The Death of Faith

Be near me Lord Jesus,

I ask thee to stay,

Close by my forever,

And love me I pray.

-- "Away in a Manger"

Shortly after my birth in 1963 I was added to the Christian Church by baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity and marked as God's own. As with everything else in my life, God has been more faithful to that promise than I have been.

My earliest recollection of religious sentiment was my fondness for two Christmas hymns, Silent Night and Away in a Manger. I can remember to this day how earnestly I desired Jesus always to be near me. Other than that dim evidence of my baptism, I had the normal childhood perceptions of God -- laying awake at night wondering how He could know all things, like what I was about to think, or what it means for Him to be in heaven, or that Jesus sat on His right hand. At dinner one night I asked if that meant that He only had one available.

My recollections of church are almost all negative, starting with that thing about the right hand of God. Someone in my family told the pastor what I had said, and he poked fun at me one Sunday about it. Embarrassed, I asked where he'd heard it. He came up with some kind of pious nonsense about God's mysterious ways, or something like that, which told me that this man was a fake and not to be trusted. God was, to him, a way to hide convenient lies and half-truths.

In addition to misgivings about my pastor, I hated church, and I especially hated two things: the amens at the end of the hymn, and the blocked doorways at the end of the service. After enduring a droll, plodding, uninteresting song with words I couldn't understand, I finally expected some relief -- the suffering might finally be over. But no! Hymn writers and organists are cruel to children. I still had to endure a prolonged, musical Amen. After several episodes of this torture, sprinkled throughout the boring service, we finally got to the end and hoped to be rid of the place, but then the pastor ran to the back and blocked the exit so we couldn't get out.

Besides the hymns and the blocked exits, I remember looking at the stained glass windows, which were pretty, but meant nothing to me, and studying the curious symbols mounted on the brick wall at the front of the church. Sometimes I'd wonder why certain folk (the choir) had to sit over there, or why mom and dad bothered to come, since they clearly didn't pay much attention once the pastor got down to the business of preaching. (Maybe they did pay attention, but from my point of view no one in his right mind would bother.)

Communion occurred sporadically -- contrary to the Lutheran tradition of weekly communion. This provided a welcome opportunity to get out of the pew, and when the pastor laid his hand on my head to give me a blessing, it felt weird -- as if there might be something to a blessing after all.

I seem to recall mom taking us to church more frequently than dad, and I remember sometimes getting donuts on the way home. But the real treat -- better than donuts -- was when dad drove the old Chevy. It had the wonderful ability of letting out a huge cloud of blue smoke, which I thought dad could do at will from one of those gizmos on the control panel. If someone pulled up too close behind us, and especially if they drove a Rambler, which dad thought was the source of most of the evil on the roads, we'd yell, "gas 'em, dad," and sometimes he actually would. We'd laugh and laugh, and roll around on the seats and point at the unfortunate soul emerging from the cloud of blue fumes.

Of course EPA didn't exist back then, and seat belts were optional.

Other than the occasional jaunt to church, family religion consisted of grace (only sometimes, as I recall) and Friday night Advent services -- in season. I liked them when I was young, but since my older siblings clearly did not, I soon learned to dislike them ... or at least to seem to.

The family was more observant before I came along, so I'm told, and I hope that wasn't my fault. It is hard, after all, to get several children up and out to a service. Furthermore, it's hard to blame mom and dad for slacking off on church attendance. Most sermons are pretty boring fare, consisting either of sentimental tripe that everybody knows or obscure theological topics that no practical man cares for.

I'm reminded of this every time I drive past a church. There's that silly sign out front with a teaser for the next week's sermon, as if Joe Passerby is going to see, "Saving faith: what is it?" and think, "By golly, that's something I've been dying to know. When were those services again?"

We deride sitcoms for attempting to answer social questions in 24 minutes, but we expect pastors, with far less preparation and a lower budget, to give us something worthwhile in a 10 or 15 minute talk? Let's be serious, for goodness sake.

The bottom line is that most sermons are useless, and sleeping through them might be better for you anyway. Mom and dad believed, but they didn't seem to feel the need for church, and since Lutherans don't believe in Sunday as a religious obligation, why come? If you come too much, they ask you to do things, like guard the back doors against latecomers or baby sit kids while they cut and paste pictures of Bible characters. (That's supposed to teach them good religious ideas, like the virtue of baby sitting other kids so they can cut and paste pictures of Bible characters.)

Santa

You better watch out,

You better not cry,

You better not pout ....

-- "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"

My next religious experience centered on God's chief rival: the jolly old man in the red suit. In second grade I became concerned that I had been taken in on the Santa Claus business when I discovered that many of my fellows didn’t believe. This worried me considerably, so I decided to ask mom and dad about it.

The scene is indelibly impressed on my memory. I was standing in the hallway, outside my bedroom. Mom and dad had just emerged from theirs. Mom was wearing a red dress.

"Dad, is Santa Claus real?"

There was some hemming and hawing (whoever convinced parents that they should lie to their kids about Santa Claus is in the very hottest place in Hell, I'm sure), and a fair amount of suppressed mirth, but somewhere in the midst of it, dad said, "Well, he wears red." (That was back in the days when even 2nd graders knew enough grammar to know that "he" is a sex-neutral pronoun meaning, "a person; anyone.")

That wasn't good enough for me. I needed a straight-forward answer, and since mom and dad seemed to be in on the deception, I was just going to have to find out for myself.

I had learned in school that children in other cultures put their pillow cases over the posts on their headboards for Santa to fill with goodies, so I emptied mine and put it out for the fat elf to do his business. Maybe I'd even get extra loot out of the deal. But of course no sooner had I finished the deed than mom knocked on the door.

"Don't come in," I said as I scrambled to stuff the pillow back in the case.

"Why not?" came the now suspicious voice.

I didn't know what to say, so I lied. Hey, the pastor did it to cover up religious stuff. Why not me?

"I'm working on another present for you."

In fact, the only present I had for her was something she had helped me to make in Cub Scouts. It didn't occur to me that this would cause trouble the next day, when I'd have to explain the whole thing.

I managed to escape calamity and, by morning, had proved to my own satisfaction that Santa Claus was a lie.

So the kids at school were right. I had been gullible. Taken in by a vast, anti-child conspiracy. Something had to be done, and I resolved, from that moment forward, never to be fooled by that kind of nonsense again. Claims that went beyond my daily experience were presumptively false. No more fairies and elves and things.

The seeds of atheism had been buried deep in my soul.

From that fateful decision until Junior High School, God was living on borrowed time.

Evolving Atheism

In the beginning Man created God;

and in the image of man created he him

And Man gave unto God a multitude of names,

that he might be Lord of the earth when it was suited to Man.

-- From the album cover of "Aqualung," by Jethro Tull

In fifth grade I developed an unusual interest in early man. So, when the other kids wanted to be actors and astronauts, I wanted to be a paleoanthropologist. I spent my own money on a Time Life series on evolution, asked for a plaster cast of a Neanderthal skull for one birthday and a trip to the Louis Leakey symposium for another. My dad's an engineer, and science has always been emphasized in our family, so my parents were pleased with my unusual hobby.

In shop class in 7th grade, my red-neck school mates were trying to find a way to make a knife without the teacher finding out. I was building an aquarium-like case for my Neanderthal skull.

My interest in evolution was not completely limited to early man. Years later, in high school, I wanted to try to duplicate Miller's classic experiment in which amino acids spontaneously form from methane, ammonia and other basic compounds assumed to have been present in the early atmosphere. My twist was to use silicon instead of carbon. (The idea was inspired by Star Trek, of course.)

I ran the idea past the late Cyril Ponamperuma, a leading scientist on the chemical origin of life, then at the University of Maryland, and although he seemed to like the idea of a 10th grade kid thinking of such things, he warned me that silene, the silicon equivalent to methane, spontaneously combusts when exposed to air, and was otherwise not fit for high-school level experimentation.

I sensibly gave up the idea, but it shows how evolutionary thinking filled my brain.

Of course the term "evolution" is a bit slippery and means different things in different contexts. What I meant by "evolution" was the idea that all of the complexities of life can be explained by natural processes plus lots of time. The magic trick, of course, is that evolutionists use very numbers -- so large that the eyes glaze over, after which the victim gladly accepts the flawed idea that things which simply can't happen in real life become possible over billions of years. And while it is true that anything possible can happen in unlimited time, there is all the difference in the world between "unlimited," and, say, three billion years. It's the difference between the finite and the infinite. But since "three billion years" is such a horribly big number it seems like "unlimited time," which makes room for the essential deception.

I was thoroughly deceived by this argument, and believed that everything I saw from day to day -- birds, beasts, trees, flowers, and even my own eyes and hands -- were the result of millions of years of magical "evolution": natural processes, chance, and, the trump card, unlimited time.

So there I was, sitting in my first class of the day (it was called "Core," for some reason -- this was back in 7^th grade, by the way) and my best school chum and I got on the subject of religion. I don't remember how or why it came up, but I do remember my friend saying, in an offhand way, "Have you ever considered that maybe God doesn't exist?"

Shades of Santa Claus all over again. It was my best friend in second grade who exposed the fat elf.

My brain went into overdrive. Why should I believe in God, after all? I'd never seen Him, or His footprint, or any other clear evidence of His existence. Those silly stories about the Garden of Eden and all that were clearly false: mankind had evolved from early primates, and they from earlier mammals, and they from reptiles, and they from fish, and so on down to the methane and ammonia in Miller's test tube. Hey, I was only in 7th grade! I didn't know that Miller's amino acids are completely useless to the formation of life, or that the step from amino acids to the most basic life form is like the step from a dirty cave to the Taj Mahal.

Suddenly, "God" became a concept right up there with Big Foot, unicorns, tooth fairies and, of course, the jolly old man in the big red suit.

"You're right," I said, although my friend was not asserting God’s non-existence. "There is no God."

I haven't been a 7th grader for a few years, but my impression is that confessing atheism wouldn't create much of a stir nowadays.

"So what?" they'd say. "Sam has two moms, and one of them's a witch."

But back in middle-class suburbia in 1975, it created enough of a stir that it labeled me for the rest of my public-school career. In math class, when the Roman Catholic teacher mentioned something about God, some wiseacre had to tell him that I didn't believe.

"Now, now. Greg's entitled to his opinion," the teacher would lecture. "He's wrong, but he's entitled to his opinion."

If only I'd known the money I could have made by suing that faithful Christian man!

In short, the environment was hostile to atheism, and there were only two real options. Repent my atheism -- perhaps taking the milder step of simple agnosticism (but then everyone would want to gnostify me) -- or be all the more zealous and evangelistic in my newfound faith. Of course I was far too ornery to repent of anything, and besides, none of my believing peers had even a half-baked reason why they believed in God. (I'll bet my math teacher did, but of course I didn't ask him. That would have required humility, and we didn’t trust grownups.) I could tell my schoolmates lots of reasons not to believe in God (or so I thought), but they couldn't come up with one argument that could withstand my withering replies.

Only later did I find out how intimidated some of my friends were on this subject. You see, they were comfortable in their milquetoast faith. I was on a defensive crusade. Every day I might be called upon to argue against an entire lunch table full of theists, or a whole classroom. I had to be prepared, so I rehearsed my arguments as I mowed the lawn. I staged mock arguments in my head as I practiced my trumpet, or swam laps, or shot baskets, remembering what others had said, predicting how they might reply to what I'd say and developing my rebuttal.

When it came time to debate, I had a well-rehearsed argument on the tip of my tongue. They had, "Well, I believe no matter what you say," which only served to confirm my prejudice: that religious belief was simply that -- belief based on no evidence.

Mom and dad were surprisingly unconcerned about my conversion. They thought I'd grow out of it. I did, but it took quite a lot longer than they expected, and more than the mere passage of time. It took arguments, and evidence, and something else.

After a few years I was a confirmed atheist with years of experience both thinking as an atheist and replying to the pat answers of Christians. At roughly the same time, my sister had a religious experience in the other direction. She became quite serious about her faith, and I became one of her mission fields.

I only remember a few of these conversations, but one in particular stands out. She was telling me all kinds of reasons why evolution couldn't possibly happen. They were perfectly good arguments, in retrospect -- like, for example, that if advances in evolution take place from chance mutations that happen to survive because they happen to be in the right place at the right time, then we should expect to see chance mutations all around, like a bird with a nose on one wing, or a horse with a fish-like tail. After all, the mutations have to be there when the time is right, and it's not as if Someone's Planning Things. Moreover, since physical changes frequently require corresponding behavioral adaptations -- what good is a wing if you're afraid to jump out of the tree? -- we should also see lots of odd behavior in the animal world. After all, there is no Designer who ensures that an accidental wing will happen at the same time as an accidental urge to fly, and either of them would be useless without the other. Evolution requires them to happen, "by chance," at the same time and in the right circumstance. In other words, at least three things need to happen at once: there has to be (1) a physical modification and (2) a corresponding behavioral modification (3) in a circumstance in which those changes will benefit the creature. Since Nothing and Nobody coordinates these three factors, and since all three have to synch up for any one of them to be any use, then in order for there to be a ghost of a chance of them coming together at the right time we’d have to assume that they would be going on very, very frequently.

So, evolutionary theory makes a testable hypothesis. For this mechanism to work we would expect to see mutations going on all the time. We should see deer leaping off cliffs and trying to fly, and other deer with wings who won't. (I’m exaggerating, but you get the point.) In short, if the changes that make up the stuff of evolution happen by chance, with no underlying design, there would have to be tons of them before one came along that did any good.

So now we can test the theory. Is it true?

Of course not, but I couldn't see that at the time. You see, it was impossible for me to believe that evolution was not true. After all, here we are. We had to get here somehow, and since evolution was the only "reasonable" answer -- i.e., the only one that fit with my naturalistic, un-designed worldview -- evolution had to be true. There was simply no other alternative.

Yes, it's embarrassing, but that's what I thought. My only excuse is that I was not alone in my block-headedness. I have seen that same attitude again and again in other people who are trapped in the same atheistic faith. Rejection of a Planner requires a belief that things that seem to be planned really aren’t. If Divine intervention is ruled out of consideration from the start, then there aren’t a lot of choices. They have (I had) suppressed the truth -- or even the possibility of the truth -- by a world-view that is presuppositionally anti-theistic.

So!

Come on ye childhood heroes!

Won't you rise up from the pages of your comic-books

your super crooks

and show us all the way.

Well! Make your will and testament. Won't you?

Join your local government.

We'll have Superman for president

let Robin save the day.

-- "Thick as a Brick," by Jethro Tull.

My mind was closed to the possibility of divine intervention, but it wasn't closed to all the enemies of materialism. My high school experiences with Dungeons and Dragons sometimes made me wonder about paranormal abilities. I bring this up merely to point out that I was not attached to materialism, but decidedly detachment from theism.

No, playing Dungeons and Dragons did not mean doing all those weird things that paranoid moms talk about. For us, D&D was just a game. Our pretend characters roamed around our pretend worlds kicking pretend butts and collecting pretend loot. It wasn't an introduction to Wicca, or Hinduism, or Vampirism or any of the other -isms. It was just fun.

But there was one strange phenomenon that nudged my materialism, ever so slightly. Sometimes I had an uncanny intuition for what was behind the next door.

Let me explain. In D&D, one player, the "dungeon master," creates a multi-level dungeon, usually on graph paper, and fills the rooms, corridors, etc., with traps, monsters, treasure and so forth. The other players direct their characters -- wizards, fighters, clerics, etc., whose attributes are created by rolling dice -- through this dungeon.

For example, the dungeon master will explain where the characters are: "You are in a narrow, dark corridor. Your torch illumines the walls for twenty feet in both directions. Ahead and to the left is a broken, wooden door, tilting on leather hinges. Behind you, the passage seems to curve to the right."

The players then decide which way to go, e.g., "Our thief," that's one kind of character, and very useful in this game, "will quietly approach the door and peer in."

Sometimes the door will have a trap, or there might be a Medusa in the room, who would, of course, turn you to stone if you looked at her. (She's the mythical equivalent to the feminist, I suppose, whose gaze causes Army generals to wet their pants and chant, "yes, we need to be more caring in the army. I despise patriarchal notions of defense and honor and loyalty. The army isn't about winning wars, it's about equal opportunity and sisterhood.")

I was never tricked by a Medusa.

Somehow I always knew. My friends thought I was the luckiest guy in the world, but of course Mr. Spock, my mentor, didn't believe in luck, and neither did I.

My rational side told me that I was picking up subtle, unintentional clues from the dungeon master. Since I was the dungeon master most of the time, it's possible the others learned how to play that role from me -- at least to some extent. It is not unreasonable to think that I was hearing things they weren't intending to say.

There was, however, the tantalizing thought that I had some sixth sense. You know how it is. Everyone has experiences that don't seem to fit into the normal humdrum explanations of reality. I had my share, and I'd heard of others from family members. (My sister had some idea that spiritualism ran in the family.)

I mention this only to contrast it with my rejection of God. Generally speaking, I was a convinced materialist, but not so convinced that I wouldn't entertain silly ideas about spooky stuff. God, however, was out of the question. "Give me a break," I'm sure I'd have said. "That stuff is ridiculous!"

And so, the two main attacks on my atheism were ineffectual. Spiritual hokiness was just a joke, really, and my mind had cast itself in a mold that simply did not allow Christian apologetic to seep in. There was no room for God in my thoughts.

Another illustration of this is a conversation I had with some friends of the family. A few of us were in the living room, talking after dinner, when religion came up -- or, rather, it was probably brought up by my sister. In any event, a young woman my age said she never understood why Jesus had to die. I piped up immediately: "Because he did die, and his followers had to come up with some excuse to explain it."

Their throat is an open tomb;

With their tongues they have practiced deceit;

The poison of asps is under their lips;

...

There is no fear of God before their eyes.

-- St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, 3:13, 18

And how!

It wasn't until much later that the first real crack appeared in my atheism, and it was self-induced. I was sitting in English class in 12th grade, pondering a paper I had written on predestination (yes, I believed in predestination before I believed in God), the Big Bang, and physics.

As a materialist, I naturally thought that any predictions of future events would have to be made on the basis of material causes, so I tried to imagine how that would work. My thought experiment went something like this: if the entire universe consisted of two pool balls, and nothing else, then it would be a simple matter to calculate what they would do for all eternity. You'd simply enter their mass, position, momentum, elasticity, etc., into an equation, and presto: foreknowledge. Their gravitational attraction would pull them together until they collided, they'd bounce off each other according to their elasticity, preserving momentum and energy except for what was lost to heat, and so forth. It would be a simple physics problem. You could even run it backwards and determine, from any point in time, where they'd been.

This works with two pool balls because they are just objects. They don't "choose" which way to go. They are compelled by physical law. And it doesn't have to be only two pool balls. There could be hundreds, or millions, or trillions. The concept is the same. To the extent that objects are controlled by physical law, they are entirely predictable.

Well, that's the problem. As an atheist, and a materialist, I didn't believe in spirits and all that. As far as I was concerned, a human is just a very complicated physical machine, like a computer. Each synapse in the brain fires according to the dictates of physical law, and if each individual part is determined, then the whole is determined, even if the behavior that results from this complicated interaction is beyond anyone's ability to predict.

It's very hard to imagine how thought fits in to that. After all, we don't consider our train of thought to be the natural, physical, material consequences of the chemical condition of our brain. So, to make the thought experiment a little easier, I cast my imagination back in time before there were any thinking humans to complicate the matter. And beyond that, back before life -- back when the materialism of my little universe could be uncluttered by sentimentality about personality and living things and "free will."

So, into my imaginary computer I fed all the imaginary data of everything in my imaginary universe. Once the computer had everything calibrated, I turned the imaginary "time" dial forward one notch, and everything moved. Planet X was pulled this way by its sun, and only marginally affected by Planet Y over there (but it's all taken into account by this wonderful, imaginary computer). No speck of dust escaped. Its trajectory about that bit of comet was right there in the file. In fact, every detail of the entire universe, down to the smallest sub-atomic particle, was accounted for in my computer's exhaustive and all-encompassing routine.

After a little bit of work, the image was set in my mind. My universe, which was just an imaginary construct of the universe, was running like clockwork, and my supercomputer had it all recorded and predicted. The timeline progressed. Galaxies formed, as well as our solar system. The Earth formed from the solar dust and eventually cooled. (Of course all of this is happening as the logical, inevitable consequence of the Big Bang. It's just the pool balls again -- only lots of them of all sizes.) Earth's atmosphere formed as a result of chemical processes in the formation of the planet. Ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide were there, forming into basic amino acids (ala Miller's experiment). But these processes were all dictated by physical law: they were determined by mathematical certainty from the first instant of creation. The carbon dioxide in my imaginary universe can't "choose" to run off to Venus on holiday. It is compelled by physical law.

So, physical law inexorably forced my imaginary world from the Big Bang to our first, scum-like ancestors in a pond somewhere in France (as Q showed Jean-Luc Picard in "All Good Things Come to an End"). At this point things get harder because we've introduced that annoying little detail called "life," and we don't tend to think of living things as the servants of physical law in quite the same way that we might think of a pebble or a speck of dust. But I figured that very simple life forms are just little biological machines. They don't "choose" anything either. The reactions in a cell are still governed by chemistry, so this pond-scum life-form followed natural law too.

And it seemed hard to decide where to amend that judgment. Each life-form in the evolutionary ladder of my imaginary universe was just ever-so-slightly more complicated than the last. Nothing essential has changed. It's still just a collection of chemicals that owes its existence to a string of deterministic causes stretching back billions of years. The fact that it goes by the name "amoeba" doesn't change that.

On and on it went. No matter how complicated the life-forms in my imaginary universe became, they were just physical things, obeying physical laws. Chemicals that happens to be in the cytoplasm of a bacteria are not exempt from gravity or electrical attraction.

So my thought experiment had created the first life on earth with nothing but matter, natural law, time and chance.

At this point, some wiseacre is going to object to my thought experiment. "But quantum physics shows that there really is chance in the world. Everything's not determined."

Quantum physics does nothing of the kind. There are certainly some brain benders in the quantum universe, but what the wiseacre means by "chance" in this situation is really "lack of cause" -- that is, that nothing compelled some object (whatever it is) to act in a certain way. But let's not confuse a perfectly valid sense of "chance" -- e.g., that we don't know or can't account for all the causes that brought about a certain result, such as what causes a coin to land on heads or tails for any given flip -- with an invalid sense of "chance" -- that something happened with no cause at all. Science is at an end if we believe in that kind of "chance."

That's not quantum physics, it's foolishness. We don't understand how everything works at the quantum level, but if we admit of the (wrong-headed) "chance" explanation, then scientists might as well pack up their bags and spend their time at the swimming pool, because if there is no cause of the action of an object then there is certainly no way to explain it, and it is silly to try. If things happen for "no cause," then what kind of fool spends his life searching for one?

Just to drive the point home, try for a moment to imagine the contrary. A professor is presenting a paper at a scientific convention ....

"My research has shown that quarks like to go left."

"Why do you think that is, professor," a fellow scientist asks.

"Why? You ask why? There is no why. Nothing causes them to move left. They just do."

"So you're saying that it's their nature to move left? That something in their very being incites them to move left?"

"You western, linear-thinking male! Why are you always looking for causes and effects. They just do. They do, do, do, and there's no reason or explanation for it. Maybe next year they'll move right."

Sounds like the end of science to me.

No, effects have causes, and effects that are not self-caused are caused from outside of themselves. If there is no cause, then there is no effect -- nothing happens. The cause may escape us. It may contradict our previous observations, or our previous estimates of how the physical world really behaves, but the idea that things can happen for no reason is simply irrational.

My high-school experiment in imaginary universes was not bothered by all this. The obvious conclusion of my thought experiment was that from the instant of the Big Bang (I didn't bother to try to think before the Big Bang), everything in the universe was causally necessary by the inexorable operation of physical law, including, of course, me, sitting on a plastic chair in high school English class thinking about the fact that my thoughts are merely the necessary outcome of physical law operating on a big pile of dust. My thoughts, my hopes and my sense of personality was just the random, accidental result of a bunch of dust. But worse than that, it was the necessary, inescapable conclusion of a long string of deterministic actions.

That conclusion seemed completely absurd, but it also seemed to be the necessary conclusion of my materialistic world view.

No, I didn't run over to the nearest Young Lifer and ask what I had to do to be saved. I stored the thought away in one of my spare disk drives and moved on to other things, like whether or not I should go to the prom. But my atheism had been dealt a severe blow. The uncomfortable fact was that materialism led to the insane conclusion that everything I thought of as personality, like wondering whether I wanted to go to the prom, and who I'd take, was the determined, unavoidable step in a complicated equation that dealt in gravity, electric attraction, chemistry, and so forth, and that it all started by a Big Bang 12 billion years ago.

A Spinning Moral Compass

One of the things that always confused me about other materialists (as an aside, an atheist is not necessarily a materialist, although most are) was their left-over attachment to morality. If the universe is just atoms and physical law, then where does "morality" fit in? I never saw it on the periodic table of elements.

Consider: when a man says that Hitler was evil, he is making a statement about Moral Reality. He isn't saying, "I don't like Hitler," or, "I would prefer that Hitler were this way instead of that." He's not saying that at all. He's saying that Hitler is wrong, which assumes that there is an objective moral standard by which Hitler can be judged. He is, in fact, making a statement about the nature of the universe and the existence of a thing called morality. He is saying that the universe contains more than just matter, energy and physical law.

So, when a materialist says "Hitler was evil" he is being inconsistent with his materialism. He is asserting a non-material component to the universe: morality. And for the statement "Hitler is evil" to mean what he intends by it (and not merely "I don't like Hitler"), morality has to be more than a cultural custom or a preference. It has to be a Real Thing: real enough to say that one answer is right and the other is wrong.

But a materialist's universe doesn't have room for such things. Morality is unlike physical laws -- gravity, conservation of energy, and so forth -- because it is personal.

It's easy to imagine a clock-work, mechanistic, materialist universe with rules of mathematics, a gravitational coefficient and a periodic table of elements. Of course even this raises the question whether someone built this fine machine, but it's all comfortably "materialistic." It's another thing entirely to introduce a moral ought into the universe: You shall not covet. That's not the kind of thing you expect in a materialistic universe -- in fact, it is flatly inconsistent with a materialistic universe, as the existentialists are honest enough to admit. (Or at least so I'm told. I've never actually read much existential philosophy.)

Since I was committed to a materialist's universe, I didn't believe in morals. If there's no God, then there's no morality, and that was fine with me.

That's what I told myself, and that's what I'd say to others in an argument, but in company with all materialists I was completely inconsistent on this point. In the abstract, while I was shooting baskets in the back yard and working on my philosophy, I didn't believe in morality, but if someone wronged me ....

Well I'm a common working man,

With a half of bitter, bread and jam,

And if it pleases me I'll put one on ya man,

When the copper fades away.

-- It's up to me, Jethro Tull

A materialist who has read the foregoing might object. Moral conventions, he says, are mere practicalities to enable us to live in society. After all, a well-regulated society requires such concepts as private property, and coveting leads to bad things like stealing and murder, so you can understand, on a purely utilitarian level, why it would make sense to have a rule against coveting.

Hey, I'm all for utility, but who said that stealing and murder are bad things, or that "enabling us to live in society" is a goal consistent with unadorned materialism? You see, even "utilitarian" ethics assumes a moral position that it can't justify, namely, that utility is better than a lack of utility. You simply can't escape making a moral judgment.

Let's go back to the example of Hitler. People don't dislike Hitler because his plan was inefficient, but because it was evil. If all our moral conventions are merely attempts at an efficient organization of the masses, then I should regard them the way I regard, say, a speed limit. It's a good idea for everyone to obey it, and I will too, especially when the cop is watching, but maybe not if I know for certain that he's napping, or if the law is repealed. In other words, it's not a moral issue.

But that's not at all the way we view morality, and the person who believes that morality stems from utility simply hasn't thought hard enough about either of them.

Philosophically, I was committed to the notion of a mechanistic, material universe, which meant that morality was out of the question. I accepted that -- philosophically. Of course it is impossible to accept it practically, or consistently, because everyone, including the materialistic atheist, is constantly making moral judgments about everything. If a man says that he doesn't believe in morality, the best thing you can do for him is punch him in the stomach. He will, of course, believe that you did a bad thing to him. If he still has a brain in his head, he will realize that he really does believe in morality.

My inconsistency on the matter of morals eventually caught up with me, but it took a while.

The rivers are full of crocodile nasties,

And he who made kittens put snakes in the grass,

He's a lover of life, but a player of pawns,

Yes the king on his sunset lies waiting for dawn,

To light up his jungle as play is resumed,

The monkeys seem willing to strike up the tune.

Well let's bungle in the jungle,

Well that's all right, by me

-- "Bungle in the Jungle," by Jethro Tull

Another element of atheism that I freely embraced was the fact that when I died I would cease to exist. It wasn't a comfortable thought, but I didn't believe in trying to make life easier by swallowing convenient lies, and I thought all this stuff about life after death was just that -- a convenient lie to comfort people who couldn't face facts.

I would have disagreed with Ian Anderson (in the lyric quoted above) that the "king on his sunset" had placed the snake in the grass, but I agreed with the conclusion: this is the jungle we live in, so let's get on with things and enjoy ourselves. There's no point standing around wishing the world were otherwise. It's not.

I had come to embrace existential meaningless, amorality and the certainty that at some time in the future all my thoughts, memories, wants and desires -- everything that I called "me" -- would simply be gone with no recovery. I didn't particularly like the idea, but I thought it was the truth, so I dealt with it and moved on. There wasn't any use crying about it.