The Humanities and Atheism
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.
