Pardon the Interruption: The REAL Worst Argument in the World

My co-author points out in the previous entry what she believes to be a crucial argumentative fallacy that those on the left may or may not realize is implied in their position. The fact that Christianity is the dominant religion in the west - where the brand of leftists Stephanie encounters thrive - makes it the most urgent target if you are insecure enough in your moral position that you need to shout down people of faith when they disagree. It's not, IMO, a conscious anti-Christian bias; it just comes from Christianity's position as the most powerful faith based morality in the west.

I think there's a far more important and far more frustrating problem among atheists and agnostics in the west (who are, nearly universally, also extreme leftists). I consider it more important because it goes straight to the mere existence of God, let alone the worthiness of faiths in his name. It goes something like this:

If God exists, why does the world he created suck so horribly. When you study biology, you realize how flawed our very DNA is, and how many things go wrong that shouldn't. If God created the heavens, then he's a crappy contractor.

Here's how to make an atheist. Take a person, expose them too little to the logical defense of faith as they are maturing, make them believe they're in absolute control over everything that happens in their lives, and then hit them with a natural disaster, a genetic defect that rears its head later in life, a personal loss, or some combination thereof. Why? Because humans have a bad habit of confusing good and bad with pain and joy. If it feels good, it IS good. If not, it's bad. The plain simple truth is...pain is not always bad, joy is not always good for us, and a natural world that includes hazards, faulty DNA, and suffering is not necessarily constructed improperly.

When can joy be bad? I've had a number of friends over the years who bounced in and out of relationships and who found themselves having a hard time staying monogamous. Doing what you want, when you want might feel good in the short term, but imposing order on your life and embracing some limitations on your joy and liberty will feel BETTER in the long wrong. All of these friends of mine wonder why they are so profoundly unhappy and get annoyed with me when I don't indulge them with what Plato would call "idiot compassion." I'm no paragon of moderation, mind you. I am overweight because I eat what I like, not what I should. Just another example of how joy can turn into something bad.

When can pain be good? This is a little harder to grasp, because suffering makes us unhappy and the struggle to overcome life's obstacles is very difficult to accept as a positive thing. But let me ask you this - what would be the point of living in a world without suffering? Would we ever feel motivated to learn anything? Would we ever fulfill our potential? History is littered with examples of great human innovation coming in the wake of terrible disaster. World War II - one of the darkest chapters in human history - ended with the discovery of how to harness the power of the atom. We did use that to blow up a pair of Japanese cities - an unfortunate consequence of war - but we're also using it now to power our homes with clean, safe nuclear energy and one day, we'll use it to leave this planet behind and power our way into the great unknown of space - our last great adventure. The industrial revolution and the perfection of the idea of mass production have multiplied the human life span by 2.5, increased our standard of living, made a huge variety of wonderful products stunningly affordable and made everything we take for granted about our modern way of life possible and that great revolution was born in England as a direct reaction to fears that the country's resources would be overrun and people would start starving due to the rising population. Agriculture itself was made possible by our desire to stop wandering around nomadically following herds of wildebeests and buffalo around. The nomadic lifestyle is a hard life and we responded by asking "how can we make this better?"

Look no further than the human reaction to the worst natural disasters if you want a graphic example of how suffering can be good. The people of Greensberg, KS, would tell you they're a stronger community now than they were before the tornado. Hurricane Katrina helped to highlight government corruption on a massive scale in the state of Louisiana and in the city of New Orleans. After the great New England ice storm of 1998, people worked together for weeks to clear the debris, shared food and resources, and some of those towns in New England were forever changed by their experiences. Indeed, every time humanity encounters a big enough problem, we see the better side of our nature (and the worst side as well, I'll grant you, though I will be quick to point out that the people helping clean up the neighborhoods are the most likely to be people of faith, not the ones looting).

I once encountered someone who used our friendly wildebeests as an example of why nature is disgustingly ill-conceived and no God could possibly have designed it this way and been well-intentioned. There is a common disease in Africa that affects pack animals like the wildebeest. It's caused by a parasitic organism that enters the creature through the ear and slowly eats its way into the animal's head. This has the affect of compromising its balance and causing it to walk in ever smaller circles. When the other members of its herd realize that it can't walk straight, they isolate it and move on because the slowest member of the herd is the one most likely to get eaten by a lion and they can't afford that risk. It's a gruesome looking and horribly cruel-seeming death. Why would God create a natural system that has what would appear to be a cruel flaw? The answer is simple - the parasitic nature of some lifeforms is REQUIRED to keep the food chain balanced and to allow for evolution as we know it to have occurred. In fact, we humans owe our existence to this form of life. The mitochondrial DNA we carry form generation to generation is a parasitic embryo of sorts that entered some of the first complex multi-cellular organisms and never came out (because having a mitochondrial nucleus turned out to be beneficial!). We tend to call organisms that have life-giving properties when they enter a host symbiotic instead of parasitic, but the mechanism is the same. A natural world without parasites would be hopelessly BROKEN and we wouldn't be here.

When a volcano erupts, it kills everything in its path. But our atmosphere is given to us by Earth's earliest volcanoes and every volcanic eruption puts megatons of mineral-rich soil out onto the surface making for extremely fertile ground for growing food. Lightning from thunderstorms kills about 3,000 people each year worldwide. It also is singularly responsible for all of the nitrogen in the ground (it splits N2 into free nitrogen in the atmosphere and that precipitates to the ground)...life would be impossible without lightning. Hurricanes are the single most important transfer mechanism to get rainfall and heat energy out of the tropics and into the polar regions. We tried to eradicate forest fires (to protect property we'd built in dry forested parts of the west), and quickly realized that this was a HORRIBLE idea because guess what...we need the fires! The fires help trees spread their seed, rejuvenate aging forest floors and start the cycle of making new life all over. When one of these many natural disasters strikes you personally, it is a very difficult thing to recover from psychologically, because we humans tend to be arrogant and we feel like we have control over nature. But you name me a natural disaster and I'll tell you why life would be impossible if that disaster didn't happen. The more we learn about our world...the more amazing a place we're realizing it is.

So...the next time you hear someone use that argument to defend their atheism...call them on it. Pain is not bad and joy is not good. It is our reaction to pain and joy that defines whether our lives are going to be good or bad. The worst personal loss or natural disaster can turn into great personal motivation to learn, inspire others or join a cause that could help make this world a better place for us all. The most pleasurable orgasm or best tasting food could lead to profound misery. Do yourselves a favor...take a look up at the night sky on a clear evening. Those stars you see out there...they belong to us! This universe in which we've grown our little cultures is vast...filled with wonders beyond our comprehension and we sit here questioning whether there is something good that suffuses it all...whether a noble God could have made this place for us? I, for one, have no reason to doubt it.