Letter from a Jewish Atheist Uncle

A reader writes:

If you have a minute, no pressure, I would love your perspective on the best way to address the fairly short dialogue which I will past below.

My Jewish Atheist Uncle, is responding to a question posed to him by my father.

He is a very bright guy and is open, not the typical hateful far left atheist type, and I am not sure where to go with him on this issue. The conversation has been ongoing daily and deep for months. We gave each other a book challenge and he is currently reading JP11 Theology of the Body (the long version). I just can’t bring myself to let it go.

Here it is:

“What do you mean when you say that your philosophy is to live a good life? Good by whose standards? Your own. Did you set these standards in your mind a long time ago when you decided you were a non-believer and have they changed over the years? Did your parents instill these standards in you when you were young? How can you be comfortable with the thought that “here today, gone forever tomorrow”?

Good by my, ever changing, standards. My core beliefs are ones that I have held for a long time. There is no God. If God is omnipotent and omnipresent, where is there a place for my life to have any interest let alone meaning? He knows what I think, what I am going to do, what circumstances will affect me – there is no point to my life, it is all pre-determined. Free will is not compatible with an omnipotent and omnipresent God and I am not inclined to explain away the difficult bits by saying that we are mere mortals who do not comprehend the mysterious ways and the mind of God. He knows what I will chose. Even if He doesn’t intervene in my choices, each choice I make is still, ab initio, a done deal. That surely removes “the meaning of life”? I know some religions say that He is not omnipotent and we must fight on his side against immensely powerful bad guys, but again if He is omnipresent, He knows what I will do. I find arguments to substantiate belief in a personal God very weak. I see no compelling reasons to believe in God, and many reasons not to believe in a good God.

Did I get values and ideas from my parents? Yes. They were very strong about right and wrong, very weak on religion. They thought that religious instruction should come from Heder (pronounced Chaida) which I attended on Sunday mornings and, from 7 to 10 years old, they sent me to a Jewish private school. This experience started my rejection of religion. When I was 14, I had an accident when my tennis racquet holder fell into the front wheel spokes of my bike. The rabbi visited me in hospital. He said “serves you right for riding your bike on the Sabbath”. That formalised my break with religion.

Many of my opinions have changed over the years. I became more honest in stages, over many years. I always thought it was right to be honest. Now, I have finally got around to practicing what I preach. I don’t think my political opinions have changed significantly- I think the world has moved to the right. I am still in the same place as the Conservative Party politicians of the sixties. I have become more generous in my daily habits, more interested and more concerned. I do not think any of this had anything whatsoever to do with being a non-believer.

How can I be comfortable with “here today, gone forever tomorrow”? That is life. I would be far more uncomfortable with the thought of eternity. How can you be comfortable with the thought of you not ending? Do you feel competent to exist forever? You know that if you play enough rounds of golf, you will score eighteen ones, twos or threes, depending on how far you can hit the ball. Four ones on the short holes, probably twelve twos and two threes on the holes where your second cannot reach the pin. A round of 34! After you are dead, you will have enough time to “play enough rounds of golf” trillions of times. Eternity scares me.

I have often asked myself if religion and belief in a Superior Being and a life hereafter is a load of baloney and merely a crutch for the weak. When I have these thoughts I conclude that I could not accept that my existence on this earth was just a series of accidents, that my passing through this world as a unique being, a once-off, one-off, will be the beginning and end of ” my ” existence through the billions of years. I don’t know where my “soul” or unique being was all the time up to 1940 but I have to believe that it will go somewhere after I die, otherwise “What the hell has it been all about?” What a waste of energy and effort.

Is my existence merely “Nature’s” way of using my body as a vehicle to continue the development of the species, like an egg uses a chicken to reproduce itself? Natural selection, Darwin’s Theory etc? If that was the case why was I given a “soul / a unique persona” and by whom was this given?

I am sure that evolution is a solid explanation for our current circumstance. So does the Catholic Church. It believes that “The OT is a God inspired story, not intended to be literally interpreted. The Church doesn’t teach a 7 day creation, for example.” (from John’s email earlier today). You seem to find consciousness difficult. You are in good company! Crick (of Crick and Watson, structure of DNA fame) has written about it, but I do not find any of the books on the subject accessible to this “bear of so little brain” (Winnie the Pooh).

One of the questions I ask myself is what has happened to the soul of someone who has had a stroke or suffers from dementia? Surely the soul is your essence. Where is it when your brain is malfunctioning? You talk of “soul or unique being”. Are you a unique being? I think that I have changed enough so that I could say that I have been half a dozen “unique beings” over my life to date.

“What has it all been about?” Buddhists answer that question without resorting to a personal God. And by living a life that is friendly to everyone else. To look for the answer to the meaning of life, I would certainly not make my first call to any religious leader. How can a person adopt a personal moral compass based on the wisdom or guidance of those who have used wars and crusades (all done in God’s name) to spread their power and acquire great wealth. Surely, whatever life is about, that cannot be it.

A few thoughts. First, your uncle needs to read Boethius. The notion that God’s omniscience and omnipotence somehow how cancels his freedom is not even a Jewish, much less Christian understanding of God. It’s closer to Islam or some sort of pagan vision of Fate. In Christian understanding, God’s omnipotence is precisely what guarantees our freedom–“where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”. The fact that God sees us making our free choices in his eternal Now does not mean that we are not freely making them. For goodness sake, if there’s any lesson the Old Testament teaches us, it’s that human beings can do whatever the hell (and I mean that literally) they want. How much more freedom can a person want? His argument seems to boil down to the notion that if God gives order and structure to the universe and human life, this takes away meaning from life. This seems to me be like saying “The rules of football take away all meaning from the game.”

As to the “many reasons” not to believe in a good God, there are, in fact, only two: both of them mentioned by St. Thomas. All others are fallacies.

Moving on, I can respect his story of childhood trauma, but not as an argument against the existence of God. I’m sorry his rabbi was a jerk, but so what? People can be jerks. Doesn’t mean there’s no God.

Similarly, saying “I’ve grown in my practice of morals” tells us nothing about the non-existence of God.” If anything, it makes the problem more acute since, as I have often pointed out, you can’t derive Ought from Is. Believers in a purely materialist universe can be highly moral people. What they cannot be is people who can give a coherent account of why their moral principles have a transcendent claim. To do that, you have to, one way or another, smuggle in a transcendent God as guarantor of things like right and wrong and the dignity of the human person. In short, the atheistic moralist is always a thief.

“Eternity scares me” is an interesting insight into your uncle’s mind and emotions, but of course, that’s not an argument. Surgery scares me, but that’s not the same as saying “There’s no such thing as surgery.” And, of course, your uncle’s conception of eternity is entirely earthbound–almost as earthbound as an ancient Egyptian who thought he’d need all that stuff in the tomb. In the Christian conception, “eternal life” is not mere longevity but life that is fully “lifeful”: the participation in the divine life of God himself. Indeed, Christian civilization has preserved, in the myth of the vampire or the story of Gollum precisely your uncle’s terror of merely earthly life stretched out untill it becomes an unendurable horror. Indeed, that is precisely what the story of Eden hints at: God *as a mercy* keeps fallen man from the horror of endless life until it can be redeemed to eternal life.

A couple final points: It’s not quite cricket to say Buddhists answer “what life is all about” without reference to a deity. It’s more accurate to say Buddhists say, “Don’t ask what life is about.” Westerners who dabble in Buddhism are cute, but the whole “extinction of the self” thing is not really what they want.

Finally, the whole “ignore religious leaders” thing is supremely American and individualistic. It, again, simply takes for granted that the entirety of civilization would have occurred to you ex nihilo without anybody’s help, perhaps the grandest illusion that moderns routinely embrace. Medievals were modest enough to recognize that “if we see further than our ancestors, it’s because we stand on the shoulders of giants.” Moderns typically believe that, because we have microwaves and blenders, we are qualified to despise all previous generations from our privileged position on the final and permanent platform of world history.