Monday, April 5, 2010 at 9:36AM | in Religion Reviewing the atheism debate
In The Guardian, Madeleine Bunting reviews her bookshelf, weighed down with tomes on atheism and its discontents:
The great mistake the atheists made is to claim that religion started out as a clumsy stab at science – trying to explain how the world worked – and is now clearly redundant. That misses the point entirely: religion is not about explaining how an earthquake or flood happens; rather it offers meanings for such events. When someone is killed in a car accident, western rationality is good at analysing how the brakes failed and the road curved, but has nothing to say about why, on that particular day, the brakes failed when it was you in the car: the sequence of random events that kill. This search for meaning is part of what drives the religious spirit.
Monday, April 5, 2010 at 9:36AM | in Religion 
Reader Comments (2)
Are posts like this Munir-bait? If so, I'm biting :)
There an important distinction between religion as meaning-making versus meaning-finding. Take the example of the game of roulette. Doestoevsky has some great passages in The Gambler where characters interpret and predict the sequence of numbers that come up: some numbers are 'hot', some are 'due to show up'. They have ever-more intricate theories set up to better guess the next number. On some level presumably they realize these numbers are truly random, but we have such a strong instinct as humans to find meaning in anything that happens to us that we'll quite willingly fool ourselves.
Yes that's not the same as for religion - the kind of meaning we're concerned with is far more powerful and more subtle, but in the case of that car crash you quoted, religion can create a meaning even if a truly satisfying one does not exist.
I do make the 'great mistake' she mentions but think that a) religion serves other purposes as well, and b) to the degree that religion is a 'clumsy stab at science' it has retreated to deeper and more mysterious phenomena. So lightning and births may have been abandoned to science, but the subtler workings of consciousness and the origins of life and the universe are still realms where valid knowledge may be drawn from religion. With time, they will be understood better and religion will retreat further. That seems to me so clear a pattern as to be obvious.
That's not to say religion doesn't serve other functions. An atheist friend was telling me how much he appreciated the value of a religious community for events like weddings and (especially) funerals. I personally sometimes miss having something like the remover of difficulties to recite when I need it. Even outside those special events, the sense of community and belonging that religion provides can be quite amazing. Atheists have come up with no satisfying alternatives, but I suspect that will eventually happen.
Sorry about the long comment!
Munir -- Thanks for the comment.
I think the starting point has be at the level of knowledge. What is it possible to know through scientific means, and what is it possible know through the interpretive process of engaging with religious texts. These two processes of acquiring knowledge are clearly not necessarily contradictory and can even be complementary. For an imperfect non-theistic corollary, consider the knowledge about life and humanity that one acquires from good literature and compare it to scientific knowledge. (From a Baha'i perspective literature would not possess the same authority as revelation, of course, but the point remains).
The point raised by the author concerns how these forms of knowledge enable humans to generate coherent meaning out of the discordant information fed to them by a chaotic world. We use our knowledge to navigate the world. The point she makes is that some of the information presented by the world cannot be ordered by scientific knowledge. It remains as uninterpreted chaos, a condition that can be deeply dissatisfying. Religious knowledge, however, allows people to assimilate such information into a coherent narrative about their lives and society.
It's not about the 'functions' of religion or science in the world. It's more about how humans acquire knowledge (in pursuit of truth) and use it to live out meaning-full lives.
Another dimension to this discussion is exposed in the Stanley Fish post from April 14 -- the question of 'motivation'.