I’ve had occasion to notice it before, and I daresay I will again – some people just seem to be unable to disagree with, or even mention, a woman without breaking out the Special Insulting language. That’s especially noticeable when there are men being disagreed with or mentioned too, and they don’t get the Special Insulting language.

Look at Science and Religion Today.

Jerry Coyne is disappointed. Michael Shermer responds. Josh Rosenau jumps in, and sides, and calls. But I – I don’t do anything as quiet and reasonable as that. Well naturally not: I don’t have the balls.

It’s not as if the tone of what I say, or the part of it quoted there, is wildly different from the tone of the people who have the balls. But I’m the one who…

Well there you go. As Samuel Johnson said, if we wanted to listen to a woman talk we wouldn’t spend all our time talking to each other, now would we.

(It is seriously irritating though. It means that no matter what you do – no matter how carefully you write, no matter how much you know, no matter how clearly you think [and I’m not claiming any of that for myself – I’m just saying], to some people you will still be a stupid frantic over-emotional crazy female who can safely be belittled and sneered at because after all – she is just a woman.

It makes me tired.)

Libby Purves suggests that the Catholic church’s response to its own recent history has been due to its own perspective that the reporting (she quotes a reporter for the Boston Globe) “is fuelled by anti-Catholicism and shyster lawyers hustling to tap the deep pockets of the church.” And maybe it is, she says. But.

But such an attitude is not a dignified response to clamorous hysteria. It is self-protective, paranoid arrogance; the canker that threatens all religions and ideologies. We recognise it all too well from history, and from modern fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam. Once you are convinced that you alone hold the truth — whether your god is Amun-Ra or Marx — you slough off self-doubt and self-examination. You build rich hierarchies of obedience, surround them with impressive ritual and illogical rules, and then circle the wagons to protect your artificial structure.

And you do that so thoroughly and with such fervor that you can even manage to justify (to yourself) protecting perpetrators while threatening victims – even though the perps are grown men and the victims are children.

A bit more on Shermer, in a very level humble non-fundamentalist tone, because it’s not that I want to enforce orthodoxy with a big heavy stick, it’s that…I disagree with him about some things. I’m not trying to expel him into the outer darkness, I just disagree with him about some things. I’ll say what they are, because I feel like it.

[I]t seems to me that believers who accept Newton’s theory of gravity as the means by which God creates stars, planets, solar systems, galaxies, and universes, can just as readily accept Darwin’s theory of evolution as the means by which God creates life.

I said yesterday in comments but will say again – nuh uh. Even after we change ‘evolution’ to ‘natural selection’ and ‘life’ to ‘species,’ still nuh uh. Not just as readily at all, because natural selection is horrible. Gravity has its flaws too, as you’ll notice if you ever fall off a cliff, but compared to natural selection, it’s sweetness itself. Let’s don’t forget what natural selection is, shall we? It’s that thing that makes organisms compete with each other to see who can be first to eat the other. It’s not nice. It’s not kind. If it was all God’s idea, God has a nasty way of doing things. It’s just not true that it’s as easy for a theist to accept as gravity is. Shermer must know this; he must have written in a hurry; but if he did he did – the piece is still there, and it’s worth disagreeing with.

After the bit I disagreed with yesterday, about what ‘works’ in some undefined sense, he goes on to say

if it is your goal to educate everyone on earth to the power and wonders of science (as it is the Skeptics Society and www.skeptic.com) and to employ science to solve social, political, economic, medical and environmental problems (as it is my personal goal), then we need as many people as we can get on board toward a common goal, whatever it may be (starvation in Africa, disease in India, poverty in South America, global warming everywhere…pick your battle).

I didn’t notice it until later yesterday, after I’d already commented, but that’s an incredibly ambitious claim when combined with the rest of what he says. His claim is that we need as many people as we can get on board toward some common goal, any common goal, it doesn’t even matter what common goal it is – and in order to reach this highly questionable goal, we have to do the accommodationist thing. What that boils down to is that the real goal is simply to get as many people as we can on board toward whatever, and everything else is subordinate to that bizarre goal.

I don’t think he actually meant to say that – it’s too absurd. But he did say it, and I suspect that’s because that is what the accommodationist mindset does – it puts the frantic worry about alienating some number of people before everything else, until it finally finds itself exclaiming madly that we have to unite everyone, everyone I tell you! and that therefore no atheists can say anything that might be disconcerting to anyone. It’s nuts – but I think that’s what the thinking is. I think accommodationists are fundamentally allergic to a certain kind (and a certain kind only) of potentially ‘controversial’ ideas. I think their fretting about this ends up eroding their awareness that total agreement about anything is impossible, and that it’s futile to try to rule out disagreement ahead of time, and that the attempt is not only futile but the dire enemy of free thought and inquiry and speech.

Russell urged us to read Shermer’s essay in 50 Voices of Disbelief, so I did. I have to tell you, I have some disagreements there, too. I’m sorry! I’m a noodge! I can’t help it.

For example…he says on p 69

Most people equate ‘atheist’ not only with someone who believes that there is no God (which is technically not a tenable position because one cannot prove that there is no God; that is, you cannot prove a negative)…

Well that’s not right. It’s perfectly tenable to believe things that you cannot prove. It’s rash, and untenable if you like, to claim certainty about such things, but to believe them? Of course not. I believe that there is no invisible dragon sitting on my desk. Can I prove it? No. I believe it nevertheless. Shermer must have meant someone who ‘claims to know’ or ‘is certain’ – but he didn’t say that.

Another item, on the same page:

A second reason I don’t believe in God is emotional: I’m comfortable with not having answers to everything. By temperament, I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.

That jumped out at me because he had just finished telling us that he was a devout Christian as a teenager – far more devout than his nominally-religious parents. He goes into some detail about that, and the result is that the claim about his temperament sounds very odd. It sounds self-flattering and unconvincing.

I’m just saying – Shermer isn’t a terribly careful writer. I’ve thought this before, about both his belief books. So I’m not doing some anti-accommodationism bandwagon number by disagreeing with him; I just disagree with him about some things, that’s all.

50 Voices of Disbelief is terrific, by the way. Read Sean Carroll’s piece. Read Austin Dacey’s. Read Tom Clark’s. Read them all.

Oh I get it – some of them were never actually priests at all – they were guys who wanted to fuck children and figured out that being ‘a priest’ was a terrific dodge for doing just that – it shunted a big supply of trusting obedient children straight into your hands, and it made it very likely that you would be able to dodge prosecution, punishment, discovery, and even being fired. What a beautiful set-up! Tailor made!

Fr William Carney, a “crude and loutish” priest who “used bad language” and was then aged 29, had lunch with Michael Woods, the then health minister, in 1980. For three years Carney had been making inquiries about his chances of fostering children…Two years later Carney requested permission to foster a particular boy from an institution at the commencement of Ten Plus, a programme designed to encourage the fostering of children aged over 10. This boy subsequently alleged that Carney abused him. After his ordination as a priest of the Dublin diocese in 1974, Carney regularly sexually abused boys and girls. The Dublin Commission records complaints or suspicions about him relating to 32 named individuals and says there is evidence he preyed on many more.

Terrific, isn’t it? Carney was ‘ordained’ at age 23, and got right down to work. All went so swimmingly that six years later he was trying to foster children – with the encouragement of his bishop, who had ‘a soft spot’ for him.

Yet this church has the gall to tell the rest of us what to do.

Michael Shermer replies, or retorts, to Jerry Coyne.

What is the right way to respond to theists and/or theism? That is the question asked at every atheism/humanism conference I’ve attended the past several years. The answer is simple: there is no one “right way”. There are multiple ways, all of which work, depending on the context.

He expands on the point, but without bothering to say what he means by ‘works.’ It’s a rather silly way to put it, frankly, because one doesn’t always expect one’s responses to ‘work’ – one sometimes simply wants to say what is true to the best of one’s ability, not to do what ‘works.’ This is a big part of the issue between accommodationists and critics of accommodationism, and it’s one of the most irritating things about accommodationists that they almost never seem to get that. Accommodationists always talk about what works, what wins more allies, what is least likely to offend the moderates, and similar calculating issues. Critics of accommodationism on the other hand tend to dislike manipulative rhetoric and tactical evasion, and want to try to tell the truth instead of trying to shape a message for fragile listeners.

Shermer’s apparent unawareness of that disagreement leads him, predictably, into the usual strawman overstatement and sneering.

If you insist that people of faith renounce every last ounce of their beliefs before they are allowed to join the common fight against these scourges of humanity, then you have just alienated the vast majority of the world’s population from your project. To what end? So you can stand up tall and proud and proclaim “…but I never gave an inch to those faith heads!”? Well good for you! Just keep on playing “Nearer my Atheism to Thee” while the ship of humanity slips further into the depths of disaster.

We don’t insist that. That is a strawman. What we insist is that we shouldn’t be expected to say things that we do not think are true on the flimsy grounds that some observers think that not doing so will ‘alienate the vast majority of the world’s population from your project’ (and what if we don’t have a project apart from telling the truth as we see it?). There is a difference between insisting ‘that people of faith renounce every last ounce of their beliefs,’ and refusing to tailor everything we say to suit some vague idea of what will not threaten other people. There is a big, serious, important difference between those two things. It is irritating that accommodationists so often insist on framing the matter the first way. It is irritating and it does not increase our respect for their probity.

The rest of the quoted passage is of course just snotty jeering. That doesn’t do much for the respect for probity either.

I wondered as soon as I read or heard (I forget which) that the coma guy was communicating by typing with the help of his caregiver. Uh oh, I thought. No he isn’t. If he’s doing it with someone else’s ‘help,’ then he’s not doing it. This has been tested. It’s the clever Hans effect. The ‘helper’ or ‘facilitator’ does the typing.

James Randi had the same thought, and he saw some video which further gave the game away. He finds it all very irritating.

From the Frontline documentary:

NARRATOR: The facilitator and autistic individual sat side by side, with a screen dividing their visual field. Sometimes they were shown the same picture, sometimes different ones. They tested 12 clients facilitating with 9 staff members, many who were trained in Syracuse. They ran dozens of trials. The results were shocking.

Not one correct answer. Not one. It was Clever Hans.

Doesn’t the BBC ever want to puke on itself? Seriously. Doesn’t its gorge ever rise until it can’t stand it any more and it has to shout rude words in a hoarse voice and pour beer over its head and kick the table over? Doesn’t it ever get sick of talking babyish cant?

Secondary schools run by faith groups are better than non-religious schools at building community relations, research in England suggests. A study funded by the Church of England found faith schools were rated higher than others by Ofsted inspectors on what is called “community cohesion”. The church says its schools take all faiths seriously and look for common ground while respecting difference.

What is called by whom ‘community cohesion’? And what’s it supposed to mean? Cohesion of communities, or cohesion between communities? The first makes sense but is a decidedly mixed blessing, the second is ludicrously oxymoronic. Maybe it’s supposed to mean both, without any thought about either one, but just a brainless pious hope that we can all have everything: cohesion and commmunity and tolerance and everybody loves everybody else. Let’s train people to think they all belong to a particular ‘community,’ for preference a religious excuse me I mean ‘faith’ community, but that’s not absolutely required unless of course the people are Muslims in which case it is absolutely required; then when we’ve done that let’s train them to aim at cohesion, without ever quite explaining what we mean by that; then let’s send them all to ‘faith’ schools; then let’s urge them to look for common ground while respecting difference. Let’s give them mixed messages! Let’s make no sense at all and then look around with an air of pleased expectancy at the peaceable kingdom we have created!

The Reverend Janina Ainsworth, chief education officer for the Church of England, says schools with a religious foundation have a particular role “in modelling how faith and belief can be explored and expressed in ways that bring communities together, rather than driving them apart. In Church of England schools that means taking all faith seriously and placing a high premium on dialogue, seeking the common ground as well as understanding and respecting difference.”

Yes take all ‘faith’ seriously because of course it is crucial to take seriously all brands of evidence-free belief, and at the same time do the impossible by squaring common ground with difference. That’s the advantage of people who take faith seriously of course – they don’t have to notice troublesome difficulties of that kind, they can just have ‘faith’ that the impossible can be done. They can talk woolly fluffy feel-good mush, and be pleased with themselves afterwards.

Not surprisingly, Keith Porteous Wood is the one person quoted in the article who makes any sense, by pointing out the obvious –

“The very existence of minority faith schools is a major impediment to cohesion, especially where members tend also to be from ethnic and cultural minorities. Such schools tend to be mono-religious, mono-ethnic and mono-cultural, quite often of children from communities that are already separate from mainstream society.”

Yes but if everyone just keeps saying faith and cohesion and community over and over and over again, it will all work out in the end, surely.

Greta Christina puts it well.

Religion is a hypothesis about how the world works, and why it is the way it is. Religion is the hypothesis that the world is the way it is, at least in part, because of immaterial beings or forces that act on the material world.

It’s other things too, but the significant bit is this hypothesis of an immaterial world acting on the material one. ‘The hypothesis that there is a supernatural world, and that the natural world is the way it is because of the supernatural one.’

Quite so. And a hypothesis of that kind makes a difference to how people think and act, and it does have to be open to discussion and dispute. It should not must not cannot be walled off from discussion and dispute.

Another entry in the ledger where we keep track of the claim that ‘compassion is at the heart of every religion’.

The report into clerical abuse in Dublin archdiocese reveals the “reprehensible behaviour” of the Catholic hierarchy…The report finds the Catholic hierarchy and state authorities failed to respond to allegations of clerical child abuse made against a sample of 46 priests…”The Dublin archdiocese behaved in a manner that was absolutely reprehensible. Over the space of 20 years, they moved the problem on, looked after their own financial interests, looked after their priests and not the victims. The archdiocese is centre-stage. Once you read it, it jumps out at you,” a source said.

The Dublin archdiocese, then, protected its own people, who were all grown men, and by doing so perpetuated harm to children. Offhand, that does not sound conspicuously compassionate. The priests doubtless needed compassion, but first of all they needed to be stopped. They did not need compassion in the form of being allowed to go on abusing children, and the children certainly did not need compassion-for-priests in that form.

We still don’t know whether that police trainer was fired for his beliefs or what he did about them or indeed some other reason, such as getting a hard-on while being frisked during a training exercise. ‘”We welcome all races and religions,” a police spokesman said’ – somewhat idiotically, since beliefs aren’t inherently part of ‘races’ while they are inherently part of religions, and some beliefs could well be incompatible with being a good cop or cop trainer.

Assistant Chief Officer Julia Rogers said: “GMP notes and fully supports the judge’s ruling. This matter has never been about Mr Power’s beliefs and we vehemently deny any claim he was discriminated against on those or any other grounds. GMP welcomes all races and religions and employs and actively recruits people with diverse beliefs and from many different ethnic backgrounds.” In an earlier hearing, the employment tribunal said his psychic beliefs fell under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.

The not quite explicit assumption seems to be that all beliefs should be protected, in other words that no belief should ever be a reason to fire someone. But that’s crazy. Some beliefs are incompatible with some jobs – obviously. If UK law gives blanket employment immunity to all beliefs, then it’s creating a hornets’ nest.

Struck by a novel and original idea, our commentator decides to look up said Regulations – and finds that they do in fact include an exemption, where, for one, ‘being of a particular religion or belief is a genuine and determining occupational requirement.’ Look in Part II, under ‘Exception for genuine occupational requirement.’ So in fact an employer can fire an employee who has a belief that would interfere with doing the job properly. That would, surely, apply to a police trainer whose belief about psychic powers got out of his head and into his police training. So it’s all a fuss about nothing – unless, I suppose, all the employment tribunals are staffed by maniacs. Which is always possible, especially if their beliefs are protected under – oh never mind.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is having a hard time putting things together.

Among western elites – artistic, political, scientific, media – I notice more expressions of abhorrence of Islam and its diverse adherents than ever before…Influential anti-Muslim voices are no longer bothering with nuance. Douglas J Hagmann, director of the non-governmental Northeast Intelligence Network in the US writes: “The latest murderous rampage should be enough to illustrate that Islam is totally incompatible with freedom, democracy and the western culture.” I wonder how many of my British friends think exactly this…Radical Islamists peddle partial narratives about the Crusades, forgetting the Nato interventions to save Bosnian Muslims from genocide and the fact that millions of us would never leave the West where we have human rights we would not have in Muslim nations.

Okay stop right there. Stop there, and think about it. Alibhai-Brown should have, and she didn’t – she rushed on to make a different point, instead. She apparently didn’t even register what she’d said. If she had, she couldn’t have left the first part of the article as it was – she would have gone back and re-written it, or possibly abandoned it in despair. She needed to stop and think very hard about the implications of what she blurted out there: that ‘in Muslim nations’ she and everyone else would not have certain human rights. Well – why is that? Why is that the case? Why did even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown not say ‘in most Muslim nations’ much less ‘some Muslim nations’ much less ‘a few Muslim nations’? Why is it the case that ‘in Muslim nations’ in general, some human rights are not available? Is it not possible that that is because of something about Islam itself, which she doesn’t want to admit to? Because if it’s not something about Islam itself, it seems awfully surprising that it applies to ‘Muslim nations’ without qualification, and that even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown takes this for granted as a fact.

The horrible truth is that it is something about Islam itself that renders some human rights unavailable in places where Islam is entangled with the government, which is to say ‘in Muslim nations.’ Islam itself, as the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam makes so unpleasantly clear, does rule out certain rights, especially for certain people, such as women. This isn’t ‘extremist’ Islam, or terrorist Islam, or radical Islam, or any other minority or eccentric Islam, it’s just Islam. That fact could be different – it’s a contingent fact, as it is a contingent fact that some religions have learned to ignore the nastier parts of its holy books while others have not – but in the world as it is now, that fact is not different. Alibhai-Brown almost admitted that – but not quite. She clings to the idea of Islam’s ‘diverse adherents’ and fails to point out how much of the content of ‘Islam’ has to be ignored for that putative diversity to amount to anything.

John Denham really does talk the most rebarbative kack.

As communities secretary I am formally responsible for the government’s engagement with faith communities. Lacking some depth of knowledge I set about recruiting a panel of advisors (retained on an expenses-only basis) to advise me on relations with these communities.

And to encourage him to think in communalist terms and to use the word ‘community’ a minimum of six times whenever he opens his mouth, lest any foolish person somehow lose track of the fact that New Labour is obsessed with ‘communities’ to the point of insanity.

Outside of polemic is the real question of how a modern government should relate to the fact of faith. One view is that government should seek to marginalise faith as much as it can. The other, which I hold, is that something which is of immense importance to millions of people – the precise size of this minority or majority is not the real point – should not be lightly dismissed.

Note that – ‘the other’ – there are two and only two; there is one, and then there is the other. Bullshit, and coercive bullshit at that. It is not the case that the only alternative to thinking government should try ‘to marginalise faith as much as it can’ is thinking government should not ‘lightly dismiss’ anything ‘which is of immense importance to millions of people.’ That’s a false dichotomy, a bogusly limited choice, a stupidly narrow frame of reference, and a bullying piece of sentimentalism. It’s not a matter of what should or should not be ‘lightly dismissed,’ it’s a question of what the state should actively foster – particularly at the expense of alternatives, such as secularism, meaning neutrality among religions. Religion is important to lots of people, as Denham sagely points out, but he neglects to point out that freedom from religion, freedom of religion, separation of religion from government, is also important to lots of people. He simply plumps for the stupid retrograde intrusive notion that government should be sticking its nose into religion and shoving religion onto its balky citizens.

Over the past few weeks I’ve tried to set out a reasoned argument for government to take faith seriously. Firstly, the fact of faith for many of our citizens should be respected. Second, many issues which concern governments can not be tackled solely by regulation or spending. Governments and faiths share an interest in the values which lead people to act they way they do.

What does he mean ‘the fact of faith for many of our citizens should be respected’? That it should be acknowledged? But it already is, and that’s not a matter for government, and why should that fact be respected while the opposite fact is strenuously disrespected? That it should be respected in some substantive sense? If so, the hell with that. That it’s the governments job to go creeping around the landscape sucking up to various ‘communities’? That’s just absurd.

Campaigns for international development, peace, decent housing, living wages and many others have often been sustained by those of faith – not alone of course, but as key participants nonetheless. On these issues, and others including climate change and the values of our economy, faiths have views and values that deserve a hearing.

No they don’t. That’s flat-out nonsense. ‘Faiths’ have no views that are exclusively faithy that deserve a hearing – all they have are shared views that deserve a hearing for shareable reasons. ‘Faith’ as such adds nothing useful to views and values, and it often subtracts merit from views and values, by making them subject to threats and rewards, or predictions about some imagined other world.

Massimo Pigliucci is patrolling the borders again.

Take, for instance, my recurring argument that some (but not all!) of the “new atheists” engage in scientistic attitudes by overplaying the epistemological power of science while downplaying (or even simply negating) the notion that science fundamentally depends on non-empirical (i.e., philosophical) assumptions to even get started.

But if science depends on those assumptions why aren’t those assumptions simply part of science? Why aren’t the assumptions part of what is meant by the word ‘science’?

We already have science to help us solve scientific problems, philosophy does something else by using different tools, so why compare apples and oranges?

But if science rests on philosophical assumptions, then philosophy doesn’t (exclusively) do something else. If science rests on philosophical assumptions then the two are entangled to some extent.

Pigliucci goes on to say as much, in a way, but he also reverts to the border-patrolling.

So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little to philosophy. Yes, science can empirically test specific religious claims (intercessory prayer, age of the earth, etc.), but the best objections against the concept of, say, an omnibenevolent and onmnipowerful god, are philosophical in nature (e.g., the argument from evil).

But the argument from evil can be at least partly empirical – we wouldn’t know there was any ‘evil’ i.e. suffering apart from our own if it couldn’t.

Now why is it that so many people take sides on a debate that doesn’t make much sense, rather than rejoice in what the human mind can achieve through the joint efforts of two of its most illustrious intellectual traditions?

Well right – but if it’s a matter of joint efforts why worry so much about the borders?

What are we talking about here?

A police trainer who was sacked for believing that officers should use psychics to solve crimes is going to court to prove he was the victim of religious discrimination.

Was he sacked – is he claiming he was sacked – just for believing that? Or was he sacked for practicing it? Surely that makes an important difference – yet, oddly, the piece nowhere makes it clear which possibility is at issue.

Alan Power, who has been a member of a Spiritualist church for 30 years, argues that his belief in the power of mediums should be placed on a par with more mainstream religious and philosophical convictions…At a tribunal in London, Mr Power will claim that Greater Manchester Police broke the law by sacking him for believing that mediums should be consulted in criminal investigations.

But did they? Did they sack him just for believing that, or did they sack him for putting it into practice? Come on, Telegraph, obviously that’s a crucial bit of information; why did you forget to provide it?! Surely it’s quite right that employers shouldn’t be firing people just because they believe X Y or Z; surely that’s none of an employer’s business unless the employee is acting on the beliefs. If this police trainer was actually wasting public time and money by consulting psychics, or training cops to do so, then that would be a good reason to fire him – yet the Telegraph never says a word about that. Bad journalism.

The judge however said something truly ridiculous.

The judge wrote: “I am satisfied that the claimant’s beliefs that there is life after death and that the dead can be contacted through mediums are worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

No, they aren’t – respect is exactly what they are not worthy of, in a democratic society or an oligarchy. Forebearance, other things being equal, yes, but respect, no. Tolerance, in the sense of not being interfered with, yes, but respect, no. I know this is familiar territory – I seem to spend my life making the distinction between tolerance and respect – but since the coercive slide keeps being made, one has to keep pointing it out. Employees should be free to believe anything they want to, but that doesn’t mean they should be free to do anything they want to merely because they do it as a matter of ‘belief’; we should all tolerate each other’s beliefs, which does not entail never questioning or criticising them, but that doesn’t mean we should all respect each other’s beliefs, which perhaps would entail never questioning or criticising them.

I’m reading Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. It’s a very slight book which one could read in an hour, but I’m reading it slowly because I’m taking a lot of notes, and also because it makes me sick, so I don’t like to read it for long at a stretch. I gave myself a break from it for a few days, and when I picked it up again after this break, I was struck all over again by its truly objectionable combination of rudeness and glibness and shallowness and pretension. I really hate that combination, and Terry Eagleton wears it as if it were a mink coat and he were a heedless aristocrat.

I’ll explain what I mean. The rudeness is in the insistent, wild, evidence-free denunciation of largely imaginary people he labels ‘Dawkins’ and ‘Hitchens’ and, mostly, as a pair, ‘Ditchkins.’ The glibness is in his habit of assertion, his absurd comparisons and analogies (‘it’s as if,’ he’s always saying, and it never is), his air of authority which is not backed up by any strength of argument or breadth of learning. The shallowness is in his failure to notice any of this. The pretension in his assumption that literary critics are some kind of universal authorities.

I can illustrate all this by extensive quotation, and I will; this is by way of throat-clearing. I’ll give you just one tiny example to warm your hands over in the meantime.

[T]he scientific rationalist passes too quickly over the thorny issue of what is to count as certainty, as well as of the diverse species of certainty by which we live. [p 115]

No she doesn’t. That’s just an absurd generalization, with not a shred of example or evidence, not to mention argument – and it is, as such, entirely typical. It is his style, his schtick, his thing.

The next paragraph pretends to expand on the point, but doesn’t.

Nobody has ever clapped eyes on the unconscious. Yet many people believe in its existence, on the grounds that it makes excellent sense of their experience of the world. (One doubts that this includes Ditchkins, since the English tend to have common sense rather than an unconscious.)[p 115]

That, too, is absolutely typical – he slams Dawkins and Hitchens with a guess about what they may or may not think – completely without embarrassment or diffidence. He does that repeatedly throughout the book. It’s rude, it’s glib, it’s unfair, it’s stupid, and it’s crap ‘scholarship.’

You can see why the book is hard to stomach.

Richard Norman offers to take seriously the claims of Eagleton and Armstrong and other critics of The God Delusion in order to ‘try to do justice to the nuanced diversity of the views of the religious,’ agreeing at the outset that

Dawkins does over-simplify. Although he knows perfectly well that most Christians are not creationists, he sometimes writes as though they were, and implies that all religious belief is just obviously refuted by science and Darwin. He is inclined to treat all versions of religion as equally irrational.

He considers the relationship between religion and science first, pointing out that Dawkins is right that the claim that ‘God’ is a simpler answer to questions about why the universe exists and why it is ‘fine-tuned’ in such a way that etc etc is ‘to misunderstand the requirement of simplicity.’ It’s very simple to say ‘God’ of course, but a mind that could fine-tune a universe is actually…not simple; ‘it stands much more in need of explanation than what it is supposed to explain.

We cannot just assume that the only good explanations are scientific explanations. We need to take seriously the claim that scientific explanations are incomplete, and need to be supplemented by a different kind of explanation. But what we can properly insist is that any proposed alternative kind of explanation must still meet the same standards for what counts as a good explanation. In particular, a good explanation can’t be one which makes things even more inexplicable.

Right, but this is where I get confused. Surely ‘the same standards for what counts as a good explanation’ are at least continuous with science – not some radically different kind of thing. In a sense, standards for what counts as a good explanation are what science is all about. So if the standards are the same – then what does it mean to say that scientific explanations are incomplete, and need to be supplemented by a different kind of explanation? How can they be supplemented by a different kind of explanation when the standards for what counts as a good explanation are not different? I’m not sure that’s not a concession without any real content – yes by all means supplement science with a different kind of explanation; the only stipulation is that the explanation can’t be just pulled out of your ass.

Then there’s the ‘faith’ question.

Dawkins says at one point: “Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don’t have to make the case for what you believe.” That’s much too sweeping. By the very act of producing counter-arguments, Dawkins has to acknowledge that some Christians, at any rate, do make a case for what they believe. It’s just that their case isn’t good enough.

Yes but the fact that some Christians do make a case for what they believe doesn’t mean that, according to Christianity, they have to. I don’t think it is all that much too sweeping. It doesn’t rule out the claim that some Christians try to make a case for what they believe, because that fact is perfectly consistent with the additional fact that faith is considered a virtue – and faith is considered a virtue; it’s no good pretending it isn’t. Doubts are considered tragic, or guilty, or both. Some, and maybe many, Christians also consider doubts quite reasonable and understandable, but that’s because ‘Christians’ includes a lot of people. Christianity as such, however, places faith front and center, not doubts. Faith is the goal, faith is the value, faith is the hooray word. Making or trying to make a case comes way far back in the field.

Norman considers the ‘sideways move’ that people like Armstrong and Eagleton make and finds it risky.

A religion built around metaphors and stories, rather than doctrines, seems to me to be inherently unstable. If talk of divine creation is just a metaphor for the awe-inspiring beauty and complexity of the natural world, it can hold that meaning for anyone…Isn’t an identity based on metaphors and stories always going to be fragile and porous? I cannot see how, in the end, a distinctive religious identity can be possible unless it is based on the acceptance of at least some non-metaphorical factual beliefs – beliefs about the existence of a personal deity and about how his intentions and purposes explain our world. Those beliefs do, inescapably, need to be rationally defended. And they can’t be. On that point, certainly, Dawkins is right.

That’s how it always looks to me. I can see at least some of what believers get out of religion – but I also see that as depending on those beliefs, and the beliefs as not rationally defensible.

What exactly are they talking about? What do they mean by ‘communities’? It does make a difference.

We are working to help people and local organisations create strong, attractive and economically thriving communities and neighbourhoods. Our aim is to ensure that they are given all the support they need to make the best of their communities and overcome their own difficulties. These are problems like community conflict, extremism, deprivation and disadvantage.

That sounds (mostly) benign and useful. In fact it sounds like what Barack Obama used to do – and in doing realized that he wanted to change more than just local ‘communities.’ People live in (literal) communities and neighbourhoods, and it is good to help those communities and neighbourhoods thrive. But…people also ‘live in’ non-literal ‘communities’ and some of what the communities department does seems to apply to that kind of community – but they’re not clear about it, so their mission statements and lists of objectives are bound to be at least somewhat misleading.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps they are talking only about literal communities on the website, but in that case, the ‘communities secretary’ is doing something very peculiar in setting up a panel of religious ‘experts’ to advise the gummint. Why would that even be part of his remit, if he’s the secretary for communities-and-neighborhoods as opposed to the secretary for communalism? It seems like Animal Control setting up prayer meetings. Superfluous, intrusive, and fundamentally not their job.

Sometimes the level of disgustingness can still surprise and disconcert and sicken.

Faith groups are to be given a central role in shaping government policies, a senior minister has vowed. John Denham, the communities secretary, said the values of Christians, Muslims and other religions were essential in building a “progressive society”. He attacked secularists who have called for religion to be kept out of public life. Mr Denham revealed that a new panel of religious experts has been set up to advise the Government on making public policy decisions.

What is a ‘communities secretary’ and why does the UK government think it’s a good thing to have one? Why does New Labour have such a chronic frozen painful hard-on for ‘communities’ and community-thought and ‘faith groups’? Why is it so soft in the head? Why is it so determined not to treat people like grown ups?

Mr Denham argued that Christians and Muslims can contribute significant insights on key issues, such as the economy, parenting and tackling climate change.

Meaning they can contribute such insights as Christians and Muslims? Insights that they would not be able to contribute if they were not Christians and Muslims? If so – what, exactly, would those be? What kind of insights? Arrived at how? What can Christianity and Islam tell anyone about the economy? And as for parenting – those could be some pretty dubious insights, unless the ‘communities secretary’ picks his ‘religious experts’ very very carefully indeed.

“Anyone wanting to build a more progressive society would ignore the powerful role of faith at their peril,” he said. “We should continually seek ways of encouraging and enhancing the contribution faith communities make on the central issues of our time. Faith is a strong and powerful source of honesty, solidarity, generosity – the very values which are essential to politics, to our economy and our society.” The minister said that the Government needed to be educated by faith groups on “how to inform the rest of society about these issues”.

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I can’t even say anything rational on that; the disgust is too visceral. Why? Because it’s so abject, so crawling, so untrue, so stupid, so insulting. We don’t need “faith” to build a more progressive society; “faith communities” don’t make a contribution on the central issues of our time – most of them do the exact opposite, pitching fits about contraception, gender equality, gay rights, secularism, liberalism, individual rights, non-procreation, and on and on. “Faith” is by no means the only or a particularly good source of honesty or generosity and its talent for solidarity all too often slides into hatred of or indifference to everyone outside the “faith group.” And the government, above all, does not need to be educated by “faith groups” on how to shove religious ideas down everyone’s throats – the very idea is intrusive, presumptuous, patronizing, and mind-bogglingly insulting.

He added that he was sympathetic with religious leaders, such as Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had complained of the rise of aggressive secularism in Britain. “I don’t like the strand of secularism that says that faith is inherently a bad thing to have and should be kept out of public life,” Mr Denham said. The religious panel is being launched this week to coincide with a series of interfaith initiatives designed to increase social cohesion. It is being headed up by Francis Davis, a fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University, who is a prominent figure in the Catholic Church.

Well isn’t that sweet – the UK government will from now on be advised by a panel headed by a prominent Catholic. Soon the UK will catch up to the US, whose Supreme Court is majority-Catholic.

You know how people like Armstrong and Eagleton and – well most of the ‘we hate the new atheists’ crowd are always saying that the ‘new’ atheists are clueless and naïve and stupid and wrong to talk about that literal God that is a person who lives in the sky and answers prayers that nobody believes in and that according to Armstrong most people always did not believe in? You know, right? Well somebody forgot to tell philosophers, apparently, because the ones who wrote essays for Philosophers Without Gods talk about that literal God. They don’t talk about the God that is the ground of being, or the God that is a sign for something beyond whatever – they talk about the familiar God: a supernatural person of some kind who made everything and cares about us and is all-powerful and all-knowing and Good. So apparently they’re all clueless and naïve and stupid and wrong too.

Georges Rey, for instance, in “Meta-Atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception”:

I should say roughly what I shall mean by “God.”…What seems to me essential to most conceptions, and is at issue with atheists, is that God is a supernatural, psychological being, that is, a being not subject to ordinary physical limitations but capable of some or other mental state, such as knowing, caring, loving, disapproving – and indeed, at least in Christianity, is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and necessarily benevolent… (p. 246, italics his)

David Lewis (or Philip Kitcher, who wrote Lewis’s essay from notes and conversation after Lewis’s death) simply takes that God for granted in his “Divine Evil”:

The most ambitious versions of the argument claim that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and completely benevolent deity.

And that’s the God that’s at issue pretty much throughout – probably because no one would be motivated to write an article on doing without a sign that points to the transcendent, or “the ground of being.” You’d be finished before you started – “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean” would cover it, and that’s not an essay. Eaglestrong are being something less than forthright in claiming that that literal God that is omnipotent and watching over us is the God of only about three foolish people who haven’t been paying attention while everyone else switched to the more sophisticated version when Aquinas was in knee-pants. What they say is not correct. The facts are otherwise.

Meanwhile Nigeria has a different child abuse problem. Small children are accused of being witches and if they’re lucky turn up at the CRARN center scarred and emaciated. Nwanakwo, age 9, had acid poured down his throat by his father after a pastor at a prayer meeting told him he was a witch. Sam Ikpe-Itauma, president of the Child’s Right and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN) in Akwa Ibom State bids him a sad and angry good-bye.