Author: Ophelia Benson

Karen Armstrong’s breezy way with facts and references can sometimes produce declarations that are really funny. On the first page of chapter 10, ‘Atheism,’ for instance, she starts with a preacher launching ‘a crusdade’ against Deism in 1790 and goes on with the rise of Evangelicalism into the 1830s. No references of course. The next paragraph starts ‘On the frontiers, nearly 40 percent of Americans felt slighted by the aristocratic republican government…’

!!! Really?! How the hell does she know that? She doesn’t even say at what particular moment in time that bizarrely exact claim was (according to her) true, and she certainly doesn’t say how she knows or how anyone else knows either. That’s not surprising, because no one does know that; no one could know that; there was no way for anyone to know that between 1790 and the 1830s. Actually there’s no way for anyone to know that even now, since even polling measures what people say they think or feel, not what they feel.

It is, frankly, typical of Armstrong’s level of thought to make such an absurd claim. It’s as if she winds herself up like a toy and then just cranks out some yards of prose, without really thinking about anything she’s saying. She tells stories, but unfortunately she presents her stories as factual narratives, and that’s very misleading.

This would matter much less if she weren’t so widely considered a deep and powerful and learned thinker. But she is, so it does.

And another thing. There’s no entry in the index for Aquinas. That surprised me when I looked for it, then I found him in the text – but she calls him Thomas. So I looked under Thomas, and there he is. But there’s no ‘Aquinas: see Thomas of Aquinas’ in the index. In any case – what’s that about? He’s known as Aquinas, not Thomas. He’s not like Leonardo, who is Leonardo, not da Vinci. I looked in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy: he’s under Aquinas. So what’s Armstrong doing? Is this some Catholic thing? Is it an affectation? Or is she just clueless. I don’t know, but it’s damn silly.

Sholto Byrnes says aha – but his aha depends on a confusion of terms, a lumping together of different words with different meanings as if they all meant the same thing. That kind of aha is not a good kind, because people can just say, sharply or compassionately depending on temperament, ‘oh dear, you’ve made a muddle there.’

Let’s be clear: they could now be afforded rights under law specifically formulated to protect religion and belief. And those are two words that many scientists, rationalists and atheists don’t like to be associated with at all.

Nonsense. We have no problem ‘being associated with’ belief; we don’t claim to have no beliefs or to want no beliefs or to object to beliefs as such. Of course we don’t! Religion and belief are different things.

Atheists in particular hate it when they are referred to as “fundamentalist” or if they are accused of making a religion out of science. I’ve done both in the past, acts that have swiftly been followed by much foot-stamping and name-calling in the blogosphere.

But that’s a different thing. We do object to the first one because it’s just a silly distortion of the word, and we object to the second when, for instance, it’s just a wild assertion about atheists in general, as it so often is. We don’t say that no atheists ever ‘make a religion out of science’; we do say it’s just rhetorical abuse to claim that we all do.

[I]t seems to me that most militant atheists are characterised not just by an absence of belief in a god, but by a trust in science so certain and ardent that it is entirely akin to religious belief — and a highly devoted, if not fanatical, one at that. No, they say, these are not matters of belief. These are facts. Science says so.

No we don’t. We don’t say that. Sholto Byrnes is remarkably bad at accurately characterizing people he disagrees with. He skids into gross exaggeration and over-generalization the minute he puts fingers to keys. He should work on that.

More of Armstrong playing at Grown Up Scholarship. On page 279 she lays down the law about Wittgenstein for almost the whole page.

In his later years, Wittgenstein changed his mind. He no longer believed that language should merely state facts but acknowledged that words also issued commands, made promises, and expressed emotion. Turning his back on the early modern ambition to establish a single method of arrivingat truth, Wittgenstein now maintained that there were an infinite number of social discourses. So it was a grave mistake “to make religious belief a matter of evidence in the way that science is a matter of evidence”

And there we have our first reference: it is to “Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cecil Barrett, Oxford 1966′ – so not something Wittgenstein himself published, but a posthumous compilation. Armstrong goes on for the rest of the long paragraph, making Wittgenstein say much what she says on the subject; the next reference is to the same book, the six after that are to ‘Maurice Drury, “Conversations With Wittgenstein,” in Ludgwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, and the final one is to Ray Monk’s biography.

Not primary core Wittgenstein, in other words, but peripheral, compiled Wittgenstein, and chat, and a biography. One suspects cherry-picking, and one also suspects superficiality. One is not impressed.

Reading Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is an irritating experience, and not just in the more obvious or predictable way. There is also the matter of her pretense of scholarship, which upon inspection turns out to be rather thin. For example:

Chapter 11, ‘Unknowing,’ begins with three pages of factual statements with names, dates, and other particulars, beginning with the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900 and what David Hilbert said there, what it implied about confidence in scientific progress, what Virginia Woolf said, what Picasso and James Joyce were up to, moving on to the First World War, the depression, and the war after that, with a pause halfway through to sum up: “It was now difficult to feel sanguine about the limitless progress of civilization. Modern secular ideologies were proving to be as lethal as any religious bigotry.”

Then we move to “Modern science had been founded on the belief that it was possible to achieve objective certainty.” We get a brisk mention of Hume and Kant, then James Clark Maxwell, then Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, then Becquerel and Planck, and at last we arrive where we knew we were heading, at Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg. “Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) developed quantum mechanics, an achievement that contradicted nearly every major postulate of Newtonian physics.”

That, thank god, is the end of the third paragraph. We’ve taken in a lot and are panting slightly. One more paragraph to go, to complete this magisterial survey. “So much for the traditional assumption that knowledge would proceed incrementally…In the bewildering universe of quantum mechanics” and so on, you can write it in your sleep. But what’s interesting about all this is that there is not one reference for any of it. Not one. It’s all poured out of Karen Armstrong’s teeming mind, apparently, so thoroughly assimilated and absorbed that there is no need to reference it – it is just her Knowledge. We do not get a reference until the end of the fourth paragraph of the chapter, three pages in (p. 264), for a direct quotation from Einstein. And what is the reference? Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 356.

In other words, most of that three pages is just a summary of part of a secondary book, a popular history of ideas, but it’s not presented that way. She nowhere says ‘to summarize pages 355-6 from Richard Tarnas’s best-selling book’ or similar – she just spouts it all as if it were an overflow of her vast erudition. That’s not illegal, but it’s not best practice, either. (Apart from anything else, it doesn’t really give Tarnas adequate credit, because it looks as if the reference is just to the direct quotation.) It’s not best practice, and in someone like Armstrong, it’s also deeply irritating. Why? Because she does convey an air of authority and wisdom and deep learning. There’s that ridiculously boastful pile of books on the front cover, for one thing! There’s the third sentence on the first page, in the Introduction, for another: “‘That book was really hard!’ readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. ‘Of course it was!’ I want to reply. ‘It was about God.’” A barely-veiled boast – I Write Hard Books. Well this book at least is not hard, it’s pseudo-hard, and when you look closely at it it also turns out to be pseudo-erudite and inadequately referenced.

The first three pages aren’t an aberration, either; she goes on the same way. Page 266 gets really down to it with Heisenberg and that other fella. “In 1931, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906-78) devised a theorem to show that any formal logical or mathematical system must contain propositions that are not verifiable within that system; there would always be propositions that could be proved or disproved only by input from outside. This completely undercut the traditional assumption of systematic decidability.” Then there’s what John Dewey (dates provided, as always) said in his Gifford Lectures in 1929, then there’s commentary about our limited minds, all reference-free, then there’s a quotation from “the American physicist Percy Bridgman” (dates provided again), including (this must have thrilled Armstrong) “We are confronted with something truly ineffable.” The direct quotation, at last, gets a reference: “Quoted in Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind“. Another secondary source, you see – and one with an apparent agenda. This is thin, second-hand, warmed-over, paraphrased stuff, but it’s not presented that way. Armstrong has a reputation as a scholar, but it’s not always earned.

Udo and Russell have their say on the putative schism between atheist camps.

In a different world, the merits, or otherwise, of religious teachings might be discussed more dispassionately. In that world, some of us who criticise religion itself might be content to argue that the church (and the mosque, and all the other religious architecture that sprouts across the landscape) should be kept separate from the state. Unfortunately, however, we don’t live in that world.

No, we don’t, and furthermore, all the fuming and name-calling from the people who despise the “new” atheists is, perversely or tragically or amusingly, just fanning the flames of “new” atheism. That’s partly because nearly all of the fuming and name-calling is noticeably unfair and inaccurate, and so it just irritates instead of persuading, but it’s also because the intensity and fury awakens our curiosity. It does. I often see people asking – people sometimes ask me – why “new” atheists care, why we’re so interested in theism, why bother, why not just ignore the whole thing. Well this is part of why – it’s because the more fury and unfair rhetoric there is, the more we wonder what’s going on, what theists and fans of theists are so worked up about, what they’re thinking, what all this is based on. So we look into it – and we are interested and perhaps surprised by what we find, so we talk about it, and that’s why we don’t ignore the whole thing.

When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising — and totally justifiable — that atheists and skeptics question the source of this authority. If religious organisations or their leaders claim to speak on behalf of a god, it is fair to ask whether the god concerned really makes the claims that are communicated on its behalf. Does this god even exist? Where is the evidence? And even if this being does exist, why, exactly, should its wishes be translated into law?

Yes, that’s what I mean. Even when religion claims authority in the political sphere in something that doesn’t directly affect us, we still question the source of the authority (some of us do). We’re interested. The louder the claims of authority are, the more interested we are. We start to wonder, or to pay more attention than we used to. What is that about? we wonder. Where does this idea come from, and why do poeple accept it so readily? How do people manage to ignore the many obvious problems with it? So we investigate, and write about our investigations, and then the despisers come along and call us a great many harsh names for doing so, and then we get our backs up. We are allowed to investigate this, and we are allowed to talk about it, and we are not any of those things we just got called. So next time we dig twenty feet down instead of ten.