Ayn Rand Was Wrong About The Axiology Of Atheism
"an omnipotent being is, by definition, a totalitarian dictator"
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Can you interfere arbitrarily with what I am doing? Yes—physically. No—mentally. Can a brick kill me? Yes. Can a brick get into my mind and tell me what to think or do? No. Can an omnipotent being do that? Yes.
An omnipotent being, by definition, is a totalitarian dictator. Ah, but he won’t use his power? Never mind. He has it.
—Ayn Rand, “Letter to Isabel Paterson”, 1945.
In contemporary Philosophy of Religion—a field as serious as I am when I make this face (*makes face*; it’s not my fault you can’t see what I’m doing :p)—there are three main questions we want answering:
The Ontology of Theism: Does God exist? If so, what is he like? What are his attributes? Does he know what I’ll eat for lunch tomorrow? Does he know that it will be yours?
The Epistemology of Theism: Can we know the answers to these questions? If so, how?
The Axiology of Theism: Leaving aside whether God does exist, should we want God to exist? From the point of view of the universe, would it be better or worse if God existed? If God existed, would that be in my self-interest? Do questions like these even make sense?
Today, *schoolmarmishly raps on chalkboard*, we’ll be looking at number three. Regardless of whether God does exist, should we want him to?
Until recently, nobody cared about this question. People went about their day ignoring it. And look where that got them. These days, it’s the cat’s pyjamas—the dog’s sandals, as it were—the peasant’s underwear, the frog’s collar. (Note: the last three expressions are trademarked.) A literature on the axiology of theism has bloomed, and, as a result, we are more prosperous now than at any other point in history.
Logically, the question of whether we should want God to exist comes apart from the question of whether God in fact does exist. In principle, you could be an atheist but wish theism were true, or be a theist but think—on the whole—it would be better if there were no God. You might also take a narrower point of view, conceding, for example, that it would be better on the whole if theism were true, but worse for you in particular, since you’re liable to go to Hell on account of what you did to Matthew Adelstein’s mother.1
Anyway. Ayn Rand was what’s known today as an anti-theist (though she didn’t use that terminology, being from an era before the literature on the axiology of theism, when 96% of people still lived in huts.) That is, Rand thought it would be better if there were no God. Specifically, she was what philosopher Klaas Kraay would call a personal anti-theist, in that she thought theism would be worse from the point of view of people (as opposed to being worse from the point of view of the universe. Indeed, for Rand and later Objectivists, there is no such thing as being good or bad from the point of view of the universe. Value concepts like good and bad only make sense relative to individual lives. Something can only be good for Howard, or bad for Dominique—nothing is “good, full stop.”)
My only primary source for my ‘Ayn Rand was an anti-theist’ claim is a hilariously salty letter penned by Rand to Isabel Paterson on August 4th, 1945:
Now, to the question of God, where your presentation of what you assume to be my position simply made me sick.
You state my assumption as: “If God exists, man is a slave,” and you proceed to say: “Why? Your assumption there is actually that a creative mind necessarily makes a slave of any person less creative who also happens to exist. Does it? If that is so, you have no proper grievance against your reviewer who said that a world of Roark’s was Fascism.”
First, I do not wish to mention the name of Roark in any such connection. You could have made the same point using another illustration. I have always thought of you as a person of extremely delicate sensitivity, your fighting manner towards Republicans notwithstanding. I thought you had delicacy in important matters. I did not think you’d stoop to this. I, who love to argue, will not bother to argue or explain myself on this particular point. I’ll let you guess what I mean, if you care to.
But I will discuss your point, omitting your choice of illustration. No, I do not think that a creative mind necessarily makes a slave of any person less creative who also happens to exist. A creative mind does not and cannot reach into another mind, whether more or less creative or otherwise. A creative mind does nothing to another mind—except offer it material to digest, which the other mind may digest or not, as it pleases. A creative mind is not omnipotent. Its greatness and beauty and nobility is precisely that it neither has nor seeks any power over any other mind. But I’m speaking of a human creative mind, am I not? That is all the word means to me, anyway, that is all I can understand.
But if you speak of God as a “creative mind,” you imply something entirely different from the conception of a human mind. I do not know precisely what you or anyone ever really implies by the conception of God or God’s mind. I gather only, by such definitions as are given, that God’s mind is something which man’s mind is not. Therefore, I see no possible, conceivable rational excuse for applying any conclusion whatever about God’s mind to the sphere, nature and virtue of man’s mind. I see no rationality in a statement such as: “Ah, you think that God’s mind enslaves man? Therefore, you must think that man’s mind enslaves men.” But there, you see? I expect a rational excuse. That is probably the reason why I despise, man’s mind, despise man’s creative faculty and write books that denounce creative men.
Can you interfere arbitrarily with what I am doing? Yes—physically. No—mentally. Can a brick kill me? Yes. Can a brick get into my mind and tell me what to think or do? No. Can an omnipotent being do that? Yes.
An omnipotent being, by definition, is a totalitarian dictator. Ah, but he won’t use his power? Never mind. He has it.
To my knowledge, which is vast and spans several galaxies, this is the only place where Rand spells out her anti-theism. (Note, however, that this is a private letter from 1945, yada yada, and so may not reflect Rand’s mature position.)
I. Ayn, Interpreted
What is the argument here? Best I can tell, Rand is going for something like the following.
Though Rand doesn’t say explicitly, in the letter, that “If God exists, man is a slave”, she quotes Patterson summarizing her to that effect, doesn’t condemn the summary as a distortion, and then appears to argue for it. So Rand’s conclusion is that if God exists, man is a slave:
Conclusion: If God exists, man is a slave.
How does Rand get to her conclusion? Not—and I mean not!, unless you want to make Ayn Rand sick—from the fact that if God exists, his mind is superior to ours.
The argument, I take it, is runs something like this:
If a being can “get into my mind and tell me what to think or do”, I am, in some deeply undesirable way, a slave to that being.
Premise 1 is true even if there is a vanishingly low probability of that being actually getting into my mind and telling me what to think or do.
If God exists, there is a being who can get into my mind and tell me what to think and do.
So, if God exists, I am, in some deeply undesirable way, a slave to God.2
II. Rand Goes Republican
I think this is one of the more interesting arguments Ayn Rand ever made.
Before I say why I’m not on board with it, I want to flag an interesting parallel between Rand’s argument for anti-theism and the Republican tradition in political philosophy. According to Republicans, you can be problematically unfree even when nobody is coercively interfering with your decisions. As long as someone can interfere with your decisions, on a whim, and do so with impunity, you are problematically unfree.
The Republican tradition is as old as the hills. In his book, Just Freedom?, Phillip Pettit discusses a famous intuition-pump for the Republican conception of freedom, courtesy of some Roman thinkers:
To illustrate this same possibility, the Romans relied on the example of a slave who is lucky enough to enjoy his master’s benevolence, charming enough to win the master’s indulgence, or cunning enough to escape the master’s attentions. The slave who congratulates himself on how free his good fortune or sharp wit enables him to be is a figure of fun in Roman comedies (Skinner 1998, 40–41). As any Roman audience would have been aware, such a slave is self-deceived. You are not free if you have a master, however good or gullible that master may be. In the words of Algernon Sidney (1990, 441), a seventeenth-century republican thinker, “he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst.”3
In other words: even if your slave-master is perfectly benevolent, and the odds of him restricting your freedom are so low they’re not even worth thinking about, the fact that he could, at any moment, order you to pick cotton is sufficient to make you a slave and you freedom illusory.
This is Rand’s intuition about God. Even if God won’t interfere with your thoughts, he still could. And that makes you his slave.
III. My Take
In a tweet:
1. Rand’s Argument is Prima Facie Inconsistent with Objectivism
Rand’s argument—to go through—needs something like a Republican conception of freedom. But I’m not sure such a view sits naturally with Objectivism.
Consider some of Rand’s remarks on the nature of freedom:
Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion. (“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business”)
Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else. (“Conservatism: An Obituary”)
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. (“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business”)
A surface-level reading would be that Rand endorses a purely negative conception of freedom: you are only unfree, in a morally problematic way, if you’re being coerced.
While this is a perfectly respectable line to take, it’s diametrically opposed to the Republican conception of freedom. For according to Republicans, whether you are actively being coerced—or likely to be coerced—is irrelevant to whether you’re free.
Maybe I’m being unfair. After all, Rand stipulates—in 2/3 of the quotes above—that she’s talking about political freedom, specifically. However, consider the last quote again:
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. (“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business”)
This seems to flatly contradict Rand’s argument for anti-theism. Recall, the first two premises of that argument were:
If a being can “get into my mind and tell me what to think or do”, I am, in some deeply undesirable way, a slave to that being.
Premise 1 is true even if there is a vanishingly low probability of that being actually getting into my mind and telling me what to think or do.
But if thing that essentially differentiates freedom from slavery is the presence of physical coercion, then it’s not clear why the mere possibility of physical coercion—even if the odds of it happening, conditional on theism, are 0.0000000 […] 000001—is going to make the difference between a freeman and a slave.
Also, it’s not clear there’s any principled way to affirm the Republican theory of freedom, but deny that it applies to the political realm. If freedom from the possibility of the arbitrary exercise of power is what it takes to not be a slave, after all, then why wouldn’t that be true when it comes to freedom from arbitrary state power?
Yet if there’s no principled way to say that the Republican theory of freedom is true in the case of God and man, true in the case of the benevolent slave-holder, but inapplicable when it comes to politics, then Rand’s insistence that “[f]reedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion” is going to flatly contradict the Republican theory of freedom, which her argument for anti-theism hangs on.
2. It’s a Very Weak Consideration in Favour of Anti-Theism - If That.
One day, at Reliable Machine Inc., you notice your colleague, Dr. Truthstus, fiddling with a large contraption.
“Ahhh, helloooooo!!!”, he says, his eyes bulging with weirdness. “The machine is almost ready!”
“What does it do?”, you ask, munching the heel of your baguette.
“What does it doooooooo???”, he exclaims, obviously a fucking freak. “It… it… it… makes the world better for everyone, including you! When I turn it on, everyone, including you, will be 99% more likely to live a flourishing life of reason, purpose, and self-esteem!”
“Sounds aight”, you mumble, wiping hummus off your mouth with your sleeve. “What’s the catch?”
“What’s the caaaaaaaaaaaatch???”, he cries, having been bullied relentlessly in high school. “The catch is that there’s a tiny, tiny, non-zero probability that at some point, the machine will get into your mind and tell you what to think or do...”
Question: assuming Dr. Truthstus is telling the truth, is it desirable—all things considered—that he switches it on?
Answer: obviously yes.
Even if Republicans are right, and the mere possibility of someone fiddling with your thoughts undermines your freedom, the pros of the machine run circles around the cons.
The same—I claim—is true when it comes to theism. Even if there’s one downside to theism being true, the pros still massively outweigh the cons. What are the pros? They’re just the obvious ones you’d expect. Theism raises the probability of (and, I’d argue, more or less entails) universalism—the view that all will be saved eventually, and enjoy infinite bliss in Heaven forever. Arguably, theism also entails that justice will be done in the end, and that there are no gratuitous evils.
Even just the the first of these considerations—the consideration about universalism—more or less swallows up Rand’s consideration in favour of anti-theism.
3. Even If We Are God’s Slaves, That’s Probably In Our Self-Interest
On standard, Abrahamic conceptions of theism, God loves you and cares about you as an individual. But if that’s the version of theism we’re rolling with, then even if God does a little neuro-intervention, it’s probably to our benefit in the long run. So don’t be a sour grape about it!
IV. Conclusion
Like I said, I think Rand had an interesting argument. I have half a mind to write a paper about it. But, interesting as the argument may be, even if we grant the Republican view of freedom, we shouldn’t be anti-theists overall. Any neuro-intervention God does will probably be to our benefit, and the prudential goods of theism outweigh this reduction on our freedom in spades. Plus, the argument is probably incompatible with Objectivism anyway. :p
The thing you did to Mrs. Adelstein, the thing that put her in a wheelchair, was forgetting to send her a birthday card.
Two notes: first, I added the ‘enslaved, in a deeply undesirable way’ part to make the axiological assumption explicit: Rand doesn’t say enslavement is deeply undesirable, but obviously that’s implied. Second, I made it part of the argument that “Premise 1 is true even if there is a vanishingly low probability of that being actually getting into my mind and telling me what to think or do.” This isn’t the language Rand uses, but I think it’s the most natural way to interpret the “Ah, but he won’t use his power? Never mind. He has it” remark.
Pettit, P. (2014). Just freedom: A moral compass for a complex world. WW Norton & Company: p. 28.
A celestial North Korea.