This one is Sullivan bait if anything ever was. [Read more →]

John Horgan has a question – does religion do more harm than good?

Leaving aside the impossibility of quantifying the benefits and downsides of faith in any systematic fashion – what metric, one wonders, does Horgan think we should use? – I’m struck by the fact that no one thinks to ask this sort of question about anything but organized religion.

Instead of ritually bashing the church, why isn’t Horgan interested in, say, questioning the benefits of modern science? After enduring two world wars and a half-century on the brink of nuclear annihilation, are we all confident that modern technology and innovation are unambiguously beneficial? Obviously, this question is equally absurd – The green revolution versus Hiroshima? Napalm versus modern medicine? – but it’s striking that Horgan and his ilk are only interested in lobbing dumb hypotheticals at religious believers.

Mark’s sharp post the other day on PZ Myers (building off a similarly sharp post by Br. Ken @ Popehat) mentioned an earlier call of mine for an atheist theology.  That post only introduced the idea, so since it’s come up again and is very relevant to the current bruhaha with Myers, let me flesh this idea out.

Now before I go there, one well headed advisory warning.  In the comments to Mark’s post, Consumatopia writes (comment #12):

However, I think it’s worth stepping back and thinking about the point of this argument. I agree absolutely with Ken’s criticism of Myers at popehat, but I’m pretty sure that simple human inconsistency/hypocrisy in the face of great passion is the cause of this, not the abstract epistemological problems we might address here.

I’m sure C-topia’s analysis is part of what is going on. So not discounting that, I’d like to add another one. Not an abstract epistemological one but more a structural-worldview investigation which can be operating simultaneously and complementary to C-topia’s more individual-phenomenologico-ethical read.   The atheist theology thread will dive in and out of the analysis around my analysis of Myers (he being only one example to support my hypothesis, though I think a paradigmatic or at least well known one).

And off we go…

Myers in this Bloggingheads episode describes his religious upbringing as basically milquetoast Protestant.  He had to go to confirmation classes (usually in the early teen years) got bored of the teachings, started asking questions about the rationality of this belief system and then left church never to return.  Standard version of this whole thing. [By standard I don't mean to demean it, just that it''s a common pattern].

This is where James Fowler’s work of the Stages of Faith development is so crucial and why I point to it so often.  One of the geniuses of Fowler’s work is a basic trust that humans have a spiritual line of development or intelligence with cross-cultural structural similarities in their patterning regardless of whether they formally believe in God or not.  And actually whether or not God exists does not change Fowler’s reconstruction.  Even if there is no God, humans continue to develop meaning-making stories and go through sequential orders of faith development.  Those patterns tell us something about human maturation–even if not about the Divine (though I obviously think it does the latter as well). [Read more →]

Ken at Popehat has what our friend Kip rightly calls an “important post” up about PZ Myers’ latest crusade to blame all people who believe in a Higher Being for the unconscionable actions taken by others who believe in a Higher Being.  Ken writes:

But his effort to lay the wages of religious extremism at the feet of anyone who has faith is silly, and not worth our outrage. It’s remarkably similar to the rhetoric of American theocrats who argue that atheism is responsible for the killing fields, and Stalin’s purges, and school shootings, and for nihilistic crimes by broken people everywhere. But people are not automatons wound up by a single motivation, and history is not a four-color panel in the comic books. Saying that Stalin or Pol Pot massacred religious people because of atheism is to credulously conflate ostensible motives with far more complex political motives. Laying youth crime at the feet of atheism is to make pathology a caricature. I suspect Myers would acknowledge all of that — about atheism. But the same can be said for facile efforts to lay the evils of history at the feet of religion. Religion has often been an excuse for inhumanity, but excuses are not the same as reasons.

The League’s consortium on atheism, theism, and the interplay between science and religion is here.   It was one of our earliest discussions and, I think, remains one of our best.  Particularly pertinent is Chris’ excellent post calling for an atheist theology, which points out:

The upshot of which is that there is no such thing as a non-believer….Since faith=trust, then calling someone an unbeliever is saying they are un-trusting.  I’ve never met a human who does not trust in something or someone, even if they be (imo) the idols of money, sex, food, their own ego, status, or whatever.  Everybody trusts that something will bring them salvation of one kind or another. 

The bottom line is that atheism cannot disprove the existence of God(s) anymore than theisms can prove it – at best you can make imperfect philosophical arguments that God(s) does or does not exist while ultimately relying on some form of more or less blind faith.  Assuming that the bad acts done by a handful in the name of God-ness or God-lessness prove the correctness of the opposite belief requires ignorance of the fact that plenty of undeniably evil acts have been done in the name of both.   And as Ken suggests in the comments to his post, it also ignores that plenty of undeniably good acts have been done in the name of both.  To say that a belief in God-ness or God-lessness inevitably causes (rather than merely being an excuse for) all the bad things done in its name is to say that it also must inevitably cause (rather than merely be an excuse for) all the good things done in its name.

I wanted to draw attention to this post over at William Randolph’s blog.  He has a pretty good summation of our recent series on atheism, and takes the discussion one step further:

What is needed for this discussion—more than a neuroscience of belief or a biology of belief—is a human psychology of belief. And until someone shows me a better starting point, I will begin with William James’s essay “The Will to Believe”. If there are real truths that cannot be objectively decided—and the entire point of the avian fettuccine avatar is that science has nothing to say about such putative truths—then we can either cut ourselves off from such truths and remain secure in the fully justifiable, or we can leave safety behind, daring to know. James’s contribution is the idea of the live option: that for any particular person, some ideas will be plausable and some ideas will not. The avian fettucine avatar is not a live option for anyone, as far as I know. For cultural and historical reasons, the Christian God is much more likely to be one in our place and time.

Now, I think this discussion has largely run its course, and I won’t offer up much more at this time.  But I think Will is on to something here.  Not everything is quite so plain or so cut and dry as we’d like it to be.  Psychology, plausibility–these things don’t fall on the side of rational thought.  Just because the Spaghetti monster and the Christian God are both equally unprovable does not mean humanity won’t gravitate more to the one than the other.  Similarly there are dragons in ours and many other cultures myths, but rarely are there noodle behemoths.  There is something indefinably human about our belief in these things, in our decision to draw lines between what is spiritual and what is silly.

Will finishes his piece with something I think strikes this whole question dead-on:

A person’s fundamental beliefs have less to do with the questions she can answer and much more to do with the questions she can afford to leave unanswered.

Now isn’t that precisely correct?  Doesn’t that cut to the very heart of the whole notion of Faith?  Even atheists have unanswered questions that they cannot but help to leave unanswered, and they resolve to do so as a matter of Faith or perhaps inevitability, I’m not sure it matters what it’s termed.

Reading through this whole, excellent series on atheism, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. has been an extremely worthwhile experience.   As I wrote in the comments to Chris’ post (you have no idea how much I’m loving that we have a student of theology in our little crew here):

I’m reminded of the old – and classic – Simpsons episode with Stephen Jay Gould, in which the judge orders “religion to stay five hundred yards away from science,” but in which Gould acknowledges that he was unwilling to test whether the apparent bones of an angel were real or fake. I’ve long thought this was one of the most poignant Simpsons episodes; I also think it (ie, the episode as a whole) does a good job illustrating the way in which faith (which as you correctly note is synonymous in many ways with trust) should not – and cannot – attempt to masquerade as science, even as science should not – and cannot -seek to take the place of religion.

I think this old Simpsons reference gets to the crux of the problem, not only with respect to overly evangelistic atheists, but also to overly evangelical, uhh, evangelicals.  It also explains why I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in its original incarnation in the context of the Kansas Intelligent Design debate, was perfectly within the realm of legitimate dialogue…and why its occasional subsequent use as a way of mocking religion is not.

I think Chris is absolutely correct when he writes that “faith=trust,” and that “I’ve never met a human who does not trust in something or someone.”  This, to me, is the central issue – ultimately, even the most hardcore atheist must put a certain amount of blind trust in SOMETHING, even if that trust is something as fundamental to atheism as the idea that reality exists and can be understood purely through rationality.

But whereever one chooses to place their trust, the fact is that whether that trust is properly placed is more or less unfalsifiable, and not subject to scientific proof or disproof.  For the religious person, there is simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist – as long as there is something in the universe that cannot rationally be explained, there is a basis for trusting in the existence of god.  For the atheist, there is likewise simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist – as long as a scientific or rational explanation for anything in the universe is theoretically possible, there is a basis to trust in the ability of reason to explain everything, and no basis to trust in the existence of god.

[Read more →]

Much has been made recently of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, variations on the teapot analogy, and the Best-selling Atheist Bookseller’s Club.  I’m not sure exactly why so much has been made of this topic, but then again, the question “Does God exist?” has been a fairly important question since time immemorial, permeating just about every significant philosophical debate throughout the Ages.  Descartes thought he had definitive proof of God’s existence nearly four hundred years ago.  Now Richard Dawkins has grabbed hold of Bertrand Russell’s tailcoats in definitively proving that God does not in fact exist.

Or not.  Basically the best Dawkins can do is argue that since there must be some evolutionary origin of deities, as it were, to explain the extraordinary complexity of God, than God must have emerged from something, and this leads to a sort of never-ending series of origins going back to something that is actually quite simple.  (Say a Bigger Bang that created God and then from there on out we’ve had God doing everything else…I’m not sure how this disproves God, though).  What Dawkins fails to realize is that in most theological circles the complexity of God is really fairly immaterial, written off with a statement as simple as ‘begotten, not made.’

And so Dawkins and his fellows in the International Unbeliever’s Union have come up with such quaint analogies as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a less elegant variation on Russell’s teapot.  Essentially, they claim that the likelihood of God is similar to the likelihood of a Flying Spaghetti Monster or an interstellar magical teapot orbiting the Earth.  To which, of course, one might say, “Who cares?“  There is nothing likely about anything, really.  There is nothing likely about our very existence, and yet here we are.  Faith doesn’t take into account likelihood any more than a lack of religious belief requires definitive proof of God’s non-existence.  People are atheists because they have no proof to the contrary; people are religious because they require no proof to back their beliefs.  Hence the term faith.  Hence the advent of agnosticism, a rather lukewarm if practical sort of faith in our inability to really know anything.  (Note: agnostics can only sell self-help books, as they are quite likely to fail in attacking others for their beliefs, but quite good at reinforcing that marketable notion of believe (and do) whatever you like). [Read more →]

As the League’s resident theological student, I have been a bit loathe to enter the atheism/spaghetti monster/god or no god (non)debate.  Perhaps the best comment (imo) came from James Williams  in the original thread who said that the Flying Spaghetti Monster (delicious be his name forever and ever) grows out of the intelligent (or lack thereof) design versus darwinian, er food fight.

Which is too bad in my opinion since, though it may seem strange to some, I’m hugely in favor of atheist religion creation.  Just done well and one that need not be anti-religious.   I generally agree with Freddie’s original point that the so-called New Atheists are in many ways uncivil and worse at times illiberal.  But so far as pastafarianism goes (Jah Pastafarai!!!) I think it’s too bad it doesn’t learn or rather practice a deeper atheist spirituality.

Atheism as such simply means not having the gods (theos) that everybody else worships at a certain time.  When Christians first came on the scene, they were called atheists because they didn’t worship the Greco-Roman-Near Eastern polytheistic pantheon.

The real question is what god(s) those who are a-theos don’t have.  What theos are they “a”-ing in other words?  [Read more →]

When Freddie suggests that part of the problem with modern atheism is that it seems like many (most?) prominent atheists couch their arguments in the folds of derision I can’t but heartily agree with him. I’m not a religious individual myself, but it rankles me something fierce when I listen to a PZ Meyers or a Bill Maher hold forth about the stupidity/absurdity of religion. I mean, people should feel free to disagree about things all they want and debate those disagreements, we’re better off when we have those types of debates. But we fail to receive the benefits of having those types of important debates when they take place within a context lacking respect and dignity for all parties involved.

The challenge here, I think, is to hold in mind that whether you are an atheist who rests her understanding of the world in science and empirical data or the religious believer who finds meaning through scripture and God, that both means of understanding are properly understood to be a process of inquiry.

In terms of resting one’s belief about the nature of the world in the revelations of science, there is often a corresponding failure to understand that doing so is, in itself, a choice to explore the world from a particular vantage point. The popular view of science is that is has to do only with the material, that whatever we can touch and feel, dissect and study with our senses is what is really real. Insofar as God and the process of understanding through religion don’t deal with the material, atheists thus assume that they are invalid and merely the hair-brained superstitions of the unenlightened.

But empiricism and materialism are not, in fact, the same thing. Empiricism is a study of reality through the avenue of experience and the assumption that only the material can be experienced is itself an unspoken premise that limits what we stand to discover. The explanatory power of the natural sciences not withstanding, operating under the assumption that only the material constitutes reality and is therefore deserving of consideration is as much a matter of faith as a belief in God.

I take the idea of whether one can have an experience of God to be an open question so long as experience isn’t necessarily relegated into the domain of the material. Despite not being a religious individual I have had what I would call an experience of God that was entirely subjective and has infused my own life with a deeply held spirituality. That the experience can’t be easily translated into material terms doesn’t, at least in my mind, invalidate it as an experience. Nor does it cause the influence of that experience on my life to be null and void.

It is this, in my mind, that gives religion the power that Freddie rightly notes it has: the infusion of one’s life with a deeper current of purposefulness through openness to an experience of something greater than one’s self. Again, rightly understood, I think such an experience isn’t so much determinative as it is dispositive.

Besides, I feel like the whole argument over the existence of God is misplaced. It’s not a belief in God that keeps me from adhering to any particular religious tradition, but my concerns around the way that most religious traditions operate, the stasis of belief that tends to become the norm in such communities, and the levels of discrimination and xenophobia that such stasis can tend to produce. Most of the criticisms that I’ve ever heard about religion are grounded in those same kinds of concerns, but those concerns have literally nothing to do with the belief in the existence of God, there are cultural not metaphysical. So a good faith argument about the problematic elements of religion ought to focus on those cultural elements, and would be a good deal more effective as a result I would wager.

Reading over the various responses to Ross Douthat’s piece on celestial teapots and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it occurs to me once again that there is a very obvious difference between a Flying Spaghetti Monster and god (of whatever denomination): the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a construct designed specifically to ridicule, and god is not.

I’ve been accused of sweeping too many atheists into the ranks of those who are insufficiently respectful of the people they disagree with (that is, the religious). There’s some truth to that, and its a particularly lame failing because I am myself an atheist who tries hard to avoid the language or tenor of ridicule and derision. But things like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I think, do lend credence to my belief that the public face of atheism is concerned primarily with a discourse of derision. There are plenty of ways to invoke the idea of a being that has no evidentiary basis for believing in it; choosing “the Flying Spaghetti Monster” is not an accident, and it’s not unclear what the intent is. Flying Spaghetti Monster is a way to invoke ridicule. I defy anyone to assert that it isn’t. If the point isn’t to disparage the people with whom you disagree, then why not simply call it “an unobserved being” or something similar?

This is one of the more frustrating philosophical failings of contemporary atheism: the refusal or inability to confront the fact that there is a fundamental difference between all of the various constructs erected as analogies for god, and god– no one believes in the former, billions believe in the latter. That is not a difference that is dispositive of the existence of god, but it is a difference nevertheless, and in fact an extraordinarily important one for any kind of pragmatic or political discussion of the issue.

I’m left with three possibilities when I consider the atheism of disrespect. Either people like Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers, Bill Maher, and assorted don’t know that the way they are confronting these issues is disrespectful, in which case they are tone deaf to a frankly absurd degree; or they think that, tactically, the way to get the kind of change they say they want is to ridicule people into believing as they do, in which case they have a dramatically underdeveloped understanding of human psychology and sociology; or they are more interested in producing ridicule than in producing change.

I really try to avoid readings like option three, I really do, but it can be hard. I make it my policy to avoid assuming bad faith whenever possible. I just can’t quite wrap my head around what, exactly, a film like Religulous is supposed to accomplish, besides box office success. Maher and his producer both have said that they wanted their film to generate discussion and change. But how? Is there anyone out there reading this who has been able to change the opinion of people with whom they disagree by resorting to ridicule and name-calling? Basic knowledge of the human condition tells us that people, when threatened and demeaned, reinforce their position and become entrenched. So what’s being accomplished?

I think the temptation among aggressive atheists is to think that they are just a few converts away from the great crumble, that if they could just move a few more people closer to their position, they’d win the day. This is folly. There are more people who claim a religious devotion than not, in this world, by billions. There are more in this country by millions. You don’t argue your way out of niches by constantly thumbing your noses at the people who you’re trying to convert. The question then becomes, are they converting at all? Or are they merely asserting superiority?

Part of the reason I am accusatory of atheism, more often than fundamentalism or extremism, is that I am more likely to encounter the former than the latter. It’s easier to be annoyed by atheism than Christian fundamentalists when you live in a very blue section of a very blue state in academic, liberal circles. Were I to live in some Bible-thumping enclave in Kansas, things might be different. But at the end of the day, there is content to the way that the most vocal and visible atheists speak and argue, and as much as I don’t want to sweep up atheism as it stands into a too-broad indictment, I don’t particularly feel guilty about calling a spade a spade and accurately reflecting on the general tenor of Christopher Hitchens et al.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster, in other words, is great for giggles from the converted and terrible for outreach and education. Which am I to take as its primary mission?