I have not, I think, made a secret of the fact that I am a “Neville Chamberlain atheist,” at least when set against the jeremiads of P.Z. Myers or Larry Moran. Part of this is due my personal laissez faire orientation when it comes to to falsities in the minds of others. So long as the falsehoods do not impinge upon my own life I am inclined to let them stand if a full frontal attack would necessitate the spending of time better allocated to other pursuits. Of course, religion is not a trivial thing, its manifestation has significant import for our world. But my own attitude has been shaped by the reading of scientific literature which suggests that some form of organized supernaturalism is an inevitable outcome of modal human psychology. In particular, this passage from In Gods We Trust has been a significant force in my own inclination toward pragmatism in regards to religion:
Finally, the fact that God’s word is accepted as true on faith-come what may-entails that it can never be false or deceptive or merely figurative . Ordinary preoccupation with lying and false belief in communication therefore plays no role in interpretation (or at least no consistent role). Neither can failed attempts at verification or confirmation of this or that aspect of the information represented in a religious statement, or inferred from it, undermine the audience’s belief in the statement’s truth.
On the contrary, apparently discomforming evidence only seems to make believers try harder to understand the deeper truth and to strengthen religious beliefs. For example, after reaading a bogus article on a new fidning from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seemed to contradict Christian doctrine, religious believers who also believed the story reported their religious beliefs reinforced (Batson 1975). For believers, then, confidence in religious doctrine and belief can increase through both, confirmation and disconfirmation of any factual assumptions that may accompany interpretation of those beliefs….
(page 92-93)
There are two major points that I think are important here:
1) Religion is an extremely powerful complex of ideas, robust and resistant to a fault against being overturned. This should not surprise anyone, but, I have met many atheists (including myself) who have attempted either analytic or empirical disconfirmation of the God hypothesis aimed at believers. Data such as the above suggests that we’re wasting our time. Of course, people do change their minds and beliefs, but the process is psychologically & socially complex. It isn’t a matter of “doing the sums,” so to speak.
2) This powerful tendency to not face up to disconfirmation isn’t really restricted to religion. Much of Thomas Kuhn’s work on science suggests that the same process is at work in that culture, paradigm shifts are enabled by the death of a generation of scientists who refuse to give up on hypotheses long falsified. Similarly, obviously many political beliefs and positions exhibit the same tendency.
As I have stated, religion is natural, and it co-opts conventional human psychology. But, that being said, it is also special. Men do not give their lives for the glory of a scientific hypothesis, but they do die ostensibly in the name of God. The stubborn adherence to the absurd is a common human tendency, but religious beliefs marry this to overwhelmingly powerful emotional valences, drawing on multiple psychological vectors (e.g., emotional attachment to the personal God, identification with the religious community, etc.). There are many tributaries which flow into the river of religion, and that is what gives the phenomenon its torrential power. If religiosity was dependent upon one subsidiary for its robusticity then tackling it would be an easy feat, but it is a many headed hydra. While it maintains its invariant character within the human psyche in the face of countervailing winds, on the social scale measured in generations it is incredibly adaptable and flexible, mutating and accommodating within the broad bounds of its conceptual constraints.
Let me assume for a moment that you, the reader, are in the minority of the human race which does not subscribe to the supernatural religions. How are we to deal with the fact of the ubiquity of religious belief and practice? If religion is a natural phenomenon, what engineering responses can be taken to tame it? If one is building a road and one encounters a mountain there are multiple options which are available. One might destroy the mountain with explosives. One might tunnel through the mountain. Or, one might build around the mountain. Each choice has costs and benefits. Tearing down the mountain will be difficult and entail great cost, and, the consequences of such a geological rearrangement on the overall environment are not trivial. Tunneling through the mountain is an engineering challenge, not without its costs or dangers, though one would expect that the environmental impact might be less than tearing down the mountain as the geological rearrangment is trivial. Finally, going around the mountain involves less cost, but would add length to the road which would translate into long term costs of time for anyone traveling the path (so, the short term cost is slight, but integrated over time it would build up). But a choice we make for one mountain is not a choice we need to make for all mountains, and just as some engineers specialize in tearing down mountains, so others focus on efficient road building. Religion is a complex phenomenon, and if we as unbelievers are to engage it and turn it to our own ends our own models must be sufficiently nuanced and our courses of action multi-faceted and conditional. Otherwise, we fall into the fallacies of the fundamentalists, who are wont to divide the world into their imaginings of darkness and light, denying the textured gradations of reality.
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