Defending Religion as a Kind of Art
PZ Myers takes on a "flaky atheist" who managed to get an article on this subject printed in the Guardian:
Our aspirations and our art and our morality are products of our humanity, not our religion. Religion has done a fine job of confusing humanity with superstitious dogma, however, to the point where even some atheists think we wouldn't have transcendent meaning without that old grab-bag of lies.
Evans has this idea that religion is a kind of symbolic art, and that atheists are criticizing it as a bad painting, while all the good religious people are sharing his view of it as an elaborate metaphor for life. That is false. ... [I]t is ludicrous to imply that religious people are largely sensible of the metaphorical nature of religion and share his view of it. Face it: most religious people in the western world believe that god is real. Heaven and hell are real. Jesus is god. Etc., etc., etc. They do mistake the art of religion for reality, and as he condescendingly puts it, must be "only a child".
Myers is right — if anyone recognizes that religion cannot literally be true, it's atheists. Religious people are the ones who treat portions or all of their systems as if they were literally true. Atheists, when criticizing religion, must however criticize it as an allegedly-true system. Otherwise, they won't be criticizing what religious people believe. That's only common sense: you criticize what people actually assert as true, not what you think is true.
Ophelia Benson comments on Evans' article, noting that he doesn't even understand what atheism is:
There aren't many species of atheism, because atheism isn't like religion, so it's no good saying 'just as there are many species of religion' as if that made it true. Religion is all about multiplying entities, and about making up stuff to believe; atheism isn't, it's just about not believing the stuff other people have made up. It's not a belief, it's not a religion, it's not a mirror-image of religion only with minus signs where the pluses should be. It's just not believing there is a god, that's all. It's not old and tired today because there's nothing to be old and tired. It's not a system, not an ideology, not a set of postulates or rules or myths; it's just non-belief in a deity. It's no more stale and tired than all the other things we don't believe, because there's no bread to get stale. My non-belief in the Great Pumpkin isn't stale, so why should my non-belief in 'God' be? No earthly reason. People just think it sounds deep or wise or shrewd to say so. Well it doesn't.
If Dylan Evans can't even figure out that mere atheism isn't a belief system, how can he be trusted to produce an even vaguely accurate analysis of religion and atheists' reaction to religion? As Benson notes, just about everything Evans writes about atheism, religion, and science is wrong.
Evans is correct, I think, that religions are systems that give structure and substance to a human desire for transcendence. If there were any one essential element that is common to all religions, it would probably be this desire for transcendence — we can find it in one for or another in religions as diverse as Christianity, Buddhism, and Raelians.
The problem is that most religious people regard this structure and substance as literally true. Their god isn't a metaphor for their quest for transcendence, their god really does exist and really does tell them to hate gays or impose certain moral standards on others. Atheists would be happy, I think, if Evans' description of religion were shared by religious believers but it isn't — and that means his "criticism" of atheists has little value except as an example of how not to argue and what not to do.
I guess being a bad example is better than nothing, though.
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