Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje takes an unflinching look at a small, quiet community that seems to be gaining in numbers in the unsuspecting coffee shops of San Antonio — atheists!
She wears stylish glasses, and her thick black hair is swept up in a ponytail; the only hint of a slightly rebellious streak is the tattoo that peeks from under her shirtsleeve. He is a slight, soft-spoken man with a laid-back demeanor and a full beard.
Melissa and Chanse are young atheists. They don’t believe in God. As such, they’re part of a small but substantial minority that swims against the overtly religious mainstream of America, a spiritual tenor that has grown more strident in recent times as issues of faith increasingly become entangled with politics and public policy.
Of course they are stylish! And only slightly rebellious, at least on the surface. In fact it’s a very nice article, the point of which is that atheists and agnostics, despite being a tiny minority (about 3 percent), constitute the fastest-growing category of religious “belief” in the United States.
This cheerful demographic fact ties into a discussion between Chris Mooney, PZ Myers and others a little while back, on how we should speak about science and evolution and religion in the public sphere. Chris suggested that, since we live in a very religious culture, it’s to our own benefit to emphasize the compatibility of religious belief with a scientific worldview. PZ replied that there is no reason to dilute our message just to win some temporary battles. And the truth is that, while there are some staunchly religious scientists who also believe in evolution, and there’s no reason not to have such people be fighting for the cause of science, most scientists are somewhat agnostic if not downright atheist, and there’s no reason to hide that fact. Chris’s response correctly identified the underlying disagreement, which is completely about tactics. (Be sure to read Chris at Mixing Memory on the use of “framing” in this context, and John Rennie at Scientific American on the Dover trial.)
If I may put words into their mouths, Chris is a strategist, looking for the most politically effective ways of fighting the battle currently before us, which is defending evolution in schools. PZ is playing the role of the intellectual, for whom strategy and tactics will always take a back seat to telling the truth. If it makes a few people uncomfortable, that’s their problem. This is why Richard Dawkins generates such emotional responses among people who are clearly on his side when it comes to the truth of evolution; intellectuals admire his fierce determination to call it as he sees it, while strategists cringe at his blatantly anti-religious rhetoric.
I am on the uncompromising-intellectual side of this debate (big surprise there), but I think that the truth-telling attitude has its strategic benefits as well. The fight over teaching evolution in public schools is a tiny skirmish in a much broader cultural conversation. (See? We don’t have to call it a “war.”) We do live in a religious society, remarkably so when we are compared to similar countries elsewhere in the world, and there are complicated reasons for that. But increasingly, a lot of folks are wondering whether their supernatural beliefs are really warranted by the evidence, or whether they’re not just going along because that’s what everyone does. To young people wondering about the meaning of it all, it can be extremely powerful to hear someone say that it’s okay not to believe in God. Everyone always says that you will never talk someone out of their religious beliefs by lecturing about the scientific method; that’s certainly true for a wide range of people who are very confident in their positions, but there are also a huge number of people who are legitimately questioning what to believe. In the long run, the way to squelch the political effectiveness of the intelligent-design movement, the anti-abortion movement, the anti-gay-marriage movement, and so on, is to relegate them to insignificant minority positions within the populace, and one good way to do that is to undermine their supernatural foundations. It’s an extremely long-term project, to say the least, but one worth keeping in mind.
The only time I think the Stoeltje article stumbles is at the very end:
But what, exactly, do atheists believe in, if not in God?
In a nutshell, atheists believe in reason alone, in those things that can be arrived at through intellect and the scientific method. Concrete evidence for God, they argue, simply doesn’t exist. They don’t cotton to leaps of faith or anything that involves a supernatural being reaching into human lives. They believe you can live a happy, respectable life based on human ethics that were derived not from God handing down a tablet but from a code of rules that emerged naturally through an evolutionary process in which humans learned how to live together successfully.
The idea that atheists replace “religion” with “science” is an unfortunately common misunderstanding. Religion plays many roles — it tells a story about the workings of the universe, it suggest moral and ethical guidelines, and it provides social and cultural institutions and practices. Science does not play all those roles, nor should it pretend to; it talks about how the universe works, but is of no help with morality or culture. However, the moral and cultural roles of religion do not stand independently of its beliefs about the universe (existence of a caring supernatural being or what have you) — if that part of the story isn’t true, the other teachings of the religion (homosexuality is a sin, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven) aren’t necessarily any better or worse than any other set of non-religious cultural practices, and should be evaluated on that basis. Science can’t tell us how we should treat other human beings. What it can do is to free us from the mistaken idea that the correct way to treat other human beings can be found in scripture or in church teachings or in the contemplation of God’s will; we human beings have to solve this hard problem all by ourselves.
If you want to have science tell you what moral behavior is, you have to accept what it tells you.
And if one rejects evidence-based prescriptions for behavior in favor of some other, it may be appropriate, but I see no way to distinguish such a decision from any other faith-based appeal to normative behavior. It may be we’re stuck with that conundrum, I don’t know. If such is the case, we secularists are bound to be forced, I think, to acknowledge we’ve no more rational justification for our sense of “right” or “wrong” than anyone else, and no firmer basis to argue for what we assert to be appropriate behavior than anyone else who may differ in their oppinion on what is “good” and “bad”.
DB:
But by labelling some individuals as ‘normal’ and some as ‘sociopathic,’ aren’t we already making appeals beyond the simple ‘feels good, feels bad’ ethos? If some people feel empathy, and others don’t, and more relevantly, some feel more empathy than others (i.e., what is the threshhold of pleasure payoff versus amount of pain dealt to another to make an action net pleasurable?), then how is it possible to use this standard as a means by which to build a code of ethics from the ground up? I can see it’s use as a justification for why certain types of laws shouldn’t exist, but without a notion of what is ‘normal’ or of ‘societal good’, I don’t see how universal, positive reasons for an ethical code can be built this way.
efp wrote:
The atheist’s position is not one position, or at least it is not a position justified from one set of premises, but many. In the case of the intellectual justification that Sean summarizes, it is a belief “in reason alone, in those things that can be arrived at through intellect and the scientific method.” But one may ask, “Why does the atheist arrive at this conclusion?” If the religious roots of Western culture did not exist, if the school children of America were raised without any religious teaching whatsoever, would society blame its ills on science, or would there even be any ills? Would the universal acceptance of things only reason can establish substantially improve society? Is this the reason for this conclusion?
Of course, these are questions impossible to answer definitively, but it’s immediately obvious that some standard of reasonableness would have to be established as a foundation for an atheistic society. Is it reasonable to kill the unborn in certain cases? Is it reasonable to kill the aged and infirm? Is it reasonable to tolerate, foster or encourage non-reproductive sexual relationships? Is it ever reasonable to go to war? Is it ever reasonable to permit people to be non-reasonable, if they chose to do so? Is it reasonable to permit them to raise a following of unreasonable thinking sympathizers?
Where does the atheistic society’s standard of reasonableness come from? Is this answer in the atheist’s imaginative repertoire?
I agree with bittergraduatestudent, and disagree with Dumb Biologist. Explaining the biochemistry of moral decision-making, or explaining the biological origins of morality does not at all help us to make our moral decisions. If I’m struggling over two courses of action, I want to know which one is morally correct. The answer, “The morally correct one is whichever one evolution made you comfortable in doing” is pretty useless as a guide to behavior.
I shouldn’t have said that I disagree with Dumb Biologist; he also seems to agree that science doesn’t give us any guidance about what we should do.
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Knowledge about fundamental laws of physics and cosmololgy are relevant to questions of morality. See e.g. here.
I disagree that science has nothing to say about morality. Science can lend an insight into much of our biology, of which morality is a part. The scientific method/logic can be applied to many moral ideas.
There are more atheists than 3%. 20% seems to me more correct and it’s likely even more than that not thta numbers matter much. If you make it politically and socially ok to express an atheist perspective they will come out of the woodwork.
Uber,
Science can shed light on why humans have moral feelings, and it can shed light on why we feel that some things are moral and some things are not. However, if we are faced with a dilemma in which we are not sure which way to turn, there is a limit to how much science can tell us. It can tell us what the likely consequences of each choice might be, and it can tell us what the likely emotional response to each consequence might be. But I don’t see how it can tell us which consequence we should strive for. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive.
But by labelling some individuals as ‘normal’ and some as ‘sociopathic,’ aren’t we already making appeals beyond the simple ‘feels good, feels bad’ ethos?
I honestly don’t know. Hypothetically, a population of social creatures with a preponderance of individuals that are innately averse to inflicting unprovoked acts of violence upon each other is going to be more successful than one in which wanton behavior is is the norm. Having this putative adaptive psychological motivation to not only behave oneself in a generally peaceful manner, but also to encourage such behavior in others with rewarding or punishing stimuli, could be rooted entirely in the physiology and biochemistry of the brain (I won’t get into the false dichotomy of nature vs. nurture here). We experience such adaptive motivations as something that feels “good” or “bad”, and may even perceive this “goodness” and “badness” to have some greater reality than the contents of the meatware in our skulls.
If there is a greater reality to “goodness” or “badness”, perhaps it’s simply survivability, which is kind of an imperative for any successful species. The idea of “feels good” or “feels bad” as a partial guide for societal norms is not to guarantee maximizing the positive emotions of any particular individual (who could be sociopathic), but the entire population, on average. If one used a sound empirical method to determine that a change in a particular societal norm would enhance survivability of the population (reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for instance), one might also hypothesize that the average satisfaction of the population would also be enhanced (altruistic sentiments for future generations included), and use this reasoning to try to encourage individuals in that population to adopt that behavior. One maximizes their individual chance for happiness by playing along, so it makes sense to. Beyond that, maybe there’s nothing more to it.
I’ve little confidence it’s a workable idea, at any rate, so perhaps my wondering aloud about these things is rather academic, at best.
Dumb Biologist writes: Hypothetically, a population of social creatures with a preponderance of individuals that are innately averse to inflicting unprovoked acts of violence upon each other is going to be more successful than one in which wanton behavior is is the norm.
Yes, if the preponderance of the population acts ethically, that is an advantage to the population as a whole. However, suppose that the preponderance acts ethically, but a tiny minority acts unethically in a way that benefits that minority. Then the minority will prosper at the expense of the majority. The question is how to maintain a stable majority of ethical actors in the presence of temptations to behave unethically.
Yeah, well, maybe you try to convince them with rationally-constructed arguments base upon evidence, or you cut to the chase and throw them in the clink, or you scare them with the Smiting From On High. Your guess is as good as mine which, if any, of the above, is to be the most successful.
Eric Wallace said:
This is true if you insist on an objective moral rule. But my point is that moral rules are not objective. (Incidentally, that’s one reason why there are differences between cultures, and, as a consequence, clashes.) Without objective moral rules there is no need for an (objective) “rule-giver”.
Actually, my conclusion is more of an observation—that people of faith often don’t grasp the nature of skepticism. The themata of faith, where believing is seeing, is projected onto all realms of thought. For instance, as far as I can tell, President Bush honestly doesn’t grasp the difference between evidence and assertion; in his mental model of the world, belief is truth. This is a direct extension of his religious faith, and has tangible consequences.
I think an atheistic society would be more likely to have fewer ills, but not because of atheism itself. If everyone were to suddenly stop believing in God, otherwise remaining the same, things wouldn’t change much. People would just find another reason to be bigots. Religion is an especially convenient means for people to express their tribalism, but Social Darwinism is evidence that (poorly understood) science can also be twisted to such ends. However, atheism is often a symptom of a healthy skepticism, of thinking critically, and an inclusive intellectual maturity. These are traits that definitely benefit society.
(Apologies for referring to some of the earliest posts, but this is a pet peeve of mine).
For more information about agnosticism for those who need it, go here. 🙂
I object to the common perceptions of atheism and agnosticism, as voiced by a couple of self-proclaimed agnostic commenters here, for multiple reasons. They are at odds with what the vast majority of atheists actually believe, they encourage people who think the same things as the majority of atheists to label themselves ‘agnostic’ without knowing what it really means, and they encourage people to believe that when evaluating a claim they must look for evidence both for and against it.
I have seen no evidence for or against god. That makes me an agnostic (although some kinds of agnostic are pretty dogmatic, and believe that no evidence for god is possible). Many rational theists are also agnostic for the same reason, even though they believe fervently in a god.
You will not get me to say that I believe in the non-existence of god. To me that statement is a nonsensical misstatement of the way one should look at the world. But, I do not have any religious beliefs, I do not believe in god. That makes me an atheist.
I don’t know about that. Not all social problems stem from religion, to be sure, but many of the big ones do, and persist primarily because of religious tribal loyalties. I find it difficult to believe that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for example, would continue if all concerned suddenly became atheists. Similarly with the historical strife in Northern Ireland. And somehow I doubt al-Qaeda would have such an easy time finding suicide bombers if its candidates didn’t firmly believe in a garden of wine and virgins for the heroic martyrs.
Calling atheism “just a different belief” is like calling a vegetarian just a different meat eater.
Ebonmuse writes: Not all social problems stem from religion, to be sure, but many of the big ones do, and persist primarily because of religious tribal loyalties.
I don’t think that you know that. The fact that ethnic conflicts have a religious component does not imply that the religious component is the cause of the conflict.
You go on to say:
I find it difficult to believe that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for example, would continue if all concerned suddenly became atheists. Similarly with the historical strife in Northern Ireland.
I think you’re wrong. The Palestinians are not religiously monolithic; there are Christian Palestinians as well as Moslem Palestinians. There tend not to be Jewish Palestinians, but that is because all (or most) of the Jewish Palestinians became Israelis.
In the case of Ireland, the IRA is largely a Marxist organization, and many of its members are atheists.
I some article by Dawkins I saw a good definition, something like “Tooth Fairy Agnostic”. The basic gist was just because it’s impossible to disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy doesn’t mean you need to take Her existence seriously. Same goes for the sundry deities. So, sure, for the sake of intellectual honesty, perhaps its untenable to assert the non-existence of God, but that’s not an excuse to consider His existence likely or at all relevant to human affairs.
The Palestinians are not religiously monolithic; there are Christian Palestinians as well as Moslem Palestinians.
That’s hardly the same as proving that religion isn’t the primary cause of the conflict there. You prove my point for me – the ones who were Jewish were absorbed into the state of Israel without much problem, which shows that religious differences are the primary cause of the ongoing conflict.
In the case of Ireland, the IRA is largely a Marxist organization, and many of its members are atheists.
The conflict in Northern Ireland is and has always been organized along Catholic/Protestant lines. That’s how it got started, when James I confiscated land from Catholics in Ulster and gave it to imported Protestants. It’s absurd to say that religion has not historically been the major reason for the troubles there.
Ebonmuse writes: It’s absurd to say that religion has not historically been the major reason for the troubles there.
No, it’s not absurd. The Catholic/Protestant distinction is a proxy for Irish/British. The Protestants in Ireland were descendents of immigrants from England and Scotland.
In ethnic conflicts, any reliable indicator of which “side” you are on tends to come into play: Skin color, language, religious affiliation. That doesn’t mean that the conflict was caused by that difference.
Oh, and Ebonmuse, the conflict between England and Ireland dates all the way back to 1169, when both countries were Catholic.
Statistically speaking, Include Canada in the non-belief uprising.
“No religion” (16%) are in second place to the Christians (43%). Canada is slated for another census this year (2006), and hopefully the upward trend (44%) will have continued.
http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/products/highlight/Religion/Page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo=PR&View=1a&Code=01&Table=1&StartRec=1&Sort=2&B1=Canada&B2=1
I shouldn’t have said that I disagree with Dumb Biologist; he also seems to agree that science doesn’t give us any guidance about what we should do.
I guess I would say I’ve no confidence that I or anyone else really knows in some cosmic way what we “should” do. If you simply declare that A or B is the “right thing to do”, then I challenge you to define what you base your moral first principles on. “It just is,” or “it’s common sense” isn’t persuasive as a bald assertion, in my mind, though it may be that’s what we’re stuck with. I feel personally I have an innate and aquired sense of morality, but whether or not that will guide me to make the “best” decisions, I’ve absolutely no idea. I don’t take it on faith there’s some greater principle of goodness to which I should appeal, I only know how I feel when I do things that I seem to innately or, through conditioning, recognize as “bad”. I’ve no rational reason to assume I am “right” about anything based upon my “sense of right and wrong”. I’m a complete moral skeptic, I think.
And, I think that skeptical inquiry could yield successful prescriptives for maximizing human satisfaction, which presumably has some relation to survival. I don’t say I even know that for certain, I just think it’s an idea that merits exploration, despite our inability to rely upon it for “moral first principles”. I’ve no idea where those are supposed to come from, if there is not a naturalistic explanation, and I’ve no way to judge what approach to ethics is “best” in a rational way, except to recognize the possibility that morality emerges from an evolutionary process, that it is maintained by innate and aquired drives to behave in a manner commonly perceived as “moral” or “ethical”, and acting in accordance with those drives produces positive emotions.
The second question is certainly in the domain of science, and evolutionary psychology (or neurology, or whatever) may lend some significant insight into it. But, like Sean, I don’t think answers to this second question really have much bearing on the first.
Artistically straying, because I was lead by example?:) It’s Cliffords fault. Damn you clifford.
You know that saying, “you are what you eat,” well lets change that around a bit and insert, “food for thought?”
There are some good chefs around who deal with the landscape of “texture surfaces”. Who respect the inherent nature of mining, who posted dangers for us about dealing with making trips into the outback and who do walkabouts.
I don’t want to go off planet here:)
Anyway, as to the “emphemeral qualities of mind,” if held to “matter states” then we would have never ventured into journies “off planet” into non-euclidean realms of thought.
Argue as you might, “this food” changed the substance of those who deal with planet landscapes?
“The earth” is not so round, if you look closer. That’s part of the progression of thinking, beyond the matter states.
I’m hungry. 🙂