What's The Utility of Loving God?
On New Atheism
Pragmatists only care about utility, not truth. For a pragmatist, if there’s no utility to loving God what’s the point? On the other hand, if there is utility, some will argue, why not just jump to the end result and skip the God part?
Love—that’s just chemicals being released in your brain.
Religion—that’s just an evolutionary phenomenon we adapted to foment better social cooperation.
Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and other “New Atheists,” have created a movement around the idea that X (some humanistic or religious ideal) is reducible to Y (some scientific-materialist explanation). Of course, if we lived solely in their universe, it’s not clear we’d be motivated to thrust ourselves into any commitments, because we’d be too busy explaining why others hold them.
Either that, or we’d be living in self-contradiction, pointing out the unrigorous nature of others’ commitments while failing to recognize our own blindspots. (Reductionism for my enemies—self-evident truth for me and mine.)
I remember my professor of religious studies—an atheist—briefly forgot what he was about to say, and mumbled, “Oh God…” as filler. He had no idea what he’d said, but it’s a metaphor for the fact that most rationalist-materialists still have some part of themselves that’s romantic, even if they deny it.
I open with the issue of “love of God” precisely because it’s a strange locution, likely alien to many of my modern readers. Never mind that Maimonides thought it was the most important commandment in the entire Torah, or as we say today, in self-help land, the first “rule for life.”
Perhaps there is a cash-value to loving God. If there is, some defender or critic can give a TedTalk on it, telling us the health benefits (or social ills) of adopting it. Certainly, readers of Proverbs, or subscribers to the prosperity gospel think that obeying God is a way to get rich.
For my part, I simply want to suggest that loving God is no more crazy than loving anyone.
To love someone, or to love an idea, to say, “I love you,” and mean it—to commit to something beyond oneself—is not something that reason alone can get us to do.
The point is not that rationalists should be consistent and banish love from their vocabulary. On the contrary, it’s that, in discovering the inconsistency between a worldview that reduces love to chemicals or something mechanical and the experience of being in love, they should be more open to and tolerant of those who are obviously religious or spiritual. If you buy roses for a lover, or engage in any form of courtship, romance, or marital ritual, you’re no crazier than someone who prays, goes on pilgrimage, or says grace before meals.
To say that we should take religion seriously doesn’t mean that we need to agree with the belief content espoused by religious people. It only means that, we should believe people when they tell us that they are in love.
New Atheists are like those who, upon hearing their friend talk about a new love interest, think to themselves, “you’re not in love; you’re just lonely”; “you’re not in love, you just want status”; “you’re not in love, you just are socially programmed to choose a partner because everyone else around you is doing it.” Those things can all be true—but love transcends these sorts of explanations. One wonders if the New Atheist doesn’t suffer from a case of sour grapes—the critique of others’ love says more about their own incapacity for it.
Religion can be about ethics, community, politics, status, the need for ritual, and many things studied by anthropologists, but it’s also, for many, about a real experience of divinity. Academics arrogantly patronize religion, as if it’s just a game, while engaging in their own arcane rituals: the academic conference is a form of mass; the lecture a form of liturgy; office hours a form of confession; citation count a sign of salvation.
The joke is on them. If religion is just a game, academia is also just a game, albeit a far less compelling, sustainable, and wise one.
Correcting someone when they talk about their relationship with God is no different than correcting them when they tell you about a new date they are excited about, a kid they’re proud of, or a hero they happened to hear speak at a local event. The fact that we need religion to fill some void, as Marx well knew, when he called it “an opiate of the masses” and a “haven in a heartless world,” doesn’t mean it exists only to fill a void or that its meaning is reducible to its pragmatic function.
If you are someone who loves and believes in using the word love, you are not a rationalist; you are a believer, in the broad sense. Since most people love, it is fair to say that most people are believers, and that rationalism is more a symptom of a bad break-up or a bad relationship than a verdict on love itself.
Gauntlet thrown.
Why am I wrong?
—Zohar
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