by Sam Harris
Original link: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/salon-pulls-out-all-the-stops-in-dissing-new-atheists/
If you want to see every shopworn criticism of New Atheism rolled up into one splenetic article, then it’s this one (in
Salon, of course): “
New atheism’s fatal arrogance: The glaring intellectual laziness of Bill Maher & Richard Dawkins.” The writer is
Sean Illing,
a graduate student in political science at Louisiana State University,
who professes to be an atheist. And, like Maru, this is a box I cannot
help but enter. I will try to be brief, but will probably fail.
So what exactly
is the intellectual laziness of Bill Maher
and Richard Dawkins? It is one of Illing’s several accusations leveled
at New Athiests, which I’ll summarize below:
1. New Atheists are just too stupid to realize that religion
isn’t about truths, but about fictions that make people feel good, and
structure their lives. Yes, Illing appears to be a
nonbeliever, and sees religion as promulgating untruths, but that
doesn’t matter, for those untruths give people
meaning. This is a variant on the
“Courtier’s Reply” trope, in which believers fault us for not tackling the Most Sophisticated Forms of Theology™
(the so-called “best arguments”). In this case, defenders of faith like
Illing simply admit that religious “truth claims” are all bogus, but
they don’t really care. In fact, the people who are at fault are not the
believers who structure their morality and behavior around those
bogus claims, but the
atheists who take believers at their
word, apparently thinking erroneously that believers really believe.
That, says Illnig, is the fatal weakness of Maher and Dawkins (my
emphasis):
But there’s something missing in their critiques,
something fundamental. For all their eloquence, their arguments are
often banal. Regrettably, they’ve shown little interest in understanding
the religious compulsion. They talk incessantly about the untruth of
religion because they assume truth is what matters most to religious
people. And perhaps it does for many, but certainly not all – at least
not in the conventional sense of that term. Religious convictions, in
many cases, are held not because they’re true but because they’re
meaningful, because they’re personally transformative. New Atheists are
blind to this brand of belief.
It’s perfectly rational to reject faith as a matter of principle.
Many people (myself included) find no practical advantage in believing
things without evidence. But what about those who do? If a belief is
held because of its effects, not its truth content, why should its
falsity matter to the believer? Of course, most religious people
consider their beliefs true in some sense, but that’s to be expected:
the consolation derived from a belief is greater if its illusory origins
are concealed. The point is that such beliefs aren’t held because
they’re true as such; they’re accepted on faith because they’re
meaningful.
The problem is that the New Atheists think of God
only in epistemological terms. Consequently, they have nothing to say to
those who affirm God for existential reasons. New Atheist
writers tend to approach religion from the perspective of science: They
argue that a particular religion isn’t true or that the empirical claims
of religious texts are false. That’s easy to do. The more interesting
question is why religions endure in spite of being empirically untrue.
There are, of course, millions of fundamentalists for whom God is a
literal proposition. Their claims concerning God are empirical and
should be treated as such. For many [JAC: How many?
Most?], though, God is an existential impulse, a transcendent idea with
no referent in reality. This conception of God is untouched – and
untouchable – by positivist science; asking if God is true in this sense
is like asking how much the number 12 weighs – it’s nonsensical.
Now, really? How many religious people wouldn’t give a hoot if they
were told that what they believed was false? Would they say, “I don’t
care: I have
existential reasons for believing in God.”
As I wrote yesterday:
Sadly, the data show that while religion does have these
other functions, it’s simply not the case that truth is irrelevant. Even
theologians (the honest ones) admit that without an underpinning of
beliefs about what’s really true about the universe, religion
crumbles. Where would Christianity be if adherents thought that Jesus’s
divinity, crucifixion, and resurrection were just a fictitious but
convenient framework on which to hang their emotions? Would Mormons wear
their sacred underwear if theyknew Joseph Smith was really a
con man who fabricated those plates? Do the Sophisticated Critics really
believe that if Muslims knew for certain that Muhammed didn’t
get the Qur’an from the mouth of God, via an angel, but made it up
himself, that Islam would have the sway it does? Get serious.
I challenge Illing to stand on the steps of any mosque in Pakistan or
Iran and tell believers that it doesn’t matter whether what they think
about Muhammad or the inerrancy of the Qur’an is irrelevant; all that
matters is that the beliefs motivate their behavior. I suspect his
longevity would be severely reduced. And there are 1.6 billion Muslims
on this planet.
Note as well that Illing really does admit that believers must
undergird their behavior with acceptance of factual propositions, for he
says this:
“Of course, most religious people consider their beliefs
true in some sense, but that’s to be expected: the consolation derived
from a belief is greater if its illusory origins are concealed.”
I’m not sure what he means by “true in some sense”, but I suspect
that the 57% of Americans who think that Jesus was born of a virgin take
it as a real fact that Mary was not penetrated by a human male before
baby Jesus was born. And I think the 42% of Americans who think that
humans were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000
years are really thinking of
actual years and an
actual creator God.
(By the way, if the facts here aren’t all that important, why do
creationists keep trying to get this stuff taught in public schools?)
And what about this?:
The point is that such beliefs aren’t held because they’re true as such; they’re accepted on faith because they’re meaningful.
Illing has not thought this through. What is accepted on faith is
the religious epistemology: statements about the existence of God and
Jesus, Mohammed or Moroni, and the moral codes that stem from the
scriptures. They may not look at these propositions too closely, but
they believe them, and they undergird the faith of everyone except for
the highly rarefied and well-fed theologians who eschew the need for
truth.
But really, religion is not treated like fiction. Religious people
don’t act like all of scripture is fictional, nor do they act like they
don’t
care whether scripture is fictional. At least some
truths matter. (For Christians, the one non-negotiable is the salvific
effect of Jesus’s death and resurrection.) You don’t see people basing
their lives and hopes and morality and meanings on things that are
palpably untrue, like the
Harry Potter series or even
The Brothers Karamazov. If you’re a normal person (i.e., not Karen Armstrong or David Bentley Hart), you must accept
some fundamental truths about your faith if it’s to inspire you.
Hell, this is kindergarten stuff, realized even by theologians. I’ll give a few quotes, starting with the Bible itself:
But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.—Paul, 1 Cornithians 15:13-14
A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of
abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature
of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer
credible.—Ian Barbour
I cannot regard theology as merely concerned with a collection of
stories which motivate an attitude toward life. It must have
its anchorage in the way things actually are, and the way they
happen.—John Polkinghorne
Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more
than just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion
often makes claims about ‘the way things are.’ —Karl Giberson &
Francis Collins
That’s only a small sample; I have more for Illing if he wants them.
And here is what Americans actually believe to be true (percentage of
all Americans accepting the propositions below). This is not a small
minority of Americans—it’s MOST OF THEM:
A personal God concerned with you 68%
Absolutely certain there is a God 54%
Jesus was the son of God 68%
Jesus was born of a virgin 57%
Jesus was resurrected 65%
Miracles 72%
Heaven 68%
Hell and Satan 58%
Angels 68%
Survival of soul after death 64%
2. Without the (false) verities of religion, people’s lives will lose meaning.
For [Dostoyevsky’s] part, God was a bridge to
self-transcendence, a way of linking the individual to a tradition and a
community. The truth of Christ was therefore less important than the
living faith made possible by belief in Christ. . .
“I’ve never seen anyone die for the ontological argument,” Camus
wrote, but “I see many people die because they judge that life is not
worth living. I see others getting killed for ideas or illusions that
give them a reason for living.” Today is no different; people continue
to kill and die in defense of beliefs that give their lives meaning and
shape.
. . . The New Atheists don’t have a satisfactory alternative for such
people. They argue that religion is false; that it’s divisive; that
it’s unethical; that it makes a virtue of self-deception; that it does
more harm than good – and maybe they’re right, but if they don’t
understand that, for many, meaning is more important than truth, they’ll
never appreciate the vitality of religion. To his credit, Sam Harris’
most recent book, “Waking Up,” grapples with these issues in truly
fascinating ways. Indeed, Harris writes insightfully about the necessity
of love, meaning and self-transcendence. But he’s a fringe voice in the
New Atheist community. Most are too busy disproving religion to
consider why it is so persistent, and why something beyond science will
have to take its place in a Godless world.
What we see here is the incredibly arrogant and condescending Little
People Argument: while rationalists like Illing can easily reject
religion’s truths and get along fine without them—he says, “It’s
perfectly rational to reject faith as a matter of principle. Many people
[myself included] find no practical advantage in believing things
without evidence”—the Little People can’t. They need their faith! I
guess the Little People who populate much of Northern Europe don’t
count.
Let us make one thing clear: it is a benefit to humanity to rid it of
false beliefs, even if you have nothing to put in their place. Many
people in the South structured their lives around the implicit
assumption that whites were far superior to blacks, and that a decent
society demanded the subjugation of blacks. Did the civil rights
movement offer
something to replace the need of Southern whites
to feel superior? Nope; the movement simply rid society of a false and
invidious notion that people were inherently unequal and thus should be
treated unequally.
Likewise, New Atheists rid society of the belief that it’s being
monitored and tended by a celestial dictator. That alone is a good, for
it’s better to see the truth. I don’t see it as an inherent
responsibility of atheists to replace religion with something else that
gives people meaning, for I think that most people (as they have in
atheistic Europe) will find such meaning for themselves, and that it
will differ from person to person. I bet if you asked most Swedes how
they can possibly find meaning in their lives without religion, they’d
just look like you were crazy.
Which brings us to the last point:
3. New Atheists should be faulted for attacking religion without at the same time suggesting replacements for religion.
The New Atheists have an important role to play. Reason
needs its champions, too. And religion has to be resisted because there
are genuine societal costs. One can draw a straight line between
religious dogma and scientific obscurantism or moral stagnation, for
example. That’s a real problem. But if religion is ineradicable, we have
to find a way to limit its destructive consequences. Satire and
criticism are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.
People like Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens make a powerful
case for a more humanistic ethics. Harris writes admirably about the
need to be more attentive to the present, to the suffering of other
human beings. I agree. But if we want to encourage people to care about
the right things, we should spend as much time encouraging them to care
about the right things as we do criticizing their faith.
Here we see more arrogance—not from the New Atheists but from Illing.
Who is he to tell us how to spend our time? In fact, some of us
criticize religion, while others, like Phil Kitcher, Chris Stedman and
Alain de Botton—spend their time finding the substitutes for religion.
Isn’t that just as good as all of us spending our time doing both?
After all, we have the principle of comparative advantage at work:
let each of us do what he or she is good at. I am not good at suggesting
religion substitutes because I don’t believe that we
need formal substitutes, and the evidence from modern Europe supports me. Nor do we have good studies to show a). what will
count as a religion substitute for people, and b). whether people really
need
those things to have a meaningful life. Since I think that religion is
on balance a harmful superstition, standing in the way of rational
discourse, and as a scientist who’s read theology I can do something
about that, that’s what I do. I’m not keen on finding religion
substitutes, and neither Illing nor I (nor
anyone, I think) is
well qualified to tell people what can replace church. As water finds
its own level, so will people find their own meaning.
In the end, it’s not the New Atheists who are arrogant. How could we
be, if we’re wedded to rationality, doubt, and the use of evidence? Who
asks themselves more often questions like, “Could I be wrong?”, or “How
would I know if I were wrong?” Hint: it’s not the believers.
No, it’s Illing who’s the arrogant one, for he presumes that he, who
sits proudly at the Big People’s Table and can dispense with the need
for religion, must preach to all of us that those Little People at the
Children’s Table must have their
pabulum faith—or a
substitute for it. It is he who doubts the ability of people to live
without convenient fictions. I have more faith in humanity than that,
and I use the word “faith” as a metaphor.
