I'm not a professional philosopher, but I've had a few basic courses in philosophy over the years, and studied a good deal of the history of ideas, e.g., intellectual history. Whenever I feel confused, burned out, at the end of my rope, depressed and disillusioned, a point where many (often uneducated) people turn to prayer, I tend to pick up a good book on the history of philosophy; I try to pick a new one that I haven't read before. Sometimes it is a history of strictly Western Philosophy, sometimes it includes Eastern Philosophy as well. I have done this a couple of times in my life, and it is a good way for me to, as Timothy Leary would've put it, "tune in, and drop out" for awhile, but I always come back to everyday life refreshed and much more clear headed than before.

A few basic courses in philosophy, specifically on the structure of logical arguments, etc. (In my case, Intro to Philosophy and Intro to Logic, specifically symbolic logic, plus part of a course on Immanuel Kant, and my personal lay interest in philosophy and the history of ideas) is usually enough to demolish most naïve faith-based belief systems. One key philosophical idea that I want to discuss in this essay is that of Teleology. Most contemporary versions of Theism are utterly dependent on teleological assumptions about the nature of the universe. In simpler terms, more religious terms, it's a belief that there is a divine purpose to everything that happens in our lives and indeed, in the universe at large. In reality, all of this is just so much "post hoc" false reasoning. (Actually the proper Latin is Post hoc ergo propter hoc which means "after this, therefore because of this." It is often shortened to simply post hoc.) Causality itself is a very slippery notion, just ask David Hume.

Anyway, it is precisely this kind of post hoc, teleological thinking that lies at the heart of books like The Purpose Driven Life. A Purpose Driven Life has made a lot of headlines recently because of the murderous rampage of Brian Nichols, who was allegedly pursuaded to turn himself in by a religious woman he took captive, who read this book to him. What not a lot of media are reporting is that Brian Nichols was already a church-going believer, and was therefore not "converted," as many in the news media now assert.

I tried reading this book and couldn't get past the first page, because I couldn't accept the books first premise, since it was (to me) straight off based on a logical fallacy. One thing philosophy teaches you is that if you accept an absurd premise, you can be compelled later to accept an absurd conclusion by the rules of logical argumentation. Therefore it pays to be skeptical about all premises made by people who are trying to persuade you to believe something. You are free to reject any and all premises of any argument. The Purpose Driven Life asserts, as most theists do, that there are no accidents in life, "everything happens for a reason," e.g., according to some divine plan. Now I know this idea can be very comforting to people, especially people who have had some hard knocks and are looking for that "silver lining" in those dark clouds. And I certainly do encourage people to look for silver linings in the bad things that can happen in our lives. I encourage this not because I believe in telos, or that history is driven by some hidden purpose, but because experience has taught me that life can be pretty ambigious, and we miss important opportunities when we let cynicism and pessimism overwhelm our thinking to an unhealthy degree.

Nevertheless, I do not accept teleological explanations of reality. A line from the movie Terminator 2 sums up this outlook nicely: "There is no fate but what we make." Of course, the Terminator series itself, ironically, is all about a relentless causality towards a predestined future. The series represents a non-theistic teleological outlook, in contrast to a theistic one like A Purpose Driven Life. But the Terminator series is a work of fiction with a real author who gets to "play" God in his fictional universe. It's important to keep clear distinctions in mind between works of fiction that try to reproduce reality and reality itself.

A Purpose Driven Life is also very backward looking; it tries to convince people after the fact that there is a coherent, divine purpose to events in their lives hitherto unrecognized. It's a natural human tendency to do so, but it tends to lead to logical fallacies very quickly. David Hume's counsel was to use the scientific method to avoid these pitfalls. This philosophical point about rejecting teleological explanations of reality and past events was at the core of the dispute between my former-theist-turned-agnostic ex-wife and myself, an outright atheist. Over time my wife drifted back to a theistic point of view (in truth, she never wandered far from it even during her professed "agnosticism" period), and we frequently clashed over this philosophical battle ground, especially as to how to conduct our lives and plan for the future. She had an iron faith that "God will provide" that I simply did not-could not-share. To me, that was simply an irresponsible outlook; an abdication of personal responsibility, to be frank about it (though, quite hypocritically I might add, my ex-wife was very preachy and moralizing about the subject of personal responsibility and very unforgiving of others who fell short in this area). Aside from my ex-wife being an utter control freak, I profoundly disagreed with and did not like the direction that both our lives were taking. I finally did something that probably disrupted her "purpose driven life"-I left the relationship. Not long after I left, my wife (and soon to be ex-wife) crossed back over into an intense theism of a hardcore fundamentalist bent (the kind she was raised with); by the time we were formally divorced, she was accusing me of being "in the grip of Satan," etc. I saw during the course of our bitter divorce just how completely crazy the person I married was, and was glad to be out of the relationship. My kindly but creepy fundamentalist mother-in-law had predicted (in a way that sort of freaked me out) that I would bring her daughter "back to Jesus." I guess, ironically, I sort of did, but not in the way she expected. My ex mother-in-law of course has to say "God works in mysterious ways." My explanation is that my ex-wife was headed that way anyway, I just acted as a catalyst by leaving the relationship.

Me personally, I believe in a more existential outlook. We exist to make choices in this world, and we are held responsible for those choices and their consequences. Things just happen. When we die, we die, that's it, show's over, thank you for playing. The only reliable guide we have to predicting and coping with nature is the scientific method and a rational, probabalistic outlook. Our morals, our ethics, are not "God given" as my ex-wife believed, but a natural outcome of the necessity for getting along with other human beings in order to survive.

To quote from Wikipedia… "Post hoc reasoning is related to the logical fallacy 'correlation implies causation' (cum hoc ergo propter hoc)…These lines of reasoning are the basis for many superstitious beliefs and magical thinking, connecting two things that have no actual or logical connection. For example, if a person sees a coin on the ground and picks it up, and later receives good news, that person may become convinced that finding the coin resulted in the good news, even though it was a mere coincidence." This is the entire basis of the book A Purpose Driven Life. In fact, A Purpose Driven Life would go even one step further in the above example…interpreting the coin as a "sign from God," especially if finding that coin gave them enough money to buy a newspaper to read about the aforementioned good news, or to buy a cup of coffee they were craving and while in the café they meet a friend who delivered the good news to them, etc. No doubt this is all interesting, possibly the start of a good Hollywood movie idea, but to jump to the conclusion that there was a "divine hand" in all this is quite an outrageous stretch, completely irrational and illogical.

My viewpoint is a more naturalistic one. Again to quote from Wikipedia: "Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism, that reject the validity of explanations or theories making use of entities inaccessible to natural science, that is, supernatural phenomena: phenomena beyond the natural world that we measure using the scientific method. Naturalism also rejects teleology, or the idea that natural phenomena and events have an innate purpose." I hold this viewpoint because it is logical and coherent, not because I have a "hard heart" or am "lost" or "refuse God's love" or "in the grip of Satan," though these are things the author of A Purpose Driven Life tries to convince his readers of. Moreover, it's something my now ex-wife never could quite get a handle on, and was one of the underlying reasons for our ultimate divorce.

Could I have persuaded a murderer like Brian Nichols to turn himself in? Now, I hope I am never confronted with the need to try to, and I don't envy that woman who confronted Nichols after he took her hostage. But if I did find myself in such a terrifying scenario, I would probably fall back on a version of cognitive therapy known as "Reality Therapy" that I learned in preparation to become a schoolteacher. Reality Therapy basically demands people to stop and examine their current behavior. It then asks them what their short term and long term goals are, then asks them if their current behavior is conducive to reaching those goals. It's surprisingly effective in many instances. Of course, it assumes that people are basically rational and very interested in long term self-preservation. Now, I suppose if I met a true psychotic whose goal is/was to "murder as many people as possible," I'm pretty hosed. But then again, the young religious woman probably wouldn't have fared much better, either. She might do marginally better against a religiously minded psychotic, like the kind that shoot OB-GYNs outside of women's health clinics. But looking at the history of religious wars, particularly in Europe where Catholics and Protestants slaughted each other with reckless abandon, I wouldn't be too sure about that, either.

The wider philosophical implications of A Purpose Driven Life are so odious they make a reasonable person want to vomit. To believe the premises and conclusions of A Purpose Driven Life entails that there was a divine purpose to, among other things, "The Black Death," e.g., the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages, the Holy Inquisition, The Crusades, and most notably in our age, the Holocaust. The theist will attempt to wiggle out of this by saying "oh, no, these are people turning away from God's plan, etc, etc." which ignores a lot of evidence to the contrary. Hitler was a devout Roman Catholic and the Wehrmacht wrote "Gott mit Uns" ("God is With Us") on their belt buckles. Shadia Drury, in her recent book Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche, demonstrates rather conclusively just how theologically consistent the allegedly "aberrant" Medieval Church actually was. No theological deviation from "God's True Plan" going on here, asserts Drury-the Catholic Church was simply following the "Good Book" as it was written. It was the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that finally put a stop to this madness, or at least put a brake on it, which is why theists are resuming their war on Science itself. Dostoyevskii famously wrote that where there is no God, everything is permitted. Philosopher Stephen Eric Bronner has recently written a very pithy response that basically says: Perhaps. But a whole lot of very awful stuff was permitted while God was supposedly on watch, too. The book in which Bronner's statement appears is called Reclaiming the Enlightenment, and I highly recommend it.