so does ignorance
I was about to tweet the following today:
An uneducated atheist is useless.
Then, I paused.
At first I questioned whether or not it was offensive, and was going to add a “disclaimer” to my tweet. But the more I thought, the more I questioned my original tweet. “Really?” I asked, “because perhaps one doesn’t need an education to draw a conclusion on the existence of the supernatural.” Which then begs the question, “do you have to be told that a god exists?”
Clearly, untold numbers of tribes have evolved beliefs in the supernatural. Where does lightning come from? How does fire burn? Why did the rains come and wash away my crops? If there are no answers for these, then it is likely normal to ascribe them to unseen forces. But if a child grows up knowing that lightning is cloud friction, and fire needs fuel, heat, and air to burn, and that rains come in seasonal patterns, then will (without religious indoctrination) a belief on the supernatural arise? But then again, there are always monsters under the bed, the Dark Side of the Force that allows moms to “just know,” and – of course – Santa Claus. But is it age that pares these beliefs away from us? Do we have a sit-down session in which we learn that these aren’t real? I think that as the rational mind ages, the tendency for the spectacular fades, and is replaced by a bigger desire to “know.” As Neil DeGrasse Tyson said (in a video I linked to some days ago), “humans are uncomfortable at the boundary of ignorance.” And I think experimentation is built into it.
Back to my original point, though, does knowledge trump belief? Is the belief in no-god really all that different than a belief in a god/gods without the education (on whatever level) that usually accompanies it? Or, more to the point, can a person automatically apprehend the requirement for believers to prove their own claim before he or she reaches a conclusion? Thus, is an uneducated atheist even possible?
from tencommandments.org:
In trying to close my ears, I quote Calvin (as in, and Hobbes) – “I can’t even tell which muscle to flex!”
You manage to call several various issues up with this one innocuous proposed tweet, but I’ll deal with only a couple.
Many believers think children are born “seeking god.” You speak to this a bit with your riff on lightning, fire, and rain; there’s an innate human curiosity (that we seem to do a grand job of stamping out of children, culturally, but that’s another topic for discussion) that notes these “mysterious” things. *Why* does it so quickly default to assigning those mysteries to Something Unseen Which Must Also Be Sentient? I am starting to think it goes back to what I mentioned in another post: a genetic tendency to ask why vs. ask for protection. I have argued hotly that it is collective group programming that plants the “god” seed in a young mind. Because really, how often does a single person or two group up without the oversight of elders?
It would be wildly interesting to test that tribal tendency to blame it on deities or demons; would it manifest in a modern petri dish-style experiment? (Read “Oryx and Crake” by Marg Atwood for a *fascinating* take on this very posit.) I kind of doubt it; 35,000 years ago, a communal questioning of death and “Where did they go?” led prehistoric communities to paint animals on cave walls. Did they come to this animistic conclusion after long chats by the fire over haunches of mammoth?
I would say absolutely yes, an uneducated atheist is possible, just like an educated believer is possible. It’s not the majority outcome; my best friend is a doctor and a believer, and she laments — RAILS — at the discrimination she faces in medicine for believing as she does. She is beyond the bell curve, as it were, which is reason enough to infer that uneducated atheists lie outside the bell curve as well. Anecdotally, this tends to suggest the genetic predisposition to believe or not is accurate.
Which begs the next even more fascinating question: does that possibly genetic tendency to believe or quest become diluted when scientists procreate with mystics? It would seem that it does. Which gene might carry this inclination, and is it recessive and not dominant? Which flip of the switch is an evolutionary leap forward? (It’s a rhetorical and self-evident question, given man’s history.)
The other less obvious issue to me is wrapped in my learning recently that both Plato and Aristotle had interests in astral fields/energy; Plato called it nous and Aristotle called it entelecheia. I find myself dumbfounded to learn that these great, rational minds entertained — quite seriously — ideas that in their time were considered magical and highly specious. Even now, this topic is viewed skeptically, after passing in and out of “accepted” science. In digging into other notable scientific minds, especially those affiliated with the Masons, I learned Isaac Newton wrote pretty extensively on the importance of prophetic vision, and he studied alchemy as well. He was one of *many* scientists with decidedly UNscientific interests. My mystical side is intrigued; my rational side is chagrined.
It’s personally relevant because I seem to beat back my own mystical curiosity with the shield of reason. I have hoped rationality would temper my more chaotic emotional tendencies. Yet more and more it seems it should be more of a balance than I’ve managed to attain. Perhaps because that mystical curiosity seems handily tied up in the “experimentation” that you laud. (And I agree, FTR.) Experimentation, and that natural human curiosity it roots in … it’s so easy to lose touch with! How many of us really still indulge it? How many of us stand in the face of cultural condemnation to do so? It’s not Mature or Grown Up or Proper to be too curious, to ask “impolite” questions or behave in “unapproved” ways or ideas.
This atheist has found that the more she pushed outside her socially approved box, the more her Curious Self needed to be fed, and those feeding mechanisms are not easily available in the larger, “approved” culture. And I have married and procreated with no scientists, so my genetic legacy ends here. Curious, though, isn’t it? Does that better my species or not? I and any potential curious-as-Hades progeny won’t be around to judge.
ADDED: in my mind, logically, if not believing in myth is an evolutionary leap forward in the species, then any atheist, educated or not, is a plus. Statistically, the bell curve ties non-belief to education, so the uneducated atheist is likely few and far between. Given all the fun stats about how unlikely we are to commit crimes, the more of us right now the better! http://www.skepticfiles.org/american/prison.htm
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