The Story of Barrett (Part 6 ... continued)

Life on my Own (sort of)

The next two years were spent marking time. For the first year, I lived with an East Logmeadow family I had met through the local parish church. In spite of having four children already, Tom and Diane took me in and treated me in every way like a member of the family. I remained in school and as part of the required curriculum at Cathedral High School I was enrolled in a class called apologetics.

Apologetics is a series of arguments (as the word is used in the legal sense) which purport to rationally and logically prove the existence of God and the truth of the bible and of Catholic doctrine. The arguments are presented in syllogistic form with a "Major" (Everything in the universe, including the universe itself, had to have a beginning and anything with a beginning had to have a cause); a Minor (The cause of everything in the universe must itself be uncaused. The regression to previous causes cannot continue forever. By definition, if it wasn't caused, it must be something that was not created); and a Conclusion (Everything in the universe, including the universe itself, must have been caused by an uncreated First Cause and that original First Cause must be a personal being that is aware of itself, able to make decisions and have purposes and yet must have capabilities that far surpass ours).

This causality (or teleological) argument has one fatal defect. If we accept the fact that nothing can exist without a cause, we cannot logically insist on the existence of an "uncaused" First Cause. If we postulate a god who is uncaused, we are equally free to believe in a universe that is uncaused. Occam's razor must be applied.

Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"): "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", or "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".

This is often paraphrased as "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

In spite of its weakness, causality is probably the "strongest" of the weak arguments presented for the existence of a god. There are many others. There is the "History" argument (great men throughout the ages have believed in God) which fails to define "great men" and completely ignores the fact that these same great men seem to have believed in a variety of different gods with characteristics ranging from the ridiculous to the ... ridiculous. Great men throughout the ages have believed in everything from astrology, the superiority of a Master Race (which, by coincidence is always the same as the race of the believer), the superiority of men and inferiority of women, paganism, pyramid power, alien invasions, ghosts, racism, slavery, and creationism to UFO's, parapsychology, The Great Pumpkin and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. When it comes to what they've believed, great men throughout history have chosen to believe a whole lot of contradictary things. The argument of history also ignores those "great men" throughout history (and there are many of them) who have embraced atheism and agnosticism.

The argument of Authority is laughable. We should accept the truth of Christianity and/or Catholicism based on the authority of the Bible which is the unerring word of God. How do we know it's the unerring word of God? Why, the Bible tells us that it's the divinely inspired word of God so it must be true if the Bible says so because the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Huh?

George Washington never told a lie. How do we know this? George Washington told us he never told a lie and we believe it because ... well ... because he couldn't say it if it weren't true since George Washington never told a lie.. Abraham Lincoln once walked ten miles through the snow to return a nickel he had inadvertantly overcharged a man. We know this because Abraham Lincoln told us all about it and certainly even a politician wouldn't falsify something that important.

The "great men" argument employs the same arrogance as the Kellog Company. "Great athletes eat Kellogs Corn Flakes. Who the hell do you think you are eating Cheerios?"

Another favorite argument of believers is the Order and Harmony Argument (the Watchmaker Argument). Where order and harmony exist, there has to be a Planner since neither order nor harmony can exist without the guiding hand of an intelligent Creator. Just as the parts of a watch can't come together and assemble spontaneously without a watchmaker, so too, the universe and everything in it couldn't come into being and display so much order and harmony were it not for the existence of a God who planned and executed the whole thing.

Here, the apologist is confusing cause and effect. His view of the universe is far to anthropocentric. The earth circles the sun within the narrow "comfort zone" where human life is possible because water can exist as a liquid. This was not arranged for the benefit of man. Man evolved because the conditions permitting human life existed. The conditions weren't planned out and created so that man could exist.

Order and Harmony apologists are fond of doing studies and coming up with "statistics" to prove that the odds against the a universe like ours simply coming into existence are so many trillion, trillion, trillion to one. This conclusively proves that the universe could only have been created by an intelligent God.

Doing a statistical analysis and reaching a conclusion on the basis of multiple chance events that occurred in the past is a perversion of science and a guarantee of error.

You are the result of a union of your mother's egg and a single spermatozoa from your father. A typical human male ejaculates 10,000,000 sperm cells during intercourse. Except in rare situations, only one of those sperm cells will reach the egg and result in an embryo which in turn will become a unique, individual human being. The odds against YOUR ever coming into existence with your particular DNA and phenotype were ten million to one.

Just as surely as the odds were against you ever being born, the odds were that SOMEONE was going to be born. So in once sense, you beat the odds.

What are the odds that the population of our planet would be the exact same 6.5 billion individuals that presently make up the world's population? That's easy. Just multiply 6.5 billion times 10 million and those are the odds against it happening. Does the existence of 6.5 billion (approximaely) unique individuals prove the existence of God? Hardly!

Needless to say I wasn't all that popular with Father Murphy who taught the apologetics class.

I completed my sophomore year (barely) and went through the summer working at odd jobs around the neighborhood for what little money I could earn. With an extra mouth to feed, the family's budget was stretched almost to the breaking point and Tommy was forced to take a second, part-time job three evenings a week to help keep the family afloat. Even though I was at least partly responsible for the financial crunch, no mention was ever made of my inability to contribute to the family coffers. Through it all, I was always made to feel just as welcome and cared about as their other children.

When summer break ended in September and the school year began, I started to have problems staying awake in class. A doctor diagnosed my condition as narcolepsy and prescribed medication which Tommy paid for and I continued to take through the remainder of my time with the family. Whatever medication they gave me didn't seem to have much effect. No sooner would I sit down at my desk than I would drop off and not awaken until the bell rang at the end of the period. Teachers eventually stopped waking me up because my periods of consciousness wouldn't last more than five or six minutes before I dropped off again. Poor, generous Tommy was the one who paid the price. If he wasn't gone in the evening to his second job, he was being summoned for evening meetings with my teachers to answer for my less than stellar performance in the classroom.

In my junior year at Cathedral High School my fifth period religion teacher was a sweet, elderly nun who could no more fail a student than I could brutalize and torture a puppy. As a result, I succeeded in failing every subject I was taking except religion. Not only was I a failure, thanks to that one kind-hearted nun I couldn't even qualify as a consistent failure. I was a failure at failing which is probably as low as you can sink on the achievement scale.

I had expected to fail. I was sick of school and, at 16, I could legally drop out. That's what I wanted to do.

Tom and Diane were patient and understanding ... and absolutely insistent that I finish high school. They were willing to move me to East Longmeadow High (the public school) to repeat my Junior year but my decision to drop out of school was completely unacceptible. When I refused to even consider completing high school, Tom and Diane used the only weapon they had. If I didn't go back to school, I would have to move out.

Neither of them wanted me to move out and I didn't want to leave ... but I was then very much as I am today. When confronted with an either/or choice, I've invariably gone for the "or". My refusal to return to school was stupid, selfish and unreasonable. In light of what Tom and Diane had both done for me, it was an act of ingratitude that I am still ashamed of today.

My departure was amicable though and even after I got a room at the Springfield YMCA, I was a frequent dinner guest and visitor. Tom and Diane and I remained in touch for many years afterwards.

I worked a number of jobs and barely got by until two months before my eighteenth birthday. My experiment at supporting myself and getting by on my own was a dismal failure and I found myself back with my father and Earline for two weeks while my application to join the Navy was being processed. Two weeks after my return to their home I boarded a plane heading for Great Lakes, Illinois to begin basic training.

Is it any surprise to anyone who knows me that the Navy and I had a stormy relationship almost from the beginning?

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