"Poetic Atheism"

Jennifer Hecht's latest contribution to a new blog called Unreasonable Faith*: 

...I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I don’t think the universe can think. I don’t believe there is some special being that is separate from the universe and knows about us and cares about us and made us. All of that is the imaginative fantasy of one group of animals on planet Earth... 

What comes into being when matter and energy fall into such patterns that they look up and say hi and write symphonies? Art happens. It’s very strange and wonderful.

The truth may be real but it is not “matter of fact.” What in fact we have here is a billion fantastically sexy weird interesting stories all going on at once in a great cacophony of experience. How do we make sense of what it is to be human, to be this thing, this sentient matter?

Well I certainly don’t think the magic of consciousness should be considered evidence for something hidden, something else. The magic of consciousness is magic enough. Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are.

But the truth, the what actually is is very strange and overloaded and wondrous indeed...

==

*owned by former evangelical Christian Daniel Florien, who explains what made him a skeptic:

1. I read widely outside of evangelical Christianity with an open mind. Just reading isn’t good enough — without an open mind, everything confirms your own beliefs. I decided truth was more important than my current beliefs. I was warned this was dangerous. It was indeed.
2. I studied science with an open mind. I came to believe in an old earth, then finally evolution. This was a long process of removing layer after layer of propaganda.
3. I looked for evidence for many of the claims I believed and realized that there was no reputable evidence at all. I could believe Jesus was resurrected, or that Moses parted the Red Sea, but there was no evidence outside oral stories recorded by unknown biased authors many decades (or, as with Moses, many centuries) after the fact.
4. I researched the history and authorship of the Bible from a secular perspective. After I realized the messy history of the Bible, and saw all the contradictions and absurdities, I could not believe in inspiration much less infallibility, and any faith I still had crashed down.
5. I learned to think critically and, with much trepidation, finally applied it to my own religion. After years of struggling, I finally accepted I was in a cult called evangelical Christianity.
6. I asked hard questions and got tired of the final answers being “it’s a mystery,” which really meant, “it doesn’t make any sense to me either, but that’s what the Bible says.”
7. I learned about probability. Things I thought could not happen without divine intervention ended up being within the laws of probability. Coincidence really exists.

count on doubt

We come at last today to the end of our reading, in A&S, of Jennifer Hecht's Doubt. What an impressive assemblage of insight and inspiration for all of us who don't line up on matters "spiritual" with 90+ % of our countrymen, but who nonetheless find life challenging but meaningful and well worth living.

It is fitting that she brings Tom Jefferson back, at the end, to remind us: "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear."


And:

Accept that we are animals, but ones with special problems, and that the world is natural, but natural is just an idea that we animals have in our heads. Devote yourself to wisdom, self-knowledge, friends, family, and give some attention to community, money, politics, and pleasure. Know that none of it brings happiness all that consistently. It's best to stay agile, to keep an open mind... the one thing you can really count on is doubt. Expect change. Accept death. Enjoy life. In that order. Repeat...

"Looking Backward"

Jennifer Hecht didn't leave much out of Doubt: A History. But might there have been a place for Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward inspired many late-19th century social utopians to translate their religious doubt into a political faith-- a faith that was supposed to have been redeemed by now, in Bellamy's dream? (Check out the new Google "clip" function.)

quiz

We've focused a lot on New Atheists in A&S so far, but we're about to take up a fairly extensive survey of Old Atheists-- brought to us by Christopher Hitchens' Portable Atheists anthology , and by Jennifer Michael Hecht in Doubt: A History (The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus* to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson). Yes, "doubt" here is a publisher-prompted euphemism, not Ms. Hecht's idea (as she told D.J. Grothe ). But a rose is a rose...

Hecht's introduction is highlighted by the Scale of Doubt Quiz . Take it, see what it tells you.


*Did you know that Jesus was a radical secular humanist ?

"on the slab"

I really like the way Jennifer Hecht's mind works, as evidenced in this post "on choice and the meaning of life."

When science presents a relationship to the public -- this causes that -- it seems like the tough part was measuring reality, but the toughest part comes first. It is the choice to be concerned with a particular influence that might be making some phenomenon happen. Once you choose which thing you’re going to study, you have made the biggest decision you will make. A writer’s greatest act of editing is in plucking one subject out of the busy universe and placing it on the slab.

What she's really talking about here is the power of attention, and she's right: the biggest choice we can make in any research or inquiry, or maybe even any undertaking at all, is the choice to give our attention to this, not that. (A close second might be the choice to do this, then that.)

So, the time I'm spending on syllabi is not wasted. (But what about the time I wasn't spending on them last week? Mr. Paige's answer works for me: Don't look back...!)

Anyway, I'm glad Jennifer's book Doubt: A History made the cut for A&S. It'll be time well-spent, too.