http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(15)00743-5.pdf
Seems to fit in with recent threads.
His latest book, Faith Versus Fact, is
intended not to pile on the arguments
for atheism but to advance the debate
into its next round. It is a brief against the
faitheists — scientists and religionists
alike — who advocate a make-nice
accommodation between science and
religion. As with Michael Corleone’s offer
to Nevada Senator Pat Geary in The
Godfather Part II, Coyne’s offer to religion
on the part of science is this: Nothing.
This sounds more imperialistic and
scientistic than it really is, because Coyne
defi nes ‘science’ broadly, to encompass
any system of belief grounded by reason
and evidence, rather than faith. On
this defi nition, many of the humanities,
such as history and philosophy, count
as ‘science’, not just the traditional
physical and social sciences.
Coyne quotes several historical and
recent writers, particularly Carl Sagan
and the philosophers Yonatan Fishman
and Maarten Boudry, while adding some
examples of his own, to show how the
existence of the God of scripture is a
testable empirical hypothesis. The Bible’s
historical accounts could have been
corroborated by archaeology, genetics
and philology. It could have contained
uncannily prescient truths such as “thou
shalt not travel faster than light” or “two
strands entwined is the secret of life.” A
bright light might appear in the heavens
one day and a man clad in white robe and
sandals, supported by winged angels,
could descend from the sky, give sight
to the blind, and resurrect the dead. We
might discover that intercessory prayer
can restore hearing or re-grow amputated
limbs, or that anyone who speaks the
Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is
immediately struck down by lightning,
while those who pray to Allah five times a
day are free from disease and misfortune.
KN,
You’re backpedaling from your statement:
Therefore, I have no right to criticize Rastafarianism unless Rastas are “drawing upon their religious beliefs in order to justify public laws and policies that non-believers are also obliged to follow.”
No right to criticize goofy religious beliefs unless non-believers are harmed specifically via public laws and policies? That makes no sense.
Come on, KN. You use the word “criticize” like other native English speakers do. You’ve criticized plenty of philosophical views here — are we to suppose that you regard them as “dangerous, bad, or evil”?
(And yet I’m the one who gets accused of being unreasonable and emotional.)
A little critical thinking here shouldn’t be so hard. Which religions? Which denominations, sects, interpretations? (“Religion” is, quite frankly, far too generic and vague a concept for it to be really useful; the more generic and vague a concept, the greater the danger that a specific picture will control our thinking. That much we should have learned from Wittgenstein, at least.)
Further questions: under what material, economic, political, and sociological conditions do particular kinds of interpretations flourish and wither? How do you know when you should be talking about “religion” and not about misogyny, racism, or even just a misguided and angry reaction to local economic instability and global economic exploitation? How does the history of the religion in question interact with other kinds of history? How do religious practices get transmitted in colonialism, imperialism? For example, in the context of African-American history, how did Christianity mutate and evolve from being a tool of enslavement to being a tool of empowerment and resistance? If one really wants to be exercised about the rise of radical Islam, one might need to think carefully about the relationship between religious differences and other kinds of cultural and political difference as to why Sayyid Qutb and Mahatma Gandhi responded in quite different ways to their Western education.
In any event, I’ve already made it perfectly clear that I strongly favor a secular state, for all the Spinozistic reasons. And one can favor a secular state while still finding immense significance and value in religious vocabulary and practice, as I (and many others do). One needn’t think that religion is “rubbish” in order to favor a secular state and a pluralistic public sphere.
Criticizing a philosophical view is quite different from criticizing a religious practice. In criticizing a philosophical view one is taking aim against a certain intellectual position using the methods of conceptual analysis, consistency with other positions, etc. But religions are not intellectual positions; they are specific ways of living one’s life, both alone and in communities. Hence criticizing a religious practice is saying that people should not organize their lives in a certain way. Philosophy and religion are apples and oranges, for better and for worse. One of the reasons why I’m not crazy about theology is that it confuses the two.
Kantian Naturalist,
Religion isn’t a injurious to other religions or the non-religious just because it encourages unsupported beliefs, although that’s reason enough to criticize it. It’s injurious to others because it represents entrenched power structures that act on those irrational beliefs.
If your neighbor chooses to quietly worship in private, that’s no one’s business. As soon as those beliefs, or the consequences of them, are brought into the public sphere, they are proper targets of criticism.
Kantian Naturalist,
People should not organize their lives in such a way as to deny freedom and bodily autonomy from half their population based solely on gender.
That wasn’t so hard. I suspect you might even agree.
Amen. Preach it, brother.
Religion needs to be criticised because it provides a rationale for cruel, authoritarian and barbaric practices. Once we have eliminated the rationale, we can discuss the practices in their emperor’s clothes.
I have nothing but contempt for religious and political tribalism. Left or right. It’s all the same. Power and authority. Implicitly rationalizing telling other people what to do. Authoritarianism is contemptuous regardless of its stated goals. The most contemptuous rationale is the greater good. That’s the bottom of the scum bucket.
And beliefs always have consequences, so beliefs are always proper targets of criticism in public.
It’s not as if any of these hypothetical believers are hermits in an isolated desert somewhere. They’re interacting with their children, with their children’s teachers, with their coworkers and their customers, with local politics — and all with their supposedly “private” beliefs tucked away, not doing anything, not influencing any of their decisions about what their children can read or what books the local store can stock or whatever. O RLY?
Well, I could see KN’s point that what we (should) object to is the actions (book banning, for example) rather than the belief itself. But I think that’s just short-sighted to merely keep pushing back against a never-ending stream of religious-belief inspired actions. That’s like saying the best we can do against HIV is to keep the symptoms in check with the three-drug cocktail. Okay, maybe that is the best we can do with religious belief, keep the symptoms in check.
Dunno, if that’s the best we can do in the real world, doesn’t mean I think it’s a positive good and something I should actually aspire to, as KN seems to.
It seems odd that someone devoted to the life of the mind would object to arguing the life of the mind.
Now if Coyne or Dawkins or someone takes to the streets and pickets churches, I might raise an eyebrow, but writing books? No.
I am temperamentally unable to support militancy unless it has the immediate goal of opposing a significant injustice. Such as (in my lifetime) Jim Crow laws or governmental discrimination against gays.
I have no interest in tearing down historical monuments, even if their content is offensive. Sometimes it is worth having reminders of past injustices.
But criticism? Argument? Give me a break.
It’s the entrenched power structures that inhibit the cultivation of human capacities that are the legitimate target of socio-political criticism. The fact that some entrenched power structures are legitimized by religious discourse and practice is no more a point against religious discourse and practice per se than the use of Marxist discourse is a point against Stalinism.
In other words, we should be willing to distinguish between world-views and ideologies, and focus criticisms on specific ways in which a world-view is used to maintain false consciousness and legitimize some entrenched system of power structures. To do that is not to criticize religious discourse as such.
Moreover, the role of religious discourse and practice in promoting such criticisms should not be overlooked — here we think of the attitude of Old Testament prophets (Amos, Micah, Isaiah) and Jesus in Scripture as inspiring political reforms and social resistance for millennia, and in the 20th-century, it should suffice to take note of Black churches in the civil rights era, liberal Christianity and Judaism in the fight for same-sex marriage, and (though marginal still) liberal Christianity and Judaism in environmentalism. Currently American Judaism is undergoing a quiet civil war over Palestine, but there are non-Zionist Jewish political groups, like Jewish Voices for Peace and New Israel Fund, which are inspired by the Jewish tradition to defend human rights, civil rights, and the right to sovereignty for all Palestinians.
What part in this would you credit to the enlightenment?
I started college about the time of the Selma march. I knew people who marched. They were secular Quakers and jews. Within a year or two they were protesting the Vietnam war.
In all this I never heard a religious or theological word spoken.
But in my childhood, I heard plenty of religion spoken to justify segregation.
I don’t buy it. I have personally never seen an example of a person citing religion or theology as a rationale for social justice.
KN,
We’re talking about religious beliefs, not religious practices. Your statement again:
Again, that’s ridiculous. We are entitled to criticize philosophical, scientific, and political beliefs. Why should religious beliefs be exempt?
Religious beliefs can be criticized in exactly the same way. Why shouldn’t they?
To be fair, I was in Ithaca. The berrigan brothers were influential there. Father Drinan, too. But their Church wasn’t particularly sympathetic.
petrushka,
Indeed.
Of course, KN’s tune may quickly change once someone starts telling him which ideas he can and cannot criticize.
I think that part of the problem here is how we’re using the term “right”. You want to use the term “right” to mean an entitlement or permission.
I’m not using the term that way: I’m using the term “right” to mean a special kind of entitlement or permission, one that cannot be abrogated or curtailed by any legitimate use of power. (That’s how we talk about human rights and civil rights, I think.) Some entitlements can be curtailed in light of more important considerations; I’m entitled to fart whenever and whenever I want, but it would be rude to do so in front of the Queen, and no doubt arrogant for me to insist on my right to fart in front of the Queen.
That’s why I want to focus on actual harms done by entrenched institutions that use religious language in their ideological justification. The right to criticize religion has to be grounded at the socio-political level, not at the “merely” epistemological level.
A further difference — and a much wider one — is that I don’t think that there is any essential relation between religion and ideology. I think that there are both non-religious ideologies (which perhaps no one here will contest, but it’s worth stressing) and non-ideological religions (which perhaps I am the only one here to stress).
The reason I’m stressing non-ideologically motivated forms of religious discourse is because I think that this is an important voice within the modern Western conversation about religion in public spaces that is otherwise absent from TSZ. If religious discourse is interpreted as non-assertoric, it ceases to have the epistemic role of “belief”. Insofar as we have “beliefs about the world” to the extent that there claims or assertions about the world we are prepared to endorse, then a non-assertoric interpretation of religious discourse means that religion does not, strictly speaking, involve any beliefs at all. (No more than poetry or music does, at any rate.)
And non-assertoric religious discourse, because it has no epistemic role at all, cannot play an ideological role either, because ideologies are pathologies of reason.
Kantian Naturalist,
KN, I don’t follow your first three paragraphs here. Would you mind explainig them a bit further? Thanks.
I appreciate the fart example because it is concrete rather than abstract.
I would further appreciate a concrete illustration of criticism that goes too far, or whatever.
Perhaps irrelevant, but something that comes to mind, would be religious art of music displayed or performed in public museums or theaters. I see no reason to forbid that. (Nor do I see any reason for taking down 10 Commandments plaques from courtrooms.)
Without examples from KN, I cannot imagine what is being discussed here.
petrushka,
That’s a good example of the line, right there. I agree with you about religious art and music, portrayed purely as art. I strongly disagree about sectarian displays in courtrooms and other government buildings — they give the very strong impression that those who don’t share the beliefs represented are not equal citizens and are less likely to get equal justice.
KN,
I’m not buying it. Here is your original statement:
You’re telling us that we should not criticize religious beliefs. Why should they be exempt?