Should we promote tolerant religion?

There's an interesting essay at Positive Liberty: While Europe Slept, by Jonathan Rowe. It made me stop and think. I'm an advocate for peaceful co-existence with religion; and have debated this up and down the blogs in recent times along with lots of other opinionated folks with diverse notions of how we relate to religion and to religious believers. The author of the above essay also advocates the gentle conciliatory approach, but with a bit of a twist.

You may want to read Jonathan's essay first, and then come back here to see what wisdom I can add. Because -- despite being a milk and mildness atheist myself -- I can see scope for my more hardline "new" atheist colleagues to use the same evidence Jonathan submits to argue for a negative effect of mild tolerance.

Jonathan adds a wrinkle to the notion of tolerance. He proposes that the founding fathers of the USA had a conciliatory approach to religion in which they deliberately promoted a notion of "authentic" religion that was consistent with their own secular ideals of liberality and tolerance. No matter that the actual divines of the time were still burning heretics and seeking to promote their notion of "right" religion with all the possible force available... the founding fathers deliberately chose to single out and promote forms of religion that were "compatible with liberal democratic, secular, pluralistic norms".

Jonathan proposes that we should be doing the same thing right now, with Islam. That is, in talking about Islam we should at every opportunity emphasize that "authentic" Islam is a religion of peace. As he says in the essay:

Whenever I criticize the more extreme elements of Islam, I always stress that most Muslims say this doesn’t represent the authentic version of their faith. Now, in truth, I have no idea whether I’m right and may well be engaging in a Straussian lie. But, if Islam, as a faith, isn’t going away — and I don’t think it is — Muslims must be convinced that a more liberal, sober and rational understanding of their faith is the authentic one. This is exactly what Madison tried to do with Christians in his Memorial and Remonstrance.

Can we identify a scientifically convenient authentic religion?

As I read this, I immediately thought of the ways in which we atheists approach religion. It's a hot topic in the blogsphere -- is religion the enemy of science? Or is religion (the "right" religion, of course) compatible with science?

The hardline approach is that religion and science are implacably opposed. Individuals may find a personal reconciliation; but only at the cost of their own personal consistency. It's an uneasy truce between opposing forces, and it invariably means that theists descend into unscientific nonsense at some point in this alleged reconciliation.

The conciliatory approach -- mine -- is that religion itself is consistent with science; though of course there are individual believers (creationists, for example) who hold views that are unambiguously falsified by the findings of scientists. But we tend to say that science is a process for finding things out, and that it can't find out everything. We tend not to think of science as requiring a belief in metaphysical naturalism, even though most of us actually do seem to be metaphysical naturalists -- disbelievers in God and in the supernatural. No matter; we admit that some of our scientific colleagues may have radically different metaphysical perspectives; and as long as they don't try to bring in the supernatural as a way of distorting the actual methods of scientific investigation, we don't mind what they believe. If you really can form your beliefs in such a way as to avoid being directly falsified by a line of empirical evidence, then you can be consistent with science.

Now there's something to be said for the notion that we are promoting as "authentic" a form of religion that is highly unusual and quite distinct from traditional religion all down the ages. It's not quite a total humbug, because religion does change over time; and there are plenty of religious leaders trying to promote an expression of their religion that remains fully consistent with all the discoveries of modern science. We tolerant atheists approve and encourage them.

But what if we succeed?

What will be the result? In the short term, I think the tolerant approach is pragmatic, and it may even succeed in making it possible for many in the churches to drag themselves out of the nineteenth century and share in the marvelous insights that are gained into our world when you look at it directly. And it seems that it worked for the founding fathers as well; modern religion (Christianity, at least) now recognizes many of the ideals of the enlightenment; ideals of human freedom and liberty and individual rights. Indeed, most Christians insist that this is "authentic" Christianity, and that the modern secular state only manages to retain such "Christian" ideals because of the beneficient influence of believers.

That's humbug. Religion has matured; and modern secular humanism has had a substantial positive effect. The process is not complete; but it's there, in my opinion.

And yet, and yet. Look at what we have today. The influence of religion on the social and political life in the USA is immense -- far greater than in other first world nations -- and it is to your detriment. Perhaps your founding fathers would have been better to discard any religious rhetoric altogether, and not be shackled with the Sisyphean task of dragging religion along with them as they built a new society.

You see, even if individuals of wisdom and circumspection manage to live peacefully with science, or with unbelievers, in each new generation this needs to be rediscovered. In each new generation, there are bound to be new believers who are intolerant, irrational and unwise. It's right there in the holy book; it is not a natural thing to impose tolerance and scientific literacy in ancient texts going right back to the bronze age.

Perhaps the USA would had avoided the problems she now has with such a substantial influence of religion on political and social life, if there had been less of a deliberate attempt to promote an improved modernized version of religion.

Here I stand, for the time being.

I'm still a tolerant atheist. I still think that religion can be compatible with science, for those believers who deliberately let all the findings of modern science inform the content of their faith.

I can't manage it myself; but I don't charge that others who find a stable reconcilation are necessarily being inconsistent. I'm not particularly concerned to persuade them to change, unless they want to engage in mutually respectful debate and discussion, in which case I will argue that there's excellent reason to think no God exists. I do aim to be persuasive for that position, though relaxed if others are not persuaded.

I am much more concerned with promoting a good education in science and history, and to that end I am happy to hold up as examples of "reasonable" religion those who do manage the reconciliation. And in this I am actively trying to influence the shape of religion in the future, despite the fact that I am not religious.

My own guess is that this is the most effective approach for addressing the problems with science education posed by creationism and other forms of pseudoscience. My own guess is that shifts in religion of this form will also tend to erode religion. There is an inertia to our beliefs. It's not easy to move them, but once they start to shift they do tend to continue to slide. It's not my objective, but it is my expectation that in encouraging a more "reasonable" religion, in the sense of one that is reconciled with the findings of science, I am also contributing to the gradual erosion of religion.

But I think I do understand the concerns of my more hardline fellow unbelievers. What do you think?

(Thanks to Bob Englehart for the cartoon. See it in his blog.)