The Awkward Age

I like this billboard, though I also suspect it was photoshopped, rather than a real billboard.

I also like this comment on the post the image illustrates:

My favorite quote thus far; “So we got the date wrong. It’s not like its the end of the world.”

But that's about as far as it goes. The post itself concludes:

What I am wondering is this: when the world did not end, did it cause anyone to become more rational? Or will the Doomsdayers become stronger believers (as sometimes happens in cults) – and more importantly, do moderate Christians feel their interpretation of the bible has been validated?

The word "rational" (not to mention "moderate") increasingly sets off alarms for me, as more and more atheists say and write and post ravingly irrational things in the name of irrationality. I can't see any reason why the failure of the Rapture to take place last Saturday should "cause anyone to become more rational." As the blogger points out, "moderate" Christians who've been citing Matthew 24:36 as a warning about predicting a date for the Second Coming will probably see Jesus' non-appearance as a vindication of their interpretation of the Bible, not as a reason to abandon Christianity.

But then, why should they? Scientists are constantly making absurd and irrational claims about science and what it can do. A decade or so back, I read a lot of stuff by scientists who claimed that a Grand Unified Theory of Physics was right around the corner. They didn't specify the date and hour, of course -- they were as canny about that as the authors of the gospels -- but they were sure it would happen within a generation. It didn't. A little over a century ago, some physicists were making similar forecasts -- just before Einstein published his theory of relativity and knocked 19th-century physics ass over teakettle. Computer scientists have long made similar failed promises for the development of artificial intelligence. No one -- at least no scientist -- would argue that because these predictions failed, science should be scrapped.

I talked about this with an old friend who said that, confronted with harmful scientific claims about sex and race, she tries to talk about "scientists" rather than "science," since science isn't responsible for what scientists do or say. I agreed to an extent, but argued that you can't really separate the two: there is no such thing as "science", just a lot of scientists engaged in various projects. Then I pointed out that defenders of religion say the same thing she'd said about science: it's not Christianity's fault, it's Christians who you should blame.

A few years ago, Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation, "I actually believe in science. I believe we are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves." Pollitt has often attacked critics of science, whether Christian fundamentalists or members of the "academic left." But her statement of belief in science (which I've heard from many other people) isn't rational: it's an affirmation of faith, a credo. Whether "we" really are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves will have to be seen. (I have no such faith myself.) When people, especially scientists, proclaim what Science will do in the future, they are making statements of faith, not reason.

I don't "believe in science" any more than I believe in Christianity; nor do I "believe" in atheism. I don't even "believe" in Reason. I think reason is a useful tool, but like any tool it has its limits, and it's only as good as the premises one starts with. As the saying goes, "Garbage In, Garbage Out." ("Garbage In, Gospel Out," a computer-scientist friend of mine puts it ironically.) Raising Science or Reason to authority is another version of what Religion is for some people: an attempt to escape human limitations and achieve certainty by fiat.

The Awkward Age

I like this billboard, though I also suspect it was photoshopped, rather than a real billboard.

I also like this comment on the post the image illustrates:

My favorite quote thus far; “So we got the date wrong. It’s not like its the end of the world.”

But that's about as far as it goes. The post itself concludes:

What I am wondering is this: when the world did not end, did it cause anyone to become more rational? Or will the Doomsdayers become stronger believers (as sometimes happens in cults) – and more importantly, do moderate Christians feel their interpretation of the bible has been validated?

The word "rational" (not to mention "moderate") increasingly sets off alarms for me, as more and more atheists say and write and post ravingly irrational things in the name of irrationality. I can't see any reason why the failure of the Rapture to take place last Saturday should "cause anyone to become more rational." As the blogger points out, "moderate" Christians who've been citing Matthew 24:36 as a warning about predicting a date for the Second Coming will probably see Jesus' non-appearance as a vindication of their interpretation of the Bible, not as a reason to abandon Christianity.

But then, why should they? Scientists are constantly making absurd and irrational claims about science and what it can do. A decade or so back, I read a lot of stuff by scientists who claimed that a Grand Unified Theory of Physics was right around the corner. They didn't specify the date and hour, of course -- they were as canny about that as the authors of the gospels -- but they were sure it would happen within a generation. It didn't. A little over a century ago, some physicists were making similar forecasts -- just before Einstein published his theory of relativity and knocked 19th-century physics ass over teakettle. Computer scientists have long made similar failed promises for the development of artificial intelligence. No one -- at least no scientist -- would argue that because these predictions failed, science should be scrapped.

I talked about this with an old friend who said that, confronted with harmful scientific claims about sex and race, she tries to talk about "scientists" rather than "science," since science isn't responsible for what scientists do or say. I agreed to an extent, but argued that you can't really separate the two: there is no such thing as "science", just a lot of scientists engaged in various projects. Then I pointed out that defenders of religion say the same thing she'd said about science: it's not Christianity's fault, it's Christians who you should blame.

A few years ago, Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation, "I actually believe in science. I believe we are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves." Pollitt has often attacked critics of science, whether Christian fundamentalists or members of the "academic left." But her statement of belief in science (which I've heard from many other people) isn't rational: it's an affirmation of faith, a credo. Whether "we" really are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves will have to be seen. (I have no such faith myself.) When people, especially scientists, proclaim what Science will do in the future, they are making statements of faith, not reason.

I don't "believe in science" any more than I believe in Christianity; nor do I "believe" in atheism. I don't even "believe" in Reason. I think reason is a useful tool, but like any tool it has its limits, and it's only as good as the premises one starts with. As the saying goes, "Garbage In, Garbage Out." ("Garbage In, Gospel Out," a computer-scientist friend of mine puts it ironically.) Raising Science or Reason to authority is another version of what Religion is for some people: an attempt to escape human limitations and achieve certainty by fiat.

Science vs. Religion

This is cute, but it's not really a good antithesis. How about "Science lets you bomb civilians from the sky without any danger to you"? Or "Science lets you shred unarmed civilians with machine-gun fire via video in your attack helicopter"? Or "Science lets you kill children with remote-control drones from thousands of miles away"? Or "Science lets you cull the human race of inferior losers through eugenics"?

The September 11 terrorists didn't fly into the World Trade Towers by the power of religion. (Whoa, dude, you mean they totally flew through the air? Praise God!) Like any other good soldiers, they used high technology which enabled them to do much more damage than they could have done by their own muscle power. Scientists have been remarkably willing to put enormous destructive power into the hands of politicians and generals, but that's okay because it's not for scientists to decide these things -- or so they claim. The responsibility isn't theirs alone, of course, but they must shoulder their share.

What's wrong with this bumper sticker is that it deliberately confuses what is at stake. It's not a confusion limited to atheistic scientists, of course. At the beginning of Patience With God, for example, Frank Schaeffer draws the reader this picture of the trouble we're in here in River City:

At a time when Islamist extremists strap bombs to themselves and blow up women and children; when America has just come staggering out of the searing thirty-year-plus embrace of the reactionary, dumb-as-mud Religious Right; and when some people are bullying, harassing, and persecuting gay men and women in the name of religion, it's understandable that the sort of decent people most of us would want for neighbors run from religion. There is a problem, though, for those who flee religion expecting to find sanity in unbelief. The madness never was about religion, let alone caused by faith in God. It was and is about how we evolved and what we evolved into [3].

Now, I'm the kind of atheist who agrees that "the madness never was ... caused by faith in God", since human beings create their gods. "Faith in God" is an effect, not a cause. (Schaeffer, though, still thinks there's a nice God who protects babies.) But look again at those opening clauses: he mentions "extremist" Muslim suicide bombers, but not "extremist" Christian American soldiers killing hajis as payback for 9-11, though American soldiers have killed far more people in the past few decades than Muslim suicide bombers have. America is rich, after all, and can equip its soldiers to kill more effectively and on a much larger scale. I think Schaeffer can now blame Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for their murderous religiosity, though it will be interesting to see just how far he goes as the book proceeds. But my point is that it's easy and safe to invoke Islamist suicide bombers as a symbol of religious fanaticism, and not so safe or easy to recognize the same fanaticism on our side -- whether "our side" is America, Christianity, or science.

So the bumper sticker that inspired this post really is meant to paper over Western science-driven state terror. Possibly the person who designed it didn't realize that, but if so, he or she is less rational than he or she clearly wants to believe.

Science vs. Religion

This is cute, but it's not really a good antithesis. How about "Science lets you bomb civilians from the sky without any danger to you"? Or "Science lets you shred unarmed civilians with machine-gun fire via video in your attack helicopter"? Or "Science lets you kill children with remote-control drones from thousands of miles away"? Or "Science lets you cull the human race of inferior losers through eugenics"?

The September 11 terrorists didn't fly into the World Trade Towers by the power of religion. (Whoa, dude, you mean they totally flew through the air? Praise God!) Like any other good soldiers, they used high technology which enabled them to do much more damage than they could have done by their own muscle power. Scientists have been remarkably willing to put enormous destructive power into the hands of politicians and generals, but that's okay because it's not for scientists to decide these things -- or so they claim. The responsibility isn't theirs alone, of course, but they must shoulder their share.

What's wrong with this bumper sticker is that it deliberately confuses what is at stake. It's not a confusion limited to atheistic scientists, of course. At the beginning of Patience With God, for example, Frank Schaeffer draws the reader this picture of the trouble we're in here in River City:

At a time when Islamist extremists strap bombs to themselves and blow up women and children; when America has just come staggering out of the searing thirty-year-plus embrace of the reactionary, dumb-as-mud Religious Right; and when some people are bullying, harassing, and persecuting gay men and women in the name of religion, it's understandable that the sort of decent people most of us would want for neighbors run from religion. There is a problem, though, for those who flee religion expecting to find sanity in unbelief. The madness never was about religion, let alone caused by faith in God. It was and is about how we evolved and what we evolved into [3].

Now, I'm the kind of atheist who agrees that "the madness never was ... caused by faith in God", since human beings create their gods. "Faith in God" is an effect, not a cause. (Schaeffer, though, still thinks there's a nice God who protects babies.) But look again at those opening clauses: he mentions "extremist" Muslim suicide bombers, but not "extremist" Christian American soldiers killing hajis as payback for 9-11, though American soldiers have killed far more people in the past few decades than Muslim suicide bombers have. America is rich, after all, and can equip its soldiers to kill more effectively and on a much larger scale. I think Schaeffer can now blame Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for their murderous religiosity, though it will be interesting to see just how far he goes as the book proceeds. But my point is that it's easy and safe to invoke Islamist suicide bombers as a symbol of religious fanaticism, and not so safe or easy to recognize the same fanaticism on our side -- whether "our side" is America, Christianity, or science.

So the bumper sticker that inspired this post really is meant to paper over Western science-driven state terror. Possibly the person who designed it didn't realize that, but if so, he or she is less rational than he or she clearly wants to believe.

Still an Atheist, Thank God

I got e-mail the other day that sent me back to a conundrum I've been fretting about for decades. It might be summed up by something the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to his student Norman Malcolm:

... what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. & if it does not improve your thinking about important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious ... You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty,' 'probability,' 'perception,' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important.

I've always been inspired by these words, but they also worry me. As I've mentioned before, happiness is hard to define, but I think I can safely say that by all accounts Wittgenstein wasn't a very happy person. This seems to have been more a matter of his temperament than of his lack of religious belief; suffering seems to have run in his family. Philosophy was an ongoing struggle for him, but it was still important to him to continue that struggle. It's also important to me to think about these things.

Thinking about them, though, doesn't lead anywhere, not to final answers, not to the certainty that so many people (including me, in some moods) crave. Which brings me to the e-mail I received. I'd mentioned that, on one hand, I think atheists should inform ourselves about the religions we criticize, but on the other, we don't really need to criticize them, informing ourselves is a lot of work, and not everybody wants to do that work. Certainly most believers don't bother to inform themselves even about their own religion. My correspondent wrote:

Frankly, I think Christians (and other theists, for that matter) do have an obligation to study other faiths. Not just because the NT has no monopoly on truth, but seeing the truths revealed in the NT from other standpoints (and therefore removed from Christianity's local and temporal peculiarities) can only be beneficial. Otherwise, what folks call Christianity is all-too often just a devotional cult. Not that there's anything wrong with devotional cults, mind you, Christianity just purports to be something different. For a religion based on a book, as you point out, its followers are often shockingly illiterate.

I agree that "the NT has no monopoly on truth," but I consider that too modest a concession: I don't think the NT even has a significant market share. (I react the same way when someone declares that Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on morality. It's meant to be a generous concession, but it still claims too much.) I don't find Christian believers' ignorance about their religion all that shocking, though. Between the writing of the New Testament in the vernacular and the Protestant insistence that the Bible should be available in the vernacular, there was a long period in the West when the Bible was available in Latin and believers were discouraged from reading it. And what is the "something different" that Christianity purports to be? The early Christians didn't study the New Testament, because it didn't exist for the first Christian century or so: Christianity was a devotional cult in those days, the glory days of Christian beginnings. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question, but it has little to do with the importance of learning and thinking. It was, however, a point of pride for the early churches that most of the early Christians were anything but philosophers or scholars. Robert Wilken described a mid-second century "pagan" caricature of Christians in The Myth of Christian Beginnings, and commented (176-7):

Most Christians probably fitted this caricature, and even more significantly, liked being unlettered. They even made a virtue of their lack of sophistication by quoting the New Testament. In answer to questions about the reasons behind Christian beliefs, some Christians replied, "Simply believe. Your faith will save you." Or "The wisdom of this world is foolishness." Proud of their isolation from the surrounding culture, many Christians thumbed their noses at the autocrats and intellectuals. Confident they had found a way of life better than their fellows, they were content to remain in their ghettos. Exploited and abused by the upper classes, these people now had their own franchise on truth and were not about to let it be taken over by others.

One reason atheists so often put their facts about religion wrong is that they were raised and trained in one religion or another. (I myself was not; I had no religious upbringing, though I wasn't raised to be an atheist either.) Such atheists therefore feel as qualified to talk about their former religion and what is wrong with it as anyone still in the circle, and in a sense they are: they are as little qualified to talk about Christianity, for example, as most Christians are, since most Christians are spectacularly ill-informed about their religion. Sometimes liberal Christians trot out the statistics about Biblical illiteracy in order to hit "fundamentalists" over the head with them, but the liberals are no more knowledgeable themselves. (Christians, including liberals, mostly honor "Let him who is without sin be first to cast a stone" and "Judge not, lest you be judged" in the breach rather than the observance.) I've seen claims that this ignorance about the bare facts of the Bible and Christianity is a new development caused by Teh Teevee and Teh Video Games, but I doubt it: surveys of Americans' biblical knowledge in the 1950s produced essentially the same results. (This article, by a conservative Christian theologian, discusses the problem pretty well.)

Worse (or better?) still, there isn't really any consensus about what, say, Christianity is, or what it teaches, or how Christians should conduct themselves. Those who do trouble to inform themselves will soon find this out. There is no true core of Christianity, nor of Judaism, or probably of any other religion. Nor is there a true core of atheism -- some of us militantly deny the existence of gods, others simply don't view theism as a live option and put the burden of argument on the theist. Moving beyond the nonexistence of gods to questions of knowledge and conduct, we disagree among ourselves as much as believers do. Atheism really has few if any consequences that follow from the rejection of theism; we can't even do the opposite of what believers do, since believers exhibit such a contradictory range of opinion and behavior.

But here's my question for today. How much do we need to know about religion or philosophy? As numerous writers have argued on the biblical literacy question, it's not certain what constitutes biblical literacy. It's probably good for Christians to know the names of the gospels, who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, what's in the Ten Commandments (presumably both versions), and so on, but is such rote knowledge enough? More complex questions raise more serious difficulties, because they don't have simple soundbyte answers: how does a Christian decide questions of right and wrong, for example, where the Bible is either equivocal or silent on an issue? And how do atheists decide right and wrong? Most atheists I've encountered tend to skate round this question. I'm not denying that atheists have moral values, of course, since I'm an atheist myself, but I don't find that atheists are more thoughtful about moral philosophy than theists. In either case there is a wide range of positions and views, with no resolution in sight.

When I studied the Bible a couple of decades ago, I found it very interesting -- not because it was written by God, but because it was written by human beings. It made much more sense to me when I read it as a human document like any other. But that is a reflection of my own interest in reading as a way of learning about what it means to be human. There are other ways, which are also important to me, but reading isn't important or useful to many people -- maybe most? I've read enough about education to reach the conclusion that it's not possible to prescribe for everyone what they should learn. When people ask me for suggestions, I have to spend a fair amount of time listening to them, so that I know what they know and what they want to learn, before I can make any suggestions. That would be a teacher's obligation in any subject.

On one hand there's too much information that has to be taken into account on just about any matter of importance, and any important question has too many ramifications to settle simply. On the other hand, people have to decide and act, even in the absence of certainty; and there's enough shared information between different traditions that if you don't get information and ideas from one tradition, you'll eventually get it from another. That's not to say that "all religions teach the same truth", because each religion is divided within and against itself; and because all religions also teach the same lies. Belonging to a religious tradition doesn't exempt you from the necessity of choosing among its claims and prescriptions, but neither does rejecting all religious traditions.

Still an Atheist, Thank God

I got e-mail the other day that sent me back to a conundrum I've been fretting about for decades. It might be summed up by something the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to his student Norman Malcolm:

... what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. & if it does not improve your thinking about important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious ... You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty,' 'probability,' 'perception,' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important.

I've always been inspired by these words, but they also worry me. As I've mentioned before, happiness is hard to define, but I think I can safely say that by all accounts Wittgenstein wasn't a very happy person. This seems to have been more a matter of his temperament than of his lack of religious belief; suffering seems to have run in his family. Philosophy was an ongoing struggle for him, but it was still important to him to continue that struggle. It's also important to me to think about these things.

Thinking about them, though, doesn't lead anywhere, not to final answers, not to the certainty that so many people (including me, in some moods) crave. Which brings me to the e-mail I received. I'd mentioned that, on one hand, I think atheists should inform ourselves about the religions we criticize, but on the other, we don't really need to criticize them, informing ourselves is a lot of work, and not everybody wants to do that work. Certainly most believers don't bother to inform themselves even about their own religion. My correspondent wrote:

Frankly, I think Christians (and other theists, for that matter) do have an obligation to study other faiths. Not just because the NT has no monopoly on truth, but seeing the truths revealed in the NT from other standpoints (and therefore removed from Christianity's local and temporal peculiarities) can only be beneficial. Otherwise, what folks call Christianity is all-too often just a devotional cult. Not that there's anything wrong with devotional cults, mind you, Christianity just purports to be something different. For a religion based on a book, as you point out, its followers are often shockingly illiterate.

I agree that "the NT has no monopoly on truth," but I consider that too modest a concession: I don't think the NT even has a significant market share. (I react the same way when someone declares that Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on morality. It's meant to be a generous concession, but it still claims too much.) I don't find Christian believers' ignorance about their religion all that shocking, though. Between the writing of the New Testament in the vernacular and the Protestant insistence that the Bible should be available in the vernacular, there was a long period in the West when the Bible was available in Latin and believers were discouraged from reading it. And what is the "something different" that Christianity purports to be? The early Christians didn't study the New Testament, because it didn't exist for the first Christian century or so: Christianity was a devotional cult in those days, the glory days of Christian beginnings. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is another question, but it has little to do with the importance of learning and thinking. It was, however, a point of pride for the early churches that most of the early Christians were anything but philosophers or scholars. Robert Wilken described a mid-second century "pagan" caricature of Christians in The Myth of Christian Beginnings, and commented (176-7):

Most Christians probably fitted this caricature, and even more significantly, liked being unlettered. They even made a virtue of their lack of sophistication by quoting the New Testament. In answer to questions about the reasons behind Christian beliefs, some Christians replied, "Simply believe. Your faith will save you." Or "The wisdom of this world is foolishness." Proud of their isolation from the surrounding culture, many Christians thumbed their noses at the autocrats and intellectuals. Confident they had found a way of life better than their fellows, they were content to remain in their ghettos. Exploited and abused by the upper classes, these people now had their own franchise on truth and were not about to let it be taken over by others.

One reason atheists so often put their facts about religion wrong is that they were raised and trained in one religion or another. (I myself was not; I had no religious upbringing, though I wasn't raised to be an atheist either.) Such atheists therefore feel as qualified to talk about their former religion and what is wrong with it as anyone still in the circle, and in a sense they are: they are as little qualified to talk about Christianity, for example, as most Christians are, since most Christians are spectacularly ill-informed about their religion. Sometimes liberal Christians trot out the statistics about Biblical illiteracy in order to hit "fundamentalists" over the head with them, but the liberals are no more knowledgeable themselves. (Christians, including liberals, mostly honor "Let him who is without sin be first to cast a stone" and "Judge not, lest you be judged" in the breach rather than the observance.) I've seen claims that this ignorance about the bare facts of the Bible and Christianity is a new development caused by Teh Teevee and Teh Video Games, but I doubt it: surveys of Americans' biblical knowledge in the 1950s produced essentially the same results. (This article, by a conservative Christian theologian, discusses the problem pretty well.)

Worse (or better?) still, there isn't really any consensus about what, say, Christianity is, or what it teaches, or how Christians should conduct themselves. Those who do trouble to inform themselves will soon find this out. There is no true core of Christianity, nor of Judaism, or probably of any other religion. Nor is there a true core of atheism -- some of us militantly deny the existence of gods, others simply don't view theism as a live option and put the burden of argument on the theist. Moving beyond the nonexistence of gods to questions of knowledge and conduct, we disagree among ourselves as much as believers do. Atheism really has few if any consequences that follow from the rejection of theism; we can't even do the opposite of what believers do, since believers exhibit such a contradictory range of opinion and behavior.

But here's my question for today. How much do we need to know about religion or philosophy? As numerous writers have argued on the biblical literacy question, it's not certain what constitutes biblical literacy. It's probably good for Christians to know the names of the gospels, who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, what's in the Ten Commandments (presumably both versions), and so on, but is such rote knowledge enough? More complex questions raise more serious difficulties, because they don't have simple soundbyte answers: how does a Christian decide questions of right and wrong, for example, where the Bible is either equivocal or silent on an issue? And how do atheists decide right and wrong? Most atheists I've encountered tend to skate round this question. I'm not denying that atheists have moral values, of course, since I'm an atheist myself, but I don't find that atheists are more thoughtful about moral philosophy than theists. In either case there is a wide range of positions and views, with no resolution in sight.

When I studied the Bible a couple of decades ago, I found it very interesting -- not because it was written by God, but because it was written by human beings. It made much more sense to me when I read it as a human document like any other. But that is a reflection of my own interest in reading as a way of learning about what it means to be human. There are other ways, which are also important to me, but reading isn't important or useful to many people -- maybe most? I've read enough about education to reach the conclusion that it's not possible to prescribe for everyone what they should learn. When people ask me for suggestions, I have to spend a fair amount of time listening to them, so that I know what they know and what they want to learn, before I can make any suggestions. That would be a teacher's obligation in any subject.

On one hand there's too much information that has to be taken into account on just about any matter of importance, and any important question has too many ramifications to settle simply. On the other hand, people have to decide and act, even in the absence of certainty; and there's enough shared information between different traditions that if you don't get information and ideas from one tradition, you'll eventually get it from another. That's not to say that "all religions teach the same truth", because each religion is divided within and against itself; and because all religions also teach the same lies. Belonging to a religious tradition doesn't exempt you from the necessity of choosing among its claims and prescriptions, but neither does rejecting all religious traditions.

Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back

It's possible -- no one has proven that it's impossible, anyway -- that the universe is a vast booby trap, designed and constructed by a cosmic practical joker waiting for us to make a misstep so he can jump us while holding us responsible for our doom. It's possible that the universe is set up so that it's possible to kill a human being in such a way that it's impossible for them to go to heaven (78); even cremating a cadaver can prevent the spirit from finding its way to peace [91]. It's possible that absolute good and absolute evil are at war in the world, and everything bad that happens to us is just collateral damage in that conflict; sorry about that [86]. It's possible that we can persuade absolute good or absolute evil, or their many agents, spiritual and material, to do us no harm (or less harm, at least) for the moment through bribery, sweet-talk, flattery, and appeasement, or at least by burning sage [186] for protection. It's possible that what "white doctors call 'being sick' is more like an accident, like the person went off the road and the [molecules] forgot how to be" [190]. And it's possible that if you're going to ask a sacred mountain to take care of a dead friend, you should be "careful not to say the name of the dead" [252].

What I find puzzling is that so many religious believers see the universe just this way, though they'll object to the bald way I've described their worldview here. Officially God is good, but when you listen to what believers say about him, "good" is not the word that comes to mind. And I'm not talking only about Christianity here. The page numbers in the paragraph above refer to a novel I just finished reading, Going Through Ghosts by Mary Sojourner (University of Nevada Press, 2010), based on Native American cosmology and religious practice. (I should mention that it's not at all a bad book, even if its theology annoyed me.) Try this exchange between a living character and the ghost of a murdered one (124):

"What do your cosmic supervisors think about this place?" Maggie asked.
"They are busy with an earthquake about to happen in the Middle East," Sarah said.

"Busy" how? I wondered. Are they busy trying to prevent it, or busy trying to start it? Do earthquakes happen because the spirits are understaffed, or inattentive, or hungover? This sort of thing is supposed to be spiritually superior to the ways of the whites?

Near the end of the book, Sarah the friendly ghost, now happily "all-the-way-dead", is watching the living with her recently dead teacher Minnie (244).

They had been told they were only to watch, and it had been made clear that they were not to intervene in anything. "Sometimes," their teachers had told them, "we might drop something down in front of a human. We see which way they go. There is something else you can give them; we'll show you when you've learned to watch."

Sure, it's possible that the afterlife is like an American elementary-school classroom with the students gathered around an ant farm, or at best a university psychology rat lab. But is that the best of all possible worlds? What entitles the teachers to test the humans they observe with such smug detachment? Their superiority is assumed by the author, but not recognized by this reader.

To repeat: it may be that the world really is an obstacle course designed by a being with obsessive-compulsive disorder, paranoia, Tourette's syndrome, with a booby-trap at the end. What I don't understand is why so many people, given the opportunity to invent their own higher power, invent such nasty ones. The only comprehensible reason I can imagine is that the universe is a fairly inhospitable place; our lives are too often nasty, brutish, and short; so it makes a kind of sense to believe that if you're really, really, good -- if you bear up patiently and uncomplainingly under the worst suffering the Beings In Charge can inflict on you -- then they'll finally smile and tell you it's okay, you passed the test, you're a good little human and everything is going to be all right now. And maybe that's reality; who knows? But if it is, the Beings in Charge are still sadistic demons who should be defied, not deified.

But yeah, I know, a lot of people don't see it that way. Anyone else remember the Clerk's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

The Clerk's tale is about a marquis of Saluzzo named Walter. Lord Walter of Saluzzo is a bachelor who is asked by his subjects to marry in order to provide an heir. He assents and decides he will marry a peasant, named Griselda. Griselda is a poor girl, used to a life of pain and labor.

After Griselda has borne him a daughter, Walter decides to test her loyalty. He sends an officer to take the baby, pretending to kill her, and convey it secretly to Bologna. Griselda makes no protest at this. When she bears a son several years later, Walter again has him taken from her.

Finally, Walter determines one last test. He has a Papal bull of annulment forged which enables him to leave Griselda, and informs her that he intends to remarry. He requires her to prepare the wedding for his new bride. Secretly, he has the children returned from Bologna, and he presents his daughter as his intended wife. Eventually he informs Griselda of the deceit, and they live happily ever after.

There's always been disagreement among readers about how to understand this story (and Chaucer himself sent mixed signals in the text), but it "was an enormously popular one, included in virtually all of the adaptations of Chaucer done for children and juveniles in the 19th and early 20th centuries". A lot of people evidently get off on this sort of thing; Story of O is considered unwholesome, but not the Clerk's Tale.

I also recall Albert Brooks's movie 1991 Defending Your Life. Brooks, who also wrote and directed, plays a guy who's killed in an auto accident; his spirit goes to Judgment City, where you must defend your life before a cosmic court, who decide whether to send you back or promote you. He meets and falls in love with the saintly Meryl Streep, but of course the court separates them -- she'll move up, he'll be sent back. Brooks desperately runs after the tram she's on and braves even electroshock to follow her; the cosmic judges beam smugly at this proof of his merit and (as I recall -- it has been years since I saw it) change their verdict in his favor. Incomprehensibly to me, Defending Your Life got good reviews and is still a cult favorite. I prefer Kore-eda Hirokazu's non-sadistic 1998 fantasy After Life myself, but I must recognize that many people like to fantasize about being tested, even cruelly, and coming through the test successfully.

But I know this is a matter of temperament; for me, as I've said before, the universe feels less unpleasant if no one is out there watching all the horrors but doing nothing about them. That's leaving aside the thought that someone is out there making the horrors happen. No doubt my preference is as much wish-fulfillment as the belief that someone is testing us, "sending us the disaster to overcome", but I think the wishes we make reveal a lot about us.

Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back

It's possible -- no one has proven that it's impossible, anyway -- that the universe is a vast booby trap, designed and constructed by a cosmic practical joker waiting for us to make a misstep so he can jump us while holding us responsible for our doom. It's possible that the universe is set up so that it's possible to kill a human being in such a way that it's impossible for them to go to heaven (78); even cremating a cadaver can prevent the spirit from finding its way to peace [91]. It's possible that absolute good and absolute evil are at war in the world, and everything bad that happens to us is just collateral damage in that conflict; sorry about that [86]. It's possible that we can persuade absolute good or absolute evil, or their many agents, spiritual and material, to do us no harm (or less harm, at least) for the moment through bribery, sweet-talk, flattery, and appeasement, or at least by burning sage [186] for protection. It's possible that what "white doctors call 'being sick' is more like an accident, like the person went off the road and the [molecules] forgot how to be" [190]. And it's possible that if you're going to ask a sacred mountain to take care of a dead friend, you should be "careful not to say the name of the dead" [252].

What I find puzzling is that so many religious believers see the universe just this way, though they'll object to the bald way I've described their worldview here. Officially God is good, but when you listen to what believers say about him, "good" is not the word that comes to mind. And I'm not talking only about Christianity here. The page numbers in the paragraph above refer to a novel I just finished reading, Going Through Ghosts by Mary Sojourner (University of Nevada Press, 2010), based on Native American cosmology and religious practice. (I should mention that it's not at all a bad book, even if its theology annoyed me.) Try this exchange between a living character and the ghost of a murdered one (124):

"What do your cosmic supervisors think about this place?" Maggie asked.
"They are busy with an earthquake about to happen in the Middle East," Sarah said.

"Busy" how? I wondered. Are they busy trying to prevent it, or busy trying to start it? Do earthquakes happen because the spirits are understaffed, or inattentive, or hungover? This sort of thing is supposed to be spiritually superior to the ways of the whites?

Near the end of the book, Sarah the friendly ghost, now happily "all-the-way-dead", is watching the living with her recently dead teacher Minnie (244).

They had been told they were only to watch, and it had been made clear that they were not to intervene in anything. "Sometimes," their teachers had told them, "we might drop something down in front of a human. We see which way they go. There is something else you can give them; we'll show you when you've learned to watch."

Sure, it's possible that the afterlife is like an American elementary-school classroom with the students gathered around an ant farm, or at best a university psychology rat lab. But is that the best of all possible worlds? What entitles the teachers to test the humans they observe with such smug detachment? Their superiority is assumed by the author, but not recognized by this reader.

To repeat: it may be that the world really is an obstacle course designed by a being with obsessive-compulsive disorder, paranoia, Tourette's syndrome, with a booby-trap at the end. What I don't understand is why so many people, given the opportunity to invent their own higher power, invent such nasty ones. The only comprehensible reason I can imagine is that the universe is a fairly inhospitable place; our lives are too often nasty, brutish, and short; so it makes a kind of sense to believe that if you're really, really, good -- if you bear up patiently and uncomplainingly under the worst suffering the Beings In Charge can inflict on you -- then they'll finally smile and tell you it's okay, you passed the test, you're a good little human and everything is going to be all right now. And maybe that's reality; who knows? But if it is, the Beings in Charge are still sadistic demons who should be defied, not deified.

But yeah, I know, a lot of people don't see it that way. Anyone else remember the Clerk's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

The Clerk's tale is about a marquis of Saluzzo named Walter. Lord Walter of Saluzzo is a bachelor who is asked by his subjects to marry in order to provide an heir. He assents and decides he will marry a peasant, named Griselda. Griselda is a poor girl, used to a life of pain and labor.

After Griselda has borne him a daughter, Walter decides to test her loyalty. He sends an officer to take the baby, pretending to kill her, and convey it secretly to Bologna. Griselda makes no protest at this. When she bears a son several years later, Walter again has him taken from her.

Finally, Walter determines one last test. He has a Papal bull of annulment forged which enables him to leave Griselda, and informs her that he intends to remarry. He requires her to prepare the wedding for his new bride. Secretly, he has the children returned from Bologna, and he presents his daughter as his intended wife. Eventually he informs Griselda of the deceit, and they live happily ever after.

There's always been disagreement among readers about how to understand this story (and Chaucer himself sent mixed signals in the text), but it "was an enormously popular one, included in virtually all of the adaptations of Chaucer done for children and juveniles in the 19th and early 20th centuries". A lot of people evidently get off on this sort of thing; Story of O is considered unwholesome, but not the Clerk's Tale.

I also recall Albert Brooks's movie 1991 Defending Your Life. Brooks, who also wrote and directed, plays a guy who's killed in an auto accident; his spirit goes to Judgment City, where you must defend your life before a cosmic court, who decide whether to send you back or promote you. He meets and falls in love with the saintly Meryl Streep, but of course the court separates them -- she'll move up, he'll be sent back. Brooks desperately runs after the tram she's on and braves even electroshock to follow her; the cosmic judges beam smugly at this proof of his merit and (as I recall -- it has been years since I saw it) change their verdict in his favor. Incomprehensibly to me, Defending Your Life got good reviews and is still a cult favorite. I prefer Kore-eda Hirokazu's non-sadistic 1998 fantasy After Life myself, but I must recognize that many people like to fantasize about being tested, even cruelly, and coming through the test successfully.

But I know this is a matter of temperament; for me, as I've said before, the universe feels less unpleasant if no one is out there watching all the horrors but doing nothing about them. That's leaving aside the thought that someone is out there making the horrors happen. No doubt my preference is as much wish-fulfillment as the belief that someone is testing us, "sending us the disaster to overcome", but I think the wishes we make reveal a lot about us.

The Truth Lies Somewhere In Between

I've started reading Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale, 2009), after dragging my feet because there were so many other things I needed to read. But now it's due at the library in a couple of days, and I've run out of renewals, so it may be a while before I finish it. (No way am I going to spend money on it.) I have read the first 25 or so pages, though, and while I agree with some of what Eagleton says, much of it is wackery. He reminds me slightly of Philip Kitcher, whom I wrote about here before, because of his attempt to distance himself both from religious conservatives and the New Atheists -- especially Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whom he schmears together with donnish humor as "Ditchkins", hur hur hur. So, I reject religious conservatives and I reject the New Atheists, but I also reject those who try to split the difference like Eagleton, Kitcher, and Chris Hedges. Where does that leave me?

For those who don't know, Eagleton is a Marxist literary critic of Irish Catholic extraction at Oxford University, a former student of the great Raymond Williams. I believe I tried to read one of his books, perhaps his attack on postmodernism, but for various reasons never finished it either; it might have been the one I'd seen reviewed in The New York Times, where Eagleton evidently raved about the barbarians at the gates of academe with their dirty French philosophies. He's cute, but cute don't get the job done.

The more I read, the more it seemed that Eagleton is not really an atheist, but a Christian. He says not, though he mentions having been influenced by liberation theology in his college days. Still, he writes (or rather talks -- the book was originally a set of lectures, very chatty in tone) like a fighting liberal priest who's not afraid to talk to the young. For instance:

There is a document that records God's endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it. ... The Creation is the original acte gratuit [8].

Eagleton's existentialist roots are showing here. But, of course, the Bible is not a "document" but an anthology of documents; if it depicts Yahweh's "endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion", it also shows him setting up that organized religion he's struggling with, right down to the dimensions of the Tabernacle and, eventually, the Temple; that's when his engineering side comes into play. Sometimes he pretends he's not interested in sacrifices (the sweet smell of burning fat in which he delights), but at other times he complains that the cattle are scrawny, blemished, and not numerous enough. (As I've said before, the Bible is the ultimate source of the Borscht Belt joke about the food here being terrible -- and such small portions.) He's not even averse to sacrificing the occasional virgin. And overall there's the pity party for Yahweh, poor little guy, he gets no respect, sometimes it gets him down.

The world thus belongs to that exceedingly rare class of objects which, in a way that would have delighted the heart of Oscar Wilde, exist entirely for their own sake and for no drearily utilitarian end -- a category which along with God includes art, evil, and humanity. It is part of the world's sharing in God's own freedom that it works all by itself. Unlike George Bush, God is not an interventionist kind of ruler [9].

Just to nitpick, it doesn't sound like that class of non-utilitarian objects is really all that "rare," since it would have to include everything in the world as well as the world itself. But how do you like that timely bit about George Bush? However, Yahweh as depicted in that "document" the Bible is very much an interventionist kind of ruler, quite hands-on in fact: walking around the Garden of Eden at dusk, kicking out Adam and Eve when they disobey, killing everything in the world because he was peeved at humanity, visiting Abraham and opening Sarah's womb, sending plagues on Egypt, rejecting Saul in favor of David, and neither last nor least, sending his Son to die on the cross for the sins of humanity. To this day he's cooking up tsunamis and earthquakes, famines and viruses, just to keep us on our toes. The doctrine of Yahweh as not just creator but sustainer of the world is found in the Bible as well as in later theologians. With his Thomist background (and he has quite a boner for Aquinas), Eagleton must know all this, but he's got all this fine blarney to unreel for our entertainment.

For theology, science does not start far back enough -- not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but that does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible [13].

Funny, in my experience it has been precisely philosophers who asked such questions, including philosophers of science. The theologians I've read usually don't write about such interesting stuff, they're usually trying to reconcile the Bible with Plato or Aristotle or Heidegger or Charles Schulz. In general, Eagleton seems to talk about "theologians" when he means "philosophers," but it sounds like he's still stuck in the era of logical positivism, when a clique of mostly British philosophers did claim that such questions were bogus, and that was around the time when Eagleton was in college. But things have changed since then.

The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for the morrow [14].

While Eagleton was revisiting the Sermon on the Mount, he should have noticed the bits about cutting off your arm and plucking out your eye to avoid sin, lest your whole body be cast into Hell. But that's not quite compatible with Jesus the Warm Fuzzy Hippie, I guess, so he leaves it out, along with becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven and observing every jot and tittle of the Torah, the lesser commandments along with the greater.

Jesus probably preached this kind of ethic because he thought the end of the world was just around the corner, which turns out to have been rather a grave miscalculation. His sense of history seems to have been a little awry. ... Even so, it is not quite the kind of morality one associates with chartered accountants or oil executives [15].

Oh, that's all right then. But I don't go along with the bogus loaded alternatives Eagleton posits here: either take no thought for the morrow, or become an oil executive. That's the sort of fake choices I associate with religious believers, though I admit they're not the only ones guilty of it. And it is entertaining when Eagleton quotes Hitchens fuming like a Dickensian miser or an American Teabagger about Jesus' ethic: "The analogy of humans to lilies ... suggests -- along with many other injunctions -- that things like thrift, innovation, family life, and so forth are a sheer waste of time". But it doesn't appear that Eagleton is any more interested than Hitchens is in actually emulating Jesus in this respect; he's not living on pure thoughts and the kindness of strangers, he's a hardworking professor and a prolific author (forty or so books, and recently a visiting faculty at Notre Dame University). He goes on (and on and on):

Because God is transcendent -- that's to say, because he doesn't need humanity, having fashioned it just for the fun of it -- he is not neurotically possessive of us [15].

Really? We're talking about Yahweh here, remember, Yahweh the jealous god, his name is Jealous, and you shall have no god but Yahweh, or he shall strip you naked before your lovers, et cetera, et cetera. "Neurotically possessive" is just how I'd describe the god of that "document" the Bible. Like most theologians and religious laymen, Eagleton makes up a god he likes to think about, and projects it onto the Bible, even though his fantasy clashes in many obvious ways with the picture of Yahweh most readers find there.

Eagleton does say in the Preface that he's just trying "to 'ventriloquize' what I take to be a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists[;] I do not wish to be mistaken for a dummy" (xii). But since he accuses 'Ditchkins' and their ilk of "writ[ing] off a worthless caricature of the real [New Testament], rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to to match religion's own" (xi), he's casting the first stone in a glass house. Except that Eagleton clearly isn't ignorant; he's just disingenuous.

Eagleton claims that

the Jewish and Christian religions have much to say about some vital questions -- death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like -- on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence [xii].

I don't think so -- that is, I don't think that the left has "for the most part" been silent on such issues; it's exactly the left that has dealt with them in ways that made sense to me; and I don't agree that the Jewish and Christian religions have much to say about those vital questions. Or rather, they do have a lot to say, but what they have to say is usually inhumane, irrelevant, and downright wrong. Sure, some Jewish and Christian writers have contributed useful ideas to my worldview, but they were not, as far as I can tell, representative of their faiths. (Most of the numerous Jewish writers I've learned from were aggressively non-observant.) Which reminds me, at one point Eagleton tries to adduce Spinoza as a "key theorist of toleration ... a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic" (18), conveniently neglecting the facts that Spinoza's god was not the God of the Hebrew Bible, and that Spinoza was thrown out of the synagogue for his heterodox views.

Finally, there's this popular evasion:

For it is of course always easier to buy one's rejection of a belief system on the cheap, by (for example) triumphantly dismissing a version of Christianity that only seriously weird types, some of them lurking sheepishly in caves to ashamed to come out and confront the rest of us, would espouse in the first place [5].

You know what I'm talkin' about -- Christians love to complain that critics of the faith are either attacking a totally fabricated straw man, or are stereotyping all Christians on the basis of a few bad apples like Fred Phelps or that guy in the Vatican in the pointy hat. The trouble with Christianity as far as I'm concerned lies in the New Testament itself (though it can of course always be reinterpreted to mean whatever one likes) and in versions of Christianity that are held by millions of ordinary believers. Dismissing them as "seriously weird types" is a popular way to try to distract critics from the real problems, but it's 1) dishonest and 2) doesn't work with me. I always ask the people who use this tactic which version of Christianity I should go by, then, and that's how I developed my rejection of that belief system -- not on the cheap, but by doing quite a bit of study, more than most Christians do. So I can say pretty confidently that the version of Christianity that Eagleton is "ventriloquizing" here is espoused only by a few seriously weird types, not lurking in caves but, like Eagleton, in Oxford and the Notre Dame campus. It's based on a shamelessly selective reading of the Bible generally and of the gospels in particular, which means that Eagleton is relying on the ignorance of his audience and their readiness to believe the best about Christianity, whatever the facts may be.

The Truth Lies Somewhere In Between

I've started reading Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale, 2009), after dragging my feet because there were so many other things I needed to read. But now it's due at the library in a couple of days, and I've run out of renewals, so it may be a while before I finish it. (No way am I going to spend money on it.) I have read the first 25 or so pages, though, and while I agree with some of what Eagleton says, much of it is wackery. He reminds me slightly of Philip Kitcher, whom I wrote about here before, because of his attempt to distance himself both from religious conservatives and the New Atheists -- especially Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whom he schmears together with donnish humor as "Ditchkins", hur hur hur. So, I reject religious conservatives and I reject the New Atheists, but I also reject those who try to split the difference like Eagleton, Kitcher, and Chris Hedges. Where does that leave me?

For those who don't know, Eagleton is a Marxist literary critic of Irish Catholic extraction at Oxford University, a former student of the great Raymond Williams. I believe I tried to read one of his books, perhaps his attack on postmodernism, but for various reasons never finished it either; it might have been the one I'd seen reviewed in The New York Times, where Eagleton evidently raved about the barbarians at the gates of academe with their dirty French philosophies. He's cute, but cute don't get the job done.

The more I read, the more it seemed that Eagleton is not really an atheist, but a Christian. He says not, though he mentions having been influenced by liberation theology in his college days. Still, he writes (or rather talks -- the book was originally a set of lectures, very chatty in tone) like a fighting liberal priest who's not afraid to talk to the young. For instance:

There is a document that records God's endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it. ... The Creation is the original acte gratuit [8].

Eagleton's existentialist roots are showing here. But, of course, the Bible is not a "document" but an anthology of documents; if it depicts Yahweh's "endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion", it also shows him setting up that organized religion he's struggling with, right down to the dimensions of the Tabernacle and, eventually, the Temple; that's when his engineering side comes into play. Sometimes he pretends he's not interested in sacrifices (the sweet smell of burning fat in which he delights), but at other times he complains that the cattle are scrawny, blemished, and not numerous enough. (As I've said before, the Bible is the ultimate source of the Borscht Belt joke about the food here being terrible -- and such small portions.) He's not even averse to sacrificing the occasional virgin. And overall there's the pity party for Yahweh, poor little guy, he gets no respect, sometimes it gets him down.

The world thus belongs to that exceedingly rare class of objects which, in a way that would have delighted the heart of Oscar Wilde, exist entirely for their own sake and for no drearily utilitarian end -- a category which along with God includes art, evil, and humanity. It is part of the world's sharing in God's own freedom that it works all by itself. Unlike George Bush, God is not an interventionist kind of ruler [9].

Just to nitpick, it doesn't sound like that class of non-utilitarian objects is really all that "rare," since it would have to include everything in the world as well as the world itself. But how do you like that timely bit about George Bush? However, Yahweh as depicted in that "document" the Bible is very much an interventionist kind of ruler, quite hands-on in fact: walking around the Garden of Eden at dusk, kicking out Adam and Eve when they disobey, killing everything in the world because he was peeved at humanity, visiting Abraham and opening Sarah's womb, sending plagues on Egypt, rejecting Saul in favor of David, and neither last nor least, sending his Son to die on the cross for the sins of humanity. To this day he's cooking up tsunamis and earthquakes, famines and viruses, just to keep us on our toes. The doctrine of Yahweh as not just creator but sustainer of the world is found in the Bible as well as in later theologians. With his Thomist background (and he has quite a boner for Aquinas), Eagleton must know all this, but he's got all this fine blarney to unreel for our entertainment.

For theology, science does not start far back enough -- not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but that does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible [13].

Funny, in my experience it has been precisely philosophers who asked such questions, including philosophers of science. The theologians I've read usually don't write about such interesting stuff, they're usually trying to reconcile the Bible with Plato or Aristotle or Heidegger or Charles Schulz. In general, Eagleton seems to talk about "theologians" when he means "philosophers," but it sounds like he's still stuck in the era of logical positivism, when a clique of mostly British philosophers did claim that such questions were bogus, and that was around the time when Eagleton was in college. But things have changed since then.

The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for the morrow [14].

While Eagleton was revisiting the Sermon on the Mount, he should have noticed the bits about cutting off your arm and plucking out your eye to avoid sin, lest your whole body be cast into Hell. But that's not quite compatible with Jesus the Warm Fuzzy Hippie, I guess, so he leaves it out, along with becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven and observing every jot and tittle of the Torah, the lesser commandments along with the greater.

Jesus probably preached this kind of ethic because he thought the end of the world was just around the corner, which turns out to have been rather a grave miscalculation. His sense of history seems to have been a little awry. ... Even so, it is not quite the kind of morality one associates with chartered accountants or oil executives [15].

Oh, that's all right then. But I don't go along with the bogus loaded alternatives Eagleton posits here: either take no thought for the morrow, or become an oil executive. That's the sort of fake choices I associate with religious believers, though I admit they're not the only ones guilty of it. And it is entertaining when Eagleton quotes Hitchens fuming like a Dickensian miser or an American Teabagger about Jesus' ethic: "The analogy of humans to lilies ... suggests -- along with many other injunctions -- that things like thrift, innovation, family life, and so forth are a sheer waste of time". But it doesn't appear that Eagleton is any more interested than Hitchens is in actually emulating Jesus in this respect; he's not living on pure thoughts and the kindness of strangers, he's a hardworking professor and a prolific author (forty or so books, and recently a visiting faculty at Notre Dame University). He goes on (and on and on):

Because God is transcendent -- that's to say, because he doesn't need humanity, having fashioned it just for the fun of it -- he is not neurotically possessive of us [15].

Really? We're talking about Yahweh here, remember, Yahweh the jealous god, his name is Jealous, and you shall have no god but Yahweh, or he shall strip you naked before your lovers, et cetera, et cetera. "Neurotically possessive" is just how I'd describe the god of that "document" the Bible. Like most theologians and religious laymen, Eagleton makes up a god he likes to think about, and projects it onto the Bible, even though his fantasy clashes in many obvious ways with the picture of Yahweh most readers find there.

Eagleton does say in the Preface that he's just trying "to 'ventriloquize' what I take to be a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists[;] I do not wish to be mistaken for a dummy" (xii). But since he accuses 'Ditchkins' and their ilk of "writ[ing] off a worthless caricature of the real [New Testament], rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to to match religion's own" (xi), he's casting the first stone in a glass house. Except that Eagleton clearly isn't ignorant; he's just disingenuous.

Eagleton claims that

the Jewish and Christian religions have much to say about some vital questions -- death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like -- on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence [xii].

I don't think so -- that is, I don't think that the left has "for the most part" been silent on such issues; it's exactly the left that has dealt with them in ways that made sense to me; and I don't agree that the Jewish and Christian religions have much to say about those vital questions. Or rather, they do have a lot to say, but what they have to say is usually inhumane, irrelevant, and downright wrong. Sure, some Jewish and Christian writers have contributed useful ideas to my worldview, but they were not, as far as I can tell, representative of their faiths. (Most of the numerous Jewish writers I've learned from were aggressively non-observant.) Which reminds me, at one point Eagleton tries to adduce Spinoza as a "key theorist of toleration ... a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic" (18), conveniently neglecting the facts that Spinoza's god was not the God of the Hebrew Bible, and that Spinoza was thrown out of the synagogue for his heterodox views.

Finally, there's this popular evasion:

For it is of course always easier to buy one's rejection of a belief system on the cheap, by (for example) triumphantly dismissing a version of Christianity that only seriously weird types, some of them lurking sheepishly in caves to ashamed to come out and confront the rest of us, would espouse in the first place [5].

You know what I'm talkin' about -- Christians love to complain that critics of the faith are either attacking a totally fabricated straw man, or are stereotyping all Christians on the basis of a few bad apples like Fred Phelps or that guy in the Vatican in the pointy hat. The trouble with Christianity as far as I'm concerned lies in the New Testament itself (though it can of course always be reinterpreted to mean whatever one likes) and in versions of Christianity that are held by millions of ordinary believers. Dismissing them as "seriously weird types" is a popular way to try to distract critics from the real problems, but it's 1) dishonest and 2) doesn't work with me. I always ask the people who use this tactic which version of Christianity I should go by, then, and that's how I developed my rejection of that belief system -- not on the cheap, but by doing quite a bit of study, more than most Christians do. So I can say pretty confidently that the version of Christianity that Eagleton is "ventriloquizing" here is espoused only by a few seriously weird types, not lurking in caves but, like Eagleton, in Oxford and the Notre Dame campus. It's based on a shamelessly selective reading of the Bible generally and of the gospels in particular, which means that Eagleton is relying on the ignorance of his audience and their readiness to believe the best about Christianity, whatever the facts may be.

Spheres of Influence

Returning to The Pure Society -- Pichot touched on a question that has been on my mind for some time now, ever since I read Stephen Jay Gould's Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999). I've read most of his other books, and Rocks of Ages was the first I couldn't finish. Gould argued for a division of spheres of influence between science and religion, for what he called "non-overlapping magisteria" or NOMA. He actually drew a parallel between this proposed division and the infamous division of the New World into Spanish and Portuguese spheres by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which overrode Pope Alexander VI's bull granting most of the land to Spain. In both cases, there are other claimants to the territories involved, not least the people who are living in them to begin with.

Gould first declared that moral and social questions were the proper sphere of religion, and explanation of the universe was the proper sphere of science. As long as each magisterium kept to its knitting, all would be well. But then he backtracked, admitting that religion hadn't done such a good job with moral questions, and dropped the matter. The author of The Mismeasure of Man might have done better to point out just how badly science had done when it ventured into the moral and social arena.

Richard Dawkins attacked Gould in his normal manner, what Pichot calls the "idiotic hawker" (70) style, in The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). To some extent I agree with Dawkins, as when he asks why religion should be consulted at all:

I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let's throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will. Unlike my astronomer friends, I don't think we should even throw them a sop, I have yet to see any good reason that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.

Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free license to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up?

As I already pointed out, Gould had backtracked on the advisability of letting religion pronounce on moral and social questions. One might also ask, though, why anyone would ask Dawkins's advice on morality or any other matter. (Of course "theology" is a subject, if an eminently dismissible one; the idiotic hawker is letting his rhetoric run away with him, as usual.) His discourse on social matters, which has been abundant, is no better than that of "religion" (as though religion were a coherent body of discourse), notable for its incoherence when it isn't just good old-fashioned scientific racism.

I was even more startled when Michael Shermer declared in his The Science of Good and Evil (Holt, 2005, page 6):

Most people don’t go to church to hear an explanation for the origin of the cosmos and life (and if they did, and they knew something about the findings of modern science, they would be dismayed to be told that the Genesis myth of a six-day creation less than ten thousand years ago was to be taken literally). Instead, most folks go to socialize with like-minded friends, neighbors, and colleagues to contemplate the meaning of their lives and life and to glean moral messages from the homilies presented in stories, myths and anecdotes of the knotty problems that life presents to us all. To date science – even scientism – has had little to do or say in this social mode, …

As long as religion does not make quasi-scientific claims about the factual nature of the world, then there is no conflict between science and religion.

Why doesn’t this reassure me? The avoidance of turf wars between two vicious gangs doesn’t necessarily make a better world.

I am still boggled by Shermer's claim that science has had little to do or say in this social mode. As Pichot's book shows, this is completely false, though I knew that long before I'd read Pichot. Shermer lets the cat out of the bag when he says a few pages later (9), "As such, evolutionary ethics is a subdivision of a larger science called evolutionary psychology, which attempts a scientific study of all social and psychological human behavior." Evolutionary psychology is the current alias of sociobiology, the main intervention of "science -- even scientism" into the "social mode."

Pichot says it better (341):

Against these temptations and attempts, it has to be reasserted that the universality of human rights is not based on the genetic identity of the human species. Such a notion leads straight to the differentiation of social and political rights as a function of variations in the genome – whether these are racial variations or not. It is not up to biology to lay down the law, to make decisions of a political and social order, whether on matters of race or of ‘genetic correctness’.

As we have explained, there are two quite distinct social uses of biology … On the one hand, there are uses, such as Pasteurianism, that are essentially technical, and these are perfectly acceptable and even desirable. On the other hand, there are uses, such as those made of genetics and Darwinism, that claim the right (or even the obligation) to intervene in the social-political order and modify this to make it correspond to a [342] supposedly natural order – which in reality is more like an order of profitability. This second category of social uses is totally unacceptable.

In these matters of society and politics, geneticists have nothing to say; it is up to political philosophers to make comments and recommendations. As these latter keep silent and abandon the field to biologists, which they certainly should not do, I shall attempt, for better or worse, to step into their place and maintain that, although the objective physical and intellectual qualities of individuals may be different – whether this difference is hereditary or acquired – this does not affect these individuals in their essential being, because they cannot be reduced to a set of objective qualities. Persons are not objects, ‘human resources’ whose profitability or contribution to progress is to be measured. In this respect, they are neither unequal nor different; they are in fact incomparable. And it is because they are incomparable that they are equal, in an equality that is based neither on measurement nor on comparison, but on an equality of dignity and right. Biological criteria have no place here.

Of course, we mere humans needn't defer to political philosophers either...

Spheres of Influence

Returning to The Pure Society -- Pichot touched on a question that has been on my mind for some time now, ever since I read Stephen Jay Gould's Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999). I've read most of his other books, and Rocks of Ages was the first I couldn't finish. Gould argued for a division of spheres of influence between science and religion, for what he called "non-overlapping magisteria" or NOMA. He actually drew a parallel between this proposed division and the infamous division of the New World into Spanish and Portuguese spheres by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which overrode Pope Alexander VI's bull granting most of the land to Spain. In both cases, there are other claimants to the territories involved, not least the people who are living in them to begin with.

Gould first declared that moral and social questions were the proper sphere of religion, and explanation of the universe was the proper sphere of science. As long as each magisterium kept to its knitting, all would be well. But then he backtracked, admitting that religion hadn't done such a good job with moral questions, and dropped the matter. The author of The Mismeasure of Man might have done better to point out just how badly science had done when it ventured into the moral and social arena.

Richard Dawkins attacked Gould in his normal manner, what Pichot calls the "idiotic hawker" (70) style, in The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). To some extent I agree with Dawkins, as when he asks why religion should be consulted at all:

I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let's throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will. Unlike my astronomer friends, I don't think we should even throw them a sop, I have yet to see any good reason that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.

Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free license to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up?

As I already pointed out, Gould had backtracked on the advisability of letting religion pronounce on moral and social questions. One might also ask, though, why anyone would ask Dawkins's advice on morality or any other matter. (Of course "theology" is a subject, if an eminently dismissible one; the idiotic hawker is letting his rhetoric run away with him, as usual.) His discourse on social matters, which has been abundant, is no better than that of "religion" (as though religion were a coherent body of discourse), notable for its incoherence when it isn't just good old-fashioned scientific racism.

I was even more startled when Michael Shermer declared in his The Science of Good and Evil (Holt, 2005, page 6):

Most people don’t go to church to hear an explanation for the origin of the cosmos and life (and if they did, and they knew something about the findings of modern science, they would be dismayed to be told that the Genesis myth of a six-day creation less than ten thousand years ago was to be taken literally). Instead, most folks go to socialize with like-minded friends, neighbors, and colleagues to contemplate the meaning of their lives and life and to glean moral messages from the homilies presented in stories, myths and anecdotes of the knotty problems that life presents to us all. To date science – even scientism – has had little to do or say in this social mode, …

As long as religion does not make quasi-scientific claims about the factual nature of the world, then there is no conflict between science and religion.

Why doesn’t this reassure me? The avoidance of turf wars between two vicious gangs doesn’t necessarily make a better world.

I am still boggled by Shermer's claim that science has had little to do or say in this social mode. As Pichot's book shows, this is completely false, though I knew that long before I'd read Pichot. Shermer lets the cat out of the bag when he says a few pages later (9), "As such, evolutionary ethics is a subdivision of a larger science called evolutionary psychology, which attempts a scientific study of all social and psychological human behavior." Evolutionary psychology is the current alias of sociobiology, the main intervention of "science -- even scientism" into the "social mode."

Pichot says it better (341):

Against these temptations and attempts, it has to be reasserted that the universality of human rights is not based on the genetic identity of the human species. Such a notion leads straight to the differentiation of social and political rights as a function of variations in the genome – whether these are racial variations or not. It is not up to biology to lay down the law, to make decisions of a political and social order, whether on matters of race or of ‘genetic correctness’.

As we have explained, there are two quite distinct social uses of biology … On the one hand, there are uses, such as Pasteurianism, that are essentially technical, and these are perfectly acceptable and even desirable. On the other hand, there are uses, such as those made of genetics and Darwinism, that claim the right (or even the obligation) to intervene in the social-political order and modify this to make it correspond to a [342] supposedly natural order – which in reality is more like an order of profitability. This second category of social uses is totally unacceptable.

In these matters of society and politics, geneticists have nothing to say; it is up to political philosophers to make comments and recommendations. As these latter keep silent and abandon the field to biologists, which they certainly should not do, I shall attempt, for better or worse, to step into their place and maintain that, although the objective physical and intellectual qualities of individuals may be different – whether this difference is hereditary or acquired – this does not affect these individuals in their essential being, because they cannot be reduced to a set of objective qualities. Persons are not objects, ‘human resources’ whose profitability or contribution to progress is to be measured. In this respect, they are neither unequal nor different; they are in fact incomparable. And it is because they are incomparable that they are equal, in an equality that is based neither on measurement nor on comparison, but on an equality of dignity and right. Biological criteria have no place here.

Of course, we mere humans needn't defer to political philosophers either...