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So you think you can live without God? |
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So you think you can live without God?
Variations on the above question are often used against atheists and humanists. Some of them merit serious replies; others are based on such misunderstandings that it can be hard to know how to respond. The answers below, compiled by the Humanist Philosophers and the British Humanist Association, will probably not change the minds of religious believers, but may help them to understand the humanist world view. We hope they will also support non-religious people faced with similar challenges.
Questions
1. Aren’t atheism and Humanism just negative?
2. The stress on reason and rationality makes atheism and Humanism cold and dry. Is there no place for emotion or spirituality in your world view?
3. Aren’t humanist values parasitic on religious ones?
4. What do you believe in then, if you don’t believe in God?
5. How do you know you just haven’t found the right religion yet?
6. Even atheists pray in desperate circumstances.
7. Doesn’t the existence of the paranormal support the existence of God?
8. Do you believe that the universe is good, bad, or neutral?
9. Can you really believe that you are just the product of chance? Is life really that purposeless?
10. Isn’t living in a purposeless universe depressing?
11. Isn’t the belief that we die and that’s the end depressing and morbid?
12. How do you explain the perfection of life, and its unlikelihood, if there is no creator or designer god?
13. How do you explain the existence of suffering and evil in the world?
14. Isn’t it hypocritical for atheists or humanists to join in religious holidays and ceremonies? Or admire religious art or architecture? Or send their children to faith schools?
Responses
1. Aren’t atheism and Humanism just negative? Would they exist if there were no religion to react against?
Atheism cannot be parasitic on religion because atheists would believe exactly the same as they do even if there were no religion to react against. The end of all religion would be the triumph of atheism, not its dissolution. Positive atheists – humanists – simply believe that within the confines of a mortal life and the universe we live in, we have all the resources we need to live meaningful and ethical lives. They believe it is a mistake to think that we need anything more, or that anything more actually exists.
2. The stress on reason and rationality makes atheism and Humanism cold and dry. Is there no place for emotion or spirituality in your world view?
Reason and emotion are not stark opposites. Even the most abstract reasoning has some passionate motive. After all, reasoning is hard work, and people do not bother to reason about matters that they do not care about. On the other hand, the feelings of sane human beings are always to some degree thoughtful. Our feelings are always about something, and we can try to understand what they are about by reasoning.
It is true that extreme emotions make us more likely to commit logical errors, but this does not show that emotion is the enemy of reason. Photographs are sometimes overexposed, but this does not show that light is the enemy of photography; air-resistance slows down aeroplanes and birds, but this does not show that birds and planes would fly better with no air at all.
Humanists stress reason and rationality when in debate with theologians; but they experience and talk about feelings just as well as anyone else, for example in relationships or when they marvel at the wonders of nature. Humanists recognise emotion and spiritual needs more specifically in their ceremonies such as weddings, baby-namings, and funerals.
Click here for more on Humanist Ceremonies, and here for an article on humanist spirituality.
3. Aren’t humanist values parasitic on religious ones? What stops atheists doing bad things? Isn’t it a bit naïve to think that people can be good without supernatural help?
Anyone who has any acquaintance with other people’s lives will know that it is perfectly possible to be good without supernatural help. There are millions of atheists and humanists who live good lives. Religion has inspired people to do fine things (from small acts of kindness to large-scale movements for social justice) but it has also motivated people to do some terrible things (such as religious wars and persecution), and whether or not people are religious seems to have little to do with how well they live.
What enables human beings to live well rather than badly is their capacity for imaginative and sympathetic identification with the joys and sufferings of others, together with their capacity to think rationally about the consequences of their actions.
The religious element, in fact, distorts moral motivation. Good people are those who help others simply because others need help, who tell the truth just because they want to trust others and be trusted, and who act fairly and justly out of respect for the needs and rights of others. Someone who acts in superficially similar ways to these, but does it simply because they believe that it is commanded by an all-powerful deity, is not morally admirable but merely servile. Someone who is motivated only by the hope of eternal reward, or the fear of eternal punishment, is merely selfish.
Thus it is not humanist values that are parasitic on religious ones, but the reverse. True human values are rooted in our need to live fulfilling lives and to share them with others. These values are to be found at all periods of history and in all parts of the world. Unsurprisingly, they are also found in all the great world religions, but there they are always combined and overlaid with other values which are either absurd and trivial (such as insisting that everybody rests from work on the same day of the week or eats only certain kinds of meat) or actively pernicious (such as persecuting gays or stoning adulterers). The core, rational values are humanist ones.
See also Understanding Humanism resources on ethics and Richard Robinson’s An Atheist’s Values – long out of print, this excellent defence of humanist morality and critique of “Christian values”
4. What do you believe in then, if you don’t believe in God?
The universe, nature, people, love, art, meaning, relationships, gravity, coffee, values, purpose, comedy… But the person who asks this question surely realises that there are many things left to believe in once God is removed from the picture. So what is motivating the question?
Perhaps it is a question about values, meaning, the emotional or “spiritual” dimensions, issues which are addressed elsewhere in this resource (see, for example, Questions 2 and 3, above).
Or perhaps the question is motivated by a vague sense that the atheist world view adds up to something less than a religious one. In a trivial sense, this is true: the religious believe in everything atheists do, plus a god or gods; but is a religious world view really better than an atheist one simply because it believes in more? If that were the case, then we should all believe in as many things as possible: fairies, pixies, spirits, all the Roman and Greek gods perhaps?
So why this sense that the atheist world view lacks something? Perhaps it is that, for many, the world view they have come to assume contains religion. A worldview without it therefore looks like a jigsaw puzzle with some large and vital pieces missing – take away religion and it just doesn’t look complete. But this is an illusion created by the assumption that religion has a part. To overcome this, it is necessary to try to see the atheist world view as complete in itself, and not as the religious world view with key parts removed. Then the list of what atheists do believe in will seem to be as it is: more than enough to fill a life.
5. How do you know you just haven’t found the right religion yet? How can you reject my religion when you know so little about it?
What atheists and humanists reject are not just the details of this or that religion, but the very idea of the existence of a god. They do so because the supposed arguments and evidence for the existence of a god are simply not good enough, because there are innumerable facts of experience which seem incompatible with the existence of a loving and omnipotent deity, and because the very idea of a supernatural being is at odds with a rational and scientific view of the world. If the very idea of a god is implausible, there is no point in shopping around to try to choose between the gods of Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or any other religion on offer.
The objection can in fact be turned round. Why is it that people who grow up in a Christian community tend to be Christians, people who grow up in a Hindu community tend to be Hindus, people who grow up in an Islamic community tend to be Muslims, and so on? Most religious believers adhere to their beliefs not because they have examined all the options, but because they have simply accepted the religion in which they happen to have been brought up.
Humanists are typically people who have thought seriously about the claims of religion. In all existing societies the dominant system of belief is a religious one, and it takes thought and sometimes courage to reject it. Humanists tend to have thought more about their own beliefs and to know more about the beliefs they reject than those people who unthinkingly write “C of E” on a form when asked for their religion.
6. Even atheists pray in desperate circumstances. (Sometimes this is expressed as: “There are no atheists in foxholes.”)
The statement is simply false. Atheists can understand the appeal of being able to feel, in a crisis, that there is a higher power one can turn to. This is especially the case in a situation where one is helpless, where the outcome depends on factors outside one’s control, where, for instance, the life of a loved one hangs in the balance and all one can do is say to oneself, “Please let her be OK.” But the fact that we can recognise the sometimes overwhelming strength of such a need does not in any way show that there is a god to meet that need. On the contrary – the very fact that it would sometimes be hugely tempting to believe that there is a god to pray to should make us suspect that belief in the existence of such a god is not based on rational grounds but on wishful thinking.
There are any number of atheists who have found themselves in a crisis and recognised that their survival depends on their own efforts and those of other human beings and that there is no point in invoking supernatural aid. Here are some examples:
The climber Joe Simpson was injured and faced almost certain death in 1985 on a climbing expedition in Peru. On Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in September 2004, he described it:
as looking into the end of everything and there was no one there, there was nothing there, which I believed but to have it confirmed was a void I was staring into… I always wondered if everything hit the fan would I turn round and say a few “Our Fathers”, a few “Hail Marys” – and the fact that there was nothing there for me and I never did confirmed to me my lack of faith, and it strengthened me, I think… I never once thought of turning to God and that was as much a driving thing – I think if for one moment I’d ever thought “If I say a few prayers Someone will help me” or “I should go and meet my Father and die” I would have just sat and died.
The accident is described in Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void and in the film of the book.
Gillian Crawford, founder of the charity ImpAcTAIDS, described a similar experience in My Life with HIVin The Scotsman on 8th December 2004:
I’m a humanist and, yes, I think it was provoked by becoming HIV positive. It’s that Touching the Void moment when you realise that if you were going to call on God, this would be the time to do it. So I knew for sure that it wasn’t God that I needed. Yet I still wanted to believe in some morality and ethics within society. I have a very strong sense of justice and fair-play, but it comes from being a humanist, not a Presbyterian.
Humanist celebrant Myrtle Ewing talked to the Belfast Telegraph in April 2005 about her beliefs. When asked, “Can you conceive of any personal crisis that might lead you to prayer and God?” she replied:
I’ve been there. And it didn’t. Ten years ago my husband, Sidney, was awaiting open heart surgery. I was alone in London. I walked through the hospital grounds and thought that if I ever needed religion, it was then. Then it came to me – just hope the surgeon doing the operation knows what he’s about and he hasn’t just had a row with his wife! I knew then there would never be a time when I’d have to reach for some deity. I was completely convinced. I can’t envisage a situation that would shatter my disbelief.
The obituaries of James Stockdale, US vice-presidential candidate and naval officer, focused on how the philosophy of Epictetus helped him to get through when he was taken prisoner in the Vietnam war.
In an illuminating example of the practical uses of philosophy, Stockdale explained that it was the Stoic teaching of Epictetus which had enabled him to endure his years of captivity after he was shot down over Vietnam, and emerge from the experience with his sense of himself more or less intact.
– Daily Telegraph , 7th July 2005
Epictetus taught that the epitome of evil is not death, but the fear of death. He taught that what he believed could be summed up in three words: tranquillity, fearlessness, and freedom. It was this teaching that helped Stockdale to resist torture and to help younger men, some boys, to resist with him, to answer them when they asked, “What are we to take torture for?” He worked hard to maintain morale by assuring prisoners, when they emerged from torture, that they should not feel guilty if they had broken: everybody does. Guilt, too, was something from which Epictetus wanted to free men.
– Guardian, 8th July 2005
I think we all have obligations to be good, honest, hard-working, caring, and compassionate,” he said in UK Times Online, and ET Magazine quoted him saying “If there was a god, I’d still have both nuts.”
In 1996, marathon cyclist Lance Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer that spread to his lungs and brain. After undergoing chemotherapy, he won the first of his seven Tour de France victories (his final victory before retiring was in 2005). In his book It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, he wrote about the night before undergoing brain surgery:
I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn’t pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable.
In an interview with Time, Armstrong said: “I don’t have anything against organized religion per se. We all need something in our lives. I personally just have not accepted that belief. But I’m one of the few.”
7. Doesn’t the existence of the paranormal support the existence of God?
A question also phrased in the form of a statement: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. (Shakespeare’s Hamlet).
We think this a bit of a non-sequitur – even if the existence of the paranormal were conclusively demonstrated (and it hasn’t been yet), it would not prove the existence of God.
8. Do you believe that the universe is good, bad, or neutral?
The answer is simple: the universe is neutral. The idea that the universe exists for our benefit belongs with a superseded cosmology which places human beings and their earth at the centre of the universe. We now know that we are just one species which happens to have evolved on one planet revolving around one star among millions of galaxies. The universe is not out there rooting for us. From a cosmic point of view we are insignificant. That doesn’t make our lives worthless; it just means that we have to find meaning and significance from within ourselves, rather than supposing that it is somehow built into the universe.
Of course the natural world contains much that is beautiful and inspiring, but it also contains earthquakes, floods, droughts, disease, and other natural disasters. There is no reason to suppose that the universe is on our side. It’s up to us, as human beings, to make what we can of it, to appreciate the good bits, and to seek together to overcome the bad. That’s what Humanism is all about.
9. Can you really believe that you are just the product of chance? Is life really that purposeless?
Building on the quick answers of “Yes” and “It depends”, we need to decide whether we are talking about there being life at all, or the fact that a particular person exists, or the development of a particular person’s life. We also need to distinguish between explanations by means of causes and those by means of purposes. (We might explain the light going out by telling a causal story: it was caused by a break in the circuit, caused by a switch going up, caused by a hand movement, caused by muscle contractions etc. We might also explain the light going out in terms of your purpose being to save electricity.)
Regarding life in general, there is presumably a causal explanation of there being life, but there is no reason to think that there is an explanation in terms of purposes. Tried and test ed arguments exist to show that putting forward a god as the ultimate cause of the world, with a purpose in mind, gets us nowhere, not least because suggestions of a god as ultimate cause are probably incoherent.
That a particular person exists can, in theory, be explained causally in terms of a sperm and egg combining. That a particular person exists can often also be partially explained by purposes: Mr and Mrs Jones’s purpose was to have a child (though it is doubtful whether their purpose was to have this child in particular).
Turning to the development of a particular person’s life – and this presumably is what matters – such a development is an excellent example of where purposes do exist. Virtually all human lives involve plans and purposes. That there is no purpose to life in general does not undermine this. For an activity to be purposeful, it does not need to be part of some greater purpose. That we can engage in purposeful and meaningful activities – from moving the queen in a game of chess to planning and delighting in a holiday or gazing at the stars – does not depend upon the chess game, the holiday, or the stars all having purposes themselves. That would be odd indeed.
10. Isn’t living in a purposeless universe depressing?
Many things can depress – from the trivial to the serious. Some of us get pretty depressed when the wine is finished, our letters go unanswered, and the attractive stranger with the sparkling eyes just walks on by. Many of us feel depressed at the latest casualties resulting from wars, disease, and earthquakes. Doubtless some people do feel depressed at the thought of living in a purposeless universe; but why should believing that one is part of God’s plan help? Indeed, to be told that we are nothing but part of someone else’s overall purpose over which we have no control – a god’s – would, if anything, make many of us wonder about the value of our own purposes.
Are the grouse any better off, when – on the glorious twelfth – they discover that they are there for a purpose, and are part of someone else’s plan, about which they were not consulted? Are chickens any better off, because they are part of our human purpose, the creation of cheap food?
11. Isn’t the belief that we die and that’s the end depressing and morbid? Isn’t life pointless if that’s all there is?
Why should the fact that something comes to an end make it pointless? Often the brevity and intensity of an experience is part of its value, and there are any number of exhilarating experiences which if prolonged indefinitely would become excruciating. (No doubt you can think of your own examples.)
Different people react differently to the idea of living for ever. Some people think that if they had the chance they would give it a go, while others are horrified by the idea of the boredom of endless repetition, or feel that it would be difficult to give meaning to a life without any finite shape and structure.
Thinking About Death is an introduction to the Humanist Philosophers’ Group book of essays based on their 2002 conference.
What gives the objection its plausibility is the fact that if an activity is cut short and left incomplete, we find this frustrating, but even that doesn’t make it worthless. An early death may indeed be tragic. But, by the same token, someone who has enjoyed a normal life span and looks back on their joys and achievements can feel a sense of fulfilment and completion – all the more so if they know that they will be remembered fondly and that they have bequeathed something positive to the next generation. That is the only sort of immortality we can hope for, and the only sort worth having.
12. How do you explain the perfection of life, and its unlikelihood, if there is no creator or designer god?
What perfection? Living things, including human beings, have their share of disease and pain and pointless suffering. If life really had been created by an all-loving and all-powerful god, he (or she) could surely have made a better job of it.
What does need explaining is the fact that living things possess organs and traits, often intricate and complex, which are adapted to their environment and their needs and which may appear to be the product of purposive design. By far the most plausible explanation of this is the theory of evolution by natural selection. It’s not that living things were designed with the features they need in order to survive. Rather, those features came about as the result of random genetic mutations, and where such features conferred an advantage, however slight, in the struggle for survival, their possessors were more likely to survive and reproduce. People ask how small genetic variations could explain the emergence of completely new species, or the existence of complex organs such as the eye. The explanation is to be found in the accumulation of small changes over vast periods of time. Think of the way in which domestic breeding, using natural mutations, can produce new varieties of dogs or cats, and of fruit or flowers, strikingly different from their ancestors, in a relatively short period of time. This helps us to understand how, over three or four thousand million years, the great diversity of living species, each adapted to their environment, could have evolved without a creator god.
Richard Dawkins, in his “Lament for Douglas Adams” in The Guardian (14 May 2004) recalls how Adams countered arguments about apparent order and purpose in the universe:
To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow preordained for us, because we are so well suited to live in it, he [Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.
See also
•Countering Creationism
•In The Accidental Tumour, science writer Carl Zimmer wonders why creationists never mention malignant tumours as evidence of God’s creativity.
13. How do you explain the existence of suffering and evil in the world?
It is bizarre that this question can come from believers in the existence of God – a god who is typically said to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. Yes, there is suffering in the world, but its existence certainly is not explained by the existence of such a powerful and good god.
Explanations can be given in terms of causes and sometimes purposes. Much suffering results from natural events, such as earthquakes, floods, and disease. There are causal explanations for these events, though none is in terms of purposes. Indeed, an explanation in terms of purposes would seem to have to make reference to some power aiming to bring about suffering as a result of such events – hardly a cheering thought.
Regretfully, there are also many examples of suffering that result from people deliberately inflicting them, often with a purpose – sometimes, indeed, with a religious purpose and sometimes, indeed, claiming to be following the voice of God. There are, no doubt, explanations why there are such people around – be they religious or atheist. Their existence, for an atheist, is no more surprising than the existence of earthquakes, hurricanes, and the AIDs virus; and their existence should be no more surprising than that of love, humour, and altruism. To insist that all these things are surprising unless God exists, should be met by the comment that it would be even more surprising if a loving god had created terrible evils.
14. Isn’t it hypocritical for atheists to join in religious holidays and ceremonies? Or admire religious art or architecture? Or send their children to faith schools?
There are a number of different issues here. What links some of them is the general point that good things which are partly religious in origin can outgrow their origins. Take the case of religious holidays. It’s first worth noting that Christmas and Easter are as much pagan as Christian. They reflect the need to mark the turn of the year and to celebrate the return of new life in spring. Much of the traditional imagery derives from these roots – there’s nothing particularly religious about Christmas trees and Easter eggs. And, especially at the beginning and end of winter, we all need a break!
Something similar can be said about religious art and architecture. The best of it transcends its religious origins to reflect universal human experiences. Depictions of the nativity can say something about the universal significance of relations between parent and child. Depictions of the crucifixion or the ‘pieta’ may be profound meditations on human suffering and loss (though they may also be cloyingly sentimental or sickly masochistic). Great religious music such as Bach’s B-minor Masscan expresses a range of universal human emotions from remorse and grief to joy and triumph. Having said that, it’s often also the case that the best bits of “religious” art are the non-religious bits – like the scenes from everyday life at the bottom of each of the stained-glass windows in Chartres cathedral. But it’s really no more hypocritical for atheists to admire religious art than it is for Christians to admire the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon.
The question of ceremonies is more complicated. We all need ceremonies to mark the events of birth and marriage and death, but the traditional Christian ones are often excruciatingly inadequate, and that is why humanists have introduced their own naming ceremonies and weddings and funerals.
A humanist funeral dispenses with all the stuff about “resurrection” and serves instead the very necessary purpose of remembering and celebrating the life of the person who has died. But humanists will also want to celebrate the marriages or mourn the deaths of friends or family, even when those events are marked by religious ceremonies, and there’s nothing hypocritical about that (though they probably won’t join in the prayers).
Faith schools are a bit different. The BHA is strongly opposed to state support for faith schools, which exacerbate cultural divisions and are likely to pressurise pupils into the acceptance of religious beliefs instead of encouraging them to make up their own minds. In practice, humanist parents sometimes have little choice about sending their children to faith schools, especially at primary level where the only local school may be a faith school. On the other hand, pretending to be religious in order to get your child into a religious secondary school because it’s got a better academic record than the local comprehensive may be hypocritical. But it may be a tough choice – and we all have to make compromises sometimes.
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