Thus, a few days ago, I read this article in New Scientist, "What Good is God?"; I must say I was a bit disappointed to be reading the same ideas rehashed. In every article of this sort I've read lately, the standard tripe is to interview a bunch of scientists and (for balance?) a few theologians. The verdict is always the same:
- Religion enhances socialization, thus it was selected for during the nascence of civilization
- Religion fulfills the role of general guilt-inspirer; when laws and order are necessary within group dynamics, religion is a useful tool to keep the group on the same page, afraid of the same things and inspired to act beneficially towards the group
- Abstraction of the mind, with the concomitant ability to "see" intelligent agency behind certain things (recognize design), led to an overly sensitive detection system in which we attribute intelligence to patterns in nature that are...just natural.
- We may have a language module, this irreducible center in our minds for grammar and syntax, and in the same way, a religion module, which enhances our sense of self and our role in the "grand scheme of things" and our feelings of awe and perception of transcendence
- blah blah blah
But over the past generation they have come to feel beleaguered and, except for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them. These writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to "breaking the spell" cast by the religious ascendancy, to overcoming a situation in which every other area of life can be critically analyzed while admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to American life but exempted from serious discussion.So the backdrop of "new" really only refers to the unique political situation in which we find ourselves today -- the crescendo of the culture wars where stinging critiques of religion are best-sellers but our own government can't pass a bill to support science research that may alleviate some of the worst diseases known to man for the clamor of religious zealots. And this is still newsworthy...why, again? You'd have to be blind and stupid not to know or notice the culture wars screaming around you.
I do appreciate the attempt to find some basic scientific grounds upon which to explain the origins of religion as a human construct. But I am reminded of Dennett's words (which have always meant more to me than those of Harris or Dawkins):
Perhaps we should dig just deep enough to find out what helps us and makes us happier. When we start to descend into Dennett's abyss, maybe we ought to pull back a little on the self-analysis. I bet the robot, once he knew his own programming language, and understood that his code could've been written in any of several languages, could even get a little depressed.We sit in his study, in some creaky chairs, with the deep silence of an August morning around us, and Dennett tells me that he takes very seriously the risk of overreliance on thought. He doesn't want people to lose confidence in what he calls their "default settings," by which he means the conviction that their ethical intuitions are trustworthy. These default settings give us a feeling of security, a belief that our own sacrifices will be reciprocated. "If you shatter this confidence," he says, "then you get into a deep hole. Without trust, everything goes wrong."
It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things.
"Would intelligent robots be religious?" it occurs to me to ask.
"Perhaps they would," he answers thoughtfully. "Although, if they were intelligent enough to evaluate their own programming, they would eventually question their belief in God."
Dennett is an advocate of admitting that we simply don't have good reasons for some of the things we believe. Although we must guard our defaults, we still have to admit that they may be somewhat arbitrary. "How else do we protect ourselves?" he asks. "With absolutisms? This means telling lies, and when the lies are exposed, the crash is worse. It's not that science can discover when the body is ensouled. That's nonsense. We are not going to tolerate infanticide. But we're not going to put people in jail for onanism. Instead of protecting stability with a brittle set of myths, we can defend a deep resistance to mucking with the boundaries."
