Closer to Truth, “John Polkinghorne — What’s the New Atheism?” (2019)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/18

Robert Lawrence Kuhn: John, there’s been a flurry of atheistic books, lectures, and commentaries in the last few years that have become, shall we say, more aggressive, more enthusiastic in stating that not only is there no God, but that it is very good for the world to come to that conclusion to eliminate religion. First of all, how do you see this new atheism?

John Polkinghorne: Well, I see it as being relentlessly polemical. It really is not, I think, engaging with the issues. It’s strong on assertion, strong on trying to create an image of religion without respect either to religious practice or religious thinking in any serious way. For example, The God Delusion is an extraordinary book. I haven’t made a serious review of it. It hasn’t said this book has serious defects. The principal defect is that it’s strong on assertion and very weak on argument.

There are arguments in support of the theological belief in the existence of God. I can understand that people don’t necessarily find those arguments convincing, but they don’t answer them by neglecting them, pretending that they’re not there. They don’t answer them by unfair polemical techniques. For example, Dawkins devotes a great deal of space in The God Delusion to talking about the terrible things that religious people have done, crusades, inquisitions, and of course that’s part of the story and we should acknowledge that, be penitent and regretful for it. But then to take Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and just dismiss them on a couple of bases is not really relevant to the issue. It seems to me just dishonest.

What we’re seeing in these terrible events is the flaw in human nature rather than a necessary flaw in religious people. I think that’s just unfair and dishonest.

Closer to Truth, “John Polkinghorne — What’s the New Atheism?” (2019)

What a delightful person! John Polkinghorne gives ordinary language for a subtle, nuanced take on atheism and its issues. I’m going to tell you straight up. That’s rare, not simply uncommon. At the time of the interview and somewhat now, there is a production of a lot of atheist materials.

However, we should bear in mind. The Christian and Islamic book sales have been completely huge forever. So, the newness is merely in the popularization of atheism. Which is to say, atheism won the culture war with the religious in the West. Religious speakers are merely commenting on their loss, functionally speaking.

Now, the battle, as seen in Dr. Jordan Peterson, is dealing with the derivatives, of which theist and non-theist communities have failed to uphold honest conversation to some degrees. The fault lines are everything talked about in more serious international circles.

Take, for example, the United Nations, the idea of the sex, race, gender, class, parenthood, childhood, land rights, Indigenous status, and the like. All of their traditional categories laid out at its inception after the failure of the League of Nations are the identical categories fought over, by conservatives, centrists, and liberals alike.

Polkinghorne does have a point. A decent portion of public commentary from New Atheism and such was superificial or polemical. It seems part and parcel of early consciousness-raising communities and efforts. I question the aggression. I really do.

When a community has been persecuted into silence all over the Christian and Muslim worlds, speaking up, it is not only a crime legally, but can be seen as aggressive socially.

“I do not believe in God.”

“Stop being so angry.”

It’s an impossibly idiotic social situation. It happens. Many people leave religious communities for the real hatred of homosexuals and the status of women. Have we forgotten about ex-communication and ostracization of former community members?

Didn’t think so, we know the truth. What we saw with the New Atheism and Firebrand Atheism movement, for the followers, was a healing in public if that makes sense, it was a cleansing taking on the title of normalizing non-theism.

I appreciate Polkinghorne’s articulateness and honesty in mentioning the crimes of religious people in the names of religions. I wouldn’t be so dismissive of those crimes, though, nor be so fearful on the other side of acknowledging of secular dogmatic regimes in atheistic communism and the like. The issue is dogma, and in political institutions authoritarianism merged with a dogma, secular or religious. Their conversation was good. It continued:

Kuhn: I think we can divide their arguments into two categories. The first category, as you’ve said, is a demonstration that the history of religion has been significantly detrimental for human existence, that its deficits are far more than its benefits, and that indeed huge numbers of people have suffered because of religion. That is not a philosophical argument. It’s an argument based upon results. Assuming that even to be true, what would be the significance of that?

Polkinghorne: Well, if it were true, we have to take that very seriously. I don’t think that has been demonstrated. Of course, as I say, religion has done terrible things. Religion has done a great many things of the greatest benefit. It’s been the source of a great deal of art. The original universities and hospitals came out of religious settings and so on. All these things are discounted by the new atheists, not taken seriously in my opinion.

If the crimes of religion have been “significantly detrimental for human existence” where “huge numbers of people have suffered,” and if “we have to take that very seriously,” we cannot immediately lean on how “religion has done a great many things of the greatest benefit.” We must wrestle honestly with that history, firstly, because those are the crimes. Self-adulation before justice is pride, or some such thing. It might be categorically unchristian, otherwise. Dr. Sam Harris does have a rhetorical retort of some force. When he says, ‘It is true. No one else was around to do the job.’ When Polkinghorne praises the art of the sages past in Christian and Islamic eras, non-theists were murdered, brutalized, and criminalized. The same could be argued regarding the hospitals and universities. I do not want to dismiss the contributions of brilliant religious people to humanistic enterprises. Even so, these ashes formed into something more substantive, non-theist philosophies and sciences. They continue:

Kuhn: Well, my question is a different one. My question is, so what follows from either one of those? A lot of good hospitals and art have been developed from a lot of other ways and a lot of people have been hurt from other things other than religion. So what difference does it make? Is that any demonstration of what the ultimate reality is if religion has done these good things or these bad things? Is it relevant at all in any way?

Polkinghorne: Well, I think the mixed economy of human achievement in this sort of way simply shows us there is something has gone wrong with human nature. There is a slantedness in human nature, the sort of thing that turns a country’s into its next tyrant and so on and so on. I think that’s something that we need to take seriously and to recognize. And the religious diagnosis of that is what is called sin. And sin essentially is refusal to accept that we are creatures, to believe that we can do it our way, that we don’t need the grace of God to help us in trying to do what is right. And I think that is actually a serious mistake to make.

Kuhn, as you can see, is pointing to the more fundamental ontological basis. What is the “ultimate reality”? Ultimate reality is redundant. Why does anyone use the phrase? We mean reality, as that is ultimate by definition. The idea that great works of art produced by religious individuals in religious times and cultures and, therefore, the religions are true is akin to an individual making the argument from person experience. They don’t work in general interpersonally. They shouldn’t work historically or culturally. The basic question: Is it true or false, somewhere in between or meaningless? He is, certainly, correct to point to the “religious diagnosis” as sin as the problem. Yet, what is the basis for this: scripture, the God concept, and an asserted supernatural realm? It isn’t parsimonious. It’s, for all of the purported purity and holiness, fragmentary, excessive, and asymmetrically ugly. It’s intellectually hefty in the sense of burdensome. They continue:

Kuhn: Second approach is a scientific one. And that says that by adding the necessity of God, you’re creating a God of the gaps, that it’s a pessimistic view of science, that science certainly cannot answer all the questions, but it has been progressing more and more and more. And ultimately, we’ll be able to answer all the questions of any significance about existence.

Polkinghorne: Well, I think it’s totally absurd and I’m just about to think that science really can answer every serious question about existence. Science has purchased its very great success, and of course, as a scientist, I want to take it absolutely seriously, purchased its very great success by the modesty of its ambition. Essentially, it only asks one question about the world, the question of process, the question of how things happen. It brackets out questions of meaning and value and purpose.

But those are questions that we know are meaningful and necessary to ask. And I think it is absurd to think science describes a lunar landscape populated by people who are seen simply as replicating information processing systems. There are no real persons in that bleak and arid world. And nobody, new atheist or whatever, lives their lives as if that was true.

I disagree with Kuhn’s charcterization, as the scientific formulation does not necessitate a claim to all truths, but does provide a process whereby one can garner practical, operational facts about the world. Certainly, though, a God of the gaps has been attempted in so many circumstances. Polkinghorne does not address the central issue, though. If science continues to proceed and create conditions under which God becomes an receding portion of actuality, or the places for supernaturalism can shrink, then to imply God is still accessible in those pockets is, indeed, the God of the gaps in action. In some sense, if one redefines meaning, meaning could be the means by which valence is carved out by subjectivities in the universe. Meaning could, in fact, be subject to scientific scrutiny, not the individual selection of meanings, but the process by which meaning is ascribed, how we value what we value, and how we create purposes and even wittling down the the range of possible purposes ascribed by ourselves for ourselves. It is not necessarily distinct. Let’s continue:

Kuhn: Well, the argument is it’s value, morality, that science can’t do that. Some scientists say that maybe with understanding how the brain works and a neuromorality or neurotheology, you can see brain states so that you can be able to assert things about proper morality. But most people say no. But that’s a construct. That’s a human construct. And we shouldn’t have to look to some supernatural thing for that, because it’s something that comes out of human beings. And it’s not something here or there.

Polkinghorne: I don’t think morality is a human construct in the sense of being an armory construct. I think we have genuine ethical knowledge. I think my conviction that torturing children is wrong is not some disguised genetic survival strategy, nor a convention of my society. It’s a fact about the world. And I think that science does not explain where that fact comes from. As I say, it has limited its scope precisely by not seeking to answer that sort of question. One of the physicists I knew a bit was Pauli, Wolfgang Pauli, a man with a very acerbic tongue, and he used to wag his finger at people and say, “No credits for the future.” In other words, don’t claim that my theory is a bit shaky today, but tomorrow it will explain everything. And I would say that to the people who say that science is in the end giving us the only knowledge we can have. That seems to me just totally absurd.

Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Kuhn and Polkinghorne here. Neuromorality and neurotheology get at empirical orientrations on what I would speak to here. It’s going to lead them to a dead-end, though. To argue for the human construction of morality and to have the ethic as a genuine ethical knowledge, the human construction of morality is a fact, but the construction, for the most part, does not happen consciously. So, we do this in the manner similar to the development of the visual system. We do not develop a visual system at once. It evolves and refines in individual development. Similarly with the human construction of morality, it’s innate and developmental in the same manner water can phase change to ice and the ice crystals can develop a pattern of structure. Human construction of morality and genuine ethical knolwedge are done by us, but happen outside of our control mostly. Thus, this can seem innate, because it is, and can seem supernatural, because it’s beyond our immediate experiential access and control. It is, in a way, a genetic survival strategy to have the human construction of knowledge for genuine ethical knowledge.

No God of the Bible necessary and no polemics required.

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