Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 12/14/2009

Question
QUESTION: What is your best argument, or point, for there not being a Creator?

ANSWER: Only One! I guess I will have to go with the Problem of Evil.


Introduction:
This is so hard because there is a large variety of claims that religious people would make that would attempt to make to show a God, but for every one there are multiple atheists and academics explaining what is wrong with that claim. The New Atheists do a lot of speeches and debates which address the more common ones and this one by Sam Harris seems to be most direct and clear that I have come across[1]. Since you specifically mention a "Creator", perhaps you are especially interested in arguments framed to infer God from "natural design". Here is a youtube series explaining the science of origins which does not include God[2], a modern book explaining how the science contradicts the notion of a God (Victor Stenger's God:The Failed Hypothesis)[3][4], and a classic philosophy text critiquing these arguments before the science was known (David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)[5]. Okay, so I have to stop now and get into the Problem of Evil.


The Problem of Evil:
The Problem of Evil is a challenge to that pre-dates both Jesus and Muhammad (you'd think they would have bothered to address it), and is usually attributed to Epicurus. The problem of evil specifically addresses the notion of a God that is perfect - omnipotent/all-powerful (capable of everything, or at least universe-controlling power), omniscient/all-knowing (knowledgeable of everything, or at least everything one would want for running a universe), and omni-benevolent/all-loving (knowledgeable and willing to do moral good). This fits the description of the Judeo-Christian God and the God of Islam. A God that does not meet these characteristics is lacking a religious tradition with which to follow him and any other conception seems more like a cryptic alien that is not worth worshiping. So for the remainder of the discussion, my mention of God will imply omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence.

The thing that immediately follows from this is that God is incompatible with true evil (this is the "Logical" Problem of Evil). If there is evil, than God knows about it, is about to change it, and is inclined to change that evil - but yet it is still there. It must be the case that God is not really omnipotent, not really omniscient, or not really good because apparently he is unable or unwilling to overcome evil in all its forms. I speak of the existence of any evil interchangeably with a lack of perfect good. I think it is clear to anyone who cares about the universe enough to sit and think about it that there is things in this world worth changing for the better.

What do we mean by evil anyway? On a practical level it is things that we would be upset with being the product of deliberate design. In 2004, 200,000-300,000 people were killed by a tsunami in the Indian Ocean[6] and this is just horrible. If a person had caused this, or even permitted it to happen, it would be truly evil and it would be listed among one of the worse crimes in history[7]. This is not a creature worthy of respect, much less worship, but the very least that can be said of it is that it cannot be reconciled with a moral command not to kill. If on the other hand, this is not evil but part of God's plan for good, than the true believer aught to celebrate and cheer that this big divine move has been executed (no pun intended). I do not think I need warn you about what kind of sick madness this kind of belief leads to, but the Westboro Baptist Church actually takes this position[8].

The Problem of Evil is actually a great deal stronger than just disproving the perfect God. If we were to infer for some other reason that a God that created the universe or is controlling the universe, than the kind of God which we would infer does not look like the monotheistic God (this is the "Evidential" Problem of Evil). If a person was in control of the weather and geology than we might be grateful for the rain on our crops, but we would immediately figure out that his intentions were indifferent, incomprehensible, and/or hostile to us from his fondness for natural disaster. If there was a being who manipulated things behind the scenes in subtle ways but was powerless to stop the weather, than this is an expendable creature of folklore who is not worth any consideration when going about our daily lives.

So this is the essence of the argument at this point and when one stops and thinks honestly about the way the world works, it doesn't have a divine helping hand. As one would expect of any good argument that has been around for a while, however, there have been numerous objections that have been raised in the attempted defense of God. This is a subbranch of Theology called Theodicy. As we will see below, the Problem of Evil touches on so many central elements of religion that many believers even think it is important to understand the Paradox of Evil and for nonbelievers it becomes literally impossible to believe in a God for which you can identify no coherent form. I will address the most common attempts to resolve the Problem of Evil below, but I think it is worth noting that the vast bulk of these involve supposing further theological baggage without justification for why we might expect those elaborations to be true in the first place. Since the philosophy gets quite involved, theodicies are often mistaken for being profound or true even if you do not understand them. Out of the respect for you, however, I intend to go into comprehensive detail rather than assume you will use next sections as a sort of confirmation bias a-la-carte menu.


"Mysterious Ways" Theodicy:
The idea behind this theodicy is that there really isn't evil in the world and that we will really do live in a perfect universe. The problem is that we humans are too short-sighted, ignorant, and/or lacking in faith to see the good that comes out of apparent catastrophes. Someone who loses their wife is forced to step into the role of father that they had always meant to be. Right that moment, when grandpa had the heart-attack, he was thinking the most wonderful and holy thought - so really he died a sublimely perfect death and went straight to heaven. She may be missing both her legs and one arm, but she's building a lot of character overcoming obstacles in her daily life. It makes for a good movie plotline, but not much else.

The first thing that jumps out at you is that there is no reason to suppose this is true (so the Evidential Problem of Evil is still untouched) and that it would be unreasonable to conclude someone who you found committing an apparently blatant evil would actually be doing something good. There also plenty of examples to think of in which it doesn't appear the pain serves any purpose. The Ebola virus[9], for instance is disease so horrible you would have to be twisted to thing that good can come of it. It is incurable, incredibly contagious, and it's chief symptom is bleeding from every orifice as your organs liquefy - a process which gets increasingly unbearable in pain until death (from shock). If death is the design, surely this can happen in a less painful manner. If there is a lesson in suffering here (can sane person advocate such a thing), than certainly the fatality at the end narrows the window for personal development. If this happens to be the tailor-made destiny for a particular individual, why does it spread so readily to others without regard for moral temperament? On a macroscopic scale, the incidence of horrible diseases in developing countries is a severe blow to near every human value - life, liberty, happiness, equality, justice etc. Biologically, however, the Ebola virus makes lots of sense - it is devastatingly efficient at transforming an entire host into a breeding ground for self-propagation. Whenever science does come up with a vaccine or effective treatment, it would be unthinkable not to immediately intervene to save as many people as possible - people who are currently in God's hands. Again, because people don't applaud natural disasters, I have to dismiss this theodicy on the basis that it doesn't even seem like a satisfactory response to the believer, let alone the nonbeliever.

We also have to address the question of how evil caused by human actions fits into this (presumably natural evils fall into the category of human evils at the point in which we gain the power to stop it). If it's like natural events and ends up having indirect good effects, than it doesn't really matter what you do - in the end the result will be good. It is actually impossible for human to function without having some sort of (moral) preference of one thing over another because even despair (inaction, suicide, selfishness etc) would be some sort of preference. If humans actions are instead cases of genuine evil that can harm other innocent humans, there has to be some sort of justification for this. As we will see below, the "Free Will" theodicy usually picks up at this point but without it this is another big problem for this theodicy.


"Life's a Test" Theodicy:
In this theodicy, it is no longer a requirement for God this world to be a pleasant place. It may be more unpleasant than it has to, there may not be enough time to do what you want to accomplish, you might never know the people you love as well as you like, and you may never even be loved - God is not concerned with this world. This right here is enough to make most people uncomfortable[10]. In this worldview, the only thing that matters is Heaven and Hell (and a couple of extra types of afterlives if you have them). After all, the afterlife is infinite, so any expected utility calculation would make earthly events infinitesimally insignificant compared to the affairs of the afterlife. What we do have this world for is for the sole purpose of sorting individuals out for the afterlife. (Side note: Some people interpret this to mean that an individual has an innate nature and this world gives them the choice or the explanation for their ultimate afterlife. Others interpret this to mean that an individual is created by their decisions and experiences in this world and therefore is a necessary part of the process in generating souls to experience the afterlife.) From this point this idea separates into two varieties.

In the first variety, this universe is a perfect test. Every event, whether it appears pivotal or mundane, negative or positive, it is absolutely the test of character that is next needed for this person. If this had a useful explanatory value for understanding the events of the universe than it would be a quite interesting idea, but instead this does not appear to match the world we live in. We have a lot of freedom and we care a lot about the things that happen in our lives, but life is not a series of novel situations and philosophical dilemmas. If nothing else, there is unnecessary repetition, wasted time, and unexplored territory. In the second variety, any series of experiences serves as an adequate test since it forces you to make a choice which has some consequences. This suggests a high-degree of indifference on part of God (isn't it curious how that happens as he becomes more realistic), because it doesn't serve to explain why God would care to create the world the way it is, what events of the future is characteristic of universe that has God in it, or why people live to be any longer than the most short-lived of us (who has presumably lived long enough).

All of the varieties of this theodicy suffer from the same the problem of morality. God, contrary to what he might say, actually has no preference for whether people end up in heaven or hell. He cannot have a preference, because if he did than the resolution of events on this world would matter and therefore would have to be optimal (see "Mysterious Ways" above). So God actually regards an individual passing through the world for the sole purpose of making it to heaven to be a great good, but if that same individual falls away in life and ends up in hell than God regards this also a victory. God cannot care any about peace versus suffering, all that matter is that justice is served and individuals get what they "deserve". This seems to make God quite a monstrous creature to me, because based on the principles of proportional punishment, there is no crime an individual can commit that makes them deserve infinite torture (if, indeed, we even concede that it would be acceptable for God to indulge in any sort retribution through torture ). The philosophy term for the Problem of Evil as it applies specifically to hell is sometimes called the Problem of Hell. But even if we do take it on faith that the guiding moral principle of the universe is the supreme important of individuals being sorted into their appropriate categories than, our problems don't end there. An individual knows that if he does good things and goes to heaven than that is a victory for righteousness and if he does bad things and goes to hell than it is still a victory for righteousness. Any feelings felt or situations resolved on their earth don't matter. Such an individual has the same problem as that in the end of the "Mysterious Ways" theodicy, there is no justification for any preference of any act.


"Contrast" Theodicy:
This theodicy contends that good things are meaningless without evil as a contrast. Typically this claim is justified only by analogies: What is light without darkness? What is height without depth? What is success without failure? The details, unfortunately, get fuzzier when you press this theodicy beyond the analogy. Near as I can tell it separates into two varieties. In the first variety it is possible to have good without evil, but it can only be understood by humans by there being evil in the world as contrast. But just as we do not live in a world with no evil I think it is clear that we do not live in the world with the minimal evil (that is required to demonstrate the concept to humans). Neither do I think it is plausible that all evil is a more involved "demonstration of contrast" that is necessary to build character (see "Mysterious Ways" theodicy). In the second variety of the "Contrast", good actually does have no value (to God) without there being some evil for it to contrast with. This ceases to make "good" an actual moral value, instead what God values is some sort of diversity, or a special good-to-evil ratio. Because of the progression of human civilization there does not appear to be any constant "Good/Evil" ratio in the universe - so if we had an optimal amount of evil to demonstrate good to humans for any given time (and place), the future and past would be suboptimal. Needless to say, in such a bizarre framework whether an action if "good" or "evil" is not a solid predictor of whether we need more or less of it and humans are left confused about what to do with their lives.


"Free Will & Original Sin" Theodicy:
This is by far the most common theodicy that one encounters in modern Christianity and most believers make the Original Sin the time in which humans had inadvertently give themselves free will. It contends that God cannot do anything about human evil because doing so violate "free will" and therefore defeat whole the purpose of having humans. After all, how entertained can God be at his own puppet show (but then again, isn't that what we are called to create when we "accept Jesus into our heart" and let the "holy spirit act through us"?).  What believers mean when they say "free will" is hard for me to define, because I think most of the ideas justified "because of our free will" curiously don't go into any more detail than that. But usually the idea is that if God made people in such a way that they didn't evil, than the only way to do this would be to control all their actions (but the individual is still there being dragged along by their body as they are aware of what they would do otherwise). Furthermore God cannot make the future optimal because he does not know what people are going to do next. Lastly natural evils occur because they are punishing mankind for the original sin (or current sins), and therefore God cannot do anything about natural evil for the same reason.

God does not influence the events of the world to maximize free will. Every human that has ever lived biologically requires sleep and most require about 8 hours. This is an involuntarily loss of all control over one's actions (unfree) which serves no valuable purpose for mankind (evil). He does not intervene against a small amount of free will to protect a much larger amount of life and liberty. For example, sooner than suffer the destruction of the free will of millions of Jews during the Holocaust, God could have smited Hitler, changed Hitler's mind, or naturally disrupted the concentration camp infrastructure, but he did not.

Whatever it is that people mean when they talk about "free will", there is a component to the mankind which is better characterized as "natural inclination". For example, there are some people who naturally enjoy healthier foods (no one choses how their food will taste) and it would be a good service to mankind if were inclined to eat healthier (or perhaps more accurately identify foods that are good for us by taste). Our bodies fatigue and our mind wanders when we are overworked, and a stronger work ethic would allow us to accomplish more good feats. When someone cuts us off in traffic, our immediate reaction is hostility and impatience - even before our more conscientious thoughts take over. If souls were really free to choose between good and evil, we would not expect a difference in levels of violent crime to vary by gender. But of course, because of testosterone levels, men have a natural proclivity for violence and aggression which is both evil and (presumably) unfree. If you think the notion of these evil inclinations serve a purpose in building our character, testing us, or providing a meaningful contrast see the "Mysterious Ways", "Life is a Test", and "Contrast" Theodicy respectively. The degree of which you can influence someone's character without taking their free will is limitless. We all know people who have been changed by experiences that they have had in life. Even as they changed they would characterize all their actions as their own free will. It stands to reason, therefore, that there has to be something that God can do to improve character without losing free will.

People choosing their own actions does not mean that God cannot be in the position to know those actions. Looking back into the past, we feel like our actions are our own but yet the one thing we did is the only way it could happen. If we had done something else, than by definition, we would have done something else only. In other words, it does not infringe on our free will to ignore choices which we ultimately are not going to make. Whenever the time comes to make a choice, it enters that past and we no longer have the ability to change that choice - a phenomenon that God is apparently okay with. So it does us no harm for God to know what choice we are going to make before we actually make it.

Lastly I want to attack the idea that natural events are really an extension of justice for humans. This is another one of those ideas that you can see is not true by simply comparing it to the way we know the world works. Climate is a better predictor of natural disaster than the moral temperament of it's victims, for example. Furthermore I don't think some vague notion of justice can be used to explain away all the evil things in the world, because some of them are so horrible as not to be in the category that people deserve (see "Mysterious Ways" and last paragraph of "Life's a test"). I also don't think that it is just that Adam and Eve sinning in the past should have punishments for innocent descendants. Someone who is born with a horrible disability cannot possibly have done anything to deserve it. If this is a mental illness, they may lose some of the ability that they would need to absolve themselves in the future (but of course as with a vast number of birth defects, they will not be cured).


"No Position to Judge" Theodicy:
According to this theodicy, the Problem of Evil presupposes that there is a good and evil which we identify as humans, but this is impossible without a firm belief in God. In a more general form, proponents of this theodicy might say that if an individual takes natural events to be evidence of the cruelty or nonexistence of God, than it can be inferred that that individual is unqualified to make such judgments because he or shes lack the faith (suspension of disbelief) necessary to see the truth. This is quite a perverse obsession in believing in God, if you ask me, because such individuals are even willing to ignore even the courage of their own convictions under the assumption that it must be the case that God exists.

For the believer trying to understand their faith or the agnostic trying to figure out whether it is even possible to believe in logical inconsistency, this theodicy provides no answers and is of no comfort. The idea is if atheism is made intolerable than an individual loses the will to press the Problem of Evil argument and in the process cede they do not have an argument they care to offer. For those who have experience with mathematical/logical proofs from contradiction might know, this theodicy does not show that there is no contradiction between God and morality, it only implies that the idea that "morality exists" might itself be the unwarranted assumption.

The question of whether secular morality exists is a completely independent question from that of whether God makes sense with any moral system. Of course it is very much possible for believers and non-believers alike to question the morality of God himself and we see this all the time. An amusing parody of the idea that humans derive their morality solely from God can be found here[11]. Moreover when making this point religious apologists dismiss the entirety of secular ethics (Humanism, Utilitarianism, Existentialism, Absurdism, Nietzsche-ism etc) without addressing it and often without having read it. And theses religious apologists dismiss secular ethics in the same breath as they assert that nonbelievers haven't been exposed to enough religious media or haven't thought enough about it.


"The World is a Beautiful Place":
Some people try to explain away the Problem of Evil by contending that atheists are just bitter people who find that the world isn't good enough for their unrealistic standards. This is an example of the genetic fallacy - finding the motivation for an argument doesn't make it any less true. This also shows a lack of understanding about the point the argument is making, since all that it is required of a nonbeliever is that there be something in the world worth fixing that God has not fixed. But mostly this is wrong because this doesn't match my reality at all. I see the world as a beautiful place and am grateful for every moment I spend in it. Personally, I am a very happy person and among the people I know, I am one of the most optimistic. I have had no great personal tragedies which I could attribute my atheism to, and especially after settling into my atheism, I cope with the minor hardships that I have had quite well. I think it is always good to be skeptical of this sort of thing, but it if there is a correlation between hardship and nonbelief it appears to go the other way[12][13]. If it can be put as an ideological difference, it is would be that nonbelievers see humanity as the source of value in the universe, while believers would put all humans secondary to patterns of nature. This notion of a fundamentally sinful and dirty mankind might be good at exploiting human vulnerability and self-consciousness, but however contemptible human can be, we are less contemptible than nature. The story of human history is not a peaceful as it could be, but the amount of life and liberty in human civilization has relentlessly progressed throughout time and I remain confident that it will continue to do so in the hands of the collective mankind.


"Might makes Right":
When we stop to think about it, we don't actually have to look in nature to find examples of evil that we can attribute to God if he existed. The Bible itself shows that God commits a number of atrocities and coexists in a universe with Satan in it. Here is a movie clip of a Jew in a concentration camp highlighting the most egregious offenses of God[14] and here is a listing of all the murder crimes of God envisioned as a court case[15]. Most notable examples are the World Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Battle of Jericho, and the plagues of Egypt. God consistently motivates humans primarily through fear and holds loyalty to his might to be the highest of value. The New Testament does not repudiate this bloody past, and adds to it the most well-known example of all - the gratuitous blood sacrifice of the innocent Jesus Christ (I know he didn't stay dead, but this at least horrendous torture which is not necessary for any sort of divine magic). But the book that I've always felt most addresses the issue head-on is the Book of Job, in which God permits the torture of the most pious man alive as part of a challenge from Satan. Ultimately Job is rewarded for his continual faith in God, but in the meantime he and God have a conversation about whether or not God has the right to do such a thing, starting Chapter 38[16]. God delivers what I regard to be the worst conceivable answer to such a question, in which he argues that his power justifies anything that he cares to do.

This of course is so removed from morality and nobility that it almost the exact opposite. If God acts in unjustified manners and is powerful than we should still do what is right, independent of the consequences against ourselves. In this modern world, with fewer spooky unknowns which people previously attributed to supernatural forces (disease, astronomy, and abiogenesis), God's might seems weaker than ever. Take it from a nonbeliever, supernatural curses and curious bouts of dreadful luck are not side effects of ignoring God. Since there will be no danger of smiting and God doesn't claim that his ideas stand on merit, than this leaves us free to act on our conscious without fear of a God that may or may not exist.


Conclusion:
The Problem of Evil presents a serious contradiction in God that makes him not only impossible to exist, but impossible to conceive. In a world with a controlling perfect complete being, why does he need us? Why does God follow rigid naturalistic laws indifferent to human suffering? Why would the natural state of being in the universe serve as the model for directed intelligent action? These are very basic questions that we should expect to religion to answer, and it doesn't. To me, atheism not only makes more sense, but is a positive philosophical framework. The universe is an indifferent pattern, but we humans know we can do better that that. With our intelligent we identify the value things (life, happiness, freedom,) and build up around that. There are always setback and there is always work to be done, but someone's got to it.


Links:
[1]http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=26DEA83F73144C2D
[2]http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DB23537556D7AADB
[3]http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591024811
[4]http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godless/Summary.htm
[5]http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm
[6]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
[7]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
[8]http://vodpod.com/watch/453706-louis-theroux-westboro-baptist-church
[9]http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001339.htm
[10]http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?&next_url=/watch%3Fv%3DEl4KxBWRol0
[11]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqC73omSk4o
[12]http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/dec/08/religion-society-greg
[13]http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdffeel
[14]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A5MM9XBGT8
[15]http://www.thegodmurders.com/id91.html
[16]http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+38

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you so much for taking such deliberate care in articulating your answer(s). I'd like to be able to address each of your points but, since this forum seems to be geared towards asking questions, rather than giving responses, I will assume that I should simply remain creative in asking more questions. So here goes.

If there is no God, then there is no Absolute Moral Lawgiver. If there is no Moral Lawgiver, then there is no absolute moral law. If there is no absolute moral law, then there is no definitive evil. If there is no definitive evil, then how can you use it to argue that there is surely no God?

In addition to your response, what would be your next best defense for atheism?
Thank you again for your time, I hope to keep this going!

Answer
Introduction:
Well there is certainly a lot more that has been said (and counter-said) about the Problem of Evil than I have put here, and it is certainly plausible that what you find interesting or reasonable in the discussion might be different from that. Hopefully by looking up the Problem of Evil and particular theodicies you can find more opinions. It is also one of the most frequent topics in public debates about God. I don't understand why the AllExperts does not have a policy of listing email-addresses, but my email is jsePrometheus@gmail.com . If you'd like to continue this conversation beyond this point, I would be happy to start an email correspondence.

The response you posed about no Absolute Moral Lawgiver is something I would file under my "No Position to Judge" Theodicy. Looking back at it, I said a lot but didn't go into great detail of the justification for my comments. I will attempt to flesh out those ideas. Also the idea that you brought up has two implicitly arguments which are related to the concept and I think you might want me to address. The first idea is that morality is impossible under atheism and therefore it isn't worth considering no matter how likely it might be. The second idea is that the existence of our moral senses is an absolute proof of God which has to be addressed because it would contradict the absolute disproof of God that the Problem of Evil poses.

For the remainder of the God debate, the conversation mostly seems to be atheists responding to what they would regard as unjustified claims on part of the believers, so it is hard to do so without figuring out what the believer finds plausible or implausible. There is one counterargument that seems to work with a great number of those claims, that I like to call the "Argument from Symmetry". The idea is that what a believer would use to justify their own religion they would be unwilling to accept or contradicting themselves to accept as evidence for another religion. I will explain the concept in more detail as well as look at some particularly illuminating examples.


"No Absolute Moral Lawgiver":
So for the Problem of Evil to be a problem for God I don't have to show that you can have morality or notions of evil without God. The Problem of Evil is a type of a proof by contradiction. Proofs by contradiction go something like this: Let's assume propositions A, B, C, are true and study how they relate to each other. If we find that they imply proposition P is true and also that P is false than something is clearly wrong since this presents a contradiction because P can't be both true and false. So maybe we incorrectly related the propositions to each other (this is where most of the theodicies come in). But if our logic is sound, than what it means is that one of initial assumptions is actually not true. In this case we might have assumed incorrectly that God exists (A is true), assumed incorrectly that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving (B is true), or assumed incorrectly that evil exists (C is true). From there I said if A is false (God does not exist) than B is false (God is not great) and I have proven atheism. If instead we suppose that just B is false (God is not great) that I have not proven atheism but I have shown that God is hard to worship and is not worth worshiping (at least, in my opinion). Lastly I said if C is false (there is no evil) than there may be a God but it is impossible to act upon any moral basis. So what the point you raised did was to say that if A is false (God does not exist) or B is false (God is not great) than this would imply that there is no Absolute Moral Lawgiver which would in turn imply that C is false. So with the Problem of Evil we have either A is false, B is false, or C is false. And if we accept your addition we have if A is false than C is false and if B is false than C is false. So together what we showed is that C is false - there is no morality with or without God. You didn't prove A is true or B is true or C is true, you just showed that atheism has a nasty consequence (no morality). Maybe for a lot of folks that would stop the conversation and they would immediately go to church and pray to remember the ignorance that they had before they knew about the Problem of Evil. But I don't think that your idea "No God => No morality" that you presented is actually true so in this next section "Secular morality is Impossible" I argue that you can have secular morality (and works out quite nicely). But in logic there is something called the contrapositive which means that if "No God => No morality" is logically equivalent to "morality => God" so in the section "Moral Senses Prove God" I show that that is also false. I really am sorry to pull out all the formal logic on you, but I hope representing things that way I gave you a good idea of what is going on.


"Secular morality is Impossible":
There are at least three distinct things people talk about when they talk about morality. The first is "how do I decide what to do next?" - I'll talk about that in this paragraph and the next, the second is "why is it that we have the notions of morality anyway?" and that I'll talk about below in "Moral sense prove God", and the third is "why should we have a morality?" and I will talk about that in the third and fourth paragraph. I should say that atheists generally don't find identifying and following morality to be a big problem (in that it actually comes easily), so most of what I will speak about on the subject are things that are much more representative of my own way of thinking about things. As you may have inferred by the fact that I am declining to kick babies or to stare at the wall while drooling uncontrollably, and instead typing to you a (hopefully) coherent message, we know humans have a moral sentiment. If nothing else we have to decide somehow whether we act or do not act and what we do when we act. If you intellectually try to force nihilism on yourself, you will find it impossible to treat all electrical impulses you could send to your body as equal. But our moral sentiment goes beyond that - our default system for making decisions is remarkably universal across different people and this system includes the desire to do good. There is actually a series of experiments in which people all over the world are given that same hypothetical ethical dilemmas and the result is that even on "tricky" ones some 80-95% people make the same moral decision (unfortunately I can't find the literature on it). So what I'm saying is that at a practical level if you tell someone "Look, I get that God's relationship with his own ethical system is confusing, but who are you to tell him he's wrong to harm innocent people" they will response "Bullshit! He's being a jerk, you know he's being a jerk and you are being a jerk too if you defend him!" What I'm telling you that this line of dialogue even applies to yourself. If you think that you actually have the capacity within yourself to remove all the disgust you have for evil because some religious principles tells you they don't count, than you aren't being honest with yourself. So the idea of following this universal morality so that everyone can get along is called Universalism. Of course when religious morals depart from Universalism than they are subject to criticism from atheism and you have probably heard the famous quote on the subject by Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg - "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil -- that takes religion." You have to think that if the one true objective morality was something unreasonable like to spell out on a planetary scale the name of an obscure God, than no one would follow it anyway so it might as not be there when considering human behavior. So by principles of Pragmatism (capital P), any viable morality we already know it has to look something like Universalism. For people who don't think much about philosophy and have a desire to do good, I think that even the very basic idea of Universalism is sufficient to judge and reject an evil-permitting God in favor of getting on just quite well without that superstition.

But most atheists would describe their ethical system as Secular Humanism. The central idea of Humanism is that people are good - we should encourage more people to be in existence (life) and we should care about what people care about (liberty, happiness, justice, art etc). Now this sounds at once non-controversial and transparently anthropocentric, and that's mostly correct. But the interesting thing about Humanism is that it seems to be useful in informing society as a whole on moral principles. How did we figure out that the slavery was a bad idea, women are equal humans to men, or that freedom of speech is a sacred right? We didn't get it from the Bible, which has a quite rough past on those issues, but yet these values are almost universally held in the civilized world. They are so obvious and so valuable that people in the US have erroneously attempted to claim that the Founding Fathers had always said this (they were good about freedom of speech but not the rest) or that founding religious prophets had always said this (they were abysmal on all three). Instead we figured out these ideas through "caring about what people care about" and using human reasoning with Universalism to work them out together. Many atheist institutions, most notably the Center for Inquiry, actually propose that Morality is a field of rational empirical study which we can get better at over time as part of Mathematics, Philosophy, or Psychology. Obviously Humanism doesn't need God to find a great system of ethics and so Secular Humanism has become the dominant type of Humanism (which also emphasizes religious principles are not intrinsically justified). In what I'm sure is a paraphrase of Michael Shermer, "People don't need bad reasons to do things that there are good reasons for". Why is murder bad? Not because the Bible tells me so, because I should hope people wouldn't do so if it did, but because it ends people's lives, makes others people miss the deceased, and makes me feel like a horrible person (which I what would be). One last comment about Humanism (caring about people, and what people care about) is that it can be similarly derived from Pragmatic principles and the human condition. Anyone who is alive and intends to keep living has already made the assumption that life is worth living for one person (and by extension all persons). People have to be alive to do something and again any morality that is not something that would even occur to people than it's doesn't matter. So anyone who wants to play the game of life (and don't we all) has already accepted the basic tenets of Humanism. This is why I said earlier that it doesn't really see difficult to justify and atheists don't typically spend a lot of time agonizing over it.

But this point I have been talking more about how people are inclined to do as the should rather than what people should be inclined to do. I have done this deliberately because your objection went from "...no absolute moral law, then there is no definitive evil. If there is no definitive evil, then how can you use it to argue..." and by now it should be clear that there is an error here. People don't get handed their morality from the heavens (nor should we in my opinion), but rather they derive their own. So if by "definitive evil" you mean something that has to come from God's law than I would reply that we feel comfortable judging God on his real evil (maybe we'd call it "inventive evil"). If by "definitive evil" you mean something we are a capable of judging God by than I think your inference that it must come from God's law is wholly unwarranted. Existentialism is the concept that intelligent life forms imbue their actions with purpose rather than use their actions to chase things that naturally have purpose (in truth you will see me claim to have it both ways). This is more of an analogy than an example, but the idea is how the American flag is not just a piece of cloth, because this particular piece of cloth is symbolic, and you don't have to be a believer to recognizes that there is a real difference between burning/revering an American flag and doing the same to a dish rag. Absurdism supposes that even if the Existentialists are wrong, the attempt to chase after things that have purpose, or the attempt to imbue life with purpose could itself be meaningful. Absurdists would also say you are better off confronting a horrible truth and conquering it by accepting it than to hide from a horrible truth (which I would characterize as faith). Needless to say Existentialism and Absurdism are concepts that are not necessary to behave in a moral way or to know what is moral. They are designed to explain and justify this whole notion of morality altogether, but I think I can provide adequate justification without either concept actually.

So you may have been noticing I have been sprinkling ideas and arguments across the last couple of paragraphs and I have not pledged my allegiance to any one of these concepts. The reason is because my own personal philosophy is a hodge-podge mix of all the above and I find that they all agree on the important parts. I suspect that people who don't enjoy thinking about this as much as I do get by just fine and that people who actually study Philosophy beyond a hobby can get into a great bit more detail than I. I would add that there is an objective scientific difference between living and non-living things (see my post on the subject[17]) and it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that an active living universe should be preferable by virtue of being more complicated and interesting (by having more depth it's almost like saying that there is more universe). And of course an active living universe doesn't seem to make much of a difference if all the living adherents act like rocks and so it only stands to reason that their own little ideas and experiences have value to them. Certainly if I feel like they do and I would be right, than that can't be nullified by finding that there is a naturalistic process behind those thoughts and feelings (I mean it's as good as a metaphysical process that does the same). So you see I built the axioms necessary for Humanism - life and human happiness. Coming from my ideas about the core drive that living things have to be alive and to do something, anything I suppose the minimal value a human life can have is 0 (that is, if it is in unbearable misery or stupor) and it only goes up from there. Since humans are related to animals, it stands to reason animal life is valuable, but not as much. Human life is valuable not so much in number but in duration (so longer lives are better). So to express things in terms of Utilitarianism, I would calculate value in the universe to be approximately all minds integrated (as in a mathematical integral) over time (expressed more in terms of awareness than in actual time) and space (multiple minds, or bigger minds). And that's what works for me.


"Moral Senses Prove God":
I am not relaying to you the original idea but rather the modern apologetics derived from the original idea, but I believe it is Kant who is most widely attributed to first arguing along these lines. If there was a God he would care about morality, but if he was the only one who cared about morality than he couldn't get humans to do anything. So if there is a God we would expect to find some sort of universal moral sentiment built into human beings (notice already that this argument relies on building a storyline which wouldn't even be possible to build if the Logic Problem of Evil holds). We don't have any reason to expect a universal moral sentiment in human beings without the existence of God (this claim is sometimes justified along the lines I get into for "Secular morality is Impossible" and sometimes not at all), therefore if we see a universal moral sentiment in human beings than it implies a God. Finally we do see a universal moral sentiment therefore God. The rest is usually theological elaboration in which there is speculation that this is the way God wants us to know about him is by understanding him as the being that understands and gives us our moral sentiment etc etc.

I want to pause here to point out that I agree with the premise of a rather universal moral sentiment (see my discussion of "Secular morality is Impossible") and actually am surprised to find when religious people take this position (when I watch debates on the God I usually find that nonbelievers bring up Kant as frequently as believers do). The traditional take on religion in so far as humans have natural inclinations they are all of the dirty sinful short-sighted variety - sex, violence, drugs, rock & roll etc - and it is necessary for God to coerce us into what is good for us because we couldn't possibly manage to behave on our own. In contrast I believe a human shown how to make good decisions and permitted to experience the joy and personal satisfaction that comes with helping other people does not need a contest of wills to become an increasingly virtuous person. Proponents of the "Moral senses prove God" argument actually agree that the desire of humans to help each other has nothing to do whether or not those humans also believe the universe is run on magic. I for one count this development as great progress in religious thought even as it is achieved by eviscerating an idea that only exists in the first place because of religious thought (there's an oxymoron for you :P).

The main reason what the "Moral senses prove God" argument doesn't work however is because there are ways in which you can get the universal moral sentiment that we observe in humans naturalistically. I wouldn't have expected Kant to have figured it out however, because he preceded both evolution and psychology. Presumably you understand that humans evolved from animals and that includes ideas like fear and anger and hunger (I really wish I didn't have to presume), but what is much less commonly understood is that even altruistic behavior can be accounted for by evolution (maybe this is why biologist is one of the professions with the highest rates of nonbelief). An overview of the subject can be found here[18]. At first it seems very impossible that altruism could be evolutionary. Altruism means giving up something from yourself for another so that means one animal would act in a way detrimental to a survival in a way that helps another animal increase it's chance of survival. It would seem that animals like the first one would die out relative to it's competitor animal who is more selfish. But there are two reasons why this simplistic model is incorrect (and here I am speaking for modern biology, not atheism). The first is often we are in the situation where we can bring someone else more benefit than we cost ourselves so we can act in our mutual self-interest by helping each other. In the animal kingdom we see these symbiotic relationships all over the place and in economics humans have know this as a matter of public policy since we got rid of Mercantilism. This is also the sort of behavior that occurs with pack-hunting. Not only do pack animals work together to bring down a prey which they can all get a fair slice of but it is necessary for pack animals to look out for each other in order to be successful at this. But the second reason why the simplistic model of selfishness is correct is because of something called group evolution. Animals in the same species will actually go beyond cooperative behavior in their own self-interest that occasionally misfires and goes overboard. Animals will actually risk or sacrifice their life so that other animals of the same species can survive so long as it is good for the group as a whole. The reason is that as members of the same pack, these animals are genetically similar so the genes that carry this sort of altruistic behavior will actually survive through the successful propagation of other members of the pack. The level with which animals are willing to take personal risks and have the highest priority to set up mutual beneficial relationship with are those that are genetically closest- those that are most genetically similar (family) or most likely to hold future genetic material (potential mates). Thinking about humans in this context it should not be surprising that those who we "dehumanize" are those we are most likely to mistreat and those who we "incorporate into our family" are those we treat the best.


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Argument from Symmetry:
It is often the case that someone argues on behalf of religion by first assuming it to be true (because of, you know, that "horrible alternative" atheism), and then comes up with reasons to support that idea. That's not a bad brainstorming tool, but it does show when someone is not using the scientific/skeptical way for arriving at an unbiased truth which is to consider all the evidence and looking at what reasonable conclusion follows. What ensues in many a Atheist-Theist debate is whether or not the arguments the theist is using are sufficient justification for the specific supernatural claims being made. But in reality, we know that even the theist agrees that such arguments are not justified when used them in any other context - A believer is an atheist with respect to every religion but one. If all religions are similar in justification, than the only sensible position to take with respect to religion is to believe none of them or all of them. Believing in all religions leads to inevitable contradictions as well as a whole host of silly nonsense, unless you so water it down as to make it equivalent to atheism (like pantheism) - so long as an interfaith religion manages to advocate universal human values and avoid superstition than it is certainly fine by me. Now religions do have some important differences of which I am aware but the important part that I am stressing here is to look at the kind justifications that are being used for them. At every example in which I apply the Argument from Symmetry, I will do my best to identify the critical aspects that are similar in the religious justifications. If nothing else, the concept I am conveying when I talk about the Argument from Symmetry should make it clear why atheists feel comfortable dismissing the various religions that they know comparatively little about when they leave their religion of birth (in Ireland they have joke about wanting to know whether someone is a "Catholic atheist" or a "Protestant atheist"). Some of what I say here is sentiments echoed in the Sam Harris speech I had linked earlier[1].

One of the most powerful ways the Argument from Symmetry is applied is to the concept of faith. Now I have to be careful here, because faith is one of those ill-defined words that means different things to different people. Here the idea of faith that I am talking about are statements along the lines of the following: "Sometimes you just have to believe things that you have no rational reason to suppose", "Revelation poured through me and suddenly I knew that there was a God", "I can't articulate how I know it, it's just something that I know", "I felt an uplifting enlightening sensation on that mountaintop and I realized it must be the God of the Bible reaching out to me to let me know he cares". I respond to such comments that your experiences imply statements about the tranquil state of your brain not the state of the universe and that in general it is unwise to just go about assuming things that you would just like to be true. No degree of fervent certainty or state of happiness in a Muslim or Hindu will convince a Christian to convert, which is why atheists feel comfortable doubting the reliability of the knowledge claimed by believers even while they do not doubt the sincerity of their sentiments. The concept of someone knowing without rational justification, gets even more absurd when we apply this to political ideologies, say Communists versus Laissez-Faire Capitalists versus Conspiracy Theorists. Believers find by investing more emotional energy into religion and telling themselves they must have the truth, it helps them stay true to their religion and they make the mistake of projecting that strategy on those who are not actually psychologically bribed in the process. I feel for these individuals because I completely identify with the sorts of experiences that believers talk about and I understand how tempting these non-sequiturs really are. I find myself filled with a sublime peace when I sit in the quiet and think about the universe. So many unexpected good things pop up on a regular basis that I feel truly blessed. I find it amusing to suppose that there is in fact a God and all of this means that he is calling me to continue my good work as an atheist (of course what I am really surprised at is the human ability to overestimate the predictably of the future and find patterns where there are none). While I mean what I said, if you think that I can't really have such sensations because I am an atheist or if you think I'm just pretending for the sake of argument than clearly you understand that personal feelings of revelation are not helpful as evidence for (or against) a deity.

The Argument from Symmetry applies most directly to Pascal's Wager. The idea behind Pascal's Wager is that no matter what probability you assign to God, if you don't believe in God and you are wrong than you go to Hell whereas you can believe, at no cost whatsoever, and go to heaven if you are right. So, besides the whole idea that whether you think something is the product of observation and not a decision and nevermind what God thinks of someone who is so cowardly as to transparently sacrifice moral ideals for personal gain - Pascal's Wager is nothing in light of symmetry. We might imagine 'Zod' who is exactly opposite to God in moral principles but equal in might. Believing in God or following a rule that God sets in fact makes Zod very angry and he will punish you for the things God would have rewarded you for and vise-versa. And we can imagine a whole host of crazy outlandish improbably Gods, which is the point of various parody deities like the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Church of the FSM), the Invisible Purple Unicorn (who although invisible, is most assuredly purple),Athe (God of Atheists), and the various gods of Discordianism. So if we don't have any justification for these God except fear of their wrath and the fact that we can think about them, then all the promises and perils cancel each other out. But it's even worse than that for the monotheistic gods, of course, if we can should that they are impossible (zero probability) by the Logical Problem of Evil. We can also imagine that some of them are slightly more plausible than others, and when looking at the world this way what we have left also have the Evidential Problem of Evil. Given the hideous history of the popular religions, its also not clear to me that popular religions should be gauged more likely just because they are more convenient. What really determines the way we make decisions in face such infinite possibilities is when we judge is plausible and what kind of morality we think a good person should try to follow. In other words, atheism.

The Argument from Symmetry even applies to areas in which the probabilities of different statements are not even similar, for example, historical claims about supernatural events. We'll set aside the events of the Bible which there is historical evidence that it definitely did not occur even if we allow for supernatural phenomenon - the World Flood, the Tower of Babel, the earthquake and/or darkness at the death of Jesus - and assume that we are reading the Bible (or whatever holy text) with a fairly liberal interpretation. Such a person is really just interested in the important particulars of the Gospels that are necessary for practicing traditional Christianity: Jesus is born of a virgin, he lives a moral life in which he performs many minor miracles (walking on water, curing the sick, fishes and loaves, water and wine etc), he dies on the cross in accordance with Old Testament prophecies, and is resurrected on third day before ascending into heaven. But what reasons does a believer offer for supposing that these events occurred as a matter of historical fact? Some would say that the Bible is such a good book that it has to have been created with the work of the deity, (but what religion does not have adherents who claim the same about their book? and can these individuals have actually read that many good books if they are making that claim about the Bible?) Some would say the rapid propagation of Christianity is evidence of it's obvious truth and ground-breaking moral sentiments, (but there are a number of other popular religions characterized by a rapid adoption, the most insulting comparison of which would be Scientology). Some would say that non-supernatural phenomenon mentioned in the book has been independently verified by the historical record, (which is true but isn't that also true of the Iliad?). I've heard some people claimed the Bible can show "incredible" things by using a computer to perform a sort of numerology on the book called the Bible Code, (and skeptics are able to do the exact same thing with Moby Dick). But the most people just figure it is kind of simple - the writers of the Gospels saw what occurred, jotted it down, and apart from some apparent inconsistencies here and there, we can be sure of the truth of the events because the writers independently verified each other. In reality, the Gospels occurred hundreds of years after the death of Jesus and so none of the authors could have actually witnessed the events they were claimed to have seen. The Gospels are staggered so each one beyond the first wrote in the context of the previous publishing, plagiarizing most of the content and embellishing with details that, if true, would most certainly be in the original account. If you think this is an atheist-academic conspiracy on the subject, you will surprised to learn that you hear the exact same history of the Bible at Seminary School, (but why is it they paint a different picture to their congregation?). But on to my point, the evidence is scant on the subject (which among other things claims to overturn solid academic knowledge in nearly every discipline) and the evidence is drastically less than that of other modern and historical claims of supernatural phenomenon to which the believer does not subscribe (for instance, eyewitness claims of tribalistic superstitions in various developing countries around the world). Similarly modern claims about faith healing (among Protestants) or miraculous saints (among Catholics) are in the same kind of evidential categories as aliens, psychic phenomenon, homeopathy, ghosts, and rival religious claims (I realize you may think some of these things are real but I assume you take at least one of these things to be the complete farce that it is).

While it is hard to say where one argument ends and another begins I did want to make one other related point. Often believers will claim some sort of proof of a God which, while having some of the properties typically ascribed to a deity (for example Creator, Perfect Being, First Cause, Absolute Moral Lawgiver, Intelligent Designer), does not get into the particulars of the religious implications. From this abstract, nebulous version of deity they will immediately segway to talking about Christianity (or whatever religion) and leading a prayer to accept the lord Jesus Christ into your heart (Quick! Limited time offers before the magic-fades/logic-errors-appear!). But of course the proof the believer provided (which is usually wrong before this point for some unrelated reason anyway) doesn't justify the leap to detail because of all the other hypothetical deities (as well as space aliens) which could do the same job so what all we really know from the proof is abstract and useless - "Okay, good work everyone we figured out that something had to start it all and that something is way too complicated for people to comprehend without getting something wrong about it". And amusing youtube video on these sorts of nebulous versions of God can be found here[19].


Symmetry of Symmetry:
It is a fine question to ask whether or not the Argument from Symmetry is unfair or rules out too much. In essence, what we are talking about is applying this principle of symmetry to itself - is there any applications of the argument that atheists would find objectionable? The answer, in short, is no - not any that I am aware of. Instead what we find is that these same sorts of ideas are readily incorporated into a much larger framework at the heart of (naturalistic) atheism - Skepticism. The word "Skepticism" is somewhat of a misnomer because it's not really about an emotional appeal to doubt, but rather a toolbox with which we can examine wild claims or scant evidence (sometimes it is referred to as "Scientific Skepticism"). The Skeptic's Dictionary[20], Skeptic Society[21], and the Skepticality podcast[22] are good places to find out about the modern Skepticism movement and what I mean by that. As you may have noticed earlier, symmetry and skepticism helped us address psuedoscientific and paranormal claims like psychics and aliens. In this way, Skepticism embodies an extremely useful, philosophically parsimonious, way of understanding the world without which it is difficult to make rational decisions about anything.

We do have to watch out for what is referred to as a "false equivalence". I want to stress that the Argument from Symmetry does not say everything is the same, but only that people are being inconsistent In their standards for justification. For example it should contradict moral relativism (sometimes people mean different things when they say "relativism" so we have to be careful, but here I mean that kind of "relativism" which believers frequently insult atheists with). The rule "killing people is bad" and "killing people is good" are both rules of morality someone could attempt to live by, but we have reason to give more credence to the idea that "killing people is bad" whereas the situation would be substantially murkier if I said "fxdfsd is good" versus "fxdfsd is bad". New Atheists are often accused of being unduly hard on mainstream Christianity when Islam is guilty of many more human rights atrocities and Mormonism is even less plausible than Christianity. Some of that criticism of atheist's false equivalence is fair - English-speaking atheists are most familiar with mainstream Christianity and public atheists who make a living in media do so by addressing an audience familiar with Christianity. It should be clear however that New Atheists consider it a matter of personal integrity to speak openly about injustice and fraud wherever we see it and when taking steps towards secularism and human rights we first seek to combat the greatest harm as we see it. Listen carefully to Sam Harris[23], Christopher Hitchens, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali[24][25] and you will see that is a big part of the message.

The Argument from Symmetry is so named (by me and called that mostly only by me) from its resemblence to the concept of mathematical symmetry and because I like doing so, I will tell you a little bit about that. Often when you have an incredibly complex system it is hard to know anything about it, but if you can identify symmetries you can make the situation exceptionally simpler. For example, in physics one of the many places we have this is the "N-body Problem". When you have three of more gravitational bodies (or alternatively, electromagnetically charged particles), the math becomes incredibly difficult because each particle effects how each particle effects each other particle etc etc (you can actually prove circumstances in which the motion is "chaotic" which means exceedingly difficult to approximate). But if you have a sphere, or a ring, or a platonic solid or a regular polygon with a particle in the center than the effects of all those cancel each other. It's hard to explain without going into more technical detail, but the many of the ways they go about studying more general, less symmetric, systems of particles is by identifying symmetric subsystems (things like "central configurations" and "Lagrange points") and seeing what happens if you perturb (slightly deviate from) such systems to understand from there. Symmetry is so useful, in fact, that equations in just about every field of mathematics can be described in terms of some symmetry or another. The important idea to take away about how to use symmetry is to identify cases in which two or more things (religions) have the similar relationship to something (reality, you) because then you know, in-so-far as they are similar, that you can draw the same conclusion about them (true or false, relevant or irrelevant, etc). If the things I say about the Argument from Symmetry as it pertains to God doesn't jive well with you, it is the premises I make about the relationship of religions to each other that you disagree with, not the actual notion of symmetric arguments.

We also frequently use principles of symmetry as a heuristic in our daily life. When I open a closet door, I might not actually find what I expect, especially if I consider intelligent agents which aim to hide from me. My friends could be hiding in their to surprise me for my birthday, there could be a crazy man waiting in there to kill me, or someone caught naked in public and hiding in embarrassment before making a final streak to safety. There could be leaking water from the ceiling, a mouse hole, a spider web, or even a mystical creature of folklore incredibly successful at hiding itself until now. All of these things have extremely low probabilities (but not the same low probabilities obviously) and the good and bad tend to roughly cancel each other out (see the parallel with what I said about Pascal Wager?). This is why I don't hesitate to think about any of these bizarre things when I open a closet door and fully expect to see in that closet whatever was in it when I left it last. What drives me to make sense of these situations is mostly the things that are quite certain but I keep a certain awareness of uncertainty in my mind. I don't mean to say that there is actually a human that actually runs the numbers in his/her head, but everyone has implicit expectations about what they could find. Someone suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder might have implicitly figured the world is a hostile and dangerous person and actually experience a fear as they open a closet door because they expose themselves to whatever uncertainty lies behind it. I can't say that I actually know a whole lot about treating PTSD, but presumably a cognitive understanding of the lack of danger in a closet (like I've described here) or learning through exposure to positive or safe uncertainties would help them overcome their fear of the world. For more on operating in the presence of such conditional probabilities in decisions we make about God, here is a youtube video that explains the agnostic atheistic mentality[26].


Conclusion: I really got carried away didn't I? I hope somewhere in that miasma of talking points you can find what you are looking for.

More Links:
[17]http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/10/living-things-non-living-1.htm
[18]http://arizonaatheist.blogspot.com/2009/02/altruism-in-primates-and-humans.html
[19]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVbnciQYMiM
[20]http://www.skepdic.com/
[21]http://www.skeptic.com/
[22]http://www.skepticality.com/
[23]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=630y_aBIuc0 (you probably just want the one clip, starting at about 3min)
[24]http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/283/infidel/
[25]http://www.amazon.com/Infidel-Ayaan-Hirsi-Ali/dp/0743289684
[26]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wV_REEdvxo