Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh yes – this sounds familiar.

Richard Dawkins once took part in a debate with the distinguished theologian and philosopher Richard Swinburne. The Holocaust, Swinburne suggested, had a positive element because it gave Jews an opportunity to be noble and courageous. Swinburne’s ‘grotesque piece of reasoning’, Dawkins writes in his new book, is ‘damningly typical of the theological mind’, and an attitude that reveals not just the redundancy of religion but also its immorality.

We’ve had a look at Swinburne’s grotesque reasoning before, more than once. Stuff like that gives philosophy of religion a bad name, I should think. David Attenborough is a useful counter to that kind of thing.

People sometimes say to me, “Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?” And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm.

It’s the devil’s chaplain. Darwin to Hooker: ‘What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of Nature!’

Kenan disagrees with Dawkins about religion as abusive to children though. But I in turn disagree with Kenan.

Parents indoctrinate their children with all manner of odious beliefs. That is the nature of parenting. And the nature of growing up is that young people decide for themselves, often rejecting the views of their parents. Dawkins’s argument seems to reveal less about the nature of religion than about his own pessimistic view of the human capacity for change and independent thought.

Well, no, not all parents, not necessarily, and to the extent that they do, that’s not desirable. One could make a similar sort of generalizing reply – parents beat their children, parents abuse their children, parents deny their children education, parents neglect their children. Some do, but when they do the state sometimes intervenes, and that’s a good thing. That’s not to say the state ought to intervene when parents pass on their odious beliefs, it’s just to say that it’s not necessarily desirable or okay or tolerable simply because it happens. Some children reject the views of their parents, but some don’t; the world is full of people who have odious beliefs, and the rest of us have to live with them. That’s not to say we should all zoom around indoctrinating one another and creeping into one another’s basement windows in order to murmur into the ears of one another’s children – it’s just to say the problem is not so easily dismissed.

Kenan’s amusing though.

Dawkins steamrollers over such complexities. The result, ironically, is that he ends up sounding as naive and unworldly as any happy clappy believer. ‘Imagine with John Lennon a world with no religion,’ he writes.

Hmmm I think I’ll start smaller. A world with no SUVs. That will do for a beginning.

What I keep saying! But Sean Carrol says it a lot better in a review of Eagleton’s review of Dawkins.

Okay, very good. God, in this conception, is not some thing out there in the world (or even outside the world), available to be poked and prodded and have his beard tugged upon…The previous excerpt, which defined God as “the condition of possibility,” seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves…But – inevitably – Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe “out of love,” is capable of “regret,” and “is an artist.” That’s crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that “The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret”? Nothing at all…And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.

This is (she enunciated with quiet intensity) what I keep saying. You can’t do both.

The problematic nature of this transition – from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth – is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.” It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: “Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?” The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it’s because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions.

That’s exactly it. Takes a cosmologist to say it so clearly. It’s not just a minor bump, it’s a deal-breaker. So Eagleton’s blithe one minute having God be ineffable and not like Gore or an octopus or his foot and the next minute having it be all kinds of specific and particular and just so and not otherwise – won’t work, and makes him look silly. Pick one and stick to it, but don’t pretend it can be both.

A very interesting discussion last week at the Valve. Similar to many discussions we have, but also different, on account of different people conducting it. It’s about Dawkins and what the Valve poster, Bill Benzon, finds ‘bothersome’ about him. He puts it this way:

As far as I can tell, my target is a certain kind of discourse, a kind which Dawkins exemplifies particularly well, but others participate in it as well. And what bothers me about this discourse is not that it is against religious belief, but that it is against the religious as well.

That’s not as clear as it might be, but I think what he’s saying is, people who are sharply critical of religious belief are ‘against’ (attacking, hostile to, unfair to, aggressive toward, offensive to, unkind to) religious believers themselves. In other words it’s yet another voice swelling the already deafening chorus saying ‘shut up about religion because it is offensive to be critical about it because it’s not possible to be critical about it without attacking the people who believe in it.’ It’s saying that it’s not morally respectable to discuss religion in frank terms because there is no way to do that without insulting – without ‘being against’ – religious believers. I dislike that chorus, for several reasons, which I’ve referred to now and then: among them are the fact that that doesn’t apply to other beliefs, and the fact that it simply adds to the already very heavy social pressure to be extra extra extra-special kind about religion.

Most commenters, I’m happy to say, share my dislike, and do an excellent job of arguing. A biggish chunk of the morning flew away while I read the comments; I recommend them. John Horgan – the ‘end of science’ guy – drops in; so does PZ; so do other interesting people. Dan Green (a Valve author who is also a B&W author) notes:

It’s puzzling to me that otherwise smart, non-mystical people like Bill Benzon, Jonathan Derbyshire, and, indeed, Thomas Nagel have come down so hard on Dawkins’s book and its “deperate arrogance.” It suggests that atheism is still far from acceptable even in “intellectual” circles.

Just so; and that’s why this kind of thing is annoying and depressing. There shouldn’t be all this pressure to closet the atheism even in ‘intellectual’ circles. It shouldn’t be a consensus. It’s a consensus even among people who claim not to like consensus. Very odd.

Muriel Gray at the Herald is not silenced.

…a nutcase Britain utterly obsessed with religion. People were threatening Jack Straw with violence; some woman (we think – for all we know it could have been Paul Gascoigne under that niquab) was claiming her right to mumble lessons at children while wearing a bag over her head, and the pope had made the hilariously Monty-Python esque declaration that he was “considering” abolishing limbo for unbaptised babies, no doubt making intelligent Catholics squirm with embarrassment at the screaming silliness of heavenly admission by human whim.

Yes, but also giving me something to write a teasing N&C about. It’s an ill wind, etc.

Let’s start with vocabulary. Let’s stop describing these tax-funded establishments as faith schools. They are superstition schools, for that is what they teach. Alongside hard facts, innocent children are hoodwinked into accepting as real the mythology of virgin births, gods who regard women with bare heads as wicked harlots, that Noah’s Ark was real and that Darwin was wrong. It’s clear that, given the rising tide of superstition sweeping our country, no politician will help end this state-funded child abuse, and so it is time to try and fight back.

But be sure to do it without being, or appearing to be, ‘against the religious.’ Thass forbidden.

Once we got our schools and started churning out multiracial youngsters free from any kind of manipulation, save that of being taught to question everything, we could start our political lobbying. Why should religious concerns be put above ours? Why shouldn’t we have the right to be appeased when we are offended by religion, the way the religious whine like toddlers when someone shakes a stick at their myths? Why shouldn’t we be consulted and treated with respect as a community? Why are the sincerely held beliefs I’ve outlined inferior to those of a Christian, Jew or a Muslim?

Why indeed. I would very much like to know.

Here’s a great listen for you – Julia Sweeney on Fresh Air. She’s got a one-woman show called ‘Letting Go of God’ at an off-off-Broadway theater, and she gives a pretty good run-through of the journey from theism to atheism in this interview. In fact it’s pretty hilarious what a lot she manages to get into thirty minutes or so – religion as consolation in despair, Bible study, Abraham and Isaac, perverse excuses for Abraham and Isaac, a wink-wink priest who explains that we sophisticated believers know better but myths are for the people, the anger and sense of treachery at being told that, withdrawal from the church, turn to New Age, in particular Deepak Chopra, being stimulated by his talk of quantum mechanics, which he cites to subvert science but she didn’t realize that at the time, reading about quantum mechanics because of Chopra-stimulus, being excited by science and the scientific way of thinking, seeing everything through that filter, that skeptical filter – that’s about the first five minutes. It’s good stuff.

There’s one bit where she talks about the way she used to have God in her head; she would talk to him, tell him about her problems, discuss things – he was very compassionate about my problems, she says with a cackle. So, Terri Gross asked, wasn’t it lonely when you didn’t have God in your head any more? I answered for Sweeney: maybe, but also freeing. Sweeney said yes but it was also liberating.

That’s exactly it, you see. It’s liberating. I think people underestimate that – people who emphasize the consolation of religion. It is consoling, of course I see that, but it is also – something the absence of which is liberating. It’s surveillance. The constant presence of someone you take to be real inside your head is (can be) consoling and companionable but it’s also relentless. Sweeney talked with some passion about realizing that her thoughts were her own, that what went on inside her head belonged to her and no one else. Well exactly.

And she explained, with some eloquence, how she finds skepticism and an interest in science themselves actually consoling. A great listen.