Salvaging Leviticus?

Maurice Harris, a progressive rabbi, has written what appears to be a fascinating new book: Leviticus: You Have No Idea. You can find excerpts and a table of contents on his website for the book. Here's a choice quote that convinced me to buy it:

Why do I think Leviticus can be a valuable book for people today who have—for lack of a more precise way of putting it—a progressive approach to religion? Because when it comes to Leviticus, we really have no idea. No idea of the surprisingly relevant questions and insights it contains, and little idea of how to integrate its strange, authoritarian, and intimidating worldview with our commitment to progressive values. 

As with so many other parts of the Bible, we tend to miss a lot of what’s there in Leviticus by not taking the time to explore it and greet it freshly with the question, “What might we learn today from studying this text, from bringing our current problems and struggles into dialog with even this text?” And if, in the course of greeting Leviticus with those questions, we are willing to let our sacred texts be imperfect—let them be a record of our ancestors’ understandings of God, not of God’s literal words beamed down to us never to be challenged—then the potential for what we can learn that’s directly relevant to our moment in human history expands dramatically.

The final message here resonates powerfully with some current work I'm doing on the concept of divine revelation. My philosophical question--rather different from Harris's scriptural one but, I think, leading to complementary insights--is this: What implications does one's view about God have for one's understanding of divine revelation? More precisely, does a particular understanding of God--say, the understanding of God as being essentially loving--require or preclude any specific views about how a God would self-disclose or what content should make us suspect/doubt revelatory origin?

My argument (which should come as no surprise to readers of this blog) is that if we take seriously the view that God is love, we should not expect to encounter God most clearly in the pages of a text, but rather in the context of loving relationships--that is, in the context of loving and being loved (including but not limited to our experience of loving and being loved by the divine, our passional reaching for the infinite and our occasional sense of "being in the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face," to quote Simone Weil's account of her first mystical experience).

But lessons drawn from our experiences of love need to be formulated, and it seems that if God is love then we should place our deepest trust in those lessons that emerge out of a community of loving discourse. In such a community, I think a holy text can serve as the proxy voice of those who have lived long ago. Their wisdom and insights can become part of the loving conversation--not an authoritarian conversation-stopper that we must silence in order to have a loving discourse at all (which is what fundamentalism would turn holy texts into), but a voice in the dialogue, as Harris suggest in the words above.

Progressive Religion vs. Fundamentalism, Part 2: A Slippery Slope?

Two Kinds of Religion

A few weeks back I offered the first post in a promised series--a series in which my aim will be to consider objections to the legitimacy of religion in general in the light of the distinction between progressive religion and fundamentalism.

In that first post my purpose was to explain what I have in mind by the two kinds of religion--not in rigorous philosophical terms, but in an accessible way that I hope is useful. As I made clear in that post, the distinction I have in mind is between ideal types. Actual religions can be more or less progressive, more or less fundamentalistic.

In brief, the key feature of fundamentalism is certainty: This creed, these texts, this leader or institution offers us the Truth with a capital "T"--that is, a deep and ultimate truth about the nature of reality (in theism, about the nature of God), and a decisive account of how we ought to live so as to be in harmony with this deepest reality (in theism, living in tune with God's nature and will). In fundamentalism an equivalence is asserted between the teachings of a particular book or other authority and the self-disclosure of the creator. The Bible is the Word of God. Hence, no distinction is made between doubting that the Bible is God's Word and doubting God's Word. Anyone who doubts the chosen holy book or prophet or clerical authority is thus an enemy of Truth.

In brief, the key feature of progressive religion is critical appropriation and living out of inherited worldviews and ways of life: A religious tradition, with its creeds and sacred narratives, its scriptures and its sacraments, is embraced on account of its perceived promise in helping us to grow in wisdom. It's a matter of trajectory. The religious tradition is seen as offering a powerful template for engaging with the world, one that promises ever deeper insight into fundamental truths about ourselves and the world if only we are open to having that template itself evolve in the light of what lived experience--our own and others'--teaches us.

In other words, like fundamentalism, progressive religion reaches for profound truths about ourselves and reality that transcend what ordinary empirical inquiry gives to us. But while fundamentalism claims to have grasped these truths, equating them with the doctrines and practices and narratives of their religion, the religious progressive sees these doctrines and practices and narratives as instruments for progressively moving towards truths that, by their nature, may never be fully within reach.

The Slippery Slope Premise

A recurring challenge to progressive religion, especially in the last few years, is that there's something about even religion in its progressive forms that facilitates fundamentalism. If we endorse or legitimize progressive religion, we thereby endorse or legitimize a pattern of thinking or approach to life that opens the door to fundamentalist belief. You can't have one without the other.

Let's call this the slippery slope premise: There's a slippery slope from progressive religion to fundamentalism, not in the sense that every person who embraces the former is inevitably going to slide into the latter, but in the sense that if society lets the former in the door, the latter will slide in with it.
The most sweeping recent critics of religion (the "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) have offered various reasons for thinking that this slippery slope premise is true, and have then made use of it to conclude that even if what they call "moderate" religion is in its own right harmless, it should be opposed because (in Dawkins' words) its teachings "though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism" (The God Delusion, p. 306).

There's a sense in which my first book, Is God a Delusion?, was largely about this slippery slope argument. I wanted to delineate a way of being religious (which I perhaps unwisely sometimes called "true religion") that wan't touched by the New Atheist challenges. I responded to these challenges, in essence, by saying, "Here's a species of religion that doesn't have the vices you rail against; and your glancing efforts to show that 'moderate' religion provides succor to more extreme forms don't succeed in showing that the species of religion I have in mind does anything of the kind."  

But, of course, there are different ways to support a premise. Just because Dawkins and Harris haven't shown that progressive religion is "an open invitation to extremism," it doesn't follow that it's not. There might be better arguments for the slippery slope. In fact, there are probably different sorts of slippery slopes, in the sense of different ways in which endorsing one form of religion might inevitably advance the cause of another. Dawkins and Harris focus on what we might call logical slippery slopes: They think that you cannot consistently complain about or critique fundamentalism if you respect "moderate" religion. But perhaps there are slippery slopes that are less logical and more sociological, or perhaps psychological. What would be the arguments for those sorts of slippery slopes?  

While I hope to devote more attention to these questions in future posts, I don't want to do so here. Rather, for the rest of this post I want to consider what follows if you buy into the slippery slope premise.

Letting in the Bugs

If we accept the slippery slope premise as described above, should we conclude that religion in general ought to be opposed?

The New Atheists think so, but this is one of those places where they seem to be jumping to conclusions. Consider: What if the patterns of thinking that open the door to fundamentalism--and which are purportedly present even in progressive religion--are so deeply rooted in the human condition that there is no real hope of reducing their presence in human society? Our best hope, then, might be to channel those patterns into benign forms of expression. And what if progressive religion is the most effective way to do that?

In that case, promoting progressive religion could help reduce extremism even if it also legitimized a way of thinking found among extremists.

Or what if religion, in addition to having the harmful effect of promoting patterns of thinking that generate extremism, also has an array of positive effects? What if the negative costs of extremism can be overridden by religion’s benefits whenever the fundamentalist/progressive balance is weighted sufficiently on the side of progressivism? And what if such a progressive weighting is within reach?

In that case, legitimizing progressive religion might make the world a better place despite the negative side-effect of offering space for fundamentalism. To return to an earlier metaphor, perhaps it is true that if you open the door to progressive religion, fundamentalism will slip in, too. But likewise, when I let my dogs inside at night, bugs inevitably slip in with them. The opening for my dogs is wide enough, and my dogs slow enough, that sometimes a dozen insects pour in, attracted by the light, before I can get the sliding door shut again.

It hardly follows from this that I should forego the joys of pet ownership. Perhaps if I lived somewhere swarming with mosquitos carrying deadly diseases, the costs might outweigh the benefits. But even then, whether the costs outweigh the benefits might depend on whether there are steps one can take to minimize the number of bugs that pour through.

With my own dogs I've become quite adept at such steps. I avoid letting them out and in at twilight, when the mosquitos are most prevalent. When I let them in at night, I dim the lights inside the house, turn on a floodlight outside that attracts the bugs, open the door enough to call the dogs, shut the door quickly, and don't open it again until they're right there ready to come inside. Sometimes, I'm afraid to say, I almost nip off the tips of their tails sliding the door shut again.

Likewise, there may be strategies that we can take as a society to let in progressive religion while minimizing the number of fundamentalist bugs. If there is some sort of slippery slope--and if, as I believe, there are substantial and important contributions that progressive religion can make to society--then I think an exploration of such strategies is worth having.

And meaningful conversations about such strategies is hindered by polarizing language that throws all religion into a single basket, insisting on all or nothing.

Progressive Religion vs. Fundamentalism: Part 1

In my recent post on the importance of progressive religion, I intimated that not all religion is the same; but I made no effort to explicitly distinguish one kind of religion from another. Since I want to address a significant challenge to progressive religion in an upcoming post or two, I think it may help first to devote a post to explaining what I mean by “progressive religion,” and how it differs from fundamentalism.


Here goes.

Some religion inspires us with hopeful visions, while some drives us with fearful warnings.

Some religion is inclusive (in the sense of encouraging its members not to make distinctions among people, even on the basis of religion), while some is exclusive (especially based on religion).

Some religion takes scientific discoveries and empirical knowledge seriously, understanding faith as offering a way of seeing this empirical whole in the light of evolving postulates about what lies beyond. And then there’s the religion that makes unyielding claims about the empirical world and fights tooth and nail against any discovery that challenges them.

Some religion is fallibilistic, while some is dogmatic. That is, some religion, even if it offers teachings and creeds, regards these as finite human efforts to grasp a truth that transcends us, such that even as we live out these creeds we must remain open to correction, to being moved by the insights of others unlike ourselves and by the practical failures of our creeds in the face of lived experience. Other religion, by contrast, regards its teachings as the standard by which truth is measured.

Some religions think we learn the most about how to treat each other when we pay empathetic attention to those around us, when we try to collectively tease wisdom out of the experiences that come from the messy business of real human relationships. Others insist that how we should treat each other is clearly and inerrantly spelled out in a book, and that the book’s teachings are infallible even in the face of the agonized cries of those who find themselves crushed by those teachings.

Some religions think God (or the transcendent more vaguely construed) self-discloses to all of us through an array of channels—inherited stories, great teachers and prophets, insightful writings, personal intuitions, moments of mystical wonder, the experience of loving and being loved—and that the task of discerning the nature of what is thus revealed should be a collective human one and should never be regarded as finished. Others insist that one centralized authority contains the definitive revelation of God, and that all of us defy God’s word if we do not put this authority’s pronouncements above all other sources of insight that may come to us.

A religion that embodies the former in each of these pairs is what I call “progressive religion.” One that embodies each of the latter I call “fundamentalism.” As described these are ideal types. Real religions may mix and match features or fall between the extremes in a range of ways.

I make no pretense of having described these types in wholly neutral and dispassionate terms. I find progressive religion appealing and fundamentalism off-putting, and my descriptions reflect this. I am not writing here as a disinterested academic, but I am writing in a way that I hope is helpful. There is, I think, a descriptive content here that I hope helps to characterize a distinction that matters to me. Progressive religion is characterized, we might say, by a spirit of seeking and openness; fundamentalism by a spirit of certainty and bifurcation.

Both can be and typically are expressed within the context of an inherited tradition that is treated with deep respect—but progressive religion regards the tradition as a resource for engaging with the world, both collectively and personally, in ways that can generate deepening wisdom—in something like the Hegelian fashion, although I don’t mean to imply by this that all religious progressives have read Hegel (or that all of Hegel’s philosophy would be endorsed by them).

The Hegelian idea, in roughest terms, is that while the deepest truths about reality cannot be directly seen with our senses or grasped with our intellects, they can nevertheless be approached through living out a worldview respectfully but critically, so that the places where the worldview “grates” against the truth become apparent, and the worldview can be refined accordingly. More profoundly, the idea is that we have no choice but to live out a worldview of one sort or another. Even when we aren’t aware that we are taking things for granted, we are. The trick is to become aware of our assumptions and, instead of simply using them as the standard whereby we criticize and condemn everyone who disagrees with us, we test their adequacy by living them out in a spirit of openness—openness to noticing where the worldview doesn’t work, and modifying it accordingly.

Progressive religion accepts this idea, explicitly or implicitly. Fundamentalism rejects it, holding instead that the central dogmas of its tradition are certain and hence not to be questioned. To question them is to question truth and so to court error. To reject them is to reject truth and to live in error. The world becomes divided between those who live in truth (the Children of Light) and those who live in error (the Children of Darkness). The mission—to spread truth and light—becomes quite readily construed as a zero-sum struggle.

At root, progressive religion is most alive wherever great weight is placed on the distinction between what one believes to be true and what is true. While progressive religion affirms the legitimacy of having beliefs, it does so while insisting on the ever-present possibility of a disparity between what one believes and what is the case. And so the deepest devotion to truth, for the progressive, is found in the acknowledgment that one could be wrong about matters of faith.

Fundamentalism doesn’t merely minimize the importance of this distinction. It denies it. Its creeds are the truth. Hence, to disagree with its creeds is to deny the truth. To fail to revere its creeds is to fail to care about the truth. Devotion to the truth, for the fundamentalist, can never be paired with skepticism about the fundamentalist’s creed.

A recurring challenge to progressive religion is that there is something about the nature of religion, even in its progressive forms, that provides succor to fundamentalism. To legitimize progressive religion is to legitimize patterns of thinking that can and sometimes do lead to extremism.

In a way, my first book, Is God a Delusion?, can be usefully seen as an effort to respond to just this sort of challenge. But in an upcoming post or two I want to consider the challenge anew, and attempt to articulate my responses to it in ways that address themes that have emerged on this blog, and in a form amenable (I hope) to fruitful discussion.

Cherry Picking Problems

Greta Christina thinks religious progressives have a cherry-picking problem. Since I launched this blog with a response to her infamous post on atheist anger, and since her cherry-picking essay is getting some attention, it seems fitting for me to say something about this so-called problem. And I seem to be uniquely situated to do so. After all, not only am I a self-professed religious progressive, but I also have experience picking cherries.

Back in college I had a summer job at a fruit orchard in Orondo, Washington. At the height of the cherry harvest, I was pulled away from trimming apple trees and spreading paraquat so that I could help pick cherries. And I must admit that I did have something of a cherry-picking problem.

The thing is, when you pick cherries at an orchard, you need to be fast. One of my co-workers, Rippin' Rod Ripley, had his name for a reason: He ripped those cherried from the tree so fast that he was actually able to earn enough for a few weeks of hotels, booze, and whores when the season was over (Rippin' Rod was a Vietnam vet who lived in a trailer on the orchard grounds during the fruit-picking season, but was homeless once the season was over and the money ran out).

You need to be fast--if not as fast as Rippin' Rod, then at least fast enough so that you aren't losing the orchard money. But you also need to be picky. Some cherries are split. You don't want too many of them in your bucket, or that whole batch becomes a lower grade. More serious are the cherries that have mold on them. If those go in the bucket, they can ruin the cherries around them.

And you don't just need to be fast and picky. You also need to be skillful. You see, when you pluck a cherry from the tree, it's very easy to leave the cherry stem behind. It's hooked onto the branch at least as strongly as it is to the fruit, so that if you just rip a bunch of cherries down off a branch into your bucket, chances are it'll be a bucket full of stemless cherries.

But consumers want their cherries with stems. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's so that they won't lose out on opportunities to be entertained (tittilated?) by those rare individuals (such as my wife) who can pop the stem in their mouth, work it around for a minute with their tongue, and spit it out again with a perfect little knot tied in it. Yes, my wife can do that. It's part of why I married her.

In any event, back to cherry-picking. While I could be fast, it was at the cost of selectivity and skill. And while I could be selective and skillful, it made me really slow. I never did get the knack that Rippin' Rod displayed out there among the trees, this ability to rip cherries from the trees at a frenetic pace and end up with buckets of pretty, unsplit, mold-free, stem-sporting cherries.

So, I confess to having a cherry-picking problem. But here's the thing: This problem has absolutely nothing to do with my religious progressivism. In fact, back when I was picking cherries at that orchard, I wasn't a religious progressive at all. That was the time in my life when I got sucked in by a more fundamentalist form of Christianity. I was recently "born again." I occasionally spoke in tongues and convinced myself I wasn't just making $#!t up. While at the orchard, I went with a friend most Sundays to a small Seventh Day Adventist church with a pastor whose mantra was "Just believe!"

Oh, wait.

Just glanced back at Greta Christina's post. Looks as if this "cherry picking" language is a metaphor. Whoowee,  am I embarrassed.

Well, taken in those terms her argument's a bit more interesting. But all kidding aside, I think my earlier conclusion still stands: I do have a cherry-picking problem. We all do. So does she. It's called "the problem of the criterion." The problem arises whenever we consider our judgments about our standards of judgment. By what standards do we decide that we have the right standards? How can we be critical of our own starting points without either implicitly abandoning those starting points in favor of different ones which we then use to critique the earlier starting points (but then we're still not critiquing the starting points we have now) or relying on our starting points and so begging the question?

But this problem isn't a problem with my religious progressivism. Instead, my progressivism is an attempt to pursue a solution to the problem--a Hegelian solution, if you will.

I think her framing of the problem as a special problem for religious progressives is rooted in the same misconceptions about the nature of progressive religion that Sam Harris falls prey to when he calls religious moderates "failed fundamentalists" who betray both faith and reason equally. I talk about Harris's mischaracterization in Chapter 1 of Is God a Delusion?, and much of what I say there is applicable to the cherry-picking challenge.

But here I want to pursue a slightly different line of response. Greta Christina, like Harris, is assuming a foundationalist epistemology, and in effect arguing that if you "cherry pick" the Bible you are rejecting the religious fundamentalist's foundational source of evidence--namely, Scripture--in favor of the standards you're using to distinguish the "bad" biblical cherries frome the keepers. And these standards, she argues, are either the same one's that serve as the epistemological foundations for naturalism, or they're standards that are clearly unreliable ("what's in my heart").

And so Greta Christina concludes, in effect, that if you're prepared to "pick cherries" you have in effect abandoned the foundations of faith (blind allegiance to The Holy Book) and so need different ones--and the only tenable ones are the foundations that scientists rely on. And as soon as you limit yourself to those foundations you pretty much have to throw out God and the Bible altogether. And so you should be an atheist rather than a religious progressive. (I just had to go back and correct an interesting typo at the start of this paragraph--I'd mistakenly written "Great Christian").

But this whole argument is premised not only on an implicit embrace of a foundationalist epistemology (as opposed, say, to a more Hegelian approach). It is also premised on an understanding of the Bible that's drawn from Biblical fundamentalism (in which Scripture serves the same foundational evidential role that, for example, sense experience serves for the empiricist) and on a sweeping dismissal of alternative foundations (moral intuition, mystical experience, "first principles of the intellect," etc.)--a dismissal that implicitly relies on an indiscriminate lumping together of all of these things into the same "what's-in-my-heart" subjective category that, while defensible if you assume the naturalist's view of what counts as epistemically foundational, is not defensible if you want to avoid begging the question about what can and cannot qualify as foundational. We need a way to decide among foundations that doesn't beg the question, which means we need to replace epistemic foundationalism with something more nuanced--like the Hegelian dialectical method I favor.

In fact, I think religious progressives in general have made just this kind of shift, even if they've never heard of Hegel. They have lost faith in foundationalism--or, more broadly, they've lost their confidence in the human capacity to "get it right" with respect to evidential foundations. Often, this loss of faith starts with the foundations posited by fundemantalist religious traditions--but their sketpicism extends further than that. Not that they reject the conclusions that scientists reach based on their foundations, but the lived experience of progressives suggests to them that what science can offer based on those foundations is far too limiting, that there is something deep and profound beneath the empirical surface that science explores. To rule this out in advance, to rely on an epistemology that makes any such "something more" eternally inaccessible should it prove to be there, seems as bad as the Biblical fundamentalist's insistence that the Bible offers unassailable foundations from which to build a system of beliefs and a way of life.

And as progressives look at their religious traditions, inherited stories, holy books, and oral teachings, they begin to see that viewing them according to a foundationalist lens is a very modern distortion of what is going on, a misconstrual of what the tradition had been up to until Cartesian Foundationalism got a hold of it. What they see in, say, the Bible, is not some singular "source of evidence" a la sense perception, but an evolving worldview, a holistic way-of-seeing the totality of human experience which, while it presupposes standards for evaluating beliefs, is constantly refining those very standards and methods in the light of lived engagement with the world.

The picture of God in the Bible is not univocal, but evolving. The ethical notions are not univocal, but evolving. There is a direction, a trajectory, that suggests viewing the Bible as a record of the growth and development of a way of seeing a reality that's more mystery than clarity, but which impresses itself upon us and transforms us no matter what standards of evidence we happen to be working with. No matter how inadequate out interpetive scheme, the reality that lies behind experience has a way of breaking through, producing cracks and fissures, exposing inadequacies.

And the religious progressive sees promise in the process. The progressive sees a trajectory that this evolution is taking, and so steps with a hopeful spirit into the evolving tradition to be part of its further evolution in the light of lived human experience. And in taking on that tradition and modifying it in the light of experience, the proper metaphor is not "picking cherries" at all. A better metaphor--derived from my recent history--would be road-testing a new bicycle.

You take it out on the road and, in the light of what you experience, you adjust the seat a little bit upward. You move the handlebars a bit. You decide that the saddle isn't right for your butt, and so you buy a different one. The tires are perhaps the wrong kind for the gravelly roads on which you have to ride--making you too susceptible to a flat. So you get "armadillo" tires. When you start out the process, you don't even really know what you should be looking for. Does the disturbing numbness in your unmentionables mean you've got the wrong seat, or just that your body needs to adjust to riding? What about the ache in your lower back? The very standards by which you decide what changes to make are part of what you discover over the course of road-testing the bike.

If someone watching this process were to say, "Hey, you're cherry-picking!", you'd probably scratch you're head in befuddlement. If they went on to say that you were just being a hypocrite for not trading in the bike for a car--well, you get the idea. The "picking cherries" metaphor presupposes that we have in place a set of foundational standards of judgment (freedom from splits and mold, etc.) that are clearly distinct from the cherries being selected on the basis of those standards. But when we're talking about a holistic worldview, there is no such ready dichotomy between the "correct" standards of judgment and that which is being judged. The road-testing metaphor is far more helpful here.

And you need a vehicle in order to do a road test. It's not something you can dispense with. Even Greta Christina has her metaphorical "vehicle"--her metaphysical naturalism with the evidentiary standards it implies (and the ones it rejects). While there might be a time and a place for telling someone that their bike is a piece of crap and they should consider a new one rather than keep tuning up and replacing parts on the one they have, the mere fact that someone is pursuing such refinements isn't evidence that the bike should be thrown out. The person who tunes up their bike is not thereby a hypocrite. And just because a bike needs more frequent maintenance than a minivan doesn't mean that people should give up riding bicycles. 

I could develop these ideas more precisely in terms of the Hegelian dialectic and its implications. But I already intend to offer a more rigorous treatment of this Hegelian approach as it relates to religion and science, and since I'm getting ready to leave for a conference in the morning, I'll leave matters at that for now. If you want more detail, you can always check out the online video of my University of Tulsa lecture, in which I respond to this species of challege if not to Greta Christina's specific formulation of it. Or you can look at this post, in which I describe the progressive approach to the Bible.

A Case of Atheistic Fundamentalism?

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my “book talk,” which I’ll be giving at various venues in which I’ve been invited to speak on themes related to my book. The process of preparing that talk forced me to immerse myself in the blogging of a rather unsavory character—a man named PZ Myers.

Let me explain. I inaugurated the book talk about a week ago, at a public lecture at Oklahoma State University, and was pleased by the crowd that turned out. But if that crowd was hoping for an overview of my book, they were disappointed. They didn’t get a narrative of the book’s origins or anecdotes about how it’s been received. They didn’t hear me lay out in detail one or more of the arguments found in the book. In short, I didn’t give them the kind of talk that, for example, I saw Bart Ehrman give with such wit and energy a couple of years ago, while he was promoting Misquoting Jesus.

I decided to do something different. You see, about the time that I sent in the first draft of my book to the publisher, the paperback edition of Dawkins’ The God Delusion came out, complete with a new preface by the author. In that preface, Dawkins responded (in a very general way) to a number of criticisms of his book.

One of those criticisms is this: In The God Delusion, Dawkins leaves the familiar territory of biology and treads brazenly into the domain of theology and philosophy…but clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. His ignorance of theology and philosophy is staggering. One of the most prominent scholars to make this charge was the eminent biologist H Allen Orr, of my alma mater, in The New York Review of Books. But it’s also a charge that I level in more than one place in my book.

In the new preface to The God Delusion, Dawkins doesn’t deny that he has little knowledge of theology and philosophy. What he denies is that he needs to be especially expert in these disciplines in order to make the points he wants to make in The God Delusion. In making this case, Dawkins relies almost entirely on a bit of satire written by PZ Myers.

Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota at Morris, is perhaps best known as the atheist blogger who challenged his readers to “score” him a consecrated communion wafer so that he could desecrate it (something which he later did, along with pages from the Koran and from The God Delusion, in order to highlight his conviction that nothing should be held sacred). But aside from this incident, his most well-known contribution to the intellectual world is a ribald little elaboration on H.C. Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a piece of satire that Myers calls “the Courtier’s Reply.”

It is this piece that Dawkins leans on, quoting almost in its entirety in the new preface to The God Delusion. In the piece, Myers adopts the persona of one of the emperor’s courtiers, expressing disgust at Dawkins for accusing the emperor of nudity without having read any of the learned treatises on the properties and aesthetic merits of the emperor’s raiment. The point, of course, is that these treatises are just obfuscation, and that one needn’t pay any attention to them in order to see that the emperor is naked.

My book talk is an attempt to explain why Dawkins really does need to be an expert in theology and philosophy of religion—or at least far more expert than he happens to be—in order to develop the kind of case he wants to make in The God Delusion. As such, developing my book talk forced me to take a look at PZ Myers’ blog—which, all things told, I found to be a rather unpleasant experience, something like being forced to have dinner with a boorishly bombastic relative who spends the entire evening leveling eloquent insults against everyone you love.

Now I don’t want to lay out here, in all its details, my response to Myers’ “Courtier’s Reply.” My book talk is a forty minute lecture, and culling it down to a more bloggish size is a project that will take more time than I have available right now. All I’ll say is this: Myers’ Courtier’s Reply likens theology in all its richness and diversity to pandering obfuscation. But this analogy reveals a profound failure to understand the substance and content of the best theology. Theology is not just about describing the properties of God and giving bad arguments for God’s existence. It is more profoundly about offering a holistic interpretation of human experience, an interpretation which differs from a materialistic or naturalistic one in that it draws its meaning from the conviction that there is something vast and important and essentially purposive behind the empirical surfaces that science studies.

When it comes to holistic interpretations of experience, or worldviews, the best way to decide among them is to compare how well they do in making sense of our actual experience (including but not limited to our empirical experience), and in how well they guide us in our efforts to engage the world around us effectively and with integrity. We cannot decide between atheistic and theistic worldviews without doing this comparative work. And we cannot do this comparative work adequately if we ignore the most comprehensively and carefully developed theistic worldviews—especially those that take the lessons of science seriously and incorporate them into the data that our worldview is supposed to explain. In short, we cannot decide whether a theistic worldview is better than an atheistic one without studying the most important works of theology.

Myers might have recognized all of this had he actually read the best theology. But he hasn’t. He doesn’t think he needs to. His argument against reading theology is one of those insular ideological arguments that immunizes itself from criticism by rejecting in advance that which would expose its failings. Its basic aim is to celebrate and justify one’s failure to critically engage in an open-minded way with the most careful of one’s intellectual opponents, and in this respect is just like what Dawkins himself is complaining about when he refers to the “immunological devices” that keep “faith heads” from listening to the arguments of their opponents—the most effective of which he takes to be “a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely the work of Satan.”

Myers replaces warnings with ridicule, and thinks anyone who bothers to open a book like, say, Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, is an idiot, since the book is surely the work of an obfuscating panderer.

But enough of this. My main objective in this post isn’t to offer a detailed counter to the Courtier’s Reply, but to reflect on an exchange I discovered when I went to PZ Myers’ blog, “Pharyngula,” while researching my book talk. As I was reading the pages of comments posted in response to Myers’ satire (most of which were of the form “Hear! Hear!”), I noticed one commentator who questioned whether Myers’ satire really applied to H Allen Orr’s scathing review of The God Delusion.

Myers responded by quoting a passage from Orr’s review, a passage that he said “falls squarely into the pigeonhole of the Courtier’s Reply.”

But then something interesting happened. A commentator whom I’ll call JR examined the very passage from Orr’s review that Myers quoted, and he argued that the nature of Orr’s complaints in this passage could not be dismissed by a simple appeal to the Courtier’s Reply. In effect, JR claimed that Dawkins was doing more in his book than simply arguing that there probably is no God—that he was also making claims about the dangers of religious faith, for example. And some of Orr’s complaints related to Dawkins’ failure to consider theological ideas relevant to these other concerns.

So, how did Myers reply to JR? He replied by shutting him down. He pointed out (accurately) that JR had admitted on another blog to having not yet read The God Delusion. And then he told JR to “toddle off”—or Myers would block him from posting on the site.

And then he launched into the following angry outburst:

This is a bad thing: criticizing books at length that you’ve never read. It really pisses me off, too, because I at least try to read the other side. I’ve read Collins (execrable), Miller (half bad/half good), Wilson (not bad), Roughgarden (pretty awful), and even Coulter (gibbering insanity)...what is it with people who think it’s OK to tear into Dawkins on 2nd or 3rd hand echoes of what he actually wrote? It’s intellectually dishonest.

Now, I agree that it is bad to criticize what you haven’t read based on hearsay about its contents. For example, it’s a really bad thing just to assume that the great works of theology have no bearing on Dawkins’ claims in The God Delusion when you’ve never actually read these works. I’m happy to agree with Myers wholeheartedly on this point. It’s intellectually dishonest. Shame on Myers and Dawkins for doing it.

But the thing is, JR wasn’t doing it. He wasn’t talking about The God Delusion, but rather about Orr’s review of it and Myers’ dismissal of that review. JR was pointing out that the claims made in Orr’s review couldn’t be dismissed by an appeal the Courtier’s Reply.

Myers never answered this challenge. He never even tried. Instead, he told JR to shut up and go away or he’d silence him. And he did it on the basis of an essentially irrelevant ad hominem attack.

This kind of behavior may be a pretty good way to ensure that the comments section of your blog is populated mainly by yes-men. But it is not the way to promote a serious intellectual conversation that engages opposing views and arguments fairly.

Now there may be times and places in which it might be appropriate to end a conversation with someone, perhaps to ask them to leave your parlor or your blog site, because they are interfering with the productivity of the conversation rather than contributing to it. But what prompted Myers’ injunction to “toddle off” was a single post—a post which, I might add, raised an issue worth raising. What’s on display here is not exactly what I’d call a free thinker who cares about reasons and arguments and a careful consideration of their merits. But isn’t that what Myers wants to be?

One gets the sense that he does, especially when he protests that at least he tries to read the other side. But I think his list of the works on “the other side” is instructive. Francis Collins, Ken Miller, E.O. Wilson, and Joan Roughgarden are all biologists like him, all of whom have written books addressing the relationship between science and religion in a manner sympathetic to religion, all of whom wrote with a general audience in mind. Some of their books are very good ones taken in these terms, but none of these authors is expert in theology or the philosophy of religion. None of their books displays the rigorous treatment of the subject that you’d find in an academic work written by an accomplished philosopher or theologian. Ann Coulter, the last name he mentions, is a lawyer and a conservative political commentator (to put it charitably). What expertise she brings to the table is, I think, a mystery to most.

If Myers wants a reading list of truly important works on “the other side,” I’d be happy to give him one. It would likely include classics by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hermann Lotze, as well as more recent books, such as the provocative Agnostic Inquirer by Sandra Menssen and Thomas Sullivan, and the game-changing analysis of naturalism (simply titled Naturalism) by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. I suppose I’d narcissistically include my own book as a more accessible introduction to the philosophical and theological grounds for challenging Dawkins and the other “new atheists,” but I wouldn’t recommend it as an alternative to reading the more detailed academic works and the classics in philosophical theology.

But here’s the thing. I want to have conversations that are thoughtful and careful, conversations that make a serious effort to understand and respond to opposing perspectives, conversations in which all parties are open to being moved—if not moved to abandon their beliefs, then at least to modify them in the light of important criticisms.

I’m not opposed to conversations that get passionate. Let’s let everyone in the conversation be human—and part of what it means to be human is to care so much about what you’re saying that you sometimes get carried away. You say things that aren’t fully thought through, or you say them in a way that isn’t all that nice. Let’s have patience with each other when this happens. But let’s not indulge our capacity for vitriol. And let us, above all, strive to listen to each other with charity.

I think there’s something to be said for conversations of this sort. But to have them, there are some things we need to set aside. Among them are “immunological devices” that justify our refusal to take seriously what others have to say. Reliance on such devices seems one useful definition of "fundamentalism."

And it seems to me that it isn’t just religious fundamentalists who are prone to making use of such devices.

An Uncharitable Review

I won’t make a habit of this, but I’ve decided to comment on an uncharitable review of Is God a Delusion? that appeared recently on Amazon. I do so in case other readers have misunderstood my arguments in the same ways that this “Hande Z” has.

For ease of reference, I will refer to the reviewer as HZ. Let me walk through HZ’s main points one by one. HZ writes:

Reitan begins with an attack against people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, calling them "New Atheists" without explaining why the adjective "new" was necessary and what he meant. Would he be a "New Apologist" then?

This is a minor point, but still deserves some reflection. Writing the kind of book I did, I needed a phrase to refer collectively to the authors of the atheist bestsellers I was addressing. Early on I borrowed Schleiermacher’s language and referred to them as “today’s cultured despisers of religion.” This proved to be an extremely clumsy phrase for repeated use. And so I chose “new atheists” for its brevity as well as for reasons mentioned on pp. 3-4 of the introduction.

It turns out I was hardly unique in finding this appellation appropriate. In fact, it’s become the common name for the species of atheism exemplified by Hitchens and Dawkins. Their kind of atheism is characterized by several features. First, it isn’t merely disdainful of religion, but hostile to it. Second, it’s not quietly hostile. In fact, Dawkins calls for atheists to “come out of the closet” and profess their atheism to the world, to express a kind of “atheist pride.” But the pride he advocates is not the sort that can comfortably coexist with respect for religious belief, because it involves taking pride in having avoided the supposed foolishness of religion. And this fact highlights the third distinctive feature of this species of atheism: it’s not just about disbelief in the supernatural. It asserts that to be religious is to exhibit a shortcoming in one’s intellect or moral character (or both). The view seems to be that, on this issue, reasonable people cannot disagree, because to disagree with atheism is unreasonable.

Is such atheism new? Not entirely. Bertrand Russell, for example, seemed to have been an atheist of this sort (at least in his more bellicose moments). But the prevalence of this species of “out” atheist hostility to religion appears to be on the rise in recent years. And so, to speak of the representatives of this brand of atheism as the “new” atheists seems apt.

Let’s move on to some of HZ’s more substantive criticisms. HZ writes:

He tried to garner support and sympathy by flattering people of all religions, but tripped up when he concluded his Introduction with this comment: "We must find ways, not to stamp out religion, but to let true religion loose upon the world." (Reitan's emphasis) Which was that true religion he had in mind? His own belief seems clearly to be Christian (but which model?); and that being so, was he then really empathetic to Sikhism, Islam, and all the other religions he fawned over? At page 61 he distinguishes "the god Hypothesis" from "the God Hypothesis". Who was his "God"? We won't find the answer in this book.

Here, HZ pounces on my use of the phrase “true religion,” but ignores the context which gives it meaning. In fact, two pages prior to the passage HZ quotes, I explicitly state what I mean by “true religion." It is religion that is “born out of a combination of rational insight, profound experiences of a distinctive kind, and morally laudable hope” and is then “refined and shaped by careful and humble reflection in open-minded discourse with others” (p. 9).

Throughout the book I develop these elements into an account of the parameters within which religion can be both intellectually respectable and morally benign, and I also discuss the corrupting forces that can push religion outside of these parameters. Any religion—Christian, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Hindu—that stays true to these parameters counts as “true religion” in my sense. Religion that loses touch with them is not.

And one way to lose touch with them is to lose touch with what Schleiermacher calls the “beautiful modesty” and “friendly, attractive forbearance” that naturally accompanies experience of the transcendent. Religion rooted in such experience cannot help but recognize that the subject matter of religion defies finite human efforts to describe it. This is why Schleiermacher insists that anyone whose religion is rooted in such experience “must be conscious that his religion is only part of the whole; that about the same circumstances there may be views and sentiments quite different from his, yet just as pious.”

In short, far from belying my propensity for religious inclusivism, my reference to letting true religion “loose upon the world” is an expression of that inclusivism. By “true religion,” I mean religion that (among other things) views other religious traditions as having something of value to say about the mysteries of the transcendent. Such inclusivism is not uncritical, but the criteria by which religions are judged are not those of doctrinal orthodoxy or allegiance to a single tradition or holy text, etc.

As for the reviewer’s mention of my distinction between “the god of superstition” and “the God of religion,” it is astonishing when he says that “we won’t find any answers in this book”—since developing and discussing the significance of this distinction is one of the book's chief aims.

In briefest terms, my point (piggy-backing on Plutarch) is this: There is a profound difference between believing in a supernatural tyrant who needs to be appeased on pain of harsh retribution, and living in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness. Religions that affirm the supernatural tyrant are what Plutarch called superstition. And belief in this god of superstition inspires the same kind of frenzied efforts at appeasement that an abusive spouse so often inspires, producing a supernatural variant of battered wife syndrome. Such belief is harmful—and atheism in the face of such a god is like a healthy divorce with a lifetime restraining order attached.

But it doesn’t follow that it is likewise harmful to live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, that when we act with moral integrity we are aligning ourselves with the most basic truth about reality. I call this “the ethico-religious hope,” and I define the God of religion as that which, if it existed, would fulfill this hope. Such a definition is what I call “functional,” in that it doesn’t specify God in terms of a list of properties (although it implies benevolence) but rather in terms of the role that God serves in the psychological economy of the devout theist—that is, the theist who loves and trusts God. Tyrants inspire neither love nor trust, but only fear and servile obedience.

HZ is unhappy with this kind of functional definition, perceiving it as my attempt to define God so vaguely that the theist can “evade, hide, and shift his ground every time he gets cornered.” HZ wants me to offer what, in my book, I call a “substantive definition” of God—that is, a definition in terms of a list of precise properties.

This is an issue I have discussed in other posts, and so I won’t beat a dead horse here. Suffice it to say that early scientists wouldn’t have gotten very far if they hadn’t left room for non-substantive definitions. Image a Copernican-era scientist who insisted that “star” be defined in terms of the old substantive conception of it as a “pinhole in the firmament,” who then concluded on the basis of the evidence that stars do not exist, and finally accused those who defined “star” by pointing upward, and who offered new conceptualizations in light of new evidence, as being guilty of “evading, hiding, and shifting the ground every time they get cornered.”

HZ writes:

Can he justify his claim that the "cause of the trouble is a fundamentalist insistence that one ought to accept without question that some text or institution or prophetic leader (is perfectly) articulating the very will of God?" (The reviewer leaves out of the quote what I have re-inserted in parentheses for the sake of clarity). Isn't this a circular argument? Who is a fundamentalist? It seems that he would be someone who disagrees with Reitan.

In the passage quoted (found on p. 71), I am discussing ways in which belief in God’s goodness can be stripped of meaning. One issue I focus on is the idea that you “ought to accept without question that some text or institution or prophetic leader” perfectly represents God’s will. For ease of reference I call this way of thinking “fundamentalist,” and I argue that it strips all meaning from the claim that God is good, leaving us with a supernatural being whose will must be followed, but who isn’t good in any meaningful sense. In short: a supernatural tyrant. Fundamentalism in the indicated sense leads to belief in the god of superstition. There is no circularity here, and the meaning of “fundamentalist” is far more substantive than just “anyone who disagrees with me.”

HZ writes:

Reitan called Dawkins a philosophical novice because (or so Reitan believed) he did not understand Aquinas. Reitan and Aquinas believed in God (and since Aquinas was Christian, Reitan's belief must be Christian) because everything in the universe must have a cause except the first cause. They realise d that if they don't put a stop to this then they are stuck in an infinite regress - turtles all the way down. So why is this first cause so personal that he needs and wants to be worshipped? Why not just a bang from a bag of gas? Reitan would believe that a bag of gas must have a first cause. So, can he explain why a bag of gas can't be the first cause that he believed must exist; a cause that had no cause? How does he differentiate his idea of the first cause (his "god") from a bag of gas?

I set aside the invalid argument that since Aquinas and I both believe in God, and Aquinas was a Christian, I must be Christian too. I’ll simply refer HZ on this matter to any introductory logic book. What I want to point out is that HZ is simply repeating the very interpretive errors that Dawkins falls into, and which I discuss in Chapter 5.

Let me put this as simply as I can. It is one thing to argue that everything must have a cause, notice that this leads to an infinite regress, and then try to escape the regress by arbitrarily positing a first cause which, in defiance of the first premise, doesn’t need a cause after all. It is something else entirely to argue that everything which possesses some property P (e.g., the property of coming into existence) requires a cause, notice that if everything possessed property P there would be an infinite regress, and therefore conclude that to avoid such a regress we must suppose there exists something which lacks property P. Aquinas argues along the latter lines, not the former. And, arguing along these lines, Aquinas concludes that there must exist some fundamental reality that never came to be (that is, exists eternally), that does not change but is capable of bringing about change in other things, and that exists necessarily. If HZ wants to make the case that a bag of gas could be eternal, unchanging, and necessarily existent, I’d be very interested to see the argument. However, it would have to be a bag of gas radically unlike anything in the empirical world—including bags of gas.

HZ goes on:

(I)n defending theodicy, he placed the blame(as most theists do) on man (the victim) and not god, the presumed almighty and all good. It is man's free will, he stated, when referring to the evil caused by man. What of the evil caused in natural disasters like Hurricane Katarina? Such evil if caused by god, would be redeemed by god. How? And how does Reitan know that? Perhaps we were not mean to question him on this either.

In the chapter that HZ references here, I provide an overview of a number of different ways in which theists have attempted to respond to the problem of evil. I seek to identify both the merits and the weaknesses of these responses. For example, on p. 192 I critique the appeal to free will by noting that “not all evils result from wicked choices. Some of the worst suffering is brought on by disease, famine, and natural disaster…(and) it isn’t reasonable to trace all the harms from natural evils back to human negligence.” I likewise critically discuss the so-called “soul-making theodicy,” noting among other things that it does not take into proper account the suffering in the non-human world. My aim in this chapter is not to resolve the problem of evil. Rather, my aim is to argue that even if the problem hasn’t been resolved, it doesn’t constitute such a decisive case against theism that it becomes unreasonable for someone to live in the hope that the evils of the world will be redeemed by a transcendent good.

And, just for the sake of clarity, living in the hope that evil will be redeemed is not the same as knowing that it will. I do not know that it will. No one does. Anyone who claims to know this is lying—probably first and foremost to themselves. Likewise for anyone who claims to know that evil will not be redeemed.

Last but not least, HZ writes:

I would not say don't read this book, but I would say read it but also read the counter-arguments (Amazon has a list of books on atheism); in both cases, read all the arguments critically.

Finally, something we can agree on.

Food for Thought from a Philosopher with a Contrasting Perspective

My previous post, “Sniffing Around Amidst the Soccer Match,” was inspired by a recent e-mail exchange with my good friend John Shook, who is a Vice President at the Center for Inquiry (a kind of secular humanist think tank). John expresses his frustration with much contemporary Christian theology in the following message, which I share in its entirety with his permission:

Good luck Eric on your new blog! And have some sympathy for the atheist.
Christianity is nowadays so diffuse theologically that an atheist feels like
he's darting arrows into fog. Christian theology was supposed to elevate
personal religious conviction to the level of rationally defendable knowledge.
The Enlightenment severely challenged traditional theology, and provoked a
counter-enlightenment. That's actually the story behind the eruption of
non-rational "theologies" in the 1800s. Natural theology was going nowhere,
metaphysics was out-philosophizing the theologians, and science was displaying
incredible promise. Dodging strategies (amounting to a retreat) back to
emotion/mystery/dogma seemed the only option. Christianity theology has now
mutated into two kinds of "Fideism" (just believe, baby!) -- fundamentalism and
mysterianism. Fundamentalists cling to their scriptural dogmas and accuse the
atheists of clinging to their own scientific dogmas. Mysterians ensure that
their conception of god is so vague and non-intellectual that no actual evidence
could ever be used against it. For example, "My God always has a great reason
for killing people in horrible ways, but we just can't tell what it is." As
another example, "My God is the ultimate formless ground of all being in and for
itself (or "My God is pure Love", or "My God is this big presence with me all
the time", etc), so the atheist's worries can't ever count against my God's
existence."

Fideism was highly convenient for Christians, since
their next tactic was to depict the atheist as dogmatically trying to prove that
their God doesn't exist. The atheist's prompt failure (since God is now safe
behind a bluff of dogma or hidden in a fog of mystery) was declared
supernaturalism's victory. As soon as "agnosticism" was invented, fideists
promply agreed -- human reason cannot reach their God! In other words, once
agnosticism seemed more reasonable than dogmatic atheism, fideism followed suit
and upped the ante -- since you can't prove that my god doesn't exist, then my
belief is just fine and leave me alone. That's all I ever extracted from William
Lane Craig in the end (see my debate with him on Youtube). Quite forgotten in
this debate is the atheist's real position of skepticism towards religion, not
because the atheist can prove that God doesn't exist, but simply because there's
insufficient good reason to believe that God does exist. When fideism replies by
pointing out that the essence of Christianity all along was faith without
reason, the atheist and the fideist reach one thing that they can agree
on.

Alternatively, there's always the pragmatic approach for
atheism: look at what Christians actually do, and critique their religious
beliefs accordingly. Unfortunately, that tactic is going to fail too. Try
confronting a Christian with that problem. It turns out that it is always the
bad Christians doing the bad things (or they really weren't Christians at all).
"My Christianity only leads to good behavior, while my sinning side does the bad
deed." Very convenient how Christianity ensures that we are already such bad
sinners that no bad behavior at all need ever be attributed to a Christian
belief. And criticism of God's bad behavior and immoral commands is just
irrelevant for the typical Christian, who doesn't take the irritable and
murderous bearded guy in the Old Testament too seriously
anyways.

Maybe skeptical atheism can help purify the Christian's
religion, back into a purely personal conviction. Current Christian theologies
spin the fideistic dodges as positively as possible, of course. That's the
biggest problem the skeptical atheist has with such theologies: they abandon
reason and encourage anti-intellectualism among their followers, who can't
understand what the new theologies are saying anyways. Who among the laypeople
can understand Schopenhauer or Heidegger or Tillich?? Seems to me that
theologians with their heads in the clouds should take more responsibility for
the fact that a majority of Americans can't believe Darwinian evolution. Who is
holding this country back from progress? It is NOT the atheists!

Obviously, my previous post only begins to touch on the issues John raises here, many of which deserve careful and serious attention (for those interested in a deeper look at John’s thinking, his website is http://shook.pragmatism.org). Among other things, I think John is right about the (ab)use to which the doctrine of original sin has been put, as a strategy for fending off pragmatic criticisms of Christianity. As my “Angry Atheism and True Faith” post makes clear, I strongly believe in the idea that religion should be subjected to pragmatic tests and evaluated in terms of such tests. Any way of formulating the doctrine of original sin which seeks to immunize someone’s religious beliefs from such tests should be viewed with skepticism.

This will be a topic for a future post, as will a discussion of the kind of responsibility theologians have for the anti-intellectualism of many religious people today (and what can be done about it). But first, I must get to that stack of papers I need to grade…