One of Us

> This myth irritates atheists, because it tries to make a virtue out of preying on people’s weaknesses in order to sell them a lie.

I don’t think that’s it at all. It’s not irritating because of any implied moral failing on the part of proselytizers, but because it assumes that atheists have no convictions. The atheist, in the worldview that underlies the “no atheists in foxholes” stereotype, really does believe in God, but wants to deny His existence so that we can live guilt-free hedonistic lifestyles. Because the atheist is only pretending not to believe in God he will run back to the religion of his culture as soon as he’s faced with adversity.

“The Agudah Convention” by Journeys is this stereotype put to music for the frum world. I wrote a parody a couple of years ago that turned the stereotype around: http://2nd-son.blogspot.com/2009/12/agudah-convention-parody.html

I think it’s sad that when people realize that there is no super-natural God with beard in heaven manipulating events on Earth, that right away assume they must be an atheist. There can be countless way of seeing and understanding God; love, awe, wonder, joy. For me, God is the realization that this phenomenal mishmash we call the universe has more things going right than wrong in it. Maybe I’m just a naive romantic clinging to imaginary leprechauns in the proverbial foxhole of life, but what’s beautiful and right with life cannot be an accident of fate.

Mitchell — You say:

“…it’s sad that when people realize that there is no super-natural God with beard in heaven manipulating events on Earth, that right away assume they must be an atheist.” (Emphasis mine.)

How do you know they do so right away? Don’t you think it’s possible they considered other understandings of God and rejected those too?

Good point Shulem! I guess my faith can make me unwittingly presumptuous at times.
Shabbat Shalom.

Hi FreiFem,

More cogently, the postulate is wrong. Don’t many atheists in foxholes remain atheists?

The comparison to salespeople preying on peoples weaknesses is questionable. People who buy into something because they are desperate have buyers’ remorse after the crisis is over. Once the motivation to buy leaves, they evaluate their choice and decide if it was smart. People who become religious in foxholes often stay religious after the foxhole experience. This is analogous to an absentee parent who closely misses losing a child. The experience allows him or her to consider the child’s value, which might motivate the parent to make a lifestyle change. Paradigm and behavior shifts resulting from distress or fear are not necessarily misguided.

I read the rest of the article and I wonder if you could clarify something for me. In item 5, “The logical position toward an extraordinary, supernatural claim is skepticism until proof is offered, and so far none of the thousands of gods that have been claimed to exist throughout history have lifted a finger to prove themselves.” Billions of people claim gods did give evidence for themselves. The claims and the evidence need evaluation, but the author would need to show how she knows they are valueless before dismissing them. To state definitively there is no evidence for any God sounds to me like dogma, not logic.

I think billions of people for thousands of years is enough to make it logical to consider the existence of God possible and even likely. You might find ways to discount those beliefs, and you may have reasons to be skeptical. However, shouldn’t the starting point be either to discredit the beliefs of others or find evidence for your own position?

Dovid

> More cogently, the postulate is wrong. Don’t many atheists in foxholes remain atheists?

There’s an atheist group of US military personnel who call themselves “Atheists in Foxholes.” http://www.militaryatheists.org/expaif.html

Hi G*3,

Thanks for the link. Did you notice that of the 200 names, close to 10% of them are Jewish sounding? I counted about 18 that sound Jewish. This is remarkable because I believe Jews are underrepresented in the military. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/02/paying-their-share-jewish-american-military-losses-in-the-war-on-terror/, http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/16640/attention-where-are-the-jews-in-the-u-s-military/

Still, 200 professed atheists out of 1.5 million military personnel http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/MILITARY/history/hst1009.pdf is a far smaller ratio than the 1.6% percent of the general population claiming atheism. http://religions.pewforum.org/reports Perhaps we can reformulate the principle, “There are fewer atheists in foxholes”.

Dovid

FreiFem, I was thinking there are other reasons the default position is not skepticism. For one, “[T]he National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has done extensive polling on people who have spiritual experiences — not just believe in God, but a spiritual experience. It turns out that 51 percent of people have had a spiritual experience that absolutely transformed their lives.” http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1259/can-science-and-faith-be-reconciled

Also, First Cause is a thorny problem. There are answers, such as the multi-verse theory, an oscillating universe, and this entertaining presentation of quantum fluctuations by Lawrence Krauss. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo These aren’t widely accepted and are not proven. Krauss’s excitement at finding an answer to “something from nothing” indicates atheists need to address the problem.

I don’t understand why atheism is the postulate, why we assume there is nothing beyond the physical world, before we address these points.

Dovid

One last point. Ms. Marcotte’s sixth item: “Atheist are routinely asked how people will know not to rape and murder without religion telling them not to do it, especially a religion that backs up the orders with threats of hell. Believers, listen to me carefully when I say this: When you use this argument, you terrify atheists. We hear you saying that the only thing standing between you and Ted Bundy is a flimsy belief in a supernatural being made up by pre-literate people trying to figure out where the rain came from. This is not very reassuring if you’re trying to argue from a position of moral superiority.

If anything, atheism correlates to better behavior on average. Atheists are under-represented in prison, for instance, and more religious nations have higher rates of violent crime, teen pregnancy, early adult mortality and even abortion.”

That is an important point for religious people to consider. I imagine many atheists rely on conscience to decide right from wrong and therefore have well-developed consciences. Atheism challenges religious people to transcend lower-level motivations to do good and avoid from evil. It comes to purify religion.

“Atheism (heresy) comes as a cry from the depths of pain to redeem man from narrow and alien straights—to raise him up from the darkness of the letters and aphorisms to the light of ideas and feelings until faith finds a place to stand in the center of morality. Atheism has the right of temporary existence because it is needed to digest the filth adhered to faith for the lack of intellect and service.” ([Rav Kook in] Orot 126) (from http://www.clal.org/ss21.html)

> Still, 200 professed atheists out of 1.5 million military personnel

That’s an artifact of the US military 1. Drawing a majority of its recruits from the Bible Belt and the deep south, and 2. Being heavily, if unofficially, in favor of evangelical Christianity. There are many stories of recruits and cadets being pressured to attend services, or being punished for not attending by, say, having to clean the barracks or run laps as the alternative. In such a culture, it takes a lot of guts to put your name on a list as an atheist.

> Also, First Cause is a thorny problem.

Yes, but saying “God did it” doesn’t solve anything. It just moves it back a step, from “where did the (complex) universe come from?” to “where did (the infinitely complex) God come from?”

Yes, G*3, I thought about the Bible Belt after I wrote that. I was not aware of the evangelical Christian bent. Interesting. Maybe that’s because army life makes one more inclined to be religious. That brings us back to the atheists in foxholes, so it sounds like a catch-22.

I only ask, “where did it come from”, about entities that have the quality of being potentially nonexistent. Whatever God is, must be something that does not have that potential. If whatever I thought was God had a potential for nonexistence I would ask the same question about it, and I would know that was not God. I don’t think about God in terms of who he is, but in terms of who He is not. Dimu oscha, velo kifee yeshcha.

That’s why God needs to be infinitely NOT complex. Rambam in Yesodei Hatorah 1:

ה. אלוה זה אחד הוא–אינו לא שניים ולא יתר על שניים, אלא אחד, שאין כייחודו אחד מן האחדים הנמצאים בעולם: לא אחד כמין שהוא כולל אחדים הרבה, ולא אחד כגוף שהוא נחלק למחלקות ולקצוות; אלא ייחוד שאין ייחוד אחר כמותו בעולם.

ו אילו היו האלוהות הרבה–היו גופין וגווייות, מפני שאין הנמנין השווין במציאתן נפרדין זה מזה אלא במאורעין שיארעו הגופות והגווייות. ואילו היה היוצר גוף וגווייה–היה לו קץ ותכלית, שאי אפשר להיות גוף שאין לו קץ. וכל שיש לו קץ ותכלית, יש לכוחו קץ וסוף.

> I only ask, “where did it come from”, about entities that have the quality of being potentially nonexistent. Whatever God is, must be something that does not have that potential.

That sounds similar to the Ontological Argument, in that it attempts to define God into existence. While it may be true that if God exists, He must be the sort of thing that cannot not exist, it is also plausible to say that there is nothing that cannot not exist, and so there is no God.