Evangelical Atheism

This article from the science section of today's New York Times -- A Free-for-All on Science and Religion -- got me thinking, again, about the role of religion in the world. The article reports on a conference of scientists debating (ostensibly) the relationship between science and religion. But, if the article is at all representative, the conference turned into a debate among non-believers about the merits of what might be called "evangelical atheism." As the author of the article characterized it:

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

So far as the article indicates, there were no believers involved in the debate. Rather, the conflict was between those who, while themselves non-believers, nonetheless had at least a paternalisitic tolerance for the role religion played in some peoples lives ("People need to find meaning and purpose in life. I don’t think we want to take that away from them. ") and those who consider religion to be a positive evil that needs to be confronted and, if possible, stamped out ("The world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief" and "Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization." ).

Perhaps the most strident of the latter group was Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusiuon":

"I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion," he said. "Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence."

What struck me most about the article (and, to the extent the article is a fair representation, the conference) was exactly what apprently struck Dr. Melvin Konner, an anthropologist: how indistingishable people like Dawkins and Sam Harris (author of "The End of Faith," about which I had much to say late last year) are from the very people they most despise:

I think that you [Sam Harris] and Richard [Dawkins] are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side, and that you generate more fear and hatred of science."

Just as their counterparts on the other side generate more fear and hatred of religion.

Somehow related to this was a "This American Life" story on NPR this weekend about the Rev Carlton Pearson, a pentecostal preacher from Tulsa, who woke up one day and decided that hell didn't exist and that everyone was going to heaven. He was declared a heretic by his church and most of his congregation deserted him. He had argued (preached) that the Pentecostal God was worse than Hilter. After all, he said, Hitler had killed only 6 million. The Pentecostal God was slated to kill a thousand times more than that, at least. The response of his church and those of his congregants who bothered to engage him was simply this: "Who the heck are you are? We don't like the thought of billions of people consigned to burn in hell either, but we didn't make the rules. That's what the Bible says will happen and that's just the way it is."

This kind of stuff (along with jihadis flying planes into buildings and otherwise seeing glory and martyrdom in suicide bombings) is what gives Harris' and Dawkins' antipathy some appeal. How can people believe such stuff? Indeed, how can otherwise perfectly sensible people believe in God at all?

But for all of my incredulity at such beliefs, I can not take the step Harris and Dawkins take. I cannot bring myself to condemn such belief or to campaign against it. I know too many sensible people (from my wife to C. S. Lewis) who hold such beliefs and for whom those beliefs are a positive influence in theirs lives and in their relations with others. Thus, I tend to see religious belief much as I do divining rods: I think it is silly to suppose that a Y-shaped stick held in both hands is any better at finding water than random digging. But I see no point in telling people who do believe that it is better that they are stupid or ignorant or superstitious or irrational for doing so.

In thinking about all of this, I came to the conclusion that it is not the belief or faith to which I object, it is the proselytizing. I am prepared to let anyone believe whatever he wants, just so long as that belief does not include a compulsion to convert me or to condemn me or my actions becuase they are contrary to those beliefs. I will tolerate his inanity (as I see it) so long as he tolerates my decadence (as he sees it).

Which brings me back to the NYT article that started all of this. I detest evangelicism, and it makes no difference whether the "God" in whose name the evangelicism is perpetrated is the God of Abraham, the God of Revelations, the God of the Koran or the God of scientific rationalism.