The Suffering Spouse: A Story of Religious Melodrama

Woe is me! How much I suffer!

I consider myself a "New Atheist" because when I assess the effects of mainstream religious beliefs on the world, religion more often than not appears to be harmful.

The harm shows not only in criminals like the pope or in the violence of religiously motivated groups, but also at a very basic, everyday level. At Spiritually Unequal Marriage, a website for Christians married to "non-believers," a woman writes an open letter to the community:

I remember when I came across your site. I was so thankful that I was not alone! I think the most powerful thing that you and Dineen [i.e., Lynn and Dineen, the site owners] have done lately is to post honestly and transparently. Women in these marriages WANT to have hope but they also don't want to necessarily hear that others in "unequal" marriages are thriving and joyful etc. That may sound strange but for the most part unequal marriages suffer, greatly.

This woman wants to be part of a community...of suffering! She will hear nothing of couples happy and satisfied in "unequal" marriages but prefers to dwell in sadness and difficulty.

As the woman continues, see how religious beliefs give her life a context with a narrative based on war/struggle and characters such as the devil:

And truthfully if the marriage is unequal the home has a constant open doorway for the devil. He is always welcome and WE must do battle continually. We may get "breaks” the fog may lift to some degree but the battle is continual. For those of us in marriages where there are serious addictions the battles are that much more intense. The need to cling to the Lord is that much more necessary. I think your honesty lately is revealing more Truth than ever. Because the truth is, we may live our entire lives with our spouse and they may never be saved. The hardest thing to grasp in these relationships is that it is not God's WILL that ALL be saved. It is His desire and He woos and calls people to Himself but He gives them the free will to love Him in return.

This poor woman imagines herself a solitary warrior in her own home. She mentions "addictions," so perhaps she or a loved one (likely) has substance issues. True enough, plenty of people never shake their addictions. More than anything, this woman seems trying to cope with the uncertainty of the addict. Her reality is an allegory of the religious: one may not be saved from addiction as one may not be saved religiously. The final result is beyond her ken and control, even beyond--to some extent--her loved one's control. The woman invokes God because she wants SOMEONE to be in control. The idea of God covers over the unpleasant scenario of no one having intelligent governance over her affairs.

Yet, the idea of SOMEONE being ultimately in charge, even if that someone is God, does not comfort the woman. It costs her to feel part of a purposeful universe, and that cost is separation from her loved one:

This is so difficult for us who have loved ones who are unsaved. At times, I find myself with a lump in my throat, my spirit crying out, and pain that goes deep beyond description, as I watch my loved ones walk further and further away from the Lord. Yet, at other times, there is great peace and there is a sweet surrender. It is then that I realize the peace that Christ had. He mourned those who are lost but pressed forward into God's will, trusting the entire world to God's sovereign care. Jesus prayed that God would "make another way" but prayed nevertheless, that God's WILL be done. God's will called for Christ to die. This side of the Cross we don't argue with God's decision. On the side of the Cross where Jesus' mother Mary kneeled God probably seemed to be failing His people in more ways than they could imagine. But, He knows what He's doing. We must remember that Jesus said . . .Matthew 7:13-14:

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

My great peace has not come from giving up hope.
I cling to the Promises and I declare:

"But I will keep on hoping for your help; I will praise you more and more"
Psalm 71:14

In each successive paragraph, the woman toggles between grief and sad resignation. True, the notion of God keeps her from falling into an emotional abyss. However, she would do much better to discard the idea of God altogether.

God and Bible quotes give her consolation, but the potential for happiness lies outside of God and the Bible. If she were not so preoccupied with the "spiritual warfare" scenario, she would have no worry of the saved/unsaved problem. This problem would not exist. She would own her life and her life choices. She would understand that her decisions and actions would be able to help her feel better about her life. Although she would never be able to control her loved one's addictions or know if he would re-lapse, she would be able to adopt a proper "we'll deal with it if it comes up" attitude.To ditch God would be to claim her life in the present.

For this reason, I find that atheism better allows one to compartmentalize. In contrast, religion encourages an awful combination of ceaseless naval gazing and self-flagellation. This woman seems driven to see and open her own wounds:

I pray continually for the salvation of my husband and my loved ones but my hope is not in that outcome. If I hope in that I will find myself disappointed. But if I hope in God, trusting that HE knows best even if that means that He must allow some of my loved ones to turn away from Him then, I will not be disappointed. Just as Jesus' Disciples were not disappointed at the resurrection! So, I guess to make a LONG email short, haha. I just think that the more you share your struggles, the more power you will see in your ministry. God will not force ANYONE to love Him. If He did then the love He offers would not be love at all. You can't FORCE someone to love you. Therefore, each person may choose. Though it is difficult for saved spouses to watch, their unsaved spouse may continue to drift back and forth. It is the power of God moving. Yet, in the end it is the decision of their heart and yes, God allows it. Because of His great love.

Those who have engaged in any sort of discussion with religious people know the familiar fallback, "you must freely choose to love (or fear or submit to) God/Jesus." The fallback, again, says more about the woman's fear and need to cope.

Indeed, the woman says almost nothing of substance about her loved one. In the end, her message has nothing to do with her loved one or God/Jesus. It's all about her and her oh-so-valiant struggle to fight the devil. It's about her telling us to look at her and admire her being tied to the train tracks.

She's like the lyric from the Offspring's great song, "Self Esteem":

The more you suffer,
The more it shows you really care.

And this is where I have a real problem with this woman's outlook and the religious context from which she draws. All of her "suffering" is self-inflicted and totally unnecessary. Any moment she really wanted to, she could remove herself from her marriage and just get along with her life. She could, and she'd probably be happier. Look, I take marriage and divorce very seriously, but when the two people in the marriage are not happy they should separate.

It takes more than love to make a happy marriage. It takes attitude, communication, effort, flexibility, giving, reflection, teamwork, and more. In a happy marriage, no one is "suffering" because of the other partner. On a personal level, there is no freaking way I would ever want or allow my wife to suffer because of me--and I'm sure she feels the same way. We didn't get married to be sources of suffering to each other; we married to be constant sources of comfort, encouragement, and support. For this reason, marriage partners do not need to share the same religious beliefs any more than they need to support the same political candidates or parties.

But if your beliefs or your politics cause you pain if your spouse isn't in the same camp, then you need to re-assess those beliefs and politics. And if those beliefs and politics turn out to be more important to you than your spouse, then break away from the relationship. I doubt your spouse wants to be a pre-text for your suffering.

New Atheism looks at some types of religious narrative--such as that of a world engulfed in spiritual conflict--and religious characters--such as the devil--and argues that these are not only ungrounded but poisonous. The woman who wrote the email I've examined here is one case, but notice all the assent and agreement she gets in the comments section. Instead of advising the woman to chill out and then do something productive for herself, the comments are all of a "me too" variety (although there are some disagreements on bits).

If suffering is avoidable, it should be avoided. If happiness is attainable, it should be attained. These statements seem commonsensical, but in practice we often act against common sense.

Passover/Easter Reflections

The other Jesus and Mo.

The rites of spring are come and gone again.

My family held two seders this year, the first with only the nuclear Tanners and the second involving a fuller Tanner clan. In both cases, we conducted the seder briskly to skip all flummery and to keep the kids entertained.

My dad's seder talks about the Exodus a bit more than mine. He presents the liberation of the Hebrew slaves as a basis for believing all people should have political and religious freedom. I focus more on self-advocacy and self-determination.

For the Easter part of the weekend, my wife and I hosted a meal with her family. First, however, I went to my wife's church to see my son and older daughter sing in the holiday choir. The kids were very cute, but the Easter service was insufferable. The music was so douchey, with the basic message that Jesus is Superman.

The sermon was also dreadful. The pastor asserted again and again that Jesus REALLY DID die on the cross. Really, he did. He died.

And how do we know he really really died?

Because the details of the Gospel of Mark are not what we would expect if the story was made-up, says the pastor. Here's the passage we covered together:

1 - When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body.

2 - Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb

3 - and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

4 -  But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away.

5 - As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

6 -  “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him.

7 - But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”

8 - Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

The pastor was trying to dispel the idea that Jesus perhaps fainted and didn't die. He was also arguing against the hypothesis that the corpse was moved.

I won't go into the specific points the pastor made, but I want to dwell for a moment on the idea that only Mark's accuracy is at issue here. In fact, we are dealing with reliability at many levels in the Marcian account, where a fuller reporting sequence is as follows:

The young man in the tomb
↓
[time]
↓
The three women
↓
[time]
↓
The first people they finally told
↓
[time]
↓
The people who heard the story from the first people
↓
[time (decades?)]
↓
The person or group who wrote down Mark into manuscript form

Add to this a muddied bed of Christian interpretation and re-interpretation, and you see my point: between whatever might actually have happened and us are layers of re-tellings, time, cultural and linguistic nuance, and beliefs based on a very different and more limited understanding of reality.

Therefore, whoever produced Mark was decades away and between two and five people-layers removed from the reported events. So, what is it that is REALLY, REALLY true in the story?

Clearly, we don't know what's true. Yet many of us remain comfortable with assigning high probability that of all life forms in the universe, this one human being reversed death.

Fortunately, my home was filled with turkey, vegetables, and milk chocolate to make everyone forget the amount to cognitive dissonance required to muddle through the Jewish and Christian rituals.

Yes, We Materialists Really Do Understand Materialism

Let me get this straight: You believe that Chimp Jesus is both fully God and fully Chimp, but you think my worldview is inconsistent?

Following the recent purge of dissenting voices over at Uncommon Descent, cock-of-the-walk lawyer Barry Arrington implies that materialists either don't know or don't care about the supposed inconsistencies in their worldview:

Do Materialists Believe Rape is Wrong?
I have a question for our materialist friends. Let’s imagine a group of chimpanzees. Say one of the male chimps approaches one of the female chimps and makes chimp signals that he wants to have sexual relations with her, but for whatever reason she’s not interested and refuses. Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will?

If you answer “no it is not morally wrong,” imagine further a group of humans. On the materialist view, a human is just a jumped up hairless ape. Is it morally wrong for a human male to force a human female to have sex with him against her will? If you answer “yes, it is morally wrong,” I certainly agree with you. But please explain why on the materialist view it is not wrong for a hairy ape to force a female to have sex with him, but it is wrong for a hairless ape to force a female to have sex with him.

The whole topic is disingenuous. After provoking the remaining materialists able to post, Arrington later says: "I am glad materialists rarely act as if what they say they believe is true. Instead, the vast majority of them coast along on the ethical system bestowed upon them by the Christian tradition while at the same time furiously chopping away at the root of that system. Ironic, huh?"

Arrington's play is, of course, what we know it was all along: to show the befuddled materialists/atheists that they don't actually believe materialism or atheism. Deep down, materialists and atheists are rebellious children who really do believe in God and Jesus and Mohammed and really want to be reconciled to their Maker.

Succumbing to acute SIWOTI, I finally commented

“Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will?”

I’ll say “yes” because if I believed one animal was harming another and it was in my power to stop it or to prevent it beforehand, I would do so.

Thus it is “morally wrong” from my perspective. Whether it is morally wrong from the perspective of the chimp, and whether another chimp has a “will” to be violated–or even a sense to think it has a will–is something I don’t know.

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that materialism is not a basis for morality. The surprising thing is that people seem to think materialism’s amorality is surprising.

You might want a follow-up question: Since you do not base your moral values on materialism, on what do you base them?

This comment received almost no response. I later commented:

“Again, the question is: Why do materialist have different moral expectations for chimps than they do for humans when, on their premises, chimps and humans are pretty much the same thing? Care to take a shot at that?”

Materialists have different moral expectations for chimps than for humans because materialists base their moral expectations on something other than materialism.

Chimps and humans are “pretty much the same,” as you say. But they are not exactly the same. Their brains work differently. Their societies work differently. Their tools and technologies are different in number, power, and scope. Their sense of self and species-identity lead to different behaviors and natural attitudes.

Since materialism is amoral, as I think we all agree, and cannot be the basis of sustained communal living, then materialists must base their moral expectations on something else. I can’t speak for all materialists or for anyone but myself, but I think it is broadly true that materialists base their moral expectations on learned and reasoned ideas of human-specific “good” in human-dominated societies.

This comment generated two responses, neither of which was central to the Arrington's original post. I responded to the second remark directed to my comment with this:

“Generally, materialists seem to be satisfied in explaining away morality through sociobiological evolution.”

Maybe, but the point is that materialism is amoral. It is not a basis for morality, yet it does not preclude morality either.

In any event, the questions of the OP have been answered:

Do materialists believe rape is wrong? Yes.

Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will? I answered “yes” in comment 40 and explained why. However, I explained there and in comment 66 that our view of moral chimp behavior is entirely separate from our view of moral human behavior.

If the point of the OP is that materialists are inconsistent to give chimps a free pass on rape but not humans, then that point has been demonstrated false because of (1) materialism’s neutrality w/r/t morality and (2) the difference–already mentioned a few times–between human assessment of its own species versus other species.

Other questions, such as objective morality, are peripheral to the topic introduced in the OP, and so should be dealt with separately. In post 40, I suggested this question as a potential OP: “To materialists: Since you do not base your moral values on materialism, on what do you base them?”

It's tiring and disheartening to have god-botherers repeatedly assert materialists don't really understand what materialism and atheism mean. This argument is the converse of the old standby: "If you really understood Christianity, you would believe. Since you are not a believer, you must not really 'get it.'"

We get materialism. We understand it. We know what it "implies" and doesn't. Same with atheism.

And we mean it.

Moar on Moral Relativism

I continue to take a beating on my defense of moral relativism. Initially, the main purpose of my defense was to make only one claim:

To acknowledge cultural conditioning in morality does not prevent one from judging specific actions of another culture.

This claim still seems indisputably correct.

As is my wont, I took the one claim further and laid out a thumbnail defense of moral relativism. I was perhaps mistaken to do so, now that I reflect on matters. For one thing, I am not a philosopher and before these posts I have neither fully explored nor concretely adopted any particular philosophical stand related to morality. My mistake, then, has been to lock myself into a position of moral relativism before I have thoroughly investigated the scholarship in and around it.

Nevertheless, certain elements of relativism and objectivism seem irrefutable:

1. Cultural factors do play a role in what people consider moral and immoral behavior. Surely, we can agree on this?
2. An objectivist position that asserts universal rightness or wrongness of specific behavior/category X is indefensible. How can any human phenomenon, such as morality, be universal?

Beyond these elements, the important parts of the discussion concern not only when one is permitted to pass moral judgment on an act, as I've mentioned, but also when one is permitted to impose one's own morality on others by acting punitively or otherwise by prohibiting specific behavior.

I've also made a severe charge against some of the objectivists I have encountered:

Here's what I think actually is going on with these folks: What they are really after is sufficient justification for imposing one-world under Christianity. They're looking for the reason, not to use it necessarily but for the security of having it. They are like a nation that trusts only itself with nuclear weapons and doesn't get why that would make everyone else nervous.

Honestly, these statements frighten me a bit because they are serious. Yet, I am not sure they are incorrect. That's why I have not revised or stricken them. Perhaps someone can show me a reason to think I am wrong on these charges, but Christianity's self-appointed mission to evangelize strikes me as a reason to think I'm correct.  

So what now? I will read up over the next week or two and aim to come back with a better articulated version of my position--whatever it may be--and why I think it is the most reasonable.

A week or two is virtually no time, and the matters under discussion can legitimately take a lifetime to argue and to study. I know that, and I mean no disrespect to the subject or the people who study it. My modest aim is to put together something coherent and more considered; my aim, in other words, is to improve.

I need 2012 to be about my dissertation, more than anything else. Many topics, and indeed blogging itself, will probably be placed on the back burner next year.

Holy Spirit, Holy Bullshit

Because I was invited, I have been attending an Alpha course with my wife, who is a Christian. The Alpha course, for those who don't know, is a Christian outreach program. It consists of weekly sessions to persuade people into becoming more devout Christians. It purports to offer a "safe" place for raising doubts and questions about Christianity, but--if my experience is typical--it's really an ongoing sermon conducted in "free" dinners, worship songs, DVD lectures, and small group discussions.

In my participation in the course, I have sought to be neither the token Jew nor the token atheist. Certainly, if anyone is under the impression that I may turn Christian, s/he is quite mistaken. After all...facts are facts, and no doctrine or dogma will make me give up on facts. And the facts are against Christianity as they are against Judaism, Islam, and all other theisms.

I may post later on my experiences in Alpha. My double background--Jewish and atheist--may add something new to other perspectives on the course that are already available. For now, though, I want to talk about the Holy Spirit. In the course, we seem to be building up to a focus on the importance of believing in it and venerating it.

My life as a medievalist and as an American has given me some access to the idea of the Holy Spirit, but now that I must face it by itself, squarely, I must ask: How is it that that we can talk about a holy spirit and not have the sense that we're just making shit up? I don't mean to be rude, but...come on! A fucking spirit? Are people serious about this?

Of course they are serious. I understand the importance placed on believing in or denying the Holy Spirit. I wish, however, that someone would attempt to justify the concept to me. More than most anything else in Christian doctrine, the Holy Spirit demonstrates that the power of religion comes from its stimulation of the individual psyche.

Let's look at a few pronouncements on the Holy Spirit, and remember also that for many faith demands belief in the Holy Spirit. Hear it again: Faith demands belief. Faith does not entail belief or lead to belief or point to belief. It demands and requires belief. Believe it or else you are not one of the faithful. If you disbelieve, you are not one of the godly and one of the church. If you disbelieve, you are an opponent of God and an enemy.

The basics of the belief are:

• The Holy Spirit is one "person" in the triune god. There's God the dad, Jesus the boy, and the Holy Spirit.
• The Holy Spirit shares the same essence as God and Jesus but is distinct: think of three separate impressions made in wax. Same substance, distinct forms.
• The Holy Spirit is not material but is rather perceived within a person as having emanated from God.

With the Holy Spirit, we are basically talking about people feeling as though they are instruments of God's will. The Holy Spirit is God acting in man. Christianity uses the Greek New Testament exclusively as justification for the concept. The Gospel of John figures prominently in the defense, as does the Book of Acts and Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.

It's clear, however, that no justification for the concept of the Holy Spirit exists outside the NT and the Christian interpretive tradition. We cannot apprehend the Holy Spirit through the senses or through instruments. Yet we can get in big, big trouble for not believing in the Holy Spirit. This is the sin that will not be pardoned according to the Synoptic Gospels. And people scoff at Bertrand Russell for having said fear is the foundation of religion.

If you think religion is about intellectual or even emotional arguments, you are only partly and secondarily correct. The psyche, the motivational part of the mind, is the the endgame of religion. Religion is all about supplying motives and about motivating. The Holy Spirit is, ultimately, a metaphor for motivation: motivation against reason, motivation against intellect, motivation against interest.

I began thinking I didn't know what the Holy Spirit was, but I realize now that I get it perfectly. What's more, I get what Christianity uses it for.

ABD Again!

"ABD again, Just can't wait to be ABD again...."

I am elated to report that I have passed my Ph.D. candidacy exams. I am now, once again, all but dissertation (ABD). In 2000, I took and passed the earlier incarnation of the same exams, but I never completed a dissertation. Now I have the opportunity to make good on all the time and money I had spent so long ago.

I am especially gratified at passing because my work life was so busy that finding time and ways to prepare for the exam was extremely challenging. I broke down my strategy to its core--study only the most important parts of the most important texts. It worked.

However, passing the exam and giving myself pats on the back will be meaningless if I don't finish the dissertation. Fortunately, I have a good topic and the resources to do the job. One reason I was unable to complete the dissertation the first time around was lack of access to the texts I needed.

And so, I'll humbly go where I had once gone before...and then I'll hope to travel beyond.

Are Divine-Human Interactions Possible?

[I'm pulled into ever more minutia-discussions on Kuzari]

This is more fallout from the continuing email exchange I have been having with Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb concerning my post on the Kuzari Principle. I have argued that Gottlieb needs to do a better job of establishing the possibility that divine-human interactions take place. Gottlieb disagrees.

Originally, I had asked him “Why do we think that it even makes sense to conceive of immortal, super-beings?” I asked this question because he began his syllogism explaining Kuzari on the premise, "Let E be a possible event...." The word "possible" is Gottlieb's, not mine. For the Sinai revelation to work as E, a possible event, the God of Exodus must exist and that God must be able to make himself perceptible to people.

Now, we can think of other conditions that must be possible before Sinai can be possible, but I want to stop with the two conditions I just stated. I had originally asked Gottlieb about the first condition, reasons for thinking God exists, but here I want to spend time considering the second condition, reasons for thinking that God and humans can have actual interactions with each other.

At first, Gottlieb avoided answering my question by misconstruing my request as a demand that he "prove" the possibility of such an event. But, no, I had asked that he establish the possibility, not prove it.

I suspect Gottlieb knows it is no simple matter to establish the possibility that divine beings communicate and interact with real humans. To illustrate, let’s claim that “It’s possible that divine being DB has shaken hands with Fred.” Compare this claim with four others:

(1) “It’s possible that human being HB has shaken hands with Fred.”
(2) “It’s possible that grizzly bear GB has shaken hands with Fred.”
(3) “It’s possible that the color green has shaken hands with Fred.”
(4) “It’s possible that imaginary character IC has shaken hands with Fred.”

Do we allow that all five claims are equally possible? Or do we balk and suggest that the degree of possibility will be influenced by (a) conditions such as historical time, geographical space, and available technology; (b) our prior knowledge and assumptions about the kinds of entities named as divine, human, grizzly bear, color, and imaginary; and (c) our understanding of the speaking intent of the claimants and the modality of the claims [e.g., persuasive or entertainment intent; factual or figurative mode]?

Using these three criteria, we can propose reasonable standards of impossibility:

Claim (1) will be impossible if HB and Fred don’t live at the same time and never come across one another.
Claim (2) will be impossible for the same reason as claim (1).
Claim (3) will be impossible if the claim is intended as a straightforward, factual statement.
Claim (4) will be impossible if the claim is intended as a straightforward, factual statement and Fred refers to a real human being.

But what makes the divine-human interaction claim impossible? Well, for one thing we cannot use the question of the divinities’ existence or non-existence because the claim already presupposes existence and because we want to separate the category “divinity” from the category of “imaginary character IC.” Nothing seems to make the claim impossible.

Before the religious among us rejoice too much, I remind everyone that we can achieve an equally possible and also-unfalsifiable result by using the name of any divinity or mythical being: divine-human interaction, God-human interaction, mermaid-human interaction, Ra-human interaction, Odin-human interaction, centaur-human interaction, and so on. These types of interaction are all possible and all unfalsifiable.

I had asked Gottlieb “Why do we think that it even makes sense to conceive of immortal, super-beings?” I could now just as well ask “Why do we think that it makes sense to conceive of mermaids and centaurs?” At one time, good reasons may have included explanation, fun, or for sake of tradition. Today, however, the questions are whether these reasons still hold and whether other conceptions offer better reasons.

The larger point is that  

We do not automatically grant the existence of gods--we do not and we should not. Anyone who wants to place "God" in the context of reality will have to address the questions of why posit a god at all and why posit this or that version of a god.

To put the point another way: It is becoming ever less necessary to take seriously the supernatural substance of religions.

What Exactly Does Theism Explain?

[Upon closer inspection, flaws emerge]

This blog post will get a "masochism" tag. Against all good sense I followed a link to a new collection of essays: Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science, edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona. Why do I follow such links? I don't know: I always think that maybe this time I'll read a really good argument. Invariably, I'm disappointed.

I glanced through the book's table of contents using Amazon's "Look Inside" tool, and some of the titles seemed promising. Then I read a bit of David Wood's piece, "God, Suffering, and Santa Claus: An Examination of the Explanatory Power of Theism and Atheism." From what I read, it's a deceptive piece grounded in horrible thinking. Read, for example, how Wood sets the stage for the essay:

In the previous chapter, we considered three approaches theists can take when responding to the argument from evil. The present chapter addresses a related issue--the claim that theism should be rejected because it doesn't explain or account for the presence of suffering in our world.

Wood doesn't say who makes this claim, and it's good he doesn't because the claim is quite stupid. Of course theism explains and accounts for the presence of suffering. We all know that theism has its accounting fors and explanations.

The real problem is that theism doesn't do a very good job of accounting for and explaining--and, and, and it doesn't provide evidence of sufficient quantity and quality!

Theism stinks as an answer because it explains everything all the time. The answer is always "God did it." It's as simple and definitive you can get without getting into the actual complicated details.

• Why is there something instead of nothing? God did it.
• Why does our world have just the right combination of conditions (i.e., fine-tuning) for life? God did it.
• How did life on Earth begin and how did so many different and various species of animal emerge on our planet? Why, God did it!
• How is it that people developed consciousness. Hey-na, Hey-na, God did it.
• What about morality? Yep, God did that.
• How do we explain miracles, smarty pants? Uh-huh, God. Checkmate.

However, "God did it" never makes a satisfactory answer and simply is not viable as an explanation. To illustrate, let's look at Wood's very first argument about the explanatory power of theism:

[T]heism explains why we have a world at all: God has the power to create, and he exercised this power in creating the world. We know scientifically that the universe had a beginning, and we know philosophically that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. Theism posits a cause powerful enough to create the universe.

I have to admit that this three-sentence argument stuns me, not only because it's woefully inadequate but also because there must be people who will find it persuasive! Let's break it down a bit:

(1a) Theism explains why we have a world at all. Big deal. On its face, this statement blandly asserts that we have a world because some god exists who preceded the world and caused it to come into being at some point in time through some means. We could replace the word "god" with "alien," "physical event" or "something" and the statement would be just as true. Just because theism makes an explanation does not mean the explanation is good or that it's accurate.

(1b) God has the power to create. Sorry to repeat myself, but big deal. I was skimming Ovid's Metamorphoses over the weekend, and his gods also had the power to create worlds. How do we know that Wood's God or Ovid's God(s) can create? What are the bases for knowing this?

(1c) And he exercised this power in creating the world. This is according to a book that's thousands of years old, a book with an oral history that precedes it for centuries and with contemporaneous analogues in neighboring cultures. But going beyond the dubious authority of the Bible, the questions of the nature of the creative power and what/how we know anything at all about it are insurmountable. It seems to me that at some point every power that we ascribe to God becomes indistinguishable from the unfolding workings of a vast natural universe operating according to laws of physics.

(2a) We know scientifically that the universe had a beginning. OK, but so what? How does this knowledge unambiguously point to one or more immortal beings preceding and causing this beginning? And what's the connection between having a beginning and being created? It's one thing to say the universe begun, but that doesn't help us figure out whether it was created, whatever "created" means.

(2b) And we know philosophically that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. This statement sounds very much like the first premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, championed most notably by arch-apologist William Lane Craig. The KCA purports to provide a virtually iron-clad philosophical argument for the existence of God. But consider this question: when exactly does something begin to exist? What is the defining instance--that ultra-small fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond--that constitutes the very first instance of something having begun to exist? Now I'm no philosopher, I don't pretend to be, but it seems to me that "the beginning" is a human convention rather than a natural one. Or it's at least some part conventional and some part natural. Thus, we don't know philosophically that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. We think it or we speculate about it, but we don't know it. The KCA's first premise is to me an intellectually squishy thing and surely not something upon which to base one's whole life.

(3) Theism posits a cause powerful enough to create the universe. This essentially re-states (1a), which means we've come full circle. I don't care, and neither should you, that theism posits cause A or cause B. What's the evidence for each? What's the strength of the evidence for each? How do we determine the better one?

Wood argues that "Atheists maintain that theism is a poor hypothesis because it fails to account for suffering." He further asserts that "theism accounts for a number of significant facts about our world." I have just shown that theism does not at all account for much of anything. Indeed, theism hardly accounts for itself. Theism's explanatory power stops at the first level of accounting: something caused something else to happen. Forget about accounting for suffering, theism is a poor hypothesis because it fails to account for the specifics of what it's trying to explain.

Wood also tries, deceptively, to pit theism against Atheism as two different modes of explaining facts in/about the world. This is a misrepresentation of Atheism. As a theist, Wood may see theism as attempting to explain the world. However, as an Atheist I don't ask Atheism to explain the world, and I don't use it that way. How do I "use" Atheism? I once wrote:

Atheism has something important to say about the world, our assumptions about the world, and the institutions we use to teach us about the world (including religion and science).

Atheism is commentary. What it says is not an explanation of the world but rather a determination of what makes some explanations better or worse than others. Theism and Atheism, then, are not at the same level; they are not trying to do the same things.

Atheism most decidedly is not an answer. it's rather a commitment to continue pursuing answers at their source. To me, theism's claims to have answers are very much overstated. Those of us who identify as Atheists are committed to scrutinizing theism's claims as we do all other claims, and when we find overstatement we call it out.

This, therefore, is what theists really must understand about Atheists and Atheism:

We Atheists are looking very closely at the explanations theism provides. We take theism's statements seriously. We consider these statements and want to understand them. We can and often do approach them without malice and without prejudice. But we're not going to lie and say that theism provides answers when it really doesn't. And we're not going to wink and call theism's explanations "good enough." They aren't.

I don't want to be called hostile or unfair to religion. I don't want to be thought of as someone who is blindly or heedlessly contemptuous of religion and religious beliefs. The fact is that I'm considering theism's arguments earnestly, and these arguments fail badly every time. They just don't work.

What's an honest and good person to do?