Author: Ophelia Benson

Harriet Baber likes to put things in a provocative way (as do I), and she does so in answering the Comment is Free belief question of the week. Lots of provoking, and I will oblige by being provoked into commenting.

I see no reason why I should believe that life is, as Tony Soprano’s perfectly awful mother Livia put it, “a great big nothing” after which we are annihilated. That may very well be the way things are. But I see no benefit to believing it is so.

Yes but that’s a false choice, because it’s an incomplete description of the alternative to believing that life is made into Something by the existence of god. The choice is not: 1. god, and life=something, or 2. no god, and life=nothing. I don’t think of life as a great big nothing. In fact that’s a very odd way to describe life – life is very much something. The amount and variety of life on this average-size planet is staggering; it’s light years away from “nothing.” If the idea is that life feels like nothing to people who don’t believe god exists, that’s wrong too. Harriet must know that, but…she likes to provoke.

But if I believe in God and a blissful afterlife contemplating him, then even if I am wrong I will not be disappointed. I would rather live in a fool’s paradise than no paradise at all.

Really? An eternity of blissfully contemplating god? Wouldn’t that start to get boring after about, oh, say fifty years?

Truth is overrated. And it’s remarkable that the very individuals who are most vocal in their opposition to religiously motivated puritanism are the most fiercely puritanical when it comes to truth.

No. It’s not remarkable at all, because the two are not the same kind of thing. (And who are these people, anyway?) Thinking that truth matters is not the same kind of thing as thinking that pleasure is sinful.

People in any case overestimate the value of truth and underestimate the difficulty of arriving at it. There are a great many truths in which I have abolutely no interest – truths about the lifecycle of Ctenocephalides felis, (the common cat flea) or the extensive body of truths about the condition of my teeth that my dentist imposes on me. I see no reason why I should bother with these truths or make a point of believing them.

I see no such reason either, but the whole thing is a red herring. It’s not a question of bothering with every truth there is, it’s a question of paying attention to the truth or otherwise of what one already believes.

There is some notion that even if we can ignore these workaday truths we should be concerned about the larger, more significant truths about the meaning of life, if any, and the human condition. I don’t see why. In any case, I’m a satisficer, quite happy in every department of life with good enough…I don’t much care about getting the right answers to what are commonly called the big questions.

An interesting remark from a philosopher.

That is no doubt what she wanted people to say. I’m nothing if not obliging.

Paul Sims watched Stephen Green on Channel 4’s 4Thought.tv the other day, so you won’t have to. 4Thought.tv is Channel 4’s version of the ever-laughable Deepity for the Day on BBC Radio 4. Stephen Green was srsly good, apparently. His Thought was about that there HoMoSeckShuality and why he thinks it should be put a stop to. Paul Sims collected some extracts, which is way helpful of him.

Homosexuals can never be one flesh, so they have to press into, like, sexual duty parts of the body that aren’t designed for that.

I think Stephen Green has been overthinking this. I think he has been having smutty thoughts.

In 30 years our dying civilisation is going to be taken over by a stronger one and the obvious candidate is Islam and the gays aren’t going to like it much living under that system.

So – um – let’s get rid of them all now before that happens, and then they won’t have to worry about not liking it much living under that system, because they’ll all be gone.

But srsly. Why are people giving Stephen Green air time? It’s like giving Bill Donohue air time. It’s like giving mildew a plate of food in your kitchen. It’s a mistake.

Karl Giberson and Lawrence Krauss seem to see things differently. (Now there’s a surprise.) Giberson tells us that science and religion aren’t in tension at all at all.

A religious scientist functions routinely as a scientist in the lab, perhaps looking for the gene that causes hyperbole. While they are engaged in this search they believe that God is the creator. On regular occasions this scientist goes to church, where he or she sings hymns, listens to sermons, volunteers at the soup kitchen, takes communion, and puts money in the offering plate, all the while believing that the scientific picture of the world is accurate. Occasionally this religious scientist may even daydream about finding that gene for hyperbole while listening to the sermon. At no time do the co-existing mindsets conflict or create cognitive dissonance.

Well one, he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that about any religious scientist other than himself, and he may not know it about himself. He could be kidding himself, or forgetting, or exaggerating. And two, if the co-existing mindsets never conflict or create cognitive dissonance, then that’s a sign that the religious scientist is not thinking properly. They should conflict or create cognitive dissonance. One of them is based on evidence and inference, and the other is based on just Believing. The second is inferior to the first.

Krauss highlights this:

Consider the results of a 2009 Pew Survey: 31 percent of U.S. adults believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” (So much for dogs, horses or H1N1 flu.) The survey’s most enlightening aspect was its categorization of responses by levels of religious activity, which suggests that the most devout are on average least willing to accept the evidence of reality.

You see? That is cognitive dissonance, the very thing that Giberson said “the religious scientist” simply doesn’t have. Being unwilling to accept the evidence of reality is that tension. Giberson of course means that in practice he walls the two off from each other, and he does accept the evidence of reality when he’s Doing Science. But he also means that he (and others like him) simply never notice the wall. Well if they don’t they should, and Giberson can’t know that none of them do in any case.

Lashings of extraordinary writing in Hitchens’s cancer piece in Vanity Fair. For one thing, there’s the opening, about waking up in a New York hotel room.

have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.

That final (frightening) sentence is an homage to a parallel scene in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, about a much younger man waking up with a hangover. It’s a set-piece about what a hangover feels like, and it’s funny as hell. It and the Hitchens passage also have a whiff of Wodehouse – Hitchens is Bertie describing his sensations in some awkward spot.

He managed to get to the phone and summon the emergency services.

They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist.

Beautiful writing. Do admit.

 I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Yes; just what I hate. It’s bad enough in airports and on planes.

If there were an Intelligent Designer, someone who writes that well would live to be ninety. But there isn’t.