Religion, atheism, and fundamentalism
Thanks to Framing Science for pointing me to a debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan about religion and religious moderation.
Shorter Sam Harris: If only religious people understood religion as well as atheists do, they’d be atheists like I am.
Honestly, Harris writes “Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certitude in most respects—often blinds its host to the reality and consequences of full-tilt religious lunacy.” While his own absolute rejection of faith gives him what insight into “full-tilt religious” … what, exactly?
When Andrew Sullivan, of all people, has the better of the argument, it really is time to pack it in.
For instance, we don’t even need Sully in order to address this canard:
Religious moderates—by refusing to question the legitimacy of raising children to believe that they are Christians, Muslims, and Jews—tacitly support the religious divisions in our world. They also perpetuate the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence in order to have an ethical and spiritual life.
Who’s to say that religious moderates don’t question those points? Who is to say that religious moderates, through their example of moderation and tolerance, are not actively working against the idea that those divisions are fundamental?
As for “the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence…,” I’d merely note that this ought to lead us to a state of profound agnosticism. There can be no natural evidence for God (philosophy of science and theology generally agree on this point), and neither could there be natural evidence against the supernatural. Insisting that others acknowledge the fundamental importance of one’s own answer to questions only answerable through revelation seems unwise, whatever your answer.
We do well, then, to heed the words of Orthodox Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, writing on relations between Jews and Christians, but I think more widely applicable:
the logos, the word, in which the multifarious religious experience is expressed does not lend itself to standardization or universalization. The word of faith reflects the intimate, the private, the paradoxically inexpressible cravings of the individual for and his linking up with his Maker. It reflects the numinous character and the strangeness of the act of faith of a particular community which is totally incomprehensible to the man of a different faith community. Hence, it is important that the religious or theological logos should not be employed as the medium of communication between two faith communities whose modes of expression are as unique as their apocalyptic experiences. The confrontation should occur not at a theological but at a mundane human level. There, all of us speak the universal language of modern man. As a matter of fact our common interests lie in the realm of faith, but in that of the secular orders.
My emphasis. It is clear that Sam Harris agrees that people should confront (in the politest sense of the term) on the mundane human level, and address the secular issues of personal faith, morality and spirituality that divide us. The fact that Jews and Christians understand theology differently did not mean the Rabbi refused to talk with Christians, indeed he initiated a number of interfaith dialogues on issues of poverty, civil rights and morality. It is not clear to me what part of this Mr. Harris would dispute, actually. Yet he insists that Jews, among others, somehow insist on theological unity before we can reach moral agreement. While that may be true of some Jews, as it is of some Christians and some Muslims, it is not the uniform belief of any of those religions, nor of many others. It strikes me as more worth while to address the behaviors that divide us, not the thoughts.
What people like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins fail to address to my satisfaction is that it is worth arguing over unknowable questions about theology, when the issues that either divide us or unite us are usually about our behavior towards one another, not our beliefs. Perhaps Dr. Myers’ book will succeed where others have failed.
Here is an example of such a problem. Sam Harris points to riots over the Danish cartoons lampooning Muhammad as evidence of the harm theistic faith causes. It’s hardly worth noting that the same 10 Commandments which forbid graven images also forbid murder, and no one would argue that it is permissible to violate one commandment to enforce another. It is easy enough to see that it is not faith in Allah or the prophecies of Muhammad that caused the riots, but a combination of credulous acceptance of the decrees of a few religio-political leaders and seething resentment towards the West that caused people to violate the Commandments. It is also easy to see that a dehumanizing attitude towards members of communities of different ethnic, religious and political background inspired some Dane to think that publishing unfunny cartoons about the Prophet was somehow worthwhile.
Another example from Jewish law may be appropriate here. While the first commandment is “I am the Lord your God,” it is accepted in Jewish law that non-Jews are not expected to convert. Indeed, gentiles are considered moral so long as they obey certain behavioral precepts; religious beliefs are not considered to mark someone as immoral. Biblical prophets denounce nations which behave contrary to these rules, especially regarding worship of idols, but do not criticize the beliefs that might drive a person to those behaviors. “Keep it to yourself” is more the message of the prophets.
The distinction between belief and behavior is useful in modern discourse also. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” and elsewhere that “religion is a matter which lies solely between a man and his God.” This idea is foundational to this country and to other modern liberal democracies. It applies equally well to issues of political philosophy and the general principle of free speech. How an individual speaks or thinks is no account for anyone else, so long as no other is forced to listen to the speech or to adhere to the same thoughts. And if they are so forced, it is the force which is in error, not the thought.
Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins earn the title “fundamentalist” in some circles because they espouse no sort of “moderate doubt” to dilute their own certainty. The occasional flirtations their broad group sometimes has with coercive means to reduce not only harmless religious behavior, but religious thought as well, places them in close league with fundamentalism. On this basis, I’ll offer a simple definition of fundamentalism: the idea that differences in unfalsifiable beliefs are fundamental to our relationships with other humans.
No one can dispute the accuracy of that definition for the Taliban or for those who would force creationism into public schools. It is a twist on the standard derivation of the term, in which religious movements attempted to return to “fundamental principles.” I would argue that it is not the return to those fundamentals that marks the ideology, but the act of recognizing those ideas as fundamental. Sam Harris regards theistic belief as marking a fundamental division in society, just as the authors of “The Fundamentals” a century ago regarded belief in the Virgin Birth and special creation to represent fundamental divisions.
They, like Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins, argued against the absorption of their religious community into a society-at-large that was accepting of different and indifferent to the details of religious faith. The excellent Wikipedia entry on fundamentalism describes early protestant fundamentalists as fearing “absorption into modern, Western culture, where this absorption appears to the enclave to have made irreversible progress in the wider religious community, necessitating the assertion of a separate identity based upon the fundamental or founding principles of the religion.”
For examples of that behavior, see Richard Dawkins and his references to “the Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists,” approvingly quoted by various and sundry.
0 COMMENTS
Josh, beautifully written. And heartfelt. (You will, of course, be completely misunderstood, and blog-flogged for it.)
🙂
I have been chewing over many of these issues as of late, and two things keep coming up about what I’ve sort of christened the “new atheist-theist debates” fired off by Harris, Dawkins, et al. I’m certainly glad to see them more publically, but a few things have kept niggling at me:
First, the fact that too often I feel discussions consist of such broad generalizations that they border on lacking meaning — what one may think of as a kind of over-literalism, defining things until they’re meaningless. I would be considered an atheist by many (a term I feel is inappropriate for my “nontheism”), my own philosophical/spirutal activites are informed by everything from my psychology background to modern Buddist thinkers, and I hang out with people ranging from atheists to a devout Christian transsexual to a pair of neo-Chaoates. I find the ID movement laughable. Where am *I* in the debate of all this?
A second factor that often gets ignored is that people come from radically different backgrounds. A person can be raised in a fundamentalist theistic household, be highly inteligent, and will make theistic decisions — because that is what their intelligence has to use as a background. I would assume that, if exposed to a variety of more information their beliefs will alter as they apply their intellect — but people can be mentally conservative, and it takes a lot of exposure to new ideas for a person to break down previous belief patterns.
I fear sometimes that the productive and feisty debate we need about religion and belief could end up simply polarized and non-productive because of a lack of subtleties.
I didn’t see much evidence of the above. Quite the opposite actually.
No one would disagree here with the exception that the beliefs many people carry with them cause the behaviour or thinking that is problematic.
Good grief. They simply say no good evidence has been presented not that they are certain. Just that it is unlikely. Far different from the dogmatic assertions of true fundies.
Excuse me, but Sam Harris has referred to religious belief as “illegitimate.” That’s hardly “simply say[ing] no good evidence has been presented.”
And while I certainly agree that there are bad behaviors out there, I do not see why that implies that beliefs are somehow what needs to be treated as problematic. Why not address the actions foresquare? If your beef is suicide bombing (the example Harris opens his book with), why not address suicide bombing head-on. Doing so requires moving past an obsession with religion, since (as his own footnote observes) “the Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelam has perpetrated more acts of suicidal terrorism than any other group.” And if we granted his claim that they still count because they are Hindu and therefore “undoubtedly believe many improbable things about life and death,” we would not only have to ignore Gandhi, but also grant the validity of claims that Stalin’s genocide should be counted as a mark against atheism. That sort of post hoc reasoning is simply silly.
The reason I wrote that Sully has the better argument is that he is not presuming to know more about other people’s experiences than they know about themselves. Sullivan need only sit quietly and let Sam Harris act the buffoon. You’ll note that I am not actually quoting or defending any particular of what Sullivan wrote.
It is when it’s coupled with the sentiment that minus any evidence whatsoever it certainly can’t be called a legitimate exercise.
Honestly I think that sentence so bizarre as to defy response. Why not treat that which causes the behaviour rather than pretend it doesn’t have a root cause.
Of course people commit suicide for reasons other than their religion but that doesn’t mean religion isn’t the cause of some suicide bombers and therefor gets a pass. It doesn’t. Nor does the thinking of an Andrea Yates or the multitudes of other paper cuts irrational superstitious thinking does to a society.
And puh-leez on the Stalin thought. He didn’t kill because of atheism this should be clear enough. Nobody is saying ignore Gandi or place merit on his thoughts. Just that the thoughts need not be surrounded by dogma and superstition in the first place. I’m not a religion basher and I do see some positives but overall I think religious thinking is a negative to a society.
This is what I don’t get about you Josh. Harris presents very complete reasoned arguments and you call him a buffoon. Sullivan effectively counters none of his statements and you declare him the victor. You seem to give great credit to peoples experiences when they are positive towards religion, do you do the same for the negative of which there is an equal or greater number?
If one wants to make this a battle of emotional appeal your likely correct Sullivan may be ok, but in the area of logic and common sense he has no answer. If I’m reading you right apparently if someone tells you God(whichever one they worship) visited them last night you think this ‘experience’ should be greeted as one would any other thought.
I’ll start from the bottom and work up.
Only if I greet every thought by asking someone “why should I care?” If someone tells me they thought of an interesting way to save Medicare, or to cut greenhouse gas emissions, I know why I care. I don’t know why I care that someone thinks they were visited by their favorite deity. This is why I like to think of myself as an apathist agnostic. I don’t know if God exists and I don’t care. I care about moral behavior, but I don’t care why people choose to behave morally. If they behave immorally, I am as disapproving regardless of motives or religion. I simply don’t see it as a factor.
Perhaps I overstated by calling Sullivan the victor; heck, the fight isn’t even over yet. I see massive logical fallacies at the core of Harris’ argument, post hoc arguments, excluded middles, and an odd twist on the “no true Scotsman.” Take those errors away, and he would have literally nothing. He’d have a handful of bad behaviors by religious people, a handful of similar behaviors by non-religious people, and a whole lot of people who behave well whether or not they believe in any god(s).
I agree completely that Stalin’s actions do not reflect on atheism. I simply think that the arguments you and I have offered against tainting atheism with Stalin’s bad acts are equally applicable to the case of Andrea Yates or suicide bombers. Ascribing those bad acts to religion writ large strikes me as buffoonish in its abuse of logic.
And this is where we differ regarding treating behavior vs. treating the cause of the behavior. There are people who kill themselves because of religion, there are people who get through a suicidal depression because of religion. To me, that suggests that religion in general is not the cause of bad behaviors. Perhaps some forms of religion are, and that means that we should work against those particular forms. It doesn’t mean that any and all religion is bad, any more than good behavior resulting from religion means that religion in general is good.
Yes, we should address causes, but instead, people get hung up on what I see as a buffoonishly simplistic view of the world in which some monolithic concept of religion can be blamed for either all the good or all the evil in the world.
I like the Niebuhr quotation, “Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.” Let’s figure out why some people are bad, and let people do as they please with regard to religion.
I don’t especially at the core. I see his core idea as pretty palpable. Please elaborate for me. But I agree with you that people act they way they act most often regardless of their superstitious leanings. However to quote a famous quote(as above) something to the effect of ‘bad people will do bad things and good people good things but to make a good person do a bad thing takes religion.’
I have had mentioned to me(and read on the net) that religion helps them stay out of trouble, likewise I have seen and heard people do terrible things because their religion compels them to do so. Bigotry against gays being a current prime example.
This is absurd. She killed her kids in part because she felt she was sending them to heaven. I personally doubt she would have done so otherwise. The suicide bombers think they are getting virgins, the Pope thinks Birth control is a bad idea, Christian scientists refuse medical care, creationists try and trash education. You seem to always think it has to be extreme for religion to be bad. The millions of brains addled with superstition, fear of damnation, fear of doubt, and on and on. The human misery caused in part by religious thinking simply cannot be washed away whether these folks act morally in public or not. It’s more than behaviour and I don’t see how one can be apethetic about it.
I don’t see how one can care about human pain and ignore these aspects just because they aren’t killing people. I know many religious people who are simply mentally tortured from various denominations over various completely normal life events. They do not commit immoral acts(which vary by opinion) but do suffer. There pain is very real. And yes I know religion comforts many as well and is a crutch for many and this seems the primary appeal along with social connections. But one must ask whether unproven, untestable, irrational superstition is the best option even for that function.
All this is added to the point that religion is divisive and always has been. They group people along purely irrational superstitious lines with no way to possibly find correctness. Frankly while I don’t see religion as completely evil I find it hard to rationaly defend. Emotionally perhaps but not logically.
The fallacy I see at the core of his argument is the excluded middle. He spends a lot of effort to argue that moderates are the same as extremists because they all believe in things not seen, and he does that so that he can address faith at large, and not just swipe at extremist faith. But his arguments for the harm caused by faith are all drawn from extremist faith.
The Niebuhr I quoted above was “Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.” I think that’s right. I don’t see religious faith driving our current war in Iraq, but good people went along with it for any number of reasons, many to do with power and money. Who was it that commented on the love of money being the root of all evil?
Yes, some religions are divisive, and some believers do suffer because of their faith. I find that problematic, too. I just don’t see it as an issue of faith per se, or of religion per se. I think it’s more complicated.
Other Sciencebloggers have argued that a need for belief is hard-wired into our brains, and that we’ll always have something like religion. Maybe they are right. I do know that Andrea Yates can probably be better explained in psychological terms than in religious terms. A father in my Boy Scout troop killed himself and his son after a divorce in which the mother got custody. I don’t blame religion for that, I blame psychology.
When and where religion causes problems, that needs to be addressed. When it exacerbates problems, that needs to be addressed. But the idea that faith is inherently harmful just doesn’t follow from the evidence that people put forward.
Thank you for this post!
As a religious moderate, I am grieved by some of the things that are done in the name of religion — especially when they are done by people whose religion is ostensibly the same as my own. I, no less than any atheist or agnostic — perhaps even moreso — would like to see the end of religious fundamentalism. I can’t understand why a Sam Harris or a Richard Dawkins, recognizing the dangers that religious extremism can pose to society, would not want all the allies they can get.
Because the problem is a way of thinking that is simply different from how you run the rest of your life. Not only that but it often leads to much harm. The root is irrationality and superstition. You can’t say this superstition is worse than that when they all share the same foundation of nothing.
I don’t think one can differentiate the two in psychological terms. A lifetime of indoctrination backed up by societal delusion doesn’t lead one to safety.
This is a poor analogy. Did he claim to want to send them to heaven? Your painting with to broad a stroke.
I’m not sure there is a such thing as ‘moderate’ faith but granting you your assertion Dawkins is correct that their line of thinking is the same and that is what he chooses to bluntly attack. Instead of giving moderates a free pass what is wrong with saying why the hell do you believe such wierd and potentially damaging material? And worse why do you subject your kids to it? Why do you label yourself based on superstitious leanings? None of this is wrong. Will a moderate off their kids to send them to heaven probably not, will they deny their child medical care? probably not. But they will often close their minds to rationality on many fronts and lead others to thinking that irrationality and superstition is as good as rationality and critical thinking. And any move away from reason isn’t a good move.
I don’t think so. The folks I know with these issues have these issues directly becuase of their religious indoctrination from childhood up. If we didn’t indoctrinate kids and allowed adults to choose to be superstitous or not I’d be more understanding of your argument. But the simple truth is most people where slammed with this as wee children and simply defend it for no good reason into adulthood. Unfortunately the baggage that goes with it often causes great pain. And that should concern anyone who cares about his fellow human.
JimC -
On the contrary, all of this is wrong. Before going into attack mode, shouldn’t you at least try to grasp what it is that religious moderates actually believe?
JimC, you stated “I’m not sure there is a such thing as ‘moderate’ faith … ”
The faith itself can be strong. I think the ‘moderate’ label should be applied to people of faith who aren’t seeking to force all others to adhere to that faith, or to introduce/perpetuate religious authoritarianism.
It might be nice if ‘extremist’ was defined in some clear and impersonal way.