A breath of fresh air
Oh good, a new book saying how bad and stupid the ‘new’ atheism is, and it starts out just as it should, by summoning the usual clichés.
[The book] is clearly intended as a riposte to all those blasts of aggressive atheism from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Reading Armstrong after these boys is like listening to a clever and kindly adult after a bunch of strident adolescents. Both Bible-bashing fundamentalists and dogmatic atheists have a similar idea of what “God” means, she points out…
Well done! That got a lot in. The usual implication that there have been thousands of atheist books, which promptly collapses into the usual sad admission that the total is all of five, or maybe as many as eight if you include the outliers like Onfray and Stenger. The usual charge of aggression directed at…some books. The S word! Hooray, he got in the S word! He gets the Madeleine Bunting Award for this week. ‘Fundamentalists’ is there, ‘dogmatic atheists’ is there, the charge that they share a silly idea of god that is nothing like the sophisticated version that everyone actually believes in and prays to is there. Well done in such a small space: many of the familiar stale tropes, and not one thing surprising or unexpected or even clever.
…a similar idea of what “God” means, she points out, and it is an absurdly crude one. They seem to think the word denotes a large, powerful man we can’t see.
Yes…There are reasons for that. For most people, the word denotes exactly that.
Socrates pushed rationality and intellect to the point where they fail: you reach his famous aporia, and realise you really know nothing at all. The new atheists do the opposite. Their rationality and intellect bring them to a place of absolute knowledge, a height from where they survey all history, and pronounce with finality on pretty much everything.
Okay, I’m bored with the joke now. That’s just cretinously stupid, and it’s not true. ‘The new atheists’ don’t do any such fucking thing, and we (I guess I get to say ‘we’ now, since I’ve been called one by no less an authority than Madeleine Bunting) are pretty damn tired of being told that we do.
The book is by Karen Armstrong. The reviewer, Christopher Hart, vouches for her at the outset in the careful way that one has to:
Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun who has written highly acclaimed biographies of Muhammad, Buddha and, most recently, the Bible.
Yeah – notice he doesn’t say who does the acclaiming. Cautious.
Oy, first Bunting then Armstrong? Will no one rid us of these women?
Off topic (and apologies for the clutter; I realize you may have to delete), but I’m trolling for sympathy. I just lost an entire draft chapter of my upcoming book. The. Whole. Thing. And notes. Because I’m too stupid to keep multiple copies on different hard drives. Oh, the huge manatee. I just wanna scream.
Would be ever so grateful if one or two of you would pretend to wail and gnash teeth in sympathy for me.
/drama
Consider the gnashing done here, Josh, wailing too, even baying at the moon if you like. The first rule of computers: Backup. The second rule of computers: Bacup. The third rule of computers: Backup. I lost a year’s worth of documents four years ago. I forgot the first three rules. It’s a painful experience. I learned from it.
Karen Armstrong and this whole god-besotted gang really get me. They keep talking about the subtlety of language about God. We don’t believe in a god as being ‘out there’, or like a big man in the sky. Belief, in religion is not propositional. It’s trust. It’s giving one’s loyalty. It’s … well, it’s anything but what any critic calls it.
Trouble is, even if they could get away with that, all the trappings are left, all the authoritative books and sayings, all the rules about hierarchy and rule. So the lack of intellectual depth is only a show. We’ll hide behind the idea of myth, like Bultmann, but Bultmann took certain kerygmatic parts of the gospels and other scriptural writings as themselves, because they had a particular authority to do this, as making an existential claim.
Does Karen Armstrong want to say that, well, it’s only an existential claim to those who take it this way? Well, then, the religion would fall apart, so, even when she does away with ‘belief in God’, there’s still a level with the very same intellectual function, something that is taken as authoritative. She has to ask herself what it is, after the theoligical smoke and mirrors, where the authority comes from.
Of course, Armstrong is right about one thing. We’ve lost the knack of religion. That’s why it makes no sense in a scientific culture. Existential challenges come from all sorts of places, and what challenges me existentially is not necessarily what challenges someone else. But none of it has the kind of authority that spells out the limist of thought for someone else. If Camus’ Plague is an existential challenge, and it is, it raises more questions about religion than it provides answers.
It’s so simple for the Armstrongs and the McGraths of the world. All they have to do is spin words with a kind of obscure authoritativeness. They don’t provide any very convincing explanations of why we should respond to such authority, even with all the rich ideas of the divine which is what makes religion such a rabbit warren of claims that before you’ve responded to one thing, they’re alread barking up another tree, with a new panoply of gods.
Of course, it’s not meant literally. It’s all broken myths, but beneath the myths, however broken, there is that kernel of authority, that little place where God dwells unacknowldged. I’ve just wathced the process in action in a book of Jewish theology. Take Neil Gillman’s The Death of Death. He talks a lot about the brokenness of myth, so what we have is ‘not God’s will in its purity, but our very human understanding of that will.’ But the word ‘god’ still works here as a referring expression. For to speak of God’s will, even metaphorically, must come to rest somewhere. Even metaphors make comparisons. If someone talks of God’s will then there must be something there to be known, and yet, if the myth is broken, and religion is really about human existential crisis, why keep insisting on the use of the word ‘god’? In the end the metaphor is no longer a metaphor, and gives way to straightforward description, otherwise what is the metaphor for? It’s all a con job. I’ve played the game before, and they high the peas before they start the shell game. (I’ve written this while I’m sleep, so it man not make sense at all.)
Eric, when what you write is sleepy borderline nonsense, there’s still loads more sense in it than Karen Armstrong and Maddie Bunting have written in their entire lives.
“For most people, the word denotes exactly that.”
Certainly, because most people really do want there to be–to really exist–a “large, powerful man” (sexist, of course, but even today most people feel safer with a man protecting them) who can answer their prayers and who has created the whole universe so that it makes sense to them and gives them a comfortable place to live in. They would never be satisfied with a highly sophisticated Armstrong-style metaphorical expression of the anguish of human existence, or whatever.
And as for backups, it always amuses me that the whole discussion of relative costs of Windows vs. Mac, etc., is always carried on without pointing out to computer newbies that they have to add on the cost of at one hard drive to back your stuff up on, or you’re screwed. (Or the cost of online backup storage space–but I don’t trust backups on something I can’t see with my own eyes.)
Hart, paraphrasing Armstrong, claims the view of God as a large powerful man in the sky is infantile theology.
It seems Victor Mikhailovich, whose picture of God the Father heads the review, didn’t get the message, nor Michelangelo, et al.
One might suppose that believers who think their god is beyond language would say less rather than more, and say it diffidently rather than confidently, but apparently not.
“…both Galileo and Darwin, supposed icons of modern atheism, were adamant that their discoveries had no impact on religious faith.”
Not coincidentally, we might observe that the domain of thinkable thoughts has a remarkable way of tracking the favorite fetishes of those holding the cannons and muskets.
In Galileo the case is too obvious to deserve comment.
For Darwin, he was so jittery about the consequences of his work that if it weren’t for the threat of a rival unveiling a similar book, “Origin”‘s publication would likely have been delayed quite a bit longer.
Oh, argh, Josh, wail, gnash, tear, rend, claw. Horribles.
:- (
And spread out over the five years since “The End of Faith” was published, too. That’s at most two per year, the merest drop in the ocean compared to all the pro-god books published in that time (including “sophisticated theology” and also the Left Behind series – where’s Amstrong’s book criticising that? Surely it has all the faults she’s imputing to the “new atheists”)
I remember PZ Myers making the point ages ago that, if people like this are members of a religious congregation, then their idea of “god” is really situation-specific.
When writing for people who expect woolly, content-free “sophisticated” ideas of “god”, then it’s all about poetry, metaphor, inner peace and the “big questions that science can’t answer”. But if they’re part of congregations then they go to church and worship and pray to a personal, interventionist god whose approval must be sought, just like all other believers.
As for the “absolute knowledge” thing, that is so vexing. Dawkins, in the God Delusion, was intellectually honest enough to admit that he doesn’t know everything and that science doesn’t have a complete picture of reality.
He only went as far as to claim that there is “almost certainly” no god, provided that “god” is defined in certain ways, and admitted that there are some definitions of “god” in use that he’d have to say he believes in. They’re not theistic, and they’re not useful at all, but they’re in use so he, being honest, mentioned them.
He declared himself willing to change his mind in the light of good evidence, which he regards as an admirable personality trait (he even told a little anecdote about an old professor who abandoned a theory he’d held for years). In short, he is THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what he’s routinely accused of being.
Compare that to the, yes, strident tone of CS Lewis in books like Mere Christianity. Absolute certainty, intellectual dishonesty, vile and hateful scorn poured on not only atheists but also “Papists” and “Mohammedans” are present all through it. Having read both, if anyone is “strident”, if anyone “pronounces with finality on pretty much everything” I’m confident in saying that it’s LEWIS, not Dawkins.
And yet Dawkins is a strident adolescent “new atheist” and Lewis is a good Christian, a cuddly writer of kids’ fiction. Where are the Christian writers complaining about Lewis’ description of atheism as a “boy’s philosophy”, a “philosophy of the nursery”, that a young atheist “cannot guard his faith too carefully,” that danger “lies in wait” on every side, and that a successful adherence to atheism depends on being very selective in one’s reading? Where are the Armstrongs complaining about LEWIS’ tone?
It’s the double standard that’s the worst part of this whole thing. And silence is treated as assent, so we simply HAVE to speak out about it. Hence the “new atheism”.
Annoying that this review is by Christopher Hart who is often good and right-on. There is another by Simon Blackburn which very elegantly and wryly tears Armstrong limb from limb while still leaving you thinking you might want to read the book. Check it out as an antidote to the Hart piece. Very funny in a dry, donnish sort of way:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/04/case-for-god-karen-armstrong
Simon Blackburn has a more considered review of the book.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/04/case-for-god-karen-armstrong
“Armstrong points us towards a vast tradition in all religions in which, in essence, you can ultimately say nothing about God, since God is no thing.” Wonderful. So please will she stop writing books about it? And please will Joe Ratzi and Scratchy Rowan and Maddy Bunty and all the rest of them Just Shut Up? And please will Armstrong refrain from meaningless gibberish such as “We need to think of God not as a being, but as Being.”
No? I thought not.
This is a brilliant comment:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2006/12/sastras_comment.php
Erm, just to clarify, the comment is by Sastra commenting on Evolutionblog a while ago. It’s that comment that’s brilliant. I wasn’t saying my comment was brilliant. That’s for other people to say.
I second John Meredith’s characterisation of the Blackburn review. An elegant take-down that still leaves you wanting to read the book. Oddly enough published side by side with a review by Jonathan Bartley of other books in which he says that Eagleton “uses the weapons of reason”. Some mistake here surely?
Your comment was brilliant, Mark.
I’m nothing if not obliging!
KiwiDave – well spotted about the picture. Why didn’t I think of that?!
I quite like and respect Armstrong’s argument, at least as Blackburn presented it. It’s a better place to start than the presuppositions that, say, Mooney thinks he’s trading on in his “don’t be a dick” manifesto (esp. the principle of epistemic humility). Armstrongians can rebut: thanks for the thought, but your defense already misses the point.
Naturally, as everyone else has pointed out, religious quietism in the isolationist vein is tone-deaf to the consequences of these ostensibly therapeutic ideas, which at their worst facilitate a blissful numbness to the worst horrors imaginable. But religious quietism doesn’t need to be that way. There’s nothing defensive about it, because it doesn’t pretend to be open to rational argument.
The problem, though, is that it is open to rational argument. Sure, there’s no need to defend against anything except your own intuitively held reservations, for purposes of therapy. But arguing with yourself is still an argument. So it turns out that we can find cognitive content wherever we look, even in therapy, so long as we think we can understand what’s being said or thought. Quietism, in this way, is a Maginot Line.
It is, however, much more plausible than the alternatives, and I’ll be damned if I don’t sympathize with it more.
But Ben, that is precisely what Blackburn does not present, namely, Armstrong’s argument. For, as he points out, what we really get is a song and dance, and what direction we go in after the song and dance, may or may not be good. That’s the problem. But the further problem is that, as soon as we engage intellectually with the symbols of religion, and the machine has stopped idling, then we get to the claims that religions make. Armstrong may like to think that the real sound of religion is silence, but that is not the sound that we hear. The biggest problem with religion’s Maginot line is that it is truly impregnable by reason, and yet it is armed to the teeth with arguments.
Josh: Sorry to learn of your book disaster. My wife has been writing a book, and I have been urging her to make as many backups as she can as she goes. Then trying to stick something in a USB port in the back of my computer last week, I lifted the damn thing in such a way as to put a right-angle bend in the memory stick I keep in the port at the front: my only copy of the stuff I have been meaning to back up, (but it will keep till tomorrow.)
OB: Thanks for the link to Hart’s brilliant review; the most brilliant part being the comments after it.
He says:
If ‘you can ultimately say nothing about God’ then the proposition ‘God exists’ is just as good/bad/indifferent as the proposition ‘God doesn’t exist.’ Or ‘God exists, but only on Saturdays, Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday.’ Fair enough. Who am I to argue with that sort of profundity? (By the way, anything good on TV tonight? And has anyone fed the cat?)
As for the last bit, I don’t mind a bit of music, or music+ritual. ‘Compassion’ is often patronising; I prefer empathy. But it’s the ‘graceful acceptance of mystery and unknowing’ bit that I have trouble with. I think a few others have had too. The core in that particular apple is an admonition to not question, investigate, experiment; either about the natural world or the social order and set of arrangements. Just accept the ‘mystery’ of it.
I like a good mystery. Chance to figure out whodunnit.
An important quote from Hart dropped out in the posting of the above. It should read:
Josh: Sorry to learn of your book disaster. My wife has been writing a book, and I have been urging her to make as many backups as she can as she goes. Then trying to stick something in a USB port in the back of my computer last week, I lifted the damn thing in such a way as to put a right-angle bend in the memory stick I keep in the port at the front: my only copy of the stuff I have been meaning to back up, (but it will keep till tomorrow.)
OB: Thanks for the link to Hart’s brilliant review; the most brilliant part being the comments after it.
He says: ‘Yet thanks to the misapplication of science to religious faith, we remain literal-minded and spiritually immature, frightened of the silence and solitude in which the Ancient of Days, the Unnameable, might be experienced, though never understood. We need to think of God not as a being, but as Being. Armstrong points us towards a vast tradition in all religions in which, in essence, you can ultimately say nothing about God, since God is no thing. In Islam, all speaking or theorising about the nature of Allah is mere zannah, fanciful guesswork. Instead, try “silence, reverence and awe,” she says; or music, ritual, the steady habit of compassion, and a graceful acceptance of mystery and “unknowing”.’
If ‘you can ultimately say nothing about God’ then the proposition ‘God exists’ is just as good/bad/indifferent as the proposition ‘God doesn’t exist.’ Or ‘God exists, but only on Saturdays, Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday.’ Fair enough. Who am I to argue with that sort of profundity? (By the way, anything good on TV tonight? And has anyone fed the cat?)
As for the last bit, I don’t mind a bit of music, or music+ritual. ‘Compassion’ is often patronising; I prefer empathy. But it’s the ‘graceful acceptance of mystery and unknowing’ bit that I have trouble with. I think a few others have had too. The core in that particular apple is an admonition to not question, investigate, experiment; either about the natural world or the social order and set of arrangements. Just accept the ‘mystery’ of it.
I like a good mystery. Chance to figure out whodunnit.
Ian, I think we might disagree a bit. There’s the old saw, I think attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, about how at a certain level of sophistication, technology might as well be magic. That is to say, for my purposes here anyway, its effects are so amazing that the healthiest emotional reaction to it is to hold it in awe, not to take it for granted. The flip side is that we admit that those phenomena in science that are genuine mysteries, also deserving our awe — echoing Sagan here. This is all to the good, and I think is more emotionally healthy than to treat them as trivialities to be solved by technical wizards. And that is exactly the sort of reverence and humility that seems to be at issue when we discuss the matter of unanswered questions. The key difference, of course, is that religionist types foster a faith in the supernatural that takes a priority over care for the facts (as we know them through best evidence) in order to protect the relevant feelings, while the best among the scientifically literate have those feelings rejuvenated by the evidence. It’s a gap, but not a gap that allows us to deride the sentiment in question.
Eric, I think we agree on one thing. The arguments against religious quietism are far less potent than those against the, uh, non-quietists (loudists?). For good or ill, critiques of the quietist are more likely to be interpreted as being silencing than critiques of the loudist (whose relationship to the public sphere is more obvious).
But just because the practices are less potent, does not mean they are immune to (direct or indirect) argument. The considerate quietist can be indirectly challenged on the basis of the consequences of their ideas on others, and there isn’t anything that is necessarily unfair about doing that, so long as we presume some minimal intellectual and moral norms about holding people accountable for the things they do. More directly, the practices can be compared with secular quietist alternatives, and the intuitive arguments for the secular quietist made explicit.
First, thanks to everyone for your kind displays of sympathetic solidarity over my book chapter! Especially to O, who went the extra mile and chose to rend her garments, too . . .lol
I did find a portion of a backup, at least, but not everything I’d written. Oh well. Lesson learned. My friends’ email boxes are now brimming over with requests to archive my stuff. .just what they always wanted.
On Karen Armstrong –
I hate to admit, but I liked the first book of hers that I read – The Spiral Staircase. It was five years ago (actually, I listened the audiobook, mainly while doing housework), so I don’t remember it in detail, only general impressions. It struck me as an insightful and touching memoir, but I wasn’t thinking quite as critically about religion and epistemology as I try to do now. This was before I was kidnapped and became a New Atheist, see.
She is, of course, madly misguided. I haven’t read any of her work since then, but it’s clear enough from excerpts and interviews that she’s not nearly as insightful as she appears when writing about her own experience, in the first person. No, she generalizes her own subjective yearnings onto capital-R Religion, and makes a right mess out of it.
Funny thing, just a year after I read (listened to) that book, I wrote Richard Dawkins a letter on a whim, thanking him for being a voice of reason in increasingly insane religious times in America. This was before the God Delusion; who had any idea what was about to come? Must have just been waking up to the problem in a way I hadn’t a year earlier.
“My friends’ email boxes are now brimming over with requests to archive my stuff”
You can also just set up Yahoo accounts (for instance) for that purpose. Some people above said they don’t trust the ethereal method – but I know people who swear by that, and I do it. And gmail has Docs.
You can also just set up Yahoo accounts (for instance) for that purpose. Some people above said they don’t trust the ethereal method – but I know people who swear by that, and I do it. And gmail has Docs.
You’re so right, and I use Google Docs already for other things. Really, I’m normally a very competent, organized, professional person. But I have some major, stupid blind spots. I shouldn’t need you pointing this out, but I’m awfully glad you did!
Josh, it’s best not to think of the many stages of rejection, because knowing about it doesn’t help one cope any better. At best you get a hurt brain leading to nosebleeds.
Though this is one area where I suspect that the social sciences have near perfect predictive accuracy. Confront a man with something he is paid not to accept, and he will respond in the following manner:
1. Ignore.
2. Question speaker’s credibility.
3. Unsubstantiated skepticism, relativism. (Bonus: accuse those that ask for reasons-responsive of being combative.)
4. Purposefully misunderstand the point in order to drag on debate.
5. Actively attempt to persuade in the other direction.
6. Implicitly accept speaker’s argument, but argue that it is irrelevant, misses “the point”, etc.
Storing stuff on the net is good for final backup with access from anywhere. I am reluctant to use the hard drive of my computer, as they clutter up and go down. External hard drives are OK as long as one remembers they have a limited lifetime.
I prefer 4 GB memory sticks in USB ports because they are cheap and can be daisy-chained using 1 to 4 ultra mini ports.
My wife’s whole 400 page book with photos fitted onto just one 4 GB stick.
Ben: Einstein is quoted as saying: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
But then he also said: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html
Ian, me and Al are best buddies. Though I’m less spooked by non-locality than he was.
Josh, I’ll chime in and recommend Gmail for storage. I still have years-old documents that I’ve attached to drafts on Gmail sitting there, wasting away. After the world ends, the only things left will be cockroaches and Google.
And Cher. Don’t forget.
I’m trying to but you’re not helping.
Don’t miss this VERY funny “digested Read” of the book:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/07/karen-armstrong-case-for-god
Thanks, Mags. That’s a cut-out-and-keep.