Believers, p.2
Believers, page 2
I am one of those secular people “brainwashed” into showing respect for religion. I came by this brainwashing honestly, having been raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew. But I believe religion is a part of human nature. That doesn’t mean it’s a part of every person’s makeup; it just means it’s very persistent and will never go away.
Western Europe has experienced a large decline in religion in modern times, and the US is catching up. This is true by any measure, from church attendance to declarations of faith. These are natural declines, not government-enforced ones as in China or the Soviet Union. Is this what the world will look like when all of it is as prosperous, educated, and healthy as Europe is now? Perhaps, but at present, in the less developed countries, population growth among the religious makes for a stronger countervailing trend. We may end up with something like a steady state. Some see a transition that will end with the end of faith. I don’t agree. I argue that religion’s future depends on competing trends in biological and cultural evolution, and I think they will end in equilibrium. As physician-anthropologist Wulf Schiefenhövel has said, “We are, by our very nature, Homo religiosus.”
So, what about us atheists? Dennett, in Breaking the Spell, says we should be called “Brights,” but for some reason this term has not caught on. I prefer the term that sociologists of religion use: “Nones” (because they check the “none of the above” box when asked about religion). It’s not ideal, but it is catching on. The rise of the Nones is a common theme among scholars of religion, clergy, and theologians, and it is making a lot of people nervous about the human future. It needn’t.
Nones have compassion, thankfulness, love, sometimes even a sense of oneness with other beings. We have feelings, hopes, dreams, responsibilities, ethics, rules, and rights. We have existed and been persecuted since the start of human time. Only recently, and so far only in a few parts of the planet, have we begun to be able to hold our heads high, be open about our beliefs (or lack of them), conduct our lives and raise our children as we wish. We don’t deserve to be looked down on because we stay away from the church, mosque, shrine, synagogue, or temple. We don’t want to be ostracized because we decline to prostrate ourselves, curtsy before a cross, burn incense at a statue, or wear a fringed garment during prayer. Some of us find it painful to see our children pledge allegiance to a nation “under God,” or our parents buried with rites and sacraments that they might not have cared for, for the sake of someone else’s idea of decorum. We have often been subject to such pressures.
We have also felt isolated. Nones, like gays, often appear in families and communities where they may not know anyone else like themselves. I have a friend in this situation. For many years, she and her father, a deeply believing Christian, argued warmly and frequently about his faith and her nonbelief. Both gave up on having the other come around, but they never stopped talking. Then, after becoming disabled in his seventies, her father took his own life. My friend was bereft but unwavering, and Richard Dawkins’s writings against religion helped her cope. In fact, she resented me for thinking and writing otherwise and for what she saw as my equivocation and inconstancy. Nones, like gays, need to find and defend each other.
I apologized, and I tried to avoid causing her further pain, but the fact that Dawkins and others comfort those without belief does not license them to afflict all who are otherwise comforted. Not everyone lives by bread alone, or even bread and circuses and symphonies and science. Many want or need more. A geneticist who was a Dominican priest before he lost his faith and became a scientist said, “There are six billion people in the world, and if we feel that we are going to persuade them to lead a rational life, based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming . . . it’s such an illusion, it would be like believing in the fairy godmother. . . . People need to find meaning and purpose in life . . . and they find meaning and purpose in religion.” He accused aggressive atheists of their own worst sin: “believing in the fairy godmother.” God may be a delusion, but atheists’ confidence in the imminent end of faith is a delusion too.
Consider their claims. You are not religious unless you have been indoctrinated in childhood, and your religiosity is proportional to the strength of your indoctrination. Intelligence is the key to overcoming the indoctrination, given the right arguments. Finally, religion is a vice, harmful, and in fact evil.
But there are a few problems. For one thing, parents of all religious inclinations, including atheists, often find that their children grow up to believe things quite different from what they were taught, and are sometimes more devout than their parents. Second, while doubts of philosophers, scientists, and others are as old as the oldest major religions, some of the brightest people in the world have been aware of those arguments and have rejected them in favor of belief. Among these are Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, Max Planck, Ronald Fisher, David Lack, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Freeman Dyson, and Francis Collins. Also included are about 40 percent of scientists and about 7 or 8 percent of the US National Academy of Sciences. The number of believing scientists has declined, but they still refute the claim that intelligence, even scientific intelligence, is incompatible with religion, or that faith precludes scientific achievement.
As for religion being a vice—well, if you were going to act like a scientist, you might start with an open digital document and divide it into two columns. At the top of one you would key in, “Harm Done by Religion”; at the top of the other, “Good Done by Religion.” You would gather empirical evidence on both sides, then compare them. I don’t say this would be easy or precise, but some truth might be gained. What you would not do, if you wanted to be a scientist, is have only one column. Yet this is what many critics do. The litany of religious tyranny, wars, terrorism, logical errors, and opposition to science are these critics’ meat and potatoes, but religion’s most insidious harm is that it dupes innocent people into believing a pack of lies.
I will not challenge the litany, except the last item, and that only partly. We will explore the possibility that religion does some good, that this good is to some extent observable and measurable, and that it might just outweigh the evil that religion also does. That tipping toward good will likely be more true in the future, as the most tyrannical, violent, and exclusivist forms of faith are supplanted by tolerant ones, and as those who walk away from faith can do that without prejudice.
As for being duped into believing a pack of lies, let’s rephrase that a bit. People are led, often beginning in childhood, into following their religious inclinations (if any) and expressing them with rituals, practices, ideas, symbols, and narratives traditional to the culture they come from. Most of these forms have no basis in evidence and never will, except that they feel right to the person involved with them. In other words, the “evidence” is subjective, not scientific.
Joan Roughgarden is a leading evolutionary ecologist at Stanford University who is also a believing Christian and the author of Evolution and Christian Faith, which Roughgarden herself has said is not a work of science, but a religious book. She criticizes science for being arrogant and often wrong. She disputes the claim that scientists don’t have prophets, saying that Darwin is treated as such, and she uses his theory of sexual selection as an example. She rejects intelligent design but believes that, in view of the frequent and persistent errors of science, “the credibility of the Bible rises.”
I disagree with her about sexual selection, which has received overwhelming empirical support—foreseen by Darwin not because he was a prophet but because he was a smart observer. I agree that the discourse around it sometimes has a locker room odor. As for errors in science, they persist beyond their time, but usually not by much; the whole point of science is to replace bad ideas with better ones. That process happens in religion, but religion takes much more on authority.
However, I agree with Roughgarden that “it’s not irrational for someone to relatively emphasize the status of the Bible,” although it is nonrational. And I agree more strongly when she asks, “Is rational thought all that correct? What about our emotions? Do we actually require a rational argument for God?” My answer to that is no, argument is irrelevant. I also appreciate Roughgarden’s observation that communion is a symbol of community, the latter being to my mind one of religion’s most valuable assets. As for our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, many argue that they are completely based in brain function. I accept this claim; I have written and taught it for a lifetime. Every day we find more support for it. But however strong it is, it is not the last word on whether faith should make sense to believers.
Read the criticisms of faith; they will sharpen and may persuade you. But you may not meet up with much you haven’t heard before. Here is a partial list, with some of their past proponents:
There is no reason to think that a supernatural being intervenes in nature, history, or everyday life. (Aristotle)
The God of the Old Testament is punitive, misogynistic, brutal, unforgiving, obsessional, and at times an ethnic cleanser. (many ancient rabbis, including Jesus)
Religions have often caused or worsened devastating wars. (Herodotus)
The Bible contains contradictions and far-fetched tales. (Maimonides, Spinoza)
The Qur’an seems to condone violence to spread Islam. (Javed Ahmad Ghamidi)
Nothing supernatural is needed to explain the human mind. (David Hume)
Jesus cannot have been the son of God. (Thomas Jefferson)
The history of life, including human life, is a natural process. (Charles Darwin)
Religion discourages people from bettering their real lives. (Karl Marx)
God is a mental holdover from our experience with our parents. (Sigmund Freud)
Religion results from childhood reward and punishment. (B. F. Skinner)
No scientific evidence exists to confirm belief in reincarnation. (the Dalai Lama)
Some terrorism results from religious fanaticism. (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush)
It is best not to believe in things for which there is no evidence. (Bertrand Russell)
If life has so far sheltered you from these arguments, then you have a lot to learn from recent atheistic writings. Even if you’ve heard them, the arguments are ably made in these works. But if you are not aware that some of the most religious people, including leaders and thinkers in all faiths, have acknowledged almost all these claims and found ways to deal with them without abandoning their faith, or even while embracing it more strongly, you will not learn that fact from recent critiques, which hold that believers are as ignorant of doubt as the atheists themselves are of faith.
In fact, these authors do not know the first thing about faith, which is that faith is the conviction of things unseen. They ignore or belittle the key phrase describing this realm of human experience: the leap of faith—a metaphor for what believers must daily do in the absence of evidence. Faith is supposed to be a struggle, a striving toward belief; a difficult overcoming, not a denial, of doubt. The history of faith is one of people trying to find God, spirituality, or unity in a way that adds meaning and mystery to a purely material world. I long ago gave up that struggle for other quests that I found meaningful. But I let people who are still engaged in it find their own way; I don’t belittle them or try to block their chosen path, and I hope they do the same for me.
This book is, in part, a personal story of religious and irreligious encounters. I like the tension and drama of electric, sometimes bitter conversations among people with different views of life. But there is new research on the neuroscience, psychology, childhood development, evolution, anthropology, and sociology of religion. And there is the dynamic reality of faith and practice throughout the world. In what I hope is a colorful weave of words, facts, and thoughts, I will try to represent both.
Believers
1
Encounters
Brooklyn is the Borough of Churches, and it made me nervous as a child to walk past some of them, although I was roughed up only a few times, at the cost of my pride and a handful of coins. The immediate wake of World War II was a tense time for Jews.
But it wasn’t just about threats, past or present; I was steeped in Judaism and Jewishness. My earliest memories are of my grandfather swaying in the sunlit parlor of our apartment, wrapped in a prayer shawl, his left arm and forehead adorned with the black leather straps and boxes that observant Jewish men put on for weekday morning prayers. My initial religious inspiration came from him. He sat me in his lap and taught me Hebrew letters from the headlines of the left-leaning, Yiddish-language daily the Forvertz. He was a retired hardware store owner, not a socialist; the Forvertz was just the leading daily in his native tongue. But his faith was a constant, and I was in awe of it. I prayed long and hard for him in his last illness, yet when he died I did not lose faith; like most people whose prayers are not answered (at least not simply), my response was different.
A year earlier my grandfather had enrolled me in after-school Hebrew classes at the local Orthodox synagogue. I was there every day between ages 8 and 17. I became more religious than my parents and most of my friends. But at 17, I lost my faith. I started college that fall, but there were other things going on in my life and in the world. In August, still 16 by two days and not yet quite a college boy, I defied my parents and boarded a bus to Washington, where I heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the speech that would change America and the world. His stunning oration ended with an imagined future cry that would unite liberation and faith: Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last! For him and me, God was there.
White as I was, King’s dream was mine too. While still in high school, I was active in that struggle, as well as the one to avert nuclear war, a constant threat. I still went to synagogue on Saturday, and I knew Dr. King’s speech and much other discourse on integration drew its metaphors and phrasing from the Bible I had studied, but my rabbi did not say the things I hoped to hear.
That fall, in one class at Brooklyn College, the professor came in, sat cross-legged on the desk, lit his pipe, and began “doing philosophy”—which meant, among other things, undermining faith. Still an Orthodox Jew, I had little use for this, and I often whispered with the young woman next to me. Halfway through the semester, the professor quite properly asked us to sit separately. I sulked, stopped coming, and got a D+. But his message sank in. After synagogue on Friday nights, I walked—keeping the Sabbath—to that young woman’s house, almost an hour each way. By winter I no longer believed.
It wasn’t just because of the philosophy class. My generation and I were in turmoil—politically, sexually, artistically, and musically, as well as religiously—and it is likely I would have changed without the philosopher’s challenges. But the analytic language he taught me was a bridge. I turned to anthropology to get a new take on religion and a new account of the deep human past. Like many Jewish boys, I was pre-med, but I went to graduate school in physical anthropology and studied the biology of behavior—the embodiment of mind.
I lived for two years in Africa, doing research among hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari. I taught about human nature for five years, but then went to medical school after all. Nothing human is alien to me, a favorite saying, now meant not just the lives of hunter-gatherers but also mental and physical illness. I saw people give birth (I delivered thirty-six babies) and face death (rarely peaceful), with or without religion. It didn’t seem crucial. But if a patient was religious, I was the one who called a chaplain. After medical school I taught again. Africa, medicine, and fatherhood remade me, but I began another thirty-five years of teaching evolution, human biology, and brain science. If students are religious, I help them reconcile evolution with faith; if they are doubting, I help with that too.
My childhood and adolescence were steeped in conventional faith. But what is the logic of my half century of nonbelief—what some would call my healthy resistance to rubbish; others, my tragic inability to embrace some of life’s most meaningful experiences? I almost failed philosophy, but it helped give me the framework I needed to understand a painful personal experience: the loss of faith. Philosophy alone could not have caused the loss or maintained it all my life, but it mattered to me at the time, and it still matters now. The professor, Martin Lean, was an analytic philosopher; he closely examined words and sentences, with the goal of clarifying discourse. The following simplification may help.
The modern analytic tradition begins with David Hume, goes through John Stuart Mill, and embraces Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and many others. I fell in with some of Lean’s smart and funny graduate students. They covered a door in their apartment with an evolutionary tree of philosophers, their faves and bêtes noires drawn as ancestors and descendants. The phrase “The Qua Being” was prominently scrawled in one corner, an evolutionary side trunk of bad philosophers. The Qua Being culminated in the mid-twentieth century with thinkers like Martin Heidegger, who wrote, “Nothing nothings itself” and, “To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground”; Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote, “If the being of phenomena is not resolved in a phenomenon of being and if nevertheless we can not say anything about being without considering this phenomenon of being, then the exact relation which unites the phenomenon of being to the being of the phenomenon must be established first of all”; and Edmund Husserl, who wrote, “Phenomenology as the science of all conceivable transcendental phenomena and especially the synthetic total structures in which alone they are concretely possible—those of the transcendental single subjects is eo ipso the a priori science of all conceivable beings.”
