This book has the following five chapters:
2) The Nature of Happiness
3) The Content and Structure of Happiness
4) The Possibility of Happiness
5) The Hope of Happiness
Abstract:
Part 1: God's existence versus belief in God's existence
Let's separate out two questions: First, would God's existence make things better? Second, would my belief in God's existence make things better for me?
To the first question, what could be more obviously true than that a perfect being would make things better? A perfect being would, necessarily, be the foundation of the universe. And if the universe has a perfect foundation, then the universe results from and thus is part of that perfection. And so, if perfection has been instantiated, then we live in a fundamentally perfect world.
If God does not exist, then all bets are off; the universe could be as uncaring about our suffering as we could imagine, and so we could imagine living in a nightmare world for eternity with no God to rescue us. Only the presence of a perfect being guarantees that we won't be stuck in a nightmare world like this. So not only would God make things maximally better compared to a godless world, but only God can ensure that things aren't maximally bad for anyone.
Saying God makes things better is thus almost like saying the make-things-better-person makes things better. Even if a merely highly excellent, highly virtuous, highly powerful person were to exist, then this would entail great improvements to our world. And yet God is maximally excellent, maximally virtuous, and maximally powerful, and thus entails maximum improvements to our world. So I can't understand why someone would try to argue that God's existence would make things worse off, or would make no difference.
(I do wonder about Graham Oppy's argument that impossible things cannot coherently make a difference, and because God is impossible, the question of what difference would God make is an incoherent question.)
Maybe one reason why naturalists are surprisingly hostile to pro-theism (the view that God would make things better and thus we ought to want God to exist) is perhaps because we need to separate out the improvements God would make to the world from the improvements my belief in God would make to my life.
It's on this second question that I turn more anti-theist. First, I think doxastic involuntarism is true: We can't choose to believe what we believe, we simply find ourselves believing things or not believing them according to what makes sense to us. So even if it were the case that my belief in God would improve my life, I might not be capable of believing in God because of, say, my analysis of the problem of evil.
Second, it's easy to argue that my belief in God would make my life significantly worse. Indeed, I lost my belief in God because of how painful holding onto that belief became.
That pain has two components: The intellectual component, and the emotional component.
The intellectual component is this: It's painful trying to believe in God when there are a barrage of arguments against belief in God. This is made especially worse when you believe in the God of Christianity, because not only do you have to face arguments against the coherence of a perfect being, but now you have to deal with difficult Bible verses and Christian doctrines.
Matters are made worse still if you feel obligated as a Christian to not only believe in God, but to believe in God with certainty. When faith is a virtue, doubt is a sin, and so having any doubt in God's existence can be seen as a moral failure in Christian culture. After all, how can one be regenerated by and filled with the Holy Spirit and yet still have doubts?
But if Christians are committed to being certain in their beliefs, that means that non-Christians need not argue that Christianity is false, but only that it might be false. But not only do naturalists argue that Christianity might be false, they argue that Christianity is clearly false. Some naturalists, like Georges Rey, argue that Christianity is so clearly false that Christians must be engaging in self-deception; even Christians don't really believe, they just lie to themselves and say they do so they can fit into their social environment and combat anxieties over death and morality.
The emotional component of the pain of belief in God comes from what happens when you love God and want to be with God but find yourself in a godless world. The more I loved God and wanted to be with God, the more painful it felt to live day in and day out in a world that doesn't believe in God, that doesn't respect belief in God, that holds no tangible, undeniable evidence of God, and in which the silence of God in the face of horrendous suffering is deafening.
It was during these moments that I started thinking about virtuous despair. In the Christian world, love is the greatest virtue, and loving God above all else is the most important quality in a virtuous person. So loving God is a virtue, and yet loving God brings despair, because the more you love God, the more painful the godlessness of the world becomes, and the more absurd it feels to live in a godless world day after day after day. So this despair is caused by virtue.
It's important to highlight the day after day aspect of this; the hours accumulate and accumulate, and the days and years pile on. But what are we doing with this time? Seeing God? Seeing God's great works throughout the world? Seeing any sign of God, or spending any time with God in any undeniable, tangible sort of way? No. As the hours accumulate, the time spent apart from God accumulates too. The more you love God, the more agonizing these God-empty hours become.
(This reminds me of the Problem of Relationship: God creates us to relate in a number of ways: sight, sound, touch, conversation, assistance, etc., and proceeds to relate to us in zero of those ways.)
So while it might be true that "God's existence has significant, positive, and desirable implications for human happiness", it's not true that my belief in God will bring me happiness. To the contrary, my belief in God brought me agony.
Part 2: Absurdity of life without God?
If God's existence has significant, positive, and desirable implications for human happiness, then doesn't it follow that God's non-existence has significant, negative, and undesirable implications for human happiness?
I think this is right, and I accept that there is a great deal of pessimism in my naturalism in contrast to my previous Christian worldview. But I argue for a mitigated pessimism that makes room for optimism, even deep optimism in the face of death and the injustice, and suffering of our world.
I've written on the topic of the absurdity of life without God, where I've stated that I used to think that the absurdity of life without God is an ace-in-the-hole argument against naturalism, and that I have since changed my views completely and now argue that there is no intellectual or practical problem of meaning for naturalism, and even if there were, Christianity would be of no use in solving it seeing that it is a false worldview. So if one of the book's theses is that there is a problem for naturalism, say, along the lines of what Yujin Nagasawa argues for in his recent book The Problem of Evil for Atheists, or what William Lane Craig argues for in his book Reasonable Faith, then I will take issue with Shea's views.
I take issue regardless because I think that one could, ironically, levy problems of meaning and happiness against Christian belief as discussed above, though I have more to say specifically about how Christian beliefs can threaten the meaningfulness of our existence.
My views have changed indeed.
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