A recent essay by Benjamin Cain on Medium got me thinking about something that, to be honest, I don’t spend much time on – religion. Cain’s essay is a convincing takedown of John Vervaeke’s nontheism as a real alternative to atheism.
Vervaeke claims that atheists and theist share a common conception of the sacred — a conception that he rejects. Cain pulls this quote:
“I’m a nontheist,” Vervaeke said, “which means I think the shared set of presuppositions between the theist and the atheist are actually what needs to be rejected.” Clarifying the difference between these three, he said theists and atheists both presuppose “that sacredness is to be understood in terms of a personal being that is in some sense the Supreme Being, and that the right relationship to that being is to have a correct set of beliefs.” And Vervaeke goes on to say, “I reject all of those claims.”
Sacredness, for Vervaeke, doesn’t come from a being (supernatural) but from participation in being, and Vervaeke thinks atheism, in rejecting a supreme being, is also rejecting any form of sacredness.
Cain isn’t buying it. He argues, first, that the desire of nontheists to avoid the atheist label is a tribal dispute:
“…some Western secularists found that they don’t approve of the politics of some prominent atheists, so they disassociate from the label “atheism.”
And then Cain dismantles the idea that because atheists reject a theist supreme being they accept the idea that sacredness comes from a supreme being.
“Vervaeke says atheists are just as caught up as theists in the notion of a Supreme Being and in treating sacredness as a way of relating to that being with the right beliefs. But that’s confused since atheists would do so only for the sake of argument because atheism is the denial of theism.
If you question someone’s understanding of plants, and you mean to criticize what that person has said on the subject, you’d do well not to talk instead about capitalism, astronomy, or how to bake a souffle. No, you’d talk about plants. Does that mean that both you and the target of your criticism are equally obsessed with plants? No, you’re talking about plants because someone else is doing so, and you’re disagreeing with what’s already been said about them.
Blaming atheists for the incoherence of the concept of a Supreme Being is the gross fallacy of shooting the messenger.”
If atheism is the denial of theism, then Vervaeke, as Cain points out, must be an atheist:
So Vervaeke’s an atheist, unless he wants to say that instead of denying theism, he’s only personally without theism even though he leaves open the possibility that theism is true.”
This just seems right to me. To say that atheists, in rejecting theism, thereby endorse theistic views of sacredness can’t be right.
Having said that, there are aspects of atheism that I think do require re-branding and I’m also skeptical of Cain’s argument that atheism extends (or at least should extend) to accepting sacredness, spiritual metaphysics and even pantheism.
Cain writes:
“Elsewhere, I point out that pantheism, for instance, is consistent with atheism, assuming that the theism that’s being rejected by both atheists and pantheists is the positing not just of a Supreme Being, but of a personal creator of nature who miraculously intervenes in the natural course of events to help along our species. Pantheists can treat nature as sacred while rejecting theism in that sense, which would make pantheists atheists.”
And
“But that’s not what chiefly separates atheists and theists. Instead, the issue is whether the Supreme Being or, if you like, the ground of being is personal. The issue is whether sacredness should be trivialized in a tribal manner, as when theists reduce sacredness to some conception that humanizes the transcendent to make it familiar and comforting to social mammals like us.”
I’m not particularly interested in religion (or metaphysics for that matter), and when the topic comes up, I tend to describe myself as a materialist. In simple terms, I don’t believe there is a god, I don’t believe there are gods, I don’t believe there are spirits, I don’t believe there are souls, I don’t think there are objective moral facts, and I don’t think there is anything sacred. In other words…I’m a materialist.
Now, before reading Cain’s essay, I honestly would have thought that’s what an atheist was. But after reading his essay, I realized that while Cain would classify me as an atheist (and I’m fine with that), he would also classify many non-materialists as atheists. And I guess I’m okay with that too.
But in describing myself as a materialist not an atheist, part of what I wanted to avoid are some of the connotations of atheism that I am, in fact, quite uncomfortable with. These aren’t really political, or at least they aren’t primarily political. My concern with atheism as a brand is that I perceive it to be anti-religious. In one sense, this is obviously true. If you deny the truth of X, you are presumably anti-X. But, in another sense, it’s deeply misleading.
I believe that all religions are completely wrong in their metaphysics. I also happen to believe Kant was completely wrong. And Plato and Aristotle for that matter — though Aristotle isn’t as wrong as Plato. But I don’t describe myself as an anti-Platonist, an anti-Kantian, or as an anti-theist. I’m a materialist and that necessarily, it seems to me, implies that I disagree with Platonic and Christian and Kantian metaphysics.
On the other hand, I’m not at all anti-religious any more than I am anti-Plato. I love Plato. I think The Republic is the greatest book ever written. That doesn’t mean I agree with it, but there’s a lot in it that I find profound, interesting and, in at least some respects, true. As a student, I happened to study medieval philosophy quite deeply.[1] I loved Augustine, and I admired Aquinas. Not because I agreed with them. I didn’t find my materialism late in life. But I found, as with Plato, that much of what they said was profound, interesting and, in at least some respects, true. In conversing with Catholics, I often have the odd experience not only of understanding their theology better than they do, but also of admiring it rather more.
I do not believe that religion is necessarily bad. I do not believe it has been, overall, a force for bad in the world. Quite the contrary. Are churches secularized institutions with all the problems and potential for abuse that come with any powerful institution. Of course. That doesn’t mean I’m against them anymore than it means I’m against corporations or governments.
People may find this hard to understand, but being untrue (at least outside of the sciences) is not the same as being un-valuable.
Here’s another way to look at it. I’m a materialist. Marx was a materialist. Plato and Aquinas were not. But while Marx may have been right about materialism, he was deeply wrong about economics, completely mistaken about history, quite misguided about human psychology, and utterly wrong about value. Aquinas and Plato may be wrong about materialism. But they were both far more right than Marx about history, psychology and value.
If someone described me as an anti-Marxist, I wouldn’t complain. Yet I agree with Marx not just about materialism but about some of his critiques of capitalism and some of his insights into the awfulness of assembly-line work and the problems of power.
The problem I have with atheism isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s not. But thinking religion untrue does not commit me to thinking religion to be evil or even without value, and to many prominent atheists that seems to be their commitment. I have no interest in condemning religion and no real interest in arguing against it. Not least because I would rather live in a world where everyone believes in Aquinas than a world where everyone believes in Marx.
That doesn’t mean I’m in favor of lying about what I believe or that I endorse some form of meta theory where people should have religion even though I think it’s false. I’m most definitely not in favor of that and I’m willing, if asked, to defend my materialism. I just don’t think people’s metaphysics are worth spending much time on. Insofar as religion encourages people to think beyond their immediate preference satisfaction, it’s flat out a good thing. I’d rather be with people who value something beyond their own satisfaction, even if I get to those values by a different path.
I simply don’t accept that because I disagree with Christian metaphysics (honestly, I’m not even a huge fan of Christian ethics) I must also be virulently opposed to Christianity. Because I don’t believe in God, I must think that not believing in God is deeply important. I’m not and I don’t. Believing in God or not isn’t particularly important and has almost nothing to do with what you value and how you live. Take two people with identical virtues and explain to me why I should think the materialist is better or worse than the theist? Why should I care?
Which brings me to my final point. If Cain is right that I am an atheist but so, too, is a pantheist, then I would just want to make it clear that not only do I reject theism I reject pantheism and, what’s more, I reject the sacred. Though again, its not something I really want to argue about.
Nature may be sublime. It may be awe-inspiring. But it is not sacred in the way I understand the term. Nothing is sacred. We are physical beings, living in a physical world, with our physical brains. Because we think, we can invest value in things. And we are not wrong to do so. But there is no ground outside ourselves that underwrites that value.
If Vervaeke is rebranding atheism as nontheism so he can retain the sacred…well, I think that’s just the same mistake as theism without the substance of great thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas. I’m asacred. I think most of us, if we admit it to ourselves, are asacred or at least live as if we are.
We don’t go around living our lives for the sacred, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Value does not come from sacred. And the things we value mostly don’t come from being and nature either. We feel awe and beauty and joy because of what we are. It doesn’t have to be more. It doesn’t gain anything from being more. Adding a confused and empty word to the awe or joy we perceive or the beauty we see doesn’t make it better or truer. Sacred joy is just joy. Sacred awe is just awe. Sacred nature is just nature.
The thing that people seem to have a terrible time understanding is that being materialist doesn’t commit one to valuing only material things. A materialist can value love, friendship, honor, beauty, humor, charity and even nature. A materialist can value (and believe) in virtues like courage, kindness, and wisdom. Nor does a materialist need egotistical or utilitarian justifications for valuing those things. Indeed, I’ve written before that because of the nature of our cognitive functioning, a decision-maker cannot simply use preference satisfaction or utility to make many of our biggest and most important decisions. That’s true not because we have a soul, but because we have a mind that changes with experience. We have to think about what to value and who to be. We just don’t have a sacred text to give us the answers.
Do we need more than this? Is the sacred an essential component to our ethics and lives? I don’t think so. Perhaps a sense of the sacred made doing or being some of these things easier. Perhaps it carried with it its own kind of beauty. I wouldn’t argue with either of those things. In losing our sense of the sacred, we probably lost something. Yet I think we gained something too. Something of truth and something of the nature of the real problem in ethics. If we are all materialists (and mostly I think we are), this is — if you’ll excuse my humor — the cross we bear. The world has been de-sacralized.
That may well have made it worse, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
[1] At Duke, the Chairman of the Department taught my introductory philosophy course and happened to be a leading expert in Medieval philosophy. He also happened to be one of the best teachers I was ever fortunate enough to encounter. So, I took a lot of Medieval philosophy classes.