Foxholes & Deathbeds: Agnosticism (Revisited)

“One night, when I was still in the army, I was driving the mid-shift out to our intercept site on the West German border to relieve the swing shift. On a remote but straight stretch of rural road, the fellow riding shotgun,who’d been drinking, reached over and turned off my headlights. I froze at the wheel, then yelled some obscenity before reaching down and turning them back on. I realized then that driving in total darkness is risky business, but even with the sun overhead, given the curvature of the Earth, the full journey can never be foreseen. Faith or trust lets drivers relax and enjoy the scenery when death is racing toward them day and night at an unknowable rate.”—By Skip Eisiminger

 

Skip the B.S. 

By Skip Eisiminger

Note: This week, Weekly Hubris is featuring the work, present and past, of Skip Eisiminger. The column that follows here originally ran on August 4, 2014.

“An atheist . . . has no invisible means of support.”—John Buchan

“A person of faith has no visible means of support.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1/19/2015—Greenville County recently installed a bronze plaque at County Square that reads, “In God we trust.” Before the dust settled inside council chambers, the executive director of the state’s ACLU chapter said she worried that atheists and Muslims might feel uncomfortable, presumably because these two place their trust in Reason and Allah, respectively.

I understand the momentum of the slippery slope, but I doubt that posting this statement of majority belief in another public place will thrust us toward a Christian version of Sharia law or an Iranian-style theocracy. But what exactly does “In God we trust” mean? To me, it simply says that we, who have placed our confidence in the Creator, implicitly believe in some higher, unseen power like gravity who will do what He, She, or It can to protect humanity and the planet, itself. “God” is what I call this shadowy but selfless creator, knowing He’s never been fingerprinted by either science or religion.

One of the pleasures of modern life is highway travel but, unless I trust those who share the road with me to drive safely, my brain and stomach will be tied in a spastic knot before I reach my destination. Likewise, if I lose the trust I have in my spouse, intimacy will cease to be the pleasure it has always been. So I trust that neither God nor someone else will drive into me or give me an STD. Call me an agnostic shading toward belief, but if others place their faith in Allah or Reason, I will respect what gets them down the road.

Knowing what unrestrained pride has wrought in the past, I think it’s wise to acknowledge our dependence and the mid-range position humans occupy in the cosmic hierarchy. Knowing also that asteroids occasionally strike the Earth, that 99.9 percent of all species which have existed here are extinct, and that the“unsinkable”Titanic sank, I realize God has a universe to manage. Nevertheless, I trust He’s doing the best He can, for His will is as free as my own, and my responsibility is modeled on His.

I’ve often wondered whether “In Reason we trust” would be a viable alternative to our nation’s motto, as secular humanists have argued, but reviewing the track record of “Reason” in Revolutionary Paris, I’d say it isn’t. In 1793, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was rededicated to “The Cult of Reason”; this was followed a few months later by another re-dedication to “The Cult of the Supreme Being.” But the cult worshipers, who’d replaced images of Mary with those of the “Goddess of Reason,” soon cheered the innocent heads that rolled in the Place de la Concorde. Meanwhile Diderot’s Encyclopédie cross-indexed the “Eucharist” and “cannibalism.”

“The Federal Bone Orchard” is just one of the slangy references assigned to Arlington National Cemetery, where my parents rest in peace. A physicist friend says his parents are lying in “a cold grave”; I say, “Mine are in heaven.” He snickers when I say,“God provided the spark,” saying, “It just happened,” for my “Creation” is his “Big Bang.” What he calls “superstition,” I call “faith,” and what he calls “sunlight and rain,” I call “God’s love.” We are two academics sharing a culture divided by dueling and reductive euphemisms, and who’s to say which of us is closer to the truth?

I’m confident my parents’ bodies have not moved since they were interred in the nation’s capital, but their voices occupy my head with enough authority and regularity that I’m not sure the grave captured both body and soul. My sisters report similar encounters, descriptions of which we share by email. It’s a comfort to the three of us knowing our parents are reasonably content.

Are we deluded? Is our subconscious via our dreams just feeding us what we want to hear? Of course, I cannot be sure, and I’m not sure anyone can. And so, like my political self, I find myself drifting to the center, away from the wings. I’ve flirted with the left and the right just as I’ve entertained atheism and belief. Most Sunday evenings, after finishing the Times and Saturday’s Journal, I drop my papers beside me and think, “I just don’t know.”

But as I look left and right, up and down, the majority seem certain; indeed, many strike me as intolerably certain, so I’ve declared myself a born-again agnostic. I’m not positive of that either, but that’s where I’ve landed for the present. If nothing else, I’m drawn to the simplicity and honesty of the position. As science proposes multiverses “that just happen” and Christian fundamentalists continue to opt for Adam’s rib, I’m just going to step off stage. The burden of proof is on those who claim to know; meanwhile, I’ll trust in God and assume the best until I know otherwise. 

A fellow I occasionally see at the gym has a T-shirt that reads, “Your workout is my warm-up.” Since he knows nothing of me except what he occasionally sees, I find that statement on his swollen chest gratuitously insulting. For all he knows, my warm-up is his workout, but I’d never broadcast it. It’s that stick-in-your-eye self-righteousness that leads me away from atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, who wrote, “Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish . . . . Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake . . . .”

And it’s the judgmental character of a Fred Phelps screaming, “God hates fags,” that leads me screaming away from fundamental belief.

One night, when I was still in the army, I was driving the mid-shift out to our intercept site on the West German border to relieve the swing shift. On a remote but straight stretch of rural road, the fellow riding shotgun,who’d been drinking, reached over and turned off my headlights. I froze at the wheel, then yelled some obscenity before reaching down and turning them back on. I realized then that driving in total darkness is risky business, but even with the sun overhead, given the curvature of the Earth, the full journey can never be foreseen. Faith or trust lets drivers relax and enjoy the scenery when death is racing toward them day and night at an unknowable rate. 

An Agnostic’s Statement of Faith: A Bill of Rights

• I will accept moral support wherever I can acquire or imagine it.

• I will tell young orphans or widows that a loved one is alive in “the everlasting perhaps,” for life after death is a comfortable but necessary fiction. Indeed, the death of a loved one may be the best reason to affirm God’s existence.

• I believe that religion was created to help humans cope with death, provide a focus for our gratitude, and assure us that justice will ultimately prevail.

• I will praise the good work of any church or field of science even if I am not affiliated with that church or do work of a scientific nature.

• I will consider belief and atheism to be acts of faith, and “acts of God” to be acts of nature.

• I will stroke a rabbit’s foot confident there’s no harm in the occasional animism, steering a course between the foot and its magic.

• I will cherry-pick the words of Jesus, Confucius, Rumi, Plato, Mohammad, and Buddha, among others while enjoying but rejecting the myths.

• I will shape God to suit my life, given that gods have always been relative to their believers.

• I will skip atheist weddings that last eight minutes and cost $1.65, as well as Roman Catholic weddings in which a priest offers the bride communion wine but denies it to her Protestant groom.

• I will always need to believe in someone, and someone to believe in me.

• I will disdain intolerant certainty of either stripe. 

Riders to the Above

• I’m convinced that admitting all or questioning all keeps me from thinking independently. As one who endeavors to be thoughtful and fair-minded, I should look both out and in.

• Given that neither science nor history can explain how the Golden Rule came to be golden in every major religion, widely separated by time and space, I will accept Emerson’s theory that this sublime rule was drawn from the mind of God.

• The moving and excited faces of believers and nonbelievers alike convince me that God is at the very least an emotional reality.

• I respect the deist Thomas Paine’s statement, “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good,” but I would first ask what the recipient desires.

• Hitler was a Roman Catholic who came to worship himself, and Pol Pot was a Catholic-Buddhist turned atheist, which merely suggests that neither religion nor atheism offers any guarantees. Mussolini thought God was “an affront to human reason,” but it was he, who could not get the Italian trains to run on time, who ultimately earned that epithet.

• The believer who has doubts or the atheist who prays is not necessarily a coward or a hypocrite.

• It’s true that atheists don’t do evil in atheism’s name the way witches were burned in God’s name, but killing in the name of progress or the proletariat is still wrong.

• Christopher Hitchens’ clever observation that “the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence” must apply to the church as well as science.

• Atheists often urge us to “Celebrate Reality,” when often there’s little to celebrate, as when the survivors of Hiroshima and Chernobyl are left groping for something to trust in. As late as 1932, Albert Einstein, an agnostic, thought nuclear energy would never be obtainable, but nature has a way of circumventing the limits defined by science. That’s why I add a pinch of salt to each dose of science I consume.

• If the church is pulling the cart, let reason hold the reins.

• When Franklin tamed lightning, the church initially took offense but eventually, most installed lightning rods.

• Long ago, some anonymous priests said, “Kill the POWs,” but reason replied, “Let these prisoners tend our fields and flocks.” Eventually, however, the priests concluded, “Slavery is an abomination.” For once, reason and the church concurred.

• Finally, mystery and anticipation are vital to plot interest.