Mark Jones pointed this out in a comment. If this is accommodationism even I can live with it.
Today’s science-oriented atheists call us into right relationship with our time, and that means using all of our best information and cross-cultural experience.
Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web. It is also a time of smart bombs, collapsing economies, and exploding oil platforms. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers.
So let today’s collective intelligence revitalize our faith traditions! Let us rejoice in the discovery that the atoms of our bodies were forged inside supernovas, and let us celebrate this natural process as divine.
Let the story of evolution be told in ways that engender familial love and gratitude that we are related to everything—not just monkeys, but jellyfish and zucchini too. Let us marvel at how rapidly our species has learned to care and cooperate in ever-widening circles: from family groups and tribes all the way to nation-states, and now globally.
An evolutionary God can be as vast, as real, and as all embracing as our creative Cosmos and no more inclined than the Universe to take sides in matters of war, weather, or geological upheaval.
All right! Let’s do that! Or let’s you do that, and I’ll just skip the words God and divine but I promise not to scowl or squirm or look out the window when you do, and we’ll all join hands and love each other to bits.
Comments
19 responses to “Now that’s what I call accommodation”
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by David Stoddart, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Now that’s what I call accommodation http://dlvr.it/3FWG8 […]
God = Appreciation
verb
to recognize worth,
synonyms
apprehend, be cognizant of, be aware of, be conscious of, catch the drift, comprehend, dig, fathom, grasp, know, perceive, read, realize, recognize, savvy, see daylight, sympathize with, take account of, understand.
OK, job done.
Exhibit A!
Er, I can’t.
Dowd:
What does this even mean?
The universe is conscious? Has intent? What is it? What is the evidence for it?
Yes, yes, it does.
Hear that, religious people? And no.
What do you mean by this? Has a brain, has an intent? How? Define “divine.”
Baloney. Atheism is evidence based.
Any characteristic of our brains or CNS evolved. There is a ton of evidence for this. And what does this mean?
Evolutionarily, one might say. Bow down before The Great Soccer Ball.
Yeah, skip over the immense variation in cosmological visions. What does that tell you?
Ahem.
A product of the human brain/imagination/some cultures. That’s it. Not “divine.” “Personification” assumes a reality (oh, yeah…). “Person” is closer to the beliefs of the major religions.
Indeed, but not how you mean.
Oh, right. Every religion is really saying just the same thing.
What is “God” – reality?
Oh.
That sentence is garbage.
Good grief. You have devotion to reality?
Yeah, no joke.
Well, that’s for sure.
*looks up* Huh?
Yay!
Oh, FFS.
Drivel.
Dowd was interviewed on the Infidel Guy show recently and came across very well. It was almost shocking to hear someone on the accomodationist side avoid the standard straw man and ignoring tactics that seem almost obligatory when this side deal with the “New Atheists”. I think that Salty Current should look up his interview on that show before she darws the conclusion she has in her above post. I agree with Ophelia on this one – if this is accomodationism then I can live with it (unfortunately it sticks out like a sore thum compared to the usual dishonest tactics employed on the intersocks-shun.)
I haven’t read the whole Dowd piece, but as presented here I agree with Ophelia that I can live with this sort of theism without agreeing with it.
Hmm. I’m not sure what to say about his “accomodationism,” since he’s a theist and I’m used to thinking about this as a strategy of atheists. What does it mean for a theist to be an accomodationist? He seems like a nice guy, and I’m happy to have a theist who doesn’t hate me. But I can’t “live with” his woo if that means not challenging it or pointing out that it’s silly.
I’m pretty sure we’re not hearing from a theist here. Dowd is trying to take a tradition that he loves – Christianity – and move it away from superstition. It seems to me an impossible task, but I commend him for trying.
He isn’t a theist by any common definition of the term (and he doesnt claim to be). From reading his stuff and hearing him on the Infidel Guy show I would describe him as being closest to a Spinozan pantheist. He still uses the title ‘Reverend’ from his former life as a more traditional preacher and this, apparently, guarantees him access to religious congregations in a way that a straighforward godless type would never get. I guess Hitchens point about the respect given to this title in the US is pretty much exactly true – perhaps PZ and Jerry (and Ophelia!) should start calling themselves Reverend when talking about religion!
Dowd, to me exemplifies the problem with accomodationism as a label for arguments. When we use it we generally refer to two very different arguments – those of Dowd, and those of Mooney.
Dowd argues that religion is compatible with science – because he really thinks it is. That I can live with because he is stating his genuine ideas. I disagree with those ideas, but they are genuine. I have no real problem with people who genuinely disagree with me, they are my best sources of education.
Mooney argues that religion is compatible with science – because that is the politically expedient thing to argue. His argument is plastic; its obviously fake and becomes toxic in the heat of an argument.
I note that Dowd doesn’t self-identify as a theist, and he seems to talk about God as some kind of Einstein’s God, so perhaps it’s wrong to call him a theist. His commitment to science combined with some woo-lly use of language suggests that he wants to have his cake and eat it, though. Nevertheless, he is, I think, moderately *religious*, so it’s interesting to read his take on the ‘gnus’, and that was what caught my eye.
SC
I took a different lesson from the essay; that challenge and ridicule are pushing him (and, one hopes, others) towards ‘accommodating’ a more reality based world view and he, at least, welcomes it. That was what interested me about it. The logical end of this process will be a jettisoning of any magical thinking that his woo-soaked prose suggests he still entertains. That may be too optimistic, however.
So for me it’s an endorsement of the new atheist, and your, approach. Please carry on pointing out how silly he is, when he is!
Well, I think he claims to be an evangelical pentecostal preacher. He’s also called himself any number of different things, failing or refusing to acknowledge that these descriptors have meaning in terms of belief.
That’s what it sounds like to me (hence my bracketed remark above). But then he should be clear about that and stop claiming he’s not a theist and that he’s all things and there’s no real difference among them. Refusing a descriptive label or accepting all of them doesn’t render them meaningless or reconcilable.
Yes, I think this is a good distinction in terms of compatibilism (I think that’s a better term for what is being discussed here than accomodationism, which is a political strategy), and I agree.
He’s a believer, not an accomodationist. Again, I think he’s sincere, but his ideas are silly and I can’t “live with” them if that means not being able to challenge them* and say they’re silly when they are. Same as with Ken Miller or Francis Collins.
*There was a weeks-long discussion at Pharyngula several months ago with a couple of pantheists. The pantheists lost. :)
Oh, I wasn’t disputing that. I think this is where the confusion about the meaning of “accomodationism” comes into play.
Yeah, it’s hard to say. I’ve read several people say that they went through a stage like this. on their way to atheism. On the other hand, this “creative universe” pantheism is its own particular brand of woo, so…
Yeah, again, I wasn’t disputing this interpretation of what he’s saying. I think it’s correct. As far as religious responses to atheists go, it’s about as pleasant as you can get short of joining us.
Some of the responses to this are rather…strange.
Dowd, quoted by Mark Jones in the original comment:
So, as Mark Jones is pointing out, Dowd is saying contra Mooney that gnus, through their “attacks,” have been good and effective in leading at least some religious people to rethink their ideas and move closer to an acceptance of science. Great. But the response to this here seems to be to take the Mooney line: to want to not do, and want others not to do, in Dowd’s case the very thing Dowd is recognizing as positive and basically thanking us for doing – challenging beliefs. Weird.
Not at all. Live with isn’t the same as agree with. I can live with it for one thing because it doesn’t demand that I not challenge it or disagree with any part of it.
I was talking more about some of the comments in the thread and not your post, but this:
didn’t suggest a challenging or openly disagreeing approach to me. As far as I’m concerned, if Dowd appreciates open criticism I’m happy to oblige.
:)
I haven’t carefully studied Dowd’s writings, but it sounds to me as if Dowd is basically refining our understanding of God so well that God has disappeared, and something else has taken its place. That something else looks to me like some hybrid concept halfway between Spinozan pantheism and humanistic naturalism. Glory be, he’s found a God that even atheists can believe in!
Uh huh. I will trust the sincerity (and consistency) of Dowd’s redefinition only if Dowd would admit that he’d be just as happy to be considered an atheist, as to be counted as a theist — and his deep, informed definition of God happily thrown out to make way for a non-theistic “reality in all its fullness.” Religious terms are just words, after all.
Something tells me that he’d be unwilling, and that we’ve got another example here of what Daniel Dennett calls “belief in belief.” It doesn’t matter what you think God is — you can take out every anthropomorphic characteristic you want till “God” is just a poetic metaphor standing in for whatever the hell you want it to stand in for. But … you can’t stop loving God. Whatever you do, up to and including embracing a bottom-up naturalism, should only make you love God even more.
Sometimes I like to play a game with the writings of the ultra-liberal person of faith. I read them and imagine their words being said by an atheist — but in a disapproving tone.
“God,” he sneered, “is just a mythic name for reality, in all its fullness. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers. “God” is a personification, not a person. If we miss this, we miss everything. For crying out loud, evidence from a wide range of disciplines, from cognitive neuroscience to anthropology to cross-cultural study of the world’s myths and religions all support the notion that God is a human-created divine personification, not a person, not a “being.” Clearly, there is no God!” And with that, the militant atheist flounced off…
Oh, what an unimaginative atheist! He could have said the exact same thing, in tones of approval and wonder, and then come to the exact opposite conclusion!
This one guy has already accommodated himself, by shifting his definition of God so far out of whack with the mainstream that he isn’t impinging on the rest of us anymore. We don’t need to consider his stance at all. Contrast that with the 225,000,000 Americans who believe an all-powerful guy with a beard talks to them and tells them to discriminate against women and gays “for their own good,” and that all atheists are part of an immoral Communist satanic conspiracy. It’s the latter, “moderate,” “mainsteam” group that we’re told to accommodate, and, increasingly, I say “to hell with them” instead.
Remember that Paul Tillich, an existentialist agnostic, was considered a very influential Christian theologian. And sometime around 1960, an Anglican Bishop named Robinson (forget his first name, sorry) published a book titled Honest To God, in which he admitted that the anthropomorphic god most Christians believed in probably didn’t exist.
My point is that this fellow isn’t just coming out of left field. Christianity may have been moving in this direction last century, only to find itself hijacked by a resurgence of fundamentalism that was carefully nurtured and financed by people who perceived its reactionary political usefulness.
Or maybe not. Maybe fundamentalism would’ve thrived anyway. That’ll be for historians of the future to mull over, I suppose. But I think a real shift in this direction, away from dogma and “scripture” and toward critical thinking, would be great. Hope it catches on amongst the faithful.