John Humphreys: In God We Doubt

This isn't bad, according to me.

Humphreys has several points, but primarily he's concerned to gesture at an argument in defense of good religious folk against the "radical atheists." Though I'm an atheist myself, I've got little time for the Richard Dawkinses of the world. However...it does seem a tad odd to me how much of this kind of thing is going around. Two thousand years of getting Christianity shoved down our throats...but a couple of popularized books rejecting religion and all of a sudden it's a crisis, and Christianity is besieged. Faith is, apparently, an extraordinarily fragile thing...

Thing for us non-radicals on either side to keep in mind is that dogmatists and kooks on one side generate more dogmatists and kooks on the other. Without the inquisition, Pat Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, and the innumerable Church Ladies all across the country, you get fewer Richard Dawkinses.

Folks like me, for example, don't generally have contempt for sensible Christians. Hell, some of my best friends are Christians, and I even like talking about philosophy with them, and I even learn things from it. But it's the zealots and dogmatists that embody a stereotype of the ignorant theist, believing the craziest things for the craziest reasons. And this part of our public discussion, like so much of it, takes place largely in the shadow of such stereotypes. And I'm not only talking about ignorant Bible-thumpers, either. I've known plenty of intelligent, articulate, well-educated dogmatists, smugly uttering theistic nonsense as if it were the most obvious common sense.

Well, to say the least, it ain't.

But it is a heck of an interesting possibility, remote though it may be. But Christians who act as if their unlikely theory were true beyond any questioning are just as wrong and just as annoying as any other people who act as if an unlikely theory were so obvious that only a fool or a villain could doubt it. I don't mind someone who wants to discuss the possibility that UFOs are intelligent visitors from other planets; what I do mind is frothing-at-the-mouth lunatics who insist that I'm a puppet of The Man for being skeptical about it. Qua intriguing possibility, the Abrahamic conception of God has a lot to be said for it, I think. But only someone who doesn't understand it very well could insist that it's obviously obvious. In fact, it's obviously not obvious--though it could turn out to be true.

My guess is that what people really have unshakable faith in is goodness; and, perhaps, in the proposition that there's more to the universe than just atoms in the void. They anthropomorphize these things though, and mistakenly think that the only way for there to be goodness is for there to be a divine lawmaker, and the only way for there to be more is if it's a big, powerful, ghostly person. Mix this in with the fact that almost everyone believes whichever religion they were taught as a child, and, well, there you have it. If it's hard for a man to understand something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it, so much the more so when it's his eternal life that's at stake.

Too bad more people don't read real philosophy--and too bad there isn't more good, accessible philosophy for them to read. I actually think that hope for and faith in goodness and meaning are among the most rational of things. And I think if more people could see that such things are separable from belief in, e.g., the divinity of Jesus, we could have a calmer and more reasoned public discussion of all this stuff.

[via Metafilter]