Gratitude and Atheism

I know I've written a good bit about atheism this week, and I apologize. I'm not particularly obsessed with atheism and trying to debunk it like some of my fellow brethren are. I wouldn't presume to think that I could debunk atheism even if I wanted to. I do think that atheism is a severely deficient ideology that is plagued with self-inconsistency, and that this has been demonstrated ad nauseum by many folks who are smarter than I. But I also know that there are presuppositional reasons why atheism will always be with us, and that such presuppositions are very difficult to dislodge, even when faced with the absurdities that arise from them.

Case in point, a new article written by Ronald Aronson that recently appeared in The Philosopher's Magazine. Aronson is a professor of Humanities at Wayne State, and considers himself an atheist. In this article, titled 'Thank Who Very Much?', Aronson tackles the question of giving thanks when one does not believe in God. It is a refreshing article that is both thought-provoking and sad. He starts off his article thusly:

Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists. We who live after progress, after Marxism, and after the Holocaust have stopped believing that the world is being transformed by reason and democracy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern faith that human life is heading in a positive direction has been undone, giving way to the earlier religious faith it replaced, or to no faith at all. Alone as never before, in a universe scientifically better understood than ever, we find little in its almost-infinite vastness to guide us towards what our lives mean and how we should live them.

In attempting to formulate an atheology of life and ethics in this environment, Aronson turns to the notion of gratitude. He laments that gratitude, while a mainstay of theistic religion, is mostly ignored in secular life and literature, and arguably for good reason as the title of his article suggests. In atheistic literature, the feeling of gratitude is a serious problem; so much so that Camus never felt grateful for even simple pleasures like the warmth of the sun on a cold day because he knew what the implications of feeling a sense of gratitude would mean to his view of the cosmos as empty and absurd, along with the lives we live. On the other side, atheists like Baggini have suggested that feelings of gratitude are, a la Freud, merely unfortunate vestiges of the supernatural worldviews humans used to hold to but have now shrugged off, but obviously not in their entirety if feelings of gratitude are still floating around in the minds of secularists. In a nutshell, feelings of gratitude in these paradigms are very difficult to deal with and require a good bit of scrambling in order to delegitimize them.

Aronson takes a different approach. He believes that gratitude is a good thing to feel and that the secular worldview would profit from such feelings. He recalls how he himself felt "vague" feelings of gratitude while walking through a scenic wood one day. This feeling, naturally, raised the question of what he was thankful for, and even more on point, who or what should be the object of his thanks? He says that it would have been a very natural thing in his experience to give thanks to God. He believes that "thanking God out here on the trail would tie together everything I see and experience, it would direct me towards its source, and would give me a personal relationship with that being." But of course, being an atheist, God cannot be a proper object of such gratitude. So Aronson tries to find a 'third way' on gratitude by rejecting Camus' vision of cosmic absurdity and also rejecting Baggini's view that feelings of gratitude are illegitimate for those who have left supernaturalism behind.

In the end, Aronson appeals to dependence upon both personal and impersonal forces and agents as the basis for gratitude. He, appropriately in my view, says that the atheist should feel comfortable feeling a sense of thanks toward those humans who have come before him who have enabled him to enjoy and experience pleasure in things like nature. But then he takes a more difficult road, and one that atheism as a whole has never satisfactorily flushed out. Aronson adopts the Sagan-like gratitude for the impersonal universe. He says that such gratitude "is a way of acknowledging one of our most intimate if impersonal relationships, with the cosmic and natural forces that make us possible."

The main problem with Aronson's construction is immediately obvious. While Aronson can feel gratitude for the warmth of the sun, he is unable to direct his gratitude to the sun, because the sun isn't listening. The sun, being impersonal, has no clue what gratitude even is. The human who feels gratitude toward the sun knows this. So what Aronson is left with is feeling gratitude toward an impersonal agent that he can't express to that agent. In trying to develop an atheology of gratitude, Aronson is thoroughly confusing categories of ontology without addressing how such a dissonant mix is anything but incoherent. Gratitude is an innate emotion that can only be experienced by the personal. When it is directed toward the impersonal, its meaning and significance are highly questionable to put it nicely. Gratitude means nothing to the impersonal at all, so there is no meaning or significance of the feeling on that side of the equation. So then we have to ask whether giving thanks to the impersonal is meaningful to the personal agent who feels the gratitude. Aronson seems to think so, but his own article betrays a much deeper longing for connection than his proposal can ever allow. He feels gratitude, and apparently wants to express it, but without saying so, he seems to realize that feelings of gratitude are problematic when they are directed toward an impersonal phenomenon or entity that lacks all intentionality. Can we really give thanks for a random, unintentional, unemotional, non-purposeful, haphazard, and impersonal event like the warmth of the sun on a cold day? Doesn't gratitude entail an appreciation of the personal intentionality of that which we are thankful? Can gratitude for the impersonal and random possibly be as meaningful as gratitude for the personal and intentional? I don't think so, and it doesn't sound like Aronson himself is entirely convinced either. So the only way he can express his gratitude of the impersonal is indirectly through articles or conversing with others who are not the object of his gratitude. The only way he can direct his gratitude toward the object of his thanks is to talk to trees. Since he's not prepared to do that, his atheology of gratitude fails because he can't get out of his own way. In the end, he has to default to ultimately directing his gratitude of the impersonal toward other personal agents in order for the feeling of gratitude to be meaningful. He's actually moving closer to the truth in doing this, but he's failing his own litmus test too.

A much better explanation for Aronson's predicament is what Scripture says about the human condition. Aronson is absolutely right in rejecting calls to deny feelings of gratitude. They are legitimate, and the fact that Aronson feels them indicates the truth of the Biblical doctrine of general revelation in Romans 1. People know the truth, even those who deny God. The only thing that's at issue is the degree to which people are willing to suppress what they know to be true and embrace a perversion instead. Aronson is not suppressing the truth as much as those atheistic colleagues who deny the feeling of gratitude right off the top. But Aronson is suppressing the truth by trying to make sense of his true feeling without the true God. When the Christian feels gratitude toward the beauty and order of nature, his affection and gratitude are not directed toward the creation, but toward the Creator who established it and maintains it every second. The Christian's gratitude is not only well-placed, it also makes the most sense as even Aronson seems to imply.

The issue of gratitude is a biggie in worldview conversations. One of the very basic differences between a theistic worldview and an atheistic worldview is over the question of gratitude. Gratitude is a common-sense emotion for the theist; it is a hopeless conundrum for the atheist.