Monday, April 12, 2010

Religion without God?

I feel very uneducated sometimes. This is a good thing. I wrote this advocating a scientific alternative to religion before reading ‘Good without God’ by Greg Epstein (Harvard’s Humanist chaplain). Turns out, I was basically talking about Humanism.

While it might be true that there is no God and the holy books are more fiction than fact, they are still the basis of much of our culture, in a lot of ways they are required for us to function, and until we have something coherent to replace them with, atheism will never and perhaps should never catch on. But as a scientific approach to religion develops, preexisting religions will be great contributors.

I’m going to forget about convincing anyone that God doesn’t exist or that the Bible is rubbish for a moment and look at what religion means to society. Who cares if God doesn’t exist, as long the idea of God is needed for us to stay civil? As far as I’m concerned, the ‘Four Horsemen’ (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) have made nearly airtight cases against God, cases that anyone who dares would understand. The problem is that very few dare to risk giving up God, to make the conscious decision to call into question the steady guiding force of their lives. I can’t say I blame them.

Religious leaders ranging from Rick Warren to Osama Bin Laden have suggested that not only will we not receive eternal salvation if we do not submit to their versions of the supernatural, but we cannot even live moral lives without God or some other version of him. The simple idea is that human beings will live exclusively according to their most immediate pleasures without the guiding force of Faith. I think I can show that they're wrong. We can have a moral religion based on the rational pursuit of truth without a belief in anything implausible.

From my favorite source, Wikipedia: A religion is a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a supernatural agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

Notice that a belief in God or anything supernatural is not a necessary part of religion (neither is calling it 'religion' if we've developed an allergy to this word.)

Atheism, even at its barest, is a set of beliefs concerning the cause and nature of the universe. (A supernatural being did not cause the universe, and there are no supernatural forces.) But what atheism at its barest is missing is a set of beliefs concerning the purpose of the universe, devotional and ritual observances, and a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs. Atheism does not necessarily preclude purpose of the universe, devotional and ritual observances, and a human moral code, there just aren’t any commonly connected with atheism yet.

Let’s take a glance at what seems to be the most important missing piece, purpose. (It seems that once we have a declared purpose, a moral code would develop around what promotes this purpose and what impedes it.) Can we find a purpose for the universe without God? I actually don’t think so; it would be the height of presumption to begin attributing purpose to something we understand as poorly as the universe. But this doesn’t mean that atheists must be without purpose altogether. Many of the religious perspectives on the universe were developed during a time when humanity considered itself the primary force, so the universe’s purpose was humanity’s. In light of a less flattering but more accurate perspective on the universe, we may now manage to find a purpose for humanity without attributing any purpose to the universe.

Perhaps the purpose of humanity is to seek purpose in the universe, perhaps it is to reduce the suffering of sentient beings, or perhaps it is to expand the scope of human knowledge and the grasp of human technology so that we might better reduce suffering, understand the universe, or both. I’m inclined to each of these; they are not mutually exclusive, and seem already to be a driving force of humanity. These ideas have been more or less present in every major religion and secular movement. Without the conventional sky-god, though, humanity’s purpose suddenly becomes no more than what humanity has made it. This might be unsettling to some, but, to atheists, this has always been the case, whether we realized it or not.

When religion is understood as an emergent phenomenon of human civilization we find two important points. First of all, there is almost certainly a complicated interplay where the nature of mankind has influenced the development of religion and religion, in turn, has influenced the nature of mankind. Following from this, past and present religious traditions may contain crucial information for the development of a scientific religion. Let’s look at meme theory to understand how religious traditions may be a source of valuable information.

Again, from Wikipedia:
meme (rhymes with cream) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. (From the Greek word μιμητισμός ([mɪmetɪsmos]) for "something imitated".) Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.

The idea is that we can glean useful information from memes just as we do already with genes. It is no coincidence that Richard Dawkins is one of the first to consider meme theory (he’s also responsible for the clever name), and Daniel Dennett does an impressive job fleshing out meme theory’s importance in the development of religions (This will be an oversimplification. If you are at all interested in the idea you really should check out Dawkins’ Selfish Gene and Dennett’s Breaking The Spell.)

Obviously, a creature’s genetic data gives us information about how it will produce proteins and more indirectly how it will develop. If we were smart enough, or had enough processing power, we could theoretically translate this information directly from the language of C, A, T, G, and some other, less understood factors into information about what a creature would look like, and how it would function in awesome detail without ever leaving the computer. We could even similarly decode a creature’s ancestral past straight from its genome. We can look at a few clues (both raw genetic clues and fossil records, or indirect genetic clues) and see that whales share ancestors with the first sea creatures to undergo extensive adaptation and travel onto land and also share ancestors with mammals who underwent another round of extensive adaption to go back into the sea. And so, we can look at clues and make educated guesses about religion.

If it is true that religions have undergone even a broad, loose trend from many heavily anthropomorphized gods to a single, less tangible, more vague, more ‘perfect’ monotheistic God, then what does that tell us? Whatever it tells us, it must explain why such a meme is more fit than competing memes. It could tell us that God is somehow working in small ways, guiding our concept of the cosmos closer to the true understanding of him. It may mean that a broader vision of God creates a closer connection among believes than a complex pantheon and the believer’s are therefore more likely to survive. Why do nearly all of the major religions with deanthropomorphized monotheistic Gods provide a human or human-like example to follow? It could be because in reality there is a good God, and he is providing this example out of the goodness of his ethereal heart so that we might better know how to be good. It could be that a meme that provides an example of goodness for its followers and better encourages charitable acts in its followers is more fit for survival.

Memetics might offer more questions than answers, but it’s not totally devoid of useful information. Here’s my central takeaway. A major factor of meme fitness must be benefit to its host, though there also must be memes that survive temporarily to their host’s detriment. So we can look at the history of religion as a millennia-long experiment whose data we would be foolish to discard.

Many religious followers might be upset by the reduction of present religion to information to be mined but this is simply the idea that there is much to learn from religions, both past and present. Furthermore, as brave atheists such as Sam Harris (author of End of Faith who is currently working on The Moral Landscape—scheduled to be released Fall 2010, it will explore how science will determine human values) blaze the way for a reason-based religion, we have a time-tested framework to build around. We can remove components we find structurally unsound as we fill in the holes with the firm support of fresh developments of reason.

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