On The Uncontroversial Subject of Religion...

Ross Douthat tries to run an argument that's always puzzled me -- the idea that we can infer the truth of theism from the fact that theism is widely believed:

am, however, consistently puzzled by the resistance, whether it's among my friends and neighbors or the Sam Harrises of the world, to any consideration of the notion that religious experience might be like most other widespread human experiences - which is to say, a response to something that's actually out there. [...] As soon as homo sapiens developed consciousness, we became conscious of (what seems to be) a numinous reality interwoven with our own; it's just possible, surely, that we started experiencing the numinous because it happens to be real.

The trouble, I think, is that one thing just about everyone should be prepared to agree about is that most peoples' religious beliefs are false. As you can see in the handy chart I stole from this site, there's just too much diversity in religious belief. Whatever the right thing to believe is, most people don't believe it. At best, you can combine the Christian and Muslim blocks (and the trivial number of Jews) to form a very slight majority in form of some form of monotheism. Even here, though, the folk practices of many Catholics (and unless I'm mistaken, Orthodox Christians and Shiite Muslims as well) has strong polytheistic elements. It's only a kind of rhetorical overreach on the part of atheists -- pitting "religion" versus "not religion" as the key disagreement -- that creates the appearance of a large majority in favor of "religion."

There's clearly a significant human predilection for not-supported-by-science beliefs of various sorts -- in the existence of a god or gods, astrology, fortune-telling, alien visits to earth, the healing power of crystals, etc. -- but there's no particular convergence of these beliefs on anything in particular. Meanwhile, on many of the particular question you might ask about religious subjects, atheists are going to be in the majority. Like most people on earth, atheists don't believe that Jesus Christ died for man's sins. Similarly, just like most people, atheists don't believe that Muhammed was Allah's greatest prophet or that the Hidden Imam will return. And, again, like most people atheists don't believe that you'll be reborn on earth after death in a new body.

Comments

And, like most people on the earth, atheists don't believe that God chose George W. Bush to lead His Nation through Its Time of Tribulation.

Just wanted to add that, not sure exactly why.

Posted by Ottoe | November 22, 2006 11:53 PM

Not sure where they derive their Chinese folk and Buddhism stats from, but they should be aware that Chinese religious believers are very likely underestimated as a result of residual government anti-religious bias. That might affect your monotheistic majority -- it might be more like a monotheistic plurality. And, of course, what with African syncretism, a lot of those Christians may not really be monotheistic, strictly speaking.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 23, 2006 12:03 AM

Very good point. You could, of course, make the argument that all religions are an imperfect perception of some objective reality...but then just about everybody would reject that.

If Douthat is looking for a more likely explanation for religion, he might consider reading The Atlantic a few months ago. There was an excellent article about how the human brain may, for evolutionary reasons, be hard-wired to perceive religious 'truths'. Not an article the pro-religion people will like, but...Occam's razor and all that.

Posted by Tom Hilton | November 23, 2006 12:06 AM

The trouble, I think, is that one thing just about everyone should be prepared to agree about is that most peoples' religious beliefs are false. As you can see in the handy chart I stole from this site, there's just too much diversity in religious belief.

That's true of, like, every belief system whether religious or secular, depending on what level of specificity you require among those beliefs. That individual people's beliefs don't overlap is just as much proof against religion as it is proof against Rawls.

Most religious beliefs are not particularly adversarial, most involve a complex set of practices that can't be boiled down to a question of whose god is right.

Posted by DivGuy | November 23, 2006 12:08 AM

Also, the way he puts it is so broad: "a numinous reality interwoven with our own." Plenty of modern wacky theories of physics would qualify under that rubric. If all you demand is that people agree that all this crazy shit in the universe is structured on a level we don't fully understand, well that's pretty weak stuff.

Posted by dj moonbat | November 23, 2006 12:11 AM

What you say is true at the formal, doctrinal level. And yet, it is astonishing how much convergence there is in folk belief. Most polytheisms have a dominant god: lots of monotheisms have powerful angels and saints and so on. Most Buddhists believe something a lot more like mainstream Christianity than Westerners are led to believe, and mainstream Christian belief is probably really Pelagian and Arian, rather than orthodox.

Posted by Pithlord | November 23, 2006 12:12 AM

it is astonishing how much convergence there is in folk belief

No, it's not. It's no more astonishing than the incredible number of folk cultures that use the pentatonic scale, or the incredible number of cultures that have a myth in which a farm boy living with adoptive parents encounters a mysterious figure who explains to him that he is the true son of the High King and must battle the Dark Lord to save the realm. Does that mean that there really IS a farm boy who is the true son of the High King? No. It means that everybody has some similar built-in ideas about what makes a good story.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 23, 2006 12:28 AM

It means that everybody has some similar built-in ideas about what makes a good story

And you don't find that astonishing?

Posted by dj moonbat | November 23, 2006 12:33 AM

It turns out that despite rumors to the contrary, God is actually a libertarian who is concerned that America has not yet embraced the flat tax. He is also eager to see gay marriage in all fifty states.

I read it at andrewsullivan.com it must be true.

Posted by Linus | November 23, 2006 12:51 AM

I think the Mahdi is the one who's going to come, and the Hidden Imam is around all the time, though he is only seen by Shi'ites and they only realize it afterwards.

At least that's what I heard in my brief moments of wakefulness during my last Religion 201 lecture on Sacred Beings in Islam.

Posted by ... | November 23, 2006 12:59 AM

What's the difference between atheist and non-relgious? Atheism is now considered a religion?

Posted by The Bobs | November 23, 2006 1:01 AM

Pithlord, how the hell is Buddhism like mainstream Christianity?

Posted by Jenn | November 23, 2006 1:08 AM

What's the difference between atheist and non-relgious? Atheism is now considered a religion?

No. Atheists believe there's no God. The non-religious just don't care.

Posted by dj moonbat | November 23, 2006 1:12 AM

Unless the Chinese government is counting people who should be counted as being Chinese folk religionists as Jews, Christians, or Muslims, or simply dropping them out of the survey altogether then Matt's monotheistic majority (no alliteration intended) remains intact.

I suppose one might try to save the ad populum argument for religion by saying that all of the religions are right, and are only wrong to the extent that they claim others are wrong: i.e., Jesus really [i]is[/i] the messiah, Boddhisattvas really [i]do[/i] stick around on Earth trying to help others attain enlightenment, Mohammed really [i]is[/i] God's prophet, etc. Reconciling all of this would be tricky, but many religions are already thoroughly internally contradictory anyway, so it might not be that much harder than following a single religion. I'm not a close scholar of these things, but sometimes I get the impression that Bahá'í is an attempt to sorta combine all religions and claim that they're all right.

Posted by Julian Elson | November 23, 2006 1:18 AM

No. Atheism is the lack of belief in the proposition 'God exists', which is compatible with the belief in the proposition 'God does not exist', but does not entail it, since not having a belief doesn't entail having one. You can be an atheist without ever once having considered the concept 'God'.

Posted by Will Wilkinson | November 23, 2006 1:27 AM

Matt, you're getting a lot of mileage out of the polysemy of the word "belief." If you make even a crude distinction between belief as the conviction that the holy has some extra-mental reality and belief as the set of contingent historical doctrines that various people have claimed to derive from that conviction, your diversity objection no longer works against the first kind of belief, which I think is what Douthat is talking about here.

Posted by ogged | November 23, 2006 1:28 AM

dj moonbat,

No.
Atheists don't believe anything, per se. They are pursuaded by the preponderance of evidence that assertions of the existance of the supernatural are the product of human fantacy.

Posted by joe | November 23, 2006 1:28 AM

Ogged,

So you're saying that "that the holy has some extra-mental reality" is not a contingent historical doctrine?

Posted by Will Wilkinson | November 23, 2006 1:34 AM

Atheists don't believe anything, per se...

I wasn't being even a little bit serious.

Posted by dj moonbat | November 23, 2006 1:37 AM

Well, every belief is contingent and historical, but surely we can see the difference between the vague belief that there's something "real" about the holy, which I think is what most people mean when they say they're religious, and which seems to be a position that just about every known culture has endorsed to some degree, and the very specific doctrines ("No meat on Friday" "God is one, and also three") that specific religions have espoused.

Posted by ogged | November 23, 2006 1:40 AM

I'm kind of surprised at the seeming obtuseness of this. Framing it as religion vs. non-religion is not rhetorical overreach, it's about as accurate as a broad description as one can get. All religions hold the conviction that there is (again broadly speaking) something beyond this life that we should be concerned with in this life. They vary on what this is and thus what we should be doing about it, but this is miles apart from the atheists who affirm that there is no such thing to be concerned about.

I'm a Christian theologian. I taught a course with a Buddhist Lama. We disagree on some pretty major issues, but I would never say his beliefs as a whole are false, nor would he of mine. But we would both say that we agree with each other, and disagree with a self-defined "atheist", on something pretty fundamental (even though the Lama thinks my "God" doesn't exist).

Posted by Marcel | November 23, 2006 1:44 AM

Oh, and that last paragraph is very weak indeed. You say atheists are "in the majority" on many religious questions, and then go on to cite as your examples three things that atheists reject. Woohoo. Every single person in the world is in the majority if we're only counting rejected beliefs. We are all differentiated by what we're for, which puts you back to square one (and makes atheism a very odd self-nomination).

Posted by Marcel | November 23, 2006 1:55 AM

"All religions hold the conviction that there is (again broadly speaking) something beyond this life that we should be concerned with in this life."

Or a dimension OF this life that we should be concerned with but ordinarily aren't aware of--a conviction not limited to members of religions per se.

This conviction, moreover, is often based not on reason or emotion or wish-fulfillment or faith but on direct personal experience of the numinous. Which, along with $2.50, will get you a container of coffee at Starbuck's. This sort of truth is *subjective*.

Unfortunately, Western culture tends to equate subjective with imaginary, not "real."

Douthat's phrasing obscures this point; he refers to "a response to something that's actually out there." But it may not be *out there*, it may be *in here*--which, perhaps, makes it even more surprising that so many people have such similar experiences. Is it possible there is something "in here," in all of us--whether we're aware of it or not--something we hold in common, that is in some sense "real"?

Posted by Swift Loris | November 23, 2006 2:07 AM

Matt, you are altogether too kind to Ross, I think.

The problem with what he's saying isn't that judging the truth of religion by world public opinion is ambiguous. It's not really even that using democracy to validate religious belief is silly on its surface. Rather, it's that any belief that there is supernatural intervention in the affairs of the world is at odds with the received scientific view (which nobody doubts in their daily life) of the world as, everywhere and always, governed by physical law. It might seem "puzzling" that someone as smart as Ross is "puzzled" by the beliefs of people who understand that, but really it's not: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, on down the line, the world is full of people who select their most deeply held beliefs the way the rest of us choose comfort food.

You should be reading Cosmic Variance.

Posted by Andy McLennan | November 23, 2006 2:15 AM

Unlike Marcel, I really like your formulation of how atheists are in the majority on most issues at the end. Marcel's assertion that only "positive" beliefs matter (if there's even a distinction) doesn't make any sense. Every single person in the world is in the majority if we're only counting rejected beliefs? Rejecting gravity doesn't put you in the majority. Rejecting the hidden imam, reincarnation, etc does.

Posted by Gabriel | November 23, 2006 2:15 AM

"tries to run" an argument?

you sound like a policy debater.

woo.

Posted by ethan | November 23, 2006 2:29 AM

A theologian:

All religions hold the conviction that there is (again broadly speaking) something beyond this life that we should be concerned with in this life. They vary on what this is and thus what we should be doing about it, but this is miles apart from the atheists who affirm that there is no such thing to be concerned about.

This is absolutely false. It may surprise a theologian, but "atheists" are no more uniform then "theists", but most of atheists/agnostics I know believe in values that transcend their individual welfare: well-being of family, society, humanity, environment.

Many theist who are otherwise perfectly nice seem to suggests, with varying degrees of openness that if some atheists/agnostics follow any kind of rules except their own good that is because they somehow did not notice that they do not have to. "God does not exist, everything is permitted!" My definition is "atheist" is "an agnostic sufficiently peeved by the theists to be affirmative about his lack of belief".

About the issue raised by Matt: go back 200 years. Most of the people are illiterate, and it was ever so, so that the motion that writing and reading is bad carries. One can continue in that vein. In almost all primitive culture there is connection between "experience of the numinous" and the ingestion of halucinogenic materials -- not exactly a proof of veracity of those experiences.

Posted by piotr | November 23, 2006 3:19 AM

Even here, though, the folk practices of many Catholics (and unless I'm mistaken, Orthodox Christians and Shiite Muslims as well) has strong polytheistic elements.

You won't find many Christians or Muslims who will accept this characterization of their beliefs.

Your approach to the subject is conveniently inconsistent: one moment you're treating religions as contradictory sets of propositions, the better to debunk them; the next, you disregard their explicit theologies in favor of a genealogical account.

Posted by Wade | November 23, 2006 5:16 AM

Is it possible there is something "in here," in all of us--whether we're aware of it or not--something we hold in common, that is in some sense "real"?

It's not only possible, it's self-evident. We are all human beings, with very similarly ordered minds. So we share a lot of built-in attitudes, practices, and aptitudes. And we're highly communicative animals, so we are adept at empathy, and have rich moral imaginations which aid us both intellectually and emotionally to build relationships and complex societies. All of this is "real".

What is not real is that dude with the long beard up in the sky who some people think sends messages to them, or has sent them to others who pass them along in a game of Holy Telephone.

More important to this thread is Matthew's point: Vodun priestesses believe that they transform themselves into bats, fly out at night and suck the souls out of their enemies. I share with Pope Benedict the belief that they do no such thing. Wherefore the claim that nevertheless, the Pope and the Vodun priestesses are "believers", while I am a "non-believer"? In what do the Pope and the Vodun priestesses share a belief?

Well, I guess they arguably share a belief in a personalistic universe, guided by unseen beings with intentionality. But if that's the argument, it would be nice if adherents of the believer/nonbeliever classification would phrase it clearly as a belief in a personalistic or intentional universe, rather than constantly referring to "something outside ourselves". I believe in something outside myself; I believe in lots outside myself. Just not the moral ghosties.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 23, 2006 6:35 AM

I think the atheists are not solely responsible for the 'religious vs. nonreligious' framing. I've seen opinion polls that strongly suggest that members of any religion are more comfortable with members of other religions than they are with members of no religion.

Posted by neil | November 23, 2006 6:47 AM

You won't find many Christians or Muslims who will accept this characterization of their beliefs.

Well, duh.

I do have problems with Matthew's last graf, because there's a fairly clear category distinction between those who have theological objections and those who step outside the domain of theology entirely to object.

If you accept ad populum for theism, aren't you at least to some extent drawn into the further argument that whoever has the most believers has first call on what the nature of that theism might be?

[Tangentially, I've long been fascinated with micro-religions. Too many of them are currently under threat in Iraq: the Yazidis and Mandaeans and even the Zoroastrians. You'll find pockets of Christian denominations across the Levant that were declared schismatic before the Catholic-Orthodox split. There are four Shakers left in the world. If you choose to become a Shaker -- it's different from the other micro-faiths in that you have to convert -- what's your motivation?]

Anyway, Daniel Dennett takes a good look at the ad populum thing.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | November 23, 2006 6:48 AM

I'm a bit rusty on my Maslow, but I believe that he and many folks would argue that the "religious experience" is universal, and that the various religions are cultural interpretations of a fundamental human reality. Someone in a Buddhist culture is predisposed to interpret a "religious experience" in Buddhist terms, a Muslim in Islamic terms, etc.

Of course there is no way you could prove that, as far as I can tell, beyond comparing the various discriptions of mystical experiences from various traditions - which is pretty thin.

I don't think that you can infer the "truth" of anything due to the fact that it is widely believed. But you can infer that it is fairly fundamental to human experience. I don't know what would "prove" that love is real, but it seems real to me in that a whole lot of people are in it at various points in time.

I think that it is safe to assume that there is a human tendency to create hierarchical social organizations in large populations. The fact that the governments of the world are not of a uniform type - socialist here, parlimentarian there, would not disprove this at all.

Douthat doesn't argue for the truth of any specific religious docterines as best I can tell. Rather, he argues for the reality of the "numenous". Why would the varieties of ways in which people approach the numenous disprove its existance?

Posted by Justaguy | November 23, 2006 8:17 AM

from "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
by Robert Browning

There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails;
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 23, 2006 9:16 AM

Re: Rather, it's that any belief that there is supernatural intervention in the affairs of the world is at odds with the received scientific view (which nobody doubts in their daily life) of the world as, everywhere and always, governed by physical law.

Except that this is no longer the scientific view. Post quantum mechanics all we can really say about the so-called "laws" of nature is that they are statistical generalities that hold up most of the time while masking a great deal of anarchy below the surface of the reality we function in. In short, anomalous events are allowed, perhaps even encouraged by nature. Whether that implies a "supernatural" or not is very much open to question of course. But just as religious people complain that the modern world has reduced the Ten Commandments to the Ten Suggestions, so too the Laws of Nature have been reduced to the Probabilities of Nature.

Posted by Jonf | November 23, 2006 9:43 AM

In almost all primitive culture there is connection between "experience of the numinous" and the ingestion of halucinogenic materials -- not exactly a proof of veracity of those experiences.

To the extent this is the case, it's irrelevant, given the frequency of experience of the numinous without the aid of hallucinogens in cultures that are not "primitive."

Also, where experience of the numinous is concerned, it's not at all clear what "proof of veracity" would mean. Many such experiences are reported to be ineffable.

Posted by Swift Loris | November 23, 2006 10:08 AM

...It would be nice if adherents of the believer/nonbeliever classification would phrase it clearly as a belief in a personalistic or intentional universe, rather than constantly referring to "something outside ourselves". I believe in something outside myself; I believe in lots outside myself. Just not the moral ghosties.

Since you quoted me, I'll point out that I explicitly referred to something *inside* ourselves, not "outside," and suggested that experience of the numinous was purely subjective, i.e., with no external referent; but that we all share that *internal* referent in common. How that translates into specific beliefs is an entirely different question from the issue of whether that internal referent is in some sense real.

And "the numinous," by the way, is not a matter of "built-in attitudes, practices, and aptitudes" or "rich moral imaginations" or whatever aids us "to build relationships and complex societies" (although experience of the numinous may play an indirect role here).

Nor is it the "dude with the long beard up in the sky," nor sucking the souls out of one's enemies, nor even "a personalistic universe, guided by unseen beings with intentionality."

In other words, at least with regard to my post--and I think Douthat's piece as well--you're beating up (inadvertently, I suspect) a straw man.

Posted by Swift Loris | November 23, 2006 10:46 AM

I'm a Christian theologian. I taught a course with a Buddhist Lama. We disagree on some pretty major issues, but I would never say his beliefs as a whole are false, nor would he of mine. But we would both say that we agree with each other, and disagree with a self-defined "atheist", on something pretty fundamental (even though the Lama thinks my "God" doesn't exist).

For my part, I can look at Buddhism and say "maybe", I can look at atheism and say "maybe". But when I look at Christianity or any doctrine based on supernatural, human-like intelligent agents, I say "definitely not". Presumably the same reaction most Christians would have when looking at, say, Norse mythology. Sam Harris's book I guess also had some affinity with Buddhism and mysticism.

The suggestion that Buddhism and Christian are closer to each than to atheism is puzzling to me--other than similar moral systems (which many atheists also share) I don't really see any resemblance between them at all. Indeed, on the issue of animal rights, I suspect atheists and Buddhists are way closer to each other than to Christians.

Posted by Consumatopia | November 23, 2006 10:57 AM

Matt: as I read Douthat, he's not arguing that most people believe X, so X must be true. He's making the quite different point that many people have an experience that purports to be of Y, and it is worth taking seriously the possibility that they are, in fact, having an experience of Y.

The argument comes from Chesterton (The Everlasting Man) via CS Lewis (The Problem of Pain.) From the latter, after Lewis has defined 'awe' (as he uses it in this part of the book) as what we feel in the face of the Numinous, argued that it is widespread, and that it is not derivable from some statement of the facts as we see them:

"There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name 'Revelation' might properly be given." (pp. 20-21.)

Posted by hilzoy | November 23, 2006 11:14 AM

I would guess that the reference to Buddhism that looks a lot like Christianity refers to the Pure Land sects which are widely followed in Japan. They teach that for many achieving enlightenment in this sphere is too difficult. The Amida Buddha, a celestial buddhisatva, not God in the Western sense, but a powerful, if impermanent being, has created the Pure Land, a realm that believers can be reborn into, where the achievment of enlightenment is guarenteed. Since many Buddhist lay people practice, not to acheive enlightenment in this life time, but for a better rebirth, the idea of the Pure Land is not really out of the Buddhist mainstream. IMO, the resemblance to Christianity is superficial.

Posted by monlam | November 23, 2006 11:16 AM

And "the numinous," by the way, is not a matter of "built-in attitudes, practices, and aptitudes"

How do you know, Swift? Nobody disputes that humans have the capacity to have religious experiences. Many dispute that these are anything but internal experiences. In fact, you are apparently agreeing that perhaps these ARE internal experiences. Okay, fine then. That sounds like a built-in aptitude to me, and there seems no reason to believe that it is anything but a dose of epinephrin and some neurons firing.

"There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind,

Sounds about right to me, Hilzoy. Thanks for the excellent quote.

corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function,

Now, here he becomes tendentious. How does he know it "serves no biological function"? We don't understand what might be the uses of beauty, or the uses of awe, from an evolutionary perspective. And what does "corresponding to nothing objective" mean? If I fall in love with a girl, is my love false unless she can be objectively verified to be beautiful? If I shiver in awe at the cosmos and the mystery of consciousness, is my shiver false unless there is an ethereal substance of the soul for it to be awed at? Awe is an objective reality. Hell, I shiver in awe at the Crucifixion, and I don't even believe in it! I find it a magnificent myth. Is the awe of someone who does believe in it better than mine, because he thinks it was a historical event, whereas I think it is simply one of the greatest fictions invented by man?

Posted by brooksfoe | November 23, 2006 12:28 PM

Matt, you seem to be running together the argument from common consent with the argument from religious experience. Douthat, it seems to me, is presenting a version of the latter, not the former.

Most atheists and agnostics who have addressed the argument from religious experience in a serious way do not simply "resist any consideration of the notion that religious experience might be an experience of something out there" - as Douthat would have it. Rather they examine the varied reports from various parts of the world of the kinds of experiences that might be classified as religious experiences, consider the theistic explanation of those experiences, and then reject that explanation as insufficiently supported by the phenomena.

One consideration that has seemed especially relevant to religious skeptics is that, while reports of experiences that appear to their subjects to involve some sort of liberating contact with an aspect of reality that transcends everyday human experience are fairly common, reports that the reality in question is something that possesses will, intelligence, power and other traditional attributes of God are not at all universal, and seem to show some causal dependence on the cultural background of the experience.

Nor is a universal characteristic of religious experiece that the experience presents itself as having an object, and an object that has Otto's "numinous" character of being "wholly other".

Posted by Dan Kervick | November 23, 2006 12:35 PM

If you think of religion as a set of practices and attitudes, rather than a set of beliefs, a lot of it makes much more sense. Religion that purports to factualness is fundamentalism, but there are other kinds.

Posted by mtraven | November 23, 2006 12:36 PM

Consumatopia,

Not all Christians would accept your assumption that it depends on the existence of supernatural beings with intentionality. On the other hand, clearly the vast majority of Buddhists (and maybe even atheists) believe in such beings.

Posted by Pithlord | November 23, 2006 1:01 PM

Not wanting to participate in the hijacking of the thread, but it's pretty straightforward, really.

I don't have a religion; I'm an atheist. The only difference between "atheist" and "non-religious" is that when you ask people around the world "what is your religion?", 12.7% of them say "I don't have a religion", and 2.5% of them say "I'm an atheist."

It makes no sense for a person who understands those two statements not to combine them into a single demographic. But the people who made the graph didn't understand that they're equivalent statements. Which is perfectly understandable, given that several commenters on this thread don't either.

It's a useful graph, but people really should note it's flawed. The nonreligious comprise 14.2% of the population, and form the third largest, not fourth largest, demographic bloc in the world.

Posted by eyelessgame | November 23, 2006 1:08 PM

From piotr: It may surprise a theologian, but "atheists" are no more uniform then "theists", but most of atheists/agnostics I know believe in values that transcend their individual welfare: well-being of family, society, humanity, environment.

This doesn't surprise me at all. It illustrates my point, which is that atheism is not a meaningful category, but a catch-all term for those who reject any religious label. Some atheists are secular humanists, others are tribalists, etc. But to say that my belief is that I don't believe in God is not to say what my beliefs actually are. Grouping the humanists, eco-ists, tribalists under a single label based on what they don't believe is sort of useless, isn't it?

Posted by Marcel | November 23, 2006 1:39 PM

As I understand it, an atheist isn't someone who fails to have a belief in the existence of God (which would be an agnostic), but someone who has a belief in the non-existence of God.

One thing I wonder about is whether the "God" in which the atheist disbelieves is the same as the "God" in which the theist believes. I don't think of myself as an atheist, but I don't believe in what Dawkins or Dennett assert theists believe in.

Posted by Pithlord | November 23, 2006 2:11 PM

"Built-in aptitudes," as you described them earlier, were those "which aid us both intellectually and emotionally to build relationships and complex societies." I took that to mean aptitudes that are directed toward accomplishing things in the external world. If you want to redefine "aptitudes" to include the ability to have a purely internal experience of the numinous that is not externally directed, fine, but then you have to reformulate your argument.

Posted by Swift Loris | November 23, 2006 5:22 PM

And lots of people with no belief in some sort of deity have this...experience in a variety of contexts (and some, apparently, never do); when I was young I felt it during Mass, and now I'm more likely to get it as a result of my interaction with a performance, either as an audience member or as the performer. It's also my understanding that this same response can be induced by electrically stimulating the proper portion of the brain; PZ Myers (who I don't think has ever said anything insightful about religion on his blog, but I keep reading him for other reasons) had a post on this a few months back. So it appears that this religious-experience-response is the byproduct of some biochemical reaction in our brains. In my opinion, the fact that it can be explained scientifically doesn't weigh against the possibility that God exists, and if we weren't able to explain it it wouldn't weigh against the possiblity that God doesn't. People interpret this experience in a myriad of ways, and tend to put them in the framework provided them by their prior knowledge and the setup of their culture - when I was a young and religious kid, these experiences were clearly the result of a connection with the Divine, and now that I'm an agnostic adult, they're...not. The fact that lots of people agree on something isn't a reason to think it's true; most people get the Monty Hall puzzle wrong, and surely the existence of some divine power is trickier than a math puzzle dervied from a game show.

Posted by Quarterican | November 23, 2006 6:38 PM

One thing I wonder about is whether the "God" in which the atheist disbelieves is the same as the "God" in which the theist believes. I don't think of myself as an atheist, but I don't believe in what Dawkins or Dennett assert theists believe in.

There's a joke about a self-declared atheist that ends something like "...yes, but the God I don't believe in is a just and loving God!"

I call myself an agnostic Deist, myself: "I don't know if there's a God or not, but if so, he probably doesn't have a long white beard nor concern himself unduly with how often I pray to him or what I do in the bedroom." Sounds like that might be compatible with your position.

Posted by Hamilton Lovecraft | November 23, 2006 6:47 PM

As I understand it, an atheist isn't someone who fails to have a belief in the existence of God (which would be an agnostic), but someone who has a belief in the non-existence of God.

I think you use "belief" in a misleading way, and thereby draw a distinction that doesn't exist. Joe put it nicely above:

"Atheists don't believe anything, per se. They are pursuaded by the preponderance of evidence that assertions of the existance of the supernatural are the product of human fantasy."

It's no more correct to speak of atheists "believing" in the absence of a god than it is to speak of any of us "believing" in gravity ... while it's not wrong per se, it is wrong if it implies the element of faith that most religious believers will tell you they need to overcome the absence of physical evidence.

Posted by Mork | November 23, 2006 7:30 PM

...When I was a young and religious kid, these experiences were clearly the result of a connection with the Divine, and now that I'm an agnostic adult, they're...not. The fact that lots of people agree on something isn't a reason to think it's true; most people get the Monty Hall puzzle wrong, and surely the existence of some divine power is trickier than a math puzzle dervied from a game show.

I wonder if part of the trickiness is that our ideas of what "the numinous" may or may not be are too specific, too limited, too objectified, and too freighted with associations. It's easier to decide whether one does or does not believe in the existence of X, but what if X is a straw man?

Posted by Swift Loris | November 23, 2006 8:20 PM

I believe in the reality of the nouminous myself, but Douthat has a terrible argument going. Color-blindness is real and fairly widespread, and limited perception of the EM spectrum is universal. Calamities like athritis and lower back pain are very common, too. I've never understood why anyone thinks "it's natural" is a sufficient argument for anything. Individually and collectively, we constantly pass judgment on features of nature and try to stomp them out, and a priori we can't just assert that Dawkins and PZ Myers are wrong to regard the religious impulse itself as something as dangerous to us as the plague.

And it seems like folks should realize that before hanging out "it's natural" as an argument in favor.

Posted by Bruce Baugh | November 23, 2006 10:34 PM

you're all jumping back and forth between different things. the common tendencies toward the same characteristics being the properties of supernatural agents is probably what ross is alluding to suggest those agents might be real. the specific theologies of different religions are concepts overlain atop the foundation. in the books Religion Explained explained by pascal boyer and In Gods We Trust by scott atran there is a cognitive anthropological account which shows just how people seem to converge upon these same characteristics, and how they tend to be the 'true belief' across cultures no matter what is reflectively professed. re: pithlord on buddhism & christian, see Theological Incorrectness by d. jason slone, who studies therevada practice in sri lanka and showed just how similar religious belief amongst the laity was to their muslim, christian and hindu neigbhors, despite the arguments by elite bhikkus that they espoused a rational non-theistic creed. i have a post where i outline the most current up to date scientific analysis of religion as a natural phenomenon.

p.s. i'm an atheist, don't pull the "are you saying religion is true if it's natural" crap on me.

Posted by chet snicker | November 23, 2006 11:40 PM

the common tendencies toward the same characteristics being the properties of supernatural agents is probably what ross is alluding to suggest those agents might be real.

I don't have the sense that this was his point, or even one of his points, actually. He didn't refer to agents or agency. He wrote of a "numinous reality interwoven with our own" and "authentic, William James-style religious experience" and "encounters with something outside the usual run of sensory experience," but he didn't get any more specific than that.

Experience of the numinous does not seem to involve the concept of agency (or any concept at all, for that matter). The idea of agency may be imposed on the experience after the fact--as with the glossolalia practitioners--but it isn't a feature of the experience in and of itself.

Posted by Swift Loris | November 24, 2006 2:28 AM

Well, I personally believe that God/HigherPower/Spirit/TheAbsolute whatever you want to call it exists because of personal/mystical/transcendant experiences I've had. I suppose these experiences could just be neurons misfiring...but if so these misfiring neurons have certainly changed my life for the better, making me a more open and loving person living life more fully and completely.

But while I believe that the universe has far more going on than simple materialism implies, I'm no longer at all "religious" in any classic sense and am certainly a heretic by Christian standards theologically.

I also believe that what you think about God is more a reflection of what you, yourself are...if you think God is a nasty old man sitting on a thrown condemning people to eternal suffering for temporal transgressions...well, that tells you a lot more about yourself than it does about God in my view.

Your mileage may vary of course.

Posted by FDRLincoln | November 24, 2006 1:45 PM

Marcel:

But to say that my belief is that I don't believe in God is not to say what my beliefs actually are.

To say that you believe in god is not to say what your beliefs are either.

Except that you don't believe that we die. Not completely and utterly like a crushed ant. Correct?

Posted by epistemology | November 24, 2006 10:53 PM

"There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function..."

The part in bold seems to be a superfluous and unsupported assertion.

Posted by theCoach | November 27, 2006 9:39 AM

I'm sorry, but why can't writing about religious belief v. unbelief rise above the terms we all hashed out at 2 a.m. in the college dorm, all those years ago. If we were physicists, it would be as if we had been continually discovering, forgetting, and rediscovering Newtonian gravity for the past 300 years.

Posted by TotallyBoredWithIt | November 30, 2006 9:50 AM