Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Many of you know that Brian Dalton (“Mr. Deity”) used to be a Mormon. Here, speaking from his nearly three decades in the faith, he takes the religion apart in a video that’s remarkably “strident” for Dalton. And much of what he says applies to religion in general.
He’s clearly ticked off that he wasted so many years believing in fairy tales. ~
Reza Aslan is enjoying a spurt of fame (I’d call it notoriety) since the altercation between Sam Harris + Bill Maher vs Ben Affleck on Maher’s show. Always a Muslim apologist, who can’t even admit that Muslims believe that Muhammad deflowered a 9-year-old girl, Aslan has become the Karen Armstrong of Islam.
In an op-ed on CNN, “How strong is the link between faith and terrorism?“, Aslan basically denies that beliefs play a “necessary and distinct” role in actions, although he never defines what he means by “necessary and distinct”:
After all, there’s no question that a person’s religious beliefs can and often do influence his or her behavior. The mistake lies in assuming there is a necessary and distinctcausal connection between belief and behavior — that Bibeau’s [the Canadian Muslim who shot a Candian soldier] actions were exclusively the result of his religious beliefs.
The notion that there is a one-to-one correlation between religious beliefs and behavior may seem obvious and self-evident to those unfamiliar with the study of religion. But it has been repeatedly debunked by social scientists who note that “beliefs do not causally explain behavior” and that behavior is in fact the result of complex interplay among a host of social, political, cultural, ethical, emotional, and yes, religious factors.
Well, I don’t know the studies to which Aslan’s referring, but to say that beliefs do not causally explain behavior seems insane. What about men who shoot their wives, or their wives’ lovers, because they believe they’re cuckolds? What about gangsters who kill other gangsters who, they think, have muscled in on their territory? What about honor killings? Are those not behaviors that come directly from beliefs? The “complexity” bit is just a canard that Aslan throws in to make us think, “Wow–things are really complicated! Maybe I ought to stop harping on religion.”
In truth, Aslan wants us to think that it’s only religious beliefs that don’t determine (“necessarily and distinctly”) behavior, because his interest is in defending religion, Islam in particular. But what does “necessarily and distinctly” mean? I’d say that if there is a purported mix of factors that are said to determine a behavior, and that the behavior never occurs without a certain one of the factors (say, religious belief), then, yes, religion necessarily and distinctly influences that behavior. It’s like a multifactoral statistical analysis, in which you partition out the contributors to an outcome and find one has the overriding influence. Only the willfully blind would say, I think, that the murder of Shiites by Sunnis, the stoning of adulterers, the killing of apostates, and so on, would still occur had religion never inflicted itself on our species (for one thing, we wouldn’t have Sunnis and Shiite sects, which separate people of identical backgrounds and ethnicity).
I don’t think that anyone would claim that many actions that are largely motivated by religious beliefs have no other causes, something that Aslan claims all New Atheists think. For example, a Muslim growing up in Minnesota probably won’t behead a journalist because of the accidents of geography and history. Yet Aslan claims that, for example, Sam Harris thinks not only that religion is only cause of bad behavior by Muslim extremists, but also that those extremists should be killed before they even do anything—as a sort of preemptive strike. As he says:
But to argue that Breivik’s or Bibeau’s actions were motivated solely by their religious beliefs — or that their religious beliefs necessarily dictated their actions — is simply irrational.
And yet, this trope has become exceedingly common among some critics of religion. Take the following excerpt from the bestselling book “The End of Faith,” by the anti-theist activist Sam Harris (Note: because Harris has repeatedly tried to defuse the significance of his argument and has even gone so far as to accuse those, including me, who quote his words of defamation, I will present the passage in its entirety so that there can be no confusion as to his meaning).
“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense.”
Harris’ argument is that a person’s religious beliefs do not merely influence his or her behavior. They determine it. In other words, people holding certain beliefs should be killed, not because those beliefs may lead to violent behavior, but because they necessarily will. Therefore, in order to save ourselves (“self-defense” Harris calls it) we may be justified in killing the believer before his or her beliefs turn into action — as they inevitably will.
This goes on, but you get the point. According to Aslan, Harris thinks we should nuke Muslim extremists because we predict they’ll engage in bad behavior. They don’t have to have even done anything; they only have to be threatening.
But of course Aslan, as is his wont, is misrrepresenting Harris. Not only that, but (as we’ll see), Aslan actually agrees with the “preemptive strike” position: he’s more extreme than is Harris!
You can read Harris’s own response to Aslan’s claim, written before Aslan’s article, in a piece at Harris’s site: “On the mechanics of defamation.” Although it’s been a while since I read The End of Faith, that quotation immediately struck me as having been taken out of context. Sure enough, Sam’s post gives the full context, which explains that people deserve being taking out if they have already shown, through their behavior, direct and convincing evidence that they will commit harms in the future (he mentions in an endnote to this passage that Al-Qaeda’s bombing of the World Trade Center is one example). It is when beliefs are translated into malevolent actions that we are justified, or so Harris says, in killing people. One can argue about this, but it’s patently clear that Aslan is leaving out the part about “having beliefs that one is warranted in thinking will produce even more harm in the future.”
I don’t need to defend Harris; as he showed on his discussion with Cenk Uygur, he can do that himself. What I’m arguing here is that Aslan is intellectually dishonest, and he’s learned that his distortions (which begin with him misrepresenting his own credentials) only bring him more attention.
To top it off, for someone who criticizes Harris for being preemptively hawkish, Aslan has no business saying this in an interview in New York Magazine:
How do you counter the group? [ISIS]
The way you confront an organization like that is twofold. No. 1, you kill their militants. There is no room for discussion or negotiation when it comes to an ISIS or an Al Qaeda militant. They don’t want anything concrete. And if you want nothing that’s measurable or concrete, there is nothing to talk about. You must be destroyed. But that’s not the end of the argument because, as you rightly say, this is an organization that has managed to draw Muslims from around the world to their cause by setting themselves up as a group that is addressing their grievances, whatever those grievances may be.
Aslan also argues that ISIS is not an Islamist organization, but a jihadist organization, and is “transnational” because they don’t want a country (no, they only want the world as a Caliphate). The distinction is lost on me, for their motivations, as nearly everyone but the blinkered admit, are to carry out what they see as the dictates of the Qur’an.
And so Aslan, blinkered himself, cannot see a connection between religious ideology and action. It is as if religion is the sole form of belief that is immune to being translated into action. One more quote from his CNN piece will suffice:
It is true that religious beliefs can often lead to actions that violate basic human rights. It is also true that a great many of those actions are taking place right now among Muslims. But it is ridiculous to claim that the actions of Islamic extremists are either necessarily or exclusively the result of their belief in Islam.
“Ridiculous”? Really? What would it take, Dr. Aslan, to convince you that ISIS wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if Islam had never existed? And what do you mean by “necessarily or exclusively the result of their belief in Islam”? Yes, there are many Muslims who don’t engage in the barbarities of ISIS, just as there are many Christians who don’t bomb abortion clinics. But what is really ridiculous is to pretend that an extreme belief in the tenets of Islam is not what’s motivating the perfidies of ISIS.
Since this site began I’ve written a few posts about Francis Spufford, a Christian writer who can’t stop attacking New Atheists, and in the most insupportable and mean-spirited ways.
Spufford has just issued his recent book (which came out in March in the UK) in the US; it’s called Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Although I’m burnt out on reading apologetics (Spufford aspires, I think, to be the modern C. S. Lewis), I did read this week-old interview with Spufford on book Tumblr. The interviewer is Luis Rivas from the Spanish Catholic weekly Vida Nueva, so of course the interview is sympathetic. As we’re leaving this morning for parts unknown, I can only reproduce and comment on a bit of the interview.
Here is the Amazon blurb for the U.S. edition issued on October 15:
Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the “new atheist” crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience.
Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford’s crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis.
Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made.
I wasn’t aware that many believers felt they were being “patronized” by New Atheists, although of course we’re all aware of the accusations that we take religious belief literally—that we make the mistake of thinking religious people actually believe to be true what they say they believed. Here are five select questions from the interview and Spufford’s answers (all indented). My own remarks are flush left.
Does faith prevent Christians from being intellectuals?
That music you hear in the distance? It’s St Augustine, St Teresa, Teilhard de Chardin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Simone Weil all singing together, and what they are singing is that, as Christ commanded, we are supposed to love God with our minds, as well as with our hearts and our souls and our strength. It is an illusion to think that there is any necessary conflict between a Christian commitment and free, adventurous thinking. No-one ever does their thinking on a blank sheet of paper. Every intellectual of every kind is in a conversation with some set of ideas, doctrines, ways of seeing the world, and that’s what makes their own thinking serious. The Christian conversation with Christian ideas, and with every other kind of idea, need not be defensive or imprisoning. Why is there a stereotype that says you have to choose between faith and thought? Two reasons, I think. One, that people think belief means entering a kingdom of fixed answers — when, in my experience, it really means living with more and more questions. Two, that people imagine religion must shrink as science grows bigger. But they don’t do the same thing, or occupy the same space. There is plenty of thinking room for both. The great contemporary American novelist Marilynne Robinson says there is nothing like a subscription to Scientific American to fill you with wonder at Creation.
It is an illusion to think that you can reconcile rational thinking with a bunch of myths for which there is no evidence. When you hear the term “conversation with ideas,” you should run (just as you should with the word “nuance”), for what that “conversation” denotes is a contorted process to convince you to accept what your intellect tells you is unacceptable.
And really, if Spufford thinks that most of the faithful don’t think that religion provides “fixed answers,” he’s wrong. Sophisticated he may be, but if religion provides “purpose and meaning” for people, how can it do that without answers?
The history of science tells us that as science expands, religion shrinks, and we have numerous examples of that: evolution, free will, consciousness, the origin of the universe, and so on. And many of the faithful still make statements that there are scientific facts that can be explained only by God. (Example: “the Moral Law”—our “innate sense of right and wrong.” That, says National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, can be explained only by God.) My new book has a large section of one chapter on (and a refutation of) this “new natural theology.”
. . . Does it make sense to go on being a Christian in the 21st century?
Yes! And, what is more, the same kind of sense it has always made. No matter where history takes us, we will still be sinners in need of redemption, prodigal daughters and sons hoping that God is running towards us on the long road, with His arms open wide.
Well, if by “sinners in need of redemption,” Spufford means, “nobody’s perfect,” he’s pretty much right. But somehow I think he means more than that. For there’s no evidence of any God running towards us with open arms. This is the kind of doublespeak believers use to conflate a perfectly aceptable statement into some kind of reason for belief in God.
Isn’t there a paradox here? Impenitente is directed towards atheists and agnostics…
… and yet it is finding an audience among believers. I think this is because I decided that the best way to try to explain us to atheists and agnostics was to lay out the emotional phases and qualities of faith, which can be recognised even by people who are very resistant to the ideas. And so I tried to paint a kind of portrait of the Christian heart, using my own chaotic and imperfect heart, which I know best, as the model. I meant to make us recognisable to others, but by accident I seem to have given some Christian readers the pleasure of recognising themselves. Flatteringly, they seem to see their portrait in my portrait, their doubts and dilemmas in my doubts and dilemmas. It’s an accident, but one I am very pleased by.
This is absolutely predictable. Spufford’s arguments against atheism, like all such arguments, are unconvincing, and his are particularly unconvincing because they’re (or have been) motivated completely by what he finds emotionally congenial. Of course such appeals will find their natural home with believers, not atheists.
Why did atheism disappoint you?
It turned out not to contain what my soul needed for nourishment in bad times. It was not any kind of philosophical process that led me out from disbelief. I had made a mess of things in my life, and I needed mercy, and to my astonishment, mercy was there. An experience of mercy, rather than an idea of it. And the rest followed from there. I felt my way back to Christianity, discovering through many surprises that the religion I remembered from my childhood looked different if you came to it as an adult with adult needs: not pretty, not small, not ridiculous, but tough and gigantic and marvellous.
This is quite revealing. Atheism disappointed Spufford for, despite being the only credible intellectual response to a lack of evidence, it didn’t satisfy him emotionally. He had a rough time, and religion brought him the solace he needs. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that there’s a God, or that the tenets of Christianity are true. Some find solace in the bottle or the joint, others in God. The difference is that alcohol and marijuana actually exist.
. . . How can we reconcile the idea of a good God with the world’s suffering?
I can’t. Can you? All of the theological justifications have something valuable in them, but in the end, none of them seem complete. But luckily we have something beside theological ideas: we have Christ crucified, joining with us in the sufferings of the world. Like most Christians, I am not comforted by abstract ideas about God, but by Christ’s own presence, in the gospels and in bread and wine. As I say in the book: we don’t have a justification, but we have a story. A true story, of God redeeming the world.
I’ve always said that theodicy—the ineffectual religious rationalization of evil, particularly “natural evils” like childhood cancers or natural disasters—constitutes one of the best arguments against the existence of an omnipotent and loving God. This is nothing new, although the faithful continue to confect new explanations about why God would let kids get leukemia, or kill thousands in tsunamis. Their explanations remain ludicrous and convincing only to those who want to believe. The existence of a crucified Christ who also suffered (and how does Spufford know that that happened?) doesn’t make matters any better. Does a crucified Christ palliate the sufferings of children with cancer, or the grief of those who have lost friends or relatives in natural disasters?
The words “we don’t have a justification, but we have a story” should be the very motto of all theologians. If they can make something up, they’re satisfied. As for it being the “true” story that Spufford thinks, one involving God redeeming the world, well, how does he know that? Only because his emotions make him think it is true.
It’s no surprise that atheists would find such a book unconvincing, but believers would be drawn to it like flies.
Over at The Atlantic, you can read one of the more bizarre takes on atheism I’ve seen in a while. It’s not a nasty critique of New Atheism in the John Gray style, but a very strange piece about how New Atheism, LIKE RELIGION (these articles always draw that parallel), is based on wish-thinking.
“What?”, you say. “How can that be?” Well, read “Irrational Atheism,” a short piece by Crispin Sartwell, a philosophy professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and, according to Wikipedia, “a self-described individualist anarchist.” If you don’t know what that is, Wikipedia can also inform you about individualist anarchism.
At any rate, I find it bizarre that so many of these misguided pieces—articles that nearly all of us could refute standing on our heads, come from philosophy professors. What does that say about philosophy?
Sartwell’s piece starts off on a bad note:
Religious beliefs are remarkably various. But sometimes it can seem that there is only one way to be an atheist: asserting, on the basis of reasoned argument, that belief in God is irrational. The aging “new atheists”—Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, for example—pit reason against faith, science against superstition, and declare for reason and science.
“Aging”? Well, we’re all aging. If he means “old,” implying “superannuated,” why doesn’t Sartwell just say so, or is he using some sly denigration here. And, of course, Sam Harris is hardly old: he’s 47. As for the rest of the sentence—the contrast between science and superstition—that’s fine. Except for one thing: Sartwell doesn’t buy it.
Sartwell’s thesis is in fact the tired old mill-horse that atheism, like religion, is based on faith: in his case, a faith in naturalism:
[New Atheism] pictures the universe as a natural system, a system not guided by intelligent design and not traversed by spirits; a universe that can be explained by science, because it consists of material objects operating according to physical laws. In this sense, atheism embodies a whole picture of the world, offering explanations about its most general organization to the character of individual events.
Ironically, this is similar to the totalizing worldview of religion—neither can be shown to be true or false by science, or indeed by any rational technique. Whether theistic or atheistic, they are all matters of faith, stances taken up by tiny creatures in an infinitely rich environment.
. . . I have taken a leap of atheist faith.
There we have it: naturalism, like supernaturalism, is a matter of faith. That’s wrong on several levels.
First of all, while atheism is intimately connected to naturalism, the two are not identical. Most atheists do indeed believe that there is nothing supernatural (i.e., nothing defying the laws of physics) in the universe, but not all atheists agree. The philosopher Tom Nagel, for instance, believes in some kind of teleology that is not at bottom naturalistic, but he’s also an atheist. The justification for naturalism is that it works: we have never understood anything about the universe by assuming the supernatural, while assuming naturalism as a working hypothesis has moved our understanding ever forward.
The justification for atheism is related but not identical: we haven’t seen any evidence for any gods. One could in principle be an atheist but not a naturalist: if, for example, you haven’t yet understood how nature works but you also haven’t seen evidence for any gods or divine intervention. Not understanding something doesn’t by default mean that a god is involved. (This is the mistaken “god-of-the-gaps” gambit.)
But at any rate, the kind of “faith” we have in science is not the same kind of “faith” we have in gods or the divine. I could explain this in detail, but fortunately I already have: in my piece at Slate called “No faith in science.” Suffice it to say that in religion faith is basically belief in something that lacks sufficient evidence to convince most rational people, or, in most cases, no evidence at all save revelation, dogma, authority, and wish-thinking. (These things aren’t evidence, of course.) In science we don’t really use the word “faith”; rather, we have confidence in the existence of phenomena based on evidence in principle available to anyone. As I said in my piece:
You have faith (i.e., confidence) that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, and there’s no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the sun has burnt out. You have faith in your doctor because, presumably, she has treated you and others successfully, and you know that what she prescribes is tested scientifically. You wouldn’t go to a shaman or a spiritual healer for strep throat—unless you want to waste your money.
The conflation of faith as “unevidenced belief” with faith as “justified confidence” is simply a word trick used to buttress religion. In fact, you’ll never hear a scientist saying, “I have faith in evolution” or “I have faith in electrons.” Not only is such language alien to us, but we know full well how those words can be misused in the name of religion.
Somehow Sartwell seems to have missed this crucial difference.
Further, he seems to think that most atheists have arrived at their nonbelief in a manner similar to the way believers embraced their faith. He argues that we have an a priori emotional commitment to atheism, or were brought up as atheists, and then embrace the “arguments” for atheism only later, in a manner similar to how Jesus and Mo supported their religion. Proceeding with this flawed line of argument, Sartwell says this:
Religious people sometimes try to give proofs of the truth of their faith—Saint Thomas Aquinas famously gave five in his Summa Theologica. But for many people, belief comes before arguments, originating in family, social and institutional context, in desire and need. The arguments are post-hoc rationalizations. This can be true of atheism as well. For me, it’s what I grew up with. It gets by in my social world, where professions of religious faith would be considered out of place. My non-faith is fundamentally part of how I connect with others and the world.
Does Sartwell not know that for many—perhaps most—atheists, the adoption of unbelief came not from indoctrination by family or peers, but through thinking through the supposed evidence for faith? After all, many atheists (and many readers here) were brought up religious, and only later realized that it was a man-made system of thought that simply confected its “truths.” As for atheism helping us get by in our social world, religion would in fact be a much better way of doing that, at least in the U.S.
Sartwell continues his threadbare argument:
The idea that the atheist comes to her view of the world through rationality and argumentation, while the believer relies on arbitrary emotional commitments, is false. This accounts for the sense that atheists such as Christopher Hitchens or Dawkins are arrogant: Their line of thinking often takes the form of disqualifying others on the grounds that they are irrational. But the atheist too, is deciding to believe in conditions of irremediable uncertainty, not merely following out a proof.
That’s just bogus. The atheist is not irrational to refuse to believe in gods without evidence. To say that this is “believing in conditions of irremediable uncertainty” is just obscurantist philosopherspeak for “the atheist doesn’t believe in things for which there is not good evidence.” I am still stunned that a card-carrying philosopher can make an argument like this. He goes on:
Religious people have often offloaded the burden of their choices on institutions and relied on the Church’s authorities and dogmas. But some atheists are equally willing to offload their beliefs on “reason” or “science” without acknowledging that they are making a bold intellectual commitment about the nature of the universe, and making it with utterly insufficient data. Religion at its best treats belief as a resolution in the face of doubt. I want an atheism that does the same, that displays epistemological courage.
Really? Is naturalism—a way of regarding the world that came about not through fabrication or revelation, but from time-tested experience—the same thing as “a resolution in the face of doubt”? I don’t think so. It is the “insufficient data” for god that leads us to atheism, in precisely the same way that the insufficent data for the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or alien abduction leads us to doubt their existence. It’s simply bizarre that Sartwell seems to want an atheism arrived at without rational argument, an atheism that he simply likes, and makes him feel “episemologically couragenous.” (Even writing those words makes me chuckle.) But an absence of evidence, where there should be evidence (as with God), is a rational reason for doubting the existence of gods. What is irrational is to accept gods on the basis of no evidence at all.
And so, almost inevitably, Sartwell brings up Kierkegaard, the man who said that one should believe without evidence—indeed, one should believe in gods because the idea is silly and insupportable:
Kierkegaard defined faith as “an objective uncertainty held fast in passionate inwardness.” He recommended Christianity not because it was well justified, and not in spite of the fact that it was insufficiently justified, but because it constituted a paradox: “The eternal God had appeared in time and died.” That’s not just difficult to explain, he said; it is entirely contradictory. By any reasonable measure it simply cannot be true. But that’s why believing it called for total passion over the course of a lifetime. Christianity was the best thing to believe in part because it was the hardest thing to believe.
If a believer rejects rationality in this manner, you aren’t likely to persuade him by showing him that his reasons are bad; he admits as much, or more. There’s no use having an argument with a person who rejects argumentation.
So what? If someone is irrational, there’s no point indeed in arguing with them. But that doesn’t mean that all believers accept their faith precisely because it’s unreasonable. Many rely on arguments—things they (but not we) consider as “evidence”. That, after all, is what apologetics is all about, and it’s what Natural Theology is about as well. Believers crave evidence for their faith, because in their hearts they know that there isn’t any. That’s why they scour the slopes of Mount Ararat for remains of the Ark, and dig up Jerusalem looking for Jesus’s tomb. That’s why Indian Christians flocked to a statue of Jesus in Mumbai that was dripping water: it confirmed their faith. When the skeptic Sanal Edamaruku discovered that the water came from blocked plumbing, so that Jesus was actually weeping toilet water, he was run out of the country on threat of arrest. If believers believed simply because it was unreasonable, they wouldn’t care about miracles.
And imagine if, in our daily life, we believed things because they simply “couldn’t be true.” We’d believe that horses could fly, that DNA was a triple helix, and that Republicans cared about the poor. Why exempt religion—supposedly one of the most important things one can commit to in one’s life—from the same evidentiary standards we use to accept other things?
At the end Sartwell simply jumps the shark in an incoherent burst of purple prose, much like the final group of explosions that end a fourth-of-July fireworks display:
By not believing in God, I keep faith with the world’s indifference. I love its beauty. I hate its suffering. I think both are perfectly real, because I experience them both, all the time. I do not see any reason to suspend judgment: I’m here, and I commit. I’m perfectly sincere and definite in my belief that there is no God. I can see that there could be comfort in believing otherwise, believing that all the suffering and death makes sense, that everyone gets what they deserve, and that existence works out in the end.
But to believe that would be to betray my actual experiences, and even without the aid of reasoned arguments, that’s reason enough not to believe.
Commitment for commitment’s sake is simply dumb and irrational. And Sartwell’s last sentence is ambiguous: a sign of poor thinking, poor writing, or, in this case, probably both. If by “actual experiences,” he means “I haven’t seen evidence for God,” then he is making an evidence-based argument, which of course undercuts his whole “leap of faith to atheism” trope. But if by “actual experiences” he means “I have found that atheism helps me get by in the world,” as he says above, then that’s not a “reason” for being an unbeliever.
Religion is irrational, for it asks us to believe without evidence. It’s even dumber to believe things that can’t possibly be true based on what we know about the world, which is what Tertullian and Kierkegaard asked us to do.
Atheism, despite whatever Sartwell says, is eminently rational. We see no evidence for any gods, much less the Abrahamic gods. There are thousands of different religions, each with adherents believing different tenets that are incompatible with those of other faiths. What is the justification for belief in such a case? If you’re a Pentecostal Christian, you think you’ll go to hell unless you accept Jesus as your personal savior. If, on the other hand, you’re a Muslim, you’ll go to hell if you believe that! That, my friends, is faith.
In contrast, there is only one brand of science, although we do have disputes about some issues not yet settled by hard evidence (and at least we have the guts to admit that “we don’t know” about things like dark matter). Neither scientists nor good atheists will accept something for which there is no evidence. It is in fact the paragon of rationality to refuse to sign onto such propositions.
How is it possible that a lowly biologist can see such things, and a credentialed philosopher can’t? Could Massimo Pigliucci possibly be wrong in saying that biologists aren’t credible when they try to do philosophy?
h/t: Keith
There is so much atheist-bashing appearing in the popular press that I can’t keep up with it. And so much of it is repetitive that there’s no point in taking it all apart. Someone should simply write a piece on “common journalistic criticisms of atheism and how to answer them,” but that person ain’t gonna be me. I wonder about the sudden outpouring of vitriol against unbelievers, but would like to think it’s the defensive reaction of believers on their heels, and the sympathetic feeling of faitheists.
Here’s one such piece from yesterday’s New York Times (fast becoming the Salon of intellectuals), brought to my attention by reader Alberto. It’s called “A Christian apologist and an atheist thrive in an improbable bond.” How can any reader not get a warm feeling from a title expressing such comity?
This reader didn’t, and neither did Alberto. The article is about the friendship of two men with opposing worldviews. One is David Skeel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school and a Christian apologist who believes that faith and reason can be reconciled. The other is Patrick Arsenaut, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn’s school of medicine and an atheist.
Arsenault wrote to Skeel, and so began a relationship that resulted in a book on theology by Skeel. But the writer can’t resist a bit of editorializing, giving a trope that is fast becoming tiresome (my emphasis below):
To use the theological term, Professor Skeel was a Christian apologist, one who explains and defends the faith against doubters. Dr. Arsenault was an atheist, as he explained in the email, who had attended the public discussion with his own humanist loyalties. Yet he wrote that he appreciated Professor Skeel “for choosing to pose the big difficult questions of Christianity.” The next day, Professor Skeel sent a note suggesting they have coffee and talk.
So commenced the unlikely friendship and intellectual partnership of the atheist and the apologist. Since then, their relationship has transpired through private emails and chats. Two months ago, though, it became public with the release of Professor Skeel’s book “True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World.”
Sadly, the book isn’t selling well: despite its release on August 28, only about five weeks ago, it’s in position 74,287 on Amazon and has garnered only one customer review. The article continues:
Not only is Dr. Arsenault acknowledged in the book, and not only is he quoted in it as a “materialist friend of mine,” but the true paradox of “True Paradox” is that the volume night not have existed at all, or certainly would not exist in its present shape and voice, without the secular scientist as its midwife. And that odd reality is testament to a rare brand of mutual civility in the culture wars, with their countervailing trends of religious fundamentalism and dogmatic atheism.
How many times must we hear that “dogmatic atheism” is the same as “religious fundamentalism”? They are similar in only two ways: both deal with the validity of religious belief, and both have passionate advocates. Other than that, their worldviews and methods for ascertaining “truth” are at complete odds. It’s as if one could equate the segregationists of the 1960s U.S. South with the civil rights advocates who opposed them.
And what is “dogmatic atheism,” anyway? The claim that “I know for sure there is no god”? Few would say that, but, given the absence of any evidence for God, one is perfectly entitled to say, “I’m almost certain that there is no God,” as Richard Dawkins does. Is that “dogmatic”? If so, it’s no more dogmatic than the views of non-fundamentalist believers who are even more certain that God exists than atheists are that God doesn’t. Remember, a Harris Poll taken last year showed that more than half of all Americans—54%—professed absolute certainty that God exists. That means that 54% of Americans are “dogmatic believers.” Let’s see the New York Times characterize them in that way!
The article has a lot of mutual back-patting between the two men and is notable for the complete absence of what these guys should really be arguing about: “How do you know the things you claim so strongly?” Why is that missing? Perhaps for the reason Alberto noted in his email: “My experience is that posing the simple question ‘How do you know that you know?’ will lead to be called “dogmatic”, which is a contradiction in terms.”
A few more bits:
. . . Dr. Arsenault, 31, put it this way: “I can tell David that resurrection isn’t plausible in the least. And he doesn’t flinch. I don’t have a desire for David not to be a Christian. If he came to me tomorrow and said he was dropping it, I’d be concerned. This is his family and his community. I’d feel like I had taken away a lot.”
. . . During a van trip to the West Coast the summer after his sophomore year, Professor Skeel opened a Bible to the first verse of Genesis and read all the way through. Though he did not formalize his ties to a particular congregation until several decades later with the Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, he recalls in “True Paradox” that “the sheer beauty of the Bible is what first drew me in, and it’s what I go back to when I’m asked over a beer late at night why I believe that Christianity is true.”
In both cases Skeel’s belief is validated not by evidence, but in the first case because he’d lose his “community” if he gave up belief (so would fundamentalist Baptists!), and in the second it’s because the Bible is beautiful (so is Homer!).
And verily did this intercourse become The Book:
Amid all the respect and comity, though, the atheist and the apologist ducked no fights, especially concerning Professor Skeel’s belief that God endowed humans with humanity. Dr. Arsenault asserted in one email that men and women “are not so different from those unconscious computers.” In another, he suggested that human beings, far from being the most advanced form of life, would pale next to bacteria in terms of survival under duress. As for love, Dr. Arsenault attributed his ardor for his wife to “a neuronal change induced by mutual oxytocin release.” He referred to Professor Skeel’s God only with a lowercase g.
The effect of the emails, the coffee chats and edits was to sharpen Professor Skeel’s arguments and to encourage him to reckon with the findings of scientists like Dr. Pinker. “True Paradox” became a book of engagement rather than avoidance.
Even so, nothing that Professor Skeel wrote ever changed Dr. Arsenault’s nonbelief. [JAC: Did anybody expect it would?] What the book did confirm, though, was their shared value of principled disagreement.
Call me cynical, but what is the “value” of principled disagreement, at least for Arsenault? Of course religion can benefit from the input of scientists and nonbelievers. Much religion always has, for the truth about nature has forced liberal theology to revise its tenets. The creation story of Genesis didn’t happen, nor did the exile of Jews in the desert, their captivity in Egypt, the descent of all of us from Adam and Eve or the Roman census preceding Jesus’s birth. But how do nonbelievers benefit from engaging with religionists? Only by learning a bit about the history of faith (which you can do from books), and coming to grips with the religious mindset—the ability to believe what is unbelievable. But reaches a point where you don’t learn much new by further engagement with believers about faith. Life is too short.
Nevertheless, I’m not decrying Arsenault’s and Skeel’s friendship. More power to them if they like each other despite their disagreements. I have a few friends who are believers, and we know each other’s stands. We just avoid the topic. I’ve always wondered, though, how a husband and wife could have a harmonious marriage when one is an atheist and the other a strong believer. Can you avoid the discussion for a lifetime?
At the article’s end, there’s a bit more editorializing on the part of the writer (my emphasis):
“The thing that really sticks out with me,” Dr. Arsenault said, “is that in the culture wars, the rhetoric is acerbic on both sides. On the humanist side, there’s this tendency to view people of faith as not rational. And David is clearly rational. He’s just looked at the same evidence as me and come to a different conclusion.”
If that’s not a contradiction, I don’t know what is. Homeopaths, UFO and ESP advocates, conspiracy theorists about 9/11, global warming denialists—all of these people look at the same evidence as we do and come to different conclusion. Why? Because there are factors other than reason at play: emotional commitment and confirmation bias. Are they irrational? Of course! Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines “rational” (the first definition is “having the faculty of reasoning”):
If you look at the facts and decide that there is a supernatural being, immanent in everything, who cares for all of us, and sent his Son to Earth to be nailed to sticks; or that Mohamed really did receive dictation from God and flew from Mecca to Jerusalem on a wingéd horse; or that Joseph Smith found golden plates pointed out by the angel Moroni—if you believe any of this, then you are not exercising sound judgement, but either surrendering to emotion or evincing the brainwashing you received from your family, church, and peers. I call that irrational—in exactly the same way that belief in homeopathy is irrational.
It may be rational to pretend to believe, as Arsenault alludes to above, for you might be ostracized by your family and friends if you give up your faith. I’ve met many nonbelievers who suffered that fate; Jerry DeWitt is a poignant example. But that’s different from holding the beliefs themselves, which, to my mind, is a supreme irrationality.
In yesterday’s paper edition of the New York Times, the “letters” section highlights four responses to Julia Baird’s Sept. 25 op-ed,“Doubt as a sign of faith” (my post on here essay is here). Baird’s thesis, taking off from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent admission that sometimes he doubted God’s existence (but not Jesus’s), was that doubt is not a weakness of religious faith, but a strength. Remember Barid’s words?:
Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.
As I noted, the problem is that there is no good way to resolve religous doubt except to either embrace it and become an atheist or, more usually, to convince yourself based on wish-thinking that you were right all along. It eludes me how going through a “darkness of the soul” somehow can strengthen you in your faith. That’s just not rational—not unless you find a gleam of evidence somewhere in the darkness. And if you return to faith after having your doubts, you are discarding intellectual honesty for emotional security.
So one would think that among the four letters to the NYT editor there might be at least one dissenter, one person who says that doubt is a strength of the intellect, but not a virtue of faith. But one would think wrong. All four letters agree with Baird, extolling the virtue of doubt.
Just three samples of the madness:
Julia Baird is wise to remind us that Christ himself experienced doubt and darkness on the cross when he cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” This cry has long confounded Christendom, but it should not because if Christ was to experience all that is human, he also had to experience spiritual doubt and darkness, a perplexing irony for he who said, “I am the light of the world.”
As for the archbishop of Canterbury: how poignantly real and human to admit and embrace his own doubt. Only a man who identifies with the whole of our humanity, its light and its shadow, could muster the humility and courage to reveal his own spiritual landscape.
How many of us would be so willing to lay bare our inner selves?
ROBERT WALDRON
Boston, Sept. 26, 2014The writer is the author of books about Christianity.
Courage? Is the Archbishop now hedging his public sermons or prayers: “Dear God (if you exist). . .” And if Christ had to experience “all that is human,” then he’d have to have sex, too, which I don’t think is mentioned in Scripture.
*****
Even the most faithful have doubts about their faith. If one does not, he or she is either a fool or a liar.
In my case it came as a crushing blow, even though I was a priest chaplain with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. I was always afraid that some bullet had my name on it. Once when we were in a firefight and the Marine point man was wounded, the medic shamed me into crawling up with him to help the man. In spite of fear, I followed him. When we were halfway there, a bullet blew the medic’s head off.
Covered with his blood, I lost my faith. How could a loving God do this to such a good man? I crawled to the Marine, lifted him onto my shoulders, stood up and carried him down. I had hoped that the enemy would kill me because I had nothing more to live for.
A priest without faith is like wine without grapes. I made it, and all thought I was courageous. Not so. I wanted to die. Later I came to belief again, but that is another story.
A situation can be shocking and so traumatic that we can go beyond doubt to atheism. But doubt there was, even for a priest.
PETER J. RIGA
Houston, Sept. 27, 2014
After that, he should have become an atheist for good. Finally:
****
Julia Baird’s article reminds me of something that Dr. Leonard Kravitz, one of my rabbinical school professors at Hebrew Union College in New York, used to say to his students: “Certainty doesn’t make you correct. Certainty makes you certain.”
(Rabbi) STEVEN FOLBERG
Austin, Tex., Sept. 26, 2014
Dr. Kravitz was right. But belief in something for which there is no evidence makes you not admirable, but credulous.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the Times didn’t publish any letters saying that perhaps having doubts means that you’re believing in something that might not be true. After all, it’s not kosher to publicly criticize religion, even in the “letters” column of a liberal newspaper.
On September 18 I discussed the confession of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that he had experienced some heavy doubts about God’s existence, based on God’s distressing lack of appearance on the planet. Surprisingly, though, Welby had no doubts about Jesus. I found that quite astonishing, for Jesus has meaning to Welby only as the son of God (as well as a third of the Godhead, given that Anglicans accept the Trinity). How can you doubt God and be certain about the divinity of Jesus?
At any rate, Julia Baird (an Australian opinion writer for the New York Times who also has a Ph.D. in history) has taken to her keyboard to defend Welby in a Sept. 25 Times op-ed,, “Doubt as a sign of faith.” Her thesis is, in her words, this: “Doubt is a crucial part of faith.”
But her piece does not start off well:
Certainty is so often overrated.
This is especially the case when it comes to faith, or other imponderables.
Overrated? Wouldn’t you want to be certain that your faith was right? After all, you’re staking a lot of your life, and all of your afterlife, on what you believe. And certainty in other matters, so long as it’s supported by evidence, is what you want. (I think she’s talking about real empirical certainty, not simply one’s assertion that one is right.)
To defend her thesis, Baird first lists some religious people who have had religious doubts, including Welby himself , Mother Teresa (her diary entries on this are now well known), C. L. Lewis, Flannery O’Conner, Benjamin Franklin, and even Jesus himself, who, says Baird, cried out on the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Well, that might not be Jesus’s doubt about God’s existence, but anguish about why God didn’t save him.
Indeed, according to scripture Jesus did say that, but in only two of the four Gospels, Matthew and Mark. Here are his final words in all four gospels:
If Baird quoted Luke or John, we wouldn’t see that doubt, so she’s cherry-picking. Did Luke and John simply leave out those crucial words of doubt, or did someone make them up? (Baird appears to believe they are real, for she implies, as we’ll see below, that she’s a Baptist.)
But never mind. Her view that doubt is inherent in faith, is largely (but not completely) correct. How can it not be for many? If you’re committed to believing a bunch of superstition lacking evidence, and yet you’re a thinking person who bases the rest of your life on things for which you’d like evidence, then sometimes you must wonder if all this stuff is real. That’s all well and good, but, given the nature of faith, how does one resolve those doubts? This is the question Baird avoids:
Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.
This is truly making a virtue of necessity. For there is no good way for a believer to actually resolve those doubts, for there is no evidence to appeal to. How can Welby call on evidence to convince himself that God really exists? After all, it’s that lack of evidence that raised his doubts in the first place! At least Baird admits that faith is “persisting in the presence of doubt,” that is, pretending that something exists when you’re not sure it does.
No, there are only two ways to quell those doubts. First, just decide to quietly shelve them and convince yourself that you were right all along, or conjure up some “evidence,” like a frozen waterfall or a beautiful evensong, to get you back on track. But that is just confirmation bias. Or, you can do what Baird’s pastor does, and just say that maybe it doesn’t matter if what you believe is true, so long as it produces good things:
My local pastor, Tim Giovanelli, a Baptist whose ocean-swimming prowess has lassoed scores of surfers and swimmers into his church, puts it simply: “For Welby, myself and many others, it is not that we have certainty but have seen the plausibility of faith and positive impact it can make. In a broken world, that can be enough.”
But where does the “plausibility” come from? Doesn’t Giovanelli really mean “logical possibility”? It is the mistaking of the logical possibility (and emotional appeal) of a God for the plausibility of a God (something that Alvin Plantinga does continually, and on purpose), that mistakenly leads the doubters back to faith.
Yes, religious doubt is natural, and inevitable in rational people, but the whole goal of religion is to quash it. Granted, some, like Welby, will admit it (though I suspect that people like Al Mohler, Ken Ham, and William Lane Craig don’t have such doubts), but in the end they always decide that they were right all along—on no evidence—and plow ahead as before, like a ship going around an iceberg. I doubt that Welby’s newfound doubts will affect his sermons or public pronouncements from now on: he will certainly act as if God and Jesus exist when he talks to his flock.
At the end, Baird compares the doubts of believers with those of rationalists, quoting the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell:
If we don’t accept both the commonality and importance of doubt, we don’t allow for the possibility of mistakes or misjudgments. While certainty frequently calcifies into rigidity, intolerance and self-righteousness, doubt can deepen, clarify and explain. This is, of course, a subject far broader than belief in God. [JAC: Really? How can religious doubt itself “clarify and explain” without some way of resolving it?]
The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it best. The whole problem with the world, he wrote, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
But there are two differences between the kind of doubt evinced by Baird and that mentioned by Russell. First, when a scientist or empiricist doubts something, say string theory, they don’t go around proclaiming that it is true. They admit constantly that it is plausible but unsettled. Scientific “truth” only comes with substantial empirical verification. In contrast, the believers who have doubts, like Welby, ultimately go their merry way and forget that they had those doubts, saying that they’ve been resolved by further reflection. But reflection can’t resolve doubt unless you have a way of adjudicating the conflicting positions.
And that brings us to a crucial difference between religion and science. In science doubts are resolved by evidence. If you don’t have evidence that string theory is correct, you don’t tell yourself and others, “upon deeper reflection, I have clarified to myself that it is indeed right.” If you don’t have good evidence, you stop promoting your theory as the truth; instead, you persist in asserting that it’s undecided. But will be a cold day in July (in the northern hemisphere!) when Welby and Baird, who have even less evidence for God than physicists have for string theory, start doubting God’s existence publicly and frequently. Unless the doubts of the faithful are resolved by “deep reflection”—almost always the case—they become nonbelievers.
Baird’s article is a prime example of what I call The Great Sausage Machine of Theology: a mental appartus that converts scientific and empirical necessities—in this case a lack of evidence for one’s beliefs—into theological virtues. And, like sausage-making, the working of the Theological Grinder are best kept hidden. By exposing them, Baird has revealed their intellectual vacuity.