Atheism 10: Away from fundamentalism

Let me start with this:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html

The above links to a piece published in Wired on the "New" Atheists, and it is a good review. As always, because we are so under-exposed to atheistic thought in America, it is refreshing to read. I'm not going to analyze this article, but below I offer my own thoughts on atheism. The "new" atheists of the title are the standard crew; Dawkins, Dennett, and a few other less well known folks. I'm sharing it with you because it gives a fair hearing to the atheist message (which is exceedingly rare), and contrasts the new atheism with the new fundamentalisms - a comparison whose time is ripe.

Of course comparing nearly anything with the new fundamentalisms (think the Jesus Camp documentary) puts that thing in a good light. The author makes the case the "new" atheism suggests that it's not just that belief in god is wrong, but that tolerance for belief in god is wrong, and therefore religion is not just incorrect, but evil. The argument is that because faith is the soil in which fundamentalism grows, the only way to solve the problem of fundamentalism is to eliminate the cause of faith. There is logic here, but also a seeming lack of awareness about human evolutionary psychology.

As you would guess, I agree intellectually with their critique of religious belief, although not their solution. Dawkins and others seek an end to false faith, and a beautiful day when everyone is intentionally careful about their beliefs and only accept those ideas that have the most evidence. This is a rosy picture of homo sapien decision-making if I've even seen one (and I've seen a few). Of the bunch, Dennett has the most even-keeled response to faith, recognizing some of the cognitive function of such an institution. The rest would have religion and superstition eliminated entirely. This is the author's gloss of their solution, and I'm disappointed.

Now, these atheists are nice people and have noble goals. They want more truth and less suffering. They've got the upper hand in providing the former by a considerable margin (read the article), but can't touch the church-delivered securities in the latter. And therein lies the reason why their quests are misguided. Below, I hope to explain what I see as the greatest error of such fundamentalist atheism, and to offer a more sensible solution to the same problem they identify, namely religious beliefs' capacity for harm.

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PART I
What's Wrong with Fundamentalist Atheism
A Radical Atheist's Perspective

The fundamentalist atheism of the article suggests that we rid ourselves of false beliefs. That sounds like a great idea - we should all struggle to do that. It also suggests that organized religion is more bad than good, and that we should have less tolerance for faith and supernatural explanations. Finally, the proposed solution is to achieve a world without such frivolous beliefs. Let's take these one at a time.

First, is religion bad? Yes, but it's also good. Does the amount of destruction and pain caused by the false beliefs of organized religion outweigh the peace and comfort it can also bestow? In my opinion, it does. But there has been no tally. We need a historical record keeping for each of the major faiths to determine the bloodshed-to-beneficence ratio for each. I think the tally will be negative, (keep in mind even Buddhism has been pretty nasty) but the data just are not collected. Besides, let's say that we had the definitive data in hand, and that the report card was very bad. We would then make the comparison to other human institutions such as liberal democracies and atheist communisms, and make a tally for each of them. Among these peers organized religion blends right in. So saying religion is bad doesn't make much of a point because so are many of humanities largest institutions.

Let's follow their solution - the elimination of faith - through. Obvisously it is 1) impossible, and 2) massively unethical. But this is not a call to arms, but an appeal to the mind. These atheists want people to re-evaluate their own beliefs, not forcibly change those of others. At least that is a refreshing difference between fundamental Atheists and religious fundamentalists. Because this is a thought experiment, one problem with eliminating the institutions of false faith is finding something to supplant it with. One of the biggest critiques of religion is it's capacity for polarization. Humans take to institutions that accentuate in-group solidarity at the expense of between-group connections like a swarm of bees to a hive. Call those institutions whatever you want. Some are religions with wacky beliefs, others are computer platforms, some a nations, others are sports teams. We love our us-vs-them groups. If religions magically disappeared, other social groupings would rise to the ethnocidal challenge (nation-states anyone?). Eliminating religion is not therefore a very worthwhile goal, considering the replacements are just as likely to be destructive. There will always be "religions" in the sense that we will consistently form groups with rituals, beliefs, status, mob-like decision-making, the whole shebang.

If we eliminate "faith" we are left with the psychological realities of the human organism and its population level consequences. Namely group-ism, (racism, sexism, agism) us-vs-them-ism, to name just the most damaging of our inbuilt tendencies. As the author discovers, even if faith could be eliminated, there is little psychological cushioning from the harsh realities of the cold universe. You're born, with defects, and you die. The logic that there is no magical connection to something greater can be hard to handle, and worse yet, the road to economic rationality and hedonism. While these atheists don't seek that goal, others do, and I strongly object. Before we go eliminating faith we need suitable alternatives that will A) keep people happy, and B) keep them contributing to the common good. So eliminating faith is not a useful solution, even in theory.

Now for me, as an evolutionary scholar of human nature and human behavior, the quest of eliminating faith is riddled with theoretical problems. First, faith cannot be eliminated given our understanding of human nature for the simple reason that we like forming clubs, and that our logic is error prone. That's all you need. Preheat to 350˚ and bake for a millennium. Serve your new religious zealotry with a side of ethnic violence, or garnish with a dash of discrimination.

What these atheists are missing is the crucial difference between the medium and the message. When talking about faith, the message, is the faith itself, the erroneous beliefs. But what makes those beliefs circulate in the population causing so much harm? What is the medium? The medium is our evolved cognitive capacities that are designed not just to make sense of the world, but to find both ecological and social benefits, and (here's the evolutionary kicker) do so at low cost. Enter our imitative psychology - our inbuilt gullibility. We are gullible because being gullible makes us more flexible, adaptable, and perhaps, makes the world easier to handle, and because, honestly, being gullible is cheap, especially if you live in a group of like minded people. The message being transmitted over the wires of imitative-psychology is that of a costly, false belief. The fundamental atheists seek an end to damaging belief, but their ideas are built on the assumption that the false nature of these beliefs stems from the beliefs themselves, rather than from the the framework that brought them into existence. They fail to recognize that erroneous belief is a product of the cognitive infrastructure that undergirds all our beliefs.

On a basic level faith is necessary for social function. Faith is acceptance of socially acquired information without fact checking. We trust each other, we accept food without checking if it's poisoned, code with out checking if it contains viruses, rides without knowing the motives of the driver, and most importantly we accept facts and ideas from others without doing the research ourselves in order to verify them. We can't. We don't have the time. It's too expensive. But being gullible is cheap, and so long as you are in a group of people in similar situations, you can trust their advice. And, this is the reason why we prefer creating groups of people like us. Our gullibility is what distinguishes us from other animals, and it is literally the foundation of all culture.

So, for an non-fundamentalist atheist like me, if "faith" so defined is not the enemy, what is? The author (whose name I forget) makes the distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism, which is, I think a useful one to use in dissecting the nature of our own beliefs. It also gives me a new, better label for my own beliefs: I'm a naturalist.


PART II
How to Make a Reasonable Atheist Platform

So, we can't criticize religion for harboring erroneous ideas, because they are ubiquitous. However, these atheists suggest we should not let religious belief off the hook, because it is responsible for so much bloodshed. So, can we then criticize major world religions for causing such injustice? I think in part we can, but doing so misses describing the real dynamics that drive group-based hate. Fundamentally it is human group tendencies that cause some of the problems attributed to religions, and that doesn't just go away - it's a part of us.

So should an atheist have any complaint against religion or religious belief? Yes. Religions are institutions just as much as the state of Oklahoma, the DMV, NBC or McDonalds are. They are party arbitrarily defined human entities that constrain action and affect the belief of the individuals they influence. Religions are some of the oldest and most powerful institutions around. As a category they are perhaps second only to the state in power, yet unlike a state many modern religions do not have to make provisions for the survival and health of their members. In fact many religions are able to sustain themselves on the generosity of their members. This would be fine, if it didn't rest on our gullibility.

If there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that a capitalist society becomes used to the idea of choosing how institutions should behave. We tell our companies: Don't pollute. Treat workers well. A little insider trading is okay, as long as we don't catch you. I would argue that it is very healthy for any society to collectively exert control over the structure of their institutions. Of course, in a capitalist system, we only control businesses, and often only weakly. Take pyramid schemes for instance, or predatory lending, or credit card companies that make it easy for you to default. In my view when an institution becomes predatory (and *any* institution can) we should reform it.

Furthermore, institutions should be measured by the extent to which they engender inter-group cooperation and respect. Ecumenical work does this between Christian faiths, and beyond. Now that's my kind of religion - bringing people together. But so much of religious belief is structured to separate people. Of course this is not intentional, there is no conspiracy theory here, but rather things evolve this way naturally. So, we should try to build institutions that wear away those boundaries, and discourage the creation of new ones. No small feat.

The problem with religion, is therefore, two problems: the problem of false belief (a minor and ubiquitous problem), and the problem of institutional structure. Ultimately there is no solution to problem of false belief. However we can fashion institutions to improve the veracity of belief over time. See science for our best version of such an institution. Science is a unique institution because it divorces its function from the beliefs of it's practitioners (to a decent degree). Science is not-centralized but distributed. It's structure allows beliefs, "theories" rise and fall, and re-emerge changed in light of new evidence, but the institution remains largely unchanged. The basic structure is that of the collaborative project: have and idea, share it with others, everyone test it, make revisions, and bring it back to the table. Interestingly, this is very analogous to another institution that has evolved to design software: the open-source movement. The open-source practitioners design some code, share it around, everyone is welcome to re-use or incorporate it in anyway they like (save for commercial benefit), so long as they share what they've done. It works well too. You know the Web? 80% hosted on the open-source web-server Apache.

The second, and more difficult problem with religion, is the problem of institutional structure, and is by no means unique to religion. To the extent that a given religion promotes us-versus-them mentality, it is evil. Of course, these religions often do well for obvious evolutionary reasons. (Take quakerism as the antithesis of this type of religion. It's shrinking because it doesn't make that distinction, and doesn't proselytize.) And to the extent that a religion uses the cheap spread of erroneous belief to extract support from individuals while that support is simply put to the purpose of furthering the institutional machine itself, it is a waste of resources. To the extent that religion is spirituality, it is healthy.

A healthy society would attempt to configure itself in such a way so as to reduce the effect of everything from pyramid schemes to predatory religious institutions to run-away governmental bureaucracies. Imagine if we could make our institutions like the open-source folks make software, and bat around different theological ideas they way scientists debate theory. A healthy society, might a more benign form of capitalism, where citizens control not only businesses but all institutions. Everyone would be allowed to apply for temporary funding to create a new institution, a new revision to the way society functions. At the end of every year, the populace would vote on the most innovative institutions to incorporate into the government. Thus, the government itself would be and open source, collaborative project. New institutional mechanisms (like a new welfare system) could then be evaluated on their ability to provide social benefits. This way society would evolve to be harmonious with itself.

We will always be susceptible to institutions that only use support dollars to further their own propaganda. But I believe that an open-source society would be a make us a little more immune.

The "end to faith" logic is not the solution, but I do think it is a healthy thought. Specifically to question one's belief, and the beliefs of others is healthy for individuals, but more importantly, for society, and democracy. We need more of such skepticism in our public discourse, especially these days.


Tim M. Waring, 2009