The Reality-Based Community

 Atheistic bigotry

I guess I'm glad I know that, freed from the chains of obsolete superstition, atheists are invariably tolerant, rational, and loving, and that they don't go off on bigoted rants as so many religious folks do. Because if I didn't know that independently, I don't think I could prove it from the evidence.

After all, if I heard Jerry Falwell claim that all Muslims, without distinction, are "ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed," or heard Osama bin Laden make the same claim about Christians, I'd just nod my head and say, "Yep. Bigots." So I might easily have made the mistake of calling P.Z. Meyers a bigot for saying exactly that about religious believers in general. And that would have hurt his sensitive feelings. After all, he's not a bigot at all: "My cause," says Meyers, is simply the truth."

Now, what's the difference between "My cause is simply the truth" and "What I believe is true"? None that I can see. The gospels refer to Jesus as "the Truth." The fact that Meyers doesn't use a capital "T" doesn't make him any more open to ideas he doesn't currently hold.

I'm not a member of any congregation or an adherent of any denomination. So it's not my self-love that protests when Meyers calls refers to all religious beliefs as "goofy, stupid, and ridiculous." It's my liberalism that's offended, and my suspicion that there might be something to be learned from very old and widespread traditions. (I've always wanted to ask someone like Meyers — or Dawkins, or Pinker — how much smarter he thinks he is than, let's say, Heraclitus or Socrates or Maimonides or Newton, who thought hard about religion and didn't dismiss it as nonsense.)

Meyers , it seems to me, is just the flip side of Michael Gerson. Meyers furiously denounces as false the sort of childish religion that Gerson exemplifies but that thoughtful worshippers of every persuasion have always despised.

Religious thought, writing, and speech, at its adult level, is always metaphorical. "Humans are created in the Image of God," taken literally, is nonsense, if you remember that it is a part of a religious tradition that says that God is an infinite, omniscient, beneficent, immortal being "without parts or passions," which is the opposite of finite, finitely rational, ethically challenged mortal beings with physical bodies and emotional drives. It makes no more sense as a proposition in comparative primatology than "My love is like a red, red rose" makes sense as a proposition in botany. But it's a very powerful metaphor for the ethical proposition "Human beings are not to be damaged or degraded." (Of course religious writers don't generally assert that "God" names a metaphor rather than an entity, any more than the actor playing Hamlet looks at the audience and says, "I'm not really the Prince of Denmark" or any more than a Pynchon novel carries a disclaimer on the title page, "None of this stuff really happened.")

Confronted with the verse from Robert Burns, Meyers would no doubt say: "She is not! Why, she doesn't even have petals, and her reproductive strategy is entirely different from that of a rose." And Gerson would reply angrily, "If you don't believe in the petals of your beloved you have no objective reason to have sex, and the species will die out."

Considering "God exists" as an empirical proposition on the model of "the Earth is a spheroid," there's no evidence for it. It corresponds to no observation or well-formed theory, and the attributes usually attributed to the metaphorical entity are, in logical terms, mutually inconsistent. (Really, It's not very hard to prove that One doesn't equal Three.) Believing literally in the old but remarkably fit white guy with a long beard that Michelangelo painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling makes about as much sense as believing in unicorns. So, as between Gerson and Meyers, I side with Meyers, since "The proposition you maintain has no evidence to back it up and is, moreover, incoherent" is a stronger argument than "Yes, but I couldn't stand it if the proposition were false."

But if, like anyone who has thought deeply about these matters, you think of God as an especially potent metaphor (or, to put in more flowery terms, "a mystery to be understood only in part, and then by faith") — if you think that, then the whole debate is pointless. Both Gerson and Meyers are just being silly: it's two blind men debating the nature of the elephant while groping around different parts of a Land Rover.

Footnote The word "agnostic" gets misused in this debate. An agnostic is not someone who says "In my mind, it's even money whether God exists or not." An agnostic, properly speaking, is one who doesn't think "God exists" is a proposition that can be argued about, either because the relevant evidence can't be gathered or because it wasn't an empirical proposition in the first place.