Do theological divisions stick in your craw?

Over at the Interpath Conversations group on Facebook, a forum member had a question to ask about the attitude of Richard Dawkins toward believers:

This video was shot in 2007, at around the 55:30 mark he begins a comment in which he ends up saying that it "sticks in his craw" to work with "decent moderate religious people." But in more recent years, I've heard him talk quite happily about working with progressive/liberal religious people and even called them something-like his "comrades in arms against ignorance."  

Earlier in the same comment he talks about belief in a supernatural creator being incompatible with science. But I know that many (if not most!) liberal/progressive religious people are not "supernatural theists" but rather 'pan-en-theists', even if they're unfamiliar with the term. 

So, my question is, does it still stick in his craw? Or, is he now more okay with working with liberal/progressive religious folk who aren't supernatural theists? I'm merely trying to understand his point of view, not looking for an argument. Thanks!

That's a pretty fair question! I thought it deserved to be brought outside of the silo of Facebook and added to the ongoing workings-out here of topics in belief, nonbelief, and interaction across those questions that divide us.

My answer to the forum member was as follows:

Thinking about his books and public comments, I would say that what sticks in Dawkins' craw is not working with such people (the 'softcore theists', we might say), but with the idea that persons committed to making society more welcoming of scientific/skeptical ways of looking at the world should be allying with persons committed to making the work more welcoming of supernaturalistic belief.  

That is to say, it is the organizational "working with" which is problematic -- which leads to issues of conflict over incompatible commitments -- rather than interpersonal "working with."  

You've likely heard the reasoning that by helping to normalize supernaturalistic belief of the sort that Dawkins finds unwarranted, moderate or liberal believers help to create safe conditions in society where more radical or dangerous strains of belief can find an entrance point and eventually flourish. This, too, is an organizational (or societal) dynamic, and not an interpersonal one.  

Compare this attitude to, say, Sam Harris' recommendation that nonbelievers be conversationally intolerant of supernaturalistic belief, when we encounter it in our personal lives. Now, Dawkins may well be impatient with the believers in his personal life; but as I understand it, his public and written comments along the lines of this "sticks in my craw" remark aren't expressions of interpersonal animosity.

Or did I get it backwards? Is Dawkins in his personal life someone who finds theists backward or foolish? Does he go out of his way to avoid dealing with them? On the other hand, does he see the value in forging organizational alliances with theistic groups who are working toward a shared goal? You know what, I don't think it matters, not in the case of Dawkins specifically.

What matters is that we recognize this as a fair question, and an important one. If you're a believer/nonbeliever, how do you feel about interacting with nonbelievers/believers? Do these feelings get in the way of opportunities to work together? Does working together mean we are compromising our principled commitment to endorsing and proliferating a worldview?

There's a conversation we need to have about how to work with people you think are wrong in some aspect of their thinking. It would have to touch on issues of humility, cooperativeness, conviction, civility, and good will. It might even be a conversation to have with folks at a young age, since as part of your interpersonal, social skill too;-kit the ability to work alongside and in productive cooperation with people you think are wrong is indispensable. So add this topic to the syllabus for secular Sunday School. 

Belief: Important, though grossly over-emphasized

I often remind people (theists, atheists, allies, assholes, anyone who needs reminding really): You know I'm an atheist. But, now that you know that, how much do you know about me? Exceedingly little.

Anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, musters the same point in her guest column for The New York Times titled "Belief Is the Least Part of Faith":

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

Luhrmann calls it the problem of belief, and I agree that belief is a problem, though not just because it represents a barrier toward a feeling of community or unity among persons of different ethical and doctrinal commitments -- as a believer in materialism and rationalism, I think it is ethically urgent that we cultivate as widely as possible the practices of skepticism, irony, and empiricism, so as to fortify our culture and body politic against attractive but untrue and dangerous memes.

However: Luhrmann's purpose in his column is not to problematize belief, but to problematize the emphasis on belief as a sticking point of contention between believers and secularists. I agree fully with her perspective in this regard, and would offer this as a take-away:

The epistemic position any person stakes out on the question of theism (or any question of doctrine) is a small aspect of the much larger and manifold state of identifying with a particular worldview tradition. Far more important than what is believed, is how the belief is arrived at (a measure of warrant); whether the belief is consistent with other beliefs held by the believer (a measure of rationality); and which behaviors are engendered by that belief (a measure of moral merit). There are a great number of beliefs I as a staunch atheist hold, which are utterly unrelated to my view on existence of divinities.

My ethical commitments, in other words, like those of believers and nonbelievers of all sorts, have a relationship TO my faith outlook... but cannot, and should not, be reduced TO the fact of my belief or nonbelief. The human epistemic machine, with all its moral and philosophical sub-systems, is far too complex to be so reduced.

These facts should be known widely, since they have direct bearing on the way we interact with persons who identify with faith or philosophical traditions other than our own.

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NB: Luhrmann notes "As the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out, when the King James Bible was printed in 1611, 'to believe' meant something like 'to hold dear.'" Quite so. Etymologically, the Germanic verb "to believe" can be thought of as "to be-love": "to love so as to live by." This word-fact should douse the torches of all those atheists who decry "belief" as an act of intellectual weakness. (Though the worst of the rhetoric is focused tightly on the intellectual treason of "faith"). Let the warning be: Semantic arguments may by semantic means debunked.

The (acceptable) limits of verificationism

Charles Taliaferro, Evidenca and Faith: Philosophy and Religion Since the Seventeeth Century, Cambridge UP, 2005, p.350, under the heading “Contra Positivism”:

Ayer, Schlick, and the others wanted to rule out what is untestable, partly because they were opposed to radical skepticism. […] For the positivists, the demon hypotheses (or brain in vat scenarios) are to be rejected for they are not verifiable. […] To insist on verifiability as a requirement for meaning seems to rule out meaningful narratives of how one might be systematically and irrevocably deceived. 

Emphasis mine. The word “insist” in the last sentence above is too strong. That “comprehensive Cartesian skepticism advances (at least initially) the possibility that one’s sensory experiences may all be systematically mistaken” (ibid.) entails a limitation, not the ruin, of verificationist positivism. The more charitable interpretation of the verifiability requirement is as a methodological, rather than an (ideological?) act of insistence.

The Cartesian possibility—that our sensory data corresponds to a deceptive pattern of electrochemical signals, and not to some functional engagement with the world we think we perceive—surely limits the confidence we may responsibly feel in our physics or metaphysics. However, a practical epistemology doesn’t demand logical certainty. We may proceed with intellectual confidence, and some degree of moral assurance, if we possess warrant sufficient for our beliefs. This principle would make epistemology a relative system, as sufficiency is relative both to the claim in question and the evidence for that claim. Well, a relative epistemology needn't be thought a useless epistemology! The incompleteness theorem did not paralyze either mathematics or computer science; there is no reason we cannot make use of a verificationist epistemology in such circumstances that are not weakened by this foundational limitation.