It’s Not In the Obvious Lifestyle Differences

Theists and atheists don’t live lives that different from each others. This is a source of angst for both sides and actually a point for evolutionary atheism. We are deeply conditioned by our drive to survive and prosper our friends and family at the expense of others, the environment and our enemies.

What we quarrel over is the source and location of meaning, value and existence that ideally should eventually appear in our lifestyle choices.

Atheistic Materialism

It’s always dangerous describing the other side but I’ll try to be fair.

My understanding of the assertion of atheistic materialism is that our current universe, including humanity in all of its social complexity is a product of physics and chance. The universe upon which life as we know it is dependent is a glorious accident come into being for no meaning or reason at all because meaning and reason are functions of a mind. Since the universe has no mind, it is just physics, nothing more.

Once, again through some happy accident (for us, because you need a brain to host a mind to experience what we call “happiness”) once life emerged life continued to develop on the basis of a biological bias for self-preservation. Through a series of calamities, catastrophes, dumb and blind chances, somehow ever more complex and capable creatures survived and out competed their environment and competitors and we within our tiny bubble of knowledge amidst a sea of stars and galaxies have arrived to be ourselves. The norm, if one can exist at all apart from a brain and a mind to host it, is survival at the expense of one’s environment and competitors. Homo Sapien as a species has managed to out compete his environment and competitors so far and all that we note in human society, art, culture and history are attributable to this process.

Defining Good and Evil beneath the Rule of Survival

Of course in the universe itself there is no good, bad, right or wrong in this system because those definitions always must be located within the mind of a creature capable of judging and evaluation and all judgment and evaluation is dependent upon a point of view. If a tsunami inundates the island of my enemy, the tsunami was good. If the tsunami inundates the island of my family, the tsunami is bad. According to nature the tsunami simply is and the carbon based creatures that feel one way or another about it are incidental. The asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs and made room for the mammals was good for us (locating myself with the mammals) and bad for the dinosaurs, locating myself on the other side of a line that of course is also dependent upon my large brain which makes such distinctions.

Good, bad, right, and wrong are all categories dependent upon an observer with the meat capacity to host a mind capable of such judgments. Good, bad, right and wrong don’t actually exist in the universe apart from the minds to host them and assert them.

Christian Theism

There are obviously lots of theisms besides the Christian brand but since I’m a Christian I’ll stick to its assertions. Many other theists share much of what I’ll assert.

Christians obviously assert that creation has come to be as it is today by the design of a mind. Many Christians accept evolutionary descriptions of the origins of our present universe but assert that behind it lay a mind and a plan, someone who wanted it and has judgments about it.

Christians also believe that this being possessing mind, power, intentionality and judgment also critiques existence as it is. The state of affairs on planet earth (and other planets I assume too) is not fully what this being wishes it to be and so in this place there are things that the being calls “good” and things that this being calls “bad”. What is “good” and “bad” is dependent not simply upon survival of this being, because the survival of this being is not contingent upon the universe he/she has made.

According to Christians, this universe in fact has a future beyond what is immediately evident involving its past, present and future.

Dealing with Loss

One of the realities for an atheistic materialist is that time eventually devours all. Extinct animals, worlds, stars and galaxies are lost forever. We, as brain hosted minds don’t mourn a lot of this (our judgments again) until we come into contact with it. We tend to experience it more within the tiny lifespan of our conscious selves. When Hawaii is devastated by invasive species, when the global icecaps melt, when homes burn down and loved ones die, we experience this loss. Ultimately, all of this loss is lost for good. The person who dies childless and has not passed down his or her genetic material to another is gone for good. The civilization that dies and whose art, history, thought and culture goes unrecorded or destroyed by volcanos, microbes and thoughtless grave robbers is gone for good because there is no mind to remember it. Chance and physics made the universe and chance and physics will consume it, all.

Because we as a species are biased or survival we find this horrific, but fear in is of no more inherent value than fear in the rats I used to drown in the traps. They may claw at the cage and feel fear, and my mirror neurons may in fact in that moment feel a bit of pity for them, but my drive to keep my children safe from their threat pushes me to advantage myself at the expense of the rat. I win, rat loses. Feelings are simply a survival advantage afforded by my superior evolutionary position.

Your Wellbeing at My Expense

According to Christians, the author and creator of the universe has within itself (there are three persons in this deity) a way of living that can be seen and valued in this universe but is a decidedly minority position. It is the notion of “your wellbeing at my expense”.

We see this in human evolution. Every mother who decides to birth a child, every father who foregoes implanting his seed in every female he can subdue tastes this virtue.

What this virtue says is that the deity made the world not out of necessity, but out of love. Love here is not the romantic kind, it is the what we know as generosity. This being is the greatest thing in existence and wished to share itself with others who could enjoy it and relate to it and so he/she made the world.

What this being is doing through the world is to try to share its joyful generosity with the species in charge of this world. This of course is at the heart of the central narrative of this religion which has the story of the deity dying for the sake of ungrateful and undeserving creatures. That crucified deity then is raised to being a new universe that is somehow beyond decay and loss where the joy of pursuing the value of “your wellbeing at my expense” find final realization. That’s what Christianity asserts.

Implications

This is of course where things get dicey. As I noted before Christian theists and atheists live for the most part like each other.

Two questions then arise:

1. Which worldview better matches the evidence and is the most true
2. Which worldview better produces human flourishing

If you think about the questions and their answers from the particular points of view there is indeed some irony.

Question #1 about evidence is frankly inconsistent with the narrative of atheistic evolution. Such a question is pointless and meaningless. Humanity as a species evolves by the rule of survival, not truth. According to this narrative our species evolved because our minds are biased towards that which is useful for our own survival advantage. The reason we succeeded, and our hope for future flourishing is the excellence by which we pursue “my wellbeing at the expense of the environment and my competition”. Whether something is “true” is at best secondary to whether something serves me.

Now we as a species don’t like to admit this, because it grates against our communitarian impulse and we know that working together can advantage us as a species, but when push comes to shove, if the competition is between us and the squirrels, or the trees, or the ice caps, or our human enemies, the iron law of survival must reign. We killed off the neanderthal and all other less powerful evolutionary branches because that law must not be broken. “Truth” is a commodity that is secondary to survival.

The irony of course is that as a value we honor “sacrifice” and when evaluated in survivalist terms we can pragmatically embrace it, and promote it amongst others whose sacrifice might benefit us.

How Then Shall We Live?

If you’re an atheistic materialist who buys into the darwinian existential narrative the best way to live is to promote sacrifice as a value as long as it benefits my DNA, my tribe and my species.

If you are a Christian theist, you embrace the way of Jesus which was “your wellbeing at my expense” and bank on the resurrection of Jesus being what Christians believe it is.

Ironically if I were an atheistic materialist I would want to live in a world with lots of Christians who are really trying to live out “your wellbeing at my expense”. Atheists who believe Christianity is untrue should actually try to promote the idea because it advantages them and their survival future because of a fairy tale of resurrection and future reward. If Christianity is simply a narrative that evolved because it advantaged the species by way of self-sacrifice then enlightened atheists should sing its praises and promote it in the quiet consolation that their religious adversaries and working towards their better, future survival. What a smart atheist wants to void is becoming one and sacrificing him or herself for the welfare of the others.