4
Death and Faith

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

—Genesis 2:15–17

What does this ban on intelligence mean? You can do anything in this magnificent Garden, except become intelligent—the Tree of Knowledge—or immortal—the Tree of Life. What a fate God has in store for men: stupidity and mortality! A God who offers such a gift to his creatures must be perverse. . . . Let us then praise Eve who opted for intelligence at risk of death.

—Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto1

As it did then, the choice proves difficult today. Who is the hero? Genesis sides with God, while Michel Onfray sides with Eve. One inaccuracy, however, stacks the deck against God. It is not true, as Onfray suggests, that immortality was withheld within the garden of Eden. It was only after Eve’s choice that the tree of life became off-limits. If God’s purpose was to fence off both immortality and intelligence, then perhaps a case could be made for its being Christopher Hitchens’s North Korea.2 However, it was immortality inside and “intelligence” outside. Faith with immortality or death with intelligence—such was the trade. In this chapter, let us enter the mind of the atheist as he stares at the fruit, moments before choosing.

Death Is Unfair

In Albert Camus’s The Plague, Father Paneloux points his finger at his congregation: “Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it.”3 The atheist slaps the finger away. In his second sermon, after it has become clear that the plague was indiscriminately killing off even sweet children, a gentler Father Paneloux softens his voice and points up to heaven: “My brothers, the love of God is a hard love. . . . [I]t alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours.”4 The atheist agrees with the gesture but cannot stomach the tone. Whether God deals it angrily to sinners or gently to children, he is the dealer of death, and such a hand is never fair.

So the author of each life concludes each story with unresolved tragedy. Says the atheist, such a malicious author should never have been permitted to write, let alone have his writings adapted into real-life dramas. For Richard Carrier, the unthinkable is a God of disasters:

A tsunami approaches and will soon devastate the lives of millions. A loving person warns them, and tells them how best to protect themselves and their children. And a loving person with godlike powers could simply calm the sea, or grant everyone’s bodies the power to resist serious injury, so the only tragedy they must come together to overcome is temporary pain and the loss of worldly goods. We would have done these things, if we could—and God can. Therefore, either God would have done them, too—or God is worse than us. Far worse. Either way, Christianity is false.5

Sam Harris takes on the God of diseases:

The child born without limbs, the sightless fly, the vanished species—these are nothing less than Mother Nature caught in the act of throwing her clay. No perfect God could maintain such incongruities. It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis. Any person who intentionally loosed such horrors upon the earth would be ground to dust for his crimes.6

Or perhaps the author of this world was not what we would traditionally consider God at all. Bertrand Russell says it is a “line which I often thought was a very plausible one—that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking.”7 Whatever the case, this universe of death cannot be the creation of a God of life.

Thus if God does exist, then in fighting death we find ourselves fighting God. Camus’s hero Dr. Rieux could stand it no longer. After they both witnessed the agony of a child’s death, Dr. Rieux shouts at the answer man Father Paneloux, “Ah! That child, anyhow, was innocent, and you know it as well as I do!” Paneloux was gentle: “I understand. That sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.” The doctor shakes his head. “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”8 The atheist proudly joins Rieux, who “believed himself to be on the right road, in fighting against creation as he found it.”9 In fighting against creation, they must fight against the will of its Creator, but, reasons the atheist, such a bully deserves to be fought against.

Faith Is Unreasonable

So given the choice in the garden of Eden, it seems the atheist will choose against death. But what is the alternative? Trust in God. Be content to allow him alone to know what is inside that fruit. Let go and trust. This is called faith. The problem for the atheist is that faith for him is categorized under vice, not virtue. There are at least four reasons the atheist cannot choose faith.

First, faith is said to encourage ignorance. After all, in the garden of Eden it was either faith or knowledge. Put that way, it is not difficult to guess which the atheist will choose. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, “‘Faith’ means the will to avoid knowing what is true.”10 In reference to the faithful, Richard Dawkins writes, “Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you are.”11 According to Hitchens, faith “is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary.”12 Onfray notes, “God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence, and the critical mind. All the rest follows in a chain reaction.”13 As if it were possible, Harris puts it even more strongly: “Every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable.”14 And the legions of the marching ignorant push back the champions of progress. Hitchens writes, “The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all disputes about philosophy, science, history, and human nature.”15

Second, faith is said to encourage arrogance. After all, people of faith believe they know things no human could possibly know. According to Hitchens,

And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what “he” demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. . . . Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude “belief” from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.16

Intellectually, this arrogance emerges as circular reasoning, as Harris explains: “How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so.”17 Socially, the arrogance proves even less becoming, as Harris again points out: “Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation. Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world.”18

What happens, then, when the ignorance of the faithful mixes with their arrogance? The result is front-page fanaticism. According to Hitchens, “The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how ‘people of faith’ possess moral advantages that others can only envy.”19 Harris echoes, “It is important to specify the dimension in which Muslim ‘extremists’ are actually extreme. They are extreme in their faith.”20 Thus, the third reason the atheist cannot choose faith is that it is said to encourage fanaticism. Even the most patient among us would prefer any neighbor to an ignorant and arrogant one. Yet it seems the combination leads to something a bit more problematic than mere social awkwardness.

It is not our intention to argue with the atheist here. Our overriding aim is to simply allow atheists to argue against their own arguments. But in the interest of reaching a fair definition of faith, we must insert some commentary. No doubt many people of faith are ignorant, arrogant, and fanatical. However, surely these same atheists have brilliant colleagues of faith just down the hall who exhibit none of these unpleasant traits. Faith can be reasonable, humble, and peaceful; it all depends on the nature of its object. Rather than a monstrosity, faith as introduced in Genesis is merely the response of contentment to the purposeful withholding of knowledge by God to build mutual trust. By giving a prohibition, God was saying, I will trust you to trust me. With that, the Parent administers the first test of freedom, something necessary, as all parents know, for the eventual maturity of the child. If God had meant to imprison the human in perpetual childhood, he would never have risked the opportunity in the first place. Faith becomes necessary anytime knowledge is withheld. It becomes actual when the believer contents himself not in knowing but in knowing why he trusts God who knows. In the absence of complete certainty, the believer trusts in God because God is shown to be, whether by reason or revelation or experience, trustworthy. Far from being ignorant and arrogant, such contentment is actually quite reasonable and humble, so long as the object of that faith is trustworthy.

So the trustworthiness of God becomes the question. With faith defined less unpleasantly, is the atheist permitted to consider faith less suspiciously? It seems not, because any God who prescribes faith is held to be automatically untrustworthy. Here we find the fourth reason the atheist cannot choose faith—namely, that he believes it is immoral of God to withhold knowledge. Any God who would purposefully and perpetually withhold knowledge is an unfair, unfit parent whose competence is begging to be challenged. According to Dan Barker, we should have outgrown such pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain parenting methods decades ago: “‘Do this because I said so’ is the kind of thing you say to a small child. A toddler may not be mature enough to follow a line of reasoning, so parents might have to exercise authority to prohibit something dangerous. . . . The child, in later years, should be able to obtain a reasonable explanation from the parent. If not, the parent is a petty tyrant.”21 Russell argues that absolutely no knowledge should be withheld even from children, especially in the case of sexuality:

There is no sound reason, of any sort or kind, for concealing facts when talking to children. . . . All ignorance is regrettable, but ignorance on so important a matter as sex is a serious danger.

When I say that children should be told about sex, I do not mean that they should be told only the bare physiological facts; they should be told whatever they wish to know. There should be no attempt to represent adults as more virtuous than they are, or sex as occurring only in marriage. . . . I am convinced that complete openness on sexual subjects is the best way to prevent children from thinking about them excessively, nastily, or unwholesomely, and also the almost indispensable preliminary to an enlightened sexual morality.22

Again, he writes, “I do not think there can be any defense for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age.”23 After pausing again to rally for sexual freedom, he repeats, “There is no rational ground of any sort or kind for keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter.”24

Such an overbearing curiosity begets an overturned theology. Trading Christianity for atheism, says Onfray, “will require us to set aside obedience and submission in matters of religion and to reactivate an ancient taboo: tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.”25 Again referring to sex, Russell argues, “It is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.”26 In making it impermissible to withhold knowledge, it seems the atheist would make taboo the very making of taboos. Free at last we are—or would be but for the old faithful who hold progress back. Small wonder that atheists go beyond pitying the faithful to actually loathing faith, even calling it, as did Dawkins, “one of the world’s great evils.”27 For, to them, faith restricts not only personal development but societal progress. For the faithful become not only ignorant, arrogant, fanatical victims of faith but also enforcers of despotic inhibitions.

On the Other Hand

Thus it would seem the position of the atheist is a bit dictatorial. If God is being called immoral for permitting death and prescribing faith, is not the atheist demanding immortality and limitless knowledge? However, explains the atheist, such an infinite God should be able to manage such a tall order. If God can, he should. If he is good, he owes it.

On the other hand, without God in the picture, death and faith cease to be nearly as problematic. As for the atheist’s view of death, whereas he was ready to have God “ground to dust for his crimes,”28 in the absence of God, he faces death with a dignified, almost resigned serenity. Perhaps the atheist, like Dr. Rieux, remains devoted to the prevention of deaths, but as to death in general, it is a fact to be accepted. Hitchens notes, “We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way and room.”29 Asked how he braced himself for the inescapability and finality of death, Dawkins responded, “I don’t feel depressed about it. But if somebody does, that’s their problem. Maybe the logic is deeply pessimistic; the universe is bleak, cold, and empty. But so what?”30 The atheist is unafraid. According to Russell, “All fear is bad. I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.”31 Condemned to the inevitable, “It remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow fall, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate.”32 Besides, we have been there before in a sense, as David Hume noted in an interview shortly before his death: “I [James Boswell, interviewer] asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes.”33

Some atheists have gone so far as to claim to prefer only one temporary life. Barker writes, “The scarcity and brevity of life is what enlarges its value. . . . If life is eternal, then life is cheap.”34 Dawkins notes, “As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious.”35 Unwittingly echoing the rationale of the Christian God, Russell hints that death itself, though unpleasant, might actually be merciful. He writes, “Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable.”36 Speaking of the perpetrators of “human sacrifices, persecutions of heretics, witch-hunts, pogroms leading up to wholesale extermination by poison gases,” although as always in the context of blaming God, he writes, “And can we really wish that the men who practiced them should live forever?”37 Whatever the case, in the absence of God, death is no longer the enemy it once was.

What about godless faith? Definition here is crucial. No atheist would admit to having “belief without evidence” in, for instance, science. But this is not the approach of the thinking Christian toward God either. As we recall, faith is not inherently ignorant, arrogant, or fanatical. Biblically, it is merely trust amid the absence of complete certainty. The reasonableness or unreasonableness of faith depends on the trustworthiness of its object. Christians believe that God exists and can be trusted. Atheists believe the postulated God of Christianity to be intrinsically untrustworthy. But are there any other respectable candidates for the atheists’ faith? Indeed there are.

First, many atheists call for faith in humanity. Notice Russell’s use of the words hope and trust:

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.38

Similarly, note the word believe in the Humanist Manifesto 2000: “Although many problems seem intractable, we have good reasons to believe that we can marshal our best talents to solve them, and that by goodwill and dedication a better life is attainable by more and more members of the human community.”39

Second, the atheist calls for faith in science. According to the Humanist Manifesto II, “Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.”40 Similarly, the Humanist Manifesto 2000 beams, “For the first time in human history we possess the means—provided by science and technology—to ameliorate the human condition, advance happiness and freedom, and enhance human life for all people on the planet.”41 Russell is equally enthusiastic: “Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”42 Of course, no one is being accused of having belief despite evidence, neither Christian nor atheist. Both demonstrate faith as trust amid the absence of complete certainty. Yet science provides complete certainty, doesn’t it? Is there really an absence of certainty needing to be filled with trust when it comes to science? There is, especially when atheists dreamily claim that scientific progress will be able to grant “an abundant and meaningful life,” “ameliorate the human condition,” and so on. It takes faith to believe that the ability to understand and manipulate the physical world can effect such elusive wonders.

The final candidate for faith is perhaps the most controversial, and nothing need hang on this premise. The atheist at least places faith in humanity and science, and nothing more needs to be said on the matter. However, we found this final candidate so intriguing, we had to at least mention it as a possibility. At least some atheists came across as not unfavorable toward a monistic, pantheistic deity. Chapman Cohen, onetime president of the National Secular Society in Britain, had this to say:

It was a sound instinct that led the religious world to brand the Pantheism of Spinoza as Atheism. . . . Every intelligible Theism involves a dualism or a pluralism, while every non-theism is as inevitably driven, sooner or later, to a monism. . . . To call the monism advocated a spiritual monism does not alter the fact; it only disguises it from superficial observers and shallow thinkers. Spiritual and material are mere words. . . .

Monism—too much emphasis cannot be placed upon this truth—admits of no breaks, allows for no interference, no guidance, no special providence.43

According to Hitchens, a pantheistic god is far less evil than a theistic one and perhaps even harmless:

Argument continues about whether Spinoza was an atheist: it now seems odd that we should have to argue as to whether pantheism is atheism or not. In its own express terms it is actually theistic, but Spinoza’s definition of a god made manifest throughout the natural world comes very close to defining a religious god out of existence. And if there is a pervasive, preexisting cosmic deity, who is part of what he creates, then there is no space left for a god who intervenes in human affairs, let alone for a god who takes sides in vicious hamlet-wars between different tribes of Jews and Arabs. No text can have been written or inspired by him, for one thing, or can be the special property of one sect or tribe.44

Harris is perhaps the most outspoken of the atheists about the potential marriage of pantheism and atheism or at least the courtship of neuroscience and meditation:

For millennia, contemplatives have known that ordinary people can divest themselves of the feeling that they call “I” and thereby relinquish the sense that they are separate from the rest of the universe. This phenomenon, which has been reported by practitioners in many spiritual traditions, is supported by a wealth of evidence—neuroscientific, philosophical, and introspective. Such experiences are “spiritual” or “mystical,” for want of better words, in that they are relatively rare (unnecessarily so), significant (in that they uncover genuine facts about the world), and personally transformative.45

Clearly many atheists, including Hitchens, have been outspokenly critical of Eastern religious practices. Yet Spinoza-brand pantheism gets a special exemption. Why? It cannot be that it requires no faith—of course this brand of spirituality requires a certain trust due to the absence of complete certainty. An atheist sympathetic to pantheism might respond that what gives it special exemption is that its claims might be more experientially verified, whereas Christian faith, for example, has to lean more heavily on historical and philosophical reasoning. C. S. Lewis proposes his own explanation for its attraction: “The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance.”46 One thing is for sure: it certainly boosts credibility to posthumously enlist intellects like Spinoza and Einstein for the cause of atheism.

Let us summarize. When viewed within the Christian system, death is unspeakably evil, a divine crime worth being “ground to dust” over.47 Likewise, faith within the Christian system is ignorant, arrogant, and fanatical. So neither of the garden of Eden varieties is edible. However, out from underneath God, death is natural and nothing to fret over. It is fine so long as it is dealt by life but inexcusable when decreed by God. Moreover, faith is understandable, even virtuous, when the object is something trustworthy like man and science. Thus, the problem with death and faith lies not in themselves but in their utilization by God. Once again the problem is God.

Like a blocked basketball shot, death upsets our aims. “Foul!” cries the atheist. Like a referee’s controversial call, faith demands trust. “Boo!” cries the atheist. Neither death nor faith as given by God agrees with the atheist. Yet the choice between binding oneself to the Source of life and loosing oneself from the Source of life seems to exhaust the possibilities of a theistic universe. How would the atheist have chosen in the garden of Eden? There is a way to escape a seemingly insurmountable dilemma, and that is with a counterdilemma. We imagine that the atheist will likely refuse both options as proposed by God in favor of a restatement of the dilemma. It will be recalled that, in the garden of Eden, it was Satan that recast the choice in fresh terms. It was never faith versus death, explains Satan, but merely ignorance versus knowledge. “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4b–5). “Well, when you put it that way . . . ,” says the atheist. And ever since, faith, for the unbelieving, has become synonymous with the chains of ignorance. As Barker puts it, “The bible says that the ‘ungodly are like chaff which the wind blows away’ (Ps. 1:4). That’s fine with me. I prefer the winds of freethought to the chains of orthodoxy.”48 Hence the choice becomes obvious, thanks to the new perspective. Christian faith minus God is utter ignorance, while death minus God means a lifetime of freedom. In the passage that follows, Onfray’s words might chill the believer, but then again, for the atheist, God is the enemy. And the enemy of my enemy is . . .

Satan—“the adversary, the accuser”—breathes the wind of freedom across the dirty waters of the primal world where obedience reigns supreme—the reign of maximum servitude. Beyond good and evil, and not simply as an incarnation of the latter, the devil talks libertarian possibilities into being. He restores to men their power over themselves and the world, frees them from supervision and control. We may rightly conclude that these fallen angels attract the hatred of monotheisms. On the other hand, they attract the incandescent love of atheists.49