The Loss of the Centre: New Atheism Versus Religion Today (Part 2) – Lindsay Ann Cox

[Note: Part 1 of this article was published on this blog Aug. 9th, 2010. It remains on this site; please scroll down and or check the Blog Archive to read it. Thanks!]

PART 2 – Necessary Middle Ground

At the end of part one I summoned the unique eloquence of Bill Maher to send us off, making sure that we went away from our computers not just considering the ‘establishment of the extreme ground’ of New Atheism, but having experienced a tidbit of it for ourselves. Religulous, the movie, is ‘atheist porn’ in its finest form and so please forgive me if I return to it briefly for the purpose of re-establishing that from which we must learn and grow and move forward: the extremities and hostilities of New Atheism and its refusal to interact substantively with the full spectrum of religious belief.

Plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live… [because f]aith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about and those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction. Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings, who don’t have all the answers, to think that they do (Maher, Religulous).

I am an intellectual slaveholder. Did you know that? Did you know that my years of study and constant struggling within the global Church keeps people in bondage to fantasy, nonsense and crazy destruction? Did you know that I had, and apparently have, that power? I didn’t and, despite these condemnations, I don’t think it’s true. In fact, I think it is yet another way for New Atheists to make us feel bad about ourselves, to shame us into thinking like they do, instead of holding onto years of what I consider to be a true calling: wrestling with my beliefs, belief in general and, of course, the idea of God. This is the true task of faith, if the New Atheists ever bothered to learn about the religions they are criticizing. It is the faith that previous generations of scientists sought to offer some modicum of respect. The finest minds of the last few thousand years have given their best efforts to understanding the world, often in the context of religion, and perhaps their endeavours require some small sense of historical value and resulting respect. This is not the deferential and undeserved respect Dawkins (and myself) condemned in part one of the article; it is the appropriate recognition of the learning, and dare I say wrestling, that has come before, whether one agrees with it or not.

In addition, however, to the abject refusal to consider the nuances of global religions, New Atheists also undermine or outrightly reject the more moderate sentiments of atheism held by previous generations of scientists, extending their hostilities to anyone who might attempt to mitigate the effects of new scientific discoveries on much older belief systems. Thus, “New Atheists find themselves in conflict with many other atheists who prefer to accommodate religion and not challenge beliefs, even when those beliefs conflict with well-established science” (Stenger 13). To the New Atheists, any scientist willing to consider the possibility that science might be able to function as a part of a religious belief system, or vice versa, isn’t worth his or her degrees, let alone of interaction and debate. To New Atheists such ‘accommodating atheists’ are actually religious moderates and, as we know, “the New Atheists say we should challenge the irrational thinking behind religious beliefs, including that of moderates, which can only help to justify the more extreme activities, as well as motivate less extreme, but still dangerous, behaviour” (Stenger 13). How unfortunate it must be to make enemies out of one’s own colleagues, and in the case of New Atheism how completely unhelpful. Moreover, how is making ‘moderate’ a dirty word going to solve any of the world’s problems?

I suppose the New Atheists might say that the time for moderation has come and gone with the bombing and falling of the twin towers in 2001 and that New Atheism is the only way to ensure a 9/11-like event never happens again. And so, “[w]here once there was automatic respect and deference [for religion], now to a growing number of people faith is a warning sign, not a sign of warmth. New Atheism captures this mood swing” (Wainwright 16). It is, indeed, a mood swing in the truest sense of that phrase: New Atheism is puritanically intolerant and debilitatingly self-oriented, not to mention exclusive and historically disrespectful. A perfect example would be how New Atheists treat their predecessors, insisting that “Spencer, Darwin et al [Tydall, Huxley, etc.] were not only not New Atheists, they were not even atheists… Huxley was eager to avoid making an explicit denial of God’s existence,” says Tim Madigan in W.K. Clifford’s The Ethics of Belief (p. 23). Madigan also quotes Darwin: ‘The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic’” (Madigan and Darwin qtd. in Wainwright 17). Like all rebellious younger generations, the New Atheists have little care or concern for the more religiously involved lives of older generations of scientists nor do they acknowledge how difficult claiming any kind of atheism would have been a century earlier. New Atheists like doubt and humility – attributes they claim religion is without – but, again, this assertion is the result of a significant glossing over of considered and nuanced responses of some of the greatest scientific minds who changed they way the world understands itself. Indeed, in “coining the word ‘agnostic’, Huxley was implicitly criticizing those who ‘were quite sure they had attained a certain ‘gnosis’ [knowledge]’” (Madigan and Huxley qtd. in Wainwright 17). No matter what happens to me in life, nor how many degrees or positions I hold, I will never acquire ‘gnosis’ and I will never attempt to engender an arrogance in myself or others which pretends that such an endeavour is even possible. Arrogance is something New Atheists claim religion is full of and this, at times, is unfortunately true. But it’s also a case of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’, so to speak. There must be another possibility…

Nuances and Tensions within Religious Moderation

Sometimes it seems that New Atheists must live in Kansas or Baghdad or Jerusalem and they must only watch Fox (pseudo) News and Al-Jeezera and read religious texts completely ignorant of the centuries of scholastic treatments and theological developments thereof. This is the only way that their position seems tenable and moderates can be misconstrued as equally threatening as religious extremists. Truly, it seems that New Atheists need to get out and meet some new and different people, religious moderates in particular. “What they would discover if they did is that the God they don’t believe in, most religious people don’t believe in either. A great number of religious people – especially in developed countries – do not insist on the exclusive truth of their particular religious brand; do not wish death sanctions against those who believe differently (or who don’t believe at all); and do not reject the scientific method, or philosophical inquiry” (Mabry 22). A dynamic instead of static presentation of religious moderates may well serve New Atheists better, if they would dare.

The situation looks something like this to me: New Atheists on one big hill screaming for the end of all religion and fundamentalists of all religions standing together (God forbid) on another, equally big hill screaming that God is going to punish all those heathens and kafirs, both hilltops producing very little but panic and sore throats. Meanwhile, in the valley below are the moderates, who tend their middle ground where, though not heard so well because not elevated by extremist behaviours and actions, they learn about the realities of both hilltops and attempt to bring both parties down from their self-imposed high and mighty hilltops. In the centre valley all three groups would sit together and the moderates of the valley would, of course, moderate the discussion and keep us moving forward… together.

Now, of course, every metaphor breaks down when you push it too far, but the old adage, ‘all things in moderation’ is so old and well-known for good reason: it’s true. And, although

you wouldn’t know it from the writing of the New Atheists, the truth is that there are such things as religious moderates, religious liberals and religious progressives. There are religious people who believe that critical thinking in matters of religion is essential to mature faith, and indeed, a key component of religious faithfulness. There are people who understand that our images of divinity are the result of a primal human impulse to anthropomorphize Mystery because it makes it easier to relate to. There are people who understand that symbols are not identical with the things they signify – who do not turn ideas, images and ideologies into idols. There are people who do not think that violence is the proper response to dissent – who in fact see tolerance, compassion and liberty as the litmus test of authentic spiritual expression. There is no serious consideration of this vast cross-section of religious life in the writings of the New Atheists (Mabry 22).

The inherent complexity of religious faith, the abounding grey area of belief and doubt, the dynamic dialogical capacities for religious interaction in the public sphere, these are just a few of the kinds of ‘vast cross-sections of religions life’ New Atheists seem to refuse to address. “Unfortunately, when the New Atheists do bring up moderate and liberal religion, it is only to dismiss it out of hand in a paragraph for not being ’authentic’ (Mabry 22). The problem, of course, in doing this – in dismissing what is difficult instead of delving into it as an opportunity – is that it affects one’s credibility on other subjects. “That’s too bad, because there is a lot of value and validity in much of what they say. Intolerant, violent and exclusionary forms of religion ought to be challenged and questioned. But forms of religion that are not extremist, reactionary and uncritical do exist, and need to be acknowledged” (Mabry 23). More than acknowledged, moderates need to be taken seriously as productive parts of the solution to our global predicament. New Atheists are scientists that don’t particularly bother with the dynamism of religion and fundamentalists reject anything scientific that would contradict the bible and no one learns anything and nothing changes because both reject the middle ground of moderates due to different varieties of ‘inauthenticity’. Extremism and violence due to frustration and distrust follows… as we’ve seen.

Recovering the Centre with Wright

Robert Wright, past professor of philosophy at Princeton and religion at Penn State, founder of bloggingheads.tv, current Senior Fellow for the New America Foundation and writer extraordinaire, might just be able to productively contribute to this debate and, perhaps, even help us in ‘recovering the centre’. In his most recent book, The Evolution of God, Wright asserts that the ‘materialist’ account of religion’s origin, history and future, which he will use, does not preclude the validity of a religious worldview. In fact, in this book, he does the opposite: he “actually affirms the validity of a religious worldview; not a traditionally religious worldview, but a worldview that is in some meaningful sense religious” (Wright 4). Breaking centre ground, indeed!

Wright is not a scientist nor does he seem particularly religious, though he does mention his mother attending a Baptist church in California. He does not claim expertise in either scientific or religious disciplines, but instead uses his critical skills, philosophical training and a fervent humility to explore both, thanking his consultants, academic friends and various interdisciplinary colleagues profusely along the way. Wright has done the hard work of taking all sides into consideration, dismissing none as ‘inauthentic’ and, as a result, dares to suggest a positive interaction between science and religion, reason and faith.

The first step towards creating substantive and relevant-to-all-sides middle ground, for Wright, was to review the history of religions and religious phenomena chronologically from the primordial faith of early hunter-gatherer peoples to Islam several thousands of years later. From this review Wright highlights many times when the science of the day and religion necessarily interacting with each other, but makes note that religion has always survived said encounter, however changed thereafter. “The notion [of the divine] has had to change, but that’s no indictment of religion. After all, science has changed relentlessly, revising if not discarding old theories, and none of us think of that as an indictment of science. On the contrary, we think this ongoing adaptation is carrying science closer to the truth. Maybe the same thing is happening to religion” (Wright 5). Religion, like science, evolves because it must, because older ideas of God, religion and faith therein need to be relevant to many varied contexts throughout history. For the prophets of the Old or First Testament, this meant locating the will of God in the social salvation of Israel and its people and then connecting this to a more individualized sense of salvation, thus connecting the person and his or her society to God. Linking these two kinds of salvation is key because, “traditionally, religions that have failed to align individual salvations with social salvation have not, in the end, faired well. And, like it or not, the social system to be saved is now a global one. Any religion whose prerequisites for individual salvation don’t conduce to the salvation of the whole world is a religion whose time has passed” (Wright 430). What this means in less specifically salvific language is that a religion must be able to ‘save’ both individuals and their societies from each other, themselves and whatever superstitious claims about God or gods were popular at the time. The Abrahamic prophets were particularly good at presenting their three religions in this dually salvific capacity and so, as Wright accurately points out, “[e]ven if time does pass them by, all Abrahamic religions will always be able to say this much: their prophets were right. Things may look bad, but salvation is possible so long as you understand what it requires. Still, it will be a shame if they don’t manage to illustrate the point” (Wright 430). A shame, indeed, for what these prophets were calling their believers to is what we now call ‘social justice’.

Social justice, though most commonly called this in Christianity, is a concept based on the justice-oriented praxis of one’s faith: seeking justice for others within one’s society – whether local or global – which will, in the end, bring a believer closer to God, which is the whole point of salvation, as it were. Therein, individual and society are reciprocally saved. What these millennia-old prophets were trying to show us, and what we have needed to learn time and again in the past century, is the “commonsensical-sounding yet elusive moral truth that people everywhere are people, just like us” (Wright 434). Whether white, brown, black or whatever in between; whether male or female; whether hetero or homosexual; whether adult or child we are all people and as we learn this our God or gods need to change accordingly. And so, while we grow, despite the supposed immutability of the monotheistic God, “the god of the Abrahamic scriptures – real or not – does [also] have a tendency to grow morally. This growth, though at times cryptic and superficially haphazard, is the ‘revelation’ of the moral order underlying history: as the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration “ (Wright 435). What Wright is moving towards here is an understanding of the ‘movements of God’ in the world, of the changes that have had to take place in the evolution of humanity and, as a result, God, in secularly and scientifically-relevant language. The ‘revelation’ being the reciprocal evolution of God and humanity, as necessary for continued existence of both. What this means is that the current challenge of finding a way to link one’s sense of individual and social salvation, for the believer, can also be framed as the same project but with more secular language: “the challenge is to link the avoidance of individual chaos to the avoidance of social chaos.Or: link the pursuit of psychic intactness to social intactness. Or: link the pursuit of personal integrity to social integrity. Or: link the pursuit of psychic harmony to social harmony. Or whatever. The exact language depends on the context (Wright 440). This is the development of a moral order in the world and throughout history – a moral order of necessity: get it together or die trying.

I’m sure that, if asked, New Atheists and probably a lot of various kinds of scientists would have serious reservations about framing the world’s current (and past) problems as issues of social salvation and would definitely squirm at the connection between social and individual salvation as related to a conception of God, however, increasingly non-anthropomorphic.At the same time, though, fundamentalists would view such a presentation as horribly profane and hugely sacrilegious, such is the nature of trying to recover a centrist position within two opposing extremes. But it’s a place to start! Perhaps some scientists could begin to see how, according to a religious perspective, a moral order in the world could have developed through evolution and that some sense of divinity could be present as the creative force behind evolution. Similarly, perhaps fundamentalists might find a way to more broadly conceive of God. For, example, “there is a precedent in theology for using the word ‘god’ in a non-anthropomorphic way. For example, the twentieth-century Christian theologian Paul Tillich described God as ‘the ground of being’” (Tillich qtd. in Wright 445). Taking it a little further, religious adherents seeking a centrist position in the reason versus faith debate could, following Darwin’s idea of a ‘creative force’, meaning that this “moral order, to the believer, is among the grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation… [and] if the believer, having concluded that the moral order suggests the existence of some as-yet-unknown source of creativity that set natural selection in motion, decided to call the source ‘God,’ well, that’s the believer’s business” (Wright 450). Dynamic enough for both sides of the divide or just some form of deism considered useless by most? What about religion’s enduring sense of inspiration, consolation and love?

If there is an underlying moral order to the development of humanity in the context of the history of civilizations and this moral order can be understood as a result of what Wright calls ‘the moral imagination’, where you not just comprehend but live an ontological reality of necessarily reciprocal existential alterity and this is broadly understood as connected to some creative force through the natural selection of evolution, what about moral progress? What about inspiration, consolation and love? Does the moral imagination and thus moral order require God or gods for moral progress? Perhaps. “It’s nice that some people can be paragons of virtue without this kind of [so-called divine] help, but in a way it’s surprising; the natural human condition is to ground your moral life in the existence of other beings, and the more ubiquitous the beings, the firmer the ground” (Wright 452). What this means is that the very same necessarily reciprocal existential alterity, which drives human beings towards one another, drives us also towards some sense of God. For many people, God and God’s love embodies humanity’s need to reach within and beyond alerity, not only for the sake of one’s self but for one’s community and world at large – for each other, as it were. Is this not moral progress, if actually practiced, that is?

Whatever we posit as the source of the moral order – anthropomorphic God who spawned natural selection or mechanistic selective process that spawned natural selection or something in between – the point is that if you believe the moral order exists, then the believer’s attempt to conceive of its source and relate to its source, would seem a legitimate exercise even by the standards of science regardless of how crude the conception of that source, regardless of how circuitous the means of relating to it (Wright 454).

So the scientists don’t really agree with how believers conceive of the natural world as related to their sense of God or gods and the believers think that scientists do not fully appreciate the depth of their ‘creative force’, but can those, at times contextual, issues be considered details within a larger moral order to which both sides can acquiesce? Further, can extremists like the New Atheists and fundamentalists see these as tentative possibilities for at least coming to the figurative table to talk and be mediated by moderates and find ways around human self-destruction? Could this be the dynamic beginning of recovering the centre in this intense debate?

Somewhere in the back of my head, I hear my mother, a resolute fan of Sunday School theology, saying, “But, Lindsay, what about love? What about God’s love?” In my heart I think, “Ah, bless her.” In my mind, I think, “Love is really complicated, mom. Even God’s love… maybe especially God’s love.” The reality is that love is the best and most wonderful and confusing and glorious idea and “at its best brings a truer apprehension of the other, an empathetic understanding that converges on the moral truth of respect, even reverence, for the other” (Wright 457). Lived love, the kind that seems so rare but so necessary, is the end goal of moral progress, which the moral imagination understands through the moral order, and is – in the end – a moral truth in itself (thank you, Robert Wright for this plethora of ‘moral’ phrases; please see chapters nineteen and twenty of The Evolution of God for a full explanation of these terms).

The goal of the entire scientific reason versus religious faith debate exists because people on both sides would like to reconcile two seemingly opposing systems of thought… at least this used to be the case. But what if each side were mediated by persons who refused to dismiss the ‘other’, instead working to find dialogically and yet mutually relevant ways to tolerate, if not respect, one another’s opinions. Is that possible? Even if each side feels like it’s humouring the other side a bit, could potentially ending religiously based global violence not be worth it? Could this be lived love, both sacred and (post)-secularly conceived?

Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat as physicists ascribe properties to electrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love. And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love’s organic association with truth – by the fact, indeed, that at times these two properties almost blend into one. You might say that love and truth are the two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine. Then again, you might not say that. The point is just that you wouldn’t have to be crazy to say it (Wright 459).

The recovery of the centre, the development of dynamic and mediated middle ground, means that we don’t call each other crazy. It also means, however, that extreme ground must be mitigated by people who dare to give value to both scientific and religious worldviews. This is the role of moderates. Do not dismiss us; we are not inauthentic and we will not dismiss you.

Dawkins Revisited

In the Preface to the paperback edition of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins addresses some of the criticisms he has received regarding his book and I found one question and answer particularly useful in summing things up.

Question: You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best. You go after crude rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich and Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.

Answer: If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surly be a better place, and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible. To the vast majority of believers around the world, religion all too closely resembles what you hear from the likes of Roberston, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men, they are all too influential, and everybody in the modern world has to deal with them (Dawkins 15).

 

Numerical negligibility is not a reason to forego interacting with those who dare to educate themselves about their own religion and that of others. In fact, it is the exact reason for interaction – not one academic to another, because then we will lose ourselves in our egos and multi-syllabic words, but one ‘other’ to ‘an-other’. Moderate religious believers stand in an historically unique position to substantively effect the future of the world: they must mediate between the extremes. They must refer to neither as crazy, refusing to alienate as a result, and they – we – must, truly must, recover the centre within this ancient debate of reason versus faith, creating and tending our figurative middle ground with patient ears, soft eyes and compassionate words for all. Truly, for all.

And so to Richard Dawkins and all the New Atheists I say: I am so sorry you gave up on us moderates. Thankfully our subtle, nuanced sense of religion will never let us give up on you, or anyone else for that matter. We will continue to seek middle-ground, grappling and wrestling with the diversity of our world and the abounding tensions therein. We will work and pray for it in the many ways in which it is possible to do so. And therein, we will work and pray for you and everyone who wears self-imposed blinders, which leave religion as a black and white entity, deserving no better than extreme and oversimplified responses to the reality of our world: glorious and diverse truthS located only in dialogical dynamism and the tension of grey complexity.

To my favourite New Atheist, though I’m not sure he would give himself this title, Bill Maher, who insists upon the following:

If you belong to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife, where the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers. If the world does comes to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of a religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was: that we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it. Grow up or die (Religulous).

Works Cited

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion.New York: Mariner Books, 2008.

Holy Bible. New Revised Standard Version with Apocryphal / Deuterocanonical Books. New York: American Bible Society, 1989.

Mabry, John R. and Thomas Crean. “Two Priests Respond.” Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas. April/May 2010: 78.

Religulous. Dir. Larry Charles. Perf. Bill Maher. Thousand Words, 2008.

Stenger, Victor. “What’s New About the New Atheism?” Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas. April/May 2010: 78.

Wainwright, Jon. “The Not So New Atheists?” Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas. April/May 2010: 78.

Wright, Robert. The Evolution of God. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

* For more information on Richard Wright, please see the following sites:

http://newamerica.net/user/102

http://evolutionofgod.net/

http://bloggingheads.tv/about/