Reading List
The Church of the Non-Believers
A band of intellectual brothers is mounting a crusade against belief in God. Are they winning converts, or merely preaching to the choir?
Notable excerpts:
We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. “There would be a religion of reason,” Harris says. “We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it’s in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit.”
I do call it prayer. Here is the atheist prayer: that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.
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Dennett is an advocate of admitting that we simply don’t have good reasons for some of the things we believe. Although we must guard our defaults, we still have to admit that they may be somewhat arbitrary. “How else do we protect ourselves?” he asks. “With absolutisms? This means telling lies, and when the lies are exposed, the crash is worse. It’s not that science can discover when the body is ensouled. That’s nonsense. We are not going to tolerate infanticide. But we’re not going to put people in jail for onanism. Instead of protecting stability with a brittle set of myths, we can defend a deep resistance to mucking with the boundaries.”
This sounds to me a little like the religion of reason that Harris foresees.
“Yes, there could be a rational religion,” Dennett says. “We could have a rational policy not even to think about certain things.” He understands that this would create constant tension between prohibition and curiosity. But the borders of our sacred beliefs could be well guarded simply by acknowledging that it is pragmatic to refuse to change them.
I ask Dennett if there might not be a contradiction in his scheme. On the one hand, he aggressively confronts the faithful, attacking their sacred beliefs. On the other hand, he proposes that our inherited defaults be put outside the limits of dispute. But this would make our defaults into a religion, unimpeachable and implacable gods. And besides, are we not atheists? Sacred prohibitions are anathema to us.
Dennett replies that exceptions can be made. “Philosophers are the ones who refuse to accept the sacred values,” he says. For instance, Socrates.
I find this answer supremely odd. The image of an atheist religion whose sacred objects, called defaults, are taboo for all except philosophers – this is the material of the cruelest parody. But that’s not what Dennett means. In his scenario, the philosophers are not revered authorities but mental risk-takers and scouts. Their adventures invite ridicule, or worse. “Philosophers should expect to be hooted at and reviled,” Dennett says. “Socrates drank the hemlock. He knew what he was doing.”
With this, I begin to understand what kind of atheist I want to be. Dennett’s invocation of Socrates is a reminder that there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat. Having been raised under Christianity, we are well schooled in this tactic of belated victory. The world has reversed its judgment on Socrates, as on Jesus and the fanatical John Brown. All critics of fundamental values, even those who have no magical beliefs, will find themselves tempted to retrace this path. Dawkins’ tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris’ vision of apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery – this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy.
In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright takes on fellow nonbelievers Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and argues that religion may be nonsense—but it helps mankind.
Notable excerpt:
I would say there’s reason to believe there is some sort of purpose unfolding through the natural workings of the world. This doesn’t by itself establish the existence of a god, much less a good one, but it seems to cut against the grain of pure atheism.
On the occasion of Stephen W. Hawking’s 60th trip around the sun, we consider a social phenomenon that reveals something deep about human nature.
Notable excerpts:
Scientism’s voice can best be heard through a literary genre for both lay readers and professionals that includes the works of such scientists as Carl Sagan, E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond. Scientism is a bridge spanning the abyss between what physicist C. P. Snow famously called the “two cultures” of science and the arts/humanities (neither encampment being able to communicate with the other). Scientism has generated a new literati and intelligentsia passionately concerned with the profound philosophical, ideological and theological implications of scientific discoveries.
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First, cosmology and evolutionary theory ask the ultimate origin questions that have traditionally been the province of religion and theology. Scientism is courageously proffering naturalistic answers that supplant supernaturalistic ones and in the process is providing spiritual sustenance for those whose needs are not being met by these ancient cultural traditions. Second, we are, at base, a socially hierarchical primate species. We show deference to our leaders, pay respect to our elders and follow the dictates of our shamans; this being the Age of Science, it is scientism’s shamans who command our veneration. Third, because of language we are also storytelling, mythmaking primates, with scientism as the foundational stratum of our story and scientists as the premier mythmakers of our time.
Notable excerpt:
I am no memetic engineer, and I have very little idea how to increase the numbers of the super nice and spread their memes through the meme pool. The best I can offer is what I hope may be a catchy slogan. ‘Atheists for Jesus’ would grace a T-shirt. There is no strong reason to choose Jesus as icon, rather than some other role model from the ranks of the super nice such as Mahatma Gandhi (not the odiously self-righteous Mother Teresa, heavens no). I think we owe Jesus the honour of separating his genuinely original and radical ethics from the supernatural nonsense which he inevitably espoused as a man of his time. And perhaps the oxymoronic impact of ‘Atheists for Jesus’ might be just what is needed to kick start the meme of super niceness in a post-Christian society. If we play our cards right – could we lead society away from the nether regions of its Darwinian origins into kinder and more compassionate uplands of post-singularity enlightenment?
Wilson (Edward) On Human Nature Summary
Notable excerpt:
The predisposition to religious belief is an ineradicable part of human behavior. Mankind has produced 100,000 religions. It is an illusion to think that scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief. Men would rather believe than know. “God’s immanence has been pushed somewhere below the subatomic particles or beyond the farthest visible galaxy,” leading to “process theology”.
A kind of Darwinistic survival of the fittest has occurred with religions. The ecological principle called Gause’s law holds that competition is maximal between species with identical needs. “Religion is superbly serviceable to the purposes of warfare and economic exploitation.” “Religion is above all the process by which individuals are persuaded to subordinate their immediate self-interests to the interests of the group.” Simple rules are provided allowing quick decisions. The structure of religion is at the surface ecclesiastic (chosen for emotional impact under contemporary social conditions), deeper still is ecological, and finally is genetic. “Religious practices that consistently enhance survival and procreation of the practitioners will propagate the physiological controls that favor the acquisition of the practices during single lifetimes.” Unthinking submission to the communal will promotes the fitness of the members of the tribe. Even submission to secular religions such as Communism and guru cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantage.
The mechanisms of religion include: (1) objectification (the reduction of reality to images and definitions that are easily understood and cannot be refuted); (2) commitment through faith (a kind of tribalism enacted through self-surrender); and (3) myth (the narratives that explain the tribe’s favored position on the Earth, often incorporating supernatural forces struggling for control, apocalypse, and millennium).
The three great religion categories of today are Marxism, traditional religion, and scientific materialism. (In the glossary, the author defines the latter as “The view that all phenomena in the universe including the human mind, have a material basis, are subject to the same physical laws, and can be most deeply understood by scientific analysis”.) Though theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline, religion will endure for a long time to come and will not be replaced by scientific materialism. “God remains a viable hypothesis as the prime mover, however undefinable and untestable that conception may be. (p. 105)