Gavin Ortlund on what we lose when we lose God

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-nHx7GBGA

3:20 - 4:00

"Let's suppose there is no God. It is hard to state how dark that is. What it means for our human nature, for love, for the way that I feel about my kids – so that's one of the most important things in my life, that feeling of love I have for them. If that's reductively explained by evolutionary psychology – basically I feel this way because it helped animals survive in my animal ancestry, and that's it, and there's nothing more – if I really try to live on that basis, I do find it dehumanizing. It tears away everything that I think gives life value and meaning, and hope."

It cannot possibly be dehumanizing to find out the true nature of humans. It would be the opposite; it would be a humanization of your views about yourself to find out what it really means to be human. Really, it's Christianity that dehumanizes us and makes us out to be these 'kingly creatures' or godly spiritual beings with immortal souls – made in the 'image of God' and loved by God to the point of incarnation, sacrifice, and salvation.

Clearly, Ortlund had in mind something other than the literal meaning of dehumanizing – something more along the lines of what he says next. If there is no God and we are mere flukes of nature – the result of particles smashing together in surprisingly productive ways – then there's no real reason for our existence. We are because we can be and that's simply how the dice came up; or, in the case of necessitarianism, we are because we must be as determined by the necessary laws of nature.

In one sense I'm in full agreement with Gavin Ortlund. I think we lose a lot when we lose God; in some sense losing God is an infinite loss, or at least an infinite disappointment. I think God entails that the universe is in the best possible state of affairs, or at least in one possible configuration of a best possible state of affairs. Hence, why I defend pro-theism. The world would be so much more meaningful and beautiful if death wasn't the end, but we went on to enjoy a world where nature and humanity are in perfect harmony, where we can explore galaxies and build worlds of our own. We can imagine a world infinitely better than ours, and it's pretty crushing to start with a worldview in which everything is enchanted by God's purpose and adoration only to come to believe that death is the end and we are just another bug crawling around on a speck of dust floating in a cosmic sea of indifference. We are not kingly creatures, but machines obeying complex lines of code that so happen to include the curse of subjective consciousness.

Reality is hellish compared to what we can imagine. Gavin is right – that's dark. But it's a darkness we must face. Hiding from it doesn't make it go away.

While the naturalistic worldview invites deep cynicism and pessimism, I don't think it entails the extreme version where humans are objectively worthless and all value is subjective. On that view, anthropocide isn't wrong in any real sense; destroying all of humanity wouldn't make any real difference. That's a degree of cynicism too extreme for me. I think that view fails to appreciate the reality of value.

In another post, I'll defend my view of mitigated cynicism. We should be cynical up to a point, but I argue that human value is immense, finite, and objective. Human value is not infinite like the idealists and Christians believe or want to believe. And human value is not nothing as the cynics think. And human value is not subjective like the anti-realists say. But that's for another time.

The privacy argument against pro-theism is bad

We do not value privacy to an infinite degree. To date, get married, and have kids is to give up an enormous amount of privacy to your significant other. There is a privacy-loneliness tradeoff that humans take, often with little hesitation.

In medical cases, we give up our privacy to our doctors and we feel great comfort when we are cared for. God is the perfect doctor with perfect bedside manner. If we're willing to give up our privacy to our doctors, all the more would we be willing to give up our privacy to God, whom we trust all the more and who all the more provides a sense of ease and comfort for those in his presence.

But even saying "giving up" our privacy doesn't do the situation justice. Is a parent giving up their time to be with their children, or their spouse? Sure, but what else is time for? Am I giving up my money to live my best life? What else is money for? To collect dust? Am I giving up space in my bed when I sleep in it at night, as if that space had some other purpose?

Even if it's a "trade" between privacy and being with God, it's the easiest trade we ever made. We want to be known, we want to be loved, we want to be understood, we want to be seen, we want to be a part of something greater than ourselves, and we want to feel as though we belong. All these things require giving up some degree of privacy.

God promises to make you feel all these things to their greatest degree. God knows you, God loves you, God understands you, God sees you, by being part of God you are part of something far greater than yourself, and God makes you feel as though you belong in this world and were created with a purpose in mind. Your existence, instead of being a mindless accident, is a mindful event full of reason.

The privacy argument vastly overestimates our value of privacy as if privacy is the single greatest good in all of life, which is clearly false. We happily give up privacy for greater goods.

The argument is even worse than that. If God exists, then there are no broadly gratuitous evils. Imagine you had the power to bring God into being and solve the problem of evil, or withhold God. Imagine telling a child whose mom is dying of cancer (assuming this is a broadly gratuitous evil), "Sorry, but whether you know it or not, your privacy is more important to you than your mom being healthy." Absurd. Obviously we would gladly give up the good of our privacy to be free from horrendous evils.

Why do we want privacy? For safety and dignity. And yet with God we have maximal safety and dignity, and without God we lose all safety and dignity. With God we are kingly creatures participating in a Grand Story, eternally loved by the all-powerful, all-wise creator of the universe. Nothing could possibly be more dignifying than that! And speaking of safety, God guarantees our eternal safety in an afterlife. (I'm assuming a model of God that is logically incompatible with any fundamentally bad world, i.e. hell.)

If we knew God watched us, how would this affect our behavior? Perhaps it would give us a greater incentive to act rightly.

Let's be careful here. With the world as it actually is now, belief in God needn't give a greater degree of moral motivation nor the right kind of moral motivation. On the degree of moral motivation, rationality provides the motivation to be moral, and belief in God, in the actual world, will not necessarily make one more rational. (Given the reasons to doubt God's existence, if anything the opposite is the case.) On the right kind of moral motivation,  knowing God is watching doesn't help us by itself. We have to know what God is like and what he wants. If we have no idea, then a group of people might avoid a behavior, assuming that God disapproves of it, when it turns out that God wants that behavior.

Epistemically, in the actual world, we have the problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness. We don't know that God is watching us. If someone believes in God, they easily could come to false beliefs about what God wants, and so their belief that God is watching them could motivate them to act wrongly.

But in the counterfactual world where God really exists, I assume the problem of evil and divine Hiddenness would be solved and we would in fact know that God exists, that he is watching over us, and that we wouldn't have to guess as to what God is like or what he wants from us. With the epistemic problems dealt with, then it would be the case that belief that God is watching us would beneficially affect our behavior.

Although, this strikes me as a moot point, because such a God would just create us with better natures to begin with, so we wouldn't need God watching us to motivate our moral behavior. Our motivation would come from within.

Maybe we would feel embarrassed with God watching us at all times, even in private moments? Not at all. Christians who love God do not feel embarrassed by this at all, and if anything they feel the opposite. Again, do you feel embarrassed when a doctor takes care of you? For some people, the answer will be a simple and resounding yes. But when you're with a doctor who truly loves their work and finds all things medical fascinating, it's like your ailment becomes an object of interest rather than scrutiny. And if the doctor truly cares about his subjects and has great bedside manner, you won't be made to feel lesser in any way. God would also look upon us with perfect understanding, interest, and care. God would make us feel valued despite our limitations, and in fact it may very well be a key aspect of love to love something despite its limitations. Far from our limitations making us feel embarrassed, precluding us from feeling loved by God, it is exactly our limitations that highlight God's love for us!

Our vulnerability sets us up for deep pain when it's taken advantage of. But vulnerability is a double edged sword, where it also sets us up to feel loved in a thoroughgoing way. When someone makes you feel valued and comforted at your weakest moment, then you feel truly valued and at ease. In fact, it is exactly because of these sorts of effects that I would feel inclined to say vulnerability, or experiences of limitation, is one of those evils that can be justified because of the greater goods it enables, especially when that vulnerability never backfires, which, it goes without saying, never happens with God.

The misery argument against pro-theism

Should we want God to exist? If God would make the world better overall, then yes we should want God to exist. And I have reason to think God would make the world infinitely better.

There is only one good argument against pro-theism that I know of, which is a practical argument: Wanting impossible things will make you miserable, and wanting God is to want an impossible thing. So wanting God will make you miserable.

My response to this argument is that we find ourselves wanting impossible things all the time, and doing so is not only natural but can even show our virtue. When a loved one dies, we wish the loved one was not dead. It's impossible for the loved one to not be dead, but we have that desire anyway, and not only can we not be faulted for having such a desire, but if anything it would be callous for us to be indifferent.

When we experience loss, we naturally grieve that loss and wish against it. We must grieve to 1) express our emotion and not let it bottle up (the psychological / physiological demand), and 2) to demonstrate our good character (we appropriately recognize the value of what has been lost). Consider a mother who loses a child, but does not grieve. This would be very disturbing, and we would want to know why the mother isn't grieving. 

Obviously, one cannot force grief; it must come naturally, and we only grieve when we lose something precious to us.

And yet, while we must grieve, we cannot grieve forever. One can feel guilty for "moving on" too quickly; one can feel as though the greater the grief, the greater the love, and thus if I am to prove my love I must grieve for a great while. But this isn't the case. The badness of death is tricky, because it depends on what the dead have been deprived of. Depending on the circumstances of the dead, when they were alive, they might not have been deprived of much. A sickly child who has only a life of illness and pain to look forward to doesn't lose much by dying. An elderly parent who has only a cold hospital room to look forward to doesn't lose much by dying. And one might reasonably feel that given that our world is not a good world, or at least not a fundamentally good world, for existential reasons it's always the case that the dead aren't being deprived of a whole lot. By being dead, all existential problems (and all other problems besides, with the only conditional exception of deprivation) have been solved. Given the potential goodness of death for these reasons, one's grief might be cut short, and depending on one's own depression, might even turn into envy.

But in ordinary circumstances, grief is what follows loss, and the problem of how to grieve and for how long emerges. This leads to the paradox of grieving: I must grieve forever to recognize the permanence of the loss, and yet I must not grieve forever so I can live my life. Overstaying in grief fails to maximize flourishing, and no loved one would want that of you. But how does one stop grieving and move on without callously pushing aside the loved one as if they never existed?

The answer, like with any paradox, is balance. You don't grieve so much that your grief gets in the way of your ability to live. But you don't bury your feelings or pretend like the loved one never existed either. You grieve for a time, and that's the time to let out your feelings, and then when it feels right you let go. There is some compartmentalization here: in you, at all times, is your love, hidden away. Then, after some time has passed, you can bring that hidden love back to the surface and grieve again. And again, you move on.

I suggest that the death of God should be treated like the death of a loved one. You grieve, you move on, and you grieve, and you move on, and this cycle repeats until the end. You do this by ear, not by ritual. If you don't feel like grieving, then you don't. But when you do feel like grieving, you do, and you do not suppress it. Grief is human, and humans have a way of finding the balance of things, and the right balance for one person is different for another.

You might want to say God is too different. When someone "loses" God they really gain the truth that there was no God in the first place. But this fails to appreciate just how real God is for those who believe, and just how deeply emotional that relationship is. If you ask those who had such a relationship with God and lost faith, I think you’ll find losing God very much analogous to losing a best friend, a fiance, a spouse, or, if I may, a heavenly father. (I note there are those who feel silly for ever believing in God in the first place. But did they have the kind of perceived deep connection with God and deep belief in God that I have in mind?)

It's true that strictly speaking God isn't lost, as God was never really there. Instead, it's more like losing your optimism in the world. The world was fundamentally good, and now it's not; the world is infinitely worse than I thought it was. You can reasonably ask: How on earth does one "grieve" infinite disappointment such as this? This isn't a normal kind of loss.

You can rejoice in the discovery of truth and the shedding of false beliefs. You can be infinitely grateful that the world is infinitely better than a fundamentally bad world. The world is fundamentally neutral, and that feels, yes, overwhelmingly disappointing, but, weirdly, it feels fair. It kind of feels right. From day one, how did life treat you? How does life treat anyone? Peasants wish they were kings, and kings, paranoid of the Sword of Damocles hanging over their bed, wish they were peasants. If something is too good to be true, it always is. That's why life has taught you since day one, hasn't it? To discover that the world isn't fundamentally bad is an incredible sigh of relief, and given how bad things can get, it can almost feel too good to be true that the world isn't fundamentally bad!

You can ask how we know the world isn't fundamentally bad. It's true that I guess I can't have absolute certainty that my soul won't survive my death and attach to some nearby rock and remain there in silent agony for billions of years. But if testimonies of near death experience mean anything (and I don't really think they do), there is no risk of this. More importantly, consciousness, by all accounts, is an incredibly expensive thing. You need very particular organs, brains, in a very particular state to maintain consciousness. Even with brains and even with the right state, we lose consciousness very easily, like in sleep or anesthesia. This nearly guarantees that death is the end of consciousness, which means a fundamentally bad life – a life of eternal conscious torment – is impossible.

So there is something oddly beautiful, I think, in the infinite fairness or neutrality of this arrangement. But for those of us who once upon a time truly believed in heaven, we will have to, occasionally, grieve our loss of faith. We have no choice. We simply recognize the infinite loss.

We grieve, and we move on.