Ah, the Templeton prize. What a treat.

A Canadian philosopher who believes that spirituality is an essential part of the study of philosophy and the social sciences has won the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for advancement and research of spiritual matters.

Okay; first pressing question; what does that mean? What is spirituality? Depending on how it’s defined, either, of course it’s an essential part of the study of philosophy and the social sciences, or what on earth does he mean it’s an essential part of the study of philosophy and the social sciences?

Professor Taylor has written extensively on the sense of self and how it is defined by morals and what one considers good. People operate in the register of spiritual issues, he said, and to separate those from the humanities and social sciences leads to flawed conclusions. “The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable,” Professor Taylor said.

Same thing. Wot’s he mean? Just stuff that’s not rocks and boards and dirt? Then of course people ‘operate in the register of spiritual issues’ (I suppose he means think about and care about, but ‘operate in the register of’ sounds more – Templetonian). Or supernatural? Then some operate in that register (or think they do, or want to, or hope to) and some don’t.

Whatever. Professor Taylor can have his prize, I don’t mind, but I wish people would say what they mean when they talk about spirituality.

This interview with Martha Nussbaum is full of interesting stuff.

I find that the US is in a way one of the most difficult places for philosophy to play a public role because the media are so sensationalistic and so anti-intellectual. If I go to most countries in Europe I’ll have a much easier time publishing in a newspaper than I would in the US. The New York Times op-ed page is very dumbed down and I no longer even bother trying to get something published there because they don’t like anything that has a complicated argument.

Undeniable, and depressing, and irritating. This is one reason we have to laugh loudly and scornfully whenever the NY Times tells us (as it regularly solemnly ludicrously does) that it’s the best newspaper or even news organization in the world.

On the other hand there’s a familiar claim that I’ve disputed here before and that I don’t like at all.

I think the political form of liberalism, in which we don’t advocate a comprehensive doctrine of autonomy but rather certain ethical principles for the political realm, is more defensible in a world in which, for example, we have religions that don’t think autonomy is a particularly great good. We don’t show respect for them if we say that only autonomous lives are worthwhile.

I don’t want to show respect for religions that don’t think autonomy is a particularly great good. That’s exactly what I don’t want to do – so I flinch when I see it adduced as a reason for not advocationg a comprehensive doctrine of autonomy, even though I probably wouldn’t advocate such a thing myself anyway (because of the words comprehensive and doctrine, which also make me flinch, which I think is part of Nussbaum’s point, but I still dislike the reason adduced).

Wherever the ideas come from, I think the important thing is now that they do enrich the debate within liberalism and I think they should be defended in a way that’s still recognizably liberal. By that I mean with an emphasis on the idea that each person is the ultimate beneficiary, not large groups of people, not even families, but each person seen as an equal of every other person. And I also think that it’s a hallmark of liberalism that ideas of choice and freedom are really very, very important. Of course I think one has to stress that we don’t have choice if people are just left to their own devices. The state has to act positively to create the conditions for choice.

That’s better. (So a comprehensive doctrine of autonomy is different from ideas of choice and freedom. Okay. I’m not sure I understand why, but maybe that’s because I need to read some more Rawls. Anyway I’m glad we get to think ideas of choice and freedom are important even if we are urged to respect religions that don’t think autonomy is.)

Because English has to defend itself against people who say it’s not a proper academic subject, it’s prone to fads. I think we’re not at the end of the fads, there’ll probably be some other fad that will be again rather annoying and we’ll have to fight against that one. But at present, at least, I think the post-modern one is on the way out. Whether ethics in its serious sense will become central in English departments I am not sure, because I think very few literary scholars have the patience to do the sustained hard philosophical work that’s needed. Whenever they talk about philosophy, with the exception of Wayne Booth, for example, they’ll talk about it in a way that seems to me quite embarrassing and amateurish.

I’ve noticed that. More than once. More than twice. There’s the way they seem to think Derrida invented ideas that have been around for centuries, for example; very cringe-making. (That’s not Derrida’s fault.)

So you can get departments, often very good departments, where people would make fun of a literary inquiry, or think that it was not proper philosophy. In my own department, fortunately, it’s not that way at all. Many people would want, for example, to teach a course on Proust…So I think now it’s a much more open field than it was when I was a graduate student, when you couldn’t even write a dissertation on Aristotle’s views about friendship because people would make fun of you. They would say it was too soft or something.

Funny. Once, many years ago, The Philosophers’ Magazine had a discussion board, which I stumbled into and found interesting and so began to comment on. After I’d been doing that for three or four weeks I started a thread on friendship – and I got roundly pounced on and told that that was not a philosophical subject. I was much suprised to hear it, and wondered to myself about Aristotle and so on.

My primary difference with MacKinnon is that she is reluctant to express any universal norms or ideals…She thinks it’s too dictatorial to announce ahead of time what the norms are. However, in her writings there’s a very obvious normative structure. There are ideas of dignity and equality…But I think she herself is, when you philosophically reconstruct her views. I don’t think you can do it without employing normative notions; to the extent that she does avoid them it just means that her own ideas are underdeveloped and that there’s not enough of a principled structure.

And without the principled structure you find yourself in the muddy shifting quicksand of tolerance and respect and acceptance without any stipulations or definitions or limits, and that’s the end of universal women’s rights or human rights. We need the principled structure.

The ones I don’t think are so very helpful are the post-modernist feminists like Judith Butler whom I have criticized very strongly…And when I see academic feminists saying: well we can write these elegant papers in a jargon which parody the norms, I want to know where the feminist struggle that we had is…And then the Carol Gilligan group: I think their work is not so good and I think it provides a handy rationale for the exploitation of women as caregivers. So I am very critical of those two groups.

Yup, yup, yup. Same here. Apart from the respect for religions part (which I may not understand properly anyway), I like it all.

You know, bulwarks are useful things when there’s a hurricane, or a flood, or maybe a mob of ravenous aggressive rabbits approaching the town; but other times, not so much. There are some bulwarks we don’t much want, some bulwarks we’d rather not have, thanks. Take your bulwark and go away. This one for instance.

Why has the church taken a stand on [the issue of gay adoptions] when it barely protested against the introduction of civil partnerships last year? Is this largely a symbolic issue, a stand-in for a much deeper debate about the relationship between faith and the state? Does the church see itself as the last bulwark against an encroaching tide of liberalism?

Maybe so, and if it does, it needs to go away and repent. It needs to go far far far away, like into the metaphysical possible world where ‘God’ necessarily exists and no one else does, and hang its mitred head and repent. Or if it can’t repent, it just needs to go far far away and leave us alone. We don’t want any damn bulwarks against encroaching tides of liberalism, thanks. That is the very last thing on earth we want – the BBC put that very neatly. No thank you. No churchy bulwarks against encroaching tides of liberalism, but on the contrary, an encroaching tide of liberalism that sweeps all before it. Liberalism good, anti-liberalism bad. Tide good, bulwark bad. Liberalism in this context clearly means general liberty from taboos and exclusions and punishments, from oppression and deprivation and subordination that have no rational basis, and that is a good thing and opposition to it is a bad thing. Hey hey, ho ho, churchy bulwark gotta go.

Stephen Law discusses the ontological argument.

Anselm’s argument simple and elegant. He begins by characterizing God as a being greater than which cannot be conceived. That God, if he exists, is such a being seems clear. If you conceive of a being, yet can also conceive of a still greater being, then the being you first thought of cannot be God. Armed with this concept of God, we can now argue for God’s existence as follows. We can at least conceive of such a being. That there exists a being greater than which cannot be conceived is at least a hypothesis we can entertain. But, adds Anselm, as it is greater to exist in reality than merely in our imagination, this being must really exist. After all, if he did not exist, then he would not be as great a being as we can conceive.

Stephen notes that few philosophers find the argument cogent or convincing, but also that there is no consensus about what’s wrong with it. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but what I wonder is, why anyone ever found it convincing. It has that grandiosity problem I mentioned (that is, it seems to me to have that problem). It just seems like silly magic – as if merely thinking the words ‘perfect’ and ‘exists’ could make something exist. It doesn’t matter what we can conceive and what we decide must be true – we can’t make anything exist by the power of thought (except thoughts, which don’t count, because I’m a reductionist materialist, and a heathen).

I have a different (though related) problem with Gaunilo’s objection.

Here’s Gaunilo’s argument. Can we not conceive of a perfect island – an island perfect in every conceivable way, from the purity of its streams to the sublime contours of its landscape? It seems we can. But if we can conceive of such an island, and it is greater to exist in reality than in imagination, then the island we are conceiving of must exist. If it didn’t exist, it would not be perfect in every way. On the seemingly safe assumption that there is no such island, it seems we have no choice but to accept that there is something wrong with the argument that appears to establish that there is.

Simon Blackburn’s version of that is Dreamboat – the perfect lover. Anyway, about the island – does it make sense to say that an island can be perfect in every conceivable way, from the purity of its streams to the sublime contours of its landscape? Are pure streams and sublime contours examples of perfection? They don’t seem so to me. They seem more like examples of very very good or extremely nice or ravishingly beautiful if you happen to like that kind of thing – but that’s not the same thing as perfect. What’s a perfect apple? Or a perfect brownie? Or a perfect sweater? Or a perfect book? Depends, doesn’t it; depends what you like. It’s a value judgment; it’s moral or aesthetic or both; it’s relative at least to humans and often to individuals; ‘perfect’ doesn’t come into it. So that’s a further element in the puzzle. It puzzles me anyway.

Right, Plantinga on Dawkins. There is one bit that’s quite funny, but there’s another that I can’t understand. It’s familiar, and I never understand it. It just seems childish, in a literal way: childishly grandiose; and that can’t be right, so I must not understand it. Help me out here.

So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God’s existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn’t just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn’t even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.

I just don’t begin to understand that. I don’t understand the ‘So’ that begins the fifth sentence. So? So? Coming after ‘his existence is maximally probable’? When the whole chain started with ‘According to classical theism’? And then said a lot of things that (as far as I can tell) are to do with logic but make nothing happen. Why does the fact that ‘God’ is X according to classical theism mean that anything else follows for people who don’t adhere to classical theism in the first place? I could understand why something would follow if the phrase went ‘according to geology’ or physics or molecular biology and then were followed by a claim about rocks or quarks or DNA that included the word ‘is’ – but classical theism? No. And then there’s that ‘if’. If God is a necessary being, then…then how do we get to So? We start from a claim from a supernaturalist field, we go on to an if, and we end up at a bizarre certainty that Dawkins owes us an explanation. I do not understand that passage. It looks nonsensical to me, and that can’t be right.

Peter Tatchell wants to know.

Why is much of the left and the liberal media ignoring the struggle for democracy and women’s rights in Iran?…Sunday’s demonstration was the latest in a series. It was called in solidarity with five women activists who are on trial after they staged a peaceful rally last June against Islamic laws that discriminate against women – in particular the sexist laws on polygamy and child custody. The five activists in the dock are Nusheen Ahmadi Khorasani, Parvin Ardalan, Sussan Tahmasebi, Shahla Entesari and Fariba Davoodi Mohajer. For holding a peaceful protest, they are charged with endangering national security, propaganda against the state, and taking part in an illegal gathering…The liberal western media – including The Guardian – has mostly failed to report these women’s protests and their bloody suppression. The left, too, ignores the heroic struggle of the women of Iran. Misogyny and police brutality are not okay in Britain, but apparently acceptable in Tehran. Why the double standards?

Why indeed? Absence of mind? Distance? More pressing concerns? Or something more sinister.

There are several interesting comments there too, worth sorting through the usual CisF deluge. This one for instance –

I work in human rights advocacy and have become appalled at the manner in which elements across the entire spectrum of the left have become hostile to universal human rights. Those who condemn homophobia in Saudi Arabia are silenced, those who speak out for Muslims who convert to Christianity and face prison or death are condemned, those who challenge violently misogynistic laws and practices in Pakistan or Afghanistsan are dismissed. The ethical core of the left is being rotted by moral relativism. It is a woeful and tragic spectacle.

I’m not sure it is exactly moral relativism, at least not in a broad sense. It’s more like geographico-politico relativism, or that combined with a mistaken idea of politeness – it’s not good manners to criticize other countries or cultures – even if segments of those countries are busy campaigning against manifest gross injustice and would love our solidarity and support.

There’s also a fair amount of sinister nonsense (or sinister balls, as they used to call it around the NS) about Maryam Namazie, and ‘the mainstream organisations of British Muslims’ meaning the MCB, and all this does is encourage fascists and racists – in short, sinister balls of the kind that demonstrates exactly the kind of stupidity Tatchell is asking about. Know the enemy.

Also, a reminder: you fortunate people in or near London get to go to a seminar on Women’s Rights, the Veil and Islamic and religious laws tomorrow.

Speakers: Sonja Eggerickx: President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union; Ann Harrison: Researcher, Middle East and North Africa Department of Amnesty International’s International Secretariat; Maryam Namazie: frequent contributor to B&W and 2005 National Secular Society’s Secularist of the Year Award Winner; Taslima Nasrin: Physician, writer, radical feminist, human rights activist and secular humanist. Co-sponsored by the International Campaign in Defense of Women’s Right in Iran- UK, the National Secular Society and the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association. Free. University of London Union
Room 3D, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY. 6 to 10 p.m. I’d go in a heartbeat if I were in London.

Check out the Secular Islam summit blog. Check out the St Petersburg Declaration.

We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree.

…We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights.

…We call on the governments of the world to

reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms; oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostacy, in accordance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights;

eliminate practices, such as female circumcision, honor killing, forced veiling, and forced marriage, that further the oppression of women

Read it all. Excellent stuff. Shoulders to the wheel, all; support these people; spread the word.

There are two choices, it sees to me. Either ‘God’ is the god of religion, of churches and mosques, that gives rules and answers prayers – in which case it’s part of nature and history; or it’s something else, which we can’t comprehend.

Either it’s the first, which is like a giant cop, or a combination cop and nurse, or it’s the second, which is [ ? ]. The first is not reasonable to believe in, because a god like that would (or should) provide unmistakable evidence of its existence and its wishes (because what in hell is the point of keeping it a secret?). The second is perfectly reasonable to believe in – but is it reasonable to call that ‘God’?

The combination of the two makes no sense at all. An unknown that tells us what to do, a mystery that we’re supposed to worship in specific terms, a question mark that loves us – it’s an incoherent jumble. Yet it’s the usual idea of ‘God’ – half parental half concealed; half judge half Cloud of Unknowing. It might as well be half Bactrian camel half peanut butter.

If it’s simply (or complicatedly) what we don’t know, or causes that we don’t know about, and the like, who would object? Who would disbelieve in the existence of such things or concepts, or think it not reasonable to believe in them? But why on earth call that ‘God’? Is it because its fans are desperate to retain a person god? But that’s not reasonable either; not for theological reasons, but for biological ones. We know now what humans are, and how we got to be what we are. Do we really think ‘God’ (or Betsy, as we might as well call it) is like that? But if human nature and human abilities are a product of natural selection, how could Betsy’s nature and abilities be similar? So the ‘person’ thing seems pretty untenable, no matter what you do.

Before 1859, it must have been different. It must have been (seemed) self-evident that humans were mysteriously special and strange and interesting, unlike other animals and very unlike trees and rocks. All explanations were unsatisfactory, and a person-like god making us as miniatures of itself could have been the least unsatisfactory. That’s not unreasonable. But once the peculiarity of humans no longer seems so peculiar, a person-like god becomes less necessary and less explanatory. In fact it raises questions rather than explaining. (Does it have an appendix? Does it have a small intestine? Why?) A person-like god now seems not like a spiritual version of ourselves but like an inexplicable giant ape. Why would there be a god like that? Okay it has no body (but then we’re getting into unknowable territory, which is the other choice, but never mind for now), but it has a person-like mind of some sort. But – our minds are human minds. They’re not Pure Minds, they’re not examples of What Mind Should Be; they’re human minds. A person-like god seems like a not very reasonable belief – it has to be person-like and yet completely different in every way that matters. Well then we’re just back to Incomprehensible again, in which case we’re back to Nobody Knows again, which means we’re back to Why call it God again.

One of the ironies in all this is that theists are so seldom expected to define their god – just invoking the name is supposed to be adequate – it’s supposed to be self-evident who and what it is. Theists and some agnostics claim that atheists have too much certainty, but belief in a shifting inscrutable but bossy demanding god is – at the very least dangerous. Believers don’t always use their god to bully and oppress, but the risk is always there – it’s well adapted for such a purpose. I would argue that atheists are not wrong to be pretty certain that, at a minimum, it is dangerous to believe in elusive mysterious inscrutable gods who impose strong laws and punishments on human beings.

Because there is no appeal. No accountability, no chance to revise, discuss, re-think. There are no defense lawyers, no appellate courts. And in fact no present god, either, but only human intermediaries. Why should we – and how can we? – be so sure they have it right?

Mark Vernon adds this in a comment on Stephen’s post on the mystery move:

Both the atheist and the theist will do away with false gods, and false theories, as they ponder the mystery. But whereas the atheist will conclude there is no god, and the universe is pure, if delightful, chance. The theist will conclude that the universe is pure gift – as articulated by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. The difference between believing the universe is chance and gift strikes me as a very great one.

Yes, it’s a big difference, but on the other hand ‘chance’ might not be quite the right word (brute fact might be better); and as Stephen points out, ‘gift’ has some problems too. And in any case, it always makes a big difference how one thinks of things, but that fact doesn’t change reality. It makes a difference whether we think various natural forces caused it to rain today, or that our dearest friend made it rain today; but that doesn’t determine what caused it to rain today, so pointing out the difference between the two ideas is beside the point if the dispute is over whether or not ‘god’ exists, or whether it’s reasonable to think so.

Well exactly. Just what I’ve been thinking, and fuming at, for weeks.

“The enlightenment driven away…” This very strong and bitter line [of Auden’s – OB] came back to me when I saw the hostile, sneaky reviews that have been dogging the success of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s best seller Infidel…Two of our leading intellectual commentators, Timothy Garton Ash (in the New York Review of Books) and Ian Buruma, described Hirsi Ali, or those who defend her, as “Enlightenment fundamentalist[s].” In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Buruma made a further borrowing from the language of tyranny and intolerance and described her view as an “absolutist” one…In her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the following: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” This is a fairly representative quotation. She has her criticisms of the West, but she prefers it to a society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence is officially preached against unbelievers. As an African victim of, and escapee from, this system, she feels she has acquired the right to say so. What is “fundamentalist” about that?

What, indeed? What, what, what? I would really like to know. I read that nasty, ‘hostile, sneaky’ review of Buruma’s in the Sunday NY Times, and was thoroughly and profoundly irritated by it – as well as a little frightened. If he thinks that, he’d be willing to compromise on my rights as well as Hirsi Ali’s (not, be it noted, his own). I don’t want the Ian Burumas doing that. I find it alarming that they seem to be willing to consider it (and also, frankly, that they don’t even pause to notice that it’s other people’s rights that are in danger much more than their own, and to worry that that might make their own views look a little suspect).

The Feb. 26 edition of Newsweek takes up where Garton Ash and Buruma leave off and says, in an article by Lorraine Ali, that, “It’s ironic that this would-be ‘infidel’ often sounds as single-minded and reactionary as the zealots she’s worked so hard to oppose.”…Accompanying the article is a typically superficial Newsweek Q&A sidebar, which is almost unbelievably headed: “A Bombthrower’s Life.” The subject of this absurd headline is a woman who has been threatened with horrific violence…She has never used or advocated violence. Yet to whom does Newsweek refer as the “Bombthrower”? It’s always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it’s the victim of violence who is “really” inciting it.

The Bombthrower. Staggering, isn’t it.

Garton Ash and Buruma would once have made short work of any apologist who accused the critics of the U.S.S.R. or the People’s Republic of China of “heating up the Cold War” if they made any points about human rights. Why, then, do they grant an exception to Islam…?…Is it because Islam is a “faith”? Or is it because it is the faith – in Europe at least – of some ethnic minorities? In neither case would any special protection from criticism be justified. Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny. And within these “minorities,” there are other minorities who want to escape from the control of their ghetto leaders…This is a very complex question, which will require a lot of ingenuity in its handling. The pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally “fundamentalist,” is of no help here. And notice what happens when Newsweek takes up the cry: The enemy of fundamentalism is defined as someone on the fringe while, before you have had time to notice the sleight of hand, the aggrieved, self-pitying Muslim has become the uncontested tenant of the middle ground.

Right. Hirsi Ali is the ‘bombthrower’ while people who are offended by dissent from Islam are her victims. Very strange.

Mina Ahadi has the right idea. She also has police protection, because – you’ll never guess – she’s had death threats.

Human rights activists have formed a “Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany” to help women renounce the Islamic faith if they feel oppressed by its laws…Iranian-born Mina Ahadi, 50, said she set up the group to highlight the difficulties of renouncing the Islamic faith which she believes to be misogynist. She wants the group to form a counterweight to Muslim organisations that she says don’t adequately represent Germany’s secular-minded Muslim immigrants…Renouncing Islam can carry the death penalty in a number of countries.

Misogynist? Just because of a few little death threats? Nah.

I’m also critical of Islam in Germany and of the way the German government deals with the issue of Islam. Many Muslim organisations like the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD) or Milli Görüs engage in politics or interfere in people’s everyday lives…The associations pretend that they represent everyone and to some extent are acknowledged as such by the German side. That’s bad. We have to give a signal against that and say: Not in our name. We are secular humanists. We want to give these people a voice. Someone has to make a start. We’re advocating human rights…We want to form a counterweight to the Muslim organisations. The fact that we’re doing this under police protection shows how necessary our initiative is.

Yeah, you could say that. Good luck, Mina Ahadi.

More from Mark Vernon. And more again. I’m still not convinced though.

But this is the over-riding issue, it seems to me, in the atheists’ dismissal of God: if they really want to be conclusive then they must address the best ideas of God available, the criterion for that being those of the great theologians…Unfortunately, or irritatingly, though, they will find that the best theologians say that God is not ultimately amenable to the kind of analysis they want to apply. For the very simple reason that God is beyond human comprehension, else not God. This is not to say that reason has no role to play in theology: it’s primary purpose is to do away with false gods.

But if ‘God’ is beyond human comprehension, then how can (human) reason do away with false gods? How can it do one but not the other – or if it can’t do one, how can it do the other? How can you know this is counterfeit, and this is a fraud, and this is no good, if you don’t know what the authentic version is?

And there’s also the wearyingly familiar problem, which I apologize for repeating, that if ‘God’ is beyond human comprehension, then why do people say things about it at all? If it’s beyond human comprehension – why doesn’t that mean that there is just nothing at all for humans to say about it? It still seems like a cheat. ‘God’ is beyond comprehension so it’s ‘not ultimately amenable to the kind of analysis atheists want to apply,’ but it is amenable to the kind of analysis theists want to apply. How can that not look like a shell game? Not to mention the pesky fact – again, much repeated – that many people do claim to comprehend god and make all sorts of factual claims about it, especially about the way it wants us to behave and not behave, which people it wants us to treat badly, how hard to hit children, and the like. In that sense the theologians’ beyond comprehension god is beside the point. The problem with religion is all the claims that people do make about god, so it’s in a way irrelevant to point out that theologians mean a different kind of god.

Stephen Law comments here and here. He answers the ‘God is beyond human comprehension else not God’ move this way:

But now here’s my question: what is the difference between the atheist who admits there is indeed a fascinating mystery about why there is anything at all, a mystery to which they do not have the answer, and Vernon’s theist who says there’s a mystery about why there is anything at all, and calls this mystery “God”? Surely the difference is entirely trivial and semantic?

It seems so to me. There’s this [ ] that we don’t comprehend, called ‘God,’ or there are a lot of things we don’t comprehend, and because we don’t comprehend them we don’t give them names. There’s an unknown unknown; let’s either call it ‘God’ or not call it anything. There’s a mystery about why there is anything at all; let’s call it ‘God’; no, let’s not give it a name. That does indeed seem like a trivial difference. (I think Stephen meant to say ‘anything’ instead of ‘nothing’ in the theist version: I think the two mysteries are meant to be the same mystery rather than different mysteries.)

Update: Yes, Stephen meant ‘anything,’ so I’ll change the wording, noting it here because commenters have quoted the first version.

Solana Larsen, who is blogging from the UN Conference on the Status of Women, points out the press release announcing Condoleeza Rice’s choice of delegates to attend the conference.

Bramon is a major fundraiser for Bush, and so is Guillermin Gable. Both are succesful business women, and Guillermin Gable is a member of Women Corporate Directors. Ooh well, that should make them qualified to take democratic global decisions on women in poverty, shouldn’t it? The real star is Pia Francesca de Solenni. She won an award from the Vatican for her PhD thesis. Guess what it’s about.

I am profoundly, bottomlessly sick of this administration’s insistence on appointing political hacks to everything from FEMA to putting Iraq back together to attending conferences on the status of women. I’m sick to death of their contempt for knowledge, experience, expertise (real expertise, not expertise in knowing whether god exists or not), competence, and reality. I’m also sick of their religion-and-family schtick. Of course I had to look up what her PhD thesis was about.

Woman is created in the image of God. Like man, she is created for the purpose of knowing, ultimately knowing God. True feminism, therefore, respects woman´s essential identity as an image of God.

Ah. So I’m a false feminist then.

As a result of many feminist theories, woman begins to be considered an atomistic individual, an individual without relations to others. Yet, we see that every aspect of our life – for both men and women – we need others.

Uh huh. But do we need others as equals, or as either dominant or subordinate? Feminism doesn’t say we don’t need others, it says women shouldn’t be systematically as a gender subordinate to men. Atomism has nothing to do with it. Red herring; straw woman; bullshit.

As Christians, we recognize the inherent equality of all human beings, man and woman. The differences are constructive even if we don´t understand them. Remember that the differences existed before original sin. The tensions that arise from them, however, are due to original sin. Why should we settle for any system of thought that gives us anything less than being created in the image of God?

Because we don’t know who or what that is, and we don’t think you know either; because we think it’s the other way around: ‘God’ was created in the image of humans, not vice versa; because we don’t think this hypothesized god exists; because we don’t like your god; because this god has allowed countless centuries of inequality and oppression, so we think systems of thought that give us more than being created in the image of your wrathful vengeful cruel male god are better than the system of thought you offer. That’s why.

Larsen also pointed out this item from ‘Concerned Women of America’.

There is disagreement, too, about who does the best job of protection girls and women from discrimination and violence. The left argues that women need to be “empowered” to protect themselves. While those of us from the right agree that women need self-confidence and self-esteem, we believe that girls and women have inherent worth and that being raised in a family headed by a married mother and father is the best way to nurture strong feelings of self worth.

Well, that depends, doesn’t it. What if the married mother and father have funny ideas about women and girls, and raise their daughters to believe they’re weak and stupid and subordinate? Or perhaps that they’re dirty and voracious and dangerous? Like most things, families are only as good as they are – there is no magic mechanism that makes sure all families are Good and Healthy and Fair.

Furthermore, one problem with all this rabid insistence on family family family is that it pushes a none-too-subtle message that women are primarily wives and mothers. That’s the not-very-hidden agenda of all these Focusonthefamily type outfits – they’re Kinder Küche Kirche with Murkan masks on.

Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, Jennifer Marshall, put it beautifully. “Research has indicated that girls fare better in terms of health, safety and general welfare when they live in an intact family, with a married mother and father. Around the world, family plays an essential role in protecting young girls from violence, yet some feminist NGOs have put more emphasis on asserting girls’ autonomy and sexual independence. Healthy marriage and strong family are critical to an effective strategy for protecting the most vulnerable and eradicating exploitation through sex trafficking and other forms of abuse. The significance of fathers in promoting their daughters’ welfare, in particular, must not be overlooked.”

That is beautiful – except for the tiny unimportant fact that ‘around the world,’ fathers all too often play an essential role in beating the crap out of girls, selling them to settle poker debts, forcing them to marry much older men, keeping them out of school, and various other minor abuses. So that’s a stupid thing for Jennifer Marshall to say, isn’t it. It’s just plain stupid – to generalize in that silly way and ignore the abundantly reported reality that fathers are simply not universally kind or even fair to their daughters and do not universally treat them well or even fairly. Some do, some don’t. There are places where pretty much no fathers treat their daughters fairly. Sentimental drooling about family doesn’t change that.

Ah-a. Sandra Harding has a new book – and it does look like a corker. Happily, people are taking note, and adding it to their science studies course outlines as required reading. Splendid.

The idea of this science as value- or culture-free is pulled apart by postcolonialist analyses of the culturally distinctive ways that Western science has developed…Harding problematizes the claim to universality that Western science rests upon…This evaluation is not only presented in terms of how we might transform the scientific traditions of the “Global North”, but also how we might transform the way we study science to be more critical, reflexive, and politically-engaged.

Great. Study of science that is more politically engaged. Great idea. Of course, the Bush admin has been doing that for more than six years now, but more encouragement is always welcome. And of course the first step is to problematize the claim to universality that Western science rests upon – because of course it’s not universal at all, it’s purely local, and researchers in Manila and Mumbai and Lima are bound to find different, local results if they’re doing the work properly.

The first section of this book also reviews the antiracist and feminist argument that modern Western science exacerbates social inequalities through discriminatory projects, philosophies, technologies, and social structure. One of the most intriguing chapters of this section is devoted to an analysis of the discriminatory epistemologies and philosophies of science (chapter 5); here Harding reaffirms her commitment to standpoint theory in light of recent and innovative work on its application to science studies.

Ever read Harding on standpoint epistemology? It’s impressive stuff, I can tell you. Women have a different epistemology because they have different lives. See?

(No, that’s not unfair. She really is that crude.)

Perhaps the most valuable contribution that this volume makes can be found in its second section, comprised of three chapters on the topic of Truth, Relativism, and Science’s Political Unconsciousness. In these final essays Harding pulls together…proposed means of securing a future “world of sciences” with the possibility for advancing social justice…Harding lays out the “central foci of a still emerging network of postpositivist philosophies of science” in a way that allows for an interlocking plurality of sciences to exist that are best suited to particular local resources, goals, environments, and cultures for producing effective and socially-just outcomes…Here she brilliantly analyzes how both the anti-democratic and (supposedly) pro-democratic ideals of Western science are deeply problematic, preventing this model, which “speaks in a monologue”, from being suitable as a universal system.

Right. It speaks in a monologue, so it’s undemocratic, so it’s not ‘suitable as a universal system.’ It’s inappropriate. It’s impolite. It speaks in a monologue in the sense of saying some findings are not supported by evidence and so probably wrong. Well obviously that’s neither democratic nor kind – didn’t we all learn not to talk that way in kindergarten? I think so. So that’s that for that kind of science then; on with the new kind.

Instructors in particular will appreciate this new resource of not only a comprehensive overview of arguments in both past and present critical science studies, but also an “updated” and clarified understanding of one of the most important and influential writers in this area, who clearly has continued to push forward with innovative engagement.

One of the most important and influential, alas – that’s why she made an extended guest appearance in Why Truth Matters: because she is indeed, however incredible it may seem, influential.

Mark Vernon discusses what he calls ‘common mistakes of atheists’ – but the examples he gives aren’t examples, because they don’t make the mistakes he says they make. His attributions are rather sloppy. Okay very sloppy. He doesn’t quote, he just says.

If you do the rounds of the philosophically minded blogs of atheists, it is common for arguments about the non-existence of God to be rehearsed. Typically, they present ‘proofs’ that require empirical evidence. For example, Stephen Law, argues that if God is all-powerful and all-good, then the fact that there is so much evil in the world provides evidence that tilts the odds decisively against God’s existence.

But arguing that something tilts the odds is not the same thing as ‘presenting “proofs”,’ and Stephen Law hedges things a good deal more than that.

Would this constitute a “proof” that there’s no God? Depends what you mean by “proof”. Personally I think these sorts of consideration do establish beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no all-powerful all-good God. So we can, in this sense, prove there’s no God. Yet all the people quoted in my last blog say you cannot “scientifically” prove or disprove God’s existence. If they mean prove beyond any doubt they are right. But then hardly anything is provable in that sense, not even the non-existence of fairies.

And so on. He doesn’t just ‘present proofs,’ so that ‘for example’ is misleading.

Vernon also just says about me, and I’m not convinced by what he just says.

Or they say that God is a supernatural entity for which there is as much evidence as fairies – a familiar trope on butterfliesandwheels.

Is it? A familiar trope? Is that something I say a lot? I’m not sure I’ve ever said it, and I am sure I don’t say it a lot, so what does he mean ‘a familiar trope’?

And more to the point, why do theists and pro-theist ‘agnostics,’ which is what I take Vernon to be (since he certainly seems to spend a lot of time rebuking imaginary atheists for saying things they don’t say, for a just plain agnostic) – why do they do that? Why do they mischaracterize atheists and then scold the caricature so much?

Well, maybe because they don’t have much to say if they don’t. I don’t know. But I must say I’m beginning to suspect it. All this complaining about imaginary atheists is beginning to remind me of people who say everyone to the left of Bush is a traitor.

Vernon says more, and most of it seems pretty woolly to me.

Now, I am an agnostic. So I think that the jury is out on the existence of God and, in fact, always will be. Why? Because the very best theologians – those who it is only reasonable to consult before claiming to have disproved the thing about which they are experts – say so.

Wait – what? ‘I think the jury is out on the existence of God and always will be; why? Because the very best theologians say so.’ Did he really mean to say that? Or did he lose track because of the inserted clause, and say something much cruder and sillier than he meant to. Probably. But then there’s that inserted clause, which is also not very good. Atheists don’t claim (most of them) to have ‘disproved’ the existence of god. And what does he mean ‘disproved the thing’? How would you disprove a thing? And then the ‘about which they are experts’ bit – experts in what sense? And experts in what? The thing, we know; but what does that mean? Do they have special expert knowledge that there is a god or that god does exist (and what kind of god it is and what it does and what it wants us to do)? If so why don’t they make it public? I realize they have arguments, but I’m not sure that having arguments that god exists (or ‘about the thing,’ for short) makes them experts. I have no problem agreeing it makes them scholars, but experts? No. No, frankly, I think that’s a stupid word to use about a supernatural subject – unless of course one of these experts comes up with some real evidence (yes, evidence) that a supernatural entity exists. That would be expertise. But just saying? Not so much.

There’s more, but that’s enough. I find this kind of thing depressing.

To be fair to Terry Eagleton, he’s perfectly capable of being entirely lucid and even (dare I say it) sensible. I leafed through The Eagelton Reader earlier today to find a sample – and it was not difficult. From an essay called ‘Deconstruction and Human Rights’:

Equivocation and ambiguity are not always moral virtues; and there seems no doubt that such finespun obliquity on issues of central political importance has done much to disillusion those erstwhile enthusiasts for deconstruction who somewhat gullibly credited its promissory note to deliver some political goods.

There you go. Clear as a bell.

Update: I shortened the quoted passage, to omit a swipe at Derrida that I almost didn’t include to begin with, but ended up including for the sake of offering some context. But Roger points out that it’s inaccurate – and I don’t agree with the point of it anyway (which seems to be that all writing ought to be politically useful in some way, or at least ought to be rebuked for not being), so out it goes. My main goal was just to be fair to Eagleton; and the passage is more elegant on its own anyway.

I’m not the only one who wasn’t impressed or convinced by that piece by Stuart Jeffries. Caspar Melville is another.

Stuart Jeffries piece on faith and unbelief is an example of a certain kind of liberal intellectual position which seeks to stand above the current debates about the place of religion in contemporary society…He quotes without challenge the preposterous assertion from Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, that “atheists like Richard Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube” (since when is writing books and making arguments comparable to mass murder?)…Jeffries is quite right to point out that these days secularists seem exasperated. But who can blame us when the case against unaccountable and undemocratic religious privilege is so misrepresented by articles like his?

Well exactly. If people like him didn’t keep saying silly things like that, people like us would be better-tempered and sweeter and would stop blowing up tubes and buses, or rather not so much blowing them up as, well, not blowing them up. We wouldn’t stop not blowing them up – we’d – oh never mind.

David Thompson also comments.

What we’re hearing instead, and hearing very often, are statements like another quoted in Jeffries’ article, by Oxford theologian Alister McGrath: “We need to treat those who disagree with us with intellectual respect, rather than dismissing them – as Dawkins does – as liars, knaves and charlatans.” This rather presupposes that intellectual respect could in all fairness be assigned to a person who presents no credible argument to support grandiose claims regarding the origin and nature of existence, and the alleged preferences of a hypothetical deity on whose behalf he affects to speak. Well, if you want to avoid being viewed as a knave or a pompous little fraud, it helps to have the goods to back up your claims.

And it’s just asking too much to demand that we treat all those who disagree with us with intellectual respect. What if they’re not intellectually respectable? Civility is one thing, but intellectual respect is another.

David cites that comment by Colin Slee too – I daresay everyone who discussed that article cited that comment. It certainly did stand out! So much so that it caused me to lapse into a rare but sincere fantasy about violence.

Ben at Religion is Bullshit has a splendid comment. Stuart Jeffries is probably feeling pretty silly by now! One can hope so anyway.

Stephen Law has posts about the ever-popular ‘atheism is faith’ trope here and here. He also has ones on cultural relativism here and several other places – I don’t have the strength to link to all of them: you should just go explore the whole blog.

In sharp contrast to Our Terry, here’s a nice thing – a former MP (Labour) for Reading East who is reading Why Truth Matters and thinks it’s worth reading.

If you go to the Butterflies and Wheels site, you will find a fascinating thread prompted by a piece by Nick Cohen in the Observer yesterday; the piece was largely about the jailed Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Suleiman, but also mentioned Chinese government attempts to police the internet – but as so often it is the comment thread which proves the more illuminating. It is a fact that hardly any bloggers posting in English have had anything to say about Kareem. It is a fact, for instance, that when I posted on this subject a few days ago there were no comments. Not one at the time of posting now. I can only suppose that is because nobody is interested – otherwise they’d comment, wouldn’t they?…I wonder though, and I hope this is not true, whether the silence on this subject is illustrative of a more general view, perhaps on the Guardian-reading so-called Left?

I’ll have to comment. But I did post several news links here, so I’m interested. But I wonder too about that more general view.

I went to the butterfliesandwheels site because I am reading a book by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom called “Why Truth Matters” . It’s worth reading, and is a challenge to a non-intellectual like me. It is about scepticism, relativism and doubt. If you want to give it a go Mr Amazon will come round on his bike and deliver it to you. It has made me look up all sorts of things I never did when I was in politics full time – like Manichaeism for instance…As far as I can understand Manichaeism as it is thought of today, it means to refer to the view that some things are just wrong. No relativism, no ifs or buts, just wrong. This is really the core of my own disillusion with the Guardian-reading tendency in British (more properly English) thought and society. Female genital mutilation, for instance, is wrong. Not culturally specific, wrong. Women often have it done to them by their own grandmothers. That doesn’t make it right.

Yep. You betcha. That’s why we’re writing a book about that – all the wrongs that are done to women that are just wrong, and not any less wrong if their grandmothers do it to them. We’ll all join hands and fight back – Jane Griffiths and B&W readers and writers and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maryam Namazie and Marie-Therese O’Loughlin and Gina Khan; we’ll all resist. You’ll see.

Another reader is our friend Richard Dawkins (or perhaps Josh, but I assume Dawkins does at least some of the choosing). I have to admit I’ve kind of longed to see something from B&W there, so I’m chuffed about that. Laugh if you like.

Time to get out the trusty old grain of salt, and put it to good use. It’s to do with Terry Eagleton again.

In the preface to his latest book, The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton writes that his subject matter is fit only for the crazed and the comic, and hopes that he inclines more towards the latter. “I have tried to treat a high-minded topic as lightly and lucidly as possible,” he says. He has certainly managed the light bit…But comic? Or lucid? There are precious few gags on offer – unless you count passing references to Monty Python and Douglas Adams – and the prose is so dense in parts, you can re-read a passage several times and still be none the wiser. The words make sense on their own, but somehow, when combined, they rather lose their meaning. But then, literary and cultural theorists tend to have different benchmarks of levity and clarity from the rest of us. As Britain’s answer to Derrida, Althusser and Deleuze, Eagleton has standards to maintain, and he doesn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered at the suggestion that – so it often appears to the rest of us – theorists are wilfully esoteric and exist only to talk to other theorists. If it’s difficult, it’s difficult, and it’s not the job of the theorist to make things overly accessible; it’s the reader’s job to put in the intellectual legwork to meet the writer on his or her own turf.

No. No no no no. All wrong. It’s not that it’s ‘difficult,’ it’s that it’s pointlessly difficult. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s that it’s difficult way out of proportion to its merit or interest or significance, and that it’s difficult on purpose for the sake of being difficult, as opposed to unavoidably as a result of the nature of the subject matter. Got that? Terry Eagelton doesn’t write about anything that needs to be made incomprehensible, therefore he ought not to do so.

And speaking of fundamentalists v liberals, this piece by Stuart Jeffries is truly disgusting. It’s a whole new level beyond the usual mewling Guardian drivel about religion. It’s really contemptible.

Today, it’s the religious on one side, and the secular on the other. Britain is dividing into intolerant camps who revel in expressing contempt for each other’s most dearly held beliefs. “We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism,” says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England.”

That’s a revolting, outrageous, immoral thing to say. Reading it, I keep wishing Colin Slee were in front of me – tied down, naturally, or else very small and weak – so that I could punch him.

“You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths – and, indeed, thinking atheists – in the other corner. ” says Slee.

Oh, right – it’s the Anglicans and Catholics and ‘other faiths’ who are intelligent and thinking, along with thinking atheists as an afterthought. Does Slee take himself to be an example of a thinking liberal? After that comment?

There’s a great deal of nonsense, then a resoundingly stupid conclusion.

What should such a public square be like?…[I]t could be based on respectful understanding of others’ most cherished beliefs, argues Spencer: “We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres.” It is, at least, a hope…

But what about ‘other value systems’ that in fact are not coherent, reasonable, or valuable? Why should we be ‘more willing’ to treat them that way if that is not in fact the way they are? Why should we not be allowed to note that ‘cherished’ is one thing and ‘coherent, reasonable, and valuable’ are others, and that there is no necessary connection between them? Why are we being told to engage in some masquerade in which we pretend that every moth-eaten ridiculous ‘belief’ anyone has must be treated with respect as coherent, reasonable, and valuable? As if everyone were four years old and would cry boo-hoo if someone said ‘That’s crap’?

I leave it to your wisdom to determine.