Philosophy Made Me into an Atheist and a Nihilist
Many people associate philosophy with atheism. Such people would accordingly be ready to draw lines from my undergraduate study of philosophy to my current atheism. But in reality, Christianity did most of what people might want to attribute to philosophy, as I described here. Nevertheless, there was still a role for philosophy to play.
In short, philosophy taught me just how difficult it really is to establish, or prove, or know something. Professors poked and picked at essays, always demanding more support, more justification, more clarity and completeness. Philosophers like Descartes and Hume and Quine dug all the way to the foundations, laying bare the gaps and assumptions in many “obvious” or “common sense” positions. Symbolic logic distilled the rules of deductive reasoning, showing how flawlessly they work, but also how terribly exacting they are. The end result was a rather Socratic knowledge of how little we know.
As for God, it’s not some utterly obvious truth that He exists, nor is it something that we can logically prove.
Similarly, ethical standards, and a meaning or purpose to human life, are also not utterly obvious, or logically provable—from scratch, that is.
They can be proven once you assume a religious proposition or two, though. Assume that the Bible is from God, or that the Jesus of the gospels rose from the dead, and then everything else follows. Once one assumption gets you to the Bible—either directly, or via Jesus—you have an expansive philosophical storehouse. You have to do some work to arrive at a coherent biblical system, but once you do, you’re home free. With relative ease, you can deduce robust accounts of ethics, of meaning, of anthropology. You can make sense of the whole world, and justify some of our very deepest convictions and longings. All it takes is that one assumption.
And philosophy helped me to realize that it all came from that assumption. I knew just how much hung upon Christianity. I didn’t blithely think that most of my beliefs were obvious, were universal, were simple common sense. I knew that instead, they fully and desperately depended upon the Bible. I believed that God had spoken. And I knew that if He hadn’t, we’d know nothing.
But I can’t think of any philosophy or philosopher that doesn’t start from an assumption.
That would mean that philosophy, atheism, nihilism, Christianity, and astrology all start with the same bagage – assumption. Every philosophical proof can be broken down to its irreducible assumptions that it has faith in.
I had much the same experience. I embraced Christianity right around the same time that I began studying philosophy as an undergrad. Rather than focus on the relational, communal features of the faith, I treated Christianity as a complex belief system that I assumed was utterly rational and objectively true. Reformed theology was perfectly suited to this approach so I followed Augustine, Edwards and Calvin. Toward the end of my undergraduate work (around three years later) I was 180 degrees from where I began. It was clear that the theological system that seemed so crystal clear was not only inconsistent and unintelligible, it was also morally repugnant. So I left it behind (for more than fifteen years).
I don’t know that I agree anymore that anything ultimately follows from the first assumption that you indicated. It looks like it ought to, and at some level one can make an argument that is more or less intellectually defensible once you’ve made the initial leap. However, these are not very sturdy arguments and since they are based on a rather confusing collection of writings from the ancient world, they lend themselves to multiple interpretations. Even the ethical system is confusing depending on what your view of the character of God is.
A rational belief system would look more like Spinoza, not Christianity.
gabriel, I would contend that my only assumptions are that I’m not a brain in a vat and that logic works. For the record, it does trouble me to assume the latter.
I subsequently end up very agnostic. Strictly speaking, I’m not asserting that there is no God or that there is no ultimate meaning or morality. I’m actually writing an email along these lines to the aforementioned Alex which I’ll eventually post here. My draft reads in part: “The crux of the matter is that I’m not asserting anything. When it seems like I’m asserting things, that’s actually shorthand. When I seem to be asserting that there is no ultimate meaning to life, that is a shorthand way of saying that we don’t know of any ultimate meaning to life. I’m not positively asserting that there is no meaning; I’m just pointing to how you can’t positively assert that there is such meaning. Likewise for ultimate morality, God, Tillich’s Being, etc.”
Abonilox, it seems to me that a consistent and intelligible account of Christianity is possible. As far as I can tell, I had one. (It was comfortable with Reformed theology although not committed to many of the finer points.) As for moral repugnance, that’s certainly a visceral problem, but I don’t think it’s an intellectual one.
I’m no longer committed to saying that a consistent and intelligible account—mine or otherwise—is the most natural or defensible interpretation of Christianity. A rather confusing collection of writings indeed. And maybe the soundest view of them is that they are contradictory. A believer’s project of assuming that the writings cohere and then searching for how—that seems possible to me; that’s what I did. But that may be an arduous enough project that the more reasonable conclusion is to admit defeat—i.e. biblical incoherence and contradiction.