Professional atheist provacateur Richard Dawkins has been making the rounds with his new book, "The God Delusion."
I find Dawkins troubling, because for every five intelligent things he says, he comes out with two really annoying things. He's a proselytic atheist, which is sort of hard to wrap one's head around. And he is the patron saint of atheists who think they are, axiomatically, intellectually superior to non-atheists. Typical conversation:
A: "Religious faith is for the weak-minded."
B: "What? That's an insulting thing to say."
A: "I'm sorry if you thought I was being insulting. Really, what I meant to say was that only a childish idiot could believe in something as obviously ridiculous as an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do."
B: "What? You can't be serious. I guarantee you, people who are much more brilliant than you or I have been sincere religious believers."
A: "I'm sorry if you feel I'm insulting your religious faith."
B: "I don't have any religious faith! I just think it's incredibly arrogant of you to claim that you are intellectually superior to everyone who has ever had religious faith!"
A: "I never claimed to be intellectually superior. It's just that religious beliefs are so obviously insane, how could a sane, intelligent person believe them?"
Anyway, in the interview above Dawkins makes some good points about how people need to start coming out the closet as atheists, and how society needs to be accepting of that. I believe that. I believe that people who are atheists should feel free to say so, and it shouldn't negatively affect their chances of getting elected, or hired, or whatever.
But he also says a few things that I can't agree with at all. For example, this:
Yet moderate religion makes the world safe for extremist religion by teaching that religious faith is a virtue, and by the immunity to criticism that religion enjoys.
The world is made safe for people like them and Osama Bin Laden because we've all been brainwashed to respect religious faith and not to criticize it with the same vigor we criticize political and other sorts of opinions that we disagree with.
Here, Dawkins is making the mistake -- deliberately, it seems to me -- of taking what religious extremists say about their own motivations at face value. That is, when the Bin Ladens of the world say things like "I am murdering The Great Satan in the holy name of Allah!" Dawkins is willing to say, "Ah, well, then, it is clearly religious faith that is motivating these monsters."
When, of course, it is not. Religious faith has no more to do with the real motivations of most suicide bombers than video games had to do with the real motivations of the Columbine shooters.
People who kill and are mentally deranged may cite all sorts of "reasons" for what they do, and those reasons might include "God told me to." But they might also include "Beatles records tell me to" or "saucer people tell me to" or "ladybugs tell me to." You can see our own prejudices reflected in how we interpret these claims. Mainstream Christians might assume that "God told me to," meaning their own god, is craziness having nothing to do with their actual religion. But then they think the claim that "Satan told me to" actually has some merit. "Beatles records told me to" won't wash with your typical Baby Boomer. Yet, they might be genuinely worried about the effect of the music after hearing "Rob Zombie records told me to."
There is another, more common reason that people kill in the name of religion -- tribalism.
Religion encompasses three things: moral philosophy, metaphysics, and tribal identity.
Most religious people make no distinction between these facets, until they notice them come into conflict with each other. For example, the anti-gay practices of many Christian religions (tribal) is clearly at odds with Christ's commandment to love your neighbor as yourself (moral philosophy). Some religious people don't see the conflict because they don't notice. But once you do notice, you have to make a choice. Which is more important to you? Moral philosophy, or tribal identity?
Religion as it is actually practiced in the larger world is primarily about the moral and tribal aspects. When Martin Luther King invoked Christianity in his fight for civil rights, he was invoking the moral philosophy of Christianity. When people kill in the name of their god, they are usually invoking tribal identity.
However, religion as it defines itself is often primarily about metaphysics. You know, "God sent his only son do die on the cross and save us from hell." The existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, the importance of dying on a cross, the existence of hell -- these are all metaphysics, and therefore subjective. There is no way to verify them.
And, even if all these things turn out to be literally true, the person(s) who first proposed them -- the founder(s) of the religion -- didn't know that. They had no way to know that.
Nobody who ever founded a religion had any objective claim to metaphysical knowledge that was greater than anyone else's claim.
Nobody.
Religion in some form arises out of natural and basic human impulses. We shape things into stories, imposing narrative on what is probably just a bunch of stuff that happened. We look for patterns, and tend to find those patterns whether they exist or not. We anthropomorphize, and are inclined to see human-like thoughts and impulses behind natural forces that probably have no such thing. It's just how our brains work.
And maybe everything is a story, and maybe you can sometimes make it rain by dancing in the proper way at the proper time, and maybe the universe has a personality. Maybe the universe loves us. I don't know. Neither does anyone else. But everybody wants to know.
Religion and science both arise out of the same impulse: the endless questions that we ask about the world around us. How did we get here? Why is there something, rather than nothing? Why are humans different from other animals? Why do we get sick? Do our lives have a purpose? How can I keep the rain off my head? What causes earthquakes? What happens after we die? Why do we have to die? Why are we alive in the first place? What is life anyway? What's out there beyond our world? How do I make fire? How can I make the girl I like, like me back? How can I get my cousin to stop stealing my sheep?
Some of those questions may have no answer, and some of them have an answer, but the answer is no, and some of them have answers that we don't know yet. Some of them, we've figured out the answer, but that just leads to more questions. I mean, you solve the fire problem, and suddenly there's the wood shortage problem to deal with.
Our "questioning impulse" makes no distinction between practical, everyday kinds of questions, and big cosmological questions. The procedure we use for finding answers starts the same no matter what kind of question it is. We ask our fellow humans what they think the answer is. They tell us what they think the answer is. And we decide if we believe the answer or not. If we do, we stop looking. If we don't, we keep asking questions. We ask until we get an answer that satisfies us, or possibly until the tribe gets so annoyed being pestered by our endless questions that they kick us out and tell us to go annoy the tribe over the hill.
A child asks, "how do you make cookies?" and he receives an answer.
A child asks, "what happened to Grandpa when he died?" and he receives an answer to that, too.
Of course, his parents can demonstrate how to make cookies.
The way we answer these questions is passed on from generation to generation, and becomes culture, part of our tribal identity. The foods we make, the gods we believe in, the clothes we wear, the behavior we value. Tribal identity has staying power because most people are inclined, most of the time, to accept the answers they are given.
But you can make quite a stir, depending on your tribe, by challenging the answer to either sort of question. Challenge the "cookies" answer and become a pariah, or a great chef. Challenge the "after death" answer and become a pariah, or a prophet, or both.
If you're inclined to challenge your tribe, it's natural to ask not only, "is there a better answer?" but also, "how can you know your answer is right?"
With cookies, you can bake them and know they taste good. This leads, eventually, to the scientific method. You know the answer because you can do the same things and get the same results, and because your answers predict other answers which prove true. You know your answer is right because it works.
So, how can you know your answer about death is right? Your answer about God, the soul?
Well, for an individual, it comes down to the same thing. It's true if it works. It's true if it gets you out of bed in the morning, helps you treat your fellow humans better, helps you overcome your addictions, makes you happier in your day-to-day existence.
Here we come to the real fundamental conflict between science and religion. Science takes place in the external world and is, therefore, equally true for everyone all the time. Science is objective.
Religion takes place in the internal world, the world of the mind and emotions, and is, therefore, not equally true for everyone all the time. Religion is subjective.
That doesn't mean it is silly, or unimportant -- far from it. Art is also entirely subjective, and I think art is pretty important. Sometimes art even inspires people to do monumentally stupid and destructive things. Sometimes people kill over art, or die for art, or ruin their lives for art. Disagreements over art strain marriages and test friendships.
But there is an actual difference between art and religion, a problem presented by religion that is almost never presented by art.
It is this: most religions have a tradition that they describe objective reality.
To believe in a religion, the way most people understand belief, means to believe that your religion is true for everyone all the time. Reincarnation isn't just this thing that some people believe, it's what really happens. Or, what cannot possibly really happen.
So, you have something like a paradox. A religion's claim to objective truth is not only impossible to verify, but also impossible to defend against the myriad other, conflicting claims to an equally unverifiable objective reality made by every other religion.
This crossroads leads either to religious wars and schisms, or to universalism and liberal tolerance. Either you try to defend your beliefs as objective reality by attempting to destroy those who think otherwise, or you just admit that you can't and learn to live with that.
When I was young, I remember reading the Greek stories of gods and heroes, and wondering what the Greeks of the time thought about all that stuff. The Greeks were pretty sophisticated thinkers -- did they really believe in literal gods who came down from a literal mountain and turned people into literal spiders and so on?
It seemed so absurd. But then, modern Americans can be pretty sophisticated thinkers. Do we really believe that thousands of years ago there was a flood that literally drowned the entire world and a particular literal man who literally put two of literally every animal species on a single literal boat?
What I believe is that, deep down, almost no human being who ever lived has been as sure of the "what happens when we die?" answer as the "cookies" answer. In our heart of hearts, we don't believe in God the way we believe in gravity. And I think you can see this by our actions. Say what we want about believing in a better world after we die, most of us try to avoid death anyway. Premillenial types prattle on about how they think the world is about to end ANY MINUTE NOW, but most of them have children, buy insurance, invest in property, and take other actions that indicate they are planning for a future they claim to not believe in.
In fact, I believe that some of the more horrible actions taken by religious believers are born out of their lack of certainty, more than their conviction. They know that they are not sure, and yet, they think that other people are. Because they act so sure! So they have to act too. And so it turns into "The Emperor's New Clothes," with the added spice of young children being told that if they don't pretend to see the clothes they are going to a place where they will be tormented for all eternity.
Which brings me back to the Dawkins interview. When asked where he thinks religion comes from, in an evolutionary psychology sense, his answer:
Quite often, when you ask what is the survival value of "X", it turns out that you shouldn't be asking the question about "X" at all, but that "X" is a by-product of something else that does have survival value. In this case, the suggestion I put forward as only one of many possible suggestions, is that religious faith is a by-product of the childhood tendency to believe what your parents tell you.
So, inevitably, a child-brain that is pre-programmed to believe and obey what his parents tell it, is automatically vulnerable to bad advice like, "Worship the tribal juju."
I think he's partly right -- of course, parent-child idea transmission is where a particular religion comes from. But he fails to address two things.
One, is his unqualified assumption that "worship the tribal juju" is bad advice. "Kill the other tribe because they worship the wrong juju" is bad advice. And any advice which comes down to "don't plant crops this year, worship the juju instead" is obviously bad. But what about "worship the tribal juju by carving this statue"? Dancing a dance? Singing a song? Building a temple?
Of all the things that motivate people to art, tribal juju has resulted in some of the most spectacular examples we humans have produced. Paul and I have an ongoing argument over which building is the greatest building in history, the (classical) Parthenon or the (gothic) Notre Dame Cathedral, but both are powerful monuments to tribal juju.
Two, is that Dawkin's explanation covers why people who never question their tribe continue to worship the juju, but it doesn't explain why people can go through the process of challenging and examining their tribal beliefs, then come down in favor of juju anyway. Sometimes it's not even the juju they were raised with.
If all religious faith is based on blindly accepting what your parents tell you, what about conversion religions? Those suit-wearing doorknockers base their whole schtick on assuming that you aren't happy with the juju you inherited from your parents, but are still open to the whole juju concept.
Anyway, I think that the importance of metaphysical belief systems -- juju -- are overrated by believers and atheists alike. That's because they are tremendously important emotionally to the individuals who hold them. In the world we share, the objective world, it is actions that matter. Only actions can possibly matter to the outside world.
Think your religion makes you a good person? Fine, then act like one.
Think your atheism makes you a smart, liberal, tolerant person?
Fine. Act like one.
"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782 |
Contact Users: 736 Active, 1 Logged in - Time: 11:17
Netherlands. May 08 2008 05:15. Posts 10422
,
,
,
,