by Salman Hameed

The Egypt Independent has a nice profile of the growing number of atheists in Egypt. Instead of just relying on second-hand accounts, the members of the newspaper staff met with 15 atheists at cafe in downtown Cairo. The stories they tell are familiar and heartbreaking: families disowning kids,  parents resorting to violence, and even companies firing individuals for their (non)religious views.

So couple of general comments: It is not surprising that atheists exists in deeply religious Muslim countries. But even within atheism, there are all sorts of different shades - from the more familiar agnostics and atheists, to those who consider themselves not-religious but may still pray regularly (a case of cultural conditioning) to those who cognizantly embrace the surrounding Muslim culture and its affiliated religious customs. But overall we are seeing a increasing trend of self-expression especially when it comes to religious beliefs ("it is my belief") and this comes from the spread of university education as well as an exposure to broader debates via the internet and satellite television (there is also a trend of increased religiosity based on personal interpretation of the Qur'an - and it is shaped by the same self-confidence from education and worldly experience). As much as I disagree with Dawkins' Islamophobia, he does deserve credit for making atheism an acceptable "religious" position worldwide. Not surprisingly, the article also
noted the fact that most of these "open" atheists are young - in their 20s. It is the same generation that has been behind the movements for democratic representations as well.

Where will it lead to? Indeed in the short run there is going to be a backlash. But overall, we are looking at the early stages of the development of religion as a matter of personal belief. While much of these atheists and cultural Muslims may belong to a privileged or upwardly mobile middle classes, there still exists enormous socioeconomic and education disparities where religion can be used as a weapon. This is something we are seeing in Bangladesh right now (see this earlier post: Standing with Bangladesh's Secular Bloggers), where Jamaat-e-Islami has been "accusing" their young rivals of being atheists and has been successful in shifting the focus away from their own atrocities in the 1971 civil war.

So stay tuned on this issue.

Now back to the Egypt article. Here is the bit where these young atheists talk about the consequences of coming out as an atheist:

Those who have come out publicly as atheists have been not only isolated by their friends and families, but also society in general. However, others who turn down their familial religion have faced many worse trials than mere isolation.

Asmaa Omar, 24, who has just graduated the Faculty of Engineering, said that once she revealed her beliefs to her family, they began to physically and mentally torture her. Her father slapped her in the face and broke her jaw. She was not able to eat properly for seven months.

Both her immediate and extended families began to insult her. “You just want to have free relations with boys,” they would say, or “You used to be the best girl in the family,” and “Now you’re a prostitute.”

By now, she said, most of her friends have cut their ties with her and other girls no longer speak to her after she took off her veil.

Milad Suliman, or better known as Evan, was fired from his company over his beliefs. His boss confronted him with the ideas he shared on his Facebook page and told him the company could not have an atheist among its employees.

His family was not happy either. They told him his ideas were shameful and this was the reason their home was no longer blessed.

Another atheist, Sarah al-Kamel, 24, fears this very isolation, thus has chosen not tell her family of her beliefs after her newly adopted ideas created a wedge between her and her friends.

Despite the risks of coming out, many atheists I spoke to claim their numbers have slowly been on the rise following the 25 January Revolution. The rise in atheism could be seen as a by-product of the revolution pushing the boundaries of commonly-held belief systems and breaking down previous political, social and religious restrictions.

Read the full article here.

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by Salman Hameed

If you have a chance you should read at least on of the books by primatologist, Frans de Waal. I was introduced to his work with The Ape and the Sushi Master and have been a fan ever since. He works on the origins of morality and is a fantastic writer. His latest book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates looks at the moral landscape today, including the debates between militant atheism and religion. From a review in Nature:

Frans de Waal's latest book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, is both an exceptionally good

read and a tour de force of scholarship. In it, de Waal states his argument for the evolution of human empathy with the sophistication of a well-grounded, risk-taking scientist who can venture into philosophy.
...
De Waal views extreme strains of atheism as getting “all worked up about the absence of something”, at one point using the fanciful device of a talking bonobo as his mouthpiece (hence the book's title). His view is that religion is undeniably in our bones — even though evidence of primate precursors seems less than substantial. This does not mean that he is pro-religion, however. The Bonobo and the Atheist is permeated with the ethos of secular humanism, using the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights — a vision of humanity freed from narrow moral constraints — as a touchstone for his arguments. 

In his discussion of empathy and morality, de Waal has little time for what he calls “veneer theories” that reduce altruism to 'natural' selfishness. As he shows, human altruism has analogues in a wide range of species, even though sterile ants' care for the offspring of their queen can hardly be labelled empathy. When dolphins assist humans struggling in the water, we may at least suggest some basic similarities. But when a chimpanzee, sharing more than 95% of our DNA, helps an unrelated member of its group to lick a wound it cannot reach, a type of empathy very near the human is surely coming into play. 

Many evolutionists favour chimpanzees as ancestral models. Whereas de Waal does look frequently to chimpanzees as exemplars of primate altruism, he champions the less violent bonobo — not least because its habitat, like that of our common primate ancestor, remains the tropical forest, whereas chimpanzees and humans have evolved into ecological generalists. 

De Waal looks to mothering and infant care by non-kin, a basic form of empathy discussed by primatologist Sarah Hrdy in Mothers and Others (Harvard University Press, 2011), as the foundation of human altruism and complex cooperation, and as his prime evolutionary building block for morality. He also emphasizes the importance of emotion in moral choices, citing the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (Allen Lane, 2012). Haidt's empirical investigations of subjects' disgusted reactions to incest demonstrate that when it comes to morality, raw emotions trump rationality.

Read the full review here.

Also, see Frans de Waal's TED talk, Moral Behavior in Animals:


And he recently got embroiled in a controversy when he criticized some of the New Atheists. Here is de Waal's response and this also nicely encapsulates his book:

Having heard the protests by prominent atheists against the excerpt published by salon.com (under the inflammatory banner "Has militant atheism become a religion?"), let me say that the role of religion and atheism covers only about 10% of my book. It is an important part, hence the book title, but needs to be weighed against the rest of my message. In order to discuss the biological origins of morality, which is its central theme, I need to get two groups out of the way. One is fundamentalist religion, for which morality comes from God. The other are the neo-atheists who, by labeling themselves rational and everyone else irrational, have closed the door to open and tolerant debate. Calling believers idiots can't possibly be a good discussion opener. This explains my stance against militant atheism (a label that is not mine, but Dawkins' by the way). 

My book is about how morality doesn't come from above but rather is an evolutionary product. I speak of bottom-up morality, in line with the ideas of some psychologists (Haidt), philosophers and neuroscientists (Kitcher, Churchland). The book is rooted in my research on monkeys, apes, elephants, and other animals, and my conviction that they show the beginnings of morality. I have written about this before, but now I am bringing religion into the mix. Even though I don't think religion is absolutely critical, it is also not irrelevant. The question how humans would fare without it is hard to answer for the simple reason that religion is universal. There are no societies that are not now and never were religious. 

Morality promotes cooperation. It asks us to put our personal interests on the back-burner and work for the common good. It is a complex system that religion and philosophy have tried to capture in simple rules (such as the golden rule or the ten commandments), but these rules provide only imperfect summaries. We like to think of morality as top-down, but this is merely a left-over of the story of God on the mountain top. There is no evidence that it started out as a top-down system. Science is rather coming around to the Humean view of morality guided by intuitions and passions. Looking at other primates, we recognize many of the same tendencies that underlie our morality, such as rules of reciprocity, empathy and sympathy, a sense of fairness, and the need to get along. Monkeys, for example, object to unfair distributions of resources (see the end of my TED talk), and chimpanzees do each other favors even if there is nothing in it for themselves. Bonobos are probably the most empathic animals of all, and the recent genome data places them extremely close to us.
...
Human morality goes beyond all of this, but ancient primate tendencies do play a crucial role. We have been indoctrinated that nature is "red in tooth and claw," and entirely selfish, but we are now learning about conflict resolution, cooperation, empathy, and the like, in our fellow primates. They are far more harmony-oriented than people realize. I don't necessarily call apes "moral beings," but we share with them an old psychology without which we'd never have become moral.

Atheism will need to be combined with something else, something more constructive than its opposition to religion, to be relevant to our lives. The only possibility is to embrace morality as natural to our species. Otherwise atheism will end up in the Big Black Hole that Thomas Henry Huxley created for himself in the 19th Century. He did not believe morality came from God, but also denied its possible evolution. He could not explain where it came from except for saying that we had to fight very hard against our own nature to become moral (which is of course an ancient Christian position related to original sin, and so on). In this, Huxley went against Darwin himself, who did see room for moral evolution, as explained in "The Descent of Man." To debate these important issues we all need to step back, stop shouting, and move beyond unanswerable questions about the existence of God. Atheists should be interested in this debate and I hope they will join in.

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by Salman Hameed

Earlier this month, as part of our Science and Religion Lecture Series at Hampshire College, we had a fantastic lecture by Steve Nadler on Spinoza's God (or Nature). Here is your chance to find out if Spinoza was an agnostic, deist, pantheist, or an atheist. Plus, it is fascinating to hear about how Spinoza viewed succumbing to wonder and mystery (this comes out in the Q&A session after the talk). If you have some time, you should definitely check out the lecture.

As a refresher, here is the abstract for the talk:

Abstract:

In 1656, the young Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community with extreme prejudice; by the end of his short life he was regarded as one of the most radical and dangerous thinkers of his time. Among his alleged "abominable heresies" was, according to one contemporary report, the belief that "God exists only philosophically." In this lecture, we will examine Spinoza's conception of God, whereby God is identified with Nature, and address the question of whether he is, as is so often claimed, a "God intoxicated" pantheist or a devious atheist, as well as the implications of this for his views on religion.

Here is the video of the lecture:


Here is the Q&A session:

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by Salman Hameed

Last week, NPR had a thoughtful and interesting series on "nones" - people who do not affiliate with any religion - in the US. It was prompted by recent polls that show that the number of "nones" has been increasing steadily for the past few decades and that the younger people today are not only more religious unaffiliated than their elders today, but that they are more religiously unaffiliated than their younger counterparts in the past (also see an earlier post: Global Religious Landscape - Young Muslims and the Unaffiliated). This is from the Gallup poll for the US:

And here is a Pew survey that breaks the data by age:

Here are particular characteristics of this group:

• comprises atheists and agnostics as well as those who ally themselves with "nothing in particular"
• includes many who say they are spiritual or religious in some way and pray every day
• overwhelmingly says they are not looking to find an organized religion that would be right for them
• is socially liberal, with three-quarters favoring same-sex marriage and legal abortion
• Perhaps most striking is that one-third of Americans under 30 have no religious affiliation. 

I have posted below links to the full series. If you have time to listen to just one, then check out the first one at the bottom (it includes an interview with sociologist, Robert Putnam. There they talk about the possible reasons for the rise of "nones", including the idea that it is because of decreasing importance of social institutions in general. But while listening to the full series, I was wondering about the possible trends in the Muslim world. We know that the median age of Muslims in the world is 23. What kind of trends should we expect? While the importance of religion is quite high in much of the Muslim world (see this post here for plots on this), that may not tell us much about the diversity of beliefs (i.e. religion can be very important, but the way people practice it can vary a lot). Pew did ask a question about perceptions of religious orthodoxy within Islam. In particular, they asked if "there is only one interpretation of Islam" or can it be interpreted in different ways. Not surprisingly, a majority of respondents in most countries agreed with the single interpretation statement, with Morocco, Tunisia, the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon and Iraq being the exceptions, with under 50%. Interestingly, Muslims in the US are outliers on this:

Much to ponder about. Here are the links to this NPR special. If you have time, you should listen to all of these as they provide a glimpse of the complex ways people deal with religion and life.

Losing Our Religion

the two-way

As Social Issues Drive Young From Church, Leaders Try To Keep Them(466)  

January 18, 2013 Morning Edition wraps up its weeklong look at the growing number of people who say they do not identify with a religion. In the final conversation, two religious leaders describe what they do to attract young people to the church.

On Morning EditionPlaylist

Making Marriage Work When Only One Spouse Believes In God(332)  

January 17, 2013 Every couple has differences and disagreements to navigate. But what happens when the couple disagrees on the fundamental question of faith? Maria Peyer is a church-attending Lutheran; her husband, Mike Bixby, is an atheist. But they've found ways to accept and support each other's beliefs.

On Morning EditionPlaylist

On Religion, Some Young People Show Both Doubt And Respect(200)  

January 17, 2013 NPR's David Greene talks with a group of young adults who've struggled with the role of faith and religion in their lives. They do not speak of emptiness without religion, but recognize that it fills needs. They talk of having respect for religion, but say that it's not something they identify with now.

On Morning EditionPlaylist

After Tragedy, Nonbelievers Find Other Ways To Cope(372)  

January 16, 2013 Many have long turned to religion for solace in the aftermath of a tragedy, but that's not an option for the nonreligious or those whose faith is destroyed by the event. For the nonreligious, dealing with trauma and loss often requires forging one's own path.

On Morning EditionPlaylist

More Young People Are Moving Away From Religion, But Why?(1147)  

January 15, 2013 One-fifth of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, and those younger than 30 especially seem to be drifting from organized religion. Six young adults — some with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Seventh-day Adventist backgrounds — explore their struggle with faith and religion.

On Morning EditionPlaylist

the two-way

Losing Our Religion: The Growth Of The 'Nones'(731)  

January 14, 2013 As religious as this country may be, many Americans are not religious at all. The group of religiously unaffiliated – dubbed "nones"— has been growing. One-fifth of Americans say they're nones, as are one in three under 30. They're socially liberal and aren't looking for an organized religion.

On Morning EditionPlaylist

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by Salman Hameed

Steve Paulson has a knack for asking probing questions about science and religion. He did that in his excellent book, Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Science and Religion. You should definitely check it out if you are interested in knowing how scientists and philosophers navigate the questions of science and religion, and you will find a full range of responses in his book. So it is again a pleasure to read his interview of neuroscientist, Christof Koch. Here are some of the questions that are relevant for the blog:

You like big philosophical questions, don't you?
Koch: Well, I think a lot about my place in the universe. What are we doing here? How did we come about? Does it mean anything? I like to think about these problems. You know, usually you ask these questions when you're 18 and 19, and then you get on with the business of living. Even at my age, I still ask these questions because I want to know how it all fits together before I die.
...
You write about how you grew up an observant Catholic and then lost your faith in a personal god. But it seems that the search for meaning, that yearning for the absolute, is still with you.
Koch: That's correct. I try to be guided by what's scientifically plausible. Of course, there is a huge amount of randomness, but we also find ourselves in this universe that is very conducive to life. I don't know how to explain it, but I see this arrow of progress toward an ever-larger complexity and to a larger consciousness and that fills me. I don't know what it means. I can't understand it but I see it. I observe it and I'm happy about it.
So you're not exactly an atheist.Koch: I'm not a conventional atheist who believes it's all just a random formation. I believe there is meaning. But as you said, I don't believe in a personal god or any of the standard things that you're supposed to believe as a Christian.

Your book suggests that you're a deist, maybe believing there's some sort of supreme being that created the laws of the universe but does not intervene in it.
Koch: I don't know. I grew up with that picture in mind, which is very difficult to get rid of when you acquire it in your formative years. This God I have in mind is very ephemeral. It's much closer to Spinoza's God than to the God of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. The mystic Angelus Silesius, who was a contemporary of Descartes, had this wonderful quote: "God is a lucent nothing, no Now nor Here can touch him." It's totally different from any conventional conception of a god. In fact, it's much closer to Buddhist thought than to any monotheistic religion. I just grew up calling this "God" because that's my tradition, but it's not any god that we in the Western world would recognize. There isn't an old guy with a beard who watches over us.

Do you look for meaning in the world of science?Koch: I find meaning in science. It's this incredibly beautiful thing. Isn't it a wonder that we can understand the universe using mathematics that's comprehensible to our minds? That's just absolutely amazing. There's no law in the universe that says it should be like that. Physics can make predictions about the shape of the early universe. We can predict the size and the pitch of the initial bang in the universe. That's just amazing that the universe actually is comprehensible to our minds. So that fills me with great contentment.

Koch also worked with Francis Crick, a Nobel-Laureate and the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule. Crick was also a prominent and vocal atheist. Here is the part of the interview where Koch talks about Crick and his atheism. I think the anecdote about what Crick was doing 2 hours before his death is absolutely phenomenal:

What was it like to work with someone who was so brilliant?Koch: Sheer joy and pleasure. So often he would take the same fact that I read and he would come to a startling new conclusion. He made this jump because he connected these facts to, say, something he'd done earlier in molecular biology. He was very good at using metaphors and analogies from other fields. Later on he didn't sleep well, so he would often lie awake at night and think about these things and come to the breakfast table with great new ideas. He wasn't afraid of continuously throwing out ideas. Many of them were crazy. Many were interesting but didn't work. Occasionally there were wonderful ideas. He just generated so many more ideas than other people did. 

Crick was also an ardent atheist. In fact, didn't he leave Churchill College in Cambridge because they built a chapel over his objections?Koch: That's correct. I was just at Churchill College and I visited the college because of that story. 

Given your own background as a Catholic, did you talk much about religion with Crick?Koch: We did. He was gentle with respect to my faith. When I first met him I still went to church and took my family there. He didn't push me in any aggressive way. He knew I had some religious sensibilities but it didn't impede our ability to have vigorous discussions about the neural correlates of consciousness. I guess his ardor for fighting against religion had cooled by the time I met him. 

Did you ever push back? Did you ever challenge his atheist assumptions?Koch: No. We once had a very interesting discussion about death. It's one of the things I greatly admire about him. Not only that he was a genius and a great inspiration, but also his attitude about dying. He knew he had a short time to live because he had colon cancer. Every morning when I came in, we talked a bit about the current state of his health but then he would say, "Okay, let's move onto more interesting things" and we would talk about science. He kept that attitude until the bitter end. Two hours before he passed away, he dictated to his secretary the last correction to one of our papers. He knew he was going to die but he didn't let it interfere with the business of trying to understand how consciousness arises from the brain. 

And here is Koch's take on the issue of soul:

Maybe the old religious definitions of the soul are outdated. Is part of your project trying to formulate a new, science-based idea of the soul?
Koch: These theories about the complexity of consciousness are essentially a 21st century conception of the soul. The soul in this case is conscious experience. It's attached to certain physical systems. They could be computers or biological systems. However, unlike the classical soul from Plato onwards, the soul disappears if this physical system is destroyed. 

This is not a soul that can survive death.Koch: It could in principle survive death by using technology - if my brain has some fancy reconstruction technology to transcribe it into software on silicon. In principle this simulacrum could survive death and have aspects of the old me. Unless I have a backup code, my soul dies when my brain dies. End of game, unfortunately.

Read the full interview here.

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by Salman Hameed

A little while ago I had mentioned that our local theater is doing a Woody Allen retrospective. I just came back from Hannah and Her Sisters, which I had not seen before (It is good - but not in the league of Annie Hall). One of the story lines involves hypochondriac Mickey, played of course by Woody Allen. Here is a very funny 10 minute segment where Mickey goes through an existential crisis. It includes an apt response to the problem of evil (and the Nazis): " How the hell do I know about the Nazis. I don't know how the can-opener works".

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by Salman Hameed

Here is an interesting Fresh Air interview with author Christopher Beha. His new novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, tackles the subject of some people leave the religion they are born into, and why some people return to it. He was raised as a Catholic and then left his faith. Instead of being hostile to faith, his interest in religion - and more specifically - the reasons why people believe grew after after that. His novel seems to be a reflection of that interest:

In the novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder, writer Charlie Blakeman runs into his former college love after 10 years and finds out that she has converted to Catholicism. Charlie can't make sense of her conversion, but as he finds out more about Sophie's past, he sees her life is more complicated than he previously thought. When Sophie once again disappears, Charlie sets out to discover what has happened to her. 

Author Christopher Beha "was interested in writing about a person of faith," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "while also writing about the attempt of someone who does not have that capacity for faith to try to understand it." 

A former Catholic himself, Beha says, "I'm someone who was raised Catholic and was indeed a believing Catholic, not just a cultural Catholic by upbringing, who then lost his faith. And in lots of ways, faith became much more interesting to me once I didn't have it."

Listen to the full interview here.

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by Salman Hameed

Just yesterday, I had a post that pointed to a reasonable Muslim response to a billboard promoting atheism in Arabic and English. The response came from the head of the Islamic Center located two blocks from the billboard. The argument was couched in terms of freedom of speech and I thought it was a good response. But a reasonable response - I guess - doesn't make for good headlines. So CNN has a report on the same billboard - but with the headline: Atheist billboard draws Muslim ire. No seriously - where is the "Muslim ire"? Interestingly, the title of the actual title is simply Atheist Billboard Goes Up in NJ Muslim Neighborhood. Even in the "article", unnamed Muslims only offered disagreements with the message, but support for the right of speech on the billboard. Oh - the "ire"!! But CNN used the stereotype of Muslims in the US - an assumption of angry reaction - to lure the readers to the article. Here is the screenshot of the US section of CNN today:

And ladies and gentlemen - this is one of the ways media propagates stereotypes. Not to mention the fact that there is no actual news in this story. But then, news organizations like CNN stopped providing news a while ago.

Read the related post: A Reasonable Muslim Response Over Atheism Billboard.

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by Salman Hameed

Here is an excellent talk by Alain de Botton called Atheism 2.0. Instead of ridiculing religions, he looks at the positive virtues they have to offer and suggests ways in which they can be incorporates within atheism. He makes an interesting point that in the 19th century, with the decline of religion in Europe, many turned to literature to find lessons in life and morality.

By the way, I had to chance to give a TEDx talk at Amherst College yesterday as part of TEDx Pioneer Valley. It was a fantastic experience and the whole atmosphere was phenomenal. Plus all the talks were great I will post up the video when its available.

Here is Alain de Botton:

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by Salman Hameed

This short segment is a good demonstration of the difference between Sagan and somebody like Dawkins. In many ways Sagan is saying the same things,  but he is not assuming that those who follow religious beliefs are simply idiots. Furthermore, he adds a larger humanistic tone by mentioning skin color and ethnicities alongside with religion. Enjoy.

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by Salman Hameed

Pakistan is an incredibly diverse society. I have encountered people who are surprised to find that there are Hindus, Christians, Parsis (Zoroastrians) there, along with Muslims of many different shades. The problem is that it also has its share of puritans there, who want to create a monolithic society in its own specific image. This is still a minority population - though it has been gaining ground for the past couple of decades. But if we are looking for a transition to the modern world, then we have to embrace the differences. Recently there have been a number of articles in the english newspapers in Pakistan arguing for more tolerance. Some of these were triggered by Pakistan government's unfortunate efforts in the UN, on behalf of the OIC, against protecting basic rights for gays, lesbians and transgender people.

But then, as if to be in an argument itself, Pakistan also produced an excellent new film, Bol, that addresses some of the taboo topics associated with sexuality in the society. I had a chance to see it on my last to Pakistan and liked it very much. The second half of the falters a bit, but its first half is emotionally powerful and deals with local transgender issues. It also questions the escapist and often fatalistic reliance on God in a conservative society like Pakistan. If you get a chance, do see it (see the trailer here).

Just when we settle down for such stories, we then hear about students from Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), beating up students of philosophy at Punjab University. What? Philosophy students? C'mon.

If a larger scientific culture is to emerge from Pakistan, tolerance of other view points have to be the starting point. This tolerance is not just for intellectual matters, but also for differences in faith, sexuality, and ethnicities. It is the feeling that one can say and discuss things without repercussion. The media in Pakistan has become more open to taboo subjects, but it remains to be seen if this is presented as sensationalism or as part of a responsible dialogue. Like everything else, currently it is a little bit of both.

Adding to the tapestry of Pakistan's diversity, is now a group called Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics (PAA). Atheism has never really been an issue in Pakistan - but then there has never been a large explicitly atheist identifiable group either. Some of the earlier socialist (and even communist)  groups in Pakistan, both student and political, have served as a base for some of the less religious as well as those favoring a strongly secular state. PAA is also talking about separation of state and religion, but its primary emphasis appears to be more on identity and raising awareness than politics.

Lets hope we celebrate differences instead of exploiting them.

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by Salman Hameed

Today's New York Times has a nice piece that looks at the science-religion debate in a nuanced way. The article talks about the rise of public religious conservatism in the US, and the subsequent backlash in the form of New Atheism. However, the article devotes much of the space to the sophisticated ideas of philosopher Philip Kitcher. He was our Science & Religion speaker in spring of 2010 and you should check out the video of his fantastic lecture here: Religion after Darwin?

The NYT article starts with the Dawkins' claims about scientific inconsistencies (or inadequacies) in religion, but points out the multiple ways people get to religion:

Led by the biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion,” atheism has taken on a new life in popular religious debate. Dawkins’s brand of atheism is scientific in that it views the “God hypothesis” as obviously inadequate to the known facts. In particular, he employs the facts of evolution to challenge the need to postulate God as the designer of the universe. For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion.
Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.

This may seem obvious but people often forget the multiple pathways to religion and religious beliefs. The role of evidence, in fact, can be minimal for some people coming into or out of religion. Similarly, for others, an intellectual pursuit based on scientific evidence may be the defining element of their religious or irreligious worldviews. Kitcher recognizes this, and puts his emphasis on dealing with issues of meaning and values in a non-religious context:

Even more important, Kitcher takes seriously the question of whether atheism can replace the sense of meaning and purpose that believers find in religion. Pushed to the intellectual limit, many will prefer a religion of hope if faith is not possible. For them, Tennyson’s “‘the stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run’” is a prospect too bleak to sustain our existence. Kitcher agrees that mere liberation from theism is not enough. Atheists, he maintains, need to undertake the positive project of showing how their worldview can take over what he calls the ethical “functions” of theism.
...
There are those — Dawkins, for one example; existentialists like Sartre, for another — who are invigorated at the very thought that there is no guiding power in the universe. Many others, however, need convincing that atheism (or secular humanism, as Kitcher prefers) has the resources to inspire a fulfilling human life. If not, isn’t the best choice to retreat to a religion of hope? Why not place our bet on the only chance we have of real fulfillment?
Kitcher has a two-part answer. First, he offers a refined extension of Plato’s famous dilemma argument in “Euthyphro” to show that contrary to widespread opinion, theism is not in fact capable of grounding the ethical values that make life worthwhile. Second, to show that secularism is capable of grounding these values, he offers a sophisticated account of how ethics could have evolved as a “social technology” — a set of optimally designed practices and norms — to satisfy basic human desires.
Kitcher’s case is open to serious objections, but it has the conceptual and logical weight that is lacking in the polemics of the scientific atheists. It also lets Kitcher enter into genuine dialogue with believers like the philosopher Charles Taylor, whose defense of religion in “A Secular Age” offers an essential counterpoint to almost everything Kitcher says.

Wait a minute. A civilized and thoughtful exchange of ideas on matters such as this? Intriguing.

Read the full article here. Also see this New Yorker article, Is That All There Is, that also covers the same territory with Kitcher.

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by Salman Hameed

This is actually an interesting group of people talking about God and the beginnings of the universe. Here they have astronomers/physicists espousing various shades of beliefs, and an intelligent and nuanced theologian. Unfortunately, the whole debate is framed around Stephen Hawking's recent pronouncement that there is no God and an example of argument from authority. This would be fine. Many scientists (and non-scientists) have made similar pronouncements before, but somehow his statement has created a media stir (I think he has a really good PR guy) - and it doesn't help that the moderator keeps on asking if the debate is finally settled. If you ignore this part, I think the discussion is actually interesting and we've had similar discussion on this blog as well. For example, can science explain the origins of the universe, and if so, what does that explanation mean for the existence or non-existence of God (I think - it pushes the question back to some other unknown - and we go ad infinitum)? What aspects of life can be explained by science and are there religious questions that science cannot and/or should not broach? Then there is a separate question of miracles and I think Paul Davies is quite forthright about it calling it bad science and bad theology.

Best of all, it is good to see a respectful and reasonable discussion on the topic (sans the sensational framing of Hawking's claims by host, David Gregory - but then he is used to sensationalism on his weekly Meet the Press). Instead of disparaging debates between creationists and biologists, or atheists and believers, a dialogue such as this helps illustrate the complexities of both science and religion. Even if you disagree, you have something to learn about.

Enjoy!

P.S. After viewing the video, also check out this related and thoughtful post by Sean Carroll: What can we know about the world without looking at it?



and the remaining part below:

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by Salman Hameed

Here is an interesting interview with magician Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller's Bullshit! fame). He has a new book out, God, No! Signs you may already be an atheist and other magical tales. He takes the stance that there isn't much difference between atheists and religious folks when comes down to issues of morality, etc. He differs from those militant atheists who argue that primarily religion is, and has been, a source of evil in the world. Yes, there are crazies out there who act in the name of religion, but Penn believes that those are outliers, and it is a mistake to fixate on them and generalize from there. Penn takes a universalist approach to morality in humans (indeed, a huge subject...), and thinks that atheists and religious people make similar sorts of moral decisions - irrespective of what religion tells them to do - and have a lot more in common than they realize (by the way, in US the public is least likely to vote for an atheist President than any another denomination including Muslims).

This is not an academic book. Nevertheless, he is engaged with these debates at the ground-level. He understands the need and the desire to have a community, and the fact that religion fills up this niche quite nicely. In the interview there is also a nice little conversation about performing magic in the age of science, and the difference between magic and a performing a trick.

Oh - and he seems to be a local of western Massachusetts. In fact, there is even a mention of Northampton in the interview!

Listen to the full interview here (it is about 16 minutes long). 

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Here is a snapshot of some of prominent academics on God from a skeptical viewpoint. The snapshot format is interesting but it may give the impression that these views are relatively uniform. If you are interested in a more nuanced look on this topic (especially when you go beyond the notion of a personal God), check out Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Science & Religion by Steve Paulson. It contains interviews with scientists and philosophers, both religious and non-religious, and presents a fascinatingly complex views on these matters.

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Pitzer College has introduced a major in secular studies. It makes total sense - and I think it is a great idea. Hampshire does not have majors. Otherwise, it would have been an excellent place to experiment with an inter-disciplinary major in secularism.   The role of secularism - both in the religious and in the political sense - is being discussed more and more. The number of Americans who identify themselves with no religion has been increasing consistently, and now stands at 15%. Of course, one can also look at secularism from a political perspective, and that can open up a whole area of study and can include fascinating debates that are currently taking place in the middle east. The focus of secular studies at Pitzer, it seems, is on the former than the latter:

 Starting this fall, Pitzer College, a small liberal arts institution in Southern California, will inaugurate a department of secular studies. Professors from other departments, including history, philosophy, religion, science and sociology, will teach courses like “God, Darwin and Design in America,” “Anxiety in the Age of Reason” and “Bible as Literature.”

The department was proposed by Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion, who describes himself as “culturally Jewish, but agnostic-atheist on questions of deep mystery.” Over the years he grew increasingly intrigued by the growth of secularism in the United States and around the world. He studied and taught in Denmark, one of the world’s most secular countries, and has written several books about atheism.

At some places, such studies are folded into sociology or philosophy or even under religious studies. But I think this a good time to bring inter-disciplinary focus and treat secularism as a separate field:

 Studying nonbelief is as valid as studying belief, Mr. Zuckerman said, and the new major will make that very clear.

“It’s not about arguing ‘Is there a God or not?’ ” Mr. Zuckerman said. “There are hundreds of millions of people who are nonreligious. I want to know who they are, what they believe, why they are nonreligious. You have some countries where huge percentages of people — Czechs, Scandinavians — now call themselves atheists. Canada is experiencing a huge wave of secularization. This is happening very rapidly.

“It has not been studied,” he added.

Very interesting. Read the full article here. If you are interested in this topic, you should definitely check out Tom Rees' excellent blog, Epiphenom. 

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by Salman Hameed

I just saw the preview of Woody Allen's new movie, Midnight in Paris. While his recent films have varied much in terms of quality, nevertheless, I look forward to them. So for Saturday video, you get some existentialism from Woody Allen. The Brooklyn is not expanding is perhaps one my favorite lines form a movie. From Annie Hall:



and here is a monologue from Hannah and her Sisters.

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French Enlightenment: Forget Voltaire and Rousseau. It is about time that Diderot gets some attention - beyond his encylopedia (Encyclopédie) - not that there is any thing wrong with encylopedias. There is a new book out, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom, that looks at the French Enlightenment through the lens of a Parisian salon and also looks at some of the regulars there, including Diderot. From the review of the book in the Economist:

It is the story of the scandalous Paris salon run by Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach, a philosophical playground for many of the greatest thinkers of the age. Its members included Denis Diderot (most famous as the editor of the original encyclopedia, but, Mr Blom argues, an important thinker in his own right), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of romanticism, and the baron himself; even David Hume, a famous Scottish empiricist, paid the occasional visit.

A philosophy grew up around the baron’s generously stocked table that denied religious revelation and shunned Christian morality, embracing instead the primal passions (the fundamental motives, said the philosophes, for human behaviour) and cool reason (which could direct the passions, but never stand against them). They dreamt of a Utopia built on pleasure-seeking, rationality and empathy. Their ideal nation would leave no room for what they saw as the twisted ethical code of Christianity, which they argued prized suffering and destructive self-repression.

Not only was their thinking radical, but expressing it was dangerous. Diderot was imprisoned for his writings, an experience, Mr Blom argues, that left him too scared to lay out his philosophy plainly, instead disguising it within numerous plays, novels and letters. Baron d’Holbach published most of his works under pseudonyms, which helped to keep him safe but also condemned him to centuries of philosophical obscurity (except in the officially godless Soviet Union). Even when the French revolution finally came, its self-appointed guardians had no place for the philosophy of the true radicals. For Maximilien Robespierre, chief architect of the reign of terror that followed the revolution, God and religion were far too useful in keeping the population in line.

Mr Blom’s book is part biography and part polemic. He sketches the early lives of Diderot, Holbach, Rousseau and other players in the drama, and describes the philosophy they hammered out. It is also an iconoclastic rebuttal of what he describes as the “official” history of the Enlightenment, the sort of history that he finds “cut in stone” on a visit to the Paris Panthéon. There the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau were laid to rest with the blessing of the French state. Neither deserved it, suggests Mr Blom.

And here is the bit about Voltaire and Rousseau:

Voltaire, he insists, was a milquetoast careerist, too concerned with his own reputation and his comfortable life to say anything truly unsettling. Rousseau he finds even worse. By denigrating reason, celebrating impulse and advocating repression and tyranny in the name of a loosely defined “general will”, Rousseau’s thinking, argues Mr Blom, was actively maleficent (and, unsurprisingly, venerated by Robespierre). It is a tragedy of history, the author concludes, that Voltaire and Rousseau won the battle of ideas, whereas Diderot was reduced to the rank of editor of the encyclopedia, and Holbach was forgotten utterly.

Read the full review here.
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Here is a well-written review (though it reveals a bit too much) of an interesting new book (fiction), Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez. It is good to see nuanced approach to how people experience religion and non-religion. Plus, there is a definite fondness for Camus in the review:

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history,” notes the central character in Albert Camus’s novel “The Plague,” “yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.” The surprise is in the epidemic’s egalitarian choice of victims, in the unraveling of civic order and in the discovery that a just God may not be so just after all. This is why an epidemic makes such a great backdrop for a novel.

In “Salvation City,” Sigrid Nunez invokes an influenza pandemic that leaves the United States on the verge of anarchy. We see the disaster through the eyes of a teenage boy, Cole, the only child of liberal parents, a history professor and a lawyer. He has been “raised to believe religion was for retards, . . . that religious education of children was a kind of child abuse, and that if God existed he’d have to be an atheist, too.”

...

Shortly after the family has moved to Indiana for Cole’s father’s new job, the epidemic gathers strength. When his father succumbs to the flu, the boy is devastated. He sees “how terrible it must be to be afraid to die, to want to live and live, and to not have any power to change what was going to happen to you. He told himself he would have been willing to die in his father’s place — he would have done anything to save his father!”

Soon Cole too falls ill, becoming delirious. When he regains consciousness, his mother has also died, so he is sent to an orphanage. In the wake of so many deaths, these makeshift institutions are springing up everywhere. And they are nightmarish places, from which children are abducted by human traffickers “whose own numbers kept growing now that other illegal trades, like drug dealing, had become much harder to ply. Evil too has to eat.”  

Cole is then adopted by a pastor and his wife, and is even home-schooled. I'll leave the rest of the review out, as I think it reveals some key plot points. Nevertheless, here is the end of the review:

Nunez tells a fine tale, avoiding clichés and providing powerful insights. To our surprise, we are drawn equally to the Wyatt family and to Cole’s dead parents: being fallible is what they have in common. Through Cole’s eyes, the redemption offered by religion is offset by its hypocrisy; he finds his enlightenment not from dogma but from his own painful experiences. By the end of this satisfying, provocative and very plausible novel, Cole doesn’t believe that the world is about to end. Instead “he saw himself living a long time and going many places and doing many different things. ‘Your whole life ahead of you’ — never more than just an expression before — now came to him with the ring of a blessing.”

Cole’s epiphany doesn’t acknowledge a god or reject one. Instead, it echoes the insight of one of Camus’s characters: “Since the order of the world is regulated by death, perhaps is it better for God if we do not believe in him and we fight with all our might against death, without raising our eyes heavenward where he keeps silent.”  

Read the full review here.
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What impact can religion (or non-religion) make on how we see the world? There is an interesting new paper out in the journal Cognition that looks at this issue. I have just downloaded the paper and will have another post on it later (I'm traveling right now...). In the mean time, here is the summary from Science:

As academic psychologists have ventured beyond institutional and national boundaries, they have come upon an impressive influence of culture upon cognition. A canonical example of this is the relative tendency of East Asians to see visual scenes via a holistic mindset in contrast to the Western style of focusing on salient objects. Nevertheless, within these cultural categories, there is considerable intrinsic variation, which can be uncovered, for instance, in comparisons of Chinese and Japanese. Colzato et al. have looked at the linkage between religious upbringing and visual perception in three somewhat less heterogeneous populations—neo-Calvinists in the Netherlands, Roman Catholics in Italy, and Orthodox Jews in Israel—and found that adherents of each of these religions differed from atheists of the same cultural background. The Calvinists, whose tradition emphasizes the role of the individual, showed greater visual attentiveness to local features, whereas the big picture perspective was favored by Catholics and Jews, whose traditions stress social togetherness.

The paper appears in Cognition 117,10.1016, and has a great title: God: Do I Have Your Attention? Here is the abstract:

Religion is commonly defined as a set of rules, developed as part of a culture. Here we provide evidence that practice in following these rules systematically changes the way people attend to visual stimuli, as indicated by the individual sizes of the global precedence effect (better performance to global than to local features). We show that this effect is significantly reduced in Calvinism, a religion emphasizing individual responsibility, and increased in Catholicism and Judaism, religions emphasizing social solidarity. We also show that this effect is long-lasting (still affecting baptized atheists) and that its size systematically varies as a function of the amount and strictness of religious practices. These findings suggest that religious practice induces particular cognitive-control styles that induce chronic, directional biases in the control of visual attention.

Curious, where Muslims will fall under - and then will there be a difference between Shias and Sunnis, or how much do cultural differences wash out the religious differences. Nevertheless, this is interesting stuff.
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