…and this is a 
Hiding from religious reality
Category: Religion
Posted on: April 2, 2007 6:00 AM, by PZ Myers
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.
Comments
Spot on.
Posted by: MysticOlly | April 2, 2007 6:33 AM
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?
Posted by: Tom Rees | April 2, 2007 6:35 AM
Yeah? I have a better one for this uhm... other order of reality. How about "Janus"?
Nah, that would be too obvious, eh?
Posted by: C | April 2, 2007 7:05 AM
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.
Posted by: Mike Haubrich | April 2, 2007 7:06 AM
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
Posted by: Burt Humburg | April 2, 2007 7:06 AM
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.
Posted by: Ex-drone | April 2, 2007 7:12 AM
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 ...
Posted by: Scott Simmons | April 2, 2007 7:22 AM
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.
Posted by: Caledonian | April 2, 2007 7:28 AM
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
Posted by: MysticOlly | April 2, 2007 7:33 AM
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.
Posted by: Jud | April 2, 2007 7:35 AM
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
Posted by: MysticOlly | April 2, 2007 7:37 AM
Oh shit! Sorry I spelled the name wrong. My bad. Burt Humburg. As we say in Japan, gomen nasai yo.
Sorry.
O.
Posted by: MysticOlly | April 2, 2007 7:42 AM
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
Posted by: Burt Humburg | April 2, 2007 7:46 AM
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.
Posted by: Joshua | April 2, 2007 7:52 AM
*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.
Posted by: malpollyon | April 2, 2007 8:12 AM
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Posted by: Dean | April 2, 2007 8:22 AM
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
Posted by: MysticOlly | April 2, 2007 8:23 AM
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 2, 2007 8:25 AM
Hw cm Brt Hmbrg lft Knss?
Posted by: Dean | April 2, 2007 8:27 AM
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.
Posted by: Frustrated | April 2, 2007 8:32 AM
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?
Posted by: John B | April 2, 2007 8:36 AM
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.
Posted by: Michael Derr | April 2, 2007 8:44 AM
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.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | April 2, 2007 8:54 AM
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.
Posted by: Frustrated | April 2, 2007 9:06 AM
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.
Posted by: TheBowerbird | April 2, 2007 9:08 AM
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.
Posted by: PZ Myers | April 2, 2007 9:15 AM
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.
Posted by: John | April 2, 2007 9:23 AM
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"?
Posted by: Will E. | April 2, 2007 9:33 AM
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.
Posted by: Christian Burnham | April 2, 2007 9:36 AM
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.
Posted by: Nomen Nescio | April 2, 2007 9:36 AM
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
Posted by: Burt Humburg | April 2, 2007 9:37 AM
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.
Posted by: Peter McGrath | April 2, 2007 9:46 AM
"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.
Posted by: Alan Kellogg | April 2, 2007 9:46 AM
Exactly. Science has no need to "disprove god."
Posted by: roy sablosky | April 2, 2007 9:55 AM
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.
Posted by: Elliott Grasett | April 2, 2007 9:59 AM
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.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 2, 2007 10:00 AM
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.
Posted by: Dan | April 2, 2007 10:01 AM
"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).
Posted by: NonyNony | April 2, 2007 10:20 AM
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.
Posted by: Chris | April 2, 2007 10:20 AM
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.
Posted by: Ian | April 2, 2007 10:32 AM
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.
Posted by: Jimmy | April 2, 2007 10:36 AM
"intellectual christian thought"? Is that something like "contemporary Jedi theology"?
just less believable.
Posted by: garth | April 2, 2007 10:48 AM
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 2, 2007 10:52 AM
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.
Posted by: factlike | April 2, 2007 11:05 AM
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!
Posted by: CalGeorge | April 2, 2007 11:12 AM
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.
Posted by: Sarcastro | April 2, 2007 11:16 AM
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.
Posted by: John | April 2, 2007 11:18 AM
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.
Posted by: jb | April 2, 2007 11:31 AM
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.
Posted by: Steve_C | April 2, 2007 11:35 AM
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.
Posted by: CalGeorge | April 2, 2007 11:35 AM
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.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 2, 2007 11:37 AM
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.
Posted by: tristero | April 2, 2007 11:41 AM
"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.
Posted by: Robert Maynard | April 2, 2007 11:49 AM
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.
Posted by: Anna Z | April 2, 2007 11:49 AM
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 2, 2007 11:50 AM
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 2, 2007 11:52 AM
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.
Posted by: tristero | April 2, 2007 11:53 AM
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.)
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 2, 2007 12:01 PM
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.
Posted by: PZ Myers | April 2, 2007 12:01 PM
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.
Posted by: Blake Stacey, OM | April 2, 2007 12:03 PM
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.
Posted by: tristero | April 2, 2007 12:03 PM
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.
Posted by: John | April 2, 2007 12:03 PM
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.
Posted by: tristero | April 2, 2007 12:05 PM
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."
Posted by: Patrick | April 2, 2007 12:08 PM
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...
Posted by: Michael | April 2, 2007 12:09 PM
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.
Posted by: BadAunt | April 2, 2007 12:11 PM
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.
Posted by: tristero | April 2, 2007 12:12 PM
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, th