This is a very meaty post, and I would say I agree with it thoroughly. I hope I can be forgiven for commenting only on some of the high points, and maybe if I get the time together I will come back and respond to some other material here.
Robert Tulip wrote:In principle, atheist physicalist materialism is a highly coherent evidence-based ontology. It has the ethical attraction of the value of only believing things that are true. And yet atheism fails to engage with the real reasons behind religion as a source of social cohesion and moral vision.
I think people with a scientific turn of mind can be forgiven for saying, "One thing at a time," about the social cohesion part, and the moral vision that they see as, if anything, subverted by religion. They want to settle whether the literalist claims are true or not, and really I kind of went at it in that way myself. My science background is far better than my humanities background.
But in choosing to count as authoritative only those things that one can have a strong basis for believing are true, this materialist approach abstracts from the complex social processes of belonging, of trust, and of, as you said, social cohesion and moral vision. Abstracting that way is fine for settling the "belief" question, but it just walks away from the social problems currently solved by religion. Of which, I would argue, we are far more ignorant than we are about, say, the Solar System.
Robert Tulip wrote:I think the problem here is that God is a way of naming the mystery of life, the psychological fact that as a society our knowledge of ultimate things is limited. Language about God presents a humble way to engage with a reality that transcends our knowledge, recognising that faith and prayer and worship accept we are all in this together.
You may have noticed that there is very little humility about scientific engagement with religion. In fact, Stephen Jay Gould's argument for humility on the subject has drawn incredible amounts of criticism, despite being, to my mind at least, completely sound and still standing up very well after the critics have had their say.
Of course, religion could use some humility as well. When talking about such matters as "the mystery of life" and "knowledge of ultimate things" and "reality that transcends our knowledge" we religionists would do well to think of these as "fingers pointing at the moon" and not the moon itself. We hope that others will grasp the reasons why these vague concepts do a good job for us of structuring our thinking about experience, but to claim, as many do, that we know important answers about these matters is just kind of pathetic.
By the way I am just filled with awe and gratitude for the word "accept" in your paragraph. We don't prove, or enforce, or gloat about, or use as a club, the fact that we are all in this together. We also don't try to abstract from it, which is (as Lewis might say) a kind of denial. All of us face the life and death issues. All of us engage meaning (an intersubjective issue) from the context of individual consciousness. It is one of the together-est things about life.
Robert Tulip wrote:My observation is that scientific philosophers tend to dismiss the epistemological problems that religious people see in reductionism. In principle, reducing the mystery to matter in motion makes perfect logical sense. The problem is that our mind has a free autonomy from any material causation that we can explain, and is experienced as a whole, as a unified spiritual consciousness. So saying the mind is just the brain is a trite way to disengage from culture.
Well, maybe I disagree with you a little about this. As long as science humbly argues that we have no evidence of anything beyond the brain creating consciousness, I think it is on pretty good grounds. But to me that is like saying, "all biology is chemistry" or "all chemistry is physics." It is true in that we never see a contradiction to it, so theories that claim otherwise are pretty sure to be incorrect, but it sidesteps the important questions of biology that need their own principles (beyond the usual chemical principles) to address.
Robert Tulip wrote:There is a sound prophetic agenda in trying to reconcile culture and nature, but as you suggest, the supernaturalist paradigm has considerable resources for that work of reconciliation, and in fact the idea that culture and nature could be reconciled without respecting culture is a basic error.
This gets into really deep water, and I don't feel competent, or at least ready (when did I ever let lack of competence stop me?) to comment on. There is something deep in the idea that the cultural representation of nature is itself an important matter to be considered.
In Washington I observed that each major agency had its counterpart to the other agencies, whose job it was to represent the other agencies to the top staff of the agency that employed them. So State had an internal "economics department" which mainly reported on the issues of Treasury (and built a sort of internal representation of Treasury), and Treasury had a "foreign issues" department which mainly reported on issues of State (and built an internal model of State). The thing to know about these departments was that they had a slightly different take on a given set of issues, depending on the priorities of their agency.
Cultural representation of nature is something like that. It is not entirely faithful to nature, in some autistic, idiot savant sense, but selects the important parts to focus on. Important to whom? Well, for religion, importance to the community.
Robert Tulip wrote:Atheists cannot get the symbolic epistemology of religion, the idea that religious language lacks a precise objective referent, that speaking of God can be a way to express subjective emotional perception rather than a claim to revelation about objective entities. Now there is obviously a seductive tendency in religion to assert that symbolic language is actually objective, seen in literalism, but resistance to that tendency is not helped by the assertion that any language that is not objective is meaningless.
I hope my preceding responses will help to understand why I give an emphatic "Yes!" to this way of thinking about it.