It’s mildly ironic that the recent Dawkins discussion has centered around whether he does or does not do an adequate job of addressing the logical arguments for the existence of God, because that’s one of the few areas where I probably agree with him. I don’t find any of those arguments particularly convincing, either.<\/p>\n
There are two real problems I have with Dawkins (and most other militant atheists, for that matter, but we’ll use him as emblematic of the whole crowd). One of those problems is a matter of tact and tactics– I think his whole approach to the issue is obnoxious and counter-productive. I don’t think there’s any good purpose served by pissing people off, while he prefers to go out of his way to say inflammatory things.<\/p>\n
As I said, though, this is a tactical issue, and lots of people feel differently, arguing that the world needs Malcolm X as well as Martin Luther King. The bigger problem I have is that I think Dawkins and most other militant atheists are badly mistaken about what actually motivates religious people, and as a result are engaged in a misguided and self-defeating crusade.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As I wrote quite a while back<\/a>, I think there are three different things that get grouped together under the heading of “religion”: moral philosophy, mythology, and cultural tradition. Moral philosophy is instructions right action (all the “thou shalt not” and “love thy neighbor” stuff), mythology is the supernatural part (creation stories, miracles, etc.), and cultural tradition is everything else: fish on Fridays, pancake breakfasts, church socials, youth basketball. There’s overlap between these– particularly between the mythology and moral philosophy– and they’re hard to separate from one another, but these three aspects are present in all religions.<\/p>\n Dawkins et al. are fine on the first two. They’re great at pointing out the hypocrisies of various religions when it comes to their moral philosophies, and at using science to poke holes in the mythology (not to mention coming up with belittling terms for various parts of it). The problem is, I don’t think that stuff is what gives religion its real power.<\/p>\n To be sure, there are plenty of people out there for whom the mythological aspects are critical– people who have a personal relationship with Jesus, or who spend huge amounts of time devising ways to explain the Grand Canyon as the result of Noah’s Flood. But I think they’re a relatively small fraction of the very large number of church-going people out there. Most people aren’t religious because of a need for the existential comfort provided by the thought of a Creator watching over them, they’re religious for social and cultural reasons, and for the immediate benefits of belonging to a community.<\/p>\n Dawkins walks up to the edge of this point when he notes that most people follow the same religion as their parents (see, for example, Ethan Zuckerman’s talk report<\/a>), but he draws the wrong lesson from it. The point isn’t that children are being brainwashed to hold certain articles of faith without critical thought, the point is that religion is a social phenomenon, and serves as a kind of social and cultural glue holding communities together.<\/p>\n My paternal grandparents were very religious, but my grandmother wouldn’t’ve known an ontological argument if it bit her on the leg. Religion, for them, was as much a matter of community as anything else– they didn’t just go to Sunday Mass at St. Stan’s because it was a Catholic church, they went because it was their<\/strong> church. It wasn’t a matter of doctrine– there were at least three Catholic churches that were closer to their house– it was a matter of identity. St. Stan’s (after St. Stanislaus Kostka<\/a>) was one of the focal points of the Polish community, and a great deal revolved around that church. Half the point of going to Mass was to talk to other people in the vestibule and the parking lot afterwards.<\/p>\n This is why I think Dawkins is way off base when he says it makes no sense to associate religions with children. When a photo caption refers to a child as a Sikh, they’re not saying that that child has made a conscious decision to embrace the central tenets of the Sikh faith. They’re using the term as a sort of shorthand for a huge range of social and cultural background. It’s a way of associating that child with a whole community of people who have certain things in common, and as such is a perfectly legitimate thing to say.<\/p>\n This is also why I disagree with “projectshave”‘s comment<\/a> that:<\/p>\n Atheists should stop arguing about the existence of God. “God” is the name people give to the fog of ignorance on the borders of science. The real problem is religion. That should be a much easier target to take down.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Attacking God is the easy part. If you want to “take down” religion, you’re going to find yourself coming up against deep-rooted issues of culture and identity, and people cling to that much<\/strong> more tightly than they cling to metaphysics. I haven’t gone to Mass in years, and I stopped paying attention to official doctrine years before that, but gratuitously nasty remarks about Catholics still get my back up, because that’s how I was raised, and it remains a part of my identity.<\/p>\n And that’s why I think most militant atheist activity is ultimately pretty futile. When I think about religion in practice, I don’t think about doctrinal disputes or ontological arguments. I think of decorating the church for Midnight Mass, of putting together bags of food for the poor, of my thesis advisor washing dishes at a church supper (a month after he won the Nobel Prize), of the cheerful Mormon youths who helped my former housemates move, of the crowded church at my grandfather’s funeral.<\/p>\n That’s what people really get out of religion. They get a community to support them in bad times, and celebrate with them in good times. And that’s exactly where the militant atheist argument is weakest– they’re great at pointing out logical flaws, but have nothing to say about culture and tradition and community. Given the choice between a tight community with some dodgy metaphysical beliefs and rigorous logic with no community to speak of, most people will go with the dodgy metaphysics. I’m tempted myself, sometimes.<\/p>\n That’s where I think Dawkins (and Myers, and Harris, and Dennett, and all the rest) is misguided. I think you could get people to give up the metaphysical stuff, if not for the social and cultural aspects– God isn’t the key to religion, community is the key to religion. The way to raise the standing of atheism is not to be more vehement about attacking the metaphysical beliefs of religion, because that only backfires– people see it as an attack on the community, and draw together even tighter. If you want to make atheism more attractive, you’re not going to do it by trying to make religion look worse. You need to offer something to offset or replace the social and cultural aspects of religion.<\/p>\n How do you do this? I haven’t the foggiest idea. Atheist bake sales? Youth camps? Charitable works? It all sounds horribly corny, but I bet that something could be found, if people put a tenth of the effort into constructive social projects that they do into lectures and books and blog posts calling religious people stupid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s mildly ironic that the recent Dawkins discussion has centered around whether he does or does not do an adequate job of addressing the logical arguments for the existence of God, because that’s one of the few areas where I probably agree with him. I don’t find any of those arguments particularly convincing, either. There… Continue reading Atheist Church Socials?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n