Important Issues in My Lifetime: The Next 50 Years

I’m thirty now. Supposing I shall be so graced as to witness my eightieth birthday, I wonder about the next half a century. What are going to be some of the most important worldwide issues between now and 2060?

Well, here are some of them:

1. The Environment

We cannot keep acting like Saruman and think we’re safe in our self-constructed tower. Our twisted minions will not keep us from the green revenge of Treebeard & His Many-Leafed Company.

Seriously, though: The environment is simply the name for EVERYTHING on this planet, and EVERYTHING is pretty darn important. We humans are not self-sufficient beings; we are a hundred percent dependent on everything around us. In the next fifty years, we just absolutely have to get a grip on ourselves, send our orks into the fires of doom, and re-plant some trees in Isengard. Otherwise the whole place will come down.

2. Over-Population

Like C. S. Lewis already noted in 1959: “We shall fairly soon hopelessly overpopulate this planet and that population will be as defective in quality as excessive in quantity.”

We cannot keep multiplying indefinitely. We will reach a limit. The only question is how that limit will be reached. Through huge disasters? Or through rational, peaceful population control? I opt for the latter.

3. The Economy

Most thinkers of the past would have been horrified at the foundation of our economic system today, which is usury – money begetting money. It’s a system out of line with reality. Will it be able to last?

Aristotle would have probably said no. As he wrote in the third century BC:

“The most hated sort [of wealth-getting], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”

4. Religion

Maybe I put too much emphasis on this, since I’m particularly interested in religion, but it will be very interesting to see how religion is going to develop in the next fifty years. Will Fundamentalism – meaning a narrow worldview that leaves little room for discussion – win the upper hand? Or will Atheism spread and marginalize religion completely? Or will a more mature, balanced, open-minded form of religious practice win the majority?

We’ll see, but I propose it will have a big effect – including on the first three points.

Another Aphorism …

“A drop of philosophy creates atheism, but a whole bucket full creates piety.”

A Little Aphorism about Religion and Atheism

“If religion is perpetual childhood, then atheism is perpetual puberty.”

(I’m not saying this is true of many or even most  people, religious or otherwise. The aphorism is rather meant to express that if one of these charges is made, the other charge can be equally made. Personally, I’m trying to be cautious with any such charges. And perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that “anti-theism” is perpetual puberty, but that wouldn’t have sounded as well .)

A CELESTIAL LOTTERY: Pascal’s Wager, the Atheist’s Wager, and Job’s Wager

Pascal’s Wager

I grew up in a church where life was all about having a personal relationship with God. Over the years, however, there were many indicators that this personal relationship was probably an illusion. Authority, experience, and argument all failed to provide me with the assurance of God I was craving.

What kept my faith afloat for a while—even after my quest had failed—was a pragmatic calculation. Did I, after all, have anything substantial to lose by believing in God? Was it not rather a win-win situation? If there was a God and I believed in Him, I may be welcomed into eternal bliss. If there was no God and yet I believed in Him, my faith might still comfort me in my mortal pilgrimage. Most of all, it would help me face death with a sense of hope for yonder, and thus my last moment before being snuffed out was not going to be one of despair.

I like books with happy endings; this seemed a happy end worthwhile to pursue.

Plus: I would never find out that I’d been wrong. I would never find out that there is no God, as there would no longer be any “me” to find out anything.

Neither would an atheist ever find out he was right. After death, an atheist could not turn to me and say, “See, I told you there is no God.” If there was an “I-told-you-so” at all after death, it would be entirely in favor of the believer.

Why, then, abandon my belief in God? Because I’d like to “sin” a little more on this earth? Because I’d like to overthrow the Heavenly Autocrat and live the life of a libertine? But what kind of liberty would that be? Would it not be the liberty of flying without wings—which means not to fly?

The bird should not throw away its feathers, and I should not throw away my God.

Thus far my reasoning. I did not know it at the time, but I could boast no originality for it. The concept is commonly known as “Pascal’s Wager,” named after the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). He said that since reason is useless in deciding whether there is a God, we need to wager. And who would risk eternal damnation for the sake of a little unbelief? Indeed, “there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.”

Don’t be stupid. Wager for God.

The Failure of Pascal’s Wager

Soon, however, my pragmatic faith ran into problems. I realized that faith was not solely dependent on a simple choice. If, for instance, I made the decision to believe in a flat earth, real belief in a flat earth would not automatically follow. The mountain of evidence that had convinced me of a round earth could not so easily be swept aside.

Likewise, after authority, experience, and argument had failed to substantiate my belief in God, I could not simply snap my finger and say, “Still it’s useful to believe, and therefore I do.” It just didn’t work. I could, conceivably, maintain a pretense of faith in this way, but not real faith. For other people, such pragmatic faith might work—people who make no distinction between what is useful to them personally and what is true universally. But I am not one of those people.

There was another reason why Pascal’s Wager did not work for me. The options from which I had to choose were just too many. Pascal gives the impression that there are only two choices. There are not. My wager did not simply lay in the choice between God and no God, but rather in the God of my particular branch of Protestant Christianity and countless other options. My God was not a vague notion of God, but the concrete God who had revealed Himself most fully in Jesus Christ and was today best understood by (preferably Charismatic) Evangelical Christians.

Now the gods and their worshippers have a long history of sending each other to hell. It is no different within Christianity. According to the Catholic Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, every Christian who goes to church carrying a Protestant Bible (meaning one with sixty-six books rather than with more than seventy) is by that token “anathema,” which is to say, “deprived of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, … separated from the society of all Christians,” excluded “from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth,” excommunicated and anathematized and judged as “condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate.”

Such, at least, was the not quite ecumenical standard pronouncement of anathematizing Christians who held gravely wrong doctrines, a criterion which, according to traditional Catholicism, all Protestants fulfill simply by bringing the wrong Bible to church.

Protestants have returned the kindness. Starting with the Reformation, we have a long tradition of seeing the Antichrist in the robes of the Pontiff and trying to “save” people from the demonic deceptions of Catholicism.

If I wager for God, then which God do I choose? Do I not run the risk of being “condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels” by having a heretical Bible in my home? And conversely, may I not end up in the claws of Antichrist and ultimately in the same eternal fire by becoming a member of the Catholic Church?

Not to mention all the non-Christian religions. By accepting Christ as Lord and Savior, I run the risk of getting on the bad side of Allah, who is One and only One, and who abhors the misconception of God as Three.

And so forth, and so forth. Zeus might just as well meet me across the fateful river and strike me with lightening for never having brought him any sacrifices or even the slightest form of recognition.

If there were but one religion in the world, but one concept of God, then Pascal’s Wager would hold slightly more weight. As it is, our multiple religious options turn his Wager into a celestial lottery in which the majority is bound to lose.

But even if different gods did not send each other to hell, even if the choice was really as simple as “God or no God,” Pascal’s Wager is problematic at best. Which leads me to the Atheist’s Wager.

The Atheist’s Wager

Pascal’s Wager turns God into a vending machine in which you insert the right coin called “faith” and—plonk!—the elixir of life is ready for your grasp. Where you got the coin from is no concern of the machine’s. You might have worked hard for it, you might have stolen it, or it might even be a convincing counterfeit. The Vending-Machine God doesn’t care. All He asks for is faith in Him, whatever the motivation of that faith.

But if there really is a God, and if He is ultimate Truth itself,

would He not value honesty more than a doctrinal coin? Even honest unbelief? Such a God might say on Judgment Day: “You have refused to profess something outwardly that you could not bring yourself to believe inwardly. Therefore I welcome you. Your love for truth was—unbeknownst to you—love for Me, for I am Truth.”

This thought is sometimes called the “Atheist’s Wager.” The atheist lacks belief in Zeus, Allah, Jesus, or any other god, and wagers thus: “If, contrary to my lack of faith, there is a real God, a personal One who is in the position to determine my eternal fate, He is likely going to appreciate my hesitation to align myself to one of the many pretentious gods that are out there. And as I can see no light in these thick woods of pretentious gods, I will be my own light and live without any god.”

Makes sense.

So what am I to do? Go back to the business of daily life and henceforth eclipse any notion of God from my earthly existence?

I can certainly understand why some people do so. Still, I propose a third way, one which I would like to christen “Job’s Wager.”

Job’s Wager

In the biblical story of Job, we find a man whose sudden suffering is irreconcilable with the kind of God he was raised to believe in. Some of Job’s friends arrive on the scene to comfort him, or rather: to raid to God’s defense against Job’s accusations. They are the apologists, the keepers of orthodox doctrine and proper faith.

Job, in contrast, dares to question God. He hurls his doubts into heaven, even when heaven remains silent for longer than he thinks he can bear. He also tells his friends that their defense of God is dishonest: “Will you defend God falsely? Will you show partiality toward Him? Will you plead the case for God? Will it be well with you when He searches you out? Or can you trick Him, as one person tricks another? He will surely punish you—No hypocrite shall come before Him” (Job XIII: 7-10, 16).

Here Job voices the basic idea of the Atheist’s Wager. God might actually punish those whose faith in Him is rooted in dishonesty, and He might welcome struggling souls who honestly question Him.

But Job doesn’t stop there. His conclusion is not, “Therefore I will live without God.” His conclusion is instead, “I don’t have much faith in God—at least not the kind of God I was brought up to believe in—but I will put my doubt in God.”

Putting my doubt in God, expressing my unbelief toward Him, is Job’s Wager. It asks, “What do I do with my lack of faith, with my questions about ultimate existence? Shall I bottle them up? Shall I go on a mission of telling others how unreasonable their faith is? Or shall I cry the questions out into the night? Even if there is no answer?”

Job’s Wager makes me weigh the options and conclude that putting my doubt in God is the best choice. If there is no God, the exercise will have helped me to get in touch with my innermost feelings, live authentically, appreciate my existence more consciously, and not take the world for granted. In a word, putting my doubt in God will have made me more human. It also keeps me from the dangers of uncritical faith, in which people follow pretentious gods too easily. And if there is a God—one, furthermore, who actually cares—will He not hear my cry and eventually meet me as He met Job?

This was an excerpt of my illustrated booklet Job’s Wager: An Alternative to Pascal’s Wager and the Atheist’s Wager.

Does God Exist? A Little Overview of a Big Question

HELP! I’m Losing My Faith.

OK, I admit: I made up the title simply to grab your attention. Which is not to say that this post is about something completely different from losing one’s faith.  In the three videos below, I really do talk about my road of belief and unbelief, though you won’t find any desperate cries for help there. Instead, you’ll hear something about religious authorities, spiritual experiences, Christian apologetics, and why they didn’t work for me quite as I had hoped. And what I did then …

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever – by Christopher Hitchens

Just like the Bible can also be appreciated by non-believers, due to its impact on world history, it is not required to be an atheist to appreciate this anti-religious anthology. 

First of all, what I liked about it was that it was actually of a less polemical nature than Hitchens’ own writings. Sure, there are polemics in it, but there are also several more personal – vulnerable, if you will – accounts of struggles with belief and unbelief, such as the excerpt from Darwin’s autobiography, or James Boswell’s (himself a believer) fascinating account of his last interview with David Hume shortly before the latter’s death. 

The book also does us a service by indirectly reminding us that Karl Marx should not just be judged by the evils of the Gulag Archipelago, but be treated as someone with many noble and worthwhile thoughts. 

Other highlights of the book were George Eliot’s “On Evangelical Teaching,” which I had not read before and which might just as well have been written about TV evangelists of today. Eliot, speaking from more than 150 years in the past, eloquently described my own church background in which I grew up. A fascinating – almost prophetic – experience. 

I was also a bit surprised by the amount of very clear statements Albert Einstein had made about his religious position. I had been under the impression before that Einstein’s position required quite a bit of interpretation, and that the view of Dawkins and Hitchens was just one among many. The quotes helped me to become undeceived in this regard. 

The only critique I have against the anthology is that the inclusion of many of Hitchens’ friends seems somewhat preposterous. The historical impact of Lucretius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Marx, Darwin, Twain, Einstein etc. is firmly established, and their inclusion in this anthology is a fitting homage. But to then continue with Michael Shermer, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the like turns an anthology of great historical weight into an advertisement for New Atheism. 

Perhaps Shermer, Dennet, Harris and their friends will one day all be considered on par with Marx and Einstein, but it’s too early to tell. If I wrote a book on essential political figures, I wouldn’t move from Alexander the Great and Napoleon to my local governor, either. 

I am tempted to take a star off for that. Let’s make it half a star. 4.5/5 for “The Portable Atheist.”