Whose “squawk”?

Written by

Ophelia Benson

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It’s strange to see The Chronicle of Higher Education giving Carlin Romano space to promote the Templeton Foundation.

The Templeton Foundation, which specializes in prodding believers and nonbelievers to discuss such things in civilized ways, has published all sorts of booklets, like “Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?”…

That’s a very flattering way of describing what Templeton specializes in. To a less infatuated observer it looks more as if Templeton specializes in flattering its own self – as in the CHE blurb for Romano’s piece:

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review, is a professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College. This essay is adapted from a talk he gave this summer as a Templeton-Cambridge Fellow in Science and Religion at the University of Cambridge.

 See? To anybody who isn’t familiar with Templeton and its “Fellowships” that last bit sounds very very very ultra academic-prestigious. It’s Cambridge. It’s Cambridge twice, which must be twice as good as being Cambridge once. Plus it’s something else that sounds very dignified and prestigious too and it’s just because I don’t keep up that I don’t really know what it is, but being hyphenated with Cambridge and having temple in its name it’s obviously way important and rigorous and up there.

That’s how that works. Templeton “specializes” in locating itself in places like Cambridge so that the unwary will think that it has something to do with the eponymous university, and in giving out things called “Fellowships” so that the unwary will think that Templeton itself is kind of academic.

Romano, meanwhile, specializes in pejorative language.*

Before one gets edgy over Hawking’s latest ex cathedra squawk…Wittgenstein’s and Toulmin’s Cambridge antidote to Hawking’s smugness about God…

Is this the “discuss[ing] things in civilized ways” Romano had in mind?

*So do I, you might point out. Yes, but I don’t do it in the CHE, or about cosmologists.

Comments

7 responses to “Whose “squawk”?”

  1. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    I read about 2/3rds of that Squawk and gave up. He’s attacking a strawman. It’s not that science is a deliverer of a unique, objective account of the world, but that it does away with the need for God or any god as an explanation. If basic physics, for example, explains how the fridge light comes on when you open the door to look for a beer, then there’s no need to invoke the Fridge Leprechaun who is hiding behind the Cheedar, with torch in hand.

    I might have this guy wrong, but he just seems like another Barney Zwartz type tool. First, caricature your gnu atheist opponent, then drag out some dead philosopher who showed why the caricature is false, and presto! Ordinary punter who doesn’t know his philosopher from his sophist will be convinced.

    Did you notice that he seems to be implying that psychological states imply truth states in the article? I mean, I’m enjoying the Fridge Leprechaun experience right now, guess that implies the Fridge Leprechaun exists…..

  2. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    By the way, I’ve read about half the Hawking’s book and reckon the ‘philosophy is dead’ quote is more a cry of exasperation with philosophers. They don’t, and who’d blame them, get Quantum Mechanics, so they’re behind. Thus the real philosophising is done by the physicists. That’s how I read it anyway. But as Eric McDonald pointed out over at Jerry’s pad, a statement such as ‘philosophy is dead’ is doing philosophy.

  3. Michael Fugate Avatar
    Michael Fugate

    Over at WEIT, a commenter refers to Charles Taylor as someone to consider in matters of supernatural existences. Unfortunately, it is not the Chuck Taylor of Converse hi-top fame, but a goddy philosopher emeritus at McGill University and (drumroll please) Templeton Prize winner.

    Here is a not now unfamiliar comment from a The Other Journal interview:

    TOJ: Just to bring us back to the topic of atheism, I wonder if you have any opinion regarding those who are being called the “New Atheists,” say Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, who happen to be quite militant in their rhetoric.

    CT: Yes, I happen to have quite a negative view of these folks. I think their work is very intellectually shoddy. I mean there are two things that perhaps I am just totally allergic to. The first is that they all believe that there really are some knock-down arguments against belief in God. And of course this is something you can only believe if you have a scientistic, reductionist conception and explanation of everything in the world, including human beings. If you do have such a view that everything is to be explained in terms of physics and the movement of atoms and the like, then certain forms of access to God are just closed. For example, there are certain human experiences that might direct us to God, but these would all be totally illusory if everything could be explained in scientific terms. I spend a lot of time reflecting and writing on the various human sciences and how they can be tempted into a kind of reductionism, and not only would I say that the jury is out on that, but I would argue that the likelihood of that turning out to be the proper understanding of human beings is very small. And the problem is that they just assume this reductionistic view.

    The second thing I am allergic to is that they keep going on and on about the relationship between religion and violence, which on one level is fine because there is a lot of religiously-caused violence. But what they consistently fail to acknowledge is that the twentieth century was full of various atheists who were rampaging around killing millions of people. So it is simply absurd that at the end of the twentieth century someone would continue to advance the thesis that religion is the main cause of violence. I mean you’d think these people were writing in 1750, and that would be quite understandable if you were Voltaire or Locke, but to say this in 2008, well it just takes my breath away.

    But then what we need to do, and this is something many religious people fail to do, is to consider why this phenomena of the new atheism is happening at this time. Atheists are reacting in the same way that religious fundamentalists reacted in the past. They are people who have been very comfortable with a sense that their particular position is what makes sense of everything and so on, and then when they are confronted by something else they just go bananas and throw up the most incredibly bad arguments in a tone of indignation and anger. And that’s the problem with that whole master narrative of secularization, what’s called the secularization thesis, that people got lulled into—you know, that religion is a thing of the past, that it’s disappearing, that it did all these terrible things but it’s going to go away and so on—because when it comes back people are just undone.

    The usual complaints about the Gnus, but my favorite part is that he thinks the gnus have their backs up against the wall because they are threatened by the new ascendency of religion??? No wonder he is seeing minds without bodies.

  4. Tweets that mention Whose “squawk”? – Butterflies and Wheels — Topsy.com

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Whose “squawk”? http://dlvr.it/659TR […]

  5. jan frank Avatar
    jan frank

    I feel that the long article by Carlin Romano seems mainly to “prove” that all those modern atheists are wrong by showing that Wittgenstein became religious as he grew older and became exposed to all sorts of outside influences (i.e. the horror of war). After all, we know, Romano seems to argue, that atheists respect a real philosopher such as Wittgenstein, so if such a respected philosopher changes his mind and becomes religious, then surely all the atheists should follow suit.

    This, I feel, is a typical example of quoting AUTHORITY to prove a point – a favourite tactic with other-directed religious people, but not a respectable method of argument.

  6. Hamilton Jacobi Avatar
    Hamilton Jacobi

    Now hold on just a minute there, Jan. Are you telling me that if Richard Dawkins joined Scientology, you would not follow suit like the rest of us? I don’t think you’re allowed to be a cog in the New Atheist Noise Machine unless you’re a mindless drone. I’m going to have to ask you to turn in your membership badge and special decoder ring and leave immediately.

  7. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    :- )

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