The pleasures of argument

I got back from the PZ Myers tour of the Natural History Museum last night with an evil shit-eating grin, saying “It was so nice to be able to argue with people” … and indeed I had been trying to defend evolutionary psychology against Larry Moran. Great fun all round, but it appears that I left too early to have the argument about religion that I had been hoping for the PZ himself, who has hoiked up from the comments at pharyngula one of my periodic defences of religion in order to sneer at it. I had written that “of course atheism is a philosophical position. So is creationism. It’s trivially true that they are both, equally, philosophical positions. To claim that belief is a position, while disbelief is not, is just ridiculous.”

He doesn’t believe me. He says

Atheism is not a philosophical belief. It is a consequence of a philosophical belief, I will grant you that: it is a philosophy that says evidence, observation, and a logical chain of reasoning are important, as is a healthy skepticism. Tunnel down through most atheists’ positions, and that is where you will find their philosophical foundation. I think it’s also why atheists sometimes find themselves exasperated with agnostics–we’re arguing for the same things, but the labels are different, and agnosticism gives far too much credit to purely hypothetical speculations about nebulous possibilities.

My reply, which may illuminate this exasperation, if only by example, is below the fold:

It’s remarks like this which make me wonder whether I should write an essay asking whether atheism is compatible with science or whether there is an eternal and necessary conflict between atheism and empiricism. Because what PZ is doing here is not just making a claim about the superiority of naturalism over supernaturalism. I’m completely on board with that.

But he is also making empirical claims about religious believers; because of course he doesn’t mean that atheism is a consequence of certain philosophical virtues. He means it’s the only honest outcome of these virtues, and that religious believers cannot exhibit these traits if they are honest. This is an empirical claim which is quite easily tested and it looks to me false.. Go out and find religious believers who also believe that “evidence, observation, and a logical chain of reasoning are important, as is a healthy skepticism.” If you find any, you have disproved his implication. Now, I do know quite a lot of Christians like that, just as I know some atheists who have no interest in evidence, observation, or stuff like that when they are talking about religion, and no skepticism whatever when it comes to believing evil of Christians.

This is a perfectly simple, empirical question. I’m not interested in whether the essence of Christianity is irrational, because I’m not at all sure that Christianity or any other social arrangement has an essence. But that’s a separate argument about David Hull and cultural evolution.

The funny thing is that most of the people you will meet on the street, unless they’re genuinely crazy, believe in the same philosophy that we atheists do. They would not buy a used car unless they drove it first, they test the water temperature with their hand before they step into the shower, they don’t expect that the sensible response to discovering a lump on their breast is to pray harder rather than going to the doctor for an examination. What they’ve done instead is to add an extra layer of weirdness (I can’t quite imagine what else to call religious beliefs–they are quite strange) on top. It is not a philosophy to find the invocation of a triune, dead-and-risen-again god peculiar, and it’s a misstatement of the situation to equate belief and not-belief as equivalent philosophical positions.
You could either state that atheism is built on an internally consistent philosophy, while theism is a set of irrational confabulations bolted on to a culture, or you could try to argue that magical thinking and semi-random traditions and rituals of religion are a “philosophy,” in which case I’ll feel comfortable in saying I want no part of this “philosophical” nonsense, and I would hope that most philosophers would also take offense. One thing I cannot abide, though, is the implied false equivalence of calling both atheism and religion “philosophies”.

Of course finding something strange or weird is not a philosophical position. The argument from incredulity is pretty much worthless wherever it is directed. We have no reason whatever to suppose that the universe will turn out agreeable to common sense. It’s not just stranger than we think, but stranger than we can imagine, and all that. The world is full of strange, weird things that are in fact true. Hell, Pharyngula is full of them, especially on Fridays. Indeed, I would say that my own rejection of religious belief is grounded in the fact that most forms of Christianity make the world appear too comprehensible, and don’t do nearly enough justice to the weirdness of the universe. But there are forms of atheism which are just as cosy.

But religious belief and atheism aren’t equivalent philosophical positions because they are two diverse. I said they were equally — just as much — philosophical. But as to whether religious belief and atheism are equivalent, I think you have to ask which beliefs, and what sort of atheism. You can’t just use theism as the litmus test. I think, for instance, that theist Quakers are philosophically superior to atheist Stalinists, as well as ethically so. On balance, atheists tend to be better educated, more intelligent, and so on. But this could well be correlation, not causation.

The point at which I differ from PZ, Dawkins, and so on is that I don’t identify honest thought with any particular metaphysical stance. It seems to me that the enemies of reason are, in no particular order, superstition, magical thinking, tribalism, and, later, what Paul Tillich called “totalising absolutism”. All these things are found in most religions. To the extent that they are, I am an enemy of religion, and not just an unbeliever. But they are all, also, deeply rooted in human nature and they can all survive the death of theism. Identifying all intellectual and moral vices with theism is itself a form of idolatry, carried to the point of absurdity in Dawkins’ claim that when atheists do evil things it’s not a consequence of their atheism.

I think I understand the political requirement for that sort of cheerleading. It is about raising the profile and self-esteem of atheists as a group. But it seems to me that as soon as you do that, you are fulfilling the social functions of a religion, and a pretty literate one, at that, complete with prophets and believers quoting the scriptures as if they closed off all argument …