WHY I AM [OR AM NOT] A...

This is an autobiographical sketch meant to lay out how I arrived at my basic intellectual principles and what I take to be their justification.

WHY I AM A FUNDAMENTALIST

With respect to the Christian scriptures, I am a Fundamentalist in the sense that I think the Bible should be read literally, that it should be taken to mean just what it plainly says--that it should not be read (as it is by so many "modern" Christians) as metaphorical, symbolizing something other than what it says.

When I talk with other Fundamentalists, I understand what they mean. When they say that a great flood covered the entire earth in the days of Noah, that's exactly what they mean. When progressive Catholics say that there was a great flood in the days of Noah (if they say it at all), there's no telling what they mean. When Fundamentalists say that Jesus was born of a virgin, that's easy to understand. When liberal Episcopalians say that Jesus was born of a virgin (if they say it at all), there's no telling what they mean.

For a "Christian" who is not a Fundamentalist in my sense, there's not a single doctrine that can be counted on to be straightforwardly true. Of course it may be taken to be "true" in some sense, but not necessarily in the plain, ordinary sense. Any specific doctrine may be regarded as true in the literal sense; but it may not.

I'm not making this up. A very influential Christian theologian understands the accounts of Jesus' miracles in some such way as this: "Jesus' followers were very impressed by what a remarkable person he was, and what a life-changing influence He'd had on their lives. Unsatisfied with simply saying this, they fabricated the tales of His changing water into wine, walking on water, healing the sick, and raising the dead."

Who's to say what any particular Christian really believes? Answer: that Christian is the one who's to say. "I'll pick the doctrines that are easy [fun, interesting, possible, ...] to believe, and call the rest of them metaphors, or myths, or symbols, or anachronisms, or whatever." But that's worse than conventional Protestantism--each denomination for itself! It's chaos--all individuals for themselves! The only stance that can avoid doctrinal chaos--and its immediate consequence: the meaninglessness of the word "Christianity"--is the Fundamentalism that I share with many believers. Let us all resolve not only to mean what we say, but to take scripture to mean what it says.

Perhaps incidentally (but perhaps not), I'm no Johnny-come-lately to Fundamentalism. Around the age of eight or ten I started going to Sunday School at the Protestant church closest to my home. It happened to be Lutheran, but that was largely accidental. It was the shortest walk from home. My parents, vaguely Protestant themselves, were largely indifferent though not hostile to religious belief (though my father was appalled when at 16 or so I announced my intention to become a minister). They never pressured me to go to Sunday School or church, or, later, to Confirmation Class. This was something that I enjoyed, and pursued on my own.

But the single most important part of my religious training came from the youth group in the church. Although there was a national Luther League for youngsters, our church was affiliated not with it but with Christian Endeavor, a much more conservative interdenominational group, whose summer camps were real camp meetings--a whole week of Bible reading, private devotions, instruction, prayer, soul-saving, and public testimonials. This is no doubt where my Fundamentalism was born and encouraged.

[A NOTE ON FUNDAMENTALISM]

One of the strong motives for being a Fundamentalist is the belief that God does not intend to obscure His truth as revealed in the Bible, but rather means it to be readily intelligible. This view, however, is strained by one of Jesus' remarks. The account appears in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), where his disciples ask: "Why do you speak to them in parables?" The answer seems obvious to the Christian minister: Jesus spoke in parables so that the simple, often illiterate multitudes whom He addressed could understand the points that He wanted to make. He used homely, familiar, rustic images to carry the good news of the Kingdom to the masses. He spoke in parables so that His messages would get across to as many people as possible.

But that's not what Jesus said. He said: "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them." (Mark 4:11-12) The Son of God tells us that He speaks in parables in order to obscure His message, so that the masses, the "outsiders", will not understand it, for fear that if they understood it they might change their ways and be forgiven. That is why Jesus spoke in parables...or so He said.

Of course that doesn't mean what I initially feared: that the Bible is not to be read straightforwardly. It only means that Jesus' parables can't be read in the most straightforward way, since He delivered them in order to confuse and mislead people. But nobody ever thought that the parables were meant to be understood as literally true.

WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN

Although throughout high school I claimed to be a Bible-believing Christian, I never thought much about what I was committing myself to. It was only when I got to college that I took up the challenge to examine the nature and grounds of my beliefs. A bit of reflection revealed that much of Christian doctrine was preposterous. Let me document this in just a couple of cases.

It is Jesus' plain teaching, documented repeatedly in the gospels, that God gives believers everything they ask for in Jesus' name. [Matt. 18:19, 21:22; Mark 11:24; John 14:13-14, 15:7, 15:16, 16:23] Nothing could be more plainly false. Of course Jesus might not have said anything like what is attributed to Him; or, if He did, He might not have meant it. But, as I explained, I'm a Fundamentalist.

Both the gospels and epistles plainly teach that the sick will be cured by the ministrations of believers. [Mark 16:17-18; James 5:14-15] Nothing could be more clearly false. Again, you may not think that scripture here means what it plainly says. But I'm a Fundamentalist.

Of course I could be a Christian--a modern, progressive Christian--if I felt free to interpret the texts and traditions of Christianity in any way I chose. Then I could take: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned" to mean: "The presence of chlorophyll is a necessary condition for photosynthesis." There's a Christianity that I could subscribe to!

WHY I AM NOT AN AGNOSTIC

An agnostic, for the present purposes, is one who neither believes nor denies that there is a God. To say that someone is not an agnostic is not to say that that person knows whether or not there is a God. To say that one is not an agnostic is just to say that that person has a positive or negative belief--normally, a fairly strong belief--on the matter. So two sorts of people don't qualify as agnostics: theists ("believers"), and atheists ("disbelievers").

But, roughly, someone might qualify as an agnostic in one of two different ways. (1) Some people might have no belief with respect to the existence of God because they have not thought about the matter. I consider the existence or non-existence of God as an important matter; so I think of this first form of non-belief as lazy agnosticism. Anyone who can't or won't--or, for whatever reason, simply doesn't--think about God would qualify as a lazy agnostic.

(2) A responsible agnostic, on the other hand, is one who has thought seriously about the matter, has considered the arguments for and against the existence of God, and finds about equally good reasons to believe and to disbelieve. (So far as I know, I've never met an agnostic of this sort. But there could be such a person.)

I've thought carefully about many different arguments for the existence of God, and many variants of each. None has any merit. I'm not going to analyze each and every one of them. That's not necessary, since there's a short-cut. If God is to be an adequate object of characteristically religious devotion, of absolutely unqualified commitment, (a) He has got to be something that exists of necessity--not merely contingently, the way people and rocks and chairs and galaxies exist--and (b) the reasons for believing that He exists must guarantee His existence, and not merely make it very likely that He exists.

Those two considerations immediately disqualify almost all the traditional arguments--the "Cosmological Arguments" and the "Teleological Arguments" and the "Moral Arguments" and all the other arguments that appeal to matters of observable fact as evidence for the existence of God. No appeal to observable facts can guarantee the existence of a necessary being.

Only some sort of "Ontological Argument" for the existence of God- deducing His existence, of logical necessity, from some unavoidable concept of deity--could do the job. [See my article entitled "Anselm's Arguments for the Existence of God" for an example.] I don't think that an Ontological Argument can be as easily refuted as most commentators do. I think that there is a deductively valid inference to the conclusion "God exists" from unassailable premisses. But that argument does not establish the existence of God...nor, in the last analysis, do I think that any Ontological Argument can do so.

That leaves us with no good reason for believing that there is a God. One might want to survey the field to see whether there are any good reasons for denying the existence of God. I do think that there are such reasons. But the absence of good reasons for believing in God is a sufficiently good reason for denying that there is a God.

WHY I AM (THEREFORE) AN ATHEIST

It has sometimes been said that the proponent of any claim bears the burden of support. That surely isn't quite right. What is right is that the proponent of an outrageous claim that is incompatible with many of our well attested beliefs bears the burden of support, in the absence of which, rejection or disbelief is the appropriate stance--this because (by definition) the claim is opposed by a great weight of counter-evidence, and hence is appropriately rejected as false without any further investigation.

Although I can't document it, I somewhere picked up a relevant (and quite possibly false) story about Freud. Believers in the occult would often write to him in the hope that he would endorse their preposterous claims. After ignoring these for some time, he finally decided to write on the general matter. Among other things (so the story goes), he wrote something to this effect: "If people tell me that deep below the surface of the earth there are large pools of soda water, I might at least hear them out, to determine what evidence there might be for this remarkable claim. After all, dilute carbonic acid might be a product of natural processes. But if someone tells me that deep below the surface of the earth there are large pools of strawberry jam, I will reject the claim out of hand, with not the slightest temptation to hear anything that might be offered as evidence. The claim violates so many well established principle of nature that it is patently false, and investigation would be an obvious waste of time."

In our story, Freud is following something like the principle I enunciated above: the proponent of an outrageous claim that is incompatible with many of our well-attested beliefs bears the burden of support, in the absence of which, rejection, disbelief, is the appropriate stance (not the agnostic's suspension of belief)--this because by definition the claim is opposed by a great weight of counter-evidence, and hence is appropriately rejected as false without any further investigation.

The belief that, in addition to all the objects of the natural world and their properties, relations and activities, there is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, benevolent, invisible spirit of whose necessary existence I can be certain, is strawberry jam. There is not a shred of credible evidence supporting such a belief, and lots opposing it; so the intellectually responsible thing to do is to reject it. That is why I am an atheist.

[A NOTE ON FAITH]

The definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1 is as good as any for our purposes: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Struggling to understand this as straightforwardly as possible, I take it to mean that faith makes things real that are not real but that we wish were real; it is the "evidence" of things for which there is no evidence--at least no evidence in any conventional sense.

I suppose that faith is supposed to be a strong inner conviction of the truth or reality of something supported by nothing but that strong inner conviction. Therefore, to say that I believe something on faith is to say that I have no good reason to believe it. The belief may make me feel good. But in the absence of any other evidence, the object of faith is just as likely to be false as true. In fact, it is more likely to be false than true, since if it were true it could be expected to be supported by real evidence. (For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see my "Skepticism and the Justification of Belief".)

FROM CHRISTIAN TO ATHEIST TO LOGICIAN

The text above briefly recounts my journey from born-again Bible believing Christian to atheist. I used to think that my journey to professional philosopher and logician amounted to a 180-degree reversal from my childhood thinking. I've subsequently come to think that this is not so...that the seeds of my life as a philosopher and logician were part my early religious belief.

It was neither in school nor on the street with my buddies nor at home that I was exposed to BIG IDEAS. It was in church: in Sunday school and sermons and summer camp. I now think that as a child I was attracted to speculation about the beginning and end of the universe, about the history of religious and hence philosophical thought, about human origins and destiny, and about the meaning of life, and that I found in the religious context what satisfaction was to be had at my age. It was only when I was exposed to critical thinking in college that I realized that these were philosophical questions to which philosophers for 2500 years had been offering carefully reasoned responses. That was the real thing, and not intellectual fakery.

The second conspicuous feature of religious ideas was that, on the religious account, you could be sure that they were true. That kind of certainty in the midst of a constantly changing world of objects and thoughts was very appealing to me. Eternal verities! What a comfort to know that there were certain important (religious) matters of which one could be absolutely certain. Of course, as I pointed out above, 'tain't so. But I discovered in my studies of the formal side of philosophy that there are some truths of which we can be absolutely certain--the truths of logic and mathematics. I think that my attraction to the study of them was, at least in part, my way of trying to fill what Sartre called the "God-shaped hole" in my consciousness.


Copyright © 2003, William A. Wisdom