of Izzie’s toy box to extract what he wanted from inside. Since joining our family, Max has helped himself in this way to a number of toys. But chomping on Baby was more serious than some of his other offenses. To understand its full significance, a bit of history is required.

A couple of years ago, when Izzie was still a few months shy of her first birthday, we spent a weekend with friends at a rented cabin in an Arkansas forest. It was a wonderful occasion in which we had the chance to connect with old friends, walk in the woods, eat good food, and watch our children play together.

One of our friends, Leslie, brought everything that was needed to make cloth baby dolls. While my wife and a few others struggled to create baby dolls, Leslie made several, including one for Izzie. The result was Baby. It was the first doll Izzie ever became attached to, and it remains her favorite—although it was temporarily dethroned by a plastic Tinkerbell.

Incidentally, Max also chewed enthusiastically on Tinkerbell a few days after going to town on Baby’s scalp. We considered attaching a hook in place of Tink’s gnawed-off hand, but decided instead to buy surreptitiously a replacement. We didn’t want Izzie to start thinking of Max as The Favorite Doll Killer.

But Baby couldn’t be replaced so easily. It isn’t hard to imagine the sentimental value that all of us attached to this little doll made of brown cloth and black yarn. And it’s not hard to imagine how we felt when we came home to learn that Baby, of all Izzie’s toys, had become the target of Max’s separation-anxiety-induced destructiveness.

It would’ve been easy to turn on the poor dog in outrage, or to see the doll’s destruction as the severing of a thread linking us to Izzie’s infancy. We might have looked at this little girl who was growing up so fast, who was no longer even a toddler anymore. We might have noted how quickly it was all going by, vanishing into a past that could never be reclaimed. And we might have attached all those feelings to this object of sentimental memory, now wet with dog slobber.

And I suppose, for a little while, we did all of those things. But then my wife picked up the phone, and she called her friend Leslie, Baby's creator.

Leslie promptly offered to try to stitch up the puncture wounds and make Baby a new head of hair. But the offer wasn’t really about restoring what was lost. It was about embarking on a new journey. And a journey is precisely what it became—a journey in which all of us participated, if only vicariously.

It began with a trip to the post office. Ty took Izzie with her, and together they sent Baby off to “the doll hospital.” And by a coincidence of timing, Baby arrived at Leslie’s just as she and her family were about to leave town for spring break. And so Baby went along.

And that’s when the photos started to arrive. At first it was a bald-headed Baby, unrepaired and ready for a trip to New Orleans. Then it was Baby in front Graceland. At some point Baby got a new head of hair, longer than it had been before. And so, by the time we received the pictures of Baby in Mississippi and Louisiana, she was a new doll. In some of the pictures she began sporting new outfits that Leslie had made for her.

There were pictures of Baby posing with Leslie or her daughter--or, in one case, with another doll.

And then at last we got the message that Baby was on her way home. On the day that she arrived, Izzie squealed with delight. We opened the box and took out a baby doll who was now sporting pig tails (her old hair had been short) and a new pair of flannel jammies. Izzie joyously swept the doll into her embrace while Ty read the “discharge papers,” which instructed us on follow-up care to ensure a full recovery (the most significant instruction being to keep Baby away from the dog).

In many ways, Baby’s journey isn’t very important, especially in a world where there are children who go to bed without food. But it is a story which carries with it some lessons that are less than trivial. One of those lessons is this: Had Max not chewed off Baby’s hair, Baby would never have been shipped off to Leslie. The gestures of friendship that followed wouldn’t have happened. And Baby’s wonderful journey, photographed for our delight, wouldn’t now be a part of our lives.

This is not to say that the destruction of a sentimental toy isn’t bad. What it means is that through creativity and humor and love, people were able to make this bad thing into part of a bigger story. Baby’s unfortunate encounter with Max became an integral part of something good, something that gave meaning to what might in a different context have been nothing but an unfortunate loss.

It matters what we do with the events that occur to us. The stories we jointly weave around those events can turn a minor tragedy into one episode in a lovely tale of friendship. But the stories we weave can also turn a minor tragedy into the start of something far worse, a deeper tragedy defined by hostility and regret. The latter is more likely when we cling to the past and won’t move on, when we won’t accept the finitude of things and refuse to journey into the unknown future.

Change is inevitable. Loss is inevitable. We cannot freeze things in place. Dolls will be destroyed. Relationships will end. Friends and loved ones will die. These realities are among the pieces from which we build a life. And the choices we make about what kind of life we’ll build do not just affect our own story. We also impact other lives and life stories, just as they do our own.

We don’t tell the story all by ourselves. We can’t control its course. We can only make choices about what we’ll do with the pieces that fall before us, and then wait to see what falls before us next. The challenge is to focus on building the best life we can out of the pieces that tumble into our path, and to help others do the same.

As soon as we say, “I need to acquire these pieces or the story is ruined,” we’re in trouble. That’s when we resent the pieces that tumble in our path rather than doing the best that we can with them. As soon as we say, “All these pieces need to stay in place or the story’s ruined,” we’re in trouble. Some losses are horrible, and it may well be that part of building a good life is treasuring those pieces that are most precious and preserving them from loss as best we can. But we can’t control the story. Loss is inevitable. And when loss happens, even bitter loss, we have to decide what to do, what story to build around that loss…and then strive to build the best story we can.

It’s easier to do that, and do it well, when the loss is relatively minor, when it’s a doll that’s been chomped on by a dog. But it’s by doing it well in such cases, when the loss is small, that we develop the habits of character that will carry us through the more brutal losses, the times when we confront in all its dark terror the finitude of this life.

All of this can be said without any reference to God or the transcendent. I suspect that secular humanists and die-hard naturalists will agree with the wisdom of striving in this life to make the best of what comes without trying to control what comes, to achieve that balance between accountability for ourselves and acceptance of what is beyond our control—in short, the wisdom embodied in Reinhold Niebuhr’s extraordinary Serenity Prayer, which has been embraced by twelve step programs around the world.

But it’s hard, this task of taking responsibility for how we engage with the world while letting go of the outcome. Nobody does it perfectly, especially in the hard times, no matter how much we practice when the stakes are less high. When the finitude of this life slaps us in the face, and we confront in an unfettered way own limits and the limits of everyone and everything we hold dear, it is easy for some of us to allow a pretense of indifference to replace acceptance, and for recklessness to replace responsibility. For others, it is easy for angry defiance to reign, inspiring a futile effort to take control of the world, to defeat the inescapable boundaries of our existence.

And so, it may be that what we most need to practice when the stakes are less high, what we most need to learn from hapless dogs and shredded toys, is how not to be afraid of finitude. And one antidote to this fear, perhaps the only true antidote, is what Friedrich Schleiermacher called “the intuition of the Infinite in the finite”—that is, the sense that beyond our limits, instead of finding Barth’s dark and terrible “Das Nichtige,” the Nothingness, we will find instead a boundless Yes.

To trust this sense, despite the impossibility of proving that it is veridical, is the essence of religious faith as I understand it. It is to decide to live in the hope that this boundless Yes we sense in fleeting whispers is not an illusion, not a mere projection of our desires.

Sometimes our capacity for such faith is strengthened by the smaller but important yeses that come from our friends, perhaps in a series of photographs. Or in an affable dog who, despite a penchant for chewing up toys, can lift you out of yourself with the weight of his head on your lap. Or in a doll that is suddenly sporting a new pair of pig tails.

Reflections on the Argument from Design

A number of readers of my book have asked me why I’m as dismissive of the argument from design as I seem to be. My best friend is among them. He finds considerable power in several formulations of the argument, including Indian versions which, based on his descriptions of them, I think I probably need to study.

I am open to being convinced. But there are several reasons why I’m hesitant to give the argument from design too much evidentiary weight in my thinking about theism. First of all, in many if not most of it formulations, the argument’s soundness depends on the scientific facts. Since I am not a scientist, I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to weigh in on the scientific disagreements over which these versions of the argument turn.

Secondly, “God” names something transcendent, that is, a being that exists beyond the empirical world that science studies. As I’ve said before, science simply cannot discern whether there is more to reality than science can discern. Now many defenders of the argument from design in effect deny this, at least in one sense. They proclaim that there are empirical facts about the physical world, facts which have been or can be uncovered and described by science, that are like sign posts pointing to some cause beyond the physical world. Their view is that science can discern that there must be something more to reality than what science studies, even if it can’t actually study this “something more.”

But what this thinking ignores, on my view, is how the scientific method works. Science is methodologically naturalistic. That is, it confronts every empirical phenomenon by looking for a naturalistic explanation of it. This means that scientists, in their role as scientists, will always treat phenomena that haven’t been explained in naturalistic terms, not as signposts pointing towards the supernatural, but as research projects. The majority of scientists will therefore view those who explain these phenomena by appealing to the transcendent as jumping ship from the scientific project.

To propose supernatural explanations before science has finished pursuing naturalistic ones strikes many scientists as not giving science a chance to do its work. And since science can in principle always keep looking for naturalistic explanations, there never comes a point at which it becomes appropriate to say that “science has shown” that a supernatural explanation is best. Instead, from a scientific standpoint the only conclusion to reach is that science hasn’t explained this phenomenon…yet.

Now I don't think that any of this means one can’t or shouldn’t embrace supernatural explanations. What it means is that when you do so, you’re no longer pursuing the scientific project.

For those who doubt the ability of scientists to explain the newest mystery in naturalistic terms, scientists can point to past mysteries, once invoked as reasons to believe in God but since explained in naturalistic terms. They might say, “Give us time. We’ll eventually pull the rug out from under you again.”

The result is an image of theologians in constant retreat, staking their claim on a shrinking island of mysteries and defending the mysteries that remain against the forces of scientific progress. Their God becomes the “God of the gaps” that theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer warned against—the God that we introduce as a quasi-scientific hypothesis to explain the mysteries that the ordinary work of science has so far failed to solve. And as the “gaps” get smaller, it begins to seem to many observers as if scientists are explaining God out of existence.

This image is not wholly unwarranted if one's case for God's existence depends on the existence of such mysteries. And if, furthermore, your religious faith hinges upon some phenomenon remaining inexplicable in scientific terms, you will fight tooth and nail to keep the phenomenon scientifically inexplicable. In other words, you will fight against the efforts of scientists to do what scientists do. You will thus become an enemy of science. And in your efforts to keep science from de-mystifying the ground on which you make your religious stand, you may be led to intellectual dishonesty, or towards bizarre maneuvers to explain away the empirical facts, or even (in the last gasps of resistance) to rejecting the scientific enterprise altogether. When the case for theism is made on this turf, science and religion become enemies in a way that benefits neither.

But the “God of the gaps” defended in this particular turf war is not the God in which I believe. My God is not first and foremost an “empirical phenomenon-explainer” (certainly not in anything like the sense in which the theoretic entities invoked in science are “empirical-phenomenon explainers”).

My God is invoked to explain my religious experience. But when I invoke God in these terms, it's as an alternative to something else I might do with my religious experience—namely, explain it away. By “religious experience,” I mean an essentially non-empirical experience, a deep sense that there is something fundamental lurking behind the ordinary appearances of things, something that is truer than the mechanistic and chance-governed universe uncovered by science, something that transcends my conceptual grasp but feels enormous and inexpressibly good. To borrow Rudolf Otto’s term, it is the feeling of the numinous.

This is a feeling that comes at me from a variety of directions—sometimes all by itself, and sometimes in conjunction with other powerful experiences. I’m talking about those occasions of wonder when I witness love or beauty or tenderness and think, “This is good.” And this sense of goodness transcends the empirical facts in front of me, seeming to reach into a deeper well of reality than what my eyes can see. I can’t reduce this sense of goodness to any empirical property of the world, at least not without, in the same gesture, stripping it of its significance.

I could, of course, appeal to the side-effects of evolutionary forces on the development of the human brain to explain this experience away, rather than invoke some transcendent good in order to explain it. Why do the latter rather than the former?

I do it out of hope. I do it because it confers a special meaning on the world encountered in experience, the world that science seeks to describe. I do it because it also helps make sense of certain other non-empirical experiences without explaining them away (such as my intimate experience of myself as a conscious agent, and my experience of beauty, and my sense of the intrinsic value of persons as persons). I do it because the complex world of living things, which could be nothing but the product of chance and natural selection, thereby acquires a deeper significance: it becomes something intended by love.

I don’t choose this interpretation because the science demands it, but because my moral nature seems to demand it of me. This moral voice inside me calls me to live in hope: the hope that the universe on some fundamental level is not “pitilessly indifferent to the good” as Dawkins maintains; the hope that the universe is better than it would be if the objects of scientific study exhausted what was real. When I encounter rival worldviews which all meet a basic standard of rationality—internally coherent as well as consistent with the entire field of human experience, including the facts discerned by science—my moral voice urges me to favor that worldview which invests greater moral meaning into those same experiences and facts.

In short, my God is not ultimately an “empirical phenomenon explainer” but, rather, a “hope-fulfiller” and a “meaning-bestower.” Belief in this God does involve reading design into an empirical world which allows for such a reading even if it does not demand it. But belief in this God does not in any way hinge upon the existence of empirical phenomena that simply cannot be explained in naturalistic terms.

Belief in a transcendent benevolence, something that would fulfill our hope that the universe is on the side of goodness, does not depend upon science being finally and permanently “stumped” in its efforts to provide naturalistic explanations. Theistic religion in this sense therefore doesn’t see scientific progress as a threat. Because it’s not.

And while I think there are ways to formulate and develop the argument from design which don’t put such reasoning on a collision course with scientific progress, the history of this argument, in terms of its tendency to foment conflict along these lines, makes me wary of it.

Another Open Letter (Sort of) to a Conservative Christian Critic

The other day I received an e-mail from a conservative Christian who'd been reading my book. He had several criticisms, chief among them the following two concerns:

1. You scold those who advocate that God’s goodness is mysteriously compatible with God-imposed judgments (including hell) in the Bible; and you reject their call for a suspension of thoughtful inquiry into the issue. Yet you defend those who advocate that God’s goodness is mysteriously compatible with God-allowed evil (including horrors) in the natural world—as you call for a suspension of thoughtful inquiry into the issue.

2. Similarly, you state that the former group cannot be worshipfully devoted to God, especially because he imposes hell. Yet the latter group can be worshipfully devoted to God, even though he allows horrors.

Since I conceived of this blog as, in part, an opportunity to foster discussion about my book, I’ve decided to post here most of the reply I wrote to this critic.

But before reproducing my e-mailed reply to this critic, let me say first that I don’t agree with the characterization of my views as put forward in (1) and (2). With respect to (1), I absolutely do not call for a suspension of thoughtful inquiry into the issue of whether evil can be reconciled with the existence of a good God. That's a misconstrual. What I argue is that even though the problem of evil has not been resolved, terrestrial evils do not constitute such a convincing a case against theism that it becomes irrational to live in the hope that the world’s evils can be an will be redeemed by a transcendent benevolence. But living in this hope is hardly incompatible with continued intellectual inquiry.

In this regard, my position is very similar to one advocated by Richard Dawkins in relation to evolutionary theory. The fact that there remain persistent mysteries that have yet to be adequately explained in neo-Darwinian terms is not a reason to abandon the theory of evolution. Devout Darwinians (if I may call them that without offense) can and should continue their investigations in the hope that a solution to these mysteries is out there to be found if only scientists search diligently enough. But such a message hardly amounts to saying that thoughtful inquiry into the matter should cease. It simply means you can legitimately be a Darwinian even though there remain phenomena which have yet to be adequately explained in Darwinian terms.

With respect to (2), I don’t state that “hellists” cannot be worshipfully devoted to God. The more I think about it, the more puzzled I am about this characterization. I do think that attempts to reconcile the doctrine of hell with the doctrine of a God worthy of devotion are intellectual failures, but this is not a point I develop at length in my book. What I argue in my book is that one cannot be “worshipfully devoted” to a tyrannical God. Under some (but not all) versions of the doctrine of hell, God becomes a tyrant who spitefully smites with eternal hellfire all those who don’t abide by his arbitrary whim.

But many devoted theists believe in a God of universal benevolence, staunchly rejecting this arbitrary tyrant, and yet still endorse some moderated version of the doctrine of hell. My claim with respect to such theists is that their attempts to reconcile hell with the perfectly loving God in which they believe are failures. But insofar as it is a perfectly loving God in which they believe, it is clear that their God is one in whom it is possible to be “worshipfully devoted.”

In my original response to this critic, I didn’t make these points, instead zeroing in on the key issue as I saw it: the supposed parity between the problem of evil and what Marilyn McCord Adams dubbed “the problem of hell” in her wonderful essay, “The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians.” The main thing I want to do is challenge this parity.

What follows is what I wrote in the attempt to make this point:

The issue you put your finger on is one I’ve explored elsewhere and only touch on tangentially in my book. My reasons for finding the doctrine of hell incoherent within a broader Christian theology are spelled out in a series of articles (citations should be available in the references section of my book). In my book, if you read the problem of evil chapter carefully, you will see, I think, the outlines for a response to your concern. Your observations, in my judgment, assume too much parity between terrestrial evil and our responses to it, on the one hand, and the eternal and therefore necessarily unredeemed evil of hell. I can hope that the former are redeemed. As a matter of definition, I cannot hope that the latter are redeemed. Hoping that the former are redeemed is an essential element of the ethico-religious hope, while believing in hell amounts at best to a fundamental truncations of the scope of the ethico-religious hope.

Let me explain these points with greater care. There are important differences between terrestrial evil and hell. First, terrestrial evil is an experiential given. Hell is not. Second, terrestrial evil is finite. Hell (as traditionally conceived) is not. In fact, I don’t have much problem with those conceptualizations of hell which conceive it as a refining fire, a la Gregory of Nyssa, in which the final outcome of enduring hell is that the spirit is purged and ultimately redeemed (there are, by the way, scriptural reasons for interpreting hell in these terms). This latter difference is of utmost importance, because it entails that terrestrial evil (both moral degeneracy and suffering) might be redeemed—if there is a fundamental reality (God) that is on the side of goodness and has sovereignty in at least the Zoroastrian sense (such that God’s will is irresistible in the long run even if there are opposing forces at work which in the short run God cannot, perhaps for moral reasons, simply will away). But the doctrine of hell entails that there is evil which is never redeemed (the moral degeneracy of the damned, for one, and their horrific suffering, for another—that the latter is an evil is something some might debate, but if divine justice is construed as a species of divine benevolence, and if divine benevolence is the ultimate paradigm of goodness, then I think all suffering is evil unless it is redemptive).

At root, my differential approach to terrestrial evil and hell is motivated by my understanding of the nature of faith, as the decision to live in the hope that there is a fundamental reality decisively on the side of goodness (a hope most fully realized if there is a personal God who cares about the good and has the capacity to act decisively to preserve the good). The decision to live in this hope involves, I believe, living in the hope that all evil will be redeemed. Hence, it entails that we should hope for the redemption of all terrestrial evil. The problem of evil poses an impediment to faith only if it succeeds in dashing this hope. I argue that, even though the problem of evil hasn’t been resolved, it hasn’t dashed the hope of redemption.

But the decision to live in the hope that there is a fundamental reality decisively on the side of goodness does not merely entail that we should live in the hope that all terrestrial evil is redeemed. It entails that we should live in the hope that all evil is redeemed. But the doctrine of hell is, in my judgment, inimical to this hope. The doctrine of hell is precisely the doctrine which holds that some evil will never be redeemed. On the liberal doctrine of hell (which holds that the free choices of the damned confine them to hell, and that God would save them if only they would change their mind, but they never do despite God’s best efforts), the implication is that in God’s war against sin, in the souls of the damned God will confront a final and ultimate defeat. As I put it in a forthcoming co-authored article, “Despite all of His infinite resources, despite infinite time in which to work, despite His perfect knowledge of every nuance of the souls of the damned, despite His unrelenting love, His efforts will be for naught. At least in some human souls, sin will prove more powerful than God.”

To avoid this blasphemous conclusion, we might go with the classical version of the doctrine of hell, according to which (again quoting from my forthcoming article) “God’s salvific aims are truncated such that they simply don’t include the damned.” The reason for this truncation is usually taken to be some demand of justice, such that the damned do not deserve salvation. Quoting again: “On this view, God prevails over sin in different ways: in the saved, it is through their attainment of blessedness, which includes their sanctification; in the damned, it is through their punitive expulsion from the goods of heaven.”

But, as my co-author and I argue at length in our forthcoming article (“Species of Hell”), to be deprived of salvation is to be deprived of the beatific vision, which is to be deprived of a full understanding of the good and hence of any real capacity to order one’s values in conformity with the good. The doctrine of grace is precisely this: that it is only when God dwells in us, when God’s will becomes our will, that we can be good. So our moral sanctification requires the infusion of divine grace. Without it, we are irredeemably corrupt.

“And so,” (quoting again) “on the classical doctrine of hell, the damned are punished for their wickedness at least in part by being confirmed in wickedness for all eternity.”

I close out this line of argument with an extended quote:

“To see the full magnitude of the difficulty here, it may help to reflect for a moment on exactly what is so bad about sin. Sin at its heart is a failure to value things according to their objective degree of value. It is a failure to appropriately express, in actions and dispositions, due reverence for the inherent worth of things. The most significant element of sin, on classical theology, is the failure to do this with respect to God. God has infinite inherent worth, and thus ought to be valued above all things. To fail to do so is an objective affront to the divine majesty, akin to the sociopath’s failure to properly value his victim but magnified in severity by the infinite worth of God.

“According to the classical doctrine of hell, God responds to this infinite affront against His dignity by deliberately acting to ensure that this affront to His dignity continues for all eternity. While He could stop it from continuing, He chooses instead make sure that this most intolerable of all evils persists forever in the souls of the damned by deliberately withholding the necessary condition for bringing it to an end.”

This picture doesn’t sound to me to be compatible with the hope that all evil will eventually be redeemed, any more than does a picture of hell in which sin remains forever victorious over God in the souls of the damned. Hence, if I choose to live in that hope, I must reject the doctrine of hell in either of its versions. Fortunately, I can do so, since the evidence for the truth of the doctrine of hell is hardly decisive (even were I a biblical fundamentalist, I would have to face conflicting scriptural evidence). And so, my ethico-religious hope isn’t dashed. And—again fortunately—the evidence against theism posed by terrestrial evils is not decisive, since there is nothing in experience that precludes the possibility of grander orders of reality within which these evils might be redeemed.

Put simply, if I knew that hell were real, that would be a decisive defeater for my ethico-religious hope. But I do not know this (in fact, I have little reason to think it true), so I can keep on hoping. I do know that terrestrial evils are real, but their reality is not a decisive defeater for my ethico-religious hope. Hence, I can keep on hoping.

Now it is certainly possible that I am mistaken in my thinking about hell. But the fact is that I simply cannot see how any version of the doctrine of hell can be made compatible with the ethico-religious hope. And given this truth about me, were I to believe in hell I would cease to believe that the ethico-religious hope had been fulfilled. Hence, were I to believe in hell I would lose my faith in God. I don’t know about you, but I think God would rather that I trust in Him than that I believe in hell.

And there are very many people who are very much like me on this issue—and many of them have been so steeped in the doctrine of hell that they see it is as an inextricable piece of theistic belief—and so lose the ethico-religious hope altogether. In this respect, I am absolutely convinced that the doctrine of hell is anti-evangelical. It is bad news that drives people away from faith in God. Part of my aim in my book is to invite those people back.

Atheism on the Bus

About a decade ago, while I was living in the Puget Sound area, I entered the “Poetry on the Buses” competition—an annual event in which poets and would-be poets compete to have their poems posted in and on Seattle buses. My poem, “Lilac Festival,” was among the winners, and so for a time it could be read by commuters on their way home from work. The poem, which I’m still rather pleased with, was an attempt to capture my memories of the Rochester lilac festival, which I attended every spring as an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester. It runs as follows:

In spring, at a carnival of lilacs and balloons,
of purple-peppered hills and pollens
that glisten on the tail of the bumblebee,
a sun-blond boy with ice cream lips watches
lovers who walk with steps that make the widows nod,
and girls in college jerseys
who flash their smiles in passing, over their shoulders
like petals tossed by children playing love-me-not.

The Poetry on the Buses project has always struck me as a great alternative to using bus walls—a kind of public space—for paid advertising. As a commuter, I’d much rather read a contest-wining poem than a soda slogan. Or worse, a religious ad.

Living where I now live, I don’t get much of a chance to see bus advertising (the bus system in Stillwater is run by the university and is advertisement-free), but I do see billboard ads often enough—and with some frequency the billboard space has been leased by one religious organization or another. One popular campaign (which apparently also does run on the sides of buses) features an all-black billboard with white lettering, the message signed by “God.”

The presumptuousness of this is only matched by the banality of the messages themselves—things such as “Have you read my #1 bestseller? There will be a test,” and “Think it’s hot here?” and “Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game.” I can only imagine what God thinks of a bunch of religious slogan writers more influenced by Madison Avenue than by any deep sense of the divine, attributing their pithy messages to the infinite and transcendent mystery that lies at the heart of reality.

Now atheists are in on the game. And rather than taking their cue from the Poetry on the Buses project, they are firmly aligned with the Madison Avenue approach: Come up with a pithy message that simply can’t do justice to the deep philosophical issues to which it gestures, and then slap it on a billboard or a bus. But at least they aren’t attributing the products of their merely human sloganeering to the divine. I suppose that’s an improvement.

Thanks to a good family friend, I have a New York Times clipping about the atheist bus campaign in front of me, featuring a picture of a London double-decker bus with the world’s best-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, posed in front of it—trying (it seems) to look dapper. The atheist message on the bus reads as follows: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

The picture and the message were the first things I saw as I unfolded the clipping. And this fact gave me an opportunity to really experience first-hand the importance of context. Before reading the article itself, before coming to see the slogan in terms of the context out of which its creators were writing, I responded to it in terms of my own context.

My context is a progressive religious one. I live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, rather than being “pitilessly indifferent” to it as Dawkins maintains. And I see, in my inner spiritual experience, evidence that this hope is not in vain despite all the horrors in the world.

What does the atheist slogan on this bus mean to someone like me? As I read it, I find it jarring. Not because it’s offensive, but because the first sentence is so incongruent with the second. Given what I mean by “God,” I wouldn’t follow up the first sentence with “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” I’d follow it up, instead, with something like the following: “So the crushing horrors of history will never be redeemed, and those whose lives have been shattered by suffering and loss and brutality, and who have no prospects of transcending their miserable condition in this life, should just give up hope.”

Not that this would fit on the side of a bus.

But, of course, for me “God” refers to that reality which, if it existed, would fulfill what I call in my book “the ethico-religious hope”—that is, the hope that the universe in some fundamental way is on the side of the good, so that when we live out lives lovingly we are actually becoming attuned to the deepest reality of all.

Perhaps the most important exponent of this hope in American history was Martin Luther King, Jr., who articulated it in terms of his conviction that “the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.”

In fact, King believed that embracing this hope was essential for practitioners of nonviolence. “I am quite aware,” he said in a 1957 speech, “that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as an unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God….And this was one of the things that kept people together (during the Montgomery bus boycott), the belief that the universe is on the side of justice.”

And so, when I read the atheist slogan on the side of the bus, here is what I read: “The universe probably isn’t on the side of justice. It’s just as pitilessly indifferent to the good as Dawkins claims in his book, River Out of Eden. When evil shatters human lives in Rwanda, leaving people utterly broken until death, there will never be for them any redemption. It will be permanently true that it would have been better had they never been born. And in the world in which we live, such life-shattering events can happen to anyone, including you. And if they do happen to you, don’t look to the transcendent for hope, because there is none to be had. Your life will be decisively stripped of meaning. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”

This absurd juxtaposition of messages might usefully be contrasted with one offered by philosopher Walter Stace, who before becoming interested in mystical experience was very much an atheist in Dawkins’ mold, but with an important difference. In his famous essay, “Man Against Darkness,” Stace discusses what he thinks is the demise of religion in the face of science, but he doesn’t present his atheist picture of the world as a reason to “stop worrying and enjoy life.” Instead, he presents it as a grim truth that we need to confront. It is, in effect, one of the painful discoveries of growing up as a human species.

In Stace’s view of things, the universe doesn’t care about us. Those of us who die in despair and hopelessness will have lived lives without meaning, and no cosmic redemption can be hoped for. The truth as Stace sees it this: There is no God. Now brace yourself and try to make the best of things.

But I suppose that wouldn’t make for a very good marketing campaign on the sides of buses. Too grim. If there’s anything Madison Avenue teaches, its this: you don’t sell a product by claiming that life will be more miserable with it than without it.

But here is where differences in context become relevant. According to the New York times article, “the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign” were sewn by a comedy writer named Ariane Sherine. Sherine saw a religious ad on a bus and, when she went to the associated web site, was informed in the materials there that she and her friends were doomed to an afterlife of eternal torment because they didn’t have the right beliefs about God.

When God is portrayed as a fierce tyrant in the sky who roasts those who don’t believe the right sorts of things, atheism can seem refreshing. It becomes a liberation of sorts. In fact, this point was made beautifully long ago by the Greek scholar Plutarch.

Plutarch argued, in an essay called “On Superstition,” that there’s a fundamental difference between belief in tyrannical gods that place harsh demands on human beings on pain of retribution, and belief in a transcendent benevolence that wishes us only good. He calls the former superstition, and reserves the term “religion” for the latter. And he thinks that atheism is far preferable to superstition. Better to think there are no gods at all than to live your life in terror that the gods will smite you unless you scurry to obey their every whim. The superstitious person sees every misfortune as an act of the gods, and is always looking for someone to blame: Who is it that failed to obey with sufficient alacrity? Is it the gays, the feminists, the ACLU—all those whom Jerry Falwell blamed for the 9/11 attacks?

Far better to be an atheist than to live in cowering submission, convinced that we’re all the slaves of some irresistible supernatural tyrant. This is probably at least part of what the mystic philosopher Simone Weil had in mind when she referred to atheism as “a purification.”

But Weil was not an atheist. For her, atheism served the import role of wiping away the gods of the imagination, the deities we invent out of fear and ignorance. She believed that in order to really experience God—the divine presence that appeared to her while she was in the grip of debilitating migraine headaches, and seemed to her “a presence, like the smile on a beloved face”—in order to experience this we needed to clear our minds, to make a space within our consciousness, a place of quiet waiting into which grace might then flood in. But our imagination is always filling up these spaces with deities of our own invention, leaving no room at all for God.

And for Plutarch, the deadliest and most sinister god of the imagination is the supernatural tyrant, the growling monarch who commands us to obey or pay the price. This is a god we must flee, for the sake of our very sanity. But fleeing this god of superstition does not require us to reject all transcendent hopes, to dismiss every mystical report, to scoff at Martin Luther King’s hope that the universe bends towards justice or at Simone Weil’s encounter with a tender presence on the far side of anguish.

And so Plutarch concludes his essay by noting how atheists, in fleeing superstition, end up “leaping right over piety, which lies between.” This message (which, by the way, gives this blog its name) still has resonance so many centuries later. The god that Ariane Sherine is rejecting ought to be rejected. It is the god of superstition. But it doesn’t follow that we ought likewise to reject the God of Martin Luther King.

Walter Stace was, in my judgment, wrong to think that science has decisively refuted the existence of such a God. While nothing in our experience proves that the God of religion exists, there are deep and potent intimations of such a God in the most profound of mystical experiences. And, as I argue in my book, there are philosophical reasons to believe in deeper orders of reality than we encounter in ordinary sense experience—reasons that mean we don’t need to dismiss profound religious experiences as mere delusion.

We are free, instead, to make a different choice: to live in hope, to live as if the reports of the mystics are true, to embrace a worldview in which the deepest of all human longings is satisfied: the longing that the universe, in some fundamental way, cares about the good.

If we do, then perhaps we really can stop worrying and enjoy our lives.

An Uncharitable Review

I won’t make a habit of this, but I’ve decided to comment on an uncharitable review of Is God a Delusion? that appeared recently on Amazon. I do so in case other readers have misunderstood my arguments in the same ways that this “Hande Z” has.

For ease of reference, I will refer to the reviewer as HZ. Let me walk through HZ’s main points one by one. HZ writes:

Reitan begins with an attack against people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, calling them "New Atheists" without explaining why the adjective "new" was necessary and what he meant. Would he be a "New Apologist" then?

This is a minor point, but still deserves some reflection. Writing the kind of book I did, I needed a phrase to refer collectively to the authors of the atheist bestsellers I was addressing. Early on I borrowed Schleiermacher’s language and referred to them as “today’s cultured despisers of religion.” This proved to be an extremely clumsy phrase for repeated use. And so I chose “new atheists” for its brevity as well as for reasons mentioned on pp. 3-4 of the introduction.

It turns out I was hardly unique in finding this appellation appropriate. In fact, it’s become the common name for the species of atheism exemplified by Hitchens and Dawkins. Their kind of atheism is characterized by several features. First, it isn’t merely disdainful of religion, but hostile to it. Second, it’s not quietly hostile. In fact, Dawkins calls for atheists to “come out of the closet” and profess their atheism to the world, to express a kind of “atheist pride.” But the pride he advocates is not the sort that can comfortably coexist with respect for religious belief, because it involves taking pride in having avoided the supposed foolishness of religion. And this fact highlights the third distinctive feature of this species of atheism: it’s not just about disbelief in the supernatural. It asserts that to be religious is to exhibit a shortcoming in one’s intellect or moral character (or both). The view seems to be that, on this issue, reasonable people cannot disagree, because to disagree with atheism is unreasonable.

Is such atheism new? Not entirely. Bertrand Russell, for example, seemed to have been an atheist of this sort (at least in his more bellicose moments). But the prevalence of this species of “out” atheist hostility to religion appears to be on the rise in recent years. And so, to speak of the representatives of this brand of atheism as the “new” atheists seems apt.

Let’s move on to some of HZ’s more substantive criticisms. HZ writes:

He tried to garner support and sympathy by flattering people of all religions, but tripped up when he concluded his Introduction with this comment: "We must find ways, not to stamp out religion, but to let true religion loose upon the world." (Reitan's emphasis) Which was that true religion he had in mind? His own belief seems clearly to be Christian (but which model?); and that being so, was he then really empathetic to Sikhism, Islam, and all the other religions he fawned over? At page 61 he distinguishes "the god Hypothesis" from "the God Hypothesis". Who was his "God"? We won't find the answer in this book.

Here, HZ pounces on my use of the phrase “true religion,” but ignores the context which gives it meaning. In fact, two pages prior to the passage HZ quotes, I explicitly state what I mean by “true religion." It is religion that is “born out of a combination of rational insight, profound experiences of a distinctive kind, and morally laudable hope” and is then “refined and shaped by careful and humble reflection in open-minded discourse with others” (p. 9).

Throughout the book I develop these elements into an account of the parameters within which religion can be both intellectually respectable and morally benign, and I also discuss the corrupting forces that can push religion outside of these parameters. Any religion—Christian, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Hindu—that stays true to these parameters counts as “true religion” in my sense. Religion that loses touch with them is not.

And one way to lose touch with them is to lose touch with what Schleiermacher calls the “beautiful modesty” and “friendly, attractive forbearance” that naturally accompanies experience of the transcendent. Religion rooted in such experience cannot help but recognize that the subject matter of religion defies finite human efforts to describe it. This is why Schleiermacher insists that anyone whose religion is rooted in such experience “must be conscious that his religion is only part of the whole; that about the same circumstances there may be views and sentiments quite different from his, yet just as pious.”

In short, far from belying my propensity for religious inclusivism, my reference to letting true religion “loose upon the world” is an expression of that inclusivism. By “true religion,” I mean religion that (among other things) views other religious traditions as having something of value to say about the mysteries of the transcendent. Such inclusivism is not uncritical, but the criteria by which religions are judged are not those of doctrinal orthodoxy or allegiance to a single tradition or holy text, etc.

As for the reviewer’s mention of my distinction between “the god of superstition” and “the God of religion,” it is astonishing when he says that “we won’t find any answers in this book”—since developing and discussing the significance of this distinction is one of the book's chief aims.

In briefest terms, my point (piggy-backing on Plutarch) is this: There is a profound difference between believing in a supernatural tyrant who needs to be appeased on pain of harsh retribution, and living in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness. Religions that affirm the supernatural tyrant are what Plutarch called superstition. And belief in this god of superstition inspires the same kind of frenzied efforts at appeasement that an abusive spouse so often inspires, producing a supernatural variant of battered wife syndrome. Such belief is harmful—and atheism in the face of such a god is like a healthy divorce with a lifetime restraining order attached.

But it doesn’t follow that it is likewise harmful to live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, that when we act with moral integrity we are aligning ourselves with the most basic truth about reality. I call this “the ethico-religious hope,” and I define the God of religion as that which, if it existed, would fulfill this hope. Such a definition is what I call “functional,” in that it doesn’t specify God in terms of a list of properties (although it implies benevolence) but rather in terms of the role that God serves in the psychological economy of the devout theist—that is, the theist who loves and trusts God. Tyrants inspire neither love nor trust, but only fear and servile obedience.

HZ is unhappy with this kind of functional definition, perceiving it as my attempt to define God so vaguely that the theist can “evade, hide, and shift his ground every time he gets cornered.” HZ wants me to offer what, in my book, I call a “substantive definition” of God—that is, a definition in terms of a list of precise properties.

This is an issue I have discussed in other posts, and so I won’t beat a dead horse here. Suffice it to say that early scientists wouldn’t have gotten very far if they hadn’t left room for non-substantive definitions. Image a Copernican-era scientist who insisted that “star” be defined in terms of the old substantive conception of it as a “pinhole in the firmament,” who then concluded on the basis of the evidence that stars do not exist, and finally accused those who defined “star” by pointing upward, and who offered new conceptualizations in light of new evidence, as being guilty of “evading, hiding, and shifting the ground every time they get cornered.”

HZ writes:

Can he justify his claim that the "cause of the trouble is a fundamentalist insistence that one ought to accept without question that some text or institution or prophetic leader (is perfectly) articulating the very will of God?" (The reviewer leaves out of the quote what I have re-inserted in parentheses for the sake of clarity). Isn't this a circular argument? Who is a fundamentalist? It seems that he would be someone who disagrees with Reitan.

In the passage quoted (found on p. 71), I am discussing ways in which belief in God’s goodness can be stripped of meaning. One issue I focus on is the idea that you “ought to accept without question that some text or institution or prophetic leader” perfectly represents God’s will. For ease of reference I call this way of thinking “fundamentalist,” and I argue that it strips all meaning from the claim that God is good, leaving us with a supernatural being whose will must be followed, but who isn’t good in any meaningful sense. In short: a supernatural tyrant. Fundamentalism in the indicated sense leads to belief in the god of superstition. There is no circularity here, and the meaning of “fundamentalist” is far more substantive than just “anyone who disagrees with me.”

HZ writes:

Reitan called Dawkins a philosophical novice because (or so Reitan believed) he did not understand Aquinas. Reitan and Aquinas believed in God (and since Aquinas was Christian, Reitan's belief must be Christian) because everything in the universe must have a cause except the first cause. They realise d that if they don't put a stop to this then they are stuck in an infinite regress - turtles all the way down. So why is this first cause so personal that he needs and wants to be worshipped? Why not just a bang from a bag of gas? Reitan would believe that a bag of gas must have a first cause. So, can he explain why a bag of gas can't be the first cause that he believed must exist; a cause that had no cause? How does he differentiate his idea of the first cause (his "god") from a bag of gas?

I set aside the invalid argument that since Aquinas and I both believe in God, and Aquinas was a Christian, I must be Christian too. I’ll simply refer HZ on this matter to any introductory logic book. What I want to point out is that HZ is simply repeating the very interpretive errors that Dawkins falls into, and which I discuss in Chapter 5.

Let me put this as simply as I can. It is one thing to argue that everything must have a cause, notice that this leads to an infinite regress, and then try to escape the regress by arbitrarily positing a first cause which, in defiance of the first premise, doesn’t need a cause after all. It is something else entirely to argue that everything which possesses some property P (e.g., the property of coming into existence) requires a cause, notice that if everything possessed property P there would be an infinite regress, and therefore conclude that to avoid such a regress we must suppose there exists something which lacks property P. Aquinas argues along the latter lines, not the former. And, arguing along these lines, Aquinas concludes that there must exist some fundamental reality that never came to be (that is, exists eternally), that does not change but is capable of bringing about change in other things, and that exists necessarily. If HZ wants to make the case that a bag of gas could be eternal, unchanging, and necessarily existent, I’d be very interested to see the argument. However, it would have to be a bag of gas radically unlike anything in the empirical world—including bags of gas.

HZ goes on:

(I)n defending theodicy, he placed the blame(as most theists do) on man (the victim) and not god, the presumed almighty and all good. It is man's free will, he stated, when referring to the evil caused by man. What of the evil caused in natural disasters like Hurricane Katarina? Such evil if caused by god, would be redeemed by god. How? And how does Reitan know that? Perhaps we were not mean to question him on this either.

In the chapter that HZ references here, I provide an overview of a number of different ways in which theists have attempted to respond to the problem of evil. I seek to identify both the merits and the weaknesses of these responses. For example, on p. 192 I critique the appeal to free will by noting that “not all evils result from wicked choices. Some of the worst suffering is brought on by disease, famine, and natural disaster…(and) it isn’t reasonable to trace all the harms from natural evils back to human negligence.” I likewise critically discuss the so-called “soul-making theodicy,” noting among other things that it does not take into proper account the suffering in the non-human world. My aim in this chapter is not to resolve the problem of evil. Rather, my aim is to argue that even if the problem hasn’t been resolved, it doesn’t constitute such a decisive case against theism that it becomes unreasonable for someone to live in the hope that the evils of the world will be redeemed by a transcendent good.

And, just for the sake of clarity, living in the hope that evil will be redeemed is not the same as knowing that it will. I do not know that it will. No one does. Anyone who claims to know this is lying—probably first and foremost to themselves. Likewise for anyone who claims to know that evil will not be redeemed.

Last but not least, HZ writes:

I would not say don't read this book, but I would say read it but also read the counter-arguments (Amazon has a list of books on atheism); in both cases, read all the arguments critically.

Finally, something we can agree on.

Finding Religion on Facebook

It is interesting when and where one has religious experiences. Many report having them when communing with nature, others while engaged in charitable work. Some claim that religious worship or sacraments bring an awareness of the divine. Others find God in moments of solitary prayer, or feel a connection with the transcendent when they meditate.

Today, I was surprised by an experience that I would describe as religious, but which came over me while playing around—of all things—on Facebook. A college friend of mine had posted a picture of himself as a little boy, holding hands with his grandfather and looking up with delight into his grandfather’s face. In the picture, the two are on a walk together, both dressed in suits. In my friend’s description of the picture, he notes that this was something they did regularly—putting on their fine clothes and walking together, hand in hand through the streets of Reykjavik.

It’s one of those photographs that captures more than just a visual impression. It evokes a moment in time and the feelings that pervaded that moment. As I looked at it the photo came alive, and this personal exchange—the tender smile on the old man’s face, the unguarded delight in the boy—began to resonate with universal meanings. It was as if I was looking at a clue to the meaning of life, or more than that: the key to it.

I read the comments that had been made about the picture (it garnered a number of them, probably because the picture was so powerful)—and I learned that at the time this picture was taken, the grandfather was dying. But in the moment captured by that photograph, death isn’t written on the grandfather’s face, and there are no hints of anticipated loss in the little boy’s expression. Both are present to each other, in the moment, experiencing it and each other fully. For the space of a breath they’ve left behind the world of time, of transience and finitude.

Or that’s how it looked to me, as I sat in front of my computer gazing raptly at this image, blinking back unexpected emotion. Eventually I began to think about my own grandfather, the Norwegian with a trace of gypsy in his blood, the passionate Baptist preacher who’d once been an atheist and a Marxist, and who in his final years, as cancer ate away at his flesh, lived in stark terror of death (as if he were afraid that all his pronouncements from the pulpit would be proved wrong).

My grandfather had many admirable qualities, but he was far from a perfect man. He was part of the resistance in Denmark during the Nazi occupation, risking his life to do what he could to protect those most in danger from the occupying power. In the aftermath of the war he ministered to a young Nazi sympathizer who’d been convicted of high treason and was slated for execution. My grandfather kept pace with him as the young man was led to the firing squad, sustaining him with words of compassion and hope.

But he was also a man with a volatile temper, at least in his younger days. He beat his children. There’s evidence that early in his ministry, in the anticlimactic years after the great religious awakening he’d led in a small Norwegian town, he cheated on his wife.

But the man I knew wasn’t the child beater. Nor was it the agent of the resistance. The man I knew was the one who, when I was three years old, squatted down and held out his arms to me when I came off the airplane. I remember racing to him and throwing myself into his arms, and him sweeping me up and laughing and pressing his cheek against my hair.

The man I knew was the one who carried me through the forest at a mad run after I’d been stung in the eyelid by a bee. He was afraid I was allergic to bee stings. He was afraid that I might die, there in the woods. And so he ran for all he was worth, clutching me to him.

I can’t remember the pain. I can’t remember screaming, although I was surely squalling so they could hear me miles away. What I remember is the roughness of his cheek against mine, and the strength of his arms, and the scent of him—which in later years I came to know was the smell of cheap Aquavelva aftershave. On him it smelled good.

In these moments with my grandfather I existed in the moment, stepping out of the tide of time, the endless forward rush. It’s no surprise to me at all that this happens when human love is felt most keenly. There is a link, it seems to me, between love and the eternal.

And so I looked at this picture, which I’d stumbled across on Facebook, and I felt abruptly lifted out of myself. I felt that I was looking through a window to the eternal. This is what abides there, I thought. This is what abides in the mind of God.

And for a moment I just stayed in that space, savoring it, feeling it as an ache behind my eyes. And then, below the picture, I wrote my own comment, which included these words:

“Here’s what I think it means, on a deep level, to believe in God: it means that moments like this one, so imperfectly preserved in a picture, are imprinted in eternity, not lost but tenderly and reverently safeguarded by a fundamental reality, something beyond the empirical skin of the world, something that we come closest to in this life when we laugh like a child looking up into a beloved face.”

Objectivity and the Longings of the Soul

A commentator on my last post, Tom Clark, nicely expresses in his own words the same “ethical view” about our epistemic duties expressed by Charles Taylor (a view that Taylor, by the way, does not share). The view is roughly this: Since Christians (and, I presume, other religious believers) are forming beliefs about the way reality is, it is imperative that they do so with a dedication to making sure that they aren’t influenced by anything but the evidence—and certainly not by their desires.

In Clark’s words, “If you’re interested in getting a maximally unbiased, objective view on reality, then you should take all possible steps to insulate your knowledge claims from the influence of your hopes, longings, etc. Since Christianity presents itself as an objective worldview, one that makes claims about what really exists (e.g., god), its followers should…seek to ‘avoid at all cost the risk of being duped by an alluring illusion.’”

This is a compelling view, one to which many are drawn. It is one of the two basic schemes of thinking that William James identifies as vying for our allegiance. But there are complicating factors.

One such complicating factor has to do with the distinction between knowledge claims and other sorts of affirmations of belief. It is always dangerous to claim knowledge where what one has is something else. This is what happens, I think, in the case of fanatical religion. But not all religion is fanatical. Religious belief needn’t adopt false pretensions of knowledge where one’s belief is really a kind of pragmatic decision to live one’s life as if a hoped-for possibility is true (which is what I and many others mean by “faith”). And there is a real question about whether the demand for “a maximally unbiased, objective view” that precludes being moved by your longings and hopes should prevail in every sphere of belief, even at the level of one’s meaning-bestowing worldview, even when it comes to belief that is explicitly identified as a matter of “faith,” not knowledge.

Another factor that complicates any simple picture of our epistemic responsibilities is concisely expressed by Taylor himself when he considers the two stances William James identifies as vying for our allegiance. In Taylor’s words: “Each stance creates in a sense a total environment, in the sense that whatever considerations occur in one appear transformed in the other. They can’t be appealed to in order to decide the issue, because as they pass from one stance to the other they bear a changed meaning that robs them of their force in the new environment.”

From the one stance, the deepest longings of the soul are treated as a dangerous temptation away from one’s “Cliffordian” epistemic duty (to believe only in accord with the evidence), whereas from the other stance they are treated as (again in Taylor’s words) “the hint that there is something important here which we need to explore further, that this exploration can lead us to something of vital significance, which would otherwise be closed to us.”

This religious-leaning stance is routinely viewed by those on the other side as displaying an unacceptable indifference to truth. But that is a mischaracterization on several levels. As James points out, there are two broadly epistemic goals that have to be in view when one is forming beliefs about the nature of reality: connecting with the truth, and avoiding error. And these two goals are to an important degree in tension with one another. An epistemic practice that tries to maximize the number of truths to which one gives one’s intellectual assent may also increase the number of falsehoods to which one assents. And an epistemic practice that tries to minimize assent to falsehood may also, in the process, shut off the possibility of assenting to whole classes of truth.

Every philosopher recognizes this trade off, and few are prepared to give the goal of error-avoidance absolute dominion in the epistemic sphere. After all, the consequence of doing so is a radical skepticism which we cannot really sustain when we get on with the business of living our lives. Likewise, few are willing to open the floodgates of complete credulity.

So the real question isn’t whether one or the other of these epistemic goals should rule the day. The question is really about what kind of balance we should pursue, and what belief-forming strategies are acceptable in the attempt to find that balance. James sees passion as playing an inevitable role in this decision, even for those who choose the strict regimen of pursuing “maximally unbiased” thinking by taking “all possible steps to insulate your knowledge claims from the influence of your hopes, longings, etc.” Ironically, what motivates this decision may be nothing more than a deep longing to avoid error, to escape the risk of living under a false picture of the world. All other longings are sacrificed to this singular one.

My own view is that there isn’t one belief-forming strategy that should be required of all of us on the basis of some a priori considerations. My own inclination here is more democratic and experimental. We should afford space for people to live out different alternatives to see how well they work.

Now in the sphere of scientific inquiry, it seems pretty obvious that a certain strategy of inquiry, one that is error-averse and seeks to insulate the process of inquiry from the inquirer’s desires, has proved extremely effective in advancing human understanding of the empirical world. In fact, the success of science is so obvious to any who aren’t blinkered by ideology that within its sphere of inquiry we can rightly say that it has proved itself.

But it doesn’t follow that this same scientific strategy should be transferred to spheres of human belief formation which in principle lie outside the limits of science. When it comes to meaning-bestowing beliefs about the transcendent, or what might be more simply called “religious beliefs,” the scientific approach would dictate a kind of silence, that is, a refusal to form any beliefs at all (which for practical purposes would amount to disbelief).

And it is here that James’ thinking once again becomes salient. As James puts it, “I… cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules of truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for the plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”

The conclusion here is a wholly negative one: the rules of belief formation exemplified by science should not be relied upon when it comes to religious beliefs. What this negative conclusion opens up is a question: What rules, then, should we follow?

Some strategies have been tried and, in my judgment, have proven themselves to be abject failures in the field of human experience. One such failed strategy is the idea that religious questions are best settled by blind allegiance to the literal meaning of some purported revelatory text or central authority. That some still cling to this strategy is, in my view, more troublesome than the fact that some cling in the religious sphere to what James calls “the agnostic rules of truth-seeking.”

So what are we to do? I don’t think we will arrive at the best strategy through some a priori principles. Instead, I think we will do so through a spirit of democratic experimentation. People should be free to live out alternative strategies for forming their religious beliefs. That is, we should establish a secular society in which freedom of religion is guaranteed within certain parameters (parameters that have themselves been arrived at through social experimentation, and have been found to keep the more dangerous experiments from getting out of hand).

In my own life, I’ve found a roughly Hegelian approach to be the most compelling. It is an approach that might be called “critical traditionalism”: live out an inherited worldview to see how well it works, and revise it when it crashes up against lived experience; then live out the revised worldview to see how well it works, etc.

And when deciding which worldview to adopt in this critical way, I don’t think you can do better than to choose the one that sings to you, that resonates most with who you are and with the deepest longings of your soul. Only such a worldview will hold your interest and passion enough to enable you to really live it out, and hence really discover the merits and limitations of doing so.

While this line of thinking is all I want to develop for the moment, I do want to stress that I haven’t developed in the above reflections a stream of argument beautifully advanced by Hermann Lotze, and powerfully summarized in the introduction to his magnum opus, the Microcosmus. Lotze challenges with distinctive eloquence the view that, in the overarching business of living a human life (as opposed to, say, the more narrow business of scientific or academic inquiry) we should set aside our deepest longings in favor of a strict regimen of avoiding being duped. To do so amounts to sacrificing all that is most important in one’s life to the altar of objectivity—and while objectivity is an important value that needs to be afforded its place, it is hardly the only value. The question of how these diverse values should play out in the business of shaping our view of life, and hence how we live, is one that cannot and should not be answered too hastily, or without due attention to the many voices—including religious ones—that have something of significance to say.

Gratitude and Grace

A few weeks ago I wrote in this blog about my daughter’s “Ariel sighting” in a splat of bird poop, and I used the incident as a chance to reflect on the significance (or lack thereof) of Virgin Mary sightings. The job of preparing a sermon on gratitude, which I’ll be delivering this Sunday in my role as chair of the Stewardship Committee, has given me the opportunity to think again about such “miraculous” sightings—but this time in a way that connects to the question of what it means to live one’s life in a spirit of gratitude. While the full sermon is too long to reproduce here (and probably too long to read on Sunday morning—but, well, they’ll live), I wanted to share here a core section of that sermon. The excerpt appears below:

Now, I don’t want to debate the plausibility of interpreting such images as signs from God. That’s not my objective here this morning. What I want to think about instead is what happens to our relationship with God when we become obsessed with finding the stamp of the divine in such things as toasted cheese sandwiches, or in chocolate drippings (as happened in California a few years ago), or in a swirl of marble on a chapel wall (as happened not long ago in Ghana).

And I don’t want to limit my attention to this fixation on Virgin Mary sightings and the like—because something very similar is going on with what’s come to be called “Intelligent Design” or “ID” theory. ID theorists are determined to find evidence of the divine in biological structures that are supposedly “irreducibly complex” and hence can’t be explained in Darwinian terms. And when they find something that they think fits the bill, they hold it up and declare, “Must be God!” These ID theorists are really doing the same kind of thing as those obsessed with Virgin Mary sightings: They’re scouring the world, sifting through the ocean of human experience, looking for miracles.

As if life itself weren’t a miracle. As if every breath I take isn’t a miracle. As if the astonishing fact of existence weren’t a miracle.

The poet and scholar, Frederick Turner, puts the point this way: “It is easy to deceive ourselves that something strange, something supernatural, is happening, as we know well from accounts of flying saucer enthusiasts, superstitious cultists, and ghost hunters. But perhaps our greater danger, our greater credulity, lies in deceiving ourselves that something strange and marvelous is not happening.”

In fact, I think that the first sort of deception contributes to the second. When we begin to fool ourselves into thinking that this unusual chocolate dripping or that complex molecule is a special revelation of God, we magnify the risk of losing sight of the miraculous character of what’s always there, all around us.

As Kahlil Gibran puts it in The Prophet,

…if you would know God be not therefore a solver of
riddles.

Rather, look about you and you shall see Him playing with
your children.

And look into space; you shall see Him walking in
the clouds, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending
rain.

You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving
His hands in trees.

In this passage, Gibran isn’t trying to prove God’s existence by arguing that clouds and lightning, flowers and trees, can’t be explained in scientific terms. Rather, he’s saying that if we open ourselves up to the fullness of life and reality all around us, we’ll experience the divine moving in it all.

The quest to find God in distinctive images burned onto toasted cheese, or in biochemical systems that can’t be explained in evolutionary terms—such a quest is a distraction from the religious life as Gibran describes it. When we get caught up in such a quest, we become “solvers of riddles,” rather than children of God living in the light of God’s grace. We become so focused on finding fireworks in the night sky that we lose sight of the sky itself and the beauty of the scattered stars.

And so we forget to be grateful for the miracle of existence that surrounds us and fills us up at every moment. The constancy of the sky leads us to ignore it, and we attach our hopes and joys to the ephemeral bursts of colored sparks that splash for just a moment across our vision and are gone. The sky’s very constancy, which should magnify our gratitude, leads us instead to take it for granted.

Part of what it means to live in a spirit of gratitude is to resist this tendency. It means seeing and taking joy in the deep and abiding miracles: life; our capacity to love and to be present in the world; the spray of stars across a blue-black sky.

But there’s something else as well. As the mystic philosopher Simone Weil points out in today’s meditation, the universe is filled to the brim with everything we have ever thought to wish for. But because I don’t possess this thing at this moment, I curse the universe. I define the good as my good, and all the wonders of the universe therefore count as nothing unless I hold them in my clutches.

But I don’t need to make the universe as small as I am. I can, instead, expand myself so that my sense of self sweeps outward across the heavens, and every good that exists can be for me a source of joy. When I do that I’ve left the confines of my narrow ego and chosen instead to abide in the dwelling place of the living God (Psalm 84).

In this place, gratitude and generosity are part of the same whole. To be grateful is to feel the grace of God flowing through you. To be generous is to let it flow, unimpeded. In this place, authentic gratitude has no contact with its dark pretender, that burden of indebtedness Kahlil Gibran warns against when he tells us to “assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives.” In the dwelling place of God, generosity is a gift that makes no demands on the receiver. Gratitude is a joyous response, not the burden of reciprocal obligation. The grateful are generous, not out of duty, but because possessiveness would amount to leaving the dwelling place of God behind. It would mean a return to that lonely little universe, as tiny as a single ego.

My sermon goes on to exemplify what it means to live a human life in this spiritual space of gratitude and generosity by (no surprise here) looking at the life of Friedrich Schleiermacher. More specifically, I look at the words he spoke at the graveside of his youngest son, his beloved Nathaniel. But a discussion of that heart-wrenching sermon will have to be the subject of a later post.

Why I Believe in a Personal God

“God,” as I understand that term, names something that is not the least bit anthropomorphic but is deeply and profoundly personal. When I say that something is personal, I mean that it is both a subject and an agent. In other words, a person is a conscious self that acts.

And love cannot happen without such personhood, because love is really about a self that says YES to the other in all its otherness. To say that God’s essence is love is to say, I think, that “God” names that fundamental reality which is constantly and endlessly saying YES to all of us and everything around us. Even if such a reality is unlike anything remotely human, even if it is otherwise shrouded in a cloud of impenetrable mystery, it cannot affirm and value and care unless it is personal.

I believe in a personal God because, when I clear my mind of all my fears and frustrations and preoccupations, I can feel that YES affirming me and resounding in every particle of the universe, coming as if from the very root of it all.

The YES feels like more than just an endorsement or an attitude of approval. It is more fundamentally active than that. It is a performative YES, a YES that sustains. The YES resounds through it all as if it were the source of it all, the limitless being from which all bounded realities flow. It is the YES of the Infinite that cradles the finite, keeping it from descending back into non-existence, from being swallowed up by “the abyss in which it must inevitably sink, the ocean by whose waves it must inevitably be overwhelmed, if He who created it did not also preserve and sustain it” (to quote Karl Barth). It is, in short, a love that preserves.

The encounter with that YES is always transitory. Anxieties and the preoccupations of ordinary life flood back in, drowning it out. The dread of the abyss returns, and all that is left is the memory of a YES that, for the brief moment that it sounded clearly, was more potent than any no could ever be.

The experience of that YES could be delusional. It could be nothing but my deepest hopes projected onto the field of experience. It could just be the power of suggestion, or a side-effect of neural misfirings.

But it feels real. And I can decide to live as if it is real. For there is not a single empirical fact which precludes the reality of something like what I am experiencing—even if, as must be admitted, there are ways of elaborating on the concept of God that do clash with the empirical facts. Such elaborations must be rejected, but not the reality of that which loves from beyond the world.

Believing that my experience of a personal God is veridical doesn’t change what I would expect to observe with my ordinary senses. I wouldn’t expect the empirical world to look different were my experience authentic rather than delusional. But even if believing in the veridicality of that experience makes no difference for what I would expect the empirical world to be like, it makes an enormous practical difference for my life. When I embrace it, when I don’t explain it away but instead accept its substance—when I really come to trust that the fundamental reality in the universe is saying YES to me and everything that is, treasuring and sustaining it all, I find myself saying YES so much more.

And this means that my capacity for joy and gratitude expands, and it means that my capacity for love expands. I live, not in an indifferent universe of blind mechanism and chance, but in a universe that says YES. So long as I can sustain the hope that this is true, I find that I can love more fully and richly, without the usual limitations and conditions. In a universe where that YES is the fundamental truth, to join in the joyous affirmation is to be in tune with the voice of God.

The Parable of the Spaceship

Imagine that you abruptly wake up to find yourself on an enormous spaceship. Earth appears through one of the viewports as a diminishing globe—only less blue than it looks in the photos you’ve seen, as if you’re looking at it through a brownish film. You have no idea how you got here. You begin to explore, opening doors at random. You find a kitchen, an exercise room, several bedrooms, and other rooms with strange equipment. Some doors are locked.

As you explore, you begin to meet others who, like yourself, have no memory of how they got here. The first people you meet are a middle-aged woman named Jane, who reminds you of your favorite aunt, and a young man named Paul. Together you follow the sound of voices to what looks almost like a classroom. A dozen people have gathered there. You join them. More people trickle in, until your numbers swell to about fifty.

Eventually, several groups of intrepid explorers head off to see if they can learn more. Your own explorations are interrupted by a scream. Following the sound, you find a smashed-in door leading to a deep shaft. At the bottom is Paul, his neck obviously broken.

Having no way to reach him, you gather in the classroom with others who were close enough to hear the scream, and you await the return of the rest. After a time, one of them—whom you’ve learned is a college student named Joe—returns. He says he’s done a complete circuit of every level and found nobody else, certain nothing like a crew. “If there are space aliens flying this thing, they’re hiding behind the locked doors.”

But then, a few minutes later, Jane returns, full of excitement. “I’ve met them!” she announces. People gather around. “Well, I didn’t actually see them. It’s like they exist in another dimension. But they were able to…talk to me…sort of. What they did was make pictures in my head. From what I could gather, there’s been some kind of catastrophe. A nuclear war, maybe. I think the aliens were studying Earth when it happened and decided to save as many of us as they could. There are dozens of ships, and they…beamed us up. I guess the process is disorienting. Wipes your short-term memory. Anyway, we’re being transported to a new home. They’ve used their technology to make the ship as comfortable as they could. But some doors are locked for our safety. We shouldn’t try to go in them.” Jane pauses and shrugs. “That’s it. And I’m not sure I got it all right. It was weird, all these pictures in my head.”

Her story elicits considerable heated discussion. Jane is shocked to hear about Paul’s fate, but takes it as evidence that her visions were honest. Someone points out that her experience sounds suspiciously like hallucinating. Someone else asks if she’s ever taken LSD, which elicits a few chuckles. Jane looks away, turning red, but doesn’t answer.

More explorers return without much to report. And then a frazzled young man, Chris, stumbles in. His story is similar to Jane’s, but with important differences. “They were getting in my head, man. Putting pictures there. Forcing me to see stuff I didn’t want to see. It’s like, I saw explosions, all over the planet. And then their ships were swooping down and suckin’ people up with beams of light. They destroyed the planet, man. Alien invasion! And now they’ve snagged a few of us and they’re taking us to some other place. We’re gonna be zoo exhibits.”

Jane shakes her head. “No, no. You’ve misunderstood.”

“This is nuts,” says Steve, a chemistry professor. “Space aliens? I doubt it. This is some kind of experiment. Someone perfectly human has built this thing to test our psychological reactions or something. These…visions…are probably some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”

As hours stretch into days, people stake out bedrooms and establish routines. Steve leads a cadre of “investigators” in a systematic exploration of the ship. They map and describe it, and eventually call a meeting where they report their discoveries. One significant discovery is a room where they can regulate the ship’s temperature, humidity, and light levels. They also note that some of the unlocked rooms contain dangerous machines. “Joe nearly got electrocuted,” Steve explains. “And the nearest kitchen is running low on food. We’re gonna need to find some other food source pretty soon.”

“But what does it mean?” you ask. “Why are we here? Are we zoo specimens taken by hostile aliens, or refugees rescued by friendly ones? Or lab rats in some experiment?”

Joe shrugs. “Who knows? All we can do is describe what this place is like. If you want to know what it all means, ask the mystics over there.” He points to Jane and Chris.

“The mystics are idiots,” Steve snaps. “If we’re gonna survive we need to figure this out.”

“Maybe we can’t,” says Jane.

“Yes, we can. There’s a perfectly…human explanation for all this. We just need more information. We need to break down those locked doors.’”

“No way, man!” Chris rises to his feet, looking fierce.

“Chris is right,” says Jane. “They’re locked for our safety.”

“So says mystic Jane.”

“But remember what happened the first day. That young man who broke his neck.”

“Paul was a reckless idiot. We’ll be careful. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”

“I’ve told you what’s going on. They talked to me.”

“Convenient that they only talked to you.”

“Chris, too. Maybe only some minds are receptive.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Let’s suppose they did communicate with you. Some kind of woo-woo ESP. Why should we trust them? They sucked us from our homes.”

“To save our lives.”

“So says mystic Jane. Mystic Chris has a different interpretation, as I recall.”

“If we need more information,” Jane says, “let’s try to communicate with them again. I was in that room with all the pillows—the meditation room—when they first contacted me. Let’s go back there, try talking to them.”

“A waste of time,” Steve huffs. “If they exist at all, they obviously can’t or won’t do more than put pictures in the heads of a couple of screwballs.”

Jane sighs in frustration. “It’s hard to understand them, but I think they exhausted their ability to affect our dimension when they altered the ship to make it suitable for us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping. They can still get the ship to its destination. The drive systems operate in both their dimension and ours.”

“How convenient.” Joe shakes his head. “If you’re right, they might as well not exist as far as life on this ship is concerned. If we’re going to deal with that, we need to help ourselves. Let’s figure out how the ship works, what the dangers are, how to control them. I’m with Steve. We gotta start breaking down doors.”

“They’ll kill us, man,” Chris says. “Just like they took out Paul. You start going where they don’t want us to go, they’ll get mad. They’ll blast us. Not just you. These bastards are nasty. They’ll take it out on all of us.”

“Yeah, right,” says Steve.

“I’m serious, man. We gotta keep these buggers happy. We’re in their power. You start opening doors, I’m gonna have to stop you, man.”

“Just try it.” Steve looks around the room. “Who’s with me?” he says again.

And now, finally, the moment is here. You have to decide what to do. Do you join Steve and start breaking down doors? Do you join Jane in the meditation room? Do you join Chris in trying to stop Steve? Do you decide to ignore all of them and head to the kitchen for some soup?

Let’s suppose you like Jane. She seems a decent person, and her story of what is happening is certainly more attractive than Chris’s. If she’s right, then going to the meditation room with her might uncover some new insight. And so you decide to go, in the hope that her story is on the right track, that there are benevolent aliens guiding the ship, aliens you can trust.

Suppose you go with Jane. Suppose that while you’re sitting in the meditation room, silently asking for the aliens to speak to you, you experience a momentary glimmer of something. It feels like someone is there, except that you can’t see or hear anything. Jane, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “They’re talking!” she says. “They’re worried about Steve and Chris. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

The feeling you have might just be the power of suggestion. Jane might be hallucinating. For all you know, Steve might be right about things, or Chris. There’s no evidence that clearly speaks one way or the other. But you’ve sensed something. You trusted Jane enough to follow her to the meditation room, and it produced what felt like contact with someone. You could shrug and walk away. Go get soup. Maybe Jane’s delusion is just rubbing off on you. But you hope otherwise.

You turn to Jane. “What’s it like? Talking to them?”

“Wonderful,” she says. “They want to know us, to be our friends. And it makes it so much better, knowing they’re there and mean us well. You know? It’s all so frightening, otherwise.” She sighs. “Do you hear them at all?”

“I thought, maybe, a little.”

She smiles. “It’s a start. Keep listening for them. In the meantime, just know you can trust them.”

Let’s suppose you do just as she says. Suppose that you orient your life aboard ship in terms of Jane’s teachings, in the hope that she’s right. You decide, out of hope, to live as if her teachings are true. But since her teachings are about benevolent aliens who are looking out for the denizens of the ship, orienting your life in terms of those teachings means trusting the aliens Jane says are there.

And this means rejecting Chris’ claims about nasty aliens that need to be appeased on pain of retaliation. While it doesn’t mean blocking Steve and his group from finding out what they can about the ship, and while it certainly doesn't mean rejecting their findings, it might mean taking seriously the idea that the locked doors are locked for a good reason. But mostly, it means two things: continuing the practice of listening for their voices in the hope that a relationship with them will be possible, and finding some comfort in the promise that the ship is taking you, in the end, to a safe harbor.

And here is the question: Could a morally decent, reasonable person follow this path? If you apply the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to this parable, the answer would seem to be no. After all, Jane is training people to believe beyond the evidence, and therefore priming them to become followers of Chris and his extremism. Right?

Or have Dawkins and Harris missed something important?