Notes and Observations from a Religion vs. Atheism “Debate”

by Gary Berg-Cross

On Dec. 7^th, 2013 Perry King, Deacon of the Universalist National Memorial Church and  Don Wharton, Organizer of the DC Region Atheists participated in a 2-person debate called: Religious Faith versus Atheism.

It was well attended with a mix of people, one of whom was Mathew Goldstein who wrote a to-the-point, well reasoned &  skeptical blog called Protestant Universalists as activism allies on it.  I was there too and had some thoughts similar to Matt’s but took some notes on other aspects as well such as the ebb and flow of issues, tactics and emotions. I hope these annotated notes help recreate the flavor of what I experienced. You can see an early part of the debate here and get a sense of the speakers demeanor.

As debates of this kind go this was as polite as it probably gets. Certainly there fewer pyrotechnics as with the brothers Chris and Peter Hitchens debate or one of Dawkin's debates. Here the speakers were not kin, but still familiar with each other from past conversations. They showed a degree of respect for each other in the midst of a congenial audience made up of people are both sides of the issue, but liberal minded.  Indeed at times the most heat came from intense efforts by assigned moderators to keep the 2 speakers to 5 minute time constraints. Still, it wasn't as intentionally humorous as a religion-atheist debate among comics Jamie Kilstein &  John Fugelsang on "Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell."

The event started with each side explaining their organizations and what they stand for and who they were allied with. Perry could point to the UU values from the Enlightenment - “Freedom, Reason and Tolerance.”  Don Wharton faced with a liberal stance took a clever tactic of emphasizing secular, humanist & scientific positions and alliances such as the AHA and DC Coalition of Reason, rather than starting with atheist ones. Indeed for most of the early debate it might have been termed Religion vs. Secularism.

In the 2^nd round each side staked out some additional territory.  King expanded from the Enlightenment to what he at times called a Modern or Post-Modern Religion.  He used relativism to jumps over the hard search for truth with a string of statements that- “absolute truth does not exist". Realities are instead multiple, they are subjective and dependent on an individual's worldview of framework (Drat we should have never spent the time trying to convert those Indians). The Deacon could gesture to this idea and rattle off some thinkers but his main thrusts came with statements like:

Religion asks the question of meaning.  It’s been around a long time…Religion is not so much a set of beliefs as a set of language and symbols about what is unknown or transcendent.

This idea of religion knowing something about the unknown might have generated calls for explanation, but we weren't in the Q& A so the conversation moved on from this very sticky foundational point. It’s the type of thinking that is hard to make progress against at time limited debates.  You can choose to address 3-4 of the arguments made but if you try to pick up this one it will consume all your time.  It’s a very asymmetrical situation and I give Don high marks for navigating these obstacles. Faced with this choice when he had the floor he countered King with a simple question of:

 “what is real? and ‘this is self delusion’, ‘let’s define what is real.” 

(See my blog on myths for some discussion of delusions. Rational analysis for the masses, alas, remains an unfulfilled Enlightenment goal.)

Perry’s response was to cede the floor a bit and retreat from knowing.

“Can any of us know what is real?”  “How did it all begin?”

Not a great response from an “Enlightenment fan” but such stances postponed the issue till later in the debate when there was more time for the important issues on the human capacity to know. If you draw on thinkers of the past I like for example, Heraclitus 500 BCE whose stance on how human understand reality included (Paraphrased by John Sowa, 2003):

“Everything is in flux. But what gives that flux its form is the logos; the words or signs that enable us to perceive patterns in the flux, remember them, talk about them, and take action upon them even while we ourselves are part of the flux we are acting in and on.”

These rhetorical questions can be taken on with a gesture to that part of Science that studies human cognition.  What aspects of Science do you believe in and what limits do you set and why?  Is continental drift “real”?  Doesn't seem likely, but it now seems pretty certain along with mass extinctions, comets that hit the earth, supernova and quarks. I prefer knowing the knowable, rather than faithfully “knowing” the permanently mysterious unknown.

If Deacon King could wave at being compatible with Science, Don could ask “What does that mean?” And he could point to Epicurus and the problem of evil which provides it own big discussion area that is hard to take on. Each side had some of their favorite zingers.  Probably Deacon King had more such as:

“There is no conflict between Religion and Evolution….but Dawkins knows nothing about Religion!” or

“UU stands for the underdevelopment of arrogant atheists who are intolerant of Religion.”

“What do I mean by faith?  It’s personal.” (Ah, I guess not subject to scientific study? Calling doctor Freud......)

It’s mean to tell kids there’s no Santa Claus.”

The Deacon did have a host of easy to believe and popular wisdoms to throw into the debate and could bring the sides together with a cheery:

 “The enemy is dogma in any form.”

While agreeing on many issues of social tolerance points of real disagreement were to be found as the conversation continued.  Don argued that Religions convince people that they are members of a moral tribe and neuroscience supports this maximization of tribalism, which has its downsides. See Us Against Them: How Tribalism Affects the Way We Think .

Don threw in ideas relating religion and the idea of purity and authority figures from Jonathan Haidt's studies of intuitive, moral underpinning as political attitudes:

This moral foundation, which involves having compassion and feeling empathy for the suffering of others, is measured by asking people how much considerations of "whether someone cared for someone weak and vulnerable" and "whether or not someone suffered emotionally" factor into their decisions about what is right and wrong. As you can see, liberals score considerably higher on such questions. But now consider another foundation, "purity," which is measured by asking people how much their moral judgments involve "whether or not someone did something disgusting" and "whether or not someone violated standards of purity or decency." Conservatives score dramatically higher on this foundation.

But as we veered onto social science these too were subjects that did not land as conversational topics for any length of time. The impression I got was that Don’s atheist-secular side was grabbing more of the space of the argument.  If this were a chess game the early openings had been played and Don had major pieces deployed. 

Deacon Perry was playing a different game though and chose not to get into evidence from social and neuroscience.  

“Never say “delusions” when talking to a faith-based community,”

A good line enjoyed by the audience. I guess a comeback might be:

 “Don’t say ‘take it on faith’ when talking to an empirical science audience.”

Before we knew it the Deacon was on a different tactic.  He ceded the territory of being critical of the Bible, but within faith.  To him the Bible is a pre-modern document, but it is the source of divine inspiration (take it on faith, I guess).  As Christians we should only look at the “good stuff.”: I should note here that Deacon King seems to talk about the Bible mostly in terms of the New Testament.

OK, I’ve heard this inspiration talk before and the question that comes up in my mind is that there are separate criteria to judge what is “good” in this or any other book.  We don’t need religious criteria for this. We've golden an silver rules for quite a while.  We might agree to call the criteria “humanistic.”  That would be good to agree on or even discuss.

What was discussed was Don’s point about beliefs from groups like Christian Scientists. How do we confront the absurdity of their truth claims? Perry said “we are trying to liberalize them.”  He again fell back on the claim that there is important truth in the Bible.

Don’s chess game advanced a notch again and moved to the claim of life after death, “It’s a problem.”  Group leaders use this promise to impose their interests and notions of ethics on the community. It’s a delusion and akin to people deluding themselves about climate change. Perry responded, “It has great value.”

This exchange opened the doors a bit to the societal value of Religion and the related issue of who do we blame more for what has gone wrong (e.g. cultural conflicts, war etc.). One thinks of Paul Kurtz observation that:

“All the great religions have grown by attacking those about them. 

To the request that we need a more secular society the Deacon could only suggest that Norway has more suicides than the US (not true it turns out to be true – Norway has about the same rate.  There is an effect for the absence of sun in winter which shows up in many countries so Finland has a higher rate than the US).

Which cultures are happiest?  Don suggested the secular, Scandinavian ones. Again this is supported by UN survey studies based on not only longevity and prosperity but also the belief you can count in others in times of trouble, perception or corruption, generosity etc. There were many of these statistical skirmishes throughout but Don was clearly in better command of the facts and supported conclusions. Take the issue of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot all being “atheists.”  Don was ready with refutations on Hitler’s Catholic background, Stalin’s Russian Orthodox upbringing and Pol Pot’s training in a Buddhist monastery.  It was quite something to see vague claims swatted down by Don’s knowledge. One might have added the inconvenient observation that George Bush was “born again” and his wars killed hundreds of thousands.

It was equally interesting to see emotion-laden topics dealt with.

When the idea of Hell was introduced as based on human experience Don could parry that, yes, hellish experiences are real and we learn from them but there is no supernatural Hell.

More difficult was the topic of secular accommodationism of Religion  vs confrontation or Religion by the New Atheists (“confrontationisst” include  bloggers like PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, Eric Macdonald and Jason Rosenhouse. Also authors like Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, Ayan Hirsi Aliand Richard Dawkins. – Some trending elements of secular accommodation disturb and trouble Don. Paul Kurtz might fall into the accommodationist category if only because he worried that New Atheism confrontation was an unproductive strategy. Don’s counter (and Mathew Goldstein’s position) is to “stand firm on truth claims.”  One of Don’s memorable lines in this debate concerning how confrontation hurts people’s feelings was to pivot from people to ideas –  – “Ideas don’t have feelings.”  And he added that secularists are comfortable in their feelings at the end of life.”

Modernity (Perry cited an atheist Freud and others here, well they aren't up to data but I guess were considered modern) and post modern ideas on religion was a topic at times included the limitations of science – it doesn't have final answers. One like look to A.C. Grayling on this idea of certainty and knowledge. Yes, Science’s mindset is always in progress and prepared to un-set and revise, but that mentality is a strength rather than cock sure certainly that is fixed. Both Perry and Don cited the value of critical thinking, but Perry urged that we not try to wipe out all of tradition and world views found in myths.  They have a special truth one supposes and we should be informed by people who came before us.  Well yes, remember those old natural religions that had thunder gods and credible displays of religious devotion, such as:

fasts, food taboos, self-scarification, extravagant rituals and other “hard-to-fake” behaviors.

It is part of reliably transmitted religious demonstration showing a believers’ sincere faith to observers and potential converts.  I could see some of this behavior at the debate.  Perry would occasionally invite Don to come to service – we hope to convert you yet. Not all of us have Don’s ability to groan or sigh away these entreaties in a persuasive way. A good example of this was Don's reaction to Perry's appeal to thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a source of modern wisdom.  Don had actually read Chardin and groaned noting that that Chardin had his own brand of confusion.

As a culture generating species, we humans assimilate key information from our groups, and therefore human brains probably have built in cultural learning biases that enable us to quickly pick up the culture around us (language too). But a pre-conscious tendency to learn from others makes us vulnerable to being misinformed if not duped. This has been called the “evil teacher problem” but remember preaches are teachers). Evolutionary Psychologists speculate that we have developed a defense.  Human cognition is equipped with something called epistemic vigilance. It’s a suite of skills and preferences that guard against such manipulation by smooth talkers among us.  Better to be converted by truth and not tolerate manipulation. And so on to the question of what should be tolerated.

Perry did ask pointedly, “Can you respect my mother who goes to church on Sunday?

Don’s response was a re-post.  Religions have more control over women. And by the way should a LGBT person respect a homophobe?  There are limits.

At this point there was time for Q & A from the audience. One of the first ones was whether Don say religion going away and what would replace it.  Don pointed to Sunday Assembly as an alternative. Perry thought that we were in a Post-Christian age and needed to redefine Religion but that it would always be with us. But a thoughtful UU member asked Don if he would be happy in effect with nothing by their total capitulation to the atheist idea.  

Another question concerned the possibility of an alliance between secularists and liberal religions like the UUs. We might ally around climate change, peace and civil rights.

A question is whether we can cooperate on these, while ideas of God and Religion are enshrined in laws. It's still a good question and yet this was a good, liberal minded debate.

Facing Up to Reality: A Message from Journalism Prof Robert Jensen

By Gary Berg-Cross

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes with radical passion about important topics in exciting ways and can be read at CommonDreams.org under his byline. He’s very quotable as in his conclusion to an article called “The Case for a Morality of Radical Caution”

On complex moral questions, we almost always know less than we wish we could know. History counsels that we remain radical in our pursuit of justice and sustainability, committed to creating a better world. But we also should exercise caution, aware not just of what we know but what we don’t, and possibly can’t, know.

In reading RJ I’m often introduced to other works and authors that he quotes from. This was very much the case in reading his “Hope is for the Lazy: The Challenge of Our Dead World”, where quotes the first verse from one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems:

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
[--Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths 2007, VI,” in Leavings: Poems (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010), p. 91-93.]

Jensen’s article is an edited version of an earlier “sermon” delivered July 8, 2012, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX and a follow up to an earlier message on Hope is Weak. You can get the Obama reference which RJ modifies to say that Weak was too optimistic a characterization. Readers should not be turned away by the fact that this appeared as a sermon. The message is important in secular realms as well as before religious congregations.

Why the change from weak to dead? Jensen offers several reasons starting with”

“ to be a hope-monger or a hope-peddler today is not just a sign of weakness but also of laziness, and sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. Don’t forget that, as good Christians, we try to avoid those.”

He goes on to argue that our world is “not broken, it is dead. We are alive, if we chose to be, but the hierarchical systems of exploitation that structure the world in which we live -- patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, white supremacy, and the industrial model -- all are dead. It’s not just that they cannot be reformed, but that they cannot, and should not, be revived. The death-worship at the heart of those ideologies is exhausting us and the world, and the systems are running down. That means we have to create new systems, and in that monumental task, the odds are against us. What we need is not naïve hope but whatever it is that lies beyond naiveté, beyond hope.”

If this sounds depressing, blame it may also be as accurate as we hear in a sermon. Jensen covers the dismal, tipping point environmental scene pointing the same Nature article I blogged on earlier in “New, but biologically Poorer ,World A-Coming?” To this he adds Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.)

I’ll leave the interested reading to read the article for its wisdom and quotes from James Baldwin including the snippet - “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

I'll close with this part of the piece challenging the religious community with addressing reality and not just coping:

Avoiding reality because it is harsh is not a winning strategy. We are not going to win by praying for deliverance by the hand of God or waiting for deliverance through the wizardry of gadgets. Religion and technology, understood historically and used wisely, are both important tools to help us cope. But religious and technological fundamentalists are weak and lazy, because they spin fanciful stories about how we can magically avoid a reckoning with the human capacity for desecration.

There may, in fact, not be a winning strategy available to us at this point in history. But we have an obligation to assess the strategies available, and work at the ones that make the most sense. That is how we make a credible claim to being human. We don’t become fully human through winning. We embrace our humanity by acting out of our deepest moral principles to care for each other and care for the larger living world, even if failure is likely, even if failure is inevitable…..

To repeat one of those hard-to-bear truths: Nature doesn’t negotiate. Nature sets limits. Nature bats last. If we don’t want to be accused of weakness or laziness, we have to face not only the truth we can bear, but all of the truth, which is too much to ask us to bear.

Photo Credits:

Avoiding Reality http://www.markstivers.com/cartoons/Cartoons%202004.html

Inconvenient truths: http://sciblogs.co.nz/open-parachute/tag/climate-change/page/2/

Robert Jensen Photo:

http://article.wn.com/view/2012/05/29/DEAR_JOURNALISM_STUDENTS_Dont_Mean_To_Intrude_But_Your_Profe/

The Charm of Understanding Reality: Captured in a Children's Book Written by Richard Dawkins – Part 1

by Gary Berg-Cross

Pioneering Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget spent a professional lifetime observing children to understand their thinking. It sounds strange today to say that what he found was revolutionary. But it certainly was and contrary to much of the learning thinking holding sway in his time 50 -80 years ago. A prevailing, simple assumption was that learning is just a unitary process and children start “empty”. Learning pumps in more knowledge over time so the quantity of their intelligence grows to be that of an adult. But there were few studies with actual children & toddlers to test this idea.

After thousands of interactions with young people some barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to see a developmental pattern to children’s actions, utterances and perceptions. Like most parents he could see that infants are active explorers from birth and prefer to look at novel objects. By 6 months infants seem to understand that objects continue to exist even if hidden under something. After many studies Piaget concluded that the differences weren’t so much quantitative, but qualitative and process driven. Young children don't think like grownups. From infancy they employ schema, a kind of mental structure to guide interacts with the outside world. As schemas develop their thought processes take on their own kind of order and have their own special “logic”. It’s not a linear accretion of knowledge. Instead using a child actively constructs different models about reality using their own reasoning “logic”. Early reasoning may include magical explanations, but it evolves over time as different ideas are tested out and more abstract thought is supported. In a phrase the young child is like a junior scientist who constructs their own knowledge from experimenting on the world. They struggle to understand why things happen. This ranges from why is the sky blue, why the moon doesn’t get smaller as we travel around and why do people die. Einstein, a friend of Piaget, provided the right sort of praise for the discovery - "so simple that only a genius could have thought of it."

Piaget's insight opened not only a new window into the inner workings of the mind, but like any other pioneer it’s not the last word on the topic. By the 1970s there was neo-Piagetian work. And there are grand fusions of Piagetian thought with more social theory. Such syntheses are driven in part by breakthroughs in other fields as is still happening to evolutionary theory.
One of Piaget’s lasting contributions was to educational applications. Schools of education have housed many of Piaget’s disciples. The obvious idea is that educational material should be structured to help the advance children’s understanding and answer questions of interest things according to their logic. It also provides insights into higher order and critical thinking where we reflect not only on a problem to solve but our own thinking to solve a problem.

Now a new book The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins helps fill a need for book geared towards critical thinking. It provides a nice spark for adolescent, rational and scientific minds taking first steps in hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Susan Jacoby wrote a glowing review in WaPO on Dawkins teaches children how, not what, to think, noting its intellectual merits.
Dawkin’s motivation for book is something Piaget would have loved with broad sections, such as “What is reality? What is magic?” Each chapter starts with a clear interesting questions such as – “Why is there a sun? What is an earthquake? What is a rainbows? Why is there night and day, winter and summer? Why do bad things happen? Are we alone?” He then describes a myth which tries to answer the question. This is contrasted with scientific explanations of reality. This is an exciting aspect of the book partly because Dawkins is the first of the prominent member of the “new atheist” generation to take on the task of helping children distinguish between (ancient) mythical & magical view of reality and how it is understood by science.
To do this Dawkins uses some proven literary techniques. Each chapter begins with different versions of myths from different cultures. So the Sumerian creation stories and desert religion miracle tales are not a central feature elbowing out other ideas. In the 2^nd chapter titled, “Who Was the First Person?” we get a Tasmanian aboriginal story, with a god injured in a star-god battle who is dying. The god decided to create humans as his parting gift but in haste forgets to give people knees and instead tacks on a kangaroo tail. The rival god from the sky, seeing that the new race of people is unhappy with limited mobility, descendes to earth to cut off their tails and replace them with knees. Juxtaposed with such stores Dawkins will employ evolutionary explanations and cites philosophers, such as Hume, to present the ideas of magical explanations and myths in a fair light. Myths aren’t so much silly or stupid, since the may capture the magical and informal thinking young minds. They are, instead, just early attempts to understand the world using an immature logic, just as young children have been doing in their own lives. By showing the weaknesses of magical explanations and myths we are lead to more satisfying ones.

Along the way Dawkins provides clear, clever and uncluttered rational answers with base definitions. “Reality,” Dawkins describes simply as, “ everything that exists.” This juxtaposed with a fuzzier idea of Magic which he notes “is a slippery word.” To claify Dawkins proposed 3 kinds of magic:

· Supernatural - what we experience in myth stories, fairy tales and, miracles

· stage - pulling rabbits out of hats

· poetic magic - such as the oceanic experience of music, sunrise and double rainbows.

In Dawkins' able hands children can experience a bit of this poetic magic in understanding reality. It comes not from tricks or supernatural infusions, but as a coming together of a deep, relational pattern of ideas.

Piaget would have appreciated the message and also the approach. Facts aren’t piled up in a heap to say what they should believe. Instead Dawkins leads a young reader along a logical chain of thinking to logical conclusions.

Something that reviewers also appreciate about this volume is the enchanting illustrations provided by Dave McKean that help grasp topics showing both myths and science in graphical form. Again this fits with Piaget’s notions that younger children need concrete examples to supplement more abstract concepts and processes.

Not everyone is happy with this book and Dawkins' gentle debunking of myths which seem like rants to some true believers and this a topic for Part 2 of this blog.