Dennis Prager is a conservative Jewish talk radio host who has recently written a post at creators.com titled "If There Is No God." It is contains some particularly shallow thinking that no doubt rallies many religious conservatives around the banner of authoritarianism and revelation. Anyway, he, David Berlinski, and Ben Stein seem to be the Christo-fascists token Jews right now as he rumbles away on how morality is impossible without God and that the U.S.A. is a Christian nation.
Prager offers us this brilliant piece of analysis:
You mean that almost every time someone brings up the problems of atheism, secularism, or secular humanism that we don't hear about those things? In almost lots of debates I've watched or read . The first that come to mind are all of the debates D'Souza engaged in last year with Michael Shermer, Christopher Hitchens, and Dan Dennett (all links are to those debates). Dawkins addressed this point in The God Delusion because it's such a frequent riposte. But it's garbage.We are constantly reminded about the destructive consequences of religion — intolerance, hatred, division, inquisitions, persecutions of "heretics," holy wars. Though far from the whole story, they are, nevertheless, true. There have been many awful consequences of religion.
What one almost never hears described are the deleterious consequences of secularism — the terrible developments that have accompanied the breakdown of traditional religion and belief in God. For every thousand students who learn about the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials, maybe two learn to associate Gulag, Auschwitz, The Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide with secular regimes and ideologies.
It's really very simple. What was the driving force behind the liquidation of the Jews? Was it a centuries-old entrenched anti-Semitism that had been on- and off-again sanctioned by the Catholics and the Lutherans reinforced by a bizarre pseudo-science and philosophy of Aryan superiority or was it a lack in belief in God that sought for government to be neutral regarding religious convictions? I think I've begged the question. The Nazis didn't kill millions of the "racially inferior" because they didn't believe in God. In fact, most of them did believe in God. Hitler invoked "the Almighty" and "our God" repeatedly in Triumph of the Will. Just watch it. The Nuremberg Parteitage were full of religious and quasi-religious talking. The only thing secular about them is that they served a worldly governmental party function. But look at all that ceremony and worship. Need we forget the centuries of pogroms and the blood libel? I think not.
Mao. Stalin. Pol Pot. These were the worst men we can think of. But their motivations, while non-religious, were not caused by a lack of belief in God. These "secular ideologies" had horrible problems because they drove their believers to commit genocide, mass imprisonments, and forced starvation. The problem isn't that they were secular. The problem is that they demanded total acquiescence. True belief drives people to kill and that is where the problem lies - absolute surrender to a belief. In this way, the Communist, Nazi, and many Christian or Islamic beliefs require total surrender of one's self and one's will. Thich Nhat Hahn wrote, "With a gun in hand a man kill one, five, or even ten people. But holding on to a doctrine or a system of thought, one can kill tens of thousands of people." All of Prager's aforementioned problems come from a lack of reason, respect for logic, respect for evidence, and respect for human lives. Ideologies - religious or secular - obscure reason and dehumanize for their own survival. Next!
Prager has a litany of problems that lacking belief in God causes. Sadly (or thankfully for you the reader), I won't go into all of them. Here some of them are, first sentence or two only. I will respond to just a few:
1. Without God there is no good and evil; there are only subjective opinions that we then label "good" and "evil." This does not mean that an atheist cannot be a good person.
Thanks for telling me that I can be a good person. I needed the reassurance that I can use a combination of my inborn evolved sympathies and my rational mind to navigate my life with people and come to some version of morality. Are these subjective opinions? I think that's a bit of a stretch. See, we have things called ethical systems which are worked-out "instruction manuals" as Prager calls them that help us figure what good and bad is.
These aren't purely subjective. They are intersubjective meaning that they have arisen by many people over working conjointly to figure out what they believe makes for the good life. In no process ever observed has a transcendental being been involved with this process. Tribes the world over have morality quite similar to our own. They have proscriptions on murder and theft just as we do and we have found the Golden Rule/Categorical Imperative in every corner. The goodness of happy survival exists outside of our own subjective experience as it surrounds us in the experiences of all of our human and many of our non-human peers. Our ability to empathize creates the moral imperative and is therefore something that is outside of our own limited me and you and is in the wider pool of humanity and organisms. We look to others all the time to learn what is right and wrong and see how their behavior affects those around them. That is not subjective. It is intersubjective - it is shared conjoint behavior and communication.
It's not hard to see that it comes about quite naturally. There is no deus ex machina there. People work together to make their lives the best that they can and keep out those who would disrupt the best life.
And even if this were all just as simple as, "It's just subjective opinion," that wouldn't change the fact that just because God or gods say something is right or wrong that it necessarily right or wrong. It also wouldn't change the fact, from Prager's own line of (non-)reasoning that God's opinion is just another subjective opinion. Prager just wants to believe that it's the right opinion without proffering any evidence for it, thereby making it a circular argument. He's like the Midgard serpent or Uroburos
(pictured right) eating his own tail. People or gods would have to appeal to the same reasons that you and I do to make moral decisions and argue those points. If they weren't to do that and just declared that they were right it would be a fiat that holds no water. You need a set of criteria by which to evaluate a claim. To argue for the rightness of a claim that God makes, you have to compare it to those criteria. Happiness is one such criteria or the absence of suffering. If that is the goal of morality, then we can look at it. Then it's not just some opinion but something to be discussed and reasoned about.2. Without God, there is no objective meaning to life. We are all merely random creations of natural selection whose existence has no more intrinsic purpose or meaning than that of a pebble equally randomly produced.
This is true in some sense. Human beings are subjective creatures inherently gifted with their own consciousnesses living out their experiences as they see them and incapable of getting very far out of their own consciousnesses except by empathy and imagination which are actually functions of their brains and therefore aspects of their own subjective consciousnesses. [That was an eyeful. You might want to read it again.] Facing the absurdity of life and the existential crisis - that life seems to lack any intrinsic meaning beyond what we give to it - requires growing up in the face of the awesomeness of the sum of all that has been created and our imaginations' abilities to conceive of even more universes that might be, have been, will be, could be, or never can be. Our ability to conceive of that which is greater than us terrifies us into understanding our own insignificance in the vastness of space/time. Insignificance to all of space and time does not mean insignificance to us as social beings who love and feel beauty and kindness every day and have hopes and dreams. It is a problem of scale and a problem of comparison. Just because my love for my child is inconsequential to the Crab nebula or to all of the biomass in Africa doesn't mean anything. Who cares? What matters is the shared experience of my life with those beings I can share my life with.
But once again, even if there is some purpose given to us by God or gods, that would be just another subjective purpose. Why should that purpose necessarily be superior to any other?
3. Life is ultimately a tragic fare if there is no God. We live, we suffer, we die — some horrifically, many prematurely — and there is only oblivion afterward.They did have different fates. Mother Theresa lived and died the way that she did - administering shelter to poor and sick people in Calcutta (I'm avoiding all of the controversy about her) - and Hitler lived and died the way that he did - he was a fantastically successful genocidal despot who died miserably with his mistress, paranoid about those around him, and hated for all of history by sane people. But just because we wish for justice and it doesn't happen during our time on the third rock from the sun does it mean that there will be justice after we stop experiencing life here. It simply does not follow that it must happen because we want it to and that many of us have bought into the delusion that it must. Pony up with some evidence that people's souls (whatever those are) actually survive death and then maybe we can have a discussion about the morality of torturing or exalting people for all eternity.
5. If there is no God, the kindest and most innocent victims of torture and murder have no better a fate after death than do the most cruel torturers and mass murderers. Only if there is a good God do Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler have different fates.
The following is my favorite:
10. Without God, there is little to inspire people to create inspiring art.Hah! Norman Mailer didn't write any novels then? Nor Kurt Vonnegut? John Irving? What about all of that science fiction? Verdi, Brahms, Mozart, Haydn, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Lutoslawski, Schnittke, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Wagner, and many many other composers never wrote anything that had nothing to do with God? None of Shakespeare lacks any theistic overtures?
Note that DaVinci made the Petruvian man. Petrarch (after whom the Petruvian man is named) coined the phrase, "Man is the measure of all things." Hmmm. Little to inspire art?
I'd also like to add that I'm a composer and I have no religious works. You can go to my Myspace page and listen to them. They may not be masterpieces but they aren't flukes either.
12. Without God, humanist hubris is almost inevitable.
As opposed to all of that religious humility supposedly kept in check by God.
13. Without God, there are no inalienable human rights. Evolution confers no rights.So would Prager just go kill people willy-nilly if he were to discover that God was surely a figment of the collective imagination? If so, he needs help. This is something people unconvinced of the reality of their position tell themselves to make themselves believe it and stay good. There are lots of good reasons to be good to people, to agree that we have inalienable rights to be conferred to one another, and that not all is permitted. Prager should note that our progress toward inalienable rights correlates mighty squarely with the rise of the secular Enlightenment and the decline of religion. He should note that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were cultural heirs to the disastrous 30-years war in which religious fervor led to millions of deaths.No one ever became a fundamentalist because they were too reasonable. Prager's litany of complaints against secularism should be seen as shouts into the wind. He parades out a bunch of nonsense draped in a fuzzy blanket of righteous indignation.
14. "Without God," Dostoevsky famously wrote, "all is permitted.
If you want to get a further sense of Prager's inability to cope with clear atheist thinking you can read his debate with Sam Harris here (the picture at right [thanks samharris.org] basically sums it up). It is an absolute slaughter as Prager
set himself up repeatedly for humiliation. Hitchens also scored a number on him here. Both of these interactions - Harris and Hitchens both - are so dismal on Prager's part that the only thing that I can see Prager holding onto is that in the world of conservative talk radio, he's a pretty nice guy. That might be an argument from ignorance. Just give me the evidence that the guy is anything but a jingoistic bandwagon thumper capable of only the most surface analyses. It's kind of pathetic.
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