Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 9

(Note: This is Part 9 in the series started here. The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #9:

If there is no God, humans and "other" animals are of equal value. Only if one posits that humans, not animals, are created in the image of God do humans have any greater intrinsic sanctity than baboons. This explains the movement among the secularized elite to equate humans and animals. [Note 1.]

I share Dennis Prager’s disdain for the “secularized elite,” which we have come to understand as being the left-leaning, subjectivist intellectual establishment. But I must point out that once again, he is conceding all ground to his enemies.

To claim, as Mr. Prager has, that men deserve special consideration only if they are created in God’s image is to imply that there is no natural reason - there are no facts - that justifies distinguishing men from other animals. This is exactly the position maintained by the subjectivists that he reviles. The only difference is that religionists, wishing to rescue mankind from being relegated to the status of lowly animals, proceed to invent a supernatural pretext; they regard men as divine beings, created and chosen by God as the stewards of the earth. Subjectivists refrain from fabricating this pretext, and thus regard men as mere animals, crass beings driven by their appetites and whims.

To see how both sides are mistaken - and to arrive at the correct perspective - it is instructive to recall the arguments of the “intrinsic/subjective/objective” trichotomy that I have written about elsewhere and is one of Ayn Rand’s important identifications.[Note 2.] Mr. Prager is precise in his term “intrinsic sanctity.” It is exactly the intrinsic value of man that he seeks to preserve - a value that is somehow an attribute of every man, apart from his relationship to the real world. It is a “sanctity” unsullied by the coarse considerations of the requirements of survival, and of living the life of a man qua man. In essence, the intrinsic value of man that Prager is attempting to secure is a divine one: eternal, other-worldly, inaccessible, akin to a Platonic Form.

A proper perspective is neither subjective nor intrinsic but objective. In this, we regard value as relating to all living organisms, and only to living organisms, for it is living entities that will exist or perish according to their natures and actions. For a living organism, its basic value is life, and each of its derivative values reflects this fundamental value in its capacity to contribute to or enhance the life of the organism. Crucially, it is from the perspective of each organism that value is determined.

In this last statement we see the sharp distinction between Prager’s “intrinsic sanctity” and objective value. In Prager’s view, the value of human beings exists as an intrinsic attribute - a value in itself, apart from any consideration of a valuer. It is a sort of reified universal imposed by a supernatural Creator, a stand-alone fact of the universe. As an implicit consequence, not only should a man recognize his superiority over animals, but a baboon (or lizard, worm, amoeba, tree) would necessarily defer to it; thus, built into each of God’s lower creatures would be a “sanctity” of its own life that was somehow less than that of a human.

Of course, that is nonsense. The value of human beings is not intrinsic; it is objective. For every living organism, from single-celled microbes to Homo Sapiens, its own life is the standard of value. A man’s regard of his own life as having sanctity is derived not from some divine proclamation - from the lucky chance of having been born among God’s chosen species - but from his nature as a living being. (To be more precise, a man’s value itself follows from his being a living organism; his regard of his own value follows from his being an organism with the ability to think and to be self-aware.)

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Prager left a clue that revealed how anti-scientific and anti-reason his perspective actually is. In the phrase “humans and ‘other’ animals,” Prager put quotes around the word “other,” as if humans are not animals at all. How deeply does he hold this idea? Can he really think that humans are not to be classified as part of the animal kingdom?

Humans are the rational animals. We have a perceptual apparatus that is similar to many of the higher mammals, but we also have a faculty that, as far as can be discerned, is utterly unique among all living things: a rational, reasoning mind that operates with free will.

The abilities to abstract and conceptualize, and to choose our actions, are far and away the most significant attributes of our species. Our conceptual faculty accounts not only for our survival, but for our ability to seek happiness. Human minds have created philosophy, science, mathematics; crop rotation, the printing press, the automobile, and the computer; Hamlet, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Parthenon, Falling Water, and the Empire State Building. By any objective standard, the human species is amazing and remarkable, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”[Note 3.]

If subjectivists - seeing humans as automatons determined by social conditions and slavishly compelled by emotions - evade men’s true nature and consider us to be equal (or even “less than equal”) to other animals, they should be defeated on rational grounds. There is absolutely no reason to reach into the supernatural realm, as Mr. Prager has done, to find an excuse to shout the merits of man. As I have indicated, doing so has quite the opposite effect: it implicitly concedes that men have no value in reality.

(Note: The next installment in the series is here.)

NOTES

1. Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2. To capture the relevant idea, it is necessary to quote a relatively lengthy passage from Ayn Rand’s essay, “What is Capitalism?”

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose - claiming that the food is good in, by, and of itself.

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an "emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

The objectivist theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of values. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man - and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man.

Ayn Rand, “What is Capitalism?” from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, pp. 21-22. [Italics are in the original.]

3. To be sure, it is the human mind that is behind the worst atrocities of history as well - slavery, the wars of conquest, inquisitions, persecutions, pogroms, and People’s States. But this consideration only emphasizes the importance of philosophy, and of getting our answers right.

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 7

(Note: This is Part 7 in the series started here.  The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #7:

Without God, people in the West often become less, not more, rational. It was largely the secular, not the religious, who believed in the utterly irrational doctrine of Marxism. It was largely the secular, not the religious, who believed that men's and women's natures are basically the same, that perceived differences between the sexes are all socially induced. Religious people in Judeo-Christian countries largely confine their irrational beliefs to religious beliefs (theology), while the secular, without religion to enable the non-rational to express itself, end up applying their irrational beliefs to society, where such irrationalities do immense harm. (Note 1.)

I agree with this (except for the last sentence), and above all I appreciate Mr. Prager’s frank admission that religious belief is irrational, which will make this post much briefer than it would otherwise have been.  (It requires no elaboration.)  The subjectivism and moral relativism of the left is also irrational, in some cases just as irrational and destructive as religion.

But as I’ve pointed out many times, most recently in Part 6, the secularity of the left is utterly irrelevant.  It is an incidental, non-essential characteristic.  Socialism in its various forms (communism, fascism, democratic welfare states, etc.) and other left-leaning views like multiculturalism and environmentalism may nominally reject religion, but they certainly do not embrace reason. 

Because I’ve covered all this in such detail before, I’ll not repeat it here, but will spend the rest of this post on Prager’s last sentence.  I must say that the logic of it is a little bizarre.  He seems to be saying that because being irrational is an unavoidable condition of being human, using religion as an outlet for one’s irrationality tends to confine it to one’s personal activities, which is inherently less harmful than aiming one’s irrationality at society.  

For one thing, this is not very reassuring, for what do we do when religious people decide to, say, purposely fly commercial airplanes into buildings for God?  More than this, though, Prager’s statement is stunningly immoral.  Sure, we are all fallible and thus capable of irrationality - but virtue consists of pursuing reason to the best of our abilities, for it is via reason alone that we can grasp reality, sustain our lives, and achieve our values.  It is incumbent upon us to continually check our ideas (“Check your premises,” Ayn Rand would frequently say), and the instant we find that we are wrong, we must change our course and set things right.  It makes no sense to identify some behavior (such as being religious) as irrational - to know that it is irrational - but persist in that activity all the same.

There is another aspect to his last sentence that I find interesting in light of the very next point Mr. Prager makes regarding free will.  To assume as given that everyone must hold irrational beliefs reflects an improper view of human nature.  Prager doesn’t exactly deny free will outright, for he seems to admit choosing between secular and religious forms of irrationality; but to hold that irrationality is a necessity is to deny a vital part of free will.  At every turn a human is capable of choosing to be rational or not.

(Note: The next installment in the series is here.)

NOTES

1.  Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 6

(Note: This is Part 6 in the series started here.  The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #6:

With the death of Judeo-Christian values in the West, many Westerners believe in little. That is why secular Western Europe has been unwilling and therefore unable to confront evil, whether it was Communism during the Cold War or Islamic totalitarians in its midst today. 

The accusation in this is largely true.  What Mr. Prager refers to as “secular Western Europe” is the collection of “free” democratic welfare states that have for a century been dominated by socialism, and which since World War II have increasingly added apologetic self-hatred and multiculturalism to its body of ideas.  Broadly speaking, the intellectuals behind this “secular Western Europe” are the subjectivists and moral relativists that both Prager and I are opposed to (and which I have written about in some detail in other posts).  I completely agree with Mr. Prager’s observation that European culture has rendered its nations unwilling and unable to stand up to evil.  

During the cold war, Western intellectuals could not effectively criticize the Soviet Union because they accepted - and even admired - its basic premises.  Even when they explicitly denounced communism, they conceded the virtue of its altruistic underpinnings and rejected it only because it was “good in theory but bad in practice.”  On top of that, the left-leaning Western elite have spent the last few decades flagellating themselves in the most pretentiously vain self-abasement, finding every excuse to denigrate the West (especially America), and all the while enjoying the fruits of the freedom they despised.  Today, these self-proclaimed “liberals,” who would not recognize actual liberty even if it cried out from under their shoes, find themselves in a peculiar position.  They must advance their “enlightened, humanitarian” agenda by defending thugs who beat and murder their way into public office (as long as they were democratically elected), by supporting dictators who spray poisonous gas upon their own citizens (as long as they are anti-Bush), by cheering environmentalist saboteurs (as long as they destroy the products of industrialists), and by turning a blind eye to morality police that stone young girls to death for the crime of having been raped (as long as the killers denounce Israel).  

In the face of self-righteous evil, the meek Western intellectual is utterly powerless... and our enemies know it.  “A liberal,” Robert Frost famously said, “is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

However, despite my general agreement with Prager in his estimation of the feebleness of “secular Western Europe,” I reject his implication that secularity itself is the source of the West’s impotence.  In fact, insofar as secularity is an indication that the West has embraced reason, it is (or it would be) a positive sign.  

Unfortunately, the embrace of reason and the rejection of religion are two entirely different things.  The former is a positive, systematic, constructive, and ultimately life-sustaining activity, while the latter is simply a negative, a void.  It is true that atheism follows from reason (as does the rejection of all other types of arbitrary assertions), but atheism is not itself a philosophy.  No positive values come from simply rejecting religion.  A man who adheres strictly to reason is always an atheist, but an atheist is not necessarily a man of reason.  (Far from it, as we can see in the “secular Western Europe” that Prager rightly condemns.)  Secularity in Europe seems little more than a symptom of the subjectivist rejection of all principles, all systems.  It tells only of the penchant to disintegrate and analyze, and to scoff at absolutes as outmoded prejudices.  [Note 2.]

The key to Prager’s plausibility on this point is the ambiguity of the word believe when he writes, “many Westerners believe in little.”  Principled, reality-oriented people who do not hold religious faith will still feel that they believe in something, though they may sense that it is of a significantly different nature than that which a religious person believes.  In its strictest connotation, belief means faith - and this is surely Prager’s deepest meaning.  After all, the entire point of his article is to show that a belief in God is needed to avert the evils he enumerates.  But I think he is taking advantage of the less strict, non-religious meaning of belief (i.e. a firmly held opinion or conviction) to make his point persuasive.

No, it is not faith that Western intellectuals lack but convictions.  The West must not only identify facts, but have the courage to declare them to be true.

By veering toward a faith in God, as Mr. Prager recommends and as many Americans have done in recent years, the West may very well become less apathetic and powerless toward evil, but it wouldn’t make us right.  On the contrary, it would make us dead wrong - wrong for the very same reasons that our enemies are wrong.  It would be a disaster if Americans turn to religion as the antidote to subjectivism and multiculturalism.  The proper alternative to our cowering before crusading, irrational, medieval fanatics is surely not to become crusading, irrational, medieval fanatics ourselves.

The reason that America and the West is right and good - and ought to be defended with righteous conviction - is that this nation was founded upon Enlightenment values: an embrace of reason, logic, and science; a passion for discovering the natural order of things; a lust for living in this world; the toleration of conflicting opinions and beliefs; and above all, a respect for the individual, his property, the free use of his mind, and his unfettered liberty to act as he sees fit, provided he respects everyone else’s right to do the same.  

The United States of America remains history’s best exponent of these values.  It is impossible to square religion with America’s governing institutions.  [Note 3.]  To attempt do so would be to destroy freedom, to rip it from its moorings in this world in the hopes that a supernatural anchor is more secure.  To replace reason with God, discard earth for heaven, reject logic for dogma, sacrifice the individual for the flock, surrender liberties for commandments - is to do more damage to the West than the “secular Western European” could ever do.

(Note: The next installment in the series is here.)

NOTES

1.  Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2.  In this, I refer only to modern intellectuals.  I do not think this explanation applies to communists - at least not the early communists.  For all my denunciation of them, I do not accuse communists of being disintegrators in the realm of ideas; they were system builders.  Their rejection of religion was probably based more upon a desire to seem “scientific” and to distinguish themselves from reactionary, “bourgeois” tradition, than to rejecting principles outright.

3.  This is not to be confused with individuals’ right to practice whatever religion they wish, which I defend absolutely.

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Introduction

One of the projects I’ve been meaning to work on is to post some comments on Dennis Prager’s article called “If There Is No God,” which he published last summer on townhall.com. (Note 1.)  In general, I do not consider the point-by-point rebuttal of religious claims to be a particularly fruitful method of combating mysticism, but every now and then the exercise may be a good vehicle to reach honest minds.  I’ve found Mr. Prager to be more thoughtful and philosophical than the typical religious conservative, and in his brief article he manages to squeeze in many ideas that I believe represent mainstream religious thought.  Judging by the level of his discourse, he seems to treat his opponents respectfully, so I think he deserves the same.

My main goal here is to dash the notion that there are only two choices in the realm of morality: either to be religious or to reject morality outright.  I sympathize somewhat with the people who fly to religion in order to escape the ruinous subjectivism of modern intellectuals.  The so-called “liberals” - the cultural and political “left” - sneer at the notion of a “black and white” world, regard the acceptance of absolutes as “naive” and lacking "nuance," and consider good and evil to be mere social conventions.  The dominance of these ideas accounts for much of the deterioration in the western world today.

However, the fact that the subjectivists are wrong does not absolve the religionists from their own errors. 

It is vital to identify our nature as human beings, and to recognize that as thinking, free-willed individuals, morality is literally a matter of life and death.  To affix the validity of morality upon a supernatural God - to cast an anchor into fog, to tie one’s lifeline to a ghost - is to commit a grievous error as bad as or worse than that of the subjectivists.  I understand the desire to defend ethics, but if the religious are hoping to place morality beyond the reach of attack by basing it on God, they end up achieving just the opposite; they lay bare the bankruptcy of their arguments.  

As bad as the assault on values by the intellectual left is in America today, I think morality is far more threatened by religious conservatives.  The subjectivists attack; religionists betray.  An enemy who is an avowed antagonist is usually less dangerous than an enemy who claims to be an ally.  And to make matters worse, the religionists hold a near monopoly in the realm of values; morals and religion are practically synonymous.

If America and the West is to be saved, we must rescue morality from religion.

The choice to either accept religion or reject morality altogether is a false dichotomy.  Neither is correct.  (In fact, the two viewpoints have more in common with each other than subjectivists or religionists would probably care to admit, a point that I’ll make in Part 1 of this series.)  To have these two moral viewpoints as the only dominant choices in the world is a disaster.  The one dismisses morality altogether; the other recognizes morality, but derives it from a fairy tale.

In Mr. Prager’s essay, he enumerates fourteen consequences of there being no God.  My plan is to comment on each of these in turn in the coming weeks.  (At the rate I’ve been writing lately, those weeks will likely turn into months, unfortunately.)  In the broadest sense, the same answer applies to most of Prager’s points; namely, Prager’s assertions are arbitrary and may be dismissed accordingly without further consideration.  However, this simple rejection is not likely to be convincing or helpful to a religious person who is honestly trying to come to conclusions that are consonant with reality.  I am convinced that some religious people hold religion rather loosely - only as a matter of habit, or as I indicated above, perhaps because they are revolted by modern “liberalism.”  It is for them that I submit these ideas.  Perhaps some will see that religion does not provide the unassailable foundation that they thought it did.  But happily, an objective view of reality does provide a means – the only means – of comprehending the universe, and it also provides a framework for objectively-derived values.

(Note: The next installment in the series may be found here.)

NOTES

1.  Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god