A Friendly Reply to David G. Meyers: Part Two

[This is the second in a series of blogs in which I respond to a recently published book by acclaimed psychology professor, author, and columnist David G. Meyers. The book is called “A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists”; I recommend the book to anyone interested in religion and the “New Atheism”. It is available for purchase at amazon.com.]

In my last blog, I argued against your attempt to distinguish between “Good Religion” and “Bad Religion”, between the “baby” and the “bathwater”. Here in Part Two I would like to respond to your accusation of “out-group homogeneity bias” on the part of atheists and skeptics.

In the chapter of your book entitled “Simplistic Stereotypes”, you write that

believers may have caricaturized images of the prototypical atheist (perhaps lumping Stalin with today’s humane scientific secularists). And to judge from their recent books, atheists sometimes return the favor by equating religion with its irrational aberrations. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris itemize seeming religious lunacies, including the nasty practices listed in Leviticus, as if they had the same standing as the later teachings of the second author of Isaiah or of Jesus’ beatitudes (for example, “blessed are the peacemakers”). ‘This is like talking of chemistry in terms of phlogiston and bodily humours, and mocking it for its crudity,’ observes the theologian Keith Ward […].

You then appeal to us skeptics not to “lump all faith-heads together”.

Here again, you seem to be trying to distinguish between “Good Religion” and “Bad Religion”, and you want atheists to refrain from lumping the Good with the Bad. I have already made a straightforward argument against the cogency and practicality of this distinction (see previous blog). Now I want to explore what this diversity within and between the world’s religions means for your argument and for atheism.

Calling attention to the diversity within and between religions does very little for your argument in favor of it. For not only do atheists recognize this diversity, but we also seize on it as one of our most powerful arguments against the legitimacy of religion in general.

Let’s first examine diversity within a religion, i.e., Christianity. In the quote I gave above, you drew attention to the disparity in biblical depictions of the Most High. You seem to argue that Leviticus, which is included in the canon of your own religion, contains “religious lunacies”. At the same time, you contrast such “lunacy” to other texts – such as the Book of Isaiah and the Gospel According to Matthew – that are also included in the canon of your own religion.

Reflect for a moment on what impression of your religion and its canon this attitude will leave on a reader. As for myself, I gathered from the foregoing paragraph that your religion is extremely incoherent, that it does not agree even with itself about its own object. How many Gods does your allegedly monotheistic religion acknowledge, and which of them does its practitioners actually value?
If your sect is as Marcionist as you seem to be saying, then why not exclude the “Old Testament” (more appropriately called the Hebrew Bible) from the canon?

This problem of incoherence is exacerbated in a later chapter of your book, where you appeal to the very “Old Testament” which you disparaged in the above quote, as an authority in regard to the meaning of “soul”. You write that the Platonic idea of a disembodied (or disembodiable) soul or mind is not only contrary to current scientific understanding but that it is also

quite unlike the implicit psychology of the Old Testament people, whose nephesh (soul) terminates at death. In the Hebrew view, we do not have a nephesh; we are nephesh (living beings). In most of its eight hundred Old Testament occurrences, biblical scholars report, this nephesh is akin to the soul we have in mind when saying ‘there wasn’t a soul (person) in the room’ or ‘I love you from the depths of my soul’ (being).

Now I am very confused as to what the place of the “Old Testament” is in your religion. Is it an authoritative text or not? If it is, then why are you calling its commandments “lunacy”? If it is not, then why are you deferring to its concept of “soul”? In the first place, this indecision begins to smack of shameless opportunism. Second, it seems likely that my confusion about your religion is an extension of the confusion inherent therein.

Your claim that your religion is best thought of as “ever-reforming” does not save your case. Such an “ever-reforming” religion indicates either an inconstant understanding of God or an inconstant God. Even a casual reading of the Christian Bible argues strongly in favor of an inconstant God, which carries obviously problematic theological implications, insofar as an inconstant God cannot be trusted in any meaningful sense.

Perhaps, then, you would rather argue for an evolving understanding of a constant God. This will not do, either. First you must argue plausibly that God is something distinct from the alleged understanding of him (her, it), and this has not been done.

Now I will briefly address the diversity among religions. This diversity severely weakens the position of each religion as well as that of religion in general, insofar as their separate claims to absolute and unique truth, being equally forceful, cancel one another out. As each religion clamors for proselytes, the outsider must ask, “How does one choose among these many religions?” The only answer is in some method of deciding that is not provided by any of the religions in question (as in this case the decision-making process would be hopelessly circular). At this point, the scientific method and logic come to the rescue.

This, however, is fatal to religion. For the scientific method and logic have not led to any conclusion indicating that any characteristically religious claim is true.

In short, we atheists and skeptics recognize very well the diversity of the faithful. We just prefer to call it their confusion.

To Be Continued