Back to the middle¹.  I hope some of you are familiar with David G. Myers.  He wrote The American Paradox: Spiritual hunger in an age of plenty ² .  Myers is a careful, fair writer.  In The American Paradox, he asks why in an era of great material prosperity (the book was written before the recession) America suffers from an array of troubling social problems?  He suggests that these problems, and the paradox, reflect a deep spiritual poverty.  What impressed me most was Myers’ fair use of social data.  Myers was not interested in ending up ”liberal” or a “conservative” on any issue.  Instead, he studied the data, explored his personal moral and spiritual motivations, and often reached conclusions not at one or the other extreme, but in the murky middle.

The Murky Middle or Extremism?

The murky middle fascinates me.  So, I was delighted to discover Myers’ recent book, A Friendly Letter To Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on why God is good and faith isn’t evil ³.  I needed this book, not to help me decide about the existence of God, but for assurance about my interpretation of the argument taking place in the media.  I have a clear, comfortable personal faith conviction that God exists.  I welcomed Myers’ book because I trusted that his treatment of the issue would be fair.  I was curious how Myers would react to the current debate stirred by well-known atheists such as Richard Dawkins⁴ and Christopher Hitchens.  I struggled through a spotty reading of Dawkins’ book.  I found his writing to be angry and bitter sounding, and somewhat petty with his obsessive argument that Albert Einstein did not believe in God (OK, so what?  Einstein is one guy…!).  I also found Dawkins’ straw man approach to the debate unimpressive and uncreative.  Surely Dawkins must be aware that his characterization of religion in general and Christianity in particular is unreasonably narrow.  Not every Christian shares the views or supports the behaviors we have seen from the fundamentalist extremists among us.  It is too easy, and poor form for Dawkins to be satisfied by attacking the weakest, most crippled expressions of any religion⁵.  A good scientist does not dare to draw sweeping conclusions from outlier data.  I invite Dawkins and his friends back to the middle, to the norm, to the center of the data within the boundaries of a standard deviation from the mean.  Criticize the middle sixty-seven percent of us.  Dawkins does bad science with his habit of criticizing religion’s outlier data and then suggesting the outliers represent the norm.        

Blind Ideology?

I am not surprised that religion is being attacked.  I do wonder why a brilliant scholar such as Dawkins, writing about an issue of profound fundamental importance, would resort to such extremist tactics.  Why would he allow his petty bitterness to leak through so much of his writing?  I tried to sort through my reaction to Dawkins⁶.  David Myers’ book helped me.  This was my “ah-ha” moment (Or, my “duh” moment when I feel stupid about it).  Atheists have their extremists too!  Like any religious movement, atheists include persons who tend to be blind ideologues driven by their fears.  Extremists like Dawkins seem to be fueled more by their need for a simplistic, dualist world view than by rational thought.  Karen Armstrong⁷ articulated so well the argument that the worlds’ three monotheist religions share common characteristics at their extremes.  Let’s dump atheism into her framework and suggest that, like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, atheism includes proponents who are extreme — and irrational — in their views.  Extremists, as we have seen in history, tend to be blind ideologues who drift toward dualist, black and white thought patterns, and who are motivated by fear, expressed with angry, intolerant reactions toward those who disagree with their extreme views.

Until this light flickered in my pea brain, I was unable to understand why I was so frustrated with Dawkins’ and his friends’ treatment of the atheism debate.  Thanks to Myers and other more rational writers, I am able to wade back to the murky, rational middle, where we are free to not agree, where opposing ideas reside as neighbors, even in tension, where gray is tolerated, even welcomed.  In the murk middle both sides of a debate find lively support without irrational straw man arguments that tend to squelch healthy discourse.  In the murky middle evolutionary biology is embraced by those who believe in a living God and by those who do not believe.  Here, non-believing evolutionary biologists are confident enough about their non-belief to honor the faith choices of others.

A final point.  Myers deserves huge credit for this additional emphasis in his recent book.  Dawkins and others criticize Christianity and other religions for abuses against humanity and the planet.  Such abuses by religious humans is said to be evidence that the God they believe cannot be real.  From a Christian perspective, honest self-examination requires that the Church see, acknowledge, and change.  It is true, humans have and continue to do horrible things to one another in the name of Christianity.  While the criticisms from our extremist atheist friends might sting, many of the criticisms are true.  So we must listen, examine, and change.  At the same time, we refuse to be drawn into a petty argument about historical outliers as if those outliers are the entire set of data.  We refuse to be baited by extremist arguments.  Though the murky middle is more complicated and requires careful, patient, tolerant thought, the murky middle also is where we will discover what is true, and truth.  Do not be afraid of the murky middle.  Set aside childish obsessions with outliers and join us in the middle.                       

© Copyright by Jeffrey Y. Harlow, Ph.D (2009).

1. Two of my earlier posts (April 27 and May 1) introduced some ideas about the murky middle.
2. Myers, David G. (2000).  The American Paradox: Spiritual hunger in an age of plenty.  New Haven: Yale University Press.  See also Myers’ website: http://www.davidmyers.org.
3. Myers, David G. (2008).  A Friendly Letter To Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on why God is good and faith isn’t evil.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
4. See, for example, Dawkins’ popular book, The God Delusion (2006).  Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
5. I am grateful to John Haught for his eloquent summary of this argument.  In his God And The New Atheism: A Critical Response To Dawkins, Harris, And Hitchens (2008), Louisville: John Knox Press, Haught says, “The more I became involved in the writing of this book, the more evident it became to me that I was offering a critique not only of the new atheism but also of the kind of religious thought, ethics, and spirituality against which it is reacting.  I suggest there are reliable and more interesting theological alternatives to both.  However, even though the new atheists reject the God of creationists, fundamentalists, terrorists, and intelligent design (ID) advocates, it is not without interest that they have decided to debate with these extremists rather than with any major theologians.  This choice of antagonists betrays their unconscious privileging of literalist and conservative versions of religious thought over the more traditional mainstream types — which they completley ignore and implicitly reject for their unorthodoxy.  The new atheists are saying in effect that if God exists at all, we should allow this God’s identity to be determined once and for all by the fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religious traditions.  I believe they have chosen this strategy not only to make their job of demolition easier, but also because they have a barely distinguished admiration for the simplicity of their opponents’ views of reality.  The best evidence of their own attraction to an uncomplicated worldview can be found in their allegiance to the even simpler assumptions of scientific naturalism.” (p. xv-xvi)
6. This is not the place to re-hash the arguments for and against the existence of God.  Read Dawkins and friends.  Read Myers.  Read countless others who have dissected the issues very carefully.  To their credit, most proponents of both views (for and against the existence of God) express themselves more rationally than Dawkins.  Among atheists, David Sloan Wilson comes to mind.  Dawkins, though, seems to have captured the attention of those in the media who are drawn to outliers.
7. Armstrong, Karen (2000). The Battle For God.  New York: Ballantine Books.