PZ says many good things on the subject, for instance on what the textbook that inspired De Dora’s educational advice actually said.

…that was a small part of a two page section of the text that summarizes the legal history of efforts to keep creationism out of the public schools. It is not a book that condemns Christianity, carries on a crusade to abolish religion, or calls believers delusional; it is moderate, entirely polite in tone (praise Jesus! It meets the most important criterion of the faitheists!), and plainly describes an entirely relevant legal and social issue for biologists in non-judgmental terms. It does use the accurate, factual term “myth” for what creationists are peddling, and that’s as harsh as it gets. It is exactly what the less rude proponents of evolution teaching should want.

In other words, if textbooks and teachers can’t even do that, they really are well and truly stifled and censored, and education is reserved for people who can afford private school.

[W]hat kind of support does a reasonable and polite statement in a textbook get from the intellectual cowards — a phrase I use in complete awareness of the meaning of each word, thank you very much — who want to run away from any conflict? De Dora whines, ‘well, he has a point’. Pigliucci makes a worthless complaint about knowing our epistemological boundaries, implying that the statement of fact in Tobin and Dusheck is a violation of the separation of church and state…If a science teacher can’t even flatly state that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, not 6000, because philosophers will complain about epistomological boundaries, we’re doomed. If the effect of biology on society can’t even be mentioned in a textbook, then the relevance of the science is being sacrificed on the altar of religious submission. Getting enmired in these pointless philosophical “subtleties” when the facts are staring you in the face is a recipe for the further gutting of science education in this country.

Exactly. And gutting science education is not a good thing to do.

Jerry Coyne made a crucial point about this De Dorian Sci Ed 101 stuff.

…teaching evolution and dispelling creation provides students with a valuable lesson: it teaches them to think scientifically—surely one of the main points of a science class. They learn to weigh evidence and to show how that evidence can be used to discriminate between alternative explanations. It’s of little consequence to me that one alternative explanation comes from a literal interpretation of scripture. Indeed, it’s useful, for this is a real life example—one that’s going on now—of how alternative empirical claims are fighting for primacy in the intellectual marketplace. What better way to engage students in the scientific method?

Exactly. It’s a terribly narrowed and pinched version of teaching that De Dora is defending here. (He seems to be trying to claim this isn’t what he wants, it’s just what the law compels, but I don’t really believe him. I think he has a visceral dislike of all but the most apologetic atheism and I think that dislike infects everything he says on this subject. I could be wrong though – he writes so clumsily that it’s really impossible to be sure exactly what he is saying.)

Bizarrely though, De Dora said much the same thing himself at one point, but apparently without realizing he’d done it. He’s confused.

…the answer seems to be that we should ensure our high school science teachers are instructing students on how to think like a scientist, and imparting to students the body of knowledge scientists have accrued (and that all of our teachers generally are doing similar in their respective fields). From there, the children take that knowledge as they will.

God he’s a bad writer. But never mind that – the point is that he slipped up and said that teachers should be teaching students how to think like a scientist. So they should, but that means teachers need to teach students how anyone knows all this stuff, how the “body of knowledge” was collected and argued over and questioned and criticized – which includes for instance what it replaced, what previous claims to knowledge shaped it or got in its way or motivated it – and so on. It’s not enough to just open children’s heads and dump in a quart or two of Facts. If the Constitution requires science teachers to restrict themselves to such an impoverished version of teaching, then that’s a terrible worrying tragic situation. If it doesn’t, De Dora is talking nonsense.

Massimo is very annoyed that so many people are unimpressed by De Dora. Massimo does tend to exaggerate…

And speaking of content, what was so witless, wanky, wishy-washy, and witless about De Dora’s post? Oh, he dared question (very politely, and based on argument) one of the dogmas of the new atheism: that religious people (that’s about 90% of humanity, folks) ought (and I use the term in the moral sense) to be frontally assaulted and ridiculed at all costs, because after all, this is a war, and the goal is to vanquish the enemy, reason and principles be damned.

That’s rationally speaking?

Michael De Dora is concerned again.

…our government — and thus our public schooling system — is supposed to remain neutral on matters of religion. Federal and state governments cannot aid one religion, aid all religions, prefer one religion over another, or prefer non-religion to religion. This means that while I agree with Myers that the Biblical creation story is a “myth,” the public school classroom doesn’t seem to be the place where our message should be pushed.

Federal and state governments cannot prefer non-religion to religion, therefore, according to De Dora, as long as a mistaken claim is religious, it is against the law for public schools to say the claim is mistaken. That’s interesting. I went to a state university and I recall plenty of teachers who said particular religious claims were mistaken. I never knew that they were breaking the law by doing that. As a matter of fact I don’t believe that they were breaking the law by doing that; I think on the contrary that De Dora is talking creepy nonsense. Maybe he’s been reading Michael Ruse and Andrew Brown – they both love to announce that the Constitution forbids evil secularists to open their mouths within 500 yards of a public educational institution.

I suspect that this is not actually a bit of helpful legal advice but rather another occasion for De Dora to distance himself from the Bad kind of atheists and snuggle up to the Good kind: the ones who say snotty untrue things about Dawkins and/or Coyne and/or Hitchens a minimum of every three days. It’s all rather depressing coming from CFI. As PZ said, “Does CFI stand for the Church of Fatuous Incompetence now?”

Gita Sahgal states the problem.

The senior leadership of Amnesty International chose to answer the questions I posed about Amnesty International’s relationship with Moazzam Begg by affirming their links with him. Now they have also confirmed that the views of Begg, his associates and his organisation Cageprisoners, do not trouble them. They have stated that the idea of jihad in self defence is not antithetical to human rights; and have explained that they meant only the specific form of violent jihad that Moazzam Begg and others in Cageprisoners assert is the individual obligation of every Muslim…Unfortunately, their stance has laid waste every achievement on women’s equality and made a mockery of the universality of rights. In fact, the leadership has effectively rejected a belief in universality as an essential basis for partnership.

A dreadful thing to have to say about Amnesty International. It’s blood-chilling that even one of the pre-eminent human rights organizations doesn’t get it. If the Amnesty version of human rights prevailed, I would have no rights left. I resent that. I can’t begin to tell you how strongly I resent that.

I want to try to figure this out. I could just conclude that I simply don’t know enough about it to figure it out, and I ought to either learn more or leave it to people who do know enough. That’s certainly a possibility, of course. I’ve been thinking when reading Sam Harris’s posts in reply to his critics that he just doesn’t seem to know enough about it, and it’s certainly possible that I don’t know enough about what I’m prattling about, either. But the difference is, it seems to me, that Sam’s critics have made a lot of good arguments, while the arguments I’ve seen so far from the ‘overt atheists are wrong and bad’ faction are not very good. But then I would think that. But actually I wouldn’t, because I’m not invested in thinking Sam’s view is (partly) wrong. It just strikes me that way, that’s all. It strikes me that way because I’ve read a little about meta-ethics, among other reasons – but it’s not because I’m loyal to one view or another. But I am invested in the idea that overt atheism is not a bad thing – so maybe I can’t recognize the goodness of good arguments against it.

So I want to try to figure it out. Massimo first of all said that Sam would

get more mileage out of allying himself with philosophy (not to the exclusion of science), rather than taking what appears to be the same misguided scientistic attitude that Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have come to embody so well.

Our friend G challenged him on that, and he replied

my problem with Dawkins and Coyne is different, but stems from the same root: their position on morality is indeed distinct from Harris’ (at least Dawkins’, I don’t recall having read anything by Coyne on morality), but they insist in applying science to the supernatural, which is simply another form of the same malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having.

This is the part that I don’t understand. There was some discussion of it on that thread, in which it was suggested that Massimo has a rather special definition of ‘supernatural,’ but Massimo said no, it’s Dawkins and Coyne who have a different definition of science. I still don’t understand.

I don’t think the root is the same. I think Harris on morality is not the same kind of thing as Dawkins and Coyne on theism. That’s because I think morality is not the same kind of thing as theism. There’s some overlap, sometimes a lot of overlap, but not so much that they’re the same kind of thing. Theism is about an entity external to human beings, one that could in principle exist even if human beings didn’t exist and never had existed. Massimo’s version of ‘supernatural’ seems to be ‘entirely outside of nature such that science cannot inquire into it in any way.’ What I don’t understand is why Massimo thinks that describes theism. A supernatural god of that kind would be, as far as humans are concerned, the same thing as nothing. If it’s entirely outside, then it has nothing to do with us, and we have nothing to say about it (and atheists have no quarrel with it). That’s not the god that people who believe in god have in mind. People who believe in god do say things about their god. That god is supposed to be part of the world in some way, if only as its parent or creator or designer. I don’t see how it can be possible for a god to be any of that and still be totally out of reach of science and thus of any kind of inquiry. I can’t make sense of that.

What am I missing?

What is it with Massimo Pigliucci and the dreaded Dawkins-Coyne Phalanx or whatever it is? Why does he keep…pinging at them? And saying things that are exaggerated at best?

…my problem with Dawkins and Coyne is different, but stems from the same root: their position on morality is indeed distinct from Harris’ (at least Dawkins’, I don’t recall having read anything by Coyne on morality), but they insist in applying science to the supernatural, which is simply another form of the same malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having.

Dawkins and Coyne don’t think or say or write that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having. They say lots of things that are not compatible with that idea.

As for the Dawkins/Coyne stuff, I’m really baffled by so many smart people having such a difficult time wrapping their heads around it. I don’t want them to shout that philosophy is the greatest, I just want them to stop shouting that science is the ultimate arbiter of everything. That would be very decent of them, and then we could all get along nicely.

They don’t shout that. They don’t shout that at all, or anything resembling it. What is it with Massimo?

His new colleague is joining in the fun. Ew.

The Times is shameless. (Wait – why do I even bother to say that? It’s a Murdoch paper. Murdoch is the genius behind Fox “News” – for which the word “shameless” would be gross flattery.) Its headline is untrue, yet it won’t even post a letter from the subject saying so.

The Times ran the headline: Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI. It went on to say he was planning a legal ambush, he’d asked lawyers to do things, and so on. He says that’s not how it went. He posted a comment on the Times (and his own site) saying how it went.

Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. So all the vicious attacks on me for seeking publicity etc are misplaced…

Marc Horne, the Sunday Times reporter, telephoned me out of the blue and asked whether I was aware of the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s visit. Yes, I said. He asked me if I was in favour of their initiative. Yes, I said, I am strongly in favour of it. Beyond that, I declined to comment to Marc Horne, other than to refer him to my ‘Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope’ article. How the headline writer could go from there to “Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” is obscure to me.

It is a remarkably large and brazen jump, you must admit. Are you aware of, do you support, becomes total initiative for and responsibility for. Are you aware of the Obama administration’s attempts to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians? Yes. Do you support those efforts? Yes. Headline: I will make peace between Israel and Palestine says random person.

Richard reported an hour or so ago that five hours after he posted the comment, it still hadn’t appeared. Bill O’Reilly must be beaming with pride. Glen Beck must be sobbing with joy.

Don’t worry if one day soon you click on B&W and get a page saying ‘migration in progress’ – it won’t be a bit of hackery, and it won’t take long. B&W is moving – to a better world. Be grateful to Josh Larios.

What a brilliant idea. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens

have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998. The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the [Inquisition]… Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

The mills of the lord grind slowly…

I mentioned a passage from the Odyssey in my latest comment on Fact 1.5, as illustrating my claim that “It’s not natural to treat strangers or foreigners well, it’s not natural to think that everyone should have equal treatment, it’s not natural to think that women matter just as much as men do.” Having mentioned it I wanted to read it again, and having read it again, I wanted to post it.

It’s in Book Nine, which is where we at last get to hear about Odysseus’s journey from the beginning, when he is staying with the Phaiakians and Alkinöos asks him (in the last lines of Book Eight) to tell his story. After some polite throat-clearing he gets on with it:

I was carried by the wind from Troy
to Ismarus, land of the Kikonians.
I destroyed the city there, killed the men,
seized their wives, and captured lots of treasure,
which we divided up. I took great pains
to see that all men got an equal share.
Then I gave orders we should leave on foot—
and with all speed. But the men were fools.
They didn’t listen. They drank too much wine…

And ate too much meat and gave the neighboring Kikonians time to collect and attack. But you see how the story is told. The first and only glimpse of moral concern (or perhaps it’s prudential, or more likely it’s both) is Odysseus’s concern to make sure all his men got their fare share of the treasure and the women that they had all grabbed. The Kikonians might as well be animated figures in a computer game. This isn’t a factual issue. It’s not that Odysseus and his crew think the Kikonians are robots or zombies – it’s that they don’t care. They should care, but they don’t. Facts are part of getting them to care, but they’re not enough. Facts are necessary but not sufficient.

(For the record, I’m not assuming that Sam Harris thinks facts are sufficient. I was just disputing the list, not his views as a whole, which I haven’t yet read. On the other hand, I don’t agree with his claim that science can answer moral questions; I think science can help answer moral questions, can contribute to moral questions, but not that it can answer them, just like that, boom. Just a difference in emphasis, basically.)

I’ll add something I said on a new post of Russell’s, in reply to his ‘In other words, ethics is ultimately based on the affective attitudes of human subjects, not on the fabric of a reality external to these!’

In other words it all turns on the fact that we care, and it’s a contingent fact that we care. We might not care, and if we didn’t, morality wouldn’t even exist.

There’s a horrible passage in one of Jane Goodall’s early (and for a general readership) books on the Gombe chimps, about one elderly male chimp who was left with a paralyzed arm after a polio outbreak. One day a group of chimps were in a tree grooming each other and the damaged chimp slowly and with huge effort climbed the tree and with an exhausted sigh settled down to be groomed – whereupon all the other chimps left.

We could be like that – and we are a little like that, but not entirely. Or chimps could be less like that – and in other contexts they are less like that. The contingent fact is that chimps have some empathy and we have more, and over our history we have learned to refine and develop and expand it. That’s where morality is. It requires caring, and empathy, and those aren’t automatic.

More on Sam Harris’s 9 facts and why they don’t (I think) get us from is to ought. Just a little more, because the power is about to be turned off. Work is difficult around here these days.

FACT #1: There are behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which potentially lead to the worst possible misery for everyone. There are also behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which do not, and which, in fact, lead to states of wellbeing for many sentient creatures…FACT #3: Our “values” are ways of thinking about this domain of possibilities. If we value liberty, privacy, benevolence, dignity, freedom of expression, honesty, good manners, the right to own property, etc.—we value these things only in so far as we judge them to be part of the second set of factors conducive to (someone’s) wellbeing.

Sure. But it’s more complicated than that, and Facts 4-9 don’t discuss some of the most important complications. The more common situation about cultural practices and the like is that they lead to well-being for some people and misery for other people. It just isn’t usually the case that cultural practice X leads to well-being for everyone or that cultural practice Y leads to misery for everyone. One of the things that cultural practices do is sort people and allot more well-being to some than to others.

I think we lose sight of how new and bizarre and non-natural liberal morality is. I strongly agree that it is a better morality, but alas that is not because it is natural. It’s more because it isn’t. It’s not natural to treat strangers or foreigners well, it’s not natural to think that everyone should have equal treatment, it’s not natural to think that women matter just as much as men do. What is natural is, once one gets past close relatives, likely to be pretty disgusting. Primates are not naturally universally altruistic, to put it mildly. (Bonobos are closer to that description than most primates. But how much can we rely on bonobo nature to claim that humans are naturally generous and egalitarian?) What is natural tends to be zero-sum, and that means that self-interest (at least) is a lot more natural than other-interest. We have to buck our own natures in order to be good, or even decent. That’s fact 1.5, perhaps.

Good old Onion…

Calling the behavior shameful, sinful, and much more frequent than the Vatican was comfortable with, Pope Benedict XVI vowed this week to bring the widespread pedophilia within the Roman Catholic Church down to a more manageable level…”This is absolutely unacceptable,” Pope Benedict said. “It seems a weakening of faith in God has prevented our priests from exercising moderation when sexually abusing helpless minors.”…Starting next year, specially trained cardinals will make unannounced visits to inspect and observe random churches in order to ensure they are not going beyond diocese-wide molestation caps. The inspector-cardinals will grade each parish based on long, private interviews with altar boys in darkened church basements, and careful observation of priests’ sexual activity….As a “goodwill measure,” Cardinal Re said all churches will also be required to display a sign next to the altar showing the number of days since the last molestation.

Oh gee – is that more petty gossip?

I’ve been trying to argue with Sam Harris about his latest map for how to get from is to ought. It’s a list of 9 putative facts, which are true enough as far as they go, but I keep pointing out that the list doesn’t really confront the difference between avoiding the worst possible misery for oneself and avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone. No one’s paying any attention, but it keeps me out of trouble.

Russell discusses the same post.

The trick is to avoid cheating with stipulative definitions and to avoid relying on human psychology or human institutions. You are supposed to derive that I really, really ought to do X without relying on any of those short-cuts. That is the sort of derivation that so many people want, as its a derivation that will transcend subjectivity or semantics or culture. If you do the job, you’ve made normativity “objective”.

Cheating with stipulative definitions is exactly what Francisco Ayala has been doing, as I pointed out a couple of days ago:

‘Religion and science are not properly understood by some people, Christians particularly.’ In other words he is right by definition, because he gets to define what religion and science properly understood are, and the fact that they are not like that in practice is not evidence that he is wrong but just…that pesky Scots fella again.

Must play fair. That’s an ‘ought.’

The pope’s co-workers circle the holy wagons.

A prominent cardinal, in a marked departure from tradition, stood near Pope Benedict XVI at Easter Mass in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday and delivered pointedly public support in the face of growing anger over the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal…The remarks…came among a chorus of denunciations by church officials of what they have framed as a campaign of denigration of the church and its pontiff…“Holy Father, the people of God are with you, and do not let themselves be impressed by the gossip of the moment, by the challenges that sometimes strike at the community of believers,” Cardinal Sodano said.

In other words, the people who criticize the pope and the Vatican are not the people of God, and the notion that the suffering of the victims is more important than the suffering of the Vatican hierarchy is mere petty gossip, and the whole thing is just one of those ‘challenges’ that make clerics even stronger.

Many in the church hierarchy, from local bishops to the cardinals who run the church, have grown increasingly aggressive in the face of sweeping criticism, and more specifically, at charges that Benedict failed to act…In the culture of the church hierarchy, the mere idea of a pope — the vicar of Jesus Christ on earth, the successor of the prince of the apostles, the supreme pontiff of the universal church and sovereign of the Vatican city state, as his official titles have it — being called to account like the secular head of a corporation is incomprehensible.

And there’s your problem right there. The pope is not ‘the vicar of Jesus Christ on earth,’ because that’s a magical phrase that refers to some kind of employment relationship with a guy who died two thousand years ago. People don’t get to tell other people what to do and demand all kinds of special deference and respect because they have a self-declared connection with some long-dead human being. It’s silly enough when monarchs do it, and it’s even sillier when ‘popes’ do it.

This is what is wrong with the Catholic church. It’s a bad, diseased way to think, and it’s exactly what’s wrong with them. They think they are in a special caste elevated above other human beings, because of their ‘ordination,’ and this is a terrible, wretched, dangerous way for humans to think. This is obvious. It makes them think they can do no wrong. It makes them sanctimonious instead of good. It makes them incapable (from all appearances, at least) of thinking clearly about their own actions.

The American Humanist Association tried to give the ACLU $20,000 to help pay for the alternate prom in Mississippi, and the ACLU said no thanks, on account of humanism is as we all know a dirty word.

The ACLU then thought better of it, and apologized…but it also asked the AHA to donate (if it donated) anonymously. Quoth the spokesperson:

“If you would still like to contribute we would be thrilled, but I understand if you do not feel comfortable contributing a donation that you will not be recognized for.”

That’s an interesting way of putting it. It’s not really a matter of “feeling comfortable,” surely. It’s a matter of being insulted at being treated like a source of pollution, and disgusted that what is being held at arm’s length with a pained expression in this way is simply not believing in the imaginary deity that lots of people choose to believe in.

‘There’s no reason that our humanism should be treated as something to be hidden,’ said AHA’s executive director Roy Speckhardt. Well quite – and yet it is treated that way, and by the American Civil Liberties Union at that. But we are mocked and reviled when we point out that atheists are a despised scapegoated outsider-group and that all this determined and mendacious crapping on atheists is not a million miles from McCarthyism. Believe me now? Huh? Huh?

That interview with Ayala in the New Scientist…

They are two windows through which we look at the world. Religion deals with our relationship with our creator, with each other, the meaning and purpose of life, and moral values; science deals with the make-up of matter, expansion of galaxies, evolution of organisms. They deal with different ways of knowing. I feel that science is compatible with religious faith in a personal, omnipotent and benevolent God.

Religion deals with an imaginary or projected relationship with an imagined or projected ‘creator,’ which is a somewhat special kind of relationship, and not really a window through which we look at the world – more like a window through which we conjure a world more to our liking. Religion is far from alone in dealing with our relationship with each other or the meaning and purpose of life or moral values, while science is alone in dealing with the items on its list. Things are blurry and fuzzy and confused from the outset. Sure, science is compatible with all that, but only in the sense that one can always just compartmentalize. It’s not compatible in the sense that one can really combine the two in action. In fact it’s like multitasking that way. Teenagers love to tell adults in a condescending way that they really can text and check email and listen to a biology lecture all at the same time. Yes; we know it’s physically possible to do all three at once, the point is that they are all done badly. That’s what the teenagers don’t get, and it’s what the compatibilists don’t get either. Either you separate the two, in which case you’re tacitly admitting that they’re not compatible, or you don’t, in which case your science will be not so good.

I made a similar point in my piece on Templeton for TPM.

And yet, there are limits even to Templeton’s attempts to bring science and religion together, and that fact seems to indicate that there may be real reasons to be wary of that project, as opposed to simply being “allergic to religious thought”. Even Templeton-funded scientists don’t actually apply religious thought at the coalface – in the lab, in the field, in peer-reviewed journal articles, as the University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, author of the best-selling Why Evolution is True, confirmed.

“Indeed, none of us bring religion into our work,” he told me, “for the same reason that Laplace mentioned: ‘I have no need of that hypothesis.’ Using God or the supernatural never got us anywhere, so we gave it up. And no, nobody, not Francis Collins, or Kenneth Miller, nor anyone uses religion in their own scientific work – not that I know of!”

Anthony Grayling agrees that this is a real stumbling block. “The Templeton strategy is about trying to borrow the respectability, the lustre, the seriousness, the gravitas of proper science for its apologetical agenda. It is an entirely cosmetic matter, and doesn’t reach anywhere near any coalfaces of science. (When science reaches the coalfaces of biblical history etc it tends to have an uncomfortable result for the goddies; which is perhaps why Templeton doesn’t seem to fund much in the way of Palestinian archaeology or dating of the Turin Shroud.)”

The fact that even Templeton-funded scientists don’t actually apply religious thought at the coalface kind of gives the game away, if you ask me. It seems to reveal that all the guff about harmonization and interface is just some polite fiction that everybody ignores in practice.

New Scientist asks Ayala why there is still conflict then, and he says, ‘Religion and science are not properly understood by some people, Christians particularly.’ In other words he is right by definition, because he gets to define what religion and science properly understood are, and the fact that they are not like that in practice is not evidence that he is wrong but just…that pesky Scots fella again.

How can mutual respect between science and religion be fostered?

People of faith need better scientific education. As for scientists, I don’t know what they can do: not many argue in a rational and sustained way that religion and science are incompatible.

Nonsense. Lots of them do. Funny way to foster mutual respect.

Another consignment of rebarbative truculent inaccurate wool from Madeleine Bunting. About…? The Vatican’s petulant cries of ‘petty gossip’ in response to revelations of its settled habit of concealing and protecting child rape? No. The ‘new’ atheists – that’s what’s got her worked up: the endless unappeasable horror of the ‘new’ atheists. Their wrongness. Their violence. Their ignorance. Their deafness to the overwhelming arguments of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton.

…in the years since the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2006 and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great in 2007, there has been an addition every few weeks from enraged philosophers, theologians, historians and journalists, all trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the New Atheists.

Indeed there has. There has been, in fact, a reaction; there has been a classic backlash. There has been a prolific, energetic, often very hostile and very inaccurate backlash. Bunting herself is a part of it – she has written piece after petulant piece complaining of the ‘new’ atheists. This is another. She is part of the very loud and populous chorus trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the shoddiness of the ‘new’ atheists. They could all be right, of course, but the mere fact that they exist doesn’t show that they are right. The wild inaccuracy that so many of them resort to tends to make me think they aren’t right, at least in their overarching assumption that there is something obviously illegitimate about explicit argumentative atheism. Bunting of course takes this assumption entirely for granted.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens convey the fury of Old Testament prophets, while their opponents struggle in various well-mannered ways to contain theirs.

Ohhhhhhh no they don’t. Bunting doesn’t, for one. Chris Hedges doesn’t for another. Eagleton doesn’t.

And then, what reason do they have for fury anyway? Why should two or three or four atheist books fill so many people with such fury? Bunting doesn’t say – she just assumes it, because as mentioned she assumes that there is something obviously illegitimate about explicit argumentative atheism.

From my rough survey I would suggest those with philosophical training are the most irritated by New Atheism, while the journalists seem to enjoy the opportunities the row provides…What staggers the “philosophers” (I use the term loosely to indicate writers who use philosophical arguments) is the sheer philosophical illiteracy of Dawkins. As Terry Eagleton puts it in Reason, Faith and Revolution…

Stop right there. Eagleton is in no sense as writer who uses philosophical arguments. Eagleton doesn’t argue at all, he simply announces. There is no argument in his book. I looked for it; it isn’t there. Bunting was fooled, as she was meant to be, by Eagleton’s unearned air of omniscience.

Faced with such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought, there are two options. Either start from the beginning – Charles Taylor’s 800-page A Secular Age or Karen Armstrong’s speed history of western thought, The Case for God – or go for clever brevity, elegantly skewering the argument in the style of Eagleton or John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel. The problem with both genres is they don’t offer the kind of bestselling strident certainty that brought Dawkins such handsome financial rewards.

What such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought? Bunting hasn’t shown us any, she has only asserted it. And as for strident certainty – what, exactly, does she think she is offering in this piece and the rest of her body of work? And then the snide remark about Dawkins’s book sales, as if they too were obviously illegitimate.

She gives us several more paragraphs of warmed-over Armstrong, and finishes by rejoicing that God is being discussed again. (Because there was a time, pre-Dawkins, when God wasn’t discussed? Has she visited the religion section of any bookstores lately? Some of the rows upon rows of books there pre-date 2006.) Then she gets savaged by CisF readers.

Sholto Byrnes, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t entirely buy Peter Hitchens’s line on atheism.

For while Stalin’s atheism may have been a necessary condition for the atrocities he committed — I completely agree with Hitchens that “without God, many more things are possible than are permitted in a Godly order” — it is not a sufficient one. I part company with him when he claims that his preceding sentence proves that which follows it: “Atheism is a licence for ruthlessness, and appeals to the ruthless.”

Good about parting company, but I part company earlier than that. Atheism is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for committing atrocities, and it isn’t necessarily the case that ‘without God, many more things are possible than are permitted in a Godly order.’ Given holy wars, the inquisition, religious massacres, the revolting ubiquitous cruelty of the Irish church, it just isn’t obvious that atheism permits atrocities any more than theism does. It’s clear that atheism doesn’t rule out horrendous savage murderous violence – but it’s clear that religion doesn’t either. It’s clear that religion doesn’t necessarily make people more compassionate or generous or fair or kind – just as atheism doesn’t. It could be that one or the other tends to do better, but it’s simply not possible to argue that either one reliably prevents – makes not ‘possible’ – any extreme of human brutality.

In as much as the absence of God leaves any system of morality floundering when it comes to unarguable proof of its truth, Hitchens is on to something. An atheist society does not have the in-built defences against the will of a tyrannous majority that religion would supply, for instance.

Would, if what? Would, when? The trouble with that thought is that there have (to put it mildly) been theist societies that had no built-in defences against the will of a tyrannous majority, at least none that worked. This is a massive stumbling block for the whole ‘belief in God makes people good’ idea. If belief in God really did make people good – good in the sense that people tend to mean it nowadays: compassionate, non-violent, kind – then there wouldn’t have been so many Christian supporters of slavery in the 19th century US. If belief in God made people good then sharia wouldn’t include so many savage punishments and such relentless limitation of women’s rights and freedom. (Sharia as practiced in the real world. People like to point out that various nasty things are not really part of sharia. Maybe they’re not, but that’s not much help when the relevant people think they are.)

Atheism too, of course, has no in-built defences against the will of a tyrannous majority. In truth nothing does, apart from constitutions and bills of rights. That’s why such things are needed. Depending on the good will or the religious or atheist conscience of millions of people is a terrible idea. Neither religion nor atheism reliably makes people good, or bad either. On the other hand, religion does give a gloss of pseudo-goodness to bad actions, in the minds of people who have been raised on harsh religious beliefs. Atheism can’t put that kind of gloss on things.

I was thinking all this earlier today while I read the piece, and then I suddenly bumped into my own name. That’s an odd experience!

Last summer, I found myself in the middle of a minor fuss after I wrote a scathing review of Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s Does God Hate Women? for the Independent on Sunday. Put simply, my objection was that they detailed terrible barbarities perpetrated against women by religious people, chiefly Muslims, and then pretty much laid the blame on religion, again, chiefly Islam, for those crimes.

Actually it wasn’t the analysis we disagreed with, it was the wild inaccuracy of many of the factual claims, but never mind. Let’s consider the analysis now. I’ll just say what I said there:

We do lay the blame for certain kinds of barbarities perpetrated against women by religious people on religion, for the reason that the perpetrators of the crimes themselves cite religion as the justification for the crimes. We take them at their word. We quoted people saying things like “We will do what Allah has instructed us” (p 174). Without that, a bunch of men stoning a young girl to death in front of a crowd of people would be universally seen as a criminal act; with it, it is seen by some as pious, and not only permitted but mandated. This fact really does make a difference. It makes the same difference that the phrase “church teachings” makes when the pope and bishops fight equality legislation in the UK.

We don’t claim that all religion always makes people act like that, or that some religion makes all its adherents act like that. We do claim that religion makes brutalities that would otherwise be obviously unacceptable into pious acts, and that that fact makes a major difference.

That’s what I said there. Well it’s undeniable, surely. It’s not an all or nothing claim, it’s a something claim. That ‘something’ is not an invention or a fantasy. Just look at the self-righteous way the Vatican hierarchy is carrying on. You don’t see the Mafia acting that way! They don’t give sermons in huge churches saying all this fuss about child rape is just ‘petty gossip.’ They just shoot their way out, or bribe everyone in sight, or both. At least with them there’s no confusion.

Michael Ruse says why the Templeton Foundation is a good thing.

More recently, the award has been given to academics working on the science-religion interface. It was therefore appropriate that this year the Prize went to Francisco Ayala, a Spanish-born population geneticist at the University of California at Irvine. Ayala (a former Catholic priest) has long been interested in the science-religion relationship…

The science-religion interface? What’s that? That’s the kind of thing that Templeton always talks about, but what exactly is it? And what does Michael Ruse think it is?

It could just mean, or be intended to mean, scientists and religious believers talking. That would certainly be unexceptionable. The trouble is, that doesn’t really seem like a very plausible understanding of what it means. One doesn’t hear about a history-mathematics interface as a way of referring to historians and mathematicians talking, nor does such an activity seem worth millions of dollars of foundation money. As far as I know, Templeton’s idea of the science-religion interface or relationship or whatever is that they are supposed to contribute to or enrich each other. But that’s just what’s contested. Critics think the two don’t have anything to contribute to each other, especially in the direction religion—>science. Ruse seems to be endorsing or at least taking for granted Templeton’s project, without spelling out exactly what he’s saying.

The Templeton Foundation…is essentially devoted to the promotion of the interaction and harmony between science and religion.

But interaction in what sense? Just chatting in the halls? Or substantive, disciplinary interaction? It does make a difference, to put it mildly.

But it’s useless to repine. Ruse goes on to say a lot of wholly irrelevant things, so it turns out that actually this jumble of a piece was just an excuse to tell the world yet again about his expert witness gig in Arkansas and, more amusingly for him, to say rude things about Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and especially (wait for it) PZ Myers. The closest he gets to explaining why Templeton is all right is to say ‘I don’t see anything morally wrong with someone trying to reconcile science and religion. Clarifying that a little, I don’t see anything morally wrong with religion as such.’ Morally wrong isn’t the issue! The point is that it’s epistemically wrong.

But all of a sudden at the very end he simply agrees to that, or at least seems to.

I don’t want to reconcile science and religion if this implies that religion must be true. At most, I want to show that science does not preclude being religious.

Well – quite. So what did – oh never mind. Ruse just likes to mouth off. It’s pointless to expect him to make sense.

Ratzinger gave his old job to an American when he (Ratz) was bumped upstairs. Cardinal William Levada now heads Ratzinger’s old Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This week he expressed his sorrow and sympathy for what the church has enabled priests to do to generations of children by…writing a long article saying how awful the New York Times is.

He starts by singling out Laurie Goodstein.

Only after eight paragraphs of purple prose does Goodstein reveal that Fr. Murphy, who criminally abused as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school in the Milwaukee Archdiocese from 1950 to 1974, “not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims.”

But in paragraph 13, commenting on a statement of Fr. Lombardi (the Vatican spokesman) that Church law does not prohibit anyone from reporting cases of abuse to civil authorities, Goodstein writes, “He did not address why that had never happened in this case.” Did she forget, or did her editors not read, what she wrote in paragraph nine about Murphy getting “a pass from the police and prosecutors”?

Oh dear god – he doesn’t even get it. He doesn’t even get a point as glaring as that. Why does he suppose Murphy got a pass from the police and prosecutors? Does he think all rapers of children get passes from the police and prosecutors? Does it not occur to him that Murphy got such a pass because he was a priest? Does it not occur to him that this hints at the level of undue deference paid to religion even by secular law enforcement, and does it not further occur to him to feel searching anguish at the thought of the kinds of advantage this has given predators? No, it apparently doesn’t, not for a second. He’s apparently much too busy concentrating on His Gang to feel any sympathy or concern for anyone else. And this is all too typical of the selfish self-centered clueless blind morally bankrupt outfit he helps to run.

As a believer, I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.

And that lack of doubt perhaps helps to explain why your organization does such a crappy job of preventing harm to its subjects right here on planet earth. You have no doubt that everything will be all fixed up later on after everyone is dead. Well how convenient! Meanwhile, let them eat brioche.

…about a man with and for whom I have the privilege of working, as his “successor” Prefect, a pope whose encyclicals on love and hope and economic virtue have both surprised us and made us think, whose weekly catecheses and Holy Week homilies inspire us, and yes, whose pro-active work to help the Church deal effectively with the sexual abuse of minors continues to enable us today, I ask the Times to reconsider its attack mode about Pope Benedict XVI and give the world a more balanced view of a leader it can and should count on.

The pope is not our ‘leader.’ He is not ‘a leader.’ He is the head of an archaic reactionary authoritarian religious organization. He is not a leader and he is in no way a leader that ‘the world can and should count on.’ We do not want your leader, Mr Levada.