When major premises and minor premises in a deductive argument are true, then the conclusion logically and necessarily follows.
“Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.” Alfred North Whitehead[1]
by Jonas E. Alexis
Last
March, a good friend of mine asked me if I would like to go with him to
see a Canadian friend of his who was at one of the hospitals in the
Seoul area. He said,“He used to teach at [such and such university], and he’s an atheist.[2] He also seems to be pretty well versed in philosophy. I thought you would be interested in hearing him. What do you think?”
I responded, “Sure. When shall we go?” “This evening,” he said. “Can you make it?” “This evening? Hmmm…All right. This evening it will be.”
I got into his car around six in the evening and we headed to the southern part of Seoul. Rush hour, as we all know, is never a pleasant thing. And if you have ever driven to places like Atlanta during rush hour, you know what I mean.
But Nero (not his real name) and I drove for about an hour and half and got to our final destination. We checked in and went right to the room where his Canadian friend (Marcus, not his real name) was laying in bed.
After we’ve exchanged greetings, Marcus began to tell us about his alcohol problem. “I drank so much over the past few days that I almost killed myself,” he said.
“In fact,” he continued, “I was pretty lucky that I actually made it to this hospital. I lost my job at the university because my boss, though he realized that I was a good teacher, could not keep me there. I just don’t know what to do.”
Nero and I listened patiently to what Marcus had to say and stayed silent for about two minutes. Then a serious conversation ensued.
“I’ve also heard that you’re an atheist,” I said. “How do you think an atheist should handle a situation like that? I’m sure atheists should have reasonable solutions to such a serious problem. As Peter Adkins of Oxford has relentlessly argued, science has an answer to everything. Should there be a philosophical or scientific answer to this? Or is there an atheist answer at all? What do you think?”
Marcus got up from his bed, sat up straight, and began to reproduce the typical atheist argument in a calmly and thorough manner. He was a very knowledgeable man and seemed to have a full grasp of what he was saying.
I was quite happy to hear Marcus because he understands deductive arguments, which is to say that he understands that when the premises in an argument are true, then the conclusion logically and necessarily follows. Here is a typical example:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
If the first two premises are true, then by necessity the conclusion
has to be true. This is what is called a sound argument. Here is another
sound argument:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Once again, if the first two premises turn out to be true, one cannot escape the conclusion that the universe has a cause.Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in order to rescue himself and other fellow atheists from this inevitable conclusion, magically summoned a proposition that is far less plausible than the obvious: the universe created itself!
Dennett declares in Breaking the Spell that the universe “creates itself ex nihilo,” and that, he believes, is “the ultimate bootstrapping trick.”[3]
Quite frankly, it is a bootstrapping trick, and Dennett gets stuck on that trick because he wants the origin of this “self-creation” to be “non-miraculous”—with no supernatural intervention at all.
Unfortunately, Stephen Hawking ascribes to that “ultimate bootstrapping trick,” saying philosophical (not scientific) things like M-theory or multiverse “predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.”[4]
Going back to Marcus, I also was excited to hear him because I didn’t have to define terms precisely because he was already familiar with them.In the end, Marcus concluded that life is meaningless, that there is no ultimate and metaphysical purpose, and that once this life is over, that is all.
Marcus also made reference to the writings of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russell, among others. In fact, it was Dawkins who declared in his widely read book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life:
“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference…DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we just dance to its music.”[5]
In a slightly similar tone, Bertrand Russell wrote,
“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
“Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”[6]
Jacques Monod likewise attributed our existence to chance and necessity. He asserted:“[Man] is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged by chance… Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, [is] at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution.”[7]
Realizing that discussing the illogical leaps and incoherent systems of these people would take a long evening, I cut to the chase and asked Marcus on a personal level, “Why are you at the hospital? “What do you mean?,” he responded.
“Well, I have been listening to you very carefully and have been fascinated by your response. You’ve just told me that life is ultimately meaningless but you are trying to save your life by coming to this hospital and get some help. Aren’t you implicitly saying that your life has meaning and isn’t that an implicit contradiction?
“Aren’t you subtly trying to find meaning when your own philosophical worldview tells you that there is no ultimate meaning? If you really believe that your worldview is correct, why did you call your friend Nero and ask for advice? Sorry for being too blunt, but why couldn’t you have the courage to say something like, ‘I’m done with life and I’m out of this world’?”
At that point, Marcus lay back on his bed for the second time and tried to gather his thoughts and come up with an answer. After a few seconds, he scratched his forehead and declared, “Well, I didn’t want to die that way.”
“In what way,” I said. “I didn’t want to die in a way that is not honorable,” he responded. “I think dying in such a horrible way is bad.”
That was too good to be true. I responded, “There is an honorable way and a bad way to die now? Does your view even allow that possibility? If so, what are the criteria?
“Let me try to put it another way. When you say that this is ‘bad,’ you are indirectly or implicitly saying that there is such a thing as good. And when you grant that premise, you are also saying that there is such a thing as a moral law by which to differentiate good and bad things. Now, are you seriously saying that the moral law is just there and does not require a moral law giver?”
Friedrich Nietzsche
After a moment of silence, I continued, “Have you read Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea?” “No, I have not,” he said. “I think you should,” I moved on to say.
“If you want to seriously understand the metaphysics of atheism, people like Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Adkins, are not that significant or intellectually sound and logically consistent, though their writings have spread like wild fire in the popular culture.[8] You’ve got to read the people who took the premise of atheism to its logical conclusions. You’ve got to read people like Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, etc.
“Camus for example articulated the view that if there is no good, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’[9] Sartre ontologically theorized that ‘Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.’ Just in passing, if we take this idea seriously, there is no way to judge criminal behaviors such as Stalin’s war of extermination.”[10]
But Sartre was cognizant enough to see the logic of his argument. In fact, he made it quite clear in Existentialism and Human Emotion that if ‘If God does not exist,” if he “is a useless and costly hypothesis,” then “we have to face all the consequences of this.”[11] What are some of the consequences? Well, listen to Sartre very carefully here:
“The existentialist thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it.Nietzsche would have completely agreed with Sartre here. In fact, once God is abandoned, says Nietzsche, truth can become a lie. Nietzsche wrote:
“Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevski said, ‘If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.’
That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.”[12]
“To be truthful means using the customary metaphor—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.”[13]
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“In the book, Sartre tells a story about a man who is trying to contemplate life’s ultimate question and examine his own psyche. The man eventually deduced that the world of meaning and value is an illusion. Surely this cannot be true.
“If the world of meaning and value is an illusion, then the sentence itself or even the person positing the assertion is an illusion, which inevitably leads to the conclusion that one should not pay too much attention to that person. If the sentence has meaning and value, then at least some things have meaning and value.
“You see, Sartre was well aware of this implication, and later philosophers such as Bryan Magee indirectly argued that Sartre’s argument would not work in the real world.[14] That is why the main character in Nausea (who turned out to be Sartre himself) became sick because he knew that, taken to its logical conclusion, the worldview he was positing has the potential to create moral chaos. Wouldn’t you agree?
I added, “You know the problem with modern atheists is that they don’t have enough guts like Friedrich Nietzsche and Sartre. I appreciate Nietzsche’s honesty because he understood that if metaphysical Logos is out of the equation, then we are in deep trouble.”
“I see your point,” he said. “So, what do you think? Is there is an ultimate meaning and value and does life matter?” “I think there is an ultimate meaning and value and life certainly matters, my friend,” I responded.
“Now, if you want to follow people like Russell, you need to stick your head out and see where their philosophies logically lead them.”“If life doesn’t have meaning and value, then you wouldn’t come to the hospital. Life indeed has meaning, despite the fact that sometimes the meaning of life seems to be buried beneath the avalanche of evil and wickedness.Friedrich Hegel
“But as Friedrich Hegel correctly argues, there is a logic in history and this logic seems to be guided by Divine providence.
“If the Creator exists and is real, as I believe, then evil will one day be defeated forever. J. R. R. Tolkien, in an indirect way, proves this point in his massive work. To the carnal mind, this is implausible, most specifically when evil seems to have no boundary, when the West seems to abandon much of its moral and intellectual caliber.
“You know very well that you and I are not ‘useless passion’ [Sartre’s own words[15]]. You know very well that you are not just ‘the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules [Francis Crick’s own words[16]].
“You know very well that you have value, and to be quite frank, you know very well that there is a Creator because the moral law within you points to that direction, [as Emmanuel Kant put it[17]].
After much soul-searching, Russell in particular declared,
Thomas Nagel
Russell’s own daughter, after years of examining her father’s own philosophical and practical life, eventually left the atheist village. In a similar vein, Thomas Hobbes declared right before he died, “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.”[19]
How did he know it was dark when he has never been to the other side?
As if he was agreeing with Russell, H. G. Wells declared,
“To a watcher in some remote entirely alien cosmos, if we may assume that impossibility, it might well seem that extinction is coming to man like a brutal thunderclap of Halt!…We may be spinning more and more swiftly into the vortex of extinction, but we do not apprehend as much…
“‘A harsh queerness is coming over things and rushes past what we have hitherto been wont to consider the definite limits of hard fact. Hard fact runs away from analysis and does not return.’”[20]
Marcus caught me by surprise when he said during the latter part of our conversation,
“Do I have to give up my James Bond life if I happen to become a Christian?”
I frankly did not expect to hear that at all. I was really stunned and did not know what to say for a while. I began to mentally flip through the pages of Huxley’s Ends in Means, where he unequivocally said,
“For myself, as for no doubt most of my contemporaries, the essence of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation…We objected to morality because it interferes with our sexual freedom.”[21]
I also was cognitively trying to process what other writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Jean Paul Sartre, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Guy the Maupassant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, H. G. Wells, Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russell, Gore Vidal, have said or practiced.[22]
I also quickly thought about what Thomas Nagel of New York University has said in print. He declared explicitly that
“I want atheism to be true….It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I’m right about my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”[23]
I told Marcus, “Do you think Christianity is against sex? I mean, don’t you think that my mom and dad had to get together at some point and had sex?”
He was a little bit surprised by that response, but I proceeded to say,
“We are not against sex. We are against the perversion of it because it ultimately leads to moral degradation and sometimes to incurable diseases. Here is a question that you have to answer yourself: do you think a James Bond life is what you want to pursue all your life? Don’t you think that you are still wasting your time like Russell?”Marcus was indeed a gentleman and did not ridicule or smear or even laugh about some of the issues I raised. It was a cordial exchange of ideas and we both certainly appreciated the discussion. We exchanged addresses and said goodbye.
[1] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 7.
[2] He gave me the name of the famous university but I would not mention it here.
[3] Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Vikings, 2006), 244.
[4] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), 8.
[5] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 133.
[6] Bertrand Russell, Mystery and Logic and Other Essays (CreateSpace, 2012), 23.
[7] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 112-13.
[8] Dawkins, like Russell before him, has recently recanted his militant atheist stand and has adopted a more modest position known as agnosticism. That indeed is interesting because Dawkins made millions of dollars convincing the unsophisticated and the gullible that God is a delusion, but now he backs down. Dawkins’ argument has gotten so bad over the years that E. O. Wilson has called him a “journalist.” What will be the fate of those who built their entire faith on the doctrine of Richard Dawkins? As Eleanor Robertson of the Guardian put it last July, “it’s hard for me to understand why anyone continues to listen to him about anything… If you need an atheist, there are many philosophers, scholars of religion, and public intellectuals available who don’t refuse to acknowledge the existence of theology.”
[9] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Random House, 1955), 3.
[10] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotion (New York: Kensington Publishing, 1985), 18.
[11] Ibid., 21.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 47.
[14] Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy (New York: DK Publishing, 2001), 1.
[15] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 615.
[16] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 33.
[17] Kant said, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more oftener and the more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Classic Books International, 2010), 163.
[18] Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (New York: Routledge, 2009), 318.
[19] Quoted in Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy: A Concise Introduction to the World’s Greatest
Thinkers and Their Ideas (New York: DK Publishing, 2001), 81.
[20] H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of its Tether (New York: Didier Publishers, 1994), 8.
[21] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatoo & Windus, 1046), 273.
[22] I have pursued this issue in Christianity & Rabbinic Judaism, Vol. I (Bloomington: WestBow Press, 2010), chapter 0.2.
[23] Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/01/the-inner-logic-of-atheism/
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