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.
