Religion

USA Today reports on the efforts of “prayer warriors” who have taken to the sky for the spiritual benefit of the people of Ohio.

CINCINNATI — Ten small single-engine airplanes circling over Ohio on Friday afternoon will be on a special mission. They’ll be taking part in PrayerFlight, airplanes filled with people praying for the health and welfare of the state’s 11 million residents. […]

The prayer warriors, from all religious affiliations, pray silently and aloud while aloft. They ask God to guide leaders, pray for people in schools and hospitals, and ask for salvation. […]

The second flight had eight planes with 26 people, including six youths from Teens for Christ, a ministry of teenagers from 22 high schools. This time the group prayed over seven Ohio counties.

Samantha Ciminillo, 18, of Lima, a member of Teens for Christ, took one of the December flights. It was her first airplane ride. “You see rows and rows of houses, and you know they are full of people you are praying for,” she said. […]

For now, Ciminillo is looking forward to Friday. “God works through the power of prayer,” she said. “I’m expecting big things to happen.”

Now, as a connoisseur of sophisticated theology, I am well aware that the vast majority of religious believers share a philosophically nuanced image of the divine, such as one might read about in the London Review of Books. God is viewed as a manifestation of immanent transcendence (some tension there, to be deliciously savored!), a precondition of the universe’s existence, standing outside our ordinary categories of substance and imagination. Happy times they are, as these typically devout folks chat away over dinner about the progress of our understanding from Tertullian to Levinas, relaxing over dessert with anecdotes about Ricoeur’s hermeneutic speculations.

But, in the interests of complete honesty, we must admit that there are still a few folks out there — one or two, scattered about the landscape — who indulge in a somewhat more literal vision of the traditional religious stories. People who believe that God is some kind of person, sitting up there in the sky, looking down on us and passing judgment. A being quite frightfully anthropomorphic, whose omniscience and omnipotence correspond roughly to those associated with the beard of Gandalf and the strength of Superman, respectively.

It’s a funny kind of philosophy, and I do wonder how carefully people examine their own beliefs. If a human being were to manifest the kind of need for constant worship and gratitude that this God exhibits, we would call them pathological (or perhaps “Mr. President,” but that’s another topic). It’s a scary idea, that God has the power to exert great influence over what happens in our daily lives, but chooses to do so or not on the basis of a handful of people flying around in airplanes, praying their hearts out. (“Sorry, Kentucky; I’d love to help out, but the flightplan didn’t quite take the prayer team over your airspace.”) Subtle interventions to be sure; maybe this person’s cold won’t evolve into pneumonia, that one will get cancer but it won’t be very painful. And if it weren’t for the praying, those unsuspecting folks below would be out of luck; one imagines God doing a weary shrug, in a “Don’t look at me, I’m just enforcing the Cosmic Rules, which, yeah, I’m sort of responsible for in the first place, but still, rules are rules, you know?” kind of way.

And then there are people who believe that things don’t happen for a reason, nor are events influenced by anyone looking at us from on high. The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.

A recent Gallup poll, via Daily Kos:

If your party nominated a well-qualified Candidate For WH ’08 who was _, would you vote for that person?

                         Yes   No                  

Catholic                  95%  4%                          

Black                     94   5  

Jewish                    92   7    

A woman                   88  11        

Hispanic                  87  12    

Mormon                    72  24  

Married for third time    67  30  

72 years old              57  42

A homosexual              55  43    

An atheist                45  53

Nothing new, of course.

But what if the race were between an atheist and a black Mormon lesbian, huh? What then?

A few years ago, as a newbie assistant professor, I was visited in my office by an editor at The Free Press. He was basically trolling the corridors, looking for people who had interesting ideas for popular-science books. I said that I liked the idea of writing a book, but I didn’t really want to do a straight-up cosmology tome. I had a better idea: I could write a book explaining how, when you really think about things scientifically, you come to realize that God doesn’t exist. I even had a spiffy title picked out — God Remains Dead: Reason, Religion, and the Pointless Universe. It’s not any old book that manages to reference both Steven Weinberg and Friedrich Nietzsche right there on the cover. Box office, baby.

The editor was actually intrigued by the idea, and he took it back to his bosses. Ultimately, however, they decided not to offer me a contract, and I went on to write another book with more equations. (Now on sale at Amazon!)

All of which is to say: I totally could have been in on the ground floor of all this atheism chic. These days, between Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a prominent publicly-outspoken atheist of one form or another. That could have been me, I tell you.

These guys have gotten a lot of attention — especially Dawkins, who was recently voted Person of the Year by at least one reputable organization. Of course, some of the attention has been negative, especially from folks who are unsympathetic to the notion of a harsh, materialistic, godless universe. But even among self-professed atheists and agnostics (not to mention your wishy-washy liberal religionists), some discomfort has been expressed over the tone of Dawkins’s approach. People have been known to call him arrogant. Even if you don’t believe in God, so the argument goes, it can be a bad strategy to be upfront and in-your-face in public about one’s atheism. People are very committed to their religious beliefs, and telling them that science proves them wrong will lead them away from science, not way from God. And if you must be a die-hard materialist, at least be polite about it and respect others’ beliefs — to be obnoxious and insulting is simply counterproductive. Apart from any deep issues of what we actually should believe, this is a separate matter of how we could best persuade others to agree with us.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that atheists shouldn’t be obnoxious and insulting; in fact, I think it’s a good strategy in all sorts of situations. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, etc. But it does not follow that we should keep quiet about comforting illusions because those are the only things standing between the poor dears and overwhelming existential anxiety. If people ask whether, as scientists, we believe in God, we should respect them enough to tell the truth — whatever we think that is. That doesn’t mean we have to go door-to-door spreading the good word of the laws of nature. It just means that we should be honest about what we actually think, giving the best arguments we have for whatever that may be, and let people decide for themselves what to believe.

Arrogant or not, as a matter of fact Dawkins and company have done a great service to the cause of atheism: they have significantly shifted the Overton Window. That’s the notion, borrowed from public-policy debates, of the spectrum of “acceptable opinion” on an issue. At any given time, on any particular question, the public discourse will implicitly deem certain positions to be respectable and worthy of civilized debate, and other positions to be crazy and laughable. The crucial part of this idea is that the window can be shifted by vigorous advocacy of positions on one extreme. And that’s just what Dawkins has done.

In other words, by being arrogant and uncompromising in his atheism, Dawkins has done a tremendous amount to make the very concept of atheism a respectable part of the public debate, even if you find him personally obnoxious. Evidence: a few years ago, major newsmagazines (prompted in part by the efforts of the Templeton Foundation) were running cover stories with titles like Science Finds God (Newsweek, July 20, 1998). Pure moonshine, of course — come down where you will on the whole God debate, it remains pretty clear that science hasn’t found Him. But, within the range of acceptable public discourse, both science and God were considered to be undeniably good things — it wasn’t a stretch to put them together. Nowadays, in contrast, we find cover stories with titles like God vs. Science (Time, Nov 13, 2006). You never would have seen such a story just a few years ago.

This is a huge step forward. Keep in mind, the typical American thinks of atheists as fundamentally untrustworthy people. A major network like CNN will think nothing of hosting a roundtable discussion on atheism and not asking any atheists to participate. But, unlike a short while ago, they will eventually be shamed into admitting that was a mistake, and make up for it by inviting some atheists to defend their ideas. Baby steps. Professional news anchors may still seem a little befuddled at the notion that a clean, articulate person may not believe in God. But at least that notion is getting a decent public hearing. Once people actually hear what atheists have to say, perhaps they will get the idea that one need not be an amoral baby-killer just because one doesn’t believe in God.

For that, Richard Dawkins, thank you.