And now for something completely different…
At last, dear reader, here’s some food for thought on a topic other than the flood.
Greta Christina is a blogger that gets picked up on Alternet.org. She’s as much of a “johnny one-note” on atheism as I am about the flood. She claims her blog is about a few different topics “…and whatever,” although it looks to me to be almost entirely about atheism.
Christina’s a vigorous advocate for what she describes as “atheist activism (trying to persuade people that atheism is correct and working to change the world into one without religion).” Here’s a passage from her blog dated Nov. 26, 2009, entitled “Atheism and Diversity: Is It Wrong For Atheists To Convert Believers?” She answers her own question with a big fat “No!”
If there’s one single idea I’d most like to get across to religious believers, it would not be, “There is no God.” Or even, “There is probably no God.” I want believers to reach that conclusion on their own. [...] I don’t want people to stop believing in God just because I say so.
If there’s one single idea I’d most like to get across to religious believers, it would be this:
Religion is a hypothesis.
Religion is a hypothesis about how the world works, and why it is the way it is. Religion is the hypothesis that the world is the way it is, at least in part, because of immaterial beings or forces that act on the material world.
Hard-core materialism (what Christina’s atheism is) is just as much a hypothesis as she asserts religion is. In fact, the very essence of science is coming out with hypotheses; naturally, the “science religion” rejects prima facie the hypothesis they suppose religion to be offering as an alternative.
However, she overlooks or doesn’t entirely understand that religion is not about “how” and neither about “why” in the sense she intends.
One rightly dismisses religion that explicitly offers itself up as a explanation of observable material and physical mechanisms and phenomena. That understanding of religion only became common after the development of movable type and the wide availability of printed copies of the bible. Until the modern era, the literal take-away message that a supreme, Zeus-like being manufactured the world in a calendar week wasn’t the foremost understanding people had of the opening chapter of Genesis.
Pre-typographic religion wasn’t thought of as a “How Things Work” answer place. Rather, the modern mindset reveals a lack of appreciation for evolution when one supposes that, for a span of ~4,000 years ending around the time of the scientific revolution, people were dumb or had minds less capable than ours. Religion answers a different question than “how does this or that physical phenomenon work?” Today, most folks, including followers of the “just-write-these-off” fundamentalist religions, have forgotten what that question was. That in no way makes it a stupid question or one that only occurs to primitive (or at least pre-modern) peoples.
Evolution doesn’t progress very fast at all, according to the time scale humans experience. The earliest groups of people to paint pictures in caves had the same brains — and thus, presumably, from a materialist/atheist point of view — the same minds that we do.
Of course this doesn’t prove the existence of god. The point is that up until a few hundred years ago, the idea of religion offering up a mechanistic explanation for the observable world didn’t really occur to folks.
It is a core materialist/atheist dogma that the physical sciences will, one day, completely account for certain indirectly observable phenomenon, such as noetic experiences, and other directly observable phenomena such as synchronicity (a.k.a. the “butterfly effect”), both described by Jung along with many others before and since. Such phenomena as these, not reproducible in laboratory conditions, are bound to remain outside of what’s explainable by science, which depends on reproducing conditions in a controlled fashion.
That mankind will eventually discover a “Theory of Everything” is itself a belief: every day the TOE fails to emerge, the materialist says merely “we’re on the brink of discovering it, it’s coming soon.” Just like Jesus. Lately, materialists have latched onto quantum physics as the breakthrough by which we’ll soon understand everything. Christina’s core argument seems to be this: since the science hypothesis is correct, it’s the correct one. That’s called a tautology.
The strident polemic of activist atheism has the same shrill tone as hard-core evangelist proselytizing. Both approaches have a “the lady doth protest too much, methinks”* feel to them, signifying just the tiniest bit of doubt — on both sides.
* Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2
