Beyond New Atheism and Theism (Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Religion) [1 ed.] 103250093X, 9781032500935

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Beyond New Atheism and Theism

This book addresses the flaws and fallacies in the grounds for atheism and theism – flaws and fallacies that contaminate the arguments of non-believers and believers alike. Focusing on the highly visible debates between the New Atheists – such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris on the one hand – and their main theist opponents – including Frank Turek, John Lennox, and William Lane Craig on the other – it approaches these debates from the perspective of the sociology of religion and science. With entire worldviews at stake, it explores various failings in the logic, language, and knowledge of the protagonists, revealing mistaken and oversimplified understandings of both science itself and the sociocultural and symbolic roles of religion on both sides. Advancing a secular and humanist worldview unburdened by the problems that beset both atheism and theism, the author argues for a sociological perspective on religion, God, and science as a practice, together with a critical realist approach to the nature of the real world as we experience it. Beyond New Atheism and Theism will therefore appeal to scholars and students of sociology and cultural studies with interests in the conflicting worldviews of science and religion. Sal Restivo is a retired sociologist/anthropologist who has held professorships and endowed chairs at universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and China. He is a founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and he specializes in the sociology of science and religion. He is the editor-in-chief of Oxford’s Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia (2005). His most recent books are Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture and Social Networks (2020), Society and the Death of God (2021), Inventions in Sociology: Studies in Science and Society (2022), and The Social Brain: Sociological Foundations (2023).

Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Religion

A platform for the latest scholarly research in the sociology of religion, this series welcomes both theoretical and empirical studies that pay close attention to religion in social context. It publishes work that explores the ways in which religions adapt or react to social change and how spirituality lends meaning to people’s lives and shapes individual, collective and national identities. Polish Catholicism between Tradition and Migration Agency, Reflexivity and Transcendence Wojciech Sadlon Society and the Death of God Sal Restivo The Transformation of Religious Orders in Central and Eastern Europe Sociological Insights Stefania Palmisano, Isabelle Jonveaux, Marcin Jewdokimow Bisexuality, Religion and Spirituality Critical Perspectives Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip, Alex Toft Contemporary Monastic Economy A Sociological Perspective Across Continents Isabelle Jonveaux In Defence of Married Priesthood A Sociological Investigation of Catholic Clerical Celibacy Vivencio Ballano Beyond New Atheism and Theism A Sociology of Science, Secularism, and Religiosity Sal Restivo

Beyond New Atheism and Theism

A Sociology of Science, Secularism, and Religiosity Sal Restivo

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Sal Restivo The right of Sal Restivo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-50093-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-50094-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-39685-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Dedicated to my tribe, the Anarchists: Neither Gods Nor Masters & In memory of my father, Phil Restivo, factory worker: a moral man with principles, who didn’t believe in anything. He knew things.

Contents

List of Boxes Acknowledgments

ix x

Prologue

xi

  1 Genesis

1

  2 In the Grasp of Secular Reason

8

  3 The Science Turn and Sociology

16

  4 The New Atheist Worldview

26

  5 The Dawkins Delusion

40

  6 Case Study: The Tangled Logic of Frank Turek

48

  7 Case Study: John Lennox and the Unholy Alliance Between Mathematics, Logic, and God

61

  8 Case Study: William Lane Craig – Not Even the Illusion of Reason

83

  9 Hans Küng: A Case Study in the Vicious Circles of Theist Logic

87

10 Case Study: Alvin Plantinga – The Unbearable Absurdity of Christian Philosophy

99

11 Religion and God in Sociological Perspective

104

viii  Contents

12 Godless but Good

126

13 The Knowing Society: A Secular Moral Order

134

Index165

Boxes

1. 2. 3. 4.

Common Sense Meets Sociology Religion and the Sociological Cogito The Ideal Type How the Structure of the Philosophical Community Explains Plantinga’s Prominence 5. A Durkheimian Interlude 6. Anarchism and God With an Epicurean Postscript

19 64 73 102 111 136

Acknowledgments

For one last time, I thank my teachers, my mentors, and my educators; my parents for a lifetime of unconditional love; my sons, Dave and Dan; the students and faculty of Brooklyn Technical High School and the City College of New York; Marie DeLio, my home room teacher at P.S. 162 for helping to wake me up long after Emily J. got things started; Mrs. Brodsky, the girl’s gym teacher at P.S. 162, for burning her dark sexual charisma into my brain; James Quinn, PE, my electrical engineering mentor at Brooklyn Tech, for brushing the hair away from my eyes so I could see the circuit diagrams; Aaron Noland, for introducing me to history, social science, the French curl, and Brooks Brothers; Leo Hamalian, who tried to help me master the principle of the opening paragraph; Bernard Rosenberg for teaching me to stop worrying and love sociological theory; Burt Aginsky for clearing my path to graduate school; John Useem for clearing my path to the PhD; my amazing friends Leslie Brothers for teaching me about the brain; David Bohm for entertaining my thoughts on quantum mechanics; Joe Needham for engaging with me on the Big Problem of science in China and the West; Don Campbell for indulging and even encouraging my epistemological wildness; Jean Paul Van Bendegem, a philosopher whose roads have stop signs; Rik Pinxten, whose ideas helped me write this book; Randall Collins for thinking with me; Karin Knorr Cetina, a shining star brightening my social networks; Steve Woolgar, for tolerating my fine but enigmatic wanderings in STS and the world of brains; my friends and colleagues in the Science for the People and Radical Science Movement (esp. Rita Arditti, Hilary Rose, Les Levidow, and Jerry Ravetz); and for Natalie, who showed me how powerful the mind and will of an eight-year-old could be; and finally for Susan Kagan and Marilynn Sue Jones . . . and Ya Wen, the last and best blessing of my life.

Prologue New Atheists and Theists on Stage

“Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don’t believe in the gods. What’s your argument? Where’s your proof?” Are we listening to the voice of one of the “New Atheists”? Is it Hitchens, or Dawkins, or Harris, or Dennett (sometimes referred to as the Four Horsemen)? None of the above; no, it’s Aristophanes, the fifth-century BCE playwright, sometimes referred to as “the father of comedy” in his play Knights (Kahn, 1997). Arguments and debates between atheists and theists are as old as civilization itself, but more prominent in Western history than elsewhere. The Eastern religions have not been as consumed with supernatural Creator deities as their Western counterparts. This ancient contest emerged into public view with renewed vigor in the twenty-first century, in part fueled by the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Books by the Four Horsemen and theist critics followed in short order, followed in turn by public debates across the United States and abroad. Why focus on these particular debates at this particular time? They are rooted in the period immediately following the 9/11 tragedy and the Islamophobia it provoked, and they are a Western Christian phenomenon in the tradition of the Mediterranean religions and the Abrahamic God and their secular humanist critics. They remain relevant in a number of respects. First, they crystallize and focus attention on the key arguments for and against atheism and theism. They are like a laboratory that isolates and purifies variables and conditions to get to the heart of a particular question. Second, they are ancient, timeless, and universal debates in spite of their local character. Third, their continuing relevance is reflected in their media visibility (e.g., best-selling books and YouTube coverage) and the way they echo in contemporary politics, especially in the context of red and blue political clashes and the rise of authoritarian movements in global politics (e.g., Whitehead, 2021). The publication of books responding to this debate by believers and nonbelievers continues unabated, as a cursory survey of Amazon’s site will demonstrate. Who Are the Four Horsemen, and Who Are Their Opponents? The New Atheists

Sam Harris (1967–) was completing a doctorate in neuroscience at UCLA when he published his book The End of Faith in 2004. His dissertation is based on using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural basis of belief,

xii  Prologue disbelief, and uncertainty. Richard Dawkins (1941–) is an evolutionary biologist and he published The God Delusion (2006) while he was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Daniel C. Dennett (1942–), Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, published Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon in 2006. Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a BritishAmerican author, journalist, and columnist, and he published God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything in 2007. Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969–), sometimes referred to as the fifth “Horseman,” is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist, feminist, and former politician. She received international attention as a critic of Islam and an advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women. She actively opposed forced marriage, honor killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. She published Infidel in 2008. These are the four figures plus one (Ali) I will focus on to represent the New Atheist position. No one definition captures all of what the term “atheist” means. My concern is only with the atheism(s) advocated by the New Atheists. There are other spokespersons for the atheist or secular position who work in the shadows of the Four Horsemen, notably Michael Shermer, Bill Nye, and Neil Degrasse Tyson. They will not figure in this account. The Theists

The figures I focus on to represent the theist position are among the most visible opponents of the New Atheists. Frank Turek (1961–) is an American apologist, author, public speaker, and radio host. He is best known as the founder and president of the Christian apologetics ministry crossexamined.org. He is the author of Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case (2014). John Carson Lennox (1943–), Emeritus Professor of mathematics at Oxford University, is a Northern Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian apologist. He is the author of Gunning for God: Why The New Atheists Are Missing the Target (2011). And. William Lane Craig (1949–) is an American analytic philosopher, Christian apologist, author, Wesleyan theologian, and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University and Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology. He is the author of Reasonable Faith: Christian Apologetics (2008) and How Do We Know God Exists? (2022). In addition to chapters on Turek, Lennox, and Craig, I’ve also included chapters on the logical underpinnings of the arguments for God in theologian Hans Küng’s Does God Exist?An Answer for Today (1980), and in the prominent Christian philosopher Alvin. Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) and other writings. References Ali, A.H. (2008), Infidel (New York: Atria). Craig, W.L. (2008), Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway). Craig, W.L. (2022), How Do We Know God Exists (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press).

Prologue  xiii Dawkins, R. (2006), The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin). Dennett, D. (2006), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking). Harris, S. (2004), The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton). Hitchens, C. (2007), God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve). Kahn, C. (1997), “Greek Religion and Philosophy in the Sisyphus Fragment,” Phronesis 42, 3: 247–262. Küng, H. (1980), Does God Exist? An Answer for Today (New York: Doubleday; orig. in German, 1978). Lennox, J.C. (2011), Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target (Oxford: A Lion Book). Plantinga, A. (1974), God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper and Row). Turek, F. (2014), Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress). Whitehead, L. (2021), “The Authoritarian Temptation, and Its Radical Left Expressions,” Comparative Political Theory 1, 2: 159–169.

1 Genesis

By virtue of education and predisposition, the New Atheists share an aversion to religion, God, and gods based on a form of naturalistic realism and emotionally on a logic of anger. One of my objectives in this book is to show how someone can share their atheistic and secular views but reach radically different conclusions. I ask the reader to imagine how the innumerable debates the New Atheists have engaged in with leading believers would have unfolded if a sociologist had been invited to the debates. Not just any sociologist. Sociology has its camps, and I represent one of those camps, characterized in general by a critical sociological materialist realism and a radical social constructionist perspective rooted in conflict sociology. There are some overarching features that link the various camps of sociology. One of these features is the sociological imagination. From that standpoint I argue, first, that religion is real and that the New Atheist claims about it are misguided at best and often false and, second, that God is not real. The God of most believers is supernatural and not real; believers are the victims of a mistake in reference. In philosophical terms, “God” refers but it does not refer to a supernatural or transcendental being or entity; “God” refers to a cultural symbol, a human-made symbol. The Scientific Cogito All knowledge claims escape their evidence and must be considered highly presumptive, corrigible, and fallible. There is no justification for investing any scientific claim with positive or absolute belief. This limits deterministic, universal, and invariant claims. It does not eliminate them. The reason is that without certain levels of closure in the systems of our everyday lives life would be impossible. Philosophically, we might be justified in claiming that definitive descriptions and prescriptions about reality writ large, Reality-in-Itself, are impossible. We can never access, know, and explain “Reality-in-Itself.” But we can know things about the reality we have access to, the reality of everyday life and everyday experiences. All the things that make up life, the universe, and everything can be understood as systems. Systems can be more or less open or closed. Open systems exchange information and resources across their boundaries; closed systems do not. There are no completely closed systems in nature. The more a system approximates closure, the more it lends itself to determinism and predictions. The solar system is DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-1

2  Genesis a complexly open system, but it is sufficiently closed to allow us to predictably land humans and robots on the moon and Mars. To the extent that a system is open (in our everyday reality) and in Reality-as-It-Is-outside our everyday experience, philosophers argue that no definitive descriptions or prescriptions are possible. But degrees of closure in our everyday (including scientific) reality make definitive descriptions and prescriptions in practice possible. Open systems are not deterministic, but they are lawful. A Theological Cogito? Could the faithful defend an equivalent Theological Cogito? Could they claim that all faiths, all beliefs, escape their evidence and must be considered highly presumptive, corrigible, and fallible? Could they stand by the claim that there is no justification for investing any faith or belief with positive or absolute conviction? This would limit deterministic, universal, and invariant claims about God, the gods, belief, and faith. It would not eliminate them. But now we have to ask about whether there are degrees of closure in the systems of everyday religion and theology that permit claims that rise to the absolute evidentiary certainty associated with what I will take to be the gold standard matter of fact, the fact that the earth is not flat, the fact that it is an oblate spheroid wobbling in precession. A theological cogito that mirrors the scientific cogito is impossible because the theologian or believer is searching for and assuming the existence of a rock like, unshakeable certainty that can ground human life. Atheism Atheism is derived from the ancient Greek atheos, meaning “without gods; godless; secular; refuting or repudiating the existence of gods, especially officially sanctioned gods.” Athéisme was coined in sixteenth-century France. “Atheism” appears in English by the mid-1500s and gains strength as a tool for argumentative and logical discourse in the turmoil of the Enlightenment and the Reformation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the term being used as an insult implying a lack of moral restraint. To be accused of being an atheist in this period could result in death by torture, strangulation, and burning (e.g., in the cases of Etienne Dolet, G. Cesare Vanini, and de la Barre). Atheist treatises from this period include Knotzen’s writings of 1674 and Lyszczynski’s (1634–1689) De non-existentia Dei. The French Catholic priest Jean Meslier (1664–1729) is credited with writing the first book dedicated to defending atheism. This can be considered the beginning of atheism in the West in the modern sense. Baron d’Holbach’s (1723–1789) The System of Nature is probably the first unequivocal defense of atheism since classical antiquity. The book, published under a pseudonym, was banned and burned as were some of Diderot’s (1713–1784) writings. Diderot was, of course, the editorin-chief of the Encyclopédie.1 The French Revolution and the Cult of Reason helped to increase the visibility and advocacy of atheism. Prominent figures in the history of religious criticism are associated with atheism to different degrees,

Genesis 3 from Hume to Marx and Nietzsche. Ernestine Rose, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda J. Gage were prominent advocates of non-belief among the feminists of the 1800s. They opposed religion as sexist and oppressive to women. Atheists reject belief in the existence of the gods, God, or supernatural entities of any kind. Atheist claims vary in terms of their evidentiary foundations. The agnostic position is that there are no evidentiary grounds strong enough to support belief or non-belief. The evidentiary foundations of most atheist claims are logical or more generally reasoned in terms of the science of biology. Their reliance on biology to explain beliefs and morals is based on taking for granted that biology has to be the default science of human behavior. This obstructs their view of sociology or blinds them entirely to its theory and research on God, the gods, and religion. In this book, I argue for the sociological path to understanding and explaining these phenomena. Atheism has its strongest roots in the West. Its prominence is enhanced by the opposition of Western theism. Eastern religious, spiritual, and contemplative traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism emerged beginning in the sixth century BCE without Western-like deities at their cores. The concept of a creator deity is not unknown in the East but it is nowhere more developed and central than in the West’s theological and religious traditions, especially in the Mediterranean religions. There was no creator god within the orthodox schools of Hinduism, the Samkhya and Mimamsa. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the notion of gods in the Western sense and basic Buddhist principles. Buddhist scriptures affirm supernatural beings (Devas) but these beings do not have the powers for creating, saving, or judging, nor do they possess higher wisdom than humans or escape suffering the cycles of birth, existence, and rebirth (samsara). There is some value, however, in praying to certain deities considered to be enlightened. Buddha was not a god but is sometimes portrayed as superior to and a teacher of the gods. Belief in a creator god is, generally speaking, a distraction from the core values of Buddhism.2 Buddhism demonstrates the kinds of differences that show up when we compare Western religions with non-Western religions. There are also similarities, since all religions form the glue that holds societies together. The Buddha taught wisdom, kindness, patience, generosity, and compassion. The equivalent to the “Thou shalts” and “shalt nots” in Christianity are: “Thou shalt” not kill living things, take what is not given, behave badly sexually, lie, or use drugs or alcohol. There is a primary focus on the truth of suffering and how to overcome it. This is achieved by following the eightfold path: right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Some Buddhist philosophers assert that belief in an eternal creator god is a distraction from the central task of the religious life. Sikhs worship Waheguru, “The Creator”; Bahá'í faith is centered on an inaccessible, transcendent personal God; the near east Mandaeists, believed to have originated in Mesopotamia 2,000 years ago, believe in Hayyi Rabbi, “The Great Living God” who created all things. The emergence of atheism appears to be part of the emergence of the Axial Age, a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) to encompass the

4  Genesis broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the eighth to the third century BCE (Jaspers, 1949/2011: 2). Already in the Rig Veda (1500–1000 BCE), one can read the question, “Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?” The Charvaka or Lokavata (“Worldly Ones”) rejected core features of Hinduism such as karma and the Vedas, along with the ideas of an immortal soul and an afterlife. Such ideas can be found in the oldest Sanskrit epic, Ramayana. Here, Javali, the sage, tells Rama that the worship of the gods is a way “clever people” rule over others. The phrase “after death there is no awareness” appears in the oldest of the Upanishads (ca. 700 BCE). The principles of the Charvaka school were known to the Mughal ruler, Akbar (1542–1605). Atheists had a hearing in his court. Their ideas are chronicled by Abul Fazi (1551–1602) as discussed in Herbjørnsrud (2020); the atheists do not believe in a God or immaterial substances. The faculty of thought in their view results from natural forces and generally follow the views of the Sophists. India’s atheist traditions travelled to Europe in the late 1500s. In less than two hundred years, Charavaka teachings were showing up in the writings of Jesuit missionaries. In the ancient West atheism referred to any subversion of religion. The early Christians were considered atheists because they denied the existence of the Roman gods. Being “godless” could mean a death sentence, a fate that befell the Greek poet Diagoras of Melos. He escaped punishment by fleeing Athens. Anaxagoras (fifth century BCE) was also forced to flee Athens after claiming that the sun was a large fiery mass. The story of Socrates, who faced his accusers and didn’t escape, is well known. The early Hellenic philosophers did not deny the existence of deities but increasingly turned away from mythologies to advocate for naturalistic explanations of worldly events like lightning and earthquakes. This movement culminated in the writings of the fifth-century BCE atomists Leucippus and Democritus. “Doth someone say that there be gods above? There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.” So spoke Bellerophon in Euripides’ (480–406BCE) play of the same name. Such adumbrations of atheism did not challenge the existence of deities but rather claimed that the powers attributed to them were false, a claim found in a manuscript fragment attributed to Euripides and Critias. Primordial deities held to be “eternal and imperishable” were thought to exist by philosophers like Euhemerus (c. 330–260 BCE) but the gods of everyday beliefs were simply deified heroic figures.3 It was common in the ancient world to deify figures like Plato and Alexander the Great. Philosophers like Strato of Lampsacus and the Cyrenaic Theodorus (c. 300 BCE) seem to have been atheists in the modern sense. Some of the strongest arguments against the existence of the traditional gods came from the Sophists (fifth century BCE) and Epicureans (Epicurus, ca. 300 BCE). The Epicurean Lucretius wrote On The Nature of Things (first century BCE) in which he claimed that the gods exist but do not involve themselves in human matters. Fear of persecution could suppress atheist expressions, and this led many non-believers to adopt agnostic positions. Sextus

Genesis 5 Empiricus (second century CE, Alexandria) left behind a large number of works documenting ancient atheistic claims but recommended withholding judgment on the claims for and against the gods. The anonymous author (c. 400 BCE) of On The Sacred Disease (epilepsy) claimed the disease had a natural not a divine cause. We find believers in deities everywhere in the ancient world and what followed, and everywhere we find believers we find non-believers. Non-believers tended to be identified as heretics rather than atheists in the modern sense, and these included freethinkers, rationalists, and various philosophers. There was no shortage of atheist and heretic thinkers in the Islamic world and we find arguments against the gods in Europe as early as the late thirteenth century in Old Norse legends and especially in the Icelandic sagas. Atheism became increasingly prominent as the twentieth century’s philosophical movements unfolded, from existentialism and logical positivism to various rationalist movements, analytical philosophy, and secular humanism. Prominent names in this movement include Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Mencken, A.J. Ayer, J.N. Findlay, J.C. Smart, and John Dewey. The history of “state atheism” under communist and fascist regimes in the twentieth century has fueled contemporary debates between the New Atheists and theists. But theist claims that these states demonstrate the fallacies of atheism are not (and should not) be taken seriously by contemporary atheists. Hitler, for example, publicly stated in October 1928 that his movement was Christian. In 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, declared that Hitler was “the herald of a new revelation.” Shirer (1960: 238–239) is a classic study of Christianity and the Nazis. Albania’s 1976 constitution supported atheism as a way to ingrain in its people a scientific, materialistic worldview. China announced a “civilizing” atheism drive in Tibet in 1999 (Aiello, 2005; Bociurkiw and Strong, 1975; Conway, 1997; Hall, 1999; Shirer, 1960; Steigmann-Gall, 2003). Proofs for the existence of God began to appear in the Middle Ages. These were not necessarily aimed at countering atheists but rather addressed issues and controversies within the Christian church itself. Aquinas developed five proofs and Anselm famously composed the ontological argument. These proofs have become weapons in the modern wars of science versus religion.4 The basic flaw in these proofs is the degree to which they build their conclusions into their premises. I’ll have more to say about these proofs as we proceed. Let There Be Light The twenty-first century has seen a trend that began in the prior century: the increase in the number of people not affiliated with any religion (see Chapter 12). Anne Nicol Gaylor and her daughter Annie Laurie co-founded the Freedom from Religion Foundation in 1976, and more recently we’ve seen the emergence of the “New Atheism” and an increasingly prominent feminist atheism. The first “Women in Secularism” conference was held in 2012. The first atheist monument on American government property was unveiled in 2013 at the Bradford County Courthouse in Florida. The granite bench and plinth is inscribed with quotes by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Madelyn Murray O’Hair (1919–2005), the leading atheist activist of the middle to late years of the twentieth century.

6  Genesis O’Hair’s quote is: “An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty banished, war eliminated.” The other quotes are: “. . . the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion . . .” – Treaty of Tripoli “Question with boldness even the existence of a god because, if there be one, he must approve the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” – Thomas Jefferson 1787 “It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service (writing the Constitution), had interviews with gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.” – John Adams, 1787 “When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself, and when it cannot support itself and God does take care to support, so that its professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the civil power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.” – Benjamin Franklin, 1780 In 2015, the Madison, Wisconsin, common council became the first American city to pass an ordinance protecting atheists. And on December 16, 2016, President Obama signed into law the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act. The law amends the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 by extending protection to non-theists and people who do not claim adherence to any particular religion. Theism The term “theism” comes from the Greek theos or theoi, meaning “god” or “gods.” The term appears for the first time in Cudworth’s (1617–1688) 1678 work on “the system of the universe.” Theism commonly refers to the monotheistic God but in extended use encompasses the gods of the polytheistic traditions. According to Cudworth, theists affirm the eternal existence of a conscious understanding being or mind that is the cause of all things. This conception of theism is the usual target of the New Atheists, and therefore I will not pursue the varieties of theism, including polytheism and autotheism. Deism, however, sometimes comes up in the New Atheist/theist debates. Classically, Deists believe that God exists but does not intervene in the original plan of the universe. This is the God of Providence. Some Deists do in any case believe in divine intervention. Deists rely on naturalistic and reasoned bases for their beliefs. This abbreviated treatment of theism will be expanded in Chapters 6 to 10 on the theist opponents of the New Atheists. Notes 1 On the history of atheism, see Ruse and Bullivant (2021); on atheism in the ancient world, see Whitmarsh (2015); for a formidable philosophical justification of atheism, see Martin (1990). Martin (1990: 456) recognizes the possibility for new atheistic religions or old one (e.g., Jainism) arising “to fill the gap in people’s lives.” This is insightful in a philosopher for whom

Genesis  7 sociology has no planks in the scaffolding that supports his arguments. Ancient atheism came to an end in the West with the arrival of Catholic Christianity – Christianity wedded to imperial power; now “the paradigm of true versus false religion was the only one that mattered” (Whitmarsh, 2015: 241–242). Debates on matters cosmological and philosophical continued to be intense but were now carried out within the framework of Christian monotheism. If doubt and disbelief appear to be missing from the post-Enlightenment historical record, it is not because it didn’t exist but because it was invisible to the dominant classes: “The apparent rise of atheism in the last two centuries, however, is not a historical anomaly; viewed from the longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is the global dominance of monotheistic religions and the resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers.” 2 On Buddhism, see Armstrong (2004), Conze (1951), Penney (2007), Harvey (2013), and Spiro (1982). 3 Fragments of Euhemerus’ work in Ennius’ Latin translation have been preserved in Patristic writings (e.g., by Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea) which all rely on earlier fragments in Diodorus 5, 41–46 & 6.1. Testimonies, especially in the context of polemical criticism, are found, for example, in Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus: 8. 4 On the nature, functions, and limitations of proofs for the existence of God, see Restivo (2021: 99–112, 162–178).

References Aiello, T. (2005), “Constructing ‘Godless Communism’: Religion, Politics, and Popular Culture, 1954–1960,” Americana 4, 1: 1–11. Armstrong, K. (2004), Buddha (New York: Penguin). Bociurkiw, B.R. and J.W. Strong, eds. (1975), Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Conway, J.S. (1997), The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–1945 (Vancouver, BC: Regents College Publishing). Hall, D.R. (1999), “Representations of Place: Albania,” The Geographical Journal 165, 2: 161–172. Harvey, P. (2013), An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Herbjørnsrud, D. (2020), “The untold history of India’s vital atheist philosophy,” Blog of the APA: https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/06/16/the-untold-history-of-indias-vitalatheist-philosophy/ Jaspers, K. (1949/2011), Origin and Goal of History (Abingdon: Routledge Revivals). Martin, M. (1990), Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton University Press). Penney, S. (2007), Buddhism (New York: ‎Heinemann). Restivo, S. (2021), Society and the Death of God (New York: Routledge). Ruse, M. and S. Bullivant, eds. (2021), Cambridge History of Atheism, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Shirer, W.L. (1960), The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London: Secker & Warburg). Spiro, M. (1982), Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and its Vicissitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press). Steigmann-Gall, R. (2003), Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Whitmarsh, T. (2015), Battlilng the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (New York: A. Knopf).

2

In the Grasp of Secular Reason

“There are two obvious positions that you can take about religion,” Randall Collins (1992: 30) has pointed out. “Either you believe it or you don’t: in one case it is a supreme Reality that transcends everything sociology is concerned with; in the other it is an irrational superstition about things that don’t exist.” Believing did not come easy to me, even as a child. Autobiographical remarks might seem out of place in a sociological treatise. I would argue to the contrary that they are not out of place here. The reason is that believers and nonbelievers 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. And as a sociologist I am obliged to eliminate references to the Holy Spirit or any other revelatory entities or phenomena as the source of those views. I, like everyone else, was socialized into the broadly cultural and specifically familial views available in the society I was born into. Practicing God On the question of the existence of God, I have been a skeptic since childhood. My mother was an immigrant from southern Italy and an untutored Roman Catholic. We did not own a Bible; in fact, there were only two books in our home. They belonged to my father and were kept in a drawer. One was on boxing; the other was on Jiu Jitsu. My father, an amateur boxer in his youth and a factory worker most of his adult life, was a nonbeliever: “I don’t believe in anything,” he’d say. He was born in Brooklyn of Sicilian stock and had an eighth-grade education. My experience fits the pattern of mothers’ religious beliefs and practices mattering more than those of fathers (e.g., Acock and Bengtson, 1978; Benson and Elkin, 1990) for religious socialization. Traditionally mothers are the custodians of family and community interests and values. Of course, all of this is simpler in traditional societies. Parental religious socialization becomes increasingly difficult as the modern state unfolds into a multiplicity of cultures and identities (Warner and Williams, 2010). I recall that while I was still a small child (I cannot say what age but I was physically small in my mother’s arms and no longer sleeping in a crib), my mother would prepare me for bed by having me kneel. She would then take my right hand and move it through the sign of the cross, physically moving my hand to my forehead DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-2

In the Grasp of Secular Reason  9 (“Nel nome del padre), my chest (il figliio), and my shoulders (e lo spirito santo): “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” She did this every night for I don’t know how long. I had no idea what was going on, but the programming worked and I eventually was able to do this on my own. As soon as I could walk and get around outdoors, my mother would take me to the local Catholic church, St. Joseph’s on Suydam Street in Brooklyn, and I would watch her light candles. As I grew up, I followed most of the other kids in the neighborhood, going to church on Sunday, dressing up on Easter, going to midnight Mass on Christmas eve when we were older, and so on. We all participated by imitating, kneeling, and standing and kneeling and standing. We repeated prayers without knowing what we were saying or if we were getting words right: “Our Father who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name” I have a vague recollection of belonging to St. Joseph’s Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a “club” established for young school boys by the Papal Bull, Suprema Dispositione. One of the things we did that I never understood was hitting our chests three times during Mass. I don’t remember anyone ever explaining this to me. I was in college before I discovered that this action occurs during the part of a prayer where we acknowledge that we have sinned: “through my fault, through my fault, through my grievous fault.” Beating one’s breast signals our inner realization of our “grievous fault.” The triple repetition is a feature of Hebrew which repeats the adjective to express the superlative; Hebrew does not have a distinct word form for superlatives. This beating of the breast is done while reciting the Confiteor, one of the prayers that one can say during the Penitential Act at the beginning of the Roman Rite in the Catholic Church. It goes like this: I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers [and sisters], that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers [and sisters], to pray for me to the Lord our God. We enter into the Church and belief the same way I was programmed by my mother to pray. We are robotically inducted into religion by way of pronouncements and imitation. We are not inducted by way of reason and explanation. If everyone involved in the debates between believers and nonbelievers would recognize this basic fact of life, it would go a long way toward helping to put us all on the same pathway to knowledge as opposed to belief. In the fifth grade, some of us would leave public school around two o’clock on Wednesdays and walk to St. Joseph’s for religious instruction. This was to prepare

10  In the Grasp of Secular Reason us for our first Communion and Confirmation. None of this made sense to me but I did what was expected. I learned the Ten Commandments by rote and with limited understanding. And since this was like school, I studied, memorized, and passed tests. And I was fearful of God, heaven, hell, and dying never mind the strict nuns who taught us. Around this time (I was ten), my mom, May (Anglicized from Mafalda at Ellis Island), found me curled up in a fetal position on my parent’s bed and whimpering. “What’s wrong?” She asked. I looked up with tears in my eyes: “I don’t want to die.” As I look back on this moment, her way of comforting now appears to me rather surprising. She didn’t tell me not to worry, my soul would go to heaven, and I would live forever at God’s side and with all of my friends and relatives. No. She said that if I led an exemplary life like George Washington, I would never die. She gave me the promise of a symbolic life after death, not that of a real physical or spiritual immortality. What did she really believe in her heart of hearts? Preparing for first communion meant going to confession. That was a surreal experience. Like most of my friends, I would mumble things like “I had five bad thoughts,” “I said some bad words,” and so on. I never mentioned that I was playing doctor with little Natalie, masturbating, or peeking under the skirts of my mother’s friends. During Confirmation, there came a point with all of the young boys sitting in an auditorium with their godfathers when the bishop, who had earlier anointed us by smearing chrism (olive oil and balsam) on our foreheads and slapping us across our cheeks, said, “You are all now members of the army of Jesus.” There was a film playing on the screen behind the bishop of marching children. I burst into tears, buried my head in my godfather Cesar’s shoulder, and said, “I don’t want to be in the army.” Through all of these experiences I was acutely aware of the fact that none of the men in my family – including my godfather and my father Phil – went to church or believed in God or an afterlife. These were not educated men. They were hard-working, underpaid members of the working class. On many Sunday mornings, my father and I would take our 1950 Mercury out to a park and Simonize the car: “You’ll never know how beautiful you can make your car look until you Simonize it” was the company slogan. Simonize products had been the gold standard in automotive care since the early 1900s. One day, after we’d come home and parked the car, I asked my father if he believed in God. I was about ten or eleven. He said, “No, I believe in the Sun, the trees and flowers, the stars.” He didn’t believe in an afterlife either. I can’t say I was never afraid of dying, but my father’s views helped me to understand and embrace death realistically. When I was about 14 years old, I woke up one morning, opened my eyes, and discovered that I was unable to move. Suddenly, my small bedroom filled with a booming voice: “Yes, there is a God. Yes, there is a life after death.” And suddenly I could move. I lay there for a long time, pondering the experience. Already a science nerd, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I had just experienced an aural hallucination. Nonetheless, I was unnerved and thought to myself: “You’re only fourteen years old and there’s an unfathomable cosmos out there. Maybe there is a God.” So that very night I went back to saying my prayers before bed, something I’d given up years earlier. I did this every night for several weeks with dampening energy until the activity faded away. At 82, my certainty about gods, God, and

In the Grasp of Secular Reason 11 religion is occasionally interrupted by the thought that I’m only 82 and there is still an unfathomable cosmos out there. The fact that there is anything at all and then so much of it virtually compels me to ask: Why couldn’t this infinity of unfathomables harbor a God? Why is a supernatural all-powerful being that is immune to all efforts to rationally, logically, and empirically establish its existence impossible or improbable in these circumstances? Could I imagine somewhere in the Cosmos that could serve as a home for God? And then I remember sociology. I read Edward Abbott’s Flatland (1884) in college. The book illustrates the fact that three-dimensional beings limited to three-dimensional space might be blind to or misinterpret activity in higher-ordered dimensions. Could higher-ordered dimensions, suggested for example by superstring theory in cosmology, account for certain religious experiences or miracles? This idea was proposed for my consideration by a sociologist of religion. The higher dimensions, however, are mathematical constructs. There is no evidence that they reflect anything physicists recognize as part of the real cosmos. In fact, mathematically, you could describe anything from a sphere to the universe in any number of dimensions you choose. This involves adding new coordinate axes, or what mathematicians call “degrees of freedom.” There is nothing mysterious or mystical about the concept of dimension as a mathematical construct that might become handy for physicists in the future. It refers to the number of independent variables and not to realms of reality beyond those of our earth-bound experience, in everyday life and in science. There is nowhere in this essentially mathematical world of “independent variables” for anything – natural or supernatural – to exist. The effort to find a place for God in the new physics or new mathematics is simply the latest example of claiming that God might live in a place we humans do not have access to. In the past, God lived on high mountains, in the clouds, or in the inner holy places of temples everyday folk could not enter. We’ve now explored all these places and have not found God. So now n-dimensional space, misinterpreted and misconstrued, gives us a new possible home for God. Sociologists have already vanquished this way of saving the phenomenon of God by rejecting transcendental realities. All of this begs the question of how we three-dimensional creatures could come to know a God of higher dimensions. Occam’s razor recommends the sociological explanation. Yes, then I remember sociology. I came relatively easily to the idea that there is no God. This was in part due to my early fascination with science, my father’s irreligion, and my broad reading interests. I was teaching about the sociology of religion one day in the mid-1980s. One of the students asked my teaching assistant why she didn’t believe in God. “I read books,” she replied. One of my friends in adulthood said that my problem with God was that I could not abide the thought of someone who had more power than I did and in particular power over me. Even as an obedient child, I lived an inner life of disobedience. I didn’t like being told what to do. I’m not going to try to unravel the roots of my resistance to Authority, but it certainly made me resistant to what Christopher Hitchens came to call God’s celestial dictatorship. Like many college students who found no comfort or solace in religion, I experimented with atheism and agnosticism. This book is about the grounds for going

12  In the Grasp of Secular Reason beyond believing or not believing and reaching the point where one can say: I know. This can be an arrogant and uncritical position for a young college student. In the wake of many years of being a practicing social scientist and studying scientific practice, my defense of knowing versus believing is much more sophisticated today than it was when I was a college student and through the early years of my professional career. I taught topics in the sociology of religion for many years, but it is only recently that I have turned to writing about religion, God, and the gods. There are two more pieces of the secular reason I was called to: Brooklyn Technical High School (Tech) and The City College of New York (CCNY). I spent four years at Tech immersed in the ideas and practices of science and engineering. The nature of this education is captured in the fact that I could be studying Maxwell’s equations in one course, and in the next course work in a fully equipped foundry for an hour. I majored in electrical engineering at Tech under the mentorship of James Quinn. Quinn had been the professional engineer overseeing the construction of the Queens NY subway lines. In addition to several engineering curricula, a student could choose a college prep curriculum. But the engineering students met all the basic requirements, including New York State Regents requirements, for admission to the best colleges in the country. I entered CCNY in 1958 as an electrical engineering major. But I was slowly drawn into the social sciences and humanities as the left-wing school (known as “Red University”) with the highest of intellectual pedigrees (it was referred to as the “Jewish” or “proletarian Harvard”) drew me into the world of political awareness and activism. After four years in engineering, I transferred to sociology/anthropology. I learned about Marxism and anarchism from Aaron Noland (“I am a Proudhon man”), sociological theory from Dissent contributor Bernard Rosenberg, and professional anthropology from Burt Aginsky, who had studied under Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Ruth Benedict. I left CCNY called to sociology/anthropology and Marxism/anarchism. From Autobiography to Sociology Sociology is not based on anecdotes. The story I have just told you is not the pathway to a sociological generalization but the endpoint of one. That generalization is that parents are the single most powerful causal influence on the faith and beliefs of their children The faith and beliefs of parents while they were raising their children are the best general predictor of what any person is like religiously (Smith et al., 2020: 5–6).1 The research literature of immediate relevance here is based on studies of transmitting faith and values in contemporary America. But no culture or religion escapes this generalization. It is not just a matter of making sense sociologically of a phenomenon but the alternatives would have to be rooted in immaterial concepts like the soul or radically unscientific causal influences like revelation. Stories like mine would show up in ethnographies of parenting practices in the intergenerational transmission of faith and belief, but social science research in this area has been limited (Smith et al., 2020: 7). Indeed, the social science of religion

In the Grasp of Secular Reason 13 and spirituality has been marginalized throughout most of the twentieth century (Roehlkepartain et al., 2006: 2) In their research, Smith, Ritz, and Rotolo interviewed parents about the ways in which they transmitted their faith and belief traditions. I am going to take the anthropological liberty of generalizing their findings regarding Americans on the assumption that what they claim about how American parents transmit their religion is transparently universal. For example, their research shows that the religious lives of American parents are the single most powerful predictor of the religious lives of their children (Smith et al., 2020: 6). All children everywhere and in all times must of necessity learn faith and belief and all societies begin this process at birth. They transmit their religion by way of practices, not by trying to explain God, the afterlife, and so on. And they take advantage of the fact that children learn by imitating and the fact that as one parent said, they are “sponges . . . . You set an example and they just kind of do it” (Smith et al., 2020: 183–188); or in the words of a Mormon mother, “We have family scripture every day, family prayer morning and night, and with each meal.” Parents rely on being role models for faith and belief, leading by example, playing off the fact that kids pay attention to what you do, relying on the “subliminal effect over time” of seeing religious paraphernalia around the house, in the words of a Catholic mother. One mother referred to the fact that her children were “innocent,” “clay to be molded.” Exposing children to faith and belief through prayer is primary according to the parents in this research. Practice is primary; explaining is secondary and generally left to clergy and others outside the home. Contrary to the classic Piagetan view of children as irrational and prelogical, contemporary research suggests that they are “adept at handling different systems of thinking about reality” (Scarlett, 2006: 29). They are good at double-booking intuitive and counterintuitive ontologies depending on the circumstances. And they can travel easily between counterintuitive religious belief systems and their intuitive ontologies about everyday events (Harris, 2000; 2003). The upshot of this is that childhood programming fuels us with the cultural capital we draw on to explain what is going on in and around us as our lives unfold. When we encounter experiences we cannot explain in terms of our intuitive ontologies, we can turn to our counterintuitive ontologies, especially in matters of emotional and cognitive novelty. We may not have the psychological and sociological tools to interpret novel emotional and cognitive experiences but we have spiritual resources like “God” and “Allah” and the “Holy Spirit.” You have your parents to thank for that and your college and professional scientific educators for providing you with the cultural capital to override their programming. Sherkat (1991) shows that the relationship between parents and children regarding faith and belief is reciprocal; however, sociologically the relationship is asymmetrical. This will vary depending on the opportunities the child has outside the home to learn about faith and belief from peers, teachers, clergy, and other parents, never mind libraries and the Internet. The asymmetry is considerable in the earliest years of the child’s socialization regardless of possible external influences.

14  In the Grasp of Secular Reason As a defender of knowledge as opposed to belief or nonbelief, and more strongly as someone who cannot put any stock in faith, I am not persuaded by the grounds for atheism. The major provocation for this book is the public noise and media presence of the New Atheists. The problem with atheism in general and the New Atheists in particular is that they share a naturalistic framework with their theist opponents. This leads to arguments against the idea of God that cannot deliver a knockout punch. I will show why in the following chapters. Ultimately, my objective is to show that we can in fact deliver a knockout punch that eliminates both atheism and theism. I cannot actually enter the debate environment with theists and atheists because I assume we occupy incommensurate objectivity or truth communities. However, one way to reveal the foundations of these incommensurabilities is to treat them as commensurable as an exercise. I want to show what happens if I treat the two groups as worthy opponents in a debate. I will take as my foil the atheism/theism debate centered on the “New Atheists” versus representative theists. The theists I have chosen have been engaged in ongoing public debates with the New Atheists. All things being equal, let there be no doubt that in the debate between atheists and theists, I stand with the atheists. With respect to the Four Horsemen, I align myself closer to Hitchens than to the others. Why this is so will become clear as we proceed. My strategy is to lay out the views of my opponents and to introduce my criticisms. In a technical sense this will be an exercise in futility. Criticism across incommensurable gaps is impossible. There are two reasons to attempt this. First, we are all humans and there are some bridges across those gaps. Second, the attempt will help to isolate the areas of incommensurability and their implications for knowing things about science, religion, and God. I will offer an alternative worldview to atheism and theism using the following core elements: the concepts of culture as a speciating mechanism; the idea of incommensurable worldviews; and the theoretical claims that religion is ubiquitous (atheism is a religion; I will explain this more fully in Chapter 11), that humans are radically social, and that compassion, the translation powers of language, and the powerfully compelling nature of logic are centrifugal forces. They reinforce the boundaries that define groups and allow us to distinguish them one from the others. The result is that compassion, language, and logic are limited in their capacities to support communications between groups. My fundamental claim is that sociology (understood to be one with and often enough indistinguishable from anthropology) cleans up some of the confusion in the atheist-theist debates and closes some of the gaps that come with an uncritical naturalistic worldview. Note 1 For a bibliography on the socialization of faith and belief, see Smith et al. (2020: 6–13). On the priority of parents in religious socialization, see Smith and Denton, 2005; Spika et al., 1985; Pearce and Denton (2011); and Cnaan et al. (2004). Smith and Adamxzyk (2021) is the final publication to come out of the massive National Study of Youth and Religion, housed at the University of Notre Dame, led by co-principal investigators sociologists Christian Smith, Lisa Pearce, Stephen Vaisey, and Melinda L. Denton. “The

In the Grasp of Secular Reason 15 purpose of the NSYR is to research the shape and influence of religion and spirituality in the lives of American youth; to identify effective practices in the religious, moral, and social formation of the lives of youth; to describe the extent and perceived effectiveness of the programs and opportunities that religious communities are offering to their youth; and to foster an informed national discussion about the influence of religion in youth’s lives, in order to encourage sustained reflection about and rethinking of our cultural and institutional practices with regard to youth and religion” (according to their website, https://youthandreligion.nd.edu/research-team/).

References Abbott, E. (1884/1952), Flatland (New York: Dover). Acock, A.C. and V.L. Bengtson (1978), “On the Relative Influence of Mothers and Fathers: A Co-Variance Analysis of Political and Religious Socialization,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 40, 3: 519–530. Benson, P.L. and C.H. Elkin (1990), Effective Christian Education: A National Study of Protestant Congregations – Summary Report of Faith, Loyalty, and Congregational Life (Minneapolis: Search Institute). Cnaan, R.A., R.J. Gelles, and J.W. Sinha (2004), “Youth and Religion: The Gameboy Generation Goes to ‘Church’,” Social Indicators Research 68, 2: 175–200. Collins, R. (1992), Sociological Insights, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press). Harris, P.L. (2000), “On Not Falling Down to Earth: Children’s Metaphysical Questions,” pp. 157–178 in E.C. Roehlkergpartain, P.E. King, L. Wagener and P.L. Benson, eds., The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications). Harris, P.L. (2003), “Les Dieux, Les Ancêtres, et Les Enfants,” Terrain 40: 81–98. Pearce, L.D. and M.L. Denton (2011), A Faith of their own: Stability and change in the religiosity of America’s adolescents (New York: Oxford University Press). Roehlkepartain, E.C., P.E. King, L. Wagener and P.L. Benson, eds. (2006), The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications). Scarlett, W.G. (2006), “Toward a Developmental Analysis of Religious and Spiritual Development,” pp. 21–33 in E.C. Roehlkepartain, P.E. King, L. Wagener and P.L. Benson, eds., The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications). Sherkat, D.E. (1991), “Leaving The Faith: Testing Theories of Religious Switching Using Survival Models,” Social Science Research 20, 17: 1–87. Smith, C. and M.L. Denton (2005), Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press). Smith, C. and A. Adamxzyk (2021), Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation (New York: Oxford University Press). Smith, C., B. Ritz and M. Rotolo (2020), Religious Parenting: Transmitting Faith and Values in Contemporary America (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Spilka, B., R. Hood, and R. Gorsuch (1985), The Psychology of Religion (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall). Warner, S.R. and R.H. Williams (2010), “The Role of Families and Religious Institutions in Transmitting Religion Among Christians, Muslims, and Hindus in the USA,” pp. 159–165 in S. Collins-Mayo and P. Dandelion, eds., Religion and Youth (Aldershot: Ashgate).

3

The Science Turn and Sociology

It is impossible to grasp what I bring to the New Atheist/theist debates without some understanding of the very ideas of science and sociology. This chapter is a concise introduction to those ideas. It’s critical that we explore these ideas for two reasons: first, 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. Science as an Eminently Social Fact The New Atheists and theists alike make assumptions about science that are out of touch with what we know empirically about science-in-practice. One reason is that empirical studies of scientific practice were initiated only 50 years ago. Science studies researchers are still struggling to counter centuries of unexamined ideas about what science is in practice. The traditional view of science was that it was pure, autonomous, self-correcting, based on a defining methodology, and that it gave us unmediated access to the world as it really is. This view came to us from scientists, philosophers, and journalists immersed in the physical sciences. As a result, physics traditionally served as the model for what a science should be and some physicists concluded (as some still do today) that physics could explain everything at all levels of reality: physical, chemical, biological, and social. This gave strength to reductionism (primarily physics-based), and scientism, excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and methods. These ideas have always had their critics but it wasn’t until the development of the anthropology of science in the 1970s that we could offer empirically based objections to the traditional myths of science. The new history, anthropology, and sociology of science, more firmly grounded in empirical studies than previous philosophical speculations and bio-, auto-biographical, and journalistic worshipful approaches, demonstrated that science is socially constructed. That is, it is the work of men and women working together in social, cultural, organizational, and ecological networks and contexts that unfold in history and across cultures. Their achievements are contingently objective. Thus, this book is not scientific by itself; I am not a scientist by myself. It is science and I am a scientist only in the context DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-3

The Science Turn and Sociology  17 of its and my place in the unfolding of the linked generations of scientists collectively and intersubjectively testing ideas, theories, and experimental results. At the end of the day, I am an experiment, my book is an experiment, and my claims are an experiment. However certain I am of their truth, this is ultimately a collective decision of the evolving scientific community. We can and do know things but we do not know facts of the matter with absolute certainty. All facts of the matter escape their evidence and must be considered highly presumptive, corrigible, and fallible. We can and should be confident about what we know, but we should not allow what we know to be contaminated by absolute conviction. Science, like everything in the universe, is in flux, in becoming. Life, the universe, and everything can be analyzed as systems. Systems, as we saw earlier, can be more or less open or closed. We have to construct approximately closed systems in laboratories to identify patterns and regularities that we can then test in the outside world. The complex open systems in nature yield to our inquiries only to the extent that they are closed. The solar system is such a system, complexly open but closed enough to allow us to figure out how to land humans and robots on the moon and Mars.1 Everyday life has levels of closure, without which life would be impossible to navigate or to study scientifically. It would be impossible to do this if our lives were constantly uprooting our expectations. Imagine a world in which sinkholes randomly and regularly developed as we crossed our streets, or that our streets were hit by earthquakes every few hours. These are rare-enough occurrences, as are other environmental disturbances, and so we can generally act and react predictably in and to life’s circumstances and challenges. From a classical philosophical and some social theory perspectives, no definitive descriptions and prescriptions of reality are possible. We certainly don’t have access to such descriptions and prescriptions in terms of “Reality-in-Itself.” However, the levels of closure in our everyday realities mean that definitive descriptions and prescriptions-in-practice are possible. Sociology as an Eminently Social Fact This book is also a work in sociology. I understand and practice sociology as a science. Many sociologists, other scientists, and journalists still question the scientific status of sociology. But it is recognized as a science by the U.S. National Science Foundation and other national public and private funding agencies in the United States and abroad. Sociology is not easy to understand. 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. Social life requires a folk sociology that provides us with low-level theories about the how’s, why’s, what’s, and wherefore’s of everyday life. This folk-level theory grounds our understanding of the symbolic, gestural, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral repertoires that constitute our cultures. Folk sociology is not the same as professional sociology any more than the folk physics of alphabet blocks, Legos, and billiard ball collisions is anything like professional physics.

18  The Science Turn and Sociology I have devoted my entire career to the sociology of the hard cases. The original hard case in the sociology of science was scientific knowledge itself. Classical sociologists of science and knowledge did not believe that scientific knowledge was rooted in social life. It existed outside of time, space, history, and culture. There could be no sociology of 2 + 2 = 4. That all changed with the emergence of the new sociology of science. Working in this context, I developed a sociological approach to mathematical knowledge. The other hard cases I’ve engaged in are logic, God, and the brain. In each case I am obliged to do two difficult things at the same time: explain sociology and show how it applies to the hard case. This is part of the rationale for this chapter. The novelty of my approach to New Atheism and theism is my perspective as a sociologist. In my view and in my practice, sociology is a discovering science. But I do not want the term “discovering science” to be understood as making sociology a slave to or immature offspring of the physical and natural sciences. I use the words “discovery” and “science” nonetheless, but I stress that in my usage they carry reconstructed meanings as a consequence of research in the new sociology of science, that is, the sociology of science that has emerged over the past 50 years. I want, then, to alert you to an invisible revolution wrought by sociological discoveries and the new sociology of science they have spawned.2 Sociology has traditionally had a bad reputation. This is less true today than it was when I entered graduate school in 1965. Much of what it has stood for has indeed been, as its critics claim, needlessly obtuse and empty. Even sociologists have wondered at times if they were saying anything. But there is a core of significant worldview-shifting discoveries at the core of sociology. These discoveries are associated with what I call the high tradition. The low tradition is represented by the motley collection of titles in the sociology sections of shopping mall bookstores, images of sociology as a “soft science,” a form of socialism or social work, and a pretentious inquiry that disguises common sense and the obvious in the jargoninfested trappings of a social science. Even the idea that sociology is a “hard science,” to the extent that it imports a sexist and scientistic view of the field from the physical sciences, and stresses formal and methodological concerns over substantive social ones, is part of the low tradition. It is this low tradition that grounds the eleventh commandment called on by the conservative former prime minister of Canada Stephen Harper (Conway, 2013; Kaye and Béland, 2014) and conservative political commentator George Will – “Thou shalt not commit sociology.” Curiously, Will has a PhD in political science from Princeton and masterfully draws on statistical facts that sociologists have played a prominent role in constructing. On Harper’s version of the commandment, see Box 1. The high tradition in sociology traces its roots to the revolutionary discoveries about self, society, and culture made between 1840 and 1930 during what I’ve called the Age of the Social. This was the first Age of the Social (Restivo, 2018). For a prominent early example of the First Age of the Social, see Marx’s (1844/1958: 104ff) remarks on the social self and consciousness as social relations. The names from this period such as Nietzsche, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman should come as easily to mind as Darwin,

The Science Turn and Sociology  19 Box 1.  Common Sense Meets Sociology Prologue: “I know nothing but my country, my whole country, and nothing but my country” (slogan of the nineteenth-century American Know Nothing movement) “Fundamentalists in this country say everything you need to know is in the Bible, period. Islamists say everything you need to know is in the Koran, period.” (John Miller, Political Scientist, Michigan State University, 2007)3 “Thou Shalt Not Commit Sociology” In 2014, Canadian First Nations teenager Tina Fontaine was found murdered after being reported missing. Once again, calls went out for a national inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women. Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper responded by claiming that this was not a “sociological phenomenon” but a “crime.” Crime is an eminently social phenomenon, but this tragedy only caused Harper to recall his 2013 claim that “this is not a time to commit sociology.” Statistics Canada has long documented the facts that First Nations people face more poverty, unemployment, and violence than other Canadians. Various studies have shown that indigenous women are three times more likely to be the victims of crimes and eight times more likely to be murdered than nonindigenous women. For Harper, these statistics veil the simple fact that the issue is “crime.” Harper’s views and words echo those of President Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew, who railed against “nattering nabobs of negativism,” and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s teaching that “[t]here is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” The problem from Harper’s perspective is that bad people commit crimes, evil people commit terrorist acts, and poor people are lazy and feel entitled to government handouts. What is to be done? Catch the bad people and lock them up, track down the terrorists and kill them, and force the poor into the labor market. Don’t commit sociology and ask “why” questions or try to get to the root of the problems. The term “radical” is not a happy one for conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. But if we follow Tom Hayden’s conception of “the radical style” we can see that it comes close to, if it doesn’t actually conflate with, what we mean by science. Writing in the middle of the 1960s revolutions, Hayden defined being radical as a matter of penetrating social problems to their roots, their real causes (Hayden (1967: 6): “Radicalism as a style means being constantly driven by the question, ‘Why?’ It is not dogmatic; it understands conclusions as provisional, always ready to be discarded in the face of new evidence or changed circumstances.” This is what we mean by science, whether physics, chemistry, biology, or sociology.

20  The Science Turn and Sociology Einstein, and Marie Curie as fashioners of modern human culture. We are poorer for the fact that they don’t. The Second Age of the Social was 1930–1970, a period marked by revolutionary developments in our understanding of the social organization of knowledge and science. We are now in the Third Age of the Social, which has uncovered the social, cultural, and material roots of knowledge, science, and belief in their most abstract forms. It has led to the end of Platonism in mathematics and logic, and to sociological explanations of and the rejection of transcendental and supernatural worldviews. During these Ages, we have discovered that selves and minds and all forms of knowledge and belief are social and cultural constructions. This period of discovery reflects a general cultural climate which can be characterized in terms of the rejection of transcendence. It will be helpful, incidentally, in thinking about sociological discoveries, to learn from sociologists of science that discovery is not a simple matter of finding something new in the world and assigning the discovery to a single individual or team. It is actually a rather complex and inventive social process that involves, among other factors, techniques of communication, negotiation, and conflict, and crystallization of the discovery over time. The discoverers of society carried out a Copernican revolution that transformed our understanding of the social world. They identified the group, collectivity, society, and culture as the core concepts at the center of the human universe. Copernicus helped move the sun to the center of our solar system and the earth to a peripheral position. The sociologists helped move the group to the center of the human universe and the individual to the periphery. This achievement does not politically subordinate the individual to the group. Rather, it reveals how varieties of individual growth and development, and the formation of different types of persons, are dependent on forms of social organization and culture. Through its influence on the sociology of science, the Copernican sociological revolution has also had an impact on our understanding of science and of natural and physical realities. We are, in fact, in the midst of a second sociological revolution that is changing our conception of the nature of knowledge. The seeds of this revolution were planted during the earlier revolution, but it is only recently that sociologists have developed the appropriate tools, concepts, and orientations to pursue ideas on the social roots of knowledge, conjectures on the social nature of religion, logical concepts, and objectivity, and insights on mathematics and culture. This second Copernican sociological revolution overlaps the second and third Ages of the Social. The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1887/1974: 253, para. 319) criticisms of religion and of philosophy were major contributions to the rejection of transcendence. He warned us to be on guard against the myth of a pure, timeless knowing being. He warned us about using contradictory notions like “pure” and “absolute” when speaking of reason, knowledge, and intelligence. All these concepts presuppose an eye such as no living being can imagine, an eye required to have no direction, to abrogate its active and interpretative powers – precisely those powers that alone make of seeing seeing something. All seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing. The more emotions we allow to speak in a given matter, the more eyes we can put on in order to view a given

The Science Turn and Sociology 21 spectacle, and the more complete will be our conception of it, the greater our objectivity. This has to be understood as a collective exercise, not an individual one. The intellectual resources I have identified are part of the contemporary fund of cultural capital that has helped us to fashion such counterintuitive notions as the sociology of god, truth, nature, reality, objectivity, and logic. There is a masculine Euro-American bias in the selection of certain men to represent this invisible revolution, but it is a revolution generated and sustained by working-class men and women (as the historian E.P. Thompson helped to document), and by non-white and female sociological theorists from Harriet Martineau to W.E.B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier to Dorothy Smith. What does science look like, then, from the perspective of the invisible sociological revolution? Scientific facts are manufactured out of locally available social, material, and symbolic (interpersonally meaningful) resources. These resources become facts starting at the local level of the social interactions of scientists in a process sometimes described as creating order out of disorder. In the wake of a laboratory experiment, the sequence of writings from laboratory notes to published paper moves statements through different modes, each mode more “objective” than the previous one. That is, statements describing an experiment progressively erase the subjective, flesh-and-blood human experimenters from the increasingly objective, mechanistic, and technical discussions (Restivo, 2022: 15–53). The local generation of facts attains “universal” global status through the international activities of scientists as agents of professions and governments, and as ambassadors for the legitimacy of these facts in the service of science, economics, politics, and the military. Facts then move into the flow of the historical unfolding of generations of scientists collectively and intersubjectively testing locally generated hypotheses, repeating experiments, and skeptically exploring presumed matters of fact. The new sociology of science is an alternative to traditional ways of studying and understanding science. According to practitioners of science studies, not only is science a social activity but scientific knowledge itself is socially constructed. The idea that science is social is mired in controversy. The controversy has heated up so much that it has spawned the “science wars” of the 1990s, pitting philosophers, and physical and natural scientists against science studies researchers. Scientists from the physical, natural, and even social sciences, and philosophers are worried that the claim that science is social damages the power of logic and reason to keep irrationalism and superstition at bay. Leading sociologists of science find these attacks and concerns curious because they consider themselves scientists and defenders of science. We need to understand these issues in the context of the end of modernity, the end of a period in which the nature and value of science were considered to be beyond criticism. “Modern” and “postmodern” are multifaceted and contentious ideas. Their substance arises from the historical realities of the twentieth century – from crises in logic and mathematics to world wars, atomic bombs, holocausts, and environmental disasters – that challenged uncritical and worshipful attitudes about the value of science, the inevitability of progress, and the transparency and universality of scientific truths. Postmodernism launched social criticisms that sometimes

22  The Science Turn and Sociology took us to the abyss of radical relativism and nihilism but also stimulated the development of research and theory on science by social scientists and humanities scholars. If the practice of science and scientific knowledge are social, critics (including senior scientists and advocates of a purist conception of science coming from all fields of scholarship and research) conclude that must mean they are arbitrary, not objective, not true, and not universal. In fact, however, sociologists have not mounted an attack on objectivity and truth. They value science, the methods of science, and the findings of science. Society and culture are natural phenomena and can be studied scientifically. Some critics claim this leads to confusion, because if science is social, isn’t the sociology of science also social? Of course it is social. This is only a paradox if you assume that saying science is social is equivalent to saying it is arbitrary and untrue. Moreover, sociologists do not claim jurisdiction over the facts physical and natural scientists study, but only over those sciences as social phenomena. Though they do not claim jurisdiction over the matters of fact in science, sociologists do claim analytical purchase over those facts (sociology of scientific knowledge). Sociologists do not deny reality, truth, or objectivity. They do, however, claim that we need to revise our understanding of these ideas in the light of what we now know about how society and culture shape science, scientists, and scientific knowledge. When scientists say that there is a “reality out there,” it does not mean that there exists a description of that reality that we approach through closer and closer approximations. Science is at its best when it is not being directly and overtly controlled by powerful interests with the policing power of a state or religious institution behind it. Science is, however, inevitably embedded in a social, cultural, and historical matrix that shapes its methods, theories, and substantive content. Truth for the Twenty-First-Century Mind Truth emerged as one of the monotheistic Gods in the Axial age. All of these systems were dynamic to different degrees and subject to varieties of changes. Two polar systems defined these developments: faith and science. Faith contracted into a single pole of certainty. Science developed as a continuum of matters of fact. At one end of the continuum, the open end, matters of fact were fragile and uncertain, entertained as contested working ideas, conjectures, and hypotheses. At the other closed end, matters of fact reached essentially absolute certainty. The entire continuum was colored by skepticism. But as matters of fact moved from the open end to the closed end, the strength of skepticism decreased and the cost of skepticism increased. The open end consisted of matters of fact like gravity and the nature of space and time. Knowledge about these matters contained elements of certainty but also high levels of uncertainty and potential for change. At the closed end, the exemplary case was the shape of the earth. We can state with absolute certainty that the earth is not flat. However much we would want to inject this matter of fact with skepticism, to do so is simply too costly, intellectually and emotionally, for us to pursue. We are not taking a great chance by considering the

The Science Turn and Sociology 23 matter closed and not subject to further discussion. Of course, revisions in our fundamental ideas about space and time, the space-time continuum, and cosmic structures could revise our conception of the earth’s shape and structure but never in the direction of a flat earth. Briefly, faith collapsed into a single pole of certainty, while science evolved into a continuum of certainty. However, this did not eliminate the dynamics characteristic of all intellectual systems, the potential to devolve into cults and idealistic systems. The fact that this has happened at least episodically in science is reflected in the wide variety of criticisms aimed at “pure,” “idealistic,” “mythical” science. These criticisms refer to ecclesiasticism in science, science as a social problem, a cult that worships Truth, science conceived as a once and only phenomenon discussed in a grammar of the ever-present tense. These phenomena are eddy currents in the larger pool of scientific practice that follows reasoned rules of collective intersubjectively tested inquiry. Mythical science is unitary and monolithic (Science); reasoned, realistic science is multiple – sciences. We now have some idea of how to understand science and sociology, two keys to unraveling the issues, problems, and questions driving the theist-New Atheist debates. This background will help us evaluate the nature and limits of these debates. Let’s now consider a particular science: mathematics. It is of special interest here because it shares a history with the idea of God. Mathematics presents us with the same sorts of problems as God. Mathematics, like God, seems to escape society, history, culture, and even time and space. If we can throw a net around math, maybe we can throw one around God too. Theists rely on an immaterial understanding of mathematics and logic to support their argument for a God outside of time and space. The foundations of mathematics are not located in logic or systems of axioms but rather in forms of life. Mathematical forms and objects embody math worlds. They contain – indeed they are – the social histories of their construction. They are produced in and by math worlds, social networks of mathematicians. It is, in the end, math worlds, not individual mathematicians, that manufacture mathematics (Restivo, 2022: 231–260). This idea has not gone unnoticed by mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics. Their sociological understanding is inevitably, however, limited. Some have understood that knowledge has to be explained in terms of communities of knowers and that stories about knowledge can be told in ways that reveal how knowledge is acquired, transmitted, and extended. This is the only story they can tell. But they are intent on making this story confirm rationality, well-founded reasoning in mathematics, and something transcendentally compelling about mathematics and logic. Rationality and well-founded reasoning (and, more generally, cognition) cannot be separated from social action and culture. “Rational” is synonymous with “social” and “cultural” as an explanatory account. Explaining the content of mathematics is not a matter of constructing a simple causal link between a mathematical object, such as a theorem and a social structure. The sociological problem is to look to both “external” contexts and networks and “internal” contexts and networks. Classical Platonically oriented philosophers and mathematicians base their criticisms of sociological approaches on the assumption that only “external” contexts

24  The Science Turn and Sociology (society writ large) hold social influences. But “internal” contexts (the professional organizations and networks of mathematics) also hold social influences. The sociological task is to unpack the social histories and social worlds embodied in objects such as theorems, proofs, and equations. Mathematical objects must be treated as things that are produced by, manufactured by, social beings through social means in social settings. There is no reason why an object such as a theorem, a proof, or an equation should be treated any differently than a sculpture, a teapot, or a skyscraper. Only alienated and alienating social worlds could give rise to the idea that mathematical objects are independent, free-standing creations, and that the essence of mathematics is realized in technical talk. Notations and symbols are tools, materials, and in general resources that are socially constructed around social interests and oriented to social goals. They take their meaning from the history of their construction and usage, the ways they are used in the present, the consequences of their usage inside and outside mathematics, and the network of ideas they are part of. Mathematics, science, and knowledge in general are crucial resources in all societies. Systems of knowledge therefore tend to develop and change in ways that serve the interests of the most powerful groups in society. Once societies become stratified, the nature and transmission of knowledge begin to reflect social inequalities. And once knowledge professions emerge, professional boundaries tend to shield practitioners from the realities of their broader social roles even while they define a realm of systemically (institutionally) autonomous work. Science and math curricula in such contexts are certainly influenced by professional interests and goals, but they are also conditioned by the social functions of educational systems in stratified societies. Science worlds are social worlds, and we must ask what kinds of social worlds they are. How do they fit into the larger cultural scheme of things? Whose interests do they serve? What kinds of human beings inhabit science worlds? What sorts of values do science worlds create and sustain? Scientific change in and out of the classroom must always be examined closely in order to understand its relationship to wider social changes. It follows from all I have said that reforms and changes in general cannot be effectively carried out in isolation from broader issues of power, social structure, and values. If, on the other hand, we adopt conventional scientific tools and ways of working to help solve social, personal, and cultural problems, we will fall short of our goals. It is therefore unreasonable to suppose that social reformers and revolutionaries could eliminate science from society, and equally unreasonable to suppose that science reformers and revolutionaries could force science as we know it today into some “alternative” shape independently of broader social and cultural changes. Platonism, apriorism, and foundationalism (along with God) are dead. But the protective, awe-inspired, worshipful orientation to science survives. This is understandable, readily as a vestigial homage to the culture and conversation of the West, less readily as a vestigial homage to the God of the West. This way of seeing sensitizes us to the progressive and regressive aspects and potentials of words, concepts, and ideas that as social relations can embody inequalities, destroy environments, inhibit individual growth and development, and

The Science Turn and Sociology 25 undermine inquiry. The next time someone wants to ask an expert about the nature of science or God, he/she had better turn to a sociologist or anthropologist instead of a physicist, astronomer, chemist, or biologist if he/she wants to escape Plato’s clutches and learn something. As an exercise re-read the last four paragraphs, and every time you come across the word “mathematics” substitute the word “God.” And elsewhere try substituting the word “society” or “community” for “God.” This may give you an insight into how and why sociologists ground God in society and culture. Notes 1 On the distinction between open and closed systems and their relationship to determinism and lawfulness, see Bohm (1957). 2 On sociology as a science and its historical unfolding, see Collins (1975/1998) and Restivo (2018). On the nature and history of Science and Technology Studies and the new sociology of science, see Bauchspies et al. (2005), and Restivo (2022). 3 www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070215181425.htm

References Bauchspies, W., J. Croissant, and S. Restivo (2005), Science, Technology and Society: A Sociological Approach (New York: Wiley-Blackwell). Bohm, D. (1957), Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Collins, R. (1975), Conflict Sociology (New York: Academic Press). Collins, R. (1998), The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Conway, J. (2013), “Thou shalt not commit sociology,” CAUT Bulletin Archives, 1996–2016: https://bulletin-archives.caut.ca/bulletin/articles/2013/09/thou-shaltnot-commit-sociology Hayden, T. (1967), “A Letter to the New (Young) Left,” pp. 2–9 in M. Cohen and D. Hale, eds., The New Student Left, Rev. And Expanded (Boston: Beacon Press). Kaye, J. and D. Béland (2014), “Stephen Harper’s dangerous refusal to ‘commit sociology,’ ” Toronto Star: www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/08/22/stephen_harpers_ dangerous_refusal_to_commit_sociology.html Marx, K. (1844/1958), The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House). Nietzsche, F. (1887/1974), The Gay Science (New York: Vintage). Restivo, S. (2018), The Age of the Social (New York: Routledge). Restivo, S. (2022), Inventions in Socieology: Studies in Science and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

4

The New Atheist Worldview1

This chapter focuses on the thoughts and arguments of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and the fifth “horseman,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Dawkins argues that unjustified pride is hubris, but pride in science is justified. The examples he gives reflect the ideology of the technological fix.2 Pride is justified among the scientists who run CERN, and the engineers who build giant telescopes, and technologies like smartphones, satellites, jets, 3Dprinting, and so on. This is not arrogance or hubris but “honest and irrefutable truth.” But it’s easy to see how a belief in things or thoughts that are irrefutable could slip over into what your opponents see as a belief in an “absolute, unchallengeable, eternal authority,” precisely the terms Hitchens uses to characterize the “totalitarianism . . . innate in all religions.” Furthermore, Harris claims that “there is this domain of the sacred that is not easily captured by science, and scientific discourse has ceded it to religious discourse,” to which Dennett adds “and artistic discourse.” By ignoring sociology’s legitimate claim along with anthropology to explanatory jurisdiction over the “domain of the sacred,” the New Atheists reinforce the scientism that keeps pushing them into absolutist claims. Harris argues that the “mayhem that’s going under the aegis of Islam just cannot be compared to the fact that we have two people a decade who kill abortionists.” This ignores the potential for violence that exists in the United States on the abortion issue, a potential that has been revealed in full bloom in the wake of the recent SCOTUS ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. Harris also ignores more general features of violence in America. By focusing on violence associated rightly or wrongly with Islam, Harris demonstrates some level of Islamophobia. This focus makes him more concerned with Islamic violence than actual and potential violence associated with other religious and secular groups. Hitchens’ position is that “all religions are equally false. . . . And latently at least equally dangerous.” Hitchens tries to show that the Amish and the Dalai Lama are equally dangerous but Harris insists on separating out “jihad” as a more dangerous existential threat. They agree on the dangers “faith” poses to the “surrender of the mind” and (in a somewhat more conspiratorial tone) the fact that “you can never quite anticipate the danger of unreason.” We have to keep going back to what it is that the Four Horsemen are defending; what is it about science that makes it preferable to religion? What is their science’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-4

The New Atheist Worldview  27 truth? It is that modifications of technologies are the salvation of our planet, technologies that may someday enable us to divert dangerous asteroids and comets. The technological fix shows up again in Dawkins’ views on our brains. They evolved to track “buffalo-sized objects at lion speeds” on the African savanna, not objects that move at the speed of light or exist at the quantum level. All of this is possible because “somehow” our brains have evolved in ways that have enabled us to construct the “crystalline edifice of mathematics by which we accurately predict the behavior of entities that lie under the radar of our intuitive comprehension.” This mythical brain – a brain free of the forces of society, culture, and history – is the source of one of the big “Deep Problems”: how do brains produce consciousness? The other Deep Problems are: where do the laws of physics and the values of the fundamental constants come from and why do they appear to be fine-tuned to produce us and something rather than nothing? This is curious because the “finetuning” argument is one mobilized by theists to “prove” God. Atheists are fond of quoting David Hume in paraphrase: “Which is more probable, that the impossible has really happened or that the conjuror has fooled you?” (for the original quote, see Hume, 1779/1998: 112). At the age of 19, Nietzsche (1865/1982: 30) wrote to his sister Elizabeth: “If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.” Elsewhere (Nietzsche, 1887/1974), in describing “the gay or joyous science,” he wrote that there is a kind of honesty that has eluded the religious. They have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. They did not ask about what they were really experiencing, what were the circumstances, if their reason was bright enough, whether they were opposed to sensory deceptions, or if they were prepared to resist the fantastic? They did not and do not carry out any of these checks. They make it easy rather than hard to go against reason. The result is that their experiences are seasoned with “miracles,” and “rebirths” and the voices of angels. What is the solution for those of us who have a burning thirst for reason? We are urged to scrutinize our experiences as if they were experiments in the science lab, to do this hour after hour after day after day. We must make ourselves experiments and be our own guinea pigs. Is it any wonder that there are so few Nietzsches? Or Humes? Hume and Nietzsche are the kinds of philosophers scientists like Dawkins should pay attention to. They would require Dawkins to be more self-aware. But once we have identified the scientism and the technological fix in Dawkins’ views, we are left with a conclusion that certain precocious ten-year-olds could reach: positing a Creator God would force you into an infinite regress of creator entities or forces. The naturalistic answer to the riddles of life, the universe, and everything may be improbable but the theistic alternative is impossible. Daniel Dennett views himself as the “good cop” in this debate because he wants to “preserve the good that organized religion can do.” This means finding a secular successor to religion that can take on its traditional task of “succoring and comforting” before we usher off the churches. I am reminded here of the context for Marx’s oft-quoted axiom: “religion is the opium of the people.” The context for this remark is Marx’s (1844/1957: 42) claim that religious suffering is the expression of and a

28  The New Atheist Worldview protest against real suffering. He uses the phrases “sigh of the oppressed creature,” “heart of a heartless world,” and “soul of soulless conditions.” To the extent that Dennett understands religion in this way he does so from a biological perspective as opposed to a sociological understanding. The secret to religion in humans is found, he says, in quorum sensing in bacteria. In general, quorum sensing or quorum signaling (QS) is the ability to detect and respond to cell population density by gene regulation. For example, QS enables bacteria to restrict the expression of specific genes to the high cell densities at which the resulting phenotypes will be most beneficial. In bacteria, quorum sensing allows specific processes to be controlled, such as biofilm formation, virulence factor expression, production of secondary metabolites, and stress adaptation mechanisms such as bacterial competition systems, including secretion systems. Of all the four horsemen, only Dennett’s core text indexes social science and/or sociology. This doesn’t mean he’s prepared to let sociology inform his biology. He points out that we have learned a lot about how to study social life. But he doesn’t ask whether we should try to develop a social science of religion; he asks instead about developing a natural science of religion. “There is a case to be made,” Dennett (2006: 71, 261, 295, 317, 395) writes, “that the social sciences and humanities – the Geisteswissenschaften, or mind sciences – have their own ‘autonomous’ methodologies and subject matters, independent of the natural sciences”: This motivates a disciplinary isolation that obstructs becoming good science. It leads to ignorance and is an ideological crutch that should be thrown away. He notes that “biologists complain about reduction to physics. They don’t argue that physics provides no constraints or principles that they must understand or exploit. This is reasonable reductionism. But literally reducing biology to physics is ‘greedy reductionism.’ ” Sociologists agree at least that physics and biology provide constraints or principles that they must understand or exploit. It is “greedy reductionism” they oppose, and in spite of himself, Dennett tends to be a greedy reductionist in the case of sociology. Reductionism should not be a barrier to disciplinary autonomy. Dennett goes after the pre-emptive disqualification of his naturalistic (evolutionary) approach to religion by “the literary, historical, and cultural experts in the humanities and social sciences.” He includes in this category of the pre-emptively disqualified Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade. Durkheim (1912/1995: xvii) requires a “religious sentiment” of students of religion; Eliade (1963: iii) requires that religious phenomena must be understood at their own level. Dennett wants “methods that critically involve experiments and the disciplined methods of the natural sciences.” Besides continually conflating the social sciences and humanities, Dennett’s science as “the disciplined methods of the natural sciences” is scientistic. He reinforces this scientistic anti-social science perspective by arguing that we need better general theories of cognition to get at representations in the brain. Until then using neuroimaging to study religious beliefs is a hapless exercise. To confuse the issue more, he claims that the methods of psychology and the other social sciences are fruitful paths to follow. And he recognizes that the idea of a genetically heritable “spiritual sense” is less and less likely or interesting from an evolutionary perspective. His discussion of Rodney Stark’s One True God:

The New Atheist Worldview  29 Historical Consequences of Monotheism (2001) is instructive. Dennett (2006: 219) understands that Stark’s book is written “sociologically,” but that Stark is a believer in a one true God. Dennett understands this to mean that the book is not about God per se but about all the social and psychological lifting God does for believers. The book has no bearing on whether God exists or not, and Stark disingenuously hides behind the ambiguity of his beliefs and his sociology. Stark is indeed not a neutral observer of religion as is clear from his Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (2008). Stark is a distinguished sociologist of knowledge and religion. His book is typically critical and lucid. And his sociological imagination gets him off to a good start when he criticizes the “New Atheists” and their fellow travelers for their sociological shortcomings. Religion, belief, and God are not delusional – they are not based on ignorance; the religious do not deserve the contempt of the self-styled scientifically literate. What is missing in the New Atheists is precisely the religious sentiment Dennett dismisses and a profound ignorance of the sociology of religion and its findings on rites, rituals, and morals. There are occasional eruptions of this kind of understanding in Dennett and Hitchens but they don’t make enough of this material in their arguments. Stark understands that religion and social life are mutually implicated. He does not, however, have a robust understanding of religion as the glue – the moral order – that binds us in our families, communities, and societies; it even accounts for the coherence of our selves. There is a great deal of valuable historical and cultural information about religion and belief in Stark’s book. The problem with the book is signaled by the leading headline blurb on the back of the book jacket: “Did God Create Us, Or Did We Create God?” The answer to this question is given unequivocally in Durkheim’s discovery that gods are symbolic constructions forged by humans in sociocultural contexts. But Stark is haunted by the shadow of a confusing experience of religious faith. In the late 1980s, he described himself as incapable of religious faith but not an atheist. When he joined the private Baptist Christian Baylor University faculty in 2007, he said he had changed his view and now described himself as an “independent Christian” and in any case always a “cultural” Christian. He was also willing to associate himself with agnosticism. All of this explains why all of the impressive scholarship that unfolds in this book comes apart in the closing paragraphs. Here he shows himself vulnerable to Creationist arguments and he joins those who believe that life, the universe, and everything could not possibly be one big meaningless accident. At the end of the day and the book, Stark claims that the universe is the “ultimate revelation of God” and that science is fundamentally theology. This is an exemplary failure of the sociological and scientific imagination. Let’s look more closely at the grounds for labeling Dennett (2006: 372) “scientistic.” Careful observation of cutting-edge science, he writes, shows that it is “ragged and chaotic”; we don’t need outsiders puncturing science’s reputation – science has its own rigorous methods of self-policing and self-correction; natural science is our best source of knowledge on “any topic.” This reflects an outmoded concept of science as an autonomous system invulnerable to social system changes. Consider Dennett’s (2006: 312–313) views of my specialty research area, the sociology

30  The New Atheist Worldview of science. He describes science studies researchers as perhaps well-intentioned but naïve observers of scientific practice who produced “comically bad interpretations of what they had observed.” Among those interpretations of “careful” trained observers is that science can be “ragged and chaotic.” Dennett’s claim reflects a multiplicity of fallacies. Many of the founders of science studies were originally trained, educated, and in some cases worked in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering (e.g., David Edge a professional radio astronomer; Steve Woolgar, Oxford degree in engineering; Restivo, junior electrical engineer in an elevator company). Those who were not (e.g., Sharon Traweek, Daryl Chubin, Karin Knorr) were highly sophisticated scholars well-versed in the sciences, history, and philosophy. Knorr carried out some of her observations of scientific practice in collaboration with a natural scientist. Dennett did not support his claims by naming particular science studies scholars as I have here. When I challenged him to name these “naïve observers,” he declined. The fact is that he could not name one core science studies researcher from Woolgar and Latour to Harry Collins and David Bloor who would not have agreed with him that we should rely on the methods and findings of the physical and natural sciences to some degree. Science studies researchers have tried to clarify these matters, and if and where they claim to be relativists they are defending realism against absolutism and arguing for “disinterested inquiry” (Restivo and Croissant, 1995; Barnes and Bloor, 1982: 47n). He is ready to cede understanding of a formula like E = MC2 to the physicists. “We” non-physicists are not capable of understanding the formula. But fear not. We may not have a “feeling” for quantum mechanics, Dennett (2006: 218) says (and see Dawkins, 2019: 71), but we can do the physics and the math and test its predictions; “anybody can read the dials on an instrument.” The fact is that not just “anybody” can read the dials on an instrument. This statement manifests the scientistic fallacy that science is universal and transparent to “anybody.” It takes training to read dials and to understand the nature of the relationship between data input, dial readings, and interpretations. Because the four horsemen, and Harris and Dennett in particular, are brain-centric in their thinking, they believe scientists have had to develop tools to overcome the limits of our Stone Age brains. We moderns do not have Stone Age brains. Our brains have evolved with our cultural evolution. Why, given this viewpoint, isn’t Dennett prepared to cede understanding of religion to the sociologists? Once again we are faced with a form of scientism grounded in physics as the very definition of what science is. We find ourselves in the realm of the “physics fix.” A recent example of this is Adrian Bejan’s (2020: 4) claim in his book Freedom and Evolution: Hierarchy in Nature, Society and Science that “physics is the science that covers everything.” Bejan is Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University. In a private conversation I had with Lewis Wolpert, the developmental biologist and public understanding of science advocate Wolpert expressed a viewpoint common to Dennett, Bejan, and their ilk, that social life is transparent to their untutored introspections. To the extent that Dennett is representative of the New Atheists, we can conclude that they do not understand religion as a social and cultural phenomenon and therefore are

The New Atheist Worldview 31 predisposed based on a scientistic worldview to see believers as stupid, ignorant, illogical, irrational, and out of touch with reality. To pursue this scientistic ideology further, let’s ask how the four justify their trust in physics. According to Dawkins, we take what physicists say on trust because we have some evidence that they’ve done their homework and experiments, and that they’ve engaged in peer review and self-criticism. I can agree to some extent with this viewpoint. But the flaw in this statement is that it is limited to the ideologically defined robust sciences. I don’t mean that they are not robust. However, their robustness is ideologically tainted because “the evidence that suggests that physicists have looked into the matter,” that they’ve robustly peer reviewed each other’s works, and that they’ve been “subjected to massive criticism” is nowhere critically examined, ethnographically, sociologically, or historically. The four, like most science observers, take for granted that scientists have “looked into the matter” fairly, critically, and with high levels of self-policing. This is more or less indeed taken on faith; not necessarily the sort of faith we associate with the religion the four attack but nonetheless a form of faith. Viewed in this light, it’s easy to see that the atheist/theist debaters entangle themselves and their critics like me in a web of overlapping errors of omission and commission, fallacies about their own intellectual systems, and mostly sociological failures. But science finally is not based on faith that the universe is ordered and can be captured in laws. Scientists are persuaded by the evidence for order and pattern and law their studies uncover; faith has nothing to do with this. The danger of making the assumption that scientists have “looked into the matter” is illustrated by a recent study claiming that only one in 20 medical treatments have high-quality evidence to support their benefits. The study also found that harms of treatments are measured much more rarely (a third as much) as benefits (Howick et al., 2022). On the nature, limits, and evidentiary confidence provided by replication and reproducibility in science, see NASEM (2019). Dennett claims that science must be competitive. This is a curious claim to make about what is often referred to as a “community” guided by norms of open, cooperative communication. The ideology of competition is a vestigial remnant of the Social Darwinist’s “struggle for survival.” But Darwin himself stressed the cooperative principle in evolution (Montagu, 1952). Dennett raises a general question theists pose about faith and the New Atheists: do they have their own faith, their own religion? If we do, he says, it’s not blind faith if one is continually testing, correcting, and provisionally defending the evidence of our senses (and, he adds, “common sense”). 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 one I made up. 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, some much older. But one does not expect that theists are

32  The New Atheist Worldview actively engaged in collective, generationally linked, intersubjectively tested research on the hypotheses that Jesus was the son of God and that the Resurrection was a real historical event. 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. Sam Harris understands that religion is a unifying glue, and he is correct about religion as a force for tribalism. However, like the New Atheists in general, he doesn’t understand that religion sociologically is one with society and social order. The centripetal force of the compassion represented by religion is the source of tribalism. There is a problem here in terms of creating a global cultural order but religion isn’t the problem. Discussion Among the Four Horsemen The four (Hitchens et al., 2019: 85–131) discuss the fact that they have been accused of being strident, arrogant, vitriolic, and shrill. Dennett acknowledges this and says he’s adjusted his argumentative style but still faces accusations of rudeness and aggressiveness. He claims that the theists have made it impossible to critically disagree with them without being rude. Harris points out that this a consequence of violating a taboo. The four are offending people and at the same time telling them they shouldn’t be offended. Dennett is right that religion is institutionally protected from what Harris refers to as “rational criticism.” This is a taboo supported by secularists and atheists as well as believers. And indeed, the religious realm, the realm of belief and of God and the gods is protected by an iron cage of taboo, authority, tradition, and powerful boundaries. The reason for this is that religion is the glue of social order. Religion organizes the moral order of the cultural system. Theists don’t understand this; they don’t recognize culture as the locus of morals, values, and ethics. Therefore, they argue that we would not know right from wrong without the existence of what Hitchens refers to as a “supernatural, celestial dictator.” To be more precise, the theist argument is that we would not be able to justify our morals without God. Dawkins understands that “some historical process has led to this immunization of religion, this hyper-offence-taking that religion is allowed to take . . . . they’ve managed to enlist legions of non-religious people to take offence on their behalf.” The four need to understand that all this is a reflection of the fact that moral offenses are logical offenses. There is an intimate connection between what is moral and what is logical (Douglas, 1986: 112). The theists know the term “sociocultural” (I’ve heard William Lane Craig use it), but they don’t grasp it as a real historical force. Our institutions provide the categories of thought, and set the terms for knowledge, faith, belief, and self-knowledge. They fix identities or make them fluid, but more than this they must sacralize the principles of justice to preserve the social order and this goes with sacralizing the principles of logic. This is why morality appears to be as compelling as logic. There are some curious ways in which the New Atheists themselves reflect the resistance of religion to out and out straightforward criticism. They speak of

The New Atheist Worldview 33 admiring some of the aesthetic achievements of religion. Harris still uses words like “spiritual” and “mystical” in a positive sense. Dawkins remarks that being spiritual is not the same as being religious. Hitchens contributes to this part of the discussion by distinguishing between the “numinous” and the supernatural. This is a tricky boundary to navigate. The distinctions between the terms favored by the four and “religion” are fuzzy. “Numinous” is derived from the Latin numen, “arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring.” In the seventeenth century, the term was furthermore identified with divinity. It takes its modern sense and usage from the influential theologian Rudolf Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy (1917/1952). See Chapter 11 for more on this concept. The seeds of understanding that atheism is indeed a religion in sociological perspective shows up in the four’s desire for “a different church,” “a different ritual,” “a place for the sacred,” for “an extremely denatured church.” There is then a collective apotheosis of funerals and weddings, beautiful poetry and music, Bach’s Mache dich, mein Herze, rein. Christmas trees are fine; so are Christmas cards, and Christmas parties, and Christmas carols leaving out “the secular Christmas stuff.” “And it’s just glorious stuff. That part of the Christian story is fantastic – it’s just a beautiful tale! And you can love every inch of it without believing it.” Hitchens emphasizes that “we’re not cultural vandals.” And finally and most significantly, Dawkins recognizes the “group solidarity” that is at stake here. So when believers ask the four if they are defending science as a form of religion, as a faith, the four should be cautious and thoughtful before issuing a blanket denial. The four are forced to deal with this boundary because they realize at some level that they themselves cannot escape religion any more than they can escape society. Operating as they do with an unsupportable understanding of the autonomy of science, it is not surprising that they attribute all the good attributes of objectivity to scientists. This is one of the sources of the arrogance accusations they are constantly trying to stave off. If they approached science as a social phenomenon, they would strengthen their claims that the doctrine of “faith” is not noble; it encourages beliefs unsupported by evidence. While ignoring the social and contradictory features of science in the real world, they are quick to point out the flaws in theism. Hitchens in particular has been very keen to “expose” Mother Teresa. Intervention: Hitchens Versus Mother Teresa “I didn’t expect Mother Teresa to come out as an atheist” (Hitchens, in Hitchens et al., 2019: 58). Hitchens wrote that the Catholic Church’s “beatification” of the woman who styled herself “Mother” Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism. The “miracle” that had to be attested to to ground the beatification was a shameless fake. A Bengali woman claimed that a picture of Mother Teresa she had in her home emitted a light beam that cured her cancer. According to her physician, she had a tubercular cyst, not cancer. The cyst was treated and cured with a prescription medicine. The physician was not interviewed by the Vatican. Hitchens wrote that “George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi – that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent – was drowned in a

34  The New Atheist Worldview Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda concerning the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the Missionaries of Charity reporters witnessed.” Mother Teresa’s confessor asked her to write a letter to Jesus. This is what she wrote (Brown, 2007): I call, I cling, I want . . . and there is no One to answer . . . no One on Whom I can cling . . . no, No One. Alone . . . . Where is my Faith . . . even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness . . . . My God . . . how painful is this unknown pain . . . I have no Faith . . . I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd my heart . . .& make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them . . . because of the blasphemy . . . If there be God . . . please forgive me . . . . When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me . . . and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. An answer to Hitchen’s charges from the Catholic perspective was published in the Catholic Herald under the headline: “The Truth About Mother Teresa’s ‘Atheism’ ” (Bullivant, 2012, 2016; Simon, 2007). The Catholic perspective is that Mother Teresa’s “atheism” was “experiential.” That is, atheism in this sense defines the acute and painful perception of God’s “seeming” absence. Such experiences are not uncommon in the Christian spiritual traditions. John of the Cross, Gemma Galgani, Paul of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Padre Pio are just some of those who have reported experiencing periods of spiritual desolation or abandonment (known in the Christian tradition as the “dark night of the soul”). The apologist claim is that Mother Theresa’s “thirst for Christ . . . motivated and sustained her courageous life of service and devotion.” Teresa explained: “It often happens that those who spend their time giving light to others remain in darkness themselves.” In one of his lectures, Hitchens talks about a challenge put to him by Dennis Praeger, the conservative American radio host. Praeger asked Hitchens how he would feel if he were walking alone in the dark and several men leaving a prayer meeting started coming toward him. Praeger wanted to make the point that because the men were coming from a prayer meeting, Hitchens would have nothing to fear. Hitchens replied that he had indeed been in such situations more than once: in Belfast, Beirut, Baghdad, Bombay, Bosnia, and Bethlehem (staying just within the “b’s”). This demonstrates the significance of context. Men coming from prayer meetings can in some contexts be threatening. When Worldviews Clash From the perspective of the New Atheists, theists appear to have evolved an “interesting bag of tricks.” The theists’ ways of thinking are simply not valid. They behave like con artists in their non-arguments, non-sequiturs, and the virtue they

The New Atheist Worldview 35 make out of trust. Hitchens complains that the believer has to say that there is a timeless spaceless God and that s/he knows God’s mind and can interpret God’s intentions. Dennett adds that this move is off-limits. Theists have been taught that it’s legitimate to debate this way. All of a sudden the four come along and say you can’t make that move in this game. They have very old arguments, Harris says. Their answers come from a time when we knew very little about science. Let’s watch how this idea develops in the four’s conversation. This will reiterate some earlier ground but put it in a broader context: HARRIS: . . . you can’t argue anyone out of their beliefs. So is this a completely fatuous exercise? DAWKINS: You can’t argue with it, because it’s faith. HARRIS: I think we have a cultural problem here. [SR: This would be an interesting place for a sociologist to intervene]. DAWKINS: . . . we all know people who seem to manage this kind of splitbrain feat of, as Sam says, believing one thing on a Sunday and then something totally contradictory, or incompatible, in the rest of the week. And there’s nothing, I suppose, neurologically wrong with that; there’s no reason why one shouldn’t have a brain that’s split in that kind of way. HITCHENS: I’m afraid to say that I think that cognitive dissonance is probably necessary for everyday survival. Everyone does it a bit. There’s nothing to argue about with [the jihadists]. I mean, there it’s a simple matter: I want them to be extirpated. That’s a purely primate response with me – recognizing the need to destroy an enemy in order to assure my own survival. It will always be the case that some will attribute their presence here to the laws of biology and others will attribute their presence here to a divine plan that has a scheme for them. [SR: This ignores social and cultural evolutionary theories]. DAWKINS: But you’re confusing whether [astrology] is going to be eradicated and whether you want it to be eradicated. And it sounds as though you don’t want it to be eradicated, because you want something to argue against. And something to sharpen your wits on. HITCHENS: Yes, I think that is in fact what I want. [SR: This is some distance from a realistic scientific perspective and closer to the debate game Hitchens is so adept at]. The Nature and Limits of the New Atheist Worldview The New Atheists are on the right intellectual path in questioning the ways of thought and belief that define theism and more general beliefs in supernatural, transcendental realms and beings. There are no such realms and beings. The New Atheists are a little weak on this point because they do not consistently deny the existence of God but argue that God “probably” doesn’t exist. This at least is Dawkins’ view. Their argument suffers from a scientistic bias, a commitment

36  The New Atheist Worldview to the tech/natural-physical science fix, the lack of a religious sentiment, and the failure to fully acknowledge their own spiritual leanings as religious which could help them to develop a religious sentiment. Their recognition of the importance of ritual and group solidarity puts them at the threshold of understanding that religion is one with society. And they are not very quick to the point that morals come from culture. This is the fatal answer to theists who believe the choice is either God or molecules. The Fifth Horseman: Ayaan Hirsi Ali In his introduction to Ali’s Infidel (2007), Christopher Hitchens (2007: xiii) writes of Ali’s origins in a culture in which she was expected to accept violence to her body, her autonomy, and her most intimate relationships fatalistically as the will of a supreme being. Her book is the story of her escape from a culture of “warfare, clan rivalry, scarcity, and repression . . . superimposed on the man-made tyrannies of religion and superstition” (Hitchens, 2007: xiii). She escaped to the West, to the Netherlands in fact, remade her life via a college degree in political science, a life in politics, and as an activist for the rights of Muslim women. It so happens that even the enlightened Dutch weren’t up to supporting her activism in the context of threats from the killers of Theo van Gogh (1957–2004) to kill her next. Gogh directed Ali’s film Submission: Part 1, which was a strong indictment of the treatment of women in Islam. On November 2, 2004, a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist, Mohammed Bouveri, assassinated Gogh. In the wake of this incident, the Dutch government said it could no longer guarantee Ali’s safety. Ali was now living in America. We are living, Hitchens (2007: xviii) wrote, in an era in which the problem isn’t with the “faith community” of Islam but rather with people like Ali who upset and “offend” that community. This raises the issue of blaming an entire faith community for the actions of an extremist fringe. The problem is that according to some interpretations of the Muslim hadith Ali has committed a heresy punishable by death by leaving Islam, the religion of her birth. The hadith is a collection of traditions containing sayings of the prophet Muhammad which, with accounts of his daily practice (the Sunna), constitute the major source of guidance for Muslims apart from the Koran. Saeed and Saeed (2004) argue that in our own time, any hadith on the issue of apostasy is supplanted by the Quranic position that there is no coercion when it comes to matters of freedom of faith and belief. Hitchens (2007: xix) concludes that her book is a rebuke to the claim that there is no difference between secular civilization and clerical barbarism. Ali is “an inspiration to all those who view this confrontation without apology as the defining struggle of our time.” C. Wright Mills (1959: 3–4), in defining the sociological imagination, wrote: “men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction.” They don’t connect their everyday lives to the dynamics of world history and society. They are blind to the ways in which humans and society, biography, history, self, and world interact. The structural transformations behind their personal troubles are invisible to them. Infidel is the story of an

The New Atheist Worldview  37 individual whose life unfolds into these connections, revealing her own life, her own self, as a nexus of society, biography, and history. And this allows us to follow her transformation as she encounters countervailing social networks that slowly displace the influences of the social networks of her early years in Somalia. We begin to see the results of this transformation bubbling up in the days following the 9/11 attacks. On the very next day, in fact, Ali was walking with her former teacher at Leiden, Ruud Koole. Responding to the Twin Towers bombings, Koole said: “It’s so weird, isn’t it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?” “But it is about Islam” – Ali (2008: 268) blurted out – “This is based in belief. This is Islam.” Ali (2008: 269) was now wondering: “where did I stand on Islam?” The commentaries she was reading by Arabists and non-Arabists alike were out of touch with reality, pushing a grammar of “Yes, but,” she thought. Yes, the killings were terrible but Islam had saved Aristotle and the zero. If not “Yes, but,” then the Americans were blamed for their “blind” support for Israel (Ali, 2008: 270–271): “Most articles analyzing Bin Laden and his movement were scrutinizing a symptom, a little like analyzing Lenin and Stalin without looking at the works of Karl Marx. The Prophet Muhammad was the moral guide not Bin Laden, and it was the Prophet’s guidance that should be evaluated. But what if I didn’t like the outcome of that analysis? What would I do then?” The analogy between Marx and Muhammad is misplaced; Marx was at best an out-of-place out-of-time symbol in the Russian Revolution and its aftermath and certainly would have denounced the activities of Stalin even if perhaps he would have found the intellectual Lenin if not the political Lenin more congenial. But all of this was causing Ali (2008: 271) to think more and more about the unthinkable, the taken for granted of her origins. She was taught as a Muslim that our earthly life was a passage, a test that leads to real life in a Hereafter: In that test, everyone should ideally live in a manner resembling, as closely as possible, the followers of the Prophet. Didn’t this inhibit investment in improving daily life? Was innovation therefore forbidden to Muslims? Were human rights, progress, women’s rights all foreign to Islam? In the wake of 9/11, Ali (2008: 272) found herself questioning the holiness of the Quran. She began to see it as an historical record, written by humans . . .. one version of events, as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the Prophet Muhammed died. And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war. But it was spiritually uplifting to believe in a Hereafter, to follow the Quran’s encouragement of compassion and charity. But she could no longer disregard the totalitarianism, the pure moral framework of Islam. It dawned on her that the Quran was relative, not absolute, “just another book.” She had to reject the idea of Hell and with all of these doubts piling up she had to ask “what do I believe, truly,

38  The New Atheist Worldview about God?” (Ali, 2008: 273). She found herself reasoning that if the Quran is not timeless then it’s not holy and then saying to a Somalian imam: “I think I’m on the brink of becoming an apostate. I’m finding it more and more difficult to believe.” She ends Chapter 14, “Leaving God,” having by now read Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Mill, Voltaire, Russell, and Popper, wanting to be like Popper; “free of constraint, recognizing greatness, but unafraid to detect its flaws” (Ali, 2008: 282): “I had enough of lying. I was no longer afraid of the Hereafter.” At the April 2015 annual convention of the American Atheists, Ali was the keynote speaker. American Atheists president Dave Silverman described her as a champion of atheist thought and atheist activism. Her position on Islam as a fascist cult of death has drawn criticism from more moderate ex-Muslims. She credits Philipse’s (2004) The Atheist Manifesto with influencing her pathway to disbelief in God. Notes 1 Unless otherwise specified all Four Horsemen quotes are from Hitchens et al. (2019). For a detailed discussion of Dawkins, see Chapter 5. 2 “Technological fix” (Johnston, 2018: 620): The term “technological fix,” coined by technologist/administrator Alvin Weinberg in 1965, vaunted engineering innovation as a generic tool for circumventing problems commonly conceived as social, political, and cultural. In his role as a consultant and essayist, Weinberg popularized the term “big science” to describe national goals and the competitive funding environment after the Second World War. Big science reoriented toward technological fixes, he argued, could provide a new “Apollo project” to address social problems of the future.

References Ali, A.H. (2008), Infidel (New York: Atria). Barnes, B. and D. Bloor (1982), “Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” pp. 21–47 in M. Hollis and S Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge: MIT Press). Bejan, A. (2020), Freedom and Evolution: Hierarchy in Nature, Society and Science (New York: Springer). Brown, A. (2007), “Was Mother Teresa an atheist?,” The Guardian: www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2007/aug/24/wasmotherteresaanatheist Bullivant, S. (2012), “Christian Spirituality and Atheism,” pp. 375–386 in P. Tyler and R. Woods, eds., The Bloomsbury Guide to Christian Spirituality (New York: Bloomsbury): https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-truth-about-mother-teresas-atheism/ Bullivant, S. (2016), “The truth about Mother Teresa’s ‘atheism,’ ” Catholic Herald: https:// catholicherald.co.uk/the-truth-about-mother-teresas-atheism/ Dawkins, R. (2019), Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (New York: Random House). Dennett, D. (2006), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking). Douglas, M. (1986), How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press). Durkheim, E. (1912/1995), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press; Fields trans.). Eliade, M. (1963), Myth and Reality (New York: Harper and Row).

The New Atheist Worldview  39 Hitchens, C. (2007), “Foreword,” pp. xiii–xix in A.H. Ali, ed., Infidel (New York: Atria Press). Hitchens, C., R. Dawkins, S. Harris and D. Dennett (2019), The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution (New York: Random House). Howick, J., D. Kolets, et al. (2022), “Most Healthcare Interventions Tested in Cochrane Reviews Are Not Effective According to High Quality Evidence: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 148: 160–169. Hume, D. (1779/1998), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Hackett). Johnston, S.F. (2018), “Alvin Weinberg and the Promotion of the Technological Fix,” Technology and Culture 59, 3: 620–651. Marx, K. (1844/1957), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” pp. 41–58 in K. Marx and F. Engels, eds., On Religion (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House). Mills, C.W. (1959), The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press). Montagu, A. (1952), Darwin, Competition, & Cooperation (New York: H. Schuman). NASEM (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) (2019), Reproducibility and Replicability in Science (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press). Nietzsche, F. (1865/1982), “Letter to His Sister,” p. 30 in W. Kaufman, trans., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking). Nietzsche, F. (1887/1974), The Gay Science (New York: Vintage). Otto, R. (1917/1952), The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press). Philipse, H. (2004), The Atheist Manifesto and the Unreasonableness of Religion, in Dutch: Atheïstisch manifest en De onredelijkheid van religie (Amsterdam: Prometheus). Restivo, S. and J. Croissant (1995), “Science, Social Problems, and Progressive Thought: Essays on the Tyranny of Science,” (including “Technoscience or Tyrannoscience Rex,” a review of M. Crichton’s Jurassic Park) pp. 39–87 in S.L. Star, ed., Ecologies of Science (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). Saeed, A. and H. Saeed (2004), Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam (New York: Routledge). Simon, S. (2007), “Mother Theresa’s doubts,” NPR Weekend End Edition Transcript: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?Storyid=13947541 Stark, R. (2001), One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Stark, R. (2008), Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New York: HarperCollins).

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. Alister 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 inhabits the “same” scientific world 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. Dawkins (2006: 308) objects to treating faith as a virtue. It’s an evil because it doesn’t need to be justified or recognize any opposing arguments. Exposing children to this idea is a “grievous wrong.” He would like children to be taught “to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question.” The McGraths (2007: 25–26) turn to Thomas Aquinas for their defense of faith: God is mirrored in his creation, the world. This is assumed on faith, a faith that resonates with what we observe: “faith in God offers a better “empirical fit” with the world than its alternatives.” This is basically the argument from design. Proof does not enter into the faith equation. The “appearance of design” is all that is needed to “persuade” the believer in the divine creativity behind the universe. Dawkins’ error, according to the McGraths (2007: 26), is that he confuses “an a posteriori demonstration of the coherence of faith and observation” and “an a priori proof of faith.” Christian and other religious beliefs are “perfectly reasonable to entertain” even though they cannot be proven. They can be justified. The problem with the McGraths’ position is that they understand it to mirror the fact that scientists believe some things to be true that later turn out to be false. Scientists do not believe in truths or facts of the matter; they do not have faith that things are DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-5

The Dawkins Delusion  41 as they appear to be. All truths and facts of the matter are held in abeyance under a tent of skepticism and always at the mercy of a process that is constantly testing old evidence and churning out new evidence. It is hard to imagine any theist who would describe the idea of God as highly presumptive, corrigible, and fallible. But this is exactly the status of scientific truths. The remainder of the McGraths’ objections is more fully developed by the theists I discuss in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. McGrath (2015) takes some more jabs at Dawkins in this book which take advantage of (1) Dawkins’ overzealous defense of science, a defense that shades into scientism, and (2) Dawkins’ inexpert grasp of theology and religion. Scientism and theological naiveté make Dawkins an easy target. But McGrath simply reiterates the equally naïve claim that it is unproblematic that “atheism is a form of faith” (McGrath, 2015: 71). He goes on to claim “what everyone knows to be true: what really matters in life can rarely be demonstrated by proofs. The existence of God is never going to be demonstrated with complete certainty: . . . it’s simply not in the same category as whether the earth is flat, or whether DNA takes the form of a double helix. It’s more like the question of whether democracy is better than totalitarianism. This cannot be settled by scientific means – but this does not prevent people from reaching their own conclusions. Nor does it entail that their decisions on such matters are irrational. Dawkins may shade into scientism and he may be naïve about theology and religion, but McGrath’s naiveté is grades beyond Dawkins’. The question of whether God exists or not is precisely in the same category as whether the earth is flat or not. What McGrath doesn’t grasp is that we can only determine whether the earth is flat or not with the sciences relevant to the question. Theology can’t make this determination; religion can’t. Psychology can’t make the determination; neither can economics. We need a combination of physical and natural sciences and an exploration of the question by a generationally linked network of scientists. Physics and astronomy can’t carry out a scientific comparative analysis of democracy and totalitarianism, neither can biology, or theology, but political science has the concepts, methods, and technologies to do this. The God question escapes the “can’t be proved or disapproved” shibboleth once sociology and anthropology arrive on the stage of the sciences. Once this happens, the entire edifice of the rationale for theology collapses. Science is characterized by constantly discovering new things and reconceptualizing old things. Furthermore, these discoveries can often be materialized in proof of concept technologies. Theology and religion keep re-discovering the same invisible thing over and over using the same passive method of introspection. Where science appeals to the five senses and observable manifestations collectively pursued over historical time and across cultures, theology relies on individual revelation. It’s hard to see how theology reflects the same reasoning processes in toto that characterize science. Atheists have had problems with Dawkins for some of the same reasons as the theists. The basic problem is twofold: a casual lay understanding of religion, and a

42  The Dawkins Delusion zealous commitment to a scientistic version of science. His social views also come into play (Sixsmith, 2021). Cultural Anglicans (e.g., Dawkins) and “hawkish Enlightenment liberals” (e.g., Harris) provoked radical progressives like P.Z. Myers (2014), who advocated “Atheism Plus.” Atheism plus social justice, plus women’s rights, plus anti-racism, anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia. One of the most interesting critics of Dawkins’ views on faith is Terry Eagleton (2009). Eagleton is another curiosity, a Marxist Catholic. He is an at times intimidating mobilizer of the apparatuses of scholarly inquiry but has a sweet spot for theology. It is easy enough for someone as erudite as Eagleton to show up the flaws in Dawkins limited command of the grounds of theological and religious thinking. But Eagleton’s theological leanings trap him too. Dawkins opens himself up to being labeled a fundamentalist scientist, ideologically scientistic. Eagleton (2009: 132) is critical of that form of postmodernism that seeks to “violently . . . repress or eradicate Nature.” Setting aside some of the subtleties Eagleton misses in this strategy, he writes that science is a human affair, like religion and any other culture, “shot through with prejudice and partisanship . . . ungrounded assumptions, unconscious biases, taken-for-granted truths, and beliefs too close to the eyeball to be objectified.” These institutions are not just procedures and hypotheses. This reality, which does not require the “travesty” of postmodernism to sustain, speaks against Dawkins’ claim that science is free of religion’s main vice, faith. Here is the crux of the problem believers have with science. And unfortunately they can rely on support from scholars like Eagleton and philosopher Charles Taylor (1989), both Catholics. Taylor (1989, Part II, cited in Eagleton, 2009: 132; and see Calhoun, 1999 on the limits of Taylor’s sociological imagination) writes that the assumptions in science that are not already based on evidence entail blind faith. The concept of “faith” is one of the defining issues in the conflict between science and religion, between atheists and theists. After cutting through the variety of definitions of faith one finds in the vast literature at issue here and in philosophical discourse, the following points matter: 1. Faith almost always implies certitude about facts of the matter where there is no evidence. 1a. It can also have the weaker meaning of “strong belief.” 2. Denying that science involves faith is a way of differentiating science from religion, perhaps identifying them as “nonoverlapping magisteria” in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms. 3. Arguing that science requires faith is a strategy for bringing science and religion closer together, perhaps to argue that atheists are in no better position to defend the truth of their claims than are the theists. Theists can only attribute “faith” to scientists if they confuse faith with assumptions and/or beliefs. Science is about knowing things based on evidence available to the sensory apparatuses of a collective – evidence we can see, touch, taste, smell, or hear. There are things in the world of science that can escape the direct evidence

The Dawkins Delusion  43 of our senses but we can know them by indirect measurements, successful experiments, and technologies that incorporate and manifest such “invisible” things. We have millennia of “proof of concept” in the workings of our science-based technologies – we have medicines that cure, space probes and rockets that reach their extra-terrestrial destinations, planes that fly. The evidence of believers for invisible things is a matter of individual consciousness, such as the revelations that come from the Holy Spirit. Science is not a matter of individual consciousness or revelation; it is a collective process that unfolds over time and across cultures by way of the generational intersubjective checks and balances of scientists. This process is continuous, driven by skepticism, corrigible, fallible, and ever uncertain. All of the problems identified can indeed accrue to the individual, but this is not the case for the collective. The fact that this will not persuade theists is one of the problems this book is designed to illuminate. Dawkins Per Se Dawkins’ views are colored by an exaggerated version of science captured in the term “scientistic.” That is, he has an exaggerated belief in the principles and methods of science. This doesn’t imply that he isn’t a good scientist, just that he doesn’t fully understand or appreciate the complexities of the social patterns of scientific practice demonstrated empirically by sociologists of science. And it doesn’t mean he doesn’t know the difference between good reasoning and bad, and good logic and bad. Given statements such as that by the seventeenth-century archbishop James Ussher that the origin of the universe can be dated as October 22, 4004 BCE, Dawkins has some basis for wanting to eliminate theologians from reasoned conversations. He goes further and claims that theologians characteristically “just make stuff up.” From my perspective, there’s some justification for this claim as a first approximation. Theology at its best is a little more complicated than that even if evidentiary bases for theological claims are not what one would expect as a scientist and may be entirely missing empirically. Ignorance in science, Dawkins says, “is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched”; in theology, “it is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.” Theologians, he says, not only lack an interest in factual evidence but are contemptuous of it.” But he does understand the symbolic and mythic significance of their claims. This could be an opportunity to discuss the nature and value of symbols and myths from a cultural point of view. But because these appear to have no basis in the physical or natural world, Dawkins dismisses them outright. Notice that “reasoned conversations” define a worldview and a culture. It underscores that what is at issue here is “incommensurable world views.” There are obstructions blocking communication bridges that might link such worldviews. It is already clear, then, that the atheist/theist debaters are just ships passing in the night. Some communication might be possible across this gap but Dawkins does not know how to use “symbolic or mythic significance” as a deadly argumentative tool. Theologians are expert at this. We will see more about how this works when we consider the theist arguments.

44  The Dawkins Delusion Scientism is likely to be wed to the “technological fix,” the idea that big technological projects like the “Apollo project” could serve as models for solving future social problems. This idea, most recently echoed in “solutionism” (a term introduced and criticized by Morozov, 2013) as a techno-utopian dream, has channeled confidence in and controversy over using science and technology to solve social problems. The uncritical support for STEM (Norris, 2022; D.W. White, 2014) education is another example of science, politics, and economics ruled by the principle of the technological fix. Efforts to broaden the scope of STEM to include the arts, humanities, and writing have not seen fit to include the social sciences (but see the SHAPE proposal – Social Science, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy – by Julia Black (2022), 31st president of the British Academy). Prominent critics of STEM include Cornell engineering professor Lance Collins (2015) and Fareed Zakaria (2015), Washington Post columnist and CNN host. Dawkins wants us to know that he is passionate about whether a supernatural creator God is a matter of fact. Bracketing Dawkins’ scientism, this is a sentiment I can embrace in my worldview. The difference between us is that I consider the matter settled. There is a childlike simplicity in Dawkins’ understanding of the God delusion. His solution is expressed in the last sentence of his latest book (Dawkins, 2019: 278): “we should take our courage in both hands, grow up and give up on all gods. . .. ” It’s just not going to be that easy, and this book will show why. Conclusion: Is God a Delusion? Religion, the anarchist Bakunin (1916/1970: 68) wrote, “is a collective insanity, the more powerful because it is traditional folly, and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity.” At a personal level, I admit to experiencing believers as literally insane, schizophrenic, and delusionary. But are believers insane, delusionary in a professional technical sense? This question arises in part because Dawkins’ The God Delusion provoked critics of various stripes to argue that whatever God is, it is not a delusion. From a “common sense” lexicographical standpoint, a delusion is something that is believed or propagated in the face of clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity. If there is a dispute over what counts as “clear or reasonable contradictory evidence” we have a problem. Dawkins believes that there is something like “clear or reasonable evidence” that supports the nonexistence of God. The theists believe there is “clear or reasonable evidence” that supports the existence of God. Another problem arises because delusions cannot always be distinguished from overvalued ideas (Kiran and Chaudhury, 2009: 3). From my perspective, we (the scientific community, represented by the sociological community aligned with Durkheim) have clear and reasonable evidence that there is no God. It is therefore reasonable for me to label those who believe in God delusional. Delusion has historically been taken to be the basic sign of madness. Now comes a third problem identified by Kiran and Chaudhury (2009: 3). There is “an unavoidable field of tension in which research on delusion is situated,” between (1) a “tight objectivity-oriented conceptualization,” and (2) “the basic anthropological dimensions of subjectivity” and human interdependence:

The Dawkins Delusion  45 “delusion is never a mere object which can be objectively detected and described, because it evolves and exists within subjective and interpersonal dimensions only, however ‘pathological’ these dimensions may be.” The “naturalistic” perspective on the science of delusions is that it is a second-best solution, useful only until we have a grounded empirical neurobiological basis for identifying delusions. The “phenomenological” perspective, by contrast, insists on the scientific significance of the subjective dimension without ruling out neurobiological research strategies (Kiran and Chaudhury, 2009: 4; note that the authors closely follow Karl Jaspers (1963) writings on psychopathology). Kiran and Chaudhury provide an exhaustive inventory of concepts, theories, and criticisms of delusion. Cutting through this chaos to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a delusion is defined as a false belief about the real world that is held in spite of what most other people believe and in the face of incontrovertible evidence and proof to the contrary (Kiran and Chaudhury, 2009: 12): “The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious faith).” This seems to rule out “God” as a delusion. Resolving this issue here is not within the scope of this chapter. The psychiatric nuances Kiran and Chaudhury alert us to do not provide grounds for the use of the term by Dawkins and his critics. Let’s proceed without trying to establish that belief in God is a psychiatric disorder. We can start with the fact that Dawkins’ (2006: 5) use of the term “delusion” “disquieted some psychiatrists who regard it as a technical term.” Dawkins decides to stick with the term and justify his usage. Following the dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word, Dawkins treats a delusion as “a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of a psychiatric disorder.” This is not consistent with the DSM definition given earlier. In the typical offhanded manner he has been criticized for, he writes (Dawkins, 2006: 5) that on the matter whether belief in God is a psychiatric disorder, he is inclined to follow Pirsig (1974): one person suffering from a delusion is called insanity; many people suffering from a delusion is called religion. A. McGrath (1953–), the reader will recall, is a Christian apologist, priest, and theologian with three PhDs, including one in molecular biophysics. In his foreword to Sims (2009: ix), he writes that Richard Dawkins gave us “God is a delusion” as the sound bite of 2006. Dawkins’ view rested on “thin scholarship” and required a popular rebuttal on the psychiatry of religion. He then introduces Andrew Sims’ (2009) Is Faith Delusion? Why Religion Is Good for Your Health to address the pressing need for an answer to Dawkins. The book, he writes (Sims, 2009: ix), is the rebuttal we needed to the works of “shallow thinking” atheists: “It is a reliable, authoritative and accessible account of the psychiatric dimensions of belief in God.” But it isn’t. You will not find Dawkins or God in Sims’ index and there is no mention of Dawkins in Sims’ (2009: 117–143) chapter on “Delusion is a psychiatric term.” What Sims defends is the idea that faith and spirituality are not delusions. And here he is on solid sociological ground. Let’s see why. Sims (2009: 70) examines the history of the war between the Church and Psychiatry and argues that the conflict has been resolved to a considerable extent.

46  The Dawkins Delusion Members of both establishments, he writes, “are trying to do a somewhat similar job, helping distressed people, from radically different backgrounds.” Asking if “ ‘faith is delusion’ implies that religion is a negative factor in health” (Sims, 2009: 94). In fact, the research demonstrates a positive association between religion and physical and mental health, longevity and mortality (Hummer et al., 1999; Sherkat and Ellison, 1999; Ellison and Sherkat, 1995: 1256). This is the sense in which “religion is real” even if God is not. Religion as a family and community networking apparatus can help shape behaviors and lifestyles in ways that engender health and well-being, and it can provide a collective support network and coping mechanisms for individuals. This includes integrating individuals into social networks of caring (Idler, 1995). God is not absent from Sims’ discussion. He writes that (Sims, 2009: 142) “if it is not true that Christ is risen, then our faith is futile, in vain; this is not far from implying delusional.” A few paragraphs later (Sims, 2009: 143) he writes: “faith is spiritual, positive, subject to possible doubt, can be corrupted, but is not classifiable as a morbid or psychiatric phenomenon.” So in the end, Sims does imply rather strongly that God is not a delusion but that if Christ is not risen, then delusion is implied. And since I claim that it is as certain that there is no God as that the earth is not flat, Dawkins comes closer to the mark than the Christian apologists. Prologue to Chapters 6, 7, and 8: Theists Opposed to New Atheism The New Atheists have an advantage over theists when it comes to connecting to the real world. Even though the New Atheists are limited by scientism, tech/ science-fixes, and the lack of a sociological imagination, the science they espouse tends to protect them from wishful thinking, or letting hope drive their inquiries. Ideally, atheism should embrace the sort of sympathy for not knowing things, for not having all the answers expressed by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman (1999: 25) was comfortable not knowing things, being lost in a mysterious, purposeless universe; it didn’t frighten him. This is just the sort of fear that seems to motivate theists. References Bakunin, M. (1916/1970), God and the State (New York: Dover). Black, J. (2022), “Becoming shape,” The British Academy: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/ blog/becoming-shape/ Calhoun, C. (1999), “Charles Taylor on identity and the social imaginary,” Paper Presented to ASCUS, Nov. 20: Pittsburgh, PA. Collins, L.R. (2015), “Why social sciences are just as important as STEM disciplines,” Washington Post Opinion: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-social-sciencesare-just-as-important-as-stem-disciplines/2015/06/09/65f9b8e2–0bcc-11e5–95fd-d580f1c5d44e_story.html Dawkins, R. (2006), The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin). Dawkins, R. (2019), Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (New York: Random House).

The Dawkins Delusion  47 Eagleton, T. (2009), Reason Faith, and Reason: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press). Ellison, C. and D. Sherkat (1995), “Is Sociology the Core Discipline for the Scientific Study of Religion?,” Social Forces 73: 1255–1266. Feynman, R. (1999), The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (New York: Basic Books). Hummer, R.A., R.G. Rogers, C.B. Nam and C.G. Ellison (1999), “Religious Involvement and U.S. Adult Mortality,” Demography 36, 2: 273–285. Idler, E. (1995), “Religion, Health, and Nonphysical Senses of Self,” Social Forces 74: 683–704. Jaspers, K. (1963), General Psychopathology, translated by J Hoenig & M.W. Hamilton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Kiran, C. and S. Chaudhury (2009), “Understanding Delusion,” Industrial Psychology Journal 18, 1: 3–18. McGrath, A. (2015), Dawkins’ GOD: From the Selfish Gene to the God Delusion (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell). McGrath, A. and J.C. McGrath (2007), The Dawkins DELUSION? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press). Morozov, E. (2013), To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: Public Affairs). Myers, P.Z. (2014), The Happy Atheist (New York: Vintage). Norris, M. (2022), “Why is STEM important? The impact of STEM education on society,” Study in the USA: www.studyusa.com/en/a/2157/why-is-stem-important-the-impact- ofstem-education-on-society Pirsig, R. (1974), The Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: William Morrow and Co.). Sherkat, D. and C. Ellison, (1999), “Recent Developments and Current Controversies in the Sociology of Religion,” Annual Review of Sociology 25: 363–394. Sims, A. (2009), Is Faith Delusion? Why Religion Is Good for Your Health (London: Continuum). Sixsmith, B. (2021), “Why the Atheists Turned on Dawkins,” April 23: unherd.comsmith Taylor, C. (1989), Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). White, D.W. (2014), “What Is STEM Education and Why Is It Important,” Florida Association of Teacher Educators Journal 1, 14: 1–9. Zakaria, F. (2015), “Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous,” Washington Post Opinion: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-stem-wont-makeus-successful/2015/03/26/5f4604f2-d2a5-11e4-ab77-9646eea6a4c7_story.html

6

Case Study The Tangled Logic of Frank Turek1

Let’s consider an exemplary rebuttal to the New Atheists, Frank Turek’s (2014) argument that “atheists need God to make their case.” Turek has an MPA from George Washington University and a Doctor of Ministry in Apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminar. He is the founder and president of Christian Apologetics Ministry. Turek introduces the acronym CRIMES to ground his claim that atheists must steal from God to make their arguments. Atheists talk and write about Causality, 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. C-: The Causality argument depends on the assumption that “no one created something out of nothing.” We cannot doubt the law of causality because that would entail doubting everything including reasoning and doing science. Turek is careful to be clear here: on his interpretation; the law of causality isn’t that everything has a cause; it is that “everything that has a beginning has a cause.” For Turek’s argument to unfold it’s clear that the universe has to have a beginning. Here he can turn to science and the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang ensures that the universe had a beginning, according to Turek. He also takes time to point out that some scientists have been troubled by the idea of a “beginning” because they favored an eternal universe. Does the Big Bang in fact mean that we have proof that the universe had a beginning? Turek’s approach faces two serious obstacles. First, causality is not a simple matter of a universal law. Relativity theory, for example, abandons the concept of absolute time and space and this complicates our everyday billiards ball physics concept of cause and effect. Causality is even more complicated once we enter the quantum world. Theists are uncomfortable with uncertainty, and uncertainty, especially based on quantum theory, seems to be a natural part of the universe. Causality also gets complicated as we turn increasingly to non-linear, fractal, probabilistic, and chaotic dynamics models, moves necessitated by our increasing recognition of everyday, micro-, macro-, and cosmic complexities. This is not a friendly world for theists. Our understanding of quantum phenomena is burdened by mysteries. But these are mysteries that challenge the simple notion of universal laws of causality. “Virtual” particles can have real effects – effects without causes in the ordinary sense. In the context of these complexities, different disciplines have developed different understandings of causality and probability (e.g., Norton, 2003; Ben-Menahem, DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-6

Case Study  49 2018). There are issues of the relationship between causality, probability, and mechanism that pose as yet unresolved difficulties in science and philosophy (Illari et al., 2011; and see Bohm, 1971). Some of this research supports the idea of particles “popping up” randomly in a vacuum. The tunneling proposal says that the universe “popped up” in this way, as a quantum mechanical tunneling event (Illari et al., 2011; and see Bohm, 1971; Vilenkin, 1984; Linde, 1984; Kim, 2004; Brandenberger and Peter, 2016). The general cause of an effect is a tangle of causal tracks and establishing a single, general cause is only possible in simple cases. Causality is not a single concept and in many ways ambiguous. Some philosophers consider the concept outdated and out of step with the central ideas of fundamental physics. This idea was already being proposed in the classical era, as early as 1876 by Gustav Kirchhoff, and by Ernst Mach in 2005. Causal thinking in science seems to be pluralistic rather than part of a universal framework. Some philosophers have proposed that “cause” is a family resemblance concept. Theists are faced here with a recurring threat to their reliance on science, because concepts and findings in science are always subject to the norm of organized skepticism, leading to reevaluations and reconstructions of paradigms. They face the same problem with the Big Bang theory that they face with causality. As we will see again and again, theists are forced to try to justify their faith and beliefs by turning to science because of its obvious successes, but science will continue to disappoint theists because it cannot provide them with the rock-like certainty they require. One of the most important lessons postmodernists taught us, when they weren’t driving us in nihilistic and naively relativist directions, is that concepts are contextual. Concepts like “God” and “atom,” and even personalities like “Jesus” and “Alexander,” are understood differently today than they were 2,000 years ago. Let’s take Turek’s biblical God and assume that he understands God in the same way the writers of the Bible understood him. The problem is that trying to defend that God’s nature and existence by turning to the Big Bang is bound to be problematic. The Big Bang is important for Turek because it gives the universe a beginning and Turek can use his tortured logic to claim that if there was a beginning – that makes room for a creator God. In his colorful terms, if there was a Big Bang, there must have been a Banger! God may not change, and Turek’s faith and belief may not change, but science is changing all the time, and even at a given point in time it is always juggling multiple paradigms. A once and only Big Bang? Lemaître’s pioneering concept of the Big Bang wound the expansion of the universe back to an energy bundle. Was that a singular “beginning,” a coming into existence out of nothing? But then where did the initial energy come from? That question was not eliminated by Alan Guth’s introduction of the concept of cosmic inflation. In 2016, Stephen Hawking said that asking what came before the Big Bang “would be like asking what lies south of the South Pole.” In a 1983 paper, Hawking and Hartle envisioned a cosmos shaped like a shuttlecock. This cosmos has a diameter of zero at its nadir and smoothly expands upward. The whole shuttlecock cosmos is described by a “wave function of the universe” that encompasses past, present, and future. This makes moot all efforts

50  Case Study to think in terms of a creation (on Hawking/Hartle and Penrose/Hawking see Wolchover, 2019). This is by no means the end of the story. Neil Turok, a former Hawking collaborator, and others have pointed out the ambiguity in a “no-boundary wave function.” Others disagreed with the challenge to Hawking and Hartle, arguing that the new approach was plagued by technical errors. The Penrose-Hawking “singularity theorems” do not allow for space-time to pop up in a smooth, undramatic way at a specific “point.” If we accept that the evidence overwhelmingly supports a Big Bang, all we have is a description of how the universe began. The model does not explain why it began, it makes no assumptions about what or who made the universe, and it doesn’t assume what, if anything, came before the Big Bang. Cosmologists assume cosmic inflation but cannot prove it. The Big Bang is generally accepted as the starting point for thinking about how the universe began, but the how’s and why’s are unknown and perhaps unknowable. The Big Bang is entangled with theories about singularities, tunneling, the multiverse, an oscillating universe with many beginnings, and a collision between two membranes. We have no idea if there was a time before the Big Bang, if the universe will expand forever, if new Big Bangs are possible, if the universe is finite or infinite, or if there are other universes. The very idea that time is real has been challenged. We have a lot to learn about our place in nature’s grand scheme. And while it may be true that wherever our theories fall the Big Bang will always be a part of the picture, it does not appear to be the beginning we once supposed it to be. The mathematical models that ground our cosmological theories do not offer believers the “rock like, unshakeable certainty on which all human certainty could be built” that guides theologian Hans Küng’s need for God (see Chapter 9). Turek is delighted that he can hang his faith on a Big Bang model that represents an absolute beginning. But what happens if we live in a CPT-symmetric universe, which would mean that the before-and-after Big Bang universe is a universe-antiuniverse pair that popped out of nothing (Powell, 2019; Seigel, 1921; Boyle et al., 2018). If this doesn’t complicate the picture enough to undermine Turek’s efforts to draw theological conclusions from the Big Bang, there is the further issue that a great deal of our physics of the very large and very small depends on mathematical equations and models that are functions of mathematics itself and do not simply represent a real world. I have referred to this feature of mathematics as the source of mathegrammatical illusions. Turek’s “argument” depends on the “absolute beginning to all of material reality,” and there is no scientific way to validate absolute time and space let alone cosmological beginnings. Let’s consider another aspect of Turek’s theo-amateur cosmology. He claims there are only three possible ways to explain the fine-tuning of the universe. Life in our universe is sensitive to the values of the fundamental constants. If their values had differed only slightly from those we observe, the universe would have evolved differently and life as we know it would not have been possible. Finetuning could be accounted for by chance, physical necessity, or design. Turek dismisses “chance” because “the probabilities are too small.” This makes no sense. There is no reasonable way for Turek to identify probabilities in terms that could be

Case Study 51 used to predict or infer the likelihood of a particular configuration of fundamental constants. There is a literature on the principle of small probability that shows that here as well as elsewhere in science, things are more complicated than Turek can imagine (Chen and Fang, 2018). He dismisses physical necessity on the grounds that the universe could have had different physical conditions. We have only one universe so it’s difficult to know what “different physical conditions” could mean. There is a theory that could explain why the universe is as it is. Bootstrap physics has been used to demonstrate that the universe is the way it is because it couldn’t be any different. Bootstrap physics, along with its major advocate Geoffrey Chew, disappeared in the scrap heap of 1960s ideas and ideals that failed to survive the revolutionary turmoil that impacted virtually all aspects of everyday and professional life. The theory has been making a comeback (Baumann et al., 2020; Poland et al., 2019; Poland and Simmons-Duffin, 2016), and again this complicates the situation Turek is trying to grapple with as an amateur without a serious understanding of how science works. In their debates with the theists, the New Atheists fail to take advantage of the complexities of cosmological science as an answer to the theists’ use of Big Bang cosmology, causality, and fine-tuning. Instead, they focus on the irrationality of positing God once it has been “established” that the universe had a beginning. And if one wants to posit a designer, why does it have to be the biblical God, the Christian God? Is the universe fine-tuned for life? Does the presence of life prove that there is a God? What good will this proof be if the reversal of earth’s magnetic field and the emergence of multiple poles lead to our extinction? What if an asteroid or nuclear war destroys all life on earth? What if a “nearby” star goes nova? What if (like virtually all other species) we, too, become extinct? And what about our ultimate demise when the sun goes nova? (on existential risks, see Ainscough et al., 2021). And if there is a God who fine-tuned the universe for life, why didn’t he fine-tune it for life with quality? Or for life in an eternal paradise? To answer these questions, and more generally the problem of evil, the theists must call on an entity who exists outside of time and space, and is immaterial. How could we possibly have access to knowledge of this entity given that we exist in time and space and are material beings? The argument is that God reveals himself through revelation – which begs the question of how communication can bridge the gap between a timeless, spaceless, immaterial God and us – or through his works, that is, we ourselves and the universe around us. Not only can we know this unknowable entity but we can know or infer or logically reconstruct the way his mind works. This strains human reasoning to the breaking point. Assume we have a universe that had a beginning, and we ask, “Where did the universe come from?” God created it, say the theists. An intelligent ten-year-old could see that this doesn’t solve anything since we are then faced with the question “Who created God?” It is as easy for this ten-year-old to imagine a universe that can’t be explained as it is to imagine a God that can’t be explained. Turek’s answer is that God was not created. God “is the self-existent, uncaused first cause,” an entity without a beginning. Again, our ten-year-old understands that this is the

52  Case Study same thing logically as claiming that the universe it self-existent. Is it any wonder that atheists new and old find it impossible to navigate this logic of hope, wishful thinking, and (dare I say) delusion? R-: logic also plays a key part in Turek’s “system.” The Causality argument is followed by the argument from Reason. There is a telling exchange between the Christian Greg Bahnsen and atheist Gordon Stein that Turek describes. In the exchange, Bahnsen and Stein are discussing the nature of logic. Bahnsen asks Stein if there are laws of logic, and Stein answers, “Absolutely.” “Are they sociological laws,” Bahnsen asks, “or laws of thought?” Stein answers, “They are laws of thought.” Bahnsen then gets Stein to admit that laws of logic are not material. Following this line of reasoning, Turek then says to a questioner at one of his talks that the laws of logic “are outside of time, outside of space, and they are not made of material.” Turek goes on to claim that human beings change but the laws of logic do not change, that we cannot each have our own conceptions of logic, and that “all debates presuppose that an objective truth exists outside the human mind of each debater.” The objective of a debate is for each debater to try to show that his/ her claims are closer to that objective truth. Again, Turek is operating in a complex world with a simplistic understanding of the facts. Here, as throughout Turek’s and the theist paradigm, sociology is ignored, dismissed, or unknown. The laws of logic are in fact changeable, and they have social roots. I have shown this, for example, in my examinations of Boole’s laws of thought and the field of metamathematics.2 The logician and mathematician George Boole made one of the classic efforts to discover the “laws of pure thought.” He failed because he did not recognize the social and material roots of categorical propositions. Such propositions are in fact high-level exercises in generalization rooted in real-world experiences and behaviorbased chains of shared inductive inferences. In the case of metamathematics we find not products of pure mentality but rather products of the highly refined professional culture of mathematics. Increasingly general ideas and concepts are generated as new generations of mathematicians take the products of earlier generations as the resources for their own productive activities. Pure mathematics, pure logic, and pure science can serve to demonstrate a society’s capacity for original research. But the “purity” of these activities is a matter of false consciousness, a failure to see the sociology of it. The ideology of purity, of absolute truth, can demarcate and defend the pursuit of science, mathematics, or logic in the service of one or another set of social, political, military, economic, or religious interests. Individuals, in particular like the theists, can seize on it as a strategy for gaining control over a world that threatens, in spite of its “fine-tuning,” to disintegrate into chaos at any moment, a world ruled by chance and probability. This is a strategy that can ground the search for god, beauty, truth, and all that is considered universal and eternal. Suppose that logic transcends society, culture, history, and even time and space as Turek would have it. If that were the case we would be speechless and unaware in the face of logic. This is a special case of the apophatic fallacy. Apophatic theology seeks to describe the unknown and unknowable God by negation. The alternative cataphatic theology is considered by the apophaticists as limiting God

Case Study 53 by trying to describe Him positively. In an apophatic framework, a sociologist could have nothing to say about logic just as s/he could have nothing to say about God. The assumed certainty of Logik like that of Mathematik has classically been protected by a reinforced iron cage of certainty, authority, taboo, and tradition. That iron cage has made the “laws of logic,” as Turek (mis)understands them, invulnerable to criticism, skepticism, analysis, reading, and deconstruction. But that iron cage is and has always been an illusion, much more readily penetrated than the warning signs pinned to it are designed to make us think (cf., Nye, 1990; Restivo, 2014). We have created monsters in math, logic, and God, then forgotten that we created them and allowed them to frighten us into silence. Logic and mathematics are not once and for all monoliths to reason: there is no Logic, only logics; there is no Mathematic, only mathematics (Lotze, 1843; Spengler, 1926). Turek’s arguments are simplistic in the extreme because he is stuck in a theistic world of Platonic irrealities. His challenges to atheists generally begin with “how could mere molecules in motion explain.” This implies that we live in a black-andwhite world in which things are either material or immaterial and causes are either supernatural or biological. If we can identify features of reality that are assumed to be universal and eternal, we have set the stage for explaining the immaterial, universal, and eternal by reference to a cause (assuming the universal, eternal laws of logic and causality). That cause would have to be universal, eternal, and unchanging. And it would have to have the capacity to cause things to happen. “Laws,” Turek (2014: 36) states, “only come from lawgivers. That’s what all experience shows us.” This is the fallacy of localism. It assumes that our human experience, which is severely limited when we set ourselves in the context of the unfathomable age (or agelessness) and size (or “sizelessness”) of the universe, can be extrapolated to the Cosmos. We have already seen that the idea fails when we turn our attention to the very large (general relativity) and very small (quantum mechanics) that our technological and mathematical prosthetics give us limited access to. The fact that we have come to describe patterns and regularities in the world using the term “laws” does not mean that objects and events “obey” laws or that there must be a lawgiver: the objects and events of the world are what they are independent of whether or not we capture their patterns in statements that we label “laws.” Science studies and its allied fields in history and philosophy have given us “histories” of science once seen as universal and timeless. A similar approach to the “laws of nature” would give us conceptual histories, biographies, and the distribution of such laws across the disciplines. The “laws of nature” do not give us descriptions of reality. They describe ideal objects in models. Understood correctly, scientific explanations are given in terms of a “simulacrum” account, not traditional covering laws. An anti-realistic understanding of theoretical laws does not entail anti-realism about theoretical entities which can be grounded in concrete localized causal physical processes (“entity realism”). And the possibility that the fundamental constants might be variable is yet another stick of dynamite waiting to blow up Turek’s logic. The evidence for constancy is pretty solid and stable but the experimental search for a varying constant is ongoing in physics. The Hubble Constant, which predicts

54  Case Study the rate of expansion of the universe, appears to change as a function of how it is measured. In practice the Hubble constant is not a constant, with different ways of measuring it coming up with different answers. It’s also known to change over time, so should perhaps be called the Hubble parameter. This result is a consequence of increasing accuracy in astrophysical data-gathering instruments. The fundamental constants are fixed parameters in the Standard Model of particle physics. However, in many extensions of that model, these parameters may change. In higher-dimensional theories, for example, they depend on the size of compactified extra dimensions. Many modern theories predict that the values of the fundamental constants are dependent on time, position, or the local density of matter.3 Unfortunately for the Tureks of the world, the robust, core certainties of science are embedded in a sea of uncertainty, change, and chaos. Complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity are features of the real world, but Turek and his fellow apologists are uncomfortable in, even frightened by, that world. “We’ve . . . seen that minds and selves exist,” Turek writes,” and they can’t be explained in completely materialistic terms by scientific experiments.” This is patent nonsense, and if religion-versusscience debates weren’t claiming so much attention, if issues turning on religion and politics were not central features of our contemporary culture, we could easily ignore people like Turek. The violent ways in which they dismantle logic, reason, and argument makes them a threat to democratic ways of life and they must be attended to. The New Atheists don’t make this easy because they approach debates with theists using scientistic arguments, and without the sociological tools they need to definitively challenge the theists’ idea that we are either molecules in motion and moist robots or children of (the Christian!) God. I-: The third item in the CRIMES acronym is “Information & Intentionality.” Turek does not grasp science, and he trips all over himself mangling his version of logic. His arguments are seasoned with childish efforts to demonstrate logical contradictions. Intentionality refers to what Turek views as goal-directedness throughout the universe. This requires a “sustaining external intellect.” Yes, there is God “holding you and the universe around you together right now.” Only a schizophrenic could claim to be living in such a world, a world that has no relationship to the world I see around me with my fellow scientists. Wars abound, refugees are everywhere, the coronavirus has caused the deaths of millions of human beings, and existential threats are putting humans, all life, and the planet itself at risk. Information also points to this God holding everything together with the information in DNA. Here Turek compares DNA to the information God might use to prove his existence, a sign written in the sky: “This is God! I certainly do exist!” “Life forms,” Turek writes, “contain information-rich sequences that are far longer than ‘I AM HERE,’ or ‘HEY ROGER, THIS IS GOD!’ ” He is referring to DNA. Your genome, he writes, is an information-rich text that is over three billion characters long, all in the right order to ensure your survival. They didn’t get into that order by virtue of some physical or chemical reaction; “Minds determine messages and codes; natural forces do not,” according to Turek. He can’t imagine an entire bookshop arising as a result of a printing shop explosion. Well, neither can I. However, Turek needs to be reminded here that his perfect God introduced disease-causing

Case Study 55 mutations in specific genes into the “right order” of His information-rich text. These can be severe in terms of gene function. They are rare and so genetic disorders are individually rare. Many genes can vary and cause genetic disorders so when aggregated they represent a significant portion of medical conditions, especially in pediatric medicine (Hamosh et al., 2002). Unlike Turek and even unlike some atheists, I have sociology to turn to understand why we don’t need tortured inferences that lead to the belief that there is a Creator God that explains allegedly unseen immaterial realities like the laws of logic, mathematics, and nature and our own minds and selves. Sociology and anthropology have revealed a realm of symbols that help us explain the material nature of logic, mind, and God. God is real not as a Creator entity but as a human-created symbol. This ancient idea was grounded sociologically in Emile Durkheim’s classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, published in 1912. We know a great deal more about the human origins of the gods than theists and atheists alike have yet to grasp (Swanson, 1960; Collins, 1975: see Index for “religion;” Collins, 1992: 30–59; Maryanski, 2018; Restivo, 2021). M-: Sociology and anthropology and the concept of culture are all we need to eliminate Turek’s claims that (1) there is an objective morality and (2) there would be no objective morality unless God exists. Morals arise as societies evolve and rules of right and wrong, good and bad behavior are systematized that contribute to sustaining social life. Turek’s level of confusion about this matter is stunning. We don’t have to choose between morals arising arbitrarily and randomly in evolution, morals as grounded in biology, and morals as laws of God. We can turn to culture. This isn’t simple. The myth of individualism blinds us to society and the ways in which it forms us. I have identified “dissocism” as a form of “socialblindness” (loosely analogous to mindblindness in autism) that keeps people from seeing the social and seeing it as a causal force. Just as there is an autism spectrum disorder, I posit a dissocism spectrum disorder. This condition and the myth of individualism are most prevalent in American culture. More generally, we are blinded to social and cultural forces by the fallacy of introspective transparency. We seem to have immediate and transparent access to who and what we are, our agency and free will. But experience is a poor source of knowledge. Yes, it is the ultimate test of whether something is true or false. But it is not individual experience we depend on but collective experience unfolding over historical time and across cultures. Consider that we experience the earth as stationary. And yet we know it moves. It wobbles in precession on its axis, it is rotating at any point on the equator at 1,000 miles an hour, it travels around the sun at 66,000 miles an hour, and it is part of a solar system orbiting about the center of the Milky Way at 140 miles per second. The Milky Way itself is part of a cluster of galaxies (The Local Group) traveling toward the center of the cluster at 25 miles per second. And The Local Group itself is speeding through space at 370 miles per second. We feel none of this complex system of motions. So if our experience deceives us how do we know about all of these motions? We know about them because of the collective intersubjectively tested experience of scientists working across many united generations. If we are deceived by our experience in the case of the motions of the earth, could

56  Case Study we be deceived by our experience of our free will and agency? This is exactly what I claim; our individual experience fails us even in our most intimate, immediate, transparent sense of who and what we are. There is another way to approach this problem that implies a sociology of everyday life (Adler, 2007: 283–284): “Relying on faith and trust as a response to supernatural or unethical claims is sometimes compared to our receiving testimony from strangers – we trust them even though we do not know that they will speak truly.” Ask a stranger which train to take to get to Essex Street in Manhattan from Queens in New York City. He tells you, “Take the M or J train.” You know the stranger might be wrong out of error or malice. But you’re not without the restraining cognitive resource of plausibility. You would not accept his response if he told you to go to JFK airport to catch a commuter jet to Essex Street. Adler refers to this as “internal restraint.” Powerful external restraints in the conversational context strengthen our confidence in the stranger’s words. The stranger, in general, has no reason to lie. In general internal restraints reflect external restraints. This lawfulness is a version of pre-contractual solidarity, the irrational foundations of rational action. They don’t guarantee the stranger can be trusted but a person’s numerous encounters with informants who speak truthfully sets tight limits that underwrite trust but not blind trust in what strangers tell you. This is an exercise in the principle of the profundity of the surface: “What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity” (Nietzsche, 1887/1974: 38). One must keep in mind here that on my interpretation, the profundity of the surface is a portal to more profound levels of inquiry. We abandon any doubts about reality as an illusion when we cross the street and look both ways. This is the beginning of causal inquiries that can lead us to quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and beyond without overturning the recalcitrant causal features of our everyday world that make life possible. Adler (2007: 285) takes us in a different direction than the theists when he argues that the removal of internal and external restraints opens the door to untrustworthy testimony. Ordinary testimony, by virtue of its basic honesty and reliability, exposes the fallacy that everything is permitted if God is dead: “But the account of why testimony works so well as a result of natural internal and external restraints actually argues for a conclusion much stronger and just the reverse: if God is alive, everything is permitted.” E-: The most persistent, powerful, and dangerous problem for theists is the problem of evil. Basically, if there is an All-Good God, why is there evil and suffering in the world? Philosophers’, theologians’, and scientists’ efforts to solve this problem have generated a massive literature from as early as Epicurus (d. 270 BCE) to David Hume and into our own time. That literature is a chaotic tangle of logical and linguistic gymnastics that is an insult to intelligent inquiry. Briefly, the problem of evil is this, put in the form of a question: how can the existence of evil and suffering in the world be reconciled with a God who is All Good? This states the problem in its experiential form. Theoretically, it has been formulated as a logical problem and an evidential problem. The logical problem of evil

Case Study  57 is that if we assume an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God and the ways in which we are confronted by wars, murders, holocausts, natural disasters, pandemics, and existential threats to humanity, life, and the earth, we find ourselves embroiled in a contradiction: such a God cannot co-exist with such evils and suffering. The evidential problem of evil is: given evil and suffering, the existence of such a God is improbable at best. Let’s go directly to Turek’s conclusion and skip all the nonsense that fills up Chapter 5 on “Evil.” The solution to the problem of evil comes down to this: Turek adopts the free will solution: God allows evil to respect our free choices, to bring people to Himself, and to refine and grow people so that they may know and enjoy Him more fully: . . . a good, all-powerful God can bring good from evil even if the ripple effect makes it impossible for us to see how. This defies a rational reply. Finally, he leaves us with a parable, the parable of the pastor. To paraphrase: a young woman is raped and becomes pregnant. She is nearly destroyed by the rape, but she decides not to punish the baby for the sin of the rapist. She gives birth to a baby boy. The boy grows up to be a pastor who helps bring many people to Christ. This parable has a real root; the pastor is Gary Bingham of Hillside Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana. If his raped mother can bring good from evil, Turek tells us, so can God. This is how Turek “solves” the problem of evil. S-: If Turek’s topsy-turvy world has made you dizzy and disoriented by now, he is about to scramble your brain further by claiming that science would be impossible if theism weren’t true. There is no point in reviewing the details of this last letter in Turek’s CRIMES acronym. Turek concludes that “Atheists can do science only by stealing several immaterial realities from God. These include orderly natural laws, the laws of logic, the laws of mathematics, the laws of morality, our ability to reason, etc.” I would like to see Turek defend this position standing in the rubble of an earthquake, in the midst of a refugee camp, in the trenches of the First World War, not in the auditoriums of universities and seminaries. 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 sounds insane to me. 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, the solution to the Achilles paradox (Zeno’s paradox). Fleet-footed Achilles is in a race with a slow-moving tortoise. The tortoise is given a head start. No matter how fast he runs, Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise. The reason is that Achilles has to run half the distance to the tortoise, then half the remaining distance, then half of this, and then half of whatever distance is remaining. This could involve a sequence in which Achilles reaches the tortoise at 1m from the starting point but he has to run to the points 0.9 m, 0.99 m, 0.999 m, and 0.9999 m and so never catches the tortoise. The paradox dissolves once

58  Case Study we understand that the limit of this sequence is 1. Zeno wasn’t claiming that the act of catching the tortoise was impossible (Diogenes demonstrated this by simply walking about). Rather, Zeno was questioning the coherence of how we conceived the act of Achille’s chasing and catching the tortoise (something Diogenes’ walkabout doesn’t address). In any case, Turek is simply out of his league in the world of science. Notes 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this chapter are from Turek (2014). 2 For a detailed discussion of the sociology of Boole and metamathematics, see Restivo (1992: 149–176). On the sociology of logic, see Restivo (2014: 155–178). 3 Consider the argument that the “laws of physics should be independent of one’s choice of units or measuring apparatus. This is the case if they are framed in terms of dimensionless numbers such as the fine structure constant, α. For example, the standard model of particle physics has 19 such dimensionless parameters whose values all observers can agree on, irrespective of what clock, rulers or scales . . . they use to measure them. Dimensional constants, on the other hand, such as ħ, c, G, e and k . . . , are merely human constructs whose number and values differ from one choice of units to the next. In this sense, only dimensionless constants are ‘fundamental’. Similarly, the possible time variation of dimensionless fundamental ‘constants’ of nature is operationally well defined and a legitimate subject of physical enquiry. By contrast, the time variation of dimensional constants such as c or G on which a good many (in my opinion, confusing) papers have been written, is a unit-dependent phenomenon on which different observers might disagree depending on their apparatus. All these confusions disappear if one asks only unit-independent questions. We provide a selection of opposing opinions in the literature and respond accordingly” (Duff, 2014: 35; and see Truppe et al., 2013; Pašteka et al., 2018; Srinivasan, 2016; and see Barrow, 2005). The statement “All these confusions disappear” does not alter the facts of how dynamic physics is, a dynamism that has to make Turek and his fellow apologists uncomfortable. On the need for conceptual histories and biographies of the “laws of nature,” see Lunteren (2016); on entity realism, see Cartwright (1983). Tests of the robustness of the values of the fundamental constants have not found any reasons to conclude that they change over time and across space. Some evidence has been found suggesting that the fine structure may vary with space, but the results are controversial. The point is that a great deal of research is dedicated to testing the robustness of these constants. And we have still not found a satisfactory way to make general relativity and the standard model compatible. These dynamics have no analogy in theology.

References Adler, J.L. (2007), “Faith and Fanaticism,” pp. 266–286 in L. Antony, ed., Philosophers Without God (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ainscough, J., A. Mclaughlin, N. Jones and L. Kemp (2021), “Earth’s existential threats: Inequality, pandemics and climate change demand global leadership,” The Conversation, February 23: https://theconversation.com/earths-existential-threats-inequality-pandemicsand-climate-change-demand-global-leadership-154325 Barrow, J.D. (2005), “Varying Constants,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 363: 2139–2153. Baumann, D., C.D. Pueyo, A. Joyce, H. Lee and G.L. Pimental (2020), “The Cosmological Bootstrap: Weight-Shifting Operators and Scalar Seeds,” Journal of High Energy Physics 12, 204: 1–50.

Case Study  59 Ben-Menahem, Y. (2018), Causation in Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Bohm, D. (1971), Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Boyle, L., K. Finn and N. Turok (2018), “CPT-Symmetric Universe,” Physics Review Letters 121. Brandenberger, R. and P. Peter (2016), “Bouncing Cosmologies: Progress and Problems,” Foundations of Physics 6: 797–850. Cartwright, N. (1983), How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Chen, R. and L. Fang (2018), “The Principle of Small Probability and Its Application in Social Life,” International Journal of Advanced Research in Management, Architecture, Technology, and Engineering 4, 9: 24–27. Collins, R. (1975), Conflict Sociology (New York: Academic Press). Collins, R. (1992), Sociological Insights, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press). Duff, M.J. (2014), “How Fundamental Are Fundamental Constants,” Contemporary Physics 56, 1: 5–47. Hamosh, A., A.F. Scott, et al. (2002), “Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), a Knowledgebase of Human Genes and Genetic Disorders,” Nucleic Acids Research 30, 1: 52–55. Illari, P.M., F. Russo, and J. Williamson, eds. (2011), Causality in the Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press). Kim, S.P. (2004), “Quantum Cosmology for Tunneling Universes,” Journal of the Korean Physical Society 45: 1–8. Linde, A.D. (1984), “Quantum Creation of the Inflationary Universe,” Lettere Nuovo Cimento 39: 401–405. Lotze, H.H. (1843), Logik (Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung). Lunteren, F.V. (2016), “The Missing History of the ‘Laws of Nature,’ ” Shells and Pebbles.com: https://www.shellsandpebbles.com/2016/11/07/the-missing-history-of-thelaws-of-nature/ Maryanski, A. (2018), Emile Durkheim and the Birth of the Gods (New York: Routledge). Nietzsche, F. (1887/1974), The Gay Science (New York: Vintage). Norton, J.D. (2003), “Causation as Folk Science,” Philosophers’ Imprint 3, 4: 1–22. Nye, A. (1990), Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (New York: Routledge). Pašteka, L.F., Y. Hao, A. Borschevsky, V.V. Flambaum, and P. Schwerdtfeger (2018), “Material Size Dependence on Fundamental Constants,” Physical Review Letters 122, 16: 1–8. Poland, D. and D. Simmons-Duffin (2016), “The Conformal Bootstrap,” Nature Physics 12: 535–539. Poland, D., S. Rychkov and A. Vichi (2019), “The conformal bootstrap: Theory, numerical techniques, and applications,” High Energy Physics: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04405 Powell, C.S. (2019), “Could the big bang be wrong,” Discover Magazine: www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/could-the-big-bang-be-wrong Restivo, S. (1992), Mathematics in Society and History (New York: Springer). Restivo, S. (2014), “What Can a Sociologist Say about Logic?,” pp. 155–178 in P. Allo and B. Van Kerkhove, eds., Modestly Radical or Radically Modest: Festschift for Jean Paul Van Bendegem on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday (Georgia: College Publications); www.collegepublications.co.uk Restivo, S. (2021), Society and the Death of God (New York: Routledge). Seigel, E. (1921), “Surprise: The big bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore”: https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/surprise-the-big-bang-isnt-the-beginningof-the-universe-anymore-ae7d0b6e0102

60  Case Study Seigal, J. (2008), ‘The Ontological Parody: A Reply to Joshua Ernst’s “Charles Hartshorne and the Ontological Argument,” Aporia 18, 2: 55–61. Spengler, O. (1926), The Decline of the West (New York: A. Knopf). Srinivasan, V. (2016), “Are the Constants of Physics Constant,” Scientific American: https:// blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/are-the-constants-of-physics-constant/ Swanson, G. E. (1960), The Birth of the Gods: The Origin of Primitive Beliefs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Truppe, S., R.J. Hendricks, et al. (2013), “A Search for Varying Fundamental Constants Using Hertz-Level Frequency Measurements of Cold CH Molecules,” Nature Communications 4: 1–7. Turek, F. (2014), Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress). Vilenkin, A. (1984), “Creation of Universes From Nothing,” Physics Letters 117B, 25, 3: 1. Wolchover, N. (2019), “Physicists debate hawking’s idea that the universe had no beginning,” Quanta Magazine: www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-debate-Hawkings-ideathat-the-universe-had-no-beginning-20190606/17

7

Case Study John Lennox and the Unholy Alliance Between Mathematics, Logic, and God1

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, and 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. Let’s begin with Chapter 1: “Are God and Faith Enemies of Reason and Science.” 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 the atheists accuse theists of. Lennox actually has a case to the extent that the atheists adhere to scientism as opposed to science (as I describe it in Chapter 1). Consider Pastor Ethan Steinbrenner’s (2017) description of “faith” as given in Hebrews 11.1: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Steinbrenner, pastor at Bethany Lutheran Church in Ft. Atkinson, Wisconsin, argues that we know from God’s Word that he created the world even though we weren’t there to see this; we know from the Word that Jesus was crucified. Faith fuels our hope, trust, and certainty that Jesus will return in glory. The sciences, in practice, are characterized by a collective concept of truth as dynamic, charged with change, and bathed in skepticism. Faith is inimical to science; scientists are not bound to hope and faith in what they can’t see. They pursue what they can’t see experimentally and theoretically to test whether there is anything there. Newtonian physics is true but not in a way that prevents Einsteinian physics. Einsteinian physics is true but not in a way that prevents geometrodynamics. Biblical truth, at least as superficially understood by the faithful, does not change in these ways. Jesus is true (via perception and assumption) to contemporary Christians in the same way that he was true to the authors of the Bible. Anthropologically, it is impossible for “Jesus” to be a constant across history and culture. Christians are not exploring the possible ways in which Jesus might be something other than what he is said to be in the Bible. This goes beyond “blind faith.” It is faith fueled by ignorance. No matter how hard Christians try to make it so, hope that it is so, they cannot alter the history of Jesus. It is culturally impossible for DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-7

62  Case Study contemporary Christians to “know” Jesus in the same way Christians in the ancient world or in the medieval world “knew” Jesus. Cultures change, and that means languages change, and meanings change. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, we have had a theory of God constructed within the science of sociology. Combined with the history of God, it has given us a way to correct the mistake in reference believers have made for millennia; imagining that what was in reality a human-manufactured symbol was an entity with ontic substance more often than not in an immaterial reality. Chapters 2 and 3 in Lennox are, respectively, “Is Religion Poisonous?” and “Is Atheism Poisonous?” The provocation for these titles was the subtitle of Hitchens’ (2007) God Is Not Great: How Religion. Poisons Everything. It is easy enough to offer examples throughout human history of religious institutions being associated with crimes against humanity, from the Crusades to the Inquisition to twentiethcentury fascism. Such crimes are societal crimes cloaked in the symbols of religious institutions, but religions are not the proximate causes of crimes, conflicts, or wars. In any case, it is just as easy for the theists to point to the good religion – here they really mean the Church – does, for example, in providing food and shelter for the needy. This often comes with religious instruction. But bracketing the missionary apparatuses attached to the helping efforts of the Church, the theists’ basic comeback is to point to the horrors associated with what they describe as “atheist states,” such as the USSR, Nazi Germany, and North Korea. These states are no more atheist than they are communist or socialist. Historically, neither side really has a safe position. The reason is that religion is ubiquitous; it is the glue that holds any social group from the dyad to nation-states together and systematizes the rules of good and bad, right and wrong behavior. In a sense, then, all crimes against humanity stem from religion because they stem from society. Let’s consider a specific example from this debate. Physicist Steven Weinberg has said publicly that it takes religion to motivate good people to do evil things. He is answered by author David Berlinsky, an opponent of evolution, and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, an organization dedicated to promulgating the pseudoscience of intelligent design. Berlinsky points out that it wasn’t the Vatican that deployed poison gas, barbed wire, explosives, Zyklon B crystals, napalm, and weapons of mass destruction (on Weinberg vs. the theists, see Berlinsky, 2009). This is disingenuous in so many ways. The subtle point is that the answer to “Just who?” is “religious societies.” The more horribly evident point is the damage the Vatican’s far-flung empire has done preying on young children over centuries and the Vatican’s support of fascism in the twentieth century (Jenkins, 2001; Bruni and Burkett, 2002; Berry and Renner, 2004; Kertzler, 2014). Lennox cites Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the New Atheists for turning away from reason while blaming others for doing this (Coyne, 2017). Chomsky, an atheist, is embarrassed by the “New Atheism.” He points out that not one of the prominent advocates is a religious scholar, historian of religion, or cultural anthropologist. These are the specialists who can legitimately demonstrate the cultural, historical, literary, and linguistic contexts of the Bible and why biblical literalists

Case Study 63 are, to be blunt, mistaken and ignorant. Chomsky’s criticism applies to the New Atheists and their theist critics alike. I want us to go beyond the kinds of skepticism scholars like Chomsky have in mind to a scientific sociology of religion. The question Lennox addresses in Chapter 4 is “Can We Be Good Without God?” The New Atheists are vehement critics of the moral order of the Bible, and furthermore that we do not need it for morality. In the background of the theists’ considerations is the reverberating echo of the claim that “if God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Lennox gives the usual attribution, Dostoevsky. The quote is supposed to come from Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. The quote does not in fact appear per se in the novel. There are numerous intimations. For example, we have Dmitri’s statement from his debate with Rakitin: “But what will become of men then without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, and they can do what they like?” And Fyodorovitch says that [I]f you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. (Dostoevsky, 1922: 635, 67–68) It is as much the possibility of immortality as the existence of God that is presumed to ground human morals. Before I explain why morality is not dependent on God or immortality, let’s simply acknowledge that there are many religious traditions with strong moral teachings and no immortality doctrines. This may hold for Christian believers, but the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gives the permissibility assumption a new twist. If God does not exist, we humans are not made in his image. Therefore, anything is permissible in human relations because we are behaving toward human beings, not children of God. This means that for the atheist who adopts this position, human rights are “no more than” a social construction. If we remove “no more than,” we have the answer to this hard question. Moral orders are, like every other feature of human culture, socially constructed by definition (on the very idea of the social, see Restivo, 2018; on the social in evolution, see Wilson, 2012 and Gorney, 1972). Let’s listen to what happens to the thinking theist when s/he operates without a sociological imagination. First, Lennox asks, how can the New Atheists “rationally justify their absolute sounding commitment to timeless values without implicitly invoking God . . . the existence of absolute values demands God.” Lennox understands the New Atheists to be living in a deterministic world, “in which human behavior is nothing but a dance to the tune of DNA, [and] has no more moral significance than the dance of the bees.” If DNA, writes Lennox, “neither knows nor cares, and we dance to its music, how is it that most of us both know and care?” The answer is that DNA is not the source of our behavior, culture is. Lennox and his fellow theists are living in a DNA-dominated world that still has some public purchase but it is a world that science has left behind.

64  Case Study It has become increasingly clear that culture has been the driving force in human evolution, not genes (e.g., Wilson, 2012: 98–99). Biologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists have been publicizing this idea by re-discovering ideas that sociologists and anthropologists have known since the origin of their disciplines in the nineteenth century. The evidentiary basis for this idea has been growing in the life and neurosciences. Explaining sociology and anthropology as discovering sciences can give the general public and scientists a deeper and more robust understanding of how and why culture trumps genes in evolution, and how society and culture offer more robust explanations of the nature of being human, of the social nature of the brain, and of the sociological solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness (Restivo, 2023). The basic premises driving this idea are that (1) humans arrive already, always, and everywhere social on the evolutionary stage; they do not arrive as individuals who then become social; (2) humans have only one way to learn, and to construct inventions and discoveries; that is, by interacting and communicating with each other in social contexts and social networks in earth-bound environments (and our extra-planetary territorial extensions). The rise of humanity from band and village to chiefdom and state, in short, the ascent of civilization, has been fueled by culture, not genes. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973: 74) as early as 1973 argued for a culturological theory of brain evolution. By the early 1990s, this idea was surfacing as a social brain paradigm. The radically social nature of humans in evolutionary terms, the emergence of epigenetics, new research on brain plasticity and mirror neurons, and the social brain paradigm mean that nothing in the meaning of “human” escapes social construction. Even genes and neurons must be reconceptualized as social things. It’s important to stress here that religion is ubiquitous. It is the glue of society. There are societies that do not harbor belief in a Creator God, or in any God at all. These are called “nontheist societies” (Ball, 2015). Keeping in mind the great diversity of the Eastern religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism are exemplary nontheist religions; some Unitarian Universalists do not believe in God. Not everything is permissible in these societies! (on the fallacy of “everything is permissible,” see Norenzayan, 2013; and Epstein, 2005). Sociologists have pioneered the study of religion as the glue of society. For a brief overview see Box 2, and for a more extended discussion, see Chapter 11. Box 2.   Religion and the Sociological Cogito Pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim described religion with the ethereal statement that it consists of “things that surpass the limits of our knowledge.”2 He went on to elaborate: religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them” (1912/1995: 44). Some people associate religion with places of worship (a synagogue or church), others with

Case Study 65 a practice (confession or meditation), and still others with a concept that guides their daily lives (like dharma or sin). All of these people can agree that religion is a system of beliefs, values, and practices concerning what a person holds sacred or considers to be spiritually significant. . .. From the Latin religio (respect for what is sacred) and religare (to bind, in the sense of an obligation), the term “religion” describes various systems of belief and practice concerning what people determine to be sacred or spiritual (Durkheim, 1912/1995); Fasching and Dechant, 2001). Throughout history, and in societies across the world, leaders have used religious narratives, symbols, and traditions in an attempt to give more meaning to life and understand the universe. Some form of religion, institutionalized to different degrees, is found in every known culture, and it is usually practiced in a public way by a group. The practice of religion can include feasts and festivals, God or gods, marriage and funeral services, music and art, meditation or initiation, sacrifice or service, and other aspects of culture. While some people think of religion as something individual because religious beliefs can be highly personal, religion is a social institution. Social scientists recognize that religion exists as an organized and integrated set of beliefs, behaviors, and norms centered on basic social needs and values. Moreover, religion is a cultural universal found in all social groups (Little and Mcgivern, 2014: 474). Social and political complexity has historically been limited in Austronesia. We find chiefdoms in this area but no single state-level societies. Moralizing “Big Gods” are not central features of these societies. No one would claim that “everything is permissible” in these societies. The same is true of contemporary humanists, secularists, and atheists. Next we come to “Is the God of the Bible a Despot?” The provocation for this title is captured in the first sentence of Chapter 2 in Dawkins’ (2006) The God Delusion: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. This statement fueled Dan Barker’s 2016 book, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction. Each of the first 19 chapters of Barker’s book is devoted to one of the unpleasant traits Dawkins lists. Together, Dawkins and Barker provide a lot of bad press for the God of the Old Testament. Lennox replies in a more or less expected manner by claiming that Dawkins misconstrues and misreads texts and makes clumsy and uninformed blunders. The Center for the Study of Bible & Violence (2019) points out, with good reason, that Dawkins is not competent in the specialized discipline of biblical

66  Case Study hermeneutics. He adopts the same “flat,” literalist reading strategy of the Bible as the untutored fundamentalist. There can be no question that Dawkins is guilty of ignoring the complexity and nuances of literary interpretation in general and the specific interpretative strategies required for biblical scholarship. In general, critics of the New Atheists have in their favor the New Atheists’ flawed understanding of religion. Their undisguised hatred of God and low opinion of believers are not laudable, but in the context of the mistakes in reference that permeate the theist worldview, I at least can have some sympathy for the frustration that breeds the extremes to which the New Atheists go in defense of their position. The “hatchet job” the New Atheists do on the biblical God can easily, Lennox says, be turned on science, and with more justification. He then rehearses the litany of bombs, weapons of mass destruction, poisons, pollution, and so on which can, if one has a mind to, be dumped on the doorstep of science (on the sociological rationale for this criticism, see Restivo and Croissant, 1995; and Restivo and Bauschpies, 1996). These are extreme hits on both parties by both parties. It’s not clear the New Atheists would have much of a case if that were the topic since they tend to be scientistic and to adhere to a technological/science-fix orientation to problem solving. Lennox himself would be surprised at the case that can be made for bringing science into disrepute. Where I do this I don’t make science my foil, but Science as a modern social institution (this kind of analysis of science escapes both the atheist and theist scientists). As the chapter ends, we come to what Lennox (2011: 138) describes as “the crunch”: if we are mortal, then the biblical worldview is false. That worldview’s viability depends on immortality and a “final and fair judgment.” This doesn’t make the problem of evil and suffering go away. Lennox himself has to face this directly. How could anyone believe in a God who is ultimately responsible for the neverending scenes and experiences of evil and suffering that mark our world? Lennox admits he couldn’t if he thought death was final and there was no ultimate justice. Death is not the end, however, and God is a God “of compensation.” Atheism, Lennox claims, doesn’t get rid of evil and suffering and moreover gets rid of hope. It is a “hope-less faith” and thus makes evil and suffering “much worse.” This is a good place to retrieve Feynman’s remark quoted earlier. We live in a mysterious purposeless universe and answers are not always forthcoming; that doesn’t frighten him. The Feynmanian scientist does not operate with hopes and wishes. Hoping and wishing have nothing to do with the way the world really is. And the Feynmanian scientist wants to know what the world is really like, and this requires the courage not to be frightened and not to be motivated in your inquiries by hopes and wishes. Finally, Lennox is forced to fall back on Jesus. Christianity does not solve the problem of evil with a “set of propositions or a philosophical analysis of the possibilities”; it solves the problem with a Person who suffered. The literal belief in Jesus, the miracles, and the resurrection requires a leap of faith that leaves behind Feynmanian science and the sociology and anthropology of religion. There is a possible theological solution to the problem of evil, communicated to me by Tamar Rudavsky, professor of philosophy at Ohio State University, and

Case Study  67 an expert on ancient and medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy. She argues that there are two possible translations of “Bereshit,” the opening words of Genesis, “In the beginning . . .. ” One translation leads to the concept that God created everything out of nothing. In that case, God would be responsible for evil and suffering. A second translation allows that God did not literally create everything out of nothing; there was something for God to work with and this leads to God not being responsible for evil and suffering. Nevertheless, this is a weak explanation for evil in a world created by an All-Good God. “Is the atonement morally repellent?” This is the question that opens Chapter 6. “The atonement,” in Christian theology, is the reconciliation of God and man through Jesus Christ. Dawkins is correct, Lennox notes, that this is the “central doctrine of Christianity.” Dawkins considers this “vicious, sadomasochistic and repellent.” Hitchens finds the whole notion of vicarious redemption “repulsive.” Lennox’s defense of atonement is to criticize the “hopelessness of their position.” Jesus’ message offers “hope, forgiveness, peace of mind and heart and power for living” to millions of ordinary people. I am inevitably reminded in the face of such values of Nietzsche’s letter to his sister Elizabeth, June 11, 1865 (Hollingdale, 1999: 32): “if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. . .. ” It’s really that simple! None of the theists is capable of accepting this life imperative. And here are the ways of theists and atheists part. Given (?) that “the cleverest scientists do not fully understand things like energy, light and gravity,” how, Lennox challenges, “could anyone ever hope to fathom this most profound of all events in the history of the universe – the crucifixion of God incarnate?” The answer is yes, anyone could, with some serious sociological and anthropological training. Without this theists are stuck in a world that is asocial, ahistorical, fantastic in a way that mimics if it isn’t already a form of mental illness. This may sound harsh but we have another chance to consider this in Chapter 7, “Are Miracles Pure Fantasy?” At the end of the day, only one miracle matters, the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ. The witnesses to the resurrection represent the first fact of Christendom (C.S. Lewis, 1947: 148). Without this there would not have been any Gospels. Lennox devotes a substantial part of this chapter to criticisms of Hume’s skepticism about miracles. There is a large literature on the pros and cons of Hume’s ideas, too large to review in detail here.3 Lennox concludes this chapter by affirming Hume’s view of “uniform experience,” which shows that “resurrection by means of a natural mechanism is extremely improbable, and we may rule it out.” The issue is resolved by way of the Christian claim which does not depend on a natural mechanism but on God. And then Lennox plays the classically illogical and irrational and nearly mad card that if there is a God why we should judge the resurrection to be impossible. Christian apologetics is the site of the most outrageous vicious circles in human history, a Ptolemaic madhouse of epicycles of logic. Hume’s criticism of the very idea of miracles grows out of a commitment to the uniformity of nature. That’s all there is and there is nothing or no one who can intervene to upset this uniformity. Lennox claims this is not a consequence of “scientific investigation” but merely a function of Hume’s worldview. So science doesn’t

68  Case Study rule out miracles, worldviews do. Without entering the labyrinth of Humean claims and criticism, Hume’s worldview should be assumed to have grown on the foundations of his knowledge of the science of his time, including mathematics and logic. What does Lennox propose? Science can’t answer this question, but we can “investigate the evidence, to establish the facts, and be prepared to follow where that process leads,” says Lennox. Let us see what happens when we actually look in the attic to determine whether it harbors a mouse or not, Lennox urges. This sounds suspiciously like a scientific method. We come, finally, to the attic and the mouse in Chapter 8: “Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?” The bravado with which Lennox defends not simply the historicity of Jesus but of the resurrection is an unparalleled exercise in self-delusion. Lennox is obliged to rebut Bertrand Russell’s remark in Why I Am Not a Christian (1957) that Christ’s existence is quite doubtful; and if he did live, we know nothing about him. Lennox offers as evidence against Russell the arguments offered by Professor Ed Sanders of Duke University (an agnostic), Oxford professor Christopher Tuckett, author of the Cambridge University textbook on the historical Jesus, and liberal skeptic, and Gerd Thiessen, a New Testament historian. The upshot of these remarks is that there is no substantial doubt about Jesus’ life, there is no evidence that Jesus was a Christian invention, and his historicity is attested to by ancient historians. It’s important to understand what Lennox means by “evidence”: “proof in the rigorous mathematical sense is not available in any . . . discipline or area of experience.” Let’s grant Lennox this claim with prejudice and proceed with Lennox’ concept of “evidence:” here our ways of thinking separate. He writes that “it is up to each person to make up their mind whether the evidence is convincing for them or not.” This makes “evidence” basically a matter of opinion. Scientific evidence is not subject to “each person” making up his or her own mind; it is a community resource, subject to community standards and norms unfolded over historical time. Readers should refresh their memories on this by re-reading the section “The Scientific Cogito” in Chapter 1. What is the evidence Lennox relies on? Briefly:

• The sheer number of relevant biblical manuscripts can be treated as “authentic representations of the [lost] originals.”

• The age of the manuscripts, dating from around 100–400 CE: The Bodmer Pa-

pyri include more than 60 percent of John’s Gospel in one papyrus; the Chester Beatty Papyri contain parts of the four Gospels and Acts, parts of eight of Paul’s letters, parts of the letter to the Hebrews, and a large part of the Book of Revelation; the John Rylands Fragment, the Codex Vaticanus, and the Codex Sinaiticus include all the books of the New Testament. Lennox’s certainty about the fidelity of the ancient manuscripts is based on remarks by Bruce Metzger, Princeton Theological Seminary, in a 1998 interview. • Mistakes in the copying process stressed by atheist critics can be ignored. We can be confident that this material has come down to us as faithfully reproduced as any other ancient literature [NB!].

Case Study  69

• On the Gospels as ancient fiction: Lennox offers numerous examples demon-

•

•

•

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strating Luke’s descriptions of known historical facts about cities, countries, and geographies. This, Lennox claims, gives us some confidence as we go on to examine the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. The evidence for the resurrection: Lennox cites atheist scholars to support the claim that Jesus was crucified; he claims it is improbable that Jesus’ burial was made up, since a highly public figure, Joseph of Arimathea, requested the body from Pilate. Again, noting the prominence of the people who were witness to Jesus being buried in a tomb and the “fact” (according to John) that the tomb was in Joseph’s private garden, Lennox claims it is inconceivable that a mistake could have been made about the location of the tomb. The manner of the burial: follows the customs of the time including the use of spices in the embalming and tight binding of the body in grave cloths: Jesus could not, therefore, have swooned on the cross, revived in the tomb, and escaped. The empty tomb demonstrates a “literal resurrection of his body,” not a spiritual resurrection. Matthew’s Gospel is “the most characteristically Jewish,” published in the late 60sCE, and written for circulation among Jews. If the Gospel had been a late invention, it would have been recognized as a recent fiction. Therefore, the story must be true.

Lennox also mentions an unusual and severe edict dated ca. 30–40 CE; the Edict of Nazareth announced that robbing or desecrating a tomb carried the death penalty. The “most likely” explanation for this must be the circumstances occurring at the empty tomb on Joseph’s property.

• Lennox offers classical apologetic speculations to defend the proposition that the disciples could not have been deceived.

• The complexity of the situation in and around the tomb on the Passover with

many people coming and going is compressed in the Gospel narratives, complexities that erase the significance of any alleged contradictory elements. This claim defies comprehension. • There are various indications that tomb-robbers were not involved. Misguided followers did not take the body and rebury it. The tomb was guarded and rolling away the stone blocking entrance to the tomb would have caused a commotion. • The discovery of the empty tomb: without an empty tomb, there could be no evidence of a resurrection. But what followed is more important: a “documentary record” (Peter in Jerusalem and Caesarea, and Paul at Pisidian Antioch) of the forty days during which Jesus was seen walking and talking abroad. I will skip over Lennox’s replies to Hume’s “criteria for witnesses” which are simply not intellectually responsible. He caps this lengthy exercise in what is aptly known as “apologetics” by quoting a noted legal scholar, Sir Norman Anderson

70  Case Study (1959: 11): the “fact” of the empty tomb eliminates the plausibility of any rational critique of the resurrection narrative. On substantiating the life of Jesus, see Sanders (1993: 11), Tuckett (2001: 124), Thiessen and Merz (1998: 93–94). Commentary At the end of the day, it will become clear that all efforts to create communication bridges across the theist-atheist divide will fail because:

• Atheists and theists represent two different cultural species; • Atheists and theists represent two different objectivity communities. This means

that what Lennox understands as “evidence” is not compatible with what the atheists understand as “evidence.” Lennox is welcome to mount whatever challenge he can against my contention that the quality of the collective, intersubjectively tested, generationally linked evidence of science is superior to his reliance on the evidence of individual experience. There are several general problems we confront if we enter into a debate with Lennox and his fellow apologists, bracketing for the moment my speciation, objectivity community, and evidentiary community propositions: • The Bible is a culture-bound historically contextualized text. It is hard to understand how faith blinds really smart people from seeing the obvious ethnocentric nature of their beliefs. Ethnocentricity is readily revealed by even the most cursory studies in the comparative history of religion. • It is written on two levels (veiled writing) and allegorical. There are some basic things about human behavior and culture that we need to know in order to make our claims about religion, the gods, and their texts coherent. First, we need to understand the very idea of culture, the institutions, and patterns of behavior that we are born into and do not choose any more than we choose our DNA. We are born into a language and a network of symbols that we absorb as our own. This process gets more complicated as societies and cultures become more complicated, but the process of socialization, or programming, does not change. Societies and cultures are sui generis; that is, they are real parts of the natural world, products of general evolution, and they are a locus of causal forces. Recall the earlier story I told about my mother moving my infant hand and arm through the sign of the cross, night after night, and repeating the words “In the name of the Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” programming that movement and those words until I could do it and say it on my own. It became a habitual practice long before I had any idea about what the practice meant. • Human lives revolve around symbols. Symbols are ubiquitous but they vary by levels of reference. If I use symbols to direct you to a tree, and you follow my directions and come to a tree, the symbols I used are said to be first-order referents. “The sun” refers first order once removed to the glowing object we see in the sky. I can point you to it, but unlike the case of a tree, you can’t go to the sun. You can feel its heat on your skin, and the reality of this heat will burn and blister your skin. These are two forms of first-order referents: we can walk up to

Case Study  71 and touch a tree as well as inspect it with all of our senses; we are restricted in the senses we can rely on to make the sun refer. Other symbols are not coupled to real objects accessible by way of our senses. From the point of view reflected in this book, God is not a first-order referent. The process of referring is more complicated than this but it is important to know the difference between firstorder referring and second- and higher orders of referring. The development of science and knowledge is marked by changes in reference. In the present context there is a significant change from “God” referring to a transcendental supernatural entity to “God” referring to society. Again, cross-culturally and historically our term “God” doesn’t always translate neatly. “God” or “god” as a cultural idea can refer to material or natural symbols in the world at hand as well as refer transcendentally or supernaturally. For a review of the complexities buried in the word “God,” see Armstrong (1994) and Küng (1980). The Bible and other religious texts, along with many other kinds of texts including fairy tales and moral stories for children, cannot be read literally. We need to know, for example, that the art of concealment in writing has a long history that encompasses the ancient philosophers from at least Plato and Galen to the philosophers of Islam’s Golden Age (700 CE–1500 CE), including al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, alGhazali, and notably Averroes and Maimonides, and even into our own era. These philosophers operated with a sense of the separation between insiders and outsiders, knowers and novices, the initiated and the uninitiated. Averroes offers one of the best descriptions of the techniques of “veiled writing.” Veiled writing conveys one meaning to the uninitiated and a different meaning to the initiated. The basic techniques for achieving this form of writing include: symbolic allusion to doctrines, hiding the premises of an argument, treating subjects out of context, treating significant issues enigmatically, using equivocating language, confusing the reader with contradictory premises, stating truths very briefly, failing to draw obvious conclusions (choosing to be silent where voicing views is demanded), and attributing one’s views to hallowed real and imaginary ancients (Kogan, 1985: 21; and see Strauss, 1952; and Averroes, 1179–1180/1961). We are long past the time for leaving childish things behind. The twentieth century was witness to more and more stories like that of Uta Ranke-Heinemann (1994). She was the first woman to hold a chair of Catholic theology (1970) and lost her position for questioning the virgin birth (in 1987). She holds the (nondenominational) chair of History of Religion at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen, her birthplace. Her controversial claims include the following:

• • • • • • •

The Bible is not the word of God but the word of men. That God exists in three persons is the imagination of men. Jesus is man and not God. Mary is the mother of Jesus and not the mother of God. God created heaven and earth, but hell is a product of human fantasy. The devil and original sin do not exist. A bloody redemption at the Cross is a pagan sacrificial slaughtering of a human being, based on a model from the religious Stone Age.

72  Case Study These are significant changes but they take place within a system in which belief in a Creator God and Heaven escapes the critical scrutiny and logic of the atheistic claims. Why does reason take critical theism just so far and no further? It is in general the power of life-ever-lasting combined with the fear of “lying in a coffin for ever and ever and ever . . .” (Ranke-Heinemann, 1994: ix) that helps the most critical, the most thoughtful, the most learned of men and women time and time again save God and Jesus and other wonder workers from the fairy tale apparatus that cleans out everything else in the storehouse of religious beliefs. The Jesus Chronicles Even if Jesus lived, and even if he was remotely the human character that evolved out of the pages of the Bible, his “life and works” would not explain the origins of Christianity. The matter of fact for the lay student of Christianity is that it arose on the foundations of and in the context of pagan cultures and Roman ways of life and social organization. The signs and scars of its pagan origins are still visible in the diversified Christianity of today with its pantheon of saints. Jesus is a symbolic construction manufactured out of pagan myths and legends, a selective reading of Hebrew Scriptures, and very likely bits and pieces of Eastern narratives that had traveled West primarily in the tales and ways of traders. On an organizational level, we see that religions are in and of the cultures they represent. Early Christianity organizes on the organizational template of the Roman Empire. The idea that gods dictate once and for all canonical texts is not borne out by the historical record nor does it make sense in terms of the sociological cogito. The texts are human works and humans change, correct, and translate, translate, and re-translate, and corrupt religious texts and texts in general. The clearest examples of this are seen in the texts of Christianity. The Roman Catholic canon was not established until the Council of Trent in 1546. Martin Luther tried to remove Jude, James, Hebrews, and Revelation from the New Testament. Those books are still in the German language Luther Bible but are placed at the end of the edition. The Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 established the canon for the Church of England, the Presbyterian canon by the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647, and the Greek Orthodox canon by the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672. The companion to the idea of a God-given canon is the idea that the canon is pure and free of inconsistencies. There is too much historical analysis of these inconsistencies in the Christian texts to support any level of belief in an internally consistent canon. One of the most widely cited examples is the nativity narratives. For example, Matthew (1:1-6) and Luke (3:32-34) give different genealogies for Jesus4 As critical thinkers, we need to have some strategies about how to proceed when we arrive at the intersection between faith and knowledge, faith and reason, faith and science. How to turn knowledge, reason, and science into a form of life for our species? What happened to those ancient people who were convinced about the reality of their gods? Some of them were as convinced that Osiris was real as some are today convinced that Jesus is real. What’s the difference between Osiris and Jesus? And who are those “other gods,” Mithras, Tammuz, Hermes, and a multitude of others whose lives might have mirrored the life of Jesus? Many of these gods

Case Study  73 were sun gods who revealed the truth in Macrobius’ (aka Theodosius, 370–430 CE) claim that “All gods are only different Powers of the sun.” One of the main reasons critical thinkers begin to doubt the Jesus story is that history undermines his uniqueness. Consider the following quotation: “He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not have salvation.” If you went to school in the West, and whether you are Christian or not, you are most likely to have associated the quote with “communion” and with Jesus. But these are the words of Zoroaster (c. 628–551 BCE). Zoroaster is the first person we know of to make this declaration centuries before Jesus. At the end of the day, however, we cannot be certain about attribution, but we can within the certainty constraints of the history of the ancient world recognize certain ideas that appear over and over again over thousands of years and get associated with persons who may or may not have lived. We know with a high degree of certainty that Jesus – whether he was a real person or not – stands in a long line of potential saviors, from Adonis and Horus to Krishna and Osiris, who occupied a social role with certain characteristics. At least as ideal types (see Box 3), we know they were all born on “Christmas Day” in a cave, underground, or in a grotto to a virgin, served their people, died and rose from the dead, and were celebrated with a eucharist. This social role, correlated with the solar messiah concept, or that of the myth of the magus, existed for thousands of years (see Smith’s Jesus the Magician, 1978, and Butler’s The Myth of the Magus, 1979). And it is a pattern that can still be found primarily but not exclusively in the poorer parts of the world. Consider, for example, the emerging cult of Elvis. Some people have constructed altars to worship him, and there are many signs that, however small the scale at the moment, Elvis is being transformed into a Jesus surrogate who will return. Some of his followers believe he has already returned (Reece, 2000). The list of claimants in our own time to the title “son of God” or “Jesus reincarnated” includes Jesus of Kitwe, Zambia, Inri Cristo in Brazil, Laslo Toth, and infamously such personalities as Jim Jones and Sun Myung Moon (Sutton, 2017; Bendiksen, 2017). These figures have all attracted many followers (and see the landmark case study of three schizophrenic patients who claimed to be Christ by Rokeach, 1964). Box 3.  The Ideal Type The “ideal type” (Idealtypus) “is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or of one or more points of view” according to which “concrete individual phenomena . . . are arranged into a unified analytical construct” (Gedankenbild). The ideal type is a “utopia [that] cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality” (Weber, 1904/1949: 90). The ideal type is fictional in a sense analogous to the construction of an experiment in physics in which we idealize the environment in order to isolate the relevant variables and conditions we wish to study. In Weber’s methodology, objectivity is gained by “weighing the various evaluations against one another and making a ‘statesman-like’ compromise among them” (Weber, 1917/1949: 10).

74  Case Study In social systems that are not characterized by a high or even moderate degree of cultural diversity, identity crises are rare. This is the case for the ancient world in which religion emerged. Boys and girls grew up to be pretty much like their fathers and mothers. But it was possible to be different. Individuals could be released from a routine succession by an extraordinary endowment or event. Every society has labels for normal and abnormal social types or roles. Some “normal” social types occur in a wide range of societies from antiquity to the present, reflecting common social goals, functions, and activities tied to universal human needs and life-cycle events. Butchers, bakers, midwives, and farmers are such social types. But other “normal” social types are peculiar to given societies or historical periods. Such is the case, for example, for the tribunes and lectors of ancient Rome. “Abnormal” social types are also classified in similar and different ways depending on time and place. We recognize psychiatric categories such as schizophrenic, paranoid, and manic-depressive and healing professionals such as psychiatrists and cardiologists. The ancient world had demoniacs, divine men, and prophets. We have freedom fighters, radicals, left and right wingers; first-century Palestine had messiahs, prophets, brigands, and charlatans (Smith, 1978: 19). Jesus, for example, was variously viewed by contemporaries as a miracle worker, a messiah, a beggar, and a fugitive. The lives of magicians, wonderworkers, and messiahs from Moses on (including Apollonius, Jesus, Simon Magus, and Gregory the Wonderworker) and to our own time (Rasputin, Aleister Crowley, and Eduardo the Peruvian healer) are variations on a common theme. The stock legendary features of the magus career are the divine origin and miraculous birth, the annunciation and nativity portents, the menace to the future magus during infancy, the initiation, the trial of spiritual strength (temptation resisted after a long solitary fast), miracles, the sacrificial feast, trial and death (by crucifixion, for example), the disappearance of the body and descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. There are parallels between this career pattern and the career pattern for mythic heroes. The career of the mythic hero is characterized by the following features and stages (Rank et al., 1990; Dundes, 1999):

• • • • • • • • • • • •

The hero’s mother is a royal virgin; The father is a king and often a near relative of the hero’s mother; The circumstances of his birth are unusual; The hero is reputed to be the son of (a) god; The life of the infant hero is threatened, usually by his father or maternal grandfather; He is spirited away and raised by foster parents in a faraway country; There is no information about the hero’s childhood; The hero reaches adulthood and returns or goes to his future kingdom; He is victorious over a king, giant, or dragon; He marries a princess who is often the daughter of his predecessor; He becomes a king at about the age of 35; He reigns uneventfully, and prescribes laws;

Case Study  75

• He eventually loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects and is driven from the throne;

• He meets with a mysterious death, often on a hilltop; • His children, if any, do not succeed him; • He is not buried but nonetheless has one or more sepulchers. And a similar pattern characterizes the transformation of outstanding personalities in ancient Greece into divinities. Seusippus, Plato’s nephew, began the process of transforming the famous philosopher into a divine figure when he delivered Plato’s funeral oration. He referred to his dead uncle as the son of an alliance between his mother and Apollo. In our own time in our own society, Elvis Presley is undergoing a similar process (Reece, 2000). A common problem in constructing such parallels out of our views of the ancient world is that we must carry out such constructions with minimal and conflicting evidentiary resources. It is easy to criticize such efforts since they will often and necessarily escape the evidence. This is, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, the nature of science. Escaping the evidence is much more serious when we are dealing with the ancient world as opposed to a science lab at one of our modern universities. So it is likely that critics will easily identify troubling issues. For example, Dundes draws on evidence from a variety of texts from different eras, relies on “artificial” RankRaglan mythotypes, and fails to ground his work specifically in Hellenistic culture (Wills, 1997/2005: 228; Blomart, 2004: 96). While Dundes may exaggerate his proposition, Wills notes that the material does in fact apply to some extent to Jesus. This seems to me to represent something about the way science works. Knowledge escapes the evidence, which means that theories tend to smooth out the data, fill in the gaps in data, and construct a consistent story from the data. We construct ideal types. If we are aware of this, we can better interpret the nature, limits, and relevance of historical narratives. They escape the evidence, and they are presumptive, corrigible, and fallible like all scientific statements. If we are able to vouch for the integrity of the scholarship under consideration, we can make reasonable judgments about what the narratives can teach us. If we understand the solar messiah, sun gods, and hero paradigms in the context of a realistic theory of Jesus, it can help us oppose supernatural claims about his life and resurrection. The idea that knowledge escapes the evidence in science can be fodder for theists committed to demonstrating that science is just another faith community. Mitchell (1994: 12–17), for example, refers to an aspect of science widely commented on by philosophers of science like Michael Polanyi (1958) and theologians like John Henry Newman (in Moleski, 2000: 181), the nineteenth-century theologian: “much of our reasoning is tacit and informal”; the strength of our belief in the “evidence itself” is influenced by considerations that escape the evidence. Mitchell concludes from this that the distinction between the “entirely open-minded approach of the scientist and committed nature of religious faith is, at the very least, overdrawn.” 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

76  Case Study brilliant the efforts of theologians like Newman 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 (Cowan, 2019: 4). There is a form of skeptical theism that illustrates this point. It does not apply to the belief in the existence of God but rather to the human capacity to discern the reasons behind God’s action. This form of skepticism basically erases the problem of evil by announcing that we humans are in no position to understand why God allows evil. For all we know any apparent gratuitous act of evil in our view might be serving a greater good in God’s view. At the same time, once we let skepticism pass into the halls of theology, the very existence of God faces a potential threat. Skeptical theism brings with it the prospect of not knowing God and not trusting God.5 As scholars, we know more about the social nature and origins of religions and the gods than the majority of peoples around the world. This material is even available to clerics in the world’s religions who do not pass this knowledge on to the faithful (e.g., Shorto, 1997: 14; on “non-realist religion,” see Cupit, 1997, 2003; on Christian atheism, see Altizer, 2002 and Lyas, 1970). Dennett and LaScola (2010: 122) note: “There are systemic features of contemporary Christianity that create an almost invisible class of non-believing clergy, ensnared in their ministries by a web of obligations, constraints, comforts, and community.” Today, our knowledge is widely available in libraries and on the Internet. The last chapter of God began to be written in the early nineteenth century and the story can now come to an end. Already in the Bible itself God disappears as we move from the Old Testament through the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelations. This is not reflected in the linear order of the various books but in the attitudes of the authors and editors of the Bible stories. Their lives reflected changes in the human-divine relationship wrought by changes in the power and knowledge of humans as cultures evolved. The discovery that religion and the gods are social constructs has its origins in the works of some of the outstanding thinkers of the ancient world. The hero narrative paired with the solar messiah narrative gives us a compelling narrative in terms of the anthropology of the gods. In order to understand the social construction of the gods we must be attuned to the central role of allegory and symbolism in human storytelling. Any study of the gods must begin with the central role of the sun in the human narrative. It should be transparently clear why the sun becomes an object of worship across all the earliest civilizations. The sun god (God the Sun) is over time brought down to earth and personified in the king or emperor who becomes the son of god or God incarnate. Greek and Latin mythologies make many references to Sons of Gods, but in everyday life the term “son of god” was primarily used to refer to Roman emperors. In Hebrew and Aramaic, “sons of god” and “the gods” are equivalent. This is the starting point for the solar messiah narrative. The sons of gods are defined by a birth-to-death narrative that mirrors the heavens. Sirius is the star in the East, the brightest star in the sky. On December 24 it is aligned with the three brightest stars in Orion’s belt. We know these stars as the three kings and so were they known in the ancient Palestinian period. If you follow the line connecting Sirius and the three kings, they point to the rising sun on December 25. Thus, the three kings follow the star in the East to locate the new born God, the rising sun. The idea of the “virgin Mary” is derived from the constellation

Case Study  77 “Virgo,” the Latin term for virgin. The ancient glyph of Virgo is the altered “M,” the source of the names for the virgin mothers (e.g., Mary, Myrra, and Maya). Virgo is also known as “the house of bread.” The image of a virgin carrying a sheaf of wheat symbolizes harvest time. The Winter Solstice occurs around December 25. Beginning with the Summer Solstice, the days become shorter and colder. In the northern hemisphere the sun appears further south as the summer wanes and fall ebbs. The sun also appears to become smaller as it moves toward the southern horizon. Symbolically, the sun dies. When it reaches its lowest point, it appears to stop moving for three days. During this three-day period the sun appears to “hang” close to the Southern Cross constellation, the Crux constellation. After three days, on December 25, the sun moves one degree north up from the horizon before beginning its movement north – giving us the sun/son rises from the dead. While this has all the makings of an anthropologically reasonable symbolic narrative, it has to stand the detailed comparative test of applying across all the cultures of the world which have given us a solar messiah. Another proposition places Jesus in the tradition of the dying and resurrecting godman. In the late twentieth century, scholars began to severely criticize the designation of “dying-and-rising god” (Smith, 1987). The category of dying-and-rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts. These deities were “dying gods” and “disappearing gods,” not “dying-and-rising gods.” Dying gods and disappearing gods were in fact two different categories. At the end of the day, we are obliged to treat all such scholarly claims and criticisms, and the scholarship on whether Jesus was a real historical person or not, as irrelevant to what must be affirmed as a socio-historical fact: there was no godman, no God, no Son of God who died and rose from the dead. Has such a story come down to us? Yes. And it is unlikely that such a story arose out of nowhere. The past leaks into the present. And so it is a fair assumption to make that Jesus had precursors, historical and mythical. We can grant the scholarly difficulties with identifying a background of dying and resurrecting godmen, the objections to a strict application of the solar messiah myth, and the limitations of the “Raglan Dundee” thesis. But various aspects of these conjectures are likely true based on the principle of multiples. Ideas and technologies emerge as multiples, not singletons. There are vertical multiples that emerge in a limited time frame and horizontal multiples that occur across historical time frames. Given all of this, we are left with the following scenarios: Who Was Jesus?

• Jesus was a historical person. • Or he was not a historical person. • If he was a historical person, he might have been a magician (in Morton Smith’s,

1978) sense, or a public figure stamped with ancient mythical qualities of the hero or a god. • If he was not a historical person, he could have been a construct or composite character stamped with the mythical qualities of the hero or a god.

78  Case Study Scholars disagree about whether Jesus was a real historical person (Richard Carrier, 2014, Price, 2009 say no, Bart Ehrman, 2012, Grant, 1977 say yes). The consensus among competent historians is clear that Jesus was a real historical person. From a sociological perspective, an argument can be made that it was unlikely that Jesus was a real historical person. Such an argument rests on the Jesus multiples throughout ancient history and myth, the practice of allegorical and veiled writing, and the penchant among ancient scribes for creating composite characters. I am content to agree that the matter is not satisfactorily settled. We now have and have had for decades all the evidence we need to support the Durkheimian anthropology of God. Interestingly, the last book of the Bible could be titled the “last chapter of God.” As the Bible unfolds from Genesis to Revelation, human cultures progress over several hundred years of growth and development in the sciences and arts. Increasingly as we move through the stories of Adam, Noah, and Abraham, God’s place in the narrative becomes increasingly marginal. Humans take on more and more responsibility, there are fewer and fewer miracles and appearances of God, and by Revelation God has all but disappeared. It takes until the blossoming of biblical and religious studies in the European and especially German universities of the nineteenth century for scholarly declarations of the death of God to appear. God dies in this century philosophically as in the case of Nietzsche, anthropologically as in the case of Durkheim, and in literature during the first decade of the twentieth century (e.g., in Thomas Hardy’s (1840–1928) poem “God’s Funeral”). From this point on it is only a matter of propagating research, knowledge, and theory to bring the God narrative to an end. That is the process we are engaged in at the moment. The Emperor is out and about, and it’s just a matter of more and more people catching on to what one child has had the courage to say: “The Emperor has no clothes.” It takes a slightly more courageous child to see that there was no Emperor in the first place. Notes 1 Unless otherwise specified all quotations by Lennox are from Lennox (2011). 2 Durkheim (1912/1915: 25: Swain translates the first sentence in Section I of the Introduction as follows: “One idea which generally passes as characteristic of all that is religious, is that of the supernatural. By this is understood all sorts of things which surpass the limits of our knowledge; the supernatural is the world of the mysterious, of the unknowable, of the un-understandable.” Fields (1995) translates this passage as follows: “One notion that is generally taken to be characteristic of all that is religious is the notion of the supernatural. By that is meant any order of things that goes beyond our understanding: the supernatural is the world of mystery, the unknowable.” The original (Durkheim, 1912: 33) reads: “Une notion qui passe généralement pour caractéristique de tout ce qui est religieux est celle de surnaturel. Par là, on entend tout ordre de choses qui dépasse la portée de notre entendement; le surnaturel, c’est le monde du mystère, de l’inconnaissable, de l’incompréhensible.” 3 On the pros and cons of Hume’s ideas on miracles, see: Levine (1989, 1998, 2002), Johnson (1999), Millican (2002, 2011, 2013), Fogelin (2003), Earman (2000). 4 Vermes, 2007; Metzger and Ehrman, 2005; Ehrman, 2005, 2009; Aslan, 2013). And for overviews and bibliographies, see Levine (1989), Fogelin (2003), and Vanderburgh (2019).

Case Study  79 5 On the defense of skeptical theism, see Tooley (1991), Sennett (1993), Alston (1991), Bergmann (2001), Wysktra and Perrine (2012), and Durston (2000). On arguments against skeptical theism, see Wilks (2009), Trakakis (2003), Rowe (2001), Jordan (2006), Hasker (2004; a theist objection to skeptical theism), Dougherty (2008), and Almeida and Oppy (2003). For an overview of the arguments for and against skeptical theism, with an impressive bibliography, see Perrine (2023).

References Almeida, M. and G. Oppy (2003), “Sceptical Theism and Evidential Arguments From Evil,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81, 4: 496–516. Alston, W. (1991), “The Inductive Argument From Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” Philosophical Perspectives 5: 29–67. Altizer, T.J.J. (2002), The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group). Anderson, N. (1959), The Evidence for the Resurrection (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press). Armstrong, K. (1994), A History of God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Aslan, R. (2013), Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House). Averroes (1179–1180/1961), On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford Books). Ball, P. (2015), “Complex societies evolved without belief in all-powerful deity,” Nature/ News: www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17040.pdf Barker, D. (2016), God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction (New York: Union Square & Co.). Bendiksen, J. (2017), The Last Testament (New York: Aperture). Bergmann, M. (2001), “Skeptical Theism and Rowe’s New Evidential Argument from Evil,” Noûs 35, 2: 278–296. Berlinsky, D. (2009), The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books). Berry, J. and G. Renner (2004), Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (New York: Free Press). Blomart, A. (2004), “Transferring the Cults of Heroes in Ancient Greece,” pp. 85–98 in E.B. Aitken and J.K.B. Maclean, eds., Philostratus’s Heroikos: Religion and Cultural Identity in the Third Century C.E. (Leiden: Brill). Bruni, F. and E. Burkett (2002), A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church (New York: Harper Perennial). Butler, E.M. (1979), The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Carrier, R. (2014), On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, Ltd.) Center for the Study of Bible & Violence (2019), “A Sadomasochistic and Megalomaniacal God? Response to Richard Dawkins, Chapter 7 of The God Delusion,” https://www. csbvbristol.org.uk/2019/01/24/chapter-7-of-the-god-delusion/ Cowan, S. (2019), “The Christian worldview,” Apologetics Resource Center: https:// rw360values.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-Christian-Worldview.pdf Coyne, J. (2017), “Atheist Noam Chomsky disses new atheists,” Why Evolution is True Blog, The Web: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/04/11/atheist-noam-chomskydisses-new-atheists/ Cupit, D. (1997), After God: The Future of Religion (New York: Basic Books).

80  Case Study Cupit, D. (2003), Is Nothing Sacred: The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion (New York: Fordham University Press). Dawkins, R. (2006), The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin). Dennett, D. and L. LaScola (2010), “Preachers Who Are Not Believers,” Evolutionary Psychology 1, 8: 122–150. Dostoevsky, F. (1922), The Brothers Karamazov (New York: The Macmillan Co.). Dougherty, T. (2008), “Epistemological Considerations Concerning Skeptical Theism,” Faith & Philosophy 25: 172–176. Dundes, A. (1999), Holy Writ as Oral Writ (New York: Rowman & Littlefield). Durkheim, E. (1912/1995), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press; Fields trans.). Durston, K. (2000), “The Consequential Complexity of History and Gratuitous Evil,” Religious Studies 36: 65–80. Earman, J. (2000), Hume’s Abject Failure (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ehrman, B.D. (2005), Misquoting Jesus (New York: HarperCollins). Ehrman, B.D. (2009), Jesus Interrupted (New York: HarperCollins). Ehrman, B.D. (2012), Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperOne). Epstein, G.M. (2005), Good Without God (New York: W.W. Morrow). Fasching, D. and D. Dechant (2001), Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell). Fogelin, R. (2003), A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Geertz, C. (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books). Gorney, R. (1972), The Human Agenda (New York: Bantam). Grant, M. (1977), Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). Hasker, W. (2004), “The Sceptical Solution to the Problem of Evil,” pp. 43–57 in W. Hasker, ed., Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God (New York: Routledge). Hitchens, C. (2007), God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve). Hollingdale, R.J. (1999), Neitzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, Revised ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Jenkins, P. (2001), Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press). Johnson, D. (1999), Hume, Holism, and Miracles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Jordan, J. (2006), “Does Skeptical Theism Lead to Moral Skepticism?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 72, 2: 403–417. Kertzler, D. (2014), The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House). Kogan, B.S. (1985), Averroes and the Metaphysics of Causation (Albany: SUNY Press). Küng, H. (1980), Does God Exist? An Answer for Today (New York: Doubleday; orig. in German, 1978). Lennox, J.C. (2011), Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target (Oxford: A Lion Book). Levine, M. (1989), Hume and the Problem of Miracles: A Solution (Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers). Levine, M. (1998), “Bayesian Analyses of Hume’s Argument concerning Miracles,” Philosophy and Theology 10, 1: 101–106. Levine, M. (2002), “Review of John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles,” Hume Studies 28, 1: 161–167. Lewis, C.S. (1947), Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Harper/Collins).

Case Study  81 Little, W. and R. Mcgivern (2014), Introduction to Sociology (Houston: Rice University): https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology/ Lyas, C. (1970), “On the Coherence of Christian Atheism,” The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 45, 171: 1–19. Metzger, B.M. and B.D. Ehrman (2005), The Text of the New Testament: 1st Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press). Millican, P. (2002), Reading Hume on Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Millican, P. (2011), Twenty Questions About Hume’s ‘of Miracles’,” pp. 151–192 in A. O’Hear, ed., Philosophy and Religion, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Millican, P., (2013), “Earman on Hume on Miracles,” pp. 271–284 in S. Duncan and A. LoLordo, eds., Debates in Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses (New York: Routledge). Mitchell, B. (1994), Faith and Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Moleski, M.X. (2000), Personal Catholicism: The Theological Epistemologies of John Henry Newman and Michael Polanyi (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). Norenzayan, A. (2013), Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Perrine, T. (2023), “Skeptical Theism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/skeptical-theism/#Bib Polanyi, M. (1958), Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Price, R.M. (2009), “Jesus at the Vanishing Point,” With Responses, pp. 55–104 in J.K. Bielby and P.R. Eddy, eds., The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic). Rank, O., L. Ragan and A. Dundes (1990), In Quest of the Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Ranke-Heinemann, U. (1994), Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith (New York: HarperCollins). Reece, G.L. (2000), Elvis Religion: The Cult of the King (New York: I.B Tauris). Restivo, S. (2018), The Age of the Social (New York: Routledge). Restivo, S. (2023), The Social Brain: Sociological Foundations (New York: Lexington Books). Restivo, S. and J. Croissant (1995), “Science, Social Problems, and Progressive thought: Essays on the Tyranny of Science,” (including “Technoscience or Tyrannoscience Rex,” a review of M. Crichton’s Jurrasic Park) pp. 39–87 in S.L. Star, ed., Ecologies of Science (Albany: SUNY Press). Restivo, S. and W.K. Bauschpies (1996), “How to Criticize Science and Maintain Your Sanity,” Science as Culture (Part 3) 6, 28: 396–413. Rokeach, M. (1964), The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (New York: A. Knopf). Rowe, J. (2006), “Does Skeptical Theism Lead to Moral Skepticism?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72: 403–416. Rowe, W. (2001), “Skeptical Theism: A Response to Bergmann,” Nous 35: 297–303. Russell, B. (1957), Why I Am Not a Christian (London: Allan & Unwin). Sanders, E.P. (1993), The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin). Sennett, J. (1993), “The Inscrutable Evil Defense Against the Inductive Argument From Evil,” Faith & Philosophy 10: 220–229. Shorto, R. (1997), Gospel Truth: The New Image of Jesus Emerging From Science and History, and Why It Matters (New York: G.P. Putnam).

82  Case Study Smith, J.Z. (1987), “Dying and Rising Gods,” pp. 521–527 in M. Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. IV (London: Macmillan). Smith, M. (1978), Jesus the Magician (New York: HarperOne). Steinbrenner, E. (2017), “Question: What Is the Difference Between ‘Faith’ and ‘Blind Faith”: https://bethanylutheranfort.org/q-A/2017/9/20/question-what-is-the-differencebetween-faith-and-blind-faith Strauss, L. (1952), Persecution and the Art of Writing (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt). Sutton, C. (2017), “Seven Men Around the World Who Each Claim To Be Jesus Christ,” nzherald.co.nz: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/seven-men-around-the-world-whoeach-claim-to-be-jesus-christ/2W27IHL7PIQLTO5SFAPPAMN5HM/ Theissen, G. and A. Merz (1998), The Historical Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Tooley, M. (1991), “The Argument From Evil,” Philosophical Perspectives 5: 89–134. Trakakis, N. (2003), “Evil and the Complexity of History: A Response to Durston,” Religious Studies 39: 451–458. Tuckett, C. (2001), “Sources and Methods,” pp. 121–137 in M. Bockmuehl, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Vanderburgh, W.L. (2019), David Hume on Miracles, Evidence, and Probability (New York: Lexington). Vermes, G. (2007), The Nativity: History and Legend (New York: Doubleday). Weber, M. (1904/1949), “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy” in E.A. Shils and H.A. Finch, eds., The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press). Weber, M. (1917/1949), “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics ” in E.A. Shils and H.A. Finch, eds., The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press). Wilks, I. (2009). “Skeptical Theism and Empirical Unfalsifiability.” Faith and Philosophy. 26,1: 64–76. Wilks, I. (2013), “The Global Skepticism Objection to Skeptical Theism,” pp. 458–467 in J. McBrayer and D. Howard-Snyder, eds., The Blackwell Companion to The Problem of Evil (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell). Wills, L.M. (1997/2005), The Quest of the Historical Gospel: Mark, John and the Origins of the Gospel Genre (New York: Routledge). Wilson, E.O. (2012), The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: W.W. Norton). Wykstra, S. and T. Perrine. (2012), “Foundations of Skeptical Theism,” Faith and Philosophy 29, 4: 375–399.

8

Case Study William Lane 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 philosophers 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 (never mind the so-called educated) that they are in the presence of reasoned arguments. On the third hand, the rationale for this book, and the attention I bring to these matters, is based on my professional interests as a sociologist of knowledge and belief. In a less intellectual sense, it sometimes feels like I can’t keep my eyes off these apologeticists for the same reason people are drawn to burning buildings and car crashes. Summary of the Claims

• How do I know Christianity is true: “the role of rational argumentation in know-

ing Christianity to be true is the role of a servant. A person knows Christianity is true because the Holy Spirit tells him it is true, and while argument and evidence can be used to support this conclusion, they cannot legitimately overrule it” (2008: 51). Craig believes there is a common ground between believers and nonbelievers that allows him to communicate the Gospel: that common ground is: “the laws of logic and the facts of experience” (2008: 57). These claims are incompatible with the fallacy of introspective transparency and the social and cultural grounding of the laws of logic which are in fact collective representations and collective elaborations. • The absurdity of life without God: “Biblical Christianity . . . provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life for man: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily” (2008: 87). The alternative is to “deceive ourselves by means of some ‘Noble Lie’ into thinking that we and the universe still have value” (2008: 85). Craig sees this as relying on relativism and constituting a fiction. Therefore, he asks: “Why should we sacrifice self-interest for a fiction?” The relativist answer is that we should sacrifice our self-interest “for the sake of social coherence.” The problem, Craig writes, is “that self-interest and the interest of the herd [NB] do DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-8

84  Case Study not always coincide” (2008: 86). These claims depend on the myth of individualism and the failure to understand self, consciousness, and brain as social entities. The use of the term “herd” instead of community or society is a deliberate provocation. • The existence of God: “only if God exists can there be hope for a solution to the human predicament” (2008: 93). Craig argues that we do not have to take it on faith that God exists; we can turn to natural theology. Natural theology is theology based on reason and the discoveries of science. To take us in this direction, Craig has to show that he has command over the basic cosmological theories that bear on his version of the classical cosmological argument, the Kalam Cosmological Argument (Craig, 2000): 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore the universe has a cause. 4. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists who without the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful. 5. Therefore, an uncaused personal Creator of the universe with the properties listed in 4 exists. Craig (2008: 150) tries to pin this Alice in Wonderland argument on thermodynamics, which he claims implies that the universe had a beginning. This might have been a plausible argument in the nineteenth century. In the current standard cosmological model, entropy (2nd law of thermodynamics) has no relevance to whether the universe had a beginning or not. The leap from what are essentially local experimental results to propositions about the universe illustrates the fallacy of incommensurate scales. What is more devastating to Craig’s argument is that logically any number of and forms of “Creator entity” could conclude the argument. The argument doesn’t logically lead to the Christian God or any God QED. Craig simply plugs in his God, a God that was programmed into him the same way my mother programmed me with the sign of the cross. Craig’s general approach is to jump into the middle of a controversial arena in philosophy or science and pick out the side that fits his “God exists” assumption, no matter the Procrustean moves needed to create the fit. I’ll give one example of how this works in Craig’s argument and skip over all of his other efforts to bring cosmology to his aid; they all follow the same choice paradigm and Procrustean fit process. Craig draws on individual metaphysical absurdities such as Hilbert’s Hotel thought experiment (Hilbert, 2013; Gamow, 1947: 17) to support the generalization that a theory of tensed time is required by the Kalam proof. The tenseless theory of time (B-theory) is that the flow of time we experience is not an objective feature of reality. The tensed theory of time (A-theory) is that reality is ordered in a series of events that take place in a continual transformation of positions that give us the concept of past, present, and future. The A-B distinction was introduced by McTaggart (1908). There are two forms of the A-theory: presentism assumes only present objects exist; growing block universe assumes

William Lane Craig  85 both present and past objects exist. B-theories assume that there is no objective present: in externalism all existence in time is real; four dimensionalism treats time as analogous to space. This is a discussion that has its roots in the ancient philosophies of Heraclitus, the philosopher of ceaseless change, and Parmenides, the philosopher of a timeless unchanging reality. The literature that evolved from their iconic differences has blossomed into a metaphysical jungle of logical and linguistic propositions that diverge and converge and branch out without stop signs. This allows Craig to cherry-pick a theory he likes out of the grab bag of A-theories and ignore ways in which A-theories and B-theories may interpenetrate or interact with each other and the profundity of the surface nature of everyday “I-time” which makes a strict distinction between past, present, and future. The theists’ search for rock-like certainty leads them into the trap of trying to tie science to rock-like certainties. But no science offers a bigger trap than the theists’ favorite science, cosmology. It would help their argument for God if the Big Bang as a coming into existence out of nothing was an absolute certainty. Cosmic inflation, for example, is not one model but several. Such models are more mathematical than lenses into real physical realities. We now have cosmologists looking for a cosmic graviton background that would rule out cosmic inflation. In that case, we would be faced with the possibility that the universe began with a bounce not a bang, a bounce from a previously contracting universe (Vagnozzi and Loeb, 2022). Science will not stand still while theists try to lasso it in their God Proof Rodeo. The basic problem for theists like Craig is that science has not solved the problem of time; a credible theory of time must wait at least for a theory that resolves the differences between quantum mechanics and general relativity. I could generate the same narrative form for each of Craig’s efforts to ground his fantasies in modern cosmology or in science in general. At the end of the day, Craig’s only resources for constructing proofs are thought experiments in philosophy which are not subject to any level of objective verification. Even if we could demonstrate that actual infinities are impossible, we could only achieve this locally without any warrant to exclude an infinitely old universe. As for timeless causes, some models in quantum cosmology include the possibility of a timeless quantum field. There are too many places in Craig’s metaphysics where a handful of “whys” could readily demonstrate that his Emperor has no clothes. One must stand in awe of the capacity of intelligent men (yes, mostly men) to spin webs of logical and linguistic fantasies generation after generation, oblivious of the children of the WHY? trying to draw attention to the naked Emperor. I will give Craig (2008: 399) one more chance to awe you with his “reasonable faith,” these words that come as he concludes his book: In conclusion, therefore, three great, independently established facts – the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and the origin of the Christian faith – all point to the same marvelous conclusion: that God raised Jesus from the dead. Given that miracles are possible, this conclusion cannot be debarred to anyone seeking for the meaning to existence who see therein the hope of eternal life.

86  Case Study I cannot find enough scholarly compassion for Craig to recommend that you read the details of the argument he offers for this conclusion. I have been accused of being too quick to dismiss philosophy and have been given good grounds by learned philosophers for tempering my criticism, for making room for ideas I do not agree with. Bracketing this discourse, I defend my dismissal of Craig’s arguments on the ground that they do not rise to the level of reasonable philosophy. The theists Craig, Turek, and Lennox essentially publish outside the mainstream of traditional philosophical scholarship with Christian publishers: Lion Hudson, Crossway Publishing, and NavPress. Plantinga (see Chapter 10) publishes with W. Eerdmann, an independent religious publishing house but he has also published with university presses (e.g., Oxford and Cornell). And Küng’s (see Chapter 9) Does God Exist? was published by Doubleday; he has also published with Anchor. His work also appears under the imprint of the Christian publisher John Knox. The fact that Plantinga and Küng publish with distinguished commercial and university presses reflects the fact that for all of their logical and linguistic gymnastics with illusions and delusions, they are in a different class of thinkers than Craig, Turek, and Lennox. Their philosophies and theologies are simply more robust than what we find in other theists. On the other hand, since they are plagued by the same logical, linguistic, and metaphysical flaws as their lesser colleagues, perhaps they benefit from sometimes misguided fair play, let a thousand flowers bloom, free speech paradigms that permit a certain neutrality when considering the range of viewpoints it is desirable to publish (see Box 4, Chapter 10). In this context, religion and theology get free rides they don’t deserve. Religious freedom has been an important road to liberatory politics but a stumbling block to liberatory education. References Craig, W.L. (2000), The Kalam Cosmological Argument (Eugene: WipF and Stock Publishers). Craig, W.L. (2008), Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton: Crossway). Gamow, G. (1947). One Two Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (New York: Viking Press). Hilbert, D. (2013), David Hilbert’s Lectures on the Foundations of Arithmetics and Logic 1917–1933, edited by W. Ewald and W. Sieg (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag). McTaggart, J.L. (1908), “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17, 68: 457–474 (for further reading and a bibliography see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/, 2020). Vagnozzi, S. and A. Loeb (2022), “The Challenge of Ruling Out Inflation Via the Primordial Graviton Background,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 939, L22: 1–5.

9

Hans Küng A Case Study in the Vicious Circles of Theist Logic1

Why do smart, educated people believe in God in the wake of the evidence against the existence of God I have reviewed in the preceding chapters? I want to explore this question by considering a brilliant defense of the claim that God exists. I know of no believer with a greater multidimensional knowledge base across the humanities, arts, sciences, and philosophy than that possessed by the theologian Hans Küng. His terrifyingly brilliant command of this knowledge base is on full display in his almost 1,000-page opus, Does God Exist? (1980). This book offers up a narrative proof for the existence of God. It seems to me that a deconstruction of his approach to answering this question should throw light on my 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? It seems to me that he can only reach this conclusion if he fails to pick up certain sociological signals. One clue that this is the source of his error is that he gives a great deal of space to Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, but very little to Emile Durkheim. So let’s begin where he begins, 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. I am not prepared to undertake a psychiatric biography here. But let us note that psychologists have identified different personality types that go with different degrees of the need for certainty. In practice we can turn to a Nietzsche, who can make himself a guinea pig in the science of human behavior and eschew conviction, or a Feynman, who is not destabilized by not knowing things. Küng is a different species. Küng begins his quest at the feet – or mind – of Descartes. He immediately introduces questions that will haunt his own quest: didn’t Descartes believe in his existence before he put it in doubt; and didn’t he already believe in God before he set out to prove God? God or a God surrogate has inspired many great minds to seek a single key that would unlock the secrets of life, the universe, and everything. That key has been thought to be God per se, or surrogates like “the universal field equation” DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-9

88  Hans Küng or the “theory of everything.” Some physicists believe that the only way such a theory can be constructed is to include God or make God per se the unified theory. One of the ways to read history is to see it as the progressive realization of Protagoras’ (481–411 BCE) imperative that “man is the measure of all things.” This was a radical claim for his time since it meant that the individual human being or humanity rather than a god or an unchanging moral law is the ultimate source of value. Descartes represents an epochal turning point in Küng’s view in the unfolding of Protagoras’ imperative. For the medieval philosopher, certainty of God was the key to certainty of the self. Descartes represents a Protagorean moment, shifting the European consciousness toward certainty of the self as a key to the certainty of God. This Protagorean moment can also be viewed as culminating in the nineteenth-century sociological decentering of self and the placing of the group at the center of social life. This begins the slow death of the myth of individualism. Küng is dimly aware of this movement, but his failure to grasp its full historicocultural significance sustains his orientation to a Christian theology and the God of Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, it behooves us to continue to document his quest even if – and because – we already know where he will stand at the end of his quest. We don’t know this because we cheated and read ahead; we know this because of where he begins his quest. Historically, as the Protagorean imperative unfolds, it is always mixed in with contradictions on all sides. So while Descartes is developing the rationale for cogito ergo sum, while the ideal of mathematical certainty is becoming a feature of the unfolding scientific revolution, Descartes is dividing the universe into two different kinds of things, the hard things of the material world and the soft things of the mind and consciousness (Cartesian dualism). The key is that the mind and the body though different natural kinds nonetheless are able to interact. This will give rise to what is still in our time known as the “hard problem” of consciousness: how is it possible for us to have phenomenal experiences, experiences that “feel like something?” Inanimate things, we assume or assert, do not have such feelings. In order words, the dilemma is to explain how a material thing like the brain can generate phenomenal experiences. Classically in philosophy this is the mind-brain problem; in theology it is the soul-body problem. The other contradiction Descartes embroils himself in involves his claim that faith is exempt from the general rules of evidence and offers the greatest certainty of all methods of establishing truth. It addresses the obscure content that cannot be accessed by reason. It is achieved by an act of will, not through the exercise of the intellect. We can make assertions about this obscure content without evidence because a God who cannot deceive us (a Cartesian postulate) predisposes us to faith as an avenue to His revelations. It is a brief leap from this view to the ontological argument that a perfect being (God) must exist, a leap that can only be supported if we accept a Platonic-Augustinian realism that assigns ideas a reality of their own. This argument does not look so persuasive to the twenty-first-century mind, though there are still some unreconstructed Platonists among us, especially in mathematics. The eighteenth century was an important moment in the breakdown of the traditions of order, hierarchy, authority, discipline, Church, dogma, and faith, which

Hans Küng  89 were still important pillars of values, ethics, and morals in the seventeenth century. One should read this as more writings on the wall pointing to modernities and postmodernities that, while proclaiming the death of God and the end of traditional religion, would still ring with hymns to traditional faith and belief. Küng turns his attention next to Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Pascal said that we were faced with two possibilities, two uncertainties regarding the God question: God is or he is not. Once again, it seems that the Age of Reason (late 1600s to mid-1800s) could not sustain an unequivocal, unwavering commitment to reason above all. Pascal said we couldn’t reason our way around the uncertainties about God; we were reduced to gamblers playing “You Bet Your Life.” Here “reason” seems to show some life. A rational person should live his/her life as if God exists. If you bet wrong and there is no God, your losses will be finite material ones and certain pleasures. If you bet correctly, your gains will be infinite (life everlasting in Heaven) and you will avoid the infinite loss of an eternity in Hell. The real value of Pascal’s Wage was that it helped, with his other contributions, to usher in important advances in probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism. More writings on the wall appear in the eighteenth century, the full implications of which escape Küng once again. With materialism already in the air (the term is introduced by chemist Robert Boyle in 1661), the period between the late 1690s and the early 1800s is witness to the emergence of atheistic materialism. This was one of the achievements of the Encyclopedists (1751–1765). Intervention Laplace (1749–1827) is often found in this company thanks to a widely quoted interaction with Napoleon. Laplace, according to this tradition, famously presents his four volumes on Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon and is asked about the role of the Creator in this work. Laplace replies that he does not need the God hypothesis. The question arises in part because God appears in the writings of Laplace’s predecessors Lagrange (1736–1813) and Newton (1642/1643–1726/1727; the disparities reflect the replacement of the Julian by the Gregorian calendar). The story is apocryphal. The interaction does appear to be historical. However, Laplace appears to have been a Deist, and his reply to Napoleon meant that unlike Newton’s theory, his theory did not require the intervention of God to work (Faye, 1884: 109–111; Pasquier, 1898; Hawking, 1999; Hahn, 2005). Some of his contemporaries described him as an atheist, others as agnostic. The point is that he is not the unequivocal hero of atheism or secularism that some nonbelievers would like him to be. Laplace notwithstanding, at this point we are faced with the possibility, in opposition to the entire apparatus of traditional authority, of a natural science without God. Küng is forced to ask at this point – and not for the first or last time – whether belief in God still has a future. The weight of history affords him little space for a conventional argument for God. So he adopts the strategy of asserting a new future for God that takes this weighty history into account, especially the modern processes of secularization and emancipation. He has a rosy picture of a “new awareness” of an improving relationship between natural science and theology.

90  Hans Küng There were two related key challenges to theology and belief in the early twentieth century; one was the double movement to reduce philosophy to logic and linguistic analysis and mathematics to logic and symbolic analysis; the other was the effort to banish metaphysics. Theology, already damaged by the death of God movement and the nineteenth-century loss of faith, now seemed to be a priori senseless (Wilson, 1999; Lilla, 2007). But the death blow could not be delivered in part because the opponents had gone too far in seeking strict objectivity freed of subjectivity. The early decades of the twentieth century saw one of the great philosophical ages led by the logical positivists and their debates with rivals like Karl Popper. Amid all the positivist-anti-positivist noise there were some signs of new ideas boiling up out of the Age of the Social, which had begun in the 1840s with the crystallization of the sociological disciplines. There were cracks in the armor of “cogito ergo sum”; Descartes’ “I think” became “It thinks within me” (Bertrand Russell) and then “It thinks” (philosopher Rudolf Carnap). Sociology translated all of this to: “I am therefore I think”; and then “I (a social network) am, therefore I think.” The latter part of the Age of the Social mixed in with positivism and antipositivism churned up ideas about the limits of objective science that would eventually crystallize in the sociology of knowledge and science and then the concept of the social construction of science in the 1970s and thereafter. Karl Popper shook up the logical foundations of science, and Thomas Kuhn challenged verificationist and falsificationist models of science with his concept of paradigms or exemplars. As Küng sees it, between 1914 and 1980 there was an “internal correction” that led from hyper-Cartesian rationality, logical positivism, and linguistic analysis “back again” to the necessity of history, psychology, sociology, and even “metaphysics.” Küng was once again on the right track but his faith disturbed his path. Küng comes up to the threshold of the sociological cogito and fails to grasp the moment. His commitment to establish a rock-like foundation of certainty means he will never pass over, let alone see, that threshold. With God and theology under constant attack on various fronts especially since the 1800s, what strategy should the theologian motivated by faith adopt? Hostility between theology and natural science cannot lead to good news about God. Peaceful co-existence is in our time no more promising. The strategy for the theologian is to push for meaningful critical dialogue and cooperation between theology and natural science. Theology, philosophy, and natural science all face difficulties adapting to changes in the world picture. We are confronted as never before by one world and one humanity. One might imagine that a man of Küng’s obvious brilliance would see the virtue of a God for one world and one humanity. But he is unable to escape the clutches of the Christian God. The Copernican theological revolution for our time, the one that follows on the Copernican revolutions identified with the theologies of Clement and Origen, then Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther, is nothing more nor less than a counter-revolution in favor of the Christian God and Jesus. Küng’s call for abandoning the medieval world picture and a transition to a new paradigm is not a transition at all, as we will see. Rationality is not absolute; reason must be linked with willing and feeling: l’esprit de géometriè plus l’esprit de finesse. What has happened here? Küng’s

Hans Küng  91 paradigm shift has restored body-soul dualism! He keeps stressing the “absolute need” for a new modern understanding of God but resists his own call. He bravely carries on a quest that keeps putting him back on an ancient path despite so many encounters along the way with the most profound thinkers in history. Inevitably, his quest leads him to Hegel. Hegel is one of the great unifiers, postulating an Absolute Spirit that unifies subject and object, being and thought, and real and ideal. God is at the center not of a rigidly mathematical system but of a universal dialectical system. God as Absolute Spirit has and is a history revealing himself in his becoming. Hegel hand waves away the facts of suffering, pain, and death in order to defend world history as the history of the rational world. Küng takes his quest beyond Hegel in a search for God as a living God. Again we are promised a post-Copernican modern God in the world, transcendence in immanence, the hereafter in the here and now. To go beyond world history as the history of God we have to turn to Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and the atheistic view of world history as the history of humanity. It just so happens that Comte is considered one of the founders of sociology, and his rock of certainty is sociology as the religion of humanity; recall that his mentor Saint-Simon’s term for sociology was the “new Christianity.” Comte’s vision of a new sociological positivistic world order ruled by sociologist priests quickly evaporated. The concept of the technologically driven progress of humanity was not going to fare well in the emerging industrial revolution and the coming World Wars of the twentieth century. Was there any hope for working out a science without religion and progress without God? Hegel’s Spirit still shows some life in theologian de Chardin’s (1818–1955) vision of the universe as an evolution toward spirit, fully realized in the form of the personality of the universal Christ. And it shows up again in the mathematician and philosopher A.N. Whitehead’s (1861–1947) concept of God and world as one, of God as the poet of the world, of God as a fellow sufferer. This is not a Creator God in the biblical sense, and in the end just more Hegelian speculation, too much optimism, too much absolute idealism. Popper, attacking Whitehead’s logic, complained about his contempt for argument, and dogmatism. Where does Küng stand at this point? He is not yet prepared to answer yes or no to the question of God’s existence. In another effort to put himself on a path to a new concept of God for moderns, he writes that the question must be asked without reference to Greek, medieval, or early modern assumptions. He reiterates his course-correcting idea that given one world and one humanity, we are obliged to seek a critical dialogic collaboration between theology, natural science, modern philosophy, and modern thought. Social science, the most critical ingredient for a revolution in the God paradigm, is not going to be part of this collaboration. We are going to witness a “miracle” as Küng engages and grapples with the secularity and historicity of God and somehow is not moved off a path, we can see from our bird’s eye view, that is headed straight for Christ. Küng opposes all efforts to make God a social production. In spite of his apparent willingness to consider a paradigm shift in our understanding of God, he is blocked by (1) an unwillingness to contemplate a God manufactured by human

92  Hans Küng beings; (2) the myth of individualism; he views history, biography, and culture through a lens that filters out social groups, social networks, and social construction; and (3) an overwhelming predisposition to, faith in, the Christian God. For Küng, God is the ground of all being and of all morals. Let’s take a brief time out. Consider the analogy: God is to humans and mortals as the aether is to the propagation of light. If it’s true that we cannot prove or disprove God or the aether, we have the Einsteinian option of postulating God out of the equation. Let’s see now what happens when Küng considers sociological, materialist atheism. God is not, he asserts, a projection of “man” as Feuerbach claims. Nor is God consolation serving vested interests as Marx claims, neither is it an infantile illusion as Freud claims. After in-depth critical assessments of these thinkers, he finds that God is still an open question. He cannot help wondering, however, what would our situation be if God did not exist and never existed. Wouldn’t our world be different if in place of God there was a “bare nothing”? He is clearly aware that the choice isn’t between a God and nothing but between a God that possesses an immaterial ontology and a symbolic God. He understands that this is what Durkheim claims but simply ignores it. And in the case of Marx, who gets the full critical treatment, he misses Marx’s sociological moments – his understanding of the social nature of self, being, and consciousness and of religion as a collective human achievement. What could be worse than atheism? The consequence of atheism, nihilism. And so we arrive at Nietzsche. Here as in all the other cases he considered, Küng’s critical faculties do not fail him; but neither do they advance him. Nietzsche is the embodiment of nihilism, at once patient, diagnostician, and therapist of that fatal disease. Perhaps Küng is right that at the end, with only living alone without God or morality, left to himself, Nietzsche failed to defeat his major adversaries, Wagner and God. But Küng fails to come to terms with the Nietzsche who dances, whose thinking sizzles, whose hammer reveals that the emperor is naked, and who is willing to make himself a guinea pig in the science of humanity. On the other hand, Küng recognizes that there is conflict in Nietzsche. The philosopher who proclaims “God is dead” is also the man who seeks God. The decisive rejection of Christianity, the narration of the true history of Christianity, is juxtaposed with respect for the person of Jesus. Psychiatrically, Nietzsche’s ambivalence about God might be traced to the traumatic loss of his father when he was five years old. Did Nietzsche the Anti-Christ have a spiritual self; did he harbor a battlefield for these selves? Having dived deeply into the atheism of Feuerbach (who stood Hegel on his head), Marx (who presupposes Feuerbach), Freud (who presupposes all the great nonbelievers of the nineteenth century), and Nietzsche (who doesn’t justify atheism but “simply” accepts “man created god” as a given), Küng concludes that atheism and nihilism, never mind the sociological God, have not been substantiated. His mistake is that it is not these individual thinkers that substantiate the death of God, it is the context, the social networks of their lives and works that substantiate it. Nonetheless, Küng claims that nihilism is irrefutable; no rational argument can establish the impossibility of nihilism, and neither can any theory justify it. Can nihilism be overcome? Is the alternative to nihilism to say “Yes to Reality”? Küng

Hans Küng  93 returns to the basic attitude that has guided his quest from the very beginning: can we find a basic certainty to transcend the cogito, the credo, and the law of identity? So he turns to a claim that will drop him into the center of a fundamental sociological insight: he claims that irrationalism is the foundation of critical rationalism. This puts into question the reasonableness of reason and the reality of reality. How should we proceed? Should we align ourselves with fundamental mistrust or fundamental trust? Fundamental trust vanquishes nihilism factually. It is grounded in a reality that is uncertain. But this choice does not erase the basic question: to be or not to be? Where do we stand at this juncture? The world, my very existence, is groundless. If we stop here, God is at best uncertain and very likely does not exist. To avoid this conclusion we must simply affirm God, say “Yes” to God. Küng’s rationale here is no more substantial than that he must avoid uncertainty at all costs. We have vanquished nihilism, and now we must vanquish atheism. What can we say to those for whom life remains a riddle? Can we lead them to a solution? If it hasn’t been made clear already, now we must assert that what is at issue is the very term “God.” No term in human language has been more misused, stained, and desecrated. What is to be done? Let’s take a break from Küng’s quest to explore the sociological issue he raises when he claims that irrationalism is the ground for critical rationalism. Nietzsche noted that we rightly pride ourselves on achieving a modicum of reason and liberty in our lives. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the reasonable or reasoning animal. But sociologists claim there is something irrational about rationalism. First, rationality only appears in human history and culture under certain conditions. It is not a universal or a cultural invariant. More significantly, reasoning and rational agreement stand on a non-rational foundation. For example, rationally constructed contracts are based on a non-rational foundation. This is known as “pre-contractual solidarity.” More generally, society is based on trust. We can work together not because of rationally agreed to arrangements but because of nonrational feelings that we can trust each other. We approached this way of thinking earlier in discussing the cooperative principle in evolution and the emergence of humans as always, already, and everywhere social, and Adler’s notion of internal and external constraints. Ultimately, our rational calculations work because they are underwritten by sentiments of trust (Collins, 1992: 3–29). Let’s recognize that in a world fractured along the faults of conflicts and the breakdown of community solidarity, even pre-contractual solidarity can be compromised. As long as “the social” is perpetuated, we can be assured that such a compromise has been limited. So there is a sociological rationale for Küng’s intuition that fundamental trust seems to be without foundations. The reason for this is that it is the foundation and it is upon this foundation that it is possible for us to deal with the uncertainties of reality. In the light of all of this, Küng, echoing the distinguished Austrian philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), argues that we should not stop talking about “God” just because the word has been soiled and mauled. This is all the more reason we should keep talking about God but in a fresh way we approach with care. The question is: does the confirmation of God arise from reason or from faith? Whatever the case, we want a justifiable, not a blind, belief, a belief related

94  Hans Küng to reality. Notice that Küng has already declared reality uncertain and seems to be asking that we ground certainty of God in the uncertainty of reality. And so we arrive at the question: can God be proved? Proofs of God may have lost most of their medieval power to persuade, but they continue to fascinate us. What is possible and what is impossible when it comes to proofs of God? The proofs for God assume that God’s factual existence can be proved in principle. What are we trying to ascertain here? Is God knowable in principle as defined in Vatican 1? Can God be “immediately experienced” as Pascal (1654/2022) suggests in Mémorial? No, the question for Küng is, can God be proved in principle and in fact. There are four classical proofs of God: cosmological, teleological, ontological, and moral proof. The cosmological proof begins with our experience of movement, change, and causality in the world. Given the principle of causality, and the fact that we cannot abide an infinite regress, it follows that there must be a first cause. My reply to this proof is that in our contemporary technoscience world, the principle of causality has not gone uncontested. It has been contested at the highest levels of scientific and philosophical inquiry but has not erased the everyday causality of crossing the street and hard-boiling eggs. It now also seems unreasonable to simply claim that the infinite regress is meaningless. We saw earlier that if there is indeed a need to posit a first cause, there is no necessary reason to identify the first cause with God, and even less reason to identify the Christian God with the first cause. The teleological proof is based on the order, appropriateness, purposefulness, and dynamism of the natural world and the human mind. In addition, it assumes the principle of finality. The world and life are not “here” by chance; there is a world Creator, and there will be a final end. My reply to this proof is that we now have enough information from the sciences, mathematics, and probability theory to understand how random, chance processes could give rise to degrees of order in the world and life. We also now know that principles of chaos are natural to nature and the brain. The question of order in the world and life seems to be more a matter of perspective than of some objective reality. Where is the order in earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclones? Where is the order in poverty, disease, pain, and suffering? Can a rainbow, a sunset, or a daffodil offset a Holocaust, the Black Plague, starving children by the millions? Let’s take note of the fact that disruptive phenomena like earthquakes and social injustices like poverty are not beyond lawful scientific explanations. But that is a different kind of order than the one the believer perceives. The ontological proof is that God (innate in every human being) is the most perfect and necessary being. Perfection as well as necessity entails existence. This is a purely ideational logic and could lead to a priori proofs for the existence of the most improbable things, from unicorns to dragons, or ghosts to fairies. The moral proof is based on the assumption that the possibility of the “highest good” depends on the existence of God. The concept of culture is the immediate and transparent rebuttal to the moral proof. We don’t get our morals, values, or ethics from God but from culture (on the sociology and logic of God proofs, see Restivo, 2021: 99–112). Küng is not unaware of the objections I raise to these proofs. In general, he argues that these proofs lack coercive force. The proofs I have reviewed here and

Hans Küng  95 in earlier sections of the book are viewed by Küng as ingenious cerebral logical thought-constructs by and for philosophical and theological specialists. They are so abstract and opaque that they can hold no conviction for the “average man.” He recognizes that principles of causality and finality are contested in contemporary science and philosophy. There is no good reason to exclude infinite series or the coincidences of pure facticity. In the end, Küng makes a crucial concession that will come back to haunt him: all the assumptions behind the God proofs reflect that what is to be proved is assumed to begin with. For every proof and argument, he writes, there is a counterproof or argument. He agrees with the argument I gave earlier that can be put in the form of the question: can the God in a proof still be God? If we are going to prove God with physics or mathematics, doesn’t that mean that God must be something like a physical or mathematical object? Can we really know God by way of a “smart syllogism”? He claims that there is not a single God proof that is universally accepted. Of course, this is true for all proofs either literally or by virtue of the principle of organized skepticism. Karl Jaspers wrote that in the aftermath of Kant’s refutation of all God proofs and the failure of Hegel to restore the proofs in the wake of a new interest in the medieval proofs, it has now become urgent that we encourage a new philosophical appropriation of the proofs of God. In our contemporary situation we have on the one hand the argument from dialectical theology that it is not enough to assert God; God must be verified. On the other hand, natural theology tells us we should verify belief in God but eschew proofs. Küng asks if there is a middle ground between these two positions. We need a middle ground because we are dealing with a God who is not of this world, and is not accessible and knowable like the things of this world; it is a question of knowledge of a very different reality. The problem from my perspective is that we humans evolved in this world – we live and adapt to this reality. All of our senses are attuned to this world and this reality. Our senses have not evolved in order to access a “different” world, a “different” reality. We do not have the sensory apparatus to grasp a being such as Turek’s God: immaterial, and outside of time and space. So now what? Küng argues that we are not bound to believe in God, so how are we to justify belief in God? Küng is convinced that there is a new openness and trust in the relationships between science and religion. Natural scientists do not, in general, have a specific relationship to religion, but social scientists tend to be negative about religion; and natural scientists are more negative about it than scientists of mentality. It appears to Küng that militant atheism has lost ground among scientists. Surveys of scientists over the course of the twentieth century clearly show a divide between religious belief among scientists and across the general population. Scientists are half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. Scientists are not, however, likely to be militant atheists. In any case, this does not mean that belief in God has gained ground. Küng believes that every situation is characterized by a universal constant (an absolute factor) and a particular variable determined by the situation. Duty is a function of the situation. This idea seems to put us close to a situational ethics. But Küng claims that in some situations duty can become an absolute categorical.

96  Hans Küng The point here is that the ethical expression of the fundamental trust that is the primal foundations of society is trust in God, belief in God. Without the rationally (?) justified trust in God, no ethical norm can be absolutely, ultimately justified. We need somehow to negotiate across the divide between the abstract God of the philosophers and the concrete God of the Bible. We need to see where we finally end up as we move from Hegel, de Chardin, and Whitehead to the modern understanding of the historical, secular God. And so we arrive at saying “Yes” to the Christian God. A survey of the world religions, the Gods of those religions, and the God of the philosophers leads only to ambiguity and inconsistency. The religious experience comes in many varieties (think William James here), diverse expressions that tend to be superficial, unbalanced, and “perhaps wrong,” according to Küng. We need clarification. How do we achieve this? The answer, Küng claims, is religious reflection on religious experience. But as we have seen, experience itself is no guarantee of truth (fallacy of introspective transparency). An eternity of reflection on the experience of the earth as at rest could never reveal the nature of its multidimensional movements through space and time. Why should we think this “reflection on experience” will work in the case of a God who is not “of this world”? What has been achieved as a result of this almost 1,000-page quest? We have traveled nothing more nor less than a narrative proof that suffers from the problem of all God proofs. God was already present (assumed) at the beginning of the quest. Perhaps more significantly, the psychological, the emotional need for God was already present, the need for a rock of unshakeable certainty. And neither science, philosophy, comparative history of the world’s religions, nor any of the dearly gained achievements of human reason could stay Küng from a predetermined path to God, and not to just any God, not to a God for a newly envisioned multicultural humanity and global society, but to the God of Jesus Christ. As we come to the end of this quest it becomes important to know if there is a rationale for Küng’s optimism about the relationship between science and religion. The statistics on religious beliefs and practices among scientists across the decades don’t show anything like a general movement toward atheism. A significant number of scientists hold religious and spiritual beliefs, and a majority do not see any conflict between science and religion. A conflict view is more pronounced in the West, while a cooperative view is characteristic of, for example, India, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Scientists in the United States, like members of the general population, tend to view science and religion as non-overlapping magisteria. There are, however, particular circumstances which give rise to conflict. There is no evidence to suggest that scientists are in the vanguard of secular movements. In all these matters, context is, as many studies have demonstrated, crucial. Can we settle the conflict between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Küng decides he can turn Nietzsche’s “history of an error” on its head to give us “the (future) history of a (newly) discovered truth.” The philosopher’s God, as we have seen, is nameless, abstract, indeterminate – He does not reveal Himself. By contrast, the biblical faith (NB!) in God is concrete and determinate. This is a little confusing; is it the faith in God that is concrete or the biblical God that is concrete? Unlike the God of the philosophers, the biblical God

Hans Küng  97 has a name and reveals Himself in history as He who is and who will be, guiding, helpful, and strengthening. What about the Gods of the world’s other religions? They are definite but not coherent, according to Küng. They display many contrasting names and natures. But isn’t this true of the God of Israel? Küng doesn’t consider this. Can we really defend the idea that God reveals Himself as singular, monolithic, and unchanging across the history of Christianity? We can’t believe in all those varieties of Gods across the world religions at the same time. But how can we believe in all those varieties of the Christian God across time, space, history, and culture? What is to be done? We need to reach a rationally justifiable decision about what to believe. But why “rationally” when we have been warned over and over about the irrational foundations of rationality? The answer – contradicting much of what we have encountered along this quest – is that the biblical faith in God (why not the biblical God?) is coherent, rationally justifiable, and proved itself historically. With all of the immense learning he exhibits on this quest, Küng is stuck in a medieval, even primitive, world searching for the absolutely finite, absolutely last reality; where do the world and its order (NB) come from? This is the theological equivalent of an extreme law and order politics! Why are we born, why do we die, and where do our moral awareness and sense of ethical norms come from? Two things to keep in mind at this point. First, putting a question mark at the end of a sentence (“Why are we born?”) doesn’t automatically make a sensible or answerable question. Second, some questions seem to evoke only philosophical and theological possibilities because we have not yet graduated to cultural awareness (“Where does our moral sense come from?”). Next we encounter the theologian’s fascination with quantum physics which seems to eschew determinism and (as in the case of Bohr) encourage a complementarity view of science and religion. I have dealt with the issues, problems, and fallacies associated with this view at length in Restivo (1983). I discussed the distinction between determinism and lawfulness earlier, a distinction hardly if ever found in the theological literature. Now we arrive with Küng at some God postulates:

• • • • • • • • • •

God is not a person in the way that “man” is a person. God is more than a person. God is not less than a person. God is not a neuter, not an “it.” God is a God of “men.” Dialectical theology has failed to dissociate the philosopher’s God from the biblical God. Natural theology has failed to harmonize the philosophical and the biblical God. These “two” Gods can be “sublated” in the Hegelian sense. This sublated God is at once affirmed, negated, and transcended. This is the more divine God modern “man” has grown so critical of.

Now, without having to give up “his” reason, “man” encounters a God he “can pray and offer sacrifice, again fall on his knees in awe and sing and dance before him.”

98  Hans Küng What is it that makes a person of such immense learning want to prostrate himself before God or “man”? What is it that leads some people like myself or Christopher Hitchens not to bend their knees to human or God? What leads to the anarchist motto, Ni Dieu, Ni Maître? Prostrating yourself before God makes it easy to prostrate yourself before human dictators. The height of worship is the lowest level of self-esteem. And now at last, and inevitably, Küng leads us to the objective of our quest: the God of Jesus Christ. We arrive at the QED of this narrative proof: God exists. We have traveled through philosophical, theological, spiritual, scientific, and general intellectual minefields; skirted the upheavals of comparative anthropology; confronted and ignored the limits of reason; and remained all the while chained to the myth of individualism and the biblical God. The minefields and upheavals failed to nourish and sustain any and all doubts. We have been led on this quest by someone with (1) an amazing, and inspired capacity for ignoring a scientific worldview that in the late twentieth century became completely complicated, multiplied, pluralized, and de-scientized; and (2) a scientific worldview that has not yet invited social science into its robust core. We are left with the critical reasoning of the high-functioning schizophrenic. This is one of many instances in the history of the debates I discuss in this book where a great deal of trouble and confusion could have been avoided, perhaps, if the debates had recalled Wittgenstein’s (1922: 189) imperative: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Note 1 This chapter is a revised version of Chapter 10 in Restivo, 2021 (Routledge).

References Collins, R. (1992), Sociological Insights, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press). Faye, H. (1884), Sur L’origine Du Monde: Théories Cosmogoniques Des Anciens Et Des Modernes (Paris: Gauthier-Villars). Hahn, R. (2005), Pierre Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A Determined Scientist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hawking, S. (1999), “Does god play dice?,” Public Lecture: https://web.archive.org/ web/20000708041816/www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/dice.html Küng, H. (1980), Does God Exist? An Answer for Today (New York: Doubleday; orig. in German, 1978). Lilla, M. (2007), The Still Born God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage). Pascal, B. (1654/2022), “The Mémorial,” pp. 11–36 in R. Guardini, ed., Pascal: A Study in Christian Consciousness (Providence: Cluny Media) Pasquier, E. (1898), “Les Hypothèses Cosmogoniques (Suite),” Revue néo-scholastique 5, 18: 124–125 (footnote 1). Restivo, S. (1983), The Social Relations of Physics, Mysticism, and Mathematics (New York: Springer). Restivo, S. (2021), Society and the Death of God (New York: Routledge). Wilson, A.N. (1999), God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith and Doubt in Western Civilization (New York: Ballantine Books). Wittgenstein, L. (1922), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

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. He doesn’t style himself a Christian apologist but his writings put the lie to this selfdeception. His credentials are symbolic of academic excellence: John A O’Brien Professor, Notre Dame; Jellema Chair in Philosophy, Calvin University; president of the Society of Christian Philosophers (1983–1988); twice a prestigious Gifford Lecturer; described in Time magazine as “America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher”; the 30th most cited contemporary author in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division (1981–1982); and a Guggenheim Fellow; he has also been granted several honorary degrees. I am obliged to condemn all of these honors, including the very “discipline” of philosophy, never mind merely Christian philosophy, for giving succor to a man who has claimed (Plantinga (2000: 207–208) 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, and 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. Here are some other claims that have earned him the honors listed earlier. Plantinga’s claim that he is applying some form of objective logic in his so-called “freewill defense” refutation of the logical problem of evil is not a logic that makes sense in my objectivity community, but dare I claim further that it is not a logic that should have any purchase in any version of philosophy that deserves to be labeled “rational.” Plantinga relies on ENC logic: Emperor’s New Clothes Logic. It is nothing short of disgraceful that such nonsense can pass the alleged rigors of peer review or meet the most rudimentary standards of good reasoning in the academic arena. Plantinga’s ENC logic leads him to conclude that even an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God “could not create a world with free creatures DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-10

100  Case Study who never choose evil.” Furthermore, it is possible that such a God “would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures” (Plantinga, 1974: 49). He claims that “the price for creating a world in which they produce moral good is creating one in which they also produce moral evil.” Consider, as some reasonable philosophers indeed have (suggesting I should temper my attack on philosophy as a whole), that as some Christian doctrine has it, God has free will and is omnibenevolent. This suggests that God could have created humans with free will who were incapable of evil. Mackie (1982: 174) has described Plantinga’s “argument” as incoherent. The innate incoherence of the ontological argument for the existence of God in all its varieties is given a new ENC logical twist by Plantinga. The poverty of logic is nowhere better revealed than in Plantinga’s reliance on a normal modal logic (S5) version of the ontological argument (on modal logic, see Chellas, 1980; Hughes and Cresswell, 1996). Let’s recall the classic ontological argument formulated by St. Anselm (1033–1109): God is defined (NB!) as the most great or perfect being. Therefore, God must exist since a God who is the most great or perfect being and exists is greater than a God who does not. More formally (Oppy, 2021), ontological arguments for the existence of God are based on reason alone, analytic, a priori “necessary premises.” The first, and best-known, ontological argument was proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century CE. In his Proslogion, St. Anselm claims to derive the existence of God from the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived. St. Anselm reasoned that if such a being fails to exist, then a greater being – namely, a being than which no greater can be conceived, and which exists – can be conceived. But this would be absurd: nothing can be greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived. So a being than which no greater can be conceived – that is, God – exists. This could be from a missing chapter in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey, 1963). This sort of “reasoning,” which we have seen still drives certain areas of Christian philosophy, is just as absurd as it appears. And yet it has occupied serious thinkers for ages. It’s long past the time to put up stop signs in philosophy of any and all stripes (excepting those rare philosophers who patrol an intellectual world that contains stop signs). Plantinga (1998: 65–71) argues that there is a being which exists in all worlds whose greatness in some worlds is not surpassed. This does not mean that such a being has unsurpassed greatness in this world. He now makes a distinction between “greatness” and “excellence.” An excellent being’s excellence is specific to its particular world; “greatness” depends on a being’s properties in all worlds. It “follows” that the greatest possible being must exhibit maximum excellence in every possible world. The argument takes this form (Plantinga, 1998: 68): (A) It is possible that there be a being that has maximal greatness. (B) So there is a possible being that in some world W has maximal greatness. (C) A being has maximal greatness in a given world only if it has maximal greatness in every world. (D) A being has maximal excellence in a given world only if it has omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection in that world.

Case Study 101 And now we no longer need the supposition that necessary existence is a perfection; for obviously a being can’t be omnipotent (or for that matter omniscient or morally perfect) in a given world unless it exists in that world: (E) QED (from (A, C, and D) . . . there actually exists a being that is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect; this being, furthermore, exists and has these qualities in every [possible world]. S5 characterizes Leibniz’s ontological argument: “If a necessary being is possible, it follows that it exists actually” (Look, 2020). For Plantinga, it follows from S5 that it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being exists: • It is possible that a maximally great being exists. • If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world. • If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world. • If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists. Therefore, a maximally great being exists. Schopenhauer (1788–1860; 1813/2015: 15) had this to say about the ontological proof: “Considered in the light of day and impartially, this famous ontological proof is now actually a most beloved piece of nonsense.” Someone simply invents a concept out of a set of predicates among which implicitly or explicitly s/he includes another predicate something like “perfection,” or “immensity.” Then a predicate of reality or of existence is added: “from a given concept one can extract all of its essential predicates, i.e., those implicit in it, and just so one can also extract the essential predicates of these predicates by means of our analytical judgement.” What we have in that case are predicates that are “logically” true, which is cognitively grounded in the given concept. In this logical, nonempirical context, the predicate of reality or existence can be fetched from the invented concept, leading to the conclusion that there is in fact an object that corresponds to the concept independently of any real existence. Schopenhauer ends by recalling Schiller’s (1798–1799/2017) remark that only the confounded acuteness of the proof keeps one from seeing it as extraordinarily stupid. These proofs lend themselves readily to parody (e.g., Seigal, 2008; Martin, 1990: 79–95; Grim, 1979; Tooley, 1981; Henle, 1965: 172–180). Martin (1990: 94–95) gives an argument of the same form as Platinga’s to prove that “there is a tiny woodland creature with magical powers in our world and in every other world.” He begins this proof as follows: “There is one possible world where the property of being a special fairy is exemplified.” Given the ease with which Plantinga’s modern ontological argument can be dismantled, Martin (1990: 95) asks how it is that “some well-known philosophers who have reputations as profound thinkers have taken it quite seriously. Given the problems with the argument . . . , it is difficult to understand why they do.” Discussions

102  Case Study of the ontological proof should have ended with Schopenhauer, but the literature and the careers of philosophers analytic and Christian continue to prosper into our own time. And of course there is a Christian answer to Martin’s parody (Bishop, 2021). In order for Martin’s parody to work, the “special fairy” would have to be considered a maximally great being. It is not so, thus it cannot exist in every possible world. It’s not clear to me why a special fairy can’t exist who is a maximally great being, but then perhaps one must have an extraordinary capacity for stupidity to engage in these fantasies. Consider, for example, the endorsement on the back cover of Plantinga (1974) by S.T. Davis, now Professor Emeritus of philosophy and religion at a respected American college, Claremont McKenna at the Claremont Colleges: “Plantinga is . . . well known in Christian and secular [NB!] philosophical circles for his logical skills, [and] his rigorous argument . . . .” As a sociologist of science and religion, it falls to me professionally to explain this phenomenon. I shall instead leave it as an exercise for the reader (to cheat, see Box 4; and see, e.g., Schermer, 1997). The parodies, and the remarks of scholars from Schopenhauer to Martin, suggest I should temper my universal criticism of philosophy. However, these parodies are not yet stop signs. There is a certain slipperiness in Plantinga’s argumentative style as we can see in the way he concludes his argument (Plantinga, 1974: 112). He doesn’t claim that his argument establishes the truth of theism but only its “rational acceptability, “one of the aims of the tradition of natural theology.” All of this is enough to establish the fact that to pursue Plantinga’s “logic” any further would just have us rehearsing lessons we learned from Turek, Lennox, Craig, and Küng. This part of my job can therefore be concluded. But see Box 4. Box 4. How the Structure of the Philosophical Community Explains Plantinga’s Prominence 1. The philosophical community is a divided community or rather a set of mainly disconnected islands (or ivory towers if you like). Logicians talk preferably with other logicians, philosophers of physics with other philosophers of physics. . . . But even larger domains such as analytical philosophy or phenomenology consist of islands. 2. A consequence of the above is that publication channels are also disconnected. And inevitably the same goes for the refereeing process. It is extremely unlikely – the probability is less than the occurrence of the spontaneous unmixing of coffee and milk in my cup – that a paper of mine will ever be accepted in a journal for Christian philosophy. Though there are chances that a logical paper on ontological proofs of the existence of God could end up in a logic journal but only rarely so. 3. Another consequence is that if one looks at philosophy departments at universities, the same disconnectedness shows itself. Everyone does

Case Study 103 whatever it is he or she likes to do and interferes minimally with others, except perhaps for matters that transcend philosophy, such as who gets the office with the window (sorry, being a bit cynical here). 4. Putting all these observations together, this does indeed lead to forms of relativism, although some of the islands do have strong standards as to what counts as “decent” philosophy or not. It leads to an interpretation of “Anything goes” that says “We will not interfere” or “Let islands be islands” or “Bridges are dangerous” (Bendegem, 2022). References Bendegem, J.P.V. (2022), “How The Structure of the Philosophical Community Explains Plantinga’s Prominence,” personal communication. Bishop, J. (2021), “Alvin plantinga’s modal ontological argument and objections,” Bishop’s Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy: /12/01/alvin-plantingasmodal-ontological-argument-and-objections/ Chellas, B.F. (1980), Modal Logic: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Grim, P. (1979), “Plantinga’s God and Other Monstrosities,” Religious Studies 15: 25–31. Henle, P. (1965), “Uses of the Ontological Argument,” pp. 172–180 in A. Plantinga, ed., The Ontological Argument (New York: Doubleday). Hughes, G.E. and M.J. Cresswell (1996), A New Introduction to Modal Logic (New York: Routledge). Kesey, K. (1963), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New. York: Signet). Look, B.C. (2020), “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/leibniz/ Mackie, J.L. (1982), The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against God (New York: Oxford University Press). Martin, M. 1990), Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia: Templeton University Press). Oppy, G. (2021), “Ontological arguments,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/ontological-arguments/ Plantinga, A. (1974), God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper and Row). Plantinga, A. (1998), The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, edited by J. Sennett (Grand Rapids: W.B. Erdmans). Plantinga, A. (2000), Warranted Christian Belief (New York; Oxford University Press). Schermer, M. (1997), Why People Believe Weird Things (New York: W.H. Freeman). Schiller, F. (1798–1799/2017), “The Piccolomini,” pp. 184–293 in F. Schiller, ed., Wallenstein (Sunnyside: Loki’s Publishing). Schopenhauer, A. (1813/2015), On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Seigal, J. (2008), ‘The Ontological Parody: A Reply to Joshua Ernst’s “Charles Hartshorne and the Ontological Argument,” Aporia 18, 2: 55–61. Tooley, M. (1981), “Plantinga’s Defense of the Ontological Argument,” Mind 90: 422–427.

11 Religion and God in Sociological Perspective

In the previous chapters, I have been drawing on sociological materials in my virtual debates with atheists and theists. This chapter organizes those materials into a paradigm for the sociology of religion and the gods. I could have titled this chapter the “last chapter of ‘God’ ” to underscore the fact that we now have and have had for a long time all the evidence we need to support the Durkheimian anthropology of God. In a sense, the last chapter of God has almost been written many times. Michael Harrington’s book The Politics at God’s Funeral (1963) could have been that chapter, but Harrington refused to see the social fact of God in his own conclusions. Harrington was a nonbeliever who described himself as “religiously musical.” He may have had in mind here Max Weber, who in a 1909 letter described himself as “religiously unmusical” (Svatos, 1998: 548; cf. William James’ description of atheists as religiously tone-deaf (Ghosh, 2008: 246). I take this to mean something like Durkheim’s notion of “religious sentiment.” The problem is that Harrington repeats the uninterrogated “truism” that you can’t prove or disprove God and reports the death of the political God but not the death of God. I will draw on Harrington’s perspective as the starting point for Chapter 13 on a secular moral order. All the material for writing the last chapter of God has been available for a long time, and it has never been easier than it is today to collect, organize, and present that material and at last tell the full story. I have contributed to that narrative in Restivo (2021). This chapter is a schematic digest of what I achieved in that book on the shoulders of my social networks. The sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of the first major wave of religious rationalism which formed the scaffolding for the sociological studies of religion that were part of the first Age of the Social (1840–1930). These waves brought to light critical reasons to dismiss various commonly accepted truisms about the history of the Bible, Christianity, and Jesus. These criticisms often left certain features of that history untouched. The Deists who appeared in sixteenth-century England (e.g., Lord Herbert (1583–1648), John Toland (1670–1722), Anthony Collins (1676–1729), Hermann Reimarus (1694–1768), and Thomas Woolston (1670– 1733)) criticized the prophecies, mysteries, and miracles of the Bible but accepted ideas like the existence of God, the Creation, and the immortality of the soul. The rational study of the history of Jesus arguably begins with Reimarus (1694–1768; see Schweitzer, 1911/2005). This period was followed by religious DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-11

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective 105 rationalism in France – Voltaire (1694–1778), Diderot (1713–1784) and the Encyclopedists, and the French Revolution – and then Germany, where Hegel was the center of a network that fanned out to influence scholars from Strauss to Marx. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was associated with the so-called “higher criticism,” and we trace the origins of modern liberal theology to his writings and lectures. Strauss’ (1808–1874) Life of Jesus (1835) builds on this background to develop a groundbreaking study of the mythic nature of the Synoptic Gospels and Messianic expectations. Strauss was followed by Ernest Renan (1823–1892), author of a racially infused Life of Jesus (1863/1991), and Feuerbach (see later). Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and re-energized the preceding waves of religious rationalism. Religious beliefs and institutions were an important concern of the nineteenthcentury social thinkers who fashioned the sociological perspective. However, because of the central functions of religion as a tool of state power and a source of individual and community solidarity, the most profound results and implications of their work on the social construction of gods, religious beliefs and institutions, and faith have been basically invisible in the public arena. Sociology of Religion Emerges William Robertson Smith (1846–1894)

Smith approached the Bible as an object of historical and sociological analysis; he did not consider the Bible literally true. This heresy resulted in Smith, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, losing his position at the Aberdeen Free Church College. He ended up as a reader in Arabic at Cambridge University. In 1889, he published a study of the religion of the Semites, a founding moment in the sociology of religion. In analyzing the ancient literature, he faced a variety of historiographical challenges I have alluded to in earlier chapters. That literature is characterized by doubtful titles, forgeries, interpolations, transcriptions, and corrupted manuscripts. Smith was not afraid to rummage through these antique remains like an archaeologist trying to piece together the genuine narrative hidden in the material remains. Of all of his writings, his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: Fundamental Institutions (1889) has a critical place in the unfolding of the sociology of religion. One can expect to find in such an early effort examples of overgeneralization and cautionary conclusions. This is especially the case in his discussion of the evolution of primal religion. Smith’s review of the Babylonian records, Egyptian influences, pre-Islamic Arabia, and the Hebrew Bible convinced him that the evidence cannot support a comparative sociology of the Semitic religions. In his second lecture we find adumbrations of Durkheim’s realization that God is a symbol of society. In later lectures he discusses the nature of totems and their connection to tribal gods, an important piece of Durkheim’s approach to recognizing that worshipping God is worshipping your community. Smith’s work is preceded most immediately by works on religious history by Julius Wellhausen

106  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective and James George Frazer. Smith’s theories were more a matter of strong sociological intuitions than grounded sociological research. E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973), one of the founders of social anthropology, described Smith’s totemism as follows: “Bluntly, all Robertson Smith really does is to guess about a period of Semitic history about which we know almost nothing” (Pritchard, 1965: 51–53, 56). Smith was a theologian, and his studies were partly motivated by an interest in revitalizing religion in the wake of what he saw as the failures of the Scottish Free Church. But his perspective was guided by the emerging Age of the Social, the era in which sociology was crystallizing as a scientific discipline. He thus understood that beliefs are not individual phenomena; they are not matters of individual choice or reasoned argument. They are the result of individuals being exposed to the social contexts into which they are born. Religion is culturally imposed. We are born into religion in the same unconscious way we are born into all of the habitual practices of our society If we reasoned or speculated about our beliefs we necessarily did so under the force of the presuppositions underlying those habitual practices. Such reasons had to go in those directions and all things being equal those reasons were by nature resistant to being overturned or otherwise replaced. Smith anticipated the claim of the contemporary sociologists of religion that practices are more significant than beliefs in understanding religion. The sociology of religion should begin by focusing on ritual acts, not on the private beliefs of individuals. The social anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 155) was still underlining this perspective more than half a century later. In attempting to understand religion our focus should be on its rites rather than individual and collective beliefs. One of Smith’s key insights was to recognize that religion was not about salvation but about providing “for the preservation and welfare of society” (1889: 29). This also argues against modern ideas about a God of the gaps. Religion is not an alternative to science or a way to fill in explanatory gaps in science. What Smith noticed about the early history of religion was the importance of the relationship of the members of the community to the “higher power” of the good of the community. It was not about the relation between the individual and a supernatural power. As society and religion developed, diversified, and expanded, the organic society became the locus of a solidarity between the gods and their worshippers. This also saw the elaboration of institutions in likeness with each other. Smith stressed the parallel development of religious and political institutions, following in the footsteps of Fustel De Coulanges’ (1830–1889) The Ancient City (1864). De Coulanges is one of the founding figures of the sociology of religion along with Smith, Durkheim, and their fifteenth-century Arabic predecessor Ibn Khaldun (Turner, 1971). Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872)

Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1841/1957) introduced an anthropological materialism of religion as a human creation. Feuerbach was originally associated with Hegel and the Young Hegelians but broke with them to develop his

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective  107 anthropology of religion. This idea had occurred to some of the ancients, but now we are on the verge of a scientific grasp of God as a social construction. Feuerbach recognized that every aspect of God is a reflection of human nature; God is a projection of that nature. It is not God who blesses us with divinity; it is we who invent divinity and pin it on God. The theology that assigns God a separate existence apart from humanity is wrong and leads to many errors such as revelation, superstition, and belief in immortality. The God of the Christians, like all Gods, is an illusion. Feuerbach recognized that there was something religious about Hegel’s perspective. The materialism he opposed to Hegel influenced the liberal theologian David Strauss, Strauss’ critic, theologian Bruno Bauer, and Marx. Feuerbach is generally considered the first scholar to systematize the idea that religions and gods are created by human communities. Precursors include the fourteenth-century Arabic historian and proto-sociologist Ibn Khaldun, whose writings include ideas about “Assabiyya” (group feeling) in society, an adumbration of Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence. He also considers religious individualism and religious institutions in their historical unfolding. Feuerbach was the first thinker to apply the projection principle in the systematic analysis of religion. We find early examples of this principle in the works of Giambattista Vico, Spinoza, and as far back as the ancient Greeks in the works of Xenophanes, who observed that “the gods of Ethiopians were inevitably black with flat noses while those of the Thracians were blond with blue eyes.”1 In this context we should take notice of Karl Kautsky’s (1854–1938) Foundations of Christianity (1908/1925). As a young socialist, Kautsky became Engels’ private secretary. He was arguably the most authoritative theorist of international socialism in the early decades of the twentieth century. He approached his study of the origins of Christianity from the perspective of historical materialism, basically the sociological perspective (e.g., Bukharin, 1921/1925: Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology). Kautsky claimed that Christianity originated among the Jewish proletariat who sought to defeat the decaying Roman Empire in a violent insurrection. This is a classic exemplar of the Marxist approach to the social science of history. See more on Kautsky in the following section. Louis Wallis (1876–ca.1950)

Louis Wallis is a shadowy figure in the sociology of religion in spite of the fact that he was a pioneer in the sociology of the Bible. His publishing history on the Bible begins with Wallis (1905), followed by a series of seven papers on “Biblical Sociology” in the American Journal of Sociology (1908–1911), the basis for Wallis (1912). Then followed Wallis (1935, 1942, and 1949). He also published books on economics and social justice, a Hebrew history for young people, and a book on sociology and evolution. Wallis reports associations with and assistance from three of the leading sociologists of his era: Albion Small (Chicago), E.A. Ross (Wisconsin), and Lester Ward (Brown). He also had some sort of association with Joseph Pels (d. 1914), who was a wealthy soap manufacturer and advocated for Henry George’s single

108  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective tax proposal. This demonstrates a connection between Wallis, the single tax movement, and the social gospel movement. The latter tied Wallis to the pioneering University of Chicago sociologist Small, who paved the way for Wallis’ publications in the American Journal of Sociology and with the University of Chicago Press. The contradiction in Wallis’ work between structure and individual reflects the still robust contest between an emerging psychology and an emerging sociology that was a feature of Wallis’ era. Wallis’ agenda is to ground the Bible and God in the everyday lives of people without resorting to metaphysical or theological causes. Everyday human experiences are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of religion, the Bible, and the idea of God. There is no need to bring in the supernatural or transcendental.2 Karl Kautsky (1854–1938)

Karl Kautsky was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, and the most authoritative advocate for orthodox Marxism after Engels, whom he served as a private secretary. He was a critic of the Bolshevik Revolution and of the actions of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin regarding the establishment of a Soviet state. Foundations of Christianity was published in 1908, some 25 years after he’d published articles on the prehistoric origins of Bible history and of Christianity. He took under consideration criticisms of some of his early claims: the primitive communism of early Christianity, that “nothing definite could be said about the personality of Jesus, and that Christianity could be explained without reference to this personality . . .” (Kautsky, 1908/1925: 7). He found no reason to alter his earlier conclusions. “Of course,” he wrote (Kautsky, 1908/1925: 7–8), “I make no claim that I am exhausting the subject, which is far too gigantic to be exhausted.” It is enough if he has captured the essentials of Christianity from the perspective of historical materialism. “Historical materialism” is the term used in the Soviet academy for sociology, and Kautsky’s historical materialism of Christianity is nothing more nor less than an exploration of the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of Christianity. The book’s sociological foundations give it an important place in the history of the sociology of religion. Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Two remarks by Marx stand out for the sociologist of religion. One is perhaps his most widely quoted statement: religion “is the opium of the people” (Marx, 1844/1955: 42); the second is: “For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (Marx, 1844/1957: 41–42): “The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man . . . .” Religion is “the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore immediately the fight against the other world, of which religion is the spiritual aroma.”

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective  109 When quoting Marx on the opium of the people, people often forget what comes before (Marx, 1844/1957: 42): “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.” History is tasked with establishing this world’s truth; philosophy is there to “unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms. The criticism of heaven becomes the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion becomes the criticism of right, and the criticism of theology turns into the criticism of politics. All of this is neatly anticipated in Marx’s thesis on Democritus and Epicurus where he identifies Aeschylus’ Prometheus as “the noblest of saints and martyrs in the calendar of philosophy, Prometheus who prefers being chained to the rock than to Zeus’s service, Prometheus who hates all gods” (Aeschylus, 5th c. BCE/2015). Engels also wrote extensively about religion (e.g., Engels, 1878/1957: 146): “All religion . . . is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces.” For both Marx and Engels the scientific and atheistic criticisms of religion must be rooted in the achievements of the sciences. They contributed to the projection theory of religion. Max Weber (1864–1920)

Weber pioneered the comparative historical sociology of religion in studies of the religion of China (1915/1951), India (1916/1962), and Judaism (1917–19/1952). He introduced the field of religionsozologie, the social analysis of the world’s religions. This research reflected his primary focus on religious influences on the emergence of capitalism and Western rationalism. They also exemplify his masterful melding of the “ideal type” (see Box 3) and the method of Verstehen, understanding the meaning of action from the actor’s point of view. This did not “require the complete individualization of interpretations, since there are typical patterns of meaning which can be abstracted from the individualized totality” (Parsons, 1963: xxiii). There is no easy way to summarize Weber’s sociology of religion but Weber (1922/1963) is an excellent introduction to his perspective and conclusions. Weber analyzed the rise of religions, Gods, magicians, prophets, and priests and their social roles in systems of social stratification, the sociology of salvation, theodicy, mysticism; and the relationship between religion and politics, economics, sexuality, and art. Weber’s most famous contribution was The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05/2008), a study of the relationship between the ethics of ascetic Protestantism and the emergence of the spirit of modern capitalism. Weber argued that Calvinist and related ideas played a role in engendering the capitalistic spirit. Merton (1938), following this same line of argument, claimed there was a positive correlation between the rise of Protestant Pietism and early experimental science. Restivo (1994: 29–48), by contrast, argued from a human ecology perspective that Protestantism, capitalism, and modern science were parallel, integrated institutional responses in the spheres of religion, economy, and knowledge

110  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective to social and ecological conditions in Western Europe that fostered an exchange economy, political decentralization, and a rational-universal ethos. Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

Standing on the shoulders of a social network of projection theorists including ancients like Xenophanes and those closer to his time from Spinoza and Vico but especially de Coulanges and Smith, Emile Durkheim (1912/1995) constructed a full-fledged sociology of religion in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, published in 1912. Burdened by problems in the data pool, his methodology, and interpretative lapses, Durkheim nonetheless established without question that God was a symbolic projection of group structures and values. When we worship God, we are worshipping our own group. This mistake in reference hid a key function of religion, to systematize the moral order and buttress social solidarity. One of the controversial but insightful distinctions Durkheim identified was the societal categorization of some objects and events as sacred and others as profane. The sacred realm was dissociated from everyday mundane practice (the profane realm) and made an object of special respect, moral import, and religious authority. The most profound discovery Durkheim crystallized was that the idea of a transcendental, supernatural God occupying a transcendental supernatural realm of reality was a mistake in reference. In reality, given sociological science, God is a social construction, a cultural symbol. The literature by and on Durkheim and the sociology of religion is the foundation of my critical approach to atheism and theism, and it is extensive (Collins, 1975, 1992; Restivo, 2021; Maryanski, 2018). Defining Religion and God Durkheim (1912/1995: 44) defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Religion, inseparable from the idea of a Church, leads to the concept of religion as a social fact. According to the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF),3 “all known societies have religious beliefs and practices.” It goes on to point out: Most researchers subscribe to Émile Durkheim’s notion that religion acts as a “glue” (some think the most important “glue”) that holds society together. Support for the idea that religion provides a cohesive force was found in a comparison between religious and secular communes in 19th-century America. Gods are not universal in the same way. Again from the HRAF files: “Moralizing high gods are most likely to be found in ecologically inhospitable and unpredictable environments, in politically complex societies, in societies near (or linguistically related to) other societies with high gods, and in societies with animal husbandry and/or agriculture.”

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective 111 Box 5.  A Durkheimian Interlude (Durkheim, 1912/1995) The faithful believe they are subject to a moral power outside of themselves “from which they receive what is best in themselves.” They are not mistaken. “That power exists, and it is society.” Their acts of worship are not “paralyzed force, gesture without motion.” These acts, which the faithful believe strengthen the ties between themselves and their god, in fact strengthen their ties to society, their “god being only a figurative representative of [their] society (226–227). There are types of thought and action that press uniformly on our intellects or will; the feeling of such pressures reveals the intervention of the collectivity. Further . . . the concepts with which we routinely think are those deposited in the vocabulary . . . . speech and . . . the system of concepts it translates [are] the product of a collective elaboration. These are an expression of the societal conception of our experience of the world: “The notions corresponding to the various elements of language are therefore collective representations” (436). Logical thought, which “begins with the concept . . . has always existed; there has been no historical period when men lived in chronic confusion and contradiction. Certainly, the different features of logic in different historical periods cannot be overemphasized; logic evolves as societies themselves evolve. But however real, the differences should not cause us to miss the similarities, which are not less fundamental” (440). On the objectivity of social constructions Durkheim (1912/1995: 17–18) wrote: The fact that the ideas of time, space, genus, cause, and personality are constructed from social elements should not lead us to conclude that they are stripped of all objective value. Quite the contrary, their social origin leads one indeed to suppose that they are not without foundation in the nature of things. QED: GOD IS A SYMBOL OF SOCIETY The fact that logic and mathematics as well as G(g)od are constructed from social elements supports the propositions by R.H. Lotze (1843) – There is no Logik, only logics – and Spengler (1926) – There is no Mathematik, only mathematics. CONCLUSIONS • Religion, god, mathematics, and logic are collective elaborations and collective representations.

112  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective • Collective elaborations and collective representations are social constructions. • Social constructionism is the fundamental theorem of sociology: humans have one and only one way to invent and discover; that is by way of their interactions and communications with others in the social and ecological contexts of the earth (and its extra-terrestrial expansions). Paradigm for the Sociology of Religion A fellow sociologist of religion in my network described himself as “agnostic” in one of his texts. When I asked why “agnostic” rather than “atheist” or “committed nonbeliever,” he replied that he was agnostic about the big mysteries: why are we here, and what is the meaning of life? He was an atheist on the question of God or any gods. My own take on this is that there is a difference between the God question and questions of origin and destiny. Once we establish that God and the gods are human constructions, the God question is settled at least as corrigibly and fallibly as the flat earth question. Origin and destiny are another matter. We can build all the Hubbles and James Webbs we’re capable of, send off all the Voyager probes we can build, explore the microscopic and macroscopic with all the cleverness we can muster; origin and destiny are beyond us, beyond atheism, agnosticism, theism, and science. What isn’t beyond science, at least not beyond sociological science, is explaining religion, the gods, and God. Many keen observers of religious belief identify personal experience as the root of religion. Theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) described this personal experience as an interaction with the “numinous” (Otto, 1917/1952). There are three components of the numinous: it is wholly other relative to ordinary life and evokes silence, it provokes terror. and it carries a sense of the merciful and gracious. William James (1842–1910) also stressed numinous experiences as the foundation of religion (James, 1902/1936). As a sociologist, I reject the numinous hypothesis. First, it manifests the fallacy of introspective transparency. We cannot rely on individual experience to reveal truths and facts of the matter. Second, we have strong sociological reasons to ground religion and belief in gods in collective, group activities as argued in the Durkheimian tradition. Zuckerman (2003) offers a concise outline of a paradigm for this form of the sociology of religion. I draw on some of his work as well as Collins (1975, 1992) in the following section. Religions are collective phenomena which induce numinous experiences in individuals. Sociologists study these phenomena in terms of social institutions and social structures. Such studies reveal social patterns in religious practices and beliefs that vary with sex, gender, class, ethnicity, other demographic variables, and political and economic categories. Individual religious practices and beliefs cannot be separated from local contexts of society and culture. Your place of birth was traditionally a perfect predictor of your religion. In the modern world, all the world’s cultures have been variously influenced by and contaminated each other, transportation, exchange, and communication networks carry people and information back

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective 113 and forth around the world, and Internet access is virtually universal. Birthplace is therefore no longer a simple predictor of religion, but locality is still a good predictor especially if we know the religious profile of the locality. Your environment shapes who you are and who you can and will become religiously and otherwise. Early experiences in these localities are important determinants of life choices and life chances. Religions and gods are social constructions. The fact that they are social constructions has nothing to do with their status in reality. Religions are real institutions, real reflections of collective behaviors. Gods are socially constructed but they are not ontologically real in a natural or supernatural sense. They are real socially, symbolically. Looking at our everyday world through the lens of the sociological imagination inevitably becomes a debunking activity. Like any professional science, it will challenge and contradict “common sense” folk science. All cultures have a folk sociology that gives them a folk theory grasp of their everyday social order. Folk theories are simply our everyday understanding of the rules and expectations of our social world. For example, who is in our marriage pool and who isn’t, or who can we potentially have sex with and who are tabooed sexual partners? What does it mean if you meet someone and they reach out their hand to you? In America, the expectation in such a situation is shaking hands. Shaking hands is not traditional in Japan except in international business meetings; the Japanese greet each other with different types of bows. Professional sociologists explore such activities in greater depth than is necessary to keep the wheels of everyday society in motion. Their findings, however, can uncover social patterns, differences, and inequalities that are not accessible to folk sociologies and these findings can guide the development of theories and social policies. Common-sense assumptions about separate but equal facilities in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America were challenged by sociological research that eventually helped persuade the Supreme Court to end segregated schools legally in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Elements of a Paradigm for the Sociology of Religion What determines whether a person or cultural area will be Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or other religion? Principle 1: The determinant is sociocultural environment. Principle 2: We learn our religion and our ideas about god and we learn them originally from other people in our families, schools, and religious institutions. Theists have social amnesia about this and attribute their beliefs to an introspective exercise that appears to be transparent but is in fact an illusion that masks their socialization. What Is the Reciprocal Relationship Between Religion and Society?

Principle: Religious practices and beliefs always take place in and reflect the prevailing worldview you are born into: (1) Society impacts religion. For example: “Because racism has pervaded much of American society, so too racism has inevitably pervaded much of American religion” (Zuckerman, 2003: 76, drawing on

114  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective DuBois, 1903/2003). On the other hand (2), religion impacts society. For example: “the Faith of Fathers” [the black church] is “the social center of Negro life in the United States” (Zuckerman, 2003: 96, after DuBois, 1903/2003). Types of Societies and Types of Religions

The most significant contribution to unraveling the mysteries of religion and God is our experience of differences. Once we leave the block we live on, the city we live in, the tribe we were born into and take a wider look around – across history and culture – we find ourselves confronted with a variety of ways of doing life and religion. One of the most important tools sociologists have for gaining an explanatory perspective on our ways of living and thinking is the comparative cross-cultural method. Examining a significant number of societies across time and space is the basis for the observation that different types of societies generate different types of gods and religions. Belief in a Creator God concerned with human moral conduct shows up in about 4 percent of hunter/gatherer societies, 10 percent of simple horticultural societies, 15 percent of advanced horticultural societies, and 64 percent of agrarian societies (Lenski, 1970: 81–82, 441–442). This illustrates the correlation between the evolution of societal complexity and the cultural evolution of the engaged Creator God concept. The nature and extent of the division of labor, the degree of social differentiation, the type of stratification system, and social changes (within and across societies) are some of the factors that determine the dynamics of religions and gods over time. The most important feature of these differences is that they are systematic.4 All religions reflect the cultural concerns of the societies they develop in. In general, gods of war are products of warlike societies, agricultural peoples worship fertility gods, and the gods of patriarchal societies are male. Monotheism is found in societies with three or more levels of hierarchical sovereignty (e.g., clan, city, empire), polytheism is found in societies dominated by classes, ancestor worship is a product of societies in which the extended family is a core institution, and reincarnation is associated with small village communities in which individuals experience intense face-to-face interaction. Most hunting and gathering peoples have no conception of a Supreme Creator. The belief in a Supreme Creator who is involved in and supportive of human morality is rare in hunting and gathering, simple horticultural (no plow), advanced horticultural (metal weapons and tools), and fishing societies, but common in agrarian and herding societies. In general, then, the sacred realm is a sort of map of the social geomorphology, and the correlations between types of societies and types of religions illustrate the relationship between technological and economic development, on the one hand, and religious beliefs and institutions, on the other. The Functions of Religion

In general, religious systems divide the world into sacred and profane realms. Sometimes these realms are clearly dichotomized, sometimes they are enfolded into each other. The more democratic the society the more clearly the realms are

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective 115 distinguished; the more theocratic the society, the more enfolded the realms are. The profane world is that part of the world that can be dealt with in a practical, matter-of-fact way. The sacred realm, by contrast, has to be approached seriously, respectfully, and with careful preparations. Behavior in the sacred realm must be strictly controlled. Rituals accomplish this by stressing appropriate forms of dress, demeanor, and behavior. One of the major functions of rituals and worship is to help ground and sustain the feelings and orientations necessary for group solidarity and for preserving the prevailing social structure. The sacred can show up in civil social orders and result in setting aside national symbols such as flags, original founding documents, and artifacts as sacred objects. This idea is a key to the origins of religion. It was first discussed in sociological detail by Emile Durkheim in his study of the Australian aborigines. Among the Australian aborigines, clans are organized around and take their names from totems. A totem is generally a commonplace animal or plant. The symbol used to represent the totem is considered sacred. On the basis of his study of totemism, Durkheim concluded that when people worship a totem or a more highly developed sacred object, they are really worshipping “society,” their own group or community. Thus, there are referents for religious and spiritual beliefs, and they are real. Only they are not in some supernatural or transcendental realm but rather right here on earth in our own collective lives. The earliest forms of religion have their roots in the periodic group activities of the earliest human societies. During these activities, individuals experienced a certain kind of excitement, not unlike the excitement we feel when we enter into the spirit of a rock concert crowd or an intimate get-together with a small group of friends. The search for the source (cause) of this feeling in early human societies was eventually located outside of the individual and outside the group. Some readily available object was chosen to symbolize or represent the activity or gathering (society) and the associated emotional response (religious feeling). Rituals were then developed which regularized and enhanced the solidarity generated by the gatherings. Rites are group activities oriented toward objects that symbolize the feelings or emotions generated by raw group activities. A cult is a collection of rites and associated myths and beliefs clustered around a group of sacred objects. A religion emerges when a set of cults becomes interrelated and rationalized. The process of developing the complex religious systems already evident in the material remains of the earliest human societies we know about began in an unknown prehistory. And it took tens of thousands of years for the primordial generation of affect in group activities to develop into religious systems. One factor in this process was the human capacity for abstraction. This, combined with limited experience, helped to generate mistaken beliefs about referents for certain feelings and thoughts, and led to hypotheses about a supernatural realm. This necessarily glosses over the complexities of this process which we can only reconstruct theoretically. Personal emotional experiences during collective rituals cannot by themselves explain the origin of beliefs about the supernatural and religion. Other important factors include the human capacity for abstraction (materially, generalization) and the potential for reification that is characteristic of language use, especially in

116  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective the process of naming experiences and objects. Imagination is another factor that should not be ignored but it should not accrue to the individual per se. An example of how such factors operate is the development of ideas about the gods in the Hindu tradition. In the earliest of the ancient Hindu texts known as the Vedas, fire is considered a god, or at least a concrete god’s body. Later on, the view develops that there is an eternal god who possesses and controls, or somehow incorporates, all individual fires. This idea is secured over time through the activities of a cult which identifies itself with the god. The next stage, the development of a religion, is reached through the intellectual efforts of specialists who systematically organize ideas about the gods. Generalization (abstraction), symbolization, and reification are all at work throughout this development, side by side with organizational activities. In societies where people have not yet been alienated from the basic rites that generate gods and religions, there may be some individuals who are aware at some level that the gods are created, sustained, nourished, and rejuvenated by and in the rites. They may realize that people literally manufacture the gods in particular settings, during specific time periods, and during the ritual. But the concepts for consolidating that sort of awareness are unavailable at the more advanced stages of cultural development. By the time the concepts become available, their control has passed to classes of political, religious, and intellectual leaders. Some of them, especially in the intellectual classes, will develop and pass on the idea that religions and gods are social creations. For most people, however, religion will be so complicated and removed from any immediate relationship to social solidarity, and alienation will be so strong, that consciousness of projection will not have much of a chance to develop in any direct, experiential way. Consciousness about the social meaning of religion may be greatest when a society or its political constitution is new, when people – even in complex societies – can recall that they designed the social order, and they created their gods as symbols of and in celebration of their new society. The fact that religions are active instruments in the creation of societies helps explain why creation is so central to religions. Religion is literally about creation, but it is not about the creation of the universe by gods; it is about the creation of social orders by men and women. Once the celebratory period has passed, religions become prescriptive frameworks for future generations. An example of the creative, celebratory function of religion is provided by the history of the ancient Jews and Midianites. The Yahweh of the Old Testament was a god of the political organization they created, a celebratory symbol of federation, association, and alliance. The Covenants between God and Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David in the Old Testament represented real contracts binding the societal partners in a new social order or social relationship. Since societies, especially the more complex ones, are never totally unified, religion must ultimately manifest rival gods, heretics, evil spirits, and devils. The symbolism of religion mirrors the simplicity or complexity of a given social world. Heaven, then, generally symbolizes the moral righteousness that makes you a member in good standing of the society or group. The security of knowing you

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective  117 belong is a reward for adhering to the moral standards of your group. Hell, by contrast, symbolizes the banishment of the deviant or heretic from the group. That is the social meaning of hell as a punishment for sinning against god – that is, deviating from the morality of your group. Notions about right and wrong are intrinsically social; they regulate relationships among people. The very idea of morality implies a force beyond any individual. People adhere to moral precepts because the group demands it. Belongingness is a feature of the fact that humans are always, already, and everywhere social (on the non-human primates and belongingness, see King, 2007). This evolutionary aspect is nourished through socialization. Thus, we all experience the need to belong to different degrees and orientations to different parts of our societies. Some of us, of course, follow the moral guidelines of our society or group because we do not want to be dismissed, punished, or killed by the guardians of morality. Fractures in solidarity are the source of various kinds of loners, introverts, and sociopaths. In simpler societies, morality expresses the rules of behavior believed to be necessary (based on experience) for group survival. In more complex societies, morality is designed to sustain the reigning patterns of domination. If a person has multiple group memberships, if groups are in conflict, or if there is a pattern of joining and leaving groups then there will be multiple and conflicting moralities. If societies nourish and sustain the gods, gods should come into being when societies do and they should die when societies die. This is reflected in the fact that “immortal” gods die (Mencken, 1982: 95–98). Classic gods who have “died” can be brought back to life to symbolize new social groups. Isis is one of the gods who has been resurrected in contemporary society by pagan groups, the modern Goddess movement, and interfaith organizations such as the Fellowship of Isis. The Transcendental Religions

Transcendental religions emerged when the fashioning of early states into civilizations through urban and commercial revolutions gave rise to the social role of the priest and priestly organizations. These religions (including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, and Buddhism), sometimes referred to as “world religions,” developed in cosmopolitan centers. On the peculiarities of the Mediterranean religions, the focus of much of the debates between atheists and theists, see Pinxten (2010). Priests and their organizations emerged in close alliance with military and political institutions, but with a certain degree of autonomy. This made possible the separation of “this worldly” and “other worldly” realms, transcendentalism, and new opportunities for salvation. In traditional societies, people were considered to be in the good graces of the spirits if they were prosperous, healthy, and victorious in war. Bad luck was viewed as the result of spiritual transgressions. In the transcendental religions, good and evil were separated from success in this world, and the possibility of salvation was separated from one’s worldly fortunes. Two basic pathways to salvation became possible with the emergence of the transcendental religions. Mystical salvation put the individual in direct contact

118  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective with the “other” world. “This” world became more illusory or less important. For Christians and Muslims, the imbalances of this world were redressed in an afterlife. The good who have suffered on earth are rewarded with everlasting life in heaven, and the evil who have prospered are punished at last and forever. The “ethical” religions such as Confucianism offered an alternative to salvation in a “real” heaven; the Confucians stressed right behavior, behavior in tune with the basic principles of the everyday social world. Religious specialists or virtuosos could, in the transcendental religions, devote themselves full-time to the project of achieving salvation. For everyone else, religion continued to serve social functions appropriate for social classes. For the upper classes, it was a social activity intertwined with political ideologies and alliances, and a tool of oppression. For the lower classes, religion was a source of hope and release from the trials and uncertainties of everyday life. For the middle class, it was the source of rules about appropriate demeanor and deference (Collins, 1975: 181). As more abstract accounts of the universe developed, from Yin and Yang to Nirvana and the veils of illusion to an all-powerful God, changes in “the forms of deferential relationships and in the emotional tone of life” emerged. The demeanor emphasized in these religions reflected their ideal of eternal peace and quiet in the other world. It also represented a way of demarcating these religions from, and underlining their superiority to, traditional religions. Politics and Religion

Smaller, technologically less developed societies are, of necessity, relatively democratic. The centralization of power and the formation of states and ruling elites occur as societies increase in size, develop coalitions, and in particular develop surpluses of foodstuffs and other goods. The emergence of leaders under such conditions is based on the social positions and political skills of particular people in particular social contexts. Given the appropriate material resources, the would-be ruler still has to fashion them into a basis for leadership. Relatively democratic small-scale societies do not get transformed into centralized states when access to the weapons of advanced societies makes war coalitions and careers of conquest possible. A coalition leader who wishes to make himself a king has to deal with followers who will try to avoid giving him too much power. The same holds for the more aristocratic situations. Coalitions of charioteers or mounted knights will try to hold on to their feudal autonomies by supporting certain forms of weapons, suppliers, and a division of labor. A potential leader must thus create loyalty among his or her followers, especially in a way that allows him or her to use those followers to enforce his or her commands upon themselves. And he or she must gain control of the distribution of supplies and the tax-collecting apparatus, preferably with the help of a non-military hierarchy of officials reporting directly to him or her. These are all problems in politico-religious organization. There has always been a close connection between politics and religion. Political and religious authority are usually vested in the same person in societies up to the advanced horticultural level. Kings are usually considered gods or the

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective  119 earthly ministers of gods. Organizing military coalitions such as the Greek citystates involved organizing joint religio-political cults. Religion and politics began to separate (institutionally) with the emergence of agrarian, commercial, and cosmopolitan societies. But crucial connections were, and continue to be, maintained. Religion is drawn on by governments for ideological legitimation and administrative organization. And priests engage in political activity in order to gain state support or theocratic (hierocratic) power. Gibbon, the historian of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, noted that the people of the Roman era considered the various religions that flourished in their world equally true, the philosophers considered them equally false, and the magistrates thought of them as equally useful. Magicians, Wonderworkers, and Messiahs (See Details in Chapter 7 on John Lennox)

Some social roles are peculiar to ancient societies. The ancient world had magicians, wonderworkers, and messiahs. We have doctors and clerics. Some social roles are found everywhere after a certain level of development and the emergence of a division of labor: for example, butchers and bakers, farmers and midwives. Stock features of legends appeared appended to real and mythical individuals over and over from Moses to Jesus and even into our own times in the lives of healers and prophets. In an already diversified environment such as ancient Palestine, someone like Jesus could be viewed from different social perspectives as a miracle worker, a messiah, a beggar, a fugitive, and a warrior. The Discovery of God

Credit for crystallizing and systematizing the discovery of God goes to a small number of the founders of modern sociological and broadly social perspectives, notably Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oswald Spengler. They all had precursors, notably in the case of Durkheim the lectures of William Robertson Smith. Earlier I summarized some of their basic ideas on the origins, social functions, and political economy of religion, and on the social roles of the wonderworkers. The empirical evidence for this central discovery in the social sciences has been accumulating for centuries. Some efforts have been made to systematize that evidence and establish a firm empirical foundation for the theory of religion and the gods as social facts, as social constructions. For reasons mentioned earlier, this work has proceeded slowly and has not been able to find its way easily into the worldviews of most contemporary social groups and classes. But as Marx pointed out, religion is not simply invented by scoundrel priests and rulers; it is also an expression of human suffering and the quest for comforts and security in an alien universe. He looked forward not to an atheist society, a society that needs to deny God, but rather to a society so transformed that the question of God will not exist. Harrington, as I noted earlier, could have written the last chapter of God. The sociologist Rodney Stark in his book Discovering God (2008) might have written

120  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective the last chapter of God. But Stark, who has reconstructed his religious beliefs several times, concludes an otherwise interesting sociology of religion by arguing that the universe is the ultimate revelation of God; science is theology. And Richard Eliot Friedman in The Disappearance of God (1995) concludes another book that could have been the last chapter of God by conjecturing that in the aftermath of the biblical unfolding of the story of God hiding his face, we are perhaps on the verge of recognizing that the universe is the face of God. Nonetheless, all the material for writing the last chapter of God has been available for a long time and it has never been easier than it is today to collect, organize, and present that material and at last tell the full story. Mathematics poses the same sort of problem for sociology that religion does. This is why theists try to equate the immateriality of God with the supposed immateriality of mathematics. How can we make sense sociologically of phenomena that seem to be outside the arenas of everyday social interaction and experience? Mathematics seems to live a life of its own, in a world somehow outside of the flow of history, biography, and culture, very much like the heavenly referents for religion. Indeed, mathematics and religion are no strangers to one another; they are intimately linked in history. That they posed related challenges for the sociologist was recognized by Emile Durkheim when he concluded his study of the religious life by speculating on the social nature of logical concepts. On grounding mathematics sociologically, see Restivo (2022: 231–260). Conclusion: On God Armstrong (2009: ix) argues that we moderns have tamed and domesticated the otherness of God and made knowing who he is, what he wants, and what he expects possible. This certainly seems to be the case for the theists. They seem to have no difficulty knowing a God who, as Armstrong points out and the theists generally acknowledge, is not a being at all and is “utterly transcendent.” I pointed out earlier the apophatic and cataphatic approaches to grasping the meaning of and accessing God: apophatic theology seeks to describe the unknown and unknowable God by negation. The alternative cataphatic theology is considered by the apophaticists as limiting God by trying to describe Him positively. How can we limited finite humans know that there is something, some entity, some being who is limitless and infinite? It’s the Flatland problem I discussed at the beginning of this volume. More generally, Armstrong is critical, and rightfully so, of the tendency to think that people across history with entirely different worldviews “have always thought about God in exactly the same way” from ancient Palestinians to modern cosmologists. The earliest human pathways to knowledge were, as in ancient Greece, mythos and logos. Logos was basically the practical reason that helped us navigate everyday life, science in embryo. Mythos gave us a tool for navigating the ultimate meaning of life, the challenges of suffering, evil, and death. Mythos was religion in embryo. The scientific revolution in sixteenth-century Europe initiated a movement that made mythos suspect. This led to an increasingly rationalized view of religion which in our own time, according to Armstrong (2009: xv–xvi), gave rise

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective 121 to “two distinctively modern phenomena, fundamentalism and atheism.” Both movements have sought to prioritize logos over mythos. Fundamentalist literalists with their “creation science” have imposed a scientific narrative on the mythos of the Bible. The atheists’ critique of religion and God, and especially the criticisms of the New Atheists, have focused on “defiantly unorthodox” fundamentalist forms of faith “that frequently misrepresent the [traditions they are] trying to defend.” Armstrong is arguably the most intelligent contemporary writer on the comparative history of religion. She has enough of that religious sentiment we find in Durkheim and Marx to recognize that the most important thing to understand about religion and God is that they are practices, not cognitive phenomena; we do religion and we do God. She is also a very hopeful person and has championed a Charter for Compassion movement. The Charter for Compassion “provides an umbrella for people to engage in collaborative partnerships worldwide. Our mission is to bring to life the principles articulated in the Charter for Compassion through concrete, practical action in a myriad of sectors” (https://charterforcompassion. org/). Unfortunately, compassion, as we’ve seen, is a centripetal force associated with cultural speciation. Armstrong (1944–) is a former Roman Catholic religious sister who changed from being a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian (Armstrong, 2009: xvii). She writes (Armstrong, 2009: xvii) that as someone who abandoned religion for many years, she can sympathize with the new atheist’s irritation. Some of her early books, she writes, were definitely “Dawkinesque.” Her study of the world’s religion in the years following compelled her to change her mind. She realized the parochial and dogmatic nature of her childhood faith, Christianity, and learned that quarreling about religion is “counterproductive and not conducive to enlightenment. It not only makes authentic religious experience impossible but also violates the Socratic rationalist tradition.” Armstrong’s (2009: 327) background clearly predisposes her to a form of transcendental spiritualism, one that seeks God by way of an Augustinian charge to “turn within and become aware of the way quite ordinary responses segue into ‘otherness.’ ” She looks to the “silence we encounter on the other side of speech,” and to music as a “ ‘definitively’ rational activity . . . a ‘natural theology . . . [in which] the mind experiences a pure, direct emotion that transcends ego and fuses subjectivity and objectivity.” Armstrong’s (2009: 329) advantage over the New Atheists is that she reaches a virtually sociological understanding of religion: “From almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity.” Their mythologies, rituals, and ethics opened them to indescribable intimations of the holy that enhanced and fulfilled their humanity. Religion was not practiced because its myths and doctrines were scientifically true or historically accurate; it wasn’t about grasping the origins of the universe or reaching for a hereafter beyond the trials and tribulations of everyday life. It was engaged in under the threats and violence of powerful natural forces and the forces of kings and priests. The point of religion was “to live intensely and richly here and now.” Her understanding of God, by contrast, does not reach the highest level of sociological acumen. She still speaks of a God that is beyond speech. She is an advocate

122  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective of “negative theology,” the idea that God is beyond our sensory ability to grasp. We can only grasp God in ritual settings and ritual actions. To use Islam as an example, we get as close to a limitless God as possible for a limited human to get by hearing the words of the Quran chanted repeatedly. Compassion as action is our best pathway to God. This is not good sociology. It leaves us speechless in the face of experiences we are told are “transcendental,” indeed, “supernatural.” Armstrong’s moral strength in trying to bring out the voice of compassion across all of our religious traditions so that we can hear it above all the sound and fury of war and hatred deserves our attention and support. But however laudable, this is not a pathway to grounding awe and transcendence. Human beings, she writes (Armstrong, 1994: 399), “cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. ” Fundamentalism is not a good substitute for God. Creating a vibrant twenty-first-century faith may depend on pondering the lessons and warnings of the history of God. It would be folly to dismiss Armstrong’s ideas out of hand because of her sociological myopia. She is a font of wisdom whose works can inform the sociology of religion and God even if she herself has not taken this path. Notes 1 Vico (1668–1744; see Vico, 2020) was influenced by one of the other great thinkers concerned with critical religious philosophy, Spinoza (1632–1677; see Morrison, 2018; Vaughan, 1968; Cotrupi, 2000; and on Xenophanes, see Harvey, 1997). Primary sources include Vico (2020) and Spinoza (2005). On the projection metaphor, see Harvey (1996). Feuerbach’s influence on today’s anthropology of religion is not nearly as visible as Durkheim’s, or Marx’s, Freud’s, and Weber’s. For an example of the nature and shape of the anthropology of Christianity today, see Cannell (2006) and Bialecki et al. (2008). 2 Very little is known about Wallis to this author. The several expert consultants I asked were not much help, though I was able to confirm some information with the archivist at Ohio State University. Wallis was employed as an instructor in economics and sociology at Ohio State from 1908 to 1909. I was unable to discover any other record of employment nor any record of his credentials as a sociologist. The internal evidence is that he was an autodidact. The terms “Dr.” or “PhD” are nowhere associated with his name. Critics found his scholarship wanting, more appropriate for the popular press than the scholarly arena, even where they praised his craft and theses. He uses footnotes and bibliographies sparingly in his writings, More often than not his citations are solely to primary Biblical sources. And his main audience seems to be the general public even in his many contributions to a major scholarly journal and an outstanding academic press. Nowhere in his works are there any references to Durkheim, Marx, or Weber (whose works he must have known given his citation history), but he acknowledges Robertson Smith, and leading intellectuals in the social sciences and history including Julius Wellhausen, a pre-eminent student of Hebrew history, the pioneering anthropologist and social theorist Lewis Henry Morgan, Darwin, Spencer, and others as well as leading theologians of the period. Wallis (1916) defends the social gospel movement, arguing that it will triumph; and the Bible, as explained by scientific scholarship, will stand at the center of the greatest movement for justice and freedom that the world has ever seen (Wallis, 1916: 56–57). Wallis’ defense of the Social Gospel movement opens a door on the relationship between Christianity and sociology in the early decades of the twentieth century and earlier; indeed, Saint Simon (1760–1825) referred to the embryonic science as the New Christianity. That history is outside of the scope of this book but can

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective 123 be followed initially in Lyon (1983) and Morgan (1969). Albion Small (1854–1926), Wallis’ advocate, eschewed the “do-nothing traditions” in scholarship and especially in the new social sciences. He advocated wedding thought and action: “I would have them advance from knowledge of facts to knowledge of forces, and from knowledge of forces to control of forces in the interest of a more complete social and personal life” (Small, 1896: 513). 3 The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) was founded in 1949 at Yale University to promote cultural understanding by producing scholarly resources and infrastructures for research, teaching, and learning. It documents, supports, and conducts original research on cross-cultural commonalities and diversities past and present and organizes this material in dynamic, expertly indexed databases on microfiche. The database contains nearly one million pages of information on more than 350 world cultures. 4 For a list of empirically grounded causal propositions on the social relations of religion, see Collins (1975: 364–380); for a sociocultural typology of types of societies and types of religion, see Lenski, (1970: 81–82). General references: Bulbulia et al. (2013); Davis (1971); Dickson et al. (2005); Lambert et al. (1959); Peoples and Marlowe (2012), Peoples et al., 2016); Sanderson and Roberts (2008); Simpson (1979); Spiro and D’Andrade (1958), Swanson (1960); Underhill (1975).

References Aeschulus (5th c. BCE/2015), Prometheus Bound (New York: NYRB Classics). Armstrong, K. (1994), A History of God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Armstrong, K. (2009), The Case for God (New York: Anchor Books). Bialecki, J., N. Haynes and J. Robbins (2008), “The Anthropology of Christianity,” Religion Compass 2, 6: 1139–1158. Bukharin, N. (1921/1925), Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (London: Allen & Unwin). Bulbulia, J., A.W. Geertz, Q.D. Atkinson, E. Cohen, N. Evans, P. François, H. Gintis, et al. (2013), “The Cultural Evolution of Religion,” pp. 381–404 in P.J. Richerson and M.H. Christiansen, eds., Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion (Cambridge, MA: The Press). Cannell, F., ed. (2006), The Anthropology of Christianity (Durham: Duke University Press). Collins, R. (1975), Conflict Sociology (New York: Academic Press). Collins, R. (1992), Sociological Insights, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press). Cotrupi, C.N. (2000), Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Coulanges, F.D.N. (1864/2001), The Ancient City (Kitchner: Batache Books). Darwin, C. (1859/1994), On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Davis, W.D. (1971), “Societal Complexity and the Nature of Primitive Man’s Conception of The Supernatural,” PhD dissertation (Durham: University of North Carolina). Dickson, D.B., J. Olsen, P.F. Dahm and M.S. Wachtel (2005), “Where Do You Go When You Die? A Cross-Cultural Test of the Hypothesis That Infrastructure Predicts Individual Eschatology,” Journal of Anthropological Research 61, 1: 53–79. DuBois, W.E.B. (1903/2003), The Negro Church (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press). Durkheim, E. (1912/1995), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press; Fields trans.). Engels, F. (1878/1957), “Anti-Dühring, Excerpts,” pp. 144–150 in K. Marx and F. Engels, eds., On Religion (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House).

124  Religion and God in Sociological Perspective Friedman, E. (1995), The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery (New York: Little, Brown, & Co.). Ghosh, P. (2008), A Historian Reads Max Weber: Essays on the Protestant Ethics (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag). Harrington, M. (1983), The Politics at God’s Funeral (New York: Penguin). Harvey, V.A. (1996), “Projection: A Metaphor in Search of a Theory?,” pp. 66–82 in D.Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away? (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Harvey, V.A. (1997), Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). James, W. (1902), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans & Green). Kautsky, K. (1908/1925), Foundations of Christianity (New York: Monthly Review Press Edition). King, B.J. (2007), Evolving God (New York: Doubleday). Lambert, W.W, L.M. Triandis and M. Wolf (1959), “Some Correlates of Beliefs in the Malevolence and Benevolence of Supernatural Beings: A Cross-Societal Study,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58, 2: 162–169. Lenski, G. (1970), Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, 12th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill; Lenski and Nolan, publ. Oxford University Press). Lotze, R.H. (1843), Logik (Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung). Lyon, D. (1983), “The Idea of a Christian Sociology: Some Historical Precedents and Concerns,” Sociological Analysis 44, 3: 227–242. Marx, K. (1844/1957), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” pp. 41–58 in K. Marx and F. Engels, eds., On Religion (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House). Maryanski, A. (2018), Emile Durkheim and the Birth of the Gods (New York: Routledge). Mencken, H.L. (1982), A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Vintage; for more on the graveyard of the gods): http://nowscape.com/atheism/dead_gods.htm Merton, R.K. (1938), “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England,” Osiris 4: 360–632. Morgan, J.G. (1969), “The Development of Sociology and the Social Gospel in America,” Sociological Analysis 30, 1: 42–53. Morrison, J. (2018), “Spinoza and History,” pp. 173–198 in R. Kenington, ed., The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). Otto, R. (1917/1952), The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press). Parsons, T. (1963), “Introduction,” pp. xix–xvii in M. Weber, ed., The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press). Peoples, H.C. and F.W. Marlowe (2012), “Subsistence and the Evolution of Religion,” Human Nature 23, 3: 253–269. Peoples, H.C., P. Duda and F.W. Marlowe (2016), “Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion,” Human Nature 27, 3: 261–282. Peterson, G.P. (2001), “Religion as Orienting Worldview,” Zygon 36, 1: 5–19. Pinxten, H. (2010), The Creation of God (Brussels: Peter Lang). Pritchard, E.E. (1965), Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Radcliffe-Brown, A. (1952), Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press). Renan, E. (1863/1991), The Life of Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus). Restivo, S. (1994), “Ecology, Social Organization, and the Scientific Revolution,” pp. 29–48 in S. Restivo, ed., Science, Society, and Values: Toward a Sociology of Objectivity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press).

Religion and God in Sociological Perspective 125 Restivo, S. (2021), Society and the Death of God (New York: Routledge). Sanderson, S.K. and W.W. Roberts (2008), “The Evolutionary Forms of the Religious Life: A Cross‐cultural, Quantitative Analysis,” American Anthropologist 110, 4: 454–466. Schweitzer, A. (1911/2005), The Quest for the Historical Jesus: a critical study of its progress from Reimarusto Wrede (Mineola: Dover). Simpson, J.H. (1979), “Sovereign Groups, Subsistence Activities, and the Presence of a High God in Primitive Societies,” The Religious Dimension: New Directions in Quantitative Research, 299–310. Small, A.W. (1896), “Scholarship and Social Agitation,” American Journal of Sociology 5: 513–656. Smith, W.R. (1889), Lectures on the Religion of the Smites: Fundamental Institutions (London: A. & C. Black). Spengler, O. (1926), The Decline of the West (New York: A. Knopf). Spinoza, B. (2005/1677), Ethics (New York: Penguin). Spiro, M.E. and R.G. D’Andrade (1958), “A Cross‐Cultural Study of Some Supernatural Beliefs,” American Anthropologist 60, 3: 456–466. Strauss, D. (1835), The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (London: Chapman Brothers). Svatos, W.H. Jr., et al. (1998), “Weber, Max,” pp. 547–552 in H.W. Svatos, Jr., ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Society (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press). Swanson, G.E. (1960), The Birth of the Gods: The Origin of Primitive Beliefs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Turner, B.S. (1971), “Sociological Founders and Precursors: The Theories of Religion of Emile Durkheim, Fustel De Coulanges and IBN Khaldûn,” Religion 1, 1: 32–48. Underhill, R. (1975), “Economic and Political Antecedents of Monotheism: A CrossCultural Study,” American Journal of Sociology 80, 4: 841–861. Vaughan, F. (1968). La Scienza Nuova: Orthodoxy and the Art of Writing,” Forum Italicum 2, 4: 332–358. Vico, G. (2020), The New Science (New Haven: Yale University Press; trans. J. Taylor and R. Miner, Ciencia Nueva. Principios de ciencia nueva, 1725, rev. 1730 & 1744). Wallis, L. (1905), Egoism: A Study in the Social Problems of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Wallis, L. (1912), Sociological Study of the Bible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Wallis, L. (1916), The Struggle for Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Wallis, L. (1935), God and the Social Process – A Study in Hebrew History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Wallis, L. (1942), The Bible Is Human: A Study in Secular History (New York: Columbia University Press). Wallis, L. (1949), The Bible and Modern Belief: A Constructive Approach to the Present Religious Upheaval (Durham: Duke University Press). Weber, M. (1904–1905/2008), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton). Weber, M. (1916/1962), The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (New York: The Free Press) Weber, M. (1915/1951), The Religion of China (New York: The Free Press). Weber, M. (1917/1919/1952), Ancient Judaism (New York: The Free Press). Weber, M. (1922), “Religionsoziologie” (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr; publ. as The Sociology of Religion by Beacon Press, Boston in 1963). Zuckerman, P. (2003), Invitation to the Sociology of Religion (New York: Routledge).

12 Godless but Good

Part 1. Societies Without God According to the theists whose works I have reviewed in this book, 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, and prosperous” (Zuckerman, 2008: 2–4). As someone who has spent a lot of time in Scandinavia as a chaired professor, lecturer, and visitor I can testify to the accuracy of Zuckerman’s portrayal. 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. Zuckerman spent 14 months in Scandinavia, a part of the world where belief in God is “muted, minimal, and marginal” (Zuckerman, 2008: 3). He spent his time observing the ways of life and thought in Sweden and Denmark through his sociological lens, studying the history of these countries, and conducting informal unstructured “person on the street” interviews as well as 150 formal, structured indepth interviews with people representing different occupations, educational levels, age groups, and living situations. The majority of people in these countries do not believe in a Creator or sky God, the divine origin of the Bible, or “sin.” Church attendance in Scandinavia is the lowest among the nations of the world. What about China, which has a reputation as an irreligious society? Zuckerman (2008: 22) argues that China may in fact be one of the most religious nations, citing Yang (2004). In recent polls (Pew and Gallop polls: https://worldpopulace.com/ least-religious-countries/), Sweden and Denmark are in the top ten least religious nations; the Czech Republic is the most irreligious nation by percentage of population (roughly 80%), China is sixth on this list (nearly 52%). Ranked by sheer numbers, China, with its huge population, leads the list of least religious nations (more than 700 million; note that the United States comes in third at over 62 million even though it is arguably the most religious nation among the developed democracies in terms of church attendance and belief in God, Jesus, and the Bible (Zuckerman, 2008: 1). DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-12

Godless But Good  127 The 2022 The Economist’s Quality of life index ranked 173 cities. The top ten cities are in (from 1st to 10th): Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Netherlands, Japan, and Australia. This can be compared with the Wharton/UPenn survey, which ranked the top ten best countries as follows: Switzerland (30% non-believers), Germany (roughly 70% say religion is not important to them), Canada (about 35% reported no religious affiliation in the 2021 census, up from 24% in 2011), US (about 29% unaffiliated), Sweden (18% atheist, 55% non-religious), Japan (60% non-believers), Australia (40% report “no religion,” up from 0.7% in 1961), UK(nearly 40% report “no religion:”), France (upwards of 30%:), and Denmark (about a quarter of the population are atheist or agnostic).1 There are good reasons to be skeptical about surveys on religious beliefs and practices. One has first to consider the extent to which such studies rely on government statistics, the degree of freedom of expression allowed, and the extent of democratic institutions. Furthermore, we can expect discrepancies between individual and family religious practices and government pronouncements about religious practices which may stress secular policies. (On the methodological problems of assessing levels of religiosity at the level of nation states, see Zuckerman, 2008: 23). The religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) are the second largest religious group in North America and most of Europe; they make up almost 25 percent of America’s population. Atheists constitute almost 50 percent of the West and the Reformed West (which includes Australia and New Zealand: Pew Research Center, 2012). The category of “neither religious nor spiritual” is growing faster than the category of “spiritual but not religious” (which shows increasing numbers of atheists and agnostics). Given my argument that religion is real and ubiquitous, it should not be surprising to find that the movement away from organized traditional religion toward individualistic spirituality represents secularization rather than a sustained movement toward alternative beliefs and practices (Voas and Bruce, 2007; cf. Marshall and Olson, 2018). While polls from the early years of the twenty-first century suggest trends, more recent polls confirm that the proportion of “nones” is still rising in many countries. The statistics on secularization are at best ambivalent and religiosity, spirituality, and secularism are definitionally fuzzy and the categories tend to leak into each other (Jensen, 2021; Pew Research Center, 2018; Pew-Templeton, 2020; Poushter and Fetterolf, 2019). The United States ranked as one of the world’s most religious countries between 1981 and 2007. But the population of “nones,” 6 percent in 1991, is now closer to 25 percent. This is the largest move away from traditional religion of any country for which data is available (James et al., 2020). Yet, the highly religious percentage of the population has remained steady. Given the various problems with surveys and statistics we shouldn’t expect a triumph of secularism or a Great Awakening either in America. This is probably the case worldwide. Nonetheless there are indications that secularization is triumphing over desecularization (e.g., Brown, 2019). Moreover, some evidence indicates that traditional religiosity declines as a function of increasing levels of security. This explains the

128  Godless But Good trend away from religion in almost every high-income country since 2007; India is the most notable exception to this trend (Inglehart, 2020). Many factors can interrupt and even reverse this trend, for example, new pandemics, a global depression, catastrophic environmental challenges. The catastrophic potentials of existential risks of course would make all of this moot. Part 2. Philosophers Without God I have had harsh things to say about philosophy in this and other publications, but I have not always made clear that my claims here are not meant for individual philosophers. Nonetheless, one must be cautious here since doing philosophy has traditionally at least meant ignoring the social and living in a world of free-willing autonomous individuals whose behaviors, thoughts, and emotions could be explained by considering them as rooted in and driven by the rational application of Platonic rules of logic and language. A good illustration of this conflict between thoughtful but non-social insights and Platonic ideals about the self is offered by the meditations of philosophers on atheism and the secular life (Antony, 2007). Before I turn to what philosophers have had to say about the rationale for a secular life, I want to briefly reflect on my general criticism of philosophy; it will come into play as I explore the philosophers’ reflections on secularism. The general criticism I have leveled at philosophy is that it proceeds without stop signs. This criticism is not idiosyncratic. Consider the self-awareness of this criticism in these words by the philosopher A.C. Grayling (2007: vii). Referring to a collection of philosophical papers, he remarks that some issues get left behind without being resolved. Fashions and trends come and go with changes based not on solving or resolving problems but by “exhaustion of the resources and language for dealing with them (for further reflections by philosophers on “philosophy: end or transformation,” see Baynes et al. (1987)). Let’s consider next Ladyman’s (2017: 35) effort to deflect such criticisms. He points to an alleged remark by Richard Feynman for which I could find no source that scientists have as much use for philosophy of science as birds do for ornithology. But, Ladyman claims, scientists found Popper’s ideas on falsification useful, which shows that scientists “are not well-placed to explain to the public how science works unless they are trained in the philosophy of science.” But compare Ladyman’s remark that “scientists found Popper’s writings on falsification useful” with his later remark that “being good at an activity does not mean one is good at explaining how one is good at the activity.” The falsification conjecture offered by Popper that some scientists found helpful in thinking about their work was a myth. Falsification depends on a simplistic understanding of an experiment as a direct matter of fact derived from nature itself. This, along with an entire literature in philosophy of science, has been superseded by the sociology of scientific practice. This takes science out of the realm of thinking about what science is or should be like (i.e., philosophy) and into the realm of observing science in practice (ethnographic studies of scientific practice). In what follows I will show how these problems, which I consider endemic to philosophy as a discipline, show up

Godless But Good  129 in philosophical meditations on the secular life and limit otherwise progressive thoughts on religion and morals. Progressive Philosophers Contemplate the Secular Life I take as my sample of atheist and secular philosophers the contributors to Antony (2007). They argue that (1) religion is at war with rationality, (2) religion veils us from a reality that poses formidable challenges (such as death without the promise of an afterlife), (3) there are secular equivalents to theistic faith such as Utilitarianism and Existentialism, (4) we should, as professors for example, treat the religious beliefs of our students the way we treat belief in ghosts, (5) the Bible, by giving us a God who must be obeyed unconditionally (e.g. Deuteronomy 7:1-2 New Revised Standard Version), forces us to choose between Christianity and morality, (6) we should opt for a community of equals not one united under a supreme power, and (7) there are non-religious guidelines we can follow for a well-lived life that “gives a central place to intimacy, love, and friendship.” Adding God to this picture would gain us nothing (Homiak, 2007: 149). Rey (2009: 264–265), commenting on Plantinga’s claim that original sin is verified in our wars, cruelty, and hatred, writes that such announcements are reason enough “to be wary about religion as self-deception, not to mention as genuine belief.” Lewis (2007: 241–242) wonders if there is a “nice version” of Christianity that retains its distinctive ideas. Recall that Thomas Jefferson (1904/2011) tried to find such a version; The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth is 100 pages long. Such a version, Lewis continues, would depend, for example, on treating the hellfire and brimstone narrative as a mere conceit and excusing believers “on the grounds that they are probably not clear-headed about the commitments of their worship.” Lewis is not certain he can continue to like, respect, and admire such people. And Louise Antony (2007: 58), editor of this collection, remarks on the lesson of Eden: “it’s prudent to do what powerful divinities tell you to do – in Adam and Eve’s case, to remain in a state of childlike ignorance, devoid of conscience or principle, dependent but safe.” There is a more noble message in this tale: that knowledge and reason, those godlike powers, are so valuable that having them is worth enduring the wrath of the most powerful being in the universe. On this reading, Adam and Eve did not “fall from grace,” they ascended into moral responsibility. Antony thus urges us to “claim our rationality, to confront the harsh realities that constrain us, and to acknowledge our own responsibility, in spite of the cost – therein to make ourselves ‘as gods.’ ” Dennett (2007: 117) urges us to express our gratitude by saying “Thank goodness” instead of “Thank God.” In the former case, we can “plant a tree, feed an orphan, buy books for schoolgirls in the Islamic world,” and so on. In the latter case, you are faced with the “ludicrous” idea of repaying God: “religious people can be asked to live up to the same moral standards as secular people in science and medicine.”

130  Godless But Good Not all of the contributors to Antony’s volume are equally assertive in condemning religion. Belzer (2007: 103) notes that while letting go of the beliefs of his childhood was “probably inevitable,” he feels grateful for something in those early religious practices that has kept him from going “numb.” Tappenden (2007: 112) argues that we should take care to accurately represent the Christian narrative from a simple “humanist’s respect for human life and experience” (see Feldman, 2007: 214). Owen (2007: 178) argues that even if religious beliefs are delusions the need for the “fixed points,” they provide becomes more pressing as technology advances: “Should science be the whole truth about human beings, that truth will not set us free” (and see Blackburn, 2007: 192–193 whose ideas converge with Owens’). The Limits of Secular Philosophy Secular philosophy, like philosophy in general, is limited by its Platonic preference for operating at the level of a free-floating once-and-only logic and language as the carriers of the explanatory roots of human behavior, thought, and consciousness. In part this is a function of the historic connections between philosophy and religion. Religious beliefs permeate the history of philosophy, from Plato’s Pythagorean ideas, concept of the Forms, and belief in daemons, and the supernatural beliefs of Socrates, to the teleological and metaphysical roots of Aristotle’s philosophy, and from Descartes’ Catholicism, Spinoza’s mysticism, Leibniz’s religiosity, and Kant’s pietism to Hegel’s Christianity. The problem is not simply that religion is found in the origin story of philosophy; it is part of the origin story of every discipline. Philosophy is still deeply immersed in that origin story if not directly then by way of relying on God substitutes like Absolute Logic and Absolute Language and the exclusion of the social sciences except as grist for their logical and linguistic mills (philosophy of the social sciences). By claiming logical and linguistic authority, philosophers lay claim to being the final arbiters of what counts as “good,” “reliable,” and “valid” thinking across the disciplines, independently of empirical ethnographic investigations (for a recent treatment of the intellectual and cultural value of contemporary philosophy from a wide range of perspectives, see Blackford and Broderick (2017)). The idea that philosophers look out on a world of doubt and uncertainty through the lens of a cold hard logic (Shapiro, 2007: 16) tends to put the onus for making sense of and understanding life “from within; we must find it in ourselves to fight for justice though the odds may be against us; and we must self-consciously build a new sense of community based on recognition of our and others’ autonomous choices” (Levine, 2007: 30–31). At the core of philosophy, with due acknowledgment of the so-called turn to practice in recent decades (Restivo, 2022: 209–230), is the myth of individualism. Farrell (2007: 68) suggests some form of Existentialism as a secular equivalent to theism, “with its insistence on the importance of choice without a background of transcendent, independent moral values.” The myth of individualism nourishes another important limitation on philosophy, the implied or self-conscious assumption that we humans are rational free-willing persons. When

Godless But Good 131 Curley (2007: 88–89) claims “I choose heresy,” I assume he means this literally as a choosing behavior that is rational, logical, free-willed, and independent of social life as a locus of causal forces. “Life is up to us,” Laden (2007: 132) claims; he doesn’t mean up to the community, the social network that defines who and what we are. Homiak (2007: 149) gives central place to our “cognitive powers” as the source of a “well-lived life.” Taylor (2007: 163–164) sees us as “divided and . . . at odds” and that is the ground on which we must try to achieve “progress and moral harmony” – again, virtual Hobbesian individuals in a war of all against all charged with creating a social contract. Feldman (2007: 214) roots epistemic justification in individual viewpoints. The individual is the causal locus of evaluating evidence in Anderson’s (2007: 229–230) world of agents and cognitive biases. Egos are at the center of Lewis’ (2007: 241–242) philosophy of evil and Rey’s (2009: 264–165) analysis of the “rational absurdity” of religious claims. If the reader thinks I take too many liberties of attribution here, consider the mission statement of the Society for the Philosophy of Scientific Practice (2022). The organization adopts the position that philosophy of science has traditionally disregarded scientific practice when examining the relationship between scientific theories and the world, whereas the newer field of social studies of science has disregarded the world when studying science and society. That field has treated the world as a product of social construction. Each field has its merits but their perspectives are limited: “We advocate a philosophy of scientific practice, based on an analytic framework that takes into consideration theory, practice and the world simultaneously.” The criticism of the idea that “the world” is something other than or more than a social construction is based on (1) a misunderstanding of social construction and of “the social” more generally, (2) a traditional bias in philosophy on individual rationality and logic as the sources of the methodologies of explanation, and (3) an often uncritical adherence to the myths of individualism and free will, which manage to survive profound philosophical inquiries into the nature of the self. Social construction is not a philosophical idea – it does not mean that the world is all and only representation and language; it is the fundamental theorem of sociology. The turn to practice in philosophy is, if it is to be taken seriously, a turn to sociology and a dropping away of another philosophical subject that has developed its own science. The sociological challenge to the philosophers is this:

• Given: Humans are always, already, and everywhere social. • They interact with each other and their environments as social entities through and through.

• These interactions are manifested in the fundamental theorem of sociology (including anthropology and social psychology).

• That theorem embodies the reality that facts as inventions and discoveries are manufactured by humans as social beings interacting in social networks networked to local, regional, and global environments and social ecologies. • It follows: that we can only know the world as a social construction.

132  Godless But Good The challenge to philosophers is therefore threefold: 1. Demonstrate that the radically social nature of humans in evolution (as sketched, for example, in Wilson, 2012) – that they are always, already, and everywhere social and the most social of the eusocial species – is wrong or limited in some way. 2. Demonstrate that if (1) is wrong the “world as a social construction” is wrong. 3. Accepting that humans are radically social, offer an empirically grounded alternative to the “world as a social construction.” This challenge cannot be met without ignoring the basic sciences of sociology, anthropology, and social psychology which make philosophy irrelevant for the study of society and social practice. Note 1 https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/secular-countriesz. The reasonably well-sourced Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_state lists more than 140 secular states.

References Anderson, E.S. (2007), “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?,” pp. 215–130 in Antony, op. cit. Antony, L., ed. (2007), Philosophers without God (New York: Oxford University Press; throughout as Antony, op. cit). Baynes, K., J. Bohman and T. McCarthy, eds. (1987), After Philosophy: End or Transformation (Cambridge: MIT Press). Belzer, M. (2007), “Mere Stranger,” pp. 90–103 in Antony, op. cit. Blackburn, S. (2007), “Religion and Respect,” pp. 179–193 in Antony, op. cit. Blackford, R. and D. Broderick, eds. (2017), Philosophy’s Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress (New York: Wiley-Blackwell). Brown, D. (2019), “Measuring Long-Term Patterns of Political Secularization and Desecularization: Did They Happen or Not?,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 58, 3: 570–590. Curley, E. (2007), “On Becoming a Heretic,” pp. 80–89 in Antony, op. cit. Dennett, D. (2007), “Thank Goodness,” pp. 113–120 in Antony, op. cit. Farrell, D.M. (2007), “Life Without God: Some Personal Costs,” pp. 59–68 in Antony, op.cit. Feldman, R. (2007), “Reasonable Religious Disagreements,” 194–214 in Antony, op. cit. Grayling, A.C. (2007), Truth, Meaning and Realism (London: Continuum). Homiak, M. (2007), “An Aristotelian Life,” pp. 133–149 in Antony, op. cit. Inglehart, R. (2020), “Giving Up God: The Global Decline of Religion,” Foreign Affairs: 110–118. James, S., H. Boyd and J. Carroll (2020), “Why the partisan divide? The U.S. Is becoming more secular – and more religious,” Religion & Politics: https://religionandpolitics. org/2020/11/17/why-the-partisan-divide-the-u-s-is-becoming-more-secular-and-morereligious/-secular-and-more-religious/

Godless But Good 133 Jefferson, T. (1904/2011) The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Edition). Jensen, L.A. (2021), “The Cultural Psychology of Religiosity, Spirituality, and Secularism in Adolescence,” Adolescent Research Review 6: 277–288. Laden, A.S. (2007), “Transcendence Without God: On Atheism and Invisibility,” pp. 121–132 in Antony, op. cit. Ladyman, J. (2017), “What Has Philosophy Ever Done for Us?,” pp. 31–40 in R. Levine, J. (2007), “From Yeshiva Rochur to Secular Humanist,” pp. 17–31 in Antony, op. cit. Lewis, D. (2007), “Divine Evil,” pp. 231–242 in Antony, op. cit. Marshall, J. and D. Olson (2018), “Is ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ a Replacement for Religion or Just One Step on the Path between Religion and Nonreligion?,” Review of Religious Research 60: 503–518. Owen, D. (2007), “Disenchantment,” pp. 165–178 in Antony, op. cit. Pew Research Center (2012): www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/ Pew Research Center (2018): www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/young-adults around-the-world-are-less-religious-by-several-measures/ Pew-Templeton (2020): www.globalreligiousfutures.org/explorer#/?subtopic=15&chartTyp e=bar&year=2010&data_type=number&religious_affiliation=all&destination=to&count ries=Worldwide&age_group=all&gender=all Poushter, J. and Fetterolf, J. (2019), “How People Around the World View Religion’s Role in Their Countries”: www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/04/22/how-people-around-theworld-view-religions-role-in-their-countries/ Restivo, S. (2022), Inventions in Sociology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Rey, G. (2009), “Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception,” University of Maryland pdf: https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/religion/2009-rey.pdf Shapiro, S. (2007), “Faith and Reason, The Perpetual War: Ruminations,” pp. 3–16 in Antony, op. cit. Tappenden, J. (2007), “Atheist’s Fundamentalism,” pp. 104–112 in Antony, op. cit. Taylor, K.A. (2007), “Without the Net of Providence: Atheism and the Human Adventure,” pp. 150–164 in Antony, op. cit. Voas, D. and S. Bruce (2007), “The Spiritual Revolution: Another False Dawn for the Sacred,” pp. 43–62 in K. Flanagan and P. Jupp, eds., A Sociology of Spirituality (Aldershot: Ashgate). Wilson, E.O. (2012), The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: W.W. Norton). Yang, F. (2004), “Between Secularist Ideology and Desecularizing Reality: The Birth and Growth of Religious Research in Communist China,” Sociology of Religion 65, 2: 101–119. Zuckerman, P. (2008), Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment (New York: New York University Press).

13 The Knowing Society A Secular Moral Order

I can’t pretend that I now have the tools and skills to construct a convincing, coherent secular moral order to oppose atheism and theism and to take us beyond New Atheism and its theist critics. I am in the position of being able to construct the pieces of the puzzle of a secular moral order without yet being able to piece them all together into a solved puzzle. In this final chapter, then, I gather up and piece together to the best of my ability a solution to the puzzle that the reader should be able to grasp intuitively without the full orderly transparency ultimately required. So I am going to present more of a collage than a coherent tapestry. The immediate provocation for this book was debates between New Atheists and theists carried out in books, lecture halls, and on YouTube. They reinforced my suspicion of debates as a methodology for fostering inquiry. Time and time again the debates 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, and to ascertain the facts of the matter as known, corrigibly, fallibly, and tentatively by scientific consensus. I concluded that what I was watching when I watched such debates was two incommensurable cultures mimicking communication by speaking in the “same” language. These debates fed into my concept of incommensurable objectivity or truth communities. More generally, they manifested incommensurable worldviews and a fortiori cultural species. I consider New Atheism and theism incommensurable worldview systems that can only be opposed by an alternative worldview system. The test of a system’s truth value or survival value will not be rhetoric, or charisma, or reason, or logic but evolutionary pressures, natural selection. One of the factors at work in these debates and in this worldview competition is the boundary principle: territorial, social, and bodily boundaries have evolutionary survival implications. Boundary awareness is as much a part of our brain-body functions as the identification of patterns and the automatic completion of incomplete signs DOI: 10.4324/9781003396857-13

The Knowing Society 135 and symbols. The human gaze is automatically drawn to boundaries, In everyday instances our gaze is drawn to the boundaries that separate garments from skin (e.g., the boundary between the bottom of a skirt or shorts and the unclothed leg, calf, or ankle; the boundary between the waist and the waistband of a bathing suit or pair of pants; the boundary between the end of a short sleeve on a T-shirt and the bicep, even the boundary between the biceps and triceps on a sufficiently ripped arm; the boundary between a jacket and trousers). The boundaries between bodies are fundamental. At the level of social systems and cultures, boundaries are both barriers and invitations to communication, the object of threats or invasions. We recognize national boundaries as well as racial, sexual, class, status, gender, and other boundaries. When boundaries are threatened they react (through human machinations) by becoming stronger. Even then they can sometimes be overrun or transgressed. In the New Atheism/theism debates we see boundaries strengthening and increasing their resistance to outsider logics and languages. The threat of the Other in these debates strengthens positions rather than softening them. On some levels, communication and exchange across boundaries is possible, either by force of reason (in the case of international businesses) or by political, economic, or military force (and more often than not by reason and militarism working together or sequentially; break down the boundaries with the military and then let reason, the politicians, the bankers, and/or the priests prevail, to put it in schematic terms). In the case at hand, it is possible that a military adventure might break through the atheism/theism boundary and institute a one-world. one-worldview, secular or theocratic order. I am going to explore another path to resolution. In order to consider how to proceed in the wake of these ideas I will resolve the systems at issue, with due consideration for complexities, into three competing worldviews on the evolutionary stage: atheism, theism, and secularism. Prolegomena to a Sustainable Future’s Knowledge Base In a book that was a critical juncture on my road to the sociology of religion and God, Michael Harrington (1983: 197) asked: “Can Western society create transcendental common values in its everyday experience? Values which are not based upon – yet not counterposed to – the supernatural?” Harrington (1928–1989) was a democratic socialist and culturally a Catholic who ultimately identified with atheism. His cultural Catholicism shows up in this ecumenical effort to construct a morally responsible and spiritually fulfilling society by way of a coalition of believers and nonbelievers. There is a resonance here with Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion. Armstrong’s Charter reaches out to a global society. Harrington is focused on reconstructing the West. It is the death of the Western God he announces. Religion as we have known it in the West can no longer provide the values needed to solve the social crises of our time. Harrington is not prepared to claim “God is dead” in a general sense (Harrington, 1983: 7–8). He is not interested in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but in his social and political existence. It is this God, the God of the Judeo-Christian West, the political God who does not possess the attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and so on.

136  The Knowing Society Harrington’s political God is in fact the Judeo-Christian God in his role as a political agent and the roots of a social order. It is not easy to sustain the distinction between this political God and the God of Abraham. Harrington (1983: 2) is forced into this contradiction because he is convinced “that there can be no scientific refutation – or proof – of the existence of a nonempirical being.” I begin with Harrington because I share the basic framework of his democratic socialist agenda but do not agree that it can be followed and realized without resolving the question of the ontology of God. Moreover, democratic socialism will only put us on a path. The solution to “the spiritual crisis of Western Civilization” must embrace anarchism (see Box 6) and a global agenda. What follows is a map of how to travel beyond democratic socialism and the culture of Catholicism to a reasoned secular humanism organized around anarchistic goals. Such a society cannot carry over concepts of the transcendental and supernatural or of a God whose existence escapes science. The very idea of the immaterial is a human construct, and therefore subject to the analytical tools and theories of the human sciences. The resilience of this failure of the sociological imagination among our most talented scholars and intellectuals is a tribute to the resilience of the mindsets of our ancient and medieval ancestors, and especially to the ever-present ghost of Plato. It is time to break the ties that bind and leave childish things behind. Box 6. Anarchism and God With an Epicurean Postscript Anarchism is derived from the Greek (αναρχισμός): -anarcho- “without archons,” “without rulers.” Anarchists “support the elimination of all compulsory government” (i.e., the state), and is often described as opposition to all forms of Authority [I capitalize the “A” in Authority to allow for the legitimate authority of certain specialists and experts]. Anarchism is defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics as “the view that society can and should be organized without a coercive [NB] state” (Duthel, 2010: 2). I dedicated this book to “my tribe, the Anarchists.” That tribe takes its mores and folkways, its norms, values, and beliefs from Peter Kropotkin’s (1908: 88–94; 1902/1914) understanding of anarchism as a social science. Emma Goldman (2019: 4) wrote that anarchism had declared war on the “pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.” Religion, Property, and Government “represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails.” The phrase “No God, No Masters” comes from the title of a journal published briefly by Auguste Blanqui between 1880 and 1881: “Ni Dieu ni maître!.” A journal under the same title was published in Belgium 1885–1886 (Bianco, 1987; Kournwsky and Le Roy, 2013; Blanqui, 1925/2009; Guérin, 2005). The phrase became the motto of the anarchist movement and to a lesser extent other components of the labor movement.

The Knowing Society  137 An Epicurean Postscript “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” – Epicurus (probably a Deist) according to Hume (1779/1998: 63). The Epicurus attribution may be apocryphal. Paradigm for an Epicurean lifestyle:* • Pleasure makes life good. Pleasure is liberating and gives shape and color to our lives. • Some desires are necessary, while some desires corrode. Tranquility, not greed, leads to satisfaction. • We need friends, good friends. • Managing misfortune. Epicurus’ strikingly modern natural science influences how he approaches the question of suffering. While some philosophies, like Stoicism, see misfortune as part of a divinely ordered plan – as in some fashion cosmically good – Epicurean natural science maintains that our universe resulted from the non-intentional motions of atoms. So for Epicurus, misfortune has no cosmic purpose – it just happens. • Appreciating science. Epicurus bases a lot of his advice in his natural science. While their rivals, the Stoics, were trying to predict the future by interpreting the entrails of sacrificial birds, the Epicureans were developing an account of the world that didn’t catch on for another two thousand years. • *These principles are outlined in Austin (2022). Science and Religion The New Atheism/theism debates are a recent manifestation of a debate already emergent in the ancient writings of Plato (e.g., The Laws) and Aristotle (e.g., Metaphysics; Centore, 2021). But we moderns look to the origin of the debate in the era of one of the founders of modern science, Galileo. His conflicts with the Vatican are a key moment in the history of the struggles with faith in the face of reason. And in this moment, theists confront the sciences that will haunt them even as they seem to come to their aid: physics, astronomy, and cosmology. One problem with the theist position in the context of my contemporary story is that a new science emerged in the nineteenth century, one that they have ignored: sociology. Without taking account of sociology, it can be argued, for example, that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria; or efforts can be undertaken to demonstrate either that science simply bullies religion out of the picture or that science and religion can be reconciled. The wrench that sociology tosses into the mix is based on the fact that religion is a social institution and belief is a human, social phenomenon, making religion and

138  The Knowing Society God, and faith and belief subjects for sociological analysis. The result is that we can now tell scientifically grounded stories about the social functions of religion and identify traditional views of God as mistakes in reference: mistaking an ontic being of some usually immaterial sort for a socially constructed cultural symbol. While we haven’t seen a good public test of a confrontation between sociology and theism, sociologists of religion from Wallis (1905) to Stark (2008) have not been prepared to show off their discipline as a Durkheimian science, and theists have had no reason to engage that science. A sociological explanation of religion and the gods will not play as science or have any reasoned force with theists. Putting sociology aside then, we find that the variety of efforts on the part of believers and nonbelievers alike to argue for a conciliatory relationship between science and religion or to put them up against one another in debates have gone nowhere. And with good reason. What is at stake in the debates between atheists new and old and theists traditional and contemporary are worldviews more strongly resistant to reasoned discourse than most advocates on both sides of the science-religion divide have grasped. Their resistance is based on the fact that they are a consequence of cultural speciation. Science and Religion in their most general forms are cultural species, characterized by centripetal forces of compassion, species of objectivity, logic, rules of evidence, and truth mechanisms (giving us objectivity communities), and a Great Wall of cultural separation that cannot be bridged because there are no universal systems of reasoning and logic. The only reasonable reply to this situation is not to try to bully each other out of the game, not to engage in endless unresolvable debates, not to ignore each other, but to turn to an alternative worldview. To put it simply, I’m basically going to propose an alternative “ism,” a secularism, an alternative religion, a new societal “glue” for inquiring minds to hang their hats on. We will then not look to isolated individual rules of logic, or reason, or science to settle our disputes but first to the ability of our unfolding collective science to settle things on the evidence, and second to evolution and the grand design of natural selection. Which of these three cultural species will prove to be the most robust in meeting the adaptability tests of science and evolution? So at this point, we are beyond debates, reasons, and logics. My reply to the atheists and theists is: Here I Stand. I do not stand “nowhere,” nor do I stand alone. Leaving childhood behind, as a young adult and into adulthood I passed through powerfully secular and scientific networks. Sociologically, it is they who speak, not I. What’s in a Word: Weltanschauung I have already begun to introduce the elements of the secular worldview I advocate as an alternative to atheism and theism. Why is this a good way to capture the issues at stake in the conflict between atheism, theism, and secularism? The German word Weltanschauung was my introduction to the concept of worldview as a new sociology graduate student in 1965. It is lexicographically understood to mean “a philosophy of life,” a “concept of the world” held by an individual or a group. Individual worldviews are always reflections of a collective worldview. Some

The Knowing Society  139 definitions add the element of thoughtfulness, the contemplation of the world, of life, the universe, and everything. Freud (1933/1995: 195–196) defined it as a framework “which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.” One could then say with some reason that the overriding hypothesis of the atheists is Science, of the theists is God, and of the secularists is Humanity. If the world could be this easy to grasp, there would have been no need for the concept of cognitive dissonance. So my approach here is going to smooth over inevitable cognitive dissonances and work with the Freudian concept of worldview. This will allow us to grasp essentials the way we do in experiments when we work with vacuums and frictionless surfaces and in sociology when we invoke ideal types. The conflict between these worldviews is often conceived as a conflict about beliefs and knowledge. As a result we find that the debates between theists and atheists inevitably turn on arguments about facts of the matter. At the most general level the questions is: how can we best account for the way the world of our experience is? However, if you review the earlier definitions of religion in the sociological framework you will notice that the emphasis is on the “glue” that supports the cohesion of the community as a system of moral order. Theists are forced into the “explanatory” framework for two reasons: (1) they are sociologically myopic if not totally blind and (2) science poses a powerful explanatory system that threatens religion if its only defense is that it is an alternative explanatory framework. Religion as explanation has no competitive advantage over science. It can only survive as a system of moral order. But then it must face the reality that science and secularism are moral orders. The battle, then, is about alternative frameworks for outlining and defending moral orders. One could consider the question of the existence of God independently of Scripture by adopting philosophical or natural theology (Centore, 2021: vii). This approach depends on using so-called native rational powers in the context of appropriate life experiences and “sticking to the facts.” But which facts? “The facts” don’t really matter in this case because they are being accessed and evaluated on assumptions about methodology that rest on the myth of individualism and the fallacy of introspective transparency. This reliance essentially eliminates philosophical and psychological methods from our toolbox. The idea of religions as worldviews is not new (e.g., Peterson, 2001; Gopian and Plant, 2015); neither is the idea of science as a worldview (e.g., Orr, 2006; Carvalho, 2006) nor is the idea of incommensurable worldviews (e.g., Harrison, 2006). What is novel about my perspective is that I treat worldviews as incommensurable to a higher degree by embedding them in cultural species. Cowan, (2019: 12) provides us with the following paradigm for a comparative worldview framework: (a) GOD, (b) ULTIMATE REALITY, (c) KNOWLEDGE, (d) HUMAN BEINGS, (e) ETHICS, (f) PLIGHT, (g) SOLUTION. This simplifies the task of identifying the worldviews I oppose: New Atheism/atheism and Christian Theism/theism. Before I conclude my comparative worldview analysis, I need to provide some additional scaffolding to flesh out the rationale for a secular moral order.

140  The Knowing Society The Secular Worldview Narrative Unfolds The Polish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz (1839–1909) had one of the most powerful sociological imaginations, so powerful that it probably cost him a higher place in the pantheon of the founders of the discipline (Gumplowicz, 1885/1980: 300): It is not the individual who thinks but the spirit of his age and social group, his social community . . . The source of his thoughts is in the social medium in which he breathes, and he cannot think anything else other than what the influences of his social environment concentrating upon his brain necessitate. (Gumplowicz, 1885/1980: 240).1 Without this understanding of self, mind, brain, and consciousness, we cannot process what is going on in and around us in the world without succumbing irrevocably and without recourse to illusions, mistakes in reference, and the most profound distortions of logic and reason. The sociology of self, mind, brain, and consciousness stands as one of the most important pillars supporting the secular worldview (Restivo, 2023). The Place of Science in the Secular Worldview I stand on the grounds of the sciences, understood broadly as the disciplined but open-ended application of the methodologies, theories, and technologies of the classic physical, natural, and social sciences in their twenty-first-century manifestations. The sciences in this sense give us access to the facts of the matter of our existence as presumptive, corrigible, fallible, and not subject to absolute belief. These facts of the matter, from gravity to friction, from sex to reproduction, from carbon atoms to water, from ritual to social organization, exist on a continuum of open to closed systems. At the closed end, facts of the matter reach essentially absolute certainty: the shape of the earth, for example. That it is not flat is absolutely certain in the sense that there is no reason any longer to question this fact. Skepticism approaches its limit in such cases. The most important scaffolding in this groundwork by comparison to traditional scientific thinking is social science, and in particular sociology/anthropology, which I stand on as a robust two-pronged science. Furthermore, I understand science as a collective generational phenomenon of scientists by various labels across history and cultures intersubjectively testing claims and establishing facts of the matter, pressing forward as some facts of the matter are parked in the arena of facts of the matter too costly to continue to question even as they remain bathed in the spirit of skepticism. The Morality of Science Philosophers of science and scholars in general have uncritically accepted the truism that science cannot give us answers to questions about morals, values, and ethics. This is often if not universally paired with the assumption that science

The Knowing Society  141 doesn’t imply or entail specific morals, values, or ethics. But science is a communal activity, a subculture, a form of life, and “norms of science” have long been identified as endemic to science. Only a conception of a science alienated from humans and from society could give rise to the “truism” that it tells us nothing, implies nothing, about morality. Imagine constructing a culture of science. What would we build into such a culture in terms of values and morals? Merton (1942), following Bayet (1931), sought to clarify and codify those values and norms associated with the practice of science. He identified four norms: communism or communalism (common ownership and public sharing), universalism (science is independent of personal and culturally prescribed characteristics), disinterestedness (scientists work for the benefit of science), and organized skepticism (scientific work should be accepted on the bases of its contribution, objectivity, and rigor). Later writers suggested additional norms, including replication, originality, rationality, utilitarianism, individualism, progress, and meliorism (Ziman, 1996; Barber, 1962). These norms were not determined empirically so it was inevitable that criticisms would be raised to Merton’s proposal. Mitroff (1974) carried out a study of the Apollo moon scientists that led him to propose a set of counter-norms. Merton had already anticipated counter-norms in his original article (see Merton, 1963). More far-reaching criticisms were raised by Mulkay (1976, 1980; see also Turner, 2007; Bieliński and Tomczyńska, 2019; and Anderson et al., 2010). The foregoing provides an initial rationale for considering what might constitute the values, ethical, and moral foundations of science (the ethos of science for short). Building on the norms literature, the ethos of science would include investing findings with belief or trust at a level commensurate with the conviction warranted by the evidence. Ethical behavior implies moral integrity, not as a matter of individual will and behavior but as a collectively grounded and enforced orientation humans to humans and humans to nature. This would entail adherence to valuing goodness, kindness, generosity, a concern with quality, and virtue. The ethos of science demands reporting results with an allegiance to authenticity and a commitment to communicating all the information relevant to a particular research outcome. That ethos also requires scientists to treat living subjects, humans, animals, and the constituents of ecological niches with an appreciation for the integrity of subjects and the contributions of ecological systems to a sustainable human community and planet. The ethos of science includes a concern for the health and security of all living things, in the context of their contributions to a sustainable human community and planetary ecology. We need to generalize the medical ethos “above all, do no harm” to the sciences. If the culture at large and the scientific community are organized according to the humanitarian principles of a culture that can be variously described as democratic, socialist, communist, or anarchist, then we would not expect scientists or laypersons to be driven by a lust for fame, recognition, greed, status, or monetary rewards. Nor should they be expected to express values that reflect and encourage social injustices and inequalities. Some might argue that science, along with other creative endeavors, represents the dignity and integrity of the human-animal

142  The Knowing Society both as a human and as one of the animals. A consciousness of these issues and a critique of classical ideas about distancing the scientist from ethics, values, and morality will help to focus all of our attention on the requirements for a sustainable natural environment and a humane and sustainable human environment. Thus, the relevance of biodiversity studies does not lie in the province of pure science but in the valuing science of an ethical and moral people. Simply put, “science incorporates cultural values”; fraud, error, and pseudoscience are abhorred; “reliability, testability, accuracy, precision, generality, and simplicity of concepts” are valued (Zohoor, 2003: 92–96). These are ideals we must somehow raise to the level of routine practices across the sciences. We need to think about the “intrinsic” values of science – such as objectivity, rationality, honesty, accuracy – not as complements to humanitarian values such as empathy, compassion, and kindness but as integrally synthesized with them. There is a scientistic version of this view defended by scientists like B.F. Skinner and E.O. Wilson, who claim that the facts of evolution mean that all morality can be reduced to science. John Staddon (2019) objects to this as scientific imperialism. I am not advocating scientific imperialism or scientism, which are in any case imbued with their own systems of morals, values, and ethics. Second, I am not arguing that we have fool-proof grounds for establishing the values, morals, and ethics conducive to survival and sustainability. I do claim, however, that a culture oriented to the well-being of humanity and the planet will generate a scientific system with the same orientation (and thus values, morals, and ethics) conducive to survival and sustainability. Science and knowledge in general do not announce findings, inventions, and discoveries with guarantees attached to them regarding their potential for promoting or obstructing survival and sustainability. As the experiential knowledge base in such a culture expands over time, however, probabilities are going to favor (but not determine) outcomes that are more likely to be successful than not. Some philosophers allow their free-wheeling willy-nilly logical and linguistic gymnastics to imagine, for example, that maybe cultures that promote smoking will turn out to have better survival potential than those that ban smoking. This begins to sound like the kind of irrational skepticism that drives out rational skepticism. Toward a Secular Moral Order I want to think about a secular moral order as a scientific moral order and avoid considering the secular morality philosophers’ concerns with morality outside of religious traditions (e.g., humanism, freethinking, and certain forms of consequentialism, as well as ancient traditions of skepticism, virtue ethics, and Far Eastern thought). Thinking about what “secular” means can lead you down a rabbit hole and warrens of complexities and contradictions that bother, not without reason, serious scholars (e.g., Calhoun et al., 2011; hereafter CJV, 2011). I am going to alert you to this pathway but skirt it in order to rely on a simple but effective definition of secular: the secular refers to attitudes, activities, ethical, moral, and value positions, and explanatory frameworks that have no traditional religious or spiritual

The Knowing Society  143 bases; the secular worldview denies on empirical grounds (sociological and anthropological) the existence of transcendental and supernatural realms of reality and entities that inhabit those realms; it denies the existence of an immaterial world in the specific sense that disallows the possibility of an entity or being possessing any of the following characteristics (Turek, 2014: xxi): self-existing, infinite, simple (undivided in being), immaterial, spaceless, timeless, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, immutable, holy, and personal. The Iron Laws of the Secular Worldview A great part of humanity, including rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and crossing all demographics continue to be guided by millennia-old fallacies. They are the iron laws of the secular worldview in embryo. The rationale for eliminating these fallacies from our lives and our cultural frameworks is based on wide experiences across the sciences, broadly conceived. I arrived at these fallacies through a lifetime of study across the physical, natural, and social sciences, and by standing on the shoulders of social networks across these disciplines. These are fundamental truth claims of my objectivity community.

• The Transcendental Fallacy (also known as the theologian’s fallacy) is that

there is a world or that there are worlds beyond our own – transcendental worlds, supernatural worlds, worlds of souls, spirits and ghosts, gods, devils, and angels, heavens and hells. There are no such worlds. They are symbolic of social categories and classifications in our earthly societies and cultures. There is nothing beyond our material, organic, and social world. Death is final; there is no soul; there is no life after death. It is also possible that the so-called “many worlds interpretation” in quantum mechanics is contaminated by this fallacy as the result of mathegrammatical illusions. Such illusions also power the idea that we are a simulation, brains-in-vats, and that there is no objective reality. The world, the universe, may be more complex than we can know or imagine, but that complexity does not include transcendental or supernatural features. Stated positively, this is Durkheim’s Law. • The Subscendental Fallacy (also known as the logician’s fallacy or eponymously as the Chomsky fallacy) is that there are “deep structures” or “immanent structures” that are the locus of explanations for language, thought, and human behavior in general. Such “structures” are just as ephemeral and ethereal as transcendental and supernatural worlds. They lead to conceptions of logic, mathematics, and language as “free standing,” “independent,” “history,” “culture,” and “value-free” sets of statements. They also support misguided sociobiological, genetic, and brain-centered explanatory strategies. Restivo’s Law. • The Private Worlds Fallacy (also known as the philosopher’s fallacy) is that individual human beings harbor intrinsically private experiences. The profoundly social nature of humans, of symbols, and of language argues against intrinsically private experiences, however, as Wittgenstein, Goffman, and others have amply demonstrated. Goffman’s Law.

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• The Internal Life Fallacy. When we engage in discourses about surrogate coun-

ters, imitation, and artificial creatures that mimic us, we need to remind ourselves that we are working in an arena of symbolic and materialized analogies and metaphors. Such efforts carry a high emotional charge because they take place at the boundaries of our skins as interfaces. Analogy and generalization, if they can be shown to have constructive scientific outcomes, need not obligate us to embrace identity. Consider, for example, the case of building robots. Robots (mechanical machines) will not have to have “gut feelings” in the identical sense humans (organic machines) have gut feelings. Even this “fact” needs to be scrutinized. What we “feel” is given to us by our language, our conversations, our forms of talking, our cultures and social institutions. At the end of the day, feelings are not straightforward matters of bio-electro-chemical processes that we experience as “our own” feelings. Mechanical creatures will turn out to be just as susceptible to internal life experiences as humans, once they have developed language, conversation, and forms of talk. They will have electro-mechanical “gut feelings.” This implies a social life and awareness. Roboticists may already have made some moves in this direction, with the development of signal schemas and subsumption-based hormonal control by the late 1990s. The development of cyborgs and cybrids may make this point moot. What possibilities lie ahead of us as we implant chips in humans and fit them with artificial mechanical limbs and organs, while we also use organic materials in building our robots? Developments in AI are proceeding rapidly as I write these words with ChatGPT the most important current challenge to human creative superiority. We forget that we ourselves are evolution’s AI’s and we have nothing more nor different to worry about from machined AI’s than we do from each other. The Asimov Law. • The Fallacy of Introspective Transparency. Our thoughts and consciousness are transparent to our experience but they do not give us privileged access to what is really going on in and around us. This is classically illustrated by the fact that we do not experience the earth moving, and yet as we saw earlier it moves in many different ways and directions and at tremendous speeds. • The Psychologistic Fallacy (or neuroistic fallacy) is that the human being and/ or the human brain is/are free standing and independent, that they can be studied on their own terms independently of social and cultural contexts, influences, and forces. This is also known as the neuroistic error. It encompasses the idea that mind and consciousness are brain phenomena. Human beings and human brains are in fact constitutively social. This is the most radical formulation of the response to this fallacy. A more charitable formulation would give disciplinary credibility to neuroscience and cognitive approaches to brain studies and psychological studies in general. These approaches might produce relevant results in certain contexts. Then, there might be fruitful ways to pursue interdisciplinary studies linking the social sciences and the neurosciences. It may indeed be possible to construct a neurosocial model of the self. This would entail that socialization operates on a brain-central nervous system-body (signifying an integrated entity that eliminates conventional brain/mind-body and brain-mind

The Knowing Society  145 divisions) and not on a “person” per se. Moreover, the body here is conceived as a node in a network of interaction ritual chains (Collins, 2004; Restivo, 2020, 2023). Brother’s Law (after Brothers, 1997, 2001). • The Eternal Relevance Fallacy or Intellectual Fallacy is that ancient and more recently departed philosophers should be important and even leading members in our inquiring conversations about social life. An act of intellectual courage is needed to rid us of Plato and Hegel. Once they are eliminated, an entire pantheon of outmoded and outdated thinkers, from Aristotle to Kant, will disappear from our radar. This move might also go a long way toward eliminating the worshipful attitude that intellectuals often adopt to the more productive and visible members of their contemporary discourse communities. The caveat is that some ancient and some modern thinkers (departed ones, as well as some who are still with us) who can be claimed for philosophy are still extremely valuable for us. (Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein come immediately to mind). The issue here is that philosophy is overwhelmingly contaminated by the myth of individualism; logicist, linguistic, and symbolic reductionism; and unbridled speculation masquerading as rational thought. The idea that philosophers hold the keys to the logical foundations of all disciplines is based on the idea that there is one logic that fits all. The limitations of that logic arise from the fact that it originates in the world of physical phenomena. Most of the problems of philosophy are now re-imagined as problems in sociology and anthropology, the pre-eminently empirical social sciences. Philosophers as philosophers (psychologists as psychologists, and theologians as theologians) have nothing at all to tell us anymore about the social world. In the wake of the work of sociologists from Durkheim (1912/1995) to Mary Douglas (1986), all the central human problems of traditional and contemporary philosophy, psychology, and theology resolve into (not “reduce to”) problems in sociology and anthropology. Restivo’s 2nd Law. • The neque demonstra neque redargue fallacy; the “neither provable nor unprovable fallacy” is that one can neither prove nor disprove some claim, proposition, or statement independently of context. In some cases where this claim appears to be true, it is because a claim is made in the context of the physical and/or natural sciences that properly falls under the jurisdiction of the social sciences. Consider: One can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. This has not kept theologians, philosophers, and mathematicians from Anselm to Gödel from proposing proofs for the existence of God; and other scientists and philosophers from offering proofs that God does not exist. While all proofs build conclusions into premises, God proofs are universally and transparently contaminated by this strategy. The fallacy has not, on the other hand, kept social thinkers and social critics from proposing proofs for their theories about God as a delusion or a myth, but it has certainly tied their hands. In fact, proofs are situated, contingent, contextualized, community matters, and indeed, social constructions and social institutions. Therefore, within the world of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms and what follows, a proof that God does not exist is clearly possible. Durkheim’s 2nd Law.

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• The NOMA Fallacy. This is the fallacy, defended by S.J. Gould (1997), that sci-

ence and religion are non-overlapping magisteria. Once we admit social science into the science and religion dialogue, this fallacy is revealed. Restivo’s 3rd Law. • The Tolstoy Fallacy: that experience and feelings are trustworthy modes of interrogating and knowing reality. Consider that our immediate sensation is that the earth is fixed in place; we do not experience the earth rotating, wobbling in precession, or racing through the galaxy. In order to understand and explain the Earth in motion, we have to abandon our immediate experience of fixity, our feeling that the earth is stable. If we assume fixity and stability, we will arrive at absurd conclusions about the earth and ourselves. If, based on information garnered by expanding the scale, scope, and depth of our experiences collectively, we come to admit that the earth moves, then we can discover laws. In the case of history, society, and culture, we do not experience, we do not feel, we are not conscious of our dependence on the external world and on others. This is not straightforward. We are, in fact, more aware of our dependence on the material world than we are of our dependence on the social world. We do, of course, recognize the social influences of peer pressure and the interpersonal enforcement of rules of decorum and demeanor and so on. This is not the same as consciousness of the way social relationships and interactions cause our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, however. Differences in our levels of awareness across our material and social environments do not readily override our feeling that we are free-willing beings. In the prior instance, we had to discard a sense of an immobility that was not real and admit a motion we did not feel. In this instance, we are required to renounce our experience of free will and admit to a dependence, and especially a dependence on social causes and forces, that we do not feel. It may be easier to admit to ourselves that we are subject to recalcitrant physical laws, that we are thermodynamic systems subject to the laws of thermodynamics, than to admit that we are social systems subject to sociological laws. But we are just as subject to one set of laws as to the other set of laws. Here it is important to keep in mind the distinction between open and closed systems, and the distinction between lawful and determined, in order to avoid the fallacy that being subject to causes is the same as unmitigated determinism. On our experience of the Earth as fixed in space and the reality of its various motions, see Chapter 6. For the most compelling compendium of sociological laws in propositional form see Collins (1975). Tolstoy’s Law. • The Napoleon Fallacy is that heroic, larger-than-life individuals make history. How we think about and experience freedom and necessity depends (here I follow Tolstoy’s analysis in War and Peace, 1863–69/1996) on three things: (1) the relationship between the person carrying out an action and the external world in which the action is carried out; (2) the relationship between the actor and time; and (3) the actor’s place in the causal nexus out of which the action arises. All things being equal, there are fewer degrees of freedom for the drowning person than for the person on dry land. If we focus on the persons standing apart, alone in their room or within the woods, their actions seem to us and to them to be free. If instead we focus on their relation to the things (material and

The Knowing Society  147 symbolic) and people around them now and in the past, we will begin to multiply the influences on who and what they are as whole persons. As we multiply the influences, we diminish the degrees of freedom of their actions and thoughts and see how necessity weighs on them. It is also the case that our own current actions and thoughts appear to be freer by comparison with those of someone who lived a long time ago and whose life is open to our scrutiny in a different way than our own. That person’s life appears to have fewer degrees of freedom than does our own; but from a future perspective, ours too will appear to have had fewer degrees of freedom than we can now perceive. This is the fact of the matter for untutored introspection; the trained observer can already see fewer degrees of freedom than the untutored person observing their own life. The more time passes, and the more my introspections and judgments sharpen, the more I will find myself doubting that I have freedom of action and thought. History makes events, actions, and thoughts seem less arbitrary and less subject to free will. The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of the crafty conduct of Bismarck. The Napoleonic wars still seem to us, though already questionably, to be the outcome of their hero’s will. In the Crusades, however, we already see an event occupying its definite place in history and without which we cannot imagine the modern history of Europe, though to the chroniclers of the Crusades that event appeared merely due to the wills of certain people. Finally, attending to the unfolding of our understanding of the nexus of causal chains leads us inevitably to seeing actions and thoughts as consequences of what came before, contradicting the transparency of free will in action at the moment that a particular idea occurs to us or we perform a particular act. Understanding is the greatest enemy of the ideology of free will, ignorance its greatest nourishment. As for “responsibility,” that will appear to be greater or lesser depending on how much we know about the circumstances of the person under our judge’s eye, how much time has passed since the judged act, and how well we understand the causes of the kind of act being judged. Sociology forces us to reconsider the nature and limits of individual responsibility. Intervention Let us consider the tale of the scorpion and the frog: The scorpion wants to cross a river, but he cannot swim. He asks a frog to carry him across the river. The frog is skeptical: “If I agree to carry you across the river you will sting and kill me.” The scorpion promises not to sting the frog: “I really need to get to the other side.” The frog agrees. The scorpion climbs on the frog’s back and off they go. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog. “What th . . .,” cries the frog, “you promised not to sting me.” The scorpion replies: “But it is in my nature to sting.” And so we should consider whether perhaps with humans, too, it is in our nature to behave as we have been socialized – or programmed. Or more generally, we behave the way we evolved to behave in our specific cultural contexts. Are we any more responsible for our actions than the scorpion? It makes as much sense to condemn the scorpion for stinging the frog, as it is to condemn a human for a criminal

148  The Knowing Society act. This doesn’t mean, however, that society should not act to protect itself from further transgressions by the criminal, but it does mean we need to reconsider our ideas about responsibility and punishment. Our justice system assumes that someone who murders once is “a murderer” and not someone who murdered once and is unlikely to murder again. Bracketing the problem of determining who is a one time murderer and who is “a murderer” we need to consider the implications of the assumption. The failure to understand “responsibility” in the context of evolution led to a period in European history when animals (mostly domestic, like pigs and cows but also insects and rats) were put on trial by Church and State, charged with everything from murder to criminal damage (Evans, 1906; Kadri, 2006). Corpses and inanimate objects could also be charged for criminal behavior. This legacy survived into modern times when children and the mentally ill were charged and punished for criminal acts. It is time to take the next step and consider whether our treatment of “mentally competent” criminals is any different from our treatment of the “mentally ill” and animals. Tolstoy’s 2nd Law. Classic Fallacies From Philosophy The fallacy of misplaced concreteness, described by philosopher A.N. Whitehead, involves thinking something is a “concrete” reality when in fact it is an abstract belief, opinion or concept about the way things are. The fallacy refers to Whitehead’s thoughts on the relationship of the spatial and temporal location of objects. Whitehead rejects the notion that a real, concrete object in the universe can be described simply in terms of spatial or temporal extension. Rather, the object must be described as a field that has both a location in space and a location in time. This is analogous to lessons learned from E.A. Abbott’s Flatland (1884/1952): just as humans cannot perceive or even imagine a line that has width but no breadth, humans also cannot perceive or imagine an object that has spatial but no temporal position, or vice versa (Whitehead, 1925: 58; Whitehead, 1919). Whitehead referred to this as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The fallacy is also known as reification, concretism, and hypostatization. It means treating an abstract belief or hypothetical construct as if it were a concrete thing or event. It can have a realistic root if you consider treating a wedding ring as a reification of a love relationship. In the context of a materialist sociology, all entities and events are concrete in the sense that they are constructed. This is my intent when I, as a sociologist of mathematics, treat the construction of theorems and functions and then ideas in general as manufacturing processes akin to manufacturing bridges, roads, and houses. Category mistakes are another approach to the Whitehead fallacy. A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. For example, the statement “the business of the book sleeps eternally” is syntactically correct, but it is meaningless or nonsense or, at the very most, metaphorical, because it incorrectly ascribes the property, “sleeps eternally,” to business, and incorrectly ascribes the property, “business,” to the token, the book. The term “category mistake” was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind (1949) to remove

The Knowing Society  149 what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind introduced by Cartesian metaphysics. It was alleged to be a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance, because predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and capacities. The mind is just the body at work. The Problem of Meaning In the midst of all the chaos and terror that is in our universe, it is understandable that some people refuse to put up with it and take their own lives. There are even those who have dedicated themselves to bringing humanity to an end. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT.org, founded in 1991) calls for universal abstinence in order to bring about the gradual voluntary end to the human race. Their goal is the prevention of environmental degradation. There is a related movement that seeks to end humanity on moral grounds. Antinatalism is the view that humans should abstain from procreation on moral grounds. Already among the ancient Greeks we find examples of the argument that it would have been better not to be born. The term “antinatalism” was used probably for the first time by Théophile de Giraud (1968–) in L’art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste (2006). I am not unsympathetic to this movement. However, that is not the direction I am going to pursue. I want to consider whether those of us who choose to stay can find meaning in the middle of this firestorm of meaninglessness. Meaning only exists in one place, among our friends and in our communities. It is still possible to find kindness, compassion, empathy, and a shared feeling of belonging here and now. Don’t look up at the stars, that will only scare you into believing in heaven. Look around you. Find those who retain some of the cultural DNA of cooperative, kind, compassionate, loving humans. Cultivate them. Live with them. Love them. It won’t be easy to find or live with them. We all carry the sociopath virus of civilization. But love, compassion, and kindness can, may, stay the virus in its latent state. Love, be kind, be compassionate, and show empathy. It will, may, sustain you in the midst of the doom that sits on the horizon; it will diminish the power of that doom and allow you to live, really live. I do not rely here on a romantic concept of love, but on love as a manifestation of the cooperative principle in evolution (Restivo, 2018: 90–113). We want to know what it all means; what is the meaning of life? We find ourselves born into a world we do not choose, burdened with stress, anxiety, the need to find resources for survival, surrounded by the most horrible incidents of humans harming each other, spending precious resources on weapons of minor and mass destruction, confronted by nature’s terrifying disregard for us, burying us in volcanic ash, destroying our towns with hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes, and in the end we die. The overwhelming proportion of humanity’s creative energies and powers have been dedicated to and corrupted by violence and the myths of traditional religions and the gods. We have not endeared ourselves to each other or the very principles of life. Moreover, there is no reckoning with our capacity to procreate, knowing that the lives we bring into the world will, in the best of cases, sooner or later suffer and die. We are prisoners of biology and evolution. We are

150  The Knowing Society inevitably ruled by, surveilled by, our fellow humans; controlled by too many rules and laws that do not benefit us but are enforced by others of our kind who control the means of violence. Should we try to escape? What does it all mean? It all comes down to “the problem of Socrates” (Nietzsche, 1889/1968: 29): In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless. . . . Their voices have been “full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life.” Intervention: A Personal Credo So what do we do now that we are here? This question often came up in my classes on the sociology of religion. My reply was then and is now; first as Nietzsche would have advised, don’t look up to the sky, to the heavens, for meaning. As a sociologist, my suggestion is – if you insist on the search for meaning – look all around you in your immediate environment. Look to your family, your friends, your lovers, your neighbors. If you are going to find meaning anywhere, it’s going to be in your community, in your networks. And it is going to involve sex or more generally sensual pleasures. We haven’t learned the first thing about sex. The first thing is that sex is everywhere all the time, like gravity. My undergraduate anthropology mentor actually labeled it a natural force: sexity. Until we learn this lesson, we will continue to make life miserable for humanity. Lesson number two is that sex comes in many forms, is multi-dimensional, and more complex than anyone has yet imagined. Lesson number three is that sex exists for humans of all ages, keeping in mind that sex is a particularly focused form of sensuality. One must be sensual first. Lesson number four: touching is the alpha and omega of life (Montagu, 1986). Nothing else matters. Now what? Are there sensual and sexual issues of consent and violence because we don’t yet understand sex? Imagine a world in which movies, video games, and stories featured love, romance, sex in all of its consensual combinations and permutations and contained no violence, no guns, no mayhem. What would that say about that world? And what does it say about our world that this is not the case with us? Why shouldn’t we pursue pleasure above profits, money, territory, above all else? What about the problem of evil that is a central concern in the debates between atheists and theists? It should be clear by now that we don’t need a God to identify and to struggle against evil. Furthermore, the problem of evil is not the problem of extreme evil represented by Genghis Kahn and Hitler, but rather the problem of mundane evil represented by the school-yard bully, the mugger, the spouse abuser, and emotional violence. No one will ever figure out why there is anything at all. As for the rest, it is cosmic accidents all the way down. One can generate a curious but telling cognitive paradox by trying to imagine how much time passed before one was born (which is impossible) and then imagining how much time will pass after one dies (which is also impossible, but not in the same way). This shows that we know nothing about time. The paradox is that this exercise makes us feel as if we are on the threshold

The Knowing Society 151 of perhaps the greatest discovery of all time (so to speak!) and, simultaneously, as if we are on the threshold of going mad. Crystallizing the Secular Worldview The perspective I have unfolded in this book reflects the following facts about my social self: (1) I have convictions, but they are not absolute; (2) I know things but I do not know things with absolute certainty; (2a) I know some things with a practical absolutism, such as that I should look both ways before I cross the street; I know the world is not flat; (3) after a lifetime of sustained systematic credentialed inquiry, at some level I am aware that I cannot claim to know anything at all that isn’t related to getting food, water, shelter, and sex. Even then, I’m burdened with uncertainties and failures. This is a rhetorical but not a gratuitous claim. I mean to stress how alien we are when we try to grasp infinities and the cosmos. We are out of time and place and eventually will pass away into eternal nothingness. For this reason, I believe we should take pride in our collective ability to capture some small sense of what some of this life is all about even if it leaves us all the more insignificant in the larger scheme of things. In our own present realities, in our own knowing communities, our achievements are significant and real. We know things. Exemplary Manifestos as Foundations for a Secular Worldview A Humanist Manifesto

My goal in this book has been to take you on a journey away from a human history of thousands of years characterized by mistakes in reference that kept God and a spiritualism of hopes and wishes nourishing illusions about souls and an afterlife in our lives. This version of the religious life has been taken-for-granted by believers and nonbelievers alike. We could never prove or disprove God so we just had to live with him whether we believed in God or not. The next part of this journey will allow us to take a wider look around before we settle in on formulating a worldview opposed to theism and atheism. We are going to explore some of the efforts that people have made to establish the principles of the good society without introducing God or sneaking in God surrogates. The Humanist Manifesto is a trademark of The American Humanist Association. Humanist Manifesto I was announced in 1933. Humanist Manifesto III (Epstein, 2005: 223–225) affirms the following (summarized, with my emendations; this is part of the secular moral order I advocate):

• The universe was self-created and we learn about all of its features by way of the

sciences (SR: dynamic rationality, presumptive, corrigible, fallible. collective, historical). • Humans are an integral part of nature, the product of unguided evolution (SR: see the tinkering model of evolution: Jacob, 1977).

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• Ethical values are derived from human needs and interests as tested by experi-

ence (SR: morals, values, and ethics arise during and coalesce in the process of humans forming societies and cultures). • Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of human ideals (SR: this assumes a particular vision of human life at its best as one of critical, creative engagement with one’s self and others and in ways that sustain the ecology of the planet and of human relationships. This is of necessity a process burdened by the realities of conflicts, contradictions, and the potential for various levels of violence. Part of life’s fulfillment means engaging and mitigating these circumstances when, where, and to the extent possible). • We are not trying for “paradise” on earth; our goals are practical, not utopian. Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships (SR: I have argued that humans come onto the evolutionary stage always, already, and everywhere social; we have social selves, social brains, and social genes: Restivo, 2023). • Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness (SR: this is a progressive agenda that reflects a commitment to social justice, equity, equality, and support for societal conditions that promote healthy environments, healthy populations, and healthy persons. This is a practical non-utopian goal with no pretensions to being easily achieved, a goal that offers no guarantees of being reachable or sustainable. To think otherwise is to succumb to the same sort of wishful thinking and hope-provoked imaginings that led humans to conceive of gods, souls, heavens, and an after-life. In a society organized without a coercive state, a community-centered special progressive agenda would be unnecessary).

A Secular Manifesto: I. Secularism Secularism, as described in Article 9 of the European convention on human rights, is a diversity program whose objective is to defend religious diversity and religious freedom where it does not directly promote violence, cause distress or alarm or incite criminal behavior, while simultaneously ending religious privileges and persecutions, and fully separating state and religion. It promotes ending (1) discrimination against nonbelievers and non-religious belief systems (since religion as I understand it sociologically is ubiquitous, this should refer to non-traditional religions; this should be kept in mind when considering all references herein to religion – this should be understood to be referencing traditional religions that are god-based or grounded in supernaturalism); (2) unjustified religious discrimination, for example by preventing faith schools from firing or rejecting teachers based on their religious or marital status; (3) employee discrimination in public service religious organizations, allow reasonable accommodation for religious practices that stops short of a universal religious exemption based on subjective feelings or support for the imposition of religious practices and beliefs on nonbelievers; and (4) compulsory worship in schools and instruction in what to believe. Parallel legal systems, civil (based on secular constitutions) and religious (based on texts, e.g.,

The Knowing Society 153 Scriptures) will not be tolerated; nor will the idea that religious people are more moral than non-religious people. A SECULAR MANIFESTO: 2. Manifesto of the Polish “Secularity Congress,” October 22, 2017.

• Declaration to build a democratic, secular state governed by the rule of law: • Defend the rights and sensibilities of non-believers; support the rights of citi• • • •

•

zens to inspect and review personal data collected and processed by religious associations; Address issues involving the excessive privileges (e.g., re taxation, state financing) of the Roman Catholic Church; Establish and enforce the secular nature of public schools based on the achievements of science and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the laws of the European Union, and the Constitution of the Republic of Poland; Introduction of anti-discrimination education into schools and advocating for cultural and worldview diversity; liberalizing anti-abortion laws and introducing sex education into the schools; Liberalize patient rights to use medical services and procedures; ensure (1) the right to dignified death for everyone, (2) marriage equality and support for nontraditional marital relationships (e.g., same-sex unions), and (3) the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion and to full equality before the law, and non-disclosure rights; Public institutions are to be fully secular and there will be state support for NGOs, protection of human and civil rights, severe punishments for violating women’s rights including sexual and reproductive rights; and of the protection of nature and animal rights. Everything will be done to ensure the strict observance and protection of the secular state and democratic culture.

The Meaning of Secular Superficially, the meaning of secular seems to be relatively straightforward: it has to do with worldly or temporal features of society and culture; it has nothing to do with anything overtly or specifically religious, ecclesiastical, or clerical. Secular covers anything that doesn’t include or otherwise refer to religion. The appearance in 2011 of Rethinking Secularism, edited by three distinguished social scientists (CJV, 2011) suggested things might not be so straightforward after all. And raising questions about the secular simultaneously raises questions about religion. “However one defines secular and secularism,” the editors write (CJV, 2011: 3), “it involves religion. It is either the absence of it, the control over it, the equal treatment of its various forms or its replacement by the social values common to a secular way of life.” Secularism, they continue, “is not in itself neutral.” It is a presence, “something” we need to elaborate and understand. Whether ideology, worldview, religious perspective, constitutional framework, an aspect of science, philosophy, or whatever,

154  The Knowing Society secularism is not simply the absence of religion but something that has to be thought through. In the contemporary public arena, secularism has a special place. We saw earlier what Poland has done to incorporate it constitutionally; France has put it (laïcitè: Baubérot and Willaime, 2019; Baubérot, 2020) at the center of its national identify as did Ataturk in Turkey (later transformed), and it is part of India’s policy approach to religious diversity. According to the World Population Review, there are 96 secular nations in the world. Other sources list as many as 144.2 The meaning of secular in the context of states is slippery. It can mean that a state is neutral on matters of religion; all citizens are treated equally whether they are religious or not. It can mean that a state does not have a state religion. Such states, however, can nonetheless demonstrate religious preferences in their national ceremonies and symbols, or laws that preferentially benefit one religion. The United Nations is viewed as an exemplary secular and rational institution but its legitimacy depends on religious templates. The UN’s religious dimensions and resonances have gone largely unrecognized in the research literature (Troy, 2020). Certainly, the UN’s Charter does not encompass obvious and unequivocal references to “God” or religion. However, the Preamble states that the “nations express their faith in the dignity and worth of the human person.” We may live in a “secular age” but the values, ideas, and norms prohibited by secularism continue to influence how we live in the global age, because they provide substantial and procedural concepts of meaning. The picture of the “organizational repository of the community’s beliefs” of the UN is thus intriguing as it also accounts for the “translation” of religious semantics into political concepts of legitimacy (Barbato, 2010; Bettiza and Dionigi, 2015; Habermas, 2006). Constitutional secular clauses are not good predictors of state actions regarding religion. There is some statistical evidence that such clauses have no significant effect on religious discrimination (Fox and Flores, 2009). Taylor (2007: 15, 21) identifies three forms of secularism: (1) the public enjoys freedom of religious belief and practice, but the state is forbidden from showing any religious preferences; (2) a majority of the population does not engage in religious practices; and (3) all systems of belief and non-belief are equally protected without any one being favored over the others. This diversity hides a fundamental change in sensibility in the West but also with various densities of diffusion across the world that has been described as “disenchantment,” or the “systematic repression of the ‘magical’ elements of religion, as well as by a concomitant historical movement toward the association of personal commitment with ‘true’ religion” (CJV, 2011: 21). Casanova (2011: 55) notes that “secular” is often understood to mean “nonreligious,” “the other of the religious.” The secular has come to replace the religious and to encompass more and more of reality. It is increasingly understood as “natural reality devoid of religion, as the natural social and anthropological substratum that remains when the religious is lifted or disappears.” The secular, originally a residual category, now appears as reality itself (in its everyday experience sense) and religion is the residual category. The global diffusion of secularization driven by Western expansionism encounters Others, redrawing and re-coloring classical boundaries between “sacred” and “profane,”

The Knowing Society 155 “transcendent” and “immanent,” and “religious” and “secular” (Casanova, 2011: 72–73). These are not synonymous pairs; “The sacred tends to be immanent in preaxial cultures. The transcendent is not necessarily ‘religious’ in some axial civilizations. The secular is by no means profane in our secular age.” Acknowledging the complexities and diversities I have just reviewed, and in order to avoid introducing neologisms, I am going to use the term “secular” to mean knowledge and practices devoid of all conventional religious, spiritual, sacred, transcendental, and supernatural meanings, references, and dimensions. Secular societies are religious in the sociological sense that religions are what we call the “glue” of societies. This can help us explain studies such as the one reported in Zuckerman (2008: 29) and studies that seem to contradict his findings; “there is simply no empirical support for the oft-touted theory that without religion – or without significant and widespread worship of God – society is doomed . . . the least religious nations on earth also tend to be the most healthy and successful nations on earth.” Zuckerman is giving us, and he tells us, correlations, not causes. His point then is that irreligion doesn’t seem to impact quality of life negatively. How does all of this square up with the many studies that demonstrate “that spirituality has a significant positive relationship with quality of life, as well as resilience in various sexes, ages, occupations, and illnesses” (Dewi and Hamzah, 2019: 147; and see Borges et al., 2021: 12, who conclude “that higher levels of spirituality and religiousness are positively associated with improved HRQoL [Health Related Quality of Life] among healthy young adults with an emphasis on the psychological, environmental, and social relationships domains”). We can resolve this apparent contradiction (bracketing differences in methods, goals, and frameworks) by recognizing that there are no societies without religion. There are societies without the traditional institutional, symbolic, and ritual trappings of religion, but all working societies have moral orders and that is what we mean by religion. This is why we can have religions without God, and without transcendent and supernatural beings and realms, but we can’t have societies without religion. The health benefits of traditional religion reflect its community and solidarity functions. Religion Without God Billington (2002: x) assumes, as I do, that religion is “universal and natural in Homo sapiens . . .”). He understands this in terms of one or another form of numinous experience. I argue that it is the social phenomenon of a co-evolving, co-constructed “gluing” that accompanies the emergence of humans as always, already, and everywhere social. Religion, as the glue, the moral system, that binds the collective, is universal in this sociological sense. Billington’s goal is to excise God from the religious experience but without losing touch “with the infinite which has no form but is a state which, entered into on an occasional basis, gives meaning to the rest of what life involves.” Billington (2002: 8) advocates for “mysticism without theology.” We get a sense of Billington’s (2002: 17) perspective by noting his citation of this “immortal line” from the Tao Te Ching (Lao-tzu, ca. sixth century BCE): “The Tao that can be named is not the

156  The Knowing Society eternal Tao.” Billington (2002:46) is right when he claims that those who claim knowledge of God based on experience are misinterpreting the experience; but he doesn’t understand this as a socially grounded mistake in reference. Billington (2002: 91) reviews the experiences of mystics in the Eastern religions (e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism) “in which God is either ignored or superseded in favor of the unknown and unknowable Godhead.” In his discussion of “profane religion” Billington (2002: 91–108), building on Buber’s (1970) the “I-Thou” concept, suggests that “sex leading to orgasm is an actual example” of experiencing “the beyond” (Zhang, 2022: 2). In the end, Billington (2002: 139) can be seen to be objecting to Christianity’s claim to be the “true religion,” and indeed to rejecting all such claims by the theistic religions: “the way to live alongside others is more likely to be the natural way of Tao than any new form of the Ten Commandments.” In conclusion, Billington is right about the universality of religion but wrong about the how’s, why’s, and wherefore’s of religion. Excising God from religion requires excising the metaphysical and the mystical – the numinous, the transcendental – from religion. This is why Dworkin (2013) is no better than Billington. Without sociology, and only Einstein and other awe-driven interpreters of religion, Dworkin is trapped in a worldview without social beings. His insights on religious atheism while more humanistic than Dawkins, for example, are just as fruitless. There is, as one might expect having come this far in my book, a literature on “God without religion” (e.g., Saranam, 2005; Poisson, 2011) which falls completely outside of the sociological understanding of self, mind, and consciousness. The “God without religion” perspective is fully grounded in mysticism, mystery, and spirituality. This is just another narrative that demonstrates why God is not real. It really is that simple, once you have sociology and anthropology in your reasoning toolkit. Looking Backward and Forward Aronson (2008: 210–211) offers us some final thoughts on living in a secular world without God. In a secular world, the sacred can still exist in our living connections to humanity, to community and to “times of collective hope.” It exists in those moments in which we give our lives shape and meaning in solidarity actions for freedom, equality, and social justice. God Redux All of the sound and fury of the grounds we have covered in this book come down to one question: does God exist? The unequivocal, absolutely certain-in-practice answer is no. The obstacle to reaching this conclusion among theists is that they are stuck in a world that knows only theological reasoning, divine revelation, or “the experience of the mystics, or . . . ordinary, present-type religious experiences” as pathways to the knowledge of God; “if the idea is false, then it originated in either fantasy, fallacy, folly, or fear (or all four or any combination thereof” (Kreeft, 1993: 24–25). When is it reasonable to turn to psychology for explanations of the origins

The Knowing Society  157 of ideas? Kreeft claims that we only do this to explain the origin of false ideas; we don’t turn to psychology to explain 2 + 3 = 5 or the shape of the earth. This violates the principle of symmetry in the sociology of knowledge. The status of a belief or idea as true or false has no bearing on its social origins and contexts. Kreeft (1993: 24) understands that his approach is the best way to avoid the “ ‘genetic fallacy’: deciding whether an idea is objectively true by looking at its subjective origins.” Kreeft illustrates the way sociological myopia or blindness corrupts the reasoning process. Ideas do not have subjective origins but collective ones. And we don’t give psychological explanations for 2 + 3 = 5 because the explanation is rooted in the historical unfolding of collective practices. It is a short leap from psychology and philosophy to logic per se. That the tools of logic can be used to carry out an impressive critique of theism is illustrated by Sobel’s (2004) monumental treatise on theism and logic. The problem in this case is that Sobel’s ability to mobilize logic, mathematics, and probability theory in his effort to dismantle theism cannot survive Craig’s (nd: 2 of pdf) illusional logic. That theism, he claims, “survives the acid bath of Sobel’s trenchant critique increases one’s confidence in the arguments of natural theology and the rationality of theistic belief.” This takes us full circle back to the problems with rationality and natural theology. A Secular Worldview At this point, I have introduced all of the basic ingredients needed to construct a secular worldview that is opposed to theist and atheist worldviews. I use key categories used in many worldview frameworks identified in the literature (after Cowan, 2019). THE CATEGORIES: (a) GOD, (b) ULTIMATE REALITY, (c) KNOWLEDGE, (d) HUMAN BEINGS, (e) ETHICS, (f) PLIGHT, and (g) SOLUTION. CHRISTIAN THEISM/theism: (a) God, (b) dualism, (c) revelation, (d) created in God’s image, (e) objective morality revealed by God, (f) sin, (g) salvation by God’s grace through faith in Christ’s atonement. NEW ATHEISM/atheism: (a) no God, (b) naturalism, (c) science shading off into scientism and the technological fix, (d) accidental consequences of natural processes like all other living things and subject to natural laws, and (e) morality is culturally relative: • In the Euthyphro Plato already demonstrated that we cannot depend on or justify morals based on a God’s dictates. Here we confront the recurrent notion that without God anything would be possible. But if God is the ultimate source of morals, morals are totally a matter of his discretion and so indeed anything would be possible. Bashing babies with rocks could be “good.” Love your enemies could be good. This indeed seems to be one of the qualities of the Old Testament God. The sociologist looks to the coalescence of societies for the origin of morals. One can turn to “nature,” according to “the Atheist” Zindler (1985), to find natural grounds for morals. When we observe what we perceive to be

158  The Knowing Society moral or ethical behavior in our non-human primate cousins (see King, 2007: 191 on “the primacy of the social” and De Waal, 2013 on humanism among the primates), we are witnessing the results of the invention of the social in the unfolding of evolution. This process is already evident in the emergence of cellular cooperation as an adaptive mechanism, culminating in the emergence of humans as always, already, and everywhere social (Gorney, 1972; Wilson, 2012): “The labyrinthine complexity we see when we examine traditional moral codes does not arise of necessity: it is largely the result of vain attempts to accommodate human needs and nature to the whimsical totems and taboos of the demons and deities who emerged with us from our cave-dwellings at the end of the Paleolithic Era – and have haunted our houses ever since” (Zindler, 1985: 27). (f) The meaningless of it all, the finality of death, the relativism of ethics, values, and morals, the lack of a rock of certainty. (g) The Feynman Solution: We live in a mysterious purposeless universe and that shouldn’t frighten us. The Feynmanian scientist does not operate with hopes and wishes. Hoping and wishing have nothing to do with the way the world really is. And the Feynmanian scientist wants to know what the world is really like, and this requires the courage not to be frightened and not to be motivated in your inquiries by hopes and wishes. A SECULAR ALTERNATIVE to New Atheism/atheism & Christian theism/ theism

• Supreme Being/Entity/Power/ (a: God): There is no God (by Durkheimian proof). • Nature-Reality (b: Ultimate Reality): Reality is real (not a simulation, not a

brains-in-a-vat phenomenon, not an illusion) and singular but complex beyond our capacity to imagine; it is a never-ending layered indeterminate but lawful process of unfolding things in becoming. Humans can access the small part of this reality that they have co-evolved with; this is the reality accessible to humans through their senses, the reality-of-experience (RE) not reality-in-itself (RI; Kant’s ding an sich). RE is constituted of discoverable patterns, regularities, and invariants in systems that are more or less open or closed. There are no perfectly closed systems, but to the extent that a system is closed to that extent, humans will be able to extract lawful predictions. Reality in the most general sense is effectively infinitely decomposable; that is, there is no effective limit to the ways in which we can experience the world, trace causal chains, and describe our experiences. However, not all decompositions are equally useful for the practice of everyday life or for science itself. Local or micro-site decompositions and laws can generate statements of wide (macro-) applicability due to isomorphisms and couplings in between RE and RI. There are no supernatural or transcendental realms or beings (by Durkheimian proof). “How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world” (Wittgenstein (1922: 187). • Science (the organized form of human reasoning: c: Knowledge): The reasoning, methods, and logics of the sciences are our only ways of accessing that

The Knowing Society  159

•

•

•

•

•

reality. Revelation is eschewed as a source of knowledge (myth of individualism, fallacy of introspective transparency). Person (d: Human Beings): There is no “individual” in any traditional or common-sense terms. The person is a social network, the weighted sum of all of the networked systems his/her life has unfolded through. This follows from the fact that humans arrive on the evolutionary stage always, already, and everywhere social. Culture individuates our social selves. Humans do not have souls or any non-material “parts” that survive their death. Humans are born, they live, and they die. They do not have free will. This means, skipping over all the confusing philosophical complexities, that their lives are programmed. The programming process is more or less deterministic depending on the complexity of the societies they are born into. The more complex the society, the more open it is as a system, and the greater the illusion of free will. Our lives are variously subject to determinism but always lawful. It is more accurate to speak here in terms of unwilled agency. The person unfolds through social networks as a center of the stream of affordances and the stream of consciousness as revealed in the stream of practices.3 The birth of sociology in the nineteenth century brought with it the beginnings of the conflict between psychology and sociology over the issue of the individual versus society. Marx and Nietzsche share many of the same sensitivities to the societal and cultural transformations working their way through their century. At the end of the day, Nietzsche was going to rely on the exceptional individual to bring us through the crisis; Marx relegated that task to the working class. Looking at Nietzsche and Marx through the lens of contemporary sociology, it is clear that Marx was the more sophisticated sociological thinker. He valued the individual as much as Nietzsche did but understood the individual as through and through social. Humanity (d.1): Human beings are a product of blind evolution, the outcome of natural tinkering and accidents. They are always, already, and everywhere social, the latest manifestation of evolution’s invention of the social as an adaptive mechanism. History (d.2): The cumulative experience of humankind, local, regional, and global that locates the contexts and causes shaping our individual and collective lives and cultures. History unfolds for us out of invisible and foggy bits of information in the distant past into increasingly but always problematic vistas of more and less clear events and processes. Future (d.3): In secular perspective, the future is the unfolding of the confluence of RE social, biological, physical, and chemical causes in the context of RI (staying with the core sciences as a simplifying assumption) causes without incorporating any supernatural or transcendental realities or causes (no “end times,” no “afterlife,” no “return of the messiah,” etc.). Ethics, morals, and values (e: Ethics): The crystallizations of rules of behavior that solidify as part of the formation of societies and cultures as opposed to traditional, religious, and spiritual values are based on realistic, scientifically established features of human beings as parts of the natural order. They manifest reason rather than supernatural revelations and guidance.

160  The Knowing Society

• Plight (f): Strangers in a strange world try to survive and make sense of being

alive using the basic mechanisms of reason that coalesce into science broadly conceived. • Solution (g): The objective of a secular moral order is not to promote a perfect global society, not to aim for goals out of reach of real humans in the real world. The goal of a secular moral order is to do the best we can to promote the health and well-being of human populations and the planet, and of course each other (the golden rule) – a more doable exercise in secular morality. My understanding of the secular moral order is defined by two words: embrace reality. Don’t contaminate this with imaginings about multiple realities, transcendence, supernatural realms and beings, miracles, and illusions and delusions that give you hope. If you want to be happy, believe, and have faith. Embracing reality is then not your path. If you want to be authentic and to learn what can be learned about life, the universe, and everything, inquire with the profundity of the surface as your guide. Look both ways when you cross the street. And remember that the profundity of the surface is not the end of inquiry but a portal to other aspects of the real world of our experience. Notes 1 The contemporary empirical grounds for Gumplowicz’s early insights can be found in Collins’ (1998) studies demonstrating that it is social networks that think, not individuals. And see Restivo (2020) on genius, culture, and social networks. And see Fleck (1935/1979) on “thought collectives” and “thought styles.” Fleck (1896–1961) was a medical doctor with a profound sociological imagination who anticipated concepts like social construction that emerged in the science studies movement beginning in the late 1960s. We find in Fleck’s work adumbrations of Kuhn’s ideas on paradigms and Foucault’s notion of episteme. 2 https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/secular-countriesz. The reasonably well-sourced Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_state lists more than 140 secular states. 3 Some readers might want me to acknowledge the Charles Taylor’s of the world who’ve devoted a great deal of energy to what it means to be a person or self in today’s world. Taylor’s historical narrative on how we have come to focus on the diversity of human nature and the many ways we now recognize for pursuing self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-expression and authenticity, freedom, equality, self-rule leads us astray in two ways: in spite of a sense that our individual lives play out in society, Taylor’s self is individualist and inward looking; and Taylor himself, a lapsed Catholic who returned to the faith late in life, grounds his hope for a liberated self “implicit in Judeo-Christian theism . . . and . . . its central promise of a divine affirmation of the human” (Taylor, 1989: 521). In a secular culture, all vestiges of spiritual and religious ideas must be excised so that there are no grounds out of which hopes and wishes for fantastic realities can emerge.

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162  The Knowing Society Douglas, M. (1986), How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press). Durkheim, E. (1912/1995), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press; Fields trans.). Duthel, H. (2010), The Concise Duthel Encyclopedia of Anarchism (Lexington: IAC Society. Ltd.). Dworkin, R. (2013), Religion Without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Epstein, G.M. (2005), Good Without God (New York: W.W. Morrow). Evans, E.P. (1906), The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (New York: E.P. Dutton). Fleck, L. (1935/1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Fox, J. and D. Flores (2009), “Religious Constitutions and the State: A Cross-National Study,” The Journal of Politics 71, 4: 1499–1513. Freud, S. (1933/1995), New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton). Giraud, T.de (2006), L’art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste (Nancy: Le Mort-Qui-Trompe). Goldman, E. (2019), Anarchism and Other Essays (Seoul: Compass). Gopian, J. and E.A. Plant (2015), “Religious Worldview: Protecting One’s Meaning System Through Religious Prejudice,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41, 11: 1474–1487. Gorney, R. (1972), The Human Agenda (New York: Bantam). Gould, S.J. (1997), “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106: 16–22, 60–62. Guérin, D. (2005), No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (Chico, CA: AK Press). Gumplowicz, L. (1885/1980), Outlines of Sociology (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books). Habermas, J. (2006), “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, 1: 10. Harrington, M. (1983), The Politics at God’s Funeral (New York: Penguin). Harrison, V.S. (2006), “Scientific and Religious Worldviews: Antagonism, Non-antagonistic Incommensurability and Complementarity,” The Heythrop Journal 47: 349–366. Hume, D. (1779/1998), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Hackett). Jacob, F. (1977), “Evolution and Tinkering,” Science 196, 4295: 1161–1166. Kadri, S. (2006), The Trial: Four Thousand Years of Courtroom Drama (New York: Random House). King, B. (2007), Evolving God (New York: Doubleday). Kournwsky, L. and M. Le Roy (2013), Ni Dieu, Ni Maître: Auguste Blanqui, l’enfermé (Paris: Casterman). Kreeft, P. (1993), “Introduction: Why Debate the Existence of God?,” pp. 11–30 in J.P. Moreland and K. Nielsen, eds., Does God Exist? The Debate Between Theists & Atheists (Amherst: Prometheus Books). Kropotkin, P. (1902/1914), Mutual Aid (Boston: Extending Horizons Books). Kropotkin, P. (1908), Modern Science and Anarchism (New York: Mother Earth). Merton, R.K. (1942), “A Note on Science and Democracy,” Journal of Legal and Political Sociology 1: 15–26. Merton, R.K. (1963), “The Ambivalence of Scientists,” Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 112: 77–97.

The Knowing Society 163 Mitroff, I. (1974), “Norms and Counter-Norms in a Select Group of the Apollo Moon Scientists: A Case Study of the Ambivalence of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 39, 4: 579–595. Montagu, A. (1986), Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Row). Mulkay, M.J. (1976), “Norms and Ideology in Science,” Social Science Information 15: 637–656. Mulkay, M.J. (1980), “Interpretation and the Use of Rules: The Case of the Norms of Science,” pp. 111–125 in T.F. Gieryn, ed., Science and Social Structure: A Festscrift for Robert Merton, Series 2, vol. 39 (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences). Nietzsche, F. (1889/1968), “Twilight of the Idols,” in F. Nietzsche, ed., Twilight of The Idols/The Anti-Christ (New York: Penguin Books). Orr, M. (2006), “What Is a Scientific Worldview and How Does It Bear on the Interplay of Science and Religion,” Zygon 4, 1: 435–444. Peterson, G.P. (2001), “Religion as Orienting Worldview,” Zygon 36, 1: 5–19. Poisson, D. (2011), How to Experience God Without Religion (Research Triangle, NC: Lulu.com). Restivo, S. (2018), The Age of the Social (New York: Routledge). Restivo, S. (2020), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture and Social Networks (New York: Palgrave PIVOT). Restivo, S. (2023), The Social Brain: Sociological Foundations (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). Ryle, G. (1949), The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Saranam, S. (2005), God Without Religion (East Ellijay, GA: The Pranayama Institute). Sobel, J.H. (2004), Logic and Theism: Arguments for and Against Beliefs in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Staddon, J. (2019), “Science and Morals: Can Morality Be Deduced From the Facts of Science”: https://sites.duke.edu/behavior/2019/04/08/science-and-morals-can-moralitybe-deduced-from-the-facts-of-science/ Stark, R. (2008), Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New York: HarperCollins). Taylor, C. (1989), Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Taylor, C. (2007), A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap, Press). Tolstoy, L. (1863–1869/1996), War and Peace, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton). Troy, J. (2020), “Legitimacy in the ‘secular church’ of the United Nations,” International Relations, 34, 4: 565–582. Turek, F. (2014), Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress). Turner, S. (2007), “Scientific Norms/Counternorms,” pp. 4109–4112 in G. Ritzer, J.M. Ryan and B. Thorn, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (New York: John Wiley & Sons). Waal, F.de (2013), The Bonobo and the Atheist (New York: W.W. Norton). Wallis, L. (1905), Egoism: A Study in the Social Problems of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Whitehead, A.N. (1919), An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Whitehead, A.N. (1925), Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press). Wilson, E.O. (2012), The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright). Wittgenstein, L. (1922), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

164  The Knowing Society Zhang, W. (2022), “The Role of Sex in Intimate Relationships: An Exploration Based on Martin Buber’s Intersubjective Theory,” Hypothesis and Theory: Frontiers in Psychology: 1–9. Ziman, J. (1996), “ ‘Postmodern Science’: Constructing Knowledge With Networks and Norms,” Science Studies 9, 1: 67–80. Zindler, F.R. (1985), “Ethics Without Gods,” American Atheist 27, 2: 25–27. Zohoor, H. (2003), “The Impact of Moral Values on the Promotion of Science,” Appendix J, pp. 92–96 in The Experience and Challenges of Science and Ethics: Proceedings of an American-Iranian Workshop (Washington, DC: National Academies Press). Zuckerman, P. (2008), Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment (New York: New York University Press).

Additional Readings Durkheim, E. (1994), Durkheim on Religion (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press; Includes works of Durkheim and his reviewers). Like Durkheim, he is aware of the integrative nature of relgion. But his approach is much more philosophical, more a matter of theological, transcendental reasoning which escapes empirical research. Simmel, G. (1997), Essays on Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press; originally published 1898–1918 Like Weber, Simmel understands religion to be reflected in social relationships).

Index

911 terrorist attacks xi, 37 Abbott, E. A. (Edward) 11, 148 abortion 26 Absolute Logic 130 Absolute Spirit 91 absolute truth 52 absolutism 30 abstraction, human capacity for 115–116 Achilles paradox 57–58 Adams, John 6 Adler, J. L. 56, 93 Aeschylus 109 afterlife: death without 129, 143; in Hinduism 4; illusions about 151; imbalances redressed in 118; need to believe in 82; nonbelief in 10 agency, illusion of 56 agency, unwilled 159 Age of the Social, 1st (1840–1930) 18, 20, 90, 104, 106 Age of the Social, 2nd (1930–1970) 20 Age of the Social, 3rd (1970–2050) 20 Aginsky, Burt 12 Agnew, Spiro 19b agnosticism 3, 5, 11, 29, 112 Albania 5 Alexander the Great 4 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi (1969–) xii, 26, 36–38 alternative worldview 14, 138 alternative worldview system 134 American Atheists 38 American Humanist Association 151 American Know Nothing movement 19b analytical philosophy 5 anarchism 12, 136b Anaxagoras 4 ancestor worship 114 ancient atheism 2, 7n1

The Ancient City (De Coulanges) 106 ancient literature 105 ancient societies, social roles of 119 ancient world 75, 76 Anderson, Sir Norman 69–70 anger 1 animal rights 153 animals put on trial 148 Anselm, St. 5, 100, 145 anthropology: and death of God 78; God and 55; God question and 41; human problems resolving into 145; of religion 106–108; of science 16; sociology and 140 anti-abortion laws, liberalizing 153 anti-discrimination education 153 antinatalism 149 anti-racism 42 anti-sociology commandment (“Thou shalt not commit sociology”) 18 Antony, Louise 129, 130 Apollo moon scientists 141 Apollo project 26, 38n2, 44 apologetics 69–70 apophatic theology 52–53, 120 apostasy 36, 38 apriorism, death of 24 Aquinas, Thomas 5, 40 Arabists 37 Aristophanes xi Aristotle 37, 130, 137, 145 Armstrong, Karen 120–122, 135 Aronson, R. 156 artificial creatures 144 artistic discourse, domain of sacred ceded to 26 Asimov Law 144 assumptions: faith confused with 42–43; before proofs 95, 96

166 Index Ataturk 154 atheism: arguments for and against xi; criticism of 14; definition and historic overview of 2–5; elimination of 14; experimenting with 11; as fundamentalist ideology 40; philosopher thoughts on 128; religious 156; rise of 120–121; scientists and 95, 96; secular alternative to 158–160; sociological, materialist, critique of 92; term usage xii; vanquishing 93; as worldview 135, 157; worldview opposed to 151 Atheism Plus 42 atheism/theism debates: after September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks xi; Christian worldview as focus of 76; issues driving 23; New Atheists vs. theists in 14, 23, 134, 135, 137; sociology in 14 atheistic materialism 89 atheistic religions 2, 7n1 The Atheist Manifesto (Philipse) 38 atheist and secular philosophers 129–130 “atheist states” 62 atheists: blind faith and 61; fundamentalist forms of faith as focus of 121; rebuttal to works of “shallow thinking” 45; science as hypothesis of 139; statistics 127; see also New Atheists atom (concept), changing understanding of 49 atonement 67, 157 aural hallucination 10 Australian aborigines 115 Austronesia 65 Austro-Prussian war 147 authenticity, allegiance to 141 autism spectrum disorder 55 Averroes 71 awareness of mechanical creatures 144 Axial Age 3–4, 22 bacteria 28 Baha’i faith 3 Bahnsen, Greg 52 Bakunin, Michael 44, 119 Barker, Dan 65 Bauer, Bruno 107 Bayet, A. 141 behavior: culture as source of 63; explanatory roots of human 130;

rules of 159; socialization and programming impact on 147–148; social relationships and interactions as cause of 146 being, social nature of 92 Bejan, Adrian 30 belief: challenges to 90; intergenerational transmission of 12, 13; knowledge vs. 12, 14; neural basis of xi–xii; as social and cultural construction 20; social origins and contexts of 157; as social phenomenon 137–138; as sociological analysis subject 137–138; works on 29 beliefs: ethnocentric nature of 70; faith confused with 42–43; rites emphasized over 106 believers 43, 83 Belzer, M. 130 Berlinsky, David 62 Bible: belief in 126; as culture-bound historically contextualized text 70; emergence of 108; God of 96; God’s disappearance in 76; interpretation of 65–66; literal reading not possible for 71; moral order of 63; scholarly expertise on 62–63; sociology of 107; truisms about history of 104; worldview of 66 biblical literalists 62–63, 66 biblical manuscripts 68 biblical stories, documents offering versions of 31 biblical truth 61 Big Bang theory 48, 49, 50, 51, 85 “big science” (term) 26, 38n2 Billington, R. 155–156 Bingham, Gary 57 Bin Laden 37 biodiversity studies 142 biology 3, 28, 35, 149 birthplace, religion and 112, 113 birth-to-death narrative, songs of gods defined by 76 Bismarck, Otto von 147 Blanqui, Auguste 136b blind faith of atheists 61 bodies, boundaries between 135 body-mind connection 149 body-soul dualism 90–91 Boole, George 52 bootstrap physics 51

Index  167 boundaries, threatening of 135 boundary principle 134–135 Bouveri, Mohammed 36 brain: evolution of 27, 30, 64; mind and consciousness as phenomena of 144; social nature of 64, 144; sociology application to 18; understanding of 140 brain-central nervous system-body, socialization operating on 144–145 Breaking the Spell (Dennett) xii The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky) 63 Brother’s Law 145 Brown v. Board of Education 113 Buber, Martin (1878–1965) 93, 156 Buddhism 3, 64 Canadians 19b canonical texts 72 capitalism 109–110 Cartesian dualism 88 Cartesian metaphysics 149 Casanova, J. 154 cataphatic theology 52–53, 120 categorical propositions 52 category mistakes 148–149 Catholic church: attending 9; Mother Teresa and 33, 34; privileges of 153 Catholicism 136 causal chains, nexus of, understanding 147 causality: contesting of 94; law of 48; principles of 95; theist use of 51–52, 84; understandings, differing of 48–49 cause and effect concept, complication of 48, 49 “celestial dictatorship” 11 Celestial Mechanics (Laplace) 89 cell population density 28 cellular cooperation 158 Center for the Study of Bible & Violence 65–66 certainty: effort to establish 90; faith contraction into pole of 22, 23; impossibility of absolute 17; lack of 158; need for 87, 96; science as continuum of 23; search for 92–93 chance, world ruled by 52 change, ceaseless 85 chaos, principles of 94 Charter for Compassion movement 121, 135 Charvaka 4

ChatGPT 144 Chaudbury, S. 44–45 chest, hitting 9 Chew, Geoffrey 51 child-parent relationship 13 children 12, 148 China 5, 126 chip implants 144 Chomsky, Noam 62–63 Chomsky fallacy 143 Christian Apologetics Ministry 48 Christian God: affirmation of 96; children of 54; counter-revolution in favor of 90; faith in 92; first cause and 94; as illusion 107; Judeo-Christian God 135–136; proof of 98; questioning whether deity is 51, 84; varieties of 97 Christianity: anthropology of 107, 122n1; communism and 108; defense of 83–86; morality vs. 129; Nazism and 5; non-believing clergy within 76; origins of 72, 85, 107; rejection of 92; secular alternative to 158–160; sociology relationship to 108, 122n2; theology of 88; as “true religion” 156; truisms about history of 104; as worldview 157 Christian monotheism 2, 7n1 Christian philosophy 99, 100, 102 Christian publishers 86 Christmas story 33, 76–77 Christ, personality of universal 91 church, attending 9 church and psychiatry, war between 45–46 Church of England 72 civilization, ascent of 64 civil rights 153 classes, societies dominated by 114 “clear or reasonable evidence” 44 clerical barbarism 36 closed systems: characteristics of 1, 17; on continuum 140; lack of perfect 158; open systems vs. 146 closure, degrees of 2, 17 cognitive dissonance 35, 139 cognitive paradox 150–151 collective exercise, seeing and knowing as 20–21 collective hope, times of 156 collective representations 111b, 112b college students, religion rejected by 11 Collins, Lance 44

168 Index Collins, Randall 8, 112, 140, 160n1 common sense 19b communalism 141 communication, barriers and invitations to 135 communication of research outcome 141 communion, first 10 communion, Zoroaster and 73 communism 141 community: building new sense of 130; cohesion of 139; of equals 129; God and 25; living connections to 156; meaning, finding in 150; term usage 84 community-centered agenda 152 community solidarity 93, 105 comparative cross-cultural method 114 comparative worldview framework 139 compassion: as action 122; as centripetal force 14, 32, 121, 138; meaning in 149 compensation, God of 66 composite characters 77, 78 Comte, Auguste 91 The Concept of Mind (Ryle) 148–149 confession, attending 10 conflict sociology 1 Confucianism 118 consciousness: brain production of 27; explanatory roots of 130; “hard problem” of 64, 88; social nature of 92, 144; sociological understanding of 156; understanding of 140 constancy, evidence for 53 Copernican sociological revolution 20 Copernican sociological revolution, 2nd 20 Copernicus 20 coping mechanisms, religion provision of 46 cosmic accidents 150 cosmic inflation, concept of 49, 50 cosmic inflation, several models of 85 cosmic structures, revising ideas about 23 cosmological proof of God 94 cosmological theories 50, 84, 85 cosmos: attempt to grasp 151; human experience extrapolated to 53; shuttlecock-shaped 49–50 Covenants (Old Testament) 116 CPT-symmetric universe 50 Craig, William Lane (1949–) xii, 83–86, 157 creation 49–50, 104

Creationist arguments 29 creation science 121 Creator entity, possible forms of 84 Creator God 27, 44, 114 creator god xi, 3 crime and punishment 147–148 crimes 62 CRIMES acronym 48, 54, 57 crimes against humanity 62 critical rationalism 93 Crusades 147 Cudworth, Ralph 6 cult (defined) 115 Cult of Reason 2 cultural capital 13, 21 cultural diversity 74, 153 cultural evolution 30, 76 cultural speciation 57, 138 cultural species 70, 139 cultural system, moral order of 32 cultural values 142 culture: behavior stemming from 63; discoveries about 18; God grounded in 25; human evolution driven by 64; influence of one another 112–113; morals originating from 36, 55, 94; progress in biblical times 78; religion common to all 65b; as speciating mechanism 14; understanding 70 culture, fashioners of modern 18, 20 Curley, E. 130–131 cyborgs and cybrids 144 Czech Republic 126 daily life, concept guiding 64b–65b daily life, improving 37 “dark night of the soul” 34 Darwin, Charles 18, 20, 31, 105, 122 data, theories and 75 Davis, S. T. 102 Dawkins, Richard (1941–): atonement rejected by 67; background xii; brains as viewed by 27; critique of 27, 40–42, 43–44, 45, 46, 65–66; on God’s existence 35; as one of Four Horsemen xi; physics, trust in explained by 31; pride in science defended by 26; religion immunization cited by 32; on religious atheism 156; spiritual vs. religious distinction made by 33 The Dawkins DELUSION? (McGrath) 40

Index  169 death: dignified, right to 153; eternal nothingness after 151; fear of 72; finality of 158; navigating challenges of 120; suffering and destruction followed by 149; understanding 10; waving away 91; without afterlife 129, 143 debate methodology, limitations of 134 de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard 91, 96 decorum and demeanor, interpersonal enforcement of rules of 146 De Coulanges, Fustel 106, 110 Deep Problems 27 Deism 6 Deists 104 delusion 44–45 demeanor, rules about 118 democracy 41 democratic secular state 153 democratic socialism 136 democratic societies 114–115, 118 democratic ways of life, theist threat to 54 Democritus 4, 109 Denmark 126 Dennett, Daniel C. (1942–): artistic discourse cited by 26; background xii; on expressing gratitude 129; knowledge claims without proof cited by 35; as one of Four Horsemen xi; on preserving good of organized religion 27; religion as understood by 28–29; rudeness, accusations of 32; scientistic tendencies of 28, 29–30 Descartes, René 87, 88, 90, 130 descriptions, possibility of definitive 2, 17 design, appearance of 40 destiny, impossibility of knowing 112 determinism 97, 146, 159 deterministic world 63 devils 116 d’Holbach, Baron 2 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 45 Diagoras of Melos 4 dialectical theology 9, 95 dictators 98 Diderot, Denis (1713–1784) 2, 105 dimensional constants as human construct 54, 58n3 dimension (concept) as mathematical construct 11 dimensionless constants 54, 58n3

The Disappearance of God (Friedman) 120 disappearing gods 77 disbelievers 2, 7n1 Discovering God (Stark) 29, 119–120 discovery 18, 41 disease 94 disinterested inquiry 30 disinterestedness 141 dissocism/dissocism spectrum disorder 55 divine intervention 6 divine plan 35 divinity 74, 75 division of labor 114 DNA 8, 41, 54, 63 doctrines, symbolic allusion to 71 Does God Exist? (Küng) xii, 86, 87 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 63 Douglas, Mary 145 DuBois, W.E.B. 21 Dundes, A. 75 Durkheim, Emile: in Age of the Social, 1st (1840–1930) 18, 20; Australian aborigines studied by 115; on collective effervescence 107; and death of God 78; on discovery of God 119; God as seen by 92, 105; on gods as human constructions 29; on gods as societal representatives 111b; religion described by 64b; religion and symbols covered by 55; on religious sentiment 28, 104, 121; on social nature of logical concepts 120; on sociology of religion 110; work, wake of 145 Durkheim’s Law 143 Durkheim’s Law, 2nd 145 duty as absolute 95 Dworkin, R. 156 dying gods, deities as 77 dying-and-rising god concept, critique of 77 Eagleton, Terry 42 earth: destruction, hypothetical of life on 51; shape of 22–23, 140, 157; stationary, illusion of 55, 96, 144, 146 earth-bound environments, social networks in 64 East, star in 76 Eastern religions: atheism in 3–4; diversity of 64; mystics in 156; Western religions compared to xi, 3

170 Index Eden, lesson of 129 Einstein, Albert 20, 156 electrical engineering 12 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim) 55, 110, 145 Eliade, Mircea 28 Elvis, cult of 73 emancipation 89 emotions, cause of 146 empathy 149 emperor’s new clothes (metaphor) 78, 85, 92, 99–100 employee discrimination, ending 152 empty tomb 69, 70, 85 Encyclopedists 89, 105 The End of Faith (Harris) xi–xii Engels, Friedrich 108, 109 Enlightenment 2 entropy 84 Epicureans 4–5 Epicurus 56, 137b equality 152, 156 equality before the law 153 Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach) 106 eternal features of reality 53 eternal relevance fallacy 145 ethical behavior 141 ethical values, origin of 152 ethics, relativism of 158 ethics, secular worldview of 159 ethnocentricity 70 Euhemerus 4 Euripides 4 European Union 153 Euthypro (Plato) 157 Evans-Prichard, E. E. 106 everyday life: folk sociology of 17; religion as release from trials and uncertainties of 118; sociology of 56 everyday reality, degrees of closure in 2 evidence: belief in, factors influencing 75; beliefs unsupported by 33; concept of 68; conviction warranted by 141; knowledge vs. 75; testing old and producing new 41; theist vs. atheist understanding of 70 evil, problem of: free-will defense 99–100; God vs. 51, 56–57, 66–67, 137b; navigating challenges of 120; as unanswerable question 150 evil spirits 116 evolution: cooperative principle in 31, 93, 149; humans as product of 151,

159; pressures as test of system’s truth value 134; prisoners of 149; secularism and 138; social, invention of in 158 “excellence” 100 exceptional individual 159 exchange economy 110 existence, explanation for 35 existentialism 5, 89, 129, 130 existential threats 54, 57, 128 ex-Muslims, disagreements among 38 experience: God knowledge, alleged based on 156; limitations as knowledge source 55–56, 96; reality vs. 146; religion and personal 112 experiences: during collective rituals 115; scrutinizing 27 explanations, practices preceding 13 extended family as core institution 114 “external” contexts and networks 23–24 external influences, faith and belief impacted by 13 external restraints 56 extinction, human 51 facts: analytical purchase over 22; generation of 21; human manufacture of 131; knowing with absolute certainty, impossibility of 17 fairies 101, 102 fairy tales 71, 72 faith: as blind faith 61; dangers of 26; defined 42; description of 61; evidence vs. 31, 88; intergenerational transmission of 12, 13; and knowledge 72; not a delusion 45–46; as point of contention 40–41; and reason 72, 137; relying on 56; and science 22–23, 42, 49, 61, 72; social construction of 105; as sociological analysis subject 137–138 falsification, ideas on 128 Farrell, D. M. 130 fascism 62 feelings: nature of 144; reality vs. 146 feminist atheism 5 feminists 3 Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804–1872): God as viewed by 92, 119; on sociology of religion 106–107; Strauss followed by 105; writings about 87

Index  171 Feynman, Richard 46, 66, 87, 128 Feynman Solution 158 finality 95 fine structure constant 54, 58n3 fine-tuning argument 27 fine-tuning of universe 50–51 first cause 94 First Nations people 19b First Nations women, disappearance and murder of 19b first-order referents 70–71 Flatland (Abbott) 11, 148 Flatland problem 120 Fleck, L. 140, 160n1 folk sociology 17, 113 Fontaine, Tina, murder of 19b foundationalism, death of 24 Foundations of Christianity (Kautsky) 107, 108 Four Horsemen xi–xii, 14, 26–27, 30, 32–33 France 154 Franklin, Benjamin 6 Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act 6 Frazer, James George 106 Free Church of Scotland 105, 106 freedom, actions for 156 freedom, degrees of 146–147 Freedom and Evolution (Bejan) 30 Freedom from Religion Foundation 5 freedom of thought 153 free will: evil explained as result of 57, 99–100; illusion of 56, 159; myth of 131; renouncing experience of 146 French Revolution 2, 105 Freud, Sigmund 87, 92, 139 Friedman, Richard Eliot 120 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) xi–xii fundamental constants 54 fundamentalism 120–121, 122 fundamentalist ideology 40 fundamentalists 19b, 66 future, secular worldview of 159 Gage, Matilda J. 3 Galileo 137 Gaylor, Anne Nicol 5 Gaylor, Annie Laurie 5 Geertz, Clifford 64 general relativity 54, 58n3, 85 gene regulation 28

Genesis 78 genetic fallacy 157 genetic mutations and disorders 54–55 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 18, 20 Giraud, Théophile de 149 global age 154 global cultural order 32 global society, outreach to 135 God: absurdity of life without 83–84; anthropology of 78, 104; atheist need for 57; in Baha’i faith 3; benevolence of 100; biblical 98; biblical faith in 97; certainty of 88; changes in reference to 71; children of 54; concept, changing understanding of 49; confirmation of 93–94; creation mirroring 40; as creator 67; criticism and defense of 65–66; as cultural, human-made symbol 1, 55, 138; death of 56, 63, 78, 90; as delusion 44–46; description of 52–53; disappearance of 76, 78; discovery of 119–120; features of reality dependent on 48; grounding in society and culture 24; as human construct 91–92, 112; humanity over 88; human nature reflected in 107; hypothesis of 89; knowing and trusting, threats to 76; knowledge of 156; learning about 113; mathematics and 23, 25; morality and 55, 63; narrative, ending 78; need for 50, 96; orientation to 88; origin of 51–52, 108; perfection of 94; of philosophers vs. Bible 96–97; philosophers without 128–129; place for, seeking 11; postulates concerning 97; as practice 121; practicing 8–12; progress without 91; prostration before 97–98; religions without 155–156; as social construction 107, 110; social and psychological lifting done by 29; societies without 126–128; society, community and 25; as sociological analysis subject 137–138; sociology application to 18, 53; surrogates of 87–88; as symbol projection of group structures and values 110; as symbol of society 111b; term 93; as theist hypothesis 139; theory

172 Index of/history of 62; uncertainties regarding 89; in unfathomable cosmos 10–11; universe and humankind held together by 54; universe as revelation of 29; without religion 156; and world as one 90, 91; see also Christian God God (Barker) 65 God, belief in: future of 89; justifying 95; nations compared 126; nonbelief in 10; rational basis for 99; retaining 72; scientists and general population compared 95; as societal foundation 96 The God Delusion (Dawkins) xii, 40, 44, 65 God, existence of: acceptance of 104; arguments for 87, 91; arguments for (cosmological) 84; arguments for (fine tuning) 27; arguments for (ontological) 5, 94, 100–103; “clear or reasonable evidence” 44; evidence for 5, 54–55; evidence against 87, 156; human extinction vs. 51; impossibility of disproving 41; impossibility of proving or disproving 104, 136, 145, 151; knowledge of 99; natural theology and 139; New Atheist position on 35; nonexistence of 46; nonexistence idea rejected 93; permitting of all things in absence of 56, 63, 64, 65, 157; potential threat to 76; proofs of 94–95, 96, 98; pros and cons 44; rejection of 107; social and political 135–136 God, Freedom, and Evil (Plantinga) xii God-given canon, idea of 72 God Is Not Great (Hitchens) xii, 62 gods: anthropology of 76; biblical compared to other 97; death and resurrection of 117; environmental and societal influence on 119; human origins of 55, 107, 112; Jesus compared to other 72–73, 75; kings as 118–119; as social construct 76, 105, 113, 116, 119; social nature and origins of 76; as society representatives 111b Goffman’s Law 143 Gogh, Theo van 36 golden rule 160 Goldman, Emma 136b good society, principles of 151

Gospel, communicating 83 gospels 68, 69 Gould, Stephen Jay 42, 146 gravity 22 Grayling, A. C. 128 “greatness” vs. “excellence” 100 Greece, ancient: atheism in 4–5; citystates 119; gods analyzed in 107; knowledge pathways in 120; personalities, alleged divinity of 75 Greek mythologies 76 Greek Orthodox canon 72 Greeks, ancient, arguments against being born 149 group activities, religion roots in 115 group solidarity 36, 115, 117 group survival, morality role in 117 growing block universe 84–85 Gumplowicz, Ludwig 140 Gunning for God (Lennox) xii “gut feelings” 144 Guth, Alan 49 hadith 36 hard cases, sociology of 18 Harper, Stephen 18, 19b Harrington, Michael 104, 135–136 Harris, Sam (1967–): background xi–xii; beliefs pre-dating science cited by 35; Islamophobia demonstrated by 26; religion as unifying force recognized by 32; religious terminology used by 33; taboo violation acknowledged by 32 Hartle, James 49, 50 Hawking, Stephen 49, 50 Hayden, Tom 19b Hayyi Rabbi “The Great Living God” (Mandaeist god) 3 health, religion correlation to 46 healthy environments 152 heartless world 28 heaven(s) 116, 143, 149 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Absolute Spirit postulated by 91; break with 106–107, 145; Christianity of 130; God proofs and postulates 95, 96, 97; influence of 105 Hell, rejection of 37 hell(s) 117, 143 Heraclitus 85 herd (term) 83–84 herd interest 83–84

Index  173 hereafter 37, 38 heretics 116 hero narrative 76 hero paradigms 75 hierarchical sovereignty 114 higher criticism 105 higher-dimensional theories 54 higher-order referents 71 Hilbert’s Hotel thought experiment 84 Hinduism 4, 64 historical materialism 108 historical narratives, interpreting 75 history: degrees of freedom, impact on perception of 147; necessity of 90; secular worldview of 159; social science of 107 Hitchens, Christopher (1949–2011): Ali, A. H. writings analyzed by 36; background xii; believer criticized by 35; God’s celestial dictatorship, reference to 11, 32; men leaving prayer meeting, reference to 34; vs. Mother Teresa 33–34; no bending of knees for 98; “numinous” vs. supernatural distinction made by 33; as one of Four Horsemen xi; on religion as poison 62; Restivo, S. alignment with 14; sociology of religion, limited understanding of 29; totalitarianism in all religions cited by 26; vicarious redemption rejected by 67 Hitler, Adolf 5, 150 Holy Spirit 43 Homiak, M. 131 homophobia 42, 65 Hong Kong 96 hope, atheism elimination of 66 How Do We Know God Exists (Craig) xii Hubble Constant 53–54 human, divine affirmation of the 159, 160n3 human, nature of being 64 human-animal, dignity and integrity of 141–142 human creative superiority, challenge to 144 human-divine relationship 76 human environment, humane and sustainable 142 human evolution 64 human experience, limitations of 53 human extinction 51 human ideals, serving 152 human interdependence 44

humanist manifesto 151–152 humanities 28 humanity: central place of 88; living connections to 156; as secularist hypothesis 139; secular worldview of 159; sociology as religion of 91; technologically driven progress of 91; well-being of 142 human moral conduct 114 human nature, God as reflection of 107 human predicament 84 human race, seeking end to 149 Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) 110 human relationships, sustaining 152 human rights 37, 63, 153 humans: chip implants in 144; crime and punishment 147–148; as part of nature 151; power and knowledge of, changes in 76; as rational free-willing persons 130–131; social nature of 64, 93, 117, 131, 132, 144, 152, 155, 158, 159 human sacrifice 71 human universe, group moved to center of 20 Hume, David 3, 27, 56, 67–68, 69, 137b hunting and gathering peoples 114 Ibn Khaldun 106, 107 The Idea of the Holy (Otto) 33 ideal type 73b, 75, 109, 139 ideas, origins of 156–157 identity crises 74 imagination 116 imbalances, redressing of 118 imitation 144 immaterial as human construct 136 immaterial realities 55 immaterial world 143 immobility, discarding sense of 146 immortality 63, 66, 83, 107 inanimate objects on trial 148 incommensurable objectivity (concept) 134 incommensurable worldviews 14, 134, 139 incommensurate scales, fallacy of 84 India 4, 96, 128, 154 indigenous women, murders and other crimes against 19b individual: away from center of human universe 20; lack of 159; vs. society 159 individual consciousness, believer evidence as matter of 43

174 Index individual happiness 152 individualism, myth of: in American culture 55; assumptions based on 139; claims dependent on 84; death of 88; God and 91–92, 98; philosophy influenced by 130, 131, 145 individualistic spirituality 127 individual rationality and logic, bias on 131 individual responsibility 147, 148 individual revelation 41 individual solidarity, religion as source of 105 infant hero, threats to life of 74 Infidel (Ali) xii, 36–37 infinities, attempt to grasp 151 influences vs. degrees of freedom 146–147 information: and intentionality 54–55; islands of 102b, 103b innovation 37 insiders and outsiders, separation between 71 intellectual fallacy 145 intellectual systems 23 intelligent design 62 intentionality 54–55 “internal” contexts and networks 23, 24 internal life fallacy 144 internal restraint 56 International Religious Freedom Act 6, 1998 Internet 13, 76, 113 interpersonal connections, meaning in 149, 150 intervention 147–148 introspective transparency, fallacy of 55, 83, 96, 112, 139, 144 invisible sociological revolution 21 irrationalism 21, 93, 97 Is Faith Delusion? (Sims) 45 Isis (deity) 117 Islam: atheist and heretic thinkers in 5; critics of xii; Golden Age 71; limitless God, approach to 122; mayhem in name of 26; rejection of 36–38 Islamists 19b Islamophobia xi, 26 “I-Thou” concept 156 Jainism 64 James, William (1842–1910) 112 Jaspers, Karl 3–4, 45, 95 The Jefferson Bible 129

Jefferson, Thomas 6, 129 Jesuit missionaries 4 Jesus: army of 10; belief in 72, 126; contemporaries’ attitudes toward 74, 119; counter-revolution in favor of 90; crucifixion 67, 69, 71; evil, problem of resolved through 66; God of 88; historicity of 68, 77–78; history of 61–62, 104; identifying 77–78; personality of 108; precursors 72–77, 78; respect for person of 92; Resurrection (see Resurrection); as son of God 32; understanding, changing of 49; universal Christ, personality of 91 jihad 26 jihadists 35 John, Gospel of 68 Joseph of Arimathea 69 Judeo-Christian God 135–136 justice, fight for 130 Kalem Cosmological Argument 84 Kant, Immanuel 38, 95, 130, 145 Kautsky, Karl (1854–1938) 107, 108 kindness, meaning in 149 kings as gods 118–119 Kiran, C. 44–45 Kirchhoff, Gustav 49 Knights (Aristophanes) xi Knorr, Karin 30 knowing, nature of 20–21 knowledge: vs. belief or nonbelief 12, 14; collective experience as source of 55; vs. evidence 75; faith and 72; nature of, conception changing 20; nature and transmission of 24; revelation rejected as source of 159; as social and cultural construction 20; as societal resource 24; sociology of 90, 157 Koole, Ruud 37 Kreeft, P. 157 Kropotkin, Peter 136b Kuhn, Thomas 90, 140n1 Küng, Hans xii, 50, 86, 87–98 laboratories, closed systems in 17 Laden, A. S. 131 Ladyman, J. 128 Laplace, Pierre Simon (1749–1827) 89 L’art de guillotiner les procréateurs (Giraud) 149

Index  175 Latin mythologies 76 lawfulness 97 leaders 116, 118 learning 64 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Smith) 105 legal systems, parallel 152–153 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 100, 130 Lenin, Vladimir, analysis of 37 Lennox, John Carson (1943–) xii, 61–78, 86 Lewis, D. 129, 131 liberal theology, modern, origins of 105 life: forms of 23, 54; fulfillment in 152; meaning of 65b, 120, 149–150; order in 94; presence as proof of God 51; purposeful, requirements for 83; as system 17 Life of Jesus (Renan) 105 Life of Jesus (Strauss) 105 linguistic analysis 90 literary interpretation 66 literature 78 living things, health and security of 141 Local Group 55 localism, fallacy of 53 logic: evolution of 111b; laws of 52, 53, 55, 57, 83; morality and 32; philosophy and mathematics, application to 90; Platonism, end of 20; sociology and 52, 53; sociology application to 18; theism arguments pro and con 157; theist use of 52 logical concepts, social nature of 20, 120 logical offenses, moral offenses as 32 logical positivism 5, 90 logics 53 logos 120, 121 Lokavata 4 Lotze, R. H. 111b love, meaning in 149 Lucretius 4–5 Luke, Gospel of 69, 72 Luther, Martin 72 Mach, Ernst 49 Mackie, J. L. 100 magicians 74, 119 magus career, legendary features of 74 “man as the measure of all things” 88 Mandaeism, God in 3 marriage equality 153 Martineau, Harriet 18, 20, 21

Martin, M. 2, 7n1, 101, 102 Marx, Karl: Age of the Social, 1st (1840–1930) 18, 20; atheism, association with 3; God as seen by 92, 119; influences on 105, 107; on religion as opium 27–28, 108, 109; religious sentiment in 121; Russian Revolution and 37; on sociology of religion 108–109; working class, faith in 159; writings about 87 Marxism 12 Marxist Catholics 42 material vs. immaterial phenomena 53 materialism 89 materialist realism 1 materialist sociology 148 material world, dependence on 146 mathe-grammatical illusions 50, 143 mathematical certainty 88 mathematical constructs 11 mathematical knowledge 18 mathematical world 11 mathematics: degrees of order, role in explaining 94; God and 23, 25; laws of 55, 57; logic and symbolic analysis, reduction to 90; Platonism, end of 20; plural, not singular 53; professional culture of 52; and religion 120; as societal resource 24; sociology of 23–24, 148; theism and 157 math worlds 23 matters of fact, science as continuum of 22 Matthew, Gospel of 69, 72 McGrath, Alister 40–41, 45 McGrath, Joanna C. 40–41 McTaggart, J. L. 84 meaning 109, 149–150 meaninglessness 158 measuring apparatus 54, 58n3 mechanical creatures 144 media visibility of atheism/theism debates xi medical ethos 141 medical treatments 31 Mémorial (Pascal) 94 mental illness 57, 67 “mentally competent” criminals, treatment of 148 mentally ill on trial 148 Merton, R. K. 109, 141 Meslier, Jean 2

176 Index messiahs: of ancient world 119; common themes in lives of 74; Jesus compared to other 73; solar 75, 76, 77 Messianic expectations 105 metamathematics 52 metaphysical, excising from religion 156 metaphysics 90, 149 Milky Way 55 Mills, C. Wright 36–37 mind: as body at work 149; as brain phenomenon 144; explaining 54; nature of, confusion over 149; as social and cultural construction 20; sociological understanding of 156; understanding of 140 mind-brain problem 88 miracles 11, 67–68, 78, 85 misfortune, managing 137b misplaced concreteness, fallacy of 148 Mitchell, B. 75 Mitroff, I. 141 modernities, march toward 89 modernity, end of 21 monotheism 2, 7n1, 114 Moon, Sun Myung 73 moral integrity 141 morality: belief in god concerned with moral conduct 114; Christianity vs. 129; culturally relative nature of 157; laws of 57; logic and 32; origin of 55; simple and complex societies compared 117; without God 63, 157 moral offenses 32 moral order: alternative frameworks for 139; religion organization of 32, 139; religion systematizing of 110; as social construction 63 moral power, belief in 111b moral proof of God 94 morals: culture as origin of 36, 94; relativism of 158 moral stories for children 71 Mother Teresa 33–34 Muhammad, prophet 36, 37 Mulkay, M. J. 141 multiple poles 51 multiples, principle of 77 multiverse 50 murder 148 Muslim women’s rights xii, 36 Myers, P. Z. 42 mystical, excising from religion 156

mystical salvation 117–118 mythic hero 74–75 mythos 120, 121 myths, cultural nature and value of 43 naming experiences and objects 115–116 Napoleon 89 Napoleon Fallacy 146–147 Napoleonic wars 147 National Study of Youth and Religion 12, 14–15n1 national-universal ethos 110 “nattering nabobs of negativism” (term) 19b naturalistic perspective on science of delusions 45 naturalistic realism 1 natural laws 57, 157 natural order, humans as part of 159 natural science: advice based on 137; of religion 28; theology relationship with 89, 90 natural scientists 95 natural selection 138 natural selection as test of system’s truth value 134 natural theology: aims of 102; God’s existence, addressing through 139; God, verifying belief in 95; music as 121; overview of 84; on philosopher’s and biblical God 97; problems with 157 nature: disregard for us 149; humans as part of 151; laws of 53, 55; open systems in 17; protection of 153; repression and eradication of 42; uniformity of 67 On the Nature of Things (Lucretius) 4–5 Nazareth, Edict of 69 Nazism 5 negative theology 121–122 neque demonstra neque redargue fallacy (“neither provable nor unprovable fallacy”) 145 networks, finding meaning in 150 neuroscience 144 New Atheism 5–6, 18, 157, 158–160 New Atheists: atheist critics of 62–63; common traits of 1; debates with theists 14, 23, 134, 135, 137; fundamentalist forms of faith as focus of 121; identity of xi–xii; public and media attention to

Index  177 14; real world, connecting to 46; rebuttal to view of 48–58; religion not understood by 30–31, 66; religion resistance to criticism reflected by 32–33; science assumptions, incorrect made by 16; scientism among (see scientism: as New Atheist tendency); sociology of religion, ignorance concerning 29; worldview of 35–36 New Christianity (term) 108, 122n2 Newman, John Henry 75, 76 New Testament 68 Newton, Isaac 89 NGOs, state support for 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich: in Age of the Social, 1st (1840–1930) 18, 20; atheism, association with 3; on belief vs. inquiry 27, 67; conflict in 92; exceptional individual, belief in 159; God’s death declared by 78; God as seen by 92, 119; history of error 96; human reasoning ability touted by 93; Marx compared to 159; religion and philosophy criticized by 20; writings about 87 nihilism 22, 92–93 “no-boundary wave function” 50 Noland, Aaron 12 NOMA Fallacy 146 nonbelievers 5, 83, 152, 153 non-believing clergy 76 non-human primates, moral behavior in 157–158 non-religious belief systems 152 nontheist societies and religions 64 non-traditional marital relationships 153 non-traditional religions 152 normal modal logic (S5) version of ontological argument 100, 101 “numinous” (defined) 33 numinous experience 155 numinous hypothesis 112 Obama, Barack 6 objective morality, lack of 55 objective reality 143 objectivity 20, 33 objectivity communities 57, 70 O’Hair, Madelyn Murray 6 Old Testament 65, 76, 116, 157 One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Kelsey) 100 One True God (Stark) 28–29

ontological proof of God 5, 94, 100–103 ontologies 13 open systems: characteristics of 1, 17; closed systems vs. 146; on continuum 140; descriptions and prescriptions impossible in 2 opium, religion as 27–28, 108, 109 oppressed creature, sigh of 28, 109 oppression, religion as tool of 118 order, degrees of 94 order, origin of 97 origin, impossibility of knowing 112 original sin, doctrine of 99, 129 Origin of Species (Darwin) 105 oscillating universe 50 Osiris 72, 73 Other, threat of 135 Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937) 33, 112 overvalued ideas, delusions vs. 44 Owen, D. 130 pagan cultures 72 pain 91, 94 parable of the pastor 57 parental religious socialization, challenges of 8 parents, faith and beliefs transmitted by 12, 13 Parmenides 85 particle physics 54 particles, “popping up” of 49 Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662) 89, 94 Pascal’s Wage 89 patient rights 153 peer pressure 146 perfection, existence and 94 permitting of all things 56, 63, 64, 65, 157 person, secular worldview of 159 personality types 87 personal troubles, structural transformations behind 36–37 perspective, order as matter of 94 phenomenological perspective 45 Philipse, Herman 38 philosophers: God of 96; secular life contemplated by 129–130; sociological challenge to 131–132; without God 128–129 philosophers’ fallacy 143 philosophical community, structure of 102b–103b philosophy: Christian 99, 100, 102; criticism of 20, 128–129; and death of God 78; fallacies from 148–149; limits of 145; logic and linguistic

178 Index analysis, reduction to 90; origin story of 130; and religion 130; of science 128, 131; secular, limits of 130–132; theist publications outside mainstream 86; thought experiments in 85 physics: biology reduced to 28; dynamic nature of 54, 58n3; laws of 27, 54, 58n3; Newtonian and Einsteinian 61; as science model 16, 30–31; standard model, challenges to 31; varying constant in, search for 53–54 Pirsig, R. 45 places of worship 64b–65b planet: ecology of, sustaining 152; well-being of 142 Plantinga, Alvin xii, 86, 99–103, 102b–103b, 129 Plato: atheism/theism debates 137; break with 145; concealment in writing 71; deification of 4, 75; ghost of 136; morals independent of gods 157; Pythagorean ideas 130 Platonic-Augustinian realism 88 Platonism 20, 24 pleasure, benefits of 137b points of view, ideal type and 73b Poland 153, 154 Polanyi, Michael 75 political decentralization 110 political God 135–136 political institutions 106 political science 41 politics: atheism/theism debates echoing in xi; religion and 54, 109, 118–119 The Politics at God’s Funeral (Harrington) 104 polytheism 114 Popper, Karl 38, 90, 91, 128 positivism vs. anti-positivism 90 postmodernism 21–22, 42 post-modernities, march toward 89 poverty 94 power: centralization of 118; reforms and changes not isolated from issues of 24 practical absolutism 151 Praeger, Dennis 34 prayer meeting, men leaving 34 prayers 8–9 pre-axial cultures, sacred in 155 pre-contractual solidarity 56, 93

Presbyterian canon 72 prescriptions, possibility of definitive 2, 17 prescriptive frameworks, religions as 116 presentism 84 Presley, Elvis 73, 75 private worlds fallacy 143 probability 48–49, 50–51, 52 probability theory 89, 94, 157 procreation, price of 149 Procrustean fit process 84 profane realm 114–115 profane vs. sacred boundaries 154 profundity of the surface, principle of 56 progress 37 projection, consciousness of 116 projection principle 107 Prometheus 109 proofs as social constructions and institutions 145 Proslogion (Anselm) 100 Protagoras 88 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) 109 Protestantism and capitalism 109–110 Protestant Pietism 109 psychiatry 45–46 psychological studies 144 psychologistic fallacy 144–145 psychology 90, 108, 156–157, 159 publication channels, disconnected 102b public schools, secular nature of 153 pure mathematics 52 pure science 52 purity, ideology of 52 quality of life 155 Quality of life index 127 quantum cosmology models 85 quantum field, timeless 85 quantum mechanical tunneling event, universe origin as 49 quantum mechanics 30, 56, 85, 143 quantum physics 97 quantum theory 48 Quinn, James 12 quorum sensing/quorum signaling (QS) 28 Quran 19b, 36, 37–38, 122 racism 42, 113–114 Radcliffe-Brown, A. 106 “radical” (term) 19b radical relativism 22 radical social constructionist perspective 1

Index  179 “Raglan Dundee” thesis 77 Ramayana 4 Ranke-Heinemann, Uta 71 rational criticism 32 rationalism 93, 97 rationalist movements 5 rationality 23, 90–91, 129 rational skepticism 142 rational world, history of 91 realism 30 realities, confronting harsh 129 reality: belief related to 93–94; concrete vs. abstract 148; different systems of thinking about 13; embracing 160; features dependent on God 48; ideas assigned a 88; identifying features of 53; knowing 146; overview of 158; perspective vs. objective 94; timeless unchanging 85; uncertain nature of 93 Reality-as-It-Is 2 Reality-in-Itself (RI) 1, 17, 158 reality-of-experience (RE) 158 “reality out there” 22 real world 46, 54 reason: faith and 72, 88, 137; God and 57; going against 27; limits of 98; New Atheist turning away from 62; theist use of 52–54; theology and 75, 84; willing and feeling, link with 90–91 Reasonable Faith (Craig) xii reasoning 23 reductionism 16, 28, 145 Reformation 2 reification 115–116, 148 Reimarus, Hermann (1694–1768) 104 reincarnation 114 relationships, regulation of 117 relativism 103b relativity theory 48, 56 religion: analysis of 107; anthropology of 106–108; atheism as 14, 32, 33; atheist understanding, limited of 41–42; beliefs, origin of 115–116; biological perspective on 28; central functions of 105; as collective insanity 44; comparative history of 70, 121; criticism of 20; criticism, resistance to 32–33; cultural imposition of 106; defined 110; definition and overview/and social cogito 64b–65b; as delusion

45; development of 116; emergence of 108; evolution of primal 105; freedom of 153; free ride for 86; functions of 114–117; as glue of social order 32; as glue of society 64, 106, 110, 155; God without 156; health correlation to 46; as human achievement 92; inability to escape from 33; learning about 113; mathematics and 120; movement away from 127; New Atheist flawed understanding of 66; origins of 115; parental transmission of 13; personal experience and 112; philosopher attitudes concerning 129–130; philosophy and 130; and politics 54, 118–119; as practice 121; projection theory of 109; psychiatry of 45; rationalized view of 120–121; reality of 1; science of 28; science relationship with (see science-religion relationship); scientism compared to 31; secularism vs. 153, 154; as social construct 76, 113, 116, 119; as social and cultural phenomenon 30–31; social nature of 20; social science of 12–13, 28; and society 32, 36, 113–114, 115; sociological analysis of 137–138; sociological studies of 104; sociological understanding of 121; sociology of (see sociology of religion); sociology without 91; symbolism of 116–117; technology and 130; traditional, end of 89; trend away from 127–128; universal nature of 62, 64, 155; works on 29 religions: falseness of 26; gods of nonChristian 97; as human creation 107; as prescriptive frameworks 116; social nature and origins of 76; totalitarianism innate in all 26; types of 114; as worldviews 139 religiosity decline, factors in 127–128 religious atheism 156 religious beliefs: need for 130; social construction of 105; socialization role in 8; surveys on 126, 127 religious claims, “rational absurdity” of 131 religious criticism, history of 2–3 religious discourse 26 religious discrimination 152, 154

180 Index religious diversity 152, 154 religious experiences 10, 11, 27, 96 religious faith, confusing experience of 29 religious freedom 6, 86, 152 religious groups 26 religious ideas, excising of 159, 160n3 religious institutions 62, 105, 106 religious instruction 9–10, 152 religious leanings 35–36 religiously unaffiliated, increase in 5–6, 127 religious organizations 152 religious practices 13, 64b–65b, 70, 127, 152 religious rationalism 104–105 religious socialization, mother role in 8 religious societies 62 religious suffering 27–28 religious systems 2, 115 religious texts 71 religious traditions 63, 142 Renan, Ernest (1823–1892) 105 responsibility 147, 148 Restivo, Sal 8–12, 44 Restivo’s Law 143 Restivo’s Law, 2nd 145 Restivo’s Law, 3rd 146 Resurrection: belief in as hypothetical delusion 46; defense of 67, 68–70; evidence of 85; standard model of, hypothetical challenge to 31; story, origin of 77; theist approach to 32 Rethinking Secularism 153 revelation: as error 107; faith and belief transmission and 12; God revealing himself through 51; of Holy Spirit 43; rejection of 159; in theology and religion 41 Revelation 78 Rey, G. 131 Rig Veda 4 rites 106, 115 ritual 36, 115 rival gods 116 robots 144 role models 13 Roman Catholic canon 72 Roman Catholic Church 153 Roman emperors 76 Roman Empire 72, 119 Rose, Ernestine 3 Rosenberg, Bernard 12 Ross, E. A. 107 Rudavsky, Tamar 66–67

ruling elites 118 Russell, Bertrand 5, 38, 68, 90 Russian Revolution 37 Ryle, Gilbert 148–149 On the Sacred Disease 5 sacred, domain of the 26 sacred realm 114–115 saints, exposure of 33–34 salvation 106, 117–118 Sanders, Ed 68 saviors 73; see also messiahs Scandinavia 126 Schiller, F. 101 Schleirmacher, Friedrich 105 schools, religion in 152 Schopenhauer, A. 101–102 science: anthropology of 16; appreciating 137b; as atheist hypothesis 139; causal thinking in 49; changing, constant of 49; as collective generational phenomenon 140; culture of 141; death and destruction unleashed by 66; discoveries in 41, 84; evidencebased knowledge in 42–43, 138; faith and 22–23, 42, 49, 61, 72; history of 53; as human affair 42; ignorance in, overcoming 43; intrinsic values of 142; from invisible sociological revolution perspective 21; as knowledge source 55; miracles vs. 67–68; morality of 140–142; as moral order 139; mythical vs. realistic 23; philosophy of 128, 131; pride in 26; Protestantism, capitalism, and 109–110; reality, accessing through 158–159; as religion 33; in secular worldview 140; in social, cultural, and historical matrix 22; as social fact 16–17; social studies of 131; as societal resource 24; sociology of 16, 18, 21, 29–30, 43; sociology as 17, 18; of sociology 62; term usage 18, 19b; theism and 57; theist reliance on 49; theology and 29, 84, 120; understanding 16, 20, 23; as worldview 139 science-based technologies 43 science discourse 26 science-religion relationship: openness and trust in 95; optimistic view of

Index  181 96; science gaps and religion 106; science vs. religion 5, 26, 42–43, 54, 75–76; sociology impact on 137–138, 146 sciences: degrees of order, role in explaining 94; overview of 140 science studies movement 140, 160n1 science studies researchers 30 science wars 21 scientific cogito 1–2 scientific community 16–17 scientific evidence 68 scientific imagination, failure of 29 scientific imperialism 142 scientific knowledge 18, 21 scientific reality, degrees of closure in 2 scientific revolution 88, 120–121 scientific truths, nature of 40–41 scientific worldview 98 scientism: Dawkins guilty of 41, 42, 43, 44; factors contributing to 16; identifying 27; as New Atheist tendency 26, 35–36, 46, 54, 61, 66, 157; physics and 30–31; science morality and 142; social sciences/ humanities conflation as form of 28; and technological fix 44 scientists, attributes assumed of 33 scorpion and frog, tale of 147–148 second-order referents 71 “secular” (definition and term usage) 142–143, 153–155 “secular age” 154 secular civilization 36 secular culture 159, 160n3 secular groups 26 secular humanism 5, 136 secularism, forms of 154 secularists, humanity as hypothesis of 139 secular life, philosopher thoughts on 128, 129–130 secular manifesto 152–153 secular moral order 134, 139, 142–143, 151–152, 160 secular nations 154 secular philosophy 130–132 secular reason 12 secular societies, religious 155 secular world, living in 156 secular worldview 136, 138, 140, 143–147, 151–152, 157–160 securalization 89 seeing, nature of 20–21

self: certainty of 88; discoveries about 18; materialistic terms and scientific experiments used to explain 54; neurosocial model of 144; as social and cultural construction 20; social nature of 92; sociological decentering of 88; sociological understanding of 156; understanding of 140 self-interest 83–84 Semites, religion of 105 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks xi, 37 sequence, limit of 57–58 sex 150, 156 Sextus Empiricus 5 sexual and reproductive rights 153 Sikhism 3 Silverman, David 38 Sims, Andrew 45–46 sin, acknowledging 9 single tax movement 107–108 “singularity theorems” 50 situational ethics 95 skepticism 76, 95, 141 Skinner, B. F. 142 Small, Albion 107, 108 small probability, principle of 51 Smith, William Robertson (1846–1894) 105–106, 108, 110, 119n2 Sobel, J. H. 157 social, invention of the 158, 159 social, misunderstanding of the 131 social anthropology 106 “socialblindness” (term) 55 social brain paradigm 64 social causes and forces, dependence on 146 social construction, anticipating concept of 140, 160n1 social construction, misunderstanding of 131 social constructionism 112b social constructions 111b Social Darwinism 31 social differentiation, degree of 114 social environment, thought origin role of 140 social functions and classes 118 social gospel movement 108 social groups, religion universal in all 65b social inequalities 24, 141 social injustices 141 social institution, religion as 65b

182 Index social institution, science as 66 socialism 18 socialization: belongingness and 117; earliest years of 13; process, unchanging of 70 social justice 42, 152, 156 social life: folk sociology as requirement of 17; group at center of 88; of mechanical creatures 144; scientific knowledge rooted in 18 social networks: interacting and communicating in 64; personal transformation, role in 37; persons as 159; thinking by 140, 160n1 social order(s) 32, 116 social phenomena/on, sciences as 22, 33 social problems 19b, 44 social roles 119 social science of religion 12–13, 28 social sciences: education in 44; humanities, conflation with 28; neurosciences and 144; philosophy of 130; scientific thinking, traditional and 140; scientific worldview not incorporating 98 social scientists, attitude concerning religion 95 social self 151, 159 social solidarity 110 social structure 24, 115 social studies of science 131 social types 74 social work 18 social world 24, 145, 146 societal complexity, evolution of 114 societies without God 126–128 society: crimes against humanity originating from 62; discoverers of 20; discoveries about 18; foundations of 96; God as 71, 105, 111b; God grounded in 25; individual vs. 159; religion and 32, 36, 113–114, 115; religion as glue of 64, 106, 110, 155; term usage 84; type of 114; working to benefit 152 Society for the Philosophy of Scientific Practice 131 sociocultural environment as religion predictor 113 sociocultural as historical force 32 sociological cogito: canonical texts and 72; failure to grasp 87, 90; religion and 64b–65b

sociological imagination: defined 36–37; failure of 29, 136; New Atheists lacking 46; sociology camps linked by 1; theists operating without 63; thoughts, source of and 140; viewing world through lens of 113 sociologists, attitude concerning science 22 sociology: in atheism/theism debates 14; atheist overlooking of 3, 54, 55; birth of 159; camps of 1; Christianity relationship to 108, 122n2; commandment against (“Thou Shalt Not Commit Sociology”) 19b; and Descartes views compared 90; disciplines, crystallization of 90; discoveries in 18; emergence of 108; founders of 91; God and 55; God question and 41; human problems resolving into 145; psychology vs. 159; sciencereligion relationship, impact on 137–138, 146; scientific thinking, traditional and 140; as social fact 17–18, 20–22; theorem of 112b, 131; understanding 16, 23 sociology of knowledge 90, 157 sociology of mathematics 23–24, 148 sociology of religion: advocating scientific 63; key figures 105–110; New Atheists ignorant of 29; paradigm for 104, 112–120; teaching about 11, 12 sociology of science: as alternative to traditional study and understanding of science 21; emergence of 18; findings from 16; scientific practice social patterns as demonstrated through 43; views on 29–30 sociology of scientific knowledge (defined) 22 sociology of scientific practice 128 Socrates 4, 130, 150 “soft science,” sociology as 18 solar system 1–2, 17, 20 “solutionism” (term) 44 “son of god” (term) 76 Sophists 4 soul: faith and belief transmission and 12; illusions about 151; immortality of 4, 104; nonexistence of 159 soul-body problem 88 soulless conditions, soul of 28 souls, worlds of 143

Index  183 space and time: abandoning concept of 48; comparison between 85; God outside of 23, 51; ideas about, revising 23; nature of 22; no scientific way to validate 50 space-time continuum 23 Spengler, Oswald 111b, 119 Spinoza, Baruch 38, 107, 110, 130 spiritual desolation 34 spiritual ideas, excising of 159, 160n3 spirituality 12–13, 45–46 spiritual leanings 35–36 Staddon, John 142 Stalin, Joseph, analysis of 37 standard model 54, 58n3 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 3 Stark, Rodney 28–29, 119–120, 138 state atheism 5 state power, religion as tool of 105 state-religion separation 152 states, formation of 118 Stealing from God (Turek) xii Stein, Gordon 52 Steinbrenner, Ethan 61 STEM education 44 Stoicism 137b strangers, testimony from 56 stratified societies 24 Strauss, David 107 Strauss, L. 105 subjective, scientific significance of 45 subjectivity, anthropological dimensions of 44 Submission: Part 1 (film) 36 subscendental fallacy 143 suffering: atheism vs. Christianity on 66; in Buddhism 3; Epicurus’ approach to 137b; God, good vs. 67; navigating challenges of 120; order vs. 94; protest against 27–28; religion as expression of 119; waving away 91 sun gods 72–73, 75 Sunna 36 supernatural: beliefs about 115–116; defined 64b, 78n2 “supernatural, celestial dictator” 32 supernatural beings: in Buddhism 3; New Atheist questioning of belief in 35; religions without 155; secular worldview denying existence of 143, 158 supernatural phenomena 11

supernatural realms: hypotheses about 115; New Atheist questioning of belief in 35; religions without 154; secular worldview denying existence of 143, 158 supernatural worldview, rejection of 20 support network, religion provision of 46 supreme being, secular worldview of 158 Supreme Creator 114 surrogate counters 144 survival 35, 142 sustainability 142 sustainable natural environment 142 Sweden 126 symbolic analysis 90 symbols 43, 55, 70–71 Synoptic Gospels 105 System of Nature (d’Holbach) 2 systems 1–2, 17 taboo, religion protected by 32 Taiwan 96 Tao Te Ching 155–156 Tappenden, J. 130 Taylor, Charles 42, 154, 159, 160n3 Taylor, K. A. 131 technological fix: ideology of 26, 27; New Atheist views on 46, 66, 157; scientism and 44 technologies, modifications of 27 technology, religion and 130 teleological proof of God 94 tensed theory of time (A-theory) 84–85 tenseless theory of time (B-theory) 84, 85 Thatcher, Margaret 19b theism: arguments for and against xi; critical, limits to 72; defense of 102; definition and overview of 6; elimination of 14; existentialism as secular equivalent to 130; science and 57; secular alternative to 158–160; skeptical 76; sociological approach to 18; as worldview 135, 157; worldview opposed to 151 theist-atheist divide 70–71 theists: God as hypothesis of 139; limitations of 156; overview of xii; real world, connecting to 46; science assumptions, incorrect made by 16; science, reliance on 49; sciences confronted by 137; uncertainty, discomfort with 48 theological cogito 2

184 Index theology: challenges to 90; collapse of rationale for 41; free ride for 86; individual revelation, reliance on 41; mysticism without 155; natural science relationship with 89, 90; reason at odds with 6; science as 29, 120 theology systems 2 theories and data 75 theory of everything 87–88 thermodynamics 84, 146 Thiessen, Gerd 68 thought 52, 130 thought-constructs 94–95 thoughts, source of 140, 146 three kings, stars as 76 time, lack of knowledge about 150–151 time, theories of 84–85 Tolstoy Fallacy 146 Tolstoy’s Law 146 Tolstoy’s Law, 2nd 148 tomb-robbers 69 tortoise, impossibility of catching 57–58 totalitarianism 26, 37, 41 traditional religions 152 traditions, breakdown of 88–89 transcendence, rejection of 20 transcendental beings and realms: New Atheist questioning of belief in 35; religions without 155; secular worldview denying existence of 143, 158 transcendental fallacy 143 transcendental realities, sociologist rejection of 11 transcendental religions 117–118 transcendental spiritualism 121 transcendental supernatural being, God as 71 transcendental supernatural realm 110 tribalism 32 trust 34–35, 56, 93 truth: communities 134; existence of objective 52; experience vs. 96; for twenty-first century mind 22–25 tunneling theories 49, 50 Turek, Frank (1961–) xii, 48–58, 86, 95 Turkey 154 Turok, Neil 50 twenty-first century mind, truth for 22–25 unfathomable cosmos, God’s place in 10–11 Unitarianism 129 Unitarian Universalists 64

United Nations, religion and 154 United States, religion in 126, 127 units, choice of 54, 58n3 universal constant 95–96 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 153 universal dialectic system, God at center of 91 universal features of reality 53 universal field question 87–88 universalism 141 universe: contracting 85; creation of 4, 51; expansion, rate of 53–54; fine-tuning of 50–51; goal-directedness in 54; as God’s revelation 29; imperfections in 54–55; origin of 43, 48–50, 51–52, 84, 85; purposeless 46, 66; as revelation of God 120; self-creation of 151; as system 17; uncertainty as natural part of 48; understanding 65b universe-antiuniverse pair 50 unwilled agency 159 unworthy testimony 56 Upanishads 4 U.S. National Science Foundation 17 Ussher, James 43 utopia, ideal type as 73b values: origin of 152; reforms and changes not isolated from issues of 24; relativism of 158; transmitting 12 Vatican 62, 137 Vatican 1 94 veiled writing 71 vicarious redemption 67 Vico, Giambattista 107, 110 violence: emotional 150; energies and powers corrupted by 149; features of 26 virgin birth 71, 74 virgin Mary 76–77 virgin as symbol 77 Virgo constellation 76–77 “virtual” particles 48 Voltaire (1694–1778) 38, 105 Voluntary Human Extinction Movement 149 Waheguru “The Creator” (Sikh god) 3 Wallis, Louis (1876-ca. 1950) 107–108, 138 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 146 Ward, Lester 107 W-boson mass 31

Index  185 weapons of mass destruction 149 Weber, Max: in Age of the Social, 1st (1840–1930) 18, 20; on discovery of God 119; methodology of 73b; self-description of 104; on sociology of religion 109–110 Weinberg, Alvin 26, 38n2 Weinberg, Steven 62 Wellhausen, Julius 105 Weltanschauung 138–139 West: atheism roots in 3; reconstructing 135; science-religion relationship in 96 Western Civilization 136 Western expansion, secularization driven by 154–155 Western rationalism 109 Western religions xi Whitehead, A. N. 91, 96, 148 Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell) 68 will, faith as act of 88 Will, George 18 Williams, Rowan 63 Wills, L. M. 75 Wilson, E. O. 142 Wittgenstein, L. 5, 98, 143 Wolpert, Lewis 30

women, Islam treatment of xii, 36, 37 women’s rights 37, 42, 153 wonderworkers 74, 119 working class 159 world: as God’s creation 40; order in 94, 97; as social construction 131, 132 world history 91 worldly events 4 world religions 96, 117 World Trade Center attack xi worldviews: clash of 34–35; communication bridges between, blocking of 43; competing 135; definition and overview of 138–139; diversity of 153; frameworks 157; incommensorable 134; reasoned discourse, resistance to 138 World Wars 91 writing, concealment in 71 Xenophanes 107, 110 Zakaria, Fareed 44 Zeno’s paradox 57–58 Zindler, F. R. 157 Zoroaster 73 Zuckerman, Phil 112, 126