Apatheism and the Unexamined Life

Kevin Harris: Here’s an interesting article by Paul Copan about apatheism. It’s rather obvious from the word what the definition is, but we’ll define it in a moment. Paul says we don’t need to be apathetic about apatheism because it’s an emerging mood and considered a major civilizational force, according to Jonathan Rauch of Yale University. Paul begins the article, quote:

Back in May 2003, Jonathan Rauch’s Atlantic article “Let It Be” appeared. The topic? Apatheism. Apatheism, he claims, is a mindset, a psychological state. Apatheism doesn’t make a truth claim like atheism does (“God does not exist”). Apatheism isn’t a belief system. Rather, it is an attitude of not caring about whether God exists or not: it “concerns not what you believe but how.”

Let’s stop right there, Bill. I’m interested in that last line by Rauch. What we believe is one thing, but how we believe it is another. Certainly, we would agree that what we believe can and should inform how we live. What do you think that he’s getting at?

Dr. Craig: I think that what Rauch is getting at is the notion that the apatheist neither affirms nor denies that God exists. He just doesn’t care. In contemporary culture, this would be expressed by the term “whatever.” It just doesn’t matter. I don’t think this attitude is very well expressed by saying it concerns not what you believe but how, because there is no “how” in this case. The apatheist doesn’t believe that God exists. So it’s not a matter of how he believes it. Rather, it’s just a matter that he doesn’t care and therefore ignores it.

Kevin Harris: Paul’s article continues:

Apatheism, [Rauch] says, can actually apply not only to, say, agnostics. This label could be used for those who may believe in God at an intellectual level but who don’t really care much beyond this, don’t attend church, and so forth.

As we’ll see in a moment, Rauch thinks that this is the best way forward. So, Bill, I think you have two main tasks today as we look at this article. First, what are the philosophical implications of apatheism despite its being chiefly a psychological issue? Let’s start with that one.

Dr. Craig: I suppose the philosophical question would be whether or not we have good reasons to believe that God exists or not. Contrary to what Rauch says, I wouldn’t call people who are theists, apatheists. Your normal apatheist, as this is used culturally, just doesn’t care whether God exists. So philosophically, the most important thing would be whether or not there’s good evidence that God exists or does not exist.

Kevin Harris: And secondly, how should followers of Christ address apatheism? I’d like to wait before you answer that one, Bill. I think we need to delve further into the article first. Copan says that Jonathan Rauch thinks apatheism is an emerging mood and a major civilizational advance. He argued that a culture where people stop caring intensely about religious disagreement is safer and more civilized, less prone to religious violence and coercion. Copan disagrees and calls it a sign of decline. He writes:

As it turns out, apatheism is an indication of civilizational decline. After all, the question of God is a wide-ranging one, with profound intellectual, cultural, moral, and existential implications. So to neglect the ramifications of the divine would be—to one degree or other—indicative of an unexamined life.

I can imagine the apatheist claiming they don’t care about examining life or that they have examined it and as a result embraced apatheism. But I’ve noticed that dictum attributed to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living, is very important to Christian philosophers and apologetics in general. In fact, I think it’s rather hard to escape. Bill?

Dr. Craig: I do too. All you have to do is just think of the enormous watershed whether there is a God or there is not a God. If there is a God, particularly if there is a Christian God, then there are objective moral values and duties that we have. In particular, we have obligations to God. If God is just, then that means that we are going to deserve to be punished by this God. It may be that he’s provided a way of salvation so that we can know him forever. On the other hand, if there is no God at all, then there’s no hope for life beyond the grave. Everything is doomed to destruction in the heat death of the universe, and all of man’s achievements ultimately come to nothing. So I think there are profound differences whether or not God exists that make it difficult to be apathetic about this for any reflective person.

Kevin Harris: Paul continues:

Consider the cultural. As it turns out, the idea of God is a major civilizational advance and the inspiration of so many cultural goods and much aesthetic inspiration.

I know we’re probably preaching to the choir. Most of our audience understands and appreciates the impact of the Christian faith and the incalculable philosophical weight of the questions about God. The question is whether the apatheist can get around that impact and have their own secular version of the benefits of God-belief and Christianity. Even if the wonderful cultural and moral paradigms we enjoy in the West are the result of Christian theism, couldn’t a committed secularist simply respond that these are now freestanding secular goods, however they originated, and that pointing to their historical Christian roots doesn’t obligate anyone to care about the truth of Christianity?

Dr. Craig: It seems to me that what one would argue is that a naturalistic atheistic view of the world is incapable of maintaining these secular goods. But I would disagree with Paul in thinking that we point to these cultural goods as a result of the existence of God. What these cultural goods are would be benefits of belief in the existence of God. In a culture that has a theistic belief, there will be all of these cultural goods. But you could say the same thing about, say, an Islamic society or a Taoist society or Buddhist society that has cultural goods associated with it. So the real question would not be these cultural goods, but it would be things like objective meaning, value, and purpose in life. Can those sorts of goods be sustained as freestanding goods on a naturalistic atheistic view of the world? And I think there are really good grounds for skepticism about that.

Kevin Harris: Paul concludes his article by quoting one philosopher that says that a secular version of what has made Western civilization great cannot work. He writes:

Dedicated Christians who have followed a suffering Savior have often identified with the less fortunate, the disempowered, and the suffering. Agnostic political scientist Guenter Lewy notes this penetrating contrast between the mindset [of] the dedicated Christ-follower and the ethic of the “secularist”:

Then he quotes him:

Adherents of [a secularist] ethic are not likely to produce a Dorothy Day or a Mother Teresa. Many of these people love humanity but not individual human beings with all their failings and shortcomings. They will be found participating in demonstrations for causes such as nuclear disarmament but not sitting at the bedside of a dying person. An ethic of moral autonomy and individual rights, so important to secular liberals, is incapable of sustaining and nourishing values such as altruism and self-sacrifice.

And then Paul continues:

Those who fit within the apatheistic camp won’t likely be committed to “nourishing values such as altruism and self-sacrifice”—values that are inspired by a theological vision in which all humans are made in God’s image and are the object of God’s love and Christ’s self-giving death on the cross.

I know that some non-theist would—I know some who would—come to the bedside of a dying person, and they’re very altruistic. But do you agree with Levy that the removal of the Christian worldview would not be automatically replaced by a better secular version of love and self-sacrifice? I mean, after all, what on earth would compel one to give up the only life one has in order to serve someone else?

Dr. Craig: I think there’s absolutely no doubt. I think it is demonstrable that the impact of Christianity upon Western culture for the good of humanity has been absolutely enormous: the founding of universities, of hospitals, of care for the poor and the disadvantaged, of women’s rights, and so on and so forth. The cultural impact of Christianity has been just enormously positive. And I do think it’s highly unlikely that you could find a secular competitor which would produce those kind of goods. My problem with the whole argument is that I don’t think it proves very much. What this proves would be the necessity of such a theological vision as Paul describes, but it doesn’t prove that that vision is veridical – that it’s true. It’s not enough to show that belief in God is necessary to motivate people for humanitarian ends. That may be true, but what we really want to know is whether or not God actually does exist.

Kevin Harris: Yeah. And I think at this point we need to separate the questions. Jonathan Rauch, whose article is the main topic today, is an outspoken gay activist well known for advocating for LGBTQ policies in government. And it would be beneficial, according to Rauch, who describes himself as an unrepentant atheistic Jewish homosexual, to remove the shackles of religion from politics and daily life so that LGBTQ persons and everyone else could live how they wish. But I don’t think we have to question Rauch’s motives. He’s made that clear. All of us should be concerned with good public policy and also having a good understanding of what it means to be tolerant on a personal level. But he apparently thinks that eliminating or diminishing religion and the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West is the way to accomplish this.

Dr. Craig: Yes. I think that that is really naive. When you look at the experience, for example, of life in the Soviet Union under Marxism, the vaunted Marxist ideals of the dictatorship of the proletariat and equal possession of goods was all an illusion that was just a masquerade for the domination of the elite classes of the masses. I think it’s just enormously naive to think that if you could wave your wand and Christianity would disappear from Western culture that any sort of secular alternative could be found that would be successful.

Kevin Harris: And by the way, one of the reasons that this article caught my attention was that I actually met a man who said his wife was an apatheist.

Dr. Craig: Oh.

Kevin Harris: And he described it as someone who, he said, the things about God and church and so on just don’t even get on her radar. And we were talking – we talked for a long time – and I finally said, “Are you late? Is your wife going to be wondering where you are?” And he said, “She doesn’t care.” So it’s kind of psychological . . . maybe in some it might just be a personality thing. I don’t know. But we have unpacked the philosophical aspects as well. As we conclude, we’re back to your second task: offering ways that we can prevent apatheism, whether it’s on a personal or a political level. I think you agree it’s not a good thing, and I think your work on the absurdity of life without God really shakes people out of any kind of apathy toward Christian theism. Comment on your famous essay and what else we can do to shake things up with not only our Christ-like love but apologetics.

Dr. Craig: I agree with you here. I think that as a prolegomenon, or preface, to actually giving arguments and evidence for the truth of theism and Christian faith, we first have to awaken in the unbeliever a desire for these things – to make him care about the question whether or not God exists. And here I think that an author like Pascal, the great French philosopher, really had it right. You try to show that if God does not exist, then human life becomes ultimately absurd, and many atheists themselves will tell you this: Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Dawkins, even. In the absence of God, there is no objective meaning to life, no objective values in life, no objective purpose in life. It’s all in your head; it’s just made up; it’s an enormous illusion. And my argument is that no one can live consistently and happily within the framework of an atheistic worldview. If you manage to live happily, it will only be because you live inconsistently. You don’t really live as though your life were meaningless, valueless, and purposeless. Rather, you invest your illusory meanings and values and purposes with objective status. But if someone ever did manage to live consistently within an atheistic worldview, then he would be profoundly unhappy and perhaps even suicidal. So this is a worldview which is incapable of being lived consistently and happily. And I think that ought to motivate us to go back to square one and say, “Well, wait a minute. Maybe God does exist. What’s the evidence for God’s existence? Show me.” And that can create perhaps an openness to the existence of God that wasn’t there when a person was in his apathetic state. And we often receive comments at Reasonable Faith from former atheists who drifted away from God and now have come back because they found it absolutely unlivable. They were so much in despair, so much in darkness that they’ve come back to the light. And so I think that’s the best antidote for the sort of apatheism that Paul is describing.