Atheism isn't what it used to be, in my opinion. When I was an atheist I benefited from thinking I was intellectually superior to believers, emotionally stronger and morally more excellent. I take it as read that all atheists will hold this over me as I held it over believers when I was an atheist. That is fair enough. Furthermore, when I was an atheist I also benefited from believer-baiting, which was a good sport. We all know that you can't prove faith, and hence with a few derisive comments and a small degree of logical argument I could normally decimate any ridiculous superstition, and quite enjoyed doing so. I am pleased that atheists generally treat me with more kindness than this.
However, what has changed is that religious belief keeps being held up as a threat to science. As a scientist I initially felt this was ridiculous, and then I thought the atheists were being deliberately obtuse. Faith and science have lived together in my life very happily. However, it seems to be a driving force in New Atheism and the atheist 'live and let live' approach (albeit with a degree of mockery and derision) seems to have gone.
So I have started listening. I still don't really understand the issues, but they seem to be that science depends on data, and if you act illogically with no data, or against data, then that is anti-science (which leads to climate scepticism and the potential destruction of the planet, for example). Faith encourages actions based on no data and therefore it is bad/dangerous/should be stopped. For me, I believe faith adds something that science can't - an inner journey towards peace, love etc and an outer journey towards loving others better. The retort generally comes back that you don't need faith to do that, and yet it has seemed necessary for me. I am still trying to understand. At the moment the reaction against faith seems disproportionate in most cases and indiscriminate, putting fundamentalism in the same arena as Mother Theresa. The video below is funny and describes New Atheism quite well, but please don't click on it if you object to swearing:
11 comments:
Careful now, I don't believe in Richard Dawkins 'cos I've never had absolute proof that he exists, but if you go publishing photo's of someone purporting to be a Richard Dawkins-type thing I might have to acknowledge that, on the balance of probabilities, the data tends to lead us to the possibility that there is such a thing.
I think the New Atheism misses the point completely. Religion is more akin to art than science (right brain rather than left) and based more on intuition and feeling rather than mere data. Science can no more debunk religion than it can have a definitive view on Impressionism.
Mmmm. Feels like some atheist baiting is going on here. So, I'll rise to the bait :)
"When I was an atheist..." - At 14? Is that correct? I wouldn't hold anyone to anything they held at 14 and below.
"We all know that you can't prove faith..." - How inclusive is that 'we'? Most atheist know it, many theists know it, but apparently some theist still thinks it's possible.
This brings us to one of the problems with Dawkins: he doesn't understand the theology. Well, when he makes some point or other, some theist will object, "That's not what I believe. He's got it completely wrong." - Of course he has, for that theist's theology. But theism being what it is, we can be pretty sure it's someone's theology, because theology is like that: you can invent anything. And, because there is no data to compare it too, any theological claim can be made, with only a slim chance of anyone having any way of refuting it.
"As a scientist I initially felt this was ridiculous [that religious belief is a threat to science]. Faith and science have lived together in my life very happily."
It's quite easy to make science and faith live together in one mind. In the simple case one can 'do science', perform the work, do the job, because most scientific work that most scientists perform is quite specific, and certainly superficially is performing only a tiny sub-set of what science can do. This is the case even within science - you can do cosmology without thinking about evolution, for example. You can do cosmology and still believe in God, because our cosmological origins are still unknown to science, so theologians can make up any crap they like, and science isn't in a position to challenge most of it.
But that doesn't mean that it's outside the scope of science, just outside the capability of current science. Some theological claims can be challenged by science: Young earth Creationism - done and dusted. If you have any other pet theology you think science can't touch, let me know and I'll see what I can find.
"...it seems to be a driving force in New Atheism and the atheist 'live and let live' approach..." - There never was a 'live and let live'. Theism has always been in the face of non-believers. The 'New Atheism' is only new to the extent that it's more vocal, more thorough, and has been allowed to spread without being suppressed, mainly because of the internet. We don't have to rely on appeasement that was forced upon the press because of the privileged pressure that the church was allowed to impose on editors. The dead law of blasphemy threatened to rise, Lazarus like, at the call of the church. The related issue is 'respect', which the church has always demanded, being both patriarchal and authoritarian, betraying it's ancient horrid routes. No longer do we have to display respect for views and practices which we find abhorrent - sexual discrimination within the CoE, even worse in the RC, unbelievably atrocious in some versions of Islam.
No, theism has had it's own way for so long that it only appears that this upstart 'New Atheism' is so strident and intolerable - comes of a bits of a shock to many preachers who are used to spouting sermons unchallenged from the pulpit. How intolerable is it to assure someone they are off to hell? Nothing said by any atheist comes close to some of the vile stuff spewed out by theists. My mother was RC, my father CoE, and she converted to CoE when they married. Her RC priest told her she was in bed with the devil and her children would burn in hell for eternity. My mother, still young, and poorly educated because of the lack of good teachers during the war, was subject to this abuse (and Dawkins is correct in saying the indoctrination of children into religions is a form of child abuse) from someone who was making claims to absolute truth!
Not all theists are like this of course. But one objection that atheists make is that moderate liberal theists who have, other than belief in God, effectively the same view as humanists, are still more likely to align themselves with obnoxious fundementalists than atheist humanists - often in the name of unity or some other such worthy cause.
The alliance needn't be direct: liberal CoE + catholic CoE; Catholic CoE + RC; and various other links, down into the depths of unbelievable beliefs, because the varied nature of theism means a believer can hold common views with a great variety of significantly different believers on one or more of many theological issues. Faith is the common ground - so much so that inter-faith groups can bring together in a common bond the most liberal of theists with the most extreme fundamentalist.
But, some theists, and some atheists, claim that the likes of Dawkins do a disservice to this potential alliance of humanists and moderate theists, by speaking out against moderates, and claiming they are part of the problem. Think about the logic of this:
1) Moderates align with fundamentalists rather than humanists, because they have God in common.
2) Dawkins says moderates are problematic because they align with fundamentalists.
3) Moderates align even more strongly with fundamentalists because of what Dawkins has said.
Talk about 'shoot the messenger'. How insecure and defensive do you have to be to take such a stance against hearing a truth, just because it has something to say about your faith.
"if you act illogically with no data, or against data, then that is anti-science"
There's good reason for this. Logic alone can't give us the answers. In the simple case, where the logic is simple, and if the argument is valid, it still relies on the premises to make the argument sound. And any premise, to be logically true, requires it's own sound argument to support it. Eventually we get back to premises which we can't prove of disprove: there is a God; there is no God. Any argument we build on top of these is arbitrary (which premise do you choose?) and flawed.
This is why atheists don't show much interest in theology. All belief in God, including the source of the Bible, relies on that one premise: God exists. If that just happens to be false then the Bible definitely is a book written by superstitious men. But if God exists, then we still don't know what this God is like, and we don't know which of the many supposed 'revealed' truths are actually from this God, if any of them. If you cannot prove God exists, then all theology is futile. Even if you managed to prove God exists, that would say nothing about the theologies.
The same problems exists for any of our knowledge and our ability to prove it - it all falls back on our premises. Our only other source of knowledge is experience, our senses, data. All life uses this, all animals, and many of them get by quite well with the basic senses and a rudimentary amount of consciousness. Bacteria seem to survive without anything remotely like our consciousness. We're lucky in that we have 'reason', not as a replacement for our senses, but as a supplement. But both our reason and our senses are fallible, and by using them together, collectively, we can combine them to do, the still flawed but, the very best we can. And this is science - still flawed, but the best we can do.
Armchair philosophy and theology have there limits. Philosophy, in general, is less constrained than theology, because philosophy isn't trying to figure out the truth with the proviso that it already has the answer. Starting with the answer and then trying to justify it with reason alone isn't really that good an idea. It should be obvious to anyone that taking that route could lead you anywhere - and what we have is an inexhaustible variety of religious beliefs and theologies. Some are so ridiculous that it's even obvious to some theists: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; the earth is less than 10,000 years old - you can believe any crap you like with enough effort if you don't require confirming data.
But if you say that what we accept as truths has to be measured against something, and that something is what we use all day every day, and what has been used by every life form since life emerged - the senses, data - then as flawed as the scientific method is, and as flawed as the scientists are, we actually find that we increase our knowledge and make progress.
"anti-science (which leads to climate scepticism and the potential destruction of the planet, for example)" - Climate science is unbelievable complex, and there are many issues that make the science complex, not least of the masses of data from difference disciplines it has to deal with. We are all baffled by it. It's been hard enough to establish that the climate change we are witnessing is due to humans. Climate can vary widely over centuries and millenia. Our serious impact has been in the mere last 100 years - a mere moment in geological and climate time. And, the sciences required to study it thoroughly have been developed in only the last 20-30 years (at least with enough rigour to offer any certainty). So climate change scepticism isn't just the fault of faith. How to deal with it is even more of a problem - we don't have the science to know if more hardship will be incurred by ameliorating change or living with it; and we don't even know if we can over come it, to stabilise the climate.
On the other hand, what can faith offer to fix it? It depends on your faith. If you are a liberal theist who is comfortable with science you'll probably accept, with due scepticism, what the scientists figure out, and go with that - hence the 'green' movement within some churches. But if you're a right wing evangelical American capitalist you'll probably want to keep the oil flowing at any cost to the unwashed majority on this planet. In other words, faith again is arbitrary and doesn't in itself have anything useful to say. What it does say is motivated by the particular faith, and may coincidentally contribute for the good or the bad. If the men of faith Bush and Blair can take us to war on a whim, what hope is there for their interest in the climate.
The issue with faith isn't that it inevitably is dangerous or bad in and of itself. The problem with faith is that it provides an authoritative framework within which bad ideas and acts can be encouraged. Even science, with it's very specific methods of checks and balances struggles to maintain the discipline - e.g. Climategate. When the faith system actually encourages belief and affirmation you are opening a door that is a gift to trouble. And no matter how liberal are your personal theological views, if you really start to question the fundamentalists with any rigour, you'll soon find your own beliefs, if subjected to the same rigour, will have no foundation. Faith encourages faith, all faith, and maintains the alliances I described above. Faith is a flawed system, as is science and any human endeavour, but one which specifically rejects the methods that could counter it's flaws.
Instead, any faith is left in the hands of the conscience of the individual believer. And if your conscience tells you it's not good to deny condom use to an AIDS ridden uneducated population with poor resources, then you won't accept that in your theology. If you think the respect in which your church is held is not as important as the suffering of a child then you won't want to cover up child abuse. If you think sex discrimination and homophobia aren't worthy human traits, then you won't let your church maintain privileges that sustain them.
But, if these aren't a problem to you, if your church comes before everything human, then faith can be very accommodating. Just include in your theology any inhumane practice that suits your personal desires, and it shall be given.
"For me, I believe faith adds something that science can't - an inner journey towards peace, love etc" - Sure, along with any damn thing you want it to add. That is what faith is capable of, and that is it's danger.
But this highlights even more the subtle hand of faith. Even if we accept that science can't add peace, love, the implication is that faith is therefore required. Well it isn't. It's perfectly possible (I can attest to it) that peace and love is attainable without faith in God. Just because faith isn't always an obstacle to love and peace (and it can be an obstacle) doesn't mean it has the monopoly on peace and love. We don't proclaim that a Mafia code of honour is testament that only the Mafia can have codes of honour.
And, of course there's the possibility that science can bring love and peace. These are states of mind. We have no idea yet what science can and can't do in this respect - we only know that science can't do much yet.
"The retort generally comes back that you don't need faith to do that, and yet it has seemed necessary for me." - Then doesn't that say something about you? If others don't require faith then this to me indicates that there's a common human trait that permits love and peace. Faith may be your particular route in, but it needn't be your only route in. I suspect these are within you anyway (would you be a normal human if they weren't), and could be expressed in non-faith terms. These are gifts any human can give; and faith is just a wrapping, like Christmas paper and a bow - if you're impressed by the wrapping and not the gift, well, it doesn't say much for the gift.
"At the moment the reaction against faith seems disproportionate in most cases and indiscriminate, putting fundamentalism in the same arena as Mother Theresa." - They are in the same arena - they are all faith. If the religious themselves maintain these links, for the sake of unity, then you can hardly blame atheists for disagreeing with all faiths. Theists do see an attack on any faith as an attack on theirs.
Angela's Reasonable Religion made a similar point. My response is here. But specifically...
Religion is the family, Christianity a genus, and the various versions of Christianity a species. But then, just as in our species, there is a variety of individuals. And just as there are evolutionarily determined common features across species, such as some of the morphological similarities between humans and apes, then so there might be some similarities across Christian species. So, yes, some sort of taxonomy might well be used to describe all theists and so lump them together.
Tim Minchin:
Science adjusts its views,
Based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation,
So that belief can be preserved
Hi Drew,
"Religion is more akin to art than science...and based more on intuition and feeling rather than mere data." - Yes, this is the point. "I think the New Atheism misses the point completely." - No, New Atheism gets that point: it's all imaginary made up stuff used as an expression, and analogue, an allegory, for life. It's the theists who don't get it - they think this crap is real and true.
"Science can no more debunk religion than it can have a definitive view on Impressionism." - science can debunk some aspects of religion: young earth Creationism. Psychology would have a view on impressionism. How definitive that view is depends on how far the science gets - so far not that far, but ask again in two thousand years. There's a tendency to think very short term - typically not far our own lifetimes. Plonk one of Christ's apostles down in today, and then ask him what he thinks are miracles.
Picking up the argument that faith cannot be proven because it begins with the unprovable existence of God...
Surely science works by creating a hypothesis, looking at what things this hypothesis would imply and then comparing those to reality.
I am not trying to say that this means that the existence of God is provable - even though some will try to prove it. What I am saying is that it is by following this route that I find my faith - but of course you may not find that the observations fit - faith is like that!
Hi Alan,
I agree, faith is like that, and so inadequate as a route to reliable knowledge.
There are often a variety of opinions on scientific claims - such as the existence of tectonic plates were disputed for some time. Eventually the observed evidence becomes so overwhelming that it can't reasonably be disputed.
But with religion, through faith, it's possible to hold any number of conflicting ideas, often in the same mind. And because there is no evidence to either support or refute any of them they are all 'possible'. Of course for many theological claims the speculation is piled on speculation. There's no demand to demonstrate evidence for a foundational belief before arbitrarily piling more theology on top of that. This is what makes it no better than fantasy.
Again, there is some similarity with the frontiers of science. But these ideas are always understood to be tentative, awaiting evidence. Even if the maths implies some degree of certainty, as with many particle physics theories, there's still the suspension of 'belief' (i.e. confidence) until the evidence comes in to support those ideas. It's not common for a string theorist to derive moral ideas from their theories, and from there prescribe some actions and proscribe others. The Higgs particle, should it be discovered, isn't likely to be used in an argument for not having women bishops.
On the other hand the God particle (i.e. God) is used against having women bishops. Not for all theists, but - and this emphasies my point - for those who's particular arbitrary theology demands it.
Hi Ron,
Is there any chance of having the short answer to this one? :)
I was 14, however I was brought up in a broadly atheist family, or perhaps more accurately it was a pragmatic/sceptic family. And I think those early roots stay with us.
You say:
1) Moderates align with fundamentalists rather than humanists, because they have God in common.
2) Dawkins says moderates are problematic because they align with fundamentalists.
3) Moderates align even more strongly with fundamentalists because of what Dawkins has said.
What if these things are not true - what then?
You take little interest in theology, but surely it is interest to you if belief in God has beneficial results to the believer and that is shown in some data?
I think philosophy is interesting - it is a way of challenging assumptions which become like blind spots because we are so entrenched in our worldviews.
I didn't say faith is the only way to achieve the inner journey, I merely said it helps me.
What happens if the family is 'Those who believe in loving others as you love yourself' and the genus are humanism, moderate Christianity etc. I find I more closely align myself with those who are compassionate about others irrespective of whether they have some faith or none..
Post a Comment