Tag: atheism

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Why are Atheist Athletes Rare?

By Jim Spiegel

Last year, NFL punter Chris Kluwe made headlines because of his atheism.  The reason for his newsworthiness, as the writer of this Psychology Today report on Kluwe notes, is that “open secularity is rare in pro sports.”  This is something that has puzzled me since writing my atheism book several years ago.  Why are atheist athletes rare?

You can find all sorts of atheist lists on the Internet.  These include such categories as famous atheists, celebrity atheists, and top atheists in the world.  And it isn’t just atheist apologists that provide these lists.  There are also prodigious Wikipedia lists of atheists in various fields, including politics and law, science and technology, and arts and entertainment.

But try finding a similarly expansive list of atheist athletes.  Here’s the best I could do: 19 Famous Athletes Who are Atheist.  This is a classic case of exceptions proving the rule.  Pretty slim pickings.  I found it interesting, for starters, that they couldn’t even find one more to make it an even twenty.  (They should add Kluwe, since he’s not included.)  And it is supposedly a list of “famous” athletes.  Yet, as an avid sports buff, I only recognized five people on the list.  Moreover, some of these reach way back, such as to an Italian cyclist from 70 years ago.  And another is a WWE wrestler—isn’t that better categorized as acting?  After reading through this disappointing list, I discovered the Top 15 Athletes Who are Atheist.  But it largely overlaps with the list of 19 “famous” atheists above.

So why are atheists so rare in professional sports?  I have a theory, but to explain it I’ll need to start by discussing the primary rationale that atheists and religious skeptics give for not believing in God.  This is the problem of evil.  Lance Armstrong has been quoted as saying, “If there was a God, I’d still have both nuts.”  This statement encapsulates a common intuition about human suffering and religious belief, which essentially constitutes an atheistic argument:  God would not want humans to suffer significantly.  However, there is a lot of suffering in the world.  Therefore, God must not exist.  If you were to interview all of the atheists listed in the sites above and ask them why they reject theism, most if not all of them would cite suffering as a major reason.  But these men and women are not unique in their awareness of suffering.  All serious athletes are well acquainted with pain.  And here may lie the clue to understanding why atheist athletes are rare.

To do intense athletic training is to welcome a degree of suffering.  Athletes understand the usefulness of pain as a means to physical conditioning and mental toughness, which ultimately means success.  No pain no gain, as the saying goes.  Consequently, we should expect athletes to be less inclined to see suffering as antithetical to good ends.  And to become accustomed to linking these two things—pain and gain—is to gain a deeper existential awareness of how suffering is essential for growth in all of life, not just athletics.

This in turn will enable the athlete to recognize that God can work through painful experiences generally to bring about greater goods in people’s lives.  So he or she will be more ready to affirm with the prophet Isaiah that it is good how God gives us “the bread of adversity and the water of affliction” (Isa. 30:20).  And just as the difficulties and challenges one faces on the court, diamond or gridiron make one better, the athlete will be likely to affirm with the apostle James that our trials in life have a constructive end, namely to make us “mature and complete, not lacking anything” (Jas. 1:4).  Such an attitude might not create a perfect immunity to atheism or religious skepticism, but it certainly could prevent one’s faith from being undermined by the problem of evil.  And this might explain why atheist athletes are so rare.

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From Christianity to Atheism?

By Jim Spiegel

When reading or hearing the stories of atheists, certain patterns tend to emerge.  One standard account goes like this:  I was a devout Christian but along the way became dissatisfied with certain aspects of my faith.  As I learned more about the Bible I realized that it is loaded with problems.  After examining it more closely, I concluded that it is horribly unreliable and really just a bunch of made up stories, essentially religious fairy-tales.  This realization, combined with all of the hypocrisy I witnessed among Christians, essentially spelled the end of my faith.  So now I’m a completely fulfilled atheist.  Examples of this basic story abound on the Internet, such as here and here.

Now there are a few things about this journey to un-faith paradigm that bother me and that from a rational standpoint don’t add up.  For one thing, it strikes me as odd that so many atheists moved directly from giving up Christianity to giving up theism.  The Christian faith is just one of three major brands of theism (along with Judaism and Islam).  To falsify one form of this general religious perspective is not to falsify it in all of its forms.  After rejecting Christianity, why not look into one of the other major versions of theism?  Perhaps such atheists will insist that in discovering the Bible is a book of fairy tales they have basically discovered that all religions “of the book” (in this case, all three including the Old Testament) are baseless.  But, then, we may ask, why limit one’s theistic alternatives to these three traditions?  Why not consider generic theism or a non-religious philosophical theism such as that espoused by the likes of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle?—at least until one has thoroughly reviewed the evidences for God.  Some thinkers, such as Antony Flew late in his career, have done just this, all the while keeping an open mind about the possibility that the world creator had revealed himself in some special way.

The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt
The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt

Another unsettling fact about many atheists is their rejection of Jesus Christ, not just as a religious figure or, more specifically, the God-incarnate savior of humankind, but in toto.  That is, in rejecting Jesus Christ as Christians believe in him, one need not also reject his teachings.  One can deny that Jesus is “Lord” but still recognize his wisdom, even philosophical genius, as evident in his many brilliant discourses and parables.  One might even reasonably say that Jesus is a great philosopher.  As Doug Groothuis shows in his fascinating little book On Jesus, the itinerant Nazarene is undeniably a profound and innovative philosophical mind, whatever else he might be.

Suppose a religious tradition emerged which had as a core teaching the notion that Immanuel Kant was divine and somehow God’s envoy to save humanity from our moral faults, such as by assiduously following the Categorical Imperative, praying in Kant’s name, and so on.  Now if I decided, as I think we all should, that Kant is not the savior, would it make sense to also completely disregard him as a philosopher or otherwise ignore his many valuable insights about ultimate questions?  The same might be said of many other great thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Hume, and Plantinga.  The fact that none of these thinkers is divine is no excuse to completely ignore them as philosophers and sources of great wisdom.  In fact, we should study their teachings closely regardless of how they might be misconstrued from a religious standpoint.  Other people’s overestimation of their ultimate identity or moral goodness is no reason to ignore their philosophical genius.  Yet, this is what most atheists and other non-Christians do when it comes to Jesus.  They seem to assume that rejection of him as God-incarnate and/or savior of humanity is tantamount to rejecting him as wise or even as a significant ethicist or philosopher of religion.  But these two things are far from equivalent.

For this reason I often implore Christians-turned-atheists to return to Jesus, if only as a student of the man’s philosophical acumen.  Jesus’ logical skill, ethical teachings, anthropological insights, and cultural criticism (usually aimed at religious leaders, which should please any atheist)—not to mention his rhetorical genius and unparalleled influence on world history—all merit close study.  For these reasons we can all benefit from a better understanding of Jesus, whether we call him Lord or merely a great human thinker.

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Unreasonable Doubt—Answering Some Critics

By Jim Spiegel

An article of mine, entitled “Unreasonable Doubt,” appeared in last month’s issue of Christianity Today.  It is now available on-line here.  In the article I discuss the major themes of my book, The Making of an Atheist, which aims to explain and apply the biblical account of atheism.

With the publication of the CT article, a few more folks have written me to say that I commit the ad hominem fallacy or that my book is offensive or that my argument is circular because I assume that the Bible is divinely inspired.  (Perhaps the next issue of CT will run some readers’ letters that make such protests.)  These were the main complaints among my atheist critics when the book was first published last year.  Because I’ve grown weary of rebutting these objections one by one in emails, I’ve decided it would be a good idea to address them in a blog post.  So here you go.

As regards the ad hominem fallacy accusation, my book may contain its share of mistakes, but this is surely not one of them.  The ad hominem fallacy is committed when one insists upon the rejection of a position because of some fact (or alleged fact) about the person who holds that view.  I do not argue that we should reject atheism because of any facts about atheists.  In fact, in my book I review many of the objective evidences for theism.  Rather, my thesis concerns the moral-psychological roots of atheism.  So, to use an analogy:  It would be ad hominem to say that we should reject Capitalism because Adam Smith was a bad guy.  But it would be perfectly appropriate to argue that Smith came to affirm his view because of X, Y, and Z.  The argument in my book is like the latter, not the former.

As for the supposed offensiveness of my book, well, that depends on what one means by “offensive.”  If this is intended to mean that I am insensitive, cruel, or have attacked others without justification, the charge is unfounded, even ridiculous.  I simply offer a moral-psychological account of the roots of atheism, and I do so as fairly and sensitively as I can manage.  In fact, my account parallels what Feuerbach and Freud proposed in suggesting that belief in God is a sort of psychological projection.  (I argue that atheists, as it were, “project” the absence of God, due to a combination of moral and psychological factors.)  While deeply mistaken, I would never say—nor have I ever known a fellow theist to claim—that the Feuerbach/Freud account is offensive (in the sense defined above).

Now if my critics’ claim is that my account is offensive in the sense that it is likely to be met with anger or resentment on the part of some people, then I plead guilty.  Of course it bothers atheists to be told that their worldview is irrational and that, furthermore, it is a consequence of willful rejection of God rather than an objective assessment of evidence.  So why defend the thesis at all?  Why write a book that will incite atheists?  Well, because it is an important and biblical truth that has many significant practical implications with regard to ministry, apologetics, and personal spiritual formation.  My account of atheism is really just an unpacking and filling out of what Scripture says in Romans 1:18-32, Ephesians 4:17-18, and John 3:19-21, among other passages.

So, then, in building my account of atheism on the Bible am I guilty of arguing in a circle?  No, because I am not appealing to Scripture to build an argument against the truth of atheism (or in favor of theism).  I would never cite any biblical passage as an argument for God, as this would indeed be blatantly circular.  But, assuming that God exists and that the Bible is divinely inspired, it seems appropriate to consider what, if anything, Scripture says about the causes of atheism. This is all I do in my book.  Offensive to some it may be, but it’s an important truth that needs to be heard.

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A Former Atheist’s Near Death Experience

By Jim Spiegel

I’ve become increasingly interested in near death experiences, and the ones that interest me most are those involving atheists.  Here is one of the more well-known accounts by a former atheist, Howard Storm, who was an art professor at Northern Kentucky University when he had his experience in 1985 while awaiting surgery for an intestinal problem.  As he lost consciousness, Storm reports that he exited his body and had a distressing, hellish encounter with malevolent beings, who essentially tortured him.  In his agony and desperation, despite his atheism, he called out to Jesus to save him.  According to Storm, Jesus did just this, rescuing him from the tormenting beings and eventually introducing him to some other spiritual beings (angels?), who guided him through an intense life review and with whom Storm says he had a lengthy conversation.  The whole experience was recorded by Storm and published in his subsequent book, My Descent into Death.

After his NDE, Storm was a changed man.  Prior to the experience, he was a confirmed atheist, but afterward he could not stop talking about God and the Bible.  Storm eventually resigned from his teaching position and attended seminary to become a Christian minister.  Today he pastors a church in Ohio and does a lot of painting.  You can check out his website here.

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Theism, Atheism, and the Significance of our Lives

By Jim Spiegel

One of the traditional complaints about atheism is that it offers no grounds for believing that life is meaningful in any significant sense.  Many old school atheists seemed to acknowledge this point.  For example, Bertrand Russell grants that the eventual desolation guaranteed by naturalism is grounds for “unyielding despair,” and atheistic existentialists like Sartre and Camus recognized that without God life appears “absurd.”  The new atheists are much more optimistic, insisting that life can be quite meaningful in the absence of God.

This makes me wonder whether life can really be as significant on an atheistic worldview as it is given the truth of theism and its correlative doctrine of an afterlife.  Suppose we conceive of the overall significance of an action as relative to its total impact on what follows after, in terms of causal influence and consequences.  Thus, for example, historians often refer to particular events, such as the assassination of Lincoln or the Treaty of Versailles as especially significant because of their impact on subsequent history.  That seems reasonable enough.  Now suppose we consider the significance of any individual human life along these lines as well, such that we recognize, say, that Martin Luther King’s life was especially significant because of all of the lives he impacted and continues to impact to this day.

Now with this understanding of life “significance” in hand, let’s compare the atheistic and theistic perspectives.  Given atheism (or to be more precise, “naturalism”), all life on Earth will eventually perish, say 10,000 years from now, and whatever impact our lives have had will cease.  I won’t say that the lives we led lose all significance as a consequence, but the significance of our lives will certainly be finite.  However, given theism and the perpetual afterlife promised on this worldview, there is literally no end to the impact of our lives, for not only may earthly deeds continue to influence others forever but our on-going choices and actions in the afterlife (Heaven and/or the New Earth, given Christian theism) will be endless as well.  Since there will be no end to our lives (at least for those who wind up in Heaven), there will be no limit to the significance of our lives or even individual actions, the effects of which may be felt and acknowledged for all eternity.

So, as we compare atheism and theism on this point, it turns out that the two worldviews could not contrast more sharply when it comes to providing grounds for the significance of human life.  Given atheism, however long earthly history proceeds, in the end it will be finite and so will the significance of our lives.  Given theism, on the other hand, the significance of our lives has no upper limit but approaches infinity.  In other words, if theism is true, then the significance of our lives is immeasurably great, while in comparison, without God the significance of our lives is infinitesimally small.  (I want to emphasize the comparative nature of my point here, for only relative to such a comparison could any degree of life significance be considered “infinitesimal.”)

So what does this mean?  Is this evidence for the truth of theism?  Not at all.  On the contrary, there are no implications here with regard to which of these two worldviews is actually true.  But what it does imply is that atheists who maintain that their lives can be just as significant (given the truth of their worldview) as those of theists (given the truth of theirs) are quite mistaken.  In fact, the difference is infinitely great.

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To the God Who Might Be There

By Jim Spiegel

During my first year of graduate school I went through a brief crisis of faith, largely due to the influence of a particular professor who was especially adamant in his religious skepticism.  In fact, you might say he was—pardon the oxymoron—a dogmatic skeptic.  After a few weeks in his class I found myself struggling with doubts of my own and entertaining the thought that my Christian commitment was based on a lie.  What if, after all, God did not exist?  I recall one evening as I went to pray sensing the potential absurdity of what I was about to do—quietly thanking and praising a fictitious deity, and making assorted requests to someone who was not there.  The usual feeling of God’s presence, an ineffable intuition that was reliable until then, was gone.  What to do?  I suppose I could have allowed that feeling, or the lack thereof, to dictate a decision not to pray at all.  But as I sat there I tried to make a rational assessment of the situation.  If there really is no God, I wondered, then what harm will it do to pray?  At worst, I mutter to myself for a few minutes and perhaps benefit from the meditative discipline involved in the process.  On the other hand, if God is real, despite my failure to sense his presence, then he will hear my prayers and perhaps respond to my pleas to make his presence known to me again as before.  And perhaps he will reward me by giving me more assurance than ever that he is real since my prayers in that state would be an even greater act of faith than my usual prayers prompted by the confidence that he exists.  I’m not sure how lucid this reasoning was, but that was my thought process.

So I prayed.  I prayed then and several other times during that period to the God who might be there.  And as the days went by, my assurance of God’s existence did return—and yes, stronger than ever.  Would that confidence have returned eventually had I ceased praying?  I don’t know.  But I’m glad I did it, since I believe that not only did God hear those prayers but it was also a good exercise in devotional perseverance.  The Scriptures tell us that God rewards those who earnestly seek him, and this would seem to apply just as much to the person who doubts his existence as to the person who is confident that he is real but simply wants to learn more about him or grow closer to him.

Some would label this approach to finding God a “devotional experiment.”  If you are agnostic or even a less-than-dogmatic atheist, and you recognize at least the possibility that God exists, then try praying to the God who might be there.  You never know what you might discover as a result.

As I’ve been thinking about this lately, I quite coincidentally stumbled upon an upcoming article in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion by philosopher T. J. Mawson (who teaches at St. Peter’s College in Oxford) in which he argues that atheists have an epistemic obligation to pray that God would help them to stop being atheists.  I have not read the article (because it’s not yet available in print and I don’t have an electronic subscription to the journal), but it appears that Mawson’s claim is that given the mere possibility of God’s existence and the monumental significance of his existence and our devotion to him, if he does exist, then one should invite God to correct one’s misimpression that he does not exist.  Thus, says Mawson, atheists should pray that God will put an end to their religious unbelief.  An arresting thought, indeed.  And, no doubt, it will be irksome to some atheists.  Yet perhaps there are some who would follow Mawson’s counsel and dare to pray, as I did, to the God who might be there.

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An Atheist Meets God

By Jim Spiegel

Anyone familiar with the philosophical history of atheism knows that twentieth century British scholar A. J. Ayer is one of the most prominent atheists of the modern period.  He was a leading figure in the movement known as Logical Positivism, and his Language, Truth, and Logic is one of the definitive statements of this radical empiricist orientation.  Like other positivists, Ayer did not merely reject theism as false but insisted that the claim that there is a God is cognitively meaningless.  (He made the same claim about moral statements, by the way, which he claimed to be nothing more than expressions of emotion.)

Toward the end of his life, Ayer had a near death experience, the content of which he reported in his fascinating essay “What I Saw When I Was Dead.”  Upon its publication, many were surprised to learn that, despite this seemingly supernatural experience, Ayer did not budge from his atheism but remained convinced that there is no God.  Indeed, for a long time after reading the essay, I was puzzled over this.

But twelve years later Ayer’s attending physician, Dr. Jeremy George, revealed that Ayer might not have been completely forthcoming about his experience and the actual conclusion he drew from it.  Dr. George claimed that Ayer confided to him, “I saw a divine being.”  Then Ayer added, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”  Well, now that’s quite a confession.  If true, Ayer’s change of mind would certainly rival that of Antony Flew in terms of significance.  Indeed, if Flew had a challenger in the twentieth century as the “the world’s most notorious atheist” (as the subtitle of Flew’s recent book tags him), Ayer is probably it.

But is Dr. George’s account to be trusted?  Read Peter Foges’ recent essay in Lapham’s Quarterly, entitled “An Atheist Meets the Masters of the Universe”, and judge for yourself.  I would also recommend reading all of the comments that follow.  It’s an instructive conversation that well illustrates the fundamental differences in outlook between theists and atheists.

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The “Pray for an Atheist” Campaign

By Jim Spiegel

Several folks, including myself, have launched a Facebook page entitled Pray for an Atheist.  As you may know, April 1 has been celebrated in the past as “National Atheists Day,” and in the first week of April is held the American Atheists National Convention.  So we thought it would be a good idea to encourage Christians to commit to praying for atheists for the entire month of April.  If you would like to get involved, please become a “fan” of the page.

As you’ll see on the page, however, a number of atheists are strongly objecting to the idea that Christians are praying for them.  As one atheist put it, “if you’re going to pray for me and my ilk, that is quite disrespectful.”  And another said, “I personally find it offensive if anybody wants to pray for me.”  There have been many other expressions of disapproval, some profane and vulgar (which have been deleted).

I can’t help but think—as some people have pointed out—that all of this vitriol confirms the thesis of my book.  Atheists simply have no reason to object to our praying for them, especially since, given our worldview, it is an act of love.  After all, if God does exist, then it would be an enormous benefit to atheists if they come to believe this.  Moreover, as a Christian, it would be profoundly hypocritical of me to believe that prayer could be effectual in helping others to find redemption in Christ and yet not pray for unbelievers.

Therefore, I would ask atheists to respect my right to do what I want in the privacy of my own home, as I kneel in prayer on their behalf.

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Solving the Euthyphro Problem

By Jim Spiegel

Among the issues debated between theists and atheists is the question of God’s relation to ethics.  Many theists, including myself, maintain that without God there is no foundation for ethics.  Not only does atheism fail to provide any ultimate motivation to live virtuously but the very concept of moral goodness is undermined.  Atheists, of course, beg to differ, insisting that the concept of goodness can be adequately understood in terms of natural facts about the world, such as pleasure or human survival.  And as for moral motivation, most atheists seem to maintain that the goal of making this life the best it can be provides sufficient grounds for good behavior.

Not only do atheists (typically) maintain that ethics (both the concept of the good and the incentive to live rightly) is possible without God, they also often argue that God actually undermines ethics.  That is, they claim, ethical theories that appeal to God are problematic at best and incoherent at worst.  And it’s interesting to see how often they trot out a 2500-year-old argument, originating with Socrates (who, ironically enough, was himself a theist).  The argument, commonly known as the “Euthyphro dilemma,” originally took this form:  Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is something pious because the gods love it?”  Transposed into the context of a theistic (rather than polytheistic) divine command ethic, the dilemma looks like this:

1. Does God command X because it is good

               or

2. Is X good because God commands it?

 The question might appear trifling, but it does have some bite to it.  If we opt for (1), then something besides God’s commanding a behavior makes it good.  That is, the standard for goodness is not God’s commands, which seems to flout the notion that God is the foundation of ethics.  On the other hand, if we go with option (2), then this prompts the question why God commanded X, so it is really no answer at all.  Now, one could insist that this “why” question admits of no answer and that God’s commands are ultimately arbitrary.  But, then, this implies that God could just as well have commanded that we rape, murder, and steal from one another and, consequently, such behaviors would have been just as moral as kindness, compassion, and generosity are now.  This seems absurd, so option (2) is no more appealing than option (1).

The theist appears to be stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place here—specifically the options of admitting either that God is not the foundation of ethics or that God’s commands are arbitrary.   Is there a way out for the theist who insists that God is foundational to—or in any way crucially related to—ethics?  Many atheists and agnostics believe this argument to be devastating.  But, really, the solution is quite simple (as evidenced by the fact that in every one of my philosophy classes in which this argument is discussed some student solves the riddle on his or her own, or else with just a little Socratic leading by yours truly).  Can you figure it out?  See if you can do so before reading the next paragraph.

The best response—as I see it anyway—is to take the approach of Thomas Aquinas, among many others, and go with option (1) but to qualify this in an important way.  Yes, God commands what he does because those things are good, but the standard for goodness is not something external to God.  Rather, the divine nature is the moral standard.  It is the character of God which determines how God commands us to behave.  This explains why Scripture often uses the term “godly” and “godliness” as synonyms for moral goodness or piety.  They are one and the same thing.  To be moral is to reflect the moral nature of God.  So each divine command is essentially a specific application of the general command to morally imitate God.  Moreover, given this approach, divine commands are not properly conceived as the source of goodness but rather they serve the function of making the standard of goodness known.  That is, the role of divine commands is epistemological, whereas God’s character is the ontological ground of ethics.

Of course, atheists and many others will object that defining moral goodness in terms of the divine nature begs the question, Why call God’s nature good?  But this question could be asked about any proposed ultimate standard for ethics (e.g., pleasure, human survival, universalizability, etc.).  If there is indeed a moral standard, then its goodness must be fundamental, absolute, and inexplicable.  The nature of God is far superior to any alternative proposal because God is a being, not a mere concept or ideal.  Moreover, this Thomistic approach has the additional virtue of paralleling the foundation of ethics to that in theistic ontology and epistemology, where we understand God to be the ground of all being and of all rationality, respectively.  (I would even extend this, perhaps more controversially, to the realm of aesthetics, and propose that God is the ground of all beauty.)  Here we see another dimension of the conceptual coherence of theism.

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Blog Interview and Book Reviews About The Making of an Atheist

By Jim Spiegel

Several blogs have recently featured reviews or interviews with me about my book, The Making of an Atheist, including the blog of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, Cloud of Witnesses and Exo Tays Parembolays. 

So far, most responses to the book have been enthusiastically positive, though there have been some negative comments (from folks who have yet to read the book!), suggesting that I commit an ad hominem fallacy in claiming that atheism results from self-deception and immorality.  This would be true if the point of my book was to argue that atheism is false.  That’s not the book’s aim at all.  Rather, my purpose is to give an explanatory accountof the origins of atheistic belief.  That’s quite a different matter, and my account actually parallels the attempts of such atheists as Feuerbach and Freud to explain theistic belief.  Atheists typically applaud their accounts and aren’t inclined to accuse them of ad hominem reasoning.  Perhaps its too much to expect that they would show me the same courtesy.