The Science of Religion

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Mar 15, 2009 at 11:18


This started off as a response to a comment in my previous diary, "Karen Armstrong On Bill Moyers Journal", but after posting it, I realized that it deserved more prominence, not least because of the fact Chris has been hammering home for years on end--the religious pluralism (including atheism, agnosticism and secularism) of the progressive coalition.

There is a strain of atheism, represented by folks like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which sees religion as a threat to be attacked in the name of science.  This is, I would argue, a form of secular fundamentalism that misunderstands almost as much as religious fundamentalism does.

Science and religion are two quite different things, and trying to judge them both by one standard is guaranteed to produce all sorts of confusion.  On the flip, I'm reproducing part of an article from Science magazine that indicates a different way--it's a brief passage dealing with a scientific approach to understanding how religion functions in human society, based on our evolved biology.  It clearly recognizes that the purposes and methods religion employs are quite different from those of science, and thus it's easy, in light of this approach, to see how foolish it is to judge religion in terms of science, as simply an inferior form knowledge-gathering.  
Paul Rosenberg :: The Science of Religion
In response to my earlier diay, Semblance wrote:

Moyers is wrong

The Golden Rule is not the core of religion. It is the core of more fundamental human behavior. Religion is just trying to take credit for it.

The core of religion is belief without evidence (faith), which is a vice. People shouldn't do that.

And I wrote two replies.  The second is the more important one, and the reason I'm writing this diary.  But the first helps set it up, so I republish it as well:

Yes, And No

You're right that the Golden Rule is more fundamental than religion.  But that doesn't mean it can't be the core of religion.  In fact, it makes perfect sense that religion has as its core something fundamental to human nature.

But when you say, "The core of religion is belief without evidence (faith)," you're making the same mistake the fundamentalists make, but in a different form.  You're using the framework of logos to try to comprehend mythos.

The fundamentalists look at a religious text and they interpret it as if it were a scientific treatise.  You look at religion as a whole and say that it's about the content of the beliefs as if they were scientific claims.  But science and religion are two very different sorts of things.  And the core of religion is not beliefs, the core of religion is practice.

"By their fruits ye shall know them," as they say in the trade.

And here's the second response:

Furthermore, A More Scientific View Of Religion (From SCIENCE Magazine, No Less)

Expanding on what I wrote above, William James argued over a century ago, in The Varieties of Religious Experience for an approach that treated religion scientifically, but that did not impose alien standards on religion. Religion had its own purposes, and needed to be judged in terms of them, he argued in essence.  Judging individual truth claims and how they are supported is imposing the scientific framework invasively, ignoring the purposive structuring of the religious enterprise.  There may be a place for such an approach, but it does not yield understanding of religion as a whole.  For that, one needs to take a much more comprehensive approach, which seeks to understand the purposive framework, rather than to invalidate it based on grounds that are foreign to it.

In that spirit, science has come a long way in 100+ years.

I found this quite fortuitously (it was already open in my Adobe Acrobat window, I just hadn't read it yet), from SCIENCE VOL 316 18 MAY 2007, "The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology," Jonathan Haidt, pp. 998-1001:

    Humans attain their extreme group solidarity by forming moral communities within which selfishness is punished and virtue rewarded. Durkheim believed that gods played a crucial role in the formation of such communities. He saw religion as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them" (30). D. S. Wilson (35) has argued that the coevolution of religions and religious minds created conditions in which multilevel group selection operated, transforming the older morality of small groups into a more tribal form that could unite larger populations. As with ants, group selection greatly increased cooperation within the group, but in part for the adaptive purpose of success in conflict between groups.

    Whatever the origins of religiosity, nearly all religions have culturally evolved complexes of practices, stories, and norms that work together to suppress the self and connect people to something beyond the self. Newberg (37) found that religious experiences often involve decreased activity in brain areas that maintain maps of the self's boundaries and position, consistent with widespread reports that mystical experiences involve feelings of merging with God or the universe. Studies of ritual, particularly those involving the sort of synchronized motor movements common in religious rites, indicate that such rituals serve to bind participants together in what is often reported to be an ecstatic state of union (38). Recent work on mirror neurons indicates that, whereas such neurons exist in other primates, they are much more numerous in human beings, and they serve to synchronize our feelings and movements with those of others around us (39). Whether people use their mirror neurons to feel another's pain, enjoy a synchronized dance, or bow in unison toward Mecca, it is clear that we are prepared, neurologically, psychologically, and culturally, to link our consciousness, our emotions, and our motor movements with those of other people.

Obviously, it is quite easy for all this to lead us into scientifically false beliefs, and that needs to be vigorously resisted.  But clearly there is much, much more that's also going on here, and because it's rooted in our biology and our evolution, it's not going away anytime soon.  So the real, sensible challenge is how to make the most of it, while mitigating the worst of it.

Simply wishing it all out of existence is every bit as irrational, faith-based nonsense as you take religion itself to be.

Obviously, for those who are already atheists or agnostics, the above can be read as a more thoroughgoing explanation of how the "error" of religion comes about.  But for believers, it can just as easily be read as an explanation of how God formed humanity to be able to apprehend Him, and, through struggle, to overcome our spiritual separation.

In short, the scientific understanding offered above is basically faith-neutral.  Science and religion remain two separate enterprises.  We cannot, of course, refrain from reflecting and acting upon the relationship between the two.  But for the sake of our own clarity, we ought to do our best to reflect and act at a level that is separate from both of them.

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The Science of Religion | 136 comments
it is an inferior form (4.00 / 1)
of information. Yes there is/was a purpose for religion and you may be hitting on it. However it was evolutionarily beneficial to create religion, and then evolve from a polytheism to monotheism, and ultimately evolve to subtract one more. Perhaps inferior has too much stigma how about outdated. Religion is nothing more than a particular cultures' interpretation on the human condition.
Did You READ The Passage From SCIENCE Magazine? (4.00 / 5)
Because all you seem to have done is reguritate pre-packaged talking points--talking points which the article refutes.

Religion is not an inferior form of information, because it isn't a form of information at all.  You are simply making the same mistake the fundamentalists make.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Inferior. (0.00 / 0)
The article is tossing around the same sort of scientific explanations of religion which have been debated for a few decades now. It isn't a "form of information" but religions do very clearly use a religious epistemology as opposed to scientific epistemology. As religious epistemology doesn't favor truth of fiction, it really is a terrible path towards the truth. In many scientific circles, being false is a condemnation. Whereas in religious circles, being false wouldn't stop it from being the Truth™ with associated demands to believe that or fairies will eat your toes, you'll burn forever in fire, or goblins will steal your children or something.
[ Parent ]
Religion is not information (0.00 / 0)
You're right, religion is not a form of information at all.  It's a bunch of vague and undefined feelings that come from the experience of existing as a human being in the world.  It's inchoate and totally personal.  It tells us nothing about the actual world or how we fit into it, just how we feel about all that.

You can study religion scientifically, and people like William James have done that.  But you can't take the precepts of religions as having any truth value in the external world, or even as defining concepts that can have truth values.  They're just feelings.

I have 'em myself.  Everyone does.  That doesn't mean you should take them seriously.  Or even talk about them in public.  We all have our little rituals.  There's no point making a big deal about them.  They shouldn't influence how we treat other people or how we make decisions in any substantive way.  They're just life's little party favours.

[ Parent ]
religion and science are not "information" (4.00 / 6)
they are ways of understanding the world, and for different purposes.  They are also social entities, they are individual practices, they are, in short, ethoses and parts of social systems.  There are people who speak abotu religion that are phenomenally intelligent and extremely useful for all (e.g. Abdolkarim Soroush, who tries to bring together scientific philosophical thinking with quranic scholarship) and there are people who speak in the name of science who don't understand how much humility is (should be) required to ddo so.  It's easy to say that evolution is accepted - but are you relying on your own thinking or are you relyingg on what other people have told you?  And in that case, how is the church of science in this instance for you vastly superior to the unitarian church?  Can you explain how your car works?  So there is a difference too in the ways in which science is used as an argument in popular culture to justify things (i.e. science as a faith) and its actual practice.  You can see where this can go drastically wrong in overreliance on people like Marx or neoliberals - both of which appeal to "we have a scientific, expert, and therefore unquestionable understanding."
[ Parent ]
Yes. (0.00 / 0)
If you really want I could explain evolution to you. I'd recommend talkorigins.org to do so.

Also, for cars: http://www.howstuffworks.com/e...

--

You need take nothing on faith in science. There's either an reasonable explanation or it's complete BS. Even if you can't understand it, I can show you evolution in bacterial resistances to antibiotics and a large array of functional examples.

Yes, there is an appeal to authority when referencing scientific information that doesn't apply to the religious. If a scientist tells you that on April 13th, 2029 an asteroid is going to come remarkably close to Earth, you can believe it. This is because there's a wide array of self-checking and modeling and good science behind the prediction. When some religious person or woo practitioner says that the world will end December 21st 2012 because of the Mayan Calendar they do not command such authority because their way of "knowing" that is frankly stupid.

Science commands some authority because nobody prayed the internet into existence.

[ Parent ]
Talkorigins.org Was My Most-Used Bookmark In The Late 90s (4.00 / 2)
And yet, I think you miss the point of the comment you're responding to.  It's certainly quite false when creationists claim that there's no difference between them and real biological scientists, since both rely on "faith".

But this isn't the argument that dr anonymous is making.  Rather, he's making the original of which that argument is a crude caricature.  Scientists do have to rely on faith, as we all do in our everyday lives, but it's not an arbitrary or capricious faith, and it does does require us to ignore all sorts of other evidence to the contrary.  

dr anonymous is simply articulating a realist view of how science--an altogether human enterprise--actually works, which was once a form of heresy, but is now fairly widely accepted.  The success of the scientific enterprise is its own foundation and justification, far more secure than any sort of philosophical justification based on apriori arguments or whatever.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
you said that much better than i could :) (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
Thank you for this (4.00 / 4)
It can be amazingly hard to explain to sciencey types where religious people are even coming from. In some scientific circles, you just get this attitude that all religious people are just dumb, ignorant fools. And the key is explaining hat very few actual practicioners actually use religious texts to explain something like the literal creation of the Earth or whatever. And that is very clearly what the writers of the bible or the Vedas or the qur'an were concerned about, either. The creation myths were ways to start talking about people and ethics and society.

And on that note, "Christians" more concerned about dinosaurs and gays than love thy neighbor make me want to vomit.  

Dawkins is the only scientist in that (4.00 / 2)
crowd, and his views toward science itself are utopian and 18th century.    
[ Parent ]
I'm a research physicist (0.00 / 0)
It's pretty pervasive, actually. Not universal, but quite common
[ Parent ]
Bullshit. (0.00 / 0)
Dawkins readily admits that he could be wrong about the existence of gods and that numerous religious scientists have done a lot of brilliant work.  

The truth about John McCain.
[ Parent ]
Thank you! (0.00 / 0)
Every time someone trots out the "Dawkins is so mean" card I just want to spit.  Haven't any of his critics ever actually paid attention to anything he's said?
[ Parent ]
I've met the rare exceptions. (0.00 / 0)
After a few questions it becomes obvious that they aren't as exceptional as they think they are.
[ Parent ]
This is disingenuous . (4.00 / 1)
A great many religious believers do use their religious texts to explain the natural world. For example, only about half of Americans accept the theory of evolution. We are constantly hearing about school boards and state legislatures trying to water down their science standards exactly because so many religious people actually do believe in a literal interpretation of scripture. Louisiana passed an anti-evolution "academic freedom" bill less than two months ago.

Pretending that most religious believers are the liberal or moderate variety is just ridiculous and contrary to all polling on the subject.  

The truth about John McCain.

[ Parent ]
And this argument is disingenuous (0.00 / 0)
as it has very little to do with what I actually said.  I was talking about the content of the actual religious texts, not making any claim about the majority of believers in the US.
[ Parent ]
thanks for this post (4.00 / 7)
my contributions: some distinctions -

a) faith vs. analysis.  Science relies on each of these though not at the same points or for the same purposes.  Trusting your senses to give you an accurate picture of the world - let alone trusting scientific instruments - is at heart an act of faith upon which the rest of scientific thinking is built.  Where science excels and religion suffers as a system of accumulating knowledge about the world is that science is better at generating descriptions of the world that seem to accord with what is actually out there - i.e. its methodology, its humility (when it is remembered ;), and its honesty about how well it represents the world.  The Uncertainty principle and other distinctions (e.g. between "theory" and "law" that intelligentt design people like to point out) are actually STRENGTHS of science in that it is good at understanding its limitations as a way of understanding the world.  Those are things to keep in mind, and actually HELP undermine the flying spaghetti monster arguments that intelligent design and other neofundamentalist pseudoscientists will offer.  Science is all about HOW you do things, not just what you say or build.

b) I really appreciated that in your post, you understood that there are many, many ways of being "religious" and/or spiritual.  We can use contributions from science and other areas to inform how we go about doing this - how we understand our faith and/or spirituality or our worldview in general.  For example, evolutionary biology tells us that altruism is a frequency dependent trait - i.e. the more people are altruistic, the better it increases everyone's overall benefit - but this also increases the incentive for people to free ride (i.e. be selfish) to increase their own fitness.  It's one way of looking at things - not the only way - but it actually provides a strong moral impetus behind the Golden Rule - because what it says is that by practicing the Golden Rule you are striving not just to be fair, but for the your social group as a whole and the world as a whole to be better, even perhaps at the cost of your own individual well being to some extent in minor ways or major ways.  This is where the Golden Rule and Turn the Other Cheek overlap, and you can see the value of it and the message in situations like Sri Lanka or Palestine or other places where faith is directly invoked to ask people to look to their personal or group advantage to the detriment of other people.

c) finally, sometimes it helps sto remove this false dichotomy between "science" and "religion" (without eliminating the idea that some descriptions of the world are likely more accurate than others).  Many religious precepts originated in what might have been useful or what might have bolstered he insterests of the powerful - just as many scientific interests did so as well.  Race theory was very influenced by science (specifically Linnaeus and evolutionary theory).  Class theory was similarly influenced by evolutionary theory (social darwinism).  Medicine and intellectual property rights and how indigenous people are treated have all been influenced by science and have led to disastrous consequences.  So really at heart what we need in both science and religion is a move away from fudamentalism and an appreciation of the need to speak about what we do and don't know carefully and simultaneously to call bullshit on people who won't do this (whether scientists or more frequently pseudoscientists promoting at least in part a political agenda) - something we're especially inclined to do if we don't agree with that political agenda.  But any political argument (i.e. the fundamentalist atheists) that tells 90% of humaniy or whatever it is (perhaps more) that their belief system that they hold dear to their heart is just flat out invalid and has no merit and they are therefore by implication bad and contributing to the destruction of the world is probably not going to be phenomenally useful in mobilising people, though there are arguments on each side, i think.

Sorry for the long comment - I'm really interested in this topic.  At some point, it would be interesting to speak also about the interaction of gender and science as a social enterprise (the larry summers debate a good example of where this crops up), the connections between science and domination and the need for greater environmental consciousness and a social ethos to science, etc.  But that's beyond my space and capacity at the moment :)

Boy You Said A Mouthful, Sir! (4.00 / 2)
Now I know why some of my longer diaries don't get a lot of comments!

All I can say is that I've been over a lot of the ground you cover back in the 1970s and early 80s.  How I wish the internet had been fully functional then.  I could just hook up a few links and whip up a much more coherent response in no time!

Just one point I'd like to stress: The relationships between science, religion and colonialism was just one part of the mix back then, so I'm well aware of the realworld inseparability you speak of.  The argument here is, therefore, not so much an empirical one (the messy details are fractally messy) as it is a normative one--what are science and religion for, what's their purpose in so far as it can be separated out from the changing social/cultural/economic contexts of the day.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
science and religion are similar enterprises at least (0.00 / 0)
in one way: they both attempt to provide explanations of people's everyday experience.  For instance, people have argued (based on certain interpretations of the Bible) that the following are literally true: 1) the earth is the center of the universe, 2) that the many languages spoken on the planet derive from the Towel of Babel, 3) that people with certain abnormal behavioral characteristics are possessed by "demons," etc.

These pretty clearly conflict with scientific understandings of these phenomena.  Today, we would classify the people with those behavioral characteristics as schitzophrenia or multiple personality disorder, etc.  It's hard to take the religious explanations seriously.  If we find someone rolling on the floor and frothing at the mouth, we should take him or her to the psychologist, not the exorcist.  In these cases where religion and science conflict, religion has to yield.  It just provides bad explanations.


but Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris (4.00 / 2)
think all religious people are schizophrenic and evil, including those that don't embrace creationism or speaking in toungues.

Also being that that crowd supported the war, and one voted for Bush that branch of atheism is hardly progressive.

[ Parent ]
don't know about hitchens and harris (4.00 / 1)
But don't put Dawkins in that boat.  This is a big mis-statement of his point of view on religion.  He readily acknowledges many religious people are fine people, but thinks they are nice people despite their faith, not because of it.

He's certainly never called them schizophrenic.  I'm also not aware Dawkins supported the Iraq war, do you have a cite for that?

[ Parent ]
Hitchens and Harris are also not in that boat. (4.00 / 2)
Hitchens does have a freakish sort of jingoistic side. When ever he steps into that territory (independent of the amount of alcohol he's consumed) he usually gets lambasted by other atheists for it.

Nobody thinks all religious people are schizo. That's a real brain problem. Rather they are delusional, with well-functional brains. The fact that well functioning brains accept and incorporate delusions is the reason for the above scientific theories about the origins of religion. You can't simply ignore it as crazy. Human brains believe stupid things without good reason to accept such things. It's sort of an interesting phenomenon.

[ Parent ]
and yet people take seriously all kinds of absurd ideas (4.00 / 4)
like that "nations" are material entities and not collective imagination or that the American government can be convinced to do nice things in the world when historically and structurally there is no evidence that that is the case.  So I think the challenge is to identify "faiths" that produce bad information and politically allow the more powerful to reduce the less powerful to shreds.  Part ot his, I would argue, inherently has to go through religion, without ever conceding that some kinds of reasoning tends to produce more accurate results over time in terms of describing the world than other kinds (i.e. science and religion).  But we should do are best still to understand WHY that is.
[ Parent ]
But Your Confusing How People Use Religion With Its Purpose (4.00 / 3)
It's certainly true that science and religions "both attempt to provide explanations of people's everyday experience," but not in the way you think.  Science is a refined form of logos which is concerned with how things work.  Religion is a form of mythos which is concerned with why things are--ie, with meaning.   These provide different sorts of "explanations of people's everyday experience."

Sure, religion does offer stuff like creation stories and the like.  But that's just what lawyers call obiter dicta, it's not the point, and it can easily be changed without affecting the what the point is.  Armstrong talks about this some in the interview referred to in the previous diary.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
and you get to decide what the "point" of religion is? (0.00 / 0)
Historically, lots of people have died over the question of whether the earth is the center of the universe and other ideas.  Galileo was perceived as being a huge threat to the "point" of the Catholic Church.  For many Christians, you can't simply gloss over certain passages of the Bible and still retain the "point."  You can insist on your particular understanding of what's essential and inessential in religion, but then you're just talking past people.

Science is a refined form of logos which is concerned with how things work.  Religion is a form of mythos which is concerned with why things are--ie, with meaning.   These provide different sorts of "explanations of people's everyday experience."

Take the traditional Biblical idea that the earth is the center of the universe and our modern understanding of astronomy.  How exactly are these two different "types" of explanations?  They're trying to explain the same phenomena.  One of them is a good explanation, the other is not.


[ Parent ]
Read dr anonymous Above (4.00 / 3)
You are exactly the same as the fundamentalists.  You both make the mistake of confusing religion with science, and you both are dogmatic in your beliefs.

As dr anonymous points out, both enterprises have long been hopelessly entangled in all sorts of cultural enterprises of dubious morality.  But that's life.  People will use whatever comes to hand.  Just because someone uses a pipe to bludgeon someone to death doesn't mean that that's the purpose of pipes.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
you insist on one particular understanding (0.00 / 0)
of science and religion, and you call me dogmatic and a fundamentalist?  that's pretty ballsy.  i'm not taking any position on these issues; i'm just pointing out that, historically, a lot of people have disagreed with your view

personally, i don't care about the relationship between "science" and "religion."  i think the phenomena they refer to are simply too complex, and i think it's difficult to say anything interesting about "religion" and "science" in general.  I'm more interested in more specific issues about whether we should accept the view that some people are possessed by demons (a view that has traditionally been associated with "religion") or the view that some people have epilepsy (a view that is associated with "science").  There is an obvious conflict between the two.  One of them I can take seriously, the other I can't.

[ Parent ]
But you're the one deciding what the "point" of religion is, (4.00 / 3)
based on an imaginary group of "many Christians." It is that hard to see that while something may or may not be literally true, it may nonetheless be infused with meaning? You seem to not understand the very basic principle of metaphor- I suppose your parlance is stringently devoid of metaphor?-, and then you want to argue that others have a poor grasp of "good" logic.
   Also, you've argued against yourself with your mental illness point. If there were no functional value to a metaphoric dimension for human beings, what would be the evolutionary logic to mental illness? And are you really going to argue that a psychologist- who certainly wouldn't be my first choice if I were frothing at the mouth ( as a bipolar 1, I thank you for this lovely and empathetic characterization!)- doesn't incorporate elements of ritual in treatment?
[ Parent ]
it's just a historical fact that the Catholic Church (0.00 / 0)
read certain passages in the Bible as evidence that the sun "literally" revolves around the earth.  They didn't view it as metaphor.  Sure, lots of Christians don't.  They interpret the passage in a different way.  Historically, people have viewed the significance of certain passages in different ways.  I'm not taking any position on the question of whether they are actually central to the "point" of religion or not.

And are you really going to argue that a psychologist- who certainly wouldn't be my first choice if I were frothing at the mouth ( as a bipolar 1, I thank you for this lovely and empathetic characterization!)- doesn't incorporate elements of ritual in treatment?

OK, I'll grant that psychologists do incorporate elements of "ritual" in treatment.  So what?  Does that mean that, sending someone to the exorcist is just as good as sending them to the doctor?

[ Parent ]
But This Was A Matter of POLITICS! (4.00 / 4)
You keep overlooking the fact that Armstrong--as well as other commentators here--distinguishes quite defensibly between religion and the political use and abuse of religion, just as I'm sure you would want to distinguish between science and the political use and abuse of science.

Indeed, as a matter of historical fact, Pope Leo, before becoming Pope, had been a friend of Galileo and supported his discoveries and his heliocentric views.  It only once he got elected, amidst growing pressure from fundamentalist forces, that he switched sides.  Sort of like Bill Clinton and Lani Guinier.  Religion qua religion really didn't play any role in it.  It was just plain ole' triangulation, that's all.  

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Psychologists AREN'T doctors; (4.00 / 1)
you really should confine yourself to putting forth examples with which you have the smallest degree of experience.
    Again with the strawmen. If you can allow that ritual has some uses, then why would you want to throw it all out in the name of some false science/religion dichotomy?  
[ Parent ]
A Very Importantant Delineation (0.00 / 0)
     So far I have too many simplistic observations on both sides; thhough, there have been  trenchant anylsis, too.
I am really appreciate this diary; it is a very important topic with huge ramafications. I will contributing later to the discussion.
[ Parent ]
Bobby Jindal Would Still Take Them To An Exorcist! lol (0.00 / 0)
I hope this guy runs in the Republican Primary for president, just to showcase the utter disconnect of some the right-wing evangelicals.
[ Parent ]
There's A Joke About Repossession In There... (4.00 / 1)
[ Parent ]
Falwalwall Is Pining In His Grave To Promote Jindal's Brave Exorcism (0.00 / 0)
Actually, he was more media-savvy.  

Hagee, on the other hand, may endorse him on this brave feat, alone! Wait, is Jindal a Holocaust denier?  

[ Parent ]
That's not quite right, imho (4.00 / 1)
You're right that the Golden Rule is more fundamental than religion.  But that doesn't mean it can't be the core of religion.

If somebody's already mentioned this, apologgies; I skipped ahead...

The claim the religionists are making is stronger than that. They're claiming that religion is the "source" of the 'intention' that animates the Golden Rule. And that without religion, that 'intention' lacks authenticity.

That's the fundamentalist's assertion, as I understand it, anyway...

Conflation (4.00 / 3)
"The claim the religionists are making is stronger than that."

[snip]

"That's the fundamentalist's assertion, as I understand it, anyway..."

One of the problems with discussing this stuff is attributing one complete set of beliefs, in this case, fundamentalism, to "religionists".   I suppose you call me a religionist, in that I see value in it without believing in the factuality of the tales told in the bible.

What you've done is set up the straw man "Religionist", and knocked him down by conflating him with fundamentalists.

[ Parent ]
It's more common than one should expect. (0.00 / 0)
But, yes it's true. The most common canard atheists hear is that if you don't believe in God, you can't be moral. That without a belief in God we should just kill ourselves, other people, raping, murdering, and stealing... it clearly doesn't matter at that point.

It's an amazingly common assertion for being completely idiotic. When you call them on it, they get another tizzy about how this pompous atheists are calling them idiots.

[ Parent ]
Plain speech (4.00 / 3)
You don't shy away from the tough ones, do you? In this case, I'm glad, as it gives me a second bite at the apple. I listen to Moyers' shows as audio podcasts, and switched this one off in irritation about halfway through, as I did the John Lithgow interview last week.

For all his virtues -- and they're many -- I find Moyers smarmy enough at times to give me a rash, probably because he reminds me of Southern preachers of my youth, who cultivated reputations for peace and compassion simply by never, ever mentioning anything unpleasant. As a kid, sent to their churches, I found them frighteningly detached from all human affect, and even slightly malevolent. (I knew the word hypocrisy in those days, but I had no idea of the depth and subtlety of the concept it expresses. I just thought they were creepy.)

Being a Southerner himself, it may be that Moyers is unwittingly channeling these Southern preachers when he talks about matters of the heart and the spirit. That would seem to be the charitable explanation. Despite my personal misgivings, though, he clearly takes his morality and his religion seriously. If only his adopted style didn't make me want to run away from the sound of his voice with my hands over my ears.

This isn't a good thing, at least not when a subject as important as the one discussed in this latest interview is being aired, so I'm grateful to see the transcript here, and to read your comments on it, which, frankly, make a lot of sense. If we need to talk clearly about race in this country, it seems to me that we need to talk clearly about religion as much or even more.

I don't myself subscribe to the separate but equal appreciation of religion and science, although no doubt it's useful in giving both of these formidable devils their due. To me, the two form pretty much a seamless mental continuum. It didn't surprise me at all, for example, to read in the history of science that the most insightful of the early scientists wore both hats themselves, and yet when they looked in the mirror, saw only one. Despite what some of the textbooks told me, I don't think that this was because they lacked sophistication. Modesty, perhaps, but not sophistication.

I've no doubt that the Enlightenment was in part a response to the atrocities of religious orthodoxy in the service of a rigid political order long past its pull-date. Bon mots featuring kings strangled in the guts of priests give some of the desperate flavor of the struggle in the early eighteenth century. It also seems true to me that in our own age, the fundamentalists who hate us -- our own as well as those of radical Islam -- are driven in part by a reaction to the atrocities of secular social engineers, who, sadly, are also inheritors of the Enlightenment, and serve the masters of today, whose only religious principles are stability and profit (not necessarily in that order.)

In the end of course, they'll have neither. What we must do, if we're to save anything worth saving, is to square the circle, and modest attempts to begin the process, such as Karen Armstrong's, should be praised, as you do here, even if they do give one old curmudgeon and veteran of the culture wars a rash. ;-)

The High Middle Ages (4.00 / 1)
were a lot more sophisticated than most folks realize.  And they had both sorts of thinking--that which clearly distinguished between science and religion, and that which seemingly did not.

At one level, it's simply inevitable that one should blend the two realms.  And it can even be quite fruitful to do so.  And Armstrong doesn't really object to that.  It's just that when push comes to shove, one should happily redefine one's interpretation of scripture.  We are, after all, humble, finite creatures who really can't comprehend an infinite creator.  That's not me speaking.  That's the most orthodox of orthodoxy.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Nonoverlapping Magisteria (0.00 / 0)
is how Stephen Jay Gould describes what you're talking about. But, as Dawkins has pointed out, it is the "existence arguments" that religions make that give those religions their power. Although I accept your argument that there are other powers at work in the practice of religion, it would be very hard for me to conceive of the whole idea of religion in the development of humanity without those "existence arguments" being at the very center.
He wishes.... (4.00 / 2)
Non-overlapping? No doubt that would make things a lot easier, but it just ain't so. Given the way our brains work, ontology and epistemology have always been entangled, and no doubt always will be. Attempts to distinguish them have their uses, but they'll alway be tentative.

Rendering us unable to truly stand outside the system we're analyzing is perhaps God's cleverest joke on us. If only we could appreciate his sense of humor, and get on with the business at hand free of pretensions about coming to the end of our long pursuit, we'd be a lot better off.

[ Parent ]
Yes, and what Paul appears to be doing (0.00 / 0)
is making just another "attempt to distinguish".
[ Parent ]
Yes, and what Paul appears to be doing (4.00 / 1)
is making just another "attempt to distinguish".
[ Parent ]
Ooops (0.00 / 0)
Sorry 'bout the double post.
[ Parent ]
It's an honorable avocation, (0.00 / 0)
and Paul has, as I read him at least, no pretensions whatever about any ultimate resolution of the issues under discussion. He just doesn't want us to come to rest and fasten ourselves to this or that Rock of Ages before all of the evidence is in. That seems perfectly reasonable to me, and not a bad response to our spiritual promptings either, come to think of it.
[ Parent ]
I don't read it that way (4.00 / 1)
I think that once you're saying that science can't legitimately question something, like the existence of a supreme being, then you're suggesting that we have "come to a rest."
[ Parent ]
That only works if the literal "existence" of a supreme being is of (4.00 / 1)
concern. The straw men just keep coming in these threads.
[ Parent ]
Fair enough (0.00 / 0)
There are certainly non-theist religions. But I think that because Paul brought up Dawkins, Hitchens, and other avowed atheists as a target of his argument that he was making the existence of god a primary point of differentiation. If there is a straw man in this argument, it's Paul's, not mine.
[ Parent ]
If only science existed. (4.00 / 1)
Then we could simply test ideas against reality and see which one comes out on top. Then a scientific epistemology would exist which could determine reality without invoking metaphysics. Hey, wait, Science does exist and it does exactly that.

Gee, that seems like it should be "better" than the other way of doing it.

[ Parent ]
You overstate your case (4.00 / 3)
Science itself doesn't make the claims which you make for it here. Determining reality is a mighty tall order, much taller than you seem willing to acknowledge. Fortunately, most scientists do.
[ Parent ]
Not all of reality... (0.00 / 0)
Science determines reality, I didn't say it had a complete and coherent picture of all of reality but the truth is the necessary product of science done right.
[ Parent ]
But Gould Wasn't Just Blowing Smoke (4.00 / 4)
Armstrong points out that there is a long tradition of seeing the relationship of mythos and logos this way.  And "existence arguments" are, quite properly, outside the purview of science.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"
[ Parent ]
I'm not convinced (4.00 / 1)
that you can claim that something as essential as the origin of life is not within the proper "purview" of science and still have an open mind on the subject. There are so many points in human history where limiting the purview of science was used as an argument for all kinds of things we now take for granted as well within the purview science.
[ Parent ]
Existence Of God =/= Origin of Life (4.00 / 2)
How in the world can someone as sharp as you conflate these two questions?

God doesn't even scientifically come into the picture wrt the origin of the universe.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Am I wrong (0.00 / 0)
or isn't this kind of at the heart of the matter? That explaining the origin of life is intrinsic to religious ways of understanding the world. Is there a religion, theist or non-theist, that doesn't conflate these two questions?  
[ Parent ]
Huh??? (4.00 / 1)
Someone who practices Buddhism should chime in, but my impression is that the question is pretty much irrelevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

And it would be fair to say that a large amount of Science is exceedingly preoccupied with the question of the origin of life - does that make Science a religion?

[ Parent ]
I think you're being disingenuous (0.00 / 0)
in arguing that most religions at their core aren't about explaining why things are the way they are and how they came into being. Yes, if a follower of Buddism can chime in that would be great and I would welcome it. But I don't really think that Paul had at the core of his argument that Buddism was more or less valid than any other form of religion, just that followers of religion in all forms are right to say to scientific opinion that there is a wall between the different ways of looking at the world. And I think your "science as religion" is an interesting concept that I have to think more about before I can address it.
[ Parent ]
Actually, I DO Think Of Buddhism Quite A Lot (4.00 / 1)
as it's basically an atheistic religion.  I find it most compatible.

And the older I've gotten, the more I've come to see that there really is a core of Western religion that has more in common with Buddhism than I realized in my 20s and 30s.

It's not a question of validity, but more of what makes sense.  How useful is it?  William James, again.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Well, actually... (0.00 / 0)
...Buddhism would be better described as non-theistic than atheistic, since belief in a deity is not incompatible with it.  Some Buddhists worship the Buddha as a deity, although that isn't the mainstream thought.  In addition, there are Buddhists, if only a few, who simultaneously practice theistic religions.
[ Parent ]
Oh My Overly Clever Etymological Soul! (4.00 / 1)
As a prefix, a- means "without", so broadly speaking there's really no difference between non-whatever and a-whatever.

Which is why I've always rather liked referring to Buddhism this way.  It's precisely cause I enjoy breaking down those dualistic assumptions.

p.s.  I also dig me some Buddhist gods and goddess, too, just to further stir the pot.  Particularly Quan-Yin/Avalokiteshvara.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
"if only a few" (0.00 / 0)
I guess you could say there's "only a few" people in Japan, and definitely not ALL of them practice theistic Buddhism, or simultaneously practice Shintoism (pantheism), Christianity (monotheism), and Buddhism - only most of them do.
[ Parent ]
In fact, the earliest extant traces of relegion are generally considered (4.00 / 2)
to have been totemic and not explicitly concerned with creation myths. So it's actually rather difficult to insist that "religion in the development of humanity" has creation myths at their center.  
[ Parent ]
So explain to me (0.00 / 0)
where this form of "creation-myth-free" religion fits into a modern context of this argument. Because I'm looking around my environment right now and I ain't seeing it. If we're going to talk about religious vs. scientific ways of explaining the world, it makes sense to talk about religious explanations that are prevalent in the age of science.
[ Parent ]
Golden Rule? (4.00 / 5)
A bit off topic, but somewhat related and I find it interesting:

Pastor Levi J. Durfey of Longville Bible Chapel [oops, dead link] in a sermon on June 2, 2002, argued that what Armstrong talks about is the Silver Rule: Don't do to others what you don't want done to you. But the Golden Rule goes beyond this and commands you to do things that you would like done to you -- that is, to actively love others without expectation of getting anything back -- to act selflessly for the benefit of others. This is obviously much more demanding.

That is the difference between the Silver Rule and the Golden Rule. The Silver Rule would simply prevent Tommy from teasing Billy. "Don't do to others that which you would hate to have done to you." The Golden Rule tells Tommy to reach out in love to Billy...

Annoying People in Your Life: The Golden Rule does not allow us to ignore them just as we wish to be ignored by them. We need to reach out to them. Seek to understand them because if you were annoying yourself, your deepest need would be to be understood.

From Pastor Durfey's perspective, the Silver Rule dictates only tolerance and passive acceptance of others, whereas the Golden Rule demands active compassion and love of others, even weird, difficult, and violent people. I have known many Christians who try to actively love difficult people around them (mostly Catholic Workers and Quakers), but this is certainly not widely practiced among people who call themselves Christians. If the United States were a Christian nation by this definition, the US (and world) would be a very different place.

Approximation (4.00 / 1)
[None of the following counters you point, which I agree with completely.  But I wrote the following in response, anyway...]

The Golden Rule is only an approximation.  To get geeky, think of it as a first approximation, meaning it is the first term in an infinite series; the second term is negative.

In English, think about the couple who have different preferences when sick.  The husband likes to be coddled and the wife likes to be left alone.  We all see where this is going.  When newlywed, both good people follow the Golden Rule the wife gets coddled and the husband gets left alone.  Over time they finally realize they need to not do unto others what they do not want done to them.

[ Parent ]
Science and religion have this in common (4.00 / 3)
From Wittgenstein:

If you ask me whether or not I believe in a Judgement Day, in the sense in which religious people have belief in it, I wouldn't say:" No. I don't believe there will be such a thing." It would seem to me utterly crazy to say this.

And then I give an explanation: " I don't believe in ....", but then the religious person never believes what I describe.

I can't say. I can't contradict that person.

In one sense, I understand all he says - the English words "God", "separate", etc. I understand. I could say: "I don't believe in this" and this would be true, meaning I haven't got these thoughts or anything that hangs together with them. But not that I could contradict the thing.

From me:

The desire to reach the truth through the systematic use of words did not begin with the Greeks, but was first and most ably demonstrated by them. Telling the truth with words ultimately relies on the necessary condition of making a statement that is either true or false. A statement of this type is referred to as a logical proposition. The first rule of logic is simple. If a logical proposition is true, its opposite is false. If a proposition, let us call it A, is true, then the proposition NOT A is false. If the proposition A is false, then the proposition NOT A is true. Although it is easy to see how a statement cannot be true and false at the same time, it is another thing to prove that a statement is true or false, or even worse, partly true and partly false. An example is the statement, Meaning exists. If the statement, Meaning exists, is true, then the statement, Meaning does not exist, is false. (For the word Meaning, please feel free to substitute any subject: god, gravity, love, art, dinosaurs, free will, a red wheelbarrow, etc.) Conversely, if the statement, Meaning does not exist, is true, then the statement, Meaning exists, is false. Understanding the relationship of these logical "truth values" to one another does not tell us whether or not a proposition is actually true. What it does tell us is that whatever logic applies to a proposition applies in equal amount to its opposite expression. Logic cannot tell us whether or not meaning exists. It can tell us that, if it is provable that Meaning exists is true, then it is equally provable that Meaning does not exist is false and that if it is provable that Meaning does not exist is true, then it is equally provable that Meaning exists is false. But what of the statement, It is provable that meaning does not exist. How can we say, It is provable that meaning does not exist, and expect anyone to believe that we have any more right to the truth than the person who says, It is not provable that Meaning does not exist. This is not just another, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation. This is not about one form of logic preceding another. It is about belief preceding logic. Logic begins as an act of belief, a belief in logic if in nothing else. In all sentient beings, belief initiates the feedback loop. Not just once in a while. Every time.

Probabilistic logic (0.00 / 0)
If we accept that it is impossible to know the truth or falsity of any given statement as the fundamental axiom, then we are forced to resort to estimating the probability of any given statement being false. We cannot estimate the probability of any given statement being true, because the act of estimating would require that we know all possible outcomes and explanations - and by the first axiom we cannot know whether we know all possibilities.

That sets up a dichotomy which is not recognized in the absolute form of logic above: rather than stating the absolute "proposition A is false", we have to resort to the more cumbersome "there is a 95% chance that proposition A is false". The immediate thought would be to form a simplistic contrapositive: "therefore there is a 5% chance that proposition A is true". That contrapositive does not actually hold.

We can formulate statistical tests that could tell us that the likelihood that proposition A is false is exceedingly high, but there is always the possibility that the likelihood of propositions B, C, D, ... being false is even higher, in which case the likelihood that the original proposition A is true might be found to be fairly high as well.

At best, Science can provide an estimate of the probability that the null hypothesis "God exists" is false. That unfortunately does not translate into an estimate of the probability that "God exists" is true.

[ Parent ]
I respectfully disagree (0.00 / 0)
on logical grounds with both your assumptions and conclusions.

Perhaps, once the Large Hadron Collider comes online, we can revisit the "probability" that statistics can actually provide us with a measure of certainty regarding the "truthiness" of a proposition. We should know soon enough whether or not the Higgs boson exists and the standard model works, or whether we will have to start over from scratch.

In my own turn, I suggest you read Feyerabend for fun and Chaitin for serious.

[ Parent ]
Fundamentalism (4.00 / 5)
Applying the term fundamentalism to those who find religion at variance with science is not a useful way to further the discussion.

Fundamentalism:

A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism.

Now you might mean intolerant of other's point of view, but rude behavior by partisans does not discredit science.

There are several things to be considered when discussing the kind of in-your-face religious/political nexus that has been a feature of the US for the past 30-40 years.

1. The movement has set itself as an explicit goal the breaking down of the separation of church and state. We have religiously inspired legislation and executive regulations and under Bush (and now Obama) explicit funding from the Whitehouse of religious organizations. What has been forgotten is that the original purpose of the separation was to prevent the favoring of certain religions by the government. Right now fundamentalist Protestantism is explicitly favored as Muslims, Hindus and other groups will be happy to detail. This is dangerous.

2. The types of religions we are talking about demand blind obedience by their followers when it comes to dogma and political litmus tests. This weakens democracy which is predicated upon the concept that people make up their own minds.

3. That religious people may do good works and even attribute this to the moral precepts they claim they get from religion is irrelevant. Non-religious people do good works as well without having to refer to some set of foundational dicta. Doing good works cannot be used as a defense for the "need" for religion. As people like Sam Harris like to point out there is ample evidence of outright evil done in the name of religion as well.

4. The rise of secularism, especially in western Europe also shows that there is no necessity for religion to have a moral society. In fact their societies are more compassionate than ours with less poverty, better social services and more equality of opportunity. Whether this is a result of secularism or secularism is a result of a new type of social consciousness is open to debate, but religion can't claim that it is necessary.

5. Science and religion don't operate in different spheres, that was Stephen Jay Gould's framing, and is not widely shared by scientists, although the religious like it because they can avoid talking about difficult (for them) topics. Religion is no longer a viable way to explain how the real world operates, those who cling to foundational myths are deluded or uninformed. The most fundamentalist types of religions take great pains to keep their young from being exposed to the science which would undermine their myths, hence the cloistered lives of the Amish, Hasidim and the prevelance of parochial schools among Catholics and born-again Christians.

Religion may still try to claim the sphere of morality, but as I mentioned above there is no correlation between religious belief (or which religion) and how ethical or moral a society or its practitioners are. Atheists love their kids, don't believe in murder and mayhem any differently than Christians, Muslims or Buddhists. Morality rises out of humanist impulses, religion can harness it, but claiming a special right to this area is not born out by the evidence.

6. Even the most anti-religious will have little to complain about if the religious kept to a set of ceremonies and traditions, but it is when they try to impose their vision of how the world should be run that causes the pushback. Furthermore the intolerance of one religious group for others is dangerous and counterproductive in a world with so many sects and so many weapons. Much of the Muslim world continues to see US policy as a modern version of the Crusades. Having the government support religion explicitly only reinforces this view.

Read this article from the NY Times to see how attitudes in Scandinavia differ from those in the US.

Scandinavian Nonbelievers, Which Is Not to Say Atheists

Policies not Politics

Not What I'm Doing (4.00 / 2)
Applying the term fundamentalism to those who find religion at variance with science is not a useful way to further the discussion.

Particularly since I myself "find religion at variance with science".  What I am doing is pointing out a shared belief between fundamentalists and certain kinds of anti-religionists--a belief that religion is making the same sorts of truth claims as science is.

If one removes this shared premise, then virtually the entire debate goes away.  This is not to say anything about the historical record, of course.  It's all about how one interprets the record.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
puzzled (4.00 / 3)
I read your posting twice now and am still confused about your point. Are you saying that certain secularists are intolerant of those with religious belief? That's an argument about their presentation, not their ideas.

Polemicists need to be rude and slightly outrageous to be heard, especially with a monolithic media the way we have. So you don't like their style and think it may be counterproductive. Perhaps, but then you are criticizing the messenger and not the message.

I detailed several points about what was wrong with the message of religion in my reply above, but you only focused on the semantics of the word "fundamentalist". If you chose to use inflammatory words yourself, don't be surprised if people misunderstand you just as they do the vocal anti-religious group.

There is a claim that religion reveals certain "truths" which are outside the scope of science. This is either true, false or untestable, it all depends upon what you mean by "truth".

I claim that the part of religion which deals with the origin of the universe is testable and false. I claim that the part of religion that believes there is a supernatural being guiding things on earth is also false and this has been demonstrated by means of the usual scientific methods. That many people refuse to believe the results of the investigations, doesn't make the conclusions invalid, it just means people have a hard time letting go of beliefs they have been taught in the cradle.

Now in the area of ethics and morality, religions make claims based upon foundational documents which are given magical provenience. This has also been shown to be not based upon scientific evidence. That's neither here nor there when one wants to decide whether the moral precepts should be followed or not.

This is one of the permanent open issues of humankind. There is no absolute standard for morality and ethics and attributing it to a supernatural source doesn't help.

Ultimately it is up to people to decide what is acceptable, the religious do it selectively by adopting the parts of their dogma they favor and ignoring the rest. The non-religious have to depend upon other techniques. However the same universal standards tend to emerge, whether they are followed or not is a different question.

The golden rule has been mentioned, but there are also common rules about equality, equity and the preservation of life. The human race will now have to expand its morality set to include treatment of the rest of the planet if it is to survive.

Policies not Politics

[ Parent ]
You're all right as far as you go. (0.00 / 0)
I'll wait to see what Paul has to say in his own defense, but in the meantime, I'd observe that your view of religion is a bit reductive, and more than a bit prejudicial, as, for example, in this formulation:

Ultimately it is up to people to decide what is acceptable, the religious do it selectively by adopting the parts of their dogma they favor and ignoring the rest.

This may be true of some who are religious, but not of all. And here's a question for you: Is metaphor an example of a mental malfunction, an interesting but irrelevant byproduct of the evolution of our brains, or the expression of a fundamental apperception which links us to the gestalt of which we are all part? None of the above? All of the above?

Knowing more about science than religion isn't a crime, but it does make ecumenical discussions more difficult.

[ Parent ]
weak (0.00 / 0)
The some/all argument is weak. Just read the Bible and tell me that people still support (in the west) multiple wives or slavery or a host of other practices and punishments.

Sam Harris has a whole chapter devoted to commandments found in the Korean that aren't observed. So, yes, people do chose selectively what parts of religious practice they will follow.

Something like 60% of US Roman Catholics practice birth control and a goodly number have had abortions. The church is pretty clear about this, yet they ignore the parts that they find uncomfortable with their lifestyle.

Read Christine Wicker's book for how closely fundamentalists follow the teachings of their denominations.

As for metaphor, there is an extensive literature on this, led by the work of George Lakoff. We both think in terms of metaphor and use metaphor as a way to organize thoughts.

My issue is when metaphor is taken literally and then used as a shortcut to avoid thinking through concepts. How many people these days know what is meant by "toxic assets" or demanding that investors "take a haircut". The pundits and uninformed throw these terms around without understanding what is really meant. This slides into euphemism as well, but the point I was making was that when scientists use a term like "law of nature" they know exactly what they mean, this may not be true for laymen, who treat it literally.

Since you raised the objections, you show me where a religious group follows the teachings of its core document closely. Perhaps some Tibetan monks or other pre-modern groups might, but not in current societies.

Policies not Politics

[ Parent ]
Yes, I'm being cryptic, (0.00 / 0)
as I believe befits the subject, and yes, we do seem to be ships passing in the night. What you've chosen to argue against is religion in a much narrower sense than I mean it.

Maybe it would help if I said that science misleads as much at times as religion does, and for the same reason, i.e. the nature of the animal who invented it. There's nothing really mystical about the principle which says that understanding something by abstraction, by dividing it into smaller and smaller pieces, and analyzing them, and then belatedly trying to cobble them back together into a synthetic whole, misses something essential about the nature of the thing being abstracted in the first place. (And I might add, this is especially true if the agency doing the abstraction is part of the thing being abstracted, and absolutely true if we have no way of understanding what part.)

This is the original province of religion, and rather than wall science off from it, it might be better for them to explore a fruitful cohabitation, perhaps one moderated, in time-honored fashion, by philosophy.

[ Parent ]
At least you could be a bit more clear about whom you're criticizing... (0.00 / 0)
I find this to be a bit silly:

I claim that the part of religion which deals with the origin of the universe is testable and false. I claim that the part of religion that believes there is a supernatural being guiding things on earth is also false and this has been demonstrated by means of the usual scientific methods.

Some religions have stories about the origin of the universe that are not intended to be taken as physicial explanations, but instead seek to provide moral and spiritual guidance concerning the human search for existential meaning.  There are also religions that are non-theistic (Taoism or Buddhism, for example, which neither require nor preclude belief in the existence of a deity), and there are religions that proclaim a deity but do not believe that the deity is controlling or guiding things on earth.  

It seems clear that when you say "religion," you have a particular subset in mind, namely, Christian Fundamentalism.  It mind interest you to read a religious writer like Bishop Spong, for example, who would probably join you in some of your criticisms of religion without attributing to the entire scope of human religion the flaws of a subset.

[ Parent ]
your reading (0.00 / 0)
Some religions have stories about the origin of the universe that are not intended to be taken as physicial explanations, but instead seek to provide moral and spiritual guidance concerning the human search for existential meaning.  

That's your reading of things, the creationists or the young earth group think otherwise. I haven't seen any studies about what Muslims think about the creation of the universe, but I would imagine there are plenty of literalists among them as well.

Those who defend religion tend to be like the three blind men and the elephant. They find those aspects which support their viewpoint and ignore those who find something else. This is the same cultural blindness that they accuse anti-religious scientists of having.  

Policies not Politics

[ Parent ]
I'm not sure I understand you. (0.00 / 0)
Are you arguing that young-earth creationists believe that all religions' creation stories are intended to be taken literally?  Or are you saying that since young-earth creationists believe that their own creation stories are to be taken literally, that is evidence that "the part of religion which deals with the origin of the universe is testable and false"?

I haven't seen any studies about what Muslims think about the creation of the universe, but I would imagine there are plenty of literalists among them as well.

I don't think anyone would argue the point that there exist literalists in any of the Semitic religions, and in most of the other ones, as well.  As long as there are adherents to religions that are non-literalists, you can't go around attributing literalism to religion, per se.  Well, you can, I suppose, but it wouldn't be a very successful argument.

And this

Those who defend religion tend to be like the three blind men and the elephant. They find those aspects which support their viewpoint and ignore those who find something else. This is the same cultural blindness that they accuse anti-religious scientists of having.

seems to me to be ad hominem and irrelevant.  You made specific claims that appear to be about all religion, and so far you have only demonstrated that those claims are accurate about some adherents of some religions.  I beg your pardon if I have misunderstood, and would appreciate clarification.

[ Parent ]
authority (0.00 / 0)
The Catholic church no longer has the authority to burn people at the stake who question the teaching of the church. However, the doctrine is still as complete as it ever was. It is changing, however, as the church fathers see that they are losing members when they adhere to the most unscientific parts of the doctrine.

So now the Pope says he believes in evolution, in some vague and undefined manner, but he still believes in virgin birth and that the body of Jesus ascended to heaven, literally.

Things are even more rigid in much of the Muslim world as stonings and beheadings show.

Now if you want to say that not "everybody" believes all of the official dogma of their religion, that's true, but irrelevant. It is the dogma that defines the religion, not how closely people follow it. And the dogma of the world's major religions is still based upon supernaturalism.

Supernaturalism and science are incompatible. Cognitive dissonance allows some "believers" to reconcile these contradictions in their own minds, but that's just an adaptation to the impossible, a psychological crutch.  

Policies not Politics

[ Parent ]
Robert (0.00 / 0)
The more we talk, the farther apart we seem to get--not in agreement/disagreement, but more fundamentally in understanding what each other are driving at.  So it seems to me that it may make more sense to back off and simply try to start again, with a simple statement of position, to wit:

(1) I am a (virtually) life-long atheist, who nonetheless is quite interested in religion and spirituality--due in large part to my Unitarian upbringing--and

(2) I feel guided by empathy and compassion to try to understand people who aren't atheists in their terms, rather than mine.  (Again, due in large part to my Unitarian upbringing).

I was not trying to play semantic games above.  I did not respond to most of what you wrote because I agree with it all in one sense, but not in another, and my concerns are basically orthogonal to yours.

Indeed, that's perhaps the best metaphoric construct to use here: I see the core of religion and science as orthogonal to one another.  I know that others don't see it that way, but I do.  And I'm trying to shed some light on why I see it that way.  

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Sympathetic (4.00 / 2)
If you are saying that Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins are unsympathetic to the psychological makeup of believers than I think you are right.

However, I don't think this is their concern. Their mission is to make criticism of religion and religious dogma possible in a world where such talk is still considered blasphemy in places.

In fact there is a UN resolution on "freedom" of speech promoted by Muslim fundamentalists which makes it unacceptable to offend people's religious beliefs. This way leads tyranny (as it already has). Whether the criticism is of religion or the state, one cannot have a democratic society without the ability to criticize the leadership.

So they see their role as opening the space for debate. That believers may be upset by what they say, and that they may do some of this deliberately to provoke these people is all part of their "mission". Before they started speaking out there was no discussion in the public arena about this topic. it only existed in small enclaves like Madeline Murray O'Hair and the Council for Secular Humanism. O'Hair was hated without anyone ever hearing what she had to say, while the other groups had (still have) no impact.

If you want to take the side of the offended, that's fine, but I think they have enough sympathizers as it is. But stating the case in different forums, as you can see by the number of comments, still helps broaden the discussion.

If you've never seen it Jonathan Miller did a three part series for the BBC on the history of disbelief. It's floating around the internet. My local PBS station puts it on occasionally in the middle of the night with no announcement. That's how broad the space for discussion is.

Miller's point is that up until recently people could be (and were) killed for expressing disbelief. So the ability to question religion is recent and limited and under attack. If the polemicists go too far for your liking, then show me who else is being heard that has a more acceptable style.

When Moyers is willing to allow the same sort of discussion of disbelief as the softball approach he takes to the religious I'll concede that Harris et al are too strident.  

Policies not Politics

[ Parent ]
Missing The Point, I'm Afraid (4.00 / 1)
I know that others have talked up Hitchens & Dawkins in this discussion thread, but not me.  They're pretty peripheral to the point I'm making.  In fact, I'm not knowingly concerned with them at all, when it gets right down to it.  

Atheism has actually been much more acceptable earlier in the 20th Century than it has more recently, but the reasons for that seem entirely political, not religious.

So these guys are really a bit late for the cultural vanguard shtick.


"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Oh Come on Paul (0.00 / 0)
"I know that others have talked up Hitchens & Dawkins in this discussion thread, but not me."
"There is a strain of atheism, represented by folks like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which sees religion as a threat to be attacked in the name of science."

Can't you at least acknowledge that atheistic opinions are anathema to the mainstream of public opinion not because they are discredited in any kind of reasoned debate but because they are considered too threatening to even be considered in any kind of discussion?
[ Parent ]
What Can I Say? (4.00 / 1)
It was so inconsequential to the main thrust of my argument that I forgot having written it.

It's one of those days where I don't have enough material prewritten--at least that I'm satisfied with--so that I'm doing a lot of diary-writing work at the same time I'm also commenting.  So I really did simply forget.  And it really is indicative of how non-essential it is to my main point.  My main point which virtually everyone has ignored, which is the empirical evidence described in Science magazine.

Doesn't anyone here get the irony in that?

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Not really orthogonal after all (0.00 / 0)
What we should ponder is how it is that we do science with the same neurological equipment that we dance with. There's the real irony, if you ask me, the puzzle which will remain even after the last experiment is done -- because it's embedded in us, just like the mystics have always told us.
[ Parent ]
Main Thrust (0.00 / 0)
Darwin argued that there was empirical evidence for religion as well. He was not an atheist. But when you go toward the SJ Gould route of arguing that science can't transgrese on the realm of religious explanations for the world (and vice versa), it seems that you are giving carte blanch to religious proponents of all kinds, not just fundamentalists, to totally discount scientific arguments for evolution and other scientific explanations of how things came into being.  
[ Parent ]
No Carte Blanche (0.00 / 0)
You're misreading of Gould so total that I just can't believe it, much less refute it.  He simply isn't saying anything close to what you seem to believe.

This isn't a strawman argument.  It's a description of a hologram of a field in which the straw for the strawman argument was grown.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Then what does nonoverlapping magisteria really mean? (0.00 / 0)
I think Dawkins has a point when he says that an argument for nonoverlapping magisteria poses a problematic hypothesis: because essentially a world designed by a supreme being would be very different from a world that came about by scientific means of explanation.
[ Parent ]
To quote Gould (0.00 / 0)
"Science does not deal with questions of ultimate origins." So, as Daniel Dennett observes: "The compatibility that Gould sees between science and religion holds only so long as science knows its place and declines to address the big questions."
[ Parent ]
That article was horrifying (4.00 / 2)
I think it bolsters Paul's point more than anything. It is good that these people have a decent society and decent material conditions. But not everyone would take the tradeoff that they have made of decent material conditions for not having thought about any greater meaning to their lives. That is what Qutb was allergic to.

Any story about why something evolved is basically a guess, and stories about how complex behaviors evolved aren't much better. Daniel Levitin will have a chapter about why and how music may have evolved in his book and I have zero hope for it. You could say that religion is an emergent property of being highly intelligent and highly social. Highly social creatures want mechanisms of trust and social cohesion and select for those. Highly intelligent creatures have the ability to formulate a sense of the whole. That is what religious life puts front and center and what you might want to select for because it makes you more adaptable. Karen Armstrong evidently has a thesis of the "Great Transformation" where religion becomes more universal and less subservient to who is in power at any given time, so we can see that religion carries within itself the capacity not to be a tool of power. The religious stories that last provide the opportunity to talk about where power comes from and where transcendence and change come from.  

"Here's a song about blind faith. That's always a dangerous thing, whether it's in your girlfriend--or if it's in your government." Bruce Springsteen, quoted in Glory Days (Born in the USA tour??)  

[ Parent ]
Adaptability (0.00 / 0)
In discussing the Golden Calf, Aviva Zornberg brought out the basic critique that "It is a stiff-necked people": it is stubborn at the same time as being very quick and impetuous in its forgetting. So the theme is that idolatry and anti-religious behavior can be as rigid as the stereotype of religious behavior.  

"Here's a song about blind faith. That's always a dangerous thing, whether it's in your girlfriend--or if it's in your government." Bruce Springsteen, quoted in Glory Days (Born in the USA tour??)  
[ Parent ]
Tradeoff (4.00 / 2)
I'm not sure what tradeoff you think these people are making. You have no idea what these people think of "any greater meaning to their lives".

Apparently you think (I'm guessing) that one needs to contemplate an afterlife to give meaning to the present. Many religions have no concept of an afterlife, yet their adherents are happy being believers.

Secularists get by without a greater meaning, instead finding meaning and value in their friends and relations, their careers and life achievements and in helping others.

Those who pin their happiness on an afterlife are the losers, they are sacrificing now for a mythological future.

The Scandinavians aren't better off materially (they have less stuff than we do), they are happier because their extensive social service network makes them less stressed. Do you worry about retirement, health care, caring for your children? Would you like it if there was a functioning safety net to take care of these concerns?

Part of the problem with the religious in the US is that they are unaware of how people live elsewhere and assume that social inequality and religious adherence must be the best form of society. If they got out more they would find that people elsewhere don't share their views and find much of what goes on in the US horrifying.

Policies not Politics

[ Parent ]
Misunderstanding Dawkins (4.00 / 2)
I really have to object to the way you and other commenters are conflating Hitchens with Dawkins.  I won't bother defending Hitchens, but Dawkins argues that religious claims are WRONG, and therefore religion is useless.  Faith-based thinking is an inferior form of analyzing the world.  Not that religious people are Bad People, which isn't something Dawkins (or I) argue.  Religious people are simply Wrong when it comes to specific claims.  This doesn't preclude working with religious people, specifically liberal Christians and "others".

Which leads me to this point of yours: "There is a strain of atheism, represented by folks like ... Richard Dawkins, which sees religion as a threat to be attacked in the name of science.  This is, I would argue, a form of secular fundamentalism that misunderstands almost as much as religious fundamentalism does." [emphasis mine]

This is the wrong word to use.  Dawkins, Myers, and other "secular fundamentalists" (I'll get to that phrase in a bit) are not attacking religion; they are criticizing it.  They agree with you that we should live in a pluralistic society, and in such a society any subgroup has to be able to be criticized.  This includes the "S-Fs", of course; they aren't immune to criticism, nor should they be.  Hence why I'm not doing a "how dare you criticize them" act.

Lastly, your use of the term "secular fundamentalist" is a distortion.  "Secular fundamentalists"?  Really?  This is the same sort of mushy equivocation Versailles does with the GOP and Democrats, conservatives and liberals.  What part of "religious thinking is flawed, even if it leads to conclusions I agree with"; "religious claims are wrong or unproven, there is no God or other Higher Power"; "American society and politics would be less screwed up if religious influence waned"; "nonbelievers should be given a seat at the table" is fundamentalist?  Those are Dawkins' (and Myers') arguments, those are their claims; they are a call for greater pluralism and a greater willingness to scrutinize and criticize each others' religious beliefs.

And frankly, religious fundamentalists cause many easily-seen problems in our society.  What problems do uppity atheists cause?

Do you remember (0.00 / 0)
strategic hamlets? Should the misgivings of those who think that abortion is a mortal sin be dismissed in secular law as entirely without merit?
[ Parent ]
Yes (4.00 / 1)
Yes it should.  Now, if they want to make a secular case for criminalizing abortion, they should do so.  A subculture certainly has the right to live as it wants and make efforts to influence the pluralistic society, but those efforts have to be made in a way (language) that all other subcultures agree with (understand).  I'm paraphrasing a lot, but that's the essence of John Rawls' argument in Justice As Fairness.
[ Parent ]
I have my doubts.... (0.00 / 0)
It doesn't sound as though we disagree, not at least about the law's responsibility, but you aren't directly addressing the problems that uppity atheists cause, are you? (And in the interest of being non-inflammatory, I didn't even include Soviet examples.) In both cases I did use as examples, there's a legitimate issue which you're overlooking. In one case, the sacred isn't considered worthy of consideration under the law, and in the second, community is treated as irrelevant to a higher purpose as defined outside the community, and no appeal is permitted.

We may very well be willing in both of these examples to accept what was done, bot to pretend that it isn't problematic, or not the responsibility of secular administrators deaf to entreaties which fall outside their own experience, is essentially to dodge the issue.

[ Parent ]
There's always the fun Soviet examples (0.00 / 0)
Like state suppression of evolutionary theory in order to prop up fundamentalist Marxist atheism.
[ Parent ]
Right (4.00 / 1)
Which is my science and reality should be our guides, not dogma and rigid ideology.

And it was actually suppressed because of the Marxist ideology, not the atheist part.  The oppression of the Russian Orthodox Church was done to maintain state-sponsored atheism.

[ Parent ]
Whoops (0.00 / 0)
that should be "why" not "my".
[ Parent ]
Apologies (0.00 / 0)
but I'm not quite following you.  Could you spell it out a bit clearly?
[ Parent ]
I'll try.... (0.00 / 0)
As simply as I can put it, atheists have indeed caused problems because they're atheists. Not so many, perhaps as the enforcers of religious orthodoxy, but some have been truly horrific. (Think Auschwitz, for example.)

In any event, as bastard children of the Enlightenment, dogmatic atheist enforcers haven't been around as long as, say, Jesuits or Wahhabis, but they aren't any less callous in the way they treat things which they don't understand, or perhaps more properly, don't even see.

It's not a complicated observation, but I suspect that my original examples led you astray, perhaps because I chose them from the familiar rather than the exotic.

[ Parent ]
Bullshit (0.00 / 0)
You're going to lay Auschwitz at the feet of atheists?  Beyond the Godwin (gratz!), that's a lie.  The Nazi ideology was not atheistic; hell, they explicitly allied themselves with religion ("Gott mit uns").

And this: "In any event, as bastard children of the Enlightenment, dogmatic atheist enforcers haven't been around as long as, say, Jesuits or Wahhabis, but they aren't any less callous in the way they treat things which they don't understand, or perhaps more properly, don't even see." I'm going to break this down point by point.

bastard children of the Enlightenment: what the hell?  Not to go all Palin on you, but in what respect?

dogmatic atheist enforcers: "God doesn't exist" is apparently dogmatic, and arguing with people on the internet and publishing books making that case makes you an enforcer?  Bullshit.

haven't been around as long as, say, Jesuits or Wahhabis, but they aren't any less callous in the way they treat things which they don't understand, or perhaps more properly, don't even see.: Treat ideas that are wrong (we think) callously?  Hell yes.  One thing you won't find Dawkins or Myers or the vast majority of atheists doing is treating people (or their right to have ideas that are wrong) callously.

It's not a complicated observation you've made; it's a simple-minded false equivocation.  All it amounts to is being a WATB about being criticized, and conflating loud, even angry disagreement with the state-enforced oppression that our religious fundamentalists would visit upon us if they could.  It's bullshit.  The threat of persecution of religious peoples by atheists is a non-problem in European nations, the most secularized region of the world, and it's not even on the horizon here.

[ Parent ]
What are you pissed off about, exactly? (0.00 / 0)

All it amounts to is being a WATB about being criticized

Was that really necessary? in any case, it's as untrue as it is presumptuous.

In answer to your more substantive points, Gott mit uns was traditional on German army belt buckles. It predates the Nazis, whose adoption of Christian symbolism was wholly self-serving.

One of your accusations does, however, have some validity. It may have been disingenuous for me to conflate atheist and secular in this context, but I did so only to point out that atrocities aren't by any means exclusive to religious orthodoxies.

Those atrocities most notable in our own time were in fact conducted by people whose primary motives at least pretended to be rational. (The banality of evil, the techniques of mass production in the service of genocide, the pretense of precision weapons of mass destruction, the semantic cowardice of the phrase I mentioned above, strategic hamlet, or the more recent collateral damage.) Like it or not, none of these have anything to do with religion.

Leaving the Nazis aside, however, I think you would admit that he Soviets and the Chinese Communists, were/are avowedly atheist. Would you really deny that they were a) dogmatic, and b) that they treated people callously? Need I point out that they outnumber Dawkins and Myers by a considerable margin, even if you throw in Madalyn Murray O'Hair?

As for bastard children of the Enlightenment, this is really beyond dispute. I won't presume to give you lessons in cultural history, but the morphology of rationalism leads in some surprising directions, and the descent from Hegel to Marx to Lenin to Stalin, or from Voltaire to Locke to Monroe to Petraeus is in fact traceable.

Does that about cover it?

[ Parent ]
I'm pissed (0.00 / 0)
About any atheist that dares to be vocal in the US immediately having legions of reasonable people tut-tutting about them being "fundamentalist" and linking them with atrocities committed by atheists.

Re: Stalin and Mao, I won't deny that they were atheists.  And that they did awful things.  Some of which in the name of atheism.  But frankly, I hate the game where we trade atrocities in order to determine who was "worse".  It's a stupid game, because it doesn't prove any points.  People will do bad or good things, regardless of their ideology or religious beliefs.  That's why I took such exception to your claim that atheists do bad things "because they're atheists".  It's bullshit.  I argue against religion are because it's wrong and encourages non-reality-based thinking.  Atheists aren't immune to this, either, and I think the Commies are a good example of that.  The atrocities committed in the 20th Century were worse because of the tools they had at their disposal, not because of any change in beliefs.  Dehumanizing people* is what leads to atrocities, not statements on the existence or lack thereof of supernatural beings.

*"But atheism dehumanizes people" to which my response is "absolutely not although atheists have."

[ Parent ]
As I suspected, (0.00 / 0)
you aren't really arguing with me at all. I've never attempted to make the case, here or anywhere else, that atheism dehumanizes people, makes them rigid fundamentalists, or leads them to commit atrocities. (I could hardly do so, as I'm one myself, and I usually plead the fifth when playing devil's advocate. ;-)

Neither was I playing the who's done more horrible things game. I was only pointing out what you're reiterating here, that both religious and secular world-views can lead to contempt for the other, and that we should look somewhere other than in doctrine for the reasons why that is so. Stalin's impatience with the backward and superstitious Kulaks was not different in kind or degree from the Church's impatience with heretics.

And finally, what of the contemporary Christian's anger at being immediately linked to historical pogroms, as though he himself were guilty of them? Shall we attribute that to an ignorance of history too, and give it a pass? Sauce for the goose, it seems to me, is sauce for the gander.

[ Parent ]
Um... (0.00 / 0)
Firstly, sorry for the delay in response.  I haven't had a real chance to check the site.  Anyway, the thread is probably dead so I'll make this real short.

You @ 22:04- I've never attempted to make the case, here or anywhere else, that atheism dehumanizes people, makes them rigid fundamentalists, or leads them to commit atrocities

You @ 18:49- As simply as I can put it, atheists have indeed caused problems because they're atheists. Not so many, perhaps as the enforcers of religious orthodoxy, but some have been truly horrific. (Think Auschwitz, for example.)

[ Parent ]
I know "WATB" is a netroots staple, but it doesn't change (0.00 / 0)
the fact that cheap misogyny isn't much helpful to your case.
[ Parent ]
Withdrawn, then (0.00 / 0)
I threw it in because it was a staple and I wanted to make my point with as few letters as possible.
[ Parent ]
Dawkins is a fraud, at worst (0.00 / 0)
And a pig-headed fool, at best.

See http://www.sheldrake.org/D&C/c... .

He is indeed a "secular fundamentalist", and shows all the integrity and openness of mind as did the Catholic clergy who, as the story goes, refused to look through Galileo's telescope.

While the latter may be merely an apocryphal story, the mindset is fairly common, and readily apparent even in presumably very rational people.

(Also recommended, for insights into tribal behavior of physicists which impedes their rationality, are The Trouble with Physics and Not Even Wrong.

DemocracyABC.org
TheRealNews.Com
http://www.pdamerica.org

*GASP* (0.00 / 0)
Yes, how dare Dawkins rely on the various lines of already established evidence to suggest that people aren't really psychic. Rather he just pointed out that some people actually believe that and actually have some influence.
[ Parent ]
Dawkins was AT Sheldrake's lab WITH a camera crew (0.00 / 0)
He doesn't WANT to see any evidence that contradicts his materialistic 'gospel', much less document it. What really galls me about Dawkins is not that he's a closed-minded fool, but rather that he's a hypocrite, and an insulting one at that.

Well, all the better for his earnings, no?


DemocracyABC.org
TheRealNews.Com
http://www.pdamerica.org

[ Parent ]
Sheldrake is a parapsychologist (0.00 / 0)
Seriously, ESP, telepathy, the whole kit and caboodle. He's dishonest for suggesting that it may not be up to snuff?
[ Parent ]
Really? (4.00 / 2)
"materialistic gospel"?  Because he doubts the claims of psychics?

To quote Sagan, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".  The claims of psychics are certainly extraordinary, but their evidence has consistently been worse-than-ordinary.

I guess I'm just being a "secular fundamentalist" who is "intolerant" of your beliefs...

[ Parent ]
How can you see "extraordinary evidence" with your eyes shut? (0.00 / 0)
I repeat, he was at Sheldrake's lab, WITH a film crew.

Galileo's Catholic oppressors did not see the evidence that would have been presented through their very own eyeballs, since they did not take up Galileo's offer to enhance their vision with his telescope. (Again, I believe the story is actually apocryphal, but serves as an effective analogy, nonetheless.) Should we admire their stellar intellects, or decry their pig-headedness? I'll go with the latter, thank-you very much.

DemocracyABC.org
TheRealNews.Com
http://www.pdamerica.org

[ Parent ]
Science IS a religion (0.00 / 0)
and like all religions, it's at its best when its practitioners acknowledge that their faith does not actually give them Truth.

I could argue that Science is a religion with a singular tenet, that it is impossible to be certain that any given statement is true. For scientific knowledge to progress, it is absolutely crucial that scientists continue to question everything they think they know. Even in Science, you only find what you're looking for. If you truly believe you know the answer, you will find evidence that your answer is correct - that's true whether you think your enquiry is faith-based or science-based.

And when the purpose of enquiry becomes to reinforce what you think you already know, watch out - that also is true of both scientific and religious endeavor.

I think understanding Science as just one more religion is sufficient to understanding conflicts between Science and other religions. The subject then becomes one that theologians have given an enormous amount of thought over the centuries: can and should separate religions coexist peacefully? Those who answer "no" are likely fundamentalists and commit the sin of pride. Answering "yes" should, in my opinion, be a litmus test for those who wish to call themselves "progressive". There are a variety of rationalizations for either answer.

Pointless (4.00 / 3)
I know it is pointless to get into these debates, but the technique of defining a word to mean the opposite of what it means to win an argument just doesn't hold.

Religion:

a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

There is no such thing as a "secular" religion. Religion is based upon the concept of the supernatural, science is not.

Now it is possible to criticize individual scientists for being close-minded. This is not a fault with the scientific method, but of human nature. Individuals may form incorrect ideas and then hold to them firmly, especially if they have invested their career in them, that's human nature.

Science, however, moves on and eventually certain knowledge that has been discovered becomes widely accepted. Doctors now understand the importance of scrubbing up to avoid spreading disease to patients, a concept that was ridiculed when first proposed. There are many examples.

Those who need to believe constantly try to find arguments to support their psychological requirement, but making oneself feel better or reassured doesn't constitute a valid argument.

Science is based upon observation of the real world, followed by hypothesis which aim to generalize the observations. When these hypotheses have been tested enough times they are call theories or "laws" of nature, but this is just a metaphor. There are hypothesis which have a very high probability of being valid, those with less and those with a limited range of applicability.

Einstein showed that Newton's laws of motion don't apply exactly in certain circumstances and that led to General Relativity. All scientific theories are open to amendment or abandonment in the light of new data.

Religious dogma is not. Calling science religion doesn't make it so.

I suggest you read Daniel Dennett about the belief in belief, this is a psychological argument.

Policies not Politics

[ Parent ]
Unless we're Nietzschean ubermen, we all have psychological requirements. (4.00 / 1)
"But making oneself feel better or reassured doesn't constitute a valid argument." Uh, why isn't that precisely enough? I don't get the shame expressed here. And the "real world?" What the hell is that? And you want to talk about observations that remain static for too long? Descartes was when?  
[ Parent ]
I'll take it (4.00 / 1)
Religion:

a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

I said "I could argue that Science is a religion" - I'm not sure I totally buy the argument. However, I'll note that in your definition, Science fits the bill for the strict definition. It definitely violates the "especially when" clause. "Devotional and ritual observances" may be a part of Science, depending on your perspective, but that is only "usually" a component of religion in any case. Some would probably argue that Science does contain a moral code - I would not, but again religion apparently only "often" contains such a code. Yes, it is a stretch to define Science as a religion, but it is allowable in the definition you cite. The other piece of the stretch you may object to is the requirement that "belief concerning the ... purpose of the universe" allow belief that the purpose is null.

There are hypothesis which have a very high probability of being valid, those with less and those with a limited range of applicability.

This I cannot agree with. There are hypotheses with a very low probability of being false, those with higher probability of being false, and those that can assumed to be false under most circumstances. We are blocked from estimating the probability of any hypothesis being "valid" by the lack of knowledge of all possible alternative hypotheses.

Regarding the possibility of amendment or abandonment of religious dogma, what is your interpretation of what happened to Catholicism in Vatican II?

For me, equating the question of whether Science and religion are compatible with the question of whether Christianity and Buddhism are compatible clarifies the arguments much more than insisting that the two questions are completely different.

[ Parent ]
A generative perspective (4.00 / 5)
I get pissed off at religious fundamentalisms all the time. Who among us doesn't? But the mythos/logos dichotomy Paul emphasizes here is an important one. It should help us reconceive religion as spirituality and as aligned with the humanities and the arts more generally--that is, with the quest for meaning, with the ability to self-comfort, and with the effort to make human existence tolerable at least and valuable at most.

One problem with aggressive atheism is that it doesn't stop with attacking religion. It generally moves on to anything that isn't strictly scientific, anything that honors feeling--literature, psychiatry, the arts, love, even the qualitative social sciences. This kind of atheism on the march leaves us emotionally hollow, not to mention sanctimonious. The wisdom of the ages is foreign to it. It leaves us "partial men," as Emerson puts it in "The Poet."

So I believe that all of us who believe in science but also feel an affinity for aesthetic, contemplative, or affective experience--what Jacques Derrida called "the discourse of the human sciences"--need to defend religion in the largest sense. We're all in this together.

And twofold Always (4.00 / 2)
May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep.
[ Parent ]
ARGH (4.00 / 1)
One problem with aggressive atheism is that it doesn't stop with attacking religion. It generally moves on to anything that isn't strictly scientific, anything that honors feeling--literature, psychiatry, the arts, love, even the qualitative social sciences. This kind of atheism on the march leaves us emotionally hollow, not to mention sanctimonious. The wisdom of the ages is foreign to it. It leaves us "partial men," as Emerson puts it in "The Poet."

No. Also, no.  And no.  Some more no.  And I have to quote this: "[Some] apparently think us naturalists/materialists/scientifically-minded people can't study phenomena that can't be easily reduced to a handful of particles. Or at least that's what I've gathered. This is, of course, bunk. Science is the study of effects. Particle physics have nothing to do with it. We've just successfully reduced much of the universe to those units."

As well as this one: "Yes, everything we know so far suggests people could be described as a very complicated set of particles interacting in a sophisticated manner. Love, joy, aesthetics, and so forth are a bunch of unpronounceable chemicals bouncing around in our heads. But how exactly does that make those things valueless? They still make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. A person is a person, regardless of what processes add up to giving them those characteristics we value."

Finally, no and no.

Sorry for the outsourcing, but they're succinct and worth reading.

[ Parent ]
From my perspective, these citations from the Bronze Blog (0.00 / 0)
are just "rambling" reassertions of a reductive skepticism. They prove nothing, they do not reflect wide reading or complex thought, and they're not worth discussing.
[ Parent ]
Not Worth Discussing? (0.00 / 0)
I do so love the "Shut Up, That's Why" argument so blatantly on display.
[ Parent ]
Straw men (0.00 / 0)
A lot of people on this thread have been posing the argument that nonbelievers who are responding negatively to religious-based viewpoints are merely posing "straw men" caricatures about religion-based POVs. However, how can you get a more "straw men" based argument than this:
"One problem with aggressive atheism is that it doesn't stop with attacking religion. It generally moves on to anything that isn't strictly scientific, anything that honors feeling--literature, psychiatry, the arts, love, even the qualitative social sciences. This kind of atheism on the march leaves us emotionally hollow, not to mention sanctimonious."

[ Parent ]
Rim shot (4.00 / 2)
He may be mistaking aggressive atheists for libertarians. (Okay, okay...it's just been a long thread is all....)
[ Parent ]
Thanks (0.00 / 0)
you made me laugh
[ Parent ]
I agree that is a straw man; (0.00 / 0)
however, it's also true that when you're arguing against any value to the realm of mythos, you're also arguing against the arts and an integration of the irrational into human existence. It's not an accident that the origins of art and literature are traced to religion, but, of course, that's not to say you can't be an atheist and have appreciation for them.  
[ Parent ]
Prospective from the layman -- Trust in authority (4.00 / 1)
Much of the conversation about science and religion rests on evidence and faith.  Paul reframes the conversation to be between logos and mythos, the difference in how we experience and apply science and religion to our lives.  (I wonder how much effect of worship on the brain also applies to rock concerts... but I'm getting off the subject.)

But I want to get back to evidence and faith for a second.  From the prospective of the layman science doesn't have nearly the leg up on religion we would like to think.  Both ultimately require trust in authority.

I have both an undergraduate and graduate degree in physics, run lab classes and in general have reproduced far more fundamental experiments verifying scientific theory than the typical person.  But I haven't personally verified even the tiniest fraction of all experiments needed to verify modern theory; not even 1/100th of 1% -- not even close.  (And to be honest, sometimes I screwed up the experiment and 'disproved' the theory.)

To the layman, both scientific and religious 'facts' rest on the informed opinion of educated experts.  Ultimately, it is up to the individual to decide which group he or she trusts the most.  Both groups are backed up by higher authority (or Higher Authority), the scientific method or God.  If one already believes in God, that's a though contest for science to win.

Worse, the 'evidence' used in religion is based on the everyday experiences we all have.  The beauty of the sunrise, the anger at ones neighbor, and so on.  The evidence for science is much harder to see.

For those of us educated in science, this is easy to forget.

run => ran (0.00 / 0)
I've learned not to correct typos with replies, but the difference between 'run' and 'ran' is pretty big.  Just to be clear, I haven't run a lab class since I was a graduate student back in '93.
[ Parent ]
Lessons Learned (4.00 / 1)
The God I felt back when I was a Born Again Christian never went away.  It didn't go away when I decided the fundamentalists were right about the Bible and I was very angry at how evil our God was.  It didn't go away when I was basically an atheist.  And He is still there right now.  

God is very much a part of my soul, something I can feel quite strongly.  The fact I no longer really believe in either God or a soul (in the conventional sense, at least) hasn't changed that.  Irony be damned.

Getting back to Paul's diary, the lesson learned appears to be religion has a place in our society along side science.  The divide between the two is already well defined.  It is to our advantage to encourage this division of labor.  It is to our disadvantage to attempt to smack down religion in favor of science.  

The model Paul shows is clearly optimistic and only shows a portion of the overall picture.  (I'm not claiming this applies to Paul himself, who obviously understands the other issues as well.)  It points to a reality that already exists and one that should be encouraged.  This is how we want the conversation between science and religion to be framed.

Not for me (4.00 / 1)
That's not how I want it framed. I'd like to see some genuine feedback between the two. Despite your assertion, I have the feeling that in fact we're all laboring in the same vineyard, and that we therefore shouldn't decide too early on the proper division of labor, lest we overlook something really important.
[ Parent ]
God in science (4.00 / 1)
I've always thought that if God is real, in a truly physical (energy, whatever) sense, science will  eventually find Him.  They practically had to change the meaning of science to accommodate the experimental results found relating to quantum mechanics.  If that kind of God is real, science will eventually find Him.  (You just have to wait a few thousand or so years :-)

I'm not sure if that relates to your point.

We also have to be careful how we use science.  Scientific discoveries can greatly enlighten us, even in a moralistic sense, but they are no substitute for morality.  For example, we know that happiness is not related to wealth beyond a certain point.  However, happiness is related below a certain level of wealth.  That knowledge is scientific.  The moral impact is real, but not absolute.

[ Parent ]
I think you're conflating two separate concepts (0.00 / 0)
You have a point in that certain aspects of religion--community, unity, oneness in others, being part of something greater than yourself, etc.--are separate from science, and can't be judged by scientific standards.  That's obvious, because those are all emotions, and as such, cannot be true or false (they just are).

However, all those things you're describing are not truly religion, they're spirituality.  You don't have to be religious to have those feelings.  Moreover, religion has more components than just spirituality.  At the very least, all religions make an empirical claim--that at least one god exists.  As an empirical claim, it can be true or false, and thus does fall under the domain of science (or, to be more accurate, reason/rationality), and can be criticized using rational concepts such as evidence, proof, etc.

I'm not going to get into "faith," because everyone seems to have a different definition of that.  But the reason rationality and spirituality are different is because rationality has to do with facts, and spirituality has to do with emotions.  As soon as you start getting into the realm of facts, rationality does and should have a say.

I stopped reading here. (0.00 / 0)
This is, I would argue, a form of secular fundamentalism that misunderstands almost as much as religious fundamentalism does.

That is absolutely one the laziest false equivocations out there. I really stopped caring about your thoughts on the subject after reading that line. It's like someone referring to the "Democrat" Party, they may make a good argument afterwords, but I've already tuned them out because they are either a dishonest broker or plain ignorant.

Have you actually read Dawkins or Hitchens (on religion)? Or do you just follow the traditional media reporting on these "militant atheists"? They are anything, but fundamentalists. Their entire "creed" is to question all dogma. They don't seek blind obedience, but instead open questioning of all would be authority. Contrary to popular belief, they both freely admit they could be wrong about the existence of gods. When has a fundamentalist ever admitted such a thing?

I would think progressives would recognize cheap and easy false equivalence arguments made by the traditional media.

The truth about John McCain.

Blame It On My Math Background (0.00 / 0)
If you get a fundamental premise wrong, you get everything that follows wrong as well.  And the fundamental premise here is that mythos and logos are one and the same.

You can stop reading if you want.  It's a great way to keep yourself locked into your own false premises.

Dawkins and Hitchens are beside the point.  They are merely extreme examples of a much more common and widespread mistake.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Definitions, not Premises (0.00 / 0)
As someone with a math background, you should know that failing to define your terms is just as big a sin as getting the premise wrong.

Why do so many atheists treat religion with some disdain?  Because it doesn't define its terms.  God.  Soul.  Afterlife.  What do these things actually mean?  Nothing.  There is no logically-consistent way to assign definitions to these terms that have the properties religious folk want them to, without making them falsifiable and falsified by scientific investigation.

The religious feeling is a wacky reaction our minds often have to the experience of being alive.  That's it.  Everything else is just an attempt to dress up this feeling in fancy metaphorical clothes.  While that has aesthetic value, it has nothing at all to do with knowledge or ethics or how to make decisions or how to treat other people.

You can't take religion seriously!  You're the one who seems to conflate logos and mythos here, by appearing to treat religion as something we can even discuss meaningfully.

[ Parent ]
The Science of Religion | 136 comments
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