48 / Do you care for a dose of religion?
I picked this up on the Fairfax website, an article in the Age: Celebrity atheists expose their hypocrisy, by Dr. Dvir Abramovich, lecturer in Jewish studies. Oh boy, what a load of rubbish.
The doctor tries to make a point for God and against atheism - in the process he uses every cliché and inaccuracy under the sun. Just as an example, to refute that 'religion poisons everything' (Christopher Hitchens) he makes the (moot) point that atheists can be just as bad as religious types and uses as an example Hitler … a little research shows that Hitler was a Catholic, but more importantly, the Nazi's favourite catch-cry when going to battle was, "Gott ist mit uns", "God is with us". Thanks for nothing, dear Dr.
However, what I really take issue with is Abramovich's mis-use of Albert Einstein in his pathetic rant. Einstein famously said,
"God didn't play dice," when creating the universe. This aphorism is again and again rolled out by ignorant demagogues such as Abramovich as proof that Einstein believed in God. Spare me! Einstein's remark clearly was a figure of speech, when he referred to the universe as having an order and a beauty he admired. I have an essay on EINSTEIN. As regards Einstein’s beliefs, he debunked the notion of a personal God. But he said he hated it when the atheists enlisted him because he believed there’s a spirit manifest in the harmonies of the universe. Like Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch-Portuguese-Jewish philosopher, he believed God and nature were more or less synonymous - the idea of finding God in nature attracted Einstein.
I found a link to a famous letter by Einstein. I knew of the letter, but I had never read the whole of it. A year before his death, Albert Einstein wrote it to philosopher Erik Gutkind
after reading his book, 'Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt'. Incidentally, the letter was bought at auction in May 2008, for £207,600 - unsurprisingly, one
of the unsuccessful bidders was Richard Dawkins. So here is its translated transcript and the link with an analysis. Below it Dr Abramovich's treatise and one reader's comment:
Princeton, 3.1.1954
Dear Mr Gutkind,
Inspired by Brouwer’s repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me ... with regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human element ... unites us as having an “American Attitude.”
Still, without Brouwer’s suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation - no matter how subtle - can (for me) change this. For me the Jewish religion - like all other religions - is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people - to whom I gladly belong - have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision ...
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e. in our evaluation of human behavior ... I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes,
Yours,
A. Einstein
Celebrity atheists expose their hypocrisy
DVIR ABRAMOVICH
October 26, 2009
The fundamentalism of the crop of celebrity atheists such as Christopher Hitchens betrays their cause, says Dvir Abramovich.
A flurry of books bashing religion are making best-seller lists and grabbing a lot of attention — so much so that anti-religion publications seem to have become a lucrative genre all their own.
Works such as Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Sam Harris' End of Faith, Michel Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and Daniel Dennet's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon are bare-knuckled, no-holds barred tracts that sometimes resemble the declarations of fundamentalists who are absolutely convinced of their truth.
Hitchens and Dawkins, who are the leaders of the New Atheism movement, have received the most media spotlight and are driving the growth of this industry. Hitchens presented recently at Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas and appeared on ABC TV's Q & A program. And Dawkins will headline next year's Atheist Convention in Melbourne.
These atheists are angry that religion has not gone away and is thriving in various parts of the world. After all, calling other peoples' belief a delusion is not exactly respectful. Indeed, distinguished doctor and broadcaster Lord Winston found Dawkins' attitude to religious faith patronising, insulting and counterproductive, noting that it "portrays science in a bad light".
Hitchens and Dawkins build a straw man - they select the worst offences that have been done in the name of religion to prove that religion is a dangerous force and a kind of virus that infects the mind. At one point Hitchens writes, "Religious belief is not merely false but also actually harmful. But I think it is a mistake to condescend to those who claim 'faith'."
Employing a new name, Dawkins says atheists should refer to themselves as "brights" labelling the devout as "dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads" while Hitchens describes the religious mind as "literal and limited".
According to Hitchens (who discovered two years ago that he is Jewish by way of his mother) the Jews could have been the "carriers of philosophy instead of arid monotheism". What about Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Isaiah Berlin, Derrida, Maimonides, Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Karl Popper, Walter Benjamin and Ayn Rand to name only a few. Does it seem like Judaism is bereft of philosophers? He writes of kosher dietary laws: "In microcosm, this apparently trivial fetish shows how religion and faith and superstition distort our whole picture of the world."
So, the bottom line for these atheists is this: we are free to believe in whatever as long as it's not God.
For Hitchens and co, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Never mind that tyrants devoid of religion such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot perpetrated the worst atrocities in history. As H. Allen Orr, professor of biology at the University of Rochester, observed, the 20th century was an experiment in secularism that produced secular evil, responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million.
Dawkins is mute on the terrors unleashed by science and technology, used by genocidal regimes such as Hitler's Germany, in a century that proved to be the worst tyranny mankind has ever seen. And what about weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear and biological bombs developed by scientists?
Does that mean that all atheists and scientists are evil? Of course not. The point is that fanatics can be found in both religion and atheism.
How can anyone argue that not a single human benefit has resulted from religious faith? There are millions who every day selflessly dedicate their lives to helping others all in the name of religious belief. The cruelty and viciousness of the past and the abuse of religion in the present cannot extinguish the solidarity and good-heartedness of people of faith. Most would agree with the words of former atheist, Oxford University professor of historical theology Alister McGrath, who said: "There are some forms of religion that are pathological, that damage people. For every one of these atrocities, which must cause all of us deep concern, there are 10,000 unreported acts of kindness, generosity, and so forth arising from religious commitment."
True religious values are grounded in notions of community, charity, mercy and peace. All too often today we focus on individualism, greed and instant gratification. Anyone wishing to discredit theology should at least know some. The God Delusion contains very little examination of Jewish theology and dismisses the finest minds of Western thinkers and theologians who have written on sublime theological questions as "infantile".
Hitchens cites the Binding of Isaac and "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" injunction as brutish and stupid. Yet, scholars have interpreted the binding as ending child sacrifice and the injunction as a caution against excessive vengeance. Hitchens says that the God of Moses never refers to compassion and human friendship, overlooking "love your neighbour as yourself".
For his part, Dawkins is clearly out of his depth when it comes to Jewish teachings and ethics. He claims, for instance, that "love thy neighbour" meant only "love another Jew". He apparently is not aware that in the same chapter, Jews are commanded to love the stranger that lives in their land as they would themselves. When Jesus, himself a Jew, was asked "Who is my neighbour" he did not refer to other Jews, but to a Samaritan, considered at that time as heretical and unclean.
Above all, for Dawkins and his contemporaries, billions of people across the globe have accepted stupid and harmful ideas. Yet that iconic scientist Einstein, believed that God represented a great mind that sustained the laws of nature. We know for sure that he was not stupid or delusional. He famously remarked, "God doesn't play with the universe" and noted, when referring to the extraordinary intricacies of the universe: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Einstein believed that a humble, open-ended religious attitude to the cosmos was preferable to a completely non-religious approach.
Consider also that in A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking ends his brilliant book (which sold more than 8 million copies) with the following: "If we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God."
Dawkins and Hitchens assume all believers accept the Bible literally, which in the case of the majority of Jews and other co-religionists, has never been true. Theologians have often questioned institutional religion and have criticised the use of rigid orthodoxy and demagoguery to instill fear and obedience. In fact, most who embrace religious faith at the same time also exercise a healthy dose of skepticism and do not defend the way religion is often manipulated and distorted. Very few follow religion blindly.
The telescope and the microscope that Hitchens says has made religion redundant, does not answer for us why we are here and what is the purpose of human existence. Atoms and black holes leave little space for expounding on the measure of man, sin, holiness, dignity and the human spirit, sorrow, beauty, love, alienation and mortality. Dr Owen Anderson, professor of philosophy at Arizona State University, says the problem with the argument promoted by Hitchens and Dawkins when he asks: "Can all reality be explained as atoms in motion? Is belief in something besides atoms mere superstition?"
Tina Beatie in her book The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War of Religion maintains that atheists are engaged in religious belief themselves because naturalists as authors such as Dawkins and Hitchens use their own beliefs to invest their life with meaning. Ironic, isn't it?
Lord Winston agrees: "Think there is a body of scientific opinion from my scientific colleagues who seem to believe that science is the absolute truth and that religious and spiritual values are to be discounted. "Some people, both scientists and religious people, deal with uncertainty by being certain. That is dangerous in the fundamentalists and it is dangerous in the fundamentalist scientists."
One has to concede that a something inexplicably mysterious took place at the birth of the universe. I read that several years ago, astronomers working with NASA concluded that time began 13.7 billion years ago, a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At that instant, the universe expanded from "submicroscopic to astronomical size in the blink of an eye". The great mystery is why it would want to do that. Thomas Nagel, the philosopher notes that even if we accept evolution and that the necessary seed material was present at the time of the Big Bang, there is no scientific theory as to why the material existed in the first place, and how did such material come into existence.
All we have done is to keep pushing the great question one step back. World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking put it best, "Why does the universe go to the bother of existing?" Many would identify with the father who's compelled to believe in the divine when he notices the beauty and perfection of his daughter's ears. Hitchens mocks him, pointing out that ears always need a clean out, are mass-produced and cats have lovelier ears. A moment of pure love is missed.
Dawkins claims that religion is a form of child abuse since parents teach their kids to believe in certain religious creeds. Is it fair to compare real child abuse with parents instilling in their children religious morals and codes? Dawkins and Hitchens celebrate art over religion, forgetting that the wonder and mystery of the universe and God's role in it have provided inspiration for countless artists. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam paintings at the Sistine Chapel is only one such example.
Dawkins remarks that the human brain is a "design nightmare". Well, since we use that organ to contemplate these and other complex subjects, it can't be that badly designed.
In his introduction to The God Delusion Dawkins states: "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put if down." I wonder for how many readers this is true.
Dr Dvir Abramovich, the Jan Randa Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies is director of the Centre for Jewish History and Culture at The University of Melbourne. He is editor of the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies and President of the Australian Association of Jewish Studies. He is co-editor of the book Testifying to the Holocaust published in 2008.
Atheists are good humans, too - James Richmond - SMH - 2009 October 27
In his opinion piece titled "Celebrity atheists expose their hypocrisy", Dr Dvir Abramovich laments the attention that recent publications by the so-called "new atheists" have been receiving. He takes to task prominent atheists Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) over the positions they espouse in their best-selling books.
Abramovich's main point seems to be that the new atheists are hypocritical in criticising the evils of religion while at the same time ignoring the evils of secularism. Yet in the end one is led to wonder whether he has actually read Dawkins' and Hitchens' books, because both this point and the others he raises are directly addressed in their pages. Even if Dawkins and Hitchens are guilty as charged, Abramovich might equally be accused of emphasising the most laudable parts of religion while glossing over its long and continuing record of putting barriers between people, suppressing free thought and providing a convenient excuse for all manner of violence.
Dawkins is an eminent biologist who is an expert on the theory of evolution. Perhaps in an effort to counter Dawkins' air of science-backed authority, Abramovich invokes the famous scientists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. In essence, he argues that if Hawking wrote about knowing the "mind of God" through science and Einstein approved of taking a "religious attitude" to the cosmos, then belief in religion is, on the face of it, not "stupid". Besides, "billions of people across the globe" accept religion.
Einstein wrote explicitly that he did not believe in a personal or interventionist God, and Hawking's views appear to be similar. Einstein certainly did not believe in the God of the Bible; at best he was a deist who equated God with the scientific "laws of nature". Similarly, in Hawking's universe, God's role (if any) is reduced to little more than setting the initial conditions for the universe to explode into being at the big bang. Scientists do not currently know what caused the big bang. But at the borders of scientific research ignorance is the normal state of affairs. That we do not yet have a scientific explanation for the big bang does not mean that God is the only possibility. In fact, physicists currently working on the problem have many different working hypotheses for how the big bang may have come about, none of which require God. The argument that God steps in at the point where current scientific knowledge ends is so common that it has a name: "god of the gaps". The problem for proponents of this argument is that science is continually filling in those gaps, leaving less and less room for God.
The billions of religious people in the world ought not give us much confidence in the claims of religion, either. After all, the billions differ as to which particular set of religious beliefs is the correct one, and the major religions are incompatible in terms of their fundamental tenets. Abramovich is one of the 0.23 per cent of people in the world who subscribe to Judaism. What of the other 99.77 per cent? Does Abramovich believe that the overwhelming number of people who do not follow Judaism is indicative of the falsity of that religion in the same way that the large number of believers in general is indicative of the existence of God?
If religion is false, why do so many people follow it? Scientists such as Dawkins have a few ideas about that. The human brain has evolved over millions of years to be well adapted for dealing with and surviving the challenges thrown up by the kinds of environments in which human beings live. It has been suggested that the same adaptations that have contributed to humanity's success as a species have also, as a side effect, predisposed us towards accepting certain kinds of mystical and religious beliefs. Our brains may well be "hard-wired' for religion. Add some cultural nurture to our evolved nature and we have the beginnings of an explanation for why so many people follow some form of religion. When it comes to choosing one particular religion over another, it seems to be largely a matter of indoctrination; the best predictor of a person's religious beliefs is the beliefs held by his or her parents.
Obviously, not everybody is religious. If we do have a predisposition towards religious belief, then it seems it is possible to overcome it by learning to think critically. It is no accident that a large percentage of the highest-achieving scientists are either atheists or claim a belief in Einstein's remote kind of God. The way that science is taught and practised emphasises a particular form of critical thinking, in an atmosphere where all claims are judged on the strength of the available evidence.
Abramovich is clearly worried that the new atheists may not share the supposedly high moral standards of religious people. He refers to the 20th century as an "experiment in secularism . . . responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million", citing Hitler and Stalin as examples of the worst that atheism and secularism have produced. In another shot across Dawkins' bows, he accuses Dawkins of being 'mute on the terrors unleashed by science and technology", such as nuclear and biological weapons.
While Stalin was indisputably an atheist (though at the behest of his mother he trained for the priesthood at a Russian Orthodox seminary), there is some room for debate about Hitler's beliefs. Both were indisputably evil men. The important question is: were they evil because of their atheism? As Dawkins points out, there is not the smallest evidence that atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. And if we want to compare degrees of evil, it is important to distinguish evil intent from the means available to bring that intent to fruition. Science and technology are, of themselves, morally neutral tools that can be double-edged swords. Modern biology has given us biological weapons, but it has also given us modern medicine. The impact of Hitler's evil was made all the worse by his control over the technological apparatus of a modern industrialised state.
Hitchens writes on the difference between the evils of atheism and the evils of religion: "Humanism has many crimes for which to apologise. But it can apologise for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief. Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, 'faith-based'." He also invites us to consider the responses of religious organisations to the totalitarian regimes of the last century, pointing to the Catholic Church's support of Mussolini and its apparently passive stance in regard to the Nazi regime's persecution of the Jewish people.
Abramovich turns to the benefits of religion, pointing out that there are "millions who every day selflessly dedicate their lives to helping others all in the name of religious belief". There are, of course, many secular organisations whose members also dedicate their lives to helping others, and many individual atheists who do so independently, not in the name of religious belief, but simply because they believe it is the morally right thing to do. The argument that morality requires religion or even the existence of God has been discussed extensively by philosophers from Plato onward; there is too little space to discuss the issue here. Suffice it to say that secular humanism is a well-developed and self-consistent moral system that makes no reference to God or religion, while duplicating many of the more admirable moral precepts of established religions and improving on the less admirable ones. Our Australian system of government and the laws of the land owe as much (or more) to this secular system of morality as they do to the Christian religion.
Moderate religious people, in contrast to the fundamentalists, tell us that the foundational texts of the great monotheistic faiths should not always be taken literally; they must be appropriately interpreted. But how are we are to decide which parts of the Torah or the Bible or the Koran are to be taken as the inflexible Word of God and which parts can safely be ignored or reinterpreted? In matters of morality – take intolerance of homosexuality, for example – people nominally of the same religion often bitterly disagree about the "right" way to interpret God's word. Many Westerners today hold idiosyncratic and not-always-internally-consistent sets of beliefs made up of a hodge-podge of elements borrowed from many disparate religious traditions, often with a few "new-age" ideas thrown in. Secular humanists argue that it is better to base decisions about moral principles on reasoned arguments rather than on appeals to perceived authorities or accepted dogma or particular interpretations of the word of God. Texts such as the Bible are not primarily concerned with moral teachings anyway. The most important message of the Bible, judging from the number of words devoted to it, is that it is vitally important to believe in the correct God.
Abramovich hails religion for inspiring great works of art such as Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel. One response to this is to point to all the great works of art that do not have religious themes. Another is simply to wonder what might have been: what works of art might a Michelangelo or a Bach have produced had they been inspired by and commissioned to explore themes other than religious ones? There's no reason to suppose that their oeuvres would have been any the less impressive.
Abramovich seems to believe that without religion there can be no sense of wonder or the numinous, such as might inspire an artist like Michelangelo. He writes that mere "atoms in motion" can't explain the "dignity of the human spirit, sorrow, beauty, love" and so on. This is the "god of the gaps" argument again. A prosaic response is to point out that the sciences, such as evolutionary psychology, are in fact making some progress in explaining things like love and the dignity of the human spirit. This is another instance where science does not yet have all the answers, but that's all right. Scientists are comfortable with uncertainty – even excited by it, since it holds the promise of discovery and new understanding. A more emotional response is to point out that human feelings such as belonging, loving and being loved, being part of something bigger than oneself, can and do exist in the absence of any belief in God or religion. Atheists report those feelings and perceptions in much the same way that religious people do. The only difference is that where a devoutly religious person may feel to the core of his being that he is part of God's creation, an atheist may feel equally intensely that he is part of a complex universe entirely explainable by natural laws.
Dawkins remarks that the human brain is a "design nightmare". His point, apparently missed by Abramovich, is that the brain wasn't purposefully designed at all. No intelligent designer would have designed it the way it is. We have a beautiful and powerful explanation for why the brain is the way it is: the theory of evolution. The human brain evolved over millions of years, by the sometimes-haphazard process of random variation acted on by the emphatically non-random process of natural selection. A deep understanding of the surprising and amazingly-unlikely series of steps that led to the emergence of human brains and the humans that came along with them, inspires in the educated atheist a sense of awe similar to that which religious people must feel when they contemplate God.
James Richmond is a tutor in physics at The University of Melbourne.