Monthly Archives: October 2011

The Age of Double-Think

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Years ago I read Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe, and, stopping by a local used book store, happened upon a copy, and bought it. Now I am slowly rereading it nearly fifty years after I first read it. It’s still a fascinating account, whatever one makes of Koestler’s reliability as an historian.

However, to get to the point. When we get to the early years of Christian dominance in Europe, a period of history which Koestler calls the “Dark Interlude,” we come to what he calls “The Age of Double-Think” (pp. 102 ff.). What is interesting about it is the way that the Christian mind, at this point, was split in two. Throughout this period, although the heliocentric universe had already been widely considered by Greek scientists, and, in fact, it was generally known, even to medieval scholars, that the sun had some influence on the orbits of the planets, the general Christian vision of the universe was geocentric. And so, as Koestler points out, while astronomers like Ptolemy created a celestial geometry, based on the Platonic dogma that motion in the heavens goes in perfect circles, in order to preserve the appearances, the cosmology of the church tended to be a kind of naive Aristotelianism. As Koestler says:

The highly ingenious systems of Aristotle’s fifty-five spheres , or Ptolemy’s forty epicycles were forgotten, and the complex machinery was reduced to ten revolving spheres — a kind of poor man’s Aristotle which had nothing whatever in common with any of the observed motions in the sky. The Alexandrian astronomers had at least tried to save the phenomena; the medieval philosophers disregarded them. (103)

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The healthy mind lives with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only with as much as there is

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Since Mark Jones linked Julian Baggini’s latest article in the new heathenism series, aptly titled “What is this foolish lust for uncertainty,” I wanted to add this post, but since I was away all day yesterday, it had to wait until now. Baggini points out that a lot of people, in a phrase borrowed by Mark Vernon from John Habgood (onetime Archbishop of York), are critical of the “lust for certainty” possessed by both believers and unbelievers, and then Baggini goes him one better, and criticises instead the “lust for uncertainty” that seems to characterise so many who are reluctant to stand by conclusions reasonably arrived at or statements justly believed to be true.

Of course, lest he should fail in his ongoing mission to discomfit the new atheists, Baggini couldn’t help but throw in the following (just to show that he hasn’t lost any of his original animus towards unbelievers who have become uncomfortably assertive about their disbelief):

Vernon’s advocacy of passionate agnosticism offers soothing camomile tea to those jittery after the triple espressos of the new atheists and religious fundamentalists.

Again suggesting, as it does, that the new atheists belong to an extremist fringe occupied, at the other extreme, by religious fundamentalists, leaves the new atheist (if s/he wants to claim that dignity) marginalised and discredited. But, surely, Baggini himself would be hard-pressed to find a new atheist who is all assertion and no qualification; it’s just handy to have an intellectual dumpster around so that you can feel pretty secure yourself from the justified criticism of others, as you disavow, virtuously, the extremes that you want to contrast with your own sweet reason.

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Thoughts in Progress

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I’ve been a bit preoccupied over the last couple of days, so haven’t had the chance to post anything, but I have had a few thoughts I think might be worth sharing. Yesterday I came across a site called The Immanent Frame, with the subtitle “Secularism, Religion and the Public Sphere.” It’s published by the Social Science Reserach Council out of New York, and, according to the “About” link,

The Immanent Frame publishes interdisciplinary perspectives on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. TIF serves as a forum for ongoing exchanges among leading thinkers across the social sciences and humanities, featuring invited contributions and original essays that have not been previously published in print or online.

But it also, significantly, prides itself on being named a “favorite new religion site, egghead division” by The Revealer (a site which provides a “daily review of religion and the media”). And, while I haven’t read everything on offer, I did read a couple of articles — one by Regina Schwartz (“Secularism, Belief and Truth“), who is also the author of an interesting book on religion and violence — The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism — and an article referred to in Schwartz’s article, “Secularism: Its content and context,” by Akeel Bilgrami.

What is interesting about the two articles is that it gives a little indication of how religious believers are thinking about the role of religion in public space, and what I’ve read so far is disturbing. Of course, it’s no surprise to find that the religious feel that they occupy a central, even dominating role, in public space, but to have it put so bluntly is a bit surprising.

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William Lane Craig’s refusal to debate John Loftus, or: Is WLC a Chicken?

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John Loftus is a former student of Craig’s, a former minister, now an atheist. The following is a brief account of Loftus’s career from Point of Inquiry:

John W. Loftus earned M.A. and M.Div. degrees in theology and philosophy from Lincoln Christian Seminary under the guidance of Dr. James D. Strauss. He then attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he studied under Dr. William Lane Craig and received a Th.M. degree in philosophy of religion. Before leaving the church, he had ministries in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana, and taught at several Christian colleges.

It turns out that Loftus has challenged William Lane Craig to a debate, and WLC has declined. This may remind you of a different dispute about who is or who is not afraid to debate whom! Anyway, it needs to be said that Craig’s reasons for declining to debate his former student are far less substantive than the reasons that Richard Dawkins has given for refusing to debate William Lane Craig. It does raise the question: Is WLC a Chicken?

H/t to J. Quinton

 

Slippery Slopes should be slippery, shouldn’t they?

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In his paper in Current Oncology, and in the CTV W5 program on assisted dying, Dr. José Pereira claimed that permitting assisted dying will produce slippery slopes. He calls it “the illusion of safeguards and controls.” But slippery slopes should actually be slippery, shouldn’t they? That means, once you’re on the slope there’s no way of stopping yourself until you get to the bottom. The whole slope should be like a sheet of ice at an angle.

This is what he thinks he shows in his article, which is based on other people’s research. This is important. Pereira does no original research of his own. He takes research papers written by others and says that they provide give evidence of slippery slopes in in places where euthanasia and assisted suicide have been legalised. There are two serious problems with his approach to the issue. First, Pereira himself speaks with some regularity to Roman Catholic “pro-life” groups. His next big appearance will be at a “Priests for Life” symposium for clergy with the title, “Euthanasia — False Compassion.”

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The Evangelical Rejection of Reason

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The title of this post is the also the title of a New York Times article by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens. I wouldn’t have raised it at this point — Jerry Coyne has already commented on the Giberson-Stephens OpEd — if it were not for the fact that the NYT published a catena of letters on the subject in yesterday’s edition under the heading, “Can Science and Faith Exist Together?”

Of course, it goes without saying that science and faith can exist together. Indeed, any number of contradictions seems to be able to be held by one mind at the same time; human beings are past masters of the art of self-deception. The real question is whether science and faith can be held together without contradiction, and to this question the answer is far more tentative than religious believers wish or their busy “scholars” can establish, buttressed by Templeton funding or not.

Giberson and Stephens titled their article “The Evangelical Rejection of Reason,” and that, it has to be said, is like waving red flags around tormented bulls. Mark Looy, whose name seems to be missing an ‘n’, writes:

Accepting the Bible as God’s literal truth doesn’t mean that we discount science. It does mean that we interpret scientific evidence from the biblical viewpoint. We evaluate the same evidence as evolutionists, but they interpret it from their viewpoint. Evidence isn’t labeled with dates and facts; we arrive at conclusions about the unobservable past based on our pre-existing beliefs. This exercise also involves reason.

Apparently he thinks that, the past being unobservable, the only way to speak about it is by basing what we say on pre-existing beliefs, thus short-circuiting the entire project of critical history, and basing one’s conclusions on the emanations of one’s own brain, aided by words written down in the past, of which, apparently, it is enough to say, in the absence of any evidence whatever, that they are the literal truth. Not only is this an exercise that involves no reason at all, it explicitly rejects the use of reason, for the study of ancient texts is itself a critical historical study, which includes not only a mastery of the languages in which the texts were originally written, but archaeology, the redactional history of the texts themselves, the study their meaning and function the communities that composed them, collected them and edited them, how they have functioned in the various communities in which they came to be treated as sacred, and how they have been modified in transmission — especially during the period when every book had to be transcribed laboriously by hand. It includes the study of variant texts — of which there are often many, and sometimes in passages crucial to their canonical function — as well as the vagaries of translation, which itself raises serious questions about what it could mean to say of the text itself that it is or contains the literal truth.

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Curiouser and Curiouser: Now Dawkins is an Anti-Intellectual Coward!

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More contempt for Richard Dawkins. In today’s English Press there are two articles arguing that Dawkin’s refusal to debate William Lane Craig is “cynical and anti-intellectual “– thus, Daniel Came — and intellectual cowardice – thus Paul Vallely. It seems, at any rate, that Craig’s PR team has at least convinced a few people that Richard Dawkins should relent, join William Lane Craig at the rostrum at the Sheldonian, and give a good account of himself. Daniel Came suggests that he can’t, and that that is why he is refusing. Indeed, Daniel Came, lecturer in philosophy at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, and an associate lecturer in philosophy at the University of Kent, goes so far as to say this:

Given that there isn’t much in the way of serious argumentation in the New Atheists’ dialectical arsenal, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Dawkins and Grayling aren’t exactly queuing up to enter a public forum with an intellectually rigorous theist like Craig to have their views dissected and the inadequacy of their arguments exposed.

This response comes as a bit of surprise to me, for having listened through two whole debates by Craig (the ones with Lawrence Krauss and Lewis Wolpert), and spottily to several others, Craig simply does not demonstrate the inadequacy of the arguments of others — and his voice is unctuous and a pain to listen to. He has a pretty standard spiel, and he is in the habit of deliberately refusing to address the arguments of those with whom he enters into debate.

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Time to talk about W5

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I mentioned a few days ago that I had taken part in a CTV W5 program on assisted dying. I actually announced this back in September just after the W5 crew had departed, but W5 asked me to take down the post since in it I mentioned someone with whom they were still negotiating, Dr. José Pereira, who ”is the head and a full professor of the Division of Palliative Care at the University of Ottawa and Medical Chief of the Palliative Care programs at Bruyère Continuing Care and The Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa.” So, obligingly, I took it down. However, I was far more innocent than I thought I was about the process and the purposes of news documentaries, and the result was very disappointing, as I said in my comment that I left on the W5 web site, and repeated here with commentary on the choiceindying blog. What I didn’t realise is that the W5 producers and the journalist, Victor Malarek, thought that they were presenting two sides of an argument, and when I complained about the outcome, one producer, at least, said she thought that they had presented a fair summary of both sides.

However, the problem is that the stories they told did not constitute an argument, and the only argument that was made, was made by the Roman Catholic doctor who is opposed in principle to assisted dying in any form. He speaks regularly at Roman Catholic pro-life events, including at symposia and other events organisted by the Roman Catholic pressure group Priests for Life, which “played the hero” over Baby Joseph a few months ago, and assured that Baby Joseph would have five months more to suffer. However, the actual religious argument about the sanctity of life is almost never made publicly, since it simply has no purchase in secular contexts, and the arguments that are made by the religious are designed to arouse fear, rather than to provide reasons. Had I been told by W5 that the intention of the program was to show two sides of an argument, I would have asked for the opportunity to argue. Instead, what was presented was Elizabeth’s story. But Elizabeth’s story is not an argument. Her story is the reason I continue to make arguments, and to present her story as an argument is to have done a disservice to her, to the dignity she won by her courage, and to the appeal that she wanted me to make to see that the law comes to be changed here in Canada, so that no one need go through the kind of distress that she experienced. That is something I find hard to forgive the people at CTV W5. Having spoken to one of the producers, whom I know as Stephanie, I feel angry and abused. I feel that my willingness to open my home and my heart to these people was exploited, and that the concern that they expressed was superficial and insincere.

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Julian Baggini Again

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I don’t want to be hard on Julian Baggini, since he’s one of the good guys after all; and, as I pointed out some time ago, he’s much more like a new atheist than he sometimes claims to be. Today, in the Guardian, he has put up the fourth in his series on the New Heathenism. It consists mainly in a warning to humanists not to put too much stock in science, because it could yet turn round and stab humanism in the back.

One of his points has to do with freedom and autonomy:

If the science of humanity has shown anything at all over recent decades it is that human beings are far less autonomous, rational and free than we usually suppose. As a matter of fact, I don’t think any of these challenges defeats what really matters about the humanist view of ourselves. But to argue this would be difficult and I’m not sure I could successfully do so as yet. What’s more, it remains possible that progress in science really will shatter a few atheist shibboleths in time. These are reasons enough to think that by embracing science so closely, atheists are only making it easier for it to stab them in back.

Since a great number of atheists argue the case for determinism quite strongly, subverting freedom and autonomy wouldn’t really trouble them greatly, though I continue to argue that we do, as Dennett puts it, have all ”the varieties of freedom worth wanting” that we need. But even if science showed that we do not have this amount of freedom, and that this is the truth about us, would that amount to a stab in the back? If being a humanist is to a large extent wanting to live a life that is based on the truth about the world as well as about ourselves, and science can achieve knowledge of this truth, how is this being stabbed in the back?

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Putting William Lane Craig in his place

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Jerry Coyne — I might have known — has already beat me to it! I was almost finished this, when I received notification of Jerry’s take on Dawkins’ article about why he won’t debate William Lane Craig: It’s about morality, stupid!

In a short severe article in the Guardian this morning Richard Dawkins puts William Lane Craig decisively in his place, and punctures Craig’s self-serving balloon in several places. Dawkins explains “Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig.” As Jerry says, it’s about morality, stupid! Apparently Craig has gone into overdrive trying to shame Dawkins into debating him in Oxford this month, saying that he will place an empty chair on the stage of the Sheldonian Theatre to represent Dawkins’ absence. Here’s the poster for the event:

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