Twelfth Night or What You Will

This evening, Lady P got home from work early and ordered me asked me to help her take the Christmas Tree down before it got dark. She wanted to make sure that the process of removing the decorations was at least underway by the time Twelfth Night was upon us.

Now before you assume that my wife is an ignorant, superstitious peasant, I should tell you that she has a degree from Cambridge, a master's degree and a few other letters that she would probably call 'additional qualifications'.  She is bright enough to know that superstition has no rational basis whatsoever. 

Having a history degree, she also knows that the world could not have been made in 4004 BC and she has studied enough science to know that much of what is written in the Bible cannot possibly be true.  But, just as she likes to take the decorations down on Twelfth Night, she also likes to go to church, sing hymns and read the Bible.  As with many other perfectly sane and intelligent people, the mix of an attachment to tradition and a vague feeling that human reason may not be able to quite explain everything,  keeps her observing these rituals. Many of us are reluctant to jettison our attachment to old beliefs completely. After all, you can never be sure, can you?

Which is why I can't accept the predictions by some scientists that religion will disappear within a few decades. According to the Guardian:

People's fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.

Philosopher Daniel Denett believes that within 25 years religion will command little of the awe it seems to instil today. The spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will "gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance".

Biologist Richard Dawkins said that physicists would give religion another problem: a theory of everything that would complete Albert Einstein's dream of unifying the fundamental laws of physics. "This final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions."

This shows a belief in rationality that is, in itself, verging on a leap of religious faith.  There has been enough information around for at least the past fifty years to kill religion stone dead.  Much of this knowledge has been widely disseminated. Most people with even a basic education understand enough science to know that much of what is written in the scriptures cannot be the literal truth.  People have been getting information through television and the internet for many years now, even in the less developed parts of the world, without it having much impact on their religious belief.  It is difficult to see what difference a scientific theory of everything will make.

If people were going to be persuaded away from religion by science it would have happened by now.  Many people have drifted away from regular worship, either because science has blown a hole in religious certainty or because there are more things to do now on a Sunday, but that decline has come and gone.  The hard core of church regulars, and the larger group that goes occasionally or drifts back at Christmas and Easter,  are not going to be put off my more scientific discovery.  They are choosing to worship for other reasons. 

We are drawn to religion by our feelings rather than our thoughts.  The sense that, for all our clever inventions, there may still be things that humans will never know and the desire to hedge our bets just in case keeps many of us from declaring ourselves to be atheists.  Combine that with the traditions and rituals of religion, which appeal to the senses not to the intellect, and you have something that defies the challenge from science.

If science was going to kill religion it would have done it by now.  For intellectuals such as Denett and Dawkins to claim that technology and a scientific theory of everything will destroy religion shows a kind of faith-based arrogance that we once thought only afflicted the religious.

Update: Thank you Andrew Stuttaford at the National Review for this comment on the above post.  As a result, discussions on my view of religion and science have kicked off on three American blogs; Blogs for Bush, Not So Confidential and Anchor Rising.  You may find their comments interesting.

Update 2:  Religion is Bullshit and Hell's Handmaiden pitch in on the other side.

Comments

[G. Tingey]

Unreasoning belief, and the believers.

The believers, in all the monotheistic religions, and even that religion-without-a-god, communism, seem to have common characteristics, as do those religions.
All seem to suggest that religion is a very bad idea, and that religions, and especially their believers, will do certain unpleasant things.
In order to combat this pernicious mind-rot, I’m proposing some falsifiable tests for religions, and some suggestions as to what rational people should do about it.

A set of testable Propositions

1. No “god” can be detected - OR - God is not detectable
2. All religions are blackmail, and are based on fear and superstition.
3. All religions have been made by men.
4. Prayer has no effect on third parties.
5. All religions kill, or enslave, or torture.
What do those religions (including Marxism) actually DO?
How are they structured?
Never mind what they claim – what are their real, testable parameters?

Well?

[Matt Davis]

Whilst it is entirely possible that the Church of England will shortly disappear up its own fundament, condemned to irrelevence by the weight of its' "left wing politics before theology" driven clergy, to suggest that all religion will fade away is to completely ignore global realities. First and foremost the inexorable rise of violent, colonial, fundamentalist Islam will not be halted by the Internet or the availability of scientific knowledge. In fact it won't be halted at all until the non Islamic world wakes up to the seriousness of the threat and instead of kowtowing in a political correct manner starts the necessary fight back.

All religion is ultimately about controlling people and as such has very little, if anything, to do with god. I say good riddance to all of it, but that joyous day isn't going to occur in my lifetime.

[Rastaman]

Religion can go fart itself to death. In fact, I hope it does. I'll even put up with the stink just to see it happen. Spirituality, on the other hand, will exist as long as intelligent life does, because God is, in fact, real. Experiencing this is necessarily a personal event, but then, so is hearing a distant tree fall in the forest. It fell, you heard it. Now prove that you heard it. Prove that it fell. Right.

As to religions, it happens that several have been formed by women, the last one here in the US in the 20's. I don't recall the name of it but anyone that interested can Google it. The Greeks had Goddesses that were attended only by women worshippers, and I believe the Celts had a female harvest cult. No doubt there's been many others down thru the ages.

"All religions...". Sorry, no, they don't all fit the same mold at all.

And Steve is correct. Even ten generations won't rid us of Islam. All-out war and the judicious use of nuclear weaponry might, at great cost to the planet in general. It may come to that.

Rastaman
www.islamanazi.com

[Mary's Friend]

Speaking as a more simpler and less intelligent person than the poster and other commenter's, my view as to why there is still religion is simply because there is a huge majority, of bluntly speaking, thick and ignorant people in the world, who slightly cleverer but evil people, like to control and take advantage of for their own purposes.

If the entire world's population was bursting with common sense and or either well educated, then it would be much more likely that science could rid us all of these evil religions that have brought continuous war and suffering to us all for millennia.

I do admit there has been some good come out of religion but it has be vastly out weighed by the misery and holding back of many nations to what I like to call, stone age civilizations within country borders.

People who know better and who should reject religion I feel mostly do not through peer pressure, bullying and fashion.

[Dave]

Liberalism is a dead end, they don't breed above replacement level.

Even if the current religons do fall out of favour a new community belief system would emerge.

[Lyford]

"Most people with even a basic education understand enough science to know that much of what is written in the scriptures cannot be the literal truth."

Just out of curiousity, if you leave out Genesis, what scriptures have science proven "cannot be the literal truth?" In particular, what parts of the New Testament "cannot be the literal truth?" I'm not aware of any...

[Carly]

Just finished reading philosopher Diogenes Allen's book, Christian Belief In a Postmodern World. Far from being irrational, Allen gives legitimate, thoughtful reasons for the rationality of religious belief, especially now that the assumptions of modernity have collapsed. He also points out that it was a religious worldview that helped give rise to modern science in the first place.

[CB]

Lyford,

The problem most of the commenters here and most non-theists have, is that they are supremely confident in the limited perceptions of man to solve everything. One of my favorite complaints of non-theists is about the "improbablity" or "impossibility" of miracles. Miracles defy science, they argue so they can't possibly be true.

Now, of course the first problem with such criticism is the failure to understand the definition of the word "miracle" which is an event which supercedes or seems to supercede everyday physical law. This failure makes the complaint a tautalogy: "Micracles can't exists because there are no miracles."

The biggest problem though is that, if there is a God, defined as most define God - a supreme being with control over the material and metaphysical universe, then the acceptance of miracles is neither ridiculous nor absurd, but simply the acknowledgement that such a God would be capable of doing them.

One would have to acknowledge that if God exists, even the literal Genesis would be possible. This is not to say that God actually created the universe the way Genesis describes it literally, but merely that for God such an effort would be possible. Of course, Genesis 1 is not a material, scientific description of creation, but atheists depend on the assumption that it is because their use of evolution is powerless without it, as the Catholic Church has realized.

Also, several commenters here have charged that religion is "controlling." I would agree with the statement that "some religions" are controlling but to state absolutely that all religions are is nonsense. If they were, why has religion given up it's controlling influence on the state? Why would the founders of the United States, the majority of whom were religious men (despite the focus on the deists among them) establish freedom of religion or secular government. No, such assertions are part of a larger strategy that intends to demonize the very idea of religion, even going so far, as one commenter did to religionize Communism, which is an atheist system to the core. Such revisionist nonsense is necessary to paint the sunny, but utterly false picture which says "Religion bad, atheism/skepticism good." Others, such as Dawkins, extend this to the point where they claim that no rational person can accept religion. Again this is logical claptrap which reduces the idea of rationality to atheism, which is transparent nonsense.

Even the post here seems to take great, if sympathetic pains to assert that certain literal claims of the Bible can't really be true, but yes, we Christians really do believe in a man risen from the dead and that He was God. Such is the stuff of miracles and God that the power of death and nothingness are so ultimately weak.

Frankly, it sounds no more incredible than an eternal, self-perpetuating universe, randomly generating driven and developing life. That's the great mystery of the atheist's claims to greater rationality. Both theist and non-theist rely upon the acceptance of great mysteries and faith in them to believe what they do (with the exception of the passive skeptics and agnostics who at least profess uncertainty, for what it is worth). The non-theists believe in something they cannot ultimately explain (and good luck with that universal theory working it out) just as theists do. The difference is that one side acknowledges that faith in the context of historical revelations while the other relies on the immediately observable in the context of historical interpretation. Neither can universally and immediately resolve the dilemma, but the non-theist relies on the everyday banality of non-theism "what you see is what you get" to carry the day. Ultimately though, it simply doesn't, because the theist acknowledges the everyday as well, but believes that there is purpose and meaning to it as well.

The non-theist can't ever explain where that purpose and meaning comes from except to argue that we ascribe it ourselves, for whatever reasons, biological or psychological. It's an answer which gives way in the face of the everyday purposefulness of living.

[Jolene]

Thank you for a wonderful post!

[James G]

I always find it interesting that it seems to be biologists who feel the most vocal about the Science vs. Religion thing. Funnily enough, physicists tend to sound like mystics when they discuss their work.

It strikes me that, for people of a certain mindset, the only way Darwinian evolution can be real is if there is no God, because, like the existence of God, it cannot be proven empirically, yet. Just as there are fundamentalists on the other side who think that there can be no such thing as biological evolution because that would negate the - what was always acknowledged to be, until recently - symbolic language of Genesis.

Christianity was the sponsor and repository of scientific thought for most of the past 2000 years. One could also say that Judeo-Christian theology gave birth to the scientific method. The Judeo-Christian worldview (when greatly influenced by the Greeks) made it possible to look at the material world and posit that there are observable laws and that they can be measured. The belief in the existence of miracles, rather than contradicting these laws, makes these laws all the more relevant, as miracles are exceptions to the rules rather than the rules themselves.

This has been Church doctrine in one form or another for quite a long time, and it was only in the past couple hundred years of materialism and modernity that the more fundamentalist interpretation of scripture arose.

Also, as you already know, Steve, I don't think the Islamist threat can be counteracted and successfully fought with reason and without a religious basis to the fight. It is those people who are more religious, I would argue, that were the first to viscerally realise the threat that Islamist terrorism really poses to the West. Those who are religious realise the power of faith to move mountains.

Much of what I have written above stems from half-formed thoughts that I have been pondering lately. Please forgive the nature of my comments. (I promise, I will eventually be blogging about many of these thoughts in the months to come, and try to flesh them out a bit more.)

[G. Tingey]

Well, I was a physicist ...

And the posters apologising for religion (James G & Lyford) obviously don't know what they are talking about. I wonder if they have actually READ the bible and the recital?
( Yes, I have, before you ask )

A miracle is defined as something which has no rational explanation.
Which, according to a professional scientists' professional (as opposed to personal) world-view cannot happen.
If a miracle occurs, then, by definition, it cannot be scientifically explained or replicated.
Funny, though, there don't seem to be any miracles around at the moment, because "god" has been banished to the gaps.

There is also the assumption of "purpose" to life/the universe/everything.
Why? What justifies this anthropocentric belief?
WE usually have a purpose to our actions, or we like to think so, but why should this be so of anything else at all?

If you think that religion has any place at all, then could you please demonstrate at least the palusibility of the existence of you invisible friend [insert name here] before we go any further?
No god is detectable - and since undetectable, and undetected (as well) why should anyone bother about the commands of your pet invisible friend?

It is very noticeable that the commands of invisible friends do tend towards the cruel, vicious, blackmailing and oppressive.
Funny that, but it DOES provide priests with a nice living, doesn't it?

[James G.]

GT,
On shear mathematical probabilities alone, the fact that we are sentient beings discussing things as we are, is, if anything, so damn near impossible to have evolved by natural selection. Personally, I can't believe that chance got us here. I think it is illogical, given the millions of little factors that make life here on earth possible, to get them just right so as to create life as we know it.

I also cannot see how evolution can create ethical beings, either. Ethics and morality, if anything, are not very useful adaptations.

Also, I have read the Bible, and do quite regularly. In fact, the knowledge I gained about the origins of the Bible and the way organised religions have worked in general turned me off of it in my teens and twenties. I managed to eventually shake off the fundamentalist baggage that told me I had to believe the Bible is the literal word of God. If you had read the Bible, you would realise that the Bible itself does not even claim that.

You sound as if the only way that one can possibly understand the Bible is to take it as literal as fundamentalists do.

Ex-fundamentalist? Still smarting from deprogramming? Just wondering. You sound a bit angry.

[G. Tingey]

James G.

GROW UP.

"The Anthropic Principle", or the "unbelievably-good-fine-tuning" arguments are completely hollow.
So hollow that Douglas Adams demolished them in Hitchiker.
It's another version of "We're special" or, alternatively a god of the gaps.

Yes, you are right in one thing.
I'm annoyed.

I've got a whole church full of christian fuckwit braindead, just around the corner, and far too many pig-buggering muslims making noises about "kahlifah" (though the've gone VERY quiet recently) to be sanguine about belief in an invisible friend.

Come on.

I have put a testable, falsifyable principle up:
"No god is detectable."
Unless and until any god is detected, we can ignore all and any gods.

I really don't care what the religious do, as consenting adults in private - that's their business.
But I am completely fucked off, right up to the eyebrows, with their pontificating, with no supporting evidence whatsoever, telling me, and millions like me, what to do with my life.

Of course, if the bible isn't literally true, you can pick and choose which bits are true/important or not - oh, wars of religion, anyone?

So - go and warm up a crucifix, and stick it up the unmarried mother Mary's minge for me, will you?
Similarly, the muslims can insert a pork sausage, where it will do most good.

Why can't you interfering mean-minded busybodies just shut up, play with your toys in quiet, and leave us alone?

[Tim]

I was initially going to comment on this - but then decided that my response needed a post to itself (here if anyone is interested).