A Manual for Creating Atheists (23 page)

PB
: So, can we agree that when it comes to my wife, or to flicking a light switch, we don’t need faith?

(Long pause)

KP
: Yeah, I guess so.

PB
: Cool. So we now need to extend this further and talk about why we don’t need—shouldn’t have—faith at all. Faith, just say no.

(Laughter)

DIG DEEPER

Books

Christopher Hitchens,
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
(Hitchens, 1995)

Christopher Hitchens,
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
(Hitchens, 2007)

Victor Stenger,
The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us
(Stenger, 2011)

Victor Stenger,
God and the Atom
(Stenger, 2013)

Phil Zuckerman,
Why Are Danes and Swedes So Irreligious
? (Zuckerman, 2009)

Video

“Is God Necessary for Morality?” William Lane Craig versus (American philosopher) Shelly Kagan Debate,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en&client=mv-google&gl=US&v=SiJnCQuPiuo&nomobile=1

NOTES

1. To move beyond arguments in support of faith and focus on arguments in support of God’s existence, I highly recommend American author Guy P. Harrison’s accessible and clear
   50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God
   (Harrison, 2008). I use this text in my Atheism class at Portland State University. I’d also recommend American mathematician John Allen Paulos’s
   Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up
   (Paulos, 2008). In this brief book, Paulos rebuts classical and contemporary arguments for God’s existence.
   
2. I usually avoid Lawrence Krauss’s argument that nothingness is unstable and that sooner or later something springs from nothing (Krauss, 2012). First, this argument bumps up against the limits of my conceptual understanding. Second, I don’t have anywhere near the grasp of theoretical physics I’d need to argue this position. Unless you have an intimate familiarity with the physics behind these ideas, I’d suggest not using this line of argument.
   

   Krauss’s book,
   A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing
   , is important. However, the lines of thought contained here are much better in the context of a debate than for a Street Epistemologist.
   

3. This is also the deathblow to the Kal
   m cosmological argument, which has recently become the darling of Christian apologists. The Kal
   m argument goes like this:
   

   Premise
   : Among that which exists, everything that has a beginning has a cause.
   

   Premise
   : The universe has a beginning.
   

   Conclusion
   : The universe has a cause.
   

4. This is a version of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s (1872–1970) teapot. Russell claims that there’s a small teapot, undetectable by telescopes, in an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars. If you can’t disprove that such a teapot exists, do you believe it does exist? Personally, I’ve not had as much success with Russell’s teapot as I have with the example here. Perhaps it’s because people can’t wrap their mind around an object that we cannot detect floating in space, or because it’s easier to elicit a contradiction with an increasing number of substances found within a contained space. If you find Russell’s teapot to be more effective than my example, then use what’s most effective.
   
5. When one does attempt to provide “evidence” for God’s existence, the usual suspects emerge, the most common of which are fine-tuning and complexity. Basically, the fine-tuning argument states that God(s) calibrated initial conditions in the universe to make it possible for life to emerge. Physicist Victor Stenger completely dismantles this in his superbly readable book,
   The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us
   (Stenger, 2011).
   

   The idea behind the complexity argument, sometimes called the “watchmaker argument,” is that just as the inner workings of a watch are too complicated to have arisen on their own, so too are the workings of the universe. The universe is just too complicated to have come into existence without a designer. Dawkins and others have addressed this idea in detail.
   

   My response, which I offer as an intervention to disabuse people of unwarranted belief, I owe to a colleague; I ask about tornados: “Have you ever seen a tornado? Do you think that God has his finger on a button and just designs these incredibly intricate natural phenomena?” The idea is that complexity can emerge as a natural result of a system and not as designed or orchestrated by an entity.
   

6. The “God of the gaps” argument is the believer’s appeal to God as an explanation for whatever phenomenon we cannot explain scientifically. For example, if the scientific understanding of the day cannot explain lightning bolts, the believer will say, “God did it.” Once we can scientifically explain the mechanism behind lightning, the believer will move on to another phenomenon and attribute God as the cause of that phenomenon. The argument is referred to as the “God of the gaps,” because as our scientific knowledge expands the gaps close, and there are fewer and fewer places (phenomena) that can be attributed to being caused by God.
   

   Currently, intelligent design (ID) is a type of God of the gaps argument. The idea behind ID is basically, “You don’t know how life was formed and sustained, so it was God that formed life and sustains life.” Questions about origin of life present another God of the gaps–type argument, “You don’t know the process by which living organisms naturally arise from nonliving matter; therefore the cause was God.”
   

7. It initially surprised me when people asked why I thought this was an extraordinary claim. It no longer surprises me as I’ve become numb from being asked so frequently. If rising from the dead was an everyday occurrence, and it was not just commonplace but expected that one would rise from the dead, then
   not
   rising from the dead would be extraordinary. We don’t live in a universe in which people rise from the dead either regularly or at all. Therefore, the claim that someone rose from the dead is a remarkable claim.
   

   When I state that rising from the dead is a remarkable claim that demands extraordinary evidence, I’m told that the Bible is a not just a reliable source of evidence, but that it’s also extraordinary evidence and thus constitutes sufficient justification to warrant belief. Here’s my response: “Suppose you heard a story about a woman who could walk through walls. Let’s also suppose that you were an investigator charged with figuring out if this was true. What would you do?” Basically, I encourage the person who believes the claims in the Bible are true, to use the same standards of evidence they’d use as a modern-day investigator: What are the names of the witnesses? Where did they live? Are they reputable? How many people witnessed this? Did you interview them directly? How do you know they were credible? What was their relation to the individual in question?
   

   If a seasoned Street Epistemologist asks these questions, many people will acknowledge that the Bible is not a reliable source that can justify belief in these extraordinary claims. The conversation will usually come back to having faith, which can then be targeted as an unreliable epistemology.
   

   However, in my interventions, instead of continuing the discussion about the resurrection of Jesus and the evidence that supports this claim, I talk about Muhammad riding to heaven on a winged horse. Specifically, I ask why they don’t believe that proposition on the basis of faith, especially given that there’s
   overwhelming
   evidence that Muhammad was an historical figure. Conceptually distancing oneself from a faith tradition often helps the subject examine what constitutes extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim. (This is a variation on John W. Loftus’s idea of the outsider test for faith.)
   

8. Examples include the Anasazi, Easter Islanders, Mayan, and Norse Greenlanders. Among the reasons the Norse outpost in Greenland failed, for example, was because Norse religious teachings prohibited eating shellfish and other common, locally available foodstuffs. In short, religious dietary prohibitions (like Jews’ and Muslims’ prohibitions on pork) were the difference between success and failure.
   
9. A brief but thorough summary, which unfortunately has no references, is Tom Bartlett’s “Dusting Off God” (Bartlett, 2012).
   
10. What the faithful want, and what they claim to know, is that the universe comes prepackaged with abstract qualities such as meaning and purpose. One problem with believing that the universe has these abstract qualities as built-in properties is that it abrogates our duty to create meaning in our lives.
    

    In Viktor Frankl’s
    Man’s Search for Meaning
    , Frankl discusses meaning that he and his fellow prisoners found when interned in Auschwitz. This book had a profound effect on my understanding of how we seek meaning in our lives. It helped me understand how radically contextual meaning is, how we create our own meaning and purpose, and how we can find meaning in every instant of our lives.
    

11. The academic left tend to take a more pitiful view of the faithful while simultaneously becoming upset in response to questioning a person’s faith. They view attacks on faith as a type of intellectual hegemony and epistemological colonialism (see chapter 8).
    
12. I often hear the simplistic, reductionist claim that there is a kind of equation between atheism and Nazism—for example, statements like, “Atheism leads to Hitler/Nazism.” There have been any number of similar claims made in various quarters: Nazism was an inevitable product of Darwin, or of Luther, or of the Versailles Treaty, or of Wagner’s operas, or of Nietzsche, or of Hegel. All of these break down under the obvious objection that there were plenty of atheists, Darwinists, Lutherans, objectors to the Versailles Treaty, Wagnerites, Nietzscheans, and Hegelians who did not become Nazis. These are all vacuous arguments from a historiographical perspective.
    

    Was Adolph Hitler an atheist? Hitler cannot be called a churchgoing Christian, but neither can he be used as an example of an atheist. Hardly the product of an anti-Christian childhood and upbringing, he attended Mass with his devout mother and was a choirboy, which he quite enjoyed. Indeed, the majesty and pageantry of the Church heavily influenced the staging in Nazi rallies and rituals.
    

    Born and raised a Roman Catholic, Hitler remained a nominal Catholic for the rest of his life. He never officially renounced the Church or his membership in it, but he was hostile to the Church’s impulses of caring for the weak, infirm, and mentally handicapped, whom he wished to destroy. But this did not lead Hitler to outlaw Christianity.
    

    Hitler never doubted the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, just his Jewishness, convinced that he was actually an Aryan! The portraits of a fair-haired, blue-eyed Jesus that grace so many American homes would have doubtless met with Hitler’s approval.
    

    What follows are specific examples rebutting the claim that Hitler was an atheist:
    

     
    
    • When Party Secretary Martin Bormann closed a convent where Eva Braun’s aunt was a nun, Hitler reversed the order, telling Bormann such measures did more harm than good.
      
    • Hitler allowed the German Army to have Catholic and Protestant chaplains in the field. All troops wore a belt buckle embossed with the German eagle clutching a swastika surrounded by the inscription “
      Got mitt uns”
      —God is with us.
      
    • Hitler lamented the influence of the Bible, “that Jewish artifact,” on German Christians. In endless monologues to those around him, Hitler never once professed to be an atheist or unbeliever in the Abrahamic God of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Of the three, he had the greatest admiration for Islam, particularly its military tradition.
      
    • Survivor of over two-dozen assassination plots and attempts, Hitler credited “Divine Providence” and “Almighty God” for saving him to complete his Great Mission. On the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union and his war of extermination and conquest, Hitler ended his address to his troops with the words, “Almighty God Bless Our Arms!”
      
    • The first foreign policy coup of Nazi Germany was the “Concordat with the Vatican,” allowing the Church independence and Catholic schools to remain open in exchange for staying out of politics. It was a major recognition and early legitimization of the regime. The Church also “welcomed the way” when Operation Barbarossa—the campaign against the Godless Soviet Union—was launched. Hitler, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and architect of the Holocaust Reinhard Heydrich, nominal Catholics all, were never excommunicated by the Holy See. To this very day they remain Catholics of good standing in the eyes of the one true Church.
      
    • As to restricting church attendance, as it has been claimed, Hitler said, “If my mother were alive today, she would doubtless be a churchgoer and I would not want to hinder her.” When overzealous Nazi Party officials removed crucifixes from classroom walls in Bavaria, Hitler personally reversed the order and had them rehung.
      

    Some of the myths surrounding Hitler’s atheism can be attributed to an inaccurate and poorly translated version of
    Table Talk
    .
    Table Talk
    is a book of transcribed conversations that Hitler had with those close to him. Some versions of this text that were translated from German to other languages contained fabricated statements not found in the original German manuscript.
    

    Ian Kershaw, Alan Bullock, and other biographers of Hitler present Hitler and Nazism in general as, on balance, anticlerical. But this has to be understood as a political response that may not have anything to say about Hitler’s religious views or lack thereof. Hitler respected or even feared the Catholic Church as a potential rival (institutionally vis-à-vis the Nazi Party or the German state). Alongside Socialist or Communist labor union members, and of course Jews, practicing Catholics were the demographic least likely to support the Nazi Party in the years during which there were still free elections. Probably for this very reason Hitler was eager to make deals with Catholic authorities (quasi going above the head of the Catholic population as a whole) when it suited his purposes.
    

    Protestants were much more likely to support Nazism, and for that reason Hitler regarded the Protestant churches as more malleable (he also held them in contempt). However, Hitler’s attempt to co-opt the Protestant churches did not in the end work out too well; it generated in response the creation of the so-called Confessing Church, which became one of the centers of Nazi resistance: Barth, Niemöller, Bonhoeffer, etc. Perhaps, too, there are echoes of the cultural prejudices of his small-town Austrian upbringing, both in regard to the Catholic hierarchy and in regard to (predominantly north German/Prussian) Protestants.