Rabbi Eric Yoffie recently posted an article with the same title as this one but with atheists lacking in the humility, imagination, and curiosity. The phrase, "pot calling the kettle black" comes to mind.
I really don't see the point of the Rabbi's attack. His article was more an attempt to refute the prediction that religion will die out by the year 2038. Well get me a crystal ball and call me a prophet. Of course religion will survive past 2038, but let's face facts here. Religion is dying.
Yoffie was arguing against Nigel Barber's opinion that religion preys on people in need, and when people find themselves secure in their lives and their livelihoods, they tend to be less religious. Barber isn't claiming that this is always the case, but it is a tendency which is evident from looking at the nations that have the best and worst quality of life and noticing the lack of religiosity and religiosity of those countries respectively.
Another problem with religion these days is a little thing called the Internet. Today, when a rabbi or a priest makes a claim, we can use Google to find out just how full of kosher baloney they are. Were the Jews really slaves in Egypt? Did Jesus really fulfill Jewish prophecies? Did the Bible predict the future? It turns out that the answer to all those questions is no, and it is pretty easy to discover that using the Internet.
Let's get to the meat of Rabbi Yoffie's attack. He claims right in the title of his article that atheists lack humility, imagination, and curiosity. Interestingly enough, atheists aren't the ones claiming to be the chosen people of the creator of the universe. We also aren't the ones claiming that the creator of the universe made the entire universe just for us and gave us dominion over all the animals. No, atheists (most of us anyway) think (with good reason) that we are insignificant on the cosmic scale and that our only significance comes from each other. We live on one small planet, orbiting an average-sized star, in an average-sized galaxy, in an average-sized galaxy cluster. I think atheists are pretty darn humble compared to the religious of the Abrahamic religions.
As for imagination, atheists tend to be the ones imagining the vastness of our cosmos while religious believers are trapped within their holy book(s). Lawrence Krauss is imagining nothing, and even that takes more imagination than the limited concept of a personified deity.
And lastly, there is curiosity -- This coming from religious believers who punctuate every question with, "God did it." But don't take my word for it; let's look at the so called word of God. Perhaps the good Rabbi can remind us what happened in the story of Babel. Oh right, according to the story, people got curious and wanted to build a tower to Heaven and God knocked it down, scattered the people all over the planet, and scrambled up their language skills so that they couldn't communicate with each other to try again. Fortunately for us, we have Google Translate now. Oh and we not only built towers high into the sky, but we also sent space shuttles to the moon. No Heaven was found.
But nothing refutes Rabbi Yoffie's attacks better than this five minute video:
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Perhaps, though, the worst of it is from the fundamentalist and conservative part of religion. The more liberal practitioners of faith have historically promoted inquiry, looked for justice, had the curiosity needed to promote scientific endeavors -- even when the results were not what they expected. It was liberal clergy in Britain who delved into geology, originally looking for the Flood of Noah, but wound up not finding it and realized that the age of the earth was much more ancient than Scripture suggested. Clergy in Britain also worked in Botany and biology, giving rise to the ideas that would eventually lead Darwin to his Origins.
Not all theists lack humility, imagination and curiosity. All too many do, I admit readily. And the fundamentalists and conservatives loudly proclaim themselves as owners over all realms of faith. But it isn't true. There are those of us who know the world is wondrous, and we have a lot to learn.
Nice work. I'm happy to see you getting a chair at the Huffpo table. Long overdue.
I suggest you read the following: http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Against-For-Christ/dp/1578840058/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Strobel is unconvincing to those who actually have done the research.
You can't quantify the human psyche, despite all of Freud and Jung's efforts. I suppose you don't exist either. We're all just imaginary, so I guess none of us exist. All you have are your illusory perceptions, which are thrice removed from a reality you can never directly experience due to the perceptual barrier, and which may itself be an illusion. You could use that scientific fact to discredit anything, but that's not how science really works. I still exist, despite any assertions that I don't.
All I see is a bunch of trolls here getting lost in semantics, trying to play word games to avoid the fact that they can't prove the non-existence of the supernatural, any more than anyone can quantify the existence of god, the psyche, consciousness in general, etc. Atheism is just as messed up a pretense as organized religion.
Atheism is a rejection of belief in gods, due to lack of evidence. A lack of evidence where one should reasonably expect it is good cause for doubting what is an extraordinary claim to begin with.
There is also the presence of disconfirming evidence, such as the fact of evolution, which leaves a creator with nothing to do. The universe looks exactly as one would expect if there were no intelligence behind it. Now, in spite of this, there could be a god of some kind who is hard to spot; the point is, we are justified in withholding belief in so invisible a being, while those so arrogant as to assert its existence can only be guessing.
What is "the phenomenon of spirituality"?
In science, an unfalsifiable hypothesis is considered valid if facts at least infer the hypothesized phenomenon or its causes. That means that although god and spirituality can't be proven, they are more likely to be real than not real, based on overwhelming inference. If the majority of a species population experiences something throughout it's history of existence, it demonstrates the existence of a phenomenon. You can't deny the existence of a phenomenon on the basis of lack of clinical demonstration of cause or mechanism. You can deny the existence of the psyche and energy and information all day, but that won't make those phenomena magically disappear. The world will still function as if they exist, indicating that they DO exist.
The moon did not magically vanish before space travel confirmed its existence because some idiot philosopher claimed it didn't exist simply because we couldn't reach up and touch it. It couldn't be clinically proven to exist, but inference of human experience demonstrated that it did. Your arrogance is in thinking that lack of absolute naturalistic proof invalidates the existence of anything that can't be quantified to such a degree.
Empathy is the basis of concern and compassion, and the morality that grows from it. If you believe the former explanation and not the latter, you limit your empathy to intellectual modeling. You lack the capacity to empathize with entire groups of people or people that you have no direct contact with. Evidence demonstrates that the latter explanation better describes the height of human development, as it's the only way things like societal cohesion can exist.
All you have as the basis for humanitarianism is mimicry of a society that is spirituality-dominant. If spirituality didn't exist, there would be nothing but basic animal self-preservation urges. Society cannot exist without spirituality, due to a lack of deeper sense of obligation and commitment to collectives. No quantum entanglement and no morphic resonance/morphic field effects = no basis for social evolution. We'd be no more evolved than reptiles if such conditions did not exist.
How can you claim to know his state of mind or the mind of atheists? There's nothing in the materialist view of empathy that precludes having it for people we've never met. If you're asserting that, you'll have to connect the logical dots better. I know that I, as an atheist, have empathy for people on the other side of the world that I've never met and donate to charities all the time to help them.
"Evidence demonstrates that the latter explanation better describes the height of human development, as it's the only way things like societal cohesion can exist."
Evidence? Such as?
Your last paragraph is essentially a statement that we can only be good with religion. There is, in fact, a lot of evidence against that. For one example, look at the Scandinavian countries. They are among the top countries in every widely recognized index of well-being. Now look at their religious demographics. They are among the most atheistic countries on Earth. For other examples, I recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Society-without-God-Religious-Contentment/dp/0814797237/ref=la_B001HD3S8U_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340416367&sr=1-1
If empathy is mental mimicry of emotional language, then no, you can't empathize with people you've never seen. Ask any behavioral scientist, they'll say the same. They can't materially explain how a person can empathize with entire groups of people, because there's no external material link for the transmission of emotional information. That's why the materialist notion of empathy and social cohesion is flawed. There's no basis in fact for it.
You do as you do out of social pressure, not from intimate understanding. I know, because when I was a hardline atheist, the same thing happened to my processing. It's something that has been observed in clinical settings by behavioral psychologists. Look it up.
Scandinavians were previously highly religious, first heathen, then christian. They have become a shell of their old cultural identity, imitating things they can't experience because of their pseudoscientific convictions. Religion is responsible for today's level of cultural and technological evolution, not atheism. Read your history. All paradigms are flawed, but to believe in nothing is to be nothing. History demonstrates that, and behavioral science demonstrates that.
Absence of what you consider evidence is not evidence of absence. You can't prove a negative. You can only prove one theory that invalidates alternative theories, and when it comes to things like god and spirituality in the most essential understanding, you can't do that.
Contrarily, you can infer the existence of both with scientific observation. Inference isn't absolute proof, but it allowed Einstein to create a very real and very destructive atomic bomb, on the pretense that things like energy and particles and information exist. Most of modern science is based in inference, not direct, clinical observation of proposed substances. Reductionist materialism can only take us so far. It doesn't allow us to build computers and radios and atomic bombs. Real science requires a leap of faith.
The evidence of particle interaction and large-scale material formation demonstrates macrocosmic orchestration of information, and consciousness precedes information; there's your testament to Occam's Razor. If it looks like god and acts like god, then it probably is god.
Science is not in the business of denying phenomena, it's in the business of measuring it to determine causes and mechanisms.
Most scientists believe in god; statistical fact. Most are physicists, dealing with information that you cant' begin to wrap your head around. By believing in atheism, which is a thoroughly pseudoscientific belief, you're saying that you know better than them what is and isn't possible, and making a fact claim that you can't support with evidence. It's simply not possible to prove a negative, meaning that you can't prove the non-existence of spirituality, god, an afterlife, ESP, etc. Science follows evidence, not lack of evidence.
By making such a false fact claim, you are being arrogant, unimaginative, and not very curious. You have failed to educate yourself sufficiently enough to see that atheism is highly unlikely in light of the current scientific understanding. So, yes, you are closed off in a way that religious people are not. Your claims are no more scientific than theirs.
This is basically an arrogant sneer tacked on to a statement which has no substance whatsoever. In other words, business as usual for the religious apologists!
I'm not religious, nor do I apologize for organized religion. I tend to lump it together with atheism, since atheism is nothing more than a pseudoscientific reactionary stance to the crimes of organized religion. Both sides thrown out the baby with the bathwater, which in REAL science, is unacceptable. Deism is acceptable, agnosticism is acceptable, but atheist is not. Not when it comes to scientific advancement and free thinking.