In the past few months, I've had some very interesting conversations about religion with my friends, that span an enormous range of experience from a Christian friend politely asking if I wasn't concerned about ending up in hell to an atheist friend wondering how I could possibly defend religion. (Well, okay, the conversation got a lot more colorful than that, but that's another story).
I confess I'm fascinated by the folks called "new atheists" for reasons I hope I can illustrate below. This second installment of my summaries of "The Case for God" by Karen Armstrong will take a quick glimpse at the history of atheism and a slightly longer look at the modern phenomenon of the "new atheists," plus some general goodies about religion, science and unknowing.
Readers of my summary might feel that Karen Armstrong is
picking on atheists, but really the blame should rest on my unholy fascination
with the idea of fundamentalist atheism. Armstrong has written 18 books (many
of them very thick) about religion, of which no more than a few pages address
atheism. By my count only 48 of this book's 332 pages talk about it and this is
by far the most she's said on the subject.
If you want the really short version, just scroll to the bottom of all of this and read the last two paragraphs, they sum it up pretty well.
Now, on to the history:
In short: yes sometimes atheists attack religion and sometimes particular religious sects attack atheism, but historically there have also been very fruitful dialogues. In the last hundred years, changes in science and culture have given rise to a new kind of atheism (along with some interesting developments in religion, but that's the subject of her other book "The Battle for God").
"In the past, theologians found that extended dialogue with atheists helped them to refine their own ideas. An informed atheistic critique should be welcomed because it can draw our attention to inadequate or idolatrous thinking. The written discussion of the atheistic philosopher J. J. C. Smart and his theist colleague J. J. Haldane is a model of courtesy, intellectual acumen, and integrity and shows how valuable such a debate can be-not least in making it clear that it is impossible to settle either the existence of nonexistence of God by rational arguments alone." (p. 323)
"A form of secular fundamentalism has recently
developed in the Western world that in style and strategy is similar to the
atheism of Vogt, Buchner, and Haeckel. While physicists have felt comfortable
with the unknowing that seems to be an essential component of intellectual
advance, some biologists, whose discipline has not yet experienced a major
reversal, have remained confident of their capacity to discover absolute truth
and some, abandoning the agnostic restraint of Darwin and Huxley, have started
to preach a militant form of atheism." (p. 301)
There's more than one kind of Atheism?
In summary: yes.
"[Richard] Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific
naturalism, originally formulated by d'Holbach, that has now become a major
world-view among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this 'scientism' have
been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have
all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett,
theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better
explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other 'new
atheists'--Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience,
and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist--religion is the cause of all
the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and 'poisons
everything.' They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational
movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.
"But other atheists and scientists are wary of this
approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod
in his discussion of the implication of evolution. Everything in the natural
world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that
science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because
it could work only with natural explanations. ...
"Gould also revived, in a new form, the ancient
distinction and complimentarity of mythos and logos in what he called NOMA
(Non-Overlapping Magisteria). A 'magisterium,' he explained, was 'a domain
where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse
and resolution.' Religion and science were separate magisteria and should not
encroach on each other's domain ... They were two distinct magisteria that
'hold equal worth and necessary status for any complete human life; and ...
remain logically distinct and fully separate lines of inquiry.'
"But the new atheists will have none of this, and in his somewhat immoderate way, Dawkins denounces Gould as a quisling. ... Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe that they alone are in possession of truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem to never have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation or indeed of the Higher Criticism. Harris seems to imagine that biblical inspiration means that the Bible was actually 'written by God.' Hitchens assumes that faith is entirely dependent upon a literal reading of the Bible, and that, for example, the discrepancies in the gospel infancy narratives prove the falsity of Christianity; 'Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps a moral one at that.' Like Protestant fundamentalists, Dawkins has a simplistic view of the moral teaching of the Bible, taking it for granted that its chief purpose is to issue clear rules of conduct and provide us with 'role models,' which, not surprisingly, he finds lamentably inadequate. He also presumes that since the Bible claims to be inspired by God it must also provide scientific information. Dawkins's only point of disagreement with the Protestant fundamentalists is that he finds the Bible unreliable about science while they do not." (p. 302-4)
Note: In some places like this you might be tempted to say: well she can't just say that and not back it up. She backs it all up over pages and pages, I just wasn't going to type the whole thing out and turn this into a 10,000 word blog post. If you want to references and citations, they're in the book. I'd also like to take a moment to say that any typos or mistakes in the quotes are mine and not in the original text.
Also, if you've read this far, let me add that my personal hope in posting this is that people who are religious but don't have time to research all this stuff will have a better understanding of the various discourses out there so they can choose if there are some atheists they want to have productive conversations with rather than reacting negatively to the loudest atheists. I am probably the most religiously knowledgeable member of a family that also includes atheists, so I'm very much in favor of productive dialogues across religions and belief systems. I also hope that if there are atheists reading this who don't have the time to research all this stuff they'll understand more completely the criticisms of the "new atheists" as distinct from any blanket notion about atheism as a whole.
Fundamental flaws of the "new atheists"
In summary: they don't really seem to understand religion as a whole or faith. Of course sometimes neither do religious practitioners.
"... while Dawkins's irritation with creationists
and ID [intelligent design] theorists is understandable, he is not correct to
assume that fundamentalist belief either represents or is even typical of
either Christianity or religion as a whole.
"This type of reductionism is characteristic of the fundamentalist mentality. It is also essential to the critique of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris to present fundamentalism as the focal core of the three monotheisms. They have an extremely literalist notion of God. For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that 'there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.' Having set up this definition of God as Supernatural Designer, Dawkins only has to point out that there is in fact no design in nature in order to demolish it. But he is mistaken to assume that this is 'they way people have generally understood the term' God. He is also wrong to claim that God is a scientific hypothesis, that is, a conceptual framework for bringing intelligibility to a series of experiments and observations. It was only in the modern period that theologians started to treat God as a scientific explanation and in the process produced an idolatrous God concept." (p. 304-305)
"The new atheists all equate faith with mindless credulity. Harris wrote The End of Faith immediately after 9/11, insisting that the only way to rid our world of terrorism was to abolish all faith. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he defines faith as 'Belief without Evidence,' an attitude that he regards as morally reprehensible. It is not surprising, perhaps, that he should confuse 'faith' with 'belief' (meaning the intellectual acceptance of a proposition) because the two have become unfortunately fused in modern consciousness. But like other atheists and agnostics before him, Harris goes on to declare that faith is the root of all evil. A belief might seem innocent enough, but once you have blindly accepted the dogma that Jesus 'can be eaten in the form of a cracker,' you have made a space in your mind for other monstrous fictions: that God desires the destruction of Israel, the ethnic cleansings of Palestinians, or the 9/11 massacres. Everybody must stop believing in anything that cannot be verified by the empirical methods of science. It is not enough to get rid of extremists, fundamentalists, and terrorists. 'Moderate' believers are equally guilty of the 'inherently dangerous' crime of faith and must share responsibility for the terrorist atrocities. [Quotes in this paragraph are all from "The End of Faith."]
"Our civic toleration of faith must therefore be
eliminated. 'As long as we respect the principle that religious faith must be
respected simply because it is real faith,' Dawkins insists, 'it is hard to
withhold respect for Usama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.' The obvious and
self-evident alternative is to 'abandon the principle of automatic respect for
religious faith,' because 'the teachings of 'moderate religion,' though not
extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.' This rejection
of the Enlightenment principle of toleration is new. It is, surely, itself
extremist. 'The very idea of religious tolerance,' Harris maintains, 'is one of
the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.' In this lack of tolerance,
they are again at one with the religious fundamentalists, even though they must
be aware that the absence of respect for difference has led to some of the
worst atrocities in modern times. It is hard to hear talk of elimination
without recalling the Nazi camp and the Gulag.
"As its critics have already pointed out, there is an inherent contraction in this new atheism, especially in its emphasis on the importance of 'evidence' and the claim that science always proves its theories empirically. As Popper, Kuhn, and Palyani have argued, science itself has to rely on an act of faith. Even Monod acknowledged this. Dawkins's hero Darwin admitted that he could not prove the evolutionary hypothesis but he had confidence in it nonetheless, and for decades, as we have seen, physicists were happy to have faith in Einstein's theory of relativity, even though it had not been definitively verified. Even Harris makes a large act of faith in the ability of his own intelligence to arrive at objective truth-a claim Hume or Kant would have found questionable."
There's more to this section that I'm going to
summarize simply as: saying most modern evils are due to religion is a gross
oversimplification.
"Religious fundamentalists also develop an exaggerated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This makes the critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to the mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy is it essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth. ... In the past, theologians have found it useful to have an exchange of views with atheists ... But it is difficult to see how theologians could dialogue fruitfully with Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens because their theology is so rudimentary." (p. 307-308)
Repercussions
In summary: polarizing science and religion isn't helpful. It creates conflicts, stifles scientific creativity and discourages exploring the state of unknowing that seems to be part of being human.
"A vicious polemic is likely to exacerbate already existing tensions. We have seen that when they feel under attack, fundamentalists almost invariably become more extreme. Hitherto Muslims had little problem with Darwin, but a new hostility toward evolutionary theory is now developing in the Muslim world as a direct response to Dawkins's attack. In a world that is already so dangerously polarized, can we really afford yet another divisive discourse?" (p. 323)
[Note: If you're skipping to the end, start here:]
"Typical of the fundamentalist mind-set is the
belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new
atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth. But science depends on faith,
intuition and aesthetic vision as well as on reason. ... the danger of this
secularization of reason, which denies the possibility of transcendence, is
that reason can become an idol that seeks to destroy all rival claimants. We
hear this in the new atheism, which has forgotten that unknowing is part of the
human condition, so much so that, as the social critic Robert N. Bellah has
pointed out: 'Those who feel they are ... most fully objective in their
assessment of reality are most in the power of deep, unconscious
fantasies.'" (p. 309)
Solutions
"Today, when science itself is becoming less
determinate, it is perhaps time to return to a theology that asserts less and
is more open to silence and unknowing. Here, perhaps, dialogue with the more
thoughtful Socratic forms of atheism can help dismantle ideas that have become
idolatrous. ... When we have eaten a strong-tasting dish in a restaurant, we
are often offered a sorbet to cleanse our palate so we can taste the next
course properly. An intelligent atheistic critique could help us rinse our
minds of the more facile theology that is impending our understanding of the
divine. We may find that for a while we have to go into what mystics called the
dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing. This will not be easy for
people used to getting instant information at the click of a mouse." (p.
326-327)
Tune in next week when I summarize her remarks on the history of faith!
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