Atheists quarrel amongst themselves
Michael Ruse really could have been a good deal more careful. It’s only manners, and it’s also only sensible – flailing at an enemy that doesn’t exist is just a waste of time. (Never mind Don Quixote – he was fun at dinner but he was a bore about the windmills.)
There are several reasons why we atheists are squabbling – I will speak only for myself but I doubt I am atypical. First, non-believer though I may be, I do not think (as do the new atheists) that all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting.
See? That’s really careless. Of course ‘the new athesits’ don’t (all) think that. I’m not sure any of them think that, but we could grant Hitchens just on the strength of his subtitle; but anyone else? No.
I defend to the death the right of the new atheists to their views and to their right to propagate them.
Not really. Not exactly. Not when spending so much time and energy misrepresenting them (us).
Today, nearly a decade after 9/11, terrified as so many still are by the terrorist threat, the atheistic fundamentalists are finding equally fertile soil for their equally frenetic messages. It’s all the fault of the believers, Muslims mainly of course, but Christians also. But don’t worry. In the God Delusion, we have a message as simplistic as in The Genesis Flood. This too will solve all of your problems. Peace and prosperity await you in this world, if not the next.
That’s another hallucination. This, when he had just said ‘unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously.’ Really?! Is that an example?
I have a piece in this series too. I think I wrote a little more carefully than Ruse did.
Udo Schuklenk and I have also written an article for this series. The 800-word limit is rather constricting, but we’ve managed to express a rather different view from Ruse’s.
Ruse reminds me of nothing more than the philosophers that manipulated the Vogons into destroying Earth to keep people from learning the answer to “Life, the Universe, everything”. My impression is he fears the common man would disregard philosophy without either religion enough fear of the possible supernatural realms to be “modest in [their] unbelief”. Sniping at atheists means people will continue to read his writings, and he gets to stay relevant since people love to hate the atheists.
Ah, you (plural) too! Very constricting – and I got only 650 (maybe you got extra because there are two of yiz). The very constriction made it kind of fun though.
“since people love to hate the atheists.”
Which is one reason all this piling on is so very unattractive.
“…religion OR enough fear…”, that should read.
And yes, it is so very horribly unattractive. And he shares the trait with Mooney that they point out their in-group status to show how they aren’t picking on atheists for being atheists (that would be bigotry). They just want to reform the movement, to take it back from the fringe. They’re the True Atheists.
So one of the things that those darned strident deep-rift-creating new atheists do is to call their opponents inflammatory, perjorative names, like “fundamentalist.” Bad new atheist! No treat!
Oh wait…what about “atheist fundamentalist”? That was something Ruse said. I guess that’s not inflammatory, then. My oops.
Since I’ve now read this term, “atheist fundamentalist” in a couple of places, I’d really like one of its users to define just what, exactly, that term is supposed to mean. I think there’s pretty general agreement that the term “religious fundamentalist” is commonly used to mean something like “someone who believes in something due to religious reasons in spite of pretty strong empirical evidence to the contrary.” Since one of the central tenets of “New” atheism seems to be that “empirical evidence trumps everything”, I find it hard to wrap my head around just what, exactly, qualifies one as an “atheist fundamentalist,” as opposed to just an ordinary, everyday outspoken (or book-writing) atheist.
Robert
I do wish Ruse would tell me what some of these fundamentals are for atheism, so that I can start believing in them. Otherwise, I’ll have to continue on lacking any sort of religious belief, which apparently makes me part of the problem.
In fairness, guys like Dawkins misrepresent themselves by redefining core terms (like “religion” to mean “Abrahamic religion”) in an idiosyncratic way. It’s more or less inevitable that critics are going to carry on with the misrepresentation. (Though the inevitable is not be the justified, of course.)
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Random fun fact: Michael Ruse once published in the philosophy grad journal that I’m now an editor for. I feel connected!
In fairness, guys like Dawkins misrepresent themselves by redefining core terms (like “religion” to mean “Abrahamic religion”) in an idiosyncratic way.
I can’t say I agree. They just use religion the same way 99% of people use religion. It’s hardly idiosyncracy — in writing books for general consumption, one writes for the general audience. And unless Ruse goes around hassling theists for making overly simplistic religious claims, the way he misrepresents Dawkins et al is clearly deliberate and malicious, with an obvious agenda. Pushing the blame to “guys like Dawkins” even in such a gentle way as you do is just playing into the game the accomodationists want.
“In fairness, guys like Dawkins…”
Paul: “I can’t say I agree. They just use religion the same way 99% of people use religion.”
Exactly! And this is one thing that really gets me annoyed. Someone, like Ruse, writes “In fairness” and then immediately misrepresents what “guys like Dawkins” actually do say.
I won’t say it is malicious but it happens so often that it does seem more than just plain careless.
I can see why Dawkins would make a technical term out of it for the sake of what he was after, and I can see why he would do it for the sake of his intended audience (which is evidently a Western one). But he himself is happy to admit that his usage of the word is for his purposes. IIRC, he says something like ‘we have reason to question whether or not Eastern religions are really religions at all’, but he doesn’t seem to be operating under any pretensions that this is actually a serious argument to that effect. It’s just something we’re supposed to go along with for the sake of argument.
If I’ve read him right, then it’s no surprise that unserious people have said “Aha Dawkins, you’re generalizing unfairly”. They’re not using his restricted definition, and while they are obliged to recognize his usage, they’re not obliged to take it up for themselves. There is nothing plausible to say about the usage of “religion” that might tempt us to independently restrict it apply it only to Abrahamic faiths: no specialized information that experts on the subject have (“the essence of religion is Abrahamic!”), no arguments about parsimony and relevance of usage (“we don’t leave anything important out when we use it this way, and besides we have this other term over here to talk about that other stuff”). At least not that I can see.
Eh? But surely he’s addressing a mostly Anglophone readership, isn’t he? And he does specify in the book what kind of god he’s talking about. Does anyone think of him as addressing Hinduism and Buddhism? Surely not.
Ophelia, he is, I agree, but that’s not the point. The point is, what would it be reasonable to criticize Dawkins on? It wouldn’t be reasonable to say that he is generalizing about all religions, but it would be reasonable to say that he’s not offered us any serious reason to think that a religion without god is not a religion. Correct me if I’ve misremembered, but as my recollection goes he just sort of throws the definition out there and asks people to work with it. A charitable reader would say, “Okay” for the sake of argument, but a reasonable critic can still say “Permissible conventional usage tells me reject your formulation because we haven’t got much reason to agree to it outside of your narrow purposes”.
The wrong step, the thing that more malicious or unreasonable critics say, is that Dawkins misrepresents religion or overgeneralizes. We’re allowed to define our terms however we like so long as we’re explicit about doing it. It is better to say, in fairness to a reasonable critic, that there is a sense in which Dawkins misrepresents himself by abandoning conventional usage, just to make clear what exactly he’s getting at and what he’s on about.
Actually, I think there’s plenty of reason to think that religion is not a unitary phenomenon (Frieder Otto Wolf agrees with me, I’m pleased to say), and to give a stipulative definition of the term “religion” for whatever narrower concept you want to focus on. As long as you’re consistent, and don’t equivocate on the meaning of your terminology to draw overly broad conclusions, I don’t see the great problem.
Frankly, the very diffuse (at best) nature of the concept ‘religion’ is what leads me to more-or-less-consistently avoid it in favor of ‘faith’ – which is where I’m convinced all the deeply problematic aspects of religion lie anyway. To date, no one has ever missed or mislaid my point when I speak on those terms – or at least, if they have done so, their missing the point has not turned on the ambiguities of the key term I use to talk about the problem under discussion!
There are a lot of terms that are used interchangeably to some confusion. Often they are used for rhetorical effect and then that use is taken forward in dialog and suddenly everyone is talking about something slightly different.
For instance “God” is used as a shorthand for “religion”, Hitchens was explicit about it with “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, Ophelia wasn’t “Does God Hate Women?”.
People also miss importance nuances, Dawkin’s TV series was called “The Root of All Evil?”, the question mark is often omitted and is REALLY important. On the other hand Dawkins often juxtaposes two concepts (“Catholic Church”, “most evil institution in the world”) for rhetorical effect and then people wonder why he says the Catholic Church is the most evil institution in the world.
I suppose the problem is that people write nice “pithy” rhetorical phrases that are easy to take the wrong way and run with.
People also miss the fact that Dawkins did not choose the title for that TV series, and did not much like the title.
Not even just that: Dawkins hated the title and tried to reject it.
Dawkins hated the title and tried to reject it.
I didn’t know that. What did he want to call it?
I am not sure he had any particular title in mind. He just did not like the idea that any single thing could be the root of all evil. I believe he managed to the the question mark added when it became clear the producers were going with “The Root of All Evil”.
This discussion reminds me of my undergrad Anthropology of Religion class the first two weeks were a guided attempt to define “religion”. The conclusion was that any operationally useful definition would include things that were obviously not and exlude things that obviously were religious. Also, that there are many competing and equally valid definitions of religion (and some invalid ones).
The conclusion the professor was leading us to was that you must define your terms, that talking about “religion” as a monolithic whole left you with practically nothing to talk about aside from “belief”. (Or left you with easily refuted arguments.)
Sadly, the excellent professor was replaced with a very bad one when first prof had to take an emergency leave of absence. The good prof also spent quite a bit of time on intellectual pedigrees and how various definitions and explanations for religion came about in the anthropological literature. That made for a few uncomfortable moments for the bad prof when a few of us traced his pedigree and figured out where some of his arguments were grounded.
Wow, that was long and tangential. Sorry about that.
And he especially didn’t like having that idea pinned to him, and boy was he right! I’ve seen lots of critics of ‘new’ atheists include that title among their reasons for tutting at Dawkins – including, to my sorrow, Julian.
No it’s interesting. Hi Mya!
Mya that wasn’t at all long! You need to have a five paragraph minimum before apologies. (Unless you’re Proust.)
Concepts, like religion, are not just blobs of information in our brains, they’re also tied to the uses that we want to make of them. There are different ways to use our concepts. Sometimes we use concepts in such a way that we want them to pick out basic stuff in everyday life: cars, apples, dogs, knives, tables. These concepts are rich in information, and also nice and tidy. We know the difference between an apple and its neighbors in the same genus (i.e., oranges), and we know the difference between a whole apple and its parts (i.e., the apple core). But not all concepts are so lucky. All other things equal, some have members that are dissimilar from their neighboring concepts (i.e., concept of cutlery with members fork and spoon), and some members of the same concept are hard to distinguish from each other (i.e., hybrid rose tea v. non-hybrid rose tea). But only all other things equal. It depends on our level of expertise, and on our background purposes.
This is a problem because religion is contentious. Clearly, Dawkins thinks it is inherently Goddish because that’s part of his project. Taken alone, that’s not a very good reason to adopt his formulation (though it is a reason to recognize that he has formulated things the way he has). Heterogeneity alone isn’t a good reason either (we still tolerate “cutlery”). Though it’s not a non-reason, since obviously we want to get the most bang for our buck with our concepts. But what seems most useful to me is to start out with the least contentious definitions in order to show interesting conclusions by way of an interesting argument. That’s a standard way of doing things in philosophy, because it makes it harder for critics get it wrong and for accusing you of begging the question and that sort of thing.
Well Ben I’ve never been sure what we’re talking about – do you have in mind some particular place where Dawkins defined religion in an idiosyncratic way? Because I don’t. I have in mind a place in TGD where he specified what kind of god he was talking about…and that’s all.
Ophelia, I do. In my remarks above I was going by memory alone, but now that I’ve rustled up a copy of TGD, here is the passage I had in mind:
We might quibble over whether or not he was “defining” when he did this (“formulating” is admittedly a better term) but the point is the weakness of his starting point is a weakness in the application of the argument, which can and has been and will be exploited by critics. If there is “something to be said” for the point — well spit it out, man! (I certainly need an argument concerning the importance of the differences, since on the face of it, I am skeptical. Sure, there may be the whole “no deities” thing, and that is certainly a difference between Confucianism and the Abrahamic religions. But what else is different? The archives of B&W news and articles have been a testament to the silliness and irrationality of the Eastern religions, too. For example, IIRC, the article by Frederick Crews that doubled as an introduction to his book “Follies of the Wise” was memorable for its unexpected blasting of Eastern faiths and new age woo, just as strongly as it went after the usual suspects.)
So the formulation only works at a technical level, for his purposes. That’s fine, and indeed it’s the sort of thing that rational critics should allow for if they’re sane and patient. (Evidently Bernard Shaw once attended a lecture on mathematics. The lecturer began, “Suppose that we have an odd number.” Shaw replied: “But what if it isn’t!”)
Still, a technical formulation expires when the arguer is done her argument. When all is said and done, we’re free to continue using the natural non-technical formulation of religion. And if she protests to this, we can say that we’re indulging her formulation just to go along with her point (which is all that was asked of us), not because we think it says all there is to say about the relevant features of the world.
If there is “something to be said” for the point — well spit it out, man!
In all fairness, did you miss that the aim of TGD was to point out the absurdity of the idea of an interventionist deity? Buddhism and Confucianism do not possess such, so at most they are tangential to the issue at hand and treated as such. TGD did not aim to give a treatise on the differences in ethical/moral philosophies, or to sort religions into types or classes.
You might as well complain that he doesn’t include Deism in his discussion about religion (and in fact, many theologists to) even though he was explicit that those are not fields of belief that are relevant to the case being made.
He also rules out pantheism, panentheism, and other that’s not explicitly the “superpowered all-knowing person” model of god.
Quite. The book is called the God delusion after all – not the religion delusion. I don’t think saying ‘in this book I’m talking about this particular branch of religion’ qualifies as defining religion in an idiosyncratic way. It’s just defining terms, for a particular purpose.
Benjamin, you still haven’t shown us what is idiosyncratic about Dawkins’ starting point. He’s taking a pretty generally understood idea of monotheism that is characteristic of Christianity, the idea of a God who acts, who takes an interest in his creation, intervenes from time to time, hears prayers, is concerned about aspects of human behaviour (in quite strange ways), etc. He’s clearly set aside Einsteinian Spinozism, and as Jenavir says pantheism and other varieties of what might be considered religious.
Because religion is so amorphous, it’s damnably difficult to pin it down, which makes religion difficult to criticise. That’s really the point of Dawkins’ refusal to read the theologians, much to Eagleton’s and Ruse’s consternation and embarrassment. But suppose that he had read this theologian or that: his critics would still say he hadn’t dealt with their particular belief in God.
Ruse might counter by saying that he takes scholarship seriously, so that Dawkins is an embarrassment to atheists, because he wants to know what religious people might mean by saying that God might need no cause; but why couldn’t the same thing apply to saying that the universe needs no cause? And isn’t it a way of saying that no more explanation is needed? And has Ruse actually pointed out what the religious mean by this? And bringing up Mary Midgeley’s mistake (about the selfish gene) doesn’t really do the trick when you want to say that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. What other metaphor did Ruse have in mind? That God is just a metaphor, and no one takes belief seriously a la Armstrong?
Is Dawkins a bit slapdash with the philosophy? Yes, he is sometimes, but then he wasn’t writing a philosophy text, and if he had written one, no one would have read it. But, at the same time, is Dawkins not right to be concerned about the degree of warrant, which amounts to a lack of warrant, that people have for religious beliefs which affect all of us? Dawkins isn’t really condescending in that he holds all religionists to be stupid or bad, but he does raise an important question: Does the widespread practice of believing things without adequate warrant constitute a problem for civil society and relations amongst nations? And when you hear the fatwas and the fatuous claims made by people like the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the answer seems to be yes.
Paul, I’ve been at pains to stress a number of times here that a technical formulation is fine for your own purposes, but not outside them. That makes good sense of his central point(s), and hence why your comment is off-base.
But we, with independent minds, are not under the jurisdiction of a person’s mere purposes when we make an independent assessment of the quality of the argument. We can take issue with the tactic of going after the activist God by embedding Him in the formulation of religion (in the context of his argument). Again, his formulation is fine for his purposes, and he does have good arguments once we accept those formulations for the sake of his argument. But he doesn’t, as I say, “spit out” our reasons for being inclined to believe the Eastern faiths as non-religions, which makes it vulnerable to attack once his argument is over. And there are reasons on the face of it to think that his undeniably unsubstantiated statement is at best itself too powerless to withstand criticism from within his own position, i.e., that of movement atheism, when we examine the suspiciously familiar sins of the Eastern religions.
Imagine that I am arguing to you that the best rock band ever is Porcupine Tree. I say to you, “Suppose that by ‘band’ I mean ‘progressive rock band’.” I am a well-known curmudgeon and music critic, so I add glibly that there’s no such thing as rock outside of progressive rock, for my purposes, and by the way there’s something to be said for the idea that all other music besides progressive rock is noisy drivel. Then with all that front-matter out of the way, I go on to argue meticulously that Porcupine Tree is the best rock band ever: i.e., they’re better that Rush because Geddy Lee’s voice is annoying, better than Pink Floyd because they’re irrelevant Cold War melancholy, etc. If you say to me, “You’re a fool, The Beatles are the best rock band ever”, then maybe I can accuse you of misunderstanding my premise or of ignorance of the niceties of genres or of being tone-deaf etc. But if you go on to say, “I don’t accept the premise that all rock is prog rock, and don’t think you’ve really argued for that, we just indulged you so that you could get to the point already”, then you’d be reasonable in doing so. (Especially if it turns out that the Beatles are, in fact, the best.)
Eric,
The idiosyncracy lies in the arbitrary exclusion of Confucianism and Buddhism from scrutiny. It’s not that I blame him for not being philosophical enough, though I do think it is reasonable to point out a weakness in his argument, something that perhaps he might shore up in future printings. (It’s hardly a devastating weakness, after all.)
Of course religion is the original “True scotsman” game so I don’t expect him (or anyone really) to respond to the ongoing theological narrative. And as for his arguments on Occidental religions, of course that’s all fair. Of course we ought to look at warrant and consequences of belief and so on, and he’s done a great service by encouraging it.