Even though I was raised as a Novus Ordo Catholic, I tended to put the protestant sects (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, etc.) as well as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy all in the same category. Ever since my teenage years, the general impression I had of religious people was that they believed in fairy tales and needed to be told what to think and do.
Fast-forward a few years to
when I moved to Québec in my late twenties and observed the rather strong
hostility toward the Catholic Church. I didn’t think too much about it and
spent my first few years concerned with my own integration. Later on, I had met
a group of traditional Catholics with whom I became friends. When I discussed
this with other people, I was told, with an eye roll, that they were crazy far
right extremists. Usually Americanized leftist and atheistic SJW crowd were the
ones who labeled them as the most hateful, closed minded and stupid group of
people, next to the supposed “skinheads.”
Nonsense.
I got to thinking about the
Catholic basis for the belief in God and what I heard from the more atheistic
oriented folks – from the seemingly level-headed “New Atheist” crowd, to the
most dingbatty and inconsistent of SJWs. I wanted to analyze the Catholic point
of view for God’s existence in order to see if the slanderous labels that so
many of the “New Atheists” and their cohorts slap on traditionalists,
nationalists and Catholics make any sense.
Plenty of the Catholics I
have met are well read and articulate people. One of the questions they get
asked is how they can still believe in God when they’ve been to university,
read Nietzsche, Sartre, etc… The response is something along the lines of this:
when you tear down God, you are only left with the laws of logic and reason.
But those quickly crumble when you abandon absolute truth and rely on relative
truth, disintegrating into solipsism and narcissism.
I think Nietzsche was correct
in pointing out in his more aphoristic analyses that when you get rid of God,
you tend to get these atheist apologists like the anglophone New Atheists (Richard
Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchins). Nietzsche actually says that these
types are worse than the Christians and even makes fun of such pale faced
atheists because they just have repackaged the belief in absolute truth. Now
they must convert everyone to this truth, saying basically the following (from
“Beyond Good and Evil” and “Ecce homo”): “Looky here, on your own grounds or
world view, there is no absolute truth. So you’re really just a more cartoonish
version of the Christian preacher.”
Nietzsche often put things in
a Master and Slave framework. The elites were among the masters and when he
regarded Christianity, he thought it especially appealed to the most weak minded
of society – a slave morality. It is bad to impose a morality on someone else
and anyone who accepts an outside morality is feeble minded. However, if I
accept this idea of being a strong übermensche and not a weak Christian, isn’t
Nietzsche imposing this idea of morality on me? In his mind, there is no
universal truth. In other words, Nietzsche just falls back onto pragmatism
(doing whatever works in the short term). If only week minds accept imposed
moralities, then it follows that I should reject the Master-Slave worldview of
Nietzsche.
Nietzsche also influenced
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism with the idea that anyone who has a morality
imposed upon them is a slave. Again, if I accept Sartre’s existentialism, then
I have let a person argue and impose a position upon me. How am I not still a
slave according to this worldview? Much of this is an appeal to the ego, the
pride of man to think he is going to be better than everyone else. You might be
better at a lot of people at certain things, but you’re still finite and human.
You are not the übermensche or a god man.
Do these views present much
substance? To whom does Nietzsche, Sartre or the New Atheists appeal? They are
often the 18-22 year old college kids, sort of like a phase you go through as a
young adult. But do these quasi-adolescent phases provide any kind of
meaningful worldview? From what I can see, part of the power of
Catholic/Orthodox theology is that it does provide a worldview and thus a
foundation for understanding the three branches of philosophy.
Epistemology (how we
know things about the world)
Metaphysics (what’s real
and what’s not real; what exists what doesn’t)
Ethics (what’s right and
what’s wrong; virtue vs. vice)
A Catholic would look at the
so-called New Atheists (who seem to be the new Nietzsches/Sartres of our day)
and see what their worldview offers. Can it give a coherent account for the
three philosophic branches? Normally the atheist/materialist crowd ridicules
the Catholics without considering their own assumptions. However, we must
question our assumptions, as we interpret the world through these paradigms.
Until we question them, we always read the so-called “facts” or “evidences” in
our favor. Sometimes people can even construct a vast edifice that might effectively
and empirically communicate some truths (like critiques of feminism, gender
theory or multiculturalism), even though they are built upon faulty paradigms
or presuppositions.
In argument and debate, one
assumes the common laws of logic, rationality and consistency, which guide the
debate. Both theists and atheists acquiesce to the existence of real logical
laws and principles. If they don’t believe in logic, laws and consistency, then
they cannot debate their position of atheism over theism.
Just merely throwing “facts”
back and forth gets you nowhere, because “facts” are not seen as brute. There is no such thing as a fact that does not come as part of some context of interpretation. The idea of “brute facts” is an Enlightenment idea and an
aspect of Scientism.
That being said, if there are no brute facts, how can we debate? Some learned
Catholics use a reductio ad absurdum argument
– an argument from the impossibility of the contrary – as well as a
transcendental argument. Those in the debate compare these worldviews and see
which one is coherent and sensible and which one is contradictory.
The New Atheists have gotten
pretty popular on the internet, which I think is partially because these ideas
are spread through slogans and emotional rhetoric. These ways are much more
effective at influencing the masses toward reductionist materialism and
mystical evolution than rigorous methodical analysis. The first thing is to
look at the atheist’s position and see what it offers in regards to
epistemology (knowledge), metaphysics (what exists and what doesn’t) and ethics
(claims about what is right and wrong).
Epistemology –
We can only trust what we
know from our five senses. Empirical sense data is the most reliable way to
interpret and understand the world in some probabilistic and statistical sense.
There is no absolute certainty and no universal claims are possible. We can
only have approximations (something Bertrand Russell states several times in
“The Scientific Outlook”).
Metaphysics –
There is no such thing as
metaphysics. However, it is usually claimed that reality is just matter that is
in constant and perpetual evolutionary flux (which is a metaphysical claim, by
the way…).
Ethics –
Here, the atheist looks to
some form of secular humanism, maybe the Humanist Manifesto as
a source for new ways to come up with some form of ethics, based on what is
socially agreed upon, for example.
In short, this is what the
materialistic atheist’s worldview has to offer.
Catholic apologists often use
a transcendental argument, which is a real logical form, first given by
Aristotle. When the Sophists asked Aristotle how he knew that the laws of logic
were true, he refutes them by showing that the subject matter under discussion,
the laws of logic themselves (which are not empirical) cannot be refuted
empirically (via the five senses). Aristotle gives a transcendental argument
(Book 4 of his Metaphysics) where he says that the Sophist argument is false.
In the process of denying and saying that logical laws do not exist, the
Sophist enters the debate already assuming the existence of public, common,
universal immaterial invariant laws of logic and uses them in the very act of
rejecting them. Therefore logic and logical laws exist.
The Orthodox Church fathers
like Saint John of Damascus later picked up this idea. Kant tries to use
versions of this argument for other things. Modern linguists also made use of
it, such as Karl-Otto Apel, who provided some interesting transcendental
arguments concerning language.
***
Getting back to the New
Atheists and their materialist worldview, let’s see if their position can
provide the possibility for knowledge AT ALL?
Epistemology – Knowledge
is empirical, we can only know what we know through the five senses. However,
the claim itself that “we can only know what we know through sense data” is not
something you can learn through sense data. No amount of sense data can tell
you that universal proposition that we only know things through sense data.
Furthermore, if the naïve
empirical proposition is true, then the self who is making these empirical
arguments has no empirical view of itself. You can’t verify the self’s
existence, nor verify empirically that you are the same you from ten years ago.
You may believe that you are the same you, but what is your empirical proof for
that? While it is indeed rational to believe that the self exists and enters into
meaningful conversation using language (immaterial linguistic properties), this
takes for granted that there is a self to convey this meaning.
There are plenty of things
that people believe that cannot be verified empirically, but are rational
because of the impossibility of the contrary. If I doubt the existence of the
self and deny the self, then I am basically in some kind of solipsism. If you
believe that, they you’ve lost the debate, because you no longer believe in a
common realm of logical argumentation. Argument assumes common laws of logic.
Empirical sense data cannot prove a law of logic, nor can it verify reason, nor
prove mathematical entities or objects.
Metaphysics – The
Atheists view is that there is no metaphysics because that was stupid medieval
superstition. The world has since seen the likes of Locke, Newton, Galileo and
Darwin and has lived through the scientific revolution. Everything is perpetual
flux in evolution.
First of all, the above
statement is a universal (metaphysical) claim it itself. How can you
demonstrate a universal claim empirically? David Hume said that universal
claims assume universals, which brings us back to metaphysics—which the
materialist rejects. Empiricism cannot provide any universal claims, because
one would have to know all things.
Since you believe that
everything is in evolutionary flux, then the position that you came to in your
mind was merely the result of a determined chemical process. It was not an
actual self’s consciousness freely reflecting between positions and coming to
truth and falsehood through rationality. It was chaotic, meaningless and random
process. So, you believe that the totality of reality is meaningless; it’s just
perpetual chaos and flux.
That means that your life is
perpetual chaos and flux, so determined chemical reaction is therefore
meaningless. That means that your arguments are merely determined chemical
reaction and are therefore meaningless. That means that the sentences coming
out of your mouth as you try to refute Christianity are, by your own admission,
only a determined chemical reaction and are therefore meaningless.
Ethics – In this
position, ethics is impossible.
To say something is good or
bad requires some sort of universal benchmark by which you can make that judgment.
In the atheist/materialist position, however, there are no universal standards,
everything is under the process of evolution and that would include immaterial
realities, invariant principles, laws and moral claims – these are all
evolutionary. How do you know that anything is bad? You can’t know. You might
not like something, but you have to understand that there is a difference
between the claim of not liking something and the claim that something is
morally wrong. One of them is a universal value judgment and the other is
merely a matter of taste.
That’s why something like the
Humanist Manifesto or the idea that “morals are social constructs” is nonsense.
What if society declares that all atheists should be put to death? I imagine
that you would say that is bad. But if your claim is just that morals are
social constructs, you have no basis to say that is wrong. You might not like
it, but your not liking it has nothing to do with right or wrong.
The New Atheists love to say
that science is true whether one likes it or not. Well, guess what? Objective
logical principles are true, whether they like them or not. In other words,
they must be consistent. The things that they have tried to use to refute
Christianity, epistemic claims of certainty, knowledge of laws of logic, of
universal principles – these things cannot exist within their worldview and
there is no way of knowing how they exist.
If they make demands upon the
Christian to give an account for his views, then the atheist/materialist must
do the same. He might not like what the Christian says, but it will at least be
coherent.
***
The Christian/Catholic
position however, is not merely intellectual. Approaching God is not just a
matter of solving a bunch of equations. The only way to interpret the world
correctly is through contrition. Getting our
hearts right and living in accordance to divine law are the ways we know God.
So, in other words, there is no syllogism or math problem that will prove God,
until you turn from your egotism and worship of self.
The Catholics I know are
wrongly labeled as far right extremists and promoters of hate speech. Their
worldview is rational and coherent and their critique shows that, within the
atheist position, knowledge itself is impossible, metaphysics is nonsense
(while they assume metaphysical truths in the midst of denying metaphysical
truths), and they cannot provide a coherent foundation for ethics. So why
should anyone even listen to the New Atheists or the random, incoherent SJW at
some counter demonstration on the street while they break windows and destroy
public property?
