Dueling Philosophies That Aren't
Irradiated by LabRat
Fresh on the heels of the holiday celebrating arguably the most important event in Christianity, we have the lived spirit of Christ’s redemption: triumphalism of how much better Christians are than a disliked out-group. Specifically, the author is out to demonstrate that Easter somehow demonstrates the stupidity of atheism.
To an atheist, this comes off as “our zombie chocolate bunnies make you look stupid!”. Tongue less in cheek, it’s a pretty good demonstration of the number of cultural and philosophical assumptions, often unexamined, one acquires within what we think is a pretty specific belief system.
In a nation that once prided itself on its Judeo-Christian heritage, one out of every five Americans now claims no religious identity whatsoever; and the number of self-proclaimed Christians has declined by a whopping 15%.
Yes, those who believe in nothing seem to be winning more and more converts every year.
Not really. There’s a few bright-eyed souls, usually those that had a dramatic breakup with an evangelical background, who believe in “winning converts” to the side of atheism. Most of us really and truly don’t care. I’d say a much more realistic picture- especially that refusal to own a religious identity or call themselves Christian- is that the churches are losing people, not that we’re winning them.
Of course, it’s not quite fair to say that atheists believe in nothing. They do believe in something — the philosophical theory known as Materialism, which states that the only thing that exists is matter; that all substances and all phenomena in the universe are purely physical.
This is the first in a series of assumptions that do a rather impressive job of collapsing his own argument.
Atheism is the simple lack of belief in a god. Since it is a simple negative, it can and does have a lot of meanings depending on who’s using the term and why- everything from “none of the traditional gods exist” to “there is nothing supernatural whatsoever, anywhere”. In other words, atheism and philosophical materialism are related, but separate- philosophical materialism is the slightly harder and more concrete stance beyond “I really don’t think there’s an omnipotent cosmic entity that takes a personal interest in humans”, which is about as much as can really be applied to the vast bulk of atheists.
The problem is that this really isn’t a theory at all. It’s a superstition; a myth that basically says that everything in life — our thoughts, our emotions, our hopes, our ambitions, our passions, our memories, our philosophies, our politics, our beliefs in God and salvation and damnation — that all of this is merely the result of biochemical reactions and the movement of molecules in our brain.
What nonsense.
Welcome to Argument From Because I Just Said So, That’s Why.
What he thinks he’s arguing is that one side has a lot more explanatory power and body of philosophy behind it and one doesn’t, and that this is a compelling argument. Technically speaking this is true; you can literally explain everything if you attribute anything you do not understand to “because God wants it that way”, and one has a body of philosophy behind it and the other doesn’t because one is a two thousand year old belief system upon which most of Western philosophy was built and one is a plain and simple lack of belief in the other’s starting premise. What atheists who are philosophical materialists are really saying is “there is nothing supernatural about life, there’s a lot we don’t know and may never will, but we might”.
Or, if I’m going to get snarky about how his argument reads from my chair:
“Atheists are stupid superstitious idiots because they can’t explain as many things as believing that an omnipotent cosmic entity created everything, spent several thousand years dinking around with humanity and being unsatisfied with it, then redeemed it with the blood sacrifice of a Jewish man who now serves as his intermediary can. What rubes.”
We can’t reduce the whole of reality to what our senses tell us for the simple reason that our senses are notorious for lying to us.
Therefore omnipotent cosmic entity/resurrected Jew.
Our senses tell us that the world is flat, and yet it’s not. Our senses tell us that the world is chaotic, and yet we know that on both a micro and a macro level, it’s incredibly organized. Our senses tell us that we’re stationary, and yet we’re really moving at incredible speeds. We just can’t see it.
Therefore… you see where I’m going with this.
If atheists were infamous for telling people that all you needed was the evidence of their senses and there weren’t no dad-blamed big-bearded guys in the sky ‘coz we looked, this line of argument might make some kind of sense, but as it stands it really, really doesn’t. The principles that we know explain the higher orders of organization of the world, and the general operations of natural law, weren’t discovered by theologians, but by people assuming whatever was being studied had a natural explanation consistent with other natural law.
But the most important things in life can’t be seen with the eyes. Ideas can’t be seen. Love can’t be seen. Honor can’t be seen.
See above, except now the argument seems to be “atheists don’t believe in anything that can’t be seen and touched and if they did they’d have to admit it was supernatural”. Ideas can’t be seen because they’re inherently abstract concepts, love can’t be seen because it’s an emotional state, and honor can’t be seen because it’s a cultural construct.
The apparent line of argument- anything you can’t touch must potentially be supernatural- is so far doing a rather good job of making the author look dim, not atheists.
This isn’t a new concept. Judaism and Christianity and Islam and Buddhism have all taught for thousands of years that the highest forms of reality are invisible and mysterious. And these realities will never be reducible to clear-cut scientific formulae for the simple reason that they will never be fully comprehensible to the human mind. God didn’t mean them to be.
Thank you for your rousing defense of unassailable anti-intellectualism. Anything we can’t understand today must obviously not have meant to be understood, and anything we understand today that we didn’t a hundred years ago obviously must have been an exception.
I think I see the point he’s trying to make, but again the problem comes from fundamentally misunderstanding the way atheists think. We don’t lock up like an artificial intelligence in a bad science fiction story trying to comprehend love or the beauty of a flower, we simply don’t assume that things and concepts that aren’t amenable to reduction and reconstruction must or could be supernatural. Reductionism isn’t a life philosophy, it’s just one tool in a toolbox to describe and try to understand the world.
Or, in far fewer words: emergent properties exist and this is not controversial.
Or, in fewer words with more internet snark: FUCKING MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?!
No less a genius than Albert Einstein once said: “The most beautiful thing we can experience in life is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: for his eyes are closed.”
I find quoting the discoverer of general relativity the very next paragraph after claiming that God doesn’t want the mysterious to be understood an absolute scream, I don’t know about you.
Again: atheists don’t disbelieve in wonder or mystery, they disbelieve in powerful supernatural entities with a direct interest in humanity, and think ascribing everything not understood to such entities just because it’s an explanation is silly.
Too many people go through life today with their eyes closed. They miss out on the mysterious because they’re so fixated on what they can see and smell and touch and taste and hear.
People are generally oblivious unless temperamentally inclined otherwise. While I have met one or two atheists this describes, the vast majority of them were so secure in their religious certainties everything that deviated came as a surprise to immediately deny, even things the rest of the civilized world considers well-known facts.
They’re so steeped in the “superstition of materialism” that they’re totally blind to the existence of another world — a radically different world than the one they’re familiar with, but a world nonetheless: a world of miracles, a world of grace, a world of angels, a world of diabolical warfare, a world where the highest values are completely opposite from those of our secular society — where weakness equals strength, sacrifice equals salvation, and suffering equals unlimited power.
Schizophrenics inhabit an exciting world full of mysteries and entities the rest of us aren’t privy to as well.
The last half of that statement is a bit theologically problematic. Christianity says suffering can be redemptive, not that it always is or inherently elevates you, let alone grants “unlimited power” to anyone but Christ.
The third thing that strikes me as odd about this paragraph is the way he’s talking as though Christianity weren’t the dominant cultural influence in the Western world. Sure, there’s a pretty big gap between the church and the world, but most of the values “secular society” has are derived from Christianity and its attendant culture. Including the idea that something being painful or unpleasant must make you a better person if you do it or put up with it.
Atheists, of course, claim that all of this is absurd. Christianity, especially, they say, with its belief in Easter and the Resurrection, is nothing but “wishful thinking” — the product of weak human psychology; a psychology that is so afraid of death that it must create “delusional fantasies” in order to make life on Earth bearable.
Some of them do. Some of us just stop at “divine blood sacrifice, really?” Life on Earth nowadays is really pretty bearable with or without it for most of us.
But is it wishful thinking to believe in hell, the devil and demons? Is it wishful thinking to believe we’re going to be judged and held accountable for every sin we’ve ever committed? Is it wishful thinking to believe the best way to live our life is to sacrifice our own desires for the sake of others? Is it wishful thinking to believe that we should discipline our natural bodily urges for the sake of some unseen “kingdom”?
I’ll actually just grant him this point, which he continues over the next few paragraphs. Not all atheists have leveled this particular charge at the religious, but enough have it’s a valid and true counter-argument.
And yet, atheists persist in this ridiculous notion that human beings “invented” God merely because we’re afraid of death and want to see our dead relatives again. Amazing.
Again, not all of us. Some of us think we did because we’re a designing, pattern-finding species that is deeply uncomfortable with the unexplained, and because a personalized and externalized moral code the entire society can refer to and judge themselves against is a useful cultural adaptation.
The rest of it is pretty stock “our team’s awesome and you won’t beat us because we’re right”. Which, fair enough, the difference between what he takes on faith and what I doubt is the entire point, though I actually do agree that atheists will never stamp out religious belief for pretty much the reasons in the above paragraph.
So, there you have it: it is trivially obvious that all of Christianity’s premises are true because the world would be more boring if not, mysteries are unsolvable and more fun that way, abstract concepts exist, and atheists are poopheads.
I’m still not convinced, me, but if you’ve got any of those Reese’s peanut butter bunnies, we can try those.
April 26th, 2011 at 6:35 pm
Schizophrenics inhabit an exciting world full of mysteries and entities the rest of us aren’t privy to as well.
*grin*
April 26th, 2011 at 6:36 pm
I would have just said: God huh? My imaginary friends name is Mr. Trashbags” Of course this is why you guys have a blog and I struggle to stay one facebook.
April 26th, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Oh man, I haven’t come across an Easter screed like that since reading municipal newsgroups in 1996. I like the “atheists are all exactly alike, and they look like the caricature in my head” approach, too — that’s old-school.
April 26th, 2011 at 11:58 pm
As per your request, just letting you know that I have sent you an email…
April 27th, 2011 at 3:33 am
A couple of responses here….
First: While this discussion focuses a lot on feminism, it answers some of the points brought up here….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpmu42g6mDs&feature=player_embedded#at=433
Second:
“Ideas can’t be seen because they’re inherently abstract concepts, love can’t be seen because it’s an emotional state, and honor can’t be seen because it’s a cultural construct. ”
True….but, like the wind, we see the effects of ideas, love, and honor (or even the lack of) in our environment every day. And, since the “order” found in our universe has been discussed, couldn’t it be said that that effect may indicate an unseen cause?
Just some food for thought….
April 27th, 2011 at 3:58 am
I guess I fit somewhere in the middle. I’m a believer, but my belief is private. The ones on both sides of the debate over religion who make it their job to castigate the other side do nothing for me. Evangelicals, whether Christian or atheist, get on my nerves.
April 27th, 2011 at 6:21 am
But is it wishful thinking to believe in hell, the devil and demons? Is it wishful thinking to believe we’re going to be judged and held accountable for every sin we’ve ever committed?
In a way, though, yes, it is.
The world is full of big and small evils, and of uncontrollable and seemingly random catastrophes. Every now and then your civilization is enslaved by invaders from a land you’d barely heard of before, Sea Peoples raid and burn your towns, communities (or hell, just your wife) suddenly start coughing up blood and keeling over for no obvious reason… A Book of Judges model (in which all of these infinitely complex and uncomputable variables are reduced to the actions of a comprehensible, rational intelligence that can be bargained with) or Book of Job model (in which random evil comes from a malignant intelligence that can be defeated through steadfast devotion to a superior benevolent one) can be an enormous comfort, even if “an omnipotent being is judging my every move” doesn’t at first glance look like wishful thinking.
And belief that you’ll be held accountable for your sins, coupled with the belief that those sins will be forgiven and that others will be held accountable too, can remove a great deal of frustration over injustices that can’t otherwise be addressed by the believer. The judgment model also gives an easily comprehensible basis for taboos and norms that have developed due to their social utility, but are abstract and difficult to unpack. A healthy person feels anxiety over ignoring a neighbor’s desperate need because communities with mutual support tend to survive better than those without. “Because God, who’s done and promises so much for you, demands you practice charity in return” gives a very intuitive framework for understanding that anxiety.
Don’t get me wrong, I think “religion” as a broad category is less about people believing what makes them happy and more about the fact that a social species with seriously overcranked pattern finding and agency detection will tend to detect agency in every pattern. But it also stands to reason that over time among competing religions, those religions that meet people’s psychological needs best will tend to shake out to the top. Calling it nothing but wishful thinking is oversimplifying, but it seems very likely that Christianity spread so quickly and was adopted so universally in large part because it met the psychological needs of a wide variety of people better than its competitors did.
April 27th, 2011 at 7:38 am
[…] LabRat during Atomic Nerds thoroughly unpacks a inadequate assumptions and misconceptions. […]
April 27th, 2011 at 10:08 am
As the saying goes (bowdlerized for my tastes), assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. It’s just as stupid from Christians as when atheists deride my imaginary purple dragon friend. Forget that it’s personally insulting, it’s ignorant of the fundamental nature of the debate. When you start from the assumption that your metaphysical opponent is stupid, well, you end up begging the question. That assumption, coupled with intellectual sloth, allows you to dismiss competing ideas out of hand. Of course, you can only do that by making further assumptions. All the while, the real issues go untouched.
The trouble is that this intellectual sloth has a high probability of being confirmed. Many Christians are superstitious idiots. Many atheists are materialists. Many of all groups are squishy emotional hangers-on.
This is true of any debate, as you well know. Humans are incredibly lazy thinkers. Why spend time and effort on anything that really doesn’t matter to you? At the other end of the curve, why allow a competing idea to challenge deeply-held beliefs that are crucial to your identity? Just make a bunch of assumptions, shoot them down, and move on. Every so often you’ll be right.
Instead, why not just agree that humans are rational actors who make personal choices? I am not compelled to believe in the Christian God. I choose to, and I have sound reason for that choice. Neither are you compelled to accept a naturalist universe, but you may do so based on equally sound reasoning.
Arguing that one position “makes more sense” than the other is the last fig leaf over personal responsibility. If I must believe one way or the other because “Duh, it’s so obvious” then I’m no longer accountable for my choices that stem from that belief. It’s the last bastion of those who reserve the right to say of everything, “It’s not my fault.” DeStefano did it, elmo did it, the Pope does it, Hitchens does it, Ken Ham wallows in it.
I choose to believe that God is true. Choice is mine, and it may be the only thing that really is.
April 27th, 2011 at 10:49 am
Seeker- Science is all about the felt effects of hidden mechanisms. Some of it, like much of physics (but far from all of it) can be measured, reduced, and rebuilt, but a great deal of it is inductive. We know it’s true because it works consistently, even if sometimes our assumptions about the exact details of why it’s working the way it does are incorrect.
It’s just that, from my perspective, the answers have all so far turned out to be “effects of natural processes” and I have no reason to suspect the answer is suddenly going to be “will of an incomprehensible being that transcends nature”, and as to the origin of natural law, I find “because that’s simply the way the universe is” a less problematic answer than “because a being vastly more complex than the universe itself made it that way”.
Or… what Dr. Feelgood said. It is also within the nature of bloggers to go for low-hanging fruit; he is absolutely correct about the nature of the debate itself.
April 27th, 2011 at 1:01 pm
Seems to me that much of the confusion is that by “atheists” he seems to mean “militant evangelical atheists”.
(Which I suppose makes some sense, since they’re the kind most likely to be all “I’m an Atheist! And religion is stupid!@@!!” and get noticed.
I find that a Darwin Fish on a car is a good marker of someone I don’t want to deal with, as being the sort of atheist who’s made a replacement religion out of not believing in God.
This is not always true, but it’s a heuristic of surprising value.)
That sort of atheist tends to be aggressively materialist, thus explaining (perhaps) his conflation.
(Plus what Dr. Feelgood said - I suspect that the vast, vast majority of atheists, so-self-identified, are materialists, despite the fact that atheism does not remotely require materialism.
The squishy “spiritual” types rarely call themselves atheists, even if they’re denying all the traditional deities or deity per se.)
April 27th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
I think Elmo Iscariot makes a very important point: the wishful thinking part is the belief that there is some rational actor behind the strange things that happen, good or bad. After all, many early religions focused on keeping the mean spirits happy and disinclined to mess with you, as opposed to pleasing a good deity who will keep them at bay for you (broad strokes there).
You see a lot of the same thinking in how people understand economics, where prices increasing must be due to evil “gouging” or some shadowy cabal of capitalists trying to squeeze money out of people. Generally it is just putting a human face on the emergent effects of distributed decision making.
The wishful part is thinking there is one actor that can be pleased/warded off to avoid the problem. People seem to hate chalking up dramatic events to results of tiny, seemingly random events. Give us something we can name, personify and react to and we are happier.
April 27th, 2011 at 1:50 pm
The good doctor said:
If I must believe one way or the other because “Duh, it’s so obvious” then I’m no longer accountable for my choices that stem from that belief. It’s the last bastion of those who reserve the right to say of everything, “It’s not my fault.” …elmo did it…
Not sure where that came from, brudder. I’ve made a point here and elsewhere of pointing out that religious people and religion are not stupid. I think they’re _mistaken_ for a variety of reasons, but there’s an undeniable amount of time and brainwork that’s gone into theology over the millennia that we’ve been mentally human, and it’s foolish to pretend that religious people just believe what they do because they’re vapid idiots.
I take a materialist view of the universe because I see insufficient evidence to demand belief in unseen supernatural intelligences, and so naturally that’s the perspective I’ll have when thinking about the sociology of religion. And it seems uncontroversial that religion and Christianity in particular are very emotionally satisfying for their adherents; it’s a large part of DeStephano’s argument for religion. Both in theory and in my own experience, very many Christians do take solace and satisfaction from the ideas of divine judgment and pious sacrifice. In this model, Christians are implicitly rational actors making decisions from utility.
I’m having a hard time understanding why you think this constitutes some big, flouncing accountability-shirk
April 27th, 2011 at 1:56 pm
“I think Elmo Iscariot makes a very important point: the wishful thinking part is the belief that there is some rational actor behind the strange things that happen, good or bad. After all, many early religions focused on keeping the mean spirits happy and disinclined to mess with you, as opposed to pleasing a good deity who will keep them at bay for you (broad strokes there).”
That’s exactly why elmo’s post is the mirror image of the article LabRat fisked so perfectly. Illustrating the point by completely missing it is kind of beautiful, really.
Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions. If I contend that your picture of my belief about God is erroneous, what then?
LabRat described the trap in detail, and you guys are still stepping right on it.
April 27th, 2011 at 2:05 pm
“… but if you’ve got any of those Reese’s peanut butter bunnies, we can try those.”
Ugh. There’s no accounting for taste, and one of the worst I’ve experienced is the combination of chocolate and peanut butter.
But, I’m an atheist. What the hell do I know?
April 27th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
If I contend that your picture of my belief about God is erroneous, what then?
I’d ask you to elaborate, so that I can understand your position better. But given that you so far seem to take much more joy in loftily sneering at my childish idiocy and intellectual laziness, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a clear response.
April 27th, 2011 at 3:20 pm
I’d ask you to elaborate, so that I can understand your position better.
YES!!! That’s exactly what this whole thing is about.
If you’re willing to accept it, I’m not hostile toward you. I’ll admit I was entertained seeing you do exactly what DeStefano did, and I apologize for treating you like a source of amusement. I meant what I said to be constructive, not ridiculing. Any joy you sense is my love for exchanging ideas. “Iron sharpening iron,” and all that.
So back to the topic, I said you did the same thing as DeStefano in seeking to explain something based on broad assumptions. These assumptions may make sense to you, but they are wrong. They helped you construct a faulty context of understanding (In this model, Christians are implicitly rational actors making decisions from utility.) that allows you to make sense of a disparate worldview in terms of your own. It’s the same mistake DeStefano made. What LabRat and I would agree on here is that you can’t use “models” to explain “Christians”. The assumptions don’t hold up.
These assumptions are so ingrained in your perspective that you understood the exact opposite of what was being said (And it seems uncontroversial that religion and Christianity in particular are very emotionally satisfying for their adherents; it’s a large part of DeStephano’s argument for religion.) leading you to challenge when LabRat granted the point.
It is far more productive to understand a person than to try and explain him in a larger context. My whole thing with shirking responsibility is taking the ball and running with it. But the short version is that I can only respect you if I believe that you’re responsible for who you are and what you do. That only comes from understanding choice. Explaining away my choice to believe in God as a rational response to natural disasters is patronizing. It doesn’t help you understand me at all.
April 27th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
And once again you’ve proven regardless of what you say, or how you say it, people are NOT going to change their beliefs… But it was one hellva post! (can I say that?)
April 27th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Given that USA Today is written at a 5th grade reading level, having LabRat fisk one of their editorials is a bit like using an aerial drone to hunt deer.
The results are messy and oddly satisfying, even if it really is not sporting.
April 27th, 2011 at 5:05 pm
[Forgive wordiness. Long days and fatigue are giving me the dumb. Brevity an early casualty.]
If you’re willing to accept it, I’m not hostile toward you. I’ll admit I was entertained seeing you do exactly what DeStefano did, and I apologize for treating you like a source of amusement. I meant what I said to be constructive, not ridiculing. Any joy you sense is my love for exchanging ideas. “Iron sharpening iron,” and all that.
If I can give a word of advice, friend, it would be that responding to interaction with “you guys are so wrong you can’t even see how wrong you are” sends such strong Trollsign that people who are interested in productive conversations may just write it off as impossible.
In any case, I think we just have a misunderstanding here:
Explaining away my choice to believe in God as a rational response to natural disasters is patronizing. It doesn’t help you understand me at all…It is far more productive to understand a person than to try and explain him in a larger context.
When we try to understand movements and belief systems, we have to generalize to some degree or we can’t ever get anywhere. If I talk about New Jersey’s oppressively hyperregulatory and corrupt character, that doesn’t mean I’m accusing my Jerseyan mother of being a micromanaging busybody. I don’t know you from Adam, and don’t presume to know a damned thing about your religious beliefs or the basis for them. If I talk about the social utility of the theology in Judges and Job to the communities that created and adopted them, it has nothing to do with you in particular; I didn’t start debating theological specifics about your individual beliefs because for all I know, you could be a Christian who interprets those books in a radically different way, or even rejects their authority completely. (I understand there’s an emerging consensus that even those Biblical Jewish communities were much, much less unanimous than was traditionally assumed, but I’m not really current with Biblical scholarship.)
In short, this kind of speculation isn’t an attempt to understand any individual in a context; it’s an attempt to understand the context.
I have no beef with religion or with individual religious people; even when I set out to defend atheism from an attack by a Christian, I try to explicitly point out that Christians and atheist are both not monolithic caricatures. It seems silly to include a bunch of disclaimers every time religion comes up, but maybe I’m underestimating the baggage that comes with this discussion. I can understand how a materialist talking to a materialist about religion in a generalized way from a materialist perspective can come across to a religious person as condescending and begging the question.
Feel free to drop me a line if you’re interested in sharing details of your own individual theology; if you’re willing to accept it, I’m legitimately curious.
April 27th, 2011 at 6:18 pm
Well, like Elizabeth Tudor, I don’t seem to have the religious temperament, but I do seem to have a taste for ritual. The reason I attend Christian services is
a. I have made a commitment to do so, and
b. people I respect who I think are smarter than I am, such as Jerry Pournelle and Neptunus Lex, do so.
Besides, I have experienced a very numinous sensation when the man held up the cup and said, “This is the blood of Christ, which was shed for you.
Not to mention that Quaker wedding in which I participated. Numinous ain’t even in it, the whole place was _glowing_.
April 27th, 2011 at 9:50 pm
Arguments like this are why I’m officially agnostic.
(I’ll admit leaning towards atheism, though.)
I don’t know. But I know that I don’t know - and that puts me miles ahead of the new-Earth Creationists, and those who have the simple arguments about why Evolution is impossible.
April 27th, 2011 at 9:54 pm
DJ said:
one of the worst I’ve experienced is the combination of chocolate and peanut butter.
“She’s a witch! Burn ‘er!”
Seriously, Are you a Communist or something?
April 27th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
Dr. F — I think there’s a significant difference between Elmo’s simplifying assumptions about Christians and DeStefano’s simplifying assumptions about atheists. If I’m reading him right, Elmo’s trying to make sense of a mode of thought that’s alien to him, and “hey, it all seems to work out if religion is a rational response to a hideously complex, ridiculously unfair, and maddeningly opaque world by a social storytelling species” is a way to simplify the problem and make it more tractable, rather than an attempt exactly to describe all believers. Happens all the time when reasoning about complexity. (“Assume the racehorse is a sphere of uniform density.” “Assume the consumers are rational agents with perfect information.”) I might be projecting a bit here, because I tend to think about believers the same way — as far as I can tell, there’s no “faith” part of my brain, so when people talk about their faiths I can’t figure out what they mean except by building a — necessarily simplistic — model.
DeStefano, on the other hand, is building up a straw man specifically to set it on fire in a newspaper editorial. If you backed him into a corner, he might admit that, well, of course some atheists aren’t hyper-reductionist materialists, but for his column to hold together, his generalization must be exact and universal in all the ways Elmo’s isn’t. If he were to close with an admission that he simply doesn’t grok atheism, and has merely been rebutting the sort of thing he imagines goes on in college-level evolutionary biology classes, all his rant accomplishes is to show that he has utterly lost sight of the principle of charity.
(Not that anyone’s likely to care, but I consider myself a hyper-reductionist materialist and I’m still unwilling to commit to any spiritual stance past an indifferent sort of apathetic agnosticism.)
April 28th, 2011 at 3:17 am
LabRat: “It’s just that, from my perspective, the answers have all so far turned out to be “effects of natural processes” and I have no reason to suspect the answer is suddenly going to be “will of an incomprehensible being that transcends nature”, and as to the origin of natural law, I find “because that’s simply the way the universe is” a less problematic answer than “because a being vastly more complex than the universe itself made it that way”. ”
Neither of these options exclude the other. The fact that an automobile engine operates doesn’t exclude the fact that it was built by someone. Just because a natural process produces an effect doesn’t exclude the probability that that process was created.
But I am curious….why is believing in the possibility of a Creator of these natural processes “problematic”?
April 28th, 2011 at 7:51 am
“Seriously, Are you a Communist or something?”
Well, I suppose I could be labeled a “something”, that something being a lover of fine chocolate. It’s not just for breakfast any more, y’see.
I like peanut butter on crackers, but nowhere else. The combination of peanut butter and chocolate, or peanut butter in cookies, I find nauseating.
April 28th, 2011 at 9:35 am
Bluntobject, I’ll certainly stipulate that elmo and DeStefano made different flavors of the same error, but it’s the same error nonetheless. The assumptions only work from within your worldview, which is why you can recognize DeStefano’s assumptions as readily as I can recognize elmo’s. Just as DeStefano presumed a religious worldview to criticize atheism, so did elmo presume a naturalist worldview to comprehend the religious. Both approaches are understandable and equally flawed.
That DeStefano’s article was antagonistic and elmo’s comment was merely curious actually shames me, and therein lies the significant difference (tone). Then again, this is why I’m more eager to have a dialog with elmo over at his blog than I am to ever even meet DeStefano-with whom I no doubt have much more in common.
Since I must have an opinion on everything, peanut butter and chocolate is food of the gods.
April 28th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
“Since I must have an opinion on everything, peanut butter and chocolate is food of the gods.”
Pagan!
April 28th, 2011 at 4:15 pm
I wouldn’t even necessarily define the approach elmo and blunt outlined as necessarily inherently flawed; they’re both attempts to explore a different mindset from within a worldview the owner believes to be correct. The reason I’m less likely to take the same approach even from a friendly, curious mindset is simply out of a wish not to be rude, or to discuss on terms of solid mutual agreement.
Seeker- “problematic” only in terms of a raw attempt to make sense of complexity. I find “the cause of complexity, which must be explained, is a being impossibly more complex than complexity” to be an even more unsatsifying answer than “things simply are”. As a belief in and of itself I don’t find it problematic, I merely don’t share it.
April 28th, 2011 at 8:44 pm
LR — it’s not so much that I believe the materialist world-view to be correct (I do, but that’s not the point). It’s that the spiritual world-view is the next best thing to inaccessible to me, and trying to simulate it within a materialist framework is the best way for me to think about it at all. I know that I’m doing a far-from-perfect job of it, and I try to avoid claiming that I’ve figured out how religious people think (the whole point of the exercise being that I can’t figure it out, and am compensating). The best I’ve been able to do otherwise was read Kierkegaard, which gave me insight but not understanding.
Either way, I’m eager to read a Dr. F/Elmo exchange over on Vox M., if it develops, and while peanut butter’s one of the few things that can redeem milk chocolate I vastly prefer dark chocolate — with mint, if I must.
April 28th, 2011 at 9:12 pm
“Schizophrenics inhabit an exciting world full of mysteries and entities the rest of us aren’t privy to as well.”
A schizophrenic who has come to terms with his unusual hardwiring has no trouble recognizing the same hardwiring at work when someone has a religious experience … even if the person having the religious experience does not have a clue what is really happening.
April 29th, 2011 at 6:17 am
The reason I’m less likely to take the same approach even from a friendly, curious mindset is simply out of a wish not to be rude…
This may be one of those socially-retarded geek things, but the idea that this could be rude is completely foreign to me. I don’t take any offense when theists in theists’ blogs discuss the implications and context of atheism from an assumed religious perspective in a thoughtful and factual way.
And everybody obviously reacts to everything exactly the way I do, right? Right?
Either way, I’m eager to read a Dr. F/Elmo exchange over on Vox M., if it develops…
The good doctor dropped his reply here. Progress is slow right now, presumably because he’s having as busy a week as I am.
April 29th, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Oh, it’s completely contextual. In the comments section in discussions where I know where everyone’s coming from, sure. In the main blog post that’s going to reach a completely broadcast audience? Less inclined.
May 2nd, 2011 at 8:02 am
My apologies to all, but I can’t resist:
http://www.break.com/pictures/how-peanut-butter-is-made-2052523