The Independent: Another christian who just doesn’t “get it”

26 November 2006

In today’s The Independent on Sunday, there’s an editorial by Giles Fraser, lecturer in Philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford, where he calls for a new sort of conversation about religion. I for one would welcome it, although his analysis isn’t completely in agreement with the reasons that atheists, especially the vocal ones like Richard Dawkins and A C Grayling, promote. I don’t think that I’m being arrogant when I say that I understand their viewpoint much better than he does (he’s a christian, although he doesn’t say what flavour — I might presume Anglican).

The old one [conversation] is very tired, as in some overblown boxing match between two bruisers who just won’t topple. The slug it out. Land huge blows. Declare victory. Only for the opponent to rise again (no resurrection reference intended) and for the whole sorry circus to wind itself up for a rematch.

Yes, I agree. The old conversation is very tired. But, how many times is it necessary to have to defend science from attacks from those who haven’t taken the time to get to understand the inner working of it and have some imaginary party line thrown down from a village pulpit? How often is it required to have to explain that a claim made from a position of belief isn’t necessarily a claim of truth or actuality?

I would rather just have these points made once and then accepted, and then move onto the next challenge. Instead, it seems that we (the non-believing community) are increasingly having to defend a lack of faith in a deity, defend reality, defend science from those who think that, because they have a god on their side, their ideas are untouchable and above analysis. I’m sorry, but they’re not. If you make a claim about reality, you’d better have some evidence to back it up.

Of course, I began the project [of giving lectures in pubs in South London] with the distinct anxiety that my faith might be misrepresented by two atheist authors. After all, I am a failed atheist myself and nobody likes a turncoat.

Bzzzt. Incorrect, sir. I do believe that any discussion made with reference to your faith has nothing to do with the fact that you personally could not handle life as an atheist. This is incredibly arrogant.

But something more is needed. For a more interesting discourse about religion would also have to involve the reclamation of agnosticism, of the ability simply to admit that one doesn’t know. In the preface to Richard Dawkins’s new Christmas stocking filler The God Delusion … it cannot have been too difficult a job, for this is a book so lacking in self-doubt that it’s positively evangelical in the confidence of its self-belief. “I may be wrong” is not a sentence one could ever associate with Dawkins. And his work is so much the poorer for that.

Really? I guess you must have skimmed most of the rest of the preface in which he details exactly why he wrote the book and who he expects to get the most out of it. Of course he’s self-confident, he has no other (unlike those with a religious bent) to have confidence in!

And for “I may be wrong” to not be a phrase that he expects to come from Dawkins is just disingenuous. Has he read any of Dawkins’s other literary output, most notably that on zoology or Darwinian evolution? I doubt it, as Dawkins makes perfectly clear what ideas and thoughts (hypotheses, if you like) he cannot justify scientifically (i.e. without evidence). Fraser might want to read Dawkins’s more recent The Ancestor’s Tale for clear examples of this (which become more and more acute the further one reads).

He also doesn’t seem to get the differences between agnosticism and atheism. In brief, agnosticism deals with knowledge and atheism deals with belief — two quite different ideas. As with most vocal atheists, I am a gnostic atheist (I “know” and “believe” that they don’t exist) with regards to the various gods pimped in the likes of The Bible or The Koran, or those of the Norse or the Egyptians as the gods postulated here are just too incredible (in the correct sense of the word) and offer no evidence whatsoever. However, I would also claim to be an agnostic atheist (I don’t “know”, but I don’t believe) with regards to any other gods that may or may not exist. Of course, I don’t know — nobody does — but a lack of evidence of anything like this leads me to believe that they don’t exist either.

Of course, most of us who take pains to think about this particular issue also understand that the various philosophical arguments for gods are, for the main part inconclusive, or can be flatly rejected from the logical contradictions that they demand as reasons for acceptance.

Some atheists are threatened by non-fundamentalist faith. They reckon it a liberal alibi for fundamentalism, offering a more superficially plausible account of God which serves only to shelter fanatics from the sort of criticism that would put them out of business. On this reasoning, atheists have a vested interest in presenting the worst sort of faith as the real thing, thus enabling the whole sorry lot to be all the more easily ridiculed. This is Dawkins’ strategy.

Here’s the nub of the matter, and the idea that Fraser just doesn’t get: religion (and faith) enables acting on irrational thinking. What this means is that people (from the old granny who goes to church on a Sunday morning, right through to the fundementalist terrorists) are then allowed to make moral judgements, and then act on them, without actually thinking about things, and they have an excuse.

And then we have, as Fraser mentions, the nutters from Christian Voice, who believe that they have the final word on moral authority because they have it from The Bible, just as many (if not most or all) scripture-happy groups do. Isn’t this the same Bible that is pushed in who-knows how many thousands of pulpits and Sunday schools across the UK every weekend? There may be differences in interpretation, but who says that a liberal interpretation is correct? If one is to take The Bible in context, liberal attitudes are almost nowhere to be found, so it’s certainly not there. Why don’t the liberally religious take their Bible at face value? Why choose to interpret it in the happy-clappy way you have? Isn’t it because you find the idea of punishing the innocent for non-crimes repugnant? I bet it is.

Yes, we need a new conversation on religion. But the old one isn’t finished, and won’t be until the religious accept that allowing dogmatic non-thinking based on confused scriptures to continue without criticism is a bad thing and something that they must accept responsibility for. Perhaps if this comes to pass, we won’t need a new conversation, and people will continue to believe what they want, and not need to act irrationally on it or force their attitudes on others.

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Tags: A C Grayling, bad arguments/logical fallacies, Christian Voice, christianity, media, news, reason, response, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, The Independent

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