Led by the biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion,” atheism has taken on a new life in popular religious debate. Dawkins’s brand of atheism is scientific in that it views the “God hypothesis” as obviously inadequate to the known facts. In particular, he employs the facts of evolution to challenge the need to postulate God as the designer of the universe. For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion.
Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.
The first paragraph talks about “scientific” atheism and the known facts, but then the second paragraph criticizes that view by talking about philosophical arguments. Gary Gutting, the Notre Dame philosopher who wrote the post, makes a kind of transition from the first to the second with the remark about “an intellectual mistake,” but still, it seems like a muddying of the waters to imply that Dawkins is guilty of “scientism” and then once that’s taken care of, shift to philosophical arguments.
Of course most atheism combines the two, and most non-philosophers don’t worry much about keeping them separate. At any rate, that second paragraph doesn’t make much sense to me, for the usual kind of reason. It seems circular. Most believers get their belief from personal experiences, with God at the center. But “God” is the very item that’s in question, so how can “God” be at the center before there is any reason to think “God” exists? Gutting slots “God” in there as if it were perfectly natural and inevitable, but “God” is what atheists don’t believe exists, so it’s question-begging to slot “God” in anywhere.
A spiritual world of meaning and values is a very general category, and could mean anything or nothing. “God” is much more specific, despite its convenient flexibility for purposes of argument. It doesn’t work to claim or imply that belief in God is not an intellectual mistake by talking about personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center. Gary Gutting is a philosopher so I’m confident that he knows that much better than I do…yet he said it anyway. (Maybe he just meant “with the idea of God at its center” – but he didn’t say that.)
The main issue I have with the second paragraph is that it is clearly not true. Most people come to religion through socialisation, usually from a very early age.
I would say that most religious people believe in god because they were socialized to believe in god. Christianity is so ingrained in Americain society, even atheists like me use phrases like “thank god,” or “for god’s sake,” I think many people don’t even bother to question god’s existence at all.
Great minds think alike. :- )
That offers a good way to translate Gutting’s more flattering version:
Rather, their belief arises from what they take to be personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, whose nature they have been socialized into taking for granted, with what they take to be the “God” of this socialized belief-system as its center.
OK. I wrote a response before reading the comments. Turns out it must be a really obvious point. I wonder why the philosopher from Notre Dame didn’t think of it. ;^)
I don’t think most belief arises from personal experience of a spiritual world of meaning so much as from indoctrination. From the time most believers are old enough to hold their heads upright they are dragged to whatever church/mosque/temple their parents attend and are constantly told that this is the way it is. They are told that this god or that is at the center of all meaning and values and they accept that what their parents tell them is true.
Eventually they may come to interpret any experience through this framework and reinforce their belief, but that is secondary. The belief must be planted and nurtured first. It’s not like we find isolated people who have never heard of the Abrahamic religions but went ahead and discovered them through their own experience. People need to be taught this stuff.
“Of course most atheism combines the two, and most non-philosophers don’t worry much about keeping them separate.”
Yes,we,non-philosophical atheists, ask– “Where’s the evidence for a god or indeed, the supernatural?”
The indoctrination argument has limits,some individuals simply cannot believe, despite a religious education and others without any religious education whatsoever, discern a ‘purpose’ to the Universe. There’s a psychological aspect to religious belief,quite independent of IQ.
On the other hand, some professional philosophers do worry about the separation. I, for one, worry when other philosophers presuppose (or simply impose) an unwarranted, unmotivated, and very sharp division between philosophical and scientific argumentation. It always makes me suspect they are up to something not quite honest — and so far, my suspicions have always turned out to be warranted.
It seems that Gutting tries to make the “atheists are barking up the wrong tree” arguement but is unwittingly hammering home that, when defending their theism, believers often engage in intellectual dishonesty. I can only speak from my own experiences but when ever I get into discussions with believers they almost always start with some supposed proof, evidence or philosophical arguement to support why they believe. It’s usually only after some time that they state that their belief is the result of some unverifiable, unrepeatable personal experience* that, had it not happened to them they wouldn’t believe it either but despite that I somehow should.
* Faith is another course they often take but I’ve seen the personal experience card played more than the faith card.
Heh. I thought of you when I wrote that bit, G – the times you’ve worried about that very sharp division.
It makes sense if you think of God as a real thing which one might experience, as the author apparently does. Imagine coming to believe in the sun. You have no reason to think there’s anything up there, but you go outside and there’s all this light everywhere! You look up to figure out why, and there’s this spot in the sky where the light is so bright it hurts your eyes. You don’t think of it as the sun yet, you have no concept of “sun,” but it’s absolutely true that the sun is at the center of the personal experiences which led you to believe in the sun.
Also, good science is an essentially philosophical act. There’s a reason the Industrial Revolution began right after the Enlightenment. So I don’t have any substantive issue with characterizing the arguments of Dawkins etc. as philosophical – it’s a bit unclear, but not wrong.
The logical mistake here is assuming that understanding ones’ own experiences has nothing to do with science. For most believers, belief arises from a combination of unrecognized cognitive errors in their childhood. I don’t want to dismiss the importance of emotion and other non-rational things to our intellectual lives, but everyone needs science, or our own brains will trip us into error over and over.