When it comes to religion, I’m more interested in scientific and philosophical questions — Does God exist? Can science say anything about the supernatural? — than in sociological or political ones — Is religion good and or evil?, etc. So there was not much temptation to wade in on Pope Benedict’s recent troubles, or the wider issue of sex scandals in the Catholic Church.
Now, happily, that temptation has dipped to zero, since Phil Plait has done such a good job. Read the whole thing, as they say. Roughly, Phil notes that the Pope seems to be responsible for some very bad things; that he should be brought to justice for any wrong-doings; that there is some relevance to concerns of the skeptical community, insofar as the Church invokes supernatural explanations; but finally, that the strategy should not be simply one of proclaiming superiority and tarring religion as evil and demanding heads on plates. Catholics and other believers, whether we disagree with them or not, are human beings who will understandably be upset and troubled at the recent news. We don’t help to convert them to atheism or naturalism or skepticism by shoving the shortcomings of their leaders in their faces in the midst of a crisis; reason and rational discourse should be more our style. It’s a nuanced argument, which means it’s guaranteed to be misunderstood and caricatured, since even God can’t control the natural impulses of the internet.
Let’s be clear: I want religion to vanish. I think that religious beliefs are wrong, and that the world would be a better place if everyone accepted the real world for what it is. And I believe that many of the actions of the Church when it comes to pedophilia certainly deserve the label “evil,” whatever one might think of the people who perpetrated them.
So the question is, how to bring about the rationalist utopia in which people’s actions are based on reason and reflection rather than faith and hierarchy? I agree with Phil’s answers, as I’ve argued in other contexts. One of the primary tenets of a rationalist philosophy should be that we should be especially skeptical about claims that we want to be true. Our personal preferences don’t have any effect on the truth, so we need to guard against confirmation bias and lazy acceptance of ideas that make us happy. One great example is the idea that we’re going to make the world a better and more rational place by telling everyone how much smarter we are than everyone else, and how evil and stupid our enemies are. The Pope’s recent actions, it seems clear, are some combination of evil and stupid. But now is just not the time for patting ourselves on the back. A lot of people have been deeply hurt, directly or indirectly, and we should be able to show just a modicum of restraint. Not giving up or keeping quiet, but picking our spots. After all, we don’t have to win by being obnoxious — we can win by being right.
I think we can all agree that the Catholic Church has promulgated tremendous evil. The latest revelations, tragic as they are, merely represent the tip of the iceberg. Yet humans cannot live by rationallity alone. This doesn’t mean we should be irrational, nor does it give us license to believe the world is constructed however we want. However to require that every feeling and aspect of existence be firmly rooted in a purely logical structure is tantamount to imprisoning the human spirit. So as much as I admire the good sense in Sean’s article, I fear the tyranny of a rational utopia. May we hope to see an end of all forms of dogmatism.
“I think that you all sound a bit defensive. If there is nothing to religion, then why are you fighting it so hard?”
Mostly because it’s too integrated with society and there are a lot of de facto theocratic elements of the societies many of us live in, which in turn causes the society to be extremely marginalizing towards anyone who is not religious.
Those who think like you honestly act as if you don’t think religion has any impact on society. It does, and its impact is harmful.
“Yet humans cannot live by rationallity alone. This doesn’t mean we should be irrational, nor does it give us license to believe the world is constructed however we want. However to require that every feeling and aspect of existence be firmly rooted in a purely logical structure is tantamount to imprisoning the human spirit.”
You appear to know nothing about neuroscience, do you?
“As far as my beliefs go, I believe there are conscious beings with much greater size, energy, and ability than the human being”
Proof, please.
Also, what definition of ‘energy’ are you using? An elephant has more energy than a human, if only because it has more mass. If this is the woo-woo cosmic load-of-crud type of ‘energy’ you’re talking about, then I call bullpoop.
“We need Luke and the science of metaphysics (which I believe exists) to thwart all this bad energy stinking up the joint. The energies are subtle and in the noise floor (sorry to all you non-techies – knowledge is power is truth is good), and so we have yet to find it.”
Virtually every ‘metaphysicist’ (which sounds like they’re trying to get science cred; it’s not science, it’s philosophy) I have ever met has been a total crackpot.
“We’re a family – a system – a planet – a universe – a God.”
Nah, we’re just a universe. There are no deities to speak of.
For Christianity’s contributions to the Western world, check out these two books:
“God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science”
“How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization”
Both are very good reads.
As far as religion as a whole, I highly doubt it will ever go away. I think one aspect of religion which makes religion appealing is “the after-life”. I don’t know about you, but I find it disturbing that after death, the universe effectively ceases to exist for us. No consciousness, no sentience, etc. Utterly nothing. Many people cannot understand how this is even possible for themselves. So they believe that there must be something in us which “survives” death. Hence, the supernatural, and it goes on from there.
“I propose that whatever you believe is a sort of religion.”
Can we use a consistent definition of religion, perhaps?
“But, the one common theme is that all of them are based on faith.”
‘Faith’ is belief without evidence – almost to an extreme, hopeless-sounding, pathetic extent. I do not think all of the beliefs you mention are based on ‘faith’.
“Like Descartes we must strip past everything we have been taught and everything we “know” and ask fundamental questions about who we are and what this world is and maybe even if we exist or not (I’m joking). But, truly what do you know? Really nothing. We were not here when the big bang occurred or whenever/however this world was made. We don’t know how it happened. All we can do is interpret data and look for clues. The same is true of spirituality or of what you believe about the world. One must simply interpret the data. And, I think that no matter how obvious the data seems there is always room for error because quite simply we don’t know it all nor will we ever.”
This does not mean that just because one is only 95% certain and not 100% certain that something is untrue. Are you familiar with confidence intervals and other basic statistics?
“Besides if there is a higher being than us why do we think that we could ever completely understand it or put him/she/it in a box or ever be able to define it?”
You’re going to have to describe this hypothetical ‘higher being’.
Also, an interesting NY Times article which better elucidates the role Benedict plays in all this, better than in this post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/opinion/12douthat.html
“This blog post is about forwarding the rationalist cause, specifically in opposition to Catholicism. This is not a scientific issue, since rationalists, Catholics, atheists, deists, Protestants, Orthodox, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, agnostics, etc., can all be scientists. So why is this here?”
This is, in fact, a scientific issue, which has nothing to do with whether a given scientist is religious or not. The only thing at hand is how close an individual scientist’s beliefs hew to demanding evidence for semantic statements made about the world.
“Except, of course, no human being lives without illusion and irrational thought, as you have so deftly demonstrated…”
The difference between those who become or remain religious and those who become or remain nonreligious/atheist/etc. appears to be the effort they put and the success they have in overriding the cognitive biases they may possess.
No I haven’t studied any formal neurology and I don’t understand the subtleties of the brain. Of course, no one else I know does either. I do know that our thougt patterns are largely unconscious. This doesn’t imply they are mystical, but I don’t see them as always directed towards a purely logical objective. I view the brain as a sub unit of the universe; particularly skilled at processing a narrow band width of information and subject to the contingencies of our history.
Also, you can’t nail the church for being against legal abortion. The church holds, understandably, that a new human life begins at conception (which has lots of scientific evidence because the zygote has its own complete human genome, and it literally grows into a developed baby which everyone would agree is human — therefore, it must have been human to begin with) and, therefore, it is wrong to have an abortion unless the pregnancy puts the mother’s life at danger. I find nothing wrong with that position.
I’m afraid your goal of “rationalist utopia in which people’s actions are based on reason and reflection ” presupposes the general public is capable of rational behavior. Most people haven’t a clue about how to think rationally. They simply refuse to recognize any facts which don’t agree with their prejudices. As Dan Ariely put it, they are Predictably Irrational.
My brother once remarked that “5% think, 5% think they think and the other 90% would rather die than think”. He was an optimist.
It’s hard to call myself an ex-Catholic because I can’t remember believing any of it, and my membership in the Church had nothing to do with my personal preferences. When my parents gave up on compulsory attendance, I never looked back. But I suppose an ex-Catholic is what I am. I have even found myself correcting the odd protestant when they spouted some utter nonsense about transubstantiation or the sexual orientation of nuns.
That said, the Vatican leadership truly repulses me now. The execrable manner in which they dealt with the problem of clergy sex abuse is deserving of the uttermost contempt. What to do about His Holiness? Incarcerate him, and the rest of his criminally negligent lackeys. I don’t see this in atheist/theist terms. Spiritual authority greatly exacerbates the damage it can do, but the Holy See has revealed itself to be nothing more than a peculiar and powerful bureaucracy which has become so self-serving and corrupt that it should be dissolved.
Katherine,
One example of a ‘higher being’ is the planet itself, which is clearly a living system, alive, and I believe conscious. Also, the Sun, which a lot of people throughout time believe is a God, creates the Earth, which creates life, so the solar system is in my view, alive. This gets to the definition of life, and most of us are too egocentric and anthropomorphically self-centered to want to see this view. Even societies may have a consciousness greater than the ego of humanity, such as Ken Keyes ‘The Hundredth Monkey”, which you should read (it’s short).
However, using induction on living systems, it can be proven mathematically that if life is the exchange of energy to do the work of reproduction, becoming a more organized structure (which atoms that become molecules that become organic compounds that become cells that become creatures that form societies which are hosted on other life forms called planets, which organize into galaxies ad infinitum), which is the polar opposite of entropy perhaps, which might be called death, then in fact consciousness may be the juxtaposition of opposites, spiraling toroidally, eternally. That is one way I visualize consciousness.
In terms of pseudoscience, I believe metaphysics is a kind of boundary science in its infancy: one part mathematics, one part physics, one part philosophy, perhaps inclusive of other areas of knowledge. I hypothesize that there are organized energies (which obviously exist in the EM spectrum, and beyond), which we can contemplate and model with mathematics, yet is out of reach of our instrumentalities, because we live in a space which is limited by what we can perceive. We are thus locked in the room of speculation and theorization, until we develop the technology to capture these faint signals (and boy, do I look forward to what the LHC and the Webb Space Telescope might capture!!) – yes, there are many nuts in this ‘space’, because people who can sense these energies seem to have a more sensitive DNA frequency, or whatever it is which gives them this higher sensitivity, and the cold, harsh, material world which exists outside of love causes some kind of paranoid schizophrenia in them (and which we should study).
What if Gaia is true? What if the ancients were right about Ra and Mother Earth and Karma and the Wakah Chan? What if it’s ALL TRUE? From the Trinity to the Matrix – whatever you believe – what if the universe is actually like the Krell’s Forbidden Planet, or the Dark City, creating our reality by our thoughts? We might be more careful about how we think. Would we be more focused on our actions as well? If we all just stopped for a moment, and took that infinite yogic breath of Brahma – and in this moment, had the clarity of purpose to believe that Love will save the day? Instead of the Ouroboros rat race, we enter that dragon; We work together, resonating our thought harmonics in perfect geometrical alignment, and ‘shut it down.’ And then, in that moment, as Lennon sang it best, we imagine.
Katharine (post #28) responds to Another Sean (post #26) as follows:
“Yet humans cannot live by rationallity alone. This doesn’t mean we should be irrational, nor does it give us license to believe the world is constructed however we want. However to require that every feeling and aspect of existence be firmly rooted in a purely logical structure is tantamount to imprisoning the human spirit.”
You appear to know nothing about neuroscience, do you?
Katharine, are you happy?
Imagine that anthills evolve into really smart anthills, so smart that they can hold down jobs in the human world. The ants themselves may have evolved too but they are by no means as smart as the anthills they live in. In fact, we perceive the anthills as smart, not the ants, even though they communicate by the ants moving over a chemical messenger interface. But that intelligence cannot be of the hill’s dirt or of the ants themselves: it emerges entirely by relatively mindless ants interacting with each other and their environment.
Now imagine that the anthill not only acts like it is conscious and intelligent, it tells you that it is and it has a problem.
It says, “I’m right here, I know I’m right here, but I’m upset because there’s no way for me to reconcile my feeling of being me with the fact that I’m composed of ants and dirt. In fact, the more I think about it the more I can’t figure out why I can experience the world at all and why I feel neither inside the hill nor inside the ants.”
I think our current scientific approach runs into trouble when faced with mind-body problems, randomness, and the axiom of choice. Or rather it starts from these points as axioms. We all have a sense of what randomness seems like but every procedure for generating it falls short. We can test what we think is random but it would be hard to prove that it is in fact random. Similarly with the axiom of choice. It seems right but there is no process to choose an arbitrary real number. We can only assert that it is possible in our mind and that it yields some valid correspondence between numbers.
Shoot him. The good, practised, traditional way rationalist utopias have for dealing with those they dislike.
The knock in the middle of the night, the screams from the basement of the Lubyanka, the bullet in the back of the head.
Oh wait, that was tried already wasn’t it?
We should recognize the things that are harming the system of life that exists on this planet, and remove them. For example, Capitalism. It empowers greed (which is evil and bad – no matter how much the wealthy cherish it – sorry folks, you have been infected with an evil virus), and greed kills. Capitalism takes a system of merit exchange, and being unregulated Capitalism here in the West, allows criminals and thieves, frauds and pimps and whores, to usurp the better things in life, which are shared. This is where our selfish (Darwinian?) nature is at odds with goodness. It’s the reason for our existence. We are the drama of the conflict between good and evil, and right now, evil is winning.
Argh !
Who let THAT in ?
My God , the evil is winning …
Let’s shoot them all “virus infected” like Piscator aptly says in 42 .
Amusing to see that kind of ranting in a thread supposedly dedicated to anti religion considered as … a holy duty of the true non believers 🙂
I hereby proclaim my superiority and demand the head of the evil pope on the plate.
Science is not a religion, but the belief that science can explain everything is a religion. Actually, the Goedel theorems from logic imply that this is impossible.
The only way around this for the hard-core “rationalists” would be to deny the objective existence of natural laws and mathematics and declare that our universe is acausal and completely random, so that everything can be explained as a random fluctuation. For me, this is not a rational belief. As far as the subject of religion is concerned, I would recommend to rationalists/atheists to read a short book by Leo Tolstoy, called “A Confession”.
Philip -don’t take everything so literally – and note some of the sarcasm. But if you don’t see the evil winning (and defining evil is another problem, but lets look at human behaviors that hurt others asa start), then don’t you see all the financial hurt out there? And ranting is independent of anti-religion (or religion) – that we aren’t in the street physically yanking our lousy Congress out of their offices and caning them, given the fraud they have committed (treasonous!), then what does that say about us? We let these snake oil salesmen run amok.
“I think that religious beliefs are wrong, and that the world would be a better place if everyone accepted the real world for what it is”
As a physicist, surely you understand the limitations of science. In addition, you recognize that every experiment, every calculation that we do has at least one underlying assumption. What is an assumption if not a statement of faith? You are blinded by your desire to sculpt everything as a rational search for truth. All of our lenses are flawed, Sean. All of us view the world from our own corrupted perspective.
Great theologians are equivalent to great scientists. Both recognize the limits of their understanding. Both question their beliefs on a daily basis. Both strive for a greater understanding of the universe. We can learn much from both.
You have the same problem as the “religious” people you belittle. Both of you are absolutely certain of the answer to the question of the existence of God and the necessity for religious belief. Both of you have much to learn.
Religion is a construction of man. As such it is inherently flawed. 2000 years ago we were told to love our neighbors as ourselves and remember someone whenever we broke bread and drank wine. From this, we created a massive hierarchy and system of belief. We need to remember this whenever the “Church” is implicated in bad behavior.
The “Church” is a collection of men and women. It is not religious belief.
Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Milton: Ok, lets call it accomodationist, not appeasement. It sort of reminds me of how Obama
deals with things.
When do you complain about Pol Pot and Stalin and Mao and Che and Fidel ?