It got me thinking a bit about the agenda of the loud atheists. They certainly have many valid points, and just as many flaws.
Among the biggest flaws is their failure to distinguish between objective reality and subjective reality. Spiritual experiences (not religious beliefs, which are cultural -- subjective yes, but communally held, therefore not direct experience) are subjective and cannot be proven or disproven by scientific objectivism. As Wilber points out in The Marriage of Sense and Soul, spiritual experiences can be subjected to the scientific method -- select an injunction (for example: Zen meditation produces a specific effect), do the test, then see if your results conform to other similar tests of the same injunction. Simple, but no one does this with spiritual experience. The loud atheists reject ALL spiritual experience without testing the injunctions (although Sam Harris is doing meditation, so maybe he is the most open to the possibility that he may be partially wrong).
Another major failing, in my mind, is to lump all fundamentalisms into one fundamentalism. I think there is a big difference between Christian fundamentalists (the Blue meme in Spiral Dynamics) and Islamic fundamentalists (which I think falls into the Red-blue memetic transition -- more Red than Blue in many ways). Treating all fundamentalisms the same is a recipe for disaster.
When Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins tell Christian fundamentalists that they are no different than Islamic fundamentalists (and I have made this mistake as well), the Christians will immediately tune out anything else these critics might have to say, no matter how much truth they might bring. This is a huge failure on their part to understand the subtle distinctions in worldviews.
And that brings me to the final big issue I have with the loud atheists -- they have no comprehension of developmental worldviews, which are not specific to integral theory. Jean Gebser was writing about these distinctions nearly 70 years ago, so this isn't new information. Until the loud atheists can grasp that cultures -- just like people -- go through developmental stages in how they relate to the world, their arguments will fail to do anything other create more polarization and anger.
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3 comments:
The question shouldn't be whether the "loud atheists" (a horribly prejudiced term) are being rude. The question is: are they right? Is faith, in any form, deleterious to both human cognition and human life?
Given that we're now mired in a war that was launched on the basis of faith in rationalist principles, rather than grounded in solid intelligence and realistic planning, I tend to side with the Loudites.
Yes, some of their conclusions are ridiculous. The attempts to argue that Stalin was "religious" in his devotion to Communism smack of excuse-making. The danger isn't religion per se; the danger is faith. Disasters in human history occur when people place faith above reason.
As for Wilber not being more popular...come on, Bill. You act like you've never READ the guy. :-)
Hey Jay,
I think you are responding more to ~C's rant than to mine. I know why Wilber isn't more popular, because I have read him. :)
I tend to agree with you on the issue of faith, though I can't agree that all faith is flawed. Blind faith, the kind we see in Islamic fascists, various fundamentalisms, and in the Bushites, among others -- yes, it's a disaster.
But I have "faith" that if I can become more mindful that I will suffer less attachment. I have no proof, and there is no "rational" proof of this (yet), so it is a matter of faith on my part. I don't think faith of this nature is bad.
Anyway, glad to see in the blogosphere again. Hope all is well with you.
Peace,
Bill
Thank you Integral Options Cafe for not lumping Dan Dennett in with the fundamentalist, or Loud, athiests - a habit I've been very keen to dispell recently. Haidt's essay is a good example of where people are mis-understanding Dennett.
As you say in The Failure of the Loud Atheists the biggest flaw of the atheist fundamentalists "is their failure to distinguish between objective reality and subjective reality". Now Dennett, in both 'Breaking the Spell' and 'Consciousness Explained' is playing a completely different game and to roll him up into the angry atheist crowd is mis-reading him almost completely.
Dennett recognises interiors and exteriors. He recognises evolution and development. He recognises the difference between left and right-hand quadrants (although wouldn't use those terms). And he states clearly that 3rd person methodologies have a large part to play in understanding interiors. He's got at least Zone1 and Zone2 of the 8 Integral Methodological Pluralism zones covered and he spotted the blind spot that phenomenology has to structuralism and 3rd person methods. His hetrophenomenological method addressed the problem back in the 1980s.
This, from his latest TED talk, says it nicely.
"Scientists, using their from-the-outside, 3rd person methods, can tell you things about your own consciousness that you'd ever dream of. And the fact that you are not the authority on your own consciousness that you thought you were."
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