Author: Ophelia Benson

Mark Vernon discusses what he calls ‘common mistakes of atheists’ – but the examples he gives aren’t examples, because they don’t make the mistakes he says they make. His attributions are rather sloppy. Okay very sloppy. He doesn’t quote, he just says.

If you do the rounds of the philosophically minded blogs of atheists, it is common for arguments about the non-existence of God to be rehearsed. Typically, they present ‘proofs’ that require empirical evidence. For example, Stephen Law, argues that if God is all-powerful and all-good, then the fact that there is so much evil in the world provides evidence that tilts the odds decisively against God’s existence.

But arguing that something tilts the odds is not the same thing as ‘presenting “proofs”,’ and Stephen Law hedges things a good deal more than that.

Would this constitute a “proof” that there’s no God? Depends what you mean by “proof”. Personally I think these sorts of consideration do establish beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no all-powerful all-good God. So we can, in this sense, prove there’s no God. Yet all the people quoted in my last blog say you cannot “scientifically” prove or disprove God’s existence. If they mean prove beyond any doubt they are right. But then hardly anything is provable in that sense, not even the non-existence of fairies.

And so on. He doesn’t just ‘present proofs,’ so that ‘for example’ is misleading.

Vernon also just says about me, and I’m not convinced by what he just says.

Or they say that God is a supernatural entity for which there is as much evidence as fairies – a familiar trope on butterfliesandwheels.

Is it? A familiar trope? Is that something I say a lot? I’m not sure I’ve ever said it, and I am sure I don’t say it a lot, so what does he mean ‘a familiar trope’?

And more to the point, why do theists and pro-theist ‘agnostics,’ which is what I take Vernon to be (since he certainly seems to spend a lot of time rebuking imaginary atheists for saying things they don’t say, for a just plain agnostic) – why do they do that? Why do they mischaracterize atheists and then scold the caricature so much?

Well, maybe because they don’t have much to say if they don’t. I don’t know. But I must say I’m beginning to suspect it. All this complaining about imaginary atheists is beginning to remind me of people who say everyone to the left of Bush is a traitor.

Vernon says more, and most of it seems pretty woolly to me.

Now, I am an agnostic. So I think that the jury is out on the existence of God and, in fact, always will be. Why? Because the very best theologians – those who it is only reasonable to consult before claiming to have disproved the thing about which they are experts – say so.

Wait – what? ‘I think the jury is out on the existence of God and always will be; why? Because the very best theologians say so.’ Did he really mean to say that? Or did he lose track because of the inserted clause, and say something much cruder and sillier than he meant to. Probably. But then there’s that inserted clause, which is also not very good. Atheists don’t claim (most of them) to have ‘disproved’ the existence of god. And what does he mean ‘disproved the thing’? How would you disprove a thing? And then the ‘about which they are experts’ bit – experts in what sense? And experts in what? The thing, we know; but what does that mean? Do they have special expert knowledge that there is a god or that god does exist (and what kind of god it is and what it does and what it wants us to do)? If so why don’t they make it public? I realize they have arguments, but I’m not sure that having arguments that god exists (or ‘about the thing,’ for short) makes them experts. I have no problem agreeing it makes them scholars, but experts? No. No, frankly, I think that’s a stupid word to use about a supernatural subject – unless of course one of these experts comes up with some real evidence (yes, evidence) that a supernatural entity exists. That would be expertise. But just saying? Not so much.

There’s more, but that’s enough. I find this kind of thing depressing.

To be fair to Terry Eagleton, he’s perfectly capable of being entirely lucid and even (dare I say it) sensible. I leafed through The Eagelton Reader earlier today to find a sample – and it was not difficult. From an essay called ‘Deconstruction and Human Rights’:

Equivocation and ambiguity are not always moral virtues; and there seems no doubt that such finespun obliquity on issues of central political importance has done much to disillusion those erstwhile enthusiasts for deconstruction who somewhat gullibly credited its promissory note to deliver some political goods.

There you go. Clear as a bell.

Update: I shortened the quoted passage, to omit a swipe at Derrida that I almost didn’t include to begin with, but ended up including for the sake of offering some context. But Roger points out that it’s inaccurate – and I don’t agree with the point of it anyway (which seems to be that all writing ought to be politically useful in some way, or at least ought to be rebuked for not being), so out it goes. My main goal was just to be fair to Eagleton; and the passage is more elegant on its own anyway.

I’m not the only one who wasn’t impressed or convinced by that piece by Stuart Jeffries. Caspar Melville is another.

Stuart Jeffries piece on faith and unbelief is an example of a certain kind of liberal intellectual position which seeks to stand above the current debates about the place of religion in contemporary society…He quotes without challenge the preposterous assertion from Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, that “atheists like Richard Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube” (since when is writing books and making arguments comparable to mass murder?)…Jeffries is quite right to point out that these days secularists seem exasperated. But who can blame us when the case against unaccountable and undemocratic religious privilege is so misrepresented by articles like his?

Well exactly. If people like him didn’t keep saying silly things like that, people like us would be better-tempered and sweeter and would stop blowing up tubes and buses, or rather not so much blowing them up as, well, not blowing them up. We wouldn’t stop not blowing them up – we’d – oh never mind.

David Thompson also comments.

What we’re hearing instead, and hearing very often, are statements like another quoted in Jeffries’ article, by Oxford theologian Alister McGrath: “We need to treat those who disagree with us with intellectual respect, rather than dismissing them – as Dawkins does – as liars, knaves and charlatans.” This rather presupposes that intellectual respect could in all fairness be assigned to a person who presents no credible argument to support grandiose claims regarding the origin and nature of existence, and the alleged preferences of a hypothetical deity on whose behalf he affects to speak. Well, if you want to avoid being viewed as a knave or a pompous little fraud, it helps to have the goods to back up your claims.

And it’s just asking too much to demand that we treat all those who disagree with us with intellectual respect. What if they’re not intellectually respectable? Civility is one thing, but intellectual respect is another.

David cites that comment by Colin Slee too – I daresay everyone who discussed that article cited that comment. It certainly did stand out! So much so that it caused me to lapse into a rare but sincere fantasy about violence.

Ben at Religion is Bullshit has a splendid comment. Stuart Jeffries is probably feeling pretty silly by now! One can hope so anyway.

Stephen Law has posts about the ever-popular ‘atheism is faith’ trope here and here. He also has ones on cultural relativism here and several other places – I don’t have the strength to link to all of them: you should just go explore the whole blog.

In sharp contrast to Our Terry, here’s a nice thing – a former MP (Labour) for Reading East who is reading Why Truth Matters and thinks it’s worth reading.

If you go to the Butterflies and Wheels site, you will find a fascinating thread prompted by a piece by Nick Cohen in the Observer yesterday; the piece was largely about the jailed Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Suleiman, but also mentioned Chinese government attempts to police the internet – but as so often it is the comment thread which proves the more illuminating. It is a fact that hardly any bloggers posting in English have had anything to say about Kareem. It is a fact, for instance, that when I posted on this subject a few days ago there were no comments. Not one at the time of posting now. I can only suppose that is because nobody is interested – otherwise they’d comment, wouldn’t they?…I wonder though, and I hope this is not true, whether the silence on this subject is illustrative of a more general view, perhaps on the Guardian-reading so-called Left?

I’ll have to comment. But I did post several news links here, so I’m interested. But I wonder too about that more general view.

I went to the butterfliesandwheels site because I am reading a book by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom called “Why Truth Matters” . It’s worth reading, and is a challenge to a non-intellectual like me. It is about scepticism, relativism and doubt. If you want to give it a go Mr Amazon will come round on his bike and deliver it to you. It has made me look up all sorts of things I never did when I was in politics full time – like Manichaeism for instance…As far as I can understand Manichaeism as it is thought of today, it means to refer to the view that some things are just wrong. No relativism, no ifs or buts, just wrong. This is really the core of my own disillusion with the Guardian-reading tendency in British (more properly English) thought and society. Female genital mutilation, for instance, is wrong. Not culturally specific, wrong. Women often have it done to them by their own grandmothers. That doesn’t make it right.

Yep. You betcha. That’s why we’re writing a book about that – all the wrongs that are done to women that are just wrong, and not any less wrong if their grandmothers do it to them. We’ll all join hands and fight back – Jane Griffiths and B&W readers and writers and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maryam Namazie and Marie-Therese O’Loughlin and Gina Khan; we’ll all resist. You’ll see.

Another reader is our friend Richard Dawkins (or perhaps Josh, but I assume Dawkins does at least some of the choosing). I have to admit I’ve kind of longed to see something from B&W there, so I’m chuffed about that. Laugh if you like.

Time to get out the trusty old grain of salt, and put it to good use. It’s to do with Terry Eagleton again.

In the preface to his latest book, The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton writes that his subject matter is fit only for the crazed and the comic, and hopes that he inclines more towards the latter. “I have tried to treat a high-minded topic as lightly and lucidly as possible,” he says. He has certainly managed the light bit…But comic? Or lucid? There are precious few gags on offer – unless you count passing references to Monty Python and Douglas Adams – and the prose is so dense in parts, you can re-read a passage several times and still be none the wiser. The words make sense on their own, but somehow, when combined, they rather lose their meaning. But then, literary and cultural theorists tend to have different benchmarks of levity and clarity from the rest of us. As Britain’s answer to Derrida, Althusser and Deleuze, Eagleton has standards to maintain, and he doesn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered at the suggestion that – so it often appears to the rest of us – theorists are wilfully esoteric and exist only to talk to other theorists. If it’s difficult, it’s difficult, and it’s not the job of the theorist to make things overly accessible; it’s the reader’s job to put in the intellectual legwork to meet the writer on his or her own turf.

No. No no no no. All wrong. It’s not that it’s ‘difficult,’ it’s that it’s pointlessly difficult. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s that it’s difficult way out of proportion to its merit or interest or significance, and that it’s difficult on purpose for the sake of being difficult, as opposed to unavoidably as a result of the nature of the subject matter. Got that? Terry Eagelton doesn’t write about anything that needs to be made incomprehensible, therefore he ought not to do so.