I have now done several replies to just one chapter, Bart’s chapter explaining how he left the faith, so I had better do one more post about that chapter and call it done. We have seen how Bart gradually moved away from various of his religious convictions—some orthodox, some he merely thought orthodox, for reasons that were sometimes a matter of capitulation to other influences, and for other reasons which were arguably not a matter of capitulation or compromise at all, but quite principled. What conduced to a slippery slope, however, was his unwillingness to make those very distinctions.

On top of his struggles with issues like the moral propriety of gay sexual practices, the doctrine of damnation, and divine sovereignty, he had a life-transforming experience when he endured a terrible, life-threatening cycling accident in Cincinnati. Later on, in retrospect, he took three big lessons from the crash. First, “I learned that my core identity—my essential self, if you will—is all in my head…that my individual personality, mind, heart, and soul are all contained in my brain.” [Here he points to the work of Malcolm Gladwell and David Linden to the effect that our judgments and desires are largely controlled by the release and absorption of certain chemical in our brains in ways our conscious selves only vaguely understand; for a solid response, see here.] Second, he suddenly knew he would die one day. And third, when he dies, including his brain, he will vanish forever. “Like it or not, this life is the only one I’ve got.”

What he calls lessons are probably better thought of as inferences that he makes on the basis of what he considers good evidence. Of course, though, plenty of believers think there are intimate, organic connections between body and soul without inferring that the latter is finite, and their convictions are not without evidence, too—such as a range of highly evidenced out-of-body experiences that defy naturalistic analysis (see here). That we are going to die is a sober fact that all of us, believers and unbelievers, have to come to terms with. But Bart’s elaborate assertion without much of an argument that we just are our bodies and that, at death, we cease to exist is a quite ambitious metaphysical claim, radically underdetermined by the evidence he adduces.

When Bart shared his newfound conviction that nobody survives past physical death with his wife, he discovered this was something she had come to believe herself for some while. He realized that, if they’re right, it wouldn’t entail God’s nonexistence, but steeped as he was in evangelical theology, he took such a fact about the finality of death as reason to disbelieve in God. “As far as I was concerned, if there was no afterlife, there was no good and just God, which reduced the teachings of Jesus to an odd mix of delusional metaphysics and commonsense wisdom about the benefits of virtue.”

This was both sobering for Bart as well as animating, motivating him to figure out a new way to live. Despite his change in worldview, some things remained the same. For example, he retained his commitment to build warm and loving communities, to social justice, to education and the arts, and to believing that sacrificial love is the best way to live. Their worldviews had changed, but not their values. He gravitated to what he thought were scientific explanations and logical arguments, but also yearned for something of a “new gospel.”

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

This he found in secular humanism and his new hero, Robert Ingersoll, a 19-century politician and orator. “What struck me most when I started reading Ingersoll…was his deep and obvious commitment to love as the ultimate hope of humanity, and his great eloquence in communicating it…. [T]he surest path to true happiness is to concern yourself with the happiness of others. He instantly became my role model as a secular humanist evangelist.”

For now I will reply just to this last point about the correspondence between love and happiness. I have written quite a bit on this topic, as have many other moral apologists through the centuries. Not only is Bart right, in one sense, he’s more right than he knows; and in fact he’s implicitly furnished us with the resources for a variant of the moral argument for God. This is the argument from providence, as John Hare calls it, and it goes something like this: Full rational commitment to morality [or a life of love] requires that morality is a rationally stable enterprise; in order for morality to be a rationally stable enterprise, it must feature ultimate correspondence between happiness and virtue; there is no reason to think that such correspondence obtains unless God exists; so rationality dictates the postulation of God’s existence.

Without theism and a providential God at work ensuring ultimate and airtight correspondence between a life of love, on the one hand, and happiness, on the other, there will invariably be points of disconnect when the virtuous life of love, far from conducing to happiness, will result in far more misery than happiness. Theism, though, salvages the rationality of morality. This was an insight that Sidgwick, Kant, Reid, Locke, and others have spilled a great deal of ink on through the centuries. If Bart is looking for an argument, I might point him in this direction.

As much as I am loath to do this, because I don’t want this to seem a diatribe against Bart, it’s worth noting that such an argument would be unlikely to speak to Bart, because he actually isn’t committed to anything like the rationality of morality. Indeed, he has given up that there is anything objectively binding about morality at all. He has abandoned moral realism, by his own admission.

So his ongoing commitment to, say, the value of a life of love, is predicated on a divorce of fact and value. Whatever sense in which such a life, at least in general, is a better choice is purely practical or pragmatic. He seems to replace the “delusional metaphysics” of Jesus with no relevant metaphysics at all—just a choice on his part to live in a way that he thinks will conduce to happiness. As a philosopher I find this wholly inadequate and, frankly, profoundly unphilosophical. In some ways he remains, I think, his father’s son—content with sociological analysis, which is often fine as far as it goes. But it’s no substitute for robust philosophical reflection. It’s no surprise that plenty of other atheists would find there to be little compelling reason to be committed to living such a life; if Bart wants a worldview that actually puts love front and center, not just contingently but essentially, perhaps he should reconsider the faith he left behind.

To read more about the argument from providence and the television show The Good Place, see here.

To read more about the natural human desire for immortality, see here.