Eggs--wow, you've just articulated a whole bunch of stuff I have been stumbling over. Thanks. I particularly like the bit about not defining yourself in opposition to others--that's key for me. What I sense in your response is that you're not doing so (or not not doing so?) simply from a need to avoid conflict (which I suspect some might argue), so much as out of a sense that simplistic oppositions are intellectually dishonest and ultimately can become obfuscatory.
Put slightly differently, isn't part of the point that many of us are making in this thread is that theism vs. atheism creates a kind of false dichotomy--and one that's illuminated, perhaps, but not really altered by adding in, say, agnosticism, because we may have made the dichotomy now a 3 point "spectrum" but that's still a two-dimensional model. (The earlier comments upthread about "religion" being a Western concept, while made somewhat defensively and I think used more to battle than to clarify in that context, actually reveal the complexity of this question.)
So part of it is that idea that humans are good at map making, so good, in fact, that we forget our maps are but maps and mistake them for "the real." An atheism-agnosticism-theism spectrum is clearly but one way of "mapping" things.
Yes, the existence vs. non-existence of God or gods "matters" or we wouldn't be having this kind of passionate discussion, which has been going on in some form for a good portion of Western history and possibly other histories. But the way it's presented almost always leaves me feeling as if it's engaging me in a debate that is more about politics than about something like "truth," something like "the ground of existence in all its complexity" (TGOEIAIC?) Smart people I have known have used God-language that I am pretty convinced gets at something like TGOEIAIC in ways that work. Smart people have used science to the same end.
So the dichotomy, atheist v. theist, while it definitely helps me see some things, eventually starts obscuring more than it is enlightening things for me; when what we need are some different questions or different angles of vision on the problems. I feel like we're wasting energy in some way, spinning our wheels in old debates. Thinking much more carefully about what thought systems "do" and how they do it, rather than what they "are" potentially introduces a different dimension, it seem to me, if done carefully.
For example, historically, I see Western atheism primarily as a form of radical protestantism--as being grounded in the protestant impulse away from hierarchical systems based on a central authority in service to a more accurate view of "truth" understood primarily in ontological, or metaphysical terms. (I.e., the truth of what "reality" really is, is central for both; epistemology and ethics are intertwined but secondary, flow from how reality is understood. That's a big claim, and I'm open to being taken to task for it.)
Science is not the same as atheism, but its rise to prominence is intertwined with atheism, and it is practiced in specifically a-theistic terms; it requires viewing the universe in material terms.
It shares with protestantism several key problems: under both, for example, I believe it is easy, perhaps even required (?), for adherents to value theories about reality over human community and tradition. Both are prone to political schisms based on theories. This can be wonderful, in some ways, because both have revolutionary potential and can give helpful grounds for throwing off tyranical and oppressive systems, dead traditions, and we can sometimes learn to see the world in new ways as a result. But both can also deadly and kind of, well, soul destroying. Ok. I need to think more about that, because I suspect that Lurid, for one, won't be satisfied with that answer.
This may not help matters at all, but I'm thinking here, about the essay I just linked to in a new thread I startted in laboratory, about food and science. In the article, Michael Pollan explains how throwing off old authorities, e.g., communal understandings of food, in favor of scientific ones requiring the mediation of experts, we have become in many ways simply less happy and less healthy as a species, and we're destroying our planet, too. I realize that could be read as simply a nostalgia, but I don't think he warrants that critique. Pollan's not opposed to science, or the scientific method. He's using it all the time.
He's saying that because food is so complex, and science is only just beginning to understand its complexity, we've been too seduced by the results of highly reductive methods into making bad choices about our food, and this gives a political ideology based on incomplete science, "nutritionism" far too much sway in our minds. Human history, human traditions, are a much better guide to food, he asserts. We need not a new protestantism, in relation to food. We do NOT need a new ontological understanding of nutrition to guide us, so much as a new respect for the silent wisdom of human traditions as intertwined with in a dynamic way with the food we've eaten, and the environment as a whole.
(Does that make sense? I do see it as differing from what I'm calling "protestantism" in atheism, science, and religion because actions/ethics don't flow quite so much from ontological knowledge in Pollan's essay, but on the authority of human traditions and on the ethics of seeking to re-assert the value of a more intimate relationship between ourselves and the world.)
Atheism is only simply an opposite to protestantism, when we view both as forms of thelogical belief and not as a way of being in community and the world, as a result, typically this historical connection is obscured, and I believe we do lose an opportunity to learn something helpful.
(Whether I've helped matters at all, with this post, may be a different matter. I am concerned that I'm being too slippery in the relationship I've drawn between science and atheism, and I'm still working this out, so I welcome responses.) |
