The file keeps expanding
Another entry (they’re coming in thick and fast these days) in the “Random hostile assertions about ‘New’ atheists” file. This one, I’m sorry to say, is from HE Baber, with whom I have had friendly exchanges, and whose blog I like, and who has a way of seeing things from an unexpected angle. But ‘New’ atheists are not among the things she sees from an unexpected angle.
Most people I know are atheists. But they’re atheists of the old kind who have no particular interest in proselytising because they do not believe that anything of importance hangs on whether or not people believe in God and because they recognise that theological claims are controversial. Unlike the New Atheists they don’t think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting.
But ‘the New Atheists’ don’t think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting. I challenge anyone to find ‘a New Atheist’ (by which I do not mean just some random anonymous commenter from Dawkins’s site five months ago) claiming to have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting. All the ‘New’ atheists I know are perfectly well aware that atheism has been around for a long time. As a matter of fact it’s often the Old Theists who claim that atheism is new-fangled – they’re the ones who are always telling us that all our ideas – equality, the value of the individual, rationality, secularism, democracy – are the product of Christianity. We’re the ones who say ‘oh come on, do you really think it’s only the believers who have ever been able to think of anything? Do you really think there were no secret atheists in the good old days when atheism was a capital crime?’
I just think it’s obviously false to say that ‘New’ atheists think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting. False and rather unpleasant – unpleasant because false. There’s an awful lot of this kind of thing around, as we know, and it really is quite annoying. It’s not good to single out groups for opprobrium; it’s not good to do that by saying things about such groups that are false. I think people ought to stop doing that. I think Comment is free: belief ought to stop encouraging them to do that.
I think that everyone is confusing a philosophical problem with a psychological or a human relations one:
there is no philosophical problem with the new atheists. Their position is lucid and clear and, in my opinion, correct. However, there is something about them which turns many people off, including myself. You probably wonder why any rational person would be turned off by someone who has a correct argument, and I’m sure it has something to do with the perversity of human nature. What I can assure you is that the more new atheists insist that they are right (and they are right, I admit it), the more people will be turned off by them. Don’t jump on me. There is way of being right and especially being always right that turns off lots of people off.
As an atheist, I agree that the particular question of whether or not there’s a “god” or gods is not particularly important. It might be intellectually interesting,* but I sure don’t much care to proselytize and make sure everyone agrees with me on that, I think very limited, point.
But I definitely think that “atheist” helps convey some other ideas about the role that god belief should have in our lives and society: that secular ethics are better than supernatural ethics, that we can understand the world best by not assuming it was made special for us, that we don’t need an immortal soul for life to have value, and just in general that the world is plenty cool on its own without having to appeal to the supernatural.
Now, I can accept that “atheist” comes with some preconceptions, and I’m willing put up with those for a few minutes while I better explain what I mean. And yes, “atheist” does put the emphasis on a narrow point that by itself isn’t all that interesting. But I assume most people understand the sorts of things people use “god” to explain, so when I claim “atheism” I don’t think it’s unreasonable that they’ll get that I’m “atheist” with respect to the type things that people usually appeal to “god” for.
Are there atheists around who are actually more concerned with the narrow theological question of the existence or non-existence of god? I don’t think anyone commenting here does, Dawkins and PZ Myers don’t, Hitchens doesn’t…
When people criticize the NA, why do they focus on their atheism in the strict and narrow sense? Does anyone (John Wilkins maybe?) disagree with proselytizing atheism while in the same breath expressing agreement with the NAs’ broader arguments in favor of secularism?
Maybe I don’t pay enough attention, but I don’t see it.
*I guess if theologians deserve any respect, shouldn’t atheologians deserve just as much?
Amos, you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to make such provocative statements – without elaboration – and say “don’t jump on me.”
Your argument seems to consist merely of:
“I hate the fact that you’re right [but you don’t specify why you hate it, amos] and I really don’t like having to acknowledge it. Please be quiet.”
If that’s the sum total of your argument, it’s not only weak, it’s obnoxious. It’s the precise equivalent of saying to gay people, “I recognize you have a right hold hands in public, but I don’t like it, and I really wish you wouldn’t.” Invalid.
And also – who are these “new atheists” who have a “way” of being always right? What’s that “way?” Are you accusing certain people of comporting themselves badly? If so, who, specifically? And what specifically? If not, are you stating that the mere empirical fact of their being right is enough for you to be justifiedly rubbed the wrong way? That’s not an argument, that’s an 8 year old’s complaint.
If there’s more to your argument, then you need to unpack it. You didn’t, so don’t affect wounded surprise that you got “jumped on.” You ought to know better than to think you don’t have to justify your arguments around these parts.
Josh: You don’t get the point. It’s not an argument. I never claimed that it was an argument. It’s the gut reaction of the inner 8 year old that so many of us have. I’m trying to explain why I feel that the new atheists rub so many people the wrong way. I stated above that it’s not a philosophical question, that I agree with the conclusions of the new atheists. You’re a smart guy, Josh. Haven’t you ever noticed that smart guys often rub dumb folks like me the wrong way? Maybe it’s envy on the part of us dumb folks. I’m not exactly sure what it is. In any case, I’m not asking the new atheists to be quiet, as you affirm. They have every right in the world to continue communicating their message in the same manner. I’ve said elsewhere that people come to atheism through different routes and maybe they don’t have much in common besides the fact of not believing in God. Most of the new atheists appear to be atheists because of a basic commitment to naturalism and science. Then there are atheists because of the argument from evil, for example, Jews who stopped believing in God after the Holocaust. I’m an atheist out of a basic skepticism about and hostility to organized religion which comes from early childhood. I feel more reflected in what Julian Baggini writes, which appears to spring from a deep general skepticism, than in what Dennett writes which comes from his naturalism. I hope that I’m managing to communicate something to you, but I fear that I’m not communicating anything, so I’ll sign off. By the way, don’t tell people “what they get to do” or “don’t get to do” if you want to convince them of anything. You may win points among your fans, but you’ll turn off the person whom you’re supposedly trying to convince. Good-night.
Amos: I’m trying to explain why I feel that the new atheists rub so many people the wrong way.
No, you’re not. You’re not trying to explain why, you’re stating a fact about how you feel.
Of course the New Atheists are going to rub people the wrong way. We’re saying deeply unpopular things, and we think we’re right… indeed we are right. There’s nothing so insufferable as someone who’s unpopular and right.
You at least have the self-awareness to know that your reaction is emotional, not principled. There’s nothing wrong in itself with emotion, but too many people try to create after-the-fact justifications for their emotional reactions.
I think you would do well to examine and explain at least to yourself why you feel that the New Atheists rub you the wrong way. All too often “the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
On the face of it, the response of (old) atheists and believers alike to the so-called ‘new’ atheists is surprising. Atheism has been around a long time, and nothing that the ‘new’ atheists are saying is particularly new. So what’s new?
I think the newness is quite simple. Most (old) atheists had a very comfortable relationship with the idea of belief. In fact, atheism took refuge in the shelter of belief. Roman Catholic atheists, Anglican atheists, and other ‘religious’ atheists were quite comfortable with their unbelief, because it was seen in relationship to a particular kind of negation of belief. ‘New’ atheism is different. It doesn’t shelter under particular beliefs. It is simple disbelief, without a sense of religious belonging.
In fact, atheists such as AC Grayling deplore the name, because it makes denial the principal characteristic of the unbeliever. He prefers the term ‘naturalist’, which simply dispenses with any reference to cultural or religious tradition, and promises something positive, a promise made good by Grayling in a series of books: What is Good?, The Choice of Hercules, Towards the Light, and Liberty in the Age of Terror.
Think of Feagletosh. He’s an atheist, but a Catholic atheist, and still looks to Catholic tradition for support. There are still shades of that (as I say) in Dawkins and Hitchens. In a sense, they’re Anglican atheists, and still remember the old liturgy and the King James Bible with affection. But, basically, they have left the shelter of religion altogether. And that makes them new and threatening.
It’s also what makes them look as though they’re proselytising, because there is no primary religious tradition with which they identify themselves. The ‘new’ atheists haven’t invented this. It’s just a fact about them, and people don’t know where to place them historically. They don’t have primary loyalties – except, perhaps, to humanity.
And HE Baber gets it wrong. She ends up with: “I would be very interested in hearing why the New Atheists and their followers believe, with such manifest conviction, in unbelief.” They don’t. But they can’t be identified with any particular tradition of belief, and that makes them difficult to classify. It makes even the ‘old’ atheists uneasy.
Josh — This may tangential to your main point, but I don’t understand the “invalidity” of saying, “I recognize you have a right” to engage in some behavior, “but I don’t like it, and I really wish you wouldn’t.” If someone were to try to prohibit the behavior, that could be different, but how/why is “wishing” (even “really” wishing) that someone refrain from doing something “invalid?” And what does whether they have a “right” to do it matter? (I think it goes even a bit further: It’s not clear to me why/how it would be “invalid” to advocate — which I take a stronger than “wishing” — that people refrain from behavior “I don’t like,” even if they have a right to do it.)
“Most people I know” are citizens. They just can’t be bothered to vote..
Amos: It’s puzzling that Dawkins or Myers (for example) put you off by their open confidence that the traditional central tenets of the big religions (as opposed to Eagletonian-Armstrongian empty waffle and evasion) are untrue. On that point, Dawkins or Myers are saying nothing new, and not writing in a new way. Moreover, they do not (as you appear to assert) claim to be ‘always right’.
As for the silly ‘new atheist’ label, let’s just quote the wonderful shrill strident Lucretius (ca. 50BCE):
amos
“What I can assure you is that the more new atheists insist that they are right (and they are right, I admit it), the more people will be turned off by them. Don’t jump on me.”
But that’s all too typical of the way enemies of ‘New’ atheists talk about ‘New’ atheists – it’s (at least) hyperbolic and tendentious. It’s all too like ‘when did you stop beating your child?’
‘New’ atheists don’t ‘insist that they are right’ – they don’t pound the table and say ‘I’m right! I’m right! I’m right!’ They offer arguments and ask questions. (Of course some, including me, also throw a lot of abuse along the way, at least once it becomes obvious that their opponents are going ‘LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU’ instead of replying. But we still don’t say ‘I’m right!’)
So your claim, like so many claims in this discussion, is unhelpful because it’s so entirely beside the point.
Are you saying that you and perhaps others are turned off by arguments that you take to be good arguments?
amos – I don’t think I have “fans,” and even if I did, I’m not trying to score points. You’re not an unintelligent guy, either. But making an emotional complaint – “I don’t like this” – and expecting the targets of that complaint to just say “Oh, OK” isn’t reasonable.
Especially since it makes people genuinely curious about why that emotional reaction is there (that’s why I asked you to unpack it). I’m sorry, but just flat-out stating, “the more you say you’re right, the more people won’t like you” is just plain pissy. I don’t know who these “new atheists” are who constantly insist they’re right (where? In what contexts? Are they barging in on family dinners? Or are they responding to accusations against them?).
Jeff Chamberlain – my response to amos addresses some of your concerns, I think. But just to be clear: I didn’t (and didn’t mean to) say having an emotional response was invalid. What’s invalid is –
a. plopping an emotional response out on the table and letting it sit there as if it were self-evidently true with no explanation
b. making sweeping statements about classes of people without giving detail or context, and basically saying, “therefore, harummph.”
c. strongly implying that, since one doesn’t like a thing, other people ought not do that thing. QED.
Like I said before, that’s an eight-year-old’s complaint. It’s pouting, not adult conversation. It’s emotionally manipulative rhetoric, an unfair tactic against people who really can expect to be engaged more substantively than that. Erase the words “new atheist” from your mind, and substitute “women,” “gays,” “racial minorities,” and test to see if you don’t recognize why the subjects might not want to let that kind of pouting pass without comment. Aside from being intellectually empty, it’s damned rude.
And just to be crystal clear: people get to have any emotions they want, and they get to wish for anything they want, whether others like that or not. What they cannot expect is to articulate those emotions or wishes in a passive-aggressive way, as accusations, as legitimate justifications for wanting interlocutors to pipe down, and then not be called to account for them in a public discussion like this one .
That’s not unreasonable. And if it sounds pissy, that’s because being accused of being the new atheist version of the class nerd who had the bullying coming for being such a smarty pants makes people feel justifiedly pissy.
Because this conversation tends to make my blood boil – obviously – I should say I know I can fall victim to emotional overreactions, too. It’s impossible for any of us to expunge emotion from the discussion; we should all try to make sure the emotion is informed by, and doesn’t crowd out, reasonable argumentation (myself included).
Amos brought up the various ways people can come to atheism: commitment to naturalism, inherent skepticism, etc. I don’t think one way of getting there is necessarily any better than another. I know plenty of smart people who got there because they’re innate skeptics, or because they were convinced by explicit philosophical argumentation, or some combination.
I do think there are more and less rigorous reasons for being an atheist. While people who got “mad at god” or who discovered the problem of theodicy, are still “right” about there not likely being a god, it’s not the firmest foundation. Many people started on the road to doubt from these squishier places (me included). It’s just that some don’t go any further. That’s OK, but I think it’s unfortunate. It was reassuring and satisfying to me, as I got older and better read, to know there were more rigorous foundations for my lack of belief, that it wasn’t just my own small, personal emotional conflicts. I have to think it would be reassuring to others, too.
I don’t think the so-called New Atheists have discovered anything new about atheism any more than I think that post-Stonewall LGBT-folk discovered anything new about sexuality.
That business about being turned off? When I hear that, I think about all the ancient concern-trolling about feminism and suffrage. (It will never fly because shrillness is a turnoff, and you’ve gotta stop shoving it down people’s throats.) All the concern-trolling about gay rights. (It will never fly because anger is a turnoff, and you’ve gotta stop shoving it down people’s throats.) Et cetera, ad nauseam. I’d be surprised to find any social movement that did not have somebody claiming that the movement was distasteful and a turnoff and generally doomed to failure because everybody hates an angry know-it-all. And yet, to my way of seeing, it’s evident that feminism, anti-racism, and gay rights are trucking right along — imperfectly, yes, but trucking.
Yeah. (Both Josh and Cam.)
It’s interesting – how the rage at ‘new’ atheism is (at least seems to be) expanding, and how unself-conscious people are about just flinging stupid baseless accusations around (I’m not thinking of amos here, by the way). People one would expect to know better.
I suspect what Amos is talking about is the perpetual concern with “tone” that is ultimately the drumbeat to which all the “I’m an atheist, but…” crew march. They talk about tone and manner and stridency and militancy and how off-putting Dawkins or whomever is without ever giving specific examples – or worse, they provide examples but distort and/or misrepresent them, such as when Mooney & Kirschenbaum talk about “Crackergate” without the context of the student government office impeachment, substantial and plausible university expulsion threats, and whacko Catholic death threats suffered by the college student whose case inspired Myers’ political statement. You would think the polite and generally genial Dawkins would get less of this concern-trolling over “tone” than Christopher Hitchens, who does in fact provide many examples of fiery, strident rudeness – but in fact even Eagleton, inventor of the embarrassing and stupid rhetorical portmanteau “Ditchkens,” talks more about Dawkins than Hitchens (because Dawkins has sold many more books).
At this point, I take it as empirically proved (as much as anything can be) that one or more of the following things are true of those who fret about the “tone” of the “New Atheists” – or, for that matter, those who call them “New Atheists” without any deliberate irony and without ever mentioning that it’s a bullshit term slapped on them by their opponents and not willingly coined or adopted or encouraged or embraced by any of the persons grouped under its label. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive:
[1] They are simply theists whose sensibilities are offended, even though they claim to be atheists or agnostics. These people are deep-down convinced that questioning religion is clearly bad and wrong, and must never be done, period. Thus, someone who does question the existence of God or the wisdom of faith straightforwardly and without apology, in book form no less, is clearly unconscionably rude by definition. (I have my suspicions that Mark Vernon belongs in this category, despite his protestations to the contrary. His “arguments” on the subject are too insanely bad to take seriously on their own terms. At best, he is an agnostic who desperately *wants* to believe, and is bitter that he cannot, and so is very emotional about those who still can.)
[2] They haven’t read much or anything actually written by any of the people whose “tone” they find so distressing, but have read much of what has been written about them by their critics and taken that at face value for no good reason – or for a very bad reason, to wit, “If lots and lots of people are calling Dawkins rude, he must be rude. No smoke without fire and all that.” As an alternate hypothesis to that rather shoddy reasoning, maybe there are just lots of theists who think anyone who questions religion is rude simply for doing so, and their voices dominate the discussion because there are more of them! (I’m looking at you, Julian Baggini. No, I haven’t let you off the hook for that nonsense yet, nor have you given me any reason to do so.)
[3] They “believe in belief” (a la Dan Dennett) for some ill-formed reason or in a very vague, unspecified emotional manner. This includes those who make half-arsed pseudo-rational arguments of the “everyone believes something as a matter of faith, including atheists/scientists/etc” variety, such as Feagletosh.
[4] They really, truly, deep down think that the common rabble who embrace religion are intellectually inferior and emotionally immature, and that this is a condition that is simply irreparable. This conviction, which is almost never admitted publicly and probably is not even embraced consciously, requires them to insist that everyone without exception play extra nice and not risk hurting the feelings of these poor souls. The “reasoning” which leads from the conviction of believers’ irreparable inferiority to the recommendation of kid gloves varies: The concern over tone (and associated concern trolling) may spring from pragmatic and strategic political reasoning, as in M/K’s Unscientific America thesis. Or it may be rooted in some misguided notion that not challenging people’s unfounded beliefs at all makes people hold to them less rigidly. If true at all, this is true only in a trivial and irrelevant sense: What we generally care about are the actions which follow from the beliefs, and those actions will follow from beliefs whether they are simply unquestioned or whether they are clung rigidly in the face of opposition – but opposition at least has some chance of changing beliefs. I take M/K to be embodying this second “reasoning” to some degree as well. I am persuaded that they have this deep-down conviction of believers’ irreparable immaturity/inferiority by (A) their pointed failure in UA to understand (or admit) that the choice between religion and science is forced by religion and not by science (or by any particular presentation of science, including its association with atheism), which indicates that they think religiosity of this sort is simply unchangeable, so its not worth bringing up even if it is the real cause of the problem; and (B) their failure to talk about improving public education in science and critical thinking, instead focusing on science communication, which I think indicates a conviction that we simply can’t create an American public more prepared to listen to and understand the messages of science – they’re too dumb.
Can anyone think of a “tone” concern troll who doesn’t, either openly or by the implication of what they say, fall under one or more of these four headings? Do we need another category?
Beautifully argued, as always, G. Nope, can’t think of another category.
Thanks also for calling out Baggini. I have a lot of time for him as a thinker, but that was, as you said, the sheerest nonsense. Beneath him, and surprising.
The part that stood out to me was:
“But they’re atheists of the old kind who have no particular interest in proselytising because they do not believe that anything of importance hangs on whether or not people believe in God…”
Really?! The “god” fellow I keep hearing about has definite opinions on everything from which country to invade, to who should be on the local school board, to what scientific research should be funded, to what foods are OK to eat, to what should be taught in schools (from reproductive health to evolution). It seems like pretty much every decision in life, public and private, “hangs on” whether or not people believe in a particular god or not.
I wonder where these old atheists live.
Let me clarify. I don’t believe that Dennett, Dawkins, et. al. or any of the “New Atheists” who write books and feature in the media believe that atheism is something new and interesting.
I suspect however that many of their readers do. In fact, part of their aim seems to be to persuade all those closeted atheists, who’ve been brought up in religious homes and live in cultures where religious practice is the norm, to come out of the closet by letting them know that there are lots of atheists around and always have been, and that some, including clergy, have intentionally kept them in the dark. For them not so much atheism but the idea that there are lots of atheists around, and always have been, and that lots of people they assumed were religious believers were not, is a novelty.
And please, as an Old Theist I don’t imagine for one minute that atheism is a new-fangled idea. Atheism has been the norm in in Academia for decades and currently I suspect most educated people even in the US are at most polite agnostics. Of course I know that Dennett, Dawkins, et. al know that atheism is nothing new. It’s the village atheists who rant in the comments section in the Guardian, imagining that they’re sniffed out theism in the most unlikely places who think they’re onto something revolutionary.
It’s hard to understand much of this from where I sit. I’ve spent my entire life, including childhood, in a world where atheism was the norm and where theists are closeted or on the defensive. Maybe somewhere there are places where religious belief and “New Atheists” provide support and liberation for atheists who feel alone and on the defensive. But I don’t live there.
H.E. Baber –
Those of us in the U.S. do live there. The experience in the United States is 180 degrees from what you experience in the UK. I realize it’s difficult for people in your position to believe, but please do. You cannot imagine how oppressive the religious culture in the US is. Until very recently (and still in many portions of this country) it’s considered an act of social aggression to even mention in passing that one doesn’t believe in God.
It’s so bad that I’ve been to dinner with academics from Ivy League schools who have slapped their hands over their mouths (with that expression of “oops, goodness, I shouldn’t have let that slip out”) after “losing their composure” and responding that they were atheists when asked by dining companions. This, after one other person mentioned her membership in the Unitarian church.
Yes, this is just one anecodote, but it is sadly representative.
My apologies, HE Baber. I made the incorrect assumption that you were British. I see that you live and teach in Southern California. That makes me even more curious about where and how you grew up. If it was in the US, I’d submit (politely) that you had a demographically unusual experience if non-religion was the norm, and believers were made to feel marginalized.
Josh: I’ll try to unpack my emotional response, as much as I can, ok?
1. As you yourself admit, most people aren’t entirely rational. I don’t claim to be either.
2. When bullshit artists like Eagleton and intellectual basketcases like Armstrong get better coverage in so-called quality media than do serious atheists, those serious atheists are not playing their cards right, in my opinion.
3. I’ve always dislike organized religion immensely and found it difficult to be around people who participate in organized religion. It matters little to me whether people believe in God or not. For example, I’ve lived with a woman for over 4 years and recently, I glanced at her Facebook page and her religion was “agnostic”. I said: I always thought that you were an atheist. No, I’m an agnostic, she replied. End of conversation. My discomfort with organized religion and with those who participate in it is similar to my discomfort with political parties, boy scout groups and organized sports.
4. I’ve always enjoyed immensely works such Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian” and Nietzsche “The Anti-Christ” so I don’t have any problem with books that attack religious belief. In fact, Nietzsche and Russell are two of my favorite authors.
5. To be honest, not all the new atheists turn me off. I have different responses to each author.
I like Ophelia a lot, not always her discourse, but the person whom I sense behind the discourse and with Ophelia we started out screaming at each other in the TPM blog. There is an openness to her, a willing to learn, an innocence, which I suspect that she is not entirely aware of. Ditto with Jeremy, although he probably detests me for saying that I like him. Dennett, I cannot stand, but that comes from reading his books on cognitive philosophy, long before he got into the new atheist business. When I saw that Dennett had written a book on atheism full of his “memes”, I said: “oh no, not him”. I’ve never read a word of Sam Harris. Dawkins bores me: I find him hard to read. I’ve always liked Hitchens, and I suspect that if his book had been the only new atheist work around, my position would be different. I prefer Hitchens as an immoralist to Hitchens as a moralist, but his general anarchism attracts and amuses me. I like PZ Myers, although I’ve only read his blog a couple of times. I like his face, just as I dislike Dennett’s face. See how irrational my reactions are. I also like the fact that he desecrated a cracker. That doesn’t turn me off at all. Well, I’ve unpacked myself. You can open fire, although I’m not sure that I’ll stick around to man the trenches. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to unpack myself.
I think most of you are missing the point. I spent nearly twenty years not “believing” in God, but believing in “God”. The new atheism is new because it is direct and to the point. It doesn’t temporise with fantasy. It just says right up front something that many religious people in the “West” and most liberal theologians have known for a long time: There is simply no reason to believe in God, so, if you want to be religious at all, you have to believe in “God”. That’s what all that “Dawkins and Hitchens, et al. don’t understand theology” is all about. Many theologians have been Feuerbachian for a long time; they just weren’t prepared to go that extra step. Neither was Feuerbach. You will search in vain for his statement that God does not exist. It’s shocking to be told that there’s nothing to hold onto after all, that all that painful biblical exegesis, and all that precious theologising really don’t amount to anything, not really, and why don’t you just admit it? Some of them can even go into anaphelactic shock over skewering a “kidnapped host”. When all you’ve really got is symbols, symbols take on a quite different significance. Belief in belief is very serious business, and, whether you like Dennett or not, Amos, he’s right. (All imho of course.)
H. E.
“I’ve spent my entire life, including childhood, in a world where atheism was the norm and where theists are closeted or on the defensive.”
But then you must be using ‘world’ in a rather circumscribed way, no? You must mean a very local world? Because that certainly doesn’t describe the larger world of the US as a whole.
I’m not really clear about why Academia is the subject at all (even if we bracket all the bible colleges and other denominational colleges and universities). I thought the subject was the wide world – the public realm in general.
I disagree Ms. Benson. There are exceptions, but I think generally that anyone who proposed a logical argument in good faith is strongly implying that they think they’re right, because of the argument they’re presenting.
Larry…well yes, obviously, but that (in ordinary conversation) doesn’t translate to “insist[ing] that they are right.” Insisting that one is right is (in ordinary conversation) obnoxious and aggressive. It’s a bit much to characterize proposing a logical arguemnt in good faith as obnoxious and aggressive.
It’s good to see H.E. Baber engaging with the arguments on this thread.
I found the original piece in The Guardian nonsensical, to be blunt, and said so over on my blog, but it makes a little bit more sense now that it has been qualified in the course of this discussion. It would have been nice if the original piece had made clear that it was not attacking the (supposed) irrational certainty and aggression of the people who are usually called “New Atheists” (such as Dennett) but that of some of their fans. I do agree that such people exist: we have words for them, such as “knee-jerk atheists”: people who will take what they imagine to be the atheist stance on any possible issue and will never be civil or thoughtful, even when dealing with the most liberal (and possibly non-literal) religionists.
For example, when Yoko Ono sued the Expelled people over what I believed to be a very fair use of a small snippet of the John Lennon song “Imagine”, these people cheered for Ono by reflex – since she was on their “side” – rather than stopping to ask whether this might be a case where intellectual property rights were being pushed too far to the detriment of free speech. They were failing to see the larger picture, and were cheering for Yoko Ono much as one might cheer for a football team.
I blogged at length, setting out why I thought that the Expelled people should win in court, much as I disliked their general position as opponents of good science and purveyors of clear falsehoods about an academic conspiracy to silence dissent. As it later turned out, the makers of Expelled won the case – using arguments very similar to those that I’d suggested (not that I claim they got them from me!).
So, yes, we do have knee-jerk atheists who are far less nuanced and thoughtful than Dennett, Dawkins, etc., themselves. But that is inevitable. What movement doesn’t attract a lot of people who adopt a relatively crude version of its ideas? It’s very unfair to write in a way that perpetuates the myth that Dennett, Dawkins, etc., themselves are unnuanced and dogmatic. Any fair reading of their work shows the opposite. If anything, there is now some urgency in dispelling that myth, which is not only unfair but also making it more difficult for the individuals concerned to get a decent hearing, i.e. they have been demonised with some success.
I do belief that religion should be challenged publicly, and I’m frankly amazed at the suggestion that nothing turns on the question of whether the epistemic content of the various religions is actually correct. Much, very much, turns on it. The Catholic Church and other religious organisations claim to be in a position to speak with great epistemic and moral authority. This enables them to pronounce in public on all sorts of issues, including abortion rights, censorship, gay rights, stem-cell research, IVF, and on and on. I can think of no more important issue for public consideration than whether or not these organisations really do possess the epistemic and moral authority that they claim – and which politicians and journalists are all too ready to assume they actually have.
For this and similar reasons, I’ve become vocal about the issues in the public sphere, including co-editing the forthcoming book 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (which H.E. Baber may be interested in reading when it is published soon from Wiley-Blackwell).
By the way, I live in Australia, where most of my friends are writers, artists, academics, and the like. In my own social milieu, most people are atheists. It doesn’t follow that the churches lack political influence here, or that they receive no deference from the media and politicians. In fact, they receive much deference and exert great political influence. The question is whether that deference and influence can be justified if the churches do not really speak for a God. We need a debate here, as elsewhere, about just how much epistemic and moral authority these organisations should be accorded.
Although I don’t encounted much day-to-day religiosity in my current social world, I have encountered plenty of it in my life. Don’t assume it’s not there because it’s not found much among the ranks of university academics (for example). In any event, even in academe there has been a taboo, here in Australia, against strong criticism of religion or the churches.
I didn’t see this as a student in the 1970s, but during the 1980s and until very recently, with Dawkins, etc., breaking the ice, it became unacceptable to criticise religion, certainly in any way beyond the most respectful and genteel. Of course, it was still possible to write articles arguing for atheism in professional journals devoted to philosophy of religion, but beyond that the taboo became very strong.
I may be wrong about this, but I see the taboo that developed in the 1980s as part of that decade’s obsession with identity politics. The religious of various kinds became groups who had to be treated with total respect, or so it was thought, much like (in my circles) gays and people of colour. However, if that was the justification for shutting up about religion, it was a very poor analogy. In Western societies, the religious are not – like gays or Australian Aborigines – a group that needs special protection. On the contrary, it is often the rest of us who need protection when our freedoms are threatened by legal restrictions enacted by governments that defer to the religious lobby.
In all, Dawkins, Dennett, and others who get labeled as “New Atheists” have performed a public service by opening up a public debate about the epistemic content of religion. I continue to think that much of the reaction to this – much of the distaste, bemusement, whatever – is ill-founded and even nonsensical. It displays a failure to grasp the real-world problem of religion’s persistence and its ongoing power and influence, even in supposedly secular societies.
amos –
That’s nice. Thanks.
I’m certainly aware of my willingness to learn! It’s one of my favorite activities. But as for innocence – hey – I’m a hardened ol’ battle-axe. Yes I am too so.
Jeremy won’t mind that you like him. He’s irritatingly likable. He had undergraduates crawling all over him at CFI a couple of years ago. They couldn’t stand me.
OB, of course I’m using “world” to mean my local world and I mentioned Academia in response to Josh who brought up a dinner conversation with some “Ivy League academics.”
It would however be nice to get some empirical data about what percentage of people in the wide world, even here in the US, are the kind of naive religious bigots that Christians are quite often portrayed as being.
Now let’s have some fun, be elitist and talk dirty. Let’s consider the top socio-economic quintile of the US population: people with degrees from elite colleges or graduate degrees, academics, journalists, lawyers–you know who we mean. What percentage of them are fundamentalists–or religious believers of any kind? Do check out Stuff White People Like at http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like. See especially #2: Religions their parents don’t belong to. Theirs is the local world I’m describing, the world in which you and I live. It isn’t a tiny, anomalous byway–it isn’t just academia. It’s the elite, which wields power and sets fashion.
So I expect that you’re primarily interested in enlightening the masses, that other 80%. But no worry, elite fashions are trickling down. Even Walmart now sells those funny-looking lightbulbs and other eco-friendly products, and atheism will no doubt trickle down as well. Now if money and education would trickle down we might be in business.
Spot on, Russell.
H.E. (how do you like to be addressed, by the way?) – I admit my anecdote about the Ivy Leaguers with the vapors sounds incredible, and it’s probably not representative of the academic elite. To me, the point is that unearned deference toward religion is so strong in the US, that it can reach even that dinner conversation.
You’re right, I think most of us are more concerned about the outsized influence of the average believer. But the “elite,” as it were, really need to stop this “I don’t believe it’s a problem because, well, in my circles.. . ” I’m not referring to you, by the way, but to a general attitude. It really is that bad, and it really is silly (and irresponsible) for people who ought to know better not to recognize it.
By the way, I’m really looking forward to picking up The Multicultural Mystique . The description alone was enough to make me clap. And anyone who tells Caroline Kennedy to eat shit over her Mommyisms has to be top drawer!
Oops, I crossed with Russell. Good stuff.
“they have been demonised with some success.”
Exactly (and come to think of it, that applies to me, too), and the demonization is escalating; I find it worrying. Andrew Brown seems to be developing a cottage industry in it all by himself.
H. E. what’s the elite v masses stuff got to do with anything? A few years ago you were talking darkly about ‘flyover country’ – is this more of that? Is it some oblique accusation of – what – snobbery? What’s the idea – I should dispute only ideas belonging to the top 20%? Anyway, how do you know what percentage of the elite is atheist? Is this just more seat of the pants statistics?
Yes, religious belief – especially fundamentalist belief – is inversely proportional to educational achievement, and education itself is closely tied to money and class in the U.S. (as elsewhere, although the link is stronger here than in most of the first world). However, in democracies, the religious attitudes of the polity matter a great deal – even if they matter primarily because candidates for political office (who disproportionately come from the upper socioeconomic classes) pander to them shamelessly. Which is only one of many reasons which make me dubious about H.E. Baber’s presumably tongue-in-cheek notion of trickle-down atheism, mentioned above.
So even if there is some significant empirical truth to claims that atheism – or de facto religious indifference accompanied by pro forma religious participation – is prevalent among any given democratic society’s socioeconomic elite, that does not in any way make religious belief and the critique thereof less important. After all, critical thinking skills and science literacy and the habit and inclination to think and learn for oneself instead of accepting received opinion – presumably the products of education most responsible for that inverse relationship between education and religiosity – are surely worth promoting and spreading as widely as possible for their own sake and for the good of society. And that’s exactly what I see Dennett and Dawkins and Myers and Hitchens and Harris – and yes, our own dear Ophelia Benson – as doing through forthright criticism of faith as a way of (not) knowing things about the world.
Of course, it is never popular to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But there is something especially treacherous about someone who can see perfectly well that the emperor is buck naked but who nevertheless chooses to express horror and revulsion that someone would dare come right out and say so: “I know he’s naked, but how rude and crude of you to say so! In public! To write whole books about it, no less! For shame!” I don’t call this behavior treacherous simply because the accusations of rudeness and crudity – always accompanied by direct or implied encouragement to shut the hell up about the naked emperor already – are backed with nothing more than ugly rhetorical slights and the kind of shoddy pseudo-reasoning I parsed out above. I am also very, very suspicious of the motives of those who actively and repeatedly promote such wrong-headed and ill-supported drivel. I suspect that, at some level (perhaps not conscious), they see all too well that spreading education in general – especially critical thinking and science literacy and dissatisfaction with received truths – is exactly the last thing that socioeconomic elites with a vested interest in their own status want. If Marx was ever right about anything, he was right that religion is the opiate of the masses.
Thus, I can’t help but see the faitheists (Coyne’s choice of a group name for the “I’m an atheist but… shut up!” crowd, though I rather liked “placatheists”) as playing a duplicitous and ultimately self-serving game. They pretend to stand on principle: I don’t cotton to the religion thing myself, but I will defend the common folks’ right to have their religion, by damn! That would be principled, if anyone were trying to take away that right. But no one is trying to take anyone’s freedom of religion, some of us are just trying to lead an open and honest discussion about the price tag that religious beliefs often come with: rejection of facts based on fantasies, widespread oppression of women, claims of moral authority without foundation and consequent widespread moral idiocy (and accompanying social policy disasters such as abstinence only sex education and opposition to condoms in Africa and…). For those who are openly non-religious to repeatedly oppose clear, open, straightforward discussion of the costs of religion seems to imply that they at some level see themselves as benefiting from other people’s religiosity.
To extend Marx’s metaphor, if religion is the opiate of the masses, the faitheists aren’t pushers, per se. They’re more like tobacco lobbyists: They keep claiming against all the evidence that religion is a completely harmless recreational drug with no real deleterious side effects – religion just makes some people happy, and everyone has a right to their happiness. Atheists are portrayed as soulless killjoys for insisting on pointing out the drug has no real beneficial effects and has many, many dangerous side effects, however good it may make (some) users feel.
Recall sociologist Peter Berger’s mot, OB: “If the Indians are the most religious nation on earth and the Swedes are the least religious then the US is a nation of Indians ruled by the Swedes.” All the charts and graphs that got trotted out during the last presidential campaign showed that educational attainment goes inversely to political conservatism and religious participation. I’d be curious how many religious believers you count in your social circle, if any, and in particular how many fundamentalists.
As far as stats, I’ve done anonymous surveys of students in my required logic class–a fair cross-section of freshmen–and typically about 70% claim to believe in God, the rest being equally divided between atheists and agnostics. This is a selective but not elite Catholic college. This 70% is the same figure I recall reading as the percentage of people who said they believed in God on an internet survey–which would reflect the 50% or so of the population that has convenient internet access, so this isn’t just a small elite. Moreover in class discussion I note that none of the students have any interest in proselytizing or promoting conservative social agendas and, when pressed, the majority say that God is “an idea” that is “true for some people but not others”–and affirm that that’s just fine.
I am not “demonizing” the New Atheists and neither is Andrew Brown. I am just suggesting that the picture of a society dominated by bigoted fundamentalists who oppressed atheists and forced them into the closet until the New Atheists bravely came to their rescue is seriously misleading.
Atheism obviously isn’t new, but something else is.
‘New atheism’ seems to be a fairly small cultural phenomenon, existing primarily in parts of the media and academia, which is largely a response to the changed dynamic between Christianity and Islam in Western countries over the last decade or two.
The more assertive politicised Islam that followed the Rushdie fatwa and espeically 9/11 was met by mainstream political indulgence (at least, in the UK) and then by a more assertive Christianity. Politicians lauded the ‘multi-faith society’ and promoted faith-based policy initiaitives.
All of which left people of no faith out in the cold. So some of them spoke up for the ideas that religion shouldn’t get special treatment in politics, that most ‘religious hatred’ is inspired by rival religions against each other, that people with ‘faith’ aren’t thereby more virtuous or insightful than those without, and indeed that this whole god idea is deeply suspect.
The reaction to that, of course, was righteous indignation at these strident, shrill, aggressive, intolerant, arrogant, dogmatic atheists for daring to disagree without pulling their punches.
There wasn’t a ‘new atheism’. There was a new need for atheism, and for the humanist values and secular politics that often go with it.
Well, some people have expressed some interest in the topic, so I’ll put in my two cents worth as I have an experience that is an amalgam of:
1) southern U.S., knee-jerk reactionary fundamentalist evangelical white Christian Republicans; and
2) the evolutionary biology sections of the Ivory Tower.
(I grew up in the former and was trained in latter).
For me, it goes without saying that pervasive religious bigotry (usually of the discreet/”polite” kind) is the norm in most of the U.S. south. People might not attack those with dissenting religious views openly, but rest-assured, they think you’ll go to hell and, if they are nice people they’re likely praying for you. Religion where I grew up is so deeply ingrained that many people don’t even recognize it as a personal decision any more than obeying the laws of gravity are a decision. These people believe the following things equally: 2+2 = 4, Hitler was evil, and if you aren’t a Christian, you’re going to hell. It is rather shocking to me in retrospect how common the assumption that Catholics are going to hell is by a large segment of those fundies (something I used to believe). Of course they believe the Mormons are going to hell, that was never in doubt.
But ultimately, if you ever get a religious topic going with the types of people I grew up with, at their most inclusive, they will often offer the following: well at least those OTHER religions have a god, which is more than atheists can say. They’re still going to hell, but at least they’re trying.
I have of course painted with a broad brush which has been particularly colored by my fiercely religious upbringing. Many (in fact, most I’d argue) fundies are quite civil in actual verbal engagement. The real problem is the complete lack of any engagement with ideas contradictory to their beliefs, and a concomitant loss of empathy towards people who promulgate such ideas. Pretty much, if you aren’t saved, you’re lost and they’d love it if you’d switch sides. If you don’t switch, then your perspective isn’t worthwhile in terms of religion. It is remarkably unmovable.
As you can probably tell, I eventually sloughed off that belief system, though far later than is fashionable to admit: when I was 22 I was still a fundie. But upon entering academia (in evolutionary biology, no less) I found the situation of the faithful to be not much different. Of course, the faithful were much rarer and those that were there were much more “politically correct” (both in terms of being civil and in terms of being averse to discussing any real disagreements), but they were no less hidebound than their country cousins.
What is remarkable is how constrained fellow atheists are in such an academic environment. Sure, in academia, few criticize atheism, obviously, so it is a comforting environment in that sense. But the bending over backwards to avoid even discussing the logical implications of faith was stifling. It is as if discussing the mere possibility that somebody in the room might adhere to a faith that was wrong was morally equivalent to uttering the n-word as an intentional pejorative. And among those “moderate” religious people, they were very happy to admit that other religions might be “just as valid” or that “atheism is valid too”, but discussion of any area of disagreement was explicitly forbidden, especially when that dissent came from a godless person. And that taboo is frequently reinforced through cooperation of atheists.
For some reason, criticism of the religious perspective is seen as almost as bad as criticizing someone’s race. Yet, the religious people who mention attending institutions that openly proselytize seldom (and in my experience, NEVER) get censured as strongly as somebody who happens to comment they liked Dawkins’ book (I’ve seen this happen COUNTLESS times). This is despite the fact that weekly sermons are both more offensive and less defensible than what Dawkins wrote. (The godless are wicked, not just wrong, and will burn in hell for eternity, just as a warm up.)
Of course, when a group of non-theist academics have all privately confirmed their compatible beliefs and have ensured that they won’t offend the delicate sensibilities of any religious eavesdropper, they might let loose with a few milquetoast statements of the obvious with regard to religion: they are arbitrary, unverifiable, internally inconsistent, mutually exclusive with competing religions, etc. But what strikes me as odd is that these obvious conclusions are seen by many sincere atheist academics as skirting the boundaries of bigotry. Of course, those people who openly say as much when the religious are around are assumed to be boorish at best and bigots at worst. (And this despite the supposed “fact” that academia values discussion of all ideas as long as valid arguments can be made.)
The real irony here is that, while it is perfectly reasonable for billions of adherents to sit in on weekly sermons proclaiming that those who don’t accept their version of god will be tortured for eternity while it is uncouth for atheists to blandly assert the obvious about the foundations of faith via venues with far less reach. If the intention was to encourage a more thoughtful discourse that respected their potential audience, then the selective criticism against atheists is misplaced: it should instead be directed against those who feed the billions their hateful and unverifiable dogmas each week. To do otherwise seems to achieve the opposite of the intended effect.
It’s a bit much to characterize proposing a logical arguemnt in good faith as obnoxious and aggressive.
Indeed. But this point forms a substantial part of the critique against the New Atheists, and depends precisely on the observations that we (I count myself among the New Atheists, albeit an extremely minor and trivial contributor) actually believe the conclusions of their arguments, which I think we do.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I wanted to clarify because I felt your initial comment could be read as saying that we’re not convinced of any particular conclusion, that the New Atheists are examining the question from a fundamentally unconvinced position, in the same sense that scientists examining a novel scientific theory might explore alternatives without yet being convinced either way. We’re not convinced with certainty, but we are convinced
I’ve written about this topic numerous times, with examples and quotations. Time and again I’ve seen various critics of the New Atheist assert we are obnoxious and aggressive; upon examination, it has always been not because of the obnoxious quality of our discourse, but rather because we are not unconvinced agnostics.
And fundamentally too, I’m arguing that’s what’s bothering Amos: That the New Atheists really are convinced about a particular position: we’re not just raising the question, we’re proposing an answer, an answer we sincerely and explicitly believe to be true.
Eric MacDonald:
But who’s doing that? This claim requires quotations and evidence to be taken seriously.
Dawkins is clear and explicit in The God Delusion about precisely what sort of religion he’s criticizing. Even when the New Atheists criticize religious moderates, it’s not on the basis that they’re the same as fundamentalists, but because they shield fundamentalists, extremists, zealots and horrible people from criticism. For example, Sam Harris asserts:
They may think so, but is it true: the New Atheists do not believe so. Rather, it’s the consistent position that secular, Enlightenment ethical philosophy has been a humanizing force on religion. The actual empirical justification of the truth of this position at least needs to be made: on my examination, I find the evidence thin indeed.
Scripturally, this position is virtually insupportable, at least regarding the Abrahamic religions. Trying to shoehorn humanistic values into any of the Abrahamic scriptures requires offenses against reason and common sense that would shame the Inner Party of Oceana.
The actual empirical justification of the truth of Armstrong’s position at least needs to be made: on my examination, I find the evidence thin indeed.
I’m not so sure that H. E. is not “demonizing” the putative new atheists – for the reason that Russell indicated –
“It would have been nice if the original piece had made clear that it was not attacking the (supposed) irrational certainty and aggression of the people who are usually called “New Atheists” (such as Dennett) but that of some of their fans.”
The (pejorative) phrase ‘the New Atheists’ is widely understood to mean the four usual suspects and perhaps their fans. It is not widely understood to mean their fans but not them. So if you write an article about how stupid and deluded ‘the New Atheists’ are and you mean only the latter group – you need to spell that out. H. E. didn’t. I (for one) thought she was indeed talking about ‘the New Atheists’ as commonly understood – because I was given no reason to think otherwise.
I really should proofread my comments more carefully, my apologies.
Note that asserting that religious moderates provide “illegitimate cover for benighted fundamentalism” is most definitely not lumping them together; to imply the contrary is a fallacy.
And Andrew Sullivan’s blog (a Patrick Appel post) addresses this general issue:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/dissent-of-the-day-4.html
J.J.E. and Larry, don’t mix Eric up with the faitheists. See his letter to the archbish of Canterbury on the front page. (Hint: it’s not a love note.)
‘There are theistic “moderates” aplenty in the United States who bear severe antipathy toward nonbelievers’
And apparently H. E. herself is one such, unless the unbelievers are silent about their unbelief. If I understand her correctly, unbelief is okay if it’s in the background but not okay if it’s explicit.
Yeah…the tragic reality there is that (as far as I can tell) there is little reason to think atheism ever will have that kind of welcoming warmth. Religion offers some things that no substitute can really offer. It’s perfectly possible, and for some even easy, and for some even preferable, to get along without those things – but I strongly doubt that it’s possible for everyone.
Still – I shouldn’t go overboard with the pessimism – I think there are some pretty close substitutes. Between music festivals and Médecins Sans Frontières perhaps we can manage the swap.
@OB: I read Eric’s eloquent and moving letter. It is precisely the sort of meddling that Eric describes that the religious shouldn’t be allowed to perpetuate. And it is tragic that so many people must suffer such indignity in so many contexts. And how does one go about addressing such problems? Through critiquing the under-questioned authority that religion is accorded, even if it makes its followers uncomfortable. Or maybe, ESPECIALLY if it makes its followers uncomfortable, and therefore more likely to question such beliefs. Which is why the following confuses me:
In a subsequent post Eric replies at length, and he clears up quite a bit, but his empathy for the religious who appear to be caught in the crossfire of the culture war seems a bit overly generous. After all, it is only for religion that such concerns are expressed. Why don’t we similarly privilege partisans when we make policy arguments contrary to their party? After all, many people opposing a specific policy argument can be said to do so on grounds similar to religious adherence, especially if they are indoctrinated into a particular party at a young age. (Again I speak from experience. However, my Republican history is a story for another time. But suffice it to say that I accepted a lot of dogma, both political as well as religious.)
And, since it isn’t just fundamentalism that causes real human suffering, how do we constructively criticize it WITHOUT offending the religious? Most Americans at least (I can’t speak for the British) don’t think of Catholics as fundamentalist, but their church (and a large proportion of their followers) supports the prohibition against condoms. And there is a litany of grievances that religion perpetuates against humanity that I need not go over again. And the Catholic League can mobilize even kindly old grannies into frothy foamy irrational attacks on people who dare question the dogma of the “moderate” Catholic Church.
We could do what Eric does and write very well considered, detailed, polite, and passionate criticisms of every single bad action of religion. And in fact, I agree that that is part of the answer. However, a more comprehensive solution is to question the authority of religion to make prescriptions at all, and Eric seems to agree here. It is time to question the very basic premise of religion as a constructive contributor. Questioning the very foundations of an endeavor is not fundamentally a polite thing to do, but nor is it uncivil to religious people. If they choose to associate themselves with something that to them is very humane that they call “Christianity” or “Islam” or whatever, it is their responsibility to make it abundantly clear that they don’t buy into the tenets of other “Christianities” or “Islams”. By and large, religious people at least passively (if not outright actively) support the positions of their churches through their voting, donations, action, and inaction. It is a very distinct minority that actually protests against their church.
In spirit, up to this point, it looks as if Eric and I are very much in agreement. But then he adds:
Ultimately, it is the person’s choice to identify as religious. If they feel their “humane” position is obscured by the faith they claim to be part of, it is their responsibility to distance themselves from it. I think it is actually quite commendable that Eric feels empathy for anticipating that his viewpoint would cause the religious stress. In acknowledging and even privileging that empathy, he extends to his opponents what they do not extend to us. In fact, I feel the same empathy, especially since some of my family that I actually still respect remain religious. But I ask, is it his or my obligation to alter our approach because we fear that challenging the premises upon which religion is dependent will cause its adherents stress? Did Sweden or the Netherlands suffer a great psychological shock during the period when they lost religion? If not, is the empathy misplaced? If so, is the cost worth the reward of a secular society?
One thing that strikes me in these debates is the use of compartmentalization to derail an argument. Statements like “that’s not science, that’s philosophy or theology – or that’s not religion, that’s science”.
I am coming more and more to the conclusion that an argument is an argument – not a scientific argument or a philosophical argument or a theological argument. Given Dennett’s comment on the series of talks at the Cambridge Darwin fest and Philip Clayton’s response, it appears there is not much space left for using god as an explanation for any set of observations.
Michael, that’s what both Russell Blackford and Tom Clark have been saying with steady (and welcome) persistence throughout this dispute.
Science is not discontinuous with philosophy.
OK, Ophelia, one question: what do you mean by “demonizing”? There’s a difference between saying that someone’s claims are false or that their behavior is irritating and demonizing them, as I understand it. I suggested that New Atheists and perhaps even more so their followers were irritating, in the way that people who engage in psychobabble or expound conspiracy theories are irritating.
I don’t have the slightest antipathy to non-believers. One of my kids is a committed atheist and shows up regularly to debate the religious proselytizers who set up shop on Library Walk at his university. I’m his theological consultant: I supply him with the standard rebuttals for theistic arguments.
I don’t think, and never have said anywhere, that I think religion deserves some special respect or that there’s anything wrong about explicitly criticizing religious belief or in fact ridiculing it. Hume did a very good job of that–sharp and funny. Bravo Hume! But when 250 years later the gazillienth commenter on CIF, who is neither sharp, funny nor original, recycles the stock objections to theism tricked out with the usual cliches about flying spaghetti monsters, and it is clear that he imagines he’s sharp, original and daring–I get irritated.
When did I ever suggest that “unbelief is okay if it’s in the background but not okay if it’s explicit?” If I thought unbelief, and the interesting anti-theistic arguments, shouldn’t be made explicit I couldn’t do my job. When I do phil of religion issues in classes I give both the theistic and anti-theistic arguments, both in the strongest forms available, with objections and responses, and note that as with other metaphysical questions there are smart, informed people on both sides–it’s up for grabs. This isn’t just me: this is standard procedure in philosophy classes, including those at religiously affiliated colleges like mine, and that’s what philosophy professors do–whether they’re atheists or theists. If you want confirmation, google “philosophy of religion syllabus”
Absolutely, Michael! An argument is a claim supported by evidence and reasoning. Parsing arguments into different categories – “That’s not a scientific question, it’s philosophical.” – is a move intended to create spaces in which different claims can be evaluated by different standards of evidence and reasoning with no legitimate justification for doing so. If the evidence is weaker and the reasoning more tenuous and hypothetical – as is often the case with regard to those questions we label “philosophical” – then we are simply obligated to embrace the truth of the conclusion in a more tentative fashion and keep looking for better evidence and stronger reasoning. Since theological claims typically have absolutely no evidence and thinly veiled pseudo-reasoning at best in support of them, it is absolutely necessary for those who wish to advance such claims first to persuade their audience to lower their standards of evidence and reasoning.
Bertrand Russell had something typically wise to say about the division between science and philosophy which bears referencing here (starting with the third paragraph).
H. E.,
Good question – I usually avoid the word ‘demonize’ and its cognates, precisely because I think it (like ‘bash’ and its cognates) is used to frame disagreement or criticism as automatically wicked. I used it to echo Russell’s use – because in the case of the torrent of attacks on ‘new’ atheists I think ‘demonization’ fits – I think the critics are (remarkably uniformly) wildly exaggerating, and often inventing, the faults of the putative ‘new’ atheists in order to demonize and bash them. That’s what I mean by it. I certainly agree with you about the difference. But I don’t entirely agree with you about what you wrote.
“I suggested that New Atheists and perhaps even more so their followers were irritating”
But you didn’t – because you didn’t say “even more so their followers” – you just said “the New Atheists.” Maybe you meant to say something different, but you didn’t in fact say it, and that’s not my fault!
Okay…you’ve never said there’s anything wrong with ridiculing religion. I apologize then. But – you did tell me you hated my – was it religion-bashing? I don’t remember, but it was that general idea. Maybe you meant mine in particular, because it’s bad, while I got the impression that it was because it’s…bashing or whatever it was. That would explain the confusion! If that’s it I beg your pardon and I’ll just withdraw the claim.
But. I have to say, your tone in the CisF piece does seem hostile to explicit atheism as such.
H.E. Baber:
Well, I have personal experience to draw from. But there are polls too, so I won’t burden you with my personal anecdotes. The questions aren’t very specific and some polls are internet polls which are all but useless, but you get the general idea. American Christians, in large numbers believe in the literal existence of hell. 50% of Americans will discriminate against an atheist at the polls, surpassing even Muslims, despite the bad press of 9/11. 50% of Americans view atheists unfavorably, surpassing Scientology at only 30%. So, not only are Americans bigoted with regard to religion (including Islam and Scientology) they reserve special levels of disdain for the godless.
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As to your frustration of “clever” commenters using the FSM, you are right to be suspicious. But on the other hand, maybe you really simply have no idea of what it is really like to live in a place where you are viewed less favorably than any other large demographic group. Perhaps you’ve never had family, friends call the godless “evil” purely on the basis of their lack of faith. Perhaps you’ve never felt the same sentiment yourself, much to your current embarrassment. But that is very much part of the U.S. culture, as well as many other cultures as well. And it is a real problem.
A bit of follow-up –
H. E. you said
“I am just suggesting that the picture of a society dominated by bigoted fundamentalists who oppressed atheists and forced them into the closet until the New Atheists bravely came to their rescue is seriously misleading.”
Is it? How? All you’ve offered us so far is the fact that that’s not your experience. But you’re surely not saying that your experience can safely be taken as representative of the experience of everyone everywhere in the US – are you?
And notice the apparently impossible-to-resist bit of ‘demonization’ – the gratuitous ‘bravely.’ Nonsense. ‘New’ atheists don’t swan about calling themselves brave.
This post reminded me of this:
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/9234/occamsrazorbu0.jpg
As an atheist from a village I find your disparaging remarks demonizing. :p
Whether HE’s commentary is convincing or not, I do think it has the virtue of coming at these things from an “unexpected angle.”
I think she makes an interesting point when she notes how much philosophers themselves take weird positions in metaphysics, and take their disagreements as a matter of course. Maybe this is a model for how disagreement ought to work in the general population, or maybe not, but I think this is good food for thought.
I also think she’s got a new “take” on things when she suggests that atheists “believe in disbelief”, just as theists “believe in belief.” That’s an interesting suggestion.
But here’s what I’d say (to her directly, if she’s still reading). When Dennett talks about “believing in belief” he’s not just talking about enthusiasm or intensity or proselytizing. The person who believes in belief believes she ought to keep on believing in God despite doubts. She takes believing to be virtuous. That is what Dennett finds so pernicious–the view that it’s good to keep on believing in God, whatever the arguments and evidence show.
I don’t think it’s true that atheists (new or old) believe in unbelief in Dennett’s sense They don’t think atheists ought to stifle doubts about unbelief and keep on unbelieving. Athiests in fact find their own arguments convincing. They’re not making any “leap of unfaith,” so to speak.
So–yes, atheists of recent vintage have a lot more enthusiasm for disbelief than the old style atheists, and want to promote it more. I say that based on seeing a difference between the atheists I’ve always known and the ones I read these days (in books and at blogs like B&W), but that doesn’t really have much to do with Dennett’s notion of “belief in belief.” Beyond a play on words, there’s no real analogy here.
Or so it strikes me. Anyhow. I thought the commentary was interesting, which in my book is high praise.
Atheists have “belief in unbelief”?
This is just a simple form of tit-for-tat-ism that religionists regularly apply. Take for example the assertion “atheism is a religion too”. In general: whatever you accuse us of, you are no better yourselves.
“Atheists have “belief in unbelief”?”
Right, that’s what she says–
“New Atheists believe in unbelief. For some reason they think it important to assure their followers in the village that religious belief is not merely false but uncontroversially false and that educated people who profess to be religious believers or claim that theism is compatible with science are out to dupe them.
I don’t believe in belief. Beliefs about metaphysical issues, including the existence of God, are inconsequential. In the aggregate, religious believers are no better or worse than atheists and, historically, societies that have embodied strong religious commitments are no better or worse than those committed to atheism.
I would be very interested in hearing why the New Atheists and their followers believe, with such manifest conviction, in unbelief.”
She wanted to hear…so I thought I’d comment on this. Answer: atheists don’t believe in unbelief, in the sense that some theists believe in belief (as I argued just above).
Yes, everyone should read Tom and Russell, if they haven’t already. I was only reflecting on what has been sloshing around in my own brain lately. I wanted to comment on using labels as an excuse for not engaging an argument – such as a scientist cannot engage philosophical or theological arguments or an argument proposed by a new atheist is not worth considering. And of course, Ophelia has trying to set people straight on this for some time.
Michael – just in case it wasn’t clear – I was amplifying rather than saying ‘R and T already said that!’ I was just saying – yeah, and see R and T on this, too.
“atheists of recent vintage have a lot more enthusiasm for disbelief than the old style atheists”
Some of them of course are the same people! I am, for one. I was a silent atheist for years – until Carl Sagan’s Demon-haunted World came out. Some of the interviews he did when the book came out kind of nudged me into a slightly more vocal kind of atheism…and it’s been all downhill from there.
Ha!
Michael – just in case it wasn’t clear – I was amplifying rather than saying ‘R and T already said that!’ I was just saying – yeah, and see R and T on this, too.
“atheists of recent vintage have a lot more enthusiasm for disbelief than the old style atheists”
Some of them of course are the same people! I am, for one. I was a silent atheist for years – until Carl Sagan’s Demon-haunted World came out. Some of the interviews he did when the book came out kind of nudged me into a slightly more vocal kind of atheism…and it’s been all downhill from there.
Ha!
Grrrrr. I didn’t do that.
H.E. wrote in her original piece:
“New Atheists believe in unbelief. For some reason they think it important to assure their followers in the village that religious belief is not merely false but uncontroversially false and that educated people who profess to be religious believers or claim that theism is compatible with science are out to dupe them. …
I would be very interested in hearing why the New Atheists and their followers believe, with such manifest conviction, in unbelief.”
Note that the first reference is to “New Atheists” and the second is “the New Atheists and their followers”, so it’s a bit rich to say that it was all about a few irritating knee-jerk commenters in The Guardian. She was explicitly saying that people like Daniel Dennett “believe in unbelief”, which is a very serious claim. Believing in belief involves trying to discourage, criticism of belief because you think that belief is such a useful or virtuous thing, even though you don’t necessarily believe yourself. Accusing Dennett etc., of something analogous to this – “belief in unbelief” – is a very serious claim that is not backed up with any evidence.
Beyond this, she accuses the New Atheists of lying to their followers “For some reason”. Since we are talking about what the New Atheists say to their “followers in the village” (what a nasty, condescending expression!), this can only mean that it is Dennett, etc., themselves who are telling the lie.
What is the lie that Dennett, etc., are accused of telling to their followers in the village? It is the following: “religious belief is not merely false but uncontroversially false and […] educated people who profess to be religious believers or claim that theism is compatible with science are out to dupe [you]”.
That is a very serious charge against Dennett, etc. Of course, Dennett does think that some educated people believe in belief and so try to discourage criticism of it, so I see the small grain of truth in what H.E. is getting at, but she goes much too far. There is no evidence that Dennett (or anyone else) has ever said anything like this, “For some [or any] reason”.
As it happens, some of the people who claim that religion is compatible with science do say this for reasons of political expediency, as they have explained openly, and believe what they are saying only a narrow sense of compatibility (which they define). This, what Dennett is accused of saying would not be a total lie, but nor would it be the truth. It would be a wild exaggeration of the position. The truth is something that needs to be explained carefully, as it typically is (by Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Ophelia, Sean Carroll, and others in the “New Atheist” camp).
And I have no idea why H.E. thinks that Dennett argues that religion is “uncontroversially false” or that educated people who claim to be religious are “out to dupe” people.
I’ve read Dennett’s book twice, much else written by him, and huge amounts of other material by the “New Atheists”, and I don’t recognise these claims that are attributed to them. They are, at best, distortions; in fact, they are more like fabrications.
In short, the “New Atheists” are accused of lying, of having (mysterious) ulterior motives for doing so, and of “believing in unbelief”, with all that that entails. All of this accusation is laid without evidence, and is a distortion at best. All of it tends to attack the integrity and credibility of the individuals, poisoning their actual message without engaging with it or refuting it.
That is demonising the New Atheists. If H.E. doesn’t like the word “demonising” (or “demonizing”), she can choose another, but I think it fits and I don’t regret introducing it.
And as so many people have said in the thread above me, it’s a poor choice of target for demonisation. We should try to operate with reasoned arguments rather than by demonising opponents, but if we are going to demonise anybody Daniel Dennett is the wrong person to choose. Once again, he’s performing a valuable service at a time when it’s a useful thing to encourage public debate, not just about whether the churches are correct on this or that specific social issue, but about whether they really possess the epistemic and moral authority that they claim and are so often accorded by politicians, the media, and electorates.
I think “new atheist” is the term for rational people who treat religious claims the same way they treat all other irrational claims.
Oops: the last comment should have had my new handle.
Larry H. a.k.a. The Barefoot Bum
Larry, I wasn’t rebuking, I was just giving a pointer! The words as written could be misleading to someone who hasn’t been reading Eric’s comments for some time.
And if you’re Larry, why are the rest of us Ms and Mr? Just curious.
I’m trying to live down a well-deserved reputation for aggressive and confrontational hostility.
I’m trying to live down a well-deserved reputation for aggressive and confrontational hostility.
Damn, lots of typos in my above long comment. Hope it makes sense.
Re Larry’s, ahem, “aggressive and confrontational hostility” … well, I can sometimes be short-tempered, and I once got angry enough with him to ban him from my blog. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of that occasion, he’s welcome to come back with no recriminations on either side, if he wants. It feels silly maintaining such a relationship (which includes studiously ignoring each other on a thread like this) with someone who is an ally on many issues.
How about it, Larry? Shake hands and put it behind us?
Russell: I read H.E.’s article again, and she doesn’t exactly accuse the new atheists of lying to their readers, although what she says could be construed as to signify that she thinks that they are lying. She also could just mean that the new atheists aren’t totally consistent, and in my opinion, very few people, outside of the field of pure logic, are totally consistent. In fact, maybe times one is inconsistent in what one writes, an inconsistency that is clear to readers, but not to the person who writes. Let’s hope that she reappears to clarify what she means.
Russell,
Maybe HE will step in and clarify, but I think she might actually have gotten two things confused. One thing is believing in unbelief in the sense that parallels Dennett’s “believing in belief”–i.e.thinking it’s very important to suppress doubt about atheism, that it’s a virtue to accept atheism regardless of the evidence and arguments.
Then there is something more amorphous, and really unrelated to Dennett’s notion of “belief in belief.” That is enthusiasm or intensity about unbelief, a desire to promote it, focus on it, proselytize (a word she uses, if I recall).
I suspect when she asks at the end why atheists believe in unbelief, it’s really the latter that she’s thinking about. She’s asking–why be so intense and aggressive? Why not just believe there’s no god and go on with your life?
Or at least, that’s my stab at exegesis. Maybe she’ll clarify.
Russell:
Of course. Despite my confrontational nature, I rarely actually hold a grudge for very long. And to be perfectly honest, I no longer recall the details of our disagreement. I don’t even remember being banned; I may have quit before you fired me. ;-)
I haven’t been ignoring you, at least not on this thread. I tend to focus my attention on points I disagree with, or on which I think I can add substantive clarification.
Ms. Baber might or might not be asking the question, but you seem to be, so I’ll answer it: because I care not just about myself, but about the well-being of other people, people I sincerely believe are oppressed, exploited and diminished as fully conscious human beings by (among other things) religious bullshit.
Well, something good has come out of this thread. :)
Larry, if it makes you feel any better, you’re not the only one who has difficulty controlling his temper, and who gets himself into hot water commenting on passion-provoking issues. It’s a character trait/flaw I’ve long recognized in myself, and that I’m only partially successful controlling (!). I’ve kicked myself countless times for sticking my foot in my mouth with people who really are allies. It makes me smile to see people-who are actually “on the same side” – lay down arms. That’s difficult, and unfortunately rare, with these topics.
(I don’t mean to disparage professors of philosophy at all by characterizing them as more interested in arguments than conclusion. From what many philosophy professors of my acquaintance have explicitly said, that’s how they see their job: teaching people how to analyze and understand arguments, a valuable and worthwhile endeavor, and one that requires a conscious effort to be neutral regarding conclusions.
It’s just not my thing: I don’t want to spend 10 years learning a skill I already think I have.)
Actually, Freud wrote an excellent book about religion, The Future of an Illusion.
Barefoot Bum (or Larry H?), you say:
Since this is in part a response to me as well as to HE Baber, I wish you would recognise that I do not think that the ideas of atheism and theism are up for grabs. They aren’t, in my view. So, anything that I say about religious thought does not include a claim that the fundamental epistemic (or ontological) claims of religion are sound. I don’t think they are, nor do I think that they can be made so.
However, I do not think that there has existed yet a wholly secular philosophy, one that has existed quite apart from religious thinking, and some recent attempts to hazard such a public secular philosophy continues to paddle in the shallow end of the pool of what some have disparagingly called “nineteenth century” free thought. Some of this is fairly simplistic and curtly dismissive of traditions of thought that have, for all their shaky foundations, provided fairly deep understandings of human nature.
If we take philosophers like Feuerbach and Xenophanes seriously, religious thought, in the end, is a projection of something that is purely human. Hitchens makes the point quite often, that religion is obviously a human creation, and so it is. But, as a human creation, it provides, for all its epistemic faults, a fairly long, continuous and deep study of what it means to be human. To dismiss all this as mere bullshit is simply absurd, at least without more evidence than the obvious point that the gods these people believed in do not exist.
Richard Holloway, a former Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, in a recent book, Between the Monster and the Saint, takes a look at some of the moral monstrosities of the last century or so through the lens of religious ways of understanding what it means to be human, prescinding altogether from belief in gods. He refers far more to movies and poems than to the Bible, but he sees religious thought as being about being human, and trying to understand this peculiar being who, in the myth of the fall, is caught between the unselfconciousness of animals and the lucid immediacy of the divine.
You may say that that is all just bullshit, but it’s a kind of bullshit that has helped people understand themselves for a very long time, and is still deeply entrenched in our culture. Certainly, dismiss it as curtly as you like, but the complexity of what it is to be human will still come back to haunt us. And this has nothing whatever to do with the existence of gods. That they do not exist we can take as a given, but, when we do that, we can still see in most sensitive works of theology, however wrongheaded they may sometimes be, something of the mystery of what it is to be human, and to try to live out that humanity without the horrors which, while they certainly may be prompted by religious belief, are not always religious in their origin.
I think religion is wrongheaded, and I think its recent resurgence is dangerous, but I am not prepared to write off two thousand years of intellectual endeavour, no matter how feeble its foundations, as mere bullshit, though much of it no doubt is, just as much of the blogosphere, as well as mountains of unread books and journals, are composed of bullshit too. On the other hand, it has no right to dominate public space, and its curt dismissal from public space is long overdue.
I think some of this discussion is speaking past each other: Larry H., Eric MacDonald – you are using quite different definitions of the word “religion.” Larry is focusing on religion primarily as a set of claims about the world, the way it originated and the way it works and so on – all of which are demonstrably false by every reasonable standard of evidence and reason. Eric seems to agree that those claims are false, but understands religion much more broadly to include humanity’s attempts to understand itself – ideas about human nature, about both moral truth and moral psychology, about humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature (which, outside of mainstream thought in the big three monotheisms, is very interesting and complicated), etc. It seems that much of your disagreement follows from these conflicting definitions of “religion.”
Many, perhaps even most of these ideas Eric is concerned with are attached to a religious frame – often in an ill-fitting fashion – without genuinely relying on or springing from religion’s false claims about the world: I take Eric’s point to be that the ideas themselves are not necessarily or universally rendered false or valueless by the religious baggage tied to them, which is why he considers it worth digging into religious thought to untangle them. I don’t necessarily agree; I think most of the interesting and worthwhile ideas already have lots of interesting and religion-independent development in philosophy and other realms of secular inquiry, and most of the attempts to pull something useful out of religion result in the embarrassing mess of theological/metaphysical twaddle one finds in Coppitt and Spong. (I admire Spong, but he’s got to stop using that word “God” when what he means by it bears no relation whatsoever with what anyone else means by it. See also Spinoza, and Whitehead.) But despite that disagreement, I can at least see the point Eric is getting at, which I think Larry is missing entirely.
At least part of what Eric is getting at presumably (correct me if I’m wrong, Eric) has to do with the de facto aspect: until very recently religion was what there was, so clever reflective people who would now be in cognitive science or history or any number of other secular fields were in the church instead. This means that historically a lot of relgion got thoroughly entangled with all sorts of secular subject, because who else was going to look into them?
In what sense am I speaking past Eric? I’ve acknowledged he’s using this definition of religion a couple of times, and I’ve made specific arguments that this definition is a) way over-broand and b) has nothing to do what the New Atheists have in mind… and this thread is about criticism of the New Atheist position. I get Eric’s point, but I think he’s not correct.
Eric (and you, and everyone else) is free to define religion as he pleases and, so long as he makes his definition explicit (which he does), he’s committing no solecism against intellectual integrity. But just because he uses that definition does not mean that anyone else’s critique of religion should be evaluated according to that definition.
The New Atheists are not at all opposed to “religion” in the broad (in my opinion uselessly over-broad) sense of “humanity’s attempts to understand itself – ideas about human nature, about both moral truth and moral psychology, about humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature.” The New Atheist point is at least that we can understand ourselves better with a naturalistic, scientific approach and at the strongest that we cannot usefully understand ourselves with a supernatural, mystical, or woo-woo approach, with a lot of spooks, ghosts and metaphysical bullshit. We are, most explicitly and specifically, against the bullshit.
Of course humanity has been for ten thousand years — maybe a hundred thousand years — using mystical mumbo-jumbo and metaphysical bullshit to try to explain ourselves and our relationship to the world. Of course that mystical mumbo-jumbo has considerable historical, cultural and literary merit. All well and good. But it’s still fundamentally and irredeemably false, it rests on falsity, and the New Atheists are going to keep on pointing out that falsity without apology, shame or compromise.
Established usage of the word “religion” is broader than you think, Larry – especially if you spend any time with the literature of those who actually study religion as a cultural phenomenon (anthropologists and sociologists I mean, not apologists and theologians). So if you consistently use a narrower definition of “religion” without occasionally reinforcing that you are deliberately redefining the word in a narrow sense – and if you keep telling other people they’re using the word too broadly when, in fact, they’re usage is more in line with both the broader English usage and with the technical definitions of the word as it’s used in academic settings – you are going to generate more misunderstanding than you resolve. It’s simply not helpful.
You are right that this broader notion of religion is not what any of the “New Atheists” aim their criticisms at, and that they are very clear about their actual target – to the point of being downright repetitive about it, which they are forced to by repeated (and often willful) misunderstandings. Which is why I stated my disagreement with Eric’s position as well. But my statement of disagreement was a lot clearer on what I disagreed with and why than yours have been, because I was willing just to allow him his definition of the term as he is using it and THEN explain why I still don’t think his position is tenable even on his own terms. It generally works better that way.
Avoiding these confusions and misunderstandings (willful and otherwise) is why I usually don’t use the word “religion” at all when I’m making my own arguments. The problem is faith, not religion: That is, without the ridiculous habit of going around believing claims without evidence – or even in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary – everything that is problematic about actual religions as practiced would be either resolved or resolvable.
G Felis:
Boy, in my experience those last two contexts are very nearly polar opposites in their usages of the word “religion.” I’m more than familiar with “technical definitions of [‘religion’] as it’s used in academic settings,” and I would add members of solidly liberal religious (“religious” :-) organizations such as the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association as more or less Honorary Academics for these purposes.
But–noting that academics, the UCC, and the UUA make up a tiny proportion of the English-speaking population of the world–I confess that I have almost never heard or seen a broader notion of “religion” stated or written by anyone else in the world. In my experience, the “broader English usage” of “religion” is overwhelmingly dominated by conceptions that are founded on the notion that “religion” qua “religion” includes faith in god(s) or similar supernatural notions. The notion that, say, belief in a Spinoza-ish “god” is a kind of “religion” would strike nearly all of the English speakers I’m familiar with as faintly bizarre.
Well, at least my comments have prompted something. I’m not quite sure how to respond because the responses to my obiter dicta have been so very extensive, and they’ve grown, too, whilst I have nursed my gout. Let me start by saying that, just as there is value in reading Spinoza, even though most of his axioms, and the conclusions drawn from them, are wrong, there is value too in reading and understanding some of the work that has been done in theology, because theology as a human creation (despite its ending or beginning with belief in supernatural entities), still has much to say about the complexities of being human. A simple dismissal of all writings of those who take or have taken themselves to be religious, is like dismissing Spinoza or Leibniz because no one now thinks it possible to build up the structure of human knowledge from within reason itself.
As to Dawkins. Rieux says:
Well, I’m getting it from Dawkins. As he says, “even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes.” (TGD, 303) And I acknowledge that liberal religion can give cover to fanaticism, and it actually does so, but it also provides a way out, an easy transition from quite literal belief, through metaphor, to disbelief.
As Ophelia says, before the modern age (say from 1600 until today) most study of things like moral psychology, to confine ourselves to just one thing, was tied to religion. Someone interested in moral psychology now would not gravitate towards moral or penitential theology, but it is scarcely plausible that, just because Jeremy Taylor (for instance) wrote about holy living and holy dying from within a Christian frame of reference, he has nothing whatever to tell us about some of the subtleties and complexities of being human. And to lump Taylor in with Jerry Fallwell or Pat Robertson would be to do a grave injustice to the English tradition of moral (and religious) thought.
Nor, whatever one thinks about Don Cupitt or Graham Shaw (whose exegesis of biblical rhetoric is both devastating and enlightening regarding the uses of religious language), to think that they create a context within which ‘extremism naturally flourishes’ is going one step too far, and shows a lack of familiarity with some of the complexity of contemporary religious thought.
Of course, if religious thought is restricted to those who explicitly believe in supernatural entities, then neither Cupitt nor Shaw are religious, yet their writing is saturated with religious themes, many only mentioned to be condemned as they seek to filter out what they think to be still of value.
For myself, I find these writers hard to read now, because of their subtlety, which seems almost, on occasion, to amount of prevarication. But it still would be a pity to lose so much that has been done in trying to make out some of the sense in the project of being human. I still treasure their sensitivity and rather fine appreciation of very subtle modulations in human moral and, yes, ‘spiritual’ response. Such work is done within a religious framework, but it is much more like literary appreciation or depth psychology than it is like theology, and it is none the poorer for that.
As for the uses of the word ‘religion’, I don’t think we’ll settle that here. This language game is played, and like the word ‘game’ in the Investigations the word ‘religion’ has an incredibly complex set of uses. I actually know a lot of people who would be very surprised to learn that ‘religion’ refers necessarily to a language game in which language engages with the world by referring to belief in supernatural entities. In many cases religious language is autotelic, and is quite happy to restrict itself to a slightly dream-like state which includes its own raison d’être as a form of cultural life. But this is a much bigger question, and there is not room enough to develop these themes here.
All I am saying, in the end, is that as we rightly dismiss religious claims to know, we also have to take into consideration religion as a cultural activity which has its own ends, and has been surprisingly successful in providing a sense of meaning, purpose and a comprehensive sense of the intelligibility of life to very ordinary people. Marx at least was aware of that when he spoke of religion as the sigh of the oppressed creature. Those who disbelieve need to recall that sensitivity and sympathy, and make allowances for it too.
G Felis:
I fully understand the established usage of the word “religion”. The equivocal and broad nature of a lot of words and phrases in natural language (and academic philosophy too, an endeavor supposedly devoted to precision and clarity) has been a consistent theme in my writing.
For that reason, almost every New Atheist writer explicitly or implicitly defines the particular usage of “religion” to which their criticism is directed. Dawkins devotes an entire chapter (or most of one) of The God Delusion to spelling out what he means by religion.
I disagree. I don’t think Eric really is using “religion” in its technical, academic sense: like Rieux, I see no evidence that there is a consensus in secular or theological academia that religion means “humanity’s attempts to understand itself” etc.
But that’s beside the point anyway. Even if that were the technical academic meaning, it’s possible that the technical academic meaning is not actually useful.
Second, it is an uncontroversial fact that many words and phrases have multiple, substantively different and sometimes incompatible meanings — the equivocation fallacy is probably the most common fallacy in philosophical and logical argumentation. It’s often impossible and usually pointless to try to encompass all meanings of a term in a single critical argument. The ambiguity between different meanings is often resolved by context, but sometimes (as noted above) it is explicitly stated.
But one is certainly entitled to simply dismiss Spinoza’s or Leibniz’s conclusions, since they are in fact wrong.
And one can simply dismiss their literary and cultural merit as well, because this kind of dismissal is personal, not social. No one is dismissing the literary and cultural merit of theology to the point where they advocate shutting down secular academic literary study of these genres. The only argument I’ve seen has been for shutting down (or at least withdrawing public taxpayer support for) schools of theology, not on the basis that theology is culturally worthless but on the basis — and only to the extent — that theology takes the existence of God seriously.
You really seem to be criticizing a position you haven’t established actually exists, outside of your own interpretation, which increasingly seems tendentious.
But no one is saying that religion refers necessarily to such a language game. I simply cannot see how you can find this interpretation with good faith and basic intellectual competence.
Sorry I omitted the attribution of the quotations starting from “A simple dismissal…” to Eric MacDonald.
Also, there is no evidence whatsoever that any serious New Atheist — even among the minor or trivial contributors such as myself — that there is any dismissal at all, simple or otherwise, of all the writings of those who have taken themselves to be religious.
It seems an empty gesture at best to criticize positions not seriously held; at worst, to criticize a position implies that it actually is held, which would seem to constitute less than a full commitment to intellectual integrity.
I’m simply going to stop commenting now on this blog. I quit writing because I no longer have the stomach for defending my work against tendentious misinterpretation and outright distortion.
Re the liberal religion is good for you crowd, I read this piece from an interview with Leszek Kołakowski, who has just died. The interviewer is quoting from an essay of his.
“[t]here is something alarmingly desperate in intellectuals who have no religious attachment, faith or loyalty proper and who insist on the irreplaceable educational and moral role of religion in our world and deplore its fragility, to which they themselves eminently bear witness . . . . I do not blame them . . . .either for being irreligious or for asserting the crucial value of religious experience; I simply cannot persuade myself that their work might produce changes they believe desirable, because to spread faith, faith is needed and not an intellectual assertion of the social utility of faith.”
http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/DAED_134_3_82.pdf
Kolakowski though does not want to say whether he is a man of faith himself.
Aw, c’mon, Larry–I think your contributions here are entirely valuable. Don’t bow out because you’re being misunderstood.
Well, that’s not quite what I was saying; actually, I think that, in the specific context of academic departments of religion and such, there is a kinda sorta consensus that “religion” has that kind of a broad meaning. And then there are small, left-wingy “religious” organizations like the UCC and (especially) UUA, in which that kind of broad conception of “religion” is all but an unquestionable dogma.
It’s the rest of the world where I think conceptions of religion that are similar to yours and mine hold overwhelming sway. One (typically myopic and arrogant regarding such issues) UU clergyman, Rev. Forrest Church, has defined “religion” as “the human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” That sounds perfectly swell to your average religion professor, but to the ordinary believer-(or for that matter atheist)-on-the-street, it sure seems to me that a conception like that comes off as simply nutty.
I wrote:
And Eric MacDonald responded:
Okay; the “give cover” account is obviously very similar to the description I posted in my 07-21 10:51:41 comment above. But then I guess I don’t understand your choice of title for such an account. How do you get from “give cover” to “way in”? Those seem significantly different concepts to me.
The atheist-critique point is not, I think, that liberal religion is a “gateway drug” to fundamentalism (although, generation-over-generation, I suppose that is a potential partial explanation for the data showing that right-wing denominations are consolidating Christianity in America at the same time the nation is becoming more secular). To say that liberal religion protects conservative is a far different thing, I think, than to say the former brings people to the latter.
Thus my confusion over where you got this “way in” stuff. I still don’t see that anywhere in Dawkins, including in the passage you quote–which is very much about giving cover, not providing a gateway.
If you google “structure of the universe”, you’ll find a Wikipedia article that provides you with much more accurate information than Spinoza, Leibnitz or Plato do. But I learn more from reading Spinoza or Plato (I’ve never tackled Leibnitz) than I do reading Wikipedia. Mixed in with their out-dated science, there are incredible insights in Plato and Spinoza into who we are and what a good life is. I vote with Eric.
Larry – this is silly. Neither Eric nor G is any fan of theism, to put it mildly. Saying that religion is more than theism is not equivalent to saying theism is a good thing. The same applies to religion and faith.
What OB said, Larry. Also, you keep criticizing me for things I explicitly agree with you on. For example, upbraiding me about how the New Atheists define their terms when I made a point of saying that they do so repeatedly seems unnecessarily hostile, tendentious, and rather obviously point-missing. In fact, many of your responses to disagreement seem overly hostile and miss the point.
For cryin’ out loud, I’m not even disagreeing with you for the most part: I’m suggesting that you aren’t expressing yourself as well or clearly or usefully as you think you are. When you respond with more hostility and anger about being misunderstood (by someone who agrees with you, mind)… well, that rather makes my point for me, doesn’t it?