Tag Archives: Sam Harris

Religion and violence revisited

Tatiana_of_Rome_(Menologion_of_Basil_II)

A few weeks back I did a post on religion and violence the gist of which was that it’s far too simplistic to connect religiosity to violence without paying much closer attention to the social context. Religious violence should been seen, I argued, as the response to some real or perceived mistreatment. In addition I also suggested that perhaps what appears to make believers in monotheistic faiths particularly prone to violence is their insistence that they alone possess religious truth.

That post got some push back, particularly here, and especially over the issue of whether references in the Koran especially made Muslims more prone to violence than other religious groups. As I tried to make clear in the discussion, it makes much less sense to try to understand the most relevant form of religious violence today, that is, Islamist violence, through reference to the Koran than it does to grapple with the actual historical and social context in which such violence occurs.

For the most part, I still think that. Where my views have become somewhat more nuanced is in the role of belonging, for at least if some recent work in moral psychology is correct, religious violence is just the flipside of the moral community all successful religions help create.

It seems that while I wasn’t paying attention the case being made by some of  the most vocal New Atheists was itself changing. Back in October of last year, Sam Harris, who could be accused of having made the most inflammatory statements about Islam published a dialogue with the former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz. Having himself been jailed and tortured for his political views in Egypt, Nawaz has developed a four part model of the causes of religious extremism:

  1. grievance narrative (real or perceived)
  2. identity crisis
  3. a charismatic recruiter
  4. ideological dogma

It’s not this model, however, where Nawaz has managed to convert Harris to a less nihilistic interpretation of Islam, but through the implications of Islam’s long history of pluralism.

Sunni Islam especially, having no “pope” and no body of scholars in charge of defining what Islam is, the faith is essentially defined by what the majority of Muslims understand it to be. The task then, Nawaz argues, is to shrink the significant minority of Muslims who believe that either violence is a legitimate way to address political grievances, or that some group of believers has the right and duty to enforce their particular interpretation of Islam on not just other Muslims but non-believers as well.

Yet despite the power of Nawaz garners from his personal experience for explicating religious violence the one element he seems to miss is the one deemed most important by recent psychosocial research on the topic- namely communal participation. According to such research, religious violence, when it does indeed occur, has much less to do with the messages found in scriptures, actual belief, or even, oppression (though the last I still think the most important among the three) than the kind of hive- like nature of groups that human beings, almost alone outside of the eusocial insects, are able to create.

This at least is the case in two recent works by leading philosophers in the field of moral psychology- Paul Bloom’s Just Babies: the origins of good and evil and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. The last decade or so has seen a flood of popular and quite good books by moral philosophers and psychologists using evolutionary theory and clever experiments to gain insight into human thinking about moral topics. Bloom and Haidt are two of the best, but there’s also Joshua Green and, although covering quite different topics Daniel Kahneman both of whom I’ve written about before.

Perhaps I’ll write proper reviews of Bloom and Haidt’s books some other time, for now I just want to focus on one question: what does the latest work in moral psychology tell us about the relationship between religion and violence?

First off- it’s complicated. Bloom, in his discussion of the issue in Just Babies, points out how difficult it is to disaggregate anything from religion, for, as he phrases it, “religion is everywhere”. In his book Bloom also points out that though research on how religiosity affects behavior isn’t as informative as we might like, it does show a strong correlation between religion and charitable giving. It seems that religious individuals donate a higher percentage of their income to charity than secular persons, and even give more than non-religious individuals to charities that are secular, which is kind of mind blowing.

One might think that all this giving by religious people was somehow the result of adherence or belief. That is, one could reasonably assume that the reason religious individuals were so damned charitable is that their scriptures command it, and/or giving is the product of belief in an afterlife of rewards and punishments for how one acted in this life. Charity would  here be seen as a kind of non-temporal investment.

According to Bloom, however, that is not what the studies show. Bloom quotes the famous sociologist Robert Putnam to make his point, that it is neither adherence or belief that makes religious people more charitable but membership in a group:

“…. the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.” (203)

This good side of religious belonging is mirrored by religion’s darker side where, again, it seems that it is a matter of participation in a religious community that predicts support for violence in the supposed defense of that community rather than the measure of the person’s depth of belief.

Jonathan Haidt characterizes religions as “moral exoskeletons”, or “moral matrixes”  For their members they establish communities of trust, but their very success in binding groups together means they can also lead to moralistic killings against what is believed to be betrayal of the group or result in martyrdom in the name of the community’s defense.

Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic killing, and many religions are well suited to that task. Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of atrocity. (310)

The problem is that the very same features that allow religion, such as in the case of abolitionism, to work in the defense (even the violent defense) of minorities allows those same groups to act violently against minorities- whether Jews in the case of Christians up until very recently in historical times or groups like ISIS today against very vulnerable religious minorities such as the Yazidis or social minorities such as women or homosexuals.

The dilemma is that the atrophy of communal ties undeniably fosters the autonomy of individuals, yet we have not reached the point where we can be certain such a society lacking strong communal ties is sustainable over the long term. As Haidt puts it:

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever know at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few). (311)

At one point the smart money was predicting religious belief would be largely irrelevant to humanity  by the end of the 2oth century. If religion has appeared an especially powerful force during that period and into our own such an appearance is partly an illusion caused by the incredible atrophy of former secular collective bonds that at one point appeared to have replaced religious ties- nationalism- both ethnic and civic, socialism, communism or even the hold of political parties.

What we’ve gotten instead are a plethora of micro-affective communities competing for our attention and commitment some of whom target the very darkest aspects of human nature: our bloodlust, fear, or our anger. Sadly, the pluralism and diversity so beloved by liberals (myself included) fails to offer solutions to the problems posed by either fundamentalist inspired violence or the right’s ascending off of our fear of it; namely how to sustain a society over the longue duree absent some shared definition of the good, when our communications architecture seems built to result in sharp divisions, rival truths, and an environment where the violence of extreme minorities continually results in calls to either suppress minorities at home and protect vulnerable minorities in regions that have yet to discover the West’s pluralism.

 

Boston, Islam and the Real Scientific Solution

Arab Astronomers

The tragic bombing on April 15 by the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlane and Dzhohkar collided and amplified contemporary debates- deep and ongoing disputes on subjects as diverse as the role of religion and especially Islam in inspiring political violence, and the role and use of surveillance technology to keep the public safe. It is important that we get a grip on these issues and find a way forward that reflects the reality of the situation rather than misplaced fear and hope for the danger is that the lessons we take to be the meaning of the Boston bombing will be precisely opposite to those we should on more clear headed reflection actually draw. A path that might lead us, as it has in the recent past, to make egregious mistakes that both fail to properly understand and therefore address the challenges at issue while putting our freedom at risk in the name of security. What follows then is an attempt at clear headedness.

The Boston bombing admittedly inspired by a violent version of political Islam seemed almost to fall like clockwork into a recent liberal pushback against perceived Islamophobia by the group of thinkers known as the New Atheists. In late March of this year, less than a month before the bombing, Nathan Lean at Salon published his essay Dawkins, Hitchens Harris: New Atheists Flirt With Islamophobia   which documented a series of inflammatory statements about Islam by the New Atheists including the recent statement of Richard Dawkins that “Islam was the greatest source of evil in the world today” or an older quote by Sam Harris that: “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thorough going cult of death.” For someone, such as myself who does indeed find many of the statements about Islam made by the New Atheists to be, if not overtly racists, then at least so devoid of religious literacy and above all historical and political self-reflection that they seem about as accurate as pre-modern traveler’s tales about the kingdom of the cyclops, or the lands at the antipodes of the earth where people have feet atop their heads, the bombings could not have come at a worse cultural juncture.

If liberals such as Lean had hoped to dissuade the New Atheists from making derogatory comments about Muslims at the very least before they made an effort to actually understand the beliefs of the people they were talking about, so that Dawkins when asked after admitting he had never read the Koran responded in his ever so culturally sensitive way: “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read the Qur’an. You don’t have to read “Mein Kampf” to have an opinion about Nazism ” the fact that the murders in Boston ended up being two Muslim brothers from Chechnya would appear to give the New Atheists all the evidence they need.  The argument for a more tolerant discourse has lost all traction.

It wasn’t only this aspect of the “God debate” with which the Boston bombing intersected. There is also the on going argument for and against the deployment of widespread surveillance technology especially CCTV. The fact that the killers were caught on tape there for all the world to see seems to give weight to those arguing that whatever the concerns of civil libertarians the widespread use of CCTV is something that would far outweigh its costs. A mere three days after the bombing Slate ran an article by Farhad Manjoo We Need More Cameras and We Need Them Now.  The title kinda says it all but here’s a quote:

Cities under the threat of terrorist attack should install networks of cameras to monitor everything that happens at vulnerable urban installations. Yes, you don’t like to be watched. Neither do I. But of all the measures we might consider to improve security in an age of terrorism, installing surveillance cameras everywhere may be the best choice. They’re cheap, less intrusive than many physical security systems, and—as will hopefully be the case with the Boston bombing—they can be extremely effective at solving crimes.

Manjoo does not think the use of ubiquitous surveillance would be limited to deterring crime or terrorism or solving such acts once they occur, but that they might eventually give us a version of precrime that seems like something right out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report:

The next step in surveillance technology involves artificial intelligence. Several companies are working on software that monitors security-camera images in an effort to spot criminal activity before it happens.

London is the queen of such surveillance technology, but in the US it is New York that has most strongly devoted itself to this technological path of preventing terrorism spending upwards of 40 million dollars to develop its Domain Awareness System in partnership with Microsoft. New York has done this despite the concerns of those whom Mayor Bloomberg calls “special interests”, that is those who are concerned that ubiquitous surveillance represents a grave threat to our right to privacy.

Combining the recent disputes surrounding the New Atheists treatment of Islam and the apparent success of surveillance technology in solving the Boston bombing along with the hope that technology could prevent such events from occurring in the future might give one a particular reading of contemporary events that might go something as follows. The early 21st century is an age of renewed religious fanaticism centered on the rejection of modernity in general and the findings of science in particular. With Islam being only the most representative of the desire to overturn modern society through the use of violence. The best defense of modern societies in such circumstances is to turn to the very features that have made their societies modern in the first place, that is science and technology. Science and technology not only promise us a form of deterrence against acts of violence by religiously inspired fanatics they should allow us to prevent such acts from occurring at all if, that is, they are applied with full force.

This might be one set of lessons to draw from the Boston bombings, but would it be the right one? Let’s take the issue of surveillance technology first. The objection to surveillance technology notably CCTV was brilliantly laid out by the science-fiction writer and commentator Cory Doctorow in an article for The Guardian back in 2011.

Something like CCTV works on the assumption that people are acting rationally and therefore can be deterred. No one could argue that Tamerlane and his brother were acting rationally. Their goal seemed to be to kill as many people as possible before they were caught, but they certainly knew they would be caught. The deterrence factor of CCTV and related technologies comes into play even less when suicide bombers are concerned. According to Doctorow we seem to be hoping that we can use surveillance technology as a stand in for the social contact that should bind all of us together.

But the idea that we can all be made to behave if only we are watched closely enough all the time is bunkum. We behave ourselves because of our social contract, the collection of written and unwritten rules that bind us together by instilling us with internal surveillance in the form of conscience and aspiration. CCTVs everywhere are an invitation to walk away from the contract and our duty to one another, to become the lawlessness the CCTV is meant to prevent.

This is precisely the lesson we can draw from the foiled train bombing plot in Canada that occurred at almost at the same moment bombs were going off in Boston. While the American city was reeling, Canada was making arrests of Muslim terrorists who were plotting to bomb trains headed for the US. An act that would have been far more deadly than the Boston attacks. The Canadian Royal Mounted Police was tipped off to this planned attack by members of the Muslim community in Canada a fact that highlights the difference in the relationship between law enforcement and Muslim communities in Canada and the US. As reported in the Chicago Tribune:

Christian Leuprecht, an expert in terrorism at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said the tip-off reflected extensive efforts by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to improve ties with Muslims.

‘One of the key things, and what makes us very different from the United States, is that the RCMP has always very explicitly separated building relationships with local communities from the intelligence gathering side of the house,’ he told Reuters.

 A world covered in surveillance technology based on artificial intelligence that can “read the minds” of would be terrorists is one solution to the threat of terrorism, but the seemingly low tech approach of the RCMP is something far different and at least for the moment far more effective. In fact, when we look under the hood of what the Canadians are doing we find something much more high tech than any application of AI based sensors on the horizon.

We tend to confuse advanced technology with bells and whistles and therefore miss the fact that a solution that we don’t need to plug in or program can be just as if not more complex than anything we are currently capable of building. The religious figures who turned the Canadian plotters into the authorities were far more advanced than any “camera” we can currently construct. They were able to gauge the threat of the plotters through the use of networks of trust and communication using the most advanced machine at our disposal- the human brain. They were also able to largely avoid what will likely be the bane of first generation of the AI based surveillance technologies hoped for by Manjoo- that is false alarms. Human based threat assessment is far more targeted than the types of ubiquitous surveillance offered by our silicon friends. We only need to pay attention to those who appear threatening rather than watch everybody and separate out potential bad actors through brute force calculation.

The after effects of the Boston bombings is likely to make companies that sell surveillance technologies very rich as American cities pour billions into covering themselves with a net of “smart” cameras in the name of safety. The high profile role of such cameras in apprehending the suspects will likely result in an erosion of the kinds of civil libertarian viewpoints held by those such as Doctorow. Yet, in an age of limited resources, are these the kinds of investments cities should be making?

The Boston bombing capped off a series of massacres in Colorado and Newtown all of which might have been prevented by a greater investment in mental health services. It may seem counter intuitive to suggest that many of those drawn to terrorist activities are suffering from mental health conditions but that is what some recent research suggests.

We need better ways to identify and help persons who have fallen into some very dark places, and whereas the atomistic nature of much of American social life might not give us inroads to provide these services for many, the very connectedness of immigrant Muslim communities should allow mental health issues to be more quickly identified and addressed.  A good example of a seemingly anti-modern community that has embraced mental health services are my neighbors the Amish where problems are perhaps more quickly identified and dealt with than in my own modern community where social ties are much more diffuse. The problem of underinvestment in mental health combined with an over reliance on security technologies isn’t one confined to the US alone. Around the same time Russia was touting its superior intelligence gathering capabilities when it came to potential Chechiyan terrorist including the Tsarnaev family, an ill cared for mental health facility in Moscow burned to the ground killing 38 of its trapped residents.

Lastly, there is the issue of the New Atheists’ accusations against Islam- that it is particularly anti-modern, anti-scientific and violent. As we should well know, any belief system can be used to inspire violence especially when that violence is presented in terms of self-defense.  Yet, Islam today does seem to be a greater vector of violence than other anti-modern creeds. We need to understand why this is the case.

People who would claim that there is something anti-scientific about Islam would do well to acquaint themselves with a little history. There is a sense that the scientific revolution in the West would have been impossible without the contribution of Islamic civilization a case made brilliantly in not at least two recent books Jonathan Lyons’ House  of Wisdom  and John Freely’s Aladdin’s Lamp.  

It isn’t merely that Islamic civilization preserved the science of the ancient Greeks during the European dark ages, but that it built upon their discoveries and managed to synthesize technology and knowledge from previously disconnected civilizations from China (paper) to India (the number zero). While Western Europeans still thought diseases were caused by demons, Muslims were inventing what was the most effective medical science until the modern age. They gave us brand new forms of knowledge such as algebra, taught us how to count using our current system of arabic numerals, and the mapped the night sky giving us the names of our stars. They showed us how to create accurate maps, taught us how to tell time and measure distance, and gave us the most advanced form that most amazing of instruments, a pre-modern form of pocket computer- the astrolabe. Seeing is believing and those who doubt just how incredible the astrolabe was should checkout Tom Wujec’s great presentation on the astrolabe at TED.

Compared to the Christian West which was often busy with brutalities such as genocidal campaigns against religious dissidents, inquisitions, or the persecution, forced conversion, or expulsion of Muslims and Jews, the Islamic world was generally extremely tolerant of religious minorities to the extent that both Christian and Jewish communities thrived there.

Part of the reason Islamic civilization, which was so ahead of the West in terms of science and technology in the 1300s ,would fall so far behind was a question of geography. It wasn’t merely that the West was able to rip from the more advanced Muslims the navigational technology that would lead to the windfall of discovering the New World, it was that the way science and technology eventually developed through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries demanded strong states which Islamic civilizations on account of geography and a tradition of weak states- in Muslim societies it was a diffuse network of religious jurists rather than a centralized Church in league with the state that controlled religion and a highly internationalized network of traders rather than a tight corporate-state alliance that dominated the economy. Modernity in its pre-21st century manifestation required strong states to put down communication and    transportation networks and to initiate and support high impact policies such as economic standardization and universal education.

Yet, technology appears to have changed this reliance on the state and brought back into play the kinds of diffuse international networks which Islamic societies continue to be extremely good at. As opposed to earlier state-centric infrastructure cell phone networks can be put up almost overnight. The global nature of trade puts a premium on international connections which the communications revolution has put at the hands of everybody. The rapid decline in the cost of creating media and the bewildering ease with which this media can be distributed globally has overturned the prior centralized and highly localized nature in which communication used to operate.

Islam’s diffuse geography and deeply ingrained assumptions regarding power left it vulnerable to both its own pitifully weak states and incursions from outside powers who had followed a more centralized developmental path.  Many of these conflicts are now playing themselves out and the legacies of Western incursions unraveling so that largely Muslim states that were created out of thin air by imperialist powers such as Iraq and Syria- are imploding. Sadly, states where a largely secular elite was able to suppress traditional publics with the help of Western aid – most ominously Egypt- are slipping towards fundamentalism. We have helped create an equation where religious fundamentalism is confused with freedom.

Given the nature of modern international communications and ease of travel we are now in a situation where an alienated Muslim such as Tamerlane is not only plugged into a worldwide anti-modern discourse, he is able to “shop around” for conflicts in which to insert himself. His unhinged mother had apparently suggested he go to Palestine in search of jihad he reportedly traveled to far away Dagestan to make contact with like minded lost souls.

Our only hope here is that these conflicts in the Muslim world will play themselves out as quickly and as peacefully as possible, and that Islam, which is in many ways poised to thrive in the new condition of globalization will remember its own globalists traditions. Not just their tradition as international traders- think of how successful diaspora peoples such as the Chinese and the Jewish people have been- but their tradition of philosophic and scientific brilliance as well. The internet allows easy access to jihadi discourses by troubled Muslims, but it also increasingly offers things such as Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCS that might, in the same way Islamic civilization did for the West, bring the lessons of modernity and science deep into the Islamic world even into areas such as Afghanistan that now suffer under the isolating curse of geography.

International communication, over the long term, might be a way to bring Enlightenment norms regarding rational debate and toleration not so much to the Muslim world as back to it. Characteristics which it in some ways passed to the West in the first place, providing a forerunner of what a global civilization tolerant of differences and committed to combining the best from all the world’s cultures might look like.

Finding Our Way Through The Great God Debate

“The way that can be spoken of. Is not the constant way; The name that can be named. Is not the constant name.”

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

Over the last decade a heated debate broke onto the American scene. The intellectual conflict between the religious and those who came to be called “the New Atheists” did indeed, I think, bring something new into American society that had not existed before- the open conflict between what, at least at the top tier of researchers, is a largely secular scientific establishment, or better those who presumed to speak for them, and the traditionally religious. What emerged on the publishing scene and bestseller lists were not the kinds of “soft-core” atheism espoused by previous science popularizers such as the late and much beloved Carl Sagan, but harsh, in your face atheist suchs as the Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and another late figure, Christopher Hitchens.

On the one hand there was nothing “new” about the New Atheists. Science in the popular imagination had for sometime been used as a bridge away from religion. I need only look at myself. What really undermined my belief in the Catholicism in which I was raised were books like Carl Sagan’s Dragons of Eden, and Cosmos, or to a lesser extent Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time, even a theologically sounding book like Paul Davies God and the New Physics did nothing to shore up my belief in a personal God and the philosophically difficult or troubling ideas such as “virgin birth”, “incarnation”, “transubstantiation” or “papal infallibility” under which I was raised.

What I think makes the New Atheists of the 2000s truly new is that many science popularizers have lost the kind of cool indifference, or even openness to reaching out and explaining science in terms of religious concepts that was found in someone like Carl Sagan. Indeed, their confrontationalist stance is part of their shtick and a sure way to sell books in the same way titles like the Tao of Physics sold like hotcakes in the archaic Age of Disco.

For example, compare the soft, even if New Agey style of Sagan  to the kind of anti-religious screeds given by one of the New Atheist “four horsemen”, Richard Dawkins, in which he asks fellow atheists to “mock” and “ridicule” people’s religious  beliefs. Sagan sees religion as existing along a continuum with science, an attempt to answer life’s great questions. Science may be right, but religion stems from the same deep human instinct to ask questions and understand, whereas Dawkins seems to see only a dangerously pernicious stupidity.

It impossible to tease out who fired the first shot in the new conflict between atheists and the religious, but shots were fired. In 2004, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith hit the bookstores, a book I can still remember paging through at a Barnes N’ Noble when there were such things and thinking how shocking it was in tone. That was followed by Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion along with his documentary about religion with the less than live-and-let-live  title- The Root of All Evil? -followed by Hitchens’ book  God is Not Great, among others.

What had happened between the easy going atheism of the late Carl Sagan and the militant atheism of Harris’ The End of Faith was the tragedy of 9/11 which acted as an accelerant on a trend that had been emerging at the very least since Dawkins’ Virus of the Mind published way back in 1993. People who once made the argument that religion was evil or that signaled out any specific religion as barbaric would have before 9/11 been labeled as intolerant or racists.  Instead, in 2005 they were published in the liberal Huffington Post. Here is Harris:

It is time we admitted that we are not at war with “terrorism”; we are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.

One of the most humanistic figures in recent memory, and whose loss is thus even more to our detriment than the loss of either the poetic Sagan or the gadfly Hitchens tried early on to prevent this conflict from ever breaking out. Stephen Jay Gould as far back as 1997 tried to minimize the friction between science and religion with his idea of Nonoverlapping Magisteria (NOMA). If you read one link I have ever posted please read this humane and conciliatory essay.  The argument Gold makes in his essay is that there is no natural conflict between science and religion. Both religion and science possess their own separate domains: science deals with what is- the nature of the natural world, whereas religion deals with the question of meaning.

Science does not deal with moral questions because the study of nature is unable to yield meaning or morality on a human scale:

As a moral position (and therefore not as a deduction from my knowledge of nature’s factuality), I prefer the “cold bath” theory that nature can be truly “cruel” and “indifferent”—in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse—because nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn’t know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological microsecond), and doesn’t give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then become free to conduct moral discourse—and nothing could be more important—in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature’s factuality.

Gould later turned his NOMA essay into a book- The Rocks of Ages in which he made an extensive argument that the current debate between science and religion is really a false one that emerges largely from great deal of misunderstanding on both sides.

The real crux of any dispute between science and religion, Gould thinks, are issues of what constitutes the intellectual domain of each endeavor. Science answers questions regarding the nature of the world, but should not attempt to provide answers for questions of meaning or ethics. Whereas religion if properly oriented should concern itself with exactly these human level meaning and ethical concerns. The debate between science and religion was not only unnecessary, but the total victory of one domain over the other would, for Gould, result in a diminishment of depth and complexity that emerges as a product of our humanity.

The New Atheists did not heed Gould’s prescient and humanistic advice. Indeed, he was already in conflict with some who would become its most vociferous figures- namely Dawkins and E.O. Wilson- even before the religion vs. science debate broke fully onto the scene. This was a consequence of Gould pushing back against what he saw as a dangerous trend towards reductionism of those applying genetics and evolutionary principles to human nature. The debate between Gould and Dawkins even itself inspired a book, the 2001, Dawkins vs. Gould published a year before Gould’s death from cancer.

Yet, for how much I respect Gould, and am attracted to his idea of NOMA, I do not find his argument to be without deep flaws. One of inadequacies of Gould’s Rocks of Ages is that it makes the case the that the conflict between science and religion is merely a matter of dispute the majority of us, the scientifically inclined along with the traditionally religious, against marginal groups such as creationists, and their equally fanatical atheists antagonists. The problem, however, may be deeper than Gould lets on.

Rocks of Ages begins with the story of the Catholic Church’s teaching on evolution as an example of NOMA in action.  That story begins with Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical, Humani Generis, which declared that the theory of evolution, if  it was eventually proven definitively true by science, would not be in direct contradiction to Church teaching.  This was followed up (almost 50 years later, at the Church’s usual geriatric speed) by Pope John Paul II’s 1996 declaration that the theory of evolution was now firmly established  as a scientific fact, and that Church theology would have to adjust to this truth. Thus, in Gould’s eyes, the Church had respected NOMA by eventually deferring to science on the question of evolution whatever challenges evolution might pose to traditional Catholic theology.

Yet, the same Pope Pius XII who grudgingly accepted that evolution might be true, one year later used the scientific discovery of the Big Bang to argue, not for a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis which hadn’t been held by the Church since Augustine, but for evidence of the more ephemeral concept of a creator that was the underlying “truth” pointed to in Genesis:

Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, it [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the cosmos came forth from the hands of the Creator.

Hence, creation took place in time.

Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!

Pius XII was certainly violating the spirit if not the letter on NOMA here. Preserving the requisite scientific skepticism in regard to evolution until all the facts were in, largely because it posed challenges to Catholic theology, while jumping almost immediately on a scientific discovery that seemed to lend support for some of the core ideas of the Church- a creator God and creation ex nihilo.

This seeming inclination of the religious to ask for science to keep its hands off when it comes to challenging it claims, while embracing science the minute it seems to offer proof of some religious conviction, is precisely the argument Richard Dawkins makes against NOMA, I think rightly, in his The God Delusion, and for how much I otherwise disagree with Dawkins and detest his abusive and condescending style, I think he is right in his claim that NOMA only comes into play for many of the religious when science is being used to challenge their beliefs, and not when science seems to lend plausibility to its stories and metaphysics. Dawkins and his many of his fellow atheists, however, think this is a cultural problem, namely that the culture is being distorted by the “virus” of religion. I disagree. Instead, what we have is a serious theological problem on our hands, and some good questions to ask might be: what exactly is this problem? Was this always the case? And in light of this where might the solution lie?

In 2009, Karen Armstrong, the ex-nun, popular religious scholar, and what is less know one time vocal atheist, threw her hat into the ring in defense of religion. The Case for God which was Armstrong’s rejoinder to the New Atheists is a remarkable book .
At least one explanation of theological problems we have is that a book like the Bible, when taken literally, is clearly absurd in light of modern science. We know that the earth was not created in 6 days, that there was no primordial pair of first parents, that the world was not destroyed by flood, and we have no proof of miracles understood now as the suspension of the laws of nature through which God acts in the world.  

The critique against religion by the New Atheists assumes a literal understanding either of scripture or the divine figures behind its stories. Armstrong’s The Case for God sets out to show that this literalism is a modern invention. Whatever the case with the laity, among Christian religious scholars before the modern era, the Bible was never read as a statement of scientific or historical fact. This, no doubt, is part of the reason its many contradictions and omissions where one story of an event is directly at odds with a different version of the exact same.

The way in which medieval Christian scholars were taught to read the Bible gives us an indication of what this meant. They were taught to read first for the literal meaning and once they understood move to the next level to discover the moral meaning of a text. Only once they had grasped this moral meaning would they attempt to grapple with the true, spiritual meaning of a text. Exegesis thus resembles the movement of the spirit away from the earth and the body above into the transcendent.

The Christian tradition in its pre-modern form, for Armstrong then, was not attempting to provide a proto-scientific version of the world that our own science has shown to be primitive and false, and the divine order which it pointed to was not one of some big bearded guy in clouds, but understood as the source and background of  a mysterious cosmic order which the human mind was incapable of fully understanding.

The New Atheists often conflate religion with bad and primitive science we should have long outgrown: “Why was that man’s barn destroyed by a lightning bolt?” “ As punishment from God. “How can we save our crops from drought?” “Perform a rain dance for the spirits?” It must therefore be incredibly frustrating to the New Atheists for people to cling to such an outdated science. But, according to Armstrong religion has never primarily been about offering up explanations for the natural world.

Armstrong thinks the best way to understand religion is as akin to art or music or poetry and not as proto-science. Religion is about practice not about belief and its truths are only accessible for those engaged in such practices. One learns what being a Christian by imitating Jesus: forgiving those who hurt you, caring for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, viewing suffering as redemptive or “carrying your cross”. Similar statements can be made for the world’s other religions as well though the kinds of actions one will pursue will be very different. This is, as Stephen Prothero points out in his God is not One, because the world’s diverse faith have defined the problem of the human condition quite differently and therefore have come up with quite distinct solutions. (More on that in part two.)

How then did we become so confused regarding what religion is really about? Armstrong traces how Biblical literalism arose in tandem with the scientific revolution and when you think about it this makes a lot of sense. Descartes, who helped usher in modern mathematics wrote a “proof” for God. The giant of them all, Newton, was a Biblical literalists and thought his theory of gravity proved the existence of the Christian God. Whereas the older theology had adopted a spirit of humility regarding human knowledge, the new science that emerged in the 16th century was bold in its claims that a new way had been discovered which would lead to a full understanding of the world- including the God who it was assumed had created it. It shouldn’t be surprising that Christians, perhaps especially the new Protestants, who sought to return to the true meaning of the faith through a complete knowledge of scripture, would think that God and the Bible could be proved in the same way the new scientific truths were being proved.


God thus became a “fact” like other facts and Westerners began the road to doubt and religious schizophrenia as the world science revealed showed no trace of the Christian God -or any other God(s) – amid the cold, indifferent and self-organizing natural order science revealed. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker if God was a hypothetical builder of clocks there is no need for the hypothesis now that we know how a clock can build itself.

Armstrong,thus, provides us with a good grasp of why Gould’s NOMA might have trouble gaining traction. Our understanding of God or the divine has become horribly mixed up with the history of science itself, with the idea that God would be “proven”
an assumption that helped launch the scientific revolution. Instead, what science has done in relation to this early modern idea of God as celestial mechanic and architect of the natural world, is push this idea of God into an ever shrinking “gap” of knowledge where science (for the moment) lacked a reasonable natural explanation of events. The gap into which the modern concept of God got itself jammed after Darwin’s theory of natural selection proved sufficient to explain the complexity of life eventually became the time before the Big Bang. A hole Pope Pius XII eagerly jumped into given that it seemed to match up so closely with Church theology. Combining his 1950-51 encyclicals he seemed to be saying “We’ll give you the origin of life, but we’ll gladly take the creation of the Universe”!

This was never a good strategy.

Next time I’ll try to show how this religious crisis actually might provide an opportunity for new ways of approaching age old religious questions and open up new avenues of  pursuing transcendence- a possibility that might prove particularly relevant for the community that goes under the label, transhumanist.