Holes of various shapes
Dawkins is in good form in the Spectator:
In a recent interview, I imprudently said I was a “cultural Christian”, and I haven’t heard the end of it. I find myself unwillingly counted in the Great Christian Revival (translation, “We don’t actually believe that stuff ourselves, but we like it when other people do”) which is the subject of so much wishful thinking these days.
Of course I’m a cultural Christian. Always have been. Packed off to Anglican schools, I was confirmed when too young to know better. Large chunks of the English Hymnal were imprinted in my long-term memory, and duly pop out when I’m fooling around with my electronic clarinet. I know my way around the Bible, at least well enough to take an allusion when I encounter one. I love mediaeval cathedrals. I’ve never met a parson, of either sex, that I didn’t like. But none of that undermines my conviction that what they believe about the nature of reality is nonsense.
I too went to an Anglican school, which is odd since it was in New Jersey, but there you go. Mind you I don’t think it called itself Anglican (Episcopalian maybe?) but the tropes were there. I too still like some of those hymns.
An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which GK Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite but, for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect, if people give up Christianity?”
Heh. Hoisting themselves with their own petards, aren’t they. “What do you expect, if people give up one fantasy? They’re going to find a new fantasy!” So you’re saying theism is a fantasy; our point exactly.
Of course there are other kinds of fantasy, including ones that don’t rely on or demand actual belief. Novels, plays, movies – fiction, in short. If you’re getting the aches because you miss religion surely Middlemarch is a better substitute than trying to change sex.
The scientific reasons [for rejecting trans nonsense] are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. Like all religions it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body”.
Ah I like that – some kind of hovering inner self. Kat Grant should take some writing lessons from this fella.
Far from playing into the hands of these preachers, my colleagues and I are opposed to all faith creeds, all non-evidence-based belief systems. This includes traditional supernatural religions, but it also includes younger faith systems such as that in which a man literally becomes a woman (or a woman a man) by fiat. Or by legal decision (you could as well legally repeal the laws of thermodynamics so we can have perpetual motion machines).
How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.
What is God shaped like anyway? A starfish? A galaxy? An atom? A bowl of soup?
Updating to add a recent Pliny work:
I might be able to worship a starfish shaped god – it’s certainly a better shape than the current adult human male with long beard shape. But of course, I can’t believe in a starfish shaped god, either. It makes no more sense than the human male god.
I have a hole-shaped hole (figuratively speaking).
Dawkins, Pinker, and Coyne are in the top ten of intellectual influences on my life (Pinker less so recently, but the language books are fabulous), so I feel I’m in good company not falling for transient transmania.
If I feel I am compelled to quote you on this (and I almost certainly will), I promise to give you proper credit.
The excuse offered by Dawkins (confirmed when too young to know better) always brings out the most repulsive smugness in me as I steadfastly declined to be confirmed in the face of the conjunction of my mother’s insistence that I wasn’t refusing to be confirmed without first going to confirmation classes and my vicars’s blithe assumption that, because I was going to confirmation classes, I was going to be confirmed.
That was at the age of twelve, but my epiphany as an atheist was significantly earlier – triggered by noticing the inconsistency between Christ’s response to the Devil in the wilderness when challenged to cast himself down from the high place and the story of St Boniface and the first Christmas tree wherein he put
OdinThor to the test by cutting down his sacred oak. Even now I think it quite reasonable for a nine year old Liberal to wonder why divinities should not be subject to the self-exemption taboo.…I knew I should have done a Web first: substitute Thor for Odin. Smitten for smugness :-)
Iknklast – when I was a teenager I was briefly interested in pantheism (after reading about Baruch Spinoza and also reading the vaguely pantheistic natural writer Richard Jefferies). It seemed to make more sense, superficially, to worship the totality of the natural world – the oceans, the mountains, and the stars in the night sky – than some
anthropocentric old king or father-figure in the sky.
It also tied in with my favourite Margaret Atwood poem, “Resurrection” :
God is not the voice in the whirlwind,
God is the whirlwind,
At the last
judgement we will all be trees.
But eventually, I decided it was just being sentimental and arbitrary to worship the universe – you might as well worship your back garden, or the moon, or the European landmass.
As has often been said, it’s a hole-shaped God, not the other way around. The hole is the universal need for meaning and can take many shapes. Significance, of course, but also community and comfort, immortality and ideals.
It was strange watching atheists on atheist blogs dismiss prominent atheists defecting one after the other from their party line with the lament that these dissenters were rejecting atheism. Not that there was a schism or difference of opinion within the atheist community, but that they’d joined the religious. I do see Dawkins doing something similar here (“I’m not a fundamentalist, YOU’RE the fundamentalist!”) but the science guy isn’t talking about how debate is harming the vulnerable.
My text for today’s sermon is Matthew 5:28, King James Version: “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
Now either Yeshua bar Joseph (aka Jesus Christ) was speaking there from experience, in which case he was hoist on his own petard, or he was talking straight off the top of his head, without the slightest hint of an understanding of what he was talking about, in which case he was a total galah; ie a clown and a fool. Take your pick.
Of course, the theologians have a rejoinder: that Christ, being at one with God the Father, was in on the whole creation deal from the very beginning, and was an inseparable part of the Holy Intelligence behind intelligent design. However, biologists like Dawkins might point out there that animals of both sexes display sexual attraction; usually to others of the opposite sex, but sometimes otherwise. That means that animals are prone to sin, and in need of the redemption that any number of preachers will affirm, and explain how to get.
This theological revelation came to me as a somewhat randy and lustful teenager, and a newly minted communicant of the local Anglican Church, as I watched a cow walking up and down a barbed wire fence and trying to get closer to a randy young bull on the other side, who finished up in his lust demolishing the wooden gate in order to join her (in at least two senses of the word) and have his way with her.
That was a revelation to me somewhat analogous to St Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus. And it was downhill all the way from there.
Alan @ 4 – I too avoided any potential ceremonies or inductions or whatevers – not because I made intelligent arguments but just because I passively resisted. I think I remember that my mother occasionally said it was time to get me confirmed or whatever, and that I thought it sounded way too much like school only worse – anyway nobody ever got around to it. Yay.
Mike B,
The Language Instinct was a very well-written travesty. I don’t really have the time or inclination right now to go into my reasons for saying that, but Tomasello has an excellent critique here: https://danielwharris.com/teaching/268/readings/Tomasello.pdf
Link doesn’t work.
Corrected link:
https://danielwharris.com/teaching/268/readings/Tomasello.pdf
Append the “f” and it will work:
https://danielwharris.com/teaching/268/readings/Tomasello.pdf
I have not read the PDF, I’m just fixing the link.
Oh duh, I missed that. I fixed the link in the first comment.
Ah, hell. I’m sure Pinker is better than me at linking.
Thanks, all.
We didn’t go to church very much, but I was in the choir for a while. I don’t remember many hymns, though it was “God sees the little sparrow fall” that started me down the path of doubt, with brief rest stops at deism and agnosticism on my way out of “belief” altogether. For me it’s the Christmas carols that can still move me. Perhaps some of it is the power of childhood memory, and the comfort of innocent, unquestioning belief, since lost, in the Christmas story. I find most secular “Christmas” music dreadful; give me a good, honest, earnest actually Christian Christmas carol over almost any de-Christianized song that has been stripped of any grandeur and wonder and pumped full of Santa and elves instead. I can handle the Santa story and imagery, but for music, I’ll take the traditional classics. (One I liked that might not be as well known outside of Canada is Jesous Ahatonhia, “The Huron Carol”, originally written in the language of the Huron/Wendat people and set to a tradtional French folk tune by Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf, it set the Nativity story in the Canadian wilderness. The English version came much later. Here’s a performance by Laureena McKennitt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zJwOPeIn_s )
Enjoy!
Jesous Ahatonhia may well be one of the most beatiful carols ever written… I understand the music is an old, now forgotten, French folk song. I prefer Heather Dale’s version… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6IG6F6E5Ac
Anyways, everything you said, except I was never in church.
@Mostly Cloudy #6
I failed at an even earlier point. I’m not sure I understand what ” to worship,” as a verb, even means. What action constitutes “worship”? Observable conduct that people tend to label as “worship” is going to a special building, singing special songs, reading and talking about special writings, kneeling or bowing down or prostrating oneself in a particular way, and so on. Yet an unbeliever can perform any of those actions. Therefore, that can’t be what “worship” means. It must be some kind of internal feeling. I don’t know how anyone else can have access to the feelings produced in someone else’s mind. So there are no objectively observable criteria by which anyone can determine that another person is actively engaged in “worship.” I’m not sure what distinguishes the verb “worship” from “love.” I understand profound feelings of love, but what’s the distinguishing something by which to differentiate “worship” from “love.”
What’s the extra bit that makes it “worship” instead of “love”?
I don’t get it. I never have. “Worship” is just one of those words that has no cognitive content for me.
@Omar
Now, I want to get a galah and name him Jesus. (For extra credit, I might even teach him a few choice atheist aphorisms.)
More on topic, I always regarded God as just a Santa Claus for grown-ups and since my eccentric Catholic mother refused to indulge the Santa Claus Delusion, on the grounds that it was vaguely blasphemous, I felt my incredulity was on solid ground when confronted by the various religious fairy tales I was expected to believe in. But since the ones doing the expecting, or at least the enforcing of the expectation, were the Christian Brothers with their propensity for violence delivered by leather and rubber* I never doubted the wisdom of keeping my scepticism to myself.
*sounds kinky I know because it damn well was. Put a bunch of sexually frustrated men together and then put them in charge of boys and bad things will happen. I wasn’t aware of anything explicitly sexual happening, probably for no better reason than a day-school doesn’t provide much in the way of opportunities for private contact and brothers lack the privileges of priests, but the pleasure with which some of the brothers wielded the dreaded strap had definite elements of sexual sadism. I remember one brother explaining to his class of maybe 14-year olds how sadism was always sexual. Sometimes they didn’t even try to hide it.
Same here. I may have been a believer at four, when Jesus was an imaginary friend who came to play with me when no one else would; I don’t remember. I just know that because I told my mother, and she told me…and everyone else…about it until she died when I was 45.
What I remember most from my Christian days is the Bible Stories for Children. I loved the Noah story, not seeing the obvious cruelty of drowning a whole world (I saw it not long after, but as a youngster I mostly saw the animals getting on the big boat). The sense I got from it was similar to the fairy tales I read, which I knew were not to be believed. That suggests I was never all that devout; after all, if Noah is viewed in a similar way to the Little Mermaid, and one knows the Little Mermaid is only a story from someone’s imagination, that suggests I may have seen Noah in the same light, though it’s hard to tell from 60 years distance.
Later, though, when I did have strong enough doubts to be aware of them, as I grew into atheism, I had learned the difference: the Noah story is believed by adults all over the place, and you damn well better believe it if you know what’s good for you.
When I was going through my visits with the minister prior to baptism, he told me more than once he wasn’t sure I was ready for baptism; he wasn’t sure my faith was strong enough. In the end, he baptized me anyway. I’ve come to realize over the years he had some awareness of the pain that would be rained down on my cranium (and my gluteus maximus) if he were to tell my parents I lacked adequate faith. They would have beaten it into me. If I couldn’t love God, I would certainly be taught to fear him. (On an aside, I grew to suspect in later years that the minister was not exactly a truly pious believer, and that in fact he was at most a deist or agnostic, possibly a full-fledged atheist).
It seemed important during the thriving of the atheist movement a decade ago to be ‘debaptized’. I should no longer have to worry about my non-existent soul being yanked to a non-existent heaven because of a meaningless ritual performed many decades ago to protect my all-too-real body.
“If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.”
Dawkins is really not making his case. Human intelligence seems to be failing us.
iknklast:
I would agree with that evaluation of baptism, but I think that for all purposes both religious and otherwise, the idea of the ‘soul’ is equivalent to the idea contained within the word ‘consciousness,’ which latter does have both a physical and biological reality. The biologist Lyall Watson, in his best-seller ‘Supernature’ argued that even plants can have consciousness, which I think was taking it a tad far, but I would argue that it extends all the way down the phylogenetic tree to include all animal species whose innate behaviour is such as to result in self-preservation, and which have inbuilt into their bodies the ability to both recognise existential threats and to respond to them. This in turn means awareness, in whatever stage of development, of their own being, and acting always in defence of it. This can be as elementary as reflexively seeking to move from a well-lit location to a dark one, as displayed by earthworms and cockroaches.
The history of the idea of it is interesting. “If awareness of the environment . . . is the criterion of consciousness, then even the protozoans are conscious. If awareness of awareness is required, then it is doubtful whether the great apes and human infants are conscious.”
(Thomas GJ (1967). “Consciousness”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6. p. 366.)
The immortal Robert Burns touched on this in his classic poem ‘To a Mouse.’
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43816/to-a-mouse-56d222ab36e33)
Fascinating subject.
But reflexes aren’t conscious. Unconscious people can have reflexes despite being unconscious.
Omar: Have read some interesting essays on the evidence for “intelligence” i. trees…or at least in forests as a sort of collective consciousness.
John Zande, in his clever little books “arguing” for omnimalevolence, argued that the evil creator god never bothered to create the chemical pathways for pleasure for the first few million? billion? years of animal awareness.
‘Instinctively,’ perhaps?
The behaviour pattern that has been selected for appears in some species to be aversion to light. Light = danger, at whatever conscious level. Animals are generally light sleepers, and protect themselves when asleep against attacks by predators, and in a variety of ways: eg herding behaviour, hibernating in places difficult for predators to access.
I found this out as a kid the hard way, and in most memorable fashion. For a prank, I grabbed my pet cat when I happened upon her sleeping in a sunny spot between some rose bushes in our house garden. It took her about one millisecond to go from sleep to full-on counterattack, claws in rip and tear mode; not merely scratch.
Thank you, YNNB & takshak for that wonderful carol.
And thank you, What a Maroon (and others) for that link to Tomasello’s excellent criticism of Chomsky & Pinker.
Omar & Brian M: the scientist & philosopher Michael Polanyi has some interesting things to say about instinctive knowledge and its links with conscious knowledge in his books ’The Tacit Dimension’ & ‘Personal Knowledge’.
Here’s a sentence from the Wikipedia article on him:
“Mind is a higher-level expression of the capacity of living organisms for discrimination.”