the devil is in the details

In responding to the oblique assertions of some literary critic from the New York Times (hidden behind a subscription wall, naturally) named Stanley Fish, PZ Myers nails it:

Forget god, that empty hulk, that great vacuum that humanity has stocked with its fears and dreams, and look at what we have created and felt instead. When someone weeps over a dead child or creates a great poem, it should matter not at all what some priest imagines his pantheon is doing. Take your eyes off your hallucination of heaven—what's real are that woman's tears, that child's triumph, that grain of sand, that bird on wing. The meaning is derived from the reality of what we see and feel, not some convoluted vapor and self-serving puffery about an abstract concept like "god".

The rest of the post (well worth the read, by the way) addresses a specific passage of Mr. Fish's article (which I'm not able to read here on the internets), but I'm more intersted in the above passage from Dr. Myers. He often ably puts into words my own thoughts on the subject of god, and the above passage is a glowing example.

Before I realized I was an atheist,a friend of mine gave me a copy of "A Happy Death" by Albert Camus, who is sort of the Han Solo of the French existentialists. As a young, directionless near-graduate, I revelled in the hopelessness of it all. I idolized Mersault and his ennui. I idolized his cynicism and envied his leisure time. If only I could find an easy fortune, I too could quit my job, travel through Eastern Europe, and swim naked in the Mediterranean with three young French women with loose morals and perky breasts (not sure all those details are in the novel; I could be projecting). I completely missed the point.

Around the same time, I was introduced by a writing professor to the concept of existentialism. His distillation of the idea was "Complaining that life has no meaning is like complaining a Dictionary tells no story." While I loved this pithy statement (still do), and repeated it often to friends to show what a witty and intelligent person I was (still do), it wasn't until years later, when I gave up pretending I was agnostic, that it really settled in.

The problem with god is that it makes us seek external meaning for our lives, and implies that, by nature, life is miserable and needs god to give it meaning. Bullroar. And the same goes for the cop out of Deism, and its lazy-minded companion, spiritualism. These are all attempts to find an external solution to an internal problem. I prefer to know myself as I am, and to find meaning in the world around me: my friends, my family, the plants growing in my garden, my cats, the stars; the list goes on indefinately. None of those things need god to give them meaning, they require me to do so.

God is nothing more than an attempt by humankind to give life meaning. God did not create us, we created god. It's long past time for god to step down and let humankind take its rightful place in universe.