Theocracy Watch
Atheism, Schmatheism
Words get in the way
Connotation trumps denotation.
What’s the best label for this concept quoted just below?
[R]eality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit”
If you said ‘atheism’, nope. If you said ‘antisupernaturalism’, warmer. Give yourself a high five if you guessed ‘naturalism’. The quote is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), plato.stanford.edu, in the article just linked. It comes after a disclaimer of sorts from the scholars who curate that encyclopedia:
The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy.
Zut, alors! … as the French might say. Not very helpful for us laypersons. I suspect that if we were to run one of those street interviews asking random passersby to define ‘naturalism’, that at least half the respondents would say it’s either nude recreation (an easy confusion with ‘naturism’) or some sort of New Age flora/fauna worship … say, what the Druids were about.
As a critic of over-sensitivity, I’d be a hypocrite if I got triggered by someone calling me an atheist. On the strict definition “not believe in God”, the label applies. Two problems though: (a) Carl Sagan’s answer, when asked if he believed, that the word ‘God’ is so vague and overloaded as to make the question meaningless; and, (b) look at the list of synonyms: ‘idolator’, ‘pagan’, ‘miscreant’, ‘heathen’.
I’m not any of those things, nor are most of the famous Atheists who fly the flag (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris et al).
The A-word then is just a BadWord or GoodWord, used mostly for its connotation and emotional valence. An insult hurled by supernaturalists, relying on their incumbency of dominance of the public forum, with teeth (or maybe burning stakes would be a better way to put it), since pretty much the beginning of formal written history. On the flip side, a badge of honor among the clear thinkers.
It doesn’t really contribute to progress, though, for two sides to engage in this sort of label dueling. Socialist and capitalist zealots screaming past each other don’t shed much light on which specific policies and principles have demonstrable merits, for example.
I suppose I could go the “embrace the pejorative” route, but what I don’t like about using the A-word for my own beliefs/endoxa is that I don’t think of them as predominantly against anything. I’m for that quote at the top of this essay. That it excludes all things supernatural, including God/theos, means those sorts of speculations/ficta are not all that central.
I’m interested in actual astronomy cosmology, not this or that religion’s creation myths. I’m interested in what animal behaviorist biologists have to say about the law(s) of nature … things like whether primates and dogs have senses of fairness and empathy, from the biosphere, not whether some random prophet or guru thought one should love or hate one’s enemies. I’m interested in how medical science can treat illness and disease, not whether this or that prayer/incantation in this or that dead language is how to cure this or that rash. I’m interested in the neurology of hallucinations, not whether a mushroom or LSD trip is transporting one through some imaginary spirit world. For example.
It’s encouraging that the same SEP article I’ve quoted above includes this statement:
The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized — that is, they would both reject “supernatural” entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the “human spirit”.
Of course, theologians will howl at being excluded from that collegium. That was, after all, the primary agenda of the two most recently deceased Popes of Rome: to try to bridge the gap between fides and ratio. I can’t really speak to how much success they had in academe, but at least in terms of impact on the American body politic and therefrom the offices of power, and so the Law of the Land, that half-century of Counter-Enlightenment has been a spectacular win.
We’re one election, less than six months away, from the likely return of theocracy, in its Putin caesaropapist variety.
And … there’s the rub.
Those pantheon of Atheism figures I rattled off above did (and most continue to do … RIP Hitchens) a wonderful job fighting the good fight. The progress in the trend line of religious Nones is the evidence. But the percentage is still far too low, and may have hit a stall point. We should not be satisfied with the plurality¹. We should aim higher, say, for the super-majority 60%.
(The blue team should also be concerned that throwing the border open could well be importing a lot of bad endoxa that could undermine its whole paradigm, given enough time. Likely one of the factors along with the pandemic that’s responsible for the stall.)
To that end, my suggestion is that we spend some time and effort on vocabulary. If the supernaturalists won’t cooperate in de-polarizing the labels, and continue to insist on calling us the A-word, we should reply in kind. Call them any of the following: arationalist, faithist, fideist², supernaturalist.
(Fwiw, I get the most mileage out of the last. It tends at least to wobble my interlocutor, since almost all of them consider themselves “clear thinkers of faith” … you know, the Oprah Winfrey type … and it usually takes them a Kahneman System 2 moment where they have to process the delta to ‘superstitious’, which both of us take as a BadWord.)
Shift the argument to epistemology, that’s our most solid ground. Theology presupposes a theos, which presupposes something outside the “reality exhausted by nature”. Why Rome hates epistemology and always tries to pull the tug-o’-war rope back to metaphysics.
Coda:
Apropos of actual astronomy cosmology, how awesome is it to be living through a paradigm shift? My whole life the prevailing scientific theory was that the universe came out of a Big Bang, some 13+ billion years ago. Now the latest data from the James Webb Space Telescope is challenging some of the claims of that theory. No, it doesn’t prove YHWH created it in six days.
Stay tuned. Science is beautiful. Gotta love that asterisk.
Recommended further reading (click on the links):
Jean Meslier, arguably the first author of a book entirely dedicated to (nonsuper)naturalism. Even Voltaire(!), mostly to be counted on our team, like the USA’s Founders, and a fan of Meslier, tried to apply a Deist spin, so strong was the anathema to naturalism even during the Enlightenment. Sadly, but hardly surprisingly, Meslier, a Catholic priest, waited until he had passed to reveal his Testament, which he left in manuscript form, to be discovered among his effects. Made a strong case for the superiority of grounding morality without resort to the supernatural.
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who provided the “Arsenal of the Enlightenment”:
The superstitions that Bayle spends the vast majority of the book targeting are, first, that belief in God is necessary to live a moral life, and second, that religion is necessary to keep society peaceful and lawful. Just as Bayle refuted superstitions about comets by demonstrating that they are purely natural, predictable events, so too, Bayle refutes superstitions about atheists by demonstrating that morality and law can and should be treated as purely natural, predictable aspects of human behaviour, based largely in education and temperament.
Willard Van Orman (W.V.O.) Quine: among the 20th century’s most eminent epistemologists, right up there with Dewey, Russell and Wittgenstein for my taste:
Quine takes seriously the idea that “it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described” (1981, 21). It follows from this idea, as he construes it, that our best scientific theory of the world tells us as much as we know about reality. (Our best theory at given time tells us as much as we know at that time; no doubt our views will progress.) So setting out the broad outlines of that theory is the Quinean version or analogue of metaphysics, though he does not much use the word.
Notes:
[1] The same way Pew Research teases out Protestants and Catholics from the Christianity total (since each considers the other heretics, not Christians), it should also tease apart the evangelical from non-evangelical Protestants who also do not as a rule consider the others Christians. So Nones at 28% pip Evangelical Protestant Christians at 24% for the top of the podium.
[2] Fideism is already in use among the theologians, esp. Rome’s, who make a circular argument against that label, even though their deceased philosopher-monarch popes argued at length for fides trumping ratio … the very definition of fideism … yeah, I know.
