Modern Mumbly-Peg

My grade-school chums and I regularly played our version of school-playground mumbly-peg. The game began by outlining with a penknife a soil area about a yard square. The first player stood in this area, holding his penknife by its point waist-high, and flipping it toward the playing surface. If it landed point down that player etched a line to the playing surface’s edges. He then stood in the larger of the resulting two spaces and flipped his penknife at the smaller area that had now become his opponent’s territory. He continued to flip his penknife at the opponent’s decreasing space until he lost his turn by landing outside the opponent’s now-reduced area or failing to land his penknife with its point in that area. The object was to continually diminish the opponent’s turf until he could no longer stand in it, even with the toe of one foot, and flip his penknife. At that point the game was over.

This playground game is not the only example of limiting the space of an adversary until he/she could no longer compete. Sometimes it is done with military power, and sometimes rhetoric is the deployed device.

I have long held that the debate between religion and science was between each side acknowledging the legitimacy of the other. Religion has long celebrated, along with science, the truth found in evolution, and science had long acknowledging the validity of ethical traditions and the value-laden structures of religion. But my optimism has been pre-mature. There remains a substantial number of religious believers holding the notion that every species was created six-thousand years ago in exactly the same form as it exists today, implying that humans and dinosaurs occupied the same territory at the same time. Sometimes this intellectual blindness is just silly. There was recently the fundamentalist replica of Noah’s ark whose builders sued an insurance company for failing to cover damage from a rainstorm.

At the same time a group of intellectuals and scientists known as “the new atheists” have played a hard-nosed game of mumbly-peg by defining religion’s territory only as those areas not yet defined by science. Year after year they have flipped their rational penknifes at these areas. As the gaps in human knowledge grow smaller those whose faith has been in the “god of the gaps” have an increasingly diminished area on which to stand.

The ultimate knife flip can be seen these days in a number of essays, books and articles assuming that the domain of science is everything in the natural world. This leaves the domain of religion then only as the supernatural so that ultimately it appears that the only proper area of religion is preparing people for existence in some other non-worldly realm. If heaven is the only thing left to religion, that eliminates most of history, hope, love and other substantial ethical concerns including morality, justice, dignity, forgiveness, the dedicated life, humility, philosophy, benevolence and a long list of other very earthly concerns. Defining the domain of science as the natural world and confining religion to the supernatural rigs the conversation.

It might come as a surprise to these new atheists that an increasingly large body of religionists do not believe in some heavenly grandfather-like deity and a supernatural afterlife that goes with this notion. I for one would not like to live in a world in which all the values that are part of my religious heritage are gone, and I am left with the ultimate rule of a world without the ethics pervaded by religion. A dog-eat-dog society where the only rule is the survival of the fittest is a natural world not worth having.

Many of us have no desire to flip our spiritual and rational pen-knives at the territory legitimately theterritoty held by science. But neither do we intend to allow these new atheists to define the domain of religion only as the supernatural. The chances are, however, that the god many of the new atheists have written off is the same notion of god many religionists abandoned long ago. Solid religion is not static, and continues to develop along with other rational insights into the meaning of life. Neither do we insist that scientists must believe in Ptolemy’s notion of the universe. If we are to have a conversation, mumbly-peg is a poor place to start.