Author: Ophelia Benson

Another consignment of rebarbative truculent inaccurate wool from Madeleine Bunting. About…? The Vatican’s petulant cries of ‘petty gossip’ in response to revelations of its settled habit of concealing and protecting child rape? No. The ‘new’ atheists – that’s what’s got her worked up: the endless unappeasable horror of the ‘new’ atheists. Their wrongness. Their violence. Their ignorance. Their deafness to the overwhelming arguments of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton.

…in the years since the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2006 and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great in 2007, there has been an addition every few weeks from enraged philosophers, theologians, historians and journalists, all trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the New Atheists.

Indeed there has. There has been, in fact, a reaction; there has been a classic backlash. There has been a prolific, energetic, often very hostile and very inaccurate backlash. Bunting herself is a part of it – she has written piece after petulant piece complaining of the ‘new’ atheists. This is another. She is part of the very loud and populous chorus trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the shoddiness of the ‘new’ atheists. They could all be right, of course, but the mere fact that they exist doesn’t show that they are right. The wild inaccuracy that so many of them resort to tends to make me think they aren’t right, at least in their overarching assumption that there is something obviously illegitimate about explicit argumentative atheism. Bunting of course takes this assumption entirely for granted.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens convey the fury of Old Testament prophets, while their opponents struggle in various well-mannered ways to contain theirs.

Ohhhhhhh no they don’t. Bunting doesn’t, for one. Chris Hedges doesn’t for another. Eagleton doesn’t.

And then, what reason do they have for fury anyway? Why should two or three or four atheist books fill so many people with such fury? Bunting doesn’t say – she just assumes it, because as mentioned she assumes that there is something obviously illegitimate about explicit argumentative atheism.

From my rough survey I would suggest those with philosophical training are the most irritated by New Atheism, while the journalists seem to enjoy the opportunities the row provides…What staggers the “philosophers” (I use the term loosely to indicate writers who use philosophical arguments) is the sheer philosophical illiteracy of Dawkins. As Terry Eagleton puts it in Reason, Faith and Revolution…

Stop right there. Eagleton is in no sense as writer who uses philosophical arguments. Eagleton doesn’t argue at all, he simply announces. There is no argument in his book. I looked for it; it isn’t there. Bunting was fooled, as she was meant to be, by Eagleton’s unearned air of omniscience.

Faced with such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought, there are two options. Either start from the beginning – Charles Taylor’s 800-page A Secular Age or Karen Armstrong’s speed history of western thought, The Case for God – or go for clever brevity, elegantly skewering the argument in the style of Eagleton or John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel. The problem with both genres is they don’t offer the kind of bestselling strident certainty that brought Dawkins such handsome financial rewards.

What such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought? Bunting hasn’t shown us any, she has only asserted it. And as for strident certainty – what, exactly, does she think she is offering in this piece and the rest of her body of work? And then the snide remark about Dawkins’s book sales, as if they too were obviously illegitimate.

She gives us several more paragraphs of warmed-over Armstrong, and finishes by rejoicing that God is being discussed again. (Because there was a time, pre-Dawkins, when God wasn’t discussed? Has she visited the religion section of any bookstores lately? Some of the rows upon rows of books there pre-date 2006.) Then she gets savaged by CisF readers.

Sholto Byrnes, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t entirely buy Peter Hitchens’s line on atheism.

For while Stalin’s atheism may have been a necessary condition for the atrocities he committed — I completely agree with Hitchens that “without God, many more things are possible than are permitted in a Godly order” — it is not a sufficient one. I part company with him when he claims that his preceding sentence proves that which follows it: “Atheism is a licence for ruthlessness, and appeals to the ruthless.”

Good about parting company, but I part company earlier than that. Atheism is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for committing atrocities, and it isn’t necessarily the case that ‘without God, many more things are possible than are permitted in a Godly order.’ Given holy wars, the inquisition, religious massacres, the revolting ubiquitous cruelty of the Irish church, it just isn’t obvious that atheism permits atrocities any more than theism does. It’s clear that atheism doesn’t rule out horrendous savage murderous violence – but it’s clear that religion doesn’t either. It’s clear that religion doesn’t necessarily make people more compassionate or generous or fair or kind – just as atheism doesn’t. It could be that one or the other tends to do better, but it’s simply not possible to argue that either one reliably prevents – makes not ‘possible’ – any extreme of human brutality.

In as much as the absence of God leaves any system of morality floundering when it comes to unarguable proof of its truth, Hitchens is on to something. An atheist society does not have the in-built defences against the will of a tyrannous majority that religion would supply, for instance.

Would, if what? Would, when? The trouble with that thought is that there have (to put it mildly) been theist societies that had no built-in defences against the will of a tyrannous majority, at least none that worked. This is a massive stumbling block for the whole ‘belief in God makes people good’ idea. If belief in God really did make people good – good in the sense that people tend to mean it nowadays: compassionate, non-violent, kind – then there wouldn’t have been so many Christian supporters of slavery in the 19th century US. If belief in God made people good then sharia wouldn’t include so many savage punishments and such relentless limitation of women’s rights and freedom. (Sharia as practiced in the real world. People like to point out that various nasty things are not really part of sharia. Maybe they’re not, but that’s not much help when the relevant people think they are.)

Atheism too, of course, has no in-built defences against the will of a tyrannous majority. In truth nothing does, apart from constitutions and bills of rights. That’s why such things are needed. Depending on the good will or the religious or atheist conscience of millions of people is a terrible idea. Neither religion nor atheism reliably makes people good, or bad either. On the other hand, religion does give a gloss of pseudo-goodness to bad actions, in the minds of people who have been raised on harsh religious beliefs. Atheism can’t put that kind of gloss on things.

I was thinking all this earlier today while I read the piece, and then I suddenly bumped into my own name. That’s an odd experience!

Last summer, I found myself in the middle of a minor fuss after I wrote a scathing review of Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s Does God Hate Women? for the Independent on Sunday. Put simply, my objection was that they detailed terrible barbarities perpetrated against women by religious people, chiefly Muslims, and then pretty much laid the blame on religion, again, chiefly Islam, for those crimes.

Actually it wasn’t the analysis we disagreed with, it was the wild inaccuracy of many of the factual claims, but never mind. Let’s consider the analysis now. I’ll just say what I said there:

We do lay the blame for certain kinds of barbarities perpetrated against women by religious people on religion, for the reason that the perpetrators of the crimes themselves cite religion as the justification for the crimes. We take them at their word. We quoted people saying things like “We will do what Allah has instructed us” (p 174). Without that, a bunch of men stoning a young girl to death in front of a crowd of people would be universally seen as a criminal act; with it, it is seen by some as pious, and not only permitted but mandated. This fact really does make a difference. It makes the same difference that the phrase “church teachings” makes when the pope and bishops fight equality legislation in the UK.

We don’t claim that all religion always makes people act like that, or that some religion makes all its adherents act like that. We do claim that religion makes brutalities that would otherwise be obviously unacceptable into pious acts, and that that fact makes a major difference.

That’s what I said there. Well it’s undeniable, surely. It’s not an all or nothing claim, it’s a something claim. That ‘something’ is not an invention or a fantasy. Just look at the self-righteous way the Vatican hierarchy is carrying on. You don’t see the Mafia acting that way! They don’t give sermons in huge churches saying all this fuss about child rape is just ‘petty gossip.’ They just shoot their way out, or bribe everyone in sight, or both. At least with them there’s no confusion.

Michael Ruse says why the Templeton Foundation is a good thing.

More recently, the award has been given to academics working on the science-religion interface. It was therefore appropriate that this year the Prize went to Francisco Ayala, a Spanish-born population geneticist at the University of California at Irvine. Ayala (a former Catholic priest) has long been interested in the science-religion relationship…

The science-religion interface? What’s that? That’s the kind of thing that Templeton always talks about, but what exactly is it? And what does Michael Ruse think it is?

It could just mean, or be intended to mean, scientists and religious believers talking. That would certainly be unexceptionable. The trouble is, that doesn’t really seem like a very plausible understanding of what it means. One doesn’t hear about a history-mathematics interface as a way of referring to historians and mathematicians talking, nor does such an activity seem worth millions of dollars of foundation money. As far as I know, Templeton’s idea of the science-religion interface or relationship or whatever is that they are supposed to contribute to or enrich each other. But that’s just what’s contested. Critics think the two don’t have anything to contribute to each other, especially in the direction religion—>science. Ruse seems to be endorsing or at least taking for granted Templeton’s project, without spelling out exactly what he’s saying.

The Templeton Foundation…is essentially devoted to the promotion of the interaction and harmony between science and religion.

But interaction in what sense? Just chatting in the halls? Or substantive, disciplinary interaction? It does make a difference, to put it mildly.

But it’s useless to repine. Ruse goes on to say a lot of wholly irrelevant things, so it turns out that actually this jumble of a piece was just an excuse to tell the world yet again about his expert witness gig in Arkansas and, more amusingly for him, to say rude things about Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and especially (wait for it) PZ Myers. The closest he gets to explaining why Templeton is all right is to say ‘I don’t see anything morally wrong with someone trying to reconcile science and religion. Clarifying that a little, I don’t see anything morally wrong with religion as such.’ Morally wrong isn’t the issue! The point is that it’s epistemically wrong.

But all of a sudden at the very end he simply agrees to that, or at least seems to.

I don’t want to reconcile science and religion if this implies that religion must be true. At most, I want to show that science does not preclude being religious.

Well – quite. So what did – oh never mind. Ruse just likes to mouth off. It’s pointless to expect him to make sense.