Author: Ophelia Benson

The Vicar of Putney is sounding off again.

But what resources of self-criticism has atheism developed? Little, it seems. Rarely is a critical lens directed inwards. Once the campaigning atheist has seen the light, they remain on-message, keen to convert all unbelievers. Last week, as Maryam Namazie picked up her award for Secularist of the Year, she proposed “an uncompromising and shamelessly aggressive demand for secularism. Today, more than ever, we are in need of the complete de-religionisation of society.”

What’s his point? What does he mean? What does he think he means? He doesn’t say, he just gives another example of what he takes to be self-evident atheist non-self-criticism. Well, that’s stupid. The fact that a given atheist is a strong advocate for atheism doesn’t (at all, remotely, by any stretch even of the twisted vicarious imagination) mean that she is not self-critical. What an absurd conclusion to draw. Behold. One can be a strong advocate of atheism and be very cautious, skeptical, uncertain, tentative, gradualist about every other subject under the sun. Furthermore, one can be a strong advocate of atheism and be scrupulously, even obsessively self-critical, self-deprecating, self-mocking, self-correcting. The two are independent.

What he probably means is something like ‘atheism doesn’t consider what’s wrong with atheism enough.’ But too bad – that’s not what he said, so he doesn’t get any points for it.

Part of the problem is that many born-again atheists remain trapped in a 19th-century time warp, reheating the standard refutations of religious belief based on a form of rationalism that harks back to an era of fob-watches and long sideburns. One Oxford don has called the website of the National Secular Society a “museum of modernity, untroubled by the awkward rise of postmodernity”. Ignoring the fact that at least three generations of thought have challenged an uncritical faith in rationality, the society continues to build its temples to reason, deaf to claims that it is building on sand.

Attababy, Vic! You tell ’em! You tell those pesky old-fashioned boring dreary old hat modernists how yawn-inducing they are, how unhip, how deaf, how sandy. Above all tell them how bad it is to have ‘uncritical’ ‘faith’ (geddit? faith? he’s a vicar?) in rationality. You betcha. Let’s all have more uncritical faith in irrationality, and see how much better everything will be.

This commitment to Victorian philosophy turns to farce when campaigning secularists describe themselves as freethinkers. In truth, atheism is about as alternative as Rod Stewart. The joke is that many who were converted at university via Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene think of themselves as agents of some subversive counterculturalism. This is ridiculous to Da Vinci Code proportions. Contemporary atheism is mainstream stuff.

Grooooan. He’s arguing from fashion! He’s using the argument from hipness! He’s trying to make atheists feel silly and pathetic because we’re not ‘alternative’ enough. What an idiot. What (again) is his point? God-bothering is hipper than atheism therefore God exists? No? Well what then? God-bothering is hipper than atheism therefore we should believe in God despite the non-existence thing? Yes, apparently. Well why would that follow?

As religion returns to the geopolitical scene with frightening malevolence, secularists ought not to be handing out awards and congratulating themselves. They must first try to understand religious belief. That means dispensing with their own self-congratulatory piety: it’s the only route to an effective challenge.

That’s not funny, that’s just downright disgusting. He means Maryam. Yeah, right, that’s all Maryam does, is sit around congratulating herself – in between being imprisoned and fleeing Iran at the risk of her life, and working for women’s rights in Sudan and having to flee for her life from there, and working for women’s rights and secularism in the UK and being systematically ignored by a media that’s too busy fawning on Iqbal fucking Sacranie to phone her up for an opinion now and then, so the National Secular Society has the almightly gall to try to get her just a little more mainstream attention via this award – only for the Vicar of god damn Putney to come along and drivel about handing out awards and congratulating themselves. That pisses me off!

Sod off, Vicar of Putney. Go be Vicar of Morden for awhile – that would show you.

Back to Emptier I mean Fuller. From the morning session this time.

It is, in fact, very easy, as it were, for
things to fall out that, in a sense, the boundary
between science and non-science isn’t something one can
ever take for granted. It is actively being negotiated
at all times because there are all kinds of people who
are trying to make claims that what they’re doing is
scientific. Insofar as science is the most authoritative body
of knowledge in society. So in that respect, there’s a
kind of policing, you might say, and an occasional
negotiation of the boundary that takes place.

Yes, very true. There certainly are all kinds of people who
are trying to make claims that what they’re doing is
scientific. And there are also all kinds of people who amuse themselves by trying to create suspicions about the whole arrangement via words like ‘policing’ and ‘boundary’ and ‘authoritative’. (No doubt the next generation of Science Studies whizzers will be talking in terms of handcuffs and cells and torture and lethal injections. Why not.)

Q. Does the text Governance of Science speak to the
role of peer review in science?

A. Well, yes. And one of the things that it says is
that, while the scientific community is nominally
governed by a peer review process, as a matter of fact,
relatively few scientists ever participate in it. So if one were to look at the structure of
science from a sort of, you might say, political science
standpoint, and ask, well, what kind of regime governs
science, it wouldn’t be a democracy in the sense that
everyone has an equal say, or even that there are clear
representative bodies in terms of which the bulk of the
scientific community, as it were, could turn to and who
would then, in turn, be held accountable.
There is a tendency, in fact, for science to be
governed by a kind of, to put it bluntly, self-perpetuating elite.

Now what I want to know is, why would one want to look at the ‘structure’ of science from a political science standpoint? Is science supposed to be a form of politics? Is political science a relevant way to study the structure of science? It doesn’t seem very relevant to me – at least not in the usual sense of political science. I can certainly believe there is plenty of ‘political’ maneuvering and manipulation in science, as in any vocation, profession, workplace, group of people; and that that kind of thing is eminently worth looking at. But is that what’s meant by political science? I don’t think so. I think political science is about governance, and government. That’s a different subject. (So we have here another example of mission creep, and of changing the subject.) And that matters, because the reality is that science isn’t supposed to be ‘a democracy in the sense that everyone has an equal say’. For obvious reasons. Scientific results aren’t supposed to be reached by a vote; scientific questions aren’t supposed to be decided by majority rule. (Except on juries. Which can be a real problem…a problem which illustrates the problems with the basic idea.) Mistakes don’t turn into non-mistakes simply because a lot of people think they should.

What does ‘X works’ mean? What does it mean to say that something ‘works’? It means different things, which need to be sorted out, and it’s not ground-shifting to say so. It’s not ground-shifting to make necessary distinctions and to clarify definitions. It’s just not. It’s an essential requirement for critical thinking and for coherent discussion, not ground-shifting. Look at Steve Fuller’s testimony (which I will be doing more of later, if I can steal the time) for example after example of fuzzy language allowing someone to make absurd claims – absurd claims that could do their bit to sabotage the education of a lot of students. Fuzzy language does that kind of work all the time; it is far from a trivial issue; and it is not ground-shifting to make an issue of it. That’s why there is a new dictionary of euphemisms and obfuscations on B&W, only it’s invisible.

Alister McGrath likes the word – as theists and their admirers so often do. Theism ‘works,’ you see.

Hopelessly overstated arguments that once seemed so persuasive – such as “science disproves God” – have lost their credibility. Anyway, our culture’s criterion of acceptability is not “Is it right?” but “Does it work?” And the simple fact is that religious belief works for many, many people, giving direction, purpose and stability to their lives – witness the massive sales and impact of Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life. Atheism, already having failed to land the knockout punch by proving that God does not exist…

Hopelessly overstated arguments that no one but silly people made in the first place. Non-silly people don’t say ‘science disproves God’ so that’s a straw argument. Try to do better. But that’s a separate issue; the question here is about ‘works.’ ‘Our culture’s criterion of acceptability is not “Is it right?” but “Does it work?”’ Boy is that ever debatable, and boy does it depend on a lot of fuzzy words. Our? Culture? Acceptability? Right? And especially ‘work’?

McGrath does implicitly say what he means by the word – ‘it’ works in the sense of giving direction, purpose and stability to the lives of many many people. True. But the fact that theism (for theism is the it that McGrath has in mind) works in that sense does not mean that it is true. So if McGrath means ‘true’ when he says ‘right’ in that sentence, then he’s wrong – but no doubt that is exactly why he was careful to say ‘right’ instead of ‘true.’ That’s how fuzzy language does its work. That’s how it ‘works.’

Simon Blackburn tells a joke that also hinges on the word ‘works.’

It concerns a friend of mine, who was present at a high-powered ethics institute which had put on a forum in which representatives of the great religions held a panel. First the Buddhist talked of the ways to calm, the mastery of desire, the path of enlightenment, and the panellists all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. Then the Hindu talked of the cycles of suffering and birth and rebirth, the teachings of Krishna and the way to release, and they all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. And so on, until the Catholic priest talked of the message of Jesus Christ, the promise of salvation and the way to life eternal, and they all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. And he thumped the table and shouted: ‘No! It’s not a question of it if works for me! It’s the true word of the living God, and if you don’t believe it you’re all damned to Hell!’

And they all said: ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’.

Same thing, you see? It works for you. Great. It’s all bullshit, of course, but it works for you.

Okay, it works for you. It’s useful for you in some narrow sense – but that is not the same thing as saying it’s true.

It’s also not even the same thing as saying it’s right, but that’s another and large subject. Later.