are you an atheist?

don't ignore them, take my offhand superiority and smugness to heart

imma be reductive and annoying coz i'm tired and have had some wine but i was talking to a wiccan who believed in a lot of the tenants of that religion (focussing on the superiority of the 'natural organic' state etc) and joined that religion because of it (which mystifies me because it seems self-evidentially an act of external validation when you already had your answers) and when she suggested that there's nothing supernatural about her religion and that nature is 'magic' i got flustered because 'magic' is definitionally supernatural.

so when Evan talks about "moving goalposts" that's what I think of.

I am currently reading Schneider and Sagan's Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, which is a really fascinating and decidedly anti-creationist account of life (they even take issue with the "4th law" self-organizing principle suggested by Stuart Kauffman) among many other things. But the following passage is especially interesting since it brushes up against some knotty aporias in accounts about the origin of life--the radically incommensurable domains of religion and science which nevertheless seem caught in a permanent relation of tension (perhaps it's a version of that "actual/possible" aporia i mentioned upthread).

I've left out a few citations. sorry for any inevitable typos in what follows.

Before complexity and self-organization became catchwords, the Nobel laureate Jacques Monod contrasted chance with necessity, and wrote of the near impossibility of life's origins, which he likened to "chance caught on the wing." However unlikely, life only had to arise once. Moreover, if it had not, and it had not developed to the point where we could marvel at its complexity, the mystery of us marveling at it would not exist. As historian and philosopher of science Iris Fry points out, notions of self-organization have eased the theoretical difficulties somewhat. The belief in a naturalistic origin for life does not depend on discovering the specific biochemical route leading from nonlife to life. Even Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, an origins-of-life researcher with harsh words for those he perceives to be of a mystical bent, makes the mistake of thinking that discovering a biochemical path from nonlife to life will lay to rest creationist claims: "until such time," he has recently said, "as biologists can demonstrate an entirely material origin of life, the divine will remain a contender." But a belief in an unseen God controlling phenomena, based on faith, slips epistemologically about and is in no way beholden to evidence. If we wish to believe him, for example, God could have arranged the preliving components in such a way that they might tend naturally, under the influences of energy flow, to arrange into recursive polypeptide-nucleotide machines. Indeed, although in his letters Darwin privately revels in the possibility of life arising from some little warm pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, in public he is more circumspect, coming off more as a modern creationist in his estimation that there is "grandeur in this [evolutionary] view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed [by the Creator] into a few forms or into one." At bottom the belief in a naturalistic origin of life may also be faith--but it is faith deeply tied to empiricism, to a search for answer in a climate of the willingness to be wrong, in short to the "organized skepticism" of the scientific method. No single scientific fact or discovery can prove or disprove God, and the facts surrounding the mystery of life's origin are no exception.

that epistemological slipperiness they talk about is, i think, in line with the "moving goalposts" thing.

Well yeah, my issues with religion as an atheist come down to the probability factor that "your" god is the right god.

that "magic" vs supernatural thing is funny since it would seem she maintains private definitions for both. Hard to really talk about something with someone when they've freed themselves from any commitment to even minimal coherence and consistency. That's in keeping with darraghmac's good point above that most people are not especially interested in being intellectually rigorous about this. But that's an unfortunate tendency when religious belief is quarantined in private or subjective experience.

Moving goalposts happens on the science side as well. Seems all too easy to ignore that science pretty much evolved out of soothsayers, magicians, alchemists, astrologists, mystics, etc., and that for a time magic was considered science. Many of the big names in science were intensely religious, and many of them seriously researched supernatural phenomenon in addition to discovering the foundations of modern science.

If it is within the realm of the atheist to ignore all of this and posit that modern science is an ahistorical phenomenon then why can't the religious do the same with their subject?

strawmanning there

well both would be wrong to do that, of course. it was perhaps inevitable that religion would be backed into the corner of private experience but I think that bargain is no longer a good one.

Anyway that's why I argue for a more epistemologically humble religious stance, one derived in essence from the tradition of negative theology (ie, one that doesn't so much forgo transcendental pronouncements but radically circumscribes them).

To be more precise in addressing Adam's point, I don't think it's a given that atheists ignore the huge significance of religious thought in how ideas evolved. We have hit a point in certain culture where they butt up against each other, and one wins out and one doesn't, but that's not the whole story. It's not about denying the importance of religion, but appreciating that there was a point where the religious aspect just isn't as necessary as it was at one point.

I consider myself a spiritual person - but I can't define that spirituality in any religion.

And that skepticism isn't so much about spirituality as it is about specific religions, and the questioning that any specific religion somehow got it right.

again i'd argue that for many adherents of any given faith - not for all, obviously - the experience of being "right" as opposed to other faith groups is not really a constitutive part of their sense of their own faith

in other words sure there are dogmatists everywhere but to characterize a religion as dogmatic is to paint a partial picture of religion

It isn't, certainly, but you can't blame an atheist for thinking about that.

it's not about blame but i'm likely to mock anybody who creates a severely reductive picture of something just so's they can oppose it

my fundamental ish is with certain types of proselytizing atheism, because i don't think it's fighting an important battle and because if it were, the tools it uses to fight are fundamentally self-defeating

Well sure but that creates a severely reductive picture of atheists. I don't have a problem with someone being religious (aside from the obvious) but I can't follow them there because I can't get my head around the massive improbability.

Personal religion is not an entirely important battle, but there's an argument that it can expand into, say, a Hobby Lobby lawsuit.

feel like there are loads of aspects of eg fundamental physics that most people would be unable to get their heads around ;)

imo douchebag politics can be fought - and usually is - at the level of douchebag politics without trying to deny the douchebags' asserted ideological framework

Thanks for answers btw, mostly reminded me to remember how I generally feel abt this, happened to be p frustrated at the time

Moving goalposts happens on the science side as well. Seems all too easy to ignore that science pretty much evolved out of soothsayers, magicians, alchemists, astrologists, mystics, etc., and that for a time magic was considered science.

Exactly. It evolved. It evolved because it has the properties that you keep trying to take away from it in the tired attempt to brand it as "just like religion" in so many (negative) ways: Lack of dogma or agenda. Doubt, skepticism. Ability to change (fundamentally...not just shoehorning it into the original notion) based on new information. Goal of removing human bias/incompetence from obscuring objective truth. Fallibility. Testability. Predictability. Repeatability. Arriving at conclusions from facts and evidence rather than vice versa. It is a meritocracy for ideas. The bad ones (soothsayers, magicians, etc) fall by the wayside, replaced by ones that as best as we can figure more accurately describe/explain/predict reality (chemists, biologists, etc)

There's a difference to me between science reevaluating through testing and consensus vs. mentally rationalize the word god to not contradict those new scientific findings or cultural fluctuations.

Goal of removing human bias/incompetence from obscuring objective truth.

Good luck w that LOL

Arriving at conclusions from facts and evidence rather than vice versa.

this is a bit of a caricature of the scientific method, one that sees science as somehow exempt from the difficulties of the hermeneutic circle. to think we start from the bare "facts and evidence" and move from there to theoretical explanations is to deny the circular relationship between them, that what counts as "facts and evidence" is often pre-determined theoretically.

this is not to say that science doesn't develop/evolve. but there's really no standard to say it's developing in the teleological way you are describing ("removing bias from objective truth"). teleology, of course, being a concept science often rejects. for that reason the notion of "objective truth" may be shot through with bias as a very condition for existing at all, even a culturally conditioned object--some may even argue that objective truth may be defined most comprehensively through less accuracy!

shorter version: the distinction between "belief" and "truth" is not so easily maintained.

xp just had a scanners.gif moment with that one. haven't given my atheism much thought after i developed it when I was a kid, but these are some interesting arguments. not that they'll change my mind or anything, but i really didn't appreciate there's probably more ways of looking at it.

To pretend that people never work backwards in science is hilarious btw.

Science at least has a basis of findings to turn to when challenged. The popular religions seem to lean on anthropomorphism as support for the human spirit rationale.

Oops I meant to type anthropocentrism.

religion's problem, as far as i can see, is that its retreat into fundamentalism is a retreat into a logic of materialism (or "immanence") that is set by a rational/scientific modernity. it's playing by the rules of the other side. but religion remains open to pressures that aren't immanent--that can't, as the quote above suggests, be proved or disproved scientifically--but they are there, i think, principally in how some non-fundamentalist theologies have redefined the concept of the transcendental. just as science smuggles in transcendental premises that it has to seek out and eliminate (only to produce more of them in the process) so does religion have to confront the faulty "worldy" or immanent presumptions it borrows in order to communicate at all.

BTW Adam it is a false equivocation to say they work backwards in the same exact way.

ryan, could you clarify "so does religion have to confront the faulty "worldy" or immanent presumptions it borrows in order to communicate at all."

sure. sorry for the poor writing. im working off an assumption that religion seeks to communicate transcendence, which if taken seriously means that any *particular* communication of transcendence is in fact a betrayal or erasure of that transcendence it's trying to communicate.

Anthropocentrism is more or less a symptom of any human-created system of thought, science leans on it just as much, maybe even moreso, than religion. I would be interested in hearing any non-anthropocentric reasons to do pursue objective reality.

I mean, if you are looking at a book that is 2000 years old for studies of truth that ring scientifically false, you need not look to the Bible. That something written when most people on the planet believed the world was flat does not hold true for today, 2000 years later, wow, congratulations.

Again, I don't understand this 'working backward' idea, how you think it applies to religion. Do you think people start off believing in God and then go through the Bible and read it for evidence to back this up? You realize evidence has little/nothing to do w faith, right?

I'm not understanding how you'd see science to be more anthropocentric.

"Do you think people start off believing in God"

Well, yes.

"You realize evidence has little/nothing to do w faith, right?"

The faith needs a basis. That's how you decide what you have faith in. The basis, I believe, is anthropocentrism that comes from or along with a fear of death and the appetite for answers that are easy to conceptualize. As pattern seeking animals, easy to conceptualize = paralleling our ability to create to a hypothetical entity(ies) that must have created everything else we see and could not have created ourselves.

sure. sorry for the poor writing. im working off an assumption that religion seeks to communicate transcendence, which if taken seriously means that any *particular* communication of transcendence is in fact a betrayal or erasure of that transcendence it's trying to communicate.

― ryan, Wednesday, April 2, 2014 11:11 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks! Wasn't poor writing. I just need spoon feeding sometimes.

Seems to me a constant problem for religion in modernity is a lack of present authority to produce transcendental utterances. Religion needs to constantly recur to traditional practices and ancient texts, since no sui generis transcendental utterance can possibly be convincing coming out of someone today. Just to sound right (and not like cultish idiocy), it has to position itself within a tradition, which means that 'worldly presumptions' are an inescapable part of religion's prestige.

i agree--that's why id argue for a particular tradition (negative theology) that's often left by the wayside because it's a tradition that performs a more fundamental questioning of itself and doesn't allow for the supposed security of definitive utterances.

furthermore id even go so far (and this is prob where i lose people) as to say that those kinds of medieval theology offer a model worth adapting (stress on *adapting*) for a great many social systems, science among them.

Faith needs no basis. At the most objective level you could say it is an inherited trait, much like your eye color or geographic location of birth. To many people, belonging to a religious organization is something they were born into.

As far as anthropocentrism in science, how about the commonly accepted theory of evolution? You know, where humans are the end-all-be-all and the pitch of the evolutionary process over millions of years? Not that this isn't true (tho it might not be) but how is that not anthropocentric way to view our place in the world?

You could also bring up that we experiment on animals before humans, or that science benefiting humans far, far, far outnumbers science benefiting the environment or other animals therein. Maybe the fact that we think nothing at all of destroying some natural habitats in order to make room for progress.

Ryan, who are some writers re: negative theology you would recommend?

michael sells' book Mystical Languages of Unsaying is the place to start.

going through some notes i find this passage from hans blumenberg which is pretty great:

The crisis-laden self-dissolution of the Middle Ages can be linked to the systematic relations in the metaphysical triangle: man, God, world. This presupposes an ambivalence in Christian theology. On the one hand, theology’s theme is anthropocentric: the biblical God’s concern, within history and beyond its eschatological invalidation, for man’s salvation is transformed with the help of the received Stoic idea of pronoia [providence] into an idea of world government and the coordination of nature, history, and man, which is fully unfolded in the Scholastic system of pure rationality. On the other hand, there is the theocentric motive: the dissolution of Scholastic rationality through the exaggeration of the transcendence, sovereignty, hiddenness, fearsomeness of its God. The first motive holds the metaphysical triangle of theology, anthropology, and cosmology together; the second tears it apart. The ability of the second motive to prevail shows at the same time that the systematic consistency of the structure constituted by the first motive is insufficient, that it is superficially harmonized heterogeneity.

ah here's the bit from sells i wanted:

At least three responses to the primary dilemma of transcendence are conceivable. The first response is silence. The second response is to distinguish between ways in which the transcendent is beyond names and ways in which it is not…The third response begins with the refusal to solve the dilemma posed by the attempt to refer to the transcendent through a distinction between two kinds of name. The dilemma is accepted as a genuine aporia, that is, as unresolvable; but this acceptance, instead of leading to silence, leads to a new mode of discourse.

"As far as anthropocentrism in science, how about the commonly accepted theory of evolution? You know, where humans are the end-all-be-all and the pitch of the evolutionary process over millions of years? Not that this isn't true (tho it might not be) but how is that not anthropocentric way to view our place in the world?"

It's not quite the same as deciding from the get go that we're the focus of all existence to the point we are awarded the ability to continue existing after death.

how about the commonly accepted theory of evolution? You know, where humans are the end-all-be-all and the pitch of the evolutionary process over millions of years?

Epic fail. Nobody who actually studies evolution, like, professionally, or works in the field, believes that second sentence. At all.

pretty sure fungus is the end-all-be-all of evolution. that stuff is incredible.