Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain Conference

    Nearly 300 people met to discuss apostasy, the freedom to criticise religion, Sharia and civil society.

  • Review of C S Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion

    James Parker comments bluntly in the November Atlantic that ‘The average Christian—as if we needed reminding—makes a piss-poor apologist for his own faith. One might expect a doctrine as insolently extraordinary in its claims as Christianity to have produced some tip-top debaters, but oh dear…’ This teasing remark seems apt for the best-known Anglophone Christian apologist, C S Lewis, at least to anyone who has been unimpressed by the ‘lunatic, liar or Lord’ trilemma. In this engrossing book John Beversluis takes the trouble to analyze Lewis’s arguments in detail.

    Beversluis gives an account of Lewis’s Christian apologetics over a wide range of books, especially Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Surprised by Joy, and A Grief Observed. He begins with Lewis’s ‘argument from desire’ and what is wrong with it, including in Lewis’s own terms. Lewis’s ‘Joy’ is a desire for something unknown, a desire ‘which no natural happiness will satisfy’ (p. 41) and the pain of which is itself ‘more desirable than any satisfaction.’ It sounds familiar – in fact it sounds adolescent. I remember irritatingly vague yearnings on spring evenings when I was 16, myself – I even remember trying to figure out what the yearning was for. New York?, I would wonder, since I loved going there. But that didn’t seem to be it. Neither did anything else. I didn’t identify it with God, though, much less conclude that the existence of such a yearning entails the existence of something to satisfy it and that that something is God. Perhaps, one might think, Lewis’s was a completely different kind of feeling: more dignified, more elevated, more Wordsworthian. But Beversluis concludes that ‘the pursuit of Joy is a childish thing’ and Lewis’s complaint that he had tried everything and been disappointed ‘underscores its childishness.’ He asks whether Joy is really a salutary experience, ‘the prelude to a momentous discovery,’ and answers that people who are not susceptible to its promptings ‘are less prone to disparage such precious temporal goods as they are fortunate enough to enjoy as being poorer than some allegedly greater nontemporal good for which they are searching.’ (pp 68-9) He adds that claiming that reality does not meet one’s standards is not profundity, ‘it is adolescent disenchantment elevated to cosmic status,’ so perhaps not so different from my meaningless pubescent moods after all.

    Beversluis then considers Lewis’s ‘Moral Argument for the existence of a Power behind the moral law,’ and in doing so points out that one of Lewis’s ‘serious weaknesses as a Christian apologist’ is a constant resort to the false dilemma. Over and over again Lewis tells readers that they are forced to choose between two views ‘that allegedly exhaust their alternatives, but almost invariably do not.’ In doing so he leans heavily on the scales: he presents one view as obviously sane and reasonable, and the other as an absurdity, ‘a preposterous straw man.’

    After analyzing Lewis’s arguments for God and Christianity (and finding them unsuccessful) Beversluis devotes a chapter to Lewis’s portrayal of nonbelief and nonbelievers. Lewis’s arguments, he says, typically imply that opposing positions are so feeble that they can be demolished with a few sentences. His polemical passages have a characteristically jokey tone, a ‘palpable delight’ in setting up straw men and knocking them down, a ‘slightly superior air of dispelling nonsense and putting the embarrassed opposition to flight.’ (p 196)

    The core of the book, as it is perhaps the core of Lewis’s thought and of contemporary Christianity, is the problem of evil, or as Lewis called it, the problem of pain, which Beversluis discusses at length in chapters 9 and 10, ‘The Problem of Evil’ and ‘C S Lewis’s Crisis of Faith.’

    Whether one sees evil as a problem, Beversluis notes (p 291), depends on what one means by calling God good. Is the meaning of ‘good’ the same as ordinary usage, or not? This is the Euthyphro question: are pious things pious because they are loved by the gods or are they loved by the gods because they are pious? Christians influenced by Platonism take the second view. ‘Morality is not based on divine commands and prohibitions’ but on the real nature of good, God is good ‘in our sense.’ The other view Beversluis calls Ockhamism, because Ockham ‘set it forth very unflinchingly.’ This metaethical theory, theological voluntarism or divine command morality, holds that God’s will is free to command anything God pleases: ‘“right” does mean “whatever God commands” and “wrong” does mean “whatever God forbids”.’ (p 230) This is the Calvinist view, and also more compatible with the biblical God than the Platonist view is. There are a few people in the bible, like Job, who question god’s goodness from a moral point of view, but they are ‘glaring exceptions to the standing rule that God is to be obeyed no matter what – that is, no matter how flagrantly his commands violate moral rules including the Ten Commandments.’ (p. 291)

    Lewis reconsidered his own views on this subject after his wife died and God seemed to him like a ‘Cosmic Sadist.’ The explanation he comes up with is that his faith had been a house of cards, an ‘imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled “Illness,” “Pain,” “Death,” and “Loneliness”’ (p 282) and that God had known this. God had knocked down Lewis’s house of cards so that he would learn the truth about himself – which seems to mean that Lewis considered his wife a teaching tool for him, and God someone who uses some people to teach lessons to others, which, again, makes God seem less than ‘good in our sense.’ As Beversluis notes (p 284), ‘few who have grasped the nature of the rediscovered faith and the process by which it was rediscovered will regard it as a source of “comfort and inspiration”.’ A Grief Observed in fact reveals that Lewis’s faith was recovered at the price of leaving unanswered the very questions he began with. The answer he ends up with – the shift from the Cosmic Sadist to the Great Iconoclast – is a shift from the modified Platonist God to the view that things are good only because God says so.

    Beversluis’s account of the complications and tensions of these views, and Lewis’s struggles with them, is compelling, and also sympathetic. Beversluis is critical of Lewis’s faults as an apologist, in particular of his constant resort to straw men and false dilemmas, but he also respects him.

    One minor point is that there are numerous typos, which is especially unfortunate with such a closely-argued book. I don’t like to scold copy-editors, but – it’s unfortunate.

    John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, Prometheus Books 2007.

  • Grayling on Ex-Muslims Conference

    With Maryam Namazie, Ibn Warraq, Joan Smith, Richard Dawkins, Mina Ahadi, and more.

  • Ohanian’s Mistakes

    He seems unable to relate any incident in Einstein’s life without giving it a negative (or even poisonous) spin.

  • Jesus and Mo Get the Hots for Sarah Palin

    Their sexual innuendo skills are a bit lacking though.

  • Lawrence M. Krauss on Point of Inquiry

    He talks about the misuse of quantum physics in the New Age movement, and more.

  • Motives are one thing, facts are another

    This FAIR thing is really terrible. Look at the ‘Dirty Dozen’ for instance. They’re an obnoxious crew, most of them, but FAIR just gives a quote from each without saying what is wrong with it, and it is simply not always self-evident that anything is wrong with it. (The motives of the people saying it may be deeply suspect, but that doesn’t mean that what they say is false, and I don’t think it always is false. It’s not clear what FAIR thinks.) For example David Horowitz (whom I do not admire at all, and who I think often argues unfairly to say the least) says there are 150 Muslim students’ associations which are arms of the Muslim Brotherhood. And…? Does FAIR know that that’s not true? I think at least some Muslim students’ associations in the US do have connections to the MB. Anyway if FAIR does know that it’s not true, it should say so – it shouldn’t just assume that it’s self-evidently not true. Why would it be?

    And what Robert Spencer says is not self-evidently false either. Islam is a universalizing religion, it does hold that sharia should be universal, and it does at the very least disapprove of non-believers. The first sentence of the Daniel Pipes quotation has a whiff (or more) of racism, though in context it may be distanced (and I suspect that it is). But the second sentence, unfortunately, is at least arguably true.

    FAIR seems to take it as simply axiomatic that Islam is 1) entirely benign and 2) off-limits to criticism, and thus to take it as also axiomatic that anyone who disagrees with 1 or 2 or both is acting from racist motives and also factually wrong. But it is entirely possible – in fact, easy – to think Islam is not entirely benign without having any racist motives at all, and thus to think that Islam is in urgent need of criticism, still without any racist motives. Racists and reactionaries and missionary Christians do confuse the issue, of course, but FAIR ought to be able to make the necessary distinctions.

  • Sheep may safely graze

    Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting tackles what it (inaccurately and tendentiously) calls ‘Islamophobia’.

    The term “Islamophobia” refers to hostility toward Islam and Muslims that tends to dehumanize an entire faith, portraying it as fundamentally alien and attributing to it an inherent, essential set of negative traits such as irrationality, intolerance and violence.

    Why should a ‘faith’ be humanized to begin with? ‘Faiths’ are not human, so why is it wrong to dehumanize them? It isn’t wrong; that’s just a rather stupid and unthinking bit of rhetoric. The rest of the sentence (and the rest of the report) simply assumes that it is wrong to portray a religion as having ‘negative’ (meaning bad) traits without first determining whether or not the religion does in fact have bad traits. Imagine talking that way about criticism of other sets of ideas and practices – for instance sets of ideas and practices that FAIR (rightly) thinks are bad. Imagine talking that way about the ideology of the KKK, or Jim Crow laws, or apartheid, or Serbian nationalism. Wouldn’t it seem rather stupid to try to rule out investigation in that way? In short, FAIR seems not to have entertained even the possibility that Islam does in fact have a set of bad traits such as irrationality, intolerance and violence.

    This of course is not to mention the obvious fact that ‘Islamophobia’ in fact means hostility toward Islam and not hostility toward Muslims and that it is a bit of underhanded trickery to conflate the two.

  • Atheist Joking

    Christianity makes insolently extraordinary claims but produces terrible apologists.

  • Imran Ahmad on C S Lewis and Narnia

    ‘It’s enough to turn anyone into a secular humanist.’

  • Anthony Appiah on Philosophers

    With responses from Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel.

  • FBI Calls Murder of Said Sisters ‘Honor’ Killing

    Sisters’ relatives have said the father killed them because they dated non-Muslims and acted too western.

  • The Usual Confusion About ‘Islamophobia’

    Steve Rendall of ‘FAIR’ conflates criticism of Islam with hatred of Muslims, tries to make the former taboo.

  • FAIR Examines ‘Islamophobia’

    ‘The term “Islamophobia” refers to hostility toward Islam and Muslims’ – that begs the question.

  • The Uses of Cheater Detection

    Humans want revenge but also forgiveness. Over the long haul forgiveness wins out.

  • Physicist Says Einstein Got His Sums Wrong

    No mention of wife.

  • Is Lolita About Love or Sex?

    The novel joins a dark central current that eroticizes children relentlessly and wishes it hadn’t.

  • The reading matter in pews is limited

    Andrew Brown is also eloquent on the subject.

    The whole point about the net is that, like books, it gives people a shared space and a shared experience that is not physical. If I sit in an internet cafe – or even, God forbid, an office – and talk to someone on the net, I am far closer to the person to whom I am talking than to the noble workers on each side of me, who would never dream of emailing gossip in the middle of a working day. When I read a book, I am communing with the author, and perhaps with all the
    other readers, not with anyone else in the railway carriage.

    This is one of the exciting things about books (and the net), and turning libraries into youth clubs is one way to make that fact harder to discover.

    Learning outside school is an essentially solitary process, too. It requires concentration; it may not require silence all the time – I often find it helpful to read or work in a cafe – but when studying needs outside stimulus, you take the book away from the library, a service they already offer.

    The libraries don’t need to provide the noise for you. Noise is easy to find; quiet is not, especially for people who don’t have money.

    What is particularly cruel and futile about the Burnham plan is that it destroys the one thing that libraries offer which no amount of internet cafes, Starbucks or even skating can offer: the place where poor students can find the calm they need to try to teach themselves things that are genuinely hard to learn. Middle-class or richer children, or children at good schools, can always find a place to be quiet and study with concentration. But there must be lots of people for whom a library is the only free public space outside a church where you can hope for calm; and the reading matter in church pews tends to be depressingly limited.

    Library students everywhere please take note. (They won’t though – they hated this article as well as the Indy one.)

  • Customers need change

    Someone who works at a public library and is ‘studing an MSc in Information and Library Studies’ at a University was terribly irritated by that piece on libraries the other day.

    The article is awash with dismay over the move to allow library users to eat, drink and, heaven forbid, actually talk. Interestingly, they talk about the ’silence rule’- a concept that is completely alien to either myself or just about any other person I have encountered who works in a public library.

    Ah, is it indeed. Why?

    Don’t bother asking; the library student never says. It’s such an absurd, outdated, stuffy, elitist, stupid idea that it’s simply self-evident what’s wrong with it. Which is interesting, because one would think (or hope, forlornly) that people who work in libraries would have at least a glimmer of an idea why people who frequent libraries would value silence while they do it. But apparently not.

    If these people have their way, the public library would be nothing more than a physical manifestation of all that was bad about the 1950s. Time moves on, society changes, customers needs change. Libraries must, therefore, change.

    Why? Again, the student doesn’t say. Society does change, of course, but why that means libraries now have to be raucous instead of quiet is not clear, nor is it clear why ‘customers’ need noise in place of quiet. But then of course we are not students of Information and Library Studies, so naturally we do not understand.

    [O]ne thing is for certain, things need to move forward. There should not be enforced silence (we don’t and it certainly isn’t noisy, despite what the critics might assume), there should be an attempt to make the library a cool place to hang out…and, above all, the library should be open and welcoming to everyone, regardless of who they are. Elitism will kill the library service. Eradicating the old-fashioned perception of libraries might just save it.

    ‘It certainly isn’t noisy’ – well I wish that were the case in the public libraries I know, but it isn’t. I don’t ‘assume’ they’re noisy, I know damn well they are because I use them. I use them, but I don’t consider them ‘open and welcoming to everyone’ – I don’t consider them welcoming to people like me who want to be able to read and think in libraries. They are welcoming to people who want to make noise, they are welcoming to people who want to treat the library like an auxiliary living room or a part-time kindergarten, but they are not welcoming to people who want to use the library as a library.

    Why does future librarian assume that being open and welcoming to everyone requires being noisy and raucous? Why does future librarian assume that everyone wants noise and raucousness all the time and everywhere? Why does future librarian not think it is possible to be open and welcoming to everyone by offering quiet in one place and noise in others? Coffee shops are open and welcoming to everyone but they don’t serve fish or provide Balkan dance troupes. Rock concerts are open and welcoming to everyone but they don’t provide quiet and desks and books. Why can’t libraries be open and welcoming to everyone in a library way instead of a different way? Library student doesn’t say, and neither do the three commenters, one of whom has worked in libraries for 25 years. Which is depressing for the future of libraries. Apparently what one learns when one studies ‘Library Studies’ is that libraries should be abolished while (inexplicably) retaining the old name.

    I saw library student’s post via a post at Tom Morris’s place. He is eloquent on this subject.

  • Paul Krugman Wins Nobel Prize in Economics

    Thinks readers may have more tolerance when he’s being boring, but will not think he’s infallible.