Editor’s Note: Here’s the latest in the correspondence between “Common Sense Atheist” and me (Mark Van Steenwyk). Go HERE to read Luke’s (he’s the atheist) initial letter. My response was posted here. His second letter is here, followed by my second letter. To mix things up, all future letters in this series written by me will be posted over at Common Sense Atheism.

Mark,

Are you a mystic? Mystics irritate orthodox believers because orthodox believers value creeds and the defense of certain propositions, but mystics value relationships and “being.” And in one sense, mystics may irritate non-believers, too, for the mystic’s assertions are so fuzzy that the non-believer cannot clearly show why they should be rejected. (At the same time, they are so fuzzy the mystic cannot show why they should be supported.)

For example, I can’t make sense of a statement like “The Divine exists in community.” Does that mean that Divine spirit is generated wherever believers are gathered? Or does it mean that God pays more attention to groups than he does to a similar sum of individuals? Or does it mean the Divine’s mission is a social mission? Or does it mean that divine action supervenes only on groups of believers? Or does it mean something else?

Or consider your statement “All that exists is created, sustained, and moving towards the Divine.” But what does it mean to say that a table is moving towards the Divine? What does it mean to say that a virtual particle, which pops into and out of existence in less than a second, is “sustained” by the Divine? What else in your ontology is subject to this rule? Were necessary truths “created” by the Divine? Are propositions moving toward the Divine?

I have similar questions about every one of the ten statements that loosely comprise your own Mere Christianity. And since I’m not much clearer on what you affirm, I’m still not in a position to explain why your particular beliefs are unwarranted.

Instead, let me try to explain why I think your epistemic methods do not provide warrant for any particular beliefs.

You wrote that:

…while I think my convictions are rooted in reason, I also will be the first to acknowledge that they are rooted in mystical experience and personal desire as well.

…the non-believer aesthetically perceives the “glory of God” in the life of a holy person. This serves as the best “proof” for the non-believer.

…it is impossible to have any knowledge of God or verify the truth of revelation apart from actually living within a Christian faith-stance….

I think your epistemic methods represent a poor path to truth. Let me explain why.

Here’s how I see humanity’s situation with respect to knowledge. Recently, humanity awoke in a strange and beautiful universe. We did not know where we came from or what we should do, but we did our best to survive. We made some guesses about what things existed and how they worked, and most of those guesses turned out to be wrong. It turned out there was not a magical being that would give us a good harvest if we sacrificed virgins to him every so often. It turned out we were not at the center of a small universe. It turned out disease was the product of microorganisms, not sin or demons. It turned out earthquakes and tsunamis were the product of shifting tectonic plates. The universe was full of surprises.

So how can we figure out what things really exist and how they really work? The answer is important. The answer helps us decide what to do. If disease is the product of microorganisms and not demons, then the best way to heal billions of people is to train more doctors, not more priests and shamans. Knowledge is power; the power to do something about the condition of our universe.

Okay, so which methods give us reliable knowledge? There is no a priori answer. We could have awoken in a universe controlled by a playful demon who always delivered us truth whenever we raped antelope. In that universe, the best way to learn how the real world works would be to rape antelope as often as possible. Or we could have awoken in a universe in which our minds contained a special faculty that could directly detect truths about the universe, and so the most reliable path to knowledge would be to trust our inner sense. Or we could have awoken in a universe where our minds were programmed such that truth was always attached to things that were aesthetically pleasing to us. In such a universe, the best path to truth would have been to look for beauty.

But which universe did we wake up in? Which methods tend to work best for uncovering truth in this universe?

It could have been the case that our inner sense was a reliable guide to truth, but it’s not. Apparently, our inner sense was mankind’s primary (or only) method for finding truth for thousands of years, during which time we were dead wrong about damn near everything. Even today, the natural world continues to confound our most assured intuitions about the nature of space and time (see relativity), identity and causation (see quantum mechanics), and much more. I know that our inner sense delivers to us a sense of assurance along with its hypotheses, but the simple truth is that our inner sense has a horrible track record with the truth.

It could have been the case that mystical experience was a reliable guide to truth, but it’s not. Mystical experience has, over many eons, lead to belief in thousands of absurd and contradictory spiritual realities. Once again, it is the nature of mystical experience to deliver to us a strong assurance of veridicality along with its metaphysical claims, but the simple fact remains that mystical experience has a horrible track record with the truth.

I know the personal sway of mystical experiences. I had many of them myself. It was hard to even consider they might be an illusion. But anyone with a passing knowledge of psychology and neuroscience knows many good reasons to doubt the common metaphysical inferences drawn from mystical experiences. Mystical experience is what I call The Ultimate Bias, since we rarely hold our own mystical experiences to the same standards of proof as we do the bizarre (New Age, Hindu, Zen Buddhist…) mystical experiences of many other people. Mystical experience is another very poor guide to the truth.

It could have been the case that persons who rose to become public authorities were a reliable guide to truth, but they’re not. They’ve been wrong as often a “common” people have, and spouted just as much nonsense. Moreover, authorities constantly disagree with each other. So authority is a poor guide to truth.

It could have been the case that personal desire was a good guide to truth, but it’s not. People often have contradictory desires, and these desires often lead them to support contradictory claims. And many truths are disappointing to nearly all of us. So there seems to be little connection between what we want to be true and what is true.

It could have been the case that that beauty was a good guide to truth, but it’s not. For one thing, different people see different things as beautiful, and contradictory propositions cannot both be true. For another, there are many ugly truths. The atom bomb is very ugly but the nuclear physics behind it is deafeningly true. Suicide terrorism is ugly but it is rising in popularity precisely because its practitioners have realized an important truth: that it successfully coerces democracies to withdraw forces from a people group’s homeland. (See Robert Pape, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.)

Instead, mankind awoke and tried dozens of different methods and found that one particular set of methods – the ones we call “scientific” – are the ones that work best at uncovering the truth about the world we live in. The proof is in the pudding, as they say: scientific methods probably add a greater number of usable truths to humanity’s stockpile of knowledge than all the other methods had for thousands of years, combined. And that’s exactly why science has the prestige that it has. That’s why it’s “the game to beat.” That’s why theologians and philosophers envy scientists and try to borrow their methods as much as possible into their own practices.

Finally, I have some thoughts on Balthasar’s Christian epistemology, which you sum up thusly:

…a person must first participate in Christian experience before one can have knowledge of God. Sure, people can draw implications about God from nature and all of that… but ultimately, people will apply whatever rubric they want to the data at hand. A mountain is pretty, but isn’t [by itself] an argument for God.

In the context of your original letter, it seems like you’re saying that the believer can’t convince the unbeliever of God’s existence through traditional arguments or public evidence because the unbeliever must first willingly experience God before he can have knowledge of God – but when you accept the Christian experience and live it out, then you’ll see that God is real.

This seems problematic in at least two ways. First, if someone willingly participates in a certain worldview, of course he’s more likely to come to believe it is “true.” You could just as well say that if someone willingly participates in Hinduism he will come to “see” that it is true. But that doesn’t mean it is true.

Second, hundreds of millions of people have operated from a position of faith and have still concluded that religious traditions are false – in the last century alone! According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, non-believers skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900 to 918 million in 2000, from 0.2% of world population in 1900 to 15.3% of world population in 2000.

And I am one of those who are leaving the church in droves. I did operate from a position of faith in Jesus. I did experience his love and action as surely as my fellow believers did. But I still concluded, in the end, that he did not exist.

Mark, I would still like to understand what, exactly, you affirm, but at least I have explained (very briefly) why I do not think your epistemic methods could warrant any set of beliefs, let along the particular ones you affirm.

Now, you asked me two questions. The first was:

Is there ever room for a “leap of faith?” In other words, is it ever good to accept or act on something without evidence?

I assume you’re asking if it is morally good to act on beliefs that are unwarranted. I think the answer is yes. Without going into more detail right now, I’ll just point out that if we were morally required to gain warrant for every belief before acting on it, we would hardly be permitted to act at all, and many deeply evil states of affairs would result.

But I do not think a leap of faith toward theism is morally or rationally justified. I agree with most philosophers and scientists that theism is so thoroughly refuted that no leap of faith is justified in this case, just as no leap of faith toward belief in Santa Claus is justified.

Your second question was:

Is there any wisdom in evaluating belief systems for their effects, rather than for the rationality of their beliefs? For example: I may disagree with certain religious sects, but can recognize the beauty and outcome of their way of life. How does one evaluate such belief systems?

There is great wisdom in evaluating belief systems for their effects. Doing so may help you make moral decisions, for example a decision on which false belief systems to oppose most urgently.

But there is a great gap between the moral consequences of a belief system and the ontological truth of its metaphysical claims. Jainism has generally superb moral consequences in the world, but this does not increase the epistemic merit of its metaphysical claims one iota. Or let us imagine that the stories about a particularly genocidal religious group were true – the Biblical myths about the early Israelites, for example. Their many campaigns of terror, genocide, pillage, and rape in Canaan are morally evil and aesthetically ugly, but this does not show that their God does not exist or that their God did not command such atrocities. It could well have been that Yahweh existed and commanded many genocides and that was the truth about the universe, however immoral and ugly.

So yes, there is wisdom in evaluating the effects of belief systems. But no, there is no link between the social effects of a belief system and its truth. It could easily be the case that the truth about the universe is not conducive to healthy human society.

Mark, in your next letter I hope you can clarify (1) what you believe and (2) why your reasons are good reasons to believe.

Cheers,

Luke