In Which He Strikes Down Christianity and Arrives at Atheism

This is not a post about my sudden conversion to atheism. If you read my last post, you may remember that I spoke about the intelligibility of the universe in its explicit and implicit order as part of my reason for belief. In my about section, I write how my atheist girlfriend would ask me questions, and how this blog is my attempt to answer some of those questions. In another post, I mentioned that sometimes I feel like I’m writing Leah Libresco’s Unequally Yoked in reverse. This is one of those posts.

Since I believe that “all truth is God’s truth,” sometimes when I read or learn something new, previously held notions of belief have to be reevaluated. Maybe one of these days I’ll end up an atheist. I don’t find this likely. I’m just saying in the whole process of seeking after what is true, you are sometimes led to unexpected places. Lately what I’ve been reading has me grappling with my existing confession. I would maintain it is entirely intelligible, that it makes sense and describes the operation of the world without obvious flaw. But that doesn’t mean I know it’s without a doubt true. This is agnostic theism, after all. I believe it is true as a theoretical physicist might believe a certain proposed multiverse model of reality is true. I have perceived certain natural phenomena, and this system makes it all intelligible – so the fact that it works give me reason to believe it is true.

On the other hand, the mere working of something is not sufficient reason to believe it is true. The evolution of scientific thought, wherein what once we saw as working and true is refuted or transformed by new evidence, should be evidence enough of that. The evolution of theology, wherein the discoveries of the natural world and also the revelation of the divine leads to redefining our preconceived notions, is supplemental evidence in the case against pragmatism. (Imagine a few Jewish fishermen who believed certain things about their relationship to God and God’s relationship to all the peoples of the Earth and of a political messiah…didn’t they have to reevaluate things with the revelation of Christ? “Oh, we are the chosen people, but God’s salvation is for all people, and there isn’t only the high priest one day a year in the Holy of Holies, but right here right now I’m walking around with God incarnate who is named Jesus and is from Nazareth?” Remember this whenever someone suggests new information or challenging evidence doesn’t spark change in “religion.”)

If you’ve been following this blog in the remotest sense, we’ve always worked toward what I believe, namely a Lutheran confession of Catholic Christianity (as opposed to a Roman/Latin confession of Catholic Christianity or a Byzantine confession of same). Sometimes this meant working away from other notions, such as materialism or moral relativism. What if we didn’t work toward what I believe? What if I started from belief and worked elsewhere? This is what I aim to do with this post. I want to work away from Lutheranism toward atheism as a cogent position. Let’s go on a ride!

On the Pursuit of Knowledge

In my last post, I talked about three discrete “causes” of homosexual inclinations and behavior. I don’t know if any one of them are true, and I don’t know if all of them are true to varying degrees for different people. Given available evidence, I am inclined to believe that all of them are true to varying degrees for different people. I didn’t believe this to be too controversial. In fact, I found it rather humble to admit that there are certain things I do not know and that I was not going to proceed with the presumption that I was omniscient regarding the topic at hand. It sparked a bit of a conversation over on Facebook that I would link to, but then you’d need to log into Facebook, and, oh man, how inconvenient would that be?

Thankfully it led me to another place, a question that has been asked of me over and over again, and one that I’m sure most theists of any stripe are asked fairly regularly: how do I reconcile faith with science? That is, given the evidence, since I do not need Thor to be causing thunder and lightning, since I do not need Apollo to ride his sun-chariot across the sky, since I do not need Suijin to care for lakes and streams and oceans, then clearly the idea of “god” isn’t necessary anymore. The natural phenomena can be explained, and I’m stuck on an artifact of time gone by.

This becomes a competition between faith and doubt. I’m not even talking here about faith in that “religious” sense, but in an intellectual sense of what I put trust or belief in. Do I put stock in science or do I put stock in an abstract deity? Yes.

On Homosexuality, or: The Post I’ve Been Avoiding for a Long While

In his memoir Through Painted Deserts, Donald Miller recounts traveling with a "recovered homosexual," so described because he formerly engaged in an active gay sex life and turned away from it. I have not read Through Painted Deserts, nor do I know this man that Donald Miller traveled with; thus I cannot speak to the specificity of his case, but the beloved asked me "Do you believe in that?" when she encountered it on the page. Those were not her exact words; rather she asked "Do you believe homosexuality can be reformed?"

It’s a fair enough question if an unfortunately vague one. For one, what do we mean by "homosexuality?" Do we mean the mere behavior of a gay lifestyle? Do we mean attraction to members of the same physical sex? And especially in the modern day, do we scrap the physical sex characteristic completely and instead work with "gender" definitions – if a transgender woman who chooses to forego genital reassignment surgery, but maintains an active masculine identity, dates a man who maintains an active masculine identity, would they both be straight, bi, gay, undefined? For another, what do we mean by "reformed?" Are we trying to reassign attractions from the same sex to the opposite sex? Are we (much more simply) asking for a person to not participate in a gay lifestyle without demands for the alternative? What to do, what to do….

One River to Cross – On My Flirtation With Rome, or: Why I Can’t Swim the Tiber

I have joked with people before that I will probably be Catholic by the time I’m thirty. It would break my mother’s heart; it would scandalize a church in which I am respected as a teacher and play an active role in assorted ministries. I doubt it would shock or even anger my pastors, both friends who understand that seeking after truth often means leaving a place full of truth for a place full of still more truth. Because Abram is called out of Ur to Cana. It’s not that God wasn’t in Ur (if He weren’t, how could He speak to Abram?), and it’s not that Abram couldn’t worship God in Ur (if that’s the case, holy cow, American Jews, you are in the wrong place!); it’s that God calls us to Him in the fullness of truth. It is why one goes from agnosticism to theism – because theism is true – and from theism to monotheism – because only models with one god offer cogent descriptions of observed phenomena – and from monotheism to the Abrahamic religions and from there to Christianity, which C.S. Lewis describes as a great hall off which there are many doors, and it is our duty to choose the door wherein this mere Christianity (haha, it’s like he titled his book that!) will be fully realized in a denomination.

One makes a journey from places of truth (it is proper to doubt, for man is fallible, so start at agnosticism) to places of greater truth still, at least if one is seeking what is true. So whither goest I?

On Reason

The great Galileo said that God wrote the book of nature in the form of the language of mathematics. He was convinced that God has given us two books: the book of Sacred Scripture and the book of nature. And the language of nature – this was his conviction – is mathematics, so it is a language of God, a language of the Creator.

Let us now reflect on what mathematics is: in itself, it is an abstract system, an invention of the human spirit which as such in its purity does not exist. It is always approximated, but as such is an intellectual system, a great, ingenious invention of the human spirit.

The surprising thing is that this invention of our human intellect is truly the key to understanding nature, that nature is truly structured in a mathematical way, and that our mathematics, invented by our human mind, is truly the instrument for working with nature, to put it at our service, to use it through technology.

It seems to me almost incredible that an invention of the human mind and the structure of the universe coincide. Mathematics, which we invented, really gives us access to the nature of the universe and makes it possible for us to use it.

Therefore, the intellectual structure of the human subject and the objective structure of reality coincide: the subjective reason and the objective reason of nature are identical. I think that this coincidence between what we thought up and how nature is fulfilled and behaves is a great enigma and a great challenge, for we see that, in the end, it is “one” reason that links them both.

Our reason could not discover this other reason were there not an identical antecedent reason for both.

In this sense it really seems to me that mathematics – in which as such God cannot appear – shows us the intelligent structure of the universe. Now, there are also theories of chaos, but they are limited because if chaos had the upper hand, all technology would become impossible. Only because our mathematics is reliable, is technology reliable.

Our knowledge, which is at last making it possible to work with the energies of nature, supposes the reliable and intelligent structure of matter. Thus, we see that there is a subjective rationality and an objectified rationality in matter which coincide.

Of course, no one can now prove – as is proven in an experiment, in technical laws – that they both really originated in a single intelligence, but it seems to me that this unity of intelligence, behind the two intelligences, really appears in our world. And the more we can delve into the world with our intelligence, the more clearly the plan of Creation appears.

In the end, to reach the definitive question I would say: God exists or he does not exist. There are only two options. Either one recognizes the priority of reason, of creative Reason that is at the beginning of all things and is the principle of all things – the priority of reason is also the priority of freedom -, or one holds the priority of the irrational, inasmuch as everything that functions on our earth and in our lives would be only accidental, marginal, an irrational result – reason would be a product of irrationality.

One cannot ultimately “prove” either project, but the great option of Christianity is the option for rationality and for the priority of reason. This seems to me to be an excellent option, which shows us that behind everything is a great Intelligence to which we can entrust ourselves.

-Pope Benedict XVI in a Q&A session with diocesan youth in 2006

If I keep quoting Catholics, I’m gonna end up being a papist sympathizer. Kyrie eleison.

On Skepticism: A Healthy Distrust

The skeptic must distrust even skepticism as a mode of thought.

On Moral Realism, or: The Common Descent of Ethics

Oh my it has been almost two months since I wrote here. No more apologies because you’ve read all of those before. Instead, I welcome you to the third and final installment of a series that responds to an obnoxious April Fool’s tweet. To wit!

Hey guys, there’s an afterlife in which the vast complexity of existence is simplified into good & bad behavior. JK JK JK APRIL FOOLS LOLOLZ

The first two parts can be found here, wherein I address the idea of an afterlife, and here, wherein we talk about the complexity of existence and simplification. In this last part, we talk about good and bad behavior. You’ll notice here that I haven’t taken the time to even see if the Twitter user’s assumptions about the afterlife are even accurate to the Christian worldview in which I operate*, but rather if one can merely dismiss such a position offhand to laugh out loud(z). What you are about to read is almost perfectly copy and pasted from a comment I made over at the Patheos blog Unequally Yoked, formerly the home of a “geeky atheist pick[ing] fights with her Catholic boyfriend,” and henceforth the home of “a geeky convert pick[ing] fights in good faith.”

I recommend adding this to your blog roll, and reading all the old posts and some comments. It is a fascinating journey from an unsure atheist to an unsure crypto-theist to an unsure Catholic. Some days, I feel like I am writing her blog in reverse – as a geeky Lutheran answering the questions of his atheist girlfriend. I think it would be easier to recognize what most people do not: fideism is heresy, and of necessity we are called to wrestle with God, as inheritors of his covenant with Israel (Israel means “struggles with God”), which means working through the hard stuff “with all your mind” (Luke 10:27, emphasis mine). So hey, let’s put the brain to use and talk about good and bad behavior!

*For the record, they are not. But people tend to laugh at what they do not understand; it’s a lot easier to ridicule than to do the research.

On Irreducible Complexity, or: Sympathy for the Simple

It’s been a long while since I let my thoughts spill forth. It’s not that I haven’t been writing or sharing thoughts; no, the act of writing is an act of organization, and it is without fail that my words find their way to paper or computer. Sometimes, however, you organize and communicate to and for yourself (if you haven’t spoken to yourself in public before, you should really try it) and not for the Internet.

When last we met, I was deconstructing at length a fairly short (140-character) missive, which is to say a Tweet. Specifically, I wanted to give attention to this Tweet:

Hey guys, there’s an afterlife in which the vast complexity of existence is simplified into good & bad behavior. JK JK JK APRIL FOOLS LOLOLZ

In that first part of what I guess we’ll begin calling a “series,” I gave attention to the concept of an afterlife, a post-physicalist existential state temporally (and, by extension, spatially) displaced from the familiar encounters of our human body. In this second post, I want to look at the second part, which may or may not be part of the just kidding nature and the extensive yuks at the end. So, the question I pose going in: is existence vastly complex and, as a corollary, can it be simplified? To the jump!

On Material and Substantial Life

Hey guys, there’s an afterlife in which the vast complexity of existence is simplified into good & bad behavior. JK JK JK APRIL FOOLS LOLOLZ

The above came to my phone via Twitter yesterday. Whereas I can appreciate April Fools’ Day humor, the caricature of the conceptualization of spiritual immortality bugged me to the extent that I decided to write a post about it. Let us then explore the idea of an afterlife, whether existence is simplified and the idea of qualitative behavior – three issues, really, so we shall take them one at a time.

I will note before launching into this that though I will spend mere paragraphs on the topic, each idea – the afterlife, the complexity of existence and a moral order – on its own has books upon books upon books written about it and debate upon debate upon debate spoken over it, so my immature grasps are a little like a three-year-old messing with Duplo blocks next to a professional architect drafting and engineering floorplans and elevation views and building models…and that architect all the same in no way actually building the house itself. So we shall approach this topic with as much humility as my overinflated, frail ego will allow. And, at the very least, a little more honestly and rigorously than a one-sentence dismissive Tweet.*

*Some things deserve to be ridiculed.

We shall address each issue at hand in the clausal order of the Tweet. To that extent, the first phrase reads as follows: there is an afterlife.

On Leaps of Faith

“I think faith is stupid.”

“But you make a leap of faith yourself in assuming that one equals one.”

“Well, yes, but it’s a far smaller leap than ‘Jesus is my Lord and Savior.’ It’s about minimizing the leaps of faith I have to take.”

Premise: Mathematics are a symbolic language used to express observations of the natural world.
Premise: 1=1
Observation: 1 x 50,000,000,000,000 x 100,000,000,000 = 1
Conclusion: One does not equal one.
Corollary: Mathematics is not a sufficient symbolic language to express observations of the natural world.

The above argument so constructed could use some fine tuning, but I want to take this post to develop it for a moment. If a thing is itself, then a thing can never be more or less than itself. A thing is thus merely the sum of its constituent parts. But in the realm of biology, this is complete hogwash, and every scientist knows it. What we talk about when we talk about “life” is not the mere presence of a few carbon atoms or a few nitrogen atoms and carboxyl groups arranged in a certain way. We speak of the specialized replication of these structures, purposed to propagation.