Some Thoughts on Christmas Day

This morning I enjoyed watching Robert Mayhew's lecture "Ayn Rand's Intransigent Atheism," which was given at last summer's Objectivist Conference, or OCON. In this examination of the cosmological argument, he says much of what I've tried to say on this blog. Mayhew, a professor of philosophy at Seton Hall University, points out that Ayn Rand called herself an "intransigent" but not a "militant" atheist. Her objective was not, in a primary sense, to argue against or reject belief in God, but to affirm reason as the only method of obtaining knowledge about what exists. One who is fully committed to reason is necessarily an atheist because no room is left for what people mean by God. Her use of the word intransigence indicated that the claims of theism could simply be dismissed as empty nonsense because they misuse the language by ignoring basic metaphysical truths that cannot be escaped without self-contradiction. Rand's orientation implies the sort of criticism I've made against what has been called the "new atheism." An example of this sort of atheism can be seen in anyone who treats the assertion God exists as hypothesis for which empircal evidence must be sought. The "new atheists" find the evidence lacking, hence their atheism. But Rand (and Mayhew, George Smith, I, and others) would say that God exists is not actually a hypothesis for which evidence can in principle be sought because 1) God is a bundle of impossible contradictions and 2) relatedly, the word exists in the sentence bears no relation to the homonym exists that we acquire with our senses and rational understanding when growing up and use everyday. God exists is not in any equivalent to Joe Biden exists or Her dog exists or My laptop exists or Emotions and thoughts exist or Justice and beauty exists. In other words, God "exists" in a way has nothing in common with anything else you can imagine. For one thing, God is said to be infinite, but in our experience, existence and finiteness are inseparable. As Rand put it, "To be is to be something." And to be something is to have a nature, to be one thing and not another. (See my many earlier posts of these issues.)

I recommend Mayhew's lecture.

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If what is called the Five Books of Moses had been discovered in a cave last week and the Abrahamic religions were unknown to the world, I have little doubt that most people would dismiss those books at the imagined record of a long-extinct cult. With all the palpably immoral acts and pointless commands of Yahweh and the ridiculously detailed rituals -- the animal sacrifices to a supposed immaterial deity, the sprinkling of animal blood on an altar, and all the rest -- no more than a few people would take the scriptures seriously. Yet billions of people do so today. I guess we can take comfort that fewer take them literally than in bygone times. But the mental contortions undertaken to find moral value in them as parables are also ridiculous.

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Theism, at least the Abrahamic variety, devalues life. It must: if the point of "this life" is to get to the next or to pass Yahweh's judment, then the only life we know is less important than it would be if it were an end in itself. It is a mere instrument to somewhere something else. This is illustrated by Christianity's promise of forgiveness even for the egregious of sins as long as the sinner accepts Jesus.