Kijun Times

God is a clever devil. ~ Kazantzakis (Zorbas)

If atheists were identifiable as a group in the way that gender, race, or ethnicity-based groups are identifiable, they would have a case to demand protection. In the United States of America and elsewhere, atheists face negative stereotyping and discrimination (Wright & Nichols, 2014). They are perceived as morally suspect and as untrustworthy subverters of sacred and profane values. Guess who’s coming to dinner? An atheist. Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!

Theists in the Abrahamic tradition seek comfort in the idea that god is one (or three = one) and that He (or She) is a hypertrophic rewarder and punisher of human (mis)behavior. He is psychologically naïve, though. A psychologically trained rewarder/punisher makes rewards/punishments contingent on and proportionate to the action, delivers them swiftly, and makes them just strong enough to be effective. God – if he does anything at all – is on the wrong side of these simple psychological principles. His deserts are not contingent (the wicked rejoice and the formula by which the chosen are chosen remains a mystery); they are not proportionate (flatterers will be immersed in human excrement according to Dante); they are not swift (you need to wait till judgment day); and they are way too strong (everlasting agony). 

The catalogue of penalties is supposed to scare you straight. Be good for the sake of pain aversion. Pascal tried to prove that this is the rational decision. Yet, what is a life lived in perpetual terror of divine vengeance, unaccountability, and caprice? If the fact of being born is enough to put you in the line of god’s wrath, the dominating emotion of life is fear. The Abrahamic religions have tried various schemes to tame fear by bringing forth god’s soft side. These attempts have failed. If god is also loving and caring (and sad when you misbehave), his vengeful, condemnationist attitude lurking underneath is all the more distressing. George Carlin once made this point as only he could. After reviewing the horrors of divine ‘justice,’ Carlin softly added “But he loves you (link is external).”

When I listen to devout scientists or read what they wrote, I notice that they emphasize love over fear. It is ‘nice’ to think that there is an all-powerful being who not only created the universe but who also loves you. Without evidence and with the logic of revelation being so terribly tautological, there is only the feeling of oneself being loved that justifies belief, and this is transparently circular and self-serving. Devout scientists take their emphasis of love over terror as progress over the old-time religion, which taught fear and demanded submission. Yet, this progress is myopically emotional, and unbefitting to critically thinking scientists. Vengeance, punishment, and fear do not go away. They are not even balanced by the emphasis on love and forgiveness. They become even more frightful. Is it not particularly horrific to be eventually condemned and burned by the one who dangled the promise of love and grace before you? Freud’s analysis was not far off the mark, when he considered religious belief of the Abrahamic stripe an emotional complex, in which love and fear constitute each other, and in which fear is primary (Freud, 1928).

The discussions that devout scientists stir up from time to time – and in some of which I have participated – take god’s fundamental goodness as an axiomatic point of departure. The universe is good, it was created by a good creator, and he loves you. The line of argument is backward, though. The need to be the personal object of love comes first. To be loved by someone strong is better than being loved by someone weak, and to be loved by someone good is better than being loved by someone bad. Once you believe that you are being loved by an all-powerful and all-good being, the cosmogonic question pretty much answers itself. By the way, he also created the world. 

If love fulfillment is the first cause in this psychological sequence, God looks rather impressive indeed. Yet, the headaches will not go away. Job (his author rather) put the matter into text: brutally, honestly, and uncompromisingly. The headache has since been known as the problem of theodicy. How can god be just if there is so much – flatly undeserved – pain in the world? In three thousand years of hand-wringing, no one has come up with a compelling answer. Should this not give us pause? If we take seriously the few simple psychological principles I have used in this essay (how to reward and punish if you mean it, and how to believe by favoring evidence over desire), we must meet love-stressing theism with the utmost skepticism.

What is the alternative? Atheism, as I mentioned going in, brings its own punishments in the form of social rejection. Atheists, in this country, have trouble getting dates and they cannot be elected president (of just about anything). Shall we try deism? Deism is the poor man’s theism. Here, god created the world and then walked away. He does not care about you, let alone love you. The good news is that he will not punish you by having you wear a cloak of lead in the afterlife (Dante again). Deism is cerebral. It gained support during the Enlightenment when many wanted their rationalism but were too scared to give up the idea of god. Deism is not rational, though. Once you give up the infantile fantasy of being monitored by an omniscient and benevolent creator god, there is no psychological need to hold on to the idea that there was a creator. In deism, the problem of theodicy is no longer an issue, but the problem of infinite regress remains, and a rationalist should recoil from it. Who created the creator? Even preschoolers ask this question, and for many of them it leads to their first encounter with adult ignorance.

Love-theism, deism, and atheism all have their problems. An option that remains is theism without love. If god is a mischievous, even sadistic, demon, the problem of theodicy is solved and the problem of infinite regress can be left to the philosophers. The psychological consequences seem dire at first, but liberating at second glance. On the dire side, it may seem depressing to think that a malevolent supernatural entity is responsible for the construction of a deeply flawed world and an even flaweder human nature. On the upside, we would know whom to blame (following the Job of the discourse with his ‘friends,’ not the Job of the last chapter, who was invented by a pious and submissive scribe), and we could take the matters we can control into our own hands. By the lights of this dark theism, we can confront life as the heroic struggle that it is, and in the end, we can consider ourselves worthy adversaries – and not sheep.