MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 1 September 2007
Concerning our gods
Many
thoughtful people are getting fed up with the witless, atrocious behavior
perpetrated in the name of one god or another. Muslim fanatics slam airplanes into buildings and
exterminate fellow Muslims.
Israeli squatters stoke the fires of war by stealing land that Jehovah
supposedly bequeathed to their ancestors millennia ago. Christian extremists throw monkey
wrenches into biology teaching, encourage mid-east war to speed the day when
Christians will be "raptured" into the sky, harass pregnant women,
and threaten and murder doctors.
At
least three popular and elegant books in this vein have appeared recently: Sam Harris's "The End of Faith:
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason," Richard Dawkins' "The
God Delusion," and, most eloquently, Christopher Hitchens "God Is Not
Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything." It appears that
bad religion is drawing atheists out of the closet and onto the best seller
bookshelves.
The
question that the voice of reason directs at people of faith, and that
underlies all three books, is "what is the evidence?" How do you know that your god, your
customs, reflect the truth of ages?
How do you know that Muhammad is the chosen one, that Jews are the
chosen people, that Jesus is the savior?
What with hundreds of religious sects (or is it thousands?), all of them
contradicting each other in some manner and all of them claiming to be the one
true path, can convincing evidence be found for such a claim by any one of
them?
For
these authors, and for reasonable people everywhere, the answer is
"no." In the absence of convincing evidence, it's absurd to believe
that one sect—the Mormons, say, or Orthodox Jews, or born again Christians—has
a particular claim on The Truth.
People believe their particular myths (meaning "metaphorical
truths") only because they were brought up with them, or because a
powerful individual experience caused them to believe. Such an individual belief is quite
different from knowledge based on shared experience and reason. Perhaps the most essential difference
is that reasoned knowledge can never be absolute, while belief generally claims
to be infallible, absolute. It's
this claim of "absolute truth" that gets us all into trouble. I've never heard of scientists ramming
airplanes into buildings or murdering doctors over the laws of thermodynamics
(which, like all scientific knowledge, are tentative rather than absolute), but
there are plenty of extreme acts carried out in the name of supposedly absolute
religious beliefs.
Rational
people are never entirely certain of any assertion about the world, because all
such assertions depend on evidence, and new evidence is always possible. Thus, Dawkins' titles one of his
chapters "why there almost certainly is no God." I have yet to hear a fundamentalist
claim that "God almost certainly exists." No.
Fundamentalists always know. As the great physicist Max Born put it,
"For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is
the root cause of all evil in the world." In a word:
Faith is the cause of all evil.
This is essentially the basis of Hitchens' claim that "religion
spoils everything."
All
three authors dissect the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, especially
their obvious inconsistencies.
Hitchins points out that the four Gospels are in no sense a historical
record, that their multiple authors didn't publish anything until many decades
after the crucifixion, and that they cannot agree on anything of
importance. Matthew and Luke
cannot concur on the virgin birth or the genealogy of Jesus. There are disagreements about when
Jesus was born, the Sermon on the Mount, the anointing of Jesus, the treachery
of Judas, and Peter's denial. The
Gospels cannot even concur on a common account of the Crucifixion or the
Resurrection. In a typically
acerbic comment, Hitchens claims that "the book on which all four may
possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as 'Q,' has been lost
forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed
to have 'inspired' it."
All
three books discuss the differences and similarities between moderate (liberal)
religion and extreme (fundamentalist) religion. Fundamentalism can be defined
as belief in the absolute, literal truth of one's religious book, while
liberalism can be defined as the belief that one's religious book is to be
understood as metaphorical truth.
All three authors recognize that moderate religion is socially
preferable to extreme religion, but they also have serious objections to
moderate religion.
Islam
presents a special problem in this regard because, as Harris and Hitchins point
out, there are so few Muslim moderates.
Harris traces Muslim extremism directly to the Koran, and quotes a
boringly long list of violent statements from the Koran such as (speaking of
infidels) "Slay them wherever you find them. ÉIdolatry is worse than carnage." Harris comments that "Anyone who
can read passages like those quoted above and still not see a link between
Muslim faith and Muslim violence should probably consult a
neurologist."
The
more general problem is that religious moderates do so little to bring their
fundamentalist brethren into the light of reason. In their enthusiasm to be liberal and inclusive, moderates
often maintain an unhealthy silence about fundamentalism's deadly
foolishness.
Because there is a spiritual dimension to life, liberal religion has a lot to offer the world. But if religion, and indeed modern civilization, is to survive this century, then fundamentalist religion had better come to its senses, and moderate religion had better help them do it.