The problems with purely “spiritual (non-theistic) religion” within theistic traditions

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For many years, in my life as a priest, I believed that a spiritual, non-supernatural, humanist version of Christianity was possible, and many people in the parish, as well as others from the community, shared at least part of this vision. I dare not say that they went all the way with me in respect of the flattening out of Christian beliefs so that they referred to this world alone, but I did not mince words about what I thought was the only reasonable possibility for Christians today. In tune with this, in my homilies, Sunday by Sunday, I presented the ideas of Don Cupitt and Jack Spong, and some of my own making, too, as providing a reasonable transformation of Christian beliefs and practices, which made it a humanist version of an ancient, supernaturalist creed. I accepted the position of the Sea of Faith Network, and soon after Elizabeth and I were married, joined the Sea of Faith Network (UK), which states clearly its purpose as

Exploring and promoting religious faith as a human creation…

Indeed, our honeymoon in the UK took us to a Sea of Faith conference at Leicester University, in the Summer of 1990; and I occasionally still make forays back to the Sea of Faith Network homepage to see what new developments are taking place in the network’s thinking and practice. In the process, it has become clearer and clearer to me, over the last few years, that the time for a truly Christian humanism is up. The church, particularly the Church of England (and Anglican churches in former British colonies like Canada, Australia and New Zealand), which once tentatively welcomed revisionist ideas of Christian belief, has been in retreat now for over thirty years, though during the late eighties and nineties of the twentieth century I believed there was still a real possibility that liberal thinking about Christian belief would become widespread within the church. Those beliefs faded during the nineties, and by the time of Elizabeth’s death, they had almost completely dissipated. A retreat towards doctrinal orthodoxy of a particularly banal sort descended upon the church, and in the inspissating darkness brought about by the acceptance of doctrinal orthodoxy without any corresponding theological clarity — that is, of dogma for dogma’s sake — the church that I knew simply surrendered its intellectual respectability and opted out of the culture. It still, though, believed it had the right to pronounce upon public issues, such as assisted dying and gay relationships, irrespective of its ability to justify its position on these and other issues (such as gene research and therapy, and abortion) in terms that are intelligible today.

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How to mislead with a phrase

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Despite my repudiation of the claim, Jerry Coyne continues to argue that I think that there are “ways of knowing” other than science. I have said, and will say again, if it’s any use, that the locution ‘way(s) of knowing’ is not clear. The point of using it seems to be to rule out certain claims to know, or to be able to establish some things as items of knowledge, and others as mere subjective suppositions, but no one, so far at least, has proposed a definition of what a “way” of knowing might be. In fact, as earlier commenters have pointed out, we know all sorts of things which do not obviously come within the ambit of science, stretch the meaning of the word ‘science’ in whatever way you please. Indeed, the argument that knowledge is confined to what can be confirmed scientifically, broadly construed, is merely a way of settling the disagreement over scientism by fiat. Let’s take some of the uses of the word ‘know’ that Tim Martin Harris suggested some weeks (or is it already months!) ago: knowing how to ride a bike, knowing how to play an instrument, knowing a language, knowing someone (as against not knowing them), knowing a character in a novel or in a play, knowing what it is like to be in an accident, or to have the special knowledge that only those who have been there can have, of fighting in a battle, say, or knowing what it is like to live in poverty, or being told that you have only two weeks to live. It does not seem to me that any of these describe “ways” of knowing, a such, though each of them, in a reasonable sense, may be said to delimit spheres or items or realms of knowledge that are very different and to the achievement of which very different types of experience are necessary. And nothing very useful regarding the nature or the limits of knowledge have been determined once we have done this.

First of all, it seems to me, we must try to understand why it is that some people want to restrict knowledge to the scientific “way of knowing,” whatever that is, and so far no one has given a very satisfactory definition of why people want to make this restriction, and what making it accomplishes. This is especially true if the qualification is added about the scientific way of knowing, broadly construed. This looks very much like an effort simply to stretch the meaning of the word ‘science’ in such a way that any claim to know will automatically be entered under the column labelled “Science.” And the advantage of doing so is presumably that science, given the remarkable and admirable achievements of science over the last four centuries or so, gives a special “cachet” to the claim to know. Thus, when neuroscientists bruit about the claim to have detected, in the brain, the moment of decision — as in the famous experiments by Libet (and successors), which have been taken to prove that we make decisions before we become conscious of them — it is taken as settling, once and for all, the very contested philosophical issue of free will, even though there is as yet no reason to identify brain events as detected by neuroscientists with conscious decision making. What would support this much desiderated identification? So far, the answer to that question is unclear, which hasn’t detained neuroscientists for very long in their rush to judgement. It’s a bit like those neuroscientific experiments designed to locate the centre of spirituality in the brain, by using nuns as experimental subjects, because they, it is apparently assumed, are — if anyone is — more likely to be having religious experiences than others who do not wear their religion on their sleeve. The presuppositions underlying these assumptions are obvious, but I have yet to see a justification for making them. This is not, to be frank, much more reliable than taking individuals’ introspective accounts of their experiences as somehow above question, but so long as the label “Scientific” can be applied to the results, we are somehow lulled into the questionable belief that the results are more reliable than asking people what their experiences are like.

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Why is it a legitimate concern?

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Journalists writing about assisted dying continue to raise the spectre of abuse, and argue that those who oppose legalisation of assisted dying have a legitimate concern. Tasha Kheiriddin does it again in her latest opinion piece in the National Post. It reminds me of Victor Malarek’s misleading ending to his W5 documentary on assisted dying, where he got away with saying at the end, simply on the basis of a supposed expert’s opinion that ”It’s really scary what’s out there.” And Lloyd Robertson gave him the support that he wanted by saying something about ‘good arguments on both sides,’ which was as far from the truth revealed in the documentary itself as it could be. In the end, Dr. José Pereira was given the last word. He was the supposed expert, because he had written what must be one of the least well-documented articles on assisted dying in existence, one that was subsequently panned by real bioethicists. Indeed, in their paper,  Downie, Chambaere and Bernheim state:

Pereira’s conclusions are not supported by the evidence he provided. His paper should not be given any credence in the public policy debate about the legal status of assisted suicide and euthanasia in Canada and around the world.

Pereira is a Roman Catholic hack, whatever his expertise in end-of-life care, and his paper is not only not worth reading, but a positive impediment to clear thinking on the issue. I said this in a response to Pereira which I wrote myself and sent to the programme’s producers, but they lent it no credence. I wonder if they are willing to change their mind now that Downie et al., and for similar reasons, have dismissed it so decisively.

However the trend continues. Tasha Kheiriddin, in what appears to be a perfectly innocuous piece (linked above), in which she describes, quite dispassionately, it seems, the assisted dying law that seems likely to pass into law in Quebec, and the provisions that would have protected her father from the abuse she imagines, goes on to say, without the slightest bit of evidence:

The fear of groups opposed to right-to-die laws, like that proposed in Quebec, is that people like my father might be euthanized against their will. This is a legitimate concern; there are always situations where unscrupulous relatives or caregivers could prey on vulnerable persons.

Why is it a legitimate concern? In jurisdictions where assisted dying is legal, there is no evidence of the kinds of abuse Kheiriddin imagines. Indeed, she fails to put assisted dying into contexts where there is an equal possibility of abuse, but which are completely legal. People can refuse treatment and have treatment withdrawn without any intervention by the law, even though such refusal, or such withdrawal will lead to their deaths, and yet in these cases the possibility of abuse is just as high as it is in cases of active assistance to die. Indeed, bioethicists have been unable to find morally relevant differences between supposedly passive acts of euthanasia, and more positive ones. Why do journalists like Kheiriddin feel the need to pander to the anti-assisted dying lobby every time they write something? Or do newspapers have a policy which requires that the whole issue be treated as a very difficult, serious issue, by giving voice to the “scary things” that are “out there”, whether there are such scary things or not? It’s a bit like teaching intelligent design in biology classes, whatever the evidence says. Each “side” must be given its due, even if there aren’t two sides to every story. Continue reading

Still close to my heart

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At this time of year I tend to “go to pieces” (so to speak), and find it hard to concentrate or to keep two thoughts running consecutively. On Saturday just past I marked the 6th anniversary of Elizabeth’s death. At this time of year my normal functioning is greatly diminished. Her absence at any time is always palpable, but on the 8th of June I find it hard to think about anything else. I have little rituals to go through, fixing up the grave site after the winter, placing flowers, and then watching (and listening) to the talk that I gave at her memorial service, and, after that watching again the slide show (presented at the memorial) which I called, simply, “Elizabeth: A Love Poem.” I light a candle in her honour while I do this, and on the lighter are engraved the words, “Dignitas et Libertas,” as she had requested our daughter to do. Here is a picture of the candle burning before photos on the mantelpiece (one taken two weeks before she died, the other in 2002, just before our drive across the continent), the same candle used on the first anniversary in 2008. Ritual and liturgy run very deep in my blood, so these things are quasi-religious expressions of the importance that Elizabeth’s life played in mine (and mine in hers).

June 8 2013 (2)

June 8 2013

It was teeming rain at the time, very reminiscent of the monsoon rains in India, and the rain lasted all day. It reminded me of the poem I wrote in my cycle of poems about Elizabeth, entitled, “It’s raining now.”

It’s raining now
and every drop
a tear
that I have shed
for you.

I wonder now,
if I will ever know a time
that will not rain.

There’ve been so many torrents
since you left
that all the world’s an ocean;
and I sometimes think I’m drowning
in that watery world.

The flood keeps rising higher,
seething round
my little barque alone,
without the firm sea anchor
of you, your flaming body,
the other half of me,
the flesh and fire harmonious
that gave us steerage way,
and a clear path to follow
out to sea.

Without you I flounder
in this wavy, reckless world of gales,
with seas that roll through fog banks stretching
beyond the nearest light,
that. beckoning,
might, but cannot –
piercing that endless, rolling, foggy sea–
give comfort in my storm.

I lose myself sometimes in dreams and fantasies,
of what was more real than real,
of snowy epiphanies,
of bodies and of fire,
as when we strayed from room to room
in perfect consummation,
when we were one flesh, one body we,
one world entire.

It’s so alluring, so very inconstant there.
There is no warning –
silent and alone I face the storm,
and gaze once more with longing
over the craggy coast
of that endlessly surging, raging, foggy sea.

It’s still raining now.
I wonder if I will ever know again
a time that will not rain.

At the time it was, indeed, raining, and it was still raining when I typed the last words. As I said, these simple poems came to me in a rush during a week or two in July or August 2008, fully formed, just as they are. The first poems I ever wrote. I have never had the “daimon” again. So, they came, I know not whither. But wherever they came from, they are a tribute to the love we shared. It was an enormous privilege to have shared Elizabeth’s life and to have known her love.

An Explanatory Note

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This is just to assure readers that I have not simply abandoned you to discuss amongst yourselves. So many questions have been raised by my last two posts (including a post by Jerry Coyne in response), and I am involved in some things that I need to continue to do — which is why I abandoned choiceindying.com briefly — that I need to reflect upon these questions a bit more seriously. I have to say that I am not the odd man out in respect of the question of scientism, since this has been dealt with by a number of top flight philosophers, and I am not sure the point has been well understood. So, back to the drawing board on that question. We will see what comes out in due course. I do need to say a couple things about Jerry’s response. First, I did not say, nor do I say, that the new atheism has been a failure. This is an important qualification. That does not mean that new atheists are always right, however, and it is worthwhile being self-critical about its achievements as well as about its shortcomings. Another thing that I want to stress is that my characterisation of some arguments against religion in terms of “Such-and-so, ergo Jesus,” is not in any way addressed to Jerry, though, now that he mentions it, he has said comparable things before. But it has been such a widespread characterisation of religious argumentation — sometimes justly so characterised — that it was the form in which it came to me. We can be too simplistic in our responses to religion, and, while it may be that not everyone needs to explore the arguments of philosophical theology in depth, it is something that has been done by many atheists, and this argumentation needs to be better known. What it does show is that sometimes atheist argument is lacking in sophistication, and it is important to know that there is very sophisticated atheist argumentation available, which is why I referred to Martin, Mackie and Nielsen. Flew’s God and Philosophy is also highly recommended. And of course there are many others. While I do not think much of Alvin Plantinga’s arguments, especially his idea of god being properly basic (in his language), it is important, notwithstanding, that atheists be alive to the real arguments of philosophical theology, because, as Flew found out (though I still think he was taken advantage of when he was at his weakest), it is always possible that considerations can arise which may lead one to change one’s mind. It may be thought impossible, since these arguments would not be scientific ones, that such should be the case, but I do still insist that there are realms of knowledge that are not beholden to the scientific method. That is one issue that I need to explore further.

One other thing, before I leave this short post to its own devices, is to point out that, in one instance, Jerry Coyne is simply wrong. Jerry says this:

Well, science can’t tell us what we ought to value, for that’s a subjective judgment. But it can help us determine what we do value, simply by surveying people or examining their behavior.

This still won’t get him to values, however. Indeed, he had just said something about Enlightenment values. Indeed, the answer, he suggests is

science combined with humanism, a humanism that comes from adopting Enlightenment values.

Of course, we know that, were we to examine what people value, many would not necessarily be seen adopting Enlightenment values; and, while I think there are good reasons for adopting Enlightenment values, I do think we need to show that they  are to be preferred to other values, religious values, the perfect society as Islam or Christianity envisage it, for example. I think these are things that we can know, in a fairly straightforward sense of knowing that is not at the same time scientific.

I should mention one other thing… (see, this is how things go for me!). Jerry mentions my remarks about the structure provided by the religions, mainly, the national churches of Scandinavia. I say this is something that is an aspect of Scandinavian culture, even when people don’t notice. It’s the background to a whole lot of things that people do, even though it may not be referred to by many people in Scandinavian society. All I am saying — and I want to stress this, lest there be a misunderstanding here — is that I am talking about the socio-cultural background to our activities. It’s a point made by Michel Onfray in his <I>Atheist Manifesto</I>. We don’t get away from the epistemology and ontology of religion simply by giving up our personal belief, because the epistemology and ontology of religion are deeply embedded in most cultures, whether we notice this or not. A completely godless culture is something completely unknown, so at least it is not obvious that the eradication of religion would bring about a better state of things than before. This is something that I hope we would be modest about, since it is really unexplored territory. But with that, I will leave things, and come back to these issues at a later date. I am trying to read through Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West and Said’s Orientalism. Whether this produces anything of value you will just have to wait and see.

Oh yes, and one thing more (added later): I do not speak in terms of “ways of knowing.” That, I think, is the wrong way to frame this issue. There are different methodologies, but these do not constitute ways of knowing. To know something we must be able to provide reasons or evidence for our beliefs. Sometimes the reasoning will be scientific, but at other times we may use different types of reasoning. In morality, for example (and this I understand imperfectly for now), there are ways of reasoning to fairly stable moral conclusions that depend upon providing reasons for action, which may have to take empirical aspects of being human into consideration, but are not determined by that evidence. But this is just a blank cheque for now.

On not replacing one system of doctrines with another

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I began writing this as a response on the previous post, but it kept getting longer and longer, and so, in the end, it needed to find more space in which to stretch its wings, and to breathe more freely. So, here it is as a post, though bearing the stamp of its lowly origin.

I won’t go into the detail of the arguments (or non-arguments) presented in this thread. That was not the focus of my concern, which remains even when everything said here has been said. Certainly, for example, to say that Mozart is a greater composer than Hummel requires evidence, and the people who would be the best judge of what constitutes evidence in this case would not be scientists, but experts in music, composition, direction, performance, and appreciation. I don’t think that a study of the structure of music as related to brain structure or response would tell us very much. I may be quite wrong about this, but I think there is more going on here than simply those things discoverable by science. And that is precisely my problem with what I am here calling “scientism.” It is, basically, a “faith” position, since it is not in fact based, and cannot, in the nature of the case, be based on empirical evidence, for it is, essentially, a meta-claim about such evidence, and the belief that only those beliefs based on the kind of evidence in question constitute knowledge.

With this doctrinaire position I disagree, and I disagree with it because it is too narrow an understanding of what we may know, as the result of which the new atheism seems to me increasingly to lack depth. Unwilling to acknowledge different fields of knowledge and their importance to the human project, it impoverishes the human project by making rational discussion about it impossible. Aesthetic and moral knowledge, for instance, are simply ruled out by fiat. It may be, in the end, that we will have to acknowledge that there is no such knowledge, but it won’t do to rule it out on the principle that science alone works. Of course science works, but so, I think, do philosophy, music and literary criticism, moral analysis, and so on. If I did not think so, it would be a bit foolish of me to continue to speak about the rights of those who are suffering intolerably to receive help in dying. I believe this is an objective right that people have that is not being recognised by those who oppose assisted dying, mainly on religious grounds. I see nothing in science that can support this claim, and it makes a mockery of most humanistic disciplines to suggest that all we can know is comprised of the propositions of science. I see no reason to believe that, and I don’t think anyone has satisfactorily explained why knowledge claims should be so limited. And while I think that Persto is quite right to try to defend the rationality of religious belief, which does not necessarily depend upon scientific evidence, I do think that, in the end, all such attempts fail. I will not go into detail here, but one of the central problems for religious argumentation is to delimit what it is that “arguments for the existence of god” set out to prove, for no one has, so far, given a reasonable account of what a god might be. Indeed, to the extent that philosophical theologians are thrown back upon the expedient of apophaticism, they effectively abandon the claim that such propositions (i) make any sense, (ii) provide enough content to give substance to the arguments for the existence of the indescribable and ineffable being at the heart of the religious project. This is my reason for pointing beyond the popular new atheists to the more substantial philosophical works in which the case for the existence of a god or gods is more carefully and comprehensively argued. There are all sorts of very sophisticated works that do this, and it is a pity that people should instead base themselves on much less sophisticated argumentation, about which questions have been justly raised. While it may be true, as Pinkagendist says, that

Every religion that has proposed a god thus far has failed miserably in proving the alleged divinity of their alleged god,

the miserable failure involved takes some showing, and cannot simply be dismissed carelessly as some people are wont to do.

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How Several Misunderstandings led Megan Hodder to Faith

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The Catholic Herald recently published an essay by a newly minted Catholic, a refugee from the new atheism. It is interesting to reflect that a girl, who was 8 at the time of 9/11 – that’s 9th September 2001, folks – now a young woman of 20 or 21, should be able to say:

I grew up in a culture that has largely turned its back on faith. It’s why I was able to drift through life with my ill-conceived atheism going unchallenged, and at least partly explains the sheer extent of the popular support for the New Atheists …

What is remarkable is that someone so young should already think of herself as “drifting through life,” which is, by her own account, not what she was doing. She was, in fact, by her own testimony, avidly reading (the adverb is hers) “Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, whose ideas were sufficiently similar to mine that I could push any uncertainties I had to the back of my mind.” Scarcely an account of someone simply drifting through life. The unfortunate part is that she read Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens for certainty, for doctrine, and did not find it, though it was “atheist orthodoxy” that drove her to faith. Indeed, she seems, by all accounts, to have been searching for faith all along, for something that she could believe with all her heart. She didn’t seem to notice that the negative argument upon which she set such store, is only the fringe of the garment of a more robust humanism. She may be right. Perhaps the new atheists, in their drive to defeat the powers of religion, made it seem that religion can be demolished with a few cursory arguments, and when you stack those arguments up against an apologetics that began within a few generations of Jesus’ death, it’s hard to think of those arguments as a sufficient basis for a life.

Megan says, at one point, that she read Ratzinger’s Regensburg address, and that she expected to find in it the kind of “bigotry and illogicality that would vindicate my atheism.” This in itself is astonishing, and discouraging. Perhaps it indicates that she perceived a tone in the new atheism that is carping and superficial, and some of the criticisms of religion that I have heard are indeed just that, as though religion, which has been around for thousands of years, can simply be dismissed without intellectual sophistication at all, simly by a few contemptuous waves of a dialectical wand. But religion is much more robust than that, and it is unfortunate that the custom has arisen of treating religious thought as simply pointless hand waving. For when you are inside the religious bubble of certainty, everything makes perfect sense, as Megan Hodder discovered. Not only that, but it can be, in its more comprehensively rational form, distressingly coherent. One of the things that I found out, as a priest, was that, in order to question faith, to address questions to faith in the context of the faith community, you had to know an awful lot, and you had to keep one step ahead of the most intellectually adventurous of your parishioners. This is largely the reason why a lot of young priests who have learned many of the liberal details of biblical history and hermeneutics, along with a smattering of revisionist theology, when they get out into their first parish, and find that if they were to “tell all” their parishioners would think them irreligious, possibly not even Christian, they quickly retreat to their Sunday School faith in an almost instinctive move of self-preservation. And all their dreams of bringing about real change in the church comes to grief on the rocks of a defensive religious certainty.

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