Author: Ophelia Benson

The New Statesman provides a partial antidote.

One ally, Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association, is dismissive of the vogue for New Age thinking and the popularity of vaguely “spiritual” schools…Copson’s association has about 6,000 members, but it claims as kindred spirits, at the least, the many people of no religion who do not specifically identify themselves as humanists. These people need a voice, he argues, because of the continuing prevalence of the notion that religions have a superior morality. “Charles Clarke [the Home Secretary] gave a speech the other day saying that faith gives people values,” Copson says. “There’s an attempt to use faith as an instrument of cohesion. But other people are not valueless.” The philosopher A C Grayling, a supporter of the BHA, calls for “absolute clarity” in this area. “Very non-rigorous, very confused ideas [about belief] are a source of potential danger,” he says.

Exactly. There is indeed an attempt to use ‘faith’ or rather religion and religious belief as instruments of cohesion, and the attempt is riddled with very non-rigorous, confused ideas. For instance there is the obvious problem that ‘faith’ works against cohesion precisely to the extent that it works for it – it creates cohesion in one group and the opposite of cohesion between groups – in other words it creates sectarian hostility that might not be there if there weren’t so much insistence on cohesion of ‘faith communities’. For another instance there is the question whether it is either sensible or fair to attempt to create cohesion via fictions portrayed as truths.

The charge levelled at the New Godless is that, with their rigorous reasoning, testing and experimentation, they are making a religion out of the scientific method. “It’s an all-purpose, wild-card smear,” retorts Dennett. “It’s the last refuge of the sceptic. When someone puts forward a scientific theory that they really don’t like, they just try to discredit it as ‘scientism’. But when it comes to facts, and explanations of facts, science is the only game in town.”

Bishop of Oxford, please note. All other journalists who have used the word ‘scientism’ in the past week, please note.

Tested facts are the real ammunition of the New Godless…Raising unfounded doubts about those, says Copson, is “a failure to reason properly. The worst thing you can hear is, ‘Well, it’s my truth.’” Richard Dawkins, naturally, has little time for such viewpoints. “There’s this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out,” he says.

My, what a scientistic thing to say. Shocking.

Yet more kack; the rabbi hands the kack-distribution duty over to a bishop.

There is a paradox about the current bout of media atheism.

Oh yes, the current bout of media atheism. How about the ongoing drip drip drip of media theism? Is there a paradox about that? In the fact that it keeps saying the same few untrue things over and over and over again, never fazed by voices whispering of bad arguments and troops of strawmen, and never able to find anything new to say?

The idea that faith and reason are inherently opposed to one another is a mantra that is mind-boggling in its lack of historical perspective. The fact is that all philosophers, ancient and modern, have believed that reasons can be adduced for and against a religious view of life. Most of them have, in fact, believed in God but all have thought religious belief a matter of rational argument.

Nonsense. Tricksy wording. Sure, all philosophers have believed ‘reasons can be adduced for and against a religious view of life’ – that’s easy! Sure, reasons can be adduced for and against anything; it doesn’t follow that the reasons adduced are good reasons, or that all philosophers think they’re good reasons. And if it is still true (which I doubt, and which I strongly doubt that the bish has any evidence for) that most philosophers have believed in god in the past, much of that is, obviously, because they lacked evidence for alternative explanations. And as for all thinking religious belief is a matter of rational argument, same as the first point – of course they do, but that’s not the same thing as thinking religious believers have good rational arguments. Don’t be tricksy, bish. It ain’t Christian.

However, religious belief is a matter of considered judgment. It involves our aesthetic sense, our moral judgment, our imagination and our intuition. In this respect, it is not totally different from making a judgment, for example, that Beckett is a great playwright, the war against Iraq was wrong or the sheer existence of the universe is awesome.

Yes it is. Unless you are simply defining religious belief as a value judgment, but since that is not what most people mean by religious belief, that’s mere tricksiness. It’s that bait-and-switch tactic we’ve noted so often – talk about religion as a vague feeling or attitude to the universe when talking to atheists and a broad general public, and talk about it as theism the rest of the time. That’s cheating. Don’t cheat, bish. It ain’t Christian.

The danger of this simplistic understanding of the relationship between science and religion is now fully exposed by the way American creationists are using Dawkins and Dennett. Indeed, the leader of the American creationists has apparently written to Dawkins to say that they daily thank God for him.

Sigh. Apparently the bish missed Dennett’s piece in the Guardian commenting on that leader of the creationists thanking god story:

I find it amusing that two Brits – Madeleine Bunting and Michael Ruse – have fallen for a version of one of the most famous scams in American folklore. When Brer Rabbit gets caught by the fox, he pleads with him: “Oh, please, please, Brer Fox, whatever you do, don’t throw me in that awful briar patch!” – where he ends up safe and sound after the fox does just that. When the American propagandist William Dembski writes tauntingly to Richard Dawkins, telling him to keep up the good work on behalf of intelligent design, Bunting and Ruse fall for it!

Hello, bish? You missed the point? (I thought it was Americans who don’t do irony.)

Dawkins argues that evolution inevitably implies atheism.

No he does not. How many patient corrections of that stupid error have I seen in the past few months? I don’t know, but it’s more than a few. But obstinate blinkered tiresome woolly-minded bishops and rabbis and vicars and their fellow-travelers keep trotting it out every five minutes just the same. And then they expect us to take them seriously and think they are rational and have good arguments! No can do, bish. If you will insist on all this tricksiness of wording and recyclement of ancient misquotations, I’m not about to give you the accolade of being a rational arguer, or a scrupulous one, either.

This Easter, as usual, the Christian church will proclaim its central theme that, in Jesus, God shares our human anguish to the full and, through the resurrection, gives us hope that in the end all evil, including death, will be left behind.

So God shares our human anguish by causing his son to be tortured to death. Inspiring.

Have another serving of kack, this time from good old Rabbi Michael Lerner, he of Tikkun.

In my research on the psychodynamics of American society I discovered that the left’s hostility to religion is one of the main reasons people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off. So it becomes important to ask why.

So it becomes important to ask why, but it does not become important to ask why without at the same time carefully limiting the ways in which one asks why, and ruling out in advance the most obvious answer. It becomes important to ask why by suggesting irrelevant answers and ignoring the relevant ones. It becomes important to pretend to ask why, to ask why in a rhetorical, play-bashful way that avoids anything that might make rabbis fretful or worried.

I’ll tell you why I’m hostile to religion (since that is the ‘why’ Lerner is asking, though the way he wrote that sentence makes it look as if he’s asking why people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off) before I bother engaging with Lerner’s cautious pseudo-answers. I’m hostile to religion because I think it makes a lot of truth-claims that are false, without ever being particularly apologetic or hesitant or tentative about it, and I get hostile when people expect me (and everyone) to believe truth-claims that there is no good reason to believe. That’s why. I experience that expectation as a kind of mental tyranny, or attempted mental tyranny, and it repels me like a force field.

But Lerner doesn’t offer that as an explanation. He offers three others, instead, and then leaves it at that.

One reason is that conservatives have historically used religion to justify oppressive social systems and political regimes…Another reason is that many of the most rigidly antireligious folk on the left are themselves refugees from repressive religious communities…Yet a third possible reason is that some on the left have never seen a religious community that embodies progressive values.

And that’s it. Next paragraph, he draws conclusions from this exhaustive analysis:

So I am led to the conclusion that the main reason that underlies the left’s deep skepticism about religion is its members’ strong faith in a different kind of belief system…The left is captivated by a belief that has been called scientism…Science, however, is not the same as scientism – the belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured. As a religious person, I don’t rely on science to tell me what is right and wrong or what love means or why my life is important. I understand that such questions cannot be answered through empirical observations. Claims about God, ethics, beauty and any other face of human experience that is not subject to empirical verification – all these spiritual dimensions of life – are dismissed by the scientistic worldview as inherently unknowable and hence meaningless.

Sigh. Familiar stuff. Familiar, dreary, feeble stuff. Philip Blond-Dylan Evans territory. What does he mean by ‘the only things that are real or can be known’, for one thing? He probably means something more like testable or reproducible, but that would narrow the definition drastically and make it much too clear that that’s a reasonable, even perhaps tautological, thing to believe, so he has to re-phrase it into something much broader, which merely happens to be something that hardly anyone believes. And then he performs the same trick with ‘unknowable and hence meaningless’. Nonsense. He says the left’s ‘members’ (all of them, apparently – he didn’t qualify the claim with ‘some of’ or ‘many of’) have a strong faith in scientism, then he says that scientism dismisses love, ethics and beauty as unknowable and hence meaningless – so he’s claiming that the left in its entirety scientistically dismisses love, ethics and beauty as unknowable and hence meaningless. That’s a ridiculous, sweeping, wild claim, lightly disguised with the usual hand-waving about meaning and what science can and can’t tell us. It’s absolutely typical of that kind of woolly-but-bossy religious fluff-talk, and I say it’s kack. I can’t measure its kackiness, I can’t empirically observe it, I can’t pick it up and throw it around the room, I can’t put it in a petri dish or feed it to the cat, but I say it’s kack just the same. Therefore, I am a devout theist. QED.