A Mingled Yarn
Norm has commented on my comment on his comment on why not mention the good of religion as well as the bad. So I want to see what I think about what he thinks.
First the more minor, contingent issue – my claim that because there is a lot of unmixed criticism of atheism (and rationality, science, secularism) around, people like me don’t always feel like giving mixed criticism back.
I see no reason why opposition to religion, forthright, outspoken opposition to it, cannot, as with anything else, recognize the virtues in what it opposes if there are any.
No, nor do I. It can. But I’m not convinced that it always ought to. I can see plenty of reasons for doing so (tactical, epistemic, moral), but I can also see reasons (same kinds) for not doing so. Sometimes strong, non-balanced comment can shake up people’s thinking – or it can just entrench it further. Sometimes I, for one, feel like going the attempted shake-up route, rather than the mollification route.
But the less minor point is the more interesting to both of us, I think.
But Ophelia’s basic strategy of argument is flawed. In a quasi-Hegelian move, she disallows application of the usual resources of analysis – of analytical discrimination – where religion is concerned. It’s all just a unity, and because something very bad is at the heart of this unity, everything else in it must be bad too, as if poisoned, transmuted, by the badness.
A quasi-Hegelian move? Moi? Surely not! On account of how I wouldn’t recognize one if it bit me. No, but seriously, that’s not what I’m saying, and if it came out that way, I said it badly. I don’t think religion is all just a unity, and it’s not a matter of poisoning, as in contamination. It’s not that the bad bits kind of leak into the good bits, making them dirty or polluted. (Is it? Hmm. Yes, maybe, in a way. I probably do feel that way about it. I do have a visceral dislike of having religion forced on me. But I don’t think what I’m saying depends on that – I think what I’m saying is something slightly different.) It’s that I don’t see how to have the good parts without subscribing to the supernatural truth claims, so I don’t see how to have the good parts without subscribing to (what one takes to be) a lie. It’s not a matter of contamination but one of what is more important. As I said – I think the cost is too high. That’s not pollution, I don’t think, it’s a matter of competing goods.
Joe is a good friend: generous, loyal, funny, a great conversationalist. But he has a ferocious temper, is dishonest in business and in his sexual relationships, is vain and neglectful of his old mother. Must we say that he is all bad, then, because he has these bad qualities, and his other, better qualities, are all mixed in with the worse ones as part of the single personality?
No, but that’s not the right analogy for what I’m saying. Valuing or not valuing a particular person is one thing, and valuing or not valuing religion qua religion is another. I realize some people can take the good of religion and ignore the bad – some people go to church just for the music and community, without believing a word of it. My point is just that other people can’t, or don’t want to, and that there is a reason (a goodenough reason, I think) for that.
There are radicals of one kind and another who can see some of the insights in conservative thought, anti-socialist liberals and/or Weberians who recognize some theoretical strengths within Marxism, Marxists who identify moral and political resources as well as grave deficiencies in classical liberalism. All this is just par for the course. But by her quasi-Hegelian, anti-analytical move, Ophelia would forbid us to approach religious belief in the same way. The move is artificial and arbitrary. You can’t show that religion is all bad simply by focusing on what is bad about it.
But that’s because I take religion to be a different kind of thing. (And I think I’m right, too. If it weren’t a different kind of thing, would it get the special demands for respect and deference, the calls not to ‘offend’ it, that we’re always noticing? Isn’t it generally agreed that religion is a special case of some sort?) Liberals and Weberians don’t base their claims on the existence of a supernatural deity. So I don’t think my move is arbitrary, because the supernatural deity aspect of religion is precisely the stumbling block.
In Warsaw in 1943, a Polish Catholic risks her life to save an endangered Jew. She does so because she has been taught from childhood that all people are the children of God and it is a sin to take innocent life. How, in the face of that – which has happened plenty, and in many other historical variants as well – can one say there has been no good in religion, or that this good is merely apparent because of what it is mixed together with? I could give more than this, but it is enough. Just two things: that religious believers have often been motivated by their beliefs to act in beneficent, caring, selfless, heroic ways; and that there are universalist variants of religious belief which, in historical context, have marked a significant progress for humankind…
But do we know that it was the Catholicism, or the children of God teaching, that made the difference? Do we know that an atheist couldn’t and wouldn’t have had the same thought and the same motivation? Maybe we do, maybe we do – maybe there is some way to know this, and there are studies that back it up. But as of this moment, I’m not convinced that I do know that. I can see that it could be true – but I can also see that it could be untrue. Counterfactually, if the Polish Catholic had been taught from childhood that all people are people even as she is and it is bad and wrong to murder people – is it possible to know that that would not have motivated her to act as she did? And do we really want to give religion the credit for qualities and actions that come from somewhere else – from personal courage, generosity, kindness, for instance? Maybe the Polish Catholic acted the way she did because she was a good human being.
But my point isn’t to deny the existence of good in religion, or to say that it is all bad, it is simply to say that the price is too high.
I have no problem in accepting that Polish Catholics risked their lives to save Jewish children in 1943 Warsaw and that some (or even all of them; it doesn’t affect what I’m saying) did so explicitly because they thought such an act to be mandated by their religious beliefs. I would, however, apart from wondering, as you did, how many of them might have done it even without those specific beliefs, like to keep in mind the question of what role that very same set of beliefs played in making it unnecessary to explain why there was anything noteworthy about being a Jewish child in Warsaw in 1943.
There is another way of looking at the whole question. One could ask “is my way of looking at the good and bad in religion consistent with the way I look at good and bad in other areas?” But one could also ask “do I have a consistent way of approaching things I have reason to suppose are not true? Or do I give priority to the bad in some of them while giving priority to the good when considering others?”
Stewart,
excellent point; ‘keep in mind the question of what role that very same set of beliefs played in making it unnecessary to explain why there was anything noteworthy about being a Jewish child in Warsaw in 1943.’
Like most of us here, I have huge respect for Norm, but I would disagree with his analogy ‘Must we say that he is all bad, then, because he has these bad qualities, and his other, better qualities, are all mixed in with the worse ones as part of the single personality? In fact, we don’t do that – even when the bad qualities significantly outweigh the good ones. ‘
On an earlier post I made a brief, flippant (late night) comment which suggested that just because only 10% of the Kool Aid was cyanide we should think of the other 90% and down it. Some qualities do damn a man, regardless of his charm or conversational abilities. Similarly, some qualities do damn an ideology, for all it’s benefits. Surely being untrue is one?
Don,
Good variation on the same idea. Taken a millimeter further (you almost said it), truth is a desirable quality (why? go write a book on it, as I think OB just has) and there are ideologies out there with many, many followers that lack it – entirely. If truth is important (another book – or the same one) is its absence in a belief system not a fundamental flaw, even a disqualifying one, whatever benefits may be obtained by deliberately ignoring the fact?
Yes, OB just has, along with JS, who has made a beautiful page for it, with extracts. What a good opportunity for me to mention it.
What other certainties,apart from the fact that a theist basically is no different from a believer in a teapot circling Mars,do the enlightened hold?Is the theist,for example, weak in the head to such an extent that a would-be professor of philosophy who is a theist whose writings defend such a belief be automatically excluded from interview in preference to those whose writings show theism to be untrue.Are theists thick,deficient intellectually or just morally inferior?
“It’s that I don’t see how to have the good parts without subscribing to the supernatural truth claims, so I don’t see how to have the good parts without subscribing to (what one takes to be) a lie.”
There is a view, put to me by H.E.Baber, that people ‘shop’ for religion to match their existing ethical and aesthetic views and to facilitate their preferred behaviours. If Norm is taking that view then of course one can have the good parts without subscribing to a lie, because the good parts are not contingent upon the lie. If one believes that the ‘good parts’ are contingent upon the lie, then OB is correct.
There are a host of reasons why people behave as they do, and in my view the part played by religion varies greatly. The ‘shopping’ argument only works in societies where there is a choice of religions, or where religion is tolerant to a variety of interpretations. It seems to me unreasonable to make blanket claims about the synthetic aspects of religion, but entirely reasonable to reject the proposition that one could know of the supernatural.
Would Norm’s analogy be better if we said Joe was a good conversationalist *because* he had entertaining stories about his ferocious temper, dishonest business dealings etc? Are features of religion divisible or are they inter-dependent?
That is indeed the question. It seems to me that some of the features of religion, though not all, are interdependent – that the supernatural claims are the source of many of the goods people attribute to religion. It is consoling because etc, motivating because etc. The ‘because’ is why the features are (if they are) interdependent.
“In Warsaw in 1943, a Polish Catholic risks her life to save an endangered Jew. She does so because she has been taught from childhood that all people are the children of God.”
I am married to a woman of Polish extraction. Both her parents were Polish and she was brought up a Catholic (now a semi-lapsed one). Having been brought up as a Polish Roman Catholic, she admits to anti-semiticism, because this is what the Polish Roman Catholic tradition inculcated. I should add that she has had jewish friends whilst we lived in London and she made sure that our younger daughter was named Rebekah (note the spelling), to the shock of some of her relatives. The anti-semiticism is something that she is aware of and does not manifest itself.
To turn back to Norm’s example, I do not deny that “a Polish Catholic risked her life to save an endangered Jew” and am sure it happened on many occasions, but “she did so because she has been taught from childhood that all people are the children of God” just doesn’t ring true. She did so despite her religion, because of, perhaps, some common feeling with someone of a different background.
‘but “she did so because she has been taught from childhood that all people are the children of God” just doesn’t ring true.’
Yes, that’s what I’m getting at. I thought of but didn’t mention the fact that that’s not how it worked for most Polish Catholics. (There’s an interesting bit in a Margaret Drabble novel where a character is reading a novel that includes a moving passage about a compassionate Polish non-Jew (or was it several?) shielding a Jew, and the character is moved by it but also self-mockingly notes even while being moved that that’s not how things mostly went in WWII Poland.) Given the fact that that was a very minority reaction, it’s not clear why the religion should be the cause rather than the character of the particular person. It could be argued that she had a better understanding of her religion than her compatriots – but surely that is still rooted in something about her, rather than in the religion.
Would Norm’s Joe analogy work better if Joe were fictional, say a cartoon character, related to by many as if he were real? And his good/bad traits adduced as arguments for accepting or rejecting his existence as a fact of life?
I agree that Norm misses the main point here (I feel bad about saying that, though, since he’s a shining light in many other topics.)
The catholic woman may well have risked her life to save a jew because of her religious beliefs, but these beliefs would be used by others to justify killing the jew (not in the case of the Nazis, obviously, but by other religions etc.) They both come from the same root of unjustified ‘faith’, it’s just that the interpretations are different.
When the good and bad of religion are so inextricably linked, surely it’s impossible to logically support the ‘good’ behaviour while condemning the ‘bad’.
Well, that’s very well said!
‘Perhaps where Ophelia and Norm disagree is that his approach to this seems more consequentialist whereas she seems more concerned to avoid breaching certain principles?’
That’s how it looks to me. I have real qualms about the consequentialist aspect – but I have qualms in the other direction too, and they seem to trump the first set.
I read an interesting article on Mill on religion the other day (but after I’d written ‘There is a Reason’), that discussed some consequentialist Utilitarian arguments of Mill’s in favour of religion. It sharpened my awareness that I’m not a Utilitarian.
It quotes Mill saying it is ‘perfectly conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable’ and adds ‘Utilitarian considerations would dictate that if the benefits of religion could not be obtained by other means, then, provided that religion does not result in more harm than good, it would be wrong to undermine it.’
(Allan Millar, ‘Mill on Religion,’ Camb. Companion to Mill)
That’s what the argument is about, all right. And I don’t buy the Utilitarian conclusion. Because – ? I suppose because I think the not-lying and not-submitting to lies, not acquiescing in lies, is in some way more important than ‘benefits’. Which is not a Utilitarian thing to think. I suppose I don’t believe in the concept of the useful lie – not at the official, public, general discourse level. Private fantasies are one thing, but public ones are quite another. I think.
As I understand it, Ophelia recognizes that there may be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ downstream effects of religion, but all are predicated upon one fundamental principle – faith – which she argues is of itself ‘bad’.
Faith (ie a ‘bad’) is thus epistatic upon all of the other effects: you cannot choose ‘only the good bits’ because no matter what else you reject about a given set of religious beliefs you must have faith by definition.
(FWIW, though, if we wish to maintain that the downstream ‘good’ elements of religion – such as charity – are not or may not be inherently connected with the religious belief itself, we should surely also make the same concession with regard to the ‘bad’ downstream elements. Maybe religion is to blame for Pat Robertson… but equally, maybe he would be just as evil and bug-guts crazy without it.)
One can’t really expect a believer to concede that his beliefs are not true. When we’re lucky, we get the concession that there is no empirical evidence for them, but usually with it, we get reminded that we can bring no evidence that there isn’t a god. To concede that the probability of a god existing is vanishingly small is something that believers don’t, as a rule, do. So only we, on this side, have the problem of whether lack of truth is sufficient to condemn religion/faith in spite of the benefits it can bring (which may or may not outweigh the evil, which is also there regardless of the absence or presence of truth).
Assistance from a philosopher! Very helpful, G.
“But if you give up on standards of reasoning which we adhere to in order to reach defensible* conclusions, if you leave the question of justification out of it entirely and just evaluate the conclusions independently, then you’ve left out the only thing that prevents those bad conclusions.”
Thwack of arrow hitting target.
Thunk of arrow missing target. There may be other standards of justification, and what is meant by defensible? Which standards of reasoning? Ockhams razor?
Bayes’ theorem? A combination of these? I guess I am espousing coherence, but it is very difficult to quantify the relative coherence of opposing positions. Perhaps G. or O.B might deconfuse me?
Other standards of justification? Like what? Local standards? Multicultural standards? Faith-based standards?
Don
Thanks for taking the question seriously.
It seems to me that the tenor of Ophelia’s argument which centres on the truth about religion,intellectually arrived at,and therefore necessarily exposing the falsehood of religious belief, implies that in the future a would-be candidate for a professorship in philosophy whose writings argue strongly against OB’s views,would on that basis alone,judged to be the intellectual inferior of someone holding OB’views.Indeed you imply as much when,to paraphrase, the long innings of theism with all its burnings,indoctrination etc is replaced by the coming centuries of sober dispassionate contempt for and analytical dismemberment of religion’s claims,as evidenced perfectly in OB’s attitude to theism.Would it not be odd that just as in the past atheists may have been disallowed from holding such posts,so in the future when reason alone holds sway theists will,to even matters up,be disallowed also.Discrimination?Not at all.”All theists are thick” will then have become an a priori truth like “all bachelors are unmarried”?
Geordie,
So – what are you arguing? That analysis of the truth-claims of religion which finds them to be not well warranted, will automatically and necessarily result in disqualification of all theists from jobs teaching philosophy? And, therefore – ? That such analysis should not be undertaken? Or what?
I have to tell you – I really hate this kind of thing. You seem to be playing some kind of ‘how dare you’ card. You seem to be claiming that I shouldn’t make an argument, because making an argument implies that someone who disagrees with it is “the intellectual inferior of someone holding OB’views.” You do realize that such a claim would mean that no one should ever make an argument about anything, right?
I really, really hate this kind of attempted moral blackmail. It’s cheap, it’s whiny, it’s passive-aggressive, and its implications are both ludicrous and disgusting.
What about if you leave aside good and bad simply in terms of moral action. What about art? Surely, religious belief – of different kinds – has been a motivation and inspiration for some of the greatest works of art (visual, musical etc)?
(To be clear, it plainly isn’t *required* for inspiration; and I don’t have religious belief. I’m worried by too narrow a consideration of what constitutes good and bad).
No,OB,not as you write”finds them to be not well warranted”.Rather, as the whole tenor of what you write on these matters implies”which shows them to anyone possessing even half a brain to be indisputably false”.Triumphalism and effortless superiority whether in or against religion always makes me queasy.Thomas Nagel,the philosopher, wrote very honestly from his angle about this syndrome.”I speak from experience,being strongly subject to this fear(of religion)myself.I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and naturally hope that I am right in my belief.It’s that I hope there is no God.I don’t want there to be a God.I don’t want the universe to be like that”.
I am reading John Cottingham’s little book,”The Spiritual Dimension;Religion,Philosophy and Human Value” at the moment.It is restrained and measured but,I suppose, damningly, to those who share Nagels outlook, sympathetic to the religious impulse.For myself I think it would be a sad day if, in the time to come no professor of philosophy,like Cottingham,could undertake such a project without falling foul of those who then people the philosophical ramparts with the heady mix of Nagels worldview and OB’s intellectual hubris.
Geordie,
That’s a bullshit argument, or excuse for an argument. You don’t get to brush aside what I actually say and breezily decide what ‘the whole tenor’ of what I write ‘implies’ – without a syllable of evidence. Still less do you get to derive from that handwaving maneuver, accusations of triumphalism and effortless superiority. If you want to accuse me of various thought-crimes, you can damn well offer some evidence, or shut up.
As a matter of fact, I quoted Thomas Nagel saying that recently myself. But it is possible both not to want the universe to be like that, and to find (at least some of) the arguments for a deity wanting.
And while we’re at it, what’s with the spaces? What’s with leaving most of the spaces out after punctuation? Don’t do that – it’s affected and irritating.
Intellectual hubris. For what? Pointing out the problems with relying on ‘faith’ as a way to find out the truth about the world? Why isn’t it intellectual hubris to think that the human mind is so powerful that it can find out the truth about the world by mere ‘faith’? Why isn’t it intellectual hubris to think that cheating and shortcuts are legitimate?
If you want to comment here, do it honestly. No handwaving about ‘tenor’ and ‘implies’. Put up or fuck off.
Oh OB, don’t lower the tone, there are so many other places on the web I can go to find people being told to eff off….
To get back to the original issue, which seemed to be why religious people do good things, I would point out that the motivation of Christians [and perhaps Muslims, and maybe others too] is the fear of Hellfire. I know the Anglican/Episcopalian communion has had a tendency in recent years to pretend that Hell doesn’t exist in their theology, but it very evidently still does for more ardent Protestants and Catholics [though I note the new Pope is not keen on limbo…]
Now, a person who believes that they will burn in Hell if they do evil can do good for many reasons [in the instance of a Pole sheltering a Jew, a simple impulse of human pity, for example], but the specifically religious reason for doing good is the need to not burn in Hell. Which is a] selfish, and b] absurd, since Hell doesn’t exist — for if it did, it would contain everyone, for everyone is damned by some other person’s conception of religious rectitude.
Show me someone who acts for what they see as the good of others, and also believes that what they are doing will send them to Hell [say, a woman who saved a child from being burnt as a witch], and then you might have an image of religously-inspired real courage and virtue — but it would be rather backhanded. As religious motivations stand, they can produce wonders of apparent self-sacrifice, but largely because the people concerned have been persuaded that their existence here and now is less important than their eternal life — and indeed, that material life should perhaps be actively despised. Thus there is no actual sacrifice at all, merely a bargain for a greater reward… Supposedly. Pie in the sky, of course, but there you go.
Dave, sorry, but every now and then the tone needs lowering (by me, that is, never by anyone else). And someone else emailed to express appreciation of the same post, before you commented. No accounting for tastes, is there!
I don’t think that’s right about the motivation though. It’s one motivation, for some Xians, but it’s not the only one. And Norm did specify that it was because she had been taught from childhood that all people are God’s children. Now – I think it’s hard to be sure that that is the real reason, rather than a way of describing a more basic conviction that all people deserve not to be slaughtered, which religious people and nonreligious people alike can have (and then proceed to describe differently). But I do think it’s a different motivation from fear of hell.
OB – isn’t there something a bit ‘mixed’ in your criticism of religion? If you’re not a utilitarian, what’s the point in arguing that religion ‘does more harm than good’ socially when that isn’t really your objection to it?
This criticism could also be used, perhaps more effectively, against the religious who claim stronger families, more stable societies, and the general restraint of the destructive side to human behaviour, in favour of religion – but that isn’t why they believe in God or go to church.
Oh yes, there’s plenty mixed. I don’t claim to be coherent. I’m not a complete non-utilitarian, at least I don’t think so. It’s just that when there’s a conflict, I don’t necessarily find utilitarianism the best way out of it.
If you don’t mind me suggesting so, I think you’re very far from being completely non-utilitarian. Your balance of harm argument (religion does more harm than good) is surely an essentially utilitarian one? I think you’re conflating two separate points: one can argue perfectly plausibly that religion historically has ’caused more harm than good’; one can do the same with your point about the absurdity of imputing merit to the activity of believing in something for which there is no evidence.
But I don’t think it follows to claim religion has been harmful historically *because* what is believed is false. The problem rather is when the believer insists that everyone else should be a replica of themselves. Not eating a ham sandwich or drinking alcohol because of one’s religious convictions is absolutely harmless; forbidding the sale of alcohol or pork even to those who don’t share your religious disposition is illiberal; and the public flogging of people because they have consumed alcohol shifts illiberalism into tyranny. These surely show that when calculating whether some historical phenomenon has ‘done more harm than good’ what one should consider is not the truth of the belief but whether and to what extentthis belief has been enforced. ‘Tis all about politics in other words – and belief per se does not require the exercise of power over anyone but oneself. The problem lies not with believing something for which there is no evidence but the notion that *any* belief should be compulsory – and this has not something that has been historically an exclusively religious phenomenon by any means.
No, I’m not claiming that religion has been harmful historically solely because what is believed is false. On the other hand, I do think the falsity is part of the reason. The falsity and/or the lack of foundation. I think that’s why people are so dogmatic about it: because they know it’s shaky – they know it’s ‘faith’ – so they insist all the harder. That can lead to tyranny and to violence – as in the 16th and 17th century wars of religion for example.
Another problem with the epistemic shakiness is that reliance on ‘faith’ displaced other kinds of inquiry, and made other kinds of thinking suspect. I take that to be harmful.
From the example you use, what evidence is there that those who insigated and participated in the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries knew their religion rested on shaky foundations? And what evidence is there that it was this that led to conflict?
Hmm – perhaps I should have said ‘suspect’ it’s shaky. Or ‘know or suspect’ it’s shaky. I think the situation in the 16th and 17th was more one of suspecting than knowing. Now I think it’s closer to knowing – knowing it’s shaky, not knowing it’s false. Knowing, that is, that it’s difficult to back it up. The alternative explanations and the mountains of evidence for them in the intervening centuries make the difference, I think.
One piece of evidence is the wars themselves. People in the 16th and 17th were well aware – they could hardly avoid it! – that they disagreed on fundamentals, and if they disagreed on those – what was any of it based on?
Another piece of evidence, to my mind, is the peculiar habit they had of anxiously querying people on their deathbeds, ‘Do you still believe? Do you still believe?’ and reacting with frenzied joy when the dying one said yes. I find that something of a giveaway.
The evidence that that is what led to conflict is simply that it was widely noted at the time that the wars were the product of fanatical belief – see Montaigne for example. I’m making the inference that the worry about shakiness–>fanaticism–>wars. It’s just an inference – I said ‘I think’.
The big bad wolf back again hopefully this time to lay out how I got to say what I did.
First point; the rational theist said in his balanced way all that needed to be said in opposition to what OB originally wrote.
Second point; it was much more the “rubbish”,”rubbish indeed”(from OB)about Keith Wards “God Chance and Necessity” that suggested to me a basic “intellectual hubris”.I notice that OB’s description of the book as “God is better than Science” has disappeared.
It needs to be said therefore that it was in fact a book commended by Mary Midgley.Which is not to say that it is right;merely that it is intellectually coherent.
I then contrasted the superior attitude evident in so many of the comments compared with what I took to be the balance of the rational theist.
There is one hell of a lot of anger among them that all those theists are being so easily duped.In similar fashion Brian Eno takes great issue today in the Independent with Howard Jacobson’s restrained critique of Dawkin’s programmes.When I first read Jacobson against Dawkins I thought how odd.Brian Eno has no need to worry at all. It was Jacobson after all who previously had said “he feared the spread of religious belief in the same way that he fears the spread of Sexual disease”.
There are similarly whole groups of people of influence who if they agree about anything,agree that the God thing is most certainly not for the intelligent.Justin Webb,Justin Cartwright,Ian Jacks,Christopher Hitchens,to name only those who come immediately to mind want that acknowledged and acted upon.
All of which led me to wonder about A J Ayer being succeeded in the 70’s by Michael Dummett,someone for whom religious language was meaningless by a successor who was a very orthodox RC.I wondered whether what was then unremarked would stop being so to the point where the absence of religious belief would become a necessity for a future would-be prof of philosophy.I leave the Big House,finally with this question:
Richard Dawkins is getting long in the tooth.When the time comes to replace him would it be possible for his replacement to be Kenneth Miller who is the main American opponent,as this weeks Horizon showed,of the concept of Intelligent Design.Or would the fact that he also is,I believe,an RC count against him.At what point does the vociferous atheism of the holder of an academic post become a requirement.
How many of those in the comments who are certain of the “illusion”of theism,finding themselves on a selection panel, could honestly say that that if one candidate for philosophy prof was a religious believer and the other was an OB,such knowledge would not affect their final choice.Strange is’nt it that the one whose impartiality I would most bet on,after reading his thoughts,would be the rational theist.
Lots of Love to you all.
“It needs to be said therefore that it was in fact a book commended by Mary Midgley.Which is not to say that it is right;merely that it is intellectually coherent.”
Ha! No it is not to say that. Take a look at our Articles page – scroll all the way down to the beginning…
And no, the comment about Keith Ward’s book has not disappeared, you must have overlooked it.
Why do you insist on doing that revolting thing with the spaces? It is more irritating than anything you say.
You’re not a big bad wolf, you’re a whiner.