On the final night, I’m in a taxi with one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, arguably a doyen of his field. During the ride, I ask this brilliant man of science a delicate question...
I rediscovered Christianity as a university student in Quebec City. This was at a church that served the small English-speaking Protestant community, and it seemed to belong to a kind of Protestantism that had died out elsewhere in Canada. I wouldn't say that the English community in Quebec City was culturally isolated — they were up-to-date on the latest music and the latest fashions. But they seemed to come from an earlier time in the way they thought and behaved. They were nice people — friendly, humble, and decent.
I would say that they were ideologically isolated. Very few stores sold English-language newspapers or magazines, at least not in the mid-1980s. Most people in that community either subscribed to the Chronicle & Telegraph (a local weekly) or simply got their news from the French press. This was what made the local population so charming, both French and English. They were different in a fundamental way — and not just in the outward manifestations of culture.
All of that would change a decade later, as would the larger French Canadian community. Today, Quebec is dominated by the same generic neo-Western culture that now seems to prevail everywhere. And the church I attended has become just like churches elsewhere in Canada.
Whenever I go to a church today, I confine myself to speaking pleasantries. I avoid talking about anything else, and most other churchgoers seem to have adopted the same reflex. On one occasion, halfway through the service, I and my wife simply walked out. The sermon was devoted to Vladimir Zelensky — "a good man, a saintly man, a man in the image of God, a servant of the people who wants a world where children can play in peace."
When I discuss this with other people, they suggest joining a more "conservative" church. But those churches, too, are going in the same direction. The only exceptions are those that isolate themselves as much as possible from the dominant culture, like the Amish or certain ethnic communities that live their lives in a language other than English.
Hi Matt! I wasn't trying to nudge you on that article. I've made a few changes to it (mostly by adding links within the text). If Noah prefers the older version, that's fine with me.
In theory one could do their religion entirely without a congregation, and yet all religions insist on congregational worship as part of doctrine and even center it as part of being religious. So there must be something about congregational worship that can’t be replicated solo.
So if one accepts that congregational worship is central to religious practice, one is going to have to find a congregation. And no matter how hard one tries, it’s going to have deficiencies, some of which may particularly bother you.
I can’t answer for the trade offs of how to choose a congregation or when someone needs to change vs stick it out. Your description of church sounds pretty common as far as I can tell. And I have certainly heard the priest insert political views I disagree with into sermons and claimed it was god’s will before.
Still, my religious community is where I met my wife. It seems a better place for our kids to grow up in then the wider world. While the official greater church surrendered to COVID terror, the local church community rejected state mandates with bravery. That matters more to me then the priests latest topical diatribe.
Yes, we are social beings, and this is something that modern Christianity has forgotten.
For a long time I was like you. I felt that my church had its defects, but it still seemed better than the alternative, i.e., living alone or interacting with people who live atomized lives of hyper individualism. Things got to the point, however, where my church had become the alternative. It had fully assimilated into the values of its surrounding society, which itself was now much more atomized than it had been even a few decades ago.
I did consider joining another church. I gave up for several reasons:
1. I realized I had been drawn to church life for identitarian reasons. Church was a place where I could learn not only about myself but also about other people like me. And about their history and their narratives. When I went to other churches, I discovered they had other narratives, which sometimes portrayed people like me as "the bad guys."
2. In terms of political and ideological issues, almost all churches are trending in the same direction, even the so-called "conservative" ones. And I'm speaking as a one-time "liberal." I like gays and lesbians. I like people of other cultures. But we are now going far beyond that. It's no longer "the State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation." It's about the State mandating opinions on sexual identity in the schools, in publications, and even in personal conversations. It's no longer about "openness to other cultures." It's about ethno-masochism and self-liquidation.
3. I don't want to be a "church gypsy." I don't want to change churches every 10 years or so. I'm not the sort of person who can make friends easily, and even if I were I wouldn't enjoy that lifestyle.
Bless you, dear friend. Where will we go when all is lost? To the Sanctuaries of God he has built for us the surviving body whom have one last refuge: the home - the underground gathering place.
When living in Berkeley, I always joked that it had two kinds of weather: 70-and-dry and 70-and-wet. If it weren’t for all the Californians, it would be a great place to live!
Excellent article, particularly in its capacity to highlight that an increasingly expansive substratum of our modern college-educated population, especially those with a more harmonious relationship towards the classics, are beginning to sympathise with our perspective on the world.
Minor note: von Neumann was, for the majority of his life, ambivalent towards God, displaying a minor tendency towards belief. His conversion during the concluding days of his life largely resulted from the existential panic he was facing about his death, which conversion did nothing substantive to alleviate.
I would have loved to be at that conference... Were people feeling free to express their thoughts, or was there a heavy cloud hanging over the proceedings with a lot of posturing going on...?
An essay to emulate - Berkely dear to my heart - herewith my own Nietzschean soliloquy. With Dawkins, his revisiting became a dreary repetition lost in religious acrimony. Better to leave these issues of reverence to your master storytelling. https://humanism.substack.com/p/embracing-overlapping-lifetimes.
One of my heroines, Alex Kaschuta, also cringes when looking back at her previous militant atheism. Yet apart from the impolite stridency and the fact that it's rather gone out of fashion, in what way were the New Atheists wrong in claiming that today, knowing what we know about evolution etc., we have no good reason to believe in a God who made us, the heaven and the earth. Even from people who regret having been swept along by the New Atheist movement in the early 2000's, I still haven't heard what it was precisely that Dawkins et al got wrong. Can anyone enlighten me?
He mostly attacks the low-hanging fruit. I don't agree with William Lane Craig, but it's clear that, philosophically at least, he was in a different ball park (I mean, he was at least doing philosophy). Hitchens was a sophist. I didn't realise that when I was 19, but it's so clear to me now: he had next to no idea what he was talking about.
Yes, Hitch was my least favourite of the four. Good at arguing and making his opponent look daft but not that interested in the truth or understanding someone who sees things slightly differently.
I seem to remember watching Dawkins debating William Lane Craig and my memory of it doesn't align with yours. The latter may indeed have been more philosophical but that's only a good thing if it was good philosophy. I could claim that 'the world is round'. That's not a very philosophical claim yet it's probably true. Anyone wanting to deny it is almost bound to resort to 'philosophy' since I've never yet heard a convincing common sense argument against it.
I'd still be interested to know what Dawkins got factually wrong. Yes, it's probably true that religious people have higher fertility and may be generally happier than atheists. However, Dawkins never denied this.
I'd also like to know what the unnamed scientific genius said about why he found Christianity so convincing other than 'the higher comparative fertility of Christians'. It must have been profound since it left 'a quiet peace' in the room. What he said might have been worth including in the article.
My cringe atheist phase was partly what turned me to the right. Chiefly that the New Atheists, whilst swearing up and down that we were but quirks of evolution and biology, simultaneously denounced any difference in population groups when it came to intelligence. The kind of dismissive "magic sky daddy" thought they berated Christians for was the same line of attack they had against hereditarians.
The whole "evolution alone made us, but magically stopped at the neckline" seemed incredibly absurd even to an edgy 14-year old as I was. If the New Atheist movement were more honest on this single point they'd have been far less easily dismissed than they became. Especially as Christianity has also all but conceded on this point already much to the detriment of the Modern West.
People like Dawkins or (Chris) Hitchens were just another shade of modern liberal cowards. In an act of personal proto-Schmittian thought I instinctively knew to cast such people aside and consider them enemies from then on.
I too was largely driven off the Dawkins website after the Mods got sick of me arguing with the lefties on there. I had started as one of the first regular commentors but at some point I noticed that the site had changed from anti-religion to pro-progressive liberalism. Yet though I hate Dawkins' politics, I can't say I had ever noticed the attacks on hereditarians that you mentioned. What I did notice once was a disagreement with Phil Rushton, who at the time was my go-to scientist on all things one shouldn't be interested in. I have to say that I found Dawkins' view that differences between races were trivial and only skin-deep unconvincing. Whether he held that belief due to cowardice or because he genuinely believed it I can't say.
Either way, I see no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When your hero disappoints you there is a tendency to go to the other extreme and to then hate everything about them, as you seem to have done. This strikes me as daft since my atheism and liking for Dawkins never depended on whether I agreed with him on all matters. Let him be wrong on politics, culture and racial differences, there are plenty of other people I can read for those.
Anyway, whether cowardly or not, I'm still convinced Dawkins et al were right about religion and nothing in the article above made me rethink that. In fact quite the opposite. If the best reason the unnamed scientist could come up with for converting to Christianity was that Christians have higher fertility rates than atheists then he really can't be that great a thinker.
*If the best reason the unnamed scientist could come up with for converting to Christianity was that Christians have higher fertility rates than atheists then he really can't be that great a thinker.*
That's not even close to what's written. The 'sermon' is purposefully omitted from the story.
Dawkins has been tentatively pro-eugenics and relatively based on the topic of gender differences, and Sam Harris is more-or-less red-pilled on HBD, although it's not his go-to topic of conversation. Hitchens dismissed the latter but I don't think he really gave it serious thought, not sure about Dennett. I agree that New Atheism as a movement has a massive blind spot regarding evo-psych but the luminaries are a mixed bag on the topic.
I would agree the atheist arguments against the narrative cohesion of the bible and the weakness of arguments for Gods' factual existence are pretty solid. The arguments for religion being socially maladaptive are a lot more questionable, but I think Dawkins has been at least partly argued around on this point after some talks with Bret Weinstein et al. Harris is trying to slot guided meditation apps into the 'God shaped hole', more or less, which I think is a little reductive but at least it's making an effort. I don't think they're impervious to discussion.
Maybe Aporia will get a chance to post some excerpts from the 'sermon' at some point?
I hadn't realised the New Atheists believed religion was maladaptive, only wrong. In fact if it isn't true, which is what they believe, then surely it must be adaptive. After all, why would it be so ubiquitous if it was neither true nor adaptive?
Yes, Sam Harris is 'making an effort'. He is the most spiritually inclined of the New Atheists, the one who feels there ought to be something more. But it is precisely this effort which makes me suspicious. We don't have to try to believe the third planet from the sun or that we need oxygen to live, we just do believe it. It wouldn't bother me at all if it turned out that neither were true. But belief in God seems to require an element of trying, of wanting Him to exist. Without the wanting the evidence for His existence looks pretty thin. And truth be told, even WITH the wanting it only looks a little better.
What did you mean when you wrote, Harris is being 'a little reductive'? That meditation is religion stripped down to the bare bones?
Dawkins' position up until fairly recently was that religion was a kind of 'mind virus', and that the vast majority of humans throughout history walked around with a religious memeplex in their heads for the same reasons they walked around with worms in their intestines. I think his current position is that uncritical acceptance of the received wisdom of one's elders is broadly adaptive in slowly-changing environments, and religion piggybacks on that mechanism, though I'm paraphrasing a little. I guess you could call it a tentative concession to traditionalism.
"What did you mean when you wrote, Harris is being 'a little reductive'?"
I mean that... you know, a broad anthropological survey of religious belief suggests that meditation technique is a supplement to the moral narrative and afterlife system and not vice versa. For most people, at least.
There's a result in cybernetics known as the Good Regulator Theorem (the original apparently has some problems but the folks at lesswrong have been patching it up), which roughly states that any effective homeostatic regulator of a complex system has to be at least isomorphic to the truth. That's probably the strongest indirect argument I can see for the 'truth' of religion as a primary social regulator, though I also can't help noticing that at least one prominent world religion, e.g, failed to stamp out cousin marriage.
At some level I understand Harris' frustration with an apparently superfluous adherence to the supernatural, and I'm fairly sure you could lay out the math and charts and GWAS studies and explain to him or Dawkins or Dennett what our society's long-term policy deficiencies regarding, e.g, family formation and birthrates are, and they would adapt to the facts. But in the same way one can theorise that women spending hundreds of millennia of years evolving under a patriarchy has left most of them unable to recognise men outside that context, it's also possible that humans spending hundreds of millennia evolving under theocracy may have left most humans unable to recognise society outside that context.
I'm reminded of the Oxygen Catastrophe, in some ways.
Nice comments. I had to look up at least three things! ("What the devil is 'isomorphic?'")
I remember Dawkins saying it made sense for children to mindlessly and unquestioningly believe what they were told by their elders. Often trying things out for yourself can result in death by crocodile or something equally horrible. Adults also have the tendency. This has been Dawkins' position for as long as I've been reading him so maybe this isn't a recent concession. I think his view is that it makes evolutionary sense to err on the side of trusting your elders. Unfortnately what your elders say is sometimes wrong and once you spot it's wrong it's silly to go on trusting them, at least on that particular topic.
I'm not sure if this is right but I think Dawkins completely understands why people in the past, or scientifically illiterate people today, believe in God. What he finds odd are people like Francis Collins. You don't get much more scientifically literate than him yet he converted to Christianity later in life on a ramble after seeing a waterfall divided into three, which reminded him of the trinity and made him 'fall to his knees in prayer on the dewy grass' or some such nonsense. I would say it was likely that Collins had an emotional need to believe rather than being persuaded by the evidence, which is probably true of most people.
So yes, a belief in religion my come easily to humans because it's practically been imprinted on our DNA after being around for so long in our culture. (I suppose humans with a propensity to believe had better survival rates, and we are their descendants). I think Dawkins understands this but thinks that once you've understood how this false intuition comes to be in us, the spell ought to be broken. But clearly, with most people, it isn't.
Dawkins disrespects human aspiration and its long history of pining for an afterlife. Hope springs eternal, and no amount of philistinism will ever discredit it. It is our signature and destiny as a species.
"Well, for one, the higher comparative fertility of Christians. Lots of things like that…"
Is it really necessary to poiint out that this is an argument for Christianity giving a Darwinean advantage =(over some background) rather than being an argument for its truth?
I will add that achieving a higher reproductive rate by believing something you have no reason to believe strikes me as akin to achieving happiness by installing an electrode into a pleasure center in your brain. It might be effective, but it degrades your humanity.
"I guess I inherited my creativity from my white dad and my high IQ from my Asian mom" is just a clever way to brag about how smart and creative you are. To my mind it doesn't bode well for our hereditarian future.
"Perched next to it that first morning was Greg, a sane, sober homeless guy in his late sixties who secretly lived in the campus woods. He’d fought in Vietnam. "
The fall of Saigon was in April 1975, so 48 years before this article was written. So this is just barely possible, if the author's estimate of this guy's age is right. But homeless people look older thsn their actual age. And claiming to be a Vietnam vet is a fairly common falsehood. Remember that Indian, Nathan Phillips, who banged a drum under the nose of the kid from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky on a field trip to the Lincoln Memorial? He would be abouty 68 now, and he claimed to be a Vietnam vet, too.
This was wonderful
Many thanks. Means a lot -- I worked hard on this one!
-- MA
Love the imagery of the title's "open catacomb" followed by the shock of its "Nietzschean Right." Great piece.
I agree. Very hopeful.
This gave me the most intense feeling of FOMO. It's a sign of hope that gatherings such as this are taking place, in the belly of the beast no less.
I'm glad I conjured up the God of FOMO.
I rediscovered Christianity as a university student in Quebec City. This was at a church that served the small English-speaking Protestant community, and it seemed to belong to a kind of Protestantism that had died out elsewhere in Canada. I wouldn't say that the English community in Quebec City was culturally isolated — they were up-to-date on the latest music and the latest fashions. But they seemed to come from an earlier time in the way they thought and behaved. They were nice people — friendly, humble, and decent.
I would say that they were ideologically isolated. Very few stores sold English-language newspapers or magazines, at least not in the mid-1980s. Most people in that community either subscribed to the Chronicle & Telegraph (a local weekly) or simply got their news from the French press. This was what made the local population so charming, both French and English. They were different in a fundamental way — and not just in the outward manifestations of culture.
All of that would change a decade later, as would the larger French Canadian community. Today, Quebec is dominated by the same generic neo-Western culture that now seems to prevail everywhere. And the church I attended has become just like churches elsewhere in Canada.
Whenever I go to a church today, I confine myself to speaking pleasantries. I avoid talking about anything else, and most other churchgoers seem to have adopted the same reflex. On one occasion, halfway through the service, I and my wife simply walked out. The sermon was devoted to Vladimir Zelensky — "a good man, a saintly man, a man in the image of God, a servant of the people who wants a world where children can play in peace."
When I discuss this with other people, they suggest joining a more "conservative" church. But those churches, too, are going in the same direction. The only exceptions are those that isolate themselves as much as possible from the dominant culture, like the Amish or certain ethnic communities that live their lives in a language other than English.
Wonderful comment. Thank you Peter. Your next article will likely be out the week after next by the way. Noah loved it!
-- Matt
Hi Matt! I wasn't trying to nudge you on that article. I've made a few changes to it (mostly by adding links within the text). If Noah prefers the older version, that's fine with me.
No problem. Just wanted to update you!
In theory one could do their religion entirely without a congregation, and yet all religions insist on congregational worship as part of doctrine and even center it as part of being religious. So there must be something about congregational worship that can’t be replicated solo.
So if one accepts that congregational worship is central to religious practice, one is going to have to find a congregation. And no matter how hard one tries, it’s going to have deficiencies, some of which may particularly bother you.
I can’t answer for the trade offs of how to choose a congregation or when someone needs to change vs stick it out. Your description of church sounds pretty common as far as I can tell. And I have certainly heard the priest insert political views I disagree with into sermons and claimed it was god’s will before.
Still, my religious community is where I met my wife. It seems a better place for our kids to grow up in then the wider world. While the official greater church surrendered to COVID terror, the local church community rejected state mandates with bravery. That matters more to me then the priests latest topical diatribe.
Yes, we are social beings, and this is something that modern Christianity has forgotten.
For a long time I was like you. I felt that my church had its defects, but it still seemed better than the alternative, i.e., living alone or interacting with people who live atomized lives of hyper individualism. Things got to the point, however, where my church had become the alternative. It had fully assimilated into the values of its surrounding society, which itself was now much more atomized than it had been even a few decades ago.
I did consider joining another church. I gave up for several reasons:
1. I realized I had been drawn to church life for identitarian reasons. Church was a place where I could learn not only about myself but also about other people like me. And about their history and their narratives. When I went to other churches, I discovered they had other narratives, which sometimes portrayed people like me as "the bad guys."
2. In terms of political and ideological issues, almost all churches are trending in the same direction, even the so-called "conservative" ones. And I'm speaking as a one-time "liberal." I like gays and lesbians. I like people of other cultures. But we are now going far beyond that. It's no longer "the State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation." It's about the State mandating opinions on sexual identity in the schools, in publications, and even in personal conversations. It's no longer about "openness to other cultures." It's about ethno-masochism and self-liquidation.
3. I don't want to be a "church gypsy." I don't want to change churches every 10 years or so. I'm not the sort of person who can make friends easily, and even if I were I wouldn't enjoy that lifestyle.
Bless you, dear friend. Where will we go when all is lost? To the Sanctuaries of God he has built for us the surviving body whom have one last refuge: the home - the underground gathering place.
So wish you had recorded that ‘sermon’. Thanks for a beautiful essay.
When living in Berkeley, I always joked that it had two kinds of weather: 70-and-dry and 70-and-wet. If it weren’t for all the Californians, it would be a great place to live!
Excellent article, particularly in its capacity to highlight that an increasingly expansive substratum of our modern college-educated population, especially those with a more harmonious relationship towards the classics, are beginning to sympathise with our perspective on the world.
Minor note: von Neumann was, for the majority of his life, ambivalent towards God, displaying a minor tendency towards belief. His conversion during the concluding days of his life largely resulted from the existential panic he was facing about his death, which conversion did nothing substantive to alleviate.
You're a gifted writer...
I would have loved to be at that conference... Were people feeling free to express their thoughts, or was there a heavy cloud hanging over the proceedings with a lot of posturing going on...?
Thanks.
I think it’s probably the most ‘based’ mainstream conference you’ll find.
— Matt
An essay to emulate - Berkely dear to my heart - herewith my own Nietzschean soliloquy. With Dawkins, his revisiting became a dreary repetition lost in religious acrimony. Better to leave these issues of reverence to your master storytelling. https://humanism.substack.com/p/embracing-overlapping-lifetimes.
....and great narration.
Beautiful
One of my heroines, Alex Kaschuta, also cringes when looking back at her previous militant atheism. Yet apart from the impolite stridency and the fact that it's rather gone out of fashion, in what way were the New Atheists wrong in claiming that today, knowing what we know about evolution etc., we have no good reason to believe in a God who made us, the heaven and the earth. Even from people who regret having been swept along by the New Atheist movement in the early 2000's, I still haven't heard what it was precisely that Dawkins et al got wrong. Can anyone enlighten me?
He mostly attacks the low-hanging fruit. I don't agree with William Lane Craig, but it's clear that, philosophically at least, he was in a different ball park (I mean, he was at least doing philosophy). Hitchens was a sophist. I didn't realise that when I was 19, but it's so clear to me now: he had next to no idea what he was talking about.
Great deconstruction from a Hitchens mega fan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fopo9E7UAVQ
Yes, Hitch was my least favourite of the four. Good at arguing and making his opponent look daft but not that interested in the truth or understanding someone who sees things slightly differently.
I seem to remember watching Dawkins debating William Lane Craig and my memory of it doesn't align with yours. The latter may indeed have been more philosophical but that's only a good thing if it was good philosophy. I could claim that 'the world is round'. That's not a very philosophical claim yet it's probably true. Anyone wanting to deny it is almost bound to resort to 'philosophy' since I've never yet heard a convincing common sense argument against it.
I'd still be interested to know what Dawkins got factually wrong. Yes, it's probably true that religious people have higher fertility and may be generally happier than atheists. However, Dawkins never denied this.
I'd also like to know what the unnamed scientific genius said about why he found Christianity so convincing other than 'the higher comparative fertility of Christians'. It must have been profound since it left 'a quiet peace' in the room. What he said might have been worth including in the article.
My cringe atheist phase was partly what turned me to the right. Chiefly that the New Atheists, whilst swearing up and down that we were but quirks of evolution and biology, simultaneously denounced any difference in population groups when it came to intelligence. The kind of dismissive "magic sky daddy" thought they berated Christians for was the same line of attack they had against hereditarians.
The whole "evolution alone made us, but magically stopped at the neckline" seemed incredibly absurd even to an edgy 14-year old as I was. If the New Atheist movement were more honest on this single point they'd have been far less easily dismissed than they became. Especially as Christianity has also all but conceded on this point already much to the detriment of the Modern West.
People like Dawkins or (Chris) Hitchens were just another shade of modern liberal cowards. In an act of personal proto-Schmittian thought I instinctively knew to cast such people aside and consider them enemies from then on.
I too was largely driven off the Dawkins website after the Mods got sick of me arguing with the lefties on there. I had started as one of the first regular commentors but at some point I noticed that the site had changed from anti-religion to pro-progressive liberalism. Yet though I hate Dawkins' politics, I can't say I had ever noticed the attacks on hereditarians that you mentioned. What I did notice once was a disagreement with Phil Rushton, who at the time was my go-to scientist on all things one shouldn't be interested in. I have to say that I found Dawkins' view that differences between races were trivial and only skin-deep unconvincing. Whether he held that belief due to cowardice or because he genuinely believed it I can't say.
Either way, I see no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When your hero disappoints you there is a tendency to go to the other extreme and to then hate everything about them, as you seem to have done. This strikes me as daft since my atheism and liking for Dawkins never depended on whether I agreed with him on all matters. Let him be wrong on politics, culture and racial differences, there are plenty of other people I can read for those.
Anyway, whether cowardly or not, I'm still convinced Dawkins et al were right about religion and nothing in the article above made me rethink that. In fact quite the opposite. If the best reason the unnamed scientist could come up with for converting to Christianity was that Christians have higher fertility rates than atheists then he really can't be that great a thinker.
*If the best reason the unnamed scientist could come up with for converting to Christianity was that Christians have higher fertility rates than atheists then he really can't be that great a thinker.*
That's not even close to what's written. The 'sermon' is purposefully omitted from the story.
Dawkins has been tentatively pro-eugenics and relatively based on the topic of gender differences, and Sam Harris is more-or-less red-pilled on HBD, although it's not his go-to topic of conversation. Hitchens dismissed the latter but I don't think he really gave it serious thought, not sure about Dennett. I agree that New Atheism as a movement has a massive blind spot regarding evo-psych but the luminaries are a mixed bag on the topic.
I would agree the atheist arguments against the narrative cohesion of the bible and the weakness of arguments for Gods' factual existence are pretty solid. The arguments for religion being socially maladaptive are a lot more questionable, but I think Dawkins has been at least partly argued around on this point after some talks with Bret Weinstein et al. Harris is trying to slot guided meditation apps into the 'God shaped hole', more or less, which I think is a little reductive but at least it's making an effort. I don't think they're impervious to discussion.
Maybe Aporia will get a chance to post some excerpts from the 'sermon' at some point?
I hadn't realised the New Atheists believed religion was maladaptive, only wrong. In fact if it isn't true, which is what they believe, then surely it must be adaptive. After all, why would it be so ubiquitous if it was neither true nor adaptive?
Yes, Sam Harris is 'making an effort'. He is the most spiritually inclined of the New Atheists, the one who feels there ought to be something more. But it is precisely this effort which makes me suspicious. We don't have to try to believe the third planet from the sun or that we need oxygen to live, we just do believe it. It wouldn't bother me at all if it turned out that neither were true. But belief in God seems to require an element of trying, of wanting Him to exist. Without the wanting the evidence for His existence looks pretty thin. And truth be told, even WITH the wanting it only looks a little better.
What did you mean when you wrote, Harris is being 'a little reductive'? That meditation is religion stripped down to the bare bones?
Dawkins' position up until fairly recently was that religion was a kind of 'mind virus', and that the vast majority of humans throughout history walked around with a religious memeplex in their heads for the same reasons they walked around with worms in their intestines. I think his current position is that uncritical acceptance of the received wisdom of one's elders is broadly adaptive in slowly-changing environments, and religion piggybacks on that mechanism, though I'm paraphrasing a little. I guess you could call it a tentative concession to traditionalism.
"What did you mean when you wrote, Harris is being 'a little reductive'?"
I mean that... you know, a broad anthropological survey of religious belief suggests that meditation technique is a supplement to the moral narrative and afterlife system and not vice versa. For most people, at least.
There's a result in cybernetics known as the Good Regulator Theorem (the original apparently has some problems but the folks at lesswrong have been patching it up), which roughly states that any effective homeostatic regulator of a complex system has to be at least isomorphic to the truth. That's probably the strongest indirect argument I can see for the 'truth' of religion as a primary social regulator, though I also can't help noticing that at least one prominent world religion, e.g, failed to stamp out cousin marriage.
At some level I understand Harris' frustration with an apparently superfluous adherence to the supernatural, and I'm fairly sure you could lay out the math and charts and GWAS studies and explain to him or Dawkins or Dennett what our society's long-term policy deficiencies regarding, e.g, family formation and birthrates are, and they would adapt to the facts. But in the same way one can theorise that women spending hundreds of millennia of years evolving under a patriarchy has left most of them unable to recognise men outside that context, it's also possible that humans spending hundreds of millennia evolving under theocracy may have left most humans unable to recognise society outside that context.
I'm reminded of the Oxygen Catastrophe, in some ways.
Nice comments. I had to look up at least three things! ("What the devil is 'isomorphic?'")
I remember Dawkins saying it made sense for children to mindlessly and unquestioningly believe what they were told by their elders. Often trying things out for yourself can result in death by crocodile or something equally horrible. Adults also have the tendency. This has been Dawkins' position for as long as I've been reading him so maybe this isn't a recent concession. I think his view is that it makes evolutionary sense to err on the side of trusting your elders. Unfortnately what your elders say is sometimes wrong and once you spot it's wrong it's silly to go on trusting them, at least on that particular topic.
I'm not sure if this is right but I think Dawkins completely understands why people in the past, or scientifically illiterate people today, believe in God. What he finds odd are people like Francis Collins. You don't get much more scientifically literate than him yet he converted to Christianity later in life on a ramble after seeing a waterfall divided into three, which reminded him of the trinity and made him 'fall to his knees in prayer on the dewy grass' or some such nonsense. I would say it was likely that Collins had an emotional need to believe rather than being persuaded by the evidence, which is probably true of most people.
So yes, a belief in religion my come easily to humans because it's practically been imprinted on our DNA after being around for so long in our culture. (I suppose humans with a propensity to believe had better survival rates, and we are their descendants). I think Dawkins understands this but thinks that once you've understood how this false intuition comes to be in us, the spell ought to be broken. But clearly, with most people, it isn't.
Dawkins disrespects human aspiration and its long history of pining for an afterlife. Hope springs eternal, and no amount of philistinism will ever discredit it. It is our signature and destiny as a species.
Believe in an afterlife if you can. When you die you won't be disappointed 😂
"Well, for one, the higher comparative fertility of Christians. Lots of things like that…"
Is it really necessary to poiint out that this is an argument for Christianity giving a Darwinean advantage =(over some background) rather than being an argument for its truth?
I will add that achieving a higher reproductive rate by believing something you have no reason to believe strikes me as akin to achieving happiness by installing an electrode into a pleasure center in your brain. It might be effective, but it degrades your humanity.
"I guess I inherited my creativity from my white dad and my high IQ from my Asian mom" is just a clever way to brag about how smart and creative you are. To my mind it doesn't bode well for our hereditarian future.
You weren’t there, but you understand the tone and intention perfectly? Where do I acquire your powers of telepathy?
- MA
I'm sorry, they're genetic, of course!
"Perched next to it that first morning was Greg, a sane, sober homeless guy in his late sixties who secretly lived in the campus woods. He’d fought in Vietnam. "
The fall of Saigon was in April 1975, so 48 years before this article was written. So this is just barely possible, if the author's estimate of this guy's age is right. But homeless people look older thsn their actual age. And claiming to be a Vietnam vet is a fairly common falsehood. Remember that Indian, Nathan Phillips, who banged a drum under the nose of the kid from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky on a field trip to the Lincoln Memorial? He would be abouty 68 now, and he claimed to be a Vietnam vet, too.
But he wasn't.
what was said by 「genius」?
The man of science was obviously Jonathan Anomaly
He’s a philosopher 🫤