Atheism

He begins answering his questions by looking, first, at the atheist/pantheist positions. He describes atheism as a world-view ‘which holds that this universe (or multiverse) is all there is; there is no supernatural dimension’, and Pantheism as a world-view ‘which merges the concepts of God and the world into one impersonal entity’ (p. 21). The title of his third chapter is ‘Can Atheism Help?’ (p. 22).

I suggest his argument that atheism cannot help falls foul of the fallacy of wishful thinking: that finding the implications of something undesirable or psychologically unacceptable means that it is false. Having quoted the philosopher David Hume's famous formulation of the problem of evil, which is at the heart of this book's question, he then asks, ‘But where does this atheist path end up?’ (p. 26). First, here is Hume's formulation of the problem:

To see where he thinks ‘atheism ends up’, Lennox turns to Richard Dawkins. Owing to space restrictions, I will paraphrase the first part. Dawkins begins by listing many examples of death and suffering that are happening in the world as he writes and he also describes the indifferent, natural processes that are at work behind these events. He then finishes with:

Lennox's first response is to say ‘that Dawkins’ deterministic version of atheism seems here to abolish the categories of good and evil and replace them with blind, pitiless indifference in a fatalistic universe’ (p. 27).

There is nothing in the passage that abolishes the concepts of good and evil, only its presence in the universe independent of human conceptualisation. Naturalistic explanations do not necessarily ‘abolish’ the phenomena they describe, they merely offer an explanation that may be at odds with how we intuitively understand those phenomena to have occurred. Just as a scientific explanation of the sun (a stationary ball of gas and energy) does not deny the existence of the sun but only that it is a god riding across the sky on a chariot every day, atheism challenges the human intuition that there are anthropomorphic gods hidden behind natural occurrences.

Lennox's mistake here is to assume that this is a dichotomy (A or B but not A and B), that either Dawkins’ brand of reductionism is true or good and evil exist, when this is a false dichotomy: it could be true that Dawkins’ description contains or is consistent with humans having evolved such concepts.

Very shortly after this, Lennox asks the following rhetorical question:

The question of where concepts of good and bad come from is one which many are interested to investigate regarding naturalistic explanations for such phenomena: psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, moral philosophers, neuroscientists and more. There are many plausible naturalistic explanations for how a moral sense has emerged in humans and Lennox considers not a single one of them.

There is also no problem in preserving the concept ‘bad’ for the coronavirus even in a world without god. At its simplest, ‘bad’ means nothing more than that which harms or hinders us or our projects, and this is not necessarily even a moral sense of ‘bad’, merely prudential, but it works perfectly well for anyone (including atheists) for describing the nature of the relationship between coronavirus and human beings.

Lennox is not clear about whether he means the concepts good and bad or that goodness and badness have some kind of metaphysical reality as constituent parts of reality, but it is false to say, wholesale, that the atheist world-view excludes any notion of good and evil, yet this is a central argument for Lennox. As well as taking a look at the plethora of literature and research examining naturalistic explanations for the concepts good and evil and the human behaviours that surround them, Lennox also needs to look into the distinction between moral and prudential notions of good and bad. It is contestable whether there is a real distinction here; perhaps, in the end, all moral behaviour is reducible to prudential calculation, and there is a compelling case that this is true. Either way, Lennox has not even shown an awareness of the distinction let alone any consideration of the issues surrounding it. As Lennox suggests, atheists should consider (he says ‘answer’, but there is no imperative that it must be answered only considered) the question set by Nietzsche, ‘Why morality at all, when life, nature, and history are ‘non-moral’?’ (p. 30), but that is precisely what many philosophers have attempted to do. So, why does Lennox not consider any of those arguments? And even if we assume that atheists have not answered the question (or fail to do so), that would not, in and of itself, make his claims true. This is common within religious rhetoric: that because there may be difficulty in providing some kind of naturalistic explanation for something, it therefore follows that the religious explanation is true.Footnote ³ This is another false dichotomy: A (atheist explanation) or B (religious explanation); not A, therefore B. However, it could be the case that both A and B are false.

The Christian Answer

Let's turn to the case he makes for the Christian response to the problem of evil. As Lennox expresses it, the problem is: ‘Can the coronavirus be reconciled with the existence of a loving god?’ (p. 31). He suggests that ‘Both viruses and earthquakes . . . appear to be essential for life.’ He adds, ‘If there is a creator God, he is by definition ultimately responsible for their existence . . . Yet why do they have to exist at all?’ And he goes on to say, ‘Surely, it is not enough to say – as some might – that the coronavirus pandemic is just biology doing what biology does? Surely there must be more to it than that?’ (p. 35).

One very simple question: why ‘surely’? Why does there have to ‘be more to it than that’? Again, it could just be an unpalatable truth that ‘that is all there is to it’. One's difficulty in accepting that ‘that's all there is to it’ is not reason enough to conclude that that isn't all there is to it. This fallacy appears again and again in this book. It says much more about Lennox and his own psychological needs than it does about what case he's making. The question he closes this section with is: ‘Could God have made a world without viral pathogens?’ (p. 35).

The short answer, given that God is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient) and a loving God, is, of course, ‘yes, he could have’ (from his being omnipotent), but there is also a good case to be made that he should have (from his also being a loving and all-knowing God). However, Lennox's response to this is to make a claim about human nature. Even though coronavirus has earlier been established to fall into the category of natural evil (not moral evil), he now rehearses the usual Christian response to the problem of moral evil (which, as Lennox himself says, does not apply to natural evil): the ‘free will response’. Even though this is a red herring to the issue of coronavirus, because some think it is a punishment by God for our sins, and because it is such a common response to the problem of evil, it is worth spending some time with this argument. The argument, as he puts it, goes something like this: in order that humans should not be automatons, god granted them free will, and the consequence of this is that humans are capable of doing evil as well as good: hence the existence of moral evil.

First of all, this argument emerged from the commentators on the Bible and nowhere is it made in the Bible itself. Because the concept of ‘free will’ is conspicuously absent from the Bible, it has had to be imported from outside the Bible in order to attempt to rescue the entire system from the problem of evil.

I should qualify that there are passages that refer to ‘choice’ and ‘willingness’ etc. (e.g. those often drawn upon are: Philemon 14, Genesis 1:26, Deuteronomy 30:19–20, Isaiah 48:18, Ecclesiastes 9:10, Proverbs 21:5, Matthew 22:37), but these in no way amount to an argument for God's giving humans free will. It is from such passages as these that Christians are left to infer that God must have given us free will, but it is not even implied let alone entailed. In addition to there being no argument for free will, neither is the concept of free will, in the significant sense, anywhere explicitly mentioned in the Bible. But a subtler point is that none of these references to voluntarism imply free will. If determinism is true, we are not denuded of our capacity for choice (we will still choose which cereal to eat, for example), we are simply denuded of any free will in the making of that choice (i.e. at the very same moment and under the very same conditions, we would choose the same cereal). For free will to be true, we must be able to make a different choice at the same moment and under the same conditions and it is this that the determinist denies, counting our intuition that we can as nothing but illusion, just like humans’ earlier belief that the sun was a god riding across the skies on a chariot or that the earth was flat were illusions. All that can be inferred from the passages referenced above is that the writers of the Bible had the same language for action that we have today: ‘choice’, ‘willingness’, ‘liberty’ and so on, and as I have explained above, choice and willingness and other expressions of voluntarism are neither suggestive of free will nor are they proof that God gave us a free will.

The argument against the problem of evil is trotted out so often and habitually that the proponents have become blind to the host of assumptions the argument contains: that free will exists and is possible, that automatons would be any different from how we are now (if the determinists are right, we are automatons determined to believe in free will!), that God gave it to us, that the Bible says that God gave it to us, that a world without free will would be bad and that a world with free will is good and that preserving our free will is more important than a world without evil. All of these assumptions are highly contestable.

The most striking part of this section is when Lennox acknowledges determinism in the following sentence: ‘Richard Dawkins thinks, and the late scientist Stephen Hawking thought, that we live in a deterministic universe.’ Lennox denies this with, ‘We do not.’ And at this point I was expecting an argument for why we do not live in a deterministic universe. Here's what he says instead: ‘God gave humans choice, and he remains sovereign – the Bible declares both clearly.’

This is astonishing because there is simply no argument at all, no reasons of any kind are offered, only two assertions (unsupported claims). What's more, there is no reference to where in the Bible it states that God gave humans free will or choice, that, it is said, ‘the Bible declares . . . clearly’ (see above). There is also something of a tension between the two assertions he makes that is borne out in the Bible. Whenever ‘choice’, ‘liberty’ or ‘willingness’ are mentioned it is done so as part of an imperative command (e.g. Deut. 30: 19–20, Isaiah 48:18, Proverbs 21:5, Joshua 24:15, Romans 13:2, Galatians 5:13), reminding one of the famous Henry Ford quote, when he said, ‘any colour so long as it's black’! The ‘choices’ are rhetorical ways of saying: ‘You must obey or else (die)!’ (Romans 6:23). It is difficult to reconcile this with a genuine free will or with attempts to legitimately draw upon these examples as evidence of genuine free will in the Bible.

Lennox's slippage from talk of ‘free will’ into the word ‘choice’ here also allows me to bring in another distinction. Choice is not the same as free will. Unlike free will, choice is unproblematically compatible with determinism. Making a choice is what happens whether we are determined or not. In fact, the issue of whether my choice was a free choice hinges on whether I made my choice with a free will. Determinists speak of ‘the illusion of free will’; they don't deny that we make choices, just about whether the choice was something we could have done differently. So, the concepts used in the Bible to describe voluntary action are compatible with determinism and are distinct from agency or free will.

Finally, although there are no explicit references in the Bible to free will (or statements or arguments that God gave us one) where you would expect to find them (especially around Genesis 1:26), there are explicit expressions of determinism, notably: Proverbs 16:9, ‘a man's heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps’ and, particularly this one, John 1:13, ‘Which were born . . . not of the will of man but of God.’ So, though free will has to be imported into the Bible from outside (by theologians such as Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther and so on), determinism – more specifically, ‘divine determinism’ – does not: it is, to use Lennox's words, ‘declared clearly’.

Now we enter the internal world of the Bible, where the questions asked are answered only with reference to scripture. This is problematic for someone such as myself who is not already a fully paid up member of the club, as this response begs the question (makes a circular appeal), but it is worth taking a look at the internal logic of the biblical response that Lennox makes. Many will respond that the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis is a metaphor or to be understood symbolically. I agree with that, but given that Lennox (and plenty of other Christians) appeals to this story to explain the ‘disagreement they had with God’ and therefore why the world is full of pain, I will analyse this section in some detail.

The first thing that strikes me is that Lennox seems quite comfortable with what can only be described as the cruelty and vindictiveness of God. In response to his question, ‘Why are things the way they are?’, he appeals to the ‘disagreement’ between God and Adam and Eve in Genesis regarding ‘the nature of life and the serious possibility of death’ (p. 37). He says that they were ‘endowed . . . with the marvellous gift of free will’ and that their downfall was brought about ‘through a misuse of that freedom’ (p. 37). There are a number of problems with this. Ignoring for now that it does not anywhere say in the Bible that God gave them any free will (see above), the way it plays out for them can only be described as cruel.

Before they ate of the tree of knowledge, presumably, they were innocent and without sin. When my daughter was five years old she was innocent and precisely because of that innocence I knew that she would not seek out any inappropriate material high up on my bookshelf, so I felt no need to hide such material. When she is older, and less innocent, I will probably need to remove that more adult material and put it out of sight, but while she is innocent, there is no need. Imagine if I said to her, as a five-year-old, ‘Whatever you do, DO NOT look at that book there!’ It does not take a great leap of the imagination to entertain that she will probably look at it, when no one is around, if she is able to do so. This is the same book she would have paid no attention to if nothing was said. The point here is that ‘sin’ begins not in the mind of the innocent who has been forbidden from doing something, it comes from whoever it is who does the forbidding. In other words, sin must be prior to the action(s). We might even be inclined to say that it is because of their innocence (having no understanding of right and wrong) that the child, and Adam and Eve, did what they did. This analysis, which I contend is very human and intuitive, doesn't warrant long-term punishment. Further, how can other human beings be held accountable for the actions of their forefathers? If we are trying to import the notion of free will into all this, it makes no sense to then say that we all suffer for the actions of two people whose will has no significant connection to everyone else with regard to agency – that key concept within the notion of free will.

Also, it is not the case that Adam and Eve, once they knew about the tree of knowledge, simply weighed it up and then, on balance, decided to eat of the tree of knowledge having exercised their free choice. This is surely what would be expected if they are to be held responsible for exercising their free will. Instead, they are tempted by the embodiment of evil itself, the serpent (which, presumably, stands for the devil, though it doesn't say so explicitly in Genesis). You can hardly be held morally responsible for acting under the influence of a malevolent deceiver you hadn't been warned about while you are still in a state of innocence, and therefore easily influenced. But, does the serpent even deceive anyone? It tells Eve that she will not surely die but will instead have her eyes opened, knowing good and evil and become as a god (Genesis 3:5). As it happens the serpent is right: upon eating the fruit they do not drop dead, which is what you'd expect from what God said (‘Thou shalt surely die!’), and as it happens, they do come to know good from evil, they become moral creatures, and there is a very good case that this is what it is to become as a god: to have agency is to become a prime mover. You may be thinking that I have just found the bit in the Bible where it does say that God gave us free will, as I have just ascribed agency to Adam and Eve. Human beings undeniably conceive of themselves as moral creatures, which explains why we believe we have a free will, but it does not mean that we have a free will, only that we intuitively feel that we do (just as we intuitively felt that the earth was flat). Another problem is that the answer to the problem of evil says that humans decided to transgress and eat from the tree of knowledge because they had already been granted free will by God. That would mean that they would need to have already been in possession of free will, so one cannot appeal to the eating of the forbidden fruit to explain what it is that explains why they ate the forbidden fruit. So, not only is it impossible that God gave humans free will before their eating of the fruit, what is entailed from this analysis is that God did not ‘endow humans with the marvellous gift of free will’ (p. 37), but, contrary to the usual Christian narrative, God denied humans free will by putting the possibility of free will into the fruit of the tree of knowledge and then forbidding its consumption.Footnote ⁴

The ‘curse’ (this is how Lennox describes it) that God makes in Genesis 3:17–18 comes after the fact and he punishes them differently from the promised sanction of death. This is what's known as ‘moving the goal posts’. Any good parent/teacher will tell you that when you punish a child, firstly, you must tell them exactly what you will do; secondly, you must do what you said you'd do, and not something different; thirdly, it is good to give children a second chance, so that once they understand the punishment/consequences they will be able to think more carefully the next time. God seems to ignore all of these good parenting/teaching principles. Yes, god says that if thou eat of the tree of knowledge thou shalt surely die, but there is no reason to suppose that Adam and Eve, as innocents, would have had any understanding of what this means prior to eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. My daughter often ends up injured despite my repeated warnings about doing this and that because her innocence means that she does not understand. I may tell her off severely in order to deter her from making the same mistake in the future but I do not hold her morally responsible in any deep sense, because she is young, innocent and without understanding – actually, many of us (including Christians!) believe that we need to make mistakes in order to learn from them, that there is value in erring.

Lennox's next move is to try to provide evidence of the goodness of God's character. Apart from the fact that everything in the previous chapter seems to be evidence against this (see above), his basic move is what's known as ‘wishful thinking’. This is a fallacy: no amount of wanting or needing something to be true, in and of itself, makes it true. Yet, this is a very common motivation for belief in God. Lennox expresses this in terms of ‘ultimate justice’. He says that this is a ‘fundamental difficulty that the atheistic worldview cannot cope with’ (p. 45). Atheists, like myself, instead believe that we should do our best to establish systems of justice on earth, as there is no justice in the afterlife. Lennox himself seems to agree with the first part of this (p. 45), though it is unclear why, as he can surely wait for the afterlife and for God and Jesus to dispense justice then, and not rely on imperfect human endeavours.

The need for ‘ultimate justice’ is a kind of immaturity. When we are children, if anything perceived as unfair happens to us, we instantly appeal to our parents to distribute justice. And, in many cases, this will be done. It might not always be what we want exactly, but some kind of justice is meted out. As we get older we expect similar things from the justice system, but, just as with our parents, this system is sometimes wanting. The reason for this is that the justice system is limited and human-made and therefore open to all kinds of errors and corruption. That said, arguably, over the years the justice system has become better and it contains many more checks and balances to mean that it is not as susceptible to these imperfections as it once was, but, being human-made, it remains fallible. There is a case for saying that humans have conceived of something akin to ‘ultimate justice’ in that we have devised a way of understanding justice to go beyond the particular value systems of individual cultures and societies in the concept of universal human rights and international law. This is not without its problems, but it is certainly the case that secular humans do have recourse to some kind of system of ‘ultimate justice’.

A Personal, Secular Response to the Coronavirus WorldFootnote ⁵

This world, the only world I believe there is for us humans, will only get better if we make it better, limited by the extent to which we are able to make it better; after all, some things are in our control and some things aren't. Our lives are meaningful, even without a God, only if we make our lives meaningful; there is love in the world only if we love, there is beauty in the world for as long as we apprehend beauty and create beautiful things. Sometimes ‘shit happens’: earthquakes, viruses, tsunamis, asteroid-strikes and sometimes, because of these, people and animals suffer greatly, but, whether we like it or not, these are just indifferent events that happen because of sets of physical causes. Humans – not gods – have developed all kinds of ways of dealing with these problems, and to someone such as myself that includes religions and everything good that they afford us, and we will continue to respond to problems that we are faced with as best we can with our limited resources. Probably the most pressing of these challenges, long-term, is climate change. Currently, it will be seen to be coronavirus, although this is a fairly short-term problem. We will either get on top of this (and other problems) or we will perish (sadly, some of us certainly will). I believe in naturalistic explanations for the causes of things only because there's good reason and evidence to do so. We know some stuff, and we know a lot more stuff than we used to know, but we are struggling to manage the technology we have created and developed for our own benefit. Having a secular outlook does not mean that I cannot recognize moral behaviour (however it has arisen and developed), and I believe that it is perfectly consistent with a naturalistic outlook. I fully accept that there are many mysteries in the universe, and some things we are simply incapable of (perhaps, ever) answering or explaining. That is just a fact we have, maturely, to live with. I don't know whether I have a free will; I think it likely that we do not and that free will is an illusion, but it is a question that has not been resolved philosophically and no amount of simply asserting that we have one will make it true. But, as humans, we have some knowledge, and it is that knowledge that will be our saviour, if we use it wisely. My life is painful, brief and fragile, and it is also meaningful, beautiful and full of love. (And although I would like to live a long, healthy life, my longevity is less important to me than the quality of my life.) My life is full of such things because I and others in my life make it so. This is what it is to be human. And quite apart from the truth of whether god exists, I just don't see any need for such a belief. As it happens, I rather look forward to the oblivion death will bring, but that does not mean that I don't value the life I have. We humans have the opportunity to develop a mature response to our mortality and the fact that we have to do that says something about the extensive development of our (mysterious) consciousness. Actually, our being born into mortality gives us something gods don't have: we have to live with the fact of death and the knowledge of the fact of death, of being of the flesh, and we have to learn to respond to it, to create responses to it, to reconcile ourselves to it. This is really tough, and it is probably the root and motivation of all religious belief. This is something no immortal god need do. So, in a way, we are greater than gods because we live and we die, affording ourselves a maturity that gods can only dream of. This is what it is to be a good human without God: to live well and to die well as best we can according to our limited but growing understanding.

To return to Lennox's question, ‘Where and from whom can we get real solace or hope?’ Solace is available to atheists, as well as people of faith, through poetry, music, art, film, the natural world, history, literature (including the Bible and all the other religious texts), friends, family and community. The numinous is just as available to atheists as it is to people of faith. This is very often overlooked.

Atheists hope, too. Speaking personally, I hope for my daughter's future, I hope for a better world for her generation, I hope for a solution to the problems of climate change, poverty, famine and disease; I hope for many, many things. However, my hope, and that of other atheists/humanists, is directed towards the world we live in. And even though my hoping may breach the confines of my own life span and personal interests, it is a hope that is connected to action, implementation and instantiation, not a hope of wishful thinking, quietism and armchair judgmentalism. I hope, for instance, that a vaccine will be found to protect my daughter's generation (and ensuing generations) from a future of social distancing and restricted movement. But the hope that I have is worthless if we do not facilitate human endeavour: science, research, trials, unified action and so on. And, oddly enough, when it comes down to it, most religious people, as well as praying, also trust in these things (‘Trust in God, but always tie up your camel!’ as Rumi said). It seems that prayer, belief and faith are not enough after all! And for those few people of faith who do put their complete trust in their faith instead of human medical and technological developments, the truth is that they are very vulnerable indeed and, therefore, more likely to die or suffer. It turns out that people of faith have no special treatment after all, however much they may convince themselves otherwise.

But even if our attempts to produce a vaccine fail, or if we remain vulnerable for a long time to come, I remain hopeful. Hopeful of human beings’ ability to adapt to a ‘new normal’, to perhaps gain something positive from the restrictions to their lives, for there to be ‘happy’ consequences to what we now see as ‘plain awful’: to learn to be more communal, more caring, more moral. As Nietzsche said (something C. S. Lewis echoes in a more religious way in Lennox's piece), ‘What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger’, and this is as true for atheists as it is for people of faith, perhaps more so, given that what does kill us really kills us!