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.
A reader sent me an email he/she got touting a new project by the Templeton Religious Trust, one of the big-money-granting foundations that arose from the largesse of gazillionaire fund manager John Templeton. You can see the initiative by clicking on the screenshot below. Note that the subheading reprises the original purpose of the Templeton Foundation: to find evidence for God in science. And of course they maintain the accommodationism that science and religion can be “mutually reinforcing”, which is ridiculous:
The grant for this project, which was a munifent $3,033,427, ended last October, and now they’re public. The email gave a summary, and we find no surprises there. David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, apparently was part of this project (he appears at 1:35 in the video below). I’m not going to discuss it in detail, as it’s incredibly boring and tendentious, so click the screenshot above if you want an eyeful.
The only thing I’ll mention about the palaver below is the old rotten assertion that both science and religion are “belief systems”. No, religion is a belief system, a “way of believing what you can’t confirm, but science is, as Carl Sagan notes below, a “way of thinking.” The claim that science and religion are coequal as “belief systems” is one way that people like those at Templeton try to simultaneously do down science and elevate religion. It hasn’t worked: Christianity and Judaism are rapidly waning in the West as “nones” grow in number.
This is from the Templeton email; all bolding is theirs:
Can both science and religion help us find meaning?
Dominic Johnson at Oxford, and Michael Price at Brunel University say they can. Through a grant from Templeton Religion Trust, Johnson and Price have funded 18 research projects around the world to study how religious and scientific beliefs evolve over time and provide systems of meaning for people and whole communities.
“We are interested in the origins of two very important belief systems; religion and science; how these systems are compatible or incompatible, and what the implications are for society,” says Price.
To Price and Johnson, religion and science are both sources of wonder, awe, and life, and help satisfy the human need for meaning and purpose. Through this cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study, they have shown that many of the assumptions we have made about the relationship between religion and science have been wrong all along.
Doesn’t that remind you of sociologist Elaine Ecklund (who’s also been copiously funded by Templeton, making a career of osculating faith)?
“The findings that surprised me the most were that science and religion are not only not incompatible, but are actually mutually reinforcing,” continues Price. “The people who got the most benefits from science and religion were the people who subscribed to both belief systems.”
Science and religion are not in conflict, they’re stronger together.
For more information, watch this video
Who are they kidding? How is science, which operates without using the notion of gods or the supernatural, “stronger” because of religion? Well, here’s a 5-minute video, and the last 30 seconds tells us how science and religion are mutually reinforcing. But it’s a con.
Another big-time waste of money. What’s your meaning system?
It’s very strange that there are some people who claim that there is no real difference in the harmfulness of different religions as practiced during our day. As nearly all the Four Horsemen maintained (and Sam Harris continues to do so eloquently), Islam is the faith that, as practiced now, causes more harm than any other faith, and certainly more harm than does Christianity. And yes, I freely admit that between the 12th to the 18th centuries—the period of the Inquisition—Christianity was the world’s most harmful faith. But we mustn’t forget the Aztecs, who routinely engaged in mass and gruesome murders of both their own people and prisoners.
But now the most pernicious faith seems to be Islam. Certainly many Muslims (and I know some) practice their faith benignly and even charitably. But many others don’t, and they enable harms throughout the world—harms that were never produced by Christianity or that have been largely abandoned by them. Here are some practices promoted or exacerbated by Islamic doctrine:
Islamism: the desire to dominate the world with Islamic doctrine, including sharia law
The codified oppression of women. In many places women must be veiled, put into cloth sacks, can’t go out without a male guardian, can’t go to school or get many jobs, must walk behind their husbands, can be beaten (or divorced) by their husbands without sanction, can be stoned to death for adultery (a practice just resumed by the Taliban in Afghanistan), and so on.
Honor culture: killing of family members who supposedly sully a family’s “honor”
Female genital mutilation, which is encouraged in many places by Islam
Sharia law, which is also oppressive. For example, the testimony of women under sharia law counts only half as much as a man’s
The oppression of gays, including outright murder in places like Gaza and legal execution in places like Iran.
Blasphemy laws, under which you can be killed for insulting Islam or burning the Qur’an
The demonization and sometimes the killing of apostates or atheists
The issuing of fatwas when Westerners insult Islam, sometimes calling for killing those perceived to insult the religion (Charlie Hebdo, Salman Rushdie, etc.). This is connected with the blasphemy laws mentioned above
Divisiveness within the religion that leads to war and death: Sunnis kill Shiites and vice versa, so there are internecine killings as well as cross-cultural killing
The propagation of hatred of Jews and propagandizing of the young
Favoring religious teaching in madrassas above secular teaching
The suppression of freedom of speech in general, particularly that which criticizes the government, often an explicitly Islamic government. Masih Alinejad, for instance, fears for her life in America because she criticizes Iran, which has tried to both kill and kidnap her in separate incidents. Why? Because she’s against mandatory wearing of the headscarf (hijab) for women.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here so I can finish this post.
While I suppose you can find instances of some of these practices among Christians (e.g. honor killings, Orthodox Jews inhibiting secular learning, the demonization of gays), you would be a fool to say that the harm caused by Islam, as instantiated by the acts above, is as serious as that caused by Christianity in our era. There’s simply no argument to be made for it.
Except, of course, by P. Z. Myers, because Richard Dawkins has just defended Christianity against Islam in the way I have above, and we all know that P. Z. Myers is obsessed with criticizing Dawkins. And so Myers does, in a deeply misguided and logically confused piece on Pharyngula called “Banality and bigotry“. The point Myers wants to make is that Dawkins, as a “cultural Christian” who also sees modern Christianity as morally superior to modern Islam, is thus bigot against Islam—an “Islamophobe”, if you will. (I prefer to think of “Islamophobia” as “fear of the consequences of Islam, which isn’t bigotry.) I won’t psychologize Myers, as I just want to rebut his argument, but I’d suggest that he reflect on his obsessive animus against Dawkins. In this case, the animus has forced Myers to twist the facts to imply that Christianity is precisely as bad for the world as is Islam.
Myers’s jihad comes from the video below, in which Dawkins conveys an “Easter message” of the moral superiority of Christian behavior over Muslim behavior—comparing behaviors based on religious dictates. The interlocutor is journalist Rachel Johnson, and the venue is LBC, originally the London Broadcasting Company. It’s an interesting discussion, for Richard also queries Johnson about her own beliefs, sometimes making her squirm.
But the main error of both her queries as well as Myers’s article is to claim that because there are bad behaviors inspired by both Christianity and Islam, they must be equally bad. And if you say that, you’re a bigot. The error, of course, is the neglect of the real issue: how often do bad behavior promoted by the two faiths occur? Further, says Myers, both the Bible and Qur’an promote some bad behaviors, so the two faiths again must be pretty much equally bad. Here I’d disagree, maintaining that the Qu’ran is full of more hatred, animus, and oppressive dictates than is the Bible. (Yes, I’ve read both.) But that’s really irrelevant to the question at hand, as most modern Christians don’t follow the bad parts of the Bible, while the Qur’an hasn’t been equally defanged.
Click to listen:
Dawkins mentions some of the bad behaviors inspired by Islam that I’ve listed above, including hostility to women and gays. He adds that “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time. It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in the way Islam is not.” It seems clear that he’s referring to behaviors emanating from the religions today, which is further clarified when Dawkins says that, if given a choice, he’d prefer to to live in a culturally Christian than in a Muslim country—though he “doesn’t believe a word of Christian faith”.
I’d agree, and I’m betting that, given a choice of living in the U.S. or U.K. on the one hand or Iran or Afghanistan on the other, Myers would choose the Christian countries. You don’t have to believe the tenets of Christianity to make that no-brainer choice, nor do you have to believe that liberal democracies are the inevitable result of Christianity. It’s simply a matter of the average well-being in a country taken across all of its inhabitants.
Here, however, is how Myers deals with Dawkins’s claim that he’s a “cultural Christian” because he likes church music and cathedrals, even though he entirely rejects Christian doctrine:
It’s meaningless and trivial to say that we have all been shaped by our environment…although, of course, many Christian believers think that this is a huge deal and are acting as if Dawkins has renounced his unbelief.
He has not. What he then goes on to do, though, is to declare his bigotry, and that is what I find disturbing.
He likes hymns and cathedrals and parish churches — fine, uncontroversial, kind of boring, actually. But then he resents the idea that people would celebrate Ramadan instead of Christmas. Why? They both seem like nice holidays, that some people follow a different set of customs shouldn’t be a problem. Then he goes on to say that Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that Islam is not.”
How so? Because Islam is hostile to women and gays. He goes on to talk about how the Koran has a low regard for women.
Jesus. It’s true, but has this “cultural Christian” read the Bible? I don’t see any difference. The interviewer tries to bring up the record of actual practicing Christians, and he dismisses that as only those weird American protestants, as if jolly old England has no gay baiting, no murders of young women, and as if JK Rowling were just an open-minded, beneficent patron of the arts. Many American Christians are virulent homophobes who treat women as chattel, but his equally nasty culturally English Christianity has people and organizations that are just as awful.
Dawkins has come out as sympathetic to Christianity, but only because it justifies his bigotry. At least he’s being open and honest about both biases.
Here Myers makes the two mistakes I mentioned above. First, he sees no difference between the proportion of bad stuff in the Bible and the bad stuff in the Qur’an. I do see a difference (I presume Myers has read both, as I have), but, as I said this is really irrelevant.
The main question is where one wants to live: in a Christian or a Muslim country, and whether Islam has more pernicious effects on the modern world than does Christianity. Which religion promotes behaviors that lead to a better, more desirable society? To me the answer is clear, but apparently isn’t to either Myers or his faithful acolytes. For crying out loud, America doesn’t systematically execute gays (yes, very rarely one gets killed). And yes, some Christians are “virulent homophobes”, but it’s insane to argue that, across all Americans (or American Christians), homophobia or oppression of women are just as bad as they are in Muslim societies. Perhaps 70% of women teachers in the UK have faced sexual harassment, a figure that is 70% too high, but in Muslim countries women can’t even become teachers, nor can women and girls become students. If you followed John Rawls and, behind the curtain of ignorance, had to choose whether you’d grow up as a women in a Muslim or Christian country, knowing nothing else about your circumstances, I think the choice would be clear.
The British empire left a legacy of homophobia? Well, I don’t know much whether that was a ubiquitous result of colonialism, but for the sake of argument I’ll agree. The point, however, is that homosexuality is a capital crime in many Muslim countries. That’s why the notion of “gays for Palestine”, seen on some banners and placards, is so ridiculous. Below is a map showing where homosexuality is legal versus illegal. Notice anything?
Myers ends by accusing Richard of bigotry, presumably because Dawkins thinks that Christianity breeds better societies than does Islam. One can look up the data on various indices of social well being, happiness, and so on (the situation for gays is in the map above), and I’ll let the readers investigate, but the bullet points I’ve given already show that there are very great harms in some Muslim countries that one doesn’t find in majority Christian countries.
To conclude that Dawkins is a bigot, then, you have to not only cherry-pick the data and add confirmation bias, but also decide that making a rational argument supported by data is an instance of “bigotry”. This is the same error as concluding that it’s “Islamophobia”, a form of bigotry, to argue that Muslim societies are more dysfunctional than Christian (or atheist) ones. In reality, you can hold the argument I’ve made above without being bigoted towards individual Muslims. “Islamophobia” should be a term for “fear of what Islam does”, rather than a form of bigotry.
Meanwhile, the fun continues in New Zealand, as this article from Te Ao, which conveys Māori news, attests. In fact, there’s a video, so you can see the whole episode, as well as a transcript of the video.
Here’s what happened: A local district council met and one of the participants wanted to recite a Māori prayer—a karakia— to open the meeting. Here’s how Wikipedia characterizes the term:
Karakia are Māoriincantations and prayer used to invoke spiritual guidance and protection. They are generally used to increase the spiritual goodwill of a gathering, so as to increase the likelihood of a favourable outcome, such as at a court hearing. They are also considered a formal greeting when beginning a ceremony.
The new mayor said “no”, saying was running a “secular council” that “respects everyone”. The Māori prayer woman kept insisting on reciting the prayer and the mayor kept saying “no”. As you’ll see in the video below, some minutes later she finally flouted the mayor and burst out reciting her prayer in Māori, while other council members chimed in or gave an “amen”. Here’s the text:
Conflict has erupted at a council meeting over a mayor’s decision to shutdown a wahine Māori councillor wishing to recite karakia, before the opening of business.
Kaipara District Council met for the first time Wednesday, under new Mayor Craig Jepson, elected at October’s local elections.
As is customary in councils and at the opening of parliament, Māori Ward councillor Pera Paniora, of Te Moanaui o Kaipara, wanted to begin the meeting with a karakia.
“Excuse me, just before we start, through the chair may I say the karakia?” Paniora said.
Jepson charged on saying ‘you cannot interrupt, sorry’.
Paniora stated her case explaining the tikanga of karakia, which appeared to trigger Jepson.
“This is a council that’s full of people who are non-religious, religious, of different ethnicities and I intend to run a secular council here which respects everybody and I will not be veering from that. Thank you.” he rebuked.
“I don’t agree with that.” Paniora said.
“You cannot interject,” Jepson struck back.
Paniora tried a final time by saying ‘Excuse me for those who do practice…’ but was ultimately shut down.
“Councillor Paniora, you are not allowed to speak in this manner and we will continue with our meeting.” Jepson said.
“It doesn’t really feel like a meeting,” a third councillor interjected.
Paniora appeared to give up, however in a throw back 20 minutes later she said the karakia and members of her supporters sang Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi as part of her maiden speech.
“Seen as I wasn’t able to do the karakia this morning, it’s better late than never.” she said.
Fellow councillors and attendees in the public gallery could be heard closing the prayer in unison, with a collective ‘āmene’.
It’s clear that the article is written to show the hornéd secular mayor as the demon, even though New Zealand is a secular country. But of course the Māori must have special exemptions because they are indigenous. Note the repeated references that a karakia, which is in effect a verbal superstition (analogous to knocking on wood when you say something wishful) is customary. The mayor, whom I consider enlightened, wanted to change that. But he didn’t get away with it, and I’m betting he won’t be reelected! If this were in the U.S., also formally a secular country, the Freedom from Religion Foundation would be all over these councils, forcing them to stop saying their prayers.
The lesson: in New Zealand, when it comes to foisting superstition and religion on the public, the Māori always get their way. I hope to Ceiling Cat that they don’t suceeed in imbuing science education in schools with their superstitions, which they keep trying to do.
You can see the video and article by clicking below:
Prompted by a set of questions I found on Facebook, I queried ChatGPT:
The next question is obvious: why the difference? I asked it and the bot simply regurgitated the last paragraph.
I tried again:
I gave it one more try:
Okay, you tell me the difference!
I asked instead for jokes about “Jews” and “Muslims” instead of “Jewish jokes” and “Muslim jokes”. I got the same result:
Finally, it’s not just Jews that can be subject to jokes:
Now you could accuse the bot of being bigoted, but it’s not programmed by humans—rather, it’s programmed by data from online texts. But Muslim jokes do exist (here are some), so it’s not due to their absence on the Internet. Tentative hypothesis: the bot somehow knows that ALL jokes about Muslims could “potentially cause offense”. How it knows this is beyond me.
Yet you get the same non-response if you ask for jokes about Mormons. But Mormons aren’t known for being easily offended or violent, so I’m baffled. Are there simply no Mormon jokes? Nope; I found some here—in a Mormon publication! The mystery deepens. All we know is that the bot doesn’t treat all religions the same way.
It’s been a year since the NYT has been publishing Sunday columns on religion by the Anglican minister Tish Harrison Warren. She seems like a nice person, and is a compassionate rather than a hard-line Christian, but still, week after week, I was forced to read her lucubrations about what I see as society’s religious delusions. (Don’t ask me why I didn’t ignore them: it’s the laws of physics.) A column on God each week is like a column on Bigfoot: we’re supposed to take seriously something that doesn’t exist. Sure, you can draw moral lessons from God if you want, but too often Warren’s moral lessons tallied more with secular humanism than with Christianity.
She says her farewells, none too soon, in the piece below (click to read):
At first I thought she’d signed on for a year—as it’s been about that long—and her contract had expired. But she says instead that she decided to stop writing, and gives her reasons. Did the Times gently nudge her out the door? Who knows, but I won’t miss her. Now can we have a secular humanist or an atheist for the next year?
Warren:
For this and many other reasons, it was a tough decision to leave. And as with any tough decision, my reasons are varied and complex, but one is that writing publicly about God each week can do a number on one’s soul. Thomas Wingfold, a character in a novel by the Scottish minister and poet George MacDonald, said, “Nothing is so deadening to the divine as an habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.” Holy things, sacred topics, spiritual ideas, I believe, have power. Dealing with them is a privilege and a joy, but habitually dealing with the outside of them is inherently dangerous.
The “outsides” of holy things, to me, describes the difference between speaking about divine or sacred things and encountering the divine or the sacred directly. To be sure, we need more and better religious discourse in America. In my very first newsletter for The Times, I wrote that “we need to start talking about God,” and I still believe that. I believe that religion and, more broadly, the biggest questions in life are the driving forces behind much that is beautiful, divisive, unifying, controversial and perplexing about our culture and society.
And also behind much that is divisive and bad! But why talk about the good of religion when you can’t even prove that God exists? Why not just talk about ethics? The thing is, Warren’s columns, without her dragging in her deity, were often mawkish laden with bromides. She was the Krista Tippett of the New York Times. Nobody would be given such a column unless there was a religious angle to it (Tippett also got her start on an NPR show called “On Faith”).
In her peroration she once again tries to imbue us with the power of faith:
We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults, of congregations with faces, of the local, the small. Don’t get me wrong: Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God — the places we become human — are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation or in making breakfast at the homeless shelter down the street, in celebration with a neighbor or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.
I used to work in a soup kitchen on the South Side of Chicago, but I never met God. But I did meet Milton, a 90-year-old man who told me, over Thanksgiving dinner, how he used to wait to see Billie Holiday outside the jazz clubs that used to line the area. And that’s what kindled my investigation of jazz that became a passion. I’d say that’s better than meeting God any day, for at least Milton was real.
According to this post on Richard Dawkins’s Substack site, Jordan Peterson challenged him on Twitter to answer two questions. Dawkins decided to answer both because, as he said below, he respects Peterson:
A colleague sent two challenges to me, posted by Jordan Peterson, suggesting I should respond. I’m happy to do so because I greatly respect Dr Peterson’s courageous stance against a bossy, intolerant thought-police whose Orwellian newspeak threatens enlightened rationalism. The hero of 1984, Winston Smith, was eventually persuaded by O’Brien that, if the Party wills it, 2+2 = 5. Winston had earlier found it necessary to stake out his credo. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”.
Yes, Peterson is gutsy enough to say what isn’t popular but often worth saying, though he’s also vociferous about some stuff that isn’t admirable—like his admiration of religion. But you have to give him credit for not really caring whether his beliefs make him demonized. Click below to Read Richard’s answers.
The first question:
Richard begins his answer with a caveat:
My answer to the question is no if you include supernaturalism in your definition of a religion, and a dear colleague takes her stand on this distinction. But the following three similarities are enough for me to justify a yes answer to Jordan’s question. The first of the three is characteristic of religions in general. The other two are kin to Christianity in particular.
The similarities are Heresy Hunting, Hereditary Guilt, and Transubstantiation. This is his example of the last one:
Similarly, in the cult of woke, a man speaks the magic incantation, “I am a woman”, and thereby becomes a woman in true substance, while “her” intact penis and hairy chest are mere Aristotelian accidentals. Transsexuals have transubstantiated genitals. One thing to be said in favour of (today’s) Catholics: at least they don’t (nowadays) insist that everybody else must go along with their beliefs.
Hemant Mehta, who has long gone down the Woke Rabbit Hole, will be sharpening his knives when he reads that.
And the second question:
Part of Dawkins’s answer:
I see this accusation again and again in graffiti scribbled on the lavatory wall that is Twitter. Peterson’s tone is more civilised, of course, but the message is the same. We who have spoken out against the irrationality of religion are to blame for the rise of the irrationality of woke.
. . . I get the point, but I love truth too much to go along with it. I, along with Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Shermer, and others, are against all religions without exception. And that includes the cult of woke. To oppose one irrational dogma by promoting another irrational dogma would be a betrayal of everything I love and stand for.
Whatever else there is to admire about Peterson, his affection for religion, which may be of the “Little People” variety (e.g., “I am no believer, but religion is essential for everyone else as a social glue”), is not only an acceptance of the unevidenced, but a false belief that superstition is necessary for a good society (viz. Scandinavia). It’s also patronizing.
But it may be that Peterson really believes in, say, Christianity. I’d love to sit him down and ask him questions about whether he believes in the Resurrection, heaven, and so on, but I’m 100% sure that his answers would be so tortuous that you wouldn’t get an intelligible answer.
Every Sunday we get a paean to Christianity by Tish Harrison Warren, and yesterday we read Conservative Rabbi David Wolpetouting the advantages of Judaism—and of religion in general. Wolpe isn’t as irritating as the smarmy Warren, who provides only bromides. Wolpe seems like a nice and caring guy, and I’m sure he’s brought solace to many in his rabbinical duties. He’s also had his own tribulations: two surgeries for a brain tumor as well as lymphoma. But can’t the NYT occasionally produce columns in praise of atheism and humanism? After all, there’s no good evidence for a God, and yet that viewpoint is resolutely ignored by the paper, which publishes piece after piece by people who think not only that there is a God, but a specific kind of God, like the Christian one (e.g., Warren).
According to Wikipedia, Wolpe is infamous among conservative Jews for questioning the historicity of the Old Testament:
On Passover 2001, Wolpe told his congregation that “the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.” Casting doubt on the historicity of the Exodus during the holiday that commemorates it brought condemnation from congregants and several rabbis (especially Orthodox Rabbis). The ensuing theological debate included whole issues of Jewish newspapers such as The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and editorials in The Jerusalem Post, as well as an article in the Los Angeles Times. Critics asserted that Wolpe was attacking Jewish oral history, the significance of Passover and even the First Commandment. Orthodox Rabbi Ari Hier wrote that “Rabbi Wolpe has chosen Aristotle over Maimonides, theories and scientific method over facts”. Wolpe, on the other hand, was defended by Reform Rabbi Steven Leder from the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, who argued that “defending a rabbi in the 21st century for saying the Exodus story isn’t factual is like defending him for saying the earth isn’t flat. It’s neither new nor shocking to most of us that the earth is round or that the Torah isn’t a history book dictated to Moses by God on Mount Sinai.”
Wolpe asserted that he was arguing that the historicity of the events should not matter, since he believes faith is not determined by the same criteria as empirical truth. Wolpe argues that his views are based on the fact that no archeological digs have produced evidence of the Jews wandering the Sinai Desert for forty years, and that excavations in Israel consistently show settlement patterns at variance with the Biblical account of a sudden influx of Jews from Egypt.
In March 2010, Wolpe expounded on his views saying that it was possible that a small group of people left Egypt, came to Canaan, and influenced the native Canaanites with their traditions. This opinion is, in fact, shared by the majority of historians and biblical scholars. He added that the controversy of 2001 stemmed from the fact that Conservative Jewish congregations have been slow to accept and embrace biblical criticism. Conservative rabbis, on the other hand, are taught biblical criticism in rabbinical school.
It’s to Wolpe’s credit that he accepts the historical and archaeological evidence against the Exodus. As he says below, he thinks that religion isn’t really about “a set of beliefs to one assents.” He’s wrong, of course. Maybe that’s true for Wolpe, but why would there have been a controversy about the Exodus if some people didn’t adhere to the Old Testament claims? But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll just add that you may know Wolpe from his several debates about religion with Christopher Hitchens. Here’s one about the existence of God. (Note: it’s 90 minutes long.)
Click on the headline below to read, and you can find the piece archived here
This column seems to serve as Wolpe’s swan song: his retirement thoughts on the human condition and how it’s ameliorated by religion, which to him serves as a kind of social glue. (Wolpe’s statements are indented.)
For over a quarter century now, I have listened to people’s stories, sat by their bedsides as life slipped away, buried their parents, spouses and sometimes their children. Marriages have ended in my office, as have engagements.
I have watched families as they say cruel, cutting things to one another or, just as devastating, refuse to say anything at all. I have seen the iron claw of grief scrape out the insides of mourners, grip their windpipes, blind their eyes so that they cannot accept the mercy of people or of God.
After 26 years in the rabbinate, as I approach retirement, I have come to several realizations. All of us are wounded and broken in one way or another; those who do not recognize it in themselves or in others are more likely to cause damage than those who realize and try to rise through the brokenness.
This is what binds together a faith community. No religious tradition, certainly not my own, looks at an individual and says: “There. You are perfect.” It is humility and sadness and striving that raises us, doing good that proves the tractability of the world and its openness to improvement, and faith that allows us to continue through the shared valleys.
Well, I’ve never been a member of a “faith community,” even a Jewish one, but it seems to me that what binds a faith community together is a desire to belong to a tribe which whose members care for each other. That, plus the factors that make a tribe a tribe: shared beliefs. Jews can never be members of a Christian faith community because they don’t think the Messiah ever came back. Nor can Muslims be members of either community because they think the Qur’an is the final and correct faith, and Muhammad is the prophet. And that brings us to Wolpe’s misguided claim about religion not being about a “set of beliefs”:
I have had a privileged view of the human condition, and the essential place of religion on that hard road. Sometimes it seems, for those outside of faith communities, that religion is simply about a set of beliefs to which one assents. But I know that from the inside it is about relationships and shared vision. Where else do people sing together week after week? Where else does the past come alive to remind us how much has been learned before the sliver of time we are granted in this world?
Yes, religion is about the solace of being a member of a community. But, for most, it’s also about shared beliefs, something I discuss in Faith versus Fact. Does a Christian community have any meaning if the members don’t accept the fact that Jesus came to earth as God/son of God, was crucified, and thereby gave us the possibility of eternal life? Are Muslims not a community because they all accept the tenets of the Qur’an, dictated to Mohamed by an angel? In fact, Islam is not just a religion, but a way of life—a way of life based on shared beliefs about empirical circumstances. And so it goes for many religions: without accepting at least the existence of a divine being, most religions—and all Abrahamic religions—center largely on “a set of beliefs to one assents.”
Now as a heterodox rabbi Wolpe may indeed reject a conventional god. As he says in the debate below, he defines his god as something quite nebulous:
“God is the source of everything that exists, and God is someone, something, with whom a human being can have a relationship, and that you can live your life in alignment with a godly purpose. That any definition that is greater than that is in some ways to traduce God.”
But he has no right to pronounce on what religion is about for everyone else! And there’s ample evidence that he’s wrong.
In some ways, Wolpe’s claims are a final defense against the increasing secularization of America, which he mentions twice. Pushing back against that, he sees religion as, without question, a net good:
I know the percentage of those who not only call themselves religious but also find themselves in religious communities declines each year. The cost of this ebbing of social cohesion is multifaceted. At the most basic, it tears away at the social fabric. Many charities rely solely on religious institutions. People in churches and synagogues and mosques reliably contribute more to charities — religious and nonreligious — than their secular counterparts do. The disunity that plagues us in each political cycle is also partly because of a loss of shared moral purpose which people once found each week in the pews.
If lack of religion “tears away at the social fabric,” especially because religions promote charities, then you’d expect that atheistic countries would have a badly torn social fabric. The evidence is against that—at least the evidence from Scandinavia, where government has simply taken over the care of sick people, old people, disabled people, and poor people. There is no lack of charity in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, or other countries. (And virtually every European country has government-provided health care.)
Of course Wolpe doesn’t mention the bad things that religion does—things that Hitchens eloquently mentions in the debate above. Why are Jews demonized by many in the U.S., something mentioned by Wolpe in this article? It’s because they’ve inherited the legacy of being “Christ killers.” Why do Muslims and Jews battle each other to the death? Religion. Why did Hindus and Muslims kill each other during India’s partition in 1947, and continue to do so today? Religion, of course. Now you can say that without religion people would find other reasons to kill each other and form tribes. That may be true, but religion is perhaps the greatest cause of tribalism in the history of the world, and I’m pretty sure that, had it never arisen, the world would be a better place.
Wolpe paints the Old Testament, even if it be fictitious, as a source of solace:
I still believe the synagogue is a refuge for the bereaved and provides a road map for the seeker. I have been moved by how powerful the teachings of tradition prove to be in people’s lives, helping them sort out grievances from griefs, focusing on what matters, giving poignancy to celebrations. The stories of the Torah, read year after year, wear grooves in our souls, so that patterns of life that might escape us become clear. Sibling rivalries and their costs are clear in the story of Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. The consequences of kindness emanate from the book of Ruth. We share unanswerable questions with Job and passion with the Song of Songs. The Torah acts as a spur and a salve.
But so do many other nonreligious works! If the Torah is more efficacious than these works, it’s because people believe those stories, something Wolpe says they don’t do. Otherwise, sibling rivalries, kindness, and questioning can be found in gazillions of nonreligious works of fiction and nonfiction. And, as reader Leo (who sent me this link) noted, “I guess he wants us to ignore the Bible stories about slavery, war, genocide, etc.”
In his last paragraph, Wolpe again claims that religion is a bulwark against creeping secularism and the social damage it apparently causes:
Religion may be on the decline in this country and in the West, but if you wish to see the full panoply of a human life, moments of ecstatic joy and deepest sorrow, the summit of hopes and the connections of community, they exist concentrated in one place: your local house of worship.
Well, they also exist concentrated in a better place: your local library.
UPDATE: Adam Rutherford reminded me that it was the now-demonized Francis Galton who did statistical tests on the efficacy of prayer. His most famous is finding out that British Royals, who are prayed for constantly, didn’t live any longer than non-royals at a similar level of well being. Galton did related studies of the success of sea voyages accompanied by prayer versus those with no prayer. Again, no effect. And, more recently, I’ve written about the Templeton-funded study of intercessory prayer that found no effect of such prayer on the rate of recovery from cardiac surgery (in fact, those who were prayed for did marginally but not significantly worse). This constitutes direct evidence against Brown’s implicit thesis. (But read the last paragraph of the NYT story I’ve linked to so you can see how the faith try to rescue God.)
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Of course not! The ubiquity of a belief doesn’t tell us anything about the truth of that belief. Several hundred years ago the whole world believed that infectious diseases were caused by things like God’s will, or miasmas, or the Jews.
They were wrong.
Our species has grown up since then, because science, and science alone, has told us why those earlier beliefs were wrong. The problem is that science can’t disprove an equally unfounded belief in a deity. God is slippery, and smart theologians are paid to make him slippery, because they’d be out of a job if everyone was an atheist.
But that’s what the evidence says, so far as it exists, for we can make plenty of arguments against certain conceptions of God. The Abrahamic omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving deity, for instance, is disproven by the many innocent people who die of physical factors like earthquakes or cancer. (Theologians have a number of magic tricks to get out of that argument.) As the late Victor Stenger said, “The absence of evidence is evidence for absence—if the evidence should be there.” And certainly any god worthy of its name, who wanted people to obey and worship him, would make his presence unequivocally known. The evidence should be there.
It isn’t. Using Bayesian analysis, the priors for an Abrahamic god are low.
But forget that. This article, from the conservative site WND, tries to argue that because most people pray (even atheists, they say!), it’s evidence for God’s existence, and atheists are out of luck. Click to read:
Michael Brown uses injured football player Damar Hamlin, who is recovering (though I doubt he’ll play ball again) as an example of the ubiquity of prayer. I saw this many times on television, even with news anchors on local news who send out “thoughts and prayers”:
Around the nation, in response to the life-threatening injury to Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin, people prayed. Hamlin’s teammates and coaches prayed. Millions of fans joined in prayer, tweeting their support. Even on live TV, sports commentators stopped in the middle of their broadcast to pray.
But this is only natural. During times of crisis, especially life and death crisis, people turn to God.
We know the situation is grave, we know we cannot change things ourselves, and we know that only God – an all-powerful being who cares – can turn the tide.
That’s why, at such times, people do not turn to atheism. They turn to God.
Even non-religious people pray. In fact, many agnostics and soft atheists even turn to prayer.
It continues, showing that the God they are talking about is, of course, the God of Christianity:
As expressed by Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, “It is interesting to me as a person of faith that we tend to go to that core place [at moments of tragedy], that we start talking to God and talking about talking to God.”
He added, “I just find that rather refreshing in an affluent culture that has so much that we tend to ignore God that something like this happens and it reminds us of our own mortality, and we begin to talk about praying and talking about God. … It speaks to the yearning deep inside of us.”
But to ask again, what about Orlovsky’s sports and media colleagues? Were they also happy with him praying on live sports TV?
Yes, many of them were positive on this as well. As one headline announced, “Dan Orlovsky Praised After ‘Beautiful’ Prayer for Damar Hamlin Live on Air.”
Among those quoted in the article were ESPN presenter Ashley Brewer and Super Bowl champion Ryan Clark.
In Brewer’s words, “This is amazing, I teared up watching this in my living room today. Proud to call you my teammate & brother in Christ.”
This is what happens when, as a nation, we are drawn into a life-and-death crisis.
This is what happens when, suddenly and unexpectedly, in front of our eyes on TV, the health and well-being of a relative stranger now becomes our personal concern.
This is what happens when we realize that we need help outside of ourselves.
People pray, and prayer is welcomed rather than ridiculed.
It’s not all that welcome on this website, because, being an atheist, I think prayer is useless. If it makes you feel better, or helps you meditate, go for it. But don’t think that anybody up there is listening and will help you. For if he was and did, there wouldn’t be kids dying of cancer all the time.
Now I don’t think author Brown is trying to convince himself of anything; he’s already lost to the delusion. Nor is he trying to convince his fellow religionists, who have also drunk the Kool-Aid. I think he’s making fun of atheists by showing that we’re trumped by the ubiquity of prayer. And that wouldn’t bother us, he thinks, unless he thought that prayer’s ubiquity was evidence for God. People wouldn’t be praying all the time if they didn’t think there was really a god to pray to! Checkmate, you heathens!:
The reality is that we always need God. It’s just that, when all is well, we often forget about Him, putting our trust in ourselves and leaving Him out of our thoughts entirely. Many of us even become hostile to faith, doing our best to keep it excluded from public life. And then a crisis wakes us up as we recognize our own frailty and remember that death could be near at any time.
May we not forget these realities as life gets back to normal and, we hope and pray, Damar Hamlin makes a full and even miraculous recovery.
And may those who ignore or even scorn the idea of God think again. Eternity is always just one step away. Then what?
If the Bible is true – which I am 100% sure it is, personally – one day we will actually give account of our lives to God.
That is a sobering thought.
The sobering thought is that people who can actually think can be so deluded that they give their lives up to a belief that is totally lacking in evidence. (Brown even has a Ph.D.!) Another sobering thought is that people like Brown think that somehow the fact that lots of people pray means that God is up there listening. A third sobering thought is that Brown has not a scintilla of evidence that the God he’s so sure we’ll meet is the God of the Bible rather than the God of the Qur’an—or any other god. As for the possibility that there are no gods, well, fuggedaboutit!
