Anything goes
Simon Barnes says approving things about Darwin, David Attenborough, and evolution – but then he gets down to the real business of his piece, which is (you’ll never guess) chiding those pesky atheists. In fact the approving things turn out to be apparently just some throat-clearing en route to what really matters, which is chorus 3,987,281 of ‘fundamentalism/creationism is bad but those tiresome sciencey atheists are much much much worse.’
So much, then, for benign creation; let’s leave the creationists to fight that one out among themselves. But what of the legions of self-trumpeting atheists? What of Richard Dawkins, who had the arrogance to write a fat book about God without troubling to read up on theology, a discipline that includes many writers as subtle-minded as himself?
Yes what indeed. Let’s leave the creationists to sort each other and turn to the really fun bit, which is self-righteously demanding what business Richard Dawkins has writing about god when after all god is a subject for The Professionals despite the fact that amateurs are always telling us what to do and what to think in the name of this putative god. Let’s pretend that it’s arrogant for people to say why god is not believable but not for people to say why god is believable. Let’s leave clerics and their subjects alone but let’s really get in a huff about people who dispute truth claims that are based on no evidence.
No believer can prove that God exists: isn’t faith rather the point? And no scientist can prove that He doesn’t. You may believe that you have a soul. Professor Dawkins believes that you don’t. Both positions are equally tenable in that both are matters of belief, of faith. This stuff can be neither proved nor disproved, therefore it is nothing to do with science.
Proof and disproof (for the 9 millionth time) is not the issue; the point is that there is no evidence that there is such a thing as a ‘soul’ and there is plenty of evidence indicating that there isn’t. It’s just nonsensical to pretend that the existence of a soul is not an empirical subject at all, and equally nonsensical to pretend that there is no evidence that bears on the question. It’s even more nonsensical to conclude from the first nonsense that therefore belief that one has a soul and belief that one doesn’t are ‘equally tenable,’ because brute belief is not as tenable as belief based on reasons, such as inferences from evidence. I could decide to believe that I have the ability to fly, but such a belief would not be as tenable as the belief that I couldn’t.
It’s true that anyone can just decide to believe any old thing, evidence or no evidence – but that doesn’t mean that therefore there is nothing to be said about the content of the belief. That’s especially when the beliefs are not kept private but are trotted out in political and moral disputes, as of course they so very often are.
Oh God I could feel my heart sinking as I started to read this entry – that awful sense that the most tiresome of arguments was coming up; one needs faith to not believe in God too, therefore beliving in God is sensible.
Why do we even bother repeating the point that proof is not the issue (as it isn’t strictly speaking for any science) – but evidence is, and the evidence most certainly does not balance in the middle somewhere? Why oh why does this point not get through?!
Oliver Kamm’s riposte to Simon says is pretty good, I thought: Darwin’s Tree of Life
And beyond OB’s and Dave’s beef over proof vs evidence, I wish people would stop with the NOMA. (Gould has a lot to answer for.) The word magisterium is a Roman Catholic one, and it denotes the imagined teaching authority of the church. There is no such thing as a magisterium, no licensed authority for talking about the world and human experience. You have to have, as you say, evidence, and without it, we don’t get very far.
Religion doesn’t have a magisterium. As Kamm says, it’s not an intellectual activity, or a form of knowledge. It’s a backward looking, interpretive discourse about supposed revelations. I have long since snipped up my theology degree into little pieces, since it is not evidence for knowing anything; theology is not a discipline of knowledge. (A book that puts this rather nicely is Hector Avalos’ The End of Biblical Studies.)
The sooner we recognise this and get on with life the better.
“Why oh why does this point not get through?!”
I would love to know – I certainly make it often enough! Which isn’t to say that therefore it should have sunk in by now but to say that if I do surely other people do and therefore it should have sunk in by now.
It is heart-sinking how drearily familiar and drearily familiarly wrong all the claims are. There they all are, one after the other, each as wrong and as thought-free as the last.
“Richard Dawkins, who had the arrogance to write a fat book about God without troubling to read up on theology”
This sort of ‘reasoning’ is so tiresome and so bloody common. Theologians are not experts on God in the way that, say, chemists are experts on chemistry. Well-trained theologians are experts on theology, institutional religious opinion about God. There’s nothing arrogant about opining about God without first taking into account everyone else’s opinions about God.
And further, if theology is to be regarded as actual God-knowledge (as implied by the appeal to authority), how is that to be reconciled with this: “No believer can prove that God exists: isn’t faith rather the point?”? So what is religious doctrine? Faith (which has no authority), or knowledge (which does)?
Mr Barnes should stick to writing about sport, which he’s actually quite good at (though no match for Richard Williams).
He’s clearly out of his depth here
As an aside, why stop at Dawkins. What about the arrogance of that Lavoisier chappy, going and proposing the caloric theory of fire without even bothering to read all those learned treatises on phlogiston…
Heh. I didn’t notice that theology/faith bait-and-switch. Yeah, it’s a kind of knowledge when you want to slap Dawkins upside the head and it’s faith when you want to…slap Dawkins upside the head but in a different way. Otherwise known as having it not both ways but all possible ways.
I have read that L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Dianetics and Scientology, has published over a thousand works of fiction and non-fiction works, and entered the Guiness Book of World Records in 2007 for being the most published and most translated author in the world. He has produced thousands of hours of audio cassette lectures and the Church of Scientology works fervently to produce a definitive collection of Hubbard’s life works in one collection spanning over a hundred volumes.
I have not read a single one, and have no intention to. I will say this: I think Scientology is a load of cultish bunkum designed solely to scam people out of their money. Have I committed an intellectual sin, Mr. Barnes? Am I not subtle-minded enough?
The paragraph where he upbraids Dawkins for writing The God Delusion is particularly irritating. Are scientists not allowed to write anything about anything that isn’t in their narrow field of expertise. Way to go to create a culture of public intellectuals willing to critique the status quo. Dawkins is only allowed to write articles to go into biology journals. Bertrand Russell is only allowed to write about logical analysis and mathematics. If scientists and philosophers are not going to be allowed to write books on any subject or for any audience outside of their professional peers, then theology is included in that rule. No more Thought for the Day, no more Songs of Praise, no more Screwtape Letters and no more “atheists are fighting a war on Christmas” stories. Get back to your theology departments and write fascinating articles on the various hermeneutical approaches to a particularly tricky passage in 1 Corinthians for publication only in the Journal of Biblical Literature.
Yeah!
Yeah! Absolutely! Well said, Tom. Tu quoque! (To Simon, of course!) Come to think of it, by Barnes’ standads, journalists should just shut up!
Tom: My memory fails me for some of the details, but my sense of irony does not for the situation.
A few years ago, during the Vietnam War, a number of academics from various departments of the ANU and other universities wrote articles in the Australian press attacking government policy, which was support for the war.
One academic (name forgotten) from the ANU Dept of Sociology (I think) apparently decided to down the lot of them with one well aimed brick. He wrote a learned article, published in the Canberra Times, entitled ‘Academics who Write Outside their Fields’, and took them all to task along the lines of ‘they are no more expert in this than Joe Blow down the street, so why should anyone take any more notice of them than say, of Joe Blow?’
I can think you can probably guess what came next. An ANU philosopher wrote in to the paper pointing out that the learned correspondent was himself writing outside his own field, and had painted himself into a corner from which there was no escape.
As academic fields are everywhere narrowing towards those infinitesimal points at which each individual scholar can be said to know everything about nothing, perhaps the only matter a scholar can address is a topic on which he/she is an established world authority.
Yet the central proposition of the monotheistic religions is simple, and is all Dawkins et al would need to challenge in order to challenge the entire edifice of each one. That goes: there is an eternal, omniscient and omnipotent, unembodied and absolute intelligence responsible for the entire universe we know, which can be spoken to directly by anyone, which always listens and may or may not respond as requested.
I do not believe that proposition is hard to understand, not even (with suitable rewording) by a child. Reject it, and every other proposition of monotheism becomes irrelevant.
St Paul had the idea of this centrality of the essential simple proposition when he said “…if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” (1 Cor 15)
To which I would add: precisely.
No believer can prove that Santa exists, and scientist can prove that he doesn’t. Both positions are equally tenable in that both are matters of belief, of faith.
To expand on the comment I left at Kammo’s blog:
“What of Richard Dawkins, who had the arrogance to write a fat book about God without troubling to read up on theology,”
This is a popular lie but a lie nonetheless. You can tell it’s a lie if you read The God Delusion. So Barnes clearly hasn’t, which presumably makes him “arrogant”.
The worst you can say about Dawkins is that he believes that the theologians he consulted were being honest.
“a discipline that includes many writers as subtle-minded as himself?”
Dawkins isn’t subtle-minded about theology in much the same way I’m not subtle-minded about luminoferous ether theory. A gross-scale refutation is sufficient.
But given that theology ain’t subtle-minded, I think this is a fair comparison. ;-)
I don’t find “subtlety” preferable to truth, and Dawkins is both correct and amusing in his ripostes to the assertions of theology.
Worthwhile taking a peak at richarddawkins.net, for Jerry Coyne’s paper “Seeing and Believing” with responses. The one by Sam Harris is a must.
Barnes claims that the question concerning the existence of the soul is a matter of faith, not science, to settle. A couple of year’s ago I participated in a conference at the University of Chicago on the topic of whether natural selection was compatible with “human values.” At one point we were discussing whether natural selection could have anything to say regarding the human soul, and several of the participants said no. I remember asking at the time, “What is the soul for? Presumably, it is supposed to be rather important, so what does having a soul get you, so to speak?” Most responded by saying that the soul is the source of knowledge of “right and wrong,” that without a soul, ethics would be impossible. I then kindly pointed out that, if this is what the soul is, then of course we have souls! Not only do we have souls, but we are evening beginning to understand how they actually work (read: moral psychology rooted in Darwinian natural selection). As it turns out, having a soul is not a matter of having some non-physical stuff, but rather a fairly sophisticated computational organ (brain). To insist that ethics could not be explained that way is simply to beg the question against science, and if you continue to insist on the existence of a non-physical soul (while conceding the Darwinian account of how ethics is possible), then the ‘soul’ begins to lose all meaning.
That’s interesting. Was ‘the soul is the source of knowledge of “right and wrong”‘ supposed to be an exhaustive definition? So that it really is just another word for the mind? Or were there other parts to the definition.
I generally assume that the word is meant to include separability from the body and immortality – so that’s why I said there’s plenty of evidence indicating that there is no such thing. If the soul isn’t defined that way then that doesn’t apply – but then of course, as you say, the definition has become so baggy as to be meaningless.
I had a note all cued up and ready to go, and your server (OB) must have gone down. Anyway, I was left with a blank page! (And couldn’t connnect to the server for about 20 minutes.)
Soul is not just the organ of moral decisions. In Christianity, soul is roughtly equivalent to mind, and was thought of (in a dualistic way) as a separate substance, very much as Descartes’ thought of it. Early Christians may have thought of soul in a somewhat corporal way, but a more immaterial (or spiritual, or whatever) ‘soul stuff’ seemed to predominate eventually. The existence of soul is based, in Christianty, as in Plato, for instance, on the apparent differences between mind and body. Plato thought that the soul could put on a number of bodies in succession. Paul thought that the soul would, in the end, put on a glorious body.
In these days, when dualism is not particularly in favour, soul comes to be reduced somewhat in importance. Perhaps Marty’s conversationlists couldn’t think of anything more for souls to do than to do morality, but originally, all mental functions were essentially soul functions, and that language didn’t disappear until the seventeenth century (roughly), and now seems rather quaint.
Religious language is problematic when you slide possible functions out without saying, and leave it holding an empty bag. Always was. Only when you take everything away and give it to body or mind, the soul bag feels ‘kinda’ light. And now, clearly, it doesn’t even have morality to do, so we’ll have to send the soul begging.
Yeh – I was wondering what Marty’s conversationalists meant, and whatever that was, if it’s the usual current version of the soul or not. I was assuming that Simon Barnes meant the religious-dualist kind of soul that lives forever and is what gets resurrected even though the orthodox belief is supposed to be that resurrection is of the body. But then of course Barnes was being woolly throughout so he probably didn’t know or care exactly what he meant.
That Sam Harris reply is brilliant. I’m laughing like a maniac.
Yea, it’s great, isn’t it?
Do Columnists Matter ?
Not only is it brilliant, it’s worth putting up with Ken Miller’s in order to get to it.
Ohhh don’t say columnists don’t matter, you would take my life’s purpose away from me.
Brights such as Richard Dawkins and Theists such as Francis Collins have both attacked Stephen Jay Gould’s claim that science and religion constitute two, “nonoverlapping magisteria.” And, of course, they are both right in making such an attack. Despite what theists who believe in evolution by natural selection say, natural selection is in deep tension with the specific and widely held doctrine of the immortal soul.
To make it clear why this is so, we need to acknowledge up front that, for theists, the immortal soul is supposed to explain something; it is not merely an idle and gratuitous feature of humans, but is supposed to account for something that is otherwise inexplicable. The problem arises when another, competing explanation of the same phenomena is offered, for both explanations cannot be right. This is exactly the position we are in (or will soon be in, I predict) with respect to the immortal soul.
What is the immortal soul supposed to explain? Francis Collins attributes his conversion to Christianity in large part to reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and I think it fair to say that what the immortal soul is supposed to provide is moral knowledge–that without the existence of an immortal soul, ethics makes no sense. So when people like Collins say they are committed Darwinians, they mean they are committed up to a point, for a committed Darwinian wants to say that everything about humans can be given a natural explanation in evolutionary terms, and the concept of an immortal soul is not a part of the Darwinian tool kit–it simply does no explanatory work. Thus, if we ever reach a point where a Darwinian theory of morality is fully articulated, people will need to make a choice: either accept the Darwinian story and reject the concept of an immortal soul, or reject the Darwinian story and accept immortal souls. But because these accounts will be in conflict, they cannot have it both ways.
This, by the way, is where the real action should be in this debate between religion and science. A lot of focus is given to the question of whether there could be a God that created the universe, set down a system of laws compatible with our evolution, and then let nature run its course. Brights like Dawkins get in trouble here because the issues involved can by rather esoteric and hard to think about for creatures whose psychology was tuned to deal with more “local” problems, like how to survive and reproduce. Because Dawkins is seen as taking a hard stand on such issues, he is accused of overreaching. I think there is something to this criticism, but I also think the debate obscures the conflicts between religion and science that are less inscrutable.
Aye, me too – fully fledged CiF addict these days ! It’s a bit like fishing you know. (In fact sometimes it’s just like shooting or dynamiting fish.)
Aye, me too – fully fledged CiF addict these days ! It’s a bit like fishing you know. (In fact sometimes it’s just like shooting or dynamiting fish.)
How did that happen ?