Author: Ophelia Benson

How to pretend an incompatibility is just a difference in taste. How to airbrush a genuine stalemate.

[R]eligious convictions limit many Americans’ willingness to accept controversial scientific theories…Science and religion have traditionally, and often incorrectly, been viewed as enemies. This perception has been fueled in part by a number of famous episodes in history that have pitted scientists, like Galileo and Darwin, against the prevailing religious establishments of their time. But more often than not, scientists and people of faith have operated not at cross purposes but simply at different purposes…How can Americans say that they respect science and even know what scientists believe and yet still disagree with the scientific community on some fundamental questions? The answer is that much of the general public simply chooses not to believe the scientific theories and discoveries that seem to contradict long-held religious or other important beliefs.

Right. So it does. Much of the general public chooses not to believe discoveries, no matter how well supported by evidence, that seem to and do contradict religious beliefs. And that, good Horatio, is why science and religion are indeed enemies – especially, it is why religion is the enemy of science: because it teaches people to choose not to believe evidence-based theories that contradict religious beliefs. That means that scientists and ‘people of faith’ do indeed operate at cross purposes. Yes, the purposes are also different, but that doesn’t make them any less cross. Your would-be biologist or geologist or psychologist or cognitive scientist who chooses not to believe well-warranted theories that contradict religious beliefs is going to be an incompetent biologist or geologist or psychologist or cognitive scientist in proportion to the number and salience of the well-warranted theories that are voluntarily not believed. The two ways of thinking are at cross purposes.

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding…This reliance on religious faith may help explain why so many people do not see science as a direct threat to religion…These data once again show that, in the minds of most people in the United States, there is no real clash between science and religion. And when the two realms offer seemingly contradictory explanations (as in the case of evolution), religious people, who make up a majority of Americans, may rely primarily upon their faith for answers.

But that is a real clash. Of course the ‘reliance on religious faith may help explain why so many people do not see science as a direct threat to religion,’ but that simply amounts to saying that so many people are delusional and willfully ignorant (in the sense of choosing not to believe no matter what quantity of evidence). That doesn’t make religion compatible with science, it just makes it capable of denial, which we already knew.

Go, Wajeha Al-Huwaider.

A group called the League of Demanders of Women’s Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia will present a petition to King Abdullah this week, asking him to “return that which has been stolen from women: the right to free movement through the use of cars, which are the means of transportation today.”…Heading the new group pressing to overturn the ban is Wajeha Al-Huwaider, an American-schooled education analyst…Last month, she held a one-woman demonstration with a placard demanding, “Give Women Their Rights!” She was arrested, detained for seven hours and freed only after a male “guardian” signed for her. Banned by the Saudi Interior Ministry from writing in the Saudi press, she writes online. The authorities have threatened to take away her job if she continues.

That’s ‘moderate’ Saudi Arabia.

The ban on driving is part of a wide sweep of restrictions on the role of women, which are enforced by the country’s religious police, the Muttawa, a common sight on Saudi streets. Strict segregation of the sexes is used to deny equal educational opportunities for women, and women are allowed to work only in certain vocations. Freedom of movement is severely restricted. Women require a mehram – a male guardian’s permission – to travel, rent an apartment or attend college.

In short, women are considered to be rebellious garbage, and treated accordingly.

Wajeha Al-Huwaider is not impressed. She attacks discriminatory laws which “classify women as having less sense, detract from their importance, cast doubts about their abilities, let them be beaten and divorced, let them be imprisoned within four walls, allow them to be treated as their husbands see fit, let them be bought and sold by legal agreement, and, when the women fail and violate religious law they welcome their barbaric killing.”

Apart from all that, things are pretty good.

A bishop says something worth saying for a change:

‘It is very common in the world today, including in this country, for people who have changed their faith, particularly from being Muslim to being Christian, to be ostracised, to lose their job, for their marriages to be dissolved, for children to be taken away,’ [Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-]Ali said. ‘And this is why some leadership is necessary from Muslim leaders themselves to say that this is not what Islam teaches.’

Who are these Muslim leaders though? As we know, that phrase gets bandied around a lot, but seriously, who are they? There was a time when that translated pretty straightforwardly (and unfortunately) to people at the top of the MCB, but that facile and unwarranted equation has gone a little out of fashion – but then who are these Muslim leaders? There are prominent Muslims, of course, but they’re not necessarily leaders, and it’s really not clear that they have any particular standing to say what Islam teaches. That’s part of the problem. The lack of an official hierarchy makes Islam in a way less coercive than the Vatican or even than the Anglican hierarchy, but it also makes it harder to control. There isn’t really anyone who can say ‘this is not what Islam teaches’ and be heeded by all Muslims. In that sense Michael Nazir-Ali is sort of asking for the impossible.

The bishop warns that Muslims who switch faiths in Britain could be killed if the current climate continues. ‘We have seen honour killings have happened, and there is no reason why this kind of thing cannot happen.’ In 2004, Prince Charles asked British Muslim leaders to renounce laws of apostasy and the death sentence for converts in Islamic countries, but no public statement was ever made.

Maybe they all pretended it was some other set of Muslim leaders P.C. was asking. At any rate, it’s not surprising that no public statement was ever made, since it’s difficult to claim that ‘this is not what Islam teaches’ when it is what Islam teaches. I hope the Bishop has success with his suggestions, but he has his work cut out for him.

Dispatches obtained Islamic texts sold in Britain that say the punishment for apostasy is death – according to all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. One text called for Muslims to cut off the head of those who reject Islam. The radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir…states in its constitution that in countries that practise Sharia law, apostates are to be executed…A poll of more than 1,000 British Muslims, conducted by the Policy Exchange think-tank this year, found that 36 per cent of Muslims aged between 16 and 24 believe those who convert to another faith should be punished by death.

That’s what I mean. Not an easy job.

A week or two ago I was reading another book about emotions and thinking, The Political Brain by Drew Westen (I read it after reading this article in the NY Review of Books). I was struck by this observation on page 15:

Republicans understand what…David Hume recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around…Democratic strategists for the last three decades have instead clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind…They do so, I believe, because of an irrational emotional commitment to rationality – one that renders them, ironically, impervious to…scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain work. [italics his]

Hmmmm, I thought – do I have that? So I thought about it (rationally, I hope, despite the wild sobbing and tearing of hair). Well, I at least have an emotional commitment to rationality, I agreed. I don’t think it’s irrational, because I think rationality is better, for reasons I could enumerate – but it could be the case that that commitment causes me to overlook or forget the importance of emotion. I decided to try to do a better job of keeping it in mind.

But anyway, I have no trouble agreeing that it is an emotional commitment. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t care – everyone could be irrational and coercive up one side and down the other, and I wouldn’t care, because I wouldn’t care. The caring comes first – I get that.

Anthony Grayling finds John Gray not altogether persuasive.

In a nutshell the book consists in the repeated assertion that modern secularist thinking is utopian in aspiration, has inherited this aspiration from Christianity, has failed because its belief in progress is false and has in fact been violently regressive…[H]e is against the progressivist ambitions of the secular Enlightenment, and he hopes to annoy its proponents by giving it Christianity for a father and – that weary old canard – Nazism and Stalinism for offspring…In order to establish that secular Whiggish Enlightenment-derived aspirations are the child of Christianity, Gray begins by calling any view or outlook a “religion”. Everything is a religion: Torquemada’s Catholicism, the pluralism and empiricism of 18th-century philosophers, liberalism, Stalinism. He speaks of “secular religion” and “political religion”. This empties the word “religion” of any meaning, making it a neutral portmanteau expression like “view” or “outlook”. He can therefore premise a gigantic fallacy of equivocation, and assimilate secular Enlightenment values to the Christian “narrative” of reformation aimed at bringing about a golden age.

The Humpty Dumpty move – oddly popular with people who want to give the Enlightenment or secularism or atheism or science or all those a good kicking.

[I]n making a nonsense of the word “religion” Gray blurs and blends just where important distinctions are required. A religion is a view which essentially premises commitment to belief in the existence of supernatural agencies in the universe, almost always conceived as having intentions and expectations regarding human beings…Most religions, especially if given the chance, share the totalitarian impulses of Stalinism and Nazism (think Torquemada and the Taliban) for a simple reason: all such are monolithic ideologies demanding subservience to a supposed ideal, on pain of punishment for non-conformity. Now let us ask whether secular Enlightenment values of pluralism, democracy, the rule of independently and impartially administered law, freedom of thought, enquiry and expression, and liberty of the individual conform to the model of a monolithic ideology such as Catholicism, Islam or Stalinism.

No. They don’t.

One thing that cannot be let go by is Gray’s backhanded defence of religion as “at its best … an attempt to deal with mystery rather than the hope that mystery will be unveiled”, and regrets that “this civilising perception” (one gasps) has been lost in the current clash of fundamentalisms. This painfully vague excuse for one of the worst toxins poisoning human affairs will not do: invocation of mystery has been more a potent excuse for evil than a service to the greater good.

An attempt to deal with mystery – sounds oddly like ‘some insights into ways of ultimately enhancing human flourishing.’ Equally nebulous, equally capacious, equally cautiously non-specific. Naughty.

Speaking of morality – Jean has an interesting Ethics Poll: The Talent Show. She wants more takers, so why not amble over and take it (it’s just one question).

More thoughts on morality, Haidt, emotion, confabulation, intuition, reasoning, cultural relativism, disgust, purity, and so on.

Haidt at Edge again:

We all care about morality so passionately that it’s hard to look straight at it. We all look at the world through some kind of moral lens, and because most of the academic community uses the same lens, we validate each other’s visions and distortions. I think this problem is particularly acute in some of the new scientific writing about religion.

I’m not sure that is a problem. I can see that it’s a potential problem, and I can believe it’s sometimes a problem, but I’m not sure it is a problem overall – because I think the moral lens of the academic ‘community’ is likely to be better than many other possible lenses. One of the exceptions is when that ‘community’ gets so excited about the fact that other cultures have different lenses that it decides all lenses see equally well.

Which is not to say that Haidt is not interesting here; he is. To summarize: morality and rationality depend on the proper functioning of emotional circuits in the prefrontal cortex; human morality is the product of natural selection; automatic and unconscious processes can cause much of our behaviour, even morally loaded actions that we thought we were controlling consciously. Emotion matters; morality is hardwired; a lot of what we do is automatic rather than conscious. We’re not all that rational. Furthermore, we confabulate: we make up rational explanations for things we’ve done for unconscious reasons. We’re not all that rational, and sometimes when we are rational we’re just telling a story about something we’ve done for reasons we’re not aware of. Okay. But…

These findings suggested that emotion played a bigger role than the cognitive developmentalists had given it. These findings also suggested that there were important cultural differences, and that academic researchers may have inappropriately focused on reasoning about harm and rights because we primarily study people like ourselves – college students, and also children in private schools near our universities, whose morality is not representative of the United States, let alone the world.

Wait. Why ‘inappropriately’? Does he mean inappropriately in an epistemic sense – that that’s not the way to get a broad sample? Or does he mean in a moral sense – that that’s not the way to think about morality? The first of course makes sense, the second is more dubious. I think what’s going on in this article is that he starts out doing the first and then gradually shades into doing the second – he gradually moves from the descriptive to the normative.

Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. But I do agree with Josh Greene that sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week.

Maybe, but on public and contentious issues, don’t we use controlled processes such as reasoning quite a lot? And more to the point, don’t we have to? Is that not the only alternative to simply heeding our visceral initial reactions and then going with them? Wouldn’t that simply push us back into a world where automatic hatred of black people or gays was normal and unproblematic? A world where all our gut-level contempts and dislikes and desires to bully and exploit would grab the reins and bolt?

Mind you, as potentilla pointed out, he does explicitly say he is being descriptive rather than normative – but I’m not always convinced.

My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

I think that’s wrong. The caste system for instance does not enhance the human flourishing of the people in the bottom castes. Strongly patriarchal ideologies and ways of life do not enhance the human flourishing of women and girls. Chattel slavery did not and does not enhance the human flourishing of the slaves. I’m perfectly willing to agree that my dislike of ways of life that treat some people like shit is emotional first and rational second if at all – but I’m not willing to agree that every way of life is basically good at heart. Mind you, Haidt hedged his bets there – he didn’t say every longstanding ideology and way of life ultimately enhances human flourishing – he said every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some insights into ways of ultimately enhancing human flourishing – which could mean exactly nothing, and be conveniently unfalsifiable. What – even the most reactionary brutal male-dominated way of life sits around having insights into ways of ultimately enhancing human flourishing, then has a jolly good laugh at the whole subject and goes on as before? Well maybe so, but what good is that? Why bother saying it? Why bother saying it if not to rebuke atheists who prefer to second-guess our intuitions?