Friday, October 30, 2009 | Reason : Commentary | print version

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3 Silly Religious Beliefs Held By Non-Silly People

by Greta Christina - alternet.org

Thanks to LWS for the link.

http://www.alternet.org/story/143551/3_silly_religious_beliefs_held_by_non-silly_people?page=entire

"You can't disprove religion."

I'm seeing this trope a lot these days. "You can't disprove religion. At least -- not my religion."

"Well, of course," the trope continues, "many outdated religious beliefs -- young-earth creationism, the universe revolving around the earth, the sun being drawn across the sky by Apollo's chariot -- have been shown by science to be mistaken. But modern progressive and moderate beliefs -- these, you can't disprove with science. These are simply matters of faith: things people reasonably choose to believe, based on their personal life experience."

Then there's the corollary to this trope: "Therefore, atheism is just as much a matter of faith as religion. And atheists who think atheism is better supported by evidence are just as dogmatic and close-minded as religious believers."

The usual atheist reply to this is to cry, "That's the God of the Gaps! Whatever phenomenon isn't currently explained by science, that's where you stick your God! What kind of sense does that make? Why should any given unexplained phenomenon be best explained by religion? Has there ever been a gap in our knowledge that's eventually been shown to be filled by God?"

Which is a pretty good reply, and one I make a lot myself. But today, I want to say something else.

Today, I want to point out that this is simply not the case.

The fact is that many modern progressive and moderate religions do make claims about the observable world. And many of those claims are unsupported by science... and, in fact, are in direct contradiction of it.

I want to talk today about three specific religious beliefs. Not obscure cults or rigid fundamentalist dogmas; not young-earth creationism, or the doctrine that communion wafers literally and physically transform into the human flesh of Christ somewhere in the digestive tract, or the belief that the human mind has been taken over by space aliens. I want to talk about three widely held beliefs of modern progressive and moderate believers: beliefs held by intelligent and educated believers who respect science and don't think religion should contradict it.

And I want to point out that even these beliefs are in direct contradiction of the vast preponderance of available evidence -- almost as much as the obscure cults and the rigid fundamentalist dogma.
...
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http://www.alternet.org/story/143551/3_silly_religious_beliefs_held_by_non-silly_people?page=entire

Posted: Friday, October 30, 2009 | Permalink

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1. Comment #428377 by ozturk on October 30, 2009 at 7:45 pm

Excellent stuff. Those who claim to be modern believers, and not to believe in all that 'superstitious' old religion, should perhaps be called New Religionists. And perhaps the term should be spat out with the same cynical sneer in which New Atheists is used.

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2. Comment #428380 by DeusExNihilum on October 30, 2009 at 8:01 pm

Damn good article, raising points I often raise myself.

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3. Comment #428381 by Mango on October 30, 2009 at 8:01 pm

Great piece, and deserves to be widely circulated.

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4. Comment #428384 by caraz84 on October 30, 2009 at 8:16 pm

yeah i don't get how religious folk can vote for someone to run the country when in their heads they know who rules the world

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5. Comment #428389 by Blondin on October 30, 2009 at 8:36 pm

It is so nice to come across articles like this that consolidate and articulate so many lucid ideas in such clear, concise form. Bravo!

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6. Comment #428390 by carbonman on October 30, 2009 at 8:37 pm

Clear thinking, clearly written.

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7. Comment #428392 by tieInterceptor on October 30, 2009 at 8:42 pm

great article,

I like the part about the ridiculous "conciousness" or "soul" separated from a brain, meme... something I thought about many times.

Brains are electrochemical computers, and if you brake a brain with some accident... the personality that resided inside that grey matter will either die, or permanently change... memories lost, having to learn to talk or walk again... etc, therefore your "soul" IS your physical brain, one doesn't exist without the other.

It's like asking "where does windows vista go after I smash a computer with a sledge hammer?"...

well, the electricity dissipates into heat... and it's gone... there isn't a heaven for windows vista to go... and there isn't a heaven for your own electrochemical impulses to go either.

make the most of this life... you don't get another.

ps; digg it up!

.

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8. Comment #428400 by Stafford Gordon on October 30, 2009 at 9:30 pm

Firstly, I've had a hell of a job getting my password to grant me access; however, this article is spot on; that's it.

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9. Comment #428401 by stephen.stallebrass on October 30, 2009 at 9:41 pm

You should check out this weeks Horizon. A Pretty good BBC show called 'The Secret You' about consciousness by Marcus Du Sautoy (Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science, a post formerly held by Richard before his retirement)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nhv56/Horizon_20092010_The_Secret_You/

xXx

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10. Comment #428403 by Quine on October 30, 2009 at 9:50 pm

Understanding the continuity of life pulls the rug out from under the religious. It leaves them suspended in thin air, where the only untouched beliefs are those which make no difference.

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11. Comment #428406 by Stafford Gordon on October 30, 2009 at 10:16 pm

Further; regarding life after death, Russell wrote about this in 1925 in "What I Believe".

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12. Comment #428417 by johnscarborough on October 30, 2009 at 11:41 pm

tieInterceptor -
everyone knows from watching Red Dwarf that good computers and robots go to silicon heaven when they die.

:-)

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13. Comment #428418 by mmurray on October 30, 2009 at 11:49 pm

Thanks stephen.stallebrass but unfortunately iPlayer doesn't work for us non Brits!

Does anyone know who believes this:

or the doctrine that communion wafers literally and physically transform into the human flesh of Christ somewhere in the digestive tract,

it is not Catholic doctrine they believe it changes only in its essence but not in its appearance. Of course that is meaningless drivel but it stops people testing the bread and wine for DNA.

Michael

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14. Comment #428425 by parrja on October 30, 2009 at 11:58 pm

A clear, logical article. Does it help though? I've never had any luck using logic in arguing with religious people.

I said a while ago to a few Christians at work that I was willing to convert to Christianity, as long as they can show me even the slightest bit of proof.

Suprisingly, they haven't been very forthcoming...

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15. Comment #428431 by ergaster on October 31, 2009 at 12:23 am

#428406 by Stafford Gordon

Further; regarding life after death, Russell wrote about this in 1925 in "What I Believe".

Yes, and AFAIK he hasn't had anything to add, detract or rephrase to later editions of that book after 1971.

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16. Comment #428436 by Workingspace on October 31, 2009 at 12:58 am

I am glad to see articles put out there like this, even if some feel they are pointless or preaching to the choir.

I have had a lot of discussions with friends, some of whom are believers only insofar as they have had no reason to question what mom, pop, and community have told them. Once they hear well-reasoned arguments, they generally backslide into something along the lines of: There still must be a higher power - or There must be souls and an afterlife.

It has been easier to convince people there is no higher power than it has been to make them let go of the soul foolishness. So item number two in the article is helpful. I'll see how well it is received.

Michael

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17. Comment #428441 by mjwemdee on October 31, 2009 at 1:13 am

Comment #428425 by parrja on October 30, 2009 at 11:58 pm

A clear, logical article. Does it help though? I've never had any luck using logic in arguing with religious people.

I always think of an analogy that I found somewhere on the BCSE website: trying to argue logically with theists is like trying to play chess with a pigeon. They knock all the pieces down, crap all over the chessboard then fly back to their flock to proclaim victory.

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18. Comment #428443 by chewedbarber on October 31, 2009 at 1:47 am

I don't think the idea of a soul is intuitive.

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19. Comment #428444 by Supreme Boeing on October 31, 2009 at 2:04 am

I would say that consciousness is a computational process, not necessarily a biological process. Neurons use chemical reactions to signal eachother, but in principle this is a computational process.

This should make it possible, in principle, though not yet in practice, to simulate an entire brain in a computer. The cool thing if this works is that the consciousness generated by this simulated brain would be every bit as real as the consciousness generated by a regular meat brain.

A particularly apt analogy would be that the brain is like a computer (hardware), while the consciousness is like the software running on it. You could, in principle, simulate a computer using paper and pen(cil). You could also simulate a brain that way, but you'd have to be God to do so: it is so incredibly unpractical as to require omnipotence to actually do it.

Windows Vista still definitely goes to hell, that's self-evident :-P

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20. Comment #428446 by alovrin on October 31, 2009 at 2:09 am

Great read

Also known as "theistic evolution."

Its always good to start with a laugh.

But research is happening. The foundations for our understanding of consciousness are beginning to be laid. There are a few things that we do know about consciousness.

mmm yummy.

The universe does not have a physical structure capable of supporting consciousness. The universe does not have neurons, dendrites, ganglia. The universe has stars, and planets, and other astronomical bodies, separated by unimaginably vast regions of empty space.

And stars and planets and so on do not behave like neurons and dendrites and so on. They behave like stars and planets. They behave like objects that, as nifty as they are, are not alive, by any useful definition of the word "life."

But I'll still luv ya, ya great big lumbering lug of a universe even tho ya wont efa luff me back.

I'm aiming my sights at this New Age/ Neo-Pagan/ Wiccan belief in a World-Soul.

The kindest thought I have about those ideas nowadays is
'guess someone had to do it'

My answer: I live in Northern California. 'Nuff said.

hehe

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21. Comment #428454 by j.mills on October 31, 2009 at 3:38 am

Great article.

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22. Comment #428455 by TuftedPuffin on October 31, 2009 at 3:41 am

It's a good list, but I'd put "prayer does stuff" before "the universe has a consciousness" in the list of major mainstream beliefs that are obviously wrong. We've studied prayer. There have been medical studies testing the efficacy of prayer. Not a one has returned anything. Why, then, do most believers find it perfectly reasonable to assert that prayer can make gods change the world?

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23. Comment #428483 by RightWingAtheist on October 31, 2009 at 9:01 am

Comment #428455 by TuftedPuffin on October 31, 2009 at 3:41 am
It's a good list, but I'd put "prayer does stuff" before "the universe has a consciousness" in the list of major mainstream beliefs that are obviously wrong.

Maybe Christina ranked that just on the other side of the line dividing silly and non-silly people.

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24. Comment #428484 by RightWingAtheist on October 31, 2009 at 9:06 am

This all fits well into Penn Jillette's notation that the word "opinion" is used too liberally. A lot of things people label as opinions (both their own statements and those of other people) are actually [false] statements of fact.

Maybe the "god of the gaps" is not just a criticism, but a conscious rationalization in the heads of religious people. A lot of these religious people might consciously think they are making statements of opinion "in the gaps".

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25. Comment #428485 by Jack Rawlinson on October 31, 2009 at 9:07 am

Greta's a star. I highly recommend her blog (this piece is on there too). Atheism, politics and sex, all in the same place. Can't be bad. :-)

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/

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26. Comment #428501 by Cartomancer on October 31, 2009 at 11:30 am

World Soul? Whaaaat? I must be out of touch. Since when did that make a comeback? Thomas Aquinas was still in short cassocks when it died out the first time!

The idea of the anima mundi comes largely from Plato, specifically the cosmological dialogue Timaeus, which, in the partial translation of Chalcidius, was the only Platonic dialogue the Latin West had until 1156. The World Soul was popular in European philosophy during the flowering of "Platonic" studies of the "Twelfth-Century Renaissance". It had virtually disappeared by 1220 thanks to the recovery of newer, Aristotelian, models of what a soul is, texts of Greek and Arabic astronomy providing a new perspective on cosmology, and the arrival of Neoplatonic works (Plotinus, Proclus) detailing a more sophisticated model of the microcosm/macrocosm than could be found in Plato's Timaeus. Many Twelfth-century cosmologists, such as William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres, whose primary aim was to reconcile the creation account in Genesis with that found in the Timaeus (considered the foremost "scientific" textbook of the day), equated the World Soul with the Holy Spirit of christian theology. As the Timaeus fell out of favour at the end of the century, it was no longer considered necessary to retain all the details of Plato's cosmology in a learned work of natural philosophy, and "Is there a World-soul?" became a common question for scholastic thinkers to ask. Most answered in the negative, usually thanks to their more Aristotelian notions of what constitutes a soul (specifically that its main responsibility is informing a physical body, not moving it and engaging with abstract idealised forms). A common criticism of the idea of the World Soul was that it would mean actual living things were permeated by two souls rather than one, which was a suspect idea both theologically and in Aristotelian science as then understood. Some thinkers retained the idea that the planets move thanks to their own souls, but mostly the movement of the heavens was attributed, in the thirteenth century, either to angels or the inherent natural properties of the planets themselves. There were vehement supporters and opponents of both theories, but the natural properties camp tended to be more popular.

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27. Comment #428523 by j.mills on October 31, 2009 at 1:46 pm

Carto, have you read Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Star-Maker-S-F-Masterworks-Stapledon/dp/1857988078

It's a sort of philosophical SF quest for god, in which all cosmoses (plural?) ulimately become conscious of themselves/itself/himself. (Stapledon was a middleweight philosopher at Liverpool I think.) Chimes with your world soul erudition. Particularly liked the book's depiction of conscious stars, who acknowledge, when confronted with the evidence, that their movements do conform to this silly law of gravity thing; but they regard this as a trivial observation about the dances they perform of their own free will. It's a wunnerful wunnerful book.

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28. Comment #428524 by Logician on October 31, 2009 at 1:50 pm

@mjwemdee, #27 post:

That is absolutely the best analogy for discussing these topics with believers I've ever read. I laughed long and loudly.
It was a welcome spark after a depressing night of dealing with idiots like that in the ER.
"crap all over the chessboard"
I love it!

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29. Comment #428528 by Logician on October 31, 2009 at 2:11 pm

Crap, it really was a long night of broken dreams and drunken bums...
That would be at #17...
Anyway, it's still the best thing I've read in a while about this.

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30. Comment #428530 by Sheol99 on October 31, 2009 at 2:11 pm

It's a good list, but I'd put "prayer does stuff" before "the universe has a consciousness" in the list of major mainstream beliefs that are obviously wrong.

Yes. Prayers should be one.
The next is "Transcendence as proof of religious feeling" - the feeling of awe when you're on the top of mountain, on the seacliff during sunsets or storms. The same feeling that I think is being manipulated by the architects of St. Peters, or Kaabah, Taj Mahal, Colliseum.

I think humanity still need to wait for 30 - 40 years to sort these out.

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31. Comment #428558 by flying goose on October 31, 2009 at 4:22 pm

Which of these silly beliefs do I believe in?

1: Evolution guided by God. X

2: An immaterial soul that animates human consciousness. X

3: A sentient universe. X

I have moved beyond progressive and moderate.

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32. Comment #428559 by George Lennan on October 31, 2009 at 4:24 pm

One assertion in Christina's piece is dead wrong-

"The universe does not have a brain"

It most certainly does, several thousand million of them in this little corner alone. Consciousness is a property of the universe as much as brains are material structures in that universe. To argue for a division between sentience in the universe and sentience in biology is pretty much to argue for a kind of Cartesian dualism, where human consciousness is separate from the universe that produces it.

It's not.

We ARE the universe, looking at itself.

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33. Comment #428572 by artisfact on October 31, 2009 at 5:07 pm

An excellent, straightforward piece of writing. I love how she concludes.

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34. Comment #428582 by ridelo on October 31, 2009 at 5:46 pm

Bravo! Well said. Is it allowed to use this text for a pod-cast in Dutch?

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35. Comment #428585 by dumbcountryhick on October 31, 2009 at 5:54 pm

"It is not true that the sun goes around the earth."

Actually that one is sort of relative. One could argue that the sun goes around the earth the same way one could say that a tail wags a dog, a pendulum swings a grandfather clock or that the road moves under the wheels of your 'stationary' car while driving.
All this being said, however, I'm not about to see what happens if I get hit by a concrete pavement from the top of a tall building.

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36. Comment #428598 by Jos Gibbons on October 31, 2009 at 6:36 pm

Comment #428559 by George Lennan

I think you've misunderstood her. The view she was debunking is the belief that the universe is a sentient thing. Think pantheism with the god in it not just being a metaphor, but actually thinking. The vacuum has many interesting properties, but thinking is not among them!

Comment #428585 by dumbcountryhick

The point of geocentrism is not whether the Earth or the Sun goes around the other, but whether it is the Earth or the Sun of which the following is true: everything else in the solar system orbits it, or a body which orbits it. The planets orbit the Sun, the moons orbit their planets. The Sun has a ... well, central role which the Earth does not. The Earth lacks the privileged nature geocentrists such as the Catholics of yesteryear insisted upon. (Incidentally, the Vatican didn't give up on prohibiting the teaching of geocentrism for some time!)

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37. Comment #428599 by Irat on October 31, 2009 at 6:39 pm

@32

No, George, I think you're taking what she said out of context, and starting an argument of semantics. She's arguing that the universe does not function like an integrated conscious mind, not that there are no minds in the universe. These are, logically, two different statements.

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38. Comment #428603 by Naturalist1 on October 31, 2009 at 6:54 pm

Someone should send this to Francis Collins.

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39. Comment #428670 by yyuryyub on November 1, 2009 at 6:16 am

I agree with George Lennan.

Aren't we all, quite literally, one of the universe's accidental experiments in (albeit very limited) self-awareness?

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40. Comment #428690 by Serdan on November 1, 2009 at 2:55 pm

What a wonderful exposition of the scientific mind.

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41. Comment #428698 by bendigeidfran on November 1, 2009 at 3:51 pm

Comment #428443 by Chewedbarber

Who don't?

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42. Comment #428872 by George Lennan on November 2, 2009 at 8:02 am

thank you yruryub!
Irat, Jos, I haven't misunderstood. You are 'correcting' me to see the literal, face-value notion of Greta's claim that the universe is not conscious, but that it has conscious things in it. This is too facile, of course I can see that!

However it's a fundamentally wrong way of looking at things.

It's in effect saying that our consciouness is something 'other' than a product, or property of the universe.

I repeat that placing the phenomenon of consciousness as separate from the universe argues FOR precisely the kind of mind/matter
dualism that Greta, and no doubt you, would be so keen to denounce.

Consciousness is a property of the universe that needs brains to manifest. Rather like gravity is a property of the universe that needs mass to manifest.

Tell me you understand my point before you 'no' me again :)

Other Comments by George Lennan

43. Comment #428910 by PERSON on November 2, 2009 at 2:04 pm

42. Comment #428872 by George Lennan on November 2, 2009 at 8:02 am
That's all lovely, but you seem to have failed to consider the possibility that she's already aware of that and just wanted to get her point across simply and without confusing very different concepts.

"It's in effect saying that our consciousness is something 'other' than a product, or property of the universe."

No it's not. It's just saying that the universe as a whole is not a conscious entity. That holds even when conscious entities exist within it and are exclusively part of it. I can see no justification for your inference.

"Consciousness is a property of the universe that needs brains to manifest."
No it isn't (I suggest). Unless you take an odd/tautological definition of "brain".

"gravity is a property of the universe that needs mass to manifest"
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that gravity is a property of mass and mass and gravity are part of the universe.

If there are other universes with other rules, mass and gravity may not be related. There, gravity could be caused by heat energy, for instance, or just not be present.

Also, it's possible that mass is a consequence of gravity. That seems unlikely because of how things like chemistry work, but it's not clear to me how you'd disprove it.

Space-time is distorted around things with mass. This distortion causes the straightest path to be a curve. This deviation from apparent straight lines is gravity. (not quite right, but GTG)

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44. Comment #428927 by Lucas on November 2, 2009 at 4:38 pm

"...Consciousness is no longer ineffable. It is being effed." Out of context, very funny. Consciousness is indeed being F-ed.

Great article. I was glad she went after the New Agers. There really are a lot of intelligent, progressive people (mostly in California and the Southwest US) who buy into the human soul and the World Soul/Gaia stuff. But we've been in a post-New Age situation, by my reckoning, for about a decade. It started in the '60s, had its heyday in the '70s and '80s, and has been slowly petering out for awhile... though maybe I should go back to NoCal to make sure.

Other Comments by Lucas

45. Comment #428928 by George Lennan on November 2, 2009 at 4:40 pm

Brains/consciousness and mass/gravity is an analogy! You can put it any way you like explaining the differences, but the analogy holds.

Otherwise, I am precisely saying that the "universe as a whole is a conscious entity" *because* it has conscious entities in it. It's as hard to define 'where in the human body (or brain) consciousness resides' as it is to define 'where in the universe consciousness resides'. If you go on separating out biological entities from the universe with your cultural/philosphical knife, you are guilty of a course-graining version of dualism.

Put another way - either you are you looking at and trying to understand the universe and consciouness, or the universe is conscious in you and its trying to understand itself. This isnt woolly new age shit. It is the logical conclusion of accepting that the universe doesn't have supernatural add-ons. Consciousness is a property of the universe, period.

last point: I said - "Consciousness is a property of the universe that needs brains to manifest."
You said - "No it isn't (I suggest). Unless you take an odd/tautological definition of "brain"".

This doesn't mean much. My definition of a brain is a particular highly complex analytical/integration system. If it is tautological to add 'that can have consciousness as a property', then it is tautological to say "that gravity is a property of mass", as you do. In fact you rather make my point for me!!

Other Comments by George Lennan

46. Comment #428964 by SaintStephen on November 2, 2009 at 6:16 pm

Maybe we should consult Deepak Chopra on complex issues of the mind (Huffington Post article):

We live in an age where massive amounts of money are spent for research into the brain and almost nothing into researching the mind. This represents a huge demotion. In prior centuries the mind was exalted. It was the mind that perceived beauty, experienced love, and reached for God. Can the brain really do all those things on its own? Neuroscience says yes, but that's a leap of faith. Why would a neuron have any interest in beauty, love, and God to begin with? Its whole life is spent exchanging chemical and electrical signals with other neurons. On the fringes of speculative thinking, the mind is coming back into its own.

Then again, maybe not! This guy Chopra is a great example of a man I truly wonder about. Is he a clever snake oil salesman, reaping millions off the deluded, or is he himself deluded like Ray Comfort? Both?

In one of his posts about TGD several years ago, Chopra opined:

Dawkins doesn't seem to have any doubt about who he is: he's the evolutionary byproduct of chemical forces, physical laws, random events, natural selection, competition, adaptation, and survival. So is an amoeba. Sadly, this reductionist picture of human life is devoid of meaning.

How can an educated man put ridiculous, anthropomorphic requirements on a neuron, and insult all of biology by thinking the amoeba is devoid of meaning? There is more meaning in an amoeba than in the sum total of Deepak Chopra's entire body of work (which as you can see from this link is considerable). How can a man who Twitters quotes from Gandhi gaze upon the microscopic wonders of our very existence, only to find them wanting for lack of his own muddled, pseudo-religious fictions?

Other Comments by SaintStephen

47. Comment #429517 by SaintStephen on November 4, 2009 at 8:20 pm