I was brought up as an atheist by my parents but I attended a Christian primary
school. I remember my father catching me at a very early age praying. "What are
you doing?" he asked. "Praying to Jesus to help me at School" I replied.
"Study", he said, "it will do much more good!"
In fact my father had been a devout Christian in his youth, and had at one time
even considered the priesthood as a career. Later he abandoned Christianity, as
so many intellectuals do, because of the problem of evil.
Indeed, the presence of evil, pain and suffering in our world is the most
persistent argument raised against theism. The argument runs as follows:
1. If God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil
2. If He is all powerful, He must be able to abolish evil
3. But evil exists. Therefore, an all powerful, loving God does not exist
The conventional Christian response is:
1. God created a world of free will
2. Although God therefore made evil possible, man makes evil actual
3. Eventually God will defeat evil
Nevertheless, although these points about free will and the future have some
value, these arguments fail to explain why a loving parent would create (or
allow into existence) a Darwinian world, which, in its very essence, is about
selfishness, competition and the survival of fittest rather than the most
loving. Arguing that evil is the result of man’s free will alone is just not
enough, a Darwinian world of flesh eating animals, disease, disability,
earthquakes, inequality and heartless competition demands a better explanation.
As Schopenhauer puts it: "A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs
pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare
the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal
being eaten."
This horrifying picture is not a consequence of human free will, rather biology,
organisms have to kill and eat each other to survive, pain and competition are
the very foundation stones of our world - undermining the 'man makes
evil actual' argument. In
fact even the opening statement of the Christian response - 'God created a world
of free will' - also clearly fails. Does the
African child born to starve really have free will in any meaningful sense? Even
the lambs we breed for slaughter have more freedom than these unfortunates. Yet
how much free will do any of us have? Choose not to breathe and see how long
your freedom lasts.
Christianity also says: (1) God is love. (2) God loves each of us as if there
were only one of us. (3) Every individual is special and sacred in his own way.
Yet these sentiments are clearly completely incompatible with the cold hard
realities of human life. God, if he exists, is clearly not attached to individual human life.
If God exists, he has delibrately brought about an outrageously cruel world in which
human life is deeply expendable and inequitable. Does God care when hundreds of thousands die in
a Tsunami, or tens of millions die in a War, or hundreds of millions die of AIDS?
Obviously not.
(Note, there is another problem with Christianity which is even more obviously
fatal, which I will describe here only very briefly because it is incidental to
the article. The model of a single lifetime on earth determining a future
eternity in Heaven/Hell is absurd because it it ascribes infinite significance
to a comparatively infinitely insignificant event (Catholic purgatory does not
completely fill the hole). The 'significance of finitude' is another critical
flaw in Christian cosmology, along with 'the problem of evil' and 'the
assumption of free will'.
Does that mean that every intellectual must therefore be an atheist? No, it
simply means that every intellectual must reject Christianity's description of God.
So what alternative theories of God exist?
During The Age Of Enlightenment the
philosopher Spinoza described an impersonal God resembling a logical scientific principle rather than
a moral principle.
Spinoza also rejected the notion of free will as largely illusionary. Albert
Einstein said: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful
harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the
doings of mankind." Today we describe Spinoza's ideas as an example of
"Deism" - the philosophical belief that a supreme being created the universe and
religious truth can determined using reason and observation of the natural world
without the need for faith or organized religion. Deism became the religion of
choice for Age Of Enlightenment philosophers in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Spinoza was certainly not the first philosopher to conceive of a non-loving God.
In fact the idea of both a loving God, and of human free will, do not really
exist in Judaism. These two ideas, which have become an integral component of
modern Western religion and morality, were largely introduced by the Christians.
Consider the Ancient Greek poet Homer's cosmology. Homer’s Gods remind us of Nietzschean Übermensch; their divinity
revolved around their power, their self confidence, their psychological
intensity - in stark contrast to their human subjects, who lived
in a state of
blandness, blindness and slavery. For Homer free will is something that Gods
have, and human do not have.
Today Homer’s cosmology strikes us as both primitive and absurd. Nevertheless,
one can see that his system is at least untroubled by the problem of evil. In
fact his model fits the horrors of our Darwinian world perfectly, because his divinity
revolves around power rather than love.
Pythagoras was a critic of Homer’s cosmology. Although his precise beliefs are
shrouded in mystery, we do know that he associated reason with divinity and
therefore rejected Homer’s colourful picture of Gods sometimes exhibiting
irrational human personality traits. Pythagoras was also an ascetic, he rejected
Homer’s frequently violent and lustful Gods, he associated self discipline and
intellectual idealism with divinity. Pythagoras also conceived divinity as an
ideal unitary consciousness, something infinitely greater than individualised
human personality, so he moved from multiple psychological human looking Gods to
a single ideal dehumanised God principle. His divine principle was rational,
even mathematical, and stood in contrast to the
irrationality of mortal men.
This Pythagorean vision of divinity I have described remains untroubled by the problem of evil
because his God is not loving and human life is not sacred. Although this vision is far more advanced and that Homer's, something
still feels as if it is missing.
Teleology is the philosophical study of purpose and/or design in nature.
Sophisticated descriptions of divinity invariably involve a reason why, a sense
of direction. Early
Christianity didn't include teleology, one simply lived, suffered and went to
heaven. There was no proper rational explanation of why the world was
constructed as it is and where it is heading.
Hegel is the philosopher who famously attempted to integrate teleology into
Christianity in a rational way. Hegel believed that human beings can escape from the painful
immediacy of human life by the raising up of their consciousness in religion,
and that human history is the story of evolving religious consciousness,
consequently releasing mankind from suffering.
Plato not only built on the rational Pythagorean cosmology, he
added teleological positivism by spades. Hegel said "Anthropology has for its subject matter the soul in its
uncultivated natural condition". Plato's equivalent runs: Anthropology has for its subject
matter the soul in its unthinking natural condition. Primitive human soul, like that
of an animal, acts by instinct without intelligence. The blood soaked earth
then becomes the mother of all perfection. In their struggle for survival and
mastery, humans develop intelligence. For Hegel the endpoint is the spiritual
escape from nature, for Plato, the endpoint is the rational
conquest of nature.
For Plato, spiritual growth is the process of opening the mind, of abandoning
tradition and dogma, of learning to pragmatically solve life's challenges. What
separates a good carpenter and a bad carpenter? Skill in carpentry. How does
this skill relate to dogma? Dogma is in essence the precise opposite of skill,
it is an assumption of how carpentry should be done, not the intelligent
calculation of optimal execution. Dogma enslaves mankind in ideology, it's opposites
are intelligence and
creativity. So Plato said that what distinguishes a spiritually evolved man is
his ability to make optimal decisions, coming out of his talent for objective analysis.
Even today
Plato's ideas are radical, indeed very few people have
even heard of the idea that spiritual growth is connected with reason. Every
religions revolves around love and faith is the common, but utterly misguided,
refrain. Despite our technological advances, the world is
still utterly steeped in ideology,
still revels in ideology, still rejects rationality as evil.
The idealization of rationality during the Age Of Enlightenment has all but
vanished, even amongst the worlds premiere philosphers. Even the smartest 20th
Century scientist, Albert Einstein, demonstrated profound irrationality
concerning his own area of specialist expertise. Einstein disliked the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,
not because the scientific arguments were poor, but because he disliked the idea
of God "playing dice with the universe". What Einstein was doing was projecting
an ideological assumption onto nature and refusing to open his mind to
contradictory evidence. Yet Einstein was the smartest man in Physics, and
Heisenberg uncertainty principle was an area he specialised in - imagine how
irrational the masses are! Essentially they are robots, animals, completely
devoid of intelligence, complete steeped in ideology, whose only experience of
creativity is the production of new life by sexual reproduction.
How does one achieve rationality?
Plato
encouraged people to question their assumptions, to expose their sacred beliefs
and values systems to the cold light of reason. Socrates was the Guru who opened
the minds of the blind by questioning
subjects, demonstrating their complete
irrationality, revealing their ideological programming, tearing apart their
moral assumptions.
Christianity teaches the precise
opposite, instead of tearing apart sacred assumptions we should have faith in
them. So although Plato and Socrates believed in God, they rejected all dogma
and all faith, both in religion, in ethics and other areas. How did democratic
Athens take to Socrates' radical advice? By executing him! For those seeped
in ideology Plato is the Anti-Christ.
Under the Platonic model, we can imagine God bringing this terrible world into existence in order to educate
the souls who inhabit it. God created this primitive world of Darwinian
competition as a school. Like the child who can not understand why his parents
would cast him from the loving home into a competitive school, man can not
understand why God has created this world to educate him. Also, like the child
who lives entirely in the moment and has little concept of time, man can not
understand that what he feels is a lifetime is not even a blink of God's eye.
Like the child who does not understand that the bruises he takes will heal, man
does not understand that death is an illusion. A perfect world, like a school
without hardship, can not educate. One day man will learn to conquer Earth
completely, to cure all disease and fashion the planet in any way he pleases.
Man will become all powerful, all wise and all virtuous, man will become God. So
although the world God initially created is the precise antithesis of divinity,
it evolves into divinity.
Plato's rational teleological cosmology
is also untroubled is the problem of evil. Summarizing the differences between the Platonic and Christian
models:
Instead of detached pragmatic intelligence, we have love, traditionalism and
faith. The concept of good & evil reverses: In one case ideology is evil and
pragmatism is good, in the other case the precise opposite is true. Instead of
a loving shepherd who cares for his sheep, God is infinitely detached from
finite humanitarianism and only concerned with evolutionary idealism. Instead of
egalitarian Christian utopia, we have evolutionary struggle, we have worms and
supermen. Instead of being born into free will, we are born into slavery.
Instead of evolving into servitude, we evolve into freedom. Instead of a single
lifetime on Earth, there is reincarnation. Death is meaningless, human life is
not sacred. The black death was not a tragedy, it was just a moment
in man's evolution. Just as St Matthew's Passion is a mixture of harmony and
discord, plague is an integral part of the celestial music.
Christians will object to the apparent heartlessness of the Platonic model I have
described, yet love is not missing if we examine the concept correctly. Picture a
mother and a father caring for a child. The nurturing mother cares about her
child in the here and now, the more challenging father is concerned with the
child's evolution. The mothers worries when the child hurts himself, the father
encourages the child to climb trees and take risks, his motto is "no pain, no
gain". The mother
is happiest with the baby, who needs the greatest care. The father prefers the
older child, who is ready to begin falling down and hurting himself. Take that
masculine principle to
the extreme, to infinity, and we end up with Plato's Divinity. Schopenhauer
was right to describe human life as pure pain, that is the mechanism of growth. To the
feminine
viewpoint
this ultra masculine viewpoint is completely lacking compassion, so it is pure tyranny, pure evil. But from the
masculine
perspective, the feminine viewpoint is completely lacking idealism, so it is
pure materialism, pure evil.
Confucius spoke of a yin/yang duality underlying all philosophy and psychology.
Plato spoke of the Mortal-Immortal duality. The yin/mortal
viewpoint is egalitarian and nurturing, the yang/immortal viewpoint is
competitive and detached. In other words there are two essentially different
ways of seeing God, one is yin, and Christianity is an example; one is yang, and
the Platonic model is an example. The two visions are totally opposites, even
their concepts of good and evil reverse. No wonder the Western masses seeped in
Christianity find the Platonic model shocking, and would rather believe in
nothing at all.
Max Muller picked up on this when he described two religious visions, the Aryan
and the Semitic. One believes in utopian equality, one in struggling inequality.
We have the infamous idea of the Semitic perversion of civilization which runs
as follows: Because the exulted viewpoint of Socrates is far beyond the masses,
the Jewish Religion taught a single lifetime of passive sufferance followed by
eternal utopian bliss in the hereafter (Christianity added nurturing love). As
this perversion spread beyond the lower classes, the truth was completely lost
to Western Society. The rot goes way beyond the technical details of the Western
conception of God, it includes the moral system, the concept of enlightenment,
the purpose of life. Yet Christianity has its uses, not everyone is ready for
the Socratic method. This is why Confucius
taught two completely opposite philosophies (reflection/imitation)
simultaneously.
If you, the reader, have followed me to this point, you will now understand that
there is another conception God, which is the polar opposite of Christianity, which
is not invalidated by the problem of evil, and which is deeply rational.
Atheist readers will ask “So what? By Occam’s razor, feasibility is an insufficient
condition for assumption. Give me a reason to believe in your Platonic vision of God.”
In fact, as you open
your mind, as you tear apart all your assumptions, as you detach from ideology and ego, the existence of God becomes staggeringly obvious.
The arguments I have outlined here become beautiful and captivating, then
obvious, eventually axiomatic. On the path to clarity you will, for example,
see that Darwin’s
Theory of Evolution is a patent absurdity (article).
You will consequently marvel at the fact that the vast majority of so called intellectuals
still believe in Darwin’s theory, and then you will realize how utterly contemptible mankind is,
which will unfortunately leave you feeling terribly lonely.