Monthly Archives: January 2012

Let’s Keep New Atheism Strident

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Apparently, Sir David Attenborough is going to tell Kirsty Young that there is no inconsistency between evolution and belief in God. He may, perhaps, already have done so, since there is often a time lag between my picking up on the news and the events or anticipated events it records. He’s not confident enough to be an atheist, says Sir David, opening the floodgates of prediction that the shrill, strident new atheism is being replaced by a more genial, accommodating form of unbelief. But, of course, this is sheer nonsense. Those of us who are convinced, on good grounds, that there is no basis for belief in a god of any sort that would be religiously meaningful, have no intention of building atheist temples and listening to atheist sermons, even if, it seems, there are some atheists, like Alain de Botton, who think this is a good idea, and some theists, like George Pitcher, that particularly rebarbative Anglican priest, who begins his piece of Daily Mail pap with words of terrible banality:

There’s something divine in the air. Agnostics and atheists are beginning to nod respectfully in the direction of the Almighty, while still, of course, maintaining that He’s not there.

And he ends with something equally trite:

The shrill voice of Dawkins is gradually being marginalised by those of no more faith than him, but who nevertheless perceive mystery in humanity and, while not accepting the presence of God in the world, are prepared to face in the same direction as the rest of us and stand in awe and wonder.

Has Pitcher really heard Dawkins speak. Shrill?! Come! Come! As for awe and wonder, Dawkins has all along said that there is so much in the natural world to prompt awe and wonder. This he has never denied, and adding belief in a god doesn’t add to the wonder, or precipitate more awe. Just as a swallow does make a summer, a couple of accommodating agnostics do not actually serve to marginalise Dawkins, and Pitcher’s “arguments” are about as lame as ever, though this time he’s gone a bit downmarket and is writing for the Mail. Before his short stint as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s public relations officer (or equivalent), Pitcher was writing for the Telegraph, admittedly a conservative paper, but one of some quality. The Daily Mail, however, is in another class altogether, and given Pitcher’s completely scurrilous attack on Evan Harris, a well deserved demotion for this dislikeable hack. Long may it last!

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Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: X: The Tawdriness of the Miraculous

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Let’s return, for a moment, to Hitchens’ god is not Great, for that nimble, eloquent mind, now forever silenced, still has much to teach us.

Hitchens ends his tenth chapter with these words:

Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined — as I hope — I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. there are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too,  I guarantee, once you leave the hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking. [153]

He is referring in his own case, not to Christianity or any religion, but to the Trotskyist Marxism which coloured his early years, a source, one might think, of his irrepressible passion and intense commitment to those things that attracted his attention and held it. The chapter itself, though it ends on this note, is not really about authority and doctrine. Indeed, the ending of the chapter is, in a sense, “stuck on” to the end of his discussion of the miraculous, and seems at least partly out-of-place. In one sense the whole book is an argument against authority, and an affirmation of the transient and occasional nature of our conclusions. We are, after all, more like jumped up apes, Hitchens suggests, than like fallen angels. Our sympathies are limited and our ability to achieve reliable and stable truths about reality is more often claimed than achieved.

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What are creation myths for?

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There is an interesting discussion taking place over Peter Enns’ reflections on the creation narratives in the Old Testament. Peter Enns is an evangelical Christian biblical scholar, with a PhD from Harvard, and was once, according to Jerry Coyne in his response to Enns, “the Senior Fellow in Biblical Studies at Biologos.” (Jason Rosenhouse has pitched in with his own thoughts on the same subject.)

First of all, the important point that Peter Enns makes, and that, according to Rosenhouse, is all that he should have said:

If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve isn’t. If you believe, as evangelicals do, that God himself is responsible for what’s in the Bible, you have a problem on your hands. Once you open the door to the possibility that God’s version of human origins isn’t what actually happened — well, the dominoes start unraveling down the slippery slope. The next step is uncertainty, chaos and despair about one’s personal faith.

That, more or less, is the evangelical log flume of fear, and I have seen it played out again and again.

In recent years, the matter has gotten far worse. Popular figures like Richard Dawkins have done an in-your-face-break-the-backboard-slam-dunk over the heads of defenders of the biblical story. They’ve taken great delight in making sure Main Street knows evolution is true, and therefore the Bible is “God’s big book of bad ideas” (Bill Maher) and Christians are morons for taking it seriously. Evangelicals have been on high alert damage control mode.

Then you have the mapping of the human genome. It’s a done deal: humans and primates are 90-something percent related genetically. The best explanation for it, geneticists tell us, is that humans evolved from primates. Since my greatest scientific achievement is doing puppet shows with dissected feral cats in high school biology, I feel I have no right to contest — and I likely speak for many other evangelicals in that regard (sans puppet show). And it doesn’t help things that an evangelical, Francis Collins, was the one who pointed all this out, got the Presidential Medal of Honor for it, and talked about it (twice) on “The Colbert Report.”

If that wasn’t enough, evolution is being used nowadays to explain all sorts of things about us humans — including why we believe in God. If God is a product of evolution, like bipedalism and tool making, well, the jig’s up (and not just for evangelicals).

As Rosenhouse says, that’s pretty good. This is the way the world is folks — get over it! But of course Enns couldn’t stop there, because he wants to preserve something for Christianity. In the face of all that he has accepted, can he still do this? Enns thinks he can. All you have to do, he seems to think, is to read the creation story in a figurative way, and the problem will be solved.

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Round and Round the Mulberry Bush

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Mark Vernon responded to Julian Baggini’s series on the Heathen’s Progress in a recent piece in the Guardian, and now, in his turn, Baggini has responded to Vernon. Since it seemed to me that, in his latest Heathen’s Progress piece, Baggini had lost the thread of the story, his latest contribution adds a new and important wrinkle; for here, at last, he comes to the question of the ground of or justification for religious belief. Of course, had he started this way, the series may have been over before it was well begun, but these are, after all, crucial questions to ask when confronted by any proposal of belief. What grounds it? On what basis do I consider this belief to be true? Is it appropriate to hold this belief on quite slender grounds, or on grounds that seem inadequate to the importance that this belief will play in the system of beliefs in which it plays an important part? And so on.

We hold all sorts of beliefs on very dubious grounds, yet usually such beliefs do not play a defining role in our understanding of ourselves and the world. But when a belief plays a central role in the structure of our beliefs, it becomes very important for us to make sure that we hold that belief on reputable grounds, and this, I think, is seldom the case when it comes to religion. Indeed, the scientific understanding of the reasons why religious beliefs have come to be held seems to show that religious beliefs fulfil certain psychological conditions which enable them to be held without and even in the teeth of the evidence. Take Thompson and Aukofer’s book, Why We Believe in Gods. In a general statement about the conclusions of their book they state:

Religion utilizes and piggybacks onto everyday social-thought processes, adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved to help us negotiate our relationships with other people, to detect agency and intent, and to generate a sense of safety. [Kindle, loc 374-5]

This is important. If religious beliefs are, as Thompson and Aukofer claim, merely hitching a ride on already developed mechanisms that have evolved for other reasons having to do with social interaction and the detection of threats and benefits in the environment, then it is doubly important that we trace them back to their origins.

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How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam

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Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?

Phyllis Chesler

[This article, which I downloaded sometime in March 2007, and just came across moments ago, is worth reading, I think, in the light of attempts that are being made to diminish our freedom to criticise Islam -- or any other religion. Since it is now behind the Times paywall, I think it deserves to be more widely read. Why have we devolved, since then, to the frightened, overly sensitive victims that we seem to have become? I acknowledge that Ms. Chseler, at the time of publication of this article, met this kind of small-minded opposition to her arguments about Islamic barbarity, but would her article appear in a major Western newspaper today, I wonder? Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1480090.ece]

Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.

When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.

In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.

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Religions are totalitarian. If we cannot criticise religion, we cannot be free.

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Hector Avalos has just published a new book. The author of Fighting Words, which deals with religion and violence, and The End of Biblical Studies, which shows how, despite the fact that contemporary biblical scholarship has shown definitively that the Bible cannot plausibly be thought to be a revelation from the divine, and criticises those biblical “scholars” who continue to privilege the biblical text, despite the fact that critical study has demoted it from being a central and pivotal text for our understanding of reality, has taken his forensic exploration of biblical religion further in a book entitled Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship. (It is, unfortunately, prohibitively expensive.) For a taster Avalos has spun out an essay from the book entitled (no surprise here) ”Slavery, Abolitionism and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship: Reflections about Ethical Deflections,” which you can download here. I mention this mainly because of this fundamental point that Avalos makes in his essay:

But despite the thoroughly benign manner in which biblical ethics are often represented, the Bible endorses horrific ideas and practices.

In other words, biblical scholars know that the Bible often endorses horrifically immoral practices, but they continue to privilege the text by diverting our attention from the immoral aspects of the text, and by focusing our attention on ideals which they claim to have extracted from the text, despite the fact that the text itself remains deformed by its support for immorality.

The same, as he points out, goes for the figure of Jesus. Jesus is portrayed as the perfect, indefectible human being, despite the fact that, as a man, he must have been fallible and imperfect:

My project actually began [he writes] with a puzzling experience. If one reads almost any book on Christian ethics written by academic biblical scholars, one finds something extremely peculiar: Jesus never does anything wrong. [original italics]

This is not quite true. It may be observed that Jesus does things that are wrong, but these acts are often justified by the fact that Jesus is assumed to be the son of God, and, therefore, even though wrong to mortal eyes, they have an entirely different character when they are thought to be the doings of a god. In a passage that I have quoted before, the Oxford theologian Keith Ward says:

If one grants the existence of God and the unique status of Jesus in relation to him, these characteristics of his reported life become quite natural and appropriate. [Ethics and Christianity, 28]

That is simply too much to grant. But there is an even bigger problem; for Ward’s response to the observation that Jesus would seem to be “deluded, arrogant and intolerant” should be a reason to believe that Jesus cannot, therefore, have the relationship to God that Christians suppose that he has; yet aspects of Jesus’ character that should lead us to question his divine status are used precisely to establish his character as divine!

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The Commission on Assisted Dying is embarrassingly wrong! How did they manage it?

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The Commission on Assisted Dying report need not be read. It is such a grave misunderstanding of the reasons and purposes for which people seek assisted dying, and what the acceptance of a person’s right to ask for assisted dying means, that the rest of the report is thereby rendered meaningless. It may have useful things to say about the history of the debate, and its present status in the United Kingdom, but about assisted dying it has nothing of value to say.

Here is the crucial paragraph from page 27 of the report. This indicates a complete failure to come to terms with the issue of assisted dying and the reasons for it. It is, in itself, in my view, self-contradictory, and would, if justified, render the decision for assisted dying, for anyone, a serious danger to those who are dying. That the commission did not see this indicates that they were bamboozled by the scare tactics used by the churches into believing that allowing one disabled person to choose to die would be to devalue the lives of all disabled persons, a claim that is simply absurd, but which, if true, would make their own proposal as dangerous as the right to die for the disabled is wrongly said to be.

The Commission proposes an eligibility criterion requiring a diagnosis of terminal illness. The Commission received evidence from many disabled people and does not consider that it would be acceptable to recommend that a non-terminally ill person with significant physical impairments should be made eligible under any future legislation to request assistance in ending his or her life. The intention of the Commission in recommending that any future legislation should permit assisted suicide exclusively for those who are terminally ill and specifically excluding disabled people (unless they are terminally ill) is to establish a clear delineation between the application of assisted suicide for people who are terminally ill and others with long-term conditions or impairments. The adoption of this distinction in any future legislation would send a clear message that disabled people’s lives are valued equally.

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Shaken to the Very Core

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After a week when Islam has been in the news because of its tendency towards violence and intolerance of free speech, Karen Armstrong has once again entered the lists on behalf of the religion, telling us in rather mawkish tones that our prejudices about Islam will actually be shaken by the British Museum’s exhibition on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are supposed to make at least once in their lifetime. She tells us, eyes all agog, that

The ancient rituals of the hajj, which Arabs performed for centuries before Islam, have helped pilgrims to form habits of heart and mind that – pace the western stereotype – are non-violent and inclusive.

In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living.

Even supposing that it is true that violence of any kind was forbidden in the holy city, and that pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, or even, taking the prohibition of violence to absurd lengths, to swat an insect, it scarcely follows that this would be enough ”to form habits of heart and mind … that are non-violent and inclusive.” Habits develop only with long experience and constant repetition. To suppose that one trip to the holy city will embed these habits deeply in a personality is wishful thinking. A number of commenters on Armstrong’s piece in the Guardian have not been slow to point this out. Indeed, she has received scarcely any support for her exaggerated and unfounded notion of Islamic toleration and non-violence. As one writer, quoted by Ibn Warraq in his book Why I am not a Muslim, asks: “In short, Muhammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer, and his deity told him to conquer: do we need any more?” (122)

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Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: IX: The Koran is Borrowed from both Jewish and Christian Myths

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The ninth chapter of god is not Great is especially important because in this one Hitchens raises all the questions that seem to have been begged in his discussion of the Jewish Tanach and the Christian Bible. In those cases he seems to take for granted that inconsistencies and incoherences in the text make the claim to revelation ridiculous. This may, indeed, be true, but there is a prior question here that needs to be asked and answered, and Hitchens does, in fact, raise it now.

The preposterousness of the claim to divine revelation is made very clear in the opening paragraphs where Hitchens details the problems with pretending that the Koran could possibly be of supernatural origin. There is, first of all, the claim that the revelation was given to an illiterate man who then, in turn, spoke the words revealed to him to another who wrote it down. And then, as it happens, these bits and pieces of the supposed “revelation” were stored up in rather haphazard ways, and then compiled at a later date to form the text which is now known as the Koran, and for which so many exorbitant claims are then made. Since the text was “revealed” in Arabic, the assumption is made, as Hitchens says, that the god of the Koran is a monoglot, whose language is Arabic. The consequence is that this privileges not only the Koran but the Arabic language itself, so that no translation can be considered to be the Koran at all. So Arabs and Arabic are privileged above all other Muslims, and people whose original language is not Arabic are taught to recite the Koran even though they may not understand the language, and Arabia itself is also so privileged, so that Muslims everywhere must bow in the direction of Mecca when they pray, being forced, in consequence, to find their identity elsewhere than in their own language and culture. This has the inevitable effect of making all non-Arab Muslims subordinate to Arab Muslims, and their expression of Islam of considerably less importance.

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Free Will Again

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Since Jerry Coyne has been up to his old tricks, and dismissing free will as an illusion, I simply feel compelled to answer. Whether this is done freely or not I cannot say, but it seems like a decision that I made myself, and then carried out. Whether it will issue in a published post or not is anyone’s guess, since some of my prospective posts can still be found littering the Drafts bin. I haven’t yet decided whether to keep them or to incinerate them, but whether or not doing so will be done freely or by compulsion is still, it seems, disputable. For at least Massimo Pigliucci disputes it over at Rationally Speaking, where he takes Jerry to task for (i) misunderstanding the philosophical arguments about free will, and (ii) misrepresenting the scientific findings of Libet and others. Jerry responds to Pigliucci in the post linked above. Pigliucci’s post is a response to an earlier op-ed piece that Jerry did for USA Today, published, significantly or ominously, on New Years Day 2012.

It’s hard to know where to start, but since I have to choose to start somewhere let it be right here where I am asking myself where to start. Should I start with Jerry’s original USA Today essay? Or should I start with Pigliucci’s response? Let’s see now! No, I think I’ll start with Jerry’s response to Pigliucci’s response to Jerry! And in particular to this:

But I am addressing what I think is most people’s notion of free will, which I think is to some extent dualistic.

Massimo had said something to the effect that Jerry ignores what philosophers have to say about free will, and that the issue is far more complex than Jerry allows. In response Jerry says that he is using “most people’s notion of free will.” I guess I have to ask how often this move can be allowed? When atheists address religious faith they say, perhaps appropriately, that they are not particularly interested in what theologians have to say, but how the average religious person understands religious faith. I am sympathetic to this response. However, I wonder whether there is anything that could be called “most people’s notion of free will,” and whether it would be helpful if there were.

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