It depends where you start
Emily Manuel at Religion Dispatches talks to Adam Kotsko about his new book, which is about atonement. She mentions someone posting on his blog that “we haven’t really thought through a proper atheism yet.”
Right. I think that you can see this with the New Atheists. Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ and Dennett’s books are a kind of simplistic critique of religion that’s basically not going to change anyone’s mind. I think there has to be more to say about religion other than the fact that it makes no sense as an empirical claim. That’s just too obvious to be interesting. I think that we as a society deserve a better form of atheism.
The claim that the simplistic critique of religion is not going to change anyone’s mind is, frankly, simply ridiculous. He hedges it with “basically” but it’s not clear exactly what the hedge is – the simplistic critique will superficially change anyone’s mind but just not basically? I have no idea what that means.
The claim is ridiculous because it’s not true, and it’s easy to find out that it’s not true.
It’s also not even plausible. Why would the simplistic critique of religion not change anyone’s mind? Is everyone’s mind changeable only by complicated critiques? Certainly not. Most of the time it’s the other way around, surely – a clear easily-grapsed critique with few moving parts is the best way to change someone’s mind. That’s true even for clever people. “I’m going to take Lilac Road.” “Lilac Road is closed for repairs.” “Ah – I’ll go via Pepperville Drive then.”
The thing about the simplistic critique of religion is that lots of people have never been exposed to it. A lot of religious belief is what people have because no one has ever offered them a critique of it, simplistic or otherwise. Sometimes just realizing that there are people who don’t think the magical being exists at all is indeed enough to change anyone’s mind.
That doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it, of course, but it does mean it’s a lot too hasty to announce that it’s not going to change anyone’s mind.
Sure, there’s more to say than that religion makes no sense as an empirical claim, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth saying that religion makes no sense as an empirical claim. By all means say more if you want to, but don’t ignore the value of saying that. It may be too obvious to Adam Kotsko to be interesting, but that doesn’t mean it’s too obvious to everyone to be interesting. If you’ve never thought of it before and then you do, it can be quite interesting.
If nobody’s mind was changed by Dawkins’ book how does she explain Convert’s Corner at his site?
And this “simple” business is driving me crazy. The book says why he chose the type of religion to address, it’s because it’s so stinking common. If some suitably large proportion of the population believes just that sort of simplistic mush then addressing the mush isn’t too obvious or uninteresting. It’s necessary.
So which interesting version of Santa does he want us to discuss?
I’ve heard the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, lament the poor quality of atheists these days. Do they suggest a superior list of atheists – David Hume? Nietzsche? Betranrd Russell? I think Russell was exactly the same kind of atheist as Dawkins & Hitchens – that is, starting with the non-existence of supernatural beings. I think they should make some recommendations of class atheists if all we have today are the second rate.
Well, we’ve had this sort of Ivory Tower Atheism for centuries. It must be so disappointing for stuck-up elites that regular folks are starting to catch on to atheism without the pretensions of academia, and those various and sundry philosophers are increasingly irrelevant to the larger discussion.
It doesn’t help the whole “we need a more sophisticated atheism” crowd that in the real world of real religion, people don’t believe for complex or sophisticated theological or philosophical reasons. Even some professional apologists admit that ultimately they did not come to their faith by any of the complicated “logical” proofs they generate. At some point, the real change in society towards secularism and hopefully atheism is going to have to be from the bottom up, not the sort of top-down imposition by the Ivory Tower clowns.
I thought gnu atheism was going beyond saying that God makes no sense as an empirical claim: gnu atheism also says that God makes no sense as a matter of faith, either. In fact, faith not only makes no sense — it’s a vice. If you believe in God because you choose to have faith, then shame on you.
And religion isn’t good for you, either. Cut it out.
So just how thorough does he want atheism to get? Is it only ‘proper’ if we go into transports over the marvelous ingenuity of the human imagination and belief engine – especially when we’re dealing with intelligent people believing what would otherwise be considered crap, were we not quite so good at marveling at them doing so?
Adam Kotsko tends to support my idea that group-identity is the main factor behind religion as well as political ideologies. God belief, unbelief or any beliefs are not important–what is important is the identification and authority of the group and its mythology. What keeps the mythology as an authority is a persecution complex. Once that complex diminishes, then the mythology is emptied of its contents and no longer has any meaning.
Kotsko dismisses other atheists–not because of reason–but because they’re not in his group or his society. This dismissal is no different to denial, which forms the basic apologetic critique of New Atheism–whether from theists or atheists. New Atheists are other and therefore a threat to the in-group or mainstream society.
And since this is a delusion via the persecution complex, critics of New Atheists believe that New Atheists are persecutors–thus comparing them to militants, terrorists, the tea party and so on.
It is the persecution complex that drives religious mythology and political ideologies. It is why it’s passed on from one generation to the other–why it develops a twisted form of right (a mistaken form of morality) and its authority. Thus the mythology is important–not belief or unbelief.
Ophelia:
I’m 95% certain he means “basically not going to change” as in “not going to change any more than a nominal quantity of minds.” It’s a hedge against the random atheist who Kotsko expects might come out of the woodwork yammering “it changed my mind!”
Not incidentally, the claim is false and ridiculous for pretty much the reasons Ophelia, Grendels Dad @1, and others have provided.
Joe:
I think this is a bias of mine I’ve attested to in previous B&W threads, but for the most part I think most of the “various and sundry philosophers” who have written hifalutin tomes defending atheism/critiquing theism deserve more sympathy than that. The atheological works of folks like George H. Smith, Michael Martin, and (in his somewhat younger days) Antony Flew contain lots of good and worthwhile material; I don’t think we should badmouth those works. More recent Gnu-ish publications have certain advantages (such as broader accessibility) over the tomes by Smith, Martin, and company, and that’s perfectly fine. It seems to me the tomes still have value, even if they’re not as relevant to the “larger” (i.e., current societal) discussion as a god is not Great or a “Pharyngula” is.
One meaningful response, and probably the best one, to the Courtier’s Reply is that it’s a fallacious dodge. Another response, though, is that out-and-proud atheists count among our number several eloquent people who do know plenty about Count Roderigo’s discourse on the Emperor’s boot leather, Bellini’s On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat, and D. T. Mawkscribbler’s notions about imperial undergarments—and who can explain at (sometimes boring) length how flawed those ideas are. That has value, too, and as long as the philosophers in question don’t take dumb potshots (looking at you, Paul Kurtz) at Gnus who address a different portion of the intellectual spectrum, I think we should regard them as allies.
Count me as a Gnu Atheist who is a fan of (most) dusty and academic-ish Old Atheists.
Hee. Good one, Rieux.
I have noticed the distressingly common phenomenon of people not bumping into walls that aren’t there for the ridiculously superficial reason that they are unable to see them. We urgently need a more sophisticated rationale for not bothering to avoid head-on collisions with objects that aren’t there, one grounded in something more interesting than the mere evidence of our eyes, if, that is, we wish, as a species, to save face.
Wellllll…. I think society deserves to live in a world where everyone behaves as if it is obvious that religion makes no sense as an empirical claim. So in that sense he’s right. It would be great if there were no need for the admittedly not-very-complicated attacks on religion made by folks like Dawkins and Hitchens. But the fact that these rather simple-minded attacks have nonetheless caused as much ruckus as they have is a testament to two things: 1) they are needed, and 2) it is perhaps a bit premature for more high-minded attacks to be deployed in the wider public dialog.
If they’re so sure that the simple critiques of religion aren’t going to change people’s minds, why do they keep trying to stop people from making them? If they want to make more sophisticated critiques of religion themselves, nobody is stopping them.
On the discussion board of an advice column this morning, someone was saying that it wasn’t worth arguing with a homophobic relative (who didn’t want her kids to be around her lesbian sister and sister-in-law) because “people’s minds don’t change on such topics.” Minds may not change on important subjects from one discussion, but they do change. If minds didn’t change, my state wouldn’t have just passed a same-sex marriage bill.
Rieux,
I’m just complaining about the “stuck-up elitists,” not all philosophers. Certainly I’m also not attacking philosophy as a whole either… not this second, at any rate! :)
My point is that the academics who seem to be especially anti-Gnu seem to be somewhat jealous of the success of “less sophisticated” atheists. They also seem to be generally offended that regular people can also be atheists, and make calls for all of us to study theology, philosophy, history… and occasionally call for us to produce atheist martyrs?… in order to be justified in talking on the subject. It’s cool and maybe even useful that people have written books on the subject if philosophy is your bag, but it isn’t necessary for everyone to read those books. I don’t need much study to not believe in talking snakes… and not much more study to dismiss nonsense like the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
I agree, Joe. And on my end, I absolutely don’t want to come off as denigrating “less sophisticated” critiques, which are routinely more than sophisticated enough for the material they’re critiquing.
I’m just touchy about the implication that the stuffy academic kind of atheist work—such as Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God or Hector Avalos’s Fighting Words (which actually isn’t all that hifalutin) or The End of Biblical Studies (which sort of is)—is passé or not worthwhile because there are less-academic Gnu critiques available. I think there’s a lot of good (if not always very societally relevant) material in the former, and I think “the pretensions of academia” can be very good things in some contexts.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan of Paul Kurtz’s work who was dismayed to see the guy taking shots at Gnus in recent months; judging from comments I’ve seen from other Gnus, I suspect I’d also like some of the things R.J. Hoffman (and Berlinerblau too? dunno) has written in an atheist vein before he got on the gnubashing kick. I hope Smith, Martin, and Avalos haven’t gone there. Surely Avalos (who is clearly the Gnu-est figure in religious-studies academia) can’t have….
Anyway, Joe, I’m clearly attacking a point you didn’t really make. Nonetheless, take that.
I’ll consider myself duly chastened and deny myself the privilege of a fruity oaty bar as atonement.
Miranda!
(Uh-oh: duck!)
This sounds like nothing more than “ignore the man behind the screen.” Although it may not appear that sophisticated, the simple idea that faith claims don’t make sense is where the questioning begins. For some, it may be necessary to plow through years of listening to what appear to be sophisticated arguments, if only because they are backed up by years of repitition by people who held power. Eventually those are seen as making no sense, and you end up where you began.
I was mildly surprised/heartened to see Hoffman had written the foreword for Ibn Warraq’s Why I am not a Muslim. Also interesting to see him quoted, at reasonable length, within the text, talking about how questionable the historicity of Jesus is (But also how his existence is almost neither here nor there to the myth surrounding him).
(Please don’t take that as an super accurate paraphrase. Going from memory. And from a few weeks ago, and inbetween other books. WIANM is very interesting, but wow is it dry, and wow is it quote heavy, makes it very disjointed to read.
You see, if it changes your mind, then you were basically an atheist to begin with, so that doesn’t really count as changing someone’s mind. It’s just preaching to the choir.
So an argument can only be considered good enough if it can change the mind of someone impervious to reason.
He is right here. Most believers do not believe in religion as an empirical claim, or only as an empirical claim, and cannot be dissuaded by mere evidence. The other arguments- moral and emotional- against religion are also important. The fact that other belief-systems that satisfy the emotional needs and the need for moral certainty that religion supplied for many people turned out to be just as irrational and murderous as religious belief is evidence that merely demonstrating the falsity of religious belief is not enough.
David:
Okay. I did read that book in the mid-to-late ’90s, in part because I was going to be staying in the same building as Warraq for a few nights, there was some concern that Predictable Parties might try to harm him (say, by blowing that building up), and I thought that if I was going to be blown up I might as well read the book that was “responsible” for it. I didn’t remember that Hoffman contributed to the book, but then I had no idea who Hoffman was until a few months ago.
WIaNaM dry, heavy—yeah, I suppose it is. I thought it was tolerably good. I certainly learned a lot about Islam that I hadn’t known before.
No,Stewart, I don’t think that’s the argument: because many people believe for reasons that are not connected wth reason or logic good arguments are not all we need to see why people are believers or to dissuade believers .
@Rieux: Yeah, there’s certainly a lot to like, the issues I have are mainly with how he’s getting his point across. I think it’s very strong when it’s talking amtters of historical fact. When it’s a case of either this happened then, or it didn’t, he does brilliantly, but when he’s going on a quotathon and almost quoting authorities, it feels a bit weaker. It’s a fine line. basically, the sections where he quotes multiple sources saying that “Mohammed was a shit for XY and Z reasons” are stronger than the sections where he quotes the same or simialr sources just saying, “I reckon mohammed was a shit.”
I think I was also hoping for more than just Koran quoting for some sections. The apologist’s stance is to use the old “out of context” line, and I think that’s generally a poor excuse, however, I still think Warraq could have done a lot better dealing with the whole “out of context” thing. (In fact, he has done better, there’s articles of his over at the NER website that do exactly that, which is why those bits of the book are a little frustrating.)
Even though I’m now a little off topic, I am also a little annoyed with some of his generalisations about what “all muslims believe.” He has a few passages where he asserts “all muslims believe that the Koran is the infallible word of God.” In one sense that’s true, but in another sense, it’s not like there’s not lapsed muslims, it’s not like there’s not “moderate” muslims, and it’s not like there’s not Islamic scholars out there who haven’t tried the old sophisticated theology to get around the inherent problems with infallibility. Now, I think they doa poor job, I think the rationalisations fail miserably, but I would have preferred Warraq to address those rationalisations and dismiss them rather than saying “all muslims believe X.” I guess what I’m saying may sound dangerously like some of the criticisms levelled at dawkins, but I really don’t mean to suggest he should have gotten bogged down in disecting David Hart-esque BS, but even a caveat or paragraph here or there pointing out the problems with infallibility would have been nice.
On topic: I’ll just put my hand up as another who has been swayed by “simplicitc critiques.” or rather empirical concerns. I think they can really act as a lighting bolt, or a slap in the face. I’ve mentioned over at Eric’s place, many moons ago, DM Murdoch’s The Christ Conspiracy. That book had quite an effect on me. I don’t want to overstate how true it’s claims are, and I recall finding the last few chapters heading dangerously towards some wooish ideas, but the very fact it challenged, with some pretty excellent comparative religion discussion, the fact of Jesus existence really did broaden my thinking. It was like, “oh wow, you can even question that assumption?!?!”
Well I knew that about Hoffmann. I’ve had lunch with Hoffmann and Ibn Warraq (and various other people). The anti-atheist fume is something of a detour; that’s part of why I kept being so surprised by it.
I despise Serious Thinkers ™ who just seem to think if we lend the appearance of gravitas and complexity to something, it automatically becomes respectable. I even think it’s s small part of what fuels anti-intellectualism in American popular culture (though there are certainly other factors as well).
And as for this book, what the hell is he going on about? I mean, sure you can adapt some Christian metaphysics to a secular social program, but why on earth would you want to? You could do it with any system if you alter the meanings enough. “Okay, I know phrenology has been debunked, but I’m just using metaphorical phrenology that measures the size of your spiritual skull.” I guess it’d just be too obvious to point out that phrenology is bullshit and leave it at that.
I think there’s a strong tendency to not want to admit that enormous amounts of deep thought by very serious people over centuries – theology – was all a complete waste of time. There’s an emotional investment there. People feel that they ought to respect anything which has been so important for so long.
In the sciences I think we have an advantage; it’s completely normal in science to acknowledge that even figures we greatly admire were, in fact, completely wrong about major points. I don’t feel any need to pretend that Newton was right about alchemy; or even that Newton was right about gravity.
Having wasted some time in reading various vapid and incoherent rambles by Kotsko, which mostly consist of quoting other vapid and incoherent rambles, I ask why TF should anyone care what he says or doesn’t say. Frankly I’m tired of all these velveteen atheists who will never be real…..
Ooh, velveteen atheists, that’s a good one. sailor may be the new Hamilton Jacobi.
Ophelia: thankyou but I have no such lofty ambition…..