One of the near universal instincts which human beings have is that—whatever may be the path to salvation—we can’t all be damned. “All”, of course, is defined in terms of the group, not all human beings as a species. And by “be damned”, I mostly mean, “perish”.  And of course the if stated directly, as a proposition, it is obviously false. Despite all that, it is still a foundational belief for a great many people.

If we’re not all going to be damned, it raises the question of who will? Since it’s not all, it must be the people who stand out in some way. And there are two sub-groups of people who stand out: the best, and the worst. There’s something important to note about the best, but I’m going to save that for last. Clearly between the two, it is the worst who are the most likely candidates for damnation. This has obvious effects, like reality shows that showcase the worst people to reassure the rest of us that we’re in the middle, not the bottom. But it also has another, less obvious, but more pernicious effect. It makes most people very unwilling to stand out from the group at all.

If one stands out, there are—logically speaking—only two ways to do it. One can be better or one can be worse. To be merely different would be possible only if the characteristic in question had no moral implications. This should be possible, but in a complicated world where one does not comprehend the remote consequences of one’s actions, everything probably has some sort of moral implications. According to the people who charge double for the chocolate they sell, their competitors use slave labor and pass the savings on to you. Failing to cut the rings on a six-pack holder may strangle a seagull. Driving to the beach causes global warming, and buying a t-shirt may support a sweat shop. Buying a dress shirt made by a tailor might cause your co-worker to become self-conscious about their cheaper, less well-fitting shirt. Everything is problematic, so the only safe thing is to stick with the group. If you stand out, you might be better, but since it’s much easier to be worse, odds are good that if you risk being different, it will mean you’re worse.

The overriding principle thus becomes conformity. What will save one, in a confusing and uncertain world, is blending in with the group. It doesn’t really matter what group, of course. The only requirement is that it be a respectable group—not generally respectable, of course, only respectable to the individual. Any group for which one can feel affection is respectable in this sense, and any group one is used to who is reasonably accepting can have affection felt for it, so there is an inevitable mix of the people who happen to be around and the ones that one is willing to spend time with. Once the group has been selected, people outside of this group are irrelevant, except insofar as they affect the group, e.g. they vote for laws that the group must obey. These can be small groups—tribes, villages, etc—but in the west they are generally much larger and more amorphous. Patriotic Americans, Christian Fundamentalists, Democrats, Atheists, geeks etc. can all be such groups.

This group identity becomes the thing to which the individual will have primary allegiance. It is the one thing which they will never contradict or forsake. It is also the source of most of the contradictions which the individual will believe. The christian fundamentalist holds that the bible is literally true, but it says that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus. This is resolved through verbal tricks which don’t fool anyone, but which aren’t supposed to. They serve only to put space between the contradicting halves until the argument can be escaped, because their culture does not admit the real presence in the eucharist, and it doesn’t admit non-literal interpretaitons of the bible. There is no way to reconcile these, so it is not reconciled.

This becomes very clear in the case of atheists—most, not all, obviously, but just about all of the “new atheists”—who hold science to be an authority, but who also live like human beings. Science—in the sense of subculturally approved popular science—holds that the mind is nothing but neurons. So it is nothing but neurons, and therefore free will does not exist. On the other hand, people make choices and must be held responsible for them, so they do. There’s no way to reconcile these things, so no attempt is made to reconcile them. (Technically, there is compatibilism, but the less said about that the better.) Science is an authority, but at the same time the great thing about it is that it corrects all of its errors. There is no way to reconcile these things—the definition of an (intellectual) authority is something which cannot be wrong. Here there is a slight attempt made to reconcile the two: “it’s the best we have”. What happens when your best isn’t good enough is never addressed, nor can it be. Anything but slogans would just point out the contradiction. So all we get are slogans. Neither side of the contradiction can be given up, because the culture demands both. The only response you get to challenging any of this is to be cast out into the darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, because that’s the only possible response. If you don’t accept both halves, you are simply not part of the group. The group dis-identification can be creatively named, of course. “Denier”, “irrational”, etc. A thorn by any other name pricks just the same.

There is still the question of whether this is an initial error, or a consequence of other errors. Any individual may of course come here as the result of rejecting God and so looking for him in the world, and in what else but the culture can one hope? Still, I think that for the majority of people who fall into this mistake, it is one of the first mistakes which they make, because it is taught to them as children. Teaching children to fit into the culture in which they live is one of the duties of a parent. It starts early, and if parents leave off teaching how to not fit in, their children must be very lucky indeed to learn it. One would suppose Christianity—which has as a central theme that God is more important than culture, and one must be dependent on God and independent of Man—would crush this, but some (many) people turn attendance at church into a cultural practice. It’s one of the shared rituals that bind people together. It doesn’t matter if you understand, it matters that you attend.

So this, I contend, is the source of most Atheists’ error. It is a primary allegiance to their culture, brought about by a training to conform to their culture, and a deep-seated belief that in the great race of life, the devil will take the hindmost, so the only safe thing to do is to hide in the crowd.

Descartes proved the existence of God several times in his writings, but unfortunately the proof for which he is best known is his worst proof. It is of course not surprising since it was his first proof; according to his description, the Discourse on Method was a prototype for Meditations on First Philosophy. This proof, somewhat improved upon in the Meditations, was basically an ontological proof, and as has been observed (by Saint Thomas Aquinas, I have heard), the only one to whom an ontological proof for God is really viable is God Himself. What seems widely missed, however, is that Descartes also employed a variant of the proof from contingency.

This is actually a very natural thing for Descartes to have done, given what he had established as known at this point in the Meditations. He knew something existed which is capable of thoughts, and that these thoughts exist as successions in time. They change, and thus clearly are contingent. A contingent thing is all that’s really necessary for proving God, so why bother dragging in an argument about actual conceptions of infinite perfection which in any event it would be easy to argue no one actually has? My contention is that Descartes included this in the Meditations simply because he got attached to it having labored so hard on it in the Discourse. It thus forms the bulk of the words in his proof for God in meditation 3, but I maintain that one can simply excise the ontological proof found in meditation 3 and you are left with an intact proof from contingency. Accordingly, I will reproduce the relevant parts of meditation 3, without adding anything, but omitting all of the extraneous bits. I am here assuming that the reader possesses a copy of the Meditations on First Philosophy, and has already read it, so for brevity I am not going to reproduce what I have excised. (Cogito ergo sum, it will be recalled, came in meditation 2, so that will also not here appear in the quoted material.)

Now, it is manifest by the natural light that there must at least be as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in its effect; for whence can the effect draw its reality if not from its cause? And how could the cause communicate to it this reality unless it possessed it in itself? And hence it follows… what is cannot be produced by what is not… I am here desirous to inquire further, whether I… could exist supposing there were no God.

And I ask, from whom could I, in that case, derive my existence? Perhaps from myself, or from my parents, or from some other cause less perfect than God… But if I (were independent of every other existence, and) were myself the author of my being, I should doubt of nothing, I should desire nothing, and, in fine, no perfection would be awanting to me; for I should… thus be God… And though I were to suppose that I always was as I now am, I should not, on this ground, escape the force of these reasonings, since it would not follow, even on this supposition, that no author of my existence needed to be sought after. For the whole time of my life may be divided into an infinity of parts, each of which is in no way dependent on any other; and accordingly, because I was in existence a short time ago, it does not follow that I must now exist unless in this moment some cause create me anew as it were, that is, conserve me. In truth, it is perfectly clear and evident to all who will attentively consider the nature of duration, that the conservation of a substance, in each moment of its duration, requires the same power and act that would be necessary to create it, supposing it were not yet in existence; so that it is manifestly a dictate of the natural light that conservation and creation differ merely in respect of our mode of thinking (and not in reality).

All that is here required, therefore, is that I interrogate myself to discover whether I possess any power by means of which I can bring it about that I, who now am, shall exist a moment afterward: for, since I am merely a thinking thing (or since, at least, the precise question, in the meantime, is only of that part of myself), if such a power resided in me, I should, without doubt, be conscious of it; but I am conscious of no such power, and thereby I manifestly know that I am dependent upon some being different from myself.

But perhaps the being upon whom I am dependent is not God, and I have been produced either by my parents, or by some causes less perfect than Deity… Then it may again be inquired whether this cause owes its origin and existence to itself, or to some other cause. For if it be self-existent, it follows, from what I have before laid down, that this cause is God… But if it owe its existence to another cause than itself, we demand again, for a similar reason, whether this second cause exists of itself or through some other, until, from stage to stage, we at length arrive at an ultimate cause, which will be God.

And it is quite manifest that in this matter there can be no infinite regress of causes, seeing that the question raised respects not so much the cause which once produced me, as that by which I am at this present moment conserved.

I think that it is possible to get side-tracked by Descartes observations about the power to create and the power to maintain being the same power. I think he is largely correct, but it is a topic not often remarked on. The alternative is more or less silly if you don’t employ physical metaphors like dominoes to mask over what’s really being said. In an eternal Godless universe, each moment contains the existence of all subsequent moments to it, but does not contain its own existence. It has an infinitude of causes, but not its own. So when it hands on this infinitude of causes to the next moment, it somehow subtracts the cause of that moment before handing it on. It’s an infinite chain of parents who live by eating their children. The more common objection of atheists for a Godless world without a beginning always smuggles in some common cause between moments, or just in changes—such as space and gravity in the case of the dominoes metaphor—but if you subtract the smuggled in common independent cause, it amounts, in essence, to summing zero an infinite number of times to try to get a positive number. Or as often as not to pure nonsense where words are used as a smokescreen: one can always say, “but what if it doesn’t?” in response to anything, without having any conception of a coherent alternative.

In any event, while Descartes was certainly fond of his ontological proof, I think a careful reading of the above material will show that the real spine of his proof is the proof from contingency. The parts I excised in the ellipses serves, I think, to anticipate and counter the objection which I have run into, “why does the non-contingent thing need to be intelligent? Why can’t intelligence be an emergent property?” Rather than use the substance of free will and rational thought as an answer, as Saint Thomas did in the Summa Theologica,  Descartes tried to use the concept of God—which he maintained could not come as an inference from sense perception in the manner Hume would later insist all knowledge did—to prove that there was something which emergent properties could not account for. I think that this is unnecessary as all people have a direct experience of cognition and a very indirect experience of material causality, and so the objection can be dealt with merely by pointing out that the objector doesn’t believe the intelligence they have can be the result of emergent properties any more than anyone else does, but Descartes may simply have been more generous (or more ambitious) in dealing with the sort of people who would argue that emergent properties are the origin of everything immaterial.

Of course, I have no better window into Descartes’ soul than does any other human being, and the epitaph on his grave which he requested (“he who hid well, lived well”) certainly is a point to the side of those who thought Descartes intended to start Modern Philosophy. My point is not really to weigh in on that debate. Rather, it’s that Descartes certainly produced a good (in the sense of coherent and valid) proof of the existence of God, even if he let it get snowed under by his attachment to the ontological proof and anticipation of a myriad of not very sophisticated objections. Thus there is no middle ground between him having innocently wrecked the world, and him having been a villain on par with Iago.