Parable of the Filth Pit
Should the fact that those of us who believe in God and love Him want very badly to believe in Him raise a skeptical question in our minds? Should we not, as men of reason, be unwilling to trust our own observations and conclusions as we would be in a case where we have no bias toward one particular conclusion or another?
Should we not be utterly impartial when looking at the evidence for an against God, and listen to all arguments with equal candor and patience?
This question may be making what philosopher’s call a categorization error. The question categorizes the belief in God as if it were a scientific theory, rather than a love story.
Suppose, Dear Reader, that there were a beautiful blushing virgin whom you had just asked to marry you. Surely it would be somewhat heedless of her to reply, “I am strongly moved by passionate and erotic love for you, my handsome and strong suitor, to accept your proposal, except that I fear I am biased toward you. I want very badly to wed you, to be swept off my feet and carried away to the bridal bed: but, surely I should only decide to accept a proposal from a man I do not love, because then I will be able to trust my own observations, and I will have no bias one way or the other.”
Would not this be an odd and wrongheaded reply to hear from any girl’s lips? Who told her that decisions about love in her heart should be made on the basis of loveless observations about things not in her heart?
A scientific theory is used to explain and predict data of the material universe, and therefore, in cautious care to avoid error, to decide whether a theory is more useful or less useful for making predictions, it demands the most scrupulous, nonpartisan and objective examination of the data compared to the predicted data. If data are found not explained by the theory or not predicted by the theory, or if the theory predicts what does not come to pass, it is better to prefer another theory. The data are fairly and objectively presented, and no one is falsifying or slanting the data: none of your fellow scientists are enemies trying to lie to you. (Unless they are climate scientists, of course.)
If faith in God were a scientific theory, it would fit the rule described above, and require scrupulous, nonpartisan and objective examination of data.
But consider another case.
Once upon a time a young prince was kidnapped as a babe by an evil witch. She raises him in dungeon beneath a pigsty, a dark hole filled with filth from the pigs. Each day more hogwash falls through the bars of the narrow windowslits onto the head of the boy, and the stench fills his nostrils until he no longer smells it. The witch also addicts the boy to opium and hallucinogens so as to befuddle and befog his capacity for rational thought.
The witch teaches and trains the boy to believe a picture of the world, a world view, that is coherent and reasonable, if hopeless.
She tells him he has no father, but that he grew up spontaneously from the hogwash the coats the floor of the dungeon, like a mushroom. She tells him the light from the windowslit is not sunlight, it is the reflection of some fire of an upper torture chamber even more horrible than the dungeon of filth, so that he should rejoice that he is in the filth pit rather than outside in the sunlight. Whenever a bird or a flower of some other evidence of the higher world of sunlight falls through the narrow window slit, she tells him to be careful not to be deceived by the torturers of the bright fire chamber—they are probably just con men trying to bilk him of the precious wealth of the filth pit, the brightly colored fungi, or the hallucinogenic mushrooms, which she tells him are the most expensive and costly things in the world. When he catches the faint breath of the clean and fresh air outside, and this stirs in him a yearning for his true home, she tells him not to let his guard down lest he be deceived: besides, only gullible yokels believe in the world of fresh and clean air. When the breezes do not blow, there is no evidence inside the filth pit that there is a world outside the filth pit.
The king, knowing well what spells the witch has wrought, dons a cloak and travels in disguise to the boy’s miserable filth pit where he lives, in order to befriend him. The orphan finds that he comes to love and trust the king in disguise, and his heart yearns toward him. Even in disguise, the father acts like a good father and like a true king, commanding the boy to behave according to those rules by which, and only by which, a boy can learn to love his life and respect and save the other prisoners in the filth pit: to be brave and just and kind and decent, and to act in all ways worthy of being a prince.
The king, like the witch, offers the boy a picture of the world, a world view, that explains all the conditions of his life, but also explains the one thing the witch’s world cannot explain: the king in disguise explains why it is all boys, orphan or not, have an innate desire for a father’s love, and why even boys who never knew their true mother yearn for the mother’s kiss that no witch can give.
Then a day comes when the disguise is penetrated, and the king throws off his cloak and reveals himself. The boy has been warned by the witch every day of his life not to trust the king and not to listen to his lies.
Here are the two world views: (1) You are not a prince, but an orphan, and you never had a father nor a mother, but you sprang up from the layer of pigshit that coats the floor of the dungeon spontaneously, like a fungi. The light and spring breeze, bird song or flower petals that from time to time drop through the bars of the window slit from the upper realm are coming from a torture chamber, and they are all tricks and deceptions, or self-deceptions, perhaps implanted in you by the same mechanical process of self-generation that created you fatherless out of the corruption of the cell floor. (2) You are the beloved son of a king who promises not just to free you from the dungeon, and allow you to breathe the clean air and wonder at the strong and beautiful sunlight, but to give you his realm to rule, and to cloak you in royal glory and honor. The filth pit is not the world, only one small hole in a world wider than you can imagine, which the king intends to break open.
This is not a case like the first. This is not a scientific theory.
The boy has to choose between the picture of the world presented by the witch and the picture of the world presented by the king. It is not a case of weighing and judging objectively between two scientific claims, both of which are presented honestly. It is a case of trying to see through the lies of an enemy who has his claws in your mind.
In a scientific theory you look at all the evidence, because all the evidence comes from Mother Nature, and is honest, and can be trusted. Mother Nature is not trying to trick anyone. Mother Nature does not have an agenda.
In the case of the boy in the filth pit, he is not supposes to be like a scientist in a lab. He is supposed to be like a juror on a jury. You see, unlike a scientist, to whom blind Nature never tells lies, half the witnesses who come before a jury are lying and perjuring themselves, both the guilty who want to escape just punishment, and the perjurers trying to frame the innocent. A juror has to make a judgment, a moral judgment, about who is untrustworthy and who is trustworthy. Trust is faith. In which witness do we place faith? A scientist never makes that judgment and never has to make that judgment: stars do not tell lies to the eye pressed to the telescope; microbes do not lie to the eye at the microscope.
You, Dear Reader, are the boy in the story.
The filth pit is the empty material universe presented by modern agnostic academicians, who tell you your brain has been evolved by natural processes to make you (and all men) hallucinate a desire for God even though there is no God and no possible evolutionary advantage to that belief. Someone is lying to you.
Whom should you trust?
The mere fact that you have a desire for God in your heart, that you want to believe in Him, is not a temptation against which you must steel yourself — it is itself evidence, a fact, that cannot be explained by the witch’s filth-pit view of the world. There is no Darwinian advantage to believing a falsehood, any more than there is an evolutionary advantage to eyes that register delusions or ears that hear hallucinatory voices. Such a desire could not be in your heart unless it were implanted by a supernatural agent.
But wait! Perhaps the desire for the supernatural, the craving for the love of God, the restlessness that seeks fulfillment nowhere but in Him has a more natural explanation. Perhaps evolution merely created this craving to serve the purposes of Darwinian competition for survival of the fittest?
It is impossible that undirected evolution could have produced such a thing. Darwinian evolution operates by natural selection of inherited characteristics, the selection being driven by the competition between bloodlines and species for scarce resources, such that whatever characteristics create a smaller statistical chance of not surviving long enough to reproduce will not be carried on as frequently, and eventually not at all, versus such characteristics as create a greater statistical chance. Reproduction carries along the inheritable trait in question.
If belief in God were an inheritable characteristic, then the sons of atheists would be atheists, and the sons of theists would be theists, and it would be as instinctive and inevitable as a swallow making a swallow’s nest. We would expect to see greater percentage of atheists among one race or another, more among the Blacks and less among the Orientals or something, in the same way we see more of one eye color or hair texture among one race or the other. If no one but redheads believed in the supernatural, for example, the argument would have some basis.
Belief in God has no necessary advantage in the paleolithic competition between small bands of hunter-gatherers for scarce resources, or to bring young males to breeding age, nor to father as many children as possible in hopes of carrying the “belief in God” characteristic to the next generation. One might make the argument that belief in God aids tribal altruism, or makes warriors more fearless in battle, courage buoyed by belief in an afterworld. This is merely a “just-so” story. Nature does not need to instill a belief in Cupid to make men attracted to women, nor instill a belief in the Virgin Mary to make mothers love their babies—so when dealing with altruism or any other emotion provoked by religion, why would nature favor the belief rather than the emotion or the behavior? For any characteristic, there is no argument to show why theism would carry the advantage. Does making the tribe have warriors less fearful of death aid in reproductive strategies or does it raise the rate of carnage and murder? Does religious belief necessarily make warrior bolder? It could just as easily persuade the warrior to become a peacemaker and turn the other cheek.
To see how comically stupid this theory is, simply substitute any other belief for the “belief in God” inherited characteristic, and it will be perfectly obvious how flimsy the hypothetical is.
For example: belief in the Death Penalty. If you believed in the Death Penalty, would you suddenly become convinced that the Death Penalty was wrong because some academic proposed the just-so story that primitive tribesmen who believed in the Death Penalty, by killing any of their sons or uncles who committed a crime, had a greater rather than a less statistical chance if reproducing that trait over and above tribes that avoided the Death Penalty, and allowed criminal uncles and nephews to reproduce. At this point, how can you not simply break out laughing at this arrant nonsense spun out of thin air?
For another example: belief in Impressionist rather than pre-Raphaelite art. Back in the primitive neolithic, those cave men who were painters that, um, drew the more emotional and less realistic images on cave walls, er, somehow, for some reason, due to the benevolent influence of magic fairies, had more children than the cavemen drawing pre-Raphaelite paintings, because, of course, the kind of pictures you like to draw is determined by your genes….
The theory is impossible, and we can tell it is impossible, because it cannot even be worded or explained in a way that can fit in with the Darwinian model, unless we assume (1) theism is inheritable (2) we each can decide for ourselves whether to be influenced by inherited characteristics (3) the fact that a characteristic is inherited automatically proves it is false (4) falsehoods have a greater survival value than truths.
Each of these assumptions contradicts the next: if it is inheritable, we each cannot decide whether to obey it or not. If we each can decide for ourselves whether it is false, it cannot be automatically decided to be false merely because it is inheritable. If it is automatically false because inheritable, it cannot have greater survival value that inherited truths, because then there are no inherited truths against which the Darwinian competition would be pitched.
It is more likely to say that atheism is an inherited disease, like color blindness, that makes some people unable to see one obvious part of reality the rest of us can see, and that, since atheists are always as small minority of the population, it is a characteristic with inferior survival value because having a false belief always makes it harder to reproduce.
In sum, the atheist theory to explain theism is to call it an inheritable vulnerability to a mental disease. The disease includes topic-specific gullibility, or vulnerability to a con game run by crooked priests and televangelists to bilk the unwary of money, or as a psychological ploy to control the young or weak-minded.
If an atheist were to meet any theists who are skeptical and logical as a Medieval Schoolman like Saint Thomas Aquinas, as disinterested in money and worldly power as a hermit like Saint Francis, and as loving and giving and therefore as invulnerable to worldly control as a martyr like Saint Justin or as a Crusader like Saint George, such experience would tend to undermine the theory.
The only way for Christians to convince skeptics, in other words, given the crookedness of the human character, is to act like saints.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
