Chapter 1: In the Beginning
A: A Day of Questions
I have a memory in which I am junior in high school sitting in an American History class. The teacher was lecturing on the Civil War, and had just written two numbers on the board. The top number was the number of soldiers and citizens on the Union side of the conflict who died in the war; around 250,000 people. The bottom number was the number who died on the Confederate; 350,000. Over a half a million Americans dead in 4 years.
As an atheist, this topic lead me to think about my own impending death. Some day, I would die; and when I died I would cease to exist. No immortal soul would carry my essence beyond that fateful day.
So I asked myself, “What do I do with the life that I have?”
An answer came to me almost immediately. I wanted to leave something of value behind. I wanted to leave the world better than it would have been if I had never been a part of it.
This lead to another question.
“What is ‘better’?”
I thought of the Confederate soldiers who had died in the civil war. They were not much different from me. They thought they were leaving the world better than it would have otherwise been. They thought that the death and suffering they were contributing to the world was a lesser evil in service to a greater good.
They were wrong.
They fought and sacrificed and died; they killed and maimed others; and they did this for nothing — at least for nothing good. For less than nothing. For many of them, the world would have been better off if they had never come into the world.
That prospect bothered me a great deal. They meant to do good things. In their hearts, they were no different than their Union counterparts. In their every-day life they worked just as hard to provide for their families, and they cared for their neighbors just as compassionately as their Union brothers. In their mix of virtue and vice, they were ordinary men, not monsters.
However, they made a serious mistake. There is no good to be found in defending slavery. In making this mistake, they did not just cause their own suffering, they imposed suffering on others — on the Union soldiers and civilians they killed and maimed. And they would have preserved slavery if they could have.
Thinking of other wars, I could not imagine that the average German or Japanese soldier in World War II was much different than their American counterpart. Each wanted to do something important with his life. Each made a great sacrifice; some more than others. Yet, these people fought and died — and killed and destroyed — in the defense of evil.
The magnitude of the waste and the loss still amazes me.
I asked the same questions about things other than war. On every issue under debate — abortion, capital punishment, homosexuality, euthanasia, animal rights, social welfare, racial quotas, trade, the environment — there are armies of people devoting huge portions of their energy and fortunes fighting for what they believe in, against another army spending their energy and fortunes fighting for what they believe in, where at least one of the two sides is devoting those resources on something that is making the world worse than it would otherwise have been.
At least one side of the debate as wrong — and, more often then not I fear, both sides fight for some error, sacrificing their labor and their money to make the world worse than it would have otherwise been.
I did not want to be one of those people who thought he was doing good only to end up doing evil. So, how was I to find out which side I should join in any of these conflicts? There is no second chance; no way to say, “Oops. My mistake. Sorry. Give me another life and I will try to do better next time.”
That is the question that started to haunt me in my junior year of high school. That question pushed me through twelve years of college, and beyond, even to the present where it motivates me to write this book.
This book is a record of my attempt to answer the question, “what is ‘better’?” On the way, I visited a number of possible answers; religion, libertarianism, utilitarianism, social contract theories, and others. These chapter record those visits, and why I ultimately left these options to look elsewhere. It chronicles my examination of claims such as “right and wrong are merely a matter of opinion” and “we can perceive values much like we perceive colors and other secondary properties” and “all moral claims are false.” It explains the wheat of truth and the chaff of fiction that I thought I found there.
I hope that, with this record, I may be able to provide something useful to somebody else who may be seeking an answer to the same question. Perhaps leaving these notes is the best way that I have to fulfill that original mission, to leave the world better than it would have otherwise been.
B: Finding Meaning in Religion
The first option for me to consider, even as the question was forming in my mind in that history class, was the religious option. To find meaning for my life, I needed to look toward God, or so I was told. If I had a proper relationship with God, I would not even be asking this question. Furthermore, God was said to be the source of all morality. Morality is intrinsically linked to faith; right and wrong inseparably linked to God’s will. Those who looked elsewhere for moral truth started off lost, and could only stay lost, until they found religion.
However, I found religion to be an untrustworthy guide at best; and in all likelihood marks the path to the exact types of mistakes I was seeking to avoid.
Those Confederate soldiers that I most wanted not to emulate mostly founded their conviction in the legitimacy of slavery on the unerring truth of the Christian bible, where slavery is endorsed and sometimes commanded by God. In light of this authority, the Confederate who takes up arms could not possibly be wrong. He was fighting for God.
There was once a time that I wanted, very badly, to believe in God, but not because religion made any sense. It was because I wanted to stop the harassment I was getting at school.
I was in the 6th grade - eleven years old. I, and some classmates from the previous year, were new to this particular school. We went to the fifth grade in a different school, which had no 6th grade. The previous year, I was relatively new to that 5th grade school. I did not make friends easily. I was very shy, preferring a quiet evening with a book to the company of strangers. So, I remained an outsider.
I do not remember how my classmates found out that I did not believe in God. Somebody probably asked me a question. I answered honestly. In the town my family had recently moved from everybody knew that I was an atheist, and they simply did not care. Or, if they did care, I never knew about it.
However, these classmates cared a great deal. After recess, when I returned to my home room, I found my desk toppled and my belongings scattered. Righting my desk and collecting my possessions after recess became a daily ritual, including days in which the teacher had returned to the room before I did.
One day, when I found my desk toppled and Mr. Stevens in the room, I decided that I would see what would happen were to protest. I put as much disappointment as I could in my voice and said, “Not again.” Mr. Stevens answered with a brief statement that the students should not be doing such things. I picked up my belongings, put them back in my desk, and class began.
That particular practice stopped with a simple statement of the teacher, but other practices continued.
Three or four students cornered me in the playground nearly every day during recess, to preach to me, bully me, harass me, and threaten me, because I did not believe in their God. I took to spending my recess time hiding in an out-of-the way corner of the playground — a narrow region between the building and a chain-link fence where nobody saw me, and nobody would bother me, usually. From time to time they sought me out.
I remember going into the cafeteria for lunch, sitting down, and having every other student at the table stand up and leave.
Everybody, that is, except Steve. Steve had epilepsy, and every few days he would have a seizure. It was not serious. He would stare off into space and have these mild convulsions. I would simply wait silently for it to end, then we would continue our conversation.
One day, during gym class while we were playing kick ball, he had a small seizure while running from third base to home. He just stopped, half way home, with that blank stare I had become familiar with. So, the opposite team tagged him out, and our team — he and I were on the same team — insulted and condemned him for his failure to score. A fellow outcast, we became friends.
He was a fundamentalist Seventh-Day Adventist. He kept the Sabbath religiously, prayed before every meal, including our meals in the school cafeteria, and strictly obeyed the Adventist diet.
Together, we learned to treat our different views with mutual respect. At meals, I would sit quietly while he prayed, making no effort to pretend that I, too, was praying. He would hand over whatever food his religion prohibited, and my lack of religion permitted. I would offer him what he was allowed. Neither felt the need to condemn, harass, or convert the other; we simply had different ways of living based on different beliefs.
He did not have a choice regarding his epilepsy, but I did have a choice concerning my lack of belief in God. Clearly, my life would be better, even in my association with Steve, if I could find reason to believe in God. So, I asked my mom how to pray, and acquired a bible to read.
In my reading, I quickly reached that portion of the bible that concerned the great flood, and its aftermath, where God offered the rainbow as a sign of his promise never to do such a thing again. Naturally, I had struggled with the credibility of how Noah had fit all of the animals into the arc, how he collected animals from regions the people at the time did not even know about such as the Americas, what the carnivores ate for fourty days and fourty nights (as well as the year or so afterward while the herds of other antelope and zebra grew from the two survivors), the problems of inbreeding among the species, the gathering of the insects and microscopic creatures, and the survival of creatures accustomed to salt water (unless the rain was salty, in which case it was the survival of fresh-water plants and animals that was to be questioned).
But the last straw of credibility for me was a remark about God offering the rainbow as a sign of his promise never to do anything like the Great Flood again. At that point it became clear to me that this was a waste of time.
I had a particular interest in rainbows.
(B1) The Rainbow Connection
A few years earlier, I had gone with my family on a camping trip. I took along my favorite pillow; a pillow I identified by a thin red stripe that ran along the seam.
One day, with the sun high in the sky, I went into the tent and laid down. I looked at my pillow, and it had no red stripe. Instead, it had a black stripe where the red stripe should have been. I looked closely, trying to catch a hint of red in that stripe, but I could not find it. This was not my pillow (which, to a very young boy, could be counted among the worst of all possible horrors).
But it had to be my pillow.
Concerned, I took the pillow outside for a closer look. As soon as the sunlight hit my pillow, the stripe was red.
I took the pillow back into the tent. Again, the stripe turned black.
That was cool.
What could cause this?
I looked toward the sun, which as I could see as a few pinpoints of light on the wall of the tent. The tent wall was green.
What if all colors came from the sun? I knew that if you mixed red and yellow you can get orange; and blue and yellow made green. So, I wondered if all colors put together made sunlight. However, when all of those colors hit the wall of the tent, the tent ‘ate’ all of the colors but green. Green made it through the tent, which is why I saw green when I looked at the tent wall. This meant that, inside the tent, there were only green colors.
The stripe on my pillow ate green colors and bounced red colors off. However, there were no red colors to bounce, and all of the green color was being eaten, so the stripe looked black.
My hypothesis that sunlight contained all of the colors was later confirmed when I learned about the effects of a prism. Shine a light through a prism, and it breaks the light up into all of the colors.
Raindrops split sunlight into its color parts, and I could see that all of the colors were there.
If I was to believe that God ‘created’ rainbows as a sign that he would not cause another flood, then God had to fundamentally change the way light worked. It had to have been the case that light used to be different — that raindrops at one time did not cause sunlight to split light up into its parts.
Okay, God is supposed to be all powerful. He could do that if he wanted to. However, this possibility was tied to another childhood interest of mine – the ancient Greeks.
(B2) The Greeks
I loved the stories of the ancient Greek gods. These were the stories about how Zeus made thunder and lightning, Vulcan lived in mountains of fire (a home called a volcano). Poseidon created tidal waves when he was angry. The ancient Greeks had all sorts of god stories to explain the world around them.
However, nobody thought these stories were real. They were just stories.
The Greeks living at the time did not see things that way. They all had complete and unquestioned faith in these Gods and the literal truth of these stories. They were even willing to kill those who said otherwise, such as Socrates, who was conficted of the crimes of “worshipping false gods” and “corrupting the youth”.
This story about God and the rainbow struck me as being just like the ancient Greek stories. If the ancient Greek stories were fiction, yet accepted as literally true by a whole country full of people, then the stories of the Bible could also be fiction, yet accepted as literally true by a whole country full of people.
If I had to take the rainbow story as a real story of what happened so long ago, then I would have to take the story of Prometheus and fire as true as well. I had just as much reason to believe one as to believe the other. I had no reason at all to say that one was credible and the other was not.
Since both stories could not both be true, the only option was that both stories were false. They were inventions of a primitive mind that did not understand the world around them.
(B3) Pretend
I thought, I could at least pretend to believe the stories so that I could get the other kids at school to accept me. Once, I knelt next to chain link fence in my hidden corner of the playground, but in sight of the gang of Christians that lead the harassment against me, and prayed — or pretended to. Suddenly, the other students found me acceptable.
But I could not keep up the deception. I quickly realized that these classmates still did not accept me. They accepted a fictitious character that I created, a character in a make-believe play. I, the real me, was as alienated and alone as before.
I decided that I had to accept my status as an outcast.
The next year, I started Junior High, with the rest of my sixth-grade class, in yet another new school. I was in art class when a student from my old school approached and asked, “Do you believe in God?” His new friends sat nearby, curiously waiting for my answer.
I answered, “No.” That was all I said, but I braced myself for another year of abuse and ridicule.
Two years later, the abuse would give me a very severe fright, as a group of students decided to ‘baptize’ me by holding me underwater. They kept me underwater until I could not hold my breath any more. I shouted for help, knowing that there was no way my underwater scream could actually be heard. It was not a rational response, but they let me up after they saw the bubbles.
They could kill me if they wanted to, but I could not believe in God to save my life.
As I sat in that history class at the age of sixteen, wondering about what would count as a ‘better world,’ I already knew that religion would not help me. Since I wanted to avoid the mistakes that had trapped so many others, a collection of myths and fables seemed an unpromising route to take.
(B4) A Digression: Additional Lessons
Over the years, I have met many who scoff at the idea of somebody denying the existence of their favorite God. Some speak or write with amazement at the simple-minded atheist.
I have patiently listened or read while they present the atheist’s arguments, then tear down those arguments to demonstrate the foolishness of atheism.
In criticizing atheism, they target the “Argument from Evil” in which the atheist says that “evil exists therefore an all knowing perfectly benevolent God cannot”. They also target the “Argument from the Completeness of Science”, which states that science can explain everything in the universe so there is no reason to suggest that a God had anything to do with it.
These critics then answer these two arguments. They answer the Argument from Evil by stating that evil is caused by free will. They answer the Argument from the Completeness of Science that Science is not complete. It is, in fact, riddled with unanswered questions. So, it cannot be used as a basis for saying that God does not exist.
They further argue that because the atheists’ arguments are so easily refuted, that the atheist must have some ulterior motive or unconscious reason for accepting them. This ‘something else’ might be something sinister, such as a plot to usurp God’s authority, or rooted in a psychological issue such as a hatred of and a desire to punish God for some imagined transgression.
There is a name for constructing an obviously weak argument in order to easily tear it down and claim victory over an opponent. It is called a “straw man” argument, and both of these objections to atheism easily qualify.
First, I do not understand how this explains cancer, spina bifida, tsunamis, tornados, drought, the Black Death, and the like. If there were a God who was the creator of all things, then these are the products of God’s free will, not of man’s.
Second, I have not based my belief that no God exists on an “Argument from Evil”, nor have I asserted any “Completeness of science.” What I have done is used the very same arguments that theists use for rejecting the thousands of gods and monsters they do not believe in.
These people also believe that the Greek gods were fiction. They do not believe this on the basis of any ‘Argument from Evil’ or ‘Completeness of Science’. They deny the existence of these gods and monsters because the best explanation for what happened back then is that a whole nation full of people came to accept a story that was almost entirely made up.
If my arguments for denying the existence of their God are so poor, then why do they think that the arguments are good enough for rejecting every other god and monster ever described to them?
It is simple hypocrisy to use a standard when it suits one’s purpose and condemn it when it does not. It is simple hypocrisy to assert that, “These are the reasons that reject the existence of so many of the gods and monsters others claim to exist,” while saying, “Those who use these same standards to reject the Gods and monsters I believe in are pathetically simple minded or victims of serious self-deception.”
It is neither simple-minded nor self-deceiving to use reason consistently.
C: Which God? Which Sect?
My goal, recall, was to figure out how to make sure that I made the world a better place than it would have otherwise been. I rejected the God option because worshipping and devoting my life to a fictional being would be just the type of mistake I was trying to avoid.
Yet, maybe that was my error — thinking that this being was fiction. What if God did exist?
I would still face an insurmountable obstacle. I would need to determine which God existed, and which sect had the correct vision of that God.
My grade-school Seventh Day Adventist friend insisted that the Sabbath started at sundown on Friday and ended at sundown on Saturday. The Bible commands that those who do not worship the Sabbath and keep it holy be put to death. Yet, the country was filled with people who held that the Sabbath was on Sunday, or who ignored it entirely. And people of both persuasions ignored the Sabbath regularly without being put to death.
If I were to go with the religious option, I would still have to find out which religious option was correct, so that I would know which people needed to be killed (if any).
Should I be seeking the death of all of those who did not keep sabbath at all, or all who kept the wrong sabbath? Or should I pursuing the execution of those who worshipped on Saturday instead? Lives depend on knowing the right answer, yet the Bible did not seem the authority to go to in deciding what that answer was.
Perhaps the Jews were right and the Christians were simply seduced by a cult that doctored a historic story of some crazed streetcorner peddler who claimed, “The end is near!” in the wrong company — a 1st Century Jim Jones or David Koresh.
Or, perhaps, Vishnu or Buddha or Allah was the correct God.
How was I to decide among these options? What evidence was there that separated the true religion from all of the pretenders?
I think it is safe to say that no two people have identical views about all matters of religion. For any two people, somewhere in their beliefs, you will find a difference. Consequently, at most one person in the world today has the whole of religion correct.
At most one.
As it turns out, this is an extremely optimistic option. That one person with the accurate view of religion might not be born yet. Or, perhaps, he was already born and died — if not in the Middle East, then in the hills of Sri Lanka or on the American Great Planes long before Columbus sought to find a spice route to India.
Of all of these different views, at most one has gotten it right. Somehow, I needed to find out what that right answer was.
The odds of my success are close enough to zero to declare the possibility nonexistent.
Surprisingly, the near certainty of error is not the most significant problem with this option. Even scientists have to admit that there is still some subtle error in their favorite theory. This is where all of those ‘unanswered questions’ come from.
The problem is that that religion provides no way of measuring one option against another. What test could be conducted to show that Jesus was the Son of God but Mohammed was not a true prophet? What experiment can be performed to show that the Sabbath starts on Friday night or Saturday night, and whether the crime of working that day should be punished by death as the Bible commands?
There is no such test. Tacking note cards on a large wall and throwing a dart at it from a great distance, trusting God to guide the path of the dart, works just as well. I would wager that if people used this test, God would still give different answers to different people. No two would hit the same card — or, would do so only very rarely.
Which God? Which Sect? Most theists are certain that they know the answer to this question. Most theists are certain that they somehow came upon the one true faith, and that everybody who disagrees, however slightly, somehow fell into error.
The existence of different beliefs means that somebody has to be wrong. Religion provides no way to determine who that ‘somebody’ is.
For somebody like me, who wanted to make the world better than it would have otherwise been, this option seemed an all but certain road to just the type of error I wanted to avoid. It was just the type of error that created the Confederate defender of slavery.
D: A History of Error
Each of the previous issues discussed are sufficiently large problems to rule out the religious option. If God does not exist, then the religious option guarantees error. If there is no way to decide between competing ideas of what God wants, then pursuing this option is only an infinitesimally small step away from certain error.
Religion has yet another problem.
If the religious option were so reliable, then why is it that so many who take that path have fallen into error?
Inquisitions, crusades, witch burnings, and the persecutions of scientists who dared say the earth was not the center of the universe, jihads, the subjugation of women, slavery, protests against the study of anatomy in the Middle Ages and protests against a policy of immunization from disease at the start of the age of Science, mass suicides, holocausts, children killed by “faith healing”, coerced “conversions” and mandatory tithing (a policy enjoying a new resurgence in the United States under the name “faith based initiative”).
All of these are examples where those who pursued the religion option failed to leave the world better than it would have otherwise been.
Some people like to claim that the Bible, rather than being the source of error, is the source of America’s system of rights. But, for nearly 2,000 years, Christianity defended the divine right of kings and monarchial dictatorship over the democratic rights of the individual. Historically speaking, only monarchical dictatorships can complain true compliance with the Christian tradition; no democracy can make that claim.
While the First Commandment says, “thou shalt have no God before me,” the First Amendment says, “Thou shalt have whatever God thou wants, or no God at all”. Instead of promoting a doctrine of freedom of the press, religious commandments call for charging those who question or dissent from that religion’s dictates with blasphemy and similar crimes, hauling them before tribunals, and punishing those that are found guilty. In place of the rights of the accused against self - incrimination, they tortured confessions out of prisoners. In place of protections against cruel and unusual punishment, it dismembered people or burned them alive.
We can find within the Bible an acceptance of slavery and genocide. When Moses sought to convince a Pharaoh to “let my people go” the technique that ultimately worked, according to the Bible, was to release a plague that killed a large portion of the population, including innocent children, only one of which was the Pharaoh’s own first-born son. Today, we call this technique “bio-terrorism.” Somebody who finds their ethics in religious text can easily convince himself that God sees nothing wrong with using biological weapons of mass destruction to obtain political ends.
To somebody who thinks he would like to destroy a city with a nuclear bomb, the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah can ease their conscience. Sure, innocent children would be harmed in such a destructive attack, but innocent children were harmed at Sodom and Gomorrah as well. Apparently, this is not a problem. “Kill them all; God will know his own.”
According to the Bible, you can kill a person who wears a blend of two different types of cloth, works during the Sabbath, or, unfortunately for those who are saving for retirement, collects interest on a loan (i.e., has a savings account or purchases bonds and fixed-income securities). These three evils alone argue that virtually every man and woman alive deserves death.
I want to stress that this is no rehash of the traditional “Argument from Evil” against the existence of God. I am not saying, “Evil exists, therefore God does not.” Nor am I saying, “These evils were carried out by Christians, therefore all Christians are evil.’ That would simply be bigoted nonsense.
My point is simple. People who want to make sure that they make the world better than it would have otherwise been, and who are concerned with the possibility of being mislead into error, need to be concerned about religion as a source of ethics. It has misled people terribly in the past, and there is good reason to believe that those who bound their ethics to the Bible today are continuing to promote evil and thinking it good.
Correspondingly, we can say of a person who is not concerned about the possibility of error — who does not question whether his interpretation of the Bible leads him to truth or error as he insists on social policies harmful to others, really cares about leaving the world better than it would have otherwise been.
E: Recap
The quest I adopted as I sat in that American History class was to make sure that I left the world better than it would have otherwise been.
This immediately raised the question, “What is ‘better’?” How am I to tell that the course that I picked aimed at actually making the world ‘better’? How was I to make sure that I did not end up like the Confederate soldier, the inquisitor, or the crusader, promoting evil and only deceiving myself into thinking it was good.
There are those who say that all value comes from God, and no answer can be given to this question that is free from religion.
But three significant barriers block this route.
First, virtually all of us think we have good enough reason to dismiss almost all of the gods and monsters that humans have thought up in the past. If we take those criteria and apply them consistently, we have reason to reject all of those gods and monsters. If no god exists, then no god can serve as a foundation for right and wrong.
Second, even if we ignored this problem, we still have no way to determine which god or monster to believe in. With an infinite list of options to pick from, and no way to determine which is right, those who try to pick will have only a one in an infinite chance of being right. For all practical purposes, error is guaranteed.
Third, many of those who have selected the religious option have clearly been mislead, making the world worse than it would have otherwise been. They have launched crusades, jihads, and inquisitions, and depopulated whole continents in religious wars. They have tortured, burned, and executed so-called ‘witches’ and other heathens and heretics, and burned scientists alive for the crime of uncovering truths about the world. They have stood in the way of advances in medicine such as surgery, immunization, and stem cell research. They have used their faith as an unshakeable foundation for the defense of slavery and the divine right of kings and other dictators. In the light of this, the thought that religion is our most reliable source of moral knowledge should make one shudder.
Any of these three problems is sufficient to cause the person who wants to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, and is concerned about the possibility of falling into error, to reconsider the religious option. With that option, error is almost certain.
To find out how the world can be made a better place, and do so reliably, we have to look elsewhere.
F: The Road Ahead
My need to know the answer to this question, “What is ‘better’?”, took me through twelve years of college. However, finding the answer to this type of question is not something that is limited to the college classroom. It is something to be learned, in part, through the living of a life.
In the chapters that follow, I will look at a number of different moral theories, from Ayn Rand Objectivism to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, from Kantean deontology to J.L. Mackie’s “error theory”.
I will also be looking at the living of a life; at what ethics has to say about life, and what life has to say about ethics.
I will be paying a lot of attention to the thesis that there is no ‘better’, or that ‘betterness’ is subjective — not because I think that the theory has merit, but because a lot of people seem to think that it does.
By the time I leave college I will have answered my question, I think – at least to the degree that I am able. I will have settled on a collection of ideas that I have labeled “desire utilitarianism”.
I believe that the best way to explain “desire utilitarianism” and how I ended up there, is to start at the beginning, and to trace the steps that I took on this quest.
The trailhead for that journey started in this high-school history class. It went next to Ayn Rand Objectivism and its companion philosophy of Libertarianism.
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