Is being pubicly atheist a recent thing, especially re. collective worship?

[wanderings]

Firstly, I'm taking no sides - I had strong atheist views when I was younger, but gradually changed my mind.

There are many threads on MN about this, especially annoyance by atheist parents about collective worship in schools, and I have been wondering if it's recent that people have felt so strongly about it. I find it hard to imagine buses in the 1980s and 90s saying "there probably is no God", or parents taking their children out of assembly, or people muttering and sneering in the back row when attending baptisms (under duress): if it happened I was blissfully ignorant.

Speaking for myself, I rebelled with my heart and soul when my parents suddenly dragged me to catholic church every Sunday when I was 9. I saw the whole thing as utter nonsense, and a waste of valuable weekend time. However, I gradually changed my mind as an adult, but went CofE rather than catholic. I took the view that you did not have to take a literal view of the Bible and the church's teachings; as a child I was very literal-minded. I also love the sense of community in church.

Does anyone think it is because a generation of young adults are remembering being forced to obediently sing hymns, hear prayers from their school days, had to learn "impossibilities" such as the great flood, and are now making sure their children won't have to do the same, now that they have the right to say something which they didn't as a child?

Incidentally, madhairday, I have been reading your name as "madhairy" for ages and imagining a little black hairy haggis type thing sitting on your desk next to you. I'm a bit disappointed now........

The cosmologist I knew who was religious certainly found the conclusions that he came to through his work supported his view of a divine being - it's too amazing to have happened accidentally type thing.

Thinking about it though, our whole basis for maths and study is (obviously) based on our own understanding of things and what we are even able to experience and so there is something in there about our experiments, thoughts conclusions etc being predisposed to give us answers we can relate to because we built the tools with which to study them...

Also that we are a part of our planet, nature, the universe etc we are beings that grew from all of this and it is all we know so again we are kind of predisposed to find it beautiful and amazing and so on because it is ours, it's our habitat, sort of thing.

Just thinking out loud

Hi MHD, thank you for responding to my earlier post – that was sweet of you. I hope you are well. Yes, it all got a bit surreal last night. I felt like I had arrived late at a party only to find that everyone else was either drunk or high – and in no mood to do anything sober and conventional like discussing the OP!

Bertrand I'm sorry to disappoint you in my lack of hairy black pudding.

Evolution doesn't provide all the answers, either. ..survival of the fittest simply can't explain the formation of original dna/rna. Not sure why the fine tuning thing is precluded by evolution though if evolutionary process is how things developed. Why not take so long - if, as I believe, God is outside of time (which God would have to be if time and space was created by God in whatever way) then time means little in that sense.

Aw flip. Cant do theological arguments on phone. Humphhh

And the whole thing about life evolving to fit the prevailing conditions - I think the thing is that everything was so incredibly fine tuned even for the most primitive life forms, not simply where we are now...The survival of the fittest theory doesn't explain complex cells forming or even the most simple cell formation due to conditions being astonishingly hostile to such formation. However, as I say, I'm only scooting round the edges of all this and trying to learn, so forgive me if I'm not clear. I'm happier on theological and philosophical ground

Outwith thankyou I'm not too well at present. Rather drugged up hence curled on sofa with phone trying to recall reading through fuzzy head.

Hello MHD

I know quite a lot of religious scientists. The vicar at my old church was a physicist, and at my current church we've got a biologist and a professor of astrophysics (and that's only the ones I know about). The theologian Alister McGrath has a doctorate in molecular biophysics, while Andrew Davison, who lectures in theology and natural sciences at Cambridge has doctorates in both disciplines.

I'm happy with evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for how life-forms developed. But it can't answer the question of why life should have developed in the first place and for what purpose and to what end. Post-enlightenment science works by bracketing off those kind of 'first order' questions as irrelevant and unanswerable by science.

So much contemporary philosophy also adopts that attitude because, following Bertrand Russell, they see philosophy as trying to occupy the same ground as the natural sciences, so Anglo-American philosophy tends to treat questions such as 'why is there something rather than nothing' and 'what is the universe for' and 'why are we here' as irrelevant to philosophical enquiry. These questions need different kinds of answers - and for me that is where theology comes in.

(had to duck out of the thread last night, it was all a bit mad for a while)

and for what purpose and to what end

But that is a question only a christian would ask.

The theory of evolution does not concern itself with such questions.

The experience of life is a really fragile and mysterious enigma.

Model universes developed by scientists show that there are so many ways in which cosmic circumstances could lead to ‘dud’ lifeless universes and a very narrow window of potential prevailing conditions that would allow even in principle for the felicitous outcome we are here to observe.

I am reminded of Leo Tolstoy’s words in Anna Karenina:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

A nice cup of tea for MHD’s fuzzy head!

It isn't only Christians who concern themselves with such questions. Children ask them all the time - I used to ponder endlessly as a child the question why am I me and not someone else?

But since the Enlightenment scientists have succeeded in bracketing off these first order questions as being unimportant and irrelevant. They're not though. It's just that they can't be answered by the natural sciences.

I see many people asking questions about purpose and who they are. Certainly not questions restricted to Christians or even to those of any religion. Many people ponder these questions all the time. And evolution doesn't answer those questions just as it doesn't answer questions about our sense of morality, justice etc.

Outwith I'm being a bit thick but please can you explain the model universe and dud universe thing a bit further as I'm interested? Assuming you're not referring to the Miller experiment?

Well, certainly the 'why' questions were important to non-Christians like Aristotle and Plato. In terms of the history of ideas you could say that post-Enlightenment science could only achieve its current domination of truth-claims by radically restricting its field of enquiry and managing to turn anything outside of that field into nonsense. Professor Dawkins is an excellent example of this attitude.

But thinking that there is no such thing as a "why?", no questions of meaning and purpose, is evidence of how voluntarily circumscribed your thinking has to be within the frameworks of natural science.

"But it can't answer the question of why life should have developed in the first place and for what purpose and to what end. "

This is the spiritual part.

Non spiritual people don't feel a need to ask those questions, they don't imagine or feel the need for there to be a higher purpose or "to what end". All of these questions are only relevant if you have a feeling inside that there "must be more to it" ie a spiritual feeling. If you do not have these feelings, then these questions, they are nonsensical. I mean, people can ask them if they like, but they are coming from the starting point that "there must be something more". On what basis is that belief or feeling rooted? There isn't one, it's a spiritual question, a faith question.

"the fine tuning of the universe is just so astonishingly unlikely to have risen from chance."

I found the work by Stephen J. Gould very interesting, because most of his books were about showing how there is very little fine tuning, particularly with living beings. There are loads of redundancies, things that are useless, and no direction in evolution. Very far from the clockwork that sometimes we perceive.

It would be interesting to know how many of the 20% identified as Jewish or Muslim

I know a few people who are muslim and are in science. Some possibly more devout than others, but definitely muslim. And not just in the west but in muslim countries.

And the whole thing about life evolving to fit the prevailing conditions - I think the thing is that everything was so incredibly fine tuned even for the most primitive life forms, not simply where we are now...The survival of the fittest theory doesn't explain complex cells forming or even the most simple cell formation due to conditions being astonishingly hostile to such formation.

It's complex because things do change.

What is now unfit for life was fit to create amino acids and nucleic acids.

The type of atmosphere that would kill us now was fine for the bacteria living then.

The high oxygen atmosphere that we need now was initially poisonous, and created by some bacteria as excretion products. Until some others adapted to use it.

Things change. :)

Survival of the "better adapted" does explain complex cells forming. Complexity is given by smaller simpler units getting together. Mitochondria and chloroplasts were once free living bacteria. The same is suspected for other organelles. Lots of small steps and dead ends along the way.
See something like the book "It's a Wonderful Life" by S. J. Gould about the Burgess Shale. Some of it is outdated, but it shows brilliantly how life experimented and discarded.

I don't think I dismissed people who don't think outside the bounds set by post-enlighenment science: I said their thinking was voluntarily restricted in a certain way. That has led to tremendous progress within the natural sciences. But there are losses along the way, and it's not arrogance to point that out. Someone who says something you don't like is not necessarily arrogant. Try and attack the argument instead.

I was partly answering goblinhat's point as well as yours, hence the mention of Christianity.

it doesn't answer questions about our morality.

I'll take an evolutionary psychologists ideas on morality over someone who thinks the bible in any way points to a ethically superior deity. I don't know how we ended up being capable of altruism, as demonstrated in other organisms but I'm certain it wasn't the biblical God who changes his mind about what is and isn't okay

Hi MHD

Here are a couple of links for you:

thetruthwillmakeyoumad.wordpress.com/tag/steven-weinberg/

www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/physics/cosmo-constant.php

The second one is more technical, but perhaps you could skim read if you don’t have a scientific background.

No, nothing to do with the Miller-Urey experiment which was about trying to artificially recreate early earth conditions in the lab that might lead to the formation of the simplest organic molecules which are the building blocks of life.

Most scientists think that life could have come about by random events and then was shaped in its development by natural selection after that. So, no need for a supernatural external agency at that juncture.

I was going further back than the formation of life to the formation of the universe itself.

In a nutshell, the situation is as follows.

Cosmologists can build mathematical models to describe the universe and how it evolves in time. These models are constructed from fundamental laws and physical constants. Nobody knows where the laws and constants come from, i.e. if they are just random. One of these physical constants is called the cosmological constant. It has a very tiny but non-zero positive value. If that constant was ever so slightly larger, the universe would fly apart, no galaxies, stars and planets would have a chance of forming, and therefore there would be no possible place for life to evolve. Similarly if the constant was made ever so slightly negative, the material in the universe would contract into a big crunch before galaxies, stars and planets could form. In short, the universe is on a bit of a knife-edge when it comes to being bio-friendly. If the cosmological constant got its value by chance, it does seem rather fortuitous.

Once the required cosmological conditions are in place, though, that would allow galaxies, stars and planets to form, it is thought that life could then develop spontaneously.

!

"for what purpose and to what end."

That question pre-supposes a plan made by some one or some entity.

We can answer parts of the 'to what end?' as applied to evolutionary developments, but that is a physical cause and effect.

I am full of wonder. I get up in the night and look a the moon, eclipses, stars, I love to walk and lose myself in enormous scenery, coastlines, mountains, I love the arts, music, paintings, poetry, and all these things provoke emotional, imaginative and psychological reactions in me. It provokes my curiosity and I find out about the science behind it all - how this mountain range was formed, what makes the beautiful red of an eclipse moon etc.

I think, I imagine, I feel - but I don't think any of those are assisted by some extra special part of me that is my 'spirit'. My spirit is simply my consciousness. And none the less wonderful for that.

"for what purpose and to what end"

People have asked these questions for millennia about natural phenomena such as thunder, rain, and earthquakes. They created convoluted explanations, and attributed them to colourful gods.

It turned out that there was no purpose or end to any of it. For all their prayers, animal and human sacrifices, priests, etc these phenomena just happened, with no deity pulling the strings for no purpose whatsoever.

Thankyou Outwith - I've read some stuff about the cosmological constant. Mind blowing isn't it!

Thanks Lweji - I agree about changes, but nothing seems to sufficiently answer the development of the simplest of organic molecules, let alone cells - which contain a staggering amount of information.

Whatever way you look at it all, it certainly is fascinating :)