RELIGION IS REAL GOD IS NOT

 

Beyond New Atheism and Theism: The Sociology of Science, Secularism, and Religiosity ROUTLEDGE, expected late 2023)

 

The debates between New Atheists and theists provide a jumping off point for Restivo’s wide-ranging sociological criticque of atheism and theism as incommensurable worldview.  Restivo builds this critique into a foundation for constructing a sociologically informed secular worldview opposed to antheism and theism.

 

ENDORSEMENTS

Restivo uses sociology to analyze and transcend both the dogmatism of theology and the naïve science-worship of today’s New Atheists. God is a collective representation, the grounds for the social evolution of ethics as pragmatic rules for humans to get along. The individual is the intersection of social networks (as is science), and what both individuals and sciences do is socially real, path-dependent, and open-ended. We could call this network secularism, and it provides its own trajectory of emotional energy (call it secular faith, if you like) into the optimistic possibilities of the future.

 

Randall Collins, author of Charisma: Micro-sociology of Power and Influence

 

From an eclectic, erudite mind – this latest work from Sal Restivo is intellectually rich, admirably interdisciplinary, and sure to be engaging for anyone interested in a rigorous journey through contemporary atheism, theism, secularism, and religion.

·       Phil Zuckerman, Ph.D. and author of What It Means to be Moral and Society Without God

 

 

 Sal Restivo

 

Table of Contents

 

Prologue: New Atheists and Theists on Stage

 

The prologue introduces the principle persons and issues that make up the core focus of this book.  We meet the Four Horsemen (New Atheists Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett), and the Dutch-American feminist critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, sometimes referred to as the fifth horseman), and some of their key theist opponents (Turek, Lennox, and Craig) along with chapters on prominent theologian Hans Küng, and preeminent Christian analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga. 

 

CHAPTER 1. GENESIS

 

In this chapter, the author introduces and defines the scientific cogito, compares it to the theological cogito, and reviews the history of the very idea of atheism. The scientific cogito defines science as presumptive, corrigible, fallible, and a collective historical process that establishes facts of the matter over time and always colored in skepticism.  Faith and blind faith have no role in this process.  The theological cogito, which seeks a rock certainty on which to ground faith and belief cannot abide the scientific cogito.   Theism is discussed in a more abbreviated form than atheism as prelude to its amplification in the following chapters. 

 

CHAPTER 2. IN THE GRASP OF SECULAR REASON

 

Chapter 2 introduces the author as a non-believer.  Autobiographical remarks might seem out of place in a sociological treatise.  The author argues to the contrary that they are not out of place here.  The reason is that believers and nonbelievers , theists and atheists occupying soap boxes in the public square do not rehearse their own biographies, which in fact are narratives of how they were socialized.  They were not born with their views on religion and god imprinted in their DNA or neurons.  The author, as a sociologist, is obliged to eliminate references to the Holy Spirit or any other revelatory entities or phenomena as the source of those views. Everyone is socialized into the broadly cultural and specifically familial views available in the society s/he was born into. 

 

CHAPTER 3. THE SCIENCE TURN AND SOCIOLOGY

In order to grasp what the author brings to the New Atheist/theist debates it is necessary to achieve some understanding of the very ideas of science and sociology.  Common sense and professional ideas of science and sociology are not always or at all consonant with what we know about these fields based on empirical research; second, without an accurate understanding of science and sociology  we will miss the fatal flaws of the New Atheism and of theism. The New Atheists and theists alike make assumptions about science that are out of touch with what we know empirically about science-in-practice. They also virtually ignore the relevance of sociology to believing and not believing.  This book is a work in sociology as a science.  It may seem to be a matter of common sense and introspective transparency but that is a complex fallacy grounded in the folk sociology of everyday life. 

 

CHAPTER 4. THE NEW ATHEIST WORLD VIEW

This chapter focuses on the thoughts and arguments of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and the “5th horseman,” Ayaan Ali Hirsa. At least for the original Four Horsemen, science is worth defending because modifications of technologies are the salvation of our planet, technologies that may someday enable us to divert dangerous asteroids and comets.  They are really defending the “technological fix,” the idea that technology holds the secret to solving all of our problems, technical or social.  While this takes science in the direction of scientism, it doesn’t alter the fact that the scientific cogito and the theological cogito are imcommensurable.  Imagine picking up your morning copy of the New York Times, Washington Post, or Atlantic Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, or San Francisco Chronicle and finding the following headlines side by side: 1. W-boson mass hints at physics beyond the standard model; 2. New evidence by Vatican researchers challenges standard model of the Resurrection.  The first is an actual physics related announcement; the second is fake.  Of course, scholars have discovered numerous documents in the deserts of the Middle East, and some of these offer new versions of the Biblical stories.  But one does not expect that theists are actively engaged in collective, generationally linked, intersubjectively tested research on Jesus son of god and the resurrection.  If we understand religion sociologically as the systematization of the moral order of a social group – its norms of good and bad and right and wrong – then atheism is a religion.  Good science, however, is not faith based; it is evidence based. 

 

CHAPTER 5. THE DAWKINS DELUSION

Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology at Oxford University, published The Dawkins DELUSION? In 2007 with his wife Joanna C. McGrath, a lecturer on psychology and spirituality at Ripon College. A. McGrath is one of those psychological and sociological curiosities who traded atheism for Christianity. He now views Dawkins’ atheism as a fundamentalist ideology.  Having himself earned a PhD in molecular biophysics, he shares the same scientific worldview as Dawkins.  How, he wonders, could the two have come to such different conclusions about God?  The McGraths (2007: 13)  describe Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) as “often little more than an aggregation of convenient factoids suitably overstated to achieve maximum impact and loosely arranged to suggest that they constitute an argument.”  In fact, as we’ll see, Dawkins has antagonized atheists and theists alike.  In this case, the McGraths correctly identify some of the flaws in Dawkins’ approach but they offer standard theist rejoinders that are hopelessly divorced from the best forms of reason and evidence.  We can take “faith” as a good example of a key point of contention between Dawkins and the McGraths. 

 

CHAPTER 6. CASE STUDY: THE TANGLED LOGIC OF FRANK TUREK

Let’s consider an exemplary rebuttal to the New Atheists, Frank Turek’s argument that the “atheists need God to make their case.” Turek introduces the acronym CRIMES to ground his claim that atheists must steal from God to make their arguments.  Atheists talk and write about C-ausality, R-eason, I-nformation and I-ntentionality, M-orality, E-vil, and S-cience.  None of these features of reality, according to Turek, would exist without God.  There is no way to understand Turek’s thinking without invoking cultural speciation, and the concept of objectivity communities unless we assume mental illness. These two ideas tie down the concept of worldview differences and explain why he can sound insane to atheists.  In one of his lectures, he has a slide with the following claim: If the past were infinite we would never have arrived.  This demonstrates that Turek doesn’t understand the concept of the limit of a sequence, any more than he understands any of the science he tries to rally to his defense of theism.                                                                                                                                            

 

CHAPTER 7. CASE STUDY: JOHN LENNOX AND THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN MATHEMATICS, LOGIC, AND GOD

Lennox, unlike Turek and many other apologists involved in the debate with the New

Atheists, has impeccable scientific credentials.  His name is attached to an alphabet soup of letters: MA, PhD, DPhil, DSc. and he is a Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. He adopts a common strategy in these debates, turning the atheists criticisms of the theists back toward them, accusing the atheists of the same dogmatic foolishness they attribute to the theists.  One of the classic strategies theists use in defense of their positions is to manufacture logical contradictions out of atheist claims.  Lennox contends that the atheist view is that all faith is blind faith; therefore we should dismiss the New Atheists on that ground.  Atheism is rooted in the same kind of blind faith they accuse theists of.  Lennox actually has a case to the extent that the atheists adhere to scientism as opposed to science. However, in every case where the theist tries to draw or force an analogy between science and religion, s/he is stymied by the deep immersion of science in organized skepticism.  Theists cannot be skeptics and seek absolute certainty at the same time.  And however brilliant the efforts of theologians to bring reason into theology, God at least always escapes the skeptical sword.  The Christian worldview, which is the focus of the atheism/theism debate, rejects skepticism

 

CHAPTER 8. WILLIAM CRAIG: NOT EVEN THE ILLUSION OF REASON

By virtue of what are at the end of day superficial signs of scholarly achievement, Craig is among the most accomplished philosopher in the realm of Christian apologetics.  On the one hand, the grounded scientist, humanist, or skeptic should be embarrassed to pay any attention whatsoever to apologetics, Christian or otherwise.  On the other hand, there is a clear and present danger in the seductive potential of such apologetics to persuade the un- and under-educated that they are in the presence of reasoned arguments.  It sometimes feels as if one can’t turn away from these apologeticists for the same reason people are drawn to burning buildings and car crashes.  Like most apologists, Craig relies on a sociologically and historically naïve understanding of logic and mathematics as phenomena that escape society, culture, history, time, and space.  This allows him to claim that their alleged immateriality demonstrates the reasonableness of an immaterial, timeless, spaceless God. 

 

CHAPTER 9. HANS KÜNG: A CASE STUDY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE OF THEIST LOGIC

Why do smart, educated people believe in God in the wake of the evidence against the existence of God? Take theologian Hans Küng, for example.  His terrifyingly brilliant command of this knowledge across the disciplines is on full display in his almost 1000 page opus, Does God Exist? (1978). This book offers up a narrative proof for the existence of God. A deconstruction of his approach to answering this question should throw light on effort to understand why people as brilliant as Küng believe in God.  Why does someone who seems to know “everything” and has a powerfully critical imagination and travels across time, space, history, and culture from Plato to our present era still believe in God?  He can only reach this conclusion if he fails to pick up certain sociological signals.  Consider the epigraph at the beginning of the book: “Where is there a rock like, unshakeable certainty on which all human certainty could be built?”  Is there such a rock, and if not what then?  And what is the motivation for seeking such a rock?  Does this goal already determine the final answer to the question, Does God Exist?  Küng’s need for “unshakeable certainty”  has to be more than a rational failure to grasp the sociological cogito.  There must be an emotional logic underlying this need. Psychologists have identified different personality types that go with different degrees of the need for certainty. Consider the contrast between  Küng and Nietzsche who can make himself a guinea pig in the science of human behavior and eschew conviction, or a Feynman who is not de-stabilized by not knowing things.  These are not merely different personalities but different species. 

 

CHAPTER 10. CASE STUDY: ALVIN PLANTINGA – THE UNBEARABLE ABSURDITY

OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

Alvin Plantinga argues that a person can assert that they know God exists, without argument, as a basic belief;  belief in God is rational and basic without evidence of existence.  Who is Alvin Plantinga?Alvin Plantinga (1932-) is by any measure a distinguished fixture in the pantheon of twentieth century analytic philosophers and Christian philosophers.  The author condemn all of the honors attached to Plantinga’s achievements, the very “discipline” of philosophy, and merely Christian philosophy, for giving succor to a man who has claimed that ‘the doctrine of original sin...has been verified in the wars, cruelty and general hatefulness that have characterized human history from its very inception to the present.”  What does it say about philosophy and academic scholarship that it has stamped Plantinga’s works with their imprimaturs?  This is not a sign of academic freedom, this is not an exemplar of freedom of expression; it is a signal that in philosophy “anything goes” in the most naïve version of relativistic tolerance one can imagine. 

 

CHAPTER 11. RELIGION AND GOD IN SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

This chapter sketches a a paradigm for the sociology of religion and the gods.   Religious beliefs and institutions were an important concern of the nineteenth-century social thinkers who fashioned the sociological perspective.Among the leading contributors to the sociology of religion in that century were William Robertson Smith, Ludwig Feuerbach, Louis Wallis, Karl Kautsky, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, and most importantly Emile Durkheim.  These thinkers set the foundation for revealing the sociological reality that God only “exists” as a human created symbol of society. 

 

CHAPTER 12. GODLESS AND GOOD

This chapter is divided into two parts: Part I – Societies Without God, and Part 2 – Philosophers Without God – According to the theists, a society without God could not be moral or at least couldn’t offer a justification for its moral code.  Sociologist of religion Phil Zuckerman has countered this argument by claiming not only that societies without God are possible but are a reality.  He offers as examples of societies without God Denmark and Sweden, “probably the least religious countries in the world and possibly in the history of the world."  Both societies are “remarkably strong, safe, healthy, moral.”  These countries are not utopias, but the ways in which they are remarkably different from the United States in terms of the qualities Zuckerman identifies are transparent to even the casual visitor.      Philosophers Without God –  Atheist and secular philosophers argue that (a) religion is at war with rationality, (b) religion veils us from a reality that poses formidable challenges (such as death without the promise of an afterlife), (c) there are secular equivalents to theistic faith such as Utilitarianism and Existentialism, (d) we should, as professors for example, treat the religious beliefs of our students the way we treat belief in ghosts, (e) the Bible, by giving us a God who must be obeyed unconditionally (e.g. Deuteronomy 7: 1-2 NRSB) forces us to choose between Christianity and morality, (f) we should opt for a community of equals not one united under a supreme power, (g) there are non-religious guidelines we can follow for a well-lived life that “gives a central place to intimacy, love, and friendship....One could add a god to this picture, “ but nothing would be gained by doing so.

 

CHAPTER 13. THE KNOWING SOCIETY: A SECULAR MORAL ORDER

Time and time again the debates between the New Atheists and theists raised the same issues over and over, and like Groundhog Day, the movie, repeated themselves debate after debate.  Unlike the movie, these debates went on and on without achieving a moral or intellectual resolution.  There was no progress.  The debate methodology turned out to be a way for the debaters to present their views and talk past each other; there was no possibility of reaching a common ground.  The debate methodology unfolded in a competitive arena of rhetorical skills and degrees of charisma rather than an educational arena that made it possible for people to change their minds, to learn and internalize something one didn’t know before, to ascertain the facts of the matter as known, corrigibly, fallibly, and tentatively by scientific consensus.  The debaters represent two incommensurable cultures mimicking communication by speaking in the “same” language.  These debates reflect incommensurable objectivity or truth communities.  More generally, they manifest incommensurable worldviews and a fortiori cultural species.  The author considers New Atheism and theism as incommensurable worldview systems that can only be opposed by an alternative worldview system. The author proposes a secular worldview alternative.   The test of a systems truth value or survival value will not be rhetoric, or charisma, or reason or logic but evolutionary pressures, natural selection.