@Fruck comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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sockpuppet2 24d ago

John Psmith reviewed "Believe, by Ross Douthat"

Imagine a prophet who tells you he has a special understanding of the universe and can predict a far-future eschatological event with certainty. This might be one of the many apocalyptic preachers of a conventionally religious sort, or it could be a different sort of prophecy like the believer in scientific Marxism who has deduced the laws of history, or the charismatic business leader explaining to investors why he will inevitably conquer the world of B2B SaaS.

...

I am speaking, of course, of the wrongest and worst prophets who ever lived: the last few centuries of atheists.

People really don’t like it when you point this out, but past generations of atheists made specific and detailed predictions about what would happen as religion loosened its grip on the mind, or what science would reveal about the nature of the universe. Those predictions have been uniformly awful. For example: Enlightenment-era skeptics acknowledged that there were a vast number of purported miracles, apparitions, and self-reported mystical experiences. They conjectured, reasonably enough, that some of the supposed miracles were “pious frauds,” and the rest were delusions brought on by religious superstition. They predicted that as the proportion of religious people waned, both sources of miracles would dry up. Naturally, nothing of the sort has happened (even when normalizing to total population).

The fact that the atheists centuries ago were wrong about…approximately everything doesn’t actually have much bearing on whether God exists. Atheism has adapted. Today, instead of telling you that reports of miracles will inevitably decline, they will tell you (with equal confidence) that they will continue at the same rate forever because of…something to do with fMRI machines.2 And the eternal and unchanging universe is back, baby: it’s just the multiverse cosmology of eternal inflation now (which even takes care of the fine-tuning problem).3 There are about as many ways to be an atheist as there are to be religious, so why should we care that one particular set of guys from the 17th through early 20th centuries got repeatedly owned by events? It didn’t happen, but they deserve credit for making a specific prediction.

Ross Douthat cares, because he thinks that much of the intellectual and cultural power of modern secularism comes from a widespread but undeserved sense that the God-deniers have been proven right about stuff. Another way of putting it is that the default position for the intellectually serious has shifted from belief to unbelief. Among the educated class, at least, it used to be only the brave weirdos who were atheists, and now it’s only the brave weirdos who aren’t. Douthat quotes a Tom Stoppard play where a philosopher muses: “It is a tide which has turned only once in human history… there is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, the noes had it.” And Douthat thinks that this shift of the default, this sense that maybe at one point in the past it was reasonable to believe, but that today it is not, is completely 100% made up and unearned, founded on a self-congratulatory retconning of history.

The middle section has examples of atheist scholars being wrong... but are examples of atheists scholars being wrong evidence against atheism? We know they were wrong, because atheistic scholarship has deeply-flawed-but-integral self-correction mechanisms. What self-correction have religions done, in the last 100 years? Or is this an isolated demand for rigor, because the pro-belief case is simply that some religion is inerrant, even if we don't know which (if any!) presently-practiced religion is inerrant, therefore, no religion needs to self-correct?

There's also a section on miricles, which includes:

In the Middle Ages, many miracles had the official sanction of the state, the universities, and all the other epistemic organs of society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many miracles were recorded. And as I said at the start of this review, secularists like David Hume assumed that as soon as the miraculous lost official sanction and encouragement, the flood of stories would dry up as people stopped claiming or pretending to experience them. But what actually happened was that disenchantment didn’t really happen on the ground. People still report miraculous healings, experiences of contact with a sublime Other, mystical visions, even really crazy stuff like levitation or bilocation. In this respect our society is a bit like a communist one, where the entire ruling class adheres strictly to a certain dogma and everybody else quietly pretends to believe it while actually disbelieving it, because it clashes profoundly with their direct experience of the world. Disenchantment is official but virtual. The official encouragement and recognition of miracles stopped, but the miracles kept pouring in. Douthat discusses many of them, some quite hard to dismiss as an individual’s hallucination or forgery because they were seen by many witnesses, others reported by committed materialists who recount them the way a religious believer might shamefully discuss almost losing their faith. Or as Chesterton once put it:

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them… it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.

But isn’t the very torrent of miracles itself a problem for believers? After all, one of the most noteworthy things about wondrous or uncanny or miraculous events is that they seem to happen worldwide, to people of every imaginable creed or culture, at roughly the same rate. Shouldn’t this count as evidence against most religions, which claim that their own doctrine is true and all others are false?9 Curiously enough, no. If you actually go and look at how even the most jealous and narrowminded faiths in history interpreted the miracles reported by heathens, you find that basically none of them deny their reality. Frequently they will interpret the miracles bestowed upon followers of rival religions as acts of diabolical rather than divine power, but only very rarely do you see them claiming that they are fake. Chesterton again:

No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.

Shouldn't we question which miracles are "diabolical" and which are "divine? And why deny another religion's morals, if you don't deny its signs and wonders of other religions? And doesn't this "prove too much," inasmuch as it's also true of conspiracy theories, cryptids (fun fact: Scotland's national animal isn't the unicorn, because someone thought it'd be funny - the Scots genuinely believed unicorns existed, at the time they chose it), and UFO sightings?

The review ends by making a strange argument promoting Christianity:

All of this sound and fury and debate over who wrote the story has a way of distracting us from the story itself, and I’d like to end this review by encouraging you to read it even if you don’t believe it. The narrative of the Gospel has been the single biggest influence on the millennia-old civilization that you (probably) are a child of. But it isn’t just the story of that civilization, because it’s also somehow had an electrifying effect on just about every other culture that’s ever come into contact with it. Forget all your beliefs or disbeliefs or presuppositions, doesn’t that sound interesting? Isn’t that the sort of thing that an educated person in the year 2025 should have direct experience with?

So pick a Gospel, any Gospel (yes, they have some important disagreements on the details,12 but the overall story is the same), and try just reading it through from start to finish. Maybe next week would be an auspicious time. And as you read, try to forget all the associations you have with Christianity, positive or negative, and read the words. If you want, you can imagine yourself in the cultural frame of the first people to encounter the story, and who were much more shocked by it than you will be. But even you, who have spent your whole life subtly marinating in the moral and cultural world that this story built, will be a little bit shocked if you read the words. Because just taken at face value, it’s a really weird story.

It begins, like countless Indo-European myths, with the miraculous birth of a great hero, and a succession of dangers that befall him in childhood. This is classic perennialist stuff, maybe the biggest cliché ever, repeated in myths and legends all over the world. Maybe that should bother Christians, because it means our story is one myth among many others. Or maybe it shouldn’t, because if our story is true, then it is in a sense the story, and we should expect to find echoes of it in all times and places, like refractions in a funhouse mirror. The one thing that’s already strange about this story, though, is how insistent it is on its own specific historicity. All the other myths and legends of demigods and heroes tend to begin with something like: “long ago when the earth was young,” or “once upon in a strange and faraway land.” But this one has dates, and at the time it was written those dates were recent! It cites names of witnesses, and mentions specific people and places. That doesn’t make it true, of course, maybe they all made it up in a conspiracy of lies, but it does make it different from most legends of a great hero sent by the gods.

Anyway, the hero is born, survives his childhood trials, is officially recognized and charged with a mission by the gods, and then begins roaming the countryside: recruiting a fellowship, righting wrongs, and lifting up the sorrowful. Once again, we’re solidly in monomyth territory, this is the plot of like every adventure story ever. But wait a minute…look more closely and the details are all subtly wrong. Like, the “meeting the mentor” stage of the hero’s journey isn’t supposed to have the mentor immediately proclaiming the young hero as Lord. And then there’s the wandering part — most of it just seems to involve upsetting or confusing people. Zero monsters are slain. Zero Roman legionnaires are ambushed or waylaid by this supposed revolutionary folk hero. His only really heroic acts are miracles of healing, but whoever heard of a legend of a Great Physician? And the people who get the healings tend to be ones who, in the view of this society, don’t deserve it — heretics, prostitutes, lepers, the possessed — all of them “unclean.” Some of the healings even deliberately violate the law. Is he the first ever anarchist, come to overthrow not only the Roman occupation but also the rules of the Jewish religion? Is he a prophet of just using common sense and being nice to each other?

The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.

Has anyone read this book? If so, does this review do a bad job relaying the book's thesis? Am I wrong to think that the thesis, as presented in the review, is unpersuasive? If I am wrong, how am I wrong?

Context

Shrike sockpuppet2 24d ago

The middle section has examples of atheist scholars being wrong... but are examples of atheists scholars being wrong evidence against atheism?

I think the sociological angle specifically (where the New Atheist types said that declining religion would make the world a better place and well that is not what happened) revealed that their religious opponents (who were often chided for the idea that "morality comes from religion") actually had a stronger grasp on reality than the New Atheist types did. In my opinion it does not slam-dunk prove anything about God one way or the other by itself.

But if two groups of people make predictions and one of them is better at the predictions, your priors should be that they understand reality better. I don't know that "religious people" are perfect scorers but against the New Atheists on the general question of whether (our) society would flourish without God...I think they've generally won.

Shouldn't we question which miracles are "diabolical" and which are "divine?

Well yes, that's what Chesterton is suggesting, isn't it? That you sort out the diabolical from the divine?

And doesn't this "prove too much," inasmuch as it's also true of conspiracy theories, cryptids (fun fact: Scotland's national animal isn't the unicorn, because someone thought it'd be funny - the Scots genuinely believed unicorns existed, at the time they chose it), and UFO sightings?

This is another pet peeve of mine, but UFOs (much like, topically, the historicity of Christ) is another one of those "midwit meme" moments where both people who have studied the topic and people who just absorb what's on Ancient Aliens both take UFOs much more seriously than people who take the superficially informed view that there's nothing there.

I think it's incorrect to view this as trivially wrong. Imagine instead this was a purely scientific argument about a specific aspect of reality instead of a broader argument about the true nature of reality. Any would-be successor theory must explain why it is similar to and yet superior to alternative competing theories. Typically adherents of competing theories agree on the vast majority of the underlying facts, and so all theories will actually be quite similar, but the adherents of all of these theories must explain the distinctions in their theory from other theories, to show how it is the best theory.

If we threw out scientific theories on the basis that they were similar to (and therefore derivative of and thus incorrect) another similar theory we rejected, we would not be in a great place. Ultimately religion, too, is trying to explain reality as we know it, although on different terms.

And the reality is that materialism is unsatisfying, that people do have religious experiences and that those experiences sometimes conflict with each other.

Has anyone read this book?

I haven't, but noting the interest here in case I do.

sockpuppet2 Shrike 24d ago

I think the sociological angle specifically (where the New Atheist types said that declining religion would make the world a better place and well that is not what happened) revealed that their religious opponents (who were often chided for the idea that "morality comes from religion") actually had a stronger grasp on reality than the New Atheist types did.

Do atheists commit crime or otherwise contribute to social dysfunction at a greater rate than theists? Who gets credit, if the "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" leads to the moderately religious population falling below the critical mass necessary to socially constrain religious zealots?

Where does Chesterton suggest that we consider the possibility other religions are correct?

Yeah, I was hesitant to include UFOs, because the "U" tautologically includes real phenomena, but I couldn't think of a better "you know what I mean" example, off the top of my head. Perhaps "extra-terrestrials" would have been better.

If Jesus was unique, why would his story have any connection to the monomyth? And if his story is true, why would stories from unaffected cultures resemble his story?

Do atheists commit crime or otherwise contribute to social dysfunction at a greater rate than theists?

Yes, at least in certain key aspects. Atheists are less likely to give to charity, for instance (I think that's the latest science), less likely to marry, and less likely to have children, all of which ultimately make society a less functional place.

Well, I dunno about that phrasing, I have not read Chesterton. But here's the quote:

In denying the doctrine of a religion you are (correctly or incorrectly) thereby sorting the diabolical from the divine, aren't you?

Well, first off, why (in your theory) do cultures unaffected by Christianity have stories resembling Christ!? Genuinely interested in your answer here!

From the Christian perspective, it's very clear that God, as revealed through Scripture, loves tropes (or memes) and Scripture plays with them repeatedly. It does not seem remotely odd from that perspective that similar ideas and tropes, echoing from the dawn of time and the Author of Man, would manifest in many separate cultures.

However if I put my Cranky Literalist hat on: I am actually very suspicious of the idea of the monomyth. I do think there are a number of tropes that are fairly common, perhaps to all mankind, possibly due to oral tradition but possibly also just due to human nature. (A separate POP SCIENCE tangent, but I am told there is evidence that oral traditions can persist up to 10,000 years, which is also, I am told, within "striking range" of humanity's most recent common ancestor, so presumably it's not crazy for cultures to share a monomyth by virtue of a common oral tradition). But from what I understand of the "monomyth" specifically, it derives from Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which, admittedly, I have not read. (One of my friends did read it, and gave me a very negative review, so perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced.) But I strongly suspect Campbell (who was influenced by Jung) constructed a Procrustean bed that anyone so inclined can torture nearly any notable person into a "monomyth."

Wikipedia quotes Campbell's formula as follows:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

You could apply this to a historical figures like Julius Caesar pretty easily, it proves nothing about their historicity. (If I was a professional apologist I would have a better example, my understanding is that there are some really fun ones out there.) In fact from what I understand many primitive cultures have initiation ceremonies into adulthood which means that you could apply the monomyth neatly to...practically everyone!

Now, I should note that comparative mythology is outside of my area of expertise. But I suspect that people whose expertise it is tend to overfit it. I'm particularly more than a little suspicious of Campbell (and people like Lewis and Tolkien) because I don't trust them to do the work to show that the "monomyth" is actually the same worldwide instead of just, basically, Western.

In short, my suspicion is that while there will be parallels between Christ and various other (mythical and real) people, suggesting that the Christ story is part of a monomyth (when done by friend or foe) is more a literary exercise than anything, and that while the idea of a "monomyth" is interesting taking it literally and seriously is a mistake (not just theologically, but as a matter of history and literature.)

I'm open to contrary takes on this, though!

-1

Fruck Lacks all conviction Shrike 24d ago

If I put my literary crank hat on, I am fucking sick of the monomyth. Yet another example of a measure becoming a target. Can I ask if you recall where you heard of an oral tradition lasting 10k years? That seems implausible and like it could only be supported by a society that treats oral traditions as evidence, aka a silly one.

Shrike Fruck 24d ago

My understanding is that indigenous Australians are speculated to have extremely long oral traditions because some of them seem to line up with astronomic/geological phenomena. Example press release with overview, linking to the actual research (which I have not read): https://www.utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2023/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives-in-the-world

ETA: also, thanks for connecting "the measure becoming the target" to the monomyth.

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