"The Teapot Analogy"

I think Ross Douthat misses the point with this dissection of Bertrand Russell's "Teapot Analogy." First, the analogy:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Then Douthat's dismissal:

This analogy - like its modern descendant, the Flying Spaghetti Monster - makes a great deal of sense if you believe that the idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is. As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with, yes, the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship.

Douthat's argument is that there is no fair comparison between a native arising of a perception of the divine, and a concocted fable; the point he misses, that Russell and other's were trying to make, is that there is no perceivable difference between a religion founded on a spontaneous eruption of feeling, and a fable concocted by a philosopher. The problem that many atheists have with religion, and those who practice it, is not that anyone believes generally in some divine power; it's that around those "faint tremors" people have over time concocted the most absurd of fairy tales to support their suppression of dissimilar thought, and persecution of those who do not believe similarly.

Yes, many atheists probably feel the "faint tremors" of belief from time to time, but to most of us this hardly seems cause to start denouncing the validity of everyone else's tremors and demanding that the power of the state be bent to our moral precepts. In other words, we atheist would probably take the religious beliefs of people like Douthat more seriously, if people like Douthat would take them less so. 

I Don't Understand

...why we can't put our religious nutballs on an island with their religious nutballs and let them duke it out and leave the rest of us in peace.

Sound Off

Frank Schaeffer, son of the late evangelical preacher Francis Schaeffer and himself a former fundamentalist Christian, tears the religious right a new one in a column over at the Huffington Post. Excerpts:

Take a hard look at yourselves. Play back this year's Republican convention and you'll see an all-white crowd of people screaming for offshore oil drilling -- fat lot of good that will do! more carbon! more polution! -- and essentially reacting like starved hyenas when presented with a piece of juicy carrion. At the convention Sarah Palin and others produced nothing more than a snide list of smart ass put downs aimed at the really dumb, with so little substance that former conservatives such the late William F. Buckley, for instance (let alone my late father) would simply have been ashamed to be in your company. You have become a hate-filled rabble proud of your ignorance and resentful of the rest of your own country, resentment that's exceeded only by your maudlin (and false) sense of victimhood.

People that hate half the population of their own country can scarcely be called patriots. On the contrary, people who exult in mocking as their only way to "contribute" to solving our huge environmental, energy, military and economic problems are true subversives.

If you could feel shame there would have been a series of contrite public apologies at your convention for the incredible fiasco of non-governing that has typified the Bush administration. My pension, other people's pensions, our homes, jobs and economy are in chaos because of you. Young Americans are dying in Iraq because of you. The world is a more dangerous place because of you. America is hated because of you. Yes, that is you personally. I blame all of you.

Belligerent posturing is not a policy, it is idiocy. You Republicans have become the party of perpetual fear and aggressive non-provoked war, seeing enemies where there are none and/or provoking former friends to become our enemies, and/or faking reasons for war and/or wasting our soldier's blood in places such as Afghanistan, where our cause was just but you fumbled the ball.

Your moron vice presidential candidate is still at it! While turning her son's deployment to war into a flag-dishonoring political circus stunt she repeated the Bush lie and said that her son was going off to fight the perpetrators of 9/11. This is a barefaced lie and you all know it. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. The only reason we attacked them is because the fools listed above decided it would be good for Israel and our stupid "president" went along.

The Republican Party claims traditional values. It has propagated a laissez-faire attitude toward corporate interests and has -- literally -- stood back and encouraged the rape of the earth. You are the party of the earth-hogging SUV. You have literally sowed the wind and reaped the hurricanes.

This is as self-defeating as it is embarrassing for those claiming the moral high ground, particularly those who say that their philosophy represents traditional Judeo-Christian values. We all live here for crying out loud! Will you now fight our God and Creator too for the "right" to burn the last drop of oil while on a weekend jaunt to nowhere in your all-terrain piece of garbage?

The Republican problem is a systemic disparagement of government, community, faith in our institutions, family, God's creation and the mitigating institutions that put a check on something any party aligned with a religious movement should know all about: sin. Greed is not the only problem. Human weakness and stupidity (i.e., "sin") is the problem! And the genius of the American system is supposedly that we have a system of checks and balances to mitigate our fallen state. You have destroyed those checks and balances.

Uh...wow. That's definitely going to make some people mad. I've been less than charitable towards fundamentalists Christians in the past, but I can't say I've ever thought to craft a broadside quite on par with that. And frankly, it's not my style. But Schaeffer knows who he's talking to, as he used to be one of them. The zeal of a convert indeed.

That being said, I get pretty mad too when I read about survey results like this (via Slacktivist):

A new poll finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the golden rule.

The poll released Thursday, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, found that 57% of respondents said torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified.

The new poll found that 44% of white Southern evangelicals rely on life experiences and common sense to determine their views about torture. A lower percentage, 28%, said they relied on Christian teachings or beliefs.

Yeah, okay. A bunch of fearful white fundamentalist Christians think it's okay to torture people who don't look like them, speak like them, or worship the same religion they do. Tribalism isn't exactly new in world history. But over a quarter of these people think that Christian doctrine justifies torture. Really? The fact that a quarter of these people believe that the religion they practice-that is named after a figure who was tortured to death for his political and religious beliefs-permits torture, says something about the state of religious teaching among these folks. 

What?

So I was reading this at the Huffington Post about Hitchen's "exclusive" new article in Newsweek about Mother Theresa's religious struggles, and I came across this incongruous passage:

...really, just how exclusive could Hitch's latest reflections, in which he refers to Teresa as a "confused old lady," be? The man has already got a decade-old book (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice) on the subject, which is itself cited in the very Time article to which Newsweek is exclusively responding. Heck, Hitch may have already scooped himself, for, as he notes: "Here might be the place to declare my interest, and to state that at the invitation of the Vatican, I testified against the beatification and canonization of Mother Teresa, as well as to confess that I tend to believe that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence."

What? Why on Earth would the Vatican invite someone like Hitch to "testify" as to Mother Theresa's religious worthiness? And...why would he go? If that's the way things work now, you guys may just get to witness some live-blogging from the next Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, wherein I recount my argument against the doctrine of the infallibility of the word of God, citing the "absence of evidence" principle .

Padilla Broken

JB-again at Balkinization-laments what was done to Jose Padilla (as recounted in this Christian Science Monitor article) during his detention at the hands of the U.S. government:

If the President had his way, the government, on the basis of information that never had to be tested before any neutral magistrate, could pluck any citizen off the streets, throw them in a military prison, and proceed to drive them insane.

Those are the powers that the Bush Administration sought. I will not mince words: They are the powers of a dictator in an authoritarian regime. They are the powers of the old Soviet Union, of the military junta in Argentina during the time of the disappeared.

To be sure, the President thought that Padilla was a dangerous man. But authoritarian regimes always think that the people they lock up are dangerous. They always do it to keep the country safe, to save the country from its enemies. The question is at what cost do they assume such power without accountability.

As a nod to my earlier post, it should be noted that all of this was done at the behest of a man who purports to be a devout Christian. Our President, guided supposedly by his belief in God, believed that it was necessary to lock up Padilla and dehumanize and abuse him long past the point at which Padilla could provide any useful intelligence about his alleged connections to al Qaeda. The same applies for legions of terrorists "suspects" and wholly innocent men in Gitmo and throughout our system of black sites in Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan and who knows where else, who remain deprived of the basic human liberty that was supposedly gifted to them by God at birth. In doing so our President has led our government into a dark period that reeks of the dictatorial excesses of the worst authoritarian regimes of the 20th century. This was done by a devout Christian, and it leads people like me to jump to the only slightly rash conclusion that devout religious belief should perhaps be a disqualification for political office.

Yes, Atheists Have Morals Too

Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamahana refutes the argument of Michael Perry who-like Michael Gerson-seems to believe that authentic moral beliefs can only flow from a belief in God. Perry's argument is more clever, but he assumes like Gerson that religious beliefs offer a solid footing for moral beliefs regardless of whether God actually exists. Here's Tamahana:

Perry insists that non-religious beliefs in human rights are fatally flawed because they cannot be grounded. Religious believers do not suffer from this flaw, and therefore possess a superior foundation for human rights, he argues, because belief in God supplies the necessary foundation. But if my argument is correct, the foundation for the religious moral system is not belief in God, but the actual fact of God’s existence. Since the fact of God’s existence has never been established—and remains the impenetrable uncertainty of our existence—religious moral systems likewise operate without a grounding, for they cannot establish their foundational assumption.

Tamahana doesn't say as much, but it seems to me that Perry is trying to have his cake and eat it too: he wants his argument to rest on something else other than the existence of God so he can avoid Tamahana's charge, but what system of morality would rest on an illusion about God's existence? If events were to prove that God did not exist, would morality collapse? Probably not, as Tamahana's example helps make clear:

Perhaps a simple thought experiment can help. Imagine that your longstanding belief in God is destroyed owing to some precipitating event (say, an inexplicable, arbitrary, unjust, tragedy happens to a family member). In the dark of the night, you come to the conclusion that you no longer believe in God. The next day, when you venture into the world, will you suddenly feel tempted to freeload off your friends, cheat strangers, stop taking care of your children, or steal from, rob, rape, or kill someone? Of course not. You considered all of these things immoral the day before, and you will still see them as such. You may well experience the throes of an existential crisis (asking yourself what matters in life), but that will not of itself penetrate or dissolve your routine moral beliefs.

Even a devout Christian would have trouble arguing with this proposition.

The problem with Perry's argument and all others that echo it, is that it assumes a moral superiority on the part of the religious believer that simply doesn't exist, as events around the world throughout human history have shown us. If the religious wish to believe that their faith in God underlies their morality, so be it. But it must be acknowledged that for the atheist, morality can be just as vital. The devoutly religious fear this fact for it undermines the necessity of God, but it is a fact no less.

The Foreign Policy of the Christian Right

Crossposted over at The Agonist.

The Christian Right's foreign policy is simple: everywhere oppose Islam, and agitate for war with Iran:

If 4,000 anti-Semites gathered in Washington, I dare say that -- with justification -- the airwaves would be filled with expressions of shock and outrage from our political leaders as they denounced the event. But when an organization that implicitly sanctions religious war and is engaged in the "ongoing vilification of Islam" brings the same number of delegates to Washington, they don't get condemned -- they get received with warm greetings from President Bush, while GOP leaders and their Israeli allies are practically falling over each other in their thirst for the crowd's adulation. The mob that they are so eager to please are the leaders of Christians United For Israel, founded by firebrand Christian Zionist pastor, John Hagee.

This is how Newt Gingrich's address gets reported in the Jerusalem Post:

The former speaker of the House of Representatives, who has strong conservative credentials, didn't hold back criticism of the commander-in-chief, whom he didn't address by the title president.

"We are in greater danger than you can imagine. We lie to ourselves. We have suffered in the West an enormous defeat in Gaza. We have suffered a significant defeat in South Lebanon, and we lie about it. We don't have a peace process. We have a surrender process," Gingrich said, eliciting applause from an audience waving hundreds of American and Israeli flags.

Fortunately, there are Christians who do not hold such extremist views and do not seem to believe that the message of Christ is to make unjustified war on people who don't look like us or worship the same God. As to Gingrich's comments, it's depressing to see him use the term "we" to conflate Fatah's defeat in Gaza and Israel's defeat in Lebanon with our own foreign policy and national security interests. If Edward Luttwak is arguing that we should pay less attention to the Middle East, Gingrich would seem to be arguing that our national security interests dictate we be a participant in every single struggle against Islamic extremism, whoever it's being waged by and wherever it's being waged. Such language, coming from people at a Christian-sponsored event, makes it difficult to convince Muslims that we are not in fact in a religious war with all of Islam. Of course for these Christians, we are.

Atheists and Morality, Round Two

Will Wilkinson (via Unqualified Offerings) dismantles yet another stupid argument for why atheism is inherently amoral (or immoral, or sans morals, or whatever.) Just to throw in my two cents, I'm not sure why a universe without a supreme being is one in which there exists no free will, when the fundamentalist believers of Judaism, Islam and Christianity are certain that they and I will be sent to hell if we don't do exactly what their supreme being commands us to do.

Morality and God

In today's Washington Post, Michael Gerson has authored an article that ask the unendingly annoying question "How can anyone be good without God?":

If the atheists are right, what would be the effect on human morality?

If God were dethroned as the arbiter of moral truth, it would not, of course, mean that everyone joins the Crips or reports to the Playboy mansion. On evidence found in every culture, human beings can be good without God. And Hitchens is himself part of the proof. I know him to be intellectually courageous and unfailingly kind, when not ruthlessly flaying opponents for taking minor exception to his arguments. There is something innate about morality that is distinct from theological conviction. This instinct may result from evolutionary biology, early childhood socialization or the chemistry of the brain, but human nature is somehow constructed for sympathy and cooperative purpose.

But there is a problem. Human nature, in other circumstances, is also clearly constructed for cruel exploitation, uncontrollable rage, icy selfishness and a range of other less desirable traits.

You know, things that devout Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and so on don't have to worry about. But I interrupt:

How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: "Obey your evolutionary instincts" because those instincts are conflicted. "Respect your brain chemistry" or "follow your mental wiring" don't seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: "To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I'm going to do whatever I please." C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: "When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains."

I'm no theologian, nor am I an atheist philosopher, but it seems to me that most people are good because they're raised to be good. In fact, most people want to be good, whether as a result of biology, or socialization, or personal insights, or whatever. Society, culture, our own evolutionary history (as Gerson admits) teaches us almost from birth that it is better to get along with other people than not, and to get along with them it is better to be decent to them. That's only the beginning of the lesson, as eventually that simple guideline will grow into a moral consciousness in almost each and every one of us. This all has much to do with individual development and psychology, and it's true that for many people this development of a moral consciousness is in the context of a belief in a moral God. But that's not true for everyone, as many people who have little or no interest in religion or even spirituality still have highly developed moral reasoning and will be considered by their peers to be good, decent people. Gerson has it backwards; God does not predate the moral consciousness. The moral consciousness comes first, and only later is God interwoven into the framework. This is as true of individuals as it was of our species as a whole as we evolved from primates living in trees.

For some, moral reasoning fails for one reason or another. This is no less true of the supposedly devout than it is of atheists. Each of us has probably met someone in our lives who claimed to be devoutly religious, and yet struck as intolerant, prejudiced, selfish and judgmental. These are certainly not elements of a morally developed person. What kind of guidance does religion and faith in God provide, if such people are even possible? "Well," the religious person may argue, "there are hypocrites in every walk of life." True, but then what explains the willingness of many devout believers in God to justify acts of intolerance, cruelty and barbarity with the tenets of their religion? There are many Christians today who sincerely believe that they are devout, moral beings, and yet they also argue passionately for unjustifiable wars that will kill innocent people. Is it their faith in God that leads to this seemingly immoral conclusion? Again, someone like Gerson might argue that those people are not "truly" following the requirements of their faith in God. Maybe. But once you reach a certain number of people (say, in the millions) who sincerely believe that their God permits them to kill innocent people for the barest of justifications, can their faith in God truly be considered some kind of guide to moral reasoning?

None of this amounts to proof of God's existence. But it clarifies a point of agreement -- which reveals an even deeper division. Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of "liberation" is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

Gerson damages his own argument by conceding that a moral argument for God's necessity does not prove that God exists (you won't see a Southern Baptist arguing such a thing.) Gerson implies that God doesn't even have to exist for us to be moral beings; we need only believe in him for the trick to work.

As for his depressing conclusion, he's all wrong. Those who reject or are indifferent to the existence of God are unafraid of and see joy in their worldview. For someone like Gerson, God must exist or the world is cruel, without purpose, and without love. But the athiest and the agnostic don't need God as a crutch to find meaning in their lives, or love in the universe. What could be more liberating than to believe that a universe that was created by immutable natural laws also-in a wondrous miracle-created us? And that we are free to forge our own purpose or meaning, free to grace the universe with love, free to love each other not because God says we have to, but because we want to? This isn't a "cruel joke." Far from it! This is the gift of life, and of free will, unconstrained by a belief that our individual choices only mean something if there is an arbiter to all of our decisions.

The "Covenant"

Steve Clemons, on how some members of Congress apparently still just don't get it.