Category Archives: Religion

A Comment on Comments

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This is meant as a comment on comments to my last post. I bring it forward here, and offer it as a post, because I keep having the feeling that I am being misunderstood. Perhaps this will clarify, and if it does not, perhaps someone will be able to suggest another way of approaching the issues I address here.

I’m obviously not making myself clear, or I am being consistently misunderstood. Let’s start with “substitution.” I do not suggest that we need a substitute for religion. Indeed, humanism is not a “substitute” for religion, but a better way of dealing with some of the things that religion has dealt with. But humanism is not simply a matter of knowing facts. It is, as Grayling says so eloquently, something which includes, not only factual knowledge about the world, but also ”an outlook of great beauty and depth, premised on kindness and common sense, drawing its principles from a conversation about the good whose roots lie in the philo­sophical debates of classical antiquity, continually enriched by the insights and experience of thinkers, poets, historians and scientists ever since.” We certainly do not want to return to the blindnesses of religion which are uncommonly persistent, but that does not mean that we cannot, or that we should not, learn what we can from it. In doing so, however, we do not need to take religion au pied de la lettre. Take guilt, for instance. I said nothing at all about original sin, nor did I mean to allude to it. When I say that some guilt clings to us like a shroud, I mean that some of the things that we do seem to us simply unforgivable, and have a tendency to blight the remainder of our lives. I have seen examples of this not in any way associated with religious notions of primary guilt. That religions have sought and found ways to defuse such guilt is not a shabby lesson to learn from them. We do not at the same time need to take on board the unsatisfactory guilt-mongering upon which so much religion is based.

I have the sense that whenever I speak about religion at all, I am suspected of wanting to return things to the status quo ante, before the criticism of religion has done its work, and of course I do not want to do any such thing. So, a lot of the criticism above completely misses its mark. So when Gordon Willis says: “Religion is just a human story — that is, just a story. We need more than stories to help us grow.” Well, yes, of course we do, but that does not mean that we do not need stories, nor that stories have much to contribute to the shaping of a life. It is not necessarily all or nothing. Whatever we can mine that can contribute to human good, we should do so. That will mean taking things out of context, of course, for we do not want to retain religion. We are well rid of that. It cannot provide the transcendence that it promises — yes, this is indeed true. But that does not mean that it can provide no sense of transcendence at all, and that we cannot, as secular people, make use of such things to our own purpose. But to suppose that these things will simply happen, as some think, is probably a bit of wishful thinking. If we want to destroy religion, we will not do so without something which performs some of the functions of religion. Anderson Thompson shows so clearly how contemporary science of religion is close to understanding the sources of religion’s power over the mind, and the mechanisms by which it exercises this power. If we want to neutralise this, we will have to engage these aspects of the human. We have, for instance, in modern cosmology, a new “creation story,” as it were, and we should not be slow to adopt it as part of our narrative. We can also tell the story of our evolutionary development, along with the development of other life, and the respects in which humans differ from other forms of life on this planet. To suppose that these stories do not have the kinds of power that religious narratives do is simply to abandon our forward positions without a fight.

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In medias res …

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I have been thinking for some time about what is left when religion is simply holus-bolus denied, and the place where religion used to be is left empty. For some people, of course, this is no problem, whether because their religious indoctrination as children was not particularly deep or lasting, or because they have enough richness in their lives already, so that they don’t miss what is missing when religion simply disappears. Yet the premise underlying this, that religion is simply empty and without function is, on the face of it, very unlikely. After all, religions have, in one way or another, dominated peoples lives since the year dot; it would seem passing strange if the result of its demise did not leave some emptiness behind. Not, as is so often supposed, a “god-shaped hole,” for that is a religious apologist’s way of accounting for what is missing, but certainly a cultural void which was once filled with religious myth, belief and ritual. One of the most important things to notice is that, if religion is, as we must suppose, in some sense, an organic development of human society — and there are very few societies that have no tinge of religion at all — then it was, inevitably, performing a social and personal function for those immersed in it.

I say this, not because I have some insistent nostalgia leading me back again and again to those years (which, in truth comprise most of my life) when I was a “believer” of some sorts, and practiced religion as a priest in the church. First of all, looking back, it is hard to say when I was a person of faith, and exactly what it means that I might have been. When I ask myself what I believed for all those years I am hard put to it to state clearly what those beliefs might have been. Towards the end, of course, as I was in the process of “talking myself out of a job” — as some regarded what I was doing — I do not think I could have put my “faith”, such as it was, in clear verbal terms. And that is true, I suspect, of most so-called “believers”.  Atheists sometimes say, with a certain amount of Schadenfreude, that atheists tend to know more about the Bible and about Christian belief than many Christians do, and that, of course, is not much of a surprise. After all, Christians are living their faith, which has much more to do, as is often pointed out, with living within the interstices of a myth, than it is expressing belief in propositions.

The fact that the story, for Christians, as well as Muslims, Hindus, and so forth, is more important than specific, stateable beliefs, probably tells us much more about religious faith than nonbelievers are ready to acknowledge, since atheists have a vested interest in characterising religious faith as a matter of believing things that are not true. Certainly, in the orthodox services of the church, and, in particular, the Eucharist (Mass), statements of belief are included, much like the national anthem used to be sung before the showing of films in movie theatres, but one only begins to notice the beliefs expressed by the words when one is in the process of questioning the value of faith itself. Until then it is simply a matter of expressing one’s commitment to a way of life defined in terms of myth and story, and to the community in which that myth contributes the skeletal form of one’s own life’s narrative. Those who keep emphasising, as I often do, the propositional content of religious belief, tend to steer clear of the less determinate role that such expressions of faith play in shaping a life.

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Islamic Theology and the Criticism of Islam

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Some time ago I published a sequence of posts on Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great. (I never did finish the series, since other things got in the way. Perhaps one day I will return and discuss the remainder of the chapters of Hitchens’ book.) The one particularly in question is this one: Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: XI: “The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin”: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings. Late to the discussion, yet very welcome, is Rahman, who set out to correct some of Hitchens’ errors. This discussion has now gone through several cycles. What I am going to do now is to post Rahman’s latest comment, then I will comment on that, and I invite others who are interested to join in the discussion.

At the heart of this discussion is the question, which arose very early on with the new atheists, when challenged by Terry Eagleton, whether an atheist critic of religion had to be thoroughly acquainted with the theology of the religion being critiqued before venturing a publish a public criticism of that religion. This was answered, as you may remember, by PZ Myers, in his “Courtier’s Reply.” There’s even a Rationalwiki, as well as a Wikipedia entry under this heading – here and here. Essentially, the question at issue was whether a thorough acquaintance of a religion’s theology was necessary in order to launch an effective critique of the religion itself. In his London Review of Books review of The God Delusion, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” Eagleton, you will remember, puts it in these rather high-flown terms:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Rahman’s concerns are slightly different, but not so different that there is no relation between his concerns and those expressed by Eagleton. One of the issues over which we have differed is as to the reliability of oral transmission. I will consider these points briefly below. You can always go back to the beginnings of the discussion, if you like, by clicking on the link above which will take you to the original post, and the later discussion prompted by Rahman’s intervention. John K has also been taking part in the discussion.

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Alone in the Universe: Is there no change of death in paradise?

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Commenting on AC Grayling’s new book, The God Argument (due to be published at the end of this month), Damon Linker in The Week, after saying, without a shred of evidence, that godlessness is not umabiguously good for human beings (it could of course be argued that nothing is “unambiguously” good for human beings), goes on to say this:

If atheism is true, it is far from being good news. Learning that we’re alone in the universe, that no one hears or answers our prayers, that humanity is entirely the product of random events, that we have no more intrinsic dignity than non-human and even non-animate clumps of matter, that we face certain annihilation in death, that our sufferings are ultimately pointless, that our lives and loves do not at all matter in a larger sense, that those who commit horrific evils and elude human punishment get away with their crimes scot free — all of this (and much more) is utterly tragic.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this rather comprehensive expression of alarm. It is not at all clear that the philosophical naturalism that underlies most modern atheism is committed to all the conclusions that Linker attributes to it, but, if we concentrate simply on the fact of our being “alone in the universe,” that is, without any supernatural friend, and that we will be neither rewarded nor punished in a life to come, there being no one except other people to listen to our appeals for help, or to acknowledge the meaningfulness of our lives, there seems to be no reason for his over-exaggerated angst. I do acknowledge, however, that the increasing tide of scientism (and biologism) is probably unhelpful in the short or long term in commending naturalism to those who are going through the symptoms of withdrawal from religious belief, and not altogether intelligible in either scientific or philosophical terms either.

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This blog, really, is all about Elizabeth

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This is my first blog post at Free Thought Blogs, so I want, from the start, to explain my own reasons for being here, for thinking of myself as a “freethinker” (a term which still does not come easy to me), and for wishing to join a community dedicated to freedom of thought, atheism, and opposition to religious belief. I also want to make the point as clearly as I can, as I start out, how Elizabeth (my wife who died in 2007 in Zurich) is the main inspiration of all that I write, and the patron “saint,” if you like, of this Blog. Without her, I would have been a very different person indeed. I will also remark on some of my present interests and concerns.

At the masthead or banner of my blog choiceindying.com, there from the very beginning in December 2010, has been the tag line, “Arguing for the Right-to-Die and against the Religious Obstruction of that Right.” However, had it not been for Elizabeth, my wife of almost 18 years and best friend for 20, whose picture (sitting on a peak in the Lake District) is in the banner above, and who is now in my Gravatar image as well (precisely because what I am trying to say about her part in this is true), I probably would never have come to the point of disbelief, for not only was she a disbeliever long before I was, it was her struggle to die, when her MS, and the misery and pain and indignities associated with it, became so intolerable, that opened my eyes to the fact that, even for a liberal “believer” of the “Sea of Faith” sort, there were moral issues of great importance that I had simply overlooked by the general institutional support that accompanied my membership in, and action on behalf of, a specific religious institution. This stood out for me in stark relief the moment Elizabeth tried to take her own life, and failed, thus setting her on a course which would eventually take her to Zurich, where Dignitas, the assisted suicide organisation which accepts foreign applicants, helped her, with great kindness and dignity, to die, as she sought to do.

Elizabeth herself, though many years younger than I, was the formative influence in my life, far more important than schooling or religion. A woman of great integrity, energy, intellect and joy, she offered me unconditional love, and provided the basis for the freeing of my mind from the dead weight and trammels of my past. Though I do not believe in destiny, the shape my life took seemed – because I can only think of my life until the point that Elizabeth and I exchanged our love as but a propaedeutic and forerunner to the fullness of life that I would come in time to know with her – almost predestined, as though we were supposed to meet and fulfil each other’s dreams of love and commitment. This was expressed in a poem I wrote after her death, entitled “Easter Rising,” about an unexpected intimate encounter with Elizabeth very early on the first Easter morning after we had (earlier in the year) first exchanged our vows of love (and, truth be told, shortly before I would go out to celebrate another resurrection, in a more formal, liturgical way). The poem ends on this note:

One flame forever,
as in the snow,
deeply blended,
each to each,
we yielded,
as the sun began to climb,
and, as one, arose together,
that first Easter morn,
enfolded in each other,
a new creation,
of each other born.

Religion, from that point, began to play an increasingly secondary role in my life, and though I continued to function as a priest in the Anglican Church for all the years of our marriage — and was, indeed, more actively involved in the institutional life of the church on a diocesan level – it was perhaps inevitable that, with Elizabeth’s death, my active participation in that ministry should come to an end. I soon realised that “faith,” for me, had become not only very tenuous, but, indeed, an impediment to clarity of thought and fullness of life. I remember with great affection, however, the years I spent as a priest, and the people I served and learned to care for and admire during all those years, especially those years of priesthood which I shared with Elizabeth, who taught me (for the first time in my life) what it is to love and to be loved in return. It was when the beliefs of the church began to have an immediate impact on the life of the one I held most dear, that close relationship with the church, and participation in its official ministry became intolerable. It is important to recognise that church does not truly acknowledge the right of its members to value things differently than these things are valued through the church’s institutional expression; and being an active and supporting member of the church is in fact to uphold and defend those values, even when one most strenuously disagrees.

You may continue reading this post over at Free Thought Blogs.

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*That it was largely written by Dworkin is my judgement, at any rate, basing myself purely on stylistic grounds.

What’s Wrong with Professor Ramadan’s Appeal?

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First of all, let’s listen to Tariq Ramadan speaking at the Cambridge Union. Then we will consider briefly what is wrong with it. He has carefully dotted the field with mines that will detonate on the unwary. (For the full debate go here.)

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What Ramadan says seems to be reasonable and thoughtful, and that in itself should raise huge danger signals for us. When religious people sound reasonable there is almost always something else behind their words. That doesn’t, of course, mean that religious believers are never reasonable, but the nisus of religion is not towards reason so much as rationalisation, and therefore reason itself generally gets short shrift from believers. So, when Ramadan says that Dawkins can’t prove the non-existence of God, and makes that one of his most telling arguments, we should become suspicious, for that in itself is already a piece of sophistry.

For consider, as many atheists have said, that the same can be applied to fairies, the phoenix, the Loch Ness Monster, and various and sundry other possible entities upon which so many people have (as some still do) pondered in all seriousness. Indeed, it has recently come to light that Christian students are being taught that the Loch Ness Monster is evidence against evolution! (For this, and other odd things that the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum teaches children, see Jonny Scaramanga’s Guardian article here.) The problem with “You can’t prove that there are no gods, fairies, trolls, abominable snowmen, etc.” is simply that this kind of negative existential claim always leaves a corner of the universe unexplored where even invisible elephants dwell. And if that is the strongest argument that Ramadan has, then he has no argument at all.

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What is the real threat, individualism or collectivism?

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This post is now available in Polish translation at Racjonalista. Thanks to Malgorzata yet again!

If I seem to have been very silent over the last couple of days, that’s because I haven’t been feeling very well, and while I’m not feeling a lot better, I thought it might be worthwhile to discuss the question I ask in my title. I am thinking in particular of Margaret Somerville’s claim that the reason it is difficult to argue against assisted dying is what she calls an “intense individualism” that in her view pervades modern society. This raises a fairly important question, for it suggests that some sort of collectivism would be preferable to individualism, and this is something, I think, that we have reason to doubt.

I happen to be reading, just now, one of Elizabeth’s books, which we had discussed, but which I had not read before. The book is The First World War, by Sir Hew Strachan, who was a Brigadier in the British Army (Brigadier General in the US), and is now a Scottish military historian. The book has an interesting take on the First World War, and the reasons for fighting it, that is not often expressed. World War I is very often assumed to have been a pointless and avoidable conflict, which settled nothing of importance, when it might well be seen, instead, as the first round in a war to settle a very important question having to do with individualism and collectivism. Strachan says that

the Anglo-German antagonism became the pivot of the conflict. The polarity was best expressed in competing ideologies: liberalism and individualism against militarism and collectivism, the pursuit of mammon against the spirit of heroism. [201]

At the time the war broke out, Strachan suggests, this was much more clearly understood than it has been by later generations. But if it is seen in relation to the Second World War, the reasons for the outbreak of war in 1914 comes into sharper focus. For the Second World War may be seen (and has been long recognised by some historians to have been) an extension of the First. In fact, some historians have seen the two wars as the beginning and the end of a second Thirty Years War.

If we look at the great wars of the twentieth century in this way, we can see how the issues that were fought out on the battlefield largely underlie contemporary conflicts and competition amongst ideologies, though, this time, the antagonism is being played out between religion, on the one hand, standing for a kind of collectivism, and secularism, on the other, standing for liberalism and individualism. According to the pope, and many other religious leaders, the problem with modern society is that its focus is on the individual, and individual rights, and, according to Margaret Somerville, this makes it all but impossible to argue successfully for some of the fundamental religious values, such as the sanctity of life, because people simply cannot understand the alternative. However, what she does not seem to recognise is that, in order to argue successfully for these values, which are in essence religious and collective, she must also try to convince us that some sort of collectivism is in general more important than and preferable to liberalism and individualism. She makes no effort to do this.

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Hesitations about the “Ottawa” experience

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There was one thematic trajectory at the Ottawa conference, Eschaton 2012, that seemed to me deeply questionable, and even, perhaps, deceptive, because so apparently anodyne. One of the things that the study of religions tends to do is to define things in such a way as to (i) present religious belief as an unproblematic means of exploring ordinary human reality, and (ii) to make what is expressed under the first heading of ultimate importance to human beings (because that’s the way religious believers view them), but often fails to recognise that it does the second. It’s the kind of thing that so many religious “experts” use when they want to say something to the effect that “the god you don’t believe in isn’t the god I believe in either,” while, of course, leaving the god just hanging there in midair, without any clear definition or delimitation. Such a god could be anything or nothing, or just, as the first speaker at the Eschaton Conference, Alan Doust, called it, a thought experiment. I was just getting up to inject a note of scepticism into the conversation when suddenly the discussion was brought to an end. Gotta get in there more quickly if I want to be heard! But I tend to mull things over a bit trying to get my ducks all in a row, so the only option left is to introduce a note of scepticism here at several removes from that evening.

At first sight, it seems to make perfect sense. Since myths are not really about gods and demons, angels or jinns, or even fairies at the bottom of the garden, since these are just imaginary entities, they must be about something else. Perhaps, then, they’re about human experience, and putting that experience in the only way that seems to capture the exaltation and significance of the experience. So gods and their doings come to be thought of as — as Alan Doust put it — cultural “thought experiments.” The particular type of speech in which this is done is called mythology. And myths, we were told, are simply everywhere. Politics itself, one speaker declared, is a mythology, which really leaves the door wide open to all sorts of wonderful high jinks with words. Someone got on the elevator after the last comment was made saying, “Politics is not a myth,” and I had to agree. I guess my problem with the idea that it is – if this is really the way that myth is used in religious studies departments — is that it fails to mark off a distinct form of discourse. It’s a bit like the definition of the word ‘religion’, which people seem to turn themselves inside out to compass, without noticing that, if we are going to treat the word ‘religion’ as undefinable, we are mistaking meaning as something that attaches to a word, so that, if we are going to use it meaningfully, we will have to nail down every possible inflection that the word is capable of. In this sense definitions amount to the discernment of essences (in the Aristotelian sense). Since there are very doubtfully any of these to be had, the project is doomed to failure.

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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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On Conflict of Interest: Religion does not belong in the small print

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The other day I published a post about the recent flurry of excitement over abortion legislation in Britain and Canada, with a focus on people like Jeremy Hunt in Britain and Stephen Woodworth in Canada. One of the things that I wanted to know about both men was their religious affiliation, and though I searched the web at the time, I could not find out which church they attended, or whether they were or were not active members of their churches. So, it was interesting to read Matthew Parris’s op-ed piece in the Times this morning (“Religion does not belong in the small print“), to discover that he had the same question in his mind about Jeremy Hunt.

He begins by recording Jeremy Hunt’s position, and admits that he found himself thinking that perhaps this MP had a case for a reduction of the 24 week limit for abortion:

But then [he says] I noticed his surname. It struck me he was probably a Roman Catholic. I checked; he was a notably convinced Roman Catholic.

After reading this I thought it might be worthwhile making another try at finding out Stephen Woodworth’s religious background, so again I searched. The Wikipedia article said nothing about it, but there was a footnote with a link to a CBC candidate profile, and it comes as no surprise to read this:

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