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Courtesy, Against the tide & the necessity of tacking, by Razib
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.
Read the rest at Gene Expression.
Posted by Dan tdaxp on Mar 12, 2007 04:09 PM
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4 Comments
Excellent eye, Dan!
Very interesting quote. What strikes me as most peculiar, however, is the call to avoid a false dichotomy — “to divide the world into their imaginings of darkness and light” — while, the whole time, proposing another rigid dichotomy: unbelievers vs believers.
Where’s the acknowledgment of complexity in that other assumed dichotomy?
Curtis,
In Razib’s defense, his view of religion is pretty nuanced. He’s an atheist, but recognizes a biological impulse in humans to believe in a purposeful higher power. So thus Marxists, Environmentalists, and others are actually just as much “believers” as housewives who read the horoscope.
I found his post interesting because he’s pretty fatalistic of changing the role of “belief” in society, and skeptical of Dawkins 4G Atheism. Thus, believing that atheism is to unattractive to support a mass-movement, he instead shifts to 5G ish rhetoric where smaller numbers can do more.
I don’t think Razib’s view is quite that nuanced. He may fully acknowledge that various forms of non-theistic superstitions exist, even superstitions in science that will not die until their adherents die, but he’s still breaking it down to two groups: the believers (whatever they believe) and the unbelievers. Naturally, he may describe either group’s tendency as based in biological realities (and thus also, psychological realities), but that doesn’t make his stance nuanced, imo. His dichotomization seems similar to the Objectivist principle, that if no proof of the existence of a thing can be found, it must be assumed to not exist (for all intents and purposes; i.e., for directing a life.)
Atheists cannot disprove the existence of a god or gods but only prove that they, themselves, have not yet been able to find Him/Her/Them. I’d like to see Razib run with the notion that humans may be biologically predisposed to believe in “religion” or unprovable realities, and take it a step further by pondering how atheists may be similarly predisposed, vis-a-vis their ‘unbelief’ (which seems to me to be merely another form of belief.)
But these quibbles aside; or, rather, taking them a step further; Razib’s consideration of the strength of such predispositions, and the resiliency of belief-systems, and of the complexity of “the textured gradations of reality”, do point at a fundamental indirection, themselves, already. It’s rather like static. Atheists and theists and other-believers, and so forth and so on, may be seen to be part of that complex texture, each trying to shape it from particularized and limited viewpoints, each being constantly affected by the effects caused by so many unknown others, not realizing the full extent of the effects and affectations and so forth and so on. A motivated and dedicated core group, understanding this, might find a way to shift the overall system into a new direction while everyone else remains blissfully ignorant.
Actually, I just realized that your latest post at tdaxp, Jesusism-Paulism, Part VI: Embrace and Extend, quite relates to Razib’s 5GW suggestion:
And this, incidentally, reminds me of a link I found today on Pacific Empire, to an article at CatoUnbound, in which Tyler Cowen ponders the possibility that Libertarians should — gasp! — embrace bigger government! For much the same reasons, if I remember correctly (the link to the CatoUnbound article doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, so I’ve not linked it. But here’s an upset review at kboreilly.com: “Faulty Packaging”.)