Author: Ophelia Benson

There’s an intense discussion going on at Panda’s Thumb, on a thread of PZ’s that links to the comments by Dawkins and Dennett here – and now a new comment by Paul Kurtz. It’s that ‘should we shut up about religion or not?’ question. No we certainly should not, is my view, you will be calmly unamazed to hear. I tried to say it there only to be told I wasn’t allowed to comment. Because – what? I’ve been banned? I don’t think so, I think it must be a kink of some sort. Anyway I thought I wouldn’t waste my comment, so I’ll put it here. (At least I’m allowed to, here. It’s my Monopoly game and I can put ten hotels on Boardwalk if I want to.)

Well, another way of adding up the score is to point out how much deference to religion and religious beliefs there has been in US public discourse in the past few decades, and then noticing where that has gotten us. The expression ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a mile’ leaps to mind. The more atheists and rationalists and defenders of the Enlightenment defer and bow and keep silent about religion, the more aggressive and truculent and self-pitying religious believers seem to get. Why is that? Could it be, say, a sense of entitlement? If so, could it be time to give up on that approach and get real?

That seems to me to be how it is. We’re always hearing that forthright atheism will frighten a lot of people off, and maybe it will, but what has the opposite done? It seems to me it’s given a hell of a lot of people the idea that there is just no such thing as enough respect for and deference to ‘faith’. If no deference is ever enough (short of actual conversion and joining the godpesterers, and I won’t do it, I won’t I won’t I won’t) then why not give it up and tell what we take to be the truth? At least that way, we get to tell the truth, instead of doing all this creepy smirking tiptoeing around and apologizing for not believing fairy tales.

So good luck to PZ. I’d stand shoulder to shoulder with you, but silly old PT won’t let me.

It’s time this kind of story got more attention than putative alienated [male] yoofs.

…a quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a generation that claims the same rights as its Western counterparts, without renouncing Islamic values. For many, the key difference is education, an option often denied their poor, immigrant mothers and grandmothers. These young women are studying law, medicine and anthropology…In the crowded immigrant suburbs ringing Paris, the scene of recent riots mostly led by young Muslim men, high school teachers say girls are the most motivated students because they have the most to gain.

Which is probably part of why they’re not the ones out setting fire to buses with people on them. Another part may be that many of the aggrieved yoofs setting the fires are the very people the studious girls want to escape.

In interviews in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, young women repeated this belief like a mantra: studying offers an escape from the oppressive housing projects, from controlling young Muslim radicals and from strict social codes enforced by fathers and brothers.

Escape from controlling male relatives, basically.

At the Islamic University of Rotterdam, a small group of theology students, most of them speaking Dutch but all tightly veiled, chatted after classes about the need to end the social segregation of men and women. “In class, we sit anywhere we choose,” said a student who gave her name only as Aisha. “In the mosques, we don’t want to sit in separate or hidden spaces.”

And maybe eventually they’ll also be able to escape that tight veiling – which is, of course, simply a portable social segregation of men and women, a portable separate and hidden space.

As educated Muslim women assert themselves, they appear to be forging a strand of Euro-Islam, a hybrid that attempts to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life in a secular, democratic Europe.

Best of all would be not to have to worry about reconciling the principles laid out in the Koran, but a hybrid Euro-Islam is much better than a non-hybrid.

Women are also often at the forefront of liberal tendencies among Muslims, publishing critiques and studies about the obstacles and abuses women face. In Germany, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer, and Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born sociologist, have recently published books that have been read widely on the oppression of Muslim girls by their own families…As Muslim women take advantage of democracy and civil liberties in Europe, the question remains whether the impact of an educated minority will be continually blunted by the arrival of often poorly educated young brides from North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East. And as Europe rethinks its faltering integration policies, the place of Muslim women is a new target of scrutiny. Critics, including immigrants themselves, argue that in the name of respecting other cultures, Europeans have allowed the oppression of Muslim women in their midst.

Just so. That ice floe is beginning to break up, but slowly.

There’s a stupid new meme kicking around. I saw it a few days ago – last week sometime, I think – in some newspaper ramble about poor persecuted religion. I nearly mentioned it then, but it was a small point, and I didn’t end up getting to it. But it needs to be stamped out – because it is so stupid and back to front and deceitful. And typical in that. It’s one of the favourite tactics of religious whiners, turning things upside down so that they get to accuse rationalists of the faults and flaws and feeblenesses that really belong to religionists. Like the deadeningly familiar ‘[insert non-religious idea here] is just another religion’ ploy. The new one turns up in yesterday’s Letters to the Times. A police chaplain, Reverend Bob Green (there’s something risible in that – Reverend Bob – thoughts of Blackadder are hard to suppress), is the whiner this time.

While only 10 per cent attend church in the UK, 70 per cent consider themselves Christians, according to the 2001 census. It could be said that the former are spiritual Christians and the latter cultural Christians, but both categories, I hope, would want to confront the secularists’ agenda of dumbing down faith in whatever shape or form it manifests itself.

There it is. The idea that criticism of and resistance to ‘faith’ is an agenda of ‘dumbing down’. Okay – how do you ‘dumb down’ ‘faith’? That’s a serious question. It seems to me to be a complete, brazen oxymoron. ‘Faith’ is already dumbed down, of its nature. ‘Faith’ – in the sense meant here, in the sense the Rev is using, which is a euphemism for religion – is simply another word for dumbing down – for believing something in the absence of good evidence. Now…that’s not always a bad thing, as the fans of both ‘faith’ and religion love to point out. Having faith in people, for instance, even in the absence of good evidence that the people deserve it, can be a very good thing, sometimes the best thing. (Other times not. It all depends.) Having faith in people in general, in the world, in the future, in hope, in progress, and the like, all can be good things (or not – it depends). But in the particular sense in which the Rev means it, it entails belief in the truth-claims of religion in the absence of good evidence. Those truth-claims are mostly quite preposterous – Jesus didn’t really die, he was resurrected, he is God and also God’s son, God is omnipotent and omniscient and benevolent – you know the preposterous bits I mean. So it is absurd, and deceptive, and less than honest, to call the ‘secularists’ agenda’ ‘dumbing down’. Down from where? Where is there to go down from? What is the lofty point of intellectual mountaineering that ‘faith’ has established and secularists want to descend from? What can Rev Bob possibly mean by ‘dumbing down’? Anything? Anything at all? Even so much as a shred of anything? I have to wonder.

Well, there was a surprise. I opened the mailbox this afternoon and what was sitting on top but the Continuum catalogue. Continuum Philosophy 2006, it says. Ooooh, thought I, all excited. Jeremy mentioned a few weeks ago that he’d got one in the post, but I thought I wasn’t going to get one. But now here it was. I was excited because JS told me our book was featured. I liked that idea.

So, after a suitable interval, after doing various things and going up and down various flights of stairs and getting everything just so, I found a pair of scissors under a pile of books and papers (piles of books and papers are a permanent feature around here, like Norway and the fjords) and cut open the plastic wrapping and pulled out the catalogue. Then I turned to the first page, then I turned to the next page (page 3, that is), and that page is called ‘Highlights,’ and there, you’ll be startled to hear, is Why Truth Matters. Right there, on the page called Highlights. Page 3. Not page 64, which has the Works of George Berkeley, but page 3. Fancy. Then I turned to page 5, where the book also is, along with a couple of books by JS and Julian. Then I felt pleased. Then I went back to page 1 and read the ‘Dear Reader’ thing from the editor – and found that she mentioned the book there too. It and another book ‘explore controversial topics in a way that will inspire and stimulate.’ Oh, does it? I thought. How nice. Then I closed the catalogue – and blinked. I hadn’t noticed before, and JS hadn’t mentioned it so perhaps he never did notice, but the picture on the front of the catalogue is from the cover of our book, and not anyone else’s. No title or names, but it’s our cover art. It’s a very beautiful picture, too. They sent it for approval months ago, and we both liked it a lot. It looks lovely on the cover of the catalogue.

Oh, I’ve just noticed – it’s on the inside back cover, too – the book is. God, it’s everywhere. Very good, that. Especially with such a beautiful cover. Yes I know you can’t judge by that, but I always do anyway.

I suppose the people at Continuum must think it’s not too horrendously bad, if they’ve done all this featuring. That’s surprising, isn’t it. But there it is.

And another thing. That idea that Dennett mentioned in the Spiegel interview.

…the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.

That’s the idea that ‘Intelligent Design’ is all about, of course. The argument from incredulity – we just can’t believe that something as complex as a cell could have turned up without being designed. The argument from nonexplanation – natural selection just can’t explain how something as complex as a cell, and birds and flowers and humans, could have turned up without being designed. But what’s odd about that, along with the regress problem, is the way it goes backwards. It goes farther and farther and farther away from explanation, rather than getting closer and closer and closer to it. Which means surely that it’s not all that credible or explanatory itself – in fact it’s less so.

What needs explaining is all this apparent design. The human mind, cells, eyes, all that. Find a watch, must be a watchmaker, all that. Okay so what kind of designer would that be? Quite a proficient one. Right? Quite skilled. To design all this, it has to be quite a lot more skilled than anyone we’ve ever met or seen or heard of. And to be that much more skilled, it has to be quite a lot more complex. In fact – you could say that it’s simply incredible that it could be for instance made of the same basic constituent parts that we are made of, and yet be able to design us and everything else. It has to be so immensely skilled and complex that we can’t even really imagine its skill and complexity – we can only fling vague superlatives in its direction.

Well, okay, so you see the problem. If it’s that complex, then how do we explain it? We explain our complexity by pointing to it, and then we explain its complexity x [vast number of your choice] – how? If the problem is, if the source of incredulity is, that a complex thing needs explanation other than brute natural processes, then whatever made the complex thing that needs explaining, needs explaining a trillion or so times more than the complex thing at the first level. Oh dear. And the problem doesn’t stop there, because the next thing up will be more complex again, and so on with every level we go up. It’s not just a regress, it’s a regress that gets astronomically more insoluble with each step. If you need a big fancy smart thing to make this world, what kind of big fancy smart thing must you need to make that big fancy smart thing? Very big fancy smart indeed. So big fancy smart that you might as well give up, since otherwise the process just keeps on going forever, and makes no kind of sense. Of course we’re all at liberty to think that’s exactly how it is, if we want to – that there is an infinite series of infinitely big fancy smart things that have designed each other all the way down. But as for calling it an explanation – I don’t think so.