Author: Ophelia Benson

I want to say a few brisk words about a new piece by Mooney and Kirshenbaum in Newsweek. First a few extracts.

As soon as Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian geneticist who headed up the pioneering Human Genome Project during the 1990s, was floated as the possible new director of the National Institutes of Health-he was officially named to the post on Wednesday-the criticisms began flying. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, for one, said Collins is too public with his faith…The poster boy for the so-called New Atheist movement today is biologist Richard Dawkins…The New Atheist science blogger PZ Myers, for instance, has publicly desecrated a consecrated communion wafer, presumably taken from a Catholic mass, and put a picture of it, pierced by a rusty nail and thrown in the trash, on the Internet.

I’ve had it with these two. I’ve had it with their passive-aggressive whiny tattling nonsense, their mindless bulldog persistence, their refusal to pay attention to the abundant highly reasonable and cogent criticisms they’ve received, and above all with their petulant name-calling finger-pointing hatred of an invented group called “New Atheists” and real people such as Dawkins and Coyne and Myers. They’re not as clever or as learned or as interesting or as funny or as good at writing or even as polite or decent or civil as Dawkins and Coyne and Myers. They’re a nasty pair, bent on attacking their betters in hopes of flogging a wretchedly bad book. The hell with them.

I’ve made a list of questions for Chris Mooney (largely for him, since he’s done nearly all the posting on the subject and the questions arise from his posts as well as his book with Sheril Kirshenbaum). He’s ignored or evaded many questions over the last few weeks, and I thought it would be useful to have a list of the most pressing ones. Feel free to suggest additions.

1) What do you want? What do you mean? You say religion is private so we have no business prying into what people believe, but Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson wrote books, Francis Collins wrote a book and has a website. The National Center for Science Education has a website. Are you saying we can’t dispute claims made in books and on websites? If yes, you’re making a grotesque demand. If no – what are you saying?

2) How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?

3) How do you know it doesn’t work the other way? Instead or in addition? How do you know the increased availability of atheism doesn’t make some, perhaps many, people feel more at liberty to explore science, follow the evidence wherever it goes, and the like?

4) How do you explain the fact that theism has had pervasive automatic respect and deference for many decades yet the public-science gap has not narrowed?

5) Do you have any evidence that the putative ‘new’ atheism caused a spike in public hostility to science? Can you point to even a correlation?

6) Do you have any concern that your advice is in sharp conflict with the whole idea of free inquiry, free thought, freedom of debate, discussion, argument? Do you have any sense at all that it is, in general, a bad idea to impose prior restraints and inhibitions on what it is okay (acceptable, advisable) to discuss? Do you worry at all about the general effects of this timid, placating, cautious, apologetic imposition of taboos and ‘ssssh’ and ‘don’t mention that’ on public debate? Do you really think your reasons are good enough to trump those possible concerns? Do they, for instance, rise to the level of the reasons it’s best to avoid racial or sexual or ethnic or national epithets in public discussion? And are their attendant risks as small? Do we lose as little of substance by not saying there is no good reason to believe God exists as we do by not calling women ‘bitches’?

7) Do you take enough care to present your critics’ views accurately? You admitted on Daily Kos that you got Dawkins wrong in your book. Are you thoroughly confident that you haven’t made other such mistakes, in the book and on your blog? I know I’ve seen other inaccuracies of that kind, and pointed some of them out to you. (Just one example: you said “The New Atheist critics don’t like [what Eugenie Scott says], it seems, because they want to force people to be “rational” and completely justify their views to a very high standard, or else reject them.” Can you see what is wrong with that? I pointed it out at the time. Do you see the problem? Do you worry that it is pervasive?) Have you noticed that this has happened many times? Does it prompt you to worry more about a tendency to strawman anyone you disagree with?

8) Do you understand the need to be clear about terminology and to avoid ambiguity and equivocation? In particular, do you now see that there is a difference – an important difference, one that’s central to this disagreement – between saying that people can combine science and religion ‘in their lives,’ that ‘you really can have both in your life’, and saying that science and religion are epistemically compatible?

9) Do you understand the implications of the Pew study, which spells out the fact that a large percentage of people simply ignore the findings of science whenever they contradict their religious beliefs? Do you understand that that is not epistemic compatibility but its opposite? Do you have any qualms at all about telling scientists and atheists to just acquiesce in that?

Cristina Odone occupies the first three paragraphs of her review of Does God Hate Women? pointing out a factual mistake – the name of one Afghan woman murdered for acting like a human being with a mind exchanged for the name of a different Afghan woman murdered for acting like a human being with a mind.

It’s a fair cop. The mistake is real. It’s mine. I have no idea how I managed it, but I did.

I didn’t realize I’d done it until the literary editor of The Observer asked our publisher (who asked us) about it, and I looked it up. That was Thursday I think. Jeremy and I had a set-to this morning about whether or not I would say it was mine. He told me not to the minute we both read the review. I said of course I’m going to! He said please don’t – and I wavered. But I also pointed out how damn near impossible that would be – and he admitted as much – and then I had him.

Of course I have to! I’d have bugs crawling under my skin for the rest of my life if I didn’t. His objections are as nothing in comparison. He wouldn’t let me fry, so I’m not about to let him fry. That’s it.

He did however insist that I should say that he is adamant that the responsibility is joint. Like so:

It is entirely fair that we should cop to it together. Look, if it had turned out that people had loved the book because you wrote some particularly devastating critique of something then I would have benefitted. It just happens that you made a tiny slip, and we`re going to get a little flak because of it. But structurally that`s no different. Given that I would have benefitted in the first instance means it`s fair that I`m disbenefitted in the second. (And anyway, I don`t suppose it`ll be much more than this review, and maybe a bit of crowing from the usual suspects.)

Fair enough. As long as I don’t have to creep around like Raskolnikov with a Horrible Crime on my conscience, he can have his say.

Now – as for what Odone concludes from my stupid mistake –

In the rush to drive home their point about all religions’ oppression of women, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom shoved one woman’s narrative under another woman’s name: their priority is to make their case, not mourn a martyr.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t think Odone knows what that means. Mine was certainly a dumb-ass stupid clumsy mistake – but it also certainly wasn’t because we think either woman is unimportant, or subordinate to our making a point in our book, or anything like that. If anything it’s because we think both (and all) are important. As I said, I don’t know how I made the mistake, but the only explanation I can come up with is that both names were in my head and I somehow switched them while writing. That would be because both women matter to me, not because neither does or because one matters more than the other. In other words…the basic story is that there is a lot of material here, about horrible things done to women simply because they are women, and that I scrambled two bits of information about two such women. That stands for…having such women on my mind, not whatever other cynical thing Odone is gesturing at.

Still – to do her justice – Odone is critical of the book, but not to the point of being untruthful. She doesn’t follow the lead of Madeleine Bunting or Sholto Byrnes. She doesn’t just scream and throw things, or say we do nothing but rant from page 1 to page 178. That makes a nice change.

But there is some apologetic nonsense, all the same (and not surprisingly, since Odone is a vocal – or should I say New, or Militant? – Catholic.)

For millennia, women have found in God their greatest ally and muse – witness the writings of mystics such as Julian of Norwich and the charitable work of peasant Muslim women. For centuries, the most powerful and liberated women were the abbesses, nuns and consecrated virgins who devoted themselves to God. Women such as Maryam, Jesus’s mother, and Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife (and boss), play crucial roles in the Qur’an.

Well what choice did they have? No doubt they did, but then God was a given, wasn’t it, so it was either find in God an ally and muse, or do without. You might as well say the restaurant lobsters make a cozy home in that little tank where they wait their turn to be boiled.

Does God Hate Women? takes us on a terrible journey, where innocent women struggle – often in vain – against an oppressive culture. We should never forget these martyrs, and with their graphic descriptions of female circumcision and multiple rape, Benson and Stangroom ensure we won’t. But in explaining how God is dragged into this systemic abuse, the authors are guilty of the flawed logic they abhor in macho regimes. An attractive woman in a miniskirt who walks down the street is not responsible for the men who, distorting her attitude, read it as an invitation to rape; so God, in his many guises, cannot be held responsible for the men who distort his message into an invitation to abuse others.

Well – props for giving us that much credit, I must say. That’s a pretty generous reading, from a believer. But the last bit doesn’t really make sense, and in any case it’s beside the point. It’s not really God we’re holding responsible, since we don’t think there is any God; it is indeed the men who distort or adapt or use or anything you like the putative message. It’s religion’s power to sanctify and protect injustices that we are holding responsible.

And it’s my stupidity I’m holding responsible for the name-switch mistake. Don’t let nobody tell you different.