Triablogue promotes "Escape from Nihilism", below is my reply
In 1997, a group of students at the university where I teach asked me to give a
short talk about how I had returned to my abandoned Christian faith. The
following version was included in The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the
Fall of Man (1999, rev. ed. 2010). For a longer and more analytical account of
my reversion, see at this website “Why I Am Not an Atheist.”
Sixteen years ago I stood in the Government Department of the University of Texas
to give a talk. I was fresh out of graduate school, and it was my here's-why-you-houldhire-
me lecture. I wanted to teach about ethics and politics, so as academic job seekers
do everywhere, I was showing the faculty my stuff. So what did I tell them? Two
things. The first was that we human beings just make up the difference between good
and evil; the second was that we aren't responsible for what we do anyway. And I laid
out a ten-year plan for rebuilding ethical and political theory on these two
propositions.
Does that seem to you a good plan for getting a job teaching the young? Or does it
seem a better plan for getting committed to the state mental hospital? Well, I wasn't
committed to the state mental hospital, but I did get a job teaching the young. I've
been asked to tell you how I became a nihilist, and I've been asked to tell you how I
escaped from nihilism. Perhaps I should first explain just what my argument for
nihilism was.
As I mentioned above, I made two claims: first that we make up the difference
between good and evil,
That is obviously true, since it is a category mistake to apply "objective" to "morality" no less than it is to apply "greasy" to "4".
second that we aren't responsible for what we do anyway.
If Calvinist Steve Hays of Triablogue got it right, then no, we are not responsible for what we do any more than a pot is responsible for the shape the potter formed it into.
My argument reversed this order, because first I denied free will.
We have no reason to think the human mind is free of the laws of cause and effect that we see affecting everything else. There is a very good reason that mature civilized adults exhibit routinely repeated patterns in their choices, and no, it's not coincidence.
The reasoning was not
very original. Everything we do or think or feel, I thought, is just an effect of prior
causes. It doesn't matter that some of those prior causes are my previous deeds or
thoughts or feelings, because those would be effects of still earlier causes, and if we
traced the chain further and further back, sooner or later we would come to causes
that are outside of me completely, such as my heredity and environment.
So far, so good.
Second I concluded that if we don't have free will, then good and evil can't
make sense.
Then you were a rather stupid atheist, since there's nothing about good or evil that require their definitions to be restricted to absolute terms. Good and evil make perfect sense even where the context is wholly subjective, such as whether it be good or evil to preserve the results of unconstitutional searches merely because the officers
acted in good faith upon a warrant lacking in probable cause (i.e., good faith exception to the exclusionary rule). Many lawyers say that exception is evil, and ALL evidence obtained from an unconstitutional search must be supressed, while our courts are required to agree with the US Supreme Court that as long as the officer's reliance on the warrant was reasonable, the fruits of the search can be saved and used against the accused in trial.
On the one hand I'm not responsible for my deeds, so I can't be praised
or blamed for good or evil; on the other hand I'm not responsible for my thoughts, so
I can't have any confidence that my reasoning will lead me to the truth about good
and evil.
That is true, but the reason most humans praise and condemn each other is precisely because of ignorance or denial that we too are just machines. Since most people neither know nor care about the arguments against freewill, the world is not psychologically ready to depart from their older way of holding others responsible for their deeds.
Now so far it may seem that my argument was merely skeptical, not nihilist.
But I reasoned that if the good for man cannot be known to man, then it cannot be
offered to man as his good; for all practical purposes, there is no good.
then you were wrong, since identifying good and evil using the criteria of one's living environment, city, state, or nation, is sufficient to justify saying good exists "for all practical purposes".
This practical nihilism was linked with a practical atheism, for my arguments were
couched in such a way that I thought they applied to God too. He couldn't escape
causality either, I thought; therefore He couldn't possess confident knowledge of
good and evil any more than I could.
non-existent beings have great difficulty possessing knowledge.
And even if He could achieve such a
standard, it would make no sense for Him enforce it; trapped in causality like Him,
human beings have no ultimate control over their conduct.
Sure it could make sense; if God exists, he could just be an irrational asshole like so many past human dictators. If an ant is not correct to asssume human beings are all good or all powerful merely because we achieve something the ant never could, then we too are irrational to conclude "god", if he exists, is all good or all powerful merely because he is capable of feats we cannot accomplish.
The upshot was that
although God might exist, He would be irrelevant. I couldn't quite rule out the
existence of God, but I thought I could rule out the existence of a God that
mattered.
You should have met me earlier. I could have introduced you to the atheist argument from incoherent religious language, and you would have found out that God's non-existence is equally as assured as is the non-existence of any incoherent concept.
Holes Large and Numerous
The holes in the preceding arguments are so large that one can see light through
them. One hole is that in order to deny free will I assumed that I understood
causality.
No, in order to deny freewill, all you have to know is that the mind is nothing but the operation of the physical brain, and at that point, you have no basis to say it is capable of doing something for reasons independent of physical law, anymore than a tree branch is free to do something contrary to physical law as it breaks off and falls to the ground. The fact that most agree "freewill" disappears more and more, the further down the food chain you go (from animal to reptile to insect) seems to suggest that freewill really is nothing but an illusion.
That is foolish because I didn't know what causality really is any more
than I understand what free will really is. They are equally wonderful and
mysterious, so I had no business pretending to understand one in order to attack the
other. Another problem is that my argument was self-referentially incoherent. If
my lack of free will made my reasoning unreliable so I couldn't find out which
ideas about good and evil are true, then by the same token I shouldn't have been
able to find out which ideas about free will are true either. But in that case I had no
business denying that I had free will in the first place.
You don't need freewill to figure out truth anymore than a video camera needs freewill to make an accurate recording of reality.
At this point two things must be clearly understood. The first: One might think that
my arguments for nihilism were what led me to become a nihilist, but that is not
true. I was committed to nihilism already, and cooked up the arguments only to
rationalize it. The second: One might think that my recognition of the holes in the
arguments were what enabled me to "escape" nihilism, but that is not true either. I
saw the holes in my arguments even at the time, and covered them over with
elaborate nonsense like the need to take an ironic view of reality. Good and evil
just had to be meaningless and personal responsibility just had to be nonexistent.
The arguments were secondary. I was determined.
Personal responsibility doesn't require freewill. We desire an ordered society that punishes criminals whose mental abilities are within whatever criteria of soundness we determine. Your personal responsibility (I think you meant culpability) draws solely from others who impose their will. Most criminals are perfectly content with their lifestyle. A sense of moral culpability must be determined from outside the individual person. There's a reason you need to teach kids manners. If they are left to raise themselves as feral children, they will have no sense of responsibility and will do anything to survive, including steal, deceive and kill.
A friend may he forgive me for quoting him thinks my dismissal of my previous
rationalizations as elaborate nonsense seems too pat. Is it really that simple? The
answer is that yes, it really is that simple. In my present opinion (though not my
opinion of sixteen years ago), modern ethics is going about matters backwards. It
assumes that the problem of human sin is mainly cognitive that it has to do with the
state of our knowledge. In other words, it holds that we really don't know what's
right and wrong and that we are trying to find out.
Once again, there is no objective basis to declare any human act moral or immoral. We might think we are "trying to find out" what's right and wrong, but all we are doing is evolving and having arguments with others about the matter. Christian philosophers have already tried and failed to show objective morality with their personally chosen best examples.
Actually the problem is
volitional it has to do with the state of our will. In other words, by and large we do
know the basics of right and wrong
Not when most of the world disgrees with the fundie fanatics who claim God used to think it was morally good to burn teen prostitutes to death: Leviticus 21:9.
but wish we didn't, and we are trying, for one
reason or another, to keep ourselves in ignorance. Is this an ad hominem
argument that because my motive was bad, my nihilism must have been false? No,
it is a diagnosis, with myself as case in point. My nihilism was "false" because it
was self-referentially incoherent. [There may exist nihilisms which are false for
reasons other than self-referentially incoherency, but I am speaking only of the
version I held myself.] The motive was "bad" because although I knew this to be
the case, rather than give up the nihilism I embraced the incoherency. What one
must do with such a fellow as I once was is not to tell him what he doesn't know
(because he really knows it), but to blow away the smokescreens by which he hides
from the knowledge he has already.
The Motives Behind Nihilism
Then how did I become a nihilist? Why was I so determined? What were my real
motives?
There were quite a few. One was that having been caught up in radical politics of
the late 'sixties and early 'seventies, I had my own ideas about redeeming the
world, ideas that were opposed to the Christian faith of my childhood. As I got
further and further from God, I also got further and further from common sense
about a lot of other things, including moral law and personal responsibility.
Well then maybe you can get closer to God by lobbying for America to legalize a moral God approves of: burning teen prostitutes to death. Leviticus 21:9
That first reason for nihilism led to a second. By now I had committed certain sins
that I didn't want to repent. Because the presence of God made me more and more
uncomfortable,
Then you must have been taking some drugs back when you were an atheist, as there's more reason for "god" to make anybody unconfortable than there is for the Bermuda Triangle to make them uncomfortable, ignorance being the only exception.
I began looking for reasons to believe that He didn't exist.
Sort of like the vast majority of Christians who came to faith in an emotional moment in church, and their acceptance of theistic arguments and bible inerrancy is wholly derivative.
It's a
funny thing about us human beings: not many of us doubt God's existence and then
start sinning. Most of us sin and then start doubting His existence.
Speak for yourself, that wasn't true in my case.
A third reason for being a nihilist was simply that nihilism was taught to me. I may
have been raised by Christian parents, but I'd heard all through school that even the
most basic ideas about good and evil are different in every society. That's
empirically false as C.S. Lewis remarked, cultures may disagree about whether a
man may have one wife or four, but all of them know about marriage; they may
disagree about which actions are most courageous, but none of them rank
cowardice as a virtue.
But human consensus doesn't make a moral objective. There is human consensus that burning teenage prostitutes to death is always immoral, but because of Leviticus 21:9, Christians must concede that the consensus is wrong, and it's not allways immoral to burn such girls to death. Hence, moral consensus cannot be a justification to call any particular action of man objectively good or bad.
But by the time I was taught the false anthropology of the
times, I wanted very much to believe it.
And of course that couldn't have been the case with the start and rise of Christianity. No, it was only the undeniable miracles of Jesus and the apostles that forced unbelievers to come kicking and screaming over the line into the faith, no presumption or wish-fulfillment about it.
A fourth reason, related to the last, was the very way I was taught to use language.
My high school English teachers were determined to teach me the difference
between what they called facts and what they called opinions, and I noticed that
moral propositions were always included among the opinions. My college social
science teachers were equally determined to teach me the difference between what
they called facts and what they called "values," and to much the same effect: the
atomic weight of sodium was a fact, but the wrong of murder was not. I thought
that to speak in this fashion was to be logical. Of course it had nothing to do with
logic; it was merely nihilism itself, in disguise.
Not at all, associating "objective" with "morality" is a category mistake, read how God accepts moral correction from Moses in Exodus 32:9-14. SInce you cannot refute the thesis on the merits in the context, pretend that the larger context of Exodus is "necessary" to a "proper understanding" of those verses.
Yeah, and I cannot understand Exodus 32:15 without consulting the "larger context". Sorry Charlie.
A fifth reason for nihilism was that disbelieving in God was a good way to get
back at Him for the various things which predictably went wrong in my life after I
had lost hold of Him. Now of course if God didn't exist then I couldn't get back at
Him, so this may seem a strange sort of disbelief. But most disbelief is like that.
Not mine. When I say God is stupid and cruel, I'm only tryinig to talk to Christians at their level, not because I seriously believe it to be the case. Just like we often say to a 3 year old "Santa wants you to be nice" around Christmas. We are not committing to the premise that Santa is real.
A sixth reason for nihilism was that I had come to confuse science with a certain
world view, one which many science writers hold but that really has nothing to
with science. I mean the view that nothing is real but matter. If nothing is real but
matter, then there couldn't be such things as minds, moral law, or God, could
there?
No, since minds are nothing but brains in action, morals cannot be shown to exist apart from physical matter stuff like brains, and incoherent concepts like god only arise because of misinformed physical brains.
After all, none of those are matter. Of course not even the properties of
matter are matter, so after while it became hard to believe in matter itself.
Not true, quarks and leptons are no less physical than rocks. You cannot get rid of their physicality by calling them "energy", because energy is not some ghostly esoteric something-or-other that is different than matter, energy is nothing more than matter
in motion. The heat that burns your hand when you place it in the middle of an oven is not less physical than the wires carrying the electrical current into the oven.
You can use your finger to press a key on a computer keyboard, yet when you do, there's nothing "non-matter" about it, the entire operation was 100% physical from beginning to end.
But by
that time I was so disordered that I couldn't tell how disordered I was.
Sorry to hear it. Lay off the drugs.
I recognized
that I had committed yet another incoherency, but I concluded that reality itself
was incoherent, and that I was pretty clever to have figured this out even more so,
because in an incoherent world, figuring didn't make sense either.
Yup, drugs.
A seventh and reinforcing reason for nihilism was that for all of the other reasons, I
had fallen under the spell of the nineteenth-century German writer Friedrich
Nietzsche. I was, if anything, more Nietzschean than he was. Whereas he thought
that given the meaninglessness of things, nothing was left but to laugh or be silent,
I recognized that not even laughter or silence were left. One had no reason to do or
not do anything at all.
That was illogical. Unless you are some idiot fanatic who never takes a shit except when he thinks god will be most pleased, it is clear that God's absence doesn't negatively impact one's sense of purpose in life. You don't purchase a candy bar for the glory of God. You don't run the kids by McDonald's to avoid having to cook dinner, because you wish to lay up for yourself treasure in heaven. The normal shit that makes up the average Christian's life does not change even when they decide that atheism is true...unless they are irrational. If you could find purpose in purchasing a candy bar as a Christian, seems obvious you can find purpose in doing the same after telling yourself atheism is true.
This is a terrible thing to believe, but like Nietzsche, I
imagined myself one of the few who could believe such things who could walk the
rocky heights where the air is thin and cold.
But the main reason I was a nihilist, the reason that tied all these other reasons
together, was sheer, mulish pride. I didn't want God to be God; I wanted J.
Budziszewski to be God. I see that now. But I didn't see that then.
Nothing wrong with being master of your own fate since nothing fails quite like theistic arguments.
The Stupidity of the Intelligent
I have already said that everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of
the good things He's given us, such as our minds.
Some Christians would argue that God's presence doesn't make life any more bearable when life has you down.
One of the good things I've been
given is a stronger than average mind.
I would beg to differ. Your basis for atheism was a scary exercise is willful blindness.
I don't make the observation to boast;
human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is
that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going
wrong.
Then do what Steve Hays, a Calvinist at Triablogue does, and blame it on god.
When some people flee from God they rob and kill.
When some people convert to Christ they bomb abortion clinics.
When others flee from
God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex.
When others flee TO God, they have lots of pedophilia sex. Numbers 31:18.
When I fled from God I didn't do
any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid.
Sorry to hear it. My way of fleeing from God was not too different from the way I fled from the concept that the Bermuda Triangle is a gateway to another dimension: I simply rejected the concept and moved on with my life.
Though it always comes
as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be
highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull
down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a
doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and
evil and that we aren't responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even
taught these things to students; now that's sin.
Not at all, you Christians cannot even show that torturing babies to death solely for entertainment, is "objectively" immoral. That's pretty said given your presupposition that some human acts are objectively immoral.
It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself well, if
you are like I was, maybe you can what a person has to do to himself to go on
believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God's law is "written
on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness." The way natural law thinkers
put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means
that so long as we have minds, we can't not know them.
Nice to know you don't trifle about "work of the law" in Romans 2:15 as desperately as some apologists do.
Well, I was unusually
determined not to know them; therefore I had to destroy my mind. I resisted the
temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the
temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was
determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and
objective value. Think what this did to very capacity to love them. After all, love is
a commitment of the will to the true good of another person,
Which is precisely why it is ultimately subjective.
and how can one's
will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of
good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that his commitments are in his
control?
He can't. But defining those matters as "subjective" doesn't equate to saying they don't exist. The time I put my kids to bed on a school night is a decision within the category of "moral", despite the fact that it is wholly subjective with no possible way of nailing down which precise bedtime is the "objective" one. So love can be "real" while also being subjective.
Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the
components that have God's image stamped on them.
I thought I told you to lay off the drugs.
The problem is that they all
have God's image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how
much he pulls out, there's still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out
more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there
was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more
focussed. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was
smarter and braver than the people who didn't believe them. I thought I saw an
emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of
course I was the fool.
Escape Through Horror
How then did God bring me back? I came, over time, to feel a greater and greater
horror about myself. Not exactly a feeling of guilt, not exactly a feeling of shame,
just horror: an overpowering sense that my condition was terribly wrong. Finally it
occurred to me to wonder why, if there were no difference between the wonderful
and the horrible, I should feel horror.
Easy, you find one accords with your wishes, and the other opposes those wishes. We all wish to live, that's why we are horrified to think of another person taking our lives.
In letting that thought through, my mental
censors blundered. You see, in order to take the sense of horror seriouslyand by
now I couldn't help doing soI had to admit that there was a difference between the
wonderful and the horrible after all. For once my philosophical training did me
some good, because I knew that if there existed a horrible, there had to exist a
wonderful of which the horrible was the absence. So my walls of self-deception
collapsed all at once.
At this point I became aware again of the Savior whom I had deserted in my
twenties. Astonishingly, though I had abandoned Him, he had never abandoned
me.
The bible is not consistent on whether and to what extent God abandons those who walk away from him.
I now believe He was just in time. There is a point of no return, and I was
almost there. I said I had been pulling out one component after another, and I had
nearly got to the motherboard.
The next few years after my conversion were like being in a dark attic where I had
been for a long time, but in which shutter after shutter was being thrown back so
that great shafts of light began to stream in and illuminate the dusty corners. I
recovered whole memories, whole feelings, whole ways of understanding that I
had blocked out.
Of course I had to repudiate my dissertation. At the time I thought my career was
over because I couldn't possible retool, rethink, and get anything written and
published before my tenure review came up, but by God's grace that turned out to
be untrue.
Defending What I Had Denied
As an ethical an political theorist, what I do now is poles apart from what I did
sixteen years ago. What I write about now is those very moral principles I used to
denythe ones we can't not know because they are imprinted on our minds,
inscribed upon our consciences, written on our hearts.
Romans 2:15 says it is the work of the Law that is written on our hearts, which under bible inerrancy must mean Leviticus 21:9 is written on our hearts. Yet no Christian thinks it morally good to burn teenage prostitutes to death. I'd say you've got problems.
Some call these principles the "natural law." Such as it is, my own contribution to
the theory of natural law is a little different than those of some other writers. One
might say that I specialize in understanding the ways that we pretend we don't
know what we really do the ways we suppress our knowledge, the ways we hold it
down, the ways we deceive ourselves and others. I do not try to "prove" the natural
law as though one could prove that by which all else is proven; I do try to show
that in order to get anywhere at all, the philosophies of denial must always at some
point assume the very first principles they deny.
Not at all. You couldn't prove any act of a human to be objectively good or bad, to save your life. All you can do is reel in horror at the atheist who doesn't agree with you that torturing babies for fun is objectively immoral, call him a dangerous sociopath, and complain that the only opponents who count are those who already agree with you. That's a pretty sad case for objective morality, that you cannot prove it unless your opponent agrees with you on it.
It is a matter of awe to me that God has permitted me to make any contribution at
all. His promise is that if only the rebel turns to Jesus Christ in repentant faith,
giving up claims of self-ownership and allowing this Christ the run of the house,
He will redeem everything there is in it.
Some would argue you wouldn't bloom with so much god-pollen if terrorists kidnapped your daughter and sold her into sex slavery. There are very good reasons why "His mysterious ways" is nothing but a dogshit excuse.
Just so, it was through my rescue from
self-deception that I learned about self-deception. He has redeemed even my
nihilist past and put it to use.
Many of my students tell me they struggle with the same dark influences that I
once did. I hope that by telling the story of my own escape I may encourage them
to seek the light.
Copyright © J. Budziszewski
