So Huckabee wants to amend the Constitution to make it properly subservient to God and his divine standards. He doesn’t exactly say what standards he has in mind, at least it’s not reported here

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.

Perhaps he’d like us to imitate the current Iraq Constitution, with it’s long religious preamble and enshrinement of Sharia, in contrast to what Americans currently have. . .

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Hmmm. That’s so secular. Didn’t the founders know about the importance of basing our government on God’s standards? Did they forget we are supposed to be a Christian nation? Well, there’s always the amendments to pull God out of the hat, right?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That pretty much sums up what the Constitution has to say about God and religion. Which is why from the beginning scholars and historians — not to mention the founders themselves — have maintained that the Constitution enshrines the principle of separation of church and state.After the Constitutional Convention finished its work, the Constitution was sent to the state legislatures for ratification. There was vigorous debate across the country, and it wasn’t missed by some Christians that the Constitution never mentioned God. When one woman confronted Alexander Hamilton about why God had been left out, Hamilton replied “Madam, we forgot!”

He was being facetious. The omission was intentional. It was thoroughly vetted, it was thoroughly debated; then the respective state legislatures endorsed the wording of the Constitution and it became the supreme law of the land.

When we look at the debates of which we have record, we see that as far as religion was concerned the biggest worry from opponents was that the Constitution didn’t specifically prevent an establishment of religion (a concern that would find its answer in the 1st amendment).

True enough, some had other worries. With “no religious test” for office allowed, a few opponents objected that a Jew, an atheist, a Mahometan (Muslim), a Catholic — god forbid, even the Pope — might be elected President. (Yes, this worry was actually expressed by opponents in the North Carolina legislature). Proponents made short work of such objections. An effort in Virginia to require belief in God was also turned down.

Equally unsuccessful was the Virginia initiative in April and May 1788 to change the wording of Article 6 itself. “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust under the United Stares” became “no other religious test shall ever be required than a belief in the one only true God, who is the rewarder of the good, and the punisher of the evil.” This change was rejected. –The Godless Constitution: the Case Against Religious Correctness by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore. W. W. Norton & Company New York/London.(1996) pp 37

And yes, a few Christians of the time echoed the complaint so often heard from evangelicals today: our nation needs to be based on God’s authority, not man’s, and the Constitution needs to say so explicitly. One example occurred in Connecticut in February of 1788, and the vigorous defense of the Constitution’s secular nature which followed makes plain, I believe, the Enlightenment temper of the times.

William Williams (whose prior opposition to the “no religious test” clause had apparently drawn strong reply), wrote a letter published Feb 11 in the Hartford American Mercury defending his objection (although he admitted “I would not wish to make it a capital objection”) to the clause. All he had intended to argue, he explained, was that the only religious test should be belief in God. Williams wrote,

When the clause in the 6th Article, which provides that “no religious test should ever be required as a qualification to any office Or trust, etc.” came under consideration, I observed I should have chose that sentence, and anything relating to a religious test, had been totally omitted rather than stand as it did; but still more wished something of the kind should have been inserted, but with a reverse sense so far as to require an explicit acknowledgment of the being of a God, His perfections, and His providence, and to have been prefixed to, and stand as, the first introductory words of the Constitution in the following or similar terms, viz.: We the people of the United Slates, in a firm belief of the being and perfections of the one living and true God, the creator and supreme Governor of the world, in His universal providence and the authority of His laws: that He will require of all moral agents an account of their conduct, that all rightful powers among men are ordained of, and mediately derived from God, therefore in a dependence on His blessing and acknowledgment of His efficient protection in establishing our Independence, whereby it is become necessary to agree upon and settle a Constitution of federal government for ourselves, and in order to form a more perfect union, etc., as it is expressed in the present introduction, do ordain, etc. And instead of none, that no other religious test should ever he required, etc. –The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Vol. III. Ratification of the Constitution by the States Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Edited by Merrill Jensen, Madison State Historical Society of Wis, 1978, pp 588-590

Huckabee, I imagine, and many of our current evangelicals, would heartily endorse Williams’ call to amend the preamble so that it acknowledges God in such fashion. So too, I suppose, would the Mullahs in Iraq. Nevertheless, this suggestion went nowhere in 1788. To understand why, I’d like to quote from a hearty reply Williams got from someone named Elihu.

Should any body of men, whose characters were unknown to me, form a plan of government, and prologue it with a long pharisaical harangue about God and religion, I should suspect a design to cheat and circumvent us, and their cant, and semblance of superior sanctity would be the ground of my suspicion. If they have a plan founded on good sense, wisdom, and experience, what occasion have they to make use of God, His providence, or religion, like old cunning monks to gain our assent to what is in itself rational and just?

Elihu continued

“There must be (tis objected) some proof, some evidence that we the people acknowledge the being of a God.” Is this a thing that wants proof? Is this a thing that wants constitutional establishment in the United States? It is almost the only thing that all universally are agreed in; everybody believes there is a God; not a man of common sense in the United States denies or disbelieves it.

This was probably true. In the 1780s, atheism in the former colonies was extremely rare if not bordering on non-existent. At any rate, argued Elihu, no Constitutional test for belief in God was required .

The fool hath said ii his heart there is no God, but was there ever a wise man said such a thing? No, not in any age or in any country. Besides, if it was not so, if there were unbelievers, as it is a matter of faith, it might as well be admitted; for we are not to bind the consciences of men by laws or constitutions.

The mind is free; it may be convinced by reasoning, but cannot be compelled by laws or constitutions, no, nor by fire, faggot, or the halter.

We can forgive Elihu for not anticipating that the scientific study of geology, biology and genetics — and, yes, the theory of evolution — would eventually make atheism respectable among the best-educated Americans of the 20th and 21st centuries. As it turns out, it is wise men and women, not fools, who today are most likely to disbelieve.

Elihu finished his reply with words that could be as easily directed at the Huckabees and theocrats of our day as at the opponents of the Constitution 220 years ago.

The time has been when nations could be kept in awe with Stories of gods sitting with legislators and dictating laws; with this lure, cunning politicians have established their own power on the credulity of the people; shackling their uninformed minds with incredible tales. But the light of philosophy has arisen in these latter days, miracles have ceased, oracles are silenced, monkish darkness is dissipated, and even witches at last hide their heads. Mankind are no longer to be deluded with fable. Making the glory of God subservient to the temporal interest of men is a worn out trick, and a pretense to superior sanctity and special grace will not much longer promote weakness over the head of wisdom.

A low mind may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think himself slighted and dishonored if he is not complimented with a seat or a prologue of recognition in the Constitution, but those great philosophers who formed the Constitution had a higher idea of the perfection of that INFINITE MIND which governs all worlds than to suppose they could add to his honor or glory, or that He would be pleased with such low familiarity or vulgar flattery.

Elihu ends on a note of elegance comparable with what might have come from the pen of a Madison or Paine or Jefferson.

The most shining part, the most brilliant circumstance in honor of the framers of the Constitution is their avoiding all appearance of craft, declining to dazzle even the superstitious by a hint about grace or ghostly knowledge. They come to us in the plain language of common sense and propose to our understanding a system of government as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, nor even a God appears in a dream to propose any part of it. –The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Vol. III. Ratification of the Constitution by the States Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Edited by Merrill Jensen, Madison State Historical Society of Wis, 1978, pp 590-592

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?

Before proceeding, it is important to define God — otherwise no coherent discussion is possible. I define God as “the solitary, perfect, non-physical being who created the physical world.” By non-physical I mean “bodiless, not consisting of matter/energy (as those terms are used by physicists and other scientists).” Here then is an outline of my reasons for rejecting the existence of God, in order of importance:

A) In an argument to the best explanation, naturalism trumps supernaturalism.

My argument here is that a natural world view fits reality and is self-consistent. Supernaturalism (and therefore God) is not needed to explain existence and, more importantly, can’t explain it anyway. Whether we are attempting to account for the existence of human consciousness or the human body, of morality or the value of life, naturalism provides better explanations across the board. I’ve touched on some of these points in Why Are We Alive?, Does Life Have Meaning?, Thoughts, Feelings, & Faith, C. S. Lewis’ Moral Argument, Can General Atheism Be Proved?, The Key to Happiness, and An Irreverent Look at God, Sex, & Design. I’ve laid out the framework of the debate in What Atheists Have in Common and Naturalism’s Touchstone Proposition.

B) God Can’t Exist

B1 - The nature of the physical world makes a non-physical source impossible (the world isn’t something that could have been thought or imagined into existence)

My argument here is that the world is not informational in nature, and does not contain any mental substrate. If so it can’t be thought or conceived into existence. Furthermore, any attempt to define the nature of the physical world in a manner that avoids the impossibility of a creator results in a definition of the physical world which simply does not match reality (see reason A).

Note that a judgment about what physical existence is not lies at the heart of this second argument for atheism. The obvious issue for debate is whether this judgment about the nature of physical existence is correct and therefore whether it is possible for physical things to be conceived or thought into existence — ie, whether it is possible for essence to cause existence. It is my argument that essence is just explanation or description, and neither explanations nor descriptions can cause the physical existence of that which they describe. This represents a rejection of thousands of years of Western thought, yet is supported by modern science as well as arguments as old as the pre-Socratic Zeno of Elea. I have not written much on this yet, but will.

B2 - The nature of God makes creation of a physical world impossible (God has no means to create or interact with physical things)

I’ve introduced this argument in various forms previously. See God & Rocks, Thoughts & Trees, God’s Physical Problem and also Contingency and Necessity.

B3 - The nature of God is incompatible with the particular world we have (God is perfect but the world we have is imperfect)

The argument from perfection, also referred to as the problem of evil, was presented in Agnosticism Revisited and the Case for Atheism (scroll down a few screens for the beginning of the argument).

C) There is insufficient evidence to believe in God or any supernatural world view

Many atheists start with C, implicitly assume A, and hardly touch B (except B3 when considering the problem of evil). Although I consider C the weakest of the three reasons for atheism, it has an important place — especially when considering imperfect gods and deities.

This is only an outline, of course. It’s gradually being fleshed out on this site.

The problem is that the U.N. Human Rights Council’s wording is so broad that it condemns not just biases against people of various religious traditions, but any “defamation” of the content of those religious traditions. Instead of defending, this betrays human rights. As Brown wrote,

We believe that the Council resolutions combating defamation of religions are inappropriate and misguided. It is people that merit protection, Mr President, not their beliefs. We would suggest that member States would do better to consider a resolution combating religious obstruction to the enjoyment of human rights.

Brown pointed out that religion is often the enemy of human rights, and the resolution seems to support local laws which protect religion from being criticized on that point.

In our work of promoting reproductive health and rights we often find ourselves being opposed by religious leaders. In our programs for sex education for young people in Africa it is more often than not the churches who oppose us, believing that ignorance in matters of human reproduction is better than knowledge. In Africa, many campaigns for AIDS prevention have been cut back or replaced entirely by religiously-inspired and totally ineffective campaigns promoting abstinence only - in a continent where abstinence is simply not an option for many young girls. And we actually find some church leaders telling lies about the efficacy of condoms in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

In March this year we presented to the Council a paper on the cruel practice of child marriage [A/HRC/4/NGO/84] . In some countries we are told that this blight on the lives of young girls has divine sanction, and that to criticise it is tantamount to blasphemy - defamation of religion.

I’m glad the IHEU has seconded her on thi.

In a not unrelated matter, the IHEU has also criticized the U.N. Special Report on Islamophobia, calling the report by the U.N. Special Rapporteur “seriously flawed”. The idea behind the report is to criticize hatred and bias against Muslims which has been rearing up in Europe and elsewhere. But like the resolution against defamation of religion, the report fails to distinguish between belief systems and the people who hold to them.

As I quoted Brown earlier, “It is people that merit protection…not their beliefs.” The U. N. Special Rapporteur, explains the IHEU letter,

… fails to distinguish between, on the one hand, Islamophobia, which he defines as “baseless hostility and fear vis-à-vis Islam”, and on the other, legitimate concerns regarding the rise of Islamic extremism.

Furthermore, IHEU points out something so obvious that it should never have to be pointed out to any “Human Rights Council”, namely that the radical Islam which has become ascendant in many parts of the world is an enemy of human rights, including the right to freedom of religious belief, but also the right to kiss in public, the right of women to drive cars or teach in schools or even show their faces in public, the right to dance with someone of the opposite sex or play modern music — the list, ridiculous as it is, goes on and on.

Secondly, he fails to recognise the important differences that exist between the Islamic and modern European worldviews; differences that need to be addressed if increasing tension is to be avoided. Rather than dismissing Europe’s defence of its identity, which he describes as ‘based on intangible “values”‘ in scare quotes, he should recognise that these values are neither intangible nor exclusively “European”. They include, inter alia, the dignity and autonomy of the individual, equality of the sexes, democracy, and human rights - surely the very rights that this Council should be seeking to defend.

I have no doubt that many in the U. N. are frightened by the hostile state of affairs which currently exists between Christians and Muslims, and they desire to the stave off the rhetoric about WWIII which rolls so easily off the lips of both Christian Presidents and al Qaeda mullahs today.

The neo-Conservative goal of militarily overthrowing conservative Islamic regimes throughout the middle east was doomed from the start because of neo-Conservatives’ fundamental inability to understand human nature. When under attack or the stress of warfare, people become frightened and religious, and in fact more fanatical. Attacking the middle east the way the U. S. has exacerbates the problem of Islamic radicalism. It’s the opposite of a solution.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Islam is a threat to human rights in every country in which it is dominant if that nation lacks adequate separation of religion and state. We don’t need the U.N. or its Human Rights Council to forget why it exists. Not now and not ever.

We must face the facts: our lives, in the grand scheme of things, are short. Like the leaves falling from the tree, we bloom, flourish, and inevitably wither. Vast expanses of time preceded each of us, and equally vast expanses of time will follow us. We were not there, will not be there, to know what happens; we will never meet the people who inhabit those times, as they will never meet us. Our existence is, as Robert Ingersoll said, like a narrow vale between two cold and barren peaks.

And yet, in that narrow valley in between, there is a wondrous thing: a creature who exists, who lives, and who is conscious of that life and that existence. —http://www.daylightatheism.org/2007/10/fragile-trappings.html

We don’t need religious nonsense in order to convince ourselves that life is wonderful, that being human is worthwhile. In fact the religious nonsense gets in the way of appreciating reality in its fullness. It throws up a smokescreen, it imposes a fake “holiness”—fake God or gods—between us and the real holiness: physical life itself. Access to this holiness is free: we don’t need to fill the coffers of any religious sect, hop to unnatural moral commandments, or swallow any impossible nonsense. We are bodies, and that gives us direct access to the great reality itself.

Although we know much about that reality, it is true enough that we will never really know what it is. Likewise, we will never really know ourselves, no matter how much we know about ourselves. Our scientific knowledge is built of consistent, useful models of physical reality: the models work in that they are testable against that reality. But they do not lay bear its ultimate nature: knowledge never can.

Yet that doesn’t give excuse for believing nonsense, or for embracing models which long since collapsed under the weight of their inconsistencies and uselessness. Adam says it best,

In the face of our imperfect knowledge, what we need is humility and a candid admission of our ignorance. We do not need anyone pretending they know all the answers and dignifying that pretending with the name of “faith”. The mysteries we confront are far deeper than that, far too profound to admit of such shallow, simplistic, easily disproven answers. In truth, they are not answers at all; they are baubles, little diversions, stories invented for the comfort of children. —http://www.daylightatheism.org/2007/10/fragile-trappings.html

As if hell and a vengeful God could ever comfort children—such nonsense is more likely to traumatize than comfort. But beyond the Pyrrhic victory of believing that by faith you will be saved while others burn, beyond that rather vicious conceit lies the fact that everything which makes life wonderful is physical. All the great emotions are emotions felt in bodies, by bodies, for bodies. All our wonderful sensations, including our most sublime thoughts, are sensations of the body, require a body for existence. Without body, they can’t happen. Without body, we can’t be.

Life is an embodied enterprise. Without body, life loses its magic. And we must not forget that whatever that magic is, it is physical magic. Why then do so many try to separate human life from its reality by inserting this or that religious or spiritual barrier? Why do they seek such a condom? Why throw up so many obvious lies, such nonsense, from so many pulpits? Why shrink from reality?

What are they afraid of? To me, that’s the real mystery.

Nash declared that Naturalism’s touchstone proposition is that

Nothing exists outside the material, mechanical (that is, nonpurposeful), natural order.

We see right away that in phrasing this, Nash put his Christian thumb on the scale. He made sure to throw in “mechanical” and “nonpurposeful” because that provides something juicy to attack. But how are they fundamental to Naturalism? In fact, I would argue that if Naturalism is true, then the world can not be mechanical. Mechanism and determinism are Trojan horses Christians like Nash try to give to the Naturalist camp, but which in fact are incompatible with it, as we shall see.

If Nash hadn’t had his pro-Christian thumb on the scale, naturalism’s touchstone proposition would have been simple and far-reaching:

Nothing exists outside the natural order.

Which means, quite simply, there is no supernatural order: no God, no heaven, no place for souls to survive death and depart to. One thing that might be added to the touchstone proposition, I suppose, is that the most reliable way to learn about the natural world is to apply the scientific method. In that case we would have

Nothing exists outside the natural order, and the most reliable way to understand that order is to apply the scientific method.

though I’m not sure what is lost in conciseness is worth the addition.

What is natural?

But I think there is a problem with using this as naturalism touchstone proposition. For in essence it defines naturalism by saying that everything is natural. But what does it mean to say that everything is “natural”. Does it really mean anything?

It might make more sense to say “everything is physical” rather than “everything is natural” — but even here we are burdened with the difficulty of explaining exactly what “physical” means. Well, we might declare that “physical” means whatever the physical sciences can study. Scientists are able to study what we routinely call “the physical world” because that world does things, and it leaves evidence of its doings. It is almost as if we are saying that if it doesn’t do something, if it doesn’t leave evidence of its existence, it doesn’t exist. Existence = evidence.

But is this right? Certainly we can’t know of a thing’s existence if there is no evidence for it, but does that rule it out of existence?

It can’t. We had no evidence for the existence of neutrinos two centuries ago, yet neutrinos existed 200 years ago as certainly as they exist today. Even in 2007, things undoubtedly exist of which we currently know nothing.

Ah, but even if we were ignorant of it, neutrinos were doing things two centuries ago. Evidence logically requires an observer, and there were no observers of neutrinos then. However, in 1807 neutrinos were nonetheless doing things that in theory were observable. Existence = Possibility of Evidence.

But there is a problem with defining what is physical by its potential to produce evidence. God, according to theists, also produces evidence (the big bang, they claim, is one such example of God’s doings). That’s a problem because it means our definition of “physical” as anything whose doings are potentially observable is too broad: it doesn’t exclude clearly non-physical hypotheses like God.

It might be countered that God is excluded from being physical by His definition. After all, God is specifically “non-physical”. But the whole point is that we are trying to identify what distinguishes “physical” from “non-physical”, and the claim that physical things are those that yield evidence (or at least potential evidence) doesn’t work for making that distinction.

Of course, God can’t be detected directly. But neither can many things we definitely consider physical. We have no direct detection of the sun, only of its effects (photons, gravity etc), and this goes for a host of other “physical” entities.

What makes the God hypothesis different is how God is claimed to interact with the world. God’s way of doing things is not by moving but by thinking. God’s relationship to the world is that of a mind making things exist and happen by imagining what he wants. This gets us to the heart of the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism. The latter postulates mind before matter; the former matter before mind.

In other words, the difference between the two lies in a fundamental disagreement about when mind comes into the picture. According to naturalism, mind — intelligence, ideas, information — doesn’t exist in the beginning, and only comes into existence when organisms evolve with brains capable of creating sensations of thought. Supernaturalism tears the mind away from the brain and declares that mind was there in the beginning and created all. That is the crux of the disagreement.

Hold this thought. We’ll come back to it.

The Trojan Horse

Although I’ve identified the real distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism as a disagreement about when mind enters the picture, this has not been the usual approach to distinguishing the two worldviews. The typical approach has been to concentrate on naturalism as the belief that everything is physical or material. However, though it seems like we know what we mean by words like “physical” and “material”, as we saw earlier it is difficult to define them in a way that excludes what we don’t mean.

The attempt to get around this difficulty has led a good many thinkers to define “physical” as equivalent to our scientific knowledge of the world. The physical then becomes the same as the causal relationships found in our scientific theories — or at least those theories and laws which will be eventually found by scientists to be true. That scientific theories are “models” of the universe rather than the universe itself gets missed.

The resulting confusion is a boon for naturalism’s foes. To see how this works, let’s return to Faith & Reason. Nash quotes William Halverson, an advocate of naturalism, as follows,

The world is, to use a very inadequate metaphor, like a gigantic machine whose parts are so numerous and whose processes are so complex that we have thus far been able to achieve only a very partial and fragmentary understanding of how it works. In principle, however, everything that occurs is ultimately explicable in terms of the properties and relations of the particles of which matter is composed. Once again the point may be stated simply: determinism is true. [Halverson, Concise Introduction to Philosophy, p 394, quoted by Nash p 47]

Halverson accepted the Trojan horse. Indeed, he embraced it.

To put it bluntly, he is wrong. Both in his understanding of the nature of the world and in his understanding of Naturalism, Halverson is mistaken. The last sentence above encapsulates his error. He jumps from the observation that “in principle . . . everything that occurs is ultimately explicable” to the unwarranted assumption that such explanations control the world they explain and therefore “determinism is true”. The fact that a certain species can create extremely useful explanations of the world doesn’t mean that those explanations control the world or constitute its blueprint.

If we understand that the mind is the product of biological evolution then we are forced to accept that our understanding of the world can not be of the same nature as the world itself. The most useful explanations, for us humans, are of course deterministic explanations, but it is a mistake to assume that deterministic explanations can ever be perfect matches with the world (that is, that they can be “True”). To make that assumption is to fall for the supernatural fallacy that there exists some kind of “intelligence” embedded in the nature of existence. It is to map human knowledge against the physical world and then confuse the knowledge-map with the world, without realizing what you have done.

Meanings and relationships are, quite simply, created by the brain when it creates “objects” out of what is perceived. Knowing the world in such a fashion is useful and valid — if it weren’t our brains would never have successfully evolved as they have. But the crucial observation here is that our “minding” works perfectly well regardless of the actual nature of the world — one might almost say it works in defiance of the nature of the world. What physical reality inherently “is” doesn’t matter to the process of knowing which evolved in us. At any rate, what the world “is” will always remain ultimately unknowable. What we “know” is not the world but our knowledge of the world.

I don’t blame Nash and other Christians for applying the determinist tag to Naturalism: like Halverson, too many 20th century advocates of Naturalism have done the same. They are wrong, as an effort to understand intelligence in terms of biological evolution makes clear. The Trojan horse should be rejected.

The End of Knowledge

Another quote from Halverson is quite revealing.

If the theoretical goal of science — an absolutely exhaustive knowledge of the natural world — were to be achieved, there would remain no reality of any other kind about which we might still be ignorant.

I gather that Halverson may see practical limitations that will prevent this so-called “theoretical goal of science” from being achieved, but it is clear that he finds such a goal achievable in theory.

I do not. Halverson misunderstands the nature of human knowledge and, as a consequence, the nature of nature. Nevertheless, Halverson may at least have managed to progress a step beyond Bertrand Russell, who did in fact aver (in Has Man a Future, I believe) that someday science would discover absolutely everything there was to know about the world. In that book, Russell did not even see practical limits to complete knowledge.

Other naturalists have gone several steps past Halverson. They will tell you that science will never have complete knowledge, not just for practical reasons, but additionally because at the quantum level existence is random. At the quantum level existence doesn’t match up with the human desire for deterministic explanations, physicists have concluded.

A New Touchstone Proposition

The philosopher C. D. Broad observed,

If you start with a sufficiently narrow and inadequate view of nature you will have to postulate a God to get you out of the difficulties in which it lands you. E.g., if you insist that living organisms are mere machines, you have to postulate God to construct them out of unorganized matter.

Machines are unavoidably artifacts, the deliberate creation of some intelligent being or beings. But why should nature or anything in nature be considered a machine? It can only happen by confusing blueprints and maps. Machines follow a blueprint — a design — which was invented. But the natural world was not invented: it has a design which scientists can describe and map, but not a blueprint. The “design” observed by scientists is in fact an explanation, not a blueprint. If you get confused about this you end up with the mistaken assumption that design we observe in the natural world is of the blueprint variety.

Knowledge is a simulacrum of physical existence. Human knowledge stands in for the physical world in a very useful way, one which enables us to make intelligent decisions. But no description of the world controls or encompasses the world itself. If naturalism is true, it would be silly to think so.

Earlier we identified the dispute between naturalism and supernaturalism as a dispute about when mind enters the picture. The supernaturalist maintains that mind — in the form of God — is there from the beginning, and essentially thinks the world into existence. The naturalist puts the world first and sees mind evolving later on. The supernaturalist says mind before matter; the naturalist says matter before mind.

As I wrote in “Can General Atheism be Proved?“,

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.

This brings us to my proposal for naturalism’s touchstone proposition:

Intelligence is a product of brains and brains are a product of evolution; therefore intelligence did not exist until organisms with brains evolved into being.

Defined this way, naturalism is a falsifiable hypothesis, which can be evaluated (as I argued also in “Can General Atheism be Proved?“) 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 organisms 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.

Summary: intelligence is a biological phenomenon caused by brains, and its existence is due to the evolution of organisms with brains. Everything else in the natural worldview follows from that.

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.