The Academy for Christian Thought Thinking Things Through in a Theological Safe Space

1. The Academy for Christian ThoughtThinking Things Through in a Theological Safe Space The Paradox of Atheism Its unbelievable what an unbeliever has to believe in order to be an unbeliever

2. What is atheism? • It is difficult to understand how something could be uncaused;but it is also difficult to understand how a chain of causes could go on forever. • Michael Martin in “Atheism: A Philosophical Justification“ • The philosophical justification of atheism is a theological doctrine that asserts the non-existence of God because ultimately, atheism is the claim for moral autonomy that leads to autodeification

3. The Atheist Hall of Fame • David Hume (1711-1776), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Karl Marx (1818-1883),Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)& John Dewey (1859-1952). • Hume – causality • Feuerbach – man-made projection of wishful thinking (MPWT) • Darwin - natural selection • Marx – opium of the oppressed • Nietzsche – nihilism • Freud – scientism (Future of an Illusion) • Sarte – nihilism • Camus – absurdism

4. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) • “God is dead because we have killed him, • so all that is left is the Power to Will” • In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche described the origin of morality in 3 essays

5. 1st Essay – The Good (morality) • The gospels make exclusive claims to truth, while celebrating a morality of weakness and meekness. Their passivity is interpreted as virtuous and suffering is treated as a blessing to be redeemed in the afterlife.

6. 2nd Essay – The Right (conscience) • Christianity created ‘bad conscience’, robbing people of their freedom, making them suppress themselves with guilt – in order to maintain the claim to monotheism. The Christian poison is best cured by atheism.

7. 3rd Essay – self-denial & asceticism • The Christian ideal of self-denial is ‘life against life,’ ... “an expression of lust for power as it is manifest in those who are declining or decadent.” The priest makes the sick even sicker by its methods of cure. • The scientific worldview is equally destructive in founding its success on faith in truth. • Both religious and scientific pursuits involve the denial of one’s desires, a delusional waste of energy and potential that Nietzsche’s philosophy seeks to liberate us from.

8. Christian compassion • For Nietzsche, the overt compassion evident in Christian morality saps the self of authenticity. • Greatness is rare and must be celebrated for its achievements on its own merits. What he termed ‘herd’ mentality was the lowbrow masses who are not distinguished by power or capacities. • Each great person is a law unto himself. • Might is right.

9. The Genetic Fallacy • Nietzsche saw himself as the true heroic figure destined to liberate society from this spiral into nihilism. He asked under what originating conditions did humanity devise the idea of morality? • Underlying this was the 19th century belief in what is now called the ‘genetic fallacy’, that everything can be understood by understanding its origins, hence, the genealogy of morality.

10. Be Yourself • The morals, values and standards we have inherited were based on a belief in a transcendent God or gods who gave them to us and will judge our success in living up to them. Having lost our belief in these deities, we [in Europe] now have no reason to continue such beliefs in our value system. Our foundations have come apart beneath us. • The answer to this predicament is – ‘Be yourself!’ • Live life to the fullest, take the best advantage of life that you can and fulfill your potential, and be adventurous. Laws are a hindrance to this way of life since they are there to make life easier for the weak, but deny the strong their birthright. • Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is alive today and we should be warned.

11. Be Yourself • Nietzsche’s idea of the ultra-moral man must make his own laws to live by and ignore the consequences. This also means conquering one’s fears and quibbles about life. It is being courageous and going beyond one’s comfort zone. • The ultimate value worth maintaining is life itself. This is not surprising for someone who does not believe in the afterlife. Interestingly, even truth is subservient to life. Whatever is true but does not further the goal of living authentically must be suppressed. • LIFE is more important than TRUTH • Is this true even for us Christians today?

12. Must God die? • If the strong do not fight for their advantages, the morality of the plebs )ordinary people) will annihilate these values and impose their own, risking a regress of civilization to barbarism. • Nietzsche was alarmed by the counter-intuitive teachings of Christianity, where the first might be the last and the leader must be the servant, where even God must die to save the wicked. Nietzsche wants to destroy such Christian morality to save the true inheritors of morality. • For Nietzsche, the exemplar to life is the Overman or Superman (Ubermensch), one who escapes the repression of the herd morality and is free to pursue his true self.

13. Response to Nietzsche 1 - Authority • N believed that religion was based on authority. • However, the authority of the Bible is based on an appeal to a reasoned, reflective judgment on the merits of the proposal: • - God said “Come now and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18) • - the psalmist invites the reader to “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8), and • - Paul “reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks (Acts 18:4).

14. Response to Nietzsche 2 – Liar’s Paradox • Nietzsche believed that Christianity’s moral doctrine of ascetic self-denial is hostile towards human life. • Nietzsche declares himself an Ubermensch because he claims to escape his own critique by constructing a morality of moralities, the true morality to replace the fake one of the ‘herd.’ • Hehas no responsibilities to other humans in society and maximizes the opportunities of the strongest by eliminating the weak in order to pave the way for quicker progress. He exempts himself from the very critique he makes. • This is called the problem of the “liar’s paradox.” The liar’s paradox afflicts the liar who says, “Everything I say is false”.

15. Response to Nietzsche 3 – Will to power • According to Nietzsche’s morality, a stronger opponent always deserves to defeat a weaker one. • The will to power determines the emergence of the victor. Merit becomes a fluid concept. Nietzsche denies any absolute moral values because he has no privileged legal norm.

16. Response to Nietzsche 4 – normless norm • Can Nietzsche’s normless norm (no reference point) posit a norm (a reference point)? • Nietzsche knows he is offering a norm, one that transcends the class of norms. Nietzsche invites selected others to shape morality by directly knowing good and evil. • God warned that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil will result in deathwhile the serpent interpreted that to mean that eating of it will make one be like God, with (propositional rather than received) knowledge of good and evil.

17. Response to Nietzsche 5 – autonomy & justice • The serpent promised anautonomyso complete, that it overcomes even the creator. Nietzsche’s notion of overcoming one morality by another morality is the claim of moral autonomy, riding the will to power. • The virtue ethics of Plato and Aristotle teach us to be motivated to seek the good, and it will be right. • The deontological ethics of Kant argues that we are under a duty to do what is right, and it will be good. • The Christian belief in God leans one to a deontological view, bound by a duty to do what is right according to the commands of God. This demands our free will to seek justice as a good. It is justice then that underlies Christian morality.

18. Response to Nietzsche 6 – parasitism • In Nietzsche’s morality, the stronger minds among humanity should impose its will to power on the weak to preserve human culture. This distortion of beauty privileges personal advantage over the welfare of people. It demands the abolition of both morality and justice. • In the end, it collapses under the weight of its own incoherence because the very appeal for his normless norm (a world without universal standards of right and wrong) depends on a possibility of making just such a judgment. He was wrong not only because he rejects God but also because his philosophical system is parasitic on the very philosophical system he wants to abolish.

19. The Paradox of Atheism • The atheist seeks to avoid God and in so doing, creates a fictional god from which to make the judgment that there is no God. This transforms autonomy to autodeification, the making of oneself into the authority enjoyed by God alone. • The atheist has only his own authority by which to judge other authorities. This autonomy is eventually elevated to the very status that is denied by atheism in the first place - the state of ultimate authority. The atheist creates in himself the intellectual authority that mimics the existence of the very God that he denies. • This then is the paradox of atheism – in order to be an unbeliever (skeptic), one has first to be a believer in unbelief. This demands of the believer of unbelief a belief in something foundational – and if that something is not God, it turns out to be himself.

20. The Paradox of Atheism • Atheism creates a vacuum which conjures up its own answer to a problem of its own making. When we make ourselves the final arbiters of truth, reality and our future, this unintended consequence is an inescapable trap from which escape can only come about by the return to that which it escaped from. • Unbelief in God demands belief in oneself as having the authority of God. Atheism is transference of the will to believe, from God to ourselves. All atheists ultimately believe themselves to be Godlike. • Ultimately, the paradox of atheism is that in rejecting belief in a God who made them in his image, atheists end up making God in their own image – the practice of autodeification.

21. What an unbeliever must believe to be an unbeliever • 1. The universal laws of physics and chemistry are coincidentally fine-tuned. • 2. There is no answer to the question of origins – universe, life, us & mind. • 3. Truth is not an absolute concept. • 4. The ability of bipedal humans to learn languages and to conceptualize symbols as we do, are coincidentally natural phenomena. • 5. Love and hope result from electro-chemical generated in the neurons of brain tissue that respond to stimuli from the five senses. Ditto for anger, envy, despair, happiness, joy, etc. • 6. Every religion in the world is untrue. • 7. We all coincidentally imagined the same notion of right and wrong. •  8. Paradoxically, a faithful atheist must be a self-theist (autonomous belief in oneself as God).

22. Conclusion - autodeification • Nietzsche’s critique draws from both projection, evolutionary and motivation theories to declare a godless world into a vortex of self-aggrandizement made possible by twisting the notion of morality to mean seeking affection for advantage over affection for justice (Scotus). • However, aspects of atheistic moral autonomy lurks in all of us. • A latent atheistic impulse to assert ourselves as the center of our universe persists. Hence, the paradox of atheism is the inescapable idolatry of autodeification.

24. Academy for Christian Thought •  A resource for both believer and skeptic seeking an informed approach to how • history, the sciences & philosophy may enrich our understanding of reality. • 1. We provide a theological safe spaceto learn about the Christian faith. • 2. We initiated a ‘copyleft’ program to distribute our materials royalty-free in the Two-Thirds World. • 3. Weengage the academy through international conferences on religion and the natural sciences - to bridge mutual suspicion between the academy and the church. • 4. We bridge the cognitive gap between the pulpit and the pew and serve as a clearing house of ideas and a trusted resource.

25. Five Questions Atheists Ask • 1. Did Man invent God? Yes, man invented the image of God in response to the call of God. • 2. Why bother if we all die? • 3. What if Christians are wrong? • 4. Can we be good without God? • 5. Why do people believe in God?

26. Quotes • Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. – Christopher Hitchens (God is not great, 282). • With me, the horrid doubt always arises, whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? – Charles Darwin (The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 285).

27. Scientific explanations for belief in God • Psychological explanation: Religion requires imagination of the unseen – consistent with the possibility that faith is a response to the reality of God. • Social explanation: The human need for pattern and meaning. Made in God’s image, we are drawn to seek God in nature’s pattern and life’s meaning. • Neurological explanation: The brain is hard wired to conceive of God. • Cultural explanation: The theory of vestigial survival strategy cannot account for our stubbornly durable tendency to believe in God. • Evolutionary explanation: But celibacy and martyrdom is not adaptively advantageous. • Anthropological explanation: The brain evolved to detect hidden predators. • Philosophical explanation: memes – cultural units of information – that spread the religious virus of the mind. • ALL may be true without being exhaustive explanations for belief in God

28. What is faith? • For many atheists, faith is belief without evidence that God exists. • For believers, faith is at the core of their being, and not only in their minds, people having allowed themselves to be grasped by God. • Evolutionary explanation from neuroscience – wired to do so.

29. Sneaking suspicions that God exists • The intelligibility of reality – the human mind evolved to understand nature. • The quest for truth. • The ubiquity of faith.