Community again. Sometimes the helpless dependence on the word ends up in confusion.

“We are sure that the overwhelming majority of all communities are united in condemning any attempt to justify last year’s terrorist attacks in London,” he went on.

The overwhelming majority of all communities…I’m confused already. Does that mean that some entire ‘communities’ are not united in condemning any attempt to justify last year’s bombs? If so, which ones are they? What are we talking about? Or does it mean that the overwhelming majority of all people are united that way? But then why say ‘communities’? If it is the first, if what is meant is that some ‘communities’ are not united that way, does that mean that what is so very often called (or rather labeled) ‘the Muslim community’ is not united that way? Well, no, probably not, since that doesn’t seem to be the point of what Hayman said. But then why say ‘communities’? Perhaps he meant that within the usual ‘communities’ there are a few ‘communities’ that are not united. But then that’s a confusing way of putting it, isn’t it. He should have said ‘sub-communities’ or some such. But then that would have detracted from the rhetorical force of the majority of communities being united.

“The Muslim community has been very badly affected by [the bombings], particularly in the Beeston and Leeds area,” Mr Chaudhry said. “This will just make life even more difficult, with all the media attention and the rest of the community pointing the finger, which is not justified.”

Okay now I’m really confused. The rest of what community? Pointing what finger? At what, or whom? And why is it not justified, and by what, or whom? Who are all these people, I mean communities? Is this finger-pointing rest of the community the rest of a different community from the antecedent Muslim community, or is it the rest of the very same community? And whose finger are they pointing and why are they pointing it? What does it all mean?

Only the community knows for sure.

There is an alarming thought in this article on Barack Obama and religion.

For the past six years, the most prominent Christian in America has been the president. His belief is not of the “God said it. I believe it. That settles it,” sort that fundamentalists embrace. Rather, Bush subscribes to a syllogistic doctrine of presidential infallibility: God works through Christians; I am a Christian; I have decided to do X; therefore, X is God’s will.

For one thing, that sounds like a syllogistic doctrine of infallibility period, never mind the presidential part. But leave that aside. Since it’s Bush who is the subject and Bush is in fact, incredibly enough, the president, it’s the syllogism itself that is so alarming. Does he really think that? If so that’s even worse than what I thought he thought, which was that God spoke to him, but not, like, every second. I thought he thought God gave him guidance on the generalities, but that he had to help himself a little – had to break a sweat now and then at least. But if he just thinks it’s all as simple as that formula – then he thinks that everything he thinks and decides and does is by definition and automatically God’s will and therefore right. And that means he thinks there’s no need to think or consider or judge or ask questions at all, ever. Now I know he pretty much never does any of those things; the failure to ask questions is quite notorious; but I thought he might indulge in them just occasionally. But why would he, if he thinks there’s no need? And if he believes that syllogism, he must think there’s no need.

So that’s what religion gets you. Someone who thinks there is no need to think or consider because God will do it for him; who, unfortunately, is the most powerful human on the planet and in charge of tens of thousands of nukes. Oh how exciting.

A few randomly-assorted thoughts for the day.

From Charles McGrath again, Charles McGrath of the pessimistic view of Harry Potter’s geriatric years; this time he’s talking about Beowulf:

Far more entertaining than a lonely troll with grief issues, or one working through identity questions, is the thing from the night who (to adapt Mr. Heaney) bites into your bone lappings, bolts down your blood and gorges on you in lumps.

Yup. Don’t wanna hear about the troll’s identity questions (or why it’s clutching that Volkswagen) or grief issues, wanna hear about the munching thing from the night. Next from PZ commenting on some fundamentalist silliness about why ‘Homosexuality is sin’:

I wish someday someone could explain to me why a vast Cosmic Intelligence, omnipotent and all knowing, is so darned worried about which appendage touches which orifice in a mob of billions of busy, short-lived beings in whom he has imbued a desperate desire to bump appendages/orifices. It seems so petty and futile.

Also from Pharyngula, this time from the sidebar random quotation, from Taslima Nasrin in an interview in Free Inquiry magazine, winter 1998/1999, Vol. 19 No. 1:

I don’t find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or another fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say that because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn’t permit democracy and it violates human rights.

And a point Stewart made in a comment on ‘Domain, Nothing’:

What Bunglawala doesn’t do is address his completely different standards for evaluating scientific and religious claims. But then, he doesn’t evaluate religious claims, he just accepts them. How many religious people would there be left if they raised the bar as high for the claims of religion as they do for those of science?

Very good question. Not, of course, one that Bunglawala is likely to answer.

Okay good Bunglawala thinks Muslims should avoid going the “intelligent design” route lest they end up throwing off “their burqas as soon as they set foot on a plane to go overseas” and wrongly blaming Islam rather than the ill-informed interpretation of the Qur’an by some Muslims. Whatever. Of course interpretation of the Qur’an whether informed or ill-informed is beside the point, since the Qur’an isn’t a book about biology or even evolution – but whatever. But I do take issue with this (all too predictable, all too familiar) bit:

Dawkins’ work was forcefully argued and took no prisoners from the creationist camp; however, I did find his militant atheism quite off-putting…Gould on the other hand…gently chided those scientists who made similarly unsupported atheistic claims about what evolution had to say regarding questions of meaning and purpose – questions that have traditionally been the domain of religion.

Yeah, he did, and boy do I wish he hadn’t. Because he was wrong.

It’s not true that questions of meaning and purpose have traditionally been the domain of religion; religion has had much bigger fish to fry for most of its history. But more to the point, questions of meaning and purpose are not and have never been “the domain of religion” in the sense of being a monopoly of religion’s, which is what that claim looks like. Religion does not (whatever it might like to think) get to put up “Keep Out” signs on questions of meaning and purpose. Anybody can address those questions, anybody at all, and that emphatically includes atheists. In fact, of course, atheists are better people to turn to for such discussions, since their versions of purpose and meaning don’t rely on belief in a fictitious being who watches the sparrow and makes babies and animals suffer torments of pain because it’s good for them. I am getting very tired of these grandiose claims by religionists to expertise on questions of meaning and purpose when in fact what they have to say is not merely useless, it’s often monstrous.

Now really. That’s just silly. And yes I know he’s being jokey, but I bet he also means it, and he ought not to.

Would we even remember Little Nell if she hadn’t died in such spectacularly mawkish fashion? Would we prefer that Emma Bovary didn’t swallow the poison and instead became a clochard, cadging francs at the agricultural fair? And do we really want to contemplate Harry, now bald and grizzled, the lightning-shaped scar faded into an age spot, retired from magic and, pint in hand, prattling on about old quidditch matches? Surely it makes more sense to employ the other kind of magic, and go back to Volume 1 and start over.

Little Nell is welcome to die in childhood, I’m with dear Oscar when it comes to Nell, and with Emma B it’s fifty-fifty. The whole novel heads for her clumsy futile death, but on the other hand, it’s not self-evident that she would have been a duller character at fifty or seventy. But what I really take issue with is the look at Harry’s future. Why is that how he would end up? Bald and grizzled, fine, because that’s how it goes, but why would he be retired, and above all why would he be a pub bore prattling on about his childhood? Eh? Eh? Whence the dreary view of old age, eh? Why couldn’t and wouldn’t Harry go on doing magic all his life, why wouldn’t he become more interesting and wise as he got older? Some people do after all. Not everyone turns into a prattling bore in old age. Some people are prattling bores in old age, to be sure; I know some people like that myself; but they were prattling bores before they got old. Some people go on being interesting and curious and mentally active and thoughtful, even into old age. Imagine that! Charles McGrath might be one of those people himself.

One or two items from Christopher Hitchens’s The Missionary Position.

When Malcolm Muggeridge did his 1969 BBC documentary about Ma Teresa, one day they were taken to what MT called ‘the House of the Dying.’ It was badly lit, and the director was doubtful they could film inside, but they had just received some new film made by Kodak, and the cameraman, Ken Macmillan, a very distinguished cameraman, Hitchens says, known for his work on Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, said let’s try it, and they did. Then when they got back to London and were watching the rushes they were surprised when the shots came up: they could see every detail. And Macmillan said ‘That’s amazing, that’s extraordinary,’ and was about to go on to say ‘three cheers for Kodak’ but he didn’t get a chance to say that. Muggeridge, in Macmillan’s words (page 27), “sitting in the front row, spun round and said: ‘It’s divine light! It’s Mother Teresa. You’ll find that it’s divine light, old boy.'” In a few days journalists started calling him saying they’d heard he’d witnessed a miracle. That’s good, isn’t it? Kodak comes up with a new film that works brilliantly in bad light – and Muggeridge declares it’s divine light. That’s like that all-too-typical incident Chris Whiley mentioned in a comment the other day, where doctors save a guy who was critically ill or injured by, you know, using their skill and knowledge and technology, and when the guy wakes up he thanks – the people who prayed for him. You’ll find it’s divine light, old boy.

Then there is what Dr Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, said about his visit to the MT operation in Calcutta in 1994 (pp 38-9). He went, remember, expecting to be favourably impressed. But doctors were there only occasionally…

I saw a young man who had been admitted in poor shape with high fever, and the drugs prescribed had been tetracycline and paracetamol. Later a visiting doctor diagnosed probably malaria and substituted chloroquine. Could not someone have looked at a blood film? Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible…Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning: her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism.

Emphasis added, by Hitchens. But that’s quite something, isn’t it. And there’s more.

Finally, how competent are the sisters at managing pain?…I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Teresa’s approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer.

She had tons of money; money poured in in an avalanche; it wasn’t poverty that caused this kind of primitive treatment; it was principle. And this is saintly? What would devilish be then?

It has come to my attention that this business of ‘Mother’ Teresa’s being a horrible nightmare instead of the tiny little saint she’s cracked up to be is not common knowledge. Well I knew that, but it’s not common knowledge even among the kind of warped, twisted people who read B&W; that I didn’t know. I should have realized though. It’s meme stuff. The phrase ‘Mother Teresa’ is a kind of pop culture synonym for self-sacrificing altruism, and the corrections of that illusion get drowned out as a result. So let’s get to work and spread the counter-meme, shall we? She was a horror.

Christopher Hitchens wrote the book on the subject in 1995. He gives some highlights in this article in 2003 when the then pope was all in a lather to get her canonized while he was still alive.

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself…

There’s an interview with Hitchens here that points out the whole reputation drowning out criticism problem.

I didn’t go specifically to Calcutta, in other words, to see Mother Teresa. But when I was there I thought: here is probably not only the greatest name recognition in the second part of the 20th century for an ordinary human being—someone who isn’t in power, so to speak— but also the most fragrant name recognition. Apparently the only name about whom no one had anything but good to say. Now I will have to admit—no I won’t have to admit, I’m proud to admit— that this was enough to make me skeptical to start off with…So partly for the honor of Calcutta, and partly out of my feeling that her actions are being judged by her reputation rather than her reputation by her actions (a common postmodern problem in the image business of course, but amazing in this case), I sort of opened a file on her, kept a brief…Then I noticed another thing. That no matter what she said or did at this time nobody would point it out because she had some kind of hammer lock on my profession. It had been agreed she was a saint and there was to be no argument about it.

That would be bad enough even if she were a saint; given what she actually was, it’s horrifying.

In other words it’s pretty much like the state of indulgences in the Middle Ages. The bulk of humanity is described as a bunch of miserable sinners condemned to everlasting hell unless they’ve got the price of a pardon, which they can purchase at the nearest papacy. It’s no better than that. In fact it’s slightly worse given the advances we think we’ve made in the meantime. I’ve said this repeatedly. But I might as well not have bothered as far as most people are concerned. They simply do not judge her reputation by her actions. They consistently do the reverse and judge her actions by her reputation.

Which is a mistake. Just a plain old vulgar mistake in thinking. Made a great deal more difficult to avoid by the fact that journalists make the same mistake and journalism is how we learn of such reputations in the first place. Journalism really ought to be a great deal more careful and conscientious than it is.

…religious figures are given this sort of special pass on credulity. It’s either consciously or subconsciously assumed that a person of the cloth actually has better morals. There’s precious little evidence of this; there’s a great deal of evidence to the contrary, in fact. But somehow it’s still considered—especially in a country like America which suffers from a sort of mediocre version of multiculturalism—a possibly offensive thing to suggest. Because you’re not attacking a religion; you’re attacking the Catholic community—a rather different proposition. And the idea of offending that is anathema to so many people.

Exactly. Hence the journalistic habit of talking about the doings of the pope as if he were the pope of everyone, which he isn’t.

There’s a spirited review by our friend Peter Fosl here and more from Hitchens here.

The Archive

The Interrogations Archive

A reader alerted me to this article taking issue with Swinburne.

…serious arguments are what the religious believer needs to come up with, rather than evasive appeals to ‘faith’. If belief in God is a matter of ‘faith’ in contrast to reason, there’s nothing to distinguish it from mere wishful thinking.

Just so. And yet ‘faith’ is routinely used as a valor word, a virtue word, a self-righteous word, a self-flattering word. The nimbus around it almost always indicates ‘I have “faith” therefore I am better.’ That’s bad. Wishful thinking should not have an aura of superior virtue or depth. But it does. That’s bad.

Swinburne now offers two new versions of the argument from design, which shift the argument to another level. The first, which he calls the ‘argument from temporal order’, points to the fact that everything in the universe takes place with predictable regularity, in accordance with scientific laws…”To say that such laws govern matter is just to say that every bit of matter, every neutron and proton and electron throughout endless space and time behaves in exactly the same way…How extraordinary that is!”…What exactly is supposed to be ‘extraordinary’ about this regularity?

I’ll clear that up for you. Look, I’ll shuffle this pack of cards, then I’ll deal myself five cards, then I’ll point out how extraordinary it is that I got just those five cards and no others. It’s mind-boggling. God alone can explain it. See?

Our existence seems to call for some special explanation only if we assume that we human beings have a special importance and that a universe without us would be an impoverished universe which would have gone badly wrong. We may like to think that the purpose of the universe is to produce ourselves, but there’s no reason to suppose that that’s true. It’s just a reflection of our human perspective and our inflated ideas of our own importance.

Swinburne seems to have a really bad case of that, and of a surprising inability even to notice that he has it, or at least to acknowledge it. That’s part of what makes his arguments sound so…the way they sound.

Necessarily, if what we want to explain are the facts which science starts from, then science cannot itself explain them. But it doesn’t follow that, because there is no scientific explanation, there must be a personal explanation. The alternative is that there is no explanation at all (that is, we should reject the first premise). Swinburne thinks that this is unacceptable. He says: ‘To suppose these data to be just brute inexplicable facts seems…highly irrational.’ (p. 53) But all explanations have to come to an end somewhere. If you ask theists why there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent god, there is no further explanation they can give. If God is the explanation of everything else, then the existence of God has to be just a brute inexplicable fact. It seems to me to be a great deal more rational to accept, as our brute fact, the existence of a certain kind of universe. After all, we do have the best possible evidence that this universe, unlike God, actually exists!

Yeah but on the other hand if we’re going to stop with some brute fact or other, we might as well pick the one that loves us and makes us suffer pain so that other people can have sympathy for us – right? That being so much more consoling and all.

Because the question is, what good is sympathy and alleviating suffering if there is no suffering? What is the point of them? There is no point. They’re not needed. They’re not even virtues. The notion is absurd. Suppose a friend bounces up to you, full of bliss and happiness, to tell you some good news. Is it a good thing to clutch her hand damply and say how sorry you are? Is it a good thing to push her down and force morphine down her throat? No. Your sympathy and alleviation aren’t needed or wanted. (Sympathy in the sense of fellow-feeling is probably welcome, but that’s not what Swinburne means here.) And if your friend is never suffering and in pain, they never will be. They’re not needed unless we are in fact suffering and in pain; so why would they be good in and of themselves? They wouldn’t. But Swinburne seems to be assuming they would. Why? Why does he assume that? Other than, of course, sheer desperation to come up with some reason that pain and illness are good things.

And why on earth would it be a good thing that suffering ‘provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering’? Why is that opportunity good or desirable if suffering doesn’t exist? It isn’t. Society could go off and think about other things, ponder other choices, seize different opporunities to choose what to invest in. So why does Swinburne say it that way, as if it’s somehow inherently good for society to have an opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for suffering? Why does he think so back to front? ‘It is good for society to choose whether or not to spend money on cures for suffering, therefore, it is good that people should suffer.’ If he thinks that’s right, does he think war is good because it gives military surgeons lots of practice? If he thinks that, does he then think that the more injuries there are, the better? If he thinks that, then is he depressed on days when the newspapers are slightly less full of injuries? Is he pleased when there are earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes? Surely the logic of his peculiar argument entails that he must be. If suffering is good so that people can be sympathetic and society can make budget decisions, then the more of it there is, the better, right? Because the more suffering there is, the more chances to be sympathetic there are, so it must be a case of the more the better. So we’re all being negligent and cruel if we fail to hurt each other at every opportunity? Is that right?

Rhetoric in play in this review of Breaking the Spell.

Thus we read: “If theists would be so kind as to make a short list of all the concepts of God they renounce as balderdash before proceeding further, we atheists would know just which topics were still on the table, but, out of a mixture of caution, loyalty, and unwillingness to offend anyone ‘on their side,’ theists typically decline to do this.” Perhaps so, but then is Dennett prepared to perform a comparable triage for the favorite topics of his fellow atheists? Where do “we atheists” stand, for example, with regard to fellow atheist Howard Stern? We theists would like to know, if Dennett would be so kind, though we fear that out of a mixture of caution, loyalty and unwillingness to offend, he may pass over America’s most influential single atheist in silence.

But that’s a bad analogy, because atheists don’t posit anything qua atheists. There is no atheist equivalent of a concept of God. We can’t make a list of our concepts of non-belief in God (much less of our concepts of noGod, because we don’t believe in noGod, we just don’t believe in God, which is quite different) because there’s nothing to list. I don’t play squash; I can’t round up a lot of (or all?) non-squashplayers and compile a list of the ways we don’t play squash, can I. It would take too long, and wouldn’t tell us anything. Furthermore, Miles has done a very brazen slide there, from theists’ views of concepts of God to atheists’ opinions of – Howard Stern? In what way is that a ‘comparable triage’? It isn’t, obviously; it’s ludicrous. That ridiculous suggestion would be ‘comparable triage’ to asking theists where they stand, for example, with regard to James Dobson or Pat Robertson. That, as I am sure you will appreciate, is a quite different thing from asking theists to make a short list of all the concepts of God they renounce as balderdash. There ought to be a journalistic law against sloppy non-analogous analogies. There ought to be a strict rule, enforceable by a trip to northern Manitoba, against using the word ‘comparable’ to refer to something very different. Journalists ought to be accurate and careful; they have a responsibility and a duty to be those things; that includes book reviewers.

[T]hough Dennett pays lip service to the need for Darwinian theorists of religion to acquaint themselves with actual religion as patiently as Darwin acquainted himself with actual animal breeding, in practice he rarely does so. He defines religion, for example, in a parochially Western way as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” A religion without gods, he adds, is “like a vertebrate without a backbone.” But this is a definition that does not begin to cope with Buddhism…

That’s a mistake (or piece of rhetoric) we see a lot, and it’s pretty irritating. A ‘parochially Western way’? That definition (obviously) includes Islam, which is hardly exclusively ‘Western’, in fact is often used (mistakenly) as an antonym of ‘Western’. That’s stupid, for a lot of reasons (mixing of kinds; ‘Western’ influence on Islam; presence of Islam in the West; etc), but pretending Dennett’s definition is purely ‘Western’ is equally stupid, especially since it includes Hinduism and other ‘Eastern’ religions as well as Islam, so the fact that it doesn’t deal with Buddhism is hardly enough to make it ‘parochially Western’.

Miles may have valid points, but those two items are enough to make me suspect everything he says.

Richard Swinburne is interesting. I’ve said so before. So has Mark Fournier at Tachyphrenia. And now it’s time to say it some more. Because the things Swinburne says here are truly revolting, and yet they are, of course, what you get if you try to reconcile the omnipotent omnibenevolent God with the existence and abundance of suffering in the world – just what Darwin couldn’t manage to reconcile himself to. There’s an irony of sorts in the fact that it’s Swinburne’s view that is considered by many – by surprisingly many – to be the ‘devout’ and ‘holy’ and therefore (why? why therefore?) ‘good’ one, and Darwin’s that is considered the impious and wicked one. The approval of the deliberate causing and continuance of pain and suffering to billions of sentient beings is considered good, and the disapproval and rejection of that is considered wicked. That’s interesting, and it is, if you ask me, a sign of something badly corrupt at the heart of the whole swindle.

Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability.

Good? Good explanations? Good in what sense?

Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.

Well why stop there? It also provides pharmaceutical companies with the opportunity to develop pain medications, and nurses with the opportunity to apologize for the fact that the pain can’t be alleviated, and vicars and priests with the opportunity to pray that it will be alleviated, and God with the opportunity to refuse to alleviate it, and the funeral people with the opportunity to dispose of the corpse after the victim has committed suicide. Lots and lots of opportunities. Good. So – we should all act accordingly? We should all rush outside with our carving knives and soldering irons and distribute injuries generously around the neighborhood so that there will be further abundance of such opportunities? Suffering is a good thing because it creates these good opportunities so there should be lots more of it so we should all bend every nerve to create more of it?

No. We don’t actually think that’s the case. So why does Swinburne get to claim that it is the case, and that that’s a ‘good’ explanation? Why doesn’t everybody for miles around just tell him ‘That’s disgusting’ until he’s so embarrassed he stops saying it?

That’s a real question. I find it baffling.

Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.

Oh, godalmighty. That is such crap, and such transparent crap – so carefully arranged to get the conclusion he wants (God is okay really even though it seems to be an awful shit) with that last little escape hatch – for other people, illness not so useful. Give me a break. Swinburne looks at the world: sees that some people get ill and suffer, others don’t; needs to make this harmonize with ‘a good God’; explains that suffering is good for some people and not for others; job done.

An analogy will show that what I have written is not an ad hoc hypothesis postulated to save theism from disconfirmation.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Oh, that’s a good one. He’s not only interesting, he’s also a comedian. A sadistic comedian, but a comedian.

Darwin wrote to Asa Gray in 1860: “With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.–I am bewildered.–I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me …. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.”

In a letter to Gray later in 1860 he added: “One word more on “designed laws” & “undesigned results.” I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it, I do this designedly.–An innocent & good man stands under tree & is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (& I really shd like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most person do believe this; I can’t & don’t.–If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow shd snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man & the gnat are in same predicament.–If the death of neither man or gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production shd be necessarily designed. Yet, as I said before, I cannot persuade myself that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all from blind, brute force.”

I’ve just discovered, in looking for that first letter, that Cambridge makes what looks like all of Darwin’s letters through 1859 available online. That’s very nice of them. The project’s homepage is here.

Janet Radcliffe Richards has an excellent chapter on moral relativism in Human Nature After Darwin, including this on pages 198-9:

Any set of moral standards must include, as part of those standards, criteria for the appropriate treatment of other people…This means there are necessarily conflicts, when some people think they should do what other people think they should not be allowed to do. And, indeed, the essence of what it is for people to have different moral principles is disagreement: if there were no disagreement, there would be no difference. And since there is disagreement, it follows that not everyone can be given the freedom to follow their own principles.

This is what I was talking about the other day in ‘Gain and Loss’. There are different moral principles; there is disagreement; there are different people with competing interests, wants, needs; they are inevitably going to be in competition with other people’s interests, wants, needs. My desire for quiet competes with your desire to mow the lawn (and loses, every time); I’m not free to make off with your lawn mower in order to prevent your making a noise with it. But, on the plus side of the ledger, you’re not free to sell me into slavery.

That’s the whole point of rights: to limit certain freedoms. Rights entail limitations on the freedom to mistreat people or to interfere with certain of their freedoms (but not others). They have to do that in order to be effective rights. That’s why the whole subject is difficult and why bills of rights are a new idea and not (to put it mildly) universal yet; that’s why they have to be codified rather than implicit, and that’s why they’re needed. The freedom to mistreat people, to exploit them and use their labour, to dominate and confine and impregnate them, to subordinate and segregate and revile them, is a highly prized one. Naturally rights aren’t something that just get granted with no problem. Rights amount to a recognition that, left alone, the strong will bully the weak (see the discussions in Plato’s ‘Republic’ and ‘Gorgias’), and after millions of years we’ve decided we don’t want that. The price is a limitation on the freedom of the strong. There’s no free lunch.

Simon Blackburn, not surprisingly, talks about this matter of metaethics in his short introduction to ethics Being Good. He starts right off with the question of god as the backer or guarantor or prop for ethics.

For many people, ethics is not only tied up with religion, but is completely settled by it. Such people do not need to think too much about ethics, because there is an authoritative code of instructions, a handbook of how to live.

But the trouble with that, of course, is that the code is only as good as it is. If the code in question is a bad code, then this business of not thinking too much is not good.

Blackburn goes on the mention some of the not so good parts of the Bible, then adds,

Obviously there have been, and will be, apologists who want to defend or explain away the embarrassing elements…What is interesting, however, is that when we weigh up these attempts we are ourselves in the process of assessing moral standards. We are able to stand back from any text, however entrenched, far enough to ask whether it represents an admirable or acceptable morality, or whether we ought to accept some bits, but reject others. So again the question arises: where do these standards come from, if they have the authority to judge even our best religious traditions?

Then he cites the Euthyphro, and quotes from it, which, since it is available online, I will do too.

Euth. Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.

Euth. Yes.

People keep on getting that back to front. Approving something, thinking of it as holy or good, and thinking also (because they think god is good) that god agrees with them, but then getting the whole arrangement turned around so that they think god started the whole process. But no. Suppose god said you and some friends should go round up a few random people and torture them for fun. Would you conclude that would be a good thing to do? I can only say I hope not. It’s not god saying what’s good and you agreeing with god, it’s you thinking what’s good and also thinking god agrees with you – only without realizing you’re doing it.

Here, for instance. A moral issue (an issue because some people have made it an issue, though that wasn’t inevitable): a moral issue being discussed with arguments and reasons rather than with invocation of a deity or of Christian/Muslim/Hindu morality.

Last week British scientists announced a revolutionary screening process for inherited diseases in embryos. It will be quicker and more accurate than the existing method and it will detect thousands more genetic defects than previously possible…Those who don’t know about it can perhaps hardly imagine the drawn out suffering of Huntington’s disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Prader-Willi syndrome or Fragile X, both for the people affected and for their families, until death puts an end to it…It will be easier and better in every way to get rid of a tiny collection of cells. This is indeed playing God, as all the usual campaigners were quick to point out last week. But…whatever we may think about playing God and defying nature, we are doing it already and even though we don’t necessarily recognise it, we approve of it…There will always be absolutists, who claim the right to life for even the most infinitesimal scrap of tissue. But there are others who oppose screening on what seem to me to be even more irrational grounds.

Which she proceeds to counter with arguments. Those arguments will fail to convince many – or perhaps all – of the people who oppose screening on irrational grounds. That’s how these things go.

Simone Aspis of the British Council of Disabled People said last week that she was opposed in principle to such screening on the grounds that it sent the signal that being born disabled was a bad thing…It sent a message, she said, particularly to young people with disabilities, that their lives were worth less than everyone else’s. This seems to me to confuse a disability with a person with a disability. (This is a confusion that people with disabilities normally resent, understandably.) To say that a disability is undesirable in itself is not to say that a person with that disability is undesirable in herself, or her life worth less than someone else’s. The disability is not the person. It is to say that her life would be better without that disability.

That seems right to me, but it seems a safe bet that it won’t alter the conviction of Simone Aspis. That’s unfortunate; if people who oppose the screening succeed in blocking it, that’s very unfortunate indeed, as it was (in my view) unfortunate that the assisted suicide bill got postponed again in the House of Lords a few weeks ago. But pointing to god wouldn’t help. All the theists would simply say that their god supported their view and not the other one. That’s how these things go.

Norm quotes Freeman Dyson reviewing Dennett’s new book.

There are two kinds of atheists, ordinary atheists who do not believe in God and passionate atheists who consider God to be their personal enemy.

No, that doesn’t cover it. There’s more to it than that. There are atheists who, independent of what they consider god to be, are (probably, in terms of what Dyson is talking about) not ordinary atheists who do not believe in god and are not fussed about it: there are atheists who, whatever they think of god, feel a certain sense of outrage, or perhaps violation, at being urged or commanded to believe in something there is no good reason to believe. It’s not so much god that is their personal enemy (though that may also be the case) as the presumptuous demand that they accept a belief that there is a lot of good reason to think is false, that is their (our) enemy. Now, it’s true that the god of the Bible and the god of public belief and discourse (the one that punishes some people with hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis while saving a few, the one that answers some prayers and not others, the one that hates fags, the one that’s a man and has a low opinion of women, the one that didn’t lift a finger during the Holocaust or the Great War or King Leopold’s romps in the Congo or centuries of slavery in the US – that god) strikes me as being a repulsive guy; yes, he’s my personal enemy, but of course that’s really the doing of the people who dream him up and then try to force him on everyone; so he’s my personal enemy only in a rather peculiar sense. But the hostility to the demands for belief is much more straightforward. I don’t think people ought to chastise or rebuke or lecture or whine at people who refuse to accept truth claims about a giant powerful person who really exists in the world and really makes things happen, on the basis of no proper evidence. That is where the, shall we say, vehemence of my atheism comes from. I do not like being ordered to believe fairy tales. It pisses me off.

The first example Dyson gives actually seems much more like an example of the kind of atheism I’m talking about than what Dyson calls it. In short, his illustration doesn’t illustrate his own claim: the guy he’s talking about, he says, “had always disliked religion in general and Simpson’s piety in particular.” But disliking religion and piety is not the same thing as considering god one’s personal enemy. In other words, there are other reasons for disliking or indeed hating religion than considering god an enemy. Dyson’s formula conceals and belittles those other reasons. It’s an irritating little bit of rhetoric. I noticed it when I linked to that review in News on June 9th, and made unpleasant faces at it, but didn’t bother commenting. But that is just the kind of thing that makes atheists of my kind just that little bit more the kind of atheist we are – that rather sneering implication that we can’t have any good or rational or understandable reason for disliking religion and its attempts at imposition. So we get that bit more hostile, and the Dysons get more sneering, and round we go.

Norm points out that there is another issue:

But for both believers and unbelievers there’s another issue that is probably more important in determining their belief and unbelief, respectively. It’s the issue of the truth or otherwise of religious belief. Here Dyson opts for a standpoint that puts the issue beyond the reach of any rational adjudication. These are just two incommensurable types of knowledge…

It is indeed the issue of the truth or otherwise. I think it would have been more civil if Dyson had taken that aspect into account. But it’s the fashion to talk as if atheists are more or less loony.

A brief review of WTM in the Guardian today. A favourable review mostly – calls it lively. It takes issue with our putative slapping around of Derrida, which was actually far more of a slapping around of one of his fans, but that’s okay.

People have also alerted me to some nice blog posts on the book. This one for instance by an ex-Mormon. His self-description in the margin makes him sound like a B&W kind of guy:

I’m a full-time academic trying to make my way in the world and recover my own independence of thought and feeling…I was raised Mormon and was quite believing until college, when I gradually began to make an intellectual and spiritual split. The gay thing was always lurking in the background, but I didn’t have the courage to deal with it until I was nearly 30. I am pretty far to the left politically, but try to be as critical as possible of my values and work to envision pragmatic solutions to real problems instead of being driven by ideology. This often leaves me out of step with other thinkers and activists on the left, the queer left in particular.

He went to Brigham Young, so he was interested in the excerpt from WTM on the implications of BYU’s religious policy for freedom of academic inquiry.

My concern, however, is more global. What happens to the quality of education when this kind of policy is enacted on its faculty? Furthermore, what is the quality of the education on a campus where 95% of the faculty are believing, temple-recommend holding members who agree with the policy and therefore do or say nothing that may be challenging to the world views of their students? Isn’t that the very nature of a university education? To have our foundations laid bare and examined?

Yup; what indeed. Good to meet you, Todd.

This one is very pleasing, because it starts with the author’s “reasons for taking readers on this ongoing tour of modern genetics. The words truth and mystery pretty much summarise most of Pundit’s reasons. A lot of discussions about modern genetics tend to lack truth, or all too sadly, miss out on the mystery.” then goes on to quote the last page or so of the book. I gather he liked it, I gather he liked the little aria to truth and mystery we finished off with (with help from Dawkins and Ridley). I’m glad he did.

So the upshot of all that is (since the implied question was, if I understand it correctly, how do atheists manage to believe in objective moral standards?) that I do think there are objective moral standards, if ‘objective’ means generally applicable, and generally applicable for sound, articulable, sharable reasons; but I don’t think they’re guaranteed by anything external to humans; I think we have to give reasons for them; and I think they are human artifacts, not something in nature or part of the fabric of the cosmos. That’s sad, in a way. It would be nice if animals had a moral sense, but they don’t. (They have affections, or something like affections, which prompts them to treat some conspecifics well within certain limits, but that’s about it, and that’s a pretty rudimentary version of morality.)

But thinking moral standards are human artifacts doesn’t weaken them. On the contrary. Theists have the option of thinking that god will make things come out all right eventually (or after we die), that wickedness doesn’t, finally, flourish like the green bay tree; atheists don’t have that option, so we know damn well that we have to keep the old moral standards in good repair, because they’re all we have.

A Christian reader wondered in a comment on That Special Glow how atheists believe in “objective absolute moral standards/truths” and asked if I could elucidate. Being short of time, I noted that it’s a large subject and gave a sort of place-holder answer. He expanded on his own view: “The point about objective truths and religious belief is not that we only believe these things because we are believers and thus taught to believe them, whether or not they are right, but that this is an assurance that these standards/truths/rights are, indeed universal and always apply.” Now it’s my turn to wonder. I wonder how that works. Because in fact it seems to me that it doesn’t. It seems to me there is no assurance that moral standards (the commenter actually said ‘objective truths’ in the second comment, but he started off with moral standards/truths, which is a confused way of putting it, since it’s not clear if he’s talking about moral standards and moral truths, or moral standards, and, separately, truths; at any rate, I take him to be talking primarily about moral standards [or moral truths], so I’m addressing that) are universal and always apply. If there were such a thing, I don’t think religious belief would provide it, but I don’t think there is such a thing in any case.

The truth is (and this is a general point about the [widely-held] view, not a specific one about my interlocutor), I think the invocation of an external guarantor of this kind is just lazy, in the same sort of way that Barthes’s cited views are lazy: it’s an evasion of argument. If you want to make a case for a moral view, if you want to try to convince someone else to agree to a moral view, it’s a lot easier and simpler to say ‘god said so’ than it is to offer reasons; but the ease is precisely what’s wrong with it. It’s easy because it’s empty, and because it’s empty, it doesn’t do the work it is thought to do. It amounts to a hollowing-out of content, leaving just a shell of words behind, and using the shell of words to compel assent. But what we need is the content. Why should I persecute or refrain from persecuting homosexuals? Why should people have or not have certain rights? Why is assisted suicide acceptable or unacceptable? Why is torture acceptable or unacceptable? You have to offer reasons, and furthermore, once you have offered them, there is no guarantee that anyone will accept them. They’re necessary but not sufficient. Saying ‘because god’ is an escape from both of these irksome conditions – the effort of giving reasons, and the frustration when people don’t accept them. ‘Because god’ is, therefore, frankly just a cheat, and it ought to be more widely recognized as such, because to the extent that it’s accepted as valid, that just undermines rational discourse ever more.

The idea seems to be that the ‘assurance’ that moral standards are universal and always apply is added on to other reasons for adhering to them. But what is it that is added? What is it that provides the assurance? I don’t see it, myself, for one reason among several because the moral standards have conspicuously changed over time, and are still highly contested to this day. If god were a provider of assurance, then why would there be change over time, and why would there be disagreement? Why does it all seem to be so fallible? And if it is fallible, in what way is it assurance?