The Humanities and Atheism

Written by Robin Marie in Educational, Opinion at June 14, 2011

In the debate about religion and science, one presupposition always remains unstated – it is science, of all the offices of knowledge, which presents the most serious challenge to the worldview of theism. I am not going to dispute that here – as Michael Shermer puts it, “science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how our world works.” However, as a student of history and an atheist, I am constantly impressed with how relevant my background in the humanities is to informing my own skepticism and atheism. For while science might be the best tool ever devised for understanding how our physical world works, so far we have not yet perfected the technique of applying the scientific method to human societies. Although I am hopeful that scientists will grow increasingly adept at applying scientific methods to humanistic questions, in the meantime we have much to learn from the study of history and culture. Indeed, for me personally, the lessons I have learned from history are the most deeply convincing I know for rejecting the narrow, exclusive interpretation of human experience that all religions depend on. However, in this post I am going to focus on the three major monotheisms – particularly Christianity – and the way in which their proscribed view of human experience does not stand the test of historical inquiry.

The first and most obvious lesson history has to teach us is that not all sources are made equal – or, to put it more scientifically, not all claims are equally valid. I recently interacted with a Christian who, clearly unfamiliar with the basics of the atheism debate, asserted as obviously true the resurrection of Jesus Christ. When I corrected him – the resurrection is a belief, and far from a fact – he seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would dispute the historical reality of the resurrection. In the minds of many Christians, the fact that sources exist testifying to the resurrection is clear and sufficient proof. We have gone over the problems with this before – from the unsatisfactory quality of the gospels, to the fact that the accounts of Jesus are almost entirely limited to those from within the Christian tradition, to the problem that if you take the resurrection seriously on the basis of the evidence provided, you have no reason not to believe the women in Salem were witches or doubt that Joseph Smith discovered supernatural golden plates in New York. Sources must be examined in the context in which they are produced and the biases that the sources’ authors are likely to be operating under must be taken into account when we are determining how much to trust our sources.

Allow me to offer a simple example which is not as grand in scope as the founding of a religion but demonstrates the general principle clearly: Thomas Jefferson produced scores of sources where he informs us that Alexander Hamilton was a horrible man and a traitor to his country – Abigail Adams thought she saw the very devil in Hamilton’s eyes. And yet, Hamilton produced scores of sources where he informs us that Thomas Jefferson was a demagogue, a man who manipulated the people in a quest for his own personal power. Quite clearly both Hamilton and Jefferson existed, and both were responding to the actual actions and behaviors of the other. Yet not only can we not conclude that both were right about each other, we have good reason to suspect that both were wrong – for if we understand the context and viewpoint of each (in laymen’s terms, where they were coming from) we understand how they could have interpreted what seems to us to be fairly benign behavior as pernicious and plotting[1]. In short, we are not objective – and we often believe things fantastically off the mark under the sway of our presuppositions, our hopes, and our biases. It is clear that many believers lack even this basic understanding of the biases and unreliability of sources.

However, this is not what I intend to spend most of this post discussing – because even more compelling than understanding how to be critical of sources is an appreciation of how we can learn from human history that both the existence of difference and similarity in human experience undermines the theistic viewpoint. Let me make a disclaimer at the beginning – this argument is aimed specifically at believers that adhere to a particular religion, or a particular version of theism; this is not addressed to deists or woo-wooists, but Christians, Muslims, Jews, and anyone else who posits a particularized deity and insists that all other versions are wrong. So let’s leave the God claim alone for the sake of the discussion and think just about the more particular claims.

Let’s start with the problem of difference. Our three major monotheisms all have a particular idea about what constitutes human nature, and what it means to be human and experience the human condition. Because they are all Abrahamic religions, they overlap considerably, but for the sake of this discussion, I will focus on the Christian view of human nature. Humans, according to Christianity, suffer from original sin – whether or not you really believe in Adam and Eve is somewhat beside the point, as all Christians believe we are incurably “fallen” or “broken” in a fundamental way, and that only a personal relationship with Jesus can heal this rift with God and thus make us acceptable for entrance into heaven. Now, I would never suggest that this idea of human nature is completely fabricated – that it is based on nothing but the personal whims of ancient Jews and Christians. Clearly, humans are not only capable of evil – pedestrian or great – but many of us experience a great longing, an emptiness, or a loneliness, that Christians claim is filled by Jesus when one accepts him.[2]

However, what Christians fail to fully recognize and understand is that while many of us feel like we need “something more” in life, many of us do not. Really. Many of us really, truly cannot identify as being “broken” or “fallen” in any fundamental way, or, what a Christian would call “brokenness” another might call a complexity of their personality that drives their creativity and ultimately their hope. However, it is hard to discuss the subjective in an objective way when referring to abstract individuals – let’s take it up to the level of a society. As Daniel Everett discovered as a Christian missionary to Brazil, there exist entire societies where this sense of brokenness and longing simply does not exist – where the people have absolutely no idea that they are fundamentally sinful, or ought to be yearning for “something larger” than their earthly lives. Another great - and deeply tragic - example of this dynamic comes from the huge amount of historical information we have about Christians attempting to convert Native Americans. Many of these stories are heartbreaking – as missionaries tried to explain to Native Americans their fallen and sinful natures, confusions and conflicts abounded. Many Native Americans struggled with the teaching that they needed to be ashamed of their bodies and their sexuality, or that they could not practice their traditional rites even though, it seemed to them, there was no more fitting way to worship the divine. Indeed there is perhaps no greater example of the psychological harm Christianity can do than the tales of distraught Native Americans who desperately tried to reconcile their previous worldview with the lesson that they were sinful and shameful creatures. Of course, this opens up the question of why these differences between societies exist – but we’ll get to that soon enough. Suffice to say now that difference exists, and this undermines the theist claim that human nature is a constant.[3]

However, humorously enough, the existence of similarity across human societies also undermines the theist argument. When you talk to Christians about their faith – particularly if they are Protestant – the discussion inevitably winds around to their personal conversion experience, and/or their experiences with their personal relationship with Jesus. What they describe when talking about these experiences is often quite beautiful – and indeed, to many of us it sounds quite familiar. This is because it is quite familiar – not only in Western civilization, it turns out, but throughout all of human history. I have yet to come across any positive quality of religious belief –whether it be the feeling that you are not alone, the sense of meaning and inner peace it provides you with, the way it inspires you to be a better person than you previously thought you could be, or anything else – that is a result exclusive to any particular religion or religious belief itself. The thousands upon thousands of historical documents we have from dozens of different cultures and belief systems attesting to these experiences do include, of course, differences – but their similarities are remarkable. What differs, by and large, is the way in which these experiences are interpreted – the Hindu experience of nirvana is no less real than the Christian’s connection to Jesus, God, and hope; it is simply explained by a different narrative. But religious belief in a particularized deity requires you to trust, ultimately, that what you have experienced is not what others have experienced; that true hope, that true connection to the divine, that true meaning comes only from a particular relationship with a particular deity. This means, of course, that you must learn to limit your capacity for human empathy; you can believe that other people believe they experienced something as beautiful as your personal relationship with your deity but, ultimately, you must not take them completely at their word. For their word sounds exactly like your word. But I digress. The universality of spiritual and religious experience points to an obvious conclusion – human beings are spirituality-experiencing machines, and a shared biological, material reality underlies all of this shared experience. Here, science has in fact contributed greatly to understanding human nature, as brain scans clearly show that the brains of Buddhists monks in meditation are lighting up in the same way as the brains of Christian believers and the brains of Muslims and the brains of pretty much any other devout religious believer. They are literately experiencing the same thing – and we have amazing empirical evidence of this.

So we have difference, and we have similarity. The similarity is pretty easy to account for; we are all human, and thus the vast majority of us share brains with more or less the same tendencies.[4] Accounting for the difference is a little trickier, and it is here where a background in the humanities really helps. It is a basic tenet of all serious scholarship today that human culture is constructed – it is not the result of human beings interacting with an objective reality and thus objectively deciding what the best society looks like, but the result of the particular environment, the particular beliefs, and the particular needs any society develops in. At the most simple level, everyone accepts that this is true – no one would claim there is something objectively superior to speaking softly, as most of the English do, and speaking loudly as, the stereotype goes, most Americans do.[5] However, there is considerable resistance to carrying this further – to claim that not only does cultural relativity apply to superficial things like fashion and food, but to our ideas about gender, to our ideas about sex, to our ideas about government and yes, even to our ideas about human nature. And yet, anyone steeped in the current state of knowledge in the humanities does not hesitate to accept this.

A quick caveat. There are some in the humanities who take the reality of cultural relativity much, much too far – out of culture, basically. There are those who think that even the tested, objective findings of science are culturally constructed, and there are those who think that ethics and morality, despite the universal reality of suffering and pleasure, is entirely subjective.[6] This is wrong. I do not agree. But that is another post at another time. Suffice to say that when I am hanging around humanities people, I occasionally get annoyed with excessive postmodernism – yet when I am hanging around atheists, I occasionally get annoyed with the lack of postmodernism. But back to the main argument.

Many people accept the basic idea of Cultural Construction Lite. What they do not accept, however, is first, just how powerful culture is in shaping our perceived realities and, second, that they too are subject to this. Because again, culture does not simply shape what food we like or what clothes we wear. It shapes our beliefs about human nature and the nature of reality, too – most Native Americans, before encountering Christians, did not believe they were fundamentally sinful because no one had ever taught them to believe that. Their culture explained the shared set of human experiences very differently, and it was from that pool of ideas, biases and unconscious assumptions that they crafted their world view. It is worth noting here that some might object, “I was not raised Christian though, yet I converted.” This displays how deeply ignorant many are of how culture works, and how powerful it is – there is no need for one to be raised Christian to have Christian assumptions and a Christian worldview deeply imprinted in their consciousness and subconsciousness. Today, Western civilization is just starting to emerge into a post-Christian worldview; however, for the most part, Christianity provides a huge bulk of the metaphysics and assumptions we still labor under, particularly in the United States.[7] I have pointed this out in several ways on this blog. It is difficult to succinctly explain how culture works, and how important it is – if interested in exploring the issue further, it is best to start with the touch stone of most cultural history studies, Michel Foucault.[8] (Or simply read a simpler summary of Foucault, as reading him is not really necessary to grasping his ideas, the opinions of nerdy cultural studies students aside.)

But the basic idea is this – most of the information human beings take in requires a framework in which to interpret it. This framework is given to you by the society in which you were brought up and/or identify with, and it does not have to be instructed to you in a literal, dogmatic way – the culture constantly communicates it to you from almost the moment you are born in sometimes subtle but incredibly influential ways. Furthermore, this tendency – to interpret experience through the lens of what we already assume – is perhaps nowhere more powerful than in matters of religion and spirituality, for it is here where the most intense, basic emotions are the most prevalent and thus, the interpretation of these experiences is more resistant than usual to logic and objectivity. Additionally, matters of spiritually is where the subject matter at hand – the nature of the universe and our purpose on Earth – is the most ambiguous and difficult to attack with objective observations. It is very difficult for anyone to break out, completely, from this framework, to experience life without any presuppositions about the meaning of information – but - and here I depart from the more extreme postmodernists - this is in fact possible. And one of the best ways of doing it is by observing human nature as objectively as we can, through science for sure, but also by contrasting and comparing the variety of human experience that is recorded in the historical record. History is nothing else if not the catalog of the ways in which we are the same, and the ways in which we are different – both of which do not square with a particularistic theistic worldview.

And now let us return to the original problem we started out with, the reliability of sources. The way most Christians tell it, there was no culture in the ancient Middle East. Jesus, the apostles, the Jews, the Romans, everyone was perfectly rational and experienced reality in a direct and infallible manner. I characterize their argument this way because there is no other explanation for their confident assumption that the Gospels are reliable historical sources, and therefore the resurrection and the entire construct of Christian theology is obviously true. But the reason they have to deny the power of history and culture is quite obvious – if it is that important, that means it operates on everyone, and they themselves are no exception. If whatever combination of experience and assumptions which led them to Christianity is somehow tainted by the somewhat arbitrary location of their birth in combination with the peculiarities of their personality, then that must mean things are not so sure, not so solid as they seem. Experience is not the same as reality - all experience still requires interpretation in order to be processed and, alas, we are as yet unable to directly capture experience and subject it to a round of objective, empirical observations. However, I have never come across any argument from apologists or individual Christians which accounts for the problems of similarity and difference in the historical record – and it is because of this that I believe that truly understanding history is nearly as great a threat to religious faith as any other discipline.