Author: Ophelia Benson

I knew I would be told I was setting too high a standard by talking of reliable knowledge (and meaning by it actually reliable knowledge, rather than credible or rationally defensible or arguable beliefs or guesses or intuitions). I knew that so well that when making a couple of notes on belief and reliable knowledge this morning, that was one of the notes I made – the prediction that I would be told that. But the high standard is exactly the point. Why would we want to set a lower standard? Why would we accept a lower standard? I can see why people want to set a lower standard for their own beliefs, and perhaps for their chosen group’s beliefs; but why everyone is supposed to accept a lower standard for certain kinds of beliefs (and not others) in general, I find more puzzling. Especially because the claims we are supposed to accept a lower standard for – a lower standard for defining what reliable knowledge is, remember – are so very large and detailed (albeit conflicting) and unlikely. It is not obvious that the larger and wilder the claim is, the lower the standard for defining reliable knowledge should be. On the contrary. The larger and wilder the claim is, the more we want to know how the person making the claim knows – except, apparently, when it comes to whether ‘God’ exists and whether it is good and what it wants us to do to be good. But that’s just the kind of claim we need reliable knowledge of, and if we don’t have it, we need to be very damn cautious about heeding claims on the subject.

Notice I’m not saying this rules out belief; it obviously doesn’t. But belief isn’t knowledge, and shouldn’t be treated like knowledge. I maintain that it’s not setting too high a standard for reliable knowledge to say that it should be genuinely reliable knowledge. Otherwise it’s not reliable knowledge, and we should talk about something else; but what I’m talking about here is reliable knowledge, so I’m going to define it accordingly, not in some more relaxed way. That’s why I brought it up in the first place. I wanted to point out that we don’t actually have any reliable knowledge on this subject. (Reliable knowledge is a very scarce commodity. Very scarce indeed. But that’s why it’s as well to be modest when making assertions from incomplete knowledge. Assertions about God and what God wants us to do to be good are not always notably modest.)

Yes yes yes. We know. We’ve heard.

But some now say secularists should embrace more than the strident rhetoric poured out in such books as “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins and “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris. By devoting so much space to explaining why religion is bad, these critics argue, atheists leave little room for explaining how a godless worldview can be good. At a recent conference marking the 30th anniversary of Harvard’s humanist chaplaincy, organizers sought to distance the “new humanism” from the “new atheism.” Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein went so far as to use the (other) f-word in describing his unbelieving brethren. “At times they’ve made statements that sound really problematic, and when Sam Harris says science must destroy religion, to me that sounds dangerously close to fundamentalism,” Epstein said in an interview after the meeting.

And behold, it worked – here he is with his name in the Washington Post. It’s a way to get attention, and Harvard’s ‘Humanist chaplain’ has been getting it. That’s a shame.

Atheism’s new dogmatic streak is not that different from the religious extremists it calls to task…The suggestion that atheists may be fundamentalists in their own right has, unsurprisingly, ruffled feathers. “We’re not a unified group,” said Christopher Hitchens…”But we’re of one mind on this: The only thing that counts is free inquiry, science, research, the testing of evidence, the uses of reason…

Free inquiry, science, research, the testing of evidence, the uses of reason – what could be more dogmatic than that?

The humanists are taking advantage of renewed interest in atheism — in effect riding the coattails of Dawkins and Harris into the mainstream — to gain attention for their big-tent model.

And doing it by pissing on them, and doing that by saying things about them that are not accurate. Triply contemptible – hitching a ride and pissing on the drivers by calling them names that don’t fit.

The article talks to much better people as it goes on, but I do wish journalists would get around to ignoring Greg Epstein.

This is hard to read. Painful.

The killers struck along a lonely road south of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, on a Sunday in December 1998, spraying automatic rifle fire into a jeep carrying Norbert Zongo, his brother, and two companions. The gunmen set the vehicle ablaze in a bid to obscure their crime, but they could not erase Zongo’s reputation in the West African nation as the uncompromising editor of the weekly L’Independant. Neither, to many people’s eyes, could they conceal whose hands were stained with the killings—officials in President Blaise Compaoré’s government whom Zongo had investigated relentlessly for alleged torture and murder…Deputy editor of La Patria in Manizales, Colombia, Sierra was shot twice on a main street as he and his daughter walked back to the newsroom after lunch in January 2002. Sierra had long probed corruption within la coalición, a political cabal that governed his province with absolute authority…During Rwanda’s genocide, journalists were targeted regardless of ethnicity for being seen as supportive of peace and political reform…Marlene Garcia-Esperat, a well-regarded Philippine broadcaster and columnist whose anti-graft message earned the ire of local officials, was shot in her Tacurong home in front of her horrified family on Easter weekend in 2005.

This is no easier to read.

At Novaya Gazeta, Moscow’s twice-weekly independent newspaper, the staff’s pain is fresh even now, months after an assassin gunned down Politkovskaya—Anya, as colleagues called her—in her Moscow apartment building in October 2006. In a country where 80 percent of the public gets its news from state-controlled television, Novaya’s dogged coverage of social and political issues has won it devoted readers and passionate enemies. Two of its top journalists have been assassinated and a third has died under mysterious circumstances in the past six years; all reported on risky topics before their deaths.

This is one of the things the Internet and blogs can do – keep this stuff in circulation, keep it from fading. It’s exactly the kind of thing that should not fade. The practice should fade, the reports on the unfaded practice should not.

So if God, in Humpty Dumpty fashion, just means whatever any word-spinner says it means, then – why are we expected to heed it or obey it or respect it or not do stem-cell research because of it?

There is a ‘childish notion of an anthropomorphic God that is characteristic of the tribe, of the closed society’ and then there is the non-childish notion of a non-anthropomorphic God.

God exists in the word and through the word…God is a human concept. God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world’s chaos, randomness and cruelty…God is that mysterious force—and you can give it many names as other religions do—which works upon us and through us to seek and achieve truth, beauty and goodness. God is perhaps best understood as our ultimate concern, that in which we should place our highest hopes, confidence and trust…God is better understood as verb rather than a noun. God is not an asserted existence but a process accomplishing itself. And God is inescapable. It is the life force that sustains, transforms and defines all existence.

Well that’s all quite pretty, but it is not what everyone means by the word ‘God’ – to say the least. It’s very odd to say that God is not this childish notion of a person, then matter-of-factly say that God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, as if that were common knowledge and universally accepted. I would go so far as to say that’s dirty pool.

It is by the seriousness of our commitments to compassion, indeed our ability to sacrifice for the other, especially for the outcast and the stranger, our commitment to justice—the very core of the message of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus—that we alone can measure the quality of faith. This is the meaning of true faith…Professed faith—what we say we believe—is not faith. It is an expression of loyalty to a community, to our tribe. Faith is what we do. This is real faith. Faith is the sister of justice.

Same thing. Very pretty, but idiosyncratic; does not reflect common usage or common knowledge; therefore, no basis on which to contest someone else’s account of the matter which more closely reflects common usage and knowledge (whatever other faults it may have).

Faith is not in conflict with reason. Faith does not conflict with scientific truth, unless faith claims to express a scientific truth. Faith can neither be affirmed nor denied by scientific, historical or philosophical truth…There is a reality that is not a product of rational deduction. It is not accounted for by strict rational discourse. There is a spiritual dimension to human existence and the universe, but this is not irrational—it is non-rational.

More Humpty Dumptyism with ‘faith’ along with some unnecessary decoration. There is an emotional dimension to human existence that it is fair to call non-rational, but as for a spiritual dimension to the universe – 1) I don’t know what that means and 2) I think it’s decorative windbaggery.

The danger of Sam’s simplistic worldview is that it does what fundamentalists do: It creates the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. And once you set up this world you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, brutal occupation and even torture, anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous.

That, on the other hand, I think is a defensible view, and it also doesn’t bother with idiosyncratic definitions or with decorative windbaggery. Argumentative writing is never improved by idiosyncratic definitions or decorative windbaggery; never.