Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Ahmadinejad to Ratzinger: let’s fight secularism

    One theocrat calls on another for cooperation by “divine religions” against secularism.

  • Mandela letters published

    “One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint.”

  • Saqlain Imam on secularism in Pakistan

    Currently seculars are supporting democratic forces, while the religious forces are bent upon undermining the democratic disposition of the state.

  • Salman Rushdie and his son Milan discuss Luka

    And magic realism, gaming, Islamism, the fading of the fatwa, Bombay, and the movies, with Andrew Marr.

  • Jerry Coyne says science and religion aren’t friends

    He says it in USA Today! The walls are crumbling…

  • LA Times on “new” atheists v warm fuzzies

    About 300 nonbelievers from across the US and Canada gathered for three days of lively and, at times, gleefully blasphemous debate.

  • Yet more science-n-religion

    The more you look at this science-and-religion thing, the more Templeton you find. In fact, I wonder if there is any science-and-religion that has nothing to do with Templeton. So consider that a challenge: if you know of any, or find any, let me know.

    Mark Jones did a really good post on the subject a few days ago, and he turned up lots of intersections of s-and-r and Templeton. He skipped one though.

     Dixon’s also contributed to Science and Religion, New Historical Perspectives, with fellow ISSR members Geoffrey Cantor and Stephen Pumfrey, which has this blurb:

    The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991).

    He forgot to check John Hedley Brooke, so I did it. Well what do you know. He’s the current president of the ISSR, and he

    held the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science & Religion and Directorship of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford from 1999 to 2006…With Margaret Osler and Jitse Van der Meer, he edited Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions.

    The (Templetonian) Ian Ramsey Centre tells us

    He has lectured at many universities in America, Europe, Australia and the Far East. He has also lectured at Templeton workshops in Adelaide, Berkeley, Manchester, and Toronto. In 1998 he joined the Templeton Oxford Seminars Steering Committee…

    The guy is Templetonian up to his eyeballs. There seems to be no one in this “field” who is not.

    Thomas Dixon replied again yesterday, which was generous and helpful of him. I think, though, that his work is more theologically-inflected than he wants to say here. Or maybe theologically-inflected isn’t the right way to put it, but it does seem to be part of this overall agenda to make a case that religion and science are “in harmony” and not in conflict – not in conflict in any way. I think they are in epistemic conflict, and Dr Dixon so far has not addressed that aspect of the issue.

    It appears to be the case that all the people who are arguing this are from faculties of theology and/or Templeton-funded centres and institutes and the like, and are arguing for a particular conclusion, which is that religion and science are in harmony. I think that conclusion would be convenient for theology and religion, and not at all convenient for science. I think this agenda, if it is an agenda, should be open and public.

    Eric MacDonald quoted us a bit from Dr Dixon’s Science and Religion: a Very Short Introduction.

    I find it hard not to see it as a piece of religious apologetic, to be quite frank, although its author is an agnostic. I didn’t find the kind of detachment from the religious point of view that I would have expected, and I found it almost pervasive. So, when the Galileo issue was being discussed, there is a lot about realism and anti-realism, and about religion, like science, also wanting to provide knowledge about realities that lie behind the appearances of things. Take this quote, for instance:

    In the religious case, what intervenes between the light hitting your retina and your thoughts about the glory of God is the lengthy history of a particular sacred text, and its reading and interpretation within a succession of human communities. …. Religious teachers, as much as scientific ones, try to show their pupils that there is an unseen world behind the observed one. (Locations 325-31)

    There is a similar claim in Dr Dixon’s BBC article:

    Science and religion have had the kind of close and troubled relationship you would expect between siblings or even spouses. They share not only wonder at the majesty of the world we can see, but also a desire to find out what’s behind it that we can’t.

    Like Eric, I think that sounds like religious apologetics. It doesn’t sound like straightforward secular history. It’s flattering to religion. Religion does not have the same kind of desire to find out what’s behind the world we can see that science has. Religion doesn’t find things out; it transmits doctrine, and the doctrine itself is not a product of finding out, but of something more like legislation mixed with mythology.

    I think Templeton and the ISSR and the other outfits are working very hard to inject this idea into the broader culture in the US and the UK (and no doubt elsewhere too, but we have names and places for some of the anglophone ones), and I think we should try to shine a strong light on this project.

  • Historians admit to inventing Ancient Greeks

    “We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, all the different kinds of columns…”

  • Not Helping what?

    I’m left with one question in particular about Chris Mooney’s position at the Secular Humanism bash yesterday. He kept saying various versions of “you’re not helping!” That’s not helping; I still wonder how that’s helping; I can’t see how that’s helping.

    Here’s my question.

    Helping what? What are we supposed to be helping with? What is this giant X that Mooney is so familiar with but I am not, that we are all supposed to join hands and help with?

    Sometimes it seems to be science education in the US; sometimes it seems to be some kind of peace treaty with science; sometimes it seems to have to do with climate change…but most of the time it’s not even as definite as that, it’s just Unity For Its Own Sake.

    But why?

    Why are we supposed to be totally united at all times? Why are we under such relentless pressure not to have opinions that the majority does not share? Why are we assumed to have some vast overarching Project that requires unity and will Not Be Helped if we refuse to be drafted into that unity?

    I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t know why Mooney’s reaction, when PZ calls Francis Collins a clown, is to cry out in agitation that that is Not Helping. Not Helping what? What is it that PZ is supposed to want to do that will be Not Helped if (say) Francis Collins becomes annoyed with PZ? Or is the idea that PZ’s calling Collins a clown will Not Help some larger project that we all want to Help because Collins will abandon or sabotage that project out of annoyance at PZ? If so, 1) what is that project? and 2) if it’s that large, why would Collins abandon or sabotage it out of annoyance at PZ?

    Really – Mooney seems to have this very easily-triggered terror that a critical comment from one person about one other person will cause some terrible, general, societal harm. But is the structure really that fragile? Are cascades that easy to set off? PZ calls Collins a clown and, whammo, children flee biology class, and Congress passes laws making fuel economy a felony, and the glaciers melt and everybody dies.

    I just don’t get what the mechanism is supposed to be, and I don’t get what One Thing we are all supposed to be doing or working for or supporting that will be in jeopardy if too many gnu atheists say boisterous things about people who see the trinity in a waterfall.

    I’m not doing One Thing. (Yes I know it looks that way a lot of the time, but even there, it’s really a lot of things, and besides, it only looks that way.) I have a lot of projects. We all do. We can get together with people for one project and then separate for some other project. We don’t have to all agree about everything in order to work together for some particular project. We don’t want to know. We don’t issue criteria for working on Project Q; we just work on it.

    So what exactly is it that we’re Not Helping?

  • PZ’s opening statement at the debate

    Religion provides solace to millions, we are told, it makes them happy, and it’s mostly harmless. “But is it true?”, we ask, as if it matters.

  • Salil Tripathi reviews Salman Rushdie’s Luka

    We encounter the self-righteous, injured innocence of those easily offended, who want to silence anyone who criticizes anything they hold dear.

  • Hitchens reports from Tumor Town

    Religious maniacs are trying to prevent the use of existing embryos for stem cell research that would help existing humans.

  • Watch the Secular Humanist Conference live

    Mooney was better than one might expect; PZ was great.

  • Oh if only we could learn to doubt

    More dopy mindless generalization about “New Atheism” at Comment is Free Belief, this batch courtesy of Ed Halliwell.

    Almost two weeks on from the After New Atheism event at the RSA and the trail seems to have gone cold. It sounded so promising – the setup from a humanist writer professing his boredom with the stagnancy of debate…And yet it didn’t quite happen. As Mark Vernon reported, the evening itself was a bit of a damp squib, and normal service has been resumed on comment threads, with Caspar Melville – the aforementioned humanist – understandably crying foul at the pummelling he received for daring to call for more listening and less braying.

    Yes, but as we know, Caspar Melville did more than just cry foul; he also invited me to write a dissenting article in reply to his profession of boredom, and then didn’t wait for the next issue of the New Humanist but posted the article online. He’s far from firmly in the “Let’s everybody hate New Atheists” camp, in fact he’s not really in that camp at all.

    Now for the mindless generalizations.

    [A] way through has been hinted at, including at the event itself. Marilynne Robinson pointed to it when she said that “New Atheism doesn’t acknowledge the centrality of consciousness“…

    Oh really? All of “New Atheism” doesn’t do that? Including Dan Dennett? Including Sam Harris? And of course all other vocal atheists? And Marilynne Robinson knows that how, exactly?

    Whether it’s fixation on belief in God or fixation on the absence of evidence for God, whenever we project our crystallised concepts onto the world and call them real, we are falling into a kind of theism – creating gods out of our own ideas and making ourselves “right”. We all do it, of course, and it usually ends in the kind of unproductive fight that has characterised the New Atheist debate in recent years.

    Whereas…what – the old theist non-debate is quite productive and sensible and good? It’s unproductive for atheists to tell theists “you don’t know what you claim to know” but it’s productive for theists to go on forever claiming to know what they don’t know? In short, why single out “the New Atheist debate” as an example of projecting crystallized concepts onto the world?

    So wouldn’t it be more interesting to reframe all this as a psychological rather than scientific or religious inquiry and practise becoming familiar with how our minds work before we try to work out what, if anything, created them? There is a cost – we’d have to let go of being “right”, and instead embrace a deep kind of doubt, one that accepts that the conceptual and perceptual tools we use to explore the world are limited and may be faulty.

    But what the fuck makes this beezer think explicit atheists don’t do that? What else is all this about? Atheists are the ones who know we don’t have a special magic faculty that feeds us reliable knowledge about supernatural beings, so what’s he telling us to embrace doubt for?

    And by encouraging humility through recognition of our fallibility, we could perhaps move beyond the theism of New Atheism in a way that allows us to be a bit kinder to those with whom we disagree. How about it?

    How about what? How about agreeing with the unexamined assumption that “New Atheism” is especially unkind to those it disagrees with? How about blaming explicit atheists for everything while letting theists off any possible hook? No thanks.

  • Let’s “move beyond the theism of New Atheism”

    And while we’re at it, let’s accuse “the New Atheists” of braying. That will set the tone nicely.

  • Homophobic vandalism at University of Cape Town

    A pink closet, meant to promote gay rights at UCT, was torched on Monday night, just hours after it was set up

  • Jesus and Mo scold barmaid for strawmanning

    Just what you’d expect from someone who wants to stamp out beauty and replace people with robots.

  • Ahadi and Namazie meet European Parliament VP

    Mina Ahadi and Maryam Namazie met with Roberta Angelilli to discuss the urgent case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and hand deliver a letter from her son.

  • The BHA Census campaign

    Data on religion produced by the 2001 census gave a wholly misleading picture of the religiosity of the UK, halving the number of non-religious people.

  • More on the Science-n-religion question

    Thomas Dixon commented on one of the recent posts on this issue, and I thought it only fair to make his comment more visible, since that post is now oldish, and I also hope he will comment further.

    Dixon’s comment:

    I’ve been dismayed by some of the misinformation going around in the wake of the recent BBC Four programme I presented and a related online article I wrote for the BBC News magazine. Just for the record, I am a historian, not a theologian (although my first degree was indeed in Theology and Religious Studies), and membership of ISSR is open to anyone who has made a scholarly study of relations between science and religion, as I have. As I explain in the Preface to my ‘Very Short Introduction’, my aim is to use the history and philosophy of science to shed light on this topic, and not to try to persuade anyone to become either religious or atheistic. My own approach is entirely agnostic.

    I hope I didn’t give any misinformation; I don’t think I did. I quoted the OUP page that said Dixon is a Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London, which I assumed would imply that he’s a historian, not a theologian. I further quoted that page that said he is a member of ISSR, and I then went on to give further information about what ISSR is. I think ISSR is a bit of a stealth organization in the usual Templeton fashion, but that doesn’t mean that its members are necessarily tainted or to blame or anything like that – that’s part of the point of the stealth: people don’t always know what agendas may be in play. People may also be aware of the agenda and simply think it’s harmless, and/or an ordinary academic agenda like any other.

    In case Thomas Dixon would like to comment again, here’s the question I would like to ask. I never thought the goal was to persuade anyone to become either religious or atheistic; I think Templeton’s goal is to persuade more or less everyone that there is no conflict between religion and science. Is your approach to that entirely agnostic?