Wars, Apologetics, and Political Arguments
When political arguments ask you to commit to extreme positions, perhaps they are religious rather than ethical arguments.
Possibly the two most pressing world events at the moment are the wars in Ukraine and Israel. In each case, the argumentation for each side in the Western world has followed a similar and now-familiar pattern: My side is good, the other side is bad, and your neutrality on the subject is evil. In fact, anything short of giving material support for my side is an act of sedition.
But this type of argument is more suited to matters of faith than to matters of opinion or rationality. They are asking you to make real political and material sacrifices for their cause similar to the way a Christian asks you to sacrifice parts of yourself to live in faith that God is your creator. I am not necessarily making the argument that progressivism or neoconservatism are actually religions in their own right. While I understand that sentiment, those ideologies are still missing important pieces of what makes a religion a religion. Rather, it demonstrates how those ideologies use the concept of faith to compel populations to choose one side or the other, and commit their resources, in conflicts having nothing to do with them.
War arguments
For Ukraine-Russia, the American establishment opinion has seemed to be that Ukraine came into existence in 2022, nothing happened, and then Russia invaded it as the first step toward inevitable world conquest. Although “Russia is definitely losing,” if we fail to send over a single one of these aid dollars, Ukraine will promptly fall and Russia will easily overrun the rest of Europe in a matter of weeks. With Israel-Gaza it is that Israel has acted as a loving parent to the Palestinians, though sometimes utilizing tough love for their own good. But then on October 7 Hamas, which constitutes the entirety of Palestine, unleashed an attack on October 7 with the combined destruction of 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and several genocides. What Germany couldn’t accomplish with one of the largest war fighting machines ever assembled, Hamas will do with a few starving teenagers in paragliders and and a pile of homemade rockets stacked next to a hospital.
In either case, if you fail to support the side of the establishment’s choosing, you are actually complicit in the evil of the other side. You need not lift a finger to become the moral equivalent of a genocidal murderer. Any questions about the moral bona fides of the side lauded as the good guys is just as bad. Even if you support neither side, casting the cause of good in a bad light risks deceiving others into supporting the side of evil.
What is shared between both mainstream arguments is the demand that you not only take their side between the two combatants, but that you do so by sacrificing materially to their side’s cause. It is certainly not sufficient to take the view that the histories are too complicated and the facts too obscured for someone thousands of miles away to weigh in on it. You aren’t even permitted to point out that your own corrupt government’s involvement in it will only make things worse. To ask that your tax dollars be left out of it is anathema. Your money must be sent over and used to arm one side to kill the other side.
Thus, you are required to “do” something in this debate. There is no standing on the sidelines.
“All in” argumentation in apologetics
We see this type of argumentation in religion as well. Please indulge me in a brief digression of sorts.
When considering Christian apologetics, it is easy to forget what the real atheist response to an argument might be. Christians see the world inherently as a created thing, and so some steps in our logic seem self-evident to our minds when they really should be fleshed out. Likewise, many points taken for granted by atheists seem unsubstantiated when viewed under our worldview, and so we tend not to consider those points unless we are used to debating them with atheists.
One such point has to do with the cosmological argument. A version of this argument has for a few years been one of my favorite because of its simplicity. It is not airtight, but it can be easily grasped in a few sentences. It begins that, by the nature of existence we can observe (the physical universe), it is apparent that everything observable is physical and therefore is dependent upon some prior cause.1 And if the world had a cause, that cause must be sufficient to have created the world and everything in it. And anything sufficient for this task must be something unimaginably great. It must be so powerful it can create something from nothing, which is a power we have no analogue for in the physical world. Therefore it must be infinite in some understanding of that word. It must also be capable of exercising a will to create, and thus must be personal in some understanding of that word. It must be capable of being the first cause of all created things, and so must itself be uncreated. Thus it must be eternal in some understanding of that word. These attributes are well described in the God of the Bible.
However, the atheist rejoinder to this that we often overlook is a version of the “God of the gaps” argument. It is that, simply because the God of the Bible fits as one explanation for the cause of the universe does not justify that belief. The atheist could recognize all of our points in the above apologetic as valid and still argue that this is not sufficient evidence to warrant faith in it. The difference between the two sides in the debate is over what justifies a belief in an assertion.
Faith requires choosing a side
It is in the nature of a religious belief that its arguments demand the parties choose one side or the other.
In the atheist rejoinder summarized above, the hypothetical atheist makes the least assertive argument possible, that there is simply insufficient evidence to justify belief in the specific thing the Christian believes in. In this example, the atheist hasn’t even argued explicitly that the God the Christian believes in does not actually exist, but only that evidence does not exist to reach that specific conclusion to the exclusion of all others. If this were the very end of all his arguments, he would really be called an agnostic.
But this characterization avoids the reality of faith. The potential for faith in a thing eliminates the possibility of a neutral position with respect to it. When faith is at issue in a material sense, the question is not whether you are convinced, but whether you participate in the world with an understanding that it is true or false. It is not merely that the question has been posed to you as an issue of faith, but that due to the nature of things, you are compelled to live your life either in or out of conformance with the idea that the faith is true.
What makes it faith, as opposed to opinion, is that it is not merely a belief in the existence of facts, but of facts which are inseparable from the living of your life. What you believe with regard to matters of faith informs your understanding of the meaning of everything you come in contact with. Do the stones beneath your feet support your weight because biological life adapted through impersonal means to exist in a solid environment, or did God create matter to be that way so there would be a place for you to stand?
We Christians go so far as to believe a person’s position on this matter determines the state of his eternal existence.
With a faith, failure to treat its precepts as true is to treat it as false. This is not due to some dogma in the belief system that demands faiths in its tenets. It is due to the nature of what a faith is, and the fact that our universe is such that matters of faith necessarily arise regardless of religion or lack of it.
“All in” politics
By now, you may be able to see the purpose of my digression into apologetics and faith. The demand from political actors that we actively support their wars reveals that, for them, these are existential matters. They demand our assent. We cannot be as the Agnostic, telling the establishment we simply haven’t yet been convinced of their cause. We are required to treat them with the same “all or nothing” approach that is natural to matters of faith. We must be either as the Christian or the Atheist.
And, for some people, these are appropriate matters of a kind of faith. For a Ukrainian or an Israeli, it may not be as profound as his faith in God, but how he chooses his path forward really does impact him. If you live there today, you really do live under the implications of your choices, they are not the luxuries of mere opinions, but whether what you believe is in fact true may determine if you survive or perish. Are the Russians coming to kill you? Do the Palestinians just want you dead? Is your best hope for survival to support your government’s fight, or is your government needlessly putting you in harm’s way? Should you join your military and fight or treat your leaders as liars and flee? For them, the universe has presented these questions to them in the manner of a faith. There are few, if any, neutral positions.
But the same is not true for us thousands of miles away from Ukraine or Israel. Yet, we are meant to believe that no neutral opinion is possible for us either. Failure to endorse sending money to Ukraine is to approve of Russia’s brutality. Failure to send weapons to Israel is to approve of a genocide against it.
It is true that, to some extent we do exercise a faith in our choices here. By extending the chain of causality far enough, sending money and weapons abroad may result in fewer people dying. Although I personally don’t believe this is actually true, if it was true, it would make a difference for people over there. And if the question to us here in America is, “will supporting this aid result in at least one fewer death” then we are faced with a faith question to that extent. Failure to say “yes” means choosing “no” and having a tenuous role in any additional deaths that might otherwise have been avoided. But there is a fundamental difference between this choice between voluntary intervention and the involuntary reality of living one’s life.
Matters of the involuntary kind of faith require a choice regardless of any accidental external event. We choose to live as if God exists or as if He doesn’t whether we seek to make that choice or not, it is inseparable from the act of living. We are only put to the choice about aid to Ukraine or Israel because someone else demanded it from us. We were under no moral compulsion to personally render aid, and it was only when this external person intervened and entangled our lives with the question did our response have any bearing on the lives of people halfway around the world.
It would be similar to accusing a homeowner who defends his property from being stolen by a thief of being responsible for the thief’s child going cold because the thief couldn’t pay his heating bill.
But in the last analysis, the political world should have no such pull over us. There is no natural moral reason why we must join the establishment class in their wars. We might find a conflict worthy of our charity or even direct support, if we were personally inclined. But so long as we are not convicted that our true faiths require us to render such aid in order to align our lives with our beliefs about charity and self-sacrifice, the global political ends of our leaders should hold no such sway.
It is because of the ability of faith to transform opinions into moral imperatives on our lives that this manner of argument is found useful by the establishment class. If we were designed by God to seek out faith in something larger, then our rulers have used this part of the human condition to their maximum advantage.
The exception would be if our world were an illusion or simulation. But in that case, there must be a physical world of some kind creating our world, and that physical world must have a cause. In such a case, all the arguments applicable to our world as the real physical world apply to the source world of the illusion or simulation and, by extension, to us as ultimately inhabitants of that world.