In a relatively recent plodcast episode — Plodcast 131: What I Saw in America — Doug Wilson spends some time on the Greek word astorgos, which is often translated as “without natural affection.” It’s an interesting discussion, and I commend it to you.
Wilson didn’t make the point I’m going to try to make, but his discussion pulled various threads together in my mind and got me started. These threads, which have collected over the years in a semi-organized fashion, seem to weave a pattern — that belief in God is a “natural affection,” and that atheists tend to lack natural affection, in this and other ways.
You may remember the four loves: agape, philia, eros and storge, which roughly mean unconditional love, friendship, romantic love, and familiarity.
Just as the word atheist means “without belief in God,” astorgos means “without familiarity (or natural affection).” (IOW, the “a” prefix is a negation.)
Wilson says “natural affection” covers things like loving your home town, or your country; having a favorite pair of jeans; having a bond with your relatives (even if you don’t like them); or having a preference for human life.
To a certain mindset, such preferences aren’t rational. Why should I prefer my town or country, when I know another town is better? Why should I shower unnecessary gifts, attention and affection on my children when there are other children who are starving? (Steven Pinker asks that question in one of his books.)
In a way, the answer is “because it’s right.” It’s natural. It’s natural to love your home, and not natural to fail to love it.
Sir Roger Scruton may have a long explanation for why such affections are justified, but to the ordinary person, they simply are correct as a matter of first principles. (Recall that Scruton described the work of a conservative philosopher as someone who explains to people why their prejudices are correct.)
Before you get sidetracked, I’m not making any sort of case that we should go around believing things simply because we have an intuition (or prejudice) that they must be correct. Rather, I’m saying there’s a mindset that tends to accept these intuitions, and there’s a mindset that tends to doubt them.
In my experience, atheists tend to doubt them. That is, they not only doubt the existence of God, but when you probe, you find that they tend to doubt — or at least resist — a lot of other things that seem to fall under the category of “natural affection.”
This is not an argument for or against atheism. I’m simply offering the hypothesis that there is a mindset — being with natural affection — that gladly accepts things like love of country and family and preferential treatment for one’s offspring — and there’s a mindset — being without natural affection — that prefers to doubt and question and reject such things. The hypothesis would further claim that if we could come up with a test for natural affection (leaving God out of it), that believers would be more likely to have it, and unbelievers would be more likely not to have it.
What do you think?