He added: “The propaganda of secularism and its high priests want us to  believe that religion is dangerous for our health. It suits them to have no  opposition to their vision of a brave new world, the world which they see as   somehow governed only by people like themselves.

“They conveniently forget that secularism itself does not guarantee  freedom, rationality … or violence. Indeed, in the last century, most  violence was perpetrated by secular states on their own people.”

As usual, confusing atheism with secularism, the cardinal manages to include the Nazis, and the Communists as well, in his blanket condemnation of what he calls “secularism,” knowing full well, as he must, that the Vatican, in the thirties, saw the Nazis as a bulwark against the marauding hordes of communists to the East, and that Hitler’s Germany was the first state that the pretend state of the Vatican signed a concordat with. All the pope and his cronies needed to know was that Nazism was anti-modern and dictatorial — and therefore not unlike the church. That alone was enough to convince Vatican officials that Nazism would be a useful tool in its opposition to modernism, democracy and the forces of progress. It’s wonderful how Cormac Murphy-O’Conner seems to have missed the point that the Catholic Church is regressive and theocratic by nature, and that the Catholic Church, like the captains of German industry, thought that they could control Hitler for their own purposes.

But notice how naturally the one-time high priest (and still senior to the Archbishop of Westminster) of the English Roman Catholic Church should speak in religious terms about the supposed leadership of contemporary secularism, which has not institutional structures, imposes no restrictions on anyone, and has no means of governing people and imposing its will upon them as the Vatican and its minions increasingly tries to do. The pastoral letter of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops should be clear enough evidence of the kind of misdirection that Murphy-O’Connor seems to have learned as well as they.

So it came as no surprise to me that the CCCB should be followed up by one of their own, this time casting the bishop’s pastoral letter in ersatz secular terms. For Margaret Somerville, the Australian Canadian or Canadian Australian “ethicist”, the founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University in Montréal, we cannot be human without the sacred. (See her article in today’s Globe and Mail: “To Be Human, We Need Sacred Things.” Here’s the idea in a big nutshell (Somerville is never lost for words):

I suggest a shared concept of the sacred allows us to bond to each other, as is evident in the origin of the word religion, which comes from the Latin religare, to rebind.

The sacred has long been associated with religion. But we need a broader concept of the sacred in our multicultural, multi-religious, secular, democratic societies – a sense of the sacred that we can all share, whether or not we are religious and, if we are religious, no matter which religion we espouse. I call this concept the secular sacred.

That could allow far more of us to bind together, to experience transcendence – the feeling of belonging to something larger than ourselves – and in doing so, help us to find more shared ethics.

The secular sacred could also help to balance the intense individualism that has dominated our values and contemporary societies, but which many people, especially young people, are seeking to moderate with stronger feelings of responsibility to a community of which they are a part.

And then she goes on to say that she hasn’t had much luck convincing those on either the religious or the secular side that the concept of the secular sacred is an important (or even an intelligible) one, and takes from one of her students the “insight” that  “You might be onto something important when both sides disagree with you.” (Or not, I should have thought, as the case may be.)

But when I remember that it is to precisely this idea of “intense individualism” that Somerville ascribes the contemporary pressure for the legalisation of assisted dying, I also recall that this “grand dame” of Canadian bioethics — the first responder when the CBC wants to highlight bioethical issues – who is about as qualified in bioethics as Osama bin Laden, is not above bursts of intense individualism herself, forcing the evidence to support her case, even when it doesn’t. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worthwhile mentioning again, because when you find someone who teaches at a university playing the kind of tricks that first year university students might, in a pinch, be let off with a strong warning that such misuse of evidence is an academic crime, and not an acceptable practice, it seems appropriate to point it out yet again.

One of the major arguments against assisted dying is that helping some people to die at their request will start a veritable avalanche of cases that will become unstoppable, and all sorts of people, even those who do not wish to be killed, will be unceremoniously ushered from life as a matter of convenience. Slippery slope arguments are generally taken to be informal fallacies, but opponents of assisted dying take them very seriously, since they are among the very few secular arguments that they can bring to bear in opposition to assisted dying. Of course, their real opposition is religious — which is one reason, of course, that Somerville is so keen to establish a “secular sacred,” since she knows that the religious sacred is a valid limit only to those who accept religious belief. But slippery slopes will do just as well, if you can find them.

Almost all opponents of assisted dying think that slippery slopes abound in the Netherlands where assisted dying has been legalised, and has been legal or at least quasi-legal for several decades, and opponents make very free use of the statistics which several studies of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands provides them. Here is an example from Somerville’s book Death Talk, a collection of papers and addresses that Somerville produced on different occasions over a number of years. In the following extended quotation from this book we can see Somerville making things up as she goes along in order to support her negative conclusions regarding assisted dying. Its springboard is legalised assisted dying in the Netherlands.

“All efforts are made to convince people that this is what they ought to do, what society expects of them, what is best for themselves or their families. The result is, as [Dutch] Attorney General T.M. Schalken stated in 1984, that ‘elderly people begin to consider themselves a burden on society, and feel under an obligation to start conversations on euthanasia, or even to request it.’” [58]

This is a quotation from a report of the Institute of Medical Ethics, Working Party on the Ethics of Prolonging Life and Assisting Death,” based in London (as Somerville tells us on page 58) — but you have to watch the shells with Somerville, because her sleight of hand is very clever in the way that she stirs quotations, her own comments, and the opinions of Dutch opponents of assisted dying into a single brew, so that it is hard to say who is saying what, and where, in the end the kernel of meaning she is manipulating is to be found. However, sticking just with this quotation for a moment, since the number of people who do request assistance in dying in the Netherlands is very low (roughly two percent of deaths in the Netherlands are assisted), it seems that the supposed sense of obligation does not overpower individuals’ decisions about how to die. This is important, since opponents of assisted dying continue to think of the dying as somehow both more incompetent and thus more vulnerable to persuasion than the ordinary person. The stats in other places where assisted dying has been legalised (as in the state of Oregon) simply do not bear this out.

However, Somerville immediately goes on with a piece of academic dishonesty which is nearly breathtaking in its aplomb. Somerville tells us that there are two principles which can serve as justifications of assisted dying.

One is that of individual liberty. The other is the right to kill in the interests of others, such as the family or society. [60]

And then, after a bit of misleading persiflage, she comes directly to the point — although it is important to note that no laws governing assisted dying consider the second principle as a justifying reason for euthanasia or assisted suicide, and no one is suggesting the introduction of such laws:

The two principles that can be argued as justification for euthanasia — individual liberty and the interests of society — can conflict. For example, if someone’s right to live is denied on the basis of society’s right to cut it short when required by its larger interests, a choice must be made between the two. In this respect it is interesting to note the allegation that “a majority of the same [Dutch] public that proclaims support for voluntary euthanasia … also accepts involuntary active euthanasia — that is, denial of free choice and of the right to live.”¹⁴⁴ [The footnote is important, as we shall see.] This statement is very disturbing, and, indeed, many statements by its author have been challenged. Nevertheless, it merits consideration. The claim that “involuntary active euthanasia” is regarded as acceptable might be reflected in Dutch practice to a much greater degree than has, in general, been believed. [58]

But now comes the importance of the footnote numbered 144, which reads as follows:

Ibid., 23 [Fenigsen, "A Case against Dutch Euthanasia"]. The term “involuntary active euthanasia” is probably not intended (at least I hope not) to include euthanasia despite someone’s refusal of euthanasia. Rather, it probably intends to allow the possibility of euthanasia on those unable to consent or to refuse consent for themselves. [361]

Fenigsen is a well-known religious opponent of euthanasia, and even if Somerville hopes he does not mean by ‘involuntary active euthanasia’ what the term actually means, she still makes use of that meaning in the context in which she quotes from Fenigsen, suggesting both that the statement is very disturbing, and that such involuntary active euthanasia might be more common in Dutch practice than has been believed. Hiding, in a footnote, her reservations about the use of the word allows Somerville not only to misrepresent the situation in the Netherlands, but to develop her own opposition to assisted dying further. It is an act of deliberate falsification, and should be condemned as such.

This is the woman who is prepared to argue for what she calls the secular sacred, but if the truth is not sacred for this woman, then what does ’sanctity’ mean for her? I suggest it means precisely what the Vatican takes it to mean. Sacred is what accords with the prejudices of the Catholic Church, and the profane is everything to which that duplicitous organisation has not given its own imprimatur. Hilary Mantel is right.  Nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.

This becomes even more clear when, in the next section, the bishops state:

The right to freedom of conscience and religion derive from the unique dignity of the human person created in the image of God (cf. Gen 1: 26-27) and endowed with reason and free will. [§ 4]

This is totally wrong-headed. Our human rights cannot be dependent on the religious beliefs of a few, no matter how many. Rights must be morally prior to religious belief, and freedom of religion derives from such prior rights, rather than the other way about. Making the right to freedom of conscience depend on the idea of the dignity of the human person created in the image of God — even if, which I doubt, this makes any sense — is to put the whole regime of human rights into the thrall of religion, and subservient to it.  In fact, when the pastoral letter immediately goes on to say that human beings are the only creatures who can be in conscious relationship with God, and that to enter such a relationship freely “is essential to their dignity,” then we know that we have passed through the religious looking-glass, and everything is topsy-turvy.

In this topsy-turvydom into which we enter through the bishops’ rabbit-hole, human beings are impelled by their nature, not just, as Aristotle said, to know, but in particular to pursue religious truth (here quoting from Vatican II). The bishops even enlarge on this point to speak about conscience and truth:

… conscience [they say] has a relation to objective truth, a truth which is universal and which all must seek. [my italics]

Notice how they tie everyone up in the same bag from the very beginning, making exaggerated claims about the nature of the truth they are purveying, pretending not only to its objectivity but to its universality and furthermore to the compulsion which must drive all of us to seek it. But of course they themselves know this truth, otherwise how could they be so sure that such truth exists. Their intention is clear: to bind everyone to their conception of truth, and to understand freedom only in relation to it. This is the kind of freedom which binds women in some Roman Catholic dominated countries to bear children regardless of the circumstances of their conception, and regardless of the women’s choice in the matter. It is a kind of freedom that looks very much like bondage, and it is clear why. It is a totalitarian, theocratic kind of truth, to which the Roman Catholic Church holds the key.

But notice that the language of freedom still trips lightly from their mouths. Thus, they say:

In promoting the dignity of the human person [what about the dignity of the women who are imprisoned for abortion, or the women who would be left to die, because abortion is considered to be a mortal sin, and something which cannot be performed in a Phoenix hospital, or on a 9-year-old girl pregnant by her step father with twins!], the Church faithfully defends the freedom of conscience of all people, whatever their religion or philosophy of life. [§ 4]

This is as bald-faced as a lie can get! The Church does not promote the dignity of those who disagree with the Church on matters such as abortion, and whose philosophy of life includes the right to die with dignity. As we know from the American bishops’ statement about assisted dying, assisted dying is in fact, according to them, contrary to both freedom and dignity, despite the fact that there are philosophies of life that disagree with this position. So to claim, as they  do, that they promote human dignity of everyone, “whatever their religion or philosophy of life” is simply false, and must be known to them to be false. This is a lie, plain and simple.

What is more, the bishops have a strange notion of human rights, not as moral creations of the human community, but as something that pertains to the very nature of the human person — or, as they say, to ”the constitutive dimension of man”:

Conceded neither by the state nor by society, the freedoms of conscience and religion are inalienable and universal. [§ 4]

But notice carefully here that the freedom of conscience and religion that is meant here is only freedom of conscience and religion as understood by the Catholic Church. This is not a generally accepted idea of human rights — an area of moral philosophy which is often with some justice thought to be in a very parlous condition — Bentham used to call talk of human rights as “nonsense upon stilts – and the suggestion that human rights themselves are based on this supposedly first right of freedom of religion and conscience is a bold claim that must simply be false, since there are simply too many religions and differences of both religious and moral belief amongst them to underwrite anything that could be considered a fundamental right.  Indeed, it is more reasonable to think that the modern idea of human rights has its origin in the failure of religion to grant the freedoms and rights upon which modern democratic societies are based. The European wars of religion of the 17th century were fought over precisely this ground, that is, whether the state had any right to impose, as a matter of law and legal regulation, the religious or philosophical beliefs of its citizens, as had been claimed almost since the beginning of the Christian state, with the decree of the emperor Theodosius in 381, which declared orthodox belief in the Trinity as required of all citizens, thus disenfranchising those who did not so believe. It was to solve the deadlock between the factions of Christianity which occurred because of the Reformation and the fracturing of Christendom in 16th and 17th century Europe that led, glacially, and after unprecedented bloodshed, to the recognition that people must be permitted more latitude in belief than had been commonly allowed during the Christian centuries. For the bishops to pretend that this kind of freedom is inalienable would be laughable, if the terms in which they express it did not hark back to the days before the right of dissent was being gradually recognised — a process which received an enormous fillip by the 18th century Enlightenment.

Having placed the right to freedom of religion and conscience at the centre of human rights, it is not surprising to find the bishops supporting an active role for religion and religious conscience at the centre of public and political life. The pastoral letter quotes from Pope Ratzinger’s address to the United Nations:

… it is inconceivable [he said] that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves — their faith — in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights. [§ 5]

However, this misses the point. No one is asking politicians and others in public life to suppress their faith; but we have every right to require that decisions made to restrict the freedom of others to live as they choose should not be made on the basis of religious convictions which all citizens do not share. This point is missed when the bishops claim that since human beings live in relationship, and must therefore live their faith in such relationships, that

Believers must therefore be allowed to play their part in formulating public policy and in contributing to society as a way of living their faith in daily practice. [§ 5; my italics]

Indeed, this is a recipe for denying freedom to others who do not share the faith of believers, and who do not wish to be governed by public policy which expresses the lived faith of others in daily practice.

The bishops’ claims, if accepted, would have disastrous consequences for the governance of any democratic nation in which human rights are respected. By insisting that parents have a right “to educate their children in their religious convictions and to choose the schools which provide that formation,” or that religious institutions “in the social, charitable, health care and educational sectors,” (§ 5) (which they qualify with the words “which benefit all citizens”) the bishops are treading on dangerous ground, and seem prepared to reverse the trend towards liberal freedoms which have been advancing since the last decades of the seventeenth century. They do qualify the exercise of religious freedom in terms of “the requirements of the common good,” but that is too elastic a conception to do much good in setting limits to the exercise of religious faith in the determination of public practice, which becomes clear in the closing paragraph of section 5:

The Church’s appeals in favour of religious freedom are not based on any claim to reciprocity, whereby one group respects the rights of others only if the latter respect the rights of the group. Such an arrangement would be neither politically prudent, nor would it contribute to the common good. Rather, we honour the rights of others because it is the right thing to do, not in exchange for its equivalent or for a favour granted.

This is unacceptably vague, but it seems to mean that Catholics would be unwilling to qualify their beliefs in public decision-making, whatever the disagreements of others about their conscientious priorities; nor would they make allowances for those disagreements in decisions affecting what they see as the public good. Rights for Catholics are not granted. They are natural, universalisable and absolute. Thus, Catholics in some South American countries impose rigorous abortion laws, despite the fact that many people disagree with the religious principles upon which such laws are based. Catholic politicians “living their faith in daily practice” doubtless impose this rigorously misogynistic regulation of women’s reproductive freedoms in the name of the common good, which is a clear indication of how dangerous the Canadian bishops’ defence of religious freedom really is.

A great deal of the bishops’ conception of religious freedom hangs on their understanding of the dignity of the human person. Indeed, they say that they do not wish to impose, but only to propose. As they say (surely, one wants to say, tongue in cheek!):

All evangelization is but an effort to awaken the listener’s religious freedom to desire and embrace the saving truth of the gospel. [§ 6]

This would be laughable were it not said with such solemnity. Notice how preaching the gospel is imagined here to “awaken” religious freedom. Of course, this adheres closely to Jesus’ saying, adopted by Christians, that only in knowing the truth can one be truly free. But it makes it quite clear that whatever the bishops consider to be necessary for persons to be able to live their faith fully and freely will also be such that it might awaken such freedom in others. They can thus defend the intrusion of faith into public life as being for the common good of society, and, moreover, consonant with freedom, even though they say:

It is a violation of freedom of conscience for anyone to impose his or her own understanding of the truth on others. The right to profess the truth must always be upheld, but never in a way which involves contempt for those who think differently. [§ 6]

But notice that this does take into account the consequences of the bishops’ claim that public servants should be able live their faith in daily practice by making decisions regarding public policy, which in some cases will inevitably impose their understanding of truth on others. (Which points up the importance of secularism — see below — and why Catholic misunderstand it.)

Making use of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states at the outset that “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law,” the bishops go on to point out that there are many societies which do not grant their citizens freedom of conscience and religion, and then they proceed to suggest, by association, that such restrictions of religious and conscientious freedoms are being imposed more subtly in Canada as well. They point out, as an example, that doctors who conscientiously refuse to perform abortions are required to refer patients to physicians who do provide abortion services, and pharmacists “are being threatened by being forced to have to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or the “morning after” pill, and marriage commissioners in British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan must now perform same-sex marriages or resign.” (§ 10) But they seem unable to see that allowing such conscientious exemptions would in effect impose beliefs on others who do not share them. The bishops tell us that they respect rights because it is the right thing to do, and then effectively deny that women have a right to receive, from their physicians, services, or from their pharmacists, prescriptions, to which they have a legal right, thus making them subject to Roman Catholic strictures that they do not share.

Of course, there is much more in the bishops’ pastoral letter that needs to be aired, and I suggest that people read the letter carefully, because in almost every section there are a multitude of concerns that could be raised. I will end this post with the following concern. Faithful to the pope’s concerns about what he sees as increasing relativism, the bishops say the following (expressing more generally the principles on which the bishops base their concern for freedom of religion and conscience):

More subtle threats to religious freedom arise from the cultural predominance of radical secularism and “a subliminal relativism that penetrates every area of life. Sometimes this relativism becomes aggressive when it opposes those who say they know where the truth or meaning of life is to be found.” [§ 8]

The quotation in the quotation comes from Pope Ratzinger’s Address to Central Committee for German Catholics last year (2011). The problem is that it raises to the status of knowledge, statements of those “who say that they know where the truth or meaning of life is to be found.” Those who disagree with such claims, especially where such claims may have consequences for freedom and rights, such as women’s reproductive freedom, or the right of people to die with dignity, regardless of the Catholic conception of the meaning of life, will of course respond aggressively in defence of their rights against an organisation with the power and influence of the Roman Catholic worldwide, which spreads its tentacles deep into the political and law-making structures of the nations, including international bodies, where its influence has been disastrous for programmes of such as population control or attempts to control the spread of AIDS.

One of the most serious problems highlighted by the Canadian bishops’ pastoral letter is a serious lack of understanding of secularism. Radical secularists, according to the letter, are those who wish to see religious beliefs relegated to the private sphere, which is why so much emphasis is placed, in the letter, on public decision-making being carried out by those who live out their faith actively in their public lives. They seem not to notice that allowing this would effectively impose religious and moral beliefs which not all members of society share, and the attempt to impose these beliefs, whether the Roman Catholic Church believes them to be for the common good or not, is to act contrary to the beliefs and philosophies of life of those who do not share them. Another problem is the fact that they do not seem to see that reserving religious convictions to the private sphere applies as well to atheists as it does to the religious. Atheists do not need to bring their beliefs into the public secular sphere, for that sphere is defined in terms of its independence from specific religious belief or philosophy of life. The bishops say that

Forcing religious believers to keep their convictions to themselves, while atheists and agnostics are under no such restriction is, in fact, an expression of religious intolerance. [§ 12]

This, sadly, is simply a misunderstanding. I may want, as I suggested in my last post, to reserve a claim for knowledge – understood as a kind of knowledge or apprehension of what it means to be being human that can be derived from literature and art (and the humanities generally, including some theology) – but there is nothing which, as a nonbeliever, I can bring to the public discussion of the rights of the citizen, which is not in some sense objectively and critically discussable. My particular beliefs about what makes life meaningful to me is not something that has a place in the public discussion of laws that are to govern everyone. And this applies to the religious. Catholics are (officially) opposed to contraception, abortion, and assisted dying, and the basis for this opposition is principally religious. Catholics talk a lot about right reason and natural law, but in the end its moral prescriptions and prohibitions are traceable back to their foundation in religious belief. Such beliefs have no place in the determination of laws that will govern everyone, not because of some supposedly aggressive secularism, but because we do differ about such things, and have a right to do so. That is why Canada has no abortion law, and why it should stay that way. That is why Canada has no provision for legalised assisted dying, and why it should not stay that way.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter may be addressed to all men and women of good will, but, as it stands it is a threat to the freedom of Canadians, and should be for this reason condemned. It makes no contribution to the common good, but is instead designed so to defend ways of bringing religious faith to bear on public affairs that it is a standing threat to all who value freedom of conscience.

In philosophy, a commitment to one or more of the following lays one open to the charge of scientism.

• The sciences are more important than the arts for an understanding of the world in which we live, or, even, all we need to understand it.

• Only a scientific methodology is intellectually acceptable. Therefore, if the arts are to be a genuine part of human knowledge they must adopt it.

• Philosophical problems are scientific problems and should only be dealt with as such. [814, qv. scientism]

I am now increasingly of the opinion, however, that there is a streak of scientism running through the gnu atheism, and that a number of gnu atheists whom I respect highly have adopted this position, committed to one or more of the above conditions.

This seems to be the case with Jerry Coyne. For example, in his response to Kitcher, “The trouble with “The Trouble with Scientism“,” Jerry quite explicitly says that all that is worthwhile in the humanities is what can be assimilated to the scientific method. All else is feeling. He puts it very clearly:

Who can look at a lily pond the same way if you’ve seen Monet’s renditions?  And many of us are moved by Bach or Coltrane. But those aren’t ways of knowing — they’re ways of feeling.

And, although Kitcher does not really mention religion as a way of knowing in this context, Jerry makes use of the analogy, on a number of occasions saying things like:

I still maintain that real understanding of our universe can come only from using crude versions of methods that have been so exquisitely refined by science: reason combined with doubt, observation, and replication.  As one of my commenters said last week, “there are not different ways of knowing.  There is only knowing and not knowing.”  I would add that there is also feeling, which is the purview of art.  But none of this gives the slightest credibility to religion as a way of finding truth.

In general I agree with that sentiment. However, there is every reason to believe that something important is being left out. Not that people’s feelings can give us accurate accounts of what is “out there,” and possibly not that feelings can give us an accurate picture of what is “in here.” If I tell you what I am feeling, there is a sense in which you cannot correct me, even though you may suspect that my feelings are quite other than I claim. Crocodile tears are all too common a phenomenon to doubt that people frequently do deceive us about their feelings, or are themselves deceived.

However, there is a sense in which it would be wrong for us to exclude feelings from our knowledge of the world. This is probably why Richard Holloway, in that wonderfully weird and expressive book, Leaving Alexandria, in the end feels he has to retain something of the reality of religious feeling and its sequelae, expressing the conviction that those who miss out on what religious people are saying are missing out on something important about the human experience which, while it may not achieve the level of scientific knowledge, is still important for an understanding of being human. I know that a number of people who read this blog feel that I sometimes ride this particular hobby-horse a bit too much, perhaps out of an inertial sense that my life in religion was not wholly wasted, and that religion may still have much to teach us, much that, while it cannot be accommodated to scientific ways of knowing, nevertheless achieves the dignity of knowledge.

I think here of Hume, for example, who said that:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. [A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.3 para 4]

In view of the close interconnexion between reason and feeling (passion) it would be surprising indeed if feeling provided no insight into (and therefore knowledge of) human nature. To take an oversimple example of the kind of thing I have in mind here, the following is a footnote about the role that emotion plays in knowledge, whether as biasing effect, or as possession of built-in knowledge (the quote comes from Robert Nozick’s Invariances):

… emotional responses may have knowledge built into them, knowledge we do not explicitly possess. Random variation over stable evolutionary time, which exceeds the lifetimes of many individual organisms, can produce emotion-behavior combinations that are advantageous (on average) for reasons that we could not have learned on the basis of our own evidence and experiences. [337]

The point here is that there are ways of understanding our humanity that are stored up in things like plays and novels, music and painting, sculpture and even, perhaps, in religion, without which we would be the poorer. Of course, none of this goes towards supporting religious beliefs, but it may have something to say about the value of some of the things that have been created by religion, traditions of thought and feeling without which we might well be poorer. This, certainly, is Richard Holloway’s point in a number of books since he has come to the point of finding himself unable any longer to consider himself a Christian (he calls himself a post-Christian). It has also been my point in a number of posts over the past year or more on this blog, where I have ridden my hobby-horse from time to time insisting that, while we cannot take theology seriously as a way of knowing, there is a residuum of knowledge in theology and religious practice that we ought not to lose simply because the conclusions of theology are one and all fictive.

And this, so far as I can make out, is precisely what Philip Kitcher is trying to say. For example, he begins his Atlantic article with the following words, which, I take it, are supposed to illustrate the kind of “knowledge” that is not accessible to someone making enquiries using scientific methodology:

There are two cathedrals in Coventry. The newer on, consecrated on May 25, 1962, stands beside the remains of the older one, which dates from the fourteenth century, a ruin testifying to the bombardment of the Blitz. Three years before the consecration, in one of the earliest ventures in the twinning of towns, Coventry had paired itself with Dresden. That gesture of reconciliation was recapitulated in 1962, when Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem received its first performance at the ceremony. …

Since the 1960s, historians have worked — and debated — to bring into focus the events of the night of February 13, 1945, in which an Allied bombing attack devastated the strategically irrelevant city of Dresden. An increased understanding of the decisions that led to the fire-bombing, and of the composition of the Dresden population that suffered the consequences, have altered subsequent judgments about the conduct of war. The critical light of history has been reflected in the contributions of novelists and critics, and of theorists of human rights. Social and political changes, in other words, followed the results of humanistic inquiry, and were intertwined with th reconciliatory efforts of the citizens of Coventry and Dresden.

Etchings on the West Front of the new Coventry Cathedral seen through the tracery of the ruins of the Old Coventry Cathedral (destroyed in the Blitz, September 1941

It must not be thought that this humanistic inquiry is the same as scientific inquiry, for it includes so much more than just the bare facts that can be verified by historians. It includes a deep emotional and moral understanding, a deep human understanding — and, yes, I would like to add, knowledge — of what Wilfred Owen called the pity of war, and how this affects those who are caught up in its unforgiving clutches. This is why I continue to say, despite some criticism, that there is more to things like religion and poetry than meets the eye, and that we will be poorer if we do not examine religion for those deeply human things that can be found there — things both good and evil. For though theology may be largely fictive, it does not for that reason fail of humanity. Religion is an entirely human creation, as Christopher Hitchens never tired of telling us, and one of the most notable things about Hitchens’ god is not Great is simply that the humanity of religion and its role in human life and society stands out boldly on every page. Hitchens mentions somewhere in the book that when he visits the holy places of the religions he shows respect. Entering a mosque he removes his shoes. This is a kind of respect that, despite his stringent criticisms of religion, he maintains even in the midst of his critique, for Hitchens took religion seriously as a human pursuit and creation. As a consequence, he realised that religions know a lot about being human, despite their failure to understand the very human origin of their beliefs. It would be a pity, as I have said before, and will no doubt say again, if we did not learn what the religions have to teach us about being human, in the course of which, allied to scientific ways of knowing, we should be able to devise much more human ways of living together than either religion alone or science alone can manage to accomplish. What we need is a new synthesis, one that accepts both the limitations of science and the fictive (yet deeply human) nature of religion, a synthesis in terms of which we can, perhaps at last, create a way of living that is focused where it should be, on this world, but one which, in being focused there, recognises that, for all its pretensions, religion was focused there all along, and did not know it. I think Kitcher’s concerns are real ones, and should be attended to with some care. The scientistic reductionism that is becoming more common amongst those who rejection religious forms of believing and life will, in the end, produce a warped vision of what it means to be human. We must be much more willing to listen to the ghosts of the past, and efforts that were made, misdirected as they may have been, to live life in prospect of a life to come, but were as concerned with life right here and now as any secular humanist could hope to be. Religion needs, as religion, to be defeated, but its insights into the human character (theological anthropology) and into ways of life coordinate with that character, biased as they may be, still, I suspect, have more to teach us than we are often ready to acknowledge.

This was a question to which the Anglican theologian Maurice Wiles addressed himself in a fairly well-known popular book, God’s Action in the World (which apparently I no longer possess). One of his concerns in the book was so to describe God’s action in the world that it would be both intellectually — that is, theologically — respectable, and religiously compelling. This is a very difficult balancing act to achieve, as anyone who has tried it over a number of years with a congregation of Christians would testify. I’m sure that many members of the Clergy Project would acknowledge, for, as disbelieving clergy were heading in the direction of unbelief, many of them went through a period of trying to accommodate their religious language with what they were increasingly learning from science, philosophy, biblical studies, and the sheer bewildering variety of positions on any topic you care to mention respecting religious belief.

My own process was gradual, and, towards the end, proceeded at an almost breakneck speed. When I read some of my homilies during this period I wonder that people were content to hear me any longer, since I had moved so far and so fast away from anything that might be considered traditional faith, that, when the time came to say a few words at my wife Elizabeth’s secular memorial service, having in the meantime become an unbeliever, people who expressed concern about members of the congregation hearing something so threatening to belief were answered with: “He hasn’t said anything here that he hasn’t already said in church!” This actually came as quite a shock to me, since, though I had promised from the start of my ministry in that place that I would not tell them anything that I did not myself at the time believe, I did not think that I had travelled quite that far, and that fast.

One of the things that precipitated my move towards disbelief was my reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species. I find it surprising now that I had been able to have been already in my 60s before I read a book which had played such a vital role in defining modernity. Nor, to tell the truth, did I think it would have been such an interesting and rewarding experience. I was prompted to read it because a local fundamentalist church had circulated pamphlets throughout the community, door to door, expressing the view that one could not be at once a Christian and a Darwinian; and although I had always believed, in the back of my mind, that there was no question about the standing of evolution as a scientific fact, I had no real understanding of it, and, in order to counter the fundamentalist propaganda, I found it necessary to read something about evolution. I started with Darwin, and then went on to Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. I also sent questions to a very kind professor at Dalhousie University, who answered promptly and perspicuously. I am afraid I cannot remember his name, so I am unable to thank him personally, but I found his response to my questions a great help in situating evolutionary biology in the framework of contemporary thought.

In any event, not to make heavy weather out of the biographical point, I found, upon reading Darwin, that I had to reassess my whole view of the world, and that included my own fairly loose and liberal conception of religious faith. To tell the truth, at the time I thought I had accommodated it fairly well to the fairly secular Christianity that over the years I had come to adopt, but I think now that Darwin had really reoriented my understanding of faith almost 180 degrees, for it seemed obvious to me then, as it does to me now, that one cannot believe in the common origin of animals and plants and hold, at the same time, the kind of centrality for Christian (or any other religious faith) which must end with privileging human beings over all other life forms with which we share, not only the planet, but a common biological history.

Imagine my pleasant surprise to find this expressed so clearly by William Dembski over at Biologos (h/t Jerry Coyne — for Jerry’s response to Dembski see here). (Note that the article is in two parts.) Dembski mentions Michael Ruse’s attempt to make evolution compatible with Christianity, and, as a result, Dembski says, “essentially has to redefine Christianity.” Of course, this seems inevitable. If I had accommodated Darwinism and Christianity it was because I had over the years already redefined Christianity. What Dembski does is to sort out claims for both Christianity and Darwinism that are non-negotiable. He lists them as follows.

Non-Negotiables of Christianity:

• (C1) Divine Creation: God by wisdom created the world out of nothing.
• (C2) Reflected Glory: The world reflects God’s glory, a fact that ought to be evident to humanity.
• (C3) Human Exceptionalism: Humans alone among the creatures on earth are made in the image of God.
• (C4) Christ’s Resurrection: God, in contravention of nature’s ordinary powers, raised Jesus bodily from the dead.

Non-Negotiables of Darwinism:

• (D1) Common Descent: All organisms are related by descent with modification from a common ancestor.
• (D2) Natural Selection: Natural selection operating on random variations is the principal mechanism responsible for biological adaptations.
• (D3) Human Continuity: Humans are continuous with other animals, exhibiting no fundamental difference in kind but only differences in degree.
• (D4) Methodological Naturalism: The physical world, for purposes of scientific inquiry, may be assumed to operate by unbroken natural law.

I agree that the resurrection of Jesus must be strictly non-negotiable for Christianity, although I used to think differently about this. I used to think that the resurrection could be understood in an eschatological sense (which I won’t get into at this point, though, for those who are interested Reginald Fuller’s The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives provides a benchmark analysis of how this kind of bait and switch can work), but now I think (as my parenthetical note suggests) that there is a clever bait and switch play being made in situations like this. The liberal believer speaks of the resurrection or the incarnation, of redemption and divine forgiveness, but clouds the issue with subtle analysis and suppressed premises. In the end there is no clarity about what has been achieved and what has been lost, and much Christianity depends upon this lack of clarity.

Of course, one of the problems with Dembski’s analysis is that he takes Darwin’s position as normative for evolutionary biology, as though, for example, The Descent of Man is somehow holy text. Thus, he points out that Francis Collins doesn’t accept D3 (where ‘D’ stands for Darwinian Non-Negotiable, just as ‘C’ stands for Christian Non-Negotiable), yet The Descent of Man presupposes it. (This is not a comment on Collins, since I have no idea what Collins thinks.) I think evolutionary theory generally does presuppose common descent and a denial of human exceptionalism, so far as I understand it, so this may not be a problem, but it displays the scriptural cast of mind that Dembski brings to his project that he should consider Darwin’s books to be in some sense sacred scripture.

This said, it seems to me that Dembski’s analysis is correct. The fact that Darwinian evolution is understood to be non-teleological does exist in tension with the idea that the life world, and human beings in particular, are creations of God and declare his glory. If, in fact, the acts of God in creation are not detectable, and the process of evolution can get by without the god hypothesis, then it is not clear how creation declares the glory of God. As Dembski clearly states (and the clarity of his presentation is especially helpful):

Given that science is widely regarded as our most reliable universal form of knowledge, the failure of science to provide evidence of God, and in particular Darwin’s exclusion of design from biological origins, undercuts (C2).

The revelation of God’s glory in creation should be evident, and of life evolves simply by means of natural selection, then, while we might be misled into thinking that nature is a remarkably complex and puzzling phenomenon (since most of us do not know the specifics of the evolutionary history of the living forms that we see) which simply cries out for explanation in terms of a supervising intelligence, science is in contention with this claim, even if it does not logically contradict it. In other words, it’s possible to go on believing that God is guiding the process, but there is simply no evidence in the things themselves that there is any such supernatural invigilation.

Dembski ends his two-pronged attack on accommodationism (from the Christian viewpoint), by opining that the evidence for Darwinism is not “incredibly well established” (in his words), claiming that

the evidence for common descent is mixed and the evidence for the creative power of natural selection to build complex biological forms is nil.

– an astonishing bold claim! However, can religious believers consistently say anything else? I am more and more of the opinion that they cannot, and that, in the end, they will not. This will put religion under increasing strain, and belief will become not only much harder to justify, it will make it less emotionally compelling. It is important to note that contemporary fundamentalism, though not entirely modern as is sometimes claimed, has been deeply motivated by the advancement of science, and as scientific conclusions become more secure, fundamentalism inevitably becomes more shrill in its response.

Sometimes people suggest that there will be a reformation in Islam, for example, which will make it more compatible with modernity. However, it has to be said that Salafism and Islamism simply are the reformation in Islam. In Renaissance Europe this kind of return to sources led the intellectual world back behind Christianity to ancient Greek and Roman classical literature, philosophy, and science, and this fed into the scientific revolution in the 17th century and the Enlightenment of the 18th century. It seems very unlikely that the Muslim reformation will have this result, for it is precisely the growing openness of European thought to which the Islamic reformation is a response. Islam can see what the generous openness of Europe has wrought, and, by and large, Islam has rejected it. Those few who think that there can be an Islamic reformation that includes freedom of thought and belief are almost all of them under armed guard, for fear of their lives, as Paul Berman points out in his useful The Flight of the Intellectuals.

The problem with liberal religion is that it no longer has the emotional power of traditional religion. It cannot provide comfort in times of trouble, nor conviction upon occasions of doubt. All the roads of rational thinking lead out of religion, Dembski notwithstanding. Religion needs the supernatural. This is what provides it with motive power. The task unbelievers have is to provide an alternative motive power that can not only drive science, but can drive a world civilisation. This, I fear, is not quite as easy as some people seem to think it. Keeping people religiously motivated to common tasks is itself an unending religious task. Without elaborate symbolism, ritual and subordinate community, it would be impossible. As religion undergoes transformation in the fires of science, however, it will be important both to limit the damage that disintegrating religion can do, as well as to provide alternatives for community and meaning. It is not evident to me that either of these important tasks are being attended to in a systematic way, and at the moment I have no suggestions as to how this can be done. Perhaps, after all, I need to read Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists, for at least he seems to be considering the problem head on.

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Apologies for my spotty presence over the last few days. I was helping a member of the family move, which involved a lot of travelling and heavy lifting. And although this post is a bit rushed,  I should be a little bit more on track now for a while.

“You can’t live in a world in which half the human race walks around in a bag. It’s not okay.” So says Salman Rushdie, and so say I, and I continue to think, despite opposition from arguably the most enlightened members of modern Western societies, that the full face and body covering of women should be banned. And we should do this, not because people don’t have a right to dress as they wish, but because the rationale for dressing women like this is, as Rusdie says, a completely bizarre idea of sexuality and the place of women in society. Dressing women in bags is an open invitation for men who think that this is decent and proper and demanded by their religion, to treat women who are not dressed in this fashion as less than human. Of course, it is already to treat the women so dressed as less than human: that goes without saying. But it has serious implications for those believe it is their right to dress as they wish.

The following is an exploration of the limits of religious freedom in a free society. I think we are much too cautious in our approach to the question of religious freedom, and that it is worthwhile to explore this caution in more detail. I undertake this with some trepidation. The idea that religious freedom is a human right is so deeply embedded in the liberal conception of human rights that any qualification of this right is generally thought to threaten the very concept of what it means to have rights. However, it is my view that religion is a deepest threat to human rights today, and that this question needs to be more forthrightly explored.

There was a case a few years ago in Australia where bands of Muslim youths went around gang raping white girls, and an Australian imam at the time suggested that Australian girls, who dressed in revealing clothes, could aptly be compared to meat displayed openly in a butcher shop, instead of being discretely wrapped or placed in a cabinet. Inevitably, he suggested, just as meat displayed openly would attract flies, so women dressed “immodestly” would inevitably attract the sexual attention of men, and they have only themselves to blame if they inflame men’s passions to such a degree that they are treated as sex objects.

While these facts do not lead most liberals to suggest that perhaps, in this case, it would be better to ban the burqa altogether, it convinces me that Salman Rushdie is right, and that full body covering should be banned in any jurisdiction where the defence of human rights is a primary legal principle. First of all, it is a danger to the women who have little choice but to dress in this way, where community pressure is almost irresistible. It has been suggested that, if the burqa were to be banned, this would mean that some Muslim women would not be permitted to leave their houses. However, this is surely not an argument in favour of not imposing a ban, but an indication of just how repressive Muslim society can be. Along with a ban should go a regulation to the effect that any man refusing permission for his wife to be seen in public would be grounds for an action for marital abuse, as well as the basis for an action for the termination of marriage on the grounds of such abuse. But, second, it is a danger to women who do not dress in this way. If the reason for dressing women in this way is based on a completely bizarre idea of sexuality — an idea which was also, at one time, normatively Christian — and that the people you have to punish for arousing men’s lust are the women, then women who are not dressed in this way are placed at risk.

       To Bag or not to Bag — that is the question

This, certainly, was the view of at least one woman who lived in student housing at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, in an area which was quickly becoming a Muslim enclave. She felt distinctly unsafe, unable to sit in the back yard in the sun, or to do other things which it should have been her right to do without let or hindrance, because all the other women in the street were shrouded in black bags (to use Rushdie’s term), and sequestered in their houses behind closed blinds, while the men dressed in light Western clothing as befitted hot and humid Southern Ontario summers, and were free to associate with whom they wished. This left the non-Muslim woman feeling not only very exposed, but also devalued, vulnerable and alone. There were only two or three non-Muslim women on the street, and one of them was approached by a Muslim child who told her that her father was going to slit her throat with a big knife. The repression of Muslim women was also the repression of other women who did not share either Muslim beliefs or Islamic prejudices about women and sexuality.

The issue surrounding this question of whether or not to ban the bagging of women impressed itself powerfully on my mind by a particularly disturbing case in Britain, where nine men, eight Pakistani in origin, one Afghani, were convicted of running a sexual grooming network, in which vulnerable teenage girls in care were groomed and then sexually exploited. Everyone is careful, of course, to downplay the role that religion played in all this, possibly with some justice. Nick Griffen, leader and spokesman for the British National Party, claimed that

You only have to read the Koran or look at the Hadith – the expressions of what the Prophet did in his life– to see where Muslim paedophilia comes from. Because it’s religiously justified so long as it’s other people’s children and not their own.

That, of course, is the kind of shrill hyperbole that one comes to expect from the BNP, and, as Paul Vallely says, it is poisonous rhetoric; but it should not escape our attention that, while most of the girls involved were white, some of them were Bangladeshi in origin, and that, while most sex offenders in the greater Manchester area are white,

In 18 child sexual exploitation trials since 1997 – in Derby, Leeds, Blackpool, Blackburn, Rotherham, Sheffield, Rochdale, Oldham and Birmingham – relating to the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by two or more men, most of those convicted were of Pakistani heritage.

These facts are certainly suggestive, and at The Times, David Aaronovitch says bluntly: “Let’s be honest. There’s a clear link with Islam.” (The article is behind a paywall.)

Aaronovitch was responding to the Deputy Children’s Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, who said in a radio broadcast:

It’s not a problem confined to one community. It is absolutely happening across all ethnic and religious groups.

And then, says Aaronovitch, she said that people were looking for a pattern, so they found it, and then, he says,

Ms Berelowitz … blew a little more fog over the subject by invoking 14-year-old boys who abuse 11-year-old girls, and then disappeared into her own mist.

However, he then asks what Berelowitz knows that “Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation”  does not. For Mr. Shafiq told Aaronovitch seven years ago that there was a problem within the Muslim community, pointing out that

of 68 recent convictions involving street grooming 59 were of British Pakistani men, Mr Shafiq concluded with characteristic straightforwardness that the community clearly had a problem. In his view, a minority of Pakistani men had got it into their heads that white girls were fair game.

Aaronovitch points to other Muslim leaders who attribute the problem to imported cultural baggage. The men involved, according to “Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for northwest England and the man leading the prosecution in this case,” who said that the men involved

think that women are some lesser being. The availability of vulnerable young white girls is what has drawn the men to them.

To quote the Australian imam once again: they are like uncovered meat in the marketplace; they will attract flies. This assessment of women permeates Islam. The idea that freedom of religion should give a license to men (or, indeed, women) the right to conceive of women as they choose, and act on that conception, is a mockery of freedom.

When you put this together with the way that women are treated in so much of the Muslim world, where women are imprisoned for adultery or impurity when they have been raped, where beautiful women are scarred with acid simply because of their beauty, where, as Robert Fisk reports, “guest” workers (both men and women) are treated virtually as slaves or indentured workers, and executed without even a semblance of justice when accused by their “employers” of a crime, it is clear that Islam has a problem with women, as well as with racism. Allowing this to be swept under the carpet because of some misunderstanding of what constitutes cultural sensitivity is not only stupid; it is storing up social debts — problematic situations of Muslims in democratic polities — that will have to be cashed in sooner or later, and may well have become unsolvable if we do not address them now. In my view a beginning could be made by shaping policies that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Islam to keep women in subjection, by indicating, in law, aspects of Islam that are incompatible with respect for human rights. I think we should do this with respect to other religions as well, where women are forced to play a secondary role if they are to have membership in, and participate in the activities of, their religion.

David Aaronovitch ends his article by suggesting that feminism has not yet gone far enough. There is so much more left to do. As Ophelia Benson points out again and again over at Butterflies and Wheels, and as Aaronovitch points out in his article, there is much to do:

Still, in our society, women are subjected to abuse as bitches and “ho”s, ridiculed for their appearance and somehow incapable of being bishops. Feminism has gone too far? It’s gone nowhere near far enough. Feminism has gone mad? It ought to be as mad as hell.

It should be impossible, in a free society, for a religion to refuse leadership positions to women. It should be impossible, in a free society, for women to be repressed in the name of religion. This is not a matter of religious freedom. The purpose behind religious repression of women is the control of women and their sexuality. And religions will use any means available to them in order to prosecute this purpose. They will try to define foetuses as full human persons with the same rights that pertain to adult human beings, even if this means controlling and ruling over what pregnant women may and may not do, even to the extent of criminalising them for living their lives in the way that they choose. Canada has no abortion law, and that is the way that it should be. This is a matter for individual women to decide. The state has no place in the bodies of women. Religions propose completely asinine arguments that restrict leadership to men. The familiar one, made famous by the fatuous Ann Widdecombe, that priests must be men because Jesus was a man, is so palpably vapid, and goes so directly against Paul’s claim that in Christ there is neither man nor woman, slave or free, but all are one in Christ Jesus — a promise of equality that has seldom been made good — despite the fact that these words are held by Christians to be inspired by God. Widdecombe converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism on precisely this issue. As she said in an interview with the New Statesman:

The issue over women priests was not only that I think it’s theologically impossible to ordain women, it was the nature of the debate that was the damaging thing, because instead of the debate being “Is this theologically possible?” the debate was “If we don’t do this we won’t be acceptable to the outside world”. To me, that was an abdication of the Church’s role, which is to lead, not to follow.

But my point would be precisely that being a leader in the repression of women is not only not a good thing to be; it should be impossible, in a free society, for a religion to advocate a conception of women in which their sex alone makes them ineligible for leadership. So long as this continues, women will continue to be treated with contempt, and their lives will be cabined and confined. The notion that it is “theologically impossible” to ordain women as priests is one that should not be given free rein in a free society, because it has such serious implications for the freedom of women. Why should such beliefs be tolerated in a free society? In On Liberty John Stuart Mill suggested that people should have the maximum amount of freedom that is consistent with the greatest freedom for all. It is impossible to claim that religious beliefs about women’s place does not restrict women’s freedom, or that allowing people to adhere to such beliefs has no deleterious social consequences for women. That being the case, there should be no reason why religious freedom should include the right to hold and practice beliefs which are detrimental to women’s freedom.

But this is just silly. It’s like the old philosopher’s joke that you can’t prove logically that there isn’t an elephant in the room right now, sitting on the sofa. As long as I am allowed to make as many qualifications to the characteristics of the elephant as I like (that is, in Dennett’s terms, if I am allowed to play tennis without a net), there’s no way that you can prove that he doesn’t exist. But the argument would be pointless: adding qualifications to qualifications to every response you make would not show anything. All it would do is to demonstrate that the notion of logical possibility is not a particularly interesting concept in a context such as this.

However, in the context of evolution, it is even less pointful. Sober seems to think that the guiding hand of god would be played out in the production of mutations. But that still wouldn’t do the trick of guiding, because the guiding in evolution is done by the environment filtering the mutations through its adaptational demands. It is the environment that provides the “guiding hand,” not the mutations. All the mutations can do is provide something for the environment to work on and to select from amongst. And this is not a random process. It is an algorithmic one. The mutations that are sorted out by the environmental process of selection are the real shaping forces acting on the mutations, selecting those mutations that give reproductive advantage to the animal or plant possessing them. It’s really that simple.

If a god were to work at this level, and give special advantage to animals or plants that did not have this reproductive advantage, then it would have to go on providing this helping hand all along, because, by definition, the reproductive advantage is not provided by the environment, but by a force outside the environment. Once produce an organism that is working at cross purposes with the environment, it would be necessary to continue applying the guiding hand in order to preserve that organism in the face of competing environmental conditions. But the question here is: Is there any evidence for this lack of fit between organisms and the environment that provides evidence for an intrusive and supposedly “guiding” hand. The point here is that this is the only place for a god to be involved, and yet it is the environment that is the selecting force, and it selects on the basis of fitness. The origin of the mutations matters not at all. This was made very clear by Darwin in the analogy he conceived between natural and artificial selection. In the case of artificial selection and breeding, the necessity of creating an environment in which the organisms, from pigeons to horses, from wild grasses to wheat, can prosper, is crucial. Breeders favour mutations by selecting them. That’s the point at which the guider’s hand must be intruded in the process, and, having done that, the environment must be controlled in such a way as to allow the mutated organism to survive. In natural contexts most such “guided organisms” would not survive, because they would not have been selected in and for natural environments.

Even if, as Jerry Coyne points out, God directs the rate of mutations, and supposing a beneficent god, who is interested in creating “beneficial” mutations, the guiding hand would still be the environment, no matter how often god intervened in the process. Of course, knowing everything, a god should be able to speed up the process of evolution, by creating mutations that would be most likely to be selected by the environment. A god might even be able to “design” organisms simply by creating mutations that would be selected by the environment in a particular order. But all this is (i) merely a logical possibility — as any possibility is if you add enough qualifications; and (ii) not science but an overly complicated type of creationism.

Towards the end of his talk, as Jason Rosenhouse says, Sober claims that

There may be good reasons to reject theism, but these are philosophical reasons, not consequences of evolutionary biology.

And Rosenhouse is justly sceptical of this attempt to put some questions out of reach of all but philosophers. This is very silly of Sober, having made such a hash of the other philosophical points he wants to make, and it’s not true. There are perfectly good reasons, good scientific reasons, why theism is implausible. The guiding hand theory of evolution simply doesn’t work. If you try to make it work, it ends up putting god in charge. But if god is not in charge, and natural selection is truly natural selection — that is, if the sieve of nature is the filter through which mutations must pass — then there will never come a time when the introduction of a god into the process will make sense. Not logically impossible, simply unnecessary. The only time it would really make sense, is, as Jerry Coyne senses, if the process of evolution were sped up by speeding up the rate of environmentally friendly mutations. Not only do we not see this, as Jerry says, but even if we did see it, we would immediately begin trying to explain it by studying the processes of mutation. Scientific questioning would not come to an end at this point, because, as Aristotle said, we are, as a species, rational animals, animals who want to know. And god is never an answer, because god takes the process of inquiry out of the natural realm altogether, and puts it out of reach of not only scientists, but philosophers as well. Theology is the “subject” that pretends to deal in such “knowledge,” but there are no compelling reasons to take its conclusions seriously.

Sober, of course, begins by warning us that the principle of the uniformity of nature is an article of faith. This implies his later argument that science and belief in god are compatible But the point is nonsense. Belief in the uniformity of nature, at least at the macro level at which we live our lives, is both a methodological assumption, and a recurringly confirmed one. All the Sturm und Drang about the problem of induction, which Hume aimed much more accurately against the scholastics, and not the new sciences, is, in many senses, beside the point. Certainly, Hume was a sceptic, as every reasonable person is. What he demanded was evidence, and evidence for the nature of human beings, as well as other aspects of nature, could not be built, as was thought by Aquinas, on a logical metaphysical foundation, but must include a foundation in evidence which only provides for probabilities, and not unquestioned and unquestionable certainties. So the so-called “faith” in the principle of the uniformity of nature, is not faith, but a reasoned conclusion based on experience, and a calculation of probabilities. It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that the sun will arise tomorrow morning. Are we absolutely sure? How much certainty is necessary? We have as much as is appropriate to the particular case in question.

When, for example, in answer to a question, Sober says something to the effect that the theory of evolution is like the statement that his car is grey (and god did not prevent it from being grey), and “it implies that God did not prevent the theory from being true,” the irrelevance of what Sober is doing becomes blindingly clear; for it is plain that theory as readily implies that there was no divine intervention in the evolutionary process. The statement that God did not prevent the theory from being true is really a silly point. Suppose you don’t think it true, as young earth creationists don’t — and it is in reference to young earth creationists that he makes the claim. He’s trying to say that the theory means that God didn’t prevent the earth from being billions of years old, and that, therefore, the young earth creationists are wrong. But this is silly. If we can use the idea of logical possibility as Sober is using it, then there is no reason a young earth creationist can’t say that it is logically possible that god made the earth to look old without actually being so (as one of the questioners suggests). And since it is logically possible that god has intervened in the evolutionary process, it is entirely possible that before biologists came on the scene and began examining the processes by which life came to be, god had actually sped up the process enough to make young earth creationism logically possible at the same time that it looks, to those who look at it without the eyes of faith, immensely old. But this just goes to show how useless this kind of philosophical argumentation is, because it can be used to “prove” almost anything, or at least not put it beyond the bounds of logical believability.

This kind of doing philosophy is a very poor example of how philosophy actually functions. Philosophy doesn’t need to be this kind of useless word-spinning. I know nothing of Sober, and now wish to know less, but I think of some of the philosophers whose work I value, work like Philip Kitcher’s, for example, or Daniel Dennett’s, or, in philosophy of science, Susan Haack’s. This is philosophy with bite and purpose. It actually clarifies concepts that are important to us, and without them we would be much poorer. Philosophy should be a corrosive discipline, undermining pious certainties, even, soemtimes, the pieties of science. If philosophy of science is anything like Eliott Sober’s version of it, it is a useless pursuit. I do not think it is. I assume that Sober is not a very good example of what philosophy of science can do, especially when it is holding out the olive branch to religion. When it does this, clearly, it has a very short half life, quickly decaying into meaninglessness and triviality.

The argument goes on. Sam Harris has reacted to my post on profiling.

One line in my article raised a tsunami of contempt for me in liberal and secular circles:

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

Once again, I included myself in this profile—but that did almost nothing to stem the accusations of racism.

He keeps saying that. I don’t know why. The objection isn’t that Sam Harris wants to discriminate against people who don’t look like him, it’s that Sam Harris wants to discriminate against people on the basis of their appearance.

I’m not going to take that much farther, because it’s not what interests me at the moment, but it shows what happens when you are not clear about what you are trying to say. The point that PZ is making — good point too — is that by including himself, as someone having a particular appearance, within the scope of the kind of profiling he is suggesting, Harris has not escaped the accusation of racism, because he’s saying that people who look like him should raise suspicions in people’s minds, just on the basis of that appearance alone. And that looks a lot like racism, so no wonder people are accusing Harris of it.

What concerns me here is the old free will argument; and I only began with this example because I think some of the same kinds of confusion are lurking in the arguments of the free will denialists. I had almost put the matter to bed (for the time being anyway), and then I began reading John Shook’s interview of Dan Dennett in the latest Free Inquiry (April/May 2012, 7-9), and free will is raised again in so direct a fashion that it resuscitated all my free will questions once again. And the most important question has to do with what we mean when we speak of free will. I have tried to make it clear that when I speak of free will I do not mean that we escape thereby from the determinism of physics, if physics is deterministic, so that we stand somehow outside the chain of cause and effect, and that we are, therefore, made of some other kind of stuff — soul stuff, perhaps – that is not causally affected by the physical world, though we can, it is assumed, have, as things made of soul stuff, causal effects on the physical world. In that sense we are a little like finite gods, intruding here and there in the world around us for good or ill, and, because made entirely of rational soul stuff — that is, not affected by the passions (as Hume would call them), which are of the body bodily — we are ultimately and closely responsible for every effect we have on the world. This kind of metaphysical free will seems to be the kind of thing that free will denialists seem to have in mind when they deny that we have free will, and that our sense of having this will is only an illusion.

But if that is what Sam Harris means by free will in his little book of the same name, and if this is what he thinks is an illusion, then of course he is right. The important thing to notice is how little this denial amounts to. Essentially, it is the negation of something that no one, who has thought for a few moments together about it, can possible think to be true. Each and every one of us knows, if we would only stop to think about it for a moment, that we could not possibly have this kind of free will; for we know that we are not the kind of being that is presupposed by this notion of free will. We know, for one thing, that we do not have perfect knowledge, and that much that we know and do not know depends (at least to some extent) on our upbringing and opportunities. Not only that, of course: we also know that we often deceive ourselves. Confirmation bias, for example, is one of the readiest ways in which we allow our preconceptions to rule over our perceptions, picking out from the perceptual field only those things that tend to confirm them.

Just the other day, for instance, I was reading something online (I forget now where), and the author was saying something to the effect that Dennett thinks free will is an illusion. Having read both Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves it struck me that anyone who could say this is not really paying attention, or is just borrowing the assumption from someone else. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, that is not what Dennett is saying, and he repeats again in the interview with Shook that he is not saying that free will is an illusion. But you really do need to read through Dennett’s very detailed argument, as he moves, step by step, away from what looks like billiard-ball determinism to what he considers free will worth wanting. This is something that he say in so much more detail and insight than is possible here, going stepwise through a sequence of what we fear the determinism of science is taking from us,  and ending up with the conclusion that though we do not have the kind of metaphysical free will described above, not only does this notion of free will not make any sense of our experience, but it also is not a kind of free will worth having. And when he tells us that we do have the kind of freedom that is worth wanting, he means that it is a kind of freedom worth wanting, not just a pale simulacrum.

Now, when Dennett says this, suggesting that, after all, there is a perfectly reasonable conception of free will which is compatible with causal determinism — which is called, in philosophy, compatibilism — he is often then accused of redefining free will. Free will just is — on this account — the metaphysical sense of being made of soul stuff and having plenary control over every decision so that every decision must seem to have been made ab initio, each act a free act of creation, much like the imagined act which God is supposed to have performed at the beginning of things when s/he created the universe. But as Dennett and Flanagan have made clear, this is an unintelligible sense of free will. It makes no sense to think of free will in this way, as having no antecedents, and involving no preferences, no character, no particular tastes or past experiences on the basis of which subsequent decisions are made. What would this kind of free will even be like? Can we describe the kind of life that we would have if every one of our decisions came out of the blue like that?

Well, yes we can, because Sam Harris provides us with such a description in his book. In fact, he thinks this is the way it is. Here it is:

Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being. [34]

This is a good account of the kind of thing we should expect on the assumption of metaphysical free will. And this, so far as I can tell, is perfectly unintelligible. While I admit that there is some truth to the claim that we do not always know what we will do next, and sometimes our decisions come as a surprise, even to us; it simply does not follow that “decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc.” are perfectly inscrutable in the way that Harris declares. Indeed, saying that they are simply makes no sense, and I am sure it did not come as a great surprise to him that he decided to write a book about free will. I simply don’t think that true, whatever he may say. For, from all accounts, Harris is a thoughtful person who takes some pains to think about things and act on the basis of reasons, and he continually commends such reasons of action to others. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything about our actions is perfectly transparent to us, and often, no doubt, we act in ways that are determined only in part by thoughtful mindfulness — perhaps more often that we should like. But this does not show that free will is an illusion; all it shows is that we have a very inadequate idea of free will, and when Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne say that we do not have free will the most that they can reasonably be taken to mean, as I shall suggest, is that we do not have metaphysical free will. We are not finite gods who are the absolute originators of our actions.

But this, as Dennett keeps pointing out, only means that we have got hold of the problem in the wrong way. Even if, at a hazard, metaphysical free will is what most people have in mind when they speak of free will — and I don’t think that even this is true, because it is not a thoroughly worked out position, and probably implies a number of things that most people would deny — a reflective version of free will is not anchored to this “common-sense” view. As Dennett says in his interview with John Shook:

You can make something free out of parts that aren’t free — “free” in the important sense, in the same way as being alive and being conscious and being red [can be made of parts that are not alive, conscious or red] — these are macroscopic properties that are not shared by their microscopic parts. The same thing is true of freedom. It doesn’t mean that when you put enough neurons together in this way you have something that violates the laws of physics. It’s just as determined by the laws of physics, if they’re deterministic, it does not escape that. It’s just that it has this property at a higher level, which is the one that matters to us. And it isn’t illusory, any more than being red is illusory or being alive is illusory. [9]

That seems to me to be terrifically important. Denying free will, and trying to convince us that there is no free will is in itself, I think, self-contradictory. It is trying to say that we have reasons for thinking this way and not another way. But if we can have reasons for thinking, then we can have reasons for acting too.  And if we can’t make choices, and if they come, as Harris claims that they do, unbidden and unsuspected out of an impenetrable darkness, and we are just spectators of the passing show, what sense does it make to speak in terms of truth or falsity, of fidelity or misrepresentation? The determination that something is true is a decision that we make or not. And if something is true, then, for most of us, this is an important guide to action regarding the things to which this truth pertains. We not only have reasons for thinking something true, but something’s being true may well give us reasons for making one decision and not another. This is the level at which speaking of free will makes sense.

The denial of free will at that level is essentially a denial that we have any choice at all, even as to what we consider true, and I don’t think that Harris wants to deny this; especially since he is trying to convince us that it is true that free will is an illusion. However, it is never altogether clear to me what he takes to be illusory. His writing a book on free will may be something he only observes, as it were, as a spectator; but his reasons for thinking free will an illusion must be reasons that he has given some thoughtful consideration. Is he only a spectator of those reasons, and is he saying that his whole book is simply the unexpected and inexplicable coming to be of a concatenation of words which, when read, make an argument? But, if we cannot choose, for whom are these words an argument? And if he is making an argument that he thinks should weigh with us, then is he not giving us reasons that should weigh with us as reasons, and not just as elements in a causal chain? If all he is saying is that metaphyscial free will as described above is an illusion, then he is saying very little, because most people who discuss free will nowadays are under no illusions about the intelligibility of that kind of freedom — a freedom without antecedents, and with no future effects on the freedom of our decisions, as pure acts of ultimate creation. That kind of freedom would be as meaningless as Harris apparently thinks life really is. But having said that, if Harris really wants to convince us that we have reasons for thinking that this understanding of free will is an illusion, then we also have reasons for thinking differently about the nature of the human will, and the character of decision-making. And if that’s what he is trying to do, then he is really asking us to exercise our free will with respect to the correct description of the human will and the character of decision-making. Does it really make sense to try to convince us of this, if we have no choice in the matter?

Freedom of religion is a hard-core American value that is rarely questioned. It was supposed to be the ultimate solution to the grisly wars of religion that ravaged Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But religion is rarely satisfied with liberty. It invariably seeks dominance. It is akin to a wild beast that cannot be tamed; the brute is always there and ready to turn on its benefactor. [19]

The pull-quote on the page is this:

… Religion is rarely satisfied with liberty. It invariably seeks dominance.”

Well, you can’t say truer than that. Religion does not respect boundaries. It is about power and control, and will not be content until it achieves it. Religious people are jealous of every sign that other religions are being more successful than theirs, and they will do everything possible to compete for dominance. The ultimate dominance, of course, is control over the springs of political power.

It is not for nothing that the Roman Catholic Church has had a hissy fit about the American Department of Health and Human Services announcement that all institutions funded by the federal government will be required to make contraception and other reproductive services a required part of health insurance for employees. The conference of bishops immediately issued their non placet, and had their obedient lackeys out in force to reinforce the bishops’ hold on political power, showing that, by fair means or foul, they were quite prepared to force the government to back down on something that was not only a just demand attached to federal funding of sectarian institutions, but to acknowledge the right of the church to govern itself by a law of its own, without appeal to the law of the state. This was, undoubtedly, the primary reason for a response which was completely out of proportion to any offence that could be thought to have been caused, and it was based, almost exclusively, on a supposed right to freedom of religion.

But freedom of religion was never supposed to create conditions in which religious institutions should be recognised as a law unto themselves, such that they could subvert state law in favour of their own governing principles. The point of freedom of religion, as Shadia Drury points out, was to short-circuit the forces which led to civil unrest and the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the course of making her point, Ms Drury puts her finger on the nub of the issue. Who shall be in charge: the church or the state? The Reformation settlement in Britain, in terms of which the church became subject to the crown, as the head of the church, rather surprisingly prepared the ground, in the end, for a subordination of religion and religious law to the state and state law. As Drury puts it, reflecting on the separation of church and state in the United States:

The state is prohibited from interfering in religious faith by creating an established church akin to the Church of England, which was established by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I as a means of preventing the Catholic Church from making the states of Europe the … instruments of  its nefarious commands: Kill these heretics! Segregate these Jews! Burn these witches! The newly established church was subordinate to the Crown — and still is. In contrast, American churches are free. It is no wonder that they are so much admired by the pope, who applauds the way they use their freedom to reestablish the dominion over the state that he believes is rightfully theirs. [19]

Drury does not make her point clear. It seems, at first glance, that her reference to the church by law established in Britain is made in a critical spirit; on the other hand, it seems that having an established church has made it less likely that religion will be tangled up in the nations affairs, since the church is subordinate to the state (the Crown), and responsible to it. Like the old saw — “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” — the church, while having a modicum of influence of power in governance through the “Lords Spiritual” in the House of Lords, is also required to argue for its position, and cannot, in the end, play a dominant role in matters of law and state policy. In the United States, on the other hand, by being free, churches are able, by competing in the political market place, to exercise a control over government that can only be dreamed of by successive archbishops at Lambeth. Religious influence is at one more general and more insidious. It is less able to be checked, for freedom of religion seems to imply that, in the absence of an established religion, those who aspire to political office can use religion to attract votes, and even, it seems, to demolish basic principles of democracy in their quest for power.

As Drury says, “there is nothing in the [American] Constitution that requires the state to be secular.” (44) The clause that states that there shall be no establishment of religion does not support secularism, she points out, but nonsectarianism, which turns out to be a very different thing. Indeed, she carries on from this point to show that, in fact, the founding fathers of the republic, though they were enlightenment men at heart, also had a fairly soft spot for biblical iconology, and thought of the American Republic in terms of election and destiny, even going so far as to say that

Faith in America’s election was not restricted to radical Puritans or supposedly enlightened Founding Fathers. It is still rampant among the staunchest American Atheists. [45]

Regarding the latter point, I do not have evidence either way; those who know will have to judge whether what Drury says is right on this point. However, the point she draws from this, I think, is probably a valid one:

… if the freedom of religion is to be renegotiated [as she thinks it must be], then both sides must respect the wall of separation. The wall of separation must be understood as a pact of mutual forbearance and non-interference that goes both ways. The state offers the churches freedom, but in exchange, the churches must mind their own business where political affairs are concerned. [45]

About the likelihood of that I am not in a position to comment, though it seems, on the face of it, unlikely. The American civil religion, upon which the doctrine or idea of election is premised, is too intermeshed with the sectarian religious beliefs of Americans for it to be abandoned in favour of an effective wall of separation. Indeed, most Americans doubtless think that the possibility of founding a state on secular principles is doomed from the start, since many have no (or very little) conception of the possibility of founding a nation as a moral community of equals on anything less than belief in God and that god’s purposes for the nation. How this interdependence of religion with the American sense of being a light to the nations, with a mission to bring freedom to others in favour of a secular America, can be undone, is very difficult to see. But until the divorce is made, religious imperatives will continue to be central to the American political consciousness, and Catholic bishops and Southern Baptists and other religionists will continue to play a central role in determining the outcome of elections, and the making of law. And with the marked intrusion of other religions and their priorities into the American political landscape, the  urgency of making this separation becomes even more important. What part the new atheists can play in this process is still undetermined, but it is of enormous importance that American atheists be clear that the wall of separation between religion and the state is of crucial importance to those who do not wish to be governed by religious laws and priorities.

*********************************************

Francine Lalonde

Well, the votes are in and the result is known. Bill C-384 has been defeated. Of course, everyone sensed that this would happen. So, no surprise there. Very few surprises in the debate either. Members pulled the same old chestnuts out of the fire and then mumbled them for a moment or two with borderline intelligibility. They knew that the Bill would go down to defeat. This was not a matter of argument, but of religion. It would be true to say, I believe, that there was not one intelligent point made in opposition to Francine Lalonde’s Bill. The same old tired excuses not to face the question of dying head on, the same old hiding behind the vulnerable and the disabled, the same old refusal to face the fact of intense and unbearable human suffering. The same old reflexive support for palliative care to the exclusion of freedom for the dying, the same old prevarications about places where assisted dying has been legalised. For the most part Members of Parliament just don’t care. During the debate, and at other times, petitions were presented, which is normal procedure. However, some members went to greater lengths than usual. One petition, for example, was organised by the St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Parish in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The MP for the area, Michael Savage, even thanked a church member by name for organising the petition. Another MP, Tim Uppal, thanked the Catholic Women’s League for their petition. In incidental remarks made during debate it seemed clear that this Bill was being rejected principally on religious grounds. Yesterday, for example, 20 April 2010, one member even mentioned the prayer sessions he and family members had had with his dying mother and father, using a Benedictine book of prayer, and testified that his experience of his dying parents, and the choices they made, had even changed his mind on this Bill.

The footprint of the church in Canadian public space is still enormous. If MPs are not themselves religious – which many of them are, and are of course entitled to be – they are very cautious because they do not want to lose the religious vote. At election time churches can make a disproportionate amount of noise, and against assisted dying the churches are thoroughly organised, right down to the grass-roots. The Roman Catholic Church is especially well organised, and funds and supports a number of apparently independent organisations, such as the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians, the Catholic Civil Rights League, the Institute for Marriage and the Family, Priests for Life Canada, the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Life Canada, and so on. The list is long. The churches issue position papers, encyclicals, declarations, sermons, petitions, commentary, op-ed pieces, TV appearances. One thing about the religious. They may be in the dark ages so far as thinking goes, but their propaganda is state of the art, and some of them plainly walk the corridors of power.

The arguments are as predictable as the sun rising every morning. Here are the main ones: (i) Canadian law is based on the sanctity of life; (ii) it’s illegal; (iii) all human life is dignified (sacred, in other words); (iv) the disabled and the vulnerable will be at risk; they might even be pressured by someone to end their lives; we need to protect the freedom and dignity of the disabled; (v) palliative care will suffer; (vi) we don’t have enough palliative care, so people will ask for assistance in dying for lack of care; (vi) respect for human life will diminish; (vii) the trust between doctors and patients will be eroded; (viii) killing patients puts an unacceptable emotional burden on doctors and nurses; (ix) doctors are opposed to assisted dying; (x) no one need die in pain and distress; palliative care is the humane alternative to assisted dying; (xi) our lives are not our own, and therefore we have no right to end our lives; we are obligated to live our lives until we die a natural death; (xii) medicine is advancing every day; a person who was helped to die might have been saved by a medical breakthrough; (xiii) no law is foolproof, and unless we can frame a law that will never be abused, we (parliamentarians) should not legalise assisted dying, for that would make us responsible for murder; (xiv) Bill C-384 is flawed, e.g., the definition of competence is inadequate … perhaps you spotted a few more. None of them are adequate against the issue of freedom for the dying, and their right to choose how they will die.

No one who favours assisted dying should ignore possible issues of concern, and it may in fact be that Bill C-384, as it stood, needed some fine-tuning, but that’s precisely what cannot happen unless, after second reading, it gets sent to committee. And this is what members refused to do, although this was the primary appeal of a number of members. The Hon Mauril Bélanger, in a speech on 20th April 2010, made this appeal earnestly, telling the House that this was already being debated in the country, and that it was time for Parliament to direct the debate and clarify the issues. He said: “Here in the House, we talk of dying with dignity. Others talk about assisted suicide or even euthanasia. Maybe we are talking about the same thing, hence the need to define the terms. Let us try to have an enlightened debate, not a debate that leads to confusion. We will not clarify anything by refusing to study it.” (my emphasis) But this is something, apparently, that those who oppose assisted dying are not prepared to do. They do not want to open this matter to discussion, let alone decision. This shows that they are afraid.

In the division on the motion Bill C-384 was defeated 228 to 59. What does this decision tell us about the humanity and compassion of Members of Parliament today? It is well known that a majority of Canadians support assistance in dying, but some members claimed that this support is uninformed and spongy. The debate provided a clear sign that there is a new religious wind blowing in the country. We may be seeing the retreat of secularism and the growth of a new religiosity. This will make it even more difficult to get our message across. So we need to do more to see that more people are informed on the issues, that dying people are not simply abandoned to the callousness of parliament. There is not one solid argument against assisted dying in all those that were raised in the House. Not one.! All of them depend for their primary force on religious considerations. Yet such considerations cannot define how Canadians, who may not share those religious beliefs, are forced to die. This is a matter of human rights, and, despite all the opposition on the grounds of human dignity, this is a matter of human dignity. People have a right to die in ways that they themselves determine, and it is time that religion stepped back and let people live and die according to their own values, and not according to the values of those – and it does not even matter whether they are in a majority or a minority–whose beliefs are based on religion. Margaret Somerville may try to tell you that there is a secular sacred. Well, she’s wrong. There are no secular absolutes. Because we have respect for human life, we have to respect the decisions of those, living in great misery, who wish to end their lives with dignity – dignity as they define it, not as others do.

But Parliament has decided against freedom for Canadians, and for the continued suffering and misery of those who would choose otherwise if given the freedom to do so. A sad day for Canadian democracy. The last word belongs to Francine Lalonde, who brought forward this Private Member’s Bill, and defended it articulately, intelligently and bravely against insuperable odds. These are the keywords, and the bottom line of the whole discussion: “I did not know what unbearable pain was. Now I do and I have learned that medicine, with all its progress, can only provide help with side effects such as hallucinations or other terrible effects to the body. We have to have the right to choose. I am speaking on behalf of the vulnerable. They are the ones who need this type of legislation the most because only this type of legislation will allow them to be the people they choose to be.”

Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law …

thus clearly providing religious believers with a privileged position as citizens. This is something about which all Canadians should be deeply concerned, since religions themselves are in constant tension with each other. They may make common cause when it comes to a question which concerns all of them as religious believers, but acknowledging the supremacy of God in a public document begs the question as to how this supposed supremacy is recognised and enabled. Each religion has its own sources of authority, and those sources do not agree. This can be seen so clearly in the spectacle of Anglicans joining the Anglican Ordinariate of the Roman Catholic Church. Not only is this exchange of loyalties a challenge to the Anglican Church of Canada and its priorities; it is a claim, by the Roman Catholic Church, that the Anglican Church is deficient in its ministry and values, and thus is not a legitimate part of the Church of God. To pretend otherwise is to deceive oneself. Having been a member of a conservative Anglican movement in the Church at one time, this is precisely what this movement of Anglicans to Rome — often referred to as “poping” in Anglican circles — means, and intends to mean.

This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg of disagreement and contention between the faiths. The Roman Catholic Church still holds to the rule extra ecclesiam nullus salus — or, outside the church there is no salvation. This is applied indifferently to other Christians as well as to members of other religions. Of course, on the other side, Muslims claim to have the last plenary revelation from God, and the blueprint for the perfect human society. If it were not so dangerous, this claim would simply be laughable, as indeed it is. And then there are all the other religious allegiances that people have, each of them adhered to because of the belief that they, by some miracle, are in possession of real saving truth. Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door a couple of weeks ago, and their “come-on” line was something to the effect that there is a lot of confusion “out there” about who is a real Christian, and they offered to settle the question for me — an offer which I politely declined. But the identification of who is or is not a true Christian is only a beginning of the problem in a multiethnic, multireligious society.

Of course, this problem has always been clear to me, but it took on a new dimension upon reading Fr. Raymond de Souza’s address to the National Prayer Breakfast held on 1st May 2012 at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa, in which he takes those opening words of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as meaning something quite different from what they have any business meaning. After some religious throat-clearing, here is what he said:

A few weeks ago the thirtieth anniversary of the Constitution Act of 1982 [the year the British North America Act was "patriated" from Britain to Canada] was observed, and it begins by stating that “Canada is founded upon the principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”.  [Part I of the Constitution Act is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms] This breakfast is a concrete manifestation of just that: Those responsible for our laws are gathered to invoke the blessings and guidance of the God who is the source of all law. [italics mine]

These are exceedingly dangerous words, and should be seen to be so, for de Souza immediately goes on to spell out the implications of the preamble to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, by taking Thomas More (now made a saint by the Catholic Church, though he did not shrink from committing heretics to the fire) as an example for politicians to follow.

He preferred [says de Souza] to suffer death under Henry VIII rather than compromise the truths of faith.

All the while, though, people were urging him to compromise, but says de Souza, he refused to give in and accept preferment in place of what de Souza calls “the blessedness of faith.” And then de Souza says:

All of you have been offered the counsels of compromise. All of you have been urged to be just a little less faithful, and just a little more realistic. All of you will face, if you have the wit to see it and the honest to admit it, your own Thomas More moment. Keeping in mind your own day of judgment — the judgment of god, not the judgment of the returning officer — will help you to meet the moment with the integrity and courage that is the fruit of the blessedness of faith.

And that is why that preamble to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should never have been included, because it is the perfect avenue for people like de Souza, who is unwilling to recognise that politicians are not called to see that their own consciences are enforced in the law, but that the law is a secular thing that must encompass people whose beliefs conflict, and whose yearning for justice is often and justly expressed in opposition to what some people believe are demanded by their faith. By supposing that ”God is the source of all law” de Souza has made people’s religious convictions into the foundation of law, and so the virus of faith, infecting the minds of her legislators, by stealth or openly makes its way into laws that govern all Canadians.

But de Souza is not content to leave it at that. He  goes a lot further, and trespasses into territory, and invites the assembled politicians to do the same, where he does not belong:

Our politics benefit [says he, with faux innocence] precisely from the best that you have to offer, namely those convictions which are most deeply rooted in your understanding of our origin and destiny, our identity and our mission.

Notice how this imports not only religious conviction, but also identity and mission, into the heart of the political process, where it simply does not belong, and anyone who goes into politics should recognise this, as John F. Kennedy did. For a Catholic to take his religious convictions into the heart of politics is, literally, accept the authority of the Vatican over his legislative decisions.

In his last book, Arguably, Christopher Hitchens presents us with a very subtle analysis of Wolf Hall, an historical novel by Hilary Mantel  about the struggle between the English, and the English Church, and, as Hitchens puts it, “the divine rights of the papacy.” In the course of his analysis of this novel we come upon the confrontation between Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More. The usual judgement of Thomas Cromwell is, as Hitchens says, to make “Cromwell’s name a hissing and a byword.” Thomas More, by contrast, is always considered a saintly man, a man of conviction and courage, who refuses to temporise with what he conceived of as the truth, and accept preferment from the king, instead of the headsman. Now, here is Hitchens’ take on the heart of this encounter in which, as Hitchens says, “More discloses himself as a hybrid of Savonarola and Bartleby the Scrivener”. Cromwell speaks first (quotes from the novel in regular format, comments by Hitchens in bold):

 ”Let us be clear. You will not take the oath because your conscience advises you against it?”
“Yes.”
“Could you be a little more comprehensive in your answers?”
“No.”
“You object but you won’t say why?”
“Yes.”
“Is it the matter of the statute you object to, or the form of the oath, or the business of oath-taking in itself?”
“I would rather not say.”

By this time, any luckless prisoner of More’s would have been stretched naked on the rack, but his questioners persist courteously enough until he suddenly lashes out as the arrogant theocrat he is:

You say you have the majority. I say I have it. You say Parliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints are behind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for as many generations as there have been since the church of Christ was founded, one body, undivided –

This certainty is too much for Cromwell, who loses his composure for the first and only time:

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he says. “A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to the dogs. You call history to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More. But I have another mirror, and when I turn it about it shows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will have only the suffering, and not your martyr’s gratification.

The splendor of this outburst may conceal from the speaker, but not from us, the realization that he, too, will succeed More on the scaffold and that generations of sentimental and clerical history will canonize More while making Cromwell’s name a hissing and a byword. [150-151]

It is fiction, of course, but it is historical fiction, and it points out the danger of allowing religion to dictate our politics and our policies. For we are not legislating for past generations, nor can we count on their support. We are not legislating for gods, and we have no privileged access to god as de Souza imagines, in his religious coma, that we do; and certainly individual consciences formed by religious conviction and dictated to by priests and popes or imams and rabbis is no way to settle what should and should not be the law of the land. We have got to do better than to rest carelessly on theocratic conviction.

Fr. de Souza mentions Thomas More, as I have said, and suggests that the politicians he is speaking to should respond as More did when they come to their “Thomas More moment.” But Thomas More was a theocrat, who believed that the pope’s writ reached to the English. And while Henry VIII is not a shining example to set against the pope’s tendency to interfere in the lives of nations, his act was undoubtedly one of the sources of English freedom. Later the English would see what the power of pope’s could do. They would see their queen declared, in a papal bull, by the pope (Pius V), to be a heretic, and accordingly deposed, so that her subjects were no longer bound in allegiance to her, with more than a suggestion that any who undertook to kill her would be doing godly service. Henry’s Act of Supremacy, by which he made himself the head of the English Church, and refused pope’s right to intrude into the affairs, religious or secular, of the English, may have been a totalitarian act, but the claim of the religious that their own religiously informed consciences – in the absence of reasoned argument or consideration for the this-worldly benefit of citizens – should govern their decisions, as More was governed by his theocratic conscience, is no less a kind of tyranny. It is to intrude religion into places where it does not belong, and to govern by religious principles those who do not choose to be so governed.

In this connexion it is only to be expected that I should mention again that, in the debate on Francine Lalonde’s assisted dying legislation in 2009 and 2010 — a private member’s bill — the voices of religion were out in force. Reference to the preamble of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was raised to justify appeal to religious motives for voting against the bill. One member from Nova Scotia even commended a Roman Catholic church in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, for its petition opposing the legalisation of assisted dying. The sanctity of life was raised by a number of members who took part in the debate — a debate whose intellectual level was scarcely higher than high school model parliaments. But whereas model parliaments are created to server as a civics lesson, real Members of Parliament should at least try to acquire some depth of knowledge about issues that come before them. There was little evidence that the MPs who took part in the debate had read much more than odd bits of bumf from religious extremists. Evidence of an ability to discuss moral issues intelligently was sadly lacking, largely, I suspect, because most religious believers think that religious belief itself is a sufficient basis upon which to make reasonable moral choices, and the preamble to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, disastrously, gives them all the ammo they need to rest carelessly on that assumption. At the very least, this is a question which liberal democracies must begin to address more openly: In liberal democracies, what should be the role of the religious convictions of those elected to make legislative decisions? At the moment, I refuse to vote for a Roman Catholic, because the Roman Catholic Church is increasingly taking the same theocratic line as that expressed by de Souza. I cannot in conscience vote for someone who will put his religious convictions before his duty to the citizens of this country, for doing so simply aggravates the distinctions between people. Religion is not a force for peace and unity, nor does it have the earthly good of people in mind. Religion aims much higher than that, and gets lost in the clouds that descend over the mind every time people begin to talk about god or gods and their will and purpose for us.