As science advances at the expense of religion, the faithful evolve new strategies to keep to the trenches and avoid a retreat. One of these runs something like this (not a literal quote; I’m confecting the argument):

“The New Atheist accusation that religion rests on literal beliefs is bunk. Dawkins and all you miltant atheists are always oversimplying things, and assuming that, for a believer, literalism is important. It isn’t. The faithful run the whole gamut from almost complete Biblical literalists who take scripture at its written word, to those whose belief in the divine is deistic-—indeed, almost atheist. But what you are too militant and blind to see is that religion plays an important role in people’s lives—a role infinitely more important than just believing in some “truths” of scripture. The problem with New Atheists is that you think that by eradicating false beliefs, the problem is solved. But you can’t improve human lives that way! The onus is on you atheists to first descry the real role that religion plays in the lives of believers, and then use that knowledge to show people how they can live without faith. Dispelling falsehood is not enough. The failure of New Atheism is that it doesn’t provide a transition into secular humanism, and so is a failure. Making religion go away is not enough.”

This is, for example, the argument of Alain de Botton, who wants us to have secular worship services and cathedrals. And we’ll see this argument become increasingly common as the truth claims of religion are dispelled. “You tear down, but don’t build up in its place.”

An extended example of this argument is Gary Gutting’s piece, “The way of the agnostic,” published two days ago in the New York Times section “The Stone,” a section devoted to “the writing of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.” Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. In August of 2010 I critiqued another NYT piece of his claiming that New Atheists never dealt with the “best arguments” for God, that there were some arguments that had convinced smart people, and that atheists should at least be agnostics rather than disbelievers. It was basically the “Courtier’s Reply” argument gussied up with philosophy.

In his new piece, Gutting still claims there are valid arguments for God, but admits that maybe they’re not so absolutely convincing. But at least they’re better than tales about Santa and the Easter Bunny! And atheists have no support for their case, either!

Contemporary atheists often assert that there is no need for them to provide arguments showing that religious claims are false. Rather, they say, the very lack of good arguments for religious claims provides a solid basis for rejecting them. The case against God is, as they frequently put it, the same as the case against Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. This is what we might call the “no-arguments” argument for atheism. But the no-arguments view ignores the role of evidence and argument behind the religious beliefs of many informed and intelligent people. (For some powerful contemporary examples, see the essays in “Philosophers Who Believe” and “God and the Philosophers.”) Believers have not made an intellectually compelling case for their claims: they do not show that any rational person should accept them. But believers such as Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne and Peter van Inwagen, to cite just a few examples, have well-thought-out reasons for their belief that call for serious discussion. Their belief cannot be dismissed as on a par with children’s beliefs in Santa and the Easter Bunny. We may well not find their reasons decisive, but it would be very difficult to show that no rational person could believe for the reasons that they do. The cases intellectually sophisticated religious believers make are in fact similar to those that intellectually sophisticated thinkers (believers or not) make for their views about controversial political policies, ethical decisions or even speculative scientific theories. Here, as in religion, opposing sides have arguments that they find plausible but the other side rejects. Atheism may be intellectually viable, but it requires its own arguments and can’t merely cite the lack of decisive evidence for religion. Further, unless atheists themselves have a clearly superior case for their denial of theistic religion, then agnosticism (doubting both religion and atheism) remains a viable alternative. The no-arguments argument for atheism fails.

Well, I’ve read a lot of Plantinga, Swinburne, and van Inwagen, and, to someone who isn’t already convinced, their arguments are not only “not decisive”, but not even remotely convincing.

As for Gutting’s claim that these philosophers make it “very difficult to show that no rational person could believe for the reasons that they do,” well, that’s a red herring. Those “people” believed before they concocted their silly arguments (e.g., Plantinga’s ludicrous “naturalism-gives-us-no-reason-to-think-that-our-beliefs-are-accurate-ergo-we-have-a-God-given-sensus divinitatus), and although these folks seem like rational academics, their beliefs did not result from their arguments, but gave rise to their arguments. Theology, after all, is the post facto defense of things that you already believed. There’s a reason it’s called “apologetics.”

And of course atheists need no case for denying theistic religion beyond this: “We see no evidence for a theistic God.” The same argument supports a disbelief in Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Loch Ness monster. The only reason Gutting finds these latter fictions not comparable to God is because there are no theologians who write on Santa or the Easter Bunny. But believe me, if the human mind turned its enormously creative powers to Christmas, there would no doubt arise a Plantinga for Santa. After all, people are convinced of the equally ludicrous fables of Mormonism and Scientology. If agnosticism is a “viable alternative” concerning God, then it’s an equally viable alternative for Santa, UFOs, Zeus, Krishna, and Aphrodite.

But Gutting’s main point is the one I discussed above: the “deep truths” of faith reside not in its epistemic claims, but in its ability to foster love and a community of kindred souls. Truth claims about God, Jesus, transubstantiation, the Resurrection, and so on, don’t really matter:

Critics of a religion — and of religion in general — usually focus on knowledge claims. This is understandable since the claims are often quite extraordinary, of a sort for which we naturally require a great deal of evidence — which is seldom forthcoming. They are not entirely without evidential support. But the evidence for religious claims — metaphysical arguments from plausible but disputable premises, intermittent and often vague experiences of the divine, historical arguments from limited data, even the moral and intellectual fruitfulness of a religious life — typically does not meet ordinary (common-sense or scientific) standards for postulating an explanatory cause. Believers often say that their religious life gives them a special access (the insight of “faith”) to religious knowledge. But believers in very different religions can claim such access, and it’s hard to see what believers in one religion can, in general, say against the contradictory claims of believers in others.

Gutting then goes off on scientism, saying that “art, literature, history, and philosophy” also contribut to human understanding, and as for religion, well, it brings us moral understanding:

Every mode of understanding has its own ontology, a world of entities in terms of which it expresses its understanding. We can understand sexuality through Don Giovanni, Emma Bovary and Molly Bloom; the horror of war through the images of “Guernica”; our neurotic behavior through Freudian drives and complexes; or self-deception through Sartre’s being-for-itself, even if we are convinced that none of these entities will find a place in science’s final causal account of reality. Similarly, it is possible to understand our experiences of evil in the language of the Book of Job, of love in the language of the Gospel of John, and of sin and redemption in the language of Paul’s epistles. The fault of many who reject religious ontologies out of hand is to think that they have no value if they don’t express knowledge of the world’s causal mechanisms. The fault of many believers is to think that the understanding these ontologies bring must be due to the fact that they express such knowledge.

Gutting winds up by reiterating that the true value of religion is almost completely independent of whether its epistemic claims are true:

To evaluate a religion, we need to distinguish the three great human needs religions typically claim to satisfy: love, understanding, and knowledge. Doing so lets us appreciate religious love and understanding, even if we remain agnostic regarding religious knowledge. (For those with concerns about talking of knowledge here: I’m using “knowledge” to mean believing, with appropriate justification, what is true. Knowledge in this sense may be highly probable but not certain; and faith—e.g., belief on reliable testimony—may provide appropriate justification.) A religion offers a community in which we are loved by others and in turn learn to love them. Often this love is understood, at least partly, in terms of a moral code that guides all aspects of a believer’s life. Religious understanding offers a way of making sense of the world as a whole and our lives in particular. Among other things, it typically helps believers make sense of the group’s moral code. . . Knowledge, if it exists, adds a major dimension to religious commitment. But love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion’s knowledge claims. We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection. I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines —and other believers have similar doubts. They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.

Now I have a marvelous response to Gutting’s piece, but the margins of this post are too narrow to contain them. It does involve the fact that though religion can motivate good behaviors (and we should not deny that), it also motivates bad ones. Secular humanism, on the other hand, can promote the good but not the bad.

But what I’m most interested in is my readers’ response to Gutting’s argument, and to my own hypothetical objection to New Atheism raised at the top of this post. How would you respond if told that the benefits of faith don’t rest on the truth of its claims, but on its meeting basic human needs, and that New Atheists won’t make a dent in religion until we replace it with institutions that fill those needs?

h/t: Michael