Continuing to post extracts of previous writings: this is a portion of a talk I prepared for the Stanford Atheist group in November, 2005. The heart of it was a sense of cultural alienation, of not being at home in my birth nation, although...
To their credit, the great majority of our fellow Americans, whatever their personal beliefs, could not care less what we believe or don't. Which is good, because they don't bother us. But that same uncritical tolerance provides a cloak, a shelter, under cover of which some really creepy people can operate: the evangelicals who, if they had the power, would happily put us unbelievers in prison as dangerous to the public morals.
There is a tiny minority of Americans -- a bigger minority than atheists, but still small -- who genuinely espouse hard-core evangelical religious ideas. The common thread is that they are biblical literalists, that is, they insist that the Bible is to be taken as exact, literal, un-metaphorical truth.
For these biblical fundamentalists, creation took seven days, woman was created from man's rib, etc. Among them are "Dominion Theologists" or "Christian Reconstructionists" whose stated aim is to convert the US into a theistic state with a civil code based on that literally-true Bible -- or their reading of it. (Their precise counterparts in Islam are those who would make the Quran the sole basis of civil law.)
These are scary people. If you want to give yourself a fine shiver, don't rent a video of Nightmare on Elm Street. Just Google the phrase "Dominion theology" and read for a while. I promise you cold sweat and a sleepless night.
It might be some slight satisfaction that the Biblical literalists are even more alienated from mainstream American culture than atheists are. I feel alienated because people around me don't react to what (to me) is clearly bullshit. However, that same culture happily accomodates many ideas that are flatly contradictory to everything evangelicals believe in. Whereas I feel mildly at odds with our culture, they must feel like missionaries among the cannibals.
Dr. Phillip Johnson was one of the architects of the Intelligent Design thing, he counseled and inspired various of the authors like Michael Behe. This is Johnson, addressing a conference on "Reclaiming America for Christ" in 1999:
...the Darwinian theory of evolution contradicts not just the Book of Genesis, but every word in the Bible from beginning to end. It contradicts the idea that we are here because a creator brought about our existence for a purpose.Hang onto that phrase about "creator brought about our existence for a purpose." That's key.
This is a portion of an interview with Johnson in a Christian magazine:
It's a great error Christian leaders and intellectual leaders have made to think the origin of life [is] just one of those things scientists and professors argue about, Mr. Johnson says. The fundamental question is whether God is real or imaginary. The entire way of thinking that underlies Darwinian evolution assumes that God is out of the picture as any kind of a real entity. He points out that, it is a very short step from Darwinism and science to the kind of liberal theology we find in many of our seminaries that treats the resurrection as a faith event...
...Mr. Johnson explains, Once God is culturally determined to be imaginary, then God's morality loses its foundation and withers away. ...
Hang onto that phrase about "God's morality losing its foundation." That's another key.
Notice how far out, how radical Johnson is. He is not only alienated from the majority culture which has no problem with materialist science, he is also at odds with mainstream contemporary religion. In mainstream religions, the theologists do not see a conflict between the Bible as spiritual sourcebook and evolution as a concept. The Biblical account of creation is not undermined by Darwinian evolution -- when taken as poetic metaphor. You only have a problem with Darwin when you insist that the Bible is literally, not metaphorically true. Johnson and his ilk take that position, and that forces them into opposition to society at large and mainstream religion too.
Evangelicals quite accurately diagnose that materialist explanations for anything make a mockery of a literal reading of the Bible. Yet they have pinned their entire belief system -- including the foundation of their moral code and their very conception of purpose in life -- on a literal reading of the Bible. Ergo, anything that undermines that reading threatens the very basis of their lives!
They have to be very alienated, very frightened. And because they are afraid, they feel no shame about subverting the mechanisms of scientific debate to undermine science. And they are brazen in taking advantage of that great American tolerance for diversity, however wacky, to propagate their beliefs.
These people are not stupid. They are skilled debaters who know how to get on the good side of an audience. They are well-funded. I've shown you how very deeply and seriously motivated they are! If they are not opposed effectively, they will succeed. You will find high-school biology classes in several states having to acknowledge Intelligent Design, or some other cobbled-up alternative to evolution by natural selection.
The big question is, who will oppose them? Because of the marshmallow consistency of the American public's mind, its blithe ignorance of critical thinking, its lack of confidence in common sense, the evangelicals just don't get the kind of sharp, sarcastic criticism they should get. The criticism they would get, I like to think, in a country like Australia. Here we say things like "They mean well." "There might be something in what they say." "It's good to have all sides represented."
Are you and I supposed to do it? Heck, no! It is not us few, lonely scared atheists who should be debating these people. Evangelicals LOVE to have admitted atheists as opponents; it lets them grab the high ground as true defenders of spirituality and faith -- in the eyes of the audience of believers. In the Dover trial, the attorney who cross-examined Dr. Forrest made a big, repeated deal out of the fact that she was a signatory to the Humanist Manifesto -- as if that should disqualify her from talking about religion at all.
It was Jim Heldberg of the SF Atheists who first pointed out to me that the people who ought to be opposing them are the representatives of mainstream religion. There are clever, sophisticated theologians in the mainstream denominations who really understand the nature of literalist thinking, who know well how radical it is and what a dead-end it is because it inevitably has to clash with science over and over.
The Catholics seem to get this. An important Cardinal Shoenborn, in July, had an op-ed piece in the NY Times that seemed to dismiss the previous Pope's support for evolution. But Cardinal Shoenborn recently back-pedalled hard, saying in a lecture that Darwin's work "remains one of the very great works of intellectual history" and saying he has "no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution"
Almost simultaneously Cardinal Poupard, who has the title of President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said similar nice things about Darwin, and negative things about fundamentalism. Materialists can't take much pleasure from either Cardinal's statement, because both were insistent that "the universe didn't make itself" and that science has no business talking about ultimate origins. Still, the Catholic church has gone on record as not supporting anti-evolutionists.
That's more than can be said about American clerics and denominations, who seem to stand back and keep very quiet when a public debate like this Dover trial happens. I think this is cowardly and short-sighted of them. If they let the fundamentalist wackos carry the banner for religion, and if the fundamentalists are discredited, all religion will be discredited along with them. It will be too late for the Presbyterians and Lutherans to say, oh, they weren't speaking for us.
What would help long-term is if unbelief, materialism, could be made a practical alternative to religious belief -- so that more people were willing to check the "No Affiliation" box on a census form. What keeps that from happening? I see two causes, and they are areas that atheists or humanists could and should address.
Remember the two phrases from Phillip Johnson I said to hang onto? One was that materialism contradicts the idea that God created us for a purpose. The other was that materialism undermines God's morality.
These are the two crucial points at which almost anybody who believes in God feels threatened by the idea of atheism. They don't have to be Biblical literalists or fundamentalists; Christians of any type will almost instinctively leap to those conclusions:
- If they didn't believe in God, they would have no sense of purpose; and the universe would be a howling, unintegrated chaos of random chance.
- If they didn't believe in God, their morals would have no basis; and they would have only a shifty relativism that potentially allowed or forgave any act no matter how evil.
You have to admit, these are two very unpleasant choices: between belief versus an unintegrated chaos; and between belief versus a baseless relativist anarchy. I think it's because of these two instinctive leaps that people are so automatically shocked or scared of the idea of atheism, and retreat from it without giving it any rational thought.
Now, both perceptions are quite wrong, as this audience should realize. I've discussed the constructive alternatives to each in my book, chapter two on finding purpose in a materialist universe, and chapter eight on finding morals. I listed a number of creative, constructive alternatives and barely scratched the surface.
But I have no pulpit, no street cred. There's a crying need for an atheist Savanarola, or a humanist John Wesley -- someone to articulate and promote, first, all the profound and beautiful ways that a person can be authentic and purposeful in a materialist universe; and second, to promote the truth that ethics arise out of the basic human condition, and that the best argument for the ethical life is simple self-interest -- being ethical makes a person healthier and happier.
(Since I wrote this, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have all had some success in the role of "atheist Savanarola." However, none of them has seriously tried to make the positive points I hoped for: purpose and morals.)
These are the two arguments that are not being made by unbelievers. If they were made and cleverly promoted, it would go a long way to making unbelief a viable alternative to religion. The fundamentalists would never be convinced, but the majority could begin to find belief less essential, atheism less frightening. That could begin a swing toward a more secular society, and hopefully a more skeptical one.
I am sorry to wind up here with only a pious hope, not an actual plan. But that's where my ramblings have brought us.
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