I was thinking about it this morning, and it seems to me many atheists–with Richard Dawkins being an obvious example–seem to have this ambivalence about God. They doubt God’s existence, but also seem simultaneously to be angry with Him, for the pain and suffering in the world. The outgrowth of these contradictory trends is often de facto sadism, in which tremendous effort is expended to uproot the faith of other people, without subsituting anything in its place of value. One reader commented that Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene” had put him into a ten year depression. Dawkins replied something along the lines of the “the truth is what it is”.
The stance, in some cases, is approximately what I tried to convey in my version of the Grand Inquisitor, by having Sade say “there is no God, and He hates you.” Logically, this is a nonsensical statement. If there is no God, there is no hating. This seems clear enough. But psychologically, I think this gets close to the actual intention of many proselytizing atheists. I think in their heart of hearts they fluctuate between conceptions of “No God”, and ANTI-Theism, in the sense of hating any God who could create such a world.
Logically, a scientific mind, in evaluating the nature of the universe, would start from science. They would quickly come across any number of promising pathways indicating survival of death, latent order, and the interconnectedness of all life.
But they don’t do this. They start from Christian, mainly, theological discussions. Why? Why not Hindu narratives? The task, after all, is theoretically to discover what IS, not to interrogate cultural artifacts that are extraneous to science.
What I think one has to see, in the end, is a CULTURAL narrative, not one of science.
Theodicy is easy enough. One can simply posit that people choose the lives they live before they are born, that all decent people go to heaven, regardless of their beliefs, and that we are regularly aided by advanced spiritual beings. To this should be added the important caveat that pain is not always undesirable. To develop a richer qualitative structure, you need it.
Athletes are some of the happiest people you will meet, in general. Yet, the nature of their pursuit is “agonism”, or competition, which is to say daily hard training.
Pain is not the enemy. Nor is pleasure. It is meaninglessness of the sort modern atheists have done so much to advance.