On the occasion of Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (nice discount at Amazon!), she’s interviewed by Five Books‘ Sophie Roell on the topic of “Atheism”. It’s a really nice interview and I’ll leave it to you to read it and see what five books on atheism Jacoby recommends most highly (note: there’s one big surprise!).
Jacoby discusses her choice of books, the supposed “stridency” of Richard Dawkins, the absence of any difference between agnostics and atheists, why she doesn’t participate in debates about religion, why Hitler and Stalin don’t prove that atheism is evil, and many other issues. It’s a don’t-miss read, and you’re going to want to buy at least one of the books she recommends (besides her own, of course).
I’ll just give one snippet of her interview since it deals with a topic dear to my heart: the relationship between science and religion:
Let’s talk about The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, which I have to say is a very funny book.
Richard Dawkins is very funny. One of the reasons for reading The God Delusion is that it will disabuse you of the idea – which is a common stereotype of atheists – that they are utterly humourless. You hear this over and over again. I’m often invited to college campuses to give lectures, and often they’re religious schools – not fundamentalist schools, but colleges of a historically religious type. And very often I will hear: “Oh I expected you to be small and dark-haired and wear glasses!” The image of the atheist woman is kind of like what the image of the feminist used to be, someone too ugly to get a man. But part of it is also humorlessness. People will often say to me, “Oh you’re so funny.” “Well, yeah!”
Dawkins also explains a lot about why he disagrees with people who reconcile science and religion. I agree with him on this. I actually do think they are irreconcilable. I know lots of people who have reconciled them, but that’s only because the human brain has this incredible capacity to believe two contradictory things at the same time. That is how people are able to reconcile science and religion. But really they’re hard to reconcile, and I think when you read Dawkins he explains that very well, why you when you say “I’m religious but I also believe in science,” you’re kind of avoiding the question of the ways in which scientific reality provable as by natural experiment comes into conflict with belief in events that contradict the laws of nature.
Yes, I have to say, up until recently I did think it was fine to believe in science, but also be religious. But after interviewing Jerry Coyne for this site and then reading Dawkins, I was forced to concede that the two probably aren’t compatible.
At some point it becomes too great inconsistency.
Is it a coincidence that both these strident atheists are evolutionary biologists? Is that just because they’re thinking about where man came from and how he evolved, so are more focused on this issue than some of the rest of us?
Well I really don’t see how you could be an evolutionary biologist and not be an atheist. But the fact is that among top level scientists there are some who aren’t. The head of the National Institutes of Health here in America is a devout Christian. That does not stop him from being head of the NIH and believing in scientific medicine. I’m not saying there aren’t people who live with these two ideas, I’m simply saying I certainly couldn’t, and I don’t think there’s any consistency to doing it. Richard Dawkins explains that very well, but I don’t call that being a strident atheist!
Here is the exact analogy of someone who is religious but also “believes in science.” It’s like when we get married. We know what the divorce rate is in the western world, but we all believe that it doesn’t apply to us, that we’re going to be in love “till death do us part”, just like the Book of Common Prayer says. We know that a large percentage of marriages end in divorce, but when we take that step and get married ourselves, we are acting on quite another hope. I think people who are religious but are not against science are doing the same thing. They are, in a way, covering all the bases. But it makes more sense to believe in eternal love, even though you know that in most cases it doesn’t last, because there can always be an exception. There really are some people who stay in love forever. But you can’t give me any proof that anyone has ever risen from the dead. I’m always open. That’s why Ingersoll is right about the atheist being agnostic and vice versa – if you want to bring all of the dear friends that I’ve lost to death in the last 10 years to dinner tonight, and I’ll sit down and make spaghetti and we’ll all eat together, I will reconsider my stance on eternal life.
I’m not sure I agree with Jacoby’s “exact analogy” here, as religious people aren’t always “covering the bases” in the Pascal’s-wager sense. That is, they accept science because they have to (no bases need covering, for the truths of science are self-evident, and if you reject them you look like a moron). Religious people have nothing to lose by rejecting science but the respect of secularists. Nor do they accept religion simply because they think that they (or their coreligionists) might just be the ones who win the lottery in a world where every other religion could really be the right one. As far as I know, most deeply religious people (and nearly all Muslims) know with near certainty that they’re right.
I’ve put bold type at the end to show that Jacoby, like Ingersoll, Dawkins (perhaps!) and myself—and unlike P.Z. or readers like Ben Goren—remains open to the possibility of God and an afterlife, no matter how remote it is. That’s the proper scientific attitude, and I have yet to be convinced that one can rule out gods, the afterlife, and so on, on first principles. Regarding both the positive evidence against God (e.g., preventable physical evils in the world) and negative evidence for him (He’s always hidden), I am around a 6.995 on Dawkins’s 7-point “believer to nonbeliever” scale.
But the above is just one small part of a very nice interview. Have a look.
h/t: Barry C.
I don’t have the impression that PZ rules out the existence of God on first principles, but rather argues that any conceivable evidence could be explained by less extreme inferences.
As for me, I’ve come around to the PZ side of the argument about “scientific openness to gods”. I’ll re-open to the concept once the definition of “god” is coherent enough to be remotely testable. Until then I really don’t think there is anything to be “open to” about.
That’s my view as well. I’m around a 6.5 on the quasi-Dawkins scale of belief that theists will ever agree on a coherent, testable, statement of what God is. If they ever do, then I’ll have to consider where I am on the scale of believing that it actually exists.
An excellent article except for one thing: Jacoby and the interviewer both characterize Thomas Paine as an atheist. He was not, he was a deist as is evident by his own words:
“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consists in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.” (Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Life and writings of Thomas Paine, NY: Vincent Park, 1908, Vol 6, Part First, p.2)
I can understand how theists make the mistake of calling Paine an atheists but when atheists do that, it’s unbelievable
Vous avez ecrit: “I can understand how theists make the mistake of calling Paine an atheists but when atheists do that, it’s unbelievable.”
Perhaps they haven’t bothered to read The Age of Reason . . . ;->
A fact I noted as well. However, I’m also fairly certain that were Paine alive today, he’d be an actual atheist. Knowledge of evolution and deep time is potent medicine against the minor illness of deism.
I would also be on the PZ side on openness to god. As for Ingersoll I don’t think he left space for an afterlife but rather said the hope of an afterlife is an extension of human love and that he would be the last person to take that hope away. I could be wrong but that is what I gathered from reading his books
To Professor Coyne and visitors to Why Evolution is True:
For what I believe to be a powerful refutation of the belief that Hitler was an atheist and that Nazism was an atheist doctrine, I recommend that you visit the blog by Keele University astrophysicist Coel Hellier (coelsblog). I don’t see how the belief that Hitler was an atheist can survive the articles available there.
Cordially,
William Stewart
Only ignorant people who have made no effort to learn anything about Hitler beyond the fact that he had something to do with killing a lot of Jewish people would claim he was an atheist. Merely skimming Mein Kampf would be sufficient to mark his true character, that of a religious zealot.
An additional source of information for them to ignore would accomplish nothing.
Coel is a regular and well-spoken (written?) commenter here.
Thanks for the mention!
We need to keep repeating this point, when even atheists such as Susan Jacoby don’t fully appreciate it. She says in her interview:
OK, but it wasn’t unofficially atheist either! It wasn’t atheist at all, Third Reich Germany was vastly more religious than any European country today.
For example in a 1939 census 95% self-labelled as “Christian” with only 1.5% self-labelling as a non-believer.
Further, no part of Third Reich ideology was atheistic, it was thoroughly steeped in theism; indeed the Nazis developed their own theology, mixing Christianity with racist nationalism.
“Gott mit uns!”
/@
About 50 or so years ago Carl Friedrich, Professor of Government at Harvard, wrote a beautiful little book on the similarities between Soviet Communism and religion. I found it very illuminating at the time. But Jacoby wraps it all up in one extremely good paragraph going right to the heart of the matter — dogma that can’t be challenged. Progress!
As I see it, the issue is epistemic, not ontological — one may not be able to rule out the existence of gods from first principles, but one can rule out our ability to have evidence for them (as opposed to very powerful beings whose origins are fully natural).
As Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That doesn’t rule out magic in principle, but it rules out in principle our ability to distinguish between the two.
My old philosophy mentor was of the analytic school and he was able to take the legs out from under most any argument by insisting that the definition of all terms be mutually agreed upon and challenging the truth-value of the major premise(s). Usually, the argument didn’t get past the term definition stage, but if it did, it still had to survive the challenge of the premises. The challenge was rarely conducted because the challengee would/could not agree on a testable null hypothesis. In this case, if a first principle makes an existential claim if the subject of the claim cannot be adequately defined well enough that the truth-value of the claim can be tested or if there is no null hypothesis that can be tested the first principle is invalidated. So far, I have yet to see any kind of first principle that required the existence of god(s) survive.
Tulse,
As I have argued (on side with Jerry on this issue) I find the “Evidence of a God could be advanced aliens/technology fooling with us” excuse to be a form of special pleading. It’s treating God as a special epistemic case without good reason.
All of us here understand that no one requires Absolute Certainty for any belief to be rational. Let’s make sure we are not raising the bar suddenly on the issue of Gods – giving them some special consideration.
The “it could be a delusion/alien technology fooling our perception” could be raise about every single observation mankind has ever made. Your mother may be an alien decoy controlled from another dimension. The moon could also be a delusion sent by aliens. But we don’t adopt these as explanations for our mothers or the moon…or for X-rays or quantum particles for that matter…because that’s not how a rational method of inference works. Super Advanced Alien stories are *compatible* with the moon being an illusion, or people being controlled by aliens, or aliens playing with sub-atomic particles to make quantum effects. But unless we have evidence of the actual aliens themselves, or unless the alien hypothesis provides some unique predictions, knowledge or insight beyond “what things seem to be”…we’d be making an exception to normal rational inference to assume the aliens are the cause.
Evidence for a God is no exception. In principle: if a Being calling itself “God, The Creator Of The Universe” manifested in as empirically verifiable a manner as any other empirical phenomena in our experience, and showed all sorts of empirically inter-subjectively testable powers directly related to his claims to be able to alter nature at will or form galaxies etc, and who
shows us all sorts of evidence for His having started life on earth, created the universe etc….then what OTHER rational inference would make more sense than to say “Ok, all the evidence points to this ‘God’ being Creator Of The Universe so like any other belief we provisionally adopt it.”
??
If this God provides us with exactly the empirically reliable evidence in support of His claim, it’s just special pleading to, in this one case say “No…I refuse to acknowledge where all the evidence points.”
Vaal
(Note that the “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” objection is a separate issue from the other one: that the very concept of God is incoherent. And on THAT issue I find problems as well).
But what, then, and specifically, is the god hypothesis?
I might as well say I’m open to the existence of some undefined nonsense syllable.
Ah. I’ve got to remember to always read an entire comment before replying.
…to remember always to read…
What is more rational to believe: that our understanding about the very nature of the cosmos is radically and profoundly wrong, or that some apparently inexplicable phenomenon is actually the result of natural principles we just don’t yet fully understand?
Put another way, is it rational to believe David Copperfield really performs magic? How is that any different in principle from the case of gods?
As I see it, our rationality is deeply committed to a materialist worldview. That view predicts how the world functions to a fantastic degree. Abandoning that view for apparent supernatural phenomena has profound consequences for rationality itself.
Tulse:
1. It is the method of inquiry that is rational. The scientific approach being our most rigorous and epistemologically responsible approach. You don’t rule out what reality is at the outset (that’s what many theists do). Rather, you use the method to determine and accept the nature of reality.
The reality we accept today is radically different than one’s held in the past. And it’s damned weird: all these intricate living things being designed without a designer???!!! All of them arising from some small set of simple cells?!! The entire universe expanded from an almost unimaginably “small” point with no volume, etc? The absolute strangeness of Quantum Mechanics – so strange and counter-intuitive that some scientists thought it simply couldn’t be the case…until the evidence proved overwhelming.
The reality we now live with is different from the path and as radical and strange in it’s way as any myths. But we accept it because it has survived our most rigorous methods of empirical inquiry. If evidence starts building for some radical phenomena, for instance particles traveling much faster than the speed of light, and this evidence survives exactly the rigors of empirical inquiry that previous discoveries have surmounted, it would be irrational to suddenly say “Ok, I don’t believe in this method anymore. I refuse to go where this is leading and I refuse to acknowledge that our previous belief about physics was incorrect.”
We’d never amend any of our knowledge if we adopted that approach, would we?
For the same reason, if all manner of empirical inquiry pointed toward a certain Being as having created the universe (including this Being making Himself, His knowledge and powers empirically available to our inquiries), then it is simply special pleading to, in this one case, say “I’m not going to follow where the evidence points on this one.”
2. A God showing up who created the universe would not necessarily make our understanding of nature “profoundly wrong.” Nature may operate just as we understand it to operate.
We don’t know how life began from non-life at this point, so if it turned out this God started that ball rolling but left the rest to evolution, then our understanding of evolution isn’t demolished. Same with the beginning of the universe. We don’t know what (if anything) “caused” the universe to begin, or what “happened before.” But if a God showed up and said “your understanding of physics breaks down at Plank Density, but here’s what happened “before” that point and what I did to start things off…”
That supplies a missing link in knowledge, not that we would be “wrong” about how physics explains the subsequent inflation of our universe.
Vaal
“Plank Density” – hardwood or softwood? 😀
/@
LOL. Typing too fast. Well deserved.
Vaal
Right, but it hasn’t. At this point, it would be absurd to suggest that our understanding of the universe is so incomplete to need such a being.
A god who can change the physical universe at will would undermine not just our understanding of nature, but our very ability to understand it. As you point out, science is just applied rationality, but a god who could act without reason would make scientific inquiry meaningless. Any objective observation could be the result of divine intervention.
Tulse,
“Right, but it hasn’t. At this point, it would be absurd to suggest that our understanding of the universe is so incomplete to need such a being.”
Of course. But I thought we both understood we were discussing the question “Could there be, in principle, evidence one could rationally accept for the existence of a God?” It’s a “what if” scenario. “What could convince me there is a God?’
“A god who can change the physical universe at will would undermine not just our understanding of nature, but our very ability to understand it.”
I do not see how that follows at all. God could have made the universe just as we find it, operating exactly the same. How does this mean we would no longer understand/predict etc nature and the universe?
Merely saying a God *could* alter the universe isn’t a sufficient answer.
You’d have to have reason to conclude God *desired to alter* or *did* alter
some aspect of the universe to fool us.
Vaal
OK, but which god? Zeus? Vishnu? YHWH? Are they all equally probable? Some less than others?
The insistence of Christians to frame this argument as “our God or nothing” (hence the logical weakness of Pascal’s Wager) shouldn’t make us agree to accept their terms.
If several resurrected people congregated at my house, maybe I’d want to serve something a little more special than spaghetti for the occasion.
You aren’t a Pastafarian!
No. Maybe I’d have some Thai food delivered.
If my Sicilian grandmother made the spaghetti you might feel differently. Of course, she would also have to be resurrected.
MY spaghetti, an improvement on my maternal grandmother’s (which is an astonishing achievement)… is to die for.
But that would defeat the purpose, as my entire dinner party would be dead again.
The reference to Thomas Paine as an atheist (in the linked interview) is incorrect. While Paine disparaged religion, he was quite explicitly a deist (as were many of the leading lights of the Enlightenment).
Really got to get around to reading that Rebecca Goldstein book. I’ve had the audiobook sitting around being not listened to for far too long.
Very highly recommended, if you have read her book on Spinoza you will recognise some themes from his life.
Susan Jacoby is a saint.
Scientists never really prove anything, but instead they repeatedly confirm and fail to disprove their theories. Even the laws of gravity, and the inductive assumption that they apply the same in all parts of the universe must be regarded as an agnostic belief, subject to change if new data comes in.
That doesn’t mean we don’t precede with enormous confidence in our understanding of gravity, building skyscrapers, bridges, planes, space craft, satellites, and other enormous investments with full confidence in our theories.
This is a far cry from the fence sitting difference splitting supposedly “open-minded” view of agnosticism about God. We would be foolish to worry that gravity might change tomorrow, just it is foolish to meet religious believers in the middle on belief and doubt, because they have absolutely nothing on their side to indicate that God is real. The fist speck of real evidence produced, and I might just begin to edge away from atheism and toward the agnostic center.
So I’m agnostic about God in that infinitesimal fraction of percent that I remain open to, say, a new experiment that demonstrates in some region of space that gravity behaves as a repulsive force. If it is demonstrated conclusively I’ll change my mind about gravity. But until then we can proceed with a tremendous degree of confidence that gravity works according to our theories and measurements, and that there is no God, soul, or afterlife because there is absolutely no credible data arguing in favor of these things.
+a lot
Jacoby made a comment that I question:
By one interpretation, of course that’s true. The traditional view is that the books were written by various people, such as Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If that’s all Jacoby was saying, then I don’t question her.
However, if she was referring to divine inspiration, and the Bible being the word of God, then I do wonder if she’s correct. I’m sure most people have had 2 Timothy 3:16 quoted to them at some point, indicating that Paul believed the scriptures to be the word of God. I found an entry in the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia saying that it’s Catholic dogma to accept the divine inspiration of the Bible.
I couldn’t find much more in a few minutes of googling, and now my lunch break’s over. Any one know of any surveys done in different countries to see how many Christians believe the Bible to be divinely inspired?
“Divinely inspired” is a perfectly fine dogma to hold, because it has no actual content. “Personally inscribed and signed JHVH” or “Boomingly dictated from a mountaintop in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek” would be testable propositions, but even believers tend to avoid such specific claims. You do get fundies claiming the text is magical (like the Quran), but they’re members of the family Gaviidae (sorry, that’s an insult to actual loons).
“I’ve put bold type at the end to show that Jacoby, like Ingersoll, Dawkins (perhaps!) and myself—and unlike P.Z. or readers like Ben Goren—remains open to the possibility of God and an afterlife, no matter how remote it is. That’s the proper scientific attitude, and I have yet to be convinced that one can rule out gods, the afterlife, and so on, on first principles. ”
Well I don’t see how you can be open to the possibility of “God”. Even if you did observe something extra-ordinary, wouldn’t you as a scientist get right to work investigating it?
Even if you couldn’t find a materialistic, natural explanation for the phenomenon, I can’t imagine you giving up and throwing your hands up in the air and proclaiming “Yes that’s God because nobody on Earth can explain it”.
No, but if “God” were the best hypothesis, provided the most explanatory power, was the most parsimonious explanation, yielded testable predictions which consistently could not be falsified…
/@
Well modern science has rendered “God” irrelevant or unnecessary.
So I don’t understand how it can be invoked and revived when we encounter something quite extra-ordinary?
Ant already answered that objection.
If this new “extraordinary” phenomenon was God-like, and “if “God” were the best hypothesis, provided the most explanatory power, was the most parsimonious explanation, yielded testable predictions which consistently could not be falsified…”
Then it would be irrational and unscientific to not go with the God explanation. Science does not rule out what is real or not; it’s just a form of rigorous inquiry that something new and apparently real needs to survive pass through in order for us to provisionally accept the entity or phenomenon in question.
Vaal
Besides incorrectly claiming that Paine was an atheist, Jacoby (whose interview) I otherwise enjoyed) also makes the mistake of saying Voltaire was an atheist. I think this is an even bigger mistake, because Voltaire was a much greater writer than Paine and because Voltaire actually attacked atheism at length. He was a deist (as even wikipedia notes) and he criticized the hard-line atheism of texts like Baron D’Holbach’s “The System of Nature.”
One might argue that deists are atheists in the sense that they do not believe in any theistic deity…
/@
Before I would be open to the concept of a god existing, I would first have to be convinced that my understanding of the universe is very wrong and that we actually live in a very different type of universe. If we were living in, say, the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or one where magic actually worked, then a god existing becomes more plausible. However, this naturalistic universe just doesn’t support the existence of deities.
Jacoby is obviously unaware of my book. (Because almost everyone is. I have no marketing budget.)
If anyone cares to know what a lot of Americans thought about atheism and evolution 110 years ago, I suggest picking up my book.
http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Atheist-Nation-Godless-ebook/dp/B005PJKWUY/ref=tmm_kin_title_0
They were all big fans of Ingersoll and Paine, of course. Lots of colorful characters in there. One example: Anson A. Snow, a dairy farmer that debated evolution with preachers in his spare time. Snow was from Iowa, but Oklahoma, if you can believe it, was ground zero for evolutionary debates in the heartland, and another letter writer, Lemuel S. Welch, was one of the best advocates in the region. One debate lasted for 8 days, in 1903, and all participants had dinner together every night. (This was back when Christians were more sure of their position.)
Thought I’d add a snippet from Lemuel S. Welch’s letter:
“In nature, nothing is unimportant but a god; he is ignored in every case in which our information is exhaustive. Bumblebees are necessary to the fertilization of red clover, and the increase of a poultry yard may depend upon the ‘preacher’ propensity of a bobtailed rooster, but nothing depends upon the existence of a god.”
May 24, 1903