Friday the 13th: Why I disagree with Julie Bindel about prostitution and the Nordic Model.

Friday the 13ths (Fridays the 13th?) are days on which I speak out in favour of decriminalising prostitution and abolishing laws that harm sex workers. For details of why, please read this post and the links, which will give you more detail than I’ll be able to manage on this particular Friday 13th. Today, what I want to do is write some comments about Julie Bindel’s article Why prostitution should never be legalised in Wednesday’s Guardian.

As you can probably gather from the article’s title and URL, Bindel takes a very different stance from me on prostitution; she believes all sex work to be inherently exploitative and non-consensual, and believes that buying of sex should be criminalised, a position known as the Nordic (or Swedish) Model on which I’ve previously expressed concerns. Here, rather briefly, are my concerns about Bindel’s beliefs, and why I, although also a feminist, do not feel able to agree with her:

  • I do not believe that it is possible to say of any form of sexual experience amongst adults that this is something to which no-one could or would give consent under any circumstance. I simply don’t believe it’s possible to be that reductionist. Any form of sexual activity can be done forcibly, or coercively – or consensually. I don’t see any reason why selling sex should be the one exception.
  • I believe that the best person to assess an individual’s own experience and how s/he feels about it is that individual. When I read the accounts of women who were forced into sex work or experienced coercion, I believe them. Likewise, when I read the accounts of women who chose sex work (whether as the least of the available evils or as something they actually enjoyed and wanted to do), I believe them. When a woman says that she hated sex work and that it was horribly wrong for her, I believe her. When a woman says that she enjoyed sex work and was happy in her profession, I believe her. It makes my hackles rise when people’s own experiences and emotions are denied because they don’t fit with dogma. Bindel wants to erase the experiences and voices of women whose experience of prostitution doesn’t match her own beliefs on the subject. I do not – I cannot – accept or agree with this.
  • Bindel, in this article, is completely ignoring all of the evidence that the legal solution she proposes will be harmful to sex workers themselves. Quite simply, criminalising the buying of sex does nothing whatsoever to address the many reasons why women sell sex or to change the various situations that lead to women doing this, while doing quite a lot to make it harder for them to make the money they need or to do so safely. This means that it does not help sex workers, but does harm them. I would urge anyone considering supporting the Nordic model to please read the articles at the links in the first sentence of this paragraph. Several were written by sex workers or former sex workers who have seen, first-hand, the harm this law can do; others are about the research showing problems with these laws.

And all of that is why – as a feminist – I cannot support Bindel’s position on prostitution.

From agnosticism to atheism

In my last post, I wrote of how – as the culmination of much reading and thought on the issue – I became an agnostic. I’m now going to jump forward twelve years from that decision and explain how I eventually moved on to atheism.

I was somewhere around seventeen (I can’t remember exactly) when I became an agnostic. It was a decision I was happy with, but never something I regarded as a ‘that’s it, case closed’ moment in life – I retained my keen interest in the whole topic and continued to read and think a lot about it, open to new arguments I hadn’t come across before. While I did in fact find one – C.S. Lewis’s moral argument – and found it quite intriguing, that one didn’t stand up under examination either (another topic I need to post about!) and I remained agnostic.

That was fine by me, but I’d also have been happy to find a convincing reason to believe in God (as long as it wasn’t the tyrant version of God that supposedly sent people of the wrong beliefs to eternal torture). I didn’t, however, think seriously about becoming an atheist, because that always seemed fairly silly to me. Sure, we couldn’t prove that God existed, but how could anyone prove that he didn’t? Surely agnosticism was a far more sensible option?

Fast-forward….

I was twenty-nine, and I was chatting to the boyfriend with whom I’d recently got together. (Who would, in fact, go on to become my husband, but that’s also a different story.) He was (and still is, for that matter) an atheist. Curious, I asked him why. How could he be an atheist when he couldn’t be sure that God didn’t exist?

And he asked me “Well, do you believe in fairies?”

Lightbulb moment. As silly as it sounds now, this way of looking at things had honestly, at the time, never occurred to me. No, of course I didn’t believe in fairies. Or ghosts, or vampires, or werewolves, or…. well, name your mythological being, really. And for none of those things did I feel the need to hedge my disbelief with disclaimers about how of course they might exist, since we couldn’t really know for sure that they didn’t and surely it was important to keep an open mind… No-one would expect me to. There was no good evidence for the existence of fairies, so my response to that was not to believe in them. Simple as, end of.

When I clung to my agnosticism about God, when I tried to tell myself I was right to be open-minded about the matter… I was actually cutting the notion of a deity a level of slack that I wouldn’t have cut for any other theoretical creature.

I rapidly realised two things:

  1. Logically, I really should be an atheist.
  2. While my commitment to open-mindedness and fairness was quite genuine… it hadn’t actually been my only reason for wanting to remain an agnostic, rather than an atheist.

Being an agnostic, you see, also allowed me to continue with the hope that maybe – just maybe – there was a God of the non-horrible type out there. (The kind of God traditionally believed in by Christians was a rather different matter, but that is yet another whole other issue for yet another of the increasing number of blog posts I totally mean to get round to writing sometime.) I liked the idea that, at the end of the day, the universe might be in charge of someone wise and kind and powerful who would a) make sure that nothing went too disastrously wrong for humanity and b) give us some kind of afterlife in which some kind of justice was done.

(That, I can see, may be misinterpreted. There seems to be a widespread belief among Christians – and among other religions too, for all I know, but Christianity is where I’ve encountered it – that we unbelievers all lead meaningless lives without God and just don’t want to admit it. My life has never felt meaningless in the slightest; I’ve been very happy and fulfilled in the here-and-now without belief. My discomfort came from the feeling of being without a safety net if things went wrong.)

However, the facts remained. Despite years of searching, I had been able to find absolutely no good reason to believe such a being existed. And I’d always striven to be as honest as I could about where my exploration of the issue led me. So… it wasn’t the kind of rapid shift that my shift to agnosticism had been, and took some months of gradually coming round to the idea, but I did eventually identify as an atheist. And, eighteen years on, I still do.

How I became an agnostic

This is – very belatedly and with apologies for the long gap – the fifth in a short series of posts I’m writing about the subject of why, after investigating reasons for theism, I ultimately became a non-believer (first an agnostic, ultimately an atheist).

For background: These investigations were in my childhood/teenage years. I grew up in a non-religious household, but was intensely interested in the whole subject from an early age. I regarded the whole question of whether or not there was a God, and, if so, what religion he wanted us to follow, as being an extremely important one; so I put a lot of time into reading and thinking seriously about the subject. These are, as best as I can remember after a thirty-year gap, my reactions at the time to the arguments I found in my reading, and my thoughts on the matter.

I wasn’t originally going to include either this or a post about how I moved from agnosticism to atheism, since I did write both those posts on my old blog, but then I decided that it would be good to have the whole story together in one place.

For those who haven’t read the previous posts, here’s the story so far: I’d spent a lot of time reading about why I should/shouldn’t believe in God, trying to make up my mind, but the arguments I read ranged from ‘inconclusive’ to ‘absolute rubbish’ and I was left feeling unable to reach any kind of sensible conclusion. This didn’t, as some believers would have it, mean that I was desperately searching to fill a God-shaped hole; I would have liked to be able to conclude that God existed (apart from any other considerations, it would have meant I could join a religion, which seemed to my lonely introverted teenage self to be a great way of finding instant community and the sense of belonging I craved), but I certainly didn’t feel my life would be meaningless without reaching that conclusion. I just felt it was something I ought to decide one way or the other. But none of the arguments I read were helping me do so.

And that’s where I was in my life when, browsing the shelves of the local library, I came across Yvonne Stevenson’s ‘The Hot-House Plant‘.

As I recall, it was in the biography section, not the religious section; I can’t remember why I looked at it. I guess the title must have caught my eye. The description, however, certainly did; Yvonne Stevenson was a vicar’s daughter who had written about her experience of converting from Christianity to atheism. That intrigued me, all right. Something had obviously led her to that decision; would her reasons be any help to me in my own?

No, as it turned out. But this book would still be the turning point in my search; my definitive ‘How I became an unbeliever’ moment.

Before I get to that, I’m going to switch genres for a moment into Book Review Mode, because, regardless of how it was to end up impacting my beliefs, this book was a joy to read. Yvonne Stevenson was a lively, irrepressible, strong-minded woman who threw herself into life and into her search for answers with engaging enthusiasm. It was quite an old book even then – Stevenson had been born in 1915, and was describing events in the first twenty-one years of her life, leading up to and following her conversion – but it was one of those delightful books that are timeless.

If Stevenson had lived a century later, she’d have become one of many bloggers telling similar deconversion stories. She grew up in a loving but strict Christian (Church of England) family, with a controlling father who encouraged her to think about her faith… as long as she was reaching the same conclusions as him. While she was happy with this situation for a long time, she came increasingly to question it as she grew older – and her questions weren’t getting satisfactory answers. Lost and seeking, she arrived at university and was initially shocked to meet an atheist for the first time. However, she was increasingly won over to her new friend’s worldview (which included Marxism as well as atheism) in a series of late evening discussion sessions. Eventually – to the fury of her family and her own great relief – she converted to those beliefs herself.

I loved the book (years later, I ordered a second-hand copy online just to have one for myself) but I also took its subject matter seriously and read it with the same careful analysis that I’d tried to bring to all the arguments I’d read – both pro and con – on the subject of belief. The questions Stevenson raised, the points her friend made – did they stand up? Or were there valid alternative ways to look at the issues?

In each case, unfortunately, the answers were ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ respectively. The pro-atheism arguments were interesting to read, but ultimately just as unconvincing to me as everything else I’d read. For one thing, a lot of them weren’t even directly about theism or Christianity as such -they were about the very rigid and classist form of Christianity with which she’d grown up, and, even as a teenager, I understood that I shouldn’t judge a whole religion by some of its participants and that her points, while very valid in their way, had nothing to do with the overall truth of Christianity. Even where the book did deal directly with the question of God’s existence, though, I didn’t feel any of her arguments were conclusive; I had little difficulty in thinking of counter-arguments. As much as I loved the book, I finished it feeling I had no more hard evidence for or against God’s existence than I’d had before I started it.

So, the book didn’t give me the Final Conclusive Argument on the matter for which I’d hoped. What it did, however, was to deal a knockout blow to the one teetering prop that had so far propped up my shaky such-as-it-was theism.

A key part of the book, you see, was Stevenson’s account of her actual conversion experience. As conversion accounts go, it was a good one. It was vivid, it was dramatic, it involved actual visions – including one of being born again – and it left her with a new, glorious sense of purpose and a life so joyously changed that she actually described her experience as seeing the world in colour and in three dimensions for the first time in her life. It was a conversion account so marvellously convincing that it would have done any apologetics book proud. Except, of course, for one little detail… this was her conversion to atheism. Her vision of being reborn (which she herself fully understood to be hallucinatory) was of being reborn as a child of nature and evolution, not of God; her joy and purpose were those of a person who has finally resolved a stressful dilemma and found a meaning that makes sense for their own life.

On top of that, there was her atheist friend’s excited comment on hearing the news: “It’s the most marvellous feeling, isn’t it, when you shake off Christianity? Everything comes alive! It’s indescribable. Like springing free from a great, heavy, black cloak that’s weighed you down.” (pp 157 – 8) Different vivid simile; same sentiment. Another person whose life had been left vastly happier and more positive by conversion… to atheism.

Under the circumstances, I felt it seemed quite fair to say that neither of these experiences could have been the work of God… which answered a key question for me. To recap something I wrote in the previous post in this series:

[T]here was still one category of evidence that… well, that still wasn’t conclusive, but that did seem to have more to it than the various ineffective arguments I was reading. This was the fact that so many people reported personal experiences of psychologically encountering God, often in compelling and life-changing ways.

As I said, I didn’t find this conclusive. There seemed to be other plausible explanations; after all, if someone really believed God was speaking to them or that God loved them, surely that could lead to the kinds of experiences of bliss and comfort and changed lives that I was reading about. Still, could this be enough to account for the experiences I was reading about? (This wasn’t a rhetorical question; I genuinely wanted to know the answer.)

And there, at last, was the answer: Yes, it could. This book had just given me clearcut, categorical evidence that it was perfectly possible to have a dramatic and utterly life-changing conversion experience for purely innate psychosocial reasons, without a deity being involved in it at all. I still couldn’t prove that God didn’t exist; but I’d just been left without any convincing remaining evidence that He did.

So I took the obvious route and started seriously considering atheism.

I rapidly realised something. During all the time I’d been considering the matter, while my conscious mind had been unable to decide, another and unrecognised level of my mind had always taken belief in God for granted. This had nothing to do with any genuine feeling of my own; it was the result of having grown up in a society where the prevailing message was that there was some sort of God out there, and of having internalised this and taken it for granted. While the logical part of my mind was analysing the matter, the part that went along unthinkingly with what I was told had accepted God as unquestioningly as it had accepted other beliefs. I found myself unable to look at the world around me without taking it for granted that there was a God behind it, like a presence behind a painted image. Trying to see the world another way felt not so much like an emotional wrench as like looking at an optical illusion and trying to make the mental shift from seeing it as two faces to seeing it as a candlestick.

So, I started focusing on trying to make that shift. Throughout my day, I practiced looking at the world and replacing my mental picture of a God behind it all with a mental picture of an absence behind it all; in what subtle ways would the world look and feel different if I believed there was nobody out there? It didn’t take very long; within a few days I felt I’d made the mental shift to seeing the world as one without a god behind it. The only thing was, this didn’t give me any more of a sense of ‘Aha! This way of looking at things is correct! I have found the right answer!’ than the background assumption that God was there.

Was there a god or wasn’t there? I thought over all the reading I’d been doing. All the inconclusive arguments, each one of which seemed to have its possible counter-argument. (The world must have been created by God – but what if it was actually created by some natural process that we didn’t yet know about? There was no sign of any Supreme Being directing human lives – but what if there was a Supreme Being who just didn’t direct human lives, for whatever reason? Round and round, on and on and on.) How long had these arguments been going on between humans? Centuries? Surely, if there actually was conclusive evidence on either side, the whole question would long since have been settled by now?

Finally I faced facts: If there was such a thing as conclusive proof that God did or didn’t exist, by this time I would have found it. We didn’t have such proof. I certainly didn’t rule out the possibility of it showing up at some unspecified time in the future, but what we had right then was what we had right then. Right then, we simply couldn’t prove the matter either way. There was, in short, only one sensible recourse; to become an agnostic.

And thus, with a sense of considerable relief at having resolved this, I became an agnostic. I would keep on actively searching for new arguments or evidence – but, in the absence of same, agnosticism seemed by far the most fair and sensible conclusion to draw on the matter. I was an agnostic, I was happy with that, and, although I didn’t know it at the time, I would continue to define myself as an agnostic for the next twelve years.

To be continued…

BMJ article on gender dysphoria issues

A few weeks ago, the British Medical Journal carried two educational articles about management of gender dysphoria in the non-specialist setting (one written by a gender dysphoria specialist with input from patients, and one a collection of advice from transgender people). Transgender people can have some significant problems with healthcare both for their gender dysphoria care and for their general care, so, although this only affects a small minority of the population, this is an issue it’s important for me as a GP to be aware of.

I have a separate site where I keep the notes I make on any medical articles or educational modules I read, in order to refer back to them later. This time, however, I thought I might post them here; after all, transgender health care is an important topic to many people here. Here are the points covered by the articles:

  • When someone comes to you expressing problems with gender identity (‘you’, here, meaning GPs, not the general population), offer them referral to gender identity services ASAP. Waiting lists are horrendous, so, if a patient does want to explore the possibility of transitioning, the sooner they get on the waiting list to do so the better. As a GP, I’m very schooled in the approach of “let’s wait a bit and see how this goes with time”, and for a large proportion of the patients I see that is perfectly appropriate, but gender dysphoria is one of the situations where it isn’t. The gender identity services themselves will be the ones who can offer expert assessment and help patients reach an informed decision regarding transitioning. (As one of the patients in the second article pointed out, gender identity treatment has one of the highest satisfaction rates of any branch of medicine. Puts the desistance myth into perspective, doesn’t it?)
  • Take the trouble to find out what name and pronouns your patient wants to use, and use them. That, frankly, is just basic courtesy. However, be aware that, for safety reasons, a patient may need letters to be addressed to their old name for the time being (if they’re living with family members who are against the transition and unsupportive or even threatening over it). Use their new name and pronouns when discussing them with other healthcare personnel; it’s a way of respecting their gender even when they’re not there.
  • Transgender people who haven’t yet accessed proper treatment may be self-medicating with hormones purchased online. Ask about this and advise that it does carry risks and that ideally it should be stopped until the person is seen by the gender identity clinic. Of course, given the waiting lists, there’s a gulf here between ‘ideally’ and ‘bearably’. If a person can’t face stopping medication for the time it’ll take to get seen, advise them to let us know of side effects and to let healthcare practitioners they see know about the medication.*
  • Suggest informal on-line support groups while a patient is waiting to be seen. Tranzwiki.net was the example given.
  • Some surgical treatment can take place locally, such as hysterectomy/oophorectomy; however, do bear in mind that a person who has become visibly male may feel very awkward about attending a gynaecological clinic. One possibility suggested was that a patient in this situation could get a woman to accompany him to the clinic, if possible, so that he wouldn’t stand out as a solitary male in a sea of female patients.
  • Screening can raise unexpected problems. For one thing, gender-based automated systems in the NHS are not set up to deal with patients who’ve changed gender, and so they may not be called automatically for screening they should actually have (aortic aneurysm screening for MTF, cervical screening for FTM who still have a cervix in situ). Remember that the form that goes with the sample will need to clarify what’s going on so that the lab doesn’t simply assume that the cervical smear sample labelled as coming from Mr Fred Jones, M, to be a mistake. For another thing, the screening tools for things like risk of cardiovascular events or fractures include gender as one of the factors used to calculate risk, and the data on transgender people in this context simply doesn’t exist. It’s necessary to do some common-sense estimating and explain the uncertainties to the person in question.
  • On the topic of screening, the article also stated that AMAB women do not need routine mammography as, in the absence of progesterone, their risk of breast cancer is too low for it to be needed.
  • Conversely, an AFAB male who still has breasts should be advised to have mammography if in that age group, but may find it distressing to discuss the matter. The article ‘I am your transgender patient’ suggested that talking about ‘chest’ rather than ‘breasts’ might be easier for some men in this situation.
  • There isn’t any single rule or guideline for how transgender people feel about their gender, their identity, or their gender-specific body parts. They might be very distressed by some, quite comfortable with others. It’ll vary from person to person. This is one of the (many) situations in medical practice where you have to be sensitive to the person’s cues and willing to find out their wishes and to follow their lead.

 

*This, of course, raises the question of whether GPs in that situation should prescribe hormones themselves rather than leave the patient with the risks of buying hormones on-line. This wasn’t covered by the article. WPATH guidelines do touch on the possibility of ‘bridging’ prescriptions, but it’s a complicated issue that carries the risk of major medicolegal problems for the GP if they prescribe outside their area of expertise, and there are very good reasons why GPs would typically be unwilling to do this. This is beyond the scope of this particular article, which is why I haven’t gone into it further here.

The Don’t-Have-To-Do List

I made it. As I wrote in my last post, the school holidays (six weeks) and my chunk of booked annual leave (one week) both start today. Time, finally, to catch up on the vast amount of things in my life I’ve been letting slide.

Books on organising would probably advise me to write out a To-Do List at this point, but they can get stuffed, since the mere thought of putting everything I have to do into a visible list sends me into AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH NOOOOOOOO mode. Things will just get done when they get done; that’s all. What I did find myself writing out this morning, however, was a Don’t-Have-To-Do List – a list of the things from which I get a reprieve.

Here is the list of things that, over the next nine days (in many cases longer, but minimum of nine days), I will not have to do.

  • Think of lessons for my homeschooled son to do
  • Listen to him complaining about having to do those lessons
  • Wrestle and negotiate with my daughter about her homework
  • Make any packed lunches for anybody
  • Be anywhere by a specific time
  • Rush round in a frenzy as I face the stress of knowing that I’m not going to manage getting to the place I’m supposed to be at a specific time
  • Worry about whether my son’s taxi transport to his tuition centre will turn up on time
  • Figure out what to do about anyone’s medical problems
  • Figure out what to do about anyone’s blood results
  • Write referral letters for anyone

Even knowing how much I do still have to do, it’s truly amazing how much mental space and energy it frees up knowing that I have a break from doing all of that stuff.

Anyone else enjoying a Don’t-Have-To-Do List?

Light at the end of the tunnel

Tomorrow is the last day of the current school year, and hoo boy, you can bet your socks I’ll be glad to see it end. It’s not the end of homeschooling for me, unfortunately, as my son’s school situation is as yet unresolved; we’re hoping to get him back into school at some point in the next school year, but everything’s up in the air at the moment and the one thing that is definite is that it won’t be sorted out by the time September rolls round. But at least I’ll get a few weeks off from the soul-draining pressure of having to come up with vaguely adequate lessons and get my son to do them. It’ll be good to be done with this year for my daughter as well; she did not get on well with her teacher this year at all, and I’ve had to do what I could to deal with the struggles and fallout from that. I will wave this one goodbye with great joy.

As a bonus, I’ve actually got the week off work next week as well. Sheer chance – I had some annual leave to use up, asked my practice manager which days would be least inconvenient to have me missing, and ended up with this week – but it’s exactly what I need right now.

So, I’ll have some time to catch up on the other aspects of my life, and I’m hoping to use at least some of that to get some blogging done. I realise I don’t have a brilliant track record on that count lately, and that I have a heck of a lot of other stuff to catch up on, but at least I can try.

Off now to juggle getting dinner cooked, the laundry done, and logging into work remotely so that I can catch up on as much stuff as possible before my week off. Hope you’re all enjoying some form of relaxing summer and that those of you who are struggling with life can see the light at the end of whatever your personal tunnel right now is.

Why I’m not a believer – what about prayers and personal experience?

This is the fourth in a short series of posts I’m writing about the subject of why, after investigating reasons for theism, I ultimately became a non-believer.

For background: These investigations were in my childhood/teenage years. I grew up in a non-religious household, but was intensely interested in the whole subject from an early age. I regarded the whole question of whether or not there was a God, and, if so, what religion he wanted us to follow, as being an extremely important one; so I put a lot of time into reading and thinking seriously about the subject. These are, as best as I can remember after a thirty-year gap, my reactions at the time to the arguments I found in my reading.

I don’t know whether anyone’s been following this mini-series of posts (probably not, given how long it’s taken me to write it), but anyone who has read through the post series to date may well be wondering why there was even a question in my mind at this point about becoming a non-believer. So far, I’ve written three posts about different arguments for the existence of a god that I came across in my reading, and the overarching theme of all three seems to have been me looking blankly at the argument wondering why on earth this was meant to be even remotely convincing. Why did it take me so long to get to the point of officially declaring myself an atheist, or at least an agnostic?
Well, part of it was the difficulty of proving a negative; I couldn’t prove God didn’t exist, and hadn’t yet realised that that wasn’t in itself an automatic reason for having to take the possibility of his existence seriously without positive evidence for same. And a lot of it was an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ effect; so many people seemed so convinced that God existed that I didn’t feel able to dismiss the possibility just like that. Surely, if I kept reading and looking, I would find a more convincing argument one way or the other? Around the next corner? In the next book on the shelf on the religious section in one of the local libraries? But on top of that, there was still one category of evidence that… well, that still wasn’t conclusive, but that did seem to have more to it than the various ineffective arguments I was reading. This was the fact that so many people reported personal experiences of psychologically encountering God, often in compelling and life-changing ways.
As I said, I didn’t find this conclusive. There seemed to be other plausible explanations; after all, if someone really believed God was speaking to them or that God loved them, surely that could lead to the kinds of experiences of bliss and comfort and changed lives that I was reading about. Still, could this be enough to account for the experiences I was reading about? (This wasn’t a rhetorical question; I genuinely wanted to know the answer.)
I tried praying myself, since it seemed the obvious thing to try; if God did exist, this would give him the best chance to let me know directly. Not frenzied wordy prayers, just time in which I did my best to focus my mind on God and open myself to whatever He might be trying to tell me. And, when I did, I certainly noticed something – an inner sense of mental quiet, an awareness of my obligations. I figured that could indeed be God taking the first steps to commune with me. The trouble was, it also seemed the kind of effect that might plausibly be caused by me calming my mind and thinking I was communing with the divine. So which was it? And did the fact that I was even thinking that mean that I was overanalysing it and talking myself out of a genuine relationship with God like the dwarves in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle? Or did it just mean that I was exercising appropriate caution? After all, surely there was a risk that if I was too ready to believe I might talk myself into believing I was communing with God when I wasn’t, in much the same way as I’d managed to convince myself at the age of twelve that our house was probably haunted because I thought I could feel a presence there when I thought about it.
I simply didn’t know. This was such an important subject; surely it was incumbent on me to work out what the answer was! But I only found myself getting more confused. One thing was for sure; it all seemed a lot less clear-cut than the authors I was reading on the subject seemed to think.

And so my teenage years went on…

Why I’m not a believer – the ‘But without God we wouldn’t have any morals!’ argument

This is the third in a short series of posts I’m writing about the subject of why, after investigating reasons for theism, I ultimately became a non-believer.

For background: These investigations were in my childhood/teenage years. I grew up in a non-religious household, but was intensely interested in the whole subject from an early age. I regarded the whole question of whether or not there was a God, and, if so, what religion he wanted us to follow, as being an extremely important one; so I put a lot of time into reading and thinking seriously about the subject. These are, as best as I can remember after a thirty-year gap, my reactions at the time to the arguments I found in my reading.

This one is probably self-explanatory, but can be briefly summarised thus: ‘Without God to tell us what to do, we’d all be scratching our heads trying to figure out what right and wrong are, since there is obviously no way anybody could work this out for him/herself without some sort of Supreme Arbiter defining it for us. And you obviously don’t want that to be the case, do you? So better believe in God.’ *

I have to say that this argument, when I read it as a teenager, did send me to particular levels of facepalming “Are they serious?!” In the first place, as you’ve probably noticed, this argument is subject to exactly the same flaws as the ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument that I discussed in my last post; it falls apart logically (to be technical, it has the form of logic flaw known as an argument/appeal from consequences), and it isn’t even factually correct, since, despite not being a believer, I found myself perfectly well able to make the sort of basic distinctions between right and wrong that the authors using this argument were insisting I couldn’t possibly make. But this argument also has an extra flaw over and above the ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument; namely, that the very fact that someone is using it indicates that they don’t actually believe it.

After all, apologists surely use only arguments that they at least think have a chance of being effective? The ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument, despite its flaws, at least has a chance of convincing someone; a person who does feel their life is meaningless is going to want it to be meaningful, so that argument has a potential audience. But a person who doesn’t care about morals… doesn’t care that they don’t care about morals. If we unbelievers genuinely were all indifferent to right and wrong, then we wouldn’t care when someone pointed that deficiency out to us. It would be as meaningless to us as the fact that we don’t keep to kosher dietary laws. The very fact that apologists use the no-morals-without-God argument as an attempt to convert non-believers shows that – at least on some level – they know perfectly well that morals matter to non-believers.

I was quite intrigued by the twisting of logic that must be required to use an argument that could only be used if you didn’t believe it was true. Surely there has to be a name for that particular logic flaw? Maybe not; I can’t think of any other examples of it that I’ve heard. If anyone knows what that logic flaw would be called, do please tell me!

*Note that CS Lewis, in Mere Christianity, used a different type of pro-theism moral argument which effectively contradicts this one; the argument that precisely because we all have innate knowledge of right and wrong, we can conclude that God must exist, on the basis that the only way such innate knowledge could exist within us would be if a deity had caused us all to be born with this type of instinctive knowledge. While I don’t agree with that form of the argument either, I do find it rather better than this form. However, I’m writing this as the story of what arguments I looked at when originally deciding whether I should believe in God or not, and this particular argument was one I didn’t run across until some years later; therefore, in the interest of vaguely chronological accuracy, I’ll leave it to a later post.

Why I’m not a believer – the ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument

This is the second in a short series of posts I’m writing about the subject of why, after investigating reasons for theism, I ultimately became a non-believer.

For background: These investigations were in my childhood/teenage years. I grew up in a non-religious household, but was intensely interested in the whole subject from an early age. I regarded the whole question of whether or not there was a God, and, if so, what religion he wanted us to follow, as being an extremely important one; so I put a lot of time into reading and thinking seriously about the subject. These are, as best as I can remember after a thirty-year gap, my reactions at the time to the arguments I found in my reading.

The ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument almost got left out of this list, as it was such a poor argument I’d actually forgotten about it; however, I was reading John Blanchard’s ‘Does God Believe In Atheists?’, which spends a lot of time on it, and I thought ‘Oh, yes… now I come to think of it, I do recall coming across this when I was researching the whole God subject’. So here it is.

This argument consists of telling the reader or hearer, in impassioned terms, about… well, obviously, about how meaningless lives are without God, with the implication that we should therefore believe in God. Or, to put it another way, ‘We should believe in God because we really want [our version of] Him to exist’.

This is what is technically known as an argument from consequences (or, if you want to get fancy about it, an argumentum ad consequentiam) – the claim that a particular viewpoint is true because the consequences of it being false would be bad. (Or, conversely, that a particular viewpoint is false because the consequences of it being true would be bad.) It’s the logic flaw that’s the downfall of the cancer sufferer who ignored that lump or worrying symptom for too long because they didn’t want it to turn out to be cancerous, the gamblers who convinced themselves that that long shot just had to pay off because they so much wanted it to.

It can work if used as an appeal to emotion, but it’s an argument too flawed to stand up in the light of day. Which is why you will probably never see anyone spell it out quite as blatantly as I did a couple of paragraphs above – if anyone attempting this argument ever did explicitly state ‘And because it feels so awful not to believe in God, God must therefore exist’ then the crashing failure of logic would (hopefully) be far too obvious to take seriously.

(Ironically, if this type of argument actually had worked well in converting me, it would have backfired on any Christian apologist who tried it, since I always found the idea behind Christianity quite horrifying. The idea of God existing – a wise, kind, all-knowing being in charge of the universe and steering its ultimate destiny – sounded lovely to me, and I always hoped my studies would lead me to theism as a conclusion. But the idea that this being had set things up so that people would burn in hell forever simply for having the wrong beliefs? It appalled me. If I hadn’t recognised the fallacy behind this sort of believe-what-you-want-to-believe argument, I’d have rejected Christianity in a heartbeat without further thought, simply because I so much didn’t want it to be true.*)

A more important problem I had with this argument as a teenager, however, was that the premise was so obviously false. Plain and simple, my life did have meaning without God. Plenty of meaning. I loved being alive, I loved enjoying life’s pleasures, I loved looking forward to everything life had to bring. Sure, I liked the idea of a God existing (as long as it was a nice one, not the horrible variety of god that I was hearing about from Christian sources), but I was in no way dependent on God’s existence for finding meaning in my life.

So all of these arguments about how meaningless life was without God got a rather blank look from me. I was sorry for the people who felt that way, who obviously needed very much to hold on to their beliefs and who seemed to struggle inexplicably with enjoying life for its own sake; but their attempts to persuade me that I felt the same way simply fell flat.

 

*Obviously, I ended up rejecting Christianity anyway. But I did so only after spending a lot of time, over many years, reading and thinking about the various arguments and holding myself to strict standards in terms of whether I felt any particular argument actually disproved the belief system or not. It was not just a case of ‘I don’t want to believe it so I’ll assume it’s not true.’ (All of which will make for another post series which I do hope eventually to get round to writing.)

Why I’m not a believer – the ‘So how could X have happened without God?’ arguments

This is the first in a short series of posts I’m writing about the subject of why, after investigating reasons for theism, I ultimately became a non-believer.

For background: These investigations were in my childhood/teenage years. I grew up in a non-religious household, but was intensely interested in the whole subject from an early age. I regarded the whole question of whether or not there was a God, and, if so, what religion he wanted us to follow, as being an extremely important one; so I put a lot of time into reading and thinking seriously about the subject. These are, as best as I can remember after a thirty-year gap, my reactions at the time.

The ‘So how could X have happened without God?’ arguments, as I now think of them, are the main ones I remember coming across in this period of reading and examining different arguments for theism. Looking back from a perspective of somewhat greater knowledge of the debate field, I think I was getting my kalam cosmologicals lumped in with my design arguments (for the uninitiated, the kalam cosmological argument is a philosophical argument around the supposed necessity of a First Cause for the universe to exist at all, and the design argument is the argument that various specific aspects of the universe couldn’t possibly have reached their current form without a creator). But the basic formula always seemed to be to be similar; how could [the universe, the origin of life, some specific complex aspect of life-forms] have possibly happened without God to bring it about?

I didn’t, of course, know. I just didn’t see how that could logically lead to a certainty that ‘God did it’ must be the only possible answer.

I was perplexed. Scientists were continually working to find out new knowledge, and, as a result of this, we now knew the answers to a lot of questions about the universe that baffled humans in the past. So surely the most logical assumption to make about any question about the universe to which we didn’t know the answer was that that sentence should probably end in ‘…yet’? Why should we leap straight to assuming that this question, unlike the many that baffled humanity similarly in the past, will be insoluble? And, as long as the possibility exists of us someday finding a natural process that could explain this problem, surely we can’t logically use its existence as an argument for the existence of God?

Of course, there was a logical difficulty with that approach as well; it also couldn’t be used to prove the non-existence of God. After all, let’s suppose that the answer to one of those ‘How could X have happened without God?’ conundrums actually was ‘It couldn’t; this time, God really did do it’. How could we exclude that possibility, given that ‘We don’t yet know what natural process caused X’, and ‘X happened because of God’ were effectively indistinguishable for any as-yet-unanswered question for as long as it remained unanswered?

I thought it over, and pictured a scenario: Scientists the world over throw up their collective hands, declaring “We’re stumped. We have absolutely no idea how this could have happened through natural causes. We don’t even have any theories left as to how to investigate this. We’re clear out of ideas.” The years go by, scientists continue to rack their brains, and yet no-one can come up with a thing. At that point, it seemed to me, theists really would have a good case – not watertight, but very good indeed – for saying “It must have been God.” And, if that happened, I would take that seriously as an argument.

Until and unless that happened, though, I couldn’t see how the argument held water. I couldn’t see any way that ‘How could X have happened without God?’ questions could be used to establish the existence or otherwise of a god.