Choice in Dying

For light reading just now I’m ploughing my way through Churchill’s history of World War II. Though I am told there are many inaccuracies in it — how could there not be?! — it’s a fascinating story of World War II, and from a unique and uniquely privileged standpoint. I’m reading The Hinge of Fate just now, and have in fact just read about the hinge, which was the Battle of Alamein. Around the same time that this battle was taking place, the Japanese were at the gates of India, and the Congress Party took this moment, of all moments, to demand Indian home-rule. Churchill agreed with the Indian (colonial) government that the only way to deal with this demand and the unrest that would no doubt have been consequent upon it, especially from the Muslim League, if the government had acquiesced, and from Congress, if they refused, was to arrest Congress Party leaders. Consequently Gandhi and Nehru were imprisoned, along with a number of other prominent Congress leaders.

The relevance of this episode, which took place in the waning days of the British Raj — independence was not at issue, though the timing was – at a point when the Empire was going through a series of unprecedented defeats, compared even to the disasters in Afghanistan in the 19th century, when the Great Game beyond the Hindu Kush was played out by an earlier generation, is that it frames Gandhi’s fantastic idea that if the British would just walk out of India, the Japanese would be stopped by the non-violent techniques that had almost brought the Raj to its knees. According to Gandhi, at the time:

The presence of the British in India is an invitation to Japan to invade India. Their withdrawal would remove the bait. Assume however that it does not, Free India would be better able to cope with invasion. Unadulterated non-co-operation would then have full sway. [ quoted in vol. iv, 1951: The Hinge of Fate, 196]

Whatever the truth about the ideal of pacifism, it does not seem to me that the Japanese would have taken any notice of Gandhi’s non-cooperation. They showed scant respect for the Chinese – the rape of Nanking is still amongst the great atrocities of the twentieth-century – and it does not seem to me likely that they would have shown any more respect for India and her people. The oil wells in Persia were Japan’s goal, as well as the goal of Nazi Germany, and had Japan and Germany joined hands in the Middle East, the Holocaust might well have seemed only a minor episode of inhumanity instead of the most singular act of mass murder ever perpetrated.

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Chris Hedges brings his anti-fundamentalist diatribe to an end with these words (well, almost to an end):

There is no linear movement in history. Morality and ethics are static. Human nature does not change. Barbarism is part of the human condition and we can all succumb to its basest dimensions. This is the tragedy of history.

Which makes him part of the problem. However, this is not altogether true to the central message of his article. What he really means is that “barbarism is a part of the human condition and we will all succumb to its basest dimensions.” It is a growing conviction. When I first read John Gray’s Straw Dogs I thought it was one of those one-off sorts of things. Surely, I thought, Straw Dogs has not given expression to a wide-spread cultural mood. Yet every now and then I hear the same pessimistic conclusions being advanced as serious contributions to the human conversation. There is no further to go towards enlightenment or truth. We are simply doomed to go on forever dreaming dreams, and imagining that things could get better, that freedom could be extended to more people, peace could actually break out, and we would no longer need to think in terms of the inevitability poverty, famine, war and all their horrors.

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This is the title of the last chapter of Alister McGrath’s book, The Dawkins Delusion. It is an important chapter, because it shows clearly why, in earlier chapters, though indeed it was necessary for him to do so in order to make his points with any show of reason, McGrath did not address the question of other religions. The fact that there have been many religions — so many, in fact, that it will doubtless never be known how many gods human beings have worshipped, and why they have worshipped them – is a telling criticism of religion as such, since it raises the pressing question: Even if there were such a being or beings as God (with a capital ‘G’) or gods, on what basis may it be claimed that the god or gods you worship (for any you) are the right ones?

For example, McGrath takes fairly violent exception to the fact that Dawkins describes the god of the Old Testament — the god of the Jewish scriptures — in these words:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misgyinistic, homophobic, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. [TGD, 31]

The only charge on this charge sheet that may be questionable is that the Old Testament God is sadomasochistic. Sadistic, perhaps, but there is no clear sign that this god likes pain and suffering himself, except insofar as he created the world and humankind, and must have known, when he did so, that his creation would bring him sorrow.  Otherwise, every other charge can, I think, be met by evidence from the text itself.

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I am starting to regret the day I decided to order, pay money for, and read Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion. I call this a preliminary report. It may be the only one, since the book irritates me so much that I find it hard to stick with it for more than a few minutes running. I remembered, as I was reading it a moment ago, that in his book, The Twilight of Atheism, McGrath addresses himself to the problem of evil, and, in particular to a paper written by William Alston. Here are my notes to McGrath’s use of that paper (between « and »):

«The next point is very troubling. He takes William Alston’s paper, “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition” (Alston, Philosophical Perspectives, 1991, 29-67), and takes one thing from the first paragraph which completely misrepresents Alston’s argument. Here is what McGrath says:

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[I was looking something up in my research notes yesterday, and came across a long "commentary" on Alister McGrath's book, The Twilight of Atheism, written, I believe, sometime during the Summer of 2006. It was written before Dawkins published his book The God Delusion (I would surely have mentioned it otherwise, and I received my copy a few days after it was published). The commentary may not be profound, but it at least shows a marked consistency with my views today, including my opinions about Alister McGrath, who seems to be taken far more seriously than he deserves to be. I think others may find the comments interesting. (The citation "McGrath 2004, [page number]” refers to The Twilight of Atheism, published by Doubleday in 2004 — significantly, the year that Sam Harris’s The End of Faith also appeared, the harbinger of the new atheism, a phenomenon sufficiently prominent that the General Synod of the Church of England considered it a vital challenge in the new quinquennium, contributing some heavy irony to McGrath’s title.) The following is, you might say, a catena of excerpts. Often the notes summarise and then comment on McGrath’s argument. McGrath’s name is represented simply by ‘M’. While I would now modify some of the comments, I have left them as they appear in my notes, although I have broken up longer notes into paragraphs. I was reading Peter Gay’s two volume The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, at the time, and references to it are quite frequent. (This is by way of a prelude to my reading — it’s in the post — of McGrath’s book, The Dawkins Delusion.)]

McGrath’s fourth chapter is tellingly titled “Warfare: The Natural Sciences and the Advancement of Atheism.” (McGrath 2004, 78) The corporate consciousness of the West is that of warfare between science and religion, science providing evidence, religion depending on dogma, with a clear sense of which is intellectually more respectable. Science, so the story goes, is the liberator of mankind from the obscurantism and the stultifying dogmatism of religion. This, presumably, is what M means to challenge.

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A few days ago I added a post about Alister McGrath’s “schtick” (as I called it) of using his youthful “atheism” as part of his apologetic argument. One commenter remarked that he found McGrath’s remarks about his teenage unbelief little different from Hitchens’ or Dawkins’ claims of being brought up in the Christian faith. Just as a kind of jeu d’esprit I decided to listen to some of McGrath’s debates and lectures (for my sins, as it were, since I find listening to him more than just a little trying). The project turned up some interesting things. Indeed, it becomes clear that his youthful unbelief plays a central role in his apologetic for Christian faith.

Here are three excerpts from his debates and lectures. One  is only audio (his debate with Dawkins), which is some mercy, I suppose. I begin with the clip of his interview with George Stroumboulopoulos, host of the CBC programme “The Hour”.

McGrath’s Atheism 1

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Clearly, for McGrath, having been an atheist, even a “staunch” atheist, even further, a nasty atheist, a “rottweiler” — reminding us that Dawkins has often been called “Darwin’s rottweiler” — plays an important part in McGrath’s personal mythology. The claim, however, is very weak. Being a staunch atheist as a teenager does not have the same weight as being a staunch atheist as an adult, and McGrath even admits that. When he went up the Oxford, he says, he said to himself, “Wait a minute. You have to think more seriously about this.” He began, as he says, “to think for himself.” But then he goes on to explain how belief in God deepened his understanding of science.

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Jason Rosenhouse responds to Feser’s post “So you think you understand the cosmological argument,” with devastating effect by referring in detail to Robin Le Poidevin’s book Arguing for Atheist: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, showing how Feser’s account of Le Poidevin’s detailed account of the cosmological argument is simply a misrepresentation, and a dishonest representation, of what Le Poidevin actually says. Go and read Rosenhouse’s response. It is a classic!

I will only mention this. Feser attacks Le Poidevin in this way:

The atheist Robin Le Poidevin, in his book Arguing for Atheism (which my critic Jason Rosenhouse thinks is pretty hot stuff) begins his critique of the cosmological argument by attacking a variation of the silly argument given above — though he admits that “no-one has defended a cosmological argument of precisely this form”!  So what’s the point of attacking it?  Why not start instead with what some prominent defender of the cosmological argument has actually said?

As Jason Rosenhouse says, “That’s actually pretty vicious.  And if you are going to throw around words like “sleazy,” “slimy,” and “contemptible” you had better have the goods to back them up.” Which Feser hasn’t, for this is what Le Poidevin actually writes in his book:

In this chapter we shall look at three versions of the cosmological argument.  The first I shall call the basic cosmological argument, because the other two are modifications of it.  It goes as follows:

The basic cosmological argument:

1. Anything that exists has a cause of its existence.
2. Nothing can be the cause of its own existence.
3. The universe exists.

Therefore: The universe has a cause of its existence which lies outside the universe.

Although no-one has defended a cosmological argument of precisely this form, it provides a useful stepping-stone to the other, more sophisticated, versions.  Before discussing it, we might note that the view that the cause of the universe’s existence should be an intelligent, benevolent creator who has an interest in his creation clearly requires more than this very brief argument.  An argument for God, as he is conceived of by the theist, must surely involve a series of interconnected arguments, each contributing some further aspect to our understanding of God.  Nevertheless, being persuaded by an argument for a cause of the universe is to take a large step towards theism.

In other words, this is not, as Feser says, the argument that Le Poidevin attacks, and he goes into detail, addressing himself to the more complex arguments that Feser claims are necessary in order actually to understand the cosmological argument. Feser stands condemned out of his own mouth — or keyboard, as the case may be.

In the Intelligence Squared debate on the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world” Stephen Fry asks this very pointed question: If the church in the past cannot be blamed for getting it wrong, and acting in ways now considered gravely immoral, then what is the church for? The first of five parts is accessible here. Here is a little excerpt of the question and answer context in which Stephen Fry asks the question:

What is the church for?

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I have been trying over the last two or three days to frame a response to the ongoing crisis in Ireland over the abuse of children by Catholic clergy, and the continuing refusal of the church to report such abuse to the authorities. Instead of doing what the law requires, Irish church authorities, as recently as three or four years ago, at the direct instigation of the Vatican, have continued to cover up cases of abuse. In one case, according to the Cloyne report, one priest, known to be an offender, officiated at the wedding of one of his victims! The scale of the continuing abuse simply beggars belief, but the role of the church in covering up that abuse is still an outstanding issue that should be of concern to everyone, and not only to the Irish, for the scope of the abuse by priests and religious in many other countries is simply unknown, and if the Vatican can cover up its crimes in a country that has so recently carried out large public enquiries, and put in place laws whose purpose is to protect children from religious predators, there is simply no reason to believe that it is not taking place elsewhere, especially in places where the church is highly respected and obeyed.

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There’s a simple rhetorical strategy that is known to everyone who either writes for or speaks to the public. What you want people to remember you put right up front, so that no one will mistake your purpose. In the language of homiletics (the art of sermonising), you first tell people what you are going to say, then you say it, and then you try to explain what you meant by saying it. After you’re all finished there will still be some people who missed the point, and will ask the most asininely aggravating questions, but the great majority will at least be able to tell you, in simple terms, the message you intended to get across. So, when Michael Ruse begins a HuffPo article with the following words, they are the ones that will stick in the mind:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint — and Mr. Gish [Duane T. Gish the Creation Scientist] is but one of many to make it — the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

The italics are in the original, just to make sure that we don’t miss the importance of what he is saying, and by ending his preamble with – ”Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today” — it is clear that this is the take-home message he wants his readers to go away with.

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Edward Feser, the Pasadena pyrotechnic philosopher, has a new post up about the ignorance of philosophers, scientists, and others who refuse to pay close attention to Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Leibniz and, of course, him. Nor will he deign to argue the point in a blog post, because all the metaphysics that is assumed by the cosmological argument is simply too complex to pack into the compass of a blog post; we will just have to read his books, Aquinas and The Last Superstition. The basic error that is made can, however, be stated simply, and that is, well, simply this: “The [cosmological] argument does NOT rest on the premise that “Everything has a cause,” and “‘What Caused God?’ is not a serious objection to the argument.“

And, strictly speaking, this is true. The purpose of the argument is to show that the existence of contingent beings demands the existence of a being which is its own cause (causa sui). It follows, of course, that asking what causes the being that causes itself is not a serious objection to the argument, even though many philosophers have taken this course. Of course, it does not follow that the argument succeeds in demonstrating the existence of a self-caused being, in which case it does make sense to ask about the cause of the being which underlies contingent being. Doubtless, if the supposedly self-caused being — which, as Aquinas says, ”all men call God” – has not been shown to exist, asking for the cause of this self-originating being is merely rubbing salt into philosophical wounds, and perhaps this is what they intend to do, though Feser takes the question as a total misunderstanding of the cosmological argument itself.

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