The Peculiar Human Organism

One of the central components of my thesis (which is, mercifully, coming closer to completion) is that the new atheist account of reality is not “deep” enough - it does not provide a rich or satisfying enough account of the phenomenology of being human. Huge swaths of human existential concerns are relegated to the realm of evolutionary peculiarities or “misfirings” in the attempt to squeeze everything into what John Haught has called an “explanatory monism” which assumes that one mode of explanation - the scientific one - is all we need. This reductive approach to human beings is then held alongside (awkwardly and incoherently, in my view) an arrogated moral authority in the attempt to discredit the very religious traditions which it is unwittingly borrowing from.

I couldn’t help but think of this while reading the opening chapter of Walker Percy’s The Message in the Bottle. The book is about language and, among other things, what our ability to use it - to address others and to be addressed as subjects - might say about our uniqueness in the cosmos, but here, at the outset, Percy simply wonders about how an understanding of human beings as nothing but “organisms in environments” can account for the alienation and longing that is so pervasive a feature of human existence - even when our environment is the best (materially speaking) that our species has ever seen:

If beasts can be understood as organisms living in environments which are good or bad and to which the beast responds accordingly as it it has evolved to respond, how is man to be understood if he feels bad in the best environment?…. A theory of man must account for the alienation of man. A theory of organisms in environments cannot account for it, for in fact organisms in environments are not alienated.

Percy, writing in the mid-twentieth century, summarizes a human predicament that I suspect has not changed much since he penned these words:

Man knows he is something more than an organism in an environment, because for one thing he acts like anything but an organism in an environment. Yet he no longer has the means of understanding the traditional Judeo-Christian teaching that the “something more” is a soul somehow locked in the organism like the ghost in the machine. What is he then? He has not the faintest idea. Entered as he is into a new age, he is like a child who sees everything in his new world, names everything, knows everything except himself.

We might behave as “organisms in environments” on the physical level - we have the skills to survive and have proven wondrously adept at bending the natural world to our material purposes - but at the psychological or spiritual level, this is certainly not the case. If the story of cosmic history is about the emergence of species suited to their environments, why do we seem to be such an odd fit? How has nature thrown up a creature that expects so much more from its environment than it could possibly give it? Is it because, for reasons unknown, we’ve evolved prefrontal lobes that are too big (and overactive) for our own good? Or are human beings more than just organisms in environments.

Percy sets forth the metaphor of human beings as “homeless” wayfarers as opposed to organisms adapting to their environment in order to account for the alienation we feel. While the word “homeless” gets my theological antennae up (it seems to connote an escapist eschatology - “this world is not my home, I’m just-a-passin’ through” - which is problematic on a number of different levels), I think Percy powerfully captures the Christian idea that human beings were made for more than our current experience of the world allows.

To say that we are made for “more” does not require the further claim that this world is not a good one, just that it doesn’t seem to be enough for us. This is more of an empirical observation of how human beings, in fact, think and live in the world than it is a theological claim. The relentless human search for purpose and meaning, no matter what exotic paths this might take us on, is evidence that we at least think we are more than just “organisms in environments.” Simply put, we expect more from the world than it seems able to deliver.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of interpreting this empirical phenomenon: 1) With Richard Dawkins (among others), dismiss it as the “whingeing self-pity of those who think that life owes them something”; or 2) With Percy (among others), consider the possibility that it might just represent a clue to the mystery and meaning of the universe. Either the phenomenon is an evolutionary oddity which makes no contact with what is actually true about the cosmos, or it is a hint of things to come.

 

A Strange Salvation

One of the dangers of choosing a thesis topic related to a relatively recent (and controversial) socio-cultural phenomenon is that there is invariably a lot of material produced on the subject that one should at least attempt to keep abreast of while writing. In the case of the phenomenon that is the new atheism, this is proving to be a monumental task.

It seems like every two weeks another book comes out in response to the recent attacks on God and religion - many, unfortunately, doing their best to cleverly work into their title the word “delusion” in a rather pathetic playground-esque attempt to one-up Richard Dawkins (”you’re deluded about God,”… “no you’re deluded about atheism“… “in fact, you’re so deluded that you’re probably from the devil“… and on and on we go). I’m getting close to the finish line here, so I’ve more or less given up on the attempt to keep up with the backlash, but I did sit down and read Chris Hedges I Don’t Believe in Atheists (another unfortunate title choice) last week. It was enough to convince me that I’ve read enough reactions now.

It’s not that it’s a terrible book - Hedges has some good insights, and properly challenges the new atheists on their conviction that scientific rationality is poised to usher the planet into a future of untold bliss and religionless harmony. But it seems like every time Hedges makes a valid and necessary critique, he follows it with a prolonged rant against the view (from the new atheists or from right-wing religious fundamentalists - Hedges seems just a little too desperate to distance himself from American Christianity) that history is a story of progress toward a fixed end. For Hedges, this belief is not just mistaken, but evil, in and of itself. It has led to too much violence and misery over the years, as those who claim to have an exclusive vision of this utopic future, be they religious or atheistic, impose their vision on others. Here’s a sample:

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.

We are not saved by reason. We are not saved by religion. We are saved by turning away from projects that tempt us to become God, and by accepting our own contamination and the limitations of being human.

Human history is not a long chronicle of human advancement. It includes our cruelty, barbarism, reverses, blunders and self-inflicted disasters. History is not progressive. The ancient Greeks, like Hindus and Buddhists, saw human life and human history as cyclical. We live, they believed, in alternating stages of hope and despair, of growth and decay. This may be a more accurate understanding of human existence. To acknowledge the purposelessness of human history, to refuse to endow it with a linear march toward human perfection, is to give up the comforting idea that we are unique or greater than those who came before us. It is to accept our limitations and discard our intoxicating utopian dreams. It is to become human.

As I was reading this book (which might have been more appropriately titled I Don’t Believe in Utopias), I found myself frequently writing in the margins “yes, but…” Yes, a measure of historical humility is obligatory; yes, it’s a good and necessary thing to recognize human limitations; yes, human beings are not going to “perfect” themselves.

But…

…in light of our predicament, what ought we to do? Is the answer really moving back to a cyclical understanding of human history? Is recognizing human limitation and acknowledging the purposelessness of history really salvific? Is giving up our “intoxicating utopian dreams” really what it means to become human? In his haste to condemn the new atheists for imposing their vision of the world on others, Hedges seems to default to a bleak pessimism that, at least to me, is difficult to square with the human need for hope.

I think that Hedges is misguided in his approach to new atheists. Rather than attacking their deeply flawed means of achieving legitimate and irreducibly human ends, Hedges simply labels the ends themselves as illusory. It’s one thing to say that this or that tool is not up to the task of fulfilling human longing or that, ultimately, human beings are incapable of manufacturing the conditions that would fulfill our “utopian” desires. It’s quite another to simply label the desires themselves illusory and call this understanding salvific. The problem with the new atheists is not, from my perspective, the illegitimacy of the ends they have in mind; rather, it is with the theoretical justification they offer for these ends and the unwillingness to acknowledge their religious character.

According to the Christian vision, we do not become human by recognizing our limitation and adopting a posture of resignation to a fatalistic universe in the present, nor does salvation consist in turning away from “projects that tempt us to become like God.” In a sense, becoming “like God” is exactly what we are called to do as image-bearers - not in the idolatrous sense of believing that the task of ushering in God’s future falls exclusively to us, but in the responsible sense of understanding that God has called us to represent him well, to do our part in allowing, however incrementally, his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.

A central component of the Christian faith is the idea that this history is not a purposeless cyclical meandering with no fixed end in sight, that it is governed and guaranteed by a “God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Rom 4:17). The goal and the hope of a future unlike the present can be and has certainly been a dangerous one and the source of much suffering throughout history. But it has also produced an awful lot of good - indeed, it is largely responsible for the very shape of Western history itself. The answer for the dangerous “side-effects” of our religious and irreligious hopes is not to declare their object illegitimate, but to orient it within a proper framework which validates it and gives it shape, and which provides the resources and motivation to work toward its fulfillment.

To suggest that the solution to the conflict between religious and atheistic approaches to understanding and living in the world is to simply discard our “absurd hopes” is just as simplistic as the views Hedges is criticizing. Our best hope is to stop hoping? Sounds pretty sterile (and hopeless) to me.

 

How Do You Know?

This weekend, a friend alerted me to an interesting DVD special where four of the more prominent atheists out there right now (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) get together for a round-table discussion. The two hour unmoderated discussion is, interestingly, entitled “The Four Horsemen” - a reference, presumably, to the protagonists’ understanding of themselves as the agents entrusted with the hastening of the demise of the blight upon human history that is religion.

From the bit that I watched, the special seems to be mainly about these four guys sitting around congratulating themselves on the obvious superiority of their views, ridiculing religious people, and sharing stories about the “persecution” they’ve experienced from those who have not yet attained their level of intellectual development. I watched twenty minutes or so of the first hour on YouTube and found it fairly uninteresting - mostly, I presume, because I’ve read each of their books and they don’t really say anything in their discussion that they don’t say in their published works.

One part that did interest me, however, was near the end of the first hour when Sam Harris asked his fellow atheists if they had ever come across an argument that gave them pause, that planted even the smallest seed of doubt in their minds that their militant assault on religion might be misguided. For the most part, they said that they could not. Dennett just bluntly said “no”; Dawkins and Hitchens said something to the effect that they sometimes wondered about the political ramifications of angering religious groups, but not one of them claimed to have ever come across an actual argument that wobbled the foundations of their atheism in any way. One gets the sense that it is literally beyond their capacity to imagine how or why any intelligent person could possibly not see thing the way they do.

The new atheists are frequently accused of a rather breathtaking and condescending form of arrogance in claiming to understand and diagnose the “disease” that is religion, but for me, their arrogance is most obvious in their implicit view of the history of human thought and experience. They really do portray themselves as representing the absolute pinnacle of human intellectual development; they, alone, occupy the privileged position of surveying the human condition with absolute clarity, free from the superstitious fantasies that have clouded the judgment of the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever inhabited the planet.

C.S. Lewis once said that one of the things he found most troubling as an atheist was the view he was forced to take with respect to how others think. In Mere Christianity, he says:

If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.

The “Four Horsemen,” it seems, have no such misgivings. They simply know the truth; the only issue is how to break the news to the rest of us - how to relieve us of our delusions in the most painless manner and avoid stoking the flames of religiously-fueled violence.

In each of the new atheists’ books that I’ve read, the author expresses astonishment at how religious people can claim to have certainty about their beliefs. After reading their books, observing a few of them in debates, and now my brief exposure to their discussion amongst themselves, I can only wonder where the epistemological humility they plead for from religious folks is. John Stackhouse, in a word of warning to those tempted toward claims of certainty in the arena of faith, has recently posted on the importance of recognizing the epistemic limitations faced by all human beings, religious or not. Here’s a summary passage:

This is, finally, the point of it all. We Christians “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7)—and so does everybody else, actually, since no human being can transcend our common situation of epistemic finitude. In fact, if we enjoyed all the certainty (in the former sense) that some Christians say we should claim, well, then, we wouldn’t need faith anymore. We would just know things, and we would know that we were entirely right about them.

I think that a little more humility would be a very good thing, on both sides of the atheist/theist divide. We simply are not the sort of creatures who can know, with 100% certainty, that we are right - especially when it comes to metaphysical questions of meaning and purpose. A kind of “fortress mentality” is as evident in “The Four Horsemen” as it is in the most dogmatic circles of religious fundamentalism. In response to the ambiguities and complexities of the real world, both retreat to the safety of certainty, simply declaring (louder and more angrily if necessary) that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

The problem is that the certainty being sought and claimed (on both sides) is illusory. As Stackhouse reminds us, it simply is not possible to transcend the inherent limitations of being human. A wider appreciation of this truth could lead to the welcome recognition that conviction and commitment can be held and articulated humbly and graciously, without demonizing, ridiculing, or questioning the intelligence of those who do not share it.

 

Truth and Beauty

A couple of interesting conversations over the last couple of days have got me thinking about the relationship between truth and beauty. First, I had the chance to talk over a couple of ideas related to my thesis with my brother during a rare visit out to Saskatchewan this past weekend. We spent some time last night on the nature of the new atheism’s protest against God/religion, and how as human beings we simply do not and cannot know as much as we might like prior to making decisions about ultimate matters such as these. The “what if we’re wrong about all this?” question still comes to mind now and then (at least my mind) and I suspect that this is a normal part of life for most people, whichever side of the atheist/theist divide they find themselves on.

But what if framing the question in this way represents a bias toward an overly cognitive understanding of faith, or the adoption of worldviews in general. What if our evaluation of the data isn’t, ultimately, the most important matter? The gospels, on the whole, seem to portray Jesus as much more interested in our behaviour than our ideas - in a specific kind of life, not acquiescence to the correct body of propositions about the nature of the world. And the kind of life Jesus lived, which we believe deserves/requires our emulation, is a worthy and admirable one indeed. Even if our theology is badly mistaken, a life modeled after the pattern of Jesus would still be a “good” and “beautiful” life.

At the end of Miroslav Volf’s Free of Charge there is a brief chapter entitled “Postlude: A Conversation with a Skeptic.” In it, Volf records the following hypothetical exchange between himself and a skeptic regarding what he would do if he found out that the whole notion of a generous God who gives and forgives, and who expects us to do the same, was nothing but an enormous lie:

Skeptic: “What if your dark thoughts at night - and my sober observations! - are true? What if you are waking up to a dream?”

Volf: “Well what?”

Skeptic: “You’d be wrong.”

Volf: “And I would have lived the right kind of life, the life you called beautiful.”

Skeptic: And have lived a false beautiful life! Wouldn’t that matter to you? Can a false life ever be good?”

Can a false life ever be beautiful? Can it be good? I’ve spent the last four months or so going through Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society with a group of third and fourth year UBC students and today we were talking about his understanding of the relationship between reason, revelation, and experience. In the chapter we touched on this afternoon, Newbigin points out that all people are socialized into and inhabit a particular plausibility structure - a “taken-for-granted” way of thinking about and living in the world which privileges certain kinds of answers to certain kinds of questions.

Taken to the extreme, this understanding could lead to a form of sociological determinism where our options are completely determined by our social environment. How can we presume to tell others that they should adopt our worldview with this knowledge? Is it even possible to just accept a fundamentally different way of looking at and living in the world given what we know about the nature of belief formation and the myriad sociological and psychological factors that contribute to the process?

Well obviously it is. People do, after all, change their minds about matters of faith. But when they do it seems that more often than not it is the quality of someone’s life (or lack thereof) that proves most compelling, as opposed to the logical rigour (or lack thereof) of their argumentation. People respond to lives well lived - to “beautiful” examples of forgiveness, grace, compassion, kindness, patience, and joy. The beauty and goodness of a life could lead one to the conclusion that the foundation upon which it is based just might be true.

So what is the connection between truth and beauty? Whatever the answer to that question might be, I think that the fact that we seem to be hard-wired to expect, even demand that the two be linked is suggestive. Is it possible that a genuinely good and beautiful life would have no connection to what is ultimately true about the world? If so, what would we be claiming about the nature of the world? About human beings? About God?

At the end of the day, in light of the fact that epistemological certainty simply is not the sort of thing that is available to limited creatures such as ourselves, an attempt to live “the right kind of life” in the hope/expectation that this is a genuine reflection of what is true about the world seems like a good and useful response. Sociologist Peter Berger has said that “to have faith is to bet on the ultimate validity of joy.” I think that it is also to bet on a deep and permanent connection between truth and beauty - between the deepest aspirations of human beings and the way the world “really is” and will one day be.

 

Who Goes Where (or Who Cares)?

A couple of articles in the New York Times caught my eye over the past couple of days, the first dealing with the “conversion” of a prominent atheist and the second using this “conversion” in a discussion of the problem of evil. Antony Flew is a British philosopher who in 2004 announced, after a lengthy career as a professional philosopher devoted, at least in part, to arguing for the truth of atheism, that he had changed his mind. Professor Flew is apparently now an advocate of a form of deism - a long way away from belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but a significant change of course from the the position he held for the bulk of his career, to put it mildly. To top it off, he’s written a book describing his “pilgrimage of reason” from atheism to deism in which he claims to simply be following the evidence wherever it leads. The book has been hailed by some as a breath of fresh air - a monument to the obvious relentless rationality of theism as opposed to the dogmatic fundamentalist atheism making all the headlines these days, a welcome respite from the attacks on faith which seem to pop up on a weekly basis in bookstores, magazines, and newspaper articles around North America.

Or is it? The problem with this scenario, according to Times writer Mark Oppenheimer, is that it seems that Flew did little of the actual writing of the book, remembered few of his discussions with influential scientists and philosophers, and may not even understand some of the concepts he employs in his own arguments. The co-writer listed on the cover of the book, Roy Abraham Varghese, apparently did more than just a bit of supplementary writing. The picture presented by Oppenheimer is of an almost senile old British gentleman being led around by the nose by an enthusiastic American Christian more than a little eager for a response to the wave of atheist writings that have come out in the last couple of years. Not only did Varghese do most of the writing, Oppenhemier claims, but there were additional editing and revising done by an American evangelical pastor. While Oppenheimer does not come straight out and accuse these people of deliberately manipulating Flew for their own purposes, this is definitely the sense one gets from his article. He concludes, politely, as follows:

At a time when belief in God is more polarizing than it has been in years, when all believers are being blamed for religion’s worst excesses, Antony Flew has quietly switched sides, just following the evidence as it has been explained to him, blissfully unaware of what others have at stake.

One day later, Stanley Fish’s column on suffering, evil, and the existence of God appeared, citing Bart Ehrman and Antony Flew as examples of people being driven in opposite directions by the problem of evil. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies who for most of his life was a committed Christian, came to a point where he could no longer reconcile his belief in a providential God with the amount of suffering he saw in the world. Flew… well, we already know about Flew. Upon concluding Fish’s article, one is unclear exactly what his purpose in writing it even was. It ends with a rather unremarkable statement of approval that Ehrman and Flew can maintain their respective positions on God and evil without degenerating into ridicule and hostility, and an acknowledgment that neither would likely be convinced by the other’s argument.

It also ends with an apparently hastily appended caveat acknowledging Oppenheimer’s article from the previous day - a piece which, one suspects, Fish was unaware of as he was preparing his article. It’s difficult to imagine that Fish would have been approvingly referring to Flew had he read Oppenheimer’s conclusions regarding the book’s authorship and the deteriorating state of Flew’s memory. While one is inclined to be a bit suspicious about how much the Times editors knew about the two articles and why they published them in the order they did, and while Oppenheimer’s portrayal of the “courtship” of Flew by American Christians over the last several decades seems a bit odd (as if the very fact that Flew had evangelical friends instantly made his atheism less sincere?), the story does leave a sour taste in the mouth. The idea of an ambitious Christian ghost writing a book for a former atheist does smack of desperation. The subtitle of the book, chosen by the publishers, is particularly odious in my opinion: “How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind?!” As if being an atheist was enough to get you on the wall of the local post office….

If Oppenheimer’s claims about this book’s authorship are true, the efforts of Varghese (and whoever else was involved) come across as rather defensive and reactionary. This whole business of tabulating how many and which intellectuals belong on one side or the other, or attempting to prove that this or that person was a “real” theist or atheist strikes me as rather juvenile. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do the same thing, the former claiming in a sense that every intelligent person throughout history was some kind of latent atheist, and that if they had only been presented with the wonders of Darwinian science, they too would have been as devout an atheist as he is, and the latter joining Dawkins and the theists in the tug-of-war over which camp Einstein “really” belongs in. It all gets rather tiresome and contributes virtually nothing to the issue under discussion.

The simple fact is that intelligent people can be found on either side of the atheist/theist divide. It’s not as if Flew is the first atheist to reconsider his position - some have even been rumored to embrace faith before their mental faculties go into decline - and there have obviously been many intelligent Christians (like Ehrman) who have renounced their faith as a result of their understanding of science, the problem of evil, or any combination of other factors. The issue isn’t intelligence, no matter how it is portrayed by either side. It’s not as if all thinking people are obliged to become either atheists or theists. Honest theists will admit that there are compelling reasons for disbelief and honest atheists will admit the opposite. The position one ends up taking seems to be determined less by intellectual capacity than by an act of the will.

Faith - whether it is in the various kinds of atheism or theism - has always been a decision made within the ordinary human constraints of finitude and epistemological limitation. Of course reason has a role to play, but it’s not the only role, nor is it necessarily the decisive one in every case. A broader acknowledgment of this rather obvious fact (from my perspective, at least) might go a long way toward sparing us the annoying tendency, found in both theistic and atheistic apologetics, of assembling all the intellectuals that can be found on either side, counting them up, and seeing who wins (being sure to denigrate those on the other side along the way). As if matters of importance could be decided that easily.

 

What’s Religion Ever Done for Us? (Via an Unlikely Source)

I’ve come across Sigmund Freud relatively frequently over the last couple of years, and I’ve read and heard just enough to be familiar with the broad outlines of his views on religion. Simply put, he wasn’t very high on it. According to Freud, religion represents the childish illusion of a creature that lacks the intellectual fortitude or the courage to face the world as it really is. It is the projection of all our fears and hopes onto an imaginary cosmic screen in order to provide comfort and security in a world where neither are possible. Freud (along with Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche) is often presented as a paradigmatic example of the modern atheistic critique of religion. It’s for the weak and the deluded, a “collective neurosis” for those who can’t handle the cold hard realities of the world in which we live.

With this very general understanding of Freud, I was surprised to come across this article this morning if only because it’s the first time I’ve read of him expressing anything other than outright hostility or condescension towards religion. Mark Edmundson has written a book about Freud’s last days in general, but in this article he focuses mainly on Freud’s final book, Moses and Monotheism. Here Edmundson discovers in Freud a recognition - even an appreciation - of the role that religion has played in history. Judaism in particular, according to Freud, opened up new possibilities for human beings which would eventually lead to many of the things we so highly prize in the modern world.

First, Jewish monotheism paved the way for intellectual abstraction:

Freud argues that taking God into the mind enriches the individual immeasurably. The ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people’s capacity for abstraction. “The prohibition against making an image of God — the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,” he says, meant that in Judaism “a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea — a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.”

This ability to think about abstract concepts led to numerous developments which have improved the world we live in immensely:

[T]he mental labor of monotheism prepared the Jews — as it would eventually prepare others in the West — to achieve distinction in law, in mathematics, in science and in literary art. It gave them an advantage in all activities that involved making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life. Freud calls this internalizing process an “advance in intellectuality,” and he credits it directly to religion.

Finally, Freud acknowledged that Jewish monotheism may have prepared the ground for individual introspection, for thinking about and at least partially understanding oneself:

Freud’s argument suggests that belief in an unseen God may prepare the ground not only for science and literature and law but also for intense introspection. Someone who can contemplate an invisible God, Freud implies, is in a strong position to take seriously the invisible, but perhaps determining, dynamics of inner life. He is in a better position to know himself. To live well, the modern individual must learn to understand himself in all his singularity. He must be able to pause and consider his own character, his desires, his inhibitions and values, his inner contradictions. And Judaism, with its commitment to one unseen God, opens the way for doing so. It gives us the gift of inwardness.

This is Freud, we’re talking about? Who knew? Of course acknowledging the role religion has played and continues to play in history is a long way from embracing a religious worldview. Whatever concessions Freud was willing to make regarding the positive historical consequences of monotheism, he apparently remained an “uncompromising atheist” until his death. His place in the atheistic pantheon seems secure.

I wonder how Freud reconciled his views that a) religion represents the illusory projections of a fearful and childish creature, and b) these illusory projections played a formative role in the historical development of so many of the genuinely “humanizing” features of the modern world. Apparently, he was prepared to accept that many of the things which enrich and improve human experience were at least partially rooted in beliefs that were simply false.

Perhaps it represents a lack of imagination or courage on my behalf, but I’m not prepared to accept this. I think there is an inherent connection between truth and goodness; I find it extremely difficult to believe that so many of the things that have proven to benefit, delight, and enhance human experience of the world began in falsehood. At any rate, if Freud is right about both the historical impact of monotheism and the illusory nature of religious belief, it seems to me that this is one of the most fortunate illusions that has ever clouded our fragile, fearful, and finite little brains.