Hiroo Onoda, an Imperial Japanese Army officer who remained at his jungle post on an island in the Philippines for 29 years, refusing to believe that World War II was over, and returned to a hero’s welcome in the all but unrecognizable Japan of 1974, died Thursday at a Tokyo hospital, the Japanese government said. He was 91.
Caught in a time warp, Mr. Onoda, a second lieutenant, was one of the war’s last holdouts: a soldier who believed the emperor was a deity and the war a sacred mission; who survived on bananas and coconuts and sometimes killed villagers he assumed were enemies; who finally went home to the lotus land of paper and wood that turned out to be a futuristic world of skyscrapers, television, jet planes, pollution and atomic destruction.
Japanese history and literature are replete with heroes who have remained loyal to a cause, especially if it is lost or hopeless, and Lieutenant Onoda, a small, wiry man of dignified manner and military bearing, seemed to many like a samurai of old, offering his sword as a gesture of surrender to President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines, who returned it to him.
And his homecoming, with roaring crowds, celebratory parades and speeches by public officials, stirred his nation with a pride that many Japanese had found lacking in postwar years of rising prosperity and materialism. His ordeal of deprivation may have seemed a pointless waste to much of the world, but in Japan it was a moving reminder of the redemptive qualities of duty and perseverance.
It happened with a simple command. As related in a memoir after he came home, Lieutenant Onoda’s last order in early 1945 was to stay and fight. Loyal to a military code that taught that death was preferable to surrender, he remained behind on Lubang Island, 93 miles southwest of Manila, when Japanese forces withdrew in the face of an American invasion.
After Japan surrendered in August, thousands of Japanese soldiers were scattered across China, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Many stragglers were captured or went home, while hundreds went into hiding rather than surrender or commit suicide. Many died of starvation or sickness. A few survivors refused to believe the dropped leaflets and radio announcements saying the war had been lost.
Lieutenant Onoda, an intelligence officer trained in guerrilla tactics, and three enlisted men with him found leaflets proclaiming the war’s end, but believed they were enemy propaganda tricks. They built bamboo huts; ate bananas, coconuts and rice pilfered from a village, and killed cows for meat. Tormented by tropical heat, rats and mosquitoes, they patched their uniforms and kept their rifles in working order.
Considering themselves at war, they evaded American and Filipino search parties and attacked islanders they took to be enemy guerrillas; about 30 inhabitants were killed in skirmishes with the Japanese over the years. One of the enlisted men surrendered to Filipino forces in 1950, and two others were shot dead, one in 1954 and another in 1972, by island police officers searching for the renegades.
The last holdout, Lieutenant Onoda — officially declared dead in 1959 — was found by Norio Suzuki, a student searching for him in 1974. The lieutenant rejected his pleas to go home, insisting he was still awaiting orders. Mr. Suzuki returned with photographs, and the Japanese government sent a delegation, including the lieutenant’s brother and his former commander, to formally relieve him of duty.
“I am sorry I have disturbed you for so long a time,” Lieutenant Onoda told his brother, Toshiro.
In Manila, the lieutenant, wearing his tattered uniform, presented his sword to President Marcos, who pardoned him for crimes committed while he thought he was at war.
He was already a national hero when he arrived in Tokyo. He was met by his aging parents and huge flag-waving crowds with an outpouring of emotion. More than patriotism or admiration for his grit, his jungle saga, which had dominated the news in Japan for days, evoked waves of nostalgia and melancholy in a people searching for deeper meaning in their growing postwar affluence.
The 52-year-old lieutenant — a ghost from the past in a new blue suit, close-cropped military haircut and wispy mustache and chin whiskers — spoke earnestly of duty, and seemed to personify a devotion to traditional values that many Japanese thought had been lost.
“I was fortunate that I could devote myself to my duty in my young and vigorous years,” he said. Asked what had been on his mind all those years in the jungle, he said: “Nothing but accomplishing my duty.”
In an editorial, The Mainichi Shimbun, a leading Tokyo newspaper, said: “To this soldier, duty took precedence over personal sentiments. Onoda has shown us that there is much more in life than just material affluence and selfish pursuits. There is the spiritual aspect, something we may have forgotten.”
After his national welcome in Japan, Mr. Onoda was examined by doctors, who found him in amazingly good condition. He was given a military pension and signed a $160,000 contract for a ghostwritten memoir, “No Surrender: My Thirty Year War.” As his story went global in books, articles and documentaries, he tried to lead a normal life.
He went dancing, took driving lessons and traveled up and down the Japanese islands. But he found himself a stranger in a strange land, disillusioned with materialism and overwhelmed by changes. “There are so many tall buildings and automobiles in Tokyo,” he said. “Television might be convenient, but it has no influence on my life here.”
In 1975, he moved to a Japanese colony in São Paulo, Brazil, raised cattle and in 1976 married Machie Onuku, a Japanese tea-ceremony teacher. In 1984, the couple returned to Japan and founded the Onoda Nature School, a survival-skills youth camp. In 1996, he revisited Lubang and gave $10,000 to a school. In recent years, he lived in Japan and Brazil, where he was made an honorary citizen in 2010.
Hiroo Onoda was born on March 19, 1922, in Kainan, Wakayama, in central Japan, one of seven children of Tanejiro and Tamae Onoda. At 17, he went to work for a trading company in Wuhan, China, which Japanese forces occupied in 1938. In 1942, he joined the Japanese Army, was singled out for special training and attended Nakano School, the army’s training center for intelligence officers. He studied guerrilla warfare, philosophy, history, martial arts, propaganda and covert operations.
In late December 1944, he was sent to Lubang, a strategic island 16 miles long and 6 miles wide on the southwestern approach to Manila Bay and the island of Corregidor, with orders to sabotage harbor installations and an airstrip to disrupt a coming American invasion. But superior officers on the island superseded those orders to focus on preparations for a Japanese evacuation.
When American forces landed on Feb. 28, 1945, and the last Japanese fled or were killed, Maj. Yoshimi Taniguchi gave Lieutenant Onoda his final orders, to stand and fight. “It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens we’ll come back for you,” the major promised.
Twenty-nine years later, the retired major, by then a bookseller, returned to Lubang at Tokyo’s request to fulfill his promise. Japan had lost the war, he said, and the lieutenant was relieved of duty. The ragged soldier saluted and wept.
There's the the old saying: "Good people do good things; bad people do bad things; but, if you want good people to do really bad things: that takes RELIGION!!"
Ross Douthat deserves credit for leading the faithful and heretics to the culture war. There are millions of Americans capable of stringing words together in a coherent fashion equal or superior to Mr. Douthat. That there aren't millions of jobs allowing them the opportunity has little to do with one's belief system. The world would be better off if more people had jobs affording them the opportunity to live like a Time's columnist or even a factory worker from 1950's America that Mr. Douthat seems to recall as the best of times.
Perhaps the world would indeed be a better place for faith if the faithful were able to follow Christ's admonishment to live their faith instead of draw attention to it. I'm uncertain where the politician pretending to piety falls in the classification system offered by Mr. Douthat, but the reality of inflicting religious tenets on the true unbeliever seems not to be of great concern. Whether the pious justifies institutionalized religious bigotry or the heretic Randian objectivism someone loses on purpose. Even Paul Ryan recognizes the government shouldn't be in charge of picking winners and losers.
The problem isn't faith or a lack of faith. The problem is faith based culture warriors' demagoguery. When atheists institutionalize godlessness people will have reason to protest government intervention. The pity is culture warriors seem inclined to think their faith in god allows them the freedom to infringe on liberty.
As a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ I have found most religious institutions to be immoral. The worst sorts of immoral crimes have been committed in the service of institutional religion. Our nation has separation of church and state because our forefathers lived not too long after the ruinous religious wars in Europe, my ancestors being on several different sides. Calvin ordered disbelievers burned at the stake !!. Roman Catholic Priests believed in their own "special" status so much that they abused children and protected other priests who abused children. The institutional churches can't claim morality. Christ said: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there will I be also". I say: "watch out when there are four or five". Let each man and woman believe as each one wishes. Let us all treat each other with respect and honesty. Good enough for me.
Perhaps Ross can argue against Asmurfism - the refusal to believe that there are Smurfs. Remember, as with God, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!
It's hard to see how any of us, if we're truthful, can avoid finding ourselves on a spectrum with the churchgoing skeptic, who "practice[s] without assent, to speak the words without full belief." I regularly find myself saying, "This all resonates with me and my experience—well, except for THAT part." This thought often prompts a scriptural work-around for the self described literalist, satisfying the need to feel absolutely certain.
I'm content to feel reliably certain, comfortably certain, reasonably certain, and, when all else fails, calmly uncertain the more deeply my Christian spirituality and experience take me. Since my faith is not exclusively propositional, I increasingly find my certitude depends less on an unassailable theology and more from experiencing my life as guided and sustained in a vessel formed and borne by Jesus Christ, as he's become real for me.
Objective certainty is an idol, a false deity, a seduction. All my experience of Jesus Christ, however else I have it, cannot escape the workings of my subjective imagination (credit here to Garrett Green). I suspect believers will not reach an honest and coherent understanding of their faith until they embrace their subjectivity as part of the gift. And nonbelievers will have nothing valuable to say to us, or themselves, about faith until they both respect the role of the believer's subjective imagination and reckon with how much their own imagination is embedded is their supposed reality based convictions.
You are limiting your debate with atheists to those who are overthinking the whole issue, just as you are.
There are quite a few atheists who NEVER GIVE IT A THOUGHT AT ALL!!! They simply don't believe in God just as they don't believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. There is no need for such people to take the debate anywhere further than that.
As for me, I think the Golden Rule is a complete moral philosophy in and of itself. Behave the way you want the world you live in to actually be. That way you can look yourself in the mirror and feel good about what you see. Hypocrisy is bad and honesty is good! Even when invisible beings with superpowers aren't watching!
Every so often my wife and I have a discussion that goes something like the following.
Me. why do people believe in something so primitive that in this day and age is actually counter productive to the advancement of humankind? Religion was useful in binding primitive societies together by encoding pre-existing moral precepts that kept folks from killing each other, like not sleeping with your friend's wife. Now it's like a useless social appendage.
She. But you don't understand, some people NEED to believe in a god. It fulfills some deep seated emotional or psychological imperative.
Me. They think they need a god because their parents and clergy convinced them that they do from day 1. Or should I say, scared the bejeebers into believing in a god.
She. And that's because parents et al. have that need.
Me. But that's a vicious cycle. If parents told their children to thoroughly enjoy their time on earth because it's limited, to do good by our neighbors and try to improve the world we live in, to be thankful that evolution brought us to a point where we are aware of time and our place in the cosmos, to appreciate and seek spirituality in the incredible abundance and beauty of life on a coral reef or marvel at the stars on a late autumn clear night sky, they wouldn't need the supernatural and they wouldn't pass religious hokum onto the next generation.
She. You don't understand. They'd still need god[s].
End of discussion.
Wow, Ross you are really smart, or, at least, well read. Not necessarily right, but really well read. Something like David Brooks, who also reads a lot of books. But since nobody comes back from the beyond to tell us, we really can't know.
Fine column, Ross! I would put the Faith/coherent world-picture dynamic like this: First the would-be believer finds something in his or her life and heart which cries out for God. This could be Auden, confronting Naziism. Or say, a father whose deepest heart is unable to believe that his dead son is just utterly gone, annihilated by death. Next comes the critical part, where the religious searching comes in. Also, for believers, where the mystery of divine grace comes in. This critical step is where a deep decision has to be made, a saying yes or no to the yearning for a God to make some kind of sense of this. Following Sartre, we can decide the heart's longing for God is an aspiration vaine, an empty hope for a God who doesn't exist. This decision involves not just saying no to God, but also to something very deep in me--a decision that something deep in me is wrong, delusional, made to be frustrated. I'll give this to Sartre: at least he saw how tragic is the death of God, unlike those who can take the loss lightly!
Or the opposite decision can be made, in the mysterious dance of divine grace and the human condition: to choose God (or wasn't it first God who choose me?) in Faith, and at the same time also to say yes to my deepest self--that it is not an aspiration vaine. Pace some of Christianity's critics, I believe choosing God is not radically saying no to myself, but just the opposite.
BTW- if religion leads to morality I guess Crusaders slaughtering the citizens of the middle east and suicide bombers abiding by jihad are moral.
Belief in God and religion do not go hand in hand, nor does being part of a religion and abiding by its teaching make you moral.
The reality is that if you follow the rules of your religion you are essentially following orders. Just like the subjects of psych experiments that kept turning up the voltage on the subjects answering questions wrong did.
Just following orders is NOT moral nor does it constitute morality.
Morality can only exist when a person individually decides to do the right thing. Anything else is just rote learning showing no ethical or moral guidance.
I would say that no one truly following a religion can ever truly say they are acting morally, unless they are acting solely out of their own heart and mind with no preacher, priest, rabbi, mullah, guru influencing them.
I am an old atheist who finds the new atheism very liberating. Now it is ok to say what I've always thought.
Which is: I see no more evidence of or need for or value in Jesus/Jehovah than I do Zeus, Baal, Thor or the angel Moroni.
Ross usually is trying to answer disbelief with an argument that things were so much better when most people believed. When that fails to convince, he retreats here to theology. As if the deep study of false beliefs renders them more plausible.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”-C.H.
the ruins of a thousand temples of a thousand gods lie in the dust all around the world yet you believe the your god and your temples and your book are the truth?
There is no limit to what people might or might not believe. Some beliefs are said to be rational, others deeply irrational. But to believe or not to believe in God is totally irrational.
If God exists, he/she is infinitely greater than us, hence we are is an infinitely weak position to speculate regarding his/her existence.
If God does not exist, that is all very well, but exactly how does a mere mortal propose to prove that this is true?
Why not just accept that we are a deeply irrational species? We do our best to figure out which end is up, but we fail miserably and often. We should get over ourselves. It isn't all that long ago that Galileo got into all that trouble due to the inability of Roman society to accept that the Earth moved around the Sun.
This article and, with only a few exceptions, the comments leave me almost bedazzled at the quality of reflection on these ontological questions. I have been depressed for years by the specter of Jay Leno's street interviews ("Jay Walking") which reveal America as populated by clueless and indifferent organisms wandering through their conceptual vacuum, from one appetite to the next. This exchange gives me great cheer.
Ross, an internally consistent ideology does NOT necessarily equal congruence with reality. Your slinging of "isms" against my mind does not guarantee that ANY of them will stick.
Since I am rude enough to disagree even when we're mostly in agreement (to preempt end-runs based on those barely-accepted isms) I'll continue to pigeonhole you as Jesuitical.
Here is a quote from the Great Atheist Philosopher Bertrand Russell:
"There are many questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true."
Russell realized that science could not answer these questions decisively--that NONE of these answers, including his own Atheist answers, could be accepted as demonstrably true. Such humility is rarely present in today's militant atheism. Dawkins once said in this newspaper that he believed but could not prove atheism was true. Would that he had remembered that, before he titled his book "the God Delusion".
Don't listen to them, Ross. Better to continue praising the empty cosmos than to assault us with your pro-Republican political strategies and rants.
If belief in God led to a positive moral world view, the world would look a whole lot different. I'll just pick on the morality of European Christianity which gave us, among other things, the Crusades, the Inquisition, endless wars between different sects, the Irish laundries, the eradication of Native Americans throughout North and South America, religious justifications for slavery and segregation, multiple other forms of racism, anti-semitism and Adolph Hitler. The list goes on and on and is nowhere close to ending.
Believe it or not (sorry for the pun) I do believe that religion can impart some good values but you can't responsibly claim that good without acknowledging the centrality of the evil that has come with Christianity and many other religions. Religion has a lot to answer for. Morality needs no connection to religion to be valid.
Morality comes from the same place in the human heart as God. It comes from the impulse to survive and propagate--that which is good is that which aids in survival and propagation; that which impedes it, is evil. And the inquiry is subjective, from the point of view of the creature striving to survive and propagate. This is as true for a human being as it is for a chimpanzee, a dog, a bee, or a flower. God arises because humans have the unique capacity to see past the immediate and temporal and can intentionally choose that which they know impairs their own survival and propagation imperatives (e.g., humans can commit suicide). The idea of God was created by humans to aid in wrestling the demons in our soul to ensure we do what is in our enlightened self-interest to do.
Man is an animal with the unique ability to see outside his temporal and spatial immediacies. But still, he is an animal. His ideas of morality and God and meaning and purpose arose from his material being, and his material being is innately devoted to its continuation in space and time so far as it is able, just like any other animal.
Any other way of looking at things just yields a confused mess, like these two articles of Douthat attest.
It is interesting to watch the evolution of those who have invested so much time, energy and intellect for their specific mythology, to watch the begginings of them letting it all go; evolving. They do seem to pass through predictable steps. I've been reading Ross for a while, and just an armchair analysis, I have thought for a while now that Ross, like many who are starting to lose their faith, must publically protest and defend the undefensible. Then, one day, they finally just let it all go and admit that they no longer are among the faithful.
To ponder the meaning life would make necessary some higher entity creating and placing you here. So, like it or not, many of us contend that their is no meaning of life; a purpose yes, to forward our genes on to the next. But, no real meaning. As so many others here have said very well, it doesn't make our lives empty or devoid of morality.
And 'new atheist', pretty much the same as the old. If I may correct you and others, it is not a belief that there is no God. It is a lack of belief in a God. Big difference. One still requires a type of faith, the other, intellect. It is that the 'new atheists' are more likely to require the faithful to defend their faith. Quite often, when they do try, they suddenly realize the absurdity of it all.
Here's wishing you a soft landing Ross.
Coherence is overrated, and valued much more highly as an attribute of systems of thought theoretically than it is in practice.
Over time, the temporary experience of that infinite field of consciousness that a meditator has during meditation becomes permanent. When that is achieved, the individual experiences that within their individual consciousness 24 hours a day, regardless of whether they are awake, asleep or dreaming. It is a field of bliss that is within them all day and all night long. This field of consciousness happens to be the home of the Laws of Nature and one gains access to them because they are within them. This allows the individual to command or use the Laws to do things that one not in that state can do. This state is called Unity Consciousness, moksha, yoga and Enlightenment. One in that state is a yogi and they have the ability to do things that are called miracles. The abilities that yogis have are listed in the book The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. They include all of the things Jesus did and more. Jesus was a yogi. He lived in India for about 15 years as a student of a Vedic master. The complete knowledge of life in in the Vedas, which are thousands of years older than any religion.
Intelligence is always a characteristic of consciousness. It is this consciousness that is the cause of the universe and the fact that humans have consciousness. If this consciousness didn't exist, humans would not have consciousness because the human brain does not create or generate consciousness. If that was true the brains of bees, flies, mosquitoes, etc., all of which are very tiny, would have to do the same thing. That's absurd. So how is it that humans have consciousness? Because nothing exists except consciousness and the brain is partaking of this infinite field of universal consciousness. Is there any way to prove this? Yes. There are many published studies that prove that when someone practices the Transcendental Meditation technique, which the brain is designed to do, the individual experiences that infinite field of consciousness within their own and is the basis for their own consciousness. There are 7 states of consciousness, 4 more beyond waking, dreaming and sleeping and they are developed by meditating.
I am going to provide knowledge to readers that will help them realize that there is a deity or being that is responsible for the existence of the universe and everything about humans including our consciousness. Everything here can be verified by doing the necessary research. I realize that there are some people who will deny any proof by saying they don't believe any proof and some of them won't even look at it and some can't think logically or understand science and some just reject science for some reason, even though they use cars, telephones, computers, TVs, etc., all of which are the result of science The argument starts by recognizing that there is order in the universe. Order requires intelligence. Order is not accidental or inconsistent, sometimes on and sometimes off.
This really brings to a head few prob.s we’ve been having w/philosophy lately:1That question about “nature of things” is also assertion about it,&certain kind of explanation is demanded f/what requires none.Rain makes many sad;why would society allow that?Imagine no one had an umbrella;what then would be the proper distribution of umbrellas?2That object/concept can be practically distinguished fr/its function&fr/its purpose.In fact, when we ask, What’s that?, we mean or then ask, What’s it for?/What does it do?/How does it work?, which aren’t easily distinguished in ordinary usage, so philos. effort replaces our naïve, intuitive understanding w/something diff. fr/what the latter do f/us:it’s explanation(description)of another kind, something else, but not the same thing.3That all reduction is of some good.Abstracting fr/diff. terms to show basic value by identifying common correct(=most agree)relation/property, the consequences of which cut across assumed boundaries, is advantageous;coarsely uniting disparate things by assumed common(=some agree)relation/property to show absurdity by contradiction(often taken as original falsity)is itself absurd, i.e. it’s the argument that’s already absurd, when 2 things are related to a 3rd(or even 4th)but not to each other, not absurd conclusion implied by sound argument.It’s well not all Cretans are liars, but to say, 1 belief is coherent w/a 2nd,&that 1st belief is fine by us, then 2nd must be fine by us, is less certain—it goes too far.
Somebody used the word ''shibboleth.'' This was the original speech-sound articulation evaluation, but failure carried quite a profound ... diagnosis. Ironically, we may be recapitulating that particular book (Judges) in our own time.
It all goes down to: I don't know if my god exists but I belief in him, the old Pascal's wager. Most atheists reject the christian god. That doesn't mean they are dumb or something. And other atheists reject the existence of any god.
Christianity defined the premises and all these arguments are stuck in them. That's not fair.
Mr. Douthat, By referring to "religious believers," are you alluding to
"literal interpreters" of doctrine and the importance of the rituals which are followed or faith as a template for living, and a metaphor -- even poetry? Really a mythology which serves pragmatic purposes?
once again, so many words with so little to actually say...
here's one for Ross and others to ponder that like to put out the "complete world view" and other dreck that comes with wearing their "god" on their sleeves rather than keeping "the Light under a bushel" as their leading philosopher admonished...
"do unto others as you would have others do unto you"...sounds familiar...yes?
too bad for the self righteous that not only don't they seem to be able to live up to the first Law of Yeshua's, but there's another little surprise for the type.....
it was written centuries earlier by a non-judeo/christian as "the Ethic of Reciprocity" in a manual written for bureaucrats so they good run an ethical government...
to quote Thulsa Doom, another fictional character "contemplate this upon the Tree of Woe"
Oh my. Once again, RD spins an argument as if the World Began With The Old Testament. But he concedes, as he must, that "I would not, emphatically not, justify a belief in God on the grounds that without it you don’t have a foundation for morality." Because he knows that people thought about morality for eons before any formalized, documented religion appeared on the scene.
With that concession, we're done here. The rest of RD's argument is that positing the existence of God makes for a more compelling story, should some individual grow tired of plain old godless morality. Something about a "coherent world picture." How injecting a make-believe Creator into the "world picture" makes it more "coherent" is never explained.
Nor does RD trouble himself with the countless polytheistic religions now relegated to the scrap heap of history, even though some held sway for thousands of years. Where is their fatal flaw, such that we can comfortably label them "myths" and disregard them, while worshipping at the alter of his personal favorite?
What RD needs to do is to show us his "Every Religion But Mine Is Bogus" deconstructor in his next column. Otherwise, he still looks like the guy examing snail entrails to me.
"A way of testing a proposition that you find doubtful but appealing..."
In his introduction to "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief," Lawrence Wright states that few of Scientology's converts "have had a conversion experience -- a sudden, radical reorientation of one's life; more common is the gradual, wholehearted acceptance of propositions that might have been regarded as unacceptable or absurd at the outset..." The subtle suggestion of the psychic is much akin to the spiritual shepherding of the priest.
Ross uses the term "materialism" with a dismissiveness which assumes its definition is evident. What is the essence of the world is a question that is not, as yet, fit for fruitful discussion; in my opinion, there is likely no "answer" to it. And when Ivan, in "The Brothers Karamazov," is quoted as saying that "without God, all is permitted," one errs twice. First, Ivan didn't originate that proposition (though it is often attributed to him); Rakitin did. Second, appeals to the Ultimate illuminate nothing about the human condition.
The difference between a "materialist" account of morality and a theistic one is this: When someone asserts the supernatural, the burden of proof is on them, not on one who denies it. To ask one to credit hocus-pocus which is outside sensory experience is absurd -- and more so when ghastly torture awaits those dissuaded by this absurdity.
To quote Joe McCarthy, this "is the most unheard-of thing I've ever heard of."
I have met atheists who evince a moral code that's indistinguishable from a Fundamentalist Christian's. I have also met atheists whose moral code is identical to liberal Protestant's or Catholic's. How do you account for this, Ross? In your own words. Not someone else's.
It's always amusing to read the superstitious trying to justify their foolish beliefs.
Ross Douthat writes, "I’m proposing that a belief in God and a belief in moral realism — and, by extension, a belief in ideas like the rights-based liberalism on which our civilization is founded — form a coherent world-picture "
That's quit an assertion, given that for 90% of the past 2000 years, the believers in western religions rejected rights-based liberalism in favor of the divine right of kings to rule over their subjects.
Consider a few of the changes western religion has undergone in that time. From accepting slavery as divinely sanctioned, to rejecting it as fundamentally evil. From seating women separately from men in church, to ordaining female ministers. From torturing and murdering heretics, to praising religious freedom. From persecuting homosexuals to supporting their right to marry.
I'm not seeing any absolute morality there, Ross. It looks to me like moral relativism on a grand scale, with religion adapting to cultural values, not defining them. Is there in fact ANY moral absolute in your system, other than disparaging atheists?
"Christianity is a benefit in providing moral coherence," ---except it doesn't. For a given denomination it may, but within this collection of aphorisms, shaped by translations and interpretations, there is a world of choice.
As far as advocating Christianity, or any religious based ethos, as a bulwark against the anarchy of atheism, well, we then are into deciding who speaks for atheists, or secularist, our agnostics? It is a never ending regression into an epistemology with no hope of empirical grounding.
Belief is ultimately situational, what works for a given aggregation, whether current AA members, ancient early Christians or current seekers of non-theistic truth. This subject, as intellectual discourse, is by its nature a descent into casuistry.
Ross, please remind me why your religion believes that women are lesser creatures than men (not fit to be priests, etc) and why it believes that gay people are inherently sinners with fewer rights than heteros. If that's what religion gives us, then I'll take an incoherent world picture any day.
Moral realism is pragmatism, not belief in a deity. The evolution of socialization and thus society is what brings about moral awareness and behavior. Belief in god and therefore in religion is really about social control and hierarchical power, influence and wealth.
It isn't as if religious moralism is superior in any way to social moralism. Indeed, religion is often the most rigid and inhumane in its dogma. Religion as a whole is largely out of step with social evolution and cultural reality. Religion simply fails to evolve.
Worse, belief in god and religious dogma often interfere with civil rights and personal freedom, which is why we have separation of church and state. Belief in god seems just as likely to result in morally reprehensible behavior as anything that comes from social moralism. In fact, the worse violence and human suffering is a result of religious hatreds among "religious" people.
So, really, belief in god isn't going to make things better. The evolution of cultural morality has been and will continue to be far more successful. Just look at who is most opposed to this evolution. They all believe in god.
Eclectic Pragmatist — http://eclectic-pragmatist.tumblr.com/
People who claim the backing of God for their arguments are really arguing "Because I say so!"
I always find it interesting to read arguments for god from intelligent and educated people. This is the newest christian apologetics or theodicy. As in all such arguments there is a slight of hand, where magic happens while one is focussing elsewhere. The truth stated by Ross is that eliminative materialism cannot provide a coherent basis for morality, especially of the sort connected with universal justice and human rights. But, such lack of foundation cannot mean that an even less coherent concept of god--as has dominated the monotheistic traditions-- has any support or rationale. So, where does this lead us? Either a Nietszchean assertion that we don't need any foundations to live--- a kind of Nietzschean yes-saying and creative positing .... Or, we work more piecemeal... accepting that there is perhaps more to the world than understood within materialist philosophy, meditating on the nature consciousness, mindfulness, and meaning, expanding naturalism to include neurology and neurological plasticity, reflecting on evolutionary and psychological developmental factors connected with morality that may be built into us, or at least into our 'healthy' realization, and perhaps developing a moral phlosophy of 'care' or of 'virtues' grounded in such articulations of our nature, what contributes to our excellence and happiness, and so on.... All without any incoherent concept of god. But, ultimately always piecemeal and partial and tentative....
"But, such lack of foundation cannot mean that an even less coherent concept of god--as has dominated the monotheistic traditions-- has any support or rationale."
God has more support if it's admitted that 1) our moral experience is irreducibly real; and 2) this moral experience can't be accounted for by eliminative materialism. Given this we shall therefore have to conclude either that a) our moral experience is not real (but it is) or b) that eliminative materialism can't explain everything.
b) makes more sense here, obviously. Admittedly, we're still a long way from concluding "God exists." But at least we can longer conclude that God is ruled out by eliminative materialism. This provides more, but far from conclusive, support for God.
"Ultimately" means, roughly, "to the end," which implies something of the agonies of it all that Nietzsche illustrates so well. I'll take N to these other guys any time.
That should be, by the way, "sleight" of hand: sleight meaning "dexterity" or "cunning," perhaps. A common error, as we seldom see the word.
The argument that god is a necessary condition for human morality requires redaction of all biblical texts which do not conform to current cultural norms. The insertion of this human editorial process destroys the argument as it inserts human opinion into the chain as an improvement on god's intent. There would be less inconsistency if one built our current moral foundation on the revealed teachings of an anthology of Dilbert comic strips.
Mr. Douthat asks his readers to achieve his level of enlightenment by reading several supportive tomes. It would be more instructive if Mr. Douthat would himself read Patricia Churchland's "Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality". This book clearly documents the very current, admittedly early results of neurological research impacting moral behavior in humans as well as other organisms in the evolutionary tree. Very little is known in absolute terms at this time, but the direction is clear: in five or ten years, science will have a definitive understanding of the mechanisms by which we achieve morality.
I can only wonder what new front the theists will employ as they continue their tactical retreat.
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"I can only wonder what new front the theists will employ as they continue their tactical retreat."
Indeed. For years, theists have been watching their "God of the gaps" preside over rapidly-narrowing slices of the universe. As that has happened, they've had to shift a lot of their arguments to areas less amenable to, or less explored by, scientific research, such as ethics and morality.
As those gaps also inevitably diminish, I expect that eventually theists will have to acknowledge the truth - that they believe not because religion is a social or moral imperative, but because they just do.
I don't know that science truly accepts any explanation as absolutely definitive, but it's clear that scientism does.
I confess to a lack of familiarity with the heavy terms used to describe what, I suspect, in ordinary human life may be fairly commonplace phenomena. One thing seems sure: where polemicists are concerned, self-importance is the primary belief system, and self-defined Absolute Truth is the narcissistic god to be worshipped. These head trips cry out for a new line of statuary and an array of flickering votive candles. All in the name of nihilism.
The tight as a drum constructions that bring so much comfort to Ross aren't needed to bring coherence to most people, even in the largely rational world of science. A "coherent world-picture" is a product of radical rationalization as Ross demonstrates regularly.
"My argument is more limited: I’m proposing that a belief in God and a belief in moral realism — and, by extension, a belief in ideas like the rights-based liberalism on which our civilization is founded — form a coherent world-picture in a way that the combination of eliminative materialism and rights-based liberalism does not. "
Coherent by whose imagination? We get it. You require a belief in a god to make your vision coherent. The easter bunny and santa claus work for children to explain why easter eggs and presents magically appear at certain times of the year.
YOUR need for that belief, however, is proof of nothing, and certainly isn't proof of any deficiency in atheism.
"I won’t defend this proposition at length here,.."
Of course you won't. Every theist explanation for the universe and man's place in it ultimately hides the "truth" behind terms that range from unknowable to completely meaningless.
I've lost count of how many times you've written this same column with the same arguments. And while I can see how Coyne might be a convenient figure for you to attack, the fact that you think you can keep making these arguments endlessly without even attempting to justify why your worldview is any more complete, is telling. Your side has history, culture, and a leap of faith; that's it. It doesn't make you wrong, but it does make your confidence just as ridiculous as Coyne's.
My question is this. If indisputable evidence was to be discovered that the Bible (new and old testaments) was purely a work of fiction / a set of parables authored by humankind - would that suddenly devalue the ethical system as revealed in the teachings of Jesus Christ to Ross Douthat and all who agree that Ross' world view is optimal? Would that instantly transform the Christian world view into something that was "incoherent"?
You forget that Ross (and his ilk) would not be convinced by "indisputable evidence."
So, this is a question I've thought about much. What if Christ had lived and died but the bible was never written? Would Christian ideas have evolved in some other way? They never did emerge in any far off area such as Asia or South America. If belief in God is so essential for morality how did all those old cultures in China and Egypt, etc survive for so long? Even in Europe a real social morality didn't emerge until the Magna Carta and subsequent similar non-religious social contracts, such as the US Constitution, were made. And these only happened because the common people finally were able to wrest some control from the wealthy and powerful.
Ross, what would you know, what would you believe if the Bible didn't exist? The Trinity. The Virgin Birth. The Resurrection. How would you know any of these truths?
If I look at the world today, I really doubt that religion or belief in God leads to a higher form of social good. I am an agnostic. I am against war, the death penalty. I think everyone should be allowed to vote. I think everyone should have access to education and health care. I think guns should be limited. I think that money is not the way to happiness. I look at everyone I know who believes in God and fully 60-80 percent of them don't believe any of that. They believe the opposite. I don't understand how any of those people call themselves moral beings and yet believe that all that suffering is not something they need to care about and try to fix.
The discussion of whether God exists needs to change to a discussion of the nature of God. Does God perform miracles that contravene the laws of physics? Does God answer prayers? Does God reward good and punish evil? It the answer to all these questions is no, then belief in God has no practical effect different from non-belief in God.
Yes, miracles exist -- and professional magicians perform them on stage all the time. What professional magicians do is inexplicable to others, but they lay no claim to divine powers. So theinexplicable is not a proof of the existence of a god of miracles.
Long ago wise people argued that there should be no name for nature like "God" because it misleads people to believe that nature has a personality.
Pray tell us, Mr. Douthat, about God. Tell us who "God" is. Tell us what God wants us to do or not to do. And tell us what God does and doesn't do. Is God partial to certain prayers? Does God prefer the Christians and just tolerate the Hindus? If so, what happens to the billions of Hindus when they die? What will happen to all of us? Is God male? And what does "believing in God" mean?
Ross, I can't help wondering if my reaction to this discussion would be of interest to you. A little background first.
I was raised a Catholic - religious family, Catholic school, the whole bit - and I was a very serious believer. Until I became an adult. And then it just all fell away from me. I realized, with the adult version of my brain, that the whole 'big picture' I'd been taught made no sense to me. I did not believe it, could not believe it, and didn't want to believe it because I realized that its 'falling away' was like a breath of fresh air for me.
But I think anyone who knows me would say that I was a good person - not the best, not perfect, but on the whole a good, moral person. I've raised three children, nonbelievers all, who, I'm sure, would be described the same way.
Now for my reason for writing: I wonder if you can possibly understand how completely unnecessary the discussion you're describing seems to me? I'll admit I only skimmed much of the material. To me, it's just not worth my time. It's not relevant to my approach to life.
Now I would never make pejorative comments about your beliefs as Coyne did. I have no interest in changing your thinking on the subject as long as it doesn't in any way impinge on mine. But it seems to me that you find people like me troubling. And I just don't get that.
"But it seems to me that you find people like me troubling. And I just don't get that."
I think the answer is simple. If you're right, then Douthat is wrong.
I get so tired of posters to this column and other columns who seem to have a need to tell their "story" in response to whatever topic the column addresses. Their out-sized number seems to suggest that perhaps they are the same people using different names - and their comments often border on the rabid or the confessional. If one's story is so compelling, why not do the real work of writing a memoir and getting it published. We moderns generally lead such shallow lives that we then elaborate and rationalize bombastically in the halls of academia. Most personal "stories" and personal belief systems are stereotypical at best -- seeming to originate from a need for self-expression rather than from any compelling insight worth sharing. Douthat has a track record, at least, and all these wannabes swarm over him trying to prove they are better. Male stuff.
"My argument is more limited: I’m proposing that a belief in God and a belief in moral realism — and, by extension, a belief in ideas like the rights-based liberalism on which our civilization is founded — form a coherent world-picture in a way that the combination of eliminative materialism and rights-based liberalism does not."
Even if true, this would be irrelevant as to whether or not a deity actually exists, so I'm not sure as to the point of this argument.
Mr. Douthat more clearly restricts his argument to a certain kind of atheist than he did in the Jerry Coyne piece. His point isn't that atheism is demonstrably wrong-headed, but that certain atheists are too narrowly partisan. I agree with him about the "noble lie" reason for supporting religion, but on the broader issue of whether religion is plausible, he gives away the store: "But I want to stress that I’m not saying that “coherence” is the same thing as “truth” (or, for that matter, the same thing as “answers all objections completely persuasively”), or that anyone who finds my critique of Coyne persuasive should rush to be received into their local branch of Christendom." In doing so, he also seems to imply that the only legitimate religion is Christianity--a view point I hope he deals with in another blog.
A "new atheist," I take it, is one who believes that there is no God, that eliminative materialism is true, and that there is a universal egalitarian morality. This is the culprit Mr. Douthat is attempting to expose as hypocritical. I'm an atheist but not a "new" one on that definition. I believe that there is no God and that eliminative materialism is true, but I do not believe in morality as conceived by people like Mr. Douthat, Thomas Nagel, and Immanuel Kant.
Nagel's attack on eliminative materialism is an attack on a view that virtually no current eliminative materialist holds. Current eliminativists do not attempt to eliminate consciousness but to account for it as a function of "matter." To use Nagel's famous phrase, consciousness is "what it is like" to be a material state. It is not like something to be a rock, but it is like something to be a bat. Rocks don't have nervous systems; bats and cats do. It is something else to be like a human, because we have different types of nervous systems.
Are we all equal in some moral sense? It is hard to see how without appealing to some premise that is obviously false. But this does not leave us with no way of taking each other seriously. After all, what it is like to be a human includes the various ways we care. If caring is not enough, then how would religion or morality fill the void?
Thanks to the Times and Mr. Douthat for this kind of exchange. It is good for our democracy.
"A "new atheist," I take it, is one who believes that there is no God, that eliminative materialism is true, and that there is a universal egalitarian morality"
In my opinion, a New Atheist is simply an atheist who openly challenges the rationality of belief, instead of remaining silent as belief dominates our culture. It's an atheist who is willing to talk to believers the way believers have always talked to atheists: challenging their religious beliefs the way one would challenge another's political beliefs.
Serban asks, " Even if you believe in God assume for a minute that there is no such entity. Does that change how much you really understand about the world? Does it have to change your behavior (other than no longer praying)?"
Yes, lack of a belief in God does affect my world view and behavior. In fact, I tried this experiment for a large portion of my adult life, with rather unpleasant consequences. Of course, this is only my experience, but that does not make it less valid.
I've also tried that experiment, with the opposite result.
Of course, this is only my experience, but that does not make it less valid.
Well, at least he's not overtly ranting about the sex lives of others in this one...
Yes but he still rambles on without saying much. Does he get paid by the word?
Belief in God may or may not be necessary to lead a moral life, but humility certainly is, so much so that I believe that the lack of a genuine and abiding humility -- whether in a believer or atheist -- causes more despair and destruction than any belief system.
Belief in a personal creator seems to make people narcissistic.
Philosophical reflections such as this are the stuff of arm-chair theology, and as such have very little to do with how most people go about their daily lives. Most of us are much to busy trying to make livings and raise families or create something satisfying to wonder about ultimate goals; ordinary existence imposes purpose on us whether we want it or not.
There is also a very simple explanation for the vociferous and somewhat abrasive tone of the "new atheists". (Among them, Richard Dawkins is at his best when explaining the basis of the scientific world-view, as in "The Blind Watchmaker" and not so good when constructing polemics.) The adherents of an anti-intellectual, almost preliterate brand of "old-time" religion attempt by hook or crook (mostly by crook) to impose the consequences of their medieval beliefs on those who do not share them. By means of capturing and using the powers of the state theocracy and its logical end, inquisition, becomes a real possibility. i feel that this is what so agitates Dawkins, Harris, etc. Until such time as Douthat and his ilk speak out against the perversion of their relatively benign faith into an instrument of coercion (e.g. execution for gays in Africa) and its companion hypocrisy, I will find his musings, however elegant and thoughtful, quite irrelevant.
This column makes me really really miss Christopher Hitchens.
@Concerned MD,
I was thinking this very thought at the moment I read your comment. How he could lay waste to tedious, pedantic thinkers. I miss him every day.
Ross,
When you say god exists, does that include Zeuss, Hera, and the the rest of the gang?
As usual Douthat uses way way too many words to try, (vainly I might add) to convince the reader that humans are not able to be ethical unless they also believe in an unproven fantasy .
The connection between religious beliefs and ethics is grossly overstated. Ethical considerations and the desire to do what is good and decent, I believe, are hard-wired into human beings, no matter whether they are Muslims, Christians, or unbelievers. We have seen many so-called religious leaders that are unbelievably morally corrupt and we have also encountered many self-proclaimed atheists that are not only generous, but ethically and morally sound.
The fact of the matter is that our religious belief or lack of it is virtually a function of our background. If you were born in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia to a Taliban chief or Saudi prince, in almost all cases you will profess to be religious, not just religious, but religious in the Islamic sense. And if you were born to the Prince of Wales at the Windsor Castle, I suppose you will grow up to be an Anglican. Nobody knows what is "true" or "false" about any of the dozens of faiths people of the world are daily dying, destroying, and killing for.
We are having this argument even now precisely because nobody knows the real truth. Can you have a debate about the speed of light?
OK getting that comment to fit into 1500 characters including spaces was unduly hard work. I hope it still makes sense. Constraints are all to the good, but I wish I'd had room to retain my comparison with Andrew Sullivan: here at least you're more philosophically coherent. Also, I want to make clear that I cite my own background - as should be obvious when I refer to my personal experience of losing any possibility of faith - I do so to emphasize our differences, not to trumpet my expertise. Thank you.
No world view is coherent if it clashes with scientific facts such as the reality that nature has no personality and does not respond to any human pleas.
Modern philosophers who understand this see ethics as an evolved behavior in a social animal. There is no need to invoke a God to explain what is intrinsic to healthy human beings.
Unfortunately, "Because God says so" is a tautology that destroys logic and blocks negotiation in most dysfunctional societies, and it rests on the specious notion that there is a personage named God who alters the course of nature for people.
This is why modern atheists will not accept politics that argues for policies that are purported to affect what God does to humans.
"No world view is coherent if it clashes with scientific facts such as the reality that nature has no personality and does not respond to any human pleas."
That's not a scientific fact. It's a philosophical speculation. Science proceeds on the basis of the scientifically unprovable assumption that nature does not behave as a personal agent. In other words, science assumes, does not conclude, that nature has no personal aspects. It simply refuses to pursue this line of speculation. Instead science focuses on the objective and impersonal aspects of nature that are suspectible to quantitative, testable investigation.
Though I often disagree with you, I admire your writing about religion. For my Ph.D. in Religion at Princeton, I concentrated in New Testament, early Judaism, Christian origins and patristics; my diss. was on Jerome. Subsequently, teaching New Testament introduction for years made me a convinced atheist. That evolution just happened, without apparent rational basis. I was left with two intuitive convictions: Christianity must be false; only materialism is a plausible world-view. But philosophical grounding for these beliefs is far to seek. All the while, my sympathy & understanding deepened, not only for early Christian thought, but for contemporary Protestant and Catholic teaching.
I much appreciate the sophistication & sensitivity of your writing on religion. This column's affirmation of "multiple coherent world pictures" - & its rejection of "the synthesis of scientism and progressive moral certainty" as one of them - & its valuing of living as if in faith as a mode of philosophical experimentation - particularly impress. Your sympathy for complex, partial, doubting, yet sincere approaches to traditional religion points to a genuinely modern Christianity: one founded, as Paul might have wished, on reason, humility, & doubt (values the Fathers, too, held dear). Your rejection of philosophically crude contemporary atheisms reassures this atheist, by holding out hope for better atheism.
The World is not coherent; even God suffers from cognitive dissonance!!
I love it when there's a dog-whistle for the religion-haters to answer a summons. They dutifully line up here and ''try to throw one past the Babe.''
It's almost like Creative Writing 202 back in the college days - except you could sort of tell when the writers then were finished. Oh well.
I believe in the religions of the world. These religions express the on going evolution of the mind, the brain, and civilization. Civilization is the end product of evolution and man's moral, spiritual, and religious nature are a vital part of it. An especially important aspect of religion is the relationship of the this new human cortex and ancient pre-human brain. The sacrificed children in the religions (Isaac) expresses the attitude of the old brain towards the new. It culminates when JC on the cross says to the ancient brain, "my father, why have you forsaken me?"
Religion is evolution, like everything else of any significance.
Religion is the exact opposite of evolution. Please share your idea above with an Islamist and hear the same basic response.
Religion says that this belief and that fate are as fixed as the rising and setting of the sun. Living in the American media-dominated culture will definitely make the observer think that nothing is at all fixed or dependable, but That which establishes faith insists that man's weakness xannot change that which lasts forever.
OBTW, Isaac was never sacrificed, but Abraham had to know that he was willing to lose him - that he had it in himself to carry it out for something much bigger than himself.
Or, the whole event serves us as a preview of a quite real sacrifice to come to pass in the same area a couple millenia later.
I am an atheist. I don't engage in debates about religion. I don't try to prove that I am right and someone else is wrong. I don't feel the need to "correct" or refute anyone's argument about god, morality, whatever. I just live my life, try to treat others fairly and respectfully and try not to harm others. I long ago stopped caring what anyone else thinks of my stance on religion. Saves me a lot of energy.
Good for you. I'm married to someone who considers themselves an atheist.
He's the most honest, moral, caring person I've ever encountered.
He respects others and lives his life and is a lot more content than most people I've encountered.
Atheism?
Been there.
Done that.
World War I and WW II was started by a godless Germany, 50 million people were killed. Stalin killed or starved 20 million of his own people to collectivize the farms and indoctrinate his brand of atheism total allover deaths in Russia 120 million. Mao Tse Tung killed 70 million Chinese to establish Communism in China.
Total 240,000,000 dead.
As much as you may criticize false religions that murder other believers they have never murdered to the multitude extent of atheists.
Are you aware of the genocide that took place and is now taking place in a continent without religious values like Africa?
Read "Something of Value" by Robert Ruack to see how having no religious values destroy millions of humanity.
Look around at many in today's godless society—hopes and dreams of a moral atheism dashed to pieces by the reality of decadence, debasement, debauchery, greed, sexual perversion and hedonism it has produced.
You don't know your history very well. Plenty of people in those wars claimed that God was on their side.
For Pete's sake, the continent of Africa has religious values up the ying yang. Apparently not yours, however!
No thanks for your unknowledgable lecture. Godless Germany? Tell that to Roman Catholic Adolf, if he were still alive.
So many different gods and spirits, angels and demons. We talk about God in the Abrahamic sense of a single god, a male god because of cultural bias. I say why not worship Zeus and Hera, they may be out of style but the evidence for them is as compelling as the evidence for American protestantism.
The root of this can be found in Becker's book, The Denial of Death. We need some sort of god to rescue us from "the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler doth return..."
Consequently we invent gods, imbue them with powers, and as Becker implies we use transference and projection to send these phantasms of our anxiety out into the world as though they were objective. If this provides a personal morality and a relief from fear then all seems fine until we use our gods to control and punish others. So many were burned at the stake in the dark ages, Christian ages mind you, and so many divine right kings plagued Europe that our founding fathers banned god from government in our Constitution, despite the fact that many of the founders were god believing and Bible literate.
Ross Douthat's core axiom, that only what he calls the religious worldview informs a person's morality, is fundamentally flawed in at least two ways.
The first problem is that to define religion and the religious worldview is an untenable proposition. For example, the world's Christian churches can be more dissimilar than similar. What about the Catholics and Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries who massacred one other and anyone else? The definition of a specific religion, much less of a religious worldview, is often in the eye of the beholder. Douthat's own religious worldview does not take kindly to Pope Francis, for example (nor, one imagines, to liberal Catholics). Whence authority? or as Prince John asked in Men in Tights: "why should the people listen to you?"
The second problem is exclusion: the denial of morality to those who don't share the same conservative-religious worldview. Seriously? Are all other Christians, atheists, Muslims, animists, Buddhists, etc., immoral persons?
Douthat presents opinions others broadly share, but couches them in his conservative-religious view and then claims that there is no alternative way to see things. Sample: his "war on women" column where, bizarrely, misogyny is the product of women's liberation (a more refined version of saying, she was asking for it because her skirt was short). Follow that logic and there was no misogyny before women's lib.
At heart, he's not in dialogue (in the Socratic sense) but in monologue.
A stone age clan witnesses the birth of a new member. The mother instinctively tries to breast feed the newborn. Rather than abandon them, her mate instinctively hunts and gathers food, perhaps with other members of their group.
Other clans try to drive them off their favorite hunting grounds. Animals stalk them as prey.
Sometimes things go well. sometimes they don't and unlike those animals around them, these early humans engage in complex thinking and try to explain their fate.
They know some animals are far more powerful than they are. Is there a powerful creature that can also think, controlling things? They call it, god.
Perhaps morality is innate and related to survival. All else is imagination.
Mr. Douthat, you have far more in common with the atheists and non-theists you try to debase than with 99% of Christians. You are fighting for a conception (or theology) of reality that even most Christians would either disagree with or, what is more likely, not understand a single word of what you are talking about. Why do you continue to defend a group for which you have completely different beliefs than most of its adherents? Why even continue to call yourself a Christian? Most Christians (theologians and the "common man") would disagree with your sympathies for panpsychism and pantheism in the same way that you mock atheists and non-theists for not sympathizing enough.
I don't blame Howard, or the others who posted pretty much the same thing, for failing to understand Mr. Douthat's article; he could have used less technical language. Mr. Douthat also assumes some familiarity with current philosophers' and sociologists' obsession with narratives and individual constructions of reality, which most people do not have.
But Mr. Douthat's point has nothing to do with a deistic religion or an assumption of God as the only basis for religion - he actually argues the opposite, that with care, atheists' arguments for ethics can be valid. What he suggests is that, compared with the circular logic of the New Atheists, a standard, straightforward narrative of divinely-ordered ethics is a much more coherent narrative. And he's right, as anyone who studies metanarratives can tell you. There just aren't that many people out there - and they seem way beyond the ability of New Atheists to even begin to understand.
Oh my Spaghetti Monster! After about three paragraphs my brain started to hurt.
"eliminative materialism?"
"regnant naturalism?"
I'm a secularist all the way, but what's wrong with "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?" Who cares who said it or what other wacked-out legalisms some folks will attach to its author. It cuts through a lot of bull and goes to the heart of the fact that WE are all humans and subject to the human conditions.
I don't know, and don't care, if there's a god. I do know that there are other people on this Earth that need my help and if I'm only doing it to earn some "Heavenly reward" then, well, sorry, but that is WRONG.
Here's my secular philosophy of life, retooled without the prejudice of the religions that have proclaimed it:
I wish to be an instrument of peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
Through my life and actions I will seek not so much
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And when we die, may those we have touched
think fondly upon us and become their own instruments of peace.
There is nothing so pure as the kindness of an atheist. It is not done for reward, for protection, nor for obedience; it is done because it is kind.
Mind and matter are constructs. Pure experience is primordial" William James" Also Bill Wilson's incorporation into the 12 steps of "God of my understanding" from an original atheistic (and use the ic intentionally) member in his book and teachings of Alcoholics
Anonymous were for me , at least, a bridge that allowed a much better understanding.. You might also be interested in the origination of the word "Agnostic" by T. H. Huxley as not knowing from the gnostics an ancient religious sect who were purported to have acquired perfect knowledge.
Incidentally William James also opined that " I believe that no so called philosophy of religion can possibly be an adequate translation of what goes on in the single private man." Amen
I'm an atheist and I can sum up my morality quickly and without God. Always do the kind thing. It has everything to with you and nothing to do with God.
Actually, god is not the problem. Religions are. Early American Deists had a good point. If in fact there was a first cause, a god that created the universe and then just left it and us to our own devices, that would make sense.
However, not letting it go at that, men created god and gods in their own image and then the structures and institutions to contain him.
People search for "the" meaning of life as if there is one. From the first attributions of meaning, of god or gods handing us "meaning", in reality, men have created their own meanings.
That's how it works. We create meanings using our senses. We share our perceptions, our attributed meanings, and we adjudicate realities in the form of religions.
We don't need it to be so complicated and convaluted.
The real issue is that we must keep the human constructions of religions and our government's support of them at bey.
I am not as articulate as Ross is, but hey, lets follow the KISS mode. (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Ross isn't articulate, he's wordy.
I hear angels dancing on Douthat's pin.
Douthat claims that a feature of morality in religion is that it is consistent but illustrates this with references to a dozen philosophical texts that are anything but consistent. If you can't explain an idea without referencing the obscure then you don't understand your idea.
How can even the Bible be described as morally consistent? There are at least two moral codes: those that apply to man and those that apply to god. The acts of god would be seen as horrific if performed by a man. Even stories that are intended to be moral illustrations are frightening when examined. The great moral struggle between god and the Pharaoh is resolved by the slaughter of the innocent and the torture and starvation of the people. The fundamental concept of the new testament is that human sins required a human sacrifice.
If we are going to ask if religious morality is valid we can start by asking if religious beliefs are consistent with the things we do know. How can a set of beliefs that cannot explain the world as we observe it without recourse to endless variations of the idea that physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy and most importantly biology are not the way we measure and record them but instead things that only appear that way only because god chooses to do so? Nothing is real - evolution is a trick constantly tweaked behind the scenes. How is there morality in a world view where everything is an illusion?
When Douthat writes about "evolutionary accidents" (as he does in his Christmas column) it is abundantly clear that he actually doesn't understand much about evolution and therefore doesn't really know what he is talking about.
The first principle of evolution is that there are NO evolutionary accidents! While mutations are random, which creatures survive to procreate is definitively not random. That is the whole point!
No neo-Darwinian intelligentsia atheists (or whatever he calls them) relate the specific form morality takes to any principal of Darwinism other than in the abstract. Most people versed in Darwinism contend that evolution implanted the ability to develop moral codes that force communities to adhere more closely and function more adroitly, but not specifically the codes themselves. That is a reasonably crack-free thesis as far as I'm concerned. Liberals feel passionately about their morality because all people evolved to feel passionately about their morality.
Furthermore, most liberals I know don't actually practice egalitarianism. Rather they practice a kind of moral relativism that can be reduced to the primary axiom "Do no harm".... In multicultural societies that's about the only rule that can survive scrutiny. Most other proscriptions against food, sex, and thought have been discarded.
Finally, it isn't merely that science questions certain aspects of religion, it outright disproves a great majority of it. That's a tough nut to swallow.
I think the important point is that any ultimate ontological claim is independent of all others, so that it is logically consistent to have, say, objective morality without a god. Thus the "grounding" and "coherence" you are seeking are essentially expressions of subjective yearning - good enough to base one's religion on, for sure - but have no logical power; this is true indeed of practically anything one has to say on the ultimate ontological questions.
I personally believe the world possesses objective values, and am an atheist. Nothing logically compells me to believe in this combination, but it emerges naturally from certain backgrounds (for Jews born in non-observant families, it is almost inevitable). Sometimes you seem to believe this position is strange or rare; it is neither. But I do respect your position, which is logically consistent and has a great history behind it!
Mr. Douthat asserts that religious belief provides a coherent world view without stating exactly what that view is so that its' coherence can be judged. He further labels a new breed of atheists as judgmental and contemptuous of religious believers. He bases these statement of arguments offered by some of the more militant atheists and proceeds to attribute their actions to many atheists. Belief and doubt come in all shapes and sizes- atheists are no more argumentative or judgmental than religious believers and they are far less likely to see eternal damnation as a viable threat..
The universe is not all that coherent. Even the laws of physics which govern may events can be changed when the laws of quantum physics are applied.
Morality is no more scientific than any other human behavioral system, being influenced by genetics, society and education. The desire for coherence may be in-bred in humans but there is no corresponding duty of the universe to satisfy that desire. Apparently Douthat believes that religious belief is an either/or matter unless modified by those he doesn't quite call hypocrites for basing their religious observances on influencing the behavior of others. There is no reason atheists must justify their belief system since rejecting it offers no negative outcome unless the condemnation of the believers is considered negative. Atheists use no "damnation or reincarnation" arguments. Belief isn't a threat to them as unbelief is to believers.
I dare say that most religious intellectuals live their lives"as if" God existed, because they know they can't be sure. If they could know, they would not need faith. I doubt many of them would adhere to the incoherent or at least misleading conclusion that "as if" make religion a "noble lie". They would call it their faith and I dare say most people have a faith in something that cannot be known for certain. This would include secular humanist whose faith in humans ability to guide ourselves to a better place is no more or less outlandish then looking for guidance from a God in the heaven.
It's a sad, but accurate commentary that without belief in some 'being' more powerful than mankind, some/many/all of us would become morally bankrupt. It just goes to help define how far (or not far) our civilization has evolved.
Stephen Weinberg, the Nobel physicist said: "With or without religion, good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things, But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion."
And Bertrand Russell (he was good) said: "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines"
One can only hope..
"If someone in the midst of that kind of skepticism-infused experimentation were forced to suddenly elaborate a complete world-picture, they might end up sounding as incoherent as I think the new atheists often sound. But with this crucial difference: They would be aware of the tensions, aware of the difficulties, and accepting them as a hopefully-temporary part of a personal process, rather than claiming to have arrived at a permanent intellectual solution and proselytizing ardently on its behalf."
That's it, right there. Catholicism is inclusive not to say their aren't progressive and fundamental Catholics and are called to a mature faith to remain in the tension. Not many scientist I've conversed with claim science objective is to offer a "complete world picture." Nor, does Catholicism but then we get into teaching of the Church, which becomes a drag.
I've only engaged in religious debate with one atheist that was AWESOME! I think the reason why was he was a literate atheist re Catholic doctrine. Now I'll read the articles you've hyperlinked.
In the history of ideas, the idea of equal individual worth behind "egalitarian liberalism" no doubt owes something to Christianity. But liberalism hardly requires religion. On the contrary, liberalism in the form of modern natural law originating with Hobbes and Locke emerged as a reaction against the religious wars and intolerance of the 17th-century. The great 20th-century American philosopher of liberalism, John Rawls, defined "political liberalism" as precisely a set of ideas about a just society including basic rights that all citizens of a pluralist society could agree to REGARDLESS of their comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines. And in case we sentimentalize the egalitarianism of Christianity and think it is at the root of our own cherished beliefs that we are all free and equal, it is worth remembering that for a over a millenium avowedly Christian thinkers accomodated and indeed provided elaborate justifications for slavery in its many manifestations.
Stop skirting the obvious - is the materialist position accurate? Forget ethics! If so then we do not have to join scientism but should at least see the error in traditional religious views.
Take the following from Harris' Free Will,
And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you had with other people, events, and ideas.
Then a rebut from Treffert's "Islands of Genius",
By age five Jay had composed five symphonies. His fifth symphony, which was 190 pages and 1328 bars in length, was professionally recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra for Sony Records. On a 60 Minutes program in 2006 Jay’s parents stated that Jay spontaneously began to draw little cellos on paper at age two. Neither parent was particularly musically inclined, and there were never any musical instruments, including a cello, in the home. At age three Jay asked if he could have a cello of his own. The parents took him to him to a music store and to their astonishment Jay picked up a miniature cello and began to play it. He had never seen a real cello before that day. After that he began to draw miniature cellos and placed them on music lines. That was the beginning of his composing.
Such rebuttals are easy to find and the backdrop is a general failure to find DNA for much of anything (including IQ).
America's flagship of liberal opinion is The New Republic?
Good grief.
Does Ross Douthat not know that actual liberals are so used to TNR's conservative views being touted by the likes of Rush Limbaugh in the form of "See? Even the liberal New Republic agrees with me about (insert right wing talking point)" that liberals widely refer as "Even The Liberal New Republic"?
It's like calling Camile Paglia "America's foremost liberal feminist" when most of what she writes is conservative opinion, seemingly designed for the very purpose of giving conservatives a "liberal" to point to, as proof that all liberals secretly agree with conservatives.
Ross Douthat lives in a conservative bubble, something that becomes more apparent with every column. Can the NYT not do better than this?
I think there are semantic dissonances at play in these responses between Douthat, Coyne, and Millman (Millman makes note of one such instance), and perhaps the most glaring is the definition of the phrase "religious morality."
Douthat's initial piece seemed to define this - at its best - as Biblically-generated. Of course, there is no question that Biblical morality, when parsed down to the sentence, begets many troubling tenets. Stoning women, killing sabbath-breakers, etc. - if you adhere strictly to Biblical morality, you would never question the ethics of these ideas. So is there something outside the Bible that informs our moral choices? (And I'm not talking about the Pope or some other hierarchy - if anything, history suggests these religious establishments show less-than-moral actions in the aggregate).
All one needs to do is answer "yes" and the idea that the Bible (or any religious text) is the root of all morals goes out the window. But this is not to say that they do not provide some guidelines - the fact that there are countless religious texts with similar large ideas about morality, but differences in the minutiae, suggests that there are indeed some foundational morals built in to the human experience. Call them "Darwinian" or "Evolutionary" or "Selfish" or "Atheistic" but don't malign it from one side and then support it on your own.
Admit that not all ethics is Biblically-derived and you become open to a more inclusive "religious morality."
"belief in God and a belief in moral realism ... form a coherent world-picture"
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Same old tired shibboleth that complexity proves the existence of god. The teleological argument just proves the laziness of the writer.
I think you need to add Pascal's Wager to the options a person has in dealing with the issue of belief.
To take one small point of Douthat’s arguments in which he talks about “The rights based liberalism on which our civilization is founded”. Rights based liberalism was not part of either Catholic or Calvinist (or any Christian tradition) for most of the last 2000 years. “Original sin” by Adam and Eve was held to have cost all humans any rights except death. In fact, a focus on human rights came forward mostly in the Enlightenment. The latter was based on ‘rationality’ and reason, not on religious belief. The god that so many in the Enlightenment recognized but didn’t worship (including a significant number of the Founding Fathers) was deist, not Christian. Is this deist god the one that Douthat is holding up as the basis of morality? I have never seen Douthat as advocating deism.
On the other hand, I don’t see how the being depicted in the Old Testament/Torah can in any way be seen as the basis of morality. That being is vindictive, petty, arbitrary, blood-thirsty and genocidal; that is just for starters. The god of Christianity demands human sacrifice, something we reject in all other religious traditions. How can a being who violates so many basic principles of morality turn out to be the basis of our morality?
I am resigned to most people remaining convinced of the presence of religious truth for the simple reason that it gives them solace in the that transition between lying down and going to sleep. 'You' really do exist and matter in this universe. It is not all for naught.
But as the brain becomes more complex and discerning, as the impossibility that there really is a mind separate from organic electrical activity comes back again and again to the intelligent and well read, the justifications become ever more incoherent.
Just as incoherent as these constant railings against atheists. Which is to say against anyone who would just say to your beliefs, "nonsense".
As to morality, as best I can tell regardless of what your christian written code might say there are the same number of criminals, sadists and sociopaths who professed to be Catholic as there are in or out of any other religion.
Whatever morality there might be comes from the nature of man as a social animal. Nothing more.
How can one claim coherence for a belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God unless one has been indoctrinated in this belief before one can reason? Only then one claim a divinely ordered cosmos as the foundation for morality. Ongoing scientific findings on a prosocial suite of tendencies in human infants and the human capacity for deliberation and long-term thinking provide the starting points for a culturally created morality.
I think Mr. Douthat's argument is based on a false premise—namely that his own morality is based on his belief in the Christian God.
This is the deity who, according to the Bible, ordered his followers to commit multiple genocide. These genocides are catalogued victoriously in the Book of Joshua. Deuteronomy 13 and 20 contain laws mandating genocide, not just in the Hebrews' wars of conquest but also against conquered towns that revert to non-Hebrew religion. (As far as I know, the Bible is the only religious text to actually endorse the practice of genocide.)
The Christian god is also plainly okay with slavery; Leviticus 25:45 says explicitly that you can buy slaves from foreigners and pass them down to your children.
And Douthat's god is also clear on the place of women: they are the property of men. Adultery is a property crime; rape is not a crime at all. In fact if you rape an unbetrothed virgin, you have to pay the brideprice to her father and marry her (Deuteronomy 21:28).
And of course, Jesus did not come to abolish these laws, but fulfill them (Matthew 5:17). Paul called these laws "holy, just, and good" (Romans 7:12). In Deuteronomy 4, Douthat's god says these laws should stand for all time as a wise example to all nations.
I imagine (and hope) Mr. Douthat is just as repulsed by such laws as a liberal atheist like myself. But if his morality truly comes from God—and not secular, enlightenment morality—on what basis is he repulsed?
Christianity only provides moral guidance if you believe that suffering is bad (particularly your own suffering, for all eternity). Most atheists agree with that premise: they just cut out the (presumed imaginary) divine authority and base morality directly on how to reduce suffering in the world.
Religous person: God creates morality
Athiest: Man creates morality or slightly longer, Man creates "God" to explain morality.
Either way, if people end up acting morally, does it matter?
"with its peculiar mix of overconfident reductionism and crowing self-righteousness about morality and politics. "
Which accurately describes our materialists but also pretty much nails quite a few of our fundamentalist and authoritarian theists.
- Wonks Anonymous
Ross, I appreciate your comments on the "churchgoing skeptic" who "embraces religion experimentally in the hopes of harmonizing his own contradictory instincts and beliefs." That is similar to my own experience; I made a conscious choice to believe, since I did not want to live in a world that was amoral. This was sufficient for a college student, and put me on the path to religious growth and encounter with God. One can argue ad nauseum the philosophy of religious belief and never convince another to believe. The convincing argument is the personal encounter with the living God. Without some kind of encounter, no philosophizing will suffice; with the encounter, no philosophizing is necessary.
How can belief in God provide a coherent world view when his Word is full of contradictions and backtracking and attempts to make sense of it have resulted in innumerable different interpretations and religious sects?
There are many religions. Buddhism doesn't have the same approach to the supernatural as do the monotheistic faiths Mr. Douthat is more familiar with. The claim that there is a religious world view is empirically false.
There are many consistent world views besides those of religions. The claim that religion provides the only one is also empirically false.
Immanuel Kant, to give one profound example, found a non-revelation-based way to argue for ethical imperatives. So the claim that there is no way to justify ethics outside of religion is also empirically false.
What is true, though, is that Mr. Douthat believes that he can't be ethical without religion. I respect his sincerity, but draw the line at extrapolating his -- or his church's -- beliefs to exhaust all human possibilities.
Howard's problem may be that over the last two millenia, Christian ideas about civic and civil behavior have subtly ingrained themselves into non-religious thought. You'd need a time machine to go back to the classic Greeks or Romans to try to define good behavior sans christian ethics.
The example I like to quote is how Christ's comments about Ceasar's image on a coin led us into the whole concept of seperation of church and state, which many Russians, Islamists, & Asians still struggle with.
"What is true, though, is that Mr. Douthat believes that he can't be ethical without religion."
What he makes explicitly clear in this column and many others is that he does not, in fact, believe it to be the case that a person must be religious to be ethical.
"There are many consistent world views besides those of religions. The claim that religion provides the only one is also empirically false."
This is what you wrote. Presumably you were expressing disagreement with Douthat. Now let's take a look at what Douthat wrote:
"I think there are many potentially coherent world-pictures — which means that there are various ways that modern secular progressives could make their principles make a little more sense without returning to their ancestors’ biblical faith."
You see, he agrees with you. I'm afraid I don't understand what you're getting at.
"The claim that there is a religious world view is empirically false. "
This is what "empirical means": 1: originating in or based on observation or experience 3: capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment.
Douthat claims to have observed a religious world view. Not only have I heard this is true via Douthat, I have observed a religious world view myself: in church every Sunday when I and scores of others empirically demonstrate the existence of an observable religious world view. Therefore, there is a religious world view. To claim "there is a religious world view" is an empirically true statement. I invite you to your local church next Sunday where you can observe the truth of that statement yourself.
Ross, your obvious, high degree of education serves as framing materials for your frequent construction of arguments on the subject of religion.
But rather than build the same old architectural forms that you acquired in classrooms, textbooks, and a catechism, why don't you try for a change stepping back and conceiving this question in a different form, much Neolithic construction and religion differed from ancient Chinese differed from Babylonian differed from Greek differed from Renaissance, etc, when their internal constructs took material form?
You want this to be a "black or white" cliche construct and go always to only familiar western forms you mastered in college and doing post grad work and then publishing.
But face it, atheism, agnosticism and faith are one and the same. They're all correct in this reality. Religion is no closer to a valid explanation of humanity's dilemma than is Otto Rank as an example, or in our time, marginally, Ernest Becker in attributing our plight to the consequences of animal anxiety.
Go read "The Denial of Death" and "The Birth and Death of Meaning," and then come back to this issue with new insight, because you aren't exhibiting anything fresh here.
You write real pretty Ross, but I find it as, and more, meaningful and immediate to read the comments to your columns than to read you. That's not a good sign.
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There's a certain desperation underlying Douthat's defense of the religious worldview. He launches a fusillade of philosophy at the encroaching atheists, trying to throw up a smokescreen of -isms and -ologies that, if you read slowly, might be internally consistent but that neither discredits atheism nor buttresses belief.
In an earlier comment I said that if a totally non-technological people heard a tape recording of their dead comrade, they might well think that his spirit was inside the machine. No matter how sophisticated their arguments and no matter how passionately they argued, they would simply be wrong.
The universe doesn't care what Douthat thinks, and it doesn't care what I think. All we can do is try to figure out how the universe works. We're free to imagine, but when imagination comes up against reality, reality wins. If Douthat's religious view is right, then everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, geology, cosmology and ever other -ology would be wrong. But they're not wrong. There are mysteries in the universe, but everything we're sure of today was once a mystery. We discarded countless religious explanations along the way, and there's no going back.
History is strewn with discarded gods and quaint beliefs. But the one thing that all these myriad believers had in common was their utter certainty that they were right.
READ ALL 6 REPLIES
Gemli,"Religious belief and science are most certainly mutually exclusive."
You haven't show that they are mutually exclusive. All you have done is to point out, generally, that our assumptions guide our inquiries; and that in the past theistic assumptions have in some cases limited scientific investigation, without acknowledging that some of the methodological assumptions of science were developed within, and in many cases guided by, the assumptions of a theistic world view. But you haven't given any reasons to justify your conclusion that science and religion are inevitably irreconcilable.
"Religions create a worldview that assumes there is Someone to answer to."
Perhaps create; perhaps acknowledge. In any case, Science also creates a worldview that assumes it is answerable to its own scientifically unprovable assumptions; and, most remarkably, assumes that we are answerable to the truth as such. What scientific support is there for that assumption?
Furthermore, why should a world view in which we are answerable to someTHING be preferable to one in which we are answerable to someONE? Given the limits of human knowledge and intelligence, being accountable to the implacable standards of Science is as likely to create a sense of insecurity and inadequacy as demanding that as imperfect humans we are accountable to absolute moral standards laid down by a personal God.
Brian Hagerty ° New York
My experience with, and observation of religion contradicts your assertion Brian. If religion were "ideal" perhaps absolute mutual compatability would be true. But religion, and you're using that word as a generalit, is not ideal. Most religions live uncomfortably with science's conclusions.
Ross hints at an escape from this dilemma in saying,
" I think there are many potentially coherent world-pictures — which means that there are various ways that modern secular progressives could make their principles make a little more sense without returning to their ancestors’ biblical faith.
"Some of these paths to coherence are deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic — and some of them, yes, are atheistic or agnostic. They just aren’t atheistic in the particular style of the new-atheist crowd, with its peculiar mix of overconfident reductionism and crowing self-righteousness about morality and politics. ..."
But none of the major religions are comfortable with pantheism or panentheism for the obvious reason that either essentially changes traditional meaning of the proper noun "God" from naming a divine being apart from creation.
Panentheism, a Hindu construct, considers God to be Creation, but Creation also to be God. For western thought that amounts to a philosophical stalemate; it concedes the impossibility of asserting divine existence by proof but suggests that perhaps creation could be that "being."
It at least concedes the validity of science.
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Gemli,
If you would like to question your "utter certainty" in science or scientism you might look at my comment below.
Square one of science's "utter certainty" about life is 'DNA-beget-you'. You might contact one of the many geneticists in the Boston area and ask them how their confirmation efforts on this are going.
My principal difficulty with Douthatism is his gratuitously binary style. A fantasy Either-Or stalks about like a caged devil in his columns. There must be a billion coherent world pictures all in dynamic flux. Some embody Theism and even more are true. Of course, a coherent moral universe is the most insignificant fraction of the nonhuman cosmos.
Christianity isn't a theistic faith but many project the claim.
Interesting comment. Catholicism frames on and/both whereas Protestantism frames on either/or.
But it would seem to be the fraction of most concern to humans.
I find the argument that belief in God provides a coherent world picture while non-belief does not truly bizarre. Even if you believe in God assume for a minute that there is no such entity. Does that change how much you really understand about the world? Does it have to change your behavior (other than no longer praying)? As a scientist I must say that a belief that a God has an impact on nature would be counterproductive, once you invoke that some powerful entity can affect the laws of nature then the predictive power of such laws go out the window. And same goes for morality, if a God is necessary for a coherent human morality does that mean that if we can prove that no such entity exists there is no sound justification for human morality? Having no particular religious belief has no impact on how we conduct scientific research. The reverse is not true, although a good religious scientist won't let her belief interfere with her research.
If there is no God then naturally that changes everything. My behavior, my understanding, my entire orientation toward the universe changes. The fact that the laws of nature remain the same whether or not I believe in God is trivial compared to moral, spiritual, aesthetic difference between a universe with purpose and one without purpose. (Although as Douthat points out purpose and meaning can be found in non theistic schemes.)
"if a God is necessary for a coherent human morality does that mean that if we can prove that no such entity exists there is no sound justification for human morality?"
Yes, by definition. If morality requires God, but there is no God, there is no morality. It's a modus tollens: "If A is true, then B is true. B is not true. Therefore, A is not true."
"I find the argument that belief in God provides a coherent world picture while non-belief does not truly bizarre."
That's not Douthat's argument, fortunately.