Category Archives: Apologetics

Christian temporising over assisted dying

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Al H has been regaling us in the comments on several recent posts with his Christian convictions, with every confidence that he has proposed sufficient reasons not only to believe in God and his Christ, but to live our lives according to a Christian understanding of what is right and good. He applies this especially to assisted dying. So, for instance, he says, in response to a recent post:

To Eric MacDonald #12: In my view, personal autonomy is not a sufficient warrant to grant such an exception to the sixth commandment. Sure, suicides, murders, etc. happen and no law can prevent them. That does not imply that they should be legalized. The sense of obligation to request a physician-assisted suicide that I mentioned in my #9 post (in cases where physician-assisted suicide has been legalized) is an internal psychological sense of obligation on the part of the elderly, chronically infirm or disabled who wish not to be a burden on others, especially when that option is recommended to them by their care-givers — as I understand has happened repeatedly in the Netherlands. E.g., I don’t want my dear wife to sense that obligation in addition to her severe 24/7 physical pain. I do not regard as in the common good a segment in the training of health-care professionals devoted to most efficient and effective means of killing their patients, if requested to do so by anyone, including the patient. I believe there is merit in the Hyppocratic [sic] oath to do no harm. At least in ancient Greece it helped to restore some measure of confidence in health-care professionals.

I will now respond directly to Al H. There is simply no basis for the claims that you make here. They are prompted by your Christian beliefs, and cannot be seen as independent of them. Your reference to your dear wife in this connexion is irrelevant to the point at issue, for there is no reason to suppose that people will feel under this obligation, or, if they do, that the obligation would be based on the legalisation of assisted dying. People do sometimes feel under an obligation not to be a burden on their family. It is often a justified feeling arising from a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, and is a perfectly legitimate feeling to have. And some people, feeling such an obligation, do not take “heroic” measures in order to prolong their lives or their dying.

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The duty allotted by nature

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Many arguments regarding abortion or euthanasia (or assisted dying more generally) are based on supposed “laws of nature.” The status of such natural laws is not clear, but we are assured that they are, notwithstanding their nature as facts about the world, morally binding upon those to whom they apply. We saw this in action not so long ago when I addressed myself to Edward Feser’s book The Last Superstition. One of the things that struck me with such force about that book, and the response to my criticism of it — and here it is important to remember that the entire milieu of contemporary scholastic philosophy, basing itself on Aristotle and Aquinas, is related as like to unlike when it is used in philosophical discussion itself — is that there is a sense in which, for the modern scholastic, the arguments are already made and the conclusions are already reached, well before we begin, and there is nothing, beyond simple agreement, that can be accepted as the rational response to scholastic argumentation.

This is particularly clear in Robert George’s book, The Clash of Orthodoxies. When he is discussing Rawls’ theory of justice, he takes it for granted that the idea of justice as fairness is all very well where we do not know the truth, but where we do know it – as, he claims, we would know it if we accepted his argumentation, for this argumentation produces truth of such power and validity that it cannot be reasonably questioned by a rational person — any settlement made behind the “veil of ignorance” (or, as Rawls alternatively says, in the “original position”) is immediately called into question by any rational demonstration of the truth. George believes himself to have established, beyond reasonable doubt, that abortion, infanticide and euthanasia or assisted suicide (assisted dying) are contrary to the natural law, and therefore irrational and immoral. This, it would seem, immediately upsets the possibility of establishing an “original position” (even as a philosophical hermeneutic) from which political arrangements can be made which will assure the just (=fair) disposition of rights and privileges, wealth and opportunity that is consistent with the greatest benefit to the least well off person in society. For if justice, established in this way, must be subject to the truth (as understood by a subsection of the citizenry), any such contractual arrangements would be immediately called into question by the rational demonstration that something believed, behind the veil of ignorance, to be a matter of individual choice and determination, is, in actuality, not open to reasonable question.

The important point to notice here is that Rawls’ theory of justice was intended to overcome the ideological differences between different members of society, so that, for those, like George, who believe that their position is the only rational one, in terms of providing conclusive argument for the truth of its conclusions, there would be no hindrance to their believing themselves to have achieved truth, and to act in accordance with it, without at the same time requiring others to subordinate their own lives or reasoning to the conclusions reached by George and his fellow believers. When Rawls speaks of comprehensive world views existing side-by-side in the same society on the basis of contractual agreement not to impose views peculiar to themselves on others — thus preserving both peace and justice in society — he has in mind claims like those made by George, that their arguments offer conclusive demonstrations of the truth of their beliefs. In the kind of secular society for which Rawls’ theory of justice was intended as a means of achieving social peace and concord, as well as providing the greatest liberty for each citizen compatible with equal liberty for all, the move that George is making is simply illegitimate, for it is claiming moral certainty in a world where no such certainty exists.

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Odium Theologicum

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Sorry folks. I’ve been UA for most of the last two or three days. I had my 71st birthday during that time (on Halloween, no less!), and did a lot of jiggery-pokery with my computer, which is now up and running again with both Windows 7 and 8 in good order. Windows 8 is not compatible with all my programs, so, in order to keep them, as I wish to, I have to run both operating systems. Windows 8 is certainly faster, and has some nice features. It has been suggested to me that using a program to give me the Windows 7 experience in Windows 8 is like keeping training wheels on a bike. Well, perhaps, but then, I don’t find the Windows 8 interface as productive, even if it is functional. And it’s mainly just ugly, so I see no reason to put that excrescence on my desktop. But that’s just me. Samsung, apparently, is offering a similar interface change on all their laptops. Perhaps Samsung knows something Microsoft doesn’t. Anyway, everything is functional once again, and I am back on track.

The odium theologicum is, literally speaking, theological hatred. Referring to the Arian dispute in the early church, at the point where Athanasius (the Patriarch or Pope of Alexandria, who, of course, was later rehabilitated, and is now, amongst theologians, regarded as the main architect of Christian orthodox teaching regarding the nature of the incarnation), having been found by councils of the church in Milan and Arles, guilty of heresy, and sent by the emperor into exile, Gibbon, in his great history, says with cool wit:

The ingenious malice of their enemies had deprived them of the benefit of mutual comfort and advice, separated those illustrious exiles [for more prelates than Athanasius refused to sign the Arian protocols] into distant provinces, and carefully selected the most barbarous tracts of a great empire. Yet they soon experienced that the deserts of Libya, and the most barbarous tracts of Cappadocia, were less inhospitable than the residence of those cities in which an Arian bishop could satiate, without restraint, the exquisite rancour of theological hatred. [Decline and Fall, chapter 21]

The closing expression, “the exquisite rancour of theological hatred,” occurred to me as I watched a debate between Bill Donahue and Christopher Hitchens (which begins with this clip). (It starts off a bit unpromisingly, but after the priest moderator makes a few signs of the cross and offers a quick prayer, and then gives a long introduction in which he suggests that debates and universities were a Catholic invention, and were in any case at home in a Catholic context, we get into the real meat and potatoes of the debate, and then it becomes clear that Donahue had no intention to debate at all. Talk about odium theologicum! Bill Donahue is a nasty tempered, nasty minded, abusive bully. Why anyone should have thought it promising to put this rather abusive person into a debate is hard to fathom, yet he does express well the rancour of theological hatred. Whether it measures up to Gibbons’ “exquisite rancour” may be doubted. Here’s an example of his rebarbative style:

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It’s not, by the way, Catholics for Free Choice, it’s Catholics for Choice, and, not to put too fine a point on it, the truth seems to be that, Vatican condemnation or not, many if not most Catholics in the United States are opposed to some fundamental Catholic principles, such as the absolute prohibition of abortion. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is, according to Wikipedia, “a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses drag and religious imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance and satirize issues of gender and morality.” It had its origins during the AIDS crisis in the late seventies, and, quoting further from Wikipedia:

The Sisters have grown throughout the U.S. and are currently organized as an international network of orders, which are mostly non-profit charity organizations that raise money for AIDS, LGBT-related causes, and mainstream community service organizations, while promoting safer sex and educating others about the harmful effects of drug use and other risky behaviors. In San Francisco alone where they continue to be the most active, between 1979 and 2007 the Sisters are credited with raising over $1 million for various causes.

Although their existence may be seen as an implicit criticism of the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on gay sexuality, its main purpose is clearly empowerment and charity. A narrow-minded idiot like Bill Donahue may find this anti-Catholic, which no doubt is a part of its métier, but people like Donahue should not forget that the church brings this kind of opprobrium upon itself by taking such a hard-line in condemning all forms of sexuality besides its strictly reproductive uses. To say that the Order of Perpetual Indulgence (another name for the same thing) is anti-Catholic is perhaps not altogether false, but it is to tell only one side of the story. Of course, Hitchens rather tellingly goes on to point out that the Jesus of Matthew told his followers that those are blessed who are persecuted for his sake, so that Bill Donahue should thank his critics rather than condemn them. But for someone like Donahue to complain about anti-Catholicism when his own abusiveness seems to know no reasonable limit is to fall at the first fence.

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What is the biggest obstacle to religious faith?

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Veronica Abbass has very kindly referred me, via her comment at the Canadian Atheist site, to the “religion experts” of the Ottawa Citizen where, this week, they address the question: “What is the greatest obstacle to faith? ” Kevin Flynn, an Anglican priest and director of the Anglican Studies programme at St. Paul University — a Catholic school which, according to its website offers “degrees in Philosophy, Theology, Human Sciences and Canon Law” — in other words, not a university at all — suggests that science itself is not an obstacle to faith; rather, he says,

the greatest obstacle to faith in our culture is the notion — widely held but  little examined — that science has made religious faith absurd and untenable.  This is not science, but “scientism.”

Now, I have gone of record as suggesting that scientism is, in fact, a misunderstanding of the status and scope of science. The belief that all that we know can, in the end, be reduced to the statements of science is, I believe, an imperialist gesture by some scientists who cannot conceive of knowing what is not, at base, scientific. This is very clearly stated by Jerry Coyne in a recent piece about Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos, where, countering Nagel’s claims about reductionism, he says this (he is referring to this review of Nagel’s book, by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, in The Nation):

Here all three academics (Weisberg is a philosopher; Leiter a professor of law) make a mistake: the view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics, which is materialism, is not identical to an attempt to reduce all sciences to physics.  The former must be true unless you’re religious, while the latter is a tactical problem that will be solved to some degree as we understand more about physics and biology, but is unlikely in our lifetime to give a complete explanation for higher-level phenomena. Remember, though, that “emergent phenomena” must be consistent with the laws of physics, even those laws may not be useful for explaining things like natural selection.

And then, a bit later, he simply denies that there are moral truths, for this would contradict his claim that all that we can know can be reduced to the propositions of science. Now, I haven’t made a study of reductionism, and what it is possible to say regarding the reduction of one science to another, but it strikes me that saying, as Coyne does, that “‘emergent phenomena’ must be consistent with the laws of physics” does not, in fact, contradict the claim, made by Nagel, Weisberg and Leiter, that such reductions are or at least may not be possible. Whether it is or is not possible to carry out successive reductions of science that do in fact account for higher level phenomena, so that science is truly unified, is not something that can be based on the claim, which is obviously correct, that higher level phenomena must be consistent with the laws of physics. The question is — and it has not so far been answered, all attempts at producing a unified science to the contrary — whether the laws of physics can explain higher level phenomena. In other words, doubts about the in principle reduction of all sciences to the laws of physics is not clearly only an option for a religious believer, because there is no inconsistency in the belief that higher level phenomena may be only explicable at that higher level, even though such phenomena are consistent with the laws of physics. That seems to me almost trivially true, although I acknowledge that I have not studied the logical conundrums at the heart of concepts of reduction, emergent phenomena, and so on.

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Spufford actually does it again …, and it’s worse this time

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Over at the Guardian Spufford takes off the gloves, and gives atheism — or at least tries to give atheism — a real haymaker this time. No polite “Let’s be friends” this time around. And although he ends by saying (in a knock-off of the title of his new book which, having read his columns, no sane person will bother to read) that he is unapologetic, he begins, in typical apologetic style in his title by calling his article “a defence of faith.” Spufford, mirabile dictu, thinks that religions are composed of emotions rationalised into ideas and beliefs, and his defence upholds the claim that his book “is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity.” But if that is all Christianity is composed of — as he suggests as well in his New Humanist piece — then it is strictly irrelevant to questions of belief and unbelief. He seems to think that he has hit upon a wonderful defence of faith — as though no one had ever thought of it before. But there’s nothing new about “enthusiasm.” It has been around for donkey’s years, and most theologians have been cautious about giving their imprimatur to something composed of nothing but emotions. Pentecostalism, where religion is simply drenched with emotion, is certainly an up and coming form of Christian practice, but it is pretty short on specifics, and is intellectually negligible. Which perhaps explains the curious vacuity of Spufford’s attempts at explanation.

Starting at the end of something so empty of significance is perhaps a good idea, for if there is substance to be had it should come before the end. But, sadly, this is not the case with Spufford. He’s still arguing the deep humanity of Christian faith, though for all his words it is strangely uncompelling. This, for example, is perhaps a measure of his desperation:

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

As I said in my comment on his last effort, in the New Humanist, of course the emotions that Christians have are human ones, since Christians are human, and are bound to have them. But it doesn’t help that they have human emotions, and it certainly won’t help to pick believers out from amongst a mixed group of people including various types of believers and unbelievers. Believe it or not, we share the human condition, and we do without a doubt share many of our emotions. Spufford thinks that critics of Christianity falsify the relevant emotions by rationalising them into ideas. I think he means beliefs, here, but never mind; the truth is, despite everything that he may say about the fabric of emotions which Spufford thinks are at the centre of Christian … — ah, but here we have a problem, suddenly — at the centre of Christian what? Believing? Practice? Ritual? Community belonging? How do we distinguish between Christian emotions, say, and Jewish emotions? Could believers, then, simply dispense with belief altogether, and go off together, higglety-pigglety, in a paroxysm of emotion?

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Dear Christians … or why Francis Spufford’s letter to atheists simply won’t do

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I find it difficult to understand why the New Humanist bothered to publish, and not altogether clear why Francis Spufford decided to write, his letter to atheists. Not only does it seem altogether to miss the point of non-belief, it doesn’t really account very well for the purpose or substance of religious belief either. So, when he begins with the following teasing, chastising sentence –

Allow me to annoy you with the prospect of mutual respect between believers and atheists.

– he succeeds both in annoying and misrepresenting the relationship that now exists between us. He forgets a very important fact: that most non-believers started out as believers, and ended up as non-believers for all sorts of reasons, but amongst them are reasons referring to the harm which religious belief now does on a massive scale. The question of respect is therefore not one that can be settled with a few anodyne phrases, or tactless efforts at being ironic or funny.

Nor, it seems to me, does Spufford do religion any favours by misrepresenting the way that most religious believers hold their faith. Indeed, he tries so hard to make it seem as though religious believers don’t really believe, that their having beliefs that can and are regularly cashed in in terms of social and political policies is made to seem like something entirely extraneous to the project of religious belief, that he looks more than slightly dishonest into the bargain.

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The Problem of God’s Hiddenness

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There is something deeply troubling about the idea that God hides himself, that he does not make it plain that he exists, and that he has expectations of us which depend on our belief in his existence. Very often the reason for this hiddenness is put in terms, such as those used by Peter van Inwagen in his Gifford Lectures (Lecture 8), that suggest that God does not want people just to believe in him, but that God wants people to be in a special relationship with him which belief alone would not satisfy. Inwagen speaks in terms of atonement, though it is important to note that the focus on atonement is to a large degree a Christian preoccupation, and is not clearly related to the beliefs of other religions about relationship with God. However, let’s simply take it for granted that the main issue has to do with atonement, and reconciliation with God, a reconciliation in which our response to God is not simply one of belief, but also of love and devotion, and a free willingness to act in accordance with God’s will. Some overpowering evidence that God exists, it is suggested, would not allow for such a relationship, and therefore God must hide himself, putting out tentative feelers which should be enough for the pure of heart to see and respond with love and faithfulness.

Take the example that Inwagen uses as an analogy. Why didn’t God give us more evidence that women are the intellectual, social, emotional and spiritual equals of men? If he had, then perhaps men would have treated women differently, and we wouldn’t be saddled with so much distressing sexism. As he says, if God had let this be known,

[t]here would have been no sexism, no male domination, no clitoral circumcision, no prostitution, no sexual slavery, no foot-binding or purdah or suttee. [all quotes come from the last chapter in the linked text, "The Hiddenness of God",  accessible by text search]

Why haven’t we been given more evidence? Part of the answer, says Inwagen, is that God has

already [provided] all the evidence we need or should ever have needed to be convinced — to know — that women are not the intellectual, emotional, or spiritual inferiors of men.

What, we might ask, could possibly have blinded men to something that should have been obvious to them?

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How to Justify Religion by Making it all about You

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Mark Vernon is one of the most squishy writers out there, anodyne, non-committal, given to bland generalisation and the empty phrase posing as profound. Reminds one a bit of the Bloomsbury Group, who were given to large romantic gestures and faux profundity largely based on Clive Bell’s theory of art focused on the concept of “significant form” and G.E. Moore’s intuitionism in ethics. Lawrence captured the pretension at the core of the Bloomsbury Set’s shallowness in Women in Love, the movie version of which caught well the sexual tension and brittle intellectuality in this vignette:

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(The woman eating the fig is based on Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose salon in Bloomsbury (Bedford Square) was host to many of the Bloomsbury Group, for many of whom Lady Ottoline was an influential patron. “The way to eat a fig in society” is one of Lawrence’s poems.) Vernon’s latest Guardian op-ed does not disappoint in this respect. He takes two books, one by Rowan Williams, the departing Archbishop of Canterbury, the other by Francis Spufford, historian and science writer who has written or compiled a number of light-weight books on a variety of topics. But the point of Vernon’s piece is not, really, to say anything substantive about the books under consideration. Instead, he wants to carry further his Christian apologetics which began to pick up speed a couple of years ago. From being an ex-priest agnostic, Vernon has been climbing back onto the bandwagon of faith now for some time. In order to do that, and retain some intellectual respectability, he has to show that faith is not about those things that led him, many years ago, to abandon Christianity; there must be a not-entirely-graspable-something at the heart of Christianity that is peculiarly life affirming, and so he casts about for others who share this sense of a diaphanous something, and finds them in Willams and Spufford.

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Gods and algorithms — jeu d’esprit for a Sunday morning

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Can there be a philosophy of religion? My immediate response to this is that the “philosophical” discussion of religion is part of religion, so that it belongs to religion and not to philosophy. I have wrestled with the problem most of my adult life. When I was studying philosophy, I never read anything about religion, and deliberately avoided the area called philosophy of religion because it seemed to me a corruption of philosophy. When I was studying theology I scarcely thought of it in philosophical terms at all. There were linkages with philosophers, but not with philosophy, as such. The reason is simple. Religion is closed in a way that philosophy must not be, and while theology may seek to clarify concepts philosophically, or to use certain trends in philosophy to clarify theological ideas and conclusions (as when Bultmann or Tillich or Macquarrie use existentialism to develop their theological explorations), or to defend them, the end product is not philosophy, but theology (religion). Of course, there is that department of philosophy which is devoted to the critique of theological arguments, and to the disproof of the existence of god, and this is indeed an attempt to clarify the confusions that are created by those who believe in a god or gods. However, when it comes to the religious attempt to use philosophy in order to prove the existence of a god or gods, and thus to prove the rationality of faith or religious belief, this is always part of a particular theology or positive religion. Religion never comes to us in a generalised form, but always in terms of specific religious commitments. This does not mean, of course, that theologians cannot sometimes be philosophers, and speak entirely in philosophical terms, but when their subject matter is religious belief, they are no longer doing philosophy. The term Christian Philosophy is, I believe, an oxymoron. The purpose of philosophy is to destabilise belief, not to confirm it.

This is particularly clear in the Catholic Church’s idea of the relationship between reason and faith. As Pope Wojtyła says in his encyclical Fides et Ratio:

The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others.(54) The underlying reason for this reluctance is that, even when it engages theology, philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods. Otherwise there would be no guarantee that it would remain oriented to truth and that it was moving towards truth by way of a process governed by reason. A philosophy which did not proceed in the light of reason according to its own principles and methods would serve little purpose. At the deepest level, the autonomy which philosophy enjoys is rooted in the fact that reason is by its nature oriented to truth and is equipped moreover with the means necessary to arrive at truth. A philosophy conscious of this as its “constitutive status” cannot but respect the demands and the data of revealed truth.

Yet history shows that philosophy — especially modern philosophy — has taken wrong turns and fallen into error. It is neither the task nor the competence of the Magisterium to intervene in order to make good the lacunas of deficient philosophical discourse. Rather, it is the Magisterium’s duty to respond clearly and strongly when controversial philosophical opinions threaten right understanding of what has been revealed, and when false and partial theories which sow the seed of serious error, confusing the pure and simple faith of the People of God, begin to spread more widely. [Chapter V, Para 49]

Notice here that the wrong turning is defined, not in philosophical, but in religious terms. If philosophy falls into error it is because it fails to achieve a “right understanding of what has been revealed.” But this is not something that can be part of philosophy, since the notion of revelation is itself philosophically suspect. Of course, this will not stop religious believers from continuing to make the claim that they have received revelations from their god or gods, but it does at least, I think, raise the question whether this is relevant to the philosophical project.

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Michael Coren and the faults of Christianity

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I had the fortune until recently of not knowing that Michael Coren existed, but now that he has been thrust upon my attention by Jerry Coyne’s really hard-hitting “Vacuous Comment of the Week” over at Why Evolution is True, and since, whatever his nationality of origin, Michael Coren writes as a Canadian (for shame! for shame!), I feel the need to venture into the quagmire too, and (mixing metaphors) to hold Michael Coren’s feet to the fire. Let’s start where Jerry starts, with the Amazon.com blurb comment on Coren’s new book: Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity:

Michael Coren explores why and how Christians and Christian ideas are caricatured in popular media as well as in sophisticated society. He takes on, and debunks, ten great myths about Christianity: that it supports slavery, is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, provokes war, resists progress, and is repressive and irrelevant. In a climate that is increasingly as ignorant of Christianity as it is good at condemning it, Coren gives historical background, provides examples of how these attacks are made, and explains the reality of the Christian response, outlining authentic Christian beliefs.

The interesting thing about this comment is that it is contradicted by statistics.  Apparently, in the United States, at least, atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable about religion than religious believers. Only slightly more than half of Catholics polled knew that the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the bread and wine become substantially the body and blood of Christ when consecrated by a priest! (Google “Atheists and knowledge of religion” for 16 million hits.)

However, there is something even more important to note in the blurb’s claim about Coren’s book. According to Coren, Christianity does not support slavery, is not racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, does not provoke war, resist progress, and is not repressive or irrelevant. Let’s take them one by one.

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