Here We Go Again!
The new atheists seem to have hit a nerve. But it’s not like hitting your thumb with a hammer. When you do that, before long the pain dissipates, and, though sore, you can go on with whatever it was you were trying to hit with the hammer. Being hit by the new atheism isn’t like that. It produces a weeping sore that never heals, something like the wounds that phosphorous weapons make. Once they’ve been hit by the new atheism, the pain just won’t go away. In fact, it’s hard to find a newspaper nowadays that doesn’t have someone telling the new atheists what they are doing wrong. The new atheists – my, oh, my! – misunderstand religion, they don’t recognise that religion is so much more subtle than they imagine it, that, in fact, some religious people don’t have a clue as to what it is that they really do believe. And besides, all that shrillness and stridency! Will it never cease?! If people are that worried, the new atheists must be doing something right. There has been a continuing outpouring of complaint about the new atheism for well over five years, and almost every one of them begins by saying something like: “I agree with their conclusions, …. but.”
And all that is true — about the new atheists’ critics, I mean. You didn’t think I was talking about the new atheists did you? Nonsense! Of course not. However, I’ve just been reading a piece in the Guardian by James Wood, “Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature 2010–11,” as the St. Anne’s College (Oxford) homepage tells us. (h/t to Ophelia Benson over at Butterflies and Wheels for pointing me in the right direction.) The Weidenfield Lecture, from which the Guardian article was adapted, is about The New Atheism. His main point, of course — ’twas always thus – is that the new atheists, like the fundamentalists they are criticising, are parasitic on the literalism they deprecate, and I want to begin there.
The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a “personal God”, so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism.
Now, of course, this has been said before. However, if what he is saying is true, why did the Church of England think that it was important, for the coming five years (quinquennium), to address itself specifically to the new atheism? Of a list of twelve emphases, this is the first:
The first is to be explicit about the need to counter attempts to marginalise Christianity and to treat religious faith more generally as a social problem. This is partly about taking on the ‘new atheism’. Bishops have a key role here both as public apologists and as teachers of the faith. Church members look to their leaders to speak out on their behalf and to help them in their own understanding and witness.
If the new atheism parasitically feeding off the literalism it despises, why is the Church of England concerned? And why, when the pope came to Britain, last fall (2010), did his opening speech at Holyrood House in Scotland, address itself directly to the new atheism and call it to account, suggesting that there was a resemblance between the aims of the new atheism and Nazi tyranny? He didn’t mention the new atheism, but it was hard to miss in the heavy emphasis that he placed upon it. Here are some of his words on that occasion:
Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).
Does this not suggest that the new atheism is striking very close to home for many religious believers, amongst those, from the sound of it, whom Professor Woods would not classify as literalists? It raises this question, though. If the new atheism is quite as literal as Professor Woods holds, what literalism is he speaking about? What are the new atheists taking literally?
To that last question, Woods provides an answer. They are taking the whole business of belief too literally. People don’t believe in that simple-minded literal way. In fact, he was talking with an academic theologian only the other day, and the theologian remarked — much to Woods’ surprise — that it is impossible to be a serious Christian and to believe in heaven and hell. Woods was taken aback by this, but then resolves the problem swiftly by saying laconically:
When I, who was raised in a strongly and conventionally religious home, expressed surprise and suggested that once one stops believing in heaven one might as well stop believing in God, he said, more vehemently: “It’s exactly the opposite: not believing in heaven and hell is a prerequisite for serious Christian belief.” Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell.
The theologian was an authority, you see, so Woods needed to look no further. And it is true, many Christians do now duck and dive quite a bit on the issue of hell (as well as on many other things), but there are not so many, like Woods’s expert, who are completely sceptical about the afterlife and heaven, and he shouldn’t have been so quickly satisfied that his childhood faith didn’t hold true of many many believers whom he would not pen up with the literalists even he despises. And my guess is, that for all its impossibility, the majority of “serious” Christians (that qualifcation covers a multitude of sins) believe not only in heaven, but in hell as well, possibly even in a literal place of eternal fire. Many many Muslims clearly do.
But the most surprising thing, really, is how Woods connects literal Christianity with belief in a personal god (as we saw in the first quote from Woods above). However, it has to be said: Anyone who believes that Jesus has an essential relationship with God must believe in a personal god, because Jesus was a human person. It’s really just that simple. Not the believing part, perhaps, for belief is just that heaving changing sea that Woods speaks about, and doubt and uncertainty and blind fear of emptiness are undoubtedly a part of it. And I agree with Woods entirely: if you want really to know what it is like to be a religious “believer”, in all its subtle hues and changes, read a novel, read, as I suggested in a post not so long ago, a theologian who probes deep, like Augustine, and who knows how difficult it is really to believe, and how like a changeling the believing mind can be. That’s why I say, don’t leave out swathes and swathes of human experience just because it was religious, for religion is a human creation too, and can tell us as much about the human condition as an army of atheists. But don’t be fooled by this into supposing that belief is not belief.
And don’t, whatever you do, suggest, as Woods so eloquently and mistakenly does, that religious belief is not earnest and literal and a quest for power too, because that is to mistake religious belief for something it is not. For, as Dawkins shows in The God Delusion (in a very introductory way, of course), religious belief may turn out to be, in scientific terms, quite human and explicable. Dawkins addresses himself, in much more detail than Woods allows, to the question of how religions might have come to be so widespread and persistent, and he picks out a number of mechanisms which might be hijacked by religion. It might, indeed, for all that Dostoyevsky and Coetzee and Tolstoy and Melville and Karl Barth and Rahner too, have written about the subtleties and depth of religious believing, and the quicksilver way it flashes through consciousness and is gone, still be a misfiring of some evolved psychological mechanisms, which may even have contributed to group survival in some cases (and so not so much as an mechanism of selection), but if persisted in could well be deadly and destructive, as religion seems poised to be today.
Woods seems to think that Dawkins’ only answer to the evolutionary question about the development of religion is HADD (Hyperactive Agency Detection Device), but that is far from being the case, and ridiculing him for being simplistic and literal is Woods’ own contribution to literalism. If Woods actually thinks that, then he knows very little about the scientific theory of religion, nor did he read Dawkins very closely either, in the summary he gives of some of the evidence in chapter 5 of his book. Dawkins mentions native dualism and native teleology; he speaks of the intentional stance as having survival value – for, as he points out, tending to ascribe agency very quickly to things in our immediate environment we are not so likely to have as many false negatives, although reacting to false positives may make us jumpy, but not dead. He also discusses the long dependency period in children, and the need for them to accept things on authority: “Don’t stand too near the edge, dear,” “Don’t put your fingers on the stove; it’s hot,” “Look both ways before you cross the street,” “Don’t talk to strangers,” and so on. So children are like sponges and take in vast amounts of information in a very short period of time, which is very useful for free riders in the child’s environment, too, for fairy tales and stories of the boogey man, and for stories of gods and angels too. What is sorted out as childish and what is suitable for adults is clear from what adults retain, and what they throw away. So if adults take religion very seriously, unsurprisingly the children will not throw religious ideas away with their childhood fairy tales. Dawkins also mentions the “irrationality mechanisms” built into the brain for falling in love. And so on. You get the drift. It’s not all about HADD, as Woods suggests rather fatuously.
And then, finally, we come to Dawkins’ encounter with Archbishop Williams of Canterbury. First, watch this little clip from Dawkins’ interview with Rowan Williams, because this is the one that Woods speaks about in his article:
And this is what Woods says about the encounter:
There is an amusing clip on YouTube, in which Dawkins confronts Rowan Williams. Dawkins asks the archbishop of Canterbury if he really believes in miracles such as the virgin birth and the resurrection, happenings in which the laws of physics and biology are suspended. Well, not literally, says Williams. But, says Dawkins, pouncing, surely Williams believes that these are not just metaphors? No, says the archbishop, they are not just metaphors, they are openings in history, “spaces” when history opens up to its own depths, and something like what we call a “miracle” might occur. Dawkins rightly says that this sounds very nice but is surely nothing more than poetic language. Williams rather shamefacedly agrees. The scene is amusing because both men are so obviously arguing past each other, and are so obviously arguing about language and the role of metaphor. Dawkins comes off as the victor, because he has the easier task, and holds the literalist high ground: either the resurrection happened or it didn’t; either these words mean something or they do not. Williams seems awkwardly trapped between a need to turn his words into metaphor and a desire to retain some element of literal content.
Without stopping to consider the fix that the archbishop is in and why, Woods immediately goes on to say that both men could have found themselves in Melville’s Moby Dick. But I wish he had stuck with the pregnant, very human, moment, when the archbishop was wriggling on the hook that Dawkins had cast him, because that was a very sensitive and provocative moment too, with all sorts of depth and complexity. And Dawkins does not pounce, but allows the archbishop plenty of time to think things through, and only after the struggle did Dawkins actually provide Williams with a way out. It’s amusing, but it’s most exquisitely profound at the same time, and Woods misses this entirely.
Woods thinks that the question that is hovering in the air between the two men is how we are to describe God. Here’s what he says:
Can God be literally described, or are we condemned to hurl millions of metaphoric approximations at him, in an attempt to describe him? After all, in Melville’s novel, the white whale is symbolic of both the devil and of God, and the writer tries very hard to describe the nature and mass and temperament of that indescribable whale: Melville uses scores of different metaphors to capture the essence of the beast, and fails.
That Woods wants to turn so quickly to novels is easily explicable by the fact that that is Woods’ element, but this is not the question that “hovers over the Dawkins-Williams exchange.” Dawkins is certainly not trying to describe God, and Williams is struggling to explain a belief which, as it turns out, has no readily apparent meaning in a world governed, as he acknowledges, by the laws of science. But notice that Dawkins is not denying his love for poetic language, or the complexity of an image. He’s asking whether talking as the archbishop does makes any sense at all — not whether it is something that the believing mind slips into and out of? Because it must, you know, make sense if the believer is going to have the thought, and if that is going to make a difference: if the Christian project is to go on some account must be given of it. It’s interesting that Dawkins should have the power to befuddle the archbishop at just this point.
In fact, here is a little clip in which the archbishop is stumped for a moment about what question he would most like to ask Dawkins (in Lincoln Cathedral, I think):
Now, who is being literal here? Surely the archbishop. Dawkins is not, like Ms. Hartley, of recent HuffPo fame, in love with the universe. He was clearly, in the passage referred to by the archbishop, responding, in a perfectly human way, to the beauty and wonder of the natural world, to the enchantment of his surroundings, made even more wondrous because he could understand quite a bit of how it got to be that way. Why should the source of that be a problem for anyone? Why did it seem necessary to the archbishop, to understand that very human moment, a moment of exquisite joy at the beauty and wonder around him, in terms of some special, transcendent explanation?
And why couldn’t Woods have just stayed in the human moment of the encounter between Dawkins and the archbishop, and lived there for awhile? For that was heavy with human significance too. That’s what I can’t help wondering. For all his talk about Dostoyevsky and Melville, his response seems very shallow, and he misses something that seems so profound, when the faith of one met with the knowledge of the other, and faith had no answer. Why can’t he see, what the Church of England and the pope can see, that the new atheism is not all just a matter of thumping fundamentalists over the head with their simple-mindedness? It clearly addresses real questions to real believers who don’t really know how to answer them, and they seem to know that they’re in trouble.
Posted on 27 August 2011, in Atheism, Dawkins, Evolution, Fundamentalism, New Atheism, Religion, Religion and Science, Science, Science of Religion, Theology. Bookmark the permalink. 25 Comments.
other than having really liked this blog, from the way it was written, to the questions you brought up what I’d like to say, will sound simplistic but if you following won’t be hard and in fact, will just make it quicker and clearer… which is my aim.
so; aren’t we making it a bit too complicated? I used to believe in God as, with the education I was given, I really did believe but growing up, as I couldn’t help but believe now I can’t help but not believe.
As an atheist then, I see the approach of others (atheists ) towards Christianity, just as any other religion, pretty infantile; in fact, let’s keep it simple.
everyone is generally brought to be against morally “wrong” behaviors, but that is something that changes with time and does not necessarily depend on religion and,coming to the conclusion why don’t we just take it easier?
after all everything that matters are our actions, wether you believe or not; what you went through in this blog is important but speaking of atheists vs believers all I really would like to say is:
1) keep it simple
2) be mature
everything changes through time, all we have to do is find our balance, because it’s not a crusade… as we all live together let’s try to get along…
I’ve been way too simplistic and I may also have gone a bit off topic, but I stated what the real matter of fact is, let’s just do our best at being the best we can… you may or may not believe in God, what doesn’t change is your being a human being.
sometimes clashes are needed, but the topic of atheism vs religion doesn’t need one, I’m trying to send a message to both sides, let’s just keep on going on with life, doing our best at being good people with a little thing attached to us knows as humanity.
Phil
ps: once again, great blog, I really liked it
If he believes that this is unreasonable literalism, then it’s not obvious to me how to communicate with him at all.
Dawkins: “How did you manage to total the company car in the parking lot?”
Woods: “Don’t be so linear.”
I was so irritated by Woods’ misrepresentations that I read it a lot more more superficially then you did, so thanks for the much more detailed comments than I could make.
I was particularly struck by two comments – that new atheism is parasitic on religious literalism and that Dawkins is dead to metaphor.
The first is a rather pejorative way of describing a response to something widespread and indefensible, a bit like claiming that MLK and the civil rights movement were parasitic on Jim Crow. (Nb, this is an analogy with a narrow purpose – it does not say that atheists are oppressed and religious believers the moral equivalent of southern racists.)
The second is a rather odd accusation to make against an author who became famous by writing a book called The Selfish Gene, or does Woods read the title literally?
“and they seem to know that they’re in trouble.”
Yes indeed. Your point, Eric, is very well taken. Why on earth would woods and his ilk not see the key significance of such an encounter. It is remarkable that the religious mind seems ever ready to wax ecstatic about the wonder and beauty of God’s creation, yet they seem partially deaf to the beauty of nature itself. Dawkin’s admiration of poetry and appreciation of the complexity of nature is probably as great and perhaps purer than whatever emotion the archbishop is capable of. Why should a high religious leader have to wiggle and squirm to explain himself with respect to scientific truths that lead to a direct and honest encounter with nature and human life? The religious project is superfluous to anyone who has seen clear of the fog of religion.
As far as I can see, there are several billion people who all believe in what they call God. While some of these beliefs are very similar, and there are overlapping aspects to the belief, the problem of speaking out is to address any one God (or aspect thereof) will inevitably lead to the accusation of misrepresenting what a belief in God truly is… It’s fighting an impossible battle, really.
These days I try to do my best to highlight the hypothetical nature of the reasoning, that if we take the premise of whatever the believer is espousing, then X, Y, and Z follow. I’m still accused of misrepresenting belief, but what can I do?
Eric, you riveted my attention at the end of the second paragraph with “are parasitic on the liberalism they deprecate”, but that seems to be a typo.
What Wood wrote is worth mentioning but not worth wrestling with, I think; that, for most people, religion is generally more emotional than intellectual, is neither novel nor important. Wood might as well be criticizing physicists for missing the point when they explain rainbows and sunsets.
I’d like to see more criticism of New Atheism from a pagan perspective. The former Christians seem to be stuck in a rut.
I’d re-frame the debate a different way…
In the developed world two world wars, the spread of urban living, the spread of education, the spread and nature of communication and (hooray for Darwin!) a much greater understanding of the natural world have resulted in upsetting the old balance between the quiet certainties of religion and the quiet independence of human thought.
Arising from this broken quiet status quo are new reactionary movements, noisy religion (Evangelical/Fundamental religions) and noisy non-belief (New Atheism). Neither of which are prepared to compromise with the other.
I expect that Wood (and the Church of England thrust in the Quinquennium) are trying to put the genie back in the bottle and take us back to a time when everything was less noisy. When a Vicar could pleasantly minister to his flock and also pursue his interests in Natural Philosophy. When the Great Chain of Being tied all together, when Natural Order confirmed the status quo. When Natural Law Morality was obviously natural and obviously a law.
Those time are, I think, irretrievably gone. The old churches are just as much under threat from the New Religions as from the New Atheists.
The Pope says, “Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.”
This brings us back to the discussion under Eric’s 23 August post, “An Appeal from Richard Dawkins,” concerning whether “the Church was significantly complicit in the actions of the Third Reich” and gives us a question to ask the pope: Why do you belong to and head an organization that *did not* stand “against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live”?
There is a certain irony when in criticizing critics and calling them parasites. In fact, it’s more than irony, it’s a kind of hypocrisy, a kind of censorship, or a kind of illiberalism.
What new atheists are doing is no different to what radical atheists or free thinkers have been doing for centuries. What the critics of such critics are doing is not only ironic and hypocritical, but it’s done purely from a position of unrecognized illegitimate privilege and not rationality.
That is the basic difference between new atheist critics and their critics. New atheists are legitimately pointing out the hypocrisy, privilege and immorality of such ihierarchy and inequalities, and attempting to raise consciousness of that fact. But the privileged critics of new atheists remain ignorant of such inequalities in themselves, perpetuating the delusions they hold, and continuing with the pressure to conform to those same inequalities.
The inconsistency, contrariness and plain hypocrisy points to a psychological explanation for such people like Woods, who fail to recognize that they are the oppressors. Rather, in his mind, he is the one being oppressed by those who criticize the privilege of religion. I’d imagine Gaddafi holds the same delusional status in his mind, of the one being oppressed.
It is true that many new atheists do themselves hold positions of privilege, which allows them to voice their dissent in the first place. But such positions are unrelated to atheism or secularism, but to their professional status. In a sense, their voice is justified and legitimate, but the privileged religious voice is illegitimate and unjustified, because it is illiberal and fights against equalities. And yet, in a liberal society, even illegitimate criticism is allowed to be voiced.
I suppose that is why new atheism hits a nerve, because it’s hitting faith, false consciousness and delusion. It’s hitting the heart of the matter, the bias, bigotry and prejudice of those who continue to perpetuate the authority of religion. This is what Dawkins continues to do, when say, criticizing senator Rick Perry, in which the senator oversteps his field of legitimacy and then makes illegitimate comments against evolutionary theory. Dawkins is justified to criticize the senator, but the senator is not justified in making his anti-science comments.
Bad Jim (#6). Thanks. Fixed. Fingers faster than the conscious brain!
Deep Fried (#1). I’m not altogether sure what your point is. While I agree that live and let live is a nice slogan, and sometimes we should just heed it, it seems to me that, when religions are making something of a comeback on pretty unstable premises, and think that it’s okay to impose their will on the rest of us, we should, from a practical point of view, oppose them.
Democracy is a surprisingly fragile thing, much more fragile than big religious institutions which become part of the fabric of the individual, waking and sleeping, so it needs defence. Many people died for the freedoms that we enjoy. I’d like to hang onto them for the next generation, and we won’t, if a lot of religious people have their way.
What troubles me about people like Woods is the serene assumption that the new atheists are simply untutored barbarians without any sensitivity for the refinements of “serious” religion. But the so-called “serious” religion that he has in mind, all very vague and humanistic, is precisely the kind of religion that is on the wane. Liberal Christianity has all but collapsed. Even in a church like the Church of England, one time bastion of liberal Christianity, with the likes of JAT Robinson, David Jenkins, Don Cupitt, and others, evangelicals who read their religion almost as literally as American fundamentalists have become very prominent, and liberals are now an endangered species.
Sure, there’s a level of “village atheist” simplicity in some of the things that the new atheists say, but that is partly because the defence of Christianity, in the hands of people like Alister McGrath, Arthur Peacock, Francis Collins, and John Polkinghorne, on the “sophisticated” side, and Ted Haggard, Pat Robertson, on the American fundamentalist side, not to mention the widespread influence of fundamentalist Islam, is itself surprisingly simple minded. If the new atheists temporise every time they’re faced with a theological proposition, and if they give in to the simple trick of saying that belief is a complicated psychological phenomenon, then they’ll never put their case, which is, quite simply, that the world would be better off without totalising forms of life which would abridge the freedom of others if they could.
My own concern is immediate and pressing. I believe that it is religion, almost entirely, that is keeping the door closed for those who are suffering greatly as they die to receive the assistance in dying that some of them would welcome. Just knowing that when you are dying there is a way out that does not pass through the dark rooms of extreme pain, distress and existential collapse would be, I believe, a source of strength to all of us. My wife died early, because there was no other way to assure that she would not be trapped in her body, without the ability to carry out her wishes. I find it hard to forgive the religious for their obstruction of the right to die. Make that impossible. And this is an ongoing clash, and I won’t stop clashing with religion until the religious recognise that they have no more right to obstruct my right to die than they have to obstruct my right to express myself freely. For me this is a fight with no quarter. Religion must give up its claim to control my life — as it controlled my wife’s — or I go on fighting. When it has retreated to the private sphere where it belongs, then, and only then, will I relent.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, who was so vague and uncertain about how to defend the resurrection and the so-called virgin birth, had no hesitation in getting up in the House of Lords and arguing against the right of people to die as they choose, instead of going through the whole disintegrative process of disease and dying. It was that speech that precipitated the relinquishing of whatever “faith” I had left. Vague and woolly when it comes to faith, he had no question when it came to morality. When I called him on it, he wrote back in such a way as to minimise the number of people who die in extreme suffering and indignity, and to magnify the vulnerability of those who are quite capable of speaking for themselves. At least he wrote back. The Primate of my own church, who used, I think, to be a friend, never responded to my letter.
So this is very personal, as well as being a general and real concern of mine, that religions will, if they get the chance, exercise as much power over others as they can get their hands on. And religions are always questing for power. They are missionary enterprises. They want converts, numbers that will give them more political and economic clout. So they need to be opposed with every fibre. We know what religions are like when they do hold the reins of power. They already have too much. They should have no more power than the Lions, the Rotary or the Kiwanis clubs, and not nearly so much as the Masons.
Egbert (#9):
How true! It is very illiberal. But then religion just is, you know. Churches and mosques, clergy and other religious leaders are so accustomed to receiving the recognition and respect that they consider their due — I never got a speeding ticket, for instance, when I was wearing a clerical collar, not once — that they never stop to think that their position in society is largely unearned, and their power to influence events undeserved.
Think how readily the pope is acknowledged, without a shred of evidence, to be a moral expert. If you know the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey, you may recall the episode when Rumpole and Hilda go on a Mediterranean cruise. On the cruise is a former insurance man, now a vicar, on his way to Athens to minister to the Anglican community there. In one scene — I don’t remember it exactly — the subject turns to morals. He expresses his views on the subject and one of the group asks him pointedly what makes him a moral expert, and he says, as though he had never thought about it, something like, “Well, I suppose, now that you mention it, morality is my business now.” It’s that confident assumption, made without the slightest basis, that drives religion’s power over others. And it is that that needs to be questioned strenuously. For, if my own theological training is anything to go by, while I had done a comprehensive area in my PhD studies in moral philosophy (now sadly out of date), and even taught teachers courses in moral education, I never took one course about ethics or morals, not one. Religious leaders simply take over the moral tradition of their communities, and do not really reflect upon it critically.
This post, the quote from the Church of England and deepfriedtor’s advice to “keep it simple” inspired me to write this:
http://canadianatheist.com/2011/08/28/i%E2%80%99m-an-atheist-because/
I find it so frustrating when the religious respond to atheists by saying, in effect, “Oh, you thought we BELIEVED that stuff? Oh, oh wow. Yeah. You’re such a sucker.” Maybe there are religious contexts out there where everyone involved knows that its just a form of live action roleplaying. But this argument isn’t just factually untrue with regards to large numbers of actual religious people, its also cruel to actual religious believers, and to those who have escaped that religious context.
The problem I have with the metaphorical-way-out is that it’s not clear that the purported metaphors communicate anything true either. If “God loves you” is not meant literally, then what does the purported metaphor actually say? Does it say that we are loved by the Universe or some such naturalistic paraphrase? If so, then I would say that it is false in both its literal and metaphorical interpretations, since the Universe is quite indifferent to our situation. The deep problem with religion is not simply that it is literally false, but metaphorically false as well. The things that are meant to be conveyed are false on every level.
Daniel (#14), in The God Delusion, Dawkins points out that religion may hijack a number of psychological “subsystems” (as it were), and one of these may be the “irrational” tendency to “fall in love.” Well, if this works in the realm of religion, then the idea tha God loves you may be just an free-floating sense of love in which the individual is somehow immersed. It can’t be meant literally, but it may mimic the feelings one has when being in love with someone, and so, taking the intentional stance towards it will tend to “flesh out” the sense of “something there”.
So, here’s the thing…at least 40% of Americans believe in a literal anthropomorphic god who literally poofed the universe into existence with magic words and literally created all of the animals whole and intact in their current “kinds”.
If Woods has a problem with literalism, it’s not with US, it’s with THEM. Get THEM to stop believing in this literal supernatural world.
While you’re at it, get our Presidential candidates to stop making “jokes” about how hurricanes and earthquakes are messages from their literal god. Stop them from praying to this literal god for rain or to save our economy (or whatever else it is they prayed for during “The Response”).
Heck, in today’s newspaper, Billy Graham declared the literalness of not only his god but Satan as well. (To be fair, he does this every day).
The minute you get Billy Graham, Albert Mohler, John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and every other fundamentalist preacher to declare god and Jesus are merely metaphors, we can have a nice, reasoned discussion why ascribing supernatural agency to any natural process is backwards thinking. Why even a metaphorical god is a backwards notion when we have perfectly good, reasonable literal natural explanations for how we got here. And why religion is nothing more than a method of controlling the personal behavior of people who you think might be having more fun than you.
I’d LOVE get to the metaphorical god. I’d really love to get to the metaphorical Jesus and the metaphorical heaven and hell.
First, convince all of those other people to give up their literal beliefs. Then we can sit down and chat.
Good luck with that.
“at least 40% of Americans believe in a literal anthropomorphic god who literally poofed the universe into existence with magic words and literally created all of the animals whole and intact in their current “kinds”.”
I sometimes wonder if that many firmly believe or just say so when asked by a pollster. I find it hard to believe all of them privately think what publicly they say. Much of it could be belief in belief. I sometimes think if given 15 minutes with many believers I could not get them to admit considerable doubt. But your point is still valid if 20% are strong believers. The Woods challenge is an interesting one.
This has been a fascinating discussion, to which I cannot add, but have enjoyed sitting in on.
However, may I be pedantic and ask whom we are talking about? Is It James Wood or James Woods? My friend Google lists several of each name, and I assume it is not the American actor frequently lampooned in Family Guy.
Hi Haggis, it’s James Wood. He’s professor of lit crit at Harvard, and gave the Weidenfield Lecture at St. Anne’s College, Oxford (this year). The lecture (adapted for newspaper) can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/26/james-wood-the-new-atheism. There’s a link in the second paragraph. No, not the American actor.
Thanks for the clarification, Eric.
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