THE ATHESIM TRAP

I tend not to wade into the atheism / theism debate, largely because I find that it adds little value to a thoughtful approach to questions about human experience. These debates tend to lack nuance and they reduce complex questions to “gotcha” traps. Sam Harris, a brilliant thinker and skilled debater, wrote a disappointing blog post committing the offense of oversimplification. He criticizes Rabbis Wolpe and Artson for being unwilling to confirm the Truth of an afterlife during a recent debate. He writes:

Most modern Jews are rather noncommittal on the afterlife, and this queasiness was in evidence throughout our exchange. Hitch and I were expected to say that (1) we do not know what happens after death, or (2) we are reasonably sure nothing does—and we struck both of these notes by turns. The problem, however, was that our friends in the clergy were eager to assert (1) as well. 

It seems to me that they needed to do more than this. If they couldn’t give us some assurance of an afterlife—indeed, if they couldn’t promise the bodily resurrection of the dead—they at least owed us an explanation of why they couldn’t.

According to Harris, a modern religious thinker must assert total certainty that an afterlife exists because different thinkers have made this claim within the canon of Jewish thought. But this is a trap. Should someone proclaim the certainty of the afterlife, Harris would dismiss him as an illogical quack.  When rabbis suggest that they do not know what happens after death, he dismisses them as being unfaithful to their tradition. To Mr. Harris, belief in the resurrection of the dead is a prerequisite for being a religious Jew:

People of faith tend to ignore the coming resurrection of the dead—perhaps because the idea is so obviously preposterous. And yet this is precisely the form of afterlife one must expect if one is to be a serious Jew, Christian, or Muslim.

So the trap has been set. Either you believe in the resurrection of the dead and you are preposterous, or you don’t, and you are therefore not a person of faith. Yet many of us are unwilling to commit to a black and white answer to the question. Maybe there is an afterlife but we simply do not know. Why can’t Mr. Harris imagine that there are many religious people who simply can’t answer this question with certainty, yet still find the paradigm deeply meaningful?

Why is science permitted to learn about the world and continuously evolve in its canon of accepted norms / assumptions, but religion is not? Human beings have been asking questions about the afterlife and god since we were conscious of our humanity. Some of the answers to these questions have been troubling and even foolish, and many of them have been sophisticated in their willingness to claim metaphors and images for something unknowable. If contemporary religious thinkers must accept as True all previously articulated notions within the religious canon, then science must be forced to accept what it once determined to be its norm as well. Has anyone forced Mr. Harris to defend 19^th Century Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz’s scientifically racist claim that races were created as separate species (or Creationism for that matter)?

The imagination, flexibility, and non-literalism of modern religious thinkers is dismissed as unrepresentative of a religious tradition by public intellectuals like Mr. Harris. It seems that he would like to marginalize religious moderates in an attempt to define religion as inherently extreme, thus leaving reasonable people with only one option: to dismiss religion as a problematic threat to all rational people. Religion is not going to disappear because of the arguments of the New Atheists, so it would serve the world better for them to be open to religious expressions that are pluralistic, moderate, historical, and non-literal in nature. Why waste their time debating rabbis like Artson and Wolpe when their real disagreements are with Yitzhak Shapira and other rabbis of his ilk?