Author: Ophelia Benson

I think part of why this either-or argument is so interesting is because the ‘separate spheres’ retort is so popular. If I’ve heard people say that once I’ve heard them say it – quite a few times. It’s always irritated me profoundly. That’s one reason I was so intensely annoyed to see Stephen Jay Gould, of all people, come out with it a few years ago. (Another reason was that he said so many absurd things in the process.) It’s always irritated me because it’s so convenient. So perfectly tailored to allow people to believe anything and everything they want to, just by locating whatever it is in the ‘separate sphere.’ Of course, people are ‘allowed’ to believe what they want to in any case, but with a convenient sphere to stash things in, they can do it without losing face intellectually, or at least they think they can, and some people let them get away with it.

But let’s stop letting them do that, shall we? Let’s hold their feet to the fire. Let’s just ask them, if it’s in some separate sphere that’s immune from any kind of inquiry (and don’t let them claim there’s another, special kind of inquiry for the Separate Sphere, because there isn’t), then how do they know anything about it? And if they don’t know anything about it, why are we supposed to believe them when they tell us where it is? If they do know anything about it – how do they know? Perhaps they’ll tell you it’s via an inner experience. Well, that experience is part of nature, obviously. So let’s inquire into it. They won’t want to let you, of course, they’ll claim it’s impossible, or that they’ve had a Revelation. But just stay calm, nibble a few pistachios for strength, and ask where the Revelation came from.

After all they have gotten away with it for a long time. It is very convenient, isn’t it. There just happens to be this Place that’s not really a place, that’s not part of nature, that’s not subject to scientific inquiry (meaning any kind of human inquiry), that’s not anything we know anything about – but even though we don’t know anything about it, by definition, because it’s in this Other Realm outside of nature – despite that, religious people know all about it and about the deity who lives there. Oh well that’s convincing. Hmph. If that’s where it is then they don’t know anything about it and can’t say anything about it, and can’t whistle about it either.

Right, where was I, before things got so busy. Several places, one of which was a series of disagreements over theism and atheism. One of our readers, Ben Keen, emailed me a thought on the subject last week that suggested some further thoughts, or they may be just repeated restatements of the same thought, I’m not sure. My brain got a bit curdled over the last few days, and I’m not sure it’s back to normal yet. Whatever ‘normal’ may be in my case.

Ben’s comment, which he’s given me permission to quote, was this:

the topic of
religious claims being exempt from the same sort of scrutiny as other
sorts of truth-claims. Something people often say is that science
makes claims about the natural world and religion about things outside
the natural world. Well, it occured to me that if it’s claimed that
God can possibly have any effect at all on the natural world or if
religious precepts somehow are meant to engage in any way whatever in
how we think or act in the natural world, then indeed they must be part
of the natural world. There’s no way that something can have any
meaningful effect on us without somehow being part of the world we live
in – so the claim of privilege by separation is bogus.

I don’t think I’d thought of it in quite that way before. I’d thought of it in a slightly different way, which was to wonder in a sullen fashion why, if this God people are always saying is in another realm, is in another realm, they think they know so much about it and can talk about it with confidence? Huh? But that doesn’t make the point sharply enough, whereas Ben’s version does. Surely there are only two possibilities. Either the deity is part of nature, in which case it is accessible to human research and inquiry, or it is not, in which case it isn’t. Period. You can’t have a deity that is in some convenient ‘other realm’ inaccessible to atheists and scientists but accessible to ‘spiritual’ people. Or one who is in some other, non-natural realm, but nevertheless is in some way active or relevant in this, natural one. That’s just a flat contradiction, it makes no sense. So that particular argument just falls splat and becomes useless.

I suppose you’re thinking I’ve fallen silent. That, exhausted by all the to-and-fro, the heat and light, the blood sweat and tears of late, I’ve shrugged and yawned and decided to take up ping pong in a serious way.

No I don’t, not really, I don’t suppose you’re thinking about it one way or another, on account of how you have better things to think about. I just like to say things like that. I only do it to annoy, because I know it teases. At any rate, no, I haven’t fallen silent. On the contrary, I had a whole stack of things to talk about on Thursday, along with the ones I didn’t get to last week – and then something intervened. My colleague and I had a sudden unexpected and very large assignment, so we had to drop everything else and work on that. So now my heap of back N&Cs is longer than ever. I’ll never catch up. The rest of my life, I’ll have this nagging gnat-like little thing somewhere in my mind, buzzing away in a tiny voice about those old Comments I never commented. No I won’t. I just like to say things like that.

Anyway the heat and light was all very useful really, whatever you may think. I got a lot of new material for the Rhetoric Guide, which I haven’t updated in – I don’t even know how long. At least a year probably. All very ‘if you’ve got a lemon make lemonade,’ isn’t it. But true all the same.

And so back to the discussion. There is a pretty good article at the LRB on the hijab issue. One bit of it gave me a terrible turn for reasons somewhat separate from the hijab issue:

Another factor is surely how difficult it’s got, since 11 September, to tell a man of God from a politician. ‘God bless you’ and ‘Allahu akbar’ are not part of political discourse in France as they are in the United States and the dar el-Islam. France can feel squeezed between the two (and niggled in a third way, so to speak, by the cross-Channel wash of Blair’s piety). People feel that their cherished secular state is now something of a redoubt, and are losing their taste for an open-ended attitude to the veil.

Oh, damn. Tell me about it. I don’t watch or listen to things like campaign speeches precisely for this kind of reason (among others, all to do with general pointlessness), but I heard the end of a Kerry speech on the news and sure enough – ‘…blah blah blah and God bless you.’ I jumped as if I’d been cattle-prodded. ‘Will you stop that!’ I felt like snarling. There was a time when presidential candidates did not say that. It’s within living memory, even. I think it was Reagan who started it – I think born-again Carter didn’t do that. Was polite enough to keep it to himself. But everybody since, boy – god-blessing all over the place. Well, so – there we are, paired with the dar el-Islam. Oh good. That’s just exactly what I want the country I live in to be like. Not pesky old secular France but the god-ridden dar el-Islam. Who can blame France for feeling squeezed? (Well that’s a silly question, a lot of people can. But I don’t, anyway.) But back to the main point:

Teachers tell worrying stories which depict the veil as the beginning of selective opposition to the curriculum. This might, for example, include a Muslim student’s refusal to do gym or discuss certain areas of natural science, or to countenance teaching on the Holocaust, and then shade off into abuse or physical violence after a classroom session on the Middle East. Teachers are also clear that the wearing of religious symbols tends to exacerbate the divisions over heated issues such as Palestine. This is a management issue then, as much as a matter of principle, and a very urgent one, because of the frightening rise of anti-semitic harassment in French schools.

The management issue is surely one aspect. It’s not as if school dress-codes are unheard of. If a religion required students to attend school naked from the waist down, would teachers cheerfully acquiesce? Add that onto the coercion of women aspect, and at the very least it seems reasonable to say that one ought to be able to see some merit in the ban without being accused of thought-crime.

The old law of 1905 separating church and state has been much discussed in the course of the veil controversy, particularly by women who support the new one, and it is to women – of Muslim and non-Muslim origin – that the most eloquent defence of the ban so often falls. Painless birth was ferociously condemned by Pius XII in the 1950s, the philosopher Elisabeth Badinter reminded a television audience in January, to illustrate her point that every attempt by women to ‘take charge of their bodies’ has been made in the face of religious opinion, and that the issue of the veil is no different.

I didn’t know that about painless childbirth and Pius 12. That’s fascinating. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, eh? That’s another thing I like to say, and by no means only to annoy.

I linked a few days ago to an excellent article by Chris Mooney about a long article promoting ‘Intelligent Design’ in the Harvard Law Review. It’s worrisome stuff.

Still, you can understand why a rave review in the Harvard Law Review would get the ID crowd excited. Such a publication represents intellectual legitimization of a sort that traditional creationists never achieved. “The whole game plan here is to credential the movement,” observes Florida State University law professor Steven Gey, a specialist in legal issues surrounding the teaching of evolution. Gey calls the Harvard Law Review piece “very weak” in its assessment of the legal case for teaching ID in public schools. But he adds, “I suspect this Harvard note is going to cause problems. I suspect they’re going to make reprints and scatter it here and yon, as if this were really some valid legal approach.”

Great. More ammunition for the ‘let’s take buzzwords like “evolution” out of the curriculum’ crowd. And the Harvard Law Review article even misdescribes what Intelligent Design is.

Even more astonishingly, the Harvard Law Review piece paints the ID movement as entirely divorced from religion, citing its “exclusive focus on empirical evidence and philosophical argument.” This statement is extremely misleading. As Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross document in their new book Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford: 2004), there’s virtually nothing to Intelligent Design but religion.

An enterprising B&W reader emailed me yesterday to tell me (with permission to quote him) that he’d done some searching and found an email address for a member of the editorial board of the Review, and then wrote to said board member to alert him to the situation and urge him to read Mooney’s article. He suggested I should include the link to the list of Review board members. An excellent idea, so there it is. If you have an idle moment, why not warn someone from the Harvard Law Review.