Over at Butterflies and Wheels Ophelia has started a very fruitful discussion on the reasons for the hyper-criticism of people like Berlinerblau and Joseph Hoffmann. And Jerry Coyne has joined in with his post, “Hoffmann debate continues.” I have not indulged much in this discussion since I was busy reading, as a matter of fact (despite Joseph Hoffmann’s careless accusation that I have simply “stopped reading”). Just now I am trying to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest (to use an Anglican phrase) Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs (and have just finished reading David Lewis-Williams’ Conceiving God), so it came as something of a surprise when I read these words from Joe Hoffmann:
Jerry and his fans are probably right. There is no use arguing when they have stopped reading. MacDonald & Coyne are obviously exemplary of the position Berlinerblau characterizes as hper-empiricism. Their view of religion is their under-assessed and totally scientistic caricature of religion, de-historicized and dragged without context into their private psychology. From that vantage point, everyone else is a polemicist.
This is Comment # 38, and I have to admit that I really don’t understand what he is accusing me of. The words ‘scientism’ and ‘scientistic’ are, I think, sadly overused now as terms of abuse, though no one has yet indicated to me what is meant by these words in the contemporary context. Since I have spent a great deal of time making the point that science can certainly not account adequately for love and beauty and various other features of the human, I think it’s just an empty way to dismiss someone with whom you think you disagree, while at the same time not knowing enough about what that person believes about the subject in hand to be able to say anything of particular relevance.
As for thinking of everyone else as a polemicist, it always seemed to me that that is precisely what I am about. I do have a tendency to write polemical screeds about religion and its follies, and whether in doing so I am rightly accused of being scientistic doesn’t really matter to me very much. As to being hyper-empirical — whatever that means — all I can say is that it seems to me that if you are going to make claims that have an impact on individuals and their lives – as churches and other religious institutions do — then they must produce some kind of evidence that what they are demanding is actually required by a reasonable understanding of morality, or by the conditions which are necessary for preserving a free society.
In my understanding of the Roman Catholic position on abortion or assisted dying it does not seem to me that Roman Catholic natural law ethics provide a sufficient grounding for their moral prescriptions such that those prescriptions should be imposed upon those who do not share the particular religious beliefs which accompany them. Roman Catholics, or Anglicans, Baptists, or any other religious group which has an interest in limiting the freedom of people in matters concerning end-of-life decision-making, or the reproductive decisions of women, must provide evidence, and that cannot include the commands of a god. To the extent that religions provide people with a kind of cultural belonging, I have no objection to people indulging themselves in religious ways of life, and even believing the things which those ways of life include, but I do not see how these ways of life and their attendant beliefs, including moral beliefs, may rightly be required of others who do not share the religious presuppositions upon which they rest.
If all this makes me a hyper-empiricist, then a hyper-empiricist I am. However, I think it is up to people like Joseph Hoffmann, who make this accusation — for it is in an accusatory mode that he makes the suggestion — to explain what he means by hyper-empiricism, and to show that it applies to me — and this applies as well to Jerry Coyne, since he has yoked us together as guilty of this particularly heinous thought-crime.
The truth, however, seems to me that, on this occasion, at least, Joseph Hoffman has abandoned careful, analytical thought in favour of a kind of generalised polemicism, attacking a social movement of great energy and power, instead of trying, as a long time non-believer, to introduce his own concerns into the movement, and playing a shaping and influencing role in helping the “new atheism” to gain some maturity — if that is what he thinks is lacking. This seems to me to be generally a problem with energetic contemporary nonbelief, that atheists of long standing, instead of playing their part, as partners in this discussion, moderating it where it seems to them to need moderation, and enlarging the discussion where it seems to suffer from amnesia, have run instead to attack mode, and, instead of using their own wider understanding, and patient wisdom to broaden the scope of contemporary unbelief, have, without much concern for evidence, simply dismissed the new atheism as callow and misguided. Here they are, witnessing a revolution for which many of them have worked patiently for generations, and instead of adding their mature wisdom to the struggle with religious belief, have instead joined the religious in attempting to defeat the revolution, like royalists of old trying to prop up a crumbling ancien regime.
But if Joe thinks I have simply stopped reading, and that all the new atheism is is hyper-empiricism coupled with a kind of historical amnesia, then he either hasn’t read what I have written, or he has read it through a filter of his own devising. It is true that much that I write here at choiceindying.com is polemical. My purpose just is polemical. I believe that religion is the main roadblock to reasonable and humane laws governing end-of-life decision making. Religion is, when it comes to such things as reproductive choice, sexual morality, and end-of-life decision making moribund, and needs to be opposed, and so I oppose it, and I will go on opposing it until my dying breath.
I spent a lifetime in religion, hoping beyond hope that it would wake up to the reality of the world around it. My own conclusion, after that lifetime spent in religion, is that religion is simply unable to adapt to the modern world. It will always revert to type, because, especially in the case of the big scriptural religions, belief that a god has spoken to us in particular words stands in the middle of history, and will not let religion through. Scriptures are always there to pull the church or the mosque or the synagogue back to its old ways and presumed wisdom. I can have no part in this, not because I did not find aspects of religious community attractive or fulfilling, but because, when push came to shove, the church tended to choose the safety of the past, rather than the possibility of the future.
Until Joseph Hoffmann understands this, he cannot understand the contemporary movement of unbelief, which is a large popular movement which, as much as it may respect cultural traditions, and even, to a certain degree, the religious traditions out of which unbelievers have come, no longer sees religious belief as either life-affirming or renewing. Religion reached a dead end when science came, and, as the future I think will show, that end is truly final. It is time to shape a new culture, based on other beliefs than those having to do with imagined beings who are interested in what human beings do. We are now on our own, and, if we had realised this already, perhaps we would be further on the way towards developing ways of life consistent with the reality of the world we live in, instead of, as religion bade us do, keeping a weather eye on what is not of this world. This tendency, of looking beyond life for solutions to life’s problems, has been so destructive of human life that it is now difficult to see how to rectify the problem. That, to my mind, is the challenge of unbelief today, and one that even a Joseph Hoffmann might engage with some optimism.
“Actual persecutions of atheists have been pitifully infrequent and rare throughout history–no major purges or anything of the sort.”
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/five-good-things-about-atheism/#comment-2235
It is comments, such as the above, which not only infuriate me, but make me disown Hoffmann as an unserious person with dubious credentials.
Yes, that was a particularly infelicitous remark. I am reminded of Hume’s incredible caution, since he would have been acutely aware that a young student, Thomas Aikenhead, had been hanged for blasphemy only a few years before he was born. It also should be noted that Hume was never given a university appointment — one of the greatest British philosophers — because of his unorthodox beliefs. Hume shied away from being openly atheist since this could easily have led to criminal proceedings.
On the other hand, the post “Five Good Things about Atheism” does, in some measure, make up for Hoffmann’s earlier undiscriminating criticism of the new atheists. He’s still got a chip on his shoulder, but he at least makes an effort to make amends.
In “Five Good Things about Atheism” Hoffman includes Shelly among the imaginers, iconoclasts, rule-breakers, [and] mental adventurers, but fails to mention that Shelley was expelled from Oxford for atheism after publishing his pamphlet, _The Necessity of Atheism_ and that the British courts denied Shelley custody of his two children.
Good point, Veronica. As I say, Hoffmann makes up, in some measure, for his earlier piece of critical puffery, but he remains selective and defensive. He wants to maintain a kind of aristocratic calm — didn’t really manage it in the Berlinerblau puff piece, of course — at a time when atheism has become a fairly significant “mass” movement, which will inevitably include some pretty crude criticism of religion. I don’t think Hoffmann wants to get his hands dirty, but religion is a dirty business, so he should be ready for a little close face-to-face combat.
I didn’t know that. (Though, just now reading over the stuff I’m about to link to, I really should have.)
On that same note, and as I tried to tell Hoffman in the comment thread at Ophelia’s place, a frightening and not entirely determinate number of modern American courts have done precisely the same thing to irreligious parents, right out in the open, within the past thirty-odd years. Here‘s law professor Eugene Volokh’s description of his findings to that end; here is Volokh’s published article; here is (Catholic) Andrew Sullivan’s commendable synopsis (which mentions Shelley—d’oh) of Volokh’s findings, and here is a longer retelling from atheism.about.com’s Austin Cline.
Discrimination against irreligious parents in child custody—which bears close parallels to similar discrimination against gay and lesbian parents—is a disgusting reality of American life. Would that it were more widely recognized.
This is truly an eye-opener! I had no idea that people were being discriminated against in this way because of nonbelief in contemporary US. I don’t know about Canada, though Canada tends to be less religious than the US. However, my blog was reported in a local paper — in connexion with an assisted dying case here in Nova Scotia — and I think I was snubbed the other day in a public place by someone I know quite well. Perhaps he just didn’t see me, but it seemed very consciously done, nevertheless.
That’s a useful canary in the coal mine – a useful indicator. It’s good that atheists are not actually massacred wholesale in the US today, and I’m duly grateful and everything, but I’m not at all convinced that that’s all it takes to show that atheists are entirely free from invidious prejudices and unfair treatment.
Well isn’t that horrid, Eric.
Thank you for another clearly written and thoughtful post. Your last two paragraphs, in particular, contain wonderful statements–even a call to arms–about one of the major problems with religion and with the reason so many of us are rather happier with our atheism than we were with our religion.
“he should be ready for a little close face-to-face combat”
I’ve been reading Hoffman’s writings for quite a while and have enjoyed his wit and style. But in the last year or so he seems to have found it necessary to interrupt his conversation, go to his third-floor window, and take a shot with his BB gun at the passing atheist parade. Then, back to the conversation. Face-to-face combat he doesn’t seem to enjoy. He prefers sniping.
I think the thing that most galls these “scholars” of religion is how easily their life’s work can dismissed as fruitless. The New Atheists have been quite effective at cutting through centuries of legalistic metaphysics with their steady requests evidence. Without it, all of theology becomes as pointless an exercise debating the number of angels who can comfortably waltz upon the head of a pin.
But as you say, religion in on the defensive like never before in history. A new wind is blowing, and it is knocking down these houses of cards. The sturm and drang from the old guard is to be expected. They can wail and bemoan the lack of “sophistication” of the attacks on their scholarship all they like, but when the common man on the street can spot the con of religion despite all of their pretentious sophistry, I’d say they have good reason to be afraid.
Well, I might be guilty of scientism, but I think you’re wrong when you say, “science can certainly not account adequately for love and beauty and various other features of the human” — “cannot yet account”, maybe, but I think those things lie within the compass of science.
Of course, it depends on your definition of “adequately”.
In This Is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession, Daniel Levitin explores how science – specifically, cognitive neuroscience – can account for our appreciation of music — and surely that is one kind of beauty? (I don’t know how that turns out, having just started the book, then put it aside to finish reading The Greatest Show On Earth!)
But put that aside. It really doesn’t matter how excessive (or not) our belief in the power of science. What we already know of science evinces a naturalistic worldview and demonstrates the success of empiricism (without which we wouldn’t be having this conversation). So any degree of scientism doesn’t make (supernaturalistic) religion any less wrong.
Have they? Have the really “worked patiently”? Or only “waited patiently”? It strikes me that one of the hallmarks of the “new” atheism – one of the things that has changed – is a will to take the arguments for atheism, and against religion, out of the corridors of philosophy departments and thus (unintentionally, perhaps) to create a popular, and populist, movement (albeit a somewhat anarchic one). And that has had more impact in the past ten years than the “old” atheism has had in the past generation.
Hoffmann may be an atheist, but he is a historian and scholar of religion: Even though he has rejected the primary claims of religion, he still takes religion very seriously as a sociological and historical phenomenon, and rightly so. But part of what is new in contemporary atheism is the realization — and I say “realization” instead of “claim” or “position” advisedly — that religious claims not only should not be taken seriously, they never had any real merit or deserved to be taken seriously. Yes, such claims were (and are) taken seriously by many, but not on their actual merits. That, I think, is where the tension arises.
The age of science is the age of epistemology. We — and by “we,” I mean not just those who were dubbed by others and have lately embraced the label “New Atheists,” but pretty much every empirically-minded critical thinker who hasn’t been undermined by early religious programming or overwhelmed by the need for social approval — we don’t take religion seriously because religion has nothing serious to offer in terms of justifying any claim to truth whatsoever: Faith is an anti-epistemology, a rejection of any and all standards for actually learning anything about how the world actually is. Anything and everything about religion that has to do with faith-based supernatural claims deserves nothing but contempt and mockery and absolute rejection, period. Thoughtful people have realized this for many centuries: We use the word “atheism” rather than “godless” not just because we love Greek etymology, but because even in ancient Greece there were thoughtful people who looked at myths and legends about supernatural entities and their actions and asked, “Where’s the fucking evidence for any of this bullshit? Why should we take it even remotely seriously?” (Okay, perhaps the skeptical Greek philosophers of my imagination are a bit earthier than historical reality… but they’re more fun!)
Hoffmann, I think, finds such dismissive attitudes outrageous and offensive because taking religious seriously is his scholarly life’s work, and so naturally his dander gets up. But in his dudgeon, he overlooks a major distinction: the difference between being dismissive towards religion’s truth claims and being dismissive of religion’s social, cultural, and historical importance. New Atheists are simply correct not to take religion seriously in the former sense: Religion really is ridiculous when it pretends to establish truth claims. But that does not in any way imply that New Atheists do not take religion seriously in the latter sense: In fact, if we didn’t take religion seriously as a social force, as one of the things that shapes both history and contemporary life — and not for the better! — we wouldn’t put so much time and energy into fighting its ongoing influence and unwarranted prestige. Hoffmann’s antics can only reasonably be explained either by his failure to make this distinction himself, or by his failure to notice that New Atheists make the distinction. Either way, the failure is careless, so Hoffmann’s umbrage is overblown and misdirected — to a degree he ought to have found embarrassing when it was pointed out to him. Still, his attitude is at least somewhat understandable when one realizes that he’s failed to realize or acknowledge the distinction between dismissing religion on epistemic grounds (which is wholly justified) and dismissing religion in its entirety, including its historical and ongoing social importance (which would be foolish if anyone were doing it, but no New Atheist I’ve ever encountered does so — no matter what preening prats like Michael Ruse pretend).
Perhaps, as Ophelia notes in her post, Hoffmann’s offense has its roots in too much experience with convinced-they-know-everything atheist undergraduates. But I’d wager that if Hoffmann got off his scholarly high horse and actually interrogated those undergrads with more care and fewer presuppositions, he would find that they think religion is ridiculous because it is transparently false. That is, he would probably find that their contempt for religion is primarily epistemological in character and origin — which, I must note again, is quite justified. Being callow youths, some of these 18-19-year old atheists may also be dismissive of the historical and ongoing importance of religion as a social force, which is foolish and warrants some irritation. But I simply cannot understand how Hoffmann could move from irritation with such youthful foolishness to broad-brush jeremiads that lump Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and our host Eric and many other careful thinkers together with arrogant teenagers who maybe shouldn’t have read the internet or Nietzsche — or, worst of all, Ayn Rand (*shudder*) — without adult supervision. Frankly, Hoffmann’s unwarranted hostility is far more irritating to me than any of the freshman Randroids I’ve encountered as a philosophy teacher. He’s not a damned teenager: He ought to know better.
Great post. I agree with all of it. I think it should also be pointed out that while new atheists do always seem to be interested in dismissing religion on epistemic grounds (which earns us criticisms of being shallow and “as bad as the fundamentalists”), we do it in the hopes that once religion is publicly exposed and seen as a crock of shit, it’s ongoing social importance will become much less relevant. And regardless of how Hoffmann spent his life’s work, I’m not going to particularly mourn the loss.
Yes, religion and the religious mindset will always be of interest, but honestly nothing bores me to tears more than the idea of reading dusty scriptures. I just don’t care to analyze the cultural minutia of any particular cult, even if it is a very old cult. I’m angry Hoffmann thinks it should even be relevant in my life. We should have left this shit in the Dark Ages. It should be barroom trivia, at best.
So in a lot of ways Hoffmann’s rant is just expressing the typical academic’s fear that nobody cares about his field of expertise. His work matters, dammit, and only Philistines lack the intelligence to see its merits. It could all be wrong. Horribly wrong. But to dismiss it as a waste of time? That’s unforgivable.
I imagine their was some ancient Greek scholar who shed tears over all the wonderful stories in his pretty scrolls when they pulled the statues of Zeus down, too. There will always be those who miss the tales of the old gods. For a time. For a time.
Bah, sorry. That last post was in reply to thephilosophicalprimate. But you had a great post too, Eric.
I have to agree with H.H., that was a great comment thephilosophicalprimate, and forms a nice supplement to Eric’s article.
I also think it’s also important to emphasize realization as generally what differentiates gnus from other atheists. We no longer view religion as a matter of belief, ethics or epistemological controversy to be debated seriously, but as a sinister political reality.
Religion is like a great political machine that seeks to absorb and control everything in our lives. It completely contradicts our secular world of freedom and reason, and threatens to undermine and destroy it.
H.H. beat me to it. I was just going to comment that Hoffman’s rant appeared to be (at least partly) driven by the fear of an academic finding his area of study becoming a ‘trade’. Anyone can take up a trade without serving a long intellectual apprenticeship, as long as the their trade works.
You see this in many other areas. ‘Trained’ artists decry popular works. People who studied long and hard to write literature decry the popular hacks. Politicians decry the ‘simplistic’ views of their electorate.
If you don’t protect your status the common man will trample all over your finer feelings.
Yes, HH, I knew it was in response to TPP. In fact, TPP’s very careful remarks represent a quantum leap beyond what I had to say, and I find myself agreeing, as I usually do, with them. I would ask you to consider, though, that I spent a lifetime, not studying religion as a field of knowledge, but participating in it as a leader, so, if anything, I should be more defensive than Hoffmann, but I’m not.
While in one sense that might seem like a wasted life, spending so much time with something which, as I now see, has no epistemological warrant whatever; in a quite different sense it was a life of great value and deeply meaningful involvement with people. Knowing what I believe I know now, I would never have got involved so deeply in the religious life, but I didn’t, so I did.
And there are many things that were very attractive about participating in the life of the church. In the end it failed me deeply, but there were opportunities, along the way, to involve myself in what really amounts to an effort to live well. Some of it, of course, was completely bizarre, and I said for years that if anything would convince me not a Christian it would be what so many Christians believed and did. Even so, it would be unfair to dismiss this aspect of the life of the church, for the church itself learned a great deal from Socrates and the Stoics, as well as from humanism and socialism, and members of the church, even if they failed to live up to the impossible norms established by the Jesus of the gospels, did in fact endeavour to live their lives with great seriousness, with a deep concern for justice and respect for the individual’s struggle to live well in an unpredictable world. That is why Larkin’s poem “Churchgoing” is so powerful, since this, at least, is one thing that he recognised, that “a serious house on serious earth it is” (that is, the church building), even though it is no longer possible to be serious in quite that way anymore. But there is also a quality of lament about it, and a question what will takes its place as a realm where people can take seriously, as a personal task, living a meaningful life.
In response to Antony Allan: while I agree with you that science will doubtless be able to capture a great deal of what we mean by beauty, love, wonder, awe, etc., in the end much that pertains to our aesthetic response to the world, or our emotional understanding of relationship, is interpretive, and therefore strictly outside the expertise of science. That does not make it any less rigorous, though it must, because we each, like Leibniz’s monads, reflect the world from our own point of view, include a personal dimension which will continue to be inaccessible to scientific study and perhaps even to interpersonal understanding. Of course, that is just where the religious want to locate the truths of religion, but to the degree to which something is personal, it becomes inaccessible to epistemic evaluation and warrant, and to that extent, beyond anything that we can reasonably think of as knowledge.
Exceptionally good post, Eric, and very inclusive, despite the sniping that had gone on. Hoffmann can be very good and I would regret losing what he can contribute. Even with the reservations you had about his “amends” post, I think it is significant that he took the trouble to make it (didn’t see one from Ruse or Berlinerblau, did you?) and welcome it as a sign that alienation is not what he’s seeking.
And, of course, the suggestion that Gnus have “simply stopped reading” seems to be a claim made without evidence. The problem, of course, is what we’re reading.
I just finished Alan Guth’s book on the inflationary model of the universe. And before that, read Hawking’s new book. And before that, revisited Coyne’s Why Evolution is True. And before that, a history of the Tudors (replete with religious persecution). And before that, Vic Stenger.
I just picked up Richard Bloom’s “A Wicked Company”; a book about radicalism in the European Enlightenment. Haven’t cracked it yet.
Oh, I get it…we haven’t read Hoffmann’s books.
Guilty. Though some of them look interesting enough. It’s just that I don’t care enough about the myths — though I’m happy that he and Ehrman and Carrier and Price and others have done so. To be honest, I haven’t read any of their books, either. I suppose I should attend to that oversight some day.
But what would it profit me? I already dismiss the myths as just that — myths. What greater insight would those books provide me? I’ve read plenty of online Biblical criticism, have followed Hector Avalos’ career, have deconstructed tons of apologetics (McDowell, Strobel, Craig, et al), and on and on.
Am I to understand that I’m doon it rong?
I think thephilosophicalprimate has it right. We’re goring his ox by dismissing the category of study as being unimportant in the grand scheme of things. He’s something like a buggy whip manufacturer in the early 1900s.
It does make you wonder how much smaller the infrastructure surrounding religious history and criticism would be if there weren’t yearly crops of seminary students to teach it to, and just had to deal with students interested in it solely for its historical and literary value.
And above all if there weren’t the imperative to publish. That creates a lot of superstructure right there.
Thanks for this, top.
Hey, Eric: The long form of my name is “Anthony”, not “Antony” – but even my mother rarely uses that anymore. I guess “Ant” still sounds peculiar to folks outside the UK, but “Ant Allan” is the name I use everywhere except legal documents. So, don’t be embarrassed…
To your point, as I said, it depends on your definition of “adequately”. I could make a similar objection to someone who claimed that science can account for human vision – how each of us actually perceives a particular shade of the colour blue, say IKB, for example, is equally interpretive. But no reasonable person would seriously make or accept that claim. Science can, adequately, account for human vision.
I also think that attempts to locate the locate the “truths” of religion in that inaccessible place are flawed, inasmuch as many, if not yet all, “religious” experiences can be reproduced by physically, chemically or electrically stimulating the body and brain. We may not be able to study the experiences per se, but we can demonstrate that they do not demand supernatural causes.