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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Richard Dawkins

Disbelieving in God without being an atheist

08 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, God, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Practice

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Anselm, Benjamin C. Kinney, Christopher Hitchens, ibn Rushd, identity, religion, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Speculative Realism, theodicy

In recent years – years since I began writing this blog – I have come to realize that I do not believe in God. This is not a mere agnosticism; I believe that God does not exist. The idea of God once helped us make sense of the physical world in a way that it no longer does; the learned men and women who have studied living organisms have been most successful with a paradigm that has no need for a divine plan. Moreover the suffering of the world gives us active reason to disbelieve in God. It makes the idea of an omnipotent omnibenevolent creator seem almost absurd. There is no particular reason to believe an omnipotent being exists; if he did, he could not be omnibenevolent. He would likely be indifferent at best, evil at worst. Certainly not a being to worship or trust. I have become increasingly sympathetic to the drastic atheism of the Speculative Realist philosophers, who take their metaphors for existence from H.P. Lovecraft.

I have tended to think the non-design-based arguments for God’s existence are not taken seriously enough, and have defended them here in the past. But in the end I do not think they succeed. Continue reading →

What I learned teaching Abrahamic monotheism

19 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, God, Judaism, Rites, Supernatural

≈ 65 Comments

Tags

A.J. Jacobs, academia, autobiography, Christopher Hitchens, Hebrew Bible, Mao Zedong, pedagogy, Richard Dawkins, Richard Swinburne, Stonehill College, theodicy

I started writing this blog while I was teaching at Stonehill College, which hired me for a one-year visiting position and took me on shortly after that. A Catholic school, Stonehill requires all its students to take an introductory course in religion, and a third-year course in “moral inquiry”; faculty learn rapidly that these are the bread and butter of their teaching. In my time at Stonehill I taught one elective in Hindu tradition; the other eleven course sections were all the religion requirements.

Teaching students who did not want to be there was not always a joy. The wonderful advantage of teaching Stonehill’s required courses, though, was that there was almost no restriction on content. My love of big cross-cultural questions does not play well with the specialization taught in grad school and encouraged in academic publishing, where one must learn one thing and nothing else. But I could design these courses the way I wanted. The religion department had decided it wanted one common reference point that upper-year students could turn back to, and it had decided on the book of Exodus. But as long as you taught Exodus, the rest of the course was all up to you.

And so one semester I decided I wanted to learn more about Western monotheisms, and entitled my intro religion course “God in the West.” All that Buddhism and “Hinduism” I’d studied in grad school – never mind that. Because that was stuff I already knew pretty well. One of the things I hoped to impart to my students was a love of learning; and so I decided I would teach them a subject I wanted to learn about myself.

And learn I did. Continue reading →

Does P.Z. Myers love his wife?

14 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Family, Philosophy of Science, Supernatural

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Chris Schoen, intelligent design, John Pieret, P.Z. Myers, religion, Richard Dawkins

I’ve previously written against NOMA, Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion that “science” and “religion” are completely compatible because they represent two incommensurable domains of inquiry. But there’s at least as much of a problem with the other extreme, the view of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins that the two are completely incompatible because “science” refutes “religion.” (Few seriously assert incompatibility in the other direction, to reject science. Creationists, for example, typically proclaim their acceptance of science except where it conflicts with the Bible – thus the popularity of intelligent design, sold as a scientific theory.) Both of these views, to my mind, are almost painful in their oversimplification of the matter. There is incompatibility between certain parts of each domain. Many beliefs called “religious” are perfectly compatible with the evidence from controlled hypothesis testing; many aren’t. In the “scientific” domain, the only views I can think of that are incompatible with all “religious” belief are those which involve scientism: the belief that the only valid forms of knowing are based on the practice of science. (It’s worth stating repeatedly that this belief cannot possibly itself be based on the practice of science, and is therefore self-refuting.)

New Atheists often don’t want to admit this point. When they accept common-sense views at odds with their exultation of science as the only true way of knowing, they do it by equivocating on their definition of “science.” One finds the point in a recent exchange on P.Z. Myers’s blog. Responding to Larry Moran, Myers attacks what he calls:

the bizarre claim that “No scientist that is also a decent human being subjects all her/his beliefs to scientific scrutiny.” I think otherwise. There is a naive notion implicit in that statement that scientific scrutiny is somehow different from critical, rational examination. I’d argue the other way: no decent human being should live an unexamined life.

“Critical, rational examination,” eh? If that’s all science is, then every theologian is a scientist par excellence. I don’t think that’s a claim the New Atheists want to be making. Rather, the “science” they are defending is a) completely empirical, and b) based on the controlled experimental testing of hypotheses. So John Pieret responds to Myers by saying:

Really? What tests did you do on yourself to see if you love your wife and children? Hormone testing, eegs, what? Thinking about things is not “science” per se. Science is empiric investigation. Nor is the question whether “love” can be scientifically investigated, the question is whether individual scientists do it before they decide who they love.

Continue reading →

Marx on religion and suffering

10 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Flourishing, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Politics, Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

20th century, Aśvaghoṣa, Christopher Hitchens, Communism, drugs, Friedrich Engels, Geoff Waite, Joseph Martin, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Mao Zedong, Pali suttas, religion, Richard Dawkins, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Terry Eagleton

Skholiast’s blog pointed me to an excellent review of a collection of Marx’s and Engels’s writings on “religion.” (The author goes by “pomonomo2003” in his review; his own very interesting website reveals his name to be Joseph Martin.) The topic is notable today, at a time when the militant atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grab the headlines – and those whom one might expect to be their staunchest allies, Marxists like Terry Eagleton, have instead been among their sharpest critics.

It is likely to the Communist regimes of the 20th century that we owe Marx’s reputation as a despiser of religion. Stalin and Mao ruthlessly persecuted Christians and Buddhists, and found scriptural support for their actions in Marx’s famous claim in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that religion is “the opium of the people” or “the opiate of the masses.” From there it seems a short step to Mao’s infamous claim to the Dalai Lama that “religion is poison,” as the Cultural Revolution burned so much of Tibet’s great heritage.

But hold on just a second. Martin’s review points to an important insight that blew me away when I first heard it in Geoff Waite‘s class on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud: opium, to someone of Marx’s time, was not the addictive danger that it seems to us, or to the post-Opium War Chinese. Continue reading →

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