The PROBLEM OF PIFFLE, Part Seven and Conclusion: Cosmos and Chaos
Part Seven and Conclusion: Cosmos and Chaos
We conclude our overview of Problem of Pain inherent in the Monotheist worldview, versus the Problem of Piffle inherent in the Atheist. The previous entries are here:
This overview is not the final word on any of these topics, nor even a close examination: Each point raised has possible rebuttals and counter-rebuttals not here addressed.
This overview, at best, is meant to be a rough survey of the lay of the land to identify where apologists for either view would be wise to prepare answers for deep questions.
While not underestimating the difficulties of defending the monotheist view — for while there is an answer to the Problem of Pain, there are no easy answers — this overview demonstrates the atheist worldview, due to shallow and foolish philosophical roots, faces difficulties more numerous and more fatal.
Simply put, there are too many deep questions to which atheist worldview provides trivial answers or none at all.
A logically consistent atheist worldview portrays the cosmos as nihilist hence irrational, unreal, unknowable, nonsensical, immoral, antinomian, ugly and hopeless.
The human soul cannot flourish in such a cosmos: the atheist avoids despair only by embracing pointless hedonism or paltering hypocrisy.
The atheist answers to the deep questions of life are piffle. That is his main problem.
We conclude with a list of such unanswered questions.
***
The Paradox of Pain provokes one crucial question: if there is a single, sovereign, benevolent, all-knowing and almighty Creator and Supreme Being, why should creation include such ghastly, pointless, and enormous suffering by the innocent — and the answer is ineffable and difficult to express.
The Paradox of Piffle, on the other hand, provokes many questions whose answers are difficult if not impossible to satisfy.
I do not doubt that many a clever intellectual can invent some jury rig of special pleading to answer these objections, but each additional question poses another objection to be answered only by further jury rigging.
The atheist intellectual is in the same position as the astronomers in the days immediately before Kepler, adding epicycles atop epicycles in a dizzy juggle in order to preserve their axiom of perfect circular geocentric motion, while saving the appearances. The simpler answer of a heliocentric model in one case, or a monotheistic model in the other, is the answer preferred by Occam’s Razor.
The Paradoxes of Piffle
Let us review the several questions the atheist model fails to satisfy.
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
Let us also ask, not just why, but how is there something rather than nothing? A cosmos where all nature is open to change and decay cannot be eternal, nor could have arisen spontaneously, because from nothing, nothing comes.
A cyclic cosmos of an eternal return can be posited, where an eternal source of creation offsets the eternal decay; but then the cycle itself, to be as eternal as the slumber of Brahma, must be as supernatural as Brahma, being immune to the decay to which all nature is subject. In such a case, the cycle itself never arose, hence, in another sense of the word, also comes from nothing.
To deny nothing comes from nothing is to say anything comes from anything; worlds, men, words popping into and out of being without cause or sense, including both the denial and the denier. To form the idea of denying causation in the brain matter, or to utter such words aloud, in an acausal universe is causeless: mere noise without source springing spontaneously into the air without cause or aim.
Hence the statement that events are causeless invalidates itself.
- Why is reason rational? If reason is rational, how did it arise?
If the human faculty of reason arose from non-deliberate hence blind natural processes, then it arose irrationally. If the faculty of reason arose irrationally, it cannot be a tool meant for the purpose of correctly distinguishing logic from illogic. If reason has the power to distinguish logic from illogic, this is a happenstance, a happy accident.
In which case, there is no grounds to trust that it functions as designed, because it was not designed. There is no standard by which it can be said to achieve or fail its purpose, because it came into being with no purpose, and was not trying to reach any standard.
If reason tells us that reason cannot be trusted, why believe what it tells us?
Hence the statement invalidating reason invalidates itself.
- How is reality real?
The study of the nature of being, the realness of reality, including distinctions between fact and fiction, literal, conventional, and figurative, is called ontology.
Atheists readily admit the reality of material reality, confirmed by empirical investigation, and hold material reality to be objective, that is, true regardless of observer or viewpoint. And yet those rational objects, such as the properties of metaphysical axioms, logical categories, geometric and mathematical objects, which are also true regardless of observer or viewpoint, an atheist cannot admit to be objective without admitting that nonphysical reality is real.
Such an admission is awkward, for it opens the door to Platonic and Neoplatonic speculations into the objectivity of the Moral Order of the universe, a Prime Mover, an Uncaused First Cause, an Ideal Form of Good, and, eventually, a Supreme Being. The staunch materialist would prefer these things to be fictions or conventions prompted by cultural or biological circumstance, not an innate aspect of objective reality.
But the denial is even more awkward, for ontology cannot be studied empirically. If only empirical studies are valid because only material reality is real, then no ontological conclusion is valid. But the conclusion that only material reality is real is itself an ontological conclusion.
Hence the statement that only material reality is real invalidates itself.
- How do we know we know?
A godless universe has great difficulty explaining the objectivity of any nonphysical reality, which includes the study of by what means certain knowledge is distinguished from opinion.
The belief that all beliefs are equally valid invalidates itself for an obvious reason: for if my opinion is that truth is subjective, and your opinion is that it is not, I cannot contradict you without contradicting myself.
The usual makeshift to escape from this paradox is a retreat into pragmatism or agnosticism, or some other form of holding all knowledge to be opinion or convention. This escape, however, leads into a more claustrophobic logical trap, for it states as truth that there are no truths.
Most, when so trapped by this paradox, retreat into nonsense words, using words like “truth” and “opinion” and “real” and “objective” in inconsistent and self-defeating ways from one statement to the next.
So we hear much blarney and blather about “my truth” or “intersubjective reality” but these are signposts without roads. There are no real objects, mental or physical, to which these symbols point. Their ugly and unpoetic nature is a dead giveaway as to their unreality.
- Why do words have meaning?
Much modern philosophy is based on a simple inability or unwillingness to distinguish between real things, mental or physical, which exist of their own being, without an observer to name them, and conventions of names, which are created when men name things, as when a marriage is avowed, a contract signed, or a judge passes sentence. Such acts, by being spoken, create the reality they decree.
Much modern ink has been spilled on over the theory that the use of certain words shapes and distorts memory and perception to such a degree that the personality of a man, or a society, is controlled by the connotations of words. The effort spent by modern intellectuals to concoct angular euphemisms to whitewash vices, and vulgarian smear-words to blacken virtues, is beyond parallel in history, and beyond imagination.
I will not dirty my page with examples: turn on the news.
A parallel language opposed to English, which Orwell called Newspeak, has emerged from the pages of his cautionary dystopia to solid life the real world. As if one inspired by Mary Shelley had built a real Frankenstein monster to rampage the world.
Philosophers and sages, from Socrates to Confucius, have warned of the myriad evils that follows the corruption of language. Nominalism, however, holds that all language, being the arbitrary fiat of human beings, allows for no principled opposition to such corruption.
A monotheist, from the axioms of his worldview, can uphold either nominalism or its opposite, realism. An atheist cannot, unless he can concoct some explanation of in whom or how or where universal truths can arise or can reside can propose no basis and standard for semantics.
If words have innate meaning, the question is why, and to what degree. If they do not, the question is how can this or any questions be asked, except with words?
If words have no innate meaning, all words are arbitrary. They mean what we say they mean. But, if so, what words were used by the first ancestors of man to coin the arbitrary words they and we used thereafter? And who gave those first words meaning and how? It cannot have been by using words, if words have no meaning before men coin them.
And the statement that words have no meaning invalidates itself.
- Why is it good to be good?
A monotheist can point to the benevolence and omniscience of a Supreme Being to promulgate a beneficent and wise moral order with universal authority, to establish moral imperatives to follow, and, indeed, in the creation of man, to grant him the faculty of the conscience and, by grace, an impulse to follow those imperatives. Being omnipotent, the Supreme Being can also confirm that perfect justice will visit any scofflaw defying the moral order of the universe, if not in this life, in the next.
This model of the universe makes possible the concept of duty, that is, a moral law whose imperative is valid even for men or groups of men not inclined to obey. Otherwise, the concept of duty is impossible, hence the idea of a moral order is also impossible.
Many makeshift arguments attempting to deduce the concept of duty either from man’s self-interest rightly understood, or from social convention, or from biological imperatives, or from drives and instincts deep in the human psyche have been boldly proposed, all to no avail.
Self-interest cannot form a basis for self-sacrifice, as when a soldier, to save a child, throws himself on a hand grenade. The self-interest of the soldier would promote throwing the child on the grenade to save himself. And a moral code which denounces self-sacrifice, as we have seen from such crackpots as Ayn Rand or Fred Nietzsche, offend the moral sentiments of mankind.
Self-interest, if nothing else, would prevent the partisan of any self-centered so-called moral code from promoting such a code to his fellow men, lest they cease to contemplate acts of self-sacrifice for his benefit.
Praytell, why would any soldier take a bullet for an Objectivist or Nietzschean? The sacrifice will not be reciprocated. Why would any recruiter in his right mind ask a man unwilling to shed his blood for others into the ranks of soldier, sailor, fireman, policeman? Why would any citizen in a republic allow him a vote?
The statement that there is no morality, if made by a liar, need not be trusted. If made by an honest man, he relies on the very standards he calls into doubt to voice his doubts. In either case, the statement invalidates itself.
- Why is it just to be just?
As ethics are for individuals, so are laws for communities.
Arguments claiming moral codes are the consensus of human social behavior or human biology undermine any moral reason for being moral. Anyone who does not think it moral to place common good above personal good will not begin so to think merely because the it may serve the common good when it is common to think so.
If he cared what served the common good, he is already placing the common good above his own. If he does not care, why should he? Pointing out that the common good also benefits him as a common member does not impose a duty on him to benefit himself, particularly if and when cheating the rules all others obey benefits him more.
Utilitarianism proposes that good is whatever serves the greatest good for the greatest number, but this doctrine itself is deleterious to the greater numbers of mankind, for it makes them all subject to sacrifice when outnumbered, when a notion of sacrosanct natural rights innate to the individual would serve both individual good and communal. Utilitarianism, under its own terms, invalids itself.
However, the notion of sacrosanct natural rights is impossible absent a supernatural lawgiver to bestow them. If rights come from the king, the king may remove them. Likewise, if rights come from the people, from consensus, tradition, history or biology. These are bestowed by sovereign favor or happy accident as temporary privileges, for they can be removed by a changes of opinion, passing time, or mutation, quite arbitrarily. Only if they come from an eternal realm, are such rights eternal.
Law is the coercion of all subjects or citizens to a standard behavior needed to maintain the social order. Arbitrary law is not law, merely coercion, that is, the imposition of the will of the strong on the weak. And law in a world without any objective moral code is arbitrary.
As with coining new words if nominalism is true, enacting new laws or reforming old cannot be done merely to reconcile inconsistencies with existing law, because without a standard above human law, human law cannot deduce which laws to reform.
For reform, one needs a form, that is, a standard not yet reached.
The extant law cannot serve as the standard when making new laws or reforming old, because the extant laws is what is being debated. If there is no objective moral order to the universe, there is no such thing as just or unjust laws. Law is whatever serves the will of the stronger, in which case, by definition, it is not law at all.
Nature red in tooth and claw knows nothing of right and wrong, only survival and death, fertility and sterility. Mother Nature is cruel and ugly, and nothing sacrosanct can arise from her.
- Why is beauty sublime?
Atheism proposes beauty to be in the eye of the beholder. The results of this comical opinion are on public display in any metropolitan museum of modern art.
Their abhorrent aberration proclaims more loudly than any words I can weave the ugliness of the worldview modern art silently depicts, the passions that drive it, the nihilism that engulfs it. Such things silently call out for a psychotherapist, or a father confessor, or an exorcist.
If beauty is not real, it is not worth seeking. Since all men, even the most crude and crass, to some degree seek it, or find their lives darkened by its absence, the concept that beauty is arbitrary can be dismissed as unfit for contemplation.
It is literally too dismal a notion, too ugly, to contemplate, for it makes a junkyard adorned with graffiti, or a mass grave heaped with rotting meat and broken skulls, equal in beauty to twinkling flowers, nightingales in song, springtide zephyrs, majestic mountains, soaring eagles, dancing nymphs, mighty storms, serene stars of diamond fire, and all the sublime glories of creation.
Secular theories of aesthetics from time to time propose a non-arbitrary basis for distinguishing fine art from crude, sublime from repugnant, profound from meaningless. Like secular theories of the origins of logic, language, or law, they rest on assumptions of individual will, or cultural consensus, or biological influence, to propose a standard valid for individual, culture, or race. An individual standard is not a standard by definition. A cultural standard restates the problem at one remove: if beauty is in the eye of the collective beholder, it is again arbitrary, hence not beauty.
The other question to the aesthetic relativist is to ask how, if all beauty is in the eye of the beholder, either individual or collective, then why to standards of beauty only differ in matters of style from culture to culture and generation to generation, not in fundamentals? Different fashions to emphasize the beauty of women change as styles change, but the idea that women are beautiful does not.
How to draw the beauties in nature, likewise, may change as fashions change, but no culture has ever dismissed hawks and lions, flowers and mountains as trivial and ugly, or upheld images of dungheaps or lepers or rotting skulls as fair and pleasing to the eye. Attempts to tie aesthetic judgment to instinctive reactions of dangerous or disease-bearing objects, of instinctive assessment of the fertility of mates, does not explain why the human eye finds beauty in things like constellations in the sky or tigers in the grass, which either offer no benefit to the Darwinian struggle, nor pose dangers.
- Why no atheist saints?
If atheism were true, the atheists would be the sole men in all of history to have happened upon it. What accounts for their unique position in history?
The atheist undermines the whole splendid ediface of human intellectual effort down to its very roots. To reject theology is to reject metaphysics, which is to reject the fundamental axioms of all other branches of philosophy and natural philosophy, including, let it not be forgotten, physics, and all empirical sciences.
He is left with nothing.
The Genius of Folly
If the atheist is able to achieve an insight forbidden to all prior geniuses, their unique position may be due to one of several things: first, his position in time as the heir to all prior thought allows the benefit of an ongoing process of trial and error, an evolutionary dialectic, as it were, allowing him finally to see and reject the false starts of prior eons. Second, he could be smarter than geniuses. Third, he could be braver, with fortitude heroic enough to reject the smothering social conventions and imaginary terrors of priestcraft which deceive the lesser men around him.
Finally, his moral superiority to all the crawling wretches of mankind could grant his heart the blazing light needed to shatter eon-long and world-wide falsehoods bedeviling all other men but he and his tiny cadre. If the faithful Christian counts the Twelve Apostles, at one time, to be the sole enlightened men on Earth, he cannot call it impossible for the atheist to make a parallel claim.
The problem with the evolutionary argument is twofold. First, it is false. This is not a case where, for example Euclid or Einstein acting in the same tradition as prior thinkers, Pythagoras or Newton, discovered profound new insights unguessed by prior thinkers. There are no prior thinkers in atheism. It merely rejects all of history, all literature, all art, all science, since there is no part of any prior discipline in any field not tangentially informed by belief in the supernatural, or some form of nonphysical reality.
Moreover, if it is true, evolution in the future will produce reversals of their atheist belief even as evolution in the past reversed monotheism belief. There can be no final nor fixed answer in a universe of ever evolving truth. There can be no truth at all.
The atheist who claims religion is false but generally beneficial to individuals and groups practicing it embraces a hypocritical posture, for he undermines a doctrine he himself claims is beneficial. Any man who honestly thought so would stand silent, as a pragmatic consideration both of the common good and his self interest.
Moreover, only by acrobatic contortions of logic can it be explained how a false doctrine and false worldview is more beneficial in any sense of the word than the truth. It puts the entire world in the posture of a patient too sick to be told his true prognosis by his doctor. Such a stance makes falsehood a moral imperative. But if falsehood is a moral imperative, should not the moralist who discovers this lie to himself also? If the moralist teaches that falsehood is a moral imperative, why should his students believe him?
Be that as it may, the diminishingly small numbers of atheists in each generation requires even the humblest atheist to think himself and his small circle of cultists to be singled out as sole possessors of the truth in a world of lies.
If he says this is due to his greater intelligence or greater courage to face an unpleasant truth, even an atheist who is otherwise humble, sees himself as the only adult in the land of retarded children, the only sane man in the madhouse world, the only honest man in a land of falsehoods.
Note that the faithful Christian certainly can, and perhaps must, have a remarkably negative view of his fellow man, blacker than the blackest secular philosophy since all men are damnable. No one not born of immaculate birth is immune to original sin. By the same token, the faithful Christian has a brighter view than even the brightest secular philosophy, since all men are savable. No one has committed a sin so dire that Christ lacks the merit to atone for it. Those Christians who regard their own salvation as certain and the damnation of their enemies as sure, are regarded with pity and condemnation by honest Christians, and seen as Pharisees. The honest Christian lists himself on the list of those who merit damnation, but whom the merits of Christ can save.
Far different is our faithful atheist. He cannot see himself as being on the list of all men of all periods grossly deceived by unreason, since his reason is the idol saving him from the gods. He either holds religion to be a deception by priestcraft, a self-deception of the fearful, or ignorance of the illogical. In which case, he has no choice but to see himself as greater either in honesty, bravery, or clarity of thought.
When the Christian calls himself a sinner, the atheist calls himself a bright, and have no sense of the spectacular pomposity of the claim.
The claim to brightness and bravery above and beyond all other breeds, nations, tribes, tongues and generations is necessarily implied by the stance that all religion is superstition harmful to intellectual integrity in the individual, and deleterious to the freedom and happiness of mankind in general.
The claim that atheists outstrip all mankind either in genius or courage is best refuted by the witness of how they live their lives, and by counting their contributions to other fields of intellectual endeavor. For when the Christian claims all men are sinners, and that no saint is elevated to sainthood save by the grace of God, the sinfulness of all mankind, Christians included, is clear enough to all. But if the atheist claims his small cult of social undesirables are the true saints and heroes, that is less clear.
Again, no claim is here being made that a clever atheist cannot think of argument to try to explain or explain away some of the paradoxes, leaps of logic, and glaring inconsistencies in his worldview. If you pile enough epicycles on a circular orbit of a geocentric model, you can reach the same appearances as given by a heliocentric model proposing elliptical orbits. But your model will be a Rube Goldberg, not open to be reduced to three elegant Newtonian laws of motion.
The atheist, in a godless universe, must simply take on faith that the visible appearances of the universe reflect noumena reality, abide by universal categories, can be analyzed by essential and accidental properties, and can be correctly subject to dialectic and deductive reasonings to uncover true and reliable conclusions. He merely cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing, why reason is reasonable, why existence exists, how knowledge is known, what signals signify, nor can he explain why he, or anyone, should be prudent, just, courageous, or temperate.
Indeed, no secular moralist to my knowledge proposes temperance as a moral good: unchastity seems to be a notorious pastime found more frequently among them than in the general population. Also frequently found among them is a scathing contempt for the common man shocking to see, even among those secular writers not encouraging genocides of undesirables.
That atheism leads to immorality, history attests. That those very few things which history can call moral progress, as the abolition of slavery, spring solely from the Gospel of Christ, history also attests.
Whether any given atheist himself surrenders to the temptations of sin, of course, is up to his individual character, and the work of his guardian angel, whom the ungrateful atheist neither knowns nor thanks. But the absence of any principled reason to resist temptation incentivizes vice, even if a man of good character resists.
And Christian faith aims at sainthood, but does not guarantee it. The Church is a sick ward for the soul. Folly to expect to find the healthy in the hospital. Christ himself said he came not to save the righteous, but the sinner, so therefore one should expect more sinful men of worse character in the churchpews, whores and tax-collectors, crying for the sins each knows so well, than in the ivory towers of the intellectual.
But, on the other hand, any atheist of good moral character has that character by happy accident, not because his worldview correctly identifies virtue and vice, correctly prioritizes worldly concerns against eternal principles, and correctly provides imperatives to order the appetites and passions accordingly.
Sadly, the upshot of this is that the atheist is unlikely to have those virtues a philosopher must have, a sense of humility and patience, an ironclad integrity, a love of truth greater than love of self, and a willingness to admit wrong, in order to subject atheist views, or any views, to rigorous philosophical cross examination.
Dishonest philosophers, rhetoricians and sophists, use their wit to elude such questions, and the atheist worldview provides no necessary reason, no objective moral standard, why he should not behave this way, if so inclined. Rarely will the God at whom the atheist scoffs grant to him the divine gift of self-examination and confession unasked. Aside from the famous daemon of Socrates, such a thing is nearly unheard-of.
Atheism disarms the soul, leaving her defenseless to corruptions, including corrupt mental habits, that leech away the power to correct errors. If left untreated, and carried to its nihilist final conclusions, atheism removes the power to cure atheism.
In such a sad case, the instrument of reason used to correct errors in reasoning is erroneous. Once a man adopts a philosophy that tells him all philosophy is in vain, he cannot use philosophy to reexamine this error and recover from it. Happily, most atheists, being illogical, do not carry things to their logical extreme. Many may retain some sense either of integrity or mysticism or virtue which, if found, can be used to coax them out of the flood and safely onto the Ark of sound reasoning.
Merely because their cosmos is hopeless, does not require we give up hope for them.
We have listed only part of the paradoxes and problems an atheist model of the world must explain to be a working model, and to have even a slim hope of reflecting even a slim part of reality.
Far more likely that the clever double-minded intellectual will find some glib excuse to elude rather than answer this phalanx of paradoxes his piffle provokes. Belief in God? We should be thankful to find an intellectual willing to admit that existence exists, truth is true, or reality is real.
To find an honest atheist of sound moral character, laboring under such strong disincentives to proper character growth, is such a freakishly unlikely miracle, that the mere fact of finding such a thing should convince the hardened skeptic immediately of the reality of miracles.
The atheist model of the world has one final flaw hitherto unmentioned. It is no fun.
Even to find a happy atheist is rare, and for all these same reasons. Atheism promotes vice. Vice makes the soul heavy and unhappy.
The Christian is enjoined to weep for his sins, but also to weep for joy. Ours is the peace that passes understanding.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
