What Is Our Mental Environment & Why Does it Matter? Part 1

We inhabit not just a physical environment but also a moral environment. Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn defined our moral environment as "the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live." Though we cannot help but be aware of our physical environment, we are often oblivious to our moral environment. Yet our moral environment is always deeply influential. Blackburn continued by noting,

"It determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible. It determines our conception of when things are going well and when they are going badly. It determines our conception of what is due to us, and what is due from us, as we relate to others. It shapes our emotional responses, determining what is a cause of pride or shame, or anger or gratitude, or what can be forgiven and what cannot."

Yet Blackburn's moral environment belongs to a still larger environment -- our mental environment. Our mental environment is the surrounding climate of ideas by which we make sense of the world. It includes our moral environment since our ideas about how to live are a prime way way that we make sense of the world. But our mental environment is broader still. It includes our ideas about what exists, what can be known, and what counts as evidence for our beliefs. It assigns value to our lives and work. Above all, it determines our plausibility structures -- what we find reasonable or unreasonable, credible or incredible, thinkable or unthinkable.

Much has happened in our culture over the past 20 years. Notably, the intelligent design movement has grown internationally and pressed Western intellectuals to take seriously the claim that life and the cosmos are the product of intelligence. To be sure, many of them emphatically reject this claim. But their need to confront and refute it suggests that our mental environment is no longer stagnating in the atheistic materialism that for so long dominated Western intellectual life. This is not to say that the discussion is friendly or that Christianity is about to find widespread acceptance at places like Harvard and MIT. But instead of routinely ignoring Christianity as they did 2o years ago, many Western intellectuals now treat it with open contempt, expending a great many words to denounce it. But this is progress. The dead are ignored and forgotten. The living are scorned and reviled. Thus it can be seen as perhaps gratifying the recent rash of books by the "neo-atheists" such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens' god Is Not Great, and Sam Harris' The End of Faith. These books would be unnecessary if Christianity, and theism in general, were not again a live issue.

The neo-atheists' first line of attack in challenging religious belief, and Christianity in particular, is to invoke science as the principal debunker of religion. Science is supposed to show that any God or intelligence or purpose behind the universe is not merely superfluous but an impediment to reason. Yet evidence from science shows the opposite. The case for a designing intelligence producing life and the cosmos is now on solid ground, as can be seen from such books as The Design of Life and The Privileged Planet. Indeed, the neo-atheists are not having a good time of it when they attempt to disprove Christian faith simply by appealing to science. True, their denunciations of Christianity contain many references to "science." But the denunciations are ritualistic, with "science" used as a conjuring word [like "abracadabra"]. One finds very little actual science in their denunciations.

Instead of presenting scientific evidence that shows atheism to be true [or even probable], the neo-atheists moralize about how much better the world would be if only atheism were true. Far from demonstrating that God does not exist, the neo-atheists merely demonstrate how earnestly they desire that God not exist. The God of Christianity is, in their view, the worst thing that could befall reality. According to Richard Dawkins, for instance, the Judeo-Christian God "is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Dawkins' obsession with the Christian God borders on the pathological. Yet he underscores what has always been the main reason people reject God: the cannot believe that God is good. Eve, in the Garden of Eden, rejected God because she though He had denied her some benefit that she should have, namely, the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Clearly, a God who denies creatures benefits that they think they deserve cannot be good. Indeed, a mark of our fallenness is that we fail to see the irony in thus faulting God. Should we not rather trust that the things God denies us are denied precisely for our benefit? Likewise, the neo-atheists find lots of faults with God, their list of denied benefits being much longer than Eve's -- no surprise really, since they've had a lot longer to compile such a list!

In an interview several years back, Princeton philosopher Cornel West was asked, "What is your overall philosophical project?" He responded: "I think fundamentally it has to do with wrestling with the problem of evil." Wrestling with the problem of evil is a branch of philosophical theology known as theodicy. Theodicy attempts to resolve how a good God and an evil world can coexist. Like Cornel West, the neo-atheists are wrestling with the problem of evil. Unlike him, however, they demand a simplistic solution. For them, God does not exist, so belief in God is a delusion. But it is not just any old delusion. It is the worst of all possible delusions -- one that, unchecked, will destroy humanity.

Dawkins, for instance, regards belief in a God who does not exist as the root of all evil. He even narrated a 2006 BBC documentary with that very title -- The Root of All Evil? Demonizing religious faith is nothing new for Dawkins. A decade earlier he remarked, "I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox but harder to eradicate." Dawkins might be surprised to learn that he was here echoing none other than Adolf Hitler who said, "The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity." Given that belief in God is humanity's greatest scourge, the only legitimate business of theodicy would be to eradicate it.

By contrast, the challenge for us is to formulate a theodicy that is at once faithful to Christian orthodoxy [thereby underscoring the existence, power, and goodness of God] and credible to our mental environment [thereby challenging the neo-atheists at their own game]. But is developing such a theodicy worthwhile? Should we, as believers, even care whether such a theodicy is credible? And credible to whom? Is not credibility vastly overrated? After all, Scripture teaches that the human heart is corrupt, that expedience rather than principle dictates many of our actions, and that too often we use our minds not to seek truth but to justify falsehoods that we wish were true [see Jeremiah 17:9]. It would follow that our mental environment is itself corrupt and that credible ideas may well be false. In fact, given a sufficiently corrupt mental environment, what would be the point of appearing credible? A proposition's credibility in that case might even constitute a positive reason for rejecting it!