Charitable Atheism is up and Running

My new blog project is up and running over at WordPress. I'd like to invite those who have read this blog to make their way over there and comment on what you see.

The project to audit Professor Ed Feser's book on Aquinas will begin September 1. The intellectual challenge of it seems to be appropriate to a "back to school" time of year.

I've posted some blogs on current events and the purpose of charitable atheism in my criticism of a New Atheist canard I call "The Jerry MaGuire Defense". I've already have been accused by fellow atheists of not being a "real atheist" due to my desire to expand reason through charitable investigation of belief rather than my prior strategy of debunking religious claims through shame and ridicule. So, I now am not a "real Christian" nor am I a "real atheist". I understand the criticism but, for me, the latter strategy allows for greater peace and happiness and therefore, my moral instincts seem to inform me that it may have greater ethical value.

Thanks for the comments here and please comment on the new site.

I'd love to hear your ideas for topics we might discuss at the new site and will take them under consideration as series ideas. Peace.

The Battle is Over -- Shutting it Down

My friend Thom Stark suggested to me yesterday that many atheists are still trapped by religion and I agreed with him.

For the most part, this blog has been a project of me seeking to escape my religious bonds. I've, more than often, however, knotted the ties by which religion held me down, through a rage-filled response to a narrow theological tradition.

My response was necessary to clear my mind of group-agreement and move towards a new world-view that does not seek safety within institutional authority.

The time to maintain that position however, seems to be over so, I'm closing down this blog in the hope to start fresh in examining belief from a more charitable view.

I've grown tired of the New Atheist cliche where rancor towards the religious is born out of a presupposed caricature towards religious belief and, would rather understand the religious mind, rather than seek easy (and fallacious) methods of debunking it.

This desire is born from my appreciation of empirical realities and material truth.

I've discovered that the limited strategy of mockery towards the religious to be a false premise that does not reflect the realities in which the religious move.

My wife is a devout Christian and she isn't a stupid and superstitious person who simply believes because she is told to believe. Two of my best friends, Steve and Jen Bishop are devout Christians, Steve also holds an MDiv in Theology from Trinity Seminary, and they are two of the most thoughtful people I know. They wrestle with moral questions from a place of honesty and never accept blind belief as an answer.

If I am going to understand what is real inside of belief than I need to expand my way of knowing what those beliefs are. The best way I can think of this is to begin the practice of Philosophical Charity where I interpret, a speaker's statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, consider its best, strongest possible interpretation.

This will be a fun challenge and I think will yield knowledge.

That said, I don't think a blog committed to "battling" is appropriate to the project and therefore will be shutting this down.

This choice also affords me the opportunity to move to WordPress software and begin anew.

The URL for my next blog is http://charitableatheism.wordpress.com/ and the first project I will attempt there will be an audit of Ed Feser's book on Thomistic Theology entitled "Aquinas". Ed is a Roman Catholic and scholar of Thomistic-Aristotelian ethics. The former institution is something I distrust and the latter school is something I am ignorant of.

My goals with the blog will be spelled out on the opening page but, generally speaking will be to pursue what I consider the true New Atheist goal - a public space where reason rules. This goal has been misunderstood by me in the past to mean, where science rules and, that misunderstanding, has led to polemic rather than insight. I'm sick of polemic. I'm tired of being angry. I want to be wise.

I also want to leave a legacy for my son where he can choose disbelief as a world-view rich in wonder and peace and mystery.

For those who have read this blog and commented, thanks. This has been cool. I don't think I attracted many readers but, I think I became a better writer for working on this.

Peace,

Chuck

I Was Wrong

I was wrong. How often am I willing to say that? How sincere am I when I say it? Is it an honest expression of new information gained or simply a tactic to diffuse conflict?

When faced with flat criticism of our selves that challenges a core sense of our self-identity we experience cognitive dissonance (that spike of spite that stops agreement with oneself or others) and turns us all into Arthur Fonzerelli in our capacity to say, "I was wrong."

Yesterday I listened to a podcast from the James Randi Educational Foundation and their show "For Good Reason" with DJ Grothe where he intereviewed Carol Tavris. Tavris describes dissonance theory and confirmation bias. The former being the upsetting feeling we experience when faced with criticism that contradicts our self-image and the latter being the stories we tell ourselves to wish away the upsetting feeling.

Tavris also discusses tactics in conversation when faced with cognitive dissonance and how one might be tempted towards confirmation bias. What is the goal when challenging contrary ideas? Is it simply to debunk someone we disagree with or is it to alter that person's perspective so we both can find information that will afford a shared sense of knowledge? Debunking affords emotional release but often reinforces confirmation bias due to the cognitive dissonance it generates. Once again this illustrates the virtue of skepticism and how often "critical thought" can be simply criticism practiced for emotional equilibrium. Cognitive dissonance can be ameliorated by a lot of confirmation bias but the forward thrust of education is stifled because the confirmation bias one practices also creates dissonance in another which in turn leads to further confirmation bias etc ...

It was a good podcast and afforded me a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance where I had to wrestle with confirmation bias last night and consider how my past actions may have contradicted my desire for critical thinking.

When faced with the discomfort of competing ideas it seems wise to understand the discomfort rather than reacting to it.

Faith defeats Intellectual Humility

Dr. Coyne has a good post where he exposes the arrogance of Intelligent Design (ID) theory once again.

I am often a critic of religious thinking and I realize that makes some of my friends angry but this post by Dr. Coyne exposes the danger of how too much religious faith presents a problem to knowledge and explains my criticism (in a way).

One of the leading proponents of ID is William Dembski and he gets biology wrong again so he might cherry pick observations in service of his preferred religious belief.

Dembski seems like a nice guy but his credulity is beyond reason.

For example, he is the father of a severely autistic son and for the sake of his supernatural commitment he allowed himself and his family to be duped into an emotional manipulation by a faith healer because this superstition was recommended efficacious by his faith community. He admits the damage this choice did but demands we all continue to follow his fideistic commitment to lesser degrees when wrestling with reality.

He wishes we all would be subject to his level of credulity and ignore the foundation of health science rooted in Darwinian evolution for the sake of Christianity.

William Dembski is an engineer and a fundamentalist Christian and a smart man but he is not an evolutionary biologist yet feels he has the authority to try to falsify known science for the sake of Jesus. He is either a cynic or a dupe animating the Intelligent Design community's political campaign to over-turn Darwinian evolution because it defeats the notion of a personal creator god. He fails with facts, intellectual charity and reasoning but believes he is right (and is well-funded in this belief) due to the emotional benefits Jesus belief brings.

It is obvious to me that his assertions have no intellectual humility because he wishes to be an authority on a subject he has no formal training in simply because he has made an emotional commitment to a creation myth with societal privileged protection.

It frightens me because it undermines the course of intelligence in intellectual humility which can make us all better for a faith commitment that makes the believer feel good despite its dubious claims on reality (like Mr. Dembski's experience with the faith healer and his son).

It also angers me because when I challenge the theological assertions by believers (e.g. The phenomenon of an invisible intelligent agent known as "The Holy Spirit" that becomes part of a human's reasoning faculties when an acceptance of Jesus is entered) I am told that I don't know the theology I am citing. My inexpert stance obviates my criticism despite the fact I am simply relating the theology taught to me when I was a Christian but Christians have no problem avoiding the intellectual charity they demand of critics when looking to challenge ideas that hurt their thesis.

Making Beliefs Pay Rent

Eliezer Yudowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has a tantalizing notion I hope to practice further. He calls it making your beliefs pay rent. His simple description is as follows,

"Any belief (the mental state in which an individual holds a proposition to be true) should restrict which experiences to anticipate, to be potentially useful and thereby pay rent and earn its keep in your mind, so to speak. If a belief does not affect what you anticipate experiencing—if the world would look exactly the same whether the belief is true or whether it is false—then how could you possibly tell if it were false? And if there's no circumstance under which you would be able to notice your belief were false, then why do you believe it now?"

This principle illuminates my vague notion that there is something wrong with my past respect for intuition as master of reason. I used to be drawn to big personalities who said bold things and referenced vague language that seemed to access intuitive revealed knowledge.

I remember one boss who would encourage those that worked for him by declaring that each one of us were forces of nature who held vast creative power to change the world.

This is good rhetoric but the reality is we would have been more comfortable working together if we admitted the limits of our powers and sought to maximize our efficiencies by recognizing that simply being human does not give one phenomenological abilities to bend the laws of space-time.

I think the belief we had "force of nature" powers was not true and probably was a product of our inferiority complexes and our boss's fear.

I also have become uncomfortable with creative folks I meet either in my day job in advertising or my vocation in play-writing who invoke a devotion to irrationality as a way of understanding reality.

A few folks I know have said recently that logic is good as far as it is practiced in science but within living life one must surrender to something other than logic (they never say what exactly, maybe they mean intuition) as the compass for understanding truth.

I recognize the sentiment to embrace the power of now by sounding my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world (because I've sung this song of myself in the past, usually accompanied by anxiety or nervousness) but no longer see that expression as a disciplined way of seeking after what is true.

It seems more like an energetic blast of belief to rationalize what I'd like to be true.

The beliefs we hold might allow us to enjoy emotional experiences based on their imagined causative links to real experiences but if the belief does not anticipate an actual external experience then the rent it is costing to take up brain space is, to quote Jimmy McMillan, "too damn high!"

I'm going to blog further about what I discover when practicing this principle.

I can see now that the first lesson it teaches me is that what I held as beliefs are not true and the intelligence I thought I had, I don't.

The danger of apostasy

It seems to me that most people maintain whatever religious association they have not because they experiment with their theology to test its veracity against reality but because the shared ideas that make up that theology allow for social acceptance.

I think it is why people like me who call for proof of the claims made by their former religions are seen as mean-spirited, hostile, bigots or crazy.

We've broken the rules of polite social engagement.

A recent article in the New Yorker detailing Paul Haggis's apostasy from Scientology is a great object lesson in what transpires between people when the metaphors that make up belief are questioned for their reality.

The apostate's sanity or honesty are called into question despite the objective evidence one has to justifiably infer a religion's theology is bunk.

For example, I've come to see that a post-enlightened world of common descent, quantum mechanics, and the double-helix of our DNA does not afford much space for the interventionist god of abrahamic theism or the unmoved mover of classical theism. I therefore think it is silly to call myself Christian or Spiritual in any substantive way.

The metaphors that make up the definition of Yahweh, Jesus or spirits are unconvincing in the discoveries science has provided.

I don't think many modern believers if challenged would argue for supernaturalism when faced with naturalism's victories either.

Of course there are the Pat Robertson followers who will seek to understand god's "to do" list by analyzing natural disasters (e.g. The Haitian earthquakes as god's vendetta against Voo Doo or the snow-storms hammering the US East Coast as god's retribution against the gays) but the pre-enlightened "experimental religion" of Jonathan Edwards is resigned to the cultural scrap-heap of faith-healers and Tarot card readers.

I doubt anyone who has built their career on the observation of Christ-centered teleology will be named President of Princeton, as Edwards was, anytime soon.

Most modern believers see a god concept as a form of self-help to navigate a world that involves modern institutions (evidenced most notably in the work of Rick Warren).

These modern institutions rely on both methodological and metaphysical naturalism for their invention (e.g. the germ theory of disease as a basis for inoculation rather than spirits as a source of affliction) and therefore avoid supernaturalism as a cause.

The supernaturalism for most functioning believers in a modern world has regressed to a personal philosophy that allows emotional spikes to be framed by terms that offer a short-hand method for admitting them or justifying them.

For example, in my former experience as a Calvinist Christian, sin was a reality evidenced by the lack of perfection I experienced in either my thinking or behavior which in turn motivated a theological practice towards better behavior. I couldn't however point to a generator of sin because it was a function of my soul and therefore a product of a non-investigatable entity. Thus sin operated more as metaphor in explaining the basic reality of what I've come to see as biological and brain functions rather than being basic unto itself.

The result of metaphors like sin become theology and theology offers easy access to a social group and belonging based on the shared belief that the metaphor is basic. I don't begrudge this. It feels good to count on a society that will agree with you and always love you.

It does suggest however that a belief in unseen agents (e.g. "God" or "gods") is a function of emotional experience rather than testable ideas and therefore it seems to be more about wishful thinking to navigate one's inner life rather than understanding what makes up our shared external world.

I also think it is why when one admits apostasy towards a given religious tradition it often invites both aggressive and passive hostility from the people with whom the apostate once shared religious belief.

A person who sees theology as metaphor, and admits its usefulness is in providing comfort for those believing in the symbols of that theology, seems to be behaving like a bully telling another their organizing ideas of reality are of no deeper substance than "Goodnight Moon".

I of course believe that all theologies are of the same essential substance as fairy-tales, and don't mind believers who wish to admit this, but also find the need to justify these stories in ritual as ineffective to any real moral or intellectual aims.

The difficulty however is that believers who will dismiss the efficacy of their theology when faced with real circumstances modernity has tackled (e.g. antibiotics as first-line therapy for Streptococcus rather than the laying of hands by elders and the anointment of oil) will not admit the subordinate nature of their metaphor when considering reality.

They insist that their metaphor is real.

I've offended many people in my short time as an atheist because I've challenged the assertions they feel to be real as real in any meaningful way outside of their feelings. I once was concerned that I needed to apologize for this unintended offense but now see it as the inherent danger of apostasy. Now that I admit the function of religion as a natural phenomenon I can understand why I make so many of my former friends uncomfortable and, while sad for the friendships I seem to have lost, I no longer worry about what I could have done to change the outcome.

The word God is the product of human weakness

As an addendum to my appreciation of the need for numinous feeling (e.g. "god"). I found this letter from Einstein illuminating. So many religious, especially Christians, want to ground their belief in truth citing Einstein's intelligence and his use of the word "god" in certain writing as evidence their belief is a product of critical thought. Not so, the money quote for me:

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish . . . I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things."