“The fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile;
there is no one who does good. (Psalm 14:1,NIV)’”
This post came about recently while reflecting on the above verse. It is commonly quoted, particularly the first part, and frequently shows up in apologetics and anti-atheist discourse.
I want to focus on that first section because although it is short, more is present than might at first appear. There are two primary concepts, namely, the fool and atheism, action connecting them, speech, and a location for that action, in the fool’s heart.
In this post we will examine each of these in turn, and try to get a better look at how they relate to each other and to the everyday believer. We will see that far from being a blanket condemnation of atheists, this verse is a condemnation of humanity in general, for “no one does any good.”
Let’s start with the fool.
To be foolish, in English, is “to lack good sense or judgement.” This is closely related to words like stupid (having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense) and absurd (wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate.).
These are English definitions and connections. The thread that ties them together, however, is logic and reasoning. This is perhaps most evident in comparing them to their counterpart. The opposite of foolish is wise. The opposite of stupid is smart or clever. The opposite of absurd is logical or sensible. The English notion of foolishness is firmly rooted in the practical and intellectual.
This is part of why this verse appeals to us. In our British-based post-enlightenment world of intellectual reason, the verse affords smug satisfaction to the believer who can, with biblically mandated abandon, dismiss any and every argument of the atheist as “foolish,” faithful that underneath the atheist’s purported sophistication lies a sort of stupidity that renders all arguments moot, absolving the believer of any need to meet said arguments.
But Hebrew is not English. It originated for a different people from a wholly different time and place who had different concerns and emphasized different concepts. The word we read as fool in this verse is נָבָל nâbâl.
In Hebrew, there are five words commonly rendered as fool when translating into English, but each of these has its own nuances, like the difference between a fool and someone who is stupid or absurd; nuances that often require translations beyond one English word.
But where English traces the nuances along the logical/intellectual axis, Hebrew does so along a moral one. I don’t want to belabor this here, especially when it has already been done in this very decent blog post.
Regarding Nabal, the linked article above describes this as a steadfast or stubborn foolishness. In other words, this individual is so extremely devoted to his own aims and desires that he refuses to heed or even hear any counsel otherwise. His foolishness stems more from a morally decrepit desire to sin despite knowing it is wrong, than from purely intellectual failure. Sure, the end result is a kind of foolishness, scholastic suicide, so to speak, but it is his sinful desire rather than logical inability that has made him this way. Like many a three-year-old, he will stand on his right to do it his way come Hell or high water.
This is not really our picture of foolishness today. Where the Nabal possesses a sort of selfish, wicked arrogance, our modern sort of fool carries a degree of cringeworthy naivete or even innocence; think Disney’s Goofy or Michael Scott in The Office. That is comedy, not Nabal.
To be fair, translators are not wholly blind to this distinction as they do sometimes render the word as wicked or arrogant. Another point towards fairness might be that when the KJV translators first carried out their work in the 17th century, Fool in English likely was more impious than silly, a statement of contempt.
Furthermore, in the 17th century, though present, it was a rare individual who would argue that God did not exist. It was far more fashionable to render him impotent in some fashion, distant or distracted, than to do away with him altogether.
But a few hundred years changes things. Since then, the fool has become downright, well, foolish and materialism so entrenched in the sciences that to argue that a man like Stephen Hawking or Karl Sagan were fools for denying God beggared belief. If anything, atheism has at times almost seemed chic and advantageous in certain fields. There are more than a few pastors, theologians, and even missionaries who deny the existence of God. We have very little public reason to avoid adopting an atheist worldview if that seems desirable.
Yet while Science is by no means completely atheist and there are Christian apologists among others today who can easily argue with those who do hold to atheist worldviews, there is nevertheless a large contingent of Christian believers who see in this verse sufficient defense against atheism that such arguments are not worth their time, a situation that makes these self-declared atheists all the more contemptuous of simple-minded Christians. A sort of us against them mentality takes root on both sides that often renders discourse pointless.
Ironically enough, both sides may be fighting a strawman built on the misreading of this text that we have been touching on. To review, according to Psalm 14:1, it is not the intellectual fool who denies God in his heart; rather it is the Nabal. Furthermore, when the Nabal says in his heart that there is no God, he is not simply an idiot. He has deliberately and spitefully elected to hold a position at odds with his experience, not to mention any sense of meaning and purpose.
Consider the rest of the Psalm, which primarily laments the wickedness of man. Verse 2: The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, no not one.
There are passages of scripture which serve up sublime logical defenses of God, from the existentialism of Ecclesiastes to the teleological arguments of more than a few Psalms or most of the book of Job. Were this psalm concerned with logical approaches to God, it would read a lot more like Psalm 8.
But it is clear enough from what we have seen here that this Psalm’s focus is on the denier rather than proofs, and verse one discloses this more clearly than anywhere by revealing the location of this denial, in the heart of the Nabal.
David wrote this Psalm, a man constantly beset by hidden enemies, at times including his own depraved desires. Israel was a very theocratic monarchy. One of the key elements of power in such a society is that it is very tied to the outwardly orthodox practice of faith, which in the case of ancient Israel, means confirmed attestation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. David is revealing, with this Psalm, an awareness of the cynicism of sorts at the heart of society and even individual identity. No matter what people say with their mouths, in their hearts, they say there is no God every time they sin.
How do we know?
The psalm tells us. No one does good, no not one.
But this self-indictment is not aimed simply at the believer. Consider the atheist and how it serves as a convenient strawman for him. For this we need to look at the argument from the other side.
Who do I mean? Let’s consider those an apologetics lecturer might hold up – prominent self-declared atheists like Richard Dawkins or Neil deGrasse Tyson. Clearly these are Nabal if anyone is.
My goal is not actually to investigate their morality today, so I cannot judge that accusation of Nabal. Jesus had something to say about calling one’s brother a fool.
But considering the manner in which they lay out their arguments, I’m going to move in a separate direction and say that, if Psalm 14:1 is true, they are not really atheists. These men lay out their case from a position of relatively consistent argumentativeness as opposed to the more flippant disregard for logic one would expect in a Nabal.
For these “New Atheists” and their successors, their strawman is their conception of God. He says there is no “God”, and the anthropomorphized God here is one who would be would be soundly rejected by most legitimate theologians throughout most of history. These atheists reject the Abrahamic God of personal qualities by exaggerating those qualities into a long-bearded Zeus-like figure astride his throne, altogether human.
Consider this quote from Richard Dawkins:
Natural selection is like artificial selection, but without the human chooser.
But in such a God’s place, they often posit a conception of nature that itself sounds vaguely theistic:
Instead of a human deciding which offspring shall die and which shall reproduce, nature ‘decides’. The quotation marks are vital because nature doesn’t consciously decide.
(Climbing Mt. Improbable, 1996,)
We see it again here, the juxtaposition of either the cruelly or beneficent personhood of God with blind nature:
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous – indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
(River Out of Eden, 1995)
Dawkins is not alone in this. Here’s Carl Sagan:
“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. (Cosmos 1980)”
Here’s Neil deGrasse Tyson (on X):
The Universe is blind to our sorrows and indifferent to our pains. Have a nice day!
This is not, however, a new position. Check out this quote from the 5th century poem The Kumarasambhava exhorting the Hindu deity Brahma:
Three various forms and functions three
Proclaim thy living majesty;
Thou dost create, and then maintain,
And last, destroyest all again.
Thou art the objects that unroll
Their drama for the passive soul.
Thou art the soul that views the play
Indifferently, day by day.”
The connection I would pull out of this passage is the indifference of the divine (though the Hindu style trinitarianism is tantalizing.) Atheists deny God, hence the name. But they cannot deny something bigger than themselves, and Hindu cosmologists arrived at a solution for this millennia ago.
This bigger thing gets many names. Often, today, it’s Nature. Elsewhere and in reference to specific activities it might be described as a “driving force” though Star Wars has slowed that down a bit. I’ve also seen Natural Selection and even Chaos carry this sort of weight.
But it can be argued quite easily that what Dawkins or Sagan call Nature, many Hindus would call Brahman, ancient Greeks might have called matter or Cosmos, ancient Chinese might have called Dao and more than a few Enlightenment men of Science would have simply called God. In this light, today’s new atheists are not really atheists as much as they are radically materialist pantheists.
Only a Nabal says in his heart, “there is no God…”
Wait, am I arguing that Psalm 14:1 denies the existence of Atheists? Not at all. If you think that, maybe start again from the top. My argument here is that we exegetes have misconstrued what the terminology of this verse means to such an extent that even “Atheists” join us in the misunderstanding.
How does that work?
Let’s exam theism itself for a moment. Let’s accept as given that there is something bigger than any of us out there. It is incumbent on us to determine what that is and what our relation to it might be. In other words, we have to answer two questions:
- Why is stuff here?
- Why am I here?
And to these questions there are roughly 5 possible approaches. The nuances of each are practically innumerable, but all can be more or less categorized in the following 5 ways:
- Pantheism
- Solipsism
- Theism
- 2 of the above
- Don’t Care Ism
Give you one guess which one is Biblical Nabal. If not, keep reading.
We’ve already touched on Pantheism (which I am positing is the atheism of most any materialist atheist), but for the sake of completeness here’s a quick review. This is the suggestion that there is a sort of eternality to existence itself, whether in a figurative sense or a purely material sense. Pantheism answers our two questions thusly:
Why is stuff here? It’s always been here.
Why am I here? I am stuff.
Whether that stuff is Atman/Brahman or an eternal universe running in cycles of which my perceived consciousness is merely some electrons buzzing in fortuitous combination, the answer to the questions are the same. I am of the same stuff that everything else is made of, and this whole process just keeps happening. All the good or bad, suffering or pleasure, is just a byproduct of existence acting itself out, as is how I feel about it. Whether I am longsuffering, hedonist, or nihilist about it is up to me, though I’ve really just been “programmed” chemically or Karmically that way, so what I want doesn’t really matter. I can’t do anything about it anyway.
Wow, that’s depressing. No wonder Hindus called this the wheel of existence and Buddhists decided they wanted off this merry-go-round.
Speaking of Buddhists, let’s discuss solipsism.
This is the philosophical position that the individual is the only thing that exists. Put that starkly, it sounds incredibly arrogant and perhaps a little absurd. Nevertheless, it is a genuinely distinct way to answer these two questions, like so:
Why is stuff here? I made it, (though I may not know how). All of this is simply a figment of my imagination. (There is no spoon).
Why am I here? I suppose because I want to be here for some reason. Further, I suppose that when I get tired being here, I won’t be here anymore, nor will anything else.
To emphasize, according to this viewpoint, I am the source of everything, and as soon as I want to be done with it, I can turn it off.
Why connect this to Buddhism? Some have called Buddhism atheist. But if atheism is not atheist, then how is Buddhism atheist? I would argue it fits here better, though it might just make Solipsism collective to see it that way, which is a mind-boggling concept.
Buddhism is a response to the more depressing parts of Hinduism. Where Hinduism arrives at our inadvertent participation in an indifferent God as the source of all adversity, and the only way to resolve this is to accept it and hope the next round is a little bit better, Buddhism resolves suffering through personal enlightenment. More formally, all existence is Maya, illusion, and when I become aware of this, i.e. enlightened, it will cease to matter, in turn cancelling my existence (and presumably all other existence, at least to me) if I so desire (though I am beyond desire at that point). In other words, I am God, and there is no spoon.
Ok, round 3, theism. This one is the classical God formula of the Judeo-Christian (and Muslim) worlds.
Why is there stuff? An outside entity (God) made it.
Why am I here? That entity made me too.
This position does not necessarily imply the God of the Bible. The God of the Quran could fit here just as easily, and perhaps some iterations of various pagan gods. What it does imply, however, is a Holy God, i.e. one distinct from the Cosmos as we know it. Though He is responsible for our existence, He is in some way if not every way not affected by it. Any power that we have in this schema is given us by that creator.
The last non-Nabal position is simply a blending of two of the other positions. For instance, a pantheist/theist blend might look like Zoroastrianism or some forms of Gnostic Dualism or Ancient Near Eastern cosmologies in which the Holy, i.e., Spiritual God is essentially an alien to this otherwise eternal universe who may or may not be balanced in power with it, pitting the material and spiritual worlds in a long-term cosmic war.
Or maybe this blend is solipsist/pantheist or solipsist/theist, and I am the unaware godly invader or defender waiting to be awakened to fight off the forces of darkness that are either natural to this realm or invading it. And maybe, I will discover that this opposing force is simply the darker/lighter half of my nature and all we need to do is unite to… If this is starting to sound like the backstory to an RPG, you caught me. I am a gamer when I find the time, which is increasingly rare.
In any of these myriad cases, we have two approaches to the divine placed alongside each other, clashing as a result. This makes for good fantasy with ready-made high-stakes conflict, but breaks down handily when put under the knife of philosophy.
This leaves the Nabal position, which is less of a take on the divine and more a mark of insouciance on the part of the holder.
Why is stuff here? Who cares.
Why am I here? Who cares. I’m just gonna do what I want.
The whole point of this sort of position is a flippant disregard for anything greater than oneself. It is a position steeped in self-centered arrogance. Unlike the other positions, which are at least peering into the darkness of ignorance trying to see, this is one which, when asked, doesn’t even look up because he’s too busy fiddling on his phone. It is truly the only atheist position because it firmly declares “I couldn’t care less if God is there or not. I am God in my own little world and ain’t nobody or nothing gonna make me do anything I don’t want to.”
While it is possible that some self-proclaimed atheists possess this level of flippancy, I think many deserve some respect for pursuing their investigation as far as they have. My Bible says that all who seek will find and if they continue to pursue investigation without limit, truth is the inevitable destination. The Psalm 14:1 Nabal deserves no such respect.
We can point fingers in disgust, but all of us have at some point, usually right as we are getting ready to do something a touch more sordid than we ought, said in our hearts, “I’m going to do this thing I know is wrong and I don’t care if God is there or not. I just want to do it.”
The Nabal says in his heart, “I don’t care whether there’s a God or not.”
He’s corrupt and does horrible things. No one does any good.
It is convenient to paint the actor of Psalm 14:1 as a silly fool, because then he is easy to dismiss as other. But very few people qualify as cartoonishly silly fools. To acknowledge the Psalm as actually pointing at all who have deliberately looked away from God when seeing him would be inconvenient, wow, that is indicting. Honestly, it makes me feel a little foolish.
Casual Conjecture 