Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, is making some waves again with a sermon entitled Thank God for the New Atheists(pdf).
Dowd wants to thank us for forcing Christians to face the scriptural passages “that portray God as brutal, cruel, vindictive, and genocidal.” In doing so, the New Atheists are forcing believers towards the proper relationship with reality.
They are shouting at us to collectively awaken to the dangers of revering texts and doctrines on no sounder basis than tradition and authority. Because the New Atheists put their faith, their confidence, in an evidentially formed and continuously tested view of the world, these critics of religion are well positioned to see what’s real and what’s important today. It is thus time for religious people to listen to the New Atheists—and to listen as if they were speaking with God’s voice, because in my view they are!
What follows – the bulk of his sermon – is what that proper relationship is. It’s a pretty good run-down of one type of Liberal Christian theology, with it’s base in Rudolf Bultman. Dowd is what John Shelby Spong used to call a “non-theist,” a person who feels that God is not a person. What exactly this God thing happens to be is probably beyond us, but at least we can experience God in some way and cultivate that experience.
For myself, I don’t see how we can listen to what science tell us about the human mind – which Dowd seems to want us to do – and still trust that these spiritual experience are telling us something true about the universe. Having grown up in a family with more than its fair share of mental illnesses, I’m leery of assuming that any powerful experience is necessarily true or derived from a source outside my own brain chemistry.
Julie Ingersoll over at Religion Dispatches catches the reaction to Dowd from Dr. Al Mohler- sort of the go-to fundamentalist these days. Mohler stats that Dowd’s religion is not really Christianity, but an illustration “theological and biblical costs of embracing the evolutionary worldview.”
Mohler has the wrong end of the stick and he should know better.. The roots of Liberal theology predate Darwin. Mohler’s Fundamentalist Christianity arose largely as a reaction to Strauss, Schleiermacher and the rest of the Liberal theologians and their Higher Criticism.
I find this quote from Al Mohler* interesting:
What he calls cost, I call benefit. Accept what is demonstrably and provably true and you can be more honest with yourself and your life.
* I refuse to call him “Dr Al Mohler”, because in my opinion he is using the title spuriously and without merit. To earn a PhD in any other field, one must add new knowledge to the world – that is, one must prove something that is not already known to be true. Not so in theology: in that field you just have to say the sorts of things that the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary like to hear, and they then call you a Doctor. It’s one of the maion reasons that I do not accept theology as a valid academic discipline – it’s like history, but you’re not allowed to follow the facts unless they take you in a pre-approved direction. If they don’t, you dismiss them as being created by the Devil.
Bit confused here, not being an atheist and all, but, what is a “New Atheist?” What exactly is new about it?
“New Atheist” is a term applied, usually in a prejorative tone, to describe atheists who are strident and forceful in their beliefs. Why this should be considered “new”, I have no idea. One might as well describe Ann Coulter as a “New Retard”.
“Ann Coulter as a “New Retard”.
Thank you Custador, coffee just came out my nose!
The term “retard” is offensive to the mentally disabled. Please substitute “moron,” after the great angel Moroni. Kthxbai.
Man…now I sound like a copycat….
..I just said this on the other post…
From my experience with righteous people many of them think that their woo gains respectability and validity from being around for a long time. They therefore think that by portraying atheists as a johnny come lately they show their opinions to be less significant. It’s an inherent problem of having your world view rely on authority rather then on evidence.
Obviously the term varies from use to use, and it is indeed often used pejoratively, but it does have some consistency. It generally refers to the recent increase in irreligion and activism by notable atheists, particularly some recent books like The God Delusion and God Is Not Great. “New Atheists” generally have a scientific perspective and make decisions based on reason and evidence. Although much of New Atheism draws from traditions as old as ancient Greece and particularly popular during the enlightenment with such thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, it generally wasn’t expressed as stridently and wasn’t as widespread until the internet age.
On the one hand, there is no question that such a shift exists, but I think it is not as strong as some people make it out to be. After all, Carl Sagan was a model for this type of thinking long before the internet, and he was hardly the first scientist to express these views. While not an activist, Einstein still made his religious views pretty clear.
But anyway, that’s my take on it.
Oh, and there’s an OK Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism.
I remember an article I read about how people have been scolding the “New Atheists” for the last hundred years or so. Don’t remember the name or author, anyone else?
Dowd states at outset that this has a been a journey for him. I wonder if he’s ever considered that his journey is not complete. (He’s not as far along the road as he thinks he is because his title is still personifying God.) Maybe he’ll eventually complete his journey and reason his way to atheism. The skeptic in me however doubts it — he’s found his “sweet spot” in publishing. Look for him to preach his version of a “non-theistic religion” in other books.
I bet that nutty book will sell a lot of copies.
Sounds to me like he is just one more preacher who knows that everything he talks about is imaginary and relegated to mythology, as are all gods, eventually.
Perhaps the cognitive dissonance is more than some can really handle?
I like the book because it will make fundies grind their teeth, and because it may lead a few people to take a step away from the more grotesque forms of religion.
But, yeah, it’s still woo.
It is interesting to see religion dying. Even though this mental gymnastics is still hiding behind lies, I think it is a wonderful thing and should be encouraged in society. The greatest problem with religion is its inability to accept the world as it is. This is the first step towards a world without thought destroying religion. Once they accept that the bible isn’t completely true, and they need to look at real evidence, they will begin to realize that everything their religion is built on is BS.
I am a secular humanist rabbi. For those of you who don’t know what that it, we represent an approach to Judaism that is strictly cultural and historical with no religious identity. When we celebrate holidays and life cycle we do so in a completely non-theistic manner and we delete those rituals that are not in consonance with our approach (I, for one, believe that circumcision is barbaric). We are, of course, comprised primarily of atheists and freethinkers drawn to Jewish communal experience and open to the entire realm of human experience as well. We do not pray but we do gather communally and reflect upon life and learn about human responsibility and dignity.
Unlike our approach, many liberal Jews and Christians have tried to hang on to the poetry of theism while abandoning ancient and medieval god concepts. I myself tried this route but found that the resulting non-theistic definition of the word “God” had no content and thus abandoned it. I’ve been involved in debates with liberal rabbis who are angry at me for no longer “wrestling” with this issue, but I simply found that I could not address prayers and benedictions to a character from fiction.
This fellow is similar to those rabbis. He is desperate to be a modern rational person and still hang on to theistic language. I have a sneaking suspicion he might give up on this. (There is a large subset of Unitarian Universalists who are also 100% god-free – the HUUmanists. Maybe he’d find a home there as I did with the secular humanistic Jewish movement.)
Very cool. Just because you no longer “wrestle” with God does not mean you are lost to Israel. I came from a fundamentalist family (Christian) and I enjoy the Christian heritage when I read literature or look at art, but outside of that religion (in a metaphysical senses) no longer has any place in my life.
You go, Rabbi!!! :D
I thought nearly all UUs were atheists. I guess I was wrong?
I find myself wishing there were a rabbi in my area like you…a like-minded synagogue too.
I think what this preacher is telling us is that more Christians need to be like bgrulker and read this blog.
Oh and John C too, I think. You can never be sure with him.
Years ago I took Dowd’s route through religion though in the end, back in 2000, I even let that go. One of the books that I am glad I read was Walter Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy and The Faith of a Heretic, where he doesn’t simply knock down easy targets like fundamentalist religion, but theologians like Bultmann and Tillich (and at that time in my life I regarded Tillich very highly).
But the real reason I dropped out had nothing to do with reason– I just simply became exhausted from the mental gymnastics of re-interpreting everything in my head that was said in various churches to fit my own very personal theological definitions. I went through all that out of a mere “metaphysical habit,” but finally got tired of jumping through hoops of my own making.
This sort of “liberal” theological view is really just theological taxidermy. It may be a nicer alternative to fundamentalism or mainstream Christianity, but it is just as dishonest.
the problem I have with Dowd is that he is an Evolutionist, in the sense that right wing Christians tend to use the word. Namely taking evolution as grand theory of everything rather then a theory in the field of biology.
Because of this all of the strawman criticisms advanced by creationists actually apply to his position. Note that the hard facts of biological evolution play a very small part in his writing. Instead he focuses on the more contentious field of Evolutionary Psychology and the purely mythical story of universal evolution. That is a heavily pantheistic idea of the entire universe evolving as a single organism. Incidentally he does try to claim that his position is distinct from pantheism, however I could not see the difference,
And as far as getting Christianity into the picture that’s just hand waving on his part, as it really is a piece that doesn’t fit.
So what, exactly, about human experience doesn’t come from evolution? What part of us didn’t evolve?
(those are real questions– I just now realize that they sound a bit snarky, but I mean them literally…)
:)
The thing is that humans have very little instinct. And seem to require a lot of learning by imitation, more so than any other animal. The way we pass knowledge to the next generation looks a lot more like Lemarkian change then Darwinian Evolution. On this blog this is usually referred to as child abuse by religious indoctrination.
The inner lizard and inner furry little mammal may be no more real then the inner child, or any other psychological metaphor. And Dowd very much seems to fail to realise that these are metaphors. The whole idea of assigning human behaviors to these legacy is also highly anthropomorphic. If you where to do the analysis you would brobably find that Dowd’s attributions of behaviors are based more on folk lore then on actual animal observation.
He also fails to consider the possibility of convergent evolution (which is well documented, ie the number of times that the eye has evolved). Just because a reptile displays behavior X and a mammal displays behavior X, it does not necessarily follow that they shared a common ancestor who did. To prove that you would need to isolate the gene sequence that is responsible for behavior X.
All in all the issue here is that Biological Evolution is a resilient and well tested theory. While Evolutionary Psychology is a much more questionable hypothesis, and has many mainstream opponents. Using this as a place to hang your theology on requires a considerable leap of faith.
Sounds as though Dowd is trying to subvert atheists, hammer them into his own worldview, and reshape them into inanimate tools, rather than accept them as fellow sentient persons in their own right. That is … he’s saying atheists are a kind of “tool” to be used by believers, for their own benefit (that benefit being a kind of moderation of their beliefs). Another way of putting it is, atheists are a kind of hurdle that God has thrown in front of believers, for them to leap over and learn from while they race to the finish line of Heaven.
Or something like that.
At any rate, it all seems very snide and snarky to me, even if — ostensibly — Dowd appears to be “making nice” with atheists and trying to give them credit for something. If he’s paying them a compliment, it’s a backhanded one.
I kind of went back and forth on it reading the rest of the article. In the quotes here, he says we’ve been shouting… and I guess rather than mind it or criticize us for it, people should listen. In his view we are speaking in god’s voice and in the article he also considers us prophets. In the rest of it, he is calling for a worship of god as a present being consisting of all that’s reality created by him, similar to a concept I once had that what people call god is actually everything there is and how it works including the unknowable, the machinery of earth and the universe (seems complicated to explain I don’t really mean any god). Mine didn’t have any reasons or plan, it wasn’t really the same as what Dowd speaks of, so it’s hard for me to understand how someone could approach the idea of this without completely giving up god. He seems as delusional as anyone religious in that respect, it’s still contorting the concept in an effort to reconcile faith with reality, rather than admit there’s nothing else there, it’s just what it is, and being satisfied as though he’s made a discovery of some sort, rather than redefined god to fit his image. He’s so close to the edge of it, without going over.
As far as using atheists like tools, I guess that’s ok. I mean, what’s the difference between being used as a tool to draw people to at least some enlightenment, and being a resource for discussion? I guess I would have to recommend the article. If it helps Christians reform their views and have at least minimal respect for atheism rather than argue, it’s ok, and they might become atheists. I suspect Dowd is an atheist himself, but has to sound enough like a Christian for Christians to listen to what he has to say, and perhaps follow his suggestions. It’s subversive, his language says he’s clinging to god-belief, and he does say he’s not suggesting anything so far as for anyone to become like us, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some did.
Another thing to consider is that people who are inclined to hear or read this will be the most liberal, it’s not going to smack them in the face real hard to find out that reality is real, although it’s practically heresy to call atheists “prophets.” I’m a little bowled over that god would speak to people via atheists, and his audience of even liberal Christians might find that pretty absurd.
Well,I’m new to your blog and I’ve only read down to the book burning post and I think I really enjoy your topics. The world is a crazy place. Organized religion just enables it.
FYI…
Here’s the latest in my public debate with Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: (Connie, my atheist science writer wife, thinks it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.)
“Biblical Christianity Is Bankrupt”:
http://thankgodforevolution.com/node/2070
I used to attend the church of Jack Graham… and at that time he was the president of the SBTS.
I called the church I went to “The Baptidome”. Of course, I’m a skeptic now. :D
You know Mr. Dowd, you seem like a decent guy, and if every Christian were like you, the world would definitely be a better place. . .
But.
It seems like you’ve ditched everything but the labels. Why cling to those labels at all? Why be a Naturalist Christian and not just a naturalist? What does tossing the label Christian into the mix get you?
Just curious. Your version of Christianity is pretty low impact, and I don’t particularly have any argument with it. But it does seem a bit superfluous.
Ty, there’s over a billion Christians in the world. Don’t you think it would be a good idea for at least a few of us to have a passion for leading the rest into an evidential, evolutionary/ecological (naturalist) worldview? Wish me luck. :-)
If anyone here is interested, here’s my recent public debate with Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Connie, my atheist wife, thinks it’s the best thing I’ve written in years):
BIBLICAL CHRISTIANITY IS BANKRUPT
http://thankgodforevolution.com/node/2070
Co-evolutionarily,
~ Michael