Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

Without tackling the “atheism as a religion” argument here are some interesting statistics on religion from Adherents.com

1. Christianity: 2.1 billion
2. Islam: 1.5 billion
3. Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
4. Hinduism: 900 million
5. Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
6. Buddhism: 376 million
7. primal-indigenous: 300 million
8. African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
9. Sikhism: 23 million
10. Juche: 19 million
11. Spiritism: 15 million
12. Judaism: 14 million
13. Baha’i: 7 million
14. Jainism: 4.2 million
15. Shinto: 4 million
16. Cao Dai: 4 million
17. Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
18. Tenrikyo: 2 million
19. Neo-Paganism: 1 million
20. Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
21. Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
22. Scientology: 500 thousand

 P.S. The scientology figure of adherents is greatly debated. See SolitaryTrees for one such debate.

Alex McCullie

The following quotation comes from the Age editorial of 3 Feb 2010 on gay rights and the Papacy:

…As The Age has argued before, freedom of religion does mean that the right of religious organisations to decide matters internal to them should not be infringed. The state must not tell churches who should be ordained, for example. But the hiring of a physics teacher for a church school is hardly a comparable decision, and when churches claim that it is they succeed only in demonstrating that their commitment to social justice is a selective one. The Pope, and Australia’s bishops too, should heed the example of those Catholic schools that have quietly hired gay and lesbian teachers anyway – and still kept their ”ethos” intact…(my emphasis)

Alex McCullie

Thank you, Karl

Alex McCullie

Here is a link to Susan Blackmore’s essay in the Guardian. She also refers to an interesting research paper by Gregory Paul,  freelance researcher, on the dependence on religious belief and dysfunctional psychosociological conditions.

Alex McCullie

The Progressive Christian Network (PCN) in Victoria in Australia posted a series of responses by members in May, 2007 to comments by Richard Dawkins about his book, God Delusion, and to local newspaper columnist, Catherine Deveny. Here are my reflections on the PCN member’s articles. Most are familiar with Richard Dawkins and his knack of irritating people of faith, including liberals and progressives. After holding privileged positions in society, religions seem to react poorly to his type of overt criticism.

Atheists, like Dawkins, see that the sciences provide the most reliable and coherent explanations for our world and, in particular, for our species evolution. In this view we are physical beings in a physical world driven by physical causes, nothing magical. “Physical” means any combination of mass and energy as investigated by the sciences. So, most importantly, our sense of consciousness, self, free-will, and morality has strictly physical causes. In fact, scientists and most philosophers today accept that mental states arise from brain activities and not some “magical source”. Even though not fully understood, researchers continue seek physical explanations without declaring them to be permanently mysterious. Very few promote separate physical and non-physical dualistic-type explanations.

So Dawkins like many others sees declarations of “extra” realities as not only unnecessary but simply wishful, deluded, and misguided attempts to claim something special for humans. And proclaiming this really irritates the religious. Some critics go further to claim that all religions are outright harmful and dangerous. Many non-believers find this claim extreme, even though they often want to reduce or eliminate the special societal and financial privileges that religions and their religious schools receive.

To take one PCN response, Rob Sutherland, in God Is the more, abuses Dawkins and Deveny for attacking a monarchical form of God, the sky-god, as the only form of Christian God instead of recognising Sutherland’s nicer ineffable essence, the “more” (a la William James). He then continues with confusing arguments about atheism as some sort of rejection of non-physical consciousness; new-age mumbo-jumbo about quantum theology, thankfully quoted; and atheistic fundamentalists, Dawkins and company, as close-minded, non-seekers of the truth. Perhaps Dawkins best sums up Sutherland’s type of open-minded searching. “By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”

I agree with progressive Christians that atheists and other non-believers need to be aware of the variations in Christian belief. There are vast differences between the traditional sky-god and the progressive loving essence, the “more”. However progressive Christians also need to recognise that they are a very small part of the world-wide Christian marketplace. From recent Pew Forum surveys in the US, it appears the 70 million religious people over 14 years take their sacred texts as the inerrant word of God. Another 70 million take them as the word of God written through people. So, I would expect millions to believe in the actual physical resurrection of Jesus, a very anti-scientific and unsustainable attitude. These are the true targets of religious critics. The more benign progressive Christians do not register on their radar.

Sutherland construes a unique definition of atheism. Usually atheists do not believe in a god or explicitly reject the existence of a god. Atheists, like most Christians, have a monarchical sky-god in mind. Many atheists then go on to reject any and all supernatural postulates. Naturalism extends this into a worldview of a physical reality, and only then do naturalists need to address questions like consciousness and free-will.

Finally, quantum mechanics is the physics of subatomic particles and its language is mathematics. It appears a bizarre world where a particle can occupy two places at the same time and two particles can affect each other with no apparent connection. Also it is a world of probabilistic determinism unlike the apparent casual determinism of our physical world. But it is pure speculation to draw any sort of metaphysical conclusions about our own reality. This research provides no evidence for spirits, gods, consciousness, the soul or free-will. In particular it is not the “backdoor for God”.

Many religions continue to be sensitive to criticism of all types. Many traditional religions expect blatant contradictions, wishful thinking, unsupported claims of authority, and dangerous moralisations to be accepted without question. Unfortunately they often are! Classifying their most vocal critics as fundamentalists or militants seeks to marginalise them with the bombing-wielding religious fanatics whom we all deplore. It is an effective, though, dishonest ploy.

Alex McCullie

“What is a religion?”

“What is being religious?”

… are very contentious questions especially among philosophers of religion.

I have floated the idea that it is something to do with seeing intentionality and purpose in our world where a naturalist would see none. A naturalist sees a pattern whereas a “religionist” sees a purpose. I saw god(s), heaven, hell, spirits as outcomes from that difference. Instead of claims of great revelatory insight, I got a rejection and indifference from friends and class and lecture attendees!

Here, in Australia, the vast major of people operate their everyday lives as naturalists even if they hold strong religious feelings. That’s how we work and live together.

So, what is seeing the world through a “religious lens”?

1. There is something more than the physical world as specified by the sciences. Call it the “more” (from William James).
2. Unlike the transitory nature of the physical world, the “more” is seen as permanent and unchanging, providing the “bedrock” of the world and our place in that world. The “more” provides structure, continuity and purpose to all reality and meaning to people’s lives as part of that reality. The “more” is taken as pre-eminent, overarching the physical world. It is revered as something fundamentally more important.
3. Commonly the “more” is seen as having a consciousness that willed our physical world into existence and maintains its ongoing existence
4. Religious beliefs, doctrines and practices are seen as human attempts to mediate with the “more” and therefore they are considered foundational to a person’s ultimate well-being. Most religions provide teachings and moral exemplars on leading lives in harmony with the “more”.
5. Many attempt to “sharpen” their religious lens by objectifying and personalising the “more” with well-defined god or gods; sacred objects and locations; sacred texts; and sacred ceremonies.

Alex McCullie

Despite the apologists explaining away (or attempting to explain away) any “wars” between science and religion, US film distributors have rejected latest Darwin film as too controversial. The producer, Jeremy Thomas, is quoted as saying:

“The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.
“It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It’s quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.
“Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn’t saying ‘kill all religion’, he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people.”

Read full article here.
Alex McCullie

This is one of the popular “con-jobs” commonly used by Christian leaders and writers to attack religious non-belief.

The Christian attack on materialism is a convenient and deceptive conflation of two separate uses of the word, “materialism”. As a philosophical worldview, materialism is the belief that all aspects of reality have a material or physical source. Modern science shows that matter resolves to mass and energy so this worldview is often better referred to as physicalism or naturalism. Therefore people are seen as physical beings interacting with a physical world. Believing in materialism or naturalism does not deny that we have feelings, moral sensibilities and ambitions. This worldview sees only physical sources and denies any non-physical postulations commonly referred as god or gods. All empirically-based sciences from physics and chemistry to the human sciences use this materialist assumption about the world and knowledge.

However many Christian writers deliberately confuse this meaning, which most atheists and agnostics hold, with an everyday usage of materialism as excessive consumerism, as reflected in Madonna’s song, “A Material Girl”.

Religious and non-religious people alike seem to condemn or embrace today’s consumerism. Christians are quite comfortable benefiting from the consumption of others and would be hypocritical of Christian writers to claim otherwise. One could argue separately about the role of capitalism and globalisation as contributors to this problem. However the harmful consequences for humanity and the world are part of a total human problem and have little or nothing to do with religious belief.

In a recent speech Pope Benedict XVI attempted this very deception. He somehow claims that Christian religious belief has the high moral ground on caring for the environment and that atheism and by implication materialism are leading to the destruction of our planet. Critics would rightfully see this newly-found custodianship as blatantly hypocritical. Look at a short sample of his speech:

Experiencing the shared responsibility for creation (Cf. 51), the Church is not only committed to the promotion of the defense of the earth, of water and of air, given by the Creator to everyone, but above all is committed to protect man from the destruction of himself. In fact, “when ‘human ecology’ is respected in society, environmental ecology also benefits” (ibid). Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where is existence is denied? If the human creature’s relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the “final authority,” and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.

Alex McCullie

One of the great challenges for intellectual thought is resolving the apparent dissonance between our rich inner lives in which we play starring roles, our first person view, and our relative insignificance in the external world, the third-person view.

Religions have attempted the resolution by positing real external analogues of our inner world. Separate non-physical personalities, with intentionality and purpose, like human-type god or gods, evil and good spirits, existent heaven and hell, and angels are comforting projections of our internal world onto an indifferent, largely inanimate world, thereby harmonising it with our internal lives. To be credible, though, these projections needed to be consistent with our every-day perceptions. So they had to be invisible and physically indetectable, essential qualities for any credibility. Religions then relied on human wish-fulfilment to take care of the rest.

Philosophy similarly has struggled with this first-person/third-person dichotomy with dualisms, idealism and realism/anti-realism, mind-body problems and conflicts between free-will and causal determinism to name a few. As an example, the mind-body problem seems to revolve around two questions. Firstly, how can a purely physical explanation of the brain, chemicals, electricity, neurons firing, truly reflect my rich inner life, and, secondly, how does a separate consciousness, sounding similar to religious-like projections, actually manipulate the physical body, without resorting to another higher-order projection like god?

The sciences, on the other hand, avoid the problem by simply taking a third-party view with humans being part, often small, of a much broader reality.  Look at cosmology to see our relative insignificance. So most sciences are not in the first-person business, though, perhaps, psychology sits part-way in the continuum. The success, credibility and consequent influence of science have created serious problems for human-centred explanations from religion and philosophy. Today most people live in a truly scientific-world view, at least in the countries of Western Europe as well as Australia, New Zealand and US to name a few.

The problem for religions and philosophy, in their 2500 to 4500 years of effort, is that they have been remarkably unsuccessful at solving the dilemma. At the same time science with its strictly third-party perspective has been devastatingly successful over the last 200 years at telling more about the world we inhabit. This assessment is based on science’s ability to generate reliable knowledge. Criticisms, often from religious and philosophical sources, about uses of the resulting technologies seem irreverent to this assessment. Human uses of the knowledge genuinely raise important issues to be addressed separately.

Therefore we need to change our reliance of the authenticity of our inner first person to meet new realities of the twenty-first century. We should question whether god or gods, consciousness, soul, free-will, morality, spirituality and the mind are simply constructs, rather than separate ontological realities, to make an indifferent physical reality seem more palatable to over-inflated senses of self-worth.

Alex McCullie

PS Try this thought experiment. What was God doing more than 150,000 years ago before any recognisable humans evolved on this planet? Did morality, angels, satan, the Word, after Earth’s formation? Or could they simply be our creations?

Conversations with Zak

I never found out where he came from, but Zak wanted to know about us – humanity. After reading books on science, technology, psychology and sociology, he continued “Progressive and updatable, that’s good. Most commendable. Now, what is religion?”

 “I can tell you about Christianity. But there are many others”, I said tentatively. I explained that Christianity is about seeking another world that is everywhere, but cannot be seen or touched. However we know that God – he is all powerful and morally perfect – resides there with his son, Jesus. Other religions don’t believe that about Jesus though.  Zak looked sceptical. “How do you know?”

“Well, we have a book that says so. The Holy Bible describes God, Jesus, life after death, heaven and hell, how to behave, and what to worship. I had to explain that ‘worship’ meant something like feeling unworthy, and serving God and then feeling constant gratitude. “Curious” was all I heard from Zak. And then “Tell me more”.

I explained that the Bible was written some 2000 to 3000 years ago based on some events in the Middle East: after a bit of searching, I showed where on the map. The Christian part is about God’s son, a man called Jesus, sort of half-man, half-God. In fact he is the same God as well – it’s a bit confusing, I said somewhat awkwardly. He was executed after one year of preaching or, perhaps, three, but that was enough to start Christianity. He exorcised demons, reanimated dead bodies (that happened to him as well) and performed other magical feats like walking on water and solving food shortages. “Do you have demons?” Zak asked. Well no, I explained. “Maybe Jesus got rid of them all.” Zak suggested, somewhat sarcastically, I suspected.

“Can I see this Bible?” “The originals were lost a long time ago, but we have copies” “Who copied the Bible?” Zak asked. I explained that Christians don’t know, but they believe that it’s totally accurate; in fact, many see it as the literal word of God – that’s part of their faith. “Do Christians change the Bible after learning more about the world?” “No, there is no need. The Bible already represents absolute truth.”

Zak left dismayed to continue the conversation another day.

Alex McCullie