Moral Health

Here is an unvarnished truth with which the committed atheist Richard Dawkins needs to come to grip: If you do not want to believe in God, then there is probably nothing that anyone can say or do that would make you believe.  Likewise, if you want to believe in God, then there is probably nothing anyone can say or do that would make you disbelieve.  Truth be told, nobody believes or disbelieves in God simply because of some string of sentences or series of acts.  To be sure, people change sides all the time.  But the explanation for this is not that, alas, they stumbled upon this or that argument or series of facts.

As I shall try to show, the belief in God is very much akin to the belief that our parents loved us or our commitment to friendship or romantic love.  And that, alas, tells us something important about our humanity.

Richard Dawkins is a committed atheist, and a very talented evolutionary scientist, author of the influential book The Selfish Gene.

In his 2006 book, The God Delusion, Dawkins examines and finds entirely unacceptable a multitude of considerations that purport to show or provide reasons to believe that God exists.  But is that why he does not believe in God?  Was it the epiphany of seeing that Thomas Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God flounder that turned Dawkins into an atheist?  I don’t think so.

Or, was there a string of empirical truths that did it for Dawkins?  For instance, was it his commitment to the truth of evolutionary theory?  I doubt it.  Why?  Because there is no string of empirical truths about the world that yield the conclusion that God does not exist.  Empirical truths can yield all sorts of interesting conclusions about emperically verifiable things.  If you know, for instance, that Jane is at this very moment in Brazil, then you also know that this very same Jane cannot be in Spain two minutes later.  We do not at this point in time have the means to traverse thousands of miles in a mere 2 minutes.

But there is no set of empirical facts that will yield in a like manner the conclusion that God does not exist.  True, many religious folks seem to think that there is some incompatibility between the truth of evolution and the existence of God.  The incompatibility, rather, is in the truth of evolution and certain actions attributed to God.  If the claim is that God brought the human race into existence by combining water, sand, and leaves from a tree: well that action attributed to God is clearly incompatible with evolution’s claim that the human race evolved from apes.

However, the belief that the human race evolved from apes which, in turn, evolved from creatures in the sea (or whatever) hardly requires me, on the pain of otherwise being irrational, to assert that God does not exist.

The underlying premise of Dawkins’ argument is that human beings should be guided by the facts and none other than the facts.  I myself wonder whether, from an evolutionary perspective, this is how human beings are actually constituted.

Consider the following very simple conviction that many a person has: My parents love me.  Now, what facts actually establish this?  It is true, of course, that in the typical case a person can say that her parents did this and that and the other for her.  A person will invariably point to many sacrifices that were made by her parents on her behalf.  But how is all of this supposed to establish the conclusion that she was loved by her parents, especially since the very same action can flow from entirely different and incompatible motives?  Was it a photo opportunity, given my bid for president, or my affection for you as my friend that motivated me to jump into the pool and save your life?

Now, imagine two families, one rich and one poor.  John is a child of the poor family and Jane is a child of the rich family.  As it turns out John and Jane are playmates.  Now, Jane gets all the toys and amenities and privileges that a child could want; whereas John does not.  Jane, then, can point to one thing and then another as evidence, supposedly, that her parents love her.  But now I ask you: Is John at a disadvantage when it comes to thinking that his parents love him?  After all, he can surely see that his parents are not giving him all the things that Jane’s parents are giving her.  His parents may tell him that they are poor.  But what exactly does that utterance do for a child?  Surely it is not the case that John has doubts as to whether his parents loved him and the utterance “We are a poor family” wipes away the doubts.

My general point here is that the belief that one was loved by one’s parents is not so much tied this fact and then that one.  Rather, this belief is simply tied to the phenomenology of the experience with one’s parents, which is about a host of quite ineffable things from a touch to a look.  The fact that parental love can be secured in this way makes it possible for children to feel loved by their parents across an exceedingly wide-variety of differences.  In particular, rich children are not at an advantage when it comes to having the conviction that they are loved by their parents.

By the way, a similar line of reasoning applies to friendship or romantic love.  There is no one thing that establishes that people have romantic love for one another?  Not even sex.

In an odd way, then the real problem with Dawkins book, The God Delusion, is that he does not see the forest for the trees; and this is quite striking given that he is an evolutionary theorist.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins is committed to the tedious exercise of exposing one fallacy after another on the part of those who believe in God or who ague for God’s existence.  Or, Dawkins draws attention to one morally unacceptable piece of behavior after another that has been committed in the name of God.  For example, he tells us about the abominable behavior of the religious pro-life folks who kill doctors who perform abortions because these religious folks regard the fetus as a person.  See the section in The God Delusion entitled “Faith and the Sanctity of Life” (pp. 291-298).  I have discussed some of his other claims in a previous blog-entry.

What does Dawkins imagine?  Does he think that a theist who completes The God Delusion will go: “What on earth am I doing believing in God?  This is utterly silly of me.”  Does he expect the reader to conclude that all religious people are morally bad or more so than all non-religious people?

No honest and reasonably informed person could possibly think either that all religious people are morally bad or that all non-religious people are morally good.  Certainly, this much is clear.  There is no way for Richard Dawkins to establish the truth of the counterfactual that if there had been no religion in the world, then the world would be a better place.

I claimed that Richard Dawkins does not see the forest for the trees.  What did I mean by that?  The question that he might ask is this: Is there is something about human nature that makes it the case that belief in God remains such a rich feature of the human tapestry?

To see my point, consider the case of romantic love.  People continue to believe in and to be moved by the idea of romantic love although if one just looked at the facts alone, one might deem the pursuit of romantic love rationally indefensible.  Look at all the betrayal, deceit, and pained caused by the pursuit of romantic love gone awry.  True, there are some marvelous successes.  Just so, there are lots and lots and lots of horrendous failures.  So it is notwithstanding the fact that case after case of romantic love often starts with the greatest of hopes.

What distinguishes human beings from mere animals is that we are and can be animated by the transcendent.  Whether it be parental love or romantic love or love between friends, the truth of the matter is that love is necessarily a transcendent good.  Facts are relevant, but are rarely decisive—in just the way that (as Kurt Baier observed) candlelight is relevant to having a romantic atmosphere but not decisive with regard to whether the atmosphere is romantic or not.  Out of love, we make sacrifices and take risks that we would in the typical instance never ever make for another and for which there can be no rationally compelling argument to make on behalf of another.

At yet a more rarified level, religion speaks to the impulse that I have just described in the preceding paragraph.  Can this impulse be put to evil use?  Absolutely.  But this merely tells us what we already know, namely that anything can be abused—even the transcendent traits of love and loyalty can be abused in the most horrific ways.

Accordingly, living well consists not in destroying any trait that can be abused, but so successfully harnessing the trait in question for that which is good that the trait’s abuse is kept to a minimum if not eliminated entirely.  Whether it is religion or love, this is the challenge that we human beings have and no mere animal has.  This challenge is the mark of our humanity.

What Richard Dawkins has unwittingly shown in his book The God Delusion is not that belief in God, as such, is the problem, but rather that the fear of having that belief is.

If someone asked me for a simple indication of a morally decent person, I would answer: The individual who is not prone to gossip.  Of course, helping others is generally speaking a wonderful indication of a decent person.  But, alas, many people do not have the means or the wherewithal to do that.  But anyone who is in full possession of her or his mental faculties has the wherewithal to refrain from gossiping.

Gossip has a very striking feature: It veers towards gratuitous negativity about another.  I suppose that strictly speaking there can be good gossip.  But the truth be told, it is rare that the unconfirmed rumor going around is that Smith stayed up all night helping the neighbors or that Jones refused to attend the party because the host informed him that there would be drugs at the event.  In general, it is rare that what people gossip about is what anyone admires.  This is part of the reason for why I hold that one indication of a decent person is that the individual is not prone to gossip.

The idea that gossip is gratuitous is extremely important to why I think it unlikely that someone who gossips is also decent individual.  That said, there clearly are times when we need to talk about another.  If you are my friend and Opidopo (whom I know well) wronged you in a most egregious manner, then it might be perfectly natural for you to talk about that wrong with me.  My job, if I am a decent person, would be to help you to understand how it is that Opidopo, contrary to your wildest expectations, has wronged you; and doing that might require me to share with you some unsavory details about his life.

Suppose that Opidopo is prone to jealousy.  I have done my job if I have helped you to appreciate that.  But now suppose that not only is Opidopo prone to jealousy but he was convicted of pedophilia 20 years ago, where this has nothing whatsoever to do with what he did to you.  On my view, to tell you about that conviction constitutes gossip, precisely because that fact has nothing whatsoever to do with his having wronged you.

So Opidopo has just egregiously wronged you and I explain to you that he is given to jealousy, as well as telling you about his pedophilia conviction.  The latter might very well be an instance of excusable gossip—if, that is, my motive was to help you see that in general Opidopo is a troubled person.  A lot would turn on just how egregious the wrong is.  There are lynchpin negative facts, as I shall say, that put everything in perspective regarding a person’s inappropriate behavior.  Knowing when to offer a lynchpin fact is a matter of great maturity.  I shall come to that later.

Why have I chosen gossip as the indicator of a decent person?  The answer is extremely simple.  Given that we are healthy: If there is anything on this earth over which we have very nearly complete control it is what we say.  If we don’t have that control, surely we could have it if we wanted to have it.  We could have that control even when we are angry or profoundly hurt.

With rare exception, we do not say anything and everything that is hurtful when we are angry.  And when we do it is because we chose to do so in order to hurt the person.  We may cry uncontrollably, but we do not speak uncontrollably.  This is because necessarily speech requires a choice of one word rather than another.  Thus, you might call me a “bastard” or a “fucking bastard” or a “mother-fucking bastard”.  But necessarily you made a choice.

On the one hand, then, nothing is easier to produce than a string of words.  On the other, we have no greater control than over that which we speak.  Therein lies the key to my claim that we can judge a decent person by the extent to which he is prone to gossip.

When it comes to many things—food, for example—you may deceive me or simply, with the best of intentions, inaccurately describe what the food item is or tastes like.  But it is utterly impossible for you to deceive me about what I might choose to utter in response to what you say.

The greatest exercise of free will among human beings lies in what they choose to say.  The choice to say one thing rather than another or not to say anything at all is always there.  And with speech more than with any other activity not doing—that is, not saying—anything is often a formidable exercise of willpower.  With an activity, it is easy enough to miss the moment to offer help or it can be easy enough to doubt whether one has the skills to offer the assistance needed.  Not so with speech.  Accordingly, silence is invariably a choice like none other.

The line between gossiping and being properly informative about a person, especially that person’s faults, is undoubtedly a very thin one.  But it is no less real on that account.

If I know that Opidopo has a pedophilia past, then surely I have a moral duty to inform you of this, even though he is married, if I also know that you are getting ready to have your young children spend the weekend at the home where he and his wife reside.  Suppose, on the other hand, that he is given to viciously berating you.  Whether I shall tell you the lynchpin fact about his pedophilia past no doubt has a lot to do with the kind of person that you are.

You might be the kind of person who in response to that information remarks: “Thank you so much for sharing that with me.  I can now put things in perspective and simply ignore his remarks”.  Or, you might be the sort of person who feels the need to tell every Jane, Tom, and Harry.  Given that I can have clarity here: my telling you in the first instance would not be gossip; whereas my telling you in the second would be.

This gives us another insight into why a person’s not being prone to gossip points towards that individual having a decent character.  There are two ways for a person not to be prone to gossip: (i) The individual may choose by and large to error on the side of caution and simply refrain from commenting on others.  (ii) The individual may exercise enormous maturity of judgment.  With (i), we have an enormous exercise of self-control, as the person refuses to speak negatively about others.  With (ii), we have the excellence of not speaking negatively about others plus the additional excellence of the ability to judge moral character well.  And this tells us what we already know, namely that every excellence admits of degrees.  In the move from (i) to (ii), a person moves from being not only a decent person but to being an upright person.

These remarks underscore the time-honored saying that knowledge is power.  It has been the case and it shall always be the case that he mark of how a person uses her or his power is an ineluctable indication of the kind of moral character that the individual has.  Alas, the idea behind gossip presented in this essay is none other than an expression of this time-honored truth.

A most striking corollary here is this: A gossip should not be among those whom we admire.  But that is another essay.