The Cure for Religious Diversity

May 17, 2013 By 7 Comments

I’ll admit that I was surprised to see John Loftus’ new book The Outsider Test of Faith. On one hand, the OTF has been Loftus’ signature argument for six or seven years now. On the other hand, it’s fundamentally a simple argument.

The OTF, boiled down, states that you should evaluate your faith from the outside. As Loftus puts it, “The only way to rationally test one’s culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider, a nonbeliever, with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use when examining the other religious faiths they reject.”

So, in short, the OTF is nothing more than the golden rule: You should treat your own religion exactly as you treat other religions, and evaluate your beliefs using the same criteria that you use to evaluate others’ beliefs. It’s a sound and powerful argument. Granted, stepping outside oneself and one’s own upbringing is one of the most difficult things to do. Still, do we really need an entire book to explain it?

Answer: no, but we do need an entire book to defend it. Loftus’ first couple of chapters describe the OTF and the thought process behind it. His last two chapters work through the OTF and explain some of the implications. But half of the book is Loftus responding to critics.

Loftus is a magnet for apologists, so he’s got quite a rogues gallery of people to work through. He does a good job of condensing arguments that likely took up long comment threads on one blog or another, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover.

All this does leave me with a problem. The natural audience for this book are people like myself who are stuck in to the world of apologetics and counter-apologetics. This new work gives us a nice handbook where all the likely moves of the debate are spelled out. People who avoid these debates – known in the trade as sane people – might be better off sticking with Loftus’ shorter description of the OTF in the collection The End of Christianity.

Filed Under: Book Reviews 7 Comments

Stenger’s “God and the Atom”

April 29, 2013 By 7 Comments

Richard Feynman once opined on the most important sentence in science:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied. [ Six Easy Pieces, p 4]

If the idea that everything we see and interact with can be broken down to particles and void – in short, to atomism – could be the foundation of a reborn science, then it makes sense to use atomism as the starting point for a discussion of a science-based world view. That’s what Victor Stenger is attempting to do in his latest book God and the Atom. By showing how universe rests on a foundation of particle physics, Stenger can show that there is no place for – or at least no need for – God and the supernatural.

It’s an ambitious goal, one made more complicated by Stenger’s decision to include a history of the idea of atomism from ancient Athens through the Renaissance, and carry the thread through his discussion of particle physics. However, Stenger’s forty year career as a particle physicist make him qualified to make the attempt.

And it’s a solid attempt but, sadly, not a very successful one. Stenger needs to cram history, a whole field of science and an entire worldview into 300 pages, with end notes. The results are predictable: the early history is choppy, the arguments are scant and little space is given to counterarguments. Not surprisingly the physics are handled well, if perhaps a bit speedily for some readers. His use of the history from Newton onward is smooth and helpful in connecting the development of particle physics. But Stenger’s central argument needs more space to develop than he’s allowed himself.

To pick one problem, there’s Stenger’s approach to reductionism. While it may be accurate to say that particles and void are the foundation of our universe, we do not live in that foundation. We live in a house constructed on that foundation, and it is not easy to see how the foundation gives rise to the house.

How do atomic interactions “scale up” into the world we experience? That’s an important question to deal with if you’re going to be appealing to a popular audience. You have to connect the world they live in with the world Stenger is describing.

One way to deal with this a discussion of emergence. Stenger spends only a few paragraphs on the issue (pp. 270-271), and he seems to view the topic with suspicion. Perhaps this is because so many philosophers and liberal theologians like Philip Clayton are claiming the word emergence and taking it farther than scientists would go, but leaving out the discussion creates a massive gap.

Obviously, I am in complete sympathy with the goal of describing a bottom-up universe. But such a worldview is counter-intuitive, and learning to think in terms of complex systems giving rise to phenomena – of chaos leading to order – takes careful teaching. Saying in essence “here are the atoms, there is no God” doesn’t really address the problem.

Filed Under: Atheism, Book Reviews, Science 7 Comments

The Myth of Persecution

March 25, 2013 By 8 Comments

I’m a bit slow in my review of Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution. It has received positive reviews from James McGrath, Thomas Verenna and Jim West. In my defense, I’m buying a house and finding that it’s killed all my reading (and writing) time.

Since I’m arriving late, I’ll keep things short. Moss makes clear that this is a book with a political point. In the introduction and the last chapter, Moss dwells on the modern problems caused by Christianity’s sense of being persecuted. She’s hoping to strike at the myth that Christianity was brutally persecuted from the time of Christ until Constantine.

Moss is trying to problematize that myth. I’m sorry for the buzzword, but it’s the best way to describe what’s going on. She’s attacking the narrative from all angles and finding all the ways that the history of Christianity is more complicated than the narrative. It’s not a matter of “This is wrong” as “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

She begins by showing how the myth of the “good death” goes as far back in western culture as you can go. The heroes in The Iliad face death stoically, die for their country and receive immortality in song and legend. This starts a literary trope that continues through Socrates and the other philosophers, through the Jewish martyrs and into Jesus and the Christian martyrs.

Having established the literary components of this myth, she then goes on to show how our oldest sources for the persecution are not as reliable as we’d like. Martyr stories are literary creations that come much later than the events they appear to describe. Close reading of historical sources show that persecuting figures were generally aiming at broad problems and Christians simply got caught in the blast.

She rounds it out by showing how later Christian writers used the image of the martyr to advance their own agenda. The most important is the church historian Eusebius, who popularized the narrative of the persecuted church. Moss is able to show how Eusebius was using the authority of the martyr figure to enhance the stature of his stream of orthodox tradition over the “heretics” who disagreed with him.

Moss gives us a very convincing argument that the story of the persecuted church is greatly exaggerated. While there are some accurate elements to the stories and there were figures who were likely persecuted, most of the accounts are unreliable and most of the history shows Christians suffering for being a religion minority rather than simply being Christian.

However, there are some bits that feel like semantic arguments. Moss points out that both Paul and Tacitus speak of persecuted Christians before the name and identity of Christianity had existed. That’s a good point, but presumably both Paul and Nero did persecute someone. But if some “proto-Christian” group was persecuted, shouldn’t that count?

Another of Moss’ central argument is that persecution is not prosecution. When Rome demanded that all subjects sacrifice to the genus of the emperor, Christians were not specifically targeted but did suffer when they refused. Technically that works, but emotionally it lacks a bit.

The Myth of Persecution is one of the most neatly written academic works I’ve read. It is short and reads quickly, yet it rarely feels like Moss is skimping. Despite its brevity it is still loaded with interesting data and provocative ideas. I’m going to recommend it highly to everyone interested in Christian history or Christian thought.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Christianity, History, Religious Violence 8 Comments

Download the Universe

August 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Apparently Carl Zimmer, science writer extraordinaire, was complaining at a conference that science writing lacks the social network backing found in genres like romance or science fiction. There simply aren’t the online communities reviewing and discussing the works of popular science books, and this was preventing any e-book market from forming.

Challenged to do something about it, Zimmer and a number of others authors, including Tom Levenson of Balloon Juice, put together a blog called Download the Universe, to be a place where they could review, discuss and interact with fans. Hopefully this will create a market for science e-books as well as expand the market for traditional science books.

Levenson explains:

Here’s the thing. These writers have come together because we are in the midst of a revolution in the way we talk to each to other—the existence of this blog is an example of communication and community that would not have been possible a very short time ago. One consequence of that change is that models for making a living through the craft of writing are being remade. Publishing has been disintermediated, which to my mind is mostly a very good thing indeed. (I do know that all this is old hat to everyone reading this.) But DtU came into existence because such disintermediation makes it harder to get the word out about good stuff. So as science writers, working in an area we think surpassingly important (and lots of fun) we’ve taken matters into our own hands, as the technology requires us to do. So, if you do have an interest in the construction of a culture of smart lay conversation about science, Download the Universe may be very useful to you. I hope so.

Well, I’m intrigued.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Books, Science Leave a Comment

Nonbeliever Nation

August 24, 2012 By 3 Comments

The most influential political movement for my generation has to be the Religious Right. While I’m sure its members have never felt that they’ve ever completely succeeded, they’ve done more to change politics in America than any other group. They’ve redefined public religion: our most prominent Christians used to include liberals like Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry Ward Beecher, now their ranks are almost completely conservative. They’ve redefined politics, largely by elevating the role of religious identity. Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon, and Barack Obama, who was raised in a nonreligious home, both try to sound like a conventional Christians when behind the podium.

But every successful political movement selects for its own defeat, since it inevitable creates a backlash. Yet while there have been several attempts to organize a Religious Left, none have been successful enough to make a dent. Could a non-religious left be the answer?

That’s the hope expressed in David Niose’s new book Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of the Secular Americans. Niose does some fiddling with definitions and back of the envelope calculations and decides that 15% of Americans are secular. That’s a grab-bag of atheists, agnostics, cultural Catholics, humanistic Jews, seekers, post-modern believers and other people who don’t consider themselves conventionally religious.

While still a minority, that’s a substantial number. Particularly since, as Niose points out, it consistently votes more progressively than other groups. But is this really the beginning of a “post-theological” era, as he suggests?

Niose gives a brisk history of America’s secular tradition and the rise of the Religious Right. This does what it needs to, but it won’t be any news to readers in the atheosphere. Niose easily debunks the idea that religious belief leads to personal morality and social stability. Again not new information for this audience, but necessary since this has been the most popular argument in favor of public religion.

The second half of the book is more useful. He gives a history of some of the profusion of secular groups that have arisen, like the Secular Coalition of America and the American Humanist Association. He devotes a separate chapter to the rise of student groups, calling the a “Reason for Hope and a Hope for Reason.” This is a useful service for those of us who have lived through the rise of these groups and can no longer remember what all those blasted acronyms stand for.

I suspect that these are the issues that are going to be most interesting to future historians of American politics. The Religious Right owes much of its success to networks of small groups that plowed the field during the mid-20th century. And while we cannot and start our own religious schools and colleges, which were another boon to the Religious Right, our student groups may offer some of the same appeal. I think Niose’s instincts here are dead on, and I hope that he will continues to watch and comment on these groups.

Niose gives a rundown on some of the culture war issues that secular group have been fighting, then lays out a some suggestions for future areas of progressive politics that secularism will play a part in. I like that his focus on education, feminism (something of a hot button issue there) and race. However, it’s a bit harder to see how we can go from banging the drum for a group described as “nonreligious” and then claim that we’ll reduce the tribalism in American politics.

All told, the book is not quite a history, nor a political manifesto or a cultural analysis. It’s a mingling of all three: enough of a history to know where we’ve been, enough analysis to know who we are, and enough manifesto to give us an idea of where we’re headed.

Filed Under: Atheism, Book Reviews, Politics 3 Comments
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