{Note: The following essay is in two parts. The second part immediately follows the first. Because the subject of this thread focuses on a work by a philosopher rather than original religious scriptures, it has been posted in the “Philosophical Literature “ forum rather than in “Religious Texts.”}
“But whence can wisdom be obtained and where is the place of understanding?” (Job 28:12)
William James Redux:
The New Atheism vs. “The Will to Believe”
Part One: The Will Not to Believe
Among the many hagiographies I heard in my youth, the one which stands out is a slightly irreverent story about the saintly scholar Teresa of Avila (1515-1582.) While St. Theresa was making an arduous journey, a sudden storm brought a horrifying clap of thunder which frightened her donkey so much that he threw her straight into a mud puddle. As legend has it, St. Theresa sighed, lifted her eyes heavenward, and said, “Lord, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!”
Fast forward five centuries. Over the millennia, human history seems to have backed up St. Teresa’s wry observation. Persecution, enslavement, and genocide continuously plagued its victims, from Biblical times, up through the latter years of the Roman Empire, during the Spanish Inquisition,the Reformation (for both Catholics and Protestants, depending on the monarch), and the hysteria-fueled witch hunts in western Europe and the American colonies, to the violence of atheistic totalitarianism in both China and Stalinist Russia, all overshadowed by the tragic cloud of the Holocaust, the inexorable sin of modern-- if not all-- times. At the end of the twentieth century, religious persecution still was raging in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and as the new millennium began, on a September morning in 2001, the United States suffered devastating acts of violence attributed to members of a radical religious sect from The Middle East, followed by two wars in two different countries in that part of world, while tensions within The Holy Land itself–a veritable ground zero for religious conflict- intermittently continue to flare up. These events are just a few of many that have stirred the witch’s brew of seemingly intractable ethnic and religious bias against the “Other.” Yet despite the undeniable turmoil and tragedy, various religious cultures seem to be holding on. Nevertheless, if The Lord can still count on having friends – listed perhaps on some kind of celestial “Facebook” – His status here on Earth seems to have fallen, like St. Teresa, into a mud puddle of its own.
The current “state-of-the- art” technology hasn’t- yet!- enabled us to read the minds or look into the hearts of our neighbors; for this we can be thankful. One can speculate, however, on the reasons by which an individual would characterize himself as an atheist. For instance, like the existential anti-heroes who wander aimlessly through novels and film, he may have been buffeted around so much by the vagaries of modern life that he has become mired in cynicism, a dark but endurable milieu in which faith in God –and certainly the outward trappings of worship – are irrelevant. Or he may be a perpetual adolescent, one who is so emotionally sensitive that he considers the aforementioned vagaries not merely as the inevitable ups-and-downs of the human condition but a personal affront –a direct assault on him! Somehow the person might latch on the notion that if God really existed, he would never be treated so badly. Such solipsism might be reduced to “I am miserable; that means God must not exist.” Or perhaps the person had received a more-or-less secular upbringing out of which he has inherited no apparent religious traditions or practices. There may not be a place for faith in a person quite content to live in the here-and-now, a bit like the “things as they are” mantra of Wallace Stevens, but without the poet’s pervasive credo for the“necessary angel” of the–albeit secular - imagination. Some individuals are de facto atheists through force of habit, or for the reason that the question has never come up, in either case, he feels no need to seek spiritual succor. Others actively reject beyond anything that can immediately perceive through the senses. (Ironically, not even scientists limit their thinking in that way, as we hope to show later in the second part of this discussion. )
None of these hypothetical non-believers are intrinsically harmful to society as a whole; indeed, in a pluralistic or “enlightened” culture, to ostracize or persecute one who professes no religious belief is every bit as erroneous as disrespect or persecution against members of a particular religion. It cannot be overemphasized that, generally speaking, committed Secular Humanists are often as conscientious, charitable, and ethical as the best of their church-going brethren –if not more so, because the secularist’s motives for doing good do not stem from an ultimate desire to achieve, in a future life, the reward of eternal salvation. The freedom to listen to one’s conscience and to follow its direction according to one’s will is –or certainly should be – the inherent right of every human being. Within an individual, atheism is in itself a neutral intellectual stance in that is self-contained.
It is only when atheism adopts its own kind of orthodoxy, when it becomes doctrinaire, and proselytizes for its unilateral acceptance that it threatens an individual’s faith. This shift in the way segments of human race think of their place in the universe amid the absence of a Supreme Being has been called “The New Atheism.” Books by celebrity atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris have appeared on Best Seller lists, and within the realm of popular media have been given air time on late night talk shows and bandwidth on the worldwide web. Even sitcoms and standup comedians have slyly inserted mocking one-liners against organized religion. (To a certain extent, there have always been enclaves of an atheistic world view among the intelligentsia. In the early 1960s the Vassar alumnae in Mary McCarthy’s wildly-popular novel, The Group, advised one another to read the Bible– “as literature.”)
Lately the collective mind-set among the educated classes of the West who have not only turned their backs on organized religion but also have abandoned all belief in a Creator or a Supreme Being seems more prevalent –and aggressively vocal. There has been a stark change from the way atheists formerly regarded their believing brethren. According to CNN news, “What the new atheists share is a belief that religion should not be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument. . .Their tone is overtly confrontational rather than gently persuasive.” Adherents of this kind of atheism seem to act as if they are on a sacred mission, adapting the same methods which religion used to gain converts with more imperious force than a Tudor cardinal, and more fiery zeal than any band of Jehovah’s Witnesses ringing doorbells on a Saturday morning.
The primary reason for this position is that there has not yet been found any tangible or verifiable evidence of the existence of God, nor, as they believe, can such facts be established by means of rational argument.
Secondarily, atheistic ideas have surfaced perhaps as a reaction to actions and notions expressed by believers. When some atheists are asked the reason for disdaining religious belief, the facile answer often runs toward “All the evil in the world has been done in the name of God.” Though a bit simplistic, that retort is at least partially valid: often the justification for war includes some statement from the nation’s leader that “God (or justice, or goodness, etc.) is on our side.” Invariably, though, the nation’s enemy adamantly trusts that God is on their side as well. It is difficult to believe that God in His infinite wisdom (justice, goodness, etc.) would hedge His bets, or claim to be on both sides, like the Mayor of New York during a Subway Series between the Mets and the Yankees. Blaming religion for the woe in this Valley of Tears may be admittedly an historically valid opinion in the sense that it was the human interpretation of religion in this--not the next -world that used the pretext of “God’s will” to execute the horrifying deeds. It takes monumental presumption, not to mention exquisite hubris-- for a leader of a country or government to say that he knows exactly what “God’s will” might be.
Conventional wisdom posits that the basis of knowing “God’s will” as well as forming specific religious beliefs and practices within Judeo-Christian cultures is The Bible, constituted from a set of books in The Old and New Testaments, which the devout consider to have been
divinely inspired and thus represent “The Word of God.” In this idea atheists have found a vulnerability, another way of showing how religion does not stand up to rational argument. When a religious person says, “ The Bible is true because it says so in The Bible,” he or she has committed a sin of logic - “begging the question.”
In addition to falling victim to the fallacy of circular reasoning by its devotees, the Bible has come under fire with disputes over its authenticity. Because its origin stretches deep into antiquity, the provenance of the manuscripts is cloudy with questionable authorship, and as two of the world’s major religions evolved, large segments of the tome have been subject to mistranslation and egregious redaction, with several books –The Apocrypha-- banned from the finished Bible entirely. Because both the Old and New Testaments sprang from a culture quite different from civilization as it developed down through the centuries, a thorny problem grew in the attempt to adapt the teachings of the Bible to that of various and highly disparate cultures. It doesn't help matters that, taken as a whole, passages in one part of the Bible directly contradict what a different chapter and verse proclaims. The confusion surrounding the Holy Book did not escape the irreverent wit of Mark Twain in his Letters from the Earth: “It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”
Another possible explanation for the rise of the New Atheists is a reaction to the tendency of some sects of Christians -variously called in recent decades “The Moral Majority” or “The Religious Right”-- to exert influence upon social mores and especially legislation. The fundamentalist Christians desire to downplay the Wall between Church and State implicit in the United States Constitution in order to effect changes in the country’s laws and social structure. Some of the causes cherished by this Christian faction are: “faith-based initiatives” (which would allow federal funding of church-based charities and educational groups), allowing prayer in public schools, “pro-life” as opposed to “pro-choice” in abortion and birth control issues, campaigns against rights for gay people, as well as the most-contentious wedge issue: the espousal of “creationism” to replace or at least share an equal footing with evolution, upon which the life sciences form a basic framework and which most Christian fundamentalists consider merely a “theory.”
Aside from the fact that everyone has a right to one's own opinion, it would seem that Science and Religion would be on the proverbial “level playing field” in that each side would have the ability to present evidence to back up its opinion. Lurid news stories about financial and sex scandals among institutional Christian religions and individual clergymen, often made worse by the inevitable cover-up, have thrown fuel into the passionate fire. More trivially, the atheistic cause has locked on isolated anecdotes ripe for mocking: unquestioned adherence to religious doctrines based on the Bible’s literal text rather than allegorical truth, sermons and tracts which wildly underestimate the actual age of geographical earth, and the “Creation” museum which feature homo sapiens incongruously living side-by-side with dinosaurs, as if the dioramas had been designed in the Hanna Barbera studio. Another point which atheists are fond of bringing up is that it took the Catholic Church 400 years to apologize for having excommunicated Galileo, yet one can't help thinking that it might take another 400 years for Science to forgive the Church for maligning Galileo in the first place.
There is, however, an astounding aspect of the controversy has arisen in that many members of religious congregations do not completely know whereof they speak. If someone should ask a an American church member about the core tenets of his religion, the odds of his coming up with the correct answer are about as good as his using the apostrophe appropriately. In a recent newspaper column,”The Unbelievable Truth,” Daniel Dennett maintains that “atheists and agnostics tend to know more about the world’s religions than believers do.” According to research from the Pew (no pun intended) Forum on Religion and Public Life, on average, nearly half the people who took the survey were unable to answer questions about the doctrines of their own faith. For instance, 54% of Protestants did not know Martin Luther’s seminal role in the Protestant Reformation, while Catholics did not fully comprehend the Church’s doctrine concerning transubstantiation. (Although the article did not spell this out, many Christians and a large number of Catholics are misinformed about the nature of the Immaculate Conception, as they erroneously think the concept has something to do with Virgin Birth.)
Dennett further explains that because of the scientific knowledge that came to light over the centuries, The Church found itself in the uncomfortable position of being forced to defend the plausibility of its tenets and to maintain its viability in society. There were two ways in which religion could reconcile itself with these “new sophisticated understandings.” The first choice: to “[t]reat the long steady retreat into metaphor and mystery as a process of increasing wisdom” was, in Dennett’s opinion overruled by the second tactic: to "[c]loak all the doctrines in a convenient fog and then not just excuse the faithful from trying to penetrate the fog, but celebrate the policy of not looking too closely at anyone’s creed –not even your own.” The result of this ecclesiastically-sanctioned obfuscation, Dennett believes, is that “the most religiously affiliated people have no firm knowledge or even opinions” about religion, including the one in which they worship.
Ironically, atheists seem to know more about religion than churchgoers. Dennett believes that atheists are “curious” and “truth-loving folks,” as opposed to those who “are afraid of what they might discover if they read the fine print too carefully, so they sign on the dotted line without glance, and then often feel the need to defend their lack of curiosity as an example of their holy trust in their own faith.” Dennett concludes his argument with the idea that some theologians are “well-nigh indistinguishable from atheists,” because the deeper their study of doctrine goes, the less likely the core beliefs can stand up under scrutiny. The benchmark for this phenomenon is the increasing appearance of “pastors who no longer hold the beliefs that are professionally obliged to preach, but go on executing their duties. . .These folks are caught in a web of what might be called designed miscommunication, and it takes an unmeasured toil on their consciences.”
Pastors preaching what they themselves don’t believe? Will atheism capture the soul of humanity– if we, indeed, still have souls? Is religious faith about to receive its own last rites, and is God really dead? Are our most cherished truths doomed because they were never true? And will we leave poor St. Teresa out there in the mud-covered field? Or—
–did an American philosopher already resolve this issue over 100 years ago? Stayed tuned for part two, which immediately follows.
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Originally Posted by AuntShecky
