One thing that religions typically do — although certainly not the only one — is to make claims about how the world works. How important are those claims to what religion really is, and how we should think about it?
PZ Myers has posted a very interesting letter from Stephen Asma that talks about this issue. Asma earlier wrote a critique of New Atheism in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to which PZ responded, but I think the new letter is more interesting than the previous salvos. Russell Blackford has also chimed in.
This is a very healthy discussion to be having — moving a bit beyond the caricatures of atheism by believers, and of religion by atheists. Much of what Asma says I find quite persuasive. The crux is something like this:
My argument is that religion helps people, rightly or wrongly, manage their emotional lives. And while it doesn’t do very much for me and other skeptics (I prefer art), I would be very inattentive if I failed to notice how much relief and comfort it gave to other people.
Asma wants to consider the aspects of religion that are closer to those of art or literature than those of science. There’s no question that religions have beneficial effects along with their bad ones. If we’re being rational about it, we should try to understand how those effects work, even if our only agenda is to find some sort of acceptable substitute.
If we were starting from scratch I would put it this way: some of the sense of wonder and anticipation of possibility that defines us as human is often categorized under the heading of “religion.” We can raise questions about the truthfulness of religion’s attempts to describe how the world works, while at the same time respecting some of the careful thought that religious people have put into understanding the human condition.
But … there’s usually a “but.” I have to wonder about these attempts to completely downplay the role of truth-claims in religious belief. In my experience, when I hear someone arguing that the important aspects of religion are moral or aesthetic, and the statements about how the world works are an unfortunate bit of historical baggage, it usually is not coming from a religious person, but rather from a sympathetic non-believer. My impression is that the way a religion views the world is actually quite important to a typical believer. I have in mind both very specific kinds of claims, that God created the world some number of years ago or that we are sorted into various afterlives depending on our Earthly track record, or more vague ones, that God allows the world to be or that moments of transcendence represent connection with a higher power. I don’t think these are unimportant to most religious believers, even most very sophisticated ones (I could be wrong).
And, needless to say, views about how the world works are very often central to the other aspects of religious belief. If you really believe in Heaven and Hell, you’d be crazy not to let that belief influence your view of morality here on Earth.
So, while I’m all in favor of understanding the nature of religious belief and also exhibiting a willingness to learn from believers who have thought long and hard about philosophy or ethics or what have you, I don’t foresee having a truly open and respectful dialogue without putting questions of how the world really works front and center. If we took a religion and removed from it any claims about how the world works, leaving a set of ideas about morality and human life, would it make sense to even call the result a religion? It would be more like a philosophy or worldview, and those are things that even we atheists are more than happy to engage with.
Still, we don’t always do a good job of that engagement. I look forward to the day when “atheism” as a worldview takes difficult emotional human questions more seriously in a public way.
religion is a form of mythos. It screws up when it tries to do logos. Science, by its nature, can only do logos.
In the end, the point of the Christ story/Buddha story/whatever is not about the historical record about historical events. It is about a series of events intended to ascribe meaning to events and to life. It should not be taken a a ‘how things work’.
“There’s no question that religions have beneficial effects along with their bad ones.”
Really?
Besides things that are mis-attributed, exactly what are the beneficial effects that would not be there without religion?
FWIW, in the liberal churches that I’m most familiar with the moral and ethical aspects of Christianity are far more emphasized than claims about “how the world works.” Probably 90%-10% in my experience. And the pastors and members are generally very “science friendly.” You’re far more likely to hear about the Sermon on the Mount’s implications for this weekend’s Feed the Homeless serv-a-thon than any particularly strong dogma about how the physical world works or doesn’t.
Admittedly, I don’t know much about this ratio outside my little corner of organized religion, but I think it is worth pointing out.
Nice post. Paul Tillich wrote of religious truths not as scientific or causal statements but in terms of the human coming into contact with their ‘ultimate concern’ or the grounding of their being. Of course this strikes the modern as sounding vague and unpersuasive. And well it certainly is, but necessarily so. To the extent the religious person is forced to be more specific, they will have to use words to describe the situation, and necessarily anologize to other objects in the world. But if there is a God, and I’m not saying there is, I would expect such an analogy to drastically fail. I would say that we need to appreciate the limits of language. The physicist has the use of mathematics. I don’t deny the religous person the use of art and literature to express their emotions.
From what I can tell, at least the founders of a lot of religions would agree with you. For example, Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and so is your faith.” (the rest of I Corinthians 15 has other similar claims, in case anyone cares to look this up). In other words, there’s no point in being a Christian if this very specific historical claim of the religion turns out to be false.
Several (though perhaps not all) religions clearly depend on similar truth claims that could in principle be empirically verified or refuted, even if we don’t have access to the relevant data any more (you made this very point about the contents of the Library of Alexandria not too long ago). Either Muhammad received a revelation from Allah via Gabriel, or he didn’t. Either Joseph Smith received golden tablets from Moroni, or he didn’t. And so on. In each of these cases, if one holds that the factual claims are false, then there is basically no rational justification for trusting any of the rest of that religion’s claims (historical, moral, ethical, or what have you).
To claim otherwise is, in my opinion, not only fatuous but disrespectful of the religion in question, as it smacks more of condescension than serious interaction. And since you expressed trepidation about speaking on behalf of religious believers, I will also add at least one relevant data point for you: while my strong allergic reaction to (this aspect of) postmodern relativism draws on both my early religious upbringing and my later training as a scientist, it still seems like nothing more than basic rules of logic to me, which I would like to think that I’d recognize even if I were neither a Christian nor a physicist.
What about the God of Spinoza? Even if you think science demystifies the World at a point isn’t there always Wonder to continue to the next? When Science does get close to the first mover at the instant of creation would it be a divine relevation of some measure? How do you know that it will be an inaminate mechanical crank? I think you can believe in something sacred (or the wonder of it all) such as the creation and still not be a religionist or atheist. At the same time it is easy enough to believe in ‘oblivion’ and that religions are anthropic with less to say how the World works. I think some atheists and some religionists try to keep to principle somehow. Maybe principle is linked in the way things work and maybe Science will give us the ah ha moment of deep understanding which destroys the inherited dead world of Aristotle.
“[I want] “atheism” as a worldview [to take] difficult emotional human questions more seriously in a public way.”
Isn’t half the point of atheism not telling other people what they should think the answers to subjective questions are? That is, we defend the truth where there is an objective truth and butt out when there isn’t one. For atheism to take a stance other than “whatever makes you happy” on difficult emotional human questions is wholly inappropriate.
I am really glad Asma articulated in words, and put some substance behind how many “non-new atheists” view religions in general. For me, I think the following point in his response to PZ is the most relevant:
People who critique such emotional responses and strategies with the refrain “But is it true?” are missing the point. I agree with the atheists: Most religious beliefs are not true. But here’s the crux. The emotional brain doesn’t care. It doesn’t operate on the grounds of true and false. An emotion is not a representation or a judgment, so it cannot be evaluated like a theory. Emotions are not true or false.
The whole “Four horsemen” new atheist movement may be a nice push back against silly (predominantly american) Christian evangelical movement, but as a viable philosophical replacement for the human condition, it’s sorely inadequate because it assumes, as Asma pointed out, a stable emotional safety as a pre-requisite.
As Sean said, I think this conversation started by Asma is worth having and will be fruitful. But so far, if PZ’s responses (and most the comments) are any judgement, new atheists are still in the middle of shouting very loudly at any “retreat”. For them, I prescribe some time in a disaster zone.
Eugene
#2 Steve
It would be odd if religion somehow managed to come into such a fundamental part of the human experience without providing some evolutionary advantage. One could easily imagine a few – social cohesion, motivation for individual self-sacrifice for the group, enforcing a foundation of behavior without which human society would be impossible.
However, there is something that often does not get brought up in these sort of discussions. That is the human experience of transcendence which makes take on different forms in different cultures and religions (and sometimes even in atheists). It may in fact be nothing more than biochemical but it is something that goes beyond a set of beliefs or a code of conduct and goes to a sense of something greater than our small egos.
Does this capability too have an evolutionary origin?
I think the question is a good one, but just as you can ask hard questions of a religion about its claims about how the world “works”,” so religion can ask hard questions of an atheist about what his or her world view say about how the world “works.” Physics does a pretty darn good job of explaining how the physical world “works,” but I would argue that various religions do a pretty darn good job of explaining how the world of human interaction “works.” Organized religions are full of hypocrisy, selfishness, greed, hatred, violence and death? That’s not news. That’s the world of human interactions! The Pollyannas are not the folks praying to God, but the ones who think they can develop a world view without these essential evils. A religion’s job is not to ignore these qualities, even the ones in their midst, but to try to understand and come to grips with them! Say what you will about Christianity, but it doesn’t flinch from confronting the real, flawed world around us. As for Heaven and Hell, well, those ideas are about as old fashioned in religion as luminiferous ether and caloric are in Physics.
Various Christian claims:
1) Men are born sinful. This is true, or close enough to be Newtonian physics,
2) Women should be subordinate to men. This is false, or certainly suicidal in the US for most men,
3) Children should honor their parents. True if they want to leave the house,
4) Jesus rose from the dead. This is too far in the past, no living witnesses, witnesses are lousy reporters, anyway.
5) There is a God. This is untestable. If he’s all powerful, then you can’t make him reveal himself. If he isn’t then he isn’t God…
And so on. If you make a list of religious claims, then some will be correct, some false and many simply untestable and, therefore, not scientific propositions.
There is such a huge problem with this that I am flabbergasted. The ‘good’ or acceptable goodness of religion is _easily_ sourced from many other places without the crap that religion brings along with it. If we have to burn supposed witches to have morality there is something wrong with us. I get it that you are saying have those things without the witch burning – which in turn simply means be good without god already. Why ‘save’ religions? Scrap them and get on with being good for goodness sake. You cannot separate religion’s good parts from the absolute shit that they have dumped on the world from their beginnings.
Look at it another way, take Asma’s text and replace religion, faith et al with a similar form of the phrase drug addiction. Do we want to take the good parts of drug addiction and use them, or simply work to achieve goodness without addiction or trying to _get along_ with the addicted?
I don’t think this point can be made strongly enough. Religion ruins everything. There is no good in it. Period. Anything in it which is claimed to be good comes with so many strings attached that it is reduced to nothing but bile. Those same people claiming that the fellowship is useful are forgetting that it comes with the strings attached: you can have the fellowship but you have to oppress the GLBT members of society. God is love, unless you believe in a competing faith. For ANYTHING you can say is good about religion I can show you how it’s covered in shit and full of hidden dangers. Yes, we all need our daily bread, but if you have to eat it in the form of a shit sandwich, what’s the point?
Re: “… would it make sense to even call the result a religion? It would be more like a philosophy or worldview…”
Sure it would be valid to call it a religion. My impression is that most religions are heavily influenced by philosophy. Some, like Bhuddism and Shinto, seem to be mostly philosophy, from my limited outsider perspective.
In fact this is one of the reasons and ways I can accomodate religion. Religion essentially works for me at the level of philosophy. Where it fails for me is as a matter of faith.
I find that all the major religions have thought long and hard about philosophical issues and have important things to say about them. Not only that but they spend major resources as educators to the masses.
Why does it matter to be a moral person? What is the role of others in our lives? If we all die anyway, why not just live selfishly and revel in immediate gratification? Religions address these issues.
You might not agree with where they start from (God/Gods), but religions help vast numbers of people to live together.
Mr. Z: Replace the word “religion” with the word “family” in your post. I would argue that they have pretty close to the same meaning. ..
At least among those I have met, believers who consider “the important aspects of religion are moral or aesthetic, and the statements about how the world works are an unfortunate bit of historical baggage” are much less likely to talk about their religions than most, and often avoid it if they can. This view seems to be pretty common in liberal churches, and I expect in liberal branches of other religions as well.
Shelby Spong is pretty popular in some Episcopalian congregations (but certainly not in others), and these are far from the most liberal churches out there.
more vague ones, that God allows the world to be or that moments of transcendence represent connection with a higher power
Interestingly, those are the exact points raised by the Christian I engage with most frequently on his blog (psnt.net). I am curious how others may have responded to these particular assertions, especially responses that might have more substance than a simple ‘how do you know that?’.
I thought religion simply is about what is going to happen to you after you die – and its pretty much a proven truth that no matter where you go the same stuff is going to show up on your door stoop… that includes when you die.
This dialogue:
“[When I discovered, or when it was explained to me, that Hinduism is a pedagogical religion, namely, that the best “good deed” of a Hindu consisted of explaining something or the other, I lost my inhibitions and began with questions… A young Balinese became my primary teacher. One day I asked him if believed that the history of Prince Rama – one of the holy books of the Hindus – is true.
Without hesitation, he answered it with “Yes”.
“So you believe that the Prince Rama lived somewhere and somewhen?”
“I do not know if he lived”, he said.
“Then it is a story?”
“Yes, it is a story.”
“Then someone wrote this story – I mean: a human being wrote it?” “Certainly some human being wrote it”, he said. “Then some human being could have also invented it”, I answered and felt
triumphant, when I thought that I had convinced him.
But he said: “It is quite possible that somebody invented this story. But true it is, in any case.”
“Then it is the case that Prince Rama did not live on this earth?”
“What is it that you want to know?” he asked. “Do you want to know whether the story is true, or merely whether it occurred?”
“The Christians believe that their God Jesus Christ was also on earth”, I said, “in the New Testament, it has been so described by human beings. But the Christians believe that this is the description of the reality. Their God was also really on Earth.”
My Balinese friend thought it over and said: “I had been already so informed. I do not understand why it is important that your God was on earth, but it does strike me that the Europeans are not pious. Is that correct?”
“Yes, it is”, I said.
—-
After quoting this passage from Bichsel, the author continues:
Consider carefully the claims of this young Balinese. (A) Even though the narrative of events could have been invented and written by a human being, his ‘holy book’ remains true. (B) He does not know, and is not interested in knowing, whether Rama really lived but this does not af- fect the truth of Ramayana. (C) He draws a distinction between a story that is true (not just any story, nota bene, but his ‘holy book’) and the issue whether it is a chronicle of events on earth. (D) Finally, it remains his ‘holy’ book despite, or precisely because of, the above.
That is to say, he is indifferent to the historical truth and suggests, in the italicized part of the dialogue, that it is not a proper question; even if the invention of a human being and historically untrue, the story is true. He correlates impiety with believing in the truth of the Biblical narrative. As I would like to formulate it, not only is the young Indonesian drawing a distinction between a story and a history but also suggesting that the historicity of Ramayana is irrelevant to its truth.
—
FYI, there are many folk versions of the Ramayana (doesn’t make sense if the Ramayana is meant to represent historical truth; e.g., are there folk tales about Jesus?). Amusingly, in one of them the argument between Rama and Sita about whether she should accompany him in his banishment is won by Sita with the stellar point that Sita makes – “In all the versions of Ramayana I have heard, Sita accompanies Rama, so there!”.
I think this is ample evidence that whatever the Hindu villager thinks about the Ramayana, it is not as the historical truth (e.g., unlike the traditional attitude of Christians towards the Bible.)
As to the Ayodhya mosque dispute, supposedly built on the spot where Rama was born – you should realize that insistence of historical truth among Hindus is truly radical; a modern innovation, so to speak; a notion that Hindus must have a city like Mecca or Jerusalem with a historical claim.
—-
Now the author I quoted makes the point that Hinduism is not a religion (he actually argues that Hinduism does not exist, it is a construct of people who see the world only through the prism of religion). But since there is a long convention of calling Hinduism a religion, I submit that religion has content without the various truth-claims that y’all claim that are essential to a religion.
I can only speak from my own personal experience; I once belonged to a traditional Jewish congregation that met weekly.
At least in this particular congregation, nobody spoke seriously about faith-statements or about taking any of it literally; I estimate that half of the attendees did not even believe in God. There was little emphasis even on philosophy.
No, what was emphasized was not believing or thinking but doing. They practiced intense rituals that are thousands of years old, rituals that brought a sense of stability and continuity to ancestors who often had no place to call a permanent home.
They sang very beautiful, very old songs to very beautiful, very old melodies that had been with all of them their whole lives, and for the lives of many generations who went before them. They chanted familiar incantations, ate ritual meals, and provided each other with continuity and support during difficult times. They provided each other with a sense of belonging in a country in which belonging—real, unconditional belonging—is fast becoming a rarity.
For those who have no experience with a religion like that, whose understanding of religion is limited to the shallow, simple-minded, historically disconnected thing that is modern American evangelical Christianity, I cannot imagine how you could possibly understand. It’s like trying to describe an old friend from your childhood; people who never knew him will just never really understand what it was like to know him.
I left this congregation because I stopped personally needing these things. I once had the emotional need for them, but I do not any longer. But most people do need these things, and atheism just won’t do it for them. Atheism certainly didn’t do it for me when I needed these things.
Where are the age-old songs in atheism? Where are the rituals? Where are the group chants? How are you going to get a group of grown adults together each week to sing silly but moving songs with a straight face? Where’s the house where you get together with people from all walks of life that you’ve known your whole life, people who will provide you with an unconditional sense of belonging, when even your family isn’t always there for you? Where’s the sense of continuity and permanence that one finds in the Old Religions, in a world of constant flux and change and instability? In one of these religions, inside all the customs and music and chanting and rituals, you feel utterly wrapped up inside a rich old-ness, a permanence. The immutable Laws of Nature, majestic and permanent though they may be, just don’t provide that feeling to most people; certainly not to me.
It’s not about truth-statements or even philosophy; those aren’t the things the majority of people get most from their religion. And atheism simply cannot provide those things.
And for people who don’t need them, that’s great. But human beings are not all the same; some people need the things that religion provides, far beyond the “truth-statements.”
What drives me crazy about people like Sean is that they seem to believe at some level that there really is a solution that works well for everybody. Not a specific, cookie-cutter solution per se, but a general solution, a scientific posture toward the world, a disposition that doesn’t require the manifold melodies that many serious old religions provide. But people are really, really different, and that solution just won’t work for everybody. People need very different things to be content with their lives; I am under no illusion that my own persuasion is right for everybody else.
This is taken from PZ’s resly to Asma:
“He could show me a religion that is nothing but sweetness and light, happiness and good thoughts and equality for all, and it wouldn’t matter: the one question I would ask is, “Is it true?” It wouldn’t matter if he could show empirically that adopting this hypothetical faith leads to world peace, the voluntary abolishment of crime, the disappearance of dental caries, and that every child on the planet would get their very own pony — I’d still battle it with every fierce and angry word I could speak and type if it wasn’t also shown to be a true and accurate description of the world. Some of us, at least, will refuse to drink the Kool-Aid, no matter how much sugar they put in it.”
——————————————————————–
See, THIS is the attitude I don’t understand.
So, suppose you have a society, where adopting a false/unverifiable worldview really HAS led to world peace, abolition of crime, and high degree of emotional wellbeing all around.
Now suppose you also have very strong evidence that getting the people in that society to “face the truth” would lead to war, violent crime, widespread depression and suicide.
In this case, would you still tell them “the truth”? If so, what is your rationale?
Surely, some personal machismo about “refusing to drink the Kool Aid” wouldn’t suffice?
Interesting. I think both social and psychological benefits are the reason why religion is so widely spread. But I think time will come when science offers the same benefits and since science, in contrast to religion, doesn’t require people to insult their own intelligence, religions are on the way out. I recently wrote a blogpost about this, see Religion: A temporary phase in mankind’s history?
Sean (if I may be so familiar), you wrote: some of the sense of wonder and anticipation of possibility that defines us as human is often categorized under the heading of “religion.”
I would argue that a more general term would be “spirituality” – with “religion” being a sub-set or particular expression of “spirituality”. Of course, this begs the question of the definition of “spirituality”, but I’m trying to keep my posts short…
Sean, I welcome this more thoughtful approach to religious questions . Of course the usual angry atheists have made their appearance but given the quality of their reasoning they can be largely discounted. Religious experience is a major aspect of our evolution and on those grounds alone it deserves thoughtful treatment, not the rantings of the angry atheists.
You are sympathetic to this statement “My argument is that religion helps people, rightly or wrongly, manage their emotional lives”. While I agree with this I feel you have missed another vital component.
Some three years ago, after a lifetime of atheism, I, for the first time, carefully examined Christian claims and beliefs. I found to my surprise that they could survive careful and rigorous examination, notwithstanding the crude characitures of the angry atheists. More as an experiment, than anything else, I started attending my local Roman Catholic church. This was an important experience and I spent a lot of time carefully parsing the statements contained in the service, the hymns and the scriptures.
I found, as you claim, an important part of the religious experience is the way it helps manage people’s emotional lives. But more importantly, I found that, in a profound and ongoing way, it advocates leading a life based on tolerance, respect, love, forgiveness, good to others, community involvement and self examination (amongst other virtues). It provided a clear ethical framework that was most admirable. I was astonished. Was this the belief system that was so roundly condemned by atheists? It is the extraordinary emphasis on these values that moved me. This little church that I attend runs a hospice, soup kitchens, an old age home, an AIDS project and has numerous other charitable works amongst the many destitute of the region where I live. What was so bad about this?
So, what I have found is while it is an important way of managing one’s emotional life, it is even more importantly a powerful way of modulating community and interpersonal relationships in a way that is profoundly beneficial to society. I understand that, as a physicist, truth statements are important to you. They are to me as well and I believe, but don’t expect you to agree, that religion can survive some tests of truth provided one excludes the fringe beliefs that so many atheists lampoon and has reasonable expectations of truth. After all, we seriously entertain the multiverse hypothesis despite the absence of evidence.
@psmith and Mike
Yes, yes, of course the “helpful” side of religion is valuable and beautiful despite its idiocy.
And the problem isn’t the idiocy per se but, given the arbitrariness involved, how you can prevent “your “religious values” from colliding with other distinct faiths.
Even inside a common faith the bitter conflicts are between slight variants of the dogmas, ending up in slaughter of the “heretics”.
There cannot be any remedy to this since theology is all whimsical and never evidence based.
Can you solve this conundrum? I guess not…
I look forward to the day when “atheism” as a worldview takes difficult emotional human questions more seriously in a public way.
If that’s what you really want, then you need to stop linking to and doing anything that brings any more attention to PZ Myers.