Author: Ophelia Benson

What are we talking about here?

A police trainer who was sacked for believing that officers should use psychics to solve crimes is going to court to prove he was the victim of religious discrimination.

Was he sacked – is he claiming he was sacked – just for believing that? Or was he sacked for practicing it? Surely that makes an important difference – yet, oddly, the piece nowhere makes it clear which possibility is at issue.

Alan Power, who has been a member of a Spiritualist church for 30 years, argues that his belief in the power of mediums should be placed on a par with more mainstream religious and philosophical convictions…At a tribunal in London, Mr Power will claim that Greater Manchester Police broke the law by sacking him for believing that mediums should be consulted in criminal investigations.

But did they? Did they sack him just for believing that, or did they sack him for putting it into practice? Come on, Telegraph, obviously that’s a crucial bit of information; why did you forget to provide it?! Surely it’s quite right that employers shouldn’t be firing people just because they believe X Y or Z; surely that’s none of an employer’s business unless the employee is acting on the beliefs. If this police trainer was actually wasting public time and money by consulting psychics, or training cops to do so, then that would be a good reason to fire him – yet the Telegraph never says a word about that. Bad journalism.

The judge however said something truly ridiculous.

The judge wrote: “I am satisfied that the claimant’s beliefs that there is life after death and that the dead can be contacted through mediums are worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

No, they aren’t – respect is exactly what they are not worthy of, in a democratic society or an oligarchy. Forebearance, other things being equal, yes, but respect, no. Tolerance, in the sense of not being interfered with, yes, but respect, no. I know this is familiar territory – I seem to spend my life making the distinction between tolerance and respect – but since the coercive slide keeps being made, one has to keep pointing it out. Employees should be free to believe anything they want to, but that doesn’t mean they should be free to do anything they want to merely because they do it as a matter of ‘belief’; we should all tolerate each other’s beliefs, which does not entail never questioning or criticising them, but that doesn’t mean we should all respect each other’s beliefs, which perhaps would entail never questioning or criticising them.

I’m reading Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. It’s a very slight book which one could read in an hour, but I’m reading it slowly because I’m taking a lot of notes, and also because it makes me sick, so I don’t like to read it for long at a stretch. I gave myself a break from it for a few days, and when I picked it up again after this break, I was struck all over again by its truly objectionable combination of rudeness and glibness and shallowness and pretension. I really hate that combination, and Terry Eagleton wears it as if it were a mink coat and he were a heedless aristocrat.

I’ll explain what I mean. The rudeness is in the insistent, wild, evidence-free denunciation of largely imaginary people he labels ‘Dawkins’ and ‘Hitchens’ and, mostly, as a pair, ‘Ditchkins.’ The glibness is in his habit of assertion, his absurd comparisons and analogies (‘it’s as if,’ he’s always saying, and it never is), his air of authority which is not backed up by any strength of argument or breadth of learning. The shallowness is in his failure to notice any of this. The pretension in his assumption that literary critics are some kind of universal authorities.

I can illustrate all this by extensive quotation, and I will; this is by way of throat-clearing. I’ll give you just one tiny example to warm your hands over in the meantime.

[T]he scientific rationalist passes too quickly over the thorny issue of what is to count as certainty, as well as of the diverse species of certainty by which we live. [p 115]

No she doesn’t. That’s just an absurd generalization, with not a shred of example or evidence, not to mention argument – and it is, as such, entirely typical. It is his style, his schtick, his thing.

The next paragraph pretends to expand on the point, but doesn’t.

Nobody has ever clapped eyes on the unconscious. Yet many people believe in its existence, on the grounds that it makes excellent sense of their experience of the world. (One doubts that this includes Ditchkins, since the English tend to have common sense rather than an unconscious.)[p 115]

That, too, is absolutely typical – he slams Dawkins and Hitchens with a guess about what they may or may not think – completely without embarrassment or diffidence. He does that repeatedly throughout the book. It’s rude, it’s glib, it’s unfair, it’s stupid, and it’s crap ‘scholarship.’

You can see why the book is hard to stomach.

Richard Norman offers to take seriously the claims of Eagleton and Armstrong and other critics of The God Delusion in order to ‘try to do justice to the nuanced diversity of the views of the religious,’ agreeing at the outset that

Dawkins does over-simplify. Although he knows perfectly well that most Christians are not creationists, he sometimes writes as though they were, and implies that all religious belief is just obviously refuted by science and Darwin. He is inclined to treat all versions of religion as equally irrational.

He considers the relationship between religion and science first, pointing out that Dawkins is right that the claim that ‘God’ is a simpler answer to questions about why the universe exists and why it is ‘fine-tuned’ in such a way that etc etc is ‘to misunderstand the requirement of simplicity.’ It’s very simple to say ‘God’ of course, but a mind that could fine-tune a universe is actually…not simple; ‘it stands much more in need of explanation than what it is supposed to explain.

We cannot just assume that the only good explanations are scientific explanations. We need to take seriously the claim that scientific explanations are incomplete, and need to be supplemented by a different kind of explanation. But what we can properly insist is that any proposed alternative kind of explanation must still meet the same standards for what counts as a good explanation. In particular, a good explanation can’t be one which makes things even more inexplicable.

Right, but this is where I get confused. Surely ‘the same standards for what counts as a good explanation’ are at least continuous with science – not some radically different kind of thing. In a sense, standards for what counts as a good explanation are what science is all about. So if the standards are the same – then what does it mean to say that scientific explanations are incomplete, and need to be supplemented by a different kind of explanation? How can they be supplemented by a different kind of explanation when the standards for what counts as a good explanation are not different? I’m not sure that’s not a concession without any real content – yes by all means supplement science with a different kind of explanation; the only stipulation is that the explanation can’t be just pulled out of your ass.

Then there’s the ‘faith’ question.

Dawkins says at one point: “Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don’t have to make the case for what you believe.” That’s much too sweeping. By the very act of producing counter-arguments, Dawkins has to acknowledge that some Christians, at any rate, do make a case for what they believe. It’s just that their case isn’t good enough.

Yes but the fact that some Christians do make a case for what they believe doesn’t mean that, according to Christianity, they have to. I don’t think it is all that much too sweeping. It doesn’t rule out the claim that some Christians try to make a case for what they believe, because that fact is perfectly consistent with the additional fact that faith is considered a virtue – and faith is considered a virtue; it’s no good pretending it isn’t. Doubts are considered tragic, or guilty, or both. Some, and maybe many, Christians also consider doubts quite reasonable and understandable, but that’s because ‘Christians’ includes a lot of people. Christianity as such, however, places faith front and center, not doubts. Faith is the goal, faith is the value, faith is the hooray word. Making or trying to make a case comes way far back in the field.

Norman considers the ‘sideways move’ that people like Armstrong and Eagleton make and finds it risky.

A religion built around metaphors and stories, rather than doctrines, seems to me to be inherently unstable. If talk of divine creation is just a metaphor for the awe-inspiring beauty and complexity of the natural world, it can hold that meaning for anyone…Isn’t an identity based on metaphors and stories always going to be fragile and porous? I cannot see how, in the end, a distinctive religious identity can be possible unless it is based on the acceptance of at least some non-metaphorical factual beliefs – beliefs about the existence of a personal deity and about how his intentions and purposes explain our world. Those beliefs do, inescapably, need to be rationally defended. And they can’t be. On that point, certainly, Dawkins is right.

That’s how it always looks to me. I can see at least some of what believers get out of religion – but I also see that as depending on those beliefs, and the beliefs as not rationally defensible.

What exactly are they talking about? What do they mean by ‘communities’? It does make a difference.

We are working to help people and local organisations create strong, attractive and economically thriving communities and neighbourhoods. Our aim is to ensure that they are given all the support they need to make the best of their communities and overcome their own difficulties. These are problems like community conflict, extremism, deprivation and disadvantage.

That sounds (mostly) benign and useful. In fact it sounds like what Barack Obama used to do – and in doing realized that he wanted to change more than just local ‘communities.’ People live in (literal) communities and neighbourhoods, and it is good to help those communities and neighbourhoods thrive. But…people also ‘live in’ non-literal ‘communities’ and some of what the communities department does seems to apply to that kind of community – but they’re not clear about it, so their mission statements and lists of objectives are bound to be at least somewhat misleading.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps they are talking only about literal communities on the website, but in that case, the ‘communities secretary’ is doing something very peculiar in setting up a panel of religious ‘experts’ to advise the gummint. Why would that even be part of his remit, if he’s the secretary for communities-and-neighborhoods as opposed to the secretary for communalism? It seems like Animal Control setting up prayer meetings. Superfluous, intrusive, and fundamentally not their job.