Not all Atheists are Created Equal

            A while back one of the yogis at my studio suggested I read Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion and, having heard about Dawkins and his fellow “New Atheists” quite a bit, I agreed to give it a try.  I hear about the New Atheists a lot in the news, and I figured that this may be an important (anti-) religious trend to know about.  I really should know better than to get my news from the news. 

            Two weeks ago, I went to the hulking edifice that we call the Mahopac Library to check it out.  I must say that the Mahopac Library is easily the best thing about living in Mahopac.  It’s phenomenal!  A large selection of actual books, plus many new-fangled contraptions like computers, books on tape, videos, and lots of classrooms for special events (including yoga for Seniors), all housed in a cyclopean fortress of poor architectural taste.  I imagine that it was designed by the same guy that designed the wasteful absurdity that is our local volunteer fire station.  For a conservative small town that seems to hate taxes, they love to waste money. But I degress…Despite the awesomeness of the local library, The God Delusion had vanished mysteriously from the shelves, so I grabbed God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, another big name and big title by one of the so-called New Atheists.  I figured, hey, one book by these guys should be the same as another, right?  Glancing a several apparently similar books, the tables of contents seemed to roughly be the same:

Chapter 1:  Why there’s no such thing as God

Chapter 2:  Why people who believe in God are stupid.

Chapter 3:  Religions are really, really bad.  Like, AIDS bad. 

Chapter 4:  Conclusion:  There’s no such thing as god.

            So I took home God is Not Great, read it very quick, quickly decided to take some notes so that I could do to its infantile arguments what an ancient priest of Odin might do to a Christian.  I also ordered a copy of The God Delusion from another library in the Mid-Hudson Valley library system, just to be safe.  About a week later I got my robo-call from the library telling me it had arrived.  By that point, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read anything else by the New Atheists, but I picked it up anyway.  I must say I was pleasantly surprised.  There are definitely some things about both books that warrant their being grouped together under the same ‘movement’, but I was struck far more by their differences.  Comparing Hitchens’ book to Dawkins’ book was like comparing conservatives Rush Limbaugh to David Brooks (of the NY Times), Jack Chick to St. Augustine, or a Jerry Springer episode to a TED Talk . 

            While at the library, I also picked up The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, a theologian who teaches at Oxford with Dawkins, and his diversely educated wife (Neuroscience, Experimental Psychology & Christian Theology).  This is a direct rebuttal by some believers to the points raised in The God Delusion, so I figured it might help me break things down. 

            Below, you’ll find my reviews of all three books.  If you don’t want to read about them in  more detail, I’ll sum it up for you:

1)      God is Not Great is well-written, but as intellectually bankrupt as a tabloid.  Don’t bother.

2)      The God Delusion is well-written, fascinating, educational, but flawed in important ways.  Regardless, I recommend it.

3)      The Dawkins Delusion is not as entertaining as the others, but it’s still fascinating, and emphasizes many of the problems in Dawkins thinking, as well as puts his ideas into a much needed context.  That said, it is about as flawed as Dawkins book, maybe moreso.  I recommend it only if you read Dawkins and think he’s the atheist version of a Messiah.

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. 

The new atheists really like science.  They’re pretty much all about it.  I can totally get behind that – reasoned arguments, evidence, skepticism, maybe with some Bunson Burners and Tesla Coils thrown in for dramatic effect.  And who doesn’t like Bunson Burners or Tesla Coils, I ask?  I imagined that in their books these ‘New Atheists’ would be all about the use of reasoned arguments, appealing to my mind rather than the ‘gut’.  Sadly this is not the case with Hitchens.  I suppose I should have expected it.  He’s a journalist after all. 

            Hitchens’ argument against religion is essentially this:  Religious people do really, really bad things, and want to more bad things, plus only dumb rednecks believe in God anymore, therefore be an atheist.  Rather than convince you, he points out the rather well known dumb things people do in the name of religion, as well as the dumb things that appear in the bible and Koran, trying his damnest to provoke the disgust reaction.  He appeals straight to the gut, the emotions, and lets that overwhelm the critical mind rather than make reasoned arguments.  This is demagoguery, nothing more, nothing less.  To give this the veneer or reasonableness he also sets up religion as a straw man, defining it only by the most pathological cases, and using this as an argument against it.  This is ultimately the same argument as saying “Stalin was an atheist and a really bad man.  Ergo, all atheists are really bad men.  Wow, what a good reason to believe in God.” All of Hitchens’ arguments are essentially along these lines.  They prove about as effective as a creationist who argues “You expect me to believe I evolved from a monkey?  That’s just dumb.” 

            In summary, if you’re an atheist, this is a good book to get you fired up about being an atheist and at the idiocy of any other point of view.  If you’re a believer, you may find the book irritating, but it is so clearly full of biased, distorted logic and incomplete facts that you probably won’t waste your time being offended and just wonder how anyone takes him seriously.  The subtitle “How Religion Poisons Everything” is an absolute statement, admitting no exceptions, and that is exactly how the whole book reads.  Big provocative statements – very little to back it up.

            I want to add one more thing before I go on to Dawkins’ book.  In The God Delusion, Dawkins notes that he, as a policy, never debates Creationists, and prefers not to debate at all.  Google “Hitchens Debate” and you’ll see that Hitchens seems always happy to go a round with anyone.  Why?  Because verbal debates are ultimately won by bullying, and nothing actually comes of them.  They make good sound-bites for the news cycle, and help people reinforce views they already have.  It’s not hard to see why Hitchens likes the format.  He’s a gifted communicator with nothing much to communicate.  As he can’t brow-beat you as effectively in a book, God is Not Great falls consistently flat.

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. 

Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins is actually a scientist, specifically an Evolutionary Biologist.  This scientific training comes through very clearly, and the parts of the book I most enjoyed are the parts when his talent for explaining science to the layman (which I certainly am) really shines through.  Dawkins is slightly less polemical than Hitchens, one might be tempted to say less certain, but this is clearly not true.  Dawkins is pretty damned sure there’s no God and that religion is a dangerous fraud, but he seems to recognize the possibility that he could be wrong.  He gives you a little space to breathe, and really seems to hope you make up your own mind, although he clearly has definite ideas about there being only one possible conclusion based on the evidence he presents.  The book just comes across as more intellectually honest than Dawkins, and because he attempts to reason rather than emotionally manipulate, the book is far more convincing.  In fact, I don’t hesitate to say that I really enjoyed it.

            Dawkins wisely begins by identifying exactly what he’s trying to refute in religion (something Hitchens cannot be troubled to do) – a supernatural God, ie, a God which is outside of nature, and unbound by its laws.  A Creator God, yes, but one who is also around after the fact to answer prayers and meddle with his creation.  He then spends the rest of the book taking this notion apart pretty effectively, especially any areas that overlap with what science has discovered.  Creationism is easily banished by the Evolutionary Biologist, but then again, I don’t know many people who take Creationism seriously. 

            He also goes into the other sciences, where he is a bit less sure of himself (which The Dawkins Delusion takes him to task for), and tries to do the same thing he did to Creationism.  He presents interesting data, but he shows his bias in his interpretation of the data.  Although not specific to the individual points raised in The God Delusion, McGrath illustrates this tendency in Dawkins extremely well, using a quote from another of Dawkins’ books.  Here’s an excerpt from The Dawkins Delusion:

[Dawkins in another book, The Selfish Gene]:

[Genes] Swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.  They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.

We see here a powerful and influential interpretation of a basic scientific concept.  But are these strongly interpretative statements themselves actually scientific?

            To appreciate the issue, consider the following rewriting of this paragraph by the celebrated Oxford physiologist and systems biologist Denis Noble.  What is proven empirical fact is retained; what is interpretative has been changed, this time offering a somewhat different reading of things.

[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges.  They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves.  We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.

            There’s a lot of this kind of thing in Dawkins’ work, and it’s hard to detect unless you’re paying close attention.  McGrath is good at bringing it out. 

            There are also the polemical parts of Dawkins’ book that are only slightly less annoying than Hitchens as they’re less vitriolic by a few degrees.  What makes both of these guys ‘New Atheists’ is the fact that they’re charging into the mainstream with this stuff with all the subtlety of Sarah Palin in a china shop.  They’re culture warriors, disturbed by the radical excesses and distortions of certain religious groups and doctrines, as well as the “enabling” of religious moderates and political correctness.  They’re polarized, and polarizing, and they seem only really able to see their own points of view.  Dawkins sees thing so completely through the warfare model, he calls fellow scientists who are not atheists the “Neville Chamberlain” school of science.  He is even quoted as saying that he prefers “an honest fundamentalist” to those who try to reconcile religion with science.  It certainly makes sense that he would – a caricature is much easier to defeat than a complex issue.  

            I should mention that I’m not an atheist, although I’m finding that I have more sympathy with that viewpoint than with that of most religious folk.  I agree with these New Atheists that anyone who takes ANY book as literal, perfect, eternal and changeless truth for all (or even some) people at all times, is not substantially different from any other form of lunatic.  These people scare me, and I hope they scare you too.  However, I don’t think most believers are like that.  There’s a huge range and variety to belief, even within a single religion, not to mention the countless believers who have liberated themselves from traditional religions entirely.  The real weakness of Dawkins’ book is a superficial understanding of both religious doctrine and religious experience.  Essentially, he doesn’t know much about the religions themselves, and really doesn’t seem to understand how it impacts in most people’s lives.  He just doesn’t seem to be built that way. I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is, but now’s not the time to go too deeply into it.  In a nutshell, it seems to me that some people just have a spiritual drive, and some do not.  I think of it like a talent (at least in regards to mysticism), you have it or you don’t.  Maybe it’s not much different than artistic ability (and who knows, it may be related), or skill in mathematics and science.  As not everyone can appreciate art on the same level, not everyone can appreciate religion.  Similarly, not everyone can create art, just as not everyone can create a religion (have direct experiences of God, etc).  Similarly, I’m not cut out to be an evolutionary biologist.  I think Dawkins is wired to see things a particular way (and it shows when he tries to apply Darwinism to physics), and therefore there is a major blindspot is his views, as do the rest of us.  He simply cannot appreciate that religion can be valuable, or sane.  I’ll save my thoughts on the value of spirituality for another time.  I’m going to have to assume you share my views for now.

            We can divide the main thrust of the argument of the New Atheists into two, and I’d like to very briefly touch on each.  The first is that science has disproven much of the claims about the physical and mental world made by traditional religions and holy books.  I would basically agree with this idea, but I would also point out that people do not hold religious beliefs the way scientists hold theories.  Most (I hope) religious folks don’t really take things that literally.  Regular people are ruled by common sense primarily, at least in my experience.  They may believe in God, but most haven’t read the bible, let alone believe that they were created wholesale from a lump of clay.  Similarly, most people are not exactly on the cutting edge of science either.  Many people straight up don’t care about what religion or science says, other than what is necessary to fulfill their professional or personal goals.  I’d venture that its really about fitting in, rather than weighing evidence.  As for those who refute science, I believe the New Atheists are correct that mere respect for that position should not be the default position for a healthy society.  Perhaps such ridicule as is heaped by the New Atheists isn’t the way to go either (as it just makes people dig in their heels),  but I don’t have a counter-proposal to give.

            The second argument is that religions do not make people better, but worse.  Dawkins and Hitchens both have extensive (and distorted) chapters attempting to debunk claims that religion makes people more moral.  In one of Hitchens’ few insightful statements he writes “…religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred...” (p36) and I can’t help but agree.  However, I’d say the same thing about international soccer.  The problem, as it seems to me, is not religions exactly, but the tribal, exclusionary, and absolutist tendencies in mankind.  The problem is that we are instinctive animals, evolved as Dawkins says to “survive in a world – I shall use the name Middle World – where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light…” and a world where other humans were often the main threat.  The struggle is to step out of this limited perspective, as science has so often been able to do, and Dawkins and Hitchens both view religion as the main obstacle to this.  Certainly it can be, and I’ve argued that religion is inherently conservative for this reason.  However, just about any man-made institution can do the same.  Just look at Hitchens book, which is just as polarizing as ANY religion.  Both try to explain away Stalin’s atheism as an aberration, just like Christians would say of Hitler or the Inquisition.  But the problem seems to me not religion, but our own inborn stupidity and our nature as upright primates.  Religions are made of people, not doctrines, and people are very often dumb, arrogant, unthinking, bigoted, and irrational.  Religious beliefs can help some people become “better” and can be used by others to justify whatever their ape-like brains want.  Science can help us become “better”,  more secure, more egalitarian, more healthy, but it can also can be used (as it has been) to justify eugenics programs and social Darwinism, which are clear distortions of science, just as fundamentalism can be viewed as a distortion. 

            In summary, I think Dawkins’ book is insightful, sharp, and informative about certain areas, but greatly weakened by the author’s limited experience of religious life and doctrine.  Much of his argument against organized religion was convincing (to me), but he was largely preaching to the choir there.  But on the whole, I found it rather good, and I’d recommend it to any independent thinker.  If you’re already an atheist, I’d definitely pair it with the next book I’m going to review rather than take it at face value.  If you’re a believer you won’t need the latter, but I even more strongly recommend reading the book to challenge yourself.

            One last note – the last chapter in The God Delusion reminded me strangely of Robert Anton Wilson.  I mean this in the best possible way, and I’m curious to see if anyone agrees with me.

The Dawkins Delusion?  Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath.

            I’m going to be extremely quick here, as this is a very short book (118 pages).  This is an attempt by some smart believers to tear down Dawkins’ arguments.  It definitely pokes some holes and shows where Dawkins’ reasoning is weak, but it has some flaws of its own.  The main flaw is the defensiveness of its tone.  It kinda feels like the Dawkins hurt the McGraths’ feelings.  They do a good job of reining it in, but its still there, like a smell that just won’t go away. 

            I think this book is a must read by anyone who was convinced by The God Delusion, because it might weaken such premature certainty.  It’s also excellent for someone like me who wanted to take the New Atheists seriously, but critically.  For believers, it might make you feel better about your faith, but it’s just not necessary.  After all, if you’re a believer, we both know you probably weren’t convinced by Dawkins anyway. 

Religious Knowledge: Part III (The Revenge)

Continued from Part II...

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali lists three acceptable forms of knowledge: direct experience, logical inference (based on the experience), or testimony from a trusted source.  To me, this is a sound epistemology.  The order in which the three sources of knowledge are listed goes from the most reliable to the least.  We trust our own experiences first, then what we can deduce or induce from them, and lastly, the accounts of others.  In the last is traditionally included scriptural sources.  In most religions, this important order is turned on its head:  the most important knowledge is that which exists in the scriptures, then what is inferred from them, then individual experience.  Absurd!  But the Sutras are essentially a mystic text, full of methods to bring about religious experiences for one’s self.  Therefore experience is considered primary. 

            The above thoughts are leading me to conclude that we must take the heights of religious speculation, presented as infallible dogma which we call scripture, with a sizable chunk of salt.  I believe that scripture still has value,  but most of its value is in its description of religious or mystic experience itself.  The interpretations of these experiences must be carefully weighed, preferably in light of our own experience.  Nothing should be taken as canon, as absolute, or infallible.  We may also find value in scripture when it contains actual mystic techniques used to obtain religious experience.  Here tradition is useful, as it is more likely that a method be tried and true than the metaphysic based on it. Based on these ideas, we may refine our list of religion’s claims of knowledge to a much shorter list, and each item should be kept distinct:

1)      Descriptions of the experiences of the founder.

2)      His interpretations of his experience (which includes the cultural information which informs it).  This may include the actions of the founder, for instance, giving to the poor, as these are the result of conclusions reached by his own primary experience.  Ie. if one experiences God as love, and one then reasons that one should therefore love one’s neighbor, charity should be considered an interpretation, rather than a religious experience in its own right.

3)      Others’ interpretations of his experience. 

4)      Recorded methods of attaining direct experience.

If scripture or tradition does not contain the above, we must either discard it or generously consider it to be either a purely cultural artifact (like literature) or a philosophy as open to criticism as Descartes or Plato. 

            Perhaps someone out there is asking themselves “but what about faith?”  It would be a bit much to tackle this exhaustively here, but I think its important to address in connection to the above.  St. Paul famously defined faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Heb 11:1).   But this clearly won’t satisfy any but the most credulous mind.  I may hope for Santa Claus, but that hope cannot in any way be characterized by evidence of his existence.  Similarly, the faith of billions is not evidence.  The experience of billions would be, however, if it could be reliably replicated by others.  But we can also say we have faith in something known and real – we might have faith in ourselves.  This is confidence in the face of the unknown.  Walking into an unknown situation, faith in one’s self is helpful, especially when based on evidence.  Faith in this sense means “believing something likely, though it is presently unknown or uncertain, based on our prior experience.”  We might immediately notice the similarity of this idea of faith to our idea of an “educated guess”, or inductive reasoning, and ultimately we can’t do without it.  Faith in our methods is certainly crucial in investigating anything (faith in the scientific method is necessary to really pursue science), but I must reiterate that faith is not evidence.  Faith is a temporary measure that bridges the gap between the known and unknown, at least until the unknown becomes the known.  This only happens through experience, and therefore I must conclude that religious faith can never be a source of knowledge, and that religious experience is the only real form of religious knowledge.

            The next step, and I think it is an important one, is to separate the actual content of experience from the theologies that spring from them.  For instance, we can separate the idea of God from the experience of God.  Perhaps I have an experience of something which appears to me to be eternal, or to be full of being, knowledge and bliss.  When I come down from my altered state of consciousness, I then ask myself “what the hell was that?”  I might well suppose it to be God, especially if I’ve heard about the supposed characteristics of God from others.  If we belong to a particular religious tradition, it’s likely I would then relate my experience to scripture and tradition.  Such adherence to a tradition may well even color the experience itself, so that this experience (which we might tentatively call God) takes on certain characteristics during or after the fact, becoming Shiva, or Jesus, or God the Father.  The fact that few believers have experiences that contradict their own scriptures, but may contradict those of other faiths makes me suppose that the conclusions reached by others (inherited metaphysics) may limit, or even shape the experiences of those who hold their beliefs as dogma.  In order to get at the actual, objective thing that is experienced as ‘God’ or whatever you choose to call it, we have to first separate the experience itself from whatever is layered upon it, especially a restrictive pie-in-the-sky metaphysic.  In order to do this, we must cultivate a new methodology to generate religious experience that is not dependant on metaphysics. Such a methodology would have some rather serious implications.  For one, morality that is based upon scripture and induction, for instance the Christian notion that morality is based on divine commandment and law, would be rejected insomuch as it claims to be absolute.  This would not necessarily lessen the beneficial implications of such ideas as “thou shalt not kill”, but such ideas cannot necessarily rest on the idea of divinity.  Any such behavioral prescriptions would be suspect so far as they claim to be based on the idea of “what God wants.”  Unless, of course, you heard God command such yourself. 

            But that just raises more questions.  Even direct religious experience is full of traps and pitfalls.  The modern neo-pagans are a great example of people working in the mystic tradition to achieve knowledge of deity.  But they too quickly can make themselves silly, as when High Priest #1 has a vision of Apollo that tells him to build a replica of the oracle of Delphi in his basement and that he shall be placed in charge of the millions who are about to return to the ancient religion of Greece.  It gets worse when High Priest #2 has his own vision of Apollo that tells him that High Priest #1 is a fraud and that he should build his own oracle in the shed behind his mom’s house.  Assuming that both individuals are truthful in their claims, the content of their religious knowledge differs.  What is a High Priest to do? 

            Reconstructist Pagans (probably the more intellectual of the bunch), who are trying to literally reconstruct the extinct religion of their choice or ancestry, have come up with an interesting solution to this problem.  They regard “the lore” as paramount, including primary sources from the period in question (for instance, Hesiod, Homer, Plutarch, etc, among the Greek reconstructionists), and treat matters of personal revelation as ‘Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis,’ usually shortened to ‘UPG.’  This is treated as suspect, until it is ‘verified’ by others, or it becomes too emotionally convincing to stay objective about.   Of course, this treatment creates the same problems as religious metaphysics of the mainstream religions – personal experience is subordinated to some kind of scriptural canon.  This problem is often exacerbated in reconstructionism in that the religion in question went extinct at some point, and often much of the textural context has been lost to history.  In a group like the Norse Reconstructionists, there is a terrible lack of primary sources, and what remains to work with often enough comes down through descriptions of the pagans by Christian monks, who were clearly not impartial.  The tradition, wary of ‘UPG’, and having little to base their reconstruction on, may well feel rather incomplete (as is anything in the process of being reconstructed.)  This is not to say the endeavor is not worthwhile, but its difficulties must be addressed honestly.

            The real question, and one I don’t have anything resembling an adequate answer to, is how can we judge primary religious knowledge ('UPG')?  By what standards can we critique such experiences?  My intuition tells me that Carl Jung may have been one of the few who tackled this area, but that’s a whole different can of worms. 

            Clearly this is a bigger job than any one blogger can take on.  If you’ve actually read this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts! 

Religious Knowledge: Part II

Continued from Part I...

In classical philosophy the discipline of metaphysics was a very popular way to try to understand the universe and our place in it.  Literally meaning “after physics,” the word comes from the untitled section of Aristotle’s work that follows the section entitled “physics,” hence ‘metaphysics’.  Metaphysics, as the word is used in philosophy, refers to an attempt to formulate a comprehensive, all-inclusive theory of reality, defining and describing its nature.  Prior to the development of the scientific method, this included “natural philosophy” (the old name for science) as a sub-section.  The primary method for creating a ‘metaphysic’ is inductive reasoning – drawing general conclusions about the world from a finite amount of experiences.  Wikipedia gives us a great example of an inductive reasoning:  Every life form we know of depends on water to live (an observation.)  Therefore, every life form depends on water to live (an inductive conclusion).  Clearly the second is not necessarily true based on the observation, although based on what we know, we might assume that this will hold true, even on other planets.  But that’s an assumption, not a fact.  We can call induction, and thereby metaphysics itself, nothing more than an ‘educated guess’. 

            The problem with induction, and metaphysics as a whole, is that it relies on pure reason to take a stab in the dark about unobserved phenomena.  If we accept a particular metaphysic and its inductive reasoning, we tend to limit our thinking.  For instance, if we reason that, based on observed life (life on earth) needing water to live, all life, including that on other planets, needs water to live, then we think of potential life in a limited (although reasonable) way.  When looking for life on other planets, we look for water first.  That may or may not work out for us, but if life forms exist somewhere out there that do not require water, we are less likely to find them. 

            We use induction constantly.  We assume that because gravity has held true for all of known history, it will continue tomorrow, although there’s actually no certainty of that (no empirical observation).  We assume that, based on the fact that we are alive today, we will be alive tomorrow, although there’s clearly no guarantee.  Metaphysicians of the past have used induction to ‘prove’ the existence of God (Spinoza), a Platonic world of ideas, and the division of nature into mind and matter (Descartes), but thanks to the advent of empiricism and the scientific method, modern philosophy regards their conclusions as suspect.

            Turning back to religion, we find that their founders had certain religious experiences that we can equate with observation in science.  A certain uncommon thing (something different than average day-to-day experience) was experienced by a person, and this person tried to make sense of it.  In other words, the religious founder had an uncommon experience which impacted his current understanding of the world in one way or another, and in order to create a new worldview incorporating the new information, created a sort of metaphysical theory by inductive reasoning.  I know, I’m being extremely vague and general, but only because I want to include all major religions.  Each founder reacted differently, may have experienced differently, and certainly induced different conclusions.  Lets use the Rishis as an example:  Consciously searching after truth beyond the appearance of the world (based on what they heard from others), they used various methods (yoga, hallucinogens, etc) to bring about certain experiences.  They described these experiences as Indra, Brahman, Shiva, etc.  From this basis, they induced a metaphysical corpus which includes everything from moral law, social law, physical theories, even medical theories.  As each of these seers described things in different ways, their accounts were later organized by others into 4 Vedas, which were then connected to later commentaries and inductive speculation (the Upanishads), integrated with fictional epics (Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita), and refined by a commentarial tradition into Vedanta (meaning literally “The end, or conclusions, of the Vedas”).  Over thousands of years we come to a rich body of religious and cultural information we call Hinduism. 

            While we may look at this rich tradition and admire its complexity and beauty, we cannot ignore the problems.  The inductive reasoning that postulated that different types of people should follow laws appropriate to their role in society (dharma) became crystallized into the unfortunate caste system of the India.  Further, the deep cultural respect for tradition discouraged any attempt to look beyond what is in the scriptures (like only looking for life on water-rich planets), creating a setting in which thousands of years of guess-work based on limited spiritual experience defines one’s world view.  Intellectual life for a long time in India included logical debates which were less about reality or truth than about the clever ability to manipulate the massive scriptural corpus to prove one’s point.  My guess is based upon your guess, like a castle on a cloud. 

            The same certainly holds true for Christianity.  After the initial spate of religious experience among Christ and the Disciples, quite a few Gospels turned up around the ancient world.  Eventually the four we know became canon, around the time of St. Augustine (4^th century).  Many Gospels were rejected to make room for those four, most because they were either suspect in authenticity, or they conflicted with the metaphysics of those with the most influence.  The “Church Doctors” then put together their metaphysics based on the canon (and really, the New Testament doesn’t give us a lot of actual information about the world), and this became the Christian tradition.  The dogmas of a church are really just metaphysics, but regarded as infallible by tradition. Heresy is really just when one person’s inductive reasoning conflicts with the standard metaphysic.

            For this reason, empiricists tend to regard metaphysics and religion both as a waste of time, even calling religious or metaphysical statements “meaningless”.  David Hume wrote of classical metaphysics:

“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles [Hume’s empirical principals], what havoc must we make?  If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?  No.  Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?  No.  Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing by sophistry and illusion.” – Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 

When we also consider the difficulties of knowledge and perception, we become even more skeptical that such grandiose conclusions, such as offered by metaphysicians and theologians, can ever attain to real knowledge.  Consider further the fact that if the speculations of metaphysically inclined ‘natural philosophers’ could be so wrong in their conclusions about the physical world that everyone can touch and see without any special effort, then what is the likelihood of any metaphysic being accurate in describing the nature of what is not seen by all?  I’d say it’s not bloody likely. 

            While most empiricists call for rejecting religion as a whole on these grounds, this seems to me a bit hasty.  As top-heavy as religious doctrine becomes, it is still based on human experience.  People have spiritual experiences all the time, to varying degrees of intensity, and I myself have had quite a few.  As skeptical as I am about most theology, I cannot doubt what I have experienced, just as you don’t doubt that the earth exists under your feet.  We also cannot doubt that unlike a perception of political rights, the scientific method, or written language, religion is a truly universal cultural phenomena.  Religious experience, in its primary sense, is universal to humanity, in the same way as spoken language, an upright walk, and music exist wherever there is man.  For a modern atheist to proclaim that there is no God is bad inductive reasoning.  He makes a negative observation: “I have never experienced God” and by inductive reasoning concludes “there is no God.”  By that same logic we might go from “I have never seen Transformers 2” and therefore “Transformers 2 doesn’t exist.”  As much as I wish that were the case, just because I lack experience of it, does not make it not exist.  Mr. Atheist might then say “but Dave, you can read reviews of Transformers 2, hear about it from others, and even go rent it yourself and watch it.  You can verify its existence, but you can’t do that with God.”  To which I must respond that there are no shortage of churches out there who profess God’s existence, you can hear about him from people who’ll even come knock on your door to chat, and according to the mystics (like the yogis), you can even train yourself to eventually experience God.  While that might take years, it also takes quite a bit of training to personally verify most scientific claims.  Most atheists, secure in their own inductive reasoning, are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to even attempt having a religious experience.  We might liken this to the fact that, despite the efforts of those who might insist on its existence, I’m unwilling to sacrifice my time, intelligence or sanity to verify the existence of Transformers 2 by actually watching it.  

Cont. in Part III

Religious Knowledge: Part I

I’ve been thinking a lot about religious knowledge this week, and I wanted to try to organize my thoughts here.  The exercise was helpful, but boy did it take forever.  Due to its length (and it could have been much longer), I’ve separated this into three parts to make it easier to digest.  The thoughts herein are rather raw, so I would love to hear from anyone who reads this.  Please, comment away, and let me know if my reasoning is sound.

            Before we proceed, we have to first figure out what I’m talking about when I say ‘religious knowledge.’  What I don’t mean is knowledge about religion; facts like knowing the 10 commandments or which religions trace their lineage back to the biblical Abraham.  These facts may or may not be important historically or socially, but they are clearly not required for participation in religion.  What I mean by religious knowledge is the special knowledge professed by adherents of a particular religion.  A Christian might claim to “know” that Christ is the Lord, or that the Bible is the literal word of God.  A Buddhist may claim that the nature of life is suffering, but there is a way to salvation from it.  All religions, in one form or another, claim to possess special knowledge, and in an effort towards building an understanding of these claims, as well as a means to analyze them, these claims need to be given a close look. 

            To critique religious knowledge is an unpopular pastime.  If a physicist creates a new theory, dozens of other experts in that field attempt to reproduce the experiments that gave rise to the theory, and then follow the methodology and logic of the original physicist to see if the new theory holds water.  Trying to do the same thing with religion is often frowned upon, or is considered impossible.  People will inevitably say “people have the right to believe as they like,” or “how can you judge another culture’s ways?” By this logic, burning children as witches as is done even today in Africa, or throwing acid on the face of a woman refusing to wear a Burqa is perfectly fine and reasonable.  After all, these are cultures other than ours and we would be cultural imperialists to foist our ways upon others.  We need to be able to ask ourselves “what is the function of religion, and do x, y, and z practices serve this role or hinder it?”  It is clear, at least to me, that for the betterment of humanity, we need to be free to call people out on their barbarism when religion serves to degrade us rather than upraise us. (For more on this, check out Sam Harris' excellent Ted Talk).

            Some people say that critiquing religion is completely different than a hard science like physics, and we can never verify religious claims at all.  Religious criticism, at best, becomes roughly as objective as a food critic.  To this idea, I have to say “bullshit.”  If religions claim knowledge, this knowledge had to come from somewhere, and in all cases, this knowledge came through the medium of human beings, just like us.  I’ll get into this more in a bit. First, let’s look at what types of things religions claim.  Let me know if I missed anything:

1)      Religions make claims about reality.  This is the area of the most overlap with science, as well as the most conflict.  Religions usually have something to say about the world around us, perhaps its origin through a creation story, how it will end, even what it might be ‘made’ from (its substance).  This is also where God (when he appears) usually comes into the mix, either as a creator, the metaphysical foundation of material existence, etc. 

2)      Religions make claims about morality.  Usually based on their claims about reality, religions claim to tell us what is right and wrong behavior, how to live our lives, what a good life entails, and how to engage with our fellow beings and environment.

3)      Religions make claims about our value and place in the world (Our “life myth”).  This would tell us what our place in the world is, the relationship between humanity and the animal kingdom, as well as each other. 

4)      Religions make claims about the “problem” of life, as well as a means for overcoming it.  Every religion identifies a problem that should be addressed:  sin for Christianity, forgetfulness of God in Islam, desire and suffering in Buddhism, ignorance in Hinduism, and so on.  Each touches upon a rather important and near-universal feeling that something isn’t right with the world, that the world is not as it “aught” to be, or at least that we are not as we aught to be.  After all, if we were just hunky-dory from the start, why would religion be so prevalent and popular?  I think this last, in combination with moral guidance, sense of place, and certainty of the nature of the world provides the major psychological force of religious ‘needs’. 

5)      Religion creates community and is a vehicle for non-religious information.  This can be cultural (as in the connection of art to the Church), or practical (networking).  But this is not really a form of religious knowledge, so we’ll ignore it for now.

            Assuming that all religious knowledge falls into one of the above, we must ask for the source of this knowledge.   Ask the Christians and they will point to the Bible, ask the Muslims and they’ll point to the Koran, ask the Hindus and they’ll point to the Vedas.  Ask them where these various books came from and the answer is the same – God.  But clearly none of them imagine God sitting down somewhere, pen in hand, to write these books, and then plopping them onto some prophet’s lap saying “here’s some eternal truth for you, go forth and make 4 billion photocopies.”  No, tradition has Moses writing down the Pentateuch, the Evangalists writing down the Gospels, Mohammed writing down the Koran, and the Rishis (Seers or Sages) writing down the Vedas.

            Essentially, all religious knowledge originates with human beings who had certain experiences, told others, and perhaps wrote them down.  Swami Vivekananda puts this perfectly in his book Raja Yoga:

            “…if you go to the fountainhead of Christianity, you will find that it is based upon experience.  Christ said he saw God; the disciples said they felt God; and so forth.  Similarly, in Buddhism, it is Buddha’s experience.  He experienced certain truths, saw them, came in contact with them, and preached them to the world. …Thus it is clear that all the religions of the world have been built upon that one universal and adamantine foundation of all our knowledge – direct experience.”

            Of course, this is the same exact foundation as found in the empiricism of the physical sciences.  Theories come from what is observed, or experienced.  The difference is in the method, but also in the terms and the way the terms are understood.  In empiricism, experience leads to theories, which are by nature tentative, and open to change; and in religion, experience leads to doctrine, dogma, and tradition, which is canonical, and not open to change.

Cont. in Part II.