And another thing about the Akyol piece and all the similar strains of thought. It’s such an impoverished, pinched, narrow, trivial view of what matters, of what morality should be, of what people should fret about.

…soulless, skirt-and-money-chasing men drinking whiskey…selfish, lonely creatures in a soulless society where little is worshipped beyond money and sex…The America that people see is one represented by Hollywood and MTV…extremely hedonistic and degenerate elements that turn life into meaningless profligacy…a lifestyle based on hedonism…the masses live, earn, spend, and have relationships according to this supposition. A popular MTV hit summarizes this presumption bluntly: “You and me baby ain’t nuthin’ but mammals; so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.

Humping and consumerism, is what it boils down to. Well – I’m not crazy about consumerism myself, but it’s not the worst thing there could be. I’m not crazy about consumerism, but I don’t think it’s nearly as much of an evil as systematic inequality, exploitation, coercion, bullying, deprivation, persecution. Why doesn’t Akyol fret more about that? Why isn’t he more repelled by the way a lot of very godfull societies treat women, people in lower castes, infidels, apostates, poor people from foreign countries, and the like? Why doesn’t he have a better sense of proportion? Why doesn’t he ask himself what is more important than what, and then write accordingly? Why doesn’t he stop to realize that this God who guarantees his moral absolutes is the god cited by people who put women under house arrest for life? Why doesn’t he worry about terrible, stunted, deformed lives under some Islamic regimes at least as much as he worries about sex and whiskey in ‘the West’? Why is his thinking so very small?

It’s touching when obscurantists band together and discover how much they have in common. Mustafa Akyol gives us an example.

Little does he realize that if there is any view on the origin of life that might seriously offend other faiths – including mine, Islam – it is the materialist dogma: the assumptions that God, by definition, is a superstition, and that rationality is inherently atheistic. That offense is no minor issue. In fact, in the last two centuries, it has been the major source of the Muslim contempt for the West. And it deserves careful consideration.

That offense is no minor issue. So it’s an ‘offense’ to try to give the best natural explanation of the world that one can discover – one we should all be soundly scolded for, no doubt (otherwise the word ‘offense’ would not have been used – it implies rudeness, moral wrongdoing).

Sadly, it was secularist Europe – and especially, theophobic France – rather than the religious United States that the Islamic world encountered as “the West.” No wonder, then, that the West eventually became synonymous with godlessness. Moreover, within Muslim societies, Europeanized elites grew in number and were seen – with a lot of justification – as soulless, skirt-and-money-chasing men drinking whiskey while looking down upon traditional believers as ignoramuses.

Yes, terrible pity about secularist Europe. (And there were probably one or two women in those elites, but never mind.) It’s the ‘ignoramus’ thing that is probably the real pea under the mattress, as it so often is with truculent Xian fundamentalists too. Believers suspect that non-believers think believers are credulous, and it really pisses them off – it is an offense. Thou shalt not think a believer is a credulous fool, lest my foot shall be moved.

Yet, despite these political conflicts, the perception of the West in the minds of devout Muslims remains the greatest underlying problem. Although they admire its freedom, they detest its materialism…A recent poll in Turkey revealed that 37 percent of Turks define Americans as “materialistic” while a mere 8 percent define them as “religious.”…Yes, but what exactly is materialism? Isn’t it more obviously represented by the extravagance of pop stars than by the sophisticated theories of atheist scientists and scholars? Isn’t the cultural materialism of, say, Madonna, quite different from the philosophical materialism of Richard Dawkins?…Cultural materialism means living as if there were no God or moral absolutes, and all that matters is matter. Philosophical materialism means to argue that there is no God to establish any moral absolutes, and matter is all there is. The former worldview finds its justification in the latter. Actually, in the modern world, philosophical materialists act as the secular priesthood of a lifestyle based on hedonism and moral relativism.

Therefore philosophical materialism is wrong, God exists, we have to do what he says and not do what he doesn’t say. Powerful argument.

I still don’t get it. I don’t see how ID fans and Anthony Flew get past the first, obvious objection.

At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.

But how can that be a good explanation? How can it be an explanation at all? How can it be anything other than just an ‘I don’t know’ translated into something that sounds more impressive? Other than hand-waving? I don’t get it. Because if the origin of life and the complexity of nature require explanation – which of course they do – why doesn’t or wouldn’t any possible ‘super-intelligence’ one could come up with also require explanation? Other than by stipulation. But that’s no good – that’s just a cheat. Just adding on ‘that doesn’t require further explanation’ isn’t explanation (let alone good explanation), it’s just arranging the deck ahead of time. Origin of life, complexity of nature, require explanation; good; let’s say a super-intelligence designed and created them; very well; but then what is the explanation of the super-intelligence then?

I don’t understand why this problem doesn’t just stop the whole ridiculous fuss in its tracks. There must be a reason, I must be missing something, but nobody’s told me what it is yet.

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife. Yet biologists’ investigation of DNA “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved,” Flew says in the new video, “Has Science Discovered God?”

But if almost unbelievable complexity of arrangments means that intelligence must have been involved, and necessarily an intelligence that designed this complexity has to be more complex than whatever it is designing, then what explains the intelligence? Where did it come from, what (or who) made it so complex and so intelligent? And where is it now?

I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why this argument has legs.

There was this interview with Alister McGrath last spring, all about how wrong Richard Dawkins is and how weak his arguments are. It’s rather puzzling.

But by the time you get to A Devil’s Chaplain, what we have is a very crude religious propagandist, only loosely connected with the whole scientific culture…It seems to me, he has a real animus against religion, but I’m unable to identify any single factor that seems to be a legitimate explanation of that hostility.

That’s puzzling, because, one, Dawkins (of course) is not a religious propagandist, that’s just the usual silly – and crude – religious rhetoric that pretends religion and non-religion are both religion, theism and non-theism are both theism. Two, because I would say McGrath is the crude one, based on what I’ve read of him, which tends to be short on argument and very long on assertion. Third, what is the nonsense about being unable to identify any single factor that would explain Dawkins’ dislike of religion? Well I suppose it’s that McGrath is so convinced that there’s no good reason to be hostile to religion that he can’t recognize reasons when he sees them. Which is a pretty crude way to think, frankly.

Dawkins seems to assume that his audience is completely ignorant of religion and, therefore, will accept his inadequate characterizations of religion as being accurate…And really, one of the things I find so distressing and so puzzling in reading him was that his actual knowledge of religion is very slight. He knows he doesn’t like it, but he seems to have a very shallow understanding, for example, of what religious people mean by the word “faith.”

Okay – what do they mean then? Go on, explain it to us – give us the deep version. Go on.

But he doesn’t do that.

The reason that Richard Dawkins has become so influential is that his rather strident, rather aggressive views resonate with what quite a lot of people hope is indeed the case.

Oh right! And your views don’t! Religion has nothing whatever to do with wishful thinking! Puh-leeze.

Altogether, not a very impressive performance.

An article by Bruce Bawer in Reason raises some very basic issues.

For many Europeans, the murder of one of the Netherlands’ most outspoken public figures underscored the importance of protecting freedom of expression…Many members of Europe’s fast-growing Muslim communities, however – along with more than a few non-Muslims eager to keep the peace in an increasingly anxious and divided continent – draw a very different lesson: the need to curb freedom of expression out of respect for Muslim sensitivities…Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain agreed. “Is freedom of expression without bounds?” he asked. “Muslims are not alone in saying ‘No’ and in calling for safeguards against vilification of dearly cherished beliefs.”

Safeguards against vilification of dearly cherished beliefs – that puts the problem about as clearly as it can be put. There are difficulties with free speech absolutism, because speech can invoke and indeed create hatred and rage (can do it in minutes), and hatred and rage can all too easily lead to persecution, violence, murder, genocide. That’s not a secret. But that’s not the issue Sacranie is worrying about – he’s worrying about a different one. He’s worrying about the issue or pseudo-issue of ‘vilification’ of ‘dearly cherished beliefs’ – and that is indeed a very different issue and a different kind of issue. And, frankly, I’m having a hard time thinking of a good argument for his view. I can think of bad ones, but no good one. I think beliefs are just the kind of thing that need to be able to withstand challenge of all kinds, because the alternative is pure dogmatism, authority, revelation, fiat, assertion, because God said so, because the priest/mullah/rabbi said so, because the leader said so, because I said so. Well the hell with that.

Sacranie probably thinks and would probably like us to think that beliefs that are ‘dearly cherished’ – in the way a dear little baby is cherished, in the way a sainted mother is cherished, in the way a loyal loving friend is cherished – ought to be protected from putative vilification in the same way that cherished people ought to be protected. But that’s exactly wrong. Beliefs aren’t people, they can’t be hurt either physically or emotionally. People who hold them can, of course, but that is – surely – a necessary part of thinking at all. We grow attached to our own beliefs, of course, but the more we try to make them immune, the less worth loving they will be, because they will become rigid, dogmatic and stupid. In that sense, nobody does anyone a favour by treating beliefs as sacrosanct and immune from criticism or mockery.

I didn’t know this –

In April, after virtually no public discussion, Norway’s Parliament passed a law that punishes offensive remarks about any religion with up to three years’ imprisonment – and places the burden of proof on the accused.

Godalmighty – really? That’s grotesque. B&W clearly badly needs a correspondent in Norway.

Bawer gets the next one slightly wrong though.

Three months later, Britain’s House of Commons approved a bill that would criminalize “words or behavior” that might “stir up racial or religious hatred.” (On October 25, the bill’s most restrictive provisions were rejected by the House of Lords—an ironic example of a non-democratically elected body standing up for democracy by rebuking a democratically elected body.)

But that’s not right – because it’s not democracy that the lords stood up for. That’s rather the point. They stood up for rights or freedoms (or both, or the two seen as one thing) as distinct from democracy. That’s why mechanisms for protecting basic rights and freedoms are needed: because majorities (so, democracy) are perfectly capable of voting to take away rights and freedoms – and that is the objection to the religious hatred bill, that it would do exactly that.

Bawer concludes with the Jyllands-Posten cartoons – perhaps a little too optimistically in the light of what Louise Arbour has just said on the subject.

Artists and editors received death threats; the embassies of several Muslim countries lodged a complaint with Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen (who refused to meet with them “because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so”); and 5,000 Muslims protested in the streets of Copenhagen. Jyllands-Posten’s besieged editors, however, stood firm, writing, “Our right to say, write, photograph and draw what we want to within the framework of the law exists and must endure – unconditionally!”

Danish prime minister (possibly also muddling democracy and freedom, but never mind) and editors, well done; embassies of ‘Muslim countries’ (what is a ‘Muslim country’ anyway – can there be such a thing?), grow up.

So – is it a human right now not to have to be exposed to, or even run the risk of being exposed to, ‘any statement or act showing a lack of respect towards other people’s religion’? Has that been decided? Officially? I ask because the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is ‘concerned about a Danish newspaper’s caricatures of the Muslim prophet Mohammed and has ‘appointed UN experts in the areas of religious freedom and racism to investigate the matter.’ Uh oh. Experts in the areas of religious freedom are investigating cartoons about the prophet? So – what is religious freedom then? Does it mean the ‘freedom’ of religious people to call the cops (or the UN) whenever anyone says anything they consider blasphemous or disrespectful? If so, what about the freedom of the blasphemers and disrespecters? Have we decided that that’s what religious freedom means – the unrestricted right (and freedom) to silence critics? If so, might that be a bad idea? It seems like a pretty crappy idea to me.

Jyllands-Posten seems to have found an answer to its question.

In September, Jyllands-Posten called for and printed the cartoons by various Danish illustrators, after reports that artists were refusing to illustrate works about Islam, out of fear of fundamentalist retribution. The newspaper said it printed the cartoons as a test of whether Muslim fundamentalists had begun affecting the freedom of expression in Denmark.

And what is the result of the test?

Muslims in Denmark and abroad have protested against the newspaper, calling the caricatures blasphemous and a deliberate attempt to provoke and insult their religious sensitivities. Arbour said she understood their concerns. ‘I would like to emphasise that I deplore any statement or act showing a lack of respect towards other people’s religion,’ she said…Arbour had appointed UN experts in the areas of religious freedom and racism to investigate the matter. ‘I’m confident that they will take action in an adequate manner,’ Arbour said in her letter to the 56 governments, which have requested the UN to address the issue with Denmark. A diplomat from one of the countries told the newspaper that the governments were pleased with Arbour’s answer.

They will ‘take action’? In ‘an adequate manner’? Meaning what? What kind of action? What kind of manner, what kind of adequate? A stern talking-to for the editors of Jyllands-Posten and the cartoonists by the nice experts in the area of religious freedom and racism? If so, what will they say? ‘Good afternoon: statements or acts that show a lack of respect towards other people’s religion are racist, in fact are racism itself, and you should be ashamed of yourselves, if not locked up, which of course we have no power to effect, much as we would like to. Don’t do it again. Bye-bye.’ Is that it? Or what? What is there that they can do, what ‘action’ can they ‘take’ that will not be a grotesque imposition of religious censorship on a secular newspaper?

Human rights are a crucial idea, and yet people can hijack them for the most grotesque purposes – in fact for the purpose of removing other people’s human rights. It’s like grievance that way – ‘my grievance is that you have too many rights and freedoms, and I want you to have fewer, in fact none, and I’m really pissed off that that’s not happening, or not quite fast enough.’

It’ll be Rowan Atkinson next.

There’s a passage in Ray Bradley’s ID article –

Science, I came to realize, doesn’t rule out the possible existence of a supernatural world. It isn’t logically committed to metaphysical naturalism. But it is committed to methodological naturalism, the view that, in our attempts to understand how the world works, we should look for naturalistic explanations rather than taking easy recourse to supernatural ones. The successes of science in bridging the gaps that used to be plugged by the gods creates a strong presumption in favour of the idea that gods not only aren’t needed but don’t exist. It doesn’t prove, but it does probabilify to a high degree, the truth of metaphysical naturalism. And by the same token, it makes all supernatural beliefs highly improbable.

In our attempts to understand how the world works, we should look for naturalistic explanations rather than taking easy recourse to supernatural ones – for one thing because the naturalistic ones are the ones we can test while the supernatural ones are the ones we can’t. So the supernatural ones are not only easy, they’re also a cheat (they’re easy because they’re a cheat). It’s just an illegitimate shortcut to say ‘I don’t know so I’ll make it up.’ It’s a combination illegitimate shortcut and cheat to say ‘I don’t know so I’ll make it up and because I simply made it up I can’t test it so I don’t have to test it so that’s nice for me.’ But there’s no other way to resort to supernatural explanations – it’s not as if one can select a testable kind, is it. If it’s testable it’s not supernatural. So supernatural explanations are tainted from the outset by this immunity problem. This is abundantly obvious in many contexts – we know that if the car is making a sinister grinding sound, we should take it to a garage, not a church – but it seems to escape people’s notice in others.

And then the whole thing is further obscured, especially in the US, by the habit of translating it into stupid boring dreary political categories – by deciding that it’s a left-right issue and should be discussed on those terms, when in fact it’s an epistemic issue and should be discussed in those terms.

For instance this comment on Scott Jaschik’s article on academic controversies at Inside Higher Ed.

This is an interesting and though-provoking article. It would have been even more interesting if you had discussed the incidents at various colleges in which professors and other scientists are being censored or discriminated against by their colleagues and institutions for expressing support for intelligent design, and the prevailing academic climate in which graduate students in science are reluctant to express public support for intelligent design for fear of jeopardizing their chances of receiving a Ph.D. Why is it that academia doesn’t condemn censorship of conservative viewpoints on such topics with the same vigor that it defends the unfettered right of academics to express liberal viewpoints?

Classic. The whole subject is translated into the language of grievance, persecution, discrimination, fear – as if it were [arbitrary and unjust] discrimination to expect and demand certain basic competencies in a university setting. Well – at that rate, universities might as well give up the project of education altogether. If it became discriminatory to distinguish between warranted conclusions and invented nonsense, then what would remain to teach? ‘Liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have nothing to do with it. But years and years and years of whining and nagging by the Christian right have trained people to think otherwise, or at least to deploy rhetoric to that effect. It’s very tiresome, especially since it works.

One more dig at I mean comment on Steve Fuller. I think it’s the last for the moment, but who knows. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, etc.

It’s a point about arguing from authority. We’ve noted the arrogance of his tone in the thread at Michael’s – the way he seems to take for granted that he is The Expert in the subject and everyone else is some kind of supplicant or mendicant or rank outsider (an assumption not borne out by the comments, which would seem to reverse the equation – everyone commenting seems to be far more knowledgeable and clear-thinking than he does).

I’m sorry if this sounds patronising but I’d hate you to think you’ve been having a serious discussion worthy of people who claim ‘criticism’ as a profession. You guys simply take at face value what the media presents and then back it up with whatever you can dredge up. Haven’t you people heard of cultural studies? (It was also touching that one of you thought the New Yorker piece was harsh on me—you must lead a sheltered life, if you think that’s harsh!]

I just want to quote something that I think relevant to that tone. It’s from Jon Pike’s review of Ted Honderich at Democratiya.

But, since not even the first year undergraduate sees anything in truth by conviction, perhaps there is something else going on. Perhaps it’s not the strength of convictions themselves that matters, but the fact that they are Honderich’s convictions. Honderich is a Philosopher, after all, and an eminent one at that. He used to be the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at UCL. He has thought about these things a lot, (as if time, on its own, mattered) and his conclusions are controversial. But he is an Authority, so perhaps the persuasive force is supposed to come from some strange mix of truth by conviction and truth by authority. It’s an odd conclusion to come to, because the very basis of doing philosophy, especially critical political philosophy is a rejection of all of these notions. In order to do serious critical political philosophy, you shouldn’t care about someone’s credentials, or the strength of his or her convictions. What matters, all the time, and only, is the argument.

There it is, you see. You shouldn’t care about someone’s credentials or strength of conviction. What matters, all the time, and only, is the argument.

It’s depressing (Susan Haack has pointed this out in great detail) how heavily social constructionism relies on rhetoric to do the work of argument. (It’s also immensely ironic that a social constructionist who is programmatically suspicious of hierarchies and authority in science is so quick to resort to them himself.)

Back to Fuller. Same thread at Michael’s place. Notice a certain tension in the main post. Third para:

In particular, I am a little disturbed by the ease with which humanists and social scientists justify deference to scientific expertise, almost in a ‘good fences make good neighbours’ vain [he means vein] (Stanley Fish comes to mind in criticism, but analytic philosophy and sociology of science have their own versions of this argument). In this respect, ‘our’ side pulled its punches in the Science Wars when it refused to come out and say that the scientific establishment may not be the final word on what science is, let alone what it ought to be. I guess we just never got over the embarrassment of the Sokal Affair.

Never mind for now all there is to wonder at in that passage. Just consider these from para four and para seven:

You might want to read what I actually say – in print, in the trial, and in the written expert report I submitted before the trial…I should say that my status as an expert in the trial had nothing to do with the textbooks under scrutiny.

He seems happy enough about referring to his own putative expertise, but curls the lip at ‘deference’ (loaded word) to scientific expertise.

(Something else I noticed, just in passing – he certainly doesn’t write very well on the fly. Compare his comments with P Z Myers’s, for instance. Both were writing quickly, but one did it well and the other pretty badly. In fact often very badly – leaving out crucial words that are needed to make sense of what he is saying, for instance.)

Some other weird items.

Frankly, I think the public disposition of the Dover case is over-influenced by hatred of Bush and especially fear of the role of fundamentalist Christians in shaping the Bush agenda. (I have in mind here the propaganda campaign being waged on webpages associated with the ACLU: Don’t they have more important civil rights violations in the US to worry about?) I’m certainly no fan of Bush, and have never even voted for a Republican, but I don’t think that this trial is the right place to ‘send a message’ to Bush. Why not work instead toward getting an electable Democrat – perhaps even one that can relate to the vast numbers of religious folks in the US, as the liberal evangelist Jim Wallis (‘God’s Politics’) suggests?

Er? What’s he talking about? Why not who ‘work instead toward getting an electable Democrat’? Us? Instead of talking about what was wrong with his testimony at Dover? Because that’s not what we’re doing, we’re doing something else. What’s the point of asking why not do something completely different?

In fact, the scientists these days who most loudly flaunt their anti-Christian, atheist colours can’t escape smuggling some kind of theistically inspired thought, including James Watson’s desires to play God…But even evolution’s staunchest defenders have remarked on the strong iconic role that Darwin continues to play in this field, which is quite unusual in the natural sciences. An important reason is the politically correct lesson that his life teaches: the idea that science causes you to lose your faith. Newton, unfortunately, thought his theory confirmed his reading of the Bible. Not very politically correct.

Whaat? Politically correct? When did Bill O’Reilly enter the discussion, and why? Politically correct where, according to whom, in which circles?

In the next century, historians will marvel at the ease with which we assume that it’s psychologically credible to think that religious and scientific views can be so neatly separated from each other. This is just our old Catholic friend, the double truth doctrine, dressed up in political correctness.

Same again only more so.

And so on. As you’ll have seen if you read it – as some or perhaps all of you already have – it’s all like that – along with a thick frosting of ineffable condescension poured over everything, which is quite surreal given the quality of the comments from the opponents compared to his own. He gives the impression, on top of everything else, of being a thoroughly unpleasant character.

Quick thing. I just want to note it. I have noted a dislike for Joseph Epstein before. I’m going to do it again. I dislike a remark in this article in Commentary – which Arts and Letters Daily for some reason quoted in its teaser (which is why I saw it in the first place). Why flag up such a – well, here is the remark:

Wilson at his meanest shows up in Dabney’s account of his marriage to the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy—a marriage made in 1937 when he was forty-two and she was twenty-five. “I was too young,” McCarthy would later claim, and “I was too old,” Wilson would counter. It would be closer to the truth to say that both were too selfish and wanting in the least human insight. McCarthy always mistook her snobbery for morality; Wilson mistook life for literature. Dabney, summing up this wretched partnership, writes: “American letters has not seen another alliance so flawed and so distinguished.” So flawed and so distinguished – what a way to characterize the union of a true bitch and a genuine bully.

That’s disgusting. I’m not going to bother saying why, because I think it’s obvious. I’m tempted to call Epstein all sorts of foul names, but I won’t, because I’m better than he is. I will, however, point out that he has a mediocre intellect and McCarthy did not. Maybe that’s why he calls her foul names.

How funny – a harmonic convergence, or something. The very day that I noted the oddity of Steve Fuller’s comment on Meera Nanda’s book at Amazon, in view of his testimony at Dover – Michael Bérubé commented on exactly the same thing.

I’m working on something that I’ll explain more fully next week (when, I hope, it will be done), but in the course of my work on it I found that sociologist Steve Fuller blurbed Meera Nanda’s 2003 book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India by writing, “This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.” Right, well, it so happens that I’m down with much of Nanda’s argument myself, as I explain in a bunch of things I’ve been writing lately. But wait! This Steve Fuller is that Steve Fuller, the author of Social Epistemology (and much, much more) who showed up in Dover, Pennsylvania this past October to testify that Intelligent Design is a legitimate science…

Snap. All the more interesting because Michael has told me that it was reading Meera’s articles here (at B&W) that caused him to worry about these politically reactionary consequences himself, and that’s why he’s writing about the subject now. Which is good since he’s an influential fella, on account of being such a damn brilliant writer (well, on other accounts too, but the writing is like some kind of atomic magnet). So that means B&W is useful, in its plodding little way, and it’s always good when I get to think that B&W is useful, because it keeps me going when discouragement over hackers and my inability to fix things that need fixing threatens to cause me to run away from home and become a confectioner.

So then, to add to the interest, Steve Fuller commented on Michael’s post, and Michael turned that into a new thread with comments from a lot of knowledgeable people like P Z Myers and John Emerson. There is also a comment at the Valve. And there’s a post from October at Panda’s Thumb.

I’ll just offer a few of Fuller’s…stranger remarks.

It’s not clear – at least not to me – that there is some psychologically credible line to be drawn between ‘revelation’ and ‘reason’. This distinction exists, if at all, at the public level of how you would have your ideas tested: By calculations? By experiments? By the Bible?

And

But in my circles people don’t talk much about their religious beliefs, so I just go on my reading and intermittent outbursts of others. I do wonder what might be the motivation for atheists to do science in the grand unifying sense: Why do they believe there’s sufficient order in the universe to merit the systematic efforts at inquiry?

Because they think there can be order without design, and because there’s an immense amount to find out about that if so (or, in another way, if not). That question is oddly reminiscent of Nicholas Buxton saying in that Guardian article that the only rational thing for people who think the universe is uncaused to do is jump off a cliff.

And

Actually if you’re a Darwinist ‘all the way down’, you should say that life began as some random collocation of micro-units of matter that happened to stabilize long enough to reproduce and then mutate: i.e. the self-bootstrapping theory of life. However, Darwinists don’t want to commit to this because it’s not empirically provable – which means it allows room for more feint-hearted Darwinists to believe that God kicked off the whole process.

Provable – oh dear. That’s a very basic mistake for someone in this field, especially when he does such a lot of de haut en bas condescending to everyone else on the thread.

Now that the nonsense is out of the way – on to a very interesting article in the NY Times that starts from the murder (the ‘honour killing’) of Hatun Surucu and the trial of her brothers which began in September, and moves on to the large and familiar subject of women in Muslim immigrant enclaves in Germany.

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu’s capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German…It’s still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women on this topic, explained, “The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering.” By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother’s life – her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage.

That makes a horrible kind of sense. If their daughters don’t want to do what they did, what does that say about what they did? That’s a familiar situation with parents and children in general. The intrinsic sadness of what is known as upward mobility is that parents often see their children educated out of their reach, or at least out of easy communication.

When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to practicing law is the author of “The Great Journey Into the Fire”; Necla Kelek (“The Foreign Bride”); and Serap Cileli (“We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor”)…Taking off from their own experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model Western democracy known as Germany.

There were signs, but the author (a German man himself) didn’t worry about them much.

For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale district of Charlottenburg. But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like me didn’t care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for which there is only one word: slavery.

Tolerance of what, is always the question. One we’re finally remembering to ask.

Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There have been 49 known “honor crimes,” most involving female victims, during the past nine years – 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the “miscellaneous” column along with other family tragedies and given a five-line treatment. Indeed, it’s possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was “not in keeping with the religious regulations.” Volker Steffens, the school’s director, decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and teachers. More than anything else, it was the students’ open praise of the murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and soon of all Germany.

Well, a good thing something did. (Well done Herr Steffens.)

For more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City officials aren’t in a position to control Islamic religious instruction…Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming and sports as well as class outings…Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques in Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they continue to address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities are gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose home page – until a recent revision – praised the attacks of Sept. 11, designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals. “And that kind of thing,” she says, fuming, “is still defended by the left in the name of religious freedom.”

Just so. And not just in Germany, as we know.

This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a frontal assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are fighting on two fronts – against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. “Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these mountains of German guilt,” Seyran Ates complains. It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.

Which is exactly what Maryam Namazie and Azam Kamguian and Homa Arjomand and Ayaan Hirsi Ali – in the UK, Canada, the Netherlands – also say. Multiculturalism, religious freedom, diversity, tolerance, guilt – they leave Muslim women in the lurch.

The fact is that disregard for women’s rights – especially the right to sexual self-determination – is an integral component of almost all Islamic societies, including those in the West. Unless this issue is solved, with a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the West, there will never be a successful acculturation. Islam needs something like an Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their own Enlightenment, with its separation of religion and state, can the Western democracies persuade their Muslim residents that human rights are universally valid. Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary for integration to succeed. “We Western Muslim women,” Seyran Ates says, “will set off the reform of traditional Islam, because we are its victims.”

And they’re doing it now. Best of luck, all.

And then there’s the Narnia thing.

Icky icky ick.

What Pullman particularly objects to about the Narnia series, as it comes to a climax in The Last Battle, is that the children are killed and go to heaven. ” ‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’ “

Yeah okay – sorry, I’m with Pullman here. I hate that medieval (literally medieval) ‘this world is crap boring shadowlands and “heaven” is all joy tralala’ idea. I hate the idea of a modern children’s story that tells them being alive is like being at school and being dead is holidays, that life is the dream and being dead is waking up. What does that give you? Well, at the outermost edge, it gives you people who are so eager to get there that they kill themselves to do it, and so deluded about what is ‘good’ and what their putative deity wants that they do it by killing as many other people as possible. Not just tube-exploders and semi-airplane pilots, either – also the child soldiers in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war: they were given plastic keys and told they were the keys to Paradise, and sent off to be killed. And only slightly removed from the outermost edge, it gives you all the monster raving loonies who believe in the ‘Rapture’ and get pleasure in contemplating the future torture of most human beings on the planet – which means you get morally disgusting human beings. And then you get a lot of people who just waste the lives they do have by failing to appreciate the real world.

Furthermore, to be morally mature will involve acknowledging that reality and living in relation to God, the ground of our being and the goal of our longing. There are different concepts of reality, and following on from that different understandings of what it is to be morally mature. For the atheist, moral maturity must involve rejecting religion. For the religious believer, it must involve acknowledging the supreme reality from whom we draw our being.

That sounds grand, doesn’t it. But it’s just windy nonsense dressed up. What’s morally mature about that?

The religious bad-argument-purveyors are out in force. Lloyd Eby at World Peace Herald for instance. He says an earlier article of his got a lot of ‘responses and comments from atheists who claim that this article misrepresents what atheism is and what atheists actually believe.’ Now there’s a surprise – religious people generally do such a good job of representing what atheism is and what atheists actually believe. No strawmen there! Hardly ever.

So Eby answers the answers.

If we accept the usual or most prevalent definition of religion, a definition in which religion is explicitly tied to belief in and/or service of a supernatural god or supreme being, then atheism could not be a religion because active atheism can be defined or described as the positive rejection of the existence of any supernatural god or supreme being. Atheism is the active belief that there is no god. As one atheist put it, “Atheism is the rejection of supernatural belief. As an atheist, I do not believe in the reality of any supernatural being, and as a result of this, reject religion.”

Well there’s a bad start. That’s his first paragraph, apart from the exposition, and already he’s done exactly what he’s accused of doing. Furthermore he’s done it in the space of one sentence, in full view of the readers, and apparently without awareness that he’s done it. That’s what I call sloppy. Behold the translation – the atheist he quotes says ‘I do not believe in the reality of any supernatural being’ but Eby cites that as illustration of his version, ‘Atheism is the active belief that there is no god’ – and he apparently doesn’t see (or else he’s being tricksy) that the two are different – that he’s translated. Theists are always doing this! It’s highly irritating, and it’s dirty pool. Not believing something is not identical to believing that something not. Some atheists of course do ‘actively’ believe there is no god, but a great many don’t. A great many atheists are just, what the word implies, not theists. That’s all. Theists don’t get to redefine the word to make their case – except they do, because they do it all the time, and get away with it.

Oddly, farther down in the article, he makes that very distinction himself, and then says that the mere non-theists are not the atheists he’s talking about. Well that’s fair enough, but then he should have worded the opening gambit differently. More people will read the first two paragraphs than read the whole article (few people, I would guess, read a middle paragraph and nothing else, but lots read beginnings and nothing else).

I do indeed hold that theism and atheism are both religious. The atheist who thinks otherwise is mistaken because he is using a tendentious or incorrect definition of religion, a definition that attempts to privilege atheism and give it a logical, legal, and evidential status over the usual notions of religion. But that is unwarranted. The theist cannot prove that his belief is true; his belief is metaphysical and a statement of faith that goes beyond the observable evidence for it. And the atheist cannot prove that his view is true either; his belief is also metaphysical and a statement of unbelief that goes beyond the observable evidence for it.

Wait – stop right there. More dirty pool. How did ‘prove’ get in there? More tricksiness? This guy is a philosopher! He knows beliefs can be warranted without being provable. So he’s playing games. It’s a very familiar game, to pretend there is nothing between proof and belief in the sense of faith. Of course atheists can’t prove that atheism is true, but there is plenty of evidence that makes a deity seem pretty improbable. It’s reasonable to point out that there are some metaphysical beliefs or assumptions underlying the belief that evidence is evidential – that the world is orderly, and so on – but that’s not the same thing as the claim that atheism and theism are on exactly equal footing with regard to logical and evidential status.

More later.

Speaking of ethics and politeness, the difference between what one has a right to do and what is right to do – as we just were in comments on ‘A Valediction Forbidding Nonsense’ – I’ve been pondering a certain pattern of behavior which I’ve seen in a few people I know (especially, but not exclusively, in rich people I know) and find interesting. I should give it a name, for ease of reference – but it’s hard to think of one, because it’s a complicated pattern, with several steps.

Step 1. Volunteer the statement – unprompted by the other party – that you are going to do something. Perhaps something generous or kind or helpful, something extra – give a present, help with a project, loan a valuable object, perform a service, do a favour – something unexpected, welcome, significant. Collect gratitude. Or perhaps just a simple bit of routine scheduling – ‘I will do X on Thursday,’ ‘I will get Y done by the end of the month.’ Collect recognition of duty done.

Step 2. Don’t do it. Don’t give or loan or help with or perform whatever it is. Don’t do X on Thursday, don’t finish Y by the end of the month.

Step 3. Never state the fact. Never say ‘oh by the way I can’t [do whatever it is] after all.’ Never mention it or refer to it.

Step 4. Entailed by Step 3. Never explain. Since you don’t say ‘I’m not going to [do whatever it is] after all,’ it is not possible (or necessary) to explain.

Step 5. Also entailed by Step 3. Never apologize.

That’s it. Say ‘I’m going to give you A’ or ‘I will help you with B’. Then don’t do it; don’t say you’re not going to do it, you’re not currently doing it, you haven’t done it; don’t refer to it at all; ignore it entirely; act as if nothing was ever said, the subject was never mentioned; never explain why you’re not doing it, haven’t done it – much less why the reasons you haven’t done it are good reasons. Never apologize. Never do anything at all, simply proceed on your way as if nothing had happened.

Maybe I should call it ‘the Gaslight deception,’ on the theory that the goal is to make the other party think it was all a hallucination born of insanity.

People of course have a right to do this. But is it the right thing to do? I leave it to your wisdom to decide.

A couple of passages from the president of the Royal Society’s valedictory speech because they are so B&W.

In short, I guess that the same ill-understood circumstances that allow complex human societies to arise and persist also – and perhaps necessarily – have elements that are strongly antithetic to the values of the Enlightenment. What are these values? They are tolerance of diversity, respect for individual liberty of conscience, and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief. All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding.

See – ‘and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief’. That’s where we came in.

I end this valedictory Address much as I began my first one, by again reminding us that the Royal Society was born of the Enlightenment. Everything we do embodies that spirit: a fact-based, questioning, analytic approach to understanding the world and humankind’s place in it…Many people and institutions have always found such questioning, attended often by unavoidable uncertainties, less comfortable than the authoritarian certitudes of dogma or revelation…Today, however, fundamentalist forces are again on the march, West and East. Surveying this phenomenon, Debora MacKenzie has suggested that – in remarkably similar ways across countries and cultures – many people are scandalised by “pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexual behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy, which grants power to people rather than God.” She adds that in the US evangelical Christians have successfully fostered a belief that science is anti-religious, and that a balance must be restored, citing a survey which found 37% of Americans (many of them not evangelicals) wanted Creationism taught in schools. Fundamentalist Islam offers a similar threat to science according to Ziauddin Sardar, who notes that a rise in literalist religious thinking in the Islamic world in the 1990s seriously damaged science there, seeing the Koran as the font of all knowledge.

Because people refuse to recognize that an ugly fact trumps a cherished belief. Because as far as a great many people are concerned, it is very much the other way around – a cherished belief trumps pretty much everything, and certainly anything so small and petty and trivial as a mere fact or piece of evidence. And because deference is paid to them and witheld from the other team – because it’s considered bad manners to tell the cherished-belief-first crowd that they’re mistaken and not thinking clearly, while it’s not in the least considered bad manners to tell the evidence-first crowd that we are shallow, cold, boring, heartless, unimaginative, trivial, shallow, and mistaken and deluded and going to burn in hell forever. An unfortunate arrangement.

Another brief item. Something I noticed yesterday when coding Meera’s wonderful article – on the Amazon page for Prophets Facing Backward there is, of all things in the world, a recommendation by (wait for it) Steve Fuller. What does he say?

This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.

Uh…hello? This is the same Steve Fuller – the very same Steve Fuller, my darlings – who testified for the defense – for the ID side – at Dover a few weeks ago. So – uh – uh – what can one possibly wonder other than ‘why didn’t he heed his own advice?’ Why didn’t he hear his own wake-up call? If he went back to sleep again, why didn’t he set the alarm? I mean – yo, talk about ‘postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences’.

Oh well hang on, there’s no date on the reviews. Maybe he just wrote that. After Dover. Maybe he’s sitting at home all pink about the ears, having just read Meera’s book and feeling like a damn fool. Or…maybe he doesn’t include himself among conscientious leftists? Or maybe he thinks ID is about epistemically reactionary consequences but nothing at all to do with politically reactionary ones? Oh who knows. But anyway, it’s a puzzle.

A small point, one I wanted to make the other day but I was out of time and had to run off. The Bobby J Collitch of Knollitch textbooks again. The one called Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, to be specific.

Twain’s skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel…Throughout her [Emily Dickinson’s] life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.

Okay – so what do these bozos – Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs – mean by ‘the honest questioning of a seeker of truth’ then? Is ‘honest questioning’ the kind of questioning that knows ahead of time what the right answer is and honestly diverts itself with whatever intermediate activity it takes to get there? Is ‘honest questioning’ the kind that knows with cast-iron certainty what the answer to any given ‘question’ is and will accept no other no matter what the evidence or logic or sumptuous bribe? Is it honest and legitimate to use the honorific ‘honest questioning’ about a questioning that is required to find a particular answer no matter what? No, my brethren, I would say that it is not. I would say that it is ludicrous and self-flattering and a gross example of having it both ways to label ‘honest questioning’ the kind of pseudo-questioning (if indeed any) these buffoons – Horton, Hess and Skeggs – have in mind.

Or to put the matter more bluntly – what do they mean by it? What do they mean by upbraiding Dickinson for viewing ‘salvation’ as not a certainty and at the same time curling their Christian lip at Mark Twain’s skepticism for not being honest questioning? Eh? What do they mean by ever using the phrase ‘honest questioning’ at all in the same book in which they rebuke Dickinson for not ‘accepting’ the Bible as an ‘inerrant’ (!!) guide to life? For that matter what do they mean by writing a book at all, when their thinking is so flabby and fatuous and absurd? They shouldn’t be writing so much as a schedule of their favourite tv shows for the next week, let alone a book for tragically deprived high school students to read.

Normblog’s Writer’s Choice was by Pamela Bone the other day. I’ve linked to several of her columns in the Age here. She’s another one of these eccentrics who think women’s rights shouldn’t be just for the lucky people of the developed world.

On that drive across town Perowne sees three black figures, women in the body and face-covering burqas, huddled together on a pavement.
“He can’t help his distaste, it’s visceral. How dismal, that anyone should be obliged to walk around so entirely obliterated… And what would the relativists say, the cheerful pessimists from Daisy’s college? That it’s sacred, traditional, a stand against the fripperies of Western consumerism? But the men, the husbands… wear suits, or trainers and tracksuits, or baggy shorts and Rolexes, and are entirely charming and worldly and thoroughly educated in both traditions. Would they care to carry the folkloric torch, and stumble about in the dark at midday?”
I have wondered this too, and why left-leaning women do not protest at such an oppression of women’s rights (even if the women go along with their oppression). The reason, as Fay Weldon has said, is that today racism is seen as a much worse crime than sexism; and many people confuse criticism of religion – especially Islam – with racism. It has, of course, nothing to do with racism.

And so have I. Several million times, at a guess.

Anybody get the Evening Standard? Still got yesterday’s? Hang on to it (and if you feel so inclined, scan an article in it and send it to me). A commenter at Harry’s Place says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a searing article yesterday.

She relates how a woman in a burqa recognised her…and having followed her home last week, begged for help. She took off her burqa to reveal horrific injuries to her face and body which were inflicted by her father and brothers in their bid to control her desire for independence (She is a chemistry graduate from Bolton). She claimed that the burqa is being forcibly used to cover the injuries of many women she knows, and that her friend had been killed. “She took off her burqa to reveal a sight I shall never forget. There before me was a woman so badly battered and beaten that she looke painted, in deep blue, purple and livid pink, The sides of her mouth were torn – “He put his fist in my mouth because i was screaming” she explained.” Brown now has 12 letters from young British Muslim women with such allegations. She comments: “The pernicious ideology is propogated by misguided Muslim women who claim the burqa is an equaliser and a liberator.” She made a film for Channel 4 and met an entire class at a Muslim school in Leicester who told her that negating their physical selves in public made them feel great. Last week in Southall, Brown watched a woman in a burqa sit while her family ate – she of course couldn’t put food in her mouth. Brown rails against politicians who dare not speak out against this attack on autonomy and equality, and she finds even more baffling the “meek acceptance of the burqa by British feminists who must be repelled by the garment and its meanings. “What are they afraid of? Afghan and Iranian women fight daily against the shroud and there is nothing “colonial” about raising ethical objections to this obvious symbol of oppression..The banning of the headscarf in France was divisive.but it was also supported by many Muslims. The state was too arrogant and confrontational, but the policy was right.” She concludes: “Thousands of liberal Muslims would dearly like the state to take a stand on their behalf. If it doesn’t, it will betray vulnerable British citizens and the nation’s most cherished principles and encourage Islam to move back even faster into the dark ages, when we all need to face the future together.”

Thousands – I should think that’s a conservative number. More like hundreds of thousands of people who don’t like being brutalized, I should think.