How thoughtful?
Norm commented on Julian’s atheism piece a couple of days ago, and when I read it my attention snagged on another claim in Julian’s article.
For me, atheism’s roots are in a sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead us. That means the real enemy is not religion as such, but any kind of system of belief that does not respect these limits on our thinking. For that reason, I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent believers…
Hmm. I’m not sure what that means. Are thoughtful, intelligent believers ones who respect the limits on our thinking set by soberly assessing where reason and evidence lead us? But if they are, then are they really believers? If they’re not, are they really thoughtful and intelligent?
I think there’s a lurking and unacknowledged oxymoron there – or maybe it’s an elision. Believers can be thoughtful and intelligent but with an exception carved out for their belief. Believers, as such, aren’t thoughtful and intelligent all the way down. That’s in the nature of the word. It would sound odd to say ‘I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent, credulous people,’ but believers are by definition credulous. To the extent that they are credulous – they’re not thoughtful and intelligent enough.
This is perhaps another case where the special status of religion confuses things. It would sound odd to say ‘I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent astrologers’ – or homeopaths or Wiccans or Holocaust deniers. In those cases we would recognize from the outset that there had to be a big hole in the thoughtfulness and intelligence in question, but we’re more reluctant to see it in the case of religion.
The background idea seems to be that the two are in balance – that thoughtful intelligent believers and unbelievers are much the same, they just happen to differ on this one point. But that’s wrong. Believers are making a mistake that non-believers don’t make. They’re making a mistake even if there is a god, because we have no real evidence that there is a god, so it’s a mistake to take anyone’s word for it on the basis of nothing.
Irshad Manji is an example of the thoughtful intelligent believer who is nonetheless not thoughtful enough, because she says proudly that her faith in Allah is unshakeable. That’s not thoughtful, it’s the reverse of thoughtful. I think Manji is terrific in a lot of ways – but that does nothing to patch over the hole in her thinking.
The fact that some religious people are otherwise intelligent and thoughtful only makes it worse that they persist in their delusions. They have sufficient knowledge and intelligence to make such beliefs untenable, but they simply refuse to apply it consistently.
Actually, I’ve known some universally thoughtful and intelligent (rather than just limited-scope thoughtful & intelligent) Wiccans/neopagans. A significant proportion of neopagans (perhaps a majority, perhaps only a large-ish minority – hard to tell) do not in fact believe in the independent existence of gods or magic or whatever. Instead, they look at the concepts of gods (and their various bailiwicks) as being symbolic of various elements of human psychology and human social life, and view their rituals not as changing the external world but as changing the participants. (Think of “magic” as self-guided cognitive behavioral therapy and you won’t be too terribly far off the mark.) A flat-out majority of neopagans utterly and clearly reject faith and dogmatism, not looking at their religion as a set of beliefs that are true (or even amenable to categorization as true or false), but as a set of practices that work for them in some very personal way. Buddhists (especially Western-adopted Buddhists and Zen Buddhists) and Taoists have the same faith-rejecting tendencies.
I see no need for any of these conceptual frameworks myself, but I occasionally feel compelled to point out that faith is the problem, not religion, for two reasons: (1) Not all religions demand or expect faith, and not all religious people have faith beliefs; and (2) many non-religious belief systems (alternative medicine, conspiracy theories, rigid political ideologies, various forms of denialism) are very much or entirely dependent on faith.
(That said, there is also a sizable proportion of modern pagans who are complete New Age flakes whose absurd beliefs and behavior deserve any amount of derision anyone would care to heap on them – and a lot of those call themselves Wiccans. Amusingly, many ex-Christian pagans unconsciuosly impose patterns of dogmatism and social control in their various pagan groups – the very same things that supposedly caused them to leave Christianity in the first place. Most such groups don’t last very long…)
Yeah I know that about Buddhists – didn’t really know it about Wiccans. I know some Buddhists but no Wiccans. I should change that to something else then…
I’m not sure: if you read the debate between Russell and Father Copleston (I put a link in the on-going argument with Beale in the TPM blog or you can find it in Google), it’s hard not to categorize Copleston as “thoughtful and intelligent”. By the way, Copleston uses purely philosophical arguments for God’s existence (never faith) and does score some points against Russell, who of course is an excellent debater. Copleston’s arguments for the existence of God are sophistic, but they took a lot of thought and intelligence.
http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p20.htm
Here’s the link.
But if Copleston uses purely philosophical arguments then he’s not arguing as a ‘believer’ so my post isn’t really about him. Anyway I didn’t quite say that believers were not thoughtful and intelligent, but that (to the extent that they are believers) there is a hole in their thoughtfulness and intelligence.
Technically speaking, you are correct:
Copleston claims that the existence of God can be proved by logical arguments and unlike Beale, he avoids Jesus, the resurrection, the trinity all together in his debate with Russell.
However, he is using logic to justify his beliefs (he’s a Jesuit) and might be the type of person Julian refers to when he talks about “thoughtful, intelligent believers”. I agree that most believers lack Copleston’s logical skills: Thomas Aquinas probably would have gone into computer programming instead of theology if he had been born in the last 60 years. Copleston is Thomas Aquinas born, well, not in the last 60 years, but probably in the 20th century.
I’m going to defend Julian on this point.
I do think that there are thoughtful, intelligent religious believers. Someone like Copleston was a “believer” in the most obvious sense that he believed in the existence of God, and in many other religious doctrines. There’s no doubt (in my mind) that he was both thoughtful and intelligent. I’d say the same of many moderate Anglicans, and so on, whom I know and in some cases consider friends.
Can these people justify their positions all the way down to the point where they are arguing from premises that I’d accept? Almost certainly not. When I was busy losing my faith over 30 years ago, I thought that Bertrand Russell essentially won that famouse debate, and showed that Copleston’s arguments relied on assumptions that he could not reasonably expect a non-believer to accept.
May these believers be blind to the absurdity of some of the things that they’d have to believe in order to sustain their total belief systems consistently with empirical reality? Very likely. Familiarity with the core ideas – plus a feeling of subjective intuitive certainty – may have that effect. I think that’s the main objection to religion.
Have they thought through their belief systems to the extent of uncovering situations where they are condemned either to be inconsistent or to embrace something that would seem absurd to an outsider? In many cases, probably not.
But I think those are unreasonably strong requirements for someone to be accepted as thoughtful and reasonable. We wouldn’t apply such strong requirements in other contexts.
E.g., people who think that there is an objective morality (in a strong, metaphysical sense of “objective”) are also unlikely to meet such requirements. There is no evidence that any such thing exists; it can lead to absurdity if you try to defend it; some people never really think it through; and so on.
Or perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it’s the people (like me) who think that something like JL Mackie’s error theory of morality is correct who fail to be sufficiently intelligent and thoughtful: we lack sufficiently good evidence that commonsense assumptions are wrong; we haven’t thought it through far enough to see our mistake; we believe things that (to many other people) seem absurd; or whatever.
Yet, surely there are reasonable and thoughtful people on both sides of this argument!
I think we should use realistic standards of reasonableness and thoughtfulness.
Also, I don’t think it’s useful to narrow the definition of “believer” in a way that excludes people who are thoughtful and intelligent by ordinary standards. It looks to me as if there’s a fairly clear set of people who do fall under the description “thoughtful, intelligent believer”. The boundaries of the set may be a bit fuzzy, but surely not hopelessly so.
At one point in the above, I wrote “reasonable and thoughtful” by mistake. The actual sentence that I wrote was, I still think, correct, but of course intelligence is not the same as reasonableness. Maybe there’s a sense in which some believers are being unreasonable or even irrational – or something in the same ball-park as these – even if they are intelligent and thoughtful by our usual standards of intelligence and thoughtfulness.
I’m glad G chimed in on the Wiccan point. I can back that up with personal experience of my own.
Is it the IDEA of a guiding set of principles that does it?
I once, semi-seriously suggested, to a supposed “Norse” pagan that, although an atheist, I had time for the idea of Pallas Athena Nike.
Goddess of knowledge, truth and victory….
Are thoughtful, intelligent believers ones who respect the limits on our thinking set by soberly assessing where reason and evidence lead us? But if they are, then are they really believers?
Sure, I’d say so. So long as they understand that their beliefs aren’t founded in reason, and so long as they’re willing to talk about whether their beliefs can be either supported or negated through reason and evidence. Having a belief that’s not supported by reason and evidence doesn’t mean you’re not thoughtful and intelligent. It doesn’t even necessarily mean you’re not thoughtful and intelligent about that belief. The test is if you’re willing to discuss and adjust your beliefs if the evidence against them (not just the lack of evidence for them) mounts up high enough, and if their ethical consequences are dubious.
I *think* what Norm is getting at is that beliefs about religion aren’t quite the same as those about (say) astrology or the Holocaust, for the simple reason that astrology and the Holocaust are very susceptible to empirical disproof and proof respectively, in a way that metaphysical concepts just aren’t.
Basically, I agree with Russell Blackford, that the definition of “thoughtful and intelligent” OB is applying is a bit too rigorous. Most of us have beliefs of some sort or another that we can’t justify all the way down to first principles.
I can’t define a thoughtful and intelligent believer but I know one when I see one. Usually they are believers because of their upbringing. The believer part of them is typically more benign and hidden than someone who came to religion as an adult. Their morality comes from their own projection of their better selves onto their religion and not from any scriptures or sacred texts. It is easy to find common ground with them on issues like women’s rights and gay marriage because their “god” is subservient to them.
Well, like Eric, I’m not completely sure where I come down on this either. I expressed the idea somewhat tentatively in the post, or to put it more pejoratively, I hedged almost as much as Mark Vernon did on quantum divinity. But still – I think the word ‘believer’ is in a certain amount of tension with the word ‘thoughtful.’ If the believer is genuinely doubting, that’s different, but then Julian didn’t stipulate that.
Another good example of the type is William Sloane Coffin – who was a hero of my brother’s from the time he knew him as the chaplain at Andover, and thus also a hero of mine. Certainly he was liberal, and thoughtful…and yet…I once heard him say in an interview, with considerable passion, that God didn’t want his (WSC’s) son to be killed in a car crash, and that he grieved just as much as the parents did. He was rejecting the idea that God does everything for a reason, and thus rejecting the idea that God does everything, and thus defending a non-punitive God. It was moving, and liberal…but nevertheless I had to wonder how he knew, and how he knew he knew. It was better dogma than the punitive variety but it was still dogma.
Mind you – I would nevertheless want to engage with him, so in that sense I too agree with Julian. But then a believer as thoughtful as Coffin would not refuse to engage with ‘new’ atheists, so in that sense I disagree with Julian’s claim that new atheism makes such engagement impossible. I disagree with his equation of ‘new’ atheism with ‘demonizing all religion.’
OB: “It would sound odd to say ‘I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent, credulous people,’ but believers are by definition credulous. To the extent that they are credulous – they’re not thoughtful and intelligent enough.”
A good start to a thread with a most interesting set of comments.
There is a minimal list of acceptances required if one is to be any sort of believer. For Abrahamics, it begins with a belief in one universal omnipotent and omniscient God, and those who do not accept God on those terms are usually moving towards an exit. (I am not sure about Coffin, but the words you attribute to him indicate that he was shaky and flaky on that, Christianity’s most fundamental take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Follow the implications and God is left standing there pathetically saying “if only I’d known I would have been able to save him.”)
The list of Western Christianity’s central propositions is routinely recited in the Apostle’s Creed. (http://www.carm.org/christianity/creeds-and-confessions/apostles-creed ) To my mind one could not publicly disagree (God alone knows what Christians believe in private) with any one of its propositions without stirring up a lot of trouble, because so much follows logically from the dumping of any one of them.
Yet I dare say that exhaustive checklists of such propositions could be prepared by scholars from any of the various holy writs, and one would probably find that no two professed believers would answer identically on all of them. (eg Do you believe that a witch should be allowed to live? Yes/No.)
Believers tend to be both selective and only partly informed in their faith. Authorities have always been concerned to stabilise doctrine and belief/acceptance and minimise internal squabbling over it, which can be divisive. But the tendency of ‘believers’ to cherry pick is reflected well in Church history, particularly in the ‘creeds’. The Nicene Creed (325 AD) for example, was a response to the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ. It was revised at the Second Ecumenical Council (381 AD) as a response to the Macedonian heresy, which denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. That is, in the Fourth Century there were Christians wandering around the place saying that Christ was nothing so special, others saying the same for the Holy Spirit, and some probably saying both.
Pretty incredible stuff. Glad all that’s over.
Of course, someone like Copleston would delight in engaging with the new atheists, just as he enjoyed debating with Russell. That doesn’t mean that Copleston doubted the existence of God, but that he liked to debate. Or perhaps he did doubt privately. Maybe that’s why he enjoyed debating Russell: he secretly felt more comfortable with Russell than he did with his fellow priests. I looked Copleston up in Wikipedia and his history of philosophy has 9 or 10 or 11 volumes and includes people like Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre, even Russell. According to the Wikipedia article (which may have been written by Copleston’s publishers, although no one has questioned it so far), Copleston’s account of philosophers he disagrees with is scrupulously impartial. Maybe what Julian is saying is that there are believers so thoughtful and intelligent, like your Mr. Sloane Coffin or like Copleston, that it is a pleasure to sit down and converse with them.
Ian, you said:
Not so. Many people spend their lives right there, without the metaphysical beliefs you prescribe. That’s why I dither between Julian and Ophelia, and perhaps why Ophelia dithers too. You have no right to prescribe someone’s beliefs, and this is where, in all fairness, the four horsemen (with the exception, perhaps, of Dennett) are wrong. You don’t demolish religion by proving, in a nice easy way, that there is no god. Many religious people have known this for generations. Read Schleiermacher, for example. Religious ‘belief’ is sometimes much more subtle than that.
Perhaps, when you come to think of it, such non-believing ‘believers’ are a way out of the maze of religious belief – you say that they are at the exit, after all – and engaging with religious believers as Julian proposes is the best way to help unbelief along.
Amos, I read every single volume of Copleston’s history of philosophy long ago, when the world was very young. I no longer have them in my library, which has chaged clothes many times since then.
He’s not my William Sloane Coffin by the way, he ended up rather famous, as an opponent of the war in Vietnam and the archetypally liberal chaplain at Yale. Doonesbury’s Reverend Scott Sloane is a not at all veiled portrait.
My apologies. Of course, William Sloane Coffin was a known opponent of the War in Vietnam. I don’t receive Doonesbury cartoons in my local newspaper, and I’m too out of touch with U.S. culture to understand the subtle humor and cultural criticism that they communicate. It seems that established religion took a sharp turn towards the right, as did many other institutions, about 30 years ago, with the rise to power of Pope John Paul, Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher. I recall seating next to a Catholic priest in a flight between Brazil and Chile exactly 30 years ago, explaining to him how messed up my life was and he telling me about how messed up the lives of many saints had been. I can’t imagine having the same conversation with a priest these days, and probably, whoever replaced or will replace Sloane Coffin at Yale will be far less open-minded.
Eric: Greetings.
I am not prescribing anything for anyone, but in my view Christianity without God is a three-wheeler car, good mainly for a laugh.
There will be for some time to come I think a lot of Schleiermachers and Bishop John Robinsons preaching and scribbling away out there, trying to square the circle and reconcile ancestral belief with enlightened rational enquiry. Churches can hang on as social clubs, with their leaders ignorant of modern theology or else most reluctant to draw the attention of their flocks to it out of fear it may scare them off. Rudolf Augstein’s ‘Jesus Son of Man’ is an excellent book IMHO, and begins with a quote from Hans Conzelmann: ‘The church lives in practice on the fact that the conclusions of scientific research into the life of Jesus are not made public.’ Augstein, as you are no doubt aware, wrote his whole book as an elaboration on that one quote.
My wife is quite religious, and a Presbyterian. I am not religious at all. But we get along very well and do not engage in religious argument, as such interests are relatively unimportant beside the multitude we do share. She often asks me to accompany her to church, which I do, a few times a year and involving two distinct congregations 600 km apart. She is not a singer, while I am. So mine is often the loudest voice in the congregation. I like to sing the hymns as I did when I was a fervent teenage Anglican believer a few years back. Really I sing them for old times’ sake. (How did I come to pass through Anglicanism with a name like mine? A femme fatale was involved, and I’ll leave it at that.)
Last year my wife and I went for a change to the Anglican cathedral in Goulburn, NSW, where we both took Holy Communion. For me, that was a real blast from the past.
After reading your post I googled and bingo! a whole new world opened up. There is certainly some stuff going on out there. But none of it has any chance of reaching any sort of stability or intellectual coherence in my view, though I found a hilarious blogsite post at http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2009/01/toilet-paper-preacher.html .
They can try all the patch-ups and makeovers they like on traditional religion, but it either finishes up like a second-rate rock concert or becomes a wilting postmodernist exercise looking for its own point.
No. There’s only one way to be a Christian, and it’s all there in the Apostle’s Creed and Martin Luther’s hymn. If I was one, that’s the kind I would be; the kind my wife is. But I grant you, modern Christianity is a cathedral with more exit doors than altars.
The ex-Christian ever-seeking writer that I have the most time for is the late Alan Watts. His ‘Tao – the Watercourse Way’ is quite brilliant IMHO. But some bastard pinched my copy.
What I googled was atheist minister. Why that dropped out, I do not know.
Well, Ian, I read Alan Watts years ago, and found him much too ‘religious’ for my taste. But Tillichian existentialist Christianity (borrowed by JAT Robinson) make a lot of sense. And then, of course, there were all the philosophers of religion and theologians who took the later Wittgenstein (of On Certainty and Culture and Value very seriously. I think you prescribe too rigorously. Such believers may be standing at the exit, but many of them do not walk through. It is useful to engage with them, although I suspect that, in the recent turn to fairly orthodox theology, they must be feeling pretty lonely by now.
Interestingly, the site Debunking Christianity is an example of what happens when fundamentalist Christians become fundamentalist Christian atheists, and argue every detail of Christian belief so finely that it becomes stultifying. They can’t let go of all the little beliefs that held them captive for so long.
Greg: Faith and reason. ‘Twas ever thus.
Eric: Christianity is a very cerebral religion, and its contending schools of thought did much to create the western Enlightenment. It is after all trying to answer some pretty big questions.
Its emotionalism on the other hand tends to get to the pink candy stage pretty quickly, at least in my experience. People for a variety of reasons inherit it or get onto it as an operating system, and it gets many through life effectively enough.
There are real dangers when people lose it or have it destroyed for them by argumentative rationalists, who may of course have quite laudable intentions. I think that is recognised by psychologists.
Like MSDOS, it was cobbled together in a bit of a hurry out of bits and pieces lying around that fitted together reasonably well as long as the joints weren’t examined too closely. As I suggested before, no two Christians really have the same set of beliefs, with the cherry picking today being the other side of the cobbling yesterday. Those who want to knock God out of it entirely might just as well bulldoze the whole thing and start again from scratch. Otherwise, it’s just more cobbling.
For the learning and practising of some things, like the martial arts and the playing of musical instruments, intellectualism and rationalism can easily get in the way. It is commonly better to do what the animals do: watch, listen and copy, without any intermediate verbalisation. That to me is the great insight of ‘religions’ like Zen and Taoism, which Watts sets out rather well.
I agree with everything you say Ian, except for the last bit about bulldozing the whole shebang and starting over. Creating a form of life from scratch is very difficult, and very artificial. In many cases it is dangerous and Jim Jones and the Waco wackos show. That’s probably why people like Don Cupitt stick with Christianity, despite having in large measure deonstructed it.
This does cause problems, because people who purport to destroy the foundations of Christianity in belief in a god do not touch those who ‘believe’ in this more attenuated way. Do these ‘moderates’ contribute to the problem of religious extremism? I don’t think so, though that is the position adopted by the ‘new atheists’ by and large. I would have thought that a liberal wing would make it easier for people to move from faith through liberal forms of believing to unbelief. In this sense, it would be better to engage liberals in conversation rather than to point out that there position is unsustainable.
“For the learning and practising of some things, like the martial arts and the playing of musical instruments, intellectualism and rationalism can easily get in the way.”
Which, as I understand it, is not because i and r are bad or destructive in some way, but simply because different parts of the brain are involved in the two categories. We walk, dance, skate best (once we’ve learned how) when we do it unconsciously, because unconscious processing is very effective. In other words the insight has an explicable physical basis. Right?
“In the town black-turbaned outrunners wield wooden sticks to clear a path for a Taleban convoy of pick-up trucks.”
Are these pick-up trucks of the kind, that are used by the fundies to send women to their death beds? Do they carry in them, the equipment that is used to bury the women – up to their heads in sand?
This is a very interesting conversation about the convolutions of modern belief, but the thread of the conversation seems to have wandered (as these things do). I don’t think anything anyone has said in this thread quite gets at the inherent contradiction in Julian’s claim that triggered OB’s question.
So far, so good. But then Julian goes on to talk about engaging with thoughtful, intelligent believers – which contradicts these sentences somewhat. The question really isn’t whether believers can be thoughtful and intelligent, the question is whether those who can properly be characterized as “believers” can be said to do anything remotely resembling “sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead us” – and of course, they cannot.
Belief cannot result from sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead. Julian is correct that the problem isn’t religion as such – it’s faith, which requires rejecting reason and evidence to embrace belief. If atheism springs from the epistemological virtues of sobriety and modesty, faith oozes forth from epistemologically intemperate and wanton minds. So in what way, exactly, does Julian want to “engage” the more thoughtful and intelligent believers, if not to persuade them to eschew epistemological vice and embrace virtue? And is that not just what the so-called New Atheists are attempting to do in their various ways? (Indeed, in ways so various that they shouldn’t really be lumped together the way Julian does.)
I think Julian’s real objection is a matter of strategy; he thinks that straightforward arguments against the existence of gods are too crass, unsubtle, rude and/or crude. But too crude for what purpose? As I suggested in the other thread, the primary aim of most vocal atheists is not to change the minds of true believers, but to carve out a safe social space for non-believers so that borderline believers and secret non-believers and seriously questioning believers have someplace to go. In that task, the kind of brass Julian objects to seems quite productive in a way that a more conciliatory approach would not and could not be.
Maybe Julian thinks a more conciliatory approach would be useful to persuade true believers, in which I suspect he is simply wrong. Or perhaps he thinks that approach is useful for some other purpose – in which case I’d like him to come out and say what that purpose is, and explain why different approaches cannot be useful for different purposes side by side. But he can’t be bothered with any of that – or to provide actual evidence for the accusations he makes against the people he’s writing about, or to actually read the books he’s criticizing, or…
Just one stipulation, for purposes of clarity and being on same page etc –
“Belief cannot result from sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead.”
I take it you mean by that “belief” in the sense it has in Julian’s “thoughtful, intelligent believers” – that is, religious belief, “faith,” as opposed to belief in general – since of course belief in general can be perfectly rational and can result from sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead. I’m sure that’s what you meant, just wanted to point it out for clarity.
OB: “In other words the insight has an explicable physical basis. Right?” Completely. Playing a musical instrument or executing a martial arts technique should, according to many schools of thought, get to the stage where it is like riding a bicycle: something one does automatically without needing to think about it, and often while thinking about something else entirely. That is one of the reasons instructors in martial arts classes forbid talk among the students on the mat.
Yet the whole process is still a subject for rational examination by external observers.
Eric: Prior to the Reformation the Jim Joneses seem to have been sat on pretty effectively by Rome, and no doubt many of them met the usual fate of heretics, except for the odd crazy suicidal event like the Childrens’ Crusade. After the Reformation the religious scene gradually turned into open slather for sectarians, and though rationalism in its rise was steadily eroding the foundations of traditional Christianity, wild preachers like Jones and their flocks of the gullible don’t seem to have become more frequent; unless you include fanatics like Hitler in the list.
G: Point taken, though there is a PhD for some philosophy or psychology student in the wandering of blog threads. Probably written already.
Well, Ian, I know there were evenings when I was wandering blog threads when I should have been writing my dissertation. But it’s done now, so I can meander B&W guilt-free…
And indeed, OB, I did mean religious belief in particular – but I perhaps relied overmuch on context for that.
:-)
JB: “For me, atheism’s roots are in a sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead us. That means the real enemy is not religion as such, but any kind of system of belief that does not respect these limits on our thinking.”
I interpret this to mean, being too sure that our reason and evidence have lead us to a true and/or correct conclusion.
This affliction, in my experience, affects “athiests” as well as “believers”.
So Keith, what is lacking in sobriety and modesty about the conclusion that no good evidence has been presented why anyone should believe in the existence of any of the god or gods with the properties usually attributed to them?
‘This affliction, in my experience, affects “athiests” as well as “believers”.’
Well that can mean anything. It can mean just that you know atheists who are dogmatic about various things, which seems quite uncontentious (I don’t know the atheists you know, and plenty of people are generally dogmatic, and so on). Or at the other extreme it can mean that atheists in general are just as likely to be dogmatic as believers in general. I think that is contentious, not least because it is a sweeping claim that it would be difficult to back up.
I think a lot of people who like to say how awful atheists are rely on this kind of ambiguity.
OB: “It can mean just that you know atheists who are dogmatic about various things, which seems quite uncontentious…”
And there are issues related to religion — such as abortion and euthenasia — where athiests may be more dogmatic than believers.
OB: “Or at the other extreme it can mean that atheists in general are just as likely to be dogmatic as believers in general. I think that is contentious, not least because it is a sweeping claim that it would be difficult to back up.”
I wouldn’t make a claim that extreme but I can very vaguely remember surveys that may suggest that, although believers may tend to be more dogmatic than athiests, it is a trend rather than a clearcut distinction.
Followup, see link:
http://bhascience.blogspot.com/2008/10/atheists-are-more-intelligent-but-does.html
Frankly, I think that’s just plain horseshit. For one, every atheist I know MAKES ARGUMENTS in support of their opinions on such matters – and making reasoned arguments in support of one’s position is quite the opposite of dogmatic. Religious believers with strong positions on these matters, in contrast, seem to rely entirely on first principles which are not open to any debate or argument, and are not themselves the product of any discernible argument. For example: “A zygote has equivalent moral status to a human being because the invisible magic man in the sky done put a human soul in it” is neither an argument nor a generally acceptable premise on which to base an argument – even when the Pope says it in prettied-up Latin.
Also, being very insistent that believers’ moral certitude does not give them the right to use the power of the state to force others to act in accord with their beliefs is not dogmatic – it is principled.
On both points, Mr. McGuinness, you have demonstrated without doubt what your prior comments led me to suspect (but I gave you the benefit of a doubt) – you have no frickin’ idea what the word “dogmatic” means. Perhaps you should stop using it so freely.
Notice how carefully, not to say evasively, not to say framingly, K McG put it – atheists [the word is atheists, not athiests] may be more dogmatic than believers. Well anyone may be anything, but is there any reason to think that atheists actually are more dogmatic about abortion and euthanasia than believers are? I would say no, for the reasons G mentions.
G: I know quite well what the word “dogmatic” means, so I don’t really know what you think I have demonstrated, or why.
O: You seem to have made rather a lot out of a simple spelling mistake.
Also, I did not (and do not think I ever have) claimed that atheists, as a group, are more dogmatic than believers.
I do, however, think that some atheists may be as dogmatic on some issues as believers. I do not think that the simple lack of belief in god indicates that any individual is likely to more rational on other issues than someone who has such a belief.
This is why, in my opinion, the suggested use of the term “bright” was such a bad idea. It suggests that (what I regard as) clear thinking on one particular issue necessarily transfers onto others.
In brief, knowing that someone is an atheist does not incline me to think that they are necessarily going to be more rational or reasonable than a believer.
K: What lot did I make out of a simple spelling mistake? I pointed it out, that’s all. Is that a lot?
Of course ‘some atheists may be as dogmatic on some issues as believers’ – that’s such a broad and hedged statement that it’s not really worth making (unless one is talking to people who really do think that no atheist can possibly be as dogmatic on some issues as believers – and do you have any reason to think that applies to anyone here?).