It’s all myth, you see
This is a gleaming example of bad thinking. Alex Stein on Hitchens on God. He quotes the very passage on the guy who believes the story about the graves opening in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, and the occupants walking the streets, that I commented on last month – and then he gets it completely wrong.
“He replies that as a Christian he does believe it, though as a historian he has his doubts. I realise that I am limited here: I can usually think myself into an opponent’s position, but this is something I can’t imagine myself saying let alone thinking.” This inability to imagine fatally flaws much of Hitchens’ thesis. The argument presented by the reverend may seem incoherent. But it doesn’t take much effort to understand that he is presenting a perfectly reasonable way of looking at the world…The reverend accepts that it is almost impossible to prove the historicity of the story Hitchens refers to. To be less kind, it simply didn’t happen. But he doesn’t need to shape his moral universe according to what did or didn’t happen. Instead, he does this as a mythologian, in this case, as a purveyor of Christian myths. For him, the accuracy of the events recorded is insignificant when compared with the contribution the myth makes to the Christian view of the world.
The only problem with that is that it’s not what the reverend said. The reverend could have said that, but he didn’t. He said something genuinely different, and it doesn’t just seem incoherent, it is incoherent, and it is certainly not a perfectly reasonable way of looking at the world. Why does Alex Stein – apparently not a believer himself – feel compelled to translate what the reverend said into something less contradictory and absurd? It is not reasonable to believe something as a Christian while having doubts as a historian. If the historian’s doubts are rational and reasonable (as they of course are, since there’s a notable lack of genuine evidence that dead people have ever walked any streets), they should apply across the board; to have different epistemic rules ‘as a Christian’ is not reasonable, it’s the opposite of reasonable, and Alex Stein is being unreasonable in pretending otherwise.
[I]s the reverend’s position really so far from Hitchens’ own? However much he might protest to the contrary, it would be a mistake to define Hitchens as an ultra-rationalist. For Hitchens has frequently and vigorously promoted the idea that religion has been replaced, not by science, but by literature…Literature is as antithetical to science as is religion.
No it isn’t. Literature is literature, it is avowedly an invention, a fiction. Religion makes truth claims about the world that we are expected (often commanded) to believe. Literature is not in the least antithetical to science, because it genuinely doesn’t make competing (and absurd) claims; religion does, even though some of its defenders pretend it doesn’t as long as the spotlight of skeptical inquiry is on it.
Is the Guardian running a contest for who can write the silliest article defending religion and attacking atheism? If so, what for? What’s its point? That clarity of thought is dangerous while confusion and muddle are like vitamins?
I just read the article, and what Alex Stein calls a “sophisticated person of faith” seems to be what Hitchins, Dawkins, and other atheists would call a “humanist using religious metaphor.”
Atheists recognize, understand and use symbolic metaphors all the time. Darn right they don’t somehow “conflict” with science. That sort of clumsy straw-man dualism between science and literature tells a lot more about the clunky literalness of the person promoting it than it does about metaphysical naturalists. It harks back to the old canard that atheists only believe in “physical things you can hold, feel, and measure,” so emotions and abstractions like love or liberty must be incomprehensible to them.
If God is “real” to you in the same way Cupid or the Little Engine That Could is “real” – a mythical concept which, while not literally true, illustrates principles, values, and ideals — then you’re not discovering or practicing some higher, more refined understanding of spirituality. You’re an atheist in love with poetry — and confused about what it means to really believe in God.
“he is presenting a perfectly reasonable way of looking at the world…”
Excuse me, but no he bloody isn’t, unless you’re going to allow such free-for-all nonsense as “I believe the Yeti, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster all get together for tea on the 2nd Thursday of each month regardless of any proof to the contrary” to be “perfectly reasonable”, too..
“The reverend accepts that it is almost impossible to prove the historicity of the story Hitchens refers to. To be less kind, it simply didn’t happen. But he doesn’t need to shape his moral universe according to what did or didn’t happen. Instead, he does this as a mythologian, in this case, as a purveyor of Christian myths. For him, the accuracy of the events recorded is insignificant when compared with the contribution the myth makes to the Christian view of the world.”
Riiiiight. So it’s fine for religious ‘moral’ codes, that are supposed to be divinely-given rules & standards for all of us to adhere to, to be derived entirely from what the author admits is the historical equivalent of The Prose Edda?
Anyone know if this comment-may-be-free-but-rational-thought-clearly-costs-too-much contributor, Alex Stein is a po-mo apologist, by any chance?
Hah!
I don’t know, but I did notice one commenter at comment-may-be-free-but-rational-thought-clearly-costs-too-much saying the piece is full of po mo drivel – so maybe he is.
Good point about the moral code. What moral code, exactly, do we derive from the myth that dead people walked the streets of Jerusalem? To drive carefully, or what?
Ah, I missed the part where Stein calls the Christian apologist a “mythologian, in this case … a purveyor of Christian myths.”
Tell me, if Christopher Hitchins or Richard Dawkins had referred to theologians as “mytholgians,” wouldn’t his critics be howling and whining and beating their heads at how incredibly rude and crude he was? They’d be waving the word around like a bloody rag, the proof positive that atheists are disrespectful of the religious. But say the exact same thing with admiration in your tone and you’re apparently one of the insiders who “gets” and “understands” religion.
“For him, the accuracy of the events recorded[!] is insignificant when compared with the contribution the myth [that graves opened in Jerusalem and the former occupants walked the streets] makes to the Christian view of the world.”
It’s a rare sentence that contains so much nonsense (not to mention creepiness).
I want to know what happened next. Did they have to go back to their graves after they were let out on leave, or did they go straight to heaven? And what about the bad ones? When they were doing the undead thing, were they raping and murdering?
“It’s just the usual bait-and-switch.”
Yes this is the best way of describing the “There are terribly sophisticated proofs of an abstract God / so I pray to Jesus” move.
“Is the Guardian running a contest for who can write the silliest article defending religion and attacking atheism? “
Have you read Tristam Hunt’s piece yet? It’s gobsmackingly awful in my opinion. I stand in awe of the man, he seems to have achieved the perfect storm of braying, gormless, tendentious, posturing theobollocks.
dirigible — A link to Hunt’s piece would have been nice, but I take your word for it that it’s devoid of all gorm.
Yers, I linked to Hunt’s piece in News. That’s probably one reason I thought there must be a contest going on – the Graun just pours this stuff out.
Ya know, I only read the Grauniad when you link to it OB. So, from my perspective, their perpetual idiocy wouldn’t be a problem if YOU didn’t keep pointing it out to me!
Of course, I don’t have to click through to the articles… Or even read B&W in the first place. But that would be accepting personal responsibility, which would be positively un-American – or at least un-Amurrkin. So it’s all your fault, OB!
In one of Paul’s epistles, he says something like “If Jesus did not rise from the dead then our faith is in vain”. It’s not reasonable to interpret this any way but literally: Jesus had to literally rise from dead or else there is no point to Christianity. It’s very interesting to see people trying to get around this.
Sorry, G!
But still – the Graun is kind of interesting (in a road accident sort of way) – because it’s a kind of right-on paper in some sense. In US terms it’s more like the Nation than it is like any newspaper – yet it is a newspaper, and correspondingly more influential (or at least pervasive).
Sastra, that last paragraph of your first comment needs to be engraved in stone somewhere. (Steins forehead would be favourite.)