…what is the purpose of demonstrating the falsity of a belief when its relevance is determined either by its personal value or by its relationship to other beliefs, ones which are much more difficult to refute? This might be the problem with scientifically refuting creationism; science can’t address the value of those beliefs.

I think we’re talking in circles. I’ve already said that I’m not suggesting that scientifically refuting biblical stories is the only issue, or that it’s unrelated to other beliefs or sociological phenomena. I would argue the following:

[1] Much of the biblical text is morally questionable at best, as I think we can all agree. And those parts that are morally valuable could just as easily (and therefore should be) promulgated in texts that don’t have the morally bad stuff. For these reasons, refutation is morally valuable, not just an attempt to ascertain truth for its own sake.

[2] As you pointed out, some Christians (and perhaps many, consciously or subconsciously) base their “faith” in large part on some conception of literal truth in the bible. And as I explained, the prevalence of religious belief (or, by extension, religious modes of forming belief) is a major contributor to a climate in which extremist beliefs can flourish — in large part because it compromises the ability of moderate believers to challenge the extremists, and in part because the extremist beliefs are based on some of the same myths or types of myths (such as the idea that there’s a post-mortem paradise) as those of the moderates. For these reasons, refutation is morally valuable.

[3] Teaching people, especially kids, to form beliefs without or in spite of evidence, based on appeal to supposedly infallible authority, and that unquestioning “faith” is a virtue, constitute a severe warping of people’s reasoning faculties, which are in most people not all that well developed in the first place, so that they are more or less completely overpowered by the dogma. Inevitably, some people (even those with stronger minds) will tend to make a habit of forming beliefs in other areas with inadequate consultation of the evidence, deciding important questions on a “hunch” or a “gut feeling,” or with unjustified reliance on authority, or with insufficient caution because of a belief that a supernatural being is watching over us. Undermining the belief in the literal truth of the bible would cause many people to question what they’ve been taught and actually start using their minds more effectively. For these reasons, refutation is morally valuable.

So as I said, it’s not all about natural science. It clearly heads deep into the social sciences, and clearly touches on value apart from the simple question of truth or falsity of the biblical stories. If all you’re trying to say is that it’s a complicated case, not as simple as refuting ancient stories or individual beliefs in isolation, I’ll say here (in case it’s not clear from all I’ve said before) that I agree. But if you’re trying to argue that attempting such refutation leads into a quagmire in which the aims of refutation (elucidated above) are hopelessly thwarted, or if you’re trying to argue that my reasoning of moral value from refutation (above) is weak, then I think we’re going to have let our arguments stand on their own. I’ve stated my case as effectively as I know how.

So correct me if I’m wrong, you’re saying that because the ambiguity of the text lends itself to nefarious interpretations it therefore has a weakness that a more definitive text doesn’t, even though the ambiguity makes it possible to adapt and evolve? As long as a more definitive text was open to modification and amending I would have to agree, because as I pointed out earlier the text would have to be flexible enough for updating to remain relevant in an evolving society. If you can provide that adaptive quality without the ambiguity then it can serve the same function.

The point is that ALL texts should be open to modification or discarding. When you talk about texts that can adapt to the times, I think what you mean is that their content is timeless. Quite a lot of the Christian bible clearly is NOT timeless, and in many passages is quite repugnant. We don’t NEED to reinterpret it: we need to extract the good parts and disregard the rest (or at least limit it to historical interest). As I tried to explain, unambiguous texts would either be timeless or useless, or a combination of the two; our job in each era would be to maintain the timeless and discard the useless, just like we do in every other area of discourse. An ambiguous text is NOT better, because the ideas that are timeless are good (“adaptive”) on their own without ambiguity, and the ideas that are useless should be clearly seen as useless, not covered up by ambiguity.

There is a foreseeable problem with amending or updating religious texts though, they tend to be regarded as sacred or holy, which in the case of the Abrahamic religions is due to them being held as the word of god, who is supposed to be infallible.

It is a big problem, certainly. I wouldn’t suggest trying to amend or update religious texts; I’d rather people left behind the religious texts altogether and discarded the idea that anything can be “holy” or infallible. Then they’ll see those religious texts as the historical curiosities they are, and look for better texts to fill the gap. And that, by itself, is a big problem. You might say now that a lot of people would be cast adrift when their lifelong moorings in “faith” are destroyed, and I would agree. We humans have done such a good job through the ages of promoting religion (and oppressing its critics), and ceding it the entire practical and epistemological playing field for moral education, that we haven’t had much opportunity to develop and promulgate secular alternatives. I think we ought to have much stronger values education in our secular public schools, at all levels, but we’ll never get it while the public is so bewitched with the notion of deference to religion.

This is where I think theology is of enormous benefit. The way I see it is that within the evolution of a religion theology serves as the mutation generator; when the environment changes the theologian is forced to find new ways to adapt scripture and make it relevant to those changes, then the selective forces favour the mutations which ensure it has application and hence relevance (survival). There is a catch though. Since the selective forces are most often social in nature, mutations which are beneficial to the religion but harmful to society can be selected for by way of the religion reacting against certain types of social pressure. More bluntly, forces that are antagonistic or offensive towards the religion can favour mutations that make it more aggressive, since the religion would be required to defend itself.

I agree with all of this except the first sentence, if by theology you mean scholarship within and in the service of a religion (as opposed to people in your field, religious studies, who study religion objectively from the outside). I think theology (as you’ve described it) is part of the problem, because in cases of competing interests (e.g., promotion of religion vs. good of humanity), the theologian will tend to favor either the religion (for its own sake), or his own interpretation of it, or his own personal agenda. On average, that’s bound to be no better than, and often worse than, a disinterested but comparably educated critic or analyst or theoretician would do. Sure, a disinterested theoretician is just as susceptible to error, or to the lures of promoting a personal agenda, as a theologian, but the latter has a powerful reason to get things wrong that the former doesn’t have, all other things being equal.

Those negative selective forces can come in a variety of forms as well, including as politics, other religions, and criticism of religion, hence why I prefer to approach a fundamentalist type more diplomatically.

I agree with the need for diplomacy. My view is that humanity’s dilemma with religion is serious, but obviously we’re a long way from general agreement on the relevant points. Actually, though, I’m more impressed with the potential for diplomacy (and productive dialog generally) with religious moderates and liberals. When dealing with fundamentalists, who by definition are irrational, sometimes dangerously so, diplomacy can too easily drift into accommodation or paralysis. Iran is a good point of illustration. If we could somehow persuade them to accept ongoing unrestricted verification that they’re not working on nuclear weapons, while letting them save face (making it seem as though they came out well in the bargain), that would seem to be a good result. But if they continue to drag their feet and stall for time while secretly working on nukes, we have to know when diplomacy has failed, and we’re likely to be hindered in our next steps if other countries don’t recognize (or don’t want to acknowledge) that diplomacy has failed.

Marginalising or minimising the influence of religion in my opinion is unwise, because it appears that the practice itself plays a relevant and important role at the level of the both individual and community. On the surface it may appear to be concerned with other-worldly issues, but fundamentally its objectives lie within society it self.

As I have previously stated, even if you could send the current major religions of the world in the direction of the Greek religion, they would just be replaced by newer ones. In fact, as far as I know of, the only force that can get rid of a religion is another one.

Religion apparently does have roots in our nature, and thus would be hard to eradicate, but it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t try to attenuate it, or at least divert the religious impulse into something healthier. Plenty of people have set aside religion, and have gone on to live normal, happy lives. I’m speaking in generalities here. Arguably, there are some healthy aspects to religion, and much of what religion does is connected with things in the real world, but I’m not aware of any reason to believe that religion does those things better than any secular alternative. Would it be unwise to work for such a result? In the long run, I don’t think so, though in the short run it might be accompanied by some pains.

JD: “Just because we can’t get rid of all options open to “B” doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get rid of one such option.”

I probably shouldn’t have used Nazism as an example, because it’s unnecessarily provocative, even though I wasn’t suggesting an equivalence between religion and Nazism. But more significantly, it led us off topic. Remember I started off by saying that if religion became a less potent force in the world, ambitious people who lead religious movements would look for other ways to satisfy their ambitions, and I said that this was a different problem (i.e., not one that meant we shouldn’t try to reduce their ability to use religion to satisfy their ambitions). If you meant to dispute this point, I think you’ve overlooked two things:

[1] These leaders currently have both religion and things other than religion (such as political movements) to satisfy their ambitions. If religion were taken out of the equation, they’d have only the other things. They could try to make more of those other things than would otherwise have come into being, but by applying economic reasoning it should be apparent that those things would tend to be less effective than the religious options they lost (otherwise, they would’ve used those things instead of religion to begin with). In any case, I can’t see any reason to think that those other things would likely be so much worse than the religious options they lost that it outweighs all our other reasons for wanting to attenuate the influence of religion.

[2] Even if every one of those leaders was able to find a comparably effective outlet other than religion, which I think extremely unlikely, we’d be no worse off as a whole than if they were wreaking the same havoc with a religious movement instead. Thus, the question of what these leaders would do if they lost the option to use religion for their ambitions has no effect on the equation and argument I proposed, which may be summarized as follows:

P1: Religion + Ambitious Leaders + Credulous Masses + Weapons = Death and Destruction

P2: We’ll always have ambitious leaders. (Without religion, they might find other outlets, but at worst we’ll almost certainly be no worse off because of that.)

P3: We’ll always have credulous masses, at least until society evolves to a much higher standard of mass education.

P4: We’ll always have weapons.

C: Therefore, to reduce the death and destruction in this equation (P1), we must undermine religion.

I used this argument to explain why so many atheists focus on religion, when you suggested that we should focus on religious behaviors (“practices”) instead. I think this argument clearly shows that it DOES make sense to attack the belief, so to speak, because it is the only part of the equation we have any hope of significantly influencing.

Let’s say for a moment that you are right, that there is something about the religions which puts them in the position of being uniquely dangerous. The thing is that it doesn’t necessarily hold true for all of them. There is no danger in Jainism, which is an avowedly non-violent religion, in many respects the same goes for Buddhism, and possibly even Confucianism. I would argue that it isn’t religion per se, but rather the nature of specific religions that makes them dangerous.

For the most part, I grant this point. I was speaking in generalities for the sake of simplicity, but I think it’d be fair to say that Christianity and Islam are the biggest part of the problem. However, I do think there’s a place for religion as a whole in this discussion, because (as I’ve said elsewhere), the prevalence and persistence of religion, any religion, fosters the climate in which harmful belief systems can flourish. (For this point, I’m taking the term “religion” to mean contra-evidence belief systems generally. Even Jainism, apparently harmless though it is, holds supernatural beliefs, and the more people who discard supernatural beliefs, the more marginalized the fundamentalist remainder will be.)

Maybe it’s just higher standards considering where I am at this point in time, but I don’t think Dawkins is informed enough to argue seriously against religion. As far as I can tell what he says about religion is his own personal opinion, which appears to me to make rather naïve and simplistic claims about religion. … In fact I think Harris is far worse than Dawkins, as he seems so willing to dismiss from the equation all things that are not religion … How can one take these people seriously on the topic of religion when they demonstrate with such comments how ill-informed they are on the subject?

I have not been equally impressed with everything these men have said. Dawkins irritates me with his contempt for believers, which he seems too tone deaf to notice in himself. So I don’t generally recommend him, even to atheists, but it’s a shame, because he really does have some smart and worthwhile things to say. I’ve read both of Harris’s books and some of his articles, seen (or read transcripts of) a few of his speeches, and seen many clips of his debates. I haven’t agreed with everything he’s said, but I’ve found his views generally well supported, at least worthy of a thoughtful critique, not a brute dismissal.

Both of these men are brilliant but not infallible. I can see why they might not hold much appeal for you, particularly for purposes of your in-depth scholarship. But I think it’s simply a mistake to assert that they’re not qualified to argue against religion at all. Anyone who reads the common apologetic arguments and theodicies, and their refutations, will be able to see that the “God” of all perfections almost certainly doesn’t exist. Anyone who reads the holy texts of the Abrahamic religions will be able to see the bad stuff, if they don’t rationalize it away. Anyone who reads about the Inquisition, for example, will be able to see that religious belief was the sine qua non of that horror. Anyone who thinks objectively about the doctrine of eternal damnation, and watches theistic friends squirm when asked whether particular nonbelievers among their friends and family will burn, can see the problem with this kind of dogma. There are quite a few people who have gained some knowledge in these areas, and are adequate to the task of explaining what these things say about religion, though they may have less erudition and eloquence than Dawkins or Harris.

Wonder if anyone else (Hemant included) is still following this thread? Well, it’s been enjoyable in any case. I wish you well in your studies, and hope to see more from your perspective in the future.

So you and I will simply have to agree to disagree.

Read those academic authors I mentioned, then get back to me…

On the other hand, atheists’ interest in refuting biblical stories stems from the fact that a lot is riding on the degree of literal truth of those stories. Some of those stories may indeed have value, but some (as we’ve discussed) may be interpreted in ways that lead people to do harmful things.

The desire to refute historical interpretations of stories that can’t be true, such as the idea that the Genesis creation story is literally true, is understandable; some of them can’t be true. However, when refuting any particular belief or scriptural interpretation there is a need to be aware of what value that story has to the believer, and quite often it is that value which holds the person to the belief and prevents them from giving it up even in the light of evidence. For example, I have read comments from creationists saying that if the story of Adam and Eve was not literally true then they could no longer believe that Jesus was the path to salvation, which means that the Genesis story has value in the context of the Jesus story. This presents us with what I view as an interesting problem when trying to refute religious beliefs: what is the purpose of demonstrating the falsity of a belief when its relevance is determined either by its personal value or by its relationship to other beliefs, ones which are much more difficult to refute? This might be the problem with scientifically refuting creationism; science can’t address the value of those beliefs.

Must we keep these ancient texts, or couldn’t we simply write something new that makes sense to our modern outlook? In other words, if you don’t have any religious motivation to preserve the texts intact, I don’t see why you would argue that we should think it’s a positive trait that they can be reinterpreted, rather than simply acknowledging that it’d be better to have a modern text that culls out the horrid stuff from the ancient text and wouldn’t need any “reinterpretation” in the first place.

So correct me if I’m wrong, you’re saying that because the ambiguity of the text lends itself to nefarious interpretations it therefore has a weakness that a more definitive text doesn’t, even though the ambiguity makes it possible to adapt and evolve? As long as a more definitive text was open to modification and amending I would have to agree, because as I pointed out earlier the text would have to be flexible enough for updating to remain relevant in an evolving society. If you can provide that adaptive quality without the ambiguity then it can serve the same function.

There is a foreseeable problem with amending or updating religious texts though, they tend to be regarded as sacred or holy, which in the case of the Abrahamic religions is due to them being held as the word of god, who is supposed to be infallible. One would first have to address the issue of god before making changes to scripture, and the only way I can conceive of achieving that is to treat god as a very real component within religion, and then discern what it represents and what its function within religion is. There is one other way though, and it’s an astronomical long shot: being visited by aliens from another planet; to meet with what would obviously be a superior species would force us to rethink the image of god.

The problem, again, is that you and I can select out the maladaptive passages, but many others won’t do so, or haven’t been educated to know how to do so, or have been indoctrinated to believe that they must not do so.

This is where I think theology is of enormous benefit. The way I see it is that within the evolution of a religion theology serves as the mutation generator; when the environment changes the theologian is forced to find new ways to adapt scripture and make it relevant to those changes, then the selective forces favour the mutations which ensure it has application and hence relevance (survival). There is a catch though. Since the selective forces are most often social in nature, mutations which are beneficial to the religion but harmful to society can be selected for by way of the religion reacting against certain types of social pressure. More bluntly, forces that are antagonistic or offensive towards the religion can favour mutations that make it more aggressive, since the religion would be required to defend itself. Those negative selective forces can come in a variety of forms as well, including as politics, other religions, and criticism of religion, hence why I prefer to approach a fundamentalist type more diplomatically.

What I mean is that we should strive to attenuate the influence of religion as much as possible. Over time, today’s religions would go the way of Zeus and his ilk, relegated to a marginal few who eventually die out or give up and move on.

That is something that I most earnestly disagree with. Marginalising or minimising the influence of religion in my opinion is unwise, because it appears that the practice itself plays a relevant and important role at the level of the both individual and community. On the surface it may appear to be concerned with other-worldly issues, but fundamentally its objectives lie within society it self.

As I have previously stated, even if you could send the current major religions of the world in the direction of the Greek religion, they would just be replaced by newer ones. In fact, as far as I know of, the only force that can get rid of a religion is another one. Buddhism pretty much killed the Vedic religion, and Christianity did it to the pre-existing European religions such as the Norse religion, and it did the same for the New World religions like the Aztecs, as well as those in the Pacific. The only thing that is known to kill a religion is another religion. Perhaps a way of killing off the supernatural religions would be with what I call a secular religion, one that doesn’t rely on the supernatural.

What I mean by it being a whole different problem is that it’s not a problem that takes away from the force of needing to get rid of “A”. Just because we can’t get rid of all options open to “B” doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get rid of one such option. And what a potent option it is, as history has shown. Just to take one example, Nazism has only risen once in history, and is gone and unlikely to return in more than token form, whereas by contrast, the Catholic Church has given us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials, a tradition of persecution of Jews (with biblical basis) that was key to justifying and spreading Nazi ideology in the first place, and the Ratlines that helped those Nazi criminals escape into hiding, and it’s still in business today to give us anti-condom preaching in Africa, among other things. When “B” is prevented from using “A”, one of its best opportunities, it has a lot less to work with and is less likely to do much harm in the world.

There is a big difference between religion and a political ideology like Nazism, and it is that something like Nazism is more or less inherently absolutist; there can be no disagreement over what it says. But with a religion on the other hand, while there is the possibility of absolutism, it is not inherent to it. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that the majority of religious texts tend to have multiple authors from many different time periods, which makes it next to impossible to write with a single voice. Nazism on the other hand was pretty much the creation of one man: Hitler.

Let’s say for a moment that you are right, that there is something about the religions which puts them in the position of being uniquely dangerous. The thing is that it doesn’t necessarily hold true for all of them. There is no danger in Jainism, which is an avowedly non-violent religion, in many respects the same goes for Buddhism, and possibly even Confucianism. I would argue that it isn’t religion per se, but rather the nature of specific religions that makes them dangerous.

But he’s certainly done some reading on religion and in religious texts, and surveyed the effects of religion in the world, so he’s qualified to speak on the subject to the extent that he’s studied it, just as you and I are. I don’t think you mean to suggest, or ought to suggest, that he isn’t qualified to speak on religion at all. As far as I can tell, he’s not trying to speak in the depth that a religious scholar would speak, but only in as much depth as he has obtained for himself, which (he would argue, and I would agree), is enough to speak out against religion as a whole.

Maybe it’s just higher standards considering where I am at this point in time, but I don’t think Dawkins is informed enough to argue seriously against religion. As far as I can tell what he says about religion is his own personal opinion, which appears to me to make rather naïve and simplistic claims about religion. To say that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or the Northern Ireland Troubles wouldn’t have occurred without religion, as he does in The God Delusion, suggests to me that he doesn’t have enough information to fully grasp the various ways in which religion influences events. The situation appears to be similar with Sam Harris, as I heard him comment on a Point of Inquiry podcast that if there was no Islam then Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda would have no reason to object to the placement of US military personnel in Saudi Arabia. In fact I think Harris is far worse than Dawkins, as he seems so willing to dismiss from the equation all things that are not religion; I saw him do something to that effect in a debate with Reza Aslan. How can one take these people seriously on the topic of religion when they demonstrate with such comments how ill-informed they are on the subject?

Quick anecdote. One of my very first essays at university was a book review, (for a course that introduced the world’s religions) and there was a huge range of books to choose from. Typically the book had to be about religion. Early on I had a discussion with my tutor about the appropriateness of choosing a book like The God Delusion, and the decision that we both agreed with was that a book like Dawkins wasn’t appropriate. I think the overall opinion was that the book is highly polemical and possesses very little academic rigour for a serious discussion on religion.

Ash

I still strongly disagree with many of your positions….

So you and I will simply have to agree to disagree.

It honestly sounded like you were being a theistic apologist, and so I was arguing from that perspective. I still strongly disagree with many of your positions, but I believe that my powers of persuasion have run out. I do agree that if your interest is in the academic study of religion itself, then Dawkins, Harris, and other New Atheists are not the way to go.

I renew my recommendation to read:

John Loftus, M.Div in theology and philosophy from Lincoln Christian Seminary, Th.M degree in philosophy of religion from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

William R. Murry, former president of Meadville Lombard Theological School

Loyal Rue, professor of religion and philosophy at Luther College, and Pulitzer Prize winner

Thomas L. Thompson, professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen

These academic writers are a great place to start to study religion from a naturalistic orientation.

Dan Barker is very knowledgeable on HIS religion, and is devastating in his refutation of apologists and those who parrot their arguments, but is probably not as knowledgeable on his or any other religion as we might expect a religious studies professor to be.

John Loftus who wrote “Why I Became an Atheist” is a full blown religious scholar.

My part again…

There is a problem with having an unambiguous and fixed text though. If it is fixed, or to frame it another way, absolute, then it is not open to modification which is what any good text requires, especially if it is the basis for a moral code. You are right to point out that the ambiguity of the text leaves it open to abuse, but if it was fixed and absolute then its application would result in oppression and quite possibly the collapse of society. What the ambiguity allows for is the reinterpretation of the scripture in light of changing social conditions, which in the last two hundred years has been fuelled in large part by scientific advancement. That ambiguity or flexibility is what makes it possible for religions to evolve.

I think I see where you’re coming from, but I still think you’re missing something. You seem to be saying that if a religion had a text that was rigid and unambiguous, then when society evolved around it, the religion would not evolve, but would continue to prosper in its old ways and old beliefs, and this would hold down the rest of society. This sounds promising the way you put it, but in the long run I don’t think it works out that way.

Let’s just take Islam for illustration. In earlier centuries, in some times and places, scholarship did indeed flourish under Islam. Its holy texts don’t rigidly and unambiguously prohibit such scholarship. Presumably, many Muslims of the time either interpreted the texts to be supportive of such scholarship or interpreted such scholarship as an expression of their religious devotion. If, instead, Islam’s holy texts did prohibit scholarship, one of two things would’ve happened: [1] Islamic societies would’ve stagnated in oppression and orthodoxy, which would’ve allowed the Christian societies of the time to surpass and eventually overwhelm them, or [2] enough Muslims would’ve realized that they couldn’t go on with such rigid texts and would develop a new way without those texts (or simply leave the society). In either of these cases, the influence of the Islamic texts would’ve been severely reduced, and Islam as a force today would be marginal at best, and Islamic terrorism probably wouldn’t be nearly the threat it is today. On the other hand, if the Islamic texts did nothing but rigidly and unambiguously endorse scholarship, Muslims might’ve evolved a belief such that “God” (as they understand him) is a transcendent being who wants nothing more than for us to pursue knowledge for our own positive development. Muslim societies would’ve continued to thrive to the present day while attracting even more admirers and adherents. Maybe almost everyone would be Muslims today. Certainly, such a rigid and unambiguous belief system couldn’t give rise to terrorism.

What we have instead of these happy alternatives is an Islam that has survived because many people across the centuries have found ways to interpret it for their own updated views of what it should be. An Islamic text that had nothing in it except an exhortation to holy war against non-Muslims would have little use beyond the immediate needs of Muslim conquerors. It would survive only as long as the conquerors kept conquering. Once the conquests were beaten back, there’d be nothing left in the text to inspire and instruct people who were no longer in the business of conquering. Moreover, if such a text did survive today, it’d be easy to fight it: everyone would either be for it or against it, and most would be against it. The vast numbers of modern Muslims who want no part of holy war wouldn’t be Muslims under such a text, so we wouldn’t have to worry about offending or embarrassing them (or making them become militant) by attacking the fanatics who believed in that text.

To sum up: A rigid, unambiguous text would be good for only one thing: its plain meaning. It would have currency with the public exactly to the extent that its plain meaning was felt to be worthwhile. We’d know exactly where its adherents stand.

Or to look at it another way: Why should it be valuable for a text to be ambiguous so that later generations can reinterpret it in vastly different ways? The content, written by the ancients, will either be timeless (and thus not in need of much interpretation, but rather application to new circumstances, as with Aesop’s fables) or it will be worthless to us moderns (in which case, it’s worse than useless to pretend it has some value and try to reinterpret it for modern use). We can read the writings of, say, Plato and Aristotle, and find some points that speak to us across the ages, and discard the rest as a product of its time. That’s not reinterpretation, but reapplication. But what about the points we find in ancient biblical texts? Just to take one example, how about the command that homosexuals be stoned to death? Was it “right” for the ancients to “interpret” that as a good commandment because they thought homosexuals were evil? And is it “right” for us to “reinterpret” that commandment today so as to make things as difficult for homosexuals as we can in a pluralistic modern society? Passages like this were used to justify evil acts in ancient days, and are used to justify discrimination today. What is the value of such passages? Must we keep these ancient texts, or couldn’t we simply write something new that makes sense to our modern outlook? In other words, if you don’t have any religious motivation to preserve the texts intact, I don’t see why you would argue that we should think it’s a positive trait that they can be reinterpreted, rather than simply acknowledging that it’d be better to have a modern text that culls out the horrid stuff from the ancient text and wouldn’t need any “reinterpretation” in the first place.

The evolution of religion is much more like biological evolution than we might imagine. Just as evolution has left us with a lot of junk DNA and vestigial structures as well as certain biological flaws, so too has the evolution of religion left us with scriptural redundancies and flaws; it is simply a matter of selecting for constructive/positive interpretations and passages, rather than maladaptive ones.

I absolutely agree that it’s like a biological evolution. (I happen to take that analogy to be applicable across all sorts of sociological phenomena, as I suspect you’d agree.) The problem, again, is that you and I can select out the maladaptive passages, but many others won’t do so, or haven’t been educated to know how to do so, or have been indoctrinated to believe that they must not do so. If this were Plato’s Republic we were talking about, no problem. Lots of people read the Republic, but nobody today is going to set up a society along the lines of Plato’s ideal. But some people who read the Qu’ran come to believe that the omnipotent ruler of the universe wants them to kill nonbelievers. You and I can’t stop this by excising those passages and pointing out the good parts that people ought to pay more attention to. We can only stop it by convincing as many people as possible that they should regard the Qu’ran as no more than a historical document, to be read like Plato (though frankly, if it came to it, I think most people would rather read Plato).

But you would have to make damn sure that the idea is more than just not believed, it would also have to be forgotten. I doubt anyone believes in Zeus anymore, but the idea still survives. And even if you could somehow bury it historians and archaeologists in the future might very well uncover it. You would have to in effect set up a Ministry of Truth, à la Orwell’s 1984.

Haha, yeah, I guess I oversimplified. Obviously, we’re not going to kill the idea to the extent of wiping it out of the stream of history. If anything, it’s probably better to retain the idea as a warning to future generations, who might be confronted by newly minted fanaticisms and need to be prepared by learning about our experiences with the old ones. What I mean is that we should strive to attenuate the influence of religion as much as possible. Over time, today’s religions would go the way of Zeus and his ilk, relegated to a marginal few who eventually die out or give up and move on.

{@JD: We can’t get rid of B. Without A, some of those people would try to find political or economic means of fulfilling their ambitions, but that’s a whole different problem.}

This is obviously where we disagree. I don’t think it is a whole different problem; it is my opinion that this is the true nature of the problem, which is human nature. You get rid of religion and those people who choose to do great evil will simply find other reasons to commit that evil. Some will even go so far as to invent whole new ideologies to justify great harm, as Hitler did with Nazism and the Holocaust. It just seems that while it is human nature to express great compassion and righteousness, it still comes back to the fact that harm and great evil are also inherent to humans. (You’re not a Confucianist are you?)

What I mean by it being a whole different problem is that it’s not a problem that takes away from the force of needing to get rid of “A”. Just because we can’t get rid of all options open to “B” doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get rid of one such option. And what a potent option it is, as history has shown. Just to take one example, Nazism has only risen once in history, and is gone and unlikely to return in more than token form, whereas by contrast, the Catholic Church has given us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials, a tradition of persecution of Jews (with biblical basis) that was key to justifying and spreading Nazi ideology in the first place, and the Ratlines that helped those Nazi criminals escape into hiding, and it’s still in business today to give us anti-condom preaching in Africa, among other things. When “B” is prevented from using “A”, one of its best opportunities, it has a lot less to work with and is less likely to do much harm in the world.

No one pointed to any evidence that Francis Collins’ beliefs had ever gotten in the way of him doing his job before, as far as I can tell Harris’ arguments were little more than conjecture.

I will agree that it might be better to see if evidence of effect on job duties actually turns up. On the other hand, one’s views have to be taken to some extent as evidence of what one will do, so there is a case for the kind of concern Harris raised, even if his concern in this particular case were overblown.

Dawkins’ background in biology may give him the authority to speak on matters of biology, as well as refuting creationism, which is failed science, but it doesn’t give him license to speak with authority on anything else in religion.

Here, I think you’re saying that he’s not an authority on religion on par with a religious scholar such as the professionals in your religious studies department, and if that’s what you mean, I agree. But he’s certainly done some reading on religion and in religious texts, and surveyed the effects of religion in the world, so he’s qualified to speak on the subject to the extent that he’s studied it, just as you and I are. I don’t think you mean to suggest, or ought to suggest, that he isn’t qualified to speak on religion at all. As far as I can tell, he’s not trying to speak in the depth that a religious scholar would speak, but only in as much depth as he has obtained for himself, which (he would argue, and I would agree), is enough to speak out against religion as a whole. (For what it’s worth, although I admire the content and eloquence of Dawkins’s writing, I abhor the tone-deaf contemptuous attitude he often takes.)

I think that quip on theology at the end is where you’re getting your wires crossed. I’m talking about professional scholars of Religious Studies, the academic discipline that is the study of religion from outside of it, which stands in contrast to theology where the religion is studied from the inside.

You’re right: I had my wires crossed, still thinking that you were arguing like an apologist instead of a scholar. Dan Barker is very knowledgeable on HIS religion, and is devastating in his refutation of apologists and those who parrot their arguments, but is probably not as knowledgeable on his or any other religion as we might expect a religious studies professor to be. The extra layers of scholarship are what you need for your studies, though the lack of them doesn’t disqualify Barker (as with Dawkins) from speaking on religion to his own depth, which is still considerable.

Haha, shall we dance some more? It’s late here, and I’m going to bed. Cheers!

Getting into Ash’s part of the discussion again…

I’m not looking for any reason not to believe, because I have no reason to believe in the first place. I have never believed in deities or belonged to a religion, and most likely never will. What I’m looking for is an understanding OF religion; it is alien to me, and I wish to know more about it. To that end I have come to the conclusion that the people best qualified to provide the information for which I seek, are people who have professionally studied religion, like the academics in the Religion or Religious Studies departments of universities (not Theology)

I got this when you referred to it a little ways up-thread, and I assume Ash sees it now. I commend you on seeking atheist perspectives (other than your own, I mean), which I assume will be useful as part of your religious studies education. What you may discover is that those of us who get involved in these kinds of discussions meet very few people like you, and far more of believers who just keep passing along and repeating bogus arguments no matter how often and thoroughly they’re refuted. And we may reflexively proceed as though we’re dealing with yet another of the latter, when it’s actually not the case. I humbly beg pardon, and hope you will continue to visit and comment.

Anyway, you’re right that religious studies faculty ought to be, generally speaking, excellent sources for in-depth learning about religion. However, it might be wise to find out about whether (and to what extent) these professionals’ scholarship is influenced by a wish to believe, which could bias the way they teach the material. You might not need that warning, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

but one can’t really apply science to the belief that Jesus’ died for our sins. The ambiguity inherent to the texts that Jeff and I have been discussing means that any scientific refutation of a belief only renders it useless as an explanation for natural phenomenon, it doesn’t make the belief false in any other way. Would the fact that animals can’t talk make the majority of Aesop’s Fables redundant in all other respects?

As far as I’m concerned the social sciences are far more appropriate for studying religion than the natural sciences.

It’s true that a belief that Jesus died for our sins is not something on which we could subject to an experiment of natural science. But we can apply historical and textual analysis to the biblical accounts, and we can subject the propositions of belief to logical analysis. We do indeed seem to be talking at cross-purposes here, so perhaps our views are not so far apart. Our interest is not limited to natural sciences, so we expect to get into debates where there’s no easy way to pin down a precise answer, where different interpretations may hold.

When you say “false in any other way,” and “redundant in all other respects,” I’m not sure what you mean, but I’m guessing that you’re referring to value or worth. Aesop’s fables seem unlikely to be literally true, but that doesn’t impair their value in teaching lessons. Is that what you mean? If so, I think it’d be hard to disagree. On the other hand, atheists’ interest in refuting biblical stories stems from the fact that a lot is riding on the degree of literal truth of those stories. Some of those stories may indeed have value, but some (as we’ve discussed) may be interpreted in ways that lead people to do harmful things. It’s hard to talk those people out of doing those harmful things without undermining the belief system that motivates them. And their belief system is firmly based on a belief that the stories are literally true to some extent, which means it’s worthwhile for us to show (thru various forms of analysis) that the stories have much less literal truth than they believe.

The question is, what kind of evidence can we rely upon to determine what is true about the world? History has shown us that empirical evidence put through the rigors of the scientific method is the single best way we’ve yet devised to counter subjective errors. The scientific method isn’t perfect, but it has an exceptional track record of building a reliable database of knowledge.

And yet while science is an incredibly powerful tool for understanding the natural world, it does have its limits. It doesn’t work nearly as well in describing social and cultural phenomenon, which is what religion falls under. One can certainly perform experiments to test some of the things said in scripture, like Mark 16:18 which says that a Christian can drink any poisonous fluid and not suffer ill effects, but one can’t really apply science to the belief that Jesus’ died for our sins. The ambiguity inherent to the texts that Jeff and I have been discussing means that any scientific refutation of a belief only renders it useless as an explanation for natural phenomenon, it doesn’t make the belief false in any other way. Would the fact that animals can’t talk make the majority of Aesop’s Fables redundant in all other respects?

As far as I’m concerned the social sciences are far more appropriate for studying religion than the natural sciences.

This has happened again and again and again throughout history—and it isn’t about beating up on religion, it’s about dedication to truth, to the eternal challenge of discovering how the world works.

And when we find that the supernatural claims in religion are wrong, it severely undermines the structure of religion itself.

But actual history shows us that science doesn’t undermine religion. Scholars in the medieval Islamic world were practicing science under rulers, the Caliphs; that based their governance on Islam, with no repercussions suffered against either science or religion. In fact there has been a long history of religion supporting science; a lot of the earliest universities were founded by religious institutions for the purpose of studying nature. The idea, which was present in the first few centuries of Islam, as well as in renaissance Europe I believe; was that god could be more fully understood not by scripture alone but also through nature, and experimental science was the means by achieving that. I also know that the historian of science Ronald Numbers has said that any actual conflicts between science and religion have been the exception and not the rule.

Religion is a social phenomenon, and like science it is defined by how it is practiced; it is most likely that even without any recourse to the supernatural, religion would still exist. Simply refuting supernatural beliefs isn’t going to kill it.

Dawkins and Harris focus on epistemology (how we know things) and arguing that faith is ultimately detrimental to society. But other books, such as those above, address the topic of religion and faith more directly. They provide fewer fireworks and so don’t make the best seller lists, but offer significant arguments against supernatural belief.

Okay, this is getting irritating. I’m not looking for any reason not to believe, because I have no reason to believe in the first place. I have never believed in deities or belonged to a religion, and most likely never will. What I’m looking for is an understanding OF religion; it is alien to me, and I wish to know more about it. To that end I have come to the conclusion that the people best qualified to provide the information for which I seek, are people who have professionally studied religion, like the academics in the Religion or Religious Studies departments of universities (not Theology), like these people here:

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/religion/staff/index.html

In fact it is this very department at this exact university, the Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, where I am doing my BA major in Religious Studies.

If you are interested in books from naturalists who do have “expertise” in religion, I recommend the titles below. Some are less direct than those from Dawkins, Harris, and friends, but nevertheless make the same essential arguments.

Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity, By John W. Loftus

Religion is Not about God, By Loyal Rue

Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative, By Jerome A. Stone

Reason and Reverence: Religious Humanism for the 21st Century, By William R. Murry

When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy, By Chet Raymo

There are many different voices in atheism, some of whom even adopt a spiritual tone, like Raymo. Dawkins and Harris focus on epistemology (how we know things) and arguing that faith is ultimately detrimental to society. But other books, such as those above, address the topic of religion and faith more directly. They provide fewer fireworks and so don’t make the best seller lists, but offer significant arguments against supernatural belief.

Ash, with our conversation I think the only other thing I can say is that when it comes to religion I see little point in judging the empirical value of religious beliefs, I won’t even debate whether gods or deities exist or not.

You mentioned semantics before as being a problem, and that’s true here. The term empirical, in the context of our conversation and as scientists use the word, refers to that which can be subject to observation or experiment.There are all kinds of evidence available to us, of course, including intuition and cognitive perception. The question is, what kind of evidence can we rely upon to determine what is true about the world? History has shown us that empirical evidence put through the rigors of the scientific method is the single best way we’ve yet devised to counter subjective errors. The scientific method isn’t perfect, but it has an exceptional track record of building a reliable database of knowledge.

A large number of religious beliefs either deal with the natural world or should have some kind of indirect impact on nature. As such, religious beliefs are just as worthy of scientific examination as any other claim about how the universe is put together. And when we put those claims side by side with naturalistic explanations, the empirical evidence blows religion out of the water.

This has happened again and again and again throughout history—and it isn’t about beating up on religion, it’s about dedication to truth, to the eternal challenge of discovering how the world works.

And when we find that the supernatural claims in religion are wrong, it severely undermines the structure of religion itself. This is why there is such push back, because science is undermining people’s religious worldviews by replacing them with verifiable, reliable, rational, naturalistic explanations. And people are emotionally attached to their worldviews, so it makes sense that there is a reaction. But the goal is not to destroy religion (in general), but to promote our best knowledge and a universal ethics grounded in reason and compassion.

PS. a great read on some excellent reasons not to believe in a god, I point you to Greta Christina’s Blog.