Common Problems, Uncommon Grounds- A Matter of Trust 2

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.