Author: Ophelia Benson

Let’s pay a nice visit to the pope again. We haven’t dropped in on him in awhile, and he always repays attention. Let’s see what he’s been up to, the dear man. Dylan Evans tells us that religion is beautiful, and a metaphor, so let’s take a look at some beautiful metaphors.

A pope “must constantly bind himself and the Church to the obedience of the word of God in the face of all the attempts to adapt it or water it down,” Pope Benedict told a packed congregation. “That’s what Father John Paul II did when faced by all such attempts which were seemingly benevolent towards man. When faced with erroneous interpretations of freedom, he unequivocally underlined the inviolability of the human being, the inviolability of human life from conception to natural death. “Freedom to kill is not a true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being into slavery,” he added, to applause from the congregation.

There’s beauty for you. Rigourous thinking, too. Obedience to the word of God. Err – which word? How do you know? How do you choose? Are we talking Bible here, or what? The Catholic church isn’t all that literalist about the Bible, but then how does it know what the word of God is and above all how does it sort them? In other words, what’s he talking about?

Nothing, really, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s the pope, so he can get away with it. He can get away with announcing that he is in charge of what ‘the word of God’ is and with separating it from ‘all the attempts to adapt it or water it down.’ Do please take note of that phrase. He means human beings must not take thought and decide what are good useful reasonable laws and what are not – no, they must ask the pope what the word of God is, instead, and if the pope happens to be a benighted conservative like Ratzinger well that’s just too bad.

Make no mistake. ‘That’s what Father John Paul II did when faced by all such attempts which were seemingly benevolent towards man.’ Ah yes – ‘seemingly benevolent’ – but we know better. We here in the Vatican know that telling people not to use condoms, and telling them that condoms don’t work, is not seemingly benevolent but really benevolent – because that way they are more likely to die a horrible death and leave their children destitute orphans, which is obviously really benevolent as opposed to merely seemingly so. What luck that we deluded humans have churches to tell us what the word of God is when we get confused.

And then of course there’s the bit about natural death. Er – what? What natural death? The one ‘Father John Paul II’ had? The one Terri Schiavo spent fifteen years having? That’s natural?

Well maybe he doesn’t mean it like that. Maybe it’s a metaphor? And I’m just too secular and atheist and unartistic and thick to get it. Nothing like a little religion to tell us about our longings for transcendence, is there.

More Michael Ruse, I promised you. Very well then. I never forget a promise. There is
this review of Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain from December 2003. I remember being rude about it at the time, though I can’t find the N&C I was rude in. I remember because my colleague was tiresome enough to disagree with something I said, and to say that Ruse had a point in one of the places I disagreed with him. Well I ask you – that can’t be right. Anyway, Ruse does say some odd things in this review.

But how then does Dawkins respond to the obvious retort of the religious, who have always stressed mystery? Some of the fundamental problems of philosophy are no closer to being solved today than they were at the time of the Greeks: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is this something not something else? What is mind, and are we unique? Perhaps one agrees that traditional religions—Christianity specifically—do not offer the full answers. But what is to stop a nonbeliever like myself from saying that the Christians are asking important questions and that they are right to have a little humility before the unknown?

Uh – yeah, this particular ‘one’ does agree that traditional religions don’t offer full answers. Actually I don’t think religions offer answers at all, not even partial ones. I don’t think the things they offer are answers. Because they’re not based on serious inquiry or investigation or hard thought, they’re based on revelation and a sacred book. ‘The Christians’ aren’t asking important questions, they’re making important assertions that are made up – that’s not the same thing. Of course there are Christians who ask important questions, but Christianity itself doesn’t. That’s not in its job description. It’s way too flattering to pretend otherwise. And what is this crap about humility? What is humble about making up the answers and then pretending they have some kind of weight? That’s not my idea of humility.

Then there is an old N&C on a different Ruse article. In which he said something that really got up my nose. (Something similar to the above comment, really. Yet he’s an atheist. What is it with all these atheists who fall all over themselves to misdescribe religion and give it way more credit than it deserves?)

People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.

Sigh. Sure, religion aims, anybody can aim, but – oh never mind. You know what I’m going to say. Here is the article where Ruse said that and more. It’s basically about the compatibility of religion and ‘Darwinism’.

For refreshment, there is Jonathan Miller’s letter to the Guardian on Dylan Evans’ article. (I’m not the only one who was rude about it! Such a relief.)

I can’t speak for my friend Richard Dawkins, but I have no reason to believe that he naively regards science as substitute for religion (Letters, May 5). But instead of visualising it, as Dylan Evans does, as no more than “a means to an end”, Dawkins, like me, visualises the scientific worldview as an increasingly reliable representation of the way things are, and that as such it constitutes an end in itself…Even now I am disconcerted by the fact my intuitive disbelief merits a label, pejorative or otherwise. In fact if it weren’t for the intrusive indignation of those who do believe, it’s unlikely that I’d give the issue a second thought. But this doesn’t mean, as Evans insists, that people such as Dawkins and myself are crudely indifferent to the themes and concerns which religion and art express so differently, or that his supposedly more enlightened atheism puts ours to shame.

Of course it doesn’t. And it’s absurd to think otherwise.

So did you listen to Dylan Evans and Lewis Wolpert argue on ‘Today’ this morning? It was quite entertaining at first, but then they got off onto a not very rewarding tangent about religious art, and ran out of time, so the more interesting issues were left unexplored. Pity.

But there were some interesting things said before the tangent.

DE: I think many atheists behave in a rather adolescent manner, and I think that while emancipating themselves from the older religious culture that surrounds them, they insist on rather sort of showy gestures of aggression towards religion; I think it’s just time the atheists moved on and gave a more balanced view of the older religious culture that surrounds them; you know, there’s a time when we come to look at our parents with more compassion and we see them as human beings like us…

Why adolescent? That’s a trope we’ve heard before. Why? Why is criticism (or ‘showy gestures of aggression,’ which is a highly tendentious way of putting the matter) adolescent? Why isn’t it just reasoned criticism and dissent?

And as for moving on – well I’ll tell you what: I will if they will. And not otherwise. I mean, dang, is it not obvious why we don’t ‘move on’? We don’t ‘move on’ because unfortunately religion is not merely a matter of pretty pictures and pretty music, is it. As Lewis Wolpert pointed out:

But to value religion for its beauty, and to ignore the damage that it does to our society, just take all the stuff about contraception, and AIDS, and stem cells, and things like that, and all the holy wars, and [inaudible] see beauty in it is bizarre beyond words.

And why the parental comparison? Is that to shore up the untenable ‘adolescent’ epithet? Religion isn’t my parent, and I’m not ‘rebelling’ against it like an angry teenager. I don’t want it to loan me the car or wash my clothes or quit nagging me about my hair. Or is it there to stand in for religious people whom we’re supposed to look at with more compassion? But then why not just say that, why bring up parents with their inevitable whiff of Oedipal struggle and general babyishness? I’m all grown up, thanks, and my atheism has nothing whatever to do with adolescent rebellion. That’s a belittling, trivializing, patronizing comparison, as is the bit about showy gestures and adolescent manner. Well – if atheists deserve all this trivialization and belittling, what do theists deserve? Eh?

…so many of my fellow atheists – we can’t seem to get them to move on from the tired old religion-bashing and articulate a more content-full account of the way that they find meaning in a godless universe, and I think that’s important, I think it’s something that atheists are just not living up to really – a positive account of their own view of life…There’s a failure to try and see things from the other person’s point of view, and not even for a minute to try and adopt their perspective even for a second so that one could see what it actually seems like for the religious person, I think that it’s incumbent upon atheists who proclaim themselves to be bearers of tolerance and – to actually give an example to other people of the kind of tolerance they preach.

Tired old religion-bashing. Well, there again, religion-bashing is not nearly as tired – not within shouting distance of as tired – as religion itself is, not to mention atheism-bashing. And then – why are atheists obliged to ‘articulate a more content-full account of the way that they find meaning in a godless universe’? Why is that our job? Why is anything our job? Why are we supposed to give an account of ourselves? As if – what – theism is the default position, so anyone who isn’t a theist has some explaining to do? As in the Guardian article, Evans is arguing as if atheism is a system, an ideology, a worked-out established wide-ranging doctrine, when in fact it is merely the absence of one. And by the same token – atheists don’t ‘proclaim themselves to be bearers of tolerance.’ I wouldn’t dream of such a thing, myself. Much less would I ‘preach’ the stuff.

Evans’ whole case seems to rely on a mischaracterization of atheism as simply an inversion of religion, as like religion but turned inside out, but that’s nonsense. I won’t call it adolescent nonsense though. I’m far too polite and tolerant for that.