John Gray and the secular fundamentalists

A nice article by John Gray on secularism.

How to be an atheist: A lesson in Muscularity

I begin this post with an excerpt from an essay in Denys Turner's excellent book 'Faith Seeking', which occurs at the conclusion of the Yale philosopher-theologian's challenge to contemporary atheists. Turner writes as follows right at the conclusion of his discussion:

'So, 'How to be an atheist?' It is not easy; you need to work at it. Be intellectually adult, get an education, get yourself a discipline; resist all temptation to ask such questions as you do not know in principle can be answered, being careful to suppress any which might seem to push thought off civilized limits; be reasonable, lest you find yourself being committed to an excessive rationality; and have the good manners to scratch no itches which occur in intellectually embarassing places - at least in public...if you want to be an atheist, then, it is necessary only to find that the world is to be a platitudinously dull fact. But, I warn you, to be as resolute as it takes in the conviction of such cosmic dullness requires much hard work, not a little training, and a powerful mental asceticism. Anything less resolute, and you run the risk of affliction by theological itches...' [Faith Seeking, p.22]

Perhaps the thing I like most about this description is its stern focus on the drab conformity of much atheism, which consists in its sweeping under the proverbial carpet of life's big questions. The image which comes most readily to my mind in this context is the desire of Adam and Eve to 'hide' from God in the garden of Eden, post fruit taking, a desire which - Paul assures us (1 Cor. 15:22) - leads only to death. In Christ, meanwhile, hiding is unnecessary. Being made alive involves coming out into the open; it involves countering and reacting against the drab conformity which life in hiding demands.

However, when light comes into the world, to evoke an image from John's Gospel, some people prefer to stay in the darkness. The darkness is comfort in numbers, the realm of uncontroversy and macho back slapping; the darkness is a world in which deaths are plotted, and where the demise of the wilfully unrecognised light is hoped for. The darkness refuses to stretch out its arms to its deliverer and instead reaches to its own deliverance, which it finds confirmed in others doing the same thing. Johannine imagery, for all its worth here, only takes us so far.

What Turner's comment invites us to understand is that 'atheism' - conceived in its opposition to Christian faith - thrives in its contemporary forms on being 'civilized', staying 'rational', and refusing to move into 'uncivilized' or 'irrational' circles or trains of thoughts. The complaint owes its urgency, I think, not only to the author's Marxist sympathies. It also comes out of a genuine understanding of how the Pharisaic legalism which the Gospels can so strongly protest against can work. Not, you will understand, that I think Jesus was 'out to get' the Pharisees or to rebel against 'Pharisaism' per se: it is more likely, certainly, that he saw in Pharisaism much that was worthy of admiration, much to be commended - but also the potential for abuse, serious abuse - and this was something, I think, which certain Pharisees were themselves not particularly given to seeing. In a way, Pharisaism in its negative guises (the guises which Jesus protested against) and Atheism (that is, Muscular, Legalistic, Atheism with a capital A) are natural bedfellows.

They both start from principles of order and rationality, on the need for being civilized. And they take strong exception to acts of dissidence or words of complaint against them. And if we return to Denys Turner's words, they both require a stringent intellectual regime to support them, in which asking certain questions is ruled out de rigueur - on the basis of some unstated, hidden, a priori reasoning. Christian faith, and Christian lives, are best realised very often as acts of dissidence, as sustained attempts to break through barriers of order and rationality which are constructed in the name of reason, order and being civilized. Love, and loving behaviour cannot be relied upon to conform to these expectations; the holy spirit, the spirit of love, is too unbridled for the harness of pure reason, pure order, pure civilization, as they are conceived by Muscular Atheists. For their constructions - made apart from a political stance which finds its origin in the desire for love of God and neighbour (does love consist above all in its rationality??) - miss the mark very profoundly. And this is so even while the most collegiate support for the atheist worldview is available among friendly peers who would also sweep a certain kind of question under the carpet as part of the intellectual training in rationality and being civilized which Good Atheist Thought relies upon.

As for Christianity, meanwhile, the only wisdom, the only reason, consists in the love of God and of neighbour (which is like it). And here, a point which many Christians themselves miss needs to be made: to love as Christ demands is not to sit cosily in intellectual communion, with regimes of reason and order comfortably in place. For that is what the Pharisees and the Atheists do. To love is to believe, to be Christlike, and to pick up our crosses and follow: to love is to do what is right and to feel and think it throught doing it. And doing means challenging, overturning, reinventing, creating. This means, very often, doing what the legalists would have you not do: it involves overthrowing their tables, cracking the intellectual whip and breaking down the barriers of order and reason which they construct to maintain their communities of cosy control and peer support. God's love seeks people out: it won't let them hide. It's a lesson many Christians - myself included - need constantly to remind ourselves of.

A Review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion

The book aims to put the 'scientific' boot into 'religion'. In this respect, its author knows he is doing nothing new. Since the 1800s, popular works have been written which have described how 'science' should render 'religious' beliefs and practices obsolete. Dawkins is in some ways a sophisticated contributor to this discourse - though this can be explained for the most part in terms of the competence of his rhetorical sleights of hand, whether intentional or not - and in a number of ways disappointing.

For a start, his thesis is not that science 'disproves' religion. That would be - according to his own criteria of judgement - something he could only show by publishing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal evidence to that effect. And Dawkins does not claim to possess such evidence. So, the author is careful throughout to avoid using scientific jargon to describe the project he's engaged in. Herein lies the book's rhetorical sophistication. It presents itself as the argument of a scientistic rationalist. But it does not attempt to root its assertions concerning the non-existence of God (it is 99.99% that he does not exist, we are told) in scientific proofs.

That leads to an interesting fact about the book. You're not reading science; you're reading philosophy (and, dare I say it, theology). Dawkins knows these aren't his fields. He's curiously damning about one of them ('theology') and doesn't really mention the other ('philosophy'). This is an important fact I've discussed elsewhere. Interestingly, all of the God Delusion's 'philosophers' are atheists or agnostics, whereas all of its 'theologians' are theists. This rhetorical tactic of separating people into 'philosophers' and 'non-philosophers' on the basis of their belief in God is hardly charitable. Especially when you consider how many of the greatest 'philosophers' the world's ever seen have been theists: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and, amongst modern day philosophers, e.g. Plantinga. The failure to explore the relationship between philosophy and theism in the book is baffling.

Now it's true that there are lots of atheistic philosophers too. Everyone knows about Bertrand Russell and David Hume. But the God question didn't just disappear when their arguments appeared - at least, not in the minds of very many of the world's best philosophers. Is this important fact considered by Dawkins?

No, not really...he's more interested in pursuing the unsophisticated arguments of unsophisticated theists (his highly questionable claim to have refuted the cosmological and ontological arguments for the existence of God apart). And that, for most people (including perhaps himself) will be satisfactory. Fundamentalist believers make easy targets for many people, and it hardly takes an Oxford professor to take a swipe at them for most people to believe they're pretty nuts. What you might expect from an Oxford professor, though, is a little more respect for and awareness of the nature and history of philosophical argumentation, especially if that's what he's engaging in.

Many very eminent scientists are theists - contrary to what Dawkins implies in his book - and he doesn't confront in the God Delusion the kinds of ideas they might seek to offer in opposition to his. Check out John Barrow, John Polkinghorne, Freeman Dyson or Arthur Peacocke. And as for the philosophers, you'll hardly hear a peep from Dawkins about Plato, Hume, Aquinas or Kant. And that seems rather a shame, because these are the guys many of the philosophical academy would turn to if they want to get serious about the history of theism and philosophical arguments for or against it.

Philosophy, however, can't and doesn't work like science. Atheism and 'Reason' won't be true bedfellows until it can. And it's worth emphasising that very many philosophers - including very many atheists - see no reason to believe the harmonisation of 'science' and 'philosophy' will ever happen. But why?!

Philosophical ideas constitute 'evidence' (one of Dawkins' favourite words) of a very peculiar kind. It's not easy to twist them into irrefutable proofs about the external world, as centuries of logicians have found out (often to their dismay). Words and ideas are very tricky customers. It's very difficult to know for sure what they can and can't tell us about what's true, what's real. How good a job can they do? To take a simple example: if there were a God (and how would we know for sure that he was there?), how much could words and arguments do to describe 'him' and how much would it be beyond their power to describe? Any answer to such a question relies on the individual insights of the person who answers. If a person makes the decision beforehand that 'God' cannot possibly be describable in language, then it's no surprise if the person doesn't end up believing in a God knowable only through words and arguments. If, on the other hand, one begins with the premise that a certain combination of words and arguments could 'prove' God's existence or character, then investigation into the presence of such a God could proceed. But the ground rules have to be established. That's what Dawkins (writing in his new role as a philosopher) fails to understand and it's one reason why his academic reviewers have been so unimpressed by his book.

Consider the following: someone decides that 'God' must be the character described with complete accuracy in the pages of the Bible OR just a big fantasy. You choose either one or the other, if those are the only options, don't you...But should these be the only two options? For centuries, Christians (and Jews) have opposed simple minded interpretations of the Bible and have fully admitted that it's riddled with problematic statements and self contradictory claims. It doesn't stop them believing in God. God is more than the Bible. The Bible is first and foremost an important historical record. Only once it is interpreted as history can it be used for the purposes of philosophy or theology. But these sensible, considered positions aren't addressed by modern anti-religion polemicists such as Dawkins. And the failure to address them makes the God Delusion inadequate as a work of philosophy. And since it is not 'science' either, what is it?

Well, it's certainly a crowd pleaser. Witness the statements of applause in the dustjacket of the book. But is 'truth' being conveyed to the crowd in a 'reasonable' way which handles the 'evidence' fairly? Hardly. If it were, the book would be in a top scientific journal. Whole areas of philosophy would have become no-go areas. The great religious institutions (all of which pay attention to the findings of science, at least in their modern incarnations, despite Dawkins' suspicions) would have closed down. And yet none of this has happened.

The best conclusion to draw is that the God Delusion fails in its most basic ambitions - to show that all ideas of 'God' should be considered as species of 'delusion' - but nevertheless succeeds as an entertaining but extended rant, whose chief value is in undermining naive kinds of theism (the kinds, the author insists, which persist amongst almost all 'religious' people). For those who continue to seek God, however, the 'God Delusion' will not offer an insurmountable barrier. Dawkins himself sees the attractions of Jesus. 'Atheists for Jesus', he advocates. Well, if Jesus was God or the son of God (whatever we take these words to mean), he's clearly not far away from 'getting God' after all. His real truck is with unthinking, dishonest fundamentalism. This is something he has in common with many of the world's most religious people. The real 'delusion' is that of the insufficiently thoughtful.

A Sermon I gave [3]

Continued again...
Above all, I would suggest, we see Zacchaeus going through a number of the motions which characterise much of the devotional activity which goes on across the whole spectrum of cultural activity in human societies, both in the world of Luke’s Gospel and in our own. In the story, one person – Jesus – becomes an object of interest to another, Zacchaeus, whose eagerness to see Jesus has him make special provisions to do so. At the risk of offering a mundane comparison, an obvious parallel in the contemporary world are those who show up early and queue at celebrity book signing events. Forward planning is essential: the competition to meet the interesting and famous person concerned is always strong. Another aspect of the Zacchaeus story which is worth emphasising is that he wants above all to see Jesus – to have a good view of him – and it is in order to achieve this aim that he makes his special provisions. Again, one understands his inclinations. Seeing interesting and famous people is one of the best ways of enhancing one’s experience of their interest or fame. And fame fascinates; it captures the imagination. Live appearances are invariably more exciting than ones which are experienced second hand through the medium of another person’s account. Seeing for oneself is more satisfying. And when it comes to seeing interesting people, box office seats are often preferable, whether at football games, comedy shows, the theatre, the opera, or even the visit of a prophet, as in the case of Zacchaeus: they give you a better view, even if, perhaps, you have to sacrifice something in terms of atmosphere when you sit in them.

Finally in my list of generic characteristics of Zacchaeus’ behaviour, there’s his actual encounter with Jesus: in the encounter, Zacchaeus ends up doing what he knows will be pleasing to Jesus. He acts in a radically morally upstanding way, which not only justifies Jesus’ singling him out for visitation in spite of his past misdeeds and in spite of the criticism Jesus receives for doing so. Zacchaeus also ends up exemplifying something of Jesus’ own character by exhibiting a special concern for the plight of the poor. In the latter case, what we clearly have is, at least on one level, classic fanlike adoration. Emulation of one’s heroes is just a standard feature of our behaviour as humans. As creatures of habit and imitation, the desire to emulate comes naturally to us – and the people we find to be the most impressive, attractive and interesting, or, from a more sinister perspective, the most powerful, are the ones we often do our best to emulate. This desire – whether it is consciously felt or expressed or not – motivates us as we go about our daily lives; it serves to shape how we think and behave in a wide variety of ways, from how we have our hair cut to how we pronounce our words and how we think about our personal relationships, and the ideological stances we adopt in the context of those relationships and in the context of the world at large.

Even if it seems uncomfortable for some people to admit it, we all have our heroes, whether we acknowledge them as such or not. Even for the person who adamantly maintains that they have no heroes, certain ideas and people nonetheless end up playing privileged and pivotal roles in shaping their lives. The fact is unavoidable. The determined individualist may be absolutely his own authority in his own mind but he is still implicitly paying homage to the philosophical and cultural currents which made his very individual viewpoint intellectually conceivable and/or respectable. Whether he acknowledges them or not, then, he has his heroes, in the sense of the creative forces which have served to shape his being. And the point can be extended in the context of discussions with atheists and agnostics: one can say simply ‘you have your gods, whether you acknowledge them or not. We all do’. And for most of us, having our gods means taking an interest in certain other people, such that we wish to see and hear about them in order to shape ourselves around who they are and what they are like. It’s an inescapable fact of our human situation.

Now the dyed in the wool atheist may recognise all this. And it is true that none of it may faze him. Yes, he will say, I have my gods – although I in my detached rationalism know better than to think of them in reference to this strange and defunct word, ‘god’ which you mistakenly use – and I prefer them to yours. Well, one might answer, this may be so for you and for others with such an anodyne sense of effortless wisdom. But isn’t it rather disturbing, I would continue, that many who would invoke the respectability of your view seem to have such a hard time abandoning this language of divinity, and the habits of worship which usually accompany it – whether in the context of how they think about beautiful or impressive people, or of those that do a particularly good job at beating others in sporting competitions. Is it obvious, after all, that a regime of thinking which has given rise to forms of worship which are markedly similar to the long abandoned Graeco-Roman and celtic polytheisms of our ancestors – with their exotic and unpredictable gods, and their locally oriented mythologies and folktales – represents a step forward into a new and rational post-Christian age? I can envisage the kinds of protest which such a question might engender. But I would counter them by maintaining that the sort of inane and naive mysticism of the scientistic rationalist who expects everyone to appreciate the beauty of the universe through the lens of a microscope or telescope and who eschews the idea of corporate worship stands too far removed from the visceral world of social reality to be itself worthy of serious consideration. The debate is between the different forms of corporate worship which society allows to exist – not, at least so far as I can see, with the possibility that we might one day be rid of this awkward beast, ‘religion’, altogether. For corporate worship will continue to happen in churches or in stadiums, in shops or in nightclubs.

Beautiful words from Henri De Lubac

‘Among philosophers there are some who do not want to see the problems of existence: witness a whole genealogical tree of rationalists. There are some who simply declare such problems to be already solved; such is the whole spiritual family that has a so-called ‘mystical’ tendency. Then there are some who do not want to have any solutions for them; such are many agnostics and also numerous existentialists who make this decision as a matter of principle. There are some who want to solve these problems only with the tools of reason. And there are some who, out of sheer despair of reason, blithely impute to it what they take to be faith. Finally, there are some who see and admit that what is involved here is more than just great problems. With them reason can do its proper work; but from the bottom of their hearts the cry always explodes: ‘I stretch out my arms to my deliverer’.

I don't think he wrote anything which strikes home as truly as this passage from his Paradoxes of Faith. The sense of stretching one's arms out to one's deliverer from the bottom of one's heart is the sense which, for me above all, captures the essence of the Christian yearning for God which needs to be seen at the root of - and in spite of - all attempts at philosophical or anti-theological 'systematizing'.

Schopenhaurian Pessimism

I sometimes wonder how other people cope with bouts of depressing Schopenhaurian pessimism. It’s not easy to bring this sort of stuff up in casual conversation. It’s even less easy to experience. But for my own therapeutic purposes, I’m going to point here to a few fundamentals of the condition I’m referring to. In the first place, I identified it with Schopenhauer because he was both a cosmic pessimist and a man who had high regard for the ‘will’, which I would narrow here to simply ‘my human will’. Like many Christian theologians and mystics – including, I’d venture, both Jesus himself and St. Paul – Schopenhauer came to the verdict that individual wills need to realise their true position within a wider totality of (cosmic) Will. Not an easy thing to do, we can safely say, if even Jesus found himself struggling to do it – recall his diligent praying and conversation with God before his renewed assurance to carry out his purpose (‘not my will, but thine’) was attained. Whereas the Will of Jesus’ father had as its end goodness/good – we must surely think so?! – the Will of Schopenhauer’s universe is a malevolent beast which runs ‘the show’ without recourse to any higher principle than the perpetration of evil, pure and cynical. Or at least that’s the rather scary conclusion I understand the old fellow to have come to. An interesting thing about this picture is that it links a – or even the – central analytical category of academic psychology, the Will, with a theological disposition. Of course, many philosophers have done precisely this, and in other ways, but it’s worth noting all the same that Schopenhauer makes this connection because he makes it more directly than most (as, of course, did Nietzsche).

The sense that it is appropriate to join Schopenhauer arises, I think, from the sense that Christianity’s own ways of coping with the questions at stake are found wanting by comparison. The sense, for example, that St. Paul’s realisation of his wretchedness, of the sorry and profound limitedness of his own will-power, does something apart from testify to us of our persistent and unending failure to live up to (or even fully to recognise) what we know to be true and good. What this wretchedness can instead speak of, perhaps, is a worldview which would find even unChristian Manichaeism optimistic: a dark, dark, evil place in which souls are interred, and in which they are blind even to the extent that they cannot so much as recognise what is truly good in order to feel deficient in relation to it. Whereas Paul can feel himself at least to ‘know’ good, albeit somewhat inexactly, any such knowledge in the Schopenhaurian universe would be mere delusion: true ‘goodness’ is not just unattainable, as Paul felt it to be: it is non-existent. In the darkness which instead predominates, all that is is evil, or, at least, we cannot be sure that it is not. In this world, it is St. Paul’s mistaken sense of truth, and not just his anguish, which testifies to his fraught, failed humanness which exists only in the context of gloom, gloom, gloom.

What might speak to us in this darkness to communicate the presence of truth, of good or goodness, of beauty and love, in such a way that we can feel confident to identify them? Schopenhauer answers ‘nothing’, as does the depressing pessimism I have named after him. Christianity answers ‘the body of Christ’ in its relation to his people, the people of ‘Israel’. And in reality, this answer ought to be recognised, I think, as something of a ‘shot in the dark’ – and I mean here the important double sense of this phrase, in its denoting a ‘shot of light’ as well as its more usual meaning of ‘a high stakes gamble’. This ‘shot’ is, perhaps, something – and, it might be admitted – something precious indeed in an often dismal, cruel, arbitrary world.

The best therapy I can think of for the Schopenhaurian affliction is of the simplest sort. It is to take an ever higher view of all in the universe which we can feel passionately to be beautiful, true, good, just and right. The key thing here is that the degree of our passion must depend upon the extent to which these characteristics can be thought truly to lie together in any given belief or practice. Which, I suppose, means I am saying that something will be all the more ‘just’ only if it is all the more true, all the more good, all the more right, all the more beautiful. And I am saying the same by extension of all of the concepts just mentioned in their relations to one another. The concepts are best regarded as working together, rather than in isolation, I think. The idea here is that they might serve mutually to strengthen one another and to move towards a harmony of relations, so that we have no justice which is not right and true and good. What ‘justice’ would it be if it were not these, after all?

It is, in any case, to the extent that these phenomena can be thought to strengthen one another in an ever progressing unity that they can (perhaps) more effectively combat the threat of Schopenhaurian affliction, when it comes around – and it will continue to come around, I suspect, until their unification is full and complete. If, moreover, true love is characterised by the total and complete and full unity of these phenomena, then it is right for the Christian to speak of his longing for the eventual, complete realisation of true love. And he must be emboldened to hope for the truth of his gospel – namely, that this true love has already been made known to him as a ‘shot in the dark’, during the course of its being made complete. And this, finally, brings me back to something I said right at the beginning: that it is not easy talking with other people about one’s bouts of Schopenhaurian pessimism. I think, though, that when it seems appropriate, it is necessary to try. For pessimism struggles to remain pessimistic, perhaps, if it can open itself in communication. For if communication in its very nature implies the presumption that the apprehension of greater truths is possible through its agency, then one can perhaps hope that along with the greater truths it might yield may come also greater justice, greater beauty and greater good. One can only but hope. I wonder what Schopenhauer would say.

Dawkinsian Philosophy

Richard Dawkins is a scientist, a scientist who is better qualified than any 'theologian' - so he says - to unlock 'the truth' about the universe. When it comes to 'philosophers', as opposed to 'theologians', he's not quite so dismissive. The views of 'philosophers' are deferred to in Dawkins' recent book, The God Delusion - for example, the (atheistic) philosophers A.C. Grayling and Daniel Dennett. These are authorities whose arguments Dawkins feels he can rely upon. Richard Swinburne, for example, is classed as a 'theologian' and criticised as a representative of 'theology', as is Keith Ward, and, from the more distant past, Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm and others.

Dawkinsian 'philosophers' have to be atheists, and his 'theologians' have to be theists. There have certainly been many theistic philosophers, however, and it's pretty clear (at least to me) that many of the 'theologians' Dawkins scorns are in fact as 'philosophical' as the atheists he calls 'philosophers'. Meanwhile, there have been many atheistic theologians. What, after all, is 'theology'? A minimal definition would be that it is 'God-talk' or 'reasoning about God' and is done by theists and atheists alike. So, according to this definition, Dawkins is a theologian too, although, perhaps, he is a theologian who disagrees with the views of other theologians who hold different opinions. What's certain is that most theologians try to be 'philosophical' - and claim to be thinking 'philosophically' in their theology to greater or lesser extents.

The rhetorical tactic of dressing wolves in sheep's clothing - deferring to people whose arguments are deemed attractive as 'philosophers' and dismissing those whose arguments are deemed unattractive as 'theologians' - is not obviously a charitable one. And I do believe it is a consciously adopted rhetorical tactic. It shows Dawkins neglecting the 'principle of charity' in argument - and this isn't the only example of his doing so. How, though, does flouting this principle, which might be thought to constitute an important building block in any 'Reasoned Discourse' (a nice idea and his own darling), contribute to the advancement of his own case in rational terms? It surely doesn't (unless the sophists had it right), but it certainly makes for a decent put-down - and, hence, for a decent claim to power over those who can't detect the spin in his rhetoric. I have to say, in fairness to Dawkins, that I'd rather inhabit a world in which his argumentative assumptions - rather than those of young earth creationists - call the rhetorical shots. Still, it'd be nice if neither were being deployed: a hollow dream, I know.