Godlessness is Not a Virtue

Part I

This will be the first of several essays intended to explore questions of atheism and belief in the Western World circa 2023.  This will be mostly about Christianity, because that’s what I’m familiar with, but I’m sure much of it applies elsewhere.  I’m treating this as an introduction to help organize my thoughts, so be patient.  Don’t tune out if you don’t give a shit about religion.  That’s actually the point. 

April 15, 2023

This week is Holy Week in the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church.  Yes, that means Easter, also known as Pascha, will be celebrated a week later than the Catholic and Protestant Easter this year.  This discrepancy is the result of a historical quirk, specifically the use of different calendars to calculate the moveable feast of Easter, as well as the Orthodox insistence that Pascha take place after the Jewish Passover. This adds some personality to the vast multi-ethnic world of Christendom.  Next year Orthodox Easter will be a full month later, which is more opportunity for the Greeks to roast an entire lamb outdoors in the May sun. 

I was raised in a Christian household.  Growing up, every Sunday my brother and I went to church with our mother and grandmother, always to the same Russian Orthodox church in Brooklyn.  My brother and I were both altar boys for well over a decade.  If you have ever been to a Russian Orthodox church, or watched the movie The Deer Hunter, you would know that it is an aesthetic experience as much as a religious ritual.  The choir sings in minor keys in an ancient language that no one understands.  As a strategy to bring people closer to the divine, it frankly makes a lot of sense.    

Going to church as a child does not in and of itself instill faith, but it does provide opportunity for spiritual reflection.  When I was really young, I thought the priest, Father Igor, was actually God.  I learned later in life that this was not the case.  A good man, sure, but omniscient and omnipotent, apparently not.  This is just how a little kid processes the concept of a supreme being taught in a setting where one guy is the center of the action.  I also remember as a child performing the mental exercise of imagining that there was Nothing.  Not just that I did not exist, that’s an easy concept to grasp because we all experience some version of non-being when we fall asleep.  But no, the exercise here is to imagine that there was Nothing.  No Earth, no universe.  No nothing.  Just Nothing.  Close your eyes and try it.  When I did this as a kid, and when I do it now, you reach a moment of minor terror before snapping back into reality.  The human mind cannot contemplate it.  No land?  No water? No Earth?  No Lucky Charms?  Inconceivable. 

Each year we would also experience the rhythms of the church calendar, culminating in Great Lent, Holy Week, and Easter.   During the final week, we would go to church multiple times, most memorably on Holy Thursday, the reading of the twelve Gospels detailing the crucifixion, told in darkness, the Good Friday procession around the church carrying the Plashchanitsa (in Russian) or the Epitaphios (in Greek), midnight service on Saturday into Sunday, which from darkness sees one flicker of candlelight passed from person to person until the whole church community is illuminated, erupting in a celebration.  Christos Voskrese!  Christos Anesti!  Christ is Risen! 

During this week, we would also be sure to watch the hit NBC miniseries Jesus of Nazareth whenever it was broadcast.  It might be the most accessible and reliable way to experience your faith in the context of the underlying story.  I re-watched it last year and the story, and the movie, hold up.  Go watch it, it’s got Al Swearengen from Deadwood (also in Hot Rod) and even Ernest Borgnine, for Christ’s sake.   

If you are like most people, as you grow up and mature into an adult, your belief system is often in a state of flux, from doubt to belief to neutral disengagement, and back to the beginning.  We are human after all.  But going to church growing up did provide a hearty spiritual foundation.  A place for me to return if need be.  And, truth be told, need be.        

Because let’s be honest. Modern life in America does not afford many opportunities for genuine engagement on religious or theological issues.  I’m almost 50, but I can imagine what it must be like for our kids’ generation.  I’m not talking about the coffee hour after church, which is a safe space for such dialogue.  In 2023, if you are in neutral polite company and mention in any serious way God, the divine, basically anything that is not subject to empirical confirmation, most people tend to tune out.  If you bring anything smelling of theology, even into adjacent philosophical topics like ethics or epistemology, whatever you want to say is often either ignored or materially discounted.  Some people can be openly dismissive. 

In fact, even among the previously faithful, any attempt to get at a deeper dialogue about the mysteries that underlie existence is generally not a topic of polite conversation.  (As an aside, one reliable exception to this has been my orthodox Jewish friends and colleagues, who tend to be much more comfortable having grown-up conversations about these things, and also about taking off from work on holy days.  It’s the Sabbath, don’t call me.  Much respect.)  To me, this antipathy towards faith seems to be endemic to this particular moment in history.  It is a state of mind that is characterized by unmerited hubris and massive blind spots, peppered with an array of oft-repeated misconceptions.   

First, the misconceptions.  Here are some of the most repeated arguments against God and religion that I’ve heard in my adult life, which positions have been taken by many smart people that I respect.  The arguments all have some validity, but I have humbly provided a response to each. 

1. “Religion has been responsible for a disproportionate share of bloodshed throughout history.”  I’ve often heard this articulated as the hyperbolic “religion is responsible for more bloodshed than anything else in history.”  And there’s always some third person nodding along vigorously in agreement.  It is true that the history of Western Civilization holds many examples of religious wars (the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, Balkan strife – pick your century), as well as atrocities carried out in the name of religion (the Inquisition, the massacre of the Huguenots).  Putting aside the fact that the cause of each of these episodes can partially be attributed to non-religious causes, like ethnic tribalism or good old fashioned geopolitical power concerns, even if you accept that these were religious events first and foremost, the main argument is still—sorry to say—mostly bullshit.  How do I know it’s bullshit?  See Century, the Twentieth.  Yes, the period of history that saw the worst level of indiscriminate murder, both on the battlefield and the systematized killing of civilians, as well as torture, starvation, and you-name-it forms of human misery and debasement, took place largely in the absence of religious cause or even identification.  If you think for two seconds about the worst of the worst, about Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union (ideological, overtly areligious), Hitler and the Nazis (driven by ethnic and national mythology), World War I, World War II, Japan’s atrocities pre-war, China’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, they all took place in a realm far outside of what we would ever regard as God-fearing.  To paraphrase Professor David Berlinski, a non-religious Jew and one of the most outspoken commentators on atheism, the purveyors of 20th Century horrors, “all thought God wasn’t watching.”

   (It should be noted that the level of wrongness of the initial statement is so profound that it presents the possibility of the opposite position actually being true, namely that the greatest atrocities in human history have taken place in the absence of Judeo-Christian belief.  If that’s too far to go right now, fine, we can stop, but it’s at least something to consider.)     

         

2. “I’m not going to believe in some imaginary magical man in the sky who blah blah blah controls everything and who blah blah blah reads my mind.”   This is par for the course among anyone trying to make a point about how silly it is to be God-fearing.  Many smart people, including public intellectuals and comedians (even some good ones like Bill Maher and Ricky Gervais), use some version of this rhetorical technique.  They present a simplified version of religion that very few religious people even adhere to, and THAT is the version of religion that they mock.  The sister argument is to point to the worst and most extreme fundamentalists, the Islamic jihadists, the Christians who believe the world is 6000 years old, the Methodists (I’m not sure whether I’ve ever met a Methodist and don’t know what they believe, but I needed a third example), and say “see what religion does?  It poisons society and thought,” suggesting that if everyone took one’s religion to its logical conclusion, they would all adhere to those same extreme fundamentalist views.  It also gratuitously lumps together Islamic extremism, which obviously has caused a lot of problems in the world in recent decades, with every other religion, just to make a point about extremism.  The idea that there is no difference in kind between the likes of the Isis and moderate adherents to a faith, any faith, is laughable. This is a favorite tactic of the late Christopher Hitchens, who for all his brilliance apparently believes with a straight face that human beings would be a-okay if not for those all those nasty superstitions.  Have you ever met a human being, Chris?    The lesson here is that you shouldn’t concede the floor to the godless to explain what it means to be religious.     

    

3. “Religious institutions have all proven themselves to be hopelessly corrupt, if not outright criminal enterprises.”  Agreed.  Like all other human institutions, religious institutions have all proven themselves to be hopelessly corrupt, if not outright criminal enterprises.  The leadership of the Catholic Church covered up, and thus facilitated, the systematic abuse of children for decades, much to the chagrin of many Catholics.  Evangelical Christian churches in America have made the cynical political calculation to support the most corrupt and un-Christian Republican politician in our lifetime to secure influence and wage culture war issues from a position of power, much to the chagrin of many Evangelical Christians. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch has supported Russia’s war in the Ukraine. (The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has not.)   

   Of course, however, we rarely express the same degree of contempt for all the other institutions that naturally and inevitably fall short of our moral expectations.  The trappings of power and wealth are endemic to the human condition, after all.  How about the government? Political leadership?  Political parties?  A lot of people nowadays swear fealty to these institutions, but have you ever run into someone who actually wanted to be a politician?  Who wasn’t a sociopath, I mean.  Even charitable organizations will mostly disappoint.  Corporations?  Are you kidding?  Each of these is more inherently immoral than the next, in the last case, the corporation, by legal design.  Talk about a double standard.  Why are religious institutions held to a different standard than every other human institution, all of which are fundamentally flawed, corrupt, and prone to error?  Is it the perceived hypocrisy?

   If only there was a philosophy that recognized that human beings are at core hopelessly corrupt, because that’s a movement I would join in a heartbeat.  Oh, wait, that’s right, that insight is at the core of the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.       

    

4. “We don’t need religion anymore, because we now have Science, which has proven to be an infinitely more effective way of determining what is true.”   Stated another way, “we have moved past the superstition of religion and now rely on measurable, empirical reality as the foundation for truth.”  This is not necessarily wrong, as the intellectual shift that inspired the Scientific Revolution and later the Enlightenment has indeed transformed the world in ways we can scarcely overestimate.  However, the above statements have some real blind spots.  

It might be helpful here to briefly recount the last few hundred years of intellectual history in the West, just to orient ourselves.  Up until about the year 1600, knowledge was largely derived from authority.  The approach was an uneasy synthesis of Aristotelian logic and Christian theology, as developed by Christian Scholastic thinkers throughout the Middle Ages.  You believed something to be true because it was shown to be true by logical proof, but always starting with a set of facts that was already presumed to be true.  This world view held that there was an imperfect Earth at the center of reality, surrounded by perfect celestial heavens, all part of God’s creation. 

Over the course of the next two centuries, this world view dramatically changed.  Francis Bacon proposed a new route to knowledge, namely that, by observation of empirical nature, man could derive laws through inductive reasoning, which laws could then be confirmed by experiment.  Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler took this approach one after the other and directed it at the observable heavenly bodies, which culminated in Isaac Newton using these insights to explain it all with mathematical formulas. 

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night.  God said, ‘Let Newton be,’ and all was light. - Alexander Pope.

Newton, the undisputed G.O.A.T. when it comes to Science, used this new approach to knowledge, as well as the empirical observations of the thinkers before him, to provide mathematical proofs of the one-ness of the universe and mechanical laws that would govern all nature, both celestial bodies and objects on Earth.  The discovery of these laws not only brought all of reality under the auspices of the same natural physical laws, but bestowed upon humans immense power, such power being built upon the newly discovered ability to predict and harness physical phenomenon. 

Here is the important part for purposes of this discussion.  Newton did not see this revolution in knowledge as diminishing the role of God.  Quite the contrary.  He saw the observable perfection of nature as proof of God.  He even openly wondered why, if the universe is governed by laws of gravity whereby all objects in the universe attract all other objects in the universe, the universe does not collapse in on itself.  His answer was simple: because God intentionally placed all objects in the universe in such a manner as to prevent complete gravitational collapse, a proof of a universe designed with divine wisdom. 

What a fucking moron!

If a scientist today said such a thing, he would be laughed out of the faculty cafeteria, or the lab cafeteria, or the cafeteria at the satanic orgy.  Scientists today will tell you that the chances of a universe spontaneously generating and sustaining something called Life are preposterously small, one in trillions, but instead of sitting back and calling it a miracle, instead of marveling that the universe might have been created that way on purpose, they run down ridiculous rabbit holes and postulate that there must be an infinite number of universes, and therefore spawn shitty Oscar-winning movies where nothing means anything because there are infinite versions of you and who cares whether you live or die in this movie or this universe. 

Newton, one of the smartest humans ever to walk the Earth, saw no conflict between religious reverence for God, the Creator of the Universe, and the continued efforts to derive laws of nature from empirical reality.  As far as I’m aware, modern science since Newton, including Einstein and his ilk, has done nothing to actually call into question Newton’s intuition that religion and science were perfectly compatible. They have simply resigned by rule (and maybe some coercion by polite society) to keep them as far away as possible so as to preserve the myth that this search for truth is a zero-sum game.  

The notion that Science and religion are not necessarily in conflict is sometimes hard for people to accept, especially given the preeminence one has over the other in our esteem and imagination.  There is widespread assumption that Science just kept figuring more and more things out, with each discovery incrementally disproving the existence of any divine creator, plan, or design, so much so that it was no longer worth discussing it anymore.  Science had won.  This belief is predicated largely on the absence of serious discussion about religious or other non-material topics, not on those things being somehow disproved. Consider, for example, that one of the most noteworthy scientific discoveries of the last hundred years was that the universe was seemingly created from a singularity in one instantaneous moment of creation, often referred to by scientists as the Big Bang.  One instantaneous moment of creation from Nothing.  Hmmm.  Where have I read something like that before?  #Fuckouttahere.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Science, love it, but the idea that Science has it all figured out is so overstated that on the spectrum of what we know versus what we don’t know, it may be more lie than truth.  And, by the way, I’ll tell you what else Science doesn’t deliver.  The Cathedral of Notre Dame, Sacré-Coeur, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Hagia Sophia, La Sagrada Família, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, half of the Louvre, the Met, Prado.   But hey, nice job on Tik Tok and aspirin.  Fuck you, Science.    

Now that the civility of this discussion has devolved into name-calling, and that last part was obviously a joke, this might be a good time to take stock. The point of refuting each of these arguments is simply to eliminate weak reasons to be godless before tackling issues of faith in a fair fight.  If you’re going to be godless, you might as well stake your position on solid ground, not because some lame, rhetorical, and ahistorical excuses happen to ring true.  To this point, there is no doubt that many people have rejected the concept of God because they thought deeply about the world and their place in it and came to the conclusion that there is nothing else, that they are alone in the universe, and are willing to live with the ramifications of that mindset.  I generally respect that.  This essay is really not directed at them, because – and here’s the main point – I suspect many of those people would rather it not be that way.  To me, they are not godless at all.  In fact, in my experience people who arrive at doubt in earnest tend to swing back to faith in earnest.  But to those who relish in trying to admonish and tempt the God-fearing with the likes of the above, go proselytize somewhere else.   

5. “How can I believe in a God when there is such evil and misery in the world?  How can a perfect and good God be responsible for, and even oversee, a world with so much injustice and despair?”  Of all of the criticisms of belief, this is the hardest one to refute, and has always been the hardest one to refute, especially for people who arrive at that conclusion after experiencing something devastating in their lives. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, a Christian who grappled with doubt openly in his later works, famously presented this question through Ivan Karamazov, one of the Brothers Karamazov, in the context of the problem that tormented him – in God’s creation, why are children made to suffer?  Ivan recounts the torments and tortures of children throughout history and defiantly rejects God and his creation because they offer little hope of justice on Earth for such crimes.  Human history is filled with miseries and torments, miseries and torments that are directly tied to man’s weak and sinful nature, and Christ’s example lies hanging out there like a cruel joke, a model that mankind cannot, and does not want to, emulate.  If you want real, Big-Boy arguments against God, written by an author in the throes of doubt, by a God-fearing, flawed human, you don’t need Hitchens’ tricks, just see Karamazov, The Brothers.     

The challenge posed by this question is a profound one, and one that usually requires more faith than reasoning to appropriately address.  The question itself is both the bane of religious belief and the reason we have religion in the first place. In moments when your brain turns against you, like your immune system attacking a newly donated organ, it sometimes makes sense to extricate yourself from the logical holes and just go back to the original material—here the biblical story of Jesus and what it means.  Don’t tune out, because there’s an important point here. 

When one reads the Gospels (or watches the Cliffs notes version, Jesus of Nazareth, starring Sir Laurence Olivier, Michael York, James Mason, and the Great Ernest Borgnine), I am struck by the struggles of faith of all the characters, the Apostles (notably Peter), obviously, but even Jesus Himself.  These are not religious fundamentalists by nature.  These are people consumed with doubt and fear as they encounter seemingly divine events.  They are relatable human beings, in the text and on the screen.  The story initially ends with the crucifixion of an innocent man, one that even the most ardent disbelievers would acknowledge probably happened, as in, it is part of the historical record.  To register the snide criticisms of people who generate their arguments without any regard for or experience with the source material is something of a waste of time. 

The Christian faith realizes through the story of Christ, most notably Christ’s resurrection, a reconciliation between God and humankind, a story of a divine being who created miserable, weak, and depraved creatures, yet loves them even in their sin, and offers them the possibility of redemption.  After almost five decades, the contours of this story still ring true to me, and I know that even in the second half of my life, I will continue to return to this again and again, with some struggle and doubt sprinkled throughout. 

When in doubt, I know I can return to the same place where it started.  I will close my eyes and listen to the choir chanting in minor keys, in a language I don’t understand, but I nonetheless hear the words and understand them completely.