Sunday, November 30, 2008

An Atheist In Church

What better time to contemplate God than on the biggest shopping weekend of the year? (Even if it isn't really.) Hector and I have been having an ongoing discussion about religion and once again, he touched on all kinds of interesting things. So here are some choice quotes and some responses.

I liked the Carlin bit. He's right, that a certain amount of exposure to dirt and germs are required to get the immune system started. Something that bugs me (hah! bugs!) is when people who obviously have a cold insist on shaking my hand. Keep it to yourself, can't you? At church they do this thing called "sharing the peace." If germs and virus were big enough to see, people would realize that this is the same kind of thing as snake-handling, counting on God to protect you from danger. I think it's asking too much of God. He made those snakes and those germs dangerous. A little respect, please! A couple of years ago, the pastor said that since the flu was so bad that year, the "sharing the peace" would be suspended for a few weeks. [Sounds like "The snakes are especially venomous this season, so we won't be handling them for a month or so."] That was sensible, and should have continued indefinitely, but no, here we are back again with the coughers and snifflers extending their hands and feeling snubbed if I won't grab them. And then the backbiting starts: "He's so full of himself, he won't shake your hand!"

There is a process called science through which we know things. Then there's a thing called "science" which could be described as "things portrayed as science". (Yes, it's confusing, since the two words look and sound exactly alike and mean almost the exact opposite.) Back in the 19th century, you could find "science" which made claims on the order of "We pretty much know everything and it's just the details we need to work out."

Politicized scientific groups, the media, educational groups and the government tend to perpetuate this absurd notion to the extent that most of us walk around thinking we have a clue. And our very safe environment gives us the luxury of not having the truth slapped in our faces. This leads to a lot of superstitious behavior.

Diseases are a good example of us not having a clue. Germ theory posits that microorganisms cause disease. But that leaves a lot of holes. Why are there outbreaks? Why do some people get sick while others don't? There is a science (epidemiology) but it only works at the macro level. There are too many factors at the micro level--where we all live--to make it seem other than God playing dice.

I'm not sure about what "sharing the peace" is, exactly, but it sounds like something that is incidentally unsanitary as opposed to an attempt to test one's faith (like snake-handling). If it's incidental (not intrinsic), you could suggest more sanitary approaches.

But of course, you don't win friends by breaking tradition, regardless of sanitary (or sanity) issues.

The test of faith issue is probably more interesting.

Well, that's enough about that. Yes, I'm an atheist; yes, I go to church now and then; so what. It's a social thing.

Heh. Well, it's no skin off my nose. And I've found that religious folk don't necessarily lump all unbelievers together. If you're there, they might see you as a fellow traveler who's just farther back down the road.

(Several hundred words deleted.) … I place a great deal of value on the social networking that arises from church membership. It would please me greatly if I could see somewhere else for this kind of caring to come from, that was not mediated by the State; since State-mediated caring is not really caring at all, it's somebody's job. The reason I love my daughter, or feel concerned about my neighbor, is not because I am paid to do so; I do those things because they are part of myself. They are not things I can give up if I get another job at the highway department or investment bank.

Secular social networking tends to be about individuals hooking up for their mutual, individual benefit. It seldom, from what I've seen, goes beyond fairly immediate needs and rarely does it create a group. But it does sometimes.

The American Revolution, for example. created a fairly strong secular group. Religion was involved and influential, but not the primary driver. The Revolutionary movement was primarily philosophical, though it had plenty of violence and hardship that, up until about 50 years ago, was enough to unite Ameicans as a people even when they disagreed.

Military service, especially actual battle time, unites people.

But is violence necessary? Hector goes on:

So, if I'm reading you right, this sort of binding comes from poverty and privation. I'd rather see it come from the kind of self-interest that incorporates the realization that, to use a cliché, "a rising tide lifts all boats." Can we get past the idea that what's good for me has to be bad for you. The world is not a zero-sum process.

I don't think privation and poverty are necessary and they're certainly not sufficient, at the same time it occurred to me recently that without some sort of test, how do you know if someone's going to be there when you need them?

I think a lot of religions are based on notions of fairness. There's all this stuff we don't have a clue about, and life is not only not fair, it seems arbitrarily cruel at time. Religions often tell us that there's a scale that, ultimately, get balanced. Or they tell us we can achieve a state where we don't care.

I just can't make out where a belief in supernatural powers is required to make love work in human lives.

Value, meaning, significance--these are things that are assigned. You can say that a particular thing in the universe has a particular value: The wolf knows that the rabbit has a particular value if he's hungry and he hasn't eaten in a long time.

But what makes the wolf valuable? Ultimately, like cause-and-effect, one ends up with something outside the universe. From the standpoint of the strictly material, "life" is just an accident of physics.

But then: I have long thought that it should be possible to prove ethics by mathematics, i.e., that there must be some way to show that the right thing is also the rational thing. In other words, we don't need threats from a supernatural power to tell us that, for instance, it's wrong to [sin of your choice here, let's use "covet" as an example] covet; a little rational thought will show us that it's counter-productive to covet. Don't covet your neighbor's HDTV, and get indigestion thinking about it; it makes more sense to save your pennies and get one of your own. As simple as that.


Behaving ethically is certainly logical. We could even make a mathematical formula:

(G/E) > 1

That is, the ratio of Good (G) to Evil (E) has to be greater than one for the act to be ethical. I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but only slightly. We could say:

G1 + G2 + G3.../E1 + E2 + E3...=Ϛ

I'm using the obsolete Greek letter "stigma" because it amuses me. We'll say that the series of Gs represent the positive effects of doing something in various scopes, while E represents the evil.

For example, say you're building a house: We could count as positives the shelter, the social economic activity (assuming you don't do everything by yourself), the increase of your own assets (which might mean being worth more money, being more marriageable, etc), what the house allows you to do (raise children), if it grows a community, and we could even count the aesthetic value of the house, and the dog house and bird feeder in the back yard. We could also count tearing down a structure already on that site, if it's run down and dangerous. (Destruction can be positive, which is why I used the terms "good" and "evil" rather than "constructive" and "destructive".)

On the negative side we could count the loss of assets (if the market crashed), and basically consider the negatives or potential negatives of all the positives previously listed. Like, the house could be ugly, being a negative aesthetic. On top of that, we could posit habitats that are displaced by the construction, destruction of trees for lumber, etc.

Of course, it's easy to come up with butterfly-wing-flapping effects, and much harder to weight them. How heavily do you weight the aesthetics, for example?

So, I agree that ethics can be approached mathmetically. We could even say that given two actions,

Ϛ1 > Ϛ2

we should prefer action Ϛ1. For any given set of actions, we should prefer the one with the highest Ϛ, that is, the highest ratio of Good to Evil. The Devil is in the details, of course, but in most mundane cases finding the right action, or isolating the set of more right actions.

When certain factors are hidden, of course--well, that's when we get into trouble.

5 comments:

  1. Once again, you have given me too much to think about.

    To start with the easy part,

    I'm not sure about what "sharing the peace" is, exactly, but it sounds like something that is incidentally unsanitary as opposed to an attempt to test one's faith (like snake-handling). If it's incidental (not intrinsic), you could suggest more sanitary approaches.

    At a particular point in the service, the pastor says, "The peace of the Lord be with you." Congregation responds, "And also with you." Pastor says, "Let us share that peace." Then everyone is supposed to shake hands with everyone else. In a church that's bigger than a breadbox, this amounts to the people in a few neighboring pews. It's a toned-down version of the kiss of peace or holy kiss, nicely described here. More. Here's a comment thread on a Lutheran forum about this, some like it, some don't; some want kisses and hugs, some don't. This practice was brought back into Protestant services about 30 years ago. Better the handshakes than the smoochies, I guess, but it's still unhygienic.

    Which brings us to

    Diseases are a good example of us not having a clue. Germ theory posits that microorganisms cause disease. But that leaves a lot of holes. Why are there outbreaks? Why do some people get sick while others don't? There is a science (epidemiology) but it only works at the macro level. There are too many factors at the micro level--where we all live--to make it seem other than God playing dice.

    As far as I am concerned, the Koch-Pasteur "germ theory of disease" has been demonstrated well enough to be going on with. You think not? I hope you have been getting the kids their shots.

    Secular social networking tends to be about individuals hooking up for their mutual, individual benefit.

    Hey, mutual or individual? Pick one, you can't have both. We used to have many more non-church related social organizations, and we still have some. The Elks Club comes to mind right away. I have been invited to join, but declined because you have to be a Christian, and I did not want to lie about that — oh, I guess that is a church-related group after all! Although considering that I am implicitly lying every time I go to church, maybe I should just go ahead and forswear myself some more. Really though, it's the "visiting the sick" kind of thing that I'm concerned with here.

    I think a lot of religions are based on notions of fairness. There's all this stuff we don't have a clue about, and life is not only not fair, it seems arbitrarily cruel at time. Religions often tell us that there's a scale that, ultimately, get balanced.

    "There'll be pie, in the sky, when you die." — Joe Hill. "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform." — William Cowper. "We'll understand it better by and by." — Charles Albert Tindley. Comfort for the comfortless, pleasant lies to ease the pain. Yes, they tell us that the scale gets balanced. I don't believe everything that anybody tells me. One has to pick and choose; otherwise, you might be trying to erect the tollbooths on the Brooklyn Bridge that you've just bought.

    Value, meaning, significance--these are things that are assigned.

    Yes. I recall a book I had to read for a college ethics class, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, which I really ought to re-read before I say anything about it here, but I'm only going to comment on the title. There is no need to search for meaning. Human beings create meaning. What each person finds himself needing to search for is the right meaning for him, or her, among all the possible ones that could exist.

    You can say that a particular thing in the universe has a particular value: The wolf knows that the rabbit has a particular value if he's hungry and he hasn't eaten in a long time.

    But what makes the wolf valuable? Ultimately, like cause-and-effect, one ends up with something outside the universe.

    The wolf is valuable to himself, to his mate, to his cubs. To the extent that they have conciousness and can assign meaning. Or are we confusing meaning and value, here?

    From the standpoint of the strictly material, "life" is just an accident of physics.

    "Just" an accident of physics? It is the accident of physics which allows us, you and me, to discuss the meaning of the Universe! Nothing mere or "just" about it, it's a big deal. If we human beings here on Earth are the only thinking entities that exist, let's not get all mere accident about it. But do we need to imagine ourselves to be so special that we had to be Created? The universe is sufficiently awesome all by itself. I remember lying on the road, high in the Rockies, on a clear night, looking light-years into the starry deep; how fortunate am I to exist at all. How fortunate is the human race and our beautiful living planet to exist at all. (Never mind about disease organisms and parasites when thinking of the beauty of Gaia.)

    And on to mathematics of ethics: You have got to watch out for Utilitarianism, here. This has been done before, and badly. When you start balancing ratio of good to evil, without defining those terms, without having axioms upon which to base your theorems, you're headed straight off into "greatest good for the greatest number" territory, and that's all Marx, Mao, and Stalin. Not ethical examples at all. Ethics is for the individual. The right thing to do is the thing that does not get one's soul all twisted up trying to rationalize it.

    This reminds me off some of those college bull-sessions that would go on and on. Hard to tell if it's really deep, or if I'm just out of my depth. I don't know whether to thank you for the challenge, or curse you for making me think. Eenie-meenie-minie-moe … thanks for the challenge.

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  2. It's a funny coincidence that there's a debate over the obnoxiousness of proselytizing atheists going on over at Althouse right now. The sign's obnoxious (did I already say that?), the group ought not to have done it. It's like pissing in the punchbowl at someone else's party.

    We can get along if we'll treat each other decently. Can the Golden Rule be made into a mathematical statement?

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  3. Maybe I should let this lay, but something you said on that Althouse thread has been bugging me: "You choose not to see God." It's not a choice, look over here and see God, look over there and see only the material universe. I've looked in both directions. Maybe I'm more of an igtheist, than an atheist.

    On the mathematical ethics thing, to be a little more specific, it has to do not so much with balances as with consequences, what I tried to say about the soul getting twisted. Most of the things defined as sin are things that involve a person being untrue in some way. True = straight, as you might describe a true path, or true North. What hurts another, hurts oneself, though maybe not right away. Don't cheat your customers, it will improve your balance sheet this month, but they won't be back. Don't cheat on your wife, it will feel good for a minute, but oh dear, what comes later.

    Of course the problem with an ethics that is not God-centric is the children and the sociopaths. Children are barbarians (or Barbariennes!) who need to be taught everything, from where to relieve themselves to which fork to use; and the sociopaths just don't care. Some children can be socialized without threats of force, some not; sociopaths never learn to consider anything but personal gratification, regardless of the risk or cost to others. They are like kids who think that they can lie to their parents. Funny, isn't it? They are so transparent, when they think they are being sly. And it's that slyness that throws the mathematical ethics equation to the negative side.

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  4. I've been meaning to respond to this for a while.

    Ignostic actually sounds pretty close to me. If someone asks me "Do you believe in God?" my inclination is to say, "What do you mean?"

    As for "choosing not to see God", I'm pretty sure I was talking about how a theist sees an atheist.

    I'm less comfortably a theist than a spiritualist. That's probably part of my ultimate response to this.

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  5. If you have the "ultimate response," I'll be interested to see it. :-)

    In the meantime, maybe I'll look into Jerkism. All the best people seem to be taking it up.

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