Author: Ophelia Benson

The religious bad-argument-purveyors are out in force. Lloyd Eby at World Peace Herald for instance. He says an earlier article of his got a lot of ‘responses and comments from atheists who claim that this article misrepresents what atheism is and what atheists actually believe.’ Now there’s a surprise – religious people generally do such a good job of representing what atheism is and what atheists actually believe. No strawmen there! Hardly ever.

So Eby answers the answers.

If we accept the usual or most prevalent definition of religion, a definition in which religion is explicitly tied to belief in and/or service of a supernatural god or supreme being, then atheism could not be a religion because active atheism can be defined or described as the positive rejection of the existence of any supernatural god or supreme being. Atheism is the active belief that there is no god. As one atheist put it, “Atheism is the rejection of supernatural belief. As an atheist, I do not believe in the reality of any supernatural being, and as a result of this, reject religion.”

Well there’s a bad start. That’s his first paragraph, apart from the exposition, and already he’s done exactly what he’s accused of doing. Furthermore he’s done it in the space of one sentence, in full view of the readers, and apparently without awareness that he’s done it. That’s what I call sloppy. Behold the translation – the atheist he quotes says ‘I do not believe in the reality of any supernatural being’ but Eby cites that as illustration of his version, ‘Atheism is the active belief that there is no god’ – and he apparently doesn’t see (or else he’s being tricksy) that the two are different – that he’s translated. Theists are always doing this! It’s highly irritating, and it’s dirty pool. Not believing something is not identical to believing that something not. Some atheists of course do ‘actively’ believe there is no god, but a great many don’t. A great many atheists are just, what the word implies, not theists. That’s all. Theists don’t get to redefine the word to make their case – except they do, because they do it all the time, and get away with it.

Oddly, farther down in the article, he makes that very distinction himself, and then says that the mere non-theists are not the atheists he’s talking about. Well that’s fair enough, but then he should have worded the opening gambit differently. More people will read the first two paragraphs than read the whole article (few people, I would guess, read a middle paragraph and nothing else, but lots read beginnings and nothing else).

I do indeed hold that theism and atheism are both religious. The atheist who thinks otherwise is mistaken because he is using a tendentious or incorrect definition of religion, a definition that attempts to privilege atheism and give it a logical, legal, and evidential status over the usual notions of religion. But that is unwarranted. The theist cannot prove that his belief is true; his belief is metaphysical and a statement of faith that goes beyond the observable evidence for it. And the atheist cannot prove that his view is true either; his belief is also metaphysical and a statement of unbelief that goes beyond the observable evidence for it.

Wait – stop right there. More dirty pool. How did ‘prove’ get in there? More tricksiness? This guy is a philosopher! He knows beliefs can be warranted without being provable. So he’s playing games. It’s a very familiar game, to pretend there is nothing between proof and belief in the sense of faith. Of course atheists can’t prove that atheism is true, but there is plenty of evidence that makes a deity seem pretty improbable. It’s reasonable to point out that there are some metaphysical beliefs or assumptions underlying the belief that evidence is evidential – that the world is orderly, and so on – but that’s not the same thing as the claim that atheism and theism are on exactly equal footing with regard to logical and evidential status.

More later.

Speaking of ethics and politeness, the difference between what one has a right to do and what is right to do – as we just were in comments on ‘A Valediction Forbidding Nonsense’ – I’ve been pondering a certain pattern of behavior which I’ve seen in a few people I know (especially, but not exclusively, in rich people I know) and find interesting. I should give it a name, for ease of reference – but it’s hard to think of one, because it’s a complicated pattern, with several steps.

Step 1. Volunteer the statement – unprompted by the other party – that you are going to do something. Perhaps something generous or kind or helpful, something extra – give a present, help with a project, loan a valuable object, perform a service, do a favour – something unexpected, welcome, significant. Collect gratitude. Or perhaps just a simple bit of routine scheduling – ‘I will do X on Thursday,’ ‘I will get Y done by the end of the month.’ Collect recognition of duty done.

Step 2. Don’t do it. Don’t give or loan or help with or perform whatever it is. Don’t do X on Thursday, don’t finish Y by the end of the month.

Step 3. Never state the fact. Never say ‘oh by the way I can’t [do whatever it is] after all.’ Never mention it or refer to it.

Step 4. Entailed by Step 3. Never explain. Since you don’t say ‘I’m not going to [do whatever it is] after all,’ it is not possible (or necessary) to explain.

Step 5. Also entailed by Step 3. Never apologize.

That’s it. Say ‘I’m going to give you A’ or ‘I will help you with B’. Then don’t do it; don’t say you’re not going to do it, you’re not currently doing it, you haven’t done it; don’t refer to it at all; ignore it entirely; act as if nothing was ever said, the subject was never mentioned; never explain why you’re not doing it, haven’t done it – much less why the reasons you haven’t done it are good reasons. Never apologize. Never do anything at all, simply proceed on your way as if nothing had happened.

Maybe I should call it ‘the Gaslight deception,’ on the theory that the goal is to make the other party think it was all a hallucination born of insanity.

People of course have a right to do this. But is it the right thing to do? I leave it to your wisdom to decide.

A couple of passages from the president of the Royal Society’s valedictory speech because they are so B&W.

In short, I guess that the same ill-understood circumstances that allow complex human societies to arise and persist also – and perhaps necessarily – have elements that are strongly antithetic to the values of the Enlightenment. What are these values? They are tolerance of diversity, respect for individual liberty of conscience, and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief. All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding.

See – ‘and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief’. That’s where we came in.

I end this valedictory Address much as I began my first one, by again reminding us that the Royal Society was born of the Enlightenment. Everything we do embodies that spirit: a fact-based, questioning, analytic approach to understanding the world and humankind’s place in it…Many people and institutions have always found such questioning, attended often by unavoidable uncertainties, less comfortable than the authoritarian certitudes of dogma or revelation…Today, however, fundamentalist forces are again on the march, West and East. Surveying this phenomenon, Debora MacKenzie has suggested that – in remarkably similar ways across countries and cultures – many people are scandalised by “pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexual behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy, which grants power to people rather than God.” She adds that in the US evangelical Christians have successfully fostered a belief that science is anti-religious, and that a balance must be restored, citing a survey which found 37% of Americans (many of them not evangelicals) wanted Creationism taught in schools. Fundamentalist Islam offers a similar threat to science according to Ziauddin Sardar, who notes that a rise in literalist religious thinking in the Islamic world in the 1990s seriously damaged science there, seeing the Koran as the font of all knowledge.

Because people refuse to recognize that an ugly fact trumps a cherished belief. Because as far as a great many people are concerned, it is very much the other way around – a cherished belief trumps pretty much everything, and certainly anything so small and petty and trivial as a mere fact or piece of evidence. And because deference is paid to them and witheld from the other team – because it’s considered bad manners to tell the cherished-belief-first crowd that they’re mistaken and not thinking clearly, while it’s not in the least considered bad manners to tell the evidence-first crowd that we are shallow, cold, boring, heartless, unimaginative, trivial, shallow, and mistaken and deluded and going to burn in hell forever. An unfortunate arrangement.