Even talk of the appearance of design is misleading.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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No sooner has the real moment gone
Simon Blackburn on Baudrillard.
Baudrillard’s ideas about simulated reality seem to have touched on an old philosophical panic. Perhaps our senses are no better than our televisions. Perhaps nature has varnished and spun the pictures we receive. They too are commodities, bought in to provide sustenance.
Perhaps, but then again, it’s a mistake to relish the idea, because generalized scepticism implies that nothing is wrong with anything and nothing matters.
[A]nd would any self-respecting culture critic want to draw that conclusion? In any event, it is not all simulacra. We are participants in a public world, not hermits trapped in our own private cinemas. The cure for the sceptical nightmare is action. Nobody stays sceptical while crossing the street, or choosing dinner.
I like that ‘nobody stays sceptical while crossing the street’ – I amused myself with a little riff on that idea in Why Truth Matters. Blackburn reviewed WTM; maybe the riff stuck in his mind. (Or maybe not; it’s certainly an obvious example.)
French postmodernism may be passing, but it had a point. Even if engagement with the world is the cure, the respite it gives may be short-lived. No sooner has the real moment gone than the work of memory begins, once more selecting, massaging, suppressing and spinning.
Just so. I love that last line, and we were just talking about that idea the other week. That’s why I don’t agree with Jeremy that Stannard is being rational to believe that his inner experience of meeting god in prayer is genuine evidence that he has met god in prayer. It’s because even if he can’t doubt the experience while he’s having it, he should be aware that once the real moment has gone then the work of memory begins, once more selecting, massaging, suppressing and spinning. Even if he can’t doubt it while he’s having it, he should be able to doubt it afterwards. Being unable to doubt it afterwards is too credulous, therefore not rational.
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Madrassa Students Busy in Islamabad
Burning CDs and DVDs, loitering at traffic lights to tell women to stop driving.
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Ben Goldacre on What to Do With the Articles
With real evidence, we are all better placed to communicate the truth behind the news.
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Statistical Errors in a Serial Murder Case
If you multiply p-values together, then harmless incidents rapidly become dangerously unlikely.
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Hard Wordes in Plaine English
Scott McLemee on a new edition of the first English dictionary, published in 1604.
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Grayling’s Question Time: What is Time?
There has never been a time when philosophers were not interested in time.
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Simon Blackburn on Baudrillard
No sooner has the real moment gone than the work of memory begins, selecting, massaging, spinning.
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PrayerFlight
What a special weekend for our airplanes to be in the air, interceding on behalf of the people of Ohio.
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Jesus and Mo Test Dawkins’s Truth Claim
And triumphantly falsify it, so ha.
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Sharia Gangs Bully and Threaten in Islamabad
Creeping campaign to Talebanise Pakistan has spread from the Afghan border to the capital.
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Human Rights Activists Rally in Islamabad
Protesters urged authorities to curb the rise of extremist forces promoting intolerance and violence.
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The New Humanism Yet Again
At the end of April 2007 a “gala celebration” is being staged at America’s oldest University – the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts – to honor thirty years of the Harvard Humanist chaplaincy. The event designs to bring together friendly but competitive visions of the unruly congeries of ideas we call, for simplicity’s sake, “humanism.” To spice things up, the Harvard organizers have decided to use the sexy phrase “New Humanism” to describe the agenda. and while I do not know at the time of this writing precisely what will be said by the wise and wizened who attend the conference, I can guess, and I can guess I’ll be right.
The new humanism will be called a bright and bold vision of the future. It will put an end to the rancorous disagreements of the old humanism concerning what humanism really is, or ought to be. We will hear that humanism is not the same as atheism, but not (of course) unfriendly to atheists, unless the atheists are “fundamentalist” about their unbelief. We will hear that humanism is more than science because while science might answer the riddle of life question it does not really address the meaning of life question. And we will hear that the era of non-cooperation is at an end. The new humanism will be all about healing, while the old humanism seemed to thrive on bad feeling and schism. Above all, it will be about building a table at which everyone can sit, no matter what their inclination, no matter how hard or soft their unbelief, no matter how high or low their tax bracket. The new humanism will be customized to have sales appeal to the seekers among us, people out there “officially” described as unchurched, unaffiliated, or just looking for cheaper gas prices, a virtual ingathering of lost and lingering tribes to create the New Un-Jerusalem.
I have no trouble with vision. In fact, I wrote an article in the lateish-nineties called “The Old Humanism and the New” as the inaugural editorial for the a then- new CFI periodical, The Journal for Critical Studies In Religion, charting what I took to be a way forward in the wilderness of an over-defined and fissiparous movement – which remains over-defined and fissiparous. But visions should be anchored in reality and history, and the notions (a notion is a quart short of an idea) I see coming out the humanist chaplaincy in Cambridge are anchored in neither.
Take atheism. As a label I habitually decline it. But the debate about the role of unbelief in the humanist movement is significant, formative, and imperative. Paul Kurtz has persistently reminded secularists that atheism doesn’t define humanism; but it’s a topic – whatever intellectual bruises its discussion may incur – we will never be able to avoid. As long as untried and untested adherence to belief systems exists (and I am not looking at my watch), the question of Unbelief will hound us. If it hounds different ones of us in different ways, ranging from those who find believers naïve and intellectually challenged to those who think ‘demythologized’ religious views are humanism wearing a different coat, that’s to be expected. It’s the price of unfettered intelligence – something most humanists qua humanists do believe in, just as we believe that the way to settle ideological differences is through spirited debate, not by reconciliation, forgiveness, or violence. But if we begin with the dogma that unfettered intelligence trends just as easily toward tolerance of naïve opinion and beliefs that cannot be squared with the demands of critical thought – and this is what I see the New Humanism doing – then I say show me the door.
I reject the idea that humanism is about bridging differences. Or that the way to do this, even if it were desirable, is to build the world’s largest dining room table. The difference between humanism and other life-philosophies is real and sometimes intense, and never tends toward intellectual detente with philosophies and beliefs it finds unworthy of the human spirit. That may sound a bit abstract, metaphysical even. But we shouldn’t fear the phrase, any more than we should fear words like “virtue,” “happiness, and “truth.” The humanist quest for those ponderables does not necessarily make for a life of intellectual comfort. But as Mill said, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their side of the question.” The payoff of intellectual discomfort for humanism is science. Not being satisfied with religious explanation explains why science emerges within the humanist tradition as the agreed paradigm for understanding humanity and its role in nature and the cosmos. And it is why humanists anguish over the temptation to glorify the paradigm in a way that looks suspiciously like deification – a debate that for all its slings and arrows does not constitute a “split” in the movement. Science is not virtue. It is not happiness. And it is a way to only one kind of truth. Humanists should welcome the life disdainful of intellectual tranquility because it’s precisely this that keeps us on guard against the false comfort of the unexamined life, the life of faith.
Is it now heresy to say that humanism has never been about getting along, overlooking error, polite tolerance of all opinions, equal appreciation of all cultures, all faiths, all ideas? Do we now pretend that obscurity is clarity of thought, or that the gospel of social liberalism is the humanist agenda, or the stammering axioms of postmodernism are compatible with the examined life? I hope that is not what’s being said at Harvard, because if it is, the old humanism will need to reject it.
R. Joseph Hoffmann
Chair
Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion
Center for Inquiry
Amherst, New York -
The universal enemy
Oh good. What a relief. How kind of Walter Isaacson to reassure us all on this very material point – Einstein hated atheists! Oh, whew! Hooray hoorah kaloo kalay, I was so afraid he might have thought atheists were okay but no, no, no, hallelujah, he made sure to say otherwise so that we in 2007 would not be put off our feed with worry.
But throughout his life, Einstein was consistent in rejecting the charge that he was an atheist…And unlike Sigmund Freud or Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw, Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believed in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists…In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful.
Yay! Yay, yay, yay. That’s so good. Because the US is so teeming with atheists who are always denigrating theists while there are no theists at all who ever say a harsh word about atheists (or what they choose to call ‘Darwinists’ either). There is such a massive disproportion in US discourse between atheist denigration of theists or theism and theist denigration of atheists or atheism that it is 1) a miracle and 2) a very good thing that Time has published this gobbet of phlegm just in time for Easter.
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Just the questions, ma’am
And, not for the first time, there’s Howard Gardner.
‘In his new book Five Minds for the Future, he argues that the 21st century will belong to people who can think in certain ways.’ One of the five is ‘the respectful mind, which shows an appreciation of different cultures.’ Why is that called the respectful mind? Why isn’t it called the appreciative mind? Or why isn’t the explanatory phrase ‘which shows respect for different cultures’? (Because minds can’t show things, for one reason. Okay but besides that.) I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that it’s because unconditional respect for (undefined, unspecified) different cultures is slowly but steadily being made mandatory. Which is stupid, in a way – if it’s mandatory, it’s not really respect, is it, it’s just obedience or obeisance or slavishness. Extorted or required respect isn’t respect. It’s also not a kind of mind. It may be an idea or a way of behaving, but it’s not a mind.
Gardner believes that the education policies of today, which still revere rote-learning, are preparing children for the world of yesterday. He points to my digital recorder, the size of a cigarette lighter: “Something that small can contain every fact that you ever need to know. So what a waste of time it is to sit around learning facts! All the premium in the future is for people who can do things that machines can’t do yet. So, the capacity to ask a good question, rather than getting the right answer from a machine, becomes so much more important.”
Really. How can people ask good questions if they don’t know anything? What can their good questions be about? How can they even dig facts out of ‘machines’ if they don’t know anything?
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Parting of the ways
Matthew Parris is amusing.
During Holy Week we are treated to a variety of decent-sounding people in print and on the airwaves explaining that religion – or “faith” as they now prefer to call it – is basically all about shared moral values, making the world a better place and gaining a proper sense of awe at life’s mystery…Such faith sounds so reasonable. Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded. How can we be so sure?
Beeeeecause (as Parris of course goes on to point out) that’s not in fact what religion or ‘faith’ really is all about, that’s how.
You are living, dear reader, at a watershed in human history. This is the century during which, after 2,000 years of what has been a pretty bloody marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences. So block your ears to the cooing voices on Thought for the Day, and choose your side. “But how can you be sure?”…Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.
Moral values good (if they’re the right moral values, a question which has to be decided on secular, universalizable grounds), making the world a better place good, sense of awe more a matter of taste; but supernatural truth claims, not good; the thinking that goes into belief in supernatural truth claims, not good at all, in fact bad.
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Happy Cruciversary
It is the culmination of a plan set in motion at the dawn of time. And what a plan it is.
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Walter Isaacson on Einstein and ‘Faith’
He did believe in God – not the usual God, but – um – er – well he had a sense of awe.
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Not Fashionable to be Christian
Christians depicted as zealots or people who haven’t caught up.
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Block Your Ears to Cooing Voices
After 2,000 years of a bad marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences.