Author: Ophelia Benson

Horrible man, the archbishop of Canterbury – cruel, callous, ruthless, tyrannical. He doesn’t think so of course, but he is. He’s again sticking his oar in to prevent suffering people from ending their own lives.

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury; Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, and Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, have come together for the first time to urge peers to reject proposals that would allow families to help loved ones to die abroad free from the threat of prosecution.

Why? No reason – just to show off the superior devoutness of devout people by straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.

It would surely put vulnerable people at serious risk, especially sick people who are anxious about the burden their illness may be placing on others. Moreover, our hospice movement, an almost unique gift of this country to wider humankind, is the profound and tangible sign of another and better way to cope with the challenges faced by those who are terminally ill, by their loved ones and by those who care for them.

Notice the conditonal tense about imagined vulnerable people while the real, non-conditional, known people who have horrible diseases and don’t want to experience the last, worst days of those diseases go unmentioned. Notice how brutally callous that is. Notice the soothing irrelevant claptrap about hospices. If people prefer hospices, they will go to hospices! But some people will find their condition unendurable in a hospice or anywhere, and want to escape instead. It should not be up to the archbishop of Canterbury to decide whether they can do that or not. He’s not their daddy, and it’s none of his business.

I’m thoroughly tired of attempting to get a straight answer out of Chris Mooney, so I’ll drop the subject, but I just want to note that he has an annoying habit of attributing ignorance to people who disagree with him. He did it a month ago in his first reply to Jerry Coyne:

I guess you could say I’ve changed my view; certainly I’ve changed my emphasis. A lot more reading in philosophy and history has moved me toward a more accomodationist position. So has simple pragmatism; I don’t see what is to be gained by flailing indiscriminately against religion, other than a continuation of the culture wars. That’s especially so when those who flail against religion do so in philosophically or historically unsophisticated ways…

But that didn’t work out all that well, because some philosophers hove into view to tell him that his ways were not all that philosophically sophisticated either, though they didn’t put it that rudely. They did however say that his cherished distinction between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism is not as simple or as self-evident or as orthodox as he seems to think. So he’s gone to his fall-back position.

I’m growing increasingly convinced that the lack of historical awareness is an important factor in fanning the flames of science-religion conflict.

Not his lack of historical awareness, naturally, only that of people who disagree with him.

Then he tells us a story that he got out of a book, by way of demonstrating his historical awareness. The thought that the book might be wrong, or debatable, seems not to have occurred to him – yet he doesn’t hesitate to patronize everyone else.

Well that’s communication for you.

Allow me to run down a few of the claims in Sholto Byrnes’s review of our book that are not true.

Actually, first, let me start with a plain oddity, since it appears in the first sentence.

The question of whether God hates women is not one that can be answered with certainty; not least since, by the time any of us dared ask a putative deity such an impertinent question, we would be in no position to communicate the response to our fellows.

Ah – so he admits it. The putative deity is one that we cannot question or otherwise address until after we’re dead – by which time it is too late to ameliorate anything the putative god’s putative rules might have done to fuck up our lives while we had them. Yes, quite so; and this is part of the problem. We’re supposed to obey the rules but we can’t appeal them to a higher court until after we no longer need to. Ding ding! Bad arrangement!

Now, for the falsehoods.

Benson and Stangroom don’t really have religion in general in mind – there’s one in particular they’re after. True, a few pages deal out blame to the Christian, Jewish and Hindu deities for the misogynistic activities of some of their more extreme devotees.

Not true. It is considerably more than ‘a few pages.’ It is true that Islam gets the most pages (for obvious reasons) but it is not true that the others get only a few pages.

[A]mid the torrents of invective, they allude to many matters worthy of calm examination, such as the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to his favourite wife, Aisha, when she was only nine.

There are no ‘torrents of invective,’ and there is a considerable amount of calm examination – including that of Aisha.

This could have been the starting point for a thoughtful discussion about textual literalism and modernity. Instead, Benson and Stangroom attempt to trash the reputation of Karen Armstrong, a respected religious scholar who believes that “the emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart” and then quote, without qualification or disapproval, the view of an American Baptist leader that Muhammad’s marriage means that the Prophet was a “demon-possessed paedophile”.

1. There is such a thoughtful discussion. The ‘instead’ is absurd, because there is a whole chapter of thoughtful discussion.

2. We don’t attempt to trash the reputation of Karen Armstrong, we dispute her scholarship, which is a perfectly routine and legitimate thing to do.

3. Armstrong is a respected religious scholar only among people who are not themselves religious scholars or historians. She is referred to that way by radio presenters and similar, but not otherwise.

4. The ‘and then’ is incorrect because we quote the Baptist preacher before the extended examination of Armstrong’s work, not after it, and we quote it simply to indicate that the subject has been in the news; the suggestion that we passively endorse what he said is absurd.

This is inflammatory in the extreme. But that appears to be the point. Self-proclaimed champions of the secular right to challenge and insult others’ beliefs, Benson and Stangroom show no desire to go beyond name-calling and distortion.

1. Since it is not what we wrote, it is not inflammatory in the extreme. I consider the review itself to be considerably more inflammatory than our book is – and a kind of inflammatory that is directed at particular people (us), not at religions or their beliefs or practices.

2. Since it is not what we wrote and not inflammatory, that can’t be the point. We’re not self-declared champions of anything, and in particular we’re not champions of the right to ‘insult others’ beliefs.’ (How do you insult a belief?) I at least have argued for a general right to challenge ‘others’ beliefs’ – but does Sholto Byrnes really want to claim that there is no such right? Let’s hope not.

3. It is flatly and blatantly untrue that we show no desire to go beyond name-calling and distortion. That simply dismisses the whole book – via distorted name-calling, ironically.

Other than that (and a few more details) it’s all very reasonable.

Yesterday, by way of refreshment from enumerating the falsehoods in Sholto Byrnes’s review of our book, Jeremy and I chatted a little about elephants. He’d sent me a picture of the Toronto elephants playing water games, so I made him envious by saying I used to join the Seattle elephants in their pool to scrub their backs and generally play with them. This led to a discussion of how one gets used to being around such large animals, and Jeremy asked if they knew not to tread on people by accident. I said they do, and told a little story to illustrate, and he thought I should share it, so I will. Consider it refreshment from whatever you need refreshment from.

One of those summer pool-play days, I was standing a short distance away from the pool and the youngest calf, Sri, who was about three at the time, was standing at the edge of it. She was about my height then, but so is an SUV – she was about my height and weighed several times as much. The older calf, Chai, was in the pool and she suddenly gave Sri a playful bump from behind that sent her rocketing straight toward me, too fast for me to jump out of the way. Sri slammed on the brakes in order not to crash into me. It’s not easy to do that! She had to dig in her feet and brace her legs and just jar herself to a stop – and she did. I was very impressed by that (not to mention very relieved). She was just a kid, but she not only knew not to crash into me, she knew it mattered enough to make a big effort.

The Toronto ‘phants on Saturday:

From Safari 2009-06-27

Chris Mooney wonders something.

Wilkins’ post stirs up something that, especially as a journalist, has always made me wonder about the New Atheists–how are they so confident?…I met a lot of moderate religious people, in the course of my life, who were anything but irrational or fundamentalist. And they changed me…[T]hey certainly made me less of an absolutist. They made me less confident that I had all the answers, that my way was the only way–not just for finding out the truth, but for getting through life.

How are ‘the New Atheists’ so confident of what? What is it that Mooney takes ‘the New Atheists’ to be so confident of? Apparently that they have all the answers and that their way is the only way. Well that is (to use a good word that he also likes) a canard. I simply don’t know of any atheists who are confident that they have all the answers. In fact one thing the atheists I know are confident of is that they don’t have all the answers. Is that what Mooney means? How can ‘the New Atheists’ be so confident that they don’t have all the answers? Well…because it is so obvious that there are so many answers to be had and that life is short and the human mind is limited. But Mooney implies that the atheists he knows are confident that they have all the answers. I wonder if he could quote any of them saying anything that would back that up.

I suspect that what Mooney means, but didn’t manage to pin down accurately, is ‘how are they so confident that the epistemology of religion gets things wrong?’ I would put the confidence I have in this way: I am confident that I know of no good reason to believe that a god exists. I think that’s what atheists in general are confident of. Not that they can be certain that no god exists, but that there is no good reason for most of us to think so. I say most of us because it may be that for people who have had really powerful experiences of god, it is reasonable to say that there is a good reason for them to think so. A goodish reason anyway. Well, not really a good reason, but a reason of sorts. But for most people, there isn’t. I think we are and can be confident of that simply because if there were such a good reason, everyone would know about it. As it is – we don’t! We ask for a good reason, and we are handed a stone.

Now…is that ‘so confident’? Is it so confident that it is too confident, deplorably confident, strangely confident, unreasonably confident? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s just the commonplace kind of confident like the confident in ‘I am confident that there is no good reason to think Will Shakespeare is sitting across the room writing a new sonnet.’ It’s just vulgar everyday empiricism. I have good reason to think there are oranges in the glass bowl, I don’t have good reason to think there are elephants in it. There could of course be a kind of expertise or scholarship or instrumentation such that if I were properly trained I would be able to detect elephants in the bowl or Shakespeare across the room or a god – but I have no good reason to think there is. No one has any good reason to think there is.

That’s the kind of confidence I have. I think it’s not an over-reaching or arrogant kind of confidence because it does leave room for being wrong, and for learning better. It could be (in principle) that there is such a reason and that nobody has found it yet. It’s a temporal claim. So far, nobody has any good reason to think there is a god. (Well I suppose I can’t be confident that there are no secretive or isolated people who do have such a good reason and simply haven’t made it known yet. But other than that – if there were such a good reason it would be common knowledge in a heartbeat. It would knock Michael Jackson right off the front page.)

So that’s how we are ‘so confident.’ We are confident that we shouldn’t be expected to believe things if there is no good reason to believe them. That’s not quite the same as thinking our way is the only way, as Mooney hinted. It’s just thinking we should match important beliefs to good reasons, by way of caution, you see.