He sowed terrorism, but what Osama bin Laden hoped to reap was a full-out war of Islam against the modern world. His target was modernism; his bulls-eye was on modern values such as democracy, equality between sexes and social groups, separation of religion and government, sexual freedom, and affluence. He hoped to use anger against heavy-handed American and European support of Israel (and against US military interventions in the middle east) in order to galvanize Muslims to join in asymmetrical warfare against the “modern” infidels. His ultimate goal: restore medieval theocracy, an Islamic Caliphate.

The past few months have made it evident that he has failed. We have seen the beginnings of a general revolution breaking out in the Muslim world—not against modernism but for it. This is the opposite of what bin Laden had in mind. As Juan Cole writes,

Usama Bin Laden was a violent product of the Cold War and the Age of Dictators in the Greater Middle East. He passed from the scene at a time when the dictators are falling or trying to avoid falling in the wake of a startling set of largely peaceful mass movements demanding greater democracy and greater social equity. Bin Laden dismissed parliamentary democracy, for which so many Tunisians and Egyptians yearn, as a man-made and fallible system of government, and advocated a return to the medieval Muslim caliphate (a combination of pope and emperor) instead. Only a tiny fringe of Muslims wants such a theocratic dictatorship. The masses who rose up this spring mainly spoke of “nation,” the “people,” “liberty” and “democracy,” all keywords toward which Bin Laden was utterly dismissive.

Today, nearly a decade after his triumph on 9-11, he has been erased from the scene. It’s too much to hope that al Qaeda and Islamic suicide terrorism have suddenly come to an end. But perhaps we can see a bit of sunrise. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of what bin Laden tried to sow.

I am honored to have been invited by Dwight to write a post on atheology.com. Raised by Fundamentalist parents in the Bible Belt, I am excited to share some of my thoughts on why women join—and leave—fundamentalist religion. When I look back at the religion I left, I am struck by how great an emphasis its leaders place on womens’ submissiveness and “traditional” family values. Many of the older women and almost all of the young women in the church in which I grew up were devoted to the idea of Biblical Womanhood.

Biblical Womanhood means, essentially, that women are to joyfully submit to their husbands in everything, devote themselves to the “High Calling” of being wives and mothers, and dress and behave modestly. While the idea of womens’ working outside of the home is not discouraged if it stems from economic necessity, the highest praise and approval is reserved for full-time wives and mothers. Women who choose not to marry or not to have children are often viewed with suspicion. Women, who represent a numerical majority among members of every Christian sect, are barred from any position in the church which would give them authority over men. It was routinely suggested from the pulpit that married women ought not own their own money, have a private email address, or make friends with men.

Lest you think these ideas are unique to one congregation, the idea of Biblical Womanhood is widely endorsed across Evangelical denominations and is rapidly growing in popularity among young women and teenage girls. Many of these women say things like “I’m feminine, not feminist” and “I’m a Proverbs 31 woman!” or a “I want to be a Titus 2 woman!” Many Fundamentalist Christians view any move toward womens’ empowerment to be part of a liberal attack on Christian Family Values.

But why? Why do Fundamentalist Christians seem so obsessed with curtailing womens’ rights and equality? Why is male dominance and female submissiveness a Christian Family Value? The first and most obvious reason for embracing a system in which men rule over women and women are treated as second class citizens is that it is biblical. Taken at face value, the Bible does not set forth a society in which men and women are equals. While the Bible describes a handful of powerful women, those women do not represent a model for ordinary godly women. In fact, powerful women in the Bible are often villains (Vashti, Delilah, Jezebel). The Bible is crystal clear about women’s relationship to men (1 Corinthians 11:3, Ephesians 5:22). If one chooses to live by a literal interpretation of the Bible, one must accept that gender equality is simply inconsistent.

Of course, the Bible has been (roughly) the same for centuries. So, what has brought about the recent emphasis in Fundamentalist circles on controlling women by returning to “traditional” gender roles? One argument is that, until a few years ago, these gender roles represented broad social norms; but that, in the past few decades, the wider society has changed while the church has held with “tradition.” To some extent, this is true. The recent emphasis on women’s “returning” to biblical gender roles is, at least partly, the church’s response to feminism. In the past few decades, women have seen tremendous changes in their position relative to men. Men, too, have necessarily seen changes in their positions relative to women. Men are suddenly (in the past few decades) faced with realities which their fathers never imagined: women bosses; women professors; women in high political office—women in charge of them. Men can no longer rely on the law, on science, or on prevailing social norms to justify mens’ dominance and womens’ subjugation. One place men can reasonably expect to receive affirmation of their superiority is in Fundamentalist churches—churches which seek to live by a literal interpretation of the Bible. It follows, then, that the more rights and powers women gain in society, the more the church will seek to take those rights and powers away.

If one gives it much thought, it isn’t difficult to see why men in recent decades have embraced a system which reinforces patriarchal values just as the broader society is beginning to reject them. What may be more difficult to understand is why women would choose to live under such a system. One may reasonably imagine that women are dragged into Fundamentalist sects through abuse and manipulation by their husbands. Certainly this is sometimes the case. Other women, like myself, have been brought up by Fundamentalist families. But a shocking number of young women willingly convert to Fundamentalist sects, or, being raised in a Fundamentalist family, embrace more conservative views than their parents. Why? Why would a woman knowingly embrace the message that she is inferior?

Again, the most straight-forward reason is that the Bible tells me so. What does a woman think when she reads verses like “I do not permit a woman to speak or to hold authority; she must remain silent”? The same thing a man thinks: Women must not be as good as men. If a woman begins with the premise that the Bible is the literal word of God, and she then observes that the Bible prescribes a subservient position for women, then she must conclude that God prescribes a subservient role for women. The only way to obey God, then, is to accept her own second-class status.

Another reason why women cling to religious doctrines which preach male dominance is a bit more complicated. Rather than reflecting the successes of feminist movements, womens’ adherence to Fundamentalist views on gender reflects the failures of feminist movements. That is, it speaks to the fact that women are still oppressed in very real ways which are seldom acknowledged. When people tell little girls that we could grow up to be President of the Untied States, we know they aren’t telling us the truth. We know that, in reality, we probably can’t do that. In the same way, when people tell us that women are just as smart and capable as men in the work place but we consistently earn less money and receive fewer promotions, we feel lied to. When we are told that women have equal protection under the law, yet we are treated with suspicion and contempt when we report being the victim of a violent crime, we feel lied to. When we’re told that we are sexually liberated, but what we experience is comodification and objectification of our sexuality, we feel lied to.A doctrine which tells us that women aren’t meant to be equal to men and that we will be happier if we accept our lot in life—just seems more honest.

Not only is the idea of a divinely ordained patriarchy consistent with many womens’ experiences, it brings positive meaning to those experiences.

Fundamentalist women are told that when we choose to submit to our husbands, we are modeling perfect submission to God. When we subject our will to our husbands’, we are not being abused; we are practicing dependence on God. When we choose to dress modestly and eschew the trappings of beauty, we are demonstrating godly humility. When we abstain from sexual intimacy and pleasure, we are saving our selves as a gift for our husbands (just as we save our spirits for God). And when we satisfy our husbands demands for sex and childbearing, we are acknowledging God’s right to control our bodies. By submitting gracefully and demonstrating joy in submission, we are demonstrating to a rebellious and discontented world the “Peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding.”

Viewed through the lens of Fundamentalist Christianity, our oppression ceases to be painful, frustrating, and humiliating, and becomes instead a powerful expression of devotion to God.

Indeed, embracing feminism, not skepticism toward the existence of God, is what first separated me from the church. I didn’t question—either aloud or in my mind—whether there really was a God. I insisted that there was a God. I insisted that God loved me. And I insisted  that I, a woman, was made in the image of God, as the Bible says. I questioned why a perfect creator would create an imperfect creature in Its own image.  I then began to question why, if women and men are both made in the image of God, women should submit to men.The resistance and anger I faced for asking this relatively simple question was the beginning of the end of faith for me. Only when I refused to accept my own inferiority did I begin to reject the Bible and the Bible’s God.

Atheists will immediately recognize many of these rhetorical “themes”, as Avalos calls them. The six are as follows: the accusation of fundamentalism (secularists/atheists are “no different from religious fundamentalists insofar as they believe that they are correct, and all other positions are wrong”), omnifideism (” all worldviews and approaches are ultimately based on faith, and so deserve equal validity as scholarly methods”), the accusation of exclusivism (that excluding faith as a legitimate method of scholarship is “close-minded”), the angry atheist (ignore us, we’re just angry people), psychoanalysis (the real explanation for atheism can be found in the “biography” of each atheist), proprietary rights (the Bible is a religious book therefore “only people of faith can rightly understand [it], and atheists have no business studying it”). [Quotes are taken from "Six Anti-Secularist Themes: Deconstructing Religionist Rhetorical Weaponry" by Dr. Hector Avalos.]

Secular biblical scholars aren’t alone in being subjected to these rhetorical “weapons.” Most of them have been repeatedly employed against evolutionary scientists (starting with Darwin, of course), skeptics studying occult and “supernatural” claims, and of course atheists.

Read it for yourself. I strongly recommend it.

Why wouldn’t God be happy about a procedure that has allowed millions of couples to have babies who otherwise weren’t able to? Well, it appears he didn’t intend for these couples to have babies, and what happened? They did an end-around with this IVF malarky.

Look at it from God’s point of view. Traditionally he’s been in full control of the creation of new beings—and each new being means a new soul must be created. The production and punishment of souls is God’s primary business. Heretofore, he’s been the one to decide not only when but if a new soul will be united with a physical body and brought into life. Now, science has taken that away from him.

Wouldn’t you be pissed?

Christians, especially those unmarried men at the Vatican, think God is very upset. God is so pissed about IVF that Cathy Lynn Grossman, author of the USA Today religion blog Faith & Reason, decided ask her readers if they thought God considered IVF children to be real children? Do they even have souls?

Now I’m sure no one, regardless of their religion, denies that IVF babies are real babies with human souls.

But here’s the rub. Christians adamantly reject the notion that the soul is a product of biology. They disagree with scientists who see consciousness (and the ability to make moral choices about how to behave) as something gradually developing in the womb and after birth as a baby grows. It’s not that Christians deny that our bodies are biological entities. But Christians insist that our soul—our consciousness and free will—does not have a biological source. The soul, they maintain, is a spiritual entity which comes from God.

If soul is to be a separate entity of its own, not just something that results from biological development, then it has to join the body all at once, in a unitary moment. The soul can’t be something that gradually comes into existence over months or years. Furthermore, the magical fusion of body with soul must be God’s doing.

This last point is important because it gets to the heart of God’s role in the whole life business. According to Christianity, God assigns our soul to a body at the beginning of our life, and then at the end God decides whether or not we are deserving of going to heaven. This joining of soul with body therefore has a divine purpose—to judge the soul’s fitness for eternity at God’s side. The cruel act of saddling the soul with a temporal, flawed body is all a part of God’s rather elaborate testing operation.

In short, God creates souls and then tests us—these souls—for fitness by combining us with biologically limited bodies and placing us into trying circumstances. And the reason is to find out which of us are good enough to be trusted for eternity in heaven. Not all Christians see it exactly this way. Some denominations believe our souls will not be judged for how we behave but only for whether or not we accept the redeemer, Jesus Christ, into our hearts. A test of a different sort, in other words, but still a test which we either pass or fail.

The difficulty is how to reconcile all of this with in-vitro fertilization.

God is supposed to be in charge of the creation of souls. He is supposed to be in charge of deciding when and if a soul will be combined with a body and therefore a new test of a soul will be done.  But IVF makes it look for all the world as if God is not in control of the creation of souls at all, much less his whole soul-testing experiment.

When babies are the result of the rather uncertain hit or miss of sexual intercourse, it is easy to imagine that God has some hand in making pregnancy happen—at least for those who are inclined to a supernatural worldview. But now that scientists are deliberately creating new babies in test tubes, it looks like God no longer has any control over the matter. Now he is forced to test souls whether he wants to or not.

So yeah, if there’s a God, he’s got to be pissed. And the theologians in the Catholic Church have got to be pissed too, because now they have to explain away one more thing about life that no longer requires their God.

The United States has virtually no domestic problem that couldn’t be quickly resolved by freeing up that much wasted spending. We could push for treaties eliminating all nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (including our own, of course) and still have the greatest military on earth many times over. Eliminating weapons of mass destruction from the world’s arsenals would make us far safer than we are today (after all, Star Wars will never be a reliable defense), save us hundreds of billions, and allow us to invest the savings in ourselves and our economic future. Yet, as Greenwald points out, the major candidates in both political parties are unwilling — probably afraid — to propose the slightest cut in military expenditures.

Unless the United States can reign in what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial-congressional complex” its status as the world’s greatest economic power will come to an end during the 21st century. And with economic collapse, its military collapse will shortly follow.

Why is it that the most Christian of the worlds great nations is also the most militaristic? What is it about church-going Christians which makes them so eager to put money into warfare? The answer, I suspect, is fear. Fearful people become Christians in the first place, and Christianity — perhaps more than other religions — preys on fear in order to gain followers. Fear of death, fear of future punishment, fear of angering God. Add to that fear of other countries, fear of one’s enemies.

The result? A self-defeating blindness that leads to a monomania of investing in armaments and armies. Even when the nation’s weaknesses lie elsewhere.

These Christians, who generally call themselves evangelicals and fundamentalists because they take the fundamental tenets of their religion seriously, have managed to become powerful enough to dominate the Republican party and in 2000 they elected* one of their own as President of the United States. Within a year, this very Christian President began laying out plans for torturing his enemies.

Christianity and torture have, unfortunately, a long historical association. Indeed, the Spanish Inquisition perfected many of the most famous torture techniques, including waterboarding. You might think that Christians would be eager to strand Christianity’s associations with torture in the distant middle ages. You would think wrongly. Under the champion of Christianity residing in the White House, torture of prisoners became the official policy** of the U. S. Government.

It is difficult to write calmly about what has recently been done under the auspicies of the United States of America — difficult to avoid the intense anger and shame I feel as an American. But in the face of the Bush administration, anger and shame are unavoidable for anyone who cherishes civilized society. What is shocking is the extent to which evangelical and fundamentalist Christians embrace what Bush has done, much like the Holy See embraced the Inquisition.

I am no Christian, yet I am shamed by the way American Christians have embraced torture and other odious, uncivilized and unAmerican policies of the Bush Republicans. The evidence for the torture policy was obvious in 2004 — yet Bush was reelected. Reelected, it has to be pointed out, primarily due to the support of the most dedicated Christians. We must not forget that those who attended church regularly overwhelmingly supported Bush despite his policies, while those who rarely or only occasionally attended church opposed him.

This is a colossal moral failure on the part of American Christianity. Amazingly, among church-attending Christians there is little question about abortion’s immorality, but much doubt about whether torture is immoral. Or if torture is admitted to be wrong, it is denied that “simulated drowning” is torture. When pressed, Bush supporters have equated waterboarding with merely being dunked in water a bit — and who could object to that? Yet, everyone knows full well that the entire point of waterboarding (the water cure it used to be called) is to create the experience of drowning in the subject. As described by former Judge Advocate General Evan Wallach,

the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. — “Waterboarding Used to be a Crime”, Washington Post, Nov. 4, 2007

Or consider the description by Scylla at StraightDope.com who tried waterboarding hmself,

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex. Once that happens, it’s all over.

. . . . So, is it torture?

I’ll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I’d take the fingers, no question. – Scylla at StraightDope.com

It is tempting make the assumption that Christianity’s lack of moral compass on issues like torture is due to its flawed doctrines. Christians believe in a “perfect” God who, it so happens, will torture most people in hell for an eternity. To reconcile this with “perfection” requires a perversity of mind unimaginable to me, though hundreds of millions of Christians seem to have no problem with it. Apparently they reason that if God does it, and if God is perfect, then torture can’t be so bad, can it? So torture becomes acceptable, even respectable.

Still, one might ask, how can decent human beings ever end up there? Are Dawkins and Hutchings and Harris right? Is religion essentially an evil enterprise, one which warps the human mind and subverts decency? Sometimes it seems that way, I admit.

But the better explanation, the one that makes most sense to me, is the one provided by psychologist Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians and endorced by John Dean in his book Conservatives without Conscience and his Findlaw Writ columns. Altemeyer’s studies explain how it is possible for dedicated Christians to become the least morally grounded of all Americans. It happens not because they are Christians or even because they are religious, but because they have a personality trait which certain religions both encourage and attract.

In my opinion, The Authoritarians is a must-read book. You can download it as a PDF, or order it here. Nothing else more clearly reveals the nature of the problem facing us.

——— Footnotes ———

* “elected”– or more accurately mis-elected. In the Supreme Court’s worst moment, its decision in Bush v Gore tossed aside the provisions in the U. S. Constitution for handling Presidential elections (as if the Constitution had nothing to do with the process) and prevented the State of Florida from following the laws set up by its Legislature for choosing Presidential electors. Had the Constitution been followed Bush would likely have become President anyway — but it would have happened constitutionally, a process the religious conservatives on the Court were afraid to trust.

** “official policy” — according to John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in torturing prisoners for the Bush Administration. As Scott Horton wrote in Harpers

But this week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate. Here’s a key piece of the Kiriakou statement:

LAUER: Was the White House involved in that decision?

KIRIAKOU: Absolutely, this isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department. — “The President’s Coming Out Party”, Harpers, Dec 15, 2007

Horton goes on to observe that the Bush administration has resurrected

the process of official cruelty under the Stuart monarchs in seventeenth century England. Persons accused of state crimes very frequently were interrogated with the use of specific techniques, including the rack, the thumbscrew, and waterboarding. King James I personally described the process in The Kings Booke (1606). He would, on the advice of his officers, “approve no new torture,” but he would certainly avail himself of the existing practices. In ascending order of severity they were: thumbscrews, the rack and waterboarding. That’s right. Waterboarding was considered the most severe of the official forms of torture. Worse than the rack and thumbscrews.

In the depraved humor of Dick Cheney, of course, it’s just bobbing for apples at a Halloween Fair. — “The President’s Coming Out Party”, Harpers, Dec 15, 2007

This is the face of American Christianity today. Are Christians ashamed? Or will they continue as a group to support the Republicans who have brought us to this point?

Atheists don’t have a religion — but they do have something in common beyond what they disbelieve. What atheists share is a natural worldview.

Sometimes that worldview is a bit confused, incorporating too much from the still dominant supernatural worldview. But understood clearly, the natural worldview is simply the belief that body precedes mind. The supernatural worldview, of course, takes the opposite tact: that mind precedes body. We see right off from this that naturalism is not merely a refusal to believe in supernaturalism. It’s based on its own specific hypothesis about the nature of the world.

Logically speaking there are 3 possibilities concerning existence: physical before mental, mental before physical, and mental/physical concurrent. The first is naturalism, the second supernaturalism, and the third a hybrid which deserves a name of its own. We might call it “non-physical naturalism” or “hybrid supernaturalism” or, perhaps, pantheism.

A good many people today embrace this 3rd possibility, but whatever it is, it is not naturalism. An essential tenet of naturalism is physicalism, and physicalism locates naturalism firmly in the camp of “physical before mental.”

But isn’t it impossible to know which worldview is correct? Aren’t we forced to simply take our preferred choice on faith?

As a matter of fact, we are not. This may seem surprising, but it shouldn’t be. Whether mind or matter is primary is an empirical question, for the answer makes a difference to how we must acquire knowledge of the world. By studying how human knowledge actually works, scientists can reliably infer which worldview best fits our universe.

Now, it might be objected that no inference to the best explanation can be definitive. That’s true, of course. The scientific method is always a matter of inferring the best explanation for the evidence at hand, and as such it is always falsifiable (which simply means that new evidence may come to light and/or a better explanation be devised).

But this aspect of the scientific method is itself one of the key clues we have about which of these worldviews is correct. It’s long been recognized that the human mind employs two types of knowing. Following Kant, these are referred to as analytic and synthetic. All our knowledge about the world itself is of the synthetic sort, and we have found that we most reliably obtain synthetic knowledge when we employ the scientific method of inferring which abstract model best fits our evidence.

But our abstract models themselves consist of logical and mathematical relationships which we apprehend not synthetically but directly and analytically. Why would such a dual knowledge-system have evolved in humans? Well, it’s easy to comprehend its necessity in the context of naturalism. If existence has no underlying mental blueprint, then the world can’t be known directly. The only practical way to “know” such a physical world would be by the two-step process of devising analytic models and utilizing something like the scientific method to pick the most useful model based on its predictive value. Knowledge of the world therefore consists of “virtual” models (consequently “synthetic”) which are inherently falsifiable because none could ever be a match with any underlying mental reality (since under the model of naturalism no such mental substrate exists).

Since this seems to be a good description of how humans (especially those most successful knowers who are called scientists) actually come to know the world, the natural hypothesis fits well.

On the other hand, interestingly, there would be no need for such a synthetic process of knowing to evolve in humans if naturalism were false, since in that case the world would have an underlying mental substrate that could be known directly and analytically. The alternative worldviews do not fit well, since they cannot account for the necessity of knowing the world synthetically.

Put simply, we are forced to rely on synthetic knowledge of the world because we cannot in fact apprehend the world directly. The strong implication of this is that the physical world contains nothing capable of being apprehended directly: it contains no mental substrate. If so, naturalism is true and the other two worldview options are false.

My intent here is not to make a full-fledged argument for naturalism, but rather to buttress my point at the beginning: determining the correct worldview is something that can be done by investigating the nature of the world and of ourselves as knowers. Consequently, which worldview is correct is not a matter of faith but of scientific inference.

Summary: (1) We don’t have to rely on faith to know whether there is an intelligence behind the universe. (2) Atheists agree on a positive worldview: physical naturalism.

When I bend my knee meekly
and throw up a thoughtless prayer
to a God greater than me
I feel better immediately.

But it works regardless who I supplicate
with my fevered wishes.
I can pray to the moon
just as effectively;
moreso, actually
since the moon is so beautiful
and moves through the cloudy darkness in such majesty.

Or Mars, or Marduk, or Minerva
Aten, Aphrodite, Athena
it doesn’t matter the god I pray to
so long as I can feel its greatness
its greater-than-me-ness
I feel better immediately.

But if I happen to come out of feeling
if I dare to put a thought behind my heaven-sent address
if my prayer transforms itself into a question
a query or series of queries
then the great ones hasten to disappear.

Even the moon sneaks behind her clouds.

Likewise, if I pierce God with a few hard questions
if I skewer Him with whys,
He runs and hides.
Apparently He can’t take the heat.

No matter.
Whether query or prayer,
I feel better immediately.

However that article received a comment from Max, an agnostic, which deserves serious attention. Although agreeing that I did “a good job pointing out the irreconcilable difficulties in a particular concept of God,” one which “embodies specific attributes,” Max argued that I “left the basic idea of god untouched.”

Although Max doesn’t “believe in Allah, or Jesus, or any and all specific mythic representations of god,” he is still agnostic rather than atheist since he doesn’t “disbelieve in the very idea of god.” In fact, Max wrote,

You did not present an argument at this level. Nor will you ever, since the concept of god in abstract of a specific mythic tradition is a completely non-falsifiable proposition, and thus cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.

He fleshed this objection out at the end of his comment this way:

If you argue against the existence of god, must you not pin that argument on some imagined attribute(s) of god. The problem is that as soon as you imagine god’s attributes you cease talking about the idea of god, and start talking about some specific imagined representation of god. You can disprove a billion representations without ever even addressing the concept of god itself.

Although Max left his comment over a year ago, I never got around to replying. I’m rectifying that now.

When Is a Concept Not a Concept?

My first question for Max is this: what is the concept of God if that concept involves no specific attributes? If the nature of a concept is unspecified, then it seems to me that the concept can’t be discussed because no one has any idea what is being discussed.

If I say, “X exists, but X has no attributes and no one can say what X is,” what am I claiming? I suppose Max is correct in saying that my “X” is non-falsifiable, but maybe that is only because “X” doesn’t have a meaning, and no actual concept is being asserted.

Likewise, if “God” is a meaningless word, one which doesn’t refer to any specified concept, then yes “God” is non-falsifiable — but only because meaningless words aren’t claims or propositions at all. There is no idea behind them.

I suspect that Max’s “abstract” concept of God does have “content” of some sort or another. It must, or else nothing remains. It is evident from his comment that Max rejects “perfection” as an attribute of God. Remove that attribute and the concept of God still has meaning. But what if we also remove the attribute of “creator”, the attribute of “being” and (for good measure) the attribute of “existing”? As far as I can see, nothing usable would remain: “God” would become a meaningless word, unfalsifiable but also undiscussable.

A Minimum God

Max doesn’t reveal what he believes the abstract concept of God is, but I’m confident that it involves a God with attributes. Existence must be one of those attributes, otherwise Max could have no good objection to calling himself an atheist. It is also likely that Max would posited this God as the cause of the physical world and our human existence. God, no matter how abstractly conceived, would hardly be God (or worth bothering about) otherwise.

Such a God need not be conceived as a personal being. Perhaps what is meant by the term is simply the intelligence behind the physical universe, an intelligence responsible for the world’s existence and nature. Max, I assume, would say that such a concept of God

is a completely non-falsifiable proposition, and thus cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.

But Max would be wrong.

The notion that there’s an intelligence behind existence is nothing less than the claim that naturalism is false. If naturalism is true, it follows that there is no intelligence behind or prior to the physical universe, so to maintain otherwise is to deny the truth of naturalism. The assertion above therefore amounts to the claim that philosophical naturalism “cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.” This claim is false and I will show why.

To do so, all that is required of me is to reveal by what rational means the truth or falsity of naturalism can be determined. In fact, I don’t have to provide a convincing case for naturalism, I only have to demonstrate that a rationally convincing case is possible.

Naturalism v Supernaturalism

Naturalism maintains that intelligence is a product of brains and that brains are a product of evolution. It follows from this that intelligence did not exist anywhere in the universe until organisms with brains evolved into being. Supernaturalism maintains the contrary: that intelligence existed well before brains were created. Intelligence (whether personified in a being or not) necessarily lies behind and prior to physical existence, according to the supernatural canon.

The question Max poses, then, is whether there is a rational way to decide between these two alternatives. There clearly is. We simply have to compare the intellectual case for believing intelligence preceded the existence of brains with the intellectual case for believing intelligence did not. If one case is stronger than the other, we will know which viewpoint — naturalism or supernaturalism — better fits the evidence we have. This is an inherently rational process, and is the sort of thing that scientists (as well as non-scientists, of course) do all the time.

I wrote that we “simply” have to compare the two intellectual cases — but of course the debate on this point is hardly “simple”. But the complexity of the debate only underscores the fact that it is a rational debate, one in which both sides vie to provide the most satisfactory account of the evidence we have about when intelligence entered the picture.

In Agnosticism Revisited and the Case for Atheism I wrote about the distinction between specific atheism and general atheism. Specific atheism, I said

is that atheism which purports to disprove the existence of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic monotheistic God

and the Argument from Perfection which I presented there pertained to specific atheism. On the other hand, I wrote that general atheism

is an outgrowth of the scientific/philosophical case for naturalism. Advocates of general atheism like to begin their arguments with well-established science (evolution, the physiology of vision or of the brain) and move on to conclusions about the nature of human knowledge and its relationship to the world—conclusions which if correct eliminate supernaturalism (and therefore eliminate any supernatural God or gods).

It is general atheism which pertains to the debate we have here.

Smoking Guns

The case for naturalism (or the opposing case for supernaturalism) is far too complex to present now, and at any rate that is unnecessary for the scope of this entry. That scope, it is important to remember, is to refute Max’s claim that the most abstract concept of God “cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.” I have taken the most “abstract” concept of God to mean some kind of pre-existing intelligence responsible for the creation of the world (hopefully Max would agree). And I have pointed out that this gets us right to one of the central disputes (perhaps the central dispute) separating naturalism from supernaturalism: Is intelligence the product of brains or are brains the product of intelligence?

This is answered by investigating the world to determine whether the evidence we find fits better with the notion that intelligence existed at the beginning of the universe (before brains existed), or whether intelligence appeared with the evolution of organism with brains. I maintain that such an investigation can be done, and that doing it is a rational process which will lead to a rational answer.

In fact, I believe there are some smoking guns which indicate that naturalism is the correct answer. I have mentioned a couple of these in other blog entries.

1) Thoughts (and by proxy disembodied intelligence) can’t do anything without a physical body to do the doing. Therefore intelligence cannot bring the universe into existence or be its cause. I’ve presented the case for this position in God & Rocks as well as in Thoughts & Trees and God’s Physical Problem.

2) The existence of two types of knowing (analytic and synthetic) is prima facie evidence that there are two types of things to be known: the physical world and concepts. If supernaturalism were true we would expect there to only be one type of knowing — analytic. If naturalism were true, both analytic and synthetic knowing would need to exist in order for physical organism to “know” the world. This is touched on in Two Types of Knowing as well as in Thoughts & Trees

3) Although the Principle of Sufficient Reason holds for analytic knowledge, it appears to be false for synthetic knowledge. If there was an intelligence behind the universe, the Principle of Sufficient Reason would be true for both synthetic and analytic knowledge (thus one type of knowledge would suffice — see #2). But the fact that synthetic knowledge is best acquired through the process of methodological naturalism (together with the factual possibility of incomplete and incorrect synthetic knowledge), makes it clear that the Principle of Sufficient Reason is false for synthetic knowledge. It follows that synthetic knowledge is not something innate in the physical world which our minds discover, but rather is the result of pragmatic empiricism. This fits naturalism perfectly, but can hardly be reconciled with supernaturalism. I touched on this in Thoughts & Trees — but much more attention needs to be given it.

As for the arguments presented by the other side, such as the design and information arguments, I dispelled them in Theism’s Rose-Colored Glasses. (See also Mind, Matter & Divine Creation.) Other atheists have written volumes dispelling these supernatural assertions.

Of course, Max may not find my smoking guns convincing. But he must admit that those of us who are atheists have not “left the basic idea of god untouched.” And he must admit that the concept of God in its most abstract form (as some kind of pre-existing intelligence) can be investigated by rational means and — it is at least a possibility — be found false.

To create the necessary conditions requires the presence of a dangerous, virtually undefeatable enemy. Satan, who is so powerful that God apparently needs our assistance to defeat him, fits the bill perfectly. And the devil is the sort of ubiquitous, wily adversary that can’t help but make believers paranoid at every momentary lapse from the battle, at every voice that isn’t an obvious paean to God.

That is the real reason we invaded Iraq. It is the reason we threaten Iran today with two major carrier groups sitting in the Gulf ready for attack. Fundamentalism relies on struggle with a dangerous adversary. The state of the world in 2007 is the direct result of putting a fundamentalist in the White House and giving him the most powerful position in the world.

After the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, nearly every country on earth offered to help the United States in the effort to find and capture the terrorists behind it. The offer of assistance came even from Iraq and Iran. In the case of Iran, their interests and ours meshed well together. The Taliban who ruled Afghanistan had long been a thorn in their side – there was no love lost between the leaders of Iran and the leaders of Afghanistan. The Taliban tolerated and even seemed to support not just al Qaeda but also anti-Iranian terrorist groups like MEC.

Iranian/US cooperation against terrorists operating in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East seemed natural, and the Iranian government made overtures to the Bush Administration to set up just such an arrangement. There is a poem by Edwin Markham that perfectly encapsulates the opportunity that was suddenly available.

He drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle that took him in

The tragedy of 9-11 had a silver lining: it created an ideal opportunity to bring former enemies together in a spirit of cooperation against a common enemy. That enemy, suicide Islamic terrorism, was being condemned even in Tehran and Baghdad, and civilized people of all religions including Islam wanted to join us in stamping it out.

But that, unfortunately, would have left an adversary too small and weak to satisfy the needs of the fundamentalism inhabiting the White House. One can’t be involved with God in a cosmic struggle if the enemy is minor and easily defeated. Where’s the fear, the risk, the paranoia necessary to make people reject creature comforts and pleasures, the bodily satisfactions of life on earth, and embrace heaven?

You see, that is the fundamental challenge of afterlife. How to get people to stop loving the good things of the body, the social pleasures of food and sex and the genial enjoyment of the company of others, and get them to turn their allegiance toward what comes after death? Love, in all its forms, naturally draws us toward the embodiment of life, toward each other as body-beings.

To transfer our allegiance elsewhere, fundamentalism has to find a way to break people up, replace love with strife, condemn bodily pleasures as “sin”, create exclusive circles to drive people apart, divide human loyalties between “us” and “them”. Only by creating inordinate fear and dissonance is it possible to re-make something as undesirable as death into something to be worshipped.

That’s all heaven is: death marketed as something wonderful.

Death is eternal all right. Non-existence is the only thing that can be eternal. Call it heaven, give it wings and violins, declare the wasteland of non-existence “paradise”: that is what the cult of afterlife is all about.

Life, on the other hand, can only be temporary. Pleasures must be temporary or else they would cease to remain pleasurable, would become tedious and eventually a nightmare. Imagine having sex and being forced at the moment of orgasm to endure that sensation constantly and unchanging for weeks, years, centuries, a million billion centuries. It would utterly destroy the pleasure of it. It would transform the initially wonderful sensation into nothing less than torture.

Pleasure has to be temporary to be pleasurable. Life must be fleeting to be wonderful. We have to be able to die and cease to exist in order for life to be valuable and good for us. That is the simple reality. And our lives are good, our pleasures are supremely wonderful.

But fundamentalism has to find a way to make us forget that. It has to sabotage our human desires and pleasures. Has to, because fundamentalism is committed to worshipping not our existence but our non-existence, and calling it heaven.

It is not easy to make human beings turn against life, but fundamentalism has been successful at doing so. The fundamentalists who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center were so turned.

The trick is to create a climate of fear and paranoia peppered with the threat of a virtually undefeatable enemy, a Satan, a devil incarnate. That is what is required in order to motivate human beings sufficiently enough that they will abandon the pleasure of life for the mirage of afterlife. It is the modus operandi of fundamentalism.

And that is why the fundamentalist in the White House has positioned two carrier groups in the Gulf armed and ready to pummel Iran. It is why the administration manufactured a reason to invade Iraq four years ago. Fundamentalism must have as frightening an adversary as possible in order to turn us against life.

I doubt President Bush or the fundamentalists in his administration even understand their need for a powerful enemy. If they understood their actions, if they comprehended the fear and paranoia which pushes them to draw circles to shut others out and create enemies, that itself would be a step toward self-enlightenment.

It might even be a step toward comprehending the fundamental flaw of the cult of afterlife.