Is the rejection of nihilism the best argument in support of the consideration of the possibility of the existence of God? At the prompting of a number of students, I've been watching videos of Jordan Peterson vs. various New Atheists. Matt Dillahunty was Peterson's latest sparring partner. It was while watching this video that a thought struck me about these recent defenders of materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheism. Many of them, such as Dillahunty, describe how in the course of their lives they moved away from religious upbringings to embrace atheism. This is so alien to my own experience, since I was raised in a non-religious home, without any encouragement by my parents to believe in God. Not that I was actively discouraged. There was just a general lack of discussion of any serious sort, except for the occasional critical remark such as that "God was the opiate of the masses" or a "crutch." None of my close friends except for one went to Church.
The result was that for the earliest years of my life I found myself quite happily identifying with a kind of materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheism. In my early teens, I was attracted to Marxism and to the supposedly scientific outlook that Marx felt his outlook was based in. By my mid-teens I was also starting to explore the outlook of nihilism and was reading some Nietzsche. In my late teens, however, I began to question my commitment to nihilism and eventually found myself drawn into the life of a Christian community. That community transformed my life.
What I think many of the New Atheists don't seem to recognize is that their religious upbringing might immunize them from serious consideration of nihilism. Perhaps their religious upbringings, along with the support of lingering religious influences on culture provides an intellectual footing that prevents them from going deeper in their philosophical explorations. Whereas my own life experience started with a certain kind of vague leftist/liberal indifference towards theism, it eventually led to nihilism because one realizes that outlooks like Marxism, Positivism and scientism are not really scientific perspectives but quasi-religious worldviews. Marxism, for instance, is filled with a lingering earnestness for justice that one also hears in the Hebrew prophets. It has saints and music. I still know the words to the Internationale. What drove me towards nihilism was the inability of outlooks like Marxism, positivism, or naturalism to take seriously what committing oneself to a hard-nosed rational empiricism really entails. It involves accepting that only empirical statements are meaningful and capable of being ascertained as true or false. Seeing the world as a material system without supernatural elements means throwing out all the comforting ideas about meaning, purpose, freedom and morality. If one is truly to be a naturalist, this means not accepting subjective beliefs about realities beyond the straightforward operations of matter. As Nietzsche made clear, believing that God is dead must lead one to also wipe away the horizon of meaning which that concept enlightened.
My teenage brain was, of course, filled with certain anxieties about these thoughts. Was life essentially a joke? A meaningless struggle, with no guarantees whatsoever? Was morality a mugs game? Were all human endeavors essentially shams?-- Mere attempts to whistle past the graveyard? I accepted that the answers to these questions were most likely "yes." I still find myself sometimes inclining to these conclusions. I felt that scientific discovery shed no useful light on these issues. I was prepared to go forward in life in a stoic way without false and imaginary ideas clung to only to provide solace. This was what I felt all religious beliefs were really about. They were fantasies that helped people in the face of the stark reality of the meaninglessness of existence.
My reaction to folks like Dillahunty and Harris, who so easily spout variations of vaguely utilitarian/natural law outlooks and decry arguments that imply their positions must lead to immorality or amorality, is that they really don't take their atheism seriously enough. I might be one of the few Christians who reject their arguments not because they reject God, but because they reject atheism. They believe that atheism need not devolve to nihilism, whereas I believe that it must. So when they deny that atheism leads to immorality or amorality, I hear Nietzsche whispering in the background, have the courage of your convictions. Sure, you need not, nor are likely to, start killing people, or as Dillahunty quips to "shove Sam Harris off the stage", but don't try to justify still believing in non-empirical realities like "goodness" and "meaning." Don't suggest that "consciousness" and "freedom" are anything more than mere artifacts of an interesting picture-show of the deterministic operation of your synapses. If Matt doesn't shove Sam off the stage, admit that this has nothing to do with morality--nothing to do with Sam's worth, or Matt's sense of self-worth-- or the "self-evident goodness of happiness," but is simply the result of contingent biological instincts for self preservation. As Nietzsche jokes, "man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that." If one is prepared to jettison God because there is no compelling empirical evidence, one must also be prepared to jettison these other comforting concepts too. Don't make arbitrary exceptions for ones that you just happen to like or perhaps feel embarrassed to bring into public question.
It would appear that Jordan Peterson thinks along similar lines. You can see him probing Dillahunty in ways meant to prompt him to expose the various junctures in his thought where he holds empirically dubious commitments such as belief in free will, the intrinsic worth of human beings, the importance of being earnest as opposed to straightforwardly self-concerned, etc. One is left wondering why it is so important to ditch God but leave all these other non-empirical aspects of human life and thought untouched. Dillahunty is highly selective in his supposed empiricism and "rational" thinking. People's reports of their religious experiences are simply discounted, as are apparent somatic effects of such experiences, but their reports of consciousness, freedom and value and their supposedly amenable effects on societies (including science) are left untouched.
So I guess my argument is simple. If you are going to be a materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheist, you really must be a nihilist too. Non-nihilistic atheism unless *intensively* philosophically considered too often simply ends up being an incoherent mishmash of the cultural lingerings of moral outlooks that have grown out of essentially religious metaphysical commitments. The argument here is not that atheism necessarily leads to immoral behaviour. I think there are lots of instincts and social pressures that will keep most of us in line most of the time, and will likely continue to do so for quite some time, if not possibly indefinitely. The objection here is not about such practical matters. It's about whether one has an intellectually coherent metaphysical outlook that can make sense of one's desire for and respect of these instincts and social practices. But many of the New Atheists seem to wish to avoid such wider discussion of foundations, or what Charles Taylor calls "frameworks" of meaning. They are focused only on the issue of God, but seem uncomfortable and uninterested in discussion of other metaphysical beliefs (metaphorical substrates) and abstract issues of contemporary epistemology that inform critical aspects of their outlooks (including their respect for science).
Maybe the best way to proceed in a defense of theism is not directly by way of a defense of the existence of God. Maybe what one must first do is understand why nihilism is not acceptable. If this can be done, then the issue of faith might simply boil down to making a choice between nihilism vs. Non-nihilism (Anihilism?) If nihilism doesn't make sense, then one must find another outlook, with theism being one of the many possibilities to consider. Perhaps such consideration, if carried out honestly and sincerely over a lifetime, might be enough to allow one to count oneself a theist.
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