Religion is a very public matter
Eric MacDonald made a comment that needs to be on the main page:
In their little piece on civility, where Barbara Forrest is quoted as saying “Be nice”, Mooney and Kirshenbaum say this:
Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world.
This is false. Religion is not a very private matter. It is a very public matter, and it is increasingly more and more public. How people make sense of the world, religiously, almost always seeks to impose itself on others.
Religion does not respect boundaries. For a long time it was thought that religion had retreated to the private sphere, but it had not. Religious priorities were still reflected in law and social custom, but as soon as these came to be questioned, and in many cases overturned, religions began, once again, to strive to re-establish the religious ‘foundations’ of the culture. The introduction of an unreconstructed Islam into jurisdictions traditionally dominated by Christianity has led to renewed attempts to reassert Christian dominance.
The same thing is happening with respect to science. It is astonishing and disturbing to see someone with the apparent stature (in the scientific community) of Francis Collins making childish arguments for the consistency of science and (what turns out to be a gasp-makingly conservative form of) Christianity. This should be seen as a very deep cultural crisis. By all means tell religious yarns if you are afraid of the dark, but don’t bring them into scientific contexts, as though they had anything of value to offer. They don’t. In fact, what they offer, as Jerry Coyne points out, is only a blurring of boundaries.
Religion does not respect boundaries. Like any other form of monolithism religion is quite prepared to mix private and public, empiricism with superstition, law with personal choice. If M&K don’t understand this, then they do not understand religion and its dangers. It is a danger to anything that requires critical thinking. There is no place for humility or even etiquette here, whether or not science can or cannot prove a negative. What science can and should say is that it has no need of this hypothesis. In fact, I would hazard the guess that if there is a problem about scientific literacy, this is related to the fact that, for many, religion provides the illusion of knowing already. Making it clear that religion is something private – as private as poetry and considerably less helpful – and that the only reliable ways of knowing involve critical rationality and empirical evidence, might help to separate things that, in public discourse, are too often conflated.
Gould was wrong about NOMA, but he had the right idea. Religion needs to be put in its place. It has no relation to science whatsoever, and, despite its claims to the contrary, no special moral authority. Once this is clearly understood, the religious are free to tell each other stories, if it helps them get through the night. They may even imagine, in private, that they are talking about real things, but there is no reason for others to believe this, and lots of reasons why others should insist, and insist again, that religions must know their limits, and that they should not be taken seriously when they try to speak with a public voice.
Bravo, Mr. McDonald. Occasionally a comment is sufficiently thoughtful and eloquent be highlighted above the fold, and this is one.
Great comment.
Ha! I beat you, OB. My most recent blog entry is devoted to Eric’s comment.
Excellent observations.
I would add that the claim that “Religion is a private matter” actually contradicts the relevant science on the issue. Anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists who study the role of religion in various human society’s would be a little befuddled by such a claim. Religion is very much a social thing. Pretty much the only forms of religion that I can think of which are truly private are esoteric, meditating monks and intellectual deists. Most other forms of religion are very public and social.
Damn, Russell! Beaten again!
:- )
It is absurd how so many defenders of religion speak ex nihilo about the true nature of religion. For what this amounts to is a claim that those who do not believe or practice religion in this way are not adherents to the TRUE religion. This has been the stuff of theological dispute for centuries, and it never gets resolved. Gould made this mistake with NOMA, M&K with their characterizations of religion, and we can add to this list the Bungletons.
What believers actually believe is not a theological assertion, but the subject of empirical inquiry. Tim Lahaye’s Left Behind series has sold 65 million books, filled with the most crude and vulgar theology available. I’ve heard it said that if Christian bestsellers were allowed on the New York Times bestseller list, there would be nothing else on this list, and nearly all of these offer a similarly crude theology, an interventionist anthropomorphic God intimately involved in your daily affairs. The fastest growing churches in America preach the Gospel of Prosperity, a magical system for getting rich. And the canary in the coalmine is belief in evolution, which has only one ideological opponent, the creationist God. As religious belief rises, belief in evolution falls. So how sophisticated are the theological views of the average believer?
How many would ever have heard of Alistair McGrath but for The God Delusion? Would newspapers now be clamoring for opinions of the Bungletons on the matter were it not for the four horsemen? All of the fleas owe, at the very least, a profound debt of thanks to Dawkins et al for their full dance cards. Were it not for the four horsemen, a host of journalistic hacks would not now be scrambling to their dictionaries for the meaning of apophatic. Not that any of its proponents understand it either; from their writings, they appear to know the wishes, desires, intents, plans, wishes, joys, sorrows, and disgruntlements of God to an extent that few would claim of anyone, including themselves.
What M&K and all the Bungletons will not admit is that so called enlightened theology does not find a demand because of clever theologians, but because believers are so embarrassed by the blatantly obvious foolishness of their beliefs, pointed out by secularists and atheists, that they seek a more rational alternative. The new atheists aren’t new at all, just a return to the frank debate that was the status quo before postmodernism and multiculturalism gummed up the works by insisting that we respect everybody’s feelings. The one thing that has changed in the past thirty years is that science, particularly evolutionary psychology, has begun to discover the reasons for belief. In the absence of evidence for a belief, all that need be explained is the belief itself. We’ve made good progress on the subject, and I doubt the apologists are ready for this.
I must admit (dropping in a little late to the party, I know), I’ve got *no bloody clue* who half these people are, or why they’re supposedly (or hold themselves to be) so important?
So I went and read their (ludicrous and self-aggrandising, but what else were they going to be?) blogs, I’ve (shudders at the memory) subjected myself to trawling through the midden-heap of “Comment Is Free”, and I’m thoroughly fed-up with the whole “oh but all the people I know believe this really clever and nebulous faith that’s incredibly uplifting and brilliant, and aren’t Richard Dawkins and his silly friends so awfully beastly and rude?”, or indeed the “but liberal supernaturalists are all lovely, and kind to small rabbits, so we must gaze on their sparkly metaphysical beliefs and never, ever criticise them because it’s terribly unfair and they might not invite us to their houses on Thanksgiving…” drivel.
But seriously, are we not, perhaps, giving them a little too much attention?
Ok, so in some cases we’re talking about “intellectuals” who’ve otherwise appeared to be interesting or ‘useful’ in their analyses…well…umm…so what?
Ultimately, they aren’t the problem. Nor are they part of the solution, their heads are so firmly jammed up their smug, rhetorical bahookies.
The real issues are caused by the everyday, bigoted, absolutistic followers of faiths – might we perhaps leave the Guardianistas and their ilk to their rapidly-collapsing (circulation going through the floor last time I checked) existential bubble, please?
Butterflies & Wheels just seems to be getting a little choked up with this stuff, that’s all…?
Did the author of Jesus and Mo read this?
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2009/07/30/yours/
Yeah I think so, plus other related stuff. Author is a fan of B&W.
Andy…sure, I could. But sometimes things take off from other things, and that’s how it goes. I can’t please everyone, so I just write about what grabs my attention at the moment.
I like seeing this stuff about all those who do articles in MSM outlets. I certainly don’t follow more than a small part of it either at B&W or at the original site, but for me it’s valuable to have much of it all in one place.
Eric Macdonald’s comment is very interesting. I don’t recall seeing before the point that for many, religion may be a substitute for actual knowledge about the world (and may therefore be an important factor in scientific illiteracy as well as being
an obstacle to, for instance, better public policy).
See? Displease some, please others – so I might as well just do what interests me, and readers can skim and select and skip, and all will be well.
Making it clear that religion is something private – as private as poetry and considerably less helpful – and that the only reliable ways of knowing involve critical rationality and empirical evidence, might help to separate things that, in public discourse, are too often conflated.
Well, yes.
What baffles me about the “religion is private” people is that they don’t seem to realize that’s a normative claim, not a descriptive one. Religion should be a private matter but there is a large number of religious people who don’t want it to be, and that’s the problem.
I really don’t see any atheists picking on liberal religious church-state separationists who are quietly going to church and otherwise minding their own business, unless they decide to write books or something, in which case their arguments become fair game.