Grasping at straws
Giles Fraser is both wrong and confused.
In a recent paper for the journal Intelligence, the notorious Professor Richard Lynn has argued that intelligent people are “less likely to believe in God”…Dr David King…said: “We find Richard Lynn’s claims that some human beings are inherently superior to others repugnant.” The same thought applies to women with blond hair, to people with darker skin, or to those of us with religious belief.
No it does not. Sex, hair colour, and skin colour are all genetically determined physical differences. Religious belief is not. The two categories are not comparable. This is not, obviously, to claim that people ‘with religious belief’ are inherently inferior to others, though Giles Fraser wants to try to trick us into thinking it is. It is merely to point out that the same thought does not apply to Fraser’s mixed bag of people.
[W]hat’s really nasty here – and it’s a part of a growing phenomenon – is the way religion is being used as a subtle code for race. Belief in God is alive and well in Africa and in the Middle East and declining in western Europe. Writing about the intelligence of religious believers has, for some, become a roundabout way of commenting on the intelligence of those with darker skins whilst seeking to avoid the charge of racism.
Really? And how many is ‘some’? A few hundred?
Actually it looks to me as if it’s the other way around – as if Giles Fraser has spotted a handy and self-flattering way of warding off criticism of ‘faith’ as a way of thinking. He’s noticed that there’s a lot of belief in god in the third world and not so much in Europe (though he failed to mention the US, which of course doesn’t fit this simple-minded pattern) and realizes this presents an opportunity to wrap himself in the anti-racist flag. So wrap he does.
The BNP, for example, has started using religion as a category of racial designation so as to deflect charges of racism. For instance, they seek to defend something called “Christian Britain”. But what they really mean is “no Muslims” – and that really means “no Asians”. The fact that these categories are not in any way equivalent does not detract from the message the BNP is sending by using them in the way they do.
And the fact that your categories – people with darker skin and people with religious belief – are also not in any way equivalent doesn’t seem to have slowed you down much, either. In any case, if the BNP is defending Christian Britain, it’s not claiming that people without religious belief are inherently superior, is it – so what do you mean ‘for example’? For example of what? Not what you were talking about, at any rate.
This is difficult. Yes, Giles Fraser is a fekking moron. His understanding is shallow, his criticism misses the point, and his mother dresses him funny. (Yes, he’s so trivial I don’t feel any need to actually criticize what he has to say – ‘cuz OB’s done a fine job, thanks.)
But, as PZ Myers pointed out a few days ago, Lynn’s scientific reasoning is bullshit and he has a track record as a racist idiot – which racism informs the exact way in which his scientific reasoning fails, although PZ doesn’t explain that nearly as well as he might have.
So Fraser accidentally got it right, but doesn’t know why. Par for the course, I suppose.
I think I can boil this down to a fairly simple argument, though.
Lynn claims that stupidity makes you faithful. But there is absolutely nothing in his research that in any way eliminates the opposite possibility, that faith makes you stupid (where stupidity is measured by IQ tests) – so he may very well be confusing cause and effect. And in fact, a moment’s reflection on the nature of IQ testing – and certainly any informed analysis of actual IQ test questions – quickly reveals that reflective, critical, evidence-driven thinking is an important component to success on an IQ test. Reflection, critical thinking, and paying attention to evidence are exactly the mental skills directly opposed by faith. Since faith is paradigmatic of LEARNED BEHAVIOR – the strongest predictor of someone’s religious beliefs is the religious beliefs of their parents, after all – then there is every reason to believe that faith causes stupidity and no prima facie reason to believe that stupidity causes faith.
At best, Lynn’s biological determinism is entirely unsupported by his evidence: There is another hypothesis that not only provides an alternative explanation for exactly the same data he provides, the alternate hypothesis provides a BETTER (more theoretically coherent and causally plausible) explanation of that data – and also explains all sorts of other data (see below)!
Why is that racist? It isn’t. But the presumption that any difference between groups of humans is all due to biology – and never due to environment, learning, culture – is a primary tool of racists. Unjustified, evidence-free biological determinism rationalizes claims that whoever happens to be on the bottom rung of society simply belongs there, because an oppressive environment, poor education, and despair-shaped culture have nothing to do with their *insert socio-cultural consequence of oppression here* (low test scores, generational poverty, drug use, high teen pregnancy rate, and so on and on): It’s all just biology, see. They’re not inferior because they’re oppressed and miserable, their social status of oppression and misery is just an unfortunate side effect of their inherent biological inferiority.
Blaming biology for a phenomenon that is a product of society is pernicious and stupid. Lynn has made a career of being pernicious and stupid in exactly this way. Giles Fraser has made a career of being pernicious and stupid in other ways. I think they should resolve their differences in a cage match: Two men go in, and neither comes out – because we’ve thrown away the key.
It may be true, as G says, and his reference to PZ myers seems to back him up, that Lynn is a racist. It does not follow, however, that this makes Giles Fraser’s argument any better. Fraser’s argument has nothing to do with Lynn’s more dubious biological determinism. Fraser is just saying that people are hiding behind Lynn’s dubious science when talking about religion because this is a way of introducing race into the discussion through the back door.
Fraser has not given any reason for supposing that talking about religious believers’ intelligence is code for race. One racist biologist does it. The BNP does it, for example. (Don’t forget Ophelias’ pointed: ‘example of what?’ here.) So, everyone does it. Is that his argument?
Most people commenting on religion and religious believers’ intelligence probably know nothing or very little of Richard Lynn and his ‘ideas’, but they’ve heard people like Pat Buchanan, or Limbaugh and their cronies, and they seem to be as thick as posts in the cerebral depeartment. And, you know, it’s hard to think of reasons why religious people would dismiss the all but overwhelming evidence for evolution by natural selection except diminished intelligence. I suppose there are other reasons, but when you hear excerpts from Expelled, lower intelligence, or the crushing inability to use the intelligence they have, seems to be a factor. Not good science, but you can make a reasonable extrapolation for the sake of argument.
So, Giles Fraser seems to have dreamed up his bright idea all on his own, but in order to dream it up he had to make one assumption: that religious people distinguish themselves by race. (And to make that assumption, you have to be a bit of a latent racist yourself, don’t you?) Now, I don’t know Richard Lynn’s work. Lynn may have made the distinction himself, and done all the work for Fraser. But the assumption is false, especially if Alister McGrath is correct that 40% of scientists are religious believers. Perhaps they are the less intelligent scientists, but even then are they all Asian?!
So Giles Fraser still comes out looking as though he has egg on his face. As the Edge article that G Tingey points us to seems to suggest, religion seems to be in terminal decline (well, I wish we could use that word, anyway), and it has little to do with race, but much more with science-oriented education, secure prosperty and democracy. Fraser’s playing the race card is just another apologetic way of gathering rosebuds while he may.
What complicated webs the internet weaves.
Yes, I’ve often found it irritating the way anti-intellectualism pretends to be anti-elitism. No-one questions that there are people genetically better suited to run marathons or play soccer, yet you’re not allowed to say that some people are just smarter than others. And that maybe people smarter than yourself may know something you can learn from. It doesn’t mean you have to follow them blindly, but that they are worth listening to.
Fraser’s conversation-stopper is actually a little more subtle than it appears, at first glance. Since we can’t discuss Africa and the Middle East’s turn towards faith without being accused of racism, we also cannot discuss the fact that thet this particular turn is towards a particularly poisonous and repellent kind of faith. A kind of faith which rejects the very idea of human rights and equality (and women’s rights and women’s equality especially). So, in the name of “anti-racism”, Fraser apologizes for behavior which is even more unpleasant and illiberal. A neat trick.
But sadly, one which is not out of character for today’s religious apologists. Weep crocodile tears about one form of supposed discrimination while all the others sneak back in through the back door.
dzd. Do you really think that Fraser is that sneaky, and that he approves of all the religion that is developing in Africa and in parts of Asia? Or is he doing the usual religious apologetic thing, taking the nearest argument and using it to protect religion from certain forms of attack?
After all, the article is confused from the start. He begins my mentioning Richard Lynn, and suggests that intelligent people are less likely to believe in Lynn than in God. Most people, of course, hadn’t heard of Lynn until Fraser mentioned him. But, if intelligent people are less likely to beleive in Lynn than in God, why does he go on to say that anti-religious people use Lynn’s argument in a crypto-racist way? This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Is this subtlety or confusion?
It could be that I’m reading in motives where none exist–too many internet arguments with would-be theocrats tend to make the detector throw up a few false positives.
It would be nice if he would just think through what it is he’s talking up, though.
“Since we can’t discuss Africa and the Middle East’s turn towards faith without being accused of racism,”
Can you do it without racist statements?
If so, what’s the problem? I thought you guys had the conviction of your beliefs?
“Since we can’t discuss Africa and the Middle East’s turn towards faith without being accused of racism …”
I don’t think this was Fraser’s intention. I think he just used the nearest whipping post to critique the criticisers of religion. I don’t think he noticed the implications of what he was saying. This often happens. Look at what happens when religious people start talking about the problem of pain; they get all tied up in the most horrendous claims about the intrinsic value of mountains of evil. So, Fraser wasn’t thinking about the peculiar style of religion popular in Africa, just the fact that they are increasingly religious (if they are). That helps him defend religion back home, and that’s all he really wanted to do.
And of course DFG is right, we can go on criticising this repellant form of religion (both Islam and Christianity); we just have to make sure that the criticism doesn’t become racist, as some of it doubtless tends to be. But suppose someone does research in Africa and finds that there is a correlation between lower intelligence and repellant religion — if religious people are less intelligent on average, then it should be reflected in any population — then there is no basis for the racism charge anyway. Intelligent black folks are as likely to sit loose to religion as intelligent white folks do.
I tell you, Fraser is just doing the usual apologetic thing. Taking any ammo that comes to hand, no matter whether he does in a few of his own kind in the process.
I don’t know, I don’t think Fraser is dim enough for that. Or maybe I mean uninformed enough. He’s a rather active liberal (liberal of sorts) – it seems most unlikely that he would be able just to forget about the unhappy forms religion often takes in Africa and the Middle East.
In truth the argument is so silly I find it baffling.
Yes, I agree, the argument is silly and baffling. But have you read some of the silly apologetics around? It’s something else! And ‘serious’ theology? You haven’t read silly until you’ve delved into that! Even my silliness doesn’t hold a candle.
Yes of course I have. I’ve spent a lot of time kicking at it here. Richard Swinburne, for instance, and earlier Fraser, and Jonathan Sacks, and Mark Vernon, and Theo Hobson. But this one is just plain slapdash.
Yes, well, Swinburne counts as a rather extreme case of philosophical apologetics, and for the life of me I can’t imagine why he’s taken seriously, and Jonathan Sacks, Mark Vernon and Theo Hobson are pretty lightweight. But to get into the meat of the thing you have to read people like Barth (voluminous) and Rahner, Tillich (also voluminous, I suppose, but nowhere near Barth’s stature) and some of the minor English and American theologians, like Eric Mascall, Austin Farrer, even Rowan Williams (God forfend!) Schubert Ogden, and Maurice Wiles. The last is the most rational of the collection. The works of these theologians are where you see the evasive techniques of real theology at work big time. Paul Edwards has done some good debunking stuff on Tillich. Barth has been commended by a pope (Pius XII, I think), and Hans Kung, though still Catholic, has been dismissed as a Catholic Theologian, but if you’ve ever read him he goes on breathlessly saying the most ridiculous things. The first woman Catholic theologian, Uta Ranke Heinemann, didn’t last very long. Her “Eunuch’s for the Kingdom of God,” and “Putting Away Childish Things”, brought her meteoric career to an end. It’s a dog’s breakfast of a repast, but it does really put people like Fraser in the frame. Theo Hobson and Mark Vernon are very small fish in this particular pond. Fraser is slapdash, but I think you’d be surprised to find how slapdash even very serious theology can be.