Year: 2010

Gary Gutting is a philosopher of religion at Notre Dame, a Catholic university in the US; he writes for the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. He has a long post saying what’s wrong with Dawkins’s arguments for the strong improbability of god. It’s worth reading because it’s more than just shouting or hand-waving or tone trolling or border disputing or last Thursdayism or science has nothing to say about the supernatural-ism. That’s not to say it’s convincing, but at least there’s something there.

He addresses Dawkins’s argument (not unique to him, of course) that a god that created the universe would have to be even more complex than the universe, and thus would require explanation even more than the universe does, so it doesn’t explain the universe after all, so it’s not a good argument for the existence of god. (That’s not how Gutting puts it, it’s how I do.)

Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God’s complexity either assumes that God is material or, at least, that God is complex in the same general way that material things are (having many parts related in complicated ways to one another). The traditional religious view, however, is that God is neither material nor composed of immaterial parts (whatever that might mean). Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.

Okay…but what good is that? What good is a view, what good is “he is said to be”? It’s just saying. Anyone can say, but that doesn’t mean anyone else should believe what is said.

Obviously, there are great difficulties in understanding how God could be simple in this way. But philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God.

Okay, but I don’t really see why anyone should bother, given that there’s no real reason to pay attention to the claim in the first place. Saying “God is simple” is an ad hoc way to get around the “god would have to be more complex” objection, but it’s not a claim with any apparent relationship to observable reality. That means that intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about this legless claim don’t strike an outsider as all that valuable.

Making Dawkins’ case in any convincing way would require detailed engagement not only with Swinburne but also with other treatments by recent philosophers such as Christopher Hughes’ “A Complex Theory of a Simple God.” (For a survey of recent work on the topic, see William Vallicella’s article, “Divine Simplicity,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Okay, I had a look.

According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures in that he is devoid of any complexity or composition, whether physical or metaphysical. Besides lacking spatial and temporal parts, God is free of matter/form composition, potency/act composition, and existence/essence composition. There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes.

Okay, but again, this is just dogma. It’s just saying. I’m sure it’s internally coherent, but there’s no reason to believe it in the first place. Without any reason to believe it in the first place, it’s hard to care whether it’s internally coherent or not. Don’t you find?

 God is what he has. As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature. And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence. This is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). It is represented not only in classical Christian theology, but also in Jewish, Greek, and Islamic thought. It is to be understood as an affirmation of God’s absolute transcendence of creatures.

Okay – that all makes sense if you believe in this god in the first place. But if you don’t, it just sounds like people saying fancy things about something they know absolutely nothing about. It sounds grand, that kind of thing, but it’s just saying. Just saying is not convincing to outsiders.

You need a better first step. I already know that theology sounds explanatory and serious to insiders, but you need a better first step to convince outsiders. Science and other empirical forms of inquiry have that better first step; theism doesn’t.

Oh come on. The brush Toby Young paints with is so broad that he’s lost his grip.

No other prominent feminist has spoken out about Ashtiani’s case, unless you include Yoko Ono who has signed the petition calling for her to be freed. We’ve heard nothing from Germaine Greer, nothing from Gloria Steinem, nothing from Jane Fonda, nothing from Naomi Wolf, nothing from Clare Short, nothing from Harriet Harmen.

Well that’s interesting, and in some cases reprehensible if true, but it’s hardly conclusive. That’s not a complete list of prominent feminists, to put it mildly; arguably it’s not even a list of feminists. Jane Fonda? Yoko Ono? They’re celebrities rather than feminists.

 Almost no one on the left, with the honourable exception of Christopher Hitchens, dares to breath a word against any Islamic country for fear of being branded “Islamophobic”. Thus, a brutal dictatorship is able to torture and murder thousands of innocent women, safe in the knowledge that the self-styled keepers of the West’s conscience will remain silent.

Oh come on. Yes parts of the left are way too “sensitive” about what they take to be “Islamophobia” and way too confused about the difference between racism and criticism of religion, but it’s certainly not the case that Christopher Hitchens is the sole exception to that.

Could a feminist outcry today about the plight of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani do anything to prevent her death? We will never know, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that their continuing silence reveals the moral bankruptcy of their movement.

What do you mean we will never know?! There is such an outcry; it’s going on right now. There could be even more people involved, of course, but that doesn’t mean there are none.

Wiley-Blackwell sent me The Secular Outlook by Paul Cliteur a few days ago. It has a blurb by Russell Blackford on the back, which is a good sign.

Cliteur says it’s important to distinguish between  predictions of secularization, which are descriptive, and secularism, which is normative. There’s an amusing passage on page 4 where it becomes apparent that he does not think much of Karen Armstrong.

Armstrong, like some other authors writing on religion and secularization, mixes up “secularism” and “the secularization thesis.” A secularist to her is someone who believes in the secularization thesis. ..Armstrong and others may, of course, gleefully criticize the secularization thesis, but that is flogging a dead horse. Their argumentation has no consequence whatsoever for the viability of secularism as a moral and political philosophy or a vision of how the state should relate to religion. On the contrary.

Yes well – that’s Armstrong.

He makes a key distinction on page 5 between

tolerance as practiced by religions, not tolerance toward religions. Although both forms of tolerance are important, the first issue is a blind spot in the literature on this subject, the latter a sole preoccupation.

Ohhhhhhh – so it is. So religions are supposed to practice tolerance themselves! Who knew?

I’m going to Stockholm for a couple of days next week. It seems very absurd to go from Seattle to Stockholm for a couple of days, but then again, it’s better than not going to Stockholm at all, so I’m going. Does God Hate Women? is being published in translation, and there’s going to be a launch and stuff.

I will have a very horrible time the first day at least, and possibly throughout, because they got confused and scheduled a seminar and then the launch on the day I arrive as opposed to the next day. I have to go directly from the airport to the seminar. This is not good. I will be filthy and red-eyed and ravenous and grumpy, and it will be 4 a.m. my time without any sleep. I do not like to think what kind of spectacle I will present at this seminar, much less what I will feel like, but I have told them not to expect anything. They have only themselves to blame.

So anyway that’s where I’ll be next week for a couple of days.

Damon Linker makes a great observation, in discussing Hitchens and death and god. He compares Hitchens on the difference between his lucid self and the thing he could be turned into by drugs or pain, to Primo Levi on entering Auschwitz as a non-believer and exiting it the same way, and cites a too-devout Christian former colleague of his who had only contempt for Levi’s stoicism, calling it sinful pride.

Levi and Hitchens imply that a person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself. This is the outlook of the scientist (Levi was a chemist), the philosopher, the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic. From this standpoint, the terrified, irrational effusions of a man facing his own extinction are no more to be trusted than a blind man’s account of a crime scene: each witness lacks the capacity to perceive, make sense of, and accurately judge the essential facts. Far more reliable are the sober, critical reflections of a man in good health, protected from danger, insulated from threats to his well being. That, for Levi and Hitchens, is a man at his best and most capable of determining the truth of things.

Religious believers—including my devoutly religious colleague at First Things—make very different assumptions about the proper path to truth and what constitutes a man at his best. As Rod Dreher noted in a post about Hitchens’ recent statements, a Christian believes that the experience of suffering discloses essential truths that cannot be discovered or known in any other way. What are these truths? That we are fundamentally weak and needy creatures. That we are anxious animals, longing for someone or something to soothe us, to protect us from and relieve us of our worries…

For the religious person, human beings are at their best when they accept these truths and live humbly in their light, offering up their existential anguish as prayers, opening themselves up to the possible existence of a providential divinity who will answer those prayers and grant salvation from the horror of obliteration…

Levi and Hitchens reside in the first camp, believing that they are most themselves when they are healthy and free—at the height of their human powers; whatever they may feel or say (or be tempted to say) in moments of weakness or degradation deserves to be dismissed as inauthentic. But the devout reside in the second camp, insisting that human beings are truest to themselves—most authentic—when they are most vulnerable.

That’s a beautiful point, and it clarifies what’s at stake. The devout think that humans are at their best when they are damaged: weak, suffering, miserable. The undevout think we are at our best when we are at our best – strong, healthy, functioning well, not afraid or depressed or flattened by grief.

Well which would it be? Is a sick, deaf, lame, tired dog a dog at its best or is it a dog that is not even itself anymore – that is no more than a tube to ingest and exrete food?

It’s the same for humans. I’ll come over all Aristotelian here and say that humans are at their best when they are best at doing what humans do – talking, thinking, laughing, making, designing, inventing, cooking, dancing, singing, and a thousand things more. That is humans at their best – when they’re living up to their potential. A human that is too lazy and apathetic to do anything but slump on a couch and watch tv 18 hours a day is not a human at her best, and neither is one who is physically damaged to the point of surrender.

If a gang kidnapped you and tortured you until you agreed to betray a friend to them – would that be you at your best? Hardly. If “god” takes advantage of your illness and pain to get you to surrender – would that be you at your best? I see absolutely no reason to think so.

How familiar this statement by Rachel Polonsky sounds…

I am very glad to report that the legal dispute that Robert Service and I have had with Orlando Figes and Stephanie Palmer has now been settled.

This dispute began in mid-April when Orlando Figes denied responsibility for the ten Amazon reviews signed ‘Historian’ in a circular email to colleagues…

Our objectives in pressing this case were…to gain a contractual undertaking from Professor Figes not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage us or our works in the future; and to require Professor Figes to circulate a formal apology and retraction to all the recipients of his email of 15 April.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? The denial of responsibility – the “no not me I never”? The use of fraud and subterfuge and unlawful means to attack and damage people and their works? It sounds awfully familiar to me.

So does Robert Service’s version:

I am pleased that this squalid saga is over. I never wanted to go to law, but the behaviour of Prof. Figes over three months made it impossible to let matters rest. He lied through his teeth for a week and threatened to sue me for libel if I didn’t say black was white. His wife, herself a lawyer, took up his cause and lied that she was the culprit and not he. At the end of the second week he was forced by the incontrovertible evidence to admit that he had written the anonymous reviews posted on the Amazon website. There followed weeks of grinding, needless altercation as he tried to tamp down the wording of his apology and retraction…

Check; check; check.

Universities in the UK are under all manner of pressures and criticisms at the moment, and it is terrible that Figes has made it easier for the critics to pounce. He has brought shame on that fine institution Birkbeck College. In my view it is inappropriate that a lecturer teaching about the lies in public life in Stalin’s USSR should himself be so menacing and dishonest. I would also question whether such an academic should soon or ever again be trusted to supply confidential, impartial references or reports for research grant-giving bodies.

And what about his students? Who would want a menacing dishonest teacher?

At the moment I obviously feel sore about the hundreds of hours of wasted time since mid-April, not to mention the unpleasantness…In some of his statements according to the press he has come close to depicting himself as the victim.

Check; check; check.