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Edited on Sat Dec-18-04 04:31 PM by Stunster
I don't think any Catholic knowledgeable about Church history would deny that some pretty bad things have been done in the name of the Church.
But.... I would not regard it as a good argument against atheism that millions of people were slaughtered by atheist regimes (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceaucescu, Hoxha), that professedly atheist regimes invaded Tibet, Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. I mean, it's logically possible that atheists have done bad things AND that atheism is true.
Yet, I find a lot of atheists/agnostics/anti-religious people will cite the harms done by the Catholic Church as an institution, or by some individuals within it, as evidence that Catholicism/Christianity must be false. The irony is that such people pride themselves on not being irrational. But there's an obvious logical fallacy in their reasoning.
Next, a lot of ex-Catholics cite some unpleasant encounter with a priest, nun, Catholic school teacher, or even a family member, for why they left the Church. Again, I find this irrational. Suppose I attend a meeting of the Democratic Party, and some person, whom I happen to know is an atheist, says something dumb or rude. Does this prove that atheism is false? No. So why should a Catholic saying something dumb or rude prove that Catholicism is false? I mean, it just doesn't, does it?
The next stupid argument that people give is that religion causes wars and social division. Yes, well, so does politics, and economics. Should everyone shun politics and economics because of the long history of war and bloodshed associated with the pursuit of political power and economic advantage? One may as well say that human beings are responsible for wars, and other evils, and therefore that one should have nothing to do with human beings. But that's a nutty argument, isn't it?
God, I think, makes his presence known in lots of subtle ways. But these can be ignored or missed. And God doesn't usually intrude on people who want to be left alone. Atheists often accuse religious believers of believing in God because they want to believe (they want a fatherly Protector, they want to live beyond death, they want good to triumph over evil, etc). But why can't they see that the same charge could equally well be levelled at atheists---that perhaps they don't believe because they don't want to believe? Religious belief, if taken seriously, tends to be spiritually and morally demanding. Why would someone want to be burdened by heavy spiritual and moral burdens? Wouldn't it be easier, more natural even, to want the non-existence of God? To want there to be no definitive judgement of one's life in moral terms, to want there to be no higher authority than oneself, to want not to inconvenienced by duties of prayer, church attendance, and to do whatever one feels like doing, as far as one can get away with it? I don't think this applies to all atheists. But it strikes me that in some cases the motivations for their atheism are suspect.
Ever since Marx and Freud, even people who are not Marxists or
Freudians frequently offer those thinkers' theories as to the illusory
nature of religious belief. It is important to see how atrocious these sorts of psychologizing arguments are, as *arguments* for the falsity of religious belief. They are, despite their popularity, amzingly weak to the point of being rationally unusable, since they commit the logical error known as the Genetic Fallacy.
Let me quote from philosopher Nicholas Rescher:
Of course, there still remains the well-trodden prospect of
antitheological psychologizing. The general line is all too familiar:
"You see the traditional monotheistic God as desirable merely because
he answers a psychological need of yours. You have a psychological
yearing for acceptance, validation, support. Your God is a mere
parent-substitute to meet the needs of a weak and dependent creature."
So argues the psychologizing opponent of axological theism.
But this sort of facile sort of psychologizing ultimately cuts both
ways. For the axological theist can readily respond along the
following lines: You see the traditional monotheistic God as
undesirable because you find the very idea threatening. You atheists
too are "God fearing," but in a rather different sense. You are afraid
of God. You have an adolescent's fixated fear of and a condemnation by
authority. Your atheism roots in self-contempt. Recognizing what an
imperfect creature you yourself are, you have a fear of being judged
and found wanting. The very idea of God is threatening to you because
you fear the condemnation of an intellige nt observer who knows what
you think and do. You are enmeshed in an adolescent aversion to
parental disapproval.
So runs the psychologizing counterargument. And this line is not
without surface plausibility. Many people are in fact frightened by
the prospect of a belief in God because they ultimately have a
contempt of themselves. They feel threatened by a belief that God
might exist, because they feel that, were it so, God would not approve
of them. For them, atheism is a security shield of sorts that protects
them against an ego-damaging disapproval by somebody who "knows all,
sees all." Atheists are not inf requently people on whose inmost
nature the vice of self-contempt has its strongest hold. Pretentions
to the contrary notwithstanding, the atheist's actual posture is
generally not a self-confident independence of spirit, but a fear of
being judged.
In this regard, then, there is simply a standoff in regard to a
Freud-style psychologizing about religion. Those psychologizing
arguments that impute rationally questionable motives that can be
deployed against the believer are not difficult to revise and redirect
as arguments against the atheists. Psychologizing is a sword that cuts
both ways in regard to axiological theism. Both sides can easily play
the game of projecting, on a speculative basis, a daunting variety of
intellectually non-respectable motives for holding the point of view
that they oppose.
And philosopher Alvin Plantinga says this:
Freud's jejune speculations as to the psychological origin of
religion and Marx's careless claims about its social role can't
sensibly be taken as providing argument or reason for... the
nonexistence of God; so taken they present textbook cases (which in
fact are pretty rare) of the genetic fallacy. If such speculations and
claims have a respectable role to play, it is instead perhaps that of
providing a naturalistic explanation for the wide currency of
religious belief, or perhaps that of attempting to discredit religious
belief by tracing it to a disreputable source. But of course that
doesn't constitute anything like evidence for God's nonexistence or a reason to think theism false. One might as well cite as evidence for the existence of God St. Paul's claim (Romans 1) that
failure to believe in God is a result of sin and rebellion against God.
In other words, if it is open to the atheist to speculate about the psychology that underlies theism, it is just as open to the theist to speculate about the psychology that underlies atheism. And of course some theists (e.g. St Paul, Pascal) have done just that. But at least they, unlike some atheists, don't make the blatant logical error of thinking that their psychological speculations are evidence or arguments for the falsity of atheism. No theist argues that atheism is false because of the psychology of atheists.
Would that the reverse were true!
In sum, I find that for all the self-proclaimed supposed rationalism of the critics of the Church and its Faith, they are more often than not liable to betray themselves in elementary errors of reasoning.
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