Yes Yes and Black is White and Gray is Red
John Gray is naughty. He’s not Leon Wieseltier, he’s not Steve Fuller, but he’s doing the same strawmannish kind of arguing. Why do people do that? It’s odd. Why do they attack things people don’t claim? If the claims haven’t been made, what is the point of attacking them? I mean, what do they get out of it? What is their aim? Wouldn’t you think the point would be to say what is wrong with what the person did actually say, so as to alert readers to that and persuade them of what’s wrong with it? What’s the point of saying what is wrong with things the person didn’t say? It just seems like a waste of time and effort.
Typically, philosophers take it for granted that religions are systems of belief, and condemn them for failing to meet standards of proof that are applied in other areas of human life, above all in science.
That’s just wrong, and crudely wrong. It’s not a matter of ‘standards of proof,’ it’s a matter of evidence. Gray must know that; it’s very basic. So why does he get it wrong? What’s the point? And philosophers don’t typically take it for granted that religions are systems of belief, they typically point out that that is what they are, giving evidence (not proof, evidence) to show that that is true. So right from the start we have Gray misdescribing two central issues. That doesn’t bode well.
One cannot make a sharp distinction between natural processes and supernatural agents unless one presupposes a view of the world something like that presented in the biblical creation story, and the distinction is not found in most of the world’s religions. For example, in animism – which must rank as the oldest and most universal religion – spirits are seen as part of the natural world.
Huh? Why can’t one presuppose a view of the world not at all like that presented in the biblical creation story, and not see ‘spirits’ as part of the natural world because there is no evidence for them?
More fundamentally, it is a mistake to assume that belief is the core of religion. This may seem self-evident to many philosophers, but in fact belief is not very important in most religions…For the majority of humankind, religion has always been about practice rather than belief. In fixating on the belief-content of religion, Dennett emulates Christianity at its most rationalistic and dogmatic.
Well, I’m sorry, but I just don’t ‘believe’ that. I can believe that religion has always been about practice as well as belief, but not rather than. Not around these here monotheistic parts, anyway – and monotheism does take in a fair bit of the planet. Godbotherers do have beliefs about that god. Gray should ask some one of these days.
Wolpert interprets religion as a type of adaptive behaviour in which our beliefs are shaped by our practical needs. Like Dennett, he seems ignorant of the vast range of religious traditions in which belief is peripheral. Again, he thinks of religion as having to do with supernatural phenomena, writing naively: “Religion is concerned with the supernatural, and this involves forces and causes beyond our normal experience of nature.”
Naïvely. What planet does Gray live on? I’d be quite happy to live there too, it sounds much safer than this one, but I have no idea where it is. (Naïve of me, no doubt.)
[I]t is not supernatural belief that is hard-wired in humans: it is the need for myth, and it fuels secular belief as much as traditional religion…Myths are not primitive scientific theories that belong in the infancy of the species. They are symbolic narratives that give meaning to the lives of those who accept them. The chief difference between religious and secular believers is that, while the former have long known their myths to be extremely questionable, the latter imagine their own to be literally true.
Oh, come on. The Iliad is a symbolic narrative that gives meaning, so is Hamlet, so is Wuthering Heights. Religion is something else, and the people who ‘accept’ religion – and there are a good few of them around – do not in the least know their myths to be extremely questionable, which is why they’re always whanging the rest of us over the head with them. This whole silly trope ‘religion is myth is narrative is questionable and tentative and not believed and it is atheism or ‘secular belief’ that is the real religion and that is truly certain and dogmatic and believed without question’ – is false, and endlessly triumphantly smugly recycled as if it were both true and original. How irritating it is. I said Gray isn’t Wieseltier or Fuller, but he does border on arguing in their style here. Very tiresome.
Hi, very nice hatchet job on John Gray – he has it coming. He is himself the Great Pontificator who is beyond evidence and proof. However, it’s too late in the evening for me to provide evidence and proof that he is, in fact, the Great Pontificator. But he is. Trust me – I’ve read several of his pseudo-polymath books. Gray is the ultimate armchair philosophe who is simply too lazy to check the validity of the plethora of assertions with which he peppers his writings. The reason he often sounds clueless is that he is, in fact, clueless. Some day I’ll come up with the evidence and prove it.
I liked in particular this pretentious piece of junk:
The chief difference between religious and secular believers is that, while the former have long known their myths to be extremely questionable, the latter imagine their own to be literally true.
This is a rerun of the old ‘credo quia absurdum est’ quote of the millenium:
“We know that we believe, whereas they believe that they know.”
That may well apply to sophisticated high-church types a la John Henry Newman or Graham Greene – approximately 0.01% of all believers. It is also true that many secularists (Nazis, Communists) did believe that they knew so much that they were entitled to slaughter all those who didn’t believe what they believed. We know that, Herr Professor Gray. We’ve actually heard about such secularist abominations as the Holocaust and the Gulag, both of which are the inevitable outcome of Darwinism and those who believe the ‘myth’ of evolution to be literally true.[SARCASM OFF]
But – and I’m preaching to the gallery – how many Muslims, Hindus or born-agains “have long known their myths to be extremely questionable”?
Honest, is Gray really suggesting that devout believers don’t consider their holy books to be “literally true”?
Yes, he is. Deep down they’re all sceptics, aren’t they?
Even while they sharpen their knives to cut our throats.
Cathal: We agree on something! (Bravo!)
I think people like Gray are fundamentally condescending toward the religious. They don’t listen to what the religious say, or observe what they do.
Gray’s is a bullshit argument on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start. Are we supposed to be *happy* that religious leaders want to structure the world in accordance with beliefs that they, allegedly, don’t even think are *true*? My understanding of the old ‘credo’ tag was that it indicated the mysteries of God were beyond human comprehension, not that ‘we made it all up as we went along, nyaah, nyaah! Silly old secularists for taking us seriously, we were just kidding when we burned all those heretics…’
Stupid, stupid man.
But while Dennett keeps banging on about being a ‘bright’ I’m happy for him to be attacked by whomever…
Having gotten my own copy of the book since writing that last comment, I may add that the people who are saying that about Dennett obviously haven’t read the book itself, where he refers to “the term that had been chosen [not by me]: bright…”
“Gray is basically pragmatist. He says that religion is useful to society, providing values, etc. Therefore we believe.”
Yes but that’s not what he in fact says in the article in question. He says a whole lot more than that, and the more is very strawmanny stuff. Very Wieseltiery.
It’s perfectly possible to make that kind of pragmatic or utilitarian argument about religion without telling silly whoppers about the opposition.
‘Religion is useful for keeping the common herd down’… That’s the kind of view that gave Voltairians a bad name in the C18 — make people believe because they’re too stupid to think, while we superior folks know, and do, differently…
Cicero and Polybius said exactly the same thing. It was conventional wisdom. Religion keeps the proles in line.
Are not most of the current Neocon cabal in the US followers of Strauss? You can’t tell me Dick Cheney is a devout, Bible-beleiving fundamentalist.