Prometheus Unbound

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that atheist Thomas Nagel is one of the most respected academic philosophers in the world. I think it’s also fair to say that atheist Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, is also a highly respected academic. 

But here comes the bus! Not Jerome Bettis, but Stephen Meyer.

Meyer is a Cambridge trained philosopher of science, an Evangelical, and an ID advocate, and in his new book, Signature in the Cell (2009), he appears to have impressed a big time philosopher and distressed a big time biologist, and thus set the two atheist intellectuals on the route to a potential public rhetorical dust-up over the proper response of intellectuals to ID. Here’s what Nagel said this weekend, in the Times Literary Supplement, about Meyer’s book:

Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design  (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.

And here was Coyne’s blog response to Nagel:

“Detailed account”?? How about “religious speculation”?

Nagel is a respected philosopher who’s made big contributions to several areas of philosophy, and this is inexplicable, at least to me.  I have already called this to the attention of the TLS, just so they know.

Do any of you know of critiques of Meyer’s book written by scientists? I haven’t been able to find any on the internet, and would appreciate links.

So Coyne, who has also written for the Times, has taken it upon himself to whip out his Rolodex and directly contact the editors of the TLS. And for what purpose? To sass them? To express his dismay at their “inexplicable” editorial judgment or editorial oversight? To threaten never to write for the Times again? It’s not clear what it is, exactly, that Coyne said to the TLS, or wants the editors to do about the incident (since Coyne didn’t specify). But one thing is clear: Coyne says he contacted the TLS about Nagel’s review.

It also appears that Coyne has yet to read Meyer’s book, but the very fact that Nagel would list it as one of his two best books of 2009 still clearly has Coyne baffled.

But in terms of Nagel’s response to Meyer’s book, I don’t find it baffling at all. I read Meyer’s book a few months ago, and was also impressed by it. It’s clearly written and historically and philosphically informed. And whether you’re an agnostic (like I am), an atheist, or a theist, the book is a fascinating guide to the complexities behind the question: how did life ever come into existence in the first place? This quote, from page 383 of Meyer’s book, is an example of one of the interesting issues Meyer’s raises and tries to tackle:

If scientific methods can—in principle, at least—detect the presense of an extraterrestrial (and nonhuman) intelligence in a faraway galaxy, why can’t methods of design detection be used to establish the activity of nonhuman intelligence in the remote past as the cause of the specified complexity in the cell?

It will be interesting to see if Nagel responds to Coyne—or ignores him. And it will also be interesting to see if Coyne reads Meyer’s book, and what, after reading it, he might have to say about it.

We’ll soon see who intellectually tackles whom, won’t we?

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.

At first glance, one thing that atheism clearly seems to have going for it is this: it doesn’t have any holy books with violence advocating passages in it. Indeed, it doesn’t have any holy books at all.

So score one for atheism?

Not so fast. It is true that under stress or times of war, atheists don’t have a sacred book to pull from the shelf that might justify violent actions. And it is also true that there are obscene passages in the religious books well adapted to times of war (and for a multitude of other situations as well). Religions are, in general, highly adaptive. No doubt. But I’d like you to consider this: Atheism is highly adaptive too. Atheists also have a tradition—the secular tradition—and in times of stress, atheists also reach for ideas, and my question is, “What ideas do they reach for?”

I would suggest that, in times of power struggles or war, an atheist might well turn to Nietzsche, or pull Machiavelli’s The Prince  from the shelf, not as sacred texts, but as guides for action, and the intellectual justifying of actions. An atheist soldier in Afghanistan, for example, might well get quite cynical and start reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (with Kurtz’s dark admonition near the end of the novella to “Kill them all”). Atheism, in other words, may not treat Nietzsche or Machiavelli or Conrad as holy writ, but atheism does not exist in a vacuum. Like religious ideas, secular ideas are sought out in different contexts. Like any religionist, an atheist turns to different secular texts for different life occasions (from marriage to war).

I’m suggesting that atheism is no more or less prone to violence than religion—and that violence advocating secular books, in stressful situations, are just as easily brought from the shelf and used for violent justifications as religious ones. You don’t need holy books to find justifications for violence, you just need to pull down Sam Harris, Hegel, Marx, or Darwin from the shelf and read them in a certain way. My thesis is that a world without religion wouldn’t be any less violent or ethically horrifying than a world with religion. It would be about the same.

At Jerry Coyne’s blog today, Coyne takes after Michael Shermer for being a little too cozy with religion:

It always amuses me when an accommodationist tells the faithful that no, there is no conflict between science and religion, at least not if they stopped believing the things that cause a conflict.  In a Darwin-anniversay piece on CNN, Michael Shermer comes out as an accommodationist, and more:  he suggests that people really should modify their beliefs if they conflict with science.

In New Atheistland, accommodating other people’s beliefs (if you think they are false), and giving too much serious intellectual leeway to the question of whether God actually exists or not, are big no-nos. Such things put you in danger of being in “conflict with science”, and renders you a suspicious citizen of New Atheistland (if you call yourself an atheist). And so Shermer said, among other (to Coyne’s mind) ghastly things about religion, this:

If one is a theist, it should not matter when God made the universe — 10,000 years ago or 10 billion years ago. The difference of six zeros is meaningless to an omniscient and omnipotent being, and the glory of divine creation cries out for praise regardless of when it happened.

To which Coyne retorts:

Who is Shermer, I suggest, to tell people what beliefs should or should not “matter” to them?  Try telling this to a fundamentalist Christian, or a devout Muslim.

But perhaps if Shermer had used the word “need” as opposed to “should”, it would not have raised Coyne’s ire? (As in, “It need not logically matter when God made the world.”) Strictly speaking, theism, evolution, and a great age for the Earth are not logically incompatible.

Of course, evolution and an old Earth are logically incompatible with a literalist reading of the Bible, but the literalist reading is, in any case, blatantly false. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, gives clear structural markers of being written as poetry. Specifically, it is written in poetic parallelism (the 1st day corresponds to the 4th day, the 2nd day to the 5th, the 3rd day to the 6th). What we are reading is a poet laying out the world’s stage (on days 1, 2, and 3) and the things that move (the “actors” on days 4, 5, and 6). To put it in Shakespearean terms, Genesis 1 is a poetic expression of “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women players.” And in this profound sense, Genesis 1 is a reflection of this truth.

What Shermer is trying to make peace with are sensible moderate theists, not fundamentalists. It is the people in the middle, not those on the fringes, who will, ultimately, determine the virulence of religion and irreligion. Shermer is trying to reduce religion’s virulence, not embracing fundamentalist ownership of the Bible, and it’s ridiculous interpretations of it. Shermer is right to reclaim the Bible as part of the Western cultural patrimony, and not leave it to fundamentalists to tell us what it means, and the implications to be drawn from it.

And for this, of course, Shermer runs the risk of being demonized as an “accommodationist”, a “theologian”, and a “faitheist” by the confidence atheists who mentally inhabit that very narrow intellectual peninsula, New Atheistland.

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.

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:

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 a fan of David Berlinski, and if you live in the Los Angeles area, I notice that he will be speaking at the Beverly Hills Public Library on Tuesday of this week. Here’s the notice that I found:

Noted mathematician, philosopher, author, and senior fellow of the CSC, Dr. David Berlinski will be giving a lecture entitled:

An Agnostic Challenges Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists

Tuesday, October 27
7:30 PM
Beverly Hills Public Library
444 N Rexford Dr
Beverly Hills, CA

Admission: Free to the public
Parking: Free

And here’s more info.

In the preface to Richard Dawkins’s book, Unweaving the Rainbow  (1998, xi), he writes:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

Too late. The universe starts with the tricked out, the ad hoc, the capricious. As the poet Charles Wright put it in his poem, “Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn” (1995):

Everything comes from something,

                                                  only something comes from nothing.

And read Dawkins’s quote again, this time very carefully. Don’t you detect the whiff of, well, the argument of the theologian concerning suffering?:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

In other words, notice that the quote, with very little tinkering, is in the form of a theological argument! Indeed, it is essentially the conclusion to the Book of Job! Watch again (with my two little additions in italics):

I believe that an orderly universe created by God, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic (such as a universe that arrives by contingency, without purpose, out of nothing, then cobbles itself together blindly, by chance and natural selection).

Richard Dawkins imagines himself an atheist, but in the form of his argumentation here, he displays all the marks of someone who can’t quite let go of certain religious scaffoldings and ideas. Like the theist,

• Dawkins longs for an aesthetically “beautiful” and “wonderful” relation to the cosmos.
• Dawkins does not want a universe that is “capricious”, “ad hoc“, or “magical”, but one that is lawful and underlaid by an ultimately comprehensible order.
• Dawkins looks forward to a time when the existing appearances of incomprehensibility in the world will yield to the eschaton  of full comprehensibility.

Oh, and might I add that Dawkins writes his books for the purposes of persuasion and because he thinks that they serve to advance a moral position. That is, he treats human freedom and morality as if they are things of real value that actually exist (even as his materialist position insists that freedom and morality are illusory and contingent artifacts of more fundamental determinate processes, and without any objective content or ultimate warrant).

Can we say that the way Richard Dawkins has cobbled together his worldview (a bit of atheism here, a bit of theism there, and a whole lot of cognitive dissonance holding these divergent ideas together along the way) is just a bit, well, capricious?

Here’s Dawkin’s quote one more time:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

And Job said, Amen!

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.

I don’t know how the can opener works either:

And the universe is expanding:

For both the atheist and the theist, reality is anything but fulfilling. The way things are, without you doing anything about them, has always been a problem, for reality, unstoried, is just one damn meaningless thing after another. And often unpleasant. It’s just not the way we want it to be.

And that’s what initiates all this busy work—all this imaginative butterfly chasing, and religion critiquing, and irreligion critiquing. Mundane existence, as present to consciousness, is not the way we want it to be. So we do something about it. We overlay it with religion or irreligion. We overlay it with art, or poetry, or science, or political action. In short, we overlay reality with symbols, myths, metaphors, and stories.

Neither religion nor irreligion accords with reality objectively. But putting a symbolic, mythic, metaphorical, or story overlay upon reality is satisfying to the human mind, and that’s why both theists and atheists do it, and I would say that they do it about equally. 

For example, I suspect that William Blake was a happy person. Why? Because he lived in a self-generated and detailed imaginitive space, and yes, he took it seriously. Richard Dawkins seems like a happy fellow too, and for similar reasons. He also lives in a self-storied imaginative space (he obviously sees himself as an archetypal defender of science against the contemporary hordes of irrationalists in the world—and this gives his life narrative meaning for him). Was Blake deluded? Is Dawkins deluded? Well, objectively, I suppose so. Neither of their ways of telling stories to themselves is objectively true. Indeed, you might well tell other stories about Blake’s life than the one he told himself, and that’s true of Dawkins’s life as well. Dawkins once dismissed Blake as an obscurantist. Blake, were he alive, might well have put Dawkins into his poetry as a Urizen binder of imaginative energies. Give a punch, take a punch.

There is an existentialist writer, not well know today, but active in the 1950s and 60s, that I love.  Her name is Hazel Barnes. I’ve sometimes thought I should start a Wikipedia page for her (as, to date, she doesn’t have one). She was the first translator of Sartre into English, and was a longtime academic at the University of Colorado. I assume that she has probably passed away (she was born in 1915). But she wrote an autobiography with an almost perfect Existentialist title: The Story I Tell Myself  (University of Chicago Press, 1997). 

Barnes’s autobiography title reminds us that it is impossible for the human mind to live without narrative frameworks, and those frameworks are chosen by us from a wide range of possibilities. Existence doesn’t speak. We speak. And as human beings, we speak in symbol, myth, metaphor, and story. Further, we reveal our imaginitive life by what we choose to speak about, and by what we pull from reality to emphasize and make important. Reality does not (and cannot) warrant those choices. Only we can, and we do. I know it’s not very comfy grounds on which to build our existences, but what else can we do? Does anybody have a better idea?

What I’m trying to say is that there is nothing inherently more satisfying about reality than, say, our dreams and narratives about reality, including our religious and irreligious dreams and narratives. People dream and fantasize and narrate and act in the world precisely because those behaviors are more satisfying to them than unstoried reality is. Are they wrong to live in that space? Are they deluded? Is Don Quixote an admirable figure, a comic figure, or a tragic one? Or is Don Quixote simply a reflection of our human condition? How else, afterall, could we ever be in the world—except as Don Quixote—and still be human?

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:

Jerry Coyne, at his blog, summarized Daniel Dennett’s talk this weekend at the big atheist convention ho-down in Burbank, California this weekend (and which I went to) thus:

Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests and ministers who are atheists, and also mounted a hilarious attack on theologians like Karen Armstrong, who mouth pious nonsense like, “God is the God behind God.” Dennett calls this kind of language a “deepity”: a statement that has two meanings, one of which is true but superficial, the other which sounds profound but is meaningless. His exemplar of a deepity is the statement “Love is just a word.” True, it’s a word like “cheeseburger,” but the supposed deeper sense is wrong: love is an emotion, a feeling, a condition, and not just a word in the dictionary. He gave several examples of other deepities from academic theologians; when you see these things laid out — ripped from their texts — in a Powerpoint slide, they make you realize how truly fatuous are the lucubrations of people like Armstrong, Eagleton, and Haught. Sarcasm will be the best weapon against this stuff.

And to what Coyne said, Andrew Sullivan today offered this tart take-down:

They’re really charming, aren’t they? It is as if everything arrogant about the academy and everything sneering about cable news culture is combined into one big snarky smugfest. Maybe these atheists will indeed help push back the fundamentalist right. Maybe they will remind people that between these atheist bigots and these fundamentalist bigots, the appeal of the Christianity of the Gospels shines like the sun.

Now, now, Andrew. Love thy nay bear.

Oh, and here’s a nay bear:

And here’s two more nay bears (Jerry Coyne and Russell Blackford at the Burbank atheist conference):

And who is thy nay bear?

I’m coining the term for anybody who puts up a big bear yawn toward things of first-rank importance to you (such as your belief or disbelief in God, or UFOs, or evolution, or Buddhism, or Obama, or whatever). The nay bear is rough with the things you hold dear, and steals your metaphorical loaves and fishes from the trunks of your pampered and polished ideological cars. It’s very important to (at least once in a while) listen to your nay bears, and not push them away all the time, and defame them. We all have our nay bears, and we might be in the role of somebody else’s nay bear, and all of our nay bears are telling us something.

So love your nay bears, even if they take your shirt. Or your fish. This is my evening sermon for the soul (especially my usually narrow shrew of a soul). Good night, nay bears. Good night, soul. Good night. Yawn.

What do we really know about clouds and rainbows, let alone love and free will? To speak of them, scientifically or otherwise (including poetically), is like using chopsticks to drink the ocean. Our instruments seem inadequate to the scale of our task, and somehow our speaking is (paradoxically) a diminishment. And yet still we speak. And speak again. We must.

And we must fail.

This is why the wide (and often contradictory) varieties of scientific, philosophical, religious, and poetic languages in the world are unlikely ever to wholly die in the human heart, or experience a mass extinction with only one or a few “reality based” languages victorious (the survivors of some great future dying off of “bad ideas”). Languages, like species, are historically contingent and function in niches. They address the ontological mystery from innumerable vantages, but do not contain it. To echo Whitman, the mystery of being is large, it contains multitudes (as do we).