God-Fearing Atheists? Part II
More Problems with Atheism as a Purported School of Thought
2. Scientism: An understanding of the scientific method – the recognition of science’s strengths, coupled with awareness of its limitations – is something shared by clear-thinking human beings, whether religious or atheistic. Scientism, in contrast, is the window dressing that atheism uses when it tries to present itself as a school of thought rather than the simple and tenable rejection of the idea of God. Scientism includes notions like reductionism and the idea that anything that science can’t address is necessarily unreal or less important than those topics that it’s well equipped to study.
3. Reactivity and Negativity: Reading atheist writings, at least on the blogs, one could easily come away with the impression that the only institutions on the planet that contain elements of corruption are religious ones. Religion is the source of all evil. If only religion didn’t exist, God would be in his heaven and all would be right with the world (so to speak) – because, apparently, governments and corporations are just that good . . .
4. Dismissive: This kind of knee-jerk negativity often compels atheists to dismiss the entire field of religion and spirituality as containing nothing true or worthwhile, despite the fact that this extremely broad subject area includes such disparate writings as, say, Madonna’s latest musings along with the Buddha’s Eightfold Path . . .
Another Possible Problem
Mortality and Meaning: Atheists tend to closely identify faith with belief in God and therefore reject it. Death = the final eradication of life. Everyone and everything that we love, cherish, and value is ultimately destroyed. I wonder if it’s possible for this conviction to coexist with an attitude toward life that is positive and meaningful.
2. Scientism: An understanding of the scientific method – the recognition of science’s strengths, coupled with awareness of its limitations – is something shared by clear-thinking human beings, whether religious or atheistic. Scientism, in contrast, is the window dressing that atheism uses when it tries to present itself as a school of thought rather than the simple and tenable rejection of the idea of God. Scientism includes notions like reductionism and the idea that anything that science can’t address is necessarily unreal or less important than those topics that it’s well equipped to study.
3. Reactivity and Negativity: Reading atheist writings, at least on the blogs, one could easily come away with the impression that the only institutions on the planet that contain elements of corruption are religious ones. Religion is the source of all evil. If only religion didn’t exist, God would be in his heaven and all would be right with the world (so to speak) – because, apparently, governments and corporations are just that good . . .
4. Dismissive: This kind of knee-jerk negativity often compels atheists to dismiss the entire field of religion and spirituality as containing nothing true or worthwhile, despite the fact that this extremely broad subject area includes such disparate writings as, say, Madonna’s latest musings along with the Buddha’s Eightfold Path . . .
Another Possible Problem
Mortality and Meaning: Atheists tend to closely identify faith with belief in God and therefore reject it. Death = the final eradication of life. Everyone and everything that we love, cherish, and value is ultimately destroyed. I wonder if it’s possible for this conviction to coexist with an attitude toward life that is positive and meaningful.
Posted by Paul at 2:27 PM Permalink
32 Comments:
This claim has led to the foundation of the Discovery Institute, the Intelligent Design movement, and other religious groups masquerading as science. This is not, of course, to say religion is less valuable than science, but it cannot be placed in the same arena as science (since the very idea of God cannot be falsified).
Those who adhere to scientism often overstep their bounds (rejecting everything non-scientific), but some theists do the same with their dogma (seeking scientific justification for matters that are faith-based).
About your last question:
"I wonder if it’s possible for this conviction to coexist with an attitude toward life that is positive and meaningful"
I wonder, why wouldn't it be? Humans have an amazing ability to find beauty and meaning in life. It's such an incredible capacity that it's hard for me to believe that there are actually people who undervalue the arts, religion, and the humanities. What is life without these things?
And love for love's sake...that's glorious.
I have to admit, I’ve never really gotten my mind around that one. Even when we regard a text as sacred, even when it’s held to have come from God, wouldn’t anybody know that it was a person writing down the words – wouldn’t they have to understand that God was working by way of a human brain and hand, with limitations of historical time and place? I can't understand why anyone should expect a person writing many centuries before the invention of science to be scientifically accurate. We might as well consult the Bible or Koran when we have computer problems!
KARIN and RIMSHOT: I thought the question about mortality might give rise to a number of different responses. So far, to simplify, we’ve got:
Karin: Death as our final eradication is no problem because life is beautiful and meaningful. (Question – What do you mean by meaningful?)
Rimshot: Death as eradication in a Godless universe would mean there was no obstacle to doing as you please. What would personally please you most is to act on pretty much every violent and sexual impulse you experience. (Question – Are you sure? Hey now . . . put that rock down!)
ENEMY OF THE R: I get that idea too – that the rancor displayed by some atheists comes from negative childhood experiences with religion.
That sounds pretty awkward – having to choose between the fiction and nonfiction categories with the Gospel of Matthew! Sounds like a recipe for an argument. The only academic setting where I read the bible was divinity school, so that never came up.
Just because we as humans are so much more complex than a car, and we basically come from nature, that doesn't mean we weren't "created". I would think the exact opposite is true...I mean, we are REALLY complex.
If the earth is natural, then everything in the earth is of the earth, including all the materials needed to build and create a car (even if a material is "man-made", whatever components that went into making it had to come from the earth somewhere, even if they started as something else). If God created everything, then He created the scientific process behind all creation. Perhaps an athiest's mind is not large enough to comprehend such a thought. But they certainly can comprehend that we all came from an amoeba. I guess you and me were just lucky enough not to come from the amoeba that turned into a rhinoceros.
There is some sort of narcissism that ties in here, a real "God" complex, actually! Those athiests, they're just smarter than all of us, I guess. All us poor folk who believe in fairy tales.
Sorry, I'm rambling...I know. It's the vino.
Keshi.
To Paul, I see meaning as part of the process of understanding the world--people, animals, nature, everything around us. What is the significance of these things? This is interpreted by us, but also our intepretations are informed by a real world outside of us. Real creatures and things that have their own value. Our experiences of real things inform what we understand as meaning, and we bring meaningful interpretations of real things into the world.
Belief in God isn’t logically demonstrable. The Scholastics tried hard to prove God’s existence in the Middle Ages; every proof fails. This is not to say there’s no basis for faith or belief, just that the basis isn’t logic.
To say that everything had to come from somewhere, especially because life is so complex, combines two ideas that logically could be true – or false.
If “everything has to come from somewhere”, then where did God from? The theistic idea is that God alone possesses aseity – the quality of being self-caused – or perhaps eternality. However, it is no more or less logical to think that nature, reality, or being itself could be eternal or self-caused.
The idea that life is so complex that there must be a higher intelligence behind it is called the teleological argument, or argument from design. It’s based on an analogy with man-made objects. If you found a watch in the desert, you wouldn’t think it just “got there.” You’d take it as a sign that it came from the work of a human mind and hands. In the same way, as you say, something like a car doesn’t just “appear.”
But analogies don’t prove anything. Life as a whole could just as well be more like a natural object than a man-made object. If you find a milkweed plant growing in your backyard or a starfish on the beach, you don’t start hunting for little milkweed plant or starfish makers. For all we know, BOTH analogies could be faulty! How the world as a whole came into being might not closely resemble how any piece of it considered in isolation came into being, whether man made or natural.
KARIN and KESHI: Yes to all of that. But unless I misunderstood, Karin, you were saying that you don’t see how death viewed as the ultimate destruction of everything that we value and find meaningful in life would undermine life’s meaningfulness?
What do you make of the resurrection's centrality to Christianity?
RIMSHOT: Lol, no, I wasn’t worried about you hunting me down with the rock or anything. I know you were making a general point. One problem with words in type is there’s no tone of voice or facial expression to refer to.
You’re saying that unless morals come from beyond ourselves, the idea of right and wrong disappears – it’s just subjective opinion and people would be all over the map. Completely all over the map? Would about as many people, left to their own devices, admire Hitler as Gandhi?
People existed long before any religious institutions known today. On the whole, do you think there tended to be any consensus about, say, rape and murder being wrong? Or would people have been all over the map on those issues? Any role for the “still small voice within?” The “divine spark?” Conscience?
I think that one can have a positive and meaningful view of life even with the belief that death is the absolute end...
I agree. Plus, it depends on what you mean by "absolute end" (which typically is associated with the non-existence of the immortal soul). But every time I take a breath I inhale the molecules of my relatives, ancestors, and even dinosaurs! In a sense, everything that has once lived still continues in some fashion.
Paul,
I see it as just the opposite. Because everything will fade away and never been seen again is a reason to enjoy it and cherish it right now. I'm not counting on eternal happiness after I die. My time is now! I better make the most of it and get busy living. The fact that I view life as limited gives it more meaning to me.
In fact, if Christians believe the will have eternity in heaven, what is the meaning of the 80 or so years you have on earth? You will have longer than you mind can imagine with your god and loved ones (at least those who believed) so the time spent on earth is only a drop in the ocean.
Rimshot re morality. If you really believe that is how you would act without god, please don;t ever lose him. :) I don't need a belief in god to be a good person, husband, and father.
It seemed a contradiction to me – the importance they evidently saw in getting their message across, their devotion to this apparently because they viewed it as a point of view free from illusion - but wouldn't they want to leave people to their happy illusions? If all meaning is destroyed in the end, why so much passion about getting one’s understanding of the truth across?
As I think of it, existentialism reminds me of the perspective in . . . is it Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament’s wisdom literature? Basically: “Enjoy the good things of life while you can; for tomorrow we die.” Meaningful up to a point, and yet personally, it doesn’t leave me wanting to participate in a rousing chorus of Joy to the World!
KARIN: I haven’t read any stats on this, but my impression is that you’re one of a growing number of Christians who share a non literal view of the resurrection. A couple of thoughts:
Historically, I believe that the resurrection was central to the spreading of the “good news” or gospel – that this WAS the good news: death is not the end of our lives. The resurrection remains central to mainstream Christianity.
I think that for a long time, Christians haven't understood resurrection in the perfectly literal terms of the resurrection of the physical body as we know it. (St. Paul refers to the resurrected state as a “spiritual body.”) The gist of the idea of resurrection, in accord with the loss we experience with the death of loved ones, seems to be that the person’s core identity or “soul” is saved.
“Our legacy is what we leave behind. This to me is everlasting life.”
Stars burn out. Ours has another five billion years - which I believe is billions of years longer than any species on earth has ever survived. Cosmologists, from what I understand, see the universe as either continuing to expand indefinitely – I think the end state would be a universe of hydrogen gas? – or else as re-collapsing into an all-obliterating singularity again, maybe to re-explode as another big bang.
Even without that, the more time passes, the less clear it is that we survive in our legacies or can be connected with them. Certainly we don’t survive long in the memories of others. Most of us would have a hard time listing, for example, our seventh century heroes.
Going further back, we certainly don’t know the people who first learned to control fire, started agriculture, invented the proverbial wheel and so forth. Of course, in a sense, what they accomplished is still their legacy – their inventions and all that came from them live on. However, it looks as though these things would have been discovered by other particular individuals if not by the particular individuals by whom they were discovered – that they were inevitable, given the capacities of human brains and hands and the nature of our environment.
From what we can see of how nature works, legacies are far from everlasting.
RIMSHOT: I’m suggesting that the very idea of God had to have arisen at some point in human prehistory. Even if we suppose that people almost immediately had this idea, it wouldn’t have been the ten commandments-giving Judeo-Christian God that we grew up with.
My guess would be that any number of supernatural beings would have been perceived in the activities of nature – fertility goddesses, gods associated with the wind, the ocean, the moon and so forth. And some were no doubt understood as malevolent spirits.
The time frame I’m talking about would have been much longer than Judeo-Christian history or even civilization itself. Homo Sapiens was around for something on the order of 90,000 years prior to the rise of settled agriculture along the Tigress-Euphrates.
Did people lack morals throughout prehistory? If your idea that any form of internal moral compass is a platitude is correct, then it would seem they must have – and that we would have self destructed long before the rise of civilization and the kind of cooperation necessary for that event to occur.
JACOB: You’ve just presented a take on immortality very different from the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic perspective. I could briefly contrast these two views as follows:
Traditional Western: Immortality is about the survival of individual personhood.
Your take (also, my impression is that it’s a perspective often found in eastern religions): Immortality is found in our unity with an enduring whole.
Anyone have any thoughts on the relative merits of these two perspectives on immortality?
Please Note: This thread's a complicated and interesting one; however, something just came up that’s probably going to keep me occupied through at least the middle of the weekend. I’ll be back, but have to break for now.
Feel free to respond to other people’s comments as well as mine while I’m briefly “gone.” I’ve had to do practically zero moderating on this blog. People with different points of view of been mutually respectful, and I appreciate that.
Imo, it's worthwhile only in so far as the dialog is mutually respectful and taking place as part of the processing people do to make a differerence in how they perceive life (and/or God!) and how they act in in the world.
Core identity also does not matter to me with respect to legacy. I don't need to be connected after death with my accomplishments. It's not that I'm a totally self-effacing person. Far from it. I want recognition for what I do well. But again, after I die, being remembered for them is not a big deal to me.
Also, if I'm not original, i.e., someone else makes the same sort of contribution to the world as well or better than I do, more power to them. We need lots of people to do lots of things. In addition, the fact that someone else may have done what I do in my life if I were to never have been born, doesn't detract from the fact that I did them. I'm a whole person. I do lots of things. Most of the impact that I have is probably largely indiscernable to me. We often change people without ever knowing it, sometimes, without them being conscious of it either.
So, with respect to stars burning out and the universe expanding and collapsing, I see myself in a very broad way as folding into that. That may be too disconnected or impersonal of an understanding of everlasting for many people, but I feel comfortable with it.
The bodily resurrection is the most important Catholic thing - the idea that bodies matter, not just "souls", that the physical and the spiritual are two sides of the same coin.
About survival of personal identity after death - perhaps one reason it's important is that you can't have a relationship with God if you are not "you" , though you can become part of God or one with God.
I think that people are not really all over the place about what is good and bad .... the basics are pretty much the same, I think, in different cultures, though the details are different. What = murder might be different in cultures but the fact that murder is bad remains the same.
Just my lowly opinion. I will read your first post soon.
Also, at some point the idea of leaving behind a legacy came up.
I agree about leaving a legacy. Not important, despite the presidential stature of this preoccupation – was it Clinton who first started talking so much about that? What really matters is the work, not being remembered for it.
Of course, people are at different places with this at different times in their lives. Concern with legacy, fame, recognition for one’s achievements – if this helps motivate a person to do good things, I’m all for it for as long as it works for them.
And I agree that trying to explain what I think you may be alluding to about identity/immortality is hard to get across. If we have the same kind of thing in mind, it isn’t meaningful or really even intelligible until presented not in abstract terms, where it can come off as stark, cold and impersonal, but in experiential terms. When you put it in experiential terms, to me it’s much more personal than impersonal, although neither term is really correct.
Elaborating on that would take more than a comments thread!
CRYSTAL: “The Cheerful Existentialist” or “Blithely Existential” – there are a couple of books waiting to be written I think...
Yeah... people are quick to bring up cultural differences in discussing morality, but I’m not convinced that in general the differences go very deep. You need to understand the culture and customs mainly so as not to be misunderstood.
You write: “About survival of personal identity after death - perhaps one reason it's important is that you can't have a relationship with God if you are not ‘you’, though you can become part of God or one with God.”
Within theism, the mainstream interpretation has favored the survival of the individual’s identity and relating to God as Other. But if God is Other, then certainly God isn’t other in the same way that other finite entities are other. There is, for example, the idea of God as indwelling and immanent as well as transcendent.
The minority interpretation within theism, favored more by monasticism and I think also by certain relatively small denominations, like the Quakers, seems to emphasize our unity with God – although I’ve never seen this presented as perfect identity.
I wonder how much of the difference is only apparent - words failing to adequately express experience. That is, theological ideas about life after death don’t come from people dying and coming back to describe it, but are based on people’s major religions experiences in the here and now, which are then sometimes taken as intimations of the hereafter. But these experiences aren't always so easy to put into words.
HAZZBUZZ: Life’s unity looks to me like one of the major themes across world religions. Jung and the collective unconscious and his interest in mythology - I’m only a little acquainted with it. To me, it almost sounds like a borderline area that has elements of both psychology and spirituality intermixed.
ENEMY OF THE R: There are a lot of ways to look at scripture. I agree with you that two incorrect ways are trying to understand it literally or dismissing it as having nothing to offer.
"You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories."
Sums up my religious philosophy in seven words. However, it still leaves the whole how-did-earth-get-here-and-where-is-it-going questions pretty much up in the air.
The development of a separate identity and the surrender of one’s separate identity are apparently conflicting needs. Transcending this conflict is an important thing for harmonious, productive, coexistence. Mortality is a corollary to separate identity. Hence immortality automatically implies the surrendering of one’s identity for a purpose that transcends the domain where one exists as a separate being.
The tangible expression of science in modern times is industry and other technological institutions. Here total belonging is now being accepted as the recipe for long-term survival. Committing to the customer orientation of systems at all levels is in fact the considered shedding of personal identity as a matter of principle. This is not to be taken as an influx of religion into science and technology. It is simply that at the apex level Mathematics, which is the mother of all sciences, and Spirituality, which is the mother of all religions, fuse together ending all debates on the comparisons between science and religion.
Of course, this apex level is beyond the domain of mortality. All functions of time and other dimensions reside in it. The path of science and the path of religion appear to be different when one remains anchored in the domain of mortality.
It has been a while since I was here so took a while to catch up with you.
May you find joy and beauty in each day.
...Z
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