Giving Thanks to Human Ingenuity

Thanksgiving has always been a time for me to give thanks for living in the current century and not back when mankind was still struggling to get out of its animalistic mode of living.  When I was young I used to go through the motions of believing in a god but there was always conflict in this for me as I could not reconcile the fact of a world of good contending with a world of evil and god just sitting there allowing it to happen.  It just did not make sense.  It is not often that you read an article about Thanksgiving from an atheist point of view and so for this holiday I give thanks to Heather MacDonald for her article A secularist’s thoughts on Thanksgiving.

...The problem for the nonbeliever is not that there is no one to thank for our good fortune but that there are more targets of gratitude than we can possibly acknowledge.

God does have the advantage of being a centralized receptacle for thanks, but is otherwise quite flawed as an object of gratitude, in my view.

I am indebted every day to human ingenuity that I could not possibly replicate on my own. I live on the 15th floor of an apartment building—a remarkable situation! Within this marvel of engineering, I have electricity, clean water, protection from the elements, and now, the internet, that miracle of knowledge aggregation that gives individuals more power than anyone has ever before possessed. Humans created all these wonders through tireless, loving, and patient empirical observation and experimentation.

I give thanks for the centuries-long development of limited government and to our Founding Fathers who created the most flexible and stable written constitution yet devised. As a secular conservative, I am particularly grateful for the free market system that supplies America’s cornucopia of goodies, an accomplishment that the current financial crisis in no way discredits.

But there are elements of my good fortune that are not the product of human effort—such as the facts that I a citizen of the United States and not, say, the Congo; that I was born with a sound body; and that the laws of nature work as they do. Do I need a God to account for those windfalls? In the first two cases, definitely not. I accept without discomfort the massive role of randomness in the distribution of benefits and handicaps; the alternative—that they represent deliberate judgment–is too horrible to contemplate. Were I to thank God for my extreme luck in being born into a society where people do not routinely massacre each other, I would have to explain why I deserve this happy outcome, whereas those millions of individuals who are not so fortunate in their birthplace do not. Likewise, if God is responsible for my healthy physical constitution, I would have to explain why he allows thousands of innocent children to be born with painful and sometimes fatal birth defects while sparing me.

Coming up with such explanations, in my view, requires either narcissism or the torture of reason. Most believers seem oblivious to the solipsism entailed by their thanking God when their cancer goes into remission, say. But the problem remains: Why did God save you and let the patient in the bed next to you die? The results are no more satisfactory when a conscious effort is made to supply rationales for such disparate outcomes. Typical candidates include: It is actually a gift from God to be born with half a brain, you just lack the capacity to understand his mysterious ways; or, how dare you presume to judge him, you cringing worm?...(Secular Right: Reality and Reason)