Author: Ophelia Benson

It’s all been quite instructive – in fact, now I think of it, it couldn’t have been better if I’d planned it that way. I didn’t, I hasten to add, but it would have been fiendishly clever if I had. I’d be another Milgram or Rosenhan, a designer of some sort of thought experiment: what happens when a rational, secular empirical form of inquiry attempts to combine with a non-rational religious ‘faith-based’ form of inquiry? Sparks fly, is one answer.

There is more than one problem with trying to mix religion into non-religious enterprises like history or science. The obvious, glaring problem of course is the fundamental difference between making up one’s findings and discovering them. But even beyond that, there are further problems. There is for instance the way religion is saturated with non-cognitive elements that obstruct and interfere with – that are fundamentally hostile to – cognitive endeavours. Religion is all about things like loyalty, commitment, love, belief, hopes, desires, fears, wishes, consolation, community, tradition. Most of them good things, in the right place and used wisely, but not the right way to judge truth claims about the world. The weird non-sequitur of that absurd quotation – ‘All those enterprises I see as implicitly dependent on a Christian view of God.’ – is a good indication of that.

And it all goes round and round in a circle, because this very emotion-saturation is also what makes believers unable to see religion as a problem, unable even to hear what non-believers are saying. The two sides just talk past each other. As we saw in the discussion here: it wasn’t mere disagreement, it was complete incomprehension, even at the level of vocabulary. Which is interesting in itself. It’s interesting the way beliefs can shape what people are able to hear and perceive and take in – as my colleague put it, hearing not the argument as it is but the argument they want to hear.

That’s not to say that believers are all emotion and secularists have none, of course. But it is to say that emotions and commitments are central, avowedly so, to religion in a way they are not to history and science. And that does make a difference – an unbridgeable one.

Okay, I finally jumped. I took pity on the poor anguished people at Cliopatria, one in particular, who urged me to leave four or five times yesterday. No actually that’s not true – the taking pity bit. The urging five times is true! Ding, ding, ding, in came the emails, one after another, rebuking me for my sins and asking ‘Are you going to go?’ Terrific fun, because yesterday was also the day we were doing the last final positively last edits on the Dictionary, and I wasn’t really in urgent need of extra interruptions. But that’s okay, that’s no one’s fault. At any rate – of course as soon as people started pushing me toward the door I came over all stubborn and wouldn’t go. Isn’t that awful. What a sadist. But I didn’t feel like it yesterday. I felt like making him fire me if he wanted to get me out, rather than making it easy for him. Cruel, I know. But then…after all those endless repetitions of ‘You can say anything you want to’ followed by the instantaneous yells of rage as soon as I did say something – well I just didn’t feel like going quietly. Nope. I wanted to do a Diana and be difficult and stubborn. So I did.

And I might have gone on awhile being difficult and stubborn, too – though probably not. The fact is, I don’t want my name on a religious site. It’s that simple. But I wasn’t sure how overt it was going to be, so I was waiting to see. The answer came promptly – and it was certainly the perfect way to get rid of me! Yet another evangelical post – this one about Christian history. Urrrggghh. So I’m gone. Not out of pity at all, out of sheer revulsion.

The post quotes from an article by a ‘Christian historian’:

While ordinary history might look quite secular, Noll sees it as fundamentally Christian in its presuppositions and worldview. He compared it to science. Christian scientists do their work with confidence because they believe that the world will make sense, and that God has made it possible for the human mind to understand the world. So with the historian. “If I want to study the history of the American Revolution, I’m presupposing that something real took place, that the evidence left corresponds in some way to what really took place, that I’m intelligent enough to understand that evidence, that I’m able to put together a plausible explanation of cause and effect that might get us close to the truth,” Noll said. “All those enterprises I see as implicitly dependent on a Christian view of God.”

Eh? Presupposing that something real took place is implicitly dependent on a Christian view of God? Really? Who knew! There’s no other possible set of ideas that those presuppostitions can rest on then? Er – why?

Oh never mind, who cares. But we can see the problem. And we can also see why I felt inhibited about confronting it head-on at Cliopatria itself. Because I didn’t want to be rude, that’s why. But I must say, I didn’t think I had to censor myself here as well. I mean, be fair, as Monty Python used to say. On someone else’s territory, okay, I’ll shut up, I’ll be polite – but on ours? On territory that was set up precisely in order to expose and resist woolly thinking? It’s asking a bit much to expect me to shut up here too! But that was precisely the grievance: that instead of talking about it there (which of course I was perfectly free to do, oh yes, I could say anything I wanted to) I talked about it here. Ah. And things would have gone swimmingly if I had discussed my thoughts on the Holy Spirit and God’s will and the inerrancy of the Bible over there? I don’t think so! But we’ll never know, because I didn’t, and it also doesn’t make any difference, because there’s no way I would stay on a group blog that’s staging a Third Great Awakening. So I’m off. I prefer secular rationalist sites, thanks.

My baby done gone last month but it came back for a little while for some last improvements. We’ve improved the squalling little thing within an inch of its life, and now we’re through. Finished. Done. That baby is so over. That baby is history. That baby has to go out and make its own way now. We’ve got better things to do. At this point, having nails driven through our eyes would seem like better things to do.

And yet, oddly, however sick of it all I am, I still find it funny. There I am proofreading away, with my eyes glazing and the lower half of my body getting ever more paralyzed – and I still find myself snorting with laughter. It’s also interesting that on more and more entries I can’t remember which of us wrote them. There are a good few now that I stare stupidly at thinking ‘Did I write that? I think I did…but…no I didn’t…or did I…no…’

So that’s that. There is champagne dripping down the walls and pooling on the floor. The baby’s clothes and toys and boxes of zwieback are in bundles at the curb waiting for the Salvation Army truck to collect them. The baby’s room has been converted into a stall for a musk-ox. And I’m going on the streets.

I belatedly added a couple of blogs to the select few in Links yesterday: The Panda’s Thumb and Pharyngula. I’ve been meaning to add both for awhile, and finally got around to it yesterday. I’m very picky about blogs in Links, partly because my colleague doesn’t like blogs to begin with, and much more because I think the longer such lists are the less useful they are. There are lots of interesting, entertaining, well-written etc blogs out there, as well as lots of the other kind, but they’re on subjects that are not all that relevant to B&W, so I don’t include them. Thus you can assume that if a blog is in Links, it is [clears throat grandly] On Topic. Now I’m going to add another, also belatedly – in fact I should have added this one months ago, but kept forgetting. But having just found two excellent stories linked on Black Triangle I realized the time had come. If you don’t know about Black Triangle, check it out; the guy does terrific work. Same goes for Pharyngula and Panda’s Thumb.

The article by Max Steuer is on a subject we’ve seen a fair bit of. Pretend science, nonsense masquerading as science, claims that knowledge is old hat and now we have discourse instead.

a growing proportion of social science departments are not doing social science at all. Many are actively opposed to science in any form, especially when it comes to studying social matters. Instead, they engage in what they think of as literary or philosophical activity, but it is practised at a level so pitifully low that it would not be tolerated in any serious department of philosophy or literature…Science in all its forms is just another discourse, so they maintain. Being unwilling to undertake the demanding work that is science, they assert that one opinion is as good as another.

That last bit doesn’t get pointed out often enough, I think. It is a hell of a lot easier to learn to call everything a discourse and leave it at that than it is to learn actual physics or biology. That’s why I don’t know any physics or biology myself! I’m as lazy as the next swine if not more so, but I try not to pretend my laziness is either a virtue or a new and improved kind of insight.

A university education should involve learning how to think more effectively. It should involve the ability to sift sense from nonsense. It should encourage the ability to question, and to know when one understands something, and when not. A certain humility and the willingness to recognise one might be wrong does not go amiss. Education can be sheer pleasure. It also should include an appreciation of the need for sustained effort. Those social science departments afflicted with the modern disease encourage exactly the opposite of what an education should provide. Students learn to be dismissive. The ability to discriminate is weakened, along with the ability to follow an argument. Fancy style is what matters.

Learning to be dismissive – just so. There are more valuable and far more interesting things to learn.