Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m interested in this habit of theists and – what to call them – fellow-travelers of theists. People who aren’t theists themselves, but get all riled up at ‘materialist’ positivist etc etc etc arguments, and pitch fits about them. (Not Norm, of course! This is a different subject entirely.) The habit they have is to resort to a certain kind of moral outrage, and while doing that, to distort quite thoroughly what the posito-materialists say.

The certain kind of moral outrage in question is to say (in one way or another) ‘Are you calling me stupid?’

The thought seems to go like this (I say seems because they always leave out a lot of steps, so trying to figure out how they get from where we start to where they end up is part of the subject here): X is saying there is no good reason to believe God exists. X seems to think this is true. I think this is not true. Therefore, X thinks I’m stupid. Many other people also think this is not true. Therefore, X thinks they are all stupid. Therefore, X thinks she is better than everyone else. Therefore, X is arrogant, and trying to tell everyone what to do, and will prevent theist philosophers from getting job interviews.’

Now, the problem with this, as I see it, is that it often happens in the course of discussion, that one person will think one thing and another will think something else. X will think something is true, and Y will think it is not. Is the right move then for them to accuse each other of superiority and arrogance and trying to tell everyone what to do? Sometimes, no doubt; sometimes that is just the ticket, and ends the evening on gales of friendly laughter; but always? I would have thought no.

To put it another way, it ought to be possible, among grownups, to argue for an opinion without being told, simply because one has argued for it, that one is therefore judging everyone who doesn’t agree to be one’s intellectual inferior. Why do I think that ought to be possible? Because if it’s not, all discussion that is not of the most anodyne kind will grind to a halt, and we’ll all fall over and die of boredom. Or else the people who make this argument will be revealed as self-pitying passive-aggressive whiny bedwetters, and they will wish they had left well enough alone. That would be quite a good outcome, actually. I’ll give you an example from comments here, because I found it quite striking and exemplary [I’ll put the missing spaces in, because it’s so annoying to read without them]:

It seems to me that the tenor of Ophelia’s argument which centres on the truth about religion, intellectually arrived at, and therefore necessarily exposing the falsehood of religious belief, implies that in the future a would-be candidate for a professorship in philosophy whose writings argue strongly against OB’s views, would on that basis alone, judged to be the intellectual inferior of someone holding OB’s views.

See – the trouble with that is that it just boils down to saying X shouldn’t try to figure out the truth about religion, intellectually, and expose the [possible] falsehood of religious belief, because – that implies that in the future anyone who writes the opposite would be judged (by whom? when? how?) X’s intellectual inferior. I think the ludicrousness of that is obvious enough that I won’t bother to elaborate on it.

But it’s interesting, because symptomatic. That is of course what the O’Reilly-Limbaugh crowd (and the Pat Robertson crowd, and the similar crowds) are doing when they bark and gibber about elitists sneering at people of faith. It’s a moral blackmail move, and unfortunately, it works all too well. So it’s worth being presented with a particularly blunt and blatant example of it, so that we can see what it amounts to.

Now to ponder Norm’s answer, or parts of it.

But I fear that she’s lost sight of what this discussion is about. It’s not about whether we accept religion, nor even about whether we give it an all-round good report, in which the positive aspects outweigh the negative ones…The issue was about seeing only the bad in religion as opposed to taking a more balanced view. To justify the former approach Ophelia needs the ‘Hegelian’, contaminating move – and I suggest that that is why you find it in her original post, even though it wasn’t her intention. For if you stick with what she intended, then all you’ve got is that for her the bad in religion is more important than the good, overshadows it, and therefore is too high a price to pay. Nonetheless the good is still there, and it can be identified as such and given its due, with everything said that needs to be said about the other darker side. But you have no basis, now, for just leaving out the good aspects as if they were nothing.

I’m still not convinced that the Hegelian, contaminating move is what I need – unless I misunderstand what the Hegelian, contaminating move is, which is quite possible, since my understanding of Hegel is exiguous. But as far as I do understand, contamination isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact that if a particular good of religion depends on a supernatural truth-claim (as, for instance, surely the consolation of religion does), then it is not contaminated but weak, vulnerable, fragile. It still functions as a good in some sense, but at the price of being deluded. Now…there is something to be said for being deluded. (I wrestled with this during the writing of that pesky book. In fact the first thing the book says is that we don’t always want the truth.) But even though there is something to be said for it, it is still being deluded. I take being in a state of delusion to be a high price. Possibly worth it, in some circumstances, but still high. If that boils down to a ‘contamination’ argument – then okay, that’s what I’m arguing.

But that, surely, is how an analogy works. I’m inviting people to think about how we manage to distinguish good and bad in other matters without allowing the bad simply to ‘disappear’ the good.

Yes…But we distinguish good and bad in other matters in different ways for different kinds of good and bad, don’t we? I do, anyway! Bad food is one kind, bad movies are another, bad health is another, bad people are another, bad ideas are another, bad institutions are another. Socrates would probably whack me over the head at this point, but I don’t seem to be able to extract some sort of abstract non-particular essence of good and bad and talk about it indpendent of the kind of thing we’re talking about. I do think a bad person is one kind of thing, and – whatever religion is, is another. Just for one thing, a person has intentionality, so in talking about the good and bad of one person we have to think about how the person herself sorts out good and bad. As Tom Freeman said in comments – consider the patriot who does good things, but does them for white supremacist reasons. Is that a good person? Highly debatable! Or Norm’s Joe. If Joe’s ‘ferocious temper’ causes him to beat up women on a regular basis, do we think he’s a good person all the same? I don’t. I can agree he does good things, but that he’s a good person? No. (I know, I know, determinism – never mind that now!) But religion doesn’t have intentionality. That by itself makes it difficult for me to think about the good and bad of religion in the same kind of way I think about the good and bad of a person. So even if that is how an analogy is supposed to work, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t! That is, it doesn’t seem to help me think about how we manage to distinguish good and bad in other matters.

Finally, in reply to my story of the Polish Catholic who risked her life to save a Jew in danger, Ophelia questions whether the religious belief was a necessary condition of rescue: couldn’t the woman have done the same just through being a good or courageous person, or from a different set of beliefs?…Ophelia ends here by questioning the efficacy of religious belief in moving people to act in heroic ways on behalf of others – and she is now joined in that by some commenters in her comments box. Not only does it fly in the face of evidence collected about the motivations of actual rescuers, and not only does it contradict more general historical evidence about the motivating power of religious belief; there is, as well, a certain (prejudicial) selectivity in only recognizing the power of religious belief to influence people when you perceive that influence to be harmful, but where on the face of things it appears to be for the good, denying that it is what it seems. Isn’t this exactly the sort of fast and loose way with evidence that rationalist atheists criticize in people of faith? There is an air of complete unreality about the notion that religion has never motivated anyone towards the good.

I didn’t intend to question that efficacy in general, but only in particular. I wasn’t making a flat denial that that was what motivated the Polish Catholic, but only asking how one would know. I do think religion can motivate people to be good in general, and I’ve said that in other N&Cs. Still, Norm may have a point. It may be that I do think of religion as more powerful in inspiring domination, anger, hatred, vindictiveness, exclusion, punishment, than in inspiring the opposites – and he may be right that that’s prejudicial selectivity. I’ll have to think about that. (Not that I never have before. But I’ll have to think harder.) I suppose the truth is that I suspect it does. Because of – the evidence of human history; the numbers; the world around us at present. The prevalence of religion compared to the rarity of kindness and good governance. The searching thoroughness of certain kinds of religious sadism and cruelty. I suppose it’s the same with the Polish Catholic. If it really was her religion that made her do what she did, why were there so few people like her and so many people unlike her?

I want to answer Norm’s answer – but later. I have – all these things to do, and more keep coming in. Meanwhile I’ve been wanting to say a few acid words about that ridiculous Deborah Solomon interview with Daniel Dennett.

She starts the stupidity with the very first question. (And that’s the kind of thing that always makes me marvel at the way the Times [NY version] is always calmly informing us that it is the best newspaper in the world – that dopy mediocrity. Why have someone interview Dennett who will ask such silly, ill-informed questions? What is the point of it? Why not do better? Because it would be ‘elitist’ to get someone with a clue to ask the questions? But then – if you’re taking that route, then you don’t get to call yourself the best newspaper in the world, do you. You can’t do both.)

How could you, as a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, write a book that promotes the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology? Why would you hold a scientist’s microscope to something as intangible as belief?

Look at all that – what a train wreck. His book ‘promotes the idea’ as opposed to arguing; it’s religious ‘devotion’ that he’s talking about (she should have called it devout religious devotion, just to make sure); she expresses bovine incredulity at the idea that something ‘intangible’ could be a function of biology. Best newspaper in the world.

But your new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, is not about cathedrals. It’s about religious belief, which cannot be dissected in a lab as if it were a disease.

And not only can it not be dissected, it cannot be considered rationally or investigated at all. Nor can depression, or schizophrenia, or memory, or perception, or attention, or language – and bang goes a century of research.

Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.

Yes. And if we knew for sure that anything existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in it. Therefore what? We should believe in anything and everything? Couldn’t you have done better than that?

No, obviously she couldn’t. Dennett is polite – which is heroic of him.

That strikes me as a very reductive and uninteresting approach to religious feeling.

Does it! Compared to all the fascinating, rich questions you’ve been asking! Best newspaper in the world.

Traditionally, evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould insisted on keeping a separation between hard science and less knowable realms like religion.

What does she think she’s talking about? ‘Traditionally’? Nonsense! Gould made that argument a few years ago, but what’s traditionally got to do with it? And why does she generalize from that to ‘evolutionary biologists like’ Gould? She just means Gould, so that’s what she should have said. And, as Dennett hints (tactfully), she has the widespread idea that Gould was some sort of president of the biologists, but that’s a mistake.

So that’s the world’s best newspaper – assigning a clueless hack to ask questions on a substantive subject. What on earth is the point? Why not either do it right or refrain from doing it at all?

Norm has commented on my comment on his comment on why not mention the good of religion as well as the bad. So I want to see what I think about what he thinks.

First the more minor, contingent issue – my claim that because there is a lot of unmixed criticism of atheism (and rationality, science, secularism) around, people like me don’t always feel like giving mixed criticism back.

I see no reason why opposition to religion, forthright, outspoken opposition to it, cannot, as with anything else, recognize the virtues in what it opposes if there are any.

No, nor do I. It can. But I’m not convinced that it always ought to. I can see plenty of reasons for doing so (tactical, epistemic, moral), but I can also see reasons (same kinds) for not doing so. Sometimes strong, non-balanced comment can shake up people’s thinking – or it can just entrench it further. Sometimes I, for one, feel like going the attempted shake-up route, rather than the mollification route.

But the less minor point is the more interesting to both of us, I think.

But Ophelia’s basic strategy of argument is flawed. In a quasi-Hegelian move, she disallows application of the usual resources of analysis – of analytical discrimination – where religion is concerned. It’s all just a unity, and because something very bad is at the heart of this unity, everything else in it must be bad too, as if poisoned, transmuted, by the badness.

A quasi-Hegelian move? Moi? Surely not! On account of how I wouldn’t recognize one if it bit me. No, but seriously, that’s not what I’m saying, and if it came out that way, I said it badly. I don’t think religion is all just a unity, and it’s not a matter of poisoning, as in contamination. It’s not that the bad bits kind of leak into the good bits, making them dirty or polluted. (Is it? Hmm. Yes, maybe, in a way. I probably do feel that way about it. I do have a visceral dislike of having religion forced on me. But I don’t think what I’m saying depends on that – I think what I’m saying is something slightly different.) It’s that I don’t see how to have the good parts without subscribing to the supernatural truth claims, so I don’t see how to have the good parts without subscribing to (what one takes to be) a lie. It’s not a matter of contamination but one of what is more important. As I said – I think the cost is too high. That’s not pollution, I don’t think, it’s a matter of competing goods.

Joe is a good friend: generous, loyal, funny, a great conversationalist. But he has a ferocious temper, is dishonest in business and in his sexual relationships, is vain and neglectful of his old mother. Must we say that he is all bad, then, because he has these bad qualities, and his other, better qualities, are all mixed in with the worse ones as part of the single personality?

No, but that’s not the right analogy for what I’m saying. Valuing or not valuing a particular person is one thing, and valuing or not valuing religion qua religion is another. I realize some people can take the good of religion and ignore the bad – some people go to church just for the music and community, without believing a word of it. My point is just that other people can’t, or don’t want to, and that there is a reason (a goodenough reason, I think) for that.

There are radicals of one kind and another who can see some of the insights in conservative thought, anti-socialist liberals and/or Weberians who recognize some theoretical strengths within Marxism, Marxists who identify moral and political resources as well as grave deficiencies in classical liberalism. All this is just par for the course. But by her quasi-Hegelian, anti-analytical move, Ophelia would forbid us to approach religious belief in the same way. The move is artificial and arbitrary. You can’t show that religion is all bad simply by focusing on what is bad about it.

But that’s because I take religion to be a different kind of thing. (And I think I’m right, too. If it weren’t a different kind of thing, would it get the special demands for respect and deference, the calls not to ‘offend’ it, that we’re always noticing? Isn’t it generally agreed that religion is a special case of some sort?) Liberals and Weberians don’t base their claims on the existence of a supernatural deity. So I don’t think my move is arbitrary, because the supernatural deity aspect of religion is precisely the stumbling block.

In Warsaw in 1943, a Polish Catholic risks her life to save an endangered Jew. She does so because she has been taught from childhood that all people are the children of God and it is a sin to take innocent life. How, in the face of that – which has happened plenty, and in many other historical variants as well – can one say there has been no good in religion, or that this good is merely apparent because of what it is mixed together with? I could give more than this, but it is enough. Just two things: that religious believers have often been motivated by their beliefs to act in beneficent, caring, selfless, heroic ways; and that there are universalist variants of religious belief which, in historical context, have marked a significant progress for humankind…

But do we know that it was the Catholicism, or the children of God teaching, that made the difference? Do we know that an atheist couldn’t and wouldn’t have had the same thought and the same motivation? Maybe we do, maybe we do – maybe there is some way to know this, and there are studies that back it up. But as of this moment, I’m not convinced that I do know that. I can see that it could be true – but I can also see that it could be untrue. Counterfactually, if the Polish Catholic had been taught from childhood that all people are people even as she is and it is bad and wrong to murder people – is it possible to know that that would not have motivated her to act as she did? And do we really want to give religion the credit for qualities and actions that come from somewhere else – from personal courage, generosity, kindness, for instance? Maybe the Polish Catholic acted the way she did because she was a good human being.

But my point isn’t to deny the existence of good in religion, or to say that it is all bad, it is simply to say that the price is too high.