Author: Ophelia Benson

Susan Haack in Defending Science – Within Reason (p. 286) quotes (in order to dispute) Richard Swinburne:

If God’s existence, justice and intentions became common knowledge, then man’s freedom to choose [to believe or disbelieve] would in effect be vastly curtailed. (Swinburne, The Existence of God p. 244)

What I immediately wondered (not for the first time) on reading that is: why is that important? Why is it even meaningful? Why is belief an issue? And why, being an issue, does it become an issue of freedom? Why is it treated as a test?

We have all kinds of common knowledge – and that’s not seen as a problem. We don’t worry about our freedom to choose to believe or disbelieve various items of common knowledge; why is it different with God? That is, independent of the fact that God is hidden and is not common knowledge?

Given the fact that God is hidden – and that billions of people claim to believe in it anyway – it becomes very difficult to see how to separate the claim about freedom (and other similar claims) from the need to explain the brute inconvenient fact that God is hidden. In my case anyway, it is impossible.

In other words – God is hidden – and this obvious fact is slightly inconvenient (though not as inconvenient as it ought to be) for people who believe in it and want others to believe in it, and espcially for people who want to rebuff and reprove and correct non-believers. That means there is a need for some kind of explanation. What would such an explanation look like? Well, like what Swinburne says. Therefore…it seems likely that that is why Swinburne says it.

1) God is hidden. 2) Non-theists consider this a reason not to believe God exists. 3) Theists need a counter-reason. 4) Therefore theistic explanations of God’s hiddenness are rendered suspect by this motivation.

An explanation can be suspect and still be correct, of course – but to a non-theist all these excuses for God’s non-appearance do tend to sound awfully…carefully crafted to fit the disconcerting and undeniable facts. (We keep inviting God to dinner and it keeps not showing up.)

An argument like this would show its fragility quite readily in real life. ‘You skipped work today, you’re fired.’ ‘No, I was there.’ ‘No you weren’t!’ ‘Yes I was, it’s just that we kept missing each other.’ ‘Uh huh – that’s a little too convenient – you’re fired.’

An explanation that is too convenient in that way is suspect.

The European Federation of Catholic Medical Associations issued a statement

at the conclusion of its 11th annual congress expressing its firm commitment to the defense of life in response to the threats of abortion, euthanasia, genetic manipulation, the creation of human embryos, and others…[T]hey stressed that ethical norms and principles precede civil laws, which should be influenced by natural law and the teaching of the Church. They went on to state that decisions about “the medical treatment for patients who put their trust in us should be guided above all by our conscience. Moral evaluation of medical practice should not be based on superficial opinions or the latest tendencies, but rather on the sensibleness of a conscience formed according to the objective ethical norms common to all people and constantly defended by the Church.”

What is the difference? What is the difference between ‘superficial opinions’ and ‘the latest tendencies’ on the one hand and objective ethical norms on the other? And how do the Catholic doctors know what the difference is? And how do they tell? How, exactly, do they distinguish between the two? What exactly is that silly line-up of bollocks supposed to mean?

What it appears to mean, to an outsider at least, is simply ‘norms that we don’t like’ on the one hand and ‘norms that we do like’ on the other hand, dressed up as something detectable with fine Catholic instruments.

After emphasizing the spotless moral character that a doctor should have, they noted that “the source and foundation of ethical norms is the inalienable dignity of the human person throughout his or her life, from conception to natural death.”

Natural death? So they’re putting their imprimatur on natural death now? So we are to take it that Catholic doctors from now on will refuse to treat any illness that could, if left untreated, cause natural death? That’s a little off-putting.

Kenan Malik reminds us of the wise and reasonable words of Khomeini when he put out the hit on Rushdie and his accomplices.

[O]n February 14, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa. “I inform all zealous Muslims of the world,” he proclaimed, “that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death.”

Note that – not just Rushdie, but also all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents should be murdered by religious zealots. What a nice guy. It’s a shame he never had a chance to meet Torquemada; they would have gotten along so well.

And of course it’s so sensible and fair – that all human beings in the world should be required to say nothing about Islam that fails to meet with Khomeini’s approval, on pain of death. Islam is not incidentally but centrally a set of laws and restrictions and limitations that control the lives of people who are subject to them (people who ‘submit’ to them), but people are not allowed to discuss those laws in a way Khomeini (and his successors) might not approve (and to be safe of course we should understand that as in any way at all, since we don’t know for sure what they do or don’t approve). So an intrusive controlling demanding religion full of sexist laws and arbitrary restrictions must be immune from criticism and discussion, because if we discuss it the wrong way we might be murdered.

[T]he argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case – that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures – is now widely accepted. In the 20 years between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the withdrawal of The Jewel of Medina, the fatwa has in effect become internalised. “Self-censorship”, Shabir Akhtar, a British Muslim philosopher, suggested at the height of the Rushdie affair, “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s – not least every Muslim’s – business.”

What’s wrong with that idea? Anything?

Yes. What’s wrong with it is the implicit assumption that passionately held convictions deserve – perhaps even have a ‘right’ to? – forebearance and polite silence. But convictions aren’t things that need or ought to have forebearance and polite silence. Convictions that can’t survive the encounter with other convictions probably aren’t worth passionate tenacity; at any rate it isn’t possible to protect them without paralyzing mental life, and a universally paralyzed mental life is not a good thing.

Norm has more.

The liberal principle that we may interfere with the actions of another (only) to prevent harm to others does have its difficulties since, like many other conceptual boundaries, the boundaries of the concept of harm are fuzzy. But the principle, if it is one, that freedom of speech must be curbed to avoid offending people, is manifestly a qualification of the right of free speech that all but destroys the usefulness of the right. For there are no boundaries on what people can be offended by.

Quite. And if you broaden the meaning of ‘harm’ to include ‘offense’ then you make speech and its cognates unable to do what they are centrally for. A thought or an argument or an idea that can’t possibly offend anyone is a very bland mild tame idea, that makes nothing much happen. Ideas like that aren’t worth bothering with. We can’t have ideas that matter without the risk of offending someone.