Author: Ophelia Benson

Madeleine Bunting returns to her claim that I am strident, adding a good deal more abuse for good measure.

But the kind of strident atheism which Benson epitomises intrigues me. It’s driven by a curious intensity which is really peculiar.

No, it isn’t. It isn’t peculiar at all. I think theism and theistic ways of thinking do real and terrible harm. I think it’s Bunting’s blindness or indifference to that which is really peculiar. In order to be so mystified by my intensity, she has to simply ignore or disbelieve the horrors in the book which are explicitly and avowedly done in the name of a god. She has read the book, apparently, since she quotes some bits that she considers ‘strident’ – so she can’t claim that she was unaware of the incidents. To take just one – the one that leads up to the bits she quotes – there is the stoning to death of a 13-year-old girl who said three men had raped her, in Kismayu, Somalia, last October.

A witness told the BBC’s ‘Today’ programme that the girl had been crying, pleading for her life, and had to be forced into a hole before the stoning.

“When she came out she said: ‘What do you want from me?’”

“They said: ‘We will do what Allah has instructed us’. She said: ‘I’m not going, I’m not going. Don’t kill me, don’t kill me.’

“A few minutes later more than 50 men tried to stone her.”

The witness said people crowding round to see the execution said it was “awful”.

So – in light of the fact that the executioners said ”We will do what Allah has instructed us,’ what exactly is it that Bunting finds peculiar? How would she like people to react to that? Casually? Ironically? Temperately?

I don’t know. I don’t understand Madeleine Bunting. I don’t understand her show of incomprehension. I don’t understand what she’s playing at.

But the most extraordinary claim was “religion remains the last great prop and stay of arbitrary injustices and the coercion which backs them up”. Really? Surely the “last great prop” is overstating it? Injustice is rife all over the world and much of it makes no reference to religion. Take North Korea: where’s the religion there? Or Burma last autumn: there, religion, in the form of hundreds of Buddhist monks were leading the protests against the rule of the Burmese generals. It was precisely the opposite of what Benson is claiming: religion proved the most effective inspiration to resist arbitrary injustice. And that has been true of many other places in the world – does Benson not study her history books? – how can she make sense of the lives of Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Archbishop Desmond Tutu without the religions which inspired them to campaign against arbitrary injustice? I simply don’t understand how someone can claim to be a serious philosopher (as Benson does) and who writes books on subjects such as Why the truth matters can make such preposterous statements.

It would help if she had kept in mind the sentences that immediately precede the one she quotes –

It is true, of course, that sometimes good things are done in the name of religion. There were religious motivations for opposing the slave trade (although that required ignoring many instructions in the Bible, New Testament as well as Old), and no doubt people get something out of going to church once in a while…Nevertheless, religion remains the last great prop and stay of arbitrary injustices and the coercion that backs them up.

In other words we make exactly the point she accuses me (us) of failing to make immediately before the passage she takes exception to. I simply can’t understand how someone can claim to be whatever it is that Bunting claims to be and still distort a quotation in such a flagrant manner. I especially can’t understand how someone can do that in the process of defending the indefensible.

She misunderstands what is being claimed in the guilty sentence. It’s the ‘prop and stay’ bit and the ‘arbitrary’ bit. The sentence doesn’t say ‘religion remains the last great example of injustices’ – it says it remains the last great prop and stay of them. The Burmese generals don’t have any such prop and stay; all they have is naked power. North Korea has a kind of ghost of Marxism, but it doesn’t convince anyone. Religion convinces people. That’s the difference. The book is full of reeking examples of people convinced by religion that it is okay for them to do horrible things. Bunting should re-read the story of Rand Abdel-Qader.

Are religions corrupted by their patriarchal history – yes of course, as I’ve written on this site before. Does much of that patriarchy still survive – yes, in many places but in many others it is being challenged. Does it sometimes become misogyny – yes. So there is much common ground between Benson and I. It’s just that I would argue that the root of this problem is men – and they have used religious traditions to restrict the freedom of women.

Yes…that is rather the point. I won’t say more, since Bunting’s failure to get the point is obvious enough. (I will say it should be ‘between Benson and me’ though.)

In the debate, Benson didn’t sound as hysterical as her prose but it’s odd listening to someone who has created a caricature of religion and then pours her scorn on it. She talks about the nature of God a lot with a confidence that is bizarre – as if she had inside knowledge yet she is an atheist so all she is really talking about is her image, her understanding of God. And this is where I heartily agree with her final sentence “That is the God who hates women. That God has to go”. Hear, hear Benson.

I didn’t, actually. I don’t (of course) think ‘God’ has a nature. What I talked about was the fact that God is not available or accountable and that therefore God’s laws are fundamentally arbitrary in a way that secular laws are not. This isn’t my image or understanding of God – when’s the last time the pope reported God chatting with him about the new encyclical?

There’s another, less substantive aspect to this. Bunting in general presents herself, I think it’s fair to say, as a consciously ‘nice’ gentle ‘feminine’ kind of person – but in practice, at least in this case, she’s been strikingly aggressive. At one point on Night Waves she interrupted me in the middle of a sentence and the middle of a thought – when she had already done a lot more talking than I had, and Rana had cued me to go ahead, and I fairly obviously had a point I wanted to make – and she didn’t just say one thing and then let me go on, she simply grabbed the conversation away from me and kept on talking. I could have followed suit, but I hate shouting heads discussions; I’m willing to break in during pauses, but I’m not willing to cut people off in the middle of a sentence. But Bunting is – despite the sweetly girly voice and despite the conspicuous Christianity, she’s perfectly willing to cut people off. And she’s also willing to use quite strong language. ‘Strident…preposterous…crudeness and lack of insight…profoundly intellectually dishonest…hysterical…bizarre.’

I find that interesting.

James Hannam re-states his case in a comment on It’s not a majority vote issue.

[L]ooking back, a clear lesson seems to be that the accommodationists got things done. So even if Coyne and Myers are right (and of course, I don’t think they are) about the incompatibility of religion and evolution, prior experience suggests that they should nonetheless respect differences and even hold their noses for the good of science. No one would expect them to hide their views. But at the moment, they give the impression that they are partisans for atheism rather than for evolution.

The first question is: what things did accommodationists get done, and what connection did the accommodationism have with the getting things done? What exactly is the claim here? That accommodationists got things done that they would not have gotten done if they had not been accommodationists? And that the things they got done were more important or valuable than any other things they might have gotten done if they had not been accommodationists? In other words, there are a lot of variables here, and a lot of counter-factuals, and it’s simply not clear that ‘the accommodationists got things done’ says anything as clear-cut or useful as Hannam thinks it does (or rather, perhaps, hopes it does). In other other words it’s a very loose, vague claim, which does not justify that ‘So’ in the next sentence. No, prior experience does not suggest that they should ‘respect differences,’ much less that they should ‘hold their noses for the good of science’ – which in this context has to mean ‘hold their noses and conceal what they take to be the truth for the good of science.’

Of course, one can’t make one’s whole case every time one says anything – but one can avoid making large empty claims such as ‘the accommodationists got things done’ in order to back up a further claim that scientists should conceal what they take to be the truth. One can be more careful than that.

Here’s the problem: You have a group of people who reject evolution because of their religious beliefs. You have a mission to educate these people. Do you:

a) explain that many of their learned co-believers have thought carefully about this issue and don’t think there is a contradiction;
b) say nothing to these people and let the likes of Coyne, Dawkins and Myers convince them that they are right to be scared through other channels.

Now, if you care about evolution, this looks like a no-brainer to me.

Well, that’s because you haven’t thought about it carefully enough. One, the ‘mission to educate these people’ is not the only mission. There are a lot of ‘missions’ in play; educating people who reject evolution because of their religious beliefs is only one of them; it is not self-evident that that one ‘mission’ should trump all the others; it is in any case not self-evident that the only or best way to ‘educate these people’ is by concealing what one takes to be the truth.

Two, a) and b) represent a false dilemma. There are (as so often) more than two possibilities here, and a) and b) are very crude tendentious versions even of the two possibilities they purport to represent. One can, for instance, do a) and do other things too, one of which would be to explain why there is a contradiction, or, if you want to hedge, why many other people think there is a contradiction.

There is a whole range of possibilities, and narrowing it down to 1) talk soothing communitarian wool about what lots of learned people have thought or 2) let those pesky fundamentalist atheists scare everyone into church school, is neither productive nor interesting.

The fundamental blankness behind this way of arguing seems to be a complete blindness to the fact that some people prefer trying to get at the truth to trying to manipulate other people. Over and over we keep coming back to this ‘whatever you think the truth is, you should say that science and religion are perfectly compatible, for purely instrumental short-term reasons’ idea. It’s depressing. It’s tawdry. It’s as if all of life were an endless US presidential campaign, where the only goal is to win and no lie is too gross if only it might win West Virginia.

James Hannam is confused about accommodationism.

As the battle between creationism and evolution heats up, some atheists, like Jerry Coyne, have been insisting that it is really a battle between religion and science. Coyne resists any accommodation between religious and non-religious scientists…In order for his position to make sense, he needs to show that there is some sort of existential conflict between religion and science. So it is unfortunate for him that the historical record clearly shows that accommodation and even cooperation have been the default positions in the relationship.

No, that’s not right. It would perfectly possible for the historical record to show that and for the accommodation still to be philosophically incoherent. Coyne’s claim is not that accommodation has never happened but that it is not coherent.

True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind…The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?

What has happened in the past is fundamentally irrelevant to what Coyne is arguing, in the same way that a contemporary opinion poll would be. The historical record makes essentially the same claim as an opinion poll could make: lots of people think or have thought that science and religion can be reconciled. Coyne already knows that, and has stipulated that they can be reconciled in the trivial sense that a person can do both. His point is that the reconciliation is not coherent. Majority opinion, now or in the past, can’t decide that question.

Unfortunately for him, Hannam’s entire article rests on this irrelevant claim about the history of the conflict, which just isn’t what Coyne is talking about. Oh well.

This is what I’m saying.

Tony Blair made much of becoming a Roman Catholic six months after he left 10 Downing Street, but senior figures in the Church appear reluctant to sign up to his fan club…Blair used an interview with Attitude, a magazine for homosexuals, to criticise the approach of the Pope towards gay rights. He argued that religious leaders must start “rethinking” the issue, but the new Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, said Catholic thinking was “rather different” from the kind promoted by Blair.

Precisely. Of course it is. So what does Madeleine Bunting mean by claiming she doesn’t understand when people point out that laws handed down by an unavailable unaccountable god are different from negotiable secular laws? Eh? Eh? What does she mean by it? If the new archbish of Westminster gets it (when defending his ‘thinking’ of course, as opposed to agreeing with secularist criticism of his ‘thinking’), why doesn’t she? Merely because it’s not convenient? Surely not…