Introduction
The great John Milton, referring to American eloquence, said: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” It seems that within the framework of what constitutes “liberty”, the lighted fire called “free-speech” is the greatest sight. The cracks and fissures in the monument we have to human solidarity – supported by the pillars Rights, Liberty, Freedom, Equality – is made to echo by simply the function of free-speech. In order to fix the problems, we must first identify them; this can only be done by the same tools that made them, that raised such a monument to the heights man has allowed himself. To such heights have we been able to gaze far into the future, deeply into grains of sand, and eloquently into our deepest selves. The problems we find – in the future, the grains and ourselves – are made apparent by the liberty to speak. Silence does not remove problems, it only covers them with a transparent veil. To fill the fissures, to smooth the sutures, we must open our eyes and minds and mouths and be prepared to engage with our own fallibility.
We dislike hearing of our own failings and here-in we must allow some support. None wants to be thought a failure. Yet, there is a vast chasm between missing a step and plummeting to the ground. People often mistake the latter for the former, their emotions matching the overzealous self-harm. Jane has forgotten her child at school, thus she is a failure as a mother. She feels the brunt and punishes herself emotionally even when she picks up her child two hours later. But she is not a failure, she is a fallible human. Yes, she has made a mistake. We do not aid Jane by mocking her, though we silently rebuke her to each other. As Bertrand Russell said, we do not gossip about each other’s virtues. The point remains however that she is not a complete failure, though her emotions are dictating as such.
Many will argue that such strong emotions prevent the recurrence of such a mistake. The punishment is done for the benefit of both Jane and her child. This is certainly true, but the problem remains to what extent do we allow such cross-firing to take in collateral damage. That is, how far do we take such a loathing of failing into the public sphere?
The Loathing of Failing and Berlin’s Concepts of Freedom
Jane is not a failure as human being to forget her child, though her actions are examples of what a terrible mother would do. However, it was not Jane’s intention to forget or leave her child (how does one deliberately forget anyway?). She made a mistake and, as a human being, this will happen. No one, not even Megan Fox, is perfect (though in the looks department, she comes “close”). Thus Jane must forgive herself and continue, trying harder. This is a healthy way to progress and better herself. Mistakes are not wooden-planks to produce our own crucifix, but to take higher steps toward an intended destination. This false-dichotomy plays out when it sets it sights on the freedom of others.
The reason to restrict anything within a society, that is curb liberty, is a form of coercion. This might be under the archway of what Isaiah Berlin calls “negative liberty”. To better understand “negative” notions of freedom (within Berlin’s context, freedom and liberty are interchangeable), we can also focus on its corollary.
Berlin states, in his famous essay Two Concepts of Liberty, that negative freedom is defined by the absence of coercion. As Nigel Warburton has succinctly stated: “Coercion is when other people force you to behave in a particular way, or force you to stop behaving in a particular way. If no one is coercing you then you are free in this negative sense of freedom.” An example might be that no curfew prevents one being on the streets, no police force prevents one from driving down to see friends, and so on. If one was prevented because of a curfew, police presence, threats of violence, then one would not be free (in this negative sense).
Berlin then goes on to define a positive conception of freedom. This is the freedom to do as one wants with one’s life, within that life’s context. As Berlin puts it with his usual beautiful phrasing: ” ‘positive freedom’ – the doctrine of self-adjustment to the unalterable pattern of reality in order to avoid being destroyed by it.” The big concept is self-realisation and the actions toward exercising control over one’s life – rescinding such rights is absolving one’s positive freedom. The point is to help people realise their best virtues, their greatest strengths, their abilities. An example is someone who is stuck in a relationship with an abusive partner – no one is forcing her to stay in the relationship. The partner has told her to leave and abuses her emotionally and sometimes physically. Though the abusive partner is telling her to leave, she keeps telling herself she “loves” him. Her friends and family know this relationship is bad for her and if she could learn to love and appreciate herself more, she would realise she deserves better. In this context, she is not free – even though no one is stopping her from leaving this terrible relationship.
Thus, positive freedom is freedom to do something, as opposed to negative which is freedom from something. Positive freedom might be thought of under the domain of “rights”. This means the allowance of slight paternalistic interferences – such that, someone who is wasting their life would be put on a better path. However, if the former part of the previous paragraph is troubling – talk of what’s best for the citizen, making them better people – then one is not in solitary company. Berlin himself maintains a heightened suspicion of positive freedom. Throughout history we have seen governments do the most horrid actions in the name of bettering themselves and their citizens.
So, positive freedom is the way one’s freedom is outlined – as outlined perhaps by declaration of rights and constitutions – and negative freedom is lack of coercion when performing certain actions.
Free speech is the ability to speak or express oneself without fear of being “coerced” into silence or violence. Thus, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also states, freedom of speech is a negative freedom. Curbing it thus rescinds liberty, not so much bending as breaking it.
Removing freedom of speech is done out of this hatred or loathing of failure (and perhaps other reasons, though I won’t be addressing those here, since I am dealing with freedom of speech in a societal framework). People do not want to hear contradictory remarks about their most deeply held beliefs. The important point here is that the very existence of a challenge to conventional views is evidence of liberty and freedom. It was of course the Greeks who started this idea that one should challenge tradition (what the classicist Peter Jones calls “the tradition of challenging tradition”), basing thought and inquiry into and, more importantly, from the human realm, since this is the only realm that has utility. Even if one is completely wrong to speak out against evolution or Darwinism or cosmology, the fact remains that the established view is forced to cement itself within a stronger foundation. This means more of those who accept the established views within a framework – so the majority of scientists and Darwinism, the majority of liberals and freedom – must almost relearn their views, express them eloquently and understand why their views are better than their opponents’. Notice: I did not say their views are “true” or “perfect”. According to Karl Popper, we should work with ideas that are strongest against its counter-theories. We have ideas that withstood the onslaught of prevailing criticisms. Beneath the storm of outrage, these are the ideas that bloom even in the fog of obscurity, the rain of anger and thunder of discontent.
But these ideas only come to fruition with the ability to express them. Hating an opponent’s view, simply because it upsets or hurts one’s feelings, is not reason enough to rescind freedom of speech.
Religions are often the groups responsible for demanding censorship, banning and burning. Throughout modern history, it has been the policy of papal instruction to burn books that speak out against god, to restrict scientific inquiries which upset the geocentric world-view, and the demand from an Iranian leader to kill a man who lives in London for writing a work of fiction. Unfortunately, religions have been granted so much freedom within a liberal and secular framework that it has poisoned the well of freedom for all. The religions have taken hold of the bucket and laugh as we flail for our fingertips to touch the water’s surface. Instead, our wavering reflections on the water mock us and the bucket is punctured by the religions’ thorny retribution. Now, whenever we reach in to drink from freedom, most of it drains out because of the loopholes driven in by the religions.
This is not meant to sound extreme or to highlight that we have lost this battle. It is true that talking of liberty is hardly ever done in the context of praising it – it is usually done to defend it.
So to be able to express views, within the framework of rescinded coercion, is the most important element of any form of liberty. To encroach upon that fundamental framework for the purposes of avoiding hurt feelings is to ignore that one is rendering the framework hollow. The religious tend to forget that freedom of speech to criticise should be met by freedom to criticise back. In most other areas, it seems that many religious people share the fundamental principles of a liberal society. Yet it is no irony that we often hear about protestations (from where, ironically but unsurprisingly, Protestants derive their name), from religious groups, against the most important value within a free society: free-speech.
The Silencing of Mankind – Why Free Speech Matters
Consider any other fundamental right or important element of freedom – such as equality, justice, and avoidance of harm. All these would be close to nothing if freedom of speech was eliminated, undermined or restricted. Indeed, though freedom of speech is fourteen shades of grey, it is grey nonetheless – not black and white. We can only talk about freedom of speech with freedom of speech; we can only highlight restrictions to our rights with free-speech; we can only find power in numbers to eliminate despotism with free speech. The first mark of a society that is ruled by a totalitarian regime is when there is no freedom of speech (this does not mean that all totalitarian regimes did not allow free-speech, only that it is a clear indication of a violation of an important freedom).
If we arbitrarily demarcate lines based on nothing but the “tyranny” of “majority” opinion, as Mill viewed it, then we have got no closer to doing best for mankind. All we have done is catered to the feelings of one group – even if it is the majority. Even if the whole of mankind believes the earth flat, the planet remains stubbornly spherical. A better writer than myself, John Stuart Mill, put it like this:
If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. (”On Liberty”, Chapter II. Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion, 1869 – Italics mine.)
“Silencing mankind”. The power of Mill’s image is a resounding call to prevent a gag being placed in the mouth of humanity. Mill’s point on the censor himself runs further. The censor must assume infallibility when censoring a work, since he must know beyond all doubt that a work is better off being censored. But this is blatantly incorrect since no one can be absolutely correct in their judgements. The difficulty of course could be shifted to the other extreme: allowing a work to be published which causes harm. The point however that we need to address is that people must be given the choice. When a work is banned, restricted or pulled from distribution, a censor has taken it upon himself to read a work for a whole society. This is paternalism of the worst kind, grinding our emotional maturity into a fine powder of obedience. It seems that on the whole it would be better that a work is presented, even if it does cause harm, as this leads to the overarching growth of maturity in our species. Censoring seems to only allow for juvenile and loud voices to find support for their views: for example, a work is censored, a few “liberals” cry out. No one is hurt. A work is not censored and someone is killed by fanatics who are offended by it. The latter of course we have seen occur to the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verse. Whilst it might appear harsh that we should risk our lives for the sake of some ideal, like freedom, it seems we risk our lives and freedom by not standing up for it. The allowance of religious arrogance threatens every aspect of freedom one can name: personal autonomy, sexuality, friendship, fashion, careers.
Yet some things should be contentious for the liberal agenda, such as racist or misogynist writings. But then, they should be rejected from publication not because it hurts people’s feelings, but because of poor scholarship. I for example would be very interested to read a case, based on reason, evidence and good logic, that states we are better off denigrating women, treating them like cattle, and reducing their minds to dull throbs of rhythmic idiocy. I would like to read this because I know – as far as I know anything – that I never will. The case for the equality of humanity and the emancipation of women is so strong, in terms of a Popperian paradigm, that we can easily backhand arguments against it.
Thus it seems the censor is useless. Who is this person reading works for society? Who is deciding for the average citizen that material is too harsh?
Progress in terms of equality comes about through discussion. Limiting access to the public domain of ideas is to prevent the growth of these ideas toward the betterment of society. Before we can allow the ideas to come to fruition, we must have a foundation open to the light of reason and comprehension. Lucidity, ease of access and an understanding that ideas are fallible and to be contested should be the benchmark for policies that we decide for ourselves. Arbitrarily limiting or restricting certain forms of information assumes, as previously said, infallibility from the censor and as Mill also highlighted, the problem that the restricted document could contain the truth we seek.
The final problem in limiting free speech or censoring a work is the assumption that: only one group is harmed, or, if the whole of society is harmed, that no one benefits. Both are wrong. If, as constantly occurs, Muslims are offended by a work of art or fiction or the way someone scratches their nose, those targets are censored to placate Muslims (similarly when other religious groups cry out that they are offended). Now, that work of art is gone completely and the Muslims are satisfied. But what about the artist, the producer, the audience, and so on, who do appreciate it? Their concerns are swept aside to placate one group because they are religious as opposed to artistic or academic. Religions should not have a moral high ground but should be on the plateau of equality with the rest of us. Then we can speak of judging something; not because the religious groups hanker over us, but because we are all equally horrified at a dog being tortured to death as a work of art, equally dissatisfied with publication of some poor novel. This would mean that religions are taken seriously, not because they are religious people, but because they are people. Mature people, treated as such to show that we want to put them in line with ourselves, as adults dealing with a chaotic world. Not as children who have loud voices and toys of mass destruction they throw out their cot of platitude.
And the second point, that no one benefits is also wrong. By a group censoring or crying for a limit to the free speech in this instance, they prevent themselves from judging it. How many Muslims read The Satantic Verses before deciding Rushdie & Co. should die? How many people bothered to see the cartoons made by Jyllends-Posten before they marched in the streets, demanding death and blood of those who mocked Islam? In these instances, the groups would have benefited by simply engaging with the work. They then have a choice: ignore the silly infidels who just do not understand the power of Allah or retaliate by drawing satirical pictures of the cartoonists, writing a strongly-worded letter (minus death-threats) and so on. There are ways of “retaliating” that do not cross the bounds of discourse to enter the minefield of violence. Muslims reacting in such brash, harmful and violent ways are not making Islam any more a “religion of peace” or their faith any more acceptable by behaving in such stupid, childish ways. If religions want to be taken seriously, they must accept the rules of adult discussion which govern our growth and not the monkey-bars of juvenile delinquency that lets them leap over the lines of conduct we have in place.
This even before equality, justice, and equal suffrage. This before the inducing of minds toward intellectual adventure and fulfilment regardless of race, sex and ethnicity. This all before we decide on how create a path to glory, unifying our shaking hands and raising a platform toward peace. Freedom of speech is itself the decider in what should be free. Not everything should be said or spoken but the decision as to what we shall say, read or publish can only be decided on an open platform, using reason and not emotion as the yardstick. All this can only occur with the freedom to speak, ideas flying across the mental landscape like a flock of migrant birds blackening the ground with their shadows. Freedom starts with the first flap of wings and the dilation of the pupil toward the horizon. Now we can set off and take our wings toward a more peaceful horizon.
Why skeptics do not, and should not, waste their time with academic theology
Sunday, October 4th, 2009That the so-called ‘New Atheists’ do not waste their time engaging with sophisticated theologians is one of the most common, most pointless objections raised against Dawkins and his fellow nonbelievers. This objection, most often raised by sophisticated theologians, is based on the crucial assumption that there is something to be gained by such engagement. That this assumption is false is so evident that hearing it raised is frankly disenheartening: one imagines an unpopular schoolboy picking fights with bullies just to get a little attention. Or, more fairly, one imagines “West Side Story’s” scrawny Anybodys: all bluster, no muster, but hungry nevertheless for an attentive ear.
PZ Myers reminds us that the Emperor may be the subject of an in-depth biopic from an esteemed and respected fashion publication, but he is still naked. This “Courtier’s Reply” is the heart of any sustained attack on the flagging cult of theology. Theology is done in academic journals that nobody reads, in encyclicals that do nothing but support beliefs and practices that are already in place, and in quiet conversations between theologians outside of churches. No religious people listen unless the theologian errs in his exposition of doctrine, at which point the theologian is useful only as an example of the dangers of reason. In either end, the purposes and doctrines of the churches remain intact. The theologian makes no difference to the church, yet the theologian considers himself the apex of and spokesman for that church.
Superfluous for the believer and irrelevant to the non-believer, certainly, but is theology truly without redeeming content? Yes. The embarrassing role of the theologian is this: defend doctrine at all costs. The theologian can claim to be in the business of truth, and sometimes they even deign to conflate themselves with philosophers since their role is both academic and argument-based. This dishonest equivocation is betrayed by three simple facts. First, theologians rarely (if ever) come to conclusions that genuinely dispute the dogmas laid down by their employers. Second, on the rare occasions when they do end up disputing dogma, churches are not changed, they are simply one theologian less shortly thereafter. And third, the methods of argumentation employed in theological circles are so poor that to call them real philosophy is a slander against the rest of us.
Where there is a mystery to be resolved, such as why God permits so much evil in our universe, their defenses are either deliberately obtuse (Plantinga) or insultingly dissatisfying (Swinburne, et al). Where there is a mystery that cannot be defended even poorly, theologians do not give up doctrine, they simply state it as fact (watch Aquinas and Augustine wrestle with the contradiction of the Trinity and you’ll see what I mean).
For the theologian, it is often enough to simply drop a verse of Scripture and call the matter settled. Most of the rest of the time, theologians retreat to ancient and fallacious proofs, subtly re-brand them, and think themselves victorious when the theistically-biased journals in which they publish refuse to publish skeptical ripostes. To be called a ‘Great Light of the Church,’ Aquinas needed little more than arguments cribbed from Plato, the Bible, and decades of free time. This proud tradition continues to this day, and theologians claim their own value on these grounds.
Theology is irrelevant
This brings us to one good reason that atheists needn’t bother with theology, which is that theology has no meaningful impact on the beliefs or practices of any religious people. Atheists need not engage theologians any more than they need resolve disputes with Raelians, because like Raelians, theologians worship a god or other highly impersonal abstraction that is completely unfamiliar to any religious person. Jews do not say that they worship “knowledge knowing itself,” they worship a real person with moods and emotions named YHVH. Yet Maimonides earned his stars as the greatest Jewish theologian in history worshiping just such a god. Catholics do not recite the lengthy expositions of Aquinas or Augustine, they say the Apostle’s Creed and they are content with it. Theologians make themselves into heretics in their attempts to make ancient superstitions palatable to modern audiences, and in this sense theologians are nothing more than evangelists of a new religion to undergraduate college students.
Churches trust these evangelists-to-the-educated precisely as far as they can throw them. Church authorities can out of one side of their mouth proclaim the proud intellectual lineage of their church while using the other side to condemn the same intellectuals for “erring” on crucial dogmas. Hans Kung might be of extreme use to the Catholic Church as a prop, a smug demonstration that wise men can fill a pew as well as anyone else, but this doesn’t stop the Church from calling Kung a heretic for his views on condom use and female ordination.
Conversely, a loyal theologian can work his way through an elegant proof for each step of such a Creed, but this is nothing but a dusty curio in the Church’s attic: no one reads the proof, or if someone does, he has gained nothing but the satisfaction that a man with a PhD is as comfortable parroting the Creed back at the priest as he is. No one recites creeds because their truth is demonstrated; people recite creeds because the priests says they should and everyone else in the congregation is doing it. Where religious practice is concerned, the most a theologian can do is give you a very complicated reason for doing what you are doing already.
In this sense religious beliefs are immunized against the influence of theology because such beliefs have had centuries to dispense with heretics. If someone disagrees with a core doctrine, they are not welcome in the church, and it is that simple. Given that this is the case, how could we expect a theologian in the employ of, say, a Catholic college to give us an unbiased argument against Catholic doctrine? We could not expect it, and they do not provide it, because their paychecks depend on their faculties being deployed exclusively in defense of what the believer has already been told for his entire life. If a Catholic theologian did come up with a good objection to the Catholic position on female ordination, we can expect that such a theologian would not get to call himself Catholic for much longer. It is noteworthy that the current Pope’s previous job with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (a modern pseudonym for the Office of the Inquisitions) was to deliver threats of excommunication to such theologians. An exhaustive list of those thusly threatened can be found in the brilliant, anonymous Against Ratzinger.
The Catholic Church serves as an excellent example of the fact that modern religions are institutionally immunized against philosophical discourse. When asked to justify, say, a fundamentalist anti-homosexual dogma, or a dogma against condom use, or female ordination, or that the Eucharist host is literally and substantially the body of Jesus, no Catholic authority gives you an argument. They just tell you the page and paragrap where you can find the dogma spelled out in the Cathechism. The same is true of the vast mythology of any Christian sect: they will either tell you that a belief is good because it is the belief of the elders, or if they are in a sporting mood, they will give you a verse from the Bible. Argument and discussion is not the point, the point is the propagation of tradition. When the tradition itself is called into question, the heretic is appropriately dealt with and the conversation ceases.
Not only are religions thus immune to the kind of discourse that the whiny critics of ‘New Atheism’ demand we have, many strands of religion are explicitly anti-theological. One need only spend a moment in works like Peter Ruckman’s Anti-Intellectual Manifesto or such tracts as “The Chaplain” and “Who Is He?” to realize that good credentials and academic prestige are anathema to these believers. (While Jack Chick is on the board, it would do us well to ask if there are any theologians more widely-read than he is.) The theologian can arrogantly assume a position as a spokesman for his denomination, but the atheist knows as well as the religionist does that the theologian is just blowing smoke.
It is just as evident that theology is irrelevant because nobody reads it. If you took together every book and commentary written in defense of Biblically-adduced doctrines, would they equal even a minute fraction of the sales of the Bible itself? Of course not. People who believe in the Bible do not do so as a point of reason; reasons fall into place to support a pre-existing belief.
But why stop with the Bible? Take every book ever written by Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard and any other great lights of Christendom you please. Will their readership ever equal the readership of insultingly simplistic tracts printed by the millions and scattered at random? No. Religions do not spread with elaborate arguments, they spread with simple messages, and in fact an overly complex, overly theological religion is doomed to fail (this is why early Christians had so little difficulty out-competing Gnostics and mystery cults). The theology is an interesting accessory to be taught to an esteemed few after the religious belief is deeply entrenched in a society. It does not cause religious belief, it sustains it virtually no believers, and it never furthers belief.
This is an admission accepted as readily by the theologian. In his God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga makes a furiously rigorous case for the existence of God adduced from an ancient proof, but prefaces this proof with the disheartening maxim that “few who accept theistic belief do so because they find such an argument compelling.” Self-deprecating confessions of this sort abound in theology.
Churches ignore theologians just as plainly as believers do. How many theologians have, with their philosophy hats on, attacked the superstitious worship of relics, or fables about miraculous healings and dancing suns and demonic possessions? Many have, but who listens? Protestant churches will take your tithes at the revival meeting just the same.
Theology is about dishonesty
Like all great religious liars, theologians try to claim God for themselves, dismissing critics as targeting not “their” Christianity or “the real” Jesus. The god written about in the works of theology is an alien, an idol, a demiurge meant to satisfy the superstitions of their elders with the fashionable rationalism of their contemporaries. Theologians can toss around Biblical metaphors and tell us about the “Ground-of-all-Being” (Tillich) or the “Being-Itself” (Heidegger) or the “knowledge knowing itself” (Maimonedes) that they worship alone. They can whittle away the God of folk religion to a metaphysical abstraction so slender that it is unrecognizable. In fact, these are the skills at which they excel. Few are better at discrediting organized religion than those who claim to be using rational methods to defend it. This is how the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, a giant of our century second in his academic prestige perhaps only to Niebuhr, can deny the truth of the Bible but still count himself a Christian, or how Rudolf Bultmann called himself the same while denying the very thing that makes Christianity more than a Sparknotes version of Judaism, that is, the eternal damnation of those who fail to accept Jesus.
Theologians like to call themselves members of religions because they are dishonest. For six days a week, they write essays for poorly-circulated academic journals expounding elaborate and nuanced positions on matters of faith, but on Sundays they switch their Philosopher hat for their Religionist hat and say the same creeds everyone else does. Paul Tillich excelled at this: he advocated lying as an esteemed theological enterprise. If the simple folk religionist could be easily assuaged in his doubts, than a dutiful literalism should be encouraged. But if the questioner showed the least intellectual stamina, only then would Tillich share what he really believed and thereby keep the doubting Thomas in the faith by appealing to his intellect. Walter Kaufmann summarizes:
Tillich, however, does not favor the crude method of confronting men with arguments that he himself consdiers bad. Instead he redefines the crucial terms and cultivates a kind of double-speak. Literalists thus feel reconfirmed in their beleifs and are pleased that so erudite a man should share their faith, while the initiated realize that Tillich finds the beliefs shared by most of the famous Christians of the past and by millions of Christians in the present utterly untenable. [Kaufmann, Walter. The Faith of a Heretic,]
Tillich believed that religious belief ought to be dumbed down, if the “questioning power” in a particular believer “is very weak and can be easily answered.” (See Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. Harper, NY, 1957, Torchbooks. (c)1958. p.32-34) In his academic writing he excoriated simple-minded literalism, but thought it better that the flock be simple-minded literalists than have them exposed to the dangerous complexities of the cult of the theologian. Dishonesty this profound does not merit conversation, and how could atheists engage with such a person if their claims fluctuated with schizophrenic alacrity depending on what kind of believers were eavesdropping?
But don’t think that Tillich is the only one so guilty. This is the way of all theologians; Tillich is worthy only of such attention because his theological co-cultists hold him up so highly. Most theologians are not clergymen, and those that are do not refine their practice based on their philosophical speculations. They toe the party line in public, and in their private speculations they either do away with God entirely (as the atheist does) but use such convoluted language that nobody notices, or else they do all in their power to defend the dogma just in case an authority happens upon their writings. These cases are opposites, but they both support the conclusion: theology is a dishonest practice.
The Protestant theologian William Lane Craig is as good an example. Recognizing the poverty of his arguments, he has set himself to refining the rhetorical style with which he presents the same tired red herrings year after year rather than find new arguments. He is often described as one of the most talented theistic debaters of our time, but this is precisely the point. He can be refuted as often as he likes, as he has been in person and in writing. John Loftus, Richard Carrier, and Bart Ehrman have all refuted the dramatic misrepresentations of Biblical scholarship of which Craig is so fond (such misrepresentations include the howler that most Biblical scholars agree that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus were historical events); this has not changed his arguments. Nor does it change the arguments of any preacher or evangelist who has met a stumbling-block, and this proud tradition of feeding the same malarkey to different audiences goes all the way back to the Book of Acts, in which Paul is said to have been confounded by Greek sophisticates and then just continued on his merry way with the same message.
Churches are as dishonest as the theologians are; this is why Anselm was touted as a genius for his ontological ‘proof’ of the existence of God, but the first contemporary to refute his argument (a fellow Catholic named Gaunilo) was utterly dismissed and only rediscovered in modern times through the work of skeptics. In this case, the Church was not interested in the truth of the matter about the ontological argument, they were interested in the propagation of doctrine. How can a conversation be had with such a mindset? Atheists cannot engage meaningfully with such institutions because these institutions have spent centuries signalling their dishonesty and their insincerity. The case of Gaunilo is one of thousands; why should we hail John Calvin as an intellectual great while ignoring his cooperation with the Inquisition in disposing of heretics who disagreed with him? Why should we take seriously a Church that coyly dangles the Shroud of Turin in front of us without taking a stance on its authenticity, saying only ‘believers can have their faith strengthened by it whether it is real or not?’
Catholicism is not alone in this regard. The Buddha himself simply dismissed all questions of theology and metaphysics as “questions that tend not toward edification.” The inventor of Protestantism, Martin Luther, went a step further, calling the use of reason to question religious dogma “the Devil’s bride” and “God’s worst enemy.” Luther’s arguments came from scripture alone, and the dogma of Sola Scriptura is one of which his intellectual descendants are the most proud. The circle is thusly established: Scripture provides the answers, and where Scripture is questioned, the faculty being employed is just a tool of Satan so do not even worry about what good sense tells you.
Even Tolstoy, thought to be one of the greatest assets of his type to Christendom until CS Lewis, shrugged off his doubts, coyly remarking that “[w]hat is comprehensible to one may seem obscure to another. But all will certainly agree in what is most important….” And like that, all mystery is gone. As long as the core of the religion is accepted, peripheral anomalies in dogma are inconsequential. This is a common technique of modern apologetics: get people to swallow the message, and doubts about the message will simply solve themselves.
Another common technique is obscurantism. William Lane Craig prides himself on the simplistic, easy-to-understand character of his arguments, yet when asked to solve the ancient Euthyphro Dilemma, he simply bellows in response “God IS goodness!” As if that solved the matter. But oscillating from simplicity into obscure language is helpful because it gives the believer a catchphrase on which to hang his own doubts, and against which to smash the doubts of the skeptics around him. The catchphrase need not make sense. It need not really answer the question. But it is helpful because one can make a creed out of it.
Theology is without substance
Whether or not all of the above is enough to dismiss the cult of theology, there is still the crucial assumption that theology has some ultimate substance with which to engage. Even if this substance is presented dishonestly, is without practical impact, and is presented from the obvious bias of “faith seeking understanding” (Aquinas’s motto), we are often told that these intellectual greats have something to contribute that atheists should take seriously.
Paul, father of Christianity, disagrees. He told generations of early Christians that genuine inquiry was insubstantial, and that is how the Patristics and the other early leaders of the Christian religion closed the ears of their congregations to Greek philosophy and other troublingly intelligent doubters. This gave rise to a whole new method of engaging with arguments: ignore them at best, and at worst treat them as dangerous. The Christian crowd that butchered skeptical philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria alive was just following orders from above.
It took until the Middle Ages, when most of the heretics had already disappeared, for Christians to think it okay to engage with the arguments of their enemies. This engagement took a hollow form: parrot a crusty proof from the Greeks or perhaps the Arabs and call it a day. It does not matter how often the traditional ‘proofs’ for the existence of God (ontological, cosmological, teleological, experiential; the proofs are presented so repetitively that they are easily cubbyholed into these simple categories) are refuted by skeptics. The elegant responses by men as diverse as Guanilo, Walter Kaufmann, and John Mackie have never stopped the religious demagogue from thundering about creationism because truthful engagement with arguments is not their business.
Even when great religious men trash the arguments of their co-believers, nobody takes notice. The greatest philosopher in continental history, Immanuel Kant, spends a good deal of his epochal Critique of Pure Reason simply feasting on the traditional proofs for God in ways that have not been satisfactorily refuted since. Yet to this day theologians build careers defending these proofs. The popular Protestant theologian Alvin Plantinga has reformulated the ontological version of these arguments ad nauseum, always in ways that traditional rebuttals are just as successful, and William Lane Craig isn’t going to let go of the cosmological argument no matter what he is told from the religious or the skeptics about its futility. They do not care to make novel or solid arguments, nor can they.
So when the religious critic of atheism demands that we atheists engage with all levels of sophisticated theology, what are they really saying? They are saying that we should copy and paste established refutations in our books and essays to their satisfaction. They are saying that we should waste as much time cribbing from the dead as they do. When one attempts to prove God’s existence from their personal experiences, how many times do we have to point out the inherent unreliability of such experiences? Until the religious person is able to read them? Until the religious person is able to understand them? Until the religious person accepts them? The first step is rarely reached, the second even more rarely, and the third step often makes the headlines (see Charles Templeton) on the rare occasion when it does happen. It is fruitless.
It is fruitless not only because religious believers usually either don’t read or don’t accept the counterarguments, but also because religious believers seem particularly adept at forgetting them. Kai Nielsen explained to William Lane Craig what is wrong with the moral argument for God decades ago, yet Craig continues to use it in his lectures and debates around the world. And why shouldn’t he? He isn’t about honesty, he’s about conversion. And so with his colleagues.
Where theologians attempt to wrestle with evil, things get even uglier. Dawkins famously points out that Richard Swinburne, a celebrated theologian, is fine with the Holocaust because of how bravely it permitted the Jews to act in the face of persecution (which doesn’t matter, because in the theology of Swinburne’s religion they’re all going to hell anyways). JP Moreland’s epic Scaling the Secular City aims to defend God’s existence from skeptical inquiry while dealing with the problem of evil in a single paragraph that concludes unsatisfactorily with “Evil is traceable to the free will of God’s creatures.” The immediate question of why God would value Hitler’s free will over the lives (and, by extension, the free will) of millions of other creatures of God is obvious, and completely unanswered in the whole literature of theology.
When the religious believer cries out for God in times of distress, they do not want Plantinga’s empty assertion that God and evil are merely possibly logically compatible, they want a real answer. And the British bishops who blamed flooding and hurricanes on the sinfulness of the English people or the American televangelists who blamed the attacks of September 11th on feminists and homosexuals do not provide this answer. When a quarter million innocents are washed away by a tsunami in the southwestern Pacific, the survivors rightfully demand an explanation. They do not get one, they get platitudes. Why should atheists waste time and pages dealing with them when their inadequacy is so painfully obvious?
Theology, like all religious institutions, demands respect where none is earned. Historically they serve only the functions of defending dogma to no one in particular, providing cover for the rare believer who comes to doubt the various absurdities of his faith, and of optimistically regurgitating the failed arguments of previous theologians. There is nothing here with which to engage. There is no novelty among them to treat with new counterarguments.
Show me a proof for the existence of God whose origins are less than five hundred years in the past and perhaps we can talk. Show me where a theologian has genuinely comforted the mother of the massacred or otherwise disposed-of child and I will reconsider. Until then, do not waste my time of the time of others claiming that theology is an accomplishment to be regarded with straight-faced serious argumentation. Quit whining about your obscurity, theologians: it is your own fault. Stop complaining about how you are treated unfairly and start earning the privilege of serious treatment. Until you redeem yourselves from a long, boring, obscure, dirty history of defending dogma, you are not worth the effort. Until you get your churches to stop appealing to magical talismans, supernatural relics, and other folk superstitions, the futility of your writings is apparent. Until you get the religious con-men who refer to you only in the improbable circumstance of the one intelligent doubting believer to stop shouting “but where’d all this stuff come from?” or “but why’s this stuff look so pretty?” or, as Job’s friends were so fond of saying, “your suffering is your fault,” you have not made enough of an impact to warrant our attention. The God you worship is either unfamiliar to religious believers, in which case you are a heretic, or he is completely congruent with established creeds and dogmas, in which case you are irrelevant.
Now that that’s settled, I say we atheists get on with our lives and resume chuckling at the poor schoolboy who smacks us in the shoulder just to get our attention. He is a petty, lonely boy who craves a moment in the sun, nothing more.
Tags: god, godlessness, new-atheism, philosophy, religion, theology
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