nameandnature | (no subject)

Stuff I found on the web, probably on

andrewducker's del.icio.us feed or something.

Psychology Today on ex-Christian ex-ministers and on magical thinking

Psychology Today has a couple of interesting articles, one on ministers who lose their faith, and another on magical thinking. Quoteable quote:

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

That sounds sort of familiar. I'm not sure I'd consider myself an ex-fundamentalist, but I did find that giving up removed the constant pressure to keep baling.

The stuff about moral contagion in the magical thinking article reminded me of Haggai 2:10-14, where it's clear that cleanness (in the Bible's sense of moral and ceremonial acceptability, rather then lack of dirt) is less contagious than uncleanness. There's possibly a link here to the tendency of some religions to sharply divide the world into non-believers and believers, and to be careful about how much you expose yourself to the non-believing world (q.v. the unequally yoked teaching you get in the more extreme variants of a lot of religions).

Old interview with Philip Pullman

Third Way interviewed Pullman years ago. It's the origin of one of his statements on whether he's an agnostic or an atheist, which I rather like:

Can I elucidate my own position as far as atheism is concerned? I don’t know whether I’m an atheist or an agnostic. I’m both, depending on where the standpoint is.

The totality of what I know is no more than the tiniest pinprick of light in an enormous encircling darkness of all the things I don’t know – which includes the number of atoms in the Atlantic Ocean, the thoughts going through the mind of my next-door neighbour at this moment and what is happening two miles above the surface of the planet Mars. In this illimitable darkness there may be God and I don’t know, because I don’t know.

But if we look at this pinprick of light and come closer to it, like a camera zooming in, so that it gradually expands until here we are, sitting in this room, surrounded by all the things we do know – such as what the time is and how to drive to London and all the other things that we know, what we’ve read about history and what we can find out about science – nowhere in this knowledge that’s available to me do I see the slightest evidence for God.

So, within this tiny circle of light I’m a convinced atheist; but when I step back I can see that the totality of what I know is very small compared to the totality of what I don’t know. So, that’s my position.

This isn't really a surprising statement, but, like Ruth Gledhill's discovery that Richard Dawkins is a liberal Anglican, some people seem surprised that atheists aren't ruling out things which some people would regard as gods. The point is that there's no decent evidence that anyone has met one. Deism is a respectable position, I think (although I'm not sure why you'd bother with it), but religions which claim God has spoken to them are implausible because of God's inability to keep his story straight.

The walls have Google

The thing about blogging is that you never know who's reading. Someone called Voyou makes a post ending with an aside which is critical of A.C. Grayling's response to Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion. Grayling turns up in the comments to argue with them.

(I keep turning up more conversations about the Eagleton review: see my bookmarks for the best of them).

"Compact of hypocrisy and secret vice"

Yellow wonders whether or not he should sign the UCCF doctrinal basis in this post and the followup. Signs point to "not". Si Hollett reminds me of myself in my foolish youth.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm absolutely not a Chalmers expert -- I think I've read a grand total of about 5 pages of his work. So I have no idea whether he's changed his mind, or how well what Rob's saying matches up with any given opinion of his. (Except that I know Chalmers has said he's an atheist.)

One word of warning for anyone inclined to find out more. Some time back, on the talk page for the Wikipedia article about either Chalmers or one of his pet subjects (I forget which), there was a discussion along the following lines. A: "Y'know, all the stuff about Chalmers's position about P, Q and R is wrong because X, Y and Z." B: "Bollocks it is. I've read his work, and he definitely thinks what the article says." A: "You might like to know that I am in fact David Chalmers." B: "Well, you're wrong anyway." A: "Oh, I give up." (It was verified that A really was Chalmers. There was some further amusement because the way A initially revealed his identity was by quoting that bit in "Annie Hall" about Marshall McLuhan, and B didn't understand. So, anyway, Wikipedia pages about Chalmers may possibly have been edited by people who are confidently wrong about Chalmers.

I'm guessing that what Rob means about weak atheists is: they talk as if there's definitely no god, religion is definitely bunk, etc., but when pushed to justify their position they retreat to "well, of course I don't know for sure" and "atheism is a default position, it doesn't need justifying", and so on. I've not gone trawling for examples, but I'd guess that (1) that happens sometimes and (2) it also happens sometimes that the weak atheist says much more reasonable things and gets misunderstood by the theist, who hasn't fully grasped the difference between "the evidence is strongly against X" and "I have proof that X is wrong", or between "I've never been given any good reason to believe X, which in any case seems unlikely a priori" and "I just randomly choose to act as if X is false without having any evidence".

I don't think what I've said here amounts to an argument that evangelical Christianity is incoherent; I think it's possible to be an evangelical Christian and also an annihilationist (as e.g. John Stott does), and I've almost exclusively been arguing that the traditional idea of hell is monstrous and stupid. It's possible that bits of what I've said could be repurposed to make an argument that some ideas more central to evangelical Christianity (e.g., the way evangelicals are supposed to think about the atonement) are nonsense, but that would be a different argument and one I haven't made here. (Also, one I'm less sure is correct.)

The traditional view of hell is simply the default, because it's so culturally engrained in our culture. Likewise the traditional view of heaven (pearly gates etc). Christians tend to work with it because it's easier than re-educating people on what the correct doctrines actually are, but I think this is a mistake. The hell of trad culture is much more interesting exciting and scary than, say the small amount that is written about it in the Bible (the OT just talks about a dark place, for example). That's not to say it isn't bad, but it has no worms, that was definitely a later addition. They never worried me so much, actually.

The worms are in the gospels, actually. And the fire. The molten sulphur is in Revelation. Not so sure about the devils with pitchforks :-). Lots of other details in the ancient-pop-culture hell come from Dante, I think.

Anyway. I've been arguing against "eternal conscious torment" because that's something that (1) a lot of Christians believe in, and defend, and (2) it's monstrously evil. I quite agree that there are notions of hell that aren't so bad; and I think one can have authentic Christianity without having hell at all (other than, perhaps, as a place of final destruction). So, as I've said elsewhere in this Very Long Discussion, I'm not aiming here to refute Christianity or even evangelicalism. Just to explain why I think one particular idea believed by some but not all evangelical Christians is odious and silly and generally Bad.

No worms! The worms are in a later greek text. KJV has them, most modern translations use the Westcott hort text, which is a compilation of the earlier text. Textus receptus is the manuscript used in the KJV, hence the worms.

The fire is not necessarily literal, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad. It tends to be fairly difficult to explain to people what eternity will be like, so metaphor can come in handy. And quicker.

D'oh, you're right. I was fooled by the fact that the worms are in the RSV, which is pretty decent textually. (In particular, it's well post-W+H and isn't the TR.)

I think the fire (and worms, perhaps :-) ) are pretty clear references to Jerusalem's municipal rubbish dump at Ge Hinnom, where rubbish was burned _in order to get rid of it_. Which is one reason why I think annihilationism is a pretty tenable position for Christians even if they take a conservative view of the Bible.

I suspect that the very phrase "what eternity will be like" embodies an oversimplification -- the usual view AIUI is that eternity is all about sharing in God's transtemporal existence. (I have some suspicions that this is a sophisticated modern understanding that would have baffled the authors of the NT. That doesn't necessarily mean that Christians shouldn't adopt it.)

I suppose that some people are weakly atheistic in the general sense, and strongly atheistic towards some gods. I'd say I'm a strong atheist wrt evangelical-Christian-God. I can see that adding to the confusion about who's claiming what in debates like these.

You're right, I was writing as if all evangelicals believed in eternal torment, but neglected annihilationists like Stott, so when I was referring to your arguments I should have said "non-annihilationist evangelical Christianity". By "incoherent", I mean that the idea of a good God and eternal torment don't hang together, which I think is what you're arguing (or at least, a consequence of what you're arguing).