Psychological Literacy

If scientific literacy calls into question the book of Genesis, then psychological literacy apparently rules out faith completely.

David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, makes the case against faith in "The DNA of Religious Faith" published in the April 20, 2007, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

He announces that "the era of deference to religious belief is ending."

Religious faith, which he defines as "belief without evidence," is dangerous to society. In fact, "the very teaching of religion to defenseless children is a form of child abuse."

Psychological literacy has excluded religious faith for quite some time. "Scholars have found it easy to explain religion: They've done it hundreds of times, in psychological, psychoanalytic, sociological, historical, anthropological, and economic terms."

The problem, as he sees it, is that evolutionary theory hasn't been able to explain the survival of religious commitments in evolutionary terms. "It often appears that religious practice is fitness-reducing rather than enhancing." He writes, "Think of the frequent advocacy of sexual restraint, of tithing, of self-abnegating moral duty and other seeming diminutions of personal fitness, along with the characteristic denial of the 'evidence of our senses' in favor of faith in things asserted but not clearly demonstrated."

But riding to the rescue are "the four horsemen of the current antireligious apocalypse," Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Carl Sagan, "all passionate advocates of reason, committed to the proposition that religion is essentially unreasonable."

"Part of the attention-grabbing novelty of the Four Horsemen has been their refusal to abide by" the idea that science and religion are two independent domains, "insisting that when religion makes egregiously false 'truth claims' against science, it must be confronted, and that, moreover, religion itself can and should be 'naturalized'— that is, subjected to the same scrutiny that science brings to other phenomena."

Barash celebrates the iconoclastic work of the "Horsemen" in destroying the historic arguments for the existence of God. He takes particular glee in the attack on the argument from design, which he puts in quotes (presumably because it is not a legitimate argument or because only the scientifically illiterate would see design in biologically complex organisms). In spite of the "absurdity" of the argument from design: "This chestnut has had numerous stakes driven through its heart, but like a cinematic version of the undead, it keeps resurrecting itself, staggering, zombielike and covered with flies, back into public view."

He also addresses the "fine-tuning" argument. "Both Dawkins and Sagan examine this argument, which Dawkins caricatures as 'god-as-dial-twiddler.' Such twiddler-twaddle is oddly tautological, in that if the universe were not as it is, we indeed would not be here to wonder about it." Then he shows his disdain for articles of faith, theories that are not falsifiable: "The anthropic principle can also be 'solved' by multiple universes, of which ours could simply be the one in which we exist. This might apply not only to horizontally existing multiverses, but also to the same one occurring differently in time, if there have been (and will be) unending expansions and contractions. Moreover, it isn't at all clear that the various physical dials are independent, or that the physical constants in the universe could be any different, given the nature of matter and energy."

We wouldn't want our children to commit intellectual suicide by putting faith in "the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible." It is so much more intellectually rigorous to think that universes are multiplying at every quantum event happening all over the "current" universe, whatever that word means.

Not only is there a universe where I never made this post, but there would have to be an infinite number of universes where I made an infinite number of different posts. There would even be a universe where Richard Dawkins is a TV evangelist. But we can't have people believing in things that can't be proven. That is why Sam Harris feels a "need to take the United States in particular by the scruff of its neck and rub its nose in the dangers and absurdities of religious belief."

But the last stronghold of religion to be destroyed is the idea of transcendent moral law. Barash asserts that "God is no longer needed to explain 'Moral Law.'" Biologists have shown that "kin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selection, third-party effects, and courtship possibilities, as well as simple susceptibility to social and cultural indoctrination" taken together or in various combinations provide sufficient foundation for a transcendent morality.

Professor Barash is well within his rights to refuse to believe in Christianity or any other traditional faith, but he doesn't seem to realize that his own plausibility structure is loaded with unprovable assumptions. If he chooses to place his faith in multiverses rather than a personal God, that is understandable since his assumptions exclude the existence of such a being. But surely he could spare us the patronizing lecture.

While I would agree with his view that scientific truth and religious truth are not two completely separate realms, I am not prepared to adopt materialism as my "scientifically-proven" religion whose "articles of faith" are not open to scrutiny. I prefer my religion to be transparent and honest about what it wants me to believe.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"