In response to my post B writes:
“I fail to see how the statement 'there is no God' would place you
into the category of unhappy people. Could you please clarify? I don't think
that the claim of existence or non-existence of any deity is directly linked to
happiness. I know miserable theists and atheists, and happy theists and
atheists.”
Thank you B for your question. I’m going to try to clarify.
We need to define “happiness.” In a utilitarian theory such as Bayer
and Figdor’s “happy” means “pleasure” and “unhappy” means “pain.” “Good” means
what gives most people pleasure most of the time, and “bad” means what gives
most people pain most of the time. (Note: I have not read the book, just the
review. But it’s easy to see they are utilitarians. If they mean something
different by “happy” then I’ll need to be corrected.)
Pleasure and pain can be physical and emotional.
Beliefs can cause emotional pain. This includes both true and false
beliefs. If I believe the lump under my skin is cancerous I may experience
emotional pain, regardless of the truth or falsity of the belief. Or, e.g., a
young woman in our Monroe community has been missing for several weeks. The
beliefs that she may have been abducted and held captive, or that she might not
be alive, cause great emotional pain.
Bayer and Figdor’s non-commandment V is a belief, perhaps the core
belief of atheism. This belief gives me, as a theist, no emotional pleasure or
happiness. I think belief V is false, and significantly so. This is much like
Richard Dawkins’s existential displeasure and profound unhappiness at, e.g., Antony
Flew’s book There Is a God. The fact that people have certain beliefs that are
significantly false can make one “unhappy.”
My belief that there is a God is the
source of pleasure and a life of flourishing. Everything changed for me
when I converted from a practical atheism to theism. I transitioned from
existential pain to existential pleasure.
If non-commandment VIII is true (which I doubt because of problems
with utilitarian ethics) – “We act morally when the happiness of others makes
us happy” – then, on this non-commandment, the atheistic belief that there is
no God makes me unhappy. In itself this poses no problem for me, because all
beliefs marginalize. But some marginalize more significantly than others. The
atheistic core belief V dis-affirms my core belief that God exists. To expect
theists to be happy with this worldview strikes me as naïve. (I would never expect to bring happiness to atheists by affirming the 10 commandments and the worldview that makes sense of them.)
Finally, this means that the atheist acts immorally (given V and
VIII).
