2023-11-27

Are Apostates a Threat to Believers?

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by Neil Godfrey

This post is directed to those who presume an anti-religious in any atheist who has left a religious past, especially one that was strict and authoritarian, and who arrives at views about the Bible and Christian origins that are at odds with the “conventional wisdom” of mainstream biblical scholars.

The stereotypical apostate from a deeply religious upbringing is said to “hate” their former religion and will be biased against it to such an extent that they will seek to undermine whenever the opportunity arises. “Once a fundamentalist always a fundamentalist” — only in the reverse direction — is a refrain that I have heard often enough from defenders of mainstream scholarship when they dismiss arguments that come from known “apostates”. I think that refrain is a lazy substitute for attempting to engage with the intellectual content of the criticisms whenever they are raised. If the apostate was once a member of a rigid, authoritarian or other kind of fundamentalist or cultish sect, then it is reasonable (the mainstream scholar’s thinking goes)  to assume that the apostate is now just as brainwashed or closed-minded as ever, only now in a vengeful reaction against their former faith.

Is there evidence to support that portrayal of apostates?

Most people I have known personally who have left authoritarian cults have not the slightest interest in even thinking about their religious experiences. Those apostates are glad to engage in an entirely new life free from any reminders of that past. But that’s me — and I am merely one person’s anecdotal testimony and hearsay report.

It happens that right now I am reading a book for the purpose of reviewing it here and as early as page 31 I found myself pulled up and in dire need to to track down and skim another work that was cited on that page. Here’s what pulled I read:

Citing Burton Mack, Ellegård notes that the biblical scholar/theologian community has pretty much ignored this type of work, especially that of Wells. It’s not a surprise that Wells’s work has been subjected to rather vehement criticism from biblical scholars, some of whom accuse him of ‘anti-religious’ intentions.104

104 It always surprises me to note that many biblical scholars frequently accuse other scholars – some of them also biblical specialists – of ‘anti-religious’ intentions in their work. It’s a strange form of conspiracy theory which posits that a desire for, and search for, truth is somehow blasphemous. Canadian social psychologists Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger, in their book Amazing Conversions, studied the phenomenon and determined that it was the inculcation of the religious attitude that there is truth, and that it should be diligently sought, that disposes deeply honest people to turn that inquiry on their own beliefs. Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger, Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith & Others Abandon Religion (Prometheus Books, 1997)

From page 31 of Knight-Jadczyk, Laura. From Paul to Mark: PaleoChristianity. Red Pill Press, 2021. . Link is to a publicly available copy of the book at archive.org.

How had I missed Amazing Conversions given my zeal in seeking out and devouring that kind of book back in the late 1990s/early 2000s!

So now that I’ve caught up with Amazing Conversions, I’ll share some of its key findings on the way apostates from strict religious backgrounds approach anyone who presents as an inquirer into the truth about their religion. Surely an apostate’s attitude towards such a person tells us something meaningful about the likelihood that they might be reflexively predisposed to bias against establishment religions.

Amazing Conversions describes and discusses a 1995 study into persons who, contrary to the expectations we would have from their upbringing, became either apostates or devout believers.

This book hopes to provide some explanation of these two exceptional kinds of persons: individuals who — against the influences of their past and all the socialization theories in the world — swam against the tide and became, respectively, “Amazing Apostates” and “Amazing Believers.” It presents our research on rare persons who changed so mightily that they “crossed over” and became each other’s destiny. It tries to understand how such remarkable transformations could take place. (p. 12)

Who was selected for the study?

Most of these apostates had pretty nonreligious upbringings, and so their subsequent loss of belief does not come as a surprise. But a few — a very few came from relatively intensive religious backgrounds, and that is amazing. So we rounded up as many “Amazing Apos­tates” as we could and talked with them.

. . . .

We selected, as potential Amazing Apostates . . . all students who scored in the top quartile on the Religious Emphasis scale, and yet scored in the bottom quartile on the
Christian Orthodoxy scale.

Such persons proved quite rare. In 1994, eighteen were filtered out of 1,457 students who answered the screening booklet at the University of Manitoba. Fifteen turned up among 813 Wilfrid Laurier University students. In 1995, the figures were just 11/1,070 in Manitoba and 14/924 at Wilfrid Laurier. That works out to 1.4 percent of the sample being potential Amazing Apostates. We had to screen over 4,000 students to locate 58 of these rare beings. (pp 21, 26f of Amazing Conversions)

So this sample of 58 had travelled the road “from a strong religious childhood to religious disbelief”.

The question of particular interest here

Next we asked the AAs [=Amazing Apostates] to imagine that a younger member of their home religion came to them for advice. Religion had played a big role in this person’s life, but now questions were arising. This person wanted advice on what to do. What would they say? (p. 29)

I quote here the various descriptions of the responses to that question: Continue reading “Are Apostates a Threat to Believers?”


2023-11-25

A FAREWELL TO CHRISTIANITY

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by Neil Godfrey

I post here an interesting “Farewell to Christianity” statement by Paul-Louis Couchoud. I have relied heavily on ChatGPT to translate the original French text that appeared in Théophile ou L’étudiant des religions (1928), a compilation of his thoughts on a wide range of religious topics.

For other posts relating to Couchoud, see the posts listed under Couchoud: The Creation of Christ and Paul-Louis Couchoud. René Salm also has a detailed overview.

Source: Pdf essay by Patrick Gillet

FAREWELL TO CHRISTIANITY

Christianity is within us like a long love to which it is time to bid farewell.

Parting is difficult; it is sad and poignant. It must be dignified. It is necessary.

For a century, Western people have struggled with Christianity, unable to either leave it or keep it. Sometimes they distance themselves from it with fury and contempt, and other times they return to it with a glimmer of hope, asking for what it can no longer provide.

The time has come for a calm farewell, where due respect will be paid to the memory and gratitude, a solemn farewell, a farewell without return.

The old religion can still speak to us in an unsettling, persuasive voice. It stretches out tired arms over us that we might find gentle. It cradled our youth. It has the words that trouble us to the deepest core. We must untangle ourselves from its embrace.

By parting from it, we venture into the unknown. It would be too good if another ready-made dwelling were prepared to welcome us!

We will have to build our new shelter. It will be a task spanning centuries. Many barracks have crumbled and will crumble before the solid, straight structure rises. We have to take our part in it.

We know the apparent failures of our predecessors. We are not discouraged by them.

The great romantics, Vigny, Lamennais, Michelet, Lamartine, Hugo were religious innovators, heretics, as one might have said in other centuries. They proclaimed the generous and confused gospel of new times. They did not establish anything visible. But the spiritual momentum they initiated will not stop. They have sounded the new Angelus.

Only Auguste Comte claimed to demolish Catholicism and rebuild it in three days. His dream seems childish. Yet, with profound instinct, he showed people what will probably be the object of the future religion: humanity.

Ernest Renan wanted to penetrate the origins of Christianity. He failed. His portrait of Jesus is as false and conventional as a painting by Ary Scheffer. He also wanted to turn the religion of science, which he shared with Taine and Berthelot, into dogmas. Today, scientism appears to be nothing more than a caricature of religion. But Renan’s work prepared for a sound and firm judgment on Christianity.

Alfred Loisy dreamed of reconciling Catholic dogma and historical criticism. He was harshly awakened. Patiently, he took up Renan’s program and Auguste Comte’s idea. He dissected the holy books of Christianity and outlined certain aspects of the religion of humanity.

Emile Durkheim attempted to explain the origins of religion. He too failed. His system was daringly built on too fragile foundations. But he ingeniously saw that religion is the primitive and necessary form that society took, and that the sacred is the social.

Shall we argue that these great failures should bring us back in submission to the withered bosom of the Church?

We would have to reject both the inconsistent and the solid, the sand and the stone.

No, the religious work of a century has not been entirely in vain. Holes have been dug, foundations laid, and a direction set. Through destruction and construction, something is happening. The spirit is in labor. Birth is foreseen.

Even if everything remains to be done, the efforts of the romantics, Comte, Renan, Loisy, and Durkheim would not be in vain. We cannot return to the old mistress of souls.

Her time was beautiful. Her time has passed. She is no longer what she was for forty generations of people: a closed universe, a safe haven, a haven of the spirit.

Poor, glorious old harbor! It held out against the winds and spray for a long time. Today, the dikes are submerged. The dismantled port has become the site of the worst storms.

If I were still willing to entrust myself to a submerged port, to a broken ship, if I still proclaimed myself a Christian, I would question myself in secret. I would thoroughly scrutinize my faith.

Is there a single fundamental dogma of Christianity to which, as a modern man, I can give my full acquiescence without hesitation?

Let’s go through them. There is no need for endless details. The views of reason are as quick as lightning.

Reason changes with every century because it is the living sum of human knowledge. Today it is less imbued with logic and algebra than in the 17th century. It has acquired a new acuteness since it forged the refined methods of historical sciences.

The problems that metaphysics has vainly pondered now arise from the perspective of history.

Let’s consider the essential questions: Scripture, Jesus, God. In the face of the Christian assertion, what is the immediate reaction of today’s reason?

The sacred character was initially attached to material objects: a tree, a stone, a spring. Transferring it to an intellectual object, such as the text of a book, was a tremendous advance in abstraction. It resulted in a great oppression of the mind, common to all religions of the book.

Is there, among books, a book that is not of man, a sacred book?

What prevents us from believing it is that we are beginning to see under what circumstances, by which priestly colleges, for what purpose, the parts of the Bible were successively declared sacred, and how theologians then disserted on the alleged divine inspiration. It is a very human history.

The circumstances that lead to the canonization of a book did not only occur among the Hebrews and Christians. The Persians before the Hebrews, and the Arabs after the Christians, had their sacred books. In this case, as in others, the sacred only expresses a social fact. How would today’s historian distinguish between the various sacred books of humanity?

The sacred character was initially attached to material objects: a tree, a stone, a spring. Transferring it to an intellectual object, such as the text of a book, was a tremendous advance in abstraction. It resulted in a great oppression of the mind, common to all religions of the book. A sacred stone will be revered in new ways over the ages. A sacred text imposes itself with a bruising rigidity. Three or four words from the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ have endlessly provoked the massacre of women.

The critical study of the sacred books of the Old and New Testaments shows that most of them were composed in successive layers. The wondrous things people thought they would find there disappear upon examination.

It was admired that Isaiah had mentioned the name of Cyrus two centuries before Cyrus’s birth. This was because it had not been noticed that the Book of Isaiah is made up of two parts, separated precisely by those centuries.

It was astonishing that the wise Daniel could predict exactly the wars and marriages of the Seleucid kings, until it became evident that the author of the Book of Daniel lived during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes.

Today, the true defenders of the Bible are those who find in it a rugged and proud testimony to humanity, not those who linger in search of enigmatic oracles.

These false wonders did a disservice to the Bible. Since we now see it as the literature of an ancient people, it has lost its divine character. It has gained powerful human interest.

Today, the true defenders of the Bible are those who find in it a rugged and proud testimony to humanity, not those who linger in search of enigmatic oracles.

 

Is there, among the men who have lived, a man of a different nature than all of them, a man-God?

The problem of Jesus is not resolved. Clarifying it will be one of the great tasks of our century. It is much more difficult than it seems.

So far, it has gone through four phases.

In the time of Renan and up until around 1900, it was believed possible to write a life of Jesus. This had to be abandoned. Critics recognized that there is a lack of materials for such an undertaking.

Then, immense efforts were made in Germany and France to extract a historical core from the gospel texts. What was believed to be known about Jesus was reduced to two traits: preaching the end of the world and being condemned to death in consequence..

This small historical core itself did not remain immune to criticism. Its determination is not without arbitrariness. The solidity attributed to it is only apparent.

In recent years, Germans have given up on knowing anything certain about Jesus. What we reach historically is not Jesus, but the early Christian groups. The idea they had of Jesus was not historical. It was subordinated to the cult they rendered to him and the divine legends that circulated in the ancient world.

Finally, others have wondered if Jesus is not a purely spiritual being. It is as God that he is attested from the beginning and has crossed the centuries. However high we go, we find him on altars, an object of worship. It is difficult to understand how he could have been made God from a man. It is easier to understand how God was humanized. After all, his earthly passion, passus sub Pontio Pilato, is just a dogma, inserted as such among others in the creed.

We cannot yet say to which final conception critical research will lead. But whether Jesus remains classified among men or among gods, he will be placed in a clear-cut category.

If he is a man, he is one of the messianic agitators of the 1st century of our era, and not the least chimerical, a Jewish martyr, and not the most touching, a rabbi of Israel, and not the wisest.

If he is God, he stands beside, or rather, above the other dead and resurrected gods. He is God who suffers. He is the most moving divine figure that suffering humanity has produced.

As for the idea of a God-man, it’s a confused idea, a behemoth like the centaur, which we’re forced to disentangle.

A man could have been deified, by an uncommon aberration of religious sentiment. A god could have been endowed with a human face and earthly adventures by the infinite fertility of religious imagination. In the first case, Jesus is a false god. In the second case, he is a false man. Man-God is an unthinkable thing, a purely verbal compound.

Obscure man or splendid God, Jesus will take his place in the line of men or in the line of figures created by humanity.

Jesus has everything to lose by being registered in the annals of history. Those who deny his historical existence will remain the only ones able to defend his spiritual reality.

He has everything to lose by being registered in the annals of history. Those who deny his historical existence will remain the only ones able to defend his spiritual reality.

Is there, in the world and beyond the world, a single and personal God who, among the peoples, saves only one people: the Jews in the past, the Christians today?

What prevents us from believing …. is a knowledge of history.

What prevents us from believing this is not a philosophy of the world, but a knowledge of history.

The old philosophical problem of the existence of God loses its interest as soon as we historically perceive the birth of God.

The supreme God whom Christians worship, on whom philosophers speculate, has historical origins. It is the ancient god of Israel, the barbaric Yahweh.

He was first a small god of the desert, a djinn, the local genius of a spring in a dreadful valley. He only had real existence during seasonal festivals when nomads, grouping their tents around the spring, created him. They believed they had captured his name, lah, lahou, or lahvé. Lots were cast to summon his judgment. Some very simple wishes were attributed to him, forming a small code. By accepting these rules, one was considered to make an alliance with him.

Mercenaries who escaped from Egypt and returned to a nomadic life made an alliance with him and formed a people around him.

When these insatiable Hebrews attacked Canaan, they believed they were taking Yahweh with them in a portable chest. They attributed their successful actions to him.

As soon as they were established, Yahweh became a Baal, that is, a land-owning god. He was endowed with temples, land, slaves, sacred prostitutes, and prophets. He usurped Babylonian cosmogonic legends that made him the creator of heaven and earth.

In the spiritual history of humanity, there is no greater episode than the rise of this god. One of the most recent and humblest among the gods, he managed to eliminate all the others in the West.

The power of a god lies in the faith one devotes to him. It is most evident in defeat. Yahweh grew through tremendous defeats.

His followers were torn apart by schism and almost annihilated. He was left with only one temple, that of Jerusalem. This was the basis of his glory. The god of the single temple began to be conceived as the one God.

Then he was completely defeated by the god of Babylon, Bel-Marduk. His temple was destroyed, his people partly exterminated, partly enslaved. It was then that he rose to the highest.

A prophet-poet whose name is unknown and whom we call the Second Isaiah formulated monotheism. Yahweh is not only superior to the other gods, he alone is God. The conqueror Cyrus, who does not know him, is nevertheless his instrument. An unprecedented idea.

God was born. It is a date in human history. The Second Isaiah founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in one stroke. Judaism, which he transformed from a national religion into a catholic religion. Christianity, because in a mysterious part of his poem, he outlined the figure of the Servant, martyr and redeemer, an early version of Jesus. Islam, which is only a repetition of the monotheistic message.

A solemn date! At the same time, in the sixth century BCE, Confucius and Laozi gave China the rites of wisdom, India was stirred by the immense Buddhism, Zarathustra in Persia changed a religion of princes into a religion of peasants, and Pythagoras in the West reformed the mysteries. And the Second Isaiah proclaimed a unique God destined to conquer half the world.

It seems that the entire planet is setting its religious destiny for a long time to come. It’s like the passage of a celestial body.

After the major religious reforms of the sixth century, the Christian revolution is secondary. Its main effect was to make the monotheism of Israel acceptable to the Western world by adding a myth of redemption.

Today, the idea of a single God has become so natural to us that we believe it to be essential to religion. It is not. In Buddhism and Confucianism, the idea of God or gods plays almost no role. An atheistic religion is perfectly conceivable. . . . Monotheism is neither truer nor more moral than polytheism.

Today, the idea of a single God has become so natural to us that we believe it to be essential to religion. It is not. In Buddhism and Confucianism, the idea of God or gods plays almost no role. An atheistic religion is perfectly conceivable.

Monotheism is neither truer nor more moral than polytheism. It is a mental habit, a way of speaking. It is a religious imagination that seduces with apparent simplicity and disappoints in the end if asked for a profound explanation of things.

God, in whom we are accustomed to symbolize the absolute, is the invention of a time and a place. It has intimate connections with ancient Palestine and the city of Jerusalem.

Around the hollow rock that bore the altar of burnt offerings, humble singers composed the Psalms that are endlessly repeated in all Western temples today. The Song of Solomon was murmured there for the first time so that, centuries later in Spain, Saint Teresa and thousands of women would be intoxicated by it.

In the countless Jewish, Christian and Muslim minds for whom Jerusalem is still a holy city, God exists

But His credit, compared to what it was in past centuries, has diminished.

All the great religious movements that began in the sixth century BCE have either exhausted themselves or seem to be declining.

God is fading.

Will the celestial body pass by again?

 

Couchoud, Paul Louis. Théophile ou L’étudiant des religions. Paris: André Delpeuch, 1928. pp 219-231 (Highlighting of selected quotations are my own additions)


2023-06-26

Varieties of Atheism # 6 – Atheism and the Good of Humanity

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by Neil Godfrey

With thanks to University of Chicago Press for granting me a review copy. — David Hume (left) and Richard Rorty

The second chapter in Varieties of Atheism was, for me, a thought-provoker. It touches on the fundamentals of “How do we know?” and why we cannot justifiably sink into a self-centred “Why should I care about anyone else if there is no God?” approach to life. The author, Andre C. Willis, in the chapter titled “Atheism and Society”, examines these questions through a discussion of two philosophers, the Enlightenment era’s David Hume and the Postmodernist Richard Rorty.

Willis opens with a challenge that made me question if I was going to enjoy the rest of his chapter:

Public disputes between those who hold the idea that God exists and those who reject this idea are often fanned on one side by hostility for the Abrahamic traditions and fueled on the other side by animus for skepticism. This is why these polemical and often performative debates between so-called theists and so-called atheists often strike me as disingenuous; they masquerade as serious intellectual argument as a way to conceal low-grade animus.

I may have once had some level of hostility towards “Abrahamic traditions” but did I not have some justification for that hostility, and did those feelings negate my reasoning about them, or the question of God’s existence? Might not a certain level of animus sometimes be a product of concern for a greater good?

A little later Willis throws out another challenge, drawing on the words of Denys Turner in “How to be an Atheist”:

The hubris of a confident theism that knows “all too well what [it] is affirming when [it] says ‘God exists’” is the “mirror image” of a bold atheism that “know (s) all too well what it [is] denying when [it] says ‘God does not exist.’”

Turner goes on to explain:

For both the affirmer and the denier are complicit in a sort of cosy and mutually reassuring idolatrous domesticity: in short, they keep each other in a job.

Are the grounds for each position the same? If not, can the atheist in that exchange really be a “mirror image” of the theist? Maybe Turner has in mind an atheist I am not so familiar with. I’d rather explore new and old ideas than hang around to argue such a point ….

…. like exploring once more the thoughts of Hume and Rorty, and understanding where I fit between the philosophical systems each of those names represents.

One thing I have discovered through my own reflections on life and beliefs since leaving religion behind is that I have independently made myself part of a larger “community” of nonbelievers who share similar ideas and fundamental values. So often I find myself inwardly smiling in recognition at hearing others espousing outlooks about life and humanity that it took me years to learn for myself. There is something in common binding us and I do “wonder” a little, but unlike Willis I draw back from suggesting that this “wonder” over “something” should have a religious or theistic dimension.

Certainly it is true that reason alone is not enough to explain “life” or persuade anyone to disbelieve in God:

The conventional pillars of the Western philosophical enterprise — rational certainty, formal argumen­tation, and ethical persuasion — which, to them [Hume and Rorty], had proved insufficient tools to combat idolatry. They recognized that literature (especially Rorty’s notion of philosophy as poetics), captivating narratives (especially Rorty’s idea of redescription as a literary practice), multivocality (Hume’s numer­ous dialogues), and close attention to literary form (especially Hume’s es­says, philosophical treatises, political arguments, historical writings, and letters) were just as important as, if not more important than, the formal philosophical grammars of metaphysics and epistemology, particularly when it came to contending with belief in deities and embracing tenets of a religious tradition.

Another echo from my early days exploring a world without god: I used to say, when pushed, that I believe in poetry. Not quite sure why but I think what I was trying to say was that we resort to metaphors to convey certain experiences. That’s not spiritual but, I think, something wired into our cranial circuits. Such a “reductionist” explanation doesn’t rob it of meaning, though.

Hume worked through the logic of the arguments to conclude that there can be no reason to believe in God. Rorty concluded that all our knowledge and understanding is bound up in our language, the words and concepts we use, and we cannot go beyond those words and we may doubt that we can justify our set of words over another person’s set of words.

Like Rorty’s liberal ironist, who has continuing doubts about her final vocabulary, Hume’s moderate skeptic is “diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical convictions” . . . The similarities here are glaring.

The rationale might be different but the end result is the same – humility.

I have avoided repeating (or even explaining) here Willis’s explanations of the grounds of Hume’s and Rorty’s reasoning in the hope that interested readers will grasp some partial but sufficient sense of what each is about. Both believe in some kind of action that takes us beyond mere words or logic.

There are at least three resonances between Hume’s “easy philosophy” and the approach of Rorty’s liberal ironist that are worth noting. First, Hume says that it “bor­rows all helps from poetry.” Recall . . . Rorty’s . . . . philosophy as a form of poetry. Second, similar to the affective strengths of the Rortyan ironist, Hume’s “easy philosophy” appeals to our feelings and sentiments, not reason alone. And third, Hume’s easy philosophy understands hu­mans as “born for action” in ways that the ironist is driven to the action of redescription.

As a lay outsider I find it surprising and encouraging to see some common ground between Enlightenment and Postmodernist thinking. Or rather than “thinking” should that be “feeling”? We are animals, after all, and we have feelings before we are able to “think” in any formal logical sense.

Rorty’s “urging” for a human solidarity that cannot be justified via any “philosophical presuppositions” aims, ultimately, to function as a way to link suffering human agents. To recognize our “similarities with respect to pain and humiliation” . . . is, for Rorty, to create togetherness across vari­ous divisions and to generate connections where it feels unnatural to do so. To my ear, this way of thinking about generating connections carries a religious residue, has a teleological dimension, and relies on, in some ways, something like a quasi-theological — or at least not-fully-comprehensible – power.

I hesitate once again. Maybe it’s a matter of definition. But does not the word “theological” (even if modified with “quasi”) throw in an unnecessary factor? Why not simply call it poetical? Does not our depth of experience and wonder prompt us to call upon metaphors? Is that not enough? Is that not enough to justify a communication with a theologian?

We are all the same, however different. We all have a natural investment in the good of “us”.


Newheiser, David, ed. The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo182880666.html.

Turner, Denys. “How to Be an Atheist.” New Blackfriars 83, no. 977/978 (2002): 317–35.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43249944


 


2023-06-18

Varieties of Atheism # 5 – Pantheism and Einstein

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by Neil Godfrey

Mary-Jane Rubenstein (photo from ICE Dartmouth)

I cover here another chapter in Varieties of Atheism: Mary-Jane Rubenstein‘s “Atheism and Science” discusses the relevance of Einstein’s “cosmic religious sense” to atheism.

On Albert Einstein’s “Cosmic Religious Sense”

Mary-Jane Rubenstein begins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where we find the relationship between science and religion taking shape. Our first view is that of the confusion between pantheism and atheism. Baruch Spinoza, could be described as both a “God-intoxicated man” and an atheist! If Spinoza could declare all Nature to be God, more rigid “believers” would react with despair that such an impersonal deity was no deity at all. Even philosophers are not all convinced: Arthur Schopenhauer dismissed pantheism as nothing but “a euphemism for atheism”; closer to home, Nancy Frankenberry writes

by assimilating God to Nature … [pantheists] raise the suspicion that one of the two of them is semantically superfluous. (quoted p. 21)

What does pantheism have to do with Einstein? Einstein (along with Niels Bohr) replaced Newton’s clockwork universe with an ever-shifting one, depending on where one lives and how one observes it. What sort of god does that make the world of nature? And what are the implications for religious debates?

It all began in April 1929….

Cardinal O’Connell (bilbiolore photo)

. . .  one week before a lavish gala at the Metropolitan Opera House in honor of Einstein’s fiftieth birthday, which would draw 3,500 people in support of the Jewish National Fund and the Zionist Organization of America. As American Jews prepared to celebrate their most famous kinsman, Boston cardinal William Henry O’Connell delivered an address to the New England Province of Catholic Clubs of America, urging their members to pay no attention to the Jewish pseudoprophet. Having previously denounced Hollywood and radio technology for proliferating a monstrous cadre of “masculine women” and “effeminate men,” the cardinal charged Einstein’s theory of relativity with endorsing the categorical indistinction of the topsy-turvy era. The theory, he insisted, was nothing more than “befogged speculation producing universal doubt about God and his creation, cloaking the ghastly apparition of atheism.” (Quoted from “Einstein Believes in ‘Spinoza’s God,”’ New York Times, April 25,1929 — Rubenstein, p. 21)

Relativity — what a word. As Rubenstein remarks,

. . . one can surmise from the ensuing controversies that the mere name of relativity connoted for O’Connell moral laxity . . . . In short, relativity’s denial of any absolute reference point for space and time seemed to O’Connell a denial of the Absolute altogether, and for that reason, it was both morally and empirically wrong. (p. 22)

Einstein appealed to Spinoza’s God, not explicitly in public, but in a telegram sent to an inquiring rabbi who made the telegram famously public:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of all things, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

Einstein or his supporters tried to repair some damage in subsequent publications and statements by stressing “the essentially mysterious” nature of the universe, declaring that he “confronts it with awe and reverence”. But that was not going to appease anyone devoted to a personal god. Eventually Einstein delivered a lecture on the question of science and religion. Rubenstein summarizes key points:

Science, he ventured, is concerned with “what is” whereas religion tells us “what should be”-, science uncovers “facts,” whereas religion prescribes “human thoughts and actions.” As such, neither is sufficient on its own; in Einstein’s now iconic words, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”.

Whence, then, comes the perceived opposition between these mutually beneficial regimes? The largest impediment to the harmony between science and religion, Einstein ventures, is in the concept of a personal God. Channeling Spinoza, Einstein argues that science cannot affirm the existence of an anthropomorphic power who from time to time violates the order of nature in response to human petition. In addition to being scientifically inadmissible, he explains, such a God is ethically useless, relieving human beings of responsibility for their own actions. . . . For ethical and scientific reasons alike, then, Einstein insists that “teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God”. Once people are free from this divine overlord, Einstein promises they will also be free from egoistic concerns (like having the largest gross domestic product or the biggest sport utility vehicle), eventually attaining that comportment his earlier essay called the cosmic religious sense: a humble feeling of reverence for the mysterious yet rational whole. And in this way, the religious person becomes affectively identical to the scientist. (pp. 24f – Rubenstein’s italics)

We can imagine the outrage among many mainstream clerics. Einstein’s view was denounced as opening up a world without any moral order, with no personal god to hold people to account. In fact, though, Einstein had made the opposite case: that if God were personal, then God would be responsible for human evil.

For Einstein, the words God and Nature were interchangeable. The world is “so rationally structured that we can think of it as divine.”

Channeling Spinoza, Einstein argues that science cannot affirm the existence of an anthropomorphic power who from time to time violates the order of nature in response to human petition. In addition to being scientifically inadmissible, he explains, such a God is ethically useless, relieving human beings of responsibility for their own actions. (p. 24)

Concerning “faith”, Einstein believed in the “rationality or intelligibility of the world”, and that’s where he ran into problems with Bohr’s quantum physics and unpredictable particles. Rubenstein quotes Einstein:

The basis of all scientific work is the conviction that the world is an ordered and comprehensive entity which is a religious sentiment. (p. 27)

I suppose it is a religious sentiment. But why can’t we say that religious sentiments are really poetically felt and expressed secular sentiments? (But that thought brings us to the next chapter and the next post.)

Mystery and comprehensibility went hand in hand for Einstein. But how could one make sense of an indeterminate universe of quantum mechanics? Rubenstein refers to the historian of science Gunther Stent’s article that interprets the Einstein-Bohr debate as less a debate about physical theory than about God.

What they were actually arguing about, Stent suggests, was whether or not there was a superrational power stabilizing the quantum-dicey universe, with Einstein holding onto “the traditional monotheistic viewpoint of modern science” and Bohr breaking through to a genuine, postmodern “atheism.” (p. 32)

When Rubenstein speaks of Einstein’s appeal to God (Does God play dice?) I take God to be another term for Nature. Bohr, she writes, was baffled by Einstein’s “presumption that God was a single, immutable order of things beyond the multitude of worldly phenomena.” She speaks of the “absolutism of determinism and the anthropocentrism of ‘reason'” underlying Einstein’s view of the “ordered universe”. (I had not thought of the “rational view” of the universe as being a projected anthropomorphism before.)

If God is equated with Nature, Rubenstein is suggesting that according to the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics we arrive at “a pluralistic, perspectival pantheism that would constitute even more of a threat than atheism to the anthropic father-friend of classical theism” (p. 21)

Such a “pantheology” would amount to atheism for some, but for others it would not, Rubenstein concludes.

(There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.)

The above post, I hope, gives a reliable small taste of a thought provoking chapter.

—-
Addendum:

From one of Rubenstein’s examples I am reminded of the disputes in Australia over landmarks that are sacred sites for some and sources of monetary wealth for others. That kind of conflict and its ultimate sources will in part be addressed in my next post when I look at the chapter by Andre C. Willis exploring how the Postmodernist Rorty was prefigured in certain ways by the Enlightenment philosopher Hume and what that means for a more compassionate and healthy society beyond any religious-atheist divide.

 


2023-06-17

Varieties of Atheism # 4 – Deeper than Reason

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by Neil Godfrey

With thanks to University of Chicago Press for access to a review copy.

Varieties of Atheism has rekindled my interest in atheism as an identity and as a question for wider social consideration. One can take one’s identity for granted and risk becoming stale, ossified, a life that is lived the same day after day without any further inward understanding or self-awareness. So it’s good to read the points David Newheiser raises and to follow the leads to other readings that he offers.

In one place in Varieties Newheiser writes:

. . . atheism concerns motivations that run deeper than reason.

I consult the endnote. It reads:

Stephen LeDrew argues that the New Atheism is likewise motivated by political commitments rather than science alone. Stephen LeDrew, The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2. Susannah Ticciati develops a similar argument in her contribution to this collection.

Since I’m more interested in politics than theology I’ll put the theologian on hold for a moment and have a look at what LeDrew has to say (2016) —

. . . New Atheism is a secular fundamentalism, a modern utopian ideology that is also an active movement for social transformation. Like all fundamentalisms, it is not only a position on metaphysical questions but an essentially political phenomenon. It is only manifestly a critique of religion, while its latent project is the universalization of the ideology of scientism and the establishment of its cultural authority. Its critique is therefore not just about religion but more precisely about cultures, belief systems, and forms of knowledge—most importantly the social sciences and humanities, redundant in the New Atheism’s Darwinistic master narrative—that are perceived as challenges to this authority.

While ostensibly a critique of the dangers of irrational superstitions, then, the New Atheism is ultimately about power—more specifically, socially legitimate authority. It is a response to challenges to the authority of science and, by extension, those who practice science and regulate its institutions. By a further extension, it is a defense of the position of the white middle-class Western male, and of modernity itself, which is perceived to be under threat by a swirling concoction of religious ignorance, epistemic relativism, identity politics, and cultural pluralism. The New Atheism is a reaction to twenty-first-century challenges to the established modern social hierarchy and structure of cultural authority, seeking to eliminate perceived challenges to scientific authority not only from “premodern” religion but also “postmodern” social science. This is an attempt at placing an ideological manifestation of the natural sciences in a position of uncontested authority in the production of legitimate knowledge and in the cultural sphere of meaning and normativity.

I knew there was a reason I felt a certain discomfort with some of the writings of Dawkins, Harris, and even Hitchens.

Stephen LeDrew (photo from Publishers Weekly)

I’m a history buff so I could not turn away from LeDrew’s first chapter, The Evolution of Atheism.

As noted in an earlier post, LeDrew points out that “explicit, “avowed” atheism emerged in the Enlightenment” — and from that perspective it is a modern “movement”:

. . . “atheism” is inextricably bound up with a tradition of Enlightenment principles, including emancipation through reason, liberal democracy, the primacy of the individual, scientific rationality, and the notion of progress, which is closely related to the theory—or as Asad describes it, the “political doctrine”—of secularization . . . (p. 13)

I did not know so much has been written about atheism. LeDrew introduces his discussion by pointing to two key sources for his information:

So LeDrew draws a distinction between “scientific atheism” and “humanistic atheism”.

Scientific atheism views religion primarily as the antithesis of science and an obstacle to social and scientific progress. . . [It] understands religion as an obstacle to science-driven social progress and seeks to eradicate this relic of the premodern world through science education and “enlightenment”.

Humanistic atheism [considers] religion to be primarily a social phenomenon rather than an attempt at explaining nature . . . [It] rejects the structure of a world that gives rise to religion, which from this perspective is not a challenge to modernity but rather provides ideological support for modernity by rationalizing its inequities. It imagines alternative social formations that would cause religion to vanish. (p. 14, my formatting and bolding in all quotations)

Comte’s theory of society was…a precursor to the Darwinistic vision of progress at the heart of scientific atheism, [and] Spencer’s later fusion…of sociology and evolutionary biology into … sociobiology. (LeDrew, 19)

New Atheism as scientific atheism

We might say that such an analysis provides us with 20-20 vision and through it LeDrew focuses on the New Atheism thus:

The New Atheism is not “new” but just the most recent incarnation of a particular kind of nonbelief from a particular intellectual tradition. It excludes other kinds of religious criticism . . . The New Atheism is much more than a critical inquiry into religious faith. It is an extension and manifestation of the modern project of scientific mastery of the world and the rationalization of society, and its critique is only ostensibly about religion. More implicitly, it is a critique of other perceived challenges to this political project, wherever they may come from—even from other kinds of atheism. (14f)

LeDrew explores an interesting discussion on the thesis that atheism emerged not from a direct antagonism to religion but ironically from within theological enquiries that sought to enlist science in support of some of its views. That discussion is beyond the scope of this post but one can find more about the idea in Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God, Kors, Atheism in France, and Turner, Without God, Without Creed.

“Scientific atheism”, LeDrew explains, was born from the union of Enlightenment scepticism and the social and scientific theories of evolution. We have heard of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism. Here we find the beginnings of what many of us would view as the villain of modern times:

It is important to note that this idea of progressive social evolution, with its vision of a “natural unfolding of social complexity,” is predicated upon a misreading of Darwin, who viewed evolution as a process with no fixed direction and invoked the metaphor of a “radiating bush” to describe adaptation and differentiation. (LeDrew, p.24)

For Darwin “on God” see comment below.

It is crucial to note that for these early Darwinists, the theory of evolution was not simply a scientific fact that needed to be defended against irrational forces that would seek to discredit it. The theory of evolution was, from the beginning, tied to a certain political orientation. Darwin was born into a wealthy family of capitalists and scientists. This socialization proved determinative of his character and political views, which in turn were instructive in the development of his scientific theory. Informed by Darwin’s liberal-capitalist worldview, natural selection doubled as a metaphor for the right of individuals to pursue their self-interest in a free and competitive society. Soon after its publication, Huxley declared Origin of Species to be a gun in the armory of liberalism, the most effective new weapon for attacking superstitious beliefs and thus promoting rational materialism.

Evolution was clearly not politically neutral in the minds of its defenders. Rather, the idea was tied to liberalism and rationalism and used to promote modern goals and values, and thus transcended science to become a cornerstone of the political ideology of the Victorian liberal intelligentsia. Indeed, many scholars agree that Darwin’s theory not only validated his political views but itself was a product of Victorian culture, with Darwin early in his scientific career committing himself to a theory of nature that reflected the Malthusian socioeconomic inclinations of British high society

In this view, the theory of natural selection was a contingent result of social history rather than an inevitable conclusion. As atheism became tied to the theory of evolution, it moved from simple negation of religious beliefs to an affirmation of liberalism, scientific rationality, and the legitimacy of the institutions and methodology of modern science—and thus from religious criticism to a complete ideological system. (22f)

Thankfully LeDrew reassures atheists who are offended by that historical background:

. . . scientific atheism is not a necessary consequence of a Darwinian worldview but rather an ideology that uses “evolution” and “natural selection” as metaphors in the advancement of what is in fact a deeply political position. (25)

Humanistic atheism

We come now to the history of “humanistic atheism”.

This brand of atheism emerged from the realization that merely rationally criticizing religious beliefs did not solve the nonrational problems that led to those beliefs, “which include alienation, suffering, infantile neurosis and insecurity, and fear of death.” We leave behind Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Aldous Huxley and meet Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.

These thinkers did not give much attention to the arguments against the existence of God. Rather, they tended to simply assume his nonexistence. They were interested in the social and psychological causes that led to belief in God and in sustaining a religion that maintained inequities and ignorance. We introduced Feuerbach in our previous post. I am embarrassed to have to admit I have never studied anything about Ludwig Feuerbach but LeDrew helps me understand and atone a little for my ignorance:

Given his role as a principal architect of one of the most important streams of atheist thought of the past two centuries, it is striking that Feuerbach is rarely mentioned today in popular or scholarly religious criticism. Feuerbach’s seminal contribution to the development of atheism was his theory of God as a projection of the human onto the divine figure, which is a projection of alienation: “Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself.” That is, everything that is great about God is alienated from humanity. (27)

If you are more familiar with Karl Marx and the above sounds familiar, here is the reason:

This approach was adopted by Marx, who reconfigured Feuerbach’s theory by defining more precisely the nature of the human experience that resulted in the projection of God—that is, alienation. (27)

Freud, we know, also accounted for religion as an “illusion”. The comfort believers find in religion is understood as arising from our inner “fearful and wondering child . . . desperate for some measure of control over terrifying forces of nature . . . “. Quoting Freud, religion, then, is …

the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father.

Then there is Friedrich Nietzsche. We have all heard of “the death of God”.

. . . the notion of the death of God refers to the end of “belief in any sort of absolute centre or unshakable foundation.”71 It is a necessary step in the evolution of man, where man is a step between animal and Ubermensch, when humanity itself, rather than a distant God, becomes the meaning of Earth.72 Here we see a link between Nietzsche and Feuerbach’s theory of God as projected alienated humanity. That is, man cannot become Ubermensch—master of himself and creator of his own truth and morality—until God, the universalizing and alienating foundation of truth and morality, is “dead.”

Ah — how I recall my French classes from student days and reading Albert Camus and struggling to take in the full meaning of Existentialism.

. . . faith robs people of their own capacity for understanding . . .

Indeed, and in more ways than the one identified here (relying on the church to explain and provide meaning). A momentous turning point in my life came when it suddenly dawned on me that it was my “faith” that was my driver — it was not the object of my faith that was empowering me, giving me confidence, etc, but “faith” itself! I finally discovered I could cut out the middle (imaginary) man.

He describes religion as an illusion constructed as an escape from reality . . . 

. . . In this sense Nietzsche can be placed in line with Marx and Freud in their diagnosis of religion as both an expression of suffering and compensation for it. This idea is expressed most forcefully in his disdain for Christian morality, which for Nietzsche is nothing other than a slave morality . . . (31)

I do not think Marx is obsolete and LeDrew reminds me of one of the reasons why:

For Nietzsche, then, as for Marx, religion turns our attention away from what is really important, which is human social relations, and toward the appeasement of a supernatural deity who has the power to end our suffering if only we are prepared to submit to his will—which, of course, is really the will of powerful clerics.

The biggest difference between these thinkers is perhaps in their attitude toward the oppressed. Marx is clearly empathetic, while Nietzsche derides the weak masses beguiled by the Christian slave morality, and Freud is equally contemptuous of the majority who are mired in an infantile fantasy and “will never be able to rise above this view of life. (32)

Incidentally, it was pointed out to me recently that Bruno Bauer (whose works I have been translating) was the first to declare that religion was the “opiate of the people”, and Marx borrowed the expression from him.

–o0o–

Susannah Ticciati

A theologian’s perspective

The other scholar Newheiser cited in his remark about atheism involving a “motivation that runs deeper than reason” is the theologian Susannah Ticciati who contributes a chapter in Varieties of Atheism.

Ticciati also takes me on a journey of discovery when in her introductory paragraphs on the debate with New Atheists she points out in passing….

  • The thin narrative of progress underpinning some of the new atheist writings is exposed by Terry Eagleton (from a Marxist perspective) for its failure to recognize the radical nature of sin, and its political impotence in the face of the horrors of capitalism.
  • David Bentley Hart offers a counterhistory in which the evils allegedly brought about by “religion” are placed in the context of an account of the Christian tradition as that which has (uniquely) fostered an ethic of love and compassion.
  • Less sweepingly polemical, but sharing the dismissive tone of Eagleton and Hart, is Denys Turner’s apophatically rooted critique that such atheists deny a God that no self-reflective Christian would affirm, and that their denials are outstripped by the much more thoroughgoing denials of the apophatic tradition.
  • Voicing a perspective from beyond the male-dominated battleground of the debate, Tina Beattie exposes from a feminist perspective the ideological situatedness of the new atheism’s scientism. Her nonpolemical approach arguably enables her to offer all the more deeply devast[at]ing a critique.
  • David Fergusson, most measured of all, deliberately seeking a respectful engagement, points (among other things) to the complexity of the theological tradition as something that already houses the challenges thrown at it as if for the first time by the new atheists. Several of the theological contributors, finally, highlight the complementary rather than competitive relationship between science and theology. (85f)

The links in the above will take you to the particular work Ticciati had in mind in each case. Of course, I cannot simply sit and watch such interesting looking titles go without stopping the bus each time so I can get out and check them for myself.

Ticciati finds all of the above more or less lacking in one respect in their criticisms of the “new atheists”….. that is, their failure to hear and respond to

what is arguably the deepest concern being voiced by the new atheists—an ethical concern. (86)

Ticciati’s response is that of a theologian for her theologian peers. I confess I struggled to fully grasp her highly abstract discussion, though I imagine theologians would embrace the terms and arguments she uses as mere basics in their conceptual universe. It’s not my world and I attempt to outline her argument only with trepidation.

Babette’s Feast Guardian photo

What is the practical impact of religion? Are beliefs harmful? Or is it only certain practices that we must worry about? After surveying the respective views of Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins on these views, Ticciati refers to two quite different atheist perspectives:

(As I have said, Varieties of Atheism contains a wealth of introductions to new ideas or old ideas discussed in new ways!)

Ticciati responds to new atheist criticisms by bridging the gap between belief and practice and here she turns to 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

For the word of the cross is folly (μωρια) to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of preaching to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block (σκανδαλον) to Jews and folly (μωρια) to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Through an application of that text to the ethical questions raised by religion’s critics argues that a propositional belief (God exists; Christ crucified is the saviour of the world”; “Jesus is the Christ”) can only have meaning under certain conditions in which the believer lives in the transforming context of a “mutual upbuilding” community of fellow-believers. That’s surely a gross oversimplification of Ticciati’s argument but I hope it is enough to present an invitation for anyone interested to follow it up for elaboration. At the risk of quoting a passage out of the context in which it was meant to be read, some flavour of the discussion might be gleaned from her following words:

The “me” that utters “Christ is my savior” will always also be the perishing self that is dealt a death blow by this very claim. It must be made foolish in order to become wise. As I have shown, the more austere claim “God exists,” at least in its Christian rendition, has meaning only insofar as it is caught up in this dynamic. And for this reason, the critiques of the new atheists—however easy it might be to dismiss them on purely propositional grounds—must be heard as another invitation “to become a fool that [one] may become wise” (1 Corinthians 3:18).

. . . . .

Drawing on scriptural resources, I have developed an account of the relationship between the truth and transformative significance of two central theological claims: (1) “Christ crucified is the savior of the world,” and (2) “God exists.” In summary, I have argued that these two claims display their true meaning under the conditions of an economy of mutual upbuilding, in which stumbling over Christ as stumbling stone leads again and again to the rediscovery of Christ as cornerstone.

Personally, I prefer to read the atheist literature cited, or even selections from other theological responses that are simpler, keeping in mind Ticciati’s caveats about what she perceives to be their shortcomings. Everything is colourful. Nothing black and white.


LeDrew, Stephen. The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Newheiser, David, ed. The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022.


 


2023-06-12

Varieties of Atheism # 3

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by Neil Godfrey

Having posted here often enough about my explorations into religion it is about time I investigated what atheism is all about. So many thanks to the University of Chicago Press for allowing me access to a review copy of Varieties of Atheism : Connecting Religion and its Critics compiled and edited by David Newheiser.

David Newheiser [DN] hails from a somewhat similar religious background as I do so it is interesting to compare notes. He offers his collection of essays from various authors as potentially opening “new possibilities for conversation between those who are religious and those who are not”. Maybe. You’ll have to make up your own mind about that likelihood and I return to the question at the end of this post. But for DN atheism is not simply a matter of “belief” (or “absence of belief”):

on the contrary, athe­ism incorporates ethical disciplines, cultural practices, and affective states. (p. 2)

DN begins his discussion with reference to the four famous horsemen of the New Atheist movement of not so very long ago: Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion).  Recall those bus ads? “Just be good for goodness sake”?

What DN points out is that such New Atheists not only had a narrow-minded view of religion but that even

their conception of atheism is similarly impover­ished. (p. 3)

So DN sweeps us up for a quick birds-eye view of past atheist authors — Bertrand Russell (“Why I Am Not a Christian”), Anthony Flew (God and Philosophy), Richard Swinburne (The Existence of God), Alvin Plantinga (Warranted Christian Belief) — before bringing us down to land in the pre-modern era of Europe. The Greek term (a-theist) came to be applied (in the sixteenth century) by Roman Catholic and Protestant apologists as they hurled the word at their opponents whom they deemed immoral.

One did not identify oneself as an atheist. One accused one’s enemies of being atheist. Until, the time of the Enlightenment:

Philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Paul-Henri d’Holbach were among the first to call themselves atheists, and a century later the practice was suddenly widespread. . . . It is only in the modern period that atheism and religion came to be equated with propositional belief . . . (p. 6)

Interestingly, atheism as an identity is linked with historical shifts in what we understand by the terms “science” and “religion”:

Medieval Christians understood scientia as an intellectual habit and religio as a moral habit. On this under­standing there could be no contradiction between religio and scientia, for they are not the same sort of thing. In the modern period, however, both science and religion came to be seen as bodies of objective knowledge that make propositional statements which are sometimes at odds. . .  Through the objectifying tendency of the time, religion and science were made to signify the opposite of what they once meant, and in the process a new attitude became possible — the rejection of religion on scientific grounds. These shifts in intellectual culture contributed to the development of atheism as an identity, but they are not enough to explain it. (p. 7)

So what might explain it? DN draws upon Alec Ryrie’s study in Unbelievers: an Emotional History of Doubt and his account of the “seventeenth-century crisis of faith” . . . .

accord­ing to Ryrie the argument was motivated by morality and emotion rather than rationality alone.

Emotional angst came to a boil over the hypocrisy of the church for some; for others it was over the “erosion of doctrinal certainties”. Christians attacked Christians, but the arguments over time saw believers having it out with atheists, and it was about morality as much as propositional beliefs about the existence of a god.

So DN comes down to the nineteenth century and this imposing gentleman:

Ludwig Feuerbach, DN summarizes, claimed God to be a human idea that was used to buttress political control. His primary focus in his criticism of religion was moral.

Feuerbach is therefore an important source for later atheism, and yet his critique of religion arose from a moral sensibility that was informed by Christianity. Feuerbach was raised as a Lutheran, and he cited Luther hundreds of times — even referring to himself at one point as “Luther II.” Like Luther, Feuerbach’s outrage at the complacency of many Christians was motivated by his concern for the values they espouse.

Because Feuerbach’s atheism is driven by a passionate moral sensitivity, it cannot be reduced to the absence of belief in the existence of a God or gods. (pp. 7f – my bolding)

Yet ironically Feuerbach “explicitly disavowed the label of atheism”, insisting that his objection was only to certain forms of religion. Others with the same core motivations — though not chary about identifying as atheists — listed by DN:

For more on the moral motivations of atheists such as Feuerbach, see Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx , chap. 6. — note in DN’s Varieties
  • Friedrich Nietzsche,
  • Karl Marx,
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
  • Frederick Douglass,
  • Percy Shelley,
  • Hypatia Bonner,
  • Mikhail Bakunin,
  • and the Mar­quis de Sade.

Atheism for these figures was about more than belief, or disbelief in a god. It was about political control, alienation, ethics, human wellbeing.

Stephen LeDrew argues that the New Atheism is likewise motivated by politi­cal commitments rather than science alone. – DN’s note

DN observes that the difference between modern atheism and the atheism of ancient eras is that today atheism has become “an identity people claim from themselves” instead of an accusation to be spat at enemies. But the one constant is that

atheism concerns motivations that run deeper than reason.

At the outset of this post I referred to DN’s hope that his book would open “new possibilities for conversation between those who are religious and those who are not”. We can begin to see the reasoning behind that hope.

I have sought to show that atheism is . . .  a polyphonic assemblage that de­velops in conversation with religious traditions. Despite its association with the cool light of reason, atheism is motivated by curiosity, defiance, delight, anxiety, anger, skepticism, and sympathy. (p. 8)

What is religion? Is it possible to arrive at a genuinely objective definition? DN refers to scholarly views that understand the modern concept of religion to have been “invented” in the seventeenth-century “alongside the novel conception of the state as secular.”

I have delayed my writing too long of late. I’d like to offer as an excuse, at least in part, that David Newheiser’s Varieties of Atheism has sent me down other rewarding book trails — see the evidence in images and links above — from where I’ve had to pull myself back to the review at hand. That would only be partly true, however. I look forward to discussing some selections from Varieties in coming posts.

 


2023-05-21

Varieties of Atheism #2

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by Neil Godfrey

Here’s another interview with David Newheiser (personal webpage). This one goes into more depth on the philosophical history and “varieties” of atheism. See the New Books Network –  The Varieties of Atheism: connecting religion and its critics.

I loved the books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, even some parts of Sam Harris, when they first came out — but in the interview I found myself in agreement that those works represent a kind of two-dimensional atheism. It’s as if they say that all it means to be an atheist is to reject the idea of god and to continue with life as if nothing else needs to change. (And usually the type of religion they attacked was the fundamentalist variety — which is not wholly satisfactory.)

When does atheism become “an identity”? In what social and political contexts? Atheism surely involves an emotional engagement and outlook to life and how the world could be. Atheism changes things on an ethical and political level.

David Newheiser is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith.

The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays show that, just as religion exceeds doctrine, atheism also encompasses every dimension of human life: from imagination and feeling to community and ethics. Contributors offer new, expansive perspectives on atheism’s diverse history and possible futures. By recovering lines of affinity and tension between particular atheists and particular religious traditions, this book paves the way for fruitful conversation between religious and non-religious people in our secular age.

New Books Network –  The Varieties of Atheism: connecting religion and its critics.


2023-05-20

Varieties of Atheism

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by Neil Godfrey

Atheism in 21st Century Australia is very different to that of 19th Century Russia, yet they are grouped under the same umbrella. The varieties of atheism in different times and cultures are the subject of a new anthology of essays that aims to reveal the diverse non-religious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of New Atheist figures like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.

Gone are the days when I could listen to an author interview on the car radio and then head to the local bookshop, confident that I would find copies of their book waiting for me on the shelf. Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore. So, while I cannot discuss this particular book based on my own reading experience, I can share a link to the conversation that aroused my interest.

The primary author or editor of the book explained their personal interest in religious traditions, which originated from their upbringing in the fundamentalist Christian tradition. Their journey took a significant turn at the age of nineteen when they were expelled from their community due to accusations of “heresy.” The interest in religion is not motivated by some sort of knee-jerk reaction to a bad time, but by a desire to understand an important part of human life and how it affects the way we treat each other — and ourselves.

That experience of expulsion from one’s community resonated with my own. I was also made to think about the idea that atheism is somehow related to a particular type of religious belief system. Anyway, I hope to catch up with the book and till then you may like to listen to the interviews I heard:

Conversations wth David Newheiser and George Pattison

The discussion about Dostoevsky is also intriguing.


2021-03-31

Another Sceptic Bites the Dust — Becomes a Believer

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by Neil Godfrey

I enjoyed this interview with Hercule Poirot actor David Suchet. I have set it at about the beginning of the section in which he describes how he came to become a Christian. His background was both Jewish and Catholic (not religiously committed in either case). The critical moment that interested me most is his account of how he suddenly asked himself why he kept thinking of his late grandfather as still in some sense being with him when did not believe in life after death.  I wonder what direction he would have taken had Pascal Boyer published his book, Religion Explained: How to Make a Good Religious Concept, twenty years earlier. [the link is to my post that in my view gives a very good explanation for the universal propensity of people to believe the dead are still with us]


2020-08-02

Argument for God — part 3, final (arguments against atheism)

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by Neil Godfrey

Barrett next raises what he sees as “reflective problems for atheists“. (For Barrett’s meaning of the term “reflective beliefs” see the opening post in this series: Gods (An Anthropology of Religion Perspective) and its specific application to belief/nonbelief in God, Argument for God — part 1.)

Barrett appears to be suggesting that an atheist must in some sense fight against his or her nature in order not to believe in god/s:

In addition to reinterpreting nonreflective beliefs that suggest superhuman agency, atheism requires combating conscious, reflective arguments for theistic thought. In some ways, the burden for certainty is greater for atheists than for theists. (111)

That last sentence is also problematic. “Burden for certainty”? But let’s continue.

Barrett quite rightly points out that the thrust of his explanations for why people believe in god/s or the supernatural of some kind indicates that belief is fundamentally easy. It would hardly be an explanation for the universal belief in the supernatural otherwise, though, would it! People do not need to “work hard” to figure out reasons why they believe. But then,

Given the sort of experiences they have, including the suggestion from others that God does exist, belief enjoys such rich intuitive support that no justification seems necessary. (Perhaps this is why some believers are such easy marks for those college professors that are hell-bent on dissuading them of their faith. They have few if any explicit reasons they can articulate for belief.) Atheism, on the other hand, has less in terms of intuitive support but brings more explicit rationale to the table. As a more reflective belief system, frequently intellectually discovered, atheism has more reflective opportunity for being challenged (as well as encouraged). Hence, explicit reasons for theism generally require some attention from the atheist. (111 – my bolded highlighting)

I can agree with all of that; I can even agree with those “college professors that are hell-bent” on demanding intellectual rigour from their students. In my journey out of belief, the last bastion I was left to face was my conviction that the Bible was “true” in some theological sense. Yes, I needed to address the explicit reasons for that belief just as I had had to address the explicit reasons for each other grounds for belief up till that point.

Reasons believers typically advance for their conviction that God exists are the need for agency to explain the existence of the universe and design in the world around us. Until the arrival of “Darwinism”, Barrett notes, atheists had no real “satisfying defense against their own intuitive sense that the world was designed and the congruent claims of theists.” That may be so. But I am reminded of a time when thunder was universally believed to be the noise of divine or spirit activity of some sort, according to some of our ancient records. And how for a long time planets strangely wandered in their idiosyncratic pattern — as if (how else?) moved by some divine or spirit agent.

Meanwhile, Barrett points out that Darwinism does not address “the origin of life or the mechanical fine-tuning that many astronomers and physicists have recently noted… (Leslie 1982, Leslie 1983, Carter 2002)”. Yes. There is still more to learn. Explaining thunder was but one of the first steps.

Then Barrett returns to his concern for “certitude”:

Atheists may also have epistemological difficulties that theists (depending on theology) do not have. Theists may confidently hold reflective beliefs operating under the assumption that their mind was designed by an intelligent being to provide truth, at least in many domains. For the atheist, another explanation for the certitude of beliefs must be found, or certitude must be abandoned. If our very existence is a cosmological accident and our minds have been shaped by a series of random mutations whittled by survival pressures (not necessarily demanding truth, only survival and reproduction, as a rat, fly, or bacteria can pull off with their “minds”), then why should we feel confident in any belief? And if we can’t feel confident in our beliefs, why do we go through life pretending we can? These questions may have satisfactory answers. The point is that unlike the theist, the atheist has far more explaining to do. This, too, makes atheism harder. (112 — again, my bolding)

I certainly have no problem accepting that our brains have not evolved in such a way that will enable them to grasp a complete understanding of everything we would like. I know quantum physics and even advanced maths are beyond my abilities to comprehend fully. I am quite prepared to accept that the noises I hear my old wooden house at night are the result of contraction from temperature drops, but I am not going to launch a crusade if one day we discover some other mechanism for the noises. In other words, all “certitude” is provisional — we are always open to learning more, revising the old, even discarding it, and moving on. That kind of provisionality as the bedrock is what has enabled us to survive at all, I suspect — not any unqualified or unquestionable “certitude”.

Returning to thunder. Yes, a naturalist has much more explaining to do than the person who attributes the noise to Hephaestus or Zeus or some other divine activity. Why should that be a problem? A child can readily imagine a monster at night; it takes some “reflective activity” to think of plumbing and other noises as the temperature drops. Not every rustle in the grass is caused by a stalking tiger.

Fighting Back Theism

“Fighting Back Theism” is a heading chosen by Barrett. For me it conjures images of the rebellious, renegade atheist fighting wilfully and desperately against the God he “knows” (or “wishes not”) to exist yet also hates. For Barrett,

Atheism just requires some special conditions to help it struggle against theism.

Continue reading “Argument for God — part 3, final (arguments against atheism)”


2020-08-01

Argument for God — part 2

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by Neil Godfrey

Continuing from Argument for God — part 1.

. . . .

I will try to refrain from commenting on Barrett’s argument this time. My wordy part 1 post was met with succinct comments that said all that needed to be said then. I hope those and other commenters do not desert me now.

Barrett’s argument in his chapter titled Why Would Anyone Not Believe in God?

In this chapter, I argue that atheism (the disbelief in any gods) as a shared worldview arises only under special conditions and is indeed the exception to the rule. Compared to theism, atheism is relatively unnatural and, unsurprisingly, a very uncommon worldview. (108)

Barrett’s view is that the psychological factors, or the mental tools, that encourage us to believe in god/s present special challenges for atheism. For these reasons, he explains, atheism is “relatively unnatural” and a “very uncommon worldview.” True, he concedes, some atheists have no mental difficulty, no angst, over being atheists, but he attributes this situation to special environments that he will address towards the end of his chapter. Meanwhile, he chooses to address four mental tools that he believes post serious challenges for atheism. (Those mental tools were discussed earlier in this series, beginning at Gods – 2.)

1. Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD) and Theory of Mind (ToM)


Barrett asks readers to turn back to an event described earlier in the book.

Silo explosion – HarzardEx

Consider the following event. A coworker of my wife once performed maintenance tasks on a farm. One day, Doug was working in a grain silo when leaked propane exploded. The first explosion rushed all around him and out the second- level windows high above him. Stunned by not being harmed by the blast, he tried to get out the door, only to discover that the explosion had jammed the doors. Knowing that a second, larger explosion was coming and he had no way out, Doug muttered hopelessly, “Take me home, Lord.” He distinctly heard a voice say, “Not yet,” and then felt some invisible hands lift him a dozen feet in the air and out of a second-story window, then safely to the ground below. Once he landed outside the silo, a safe distance away, the silo and attached barn exploded into rubble. He stumbled to the farm office, where coworkers took him to the hospital. At the hospital, Doug told the doctor that God sent angels to save him. The dumbfounded doctor reluctantly agreed it was a possibility given that the amount of propane gas in the man’s lungs should have been fatal, yet he was not only alive but also conscious and talking. Doug, the doctor, and all staff of the farm believed this event to be caused by supernatural agency. In each of their minds, HADD played a major role in forming this belief. (34 — you can read this particular passage in context and with further discussion by Barrett at slideshare.)

Barrett imagines the questions that might be asked and the answers of theists and atheists:

Who [what agency – it’s our HADD prompting the question] saved him? God or angels. (theist responding)

Who saved him? A coworker saved him. (atheist answering)

But ToM then asks: Why did Doug not see the coworker?

Naive Physics asks: How did the coworker lift Doug out of the second story window?

The atheist has another possible response:

But the atheist has another option, rejecting the detection of agency: HADD was wrong, and no agent or agency was present. Some unknown physical property protected Doug from the initial explosion and propelled Doug out of the second-floor window unharmed, or it happened just by chance.

To which Barrett responds:

But this type of explanation is no explanation at all. What it amounts to is a promissory note: I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m sure there is an explanation that has nothing to do with agency. (109)

Barrett says that the atheist’s deliberate choice to reject HADD is not at all easy:

One of the strengths of the human mind is its ferocious desire to explain, make sense, and find meaning. If we tell HADD that it has misexplained something, it demands that we come up with a satisfactory counterexplanation. Finding such a counterexplanation is not always simple: it requires conscious, reflective thought; it is slow; and it may require tapping our long-term memories for knowledge we incompletely hold. Even if this cumbersome reasoning process yields a counterexplanation that seems satisfying to the self, others, not sharing the same knowledge base, may find it dissatisfying . . . (110)

Note the life-threatening urgency at the heart of Doug’s story:

Recall that HADD’s insistence that it has detected agency may increase under conditions of urgency, as when survival or physical well-being is on the line. Similarly, denying HADD and settling on a satisfactory counterexplanation in urgent situations may be all the more difficult. 

Stories like Doug’s are, Barrett acknowledges, “relatively uncommon” and

the more clever and creative you are, the more likely you are to hit on some counterexplanation that has a ring of plausibility to yourself and others.

and

But HADD experiences are common, occasionally occur when rapid explanation is required, and often cannot be easily explained in purely naturalistic terms.

I am reminding myself that I promised to bite my lip and not comment. Continue reading “Argument for God — part 2”


2018-10-23

Response #1 to the Non Sequitur program with Tim O’Neill: MOTIVES

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by Neil Godfrey

Last weekend I watched Tim O’Neill present his arguments against the idea that there was no historical Jesus. I said I would respond in a post to his points and expected to cover it all in one or two sessions. But time is getting away from me this evening so here I will address just one point, Tim’s opening claims.

Tim begins by arguing that mythicism is appealing because it pulls the rug out from Christianity.

My response:

I am not interested in and do not refer in my comments to conspiracy theorists and cult-like following of a certain kind of mythicism that I equate more with interest in aliens, UFOs, Holy Grail, type theories. I am referring to the serious scholarly stuff led by the likes of Wells, Doherty, Price, Brodie and Carrier who ground their research and arguments in the publication of biblical and other recognized scholars.
  • I don’t know of any evidence to support that claim, the claim that, in general, people who are attracted to the mythicist viewpoint do so because they are motivated by some anti-Christian animus. No doubt. In fact, the evidence that I have been able to collate suggests that this is not true.  Some mythicist authors have in fact expressed the deepest respect for Christianity (e.g. Francesco Carotta, Paul-Louis Couchoud, Hermann Detering, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Tom Harpur, Edward van der Kaaij, Robert M. Price).
  • Some mythicists have even remained Christians after embracing mythicism and it is through acknowledgement of Jesus as a “mythical” creation they find deeper meaning in their faith (e.g. Thomas Brodie, Tom Harpur, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy).
  • I do not recall reading a single scholarly mythicist work that attacks Christianity as a faith. One of the most prominent warriors against Christianity is John Loftus and he has said that arguing mythicism would be the worst way to try to turn someone away from Christianity. I have posted the same thoughts here. Tim O’Neill tells us that Richard Carrier has said the same. So I don’t know if anyone is seriously attempting to attack Christianity by means of arguing that Jesus did not even exist. (No doubt there are some less well informed people who do this sort of thing, or I assume there must be in a universe as vast as ours, but I am speaking throughout of those who are focused on the scholarly arguments for mythicism by such authors as Brodie, Carrier, Doherty, RM Price and RG Price, Detering, Lataster, Fitzgerald, Ellegard, Wells, Parvus, Onfray and such.)
  • Further, if many who are attracted to mythicism are already atheists, then it hardly seems likely that they are motivated by a desire to find pretexts to undermine Christianity. I suppose some atheists are on a vendetta against Christianity, but not even the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens used mythicism as a deadly cudgel. They did nothing more than refer to its possibility in passing and with some diffidence. They certainly held back from using it as serious weapon.

Continue reading “Response #1 to the Non Sequitur program with Tim O’Neill: MOTIVES”


2018-10-16

9 Questions Asked of Atheists

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by Neil Godfrey

Alternet has posted a useful guide for those too afraid to ask certain questions of atheists, of for those too cock-sure about atheists they don’t believe they need to ask them. It’s by Greta Christina, ‘How Can You Be Moral?’: Here Are 9 Questions You Don’t Need to Ask an Atheist — And Their Answers.

Greta’s point is that certain questions “have insult or bigotry or dehumanization woven into the very asking”. That may be so for many, but her answers are there for the genuinely curious nonetheless.

1: “How can you be moral without believing in God?”

I think that question genuinely perplexes many people who have always been taught and mix with others who never question the idea that God is the source of morality.

2: “How do you have any meaning in your life?” Sometimes asked as, “Don’t you feel sad or hopeless?” Or even, “If you don’t believe in God or heaven, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

Oh, that one, especially, genuinely perplexes many believers.

3: “Doesn’t it take just as much/even more faith to be an atheist as it does to be a believer?”

4: “Isn’t atheism just a religion?”

Now those two questions do bug me just a little as per Greta’s larger point. Just a moment’s half-attentive thought should alert one that they are silly questions.

5: “What’s the point of atheist groups? How can you have a community and a movement for something you don’t believe in?”

There I do feel myself parting ways with Greta’s thought. Greta’s answer: Continue reading “9 Questions Asked of Atheists”


2018-08-06

What’s wrong with these atheists?

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by Neil Godfrey

Another atheist’s experience on an atheist community has echoed my own experience with an online Australian atheist forum. Mano Singham recently posted Well, that was interesting!

PZ at Pharyngula recently alerted me to what happened to Chrys Stevenson when she pointed out to the people on a Facebook group that is called Atheist Safehouse that claims to have 42,4114 members that their page featured a montage of eight atheists, all of whom were male and only one was non-white.

She suggested that they might want to make the image a little more inclusive. She promptly got banned from the group because apparently raising the issue of the photo alone is sufficient to get you banned!

. . . . .
But then a moderator from Atheist Safehouse named Brad Hoschar chimed in and said that the reason Chrys got banned was not because she raised the topic of the photo but because (I kid you not) she did not speak politely!

That’s my own emphasis there. It echoes my brief experience on AFA, the Atheist Foundations of Australia forum. I have not yet been banned (though I have not revisited the site for some weeks to know for sure) but it was obvious that moderators and others there were seizing on every word of mine to twist in a way to represent me as a homophobic(!) arrogant, bullying, pig-headed intruder who had the gall to not politely accept their abuse over my attempt to point out the logical flaws in arguments in support of the historicity of Jesus. They clearly wanted me off their site.

Why are atheist communities like that?