UPDATE: Some people in the comments are indulging in various psychological speculations about Eric’s motivations, health, etc. That is simply not on here, and I’ll delete posts like that. We must take the man at his word that he is leaving for the reasons given below, and then engage those reasons. Please avoid personal comments.
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The former Anglican priest Eric MacDonald—I say “former” guardedly, as he never officially left the priesthood—taught me a lot about theology, for which I’m very grateful. But now he has finally parted company with New Atheism, and announced that decision in a long post on his website Choice in Dying:”In which I take my leave from the New Atheism.” Much of the post consists of exchanges Eric had with either me or other commenters on this site, and perhaps you’ll be familiar with some of it.
I’ve put below the two crucial paragraphs in which Eric summarizes his reasons for fleeing New Atheism:
However, as time went on I found myself at loggerheads with much that sailed under the banner of the New Atheism, finding its conception of religion so contrary to anything that I would have said about my faith in earlier years that I find myself no longer able to associate myself with this movement. Much that new atheists say about religion is simply so much straw. Of course, it does apply to the fundamentalists and some evangelicals (two separate points of view), but some Christian theology is so much more sophisticated than this as to make much new atheist opposition to religion sophistical. Some of that theology may simply be composed of what have come to be known as “deepities”, though that classification seems to me to have arisen because of the unwillingness of atheists to engage with what theologians and other religious believers have to say in defence of their worldview. And that it is an opposition of worldviews is, I think, something that has been lost sight of.
I think some of this comes out in the following conversation. There seems to be a belief that theology must simply be delusional, because there is no objective supernatural existent corresponding to the word ‘god’ — or at least that no “slam-dunk” arguments can be produced for such an existent. Consequently, it has become fairly normative to believe that religion has to do with “confected” entities, and religious thought itself not only delusional but even pathological. (Boghossian — in his book on making atheists — repeats the accusation that faith is pathological in his book so often that one is reminded of the George Orwell’s 1984, or the common practice in the Soviet Union of placing dissidents in psychiatric hospitals. There is a deeply threatening aspect to the belief that those whose ideas you oppose are somehow mentally ill, or victims of pathological ways of thinking in need of a cure.) I do not think this is true, even though I dissent from much that is said in defence of Christianity. Empirical science is not the only source of truth or understanding. Indeed, I believe that the new atheism is quickly attaching itself to beliefs that are as dogmatic and irrational as many religious dogmas, and to a kind of ideological certitude that may be as dangerous as the ideologies of the past that caused so much harm in the course of what Robert Conquest has called The Ravaged Century.
I find the first reason odd because, when I was beginning to read theology, Eric made a number of valuable suggestions for readings in Sophisticated Theology™, but always added that he doubted that I’d find anything substantive in it. For he didn’t, and, sure enough, I didn’t, either. Now, however, he seems to have changed his mind, and implies that there is something substantive in such works—and that we New Atheists are simply too obtuse or blinkered to detect it.
But there isn’t anything substantive. Before you can discuss the nature of God, however deep and nuanced your discussion, you have to provide rational arguments for the existence of a God. No theologian, however sophisticated, has done that to my satisfaction, and I’ve read a lot of them. Absent such convincing evidence, theology simply becomes academic speculation about the nature of an unevidenced being.
Further, Eric doesn’t seem to realize that many New Atheists, including many on this site, were former believers and are in fact quite aware of even the most sophisticated theological arguments. I’m always impressed at how much knowledge there is about the arguments of people like Plantinga, Haught, Richard Swinburne, or even C. S. Lewis. It’s almost as if we have no right to even discuss God until we have precisely the same knowledge of theology as does Eric.
But that is theological Whack-a-Mole. I, and others on this site, have really tried to engage the arguments of those Sophisticated Theolgians™ who have promulgated and defended their worldviews. But what can you say about someone like, for example, Alvin Plantinga, who simply asserts that it is “reasonable” to believe in God as a “basic belief,” because the Christian God has endowed us with a special sensus divinitatis to detect divinity? That’s a supposedly sophisticated argument, but fails on two counts, both of which we’ve discussed. (What about those who don’t have that sense, or whose sense tells them that another religion is true? And what do you say to the argument that because it is not irrational to believe in a God, that therefore one must take it seriously? You can say the same thing about UFOs or any unevidenced supernatural or paranormal phenomenon) Most believers hold their beliefs because they think they’re based on something true about the universe; but so long as those believers cannot adduce evidence for that truth that convinces the rest of us, we needn’t take them seriously. There are no “slam-dunk” arguments against fairies or Bigfoot, either, but grownups don’t take them seriously—for the same reason we New Atheists don’t take God seriously. Empirical investigation is not about “slam dunk” arguments, but about the best explanations for phenomena.
As for “other ways of understanding,” I claim that Eric was never able to produce a single “way of understanding” truths about our universe that didn’t at bottom rest on empirical evidence and reason. The examples he gave—history, archaeology, and so on—use precisely the methods of science to fathom truth. So if by “understanding” Eric means “apprehending what is true about the cosmos” (after all, he says “truth or understanding”), let him list the truths apprehended by “other ways of understanding.”
Finally, I don’t consider religious people mentally ill, but there’s a case to be made that they are delusional—delusional in the same way that people are deluded about homeopathy, UFOs, or the Loch Ness Monster. All of those believers are victims of a delusion in the sense that the Oxford English Dictionary uses the word “delusion”:
a. Anything that deceives the mind with a false impression; a deception; a fixed false opinion or belief with regard to objecting things, esp. as a form of mental derangement
The part I agree with here is that religious teachings do give people false impressions (though not usually promulgated by others intending to deceive), and proffer fixed false opinions or beliefs with regard to obecting things. I wouldn’t go so far as to call religion a “mental derangement,” but it’s certainly a deviation from the kind of things that people accept as “true” in their daily life. It is accepting things of the greatest import for one’s life without sufficient evidence for so doing.
We see not an iota of evidence for a god when there should be such evidence, and therefore can provisionally assume that a god doesn’t exist—or, at our most charitable, can suspend judgment on the issue. (Most skeptics, however, don’t “suspend judgment” on the existence of Xenu, Thor, or Bigfoot). Therefore, a firm belief in an unevidenced God—and most Americans do have such firm belief—is a delusion, based on wish-thinking and a “false impression.”
In claiming that New Atheists are obtuse in understanding the real meaning of religion, and that there are other ways beyond science of apprehending truth (but refusing to specify which truths are apprehended), Eric has now allied himself with the religious community he supposedly abandoned. I am very sad about this “deconversion,” and don’t really understand the reasons, but we have clearly failed to engage his apostasy. My one suggestion for him, should he be reading this, is to engage not us, but the former ministers who form the private community of the Clergy Project. For it is there one can find other ministers, many once deeply engaged in faith, who decided to leave it all behind. Surely not all of those can be accused of misunderstanding religion!
I think it is pretty damning that theists advance people like Plantinga and C. S. Lewis as deep thinkers we should respect, when their arguments are so shallow and easily-refuted.
Where is theology’s Euclid, or Euler, or Gauss? If there really were a god whose qualities were clear, wouldn’t there be the same kind of agreement as we see among mathematicians?
Lewis had some interesting ideas in The Great Divorce about how to solve the unfairness of hell. But he had to do it by rejecting major traditional notions of Christian theology (such as, one must be Christian, or believe, or ask forgiveness to go to heaven). In an earlier age, I suspect he would’ve been labeled a heretic, not feted as a Christian apologist.
Two more heretical notions in that book:
Hell is a place where on torments oneself psychologically (with regret, loneliness, etc), rather than Dante style physical torture. You can have anything physical comfort you want, but it lacks purpose or substance in contrast to Heaven.
Heaven kept trying to convince you, even after death (in a far more and active and compelling way than anything Heaven does on earth). It seems unlikely that in those circumstances anyone would reside in Hell, but Lewis, perhaps showing his Brit prejudice, makes it clear that Napoleon, obsessed with his defeat, is doomed to stay.
The interesting thing is that all of these changes are necessary to make Hell seem at all just and not monstrous, and they are all thoroughly un-Biblical.
…not to mention that they are as thoroughly unscientific and absurd as Never-Never Land.
Again, constructing self-consistent, even “sophisticated” fantasies about how one might want the world to work isn’t a challenge. Authors and poets have been doing that for many more millennia than Christians have been cannibalizing their gods. The hard part is separating the fantasy from reality. Science is the only tool we know of that does a decent job at that; theology quite trivially demonstrably fails most miserably in that endeavor.
b&
Well, as much as it pains me, in fairness to Lewis, it is a novel, not a textbook.
And, in equal fairness to Lewis, all the theological parables he presented in his novels he also presented as straight-up theology in his theological writings.
b&
Doesn’t surprise me; I’d observed a while back that his association with atheism seemed mainly a pushback against the religious interference with the right of wife to end her life the way she wished. It struck me as unlikely that one who had devoted the bulk of his life to theism could renounce it so completely.
Eric, you’re leaving New Atheism for what? Old Atheism? Theism? Deism? In the end you have to answer this question: Is there any evidence for a god?
My question as well. Also, many say that “New Atheism” is a misnomer – that there’s nothing actually new about it. So I’m not sure that repudiating New Atheism necessarily distances one from the specific arguments claimed as distasteful. Unless… atheism, in its entirety, is being repudiated.
I think the fact that “New Atheism” has stuck is somewhat unfortunate. It makes it seem like we’re just forming a clique to satisfy an urge to belong and to create in/out-groups.
There is no “regular” atheism to which to subscribe if “new” atheism isn’t to your liking. There are no arguments that you can say belong only to “regular” or only to “new” atheism. It’s just atheism. People are simply looking at our growing tendency not to back down as the formation of a separate movement.
Yea. And the label was applied by theists / accommodationists, not the “New Atheists” themselves. Those others are the ones doing the partition building. It is a time honored way of painting a target on others that are preceived as a threat of some kind. Works great even if the label is inaccurate, as in this case.
It’s a bit silly, really. When people ask, I’m simply respond with “Atheist”. Nothing new about it…..furthermore “Gnu” means wilderbeast in danish.
Not a Bison or a Yak?
Brilliant. From now on I’m a Yak atheist. 🙂
For some reason the word, just the sound not the meaning, brings a smile to my face.
Damn. The word I am referring to is YAK. See, I’m smiling right now.
I recall Sesame Street had a gnu cartoon. It’s a memory locked up there from the 70s.
The term Gnu Atheist was coined (Coyned?) to make fun of the newly minted term New Atheist. I can’t remember the details but as I recall it was inspired by a picture of a Gnu that had an “lol catz” style caption over laid on it. Can’t find the damn picture though.
Again, I can’t remember, but it may have been Jerry himself that came up with the term. He definitely posted on it when it was first minted.
Ah, I see. That clarifies it a bit.
And I wish we would’ve continued in that “what is up with this ridiculous new (ha) category” vein.
Sometimes people draw an analogy with the homosexual community embracing the term “gay”. The problem with that analogy is that “new atheism” is not a legitimate category and to embrace the term would be to legitimize it. It would be to say there are different ways to be an atheist. Will different individuals express their atheism differently based on their unique personalitirs? Sure. But that’s superficial and beside the point.
‘Gnu’ means wildebeast in English too; the label is an intentional play on words. Though I’m not sure what the original intention of that play was.
Got it. Still prefer Yak, though.:-)
Gnu’s Not Unix
b&
GNU is Not Unix. Bison is a GNU parser. YACC = yet another compiler compiler :).
I always thought it was to make fun of the unnecessary modifier.
Yes. “Gnu” is a modifier-in-jest.
Godless nullifidian unbelieving atheist.
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@Ben
Yep, I’m a true Gnu Atheist. Been using various flavours of Gnu/Linux for … well, ever since Windoze 3.1 fell over through old age, whenever that was.
Not sure how well Richard Stallman would take the appropriation of ‘Gnu’ to mean ‘atheist’ (though I guess he’d be an atheist himself). But I’m sure it will come as no surprise to the folks hear to learn that the Free Software world, living as it does on the Internet, can never agree whether the family of Unix lookalikes should be called Linux, Gnu/Linux or just Gnu…
I’m more of a BSD guy, myself….
b&
Not a masochist then? 😜
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I like my operating systems sane — at least, the ones I use to get shit done.
b&
Oh, you were talking about *operating systems* …
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Well, just look at all the ways that vendor lock-ins hold you in bondage to some really sadistic shit — especially the dominant ones. As you noted, I ain’t a masochist!
b&
(@Ben…)
What, the one with the demon…?
No, the one with the pufferfish, actually….
b&
When people ask I simply respond “Atheist”. Nothing new about it.
double trouble. My bad.
I identify as a “middle-aged atheist.”
Ignostic apathist if puished, but I am a smartarse.
Had they said “Vocal Atheist”, “Outspoken Atheist”, or “Public Atheist” that would have been more accurate than “New Atheist”, but also would have given their speech regulation game away.
The theists/accomodations like their atheists quiet, respectful, and preferably sad or at least a bit wistful.
If there is anything new about the “new atheists” it is the lack of a sympathetic position towards religious moderation. This is the position that, at least, FEELS new. And I believe it is the position that seems to have riled up the self described “agnostics” the most.
Perhaps it can be said that the “old atheists” saw religious moderation as a means to a good end, where as the “new atheists” write it off as being even less rational than fundamentalist religion.
Does anyone else feel that this may be the dividing line, at least in perception, between old and new atheism?
I don’t know if it divides “old” from “gnu” but I agree that this is precisely what drives liberal believers crazy. They can’t understand how their “nice” beliefs can be lumped in with the “obviously crazy” beliefs of people who are doing Christianity the wrong way. They hate it, but I see no reason why they shouldn’t be forced to own the problem. They legitimize faith as a reason to act in the world and if it works for them it works just as well for the “bad guys”.
Nor, it seems, can Eric.
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Think we are all just thoroughly sick of cow towing and being told what to do by people who’s beliefs are based in fantasy. And furthermore they occupy some useful real estate that could be put to better purposes.
I’d prefer religious moderation ( depending on how we define that, of course ) over literalism any day, but I don’t in any way see it is as an end-justifies-the-means approach.
I honestly think the only difference between new atheism and old atheism is the amount of evidence and knowledge we have about natural processes.
Still no sign of any gods and the gaps are getting smaller day by day.
The old atheists didn’t have much sympathy for religious positions, either; see pretty much anything Twain wrote, or Jefferson’s commentary on the Virgin Birth…or Epicurus….
b&
Ecclesiastes is one of a very few books in the Bible that contains something of substance. When pejorative “strident New Atheist” this and “fundamentalist New Atheist” gets slung around I think of atheist’s past I read about every morning here http://ffrf.org/news/day/ at the FFRF Morning Newsletter, containing brief biographies of atheist’s whose birthday fall on that date.
Strident anti-atheist religious persons don’t like anything atheist under any circumstances ever, but they particularly don’t like atheists who presume to publish and disseminate.
Atheists today risk imprisonment, death, and state tolerance of vigilante violence in many countries when they are found out, and publishing on the internet or elsewhere, the antithesis of concealment, is to risk liberty and even life.
Atheist’s in past centuries risked all of the above in every country in both Christendom and the Ottoman Empire well into the 18th Century. When I compare the most vehement commentary from past with present, hands down some of those earlier author’s utilized more incendiary vitriol than contemporary free thinkers presently employ. Perhaps the level of hostility was a direct result to the level of violence authority at the time threatened them with.
There is an xkcd cartoon I would link to if I could devise a search term to locate. It is two panels, each with one stick figure wearing a black floor length robe and cardinal’s cap, holding a Bible, and the other figure a hatless schlub nobody.
In Panel 1 the cardinal orders the schlub to “Shut up!”, and hatless guy is silent as he obsequiously bows his head. The panel is captioned Old Atheist.
The cardinal also commands “Shut up!” in panel two, but this time schlub guy resolutely returns and replies, simply, “No.” This panel’s caption is New Atheist.
Ecclesiastes? Why the hell did he mention that?
I forgot to follow that sentence with “There is nothing new under the sun.”
… schlub guy resolutely returns his gaze and replies …
It never fails to amaze me how these mistakes are invisible when I proofread before posting, and then glow like neon after permanent placement.
I’ll be the odd duck in this comment string and say that I like the term “new atheist,” not as a suggestion that there is anything new about atheism itself, but rather as the name of the new movement of atheists who are no longer content to sit quietly while the religionists put a picture of Jesus in every courthouse and suppress the teaching of any scientific principle that doesn’t comport with their Bronze Age bibles. To me, “New Atheists” is an apt term to differentiate people like Dawkins and Hitchens (and Jerry) from either the “closet” or accomodationist atheists. In that sense, people like Robert Ingersoll and Bertram Russell were also New Atheists.
I actually don’t mind the label either. And I actively like the label Gnu Atheist. I do like to point out, though, that the label is inaccurate.
I somewhat agree.
Actually I kind of assumed Eric McDonald used it that way too. So when he says he’s leaving new atheism, I took that to mean he’s leaving the “social activist wing” concerned (among other things) with promoting the visibility and acceptance of atheism.
I don’t know.
Sure, I guess you can scrape together sone kind of use for the term, as you did.
But I think it is primarily intended and perceived as a pejorative and as an attempt at dismissal. “Oh of course he’d say that. He’s just one of those uppity New Atheists. We can dismiss what he says as extremism. It’s the Regular Atheists I pay attention to.” Really? Who are these Regular Atheists? Guess what. WE are regular atheists.
It is a divide and conquer tactic.
In addition to being ‘out’ and openly disrepectful of religion, I had thought that New Atheism also promotes the view that organized religion is bad, on the whole, and so New Atheists try to get people to see that.
Sure. But is that unique to this phantom category “New Atheism”?
If you start talking about the specific reasons for opposing organized religion you’ll find that many groups and individuals that wouldn’t get lumped in with the “New Atheists”, including some stripes of theists, would agree with some of those reasons.
Bad when it attempts to impose religious beliefs on others. In the same way as opera fans are bad when they try to convince one to listen to endless Wagner.
An excellent case in point.
Not all opera fans are Wagner fans. And while I enjoy some Wagner, I would not call myself an opera fan. I like much if the music you find *in* operas, but I’m not particularly partial to the art form itself. I can understand why non- musicians might find it silly and unwieldy.
These issues are not amenable to neat and tidy categorization.
When it attempts to do it with coercion and violence, then yes, bad.
Unless they’re outright lying and obviously trying to scam listeners, I don’t blame people for proselytizing.
If it’s within law and the law is reasonable then changing the opinion and mind of a fellow H.Sapien is fair game.
I’ve seen a few theists use anti-theist in distinction from mere atheist for those atheists that are critical of religion as opposed to just not believing in God.
Aside from the most blatant accomodationists, I think atheists have at lest some criticisms of religion, I think it’s largely a distinction without a difference.
I don’t like “anti-theist,” as it implies one is against theists. I would, however, embrace, “anti-theismist.”
b&
“anti-theismist.”
Too many syllables for many people. It also implies “mist” instead of clarity.
Yes, but it’s anti mist, which means it’s for clarity…just to…um…be…ah…clear….
b&
That’s the problem with “antithismist”. The inevitable mumble/stumble/typos.
I’m happy to call myself an anti-theist, although I do agree that I’m opposed to the beliefs not to the actual people, many of which are friendly and serve good food.
I’m not “scraping” anything together. I’m pretty sure that anyone who is paying attention (either on the theist or the atheist side)understands the term “new atheist” to mean someone who is part of the new movement of vocal atheists — not that there is anything “new” about atheism itself. A 2010 CNN Article defined the term as “social and political movement in favor of atheism and secularism promoted by a collection of modern atheist writers who have advocated the view that religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.” In my view, this hits the nail squarely on the head. Thus, if religionists and accomodationists use the phrase “new atheist” as a term of disparagement against people like Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennett, then I would consider being called a new atheist a badge of honor. It reminds me of the Republicans trying to make the term “liberal” a dirty word — when your adversary tries to tarnish your name you need to stiffen your spine, not run away.
(The above comment was addressed to “Musical Beef)
(Apologies if the term “scrape together” came off as insulting. That certainly my wasn’t my intent.)
But that description from CNN would apply to a lot of “old” atheism also.
So what if there are some atheists that are more vocal and more uncompromising? So what if there are some atheists who are less willing to rock the boat? These are personality differences that have nothing to do with atheism.
I think the utility of the term (ie, using it to refer to atheists with bolder personalities) is outweighed by the negative consequences of its use, which I’ve enumerated up and down this subthread.
Musical Beef: the apology is appreciated, but wasn’t required.
Your “so what?” is clearly the difference between your position and mine. Some folks (like the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne) are doing what many of us consider to be incredibly important work, by actively opposing the efforts of the religious right to turn this country into a science-free Christian theocracy. From my perspective, there IS an important (and name-worthy) distinction between those atheists who are actively working to resist that theocracy, and those who sit on the sidelines and say “so what?”
Perhaps you simply don’t see the same threat that some of us do. If you can find a copy of the FFRF’s newspaper, you might read some of the voluminous hate mail they receive each month to understand why some of us are terrified at the prospect of these nutjobs and their ilk ever gaining any more power than they already have.
Oh, I see the same threat. And I see the need for vocal, uncompromising atheism. For pragmatic reasons my atheism in meat space has to assume a low profile, but here on the tubez I’m as uncompromising as the next atheist. We need bold atheists. My “so what” point was just that the term New Atheist just seems to be based on the personalities of certain atheists, and doesn’t really have anything to do with their atheism – why they are atheists and why they think atheism is the appropriate conclusion.
I just think embracing the term was a mistake. As Darrelle wrote, it’s a target-painting technique, and as I wrote, it’s a divide and conquer tactic, which has obviously (cf formerly-uncle Eric) had some success.
Do I think it’s a huge deal? No. Atheism will be fine. But I do think the term is a mistake.
Yes and I really would like to know what we’re all missing in understanding the sophisticated theologians.
Well, Diana, you must read them, of course.
That is something that just doesn’t work, Eric. Are they so sophisticated that they can’t be explained except in the complete full-text version?
I could give a reasonable description of how natural selection works without insisting that the questioner read all of the volumes in the Biology section of the library. And I’m not a biologist.
Exactly.
We’ve most of us read at least some of them, and Jerry’s read all the ones you’ve suggested. And none of us can identify anything of substance in any of them. And every time apologists for sophisticated theology — you included, in this case, though maybe you’ll finally prove me worng — argue for it, none can point to any specific examples.
How long must one conduct a snipe hunt before concluding that there’s no snipe to be hunted?
b&
But if I were to read them, I’d come at them from my perspective. You suggest that the New Atheists are missing something and as a life long atheist it would hold that I would miss this same thing. You must have something in mind when you say we are missing something so I’m interested in hearing what that is from you.
I doubt that those who issue admonition a to read this that or the other actually have anything specific in mind when they say you’re missing something.
They just feel that there must, simply must, be something you’re missing, and if they throw enough literature at you there’ll probably be something in there to address whatever that missing something is. No details required.
Which ones?
I think that the very simplistic reply to this (I’m simple, me!) is “Why”?
The problem is something of a disconnect, the discussion is going on at 2 different levels at once. I’m aware that theologians have put a lot of thought into their work, but the Gnus are asking the question at a more fundamental level. If one is not to throw the baby out with the bath water, one must first discern whether the baby is actually present.
*This* is the Gnus’ problem – all the logic and pontificating in the world is irrelevant if the foundation of what is being argued has either been demonstrated to be incorrect, or is completely out of the realms of what can be demonstrated.
How can Eric dismiss the theological work of other religions? I mean that they can not all be correct. How are we, as Gnus, to discern this, let alone between the various sects within the religions (hence the fundamentalist discussion on an earlier post)?
Now, maybe the Sophisticated Theologians (TM) could have some use here. Get representatives of all religions and sects in to a very big room and get them to decide which is the best “God” to fight their corner. Excellent. I’d be interested to see how that one works out for everyone involved but I wouldn’t be holding my breath.
Sorry, Eric, but if all of these intelligent and erudite folks have completely different ideas of the divine then how the hell is someone on the outside supposed to choose which one is true? It all looks like nonsense from here. And we haven’t even got in to what the rank-and-file believe: they have been somewhat poorly served by their supposed teachers if “truth” was their goal.
“How can Eric dismiss the theological work of other religions?”
Excellent. The christian apologist has clearly not engaged esoteric Islamic/Hindu/Sikh/etc theology sufficiently. How can the Christian apologist so confidently dismiss those other religions?
Getting through the (to them) essential differences between the 30,000+ Christian sects would take long enough; and of course there isn’t ‘a’ Buddhist or Hindu or Islamic theology – they all contain myriads of contentious views.
Well, that’s a good point. To paraphrase Stephen Roberts: ‘When you understand why you don’t feel the need to read 20 books on Hindu theology, you will understand why I don’t feel the need to read 20 books on Christian theology.’ 🙂
However I would also point out that Eric seems to take a very expansive view of what counts as Christian theology. In one post in this thread, he said belief in god is not necessary! So he might also go with the “I’m not dismissing them, I think they argue for the same concept using different terms” gambit. I’m speculating there. He’s been lurking on this thread a bit so maybe he’ll answer you directly.
He does! A view that I would suggest is not very Christian at all, keeping the Nicene Creed in mind as an approximation of Christianity. For all I know I’m out of date in Sophisticated Theologian-land, but God as alpha-and-omega plus some sort of magic resurrection story for JC are the bare minimum.
I can’t think of a way of looking at Eric’s argument that doesn’t seem broken.
1) We already see that he discounts mainstream Christian common-or-garden theology. This makes specific truth claims that are demonstrably incorrect.
2) Eric talks about more abstract theology. This either retreats into complete agnosticism, and at best sits poorly with 1 above, if not opposes it completely.
3) Taking other religions into account just makes things messier, with their own truth claims that mutually exclude either 1 or 2.
It’s annoying. Sophistamacated Theologians seem to work around a nasty combination of internal consistence and lack of verifiability. At least day-to-day religion offers tangible results. The biggest one, natch, only after you die in most cases.
*sigh*
I’ve read a few “sophisticated” theologians — as well as several popular “spiritual” books — and found much that was wise, good, and valuable in them. I could relate, I could learn, I could grow. I enjoyed them.
But this only happened when and if they were either on secular humanist ground, or were using “God” or “Spirit” so loosely that it was easy as pie to retranslate it into something consistent with secular humanism (like someone telling a member of AA that their “Higher Power” could be a goal or principle.)
That negates none of the New Atheist criticisms. Why?
Because, as the apocryphal Samuel Johnson did not actually write in a book review, “Your manuscript is both good and original, but what is original is not good, and what is good is not original.”
For “original,” you may substitute “religious.” By the time a theist admits that their religion cares more about Good than God, they’re not a theist.
“By the time a theist admits that their religion cares more about Good than God, they’re not a theist.”
Yes!
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Sastra and Gordon Hill from down thread a bit might want to have a chat.
Frankly, I see very little point examining others’ ruminations on a given god’s characteristics until even the prior plausibility of that god’s existence can be demonstrated.
That might sound simplistic and even dismissive to some people; however in almost all other categories of thought and discussion, suspension of belief in a particular thing is perfectly understandable pending presentation of supporting evidence or even a solid argument. Christian theologians do not appear to present arguments for their god’s existence; almost to a man they presuppose it and work backwards to justify it.
Courtroom analogies are often used when discussing the burden of proof that all believers carry; however, prior to a trial there is a hearing where a judge decides whether there is even a case strong enough to merit said trial. The Christian god, our proposed defendant, hasn’t even been apprehended, let alone charged. All we have to go on are nth-hand reports and descriptions which vary wildly from one to the next – no contemporary eyewitness accounts which are verified or trustworthy (few which are even prima facie plausible) and some that are even known to be forged.
There simply is no case for God to answer until he presents himself.
Beat me to it.
Eric, the issue is simple. Painfully simple. It could not be more simple: “New” atheists, if you must, simply and uncompromisingly ask theists to show us the evidence. Actual, objective evidence. Not philosophical conjecture, not the authority of a holy book/clergyperson/parent, not subjective warm fuzzies.
Everything else is commentary. (Often very important commentary, but commentary nonetheless.)
We should be clear that suggesting that religious beliefs are delusional is not at all the same as saying that the religious are mentally ill.
Being deluded is entirely normal for all of us! Our brains are not perfect, they are just cobbled together by evolution, and can be readily fooled.
All of us are fooled by optical illusions and continue to be so, even though we know we’re being fooled!
Did you know that 85% of students put themselves above the median in ability to get on with others, and that 25% put themselves in the top 1%?
Scientists know full well how easy it is for us to be fooled. That’s why medical trials are double-blinded.
Thus the religious should not see the suggestion that they are “deluded” as an outrageous slur akin to calling them mentally ill or adovcating that they be locked up. It is something that scientists always consider about themselves, and the religious should do likewise.
That lack is perhaps the biggest difference between the scientific approach and the religious one. Wanting to have “faith” is wanting to fool oneself.
You beat me to it! And with a far clearer account of the argument than my own.
It is if you define it that way.
I read somewhere that beliefs that you have been holding when you reached the age of 18 are extremely hard to get rid of. I view religious belief as mainly a result of brainwashing. Catholic schools are good at this (they didn’t brainwash me), but madrasses are even better.
There is a tendency to try to rescue existing beliefs, rather than replacing them with ones that work better.
I’ve observed this in teaching students….when a student is doing something incorrectly and you can show why his justification for doing it that way is wrong, he will come up with a new reason to avoid changing his behavior.
For instance, when you point out that the religious justification for circumcision is ridiculous, defenders will point to the supposed public health improvement as justification for keeping the ritual.
Throwing good money after bad is a very human trait. We don’t like giving up sunk costs, be they actual dollars or simply years of commitment to some cause.
Now if only we could move beyond the rather cynical impression of the mentally ill and realize that it is not an insult to be compared to such people.
*necessarily.;-)
+1
Yes to all of that.
Yet, being misguided or having perceptual blindspots is not quite the same as acquiring and maintaining a delusion, religious or otherwise, (alien abduction et. al.).
I think that beliefs acquired and practiced during development might physically exist in the brain as a kind of “firmware” that resists change. Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, (finding others of like beliefs) act to lock that physical brain state.
There is no question that incorrect beliefs are “mental”. I think that a brain which holds a belief that resists change despite that which evidences it to the contrary could be considered ill. It cannot be healthy to habitually mistake cognitive feedback. Certainly there are any number of untoward beliefs the consequences of holding could be unforgiving. Like the idea that I can fly.
good point! And the problem would be that religious people refuse to believe that they are being fooled or lied to either because they are too arrogant or because they have been too abused by a system that is all to happy to exploit the weak.
Ummm. Muy interesante’.
Could this be a manifestation of something that’s really gone amok w/ Eric? Something chemical? Neurological? Physiological?
It’s just too strange not to have some sort of acute, dysfunctional cause.
Be kind to MacDonald. He changed his mind once. Just because he is changing again doesn’t make it pathological.
It’s not civil or justifiable to speculate about Eric’s health, mental or otherwise, and if I see other comments like this, I’ll delete them. All we should do is engage with his arguments against New Atheism.
My sincere apologies. I didn’t mean to be offensive and I did not mean to suggest that there was anything “pathological” about his condition.
Could not the argument be put forward that delusion is, not just not a sign of being mentally ill, but a part of a sane mind? IIRC normally people have an unreasonably positive view of their abilities and life, whereas people with depression usually have a far more accurate judgment of their abilities.
Perhaps the more mainstream religion feeds off of this “natural delusion”, enabling the believes to keep it up? However when God starts talking back we can definitely go back to the mental illness trope.
The great divide I sense between the New Atheist movement, if it is such, is in the characterization of religion as theistic only which is in contrast with the studied view which includes non-theistic religions as well.
I’d like to hear more from Eric re: that the New Atheists address mostly fundamentalism. It may be that is a common perception though I’ve heard Sam Harris consciously address liberal religions as (and I’m paraphrasing) providing the shade under which fundamentalist religions can thrive. Perhaps there needs to be more explicit discussion that directly addresses liberal theism.
The current flavors of christianity, even the most liberal ones, are all derived from the original. The sources for all of them are the bible and a few other writings, and tradition. So if, as most liberal christians will say when on the defensive, you think that all those source materials are bullshit, or just the poetic day dreams of an ancient, ignorant by current standards, people, how is it reasonable to still get jehovah, jesus, salvation, heaven and whatnot out of it? I mean, if 75% of the bible is bullshit, what reason to believe that any of it is accurate? The only legitimate way to get to a religion of peace and love is to discard the bible, jesus and all the related stuff and start from scratch.
That’s been done, only we don’t call that sort of thing, “religion,” any more. At first, we called it the Enlightenment. Then we called it modern civilization. On smaller scales, some call it, “Humanism.”
b&
Eggggzzactly.
Which brings to mind another contradiction that always cracks me up. Or makes me grind my teeth, depending on how I’m feeling at the moment. Believers often scorn Humanism as being dangerously or offensively vain. This is why the Irony Meter sector will always rate highly for job security.
Try ACME brand. I find I only have to replace them a few times a week. Sure, they cost more each, but they’ll pay for themselves in just a year or so.
b&
If they’re good enough for Wile E Coyote…
Of course, Sam Harris is right. Liberal Christianity does give shelter to the virulent kind of fundamentalism that is now casting it shadow over much of Africa. American fundamentalists who can’t get their way in the US have finally found rich ground for their idiocy. So, I don’t dissent from Harris’s point, and have made it myself.
Me, too; however, my point is that, in my limited experience, many, if not most, New Atheists dismiss non-theistic religions as non-religions, a point with which many UUs, Buddhists, and others disagree, even the emerging non-theistic movements in Judaism and Christianity.
While I am uncertain as to the reason for this disconnect, I suspect it has something to do with the quest for certainty within science and the absolute absence of same within religions.
The concept of non-theistic religion seems to require a new concept of the term religion. Perhaps that has already begun, but, I’m pretty sure that a key aspect of religion, as the term has been used for a long time, is the worship of a god of some sort.
Not according to religious scholars. If scientists insist on using scientific terms like ‘theory’ appropriately, which I support, then it seems fair that religious scholars should be afforded a similar courtesy. One place to begin would be a recognized reference like The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions or the website http://www.religioustolerance.org/ but be careful, religious scholars don’t have the evidence scientists enjoy.
What I failed to mention is that the Oxford reference does not identify humanism as a religion, but many humanists do. Religion is not easily characterized as evidenced by the three hundred or so recognized Protestant denominations.
I don’t doubt what you say, but my conception of what religion means is common enough that every single source for the definition of the word that pops up on a search for “religion define” includes worship of a deity in the 1st meaning. I am not saying that is definitive, but I guess I am opining that if you aren’t worshipping a deity why continue to call it religion? I know there are always some examples that just don’t fit very nicely in any existing category, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an existing term that suits non-deistic religions better than “religion.”
It’s a question of whether to follow conventional wisdom or use the accepted vernacular of the professionals. The first definition of theory is “a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something”
Which professionals?
Good question. My answer would be serious scholars in a given field. For religion I would begin with a recognized university department dedicated to the field as a starting point, then consider the views of those seen as experts in the field. For example, if you checked the University of Chicago, an above average school, I believe, you would find this in the under graduate catalog, “Students in the program are able to explore numerous religious traditions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism…”
When Gordon Hill uses a word…
It’s possible to get some very interesting hits if you start defining religion without a deity.
For instance, were Stalinism and Nazism political cults of personality, or genuine religions in this context? In both there was a certain invocation of magic, Nazism being far more explicitly esoteric.
Is any dogma potentially religious?
Or present-day North Korea.
There’s also pseudo science, but I reckon that overlaps with religion in that it is induced by wishful thinking or an attempt to find meaning in a universe, where the idea of meaning (or purpose) as an *absolute* is illusory.
Yeah. In those examples though, and in the example of North Korea, there is a very prominent deity like analog central to the “religion”.
I think “political cult of personality” covers Stalinism and Nazism better than “religion”. With North Korea religion might be more accurate. Though I have to wonder how wide spread “Jongism” is outside of the jong’s own minds. Do the adherents believe or merely behave as if they do because to do otherwise surly means a much shorter and much more miserable life?
North Korea is an interesting one, I agree. The only country currently to be ruled by someone who died years ago.
However “superhuman” feats have also been associated with Mao… and there was a whole load of racial mystic tosh like “Blood and Soil” wrapped up in Nazism. The USSR was not quite that bad, but didn’t take any notice of reality when it went against it’s dogmas!
It’s funny that there are no claims by these (obviously) warped systems that have not also been claimed by religions. Hmm, maybe we should call these systems “Cargo Cult Religions” – if they wear enough religious trappings they finally become one?
Convergent Delusional Religioideoligies?
It sure seems very likely that at least some religions could have evolved in some way similar to that. Religogenesis?
That has a nice ring to it. You might be on to something.
Hmm…I’m not sure it will pass the five-pint audible test, though. Too many vowels….
Surely (new) atheism is opposed to only theistic religions by definition?
So, likely, “religion” is a typically a(n implicit) shorthand for “theistic religion”.
However, I cited Grayling as making the explicit distinction that a religion involves at least one supernatural agent of some kind; and thus that non-theistic “religions” were better considered as philosophies.
Elsewhere, Alan Watts, a respected authority on Buddhism stresses that Zen Buddhism is not a religion, agreeing with Grayling’s categorisation.
In Iceland, and possibly elsewhere, “life stance” is the superset of all of these, including humanism.
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While there is disagreement within religious scholarship as to what constitutes religion, there is no consensus w.r.t. the requirement for a deity. Alan Watts is certainly a recognized authority in many areas, but is one voice among many. As for Grayling, he is a philosopher, a brilliant one, and another singular voice which poses what he sees as ‘right’, but is not the ultimate authority. Back to my original point: among religious scholars, there seems to be — and in my limited reading is — a consensus that religion need not be theistic. That’s all. A New Atheism insistence otherwise limits any discussion, which, IMHO, cannot advance understanding.
The definition of words varies according to context & culture. Atheists, generally, just find that there isn’t sufficient evidence for deities. What could be simpler?
So… If you wish to use the word “religion” to mean (or include) something that doesn’t involve the existence of deities then it is up to individual people, within the set of atheists, to decide whether your particular non theistic concept has value, but atheism has nothing to do with that.
Why is it that all discussions on the internet just degenerate into inane wrangling about the meaning of words? They don’t *mean* anything other than in the context in which they are used. All you have to do to find out if some particular atheist is sympathetic to some concept you wish to label as religion is to clearly define what you are talking about. Then we can say yay or nay, but just assuming that all atheists wish to deny the label religion regardless of what concept you are attaching it to is nonsense.
Which is not the point.
You seem to be contradicting yourself: “there is no consensus w.r.t. the requirement for a deity” v. “there seems to be … a consensus that religion need not be theistic”. I’d assume there’s a mistake in the first?
Anyway, whatever religious scholars might say, the most widely understood idiomatic meaning of religion is “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods” [NOAD].
In my professional field there are many terms which are overloaded and which might have more specific and more generic meanings (and sometimes conflicting ones!). So, it behooves us to define our terms.
Whatever “religious scholars” say (and maybe they choose their definitions so as not to restrict what they can study!), the fact that a philosopher who is recognised as a New Atheist chooses to define “religion” in a narrower way is significant.
As I said, it is implicit that atheism stands against theistic religion. Would it be prudent to state this explicitly? Perhaps. (And this is what Grayling does!) But I think it’s equally imprudent for critics of New Atheism, such as Eric, to assume that we are attacking religion in the wider sense.
Does New Atheism’s (implied) insistence that religion is theist limit discussion. Yes! But why is that wrong?
What is a barrier to advancing understanding is the insistence that New Atheism has to engage with the arguments for non-theistic religions which are actually outside its area of interest.
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If widely used is the criterion, then what’s wrong with Evolution is just a theory? That’s my point. If we are to use agreed terminology in scientific discussions, a position I support, then it seems fair to use the agreed vernacular of religious scholars in discussing religion. That’s all.
If New Atheism were an academic discipline I might agree with you, but it’s not.
New Atheism’s critique of (theistic) religion is deliberately populist (and something that seems to piss off many academics who – surprise! — are critical of New Atheism).
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Thanks for clearing that up. I was mistaken.
“Surely (new) atheism is opposed to only theistic religions by definition?”
It’s got “theism” right in the name, right after “a-“, as in “no”. So yeah, I’d assume so.
Religion without theism is no longer religion. It is just strangely rigid adherence to a sectarian philosophical premise that conveniently appeals to those seeking purpose. And because it is all based in the realm of the unverifiable and the “unknowable” it becomes a perfect tool for charlatans and those in power to mind-control large groups of people.
Theistic or not theistic, religion is about giving yourself over entirely and fully to someone else’s imagined unknowable reality.
Eric is a very bright guy who really, really has a lot of trouble with the fact that he, like us all, will eventually cease to exist forever and that there is no larger, cosmic purpose to the Universe.
In the last exchange I had with Eric McDonald, he claimed that there was much of value in theology and that experts in the field were the true definers of religion, rather those of simple faith. But, he was unable to provide a single example of who any of these experts are/were or anything of value that had been written on the subject.
This is simply not true roqoco. I suggested some books that might help the interested reader learn something about the logic of religious terms, like ‘god,’ ‘prayer,’ etc. Anything by Don Cupitt, DZ Philips’ The Concept of Prayer, and things by Lloyd Geering, Dominic Crossan, etc. It’s silly to say that I can’t give you a single example of anything of value written on the subject. There’s scads of it. It will not likely convince you that you should become religious, but at least it will help to make clear what religious terms may reasonably be taken to mean.
The problem is that there’s no consistency in the views of the sophisticated theologians. Of the people you listed above, I’ve only read Crossan. But his Jesus, and accompanying theology, is different than N.T. Wrights view, which is different than Marcus Borgs’, which is different than John Spong and Stephen Patterson and E.P. Sanders. And we could continue that list of different views indefinitely.
Sure, all of those people are much more learned and sophisticated than Billy Graham and Ken Ham. But so what? They have mutually exclusive and contradictory views, which itself is an invalidation of the entire exercise of theology.
I apologize, WordPress seems to have double posted my comment and I can’t find any way to delete one of them.
Perhaps I missed those post/s. But, I am quite comfortable, as an atheist, with those such as Don Cuppit who have a “non realist” view of religion, why not – if they aren’t proposing super-naturalism, then they aren’t contravening atheism or even “new” atheism? But, by picking up and using the baggage of religious faith they aren’t using language that is optimal or useful in conveying meaning to other people. Spinoza based much of his writing in opposition to previous theological tracts, because that was the climate of the thought in the times he lived in. But you can hardly say today that the clearest way to express our thoughts about our place in the universe is as a counterpoint to archaic religious concepts.
I would ask the question in a slightly different way:
Why aren’t these theologians not loudly & publically calling Graham et al out on their lack of sophistication?
I think, Chris, that Graham et al don’t register on their scale. Graham is not very bright, and as a theologian he is a nonentity.
In response to roqoco: using the language of faith, and finding meaning within it is not so much to be an atheist, as to be a believer whose religious beliefs are in some sense immanent. When common garden variety religion refers to the transcendent, the non-realist believer finds that the transcendent in some sense turns back upon himself (herself), and reinforces a sense of the beauty and the wonder of life. They might well argue that this experience of (let us call it) immanent transcendence is an experience of great meaning and value. Don Cupitt speaks at once of emptiness and brightness, of what he calls “the fountain” which is continually giving itself away and yet brimming over ever anew. It is a specifically religious outlook on life, neither atheistic nor theistic. In the same way Ronald Dowkin speaks of the transcendent and of a universe replete with significance, mystery, wonder and beauty, but without any explicit reference to a supposed transcendent being. The universe itself, in a somewhat Spinozan way, becomes God (though he does not use that word of it as Spinoza did).
Eric, I don’t think I can think of a single person I know or know of who would deny the profound significance of the emotional experience you describe.
But I do know a great many who would vigorously object to attaching the “religious” label to it.
Carl Sagan, for example, was overflowing with that sort of ecstasy; it bubbled forth with practically every word he wrote or spoke. But he also railed against the gods every bit as vigorously as Jerry or Richard do today.
…and then there’s Jerry and Richard themselves, and The Hitch, and Twain, and oh so many more — irreligious blasphemous anti-theismists all, yet all have drunk every bit as deep from the intoxicating well of life as any.
Indeed, I’d even go so far as to argue that those who unweave the rainbow drink even deeper and more fully….
Cheers!
b&
“It only adds.”
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But why deny the attribution “religious” to this? It doesn’t make sense. I agree as to Sagan, but I am not so clear at all about Dawkins. Sagan was quite aware of the religious dimension of his relationship with the cosmos. He may have spoken of varieties of scientific experience, but it was of the religious dimension of life that he spoke. David Bentley Hart speaks of the institutionalisation of religion as a disaster. And so it is, because it transforms the experience of transcendence into dogma. The problem with the scientism that I oppose is that it does precisely the same thing. We may not be so distant in our experience, but we are fairly distant in the way that we account for it. As I say in response to Ant below, Hitchens was a deeply religious man. He just thought of religious dogma as ridiculous, and so it is, for it tries, as every mystic knows, to say the unsayable.
I can only suppose that your definition of “religion” and “religious” is vastly different from mine, for I recognize nothing religious whatsoever in either Sagan nor Hitchens.
Sagan coopted a religious term, “numinous,” with a definition that might match what you’re using for “religious.” But Sagan’s numinous (unlike the original) was expressly non-religious and offered in explicit and stark contrast to religiousness.
My favorite dictionary, American Heritage, has three definitions. The first has three sub-definitions, all explicitly devoted to divinities and the supernatural. The second is about religious orders; the third is about something pursued with zeal or devotion — fitness as a religion.
Maybe you could offer (and defend) whatever definition of the term you’re working with? I think that would help move the discussion along.
Cheers,
b&
“But why deny the attribution ‘religious’ to this? It doesn’t make sense.”
And we might say: “But why apply the attribution ‘religious’ to this? It doesn’t make sense.”
I think the main reason to deny the attribution is because of all the baggage that is associated with it: the disaster of institutionalised religion; the inference that someone really does believe in God (or some kind of supernatural agency) after all (cf. Oprah & Diana Nyad); the tacit endorsement it gives to institutionalised (theistic) religion, &c.
What you describe as “religious” others would say is “not religious, but spiritual” — but that too is not without its problems, not least of which is that the kinds of religion we decry arrogate that in the same way that they arrogate morality.
Best to make a clean break.
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* HTML fail: only “deny” and “does” should be emphasised
First, Ben, as you know, the definition of religion is itself a contested topic, and can certainly not be settled by a dictionary. But I will make a stab at it. Let’s start with Ronald Dworkin’s definition of religion:
Insofar as theistic (or even quasi-theistic) religion is concerned (and quasi-theistic religion may be conceived as using the concept of God as a limit concept, not as a name for, or a referring expression for, a knowable existent entity), one of the chief features of religion is its sense of dependence, and sense of inadequacy (Christians call it original sin): the sense that one is, in comparison with the universe or God, deeply compromised by finitude, failure to understand, openness to the vulnerable other, and in awe of the deeply mysteriousness of the fact of being.
I think this sense is quite evident in some of Sagan’s writings, especially where he speaks of the earth as a “pale blue dot” lost in the immensity of space, and the associated ways in which he emphasises the smallness and irrelevance of the individual human in the midst of cosmic vastness.
Take the last paragraphs of Pale Blue Dot, for example, where he expatiates on the wondrous future that awaits humanity. This is Sagan at his most expansive, indeed, you might say, religiously imaginative. He begins my repeating William James’ definition of religion, and then continues.
Read that last paragraph over again. That pale blue dot which people will love no less for its obscurity and fragility. And while there is a Protagorean quality in Sagan’s dream of colonising space; there is also a deep sense of what the religious would call “holiness”, which is at once an attraction and repulsion from something beyond that grasps our finitude and holds us in thrall to its mystery. I think Sagan’s cosmic dream is probably only that — a dream; but it was a dream that gave dimension and meaning to his life.
And perhaps the dreams of religion are just dreams too, just myths, as many religious people have come to appreciate, and yet they are such myths! Myths of dependence which (should) relativise all our certainties, because they are our stories. Even stories of divine revelations are human stories against which we measure ourselves. Religions henceforth must begin with the human, and find how, out of the human, we have created gods that sit in judgement of us, and which teach us to judge ourselves, to recognise our imperfections and fallibilites, and to relativise all our certainties. Sagan thought we had to be at home in the universe in order to have religion, without recognising that his dissatisfaction, and his feeling of alienation was already an aspect of religious consciousness. I think James’ definition of religion as feeling at home in the universe is completely wrong. It is precisely the not being at home in the universe that prompts the deepest religious consciousness. (But that is a matter for another time.)
Please notice, however, that none of this refers essentially to supernatural entities. Religion, as Spinoza knew, can be entirely immanent, and yet be heavy with personal significance.
None of this constitutes a defence of religion, but it does suggest that defeating arguments for the existence of God may not even begin to dismantle religion, if, indeed, it can be dismantled. What was so unique about Hitchens was his sense that there was (as Wordsworth said) something far more deeply interfused, which is why he would have regretted the passing of religion, for then he would not be able to argue with his religious friends into the wee small hours of the night.
Eric,
It does seem apparent that you’re using “religious” in very much the same sense that Sagan used “numinous.”
But there’s one big honkin’ difference.
I’ll even go so far as to concede that, in practice the most (or, at least, one of the most) important aspects of religion is that sense of awe and striving to make the most of life, and that the same is true of godless lives.
The difference, of course, is that religion introduces at the very least a teeny tiny little bit of crunchy frog into the mix in the form of some sort of deity. It might be the sort of vague apophatic limit condition you’re describing or it might be Thor tossing Mjölnir around or it might be Jesus who most literally walks with thee and talks with thee in thy waking moments.
And that’s a problem, see? For two reasons.
First, of course, is that it’s simply not true. And if there’s one thing we can be certain of from any discipline is the principle of garbage in, garbage out. Include even the smallest of contradictions in your logic and you can derive any conclusion your heart desires.
Next, even if it were true, there still remains the cookbook problem. Even with your apophatic limit concept god, there’s no point in even mentioning its existence unless it’s to attempt to align yourself with it in one way or another…but that type of surrendering of responsibility to another, no matter how mighty or admirable that other, is ultimately nothing more than an irresponsible retreat back into childhood. Only you, even in principle, can ultimately be responsible for determining your wisest course of action. Even if you blindly follow orders, you’re still responsible for your decision of whose orders to follow and for closing your eyes while following them.
Never mind Euthyphro; you are the master of your own self, at least to the extent that you have control, and yielding the reigns to another does nothing whatsoever to change your responsibility.
Cheers,
b&
It seems to me, Eric, that you’re operating with such a broadly defined version of the word “religion” (Dworkin’s) that it becomes essentially useless.
Everyone has a “deep, distinct, and comprehensive worldview”, except while sound asleep. There are few atheists who don’t think that the universe is awe-inspiring. We all recognize that there is order int the universe. And we all agree that humans find purpose in things. We disagree on where “purpose” comes from when it exists.
What is the value of this hyper-devalued definition of the word if not to simply obscure conversation? It seems to provide an intellectual potency analogous to your neighborhood homeopath’s bottle of remedy.
@ Eric
Why should we accept Dworkin’s definition of religion over any others’ (such as Grayling’s)? It seems deeply flawed in any case: What evidence is there that “inherent, objective value permeates everything”? (Note that science also holds that the universe has order — so why is that a defining characteristic of “religion”?)
I still don’t understand what “the concept of God as a limit concept” means or why it is actually useful to continue to use a term which is most widely understood to designate “a knowable existent entity” in this way.
Drawing a parallel between the “sense of inadequacy” that is “one of the chief features of religion” and Sagan’s expression of “the smallness and irrelevance of the individual human in the midst of cosmic vastness” is just misguided; the latter is an expression of intellectual humility, not inadequacy. The very fact that we delve the cosmic vastness and describe, with great precision, what we find hardly comports with that! We *do* understand. The “deeply mysteriousness” is amenable to investigation (science!), not just something to stand in awe of.
Dreams of humanity’s achievements are inspirational but ascribing “holiness” to them seems worse than pointless, for similar reasons as those I discussed elsewhere in these comments re “religious” and “spiritual”: There is too much baggage.
Your whole outlook here — and your objections to “scientism” – seems to me to be skewed by a “there are things Man was not meant to know” mentality that’s deeply inculcated by traditional, institutionalised, theistic religion.
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Eric: If religion does not include some element of the supernatural (magic of some sort) then it is either a hobby or philosophy.
And I see no evidence for the supernatural, so why introduce it? I have no need of that hypothesis.
Since I could not put it better myself:
“We have a need for what I would call ‘the transcendent’ or ‘the numinous’ or even ‘the ecstatic,’ which comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t respond to things of that sort. But I think the cultural task is to separate those impulses and those needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.” – – Christopher Hitchens
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Ant, this is one of the biggest differences between Hitchens and the other new atheists. He would be disappointed if religion disappeared. He would miss the arguments he had with them far into the night. Hitchens, despite himself — and his brother recognised this — was himself religious, and expressed in the words you quote. This was inescapable for him. That is why he took his shoes off before going into a mosque, and pointed out that the (institutionally) religious were the ones who most often offended against faith. So, of course Hitchens saw the need for transcendence. Give it any name you like, but, in the end, that need is the need for religion. As Ronald Dworkin said, atheists too have a need for religion. Well quoted indeed!
Eric,
Sam Harris has also spoken and written at some length about transcendental meditation and eastern religions, and has shown no animosity towards the value of such things, so long as it is detached from supernatural tripe. He’s taken a lot of abuse for it, but if Sam Harris doesn’t fit squarely in the New Atheist category, no one does.
This post may or may not inspire rancor among many readers at this site, but as a person raised in a devoutly religious household, I see the benefits that religion can have on an individual level (this is not the part that I think would inspire rancor here). Because of this, I think it is advisable to avoid aggressive ridicule of believers on an individual basis, but only under the circumstances where have not forced the issue. By all means, when they try to infiltrate our schools and Government with nonsense, it should be fought with vigor. I also think most people here would agree with Hitchens’ assertion that it would be imprudent at best to visit the deathbeds of the dying faithful and tell them they should now realize they’ve had it wrong all along and face an eternal sleep. I’d extend this back from the deathbed.
I don’t know if any statistics for this exist, but I’d venture to guess the further on in life one is as a religious person, the less likely it is that one will abandon religion, and my point is why try to force it so long as they are not trying to affect change in society through unfounded beliefs? Religion should be fought on an institutional level, chipping away at the empty foundation on which it is built so as to influence more people to turn away from it. I certainly never would have never fully realized the delusion behind religion if it weren’t for patient rationalists and some pivotal turning points such as stumbling upon Sam Harris’s debate with William Lane Craig. I can’t be certain, but I probably would not have been swayed by ridicule. Ridicule of ridiculous beliefs has a place in swaying opinions of an audience; Ken Ham deserves ridicule because it may sway impressionable children to whom he preaches; more sophisticated theologians such as John Haught and William Lane Craig equally deserve it for their unfounded arguments dressed up in intellectual drivel so as to impress the common believer. Ridicule can sway their audiences and can be an effective form of persuasion, it almost certainly won’t sway the person being ridiculed.
I say let the individual people have their beliefs if they are kept private, but they should hold no special status when brought into the public arena. We all have delusions, but we don’t all try to influence policy with them.
The closest parallel — and it’s damned far away — I’m aware of on the atheist side of the fence to the Fred Phelps crowd would be the American Atheist billboard campaign. That’s it.
Everybody else being “strident” is doing so on Internet message boards of one stripe or another in the context of discussions about religion, or they’re writing books, or they’re speaking at seminars, or that sort of thing.
We’re not going into hospices to tell little old ladies to lose their gods. We’re not picketing churches to tell them they’re idiots. We’re not even standing on street corners telling everybody that they’re not going to hell.
As such, I find accusations that we’re somehow being insensitive as annoying, insulting, and a rather blatant attempt at playing the “Shut the fuck up, that’s why!” rhetorical card.
If you don’t like participating or observing the public debate about religious matters, then don’t get involved and don’t frequent places where such debates happen. But don’t you dare try to silence a minority simply because you’re afraid some poor hapless imbecile will have his fweewings hurt if he takes a worng turn somewhere.
Our civilization is for the adults. If you’re not fit to participate, that’s fine; we’ve got protected spaces you can retreat to. But we’re not going to child-proof civilization just because you don’t want to civilize your children.
Cheers,
b&
I agree, and this is exactly the sentiment I’ve seen in the work of New Atheists. If strident is merely standing your ground in an argument, calling bullshit for what it is, and returning assaults on free thought with an equal level of bluntness, then you rightly point out that we can only hope the Fred Phelps of the world would be strident in this way.
I have seen strident atheists that take things to the point where they refuse to interact with religious people at all to the point of denigrating the religious as people rather than combating the ideas. This is far rarer that its equivalent on the other side though, and I could see how this stance could be construed as dogmatic. This certainly isn’t the case with the New Atheist movement though, so I’m still at a loss to coherently grasp Eric’s charges of dogmatism.
The only way I can see dogmatism fitting the movement is at the meta level. In practice, it is quite the opposite of dogmatic to state what evidence would change your mind on an issue and then do it if that evidence presents itself. At the meta level, I suppose you could call it dogmatic to state that nothing will change your mind about requiring evidence to support a claim; but, it’s not even remotely like say, stating that birth control is always wrong, it can never be right, and I should be able to prevent you from using it too.
If I refused to interact with religious people I’d 1) have very few people to interact with 2) be a bigot.
If I refused to interact with religious people I’d starve.
b&
Better not give them too many pointers to what you actually think of their religions then, I guess :).
Fortunately, religion just isn’t something that people tend to actually talk about. Surprisingly enough, even at church gigs….
b&
Well, there is our problem right there. You see Hitchens as religious; I dont. In fact, quite the contrary: I see in that quotation Hitchenss *rejection* of religion and the cultural trappings of religion – – also evinced in the subtitle of _God Is Not Great_.
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@ chris
“I see the benefits that religion can have on an individual level”
Where have you seen commenters here deny this?
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
— George Bernard Shaw
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@Ant,
Perhaps I should rephrase my prior points a bit, as I may not have stated them quite clearly. My implication is not that people on this site or the public figures associated with New Atheism in general would deny this or that anyone is running around trying to rob little (old ladies who aren’t bothering anyone) of their long held delusions. If we were doing that, I could see how the charges of some sort of fundamentalism or dogmatism may apply. I simply do not see that going on; there’s no one telling people that they HAVE to believe anything, quite the opposite of what religion does in its strict, and I would even say original form (at least for the Abrahamic religions).
Ben, I am not trying to silence anyone. I want to make this perfectly clear. Nowhere do I make such an absurd demand. However, I have some basic disagreements, and I have expressed them. Whether that means I have dissociated myself from the new atheism, or just expressed my dissatisfaction at its direction, and with what I fear is its wrong turns, is up for grabs. But it seemed best to express my dissatisfaction in the most peremptory way to express what I felt. And of course I recognise Sam Harris’ commitment to spirituality, something that he has taken some stick about over the years.
Eric, my reply was to Chris Buckley, not to you. For what it’s worth, I’ve not seen any indication from you that you wish to silence anybody.
Cheers,
b&
@ben, I don’t see how your reply could be construed as implying Eric wants to silent anyone even if you had been replying to him. I am confused, but then that seems to be the theme of the comment section on this post.
With regard to my comment about strident atheists not interacting with religious people, I’m just going to have to call a spade a spade and say that everyone is taking my words at face value and not reading it in a sufficiently sophisticated way. It couldn’t be that I overstated my case and really was referring to people who refuse to continue associating with acquaintances whom they know are religious, even if the topic is avoided. It is all of you who are interpreting this incorrectly. 😉
Atheism is a particular instance (i.e. it applies to deities) of a more general skepticism that applies to claims about the world that are not supported by sufficient empirical evidence to raise them out of the background noise of the endless possibilities that are not in fact actualised in the real world. That’s *all* there is to it. Atheists don’t (necessarily) buy into any agenda or attachments other than that basic position – a particular atheist *could*, for instance, be a believer in homeopathy, or astrology (or any other specious claim) with out any *contradiction* to their position on gods.
So, if people such as Cupitt and Dworkin have ideas that are *not* about deities, then atheism is just not a relevant concept in deciding how someone who is an atheists will evaluate the truth or value of those concepts. That is the problem with your position – i.e. you are appear to be ascribing to the term “atheism” more than it actually implies. No doubt you wish to argue against a particular kind of atheism, perhaps one that is associated with scientism, but unless you make that much clearer, your arguments are untargeted and your position is somewhat baffling.
Indeed, I think one of the biggest problems in this debate is the erroneous definition of the word “atheist.” Theists, of course, misdefine “atheist” all the time (often on purpose), but it is the self described liberal progressive “agnostics” who have been misdefining atheism by equating it with “criticism of religion.” Criticism of religion is not an atheist pursuit. It is an intellectual pursuit. It is done by both theists and atheists. And atheists who criticize religion harshly and regularly are not any more atheist than people who don’t believe in god, but never bring it up, and don’t criticize religion at all. They are equally atheist. One just chooses to engage intellectually in the debate because they think it is problematic that 90% of the world’s population still believe in supernatural interference.
The word atheist does not describe anything that you are. It only describes one very particular thing that you are not.
+1 @ roqoco
Eric – Maybe they should do, splinter in my eye and all that.
But they don’t. Hence a major part of our shared problem.
One of the reasons that “New Atheism” exists in the first place is because these bloody Sophisticated Theologians are not engaging with the everyday Christians, but leaving it up to the unsophisticated lunatics.
Do you see the problem. Abstract theology, great, whatever, people don’t pass laws or kill each other for that.
Sorry, but your reply has made me really rather angry. If you, as a moderate (ex-)clergy, are wiping your hands of the problem then us Gnus are the only voice of sanity left, and the only ones prepared to clean your own bloody house.
I didn’t respond directly to Eric’s comment (“In response to roqoco:…”) the other day because I didn’t want to sound impolite. But I simply can’t let this go un-responded to.
Eric: Please re-read that paragraph.
Sentence 1. Using faith-talk is to have “beliefs are in some sense immanent”? In some sense? What sense, exactly? How is this a response to roqoco’s point that this kind of talk isn’t a clear way to express anything.
Sentence 2 more “in some sense” talk. Whenever you include a phrase like “in some sense” you eviscerate potential meaning from a sentence. In this case I think you are trying to say that faith-talk makes some people feel all “oh wow!”. Translated to normal language this floral sentence would say very little. But gussy a sentence up with “non-realist believer” (instead of religious person?) transcendently turning back on itself and profundity is implied. But there is no profundity. You’re really saying faith-talk is comfortable to some people (and yourself), presumably because it is familiar from years of habitual use.
Then: “They might well argue that this experience of (let us call it) immanent transcendence…” Huh? Can I (some might suggest) transcend the immanent meaning brimming over from “the fountain”, forever anew? Fountains aren’t (generally) full of “emptiness and brightness”. Usually they are full of water, although I’ll grant you that some do have lights on/in them at night. But the don’t brim “ever anew”, they brim while the pump is turned on. Flip the switch and the pools dry out. Even in cloistered gardens with statues of saints.
The universe itself becomes God? In some Spinozan way, but not in such a way (one might say), the word having been used differently, some would agree. Transcendent, let us call it, as it was supposed. And brimming in a limit.
This kind of language use is simply opaque, obscurant, and unhelpful to humans trying to understand one another.
You lack all sense of poetry, GB! 😉
I can help at least with non-realist believer: someone who is religious but doesnt believe that God is real in any sense but is a useful fiction (I think this is what Eric means by *limit concept*, but he did not respond to my request for clarification) on which to focus contemplation of life, the universe and everything; many but not all Sea-of-Faith types fit this description.
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Given a contradiction or other absurdity as a premise, any and every conclusion one might desire can be reasonably attained. This is especially so when the contradiction is with sound observation of reality; such is the very foundation of all manner of paranoid delusions.
As such, theology is fundamentally useless; all its claims are bunk.
Conversely, anything of worth one might wish to point to within theology, if it truly is of worth, can be independently demonstrated worthy through sound means.
That’s what I meant with the “fruit of the poisoned tree” analogy I mentioned at least a couple times in that exchange.
If there truly is a substantial amount of substance worth preserving in theology, then it would be worthwhile to independently validate those parts without the burden of all the bullshit. The problem is that I’ve not seen anything that isn’t already available elsewhere, and those of the un-deluded more familiar with theology than I (such as Jerry) concur.
Cheers,
b&
I should add: “sophistication” is a worthless metric. Epicycles are arguably more sophisticated than Newtonian mechanics; at the least, they’re more baroque.
You could have the most elegant and sophisticated theories, such as the Luminiferous Aether, and they can be shattered by one simple observation. Indeed, such would have been the case of the Standard Model had the CERN team failed to find the Higgs.
The fundamental theorem of theology has been severely fractured since Newton, shattered since Darwin, and its last remnants obliterated and scattered to the four corners with the Higgs discovery. At its absolute best, any remaining “sophistication” within theology has no more (nor less) significance than the latest starship schematic lovingly crafted by an ardent Star Wars fan.
Cheers,
b&
The SM wouldn’t have been “shattered”. The Higgs field isn’t a continuous part of it, and even 30 years ago we were discussing Higgs-less versions of the SM with some other mechanism providing mass (something about Goldstone bosons? I’d have to dig out some old textbooks to check). And don’t forget, we still don’t have an explanation for neutrino masses!
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Hey, grant a guy a bit of hyperbole, okay?
The important part is that new discoveries (including failure to find that which was expected) can revolutionize our way of thinking, but, at the same time, the older models remain as valid as they ever were. Failure to have found the Higgs would have meant either revising the Standard Model (but not in such a way as would change the answers for that which we’ve already established) or tossing it out and coming up with something else that reduced to the Standard Model over the range of energies we already have observations for but could well go far off the reservation at other energies. And then, of course, the search would be on for evidence to confirm or disprove the new model….
b&
/That/ is unobjectionable. 😉
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It is this kind of pontification, Ben, that I take great exception to. It is unhelpful. It does not show any acquaintance with the literature. It shows no attempt to meet those who write about religion with reason. Just dismissing as bullshit those things which people argue in good faith is pointless.
As to the issue of the basic premise of religion. Is that, as Jerry says, the existence of a supernatural being, or is it, as someone like DZ Philips would say, something about the basic logic of religious terms used in the context of religious practice? There are at least fairly good attempts to give reasons for the existence of a god, none of which are slam-dunk, but some of which are certainly sophisticated in the sense that responding to them is not a simple business of cavalier dismissal. You must explain why the arguments don’t work, if they don’t. It won’t do simply to say that they don’t, or that they are bullshit, or that they are contradictions (unless, of course, you can demonstrate that they are). Classical metaphysics is much more subtle and, yes, nuanced, than that! Sophistication may not be a metric — indeed, it isn’t — but it is at least a claim that arguments are presented that demand rebuttal, not dismissal. There is a difference.
Besides this, there are forms of Christian believing that do not premise the existence of a God, arguing that God is, by definition, beyond our understanding, but that, nevertheless, the concept of God, as a limit concept, has uses in the development of a life project of great value, value which is greater than that available to those who do not have or use the concept. You can say, if you like, that this is nonsense, or you can argue that, contrary to the theologians or philosophers who understand religious concepts in this way, there is no reason to think that this is true. If you do the first, you must excuse those who make the argument for ignoring you, and if you do the latter, you must actually give reasons for supposing that this is not true, and that religious conceptions have nothing to contribute to a life project. But you must show it, not just say it. And philosophers and theologians who make this argument are sophisticated enough in their argumentation as to have a right to demand that you respond with something equally sophisticated (whether this is a metric or not). Rustic dismissal simply won’t cut the mustard.
Two responses: these arguments have been made “sophisticated” not out of any evidence for the sophistications, but purely as a method of making them unfalsifiable.
Second, all of these arguments have indeed been rebutted. Ben’s quick dismissal is likely a result of being aware of all the standard rebuttals of all the standard theistic arguments.
I agree, everything is that has been brought up has been refuted.
So then the apologists or accomadationist says one must read the entire thousand pages to understand an argument. This is total nonsense. An argument needs to be made in a few paragraphs. The thousand pages can be used to bolster the argument.
Coel, on what basis do you make your first claim? Are you familiar with the arguments, and have you shown that they defeatable. Verifiability is not necessarily the right criterion, since we can give reasons for beliefs we cannot empirically verify.
Hi Eric, yes I am pretty familiar with arguments that theologians use for the existence of god. They all seem to me to be scheming up reasons for a position arrived at on faith, and then trying to explain away the lack of actual evidence.
If, though, there are good reasons for the existence of God that atheists have not rebutted then the theologians are welcome to put them forward.
If you were to expound on these reasons (here or on your blog) then I’m sure “new atheists” would be interested in replying.
Well, I’m not particularly interested in the arguments for the existence of God, and neither were most Christians until Aristotle was introduced into the medieval curriculum as the foundational metaphysics of Christian theology. As a short introduction to religious studies would show, these arguments do not figure very largely in religious studies either. All I’m saying is that the constant reiteration of arguments for and arguments against the existence of a god or gods is really irrelevant to what most religious people think. Most religious myths can be interpreted anthropologically or existentially, and the symbol God, which is such a problem for contemporary theology, is one which has a myriad of interpretations, some of which do not include existence. Of course, within philosophy, such arguments are of some interest. Is it possible to prove the existence of God, or at least to show that belief in such a being is not irrational (not a delusion)? But that is a philosophical problem, not necessarily a religious one. But philosophy can contribute to religious practice, by pointing out that the logic of religious language may not support the kinds of beliefs that are foundational for some religious believers. Prayers of petition, for example, which ask God for a convenient parking spot can be shown to be completely at odds with the conception of God as a transcendent being. Even prayers for deliverance from disease, for example, knowing that, at some point, such prayers will not be answered, for we all die, show that petitionary prayer is different than it is often supposed to be. Our prayers, as DZ Philips says, do not change God (since God, after all, is unchangeable); they change us. Religion is a human creation, and a human practice. We must seek to understand religion existentially, not in terms of the cosmos. And again, this is not an argument for religion (I am not making one); I am just saying that opposition to religion which does not take religion into account, except in the hopelessly simplistic way as affirming the existence of a god (whatever gods are), does not really touch religion as an ongoing human project.
Hi Eric, We’re agreed that religion is a human creation and an “ongoing human project”, and understanding humans and understanding the psychology of religion is important.
If what you’re saying is that God doesn’t actually exist, and is just a metaphor, and having accepted that let’s now understand humans, then the New Atheists would be entirely with you.
However, it seems to me that it is the religious who get hung up on God’s actual existence, and make that an issue.
Further, the New Atheists are not really about theology and God’s existence (to us those issues are tritely settled), the New Atheists are more about advancing secularism and about the harmful of effect on society, not so much of religion itself, but of the privileging of religion.
I will just reiterate once again, Coel, that the issue is not one of God’s existence for many theologians either, but they would still claim a place for religion and its importance. I don’t know that I agree with them, but secularism is not atheistical, as such, nor anti-religious; it is just the premise that public space is not ideological, and is not dependent upon specific world-views. This is something that I don’t think the new atheism seems to recognise, as your use of the word ‘secular’ implies. And I do think that instead of fighting against religion holus-bolus, atheism should encourage reasonable forms of religion. The new atheism seems to me to deny that there can be any such form of religion. There is where I part company.
Hi Eric, First, is theologians aren’t pushing the issue of God’s existence then it would clarify a lot of discussion and be very helpful if they said so openly, directly and clearly.
Then we can have a sensible discussion about what good parts there may or may not be in religion.
Second, I fully appreciate and accept the meaning of “secular” you give, and that is exactly what I meant in my previous reply.
As far as I’m aware all “New Atheists” also accept that meaning, and they are against the *privilege* that religion is granted, not against religious freedom.
Well, Coel, actually they have (spoken out loudly). The problem is that those who know this — like Dawkins, for example — accuse them of hypocrisy. Fundamentalism is “real” religion for Dawkins; anything else is not religion. I’m not altogether sure that the same doesn’t apply to Jerry, though I’m not sure. My point is only that if fundamentalism is the target, fine and dandy, but if the new atheists think they have refuted all forms of religion, they are going to have to do a lot more homework. I have suggested a number of theologians and philosophers of religion, but there are others. Jack Spong, for example, is a bishop in the Episcopal Church (now retired) who has written widely on the problems with traditional understandings of Christianity. There is a book by a United Church of Canada minister, Greta Vosper, With or Without God, and an Canadian Anglican (at the time the Director of Sunday School Curriculum for the Canadian Church, who wrote, in the 60s of last century, a book entitled A Church without God (Ernest Harrison). And of course there are the famous 60s books, like Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, or Paul van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. I have already suggested Don Cupitt, Lloyd Geering, Gordon Kaufman, and there are many others who argue for a very revised form of Christianity. Of course, there are forms of Hinduism which do not include belief in gods, and Jainism, which has no gods, and Buddhism, some forms of which have no gods. This is what I mean when I say that the new atheists need to do their homework.
Has he ever said that?
This is a common accusation, but I’ve never come across any New Atheist who thinks that by refuting fundamentalist religion you refute all religion or refute the existence of God.
It seems to me that atheists recognise these distinctions full well.
Coel, it is often said by Dawkins, that fundamentalists are at least honest, since they wear their beliefs on their sleeve. Liberal Christians, however, he suggests, are hypocrites, because they do not in fact believe the tenets of their creed (in literal ways). I think Jerry Coyne has said as much as well.
Just a note to all who are interested. I am bringing an end to my comments on this thread. There are other things I have to do.
It’s not saying they are “hypocrites” because they do not believe *literally*, it is saying they are often slippery and unclear about what they do and do not believe, what is or is not metaphor, and they slide from one to the other inconsistently.
Even the most moderate non-theistic form of Christianity one could imagine supports the overall institution of Christianity simply by taking the same name as a religion which is made up of 99% fully theistic faith driven believers and was for millennia 100% faith based theistic believing. You say that atheists are rightly critical of theistic religion, but then accuse them of seeing all religion as fundamentalists. 99% of Christianity is theistic. It’s not worth saving. Invent a new name for whatever it is you are talking about. Or be irresponsible and continue to support misery causing theistic God belief by calling your supposedly sane form of religion, “Christianity.”
Hi Eric,
As a slight digression. I have seen Sophisticated Theology in action. I’m not impressed.
I was trekking in a Buddhist region of Nepal a year or so ago. I was curious to see how a “godless” Buddhism might be expressed on the ground. Talking with the more “sophisticated” Buddhists I met, it seemed that many would assent to the idea that there are no “real” gods in Buddhism; yet, over & over I saw those same people bowing to altars and images of gods, happy to support the whole fiction of some sort of personal deities attached to the many sacred sites we visited. It seemed that the godless Buddhism was (nudge nudge, wink wink) the domain of the sophisticated westerners while these same sophisticates were happy to see the locals carried along in the delusion that the gods were real.
To me, I saw a remarkable hypocrisy at work. The ‘Lama-copters’ would deliver their holinesses to the remote monasteries to serve their impoverished congregants – happy to perpetuate the notion of the “gods”. There did not appear to be any effort to disabuse them of their delusions. Quite convenient but not very honest.
-evan
Sorry to butt in here, but speaking as a theological layman I have to raise a point in regards to this:
If they do not include the existence of a god ( with some sort if properties, I presume ) then it simply isn’t religion as the vast majority of people understand it, potentially excluding some buddhists. Your re-definements of the abrahamic god purely as a symbol may be fine and dandy in philosophy departments, but I’ll venture out on a limb here and claim that that simply ins’t the way most religious people perceives Yahweh.
Yahweh as an intervening god with attributes is the foundation of abrahimc religion regardless of how refined and irrelevant you and theologians find it to be.
When the concept of god and religion becomes so vague that it is barely* detectable intellectually and practically, then it isn’t of interest to me as an atheists.
Why should it be and why on earth should I and other atheists care about the emperor’s new clothes?
There’s plenty of other religious issues that are actually important and have a very real impact on people’s lives.
G.O.B is DOA.
*where barely=zero.
If my local church opened it’s doors to everyone and didn’t proselytize, or try to impose some irrational faith or system of thought on those who came, but instead turned itself into a welcoming forum for discussing the meaning of life, the universe and everything, then I don’t imagine that any new atheist would have a problem with that… except a semantic one, in that they would likely point out that calling this new inclusive, non proselytizing, activity “religion” was confusing, considering the well established connotations of that word and that this isn’t the way that most religions in the past have behaved. And furthermore, new atheists might be a tad suspicious that such an organisation might be attempting to smuggle some creed or mystery in through the back door for reasons of their own.
“The new atheism seems to me to deny that there can be any such form of religion.”
I just don’t think that’s true; it’s just that NAs don’t think of those forms of “religion” as religion.
As (new) atheists and secularists we’d generally no argument of any life stance (religion, if you must) that (a) comports with reality and (b) doesn’t claim any special privilege wrt public policy.
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@ roqoco
The Deep Thought Church! 😉
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@ Eric
“arguments for and arguments against the existence of a god or gods is really irrelevant to what most religious people think”
Yet most religious people (in the US) really think that there is a God who exists and is capable of at least observing what goes on on Earth (79% of all people cf. 88% of all people who are religious to some degree → ~ 90% of religious people; figures from the Harris Interactive Poll that Jerry recently cited). I’d say that makes it very relevant.
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* earlier: “generally no argument of” → “generally haveno argument with”
That’s what comes of snatching time between client calls!
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That “beyond our understanding” device is a classical example of making the claim unfalsifiable by dismissing all counter-argument or even any reasonable discussion of the claim.
Can any theologian provide an example of a religion that was founded on a concept of God that was beyond our understanding? (Rather than having that concept retrofitted.)
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The reason Jerry is calling “whack a mole” on this subject is because no matter how many arguments atheists become familiar with, theologians always argue there is one or two more they must address in order to dismiss the notion. It’s “defense by infinite string-along.”
To prevent this fallacy, it would be really useful if Christian theologians could use their sophisticated knowledge to identify a “top five list” or so. A list on which they hang their hat: if these are no good, you don’t have to look further to have justified atheism.
Now we all pretty much know two of that list; the ontological and teleological arguments. And frankly, they are not that impressive in terms of power to convince.
So, Eric, can you construct a short list of arguments for God such that, if Jerry or Ben or others read your list and aren’t convinced, you will concede that they are not likely to be convinced by any of the materials they haven’t read?
This is another variation of the “defense by infinite string-along.” What you’re now saying is that atheists cannot disprove the [set of all possible gods], so therefore Christianity cannot be disproven. Of course nobody can disprove the set of all possible gods. Nor should that by any sort of requirement for new atheism; to be a socially active atheist who wants to argue for greater acceptance in the population and by common Christians, it is sufficient to address Christianity as it is believed by common Christians. If Deism-variant-X is safe from atheist arguments, well, that may please Deism-variant-x-believers but it doesn’t really impact the value or worth of atheist social activism.
What’s worse is that I’m not aware of anybody other than the very small set of theologians who’re even aware of these hypothetical gods, let alone think they’re really real.
I’d be more interested not in a top five list of difficult-to-refute theological arguments, but in a top five list of theological arguments that a majority of the laity of any of the big denominations would pick out of a list as being representative of their own true beliefs.
b&
+1
That’s the fundamental difference between philosophy and science.
In philosophy, all that’s necessary is to create a theory that’s consistent with its own rules — even if Calvinball is one of those rules. That’s fine and dandy for fiction, but it has no bearing whatsoever on reality.
In reality, one piece of evidence trumps all of logic. And I mean that in all sincerity; if one were to discover that, incomprehensible as it may seem, every time you picked two apples you wound up with three apples in your basket, you would have to conclude that 1 + 1 = 3. And then you’d also probably busy yourself with trying to figure out whether it’s you or the rest of the universe which has gone mad…but, still, that evidence would have to take primacy over your theory.
So, yes. We have overwhelming evidence that the supernatural (of which all gods and religion is a fully-contained subset) is perfectly synonymous with the imaginary. If religion and theology constrained itself to the world of the imagination, that’d be just fine; indeed, I’d posit that there may well be enough of value in theology as a form of fictional literary analysis as there is in any other of the humanities. (My experience suggests otherwise, but that could be a matter of taste — I don’t see the point in musical minimalism or almost anything that came out of the Rococo period, either.)
As the T-shirt says, “Been there, done that.” I’ve yet to encounter a definition of divinity that didn’t necessarily encompass a very obvious contradiction, with the very contradiction itself embraced in an exercise in doublethink lovingly termed, “faith.” For example, “omnipotence,” is as incoherent as, “the largest prime number,” and for most of the same reasons; “All but God can prove this sentence true,” for a personal favorite of iambic pentameter of my own authoring. And the laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood takes care of the evidential side of things; a claim of intervention, even in the initial deistic sense, is no more credible than Biblical claims of the Sun standing still in the sky were after Newton.
I’d be happy to delve into all that in greater depth if you think it’d help you, but I don’t know if that’s the point of this particular discussion.
Cheers,
b&
Personally, I find the incoherence in “just and merciful God” to be the real killer. Those are largely definitionally incompatible notions. If someone commits a crime and you punish them in a way and amount commensurate with their crime, you’ve been just but not merciful. If you punish them less than that, you’ve been merciful but not just. It is possible to be neither just nor merciful by punishing someone excessively for their crimes, but it its not possible to be both just AND merciful. Even doing “some of both” doesn’t make you just and merciful, because treating criminals in such an inconsistent and arbitrary manner is itself unjust. Alice got what she deserved but you let Bob off the hook? That’s not justice!
Rehabilitation and quarantine are the only truly just and merciful answers to crime. Punishment is itself a crime, even if we as a society might sometimes have no better means of protecting ourselves from criminals.
b&
If you’re going to use the phrase “Christian believing”, doesn’t that assume a certain amount of theological baggage that refutes your point? I could see the term “religious belief” or “theological thinking”, but “Christian”?
“Just dismissing as bullshit those things which people argue in good faith is pointless.”
I’m skeptical of the “in good faith” part. These people have devoted their lives to coming up with reasons why Santa Claus really does exist, when it’s pretty clear their motivation is an unwillingness to give up their childhood fantasies.
The argumentation of such people is unworthy of my time, given how motivated they are to pull the wool over their own eyes as well as their readers.
Saying that atheists must address their arguments is sort of a “Tar Baby” strategy, because our efforts would be diverted into obscure arguments that no one understands or cares about, rather than doing the outreach that seems to be having some effect.
And I don’t think “just dismissing as bullshit” is a fair characterization either.
I read thoughtful refutations that actually engage the arguments from commenters on atheist websites all the time. And that’s just commenters on websites!
Mr. McDonald, This kind of writing needs parsing to identify it’s meaning.
You said,
…there are forms of Christian believing that do not premise the existence of a God….
…the concept of God…has uses…value which is greater…
You can say…there is no reason to think that this is true…you must actually give reasons for supposing that this is not true.
I never heard of a christian that didn’t believe in god.
In order to claim that the “concept of god” has “uses” or “value”, you must give reasons or show evidence why this is true. Claims made without evidence or reasoning can be dismissed, without refutation, just as easily as they are made.
“There are at least fairly good attempts to give reasons for the existence of a god, none of which are slam-dunk, but some of which are certainly sophisticated in the sense that responding to them is not a simple business of cavalier dismissal”
Eric: This is extemely weak soup. If this is the pinnacle of theological force, then it’s doomed.
On the other hand, if all you are saying (which I think you are, at base) that religious practice makes (some) people feel good (some of the time), then I think most of us can agree with that.
“there are forms of Christian believing that do not premise the existence of a God, arguing that God is, by definition, beyond our understanding, but that, nevertheless, the concept of God, as a limit concept, has uses in the development of a life project of great value, value which is greater than that available to those who do not have or use the concept.”
I honestly think you are saying (there, in far too many words): That some religious practice makes some people feel good some of the time. But your are trying to make it sound more important than that for some reason.
This really is true (in the real world): “[N]o one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”
I have read plenty of sophisticated theologians. And simply dorpped the project because there really was nothing there.
You are dicing with the Emperor’s new clothes fallacy. It’s the argument from the theoligian you haven’t read. Since there are a neaar-infinite number of theologians, life is short and I have much to do that I’m inrterested in, I must take my sampling (incoplete and imperfect that it is) as a reasonably representative of the field and wash my hands of it.
“On the other hand, if all you are saying (which I think you are, at base) that religious practice makes (some) people feel good (some of the time), then I think most of us can agree with that”
And replace the religion, with its huge expenses and tithe 10% to your shrink. It will work out better.
Is there one single argument advanced for the existence of God that can be presented that is not inherently premised on the presupposition that a supernatural god entity exists?
In an argument Eric posts above, he writes a disclaimer that ‘Christian believing …’ does ‘… not premise the existence of a God …’ in one clause of his sentence, ‘… because God is … by definition, beyond our understanding …’).
Then Eric proceeds in the very next clause, in the very same sentence, to attempt to persuade the reader that ‘forms’ of Christian believing are predicated only on a ‘limit concept’ of “God” because “God” is beyond our understanding.
Well. Unless one presuppose the existence of a “God”, then there exists no ‘God limit concept’ available for ‘use in the development of a life project of great value, value which is greater than that available to those who do not have or use the (limit) concept.’
I would also note that “life project,” presumably proposed as the product the “God limit concept” tool is intended to tune, seems to me to mean exactly the same thing as one’s “life,” just dressed up in a shirt and tie for some reason.
A not unrelated question for Eric:
If someone does not believe in a supernatural-yet-human named Jesus Christ who existed ~2000 years ago, was crucified, and subsequently rose from the dead transmogrified by a process beyond human understanding into a solely supernatural entity, by what line of reasoning does such a person lay claim to being “Christian?”
Uh … it’s the vibe of the thing.
Ah yes, but does he have a precedent that supports this….ah….”vibe”?
“the basic premise of religion … [is] something about the basic logic of religious terms used in the context of religious practice”
What does that even mean?
“the concept of God, as a limit concept”
What does that even mean?
This reads like sophistry rather than sophistication…
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Hence my new term Sophistry-coated Theology™.
Is there any other kind?
Hi Eric,
(sorry for my English)
For what concerns the existence of God, I find invaluable Rebecca Goldstein’s “36 arguments for the existence of God”.
http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/authors/goldstein/36%20Arguments.pdf
I honestly think that every argument from God has been refuted, and many of those arguments just use the fallacy of “use one mistery to explain another”.
I think that, until we have some evidence, secular people will do better to search for meaning and morality in other places (even if spirituality is useful, I’m looking forward to Sam Harris “Waking up” and Buddhism is viable even without the supernatural claims).
Which arguments do you think are not covered in the document? I’m very interested in this conversation.
P.S. Also, I’m pretty sure that the wonderful Jesus of Crossan has been refuted too by historians (See Meier, Ehrman, Sanders, Allison, Fredriksen, Hurtado, Goodacre).
I am not sure that the arguments have been refuted, gianlucab86, since they continue to be refined and relaunched. The ontological argument, for example, has been resurrected several times in new forms, and each time has met with rebuttal, though not such as to satisfy everyone. These are simply ongoing disagreements. The reason lies in the process as much as in the conclusions reached. But, for what it’s worth, I think that most arguments for the existence of God have been satisfactorily answered. And perhaps Dominic Crossan’s theory about the origins of Christianity have been satisfactorily answered too. I haven’t recently done enough biblical criticism and the study of early Christianity to be able to say. However, there is another trend in Christianity which amounts to “a Christianity without God”, or a Christianity which arises as Paul van Buren says, at the edges of language, and this is another movement towards the restatement of Christianity in non-supernatural terms. The point (if there is a point to all this) is that religion, just like science and philosophy, is an ongoing conversation, both internally and externally, and the conversation has far from run out of steam. I do not hold a brief for any form of Christianity, but I do think that reason demands that we engage with those who continue to make arguments in favour of their world outlook, at the same time that we make arguments in favour of ours, and that we not be too quick to come to the conclusion that nothing further can be said.
“this is another movement towards the restatement of Christianity in non-supernatural terms”
I just don’t get this. In what real sense is this “Christianity” if you throw way the notions of sin and (supernatural) redemption?
And if you don’t believe in Jesus as the Son of God (unitarian or trinitarian or whatever), why should you favour the concept of “Christ” to build a life-stance around?
In any case, while we might continue to criticise the value in such “religions” on philosophical or scientistic grounds, if such approaches truly shed all theistic elements, and don’t claim any special divine origin for their views on social matters, then (as I noted above) they logically fall outside the scope of the (new) atheist program (such as it is), and your criticism that New Atheism doesn’t engage such religions seems misplaced.
It’s as if you were criticising antibacterial drugs for having no efficacy against viruses.
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(Hope it will be understandable)
The problem with the Ontological Argument is that is argued to defend a position that doesn’t really derive from the OA, but from something totally different, to defend faith and the pleasures of it (group, meaning, personal narcisism, good states of the mind). Nobody believes in God simply for OA.
The point (if there is a point to all this) is that religion, just like science and philosophy, is an ongoing conversation, both internally and externally, and the conversation has far from run out of steam.
This relates to something said by Sam Harris has stated: “Religion is a failed science”. Of course you can reason about it and the discussion can be really sophisticated and can continue for eternity, but ultimately there are facts in this world that undermines his premises (or at least, there are no facts that confirms it). It’s such delusional that even a single proof against naturalism is used to confirm everything, while in science you have to prove every single claim you make.
Religion can be beneficial to the mind and we all agree, but it is very plausible that, since it’s false, you can obtain the good effects without the failed science part.
If christianity is TRUE, then be a christian is fine since it’s a prerequisite to go to Heaven and not burn in Hell. If God doesn’t exists or is unrelated to christianity, then divide people into fictional groups seems very pointless to me and, maybe, even morally wrong since you divide people when there’s no need to. And that causes suffering.
That’s why we should invest our time and energy to improve secular morality and ethics, think better laws and improve our minds to be more tolerant and compassionate. It’s ok to save the good part of religion (spirituality, I love the Gospel of Thomas for example), but the truth claims should be abandoned and never teached again.
You say that we should always examine arguments from religious people. Fine. But they have in exchange to abandon theyr belief if they are proven wrong and not to invent millions of arguments that are not the real cause of theyr belief. They have to say that is a matter of pure Faith, and they have to let us inquire about the nature of this Faith.
Eric, the ontological argument in all its forms is simply re-wrought Aristotelian metaphysics. We’ve known since Newton that not all motion has a Mover; since Darwin that not all that is designed has a Designer; and since Quantum Mechanics that not all actions, period, have an Actor. Besides which, it’s always been some form of special pleading that was invalid under the very logic Aristotle himself helped develop, and we’ve known since Set Theory that the concept itself is as incoherent as the place north of the North Pole.
There’s simply no “there” there, and it’s long since past time to let go of this particular fantasy. The world simply doesn’t work the way Aristotle thought it did, and we’ve know that conclusively for centuries and had good reason to think that since the pre-Socratics.
No amount of sophistication can resurrect a Prime Mover in the light of Newton, and neither can sophistication do any good for any of the other variations on the theme.
b&
Wrong argument – the ontological argument (in it’s earliest form) was formulated by St Anselm (it has nothing to do with Aristotle) and is an attempt at an a priori proof. Few people today take it seriously as a proof, but it has some interest in logic as to why it is wrong and not everyone agrees as to exactly where the fallacy lies.
The Ontological Argument (I can’t imagine anything better than Jesus; therefore he’s knocking at my door delivering a pizza right this moment) is Platonic Idealism on steroids, and cut from the same cloth as Aristotle. It’s all variations on the same thing: taking something mundane, giving it a super-steroids shot, and conclude the existence of the n’est plus ultra hyper-extrapolation of the banality that started it all.
b&
I wonder if there is *one* of the early QM folks who could be credited with that? Paul Dirac, maybe?
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I doubt Dirac would have said any such thing :): QM makes predictions that we have to interpret probabilistically, that much we know from empirical evidence. But that doesn’t imply that the underpinnings of QM are inherently probabilistic: The many worlds interpretation (which naturally fits Feynman’s path integral formulation), for instance, is entirely deterministic. QM presents some really interesting questions that no one can definitively answer right now.
That’s one of the great things about QM; it’s the stone soup of physics — and I can’t think of any other major scientific theory that fits that description. We may well be past the point that a single person is smart enough to think up a complete solution to new physics, but we’ll have a long ways to go before we reach the point that no group of humans working in concert are up to the challenge.
…I hope….
b&
Letting go of something so BIG in ones life as religion for a priest cannot be easy. Such people seem to sometimes have a ‘spiritual void’ to fill whereas those like me who maybe went along with religion beacuse we were brought up with it even if we never believed it, do not have that void. The idea that they wasted so much time on something that was not there possibly means they want to see some solace, some additional good in what they did -that there is some social or other value in their efforts even if there is no god. Well what value there is is nothing to do with religion. It is part of being human (perhaps).
But I see myself just as an atheist not a new or old atheist. I don’t need a label to tell me what I am!
I might add that Cosmos TV series, both the Old and New / Gnu – is more than able to “fill the void”. Sagan’s numistic feeling is awakening call for me that Science is more fascinating than supernatural fantasy, .. with the added benefit of being true …
That last sentence stunned me like a big face-slap.
I think we should just let go the priest to find his own way ..
It’s a shame that Eric MacDonald has decided to “leave” New Atheism because it doesn’t include (enough) members who are like himself. Till he officially left, it did. And, if we wish to be annoying, we can blandly refuse to accept his resignation. That’ll fix him.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m not sure he has to leave. Most of his arguments seem to be internal ones and when push comes to shove may only comes down to semantics.
Consider this statement as encapsulating his main point:
Yes. And where religion abandons the foundational supernatural beliefs and aspires simply to make sense — to address and consider very human needs in psychology, sociology, therapy, politics, and so forth — then it can soar like the proverbial eagle.
This does not mean that religion is better or different than the gnu atheists think it is.
I think it means that “religion” is better or different than the religious think it is.
It seems to me that the real quarrel Eric has then is with the religious people who haven’t yet abandoned the parts of their religion which make no sense (the literal beliefs — you know, that God really exists) and swapped them out for the parts of their religion which DO make sense (let’s find a new way to think about God so that an atheist can just substitute another word and follow right along!)
The gnu atheist claim is this: the logical trap which lays in wait for religion is that everything of value is measured from a secular standpoint — and therefore cannot be said to be intrinsic to religion.
This is apparently not a broad enough perspective. Very well. Eric’s brave new task, then, is to get people to redefine “religion” and leave those supernatural elements out of it.
Hey, it made John Dewey happy — back in the 19th and early 20th century! So there is hope.
I agree. I wish he’d stay and be heard. If he elaborated on those areas he feels the New Atheists are not adequately addressing, I’d be interested in understanding it because it could be a communication issue and there aren’t many people who would hear things as Eric does (from his unique perspective).
Oh, well, Diana, there’s every likelihood that I’ll be around for some time yet!
I understand that the longing for some “sense of divinity” (a loose term that I used to describe feelings when you’re inside a big cathedral with choir full blast singing songs you know very well – I believe what Sagan called numistic) among ex-religionists; and even worse those sense were “on-the-cheap” previously, all you need is just let-go, be part of the crowd (or “let the holy-spirit descend on you”) and you got it, or supposedly got it, or assumed to be getting it by everybody.
Now, becoming a gnu, old or ancient atheist (or humanist or whatever) you are not supposed to get “the cheap-fix” no more. No-no. That’s annoying, and even more so, the taunts made by those who are still in-the-fix .. may making things unbearable.
Then you overthink it, and becoming Sophisticated-Freethinker, which is in a slippery slope into Sophisticated-Theologian (again..).
Well, then what? Actually the feeling of grandeur is everywhere to see, true in Art or Rituals (- I would say – not necessarily religious). But it is also true in Science. Cosmos TV series, Attenborough series, to say the easy ones.
Select your own poison, with Science (or Art or maybe Philosophy) it has all the numistic feeling, .. with added benefit of being true …
Organized religions are on the way out, but not necessarily all religionistic thinking.
Like Zeus and Thor, the future of Jesus and Mo. They will still inspire insights into past thinking and arts, as well as future symbolism.
Some cultural philosophies derived from ancient thinkers are still fascinating. But do not restrict yourself to certain organized religion ideas, especially the one that you know most. Open up to other forms of religions, dip here and there, especially on the essences of what the ancient holy men said.
Moses about disciplines and regulations, Jesus about love and compassions, Mo about obedience and social structure as Confucius. Taoist about natural ways, Bhagawaddita about nature of life, Buddha about many things. Each of them are person of their time and limitations. But we still can learn from them (by “them” I mean the ideas behind them).
And indeed, .. with the added benefit of being true .. , is a strong spice to enliven your mind, intellectually, rationally, scientifically, spiritually.
And I think it is reasonable for human beings to be biased toward something, like Stephen J Gould always biased by his paleo (hence the punc-eq), and even wise men will slip once in a while (or twice thrice ..). A tribe may be a good companion for a time and then no more.
As long as Reality is always the guide, to keep with that strong spice of being true.
Being an honest, true-to-self human being is definitely the real goal of being spiritual, and in a way that sometimes seemed indirect-but-becoming-more-direct with age, definitely the same goal for scientific endeavours.
I think what Eric MacDonald did is fine, his choice to call, and if he is willing to put efforts to clarify what he didn’t like with being “new-atheist”, that will be and act of goodwill from him (of course nobody can force him to do that goodness).
cheers,
“Empirical science is not the only source of truth or understanding”
I would like people who say this to put money where their mouth is. Make an industry out of an application from your other way of knowing.
It’s been done, I’m afraid: Re: Deepak Chopra. (P.T. Barnum would be proud …)
well, there’s the salvation selling industry
As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time at institutions for the mentally ill ( I’m not quite keen on that term btw;-), it is my experience that the major religions and religious ideas are fundamentally insane. Literally.
It is organized mass-delusion and the only difference between some ill people and some religious people is strength in numbers, traditional norms and how to keep your cool.
As the saying goes; If jesus or muhammad existed today they would be on heavy medication. Yet so many see them as ultimate examples of decent human behaviour and experts on how to live your life.
It sickens me to the stomach and as a mentally ill person, I reserve the right to say “It sounds like mass-psychosis” when you claim your religion is true and rational. It isn’t and it never has been.
Hypocritical arseholes.
/rant off.
At the risk of being glib wrt what you’ve had to deal with, perhaps we should caution Eric that “mental illness” is something that can be properly understood only from the inside…
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Hahaha, thanks Ant. No worries and spot on. 🙂
I’ll gladly be at anyone’s disposal when it comes to identifying potential mentally unstable ideas without, in any way, inferring that to be the dominant trait of the person in question.
I’d just ask them to reconsider the sanity of their saints, prophets and, ultimately, gods.
It’s often quite funny to start a conversation by pleeding insanity upon the god in question. It really grinds their gears….
I have heard so many people make the argument that science and reason and evidence are not the only ways of attaining knowledge, but I have yet to hear one of them provide a single example of another method of attaining knowledge. And yet even when they realize that they can’t, they remain unwilling to back down from their claim that such methods exist. This is so obviously a case of delusion/wishful thinking/cognitive dissonance etc.
My favourite is when they try to use “love” as an example of something that normal people believe in without seeing or without physical evidence. But this is so untrue of love. Who can not see love? The term “love at first sight” comes to mind. And the observable physical evidence that my wife loves me is endless. Believing that my wife loves me requires no faith whatsoever. It’s all evidenced.
Now if I believed that Gwyneth Paltrow loved me without ever having met her or talked to her, that would be delusional, and more akin to religious faith.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to sneak into the other room and get all delusional with a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow.
I don’t remember where I first encountered the reference, but love without evidence is generally referred to as, “stalking.”
b&
Tim Minchin, I’m pretty sure 🙂
Certainly his style!
b&
God, i love this site. Thanks for the yuks and thoughts!
A picture? They have these new fangled things called movies. I even heard they were available on the inter-toobz
It has often struck me, and I doubt it’s an original thought, that religious belief is psychologically similar to infatuation. I wonder if there have been any academic studies along these lines.
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PS. Does sour loving wife know of your infatuation with Gwyneth Paltrow?
PPS. Rachel Weisz and the snake.
PPPS. Doubtful.
I agree with this observation, and long ago concluded the whole believer/religion deal is all about emotion. Remove it and an empty husk remains, I’m thinkin’.
I took a quick google to look for academic studies looking at religion as infatuation just now, and gave up on that project after reading the first page of hits. The word devotional popped right up first thing, and I think its definition answers the question.
de·vo·tion [dih-voh-shuhn] Show IPA
noun
1.
profound dedication; consecration.
2.
earnest attachment to a cause, person, etc.
3.
an assignment or appropriation to any purpose, cause, etc.: the devotion of one’s wealth and time to scientific advancement.
4.
Often, devotions. Ecclesiastical . religious observance or worship; a form of prayer or worship for special use.
And just beneath:
Synonyms
2. zeal, ardor. See love.
That says it all right there. And on the same page, just below the synonyms, are lots of links to faith/religion devotional this, that, and this-and-that.
It isn’t uncommon to witness increases in respiration and breathing, smiling/laughing, a little something going on with the eyes when someone is prompted to talk about their “relationship” with the Big G or son J. I’ve never witnessed anybody blabbing about any special something they’ve got going on with the Holy Ghost, though. Back on topic, the more devout the believer, the shinier the eyes and the louder the voice, in my experience.
Piss one of these people off with some comment about their belief they find insulting or threatening, and the infatuation/love comparison often is even more glaringly obvious: the reaction may be nearly identical to what you might expect if you threaten or insult their lover, spouse, child, or other family member.
In this case the breath rate ramps right up, the voice gets louder and more intense, their pupils narrow and their entire body gets fight-or-flight tense, and I hate to think what is happening with their blood pressure.
If I have to keep explaining this “love is visible” idea using analogies like that I fear my wife will eventually figure out that I am actually obsessed with Gwyneth. “Why do you always pick her as an example?” 😉
This dispute is unfortunate since both Eric and Jerry have great arguments to make in support of their ideas. I think their differences are more important than, say, the filioque debate in Christianity, but certainly hope continued discussion can reconcile the division.
Now I’ve learnt a new word.
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I came across a quote recently from Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) which nicely describes what have come to be known as “deepities” as Mr. Macdonald alludes to. “After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.”
My own view is that Eric has struggled to maintain a comforting, certain, and justified world view. He fell out with organised religion because of its intransigence over assisted dying.
He then argued that you could achieve certainty (and therefore comfort) through ‘objective’ reason and other ways of knowing – but those terrible New Atheists kept asking for empirical proof for such ‘knowledge’ and saying that without it his (often laudable and progressive) views were only opinions.
Shooting the messengers perhaps?
I have always sought to know and understand the truth, so your first point is quite justified. The rest is speculative. I never thought that we could ever achieve what you call “certainty (and therefore comfort) through ‘objective’ reason and other ways of knowing.” Certainty is not available to us, even to science. What we “know” now will, undoubtedly, as time goes on, become what was believed in ancient times (that is, on the outside chance that humanity survives the thermonuclear age). I doubt that even Dawkins’ “theorums” will stand the test of time, though they are no doubt more likely to than Ptolemy’s astronomy. A Kantian point of some importance is that we are within an outsideless point of view. We cannot peer over the edge of the world to catch reality in the buff. It is always conditioned by our mental abilities and our concepts (which is the point of Hawking’s term ‘model dependent reality’). This is one reason why I have opposed (both in posts and in emails) what I call Jerry’s scientism. This is the shoal upon which my new atheist barque has come to grief.
“he says, as he types away on his computer keyboard, and sends his thoughts through internet technology”
And your point is? I’ve been typing at a keyboard since I was thirteen, and that was a long time before I owned a computer (37 years, in fact).
I think the point is that Jerry’s “scientism” is not much different from your own pragmatic trust of the science behind computers and the internet. You take Jerry et al. to task for being so certain that science will work, but you pragmatically behave as if you are certain science will work.
Not true. I don’t say anything about whether science works. Of course it does. That’s not the point. Scientism is the claim that all knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that there is no other thing to be known if it cannot be empirically verified. I do not think this is true. In fact, it is a dogmatic assertion for which there is not as shred of empirical evidence.
Eric: Christianity and Islam: How can you tell which is true? What possible tool can discern this?
Eric, this is obviously a most fundamental and important point.
And one on which I not only would submit that you are worng, but that it’ll be very easy to demonstrate that.
If it is true that there are other reliable ways to knowledge than through verifying them with empirical observation, then there should be examples of such.
I am unaware of any such examples. You’ve suggested hermeneutical analyses of history, but I would hope you would agree that those are notoriously unreliable, even if there might have been a random hit here or there.
So, I would humbly suggest: either you can supply evidence of that black swan that we can all agree upon, or else evidence really does trump everything else.
Cheers,
b&
Agreed, empiricism isn’t the only source of knowledge, but it is the only way we have to test that a particular assertion is likely to be true in the universe we are *actually* in. That isn’t the whole of knowledge, but it is the area of knowledge whereby we can judge the likelihood of the influence or not of some supernal power on our everyday activities. And so far we haven’t detected any deity and have no good reason to imagine that such a thing exists that is more convincing than the evidence that fairies exist at the bottom of my garden.
Empiricism isn’t the only source of ideas, certainly, but I’d vigorously argue that it’s the only source of knowledge.
You may think you know something, but, until you go out and actually check the evidence, you don’t actually know if you really do know it or if you’re just engaging in wishful thinking.
b&
I’m aware of your thoughts on the issue from some rather fruitless discussions. But here the point, on which I think you will agree, is that if you if wish to deduce whether something exists in the world, then you have to look for it in the world. The way to determine if there is a tree in the garden (that’s a yard in US speak, I think) is to take a peek. And the same applies to gods. If there is no sign of some particular god anywhere in the world, then the existential status of that god is no greater than that of fairies or unicorns.
You’re right; at least that much we can agree on.
b&
Thinking this over further, there’s an even better way to demonstrate this.
In what circumstances would you propose that something else should trump evidence?
Note that I’m not suggesting some narrow definition of one small piece of evidence. For example, you might look at an optical conclusion and naively conclude that, for example the two lines are different lengths. But, when you break out the ruler or cut out the lines and superpose them or the like, you add additional evidence that trumps the naïve conclusion and shows conclusively that they really are the same lengths.
If you can’t think of any position you would continue to hold to in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, then you really are an empiricist after all.
Cheers,
b&
Have I spoken about religion and truth? No. I have not. Indeed, the diversity of religious beliefs may reasonably be thought to be decisive in refuting the truth claims of any, if that is what they do. And, of course, some do. To the extent that they do, they are required to uphold their claims by providing backing that is appropriate for religious truth claims. Some religions are merely spiritual practices, and, like science, may be said to be judged on the basis of whether or not they work (in the way desiderated). Some forms of liberal Christianity are like this, as are some forms of Buddhism, and perhaps Hinduism. Saying that they cannot prove the existence of God is irrelevant to religion understood in this practical/cultural way.
Eric: I appreciate your reply. I probably stated my question poorly.
You claim “other ways of knowing” that a special to theologians and the religious. If these ways of knowing are of any use whatsoever (besides ritual palliative or placebo effect) then surely they should be useful in deciding between religions (since the religious always claim these specials “ways”). Hence my quesrtion, especially the part about the tool (“Way of knowing”).
I’ve read plenty of theology. None of it was anything besides making things up. (By definition: Without a an object for study (theos), what else could it be? Anthropology or psychology or counselling maybe; but then let’s call things by their correct names.)
It seems to me that your point is that some religious practice, some of the time, makes some people feel better. Well, yes, this seems to be clearly true.
As I noted below, if everyone accepted their religion as a worldview that pointed at an ecumenical, feel-good, liberal ground of all being, then there would never have been a need for the “New” Atheism.
Since other New Atheists have criticized Jerry’s stance on various things such as free will, why would this concern have you break with new atheism, as opposed to Jerry?
Also: my guess is that if you asked Jerry if he thinks our understanding of reality is “always conditioned by our mental abilities and concepts” he would say “yes” — so your objection here isn’t clear.
Sastra, this is not why I have said that I have taken my leave of the new atheism. It was a response to DiscoveredJoys. There are other things of greater moment and concern, and I have expressed them from time to time over the last year or two. Please don’t take each response here as summing up my reasons for dissenting from the general trend (as I see it) of the new atheism. And don’t exaggerate the significance of my announcement that I have taken my leave of it. It is a pointed way of saying that I think a wrong turning has been made, and that I now appreciate more fully why philosophers like Julian Baggini and Philip Kitcher have not got on board with the new atheist project. I also see (although I think his way of expressing it was ham fisted) what Terry Eagleton found worrying. That does not mean that I do not find much that the new atheists have written and do write to be on target. Of course not. But I do think the general trend of the new atheism (even though that does not clearly identity a specific group of writers) is going where I cannot follow.
Eric, I am a big admired of both you and Dr. Coyne. Personally, I think you are correct when you say science is not the source of all knowledge. Science is the source of all knowledge about objective reality, but it struggles to convey subjective experiences. That is the provenance of art (not religion).
I think a large portion of the disagreement lies in what to label subjective experiences. Do they qualify as “knowledge?” I would offer a qualified “yes.”
I stumbled across an article today that I think illustrates this point.
link
Interesting. I think people should be encouraged to do what makes them happy it has worked for me so far as I’d rather like doing what I do. I also remember how much I sucked at art of all types except creative writing, which we didn’t do much of. My art marks were always the lowest of all my marks in school, even when I took Art History in university. I’m glad I took the course, but I sucked and I disliked the way the course didn’t spend enough time talking about the context of the art. It was an intro course, but the class was about divisions in the history of art and what marked that difference, not the way the art was used or it’s iconography.
“going where I cannot follow” – Does atheism need or have a direction? Surely it is not an agreed set of beliefs unlike Roman Catholicism say, or whatever flavour of religion you like. It is not a movement -secularism is & has clear goals – the removal of religion from public life, leaving it a private affair.
I agree that we, as humans, may be limited to what we can know. Or it may be that we are just in the wrong time or place in the universe to be able to empirically observe everything that there is to know. However, I have heard New Atheists say the same thing. Is there something else that I’m missing or is that there isn’t enough of this being communicated by the New Atheists and when they profess what we do know, it comes off sounded too precise and exact?
That’s not actually how science progresses. With insignificant exceptions, everything we understand today will almost unquestionably still be correct in the future, just not as refined.
For example, at human scales, the Earth is very reasonably flat. The curvature amounts to mere inches per mile, something that is dwarfed by variations in the local landscape (even anthills!) and difficult to discern without careful observation and impossible to measure without careful coordination over long distances and / or times combined with trigonometry. It also remains a superbly useful model, as evidenced by all those flat paper maps only now being replaced by electronic devices.
One can keep marching through time and find that each revolution in terrestrial and celestial geometry marked a refinement over the previous model, but also that the new model reduced to the old one at sufficiently small scales. Indeed, you could use either Relativistic or Quantum Mechanics to derive the hypotenuse of a triangle drawn on your desk and get the exact same answer within any reasonable margin of error as Pythagoras would have given you, only you’d do an awful lot more computation to come up with the figure.
The next big revolution we’re expecting in physics is a solution to quantum gravity, which will likely also solve the open questions of dark energy, Big Bang cosmogenesis, and that sort of thing.
But — and here’s the important point — we already know that it will “reduce” to both Quantum and Relativistic as well as Newtonian and Euclidean geometries at their respective scales. It has to, or else we’ll have the evidentiary proof of its falsity.
Contrast this with theology. In what way can modern theology be considered a less-worng refinement of previous iterations? And, if so, where’s the evidentiary demonstration of said progression? How does something modern “reduce” to something older, and how do you identify the defining line between applicable scales? When is it reasonable to use a less-sophisticated older form of theology as an approximation for simpler cases?
Cheers,
b&
Very well stated Ben.
+1
Ten thousand years from now you’ll still be able to land space ships on other planets using purely Newtonian mechanics, even though it’s been over a century now since Relativity has revealed Newton to to be “wrong”.
Clarification of scientific thinking.
Well said. No deepities like all truth is relative ..
I might add that classifications of techniques and styles within Arts (as in paintings and musics) help a lot of art students to quickly grab the ideas of the old masters .. and later find his own personal choices if he is supposed to be a master himself ..
Those classifications, categorization – even naming conventions, are actually following the structure of scientific thinking, the creation of a master is helped a lot by structured thinking, even if the personal choice is subjective.
Some people are more interested in rigid structural way of thinking, some others try to be more flexible and fluid .. those differences are not actually very important, as long as we keep the Reality check .. to keep those spices of being true ..
…we are within an outsideless point of view..
I don’t think that makes the truth arbitrary to view.
Science is that discipline which reveals the unbiased truth. Everything else is just unfounded opinion, which certainly won’t stand the test of time.
I read through the full piece on MacDonald’s site and I’m at a loss for what specifically his criticisms are of New Atheism. He says, “I broke with the church over the fact that the church thinks it can parlay the unknown and inscrutable God (the vanishing point towards which all our devotion and commitment is directed) into absolute moral rules.” But, throughout the post, unless I’ve misunderstood something, his main point is that religion is a way of organizing a worldview. If God is unknowable and unchangeable, how then does this parlay into any type of coherent worldview (as alluded to in his quote above)?
While “ground of being” arguments can be debated and dismissed, I don’t find that this line of thinking is what causes issues in the world on a practical level. If this was all there was to religion, there wouldn’t be a pervasive anti-scientific movement in society, based on religion. Even the Catholic Church, which, in the last two centuries has aligned itself (mostly) with the wave of scientific advancement, still makes an enormous unjustified jump from the mysterious to the dogmatic. Of course, the cornerstone of the religion is Jesus, who they do make empirical claims about and have very specific doctrines and dogmas emanating from his teachings about how to live our lives so that we aren’t tortured for an eternity when we die.
A favorite rebuttal from Catholic apologists is that if one focuses on Hell, then the point of the religion has been missed, for the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that we know any specific person who is in hell (there are no “anti-saints”), only that there are actually people there. That’s a convenient cop out in the face of the charge that an all-loving and all-powerful God would allow eternal suffering on this level, but removing specifics doesn’t remove the ethical implications. As always, when the audience are the credulous members, all the guilt is piled on to ensure that that the faithful don’t question the Church’s authority. There is a lot more than can (and has been) said about this “sophisticated theology” such as Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “Fides Et Ratio” where he expands on the dogma of the Church that God is fully knowable based on reason alone. None of these lines of reasoning, no matter how high and deep the writings over two millennia have been piled, comes close to answering the point Jerry makes about the the assumption that God is there, a very important assertion that not only has never had a “slam-dunk” argument for it, but it hasn’t had an argument to make it distinguishable from a multitude of other arguments one could make that are logically possible (but unevidenced) about the origins of the cosmos.
For MacDonald to say that sophisticated reasons for belief have not been truly assessed is an insult to thinking people everywhere who have shed religion precisely because we wanted to go beyond the simplistic childhood indoctrination so many religious people receive and assess whether the beliefs stand up against other worldviews, or even whether they stand up as internally logically consistent, only to find that indeed, on both counts, religion fails miserably. Often, it fails miserably on a third count, which is that of offering a comforting worldview; it certainly can do that depending on the specific assertions, but frequently does just the opposite.
Regarding the claim that the New Atheists fail to address these arguments, it may be true that the original round of books by Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens and Dennett took religious fundamentalism on more so than they did sophisticated arguments, but none of them have ever backed down from debating the more nuanced views. Personally, one of the most direct and watertight arguments against sophisticated belief that I found came from Jerry’s reasoning that there simply couldn’t have been two original people who mated and produced all current humans. This directly assaults yet another specific teaching that is in the Catholic Catechism: “The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.” http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p7.htm
The catechism is full of stuff like this specifically talking about human interaction with God; how on earth does this comport with an “unknowable and unchanging” mysterious ground of all being and how does taking on arguments like these from the non-fundamentalist denominations fail to address what religious people “truly believe?”
Nice post.
To understand this you must read some theology! But if you take God as a limit point, and orient your life on that, it will make a difference to the way you live your life, even if it happens (as is very likely) that no such being exists! It’s a bit like using a compass. There doesn’t have to be a particular point to which it directs you, so long as it keeps you on track.
As to the catechism. One side of Roman Catholicism is a fundamentalism, one that has been concreting itself over the last few centuries. There was much more diversity of belief in the medieval church than in the modern one. It’s official theology is much more “realistic” than is allowable by the god expressed in much of the Bible, which is a very shadowy figure indeed. Figure it out. Institutions are aggregations of power; ideological institutions hold onto power by means of thought control. Religious institutions, therefore, are much more likely to offend against religion than those who reject their authority.
“But if you take God as a limit point, and orient your life on that, it will make a difference to the way you live your life, …”
So you are not capable without the delusion? That is beyond wrong, and condescending.
Again, the gods are irrelevant to questions of human morality. Never mind Euthyphro; we have no more reason to trust that the gods truly have our own best interests at heart than the sheep have reason to ultimately trust the shepherds.
b&
“To understand this you must read some theology! But if you take God as a limit point, and orient your life on that, it will make a difference to the way you live your life, even if it happens (as is very likely) that no such being exists! It’s a bit like using a compass. There doesn’t have to be a particular point to which it directs you, so long as it keeps you on track.”
Eric, this is just my point though. As you stated elsewhere in this thread, there is a jump from this belief in a transcendent limit point/ground of being/outside of time and space entity to getting any kind of rational argument out of it. It’s another step further to state that even if a rational series of arguments can be made that this results in concrete, practical solutions for how to live one’s life. I’m not saying that people DON’T do this, particularly theologians. They glean moral values from the Bible and other religious works to put together a worldview complete with moral responsibilities. But where is the connection? The reading still requires exegesis of the text, consideration of human writings over the centuries, cultural context, parallels and differences between the societies in which the books were written and the ones in which they’re being applied, language translations, etc. Where in all of this is your proposed “compass” directing someone?
If I understand your analogy correctly, you are suggesting that this base premise, which you agree is very unlikely to be true, at least keeps one sailing in the same direction, regardless of which direction one decides upon. If you choose a south by southwest philosophical viewpoint, you can at least know you’re still going in that direction.
I see one obvious problem here and one implied. The obvious is that every argument I’ve heard still, even if indirectly, posits attributes to this God who is the ground of being and then builds a worldview based on these premises and some sort of rational framework. The difference is in degree; the Ken Hams of the world rely solely on the Bible and their specific, literal interpretation of it at the expense of any contrary evidence. The William Lane Craigs and the Popes of the modern era accept science, but to borrow your phrasing, “concrete over” the centuries of fundamentalism that preceded the Modern Era as if it weren’t there. Writings from thinkers such as Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle and Tertullian are then cherry picked and patched together so as to work with modern rational thinking. Their more fundamentalist views are ignored when it comes to debates with outsiders, but driven home with the insiders, and I’m in agreement with you on your assertions about the Catholic Church and its institutional power as well.
The implied problem that lies behind all this is that there’s any way to accurately determine one’s direction with the unknowable ground of being standing behind it. We can apply Occam’s razor in both directions to see the issue. Can this sophisticated religious framework work as a worldview without the unknowable being? Certainly it can, for all the reasons I mention above; there’s no practical implications that can be made with an unknowable being that can’t be made without one; it’s only when attributes are applied to that being that anything at all can be inferred. In the other direction, what can be derived without the concrete arguments by solely using the unknowable being? Absolutely nothing; it’s the the equivalent of the mathematical identity law. Any worldview is exactly the same with or without a creator, unless the creator has attributes, and for that, New Atheism asks for evidence (and, as has been pointed out elsewhere on this post, so does a lot of old atheism).
As for your implication that I need to read some theology, that point has been beaten to death already in other posts so I won’t dwell on it here, except to ask, which theology? Are Papal Encyclicals not theology? What about the writings of the early church fathers and Greek philosophers, which the Church has so conveniently melded together for her own agenda? What about C.S. Lewis, John Haught, Alister McGrath, William Lane Craig, Matt Slick and Edward Feser? I don’t claim to be an expert on any specific one of these people, and I would even expect that someone like yourself is more well versed in much of their work than I am. But, I am confident that I have at least grasped their main arguments and simply implying that everyone is missing something will only fly if the people you assert this to don’t even have passing knowledge of their philosophies. What specifically is it about religion that we’re missing that can’t be retained without the unsubstantiated claims, or as Hitchens asked, what redeeming value does religion offer than could not be on offer without it? To me, these last two points are at the core of New Atheism; not fundamentalist ideology or scientism. Or, is this where we’re all failing to understand each other, perhaps you need to more clearly state what you mean by saying you’re leaving the New Atheists and where it is you’re going?
Eric, consider:
If you take unicorn racing as a limit point, and orient your life on that, it will make a difference to the way you live your life, even if it happens (as is very likely) that no such being exists! It’s a bit like using a compass. There doesn’t have to be a particular point to which it directs you, so long as it keeps you on track.
Now why is this any less helpful than if we reverse word swapping?
No, no, no. If we take the tip of the Invisible Pink Unicorn’s horn as a limit point…
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PS. iOS autocorrect knows “the Invisible Pink Unicorn”! Clearly it’s a sign.
I am going to start orienting all my compasses in this fashion. That way, which ever way it’s pointing, I know that by walking away from it, I’ll be heading towards reality. One question, is such a compass oriented to the magnetic tip or the true tip?
I am afraid I will have to *decline* to answer that
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“But if you take God as a limit point, and orient your life on that, it will make a difference to the way you live your life…”
That sounds very nice. But what is the limit point, and what difference does it make?
My PARTICULAR objection to Christianity is that they say they worship God, but in fact worship the state. God never really speaks to them, but the state speaks to them every day – and listens too! And the part of the state that they especially worship is the military and the more so when it is in kinetic action.
One might have hoped that Christians would have said there are standards of good that are above the pronouncements of the state. But they never do except for very small groups such as the Quakers.
So the limit point for the vast majority of religious people is, as far as I can see, the tip of the military spear.
“But if you take God as a limit point, and orient your life on that, it will make a difference to the way you live your life, even if it happens (as is very likely) that no such being exists!”
To me, this seems to be describing a life philosophy based on a psychological effect and calling that ‘religion’. The only role ‘God’ seems to serve in such a philosophy is as a mental touchstone, as a kind of meditative fixed point that is baroquely adorned by several thousand years of human gloss and devotion. I can relate to borrowing from religion in this way but I don’t see that that’s what atheists, new or otherwise, are concerning themselves with.
I’m fond of some bits of Zen, for example. When I read The Gateless Gate it puts me into a certain frame of mind that I feel is good for me. The koans in that collection are pretty much nonsense on one level, but they can also work to kind of slip the clutch in your brain and help you experience things a little differently. I do not think there is any magic there but at the same time I do not need a detailed psychological or neurological analysis either. In fact, I think dwelling too much on how it works would tend to spoil the effect. In order for it to work I have to read it a little bit like I take it seriously (the same, of course, is true of enjoying Harry Potter). What I get out of it is enough for me, I don’t need to analyze it. In that sense I can relate to some people’s concern about “scientism”, though I think it’s mostly a straw man. If you came to me and told me that, no, I don’t get anything out of reading these koans I’d dismiss you because I’m the one reading them and I know what I get out of them. If you insist that it’s only a psychological trick and start showing me fMRI scans of people who are reading koans and other nonsense and insist that I could get the same effect reading any kind of nonsense I might find you irritating and, in the spirit of the thing, maybe smack you with my staff ;-). That is not because I don’t think fMRI scans and experiments are useful to try to understand what is going on (though neuroscientists greatly oversell that stuff), or because I think science shouldn’t poke it’s nose in this domain, but for the same reason that I don’t want to see the how-it-was-made reel running along side the movie I’m watching. It breaks the subjective frame and diminishes the experience I’m having at that moment (later I might want to see that how-it-was-made reel). I think many people’s complaints about ‘scientism’ are of this sort: the fear, or maybe the experience, of having someone ruin the effect of something you enjoy by breaking the subjective frame you are in.
So in that sense I can understand how you can engage your own life with certain ideas, thoughts, mythologies, and fictions, even how you can suspend disbelief for the effect, and that those things can provide you with something that you, personally, find somehow useful in your life, a direction, a narrative framework, something. I just wouldn’t call that ‘religion’ and certainly not the theism that atheists define themselves in opposition to. I think most new atheists only care about such philosophies insofar as you claim that the philosophy has access to some kind of truth that the atheists must accept too (e.g. if I insist not only that I find that koans put me into an interesting frame of mind but that koans objectively lead to ‘enlightenment’). In that case you have waded into the field of public truth for which evidence is reasonably demanded.
Excellent!
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Very well articulated gluonspring.
Thank you.
-evan
Well, sure, I agree with gluonspring, Evan, but does this make it any less religious? After all, certain forms of Buddhism or Chinese pieties towards ancestors, may be thought of as philosophical forms of life, but they are also reasonable called religious, and include devotion, even forms of prayer. Why should we make our distinctions so narrow that, say, Stoicism ceases to be in some sense religious? I don’t get the point. In fact, this is precisely my point, as well as Ronald Dworkin’s, that religion is not restricted to belief in supernatural entities.
Well then Eric, it looks like there might be some misunderstanding on my part as to what you have been saying. Taoism for example does not have a deity as an object of worship & yet qualifies as a “religion” by some definitions. Sam Harris has been advocating for some sort of “spiritual” practice for some time; (a type of Atheistic Buddhist meditation?) If this is what you are hankering for, then we may not be disagreeing very at all and we are arguing about semantics. Religious practice without the god(s)? Sure.
Christianity, by standard definition involves some sort of assent to the doctrine of a personal God who sent his son, Jesus Christ to die as an atonement for the world’s sins. Many of the Biblical claims supporting this theology are falsifiable and have been falsified. After removing the fictions, there isn’t much veracity left to salvage from Christianity before it ceases altogether to be Christian.
I have many friends & family who are still in the “faith”. I love them dearly and grieve the fact that our disparate ‘beliefs’ drive a wedge between us. I sometimes miss the sense of belonging we shared. I can understand the desire to share their “communion” without re-assenting to their untenable theism; but, I can’t do it without feeling false. (My Bullshit alarm is just too loud…)
-evan
I doubt there is much quarrel here with varieties of ‘religion’ that lack gods, magic, or other ludicrous claims about the world we share. Of course everyone won’t agree on what sorts of life philosophies are appealing, and they may argue the point so passionately that sometimes it appears that they think taste is objective. Still, when Ben or someone here says that belief in God is bullshit, it is a different sort of claim than when he says that minimalism is bullshit (it isn’t, minimalism is quite grand!). The former is a strong assertion about the objective world, the latter a strong assertion about personal tastes. You can make arguments for tastes, even arguments that persuade people to buy into your tastes, but they lack the force or even the claim to objectivity that usually attends what I think most people on this site think of as the theism they are defining themselves against with the label ‘atheist’.
As for life philosophies, everyone has to construct those out of the materials they have at hand and in light of their own experiences. Many people who were once believers have groves of religious trees planted in their mind, trees with deep roots. Even once the trees die, cutting down the trees and digging up the roots can be a daunting task and one that leaves some people even a bit diminished in the end, with torn up and barren soil planted here and there with a few saplings of art or music or whatever new thing they can embrace. So I fully sympathize with anyone who, having been religious for a long time, prefers to plant clinging vines that can grow on the dead trunks of their former belief rather than try to dig up all the old roots. I think some would argue that the trees are so ugly that you’d be better off cutting them down (this metaphor is getting out of hand, isn’t it?), but that is aesthetics. The various religions are old and have been accruing bits of culture to them for thousands of years. These religions are woven into lots of other stories and rituals, into music and art and architecture. If someone has a taste for it, if their mind is already full of the furniture of religion, there is no reason to burn it all to the ground because it is fiction. I think the only thing most regulars there care about is acknowledging, in the end, what is reality and what is fiction, coupled with occasional amazement at the tastes of others in fiction.
I liked the extended metaphor!
Good comment.
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Lovely metaphor, I think. And a very nicely-worded statement.
I also appreciated your earlier analogy about the how-it-was-made reel spoiling the illusion of a movie. A popular sword-and-sandals TV series was made not far from here and I could identify most of the locations used instantly – but I found it far better to just follow the drama the first time through and leave the “I know where that was” for a re-watch or it would drop me right out of the illusion. Just as analysing exactly how it is one of my favourite authors comes up with his quirky and compelling phrases is something I really don’t want to do lest it spoil the effect for me. I *know* I’m being swayed by his clever use of language but I like the experience.
To me, Eric, the important point in gluonspring’s post was not about whether something is “religious” or not, but how best to understand–and even respect–individuals’ perceived “religious experiences.”
He said he had them himself, found them beneficial, didn’t want to think too hard about what was really going on, *but recognized that they weren’t messages from God or methods for discovering truth outside the scientific method*.
Very nice.
I was caught off guard by this statement,
“Indeed, I believe that the new atheism is quickly attaching itself to beliefs that are as dogmatic and irrational as many religious dogmas, and to a kind of ideological certitude that may be as dangerous as the ideologies of the past that caused so much harm in the course of what Robert Conquest has called The Ravaged Century.”
not because I’ve never heard it before, but because it came from someone like Eric M.
What are these beliefs and dogmas that “new atheists” are attaching themselves to?
And while I think it’s fair to say that most “new atheists” are fairly certain that the gods of the major religions (christianity, islam, hinduism, Greek and Roman gods, etc) are false and man-made, I think if you ask them about some sort of disinterested god or “being” or force that started everything, you’d probably be answered with, “Don’t know. Don’t know that I could know. But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t make a difference, because it seems like in order to make this world a better place, humans are on their own. Either way, religions are not the way to go, as they entail believing things and behaving in ways based on Dogma”.
So if the New Atheists’ irrational dogma is that dogmas should be avoided at all costs, especially if they lack evidence and rationality to back them up, then yes, I guess New Atheists are guilty of having that ideological certitude. But how in the heck is that “as dangerous as the ideologies of the past that caused so much harm in the course of The Ravaged Century”?
The accusation is that we (gnus) are scientismists and don’t appreciate fine art, literature, and music.
(OK… that last bit was just me being snarky.)
And seems to hint that there is reason to fear that we may persecute religious believers.
No, not religious believers, just those who disagree. There is a totalising trend (I believe) in the new atheism, and it is (or can be) dangerous. That is my view. Boghossian’s use of the term “pathological” with respect to religious believers is, I think, a sign of this totalising kind of thinking. You may of course disagree with me, but that is my view.
That actually makes me sad to read and a bit puzzled.
Why should new atheists want to be totalitarian and persecute those of different ideas?
Jerry, I have made a few comments on comments. To answer your entire post would take a bit more time. I do not think you have really grasped the heart of the issue. When you speak, for example, of proofs for the existence of God, you are asking for something which, notwithstanding those like David Bentley Hart, cannot be given. There is no clinching argument for the existence of such a being. But the concept of God is nonetheless used, and it has a logic. Part of that logic is that God is infinite and unknowable, and religious practices make sense against that background assumption. Of course, the temptation is always present to make a jump from the practice to claim far more knowledge of God than the concept really allows. Thus we have claims being made for which there is no justification, claims to revelations from God, for example, which are such as to be absolutely true.
I don’t know how orthodox your own upbringing was, but the Jewish conception of God (or G_d) is not of a being who can be known, and the only man who is said to have spoken with God face to face (Moshe) is as shadowy as the God with whom he was on such friendly terms. Think of Isaiah’s vision of God in the temple. It is a liturgical vision, and the only presence of God is the voice within him which says “Who will go for us?” Isaiah answers: “Here am I. Send me.” And so he becomes, for a time, the voice of God to his people (and the ‘his’ here is ambiguous).
These are all perfectly human occurrences. Religion itself is a human creation. Its terms have a human logic. And we can understand them internally without the assumption of the existence of the being posited by them. That is why religion can be carried on as a purely cultural practice. The assumption that religion is a delusion based on the claim that no proof can be provided for God’s existence is simply a non-starter. As Tillich says, God doesn’t exist.
Which is Hart’s point as well.
A naturalistic god would be an idol. Any contingent being, or any contingent truth raised to absolute status is dangerous, as anyone familiar with 20th century totalitarianism should understand (which is why I find the increasing apotheosis of science worrying). Do I want to realign myself with the church? No, I don’t think so, but, as time goes on, I find the Sturm und Drang over the niceties of religious belief a bit precious, to tell the truth.
And your continuing to say that I have never given you another way of knowing is, as I have said again and again, a misleading way of putting the point. We know such a variety of things that to suggest that there is only one method of confirmation is simply to miss the point. Historical knowledge is not confirmed simply by empirical means. There are hermeneutical factors that have to be taken into consideration for which there can be no empirical confirmation, and in this respect it is therefore unlike science, even though even science has its hermeneutical aspect (thus Hawking’s “model dependent reality”). The point is that knowing how to live well is very different from knowing about the stars and the planets, or factors affecting the evolutionary history of any species, and being able to confirm the one may give you no insight whatever into the means of confirming the other. This is why stretching the meaning of ‘science’ is simply hopeless as a way of accounting for truth, especially since no truth is ever absolutely confirmed (slam-dunk, as you say), even in science — and you >know this! Is that bit of knowledge empirically confirmable? Is it science? Well, there you have the problem.
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I can’t see how that is so. An unknowable God would give equal justification to any religious practice as well as none. Under your idea of God no speficic religious practice is sensible, because there is no way to derive it from the premise(s) on which it is supposed to rest. This is “P: cats are fuzzy, so therefore, C: let us ride bicycles” logic.
The really scary thing is that such an unkowable God as the one you’re defending makes literally any religious practice equally sensible. You realize that your argument justifies the conclusion ‘human sacrifice makes sense’ as well as it justifies the conclusion ‘silent prayer makes sense’?
I had lunch at the faculty lounge at my university recently with two historians. I asked both of them directly, whether history is some sort of science. Both of them answered “No. History is not a science. That’s an old fashioned view.” So I’m afraid Eric’s on solid ground here.
History is a discipline in the Humanities and this is probably what your historians are responding to. Most Humanities folks are not going to understand science applied in broad terms. In this they are correct. History is not Science. But, this is not what Eric is arguing.
Instead, ask your historian friends how they derive historical knowledge. What tools do they use? How do they actually know that events happened in history, who participated in those events and when those events occurred and how confident they are in that knowledge.
My historians know the issue I was referring to. In the past there was a large debate in the discipline of history over its “scientific” status in fact. There are methodological issues that come up in the humanities too that are discussed (read Collingwood, The Idea of History, if you doubt this.) What the historians are claiming is that history uses some empirical data, yes (how could it not). But knowing this does not really explain what historians do, which is bring to bear particular interpretations and hermeneutical analysis to their subject matter. This introduces a subjective element into their theorizing that concerns the “meanings” and “values” of historical agents. There is no way in principle of cashing these elements out in objective, empirical terms. The whole issue is really a bit more complicated than you’re making it out to be.
If your description is accurate, then history as a discipline has about as much bearing on reality as a James Michener novel. It might be entertaining, but it’s still just educated fiction — and thinking otherwise is a perfect example of self-delusion.
I hope your description is inaccurate, but I fear it is not.
b&
Well that’s it! I’m never, ever learning any more history unless it’s Classics where they tend to rely on prime sources and archaeological materials. Heck, how do you think I knew how to mark up this incorrect Marcus Aurelius meme this evening? (Yes, I have no life – or rather, I really like this one where I spend all my time fooling with things like this instead of other things).
Nice, Diana. And it appears Caracas read Epicurus. What educated Roman of the day did not, of course.
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
That’s a good one.
Curious that it was attributed to Aurelius; I’d have expected somebody to fabricate that sort of thing into Epicurus’s mouth, for it’s simply an inversion of his Riddle (which he may or may not have actually posed). I don’t remember Aurelius as being an Epicurean, and Wikipedia doesn’t make any note of such in his biography. Indeed, it reminds me that Aurelius was a Stoic….
b&
Yeah, Aurelius had a lot of time to sit back and enjoy the Empire and he was a Greek wannabee (with his fancy Greek beard). He wrote his meditations in Greek.
Wikiquotes says it probably came from Meditations here (and who translated this? It sounds terrible). I haven’t read the Meditations & this sounds like a complete Epicurus rip off:
Here is the link Wikiquotes references.
Aurelius probably read the presocratics. He was heavy into anything Greek. I’m surprised he actually got away with it. He even had statuary of himself naked, which Romans hated during the Empire because it was iconography reserved for gods & trying to say you were a god really annoyed the Romans.
You know, you’d be a good person to answer this question that’s been bugging me:
How did the Pagans of that time think of the gods?
I get the impression that it’s a pretty close match for today’s comic book superheroes, only as real “people” and not up-front fictions.
b&
I may be biased in this & I really only understood Roman religion from understanding how they functioned in the state (Roman state gods which included Venus as the progenitor goddess), how they were thought of gods privately (Romans worshipped their household gods – they had little shrines in their homes. It was a type of ancestor worship and was used to show piety and tradition) and how their religion was a mishmash of Greek gods laid over top of numina – they saw everything as having a spirit. I have the impression that the well educated people of the height of the Roman Empire (which is when Marcus Aurelius reigned) had similar religious outlooks that we do. The less educated believed in all kinds of stuff – mystery cults thrived among the disenfranchised and especially soldiers who travelled around & were exposed to different religions.
Now, I still think Romans suffered from mass OCD. Their ceremonies had augurs & haruspices & ceremonies that had to be run from beginning to end without interruption (even a cough) or they’d have to start all over — that’s the OCD part!
The Romans certainly were different people – they had slaves. They had an extremely hierarchical society, they engaged in blood sport, so their society wasn’t like ours, but I can’t help but think they were on to something with religion and abandoning it and maybe that’s because they didn’t have a saviour but gods that were as cruel as them.
Really makes you wonder what the world would have been like if Christianity hadn’t infested the Empire…or was it a symptom rather than a cause?
b&
@ Jesper: I suspect Eric meant to reply to Jerry’s post en tout, but replied to your comment by accident.
@ Ben: Rosenberg makes the same point about history in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.
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I’m not familiar with Rosenberg, but I’ve certainly encountered a similar sentiment before. Especially with historians of Christianity, but I’ve also heard the plaint that, for example, if historians were to be held to the same standards of science, then we wouldn’t know anything! about [insert person / subject]. My response has always been that, if that’s true, then we actually don’t know anything about [insert person / subject], and you’re just fooling yourself if you think you actually do. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s never gone over all that well….
b&
He devotes a whole chapter to the topic: History Debunked.
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@ Eric
“knowing how to live well is very different from knowing about the stars and the planets, or factors affecting the evolutionary history of any species”
Is it? How can we know how to live well, if we can’t judge the impact of how we live on our own well-being, our friends’, society’s, humanity’s, and so on, for increasingly inclusive cohorts? And how else can we judge that impact except through observation and reason (science, broadly defined)?
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“Religion itself is a human creation. Its terms have a human logic. And we can understand them internally without the assumption of the existence of the being posited by them. ”
Just like any fiction. By religion do you merely mean fiction elevated to a way of life, or an over-arching narrative for one’s life? Or a conjecture about things unknown that one takes as an over-arching narrative for one’s life?
I don’t think most new atheists are so opposed to such things, though many would be skeptical of their value.
… but some Christian theology is so much more sophisticated than this as to make much new atheist opposition to religion sophistical. … There seems to be a belief that theology must simply be delusional, because there is no objective supernatural existent corresponding to the word ‘god’ — or at least that no “slam-dunk” arguments can be produced for such an existent.
I can’t claim I fully understand what he says but I think this could be another case of “people talking about different things under the same label”. There could be beautiful and sophisticated arguments in Theology. There could be beautiful rhetorics, and one can gain interesting insights on a hypothetical world where God(s) exists. But that doesn’t change the fact that without any evidence for God theology loses almost all meaning.
I would like to compare Theology to computer games and fantasy novels. I love computer games and fantasy novels so this comparison is not condescending at all. Computer games often have supernatural beings, spiritual forces, magic, and miracles. Sometimes authors create really thought-provoking and engaging worlds where characters have to deal with unique and interesting dilemmas.
For example, take the computer game “Dragon Age”. There are a lot of unique moral dilemmas in that fantasy world. There are many real humans online who discuss such dilemmas, see for example here. These discussions can sometimes be heated and very deep, once you get into it. If you are into, you can come up with sophisticated arguments there too. But people who are not interested in such made up worlds, will call them silly or useless and they’ll find the whole concept pointless and uninteresting.
The ultimate observation is that if we restrict ourselves to reality, then theology has nothing interesting to say that cannot be said by a secular discipline. If we want to be loose with our assumptions and let our imagnation run wild, we could imagine a world where God exists and then we can try to grapple with say “the problem of evil”. But then that is no more valid than philosohpical discussions about the nature of Force in Star War series.
The problem with religion and theology is that, unlike video games or opera or any other form of creative literary endeavor, the religious claim that their fantasies really are really real.
I’m all for knock-down drag-out battles over matters of literary analysis. What I and most others have a problem with is when you lose your anchor with reality. Throw yourself wholly and without reservation into your fantasies and be richer for it; but if you’re not back to reality by dinnertime, we’ve got a problem.
Cheers,
b&
The ‘Curse of Chalion’ by Lois McMaster Bujold has an engaging and impressive theology of 5 gods complete with a consequential society… but it is shelved under Science Fiction.
A someone who’s played a lot of Bioware’s output I know what you mean. However, morality and outcomes has always been a tough thing to model in video games – in most cases you need a “slap both parties and tell them to get over themselves otherwise we are all going to die” option but there never is one.
Still, the best of any medium can make you think. And at least Bioware are very good at writing characters that you can empathise with, unlike *insert holy book of choice here*
I am a New Atheist who broke away from Neo-Transcendentalism in a UU “spiritual but not religious” background. Whenever I read a blanket gnu atheist condemnation of religion — I apply it to this one, this variation. It’s my own ground zero.
And it generally fits. No intrusions into science or politics, no rigid rules of right and wrong, no Old-Man-in-the-Sky-with-a-Beard Deity — but the basic approach and criticisms of religion coming from the New Atheists STILL fit this religion.
But how can that be, if Eric’s reasons for leaving are legitimate?
Just want to say that I thought this was really well-reasoned and written!
It sounds very much like he wants to remain in the ivory tower, and is upset about the new atheist focus on “ground-based” activism – i.e., he’s unhappy with gnu focus on basic, common belief and common believers, on things like billboards and conventions and engaging in related activism that may not be part of philosophical god-disproof (such as feminism etc.).
That’s actually fine with me, and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. If atheism writ large is a movement, we need both ivory tower intellectual products and in-the-trench-activist work. If someone finds that they are not cut out for the activist role, by all means let them contribute to the ivory tower defense or promulgation of atheism.
I do mostly agree with his dislike of calling theists insane. But regarding his other complaints about gnus not reading enough theology or ignoring other ways of company, I think he’s wrong and the gnus basically have it right.
I agree. It’s only reasonable in situations where such hyperbole is understood as such (the way you might say that a party’s economic platform is “insane”) — and then you run into problems with the casual demonization of mental illness from the privileged.
I once came across a severe critic of Richard Dawkins who said he would be pretty much okay with what Dawkins says if only he had titled his book The God Illusion instead of The God Delusion. Cutting it a bit too thin, in my opinion.
As with seemingly so many topics, this is a semantic argument, and I don’t think semantic arguments should be the basis for throwing out an entire view or movement. There are common uses of the words “delusion” and “insane” that do not imply mental illness. But, I understand the point that it certainly can be construed as rude to call someone insane or delusional in a discussion and it can even be construed as such when labeling ideas this way, though depending on the person and argument, it can be useful.
To a person who is truly interested in a topic, calling Ken Ham’s views deluded and then rattling off the reasons why can certainly be effective. I think this is less the case with the “sophisticated” arguments. We can all admit that arguing for an unfalsifiable, non-intervening deity is not as irrational as arguing for the intervening kind that should theoretically be testable simply because it is not directly contradicting observable facts.
The non-intervening deity is, however, contradicting what we have learned through science if you look at what it is instead of what it does.
Even the gods which are mystery, mystery, mystery and of which one can say nothing, nothing, nothing seem to consist of some form of meaning, intention, consciousness, and/or value with no developmental history or anchor in the physical. If paranormal studies had taken off and changed the scientific model of reality, then this would be much more consistent and plausible than it now is, written as it is with a big fat metaphysical crayon over a network of embedded neurophysical explanations.
I agree, I said something along these lines in my second post on thread 20. To clarify what I’m saying here, is that the hypothesis that there’s a deistic entity can always be pushed back a level and is really still just a God of the gaps argument, except in this case the gap is at the front, not interspersed throughout time and history. Even in a multiverse scenario, this God could be argued for as the “ground of the multiverse.” But, as I said in the other post, the argument never stops there. It might be the case in a debate format with some convoluted abstract arguments, but it is always coupled with actual assertions about the characteristics of the God when discussions are held in other contexts. My distinction here is that a logically consistent argument is less irrational than one that has demonstrable empirical evidence against its probability, not that it is necessarily supportable or worth caring about in practice.
I read Eric’s site (Choiceindying)for years. Great site and great premise worth defending.
But Eric, you should know, like many others within New Atheism, that I know virtually nothing of theology. I was never religious and all I know about reality comes to me from observation. That does not mean that I do not think parts of our reality are indeed incredibly special, like Art, Music, Language, Math, Philosophy, and, of course, Science.
Even for apostates, New Atheism is the best game in town. It is a place to be as critical as one wishes. I think you place unnatural constraints on what can be accomplished within New Atheism.
All of this reminds me of the complaining physicists used to (and still do) make about quantum computing. It may not be what you like, but it is here to stay and it is primarily the only way people who are interested in the limits of quantum mechanics (decoherence, entanglement, macroscopic teleportation, etc.) will be able to empirically test.
I have read Eric’s Blog for some time and have appreciated his writings and opinions. I am disappointed in his recent disavowal of “New Atheism”. (Not so much the change in identity as the misunderstanding of what it means to reject the notion of a verifiable or even useful deity – i.e. an A-theist.)
As a former Evangelical / Fundamentalist, I fail to see how one can salvage any sort of “Sophisticated” unknowable Deity out of that toxic soup of violent fundamentalist fiction we call “The Holy Bible”. Even with the most liberal and sophisticated metaphorical interpretations, Christianity is founded on a manufactured fiction. After you remove the verifiably false bits, what’s left besides wishful thinking? More than that, can anyone point to a more fundamentalist Christian tract than the Bible itself?
Maybe I’m not smart enough to understand Plantinga’s arguments but to me they all look like slippery rationalizations designed to preserve the last vestiges of some sort of Christian god when the facts are otherwise contradictory.
I wish Eric all the best, but I doubt very much that there is anything more than sophisticated fantasy in the sophisticated theology he looks to now.
– evan
Jerry, I have made a few comments on comments. To answer your entire post would take a bit more time. I do not think you have really grasped the heart of the issue. When you speak, for example, of proofs for the existence of God, you are asking for something which, notwithstanding those like David Bentley Hart, cannot be given. There is no clinching argument for the existence of such a being. But the concept of God is nonetheless used, and it has a logic. Part of that logic is that God is infinite and unknowable, and religious practices make sense against that background assumption. Of course, the temptation is always present to make a jump from the practice to claim far more knowledge of God than the concept really allows. Thus we have claims being made for which there is no justification, claims to revelations from God, for example, which are such as to be absolutely true.
I don’t know how orthodox your own upbringing was, but the Jewish conception of God (or G_d) is not of a being who can be known, and the only man who is said to have spoken with God face to face (Moshe) is as shadowy as the God with whom he was on such friendly terms. Think of Isaiah’s vision of God in the temple. It is a liturgical vision, and the only presence of God is the voice within him which says “Who will go for us?” Isaiah answers: “Here am I. Send me.” And so he becomes, for a time, the voice of God to his people (and the ‘his’ here is ambiguous).
These are all perfectly human occurrences. Religion itself is a human creation. Its terms have a human logic. And we can understand them internally without the assumption of the existence of the being posited by them. That is why religion can be carried on as a purely cultural practice. The assumption that religion is a delusion based on the claim that no proof can be provided for God’s existence is simply a non-starter. As Tillich says, God doesn’t exist.
Which is Hart’s point as well.
A naturalistic god would be an idol. Any contingent being, or any contingent truth raised to absolute status is dangerous, as anyone familiar with 20th century totalitarianism should understand (which is why I find the increasing apotheosis of science worrying). Do I want to realign myself with the church? No, I don’t think so, but, as time goes on, I find the Sturm und Drang over the niceties of religious belief a bit precious, to tell the truth.
And your continuing to say that I have never given you another way of knowing is, as I have said again and again, a misleading way of putting the point. We know such a variety of things that to suggest that there is only one method of confirmation is simply to miss the point. Historical knowledge is not confirmed simply by empirical means. There are hermeneutical factors that have to be taken into consideration for which there can be no empirical confirmation, and in this respect it is therefore unlike science, even though even science has its hermeneutical aspect (thus Hawking’s “model dependent reality”). The point is that knowing how to live well is very different from knowing about the stars and the planets, or factors affecting the evolutionary history of any species, and being able to confirm the one may give you no insight whatever into the means of confirming the other. This is why stretching the meaning of ‘science’ is simply hopeless as a way of accounting for truth, especially since no truth is ever absolutely confirmed (slam-dunk, as you say), even in science — and you >know this! Is that bit of knowledge empirically confirmable? Is it science? Well, there you have the problem.
If we accept history, we do so with empirical evidence even if that evidence is indirect. This is the same as science. What may differ is the strength of that evidence and we usually assign some level of certainty to our evidence and therefore claims based on the strength of that evidence. I don’t see this as another way of knowing. It’s scientific in its approach.
I had lunch at the faculty lounge at my university recently with two historians. I asked both of them directly, whether history is some sort of science. Both of them answered “No. History is not a science. That’s an old fashioned view.” So I’m afraid Eric’s on solid ground here.
I think I just had déjà vu. I responded somewhere else to you about this. Must be a reset in the Matrix. 😉
Again?
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Again again? 🙀
Hi Eric,
I’ve said pretty much everything I have to say about the ‘ways of knowing’ stuff, and I could also claim that you haven’t grasped the heart of the issue. Any facts we know about history are empirically derived, as is most of “knowing how to live well”, which, insofar as it concerns the consequences of actions rather than philosophy, also relies on observations.
But what I want to address most is your comment below:
And my response is this: What makes you so sure that Tillich and Hart represent the best thinking of theology? For against them I can array hundreds—nay, thousands— of theologians who claim that God does exist, and whose beliefs depend on that existence claim. I have lots of examples in my book of such claims, including Sophisticated Theologians like Plantinga, Haught, Polkinghorne, Swinburne, and people like Karl Giberson and Francis Collins. They have stated explicitly that religion is critically dependent on existence claims about God, Jesus, and so on. Since there aren’t any “smack-down proofs” one way or the other, why do you assert so strongly that Tillich and Hart are right and everyone else, including most believers, are wrong?
And if Tillich and Hart are right, then we don’t need religion, which, is, after all, an elaborate edifice constructed around the assumption of a divine being. If there is no God, what has religion contributed to our well-being that secular humanism hasn’t—or, now that religion doesn’t rule the roost, can’t. I would argue that religion has contributed nothing to morality or “knowing how to live” that secular humanism, starting with the Greek philosophers, haven’t contributed, or couldn’t contribute better.
There is a difference, you know, between saying God exists but is infinite and unknowable, and that there is no evidence for any God.
I’d like an answer to this, but I’d also expand upon it.
Considering that it’s likely that not even a single percentage point of the actual believing public have ever even heard of Tillich nor Hart nor would recognize their theology as congruent with their actual beliefs, why should they be considered more significant than any other heresy over the course of history?
That is, how is one supposed to identify valid (let alone even good) theology and distinguish it from that which is invalid? And if it is good theology but nobody’s aware of it or agrees with it…then what?
b&
I don’t think that Tillich and Hart represent the best in theology. I do think that, if we are to respond to religion, we have to respond to its arguments, and both Tillich and Hart have made arguments that are worthy of response. Some theologians, as you say, think of God as existing. However, faced with the arguments of Hart, Tillich, Aquinas, Barth, etc., they might modify their beliefs to take into consideration what other theologians have said. The point is to distinguish between existents, that is, those things that comprise the universe, and God, who (if it “exists”) is not part of the furniture of the universe, but is its ground. The word ‘exist’ may be being used in two senses that need to be distinguished. That is what Tillich and Hart, Aquinas and others would argue.
As to our need of religion. Obviously, we don’t need religion, if by that you mean that we could not survive without it. Like Ronald Dworkin, the religious believer might say, you either get it or you don’t, but if you don’t, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t provide an enriched basis upon which to posit a life.
I shan’t argue further about “ways” of knowing. I think you’re wrong, but you are not convinced. I don’t know how else to make the point. I don’t think history is a science, though, of course, there are undoubted empirical elements in history. Indeed, that’s what’s wrong with Marxism, because Marx believed that he had come to understand history as a science, and that the things that were to happen were necessitated by the economic conditions which he had discerned working through history. (By the way, Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, who replaced verificationism by falsifiability, dismissed Marx and others who believed that history was scientific in this sense, called (and dismissed as dangerous) Marx and others of his ilk, including Plato and Hegel, “historicists”, which he believed, with some justice, underlay the totalitarian impulse.) In the same way, there are empirically verifiable elements in biblical study, but that doesn’t make biblical philology a science, as such. History and biblical studies are both part of what are commonly known as the humanities, or what the Germans call die Geisteswissenschaften (as opposed to die Naturwissenschaften), as you know. They have empirical elements, but they are, by and large, hermeneutical studies, which rely on interpretive understanding, and there is no science which can either confirm or disconfirm interpretations, though some empirical evidence can nullify (though not quite so readily confirm) some interpretations, but this is less common than one might suppose. What you dismiss as postmodern hermeneutics, while sometimes taken to extremes, did make an important point about the plasticity of interpretation. This does not mean that there is nothing to be known, hermeneutically, but it is known with less certainty than is available to some of the sciences (though not, it has to be added, to all).
As to religion as a human creation. The point is one that is made by Don Cupitt and others. Religion is a human creation. That means that it was created, just as other cultural artifacts are created, by human beings, to serve human purposes. At some point it was reified and supposed to be objectively revealed by supernatural beings. This is a mistake, since there is no plausible way of confirming that anything is revealed from a supernatural source. So, taking religion as a human creation, one can, in Wittgensteinian fashion, ask about the logic of religious language and practices. This is what a number of philosophers of religion did in the 60s and 70s, and continue in some cases to do. In this way they have justified a religious use of language (and a participation in religious practice) as something of value. The problem is that the old supernaturalism hangs around, and will not let religion go. It is therefore dangerous, but there are still a number of people who would justify religious practice on these grounds, and it is hard to gainsay them, or to subvert them by claiming religion to be based on a fiction. Quite so, they might say, but are not human rights based on a fiction? Human equality? Justice? (Consider Rawls’ fiction of the “original position”.) Bentham called rights “nonsense on stilts”, but rights based reasoning is perhaps the best ground on which to base human community.
I can’t buy that history is predominantly hermeneutical. Interpretation really only works in theology and languages. Even literature relies on empiricism to a large extent but history is very empirical.
Your example of the dismissal of Marx and the totalitarian impulse – that sounds vaguely like if you bring empiricism and science to history, you ignite some hidden totalitarianism inside of you. What was wrong with Marxism is the application of it failed to recognized human behaviour and motivations and that sharing everything equally was against our nature. He got it right on the oppressed rising up though. If people had known more about human motivation and applied more scientific rigour, perhaps a better system would have emerged.
“I can’t buy that history is predominantly hermeneutical.”
Agreed! It’s no more so than paleontology, archaeology, phylogenetic reconstruction, or any other historical science. Done right, history is scientific. Done unscientifically, it’s just a form of lying.
Exactly what I want to say.
Historical knowledge is not separate branch of knowledge (Ken Ham?). There is a gradation of empirism from physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, to history, paleonthropy etc.
Understandable that somebody from philosophy can not understand these nuances, but assuming that historical science in different is definitely mistaken.
Good debate! Keep clashing swords and we can analyze the fragmented debris ..
😀
Even this formulation of gods we can dismiss, and reasonably enough should have done so since the development of atomic theory. We know what grounds everyday existence: basic chemistry plus gravity. We know what grounds chemistry: atoms. We know what grounds atoms: nuclei and electrons. We know what grounds those: nuclei are quarks and gluons and electrons are their own fundamental particles; there’re also lots of photons flying around, as well. And we know what grounds all the particles in the Standard Model: their associated fields. Our knowledge of what grounds the Standard Model is a bit fuzzy at this point…
…but, and this is key: whatever it is, it doesn’t actually do anything not already accounted for by the Standard Model.
So, at absolute most, you can go the route that Spinoza was groping for that Einstein embraced, and equate your god with Sagan’s Cosmos. But what does this gain you? The Cosmos cares not one whit about you, it has no knowledge, no intention, no design, no plan, no power, no authority, no morality…nothing that anybody has ever attributed to any deity ever.
Even if we accept the “Ground Round of Being” definition of some god or other, that still doesn’t get us where the Sophisticated Theologians™ are trying to take us — never mind that we’ve already got far more than adequate answers to fundamental questions of existence for these types of porpoises.
b&
Which is it? “Ground Round” or “porpoises”?
I was planning on hamburgers and fries for dinner.
Ground round porpoise, of course, of course!
b&
Obviously I can’t comment on every comment, since every comment is about me. But I wasn’t defending Hart or Tillich. Did you think I was?! But as for this:
I can’t say whether or not that is true, and I don’t see how you can make this claim without considering the arguments made. You may think them not worth while addressing, but not addressing them is not confuting them either. My problem is with argumentation like this that doesn’t go anywhere, because no addressed to the arguments themselves. It’s alright to say you’re not interested, but it’s not alright to make a claim which does not address the arguments in question. I simply don’t know whether your claim is true.
Then permit me to turn the tables on you.
If you think that there’s any wiggle room left in modern science in which an supernatural entity can function, including gods, then you haven’t considered the arguments made and you especially haven’t addressed the evidence.
There is at least as much reason to accept the Standard Model as complete and sufficient for human-scale phenomenon (and much more) as there is to accept anything else in science. Arguing otherwise amounts to a claim that maybe that apple won’t accelerate towards the center of the earth at about 10 m/s/s when it falls from the tree.
So, first: do you think it would be reasonable to seriously consider “Intelligent Falling” if it was “supported” by sufficiently sophisticated theological arguments? And please note that, though I picked an obviously facetious example intentionally, I did so carefully in order to help establish at least one boundary point, not (merely) to mock certain unsophisticates.
If you would reject Intelligent Falling, then I would be more than happy to try to step you through the basics of the physics to demonstrate that “Ground of Being” is no different, despite any apparent additional theological sophistication.
If nothing else, you should at least be aware that, to those of us familiar with the physics, there is no apparent difference between “Intelligent Falling” and “Ground of Being,” and you owe it to yourself (if nothing else) to understand why we reject the one as easily and as casually as you yourself presumably reject the other.
Cheers,
b&
I think the point here is that they do not warrant addressing because they themselves do not address what we know, not absolutely, but with a very high degree of confidence, how the cosmos works (up to some energy scale that we’re pushing higher and higher).
If the conception of god as the ground of being has any semblance of reality it needs must explain that.
Moreover, if not, if this ground of reality is only a fiction, you have to show that it is a useful one, else it can be discarded. The goal for “theology” then would be to show that “religion”, devoid of any real θεός, has value; that building your world view around such a fiction leads to a life better lived than does, say, secular humanism. I see no evidence that this is the case.
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Leave it to Ant to summarize my position better than I can….
Eric, if you care to respond further, feel free to address this post of Ant’s I’m replying to right now and ignore everything else from me in the thread.
b&
“… but are not human rights based on a fiction?”
Harris, in _The Moral Landscape_, argues they are not.
Bottom line, if God and the supernatural (Pure Primal Mentality/Values) are removed from religion, then we’re talking about a life philosophy — world views which involve values, commitments, personal validations, love, and experience. Gnu atheists have no quarrel with the formation of reasonable life philosophies.
Happy, happy, right?
So why am I suspicious that ‘sophisticated’ theologists are really just secular humanists with a poetic vocabulary and generous borrowings from traditions? Because of their attacks on new atheism, that’s why. They don’t cajole us that no, we’re all in agreement underneath and so let’s get rid of the dead wood together.
They argue against the enemy: atheism.
Theologians seem strangely desperate not to give up God-as-a-concept even if they are willing to agree (even if privately) that God as such does not exist.
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And yet they have no coherent concept on which to insist. They have faith that the word “God” means SOMETHING. No telling what though.
Hart’s and Tillich’s god does not have bishops excommunicating a nun for agreeing to a an abortion of an non-viable fetus that saved the life of the mother. Hart’s and Tillich’s god does not have bishops creating Ethical and Religious Directives for hospitals that override medical decisions. Hart’s and Tillich’s god does not have spokespeople like Margaret Somerville to preach against the right to a dignified death that honors human autonomy. Those and hundreds of other places are where the religious rubber hits the road in the real world.
Can you not sense the irony in claiming knowledge about the unknowable? Is it not obvious how absolutely any fancy anybody anywhere anywhen is equally justifiable in such an endeavor?
That’s a bug, a very serious one, and most emphatically not a feature. Time and time again, historical “knowledge” not bounded by honest scientific inquiry has later turned out to be spectacularly worng when the empiricists finally are able to get to work. The only reasonable conclusion is that the knowledge claimed by hermeneutics and related fields is false knowledge. As comforting as it might be to delude one’s self that one’s conclusions are sound because they represent the best guess you can make at the time, the proper response is to admit ignorance. The type of confidence you’re expressing in such “knowledge” simply isn’t justifiable nor is it real.
Such confidence, in fact, is the very essence of delusion.
This is true but misleading. Science generally as well as in principle always expresses uncertainty. We have six sigma confidence in the existence of the Higgs Boson — which is not absolute certainty. What it is, however, is far beyond any reasonable doubt. It’s not quite as certain as that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning (which itself isn’t certain but might as well be), but it’s certain enough that the rounding difference between the two isn’t worth worrying about.
And that’s because the only reasonable alternatives that are consistent with the observations made to date are conspiracy theories. Maybe aliens are controlling our thoughts with their mind rays; maybe we’re all part of Alice’s Red King’s dream; maybe we’re just subroutines in a computer simulation; maybe you’re just plain unsalted nuts.
…however, that last point circles right back to the fundamental question at hand — for even the gods themselves could very well be the victims of one form of delusion or another. Maybe we really are being controlled by alien mind rays, but maybe those aliens themselves are just part of Alice’s Red King’s dream, and maybe the King Himself is just a subroutine in a computer simulation.
So, if even the gods themselves can’t be certain of the nature of their own realities, of what sense does it make to call them gods?
And if there can’t even be gods in the first place, how can we sensibly study them?
Cheers,
b&
This is a plea that ‘my’ dogma is worth it. Every premise mentioned here fabricated whimsy.
“Of course, the temptation is always present to make a jump from the practice to claim far more knowledge of God than the concept really allows.”
That’s the point right there, Eric. Can you name a religion that does not claim far more knowledge than the concept of God really allows? You emphasize that God is unknowable. So Isn’t the sum of the knowledge that can be claimed about God, zero? Unknowable is unknowable. And what on earth is the point of forming a religion around something that is unknowable? It makes as little sense as forming a religion around atheism. There is literally nothing to talk about. Notice that seculars use the term “mother nature” implying something like “god” but we never give her attributes other than female, which I think is funny and poignant. But we never imagine what she wants. because she is unknowable. She is just what ever it is that causes stuff, if anything causes stuff at all. Notice no one ever went to war over mother nature. And notice why. New atheists believe in mother nature. So give us some credit for that.
BTW new atheists do not ask for proof of God, they ask for evidence of God. It’s a big difference.
I wish you well on your journey. Peace be with you.
“And what on earth is the point of forming a religion around something that is unknowable?”
I alluded to this earlier. Has any religion been formed around such a concept or is it merely being retrofitted by theology to religions that started with a far more knowable – and ostensibly known – deity?
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Indeed.
I think the rarified forms of religion that MacDonald refers to here, the writings of Tillich and so on, are just a stage in a retreat from belief. The point of forming such a religion is that you’re heavily invested in religion and it’s too costly to throw every bit of it overboard. I don’t mean this as a criticism of someone’s character or personal fortitude but just an observation about human limitations. It’s just that many people have invested a lot in religion, their mind is full of religious allusions and stories, their emotions and feelings are attached to so many religious tokens and signifiers that, even once they realize that it’s not actually true, weeding it all out of their mind is simply not a reasonable project for some people. For someone in this position, and I think that is probably essentially all the theologians MacDonald cites favorably, a negative kind of view of religion as some kind of commentary on the unknowable allows them to continue to use some of this furniture they’ve accumulated in their mind. I have sympathy for it because it is well enough to say ‘you should burn it all and start over’ if it’s not your furniture. Where these people go astray is to leap from religion-as-hypothetical/fiction to kidding themselves that “The Unknowable” really has key characteristics of the god they have come to doubt or reject or, even more to the point, to imagine that anyone without their own life history and prior investment in this particular kind of baroque furniture should care.
Well, I guess I see this more of an evolution (!) of an already formed religion, the concept of God having become more tenuous and abstract, rather than a religion newly forming around such a concept. But otherwise I concur with your assessment (as noted elsewhere).
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I was answering the “what is the point” quote and sort of ignored your question. I agree fully that these are not new religions but exaptations 😉 of existing religions. They only make sense in that light and I think there are almost certainly no examples of religions originally formed around the negative space of the unknowable.
By ‘ignored’ I mean ‘failed to address’, not ‘ignored’ as in ‘dismissed’. It’s a good question, I just failed to address it because I was focused on the quotation.
Thanks. NP.
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That all sounds fine, until one is lucid enough to recognize the great world-wide suffering inflicted on millions by religions like Christianity, at which point, I say keep your furniture, but man-up at least enough to call your furniture by a name other than Christianity, so as not to continue to support a terrible institution.
“God is unknowable” is a knowledge claim.
Actually, it’s at least four knowledge claims, one of which you hit on.
There *exists* a God that is unknowable.
There exists *a* God that is unknowable.
There exists a God that is *unknowable*.
There exists a God that is unknowable and *interacts with the universe*.
The final one is the one you touched on and is needed for theistic religions.
That’s an awful lot of knowledge claims for something that is unknowable, isn’t it? And Eric wonders how we can dismiss theology.
Thank you, I can see that I was only scratching the surface. But apparently if we read volumes sophisticated theology they have found a a way around this stumbling block that we will all understand if we put in the work. 😉
Yes, that bit of knowledge is empirically confirmable (though not absolutely so). And yes it is science.
Sorry, I’m lost, what problem?
I can’t see how that is so. An unknowable God would give equal justification to any religious practice as well as none. Under your idea of God no speficic religious practice is sensible, because there is no way to derive it from the premise(s) on which it is supposed to rest. This is “P: cats are fuzzy, so therefore, C: let us ride bicycles” logic.
The really scary thing is that such an unkowable God as the one you’re defending makes literally any religious practice equally sensible. You realize that your argument justifies the conclusion ‘human sacrifice makes sense’ as well as it justifies the conclusion ‘silent prayer makes sense’?
[This is a repost; EM originally stuck his main post as a re-re-re-reply, and I replied to that. Since he copied his main post, I’m copying my reply over too.]
+1
[Only here, as there’s no direct Reply there!]
There is no problem with the stretching of science. What does it matter if the whole of what we know turns out to be explained by science. Why fear that?
If science cannot explain how we know everything, does that make it better? One thing is for sure, at its present rate of development, science will continue to be exported into areas that address how we live, feel, care for one another, and aesthetically interpret history and the known universe. If that is upsetting, then you might want to set yourself by the fire with some hot cocoa and read only the things that comport with your wanting existence to be.
Whatever is the case, is the case. And it is happening whether anyone likes, that applying the procedures of science is the best way to understand anything.
Well, that is disappointing:
I didn’t think I would see Eric stoop to using the common religious special pleading that if you criticize a subject you criticize the person espousing it! If that were so, no science could be done.
Especially sad since Eric himself also parades the usually religious strawman around, “atheists aren’t criticizing _my/true/all_ religion”, implying an atheist strawman. So it ends with the usual grasping for straws and clutching of pearls.
Plantinga asserts that God must exist because God gave us a sensus divinitas. So, the answer begging the question is what passes for Sophisticated Theology?
I, too, received a thorough catechism in my youth. I’ve also read a fair amount of ST, including Plantinga. I had to shove bamboo strips under my fingernails while doing so to distract me from the agony, but I read him. Plantinga’s idea of ‘nuance’ is to bury a few infantile assumptions and tautologies under an avalanche of convoluted words.
I am sick to death of hearing from people like Eric MacDonald, Denys Turner, and assorted Plantingistas that, as the existence of God is a theological question, I must fully verse myself in, then restrict myself to applying, theological constructs.
FTS. Why are you lecturing me about winesaps, pink lady’s and gravensteins, when I’ve just kicked over your entire stupid apple cart?
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
Or, if I was feeling uncharitable, that you were more interested in the 3 B’s, as taught by Her Royal Majesty’s Navy: Bullshit Baffles Brains.
Nice blog, Jerry, again. I especially liked how you wanted fair challenges to the person in question. In light of that spirit, here are some mistakes in the original post and in the comments.
” Alvin Plantinga, who simply asserts that it is “reasonable” to believe in God as a “basic belief,” because the Christian God has endowed us with a special sensus divinitatis to detect divinity? ”
This isn’t fair. First Plantinga doesn’t assert that there is a senses divinitatis — the whole structure of his argument is conditional; he claims that if there is such a divine sense, then it would produce knowledge in a direct, non-argumentative way.
He states this in Warranted Christian Belief (200, OUP; 142),
“I believe that the models I shall present (models regarding the divine sense as knowledge -producing) …[is] true, or at least verisimilitudinous, close to the truth. Still, I don’t claim to show that they are true. That is because the A/C model entails the truth of theism and the extended A/C model the truth of classical Christianity. To show that these models are true, therefore, would also
be to show that theism and Christianity are true; and I don’t know how to do something one could sensibly call ‘showing’ that either of these is true…As for classical Christianity, there is even less prospect of demonstrating its truth. Of course this is nothing against either their truth or their warrant; very little of what we believe can be ‘demonstrated’ or ‘shown’”
Now there may still be lots of room to criticize Plantinga — I have some criticisms. But the problem isn’t that he asserts something that entails the truth of his view. You might think that the following claim (if Christianity is true, then many probably directly know it to be such, even in the absence of arguments) is of trivial interest. I am not so sure, for this conditional does seem to show that the very common evidential objection to religion (i.e. if it doesn’t have public evidence, it’s irrational to believe it and can’t be known) fails.
Peace
“, for this conditional does seem to show that the very common evidential objection to religion (i.e. if it doesn’t have public evidence, it’s irrational to believe it and can’t be known) fails.”
Hardly so. Try this one:
If Plantinga ever says something non-weasily, then rational, thinking people might take him seriously, otherwise, he is a big failure. This conditional validates Plantinga’s irrationality.
That looks like name calling and doesn’t engage any points, so not worthy of a reply. (Recall I don’t agree with Plantinga on lots but so far I have seen few actual criticisms of him on the comments here).
Jerry has had posts in the past dealing with Plantinga and his childish writings. He has been picked apart here more than once. No need to rehash the nonsense.
No doubt Jerry can speak for himself, but I am responding to a current claim. Calling things nonsense, again, is not an argument.
Wow:
“As for classical Christianity, there is even less prospect of demonstrating its truth. Of course this is nothing against either their truth or their warrant; very little of what we believe can be ‘demonstrated’ or ‘shown'”
That made my brain hurt.
So he’ll try to demonstrate how his model works, he doesn’t think that he can, but it doesn’t matter if it’s not convincing because little else can be known? What?
I don’t know what to say. If he managed to write stuff like this without being laughed at… I’m lost for words. Please tell me that this whole passage that you copied in is out of context.
Note: It sounds like it’s up there in the pantheon of Really Bad Justifications with Craig’s self-authenticating witness of the holy spirit BS.
I don’t recall Craig having an if-then structure, but either way, Plantinga is not claiming self-authenticating anything as far as I can remember. Just that experience counts as defeasible evidence; he rejects classical foundationalism.
Experience, frankly, is bullshit.
No, not entirely; it is, after all, all we have.
But all of human history is but one long exercise in the utterly miserable failure of “common sense,” which is nothing more nor less than the most naïvely obvious extrapolation from experience.
Much worse, it is overwhelmingly well documented that the types of religious experiences used to justify theistic beliefs are delusional at best and often deliberately fraudulent.
By claiming experience as defensible evidence, Craig might as well shout, “Pay no mention to the man behind the curtain!” and hand out “Scam me” signs to his followers to tape to their foreheads.
b&
I didn’t mean to imply that AP had Craig’s listenin to voices thing going on, but that what was quoted here was a hideous/useless non-justification of his work.
The model has an if-true then probably warranted structure. There is nothing wrong with arguing that way, as long as you argue for the ‘if’ part. He does in that book; my point was only to claim that there was an ‘if’ part to his argument. To justify that a quote will suffice. I don’t see enough understanding here to laugh.
The problem is that all of the “ifs” have long since been conclusively demonstrated to be “nots.” Yet theists insist that the “nots” are really “maybes,” at least if you squint hard enough and sing Disney songs loud enough.
b&
Saying x has been demonstrated is not an argument, nor is talking about Disney relevant.
Of course it’s an argument. If I made a claim about the real world that began, “If the Earth is flat (at all length scales) …” would you take it at all seriously?
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Absolutely this.
All the “ifs” in the universe can be postulated, but if they don’t coincide with what we observe (or are phrased so that they can never be tested) then they should be ignored unless taken as a purely intellectual exercise.
If I were objecting to something in a way that entailed the falsity of that if-clause, then, yes.
That’s just it. All the “sophisticated theology” either is an empirical claim or it depends utterly on empirical claims.
And all those claims have been as soundly demonstrated worng as the flat Earth theory, and for centuries.
Indeed, “sophisticated theology” in general seems to be nothing but an obscurantist rehash of Aristotelian metaphysics, which is the most useless and thoroughly discredited scientific theory in the history of civilization — it’s no wonder the result is as incoherent as it is.
b&
@ Chris,
The apparent principle underlying your claim ‘if X is not based on publicly available evidence then belief in X is not justified’ is precisely the one that the conditional was denying. For that reason the conditional (if correct) is not vacuous. Best to argue for your principle, in other words, otherwise the question is begged.
If you’re claiming “inner experiences,” as reliable sources of information about how the Universe works then you know nothing of human psychology. Indeed, you’re likely as deluded as the guy in the psych ward who thinks Jesus shares his bunk, though not in quite so visceral a way.
b&
@Tom
You (as in anyone) can believe what they like. They may even have good reasons to.
Unless they can demonstrate the truth of them don’t expect me to be convinced, and if it clashes with my corpus of knowledge then it’s going to have to be very well supported.
I am not talking about trivial matters – “I feel sad” or something – as, assuming that you are human you have a similar physiology to me. If, however, you claim revelation, then unless it can be demonstrated in the third person I absolutely won’t believe you. Why? I only have your word for it – you could be mistaken, lying, hallucinating, etc, all of which I am aware happens to humans.
I look at “If” as a programmer: IF Then Else . It is a complete waste of time and effort to put in conditional statements where conditions can never be met.
Useful as a thought experiment, yes. Applicable to real world conditions with known physical restraints? No.
Would you prefer abuse to argument, then?
b&
Polls concerning Bigfoot and Loch Ness –
Americans 29% say Bigfoot “definitely or “probably” real. 24% of Scots think Loch Ness Monster is “definitely” or “probably” real.
http://www.angusreidglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/2012.03.04_Myths.pdf
Clearly some kind of sensus monstrus that we muggles lack…
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I think you’ve got it. I must be a muggle. That explains a lot. But where are all of the broomsticks?
I find myself nodding along with pretty much the entire post but find this one sentence a bit odd:
Before you can discuss the nature of God, however deep and nuanced your discussion, you have to provide rational arguments for the existence of a God.
Is it not kind of the other way around? We first need to have an idea what a god is supposed to be and then we can start testing whether something with that ‘shape’ exists.
“(Most skeptics, however, don’t “suspend judgment” on the existence of … Bigfoot)”
I suppose it depends on how one defines “suspend judgment”, but I think Bigfoot could be considered something I “suspend judgment” on, or more accurately, I disbelieve in at the moment but can easily imagine changing my mind on. After all, non-homo sapiens bipedal primates have existed in the past, so it’s certainly not impossible one of them still exists today. Yes, it’s highly unlikely such mega-fauna could exist almost entirely undetected in this age of camera phones and spy satellites, but it’s much less unlikely than an omniscient utterly invisible being that can create a universe at will.
If [the Christian] God is unknowable, what’s this ‘Bible’ they’re always referring to?
Eric MacDonald: “Religion is a human creation. That means that it was created, just as other cultural artifacts are created, by human beings, to serve human purposes.”
_____
Religion being woven within our long history represents a dazzling constellation of intellectual, emotional, non-rational efforts along with its unfortunate irrational/dangerous aspects. In that sense, its dense intricacy is closer to how networks operate rather than individuals. There is a lot going on here.
To get a network to clean up its act, that is in said case, to lop off the whiplash-causing tentacles of specific divinities and re-energize stuck nodes of prescribed rituals, is a challenge that I would suspect a man who was thoughtfully drawn to the priesthood would be compelled to take on, or at the very least, espouse why it should be.
So get on with it, Eric, because, moi, is not only not drawn to the priesthood, I am repelled by it as I consider the priestly ones as being mostly inverted alpha males who think they can somehow effect change as potently and smugly as their more hyper counterparts but just without the violence. 🙂
Ask a Christian how much part “sophisticated theology” played in making them become Christian in the first place – that’ll give you an idea of how relevant it is to actual belief; evidence enough that it exists entirely as a post hoc rationalisation/justification.
I have observed something parallel. Christians don’t demand that a new convert read lots of “sophisticated theology” before their new belief is justified, but disbelief is never considered justified no matter how much of that stuff one has read. In fact, most regular Christians have never even read the Bible, yet they’re considered to be justified in their belief that it’s true.
Yes! The whole thing is egregiously asymmetric.
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Indeed; on a few occasions I pointed out the hypocrisy of religious apologists demanding atheists be familiar with every theological argument ever constructed before being ‘justified’ in their godlessness, yet were perfectly happy to accept believers who were capable of nothing more sophisticated than answering ‘yes’ to the question ‘do you believe in God?’.
Wowbagger, I’m glad you stated it this way. The “god-box” argument is pretty standard, but I’ve never really directly analyzed the obvious point of contrasting the acceptance of positive belief with no justification with the view that no amount of investigation suffices not to believe. The honest position would be to require converts to justify their faith as well, a point Dawkins nicely illustrates with his point about no Democratic or Republican children.
My own stance has always been that I’ll hear about if there’s convincing evidence for the existence of god – just like the rest of the world will.
Frankly, life is short, and I have only time to read a few thousand books. So untill that happens, I’ll continue to dismiss theology without a look.
Some people who have realised that gods are fictional, still have a fondness for religion. They like the people, the singing, the churches, and the ritual and they feel at home there. For them it is hard to hear their friends (and their past selves) being described as deluded and disingenuous. I presume that if you’ve spend much of your life reading “sophisticated theology” you may have grown fond of its poetry. Read Mary Midgely for example. Nothing that woman says makes sense, but it sounds very moving if you disengage your brain. It forms a nebulous but sticky web of ideas and feelings that many clearly enjoy. I guess Eric is one of these people. He just feels warm and fuzzy about the church, and regardless of its failings he feels they are his people, and is no longer able to remain in opposition to them.
I’ve suggested this to Eric from time to time on his blog, that some sort of nostalgia is involved. But he says no, that I just don’t understand the numinous and am insufficiently well read in sophisticated theology, and that I suffer from scientism. At least one of us is wrong.
Scientism … oh dear. Numinous?? The experience of the presence of divinity? So Eric is in fact not an atheist at all but some kind of deist? Or a Christian who thinks the others are “doing it worng”? He seems quite confused. I’m pretty sure I know which of you is wrong.
Try as I may, I can’t understand a single one of the points Eric McDonald is making. And in this I suspect I am not alone. If he has any interest in having most readers understand him, he might want to try again. If he has no interest, then never mind. “That conveys no meaning to me” may not be an argument, but it’s certainly an invitation to do a better job of explaining. And if the response is “read theology”, I would appreciate it if he would specify where, exactly (page numbers?) each point is explained in a way that a simple atheist might understand. If there is no such place, if McDonald’s meaning as well as god itself is ineffable, then I’m willing to give it all up.
Clearly we need a Theology for Dummies …
I think that’s one of the reasons I stopped frequenting Eric’s blog: That many of the posts, while they were clearly well informed by Eric’s background, were turgid and opaque.
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Indeed. Reading MacDonald’s comments to gbjames on the original post at choiceindying.com is infuriating. It’s like reading the congressional testimony of some lawyer who is compelled to appear and answer questions but who is determined not to give out any actual information. At one point he says, “As to not being able to describe ‘the thing clearly’ myself. I can, of course, though it would take a book or two. Blog posts are not the place to do it”. I really don’t know what to make of such a claim. Obviously one can say more in a long book, and give more details and more examples and paint a more thorough picture than in a short work. To assert that you can not explain yourself at all short of a book, or two, is mind boggling. I’ve read a lot of stuff in religion, philosophy, science, mathematics. A lot of really complicated stuff. A lot of ‘deep’ stuff. I think I could write a blog post about any topic you care to name that would give you at least a good idea what you’d expect to find in a whole book on any aspect of any of these topics. And I could do it cold, from memory, without any reference to any author names or other books whatsoever. This is not because I’m some amazing wizard of explanation but because that’s what it means to understand something. Does MacDonald really have something to say that is more subtle than Relativity (which I’ve explained to some degree to my 10 year old over breakfast) or Godel’s Incompleteness theorem (which I’ve explained to anyone who will sit still for the fifteen minutes it takes) or quantum mechanics (the sense of which I think most people can get from a single Scientific American article), or Borge’s vision of Judas as the hero of the New Testament? Obviously any short description of these things isn’t going to exhaust the subject. I’ve been thinking about incompleteness for fifteen years and it’s still interesting and full of things I haven’t explored. Connections between randomness and indeterminacy are truly fascinating to me and I think to fully appreciate them you would need to spend a good deal of time doing proofs in complexity theory because only then will the force of these connections really hit you. But to assert that you can’t say clearly what those connections are, that you can’t give someone an idea of what they will find if they invest the effort to work through Papadimitriou’s Computational Complexity text, that they can only know what lay in store for them there by devoting months of study to it is just absurd. It either means that you’ve got something truly novel in the history of human knowledge or that you are empty handed and trying to con us.
Well said.
If you can not summarize your thought on a subject in a few paragraphs of your own words (even if it is not complete), then you do not really understand the subject.
Either he is ignorant, or too arrogant. Both are negatives.
How about a Sophisticated Theology for everyday Christians and see how well that one sells….?
The word “delusion” is loaded. When I hear “delusional” I think of the woman on my psych rotation in medical school who had the delusion that her ex could walk through walls and was repeatedly raping her from across the country. Or I think of the woman with the fixed delusion that she had a thyroid abnormality. While some religious people maybe deluded in the psychiatric sense of word, many are religious in the same why I like the color green.
Much discussion that around pivots on “truth” and “ways of knowing.”
At this moment I disagree that empirical analysis is the only valid way to know “truth”, and I will add that the word “truth” is a bit imprecise (That’s another topic).
There are simply two ways of knowing anything, one is through observation of our external world, call that science or empiricism, or simply objective reality. The other regards our internal state that includes feelings, emotion, cognitive predilections, mental condition, etc.
Objective reality is something that we all share, and can largely agree upon as true. That agreement is,of course, predicated on our internal and subjective perceptions.
No one can tell me or another what they feel, think, taste, smell, hate, love or any other internal state. Yet, those states are as true for the individual as any agreed upon objective truth.
The whole of religion seems to base it’s “truth” on subjective states, such as Plantinga’s sensus divinitatis, or any religious persons “feeling” that po6 is with them.
Why must we argue the science is the only way of knowing? I will not suggest that religious truth is anymore that human cognition interpreted very wrongly, but we must recognize that our internal state is in fact quite true, to the individual. Neuroscience can not yet look at my insides and determine what I think or feel, and until it can accurately, our subjective experience remains an “other way of knowing.”
Another way of knowing what for example?
If I have a Sensus Personinmykitchenus and there isn’t a person in my kitchen, then it isn’t a truth that there is a person in my kitchen however much I would like it to be.
Nobody disputes that internal states exist. But it won’t wash to use the “true for the individual” bit. Either something is true or it is not. Saying something is true for one person and false for another is not a statement about the truth of a proposition simply on the fact that they disagree in opinion. One of them is wrong, they both are wrong, or the question is so poorly articulated that it makes no sense to take it seriously.
Might be better to say our internal state appears true, to the individual. In fact I doubt whether a ‘false’ internal state could exist, since the individual would have no way of knowing that.
It tends to get tautological. If I think I am a mushroom, then it is absolutely and objectively true that I think I’m a mushroom. It is certainly ‘true to me’. My actual state of mushroominess, however, is quite a different matter.
I usually prefer to say ‘fact’ rather than ‘true’ just because ‘truth’ has become such a loaded term. But ‘true for the individual’ is just a way of fudging the distinction between personal viewpoint and actual objective reality, IMO.
But individuals do have ways of “knowing it”, or at least of increasing the probability that what they know is right. Many a person has come to realize that they had been fooled about something the thought was true, perhaps that they had fooled themselves. At the whole project of science it the effort to distinguish the real from the imaginary. It works. And it allows me to know with high confidence that you are not a mushroom.
I think there’s a risk of us talking past each other, here. I think you’re referring to physical reality – whether I’m a mushroom or not is a physical fact, so should be objectively verifiable. (Thanks for assuming I’m not 🙂 Certainly science could help there.
But if, internally, I believe some (factually incorrect) circumstance which nevertheless happens to fit all the data available, how can I ever tell it is not true? The most common example is the “Is this a dream?” scenario much beloved of film-makers; it can be quite difficult to tell, since dreams have a habit of adapting themselves to accommodate external stimuli. No use pinching oneself, one can dream that.
If a computer program has made an error of logic (or read an erroneous bit of data), how can it tell? Unless it encounters an internal inconsistency or some variable goes out of range, it can’t.
Aside from that, I think the phrase “true for me” carries the implication, “this is the collection of facts that matter to me”. Which is how somebody else’s “truth” could indeed be very different from mine. The legal phrase “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is obviously a lawyer’s attempt to close the loopholes in the meaning of the word, though I think everyone here could see the fuzzy futility of the phrase “the whole truth”.
I think we’re in agreement on the fallaciousness of basing an argument on what is “true for the individual”, though.
You’re throwing two totally different definitions out here. And I think that represents the obscurity and uselessness of “true for me”.
1) Unconfirmable mental model of reality
2) Collection of interesting facts.
In the first case, since it is unconformable, there’s no reason to use the word “true”. You can get by perfectly well by using words like “idea”, “notion”, or “hunch”. Or “delusion”, for that matter.
In the second case, you are also using the wrong word. What you mean is “important” when referring to these facts. “True” adds nothing here since, presumably, the facts have previously been confirmed to be, in fact, facts.
Courts have an interest in unembellished but complete descriptions of events. It would be a bad courtroom that put much credence in testimony that ended “Well, it is true for me!”.
I’d agree with that.
What the court means by ‘the whole truth’ is ‘all relevant facts’. But of course that is subject to the witness’s judgement of what is relevant, quite aside from the notorious and well-documented defects of human perception and recollection.
First, your observations of your inner mental state are objective observations; they’re just not directly accessible to anybody but you.
But, more to the point, they’re notoriously unreliable. Never mind all the ways our senses fool us or that we make errors in logic or calculation or whatever; humans are notorious for fooling ourselves about our own inner thoughts and desires. There’s an entire field of psychology devoted to the subject: Cognitive Dissonance Theory. It’ll be unpleasant, but you owe it to yourself to learn about it — everybody does.
Cheers,
b&
A bit late, but this quote may sum up what ex-uncle is saying:
And down here a common saying is:
I thought Jerry’s response in the OP was sufficient, so I will limit myself to repeating something that I’ve posted here several times before. In the second edition of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins related this criticism: “You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best. You go after rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.”
And responded with the following statement:
“If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible. To the vast majority of believers around the world, religion all too closely resembles what you hear from the likes of Robertson, Falwell, or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men, they are all too influential, and everybody in the modern world has to deal with them.”
This is so obviously true that I really can’t understand why anyone would even consider denying it. Think about the 10,000-member fundamentalist churches in the bible belt. Look at the enrollment figures in liberal seminaries as compared to evangelical/fundamentalist seminaries. Look at the goddamned Gallup and Pew poll results. Or, if you prefer anecdotal to statistical evidence, come meet my circle of acquaintances. I know one po-mo theologian, another half-dozen or so christians who are actually not as fundamentalistic as the churches they attend–and quite literally hundreds of fundagelicals who at least say they believe all the stories and miracles in the bible, don’t accept modern science such as evolution and the big bang, believe in heaven and hell, vote straight right-wing nut job, and spend inordinate amounts of time whining about how oppressed they are by our modern godless society.
For that matter, look at the Republican primaries in 2012. They dedicated air time to specifically ask about each candidate’s views on God, and also on evolution. Here’s a hint, those weren’t on the agenda to gauge their philosophical insights into a deity who doesn’t intervene or perform miracles, or didn’t miraculously create everything ex nihilo.
I should have thought, on the face of it, that if Dawkins beef is with fundamentalism, and if he considers such know-nothing religion dangerous (as I do), he would make more of an effort to support rational types of religion, rather than dismissing it as hypocritical. He has said time and again that literal religion is obviously sincere, but those who reinterpret their religious categories are being dishonest. He can’t have it both ways, but it seems that this is what he wants.
It all comes down to evidence. That is, at the heart of it, all that Richard Dawkins asks (there are authors who’ll put that in to fancier language but the question is the same).
Demonstrate that your deity/entity/other state of reality exists in a way that A.N. Other can see. Said source of belief makes claims against our observable universe, yes?
You can’t? Not rational for the other person to believe. And also if entity has no demonstrable effects then why are you believing it in the first place?
Eric,
I really, honestly have tried to engage with the theologians (mainly ones recommended to me in forums much like this one; a believer will say (more or less): Oh yeah, well you haven’t read the ass-kicking arguments of Theologian X! Bwhahahaha! Good hither, fool, and then come back here and admit defeat!
(And, really, what you are telling me strikes me in exactly the same way.)
So I do exactly that, and what I find, every time, is the same old handful of arguments, wrapped up in (maybe) some new and even more obscurantist language. Life is too short to keep going back to this stuff. I have things to do. My sampling (of both sophisticated and popularizing) theologians is fairly broad. I’ve read the “holy books” of all the major religions. I’ve engaged dozens of believers in discussions.
And the intentionally obscure writing these people employ, is extremely worrisome (you are doing nit too, right here in this discussion forum). “[N]o one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.” You are, as far as I can tell, advocating #2 and #4 (see below).
One simple example shows this. The theologian “addresses” a question, as Jerry has pointed out. Define exactly what “addresses a question” amounts to? It’s making up (comforting) stuff about the question. Science seeks to answer the question. Some questions science may never answer (such as why anyone ever took Mark Rothko seriously): Why certain things elicit pleasurable reactions in human brains (aesthetics). But it may, it’s working on it.
In the end, it always (always) comes down to these tired old arguments (dressed In new clothes – maybe):
1. Popularity:
a. People have always believed in gods, therefore it must be true that god(s) exist(s).
b. All people at all times “felt the need” for god(s), therefore, like the other needs (hunger for food, thirst for moisture, lust for sex) the object of that need must exist, therefore it must be true that god(s) exist(s)
2. Utility:
a. Belief in god(s) provide(s) comfort, social cohesion, social supports, moral compass, world view. Therefore it must be true that god(s) exist(s).
b. Morality: It is asserted that morality is provided by god(s). Therefore it must be true that god(s) exist(s).
3. Design:
a. The life we see around us had to have been “designed” by god(s). Therefore it must be true that god(s) exist(s).
b. The universe is “designed” for human life by god(s). Therefore it must be true that god(s) exist(s).
4. Necessity:
a. There has to be a god (or gods) that is the greatest thing imaginable. (ontological argument; Anselm)
b. There has to be a god (or gods) that is the first cause. (cosmological argument; Aquinas)
(or shall we say, c. God must be the ground of all being?)
5. Personal experiences:
a. I had this amazing “feeling of god(s)”, therefore god(s) exist(s).
b. I have personally seen god(s) turn around lives, therefore god(s) exist(s). (Or god(s) turned my life around.)
6. Science is unreliable:
a. Science can’t explain everything, therefore god(s) had to have done the things we can’t (yet) explain. God(s) must exist to fill these knowledge gaps.
b. Science makes assumptions about the universe (e.g. physical law continuity through time and space), therefore that’s faith, it’s the same as faith in god(s), therefore god(s) exist(s).
If theology has these other ways of knowing, then why has it made no progress in the last few thousand years (in stark contrast to science)? What knew, reliable knowledge has it added to the world?
Cheers, and all the best.
+n, where n is a very large integer.
And, even were any of these arguments worth anything (they aren’t), then all you’d be left with is a “super being” that no one really knows anything about and that doesn’t match what any religion (of any importance) worships.
Which is a better religion, and why is it better: Christianity or Islam? Or between: Hinduism or Judaism?
My guess is that you will say that they all provide a focus for people’s lives and that makes them feel better, so they are all good (and you naughty atheists just don’t get it if you insist on ranking them).
Surely you must see that that is just feel-good nonsense?
If feel-good nonsense gets you through the night, then, hey baby, knock yourself out. But stop with the “honor” killings, suicide bombings, burkas, trying to put creationism in schools, gay-bashing, opposition to stem-cell research, dis-advantaging of women, covering up child molestation, shooting of abortion providers, opposition to end-of-life choices like physician-assisted suicide, opposition to birth control, spreading lies about condom use and AIDS prevention, opposition to same-sex unions, preventing girls from getting educations … (need I go on?).
You’ve entirely got the rwong end of the stick old boy. If everyone were get-along, ecumenical, happyland like you, then the “New” atheism never would have been needed and wouldn’t have arisen.
Very good summary.
😀
Hmmmm…… it’s so sad to see someone drift away from a rational atheistic world-view back into the embrace of the comfortable illusions of religion. On reflexion, adopting and staying with atheism is a big ask…. and it requires a very high standard of intellectual commitment to evidence based reality, even when that reality is “far less pleasant” to think about.
The illusions shed:
*That there is some propose to the universe and that there is some benevolent entity that created it
*That there is something “out there” that cares about our existence, that the universe is NOT totally indifferent to to our being
*That death is not the absolute end, that if we lose a loved one he/she is not gone to us forever
*That something more than chance has led to our being and plays a large part in our life
*That our morality has some basis in an absolute divine law
*That good behaviour will be ultimately rewarded and bad ultimately punished
*That we are not in any way special, that we are the near kin of the chimpanzee
… and of course that we have free will, that we are not robots (of course as a Compatibilist fortunately I don’t have to accept this particular one myself)
I’ve always had tremendous respect for the intellectual integrity of fellow atheists who accept these things, especially those who had to struggle against previous religious indoctrination on top of the draw of such wishful thinking to shed their religious views. That a few can’t quite manage it is not at all surprising.
A question for you Eric.
Is the green cheese that the moon is made of sharp or mild?
If you don’t take that question seriously, you understand why we don’t take theology seriously. Every single objection you would have to giving a serious answer to that applies to theology, like it or not. And every single serious counter to that answer is a counter to the arguments put forth by theology.
Interesting. When Eric instructs us that we need to read volumes of sophisticated theology to understand this other way of “knowing” it reminds me of Dan Dennett telling Sam Harris that he has to read volumes of philosophy to understand why compatiblism is true.
I took something you said about “intellectual rigor” and made my own quote about theology:
“Theology is the study of how to make sh-t up to give religion the illusion of being intellectually rigorous.”
lolz.
I wonder if much of my criticism of the evidence for the existence of Spiderman “straw”?
I need sophisticated Spidermanians to enlighten me on the merits of his existence.
Interesting how each argument boils down to “my interpretation is never properly addressed or understood”, often with the interpretation being touted as being held by a silent majority of the faithful wearing the proper tartan.
A while ago, a christian in a conversation somewhere else told all and sundry a deity did indeed make everything (but it’s not a gap) and that it loves us all – a few sentences later and completely without irony, this christian pointed out the arrogance of those who like to tell us who Blob loves.
The consensus divinatus amongst the group was this interpretation is quite viable and held by the majority being out-voiced by a strident minority.
Hardly unknowable to some it seems. Perhaps they don’t lack faith like us mundanes.
Interpretation could be replaced by idea and the arguments presented here by Mr. MacDonald might be around homeopathy or reiki or psychic ability. These things also claim to be beyond mere science. Except when they’re not.
I read the BuyBull, that was enough for me. I have read religious arguments for ages. Recently a book attempting to reconcile science and religion. Of course, this was accomplished via plucking pitted berries and after claiming doG created it all.
The only advancements religion has made is in the language used to dress it up and obscure the lack of providence.
Humans have evolved to a capacity for holding beliefs for good reasons that are unrelated to whether or not those beliefs are true. If those reasons are important enough to Eric, there is no evidence or logic you can offer to induce him to give up that belief. In such a case, truth is of secondary importance to the believer.
Eric is successfully convincing himself that he is being reasonable and rational.
The discourse between Eric and the commenters is a perfect demonstration of the inability to ‘reach’ a believer buy logic, evidence, or reason. The believer has a NEED to believe that trumps any argument. A highly intelligent believer like Eric has to have some theo/philosophical support to squelch the cognitive dissonance. So he has had to go to the far reaches of theological speculation to find anything that is even remotely acceptable to his above average intellect. Apparently, make the definition of god sufficiently amorphous/ambiguous in combination with a complex convoluted sophistry is the right mix. Alas, he found what he needed and now confirmation bias can do the rest.
A previous commenter has it spot on with this quote.
“you can take the boy our of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”
Having crossed swords repeatedly with Eric I need now to argue a bit on his behalf. Eric is not a religious believer although he once was, like many of us here. Eric has been an atheist for some time now and despite his unhappiness with many of us, his is still a non-believer as far as I can tell.
I think Eric harbors an affection for some of the religious life he left and this sees to root many of his arguments with us here and over at Choice In Dying. I think our refusal to take Sophisticated Theology™ seriously represents a kind of etiquette violation that he maps to “dogmatism”. Hyper-watered-down religious tradition (“post-Christian” philosophy, etc.) seems to appeal to him, I think, as a way to escape the bad in religion while holding on to something good. I don’t find it convincing, but that is his case as I recognize it.
I think we gnus see his perspective as some combination of unnecessary and unhelpful, and leading nowhere worth going. Despite our fondness for good food, cute animals, and a good joke, we’re a hard-ass bunch when it comes to this subject. I don’t think it bothers Eric that we’re a bunch of non-believers as much as that many of us don’t find his form of it-feels-kind-of-like-theology non-belief attractive. He would like us to take seriously the edge-case logic of hyper-sophisticated theologian/philosophers, and when we don’t the party isn’t fun for him. But he’s still a non-believer.
And I apologize to Eric to the extent that my characterization misses the mark, which it probably does to some extent.
That gels with my feelings on the matter.
One point I have made repeatedly now, which Eric has not responded to, is his view that New Atheism targets *all* religion unfairly, when it seems obvious to me that (while we might not agree with non-theistic – or post-theistic – religions) our targets are implicitly (sometimes explicitly given the way some of us – e.g. Grayling – define it) theistic religions. If he allowed us that, it seems to me he would find New Atheism far less objectionable.
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Eric is welcome to continue on with his sophisticated imaginations. But so long as he continues to call it Christianity or support the label “Christian” he is doing harm and he deserves to be ridiculed and criticized.
By all means have your flighty philosophy/religion. But so long as you try and further the legitimacy of Christianity, an institution responsible for more human suffering than almost any other, you deserve to be heavily criticized. You deserve the label delusional. And you deserve to be called out for your irresponsible behaviour.
Pfffft, a lot of Christians don’t take Sophisticate Theology (TM) seriously either so where does that leave us?
This is what’s really pissing me off about the whole thing now. The STs are sitting in their ivory tower refusing to engage with the proles, while the proles are acting like dicks. Every one else has to clean the mess up afterwards.
W**kers.
Oh, please, Chris, do your homework. There are active Sea of Faith groups in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, all of them premised on the claim that religion is a human creation, and all of them inspired by writers who have written for ordinary people, and who see a major reform of Christianity a necessity. There are any number of writers who address this kind of godless Christianity to what you call the “proles”, and it is simply unacceptable to speak of theologians in their ivory towers without doing at least a bit of homework. It is this kind of uninformed dismissal of religion which concerns me so much about the new atheism.
Eric, two questions:
• What %age of Christians in those countries belong to SoF groups? In the US?
• What %age of SoF believers are whole-heartedly non-realist/non-theist/non-supernaturalist?
I may be the victim of the availability heuristic, as evangelicals are obviously more visible, but I just don’t see these SoF types as representing a significant fraction of religious people, even in the UK.
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Percentages are irrelevant if what we are seeking is the truth. I have no idea what percentage of Christians are non-realists. I do know, from experience, that many ordinary Christians find this a refreshing approach to questions of faith. Religious institutions, of course, are conservative, and I do not defend them. Indeed, I am in general opposed to religious institutions, because they are aggregations of power, and often of power gained by illegitimate means – by their effect upon youth, for example. This does not answer the question as to the rationality of forms of religion which do posit supernatural beings, and do not think in superstitious ways. The point is that, if atheists are to oppose religion, they must be rational, since their position is based on reason. But if they simply dismiss religion without considering the content and practices of religion, and responding to religions as they really are, their dismissal is to that extent irrational. That does not mean that I would defend as rational fundamentalist or superstitious beliefs, or that I uphold the place of privilege that many religious groups demand in public space. I oppose these things firmly, as you must be aware. But I still recall Philip Kitcher’s warning, very early on, that what he calls “militant modern atheism” is going the wrong way. I disagreed with him at the time. More and more I have come to share this view, including his view regarding the excessive claims of science to be the paradigm of all knowledge. This I have never agreed with, and did not realise that this was an underlying assumption of the new atheism until the last couple of years, since when I have strenuously opposed it. Kitcher’s detailed arguments may be found in his book The Advancement of Science, the mathematical parts of which, I have to admit, are beyond me. His book Living with Darwin also expresses his concern with the more militant forms of atheism.
I find it very difficult to believe that either Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne (who will no doubt correct this if it’s wrong) would have any problems (except definitional ones) with any “religion” that simply expresses awe at the universe and doesn’t expect special treatment over other groups or societies. Most religions, though, do have some irrational components that one can’t be expected to accept on faith.
The issue of scientism is one large can of semantic worms, since the term is extremely vague and generally arguments don’t define their ground rules well enough for discussions on the subject to be meaningful. And It’s a godsend for a certain type of journalist (Such as Terry Eagleton), who want to fill up some column space. But, if one is going to have any kind of sensible discussion about how we know things, it has to come down to specifics – what types of thing can you know and how do you know them?
That depends on what we’re seeking the truth about!
The basis of your criticism is that New Atheists unfairly tar all religions with the same brush, that they should, instead, seek to understand these sophisticated, non-realist religions that don’t deserve their opprobrium.
So please do not seep under the carpet the (apparent) fact that that kind of religion accounts for, at the very most, 10% of religious people in the US, which hardly makes it a priority issue for NAs! Even if — and this point I’ve made repeatedly without a response from you – we were to regard it as the kind of religion that we are being critical of in the first place (i.e., implicit, since we are atheists, theistic religion)!
Your views on scientism are unjustified: science is the de facto paradigm of all objective knowledge about the world/cosmos. As Jerry noted elsewhere, no-one, including you, has demonstrated that there are any other reliable “ways of knowing” — all suggested examples turn out to be either science-broadly-defined (inferences from evidence that can be tested against new evidence), opinions (including historical “hermeneutics”), or wholly subjective. (If you really want to get your teeth into scientism, I look forward to your critique of Alex Rosenberg’s An Atheist’s Guide to Reality!)
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At this point I think we can all conclude that Eric simply refuses to give up on the word “religion” and he will endlessly change it’s definition to keep it alive. It matters not to him that 99% of the world’s religious people believe in a literal form of God, and that their religion makes unfounded knowledge claims about that god. None of this matters to Eric because he selfishly wants to hold on to the word “religion.” Eric is selfish and irresponsible. This is an absolutely knowable and proven fact. 😉
Tim – you need to follow Da Roolz – don’t make offensive personal accusations, just respond to people’s arguments.
I apologize for getting frustrated and breaking da roolz. But I don’t think I stepped that far over the line. And at least I was right in my assessment. I have never seen Eric acknowledge the great harm caused by the REAL doctrine of Christianity, the one that is of great consequence, and the one that more than 90% of Christians actually follow. He leaves it completely out of his arguments like it is a non factor in deciding how to define “religion” and whether or not one should try and salvage the name “Christianity.” From his arguments, it seems like he just want us all to re-write the most common definitions of “religion” to suit his inability to give up on a word. And it seems selfish and irresponsible to me.
These are not ad hominem attacks. This is a reasoned argument, on point, having followed his posts on the subject.
I would like to reiterate my apology for the last 4 lines of my initial reply on this thread. I put the winky-face on it to show that I was jokingly making a statement of absolutism. I can see how it was misconstrued given my actual position on the matter. I don’t ever name call or use the term “absolutely” like that unless I am joking. But I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again in the future.
To Tim: this name calling is absolutely unacceptable here. Apologize immediately and don’t let it happen again, or I’ll ban you. Got it?
Eric: Percentages matter very much. Almost all people, almost all the time, work to percentages in their life: Take carre fo the important things first.
If your religious sensibilities cause you to believe in a non-acting “ground of all being” that makes you feel good, then, for me: You are not a problem. I ignore you.
The fact is that the huge majority of religious believers, as Jerry points out in his latest post (13-Mar-14, middle of the day US Central time), don’t in fact have that kind of belief. The huge majority believe in the anthropomorphic god of the main holy books (or several of those gods as Hindus apparently do).
I want to deal with the problems (the actions of people who, for instance think it’s their god’s will to blow people up, shoot abortion doctors, lie about AIDS and condoms), and the feel-good ground-of all-being people simply don;t matter to me.
If they are offended that I mock religion, then my advice to them is: Change the channel, grow up, and sitffen your spine: No one promised you a offense-free environment. (If their offense were turning them into suicide bombers, that would be a different question; but it’s not.)
As I have said before: If all believers (or even the majority) were feel-good, ground-of-all-being types, the New Atheism would ever have arisen. It has arisen due to the actions of the religous, primarily Christians in the US (and elsewhere) and Muslims all over.
Do YOUR homework, Eric. Research how much misery and suffering the cult of Christianity has caused and continues to cause in this world. Being good is what is important to people. Being good because “Jesus is special” is not only not important it is NOT GOOOD for the world. It is a bad reason to be good.
I thought you were a good man but I am writing you off now because you are being selfish and irresponsible with this trying to save Christianity bullshit. New atheists write off all religion because it is unnecessary to humans and a giant net minus for society. Religious faith is a terrible reason to act in the world, and our world will continue to suffer so long as people continue to support the idea that faith is important. I am so disgusted by your selfishness, right now. Go ahead and have your “religion.” But do not expect new atheists or even old atheists to stop criticizing religion, because criticizing religion is the most responsible thing any human could be doing in today’s world. Your theologians were wrong before they ever sat down to put pen to paper. You’re all just looking to excuse your way back into comforting delusion.
Eric, that’s really very nice but they, at least in the US (and in Africa and across the Islamic world) are outliers.
Upthread you dismissed STs engaging with Graham et al… They are the ones with adherents who want to screw with the rest of us. They are the ones running faith schools in the UK (Christian, Muslim, Jewish… all as bad as each other) who are lying to children about science and filling their heads with BS on the tax dollar.
I’m aware that many Christians/Muslims/Jews are moderate. Maybe most are. Lets have more of them speak up in direct opposition to the idiots.
If your favoured thologians are not in the fight against this then they are leaving it to the Gnus. The Gnus are the nuclear option. Without the literalists the Gnus would not exist. I’m wondering whether burning the building down to get rid of an infestation is the right analogy… Not quite, but I hope that you see what I’m getting at.
Humanity is developing. These guys aren’t: and they are using humanity’s fruits against the rest of us. They don’t give a crap about Sophisticated Theology, apart from where it supports their views.
Which way are you going to jump?
The Ravaged Century, of course, as if it just popped into existence.
What of all of the previous centuries dominated by religious ideologies?
BTW, the leader of the Godwin Gang wrote how his hatred of a certain people was informed by 1400 years of Christian teaching and you can hear Kristalnacht when reading Marty Luther’s 7 Step Plan to drive these people out.
Yeah.
I get the feeling that Luther would have done an Adolf if he’d have had the means. Not a nice man.
Germany and Central Europe did a good job of depopulating itself around the time of his life anyway. The Reformation was a very ugly time.
What really sucked is just because your leader decides to throw off his religion and pick a new one, all his subjects were killed. Poor serfs didn’t really get to have an opinion on the matter.
The worst happened when the plebs went their own way sans protecting prince…
At it’s best, and in it’s most moderate and sane form, Religion, gives people bad reasons to do good things. The good reasons to do good things come from within. And they require no religion.
I greatly appreciate Eric’s good faith effort to engage us ‘new’ atheists on this subject, but I find his communication style impedes a meaningful discussion. I elaborate on this critique here:
http://skeptischism.com/atheismneat/2014/03/13/the-verbose-tao-of-obscurantism/
+1
Yes: Why use such perniciously obscure language? Say what you mean, clearly!
This kind of language is an offense (against good communication and rational discourse). Every offense is the result of:
1. Malice (lying, covering up, obfuscating)
2. Incompetence (bad writing)
Either are possible; but most religious apologists are trying to thorw sand in your eyes as the make stuff up.
Either is …
Actually, I think this is more a case of Eric trying to convince himself to retreat back into the Fold. Sad, yes, but the deception in his case is pointed inward and is only incidentally spilling outward.
b&
I agree Ben. This falls in the incompetence bucket for me.
Hah.
1) I am an IT professional
2) I work in the advertising industry
I’m very familiar with 2 situations when it comes to excessive verbiage:
1) Sender doesn’t know what they’re on about
2) Sender is trying to pull a fast one, so to speak
I’ve had almost 2 decades of explaining sometimes counter-intuitive concepts to non-technical people, and an equal amount of time translating advertising/dealer/user-speak into human.
I am violently allergic to Sophisticated Theology. I wonder why?
Transcendental Vapourware, the lot of it.
LOL. I wrote my share of pieces on the superiority of our vaporware vs. the competitor’s vaporware. All in the conditional tense, naturally.
Sack the developers, hire more marketing staff!! 😀
Uh oh — I’m banned from Choice In Dying, as Eric doesn’t want me using it as a “soapbox.” Why would I, seeing as he & his followers don’t even speak English?
For anyone interested in Eric’s Sophisticated™ ad hom and tu quoque fallacies, I’ve posted his note to me, and my response, in the comments to my original post at Atheism Neat, Where Nobody Ever Gets Banned!™ (h/t Don Draper.)
At first, I’d imputed good faith behind MacDonald’s exchanges on this subject. Now, I’m leaning toward one of the two options listed by JBlilie and Chris.
Well, I’m not the type to say banning is never appropriate. I appreciate Professor Ceiling Cat’s use of the hammer from time to time.
But… This does seem over the top to me. I may find myself banned, too since I think your view of the situation is close to my own.
I find this whole episode a bit depressing.
When people tell you they’re having trouble following what you’re saying, calling them ‘stupid’ is not the way to win hearts and minds. Yet that seems the standard response of sophisticated philosophers.
I’m not stupid, and one of the reasons I love WEIT is for all the really smart people here (our host first & foremost) who have expertise on complex subjects I’m interested in as a lay person. If this crowd can’t make sense of what you’re saying, the fault lies not with them.
The “scientism” label he is throwing at us is not in good faith. Branding new atheists as a group who demand “proof of god” is certainly not in good faith. After all of his interaction with new atheists, how could he not know by now that we emphatically point out the fact that we do not ask for proof of god, but evidence for god, and we explain in great detail the difference. To label us with “scientism” and those who have a rigid demand for proof of god, and those who “haven’t done enough homework” to hold the opinions they have, is slanderous in my opinion. It doesn’t seem like good faith to me.
Aren’t ‘proofs’ something of a fetish for philosophers? 😉 I’m happy to continue the discussion with you all, either here or at my blog, but debating with folks like MacDonald is fruitless. Nor am I going to fret much over the loss to new atheism (sic) of someone who’s not only clearly a ‘seeker’, but also so obstinate and prickly.
I’m a seeker. One could even call me spiritual (Sam Harris style). Seeking is looking for answers to the unanswered. That’s what science does. Seeking is just fine.
Religion is something that starts when the seeking is done. It is something you partake in once you have confirmed the answers. You create doctrines around those answers and you follow them religiously. To practice religion, one must first convince themselves that they know something they do not actually know. This is why atheists can write off religion entirely, whilst still leaving seekers and spiritual scientists to continue to seek and wonder in peace.
I don’t know… Seeking, as I see it, it the process by which people try out one after another of innumerable religious flavors, sprinkled liberally with a variety of more generic pseudo-scientific or spiritual woo.
Seeking seems quite different from investigating, which is what science has been developed to do. Seeking seems to be a matter of credulously wandering in search of “something more” without bothering to notice that the actual universe is far more interesting than the quest for… well, whatever it is they imagine they’ll find.
I think I’d call you “curious”, perhaps an investigator, rather than a “seeker”.
The actual universe is definitely interesting, but what makes it so interesting is that it is a mystery. We don’t know what the hell it is or how it operates? We know a lot more than we once did about it, but it remains extremely mysterious at it’s core, especially when our most advanced scientific theories to date include language like “Spooky action at a distance.”
The scientific process is better characterized as “investigating” rather than “seeking” to be sure. But that is the process itself. The desire to engage in the investigating in the first place comes from places currently unknown (unless you believe in free will) but not necessarily unknowable. You can conclude rationally that we live in a deterministic universe, as I do, but what is the universe, and why is it deterministic, and why do I have a brain that makes me wonder why I have a brain?
I’d say that “investigating” is the process, and “seeking” is the innate desire to investigate. Scientists investigate because they are humans seeking answers.
But any way you lice it, there is no woo woo in my seeking. I’m looking for things within the realm of reality not outside of it.
I still say that the innate desire is better called “curiosity”. The word “seeking” is too laden with woo-baggage for my taste.
I can certainly see that, and I understand the kind of woo woo you are concerned about. But I’ve always seen “seeking” as a secular scientific pursuit. Scientists use the term all the time to describe science “seeking” answers to mysteries. There is something to seek. Answers. Answers to mysteries that actually exist.
And accepting determinism doesn’t quash the desire to seek meaning and purpose in a seemingly meaningless circumstance. It just makes one wonder why there is such a thing as a meaningless circumstance?
Not sure why you would’t also have the same problem with the word “awe.” Or maybe you do.
+1
(But they are Seeking the Truth, dontcha know? 😉
GB can answer for himself of course, but I think there’s a differencing in usage (beyond the mundane grammatical one) between “seeking” and “seeker”. Someone who self-identifies primarily as a “seeker” seems likely to be after something more nebulous than scientific understanding.
/@
Again I certainly understand and have seen that connotation of the word being used, but unlike “religion” or “spirituality” there is no such connotation in any of the dictionary definitions of the words “seek” or “seeker.”
And I certainly don’t “primarily identify” as a seeker, but I don’t eschew the term either. I think it works and I don’t mind using the label in a secular way. I am always seeking (or searching for) answers to deep questions regarding the seemingly strange circumstance of our existence. And again, I am conducting this search in the realm of reality and not looking outside of that.
Maybe when someone has an answer that makes sense for “spooky action at a distance” I’ll stop being a seeker of the currently unknown nature of reality.
PS. Religious v. secular differences apart, “awe” has been much devalued. Many things that are merely very good are nowadays “awesome”.
/@
It is all rather subjective, of course, but there are some words that are far more commonly used by credulous “seekers” than by more science-broadly-defined “curious” people. “Awe” isn’t quite as “owned” by the credulous, partly because it has (like Ant says) been fairly devalued. It gets more wide general everyday use. I would expect everybody and his teen-aged niece to refer to “awesome” things, including an offer for a good cup of morning coffee.
Most folk I know who are clear-headed atheist types (all except one, I think!) would not self-identify as a “seeker”. They would also tend to avoid certain other fuzz-words like “numinous”, “transcendent”, and maybe “sanctification” most of the time. These words all have their place but the come with a fair bit of baggage due to how and by whom they are usually used.
FYI both Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins use the word “transcendent” to describe experiences had by secular people and they both also use the word “awe” not in it’s watered down version but very much like the word was originally intended. But perhaps those two don’t qualify as clear headed atheists in your circles. 😉
Sometimes I run across fellow atheists who feel the need to deny the mysterious nature of existence because they think it opens the door too wide for religion. I’m the last one who wants to open any doors for religion, but the universe is mysterious, there is no getting around that. We are going to have to defeat religious arguments without pretending that the universe is a settled known entity.
False choice. Nobody is denying the existence of mysteries. It is a question of whether you wallow in them or try to figure them out. In any case, like I said, there are legitimate uses for all these words, but some are more laden with baggage than others and if one can communicate what you mean without throwing in the confusion of woo-laden terms, it is better to avoid them most of the time. “Seeker” is one of the more woo-laden of them, IMO. Your opinion may differ, of course.
I hear that. But because it is a secular word according to our dictionaries, I’d rather not give it up to the woo woo crowd. I think about how the word “agnostic” was given up on by atheists and allowed to be redefined by the other side and is now used to mean something different than it actually means. And instead of fighting to save the real definition of that word, we just gave it up and now most atheists eschew it which compounds it’s mis-definition.
But I really do understands your points on it. My opinion on it isn’t strong one way or the other. I’m actually engaging in this conversation to help work it out in my own mind. So thanks for that.
Posted just today, I believe:
https://www.samharris.org/store/event_series/waking-up-with-sam-harris
This fall, I will stage a series of live events—in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—to coincide with the publication of my new book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Each event will be held in a state-of-the-art theater and consist of a lecture and extensive Q&A. Everything will be recorded, and the footage will be edited and combined with supporting material to produce an online course. All attendees will receive a special edition of Waking Up, a signed bookplate, a download of the unabridged audio book, and full access to the online course. A catered cocktail reception will follow each talk.
If you cannot come to one of these events, there are still ways to participate in this project: You can order the live video stream, pre-order the online course, or purchase one of the other sponsorship packages—including the special edition of Waking Up. (Please see the right-hand column of this page).
I just ran across this old Jesus and Mo… appropriate for this page.
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2012/07/18/read/