Curiosity: on hope and death

As you probably know, the new Discovery Channel show Curiosity recently gave their first episode over to Stephen Hawking, who argued that the laws of physics sufficiently explain how we could have gotten a “universe from nothing” and thus, do away with the need for a god. The main program was followed by one of those adorable panels where people who have been pre-screened to not be very controversial or upsetting are invited on to advocate confusion and promote quaint ideas that wouldn’t survive more serious intellectual rigor.

But I am being uncharitable – Sean Carroll did pretty well, actually. However as is usual with these sorts of “discussion panels,” a whole host of Very Bad Arguments were allowed to fly because the unfounded assumptions they were based on were never challenged. I’d like to address the theme that bothered me the most.

John Haught, the representative theologian on the panel, first argued, while claiming religion is not so much concerned with questions about the origin of the universe or of a first cause, that religion is instead primarily about the question of “is there in reality a basis for hope?”

What’s the problem with that? The problem with that is that it presupposes that we are in need of hope – that in our natural, secular state we are all hopeless – and religion comes in to supply us with hope. So I ask, hopeless about what?

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This is not Comic-Con: why social issues matter to skepticism

At TAM 9 a few weeks ago the panel on diversity ended up discussing diversity of issues as much as diversity of members. Specifically, Greta Christina and Jamila Bey argued strongly for an expansion of the issues skepticism takes on: skepticism should not be limited, they said, to the traditional “science and supernatural claims” categories. D.J. Grothe, however, disagreed. While he felt that there was a natural affiliation between skepticism and some social movements – the gay rights movement, for example – he expressed concern that to pursue social issues under the umbrella of the skeptical movement might lead to mission drift, especially since questions about social issues can be particularly divisive, as they are not so clear-cut as claims about the natural world.

As a student of history, it can be easily guessed where I fall in this debate. A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how the study of history feeds atheism, and it seems clear to me that skepticism, in turn, feeds the study of history. The same is true for all social sciences – while I acknowledge a clear difference between the hard sciences and the ‘soft’ ones, all social science ultimately hopes to obtain an understanding of society that reflects reality. While what reality actually is can often be much more difficult to discern in social science than hard science, it is far from impossible.

However, those who are uneasy with this idea of expanding the issues the skeptical movement takes on do have legitimate concerns. First, it is simply harder to find out what is true and what is bunk when we are debating social phenomena. This is largely because any characteristic being studied – let’s say drug use – can operate very differently in different societies, depending on an endless list of other factors such as economic development, cultural traditions, taboos, religious history, and so on. Social science is, in short, messy, very messy. To make matters more complicated, tests cannot be run on particular hypotheses in the same way they can in the hard sciences – you can’t create two identical societies, introduce high quality heroin into one and not the other, and then let them stew for 50 years to see what happens. There are no controls in social science. Of course, there are a slew of techniques the various fields have developed to deal with this, and the books that introduce graduate students of the social sciences with exactly these strategies number in the hundreds. But I think it is fair to say that when forming beliefs about how societies function, we can never be as sure as we can in the hard sciences that we have identified cause and effect correctly.

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Episode 51: The Amazing Meeting Recap, Interview with Greta Christina

Sam, Robin and Chris discuss Robin’s experience attending The Amazing Meeting. If you missed out on this meeting or didn’t get enough from some of the live blogs out there, be sure to tune in as Robin discusses her favorite talks as well as some of the more controversial ones. Also included in this episode is Robin’s interview with TAM speaker Greta Christina.

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Loss without religion

There is a new online support group on facebook, Grief Beyond Belief, that hopes to connect non-believers going through the loss of a loved one with others in the same situation. Grief Beyond Belief is not yet even two weeks old, and it already has over 1,000 members and active discussions taking place each day.

This success should not be surprising - a time of grief must be a particularly difficult time to be an atheist, not merely because we cannot take comfort in the belief that we shall see our loved ones again, but also because usually, we are surrounded by people who do not share this viewpoint and thus process their grief in a way that we might find difficult to connect with or even, in some situations, alienating. The courage of Pat Tillman’s brother comes to mind as a particularly poignant example of the disconnect non-believers can feel to the rest of society during such a time, especially since, in this case, Richard Tillman was dealing with opportunistic politicians banking in on the political capital of his patriotic brother through appeals to country and God.

While there are certainly ways to think about death from an atheistic perspective that are not depressing, I have personally always found this to be by far and away the most difficult implication of my lack of belief. In fact, I think it is the only implication of my lack of belief that really bothers me. But perhaps if I grew up in a culture that encouraged a realistic attitude towards death, accepting always from the start its inevitability and reality, this would not be quite so true. For that reason and many others, I think groups like Grief Beyond Belief are one of the best things we in the atheist community can do for each other to improve the qualities of our lives.

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.

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Are all religions equally crazy?

Greta Christina thinks so.

Any belief in a supernatural world that affects the natural one is equally implausible, equally the product of cognitive biases, equally unsupported by any good evidence. Some religions contradict reality quite blatantly, flatly stating that well-established historical and scientific facts aren’t true. (Young-earth Creationism does this with basic facts of evolution; Mormonism does it with basic facts of human history.) Other religions do a better job of presenting a plausible face and shoehorning their beliefs around reality. … But all religions are out of touch with reality. All religions are implausible, based on cognitive biases, and unsupported by any good evidence whatsoever. All of them ultimately rely on faith — i.e., an irrational attachment to a pre-existing idea regardless of any evidence that contradicts it — as the core foundation of their belief.”

However, I think there is an argument to be made that while all religions may be equally crazy, they are not all equally fun. As she points out in the article, Mormonism departs more notably from modern norms, and thus seems “crazier” - and to me, a lot more interesting. I was recently watching the PBS series God in America, and was shocked to find out they skipped Mormonism. How can you skip Mormonism?, that great, all-American religion that captures so well, in its tenets and the story of its formation, the upheaval of the Market Revolution and the weird way in which religious freedom interacts with an unwieldy social fabric based primarily on, well, market relations, to create these delightfully unusual backlashes against modernity? I mean really, as religions go, Mormonism is great fun, and not just because of its weirder-than-usual beliefs but because of what a great starting point it is to have discussions about other historical trends in America that are just so American. Through looking at Mormonism, we can learn not just about religions and how they work, but a lot more about America that is not, at first glance, directly related to religion.*

This is turning into an overly enthusiastic rant with no real structure, so I’ll stop here. But you get my drift.

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*For a great book that does this by looking not at Mormonism, but another cult of the era that failed to reach the heights of legitimacy that Mormonism did, I highly recommend The Kingdom of Matthias, which does discuss Mormonism briefly but is more broadly relevant to that faith because it explores the conditions that gave rise to Mormonism and scores of other churches and cults like it.

Episode 44: Osama bin Laden, Atheism & Sex, Interview with Greta Christina

Sam, Tom, Robin and Chris discuss the killing of Osama bin Laden and what it means for the West’s relationship with Islam (if anything), and we discuss the topic of sex and what God has to do with it. Also featured on this episode is an interview with Greta Christina, thinker and freelance writer.

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