The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [23]
There, in the ICU, day after dreary day, night after sleepless night, alternating between pacing up and down cold sterile hallways and sitting on hard plastic chairs in the waiting room listening to the moans and prayers of other grieving souls, I took a knee and bowed my head and asked God to heal Maureen’s broken back. I prayed with deepest sincerity. I cried out to God to overlook my doubts in the name of Maureen. I willingly suspended all disbelief. At that time and in that place, I was once again a believer. I believed because I wanted to believe that if there was any justice in the universe—any at all—this sweet, loving, smart, responsible, devoted, caring spirit did not deserve to be in a shattered body. A just and loving God who had the power to heal would surely heal Maureen. He didn’t. He didn’t, I now believe, not because “God works in mysterious ways” or “He has a special plan for Maureen”—the nauseatingly banal comforts believers sometimes offer in such trying and ultimately futile times—but because there is no God.
The Principle of Principled Values
If it turns out that I am wrong and that there is a God, and it is the Judeo-Christian God more preoccupied with belief than behavior, then I’d rather not spend eternity with him and would joyfully go to the other place where I suspect most of my family, friends, and colleagues will be, since we share most of the same principled values.
Whether or not there is a God, however, the principles that I hold and try to live by should stand on their own. In philosophy this is known as “Euthyphro’s dilemma,” first delineated 2,500 years ago by the Greek philosopher Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro. Plato’s protagonist Socrates asks a young man named Euthyphro the following question: “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods?” That is, do we judge some actions to be pious or holy because the gods happen to love those actions, or do the gods love those actions because they are inherently pious or holy? The dilemma stands in monotheism today just as it did for the polytheism of the ancient Greeks: Does God embrace moral principles naturally occurring and external to him because they are sound (“holy”), or are these moral principles sound only because God says that they are sound?3
If moral principles hold value only because we believe that God created them, then what is their value if there is no God? The principle of truth telling and honesty in human interactions, for example, is the foundation of trust and is absolutely essential for human relations; this is true whether or not there is a source outside of our world to validate such principles. Do we really need God to tell us that murder is wrong? Isn’t breaking a promise immoral because it destroys trust between people, and not because the creator of the universe says it is immoral? Thus it is that most of the principles I have inculcated along my belief journey—including my political, economic, and social attitudes—turn out to be shared even by my theist and conservative friends and colleagues, and thus I do not fit the traditional labels of either liberal or conservative. It is to this part of my belief journey we turn to now.
A Radical for Liberty
I cannot say for certain whether it was