Reverend Dr Craig Thompson has penned an opinion piece on how he feels about a certain international gathering of atheists, which I will be attending. His article Preaching to the diverted is beautifully written, but poorly argued. I’d like to answer it.

Near the beginning, Thompson states his thesis:

For if what is presented bears too much resemblance to the content of populist atheistic publications of the last decade, not much will be said which will threaten to get to the heart of the matter. There is a risk that the lectures and addresses will largely be a preaching to the diverted. Why the diverted? Because “religion” is a convenient distraction from the difficult business of life together, even for the anti-religious.

It would be helpful if Craig Thompson had actually read the “populist atheistic publications” he’s referring to. Even a cursory reading of any of these apparently elusive tomes would reveal that active atheists don’t simply blame religion for society’s ills. We “populist atheists” instead blame the thinking behind religious convictions: the certainty, the arrogance, the superstition, the fear and the self-righteousness. Atheists today oppose such depredations upon reason wherever they manifest: at nationalist rallies, at meetings where children are indoctrinated with absurdities or in the brain of someone piloting a jet full of families into a New York skyscraper.

It’s easy to go to Friedrich Nietzsche as the prototypical atheist philosopher. Thompson doesn’t do that, exactly, but he does invoke that notorious passage from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, of what the author had put in the mouth of his madman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Following his shallow reading of Nietzsche, Thompson argues that without a great unifier – tacitly God – humanity would have no choice in a godless world but to take up the responsibilities of said unifier. Thompson believes this long-overdue acceptance of reality to be a terrifying prospect; terrifying enough to argue for the persistence of the deity charade.

(An aside: Nietzsche considered Christianity to be nihilistic and the passage in question was intended to challenge atheistic moral philosophers. I’m no defender of Nietzsche’s philosophy generally, but you have to give him credit for that.)

Here is Thompson again:

Do we actually have it in ourselves to become as gods? Unless this is the question, then anything which seeks to be atheism is simply a diversion – a self-congratulatory mocking which misplaces the problem and imagines that if only God would go away we’d get along with each other just fine. Yet while it might seem that we can think ourselves out of God, we can’t think ourselves out of ourselves. The absence of God will not bring with it the presence of human harmony because we will still have to deal with our fear of each other, or our frailty in the face of nature, or our deluded sense of self-importance. It is in relation to these things, after all, that the gods are of most use to us.

As an atheist and a humanist, I find this outlook abhorrent. This is exactly the kind of hopelessness apparent in claims that we can do nothing about global warming. It assumes that we are incapable of growing up. What good can come of deference of responsibility to the gilded dictates of a vague, nebulous and (as a Uniting Church minister should know) conveniently malleable superstition? No great work of theology has contributed to modern medicine. Jesus did not descend from the heavens bearing the equations that describe spacetime. We can live without god, and I argue that we already do.

It is vexing to read a religious man decrying humanity’s deluded sense of self-importance, for what can be more self-aggrandising than holding the belief that we are God’s chosen species, the very centre of His vast creation? That He made us in His image?

Thinking of gods as normalising forces in the face of modern issues is asinine and naïve at best. Religion has been the single greatest and most consistent divisive force in all of human history. But, it should be acknowledged, Thompson is not arguing for his religion. He vaguely evokes the spectre of “togetherness” that faith itself, rather than his conception of Jesus, ostensibly imbues. Clearly, then, this is no argument for the truth-claims of his religion, but an appeal to what philosopher Dan Dennett terms “belief in belief.”

I take serious issue with faith, and as I’ve articulated elsewhere: it comes down to my concern with the credulity and incuriousness required to hold faith in supernatural deities in this century. Those of us who lack the intellectual honesty and are content to huddle under pacifying delusions are certainly not up to facing the challenge posed by the ravings of Nietzsche’s madman.

Moreover, the veracity of metaphysical claims cannot be measured empirically, and therefore all of them must be invalid, or non-statements about nothing. Certain metaphysical postulations might be correlated with more ethical behaviours and healthier states of mental wellbeing in adherents; but we should remember that ethical behaviour must occur in physical reality, and that brains are physical organs with no detectable otherworldly privileges.

There are serious philosophical problems that must be overcome in order to argue convincingly that goodness comes from a belief in gods. In Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates asks the eponymous victim: ”Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” As one might expect, theologians have been battling with this challenge this since it was first uttered. If the gods, or God, dictate goodness, then the gods are tyrants and we are forced to accept that goodness is arbitrary. This can only mean that humanity is subject to the whims of a sadistic monster. In this case, we might defer to Epicurus, another Greek philosopher. (24 seconds on YouTube:)

But, if the gods, or God, entreat humanity to be good for goodness’ own sake, then we must accept that goodness exists separately from the gods. And since evolution has wired us with an innate moral compass – which as of writing, has been borne out time and again by numerous psychological and neuroscientific experiments – the gods themselves are arbitrary in the moral sphere.

Humans evolved as a cooperative species with a strong sense of justice, so it is no surprise that some moral assumptions we regard as “good” – along with some godly justifications for evil that privileges certain tribes over others – can be found in religious literature. It is no mistake that, as Anne Lamott wrote: ”…you can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

A “goodness” independent of a deity would be defined by activity in the physical world, and as such it becomes an issue for philosophers, not priests. Despite Thompson’s undeniably eloquent insistence: the gods definitely do not hold moral sway over anyone any more.

Thompson carries his argument further:

What Nietzsche declares lies before us is starkly confronting: to be alone with each other, not just with the people who think and want like us, but everyone. For this is to have to take social, political and moral responsibility. It is to have to adjudicate, to balance, to include and to exclude. It is, in the end, to have to resort to violence, and all without any real common ground, any “god” to which we can appeal for justification – not even “reason”.

I find this very interesting. Thompson’s byline states that he is “…a Uniting Church minister in Melbourne” and that “[his] research interests include the relationships between different spheres of philosophical and religious discourse, and the theological dimensions of political life and thought.”

The Uniting Church came to be in Australia in 1977, when a few different congregations (Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational Union) merged. The Uniting Church is a progressive institution, going so far as to ordain openly homosexual ministers and, if my memory serves, to consider performing gay marriages. In order to sincerely believe in the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus while supporting 21st century secular progressive values would require an almost inhuman tolerance for cognitive dissonance. One can’t help but wonder why someone as educated as Craig Thompson would bother. The ethics claimed by him and his congregationalists are plainly more cogently and comfortably expressed by secular humanists.

Modern tolerance arose in spite of religious values; their justification was not derived from God, but reason. Craig Thompson’s church has appropriated modern values, but nonetheless clings to the religious baggage. It’s interesting that he can refer to atheists as “diverted” without noticing the irony.

He closes thus:

Whether believers and non-believers like it or not, we have a common problem. What ails us as human beings is not “God” as such, but the absence of a common story which both calls us to live together in peace and takes seriously that, in the end, we cannot do just that. Any conception of reason which could help us to live with this contradiction, without reducing us to all kinds of quasi-religious justifications of violence by the state or by individuals, would indeed be a thing to celebrate. Let us hope that what is proffered the weekend after next will do more than divert attention from this hard work. It is too easy to imagine that overcoming all that ails us is a matter of dealing with “them” and the problems they seem to present, rather than dealing with our own fears and failings.

How can we expect to deal with our own fears and failings, and how they impinge upon human flourishing in the real world, while we remain too immature to drop the ideological refuse of our distant ancestors? Why must we answer today’s problems with yesterday’s distractions? And if Thompson simply wishes to use belief as a clarion call for us taking care of one another, is this not self-defeating? A “common story” does not require the suspension of critical thinking, and you would have to be an incorrigible pessimist to think it does.

As I’ve said, metaphysical claims cannot be empirically probed. Claims that cannot be tested are unnecessary, and therefore worthless claims. Any tangible benefits – such as reduced anxiety over death – come with the baggage of an invitation to childish credulity. A social acceptance of faith sets a precedent saying that it’s OK to believe things for which there is no evidence because it makes us feel better. Better about what? Better about the idea that our prejudices regarding life and death are being tended to by some supernatural agent?

Atheism is not so hubristic. Atheism is humble because it embraces doubt and it acknowledges human fallibility. Thompson might argue that he is doing just that by entrusting God with the hard questions. To an atheist who regards gods as mere inventions, this position is incoherent. The notion of human fallibility rests on our well-known biases and blind-spots. Fallibility distrusts mere perception by definition. So while Thompson might backtrack from the Bible when its verses contradict his values, perhaps saying “the Bible was written by men, and men are fallible,” he must also strive to address that ineffable sense of God’s presence with the same scepticism.

In contrast, atheism embraces fallibility. Humans are wired to believe in gods, dualism and the supernatural, and the atheist questions those innate assumptions. The atheist makes it her prerogative to defer to science, the ultimate bias-detection mechanism. In order to do good science, one first must profess fallibility and ignorance. This allows us to confront reality as it really is, uncoloured by the beliefs Thompson would have us rally under, and far better equipped to face our challenges as a species. Not incidentally, those “populist” atheist publications Thompson glances over in his opening paragraph all hedge atheism on science.

Reason has been the engine that has driven humanity’s progress. Throughout history, religion alone has impinged upon reason. Since we have reasoned that we want to thrive as a species, why would an intelligent man like Craig Thompson insist on dragging religion back to the fore? It’s rather like pining for a lost childhood instead of facing “the difficult business of life.”

One can’t practise atheism just as one can’t practise baldness. Religious belief, on the other hand, takes up time. In the real world, religion is a diversion suffered only by the religious. The atheist speaking out against religion is actively trying to address the issues in the real world; for as long as people remain credulous, stultified, dogmatic and afraid: pessimistic assumptions about the future of humanity are justified.