R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 23

Implicit Atheists

In the discussion that most concerns me right now, the quarrel between unbelievers of an explicit and implicit variety, the debate also seems to be about men and women who see science as the basic cipher for human satisfaction–including moral good–-and those who have a wider humanistic outlook that also, often, includes a certain respect for religion, or at least an awareness of its social and cultural significance.

The “soft atheists” are men and women who aren’t afraid to accept the notion that they are unbelievers, but they make this choice on humanistic, existential or historical grounds–not because they feel the conclusion is forced on them by science.

At the risk of rousing the guard, I think thousands of intellectuals, scholars, artists, scientists, and ordinary folk fall into this category. The “atheism” they assume but do not profess or press can only strike the full-frontal atheist as quaint and hypocritical.

When I say this, the default reaction toward the critic is to impute a deadly sin: Critics are always merely jealous of commercial success. That explains everything. The logic: whatever sells is right.

My favourite “example” of the implicit atheist made no secret of her atheism. When Susan Sontag was told she was dying of cancer, that it was inoperable, and that what was left to her was “faith,” she said that she believed in nothing but this life, that there was no continuation, and that in any event she took religion far too seriously to think she could embrace it at the last minute to get a sense of relief.

Implicit atheists are not intellectually soft, but the conclusion that God does not exist does not seem pivotal, life-changing to them because they neither read it in a newspaper as data nor in a book called Wake Up You Slumbering Fools: There IS NO God.

Most of them have come to a position of unbelief through a culture in which religion inhabits ideas, spaces, patterns of thought, modes of conduct, art and music. Who can say that this is right or wrong: it’s the world we’ve got.

I suspect that implicit atheists are especially repugnant to New Atheists because they are seen to have arrived at atheism using discount methods. They lack toughness. Apparently (as a commentator opined) I don’t have cojones. Damn.

Their (our) “decision” looks like indecision. Maybe they should have to wear a red Question Mark for three years until they realize that it’s science that confirms your unbelief–sort of like the Holy Spirit confirms your being a believer in Christianity. Earn your A.

But it does seem to me, beyond this, that the implicit atheist does not entirely reject religion. How do you reject whole chapters of the human story? Your distant grandmother probably said the rosary, or wore a wig, or a veil. Your grandfather fifty generations ago might have slaughtered Jews en route to Jerusalem or Muslims after he got there. So many possibilities.

You can’t tear their superstitions out of your family album, can you–an impossibility made less critical by the fact that you have no idea what they did.

History has transformed them into innocuous unknowns in the same way that it has rendered the most noxious forms of religion impotent. The Old Testament God that most new atheists like to rant on about is a God that implicit atheists gave up on years ago. No cojones.

This comes to them inductively, though a process of intellectual growth and assimilation. What they call religion has historical context and historical importance. But the key word is “context,” because the humanistic unbeliever lives in a context where religion is no longer the magisterial authority for how we understand the physical world or how we lead our lives within it.

Many such implicit atheists will feel some degree of sadness about this, not because they feel religion doesn’t deserve our skepticism, occasional contempt, and criticism, but because they know from poetry, art, music, and philosophy that the project to create a secular humanity from the ashes of our religious predecessors is a tough project and that the nasal chorus, “God does Not exist” (option one: “Religion is Evil.”) is really a wheel-spinner when it comes to getting things done.

The anger of many hardcore (explicit?) atheists comes down to this: their belief that an atheism which is not forced by science is inauthentic. Why? because a humanistic, existential and historical unbelief does not acknowledge the apriorism of scientific atheism.

It–implicit atheism–sees science as a mode of knowing, not the only mode. Soft-core atheism (I number myself as a proud member of this club) does not blame the Bible for being a very old book, or religion for its historical overreaching. It forgives the Bible for being a book of its time and place and asks that we regard it merely as a souvenir of our human struggle for answers. Anything more–like ethical rectitude or scientific plausibility–is too much. That goes for the Qur’an, too.

There is no reason to villify God and religion, historically understood, for excesses that, as humanists, we slowly recognized as human excesses and finally learned to combat.

If we accept the principle that we made God in our image, as well as his holy and diverse books, then surely the burden is on us to clean up our mess–not to reify it merely by asserting its non-existence.

Everything from Eden to the Flood, to Sodom to the Holocaust to 9/11 was us. Not mystical religious others: Us. Science does not explain this and does not solve it for us. When the New Atheists are willing to accept real human responsibility for the abominations they attribute to a mythical beast called religion they will have taken a giant leap forward.

Surah XII

Yusuf

You cannot marry him the brother says--
and strikes her, just to make the words acute.
And with these words etched on her hopeful face
he said, 'It’s final. It is absolute.'
She looked into his eyes and saw the pain:
a thousand years of pious certainty
was his dark look. And so she asked again.
This time, he nothing said and turned away.
The girl began to pray, her hands aloft:
‘Oh Allah, the compassionate and great--
Melt thou my brother’s heart to make it soft--
Give me my lover, turn the bitter sweet.’
And God that instant looking from above
Remembered Yusuf and confirmed his love.

Illiterate Islam

Which brings me to the unpleasant thesis sentence of this little screed. Islam is illiterate. Its teachers are illiterate. Its educational system, to the extent it calls itself Islamic, is impoverished. Not particularly in its faithful, who have constructed some good (if not prestigious or world-ranked) universities and produced some excellent scholars and a vast array of professionals in the last century—mainly by availing themselves of western education and training.

But at its core–in its clergy. It is clear to almost anyone who looks at the imams and mullahs of Islam that the only comparison between Islam and the West relative to theology would have to be made between the worst graduates of fundamentalist Bible colleges in America and the best graduates of Islamic seminaries–anywhere.

What is truly remarkable, if we strip bare the reality behind these facts, is that undeniably intelligent people around the globe tolerate a situation where they can respect and obey the religious dicta of men (all men) whose religious training is roughly equivalent to (but probably not as broad as) someone with a two year degree from a junior college in Mississippi. It is impossible to think of an apt analogy without referring to slavery.

For people like me–who know the past and present of Islam pretty well–the only reasonable question is, Where is your revolution, your Reformation? Your wars are everywhere, Death is everywhere. But where is change?

True, of course, there are exceptions; but the education of Islamic clerics is a one-book-and-its-friends curriculum. It is a one-language course of study that is unfriendly to philosophy, secularism, the West, the liberal arts– especially serious historical study–most science, and worst of all the two hundred year period–sometimes called the “Islamic Enlightenment”–when Islam actually forged ahead of the West (albeit with the help of a lot of Arab-Jewish teachers like Maimonides) in learning. The West and the Crusades didn’t torch and destroy this culture—they appropriated it, expanded and developed it. Modern Islamic teachers barely refer to it. Many have not heard of it. More: http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/...

Cosmos and Cosmomorphism

The new Cosmos, like the old, serves the useful function of waking us up to science and discovery. At its best, with the dazzling graphics that computer technology has made possible since the Sagan prototype, it will awaken a new generation to the basic current understanding of what the universe is and how we have come to understand its age and origin.

But if it has a larger purpose--for example, to convince the superstitious that their religious ideas are not big enough or sophisticated enough to comprehend 'space science'--then they are out on a very thin and brittle limb.

It also repeats the core scientific fallacy that science rises above subjective impressions to cold, hard and calculating fact in its description of reality.

The fact is, science is simply a language constructed to eliminate misunderstanding of causes and effects. Any larger aspiration is beyond its competence and purpose. It has nothing to say about metaphysics, and its aesthetic statements as aesthetic statements are mere impressions.

The universe is not awesome. It is not glorious or beautiful. Usually these statements arise from photographs back at earth or of other planets or interstellar and cosmic 'events'. They arise therefore from the cosmological family album, not from a screenshot of the wasteland into which this photogenic dust has been flung.

Science as science cannot really 'move' us, for example, in the way drama can move us to fear and pity, or awe and wonder. As Stephen Crane once observed in a short poem, our existence is a matter of complete indifference to the universe and the fact that we happen to be 'star stuff,' to use Sagan's oft-quoted maxim, is a matter of complete necessity and thus of indifference to me. It can arouse no sense of gratitude, purpose, or ethical obligation.

Discussion of the awesome beauty of the universe is really a kind of' 'cosmomorphism'- a domestication of the universe equivalent to our ancient humanizing of the gods.

It is concept-poor because it has no metaphysical underpinning that could help us to understand why a scientific event describable in equations and observable as the same twinkling canopy our ancestors thought was inhabited by gods should matter to us. Now that we know that space is very big and empty of gods, we need it, at least, to be awesome. That is what cosmomorphism tries to achieve.

Events without context and purpose cannot mean anything. And it was the cold meaningless vastness that caused our progenitors to imagine that events have meaning--that, indeed, life has meaning beyond the mere fact of life. Try as science may, it is caught in self-contradiction if it wants to extract meaningful contexts for aesthetics or metaphysics in the universe it has come to believe is a mere event.

The reality of the cosmos is not friendly habitable space but incomprehensibly vast, uninhabitable space. We are in this world and on this planet and in this history like a fish is in water. We can try to make a sacrament of our awe and wonder and discovery, but we are just gawking.

Our life is here. The religious perception that we were made for this world and the world for us is false scientifically, but it is a perfectly true statement of the way things are in the only space where matter matters, our head.

East and West in Glorious Poetry

Moonbeams, blossoms, rivers. Things compared to moonbeams, blossoms, rivers, like life and love. I'm not saying Chinese poetry isn't beautiful. Because surely, moonbeams, blossoms, and rivers are beautiful. Oh, and home.

静夜思 Jìng yè sī

床前明月光， Chuáng qián míng yuè，
疑是地上霜。 Yí shì dì shàng shuāng.
举头望明月， Jŭ tóu wàng míng yuè,
低头思故乡。 Dī tóu sī gù xiāng.

Night Thoughts (by Libai - 李白)

I wake and moonbeams play around my bed,
Glittering like hoar frost to my wondering eyes.
Upwards the glorious moon I raise my head,
Then lay me down and thoughts of home arise.

American variation, showing cultural disparity:

I wake because the new security light
Is dancing on and off with every Mayfly.
I haven’t slept a wink all fucking night
And now it’s 4 AM. I want to cry.

The Abscond

Yes, you will miss me--
not like the name of the girl
in the book you read
when you were eight and wanted
to change your name to hers.
Not even like the Escher pattern on the scarf
your grandmother gave you
on your sixteenth birthday, whispering
‘Dior’ and you thought she called
You dear, and smiled. Not like that.

No you will miss me like the first time
your father said 'Look', and you looked
coming over the hill outside Lenox
and the leaves darted and danced
yellow and red for as far as you could see;
but no matter how many times
you’ve made the trip from Boston since
you have never had that moment.
Now the leaves are never that red
and the yellows have gone sickly gray.

You will miss me like Christmas eve.
You will ache to feel again the
anticipation of Midnight Mass sung
by a slightly drunken choir
and a tone deaf priest, and the sherry
your grandmother offered when you
turned twelve saying to your mother
‘It’s about time she had a drop.’
Your nose burned at the first sup;
you coughed, but drank it down
and said to your uncle, the funny one,
‘I’ll have another please, and fruitcake.’

You will miss me like innocence:
Like all the first times for everything,
Kisses both deep and glancing, the surprise
that the boy in your lab has noticed you,
the first time you flew to Europe,
your grandmother’s palm against your cheek
and her last words.
Something like that. But more.

House

You grasped my arm like it belonged to you
And had no secret thought that when you did
Everything else that waited to be said
Destroyed such simple differences: False and true,
Bitter, sweet: angel choirs began to chant
The old Exsultet: ‘Tonight just for awhile
You are reborn, rejoice in that sweet smile
In that dark hair, her mandarin descant.'
And in the darkness wheeling through the dark
You rode into my heart. I kissed you once.
You wondered, 'Is it custom, or bravery, perchance?'
Oh it was bravery, full true and deeply stark:
You, my new everything, my day and night.
My winter yielding to the spring, light to delight.

Wanted: Science Humility

I think my problem with "new atheism" is that I am as enchanted by the story of how we came to see the world as we do as by the narrative of the world as we now see it.

I do not blame us for the wrong ladders and defective lenses we built to get closer to the stars. If we survive the quest, our best rocketry and most sophisticated telescopes will look like churches and metaphysics to our human descendants.

The question of God is a question for the future; we are not poised to ask or answer it yet. Theology has not answered it; science does not know how to ask it properly. The problem is, both have become so sure that their projects are antagonistic that the thought of collaborating in order to make the discussion more fruitful has become a risible notion. No one should expect that situation to change.

For that reason, agnosticism, which is deeply curious, but also profoundly embracing of a kind of religious humility, is the only sensible position to me.

It is the unwarranted hubris of new atheist scientists that puts me off, or more specifically that the word 'atheism' should have anything whatever to do with science.

Atheism is not a conclusion. It is not a theory in the strict sense because it is not testable within any possible range of causes of natural events.

The most we can say about God is that we do not need traditional ideas of God to explain the way things are within the range we have come to understand as the natural world and universe. We can say that such religious explanations are false, and even absurd.

But the Thomistic idea of God, when it is adequately explicated, cannot be killed off so easily. Dawkins certainly didn't do it and judging at least what he has written on the topic doesn't seem to get it. No modern scientist has done it.

I am not convinced that Anselm's ideas have been buried deep enough not to be noticed by future generations of thinkers. To ask the God question as he asks it is different from asking the question "Where do things come from?" Perhaps that is why scientists in general eshew ontology when they talk about God and pick on questions of causality bolstered by assaults on defenseless scriptural texts.

But most heinous of all is the pro-science argument that those who reject a totally naturalistic explanation of the causes of the cosmos are simply not intellectually equipped to cope with its implications for religious faith. That it pure bamboozle and sophistry. It is the modern equivalent of what the medieval Scholastics claimed about their perfectly constructed theory of a hierarchical cosmos that tuned out to be totally false.

I say beware of any collocation of experts who tell you that their doctrines are fixed and final and all the more final because they seem to be impenetrable.

To be humble and skeptical at the same time will always pay bigger dividends than pretending that there are two kinds of questions. The questions science has answered and the ones it is about to answer. It has not answered the God question. It is not about to answer it.

A World Gone Flat

In Aspects of the Novel (1927), E.M. Forster defined a ‘flat character’ as one who boasts no mental or emotional development—someone whose defining characteristics, speech habits, and normal ways of thinking lock him into predictable (and often dull) actions and behaviours. A ‘round character’ by contrast is complex and increases in complexity throughout the story, capable of contradiction and emotional and psychological development. Our politics is now filled with a flatness rivaled only by the flatness that religion requires of its devotees and consumerism imposes on all parts of our daily lives, from eating to having sex. The whole world has gone from round back to flat.

The Brothers

Easy to say no on hot nights in July:
Don’t be absurd. We love you. Stay.
They remembered a girl playing tag
Or snapping her brothers’ knuckles
And running away breathless, delighted
That she could cause just a little pain.

Boys have all they can do to become men.
When the laughter stopped, when
You were needed in the kitchen or
To play hostess, you prayed; you prayed
Like Amat and Aishah and men came
And loved you and went, and sometimes
You would snap their knuckles, too,
Just to show them you had not forgotten
How to hurt, a little.

You must stop running now, darling,
And learn to catch your breath and rest.
You must not climb trees or live to make
Boys and mothers happy, because
The running you do now you do
By standing still, and waiting
For the world to change. It won’t.