Analysis of language about God requires extensive contextualisation to understand the meaning of what is claimed. The empirical evidence must start from the social placement of belief. Speaking of a "rational basis" for any belief can address both whether the belief is true and whether it is useful, along the lines of Gibbon's comment on the Roman philosophers and magistrates. Obviously, from an objective scientific perspective, truth is primary. And yet, we cannot say the practical ethical interests of the magisterium are irrational, where religious belief can be seen to serve valuable social goals. Nor can we automatically assume that the false literal content of statements exhausts their meaning, given the extensive use of parable in religion. And as I explain below, a utilitarian view of God can serve the interests of social transformation and liberation.
Part of this issue is that atheism is mainly suited to an educated elite, who see their identity in individual rather than in tribal terms. For the overwhelming majority, termed by Gibbon "the people, who see all religion as true", tribal identity is the foundational cultural and epistemic assumption, and the idea that we can have a shared rational explanation of the universe appears quite arrogant.
The idea of God is used in religion to argue that reality is actually quite different from how it appears to us. But the nature of this difference is highly contested. It seems for everyday life that there is no God, given the absence of miracles, but religion asserts that this immediate perception is mistaken. My view is that the mistake made here is primarily by religious dogma, which takes its consensus that God is personal and intentional as an emotional assumption. Playing to the popular desire for an underlying magical explanation of reality, and for validation of the social structure, dogma rejects any suggestion that its consensus could actually be founded in the motivated reasoning of psychological desire and personal interests rather than actual revelation. But this raises the problem of what in nature gave rise to these assumptions about the alleged personal and intentional attributes of God.
Saint Paul said in his hymn to love, ‘now we see through a glass darkly but then face to face (1 Cor 13:12). This can be turned against literalism. The dogmatic assumptions that God is personal and intentional are examples of a blurred vision of an underlying reality. Necessary for a simplified ignorant popular mythology, these claims do not stand up to empirical scrutiny. On this model, to see God face to face would mean recognising that God is pure allegory for natural processes. The attributes religion has attributed to God actually belong to the laws of physics, which are eternal, infinite and omnipotent. The additional hypothesis that evolution is somehow anthropic, with an inherent tendency of living systems to promote greater complexity, can provide the basis for the attribution of omnibenevolence to God.
My view is that much of the confusion surrounding Christianity has its origins in the clash between messianic and imperial versions of faith. The messianic tradition calls Christians to be like Christ and to seek to transform the world through a social vision of salvation, with heaven seen as a possible future on earth governed by love, justice, truth, mercy and peace. By contrast, the imperial tradition calls Christians to support state stability through a purely personal vision of salvation in an imaginary heavenly afterlife, making only superficial moral criticisms of culture in personal rather than structural terms.
This tension has far-reaching implications. It enables us to read the Gospels in messianic terms, seeing the crucifixion of Christ as the imperial suppression of truth. Messianic Christianity accepts scientific truth and sees all religious language as allegorical, while imperial Christianity rejects the primacy of science and sees religious language as literal and otherworldly. Jesus hints at this with his comment that the secrets of the kingdom are reserved for initiates (Matt 13). The implication is that messianic Christianity is ethical and Biblical while imperial Christianity is corrupt and self-serving. Gospel parables such as the wheat and tares (Matt 13:24-30) can be read to say that the weeds of imperial Christianity will dominate the world but will eventually be replaced by the original messianic true vision. Atheism provides a profound critique of imperial Christianity, but not of messianic Christianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Histo ... man_Empire
