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Leland B. Yeager is Ludwig von Mises Distinguished Professor Emeritus
of Economics at Auburn University.
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Some conservatives and classical liberals credit features of Western society, including individualism, capitalism, and liberal democracy, to the Judeo-Christian belief in a personal god. They see religion as essential to morality (e.g. Evans 1994, Overman 1997). "If the universe was an accident," Dean Overman insists, "there are no absolutes, and without absolutes . . . morals do not exist. Right and wrong have the same meaninglessness. . . . The very fact that one sees wrong and distinguishes it from right means one rejects an impersonal beginning to the universe. For Jewish, Islamic, and Christian theists, God is the moral absolute of the universe" (1997, pp. 177–78). Overman simply makes these assertions;
he does not argue for them.1
Members of the clergy often claim and are accorded special moral authority even on social and economic issues. Yet although economists and some other social scientists are not especially equipped to give moral guidance, they are better equipped, I conjecture, than persons whose profession makes an actual virtue out of faith, out of believing and teaching propositions without and even despite evidence. They are less likely to be content with noble-sounding words and more inclined than the clergy are to ask what asserted principles would mean in practice and what institutions would be required to carry them out.
Libertarianism is a doctrine or attitude about social and economic organization and policy. It is tolerant of diverse grounds for accepting it. It does not require theological roots and could even be embarrassed by insistence on them. As an example and as a personal exercise, I set forth my views here on the existence of God, the efficacy of prayer and ceremonies, the relation between religion and morality, and life after death. My current (though revisable) beliefs add up to what I call "reverent atheism."
I was raised in an ordinary non-fundamentalist Protestant family. My brothers and I regularly attended Sunday school and occasionally church services in the local Congregational church, of which I became a member at the usual age. My parents exposed us to religion to that extent, although my father was not actively religious and rarely attended church (until his old age, anyway). My mother took greater part in church activities but was not particularly concerned with doctrine. Around the time of the change in my own views described below, I asked her if she believed in the core doctrines of Christianity, which I recited. No, not literally, she replied.
I had considered myself a staunch Christian, actually believing mainstream Protestant doctrine. In the fall of 1941, within a few weeks before or after my 17th birthday and a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, I decided to prove my strong faith to myself by ordering several "little blue books" on atheism from the Haldeman-Julius Company of Girard, Kansas. To my surprise, reading them completely dispelled my religious faith, and in about a week. I felt no particular crisis of soul. On the contrary, I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and felt comfortable with my new skepticism.
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I decided to prove my strong faith to myself
by ordering several "little blue books" on atheism.
To my surprise, reading them completely
dispelled my religious faith, and in about a
week.
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As treasurer of the Young People's Society of our church, I was business manager of the play that the society presented each spring to raise money for a religious retreat. Despite the shift in my own religious understanding, I felt committed to carrying on with my responsibilities and did so for the remainder of the school year. Perhaps I should have felt ashamed of hypocrisy, but somehow I did not. Perhaps I felt that publicly trumpeting the state of my soul would seem too self-important.
Whether one believes in God depends, of course, on the word's meaning. I do not believe in a personal God — a being with consciousness and personality who created a universe distinct from himself, who created man partly in his own image, and who sometimes intervenes in human affairs, even responding to prayer. One reason for my skepticism is the problem of evil, including agonies, disasters, and human nastiness. Theodicy does not explain away or justify these evils to my satisfaction. A broader reason is the clash among different attributes usually attributed to God. Standard notions of God as good, merciful, and so forth at least tacitly acknowledge a preexisting morality: the good is not simply whatever God decrees. The God of the Judeo-Christian Old Testament, by the way, was hardly a paragon of virtue. Still another reason for skepticism is Occam's Razor, the precept against unnecessarily multiplying entities in trying to explain observations.
Is atheism or agnosticism the more accurate label for these views? To refer to the etymology of "atheism," mine is a belief "without God." I am not certain that no personal God exists. I have changed my view on the issue once, and further information and reasoning could conceivably make me change it again. Although I know few things with absolute certainty, not being omniscient and infallible does not bar me from holding beliefs on the basis of the information that I do have and the reflection that I have done; it does not require answering practically all questions with "I don't know." The revisability of beliefs does not require always suspending judgment. I have reached the judgment that a free-market economy offers better prospects for human happiness than socialism does. New evidence and argument could conceivably change my mind, but that possibility does not require my declaring myself agnostic on the issue of capitalism versus socialism.
I am not utterly certain that no seven-headed sea serpents are swimming around in the Indian Ocean.2 Proving a negative like that is notoriously difficult; but the serpents' existence seems vastly implausible to me, incompatible with biological and other knowledge that commands confidence. It would be inaccurate to call the question of sea serpents an open question. Even apparently closed questions are not permanently and irrevocably immune from being reopened. My deviation from utter and permanent certainty does not require my calling myself merely agnostic on the question of sea serpents — or on the question of God.
A great mystery remains — the universe itself — but saying that God created it is no solution. Who then created God? Are we not verging on an infinite regress? If something as wonderful as a creator God could have existed before he set to work, why could not something just as wonderful, the universe, have existed without a creator distinct from itself? And why be so anthropomorphic? If indeed there is a God, why suppose that he (or she or it) is so much like human beings as to have consciousness and purposes of his own and to concern himself with human affairs? Religious people who like to emphasize the ineffability of God and the possibility that his nature is incomprehensible to mere human beings should recognize that the standard religious conceptions of him may be inaccurate. Perhaps he is not an entity distinct from his creation. Perhaps he is thoroughly intermingled with the material of the universe and with the principles or regularities of its operation that scientists
try to formulate as laws of nature.
The doctrine to this effect — that God is intermingled or identical with all that exists — is pantheism. But what is the difference between this belief and the absence of belief in a personal God distinct from his creation? What is the difference in substance, not just in words and possibly in emotional yearnings, between pantheism and atheism?
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I am not utterly certain that no seven-headed
sea serpents are swimming around in the Indian
Ocean. My deviation from utter certainty does
not require my calling myself merely agnostic
on the question of sea serpents.
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In recent years several scientifically literate thinkers have been formulating the old argument from design with new sophistication (Barrow and Tipler 1986, Barrow and Silk 1994, Harris 1991 and 1992, Behe 1996, Overman 1997; however, Drange 1998 criticizes their "Fine-Tuning Argument"). The universe and life on earth could not exist if various constants of nature and features of organic chemistry deviated more than extremely slightly from what they are in fact. The probability that the universe and life could have originated by sheer chance seems vanishingly small. But as Ayn Rand said, "existence exists." Whatever is is possible. The universe, life, and human consciousness do exist, regardless of whether we have any way of determining why anything at all exists rather than just nothing. If the universe exists, of course it has the properties necessary to exist. It would be all the more remarkable if the universe existed with properties downright incompatible with its existence, as if some
circles were square in shape.
Agreed, the known constants of nature seem highly improbable. So does any actual deal from a deck of cards, with specified cards composing each of the four bridge hands (Drange 1998 employs similar analogies). A universe looking highly improbable because of its highly detailed characteristics can similarly be expected on ordinary probability grounds. Or perhaps the constants of our universe were not the consequences of a train of pure chance; perhaps some overarching future theory will account for them; perhaps some sort of internal drive or natural selection was at work. Perhaps there are or have been extremely many actual or aborted universes; so that any specific one, like the bridge deal, looks like the product of extreme chance. The hypothesis of multiple universes looks far-fetched, of course; but at one stage of scientific theorizing it can be fruitful to give free range to the imagination and come up with multiple hypotheses. Further research can work on weeding some or all of them out.
Even hypotheses that prove wrong can be heuristically or otherwise useful at one stage of research: they can be better than mere strings of words masquerading as actual hypotheses.
It is premature and presumptuous to suppose that all hypotheses about the universe have already been conclusively ruled out except the God hypothesis (which, however, as commonly preached, is intolerably vague). What better approach is there to the mysteries of the universe and even of its very existence than the scientific method? That method, as I understand it, includes giving definite formulation to questions thrown up by experience and by perceived inconsistencies among hitherto held beliefs. Mysteries, even including the mystery of the apparently deliberately fine-tuned constants of nature, are grist to its mill. The method includes conjecturing answers to questions and searching for evidence to rule out unsatisfactory answers. It includes trying to formulate propositions about reality that show wide consistency with each other and that stand up to our best efforts to disprove them. Why reject that method at a certain point and suppose that the mysteries remaining establish a theological
proposition? Why believe in a "God of the gaps"?
It is no reconciliation of science and religion to say that they cannot conflict because they concern distinct and non-overlapping domains.3 Religion, or Christianity anyway, purports to teach transcendentally important truths about reality and about how things actually work. But science is an ongoing search for a more and more adequate grasp of reality and of how things work. Over the centuries the progress of science — its filling of gaps — has forced theologians to abandon or reinterpret quite a few of their doctrines.
I do not claim to know infallibly that the scientific method is the only or the best route to profound truths about the universe. But let those who think they possess a better one — divine revelation, infallible intuition, secure faith? — argue for it and demonstrate its efficacy and superiority. Absent such a demonstration, the pretense of standard religion even seems morally questionable.
Morality seems likely to have evolved as the practices, precepts, and character traits that support social cooperation, which is essential to human survival and flourishing. Religious beliefs and ceremonies may have contributed to this cohesion and survival of societies. Perhaps, during cultural evolution, a kind of natural and social selection has fostered religion. Even if so, that likelihood does not speak to the truth of its doctrines. Neither does the frequent beauty of religious ceremonies, music, architecture, and the other arts, nor does the comfort that they give to many people. Pleasure and comfort in the beautiful aspects of religion may go far toward explaining its appeal, but they provide no support for its actual doctrines. They may even count toward explaining religious belief away. And the contrasting phenomenon of dogmatism and fanaticism centering on religion and causing chaos and bloodshed is all too familiar throughout history and nowadays still.
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Any actual deal from a deck of cards, with
specified cards composing each of the four
bridge hands, seems highly improbable. A universe
looking highly improbable because of its
highly detailed characteristics can similarly be
expected on ordinary probability grounds.
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The opportunistically vague and shifting doctrines of some Protestant sects (relative to Roman Catholicism, perhaps) repel me. Several decades ago I attended a talk at the University of Virginia by a Protestant minister remarkably named Dr. John Knox. His theme was that some members of a congregation want to accept Christian doctrines and Bible stories as literal truth, while others accept them as allegories or poetry. Fine: a minister can preach so as to satisfy both groups. Dr. Knox took no questions but left the room directly after his talk, leaving an example of the sort of intellectual dishonesty that discredits organized religion.
As for prayer, what conception of God does it imply? Either God constantly needs to have his attention directed and needs advice or else is vain and needs to be constantly flattered and groveled to. Sure, this assessment of God's character supposes that he has person-like characteristics. But that is a standard anthropomorphic supposition among many believers, not mine in particular. If, instead, God has characteristics so beyond human experience as to be incomprehensible to human beings — another familiar doctrine — how can anyone know that he needs or welcomes propitiation by prayer and ceremonies? How can we rule out his being thoroughly intermingled with all of creation instead of being distinct from it? How can we rule out pantheism, alias atheism?
Next comes a topic that it may be embarrassing to admit brooding about. Still, it is what religion — Christianity, anyway — is all about: salvation, getting to heaven. In a letter to the Opelika-Auburn News, December 2004, Dr. Jere Colley replied to a letter in which Dr. Delos McKown, retired head of Auburn University's philosophy department, had described his atheism and his belief that after his death he would simply not exist, just as before being conceived. Colley admonished McKown, age 74, that he still had time to "cram for the finals." If McKown's belief were correct, then life doesn't matter much anyway. If he were wrong, then he would soon be in one "hell of a situation." Did McKown "really want to take this chance?" With this threat Colley had restated or perhaps independently reinvented Blaise Pascal's Wager.
That wager recommends worshiping God and trying to believe in him because nothing is lost if he does not exist, whereas disbelief in an actual God might bring eternal damnation. But what comfort can anyone draw from believing in a God who, besides possessing his traditionally supposed powers, would be so morally perverse as to punish intellectual honesty and reward the opposite? We humans would be in a desperate predicament at the scant mercy of such an unjust God. Of course, the extreme unpleasantness of a doctrine does not by itself prove its error.
The wish for some sort of life after death seems to be widespread among different societies and different times. In 2001 I attended a lengthy funeral at which numerous relatives and friends eulogized the deceased. All or most seemed to take it for granted that he continued to exist in some other and better realm. Some of the speakers may have been reciting mere cant, but I doubt that. All or most seemed genuinely to believe what they were saying. The yearning for a doctrine to be true helps explain widespread belief in it, but yearning and belief are no actual evidence.
Evidence for life after death is skimpy and dubious. It is unsatisfactory to propagate belief in an unobserved phenomenon with none but the vaguest of notions of just what it consists of and of how it might occur. What best fits in with the rest of our knowledge is that dead animals and dead persons have simply ceased to exist as conscious beings, and their bodies decay. I cannot really conceive of dead pets, my mother and father, other relatives, and friends as somehow still alive in another realm. Minds, souls, and consciousness are not distinct entities but functions, albeit remarkable functions, of material bodies. Examples abound of interaction between bodies and their mental functions. Placebo effects on health and "the power of positive thinking" apparently are real. So are psychosomatic illnesses. So are the effects on minds of drugs, disease, and accidents. Disembodied minds and souls are a fantasy.
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What is the point of accepting doctrines
about states of affairs, like disembodied minds
and souls, that cannot even be clearly conceived
of, let alone examined factually?
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Far be it from me to taboo fantasies and half-baked ideas. They often have been steps toward achieving, testing, rejecting, or modifying scientific hypotheses. But they are not conclusions of research. What is the point of accepting doctrines about states of affairs, like disembodied minds and souls, that cannot even be clearly conceived of, let alone examined factually? I personally find it harder to form a definite conception of life after death than even of seven-headed sea serpents in the Indian Ocean.
Still, people — sometimes even I — may regret the prospect of totally ceasing to exist. But feelings and wishes are not evidence. And anyway, would anyone really want perpetual existence, with no prospect of relief if it became a burden or a torture? I doubt that I would want to cling to the sort of life that I have occasionally observed in nursing homes. I hope never to lose the option of suicide. Its irreversibility, though, will make me hesitant to exercise it. What I can hope for is that some people will remember me favorably after my death. I will not be around for that satisfaction, but even now I might enjoy thinking myself worthy of it.
 John Stuart
Mill (1861/1863, chapter 2) recommended remaining interested in human affairs even toward the end of life. I wanted to see how serious the Y2K problem would turn out to be &mwhether computers could cope with the change from 1999 to 2000. (I first drafted this note in March 1999, while delayed overnight by a flight cancellation, and I have tinkered with it ever since.) My next goal was January 1, 2001; for ever since I first realized the inevitability of death and had a general idea of human life span, as I did when about five years old, I hoped to see the new century. After that I hoped to see how the euro worked out and even to hold in my hands a few of the euro coins and banknotes that would come into circulation early in 2002. I have survived to have these experiences, but other interests remain (I hoped to attend conferences in Sweden and Argentina in the summer of 2005 and did attend the latter). When my interest in the future fades along with mental and
physical powers and especially if life becomes a mixture of frustration, boredom, and pain, I expect to be ready for an end to it all. Even if I had not felt ready, once the end had come, I would not be around to regret it.
Like Delos McKown, I imagine my future dead self as nonexistent, as if in some permanent total dreamless sleep. Experience testifies that a temporary lack of conscious existence is not so bad. Often, on awakening at night, I even regret having only a couple of hours or a few minutes before time to get up. While hospitalized in December 2004, I experienced a couple of episodes of extreme drowsiness and thought that dozing off, never to awake, would not be bad at all.
Even so, I cannot help wondering how utter nonexistence will feel. The answer is that I will no more feel nonexistence than anything else. I will be in the same position as my never-born and never-conceived sister Alice and as the much-desired but never-born son of Georges Simenon's fictional Commissaire Maigret.
As I hope I have shown, mine is not a smart-alecky atheism. I am no "evangelical atheist" (as I once heard someone described); instead I am a "reverent atheist." I have deep reverence for the immensity and wonders of the universe, including the mystery of the apparently deliberately fine-tuned constants of nature. I do not kid myself into thinking that I already have answers to those awe-inspiring mysteries. To accept a question-begging nonanswer ("God did it") as their explanation would, for me, indicate disrespect for the wonders of our universe and for their continuing exploration.
Appendix: Social and Political Aspects of Religion
The near-universality of some kind of religious belief is no strong evidence of its truth. As mentioned above, religion may have promoted ethical behavior, social cooperation, and the happiness of many persons — within relatively small and homogeneous societies and sects, anyway.
My old friend James Waller used to worry that we moderns are living off and eating up our religiously based moral capital of the past. Suppose that it would indeed be socially healthy if we could rebuild our moral capital on a religious basis. Again, what follows about the actual truth of religion? Counterexamples to Waller's conjecture — examples of nonreligious but decent people and of societies where morality apparently flourishes without religious consensus — supposedly lose their force; they simply exemplify living off inherited (or perhaps imported) moral capital. But a thesis thus immunized against counterevidence loses its substance.
I do not think that public policy should try to root out religion and other erroneous beliefs. Despite a widespread myth, the U.S. Constitution does not build a "wall of separation" between church and state. The First and 14th Amendments, read as written, do not bar prayer in public schools or religious symbols on public property. Instead, the First Amendment includes a reminder that authority to legislate about religion has not been granted to the federal government; and nothing in the 14th Amendment does grant it. True enough, if I were a member of a state legislature or a school board, I would vote against prayer in the public schools and against teaching "intelligent design"; but nothing in the U.S. Constitution bars either.
References
John D. Barrow and Joseph Silk. "The Left Hand of Creation." 1983, updated with new material 1993. Oxford University Press, [1994].
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle." Clarendon Press, 1986.
Michael J. Behe. "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution." Free Press, 1996.
Jere Colley. Letter to the Opelika-Auburn News (Dec. 3, 2004). 4A.
Richard Dawkins. "The God Delusion." Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Theodore M. Drange. "The Fine-Tuning Argument" (1998). http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/design.html.
James L. Evans. "Scientists Come Out Swinging and Praying." Opelika-Auburn News (Nov. 11, 2006) 1C-2C.
M. Stanton Evans. "The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition." Regnery, 1994.
R. M. Hare. "Sorting Out Ethics." Clarendon Press, 1997.
Errol E. Harris. "Cosmos and Anthropos." Humanities Press, 1991.
Errol E. Harris. "Cosmos and Theos." Humanities Press, 1992.
John Stuart Mill. "Utilitarianism." 1861/1863. Reprinted in many places, including Maurice Cowling, ed., " Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill," New York: New American Library, 1968, and John Gray, ed., "On Liberty and Other Essays," Oxford University Press, 1991.
Dean L. Overman. "A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization." Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Bertrand Russell. "Is There a God?" Commissioned but not published by Illustrated Magazine in 1952. http://www.cfpf.org.uk/articles/religion/br/br_god.html.
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In contrast, the philosopher R.M. Hare writes: "God or no God, the attitudes that make us revere the laws of morality are a social necessity; we could not live in communities without them. . . . [S]ociety would collapse unless children were brought up to feel bad when they do bad things . . ." Furthermore, "a reflective critical morality can justify these laws or rules or principles and our attitudes to them" (Hare 1997, p. 20). Thus Hare, like David Hume, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, and other classical liberals, roots ethics not in theology but in the requirements of social cooperation.
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Bertrand Russell's analogy (1952) involved a small teapot in orbit around the sun. One cannot utterly disprove the existence of such a teapot, yet belief in its existence would be absurd.
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James L. Evans, a Protestant pastor, citing the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, provides a recent example (2006) of this insistence on distinct domains.
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