I promised another reply to a comment on faith.  Commenter Stever writes:

I also see you have faith as well, even though you do not consider it a virtue. Your faith is in the natural world. That is the engine of creation, the influencer of the world in which you live. You trust and understand (even if it is a limited understanding) “it” as the thing that makes the world go ’round. It is the thing that goes around. We all have faith in things, like political parties, financial institutions, money as the source of happiness, etc

Faith as a virtue is the understanding that all our life, everything, derives meaning and understanding  out of our relationship with Jesus. Humility may look the same for you and me, but your interpretation of it excludes my undeerstanding of a personal God. For you faith isn’t a virtue and I wouldn’t expect you to understand it because you don’t subscribe to my world view. My faith is a response to what God has done for me, for humanity, and it drives me to invest more into people and my society. It is what also helps me to cling to the truth of Jesus, even when others would hurt or kill me for doing so. People have been martyred for both our countries, for freedom (aside from all the religious stuff). The soldiers belief is that there is a greater cause, a cause that hits at the heart of humanity. Sure, some do it for the money, others because they are ordered to (and in the army you need to obey orders), and a variety of other reasons. But one of the things that makes a sacrifial death meaningful is the faith that it is for a greater cause. There’s something virtuous in that.

I continue to get comments on my posts on faith, and I think I could make this blog exclusively a blog on trying to nail down faith and its significance.  It seems to be a slippery thing, and I am still unable to get a clear answer to the role specifically of faith.  I will discuss two comments by commenter Steve in this post.  I appreciate his comments and attempts to explain his reasoning, but I still lack an answer.

First, Steve writes:

Faith in general is believing in something bigger than yourself, in something outside of yourself. In the Christian sense it is understanding that God is who He says He is not just in blind obedience, but as a response to several things, which includes personal experience and historical records and interactions. The part about believing in the unseen as the singular definition of “faith” is not the whole experience and just touches it superficially. I have faith in God not just because someone told me to, but because I have tried and tested it in my life, studied where it came from and the records it contains, and have found what I consider truth.

Why is faith a virtue? One reason is because it does go beyond one’s self. At the heart of faith is openness and understanding, not selfishness and pride. Of what virtue is there in only believing in what you can see and touch? The only “truth” we would have would be isolated to our own experiences.

In previous posts, I have discussed faith and why it is considered by believers to be something good.  I really cannot understand why it should be considered a virtue.  I consider it undesirable–believing things without evidence has lead to all sorts of harm.  This is true even with simple things like superstitions, but it is especially harmful when your whole world view is based on faith and you disagree with others that have a different faith.  That is a recipe for intolerance and persecution.  We often see faith listed together with other virtues, like hope, charity, and love.  I don’t see why faith should belong to such exalted company, instead of amongst the vices

Some commenters have tried to supply an explanation for why faith is good, but it seems to me they always use the same method.  They say that faith leads to some other virtue, and that is why faith is good.  They say that faith leads to humility, or true faith leads to good works, etc.  But in doing so, they haven’t explained the value of the faith part.  Maybe humility is good, or works are good, but why can’t we have them without faith?  As far as I can tell, the commenters believe not only that faith leads to these other virtues, but that we can’t have these other virtues without faith.  I believe that all of the virtues can be supported without faith.  Faith supplies nothing extra, nothing good, nothing we couldn’t get just as easily without faith.  I still would like to see why faith, in and of itself, is good.  In this post, I would like to simply show that another virtue, humility, can be supported without God or faith.

I suppose one easy way to show that none of the major virtues require faith is to show that they are considered virtues and practiced by the many groups that do not consider faith to be valuable.  Aristotle had an entire system of ethics and discussed all  of the major virtues without once considering faith.  Aristotle saw nothing virtous in faith.  In fact, none of the ancient peoples, including the ancient Hebrews, considered faith a virtue.  There is no mention of faith in any of the older books of the Old testament.  Faith only started to become a part of religion in the few centuries before Christ, and only become central to religion with Christianity.  Faith is still not important to most Jews today–the emphasis is on following the law, not faith.

To illustrate, I will discuss humility and how it arises for an atheist.  Atheists are often stereotyped as being arrogant.  I do not believe that is true.  It certainly is not inherent in atheism, even if some atheists have that trait, as do some Christians.

If I am to be proud, I must believe that I have responsiblity for my achievements.  However, a naturalistic world is a world governed by forces beyond our control.  I may be intelligent, but that intelligence is the luck of random sexual recombination.  I am healthy, but that is simply because I have been lucky that none of the blind forces of nature and parasites have harmed me.  My temperment is the product of genes and environmental forces beyond my control.  I do not see how I could be proud at my intelligence or responsible nature when it was simply a lucky accident.

Upon seeing someone less fortunate than themselves, believers sometimes say “there, but for the grace of God, go I”, admitting that their good fortune is not of their own doing.  When I see someone less fortunate than I, I can say “there, but for the luck of random forces of nature, go I”.  I still realize that the difference between my own fortunes and those of the less fortunate is not something to be proud of, but to be thankful for.  This teaches me both humility and compassion for others.  A risk for the believer is thinking that their good fortune is because God is smiling on them and they somehow deserve their fortune.  They sometimes claim that people are unhappy or have misfortune because they are sinners.  If the believer does this, then their faith has made them less humble and less compassionate, not more humble or compassionate.

Perhaps I can be proud not that I have intelligence or health or other fortunes, but that I have made good use of them and not wasted them.  I think there is some value in that.  But even then, we must be careful.  I make good use of my talents partly because of the inherited temperament I have and partly because of how I was raised, so perhaps I do not even deserve credit for that.  On the other hand, if we take this too far we would be unable to condemn the severe criminal or praise the truly good people we know.  We must leave some room for free will and personal responsibility, while not pretending that we have too much control over our own fates.  We should allow ourselves some pride at our accomplishments, without considering ourselves better than others.

For both the believer and the non believer humility can arise from the realization that there is much beyond our control, whether that is because nature or God is beyond our control.  I actually think that the believers have a greater risk, because they can fool themselves into thinking that God is something they can influence or control or that God has given them fortune for a reason.  Certainly self righteousness is a common stereotype of the believer that is true in reality fairly often.  However, I have known many humble believers and do not want to suggest that religion usually leads to that.  However, I would suggest that humility is independeent of faith.

Likewise, all of the other virtues can be obtained without faith.  So why does God care so much whether we have faith?

A commenter recently posted on my discussion of the fall and redemption here.  It is a long comment, but I just want to comment on one part of it here.  Commenter Steve says:

I have come to the point of belief and faith in this God, so my pursuit is to understand His infiniteness in my finiteness. There could be a whole different explanation that makes total sense to you or I but we just haven’t thought of it yet. To say with confidence that this is all wrong is to have a certain amount of pride in your (and humanity’s) level of intelligence and thought. It is always easy to prove something “wrong” through lack of understanding a reality that is beyond you. This isn’t personal, talk to me about quantum physics and I could with confidence say certain things are wrong, simply because that experience is beyond me.

If a characteristic of God as stated in the Bible doesn’t seem correct or to make sense to me (or you), it may be my (mis)understanding of how an eternal God exists and thinks, that is at fault, rather than God Himself who is whacked out.

I have two comments on this.  The first is the common suggestion that not believing in God is being proud or implies some high level of certainty (in the rest of the comment, Steve seems to think I believe in some God but am struggling with various dogmas.  I do not believe in the Bible or God at all).  These believers don’t believe in Allah, or the Greek Gods, or the Hindu Gods, or the various Budhist dieties.  Isn’t it prideful for them to deny these Gods?  And for the Christian God (or whichever God they believe), they claim to know things about his nature, like that he is part of a trinity, and things about what he likes (keeping the sabbath holy, what sex acts we should do).  They claim great knowledge.  All I say is that there is no more reason for me to believe in God than in pink unicorns.  I admit my ignorance and don’t claim to have any special knowledge.

The second comment is how Steve’s comments are an argument from ignorance.  The appeal to the mystery of God is always a cop out, the end argument when logic fails.  A person can defend any God, with any inconsistencies or any sort.  When you eventually get to the point that you really don’t have an answer, you can just say God is so complex and mysterious and our humble brains can’t possibly understand it.  There is absolutely nothing that can’t be defended that way.  I am not being proud to demand a minimal level of coherence to the concepts of God.  If someone was defending the existence of Zeus, and every time a problem was found with this God, he just said Zeus is mysterious and beyond our comprehension, would a Christian find this argument convincing?  If a Christian doctrine, such as the fall and redemption, is completely illogical and arbitrary, you can’t just say we don’t understand it so accept it.  It would make more sense to admit our ignorance is great enough that even having such a doctrine in the first place is the pinnacle of pride.  If the doctrine is too complex or mysterious to make sense, how about we just do without the doctrine?

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here.  I’m sorry if anyone has been a regular reader.  I have been busy with work and other things, and religion hasn’t been in the forefront of my mind lately.  I will try to post a little more regularly here in the future.

I was prompted to write today by an article in this week’s Newsweek about John McCain and religion, by Micheal Gerson.  I had already been thinking along these lines and this brought it to the front.  The article discusses McCain’s religious beliefs and how it affects his views on policy.  Or at least it claims to.  I don’t think it does.  Instead, it discusses McCain’s ethical views and how that affects his policy.

Here is a quote to make my point: “He has shown a stubborn sense of decency and morality that should appeal broadly to Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews and others who are concerned about social issues.”  The implication is twofold–that his sense of decency is the same as his religion, and that such a sense of decency would appeal to believers but should not be an appeal to atheists or secular people.  Nowhere in the article is there a hint of how McCain’s views actually derive from religion.

Many people think atheists are immoral.  They can’t understand how they could have ethics without religion.  For many people, religion and morality are synonymous, as in the above quote.  But the truth is that most ethical beliefs are not drawn from religion.  If you are looking for stories of integrity and decency, the Bible is not a very good source.  There is nothing specifically religious about most moral teachings, once you get beyond keeping the Sabbath holy and similar religious rules.

Instead what happens is that whatever ethical beliefs people have, they ascribe them to religion and put them in the sphere of religion.  There have been many cases of secular changes in views that are later taken up by religion.  Many people today would use religion to explain why they are opposed to slavery or racism or sexism or monarchy, etc., yet in the past religion was used to justify each of those.

This is what happens:  people arive at various ethical views based on a variety of reasons, whether it is the BIble or church authority or philosophy or common ethical reasoning.  Whatever conclusions they get are then ascribed to religion.  People equate ethics and religion.  They think they are ethical because of something specifically religious, when in fact all that has happened is that whatever they choose to call ethical becomes part of there religion.

This is why people can’t understand how atheists can be ethical, and why an article discussing the ethical beliefs of John McCain, that lacks a single reference to religious doctrine, can be title “The Gospel of Chaplain John.”  People have simply decided that the word moral means religious, and evertyhing within the domain of morality is swallowed up by religion.  Things like honesty and compassion exist independently of religion, but we pretend these derive from religion.  We might as well just define religion as everything good and then use that definition to prove that nonbelievers cannot be good.  Although I do not support McCain, I can admire a sense of decency as much as a believer.

I have written before that one of the biggest differences between the believer and the non believer is how they view the world.  The universe seems to be arbitrary and uncaring, but human society does seem to care for us.  The religious impulse gives human like meaning to the universe.  The believer sees the universe as existing for a purpose and all of the things that occur have a reason, one that is ultimately concerned with our well being.  The non believer sees the universe as indifferent, neither hostile nor benign.  There is no ultimate purpose to it, and events just happen.  The universe doesn’t care about us.

One problem I have with believing there is purpose in the universe is that you must go to great intellectual twists to try to find purpose in an arbitrary world.  When something bad happens, you try to find a reason, when there really is none, and sometimes it can be quite painful to try to make sense of the senseless.

Another problem with believing the universe is benign is that we no longer need to change it.  Humans have not eliminated most of the evil in the world, especially the evil of humans on humans.  But science and technology and social advances have made the universe a little less indifferent and a little more like the human world.  The just still get sick, but disease strikes less and is more likely to be cured.  We are better able to survive natural disasters.  We have controlled nature a little bit and made it just a little bit less hostile.  If the universe isn’t like the human world, we can at least eliminate a few of the edges.

The impulse to control the world is muted in the believer.  If you believe there is a reason for everything, why try to change it?  I have heard many people argue against using genetic technology to cure diseases or save the starving by saying that we shouldn’t play God and there is a reason for all of that suffering.  In the past, people accepted their lot in life as peasants because they believed in the divine right of kings and similar views that the order of society is decreed by God.   It is only if you believe that the world is not designed for us and realize it is completely indifferent to us that we have the impulse to make it better.

I am not claiming that believers don’t want to make the world better.  Many do.  But overall, belief in a purposeful, benign universe will put a damper on that impulse, and more evils can be accepted just because it was “meant to be”.  Nothing was meant to be.

I had a strong response before when I asked for clarification on some doctrine, so maybe I can try again.  I don’t understand the whole salvation by faith/works thing. Many Christians say that salvation depends on faith alone, which seems completely irrational to me, if there was a God (I don’t believe there is).

I know that the New Testament includes passages supporting both views.  The Jerusalem Christians, lead by James, believed that following the law was most important.  On the other hand, Paul insisted that following the law isn’t needed and faith in Jesus is the only thing needed for salvation.  The writings of Paul and his followers dominate the New Testament, so that view is the main view, but there three or four books that suggest that faith alone is insufficient for salvation.  I was raised Catholic, and the Catholics tend to say both good works and faith are needed for salvation, although in my 12 years of Catholic school, the point wasn’t emphasized much.

I know that most Protestants tend instead to say that it is faith alone and emphasize this a lot.  What I don’t get is how this can seen to be morally justifiable.  If a person lives a completely upright and moral life, but they don’t believe in Jesus, they are damned.  If someone else lived a terrible life, but dies believing in Jesus, they are saved.  It also seems that the only time faith matters is death.  If a person believed for 70 years but then loses his faith for a year and dies, he is damned, but someone who didn’t believe until their last year is saved.  Why is belief at that moment more important than the other 70 years?

I don’t really understand why faith would be that important at all, actually.  Why would God put so much importance on believing things without evidence?  Why is faith even considered a virtue?  Why would he put faith as more important than how you treat others?  It seems at best like a very egotistical God.  Of course one answer to this is simply because that’s what God said.  God said you need faith to be saved, so you do.  Who are we to determine his logic?  That doesn’t change the fact that the whole thing seems very arbitrary and it gives God a character that doesn’t exactly make me want to worship him.  If he were a person, I would definitely avoid someone like that.

Understand that I don’t believe there is salvation at all, so I am not asking to be convinced that I need faith.  I don’t have it.  I’m not trying to figure out what scriptures really say or anything like that.  I just want to know how salvation based on faith alone can be viewed by anyone as just in any sense.

As I was thinking about the question of the atonement from my previous post, I realized there is a contradiction between the concept of The Fall and a common explanation for evil.  I have never seen this problem addressed before in any way.  Maybe I’m missing something or it has been addressed before.  If so, I’d like to know.

The problem of evil is how there can be evil in a world if God is all powerful and all good. One common answer to this is the argument from free will: God allows evil in the world, because only if there is evil can there be free will. We must be free to choose good or bad.  This argument assumes that free will is one of the greatest goods, so God allows evil in order to allow the greater good of free will.

First, I would like to point out this means that there must be a good that exists independent of God.  If good is simply whatever God says it is or wants it to be, he would not be constrained by greater or lesser goods.  he could simply declare that free will is not a great good, and create a world without evil.  The only way it makes sense for him to create a world with free will is if there was some criteria outside of God that could determine this world is better.  All arguments for evil actually require that God weighs pros and cons, rather than just declare whatever he wants to be good or evil.  Therefore, we can have good without God.

But the interesting point is what this says about the Fall of Adam and Eve.  According to the free will argument, a world with evil is actually better than a world without evil.  A world without any evil would not have any free will.  God created this world with evil because it is better.  Yet the Christian view is that before the fall, there was an idyllic Eden without evil.  The sin of Adam and Eve is often represented as introducing free will.  That makes sense if free will is impossible without evil.  Therefore, the fall was good.  Original sin is good.  The world before the fall, without evil, was worse than the world we have now.  If that is not true, then you loose the argument for evil.  God could create a world like Eden, but he doesn’t, so he is not all good.   How can people say that evil is acceptable because it gives us free will and yet simultaneously hold that the world before the fall was better than the world after the fall?

In Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors, the protagonist kills another character.  At first he is troubled and he fears he will get caught, but eventually it becomes clear that there will be no price to pay.  He will not get caught, he benefits personally from it, and he does not feel guilt.  When the situation is presented in a hypothetical form to another character, played by Woody Allen, he insists that there would be some kind of retribution eventually.  But the movie implies is just wishful thinking and that does not happen.

Are there acts like that, selfish acts that benefit an individual, harm another, and have no consequences?  I have just become familiar with the work of Neusner, Chilton, Green and Green in Altruism in World Religions on the concepts of selfishness and altruism in the major religions.  It is very relevant to one of my recent posts.  Neusner et al. surveyed major leaders and experts in all of the major religions of the world to see how they understood selfishness and altruism.  They surveyed many forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Budhism, etc.  They found that all religions use the words in the same way.  All of them deny the existence of selfishness and altruism in the most common sense.

Saying someone is selfish can mean different things.  It always means some form of looking out for your own interests.  It can mean looking out for your own interests in the short term at the expense of others, but the action is harmful to yourself in the long term.  It can be beneficial financially but harmful psychologically.  There are other variations.  The most straightforward meaning is that something is selfish if it benefits the self at the expense of others.  These benefits are long term and include all possible kinds of benefits.  Likewise, altruism is benefiting others at the expense of self.

No religion recognizes the existence of either of these phenomena.  How could that be?  They all teach that actions that appear selfish are ultimately harmful to the actor.  Often the harm is more long term and it is pschological or social.  Sometimes it is in the next life.  But they all teach there are no truly selfish actions.  People will not have true lasting benefits from short term selfish acts.  They always pay.  In the same way, there are no truly altruistic acts.  If a person sacrifices him or herself, she will be rewarded, eventually.  Again, it might only be in the long term, including the next life.  It might be psychological or reputation or similar rewards, but ultimately, we benefit by doing good.

In my earlier post, I claimed that religious ethics is basically based on self interest, just like secular ethics.  This study proves it.  Sometimes believers ask non believers to explain why people would do something altruistic without a God, yet even in their own religions, there are no truly altruistic acts.

Most of the reasoning used by religions are correct, and they work just as well without God.  It is true that often a selfish act comes back to haunt an individual.  They will feel guilt, they will be punished by others, they will lose their reputation.  Altruistic acts make a person feel good.  If you give some money to charity, you benefit by feeling better, and perhaps by having a better society in which to live.  Most religions actually focus on the benefits in this life.  They are wise to realize that actions that might seem beneficial in the short term are harmful in the long term.

Some religions do have something stonger to offer, for those who get away.  By having an after life or reincarnation, they can have more reliable rewards or punishments, and by having God they have a more reliable enforcer.  But people are still acting out of an self interest.  Christianity relies some on eternal rewards, but eternal life is usually based more on faith than deeds, so it mostly relies on things in this life.  The religion that brings in the supernatural to the greatest degree is Hinduism with the concept of Karma, a careful score keeping of all good and bad acts.

Evolutionary biology has come up with the same explanation for apparently altruistic acts.  It is in the selfish best interest of the individual, or at least its genes, to cooperate and be nice, sometimes.  Just as with religions, evolutionary biology does not account for truly altruistic acts, only those that seem to be altruistic.  Unlike religions, it does recognize truly selfish acts.  There are cheaters that benefit with no price to pay, under some circumstances.  Evolution explains cooperating behaviors in everything from microbes to humans, and it can account for why we have feelings of guilt or shame and why it feels good to give to charity.

So do truly selfish or altruistic acts really exist, contrary to religions?  Are there examples like in Crimes and Misdemeanors?  I think there are.  Although very often selfish acts are punished or have harmful consequences, sometimes they don’t.  The unfortunate truth is that occasionally people escape, although it isn’t often.  Usually there are consequences.  This is common enough that you can come up with your own example of someone who benefited on the backs of others.  Our laws help to get some of those who escape the psychological and social sanctions, but they aren’t as efficient at getting cheaters as God.  Maybe one reason people prefer to believe in God is so that they can feel better about such cheaters.  Religion and humanism have a similar ethic, but with God, they have 100% enforcement.

Evolution says there should be no truly altruistic acts, at least no altruistic behavior that is directly selected.  Acts that seem altruistic are actually selfish, just like with religions.  But that qualifier is important.  Not all behaviors are directly selected, and it might be that a general behavioral rule is selected that in some circumstances is truly altruistic, or a behavior is an indirect effect of selection on something else, or a behavior acts differntly under different environments.

Contrary to religions, I think there are truly altruistic acts, even if they are fairly rare.  Usually when we help others, we also get some kind of benefit, even if it is just the respect of those we help.  But sometimes a person is asked sacrifice their own happiness to help someone else achieve happiness under circumstances that it is very unlikely they will ever get a reward for their action or even be recognized.   People do it, and we are often inspired by such stories in the grand sweep of history, but it can also happen in just the every day world of life and love.  Neither evolution nor religion accounts for such acts.  Nevertheless, we can be glad they exist when we are the beneficiaries.

I will now post the last part of my discussion of ethics in a godless world.  I have put this part off because it is quite unoriginal.  The criticism goes back to Plato.  I will do my best to present it.  The easiest way to bring up this point is to ask if there is anything that God can do that is not good, or holy.  If God commands genocide (which he does in the Bible), is it good?

If the answer is that there are some things that God could do but are not good, then that means the criteria for good and evil is external to God.  If genocide is wrong even if God commands it, then right and wrong must be things that God must follow.  He is constrained by something external that we call good, and God is all good because he perfectly matches this thing we call good.  In that case, we don’t need the middle man (God).  Good exists without god, he is not the author of good.

On the other hand, if whatever God does or says is good by definition, then good is completely arbitrary.  If someone claims that God ordered them to kill their children, how could you argue against it?  God could change what is good, which seemed to happen, since some things that were law in the old testament are not law in the new testament.  The only reason we have to follow God is because he is powerful.  God might not have our best interests at heart, his rules might go contrary to nature, he could be a megalomaniac.  There is no reason to call it good, other than God said so, so you better listen.

Some people might say that although what God says is good, God’s nature is such that he would only wish what is good for us and wouldn’t order terrible things.  Notice the use of the word “good”.  What is good for us.  In order to say that God wouldn’t do something evil or bad for humans, you again need to have some external definition of what is good, some rules that we know God would not break.  You could say that God created us, so he knows what is good for us, or created our nature such that what he says is good, but again you have the same problem.

omeone might claim that good exists external to God and isn’t arbitrary, but only revelation can show us what that good is.  This then requires using the Bible as the sole source of ethics.  We have seen that is not the case.  People don’t say we shouldn’t lie just because the Bible says so.  We use reason, which presumably can be used to determine what good is, without the middle man of God.

So at first it seems that God gives us some way to ground ethics.  It seems that it removes the subjectivity.  But as I have shown in this and other posts, the criticisms that believers love to level at atheism can also be leveled against God.  We still must ground ethics in our self interest, or it still could become purely arbitrary.  At best, God becomes superfluous.  In this case, either ethics are purely arbitrary, or they exist without God.