Author: Ophelia Benson

Charles Freeman replies to James Hannam’s reply to Freeman’s criticism of Hannam’s book God’s Philosophers.

My most important point, and one that Hannam does not even address in his response, is that, in comparison to the Greeks the natural philosophers operated within the context of a much more authoritarian society. Christianity brought the concept of absolute theological truths, many ring-fenced as “articles of faith” which, as Hannam notes, apparently with approval, were unchallengeable.

That has to have been a considerable stumbling block, surely.

As intellectual life evolved in the Middle Ages, no one quite knew where the boundaries lay, the threat of heresy was used all too widely in personal power struggles between opposing factions and individuals and the ultimate punishment was burning on earth as a preliminary to eternal burning in hell. If Hannam cannot see how this affected free discussion in the Middle Ages, there is little hope for him. Yet, as I show in my critique, he even seems to be sympathetic to the process.

Well that would slow me right down, I can tell you. Burning? Oh well I guess I’ll just stick with making shoes.

There’s been a discussion of agnosticism in comments at Pharyngula, with Stephen Novella offering some attempted clarifications. I think agnostics or “agnostics” of the Mark Vernon type have muddied the waters. Not knowing doesn’t have to be some mushy compromise between theism and atheism; not knowing really does matter.

That’s central to all these “what would it take to convince you of god/the supernatural” questions – often the examples offered are of things it would be very hard or impossible for people to actually know. If a 900 foot Jesus appeared – well, appeared where? And how would anyone know it was Jesus? And what about all the people who didn’t see it, because they were ill in bed, or in prison, or stuck in a collapsed mine? For them it would be hearsay. But there would be videos. Yes but videos aren’t the same thing. And so on. It’s really hard to think of something that everybody could know about first-hand. Magic tricks with a particular word in every book and magazine in the world, for instance, wouldn’t work, because how would anyone know that?

What we can and can’t know really does matter.

The question should therefore be more limited. “What would it take to convince you that there are good reasons to believe in god/the supernatural?” That would be a lower standard, because the reasons wouldn’t have to convince you, but you could agree that they could reasonably convince other people. That question is more like asking, “What would be a better gap than the ones people point to now?”

All you would have to come up with would be something hard or impossible to explain given our current knowledge, without having to agree that you yourself would be forced to agree that it convinced you that god/the supernatural exists.

This is helpful because it’s hard to think of anything that really forces that conclusion. It’s always possible to think “but I could just think I might be hallucinating, so I would never be really convinced.”

Unless you simply make that part of the thought experiment, in which case it becomes true by definition. Let’s stipulate that, then. Yes: if there were something that forced me to believe despite thoughts of hallucination, then yes, I would believe.

We could say that the experience would be such that it made the hallucination possibility unreal – that I could mouth the words, but not actually believe them. But saying that is itself  mouthing words. We can’t know that there is such a thing, or that there could be. Maybe there could, but we don’t know.

Tricky, isn’t it.

Chris Stedman is excited about inter-faith thingies again – interfaith cooperation, interfaith training, interfaith leadership, interfaith youth, interfaith activism, the interfaith movement, the interfaith table, interfaith work, interfaith events, interfaith understanding, interfaith coffee, interfaith ice cream, interfaith bicycles…the list goes on.

Anyway, the thing that’s so particularly exciting this time is that even atheists can do it. You would think that wouldn’t make any sense, since if there’s one thing atheists can be counted on not to be interested in, it’s faith – but it turns out that you would be wrong to think that. Atheists are all over it.

Speaking before a group of policy and philanthropic professionals, I explained that there are many atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nonreligious individuals like Anderson, Chituc, Link, Garner, Liddell and others at the institutes who wish to seek understanding, respect and collaboration with their religious neighbors.

Why does that statement give me the creeps? Why does it make me want to duck my head and slam the door and run quickly in the opposite direction?

I suppose because it sounds so damn intrusive and pious and missionary-like. I don’t want to seek anything with my neighbors, nor do I want them to seek anything with me. I don’t want to pester people that way. I don’t want to be always meddling with people, and I’m suspicious of people who do. I’m suspicious of Chris Stedman. I’m suspicious of all this teaming up and leadershipping and faith-based initiativing.

And I suspect that faithiness has something – perhaps a lot – to do with that habit of mind, and atheism has a lot to do with its absence. I think faithy people tend to think they have The Answer, and to want to force it (in the nicest possible way, of course) on everyone else. I think atheists tend not to think that. Yes we tend to think atheism is liberating, but we’re not so sure of it in every case that we feel like knocking on people’s doors to tell them so.

I don’t know – I just think all this reaching out can’t help being patronizing, and it creeps me out for that reason. There they all are, the fresh-faced youngsters, planning how things are going to be for the rest of us. I don’t want them planning things for me. I want to do my own planning. I want to be grumpy if I feel like it. Maybe I’ll start wearing a big red G for Grumpy.

An item from last August, which I hadn’t seen before. For about £5,000 a taxi driver in Bradford would track down women and girls who had run away from home to escape a forced marriage.

Zakir’s job was never to harm his targets, but to return them home to face their “destiny” of being made to marry someone their parents had chosen. Despite the fact that runaways can be beaten for having escaped, he sides with the families on the issue. The softly spoken driver, speaking to G2 on the condition his real name was not used, insisted: “I did it as a favour to the families, as I knew most of them. It wasn’t about the money. It was about izzat [honour]. I saw the effect it had on them when their daughter ran away. The worry and the shame from the community talking about them. I was part of the ‘taxi driver network’, so we shared information about who we picked up and where they got dropped off.

Of course, returning them home to be forced into marriage is harming them, to put it mildly. Returning them home to be beaten is also harming them. And notice how the concern is all for “the families” and not for all the individuals who make it up, which would have to include the escaped women and girls. Notice how the families are assumed to have every right to treat women and girls as inanimate objects to be forced to do whatever the families ordain.

One woman who knows what it feels like to be hunted down is Jaspreet. She ran away from her home in Sheffield after discovering that her father was arranging her marriage. The 21-year-old said: “I overheard my dad talking to his brother in Pakistan about getting me married to my cousin over there. He’d never discussed marriage with me.

“I didn’t want to get married yet. I wanted to finish my law degree. I would have been happy to have an arranged marriage in my mid-20s. But when I protested, my dad threatened me physically and said I would be letting the family down if I refused. I couldn’t take any more of the rows, so I ran away.”

Like that. It’s her life, but she doesn’t get to decide what she does with it, “the family” does, as if she were the dining room table.

Something Allen Esterson pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago and which I had to share. From Brandt, K. J. (2005). Intelligent bodies: Women’s embodiment and subjectivity in the human-horse communication process.

The cowboy’s stranglehold on the label of expert in human-horse relationships, as well as mythic construction of the woman-horse bond, have effectively silenced women’s voices and rendered their experiences with horses non-authentic. This dissertation takes women’s knowledge of horses seriously as data and draws from three years (2001-2004) of ethnographic research of in-depth interviews and participant observation. I explore the human-horse communication process and argue that the two species co-create what I call an embodied language system to construct a world of shared meaning. I problematize the centrality of verbal spoken language and the mind in theories of subjectivity, and maintain that the privileged status of verbal language has left untheorized all non-verbal language using beings, human and non-human alike. I bring questions of embodiment–in particular women’s embodiment–to the center and examine how lived and felt corporeality shapes human subjectivity. I call for an understanding of embodiment not as deterministic but as a lived process that has a meaningful impact on how individuals understand themselves and others. Further, the women’s experiences of embodiment when working with horses propose a way to subvert oppressive dominant constructions about female bodies as inherently flawed and allow for a re-imagining of women’s bodily comportment.

Pesky privileged status of verbal language…