Faithless In Fashion

It all might be due to the easy trendiness of atheism these days, with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins recently dominating certain booklists with their seemingly trenchant criticisms of all things theological. How else to explain my sudden and shocking waking in the deep dark of last night with the following statement breaking sweet dreams' synapses in the core of my normally happy brain?

If there is no God, then I hate this universe.

What could the oracle mean?

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

[Addendum, 5.26.07: Since this post has inspired a decent discussion on atheism in the comments thread, I think it relevant to refer readers to my essay, "The Existence of God: A Letter To Christopher Hitchens," dated September 20, 2006. I believe it is essential reading for any serious inquiry into the existence of God. I am not suggesting that it is a prerequisite for joining the discussion here. ALSO, I think it should be noted that Luke Buckham, who comments frequently at Contratimes, is more than a mere internet friend. Luke and I know each other in the real world; we have had numerous face-to-face, heart-to-heart discussions, some over beer, some over burritos, and some while standing in a dry river bed. Hence, Luke and I might write here (and elsewhere) to each other differently than we might write to other correspondents. And, though I know we try to avoid doing so, we may occasionally make references to things NOT SAID in online conversations.

Lastly, I think it's only polite (and balanced) to refer readers to Luke's essay against theism posted at Luke's website, "O Machine." The title of his polemic is "SHARP WORDS, part 1: Are you an atheist?" Thanks. BG]

The Existence Of God: A Letter To Christopher Hitchens

Dear Mr. Hitchens,

You are a man of tremendous talent. I am always amazed not only by your erudite prose (so precise and elegant), but also your wits. You remind me a bit of William F. Buckley Jr.; though he is loathed by many, he is surely not loathed for being dull-witted. You may not like the comparison with a man so thoroughly conservative. But surely you must agree that both of you possess mastery over language; surely you agree that such mastery is desirable in all thinking men and women and secretly envied by most. My envy is not one whit secret: your offhand comments are more substantive than my highest order cogitations. Most men struggle to express what you simply toss off parenthetically. Minds like yours assemble in one sentence what others destroy in whole paragraphs. I thank you for the inspiration.

But I am not always convinced you are as critical as you should be. While I respect that you might describe yourself as a self-interested libertine in a fight against Islamofascists intent on, at best, revoking your license; while I agree with the thrust of this fight and that much of Islam threatens our freedoms; I am not sure I agree with your suggestion that religion in general is a threat to human life and dignity. Your recent comments on "Hardball with Chris Matthews" -- indicative of your thoughts on religion in general -- strike me as passionately spoken and yet intellectually stunted. Permit me to refresh your memory. The reason (partly) for Mr. Matthews' interview with you and Jerry Brown, as you might recall, was the recent lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI in which the Holy Father made the unfortunate decision -- or so you averred -- to quote a crusading emperor's feelings regarding Islam's contributions to the world. You said:

"The fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel, who had said the Koran was wicked because it preached spreading faith by the sword. And I can‘t imagine who advised the pope to do this. The Muslim world is always saying, falsely, that it‘s being attacked by a Crusade, a Zionist conspiracy and all this nonsense. And now you have somebody invoking and reviving the idea of the Crusader period and talking as if only Islam has ever spread its faith by violence.…

"It shows secularism is our only friend. And what we‘re fighting for is the secular enlightenment against all forms of unreason and theocracy…"

What's quite clear in (all) your comments is that you admit Islam and Roman Catholicism are both claiming revelation; such revelations have led to bloodshed and tyrannous coercion: both faiths wield a weapon -- one a sword, another a scimitar. This, I would gather, simply expresses your belief. Am I wrong?

Even if I am fallible here, I am not fallible in describing your belief that secularism is the friend of all thinking humans. Of course, by secularism you must mean those systems of thought and order which are solely derived from unencumbered reason: you await a complete "enlightenment against all forms of unreason." If you're are at all credal, this, I bet, would be your creed.

Now it would not necessarily win me a single polemical point if I mentioned that the secular state of the Soviet Union, a state committed solely to reason and the mechanization of society according to reason's laws, was itself prone to wielding something like a sword. The Soviet sword, however, was a bit more like a hammer and a sickle, where thinking humans were either pounded into submission or sickled down like so many weeds. Furthermore, this reasonable state was heaped in philosophical idealism, in a religious historical determinism which believed such enlightenment was an inevitable fact of temporal forces: the proletariat would and must seize control of their fate. In short, even Soviet reasonableness was clouded by unreason. For it might be the case that to believe solely in the inevitable force of reason is to be as unreasonable as any religious clod in the street. And it might be the case that those, like you, who hold reason rather high, might be forgetting something.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

I hope, Mr. Hitchens, that you will not mind if I share with you an argument that came together in my mind during my sophomore year in college. You see, while I was studying The History of Philosophy, Part II, under the tutelage of my professor, Malcolm Reid, something Dr. Reid said about Immanuel Kant transformed my very soul. It was really a remark made in passing that was then shaped into a question by a classmate, Nathan Stoltzfus. The remark was about Kant's idea of a transcendental ego; the question was whether Kant had unwittingly proven God's existence. I will skip the part about the proof. But I can't skip what fascinated me to no end: the part about the very nature of knowing oneself.

I wonder if you will permit me the following. I wonder if you will accept these simple subject/object propositions: I see a tree; I observe a lemon; I touch this keyboard. For surely these simple propositions are as basic to empiricism and reason as one can find. You and I can even agree to criteria that will give us some reasonable certainty that I am in fact seeing, observing and touching these very things; that such things are indeed there to be seen and touched. But I wonder if you will permit me this proposition: I see I. Or, perhaps I can state it this way: I observe myself. What do you think? Is there a problem with this?

Forgive the didactic nature of my comments here; forgive that I should presume to teach you a thing about basic philosophy, about simple epistemology. But there is a gnawing problem here, one that gnaws at one's guts. And since you believe that religious faith is unreasonable in contrast to secularism, I am left believing that you cannot have possibly chewed on this problem long enough.

Let me pose the problem this way. Can you observe yourself? Of course, we hear people all the time say that they can and do observe themselves. They do not mean they observe themselves in a mirror or portrait; they mean that they observe their own minds with their own minds. They mean a type of mental mirror, a sort of self-reflection. But I ask you, if you can observe yourself, who is doing the observing? If you can examine yourself, who, or what, is doing the examining? Or are you a self observing yourself observing yourself? Can you even do that without reflecting, like so many parallel facing mirrors, ad infinitum?

Surely you see the conundrum. Though we can have things outside of ourselves be objects of our own consciousness, we are not able to make our own consciousness an object of itself. It is not possible for the subject to be its own object; it's not possible for the knower to simultaneously know himself. It is a bit like Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty: one can't measure the position or velocity of a particle without affecting either (and hence one can't be certain of either). Thus, we cannot prove to ourselves that we even have selves: it is not possible to make one's mind an object of scrutiny. How then does each of us even know we have a self?

We know this by extrapolation made in faith. It is faith, not certainty, that is at the bottom of our 'certainty.' I cannot prove to you I exist, because I cannot prove my own existence even to myself. I have to make a leap of faith that I exist, or that my existence and mind and thoughts correspond at all to the reality outside my very being. There is no one who is not faith-full. Faith is the very basis of human epistemology. You can be certain of it.

This, at least to me, is what I got out of Dr. Reid's simple remark about Kant's transcendental ego. And I believe this all proves that no one is free of being religious, or, in your words, unreasoned.

IS THIS FAIR?

I do not know if you really ever forgot, as I implied above, this fact of human consciousness forced on us by reality. I do not know if you have not thought all this through before and have some proper and compelling answer. But I will state that I cannot imagine anyone would not agree that faith inheres in all people; that even the possibility of having souls that can believe or doubt is akin to revelation. I recognize the concomitant anxiety this all portends, for if we all share this fact of faith, we are left a bit at sea: what revelation, if any, is the most truthful? After all, if we cannot prove our own selves to our selves, how can we prove -- or, more interestingly -- disprove, the existence of God?

The battle afoot, Mr. Hitchens, is not really a battle between civilizations or for civilization. Such a battle is superficial and a true distraction. To limit this battle to mere clashes of peoples is to descend into quagmire. What this battle is, is nothing more than the very battle of wisdom, of what is real, true, and actual; about the nature of knowledge and the very cosmos; about the essence of humanity and the nature of God. This is a battle between lies and truth, between heresy and orthodoxy, between Satan and God. It is a battle that has been raging since Eden. And it is all contained in God's first question to Adam and Eve after they fled that lost paradise: Where are you?

Where, oh, where are we indeed. The answer, obviously, cannot come from ourselves.

Peace to you, dear sir.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Christopher Hitchens, Clash of civilizations, God, Faith, Philosophy, Epistemology, Chris Matthews, Hardball, William F. Buckley

When Spiders Bite

I am losing my faith. This is not a confession that I've lost faith in humanity, or the future, or tomorrow morning. This is a confession of a crisis of spirit: My very religion is crumbling around me. Atheism almost seems comforting.

What, pray tell, do Derrick Z. Jackson, Ellen Goodman, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman have in common? They have in common the grand prize of making me reconsider my belief in God. For I ask myself how is it that God–and the readers of the New York Times and Boston Globe, and the Pulitzer Prize committee–can countenance, with any seriousness other than serious alarm, the writings of these essayists? I am at a loss.

Perhaps I am a victim of ennui, the existentialist's boredom, a boredom induced in large part by overindulgence. For I have been a glutton, a foolish glutton, of the writings of myriad "critics" of Bush, Iraq, New Orleans. I have entered their nests, drawn close by blind curiosity, ignorant of their danger. I've been bitten. I am nearly paralyzed by their venom. I await the deflation of my skin, the result of my liquified innards having been sucked out through mendacious mandibles.

It is impossible to overcome, this all-out assault on reality by the opinion-shapers perched atop their righteousness. There are simply too many of them. Their webs are sticky.

Here's one statement from a rebuttal of a recent Christopher Hitchens essay. The rebuttal, written by University of Michigan professor Juan Cole and laced with pedantic and errant lessons on Hitchens' alleged fallacies, has this truly mind-boggling passage:

In essence, Hitchens is arguing for the legitimacy of a sort of hyperpower vigilantism, in which the sitting president of the United States decides which regimes may continue to exist, virtually by himself. The U.S. Congress did not even have the moral fortitude to declare war. The U.N. charter forbids wars of aggression, and, indeed, forbids all wars not clearly defensive that are not explicitly authorized by the Security Council. The Security Council may be, as Hitchens implies, corrupt and yellow-bellied, but it represents most of humankind, while Bush did not even represent a majority of Americans. [emphasis added]

It is tempting to think that the problem with modern American letters is that such letters are being drafted by members of the marijuana generation (and there really is such a generation). Cole's remark might very well have been drafted in a pot-induced haze, for its very imbecility invokes images of Cheech and Chong. One hardly thinks of Sir Bertrand Russell in the face of such polemics (other than Russell's atheism).

Here we have Cole, an opponent of the Iraq War and defender of the UN Security Council's leadership in the months leading up to the war, conceding that the Security Council may indeed be corrupt and pusillanimous, but it at least represents "MOST OF MANKIND." Bush, in contrast, "did not even represent a majority of Americans."

Excuse me while I pause at this moment so I may gouge out my eyes (but I can't, since I'm paralyzed).

Imagine, really imagine, that this statement was drafted by a PhD-holding professor, printed on Salon.com, and is meant to be an academic rebuttal of Hitchen's fallacies. Sadly, I can't imagine it. For me, it is beyond the fantastic; it is beyond the promises of even a serious acid trip. And I can't for the life of me believe that the universe in which this sort of statement is published is one governed by a God.

If a "corrupt and yellow-bellied" UN Security Council represents "most of mankind", does this mean that most of mankind is corrupt? If so, do we not want Mr. Bush to act contrary to that corruption? Moreover, doesn't the statement that Bush "did not even represent a majority of Americans" imply that the majority of Americans, who are part of "most of mankind", are also corrupt and yellow-bellied? Does not Cole's statement mean that Bush and his minority are actually NOT corrupt, but noble and courageous? Indeed it does.

Idiocy abounds, collecting paychecks and laurels.

***

Katrina Note

Now that the race card has been played in the Katrina-Bush slamfest, America is left with this truly dire fact: It can never respond more swiftly or efficiently to a natural or similar disaster than it did in New Orleans. For if it does, it will prove that the government does in fact prefer rushing to the aid of other people than the New Orleans victims. Woe to those all-white states that may face catastrophe. For if the federal government rescues them one second faster than the Katrina victims, it proves the essential racist heart of America.

Hence, we are stuck, damned for doing and not doing, because people with hard hearts have played the race card.

Nice job.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.