On Mythology and the New Atheism

What purposes to stories serve? Generally, they serve the following two purposes:

• To symbolically communicate a message whose usefulness does not rely on the literal truth of the story. The message is usually a moral one: fables are the best examples of this. The fable of the fox and the sour grapes is making a point about rationalization (i.e. modification of one’s beliefs designed to reduce cognitive dissonance) and human nature. It would be rather odd, to say the least, for a literal-minded listener to say: ‘wait a minute! Foxes can’t talk! And furthermore, they’re carnivores, so why would they be interested in eating grapes anyway?’ What would be even more odd than somebody so thoroughly missing the point, would be the creation of societies and clubs comprised of individuals who take the ‘rationalist’ position that this fable is dangerous and deluded since it tells us that foxes can talk (which it doesn’t, actually), and then having contempt for everyone who took the story the way it was intended. And to top it all off, imagine that they actually dream of a society where everybody will adopt their most sane position of no-talking-fox-ism. I’m not worried or offended by this movement, but it is at least odd and misguided, if nothing else.
• To give a literal account of events that actually happened, with the sequence of the narrative having some sort of correspondence with the sequence of events it’s supposed to represent. This requires a certain mindset and intent, and applies only to some contexts. News reports are good examples. The normal thing to do (and indeed, the rational one) is to discern what the context is before treating all stories as if they were of this sort. Unfortunately, the ‘(18th Century) Enlightenment-mind’ is psychologically predisposed to comprehending this type of story rather than the others. This does not make such stories superior or more rational. These two approaches are different but equal, and indeed one can switch at will from one to the other if one has a certain level of mental flexibility.

Religions are ways of connecting with and communicating what is perceived as Ultimate Reality, which can only truly be known through direct spiritual experience or gnostic awareness. However, to communicate the knowledge gained through such, anything from mythology to metaphors can be used. These ought not to be taken literally but understood as attempts to utilize limited and dualistic language to communicate an unlimited and non-dual reality. Not all religious or spiritual people are correct in their view of what Ultimate Reality is, of course. And certainly, many religious people take the literalistic approach of the atheists and ought to be criticized for it. However, the appropriate response is to question literalism and acontextualism, not to question ‘belief’ in God or religion as a whole.

One last point about the New Atheist movement: there are certainly supersitious religious people whose speech betrays an irrational approach to the world. But then there are people far more sophisticated, educated and emotionally mature, who still believe in God. To reconcile this apparent contradiction, New Atheists have assumed that some intelligent people must be afflicted with a disease that compels them to believe in God, even when there is ‘no good reason’ to do so (meaning that they personally cannot find any good reason). The most fashionable of such explanations these days is the highly patronizing ‘evolutionary need’ explanation. It is so vacuous it is not even worth repeating.

Anyway, the ‘post-rational’ type of religion does away with literal belief altogether and takes a flexible approach to mental models, so flexible that models can ‘cease to exist’ in a way, and also be created at will without any sense of guilt or obligation. Truth, to such a person, is no longer just known through argument or sense experience, but through intuitive holistic experience that is beyond language, mentalization and science. To such a person, two types of knowledge appear, corresponding to the distinction between God and Earth, or Unity and Multiplicity: esoteric knowledge gained directly, through intuition, which has a holistic quality; and broken up or dualistic knowledge which is gained through the senses and syllogistic thinking. The latter fits so neatly with language I sometimes refer to it as linguistic thinking, and the first as trans-linguistic.

The superstitious person is still in the fragmented state of mind, engaging in dualistic thinking (i.e. using science and syllogism). However, their science is skewed, and their ability to think syllogisticaly also. As such, they are scientists and rationalists, except that they are failures at it. They are essentially using science wrongly. But the fact that there is an apparent similarity between the post-rational mystic and pre-rational failure-scientist, namely that they both believe in God, is evidently confusing to the superficial observer. Two classes are spoken of in the New Atheist narrative: the superstitious, emotionally needy people; and the smart, cool atheists who have figured out some awesome things about evidence and science and learned to live without God like brave soldiers. But in fact, the camps should be divided like so: those who only see multiplicity and the temporal world and do not aspire to see more, and those who see or aspire to see the eternal, unified and Heavenly world. The atheist and superstitious person fall into the first camp, and the mystic falls into the second.

Cross-posted to Bazm-e-RindaaN.

Is Atheism Anti-theism?

An excerpt from the article “The New Atheist Movement is Destructive” by Julian Baggini:

Not reading The God Delusion, God is Not Great, Breaking the Spell and The End of Faith is perfectly reasonable. Why on earth would I devote precious reading hours to books which largely tell me what I already believe? These books are surely mainly for agnostics and open-minded believers. In fact, I think atheists who have read these books have more of a responsibility to account for their actions than I do my inaction. As the posters on the sides of British buses rather simplistically put it, “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” God’s non-existence is a fact atheists live with, not something that they should obsessively read about.

But if I haven’t read these books, surely I should have no opinion about them? I think you’d be less sure of this if you had read How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard (or even not read it). In any case, my opinions are not so much about these books as the general tone and direction the new atheism they represent has adopted. This is not a function of what exactly these books say, but of how they are perceived, and the kind of comments the four horsemen make in newspaper articles and interviews. All this, I think, has been unhelpful in many ways. In short, the new atheism gets atheism wrong, gets religion wrong, and is counterproductive.

How does it get atheism wrong? When I wrote my own book on the subject, I believed that atheism was widely misunderstood as being primarily a negative attack on religious belief, on which it is parasitic.

But this can’t be right. Imagine for one moment that atheism triumphs and belief in God is eradicated. On the view that atheism needs religion, then this victory would also be atheism’s extinction. This is absurd.

It is only because of historical accident that atheism is not widely recognised as a world-view in its own right. This world view is essentially a very general form of naturalism, in which there are not two kinds of stuff, the natural and the supernatural, but one. The forces that govern this substance are also natural ones and there is no ultimate purpose or agency behind them. Human life is biological, and thus does not survive beyond biological death.

Such a worldview needs defending, and a special name, only because for various reasons, it is not the one that most humans have adopted. But the view itself is true whether or not there are people who disagree with it. In a totally atheist world, we may stop noticing that it is a view at all, in the same way that most people do not notice that they believe objects exist whether we perceive them or not. But it would still be a view.

So in my book, I tried to articulate the grounds for this view with as little reference to the religious alternative as possible. The new atheism, however, is characterised by its attacks on religion. “There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds,” wrote Richard Dawkins, quite typically, quoting approvingly Stephen Weinberg, who said, “for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” Hitchens goes so far as to explicitly say that “I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist.”

This antitheism is for me a backwards step. It reinforces what I believe is a myth, that an atheist without a bishop to bash is like a fish without water. Worse, it raises the possibility that as a matter of fact, for many atheists, they do indeed need an enemy to give them their identity.

(Cross-posted to A Myth in Creation.)

Quick Responses to Bad Questions on Religion

Bad questions asked by New Atheists, that is. I find that engaging in lengthy philosophical discussions does more harm than good — especially for someone so naturally long-winded as me — so I have devised a list of quick responses to typical questions asked by New Atheists. However, I should provide the caveat that I consider the New Atheist movement a necessary antidote to religious stupidity, as well as an intellectual and in some ways moral improvement over conventionally religious thinking, which is often superstitious. That being said, I move on:

Do you have any evidence that God exists?

Yes. I have experiential evidence.

What if the experience is a delusion?

Would you ever say that your experience of your own consciousness or existence is a delusion? This is as intimate and intuitive as that.

How can a good God allow suffering to occur?

The universe/existence is in the process of achieving perfection, but it has not reached it yet. That is why suffering occurs. The universe started off imperfect in order that the joy of overcoming/growth/ascension can be experienced. Furthermore, there are some things the human mind cannot understand.

But how do you know that what you’re experiencing is God? Why do you infer that it must be God ‘creating’ the experience just because you’ve had the experience?

There is no inference involved in genuine experience of Divine Grace or whatever you want to call it. You label the experience ‘religious’ for social and pragmatic purposes, just as you label your experience of your own consciousness ’self-awareness’. You are not inferring that it is self-awareness after considering and eliminating other possibilities, but merely giving the most intuitive/common label to an experience that is itself indisputable.

If the question is why the word is used, then it is a trivial question, and the word ‘God’ can be abandoned with no loss to the ‘believer’.

Now, tell me this does not inspire religious feelings in y’all :

(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)

PZ Myers Blames Religious Moderates

PZ Myers seems to have become a political atheist leader, in the same league as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. He recently posted on the case of the parents who refused cancer treatment for their son on religious grounds. He says:

I have to say something that is heartfelt, and is also meant to offend. I do not absolve you mealy-mouthed moderates, I do not regard your beliefs as harmless. If Colleen Hauser or Leilani Neumann were in your church, you’d tell them to get medical care, but you’d also validate their belief in prayers. You would provide the soothing background muzak that says prayer is good, prayer is virtuous, prayer will connect you to the great lord who can do anything, prayer will give you solace in your time of worry. You would not raise your voice to say that prayer is useless, prayer is self-defeating, that while prayer might make you feel better while your child is suffering, that is no virtue. You pray yourselves. You think it is a noble and generous act for your representatives to prowl the corridors of hospitals, preying on the desperation of the sick. You abase yourselves before false hopes, and sacrifice human dignity on an altar built from the bones of the dead. You would spread the poison, piously excusing yourselves because you only want to administer sub-lethal doses.

You are Abraham’s enablers. I hope you all feel a small tremor of guilt when you sit your own children down at bedtime to beg a nonexistent being for aid, when you plant the seed of futile supplication and surrender to delusions in their trusting minds. Damn you all.

Some commentators on this entry have tried to assert that all those who hold a belief are not responsible for excesses committed in its name. Although I do not disagree, I think there is an easier rebuttal to make:

Myers has mischaracterized prayer as talking to an invisible person, which is a grossly impoverished analysis ignoring the phenomenology of prayer and the nature of prayer as an introspective and healing act. More important in his mischaracterization is his assumption that religious and spiritual individuals treat prayer as a remedy for all ills. He says: “You would not raise your voice to say that prayer is useless, prayer is self-defeating”, implying that praying at all or viewing prayer as useful or healing in any respect entails viewing prayer as useful in all respects, or in a particular, chosen respect of his (in this case as a cure to Hodgekin’s Lymphoma). Both of these are logical fallacies. Here is a counter-example to clarify what I mean:

Person A: Jogging is helpful to my overall fitness, since it makes me lose weight, become stronger and improves my stamina.
Doctor of Person A: You have a horrible illness.
Person A: I’m sure I can just jog it off!
Doctor of Person A: No, you can’t. Your illness cannot be cured by jogging.
Person A: I’m sure I can just jog it off!
Person X, who is watching the situation: Damn all you joggers! You didn’t tell your fellow joggers that jogging is ineffective. You jogged, thus implying jogging is a useful thing to do. It’s your fault this woman is delusional.

See how this is problematic?

And now, a general word on faith:

Faith is not in conflict with reason.  Faith does not conflict with scientific truth, unless faith claims to express a scientific truth.  Faith can neither be affirmed nor denied by scientific, historical or philosophical truth…  There is a reality that is not a product of rational deduction.  It is not accounted for by strict rational discourse.  There is a spiritual dimension to human existence and the universe, but this is not irrational—it is non-rational. Faith allows us to transcend what Flaubert said was our “mania for conclusions,” a mania he described as “one of humanity’s most useless and sterile drives.” — Chris Hedges

(Cross-posted to Yes and No)