Prometheus Unbound

And favorably!

Shermer thought I had offered an amusing blog post retort to Jerry Coyne’s charge that he (Shermer) had gone soft on theism and now deserved the label “faitheist”. See Shermer’s Huffington Post piece here, and my blog post that Shermer quotes from here.

I love Bryan Appleyard’s eloquent retorts to the blistering rhetoric coming out of New Atheistland. Here’s Appleyard today on PZ Myers’s scientism:

[M]ention intelligent design and the likes of Myers will be hurling abuse. But I gather from reading John Gribbin’s superb exposition In Search of the Multiverse that ID is, in fact, a perfectly respectable hypothesis among some physicists – the designer would not be a deity but a more technically advanced civilisation. So the world is ‘designed’ then? ‘No!‘ howls Myers; ‘Maybe,’ murmur the physicists. But there’s a bigger reason than that. Treating science as an ideology, an occasion for polemic and abuse, and anathematising those who dissent is profoundly unscientific. It is an attitude that will, in the end, damage not just science itself but science as a public institution. Science is, as Thomas Nagel put it, a ‘view from nowhere‘, it is a method, not a posture towards the world. It assumes – and, indeed, attains – the possibility of a superhuman perspective. As such, it is a profoundly admirable and magnificent achievement of the human intellect. But it is only one such achievement. When science aspires to be anything else – ideology, for example – it is prone to delusion, fantasy and intolerance. That is where we now are, a dangerous place where people set up web sites that abandon mere explanation and promote science as an ideology, as, in effect, an opinion held with such ferocity that all dissent must be crushed. This phase, I hope, will pass. But I am beginning to have my doubts.

Yes. A very particular scientific observation, in fact. The author of the first chapter of Genesis clearly based his narrative on something that he had empirically observed: the world appears to be composed of two things:

• stage elements (light, darkness, sky, waters, land, and plants); and
• moving elements (sun, moon, stars, animals, and humans)

In other words, the world is a stage with actors. The Genesis 1 author then sets this stage-actor insight into poetic parallelism to build a creation story that accords with the Hebrew week:

Stage elements                                          Actors

Day 1: light and darkness                           Day 4: the sun, moon, and stars

Day 2: waters below and above                   Day 5: sea creatures and birds

Day 3: land and plants                                Day 6: animals and humans  

Once you know the poetic parallelism at work, it’s hard to ever forget the order of creation, or the organizing stage-actor principle underlying it, which one might put in Shakespearean terms as “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” In short, undergirding Genesis 1 is a still valuable empirical surmise of the universe as actually experienced. Unfortunately, fundamentalists attempting to harmonize Genesis 1 with science have missed Genesis 1’s singular empirical categorization, and where it lies: beneath the text’s poetry.

Richard Dawkins has famously said that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has made him, not just an atheist, but “an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” In other words, by mixing a scientific theory with an ideology, Dawkins has found that his strict naturalism is, as it were, bolstered by the idea of evolution. Put still another way: a person challenged to defend his or her atheism can point to evolutionary theory as something that fits with atheism rather nicely, thank you very much. 

But wait. What other ideas fit rather nicely with Darwin’s theory of evolution? Surely not young earth creationism. You’re unlikely to ever hear a young earth creationist say, “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a young earth creationist, but an intellectually fulfilled young earth creationist.” But there are other ideas, and not just atheism, that do seem to go rather nicely with Darwin’s theory of evolution. For some examples, it’s certainly not difficult to imagine someone saying any one of these things (however repulsive in some cases):

• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a liberal theologian, but an intellectually fulfilled liberal theologian.”
• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a Nietzschean, but an intellectually fulfilled Nietzschean.”
• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a capitalist, but an intellectually fulfilled capitalist.”
• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a mass murderer, but an intellectually fulfilled mass murderer.”
• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a soldier, but an intellectually fulfilled soldier.”
• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a eugenicist, but an intellectually fulfilled eugenicist.”
• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a nationalist, but an intellectually fulfilled nationalist.”
• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a socialist, but an intellectually fulfilled socialist.”
• “Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for me to be, not just a misogynist, but an intellectually fulfilled misogynist.”

What makes Darwin’s theory of evolution so intellectually malleable that it can (at least theoretically and plausibly) accomodate so many divergent ideas, from the pro-social humanism of Albert Camus to the blood cult of Adolf Hitler? If you’re inclined, and sufficiently motivated and creative, you can connect the dots of evolutionary theory to all sorts of ideological positions, including Richard Dawkins’s style of atheism. Isn’t that interesting?

And an interesting match up. Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris v. Robert Wright, Dinesh D’Souza, and a rabbi, Shmuley Boteach:

And Appleyard skewers him, returning rhetorical fire with rhetorical fire:

I note also the appearance of this character P.Z.Myers. I’ve never read him before but I now discover he once did me over – ‘How stupid are the editors and managers who keep paying for his badly written lumps of self-contradictory fatuousness?’ Okay, I’m prepared to accept that I may be wrong about everything – I wake up every morning thinking just that – and PZ may be right, but ‘BADLY WRITTEN’! Coming from this sub-verbal sack of shit that’s a bit rich.

And one of Appleyard’s thread contributors nicely deconstructs PZ Myers’s rhetorical maneuvers:

Step 1–Begin by describing a philosophical challenge with a mixture of anger and fatigue, much as you would describe discovering a termite in your house after the exterminator had been through and presumably destroyed them all. The contempt must ooze front and center before you even address the argument so that anyone who might be inclined to take the challenge seriously is forwarned and suitably cowed. Don’t skimp on the insulting adjectives.

Step 2–Deflect the issue from the profoundly philosophical to the mundane by suddenly talking lab gobbledegook about genes, mutations, etc. Use words like phenotype liberally and try to throw in a diagram. Extra points for insisting Darwin himself was well aware of what you are saying and would have agreed with you unreservedly;

Step 3–Insist that any argument that comes within a hundred miles of religion, no matter how ethereal or tentative, leads directly to biblical literalism, preferably as practiced in the American South. Show in one paragraph how it is the root of every atrocity in history, will lead to the end of scientific inquiry and justifies the bombing of innocent villagers by the U.S. Air Force.

Step 4–Bask in the glow of hundreds of one-sentence comments thanking you profusely for your courage and agreeing you have proven there is no need to read what your opponent said to know that the stupid twit isn’t even worth reading.

I myself continue to think that PZ Myers is the most unhinged public figure in the New Atheist movement, but his fellow atheist peers (Dennett, Coyne, Dawkins, Shermer) seem to think he’s the bee’s knees, and speak of him with deep affection. I just don’t get it.

As a reminder of the problem that PZ Myers poses for liberal agnostics and atheists, here are his two blog posts—one promoting iconoclastic gestures toward Catholic communion wafers, and the other narrating his actual engaging in one of these gestures when one of his blog followers scored one for him (from the summer of 2008). How does a person who regards himself or herself as liberal defend this kind of emotional primitivism, incivility, and boorishness?:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

And this one:

OK, time for the anticlimax. I know some of you have proposed intricate plans for how to do horrible things to these crackers, but I repeat…it’s just a cracker. I wasn’t going to make any major investment of time, money, or effort in treating these dabs of unpleasantness as they deserve, because all they deserve is casual disposal. However, inspired by an old woodcut of Jews stabbing the host, I thought of a simple, quick thing to do: I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus’s tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel. My apologies to those who hoped for more, but the worst I can do is show my unconcerned contempt.

Ironically, I think that John Calvin would have understood PZ Myers.

I think that these two questions, when answered with two yeses, represent the thrust of what Intelligent Design proponents are up to in their critiques of evolution, as William Dembski recently (and concisely) stated at his blog:

The theory [of evolution] purports to give a materialistic account of life’s development once life is already here, but it has a gaping hole at the start since matter gives no evidence of being able to organize itself from non-life into life. The fossil record, especially the sudden emergence of most animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, sharply violates Darwinian expectations about the historical pattern of evolutionary change. The nano-engineering found in the DNA, RNA, and proteins of the cell far exceeds human engineering and remains completely unexplained in Darwinian terms. Darwin lovers are quick to reject such complaints.  After all, as novelist Barbara Kingsolver declares, Darwin’s idea of natural selection is “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.”

Dembski seems to be critiquing evolution on solid grounds here. I know he is an Evangelical, and that he is thus highly motivated to make such critiques, but my question is this: do these lines of critique, with regard to evolution, have at least some validity? I think that they have. If I’m wrong about this, what, as an agnostic, am I missing?

Dembski, in the same blog post, continues:

Any theory that explains everything and that can and must be true is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest swindle ever foisted on gullible intellectuals. The intelligent design community takes the latter view, siding here with Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” Still, it’s easy to understand why so flimsily a supported theory garners such vast support. It provides the creation story for an atheistic worldview. If atheism is true, then something like Darwinian evolution must follow.

I’m not sure which side—the Intelligent Design side or the Darwinist side—will be laughed at, say, a century from now. I suspect that it will be the Intelligent Design hypothesis, at least in terms of its current critiques of evolutionary biology, but it’s hard for me, as a nonscientist, to say. My hunch is that the gaps in evolutionary theory that Intelligent Design currently exploit will be filled over the next century in ways that will make the evolutionary conclusion even more compelling than it appears to be now.

But notice that this is merely a prediction, a guess really. And whether you’re a scientist or not, when it comes to the future, that’s really all we have. In the meantime, a bit of humility might suit all of us—religionist, agnostic, and atheist alike. I think that Dembski often comes across as unduly arrogant and overconfident, as do, say, atheists like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. Everybody seems just so darn cocksure, as if the other side consisted of fools. But competing confidence poses should not be mistaken for anything other than that. Maybe at profound and fundamental levels, both sides have elements to their arguments that, a hundred years from now, will be shown to be not just wrong, but spectacularly so.

Let’s see what happens. And keep an open mind.

Decoupling religion from war is not an easy thing. The poet Stephen Spender, in reflecting upon World War II, wrote these lines (in his poem, “Rejoice in the Abyss”):

Against an acrid cloud of dust, I saw

The houses kneel, revealed each in its abject

Prayer, my prayer as well: ‘Oh, God,

Spare me the lot that is my neighbor’s.’

The impulse to pray for your own survival, and leave the fate of neighbors and enemies to God (as a matter of indifference) is natural, but it is not in accord with love. So in a secular age should love, in the name of Darwinian survival, be abandoned? Should the fate of neighbors and enemies be a matter of indifference to any sane person trying to survive in a competitive, unjust, absurd, and tragic world? Or should you wed your own fate to following love and an expansion of concern, even at the expense of your own life?

What matters? What should matter?

Just asking.

Daniel Dennett. PZ Myers. Richard Dawkins. Jerry Coyne. Philosopher Michael Ruse is an atheist too. But don’t sign him up with the above confidence atheists.

Why? Here’s one reason that he gave in a recent essay in the UK’s Guardian:

[H]ow dare we be so condescending? I don’t have faith. I really don’t. Rowan Williams does as do many of my fellow philosophers like Alvin Plantinga (a Protestant) and Ernan McMullin (a Catholic). I think they are wrong; they think I am wrong. But they are not stupid or bad or whatever. If I needed advice about everyday matters, I would turn without hesitation to these men. We are caught in opposing Kuhnian paradigms. I can explain their faith claims in terms of psychology; they can explain my lack of faith claims also probably partly through psychology and probably theology also. (Plantinga, a Calvinist, would refer to original sin.) I just keep hearing Cromwell to the Scots. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” I don’t think I am wrong, but the worth and integrity of so many believers makes me modest in my unbelief.

And for sensibly counseling against intellectual hubris, what has Michael Ruse received for his pains? Well, here’s how Ruse characterizes the confidence atheists’ response to him:

Richard Dawkins has likened me to the pusillanimous appeaser at Munich, Neville Chamberlain. Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, says (echoing Orwell) that only someone with pretensions to the intelligentsia could believe the silly things I believe. And energetic blogger PZ Myers refers to me as a “clueless gobshite” because I confessed to seeing why true believers might find the Kentucky Creationist Museum convincing. I will spare you what my fellow philosopher Dan Dennett has to say about me.

I like to hear, in the teeth of opposition, an intellectual of Michael Ruse’s stature holding up for a more modest atheism. It strikes me that Ruse is advocating for a pre-9/11 atheism, a sobered atheism that harkens back to Albert Camus and the grim realities of existence that atheists grappled with during and after WWII. Religion had not poisoned and fucked up the 20th century public sphere—it was secular ideologies that had done that—and an atheism sobered by this fact was, in my view, a saner atheism than contemporary confidence atheism. Camus, sounding for all the world like Michael Ruse today, once said to a gathering of Dominican Friars (in 1948):

I wish to declare also that, not feeling that I possess any absolute truth or any message, I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.

If atheism is as compelling a philosophical position as Dennett & Co. believe it to be, then there really is no need to over sell it, for it will sell itself. The very fact that Dennett & Co. don’t trust atheism to sell itself tells you something about what must be going on beneath the surface of its most aggressive proponents. The evangelical atheist (who I imagine must be repressing a great deal in the psyche to be so confident of so many uncertain things) reminds me of the evangelical religious apologist. The broken wheel usually squeaks loudest, and against obnoxious resistance, Michael Ruse should continue to speak his modest Socratic truth: confidence atheism is intellect divorced from wisdom and humility. In not mixing the intellect with Socratic caution, the New Atheism is folly’s exhibit “A” (just as religious fundamentalism is folly’s exhibit “F”). Put in mythic terms, the New Atheists are rehearsing hubris; they are Oedipus and Jocasta before they crash. And so with Tiny Tim, and as an agnostic, I say to all those who provide pushback against the New Atheists, and try to recall to the world a saner Camus-style atheism, ”God bless them!” (If there is a god.)

And Ruse even looks a bit like a character out of a Dickens novel:

And here’s William Lane Craig, a Christian philosopher, making observations similar to Ruse:

On page 2 of A New Literary History of America (Harvard 2009) is an interesting account of what Christopher Columbus thought he had found when he explored the Venezuelan coast on his third voyage to what would come to be known as America. Columbus, when “he came across four great rivers gushing out into the sea” concluded that he “hadn’t found a new world . . . [but] the oldest one of all”: Eden!

According to Toby Lester, the author of the first essay in this volume:

The idea wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. The Bible placed the Terrestrial Paradise in the distant east, and most medieval maps placed it at the far-eastern edge of Asia. Humanity’s march west through space was also seen as a march west toward the end of time—an apocalyptic notion that medieval theologians had been bandying about for centuries.”

Imagine how Christopher Columbus’s head must have spun to think that he was probably looking into the watery river mouth of Eden, and that he had reached the circular culmination of space and time! God had apparently chosen Christopher Columbus (or so he imagined) to inhabit a very special place in human history, for Columbus seemed to be preparing the way for the End Times:

In his later years, Columbus imagined himself to be playing a starring role in this cosmic drama—a Messianic figure who, by carrying the Christian message across the ocean, was hastening the coming of the End of Days. He was no longer just Colombo or Columbus. He was also Christopher—that is, Christo-ferens, or “Christ bearer.” 

Heady stuff to imagine yourself in such dramatic historical terms, but I think this part of Columbus’s life has two cautionary elements in it:

1. concerning background knowledge; and
2. concerning associative intelligence

First, with regard to background knowledge: What is it that we think we know when we encounter new data? We may wildly misread things if we are not rigorously scrutinizing our presumed background knowledge (the things we think that we already know about the world). In this instance, Columbus had never applied sufficient scrutiny to his assumptions about the Bible. He took it for granted that the Bible contains infallible knowledge about the world’s past and its future, and he thus incorporated these assumptions into what he encountered in the present.

Second: associative intelligence (making connections between things). One of the glories of the human mind is its associative intelligence. It’s what, for example, makes poetry possible. “I measured out my life in coffee spoons” (T.S. Eliot). But what happens when the associative intelligence goes unchecked by empirical reality testing? Well, you start to get connections like these:

• I was born under the sign of Aries the Ram; therefore, I must like to butt heads with others!
• My kid was diagnosed with autism two months after getting her vaccinations; therefore, vaccinations must cause autism!
• I see four rivers entering the sea. Eden has four rivers. This must be Eden!
• God wanted my parents to name me “Christopher” because I am, in these End Times, the “bearer of Christ” to the last nations unexposed to the gospel.

Critical thinking lessons from Columbus’s experience: (1) in the face of new data and novel experiences, check your premises and background assumptions; and (2) exercise your associative intelligence, but also seek evidence for those associations. In the thrill of novel associations, keep your head about you.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816), is an extraordinary instance of an atheist addressing—or speaking to—the shadowy side of the ontological mystery (the mystery of being) as if it possessed a human persona, or was even a god.

The poem has seven stanzas. Here’s the first one:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

      Floats though unseen among us,—visiting

      This various world with an inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,

          It visits with inconstant glance

          Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,—

          Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—

          Like memory of music fled,—

          Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Notice that, like a theist who might capitalize a reference to God, Shelley capitalizes his reference to the “unseen Power” that reveals itself “with an inconstant wing”—and yet unmistakably and directly—to each individual “As summer winds that creep from flower to flower”. A “Power” likened to a hovering cloud that “Floats”—or the flight of a bird or an unpredictable wind—oddly borrows Christian tropes for the Holy Spirit. This is curious poetic language for an atheist. It seems that Shelley, who professes to not believe in God, nevertheless, in this poem, finds himself addressing, as it were, an unknown god: the dark ontological mystery that is sometimes curiously present to the mind as a kind of unstable and elusive peak experience:

          It visits with inconstant glance

          Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,—

          Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—

          Like memory of music fled,—

Then Shelley, again curiously, speaks of this “music” as grace. Grace. Absorb that. Why is an atheist turning elusive beauty into telos  distributing grace?:

Like memory of music fled,—

          Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

This is very strange language. It makes me wonder. When Shelley calls himself an atheist, does he mean merely that the conventional religious language used for talking about the ontological mystery strikes him as false—as a reduction of something completely mysterious—but that he nevertheless feels to be present—and that is in some sort of curious didactic relationship with him? Stanza 2 of this poem is startling for its religious longing and perplexity concerning suffering. This is hardly the way that you would expect an atheist to talk, and yet Shelley here sounds like the psalmist David:

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

    With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

    Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

          Ask why the sunlight not for ever

          Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,

          Why fear and dream and death and birth

          Cast on the daylight of this earth

          Such gloom,—why man has such a scope

For love and hate, despondency and hope?

These questions of ultimate meaning are necessarily met by the elusive “Spirit of Beauty” with silence, and so in the third stanza Shelley offers a theory for the debasement of the ontological mystery by religion:

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

      To sage or poet these responses given—

      Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavor,

Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,

          From all we hear and all we see,

          Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven,

          Or music by the night-wind sent

          Through strings of some still instrument,

          Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Notice that Shelley insists that conventionally superstitious and religious language—”Demon, Ghost, and Heaven”—function as “Frail spells” that do not really tame “Doubt”, nor answer the deep questions that we address to the ontological mystery concerning “chance, and mutability”. The ontological mystery does not tell us why we exist, experience beauty, suffer, and die: “No voice from some sublimer world hath ever / To sage or poet these responses given—”. Only by periodic and direct heightened experience with the “Spirit of Beauty” is a kind of answer hinted at “to life’s unquiet dream”:

Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven,

          Or music by the night-wind sent

          Through strings of some still instrument,

          Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

For Shelley, the apprehension of the “Spirit of Beauty” contains the kernel of an ontological secret. Like John Keats’s famous lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in which Keats says that, in life, we should not “follow the money” but ”follow the beauty” (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”), so Shelley gives beauty—albight intellectual beauty—first place in his soul’s quest. The apprehension of the “Spirit of Beauty” is the clue to the ontological mystery by which Shelley claims to navigate and investigate his existence. In stanza 5 he describes his dramatic youthful conversion to following this elusive mystery that he periodically perceives, this “shadow”:

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

    Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

    And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;

          I was not heard—I saw them not—

          When musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing

          All vital things that wake to bring

          News of birds and blossoming,—

          Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

Notice that Shelley, in a youthful prophet-like wilderness experience, seeking the voices of the gods of traditional religion, and musing on life, was taken unawares, on the cusp of spring, by the direct apprehension of a “shadow” that  ”fell on me; / I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!” Here is Shelley describing a possession of his spirit that claims to have held him for life. And this from stanza 6:

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

      To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?

And at the end of stanza 6 Shelley sounds like a Christian convert expressing eschatological longings:

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours . . .

They know that never joy illumed my brow

          Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free

          This world from its dark slavery,

          That thou—O awful Loveliness,

Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.

Shelley, at least in this poem, seems not so much an atheist as one who has made the unseen mysterious power beneath things his “god.” And so Shelley ends his poem (stanza 7) with a kind of prayer that his youthful memories of the dark “Spirit of Beauty” will stay with him, and calmly sustain him in the future:

The day becomes more solemn and serene

      When noon is past—there is a harmony

      In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

          Thus let thy power, which like the truth

          Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

          Its calm—to one who worships thee,

          And every form containing thee,

          Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind

To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Shelley was an atheist. But the scaffoldings of religious impulses—of the need for worship, and to speak to, and enter into communion with, the ontological mystery and “love all human kind”—were present in him. He thought that there was an invisible, maybe intelligent, “shadow” undergirding things and occasionally revealing itself to our trembling apprehensions (as individual flowers tremble in separate gusts of wind). He thought that this “shadow”—which I’m calling the ontological mystery and which he called the “Spirit of Beauty”—gives “grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.” Odd that an atheist would express himself in such curiously religious language. Would a contemporary atheist like Daniel Dennett approve?

Shelley’s poem also recalls for me these words, attributed to Jesus, in the Gospel of St. John (3:8 KJV):

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

I think that Jesus might have recognized Shelley as a compadre, as someone who was also born of the Spirit. Shelley, in a calm moment, might even have agreed.

I’m an agnostic who is not really all that sympatico with movement atheism, but earlier this month, I attended all of the Saturday sessions of the Atheist Alliance International (AAI) annual conference in Burbank, California. Most of the luminaries of the New Atheist movement (Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, Shermer etc.) were in attendance, or speaking, at the conference, but the person who gave, by far, the most stimulating talk of the day was physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss’s talk was so stimulating (it led off the morning) that the rest of the day felt like a tired and thoroughly predictable let down (at least for me). Krauss is clever and funny and thinks hard and honestly about the ontological mystery. He doesn’t think that the perplexing questions of the ultimate origins of things are silly or uninteresting to ponder. He’s one of those “I’m an atheist, but” kind of atheists who I deeply respect. Anyway, Krauss’s AAI conference talk has been posted to YouTube, and I’ve embedded it below. It is well worth an hour of your time.

And an LA Examiner report on the above talk is here.

I think that atheism, especially at its most strident, is capable of choking its own life energies by nihilistically clearing the “ground of being” of any larger meaning, and then killing off the ontological mystery by not going to imaginative literature for some sort of psychological replanting and sustenance.

For me, that’s the first kind of atheism. It’s an atheism of functionalism, scientism, and reduction. It might put on a happy face for media propaganda purposes, but it cannot escape the shadow of its own deconstructions and thus (in Paul Tillich’s phrase) its ontology of death:

• “We murder to dissect!” and
• “Viva la morte!”

Contra Richard Dawkins’s denial, this first kind of atheism really does unweave John Keats’s rainbow.

But there’s a second kind of atheism that, as an agnostic, I could (almost) give my assent to. It’s an atheism that is more like, well, agnosticism. It’s an atheism that is humble, and keeps an open heart to the ontological mystery, and embraces the crooked timber of humanity in an open and liberal fashion. It is, in short, an atheism with vast stores of negative capability. 

Atheists who subscribe to this second type of atheism think it likely that a mechanical and blind material spider inhabits the universe’s center and beginning, but they don’t like their own conclusion, and certainly don’t revel in it. They don’t, as PZ Myers so frequently does, relish that God has died in them. Rather, the death of God and the ontological mystery (for such atheists) is a sober thing to contemplate, and at the heart of this second type of atheism is not gleeful reduction, but outrage.

I’m thinking of Albert Camus here. In my estimation, Camus was an atheist worthy of respect and imitation, for he absorbed (or at least attempted to absorb) the universe’s apparent indifference toward humanity, and offered outrage and resistance as the proper response. It is an outrage to the human soul that the universe should be absurd and without meaning. And Camus demonstrated (via his own writings) that literature is one means for providing resistance, and for keeping alive in ourselves a Jacob-wrestling heart.

Camus believed that it was an unblinkered encounter with the chaotic and absurd universe (its contingency, purposelessness, and indifference) that sets the atheist to vigorous rebellion and life. Here’s Albert Camus from the “Myth of Sisyphus”:

“I derive from the absurd three consequences: my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the sheer activity of consciousness, I transform in a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.”

In other words, Camus suggests that an honest encounter with the universe’s absurdity—the suffering and death in it, and the universe’s apparent lack of purpose and indifference to us—paradoxically can lead to a vital life. It is an outraged person’s refusal of the absurd that can then affirm rebellion, freedom, and passion against it. But Camus’s atheism, while arriving at human positivity and vigor via absurdity, starts with a bleak and unblinkered encounter with meaninglessness. In other words, he does not treat atheism glibly. Nor does he set atheism in alliance with reduction and absurdity. Like the religious person, the Camus atheist rebels against the universe’s apparent monolithic and impersonal order. He (or she) is not happy with it. Not one bit.

And this is where literature comes in. I think that it is telling that (unlike prominent post World War II atheists like Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre) there are so few contemporary atheists exploring their atheism (and its philosophical consequences) via literature and literary experiment. I detect a real difference here between some of the prominent atheists of the past and those in the present. But the revival of literary reading and writing among atheists (setting its value on a par with science) would recalibrate atheist sensibilities, and make contemporary atheists less susceptible to PZ Myers style reduction-loving atheism—and more receptive to the literary, Camus-style atheism of previous generations.

Maybe most contemporary atheists don’t want this kind of atheism. But were I to be an atheist, the latter type of atheism—the atheism of Albert Camus—would be the only kind of atheism for me.

But in this clip he suggests that he is an agnostic, and rejects atheism because it “mirrors the certitude that is religion”:

Maher’s views in the clip mirror my own (straddling the confidence atheist and confidence theist divide). The clip dates to February of 2009, but in October of 2009 he accepted an award from an atheist group. Hmm. I just assumed that Maher was an atheist of the Richard Dawkins variety. Have Maher’s views shifted since this clip? Is he an atheist, or not?

If not, then we are sympatico.

I like this Karen Armstrong talk:

I”ve been thinking about something that the late Nobel Prize winner, Sir John Eccles, said of strict materialism. He called it “promissory materialism”, and said of it:

“I regard this theory as being without foundation. The more we discover scientifically about the brain the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena and the more wonderful do the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a superstition held by dogmatic materialists. It has all the features of a Messianic prophecy, with the promise of a future freed of all problems—a kind of Nirvana for our unfortunate successors.” (1994)

Eccles’s observation—”It has all the features of a Messianic prophecy”—especially struck me, and it made me think: Why would there appear to be such a parallel between atheism and theism? Here’s what I think right now:

• The traditional monotheisms have always had a very, very large hurdle to overcome: Why does a universe designed by a good God contain suffering? The solution to the problem seems inexplicable in the present, for in terms of what we actually observe around us, we appear to live in a universe utterly indifferent to our suffering. Thus, to get around this obvious problem, religious believers have set suffering’s solution in the future, in the form of a promissory expectation that God will someday set the world right, and bring poetic justice from outside (though this outside realm cannot be seen by us and is currently beyond our grasp).
• Likewise strict materialists, since being confronted in the 1970s with the problems posed by the Anthropic Principle, have been driven to postulate invisible (to us) multiverses, and to hope that scientists will discover indirect evidence for them in the future. In other words, the universe appears designed for the inclusion of life and mind in it, and cannot seem to be accounted for without the positing of other worlds invisible to it. But just as the theist overcomes the appearance of widespread evil by positing invisible worlds that will set all right, so the atheist overcomes the appearance of design by positing invisible multiverses that will set the atheist thesis into plausible coherence again.

Put in biblical terms, here’s how the Book of Revelation (20:4) glosses suffering for Christians:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any pain: for the former things are passed away.

Put simply, suffering will be a “comma” in the progress of history. It is not the final word accompanied by a period. It does not entail the death of God. Likewise, the Anthropic Principle does not entail (for the atheist) the death of atheism, for here is how the promissory atheist might put her (his) contemporary faith:

And scientists in the future shall open our eyes; and there shall be no more appearance of purpose or design in the universe, neither of matter, nor of life, nor of mind, neither shall there be any more ‘woo religion’: for the former things are passed away.

And the atheist congregation said what? Amen?

This photograph was taken a few minutes before Daniel Dennett started his Saturday afternoon talk. Dennett, by the way, is a tall dude (like basketball player tall):

Dennett, in his lecture, coined a mildly amusing term (or, more accurately, one of his friend’s daughters coined the term, and Dennett says he has been using it for awhile now). The term is ”deepity” (as in, “Ooh, dad said a deepity”). A ”deepity” is a statement that appears to have content, but actually says little or nothing (as in, say, “The ground beneath the ground of being sounds forth in silence”).

I understand Dennett’s insistence on the demystification of language (for purposes of analytical debate), and clearly defining terms, and using them without subtle shifts in meaning, but it does strike me as a potential blow for poetry to insist on language use purged of “deepities.” To be dismissive of “deepities” is almost to express contempt for poetry (and the paradoxical nature of the ontological mystery itself). Here, for example, are some lines from a poem by A.R. Ammons: “The universe has no floor / but we walk the floor.” That strikes me as deep, and not just a “deepity.” But maybe Dennett would see it differently, and has little patience for such “woo.”

Just when I think I’m getting warm and fuzzy towards religion, I encounter testimony like this. Poet Kate Gale grew up in a cult, and the whole creepy Philip Garrido incident gave her a bit of deja vu :

It reminds me of growing up at High View Church Farm School which was regularly investigated for child abuse.  They never found anything while I was there, but finally because of the constant scrutiny, the cult was moved to Canada.  Cults in the U.S. can only be closed down for stockpiling weapons and child abuse; you can’t just be closed down for being weirdos.

When New Hampshire officials would come to investigate, Gale recalls the role of strawberries in the ordeal:

[W]e smiled and clapped our hands.  We were well trained.  When the investigators left, we were given strawberries. The strawberries were good, and sometimes when we ate them, I couldn’t sit down because I’d been beaten to that point.  But the strawberries were tasty.

I think my agnosticism extends, when it really comes down to it, to keeping an open mind to the possibility that mind precedes matter in some fashion—or even that there might be something recognizably human at the end of the rainbow, something that delivers poetic justice and makes the universe a cosmos and not, ultimately, a chaos. Emotionally, it’s just very hard to accept that at the center and beginning of the universe is a mindless spider. I don’t know if God’s existence is likely, or even probable, but being embedded in the system that I am trying to understand, and as stupid as I am with regard to even, say, how a lightbulb works, I don’t think that it is impossible that my current guesses about the universe are incorrect—even wildly so. I have been spectacularly wrong about things before. I guess I just don’t trust myself enough to be an atheist (let alone a theist), and that’s what agnosticism means to me.

Author Gil Dodgen, a lifelong atheist, asked some of the same basic questions I’ve been raising lately, and he ultimately drifted into theism:

I was raised an atheist, and was very devout as a kid. I studied astronomy, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a scientist, “I don’t get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, and that all the laws of physics were fine-tuned to make life possible. Wouldn’t this require design and purpose?” Unfortunately, the response I got was, “Only mindless, uneducated religious fanatics ask that question. It was all an accident. Stop asking stupid questions.” But I wasn’t mindless, uneducated, or a religious fanatic. I was an atheist! A light went off, and I said, “Materialism doesn’t make sense. Design and purpose in the cosmos makes much more sense to me.” And I just gravitated away from atheism.

Hmm.

Am I on the same slippery slope?