When did Darwin become an integral part of Western culture? I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, and, at least in my own recollection, I do not remember ever having heard of Darwin. Of course, I studied biology in high school, and even took Biology 101 at university, but still I do not remember Darwin. Indeed, I found biology so crushingly boring, because it seemed to be just a matter of discrete facts about living things — fascinating, yet unrelated. There was no unifying principle, as I recall it now. Perhaps I was not paying attention, but I do not now remember that Darwin impinged on my consciousness as a towering figure. He did not register at all on my radar screen. I did not read the Origin until I was nearly sixty, and nothing has been the same since. Why was this not required of me before? Besides being a classic of science, it is a classic of English literature, but in my course on 19th century literature, Darwin was never mentioned. I read Carlyle and Wordsworth, Thomas Arnold and Coleridge, George Elliot and Newman, but not Darwin.
Albert Mohler, the nemesis of Biologos, was recently a guest columnist for the Christian Post, and yesterday published a piece entitled “The New Atheism and the Dogma of Darwinism.” It’s a pretty light-weight piece of yellow journalism, but he does get one thing right. Darwinism is undoubtedly the beginning of the end for religion. That’s why he keeps worrying it like a terrier. And that’s perhaps why, in my religious school, Darwin (so far as I can recall) was never even mentioned. Of course, like any school-boy growing up in the glories of the Himalayas, who would rather have been out hiking in the mountains of my childhood, perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. However, given the importance of Darwin for biology, it shouldn’t have been possible for me not to have heard, even if I had not been paying close attention. It is a tribute to the centrality of Darwin to biology that not even the Albert Mohlers of this world can ignore Darwin’s centrality and importance any more.
But then, of course, he misses the point. And that’s why one simply has to disagree with Aikin and Talisse over at 3 Quarks Daily. They have a post with a lot of falderal about how we need to respect believers, and that if the New Atheism means disrespect of religious believers, then they are not New Athiests in that sense:
… the distinction between being wrong and being stupid is essential to our cognitive lives. We affirm in Reasonable Atheism that we believe that distinctively religious beliefs are false, and that religious believers are therefore wrong. Yet having false beliefs does not make one stupid; it simply makes one wrong.
And, of course, who can argue with this? I can, and I will. There is an important difference between believers. There are believers like Albert Mohler, who might know better if he tried, and there are believers like the people who hang on Albert Mohler’s words of a Sunday morning. We have to respect many of the latter, because they trust Albert Mohler, and they are being misled by him. But Albert Mohler does not deserve our respect. He’s not just wrong, he’s culpably wrong, even if he is not stupid. And he needs to be held to account.
There is a fundamental dishonesty built into religion. It comes out clearly in John Shook’s book, The God Debates, that I am reading just now. John Shook thinks that it is incumbent upon atheists to join in the God debates, to learn as much as we can about religion and its argumentation so that we can join in the debates at a reasonably high level of sophistication. This I am willing to do, because it amuses me, but when you come upon things like the following, one has to admit that the argument is about air (and I apologise beforehand for quoting at such length):
There are two basic ways to design nonexistence proofs. The “dialectical nonexistence proof’ argues that two or more characteristics of a specific god are logically incompatible. A definition of something having logically incompatible characteristics can only be the definition of a necessarily nonexistent entity. Successful dialectical nonexistence proofs can show that specific kinds of gods cannot exist. For example, many Christians believe both that god is perfect and that god can suffer along with us. Maybe these two characteristics are contradictory. Figuring out how a perfect being can suffer requires conceptual refinements to god to avoid the negative verdict of a dialectical nonexistence proof. And even if these refinements go badly and one characteristic of god must go, theology can revise its conception of god. Avoiding dialectical nonexistence proofs is, from a flexible theology’s point of view, just another way for humanity to learn more about god.
This is not a caricature. This is the way theologians actually go to work. For example, Chapter 4 (“Divine Agency, Remodeled”) of Marilyn McCord Adams’ book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, is devoted to precisely this process of redefining God in such a way as to accommodate both God’s goodness and the manifest evils of the world. It is simply preposterous to suggest that this is an appropriate procedure for learning anything about anything. It’s a bit like making the crime fit the punishment, rather than the other way about.
So it is not surprising to find that Albert Mohler does not ask the question: Is the theory of evolution true? For it simply cannot be. He already knows the truth, and the truth that he knows is contradicted by the facts. So… what? The facts must be wrong! But he doesn’t recognise that this is what he is doing. He thinks, for example, that Dawkins’ reference to Holocaust denial in The Greatest Show on Earth is really a kind of moral disapproval:
As Richard Dawkins has recently argued, they believe that disbelief in evolution should be considered as intellectually disrespectable and reprehensible as denial of the Holocaust.
Of course, it is a kind of moral disapproval, for denying plain facts when they are staring you in the face is dishonest, and perhaps Dawkins did take a risk that his analogy would be misunderstood, since the Holocaust has become entangled with the guilty conscience of Christianity over its long history of antisemitism. But if Mohler had read carefully he would have seen that Dawkins’ use of the Holocaust is about acknowledging the plain facts of history, not about the moral faults of racism and antisemitism.
Of course, Mohler can’t see that, because he has other fish to fry, and he stares right through the facts to the “dogma” that he thinks lies behind the identification of those facts. And he does this, not because he can’t reason, or because he’s stupid, but because he’s …, well, what? Here’s where the hesitations begin, and people like Aikin and Talisse begin talking about respect. But what is there to respect in Mohler’s quite asinine attack on evolution? Certainly, it’s based on his religious beliefs, but why should we respect either him or his beliefs if he is, like the Holocaust denier, simply unwilling to accept what is true? Being wrong might not make Mohler stupid, but it does say something about his integrity — or lack thereof. If reasonable atheism, in Aikin and Talisse’s terms, means that we have to respect this man as a believer, then reasonable atheism is an ass.
The New Atheism says that there is no excuse for this nonsense. There is no excuse for intelligent people, who might know the truth, bandying about with falsehoods just to protect a favoured belief. Mohler is not only wrong, he is deliberately wrong. He may not be stupid, but he is dishonest. And this deserves no respect. Not only does it deserve our contempt, it deserves to be witheringly criticised. It is both dishonest and dangerous. Mohler might inform himself of the truth, but he refuses to do so for ideological reasons. But he also conveys his anti-intellectual values to those who consider him a religious authority.
In addition, Mohler goes even further. He tells us that
[Sam] Harris has argued that belief in God is such a danger to human civilization that religious liberty should be denied in order that science might reign supreme as the intellectual foundation of human society.
Of course, this is simply false. Sam Harris says no such thing. He does believe — and this is a defining feature of the New Atheism, in my view — that religion is dangerous. And he holds, appropriately, that religion does not deserve a place, as religion, in the public square. The religious beliefs of some should not govern what others may or may not do. The Roman Catholic Church is known to oppose abortion in any form. It believes that the conceptus/blastocyst/embryo/foetus has as just as much right to live as an adult human being who has a life with hopes, fears, plans, projects, self-regard and understanding, and all the other things that characterise adult human beings. This, with considerable justice, strikes others as ridiculous. To choose between a woman and the foetus growing inside her is a simple choice. The woman is more important than the foetus. If the church disagrees, it has a right to try to convince women of the wrongness of choosing abortion. It has no right to impose this choice on anyone. The same goes, in my judgement, for those at the end of life, or those suffering from degenerative conditions or disabilities that make life intolerable for them. They should be able to choose, when life is going disastrously wrong, that they want to bring their lives to an end.
Religions have consequences for other people, often completely unacceptable ones, and for this reason they do not deserve our respect. In fact, since they are so often dangerous, religions deserve our opposition. That does not mean that we should disrespect religious believers, so long as their religion is not such as to imply consequences for others that others have a right to reject. But as soon as religious believers break through this barrier into the public world, and begin to make claims that impose burdens on others who do not share the beliefs of believers, then believers deserve nothing but contempt.
When the pope rails against what he thinks of as modern relativism, then he deserves our contempt. When he seeks to impose burdens on people who do not share his particular outlook on the world, filtered as it is through his church’s lust for power, then we need to call him up short and tell him that he is entitled to his views, but he has no right to expect others to share his beliefs or his prejudices, and it is wrong of him to try to influence the public life of nations by the use of his quasi-state power. In fact, that is a good reason for denying the Vatican its pretended statehood.
But then came Darwin…. And Darwin changed everything. It is not true, as Mohler suggests, that before Darwin there was no coherent atheist position. It is true that David Hume was stumped when it came to the question of apparent design in the life world. But he was also ready to say — and with every show of reason — that the design seemed very faulty:
Look round this universe What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. but inspect a litle more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children. [Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Kemp Smith edition, Bobbs-Merrill, 211 (Part X)]
This could easily have been written after Darwin, but it was written many years before. Darwin explained why the world was as cruel as, in Hume’s observation, it seemed to be. And if Hume didn’t provide the basis for being a fulfilled atheist, then Darwin certainly did. And it is simply a shallow refusal to look and see that allows Mohler to spend so much time in wanton irrelevancies. This man is not to be respected. He is both wrong and foolish.
________________
Jerry Coyne addresses Aikin and Talisse’s post from a completely different angle over at Why Evolution is True. It’s really worth reading. We were doing this independently of each other, but more and more we seem to be on the same wave length. I am pleased to find myself in such exalted company.
Re Holocaust comparisons: Modulo the fact that I haven’t read the Mohler piece except in blog excerpts, and don’t know what Dawkins passage he’s referring to, I’m inclined to grant him half a point on this one. To my mind, the cultural status of the Holocaust as a modern icon of supreme evil makes it impossible to invoke it as “only” an example of historical denialism. The Holocaust deniers aren’t just another silly bunch of fruitcakes like 911 Troofers or JFK conspiracy theorists, they are enablers and post-facto participants in that evil, and you can’t invoke the Holocaust without dragging in those other associations. IMHO, it’s naive to claim that one can compare creationists (or any other group) to Holocaust deniers, while denying that one is smearing them by association. There are some places you Just Don’t Go.
Re your main point: I used to think there was a clear distinction between “Lying Charlatan” and “Sincerely Mistaken”, that the epithet “liar” should be reserved for the former, and that the standard of proof should be fairly high. Then I discovered Usenet, specifically talk.origins, and started to seriously engage with creationists — a situation where familiarity definitely breeds contempt! I realized that between those two categories lies a huge grey area of self-deception. So while the rank-and-file in the pews probably deserve our forbearance as victims of the scam, those who actively promote it pretty universally deserve the disrespectful title “Liar” — they either know they’re fibbing, or they damn well ought to know (because they are demonstrably and obviously wrong), and if they don’t it’s because they haven’t done the most elementary due diligence on the claims they make. There is, to my mind, little or no moral distinction between lying consciously and lying by deliberate ignorance. (I like to call the latter “ignorance with malice aforethought”).
I agree to a point about the issue of Holocaust denial (HD). However, HD is about something that is massively supported by known facts and so is without excuse. The same can be said about evolution. There is simply no reason to doubt it. It is massively supported, and so it takes something like the prejudices involved in HD to doubt it. I aknowledge, however, as I say, that it was a risky analogy.
“There are believers like Albert Mohler, who might know better if he tried, and there are believers like the people who hang on Albert Mohler’s words of a Sunday morning. We have to respect many of the latter, because they trust Albert Mohler, and they are being misled by him. But Albert Mohler does not deserve our respect.”
Is it really fair to draw the respect distinction between people like Mohler and those in the pews? The average person doesn’t write books or blog about creationism but he/she lives in influential relationship to others. Anyone with modest intelligence can easily get to the truth about evolution. Is, for instance, a mother who reads creationist stories to her child really of a different category?
The overwhelming evidence for evolution is why Biologos molds their brand of apologetics around it. They realize that even with the poor coverage of evolution in US schools, many will discover it on their own and reel from the prehistoric thought in Genesis. Many believers or nonbelievers who grew up in a more liberal tradition, can’t see how devastating evolution is to evangelical Christianity. Albert Mohler is really playing into the New Atheist’s hands by continuing to tie anti-evolution to Christian belief.
Yes, Ken, I think she is. Having been someone who led a Christian congregation for years, and became quite familiar with the tactics used in churches to keep people within its thrall, I think the kind of credulity shown by the ordinary person in the pews is not only excusable, it’s almost inevitable. Religions are structured like that and for that purpose. It may be that a person of modest intelligence can easily get the truth about evolution, but they won’t, because a religion is an ideology (in the bad sense). It’s whole purpose is to keep itself in being. In that sense it’s an evolutionary phenomenon. It unfailingly seeks out the effective meme, and this keeps people from wanting to find out the truth about evolution, because to do so would be to be unfaithful. And faith is the important thing. That stands between you and salvation. So, yes, I think it makes sense to draw a distinction between Mohler and the people he misleads — not all of them mind, because some of them do have the intellectual tools to address questions of truth and validity.
And even more than that. HD involves not just denial but falsification of data. David Irving faked his data. This would never have been known if he hadn’t sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel, making it both necessary and possible to fund Richard Evans (the great historian of the Third Reich) to check Irving’s references, a work that took many months and several graduate assistants. Irving did a lot of faking. This must never be overlooked. He’s not a guy with a sincere difference of opinion or interpretation. He’s a guy who faked his evidence.
And we can all say that, with impunity from the UK libel laws, because it’s what a judge ruled in a UK court. It’s the official libel-proof truth.
One of my all time favourite books, Richard Evans’ Lying for Hitler. Excellent intro to philosophy of history.
Thanks for responding Eric. My father is a retired pentecostal minister and I was as well for about the first decade of my working life. My take is that the congregants were not as passive as you are picturing. Perhaps the difference was related to sociological standing since Pentecostalism was fighting out from the back streets.
But in any event, people are morally responsible for the decisions they make are they not? If someone is bamboozled by creationism, inerrancy and such, then it is easily corrected (in regard to information, not emotions but that’s true for all adherents) if one wants to find the truth. This is so whether or not the individual holds a leadership position. And again, almost all people hold influence of some sort.
Sure, we will spend more time on Mohler than Sally Sunday but that is simply a tactical decision. I don’t think I’m willing to give pew-sitters a free walk of any sort.
I also think that dominance deception spreads out along a continuum rather than being two sided.
I think I agree with Eric’s point.
Moreover, Dawkins needed real example of denialism and of something denied that had the same significance and importance as evolution in the history of humankind.
His imaginary “Roman Empire denialism” was just too lightweight for his purposes.
He was compelled to take that risk.
I certainly do feel contempt for Albert Mohler and der Pöpenführer for their immoral beliefs and their attempts to enforce their twisted values on others, but I must admit that my contempt is mixed with a certain amount of pity. Even the smartest people can and do build themselves into intellectual and ideological traps from which they cannot escape: As Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola discovered during research for their paper “Preachers who are not Believers”, those who build a professional and social and family life around faith feel trapped by a web of obligations to play out their role even though they don’t believe. What else are they going to do for a living? How are they going to explain their non-belief to everyone in their lives?
I am not, of course, suggesting that Mohler does not genuinely believe. Rather, I am saying that I can recognize how much psychological pressure believers put on themselves to simply NOT THINK ABOUT IT — not honestly, not critically — especially when they adopt an increasingly public leadership role in a religious community. By the time a man (and it’s almost always men, of course) rises to a high position in church leadership, his intellectual ability to recognize and honestly assess truth and falsehood is quite beside the point, because it is so completely buried under his network of emotional and social commitments. And even if his epistemological honesty could be pulled free from the layers of psychological forces arrayed against it, the strength of character required to admit the specious character of the beliefs he has professed and actively spread throughout his career — even to himself, let alone to anyone else — would be extraordinary. You of all people shouldn’t forget what a difficult journey that can be, Eric. You are extraordinary.
Intellectual honesty is hard for everyone, but it only gets harder the longer you go without it in your life, and the more you build your life around the very opposite of intellectual honesty, faith. I think one of the great achievements of the New Atheist movement is to offer more and more role models for the rewards of the harder road, and to provide a sort of social safe haven for those who feel boxed in by their own history of intellectual dishonesty. The loud and proud existence of lots of people who lead perfectly happy and productive lives despite having rejected the reassuring comforts of faith must make it at least somewhat easier for believers who’ve painted themselves into the intellectual corner of faith to shrug and say, “Hey, those people in the next room seem to be having fun! I could just walk out of this corner I’ve painted myself into. So I get some paint on my shoes. So what?”
If someone like Albert Mohler had the courage to actually question his convictions instead of clinging to them all the more rigidly in the face of challenges, I’d gladly forget my contempt, forgive his intellectually disreputable past, and welcome him as a fellow traveler on the hard road of intellectual integrity.
But that ain’t gonna happen.
Well, fair enough Ken. But I think you must see the point that The Philosophical Primate is making (and this about pastors and such):
It’s difficult for everyone caught up in the trammels of religion, but it is doubly difficult for people in the pews, for they are caught in a social web that is very difficult to escape, and they are constantly given every reason to stick to the path so clearly laid out for them. This is different to people like Mohler who not only teaches this stuff to people on Sunday morning, but actually goes out of his way to become a public voice. This is really contemptible, because he, like David Irving in relation to the Holocaust, has the ability to inform himself of the truth, and he does not do it. He does not merely overvalue the evidence as Aikin and Talisse suggest. He is into denialism in a big way. It is one thing to overvalue evidence. It is another thing to deny the force of the evidence that there is. So, while you are not willing to cut any slack for the people in the pews, I think they deserve some respect, so long as they go about their lives with some dignity and respect for others.
man, you are one of the best writers in the Gnu blogosphere.
I really love your essays … you make the internet worth living.
I have a question.
Isn’t it true that many of the things that religious people are concerned about (for instance on Mohler’s site, he talks about MTV, Porn AND Darwin) … are worth caring about?
Now I am aware that in every age, the religious decry the moral decay around them, and also that every age the moral condition seems to improve, and not because people take the bible more seriously.
However, I’m raising two little girls (5&8) and I have to say, that some of Molher’s ideas about “culture” are compelling. There does seem to be an ever increasing commercialization of sex, ever more graphic and ever more targeted in ever more specific ways at kids.
I don’t know if regulation is a cure, but it is hard to understand how silence is either.
Strangely, you seldom seem to hear the Gnu atheism talking about areas where they agree with the social concerns of the religious. Sam Harris, in his “Moral Landscape” talk has this image where he does actually acknowledge this, he has a photo of a “magazine rack” that can be observed in any gas station, and he contrasts this to an image of women in burkas.
He acknowledges the disgust that our modern commercial expression rightly triggers among conservatives … but do we ever discuss where the lines are on that side of the spectrum?
See what I’m asking here? Do you have any thoughts about this?
Yours,
Perplexed in the west.
I am very much taken with this point:
I have thought about this for many years, and I believe that churches are responsible for clergy after a certain number of years in ministry, if those clergy “lose their faith.” They should certainly be responsible for any period of retraining that is necessary, and, at some point, even for guarnateed income. I think this should be a legal responsibility. As I approached the end of my own ministry, and as doubts and questions grew stronger, it was certainly a very issue with me.
Many people who become clergy have been indoctrinated with religious beliefs since childhood. They are encouraged to think about clergy in respectful ways. It is, in fact, a considerable sacrifice to become a minsiter or priest. With my education I could have earned a lot more than I did as a priest. And so ministry is very often looked upon as a signal expression of one’s Christian vocation. It may not seem so at the time, but it includes a sacrifice of intellect too, and theological schools are designed to look like institutions of higher learning, so the counterfactual nature of the commitment is never even explored. Apologetics is not a serious look at doubt. In fact, while religious doubt may be real epistemological doubt, the hot-house environment of theological training is designed to discourage this kind of questioning. And when those clergy get out into the churches they play the same game, the game of educated persons conveying knowledge to those they teach. It is a tightly structured sham.
But it is precisely this sham aspect that should require the church to take responsibility for those who have taken a look behind the magic curtain, and have seen the gears move. I would like to see this tried out in court. I wonder if it has any substance?
Yes about Lying for Hitler. Did you know that Evans was one of the very first friends o’B&W? In the sense that when I brazenly asked if I could publish something of his he re-worked a talk he’d given and sent it to me. This was when B&W hadn’t even properly started yet; it was incredibly obliging and generous of him. His In Defense of History was one of the background books for B&W – one of the sources of my interest in a certain kind of academic bullshit and its consequences.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2002/postmodernism-and-history/
That pretty much describes Karl Giberson, by his own admission.
I think that Mohler is digging a fairly deep hole for himself here.
Not only is the biological theory of evolution in absolutely no jeopardy (not now, not ever), even if some monumental new finding were to come forth, it would not in any way support Mohler’s fairy story of instant creation, a 6000-year-old universe, and a petulant invisible giant poofing us into existence with magic words. Einstein’s relativity theory did not replace Newtonian gravitation, it added to it. The “next” biological theory will do the same with evolution (indeed, “Darwinism”, if it ever existed, has already been replaced with the modern synthesis).
I, for one, think that this obsession with Darwin is perhaps the Platonic Ideal of a strawman. It is simply trivially not true that atheism = Darwin or vice versa.
And I’m quite positive that even Michael Behe does not deny common descent, but has written quite clearly about it. Nor do Francis Collins or Kenneth Miller. If these three (or even Dobzhansky) can agree on the fundamental aspects of modern biology and retain their faith, how many more feet of hole does that put Mohler in?
I know many atheists, including many scientist-atheists, and to a person not one of them has defined their deconversion in terms of a full understanding of the implications of modern biology.
It’s biblical inerrancy that’s at stake here, and it’s not merely the biological sciences that contribute to Mohler’s hole. It’s cosmology, geology, anthropology, chemistry, Newtonian physics, quantum physics, and all the rest.
If we were to grant Mohler any quarter in the arena of biology (not that we need to), would his next demand be that we give up our heliocentric model? That we deny the movement of the Earth (contra 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1, Isaiah 45:18, and all the rest)? Are we to change our biology texts and reclassify bats as birds in order to comport with Leviticus and Deuteronomy? Do we need to change our counting system so that insects have only four limbs, a la Leviticus (again)? How deep does this hole need to be before magma starts rising up from it?
And, of course, once again we are faced with someone who demands that we respect religion as a “different way of knowing”, who then demonstrates that such a “different way” is nothing more than lies built on lies built on error built on more lies. It’s turtles all the way down.
Some of us do. Harry Brighouse made a similar point years ago at Crooked Timber (I’m pretty sure it was Harry…). It’s always stuck in my mind.
I do emphatically hate all the pimping of women on magazine covers, for feminist reasons, not religious ones – but it is true that not a few fellow atheists tell me that kind of hatred is anti-sex and puritanical etc etc; that may be one reason I don’t talk about it more. I’m pretty sure it is. It gets me down.
(Not that you were asking me.)
Well, Perplexed, thanks for the vote of confidence.
Regarding your other points. Yes, I have some thoughts about this. In fact, I suspect that the kind of sexplosion that is taking place now, especially on the internet, is probably quite destructive. And there are no doubt other things of social concern that would be worth raising. So, yes, I do have concern about sexploitation. I’m afraid it may cheapen men’s understanding of women, and in that sense it is inexcusable. But which came first? The misogyny or the sexploitation. I think it’s the misogyny, and that is pretty Christian, pretty religious all round, when you think about it.
However, what’s the solution? I grew up in a straitlaced society, so straitlaced that I didn’t know what sex was about until I was nearly an adult — no, really, fully an adult. No idea whatsoever. I had the feelings, but all I knew was that, in my society, these things were forbidden, even though I didn’t know what was forbidden about them or why. But I knew, instinctively, even though no one told me, that men were more important than women, and that men were supposed to work and women were supposed to stay home and keep house. I can still remember the first female news broadcaster that I heard on CBC, sometime in the 60s. I almost drove off the road!
So, Mohler’s moral concerns may be real, but I have to wonder whether his Christian morality is a solution to them or a cause of the problems he’s concerned about. I really do.
When the Jews in Europe were given the right to prosper just like everyone else, there was a veritable explosion of creativity and self-expression. When Christians were forced to take the lid off their society, what happened? An explosion of sexual expression and pornography, yes, but also equality for women, recognition and acceptance of gay people, and other real benefits. Yes, we should be concerned, but that doesn’t mean that Christianity has a solution to it. It’s part of the problem. I don’t know what is going to take it’s place, and it may take some time to work out the worst excesses (but there will always be excesses, always were), but this doesn’t mean that society today is not a better place for your daughters to grow up in. Look around. There are all sorts of success stories. Sure, they’ll probably be more casual about sex than their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, but is this a bad thing? They’ll also be more confident, more sure of their place in the world. Freedom really is a great value.
I do think, however, that there is an important place for moral education in school — for moral and ethical philosophy, for examining the questions of the best way to live, and the right things to do. In excluding religion from the classroom — which was necessary and desirable — we excluded important issues that some people still think are religious. Well, they’re not, and we need to get that dimension back into the classroom. That would be an important contribution that the New Atheism could make, because, after all, at the very bottom of it all, is philosophy and science. Teaching philosophy and especially its moral and ethical aspects (as Dworkin understands these in his new book Justice for Hedgehogs) is vital.
Oh, I am so pleased that you answered Ophelia. I wanted to say precisely what you are saying, but didn’t know how to without sounding puritanical and anti-sex.
The ancient Greeks considered it to be part of growing up for a young boy to be “tutored” by an older man — and such tutoring absolutely involved sexual contact between the two.
In Roman times, sex slavery was common. It was routine for both young boys and girls to be used in this manner.
In ancient Palestine (and many other places), wealth was demonstrated by the number of wives and concubines one could keep.
In Victorian times, young girls were routinely “deflowered” and then were considered “ruined”, with no prospects other than the brothel — of which there was no shortage. This was somewhat of a sport for the “gentlemen” of that era.
Even in the US, in New York State as late as the year 1900, the age of consent was 10. I just finished a biography of Irving Berlin, who in the early 1900s made his living among the multitude of brothels in New York’s Bowery district.
In many times and most places, girls were nothing more than property to be bought and sold. Dowries and bride prices were more important than compatibility. Arranged marriages were more common than not.
You are longing for an era that never was, for a morality that never existed. Never.
I think Simon Blackburn’s essay “Religion and Respect” (Google for it) is a must-read for those of us trying to navigate these waters. One of the points he makes (Warning: imprecise memory at work here!) is that, taking “respect” as an assessment of moral virtue of the individual, we routinely allow for extenuating circumstances when making such assessments. And in the case of religion, both the cultural respect accorded the god-meme and the social pressures of the church community conspire to discourage the adherent from questioning their belief too hard. If that sounds too much like letting them off the hook, then let’s be honest: none of us are immune to these pressures. Some of us (like me, and our host) spent decades in this environment before seeing our way clear. I don’t think we were Bad People thereby.
So this is a pretty clear case for trying to separate respect for ideas from respect for persons. In particular (and here is where we sound the Gnu Atheist theme) that “cultural respect for the god-meme” needs to be torn down. While the infection is functionally benign in many individual cases, it nonetheless enables the many malignant cases.
I don’t know Mohler but I’ve worked with a number of people very much like him. My best guess is, in the dance between cognitive dissonance and faith, that they actually convince themselves. And they also have those dark moments of doubt. Those things are also true of the bench warmers.
Not only have I worked with these people when I was a minister but, in many ways, I met the enemy and he was me; and, there but for the grace of a non-authoritarian personality and some mysterious interpersonal inability to fight off reality go I. Why did I turn away and Mohler didn’t? I don’t know but I don’t think it’s because of some inherent evil on his part. Belief is complicated. To put it in his own language, ‘He has the witness of the Holy Spirit, so how can he not contend for the Faith?’
In no way am I willing to privilege him and we have to oppose him in the measure to which his position deserves. But in the end he only has one vote and so it’s important to also challenge the broad base for the responsibility they hold as well.
Quite so, Eric – so that discussion does get at least somewhat suppressed. You and I both are prepared to be seen as gnu in various ways, but puritanical and anti-sex? That’s a different kind of thing.
There is one place where Aikin and Talisse say flatly they think a particular theist argument is dishonest. They can do it when they try!
Ah, yes, but they take it away with the other hand. They want to play both sides of the street, and to be nasty but nice.
There is also a great need for sex education and how to prevent physical and mental abuse in relationships. The religious right tropes of “family values” are imbedded in rigid gender roles and female subservience. They are not solutions for any societal problems.
‘…for those who have taken a look behind the magic curtain , and have seen the gears move.’ That is a terrific analogy. In my rather checkered career, I was a lay preacher for a time. That, and my life with a preacher father, gave me opportunities to ‘see the gears move’, as well. And the less said about the politics in the theologic community, the better.
This post and this entire thread are terrific! Thanks, Eric, thanks all.
Oh man, there’s an awful lot of comment already that I need to read through!
I read Mohler’s piece yesterday. There’s an older one of his linked at the bottom, which got commented on by jerry and co when it was posted. It’s equally silly.
I also found some of the imbedded links hilarious. If you follow the linked words in the article, they take you to other Christian Post articles. I had to laugh when one of them, with a straight face, was an article about that teacher, Ritter, who’s suing over the teaching of evolution.
Taking in all the links and all the misinformation is actually kind of overwhelming.
Great! Thanks so much for the reference to his paper. How exciting to start B&W off with something like that! I’ve got it, reformatted it so that if doesn’t have all those jagged lines, and will soon have it on my Kindle. I’m getting so much to read that I won’t have enough days left in my life to do it! You must have read his Third Reich trilogy too, then. What a masterpiece of clarity and solid research. I wish I could write like he does. It’s such a strong, yet very clear style, very distinctive.
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As always, Eric, your posts are a joy to read. Your insights into the workings of religion are very welcome, especially as they come from knowledge of what goes on behind the curtain.
I would be very interested in posts on this topic: how religion is actually seen to work from those that drive and maintain the machinery. You have pulled back the cover; can you now introduce us to the greasy bits?
As you have led a congregation for many years, I was wondering what the procedure or process is for informing your congregants that you were wrong for all those years, and they have been misled, even if unintentionally? In the academic and professional worlds, if something that is fundamental to the profession is found to be wrong, there is a professional obligation to reverse the misinforming of the affected people.
Is there any mechanism at all for a religion to admit to their congregation that what they have been taught has been revised? For example, I don’t see any marked up bibles with paragraphs clearly identified as now determined to be metaphors or myths.
Well, mine is a special case in a way, since I spent the last few years — ten or more — finding it harder and harder to find good things to say about Christian belief. But I told people right up front that I would never tell them something that I did not believe. And as the years went by, one member of the congregation, a friend and retired priest, said to me, “You’d better slow down, or you’ll soon talk yourself out of a job.” But I had enough rope to take me to the end. I had to retire early in order to look after Elizabeth, so I got out, you might say, in time. But even then I was not disposed to give it all up. That happened when I read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech to the House of Lords in opposition to assisted dying. And I wrote a couple letters to him about this, which you can access somewhere on this site. Elizabeth (my wife) was very pleased that I had finally caught up to her. But, since the church was my community, it makes for a bit of a lonely life. Anyway, back to the subject. When we buried Elizabeth’s ashes, at her memorial service I spoke at some length about the way my faith had turned to dust. The archdeacon of the region was very concerned (I had been the archdeacon before her) and expressed some horror at what she heard me saying. But someone reassured her: “He’s not saying anything today that they haven’t heard from him before.” I don’t know about revisions, because there are no official revisions of creeds. But in the Anglican church at any rate there’s a fair degree of doctrinal fluidity, and it is possible to be very liberal indeed, as I was. And yes, of course, you can tell that to people. You have to be very sure of yourself in order to step outside the party line, and most clergy are not that sure of themselves, so they tend to keep what they say pretty orthodox. If you want to colour outside the lines, as I did, you do have to know quite a bit of theology, or people will trip you up. I have seen a number of clergy come to grief over the fact that they really did not know what they were talking about. However, it is possible, and I did it for many years. But then, I did spend a considerable time as a “professional student”, and that helps.
Thank you for your candid response.
I think I understand what you mean in saying the Anglican faith is one of the more liberal. I was raised Uniting Church in Australia so it was more NT than OT, if that is the right way to phrase it.
In any case, I am glad that you are writing now, and I hope that having a lot of blog-friends helps reduce the lonliness that can come with abandoning faith.
I like your point about learning that sex was dirty and wrong without ever being told, Eric. Even without receiving “the talk,” kids just pick it up from social cues. Notice the scare quotes to represent the forbidden and hushed nature of the subject.
Today the problems are unrealistic standards of sex, love, and beauty. Just to take the last one, count how many thick girls you see on TV in romantic roles or even as unromantic leads.
Talking more openly about what is beautiful and desirable would go a long way. So would normal-looking fashion icons on magazine covers, in movies, in porn, etc. It’s probably a fantasy, but what would our collective body image be like if every other actor on TV wasn’t wearing make up or had a visible, yet completely unremarked zit?
There should be more breathless scenes in the movies where the guy grabs the girl’s arm and whispers, “I love a girl with meat on her bones” wherein the object of desire actually fits the description. If there’s one thing I hate it’s teenagers on TV playing the part of “ugly nerd” when they could put Greek goddesses to shame.
Perhaps a suitable comparison for the denial of evolution would be the belief in a geocentric universe. Most people can get by from day to day believing it, and it was intellectually respectable before the advent of investigative science. There’s no moral implication of denying that the Earth goes round the Sun, apart from calling others wrong about it (or liars).
But the evidence that a small bit of investigation gets us, and the universal laws that form fundamental parts of our understanding of the world, make no sense if you try to cling to keeping the Earth at the centre of the universe.
It’s no coincidence that religions were a key part of resistance to the heliocentric view; that sprang from the same insistence that the Bible simply said the Sun moved, not the Earth, and so they had to defend that claim.
It was announced at graduation that the valedictorian of my Catholic high school was joining the priesthood. I was crushed. How could the smartest guy in our school throw his brain away like that? He could have accomplished some real good in the world otherwise.
Years later I learned that he had dropped out of seminary and came out of the closet as a homosexual. I was jubilant for him.
Why the present tense? You are part of a new community now. A vibrant, exuberant, and sane community that feels very lucky to count you as a member. You are surrounded by friends who won’t measure your worth by the quantity of fabulous dogma in which you can claim belief. Cheer and rejoice and let your heart be glad, for you, Eric, are now a Gnu!
Thank you, H.H, that’s very kind.
Secular concerns regarding sexuality about exploitation and pressure, gender equality and impossible standards are hardly atheist-specific concerns and are covered by other sources. Religiously inspired hatred of sexuality, however, is I suspect rarely shared by atheists.
Sexuality in society is one of those topics where rational people have real grievances, yet religion steals the show, complains for all the wrong reasons and often impedes real progress, and then tries to claim credit for any hard-won improvement by secularists. There is little common ground, only opposition followed by credit-theft.
I wonder how much of Mohler’s outrage at MTV’s Skins is due to exploitation and pressure – specifically by reinforcing the idea in teenager’s minds that the world revolves around sex and that if they want to be popular they have to have sex – or if it is just hatred of sex and lust in and of themselves – after all the glorification of teen sex and premarital sex is sure to encourage such activities and their acceptance.
Dawkins’s initial example in “The Greatest Show on Earth” is perhaps better: he imagines how frustrated a historian would be when constantly harassed by people who denied that Ancient Rome even existed.
Perhaps your schoolboy experiences of not hearing about Darwin (besides any religious background of your school) came about because the Darwinian Synthesis of the early-mid 20th century — in which Darwin’s natural selection and Mendel’s genetics were melded into a coherent explanation of evolution — hadn’t really percolated into school curricula yet, especially since the big puzzle-piece of the structure of DNA took until the 1950s to discover.
Since then, it’s been pretty hard to study biology without natural selection and genetics at the core of our understanding.
Apropos of the prior comments in this sub-thread…
Guess which state has the highest per capita porn consumption?
Hyper-religious, deeply misogynistic, conservative-to-the-core Utah.
Christianity holds no cures for misogyny, and the over-sexualization of our culture has many elements of misogyny in it — along with elements of long-term backlash against puritanical sexual repression.
This is not only true, but one of the most beautifully written short essays* I’ve read in a while.
(I would normally write “blog post” but that doesn’t do this justice.)
H.H., I daresay that that’s one reason Eric blogs about these matters—and (if I may be so bold) even more the reason for the recent posts that have led Jerry Coyne to say Eric’s “on a roll lately.” He sees a community forming around these ideals and is excited about the prospect.
Anyway, that’s true for me, ex-Christian apostate that I am. A healthy and vibrant community of Gnus is a tantalizing possibility.
“A vibrant community of gnus” does not sound like the correct collective pronoun..
Hmm – aha!
It is an implausibilty of gnus, according to the respected reference
Pub Quiz Help
Yes, there surely is a community – an implausibility of gnus! (that’s wonderful!) – forming, and growing, around Ophelia Benson’s, Jerry Coyne’s and Eric MacDonald’s blogs in particular, because the conversation is so thoughtful and stimulating. And I think this community that is coming into being constitutes a kind of strong retort to those who go on about how beliefs and believers must be ‘accommodated’; it really is no good to baby people, as Mooney and Nick (Matzke) seem to want to do for what they call ‘political’ ends – in fact, it is surely the accommodationists who are manifesting contempt for the religiously minded. The kind of serious, responsible discussion that appear on these three blogs in particular will do more to change minds in the long run than the panderers’ approach will.
@tim Harris: Yes, yes, yes. And I do like an Implausability of Gnus.
I am in constant cycle between these blogs, and PZs, and especially Russell Blackford’s and a little greta christina for good measure. The comments sections are getting better and better too.
Well done all and keep up the good work!
I agree wholeheartedly with Eamon Knight’s recommendation of Simon Blackburn’s essay “Religion and Respect,” from the anthology Philosophers Without Gods (Louise Antony, ed.).
For many years I have relied on I useful distinction — and I hope it’s an honest one — between, on the one hand, practicing respect for other human beings, case by case, and, on the other hand, respecting ideas. I’ll practice respect for human beings (and sometimes actually, sincerely respect them) because it’s good manners, and until they show me that they don’t deserve respect or don’t repay me in kind. But I’ll respect ideas only based on their merits. I can fairly call an idea nonsense, even dangerous nonsense, without disrespecting the proponent of that idea as a human being.
I went to a private HS and my biology instruction was much like Eric’s — a bunch of unrelated facts of life not particularly held together by anything. In fact, it was so bad that even though I loved science, I hated biology with a passion. Even in college I took Oceanography as a ‘biological science,’ even though it mostly geology in its course material… Anyway, except for that little bit in college, I wasn’t taught the Theory of Evolution.
And it certainly didn’t come from the home. My parents were religious-ish (it’s complicated) and never really mentioned evolution.
So, through HS and college, I’d vaguely heard about it as one of many, many things I had to learn in my Oceanography class. But it had no other mention in my life.
And that’s where most people, even someone as well educated as myself, tend to end. We have a vague knowledge of something that we were barely, if at all, exposed to in HS and/or a brief, one-week or so, exposure in college.
As an adult, I’ve gotten way beyond that. But most adults aren’t likely to do so. Not from lack of trying, but because there is no reason in the average person’s life to try. You have many, many competing interests for your time. And rehashing biology, usually taught quite poorly, is going to be a low priority for the vast majority of individuals in this life.
I kind of laugh at the whole issue. Since Paleolithic times humans have been creating sex toys, sex-art, pornography, etc. At each time we’ve a technological advance in communication, porn was one of the things that went with it. The only difference between us, today, and our caveman ancestors without the Judeo-Christian god-concept is we have better tools in the dissemination of porn. And, probably, a lot more hang-ups about it…
As for all the crap that surrounds it… It’s politics and Puritanism. It doesn’t cause rape, and we have solid studies, done by real academicians versus hacks with a point-of-view, to show that in may reduce rape by providing an outlet. It’s especially important to note that the two most relied upon studies by Malamuth that did find a correlation, failed to be verified in follow-up studies. And that Malamuth has, in later years, explored other possible correlations.
Not that it stops people from using his older studies in their pointless war on porn. It’s kind of like the vaccine nuts… There are some studies, conducted by UCLA School of Medicine, with the old whole-cell pertussis vaccination that indicated the vaccine might be more dangerous (SIDS) than the disease. But that vaccine was retired in 1996.
Yet you’ll still see the anti-vaxxers using that study.
As for the ‘degradation’ of porn, while there is an ‘objectification’ of women in porn, it reduces men (in porn) to an even lower status than the women in porn. That is to say, men (in porn) are the objects used to stimulate the women/situation. They are, literally, reduced to the role of animated ‘sex toy.’
This is why there are, maybe, ten ‘straight’ male porn stars with names people know. While there are hundred of female porn stars with names people know.
Anyway, there is more BS surrounding the porn industry than you can shake a stick at.
And long before I worry about ‘degradation’ to my two daughters from porn, I will worry about ‘degradation’ of my two daughters from our Judeo-Christian society which is built, regardless of porn and its effects, on the degradation and subservience of women by and to men. Porn isn’t even worthy of much concern, it’s a side-issue of no real merit.
I first encountered Mohler through an address that Karl Giberson had transcribed (writing inherent every time Mohler said inerrant, which speaks volumes!). It’s clear that Mohler has a solid grasp of evolutionary theory and the indisputable evidence for it. He purposefully rejects it in favor of old earth creationism. You, literally, could not reason with him because, at the cognitive level, he already agrees with you. So, no, respect under those circumstances would be meaningless. And I suspect there’s a lot of folks like that. It isn’t that they don’t understand evolution. It’s that they know and understanding of evolution corrodes theism.
Several commenters have despaired of their biology education, and the lack of exposure to evolutionary theory. As a discipline, Biology itself evolved out of three threads: Natural History, Physiology and Microbiology in the 19th century, then Genetics in the 20th. For most of the last 150 years, only those from the first and last threads really cared about Darwin. If your general biology professor was a physiologist or microbiologist, she probably never really thought about it. Fortunately, that’s changed as everyone has come to realize that Thedosius Dobzhansky was right: Evolution is the principle that allows biology to make sense. And to be really, really interesting, despite the unfortunate experience of some.
Yes. Had this community been around a decade ago, it certainly would have eased and accelerated my progress in shedding lingering vestiges of theism/deism. I had a great deal of stuff (professional) on my plate, and nowhere handy to go in off-time for sustenance and encouragement. Wonderful! An Implausibility of Gnus!
I spent much of the period 1991-2005 hanging out on talk.origins, and it got to be a bit of a community, to the extent that there would often be Howlerfests arranged in various places, where groups of regulars would get together in meatspace (usually this involved a visit to a science museum, followed by consumption of fermented beverages). It wasn’t an atheist community per se (that was next door at alt.atheism) as many of the regulars (including myself, for much of that period) were moderate Christians of one stripe or another, but it was definitely a skeptical and intellectual one. I learned a lot about science and philosophy, and it certainly influenced by eventual apostasy, just by forcing me to think through the issues.
Well, I prefer a flanders-and-swann of Gnus, but I’m wierd
.
BTW: I trust that everyone is quite clear on the correct pronunciation? Ie: the “G” in not silent (which is true whether you take the software project, or the English music-hall duo, as your source for the term).
That’s not actually so: Either pronunciation seems acceptable.
For example, New Oxford Americn Dictionary has |(g)nuː| or |(g)njuː|, the parens meaning sometimes pronounced, sometimes not.
But Collins English Dictionary has just |nuː|
(Maybe it depends on what side of the Atlantic you’re on… as Africa is on our side, the British pronunciation is obvious the more correct!)
Are we the wild beasts among atheists?
* American
Religious believers seem to fall into levels of increasing dishonesty:
1) Those who are ignorant of the evidence of natural explanations for the world (or the evidence of the falsity of their religion);
2) Those who know and understand the evidence, but reject it in favor of their dogma;
3) Those who know and understand the evidence, but compartmentalize their own thinking to avoid confronting the theological implications; and
4) Those who know and understand the evidence, and argue that it actually supports their reglious view.
Eric’s empathy for the pew-sitters seems to stem from a judgment that they are mostly in Category 1, and therefore less morally culpable. Many ministers, people of Mohler’s ilk, and more educated laypersons fall into Category 2. Category 3 we’ll call “the Francis Collins subset.” BioLogos, Templeton, and pseudo-scientists like Behe make up Category 4.
I don’t think it offends notions of moral agency to assign different culpability levels to these groups, and adjust our “respect” levels appropriately. And once a little education elevates someone from one category to the next, the respect due to them should decrease in proportion to how hard they hold onto their dogma.
Interesting: I didn’t know that, outside of flippant contexts, “guh-noo” had become accepted.
I wonder if anyone has mapped these pronunciations?
I’d suggest that those in #2 still don’t understand. If they truly understood the evidence, they couldn’t simply reject it in favour of their dogma without the mental gymnastics that characterizes #3.
The ‘g’s used to be pronounced in Old English and earlier Middle English at least, along with ‘k’ before ‘n’ – compare German ‘knabe’ with English ‘knave’. I think there was an evolutionary reason for the practice dying out: so many people’s tongues got stuck to their soft palates and they choked to death, so the more lightly you pronounced your ‘g’s and ‘k’s, the more likely you were to pass your genes on to descendants.
But “gnu” arrived in English much later than that.
— dictionary.com
There’s clearly something else going on in people’s heads that we’d have to take account of in this kind of categorization.
Quite coincidentally, I came across two germane articles via Twitter this evening.
The first is an article by John Shook:
The second, via PZ Myers, is a review of a new book by Pascal Boyer Boyer: