God, ethics, and humanism - a debate

On Feb. 3, 2009 I will debate god, Nietzsche, science and ethics with Brock University Professor David Goicoechea at the Pelham Public Library. What follows is the text of my opening remarks, which may be abridged for time.

After the debate I will post David's comments, our rebuttals, an overview of the evening and perhaps a video of the debate.

-Grant LaFleche.
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Religious faith often dies a hard death. It fights with a particular zeal to keep its privileged control over one’s life. It can root itself so deep into the fabric of our beings, defining who we are, how we act and, ultimately what our fate is, that to cast it off can feel like chopping off a limb. When faith does die you are, after all, left the enormous question of “well, what now?”

But as Jawharlal Nehur said, “facts are facts and they do not disappear on account of your likes.” In my own case facts, evidence and logic were the ultimate corrosive for faith. In as much I was did not want to let go of the pleasant poetry of Buddhist cosmology, or long before that, of the simple certainty of Biblical morality, there wasn’t any other choice. Facts are facts. Evidence is evidence. And they matter.

But trekking off into the undiscovered country of a faithless existence is not a bad thing. You can start off feeling a bit like you are playing tennis without a net. But once you grit your teeth and grapple with that essential question – what now? – you enter a world brighter, more meaningful, more fascinating and, yes, sometimes more frightening, than anything you have previously experienced. That journey, in the spirit of Nietzsche – our patron philosopher this evening – is a critical step in becoming truly human.

I mention all of this because when David and I talked about getting together for this debate, he suggested it might be worth while to recount, by way of an introduction, what lead me to atheism and secular humanism. So I will spend the next few minutes, hopefully without boring you, providing a readers digest version of my own journey from believer to non-believer, and then get into the meat of tonight’s rather weighty subjects of ethics, morals, science and the existence of god.

My father was, not to put too fine a point on it, a “just in case” Catholic. He is not a religious man by any stretch and I have never once seen him pick up a Bible. But he is the sort of fellow who, to borrow the phrase from atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett, “believes in belief.” So my brother and I were baptized as Catholics, the faith of my father’s father, in what I often imagine was my father’s metaphysical insurance policy. Should it turn out, when we die, the Catholics were right, we’d be “covered” as it were.

Nevertheless, I was not raised in a particularly religious home. It really wasn’t a subject that came up that often, and from my mother’s point of view, it was really up to us. If we wanted to go to church she’d take us. If not, we didn’t have to go. Needless to say, I spent most Sunday’s eating cereal and watching cartoons.

Catholic school was a different matter entirely. Along with the regular academic course load, there were mandatory meetings with a priest for confession, regular church services and religion class – which really wasn’t a class about religion, but rather about how Catholicism is right and everyone else’s religion is just a bunch of nonsense – including other Christians! (This is a view expressed by the present pope, who in 2007 declared that non-Catholic churches were “wounded” and because they do not accept the authority of his office, cannot really be called churches at all.) In short, I was well indoctrinated in the Catholic faith.

There were, however, several incidents which slowly, but effectively, drove a stake into the heart of my Catholic faith and by my senior year the Church seemed irrelevant to my life and often rather absurd. The idea accepting the words of a pope, whose election I had no say in, as a guide to how to live my life seemed ridiculous, as did the idea of original sin, the assumption of Mary, or taking sex advice from celibate men who had less experience with it than I did.

Like Abraham Lincoln, I came to see the “unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation” – the reasons for which I’ll discuss as the night progresses – and the inability of the religion to square itself with the mountain of scientific facts we have accumulated since the faith was formed.

But as I said faith dies hard, and like my father, I believed belief. It just seemed proper that you had to believe in SOMETHING. I ended up exploring Buddhism, which expressed a far more enlightened ethic and morality. Where the operating principle Christianity was righteousness, which is doing what god commands, Buddhism was about compassion. As Nietzsche correctly points out in the Anti-Christ, Christianity constantly tries to avoid sin, which is impossible, and so therefore is obsessed with redemption and forgiveness, while Buddhism seeks to end suffering. He regarded both as, ultimately, nihilistic nonsense, but regarding Buddhism as something far closer to what he regarded as the way human beings should live.

In any case, Buddhism, like Christianity, cannot avoid a headlong collision with facts and evidence. Just as Christianity cannot demonstrate the existence of its deity, so Buddhism cannot demonstrate the existence of reincarnation, or the cycle of samsara. And if it is as I have said, that facts matter, then they apply as much to Buddhism as to Christianity. And so it was with some considerable regret that I had to embrace intellectual honesty and let it go.

Atheism, it seems to me, is the rational position to take when one measures the faith claims against evidence.

So without belaboring my own history, I will turn to the point and which David and I agreed this debate would start – which is to say we are starting with the substance of another. Some months ago I moderated a debate, which David attended, between local evangelical preacher Peter Youngren and David Barker of the Freedom from Religion Foundation in the United States. Mr. Barker outlined six points to explain why he does not believe in god, and it is on these six points that our debate this evening will begin.

David, obviously, is unlikely to agree with Mr. Barker, or at least not nearly as much as I do. There are some points of separation between Mr. Barker and myself, and I hope to make these clear, so that this debate is not with Mr. Barker, but rather between David and myself:

1) No evidence for god. The evidence for god of the Bible is no different than the evidence for Thor, or Zeus or leprechauns.

On this point there is no argument between Mr. Barker and myself. There is no scientific evidence for the god of the Bible. There is no evidence for it that would stand up on a court of law. The existence of such a creature depends, completely and wholly, upon one’s religious convictions.
The fact of the matter is that faith is not evidence of anything other than what a religious person believes. And yet we treat religious faith, which is in the final analysis belief without evidence, as a virtue. And this is particularly true of Christianity.

There is a story in the New Testament where, after Jesus has risen from the dead, his followers gather. They tell one of their own, a skeptic named Thomas that Jesus is back. Thomas is incredulous. “I’m not going to believe something so insane unless Jesus stands before me and I can stick my fingers in his wounds.” Of course, this is the Bible, so Jesus does appear and Thomas gets to stick his fingers into Jesus’s wounds. Thomas, with the evidence of the resurrection standing in front of him, becomes a believer.

But the story doesn’t end there. Thomas receives a rebuke from Jesus. “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

The message is simple. Don’t doubt. Don’t question. Don’t investigate. Simply believe. Have faith. Thomas, according to Jesus, shouldn’t have been asking for evidence. He should have just believed the unbelievable.

I don’t see how this sort of credulity is a virtue. I rather think Thomas had it right. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

We protect faith from evidence as a society essentially by saying that it is taboo to question it. This is only in the area of our lives in which we do this. In medicine, law and justice, or even the safety features of your car, you rightly demand to have verifiable evidence. We do not respect quack medical claims and we come down rather hard on car manufacturers whose safety equipment fails. But when it comes to religion, we throw evidence out the window.

2) No coherent definition of god, and what definitions there are tend to be contradictory akin to calling a man a “married-bachelor.”

There lays at the root of the Abrahamic religions an unavoidable paradox. God is often described as being Love. Christians will sometimes call this “agope”, to use the Greek word. And something like the Sermon on the Mount is often considered one of the great statements on ethics. However, this is only part of the story of the god of the Bible. For the theology to hang together, Christians need the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament. Without it, the theology of the sequel text, the New Testament, is rendered inert. Yet it is not too much to say that god in the Old Testament is anything but loving.

He murders often and in great numbers. He orders several ethnic cleansings, including a standing order to wipe out the town of any people who dare suggest to the Hebrews that they follow another god. He orders a father to murder his own son as test of loyalty and even personally commits genocide and ecocide on a global level. Even if taken as metaphor, these are not stories about love, but about an uncontrollable, petty rage that would make even Zeus blush. Were such a god to actually exist, it would not be a creature to bow down to, but to openly oppose on basic notions of justice and human solidarity.

Even in the New Testament we see the contradiction continue. It is only in the New Testament that we are introduced to the utterly immoral concept of hell, where one can be tortured forever for rejecting god’s “love.” Where “salvation” comes in the form of a bloody human sacrifice that any of us would feel duty bound to stop if we had been there. It is made worse because the crucifixion would rob us of personal responsibility, upon which all ethics must be based, in favor of vicarious redemption – it encourages us to dump our wrong deeds upon the head of another. I am hard pressed to find a less moral and less loving doctrine than that.

Indeed, I openly reject the “sacrifice” of Jesus. I would want no part of it, were it to be true, because I reject the notion that someone has to die for my alleged crimes. The very notion of accepting personal responsibility is antithetical to the vicarious atonement offered in Christian theology.

3)No argument for god can be falsified – the ontological, moral, cosmological and teleological arguments are all poor arguments.

Imagine for a moment I told you the entire universe was created and governed by the Cosmic Platypus, and the only way to save our immortal souls was to make making offerings of frog eggs to it. Further, the commandments of the Cosmic Playtpus are laid down in the Texts of the Oracle of the Venomous Mammals. Also the Cosmic Platypus, living in a river outside of time and space, cannot be seen or touched or otherwise detected, but I nevertheless claim the Cosmic Platypus, in his all beaky glory, is as real as the nose on your face.

Now, even though that is a farcical example, the fact is you cannot disprove the existence of the Cosmic Platypus, can you? Really, you cannot anymore than you can disprove Shiva, or Baldur, or Mazda. Show me the evidence they don’t exist. So if I was seriously making the above claim about the Cosmic Platypus, his slappy tail be praised, would it not be reasonable for you to demand evidence?

The arguments for god are the same. At the very best they might point to a deist concept of a distant first cause, and all of them must eventually abandon their own logic to say, in essence, “god did it.” But such a claim cannot be falsified because it does not have any evidence to disprove. Some of these arguments, and we may want to discuss them further tonight, sound impressive. But they must, as all things, give way to facts and evidence.

4) There is no agreement among believers on moral issues.

Again, I agree with Mr. Barker. There is no agreement on moral issues, even among believers of the same faith, quoting from the same book! You can find 10 Catholics and ask them about a moral issue, and you’ll likely get 10 different answers.

What is more worrisome to me, however, when examining issues of ethics and morality is not that believers do not agree with one another – but the harm religious institutions cause by unfounded moral pronouncements.

The Catholic Church has an impressive track record in this regard, and one need only look at the Vatican’s continual and consistent condemnation of the use of condoms to combat the spread of HIV as an example. We know beyond any shadow of a doubt, thanks to science, that condoms have a significant impact in reducing the spread of this virus, yet the church sees fit to ignore this and reject it as a moral issue – which has a significant impact in the developing world where secularism does not have nearly as strong an influence and where the words of a pope carry significant weight. Well, it is a moral issue and the church’s position is plainly wicked because it contributes to suffering and death. No amount of declaring it to be a faith issue, and thus beyond reproach, can change that.

Where the secular humanist will examine the issue from a utilitarian perspective with an aim of reliving suffering, the church is irrationally dogmatic and dismissive of evidence.

The issue for me is not that believers cannot agree on moral issues. That is a common affliction of the human species. The problem arises when human suffering and well being plays second fiddle to dogmatic statements which have no basis in fact.

5)The problem of evil.

This is of course one of the great stumbling blocks of all Christianity, Catholicism included. If god is loving, if god is pure and benign, why is there such a great amount of suffering and evil. This is the question the Greek thinker Epicurus put forward hundreds of years before the supposed birth of Jesus, and it has gone largely unanswered ever since.

Often, suffering is declared to be the result of the hideous doctrine of original sin, in which the entire species is condemned for the supposed transgression of a mythological first man and woman (whose sin it seems to me to have been the acquisition of knowledge, hardly a crime at all. Indeed, the serpent in the story, far from being evil, is really a spiritual relative of Prometheus, bringing fire to mankind to free him from bondage.)

Others will say suffering and evil are mysterious in someway, and a state that brings one closer to god. We saw this in our lifetimes expressed powerfully in the person of Mother Teresa. In popular culture we treat her as a saint beyond criticism for her work with the poor in India. But as Christopher Hitchens so clearly demonstrates, Teresa was not a friend to the poor, but a friend of poverty. She believed that the more one suffered, the closer one is to Jesus. And who suffered more than the poor souls she “tended” to. Her order raised millions, but built no hospital or improved her own hospices, enacted no programs to put an end to the horrid conditions that lead to many to live such wretched lives. Instead, she gave them a place to die – a place where medical science was shunned, hypodermic needles reused by running them under cold water and people died from treatable illnesses. Her theology, rooted in a very Catholic idea of the “mystery” and utility of suffering, required these poor people remains poor, ignorant and sick.

Grappling with evil and suffering and lending aid to our fellow creatures is something that we, believer and non-believer alike, should gladly do. But never should we treat suffering as mysterious, unassailable or worse, as something good.

6) No need for belief in a god. Non Christians give more as a group than Christians.

Here is where I part company, to a degree, with Mr. Barker. He is correct to say that non-Christians “give” more in terms of charity or charitable works than Christians, but this is merely a question of demographics. Most humans on the planet today are not Christians. In a culture like the United States where most people are Christians of one stripe or another, you find believers giving more than non-believers. In countries like Sweden which have very low levels of religious activity, you see more secularists/atheists giving more than believers.

There is little point to tallying up who “gives” more because the statistics simply are not that clear cut. What does matter, however, is that a belief in god is simply unnecessary to do good things. It is not a prerequisite to do good. I was very proud recently to take part in a blood drive with the Niagara Secular Humanist Association. Those of us who took part did not donate our blood because we are ordered to do so by a sky god who holds out the carrot of punishment and reward. It is done because we know people need help and we are in a position to do so.

Indeed, secular humanism walks on the path of a much greater and humane tradition than what is found in the Bible. The Greeks had a basic moral and ethical idea that can be expressed as “Be careful whom you turn from your door.” It is famously the operating ethical system of Homer’s Odyssey. And it says that you help your fellow creatures in need because one day you might be the one who will survive on the charity of strangers. Human solidarity, as expressed in this fashion, gets us a very long way to creating a better society for everyone. It is not perfect. We will stumble. We will fail. But that is almost the point, that we struggle knowing this to be so. And knowing this is the only life we have, that we will cease to exist when we die as we did not exist before we were born, we have this one and only chance to make a difference.

And if god is not necessary to do good, if there are very human reasons to help one another, why bother with the concept of god in the first place?

If there was a god...

Horst Klaus is a founding member of the Niagara Secular Humanists, a group which advocates the importance of secularism and the separation of church and State. Horst's recent essay "If there was a God..." is the first by a guest writer to appear here on the Atheist's Handbook.


If there was a god...
Essay by secular Humanist/Atheist Horst Klaus ....

If there was a god WHY...

Would “He”have created micro organisms such as good and bad bacteria long before multi-cell organism, and long, long before mammals, primates and humans?
Why did he create killer cells such as cancer cells and viruses ? Why would a single sting
from a tsetse fly kill a human being? Why could a sting from a malaria-carrying mosquito
kill a person?

Why create the physically poor human body in his image? Why do other living creatures,
such as other land or sea mammals, birds and fish have either much superior eyesight,
hearing, sense of smell - why do they have either fur, feathers, thick blubber or other
natural protection?

Why would “He” let devout believers die in major accidents in the same way, and along
with atheists and members of other religious groups? No matter if it is a man-made disaster
or a natural one!

Why would “He” let earthquakes happen, often causing the death of thousands of believers
and atheists? Why did “He” create Tsunamis and volcanoes?

Why did “He” choose this planet to create life after the origin of the solar system had
already existed about 10 billion years earlier, and after the “Big Bang”? Four and a half
billion years ago Earth was totally hostile to any life and multi-cell life that only developed
approximately 500 million years ago.

Why did “He” choose this less than perfect, hostile planet , an insignificant speck amongst
possibly trillions of planets? A planet where even now about 70% is covered by oceans plus
more by thick ice and another large portions of the planet is either too cold, under
permafrost or otherwise not suitable to most living organisms? There are at least 200
billion star systems in our own galaxy alone, many with planets. Conservative estimates are
that the universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies.

Why did so many living organisms have to die long before primates appeared, long before
humans? 95% of all early life is extinct, mostly due to impacts from extraterrestrial objects
such as meteorites, asteroids and lately thanks to human influence?

Why would “He” supposedly have “created” the entire universe, the sun and our planet
Earth and Adam and Eve, only to have his only son to be born to a middle eastern virgin?
Why would “He” let so many different religions develop when only one is his own, the
Judaic/Christian/Islamic version? Why would “He” let them fight and kill each other, often
in the name of a god or a scripture of opposing religions?

Why would “He” wait and let scientists discover treatments and cures for a multitude of
often fatal illnesses? Why can these medications and treatments not be found in the bible?
Why let them develop in the first place?

Now one of my biggest beefs:
If a loving God created all life on Earth, why did “He” create so many carnivores born to
kill other creatures or born to be eaten alive. Humans are amongst them.

Why would humans have been chosen to rule over the domain of the animals? After all, we
multiply the same, we are born the same way as other mammals, feed the same way and
often bleed the same way. After death, we decay the same way.
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Why do we have oil reserves under-ground, when according to the scripture “He” created
a flat planet Earth only 6000 to 8000 years ago? It takes oil hundreds of millions of years to
develop.

Why would “He” support one political party, one particular political leader or one football
team, and not the other?

If God “created” everything and all life on Earth, “He” must have created homosexual
genes in humans also, as homosexuality is proven to be genetic. Hundreds of other animals
also engage in “same sex games”.

If God determines life and death, why do devout believers seek medical help at clinics and
hospitals? Is it not God’s will to decide when and how we die?

Another one of my favorites: Why did God give us two lungs, two arms, two leags, two
eyes, two kidneys, and men even have two useless nipples - but “He” gave us only one of the
most important organs, ONLY ONE HEART! Not really intelligent design?

To me and millions of Atheists, Humanists, religious Freethinkers and all those who have
given up accepting ancient religious teachings, look at them at best as unproven legends or
at worst gruesome fairytales !

THERE ARE NO GODS, NO SATAN, NO HEAVEN, NO HELL, NO DEMONS, NO ANGELS, NO VIRGIN MOTHER AND NO RELIGIOUS DOGMA for us!

And our numbers are growing!
WE CHOOSE REASON, SCIENCE, EVOLUTION AND MORALITY WITHOUT RELIGION AND REALITY INSTEAD !

Beyond Mere Atheism - An introduction.

I am reluctant to use the word atheist to describe my own unshakable disbelief, and that's not because I'm ashamed, afraid, or even embarrassed, but simply because it seems so self-evidently true to me that there is no god, and giving that conviction a special title somehow dignifies what it denies. After all, we don't have a special word for people who don't believe in ghosts or witches.
-Jonathan Miller

It goes without saying, I think, that atheism - the intellectual position that one does not accept claims about the nature of life and universe without evidence - is in the midst of something of a revival. Just run the words "Atheist" or "Atheism" through Google news and you'll a host of articles and blogs. These days most are broadsides fired by believers disquieted by a growing number of people who dare not believe. But you'll also find commentary by the Four Horsemen - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, the authors of the books which energized the surge in atheist conviction we see in public.

The most common feature of this so called "New Atheism" is a slashing critique of religion, rooted in a demand for evidence, and those of us inspired by the horsemen have followed their lead. Having dispensed with the supernatural claims of religions, particularly the assumed but unsupported by evidence claim of a god, this critique turns to the moral and ethics of religion - morals and ethics which, more often than not and particularly in the Jewish/Christian/Muslim mode, are found wanting in the extreme.

Believers often rail against this approach. We often ignore their complex and arcane theology, and they see this as a fundamental weakness. If we only understood the 21st century theological views of why god is a loving god, we, the growing legion of new atheists, would understand our arguments are weak. If only we spent more time discussing Aquinas and Augustine, we would see our demand for evidence isn't important.

Nonsense. All the theological gymnastics are fairly useless if evidence,( and by this I mean scientific evidence) the first question, the most important question, cannot be answered. As Cicero put it: the first question in this subject of the nature of the gods is do the gods exist or not? If we conclude, and we do on the basis of evidence, the gods do not exist, then need we worry about god as love, or god as father or god as source of morals? Surely not. What matters is what do those beliefs lead people to do, good or bad.

We need not go upon bended knee and only face the theological questions on the terms believers would have us use. If evidence matters, and we are told we must have regard theological "truths" and statements about the nature of reality, then we can hold those claims up to science, to reason and demand meaningful evidence. And where evidence is lacking, the claim can be (at least provisionally) put aside.

This is what the believer objects to the most. Ironically, they will often (as a scan through google blogs and news will attest) claim that new atheists use a "scientific dogma" and that atheism is a religion.

It is, to be sure, a curious claim. Atheism has no codes. No creeds. No commandments. No pastors, priests or popes. It has no holy texts. No churches, temples or sacred grounds. It has no punishments, real or imagined, for not being an atheist. So where exactly is the "religion" of atheism? I've asked many a believer this question and have yet to hear a reply. I wait still.

And this business about "scientific dogma"? It is an even more through the looking glass argument. What is dogmatic about asking for evidence about claims about the nature of reality? What is dogmatic about requiring evidence to make a conclusion? Surely, there are atheists who do not believe in a god because, well, they just don't. But it is the thrust of the "new" atheism that conclusion is the child of evidence. And it is the evidence that fuels disbelief. To say there is no god simply because you don't believe in one is as empty a statement as a declaration of faith. An examination of evidence is required either way.

And so the screeching apologists attempt to claim that atheism is a religion, making silly references to "secular gods" (again what is a secular god? I've asked this of apologists and never received an answer either.) in an attempt to redefine what atheism is. If they can - as the ill named Discovery Institute and its vapid Intelligent Design movements try to do - define atheism as a religion then they can say "Well see? You have no more evidence than we do! Atheism is just like religion. QED." Unable to face the stark fact that their faith claims exist in a vacuum of evidence, they try this transparent slight of hand to make their case.

Many of us new atheists take some joy in this. And I must confess to enjoying an argument where a theist is left with no recourse but to try and change the definition of science, or ignore logic and evidence when making assertions. But as much as their discomfort might appeal to some our darker impulses, we should temper our glee.

The fact of the matter is that while we argue, some of us with a particular almost evangelical passion, more often than not we are making a case about why religion fails. That is, we are largely anti-theist in our approach. To be sure this is a necessary part of the argument. If one regards religious claims on their own merits, that is to say they are claims about the nature of reality - and claims so powerful we ought to obey the religion that makes them (often with a big OR ELSE attached to it), then we can and should examine said claims through the lens of evidence. If someone says "Gay people should not be allowed to marry because God says so in the Bible," we can see what evidence there is said god exists. If there isn't any, the claim can be dismissed.

However, that only gets us part of the way. Because, like it or not, religion has been a vehicle for morals and ethics for a very long time. This does not mean morality comes from religion. Indeed, one need only point out that what a Christian believed to be moral 300 years ago and what they believe in to moral in 2008 shows the transitory nature of the moral zeitgiest, even among believers who like to imagine their morality is immutable. Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and other moral and ethical systems change with changing times. As Richard Dawkins puts it in the God Delusion:

Slavery, which was taken for granted in the Bible and throughout most of history, was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. All civilized nations now accept what was widely denied up to the 1920s, that a woman's vote, in an election or on a jury, is the equal of a man's. In today's enlightened societies (a category that manifestly does not include, for example, Saudi Arabia), women are no longer regarded as property, as they clearly were in biblical times. Any modern legal system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse.

But if it is indeed true, as I have argued before, that morals and ethics are largely what we say they are at any given point in time and place - our own evolved moral and ethical leanings notwithstanding - and if it is true that religion has been a delivery system of ethics and morals, and if we say that the metaphysical claims of religion are false, then what kind of morality do we want? What kind of ethics do we want? What kind of society do we want?

You see the point. The revived atheism largely lashes out at religion. However, we aren't doing nearly as good a job at talking about the way things ought to be. If we reject, for very good reasons, the morals of the Christian bible, what then do we accept?

The problem, as I noted above, is that atheism is barely a thing at all. It has no rules, or commandments. And I for one certainly do not think some moves to create atheist "churches" are a good idea. Institutionalized atheism is likely to become the very thing we rail against. Nevertheless, I believe we have to stop allowing the theists to frame moral and ethical arguments for us and start to try to discuss where we think the moral zeitgeist should go.

Most of the time we deal with theists, like Dinesh D'Souza, who blather on about "if there is no god then anything is permissible." This is a rhetorical trick that sets up a false zero sum game of either/or with no other possiblities. For example, one can say that not everything is permissible if we as a society say it isn't. Or that moral standards are set by social contract. The point is, the kind of shallow thesis the likes of D'Souza present limits the entire discussion. And for the most part we allow this to be the way the argument is framed rather than define our turf for ourselves.

So if morality and ethics is what we say it is, then I think its high time we moved beyond mere atheism and say!

So that is what I hope to explore on this blog in the next several related posts, (all to be titled "Beyond mere atheism") and during my Youtubery, in the hopes of engaging others in this discussion. Please feel free to join in.

By way of a short introduction, I think the general guiding principle of a post-Christian, non-theistic morality, should be a kind of utilitarianism that has regard for reducing human suffering while increasing human happiness. This could be, ironically enough, part of my past Buddhist training speaking, but I think we should be advocating the ideas of Epicurus and John Stewart Mill and Jeremy Bentham as both atheistic and necessary modes of moral and ethical thinking.

In the first part of this series of essays "Beyond Mere Atheism" I will start to look at these ideas more closely.

Does God Exist: The Debate - Part one of two

"On the subject of the nature of the gods, the first question is ‘Do the gods exist or do they not?’ It is difficult, you may say, to deny that the gods exist. I would agree if we were arguing the matter in a public assembly, but in a private discussion of this kind, it is perfectly easy to do so."
-Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book one

On Wednesday, April 9, I had the pleasure of moderating a debate between one of Canada's best known evangelists and one of America's more prominent atheists. Hosted by the Niagara Secular Humanist Society at the Canadian Auto-Workers Hall in St. Catharines, the event saw Peter Youngren of the Celebration Church and Dan Barker of the Freedom of Religion Foundation square off over the question asked by Cicero all those years ago: Does god exist or not.

Being the moderator, my job was not to debate - in as much as I wanted to - but rather to play the role of referee in a boxing match - make sure the fighters understood the rules, fought according to them, and protected themselves at all times.

It was a lively and sometimes heated debate, but before I present my own views on the night I wanted to say thank you to both Peter and Dan, who were both gracious and made my job as moderator very easy. They are both very likable men, and had the audience of about 300 people.(That might not sound like any great shakes, but for this town it is nothing short of a miracle....if you will excuse the phrase.)

I opened by reading the above passage from Cicero's "On the Nature of the Gods" because when it comes to theology, his question is the first and most important to be answered. Indeed, this is why Cicero includes it early in his book.

The theology of the world's three great monotheism - Christianity, Islam and Judaism - all rest on a single proposition, that God exists. Yes, yes, they each have a different view of what god is, or isn't, but this is the first fundamental assumption each faith makes. Well, they have to, don't they? If there isn't a god then all the theological gobbledygook and fretting about what said god will do to you if you say the wrong thing at the wrong time, or get up to something with your lover the cosmic voyeur doesn't like isn't worth a bother. It all becomes counting angels on the heads of pins, doesn't it?

I chose Cicero because he expressed something else important about the debate to come - that it was a debate about the existence of god. In public. With no threat of retribution for anyone. The reason Cicero said he would only agree that it is difficult to deny that god exists in pubic, but can easily do so in private, is because for most of western history - and indeed still in many parts of the world - this not believing god stuff would get you locked up, killed or tortured. Or all of the above. Or, if this was a communist country, defending a religious belief in public would be rather like saying "well, I have the noose around my neck anyway, so I might as well just kick the horse." It's important to recognize that we enjoy a historical rarity - the freedom to believe, or not, and to debate those views in public without fear.

For those who do not know, Peter Youngren is one of Canada's best known Christian preachers. He's been in his ministry for over 30 years, regularly travels around the world preaching and appears on TV frequently. I've interviewed him several times over the years as a journalist and while I've never agreed with his religious views, I've always found him to be a likable and sincere person. One of the things that did impress me about him was something he did right after the 9-11 attacks. Many Muslims in St. Catharines, like those around the world, felt they were going to blamed for what happened. In fact, there was a botched fire bombing at the local mosque. Peter was, I believe, the first Christian leader in the community to go to the mosque and tell them not to fear, that they were still part of the community and while he and they believed different things about god, they agreed on many things as well. So while I don't subscribe to Peter's beliefs, I certainly respect what he did to help defuse some community tensions during that time.

Dan Barker's story is really a real life reversal of Paul on the road to Damascus. For decades, Dan was just like Peter Youngren. He traveled and preached as an evangelical preacher. He even wrote several popular Christian musicals for kids. But over time Dan's faith crumbled away. He reached a point where, like Charles Templeton (who we will hear more about later), he felt he had to make a choice between "God and truth", and truth won out. He's since become the co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation in the United States - and turned his musical talents to music for non-believers. Like his better known counter parts like Christopher Hitchens, Dan spends a lot of his time traveling debating with people on issues of religion.

What I'm going to do in part one is provide a quick summary of the arguments and then in part two discuss my analysis of those arguments.

The debate kicked off with opening remarks, with Barker going first and asking Peter to present evidence for the existence of god. Not declarations or statements like "Well it's all so complex here must be a god," but actual evidence. Then he asked Youngren to do something I found very interesting: he asked Peter to provide an example of something that would, in his mind, falsify the god hypothesis. The reason is simple. Science spends most of its time trying to disprove its own ideas, looking for the evidence that "disproves" or falsify a hypothesis or theory. In doing so, science is constantly modifying what it knows by tossing out ideas that don't work. And most know what it would take to undermine a scientific theory. I mean, if a fossil rabbit was ever found in the pre-Cambrian, well, that would just about do it for the theory of evolution. Theories, even the most powerful and well-supported, can be toppled by a single bit of evidence. So Barker asked Youngren, to produce that kind of thing for the notion of god.

Barker also suggested that the morals of the bible, and of the character of god in particular isn't anything to write home about. Referring to the old testament god as a "war god" and listed several of Yahweh's more ghastly episodes of blood-letting, he asked a question of the audience: who believed in this desert war god Yahweh. (Youngren piped up at this point to say he believed in Yahweh, but Yahweh was not a war god). The point, Barker said, is that most people are nicer, kinder and more compassionate than the god of the Bible. He then pointed to the fact that most of the gods once believed in are now regarded as myth and that everyone in the audience is an atheist with respect to Zeus, or Odin or Thor. The only difference between them and the atheist, he said, is that the atheist goes "one god further."

Youngren, who said growing up in Sweden he lived in a community that was largely atheist, took a different tact, attacking what is sometimes called "New Atheism". In particular he said the works of Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennet, and especially Richard Dawkins, showed a great deal of "rage." Rather then embracing science, Youngren suggested atheists ignore the evidence for the existence of god - including, he said, why many cultures have developed a notion of god. His suggestion was that human beings have an innate sense of morality and knowledge of god. Finally, he said that many scientists are believers in a god, and they point to evidence to support that belief.

This followed about an hour of back and forth debate (interrupted for about 10 minutes by problems with the CAW hall's sound system). They covered a fairly wide variety of subjects, but the heart of the debate turned on two questions: the evidence for god, and the morality of god as presented in the bible (which was a repeat of the above arguments.)

On the first question, Barker noted there was no evidence to support the claims made by believers - who incidentally cannot even agree on a definition of what god is. He further noted that if such evidence existed, as many believers claim, why has it never been presented in a scientific paper? Why not win the Nobel prize?

Youngren didn't really meet these questions head on. Instead he pointed out the number of scientific titans who professed a belief in god - including Albert Einstein. On this point, Barker gave Youngren credit because the pastor didn't make the error of saying Einstein believed in a personal god. Einstein was a kind of deist, rather than a theist and Youngren made a point of making sure that was clear. However, he did note the reasons why Einstein believed what he did, and said, in essence, if it was good enough for him why not for the rest of us?

The Q & A that followed the hour long back and forth covered much of the ground already discussed by the speakers. There were a few stand outs however. Most of the questions were directed at Barker, and were from believers. Many got up to make declarations of faith (which meant I had to tell them to ask a question or give up the mic) but generally wanted to know why Barker did not believe when, as far as they knew, the bible was completely true. Some claimed to have seen miracles and one even asked if Barker, when he was a preacher, ever saw something he could not explain. Barker's primary response was to say that, in effect, declarations of faith were not evidence that god exists. He said he also understood that people think they see healings in churches like Youngren's all the time. He certainly did he believed. However, he admitted that at the time, he made no effort to critically examine what he saw and assumed, because of his belief, that the healings were real. Today he doubts they were, and suggests that most of the time it was merely a case of mind over matter. He said there may have been things that happened that he cannot explain, but his inability to explain them is not evidence of god.

The questions that were directed at Youngren were largely from his own flock and some gave him an easy time, such as the young lady who asked Youngren to explain a statement he made that he could not read through Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. (Yougren said he found the book angry and spiteful and felt Dawkins simply made no sense whatsoever, so he gave up reading.) But the preacher did face a couple of critical questions. One came from Horst Klaus of the Niagara Secular Humanist society. He asked if god was loving, why create animals that ate others? Why create viruses and bacteria that destroy other creatures from the inside out? Youngren replied that man created the harsh world we live through Adam and Eve's rebellion in Genesis. He also countered that God, even it appears he is doing something violent or bad, he still approached people with love.

The debate was, overall, well-mannered and was very well attended for the first time such an event has been held in St. Catharines. I want to think both Mr. Barker and Mr. Youngren for their time and willingness to debate such an important subject.

This is a very brief sketch of the debate that night, and I will be extending an invitation to both Dan and Peter, along with Mr. Klaus to post their impressions of the debate.


From Left: Dan Barker - Freedom from Religion Foundation, Peter Youngren - Niagara Celebration Church, Grant LaFleche - Gadfly, Horst Klaus- Niagara Secular Humanists.