Who Needs an Excuse?
Oh honestly. What was that I said about the unending flood? Here is another break in the dam – more nonsense than I’ve seen in one place for a long time. (Well not all that long. There was that Butlerian review the other day, and that item where paganism meets disability rights and gets spectacularly tangled in its own feet. But a long time if you’re waiting for lunch, anyway.) If you can read this without wanting to be violently sick – then there’s something wrong with your cognitive functioning and I want nothing further to do with you.
There are many species of atheism, just as there are many species of religion. But while many religions still thrive, most of the atheisms that have ever existed are now extinct. The non-religious person today is, therefore, rather like a person who wanders into a shop to buy a breakfast cereal and finds only one variety is for sale. Moreover, this variety isn’t very tasty, because the kind of atheism that flourishes today is old and tired.
Oh for Christ’s sake. Start off with a bang why don’t you. That is so stupid. There aren’t many species of atheism, because atheism isn’t like religion, so it’s no good saying ‘just as there are many species of religion’ as if that made it true. Religion is all about multiplying entities, and about making up stuff to believe; atheism isn’t, it’s just about not believing the stuff other people have made up. It’s not a belief, it’s not a religion, it’s not a mirror-image of religion only with minus signs where the pluses should be. It’s just not believing there is a god, that’s all. It’s not old and tired today because there’s nothing to be old and tired. It’s not a system, not an ideology, not a set of postulates or rules or myths; it’s just non-belief in a deity. It’s no more stale and tired than all the other things we don’t believe, because there’s no bread to get stale. My non-belief in the Great Pumpkin isn’t stale, so why should my non-belief in ‘God’ be? No earthly reason. People just think it sounds deep or wise or shrewd to say so. Well it doesn’t.
Today’s prominent atheists – people such as Jonathan Miller and Richard Dawkins – hawk around a belief system that reeks of the 19th century, which is not surprising, for that is when it was born. Dawkins is virulently anti-religious, passionately pro-science and artistically illiterate – thus manifesting all three of the main characteristics of the old atheism in a particularly pure form.
[Taking tight grip on temper and speaking through clenched teeth] It is not a belief system! It’s not even an it; it’s the negation of an it. Therefore it wasn’t born in the 19th century, because it wasn’t born. It’s just not believing in god or gods. Not believing is not believing. How else can one say it? Saying ‘I don’t believe X’ is not a belief system, it’s the opposite of a belief system, because it’s the rejection of one. It’s not incompatible with a belief system, or many, of course, but it itself is not a god damn belief system, it’s the refusal of one! Pay attention, dammit, Dylan Evans.
Furthermore, Dawkins is emphatically not artistically illiterate. Dylan Evans can’t have read Unweaving the Rainbow or he wouldn’t have said that.
My kind of atheism takes issue with the old atheism on all three of its main tenets: it values religion; treats science as simply a means to an end; and finds the meaning of life in art. When I say that I value religion, I don’t mean that I see any truth in the stories about gods, devils, souls and saviours. But I do think there is one respect in which religion is more truthful than science – in its depiction of the long ing for transcendent meaning that lies in man’s heart. No scientific theory has ever done justice to this longing, and in this respect religions paint more faithful pictures of the human mind.
Garbage. Complete, unadulterated garbage. Wrong and uncomprehending in every word. Wrong about atheism, stupid about science, wrong about religion.
Atheists who attack religions for painting a false picture of the world are as unsophisticated and immature as religious believers, who mistake the picture for reality. The only mature attitude to religion is to see it for what it is – a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality, and which only a child would reject for being false.
More nonsense. Atheists attack religions for ‘painting a false picture of the world’ because that’s what religions damn well do! Dylan’s hearts and flowers let’s sniff the buttercups version is very sweet and nice but it’s not religion, is it. It’s not the Vatican banning condoms and telling women how to live, it’s not Islam forbidding people to leave Islam, it’s not creationists trying to get religion taught in biology class. Dylan’s version might be a nice idea. If all believers read his article and decided ‘oh, I see, it’s all a metaphor’ and immediately began living accordingly starting right now today, I would be delighted. But guess what, they’re not going to, are they. That being the case, there is still every reason to ‘attack’ or rather criticise religions for painting a false picture of the world, and one doesn’t have to subscribe to a ‘belief system’ to do so; one can just recognize bullshit when one sees it.
“Atheism is a religion the way not collecting stamps is a hobby.” – Somebody or other
And why do religious people persist in saying that atheists can’t find “transcendent meaning” in anything? Why not? Why should “transcendent meaning” depend on the existence of a Sky Daddy?
Terrific stuff! So glad I found this site!
Glad you did, Dennis!
OB–
This is a response to one of your comments in “A Subtle Ruse”, but I’m putting it here since the last three posts are all variations on a theme.
It was not my intention to somehow finesse the question of atheism or whether I am an atheist.
Since my first comment there, my basic point has been that whatever criticisms Ruse may have of Dawkins and his ilk, he should certainly be critical of the creationists for intentionally confusing religion and science. This appears to have been overlooked in the ensuing discussion.
As long as Ruse refuses to confront them on this deliberate confusion, he is part of the problem.
Whatever the web version of “first time caller, long time listener” is, that’s me. That Dylan Evans clown gave me the jab I needed to let you folks know what a top job you’re doing, fighting the good fight. I haven’t seen so much shite since I abandoned Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper after being told that we selfish unbelievers owe civilization to Christianity. Artistically illiterate? Not just Dawkins but Dan Dennett, Steve Pinker – all their books are stuffed with cultural references. And as for religion as a pretty picture, we here in Australia have had a Moslem leader enlighten us that women who are raped deserve it because of what they’re wearing (check http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Muslim-cleric-women-incite-mens-lust-with-satanic-dress/2005/04/23/1114152362381.html).
I’ll stick with my 19th-century atheistic values. They’re a lot better than 21st-century spinelessness or 11th-century tyranny.
So, let me get this straight. Atheism is just another religious faith, and an obsolete one at that. Religion, on the other hand, is actually fine art. I feel dizzy. Let me explain what might actually be going on here. Religion is an activity people once pursued in hopes of controlling nature – praying to the gods or God for cures, bountiful crops, good weather, etc. Science now gives knowledge through which humans actually succeed in doing that. Religion often took the sensuous form of fine art – Ancient Greece is the classic case, but Catholicism still enjoys this to some extent (the cardinals had their conclave in the Sistine Chapel- Michelangelo, who by the way it seems was gay, might have hoped his work to be more inspiring in such a situation). So, let’s sort this out the right way: science teaches humans how to control nature and fine art (together with wine and women, I might add on a personal note) makes life meaningful. It looks to me as if religion is out of a job.
Evans adds plagiarism to his other sins, because having linked Jonathan Miller with Dawkins in his first paragraph (Miller artistically illiterate???!!!) he proceeds to summarise the content of Miller’s excellent recent TV series on atheism and claim it as his own very wonderful view.
Incidentally if atheism is a 19th century invention where does that leave, for one, Hume?
Oh my metaphorical God. Humankind is doomed, doomed I tell you.
I’m just surprised he didn’t mention how, although he doesn’t believe in mainstream religions, he’s very ‘spiritual’.
Arse.
Why are these people always so full of themselves? I’d like to see how he deals with burning at the transcendent metaphorical stake.
I never get these people that criticise Dawkins, what is so wrong with being honest about your atheism – all religions are false, they make false claims about the world – and to believe in these religions is to completely and wilfully ignore the evidence – somehow that is shockingly provocative, and he should tone it all down.
But to say that atheists are all amoral, unable to appreciate art, evil, and deluded – why that is just obvious common sense and perfectly acceptable discourse. Why do the religious and ‘spritual’ have no sense of irony or hypocrisy?
The research specialty of the author of the Guardian article, one Dylan Evans, is “emotional robotics”. Is it a “sin” to be handed such a blatent, tell-tale sign, and not make use of it?
http://www.dylan.org.uk/
“1997-99 London School of Economics: Ph.D. programme in Philosophy.
Thesis title: ‘Rethinking emotion: new research in emotion and recent debates in cognitive science.’ Supervisor: Professor John Worrall. Awarded 30 August 2000. For a gzipped tarball containing my PhD thesis, click here.
1996 State University of New York at Buffalo (Fulbright Scholarship).
Courses taken in the PhD program in Comparative Literature.
1994-95 University of Kent: M.A. in Psychoanalytic Studies in the Humanities (Distinction).
Dissertation: ‘Psychical violence: suggestion and the ethics of psychoanalysis.’ (Distinction). Supervisor: Dr Julia Borossa. For a gzipped tarball containing my MA dissertation, click here.
1987-91 University of Southampton: B.A. (Hons) in Spanish with Linguistics (First Class).”
A philosopher turned AIer – no wonder he talks rubbish.
That isn’t even to mention the paper in Medical Hypotheses or the psychoanalysis.
PM:
The old C.V. as a method of torture. If I’d ever bothered with a C.V., I’d be flayed alive.
By the way, there is an excellect Levinas article, originally written for “Le Temps Moderne” in 1948, on how art is written from the waste-products,- (“rubbish”),- of experience. It kind of puts aestheticism in its place, though I don’t think that would be of interest to anyone here.
“The old C.V. as a method of torture. If I’d ever bothered with a C.V., I’d be flayed alive.”
Yeah, well its a bit unfair, but I think the ratio of newspaper articles to scientific publications is telling.
London School of Economics! No wonder!
[evil smirk]
Thanks, Michael. And thanks for that link, I’m off to check it out.
“a belief system that reeks of the 19th century, which is not surprising, for that is when it was born.”
All ye gods! Dylan Evans uses “atheism” for “agnosticism,” a term coined by Thomas Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” in 1869.
Can’t the man get one thing right?
I may be pointing out the blindingly obvious but if atheism is stale for having been born in the 19th century (as is implied rather than stated outright in the article) then what does that make the major world religions?
Oh well they’re fresh as the dawn, aren’t they.
Perhaps the problem with science, and atheism is that they tend to be true. It is very difficult to get metaphorical mileage out of true things.
‘Ooh, isn’t that theory of gravity a telling metaphor for the way we all exert an influence on everyone else’, ‘no, its a result of looking at mass in the real world, and discovering the way mass exerts a force on other bits of mass’
Religion is now, and always has been, a tool of social control – from the first priest-god-kings of the Egyptians and Sumerians forward. Anyone who claims otherwise is trying to sell something.
The first priest-god-kings of the Egyptians and Sumerians appeared relatively late in (pre)history, though – much later, I assume, than religion. Perhaps religion was a tool of social control in bands of early hunter-gatherers as well – but primarily, it was a way of explaining what was happening around them. Not a scientific way – but then, the idea that natural, material events should have natural, material causes arose only with the Greeks in the 6th century BC, and perhaps nowhere else. Quite a sea-change.
Now, I know of this bridge in Arkansas…
And another thing. Dawkins might be critical of religious tendencies in people, but you’ll notice that he views most people as potentially rational beings. Evans, on the other hand, by arguing that only a child could take religion literally, insults the intelligence of all religious people. I’m sure that most rationally inclined religious people would rather be challenged by someone like Dawkins than patronized by someone like Evans.
Merlijn,
Actually, anthropologists might have some dispute with you about the role of tribal shamans and such-like with regard to social control. But my comment was primarily aimed at organized religion as an institution, not just myths and supernatural beliefs, broadly construed. The latter are a part of religion, but are not the totality of it.
“Social control” might be a matter of social integration, as well, (i.e. the coordination of social action and the anchoring of identities in processes of mutual recognition). It would be hard to understand the voluntary component in the compulsions of social order/organization otherwise. One might pity poor Iphenegia and cuss out her monstrous father, who got his comuppance anyway, but, in the modern context, the “necessity”, the need and requirement for tolerance of differences effects religious believers and unbelievers alike.
No disagreement here, John. I only meant “social control” as short-hand for lots of things, including coordination of collective action and especially anchoring identities (especially in that us/them way). It isn’t necessarily just about social hierarchies and the exercise of political power by some small number of humans over many other humans – although I do think these sorts of things play a much larger role than believers are generally willing to acknowledge.
My views on religion have many parallels with the cultural evolution arguments made by David Sloan Wilson in Darwin’s Cathedral, although I feel that he underestimates the selective dynamics of male control over female and reproduction. Probably the most interesting difference between shamanic/animist traditions found in hunter-gatherer cultures and organized religion traditions associated with agricultural civilization is that the latter seem particularly well-adapted (and I use that phrase deliberately) to the purpose of keeping women pregnant under the direct control of men. Look no further than America’s religious right and the culture of enforced pregnancy – excuse me, the “culture of life” – they obsessively promote, as in the most recent Jeb Bush debacle in Florida.
Ophelia Benson gets terribly upset at my claim that Dawkins is artistically illiterate. She thinks this shows that I can’t have read “Unweaving the Rainbow”, but in fact it is precisely this book that made me think, for the first time, that Dawkins couldn’t possibly understand poetry. It is true, of course, that he goes out of his way in this book to display a knowledge of literature, but the very ostentatiousness of these displays should be enough to raise a few eyebrows; the man protests too much. The references to poetry that abound in his “Unweaving the Rainbow”, smack of desperation – a desperation to be rid of the smell of philistinism that he is worried may waft up from his earlier writings. And when one subjects these references to any scrutiny, it immediately becomes clear that Dawkins has about as much feeling for poetry as a mole does for a beautiful sunset. To show that this comparison is not a cheap shot but the conclusion of a rigorous analysis of Dawkins’ texts would require much more space than I have at my disposal in this short comment, so I will cite here just one example of what I mean.
In the second chapter of Unweaving the Rainbow, after quoting the following lines from William Blake:
For Bacon and Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion; Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs…
Dawkins comments: “What a waste of poetic talent.” It is a waste, according to Dawkins, because Blake could have drawn inspiration from science instead of lambasting it. The implicit assumption, which Dawkins never spells out, but which underpins his comments on poetry throughout the whole book, is that science can provide richer pickings for poets than religion and mysticism because science is true, while religion and mysticism are false.
This shows a profound misunderstanding of the nature of art in general, and poetry in particular. Indeed, it is hard to see how anyone could be more wrong, for Dawkins gets things so precisely the wrong way round. The whole value of art lies in its complete disregard for the facts. It is not that art must be false, though this often helps – it is that art is supremely indifferent to the whole question of whether something is true or false. Art aims entirely at beauty, and beauty is orthogonal to truth. This is why, if there is any danger of fostering the illusion that a poem draws its beauty, even in part, from the truth of its subject matter, the poet must abandon realism and confine himself to pure fantasy. To claim otherwise, as Dawkins does, and argue that poetry can be improved by drawing its inspiration from theories that are believed to be true, is to sacrifice art on the altar of science.
This can be a hard point to grasp, especially for those without much understanding of art.
I’ll do the best I can to give you a fair shake, Evans. If you want to claim that art only encapsulates (or is only worthy when it does) a ‘complete disregard for the facts’ I think you may be defining which particluar end of art appeals to you- which is as big a misunderstanding as what you accuse Dawkins of. You may have a valid point, though, that those people who are rational, scientific and practical may not appreciate that particular brand of art for art’s sake. Perhaps it is this sort of person who, at present, is most likely to become an atheist as well. But the fact that practical people don’t like impracticality in art doesn’t have anything to do with them being somehow spiritually deficient. Biologicians aren’t poets -they work in different fields to reveal different mysteries. Are there poet atheists? Hell yes.
Next, ‘beauty is orthagonal to truth’ is an outright lie. Sometimes it can be, but sometimes, truth and elegance and beauty are one- in a fractal set, in a mathematical equation, and yes, in the idea of evolution. Only some people get this particular form of art, though.
I agree, though, that we ought not to lose the one sort of art – that we need people to delve into the mythopoetic; but I don’t think we need religions to do that. To value that one branch that is totally devoid of rational underpinning over all other forms seems dishonest, however. It is a matter of taste.
For those who are interested, Lewis Wolpert will be debating the article with me on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow morning, at 8.20 or 8.40 UK time, in case you’re anywhere near a radio or the internet then.
Dylan Evans, I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that you hadn’t read Unweaving the Rainbow. I see what you mean. The book doesn’t strike me that way, but then that’s your point – at the very least that it can strike people in more than one way (and at most that I read it uncritically).
But I agree with Mark; I think you’re describing only one possibility for art, and that there are others. What of Wordsworth for instance? The Prelude takes a microscope and a telescope (figuratively speaking) to the landscape of the real world. That’s certainly not all it does, but it is one of the things it does. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal – Thoreau – Chekhov – just to name a few off the top of my head – draw some of the beauty from the truth of the subject matter, surely?
And I do think that saying Dawkins is a philistine is to overlook the antiphilistinism of scientific discovery and inquiry. To put it another way, the idea could be turned around: it could be said that to be blind to the wonder of discovery is also philistine.
Thanks for tip about debate! Will definitely listen, albeit much later in the day. Fortunately Today is archived.
Regardless of whether it implies an “art-for-art’s-sake” doctrine, to say that art aims at “beauty” expresses on old and rather faded ideal. Leaving aside the old debates about “form” vs. “content”, the criticism of dogma or didacticism in art, and even the vexed question of the “truth” or “truth-content” of the work of art, it would be more up-to-date to say that works of art aim at “authenticity” qua the roots of expressiveness in human experience and they do so precisely by being “false”, by maintaining their distantiation, regardless of whether they adopt a “realist” style or not, from reality. That would at least allow for the functionning of art as sustaining a critical mode of reflection on reality and human experience, rather than converting it into a “spiritual” adornment.
That’s what I said. Art aims at beauty is one possibility, but there are others.
Emm… that’s probably not quite what you said. I was picking up on Evans’ recycling of a rather stale notion: the late-19th century idea that art could be a substitute for a declining credibility of religion, which was one of the vectors of the notion of “art-for-art’s-sake”, the insistence on the “autonomy” of works of art and their criteria of judgment, repudiating any utilitarian value and creating a “cult” of art. This was then sometimes recombined with an aetheticized religiosity. (T.S. Eliot would be the ultimate victim of such tendencies.) But the subsequent development of modern art would vere away from such tendencies and notions, as art works took on a fractured, not to say, fragmented, form, incorporating the painful and “ugly”, engaging in debunking and unmasking, as opposed to reconciling with reality and trading in the “sublime”, trafficking in experiences of despair and estrangement. Even as the repudiation of utilitarian values was re-enforced and the distance from ordinary reality increased, it would be hard to say that the development of such art works lacked any “function” with respect to critically testing the relations between human experience and reality. Evans wants to maintain a notion of art as “beautiful illusion” to which religion can be assimilated. But that neither does justice to the element of critical and self-critical rationality contained in works of art, such that any critical “force” they might exercise is blunted, nor to the real commitments involved in religious beliefs, even if I disagree with you about the univocal or unequivocal character of those commitments. Nietzsche, ever prescient, always ahead of his time, perhaps put it best: “We have art so that we don’t perish from the truth.”
Well said, old mole!
Shorter version: Evans is not just wrong about religion; his over/under on art is wrong, too. Or, at least, I’d be willing to make book on that.
And that’s true, too.
“This can be a hard point to grasp, especially for those without much understanding of art.”
So your argument depends upon your superior grasp of art? Blimey, and you think the scientists/atheists are arrogant.
Yeah, well spotted, PM. I thought of saying something along those lines, but figured I’d been rude enough for one while…
I do too so understand art! So nyah!
Its even worse than the arrogance, its the assumption that he understands art better than everyone else, at the same time as making a bold claim that is hardly commonly accepted amongst those with “much understanding of art”.
“The whole value of art lies in its complete disregard for the facts. It is not that art must be false, though this often helps – it is that art is supremely indifferent to the whole question of whether something is true or false. Art aims entirely at beauty, and beauty is orthogonal to truth.”
But I thought that religion as art was making what we might call metaphorical truths,
“there is one respect in which religion is more truthful than science – in its depiction of the long ing for transcendent meaning that lies in man’s heart. No scientific theory has ever done justice to this longing, and in this respect religions paint more faithful pictures of the human mind. My kind of atheism sees religions as presenting potent metaphors and images to represent human aspirations for transcendence.”
So “art is supremely indifferent to the whole question of whether something is true or false. Art aims entirely at beauty, and beauty is orthogonal to truth” yet “there is one respect in which religion is more truthful than science…No scientific theory has ever done justice to this longing, and in this respect religions paint more faithful pictures of the human mind”
Is that a coherent thesis?
Uh…let’s see…yes, because art is indifferent to truth, but religion isn’t, because it does justice to this longing. Of course, that’s all bollocks, but it can be made coherent if you look at it aslant enough.
But “In other words, religions are beautiful things, but their beauty can only be truly appreciated when they are seen as human creations – as works of art.”
So art is indifferent to truth, and religion isn’t, because “religion is more truthful than science”, but religion is art. Oops.
Yeah, well, that’s true. If religion=art, then he is contradicting himself. Oops.
I must be getting a bit confused here.
Dylan Evans says about atheism:
“It’s not a belief, it’s not a religion, it’s not a mirror-image of religion only with minus signs where the pluses should be. It’s just not believing there is a god, that’s all.”
I may not be all that bright, but for the life of me, I cannot see the difference between not believing there is a god and believing that there is no god. And if there is no difference, then atheism is as much a belief system as any other position for which no objective proof exists, albeit one that has far fewer rules than most religions.