I found this site through the posts on decoherence and many-worlds; I haven't yet read them all, and look forward to doing so. Also enjoyed the posts on Bayesian rationality.
But I was disappointed by this one. The main reason is that it implicitly reduces all religious phenomena to matters of belief, which I think is a mistake.
To be clear about where I'm coming from: I don't hold any religious beliefs. Nevertheless, I think that much of what goes on in religion is psychologically or sociologically beneficial. And I think that religious language is often misconstrued (by religious and nonreligious people alike) as expressing beliefs, when it actually (or also) functions in other ways. (It expresses certain kinds of attitudes and perspectives.)
Eliezer's main point is to deny that religion can't be disproven. In order to do this, he paints a picture of religion as essentially a set of beliefs. Addressing people like me who want to save some non-epistemic subset of religion, he says "The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept." I want to make two points about this.
The first is that even if it's true, it says nothing about the value of modern people pursuing such non-fact-based activities. Explorations of attitudes and global perspectives can be pursued via religious language in much the same way as it is pursued in non-religious art, literature, poetry, etc. Eliezer takes "ethics" as the core of the non-fact-based questions. His argument against religious ethics is that the Bible contains elements that conflict with contemporary ethics, which has "progressed" since the Bible was written. The argument simply ignores the fact that religious ethics also progresses. In other words, Eliezer implicitly focuses on fundamentalist religion; but many modern religious people explicitly treat the Bible as a literary background to rational reflections taking contemporary attitudes and insights into account. Eliezer seems strangely unaware that many modern religious people have fought against slavery, for women's rights, gay rights, etc.
In fact, he seems unaware that such rational revisions of traditional attitudes have been going on for thousands of years--and this leads into my second point: the separation between myth and morality is not something new. The prophets Hosea and Amos explicitly reject mythology when it overshadows morality; they make fun of people who think that animal sacrifices can atone for bad deeds, or that religion essentially depends on anything beyond morality. The book of Deuteronomy contains many revisions of earlier material in Exodus, turning laws from a mythic to an ethical rationale. And the Talmud contains countless examples wherein Biblical morality is reversed, explicitly or implicitly.
So I think Eliezer is doubly wrong about the orthogonality of religion and factual questions.
I clicked on a link in this post to "believing in". I expected to find an acknowledgment of the purely non-epistemic sense that this phrase often carries ("I believe in the right to organize","I believe in myself", "I believe in America"). Instead I found arguments against people who hold factual beliefs without or despite evidence. But I would hypothesize that many people who affirm beliefs without evidence are actually just affirming an attitude which they are used to expressing in the misleading belief-language. For many, "belief in God" expresses solidarity with a particular community and a set of attitudes toward the world and other people.
The main fault I find with Eliezer's analysis is that it appears blind to the literary character of many Biblical texts. He says "The vast majority of religions in human history…tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened." But this is also true of literature in general. It in no way implies that authors or readers of the stories take them literally. Anybody who thinks that Ezekiel literally expected bones to rise from graves, or that the author and audience of the story of Balaam's ass took it differently from, say, Aesop's stories, is operating with a deficient view of how stories work.
Final point: Eliezer sets himself against those who posit "wonder" as a basis and/or effect of religious language. He finds no (or very little) wonder in ancient texts. But from a philosophical point of view, I would nominate a different emotion as the essential religious category: gratitude. The most positive attitude toward the world or one's life must contain gratitude, even when what one is grateful for is something as vague as life itself, and even if one posits no metaphysical entity toward which one is grateful. And ancient religion certainly expresses such global gratitude.
This isn't really a post to be taken in isolation. I think you'll find some if not all of your objections are addressed throughout the rest of the antitheism posts.
The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.
The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it—quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah’s bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah—the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar—ruining the experimental symmetry, but this was back in the early days—to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level. The fire comes down on Elijah’s altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout “The Lord is God!”—peer review.
And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats. This is stern, but necessary. You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself. If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.
Back in the old days, people actually believed their religions instead of just believing in them. The biblical archaeologists who went in search of Noah’s Ark did not think they were wasting their time; they anticipated they might become famous. Only after failing to find confirming evidence—and finding disconfirming evidence in its place—did religionists execute what William Bartley called the retreat to commitment, “I believe because I believe.”
Back in the old days, there was no concept of religion’s being a separate magisterium. The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works—like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud. (Which is a metaphor for . . .)
Back in the old days, saying the local religion “could not be proven” would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, “Yeah, it’s all true.” From a Bayesian perspective that’s some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Although it doesn’t prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent—it could be alien teenagers.) The vast majority of religions in human history—excepting only those invented extremely recently—tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they’d actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn’t even know the difference.
The Roman Empire inherited philosophy from the ancient Greeks; imposed law and order within its provinces; kept bureaucratic records; and enforced religious tolerance. The New Testament, created during the time of the Roman Empire, bears some traces of modernity as a result. You couldn’t invent a story about God completely obliterating the city of Rome (a la Sodom and Gomorrah), because the Roman historians would call you on it, and you couldn’t just stone them.
In contrast, the people who invented the Old Testament stories could make up pretty much anything they liked. Early Egyptologists were genuinely shocked to find no trace whatsoever of Hebrew tribes having ever been in Egypt—they weren’t expecting to find a record of the Ten Plagues, but they expected to find something. As it turned out, they did find something. They found out that, during the supposed time of the Exodus, Egypt ruled much of Canaan. That’s one huge historical error, but if there are no libraries, nobody can call you on it.
The Roman Empire did have libraries. Thus, the New Testament doesn’t claim big, showy, large-scale geopolitical miracles as the Old Testament routinely did. Instead the New Testament claims smaller miracles which nonetheless fit into the same framework of evidence. A boy falls down and froths at the mouth; the cause is an unclean spirit; an unclean spirit could reasonably be expected to flee from a true prophet, but not to flee from a charlatan; Jesus casts out the unclean spirit; therefore Jesus is a true prophet and not a charlatan. This is perfectly ordinary Bayesian reasoning, if you grant the basic premise that epilepsy is caused by demons (and that the end of an epileptic fit proves the demon fled).
Not only did religion used to make claims about factual and scientific matters, religion used to make claims about everything. Religion laid down a code of law—before legislative bodies; religion laid down history—before historians and archaeologists; religion laid down the sexual morals—before Women’s Lib; religion described the forms of government—before constitutions; and religion answered scientific questions from biological taxonomy to the formation of stars.1 The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area’s having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is what’s left.
Or rather, people think ethics is what’s left. Take a culture dump from 2,500 years ago. Over time, humanity will progress immensely, and pieces of the ancient culture dump will become ever more glaringly obsolete. Ethics has not been immune to human progress—for example, we now frown upon such Bible-approved practices as keeping slaves. Why do people think that ethics is still fair game?
Intrinsically, there’s nothing small about the ethical problem with slaughtering thousands of innocent first-born male children to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country. It should be more glaring than the comparatively trivial scientific error of saying that grasshoppers have four legs. And yet, if you say the Earth is flat, people will look at you like you’re crazy. But if you say the Bible is your source of ethics, women will not slap you. Most people’s concept of rationality is determined by what they think they can get away with; they think they can get away with endorsing Bible ethics; and so it only requires a manageable effort of self-deception for them to overlook the Bible’s moral problems. Everyone has agreed not to notice the elephant in the living room, and this state of affairs can sustain itself for a time.
Maybe someday, humanity will advance further, and anyone who endorses the Bible as a source of ethics will be treated the same way as Trent Lott endorsing Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign. And then it will be said that religion’s “true core” has always been genealogy or something.
The idea that religion is a separate magisterium that cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie—a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false. It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe. You have to admire its sheer brazenness, on a par with Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. The prosecutor whips out the bloody axe, and the defendant, momentarily shocked, thinks quickly and says: “But you can’t disprove my innocence by mere evidence—it’s a separate magisterium!”
And if that doesn’t work, grab a piece of paper and scribble yourself a Get Out of Jail Free card.
1 The Old Testament doesn't talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe, perhaps because it was too busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore mens clothing, which was solid and satisfying religious content of that era.