A Pragmatic Argument for Functional Atheism

New Yorker image by Seb Agresti

Elsewhere I’ve considered the moral argument for God’s existence. A much more plausible argument is the one laid out below, the argument for effective atheism from the immorality of theistic belief. After formulating the premises, I’ll discuss them and consider some possible objections.

(1) Theism causes or exacerbates myopia (including arrogance, self-righteousness, xenophobia, and tribalism) in the believer, which is bad.

(2) The obligation to be good can outweigh the epistemic obligation to believe only what’s true.

(3) Even if theism were true, everyone would have an ethical obligation to reject theism, to avoid the theistic vices of myopia.

(4) Therefore, in the best society there would be no theistic belief and everyone should live as though there were no God.

A corollary:

(5) If theism were true, God would have been aware of the causal relation between theistic belief and vice.

(6) Since the major religions prescribe both morality and theistic belief, theism is incoherent, which means there’s no such thing as theistic belief in the first place.

Religion and Morality

This argument might strike you as dubious because of the prevailing myth that religion is needed for morality. “If God is dead, everything is permitted,” as the aphorism goes. In reality, not religion but the evolution of our biological traits is the basis of morality, because ethical standards of conduct spring from the instinct to cooperate in forming a family and, by extension, a society. We have a conscience because parents feel compelled to teach their children well, because parents are genetically driven to care for their offspring. Clearly, parasitic parents are possible, which means they might think the best lesson to impart to their children isn’t to empathize with strangers or to help others in need, but to take advantage of their weaknesses and to be as selfish as possible while only seeming to be altruistic to fit into a society of suckers. But that evolutionary strategy—a rationalization of the mutation of psychopathy—can be translated into theistic or naturalistic language, so that becomes a wash in the present context.

The point here is that we needn’t fear that morality is impossible with theistic belief or that morality emerged only because religions developed. True, the formulation of moral principles depended historically on the rise of religions and on revolutions in religious thought, such as on the Axial revolutions in the first millennium BCE. Those historical developments have amounted to a self-undermining of religion, by way of a mystical critique that’s been furthered by philosophical analysis and scientific investigation. Monotheistic religions begin with a childlike imposition of commandments supposedly revealed by God, but end with pragmatic or mystical agnosticism, as the literal interpretations of scripture are no longer trusted as being adequate or worthy accompaniments to religious experience. Either way, if intuitions hadn’t been led astray by theistic projections and speculations, the parent’s biological impulse to care for the weak (for the child) and to cooperate with fellows to survive, by hunting and protecting each other from predators could have inspired nontheistic formulations and commentaries in sophisticated secular cultures—as has anyway happened over the last few centuries.

Moreover, although religions such as Christianity have been instrumental in motivating moral behaviour, such as by positing in each person an immortal soul with freewill, that religious motivation is undermined by anachronisms in the religious stories. For example, the Christian emphasis on morality is due to Jesus’s failed prophecy about the imminent end of the world. We were meant to raise our moral standards in ecstatic expectation of God’s intervention, fuelled by signs that the natural order would “soon” be overthrown by divine forces and God’s justice would reign forever afterward. That never happened and the Church swept the failure under the rug. Also, the theist’s appeal to the immortal soul as the ground of our dignity counts for nothing if that theist also anticipates that God will punish some (and perhaps most) human souls for eternity in hell. If God “respects” these souls by honouring their wayward choices and allowing them to be tortured without end after physical death, the theist’s respect for others might as well be just as paper thin. In addition, the monotheistic justifications of morality end up being tribal rather than universal, since these religions are geared towards separating the believer from the nonbeliever. Likewise, the Eastern religions are quick to distinguish between the enlightened and the deluded. So once you realize that such justifications of theistic morality are faulty, you can credit the religion with being, at best, a cause of rather than a reason for moral behaviour. Based on certain theological delusions, Christians can act morally, such as by feeding the hungry and giving money to the poor, but that behaviour loses its moral value unless you’re interested only in the consequences of actions, not in their intentions. At any rate, moral behaviour can be caused just as efficiently by atheistic worldviews, such as by totalitarian mechanisms of instilling terror or of cultural brainwashing.

But do some aspects of religion make human badness worse?

But what of the objection that disbelief in God or other religious ideas causes immorality? Potentially, a selfish individual who’s predisposed to taking advantage of others would welcome the absence of a perfect judge who will punish all misdeeds in an afterlife. Without that threat of punishment in hell, an atheist might reason that he could profit from misdeeds as long as he avoids getting caught by the fallible human authorities. But that line of reasoning quickly butts up against two opposing arguments. First, even if the selfish atheist succeeds in avoiding detection and is never formally punished by society, this atheist will likely punish herself in some indirect way. Intentionally harming others has a corrosive effect on your character, and should you be a full-blown sociopath with no possibility of compassion, that character deficit will likely impede your progress in the long-run, perhaps even landing you in a mental hospital, even as it provides some advantages in the market of criminality. Second, the average atheist should be just as likely to infer from the lack of an afterlife that life is precious and even that we ought to help others in need, if only out of pity, given our common plight of mortality. I conclude, then, that the causal relation between atheism and immorality is muddled, at best.

By contrast, as new atheists have pointed out, there are clear paths to immorality and to the formation of vicious character traits, from theistic beliefs. As the physicist Steven Weinberg said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” There’s a form of sanctimony that’s almost synonymous with having religious convictions. Note the contrast between Western and Eastern religions on this point, since the Eastern ones are generally atheistic or mystical and thus instill humility in their adherents. While there are monks in Western religions who abase themselves in worship and while Muslims, in particular, profess the need to submit to God, zealotry is only an easy theological inference away for these theists—as the heretic hunts, crusades, witch trials, and circuses of American fundamentalism make abundantly clear in Christianity, and as the global jihads demonstrate in the case of militant Islam.

If you believe there’s an all-powerful, all-knowing creator who will judge us after death, you could reason that you’d better be cautious and humble, since pride would be foolish in the face of such a flawless overlord. However, there’s evidently a loophole, since you could just as well think you ought to be proud not as an individual standing up to God, but as one standing up for him. As long as your activities are credited to God, at least on the surface, you might find yourself possessed with religious fervor as a believer, in which case you might, for example, condescend to the nonbeliever, believing that the latter is in league with demons. Believing she’s on the winning team in an absolute war between good and evil, the theist could hardly avoid being self-righteous if only to prove she really believes her creed.

There’s another path from theism to immorality, which has to do with the ease with which poetic or archaic scripture can be reinterpreted to suit any pretext you like. Thus, the religious person can explain away any apparent moral failing, by appealing to ambiguities in her so-called life manual. The availability of arbitrary reinterpretations and convenient applications acts as a temptation to sin, to use the ironic religious language. That is, scripture is a double-edged sword since it can be used well or abused. Far from being as clear as the religious person would like, scripture can become a burden or a prison. In any case, scripture alone is insufficient and has to be supplemented with interpretations which can be honourable or self-serving.

Clarifying the Argument

Thus I say in (1) that theism causes or exacerbates myopia. Short-sightedness is at the root of selfishness, which in turn is fundamental to misbehavior. Theistic religions supply the illusion of far-sightedness, because of the positing of eternal principles and lofty, abstract entities; alas, since those principles and entities are all-too human and thus mere projections of human qualities, by directing our attention to religious subjects we’re only speaking indirectly about ourselves, as though we were speaking to a mirror. Identifying with God is only a devious way of protecting our selfish inclinations. By contrast, the atheist is open to cosmicist far-sightedness, to alienation, for example, in the face of nature’s inhumanity. That openness lends itself to humility, to disgust towards wastefulness, and to other sources of morality.

(2) seems to run up against the philosophical conviction that we ought to base our beliefs on a rational assessment of the evidence. That conviction is warranted in the case of clear-cut questions of truth; otherwise, pragmatism would amount to mind-warping self-deception. But where we needn’t follow only the philosophical imperative is where we’d only be pretending to do so, as when the evidence is mixed, at best, or when the issue is so remote and vague that no one could ever know for sure what to believe with respect to it. In so far as theism is unfalsifiable, because theological language is meant to be mythical and to push us towards a transcendent form of experience, the question of the truth value of theistic propositions isn’t even technically relevant—apart from the religious literalist’s confusion about her own project. In any case, because “God” is defined as unnatural, beyond our comprehension, and otherwise not subject to common standards of refutation, we should switch to a non-empirical basis for assessing religions. In short, if religions aren’t largely rational in either practice or purpose, the acceptance or rejection of religions should be likeness largely nonrational. For example, we could evaluate religions in terms of their aesthetic merit (as I do elsewhere) or their moral impact, as I do here.

The third premise follows from the other two, giving the conclusion (4), which just generalizes (3). Notice, of course, that this pragmatic, moral evaluation of religion doesn’t entail atheism, the nonexistence of God. What I’m speaking of here, rather, is the converse of a claim made in Woody Allen’s film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, where Saul, a fervent Jewish character says in a flashback to a great religious argument, that he prefers God to the truth, since he believes religious folks have better lives than cynical nihilists (atheists). In other words, even if all Jewish propositions could be disproven, Saul would keep his faith for pragmatic reasons. On the contrary, I say, pragmatism entails atheism, because we don’t need theism to be moral and theism taints our character, making us sanctimonious, nonsensical, and otherwise short-sighted (anthropocentric). Thus, even if theism could somehow be proved true, we’d have an ethical obligation to reject God and to live as though there were no God, to prevent ourselves from being corrupted by absolute commitments to a narrow-minded creed.

The Christian distinction between angels and humans hints at this implication, since angels are presented as slaves with no freewill who are thus happy to do God’s bidding even if that’s to wipe out species or worlds. God created humans so we’d have freewill and that’s supposed to be an advance, because God wants to test whether his creatures could choose to love him despite doubts and hardships. The above argument suggests that passing the test would require the embrace of atheism, not theism. To be human rather than angelic is to have only mixed evidence whether religions are correct or preposterous. The fundamentalist or zealous, literalistic believer takes on an angel’s one-sided mindset and thereby becomes as monstrous as an angel. In any case, there’s no sense talking about the scenario in which theism could be decisively proven in this life, since Christianity, at least, rules out that scenario by positing the all-importance of human freewill and thus of the doubts and mixed evidence that naturally pull our mind in different directions.

This raises the question of theism’s coherence, which is taken up in the subargument, in (5) and (6). There I say that given religion’s tendency to taint rather than to ennoble our character, theistic belief becomes a null option, after all, regardless of the pragmatic preference for atheism. Obviously, God would have foreseen the impact of religions on earth, including the exacerbation of tribalism and the angelification of fallible humans (or the turning of them into robotic fundamentalists). In so far as religions teach both that we ought to be moral and that we should be theists, religions are incoherent and impossible to practice. In actuality, the morality of religious people will be based on biology or secular, pragmatic arguments or intuitions, and will often unfold in spite of theistic beliefs. Alternatively, the so-called theists won’t really subscribe to the theistic propositions, so the religion’s incoherence will be practically irrelevant, because the believers will be functional atheists.

In general, the myth that theistic beliefs promote morality is a case of too much protestation in the Shakespearian sense. To be sure, there are hundreds of millions of moral persons who profess to be religious. The question, though, is whether their theistic beliefs are strong enough to motivate any nontrivial application, such as an action with real-world consequences as opposed to, say, visiting temple once a week or month for an innocuous social gathering. Even if the religious beliefs are genuine and somehow manage to be coherent, there’s the question whether they’re only correlated with morality rather than causally contributing to moral choices. And even if these beliefs do cause moral behaviour, there’s the question those effects outweigh the negative ones, that is, whether the religion produces more immorality than morality. Religious people may not see sanctimoniousness or false humility as an off-putting vice, since their scriptures can always be interpreted as celebrating these traits as forms of righteousness. But the more genuine the monotheistic faith, at least, the more likely the believers will have character flaws caused or exacerbated by their theistic beliefs. The most extreme examples today are found in the American Bible Belt, where the morass of exoteric Christian smugness and ignorance is suffocating and instrumental to the rise of Trump’s presidency by way of the conservative trolling of American liberals. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, the core theistic beliefs are toxic, so the issue we’re left with is whether religion really does more good than harm, not just externally but internally. Do religions make us better individuals, more worthy of being alive or do they degrade and stultify us and exacerbate our worst tribal tendencies?