Would the World Be Better Off Without Religion: NPR debate

PBS show Think Twice sponsored a debate bewteen atheists and theists. The proposition: That the world would be better off without religion. Debating for the motion were:

Matthew Chapman A journalist, screenwriter and director, is the co-founder and president of Science Debate, an organization seeking to get political candidates to debate important science policy issues. The great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, Chapman is the author of two books, Trials Of The Monkey: An Accidental Memoir and 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania. His most recent film, The Ledge, was accepted into competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and deals with the ultimately fatal feud between an atheist and an evangelical Christian.

A.C. Grayling, a British philosopher and professor, has written more than 20 books on philosophy, religion and reason, including Against All Gods and The Good Book: A Secular Bible. Previously a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, Grayling is now master of the New College of the Humanities, an independent university college in London. For nearly 10 years, he was the honorary secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society, and a trustee of the London Library.

AGAINST THE MOTION

Dinesh D'Souza is president of The King's College and author of What's So Great About Christianity. A former policy analyst in the Reagan White House, D'Souza served as an Olin fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and as a Rishwain scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Since releasing What's So Great About Christianity in 2008, D'Souza has gone on to debate atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett and Michael Shermer.

David Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, has been named the No. 1 Pulpit Rabbi in America by Newsweek. He teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, and previously taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, and Hunter College. He is the author of seven books, including Why Faith Matters.

Before the Oxford-style debate, moderated by ABC News' John Donvan, the audience at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts voted 52 percent in favor of the motion and 26 percent against, with 22 percent undecided. Afterward, 59 percent of the audience agreed the world would be better off without religion, while 31 percent disagreed — making the side arguing for the motion the winners of the debate. Ten percent of the audience remained undecided.

It's pretty obvious it was a set up. First of all look at the support against the motion. Where only 3% of the county will identify with being atheists, the distortion of statitics in this way is the hall mark of atheist propaganda. On athiest watch I've documented the way certain organizations bias the data in favor of atheism. In a nation where 80% identify themselves as Chrsitians and 90% believe in God, we are supposed to think they actually chose a random audience in which 50% went in believing the the world would be better off with no religion? That's ludicrous. They obviously invited atheist clubs and not theistic clubs.

Actually in a debate situation with atheists most Christian identified people would probably refuse to accept the resolution. Yet many Christian fundamentalists could actually support the resolution. There are fundamentalists who see the term "religon" as a negative, legalistic, spiritually dead counterfeit of true God worship. The wording is calculated to imply lack of belief in God when in fact it does not.

The arguments were similar to what we find on a good message board on a good day. The talked about the crusades and Hitler. The Rabbi Wolpe had more to say than his colleague D'Sousa. In fact Wolpe was very good, his answers were powerful and to the point. Against the notion that Hitler was Christina he used Hitler's Table Talk, which is what I use, to show that Hitler was neo-pagan and not a Christian (he hated Christianity). That source has been around the message boards for a long time and there are a lot of atheist rebuttals. Most fo them are silly but they can do some damage. The Rabbi cleared up the misconception that Hitler was an atheist. He was not an atheist or a Christian but a neo-Pagan.

The two atheists were typical of atheists and many of those I see on message boards all the time could have done as well. The great great grandson of Darwin did not demonstrate an impressive knowledge of science. He echoed the fortress of facts concept. Through scinece we can prove everything (contrary to Carl Popper). Religion is based upon superstition, yada yada, the same old romanticized story of brave scinece evil stupid religion that was told in the enlightenment.

Chapman's big summary sounded powerful was actually typically unfair. It was the usual atheist assertion of the fortress of facts. Medicine has cured people disease and scinece has created to technology to help people and all religion has ever done is make people feel guilty and have some crusades. This is such a typical biased bunch of Bull crap. No effort is put into rationally accessing what religon actually does for people; the pro religon advocates have no kowlege of Hood or the M scale or any of the studies taht show the long term positive effects, dramatic transformational effects of religious experience. There's no awareness of the fact that science is not in competition with religion it's not the alternative, one can be both, they don't do the same things. For all the good of the negative team, their insight and abilities to make powerful statements, they didn't play to their strengths.

It's clear from looking at this exhibition how set up it was. This illustrates the propaganda power of atheism. It means the typical slogan that atheism is not organized is just a joke.

Atheist Reject Liberal Theology by Resorting to Fundamentlaism.

Atheist criticism of modern liberal theology is to theology as Fancis Shaffer's criticism of art is to art.

Recently I find more and more atheists on CARM going on the offensive against liberal theology. Yet since they refuse to read any they don't know anything about it. They base thier understanding of it on Spinoza becuase that's all know about. this refusal to learn about the things they critize is giong to a mainia. On CARM Magritte says:

Since at least Spinoza and the Enlightenment when it became safer (relatively speaking) to directly criticize the Bible and theism, apologetics has been waging a war of redefinition and redrawing of boundaries. Modern "liberal" Christianity now has boundaries that are practically fractal in their infinite detail. Whenever a threat emerges, apologetics swiftly whisks God to safety with rationalization. Boundaries are redrawn, words redefined.

Spinoza is not very important to modern liberal theology. They just think that because he's the only alternative view of God they understand. They think primarily that Spinoza is a pantheist which they are willing to tolerate because they see it as a step toward atheism. This guys sees liberal theology as some kind of refuge that fundamentalism takes when it can't stand up to atheism. That is totally ignorant on many levels:

(1) Spinoza has very little to do with modern theology,t hey are ignorant enough to think if it's not the big man in the sky it must be Spinozian deified nature (Spinoza did not deify nature but they don't bother to learn what he really thought).

(2) Liberal theology is much older than fundamentalism. It definately existed about 300 years before inerrency (19th century). Way before any modern athiesm so trying to see ita s a refuage of failed apologetic is just sheer ignorance.

(3) Fundamentalists hate liberal theology. Liberal theologians are not fundamentalists hiding from atheism they are rarely former fundiese. Most fundies see liberal theology as satan infiltrating the faith to steal away the faithful. Most of them wont go near it. Most liberals see fundamentalism and apologetic is country corn pone hick's ville and they wont go near it!

(3) Calling liberal theology a renationalisation is total stupidity. This complety ignores the rich intelletual tradion that is traced back to Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance.

This atheist assault interprets everything it doesn't understand as "rationalization." Here is his answer to one argument I made.

This sometimes gives a strong whiff of desperation and post hoc thinking. I'll give an example: I was asking Metacrock a while back about why God did not heal amputees. His reply was that limb regrowth would be such a strong indication of God's presence that it would take away our free will as to whether or not to believe. How is one to argue with an opponent who pulls such things out of his keister on the spur of the moment?

This is totally taken out of context. Fist of all that's not even my answer. It's only a small part of my answer and it's argued hypothetically anyway. For a more full understanding of my answer on the amputee thing see my essay God and Amputees and also why wont God heal stupidity? The answer he's talking about is based upon a larger argument that is my answer to theodicy: Soteriolgocal Drama. That's my answer. It's unique to me. He's asserting that it's some srot of arche type for all liberal theology when in reality no liberal theologians even know about it and if they did they probalby wouldn't embrace it. That is idea is unique to me. But then CARM atheists are so ignorant of theology they tend to assume that I'm the only liberal. I went I went to seminary with other people. I'm just sure there were other students in those classes. Someone took those degrees on graduation. I doubt if they canceled commencement just becuase i didn't go. I graudated I just didn't feel like doing the cap and gown thing.

I invite other atheists, deists and agnostics to submit their own examples of this sort of thing. It's been going on for many generations and we should at least do it the dignity of understanding it.

He speaks giving it the dignity of understanding which is ironic becuase he has not giving it that himself. He read any theologians. When one mentioned reading them they say "they just make stuff up." This is stupid, it's just lapin stupid anti-intellectual grab age. If they had the gumption to actually read some they would find out its not just making stuff up but they can't even take the obvious step of doing some basic study. The older example was to charge that liberal theology 'enables' fundamentalism. I don't what these people think they are saing. Do they ever think at all? That's like saying socialists are enabling capitalism. How? By opposing it? That logic suggests that atheism is enabling Christianity. They might as well argue that modern art enables old fashioned realism in art.

In that CARM thread I have to hand it to Humble thinker. He usually blocks with atheists even though he claims to be a Christian, but this time he has a cogent comment:

But I think the question is this: is the "strongest possible case" in question merely post hoc rationalizations in an attempt to make the case stronger or is it a prior held belief that, upon questioning, is presented without the intention of artificially making the case stronger? Hopefully that sentence didn't get too convoluted.

"Lance" another atheist poster reiterates and magnifies the original theme. In so doing illustrates more ignorance:

Doesn't it seem strange to you that as our philosophies and sciences have become more and more sophisticated, he concept of God has been shrinking back and becoming more and more abstract? God's become more and more unfalsifiable, more and more difficult to clearly define and theistic language seems to have become more and more obscure when speaking about him. Did not people used to believe that God wanted all people to have a personal relationship with him, to the point of him preforming miracles in front of crowds of people? God used to make a splash. Now modern theologians have changed his nature such that he's hiding from us, not letting us have any very solid reason for believing he's even there because he doesn't want to make his existence obvious.

He asserts that the concept of God is "shrinking back becoming more abstract" because he defines teh true and proper understanding as the big man in the sky. He does this because he privileges fundamentalist as the truth Christianity even though liberalism is must older. Also becuase like a true fundie he's reading the Bible literally so the metaphor of king and father he sees a literal instruction about the nature of God.Atheist are really fundies. The think the reason they are atheists is because they take the Bible super literally and can't think their way through it. They see any problematic nature as contradiction becuase they can't think, they see answering problems as some form of "giving up." He says God has "become more unfalsifiable." When was God ever falsifiable? That's becuase he has to understand problematic nature of God as grounds to see contradiction and give up the faith. that's what makes him an atheist. So he's really privileging atheism and in the final analysis the whining because they can't reduce liberal theology to their frontal of finding trivial contradictions in the bible.

The question of God's falsifiability is a complex one and deserves a lot more attention then these guys are willing to give it. I've written on the question of God's falsifiability on this blog in the 2007, and also more recently in 2011. Modern theologians have changed it so that God is now hiding form us. This is just sheer ignorance of a group of ideologues who refuse to study their opponents views but reduce them to a set of slogans. Modern liberal theologians deny that God is hidden. When they give answers atheists do not listen. I've repeated Hartshorne's answer many times:

quoting myself from my Thomas Reid argument (no 8 on the god arguemnt list--see page 2)

According to Hartshorne, "[o]nly God can be so universally important that no subject can ever wholly fail or ever have failed to be aware of him (in however dim or unreflective fashion)." Now the issue of why God doesn't hold a "press conference" has do do with the fact that God does not communicate by violating normal causal principles. In process terms, the "communication" of God must be understood as the prehension of God by human beings. A "prehension" is the response of an occasion to the entire past world (both the contiguous past and the remote past.) As God is in every occasion's past actual world, every occasion must "prehend" or take account of God.

It should be noted that "prehension" is a generic mode of perception that does not necessarily entail consciousness or sensory experience. Impervious postings I explained that there a two modes of pure perception --"perception in the mode of causal efficacy" and "perception in the mode of presentational immediacy." If God is present to us, then it is in the presensory perceptual mode of causal efficacy as opposed to the sensory and conscious perceptual mode of presentational immediacy. That is why God is "invisible", i.e. invisible to sense perception. The foundation for experience of God lies in the nonsesnory non-conscious mode of prehension. So now, there is the further question: Why is there variability in our experience of God?. Or, why are some of us atheists, pantheists, theists, etc.? Every prehension has an initial datum derived from God, yet there are a multiplicity of ways in which this datum is prehended from diverse perspectives.

I agreed with Hume that sense perception tells us nothing about efficient causation (or final causation for that matter). Hume was actually presupposing causal efficacy in his attempt to deny it (i.e., in his relating of sense impressions to awareness). Causation could be described as an element of experience, but as Whitehead explains, this experience is not sensory experience. From Hume's own analysis Whitehead derives at least two forms of nonsensory perception: the perception of our own body and the nonsensory perception of one's past.

I will make it more simple than that. Being is hidden. A basic reading of Heidegger will tell us this. God is being itself, the basic hiddenness of being is the hiddenness of God. But being is not hidden it's mere ready-to-hand. This phrase refers to the nature of being that is so familiar we take it for granted and don't notice it. It's like a carpenter who so familiar with his tools that usin them is such second nature he doesn't even have to think about it. Saint Augustine says God is nearer than my inmost being. I used to use a whimsical example: suppose a fish could be scientist and a fishy committee assigns him to find this substance humans talk about, water. He studies every aspect of the world around him and never finds water becuase it never occurs to him he's looking through it.

Are We all Atheists?

There is an argument one hears atheists make quite often. It's stated as well as any by a poster on Atheist Watch:

"Jake" a poster on Atheist Watch

we are all atheists of some form. Christians are hindu atheists, Hindus are Muslim atheists, and I am an everything atheist. We all know what it is like to no believe in a certain doctrine, so the fact that we are not all born as omnireligious or polyreligious nutbags, suggests that belief is part of the indoctrination process.

The problem with this argument is two-fold: (1) it uses not the modern ideological definiton of atheists which internet atheists will always use religiously (lack of belief), but the old first century pre modern definition that was used of Christians in the beginning, those who fail to acknowledged the right gods. (2) The second problem is that the basic assumption it makes demonstrates a real lack of understanding about the nature of belief in God. I say this because it seems to me that the original statement comes out of an assumption that belief in God is about choosing between a host of little personalities. God is a big man in the sky and all beliefs about God revolve around which big man is up there; is it Zeus? Jehovah,, Juptier, Brahamin, or whomever?

This is not the basis of belief in God. Belief in God is not about choosing between a host of little personalities. All of those personalities are merely place holders, they designate something beyond of all them. God is the ground of being, the basis of all reality, there can't be two of them. It's not a context between little personality figures, those are merely place holder that point to the one true reality beyond all of them. Individual personality gods are merely personifications of concepts, all the concepts pertain to the same basic idea. The only real questions are two fold:

(1) What does God want?
(2) which tradition best mediates relationship with the divine?

The second question assumes that the first question is answered by some notion of unity with the divine.

A Hindu is not an atheist to a Christian. I don't think of Hindus as atheists, I think of atheists as atheists I think of Hindus as people with a different understanding of what God wants. That's a pretty good give away that the atheist argument is wrong, because if I don't see Hindus as atheists then they probably don't see me as one either. Of course atheists resist this kind of understanding about it because they are losing several rhetorical helps at this point. First, they are always looking for ways to bolster their numbers and this allows them the illusion that everyone is an atheist and thus their position is really dominate after all, it's just a matter of realizing it. Secondly, it allows them to play divide and conquer agaisnt religious people, which they are always doing. They try to leverage one religion against them all on the pretext that since we can't prove one is true and all others false then one can be true.

When we point out that all can be true in some sense, as I show above, they go to pieces. That is one approach they can't handle, that accounts for the atheist viciousness to all of my theological positions. They focus upon the minutia of a religious tradition, ceremonies, and formalities, theology, and ignore the experience of the living presence of God that individuals experience, which is the same all over the world.

Hand in hand with this argument that we all born atheists because we are born without belief. That in itself is begging the question. There are lots of reasons to supposes that we have an intuitive sense of God and we are born with it. I present a lot of data in my argument on religious instinct and demonstrate the position in many ways, from the dawn of per-human history to genetic evidence.

The argument actually says that the fact of a religious species is far too coincidental to be merely the product of random chance. Why why would it be that we are fit to be religious, that it is our instinct and our way of life? That would indicate that an object of religious devotion designed religiosity into humans. In summation the following factors indicate that religiosity is part of human nature:

a) Historical Tendency:

The vast Majority of Humans have been religious as far back as we have evidence of humanity (50,000 years) [see above A. 3]

b) Believers have always been vast numerical majority

That is not appeal to popularity, it's an argument about behavior which indicates an innate condition. Almost 90% currently of world population are rleigious believers in some sense.

c) Trans cultural

When anthropologists see a behavior that transcends culture they assume it is innate. There has never been a culture that was atheistic. Every culture we have ever seen or found traces of on earth going back as far as we can has been religious in some way.

Even in cultures such as China where the government attempted irradiation of religious belief there are still 51% religious and many more undecided but not "anti-"religious

d) Physical fitness for religion

Our bodies work better when we are religious, it is the major factor in health and far more of a motivator than any other trigger of the Placebo effect [see above C.3]

e) Archetypes Universal

Archetypes are natural part of the human psyche (see the next argument). Also see Jesus Chrsit and Mythology page II. Archetypes are psychological symbols which point to transcendent ideal beyond the material realm. Studies show that they are natural to all people and emerge under a broad variety of psychological techniques.Maslow says that they are found among all people using ever technqiue of psychoanalysis. [above B.3]

f) Psychologically fit for religion

Psychological factors, relgious believers have far less depression and incidence of mental illness so the human mind works best when religious. [above C]

g) Transformative power

IF the appeal of the argument were merely popularity, it would not turn on things other than popularity. Obviously these reasons I'm giving here are not popularity. But, the transformative power of religious experience is another aspect of the argument which proves that it' not merely an appeal to popularity. Religious experience transforms lives, it gives people life affirming experiences which makes them better as people and makes life worth living. Not all psychological factors are capable of doing that. We are so constituted as a species that we respond to these experiences in such a way that they do transform our lives. That proves that we are fit to be religious, and that is not an appeal to popularity.[see also point C above on psychological normality and self actualization]

h) brain wave patterns

Brain wave patterns are changed by religious experience. We go from Alpha waves to Beta and to other levels of Brain wave patterns when we have these experiences.

i) "God pod" (God module in the brain)

Scientists have identified a cluster of neurons in the brain which, when stemulated, produce feelings and thoughts about God and the transcendent. This is too great a coincidence that nature would just produce this by random chance, especially when taken together with all the other ways in which we are fit to be religious. It's an evidence of design, we are made to be a religious species.

j) Sense of the Numinous universal

the studies I've talked about intently have demonstrated that around the world mystics experince the same phenomena in the presence of God inspite of the doctrine of their traditions.

Moreover, infants should not be counted as believers in any sense. We should hold the title of "believer" in abundance for infants and young children. No one is born with an intellectual theological thesis or is capable of stating a systematic belief. But most people come closer to having innate beliefs in God than to being without of any kind of belief.