Author: Ophelia Benson

I want to scribble a little more on all this about religion, and is the glass half full or half full of wormwood, and what’s so wrong with ‘faith’ – though I’m not sure I need to after G’s eloquent and incisive summation. I probably will anyway though, because I like trying to scrape down to the bottom of things. Besides, the discussion is prompting some brilliant replies, so why stop now.

But that will take me awhile, and in the meantime I want to point out some great stuff in a talk on academic freedom Michael Bérubé gave on Thursday and then posted on his site.

The principle of academic freedom stipulates that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties”; it expressly insists that professors should have autonomy from legislatures, trustees, alumni, parents, and ecclesiastical authorities with regard to their teaching and research. In this respect it is one of the legacies of the Enlightenment, which sought – successfully, in those nations most influenced by the Enlightenment – to free scientists and humanists from the dictates of church and state. And it is precisely that autonomy from legislative and religious oversight that helped to fuel the extraordinary scientific and intellectual efflorescence in the West over the past two centuries; it has also served as one of the cornerstones of the free and open society, in contrast to societies in which certain forms of research will not be pursued if they displease the General Secretary or the Council of Clerics.

Yep. Here we are right now, at this very moment, saying things that would displease the Council of Clerics and George ‘W’ Bush, and no one is stopping us. No small benefit.

…most critics of universities don’t seem to distinguish between unconscious liberal bias and conscious, articulate liberal convictions. They take the language of “bias” from critiques of the so-called liberal media, where it is applied to outlets like the New York Times and CBS News that, in the view of some conservatives, lend a leftish slant to the news both deliberately and unwittingly. But the language of “bias” is not very well suited to the work of, say, a researcher who has spent decades investigating American drug policy or conflicts in the Middle East and who has come to conclusions that amount to more or less “liberal” critiques of current policies. Such conclusions are not “bias”; rather, they are legitimate, well-founded beliefs, and of course they should be presented – ideally, along with legitimate competing beliefs – in college classrooms. Now, notice that I said legitimate competing beliefs. We have no obligation to debate whether the Holocaust happened. And that’s not a hypothetical matter. Late last fall, the philosopher with whom I co-founded the Penn State chapter of the AAUP, Claire Katz, informed me of a graduate teaching assistant in philosophy who had just had a very strange encounter with a student. The course, which dealt with bioethics, had recently dealt with the vile history of experiments on unwitting and/or unwilling human subjects, from the Holocaust to Tuskegee, and the student wanted to know whether the “other side” would be presented as well.

A very useful distinction, and a staggering anecdote. Oh yes, the ‘other side’ of the debate over whether or not to experiment on unwilling/unwitting humans. Or slavery, or genocide. (Interesting that torture is no longer on that list.)

Then Michael discusses accountability, and agrees that public universities should indeed be accountable for how they spend money, for instance. But –

But that does not mean that legislators and taxpayers have the right, or the ability, to determine the direction of academic fields of research. And I say this with all due respect to my fellow citizens: you have every right to know that your money is not being wasted. But you do not have the right to suggest that the biology department should make room for promoters of Intelligent Design; or that the astronomy department should take stock of the fact that many people believe more in astrology than in cosmology; or that the history department should concentrate more on great leaders and less on broad social movements; or that the philosophy department should put more emphasis on deontological rather than on utilitarian conceptions of the social contract. The people who teach these subjects in public universities actually do have expertise in their fields, an expertise they have accumulated throughout their lives. And this is why we believe that decisions about academic affairs should be conducted by means of peer review rather than by plebescite. It’s a difficult contradiction to grasp: on the one hand, professors at public universities should be accountable and accessible to the public; but on the other hand, they should determine the intellectual direction of their fields without regard to public opinion or political fashion. This is precisely why academic freedom is so invaluable: it creates and sustains educational institutions that are independent of demographic variables. Which is to say: from Maine to California, the content of a public university education should not depend on whether 60 percent of the population doubts evolution or whether 40 percent of the population of a state believes in angels – and, more to the point, the content of a university education should be independent of whatever political party is in power at any one moment in history.

That last passage is something of a manifesto all on its own, and a dang good one.

I’m interested in this habit of theists and – what to call them – fellow-travelers of theists. People who aren’t theists themselves, but get all riled up at ‘materialist’ positivist etc etc etc arguments, and pitch fits about them. (Not Norm, of course! This is a different subject entirely.) The habit they have is to resort to a certain kind of moral outrage, and while doing that, to distort quite thoroughly what the posito-materialists say.

The certain kind of moral outrage in question is to say (in one way or another) ‘Are you calling me stupid?’

The thought seems to go like this (I say seems because they always leave out a lot of steps, so trying to figure out how they get from where we start to where they end up is part of the subject here): X is saying there is no good reason to believe God exists. X seems to think this is true. I think this is not true. Therefore, X thinks I’m stupid. Many other people also think this is not true. Therefore, X thinks they are all stupid. Therefore, X thinks she is better than everyone else. Therefore, X is arrogant, and trying to tell everyone what to do, and will prevent theist philosophers from getting job interviews.’

Now, the problem with this, as I see it, is that it often happens in the course of discussion, that one person will think one thing and another will think something else. X will think something is true, and Y will think it is not. Is the right move then for them to accuse each other of superiority and arrogance and trying to tell everyone what to do? Sometimes, no doubt; sometimes that is just the ticket, and ends the evening on gales of friendly laughter; but always? I would have thought no.

To put it another way, it ought to be possible, among grownups, to argue for an opinion without being told, simply because one has argued for it, that one is therefore judging everyone who doesn’t agree to be one’s intellectual inferior. Why do I think that ought to be possible? Because if it’s not, all discussion that is not of the most anodyne kind will grind to a halt, and we’ll all fall over and die of boredom. Or else the people who make this argument will be revealed as self-pitying passive-aggressive whiny bedwetters, and they will wish they had left well enough alone. That would be quite a good outcome, actually. I’ll give you an example from comments here, because I found it quite striking and exemplary [I’ll put the missing spaces in, because it’s so annoying to read without them]:

It seems to me that the tenor of Ophelia’s argument which centres on the truth about religion, intellectually arrived at, and therefore necessarily exposing the falsehood of religious belief, implies that in the future a would-be candidate for a professorship in philosophy whose writings argue strongly against OB’s views, would on that basis alone, judged to be the intellectual inferior of someone holding OB’s views.

See – the trouble with that is that it just boils down to saying X shouldn’t try to figure out the truth about religion, intellectually, and expose the [possible] falsehood of religious belief, because – that implies that in the future anyone who writes the opposite would be judged (by whom? when? how?) X’s intellectual inferior. I think the ludicrousness of that is obvious enough that I won’t bother to elaborate on it.

But it’s interesting, because symptomatic. That is of course what the O’Reilly-Limbaugh crowd (and the Pat Robertson crowd, and the similar crowds) are doing when they bark and gibber about elitists sneering at people of faith. It’s a moral blackmail move, and unfortunately, it works all too well. So it’s worth being presented with a particularly blunt and blatant example of it, so that we can see what it amounts to.

Now to ponder Norm’s answer, or parts of it.

But I fear that she’s lost sight of what this discussion is about. It’s not about whether we accept religion, nor even about whether we give it an all-round good report, in which the positive aspects outweigh the negative ones…The issue was about seeing only the bad in religion as opposed to taking a more balanced view. To justify the former approach Ophelia needs the ‘Hegelian’, contaminating move – and I suggest that that is why you find it in her original post, even though it wasn’t her intention. For if you stick with what she intended, then all you’ve got is that for her the bad in religion is more important than the good, overshadows it, and therefore is too high a price to pay. Nonetheless the good is still there, and it can be identified as such and given its due, with everything said that needs to be said about the other darker side. But you have no basis, now, for just leaving out the good aspects as if they were nothing.

I’m still not convinced that the Hegelian, contaminating move is what I need – unless I misunderstand what the Hegelian, contaminating move is, which is quite possible, since my understanding of Hegel is exiguous. But as far as I do understand, contamination isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact that if a particular good of religion depends on a supernatural truth-claim (as, for instance, surely the consolation of religion does), then it is not contaminated but weak, vulnerable, fragile. It still functions as a good in some sense, but at the price of being deluded. Now…there is something to be said for being deluded. (I wrestled with this during the writing of that pesky book. In fact the first thing the book says is that we don’t always want the truth.) But even though there is something to be said for it, it is still being deluded. I take being in a state of delusion to be a high price. Possibly worth it, in some circumstances, but still high. If that boils down to a ‘contamination’ argument – then okay, that’s what I’m arguing.

But that, surely, is how an analogy works. I’m inviting people to think about how we manage to distinguish good and bad in other matters without allowing the bad simply to ‘disappear’ the good.

Yes…But we distinguish good and bad in other matters in different ways for different kinds of good and bad, don’t we? I do, anyway! Bad food is one kind, bad movies are another, bad health is another, bad people are another, bad ideas are another, bad institutions are another. Socrates would probably whack me over the head at this point, but I don’t seem to be able to extract some sort of abstract non-particular essence of good and bad and talk about it indpendent of the kind of thing we’re talking about. I do think a bad person is one kind of thing, and – whatever religion is, is another. Just for one thing, a person has intentionality, so in talking about the good and bad of one person we have to think about how the person herself sorts out good and bad. As Tom Freeman said in comments – consider the patriot who does good things, but does them for white supremacist reasons. Is that a good person? Highly debatable! Or Norm’s Joe. If Joe’s ‘ferocious temper’ causes him to beat up women on a regular basis, do we think he’s a good person all the same? I don’t. I can agree he does good things, but that he’s a good person? No. (I know, I know, determinism – never mind that now!) But religion doesn’t have intentionality. That by itself makes it difficult for me to think about the good and bad of religion in the same kind of way I think about the good and bad of a person. So even if that is how an analogy is supposed to work, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t! That is, it doesn’t seem to help me think about how we manage to distinguish good and bad in other matters.

Finally, in reply to my story of the Polish Catholic who risked her life to save a Jew in danger, Ophelia questions whether the religious belief was a necessary condition of rescue: couldn’t the woman have done the same just through being a good or courageous person, or from a different set of beliefs?…Ophelia ends here by questioning the efficacy of religious belief in moving people to act in heroic ways on behalf of others – and she is now joined in that by some commenters in her comments box. Not only does it fly in the face of evidence collected about the motivations of actual rescuers, and not only does it contradict more general historical evidence about the motivating power of religious belief; there is, as well, a certain (prejudicial) selectivity in only recognizing the power of religious belief to influence people when you perceive that influence to be harmful, but where on the face of things it appears to be for the good, denying that it is what it seems. Isn’t this exactly the sort of fast and loose way with evidence that rationalist atheists criticize in people of faith? There is an air of complete unreality about the notion that religion has never motivated anyone towards the good.

I didn’t intend to question that efficacy in general, but only in particular. I wasn’t making a flat denial that that was what motivated the Polish Catholic, but only asking how one would know. I do think religion can motivate people to be good in general, and I’ve said that in other N&Cs. Still, Norm may have a point. It may be that I do think of religion as more powerful in inspiring domination, anger, hatred, vindictiveness, exclusion, punishment, than in inspiring the opposites – and he may be right that that’s prejudicial selectivity. I’ll have to think about that. (Not that I never have before. But I’ll have to think harder.) I suppose the truth is that I suspect it does. Because of – the evidence of human history; the numbers; the world around us at present. The prevalence of religion compared to the rarity of kindness and good governance. The searching thoroughness of certain kinds of religious sadism and cruelty. I suppose it’s the same with the Polish Catholic. If it really was her religion that made her do what she did, why were there so few people like her and so many people unlike her?

I want to answer Norm’s answer – but later. I have – all these things to do, and more keep coming in. Meanwhile I’ve been wanting to say a few acid words about that ridiculous Deborah Solomon interview with Daniel Dennett.

She starts the stupidity with the very first question. (And that’s the kind of thing that always makes me marvel at the way the Times [NY version] is always calmly informing us that it is the best newspaper in the world – that dopy mediocrity. Why have someone interview Dennett who will ask such silly, ill-informed questions? What is the point of it? Why not do better? Because it would be ‘elitist’ to get someone with a clue to ask the questions? But then – if you’re taking that route, then you don’t get to call yourself the best newspaper in the world, do you. You can’t do both.)

How could you, as a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, write a book that promotes the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology? Why would you hold a scientist’s microscope to something as intangible as belief?

Look at all that – what a train wreck. His book ‘promotes the idea’ as opposed to arguing; it’s religious ‘devotion’ that he’s talking about (she should have called it devout religious devotion, just to make sure); she expresses bovine incredulity at the idea that something ‘intangible’ could be a function of biology. Best newspaper in the world.

But your new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, is not about cathedrals. It’s about religious belief, which cannot be dissected in a lab as if it were a disease.

And not only can it not be dissected, it cannot be considered rationally or investigated at all. Nor can depression, or schizophrenia, or memory, or perception, or attention, or language – and bang goes a century of research.

Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.

Yes. And if we knew for sure that anything existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in it. Therefore what? We should believe in anything and everything? Couldn’t you have done better than that?

No, obviously she couldn’t. Dennett is polite – which is heroic of him.

That strikes me as a very reductive and uninteresting approach to religious feeling.

Does it! Compared to all the fascinating, rich questions you’ve been asking! Best newspaper in the world.

Traditionally, evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould insisted on keeping a separation between hard science and less knowable realms like religion.

What does she think she’s talking about? ‘Traditionally’? Nonsense! Gould made that argument a few years ago, but what’s traditionally got to do with it? And why does she generalize from that to ‘evolutionary biologists like’ Gould? She just means Gould, so that’s what she should have said. And, as Dennett hints (tactfully), she has the widespread idea that Gould was some sort of president of the biologists, but that’s a mistake.

So that’s the world’s best newspaper – assigning a clueless hack to ask questions on a substantive subject. What on earth is the point? Why not either do it right or refrain from doing it at all?