In my previous post, I wrote about some possible issues that religious believers, most especially conservative Christians, might have to overcome in coming together with non-believers to work for common goals. The most pressing issue I considered seemed to be the simple matter of trust. Believers, to put it in a nutshell, don't trust non-believers. This seems to be a function of how religiosity developed in human societies and over time became a sort of marker of trustworthiness. Non-believers, by not showing the common signs of religiosity, are perceived as inherently untrustworthy. Distrust may also be connected to a discomfort among believers with the way atheists draw conclusions. Studies suggest that, for instance, the hearts and minds of Christians can be moved by prayer leaders who are seen to arrive at conclusions by a combination of prayer and reason rather than by reason alone. I concluded with the suggestion that these issues may also lay near the heart of atheist distrust for believers, too.
It is hard to conclude otherwise when one considers the leading figures in atheist circles. People like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens, whose works form the cornerstone of the so-called "New Atheism," never seem to waste an opportunity to heap scorn upon believers. Their message is simple: religion is a "delusion;" it represents an existential threat to humanity, and even moderate religion is harmful because it enables extremism; it is an atavism that may have served a useful purpose but needs to be shaken off; it is a human artifact that "poisons everything." Religion is such a blight that they can find no accommodation with it. Mankind must embrace reason if it is to survive and if "spirituality" is to be continued, it must be one shorn of mythology and based (at least as Harris sees it) in the discoveries of neuroscience.
Of course this ignores that in our everyday interactions while we address or attack religion (which, like science, is a constructed category encompassing a range of human activity), our actual targets turn out to be religious believers, which is to say human beings. Small wonder, then, that having found themselves reduced to a set of beliefs, some believers might have a hard time cooperating with non-believers. They must imagine their putative partners mocking them behind their backs, especially when they read blanket attacks on their faith that fail to differentiate moderate, essentially secularized, believers, and extremists, polemics that label their closely-held beliefs delusion. In their shoes, I would find it ironic that the same people who criticize my belief as a weird sort of groupthink that requires doctrinal purity would insist on a similar type of purity of thought as a requirement for respect. That many launching such attacks are scientists may also contribute to a perception that science is, or leads to, atheism, hindering cooperation on issues such as climate change that are bound so intimately to science.
If, as I suggested in the first post on this, religious believers are going to have to make mental adjustments to work with non-believers, then it is clear non-believers will have to make similar adjustments to their attitudes. Detente is required, at least while we are attempting to work together. The joint purposes we share are not advanced by either the religious or non-religious engaging in apologetics in an attempt to convert one another. To this end, I would like to revive an idea proposed by the late Stephen Jay Gould in the pages of Natural History, the idea that religious and scientific thought address different areas. Gould called this idea "non-overlapping magisteria," or NOMA. NOMA suggests that science is not competent to address the "moral truths" of religion and religion is not competent to address "factual conclusions" of science.
Gould's idea was met with almost immediate and complete disdain from non-believers. Leaders of the "New Atheism" have either rejected it, or found it seriously limited. They suggest that if NOMA is embraced by religious leaders, it is tacit admission that there is no evidence for God. As for themselves, they are confident that moral questions can be answered without recourse to religion, and see no advantage to yielding that territory to it. Yet, as I have suggested previously, the source of moral behavior is less important than the behavior itself. If we, as non-believers, and they, as believers, can set aside for the purposes of working together our sources of moral authority, it seems NOMA can provide solid neutral territory for working together.
This would surely yield great dividends. Christians and other believers, with the help of leaders of their communities, could embrace the science needed to face looming problems such as anthropogenic global warming, which is where this project began, for NOMA ensures the faithful that God and science are compatible (see the works of Kenneth Miller, Michael Dowd and John Haugh, for example, not to mention Galileo and Newton). Non-believers could recognize that faith, or at least its objects, lie beyond the realm of the measurable and that it is possible to believe in God (or god) and embrace reason. Both sides can derive moral force from whatever sources they chose.
The point is not to turn theists into atheists, or even for one side to stop proselytizing another in all situations, but to recognize that when confronting common threats, the question of god (or God) is largely irrelevant. We atheists need to recognize this, perhaps more than theists do, because our numbers are insufficient to the tasks confronting us. While arguing over the existence of the deity or deities can be entertaining, and indeed raise questions of genuine import, alienating potential allies in important struggles makes all the rhetoric employed no more than whistling past the graveyard.
08 August 2013
Common Problems, Uncommon Grounds- A Matter of Trust 1
As part of an ongoing project to write an article for the online journal Theoecology I have been engaged in thinking about reasons (beyond the obvious ones) that atheists and Christians, especially conservative Christians, might be having trouble connecting with on another to work on environmental issues, especially anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In an earlier post I noted that polling information shows broad-based agreement on both the existence of global warming as a phenomenon, though there were differences among religious group on whether it is man-made, and on the value of action to protect the environment in general. I also suggested factors such as the shortened time horizon implied by end-times eschatology, a generalized sense that the threat of AGW is to others elsewhere, and that accepting AGW may compromise beliefs in a just world. All of these will be addressed in the final article.
However, just as I was, I thought, finishing the article, this link appeared on my Twitter feed. The article it led to talked about social science research that had been done by psychology professors at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon, on whether theist prejudice against atheists was based on a lack of trust. This would be different, say, from prejudice against gays, which other work has found to be based in disgust. It also presupposes that when in-groups and out-groups collide, the prejudice against the out-group will be based on the nature of the threat they pose.
Religious belief, they claim (and it is a claim that should be familiar to regular readers or who has spent more than ten minutes talking to me about the topic) arose as a tool of social cohesion. Like David Sloan Wilson, whose Darwin's Cathedral is a must-read on this subject, Gervais, Shariff and Norenzayan argue that religious belief was, essentially, a way to unload the responsibility (and energy cost) of motioning public morals and doling out punishment to a supernatural being. This has been so effective, that recent psychological studies show that the mere suggestion of divine watchfulness has been enough to increase honesty in personal transactions.
Over time, as human communities grew, the mixing of strangers required extension of trust. Religiosity, Gervais, and his co-writers suggest, was a potential shortcut in this. Outward signs of religious faith were a signal that a person could be trusted, helpful in an environment where everyone could not know everyone else. Because of this atheists are problematic. They do not make the outward signs that the religious do, leading religious believers to distrust them. This idea was borne out in their experiments. Self-identified religious participants expressed varying levels of distrust for atheists, with this prejudice being strongest among the most religious. In a subsequent paper, two of the authors found that this distrust could be mitigated by reminders of secular authority. Governments, they contend, have assumed the monitoring and punishment duties of gods, and it would seem that reminders of this bring home to believers that they and atheists both are liable to judgment from the same authority.
So one of the problems inherent in this meeting of the minds between religious believers and non-believers, on any topic is going to be this trust issue. Among those identifying themselves as extremely religious, such as conservative Christians, this distrust will be at its worst. Among more liberal denominations this seems less likely to be an issue, as such denominations tend to be more secularized. Another potential problem is discomfort with the way atheists come, or are perceived to have come, to their determinations, which is to say by the application of reason. An interesting study of attempts by evangelical leaders to rally the faithful on environmental issues, especially AGW, suggests that even the most conservative religious believers can be brought around by leaders within their faith tradition and more specifically by leaders who are seen to have arrived at conclusions not simply through reason, but also by prayer. Epistemology, the means of reaching the understanding, is as important as the understanding itself.
Therefore, in engaging with believers, especially conservative Christians, atheists face two challenges. The first is overcoming problems of trust. The second is that religious believers will be less likely to accept their views because of the process involved. A potential third is, of course, the attitudes of atheists themselves towards the religious. It is not far-fetched to suggest that distrust and epistemological problems may lie near the root of this as well, something I will explore further.
However, just as I was, I thought, finishing the article, this link appeared on my Twitter feed. The article it led to talked about social science research that had been done by psychology professors at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon, on whether theist prejudice against atheists was based on a lack of trust. This would be different, say, from prejudice against gays, which other work has found to be based in disgust. It also presupposes that when in-groups and out-groups collide, the prejudice against the out-group will be based on the nature of the threat they pose.
Religious belief, they claim (and it is a claim that should be familiar to regular readers or who has spent more than ten minutes talking to me about the topic) arose as a tool of social cohesion. Like David Sloan Wilson, whose Darwin's Cathedral is a must-read on this subject, Gervais, Shariff and Norenzayan argue that religious belief was, essentially, a way to unload the responsibility (and energy cost) of motioning public morals and doling out punishment to a supernatural being. This has been so effective, that recent psychological studies show that the mere suggestion of divine watchfulness has been enough to increase honesty in personal transactions.
Over time, as human communities grew, the mixing of strangers required extension of trust. Religiosity, Gervais, and his co-writers suggest, was a potential shortcut in this. Outward signs of religious faith were a signal that a person could be trusted, helpful in an environment where everyone could not know everyone else. Because of this atheists are problematic. They do not make the outward signs that the religious do, leading religious believers to distrust them. This idea was borne out in their experiments. Self-identified religious participants expressed varying levels of distrust for atheists, with this prejudice being strongest among the most religious. In a subsequent paper, two of the authors found that this distrust could be mitigated by reminders of secular authority. Governments, they contend, have assumed the monitoring and punishment duties of gods, and it would seem that reminders of this bring home to believers that they and atheists both are liable to judgment from the same authority.
So one of the problems inherent in this meeting of the minds between religious believers and non-believers, on any topic is going to be this trust issue. Among those identifying themselves as extremely religious, such as conservative Christians, this distrust will be at its worst. Among more liberal denominations this seems less likely to be an issue, as such denominations tend to be more secularized. Another potential problem is discomfort with the way atheists come, or are perceived to have come, to their determinations, which is to say by the application of reason. An interesting study of attempts by evangelical leaders to rally the faithful on environmental issues, especially AGW, suggests that even the most conservative religious believers can be brought around by leaders within their faith tradition and more specifically by leaders who are seen to have arrived at conclusions not simply through reason, but also by prayer. Epistemology, the means of reaching the understanding, is as important as the understanding itself.
Therefore, in engaging with believers, especially conservative Christians, atheists face two challenges. The first is overcoming problems of trust. The second is that religious believers will be less likely to accept their views because of the process involved. A potential third is, of course, the attitudes of atheists themselves towards the religious. It is not far-fetched to suggest that distrust and epistemological problems may lie near the root of this as well, something I will explore further.
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