Julian Baggini has put up the next installment in his series of articles on the common ground between atheism and religion. Actually, the point and purpose of the articles seems to be evolving as we go along. The first in the series (which was entitled, “Heathen’s progress, part 1: stalemate) was published on 30 September this year, and here is how he began:
In a debate that has been full of controversy and rancour, there is one assertion that surely most can agree with without dispute: the God wars have reached a tedious impasse, with all sides resorting to repetition of the same old arguments, which are met with familiar, unsatisfactory responses. This is a stalemate, with the emphasis firmly on “stale”. My heart sinks whenever I am invited to talk or write about the existence of God, whether science is compatible with faith, or whether religion is the root of all evil. I struggle to say something new, knowing that this is such well-trodden ground, the earth is packed too firmly for any new light to get in. The only hope is to start digging it up.
I think it is only fair to point out that he still hasn’t made much progress, and that the ”stalemate” — if that is what it was — is still at stalemate, whether it’s still stale or not is hard to say.
However, while Baggini says that he isn’t blaming either side, despite some of his Guardian articles which are, arguably, straight “new atheism” — if that is a genuine individuating term — he also began his series (linked above) by giving the new atheists a bit of a drubbing, just to make clear that he hasn’t really changed his mind:
[T]he new atheists are spiritually tone-deaf, fixated on the superstitious side of religion to the exclusion of its more interesting and valuable aspects.
The problem is that he hasn’t himself found any interesting or valuable aspects of religion to tell us about, and in what seemed like a fit of desperation last week, he devised a set of test questions for religious believers to answer which, he hoped, would force the hand of the religious, and make them choose a kind of faith that Julian thinks intellectually respectable, or consign themselves to the league of benighted holdovers from the past.
- Giles Fraser doesn’t “do God” that way
The first responses to last weeks’ articles of an intellectually respectable 21st century faith are now in, and, while I hate to say it, it seems to me that the outcome was entirely predictable. Giles Fraser tells Baggini that this is not how he “does God,” though this sounds a lot like a cop-out. I did say last week that leaders in the church would find it hard to come out with a clear yes or no. Theo Hobson, still vacillating, I take it, over his vocation to the priesthood, sides decidedly with the conservatives, though professing liberalism:
I’m afraid I don’t really sympathise with this [Hobson told Baggini]. Christianity can’t be reformed by the neat excision of the ‘irrational’/supernatural. It is rooted in worship of Jesus as divine – the ‘creed’ side is an expression of this.”
In other words, no, Christians are still committed to the supernatural — as well as to certain beliefs about it. You can’t worship Jesus as divine if there is no divinity. Anyone thinking about ordination would say that, wouldn’t he? Meanwhile, Nick Spencer — no surprise here — opts firmly for revelation, and informs Baggini that
Although religious texts are indeed created by human intellect and imagination, that doesn’t mean they can’t be taken as expressing the thoughts of the divine.
Never mind that there is no known way of distinguishing divine thoughts in the Bible from human ones — what, shall we just take all those with which we agree as divine, and slag the rest? — Spencer needs the supernatural to make his religious medicine go down.
On the other hand, Karen Armstrong, archpriestess of ambiguity, is, says Baggini, “basically with me,” with strong qualifications about the humanness of sacred texts (article 4). Baggini explains:
Although she said that she was with me on “religious texts are the creation of the human intellect and imagination”, she said “your wording is prohibitive”, because it “would antagonise a lot of people. It is too bald and needs nuance. There needs to be some acknowledgement that the ‘supernatural being’ is only a symbol of transcendence – something that many religious people understand intuitively – even though they might not express it explicitly. That religious language is essentially symbolic – pointing beyond itself to what lies beyond speech and concepts”.
Baggini doesn’t see why his wording should cause a problem, but this, I think, is because he doesn’t realise how much is hidden in Armstrong’s equivocation. And it’s true, of course. Saying that sacred texts are human through and through would antagonise a lot of people. The simple reason is that most religious people believe that their texts are indeed divine communications. Some will acknowledge that they are also human. After all, how else would God speak to us, other than through human words? Jesus is said to the Logos, the Word made flesh, the incarnation of the divine principle of rationality and creativity informing the universe and human life, so of course human language can also do duty as divine self-communication. The problems of separating the divine from the human remains — which is why Christians seem unable to make up their minds definitively about Jesus’ human status. As a human he must have flaws, and yet, in general, Jesus is assumed to have been without any. The same problem haunts biblical hermeneutics.
So, what’s the score? The religious are least likely to subscribe to Baggini’s four articles of 21st century faith, though A.C. Grayling, an atheist, argues that the articles
… leave out the crucial bits about religious belief, which are that there is powerful supernatural agency or agencies active in or upon the universe, with … responsibility for its existence, an interest in human beings and their behaviour, a set of desires respecting this latter, etc.
In this I think he is right. I don’t think the articles do sum up what, for a religious believer, must be included in the essentials of belief. And that is no doubt why Baggini finds Theo Hobson and Giles Fraser simply evasive. There is a kernel of belief at the centre of religious faith which is simply ineliminable. The expression ‘doing God’ is used by Fraser to slip away into the fog, like the young follower of Jesus who fled naked away, leaving his garment behind, when the authorities tried to arrest him. (Mark 14.52)
This of course should come as no surprise to Baggini, since last week he said that
Rejecting the articles of 21st-century faith means admitting many of the things that are claimed of religion by “crude and simplistic” new atheist critics.
After all, he was trying to present believers with an inescapable cleft stick, thus forcing them to choose. I did say in my last comment on Baggini’s series of articles, that
I suspect there may still be a way in which the believer can shimmer ambiguously away, but it will be interesting to watch them do it!
And it is interesting to watch them do it. After all, the locution “doing God” is the shimmer. It’s not an answer; it’s how you avoid answering. And I did say that religious leaders are most likely to use this expedient. A person “doing God” could be as belief-laden as the most fundamentalist, creationist Christian; but ”doing God” could also be the mark of a person who is travelling light, accepting belief in God, miracles, relationship with Jesus, and all the rest of the religious bag of tricks, as simply a way of speaking mythologically about human beings, their commitment to each other, and the values that they share — although, of course, at the same time trying hard not to let the cat of such reticent belief out of the bag.
What I don’t understand is where Baggini thinks he may go next. He proposed the four articles of 21st century faith as a kind of test of the rationality of faith. Now, however, that it seems that this project will not produce the results he wants, he suggests that there may still be a reasonable outcome.
… even if this middle path does vanish, [he says, referring to agreement about the four articles of 21st century faith] that does leave one intriguing possibility open. Could it be that the common ground I’m looking for is not one centred on belief at all, but something else, such as a commitment to certain values around enquiry and coexistence?
But this is not an intriguing possibility at all. What he refers to under the rubric of “certain values around enquiry and coexistence” is precisely what he thought he was doing by offering the four articles for consideration. These were supposed to mark out those who could be considered to be people whose faith was entirely intellectually respectable — that is, as satisfying the canons of rational enquiry. I assume that Baggini thinks that the four articles already expressed what he meant when he speaks here of “certain values around enquiry.” Coexistence is simply the desideratum. That, presumably, is why Baggini has been taking the new atheists to task, because they have been so hostile to religion and its belief claims, insisting that they give a good account of the ethics of religious belief. The response, very often, is that religion is not about belief, but this is now shown up as an escape strategy. This is what the religious fall back on when their beliefs are challenged.
In fact, by suggesting this “intriguing possibility” isn’t Baggini playing the same game? Last week he said, putting all his cards on the table:
So as you can see, the stakes are high. Rejecting the articles of 21st-century faith means admitting many of the things that are claimed of religion by “crude and simplistic” new atheist critics. And since I myself have often been critical of this camp, I actually have more to lose than most, should hardly any religious folk be able to sign up to these articles, or explain clearly why they won’t in such a way that doesn’t leave them either lost in a fog of obfuscation or hanging on to outmoded doctrines.
But now, it seems, he wants to back out of this commitment. The responses he got to the four articles was predictable. Now he’s got them, though, does he want to back out? He seems to be thinking: There simply has to be common ground somewhere! By suggesting the particular “intriguing possibility” that he does what Baggini is doing, I’m afraid, is obfuscating, in very much the same way that the religious do. But one thing won’t let him wriggle off the hook he’s been caught on. The “intriguing possibility” includes “values around enquiry.” I assume that those values are already expressed in the four articles, which is why we have article 2:
2. Religious belief does not, and should not, require the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth, including miracles that bend or break natural laws, the resurrection of the dead, or visits by gods or angelic messengers.
What’s hidden in this article is commitment to a rational epistemology, that is, values around enquiry to which Baggini has already committed himself. Doing God, belief in the resurrection, commitment to sacred texts as sources of divine intelligence: all these break all the epistemological rules which an intellectually respectable 21st century faith must not break. Baggini must keep this in mind has he goes forward, or else he will turn out as shimmeringly evasive as the most accomplished religious escape artist!
Yes, it’s a little galling that Baggini doesn’t admit in this latest piece that, yes, he was wrong about the new atheists; they do not misrepresent the views of theists to a significant degree.
The importance of the previous article was how it highlighted that the line Baggini and a very few closet atheist theists draw is not the line that the vast majority of believers draw between belief and non-belief. It’s simply wicked to continue this pretence that theism is largely empty of beliefs that look laughable to outsiders. Now, theists can work hard to show that their beliefs aren’t laughable – and, for example, many pretty silly things appear to be true if quantum physics is to be believed, so a belief being prima facie laughable doesn’t immediately condemn it – but let’s give up this pretence that we must suppress our smiles when confronted with silly things, if they happen to be silly things believed by the religious.
John Gray:
This is, simply, disgraceful. For Gray to cover his refusal to respond to a clear list of propositions by invoking skepticism is inexcusable, and disrespectful toward Baggini.
Yes, Ken, I noticed that. It’s really quite a foolish thing to have said. Asking someone to accept or reject propositions is not creedal, in any case, and, in Baggini’s case, his propositions were really in the nature of epistemological constraints, not creedal beliefs. In fact, the first article makes the point that creedal statements about the natural world are either secondary or irrelevant — just the point that Gray seems to be making. Gray, however, is like that. He tends, I think, to be very idiosyncratic about meaning.
To be fair, I don’t think that Baggini is really trying to obfuscate, even if that is the effect of what he says. I think that he really is trying to find some common ground that he thinks is actually there. I remember this bit from his little book on atheism:
“Cupitt finds himself under fire from Christians and atheists, who both think he is actually an atheist after all and should just admit it, but I think his attempt to save something distinctive from the wreckage of religious belief is admirable and has lessons for believers and atheists alike.”
And if you put this in the context of the grand old C-of-E tradition of country parsons being amateur geologists and butterfly catchers you can sympathise — at least, I can. But Baggini hasn’t quite got the simple fact (though he goes on about it a few pages earlier, but is sidetracked by his perception that new atheists are being unreasonable…) that when the chips are down, it’s faith that always trumps. Everything must in the end yield to faith, so common ground based on enquiry and coexistence cannot be achieved. We want to enquire, they want to reinforce their faith; we want to coexist, they want everyone to agree with them, and not just on how we get on together but on the assumed “role” of humanity and on the nature and meaning of the whole damn universe. Can’t be done. Coexistence has to mean: “live and let live — we have some common ground (i.e., wanting to live) and some clear demarcations”. This is intolerable to the religious mind, which wishes all things to be subsumed voluntarily — that is, VOLUNTARILY — in the love of the divine: and therefore, no living and letting live (that would be to tolerate sin), no demarcations (that would be complicity in denying the grace of God to all), no mutual acceptance (sinfulness cannot be tolerated), no gentlemen’s agreements (compromise is anathema to Christ crucified or Moses on the mountain or Mohammed on his magic steed), no democratic voting (the truth is one), no self-determination for women…
Baggini has always missed the point that new atheists stamp their feet, not because people hold to beliefs they consider irrational, but because the beliefs under scrutiny do so much positive harm. This is the serious problem that has to be addressed. It is not because priests are fallible men that there is so much abuse of children and nuns; it is not because women are imperfect that convent-run schools (and laundries) are (it seems inevitably) cruel and tyrannical: it is because the ethical foundation of the Church gives no valid guide, and the guidance of the Spirit is so much make-believe (and the arrogance of believers rests on the mere presupposition that their decisions are guided by God, and that their God is good, whatever he says or is believed to say or to have said). Christian ethics are a dictat from on high, merely a rule to be obeyed, in which compassion has perforce to be a matter of faith. Of course it is, for if the faith is true, God will provide; and if he doesn’t provide, we have too little faith… For this reason (i.e., that no one can live up to the demands of this primaeval, childish and neurotic state of mind), and human nature being what it is (i.e. animal, and evolved to survive), there are too many slippery slides by which people can escape examining their behaviour: and this in spite of all the tortuous self-examination some churches, like the RCC, insist on. Faith is slippery, and so are exegesis and ethics, and this only pin-points the irrationality of absolute dicta. Being reasonable and all that is all very well, as long as both sides agree on what is meant by being reasonable. But as long as one side insists that the other, being at odds with their God, is therefore unacceptable in any terms (whether human, spiritual, emotional or what you will), and can only be “suffered”, like the little children, out of compassion, there can be no end to the howls of atheist protest at each new excess of the religious.
Baggini, like many people, assumes that we can all sit down and be reasonable. But the cry of the new atheists is the cry of all those for whom religion has meant humiliation and torment and death, the destruction of the person, of all meaning, of all hope; the destruction of science, of reason, of humaneness. These are the reality that some of us have to endure. Even if there are comparatively few Asia Bibis in prison, there are many more of us tormented by the thought that there is even one. Why should we tolerate it?
Well, there is an option that Baggini doesn’t address, and that you omit. An option that I think has at least a non zero number of believers who follow it.
Imagine religion, for some, as a form of voluntary and knowing suspension of disbelief. Not belief per se! Now imagine that they belong to a community that shares this suspension of disbelief, and believes that it is both a moral wrong, and broadly incompatible with membership in this community, for a person to openly acknowledge the difference between actual belief and what they in that community do instead.
Such persons would be unable to respond to Baggini’s challenge, because that would involve breaking the taboo of never publicly stepping out of character. But their “faith” would also qualify under his minimal criteria for reasonableness, because the aspects of the faith that violate that list would be known to its practitioners as just pretend.
I actually think there are people out there who are like this. I’m thinking in particular of my region of the country, which is filled with bland “Catholics” who use birth control, support abortion rights, are broadly friendly to gay marriage, and so on, but who still raise their children within the strictures of the minimal requirements of the Catholic church, and who seem to like having the church around for weddings and funerals.
….
Note that I’m not defending this form of belief as a GOOD thing, merely as compatible with Baggini’s test, and as unlikely to have vocal proponents in Baggini’s survey.
I actually think this form of belief is particularly pernicious, and I question whether the people who engage in it are good parents. I wonder how many of the suspension-of-disbelief-ers have children who have no idea what their parents really think.
Well, it’s what I mean by a slippery slide. People want to opt out of some commitment that doesn’t square with how they view (or prefer to view) the world, and this leads to inconsistency. Of course, if they believe somewhere deep down that the church is true and right and must be obeyed, then it is impossible for them to be honest about the things they really, deep down, don’t actually accept, and won’t accept, whatever adjustments they have to make to their “faith” in consequence. Of course it’s pernicious. How could it be otherwise? They disagree about many things which go to the heart of Christian ethical teaching, but are prepared to identify with their church all the same, and plainly too whenever challenged. How can they be honest with even themselves, let alone their children?
Gordon (#4). You said:
Well, he may think it is really there, but this is something he has to show, and you can’t do this by continually changing the goal posts. He started out by, as I said, giving the new atheists a good drubbing. Then he waffles around for a few weeks in ways that seem to me simply unhelpful. Finally, he comes up with a nice test, and then, since the test seems not to be going all that well, he suggests that there is the intriguing possibility left that the middle ground is not about belief but about shared values having to do with enquiry and coexistence. But this is already to miss out on his “I have more to lose” move, and actually ensures that he doesn’t lose anything.
As to his point about Cupitt:
That’s very noble, no doubt, but, in my own experience, that is, of someone (myself) who tried to save something distinctive from the wreck of religious belief, the problem here is that while saving something from the wreckage one has to deal with all those who don’t feel it’s wrecked at all, and that I was one of hte wreckers, people who wanted to preserve the literal meaning of the faith as it was once delivered to the saints. And the effect of this is institutions which go their merry way making it hell on earth for some people because that’s what their sainted tradition commands them to do.
There may be something admirable in Cupitt’s attempt. I’ve got practically all his books on my shelves because I thought so too, and wanted to join in the salvage operation; and then the church’s culture kicks in and I’m simply out there on the outside looking at people who believe strange things, and prescribe insanities. So, I’m afraid Baggini doesn’t get any help from me on this score. He’s got a responsibility to think clearly, and stop worrying about the fringe group that wants to salvage something of value from the general wreckage of religion. First, it isn’t going to happen. The Bible/Qu’ran/Tanach has too tight a grip on the religions involved. And second, it’s making a mess of things in the meantime, including its death grip on society’s values. And so long as sacred texts are held to be sacred, this nonsense will just continue and prevail. There are no sacred texts. They’re all written by fallible — sometimes disastrously fallible human beings. And the religions are still powered by the idea that they retain their sanctity, and the people who hold the power are still being listened to with a great deal more respect than they deserve. As a project Cupitt’s transvaluation of religion is a great idea, but as something that will ever manage to cool religion down, and get it out of public places, it’s a dead loss. Indeed, it is a buttress for conventional religious thinking, and just gives it an excuse to hold on to the dogmas that much more tightly.
Don’t agree with Baggini about Cupitt. I, not too long ago, came across a second-hand copy of Taking Leave of God, and, remembering B’s words, decided to buy it. But I can’t read it, after all. I stumbled at the first page. Because, as I discovered, I don’t care, actually. (Partly, it was all too familiar, anyway). And visiting Don Cupitt’s website hasn’t helped, either. B has to accept that C is flogging a very very dead horse. And it’s all about his (C’s) feelings, not about what is true about the world, even though he is really really trying so hard. Of course, religion remains alive for many many people. The problem is that we all suffer because of this, and Cupitt and Baggini are not helping. They are both trying to sort out their ideas, and rather publicly. That’s alright, but both seem to be entangled in individual emotions, which, though inviting sympathy, is not really helpful. I am reminded of some theologians — John Haught and Alister McGrath, for example. Emotion is close to the surface, despite the attempted overlay of reason. In B’s case, this is a little disappointing, because he is generally so brilliant, but he can’t help being who he is, so that’s that. In C’s case I couldn’t care less: sentimental attachment is foolish when the beloved is found to be make-believe. As you point out (though I put it in my own words), tradition is a meat-hook with barbs, and if it’s set in writing it has to be true forever; and if we gnus don’t insist on being heard we’re going to have to fight the believers forever. B’s hope that reasonable discussion is the proper approach is foolish in the face of determined faith, and determined blindness and compromise (as Stewart talks about above). Dawkins has the right idea, after all, and one must admit, surely, that it’s more humane than a god-inspired crusade.
Sorry, NOT Stewart, Patrick. Sorry, I was talking off the top of my head, and it’s late over here…
It’s not the christian project than needs saving, it’s the atheist project.
What the accommodationists are trying to do is save or transform humanism, socialism and liberalism, because they don’t see a scientific foundation for such ethics. They root it into the human imagination, and therefore regard religion as a cultural expression of that and therefore a part of our historical identity. Their appearance of being postmodernist and their compatibility with religion (esoterically as another form of truth) is because they think the modernist project is at an end–modernism as a truth based system and worldview was like another kind of project of mankind’s will to power and is now historically over.
New atheists think that humanism, socialism and liberalism are all fine and dandy and can be supported by a kind of scientific world view and society, a kind of brave new world. They are a continuation of the modernist project, not realizing the fact-value distinction.
Baggini’s project seems to completely misunderstand this state of affairs. His ethics is that of moderation, attempting to find peace between new atheists and the religious. But there can be no peace between naturalism and supernaturalism, because they’re two different and opposing projects.
Since I think accommodationists oppose modernism (politically not practically) as much as the religious, that might explain their hostility and criticism. But that hostility and criticism is itself rooted in the very modernism that they’re rejecting, because they’re still thinking in terms of the ‘worldly’.
We atheists can actually resolve all this simply by accepting everyone as a subjective person. Our enemy is not people or individuals but institutions, organizations and dogma. But I think that new atheists have oddly begun to attack people rather than the ‘beliefs’ they hold, which still continues to disturb me (especially as I was doing the very same thing).
Well, I predicted the outcome…and even among the squishy ‘ground-of-being’ theologians who really don’t believe in much at all, yet seem to spend an inordinate amount of time defending those (non) beliefs.
It would be even more interesting to get feedback from the Catholics (paging Dr. Feser!), the Southern Baptists (Al Mohler), and apologists like Josh McDowell, William Lame Craig, et al.
I think someone coming from a Jesuit tradition would make short work of Baggini.
Baggini seems to have decided to ride this horse to the bitter end. When I was in an MBA program, such behavior was called “overcommitment to a failed plan”.
Egbert says:
What the accommodationists are trying to do is save or transform humanism, socialism and liberalism, because they don’t see a scientific foundation for such ethics. They root it into the human imagination, and therefore regard religion as a cultural expression of that and therefore a part of our historical identity.
Thanks, Egbert, for clarifying this. I am relieved to know that I am a modernist. I don’t actually know what a modernist is, and I don’t care either, but it is nice to know that I belong somewhere, wherever that may be. Well, actually, no, it isn’t, because it really, really doesn’t matter. I’ll leave taxonomy to the scientists, who need that sort of thing. Do the accommodationists care about historical identity? No idea. What is historical identity? Whose view of history are we talking about? What the hell is identity? Is there an agreed view? Do I care? If “accommodationists” have an agreed view of “history” (for any value of “history”) as an explanation of who “we” (for any value of “we”) are, is it true?
Are the accommodationists actually looking for a scientific foundation of any ethics at all? I rather thought they weren’t, except to complain about it. Anyway, what is meant by a scientific foundation of ethics? This is a point on which I confess to great confusion.
New atheists think that humanism, socialism and liberalism are all fine and dandy and can be supported by a kind of scientific world view and society, a kind of brave new world. They are a continuation of the modernist project, not realizing the fact-value distinction.
Well, this new atheist is not that much of a socialist and worries a lot about what people mean by “liberalism” and positively hates utopias. He is also aware that “humanism” covers a multitude of things, some of which may well be evils. Sorry, but your kind of new atheism doesn’t sound like my bag at all. [Maybe I'm not even a new atheist (sob)...]
Baggini’s project seems to completely misunderstand this state of affairs. His ethics is that of moderation, attempting to find peace between new atheists and the religious. But there can be no peace between naturalism and supernaturalism, because they’re two different and opposing projects.
Actually, I think that the problem for me is your idea of “project”. I don’t believe that people think things through like that — I mean, so systematically. Baggini’s “project” is really only a vague idea that he is trying to sort out. He thinks it’s perfectly clear; gradually, he discovers that it’s actually a bit of a mess. If that’s a “project”, well, then self-discovery is a project, though I think it would be better as a mere fact and the result of an attitude — say, humility — than of a deliberate plan. Saying that “his ethics is that of moderation” is less accurate, I think, than saying that moderation is a part of his ethical view. Of course, your way of saying it lends itself better to a view of people as initiating “projects” than does mine, because “projects” suggests the isolation and projection of faculties or qualities or whatever that, in my view, are better thought of as ingredients or constituents. So if you project “moderation”, it becomes “ethics” or “an ethic”, if you see what I mean.
Religious people have a project: to rule the world in God’s name. We know about this, it’s a problem. It’s one of the few things we completely agree about. That’s why we’re “new atheists” and not “new modernists” or “new enlightenmentists” or “new anythingelseists”. Naturalism might be a project. I thought it was a reasonable point of view. I hope it isn’t a project. Please tell me it’s not a project…
Since I think accommodationists oppose modernism (politically not practically) as much as the religious, that might explain their hostility and criticism. But that hostility and criticism is itself rooted in the very modernism that they’re rejecting, because they’re still thinking in terms of the ‘worldly’.
I am sorry to say that I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I often feel — in fact, almost every day — that I fail the intelligence test implicitly required of all who would comment on blogs such as this, and it is at such moments as this that I despair utterly of my ever being accepted as a merely rational human being. I shamefully admit to the pitiful foolishness of merely considering what people say, and wondering whether it is true. How depressingly naive. May I at least humbly point out, while acknowledging your “might”, that y cannot be explained by the mere fact that one thinks x.
We atheists can actually resolve all this simply by accepting everyone as a subjective person. Our enemy is not people or individuals but institutions, organizations and dogma. But I think that new atheists have oddly begun to attack people rather than the ‘beliefs’ they hold, which still continues to disturb me (especially as I was doing the very same thing).
We all have our moments, Egbert. We get cross with this person or that. It’s life, it’s how we are. Just because someone does that, it doesn’t mean that new atheists in some sense do. In my view, new atheists are people. Not modernists, not this-ists or that-ists. This is a new idea. What marks us out is the fact that we talk about things. We aren’t all the same, we don’t belong to any particular ism, we are just people who have found (a) the internet, (b) other nonbelievers, (c) similar concerns, out of compassion, for human rights, (d) a few people who talk quite sensibly, most of the time, (e) the opportunity to talk our heads off and complain about the god squad. The rest is not so much history as a confusion of ideas and feelings, which includes at least some even of the “accommodationists”, not to mention philosophical taxonomists, male male chauvinists, female male chauvinists, and other weirdos.
Gordon, I don’t like to hijack threads and so I’ll just say that I read your detailed response and respect your disagreements.
Egbert,
Can you provide one single good argument for why there is a unbridgeable fact-value distinction? Even one? I’m frankly getting sick of the fact that so many people simply assume that this is so without any argument whatsoever. We’ve known since the 1930s that the “Naturalistic Fallacy” is not a fallacy. So, are people still assuming it is more than 70 years later?
Daniel, better thinkers have made all the arguments, if you could point to an example of how a value is a fact, then feel free to persuade me.
Egbert, it’s not that way round. It is, I think, a fact that some things are wrong — that is, if there are objective values. But it is not an empirical fact that some things are wrong. It does not follow from any empirical fact that we know that something is either good or bad, right or wrong. The gap, in other words, is from “is” to “ought”, not from “ought” to “is”, because if you ought not to do something then that’s a fact about that something, but not necessarily a natural, empirical fact. Take killing as an example. The commandment says “Thou shalt not kill,” but we know that there was an awful lot of killing about when that commandment was first issued by whoever wrote them down on God’s behalf, as it were, so the empirical fact of something’s being an act of killing was not enough to make it wrong.
The question is: What needs to be added to make it wrong? Now the question is, can we add other empirical facts alone in order to get to the wrongness. I don’t think so. For instance, Sam Harris begins with values (although he seems not to notice this) when he speaks about human well-being. This is not a natural fact. Indeed, there can be many different ideas of what well-being consists in. Of course, once we know what a particular person considers well-being (for him or her), then we know some things that, other things being equal, it would be right or wrong to do with regard to that person, because we know what would be considered good or bad, and morality at least has to do with things that benefit or harm people.
Take Roman Catholic natural law morality. When it comes to killing, the natural law theorist speaks in terms of the killing innocent or non-innocent human beings. Killing another person is wrong if that person is innocent. But innocence is a value term, not a natural fact, and we can ask whether this value property is necessary and sufficient to make killing a person with this property wrong. And so on. Hume’s point when he objected to the move from descriptions of the reality to how we ought to act was that these are two entirely separate uses of language. One is descriptive, the other prescriptive. I still think he’s right, and no one has really convinced me yet that they can be run together. But, like you, I’m prepared to listen to reason.
Eric, I think there are so many evils in the world, much of which are created by religion, and so I take this fascinating problem as seriously as I’m sure you do. It’s the problem of evil rather than the problem of good that lead me off into my particular direction, which is still rather new to me.
The common ground about enquiry, perhaps, is that everyone, naturalist or supernaturalist, understands the commonsense distinction between appearance and reality: that things as they appear to us are not always as they seem, that further investigation might reveal our perceptions and conceptions to be mistaken in various ways.
If this is everyone’s epistemic starting point, then the question we face is how best to correct our possible misperceptions and misconceptions. In everyday matters, we’re all empiricists, looking to public evidence to decide questions of fact – empiricism obviously works. But supernaturalists suppose there are reliable non-empirical means by which to form true factual beliefs in certain domains, for instance about the existence of gods. Given the common ground that evidence is needed to support factual claims, the burden is on the supernaturalist to demonstrate the reliability of non-empirical claims to knowledge, those that don’t appeal to public, intersubjective evidence, but to such things as intuition, revelation, authority, etc. The basic question underlying debates about supernatural religion is whether empiricism has any epistemic rivals, so Baggini could easily cut to the chase by posing it to his interlocutors.
http://www.naturalism.org/epistemology.htm
I remember reading John Loftus’ Why I Became An Atheist on the recommendation that unlike the “new atheist” books, it actually addressed the theist position. I picked it up and was shocked at some of the things the book addressed: Moses and the Egyptian sages turning staves into snakes, Jonah and the giant fish, scientific problems of Genesis, etc. I was left wondering how Dawkins et al. could be dismissed when they had the good sense not to take these evangelical beliefs as being indicative of a reasonable case for God.
It seems that perhaps there is a case being made for the supernatural; that trying to reconcile God with the Natural is doomed to failure, and that a holistic approach to God embracing the supernaturalism may present a more reasoned position. Then Naturalism and Supernaturalism can be set up as rival contenders of explanation, and the commonality between the two is the use of reason and reflection to determine the validity of the position.
Though that’s not what Baggini is going for…
“[Accommodationists] appearance of being postmodernist and their compatibility with religion (esoterically as another form of truth) is because they think the modernist project is at an end–modernism as a truth based system and worldview was like another kind of project of mankind’s will to power and is now historically over.
To me the Modernism PoMo accommodationists are criticizing here is indistinguishable from objectivism or a scientific worldview. If you agree with this then how can you have people like Mooney and Rosenau, two accommodationists, claim to be not only pro-science but science evangelizers. Do you believe they’re double agents instead?