Letters to the Editor
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Tired old arguments masquerading as sophistication
Theologians seem to offer nothing new - ever. Haught is no exception.
"Ironically," Haught writes, "ID advocates share with their ideological enemies, the evolutionary materialists, the assumption that science itself can provide ultimate explanations."
Nonsense. Evolutionary materialists make no such assumption. They merely hold that doesn’t make sense to believe things that are unsupported by evidence, or, even worse, things that contradicted by evidence. Any serious scientist believes that all explanations are provisional – subject to revision when new evidence must be accommodated. Haught is the ignorant one - he seems to have no idea of what science is or how it operates.
“…there were atheists in the past who were much more theologically educated than these. My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what's going on in the world of theology.”
That may be true, but irrelevant. This objection is easily dispensed with – and Dawkins has already done so. If the central assumptions of religion is false, i.e., if there exists no personal God, knowledge of the elaborations of theology are not necessary to hold a perfectly valid atheistic position. Neither I nor Haught need to know the finery associated with the theology of Norse religion to be an atheist with respect to Thor and Odin and other Norse Gods.
“it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth”
This is a specious argument that verges on being self-contradictory. “Dogma” is defined as “a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.” The process of science is basically the opposite of this – nothing is, in principle, incontrovertible. As for whether atheists believe that only science can offer reliable truths – they do no such thing. Atheists merely offer skepticism: to repeat, why believe things that are unsupported by evidence, or, even worse, things that contradicted by evidence? Atheists do not hold that there can be no other path to truth than science, only that we haven’t seen one – and that no religious creed we have seen comes anywhere near close.
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Something's Always Missing
Some things have always troubled me about the arguments made by people like Haught. First of all, they shrewdly avoid saying what they believe explicitly. Let me try and explain why. It is all well and good to say that science has problems with giving purpose or hope to our lives (although I hardly believe that many nontheists would argue that they need anything other than existence to deliver this), and that maybe this necessitates some higher being (or beings?) that cannot be empirically detected (even though still somehow influencing the universe in ways that go against what would be expected by physics). However, Haught is not arguing for deism (which itself has some serious philosophical problems, the simplest of which is either recursive or circular: "What then gives this god purpose or hope?").
Instead, he is arguing for a specific theistic world-view, a Judeo-Christian one. A system in which there is the One God who Punishes, who Heals, and who Answers Prayers as revealed by the God-inspired Bible (if not literally, then metaphorically). This is quite untenable philosophically. There is overwhelming evidence that the Bible contradicts historical knowledge and scientific discovery (there is no debate on this, even among theologians). If you are a fundamentalist, this poses no problem, since it is simply the historical record and science that is wrong (fair enough - there is a probability, albeit astronomically miniscule, of this). However, Haught is intellectually honest enough to admit that the Good Book makes literally false statements. But unless interpreted so loosely (metaphorically or otherwise) as to make it meaningless, the Bible makes an overwhelming number of specific claims about what God has done, what He is doing, and what He will do for - and to - us. And if one assumes (quite correctly) that some of this narrative is contradictory or interpretive, as Haught does, then his case becomes extremely tenuous at best. Let me elaborate on this last point.
There are thousands of religions in this world - many of them precursors to Christianity, many of them pantheistic, many of them polytheistic - nearly all of which have ardent supporters and some form of revelation, nearly all of which give purpose and hope...and specifics. There are also people who have no religion at all - even primitive peoples (consider the Piraha, for instance, whose language has no tenses, recursion, or arithmetic). Why are we to believe that one specific book written and rewritten some 2000 years ago (in fact, developed long before then) should be the scaffolding for our spirituality and purpose? It is very far from clear that one system has precedence over another. They all make claims that are not only unsupported by evidence, but also unfalsifiable. Again, if Haught is arguing for a vague kind of deism, then my objections here are moot (although if more space were permitted, I could explain the standard arguments that render deism intellectually vacuous).
It is here that I would ask the (rather standard) questions Haught would rather not be asked:
Is there a Heaven and a Hell? If so, where will all of the good nonbelievers go? How about those humans that were around before there even were any religions?
If God is good, then why does he permit so much destruction and suffering?
If a God created and imbued humans with reason, why would he not want them to use it? Why would he use fear of punishment to motivate good?
Why is your vision of God the truth and not any of the plethora of others?
Can morality be evolutionary? All of the available evidence suggests that fairness, the Golden Rule, and a Moral Calculus are built into our genes (and the genes of other primates, not to mention other mammals). Is it possible that religion sprung from a natural human desire to explain causally our strange and innate emotions (such as guilt)?
Why can't we be good to each other and hopeful because it makes sense to do so? (We are all in this weird and wonderful universe together, after all). Why do we need your God (and not some other god or no god) for this?
Once specifics become part of the debate, the severe problems with this line of thought become quite obvious.