Fundamentalists

I was listening to this episode of Star Talk Radio (because Neil deGrasse Tyson is nine kinds of awesome) when Tyson's in-studio guest, Dr. David Grinspoon, described Bill Maher as an "Atheist Fundamentalist."

Suddenly, so many things made sense.

I have often been put off by the likes of Maher and Richard Dawkins when they dismiss everything to do with religion. In this podcast, Maher says that he loses respect for anyone who believes in God to the point that he can't class them with the highest level of thinkers. (That is a paraphrase, but I think Maher would approve it as capturing his idea.) Grinspoon argues that there are things that science can't explain, and that simultaneously holding the belief that the universe is 15 billion years old and that there is a power who may influence some of the things we can't explain is not a failure of intelligence.

Now, I am more and more convinced that this is a silly thing to do. Science has explained so much that there is no reason to believe that there isn't an explanation for the things we haven't figured out yet: we just haven't figured them out yet. But we can't disprove God, so why not?

At the same time, I am more and more convinced that religion serves many useful purposes. After all, if you remove God from the equation, that means that religion was completely and only created by people. So they must have done it for a reason. It meets human needs for community, for organization, for rules, and for structure. Of course it also produces an us-against-them mentality and the necessary structure for hierarchy and oppression, and those things, while human, are definitely bad.

I am not here to sing religion's praises, but what Maher does too often is define religion by it's most ridiculous pieces (i.e. talking snakes) and hold everyone who believes to that standard. He also dismisses everyone who doesn't believe exactly as he does as being less intelligent and generally wrong. That's fundamentalism. And it's no better than religious fundamentalism.

Sometimes religious people have a capacity for creative thought that absolutist atheists just don't have. If you don't believe in the possibilities of fairies, or all-encompassing romantic love, your life will be less rich for it, and possibly less successful. Sometimes it takes a little faith to keep your marriage on track.

And it is possible to believe that God exists, but has no place in science. Or that God exists but didn't write the Bible. Or that God dictated the Bible but some idiot wrote it down wrong. Or that God wrote the Bible for the people who needed it a couple thousand years ago but expects us to have the intelligence to see that it's anachronistic now and use it accordingly. I know some gay, married, highly Progressive God-believers who'd be pretty shocked to find out that they aren't religious.

Thinking religious people are our friends. Anyone who advocates for science and reason in the classroom and as a basis for political discourse is on my side, as are those who advocate for equal rights. And a scientist should be judged by her work, and only by her work. If she writes that God created the world, she's a quack. If she studies the history of the world from a scientific basis, the fact that she sings in the Church choir is not relevant in my estimation of her as a scientist.

We're never going to live in a world where everyone believes the same thing. I'm not sure I'd be interested in living in such a world. What we need is to live in a world where argument is based on rational thinking. What you do with your soul is your own business.

Souring on Dawkins

I'm not sure I can finish The God Delusion. Or rather, I'm not sure I feel like finishing it. Dawkins begins with the premise that the only sensible position on the existence of God is agnosticism, because although science cannot yet prove whether or not there is a God, we should be able to prove it someday. Then he proceeds to write an entire book attempting to prove, scientifically, that there is no God.

Why spend an entire book proving something that can't be proven? Why spend that much effort trying to deny comfort to the faithful? I think he spends far too much effort in the wrong direction, which is why I prefer the efforts of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Dan Savage, Greg Epstein and Penn Jillette. The point is not that everyone needs to disbelieve in God. Faith is faith--it defies logic and it defies science. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

I could vote for someone who believes in fairies, for example. However, if that person insists that the fairies talk to him, and he does what the fairies tell him, that's a different story. It's one thing to believe in God if God, to you, is a benevolent force in the universe that may answer prayers, or if you believe that God is love. It's another thing to believe that the Bible (whichever bible you follow) is the word of God and must be taken literally, or if you believe (as George W. Bush asserts) that God acts through you and that gives you the right to start wars.

It is the laws of God, not the existence of God, that we should argue against. Belief in God is fine insofar as it brings comfort to people in distress or a useful metaphor for teaching children right from wrong. God becomes dangerous when people use God for dangerous things. When one's world view is limited by a belief in God, that is bad. The same can be said for money, however, and I don't see Dawkins arguing against the existence of money. Money exists; perhaps God does to. Neither is the problem. People are the problem, and people can be the solution.

Likewise I see nothing wrong with studying sacred texts. In fact I find them incredibly useful much of the time. I find it unlikely that any problem I might face has never been faced before by any human, or in fact by many people. So I often find it helpful to consult the writings of the past to see how those problems have been solved before. Sometimes I find wisdom in literature, or in talking to an older person, or in reading history (or more likely, watching a documentary on TV.) But the Torah, the Talmud, and the other Jewish sacred texts were written for precisely this reason, and so I often find wisdom there. I don't take any of this literally. I don't believe any of these texts were written or dictated by a deity. But where I find wisdom and useful advice, I use it.

Of course it's essential to take all of this in context. The dating world changed drastically between the time my mother was dating and my own teen years, so it would have been foolish for me to do exactly what my mother did when she was young. But this doesn't mean I couldn't learn from her: of course I could. I just had to consider her stories in their own context and discuss with her how the things she learned from her experience applied to my own situation. I suppose it's a bit harder to do with the Torah since I can't sit down with its writers, but I can take the stories in the Torah in their context and find useful lessons in them.

The stories only become dangerous when one suggests that women can't run their own lives or gay people can't get married because of them.

I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. God is okay, for those who find comfort in the concept. And texts are harmless, in and of themselves, just as matches are harmless as long as they remain on the shelf. Careless reading is as dangerous as playing with matches, and that is where our arguments with the faithful lie. Believe in God if you wish. It's believing in the Bible that I would fight against.

So why did Dawkins waste his time?

Tinkering

I don't have time for a real post today, but I've added some links under "Other References." These are not all things that I like or agree with, but they are famous texts (and a movie) about Atheism, and they've influenced me.

I've begun reading The God Delusion and when I get a bit further in I'll write about it. So far, I'm pleased that Dawkins does not, as Maher does in Religulous, work under the assumption that the only possible definition of God is "the character in the Bible." Maher asserts that if one purports to believe in God, then one must take responsibility for everything written in the Scripture. I think that's ridiculous, and I'm glad to read that Dawkins is arguing against all deities, everywhere.

However, I prefer Epstein's assertion that Progressive believers are our allies provided that they are working for the betterment of Humanity. I can't spend my time being at war with the religious. It's hard enough fighting the Religious Right.