Salon has an interview with Elaine Pagels on the Gospel of Judas. I’m really not much interested in yet another quaint twist on Christian dogma — I can understand how historians may differ, of course — but in the course of the interview she pulls this stunt … this ridiculous, absurd, cowardly claim that is pretty much routine from theologians.
What do you make of the recent claim by the atheist Richard Dawkins that the existence of God is itself a scientific question? If you accept the idea that God intervenes in the physical world, don’t there have to be physical mechanisms for that to happen? Therefore, doesn’t this become a question for science?
Well, Dawkins loves to play village atheist. He’s such a rationalist that the God that he’s debunking is not one that most of the people I study would recognize. I mean, is there some great big person up there who made the universe out of dirt? Probably not.
I agree … almost certainly not. The idea is laughable, a great big silly joke.
Elaine Pagels, meet Rick Warren. He’s an evangelical pastor, and he’s huge — I’m sure far more people have heard of him than of Elaine Pagels, and if his flock has heard of Richard Dawkins, it’s only because Warren may have damned him from the pulpit. He has a bit of a dialogue with Sam Harris in Newsweek.
Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it?
WARREN: If you’re asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal, but I do also know metaphorical terms are used. Did God come down and blow in man’s nose? If you believe in God, you don’t have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it’s fine with me.WARREN: Sam makes all kinds of assertions based on his presuppositions. I’m willing to admit my presuppositions: there are clues to God. I talk to God every day. He talks to me.
HARRIS: What does that actually mean?
WARREN: One of the great evidences of God is answered prayer. I have a friend, a Canadian friend, who has an immigration issue. He’s an intern at this church, and so I said, “God, I need you to help me with this,” as I went out for my evening walk. As I was walking I met a woman. She said, “I’m an immigration attorney; I’d be happy to take this case.” Now, if that happened once in my life I’d say, “That is a coincidence.” If it happened tens of thousands of times, that is not a coincidence.
This concept that Pagels finds so unlikely, that there is “some great big person up there who made the universe out of dirt” is precisely what Warren and many millions of Americans believe. I agree that it is absurd, but far from being a “village atheist”, Dawkins seems to be far more aware of what people actually believe than a professional historian of Christianity. I find myself intensely disgusted by the continued and frequent denial of the obvious by the very people who purport to be the experts on the subject — it’s as if they have their eyes firmly closed and refuse to even consider the reality of religious practice.
Now Pagels is a believer; if not the “big person up there”, what does she believe in?
Are you saying that part of the problem here is the notion of a personal God? Has that become an old-fashioned view of religion?
I’m not so sure of that. I think the sense of actual contact with God is one that many people have experienced. But I guess it’s a question of what kind of God one has in mind.
So when you think about the God that you believe in, how would you describe that God?
Well, I’ve learned from the texts I work on that there really aren’t words to describe God. You spoke earlier about a transcendent reality. I think it’s certainly true that these are not just fictions that we arbitrarily invent.
Certainly many people talk about God as an ineffable presence. But if you try to explain what transcendence is, can you put that into words and explain what it means?
People have put it into words, but the words are usually metaphors or poems or hymns. Even the word “God” is a metaphor, or “the son of God,” or “Father.” They’re all simply images for some other order of reality.
Vacuous nonsense, air and fluff, excuses and evasions, nothing at all. Those seem to be our choices in this widely spread argument: the ridiculous anthropomorphic personal entity of the Rick Warren majority, or the etiolated and pointless vapor of the theological intellectuals. Common inanity vs. rarefied insipidity. The Lucky Charms leprechaun vs. invisible fairies in the garden.
I choose none of the above. The nonexistence of any of these idiotic fictions is the only choice that makes any sense.
Spot on.
These two variants of religion need each other for mutual support. Theologians have created a god that is sufficiently vaporous to be non-dissprovable. If the average christian was presented with this image of god, they would reject it because it does not fulfill the emotional need.
But the average christian can profess their belief in a deeply personal god (continually tweaking the laws of physics for their personal benefit), and can avoid the atheist challenge by deferring to the theologians (Dawkins can be ignored because he’s not attacking the ‘real’ christian god). The theologians, meanwhile, benefit from the kudos and deference received from the christian community at large (even though their beliefs are largely tangential).
There was a study (last year? year before?) showing that, in the US, belief in a personal god was inversely related to aducational level. Can’t find it now – does anyone else know where it is?
Yeah? I have a better one for this uhm… other order of reality. How about “Janus”?
Nah, that would be too obvious, eh?
I am also waiting for an answer on this “presupposition” question as well, since the objection without definition has also come up on my blog when I post regarding Dawkins.
Also, Dawkins does address the vague God that Pagels refers to in The God Delusion.
Actually, I’d like to take some objection to my friend P-Zed’s characterization. There’s a difference between God as taught by home-grown fundies in Kansas (say, for example, the pastor of one of the largest churches in Overland Park, KS – see http://tinyurl.com/2brvol ) and God as taught by modern seminaries other than fundie schools. Process theology, for example, is ascendant and holds some interesting ideas that would be perfectly in-keeping with what this interviewee says. I’m not a theologian, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were more enlightened evangelical positions besides.
But what we see here is a technique of argument among atheists: they belittle these ascendant new ways of thinking about God. Harris, in his book _The End of Faith_ memorably snarked about Tillich’s book _The Dynamics of Faith_, calling his a “congregation of one” (if I’ve gotten the quote right). And here P-Zed does pretty much the same.
Har-dee-har-har.
What is it with this movement in the pro-science circles to achieve ideological purity when it comes to religion? Apparently, there should be no constructive discourse between the religious and the areligious. As we’ve seen here, apparently every interaction is to be antagonistic.
Apart from ignoring/missing the ascendancy of these new ways of thinking about God, I think it obvious that this particular flavor of “enlightenment” encouraged by P-Zed, Harris, and the like, if you care to call it that, is a political non-starter. If you’re dealing with a population of people who are highly trained to fear anything that threatens their beliefs in God, it is the pinnacle of political stupidity to have as the centerpiece of your argument that your way of thinking separates people from God. It’s mindless atheistic purism.
There’s much to encourage here, if there is any interest to do so. Here’s a theologian trying to move away from “Big mean skygod will kill us if we pay attention to science.” Instead of encouraging this kind of thinking, P-Zed is bashing it. I haven’t read the book, so maybe I’m putting lipstick on a pig here, but my take on things is that if they’re making steps in the right direction, then perhaps patience and encouragement are in order, not approbation that they haven’t arrived at “the goal” with the first step. P-Zed doesn’t do that for his biology students, but apparently theologically he grants himself a dispensation. Organisms evolve in slow steps, P-Zed crosses the room without leaping immediately to the far door, but with going from godly to godless, there is only his desired outcome and no other intermediate position is acceptable.
Good luck with that.
BCH
The egregious part of Pagels’ comments is that she summarily dismisses Dawkins’ atheism but then can’t or won’t bother to explain her own belief.
For Tom Rees, Michael Shermer conducted a survey on the factors of belief in God in his book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. If I remember correctly, the top two factors are the religiosity of your parents/upbringing (modified by your relationship with your parents) and your level of education. For this latter factor, the higher you go in school, the more likely you are to be an atheist.
Perhaps I’m not the one to be jumping in here, but what the hey … The problem folks like Dawkins and P.Z. have with these theologians is that their musings provide a smokescreen for the masses of believers to use to convince themselves that their beliefs are not intellectually bankrupt. Rick Warren isn’t looking at these sophisticated theologians and saying, “Whoa–I guess my belief in a big Sky Fairy is kind of goofy.” He’s not really looking at those theologians at all, other than to point the skeptics at them when Dawkins raises doubts that he can’t answer.
If this was part of some intellectual process, whereby every year, more and more Christians abandoned their Bronze Age ideas in favor of this more abstract but fundamentally plausible deity, that would be great from the atheist perspective. But it will never happen, because this plausible deity doesn’t inspire the kind of widespread devotion and fanatic loyalty that the kind old guy with the beard and the heavenly thunderbolts to aim at unbelievers does. And the reason why that is, is something that these sophisticated theologians, in my opinion, really ought to be mulling over …
People don’t think rationally most of the time, and most people don’t think rationally at all.
That’s why so few people notice that a god that is so etherial as to be beyond scientific inquiry no longer meets the criteria for existence. That’s why Dawkins is actually wrong when he says science cannot disprove god – for many, many definitions of ‘god’, ‘god’ is logically incoherent and necessarily nonexistent.
Unfortunately Burt Humbug has ignored the subtle and sophistacated new ways of thinking about Odin.
For example, Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir is actually a very real, temporal, metaphorical manifestation of the eternal human ideal of creativity.
Through the appreciation of his multi-leggedness we can come to some very real and relevant insights into the moral nature of the modern man and his valiant struggle to juggle (like an eight-legged horse) the various constricting and enlightening factors that daily assail and inspire her/him.
In fact as we understand Odin’s one-eyedness is a penetrating and sublte insight into the blindness of man vis-a-vis the fact that the world (by which I mean something particularly Norse and horny) is perceived through the pirate eye-patch of our senses and thus half of the world’s mystery and beauty and . . . er . . . non-material aspect is shielded from us.
It is only through a radical re-definition of what the eye-patch is that you can understand the infinite subtleties of the perceived world and how this affects are most subtle moral choices (except of course when it comes to eight-legged horses).
So basically PZ you are an idiot.
For Odin’s sake, get a degree (in something eternally TRUE like Norse studies (you damn viking-wannabe))
((Look double-brackets))
Oli
While “God” used essentially as shorthand for “morality” may not be felt to impinge directly on science, there are of course still obvious problems with such a formulation, e.g., godless=immoral, and “It’s not just how I say to behave, it’s what God says.”
Though I think the state of our knowledge about the Universe is so primitive as to render questionable the possibility of any truly scientific statement about the existence of God or God-like beings (can we really falsify – or, heck, prove – the proposition with a degree of certainty that would be considered acceptable for peer-reviewed publication?), it’s not at all surprising that people are irritated by the propositions that follow from religious belief and seek to scrutinize the basis for such belief with the best tool we have available, i.e., science.
Damn spelling goblins inside my computer attacked my last post.
So I ask you to look beyond the physical reality of the text and see the eternal and timeless message.
Or something.
Oli
Oh shit! Sorry I spelled the name wrong. My bad. Burt Humburg. As we say in Japan, gomen nasai yo.
Sorry.
O.
Oli critiques my justification for the new ways of thinking about Odin. (No need to blockquote, just scroll up a bit.)
Continuing the analogy, if I can (I’m not up on my Norse mythology), Oli forgets the fact that there are more people who believe in Odin than who do not. They own all branches of government and winged-horse studies are a feature of every major university. There simply isn’t the widespread approbation of Odin required to justify political purity when it comes to atheism and (Odinism? What was the name of Norse mythology anyway?).
So here we have new theologians who suggest that perhaps Odin doesn’t mind if we work in our science labs and see scientific discoveries and our control over nature as blessings of Odin himself. Obviously, one can look at these things from an a-Odinistic standpoint, but that the realization that Odinism can use science itself strikes me as a thing to be encouraged.
Because, don’t ever forget, there are far more followers of Odin than not. And they vote.
Oh, but wait, I guess any belief in Odin, no matter how liberal, is intrinsically wrong and any atheist or scientist who gives the time of day to such beliefs is an appeaser.
As I said above, good luck with that.
And now to work. Talk amongst yourselves! :)
BCH
Here, here, PZ. These mush-brained psuedointellectuals like Pagels need to stop pretending they’re Christians. They’re not. In any other period of history, they’d be branded heretics right along with us godless heathens. Their fuzzy metaphorical spirit-thing is emphatically not the God of the Bible, who of course routinely involved himself in the affairs of men and performed physical miracles on behalf of his followers.
The only way to reconcile this is to basically say that the Bible is fictional — at which point, what the Hell basis do you have for any theological claims you’re making? The whole thing just unravels.
*COUGH*
“Continuing the analogy, if I can (I’m not up on my Norse mythology), Oli forgets the fact that there are more people who believe in Odin than who do not.”
You just fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous is “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”, but only slightly less well known is this:
That analogy is just not true about *any* god. Name any one god and it is a fact that there are more people worldwide who disbelieve in that god than who believe in him/her/spaghetti.
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BCH
‘wrong’ is a pretty amorphous term.
I am not sure what exactly you mean (I can come up with several caricatures) when you say that I might think belief in God/Odin is wrong.
I don’t think belief in God is wrong, if I define wrong as implying bad or evil. I think the existence of a defined linguistic meme known colloquially as ‘God’ is highly questionable. I can’t see how the belief itself has any particular moral value. Behaviour based on this belief may be good or bad. I am well aware of the vast amount of good work done by well-meaning religious charities and people, even (this is serious) to those people who offend them the most. And likewise I commend anybody who chooses to support and pursue the only known methods for discovering reliable and repeatable truth about the universe (ie. Science).
That doesn’t mean for a second that the paricular beliefs of those involved gain any truth points. Good people can still hold crazy ideas about the world.
And I believe Norse belief is technically called ‘Asatru’.
Oli
I agree. So then, why is she wasting her time by lowering herself to an intellectually inept attack on Dawkins?
Hw cm Brt Hmbrg lft Knss?
Is anyone using adblock on firefox noticing that the video ads arent’t blocked anymore? I can’t block them now. I’m really close to getting rid of all my scienceblog bookmarks.
Keep in mind, Elaine Pagels doesn’t study modern American Christianity, and probably doesn’t consider herself an expert in 20th or 21st century fundamentalism in America. Her work has been almost uniformly focused on Gnostic Christianity (hence her involvement in the Gospel of Judas press).
When she talks about ‘the people I study’ that’s what she means. I don’t see how a reference to Rick Warren’s beliefs are helpful in addressing that point.
She’s a historian of religion, so she doesn’t agree with Dawkins’ opinions about how harmful, bad and unnecessary it is… surprised?
What is particularly disgusting about the Rick Warren debate is that he fell back on, at the last moment, that most heinous of spiritually devoid gambits: Pascal’s Wager. To me, there is nothing that says, “I don’t really have faith” like claiming that a good reason to believe in God is simply because it makes more sense to hedge your bets that way. Ugh.
Frustrated:
Have you tried using Flashblock in addition to AdBlock? I find it’s pretty helpful at keeping pages uncluttered when I haven’t yet found the proper URLs to block.
I was able to figure it out, I just had to search through the page’s source code to find what I needed to block.
What’s funny is that Elaine Pagels was one of the people who pulled me out of Christianity. Her writings on Christian history ruined it for me, so for that I’m still grateful to her. That aside, you’re spot on with your criticism. Her husband, the physicist Heinz Pagels, was a fantastic person and a great author before perishing in an untimely climbing accident… Perhaps if he were still around he could sharpen her thinking.
I suspect that if Elaine Pagels studied the majority beliefs of the first century middle east, she’d find that gnostic priests were a distinct minority, and that most people were praying to rather more pedestrian gods. I also suspect that the beliefs of those gnostic priests would not translate well to the 21st century, and would look even goofier than Dawkins’ portrayal of modern theologians — there is no salvation for her thesis there.
Burt, I oppose the tepid theology of the theologians because it is dishonest. It represents a febrile strand of apologetics that is in defiance of mainstream belief, but is tolerated by those mainstream practitioners because it is handy to use in deflecting criticism. It supports idiocy instead of supplanting it.
So now scholars of Biblical history are equatable with evangelists? Pagels doesn’t use her podium to promote religious thought, rather she uses it to explore the secular history of Christianity. As The Bower Bird points out, she is responsible for leading some people to new levels of rationality in regard to religious thought – and abandoning it altogether. She doesn’t write books and books attacking we atheists and she’s certainly entitled to her personal opinion about all that, but, really, that is not her focus nor the reason she was interviewed. Besides, what she has to say in regard to “God” as a metaphor is very similar what Dawkins says about physicists who use “God” metaphorically in their statements. I don’t see any important difference and I don’t really understand the point in taking Pagels to task for answering a question about her personal opinion. It doesn’t really prove anything.
Years ago, when I was a religion major studying early Xianity, Pagels played a major role in my education. But now, trying to read her interview in Salon, my eyes just glaze over. It is all more or less fiction; she is simply doing literary exegesis the way Harold Bloom writes about Shakespeare and Milton and James Joyce. I can’t bear to read that kind of stuff about Xianity any longer. She simply refuses to see the obvious, the true heart of the matter: that the reason there were so many conflicting ideas about Xianity in its early centuries is because it was simply invented.
Rick Warren, he’s just an Elmer Gantry, but at least Gantry was played by Burt Lancaster in the movie version. Warren would rate, who? Newman from “Seinfeld”?
I was fighting the good fight on the Salon letters page for this article last night.
According to people defending the article,
Atheists ‘lash out’
We’re responsible for the Nazis (as well as the other 3 great massacres of the last century).
I was asked what proof I would require for a God. I responded ‘A solution to the Reimann Hypotheisis etched on a stone tablet from the almighty,’ but apparently God doesn’t care about such things.
and here’s a couple of good quotes from two different posters
“Like most fundamentalists, it seems most atheists (at least the ones who show up here) are so shakey in their “faith” that they have no alternative but to go on the offensive when presented with a reasonable discourse.”
“Methinks thou [christianjb] doth protest too mucho. I bet you were on your knees praying fervently for supplication and forgiveness the minute after you hit that “Publish My Letter” button.”
————————————-
I’m still waiting for a Salonista to accuse me of being a Republican, a warmonger or a misogynist- which usually happens pretty quickly if you disagree with them.
the things to add to your adblock list appear to be “.brightcove.” and “.specificclick.”, FWIW. the videos do not appear for me any longer, and i do not use flashblock.
Taking a quick break from medicine in between getting vitals and seeing patients and I noticed this comment.
I know we’re all inclined to see things from our own perspective, but if you are a theist, you don’t see these new ways of thinking about God as a means of deflecting criticism. There’s a role for not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here and it isn’t clear to me how this isn’t obvious. Even if you disagree with theology, the efforts to raise Christians out of bronze-age thinking is to be commended, whether it comes in the flavor of theism or atheism. Encourage this and marvel in a few years time when the culture is more enlightened. Maybe not atheistic, but at least not hostile to science.
There’s much here to be encouraged. That’s my point. Make of it what you will.
BCH
WARREN: Sam makes all kinds of assertions based on his presuppositions. I’m willing to admit my presuppositions: there are clues to God. I talk to God every day. He talks to me.
HARRIS: What does that actually mean?
VOICE OFF: It means your pills aren’t working.
“Sleipner” was originally the word for the four men who would haul away the corpse of the sacrifice after he was hung from Odin’s tree. “Sleipner” the eight-legged horse came about thanks to clueless academics who confused Swedish poetics for an actual item.
As to PZ’s atheism we would like to remind PZ that he is God, and as God We would must ask the PZ get over Himself.
Exactly. Science has no need to “disprove god.”
May I impose upon your generosity to cavil over Rick Warren?
According to the Grauniad, Rev Rick Warren, the author of the blockbuster self-help book The Purpose-Driven Life asserts: “You are not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He wanted you alive and created you for a purpose.”
Rickey, baby, my father was born in the year of the Third Reform Bill, 1884. Only when he had attained thirty years of age did he regard himself as mature enough, and as sufficiently well established in a career, to contemplate marriage. To that end he became engaged.
Now, Rickey, all Humanists, and seven out of twelve Fundamentalists, can add thirty to 1884 and
come up with 1914, the year in which a Great War erupted in Europe. My father enlisted.
Somewhere in Flanders, he received what the lads who were obliged to fight the Second World War learned to call a “Dear John Letter”. The destruction of his matrimonial plans was the most grievous wound he received in that whole affray – always, of course, ignoring the death of his youngest brother on the last day of the Battle of Mont Sorel. (By the way, Rickey, for what purpose was the uncle I never met, my late Uncle Hugh, created? But I digress.)
When my father returned from the war, he didn’t marry in his thirties. He didn’t settle down to raise as large a family as the one from which he had sprung — a family which would necessarily have excluded me. He postponed marriage until his early fifties. He then wedded a quite different, much younger woman, and got upon her a single child: yr humble, yr most obedient.
I am something which the First World War made possible.
My presence here on Earth is contingent, inter alia , upon the murder of an Archduke, and the deaths
of tens of millions.
Rickey, baby, had I ( qua god) determined upon the necessity of me ( qua hominid) you may be bloody well certain that I should have contrived less extravagant means.
Those attacking PZ for this post should, yet again, be reminded that Pagels’s remarks only came to his attention because of her frankly rather stupid, and definitely gratuitous, attack on Dawkins.
Pagels is an important scholar whose work I greatly respect. The tired “vilalge atheist” gibe should have been beneath her.
Yet Pagel’s does a great service to atheism. By promoting the existence of multiple mutually hostile initial branchings of christianity, that ended only with the zealots supression of ‘heretics’ by physical threat & actual violence, she brings to modern discussion the absurdity of treating any christisn text as any more credible than the book of mormon.
“If this was part of some intellectual process, whereby every year, more and more Christians abandoned their Bronze Age ideas in favor of this more abstract but fundamentally plausible deity, that would be great from the atheist perspective.”
This is, in fact, what is going on. But its occurring over generations, not years. Its not quite on geologic time, but it is quite slow. If you compare the mainstream religious views of God to where they were 100, 200, 500 and 1000 years ago, you’d see a dramatic shift in how people think about God. If you stretch that back 2000 years, you see things that we frankly consider to be insane accepted and advanced not by priests and theologians, but by the most learned philosophers of the day.
Its slow, it takes time, and really, science is a quite a young addition to the mix that has sped up the process considerably (as has democracy, for that matter).
I think the sense of ringing in your ears or spots appearing before your eyes are ones that many people have experienced, too. But most have more sense than to postulate that there must have been some actual sound or sight that caused the sensation.
Why do so few people consider the possibility that their “sense of contact” might result from something other than actual contact? Many are hostile to the mere *suggestion* that they might be mistaken – even people who in other contexts would cheerfully admit their own fallibility.
It’s partly that they’re trained to accept a particular socially-determined interpretation and display hostility to anyone who challenges that interpretation, of course. But that training seems to come awfully easy to an awful lot of people.
Ok, *why* do you think that’s true? If you’re certain about it you have darn good reasons for that certainty. Right?
I suppose it depends partly on what you mean by “arbitrarily” – I think they are fictions we mostly absorb from other members of society and impose on our vague, undefined internal experiences. Thus they are not arbitrary from an individual standpoint – most people adopt the interpretation that prevails in their culture – but from a broader perspective they are more or less arbitrary (within broad parameters set by human psychology), as we can see from their apparently meaningless variation from society to society.
The variety of religions in the world is the single biggest argument against the idea that everyone’s intuitions are a direct pipeline to universal truth – if that were so, why would universal truth look so different depending on who looked at it? The fact that so many people use the same method to produce so many different answers is proof of the unreliability of the method.
Frustrated:
“Is anyone using adblock on firefox noticing that the video ads arent’t blocked anymore? I can’t block them now. I’m really close to getting rid of all my scienceblog bookmarks.”
I’m a huge fan of “NoScript” myself. It takes care of everything Java, Javascript and Flash, starts out “off” by default, and can be turned on temporarily or permanently by site or universally, without restarting firefox (it does require a page reload, though, which sometimes wipes out forms). For sites that require scripts for full functionality (such as my bank) and don’t annoy the hell out of me with obnoxious abuses of said scripting languages, I leave them activated all the time. I have scienceblogs enabled (I don’t think I can comment without it), but the video ads must be coming from some other server, because I’ve never seen them.
His response to what are logical arguments by Pagels are insanely fanatical. She’s presenting what are fairly rational ideas about a basic inability to describe the indescribable. Something that is really only experiential. What does a sunset look like? Could you really describe it satisfactorily? Yes, there are sages that are exceptional at describing the experience of god, but it is not common, especially by the laymen. Richard Dawkins has become the Christ of the athiest. It blows my mind that athiests like this guy don’t realize that they preach with the same fanaticism as the people they criticize. They hold faith in the idea that they are right. What childishness.
“intellectual christian thought”? Is that something like “contemporary Jedi theology”?
just less believable.
So is a hallucination. You’re in no position to disparage others’ logic if that’s the best you can do.
Thank you, Jimmy, for your insightful commentary. It’s such a relief to find some comments on this site that dare to state the truth. Like you, I find it utterly impossible to describe a sunset. It simply can’t be done! I also cannot describe the plot of Hamlet, what I ate for breakfast, or my shoes. (They’re black and made of leather, but does that really explain them satisfactorily? NO! My shoes are *experiential*.) Therefore, God exists. QED, PZ.
Where is Bérubé when you need him?
From her talk:
The route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion… When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics, as has happened in the US over the past 20 years, all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion, as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.
A fascist aesthetics? A closet endorsement of Chocolate Jesus? A claim that secularism lead to impotence and appeals only to wankers?
Help us, Michael!
What was the name of Norse mythology anyway?
Aesirism? In general it was syncretic polytheism but in specific it was the Indo-European Aesir sky-god pantheon ascendant over the earlier, possibly pre-IE, cthonic Vanyir pantheon. At least as presented by the Eddas.
Wow, calling what Pagels said about Dawkins an “attack” is amazingly thin-skinned. I’d call it a “jibe” at best and certainly one that Mr. Dawkins has the knowledge of context and sense of humor to withstand! Call Dawkins the christ of atheism, now THAT’S an insult – but again, I think he is sophisticated enough to brush that off.
I equate scholars like Pagels with string theorists, actually, and like the ideas that spring from both. I don’t need to accept either as wholly indisputable fact in order to see the worth there. I also don’t need to only have friendships with athiests. Really, this is all getting very nitpicky.
TheBowerbird opines about poor femi-muddled Elaine:
Wow. Three strikes and Bowerbird is O-U-T. No wonder these environs are so oft-referred to as Testosterone Acres.
So if something is indescribable, even to people who believe in the indescribable thing, then the people who find the undescribable thing purely unbelievable are exactly like the most fanatic believers of the indescribable thing? Or actually BECOME the embodiment of the indescriabable thing?
Did I get that right?
Maybe I just didn’t describe it well.
Whoops. My reference above was to Camille Paglia’s talk.
I’m watching her on C-SPAN:
“I have been callimg, for nearly two decades, for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/videolibrary/cache/RAM_196601-1-0-0.ram
Way to go, Camille.
John, Pagels’s remarks about the supposed death of art in a non-religous sociey are also utterly fatuous. How would she know? Until extremely recently there haven’t BEEN any societies that weren’t totally saturated with religion. It’s shocking to see a distinguished historian display such a lack of historical perspective. It’s her emotional involvement with her subject talking there, not her scholarly better nature.
I am a friend of Elaine Pagels. In fact, she translated a Gnostic text – “Thunder, Perfect Mind” – for a piece I wrote.
It is quite true that Elaine’s Christianity would have had her burned at the stake in an earlier age. That, of course, is the entire point of her work, at least to a non-scholarly public, namely to challenge the very notion of what Xianity means. To a public that is used to equating Xian belief with variants of American fundamentalism, Elaine’s work is a surprising reminder that Christianity is not Pat Robertson.
Elaine’s views, which are clearly similar to what’s meant, loosely, by the phrase “Spinoza’s God” – ie, God as identical to nature, with religious practice and scripture as metaphor for imprecise, transcendent oceanic feelings – are extremely common among the more educated church/temple goers. So I don’t think she’s being cowardly, nor is she necessarily uninformed. Whether there are more “metaphorists” than there are folks who believe in a real person in the sky is, I think, something that should be left to the results of surveys, not assumed by Dawkins, Elaine, or anyone else. Anyone know of any?
One final point. The notion of religion as metaphor actually long predates Spinoza. It is, after all, what is behind the ban, among Jews and Muslims, of images of God. Yes, it is true that literalism and reification are also very old. But the notion that Genesis was never intended to be read as literally true is probably as old as Genesis itself. The people who wrote the texts probably never thought in terms of “really happened” in our sense, nor did the redactors who kept two totally different stories, as well as the Sumerian flood tale from Gilgamesh, in the final text. The notion of “historical truth” is not necessarily something that would have meant much 4000 or so years ago.
“Apparently, there should be no constructive discourse between the religious and the areligious. As we’ve seen here, apparently every interaction is to be antagonistic.”
Why should scientists treat the prospect of a dialogue with theologians any more seriously than a dialogue with the homeless man in the park who refers to himself as The Great Sherlock Holmes? Neither have anything to offer science.
The last few decades have seen some of the most prolific interdisciplinary discourse in the sciences, ever. If scientists ever genuinely need to ask theologians (or their hobo-peers) for anything, you can be sure they will.
As far as applauding people who are thinking along the “right track” (away from fundamentalism), this is almost patronising. This isn’t potty training – these are grown men and women. Pissing in the direction of the toilet might be an improvement over pissing everywhere, but it still isn’t making it to the bowl!
“Because, don’t ever forget, there are far more followers of Odin than not. And they vote.
Oh, but wait, I guess any belief in Odin, no matter how liberal, is intrinsically wrong and any atheist or scientist who gives the time of day to such beliefs is an appeaser.”
Appeasers? Oh yeah, I forgot, this rift is due to personal differences between scientists and non-scientists. Not because one of these two parties (guess which one) is interested single-mindedly in objective truth, while the other are simply trying to see how much objective truth they CAN accept while keeping their fallacious, ancient scaffolding intact.
It isn’t a debatable proposition – modern society owes its persistent existence to science, and large portions of the market wholly depend on science for continued innovation. I can see you’re not a fan of this reactionary attitude, Burt – but the time is over for science to pander to belief.
To mince words about science and tiptoe around religion is to do a disservice to the voters – you’re speaking of the Christian majority as though it is an unmovable obstacle scientists have to work around to get anywhere (when, realistically, it’s science that’s not going anywhere).
The political power of religion in America is real, but its persistence can only have negative effects on America’s place in the global market. There are plenty of other enlightened countries where such information pollution has less hold, ready to take up the mantle of Economic Superpower should Christian America falter. When people aren’t willing to listen to reason, tough love is the only (and inevitable) solution.
Pagels didn’t exactly attack Dawkins. She pointed out that the God he spends so much energy debunking is a charicature.
Nor does Pagels “enable” the fundies to believe their religion has an intellectual base. They hate her and think she’s going to hell. They don’t need or want intellectuals in their narrow world.
Nor does she speak for that world or to it, and doesn’t need to.
Of course, according to *some* atheists, only the fundamentalists are “true” believers. Sheesh, why don’t the godless clean up their own ranks first before they go picking and choosing who’s a Christian or not? Honestly, start with the agnostics, who try to pass as godless when really they are more wishy washy than the likes of Pagels.
I’m a huge advocate of keeping religion out of the schools and government, but it’s fruitless to try to eradicate it from peoples’ lives. Until we perfect the brain, making it a perfect computing machine, there will always be areas of non-rational or intuitional thought, and sometimes even faith in its many varietes. To some of us, who may agree with certain points and not others, it’s interesting to read Pagels’ views. It is not, however, our business to tell her what to believe or who she must speak for – she alone gets to choose.
You forgot to finish that sentence: “…in the more liberal Protestant denominations and in Reform Judaism”. (Coming from a Catholic background I can vouch that the statement is nonsense as regards Catholics- there you’d be talking about an “upper crust” of no more than maybe 10% of those who identify as Catholics.) We don’t need a survey to tell us that it’s not at all true of such large and rapidly growing segments as Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, other assorted evangelicals, and Mormons. You’re living in some kind of fantasy world and perhaps so is Pagels. Her work is either unknown or, if known, abhorrent, to the great majority of people in the US who identify themselves as Christians- again, the only surveys needed to draw that conclusion are the ones that measure denominational affiliation..
It’s very much the business of anyone who values intellectual honesty to object when she talks nonsense.
I should clarify that when I said that Elaine’s God is Spinoza’s, I meant this in the loosest manner possible, and not in a precise literal sense. Perhaps I shouldn’t have dragged poor Baruch’s name into this in the first place. For example, Elaine says in the interview she believes in miracles, which Spinoza, of course, did not. However, I suspect that if you pressed Elaine on the subject of miracles, you’d find she simply means something close to “not yet explainable by science” or “statistically highly unlikely” such as Joe Dimaggio’s hitting streak. Her discussion of things like the virgin birth should give a clue that Elaine in no way takes a literalist view of religious doctrines.
Tristero, Pagels is not a Spinozist by a long shot. Spinoza’s pantheism is so thoroughgoing that the great difficulty of distinguishing it from materialism has long been notorious. It’s quite clear from Pagels’s quoted remarks that her god has not yet evaporated to quite that extent (so much the worse for her.)
And I’m saying that the god Dawkins debunked is not a caricature of people’s actual beliefs. When over half the people in this country believe in a strictly literal interpretation of Genesis, it’s safe to say that there are 150,000,000 people here believe in “some great big person up there who made the universe out of dirt”.
I agree that Pagels is an Invisible Fairyist, and that’s a step up from the Lucky Charms Leprechaunist. What I find contemptible, though, is the way these theologians will readily accept the existence of an invisible intangible god, but they deny the existence of the Lucky Charms Leprechaunist type of Christian that I can see every day in my little town.
PZ wrote, way up top:
Calling it a “quaint twist” is apt, since the “new theology” set form in the Gospel was actually expounded in “Three Versions of Judas“, a 1944 short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
Steve, The Catholics I know have a wide spectrum of belief. I’ve met priests for whom the whole shebang is simply as true as anything they can see and touch. And I’ve met Catholics who go to church but think transubstantiation, virgin birth, etc, is totally ridiculous.
I agree: the fastest growing denominations have, as their stated theology, a white-bearded guy in the sky. But I think that if one survyed the members, one would find a wide-range of literal belief. (I also think one would find a tremendous amount of ignorance about the Bible.) Religious belief is not monolithic.
I also admit, as in fact I did, that my experience is primarily among religious liberals. But knowing the incredible variety within their beliefs, I’m not prepared to concede, without a proper survey, that the Guy in the Sky is the pre-dominant theology for most people who identify themselves as religious.
You may be right, but I’m from Missouri.
Steve, I agree with you about Pagel’s remarks in that realm, but it strikes me that is an opinion about one specific role that the wide umbrella of “religion” plays in creativity and I’m not keen to throw away the baby with the bathwater.
Steve, Only in the sense that religious practice and scripture is not literal, but metaphorical. In fact, the “God-drenched” Spinoza has a more specific notion of God than Pagels.
Pagels didn’t exactly attack Dawkins. She pointed out that the God he spends so much energy debunking is a charicature.
So no one actually believes in a God who created the universe and answers prayers and sent his son to die and wrote a book talking about? Well, hell, that’s a load off my chest. I guess we can just stop opposing creationists and stop worrying about those religious folk opposing stem cell research. They don’t believe those things, after all.
“Those people who believe all those crazy things aren’t real Christians! Get with the times! Real Christians believe in… uh… whatever it is I believe. There’s metaphors. Metaphors for other realities. It’s all very intellectual. And it works out great for me, because any time an atheist comes up with an argument, I can just say it doesn’t apply because my God isn’t like that. He’s just this metaphor, you know? In fact, he’s pretty much indistinguishable from nothing, except that he exists. Really. He does! Those mean atheists just can’t accept this new intellectual religion, which is the real new Christianity. All that literalism stuff is so last century.”
Why isnt the isue of brain function and brain chemistry being mentioned? You are dealing with different levels of addiction here. We all know that there is a region of the brain that is succeptable to this “god” stuff. We also know that humans do respond chemically (seritonin/dopamine receptors). Once these receptor are set off (chanting. prayer, fellowship, talking in tongues. I also know that there are 2 types of christians, the ones are are altered chemically and the ones that are there for social networking and just want to fit in – .
We are in a mess here. How do you treat billions of addicts? I have heard that focused electro magnetic radiation can effectivly erase these conditions. So, maybe in the future a controlled airburst…
I’m with Bower Bird on this one. I grew up with Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as one of the very few approved books in the house, and was secretly convinced that it proved that I was wicked. If someone tied me to a bonfire and lit it I knew I would never sing a hymn with so loud and cheerful a voice that (I’d) be heard through all the cracklings of the combustibles, and the noise of the multitude. I knew I would become an instant atheist in exchange for a bucket of water, and consequently go to hell. It was a worrying thing to know about myself.
So when I read Pagels, when I was about 18 or 19, it was a revelation to me. The Bible was a collection of HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS! I had never heard anybody talk of it that way before. I think if she’d been pushing atheism I’d have been suspicious, but her personal views on religion didn’t seem to be an issue, at least to the naive reader I was. What was important was that she treated the Bible as historical documentation, and wrote about the Christian religion in a historical context. I cannot overstate how astonishing that was to me at that time. I was unbelievably ignorant. Because of her I started to question EVERYTHING.
Pagels started me off on a process of learning about the religion I had been brought up to never question, and, really, to never even think about, at least not with any clarity. She gave me a foothold, a place to start.
So actually I don’t care if she goes all wishy-washy over religion. I will always be grateful.
PZ, I’m aware of the statistic about 50% literalist belief in Genesis and that it has been more or less consistent over time. I’m sure that is an accurate figure. And I, too, encounter nearly everyday precisely the kinds of literalist bozos you do.
What I’m interested in is finding out exactly what that survey result means. For example, I’m not prepared to concede that that can only mean half the country agrees with the statement, “I see no contradiction between the two origin tales in Genesis” because, for one thing, I’m not sure half the country is even aware there are two origin tales, let alone they contradict each other.
If pushing back against the intolerance, hate, and anti-scientism that religion can breed has now turned into attacks on Elaine Pagels of all people, then it’s time to pull back and start picking better targets. I don’t find the metaphorical god any more convincing than the personal one, but Pagels is welcome to believe in it if she wants, so long as she doesn’t subject the rest of us to believe in it with her, or tell us that we should conform our society and culture to that belief.
Exactly. Most of the country is completely uninformed and uncaring about the actual content of the Bible — it’s enough to say that they believe every word literally.
Now if everyone who currently blindly accepts the bible on faith were to become aware and accept the vague theology of Pagels, I’d be happy, and I’d be perfectly willing to accept the state of affairs. I probably wouldn’t even bother to criticize Pagelianism, although I would be rolling my eyes a lot.
In the current state of affairs, though, Pagelianism is a sloppy bit of whitewash over an ugly reality — it’s a feeble attempt to provide cover for very bad ideas. That’s why I don’t sit silent now when an otherwise intelligent historian mumbles a few lame excuses for her belief.
Is there any evidence beyond one person’s anecdote in this thread that Pagel’s or any other theologian’s writings have any impact whatsoever outside the narrow field of academic theology? Nevermind the specific impact that you claim here of raising Christians out of bronze-age thinking.
I think that comparing the entire output of all the academic theologians in the English-speaking world to the publication numbers for Left Behind — just the first one, not the sequels — should be instructive in this case.
“Sleipner” was originally the word for the four men who would haul away the corpse of the sacrifice after he was hung from Odin’s tree. “Sleipner” the eight-legged horse came about thanks to clueless academics who confused Swedish poetics for an actual item.
Did those same clueless academics carve this image in the 8th century?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ardre_Odin_Sleipnir.jpg
Or is that a realistic representation of four guys in a horse costume?
So Elaine Pagels can spout fluff and nonsense, and we’re not supposed to criticize it because, well, she’s Elaine Pagels? I don’t get it. Who else is on the list of being immune from criticism? Can I get on it?
In the current state of affairs, though, Pagelianism is a sloppy bit of whitewash over an ugly reality — it’s a feeble attempt to provide cover for very bad ideas.
Okay, yes I take that point. Instead of acknowledging the existence of fire-breathing literalists who must be repelled at all costs, she’s dodging by saying that most people she knows don’t think that way (which is probably true, I can’t imagine she has a lot of fundies in her social circle). Here I confess my ignorance: have any non-fundamentalist, non-literalist biblical scholars written something along the lines of “Saving Christianity from Crazy People”? It wouldn’t do much for me as a matter of belief, but it would stake out a position against the… well, crazy people…. which I’d appreciate.
Correction: looking again at the original quote, Pagels is indeed talking about what people believed a very, very long time ago, and not now. Dawkins, though, IS talking about what people believe now, and it would be worth acknowledging that point.
I think this is basically true, but the process is less linear than you make it sound like. One factoid I’ve always found interesting is that many leaders of the American Revolution and early politicians in this country were deists. Jefferson’s Bible and all that. While the modern equivalents of their specific beliefs would probably be Unitarianism or something, the way those individuals arrived at those beliefs would almost certainly lead to agnosticism or atheism today. Yes, that’s just supposition on my part, but after all, it’s not like there was any non-theistic story of pre-history out there to consider as an alternative. According to Wikipedia, three of the first four presidents were avowed Deists, as was Lincoln.
… But that’s it, not counting a few whose religious beliefs were undefined, or the many non-presidential Americans, of course. So while it’s broadly true that a scientific worldview is more accepted and successful today than it was 100 years ago, and moreso then than it was 500 years ago, there are gaps and pushbacks. Just because things are going well overall now, doesn’t mean they can’t get worse again.
PZ, Burt: If I may be so bold, I think much of this exchange misses the mark.
For example, Burt correctly points out that a doctrinaire rejection of all believers (including, I suppose, folks like me) is a political non-starter. But is this relevant? Even Sam Harris, our century’s answer to Thomas Paine, doesn’t appear to be running for public office. As a personal matter, I don’t feel rejected by folk like PZ or Dr. Dawkins. In fact, I can testify that both have lent me a dollop of assistance and advice upon occasion, so apparently their public pronouncements have not transformed either of these gentlemen into private ideologues. Interesting!
In the same vein, PZ rails against the rarified thought of the contemporary religious scholar whose eminence could be appropriated by fundies who would not share the former’s heterodoxy. Yet, in my experience many of these scholars are forthright in rejecting fundamentalism, so from my point of view they seem no more or less guilty of enabling the opposite side than many scientists whose words have been taken out of context.
I conclude, therefore, that what matters is whether or not the individuals in question blunder in attempting to *privilege* their views. We are able to interact with one another and make common cause to the extent that we are able to avoid that pitfall, I think. Burt, I suspect that neither you or PZ would regard anyone unable to make that commitment as a natural ally, whether they happened to agree with you, or not! And, as allies go, I admire the things both of you fellas have done on behalf of science education! Cordially…SH
I see Newsweek pandered to its no doubt largely religious audience by letting Warren have the last word, with that short-bus Pascal’s Wager riff. Yeah, if you can’t find any real reason to believe, do it because you’re too chickenshit to work out the actual odds.
Distilled, Pagels’ sniffing dismissal of Dawkins is just a garden variety No True Scotsman argument.
Humburg, above, tries his version of this slippery move:
It’s worth pausing to note the chutzpah required to dismiss tradition in theology in favor of ‘modern’ (cutting edge!) seminary studies.
Not too many generations ago, that was grounds for being paid a little visit from the Inquisition.
With regards to the idea that Pagels’ brand of theology is helping lift people out of the “Bronze Age” ideals of fundamentalist religion, it seems to me that more and more people are embracing biblical literalism and fundamentalism, not the other way around. I’m not old enough to remember the sexual revolution etc. of the 60s and 70s, but many, many people who I just graduated an elite college with were very fundamentalist, and very conservative. At an election night party in 2004, the vast majority of people were pulling for Bush, for reasons that ranged from “he will fight stem cells” to “he will fight abortion” to “Kerry is a pussy.” My impression is that my generation is more religious than my parents’ and it’s getting worse. Thoughts?
Unfortunately, that “specific notion” boils down to “everything that is”- hence his phrase “Deus sive natura”. Good luck distinguishing that conception logically from, for example, Bertrand Russell’s “neutral monism”. Again, this has been notorious among commentators on Spinoza for a very long time.
Trsitero, don’t you see that you’re simply refuting yourself? People who aren’t even aware of the disparate accounts of the creation in Genesis are for damned sure NOT people whose religion is of the rarified Pagels variety.
Atheist should enjoy Pagels as the work withe gnostic gospels just emphasizes that Xtian as any other religion has no pure no single voiced expression of “god’s[‘] word”. It’s all pre-scientific pap. Enjoy the dissolutionist.
So here we have new theologians who suggest that perhaps Odin doesn’t mind if we work in our science labs and see scientific discoveries and our control over nature as blessings of Odin himself.
Which part of that is new theology. I think the Greeks, for example, had that new theology there for a while but then all of the sudden Odin started getting all uppity again. Lol.
I know we’re all inclined to see things from our own perspective, but if you are a theist, you don’t see these new ways of thinking about God as a means of deflecting criticism.
Okay thanks. Here’s a quote from Pagels:
“Well, I’ve learned from the texts I work on that there really aren’t words to describe God.”
All those texts she read and she learned that there really aren’t words to describe God. Okay, thanks for the honesty Ms. Pagels, and thanks for not deflecting criticism.
More Pagels: “People have put it into words, but the words are usually metaphors or poems or hymns. Even the word ‘God’ is a metaphor, or ‘the son of God,’ or ‘Father.’ They’re all simply images for some other order of reality.”
Oh okay, thanks. Those are all metaphors. Thanks for not deflecting critcism. And thanks for the new theology. It rocks!!
Scott Simmons nails it: But it will never happen, because this plausible deity doesn’t inspire the kind of widespread devotion and fanatic loyalty that the kind old guy with the beard and the heavenly thunderbolts to aim at unbelievers does. And the reason why that is, is something that these sophisticated theologians, in my opinion, really ought to be mulling over …
Spot-on, Scott, and let me add another dimension: social class and ethnicity. I’ve worked in “pink collar” jobs alongside a lot of women of color and low-income women.
These women I met, decent, solid (and mostly single) mothers, spent hours in church, just hours, singing, clapping, jumping around, maybe speaking in tongues and all that. They talk about church all the time and it occupies a great deal of their lives. They get support from the “we can do it! We can improve our lives with God’s help!” spectacle and I am loathe to take that from them – but they don’t break it down into rational, attainable steps how to “do it.” This is a form of cultural capital that they didn’t learn in their environment.
The more charismatic churches sap their worshippers energy and they come to work utterly exhausted. Convinced that all they need is God, they are heirs to exhaustion; and they have all this motivation but no real idea of the hierarchical actions required of one to, say, actually get a written recommendation or choose a college. (They give away a lot of their money to church, too.) Their skill level often didn’t match the job (not because they lied in the interview, but because they honestly felt that they “can do it”) and I literally showed people how to use the computer, how to alphabetize and refile documents, and in one case, how to type on the typewriter (and how to hide this lack of skill set from the boss until they did have it). Never did I rat out a coworker to the boss.
Since church is so important to people’s lives I wish the pastors would hold seminars about concrete skills that people really need, instead of emotionally blowing people away with the We are joyful! Every! Single! Second!
How can people think with all this going on? But as Dawkins’ once said about these “happy, clappy churches,” “They are afraid of thinking.” Actually, I think he was quoting a mainstream theologian, but still.
Atheist should enjoy Pagels as the work withe gnostic gospels just emphasizes that Xtian as any other religion has no pure no single voiced expression of “god’s[‘] word”. It’s all pre-scientific pap. Enjoy the dissolutionist.
Yeah, the Christians had that there new theology there for a while, too. Odin, uppity, pot, kettle, blah blah blah…
Whatever the innate intelligence of people like Pagel, their inability to do the only sensible thing and simply part with their untenable ideas about the supernatural turns them into blithering, self-contradicting morons. “We just don’t have words for God” and “There’s no way to physically descibe God” are bald-faced retreats from a reality that continues to further erode religious dogma from all angles — a desperate effort to protect an idea that has no place in the extant world.
The questions asked by Dawkins and Harris are absolutely legitimate, and necessary, in a world full of people who insist that their supposedly extant god should hold sway over our political and educational systems, and the only answer morons like Pagel have is to complain and come up with insulting terms for the questioners. To a rational person, they look like childish, colossal fuckheads.
Life would be so much more rewarding for people in the grip of faith-woo if they could just abandon it in good conscience, but unfortunately it’s not that easy.
PZ, Agreed. If all that was going on was Pagelianism, there wouldn’t be much to worry about. You might roll your eyes, someone else might be curious, but there would be little of this nonsense you (and I, and many others) are so rightly alarmed about.
Also agreed, Elaine is not beyond criticism. I like her, both personally and as a scholar, but that is no reason not to confront her when she’s wrong or when one simply disagrees. Among other things, failure to disagree, and strongly, is rather insulting.
FWIW, the Salon interview is the most specific that I know of (there are others, in all likelihood) where Elaine talks about her own beliefs. In her books, she discussed the history of the texts without reference to her own beliefs until “Beyond Belief” which was long after she became (relatively) famous. I saw her once on a panel with a devout Catholic and a very liberal evangelical. Both the Catholic and the evangelical made a point of pompously proclaiming their own “faith,” implying that their “witness” was somehow important in weighing the truth of what they said. Elaine spoke entirely in terms of the history she had studied, never alluding to her personal beliefs.
Also, in speaking with her, Elaine has made her impatience/contempt with the ignorant fanatics, like Dobson et al, very clear. All her work as an historian is a conscious, highly polemical response to the growth of christianism and the religious right (in fact, according to some scholars, her take on the Gnostics distorts their views to make them more palatable to modern liberal sensibilities). And she very publicly denounced Passion of the Christ.
In short, I truly think it is mistaken to assume that Elaine believes Dawkins attacks a “caricature” and not a very real, very disturbing trend in American Christianity. True, she clearly is not an atheist, but I think she sees the dangers of christianism and religious fanaticism quite clearly. There is more than one way to confront christianism and her discussion of the Judas gospel is, in fact, just that.
There can be no constructive discourse until we know what it is the religious are attempting to claim. What you are interpreting as a desire for “ideological purity” is really just the simple attempt to establish the terms of the discussion.
This is the problem with liberal, moderate believers. They recognize that believers with strong metaphysical claims sound like (and frequently are) lunatics. Therefore the liberal believer jettisons any specific claim except for the basic claim that God exists, to which they cling tenaciously. Any attempt to establish what they actually mean by that is met with waffling, hedging and frequently very poetic expressions of nothing at all. They cannot tell you what they specifically believe. They are instead very skilled at only telling you what they specifically do not believe and how they feel about whatever inspecific thing they do believe (viz., “warm and fuzzy”). A frequent trick is to claim their inspecificity as a liberally enlightened recognition of the incomprehensible nature of God, a clever but useless deflection.
I question the characterization of this position as any sort of progress. It is instead an empty rhetorical tactic meant to thwart discursive progress. It is the mark of someone who wants to be left out of debate, but cannot quite bring himself to stay out of it by keeping silent.
tristero, if you’re looking for more statistics, the NSF does a yearly study; this year’s set says that about forty percent of Americans believe that humans are descended from earlier species of animals. (More than half of Americans think lasers focus sound waves, too.) There’s also this set of statistics about evolution, showing 42% support for creationism, 48% for evolution–but 18% of those (making around 8.5% of the total, if I’m reading the article right) believing in theistic evolution, making a total (roughly) 50/40 split for theistic and non-theistic beliefs in human origins, respectively.
Now, I suppose one can hold those beliefs and be a deist, since they just require a creation, not current miracles or an immanent god who chucks lightning bolts at gays.
A somewhat older set of surveys (1991 and 1993) say that 63% believe in the existence of god (of course, that’s vague), 55% believe in an afterlife, 34% in an inerrant bible, 45% in the devil, 50% in hell, 63% in heaven, and 46% in the existence of miracles. Of course, that’s all very vague, but it certainly shows that when we speak about Christianity, it’s absolutely legitimate to address it to that group of people.
“Well, I’ve learned from the texts I work on that there really aren’t words to describe God. ”
Funny thing, I know of this concept that doesn’t have any words to describe it, this thing doesn’t exist. That is probably why there are no words to describe it.
Steve, I don’t see how I’m refuting myself. I’ve never denied that the ignorant are unaware of Pagels. What I’m trying to get at vis a vis the literalists is simply a variant of the old Gary Larson cartoon: we know they’re nuts, but exactly what kind of nuts are they?
I submit that knowing that 50% of Americans take the Bible literally is not only deeply disturbing, but deeply puzzling. I want to know exactly what that means. That is all.
My hypothesis is that religious literalism is not monolithic but occupies a spectrum and that there is less absolute literalism than there is ignorance and partial literalism. If this is the case, and I think it is, it would be very useful to know more about it.
I’m certainly not denying that christianists are dangerous political operatives, and that there are lots of ’em. I want to know more about them and their followers, not so I can empathize with them, but so that I can confront them more efficiently.
As I’ve said many times. Religious tolerance and diversity: no problem. Fanaticism cloaked as devout “faith” that operates in the political cultural domain to grab/consolidate power: that is exceedingly dangerous.
grendelkhan, Thanks for the stats. As I said, I’m aware of them. And we both agree they are vague. All I’m saying is we need more information on these people. A lot more.
Why? So we can craft more effective strategies to confront and defeat them politically. Agreed, Dawkins’ approach is effective. But I think there are others that are also effective, including Elaine’s. Her work in the wider public sphere is all of a piece, namely to deny that Dobson’s “Christianity” equals all of Christianity, or is even a particularly valid offshoot.
Yes, it’s academic and the number of people involved is small, but my guess is that until The God Delusion, about as many Americans read Elaine’s books as Dawkins. I wouldn’t dismiss her or her approach out of hand. The Gnostic Gospels was a bestseller, and still sells exceedingly well. (I suspect that Dawkins now has more readers, however.)
Kristine (OM!): I am intrigued by your comments (as usual). Is it your impression that the exhausted women you’ve observed are actually hurting their ability to compete in the workplace? Would they be, in your judgement, better off not going to church just in terms of being more energetic, more alert, etc. ?
Tristero, that is a very interesting comment (to me, at least) about Pagels not proclaiming her Christianity in her books, and not usually publicly either. That was the impression I had as well, but had wondered whether it was just that I didn’t see it – it is a long time since I read her.
I must admit that I am a bit puzzled by what she says in the Salon interview. It feels a bit odd to me that something she wrote could make it so clear to me that Christianity is just another religion (and ultimately to a rejection of religion), but it didn’t work that way for her. It makes the whole question of a need for religion being sort of embedded in some people (but not all, obviously) seem far more plausible. Is it possible that it isn’t something people can choose? Maybe we are born with a need for some kind of religion (however wishy-washy), or not. Maybe that’s why religious people who attack science insist on talking about atheists ‘belief’ in science. Maybe they are incapable of imagining a life without SOME kind of belief.
Sorry, that was supposed to be ‘religious people who attack atheism.’
(It’s past my bedtime.)
Clare wrote, “Here I confess my ignorance: have any non-fundamentalist, non-literalist biblical scholars written something along the lines of ‘Saving Christianity from Crazy People’?”
Yes. John Shelby Spong.
Addendum: Spong is not a biblical scholar, per se; he’s an Episcopal bishop, but he does utilize a great deal of scholarship, cites his references, provides a real bibliography, etc.
Prof. Myers:
I, too, was led out of religion by Pagels, whose histories of early Christianity could easily lead one to realize it was all made up. I think as a historian in this field she would lose credibility by saying “this is what you should, or should not believe.”
A writer on BeliefNet said: “Elaine Pagels changed the historical landscape of Christianity by exploding the myth of the early church as a unified movement.” I think the sentiment is quite accurate. (Others, of course, joined her in this revelation of truth.)
PZ, I would ask you to read what Pagels says about the Gnostic Gospels:
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/128/story_12865_1.html
That statement is supported by her heavily researched works. For thinking people who were force fed religious doctrine (as I was) books like hers are often the best way out of the bunkum. A person with even a moderate intellect will not change his mind simply by being told “You’re wrong.” It doesn’t work that way.
What does she believe in? When her first book came out and she was doing the talk show circuit, a close friend of mine told me Pagels was asked if there was a god, and she allegedly replied … “we’ve made it all up.”
Since then, she has lost her husband and her son within a short time. Her “Beyond Belief” book talks of her going back into a church community to seek solace.
I think she honestly may be at sea about what she believes. If one is fed religious tripe at an early age, even years of study and self-proclamations of agnosticism or atheism might evaporate with an emotional shock. The addiction of the Christian religion with its idea that, after we die we’ll see the people we love and everything will be warm and fuzzy, is a hard one to break.
I do not fault her for her fuzziness. I wonder why she doesn’t just stand up and say “It’s all made up”. But I can understand why she may not be able to.
Really, if it weren’t for the “sophisticates” insisting that yes, their god is exactly the same as the sky fairy, who would ever be able to tell? The god of religion is an agent–it at least does things, even if it has a problem coping with things like iron chariots now and then. The god of theology is so subtle and watered-down that its claimed “omnipotence” becomes impotence. Nobody worships the god of theology–what would be the point?
The god of religion is impossible but relevant; the god of theology is vaguely plausible but utterly irrelevant to human life. You can watch the shells move around at astonishing speed as religious apologists attempt to switch in whichever one is more convenient at any given moment. Heck, even Pope Ratzi just preached a fire-and-brimstone speech and had his theologians do the “well, it’s just metaphorical fire” spin control afterwards. Disgusting.
Then she should have the common sense to keep quiet instead of denouncing atheists.
PAGELS SPEAKS THE TRUTH
“I think the sense of actual contact with God is one that many people have experienced. But I guess it’s a question of what kind of God one has in mind.”
Ironically, she reveals the essence of the dilemna…WHAT KIND OF GOD ONE HAS IN MIND
The figure of speech “to have something in mind,” can refer to a perceived external event or to an internal event that is perceived. Believers cannot differentiate between the two.
Well said. I find myself encountering this response increasingly of late: “Well, of course THAT naive, simplistic view of God is preposterous…but nobody really believes THAT anymore…” Whereas, of course, millions of people believe, or purport to believe, precisely that.
And they believe in Satan and Hell too….
To the vast majority of christians, these are not metapors.
They might need some special form of clearasil for metapors,
metaphors on the other hand…
I notice she’s also not a very thorough historian, at least in the interview. Nowhere does she address the possibility that some or all of the gospels is fiction / midrash. (In fact, it was learning about the non-canonical gospels that pushed me in that direction.)
Even the Jesus Seminar reduces the gospels to almost nothing.
Mike Haubrich: “Presuppositionalism” is basically the idea that “you have your starting point, so you conclude X and I have mine so I conclude Y and picking starting points is somewhat aribtrary, so a pox on both our houses – except that I can now be Christian and ‘just as ratrional’ as you guys”. I trust you can see the many, many flaws with it.
John: And yet, how is claiming that “God is a metaphor” compatible with being a Christian?
Will E: And reinvented. And retconned.
tristero: Spinoza also said it was useless to pray and many other things that believers want. I don’t think the masses of religious folk are going to adopt that (not without genuine alternatives to the needs that religious fulfill – the Marxian point).
Jimmy wrote (#41):
Well, a lot of people could describe a sunset — and indeed have done so.
Whether such has been done “satisfactorily” would depend on one’s criteria for
satisfaction, of course. But certainly one could describe a sunset sufficiently
satisfactorily that the description would be recognizable as a sunset.
More generally, I don’t personally have any great problem with the believers
in a maximally indescribable ‘god’ — at least in principle. I do not
think that they provide aid and comfort to the fundamentalists in any meaningful
way, or anything like that.
What I do find annoying is that in practice, everyone who adopts this
position seems unwilling to put it into practice themselves. For example, if Pagels truly
believes what she says:
… then there really isn’t anything more to be said, is there?. If there are no words,
then one can’t really do theo-logy, can one? If there are no words, then the
only option seems to be to follow Wittgenstein’s advice and “remain silent”.
Keith Douglas wrote, “Nowhere does she address the possibility that some or all of the gospels is fiction / midrash. (In fact, it was learning about the non-canonical gospels that pushed me in that direction.)”
Absolutely, I second those sentiments. The biblical authors were in many ways literary masters. Perhaps the only way, I would say.
All I got from this post was ‘dirt’ and ‘attorney’.
The rest is all opinion and up to interpretation. #:^)
tristero,
don’t drag Missouri into this (do you talk to people from MO, I lived there for years and they’re mostly biblical literalists!).
here’s a statistic from a Newsweek survey
the url is http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6650997/site/newsweek/
so, I showed you and all that. Most of my acquaintances insist that Mary was a literal, physical virgin when she gave birth to Jesus and that Jesus’s father was indeed the holy spirit/god. These people believe in the literal bible and they think those who don’t are going to Hell even if they don’t actually know what the bible says. This thread has been an interesting read, I’ll be back after my lecture..
And it’s very difficult to distinguish between those concepts. ;)
Well shit in my primitive appreciation for art I thought Monet did a purty good bang up job of ‘describing’ a sunset. Suppose I will concede the caveat ‘satisfactorily’ that is a gap fer shore.
Ditto on Pagels pushing me over the edge to reject christianism in general and particularly the contrived set with which i was raised. She is out of touch with what bee-leeeeevers in general carry around with them as metaphysical baggage. She should tune into the public cable channel here in Knoxville for a good dose o’ that, methinks. It is hard to come down out of one’s ivory tower and consort with the rabble, particularly when you know they would like to burn you at the stake (if they could just figure out what in the tarnation you are saying).
So Warren is admitting that this immigration issue encounter happened once, and was a complete coincidence?
Well, at least that’s honest.
PZ:
You’ve got to be careful about rolling your eyes. It makes your view of reality dark and gritty …
Would they be, in your judgement, better off not going to church just in terms of being more energetic, more alert, etc. ?
You know we don’t agree on religion so I’m going to try to be objective here and hold off on what I think they “should” do. I accept that people are different than me.
These women are sick and tired for a miriad of reasons, not just church. But my point is, if “the church is its people” then it has an obligation to recognize when it’s not helping, when what it’s doing is beside the point. I am talking about people who never grew up middle-class, and did not absorb from their environment the specific information about taking tests, resumes, professionalism on the job, skills, etc. They must learn this overtly, the way one learns a foreign language, because so many of them had no role models in this respect. But how and where do they learn it? They can’t envision the steps of even how to look for a book in the library, and they’re ashamed to ask someone in authority, so they’d ask a peer (me at the time).
I wasn’t a believer but at least in my church there was an emphasis on intellectualism, upon the writings of the church fathers, upon *gasp!* memorization, which at least trains the mind to work through intellectual puzzles and problems, and grounds one in western culture. We learn by doing, and this is still a form of rational thinking. We learned to use the church library, too. No, I didn’t believe in God but this type of practice was useful in other areas. It taught me to plan (and to plan my escape!). ;-)
It at least made me practice following a line of logic (such as the logic was). It gave me cumulative knowledge of history and literature and art. But today, that’s not what people are getting. They’re getting stimulus-response, happy-clappy instant feelgoodness. It’s anti-intellectual. Then they’re supposed to leave this environment and function in an entirely different one, one in which they are expected to be well-versed in (white, middle-class) cultural knowledge and to follow lines of logic and solve intellectual puzzles. They’re expected to plan and engage in abstract thinking. Well, those members of the “happy clappers” who are already middle-class (probably because they left the mainline church) then leave the service and rejoin the middle-class world that they already know how to negotiate, leaving the other members of the church, once again, without role models.
It’s terribly hard to move up without role models. Again, I use the phrase “cultural capital” to demonstrate this. It’s hard for middle- and upper-class Americans to appreciate how lost someone is when s/he is the first one to break into a professional environment. Most people don’t realize how much stealth information they absorb from their family and peers about how to think logically in a professional world. And then there’s the church of today, remade in the image of the mall and TV, getting everyone hopped up, hyped up, with services lasting hours, with immediate rewards. How many times do people need to be told “God loves you!” For how many times a week? For how many hours? Maybe this is liberating for people who are already middle-class and have been socialized to function in mainstream America. But all this does is teach people who were never middle-class to get impatient when results are not immediate. It raises their expectations about what they’re supposed to be feeling when they work (it is normal to feel fear and anxiety, but they expect holy joyfulness all the time). It teaches them to be completely unrealistic about how the work world is supposed to be, which makes them easily discouraged. It’s a handicap, because it’s anti-intellectual.
There was a recent survey highlighted in Newsweek about how little Americans know about the Bible. Holy crap, think about that. Americans are eating, drinking, breathing religion, but they don’t know the Bible – and I do. What does that tell you?
It’s interesting to note that several separate stories from Norse mythology establish the pursuit of knowledge as Odin’s primary motivating force. Not only was he willing to make disfiguring exchanges and embark on risky quests in order to obtain knowledge for himself, but he also went to great lengths to secure wise advisors. Pretty admirable qualities, I’d say. If he was a real leader today, you can bet he’d be pumping enormous amounts of money into science research.
Of course, he was a dishonorable, murderous deceiver, and he’d surely be hoarding the results of that research. And then there’s the human sacrifice part. So nevermind about the whole “admirable” thing, I guess.
Just sounds like a typical politician to me. ;)
Elaine Pagels may dis Dawkins with lines like “village atheist” and PZ may dis Pagels for doing so — but I get the feeling they’re all smiling and winking knowingly at each other and acting out this “good-cop, bad-cop” game on the fundies who don’t know that both science and Biblical history and archeology demolish the primitive beliefs of fundies.
However, the truly weird Christian believers are people like Andrew Sullivan whom Sam Harris is also debating:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,536,God-Is-Not-a-Moderate,Sam-Harris-and-Andrew-Sullivan-Beliefnetcom
And I’ve blogged on it:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2007/02/harris-versus-sullivan-battle-continues.html
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2007/02/harris-versus-sullivan-battle-becomes.html
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2007/03/sam-harris-very-politely-disagrees.html
Obviously it should be recognized as a problem to hold up yet another vacuous and non-real (not used) theology in response to criticism of apologetics. (But I note however that process theology posits interventionist gods, so it is amenable to Dawkins methods as I understand it.)
But apologists don’t change easily, otherwise they wouldn’t be apologists. The bait-and-switch technique where religious and theologists covers each others problems is also still too valuable.
I guess that also explains why a post answering a common technique of argument among religious, to belittle new ways of thinking about gods, is rejected on similar arguments. It doesn’t suit the purpose, so the apologist is blind for the irony.
Btw, for someone with the least interest in understanding phenomena, it is obvious what Dawkins is doing. He is reducing an area into a part that he can handle with tools available to him. It also happens to be the worst part of a problem he perceives. It isn’t a belittling of beliefs, but an honest analysis.
This can be completely reversed. Here is a scientist trying to move away from “Big mean skygod” et cetera. Instead of encouraging this kind of thinking, Burt is bashing it.
So where does all these effortless reversals of apologetics descriptions leave us? Well, at the very least in a position where apologetics need to find new arguments. Which in itself is nothing new. :-)
Obviously it should be recognized as a problem to hold up yet another vacuous and non-real (not used) theology in response to criticism of apologetics. (But I note however that process theology posits interventionist gods, so it is amenable to Dawkins methods as I understand it.)
But apologists don’t change easily, otherwise they wouldn’t be apologists. The bait-and-switch technique where religious and theologists covers each others problems is also still too valuable.
I guess that also explains why a post answering a common technique of argument among religious, to belittle new ways of thinking about gods, is rejected on similar arguments. It doesn’t suit the purpose, so the apologist is blind for the irony.
Btw, for someone with the least interest in understanding phenomena, it is obvious what Dawkins is doing. He is reducing an area into a part that he can handle with tools available to him. It also happens to be the worst part of a problem he perceives. It isn’t a belittling of beliefs, but an honest analysis.
This can be completely reversed. Here is a scientist trying to move away from “Big mean skygod” et cetera. Instead of encouraging this kind of thinking, Burt is bashing it.
So where does all these effortless reversals of apologetics descriptions leave us? Well, at the very least in a position where apologetics need to find new arguments. Which in itself is nothing new. :-)
Burt Humbug:
“I haven’t read the book, so maybe I’m putting lipstick on a pig here, but my take on things is that if they’re making steps in the right direction, then perhaps patience and encouragement are in order, not approbation that they haven’t arrived at “the goal” with the first step.”
What the metaphysical gymnastics of this kind of theological thinking seeks to accomplish is not movement away from the bearded skyking for the sake of eventual and gradual abandonment of bronze-age myth, but an insulation from meaningful attack.
It is not a step in the right direction, it is the construction of a shelter with which to protect their well-worn mythology from increasingly popular criticism.
Far from admirable, this is simply a strategy to get more mileage out of the myth by appearing enlightened (that is, by downplaying the facts of actual christian faith), and hiding the easily attacked and laughable notions that both moderate and fundamental christians cherish under their structure of metaphysical framing.
The theological stance that god is indefinable and impossible to articulate, and that the religious rituals and anthropomorphic image of the bearded white guy to which the grand majority of professed christians dedicate their faith is only a metaphore is the philosophical equivalent of that 12 year old who, in backyard games of “War” shouts that he is “invisible and invincible” so you he can’t be shot. It’s a bullshit move on the face of it, and they’re taking people like BCH for a ride.
He was also as all (asa) gods a lecherous philanderer.
But at least he didn’t change form and sex to birth Sleipner as a mare, as Loki did.
He was also as all (asa) gods a lecherous philanderer.
But at least he didn’t change form and sex to birth Sleipner as a mare, as Loki did.
Wait, does that include Bragi? If it does, I’m crushed.
Process theology, for example, is ascendant and holds some interesting ideas …
But what we see here is a technique of argument among atheists: they belittle these ascendant new ways of thinking about God.
I can tell you right now you’re not going to get most African-American believers in this country to buy process theology. Nor ecumenical Baptists of any ethnicity, for that matter – or most anybody who is a victim of the outsourcing of blue-collar jobs from this nation. That’s why Dembski is admired for bashing process theology. He knows how to get an audience in today’s America.
The point I have been belaboring here (sorry) is that there are different classes of theology that mirror the experiences of people in different social classes. Concrete thinkers want a concrete God. They don’t want what they call a “wimp God” who is a force or a way of being, or a God who is limited in knowledge or goodness. Who the hell is Pagels to say that people don’t believe in “big person up there who made the universe out of dirt”? They do. They’re not all fundies; many of them vote Democrat. Yet they overwhelmingly believe in faith healing, in miracles; they tend to be uninsured; way too many believe that AIDS was manufactured in a lab to kill black people (I’m not kidding you) and this has been preached from the pulpits (I’m not making this up).
Religion is as religion does. Americans are in denial about what religion is really doing to this country. Saying “I’m not a fundy” is like saying “I’m not racist.” Bully for you – but it’s still a systemic problem.
…some great big person up there who made the universe out of dirt…
Dang, a Straw God…
I was greatly annoyed with Karen Armstrong’s A History of God for the same reason as PZ is irked by Pagels. Though she disdains the thunderbolt-hurling fundamentalist sky-man, and that can’t help but be an improvement, in its place she substitutes some content-eviscerated notion of “God” that is deliberately left so vague that it’s impossible to say anything at all about it. And then she has the nerve to say atheists are too limited in their conception of God – that’s the step that annoys me.
Kristine: We may not agree on beliefs, but (my goodness) we share a lot of opinions. I concur, the ‘happy clappy’ church conditions significant numbers of people in a manner that keeps them ignorant and easy to manipulate, and many of them suffer in the ‘real world’ as a result.
Sadly, the unrealistic expectations that are raised by this approach are rarely directed back at the hierarchy at whose trough they drink; instead, convenient demons (liberals, gays, treehuggers, etc.) are offered as targets.
Eventually the only sense of accomplishment such folk experience is membership and participation within their belief system as one of the ‘elect’. No wonder so many of them come to have a deep hatred of the present world and look forward, Tim LaHaye-style, to its imminent destruction.
Yet, as you point out, so many of the biblically inerrant crowd are also biblically illiterate. You ask what this tells me? I would respond (with some irony) that they have succumbed to a debased form of the ‘priesthood of the believer’, one that so devalues reason and tradition that they willingly rely upon their authority figures to interpret scripture for them, rather than read it for themselves!
I’m a Methodist myself, so I often feel as if I’m a member of another species among such folk. Out of curiousity and a desire for understanding, in what religious tradition did you experience at least a partial appreciation for the life of the mind?….SH
What Pagels is talking about is what I was taught as orthodox Catholic exegesis and systematic theology in seminary.
Exactly. If- like our very own Scott Hatfield- such people would simply say what they believe without feeling the necessity of trashing atheists, I’d have no quarrel with them. I really don’t understand what they’re on about.
Indeed, mysogyny is the only possible explanation for this sentiment, since clearly this person’s spouse was not involved in an area of study which requires logical analysis, nor is the potential for positive effects on a person’s attitudes and behavior from relationships anything more than a patriarchal fiction. And indeed, such a heinous comment could only have been uttered by a male chauvinist pig, hence any actual indication on BowerBird’s part as to their gender is unnecessary. And since this interpretation is absolutely and unshakeably correct, interpteting a single comment as “three strikes” is perfectly reasonable. You’re absolutely right.
“jb,” the stereotype of feminists as irrational, paranoid reactionaries with a chip on each shoulder is both unflattering and a hindrance to the goals of gender equality and mutual respect. Please stop feeding it.
(More, on topic, in a moment).
I would love to have PZ, Dawkins and Pagel on one stage talking about all this stuff. For me, that would be great theater and learning. It’s the kind of thing PBS should put together.
Scott Hatfield:
I might as well just quote Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians (chapter 4, p. 31):
And, a little later,
Actually, I became suddenly curious – *are* “these environs” indeed “so oft-referred to as Testosterone Acres“? And if so, by who?
So I Googled the exact phrase (“Testosterone Acres”), and the phrase appears only in three places on two disparate sites (with multiple hits because of aggregation and domain synonymy) – the primary place it is used is on a site known for the sort of thinking that would consider “two” to be “many”: telicthoughts.com. The phrase is used twice, by one commenter, called “Joy”, in two thread comments.
Yah-huh.
(It also shows up on a site which appears to be dedicated to the Chevy Avalanche, which I think can be discounted)
I just noticed this, from Jimmy up in #41:
I think Zelazny finished this one rather well, in his short story “For a Breath I Tarry” (1966).
Big response roundup follows.
Meilor writes:
By that logic, why haven’t you abandoned evolution since even P-Zed admits that some of the previous evidence supporting evolution, namely Haeckle’s embryos, has been determined to be false or possibly even falsified? Rethinking ideas in the light of new evidence, by your argument, isn’t allowed. There is only the ancient way of thinking or a complete abandonment of all, apparently. Any effort to modernize ancient arguments to reflect newer thinking must be a “No True Scotsman” approach, right?
Obviously, there’s a role for not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We kept what was good about evolution and got rid of the needless bits like Haeckle. Modern evolution *doesn’t* include the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and calling that a “No True Scotsman” approach is simply empty. So too does theology discard 6-day creationism and so too is calling that statement a “No True Scotsman” argument empty. We’ve moved on from ancient understandings, whether theological or scientific. If you’re going to judge theology by the understandings caricatured by fundies, I think it’s only fair to judge evolution by the understandings Haeckle or Casey Luskin have of it.
Because anything less than that is just a “No True Scotsman” argument.
Maybe you don’t know that Johnston, the pastor I critiqued in that link from above, never got a theology degree. He just set up a fundamentalist ministry in the middle of the apparently underserved Overland Park area – what sacrifice. See http://www.religionnewsblog.com/17696/jerry-johnston-2 Long story short, “No True Scotsman” doesn’t apply because Johnston ain’t a true Scotsman.
386sx writes:
Look, I’m not a theologian, but even I know that the Tetragrammaton was constructed precisely to be unpronounceable. That’s the Tetragrammaton; that’s ancient Hebrew legend. Now she says the same thing using slightly different language and you accost her for this?
It isn’t clear to me what about an inscrutable power thought to be guiding and influencing us in ways that science cannot detect or comment upon would be expected to be describable. The belief is not useful in terms of explaining or predicting scientifically detectable things, but as long as it isn’t purported to be so, why would it’s lack of predictability be considered a strike against it? Holding theological ideas up to the tests of science strikes me as akin to criticizing a basketball player for not scoring touchdowns on the court.
Kemibe writes:
Agreed. No arguments here.
Gelf writes:
It is possible to see the transition from science-unfriendly fundamentalism to science-friendly theism as something other than progress, but it requires one to have as their goal godlessness and not enlightenment. This is a case of perspectiveless, nothing else but “The Goal” of atheism (or whatever it is you’re after) will do thinking. It’s ideological purism, same as P-Zed’s. That’s fine as far as an intellectual reasoning or whatever, but practically, you and he are politically dead in the water. Refusing to embrace these more moderate and, yes, progressive theologies on the basis that they cannot define God (or whatever it is that you’re after them to define) to your satisfaction, again, strikes me as pretty damn politically unastute.
Good luck influencing the faithful with that kind of thinking.
If it helps, the USSR didn’t collapse because we invaded Moscow. There are a lot of good reviews of our efforts to subvert communism out in the literature, most of which mention the encouragement of pro-capitalist groups, even while they lived in communism. I don’t share your goal of atheism, but even if I did, I’d still be telling you that the drop excavates the stone, not by might, but by falling often. The goal of science-friendly attitudes is shared by theists and atheists; there’s a big enough tent there for everyone.
Little steps, guys. Little steps.
BCH
Apparently, I’m a formatting n00b. My attempts to break paragraphs within my blockquote tags resulted in some odd formatting above. Apologies for this – the blockquotes should be extended more than one paragraph. -BCH
I agree entirely that the conecpt of “some great big person up there who made the universe out of dirt” is complete nonsense.
The fact is that God made the Universe out of NOTHING. Think about that. Before God created the Universe there was nothing (nothing physical, that is) – no matter, no space for it to exist in, no concept of time (or space-time for that matter), NOTHING. In to this void God spoke, and at His command the came into existence. This is the instant that we scientists refer to a “The Big Bang” – or whatever is the correct thoeretical term these days.
Now think about the implications of that. Even if you don’t believe the above let’s think about it hypothetically. If the above paragraph is true, then that means that God exists outside of the Universe. As our scientific enquiries/observations/hypotheses are limited to the Universe we inhabit they cannot comment on anything that is outside of the Universe.
Bottom line is, God is not a human creation. We are His creation, and he has revealed himself to us in what he has made and in his word to us in the Bible.
Ah, the old “the Bible is the evidence for the Bible being true” canard. Never gets old.
Isn’t Andrew exactly the believer that all the liberal Christians are saying doesn’t exist?
Maybe that’s why religious people who attack science insist on talking about atheists ‘belief’ in science. Maybe they are incapable of imagining a life without SOME kind of belief.
That’s my opinion, too, for whatever it’s worth.
Shifting away from the world-view in which one has been raised is difficult for anyone. But removing a central thought and life organizing principle, such as god belief, may be just about inconceivable for those whose sole experience and education has been in a narrow, vindictive, faith.
Liar.
And the USSR didn’t collapse because of capitalist propaganda, and it didn’t collapse because of Reagan, either. What kind of belligerence is it that blinds people to the existence of Gorbachev and Yakovlev?
#71,
A representational metaphor, a simile. Not to be taken literally. The old Norse were a poetic people and loved analogies. They used imagery all the time in their art and literature, the eight-legged horse motif was but one of them. To borrow from psychiatry, the carving is not a representation of anything concrete in the sense of Sleipner being an actual mythological beast, but of a circumlocution. A tricksy way of referring to the men who carted off Odin’s sacrifices.
That’s a good question, Dustin, but I think you know what kind: that which naturally proceeds from the myopia of occidentalism.
Nonetheless, claims which attempt to minimize the role of Reagan (or Thatcher), or that of “capitalist propoganda” and its more modest but pervasive cousin – the influence that increased east-west transparency, precipitated by Glasnost, had upon Soviet society – are no less myopic.
A quick Google turns up these interesting remarks by Gorbachev himself.
Burt-
I am wondering what new evidence has presented itself recently that would make the ancient arguments more modern? Any evidence must surely have been better known to the idividuals that existed when the texts where written so isn’t it arrogant to presume your understanding 1000’s of years later is better than the actual time.
And Andrews comment above was pretty interesting in a juvenile kind of way.
Uber, all kinds of human progress bear on our constructions of religion. Slavery used to be a-okay by the Bible and now we deem it wrong, to the point that the very God of the Bible is now taken to be against it. The God we find consistent with our beliefs is a construction of ours, so I think this is the sort of “evidence” to which you’re referring.
No, it’s not at all clear to me – in fact I would disagree – that people living thousands of years ago were more qualified to talk about God than you or I are. That’s one of the corollaries of process theology, if I understand the viewpoint correctly.
Fundamentalism holds that belief, to be sure, that old school thinking was more right than new ways of thinking about God. But I don’t endorse those kinds of viewpoints today.
BCH
I’m a Methodist myself, so I often feel as if I’m a member of another species among such folk. Out of curiousity and a desire for understanding, in what religious tradition did you experience at least a partial appreciation for the life of the mind?….SH
I attended a Lutheran church, and it was quite liberal, although there were wacky things said in the youth groups, particularly about evolution.
instead, convenient demons (liberals, gays, treehuggers, etc.) are offered as targets
I actually didn’t see this as much as just the fact that people seemed to have been trained by their frequent self-hyping in church to be underwhelmed by reality (and therefore unprepared to work through their boredom).
I pretty much equate biblical literalism with biblical illiteracy, so it’s no surprise to me that they go together, but it’s pretty ironic.
The only thing I have read by Elaine Pagels is “The Gnostic Gospels” and I enjoyed it a great deal. It was quite enlightening to read about the different versions of early Christian scriptures and the different practices of the branches of the church. It was especially interesting to note that the struggle between them was basically a cultural-evolutionary one in which the group that was most hierarchical wiped out the more consensual one, wrote the history book, and prevented the others from propagating their ideas.
I am humbly corrected, thank you. It was nice to see those Gorbachev remarks regarding the “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” quote by Reagan, so thanks again! I’ve always regarded that statement to be in the same spirit as a boss coming into my office, saying “Dustin, you aren’t doing your job, so shape up”, when I was already doing my job, and then taking credit for it afterwards.
Frak, you called me on my bluff. No, it seems Brage (Bragi) and Balder (Baldr) were considered to be pretty innocent.
OTOH, I have this danish all ages comic book that implies otherwise. Don’t knock scripture!
“we scientists” – “whatever is correct”?
Anyway, big bang is the term for the whole process of observed expansion – as in “bigbang cosmology”.
But it is only a valid description for our observable part of the universe. There are plenty of realistic cosmologies, not excluded by observation, that describes a larger setting. Some have no definite beginning, some can be infinitely old.
But even if a simple bigbang would be the remaining option, you can’t discuss time to and beyond the apparent singularity without a theory of quantum gravity. So you have made your argument out of NOTHING. Think about that. ;-)
Frak, you called me on my bluff. No, it seems Brage (Bragi) and Balder (Baldr) were considered to be pretty innocent.
OTOH, I have this danish all ages comic book that implies otherwise. Don’t knock scripture!
“we scientists” – “whatever is correct”?
Anyway, big bang is the term for the whole process of observed expansion – as in “bigbang cosmology”.
But it is only a valid description for our observable part of the universe. There are plenty of realistic cosmologies, not excluded by observation, that describes a larger setting. Some have no definite beginning, some can be infinitely old.
But even if a simple bigbang would be the remaining option, you can’t discuss time to and beyond the apparent singularity without a theory of quantum gravity. So you have made your argument out of NOTHING. Think about that. ;-)
BCH wrote:
… that old school thinking was more right than new ways of thinking about God.
But when you were asked about just what these “new ways” were, you responded with some vague rambling about slavery. So again, what are these new ways of thinking about God and how are they any different than the old ways?
Then we’re going in circles because this very post, as I pointed out in my original, criticizes a new way of thinking about God as “Hiding from religious reality.” I don’t think it’s necessary for me to itemize or even pick one particular new way of thinking about God in order for you to accept that there are some people who are thinking about God in a new way.
I’m not a theologian. If you are sincere that you can’t see the difference between the old ways of thinking about God and the new ones, then your question would be much better directed to a theologian. I harbor no delusion that you would be interested in doing so.
BCH
A representational metaphor, a simile. Not to be taken literally. The old Norse were a poetic people and loved analogies. They used imagery all the time in their art and literature, the eight-legged horse motif was but one of them. To borrow from psychiatry, the carving is not a representation of anything concrete in the sense of Sleipner being an actual mythological beast, but of a circumlocution. A tricksy way of referring to the men who carted off Odin’s sacrifices.
Perhaps the origin of the legend is four men carrying a sacrifice, like the origin of the unicorn legend might be the oryx or the rhino, but why does this mean that Sleipner can’t be an ‘actual mythological beast’, whatever the hell that means? It features in the Eddas as a steed, not as a metaphor for four men.
Reading the article, I think there are some other interesting quotes you could mine on the topic of hiding from religious reality. People have already discussed above Dr.Pagels return to religious after the deaths in her immediate family. Interestingly, the fundamwntalist reaction to her friend’s death is what caused her initially interest in the early Christian community:
I find that pretty interesting, too. I think her relationship with biblical literalism is more complicated than any rational argument could account for. Any success in mitigating fire-and-brimstone interpretations of Christianity would be like rescuing her friend from the fires of hell.
Returning to Death:
I think that last sentence seems particularly true of her personal experience with religious belief… as opposed to some position arising from her work as a historian.
PZ,
One word: poetry.
Longer version: poetry is good. Claiming that poetry is the same as rational, empirical analysis is stupid. Not only is it stupid, it’s world-rendingly stupid, a confusion of levels of aeonic proportions. However, claiming that poetry is of no value is a stupidity of lesser proportions.
Nice strawman you constructed there. Have fun knocking that one down?
So god and religion are spiritual poetry now? Yeah ok. If you say so.
You actually missed her worst comment. The rest pale in comparison:
Can you read the Bible seriously without reading it literally? There are parts of the New Testament which encourage slaves to remain slaves. Do we take that literally?
Does she know what “literal” as opposed to “serious” means? Assuming she knows, she still confuses them in action. Of course, we don’t take it literally, but we have to take it seriously, that they meant what they said, even when what they said is fabulous. You can take poetry seriously without taking it literally. But if it is neither literal nor serious, then what the hell is the point?
Steve_C,
Nice strawman yourself. I didn’t put up any argument, so there’s no strawman. I was simply pointing out the value of poetry. And yes, religion often does function poetically; if you doubt that, you’ve probably only been in contact with that most moronic of beings, the fundamentalist.
Simple-minded buffoon. PZ sure does attract them, I wonder why that’s the case?
You weren’t claiming that PZ said there’s no value in poetry?
Here’s a question. Do people go to church for the “poetry”?
frog, I’m an atheist of very much the uncompromsiing Dawkins / Myers type and I love poetry (and my all-time favorite poet happens to be Dante, at that.) What exactly the hell is the point you’re trying to make, if any?
oh and frog,
You’re an asshole.
I think poetry is wonderful stuff, myself.
I don’t think literal muses, ghosts, or gods have any hand in writing it, though. Do you?
WE deem it wrong but even an honest cursory reading of the bible shows it doesn’t. Otherwise I of course agree with you as we are always reinventing ways to ‘understand’ these things.
One word: poetry.
You know what else is good? Pork rinds. QED – PZ is an idiot. I call that the Frog Proof!
I like Funions myself, oh, and cheetos.
BCH wrote:
I don’t think it’s necessary for me to itemize or even pick one particular new way of thinking about God in order for you to accept that there are some people who are thinking about God in a new way.
Well, I think I’d need to see at least one example of this new way. I thought perhaps you knew of one, but obviously not. Looks like the usual theological doubletalk, each “new way” of thinking about God sillier than the last.
Any time I hear someone talk about ‘new ways of thinking’ I automatically place them in the Deepak Chopra wooiest category until I hear other evidence. Then I might re-evaluate my categorization (but most of the time it’s fine where it is).
Also, a pox on both your houses – Funyuns and pork rinds are disgusting, and cheetos are inedible (due to cheese fingers).
Oh I’m so going to wipe my orange cheese powder fingers on you.
You scientist types will never realise that poetry simply can’t be expressed in words!
…oh, wait.
Hmmm. Grouchiness and foolishness all rolled into one unpleasant package. AND you have a massive and apparently brainless cheering section to boot.
Oooo. Lookit the sock puppet. Hi puppet. Such a cute little frog puppet.
PZ,
Unlike some of your fans, I figure that you’re capable of distinguishing between suggestions for ways to analyze religion from an attack. The fact that a lot of religious folks are credulous cretins incapable of distinguishing the map from the territory (or even recognizing which territory the map pertains to) does not imply that all of religion is simple stupidity. If I read a poem that claims to be penned by a ghost, I don’t take that for a fact; on the other hand, to enjoy the poem for the nonce, I will suspend disbelief temporarily.
This is how religion functions for the more cognitively powerful folks – like a movie or a play. It has great emotional appeal, as a fairly realistic portrayal of people’s inner lives. Many people know this consciously – among Jews, there are many atheist Jews who go to synagogue every Saturday. For Christianity and Islam, the atheists have a tendency to lie, or fool themselves (Pagels, for example – that’s what all the talk about “Gnosticism” is about), because of those religions’ creedal nature. But talk to priests or other clerics after having a few drinks – how many of them actually believe in the literal truth of transubstantiation? How many believe in Einstein’s God when they aren’t wearing their robes and funny hats? That’s why most religions have an esoteric aspect – the big “secret” is just that it’s all a play (see the Dionysian festival and the evolution of Greek plays). The ritual is what matters.
Of course, most people are plain stupid, and their leadership recognizes that. Sometimes it’s a con, and sometimes it’s an honest attempt to organize and care for the morons. The morons can’t tell the difference between make-believe and reality. How many people went to watch the The Davinci Code, and forget that they were watching a movie? How many people go to a trekkie convention, and start to think they actually are Klingons? How many people believe that Bill Clinton really feels their pain?
But, then again, you have quite a few moronic atheists who confuse maps with territories themselves – you can see it by their paranoiac responses, unable to distinguish what’s in their minds from what’s in the minds of others. I bet a lot of them grew up as or among Christian fundamentalists.
So, who are you talking to? Dawkins has decided that he’s got to talk to the morons – as Pagel’s put it, “play the village atheist.” It’s an insult only if you think the morons should be manipulated for their own good; Dawkins obviously disagrees, for good reason – we’ve reached a point where the morons unconsciously taking part in a play may just be too dangerous for the rest of us. If you don’t recognize the game that’s being played, your criticism will be directed at the wrong parties, or at the wrong places.
To boil it down, Pagels explicitly believes in nothing, just an alternate psychotherapy to Freud’s – but it only works as long as it’s left in the realm of art (the same place for Freud as well). As soon as you try to pin it down scientifically, well of course it’ll fall apart, just like trying to analyze Yeats as a scientific treatise. Rick Warren is probably just a con-man, and believes in nothing himself. His followers are idiots – even if you manage to convince them that there is no god, they’ll still be atheistic idiots. Unfortunately, there’s no cure for cretinism.
Steve_C,
By the way, by moron I was specifically referring to you. No, House is not my sockpuppet. But it’s no surprise that you would jump to conclusions like the most cognitively defective fundamentalist – evidence is not the thing for you, you simply regurgitate your own prejudices. You’d think you’d ask PZ for an ip, or some other empirical evidence first, or even suggest a possibility while withholding judgment; but no, you have baby Jesus talking directly to you! Oracular knowledge is a wonderful thing, no?
See, PZ, the problem is not religion primarily, but stupidity; fundamentalism is just a symptom of that stupidity. Unfortunately, atheists often simply reiterate those same stupidities in new forms. Atheism isn’t the cure – it can be a symptom of a healthy mind, but it’s completely insufficient to produce intelligence.
*pout* you hurt my feelings.
Damn me for jumping to conclusions.
Doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole however.
Pompous twit.
What next, pointy-headed intellectual? Just go back to your hill-country church, Steve_C. They hate pompousness there. They’re real, authentic vegetables – you’ll be right at home.
Hate pompousness? Have you ever been to church or the south?
Talkin’ about the Free Primitive Baptists, not the the Southern Baptists. The pompous ones are the middle-class churches, and the middle-class wannabe’s. There’s still anti-papist churches around.
It’s funny, Frog. You start out this way:
The fact that a lot of religious folks are credulous cretins incapable of distinguishing the map from the territory does not imply that all of religion is simple stupidity.
But then you conclude by remarking that religion is just a scheme to bilk the credulous.
I don’t understand in what way, exactly, you part company with PZ. Maybe you think the credulous deserve to be bilked, and so religion is a noble enterprise? In a time when the credulous have been bilked so thoroughly that architects are flying planes into skyscrapers and janitors are driving car-bombs into gyno clinics (that don’t even offer abortions!), schemes that bilk the credulous majority seem like something we can ill afford.
I mean, I don’t get it. You’re on PZ’s ass for being hard on religion, but you’ve just accused every single religious person of being an idiot. But that’s clearly not the case. A lot of very smart people go for religion, hook, line, and sinker. I don’t think a single person here would accuse Francis Collins of being an idiot, he’s clearly a successful biologist and published author. The explanation for his astounding degree of support for an intellectually bankrupt exercise is clearly religion’s insidious, manipulative appeal.
But you’re ready to write off every believer as a moron to maintain religion as completely harmless (even beneficial) theatre. Who exactly is being a moron, then? I’d say you’d have to be pretty stupid to promote something that’s obviously false by inspection to this crowd. When good, smart people are falling prey to religion, something more is at work than human gullibility. I’ve never seen Francis Collins write a book about turning his life over to Kahless. (The Klingon Jesus, if you didn’t catch the reference. Color me nerdy, I guess.)
Well then you should stick to being a Southern Baptist. You’ll be right at home there with their religion of poetry, art and music.
He’s arguing that the more artful and intelligent forms of christianity are superior.
And we athiests; who point out that just by changing the definition of what god is, doesn’t make it any less silly or pointless, are morons. We should leave it alone because it makes people feel good or that it’s not the offensive literal religion that most follow.
No, Chet. That is not what I’m arguing.
First of all, I’m not on PZ’s ass. I’m simply suggesting that there are bits being missed here. I don’t know how much I diverge from PZ’s thoughts on the matter – I am safely assuming that the blog format is insufficient for a deep analysis, and giving suggestions.
Second, not all Christians are cretins. Just most; but that applies equally to all groups. But you can’t analyze the minds of the followers and the leaders together. It’s complicated, and any attempt to sum it all up in a simple truth is simply deluding yourself.
It’s not all one thing or another. It’s not all beneficial theater, and it’s not all a con, or simple irrationality (some of it is very complex irrationality). A Unitarian is not the same as a Southern Baptist, an atheist religious Jew is not the same as Jews for Jesus. Einstein’s God is not Dobson’s God, Aquinas is not Haggard. An actor on stage believing, for the moment, that he actually is Napoleon is not the same as a schizophrenic believing he is Napoleon. Trivially true, no?
The majority of people are pretty damn stupid – that’s also trivially true. They’ll never understand how much of their lives they are just making up. Then you’ve got smart folks. Some are playing a game, consciously. Some have a blind spot – it’s a tricky blind spot, because it’s a natural blind spot: the inability to suspend disbelief, and then re-implement it. They have a need for ritual – that’s universal to human cultures. But for (probably) evolutionarily good reasons, most of us forget that it’s ritual – that the dance is just a dance, that the poem is just a poem, that the painting of a door is not actually a door.
Elaine Pagels is not Rick Warren. She may be giving him comfort – I think PZ, as well as Dawkins, have a good point on that. But her “empty” beliefs aren’t exactly empty. You just can’t look at those sort of beliefs in the same light. It’s like walking on stage during a play and starting to denounce the actors all as fakes, and the audience all as dupes, while muttering about how the story isn’t “literally true”. Well, of course it isn’t – it’s not supposed to be. The God she believes in is 99% of the way to Dawkins God, but wrapped up in all kinds of poetic irrationality.
Collins may be among the smarter folks with a mental defect. You see it with children, even the smartest, all the time. They’re playing with a doll, they call it a monster, and suddenly they forget that it’s make-believe and start shrieking in fear of the monster. That doesn’t make the game stupid, or worthless, or asinine. It just makes the child a child.
What I see among some atheists is some of the same that MacNeill was peddling with his “religion is evolutionarily adapted” crap. “Religion” is not a thing – it’s a lot of different things. If you call voodoo, fundamentalist Christianity, and Pagels’ Gnosticism the same thing, you’re making the same mistake (one which Pagel makes in describing Dawkins as “playing the village atheist”).
They are all however based on the same thing. Their origins are essentially the same.
And whether or not there is a god is a question of science. Poetry and art are not… unless you’re studying the impact these things have on the human brain or why people are driven to be artistic and expressive.
But whether you can talk about God is a question for poetry. Not whether God, empirically exists in objective reality.
Questions of objective reality are scientific ones.
Questions of subjective realities are however not scientific (except insofar as the objective processes by which we experience subjective reality is a question).
People get confused about the difference between the two all the time. Often people intentionally confuse the two, for artistic effect. The best art is going to have you believing in illusions for an extended period of time. Evolution predisposes one to believe in handy illusions.
There is no “essentially the same”. That’s exactly what gets religious illusions going – that we’re splitting hairs between what goes on between your ears and what goes on “out there.” There’s an essential difference between a trekkie who plays a Klingon on weekends, and one who actually starts to worship Kahless. There’s an essential difference between a man who plays at being a knight in the renaissance fair and one who actually thinks he’s medieval gentry all the time. There’s an essential difference between Einstein talking about God, or Jefferson referring to Nature’s God, and a fundie preacher calling on Armageddon.
You can experience God without actually believing in God in any scientifically meaningful sense; poetically meaningful, is a different question.
And we’re arguing that’s NOT god. That’s something else entirely. People keep moving the markers about what god is. God is a myth. Are people “experiencing” myths?
Yes, people experience myth. What do you thing ancient Greek religions were like? People experience God. They also experience unicorns, Zeus and alien abductions. The map is not the territory.
What you should be arguing is that the “god” of Einstein, or even Pagels, is not the “god” of the fundies. You give ’em a cudgel when you mix up the two. Separate what is different. Use different tactics with different enemies.
God is a specious term. God is any damn thing you want to call God. It’s what you stick in a poem to make it rhyme.
Then we agree. But god isn’t poetry, art or the universe.
And for the vast majority of people god is NOT the god of Pagels and Einstein.
You can’t say there is no god, except the one you don’t find offensive.
You can’t have Pagels arguing against Dawkins with her god when he’s not even addressing her god. She’s moving the markers. And you can’t call atheists morons for calling her on it.
But I can call some atheists morons for letting her trip us up with here own conflation, rather than pointing out her cheat (which, PZ did point out originally). The cheat is the most important point, because it puts “liberal” religious folks in the same boat with the fundies.
And I’m not saying there is no god, except the one I find inoffensive. I’m saying that God is really experienced, which is completely different from say that God is objectively real. That experience will continue to exist – that kind of experience is a common human experience. That kind of experience needs a space for most people. People need to go from time to time to a club house, put funny hats on, sing, dance and jump up and down. They need to suspend rationality for a while.
The only people who give them that space are the priests. Trying to take away God-belief without creating something new to fill the space is doomed to failure. Buying crap from TV, going out clubbing, or drinking themselves to oblivion is ultimately unsatisfying.
Re Elaine in particular: “He’s such a rationalist that the God that he’s debunking is not one that most of the people I study would recognize.” She’s right – the God he’s debunking is not the God her folks would recognize. The response should be, that the God her people recognize isn’t the God that Dawkins is trying to debunk – he’s trying to debunk YHWH or Allah walking into the Garden of Eden. The one that 50-90% of Americans believe in. And insulting him for doing that is a cheat that puts her on the wrong side of the truth.
By coincidence, today I tracked down The God Delusion, chapter 1, and I note that in that very first chapter, Dawkins brings up the naturalistic God of Spinoza and Einstein (and other scientists), just so that he can make sure to draw the distinction between that and the literal creator-God of the fundamentalists.
I still need to read the whole book, but that first chapter is interesting for its obvious connection to this thread.
I kind of doubt that Pagels has read tGD at all, and may very well be reacting to the (somewhat inflammatory) title of the book alone.
Spaulding: One can be selectively admirable. Nietzsche, for example, was a wretch and a horrible misanthrope (and misgygonist). But he wrote wonderfully well. Leibniz was a brilliant philosopher and mathematician but who had chose very odd premisses. And so on.
Kristine: You (unwittingly?) echo the Feuerbach-Durkheim thesis that heavens and gods reflect the social structure of their creators, somewhat delayed. Incidentally, the scientific study of the sociology of religion is vital for understanding religion, IMO.
(woops, hit post)
Andrew: A catastrophic problem with your scenario is that the big bang is not the origin of the universe, it is the origin of our local hubble volume. The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum has a good paper on this subject that is fairly accessible. Look for “The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology”.
In fact, Pagels herself is aware that many Gnostics, intellectual elite included, believed in “a great big person who made the universe.” They just didn’t think that person was the God, but rather a cheap imitation. The true God is somewhere outside the universe, responsible only indirectly for its creation.
Which makes it, I think, mildly dishonest for her to say that “the God that [Dawkins is] debunking is not one that most of the people I study would recognize.” They’d recognize it just fine–it’s just that many of them would label it as the Demiurge. It doesn’t make them any more sophisticated or enlightened to have believed in an evil (or merely blind or stupid) big-man-in-the-sky rather than a good one.