In Defense of Religious Moderation

William Egginton

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231520966
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

In his latest book, William Egginton laments the current debate over religion in America, in which religious fundamentalists have set the tone of political discourse—no one can get elected without advertising a personal relation to God, for example—and prominent atheists treat religious belief as the root of all evil. Neither of these positions, Egginton argues, adequately represents the attitudes of a majority of Americans who, while identifying as Christians, Jews, and Muslims, do not find fault with those who support different faiths and philosophies. In fact, Egginton goes so far as to question whether fundamentalists and atheists truly oppose each other, united as they are in their commitment to a "code of codes." In his view, being a religious fundamentalist does not require adhering to a particular religious creed. Fundamentalists—and stringent atheists—unconsciously believe that the methods we use to understand the world are all versions of an underlying master code. This code of codes represents an ultimate truth, explaining everything. Surprisingly, perhaps the most effective weapon against such thinking is religious moderation, a way of believing that questions the very possibility of a code of codes as the source of all human knowledge. The moderately religious, with their inherent skepticism toward a master code, are best suited to protect science, politics, and other diverse strains of knowledge from fundamentalist attack, and to promote a worldview based on the compatibility between religious faith and scientific method.

1	Dogmatic Atheism

The Complexity of Belief

Bill Maher’s highly successful and often hilarious documentary Religulous ends with the comedian summing up his views on religion against a background of images of violence, death, and destruction. This sequence is nothing short of a call to arms, addressed to “rational people” and “antireligionists,” to end their timidity, come out of the closet, and assert themselves. His terms, as one might put it, are nonnegotiable, and his list of judgments includes

• It’s a plain fact, religion must die if mankind is to live.
• Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.
• Those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it, are our intellectual slaveholders.
• Those who consider themselves only moderately religious have to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price.

And the last words of the film: “That’s it. Grow up, or die.”

Linked to such frightening images, including the obligatory final mushroom cloud, and spliced with snippets from interviews with fanatics overlaid with appropriately apocalyptic quotations from the various scriptures, the film’s final turn from humorous critic of religious creeds and their adherents to harbinger of doom reveals a sleight of hand present in the writings of all those associated with what has been called the new atheism. By making the evils they catalog the result of faith instead of fanaticism, the critics hold a group of people in principle opposed to violence accountable for atrocities of the most barbaric kind.

Maher waxes philosophical during this sequence, and in so doing he touches on the real problem. “Religion,” he says, “is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. … The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.”

This is, of course, an admirable position; in fact, it is exactly the position I am advocating in this book. The only difference is that while I am attributing it to religious and other moderates, Maher and the new atheists assume that all believers lack it to the same degree and that only they and their fellow antireligionists are deserving of the epithet of doubter. But aside from the occasional afterthought, a kind of window dressing of doubt to clear them of the ever-threatening charge of their own private fundamentalism, the new atheists’ rhetoric is almost entirely devoid of any real doubt as to the ultimate truth of their position and is on the contrary almost bursting with a contempt for religious beliefs fed by their absolute certainty that those beliefs are, without exception, false.

There are two unfounded assumptions, then, at the heart of the atheist challenge: first, that faith is incompatible with doubt and, second, that there can be certainty about the falsity of religious claims. But far from being an obvious antagonist to faith, as I show in the third chapter, moderate religious practice as well as much of the theological tradition have placed doubt at the very heart of faith. When Philip Seymour Hoffman’s troubled priest says about doubt, in John Patrick Shanley’s film of the same name, that it “can be a bond as powerful as certainty,” he is echoing the opinion of religious thinkers from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Paul Tillich. As far as the second assumption is concerned, that there can be certainty about the falsity of religious claims, the entire weight of the distinction between atheism and agnosticism falls on it. To the extent that the critics in question soften their position and embrace doubt on “the big questions,” as Maher puts it, then we are in the same camp. But they cannot do so with any consistency, since the marketability of their product depends on the vehemence of their attack. Atheists thus have to feign certainty where there can be none, and in order to do that, they must distort another common notion such that it becomes almost unrecognizable. That notion is belief.

Sam Harris dedicates a chapter early on in his book The End of Faith to the problem of belief. From his perspective, belief is a problem only when religion’s defenders claim a different status for religious beliefs than for beliefs about how things are in the world. For Harris, in contrast, “believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world.” Any other kind of belief simply does not make sense. This is an important assumption for Harris to make because it and it alone guarantees that the ills he chalks up to religious belief are attributable to all believers, even those who reject a literal interpretation of scripture. By discounting the enormous middle ground of people who count themselves as believers without thereby actually believing that the world was made in six days about six thousand years ago, Harris can group them all together into a camp of the ultimately unreasonable, of those who believe absurd things without evidence and are thus outside the boundaries of reasonable discourse, those about whom he says, “There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense.”

As is apparent from this last sentence, a lot lies on this assumption. Harris is merely making explicit the threat of violence behind this reduction of all belief to one, propositional kind. Once we assume that all stated beliefs are, as Harris puts it, “processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior” and that they are, furthermore, either true or false representations of the world, with nothing in between, then the recourse to violence indeed seems inevitable. But both assumptions are, in fact, false. Beliefs are far more varied and complex than Harris assumes and, because they are not merely in a representational relation to the world, are not divided exclusively into true and false ones.

What do we mean when we say we believe something? Well, as becomes quickly apparent, that depends a lot on what we are saying we believe. Try answering these yes/no questions without spending a lot of time on them:

• Do you believe it is raining outside?
• Do you believe it will rain tomorrow?
• Do you believe that the sum of the squares of a right triangle’s two shortest sides is equal to the square of its hypotenuse?
• Do you believe smoking is bad for your health?
• Do you believe smoking is enjoyable?
• Do you believe you are happily married?
• Do you believe your best friend is happily married?
• Do you believe in love at first sight?
• Do you believe in Santa Claus?
• Do you believe Mozart’s music was divinely inspired?
• Do you believe that William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet?
• Do you believe that Hamlet’s uncle killed Hamlet’s father?
• Do you believe in God?

Clearly, I could go on for a long time, but this is probably enough to illustrate my point. Harris, who did a doctorate in neuroscience at UCLA focusing on the neurology of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty (and therefore, one hopes, knows something about it) writes that, “at present, we have no understanding of what it means, at the level of the brain, to say that a person believes or disbelieves a given proposition.” Yet despite this admission of ignorance he was certain enough to base two books and numerous articles and speeches attacking religious belief on the undemonstrated assumption that we all understand precisely the same thing each time we read the word believe in the questions above.

It is not at all clear, however, that this is the case. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Kenneth Sayre, for instance, has identified at least four different types of cognitive attitudes determining a belief’s conceptual environment and, hence, how it ultimately functions at a cognitive level. As I mentioned, recent research in the neurosciences, including work by Harris, has shown that religious and nonreligious test subjects register perceptible differences in brain activity; and research conducted by Andrew Newberg and others has shown that the same subject can register different brain activity when he or she focuses on religious as opposed to nonreligious thought contents. Given this variety it is certainly plausible that the statistics Harris enjoys quoting concerning 240 million Americans who believe in the imminence of the Second Coming may not mean exactly what Harris says they mean when they use the word believe. And I don’t mean, as Richard Dawkins has suggested, that people are consciously misrepresenting their beliefs when they answer surveys because they want to appear religious or convince themselves that they believe things they in fact don’t. As simple a question as “Do you believe in God?” may in some respondents involve completely different cognitive functions than does the question “Do you believe it is raining now?” The point is, we don’t know. And yet the entire weight of the atheist attack on religion requires that we do know.

I would argue, in fact, that it is much more reasonable to assume that when people answer different questions concerning their beliefs they are using the word in different ways and with markedly different presuppositions. When someone answers a question about belief concerning something he or she perceives at that moment, about something he or she can speculate will occur, about a character in a work of fiction, about an aesthetic value judgment, or about belief in a metaphysical being, not only is it very likely that term will have different meanings in each context but it is also probable that different people will use the term differently when answering the same question.

My claim is that the kind of people I am calling religious moderates mean something very different when they say they believe in God than do religious fundamentalists when they say that they believe in God and than do atheists when they say they do not believe in God. The difference is that atheists and fundamentalists believe either explicitly or implicitly that the ultimate reality they are referring to when they speak about the existence or nonexistence of God is knowable and in fact already formulated as knowledge—a secret language encoding every appearance in the universe. Their sentences about the ultimate nature of the universe, then, are either true or false. As Harris has expressed it, “Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn’t. Either Christ was divine, or he was not.”

Harris writes these lines, incidentally, in a moment of unrestrained camaraderie with fundamentalists, having just identified religious moderates as his and their common enemy: “Of course, there are Christians who do not agree with either of us. There are Christians who consider other faiths to be equally valid paths to salvation.” Against these religious moderates, Harris enjoins his fundamentalist brethren to “observe that the issue is both simpler and more urgent than liberals and moderates generally admit.” Indeed, simple and urgent is exactly how fundamentalists see issues, which is why they are quick to provoke, quick to find enemies, and quick to take up arms when the occasion presents itself, often long before peaceful means of conflict resolution have been explored.

Certain beliefs are, indeed, either true or false. It will be the case that it is or it is not raining outside, regardless of what you believe is the case. It is also the case that the sum of the squares of a triangle’s two shortest sides is equal to the square of its hypotenuse, again regardless of what you believe. Belief in the existence of God is an example of a category of beliefs that neither have such a relation to a verifiable sensory experience nor are what philosophers call a priori truths, statements that are true without having to be experientially verified. Such metaphysical beliefs are, in Karl Popper’s terminology, nonfalsifiable and, while they make for very bad scientific hypotheses, they are exactly what articles of faith are about. We do not have faith in the same mundane and falsifiable way that we have beliefs about the world, and it is a mistake to think that we do.

The Science of Atheism

According to the logic of the code of codes, the job of scientific practice is to form an accurate picture of how the world in fact is. Scientific knowledge is figured as a translation into our terms of a code that, while perhaps partially or temporarily obscured, is fundamentally legible and compatible with human knowledge.

This logic is as ubiquitous as it is apparently immune to being dispelled or undermined; it is as common a presumption in intellectuals of the secular left as it is in moralizers of the Christian right. In the recent words of Joel Agee, memoirist and translator of, among others, Heinrich von Kleist, “To write is to translate—not from another language, but from a formless, darkly stirring source where what needs to be said is felt to be potentially or even actually present. That is how the impossible work begins. Gradually, and sometimes in bursts, the translation into language takes shape, and when it is done, it seems like a miracle.”

Despite being an eloquent and stirring expression of what many may in fact experience as the act of writing, Agee’s description imports exactly the fundamentalist logic I have been describing into an activity that, on closer observation, many would agree is as secular and human as it gets. The attribution of the miraculous seems almost like an afterthought; what is at issue is the notion that knowledge is a kind of translation of another language, felt to be potentially or even actually present.

If this logic is religious, then, it is religious only for the following reason: it ascribes to the unknown the quality of being knowledge; and because someone must have a knowledge in order for it to be knowledge, in the case where the unknown is figured as an absolute unknown, that someone, implicitly, is God. God speaks a language, and the language he speaks is that of a reality yet to be known, of truths yet to be unveiled.

This logic persists in the most blatantly atheistic discourses, such as that of today’s most ubiquitous atheist, the former Simonyi Professorship Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Richard Dawkins. Like Harris, Dawkins has very little patience for moderation or tolerance in matters of religion. In fact, agnosticism, the principled position not to claim any metaphysical knowledge, is the target of some of his harshest vituperation. In The God Delusion Dawkins distinguishes between two types of agnosticism, which he refers to as, respectively, TAP (temporary agnosticism in practice) and PAP (permanent agnosticism in principle):

TAP … is the legitimate fence-sitting where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack the evidence to decide it (or don’t understand the evidence, or haven’t time to read the evidence, etc). TAP would be a reasonable stance towards the Permian extinction. There is a truth out there and one day we hope to know it, but for the moment we don’t.

In contrast, “the PAP style of agnosticism is appropriate for questions that can never be answered no matter how much evidence we gather, because the very idea of evidence is not applicable. The question exists on a different plane, or in a different dimension, beyond the zones where evidence can reach.”

Dawkins’s point is that agnostics of the second type place knowledge of the existence of God into precisely such a zone of nonfalsifiability, whereas he suggests that such knowledge be treated exactly like any other knowledge: subject to eventual falsifiability or, at least and in the meantime, to judgments concerning its probability. (His conclusion: very, very unlikely.)

The problem, however, with being a merely Temporary Agnostic in Practice, at least according to Dawkins’s definition, is that it necessarily implies a logic that is, paradoxically, through and through religious. Take the statement about the Permian extinction, the hypothesis that the “greatest mass extinction in fossil history” could have been caused by a “meteorite strike like the one which, with greater likelihood on present evidence, caused the later extinction of the dinosaurs.” In this case the hypothesis to be proven rests in the temporal and spatial domain of human knowledge, and hence we can expect or hope to gather enough evidence about it to eventually embrace it or reject it as the truth. In the case of the existence or nonexistence of God, however, the hypothesis concerns not an aspect of phenomenal existence but the absolute entirety of space and time. In inferring from a phenomenally limited case of verifiable knowledge to the phenomenally unlimited, Dawkins smuggles in a fundamental assumption about the nature of the whole: namely, that it exists as a potential object of cognition, that, in its entirety in space and time, the universe already has the structure of being knowable, which means that it is ideally subject to description by a language and that our task is merely to translate that language.

More than simply religious, this position is specifically fundamentalist. Furthermore, there are, as will be seen in the third chapter, explicitly religious—that is, theological—inquiries that come to conclusions totally contrary to such fundamentalism. In other words, there are cases in which starting from moderately religious presuppositions leads one to positions that are less fundamentalist and more conducive to the practice of science than the one Dawkins advocates.

To be more specific, let us take the case of the so-called intelligent design movement. As a strict Darwinist, Dawkins obviously finds intelligent design—the argument that the evidence of life is better explained by reference to a creator than to random mutation and natural selection—to be a very bad idea. He would therefore be loath to admit that his own position is more closely aligned with that of intelligent design than is a rigorously applied theology of the sort worked out in the thirteenth century by Saint Thomas Aquinas—from whose cosmological proof for the existence of God the very term intelligent design is derived.

In fact, where Dawkins’s position allows for the appearance of a reasonable debate between intelligent design theorists and Darwinians on the relative probability of their respective theories, Thomism demonstrates a priori that the science of intelligent design is based on a category mistake. The key to this argument, as Michael W. Tkacz has shown, is Aquinas’s dictum that “Creatio non est mutatio” (Creation is not change). By removing creation from the very realm of discussions concerning physical change in the phenomenal world, Aquinas ensured that his own faith in the reality of God would in no way impinge on the efforts of science to discover new truths about the physical world. In other words, Aquinas used his faith in order to make room for knowledge, knowledge unencumbered by the need to speak about the totality of existence or the absolute, as his faith was already doing that in a completely different register. Dawkins, in contrast, by wanting to include hypotheses about the whole of existence in the realm of temporal and spatial knowledge, effectively grants intelligent design theorists a place at the table with evolution by natural selection, as if they were formulating hypotheses that could be falsified.

As a Darwinist, Dawkins might understandably feel appalled to be said to be making arguments that are compatible with intelligent design, but that is in fact what he is doing. Perhaps the most influential writer to promote the intelligent design thesis is Michael Behe. In his Darwin’s Black Box he advances the argument that certain biological traits are irreducibly complex, meaning that it is inconceivable that they would have evolved by random mutation when no single element of the trait offers any selective advantage. Fo...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments (and Apologies)
• Introduction: An Uncertain Faith
• 1: Dogmatic Atheism
• 2: The Fundamentalism of Everyday Life
• 3: The Language of God
• 4: Faith in Science
• 5: In Defense of Religious Moderation
• Selected Bibliography and Recommended Reading
• Index