Belief in No God Is Also Irrational

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett hopes to break the spell--not of religious belief, but of the conviction that it is not a fit subject for scientific inquiry. Never the twain shall meet--this is a bad idea according to Dennett. Stephen Jay Gould wrote of "non-overlapping magisteria," of both science and religion as worthy of respect in their own rights, but unbridgeable, the one to the other.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking The Spell. You Think Belief In God Is Irrational? So Is Belief In Atheism

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett hopes to break the spell--not of religious belief, but of the conviction that it is not a fit subject for scientific inquiry. Never the twain shall meet--this is a bad idea according to Dennett. Stephen Jay Gould wrote of "non-overlapping magisteria," of both science and religion as worthy of respect in their own rights, but unbridgeable, the one to the other.

Dennett takes exception to  this, maintaining that  religion is a fit subject for scientific scrutiny, and in doing so he draws upon evolutionary, anthropological and psychological research on the origin and spread of religion. He speculates as to how a primitive belief in ghosts later became a belief in wind spirits, rain gods, wood nymphs, and leprechauns. According to Dennett, as hunter-gatherers became farmers, as they aggregated into prehistoric villages, a need to protect one's own arose--property, spouse, children, crops, livestock. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene no longer served the common weal. That is, genetic kinship among tribe members was not enough in itself to insure Darwinian cooperation. Shared beliefs rather than DNA enforced proper behavior. People became commanded by an authoritarian but vengeful god to do their duty to others not genetic kin.

This is a tidy explanation, tying all up in a neat bundle, but there are the Neanderthals who were not fit inside.  At digs of Neanderthal burial sites, something extraordinary was found, something which provides evidence of Neanderthal practices long before ours became the dominantly successful species.  Around the burial site and bones of a beloved individual flowers and trinkets were carefully placed. They are extinct now, the Neanderthals, but could this mean that even they had  a sense of the spiritual, a regard for an after life? I can see no other way to understand the findings. So much for Dennett's religion as emergent from the need for duty in communities. Something there is that cannot be packaged as well as he would have it.  As Yeats put it, "An aging man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick unless soul clap hands, sing, and louder sing for every tatter in his mortal dress." Religion was informed by spiritual as well as moral needs.

Dennett draws upon the concept of memes--scientifically unverifiable and another Dawkins concept--to explain how primitive beliefs evolved into modern religions. "Every minister in every faith is like a jazz musician keeping traditions alive by playing the beloved standards . . . but mixing familiarity and novelty in just the right proportions to grab the minds and hearts of their hosts." Hosts here is meant to mean the same as an unsuspecting, sometimes insentient host for a virus, a parasite. According to Dennett, people are dumb, unwitting hosts for memes, in this case religious beliefs. I will add, they are also hosts for the vaunted faith in the scientific model as the only true way of understanding the universe.

Sorry, Daniel, but I cannot get there from here. Nor can you. Dennett is playing in a mind-field, one that eventually will explain nothing and sets off duds.

Although I do not have interest or belief in the dogma or doctrine of any religion, I do see all religions as serving a deep, human need. (I think Dennett would agree with me on this while he holds that humankind would be better off without the need.)  The need is not served by a flawed scientific paradigm in which the objects of scientific investigation somehow are supposed to provide meaning. (Else, why are they pursued?) I am reminded of Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously remarked, “the more we find out about the universe, the more meaningless it all seems.” Meaningless, because science ignores the other magisterium, which at its core--though not always in tenets--points to what we all are, and teaches that fulfillment-meaning cannot be found in the objects of scientific research. John Gray continues for me.

Defender of Belief and Atheist

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins rose to celebrity with the 1976 publication of his brilliant book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins is an evangelist and publicist for atheism. He also believes that humanity has morally progressed and that the holocaust was merely a temporary set-back. He has stated that human progress is inevitable. (Scientifically speaking, this is a rather un-testable hypothesis.)

Terry Eagleton is a Marxist and highly regarded literary critic who finds in the agony of Christ on the cross a perpetual reminder of humankind's need to rise to its better, more compassionate, loving self. He finds Dawkins' moral progressivism rather shallow. Human history constantly reminds us of our failures to set the world to rights. Dawkins' view is a naive and easy humanism, according to Eagleton. As to Dawkins' evangelism for godlessness, Eagleton also finds that rather empty and easy.

Why We Believe In God

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." Woody Allen

"Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe." Recent research on the minds of infants reveals explanations of why we believe.

"One traditional approach to the origin of religious belief begins with the observation that it is difficult to be a person. There is evil all around; everyone we love will die; and soon we ourselves will die—either slowly and probably unpleasantly or quickly and probably unpleasantly. For all but a pampered and lucky few life really is nasty, brutish, and short. And if our lives have some greater meaning, it is hardly obvious."

". . . sometimes theologians use the foregoing arguments to make a case for why we should believe: if one wishes for purpose, meaning, and eternal life, there is nowhere to go but toward God."

Supernatural beliefs can find explanation in infancy: "Six-month-olds understand that physical objects obey gravity. If you put an object on a table and then remove the table, and the object just stays there (held by a hidden wire), babies are surprised; they expect the object to fall. They expect objects to be solid, and contrary to what is still being taught in some psychology classes, they understand that objects persist over time even if hidden. (Show a baby an object and then put it behind a screen. Wait a little while and then remove the screen. If the object is gone, the baby is surprised.) . . ."

. . . We are dualists; it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity—a mind or soul—are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them. . . .

. . . This belief system opens the possibility that we ourselves can survive the death of our bodies. Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. . . .

" . . . But while it may be true that "theologically correct" Buddhism explicitly rejects the notions of body-soul duality and immaterial entities with special powers, actual Buddhists believe in such things."

"The major alternative theory [of religion] is social: religion brings people together, giving them an edge over those who lack this social glue. . . . In this conception religion is a fraternity, and the analogy runs deep. . . . This is clear in the Old Testament, in which 'a jealous God' issues commands such as:

'Should your brother, your mother's son, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom or your companion who is like your own self incite you in secret, saying Let us go and worship other gods' . . . you shall surely kill him. '

. . . This theory explains almost everything about religion—except the religious part. It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people together, and it may well be that a group that does such things has an advantage over one that does not. But it is not clear why a religion has to be involved. . . ."

"First, even if a gap between America and Europe exists, it is not the United States that is idiosyncratic. After all, the rest of the world—Asia, Africa, the Middle East—is not exactly filled with hard-core atheists. If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States.

Second, the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller than we think. . . . the big difference has to do with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (. . . they argue that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.) Most polls from European countries show that a majority of their people are believers." More

A Hiccup of Gross Irrationality?

According to Hindu advaita philosophy, or nondualism, your "I am" is a manifestation of the great "I AM," and for that reason you don't die because your apparent self is only an illusion, a manifestation, a projection on the screen of your mind. In Christian doctrine, our immortal souls are sent to either heaven or hell. (Fortunately, Pope Benedict not too long ago saved innocent babies from limbo by decreeing that it does not exist.) Descartes found he could not doubt that he was doubting, and for that reason he existed. Each of these perspectives provides a stratagem for positing some kind of eternal being against the fear of dying.

Of course we knew it would only be a matter of time before neuroscientists and neurophilosophers would take aim at such beliefs as so much nonsense. I am reminded of Tom Wolfe's famous essay about them, titled "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." (See the sidebar on this page.) An argument for the evolution of the brain and from evolutionary psychology provides them with their starting point. Read on.

Some researchers "are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start." More

Fashionable To Be Devoutly Undevout

"Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion’s most passionate antagonists—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others—have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance" More

Atheism Is Also A Faith

“Religion is proving perfectly compatible with modernity in all its forms, high and low.” This conclusion by John Micklethwait, editor of the Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, seems calculated to enrage secular rationalists of all stripes.

Whether Marxian or Millian, socialist or liberal, secular rationalists have held one tenet in common: religion belongs to the infancy of the species; the more modern a society becomes, the less room there is for religious belief and practice. Never questioned, this is what lies behind the hot-gospel sermons of evangelical atheists: if you want to be modern, say goodbye to God.

At bottom, the assertion that religion is destined to die out is a confession of faith." More

Philosophers & God: An Age-Old Debate

Atheists today have public intellectuals on their side, as well as neuroscientists and philosophers. These people sound their opinions far and wide and the mass media provides them with a means. For all their stridency, there are some who are amused and say it was ever thus. Consider the following on Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, whom the essayist, Alex Byrne, calls "the four horsemen of atheism."

"The question of God’s existence is one of those few matters of general interest on which philosophers might pretend to expertise—Dennett is a professional philosopher, and Harris has a B.A. in the subject. Still, of the four, it is Dawkins who wades the furthest into philosophy. So what can philosophy contribute? In particular, have philosophers come to a verdict on the traditional arguments for God’s existence?

Although it would be too much to expect complete consensus, it is fair to say that the arguments have left the philosophical community underwhelmed. The classic contemporary work is J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism, whose ironic title summarizes Mackie’s conclusion: the persistence of belief in God is a kind of miracle because it is so unsupported by reason and evidence. The failure of arguments for God’s existence need not lead straight to atheism . . . ."

Byrne's coda: "the devout do not know that God exists in the way it is known that dinosaurs existed, or that there exist infinitely many prime numbers. The funny thing about arguments for the existence of God is that, if they succeed, they were never needed in the first place."

Somebody who left a comment on the essay: "Any Christian who busies himself trying to prove or debate the existence of God is missing his true relationship in the world." More

Children, Theory of Mind, & Hard-Wiring For God

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that religion is propagated through indoctrination, especially of children. Children are gullible, explains Dawkins, and they carry into adulthood what is imprinted on their brains at an early age.

Research indicates this is not the case. Instead, it argues that "god isn't going away, and that atheism will always be a hard sell." Children the world over seem to have an innate capacity to believe in god or gods. This is apparently how the human mind works. It is a kind of intuitive thinking that is part of our brain structure throughout life. In short, studies of children imply that belief in god is hard-wired into the brain.

"There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners."

Still, the ability to think about disembodied minds, is insufficient to explain belief in God. There is also our natural inclination to think in terms of cause and effect. For a hunter-gatherer if the wind rustled a bush, the cause might be construed as spirits.

Something called common-sense dualism also plays a part. Babies "as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people." More at New Scientist.

The Resurrection and Belief

I find a mystery novel by Maggie Hamand, The Resurrection of the Body, interesting because it explores the theme of Christ's resurrection on several levels, theological, psychological, sociological, and faith.

Its main character, Richard Page, is vicar of a parish in a seedy part of London. On Good Friday a man stumbles into his church and dies there in a pool of blood. Nobody knows who he is and he is taken to the morgue. Early Sunday morning, his body disappears. People start seeing him, or think they do. He trims roses in a public garden. He eats fish in a restaurant. He pays a prostitute and follows her up the stairs to her flat. The reviewer has this to say:

" If we had lived in Jerusalem in the first century of the common era, would we have believed Mary Magdalene when she said she saw Jesus in the garden? Thomas when he said he saw Jesus' wounds? Peter when he said he had breakfast with him on the beach?

And even though we know those stories well, how do we relate to the tales told by Rev. Page and his parishioners? Has an odd event triggered mass hysteria? Is an overworked pastor losing his grip? Is physical resurrection possible? Is it OK to go to church—to pastor a church, even—when one's faith is shaky? What is faith, anyway?

Such are the mysteries evoked by this strange little story, and to [Maggie] Hamand's credit, she does not neatly solve them. Ask a book group what point this author is trying to make, and you may get three or four mutually exclusive answers. This, I think, is the book's chief charm: it re-creates some of the bewilderment people surely felt in Jerusalem during the weeks following Jesus' crucifixion."

Elsewhere in the review we find, "Readers hoping for a conventional whodunit or thriller will be disappointed as the story unfolds. The mystery here is theological and psychological, not procedural." The review's subtitle is what caught my eye. Here it is: "The aftermath of a Good Friday murder raises disturbing questions for an Anglican vicar who doesn't believe in the physical reality of the Resurrection" More

Andrew Newberg: Why God Won't Go Away

Andrew Newberg, M.D., finds in his research evidence that the God factor is hard-wired into the brain so that religion and spirituality are likely to be with the human species for a very long time.

Newberg studies the brain and takes an approach against the mainstream. Rather than dismiss it as irrelevant in matters scientific, he sees the God factor as deeply embedded in the brain's wiring. Eighteenth Century thinkers said that the universe is a great machine, with perhaps a prime mover, but with the universe in motion that mover (God) is no longer needed. They expected history to vindicate them. Two hundred years later, religion and spirituality have not receded from public consciousness but instead are as strong as ever. Here is a video titled "God, Reality and Everything." Part 1 of 2



Click here for Part 2.

Read another take on the issue: Born Believers: How Your Brain Creates God.

The Mail has an update on god spot research.

V.S. Ramachandran on God, the temporal lobes, and mystical experience.

Part 1. Subject as above.



Part 2. On emotional salience and religious or mystical experiences. Emotional reactions to moral atrocities committed to other people, and omnipotence. Are all brains wired for religious belief? Watch it here.

Potpourri: Laughter, Cannibalism in Europe, Maria Doria Russell- God, Evil & Free Will, Why Does Music Affect Us?, Miles Davis & Theology

A Potpourri Today:

Why Do We Laugh?

Medical Cannibalism in Europe

On God, Evil & Free Will

Why Does Music Affect Us So Powerfully?

Miles Davis and Theology

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A big mystery: Why do we laugh? Contrary to folk wisdom, most laughter is not about humor. Read about it here.

The rhinoceros faces extinction partly because in Asia its horn, when ground into powder, is believed to promote virility, or act as an aphrodisiac. In Europe, a different species was once regarded as having curative powers. Consider this by Johann Schröder, a German pharmacologist, who wrote these words in the 17th century. His recipe was to cut the meat into small pieces or slices, sprinkled with "myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe" and then let it soak in wine for a few days. The meat specifically required was the "cadaver of a reddish man ... of around 24 years old." More in Spiegel.

Mary Doria Russell, a paleoanthropologist turned novelist has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page--about God, evil, doubt, and free will. Listen at Speaking of Faith.

Why does music affect us so powerfully? Like language, are there universal interpretations of the emotions that various pieces of music expresses? Is it like art in that a community of appreciation gives its importance to us? Listen at Philosophy Talk

Jon Michael Spencer says that When he listens "to the cool jazz cuts on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue," he senses "that the music has something to do with the spiritual-realm." They aren't "like the bebop Davis was moving away from after a stint with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie 'Bird' Parker." Read at Theology Today. Look for January 1996 and "Miles Davis' Kind of Blue."

Does science make belief in God obsolete?

Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?

Steven Pinker of Harvard. . .

Yes, if by...

science "we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.

Traditionally, a belief in God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral? . . .

No and yes . . .

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, O.P., is a Dominican friar, the Archbishop of Vienna, Austria, a Member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Education of the Roman Catholic Church, and was lead editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Absolutely not . . .
William D. Phillips, a Nobel Laureate in physics, is a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

No, but it should . . .
Christopher Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great and the editor of The Portable Atheist. These and more views can be found by clicking here.

No, as a matter of reason and truth. The knowledge we have gained through modern science makes belief in an Intelligence behind the cosmos more reasonable than ever. Yes, as a matter of mood, sensibility, and sentiment. Not science itself but a reductive "scientific mentality" that often accompanies it, along with the power, control, comfort, and convenience provided by modern technology, has helped to push the concept of God into the hazy twilight of agnosticism. Superficially it may seem that the advances of science have made God obsolete by providing natural explanations for phenomena that were once thought to be the result of direct divine activity—the so-called "God of the gaps." But this advance has been the completion of a program of purification from superstition begun thousands of years ago by Athens and Jerusalem, by a handful of Greek sages and by the people of Israel, who "de-divinized" Nature to a degree unparalleled in the ancient world. Summarizing an established tradition 750 years ago, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the wise governor ordinarily governs by delegation to competent subordinates. In the case of Nature, God's ordinary providence governs by means of the regularities ("laws") built into the natures of created things. This theistic outlook has been fully vindicated. As the ancient Greek materialists recognized long ago, if we wish to explain the observed world in terms of Matter without reference to Mind, then it must be explained by things material, ultimate, and very simple all at the same time—by indivisible, notional "atoms" and a chance "swerve" that sets them in random motion. If the things of everyday experience are mere aggregates of these "atoms," and if the cosmos is infinitely old and infinitely large, then chance can do the rest. To be the complete explanation of material reality, these "atoms," and whatever natural regularities they exhibit, must be so simple that their existence as inexplicable "brute facts" is plausible. Fast-forward to the present: Modern science has shown that Nature is ordered, complex, mathematically tractable, and intelligible "all the way down," as far as our instruments and techniques can discern. Instead of notional, perfectly simple "atoms," we have discovered the extraordinarily complex, beautiful, and mathematical "particle zoo" of the Standard Model of physics, hovering on the border of existence and intelligibility (as Aristotle predicted long ago with his doctrine of prime matter). And order, complexity, and intelligibility exist "all the way up" as well. We see a teleological hierarchy and chain of emergence from quantized physics, giving rise to stable chemistry, enabling the nearly miraculous properties of carbon and biochemistry, providing the material basis for the emergence of life with its own ontological hierarchy of metabolic (plant), sensitive (animal), and rational (human) existence. Beyond this astounding and unfailing order and intelligibility, our knowledge of which increases each day as science expands its scope, we now know of the precise fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants that make possible a life-supporting universe. In short, the Nature we know from modern science embodies and reflects immaterial properties and a depth of intelligibility far beyond the wildest imaginings of the Greek philosophers. To view all these extremely complex, elegant, and intelligible laws, entities, properties, and relations in the evolution of the universe as "brute facts" in need of no further explanation is, in the words of the great John Paul II, "an abdication of human intelligence." But the modern mood is an entirely different matter. In terms of modern sensibilities, the intellectual culture of the West is dominated by a scientific mentality that seeks to explain qualitative and holistic realities by quantitative and reductive descriptions of the workings of their parts. Although the scientific program that gives rise to this mentality has been quite successful in explaining the material basis for holistic realities, and in allowing us to manipulate natural things to our advantage by altering the configuration of their parts, it fails to grasp the reality of natural things themselves. The unlimited application of the "scientific mentality" is scientism, the philosophical claim that the scientific method and scientific explanations can grasp all of reality. For many, scientism is accompanied by agnosticism or atheism. In terms of popular sentiment, however, scientism has not carried the day. Most people still intuitively cling to the notion that at least human nature and human experience are not reducible to what is scientifically knowable. But with no rational alternative to scientism, most people live in a “soft,” non-rational, and relativistic world of feelings, opinions, and personal values. The increase in leisure and health brought about by our increasing mastery over Nature has not resulted, as the ancient sages supposed, in an increase in wisdom and the contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Instead, our technology-based leisure is more likely to result in quiet hedonism, consumerism, and mind-numbing mass entertainment. While many still claim belief in God, the course of their lives reflects de facto agnosticism in which the "God hypothesis" is far from everyday experiences and priorities. In all our scientistic "knowledge" of the inner workings of things, and our technology-based comforts and distractions, there seems to be no place for the still, small voice of God. In that practical and existential sense, science and technology seem to have pushed belief in God toward obsolescence. Or have they? In our innermost being, we moderns remain unsatisfied. Sooner or later we face an existential crisis, and recognize in our lives something broken, disordered, in need of redemption. The fact that we can recognize disorder, brokenness, and sin means that they occur within a larger framework of order, beauty, and goodness, or else in principle we could not recognize them as such. Yet brokenness and disorder are painfully present, and the human soul by its nature seeks something more, a deeper happiness, a lasting good. Consideration of the order and beauty in nature can lead us to a Something, the "god of the philosophers," but consideration of our incompleteness leads us beyond, in search of a Someone who is the Good of us all. Science will never make that quest obsolete. Close Essay