From DANIEL FINCKE
Patheos – Atheist
I relatively often come across academics who express contempt for Richard Dawkins’s atheist activism and The God Delusion. What is interesting about these critics is how many of them share his contempt for fundamentalist religion. Ironically that is the core of his contempt for religion and theism too.
These academics are usually people who will implicitly talk about fundamentalist, literalist religious beliefs as so plainly and obviously false that one need not even go to the trouble of explaining all that is wrong with them. Even if these academics are themselves religious or sympathetic to religion they will chummily share a laugh with a curiously outspoken atheist like me over how absurd the beliefs of fundamentalists are. They will often express outright puzzlement at how any one could believe things so bizarre as fundamentalists do.
I do not share in these academics’ puzzlement since for a long time I actually was a fundamentalist, in essence, even though I already was leery of the word. To me such people are not just some harmless oddball curiosity for the learned to laugh at or to analyze with an anthropologist’s sense for understanding people without judging or desiring to change them.
Those believers are my former self and their beliefs used to shape my mind and heart in fundamental ways. Not only that, but they are living my former life, and my alienation from that former life constitutes a core part of my biography and my present identity. And having been intellectually, morally, emotionally, and psychologically systemically misled and, in some crucial ways, held back and twisted up, by these beliefs and the communities that purvey them, I take very seriously the issue of how to dispel the delusions of believers. I do not feel like an elite who can wink at the reckless childishness of the common folks’ superstitions the way one delights in the imaginations of actual children. I see other adults’ intellectual infantilization as neither harmless, nor a matter of indifference, nor as a moral necessity for those supposedly not as psychologically superior and autonomously trustworthy as I.
So I don’t share these academics’ revulsion at Dawkins’s efforts to reach out to the everyday believer and vigorously shake them out of their delusions. When I explain to them that all Dawkins is doing is addressing the literal falseness of religious beliefs because truth matters in religious matters as much as in any others, I often get, from some atheists and some believers both, an out of hand scoff that that’s a total misunderstanding of religion—religion isn’t about literal truth in the first place! So it’s wrong to address it as literal propositional truth claims in need of refutation as though their cognitional content mattered at all!
This response frankly maddens me. And it does so even though I agree that religions serve many functions that are, indeed, wholly independent of conveying truth. And I even am sympathetic to the notion that some of those functions are human necessities, whether they are fulfilled by religions or other replacement functionaries. The dismissal of all arguments about the literal truth of religious claims bothers me because it blithely ignores the actual structure of many religious believers’ faiths. And ironically it does so in the name of being understanding about religion. It’s an attempt to be intellectually charitable about religious belief by ignoring the kinds one has contempt for instead of understanding them.
To actually acknowledge what religion is for actual people, we should take seriously the fact that for many religious people (including and especially fundamentalists), religious beliefs must be literally true or they are worthless. That is a real kind of religious way of believing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the most pervasive kind, all told. And those believers deserve to have academics who give them a shot to share the skeptical academics’ own consciousness of how false, on literal terms, religious beliefs are. They have the right to decide that their religion is not for them if it is shown false on literal grounds or to reinterpret their religion in expressivist terms if that can still work for them. They should not be condescended to and treated as though they misunderstand religion should they find its literal falseness disillusioning and a cause for apostasy. They don’t “misunderstand” religion and its functions. They often understand full well what their religion means to them and on what grounds they can or cannot assent to participate in it in good conscience.
And yet these academics have a bitter sort of contempt for Dawkins for being marvelously effective at raising the consciousness of many believers who are actually grateful to discover the truth of the irrationality and falsehood of their beliefs. He is making the literal falsehood and absurdity of religious beliefs clear to those who do not already grasp what these academics take for granted—that whatever benefits religion is giving people, literal truth is not one of them.
And even more importantly than that, Dawkins and the rest of the atheist movement are (at least ostensibly) trying to counteract the systematic training religious institutions give in outright anti-rational ways of both forming beliefs and then insulating them from criticism. It boggles my mind and infuriates me that more academics are not outraged at the ways that religious institutions do not just teach apparent falsehoods but actively miseducate people in how to reason. Relentlessly, and with all manner of shameless emotional manipulation, they teach people from childhood to affirm beliefs without evidence, to merge those beliefs so tightly to their identity that they are too painful to ever let go of, and to accept their least justified beliefs as their most sacred and unquestionable beliefs. They go so far as to convince people to orient their very moral reasoning itself, which should be the most scrupulous and conscientious part of themselves, by reference to their least rational and least careful ways of reasoning and believing—their “faith-based” and fear-based ones.
Misleading anthropomorphic thinking, rationalization in the teeth of counter-evidence, poor reasoning with respect to probabilities, indulgence of confirmation bias, blind traditionalism, mental authoritarianism, and practically all other cognitive errors to which humans are prone not only go uncorrected but are actively reinforced and outright cultivated by religious traditions. Religious institutions train countless people to embrace irrational modes of thought instead of to reject them. This training goes counter to practically everything an actual education tries to teach and exacerbates the faulty habits of thought that an actual education would seek to correct. Why are not all academics up in arms about this travesty against reason? And why are not more philosophers in the public square correcting all the philosophical muddles that everyday people believe since the closest thing they have to philosophical education is from pulpits?
This extensive counter-education, this undermining of actual education, is not just being done in a handful of fringe religious sects. This goes on in countless mainstream churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, and homes. Beliefs are inculcated through fears of eternal torture and dissenting consciences are intimidated by everything from threats of disownment and excommunication in more liberal countries to threats of imprisonment or death in more authoritarian ones.
But since Dawkins is not a philosopher and does not write with a philosopher’s technical precision about metaphysics, since he does not treat religion with an anthropologist’s lack of judgments, since he sometimes takes the effort to attack the worst popular religious beliefs that laypeople actually hold instead of the more sophisticated ones academics hold, and since he is being so gauche as to dispel the illusions of the little people, he is seen by elitist academics as doing the public an insulting disservice of some sort. Because apparently there can be no books pitched for the average believer to convince them of judgments about the general literal falsehood of religious beliefs which elite academics take for granted.
Atheist books must be either non-existent or, to be acceptable, be so abstruse that no ordinary people could read them. Billions of dollars can be made every year selling lay people worthless superstitious myths and falsehoods from the orthodox to the New Age, and countless sermons can be preached to average people weekly, but atheists should never counter any of this with something pitched to ordinary people, nor anything containing any modicum of anti-theist, anti-religious bite to counteract the barrage of pro-religious messages that bombard people from infancy.
And these academics are either unaware of or contemptuous of the countless atheists who had their consciousness raised by Dawkins. These critics either resent or miss altogether Dawkins’s genius as a powerfully influential leader of an identity movement. Dawkins told the average atheist it was okay to own their disbelief and many found this liberating and exhilarating. I can imagine why the religious academics are threatened by this and want to dismiss it as a real phenomenon or as a bad thing if real. But why are many atheist academics resistant to this consciousness raising?
If they’re so enlightened about how religion functions for people independently of its truth, then surely they must understand how important it is to people to have strong identities connected to their fundamental beliefs and values. And if they think this is a mostly benign or constructive thing for religious people, why do they react with visceral suspicion at atheists’ forming an identity around their atheism? Can’t they see this is analogous to religious people fulfilling their cravings for identity and community as rooted in their perspective on the world? Can’t they see how this could be just as constructive (or at least as benign) as what they approve of in religion?
Partly this might be met with contempt because, I guess, as irreligious atheists themselves they feel above the kinds of connections between identity and beliefs and values that the religious whom they patronizingly approve of have. So possibly they resent seeing other atheists—people like them—apparently mired in such a thing. It could be (and I claim no empirical knowledge here, I am throwing out hypotheses to be investigated) that they associate atheism with elites who know better than the average person and think it tacky of such elites to go around exposing the embarrassing errors of more simpleminded folk. If this is true, they’re oblivious or callous to the very averageness of the average atheist and to their need for identity too. And they probably overestimate their own immunity to a need for identity. Their own identity is wrapped up in being part of an elite that’s too good for trifling with fundamentalists as though they were not beneath refutation. Finally in some cases their antagonism to confrontational atheists may be an allergy to religious debates altogether based on their bad experience with religious dogmatists or based on a view of atheism as inevitably an “anti-“ position by nature, and so bound to take the form of dangerous hostility if made into a kind of group consciousness.
But these are my best psychological inferences and speculations for a frame of mind I’ve never been in myself. I’ve always cared about the truth or falsity of religious beliefs and thought it important that religious people be challenged to deal seriously with objections to their beliefs.
Finally, a quick note. Although many movement atheists are indeed getting a religion-like satisfaction of having their atheistic beliefs tied in to their identity and made into a grounds for community, this does not in any immediate way turn atheism into a faith or, even, a religion. Faith requires beliefs willfully ill proportioned to their evidence and dogmatically obstinate to evidence in principle. Atheists could be prone to faith beliefs but atheism itself is not such a belief for most atheists since most atheists perceive their disbelief or lack of belief to be at least an attempt to be responsive to evidence (or lack thereof) and not a matter of willing to believe as one desires. And religion involves much more by way of ritual and far more robust identity and community commitments than most atheists at present seem willing to have with one another (though some atheists are actually part of religions or want to be).
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See also Richard Dawkins Goes To The Bible Belt
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I don’t know if I qualify as a “cultured” or even as an “educated” (I usually consider myself as overeducated). I do read Dawkins, or did. I have even reread The Selfish Gene. So I am a little familiar with Dawkins. If it is any comfort I find the same sorts of errors in logic and reasoning in Dawkins that I find in every effort at philosophizing about genetics. The genetic paradigm just does not work outside of the laboratory. Every new intellectual tool seems to encourage this sort of overgeneralizing to irrelevant areas of thought. Science, like justice is best served blind. It is normal for researchers to pursue research into dead ends. In times of great change in consciousness and scientific work people tend to get stuck in old fashioned ways of thinking and become aggressively stubborn in defending the old paradigm. I find this sort of cup de sac reasoning to be a natural consequence of intellectual shock. Intellectual shock occurs when a new aspect of reality is uncovered that is so powerful that it blinds folks and leads them to reason from the discovery with their eyes closed resulting in lost souls. It is only in my lifetime that the laboratory bench has become the respectable position from which to view the world. This will not persist.
Non-scientist, or even scientist unfamiliar with a given field frequently resort to a primitive form of reason based on corresponding forms. Reasoning from corresponding forms is a common phenomenon. It worked fine for our prehistorical ancestors. Big animals have been dangerous to approach in the past. Any new big animal therefore is dangerous. Very clean and effective consciousness when all you have to defend yourself is a sharpened stick. Modern life is not so kind to this sort of thinking. This is very evident in medicine where people are happier with more expensive treatments to the degree that they are worried regardless of efficacy. Big problems require big solutions like surgery, and hence vast amounts of useless surgery are indulged in. People we didn’t understand have become a threat in the past, therefore when we encounter folks we don’t understand (and we are not a mad scientist anthropologist) we tend to take a hostile stance. In our personal lives if we spend more money than we earn we are in trouble. By virtue of appealing to the logic of corresponding forms politicians can claim that the country is broke since tax receipts are less than expenses and therefore the country is in trouble and about to have a crisis similar to a family economic crisis, which of course is total bull feces. Careful reasoning is hard work.
Science is a social phenomenon. Scientist are always sensitive to rejection by dominant groups of other scientist. Discovery becomes dogma and an intellectual mess develops until insurgents push forward a new way of thinking. Unfortunately basic science has traipsed so far from what is in the immediate perceptual reality of ordinary people that there is a continual temptation to popularize the speculations of informed scientist, who readily admit that they play in realms that do not make common sense, by drawing analogies and creating metaphors that draw on common everyday experience. That sells books but does little to advance knowledge.
So it is with genetics as it is with other scientific “discoveries.” Even before the laboratory methods of genetic science were hijacked by corporate criminals, there were problems with viewing the world through a genetic lens. We have been sold the concept of “a blueprint of life” at the same time that the criminals are using this thinking to claim exclusive rights to profit from the exploitation of genetic science, a fantastic claim to own the very blueprints of life. The blueprint approach, appealing as it is, is simply wrong. Life is much, much more complex than a printout of base pairs implies. As true scientists, people who are comfortable wading in the totally unknown, continue to ask questions that undermine confidence in the simplistic genetic views that the popular press pushes for the sake of profit, popularizers seek to extrapolate the tentative conclusions of these bench workers to grand heights of ultimate reality. It is a confidence game. Not a mean one. No one is getting rich off it. But it is a confidence game none the less, since reasoning about ultimate realities from tentative conclusions is a false approach fed to the gullible hungry for ultimate answers.
True scientist are aggravatingly uncertain of what they believe in. The social and political arena of science is as dependent on dogma and belief as any sectarian arena, and actual advancement of knowledge is a seeming side effect of this social milieu. In relation to the establishment of scientific thought, the true scientist is an insurgent continually threatening the established order of science with reproducible experimental results. The scientific establishment would like the rest of us to believe that the content of thick textbooks, memorized and regurgitated by countless students, describes, pretty much, the way things will always be described. But of course that is silly. The same attitude was presented in earlier times that produced textbooks that now are merely entertaining in their obvious errors. The Big Picture presented by science is always wrong, if irresistible to attempt for some, and it is the sacred duty of scientist of integrity to bring forth evidence to destroy it. When popularizers like Dawkins (who I actually do value reading) attempt to expand an already tentative set of scientific theories to matters of everyday life, like religion for instance, they create a mess.
Real science is all about uncertainty. For instance classical genetics was used to destroy Lamark’s belief in heritability of acquired characteristics, presented for the popular imagination as an explanation of why the giraffe has a long neck. Mom stretched her neck to feed from the tops of trees and her offspring therefore had longer and longer necks. Now enquiring minds must meld into their Big Picture the discovery of epigenetics, the scientifically proven ability of organisms to pass on characteristics acquired through experience to their descendants. A new and better Larmarkism? No, just another of the accumulating wrinkles that make the grand theory of genetic inheritance a little more uncomfortable. This process will continue, given the unlikely outcome that humans survive our stupidity, and eventually a new understanding will emerge, and people who hold to the old school version will be derided as ignorant. The new ignorant criticizing the old ignorant, granted, but that is how understanding evolves.
There is an even deeper level of understanding, championed by the Deep Ecology thinkers, that says that reality rests not in the nuts an bolts of life, the genes, the biochemistry, the anatomy, but in the nature of the systems themselves. It is a way of thinking that is fractal and global rather than linear and particular. It says that systems, like our bodies and minds, or a species, or life itself, evolves by expressing emergent phenomena that are not predictable by studying the nuts and bolts (an important activity in itself) but can be understood by seeking to understand evolving relationships between nested systems. When systems become unstable due to new pressures they tend to collapse and reform in radically unexpected ways. Would any observer of the late period of the dinosaurs imagine that they would suddenly disappear and be replaced by some squishy little warm blooded creatures that evolved into us? No, successful systems are very rugged and seemingly immortal until some unexpected event causes them to collapse.
So look for reality in relationship not in concrete material facts. From this point of view it becomes evident that our human species is having a very bad relationship with the rest of Life. Expect an ugly divorce if we don’t change our ignorant ways and repair our relationship with the rest of Life very, very soon. Nature is not bloody in tooth and claw, but relentlessly cooperative and integrative, helped along by predators to condition the herd. Nature is not cruel but kind in a tough love sort of way. Systems that continue to adapt to changing circumstances are retained, others not.
By buying into the competitive paradigm, a paradigm that relentlessly tries to choose winners and losers, we have rejected the fundamental processes of life itself. It is not who is right and who is wrong in a discussion that has no access to experimental validation, like the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being, but how the conversants treat each other as they debate. Relationship, in all its manifest complexity, turns out to be the actual ultimate reality not the behavior of atoms.
ybera
As one who rejected an early life rich with fundamentalist indoctrination, and enough time since to pull the useful understandings out of it, while not being bound as well by the limitation of a hard core scientific materialist perspective, life has convincingly taught me that there is much more going on here than meets the eye, and that any perspective will suffer when frozen to a dogmatic schism, religious or secular.
Implicit in atheism is the idea that life is essentially meaningless, an idiosyncrasy of nature, which will inevitably end in nothingness. If this is the case then what does it matter what anyone thinks or believes, and why bother cluttering our meaningless minds with it at all?
What is really at issue isn’t whether fundamentalism, religion, or atheism is best grounded in reality, but how any concept leads us to a more healthy relationship to the world about us, allows us to freely explore for meaning, and supports mutual respect of all points of view.
That said, the coercive, and even invasive, rude tactics used by the most stalwart fundamentalists to spread their message and retain adherents, is not only repulsive to most, but incites the ire of “rational” people. I really do not think this is what any “inspired” writer of scripture had in mind, much less the intention of a loving deity, by any name.
Again, life demonstrates that there is more here than can be seen with the eye or “rationally” understood in total, but it seems to be a function of religion in general, to obfuscate with fear, not unlike terrorism, for the purpose of control for many of the usual benefits to leadership.
For this reason, perhaps the best function religion serves is, ironically, to stimulate a further search for meaning beyond the limitations it fosters, if and when that search actually happens for the individual.
What I now understand is that we all come from the same source, with no difference but personality, and everything has importance and meaning, even personality.
We have the tools to explore this, but it lies beyond either religion or science. All that is required is a truly open, observant mind and trust in your inner resources.
The truth will set you free, to live a life free from fear. Don’t give up.
O
Dawkins in an open letter to Prince Charles:
“Sir, I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the naturalness of ‘traditional’ or ‘organic’ agriculture. Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago – too short to measure on the evolutionary timescale.
Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is not a natural food for Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified – admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a genetically modified wolf. Playing God? We’ve been playing God for centuries!
The large, anonymous crowds in which we now teem began with the agricultural revolution, and without agriculture we could survive in only a tiny fraction of our current numbers. Our high population is an agricultural (and technological and medical) artifact. It is far more unnatural than the population-limiting methods condemned as unnatural by the Pope. Like it or not, we are stuck with agriculture, and agriculture – all agriculture – is unnatural. We sold that pass 10,000 years ago.
Does that mean there’s nothing to choose between different kinds of agriculture when it comes to sustainable planetary welfare? Certainly not. Some are much more damaging than others, but it’s no use appealing to ‘nature’, or to ‘instinct’ in order to decide which ones. You have to study the evidence, soberly and reasonably – scientifically. Slashing and burning (incidentally, no agricultural system is closer to being ‘traditional’) destroys our ancient forests. Overgrazing (again, widely practised by ‘traditional’ cultures) causes soil erosion and turns fertile pasture into desert. Moving to our own modern tribe, monoculture, fed by powdered fertilisers and poisons, is bad for the future; indiscriminate use of antibiotics to promote livestock growth is worse.
Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: ‘GM GM GM GM GM GM!’
Moreover if, as I expect, the dire prophecies of GM doom fail to materialise, the feeling of let-down may spill over into complacency about real risks. Has it occurred to you that our present GM brouhaha may be a terrible case of crying wolf?”