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AC Grayling, one of the presenters at the Global Atheist Convention, talks about his view of humanity in The Australian.
Transcript from the Weekend Australian, Saturday 20 February 2010
How to be good without bothering God
British philosopher Anthony Grayling remains optimistic about the future of humanity
MIRIAM COSICANTHONY Grayling is just the man for these troubled times. The war on terror? Globalisation and its discontents? Bioethics? The decline of manners? Ask Grayling, a trained thinker hard to place on the political Left or Right, tough on cant but easy on human frailty.
No ivory tower theorist, Grayling takes the Bertrand Russell approach to the life of a philosopher: ethics is not just a rarefied conversation, it must be practised in the real world.
Not least, he says, because public support of universities demands their products are useful to society.
He is older than the present crop of celebrity philosophers — he has just turned 60 — and it shows in his rigour. He doesn’t enter the public domain to offer easy answers but rather to make us think. And think for ourselves.
“Human beings of all kinds, given the opportunity to reflect, find themselves wanting to make sense of things, to impose some kind of pattern which is satisfying to themselves,” he says during a recent telephone conversation. “But most people would rather die than think, and they shortcut things by taking on pre-packaged ideas about the world.”
The articles he writes in British newspapers and the books he writes for the layman, with catchy titles such as The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the 21st Century, are intended to help readers counteract that tendency to take the easiest path.
Grayling is coming to Australia to take part in the Perth Writers Festival later this week and the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in March. He will share the podium in both places with Richard Dawkins, a fellow Brit and non-believer.
One of the many problems with religion, from his perspective, is that it makes exclusive claims to the moral life. From ancient times, inquiry into the good and flourishing life, the spiritual, emotional and intellectual responses to the world was seen as a measure of what it means to be human. “All that was hijacked over the last 1500 years by religion,” he says. “The idea developed that it’s only in the religious setting that you can have a sense of the numinous and of the significance and depth of things.”
That exclusivity leaves out, among other things, the small daily communions — the walk in the park, the visit to a gallery, attendance in a concert hall, dinner with friends — that add immeasurably to the texture of life, a commonplace in the philosophy of classical antiquity.
People worry about the pixels rather than the big picture most of the time
Religion, he says, “monopolised thinking about those matters, and about ethics, to the extent that if someone wasn’t of a religious frame of mind, didn’t have a religious commitment, they would be regarded as incapable to thinking ethically. And yet the opposite is true. “If you don’t have a hand-me-down frozen ethical pizza from the warehouse of ideas, but you have to think about it yourself, make it from scratch with fresh ingredients, you’re likely to have thought about it much more seriously.”
Grayling likes a metaphor; it’s how he anchors the metaphysical in the concrete for general audiences. Later he employs another, when asked what most troubles people in Anglo-Saxon societies such as his and ours.
People worry about the pixels rather than the big picture most of the time, he replies. And that, to our cost, leads to moral panics and other passing sensations. “As kids, we used to play in parks, jump on our bike and go riding out to the country by ourselves,” he says, by way of example. “We allow our children to do much less now, in a situation which is actually much safer for them. As the curve of concern about child safety goes up, the actual risk to them goes down. Back in the 19th century, much worse things happened to children than happen to them now.”
We worry too much about things that are not so bad, and don’t worry enough about things we should worry about, he says: he points to erosions of civil liberties in the hope it will make us safer against terrorism and crime.
Grayling grew up in Zambia and then Malawi, where his father worked as a banker. The family was emotionally distant: his father quite warm but Victorian in outlook and uninterested in children; his mother equally uninterested in her offspring. “My parents were extremely bad at explaining things,” he says. “They told me that I would be going to boarding school and didn’t point out that they would be coming back to fetch me. So when I got to boarding school I thought, ‘Well, that was chapter one’.”
The beginning, perhaps, of the search for answers.
Grayling was a bookish child. “We were rather thrown on our own devices,” he says. “The adults entertained themselves with adultery and the children read as much as we could.”
He remembers the sepia-tinted portraits of bearded philosophers in the encyclopaedia at home, but it was when he received his adult reading ticket at the library that he fell for philosophy: Plato’s early dialogues, to be precise, which were easy enough for a 12-year-old to grasp.
“I thought it was wonderful that these great names were dedicating their lives to talking about truth and beauty and knowledge and virtue and justice. I thought, ‘Yep, that’s what I’m going to do’.” He is now professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.
His engagement with real life, one imagines, is what makes him believable as a popular pundit. “I should mention that I continue to be an academic,” he says when his newspaper columns are raised.
He even helps people tap into the philosophical resources of the Western tradition — “I don’t think anybody would puff themselves up as a teacher to humanity,” he says — hoping to calm people down and getting them thinking responsibly, he remains optimistic.
“The good news,” he says, “is that ethical roots run deep and the human being is a very intelligent creature. The technologies we have developed over time are an extraordinary achievement, the fact that the human race is able to throw up the Einsteins and the Michelangelos and the Beethovens in the thousands, and perhaps in the millions, shows that in our gene pool is a heck of a lot of smartness and that smartness is turned into practicality.
“The other thing to say is that our newspapers are full of conflict and war and murder, but in every city, all around the world, every day of the week there are millions of acts of kindness, compassion, affection, mutuality.
“And this shows that, as social animals, we’ve got a great deal of responsiveness toward one another. We have to work quite hard to put people into an out-group so that we can hate them and demonise them and bomb them. I think that’s true of humanity in general.”
And yet, philosophers have been agonising over the same questions for thousands of years, trying to make us better people.
“It surprises people when you point out to them that Christianity is a very young religion, and the classical tradition is only 2500 years old,” Grayling says sunnily. “And that tens of thousands of years of human history are lost in the mists before that time. And there was hardly any progress there at all up until the time of settled agriculture.
“You have to accept that human nature changes slowly, which is why conflicts occur; but we have made a bit of progress and we may be only at the very beginning of human history.
“If we can survive this little isthmus of madness, where there is too much technological capability and too little good sense to manage it properly, and we manage to get into the sunny uplands of a future where we are seriously more peaceable, constructive and co-operative, we will be able to benefit from the efforts of all the philosophers who have thought about how we should be live. Future human beings may have a much, much better life.”
As a reader of such articles as Miriam Cosic’s ‘How to be good without bothering God’ (Inquirer, Feb 20-21, 2010), I often regret not having been there when the alleged interview took place on which this account is ostensibly based. Acknowledging that the printed account is but a shadow of what was actually said, bereft as it is of the original atmospherics, contexts of time and place, nevertheless, attached is an attempt by one non-aligned, non-academic non-participant to respond to what has at least appeared in print.
On his website, http://acgrayling.com/, Anthony Grayling has this:
Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality as belief in the existence of fairies. From: ‘Believers are away with the fairies’ – The Telegraph
Further down, on the same website, we get this:
Every professor of philosophy needs a nine-year-old daughter. Mine has a habit of saying, "Daddy, that is a very silly idea." She is always right. From: ‘This much I know’ – The Guardian
I have a problem with reputable people who like to leave you guessing whether they are trying to be funny or serious. First, where does Anthony Grayling draw the line between ‘existence’ and ‘non-existence’? Second, does he really expect us to believe that a nine-year-old child can always be right? Besides, if it’s true that his charming daughter has developed this curious habit of accurately identifying his ideas as “very silly”, isn’t the hapless professor admitting to an embarrassing fecundity in that area?
When ‘atheists’, assuming that there is such a club with a unified raison d’etre, say they do not “believe in God”, what do they mean by ‘belief’, as opposed to ‘non-belief’, and what do they mean by ‘God’?
Evoking this word ‘God’, as a generic phenomenon, neatly avoids the use of a prefixed definite article, such as ‘a’ or ‘the’, as in ‘The Christian God’, be that feminist or paternalist, Catholic, Presbyterian or whatever, or ‘The Hindu, Muslim or Jewish God’. There are many more. However, as applies to the rubric ‘atheists’ or political parties or movements, no religious denomination can really be said to represent a united, single-minded ‘body’ of people. Nevertheless, the acceptance and validity of any reference to ‘The God of the Jews’, for example, always depends on the enduring currency of the assumption that there is, or has ever been, anytime and anywhere, such a unified, homogenous club, or tribe, called ‘the Jews’.
The word ‘God’, singular, has always been mobilised by all sorts of people, who either intend to imply, or vehemently deny, that they are referring to an axiomatic or generic, unified ‘reality’, like ‘Oxygen’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘we the people’, for which there is no plural form. (How many we the people do you know?) Similarly, the plural word ‘gods’ has always been mobilised by all sorts of people, who either intend to imply, or vehemently deny, that they are referring to real, distinctly individual, persons, artifacts or ethereal/’spiritual’ entities, of which there are also, historically as well as presently, many.
But what do we mean when we resort to definitions such as ‘the fairies’ or ‘the Jews’? Are we not merely referring to a privately apprehended figment of our own imagination, in a way similar to evoking such emotionally and ideologically loaded, and, I believe necessarily imaginary, collective terms such as ‘Europe’, ‘The USA’ or ‘The World’? But, in saying that Europe is a figment of our imagination, I am not suggesting that Europe does not really exist. It’s just that, if ‘existence’ is understood in terms of place, where does Europe exist? Have I ever seen Europe? Well, I have ‘lived in Europe’, if that’s what you mean. More specifically, I have lived in a house in a street in a city in a country, which happens to be a member of ‘The European Union’. I believe astronauts have seen enough of the Earth’s surface to enable them to make out where, what they thought of as ‘Europe’, ought to be. But I prefer to think of ‘Europe’ and ‘The USA’ etc. as essential idioms of language for the purpose of ‘making sense’, or what we generally call ‘reality’. I mean, it’s not really necessary to treat making sense as evidence of some empirical truth, is it?
At the moment I am most conveniently identified as ‘a citizen of and residing in Australia’. But that is only sufficient for those who do not share those specific identifiers because they happen to live somewhere else. On this piece of the Earth’s crust that is commonly referred to as Australia, I must be more specific. Where in Australia do I live? I must identify which State, district, town or city, suburb and street, down to my house number, in order to establish my residential status. But, as I have never experienced Australia - or Europe - as a singular, unified place, what exactly do I mean when I say ‘I love Australia’?
What do we mean when we say we believe in freedom? Can ‘freedom’ only exist as long as there are, or were, people, somewhere, to enjoy it? That is, can we say that freedom exists on Mars? What about places we’ve never even heard of? Have I ever seen freedom? I cannot see the wind but I can believe that it is causing the rustling of the leaves. While our post-Big Bang Universe is still expanding, we are told, gravity is tending to slow it down. We can see the effects of gravity. But we forget, if gravity is, by definition, everywhere, ‘weightlessness’ must be impossible. Do we have any experiential evidence for our belief in freedom? We are not free to pay tax. That’s compulsory. We are not free to come and go as we please. We must always comply with all sorts of legal requirements, including outright restrictions and dress codes.
Australia is one of those places that are frequently described as ‘a free country’. However, most ‘freedom-obsessed’ people in France or America would be appalled to learn that most adult Australian citizens just accept as ‘a fact of life’ that they are not free to vote. We are coerced to vote. Failure to vote incurs a fine. Failure to pay leads to a prison sentence. I speak from personal experience. In 1999 I failed to vote at the referendum for an Australian Republic because I felt the question was ambiguous and therefore impossible for me to answer, with a mere yes or no. After a brief trial, for which I prepared my own elaborate defence, assisted by learned counsel, I was found guilty and ordered to pay $6,000 in legal costs tabled by the Prosecution for The Crown. Freedom rarely means that it doesn’t cost anything.
Do I believe in ‘the dark side of the Moon’? (I mean the other side of that luminous ‘disk’, not the Pink Floyd album. I say ‘disk’, because that’s what I see.) Yes, I believe the Moon has a ‘dark side’. I also believe that ‘dark side’ is the popular term for that side of the Moon we never see. We are ‘reliably informed’, which is why I believe it, that the Moon spins at the same speed as it orbits the Earth. That’s why we only ever see the part of the same side of the Moon that happens to be illuminated by the Sun. Only once a month at ‘full moon’, do we ever get to see as much as we’re ever going to see of the Moon. At ‘new moon’, the ‘dark side’ is fully illuminated and we see nothing. So, I have never seen the other side of the Moon. I have seen photographs, courtesy of NASA (I believe). But I have never actually gone ‘up there’ to satisfy myself that there is, ‘in fact’, more to that disk we call the Moon than meets the eye.
So how do I know that there is another side to the Moon? How do I know that the Earth and the Moon are round spheres, rather than flat disks? Well, I don’t know. I should not be ashamed to admit this because, we are told, for most of human history, such as it is, people thought the Earth was flat. Only they did not just think that. They knew it. They also knew that the Earth was ‘in the middle’ of things - the Universe came later - and that the Sun and the Moon travelled across what they thought was some kind of vault.
Most of us now generally claim, because we believe, that the ancients - to whom we owe our existence - were wrong. And we have good reasons for saying so. We base this confident assertion on what we like to call our newly acquired ‘knowledge’. But, from this eerily elevated position, we are hardly entitled to ask, why those poor, ignorant people believed such nonsense. From their perspective, they could hardly think of this ‘ridiculous’ explanation as mere belief. Like us, they just knew.
Sound familiar? The important question for us is not, how could they get it so wrong, but rather, how did they know they were right? And you know what? Their experience told them. After all, ‘their’ Sun and ‘their’ Moon ‘rose’ in the east and ‘set’ in the west, just as we still say they do today. We say it because, just like our ancestors, that’s what it really looks like. Fancy that! Here we are, with all our arrogant scientific ‘knowledge’, still experiencing sunrise and sunset in the same old, ignorant, way.
Now, before we laugh too loudly, we ought to remember that the value we place on our own experience has not diminished one jot. Experience still is ‘the best teacher’, and is very likely to remain, not only our primary source, but also one of the most persuasive pieces, of evidence we have. Now, because life on Earth doesn’t feel at all like we’re riding on a huge spinning ball at a funfair, we need more evidence.
Take a carpenter’s spirit level. It’s indispensible to ensure that a floor is ‘horizontal’. At first, it seems to prove that the Earth is flat. That’s not true. To be truly horizontal, my kitchen bench must actually conform to the curvature of the Earth’s surface. For example, to make sure the towers of the Verrazano Bridge in New York, which are 1.3 km apart, are perpendicular (ie pointing to the centre of the Earth), they are 4 cm further apart at the top than at the base. (Sometimes, it’s just that we are too small to see.)
We are bound, like our ancestors, to believe our own experience, before we give credence to that of others, particularly if the latter account contradicts our own. Many words, not only in English, like ‘indeed’, reflect this idea. I only believe what ‘occurs’ to me. If we could see what happens every time we open the fridge door, we would ‘think twice’. I only believe cold air behaves like water because, on a hot day, I can feel it falling around my feet. On humid days the cold air condenses. Then you can see it as fog.
Does this mean we still have to peer with Galileo and Pasteur through their rude instruments to see the truth? No. Why not? Because we believe science. But you just said… that’s right, we only believe what we experience. We believe scientists because we enjoy the products of science and can see everyone else doing likewise. Science is the ‘new black’. Papal Indulgences relied on the forlorn hope that they were a free pass to Heaven, without passing Go or collecting $200 worth of aged care. The trouble was, unlike a regular lottery, you only found out whether you hit the jackpot when the game was up.
Science, on the other hand, really delivers! Here and now. Just look at GPS, the wheel, cruise control, Albert Einstein, flushing toilets, Charles Darwin, the internet, Teflon, printing, television, dishwashers, asprin, Neil Armstrong … how much time have you got? Heaven can wait. Wait a minute! What did Neil Armstrong ever invent? Well, there’s the immortal line “This is one small step for man…” (Was that his idea? OK, did Abraham Lincoln, or Shakespeare, write all his ‘own’ lines?) It’s not much, as literature goes, but it sure stopped the traffic. Was I there? No. But I remember where I was that day in July 1969. So, how do I know that Neil Armstrong, et al, were actually on the Moon? Well, I don’t know. I saw it on television. You can’t believe everything you see and read in the papers. I know. But, not only can I believe this, I want to believe it. I also want to believe there was no second gunman on ‘the grassy knoll’ in Dallas Texas in November 1963. I still remember where I was then, too, and what I was doing. But I cannot believe we can ever know what really happened. All we have is what each of us remembers, privately.
What about Global warming? OK. I believe, the Global warming debate, like the one about evolution, is really about a question of faith. I do not believe that Carbon Dioxide is a toxic substance, because my experience tells me that carbonated drinks are not that deadly and that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation actually works pretty well to revive people rather than kill them.
I am quite prepared to believe, though I have never seen it, that green plants need Carbon Dioxide. They absorb it through their leaves, extract the Carbon (to build ‘our’ wood and food) and excrete the Oxygen as a waste product. If that was not so, oxygen-dependent creatures like us, could not exist. I can also believe that our terrestrial environment is not very stable or permanent. If the climate was constant, I believe we could not have evolved. And I believe the 2004 tsunami and the Haiti and Chile earthquakes were due to ordinary slips of tectonic plates. I can see that a frog can’t live in a pond without muddying the water. But I don’t believe human activity, in the short time we’ve been here, contributes very much to the constant state of change, in the overall scheme of things. Whatever we may think about the theory of evolution, it does sort of alert us to the scale of ‘the problem’. And, if we are sitting at a moving feast and we don’t really know who is paying the piper, I don’t believe we can do very much about calling the tune. I just don’t like the idea of waste. Being human means being a true believer. What other choice do I have?
Here’s one example. I believe the only significant difference between a criminal and the rest of us, is opportunity. Oh, and a bit of luck. I believe a criminal can be defined as a person who has been found guilty in a court of law - regardless of what he may have really done - of having committed a legally proscribed act, a crime. The problem is that I also believe we can never really know what happened in the past. And I believe I’m not alone there. All we can do, is to examine, after the fact, in a duly constituted and recognised, therefore credible, court of law, all the available evidence and find, on the balance of probabilities and beyond all reasonable doubt, what is the most likely scenario on which a conviction will ‘stick’. Let’s be clear, a conviction does not, because it cannot, establish any ‘empirical truth’. All we can do is hope, and therefore fervently believe, that we get it right most of the time. I have no choice but to believe that the foundation of ‘western civilisation’, as we know it, relies on that principle, among others.
Think of the last time you exceeded the speed limit. You felt justified because you were running late for work, right? You want to believe that and I want to believe you. But I also believe that, statistically, every time I exceed the speed limit, I potentially place other road users at risk. (If you believe the statistics.) I also believe that any person who knowingly breaks the law, no matter the severity of the transgression, believes, prior to the act, that 1. he has found an opportunity and 2. he will get away with it.
Think shoplifting. No one, I believe, deliberately sets out to be a criminal. I do not believe that anyone, who has been convicted of a crime and served his time, has ever believed they would get caught, let alone become a criminal. I believe that an integral part of being human is to believe that the law only applies to me when I get caught. And, in a very real sense, that is true. It’s imperative to believe that civilization, as we know it, utterly depends on the principle that 1. the law can only be applied after the fact; 2. I have a constitutional right to remain silent and 3. I will always be regarded as not guilty until, under due process, the contrary is - not proven - but legally sustainable. I must believe this is the best we can do.
So, what are facts? Or, to echo Michel de Montaigne who lived only half a millennium ago, “What do I know?” I believe common experience suggests most of our facts are no more than reliable beliefs. To be able to establish a theory as a fact, depends on another belief. I believe, on the basis of legitimate (and therefore credible) reports, facts are beliefs that must be sustainable on the balance of probabilities and beyond all reasonable doubt, in a duly constituted and recognized forum or laboratory, not unlike a criminal court, by the examination of all the available and legitimate evidence.
Experience also teaches that, to be legitimate, experimental evidence must be replicable. I believe that this principle can be applied to any ‘fact of life’ or ‘scientific fact’. The whole process of our enquiry is never-ending. The validity of the outcomes depends on private and public faith in countless traditions and conventions, which, I must believe, firmly establish the legitimacy of what “we the people hold to be self-evident’. It seems to me, if this position is to remain sustainable, faith, or the capacity to believe, is essential.
I suppose ‘an atheist’ can be ordinarily defined as a person who says ‘he’ does not believe in (any) god. And I suppose ‘an evangelical atheist’, then, is a person who wants everyone else to agree with him. But why? As we are all bound to believe in something and it isn’t faith itself or ‘the capacity to believe’ that is held in disrepute, why should the substance give such offence? Am I the only one to detect the irony in going around telling people there really are no fairies at the bottom of their garden? Hasn’t one man’s ‘superstition’ always been another’s ‘article of faith’? How can the argument be sustained, in a legitimate court of inquiry, that it is not an article of faith if you believe you have a moral duty to disabuse others of their beliefs? Talk about people behaving irrationally because of their beliefs! Look in your mirror.
The atheist claims to know that “God does not exist.” Before we submit to the ‘devastating logic’ of this central thesis, it is worth considering that it does rely on a tacit agreement as to what that God should look like. Why keep insisting that there really is no venerable old gentleman with a long white beard and dressed in a white sheet, sitting on a cloud? After all, there are so many absurd articles of faith.
The opening line in the American Declaration of Independence reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
There is no mention here of any God. But without any evidence, it is tantalizing to speculate on what Charles Darwin, for one, could possibly have meant when he referred to a “Creator”. Can we say we are creations of evolution? The universal hysteria surrounding the modern Olympic Games seems to suggest that no one has ever believed that ‘all men are equal’. Not even, pace Martin Luther King, before the law.
The doctrine of ‘Terra Nullius”, or ‘no-man’s land’, on which British settlement of Australia was based (without any documentary authority from London mind you), nevertheless relied on the then current Christian premise that non-white people were most certainly not ‘endowed… with (any) unalienable rights’. I believe we can all agree that rights depend on laws. The question is, whose law applies to my rights?
Winston Churchill, the unchallenged ‘hero of the Second World War’, was the chief architect of the hideous debacle at Gallipoli in 1915 on which the pathetic Australian legend of the ANZACs is based. Of course, the ‘World Wars’ did not in fact engulf the entire planet. Terminology is important. As Peter Cook pointed out, “When you speak of [the Great] train robbery, this in fact involved no loss of train.” There are accounts of remote hamlets in England where the locals only became aware of ‘The Great War’ at the end of hostilities in 1918, when their parson read ‘special services’ from the pulpit on Sunday to give thanks for “the providential preservation of His Majesty’s sacred Person”. Good lord. (I can say that because, like Groucho Marx, I’d rather avoid any atheists who’d accept me as a member.)
Justification for the Vietnam War was routinely expressed in terms of ‘The Domino Theory’, the now sanctimoniously discredited ‘doctrine’ that relied entirely on the idea that Communism was like a disease that threatened first to overwhelm each country in South East Asia and then the rest of the world.
No archeological evidence has yet been found in the Sinai Peninsula to support the alleged migration of ‘thousands of Israelites’ from Egypt to Canaan, as related in the book of Exodus, on which the foundation of the modern state of Israel relies. Nor is there any genetic evidence to support the notion of a Jewish race. Chinese Jews have about as much in common with the Jews of Mumbai or Miami as the aboriginal peoples of North America have with those of Australia.
The idea of a ‘homeland’ for Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or any other religious group would meet with universal derision. Yet, Israel's ‘Law of Return’ states that every Jew anywhere has an inalienable right to Israeli citizenship, to the exclusion of all others. In spite of this magnanimity, today two-thirds of the world’s Jews, religious or not, prefer not to live in Israel.
As reported by the BBC this week, hundreds of activists walked out of a Mass in the Roman Catholic Sint-Jan Church in Dutch Den Bosch when this year’s ‘Carnival Prince’ was refused communion because of his open homosexuality. Carnival is associated with the Catholic tradition world wide of a period of public displays of licentious permissiveness preceding the annual rite of repentance during Lent. It is no secret that the Church has always treated homosexual activity as sinful. The report concludes that, “The man said he just wants equal treatment - if he is regarded as a sinner, he wants the priest to refuse communion to all other sinners too.” This is a no-brainer. Quite aside from any theological exegesis, it should be common knowledge to all those with an axe to grind that the Catholic Church has always required all communion supplicants to ritually confess their sin prior to professing repentance and contrition. As an exclusive club, the Church has a right to set the rules and its members are at liberty to either adhere to those rules or to desist from identifying themselves as turbulent confessional dissenters.
It seems to me that evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Anthony Grayling have a problem. Their insistence that God does not exist has the disturbing appearance of serving as a distraction from the main chance. As long as the atheists are barking up that tree the religious can sleep easy. The real problem is the pernicious notion of religious privilege, the historical persistence of the belief, slavishly upheld by all professing Jews, Christians and Muslims, that, having created all of humanity, this infinitely compassionate God of theirs then chose to bestow special privileges on the authors of this doctrine (naturally) as exclusive beneficiaries. Paradoxically, Dawkins, Grayling et al seem oblivious to the uncomfortable yet unavoidable observation that we are all where we are precisely because of this notion of religious privilege.
How can we deny that this God exists? If the 7th Century BC Bible writers had not inspired a Jewish tug-of-war because of and in spite of the Roman hegemony in Palestine two millennia ago, and if this had not inspired the evolution of a Christian branch of the same principle of religious privilege and political subjugation by instilling ignorance and fear, and if this had not inspired a medieval Arab shepherd boy, excluded by definition from these religiously privileged clubs, to imagine that the angel Gabriel told him to recite what became the Koran, then Galileo and the Renaissance, the British Empire and the American Dream, Charles Darwin and the flushing toilet, Martin Luther and The Holocaust, the Internet and 9/11 would not have been possible and we would not be who are and where we are today. He despises the ladder by which he attained his position at his peril.
Therefore, in the interests of intellectual integrity if nothing else, if we say that God, as a figment of religious dogma, has no right to exist because the documentary evidence is flimsy, are we not thereby bound to conclude that the United States, Australia and Israel, as figments of ideological myths, also have no right to exist? Before you answer that, bear in mind that without the intervention of ‘the (illusory) United States’ in both ‘World Wars’ (a figment, of which millions of non-participants were oblivious at the time), ‘our world’ (as we know it) would have looked very different. If an atheist has no quarrel with a designation like ‘we the people’, what in the name of Ba’al Zebûb is the problem with a designation like ‘God’?
Theo, Theo, Theo....
Where can I start with such a lengthy post? At the beginning perhaps...
You're off to a rather bad start when you quote Grayling: "Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality as belief in the existence of fairies." But then proceed to build yourself a straw man in which a statement regarding the rational truth of religious doctrine suddenly becomes an argument against the existence of any conceptual god. Wrong Mr. Wit.
Grayling argues, rather correctly, that the acceptance of religious texts/doctrine as divine truth is on an intellectual par with belief in fairies. However I do not see in this statement a denial of the existence of all possible gods nor an attempt to prove the negative (this is an accepted folly regardless, the burden of proof lies with those proposing the existence of a supernatural agent). It's a fine line but an important one.
It doesn't get better from there. You proceed with an absurdly lengthy series of seemingly related arguments which at closer inspection are simply face-palm worthy statements of the obvious. Yes there are differences between the language of concepts (nationhood, freedom etc) and empirical reality. Yes modern humans rely heavily on 2nd hand accounts of scientific evidence that forms the basis of their beliefs in simple material realities such as the existence of a dark side of the moon and the shape of the earth. The relevance of these assertions to your core argument (I know there was one, hiding deep beneath a sideshow of distraction and inductive reasoning) is flimsy at best.
A high school student could have significantly reduced the length and complexity of your response by simply asking 'how do we really know anything'? But you don't stop there. You proceed to educate us (as though we were said high school students) about reasons for the Vietnam war, Zionist claims to historical nationhood, and the doctrine of 'Terra Nullius'!!! Ummmm....
To top it all off you finish with two woefully false arguments. First you suggest by implication that without religion "Galileo and the Renaissance, the British Empire and the American Dream, Charles Darwin and the flushing toilet, Martin Luther and The Holocaust, the Internet and 9/11 would not have been possible", as if all of these things had burst forth directly from a wellspring of knowledge bound in leather and titled Torah/Bible/Quran. The relationship there is indirect at best and your argument highly misleading. What if I were to argue for an alternative/possible present day in the absence of religion where humanity is living in peace and populating other planets? It would be just as absurd and pointless to debate.
Second and finally you argue in the interests of "intellectual integrity if nothing else" that there is an equivalence between God as a figment of religious dogma and nations as figments of ideological myths and that denial of one must be a denial of the other. They are similar only in that they share the labels you have applied to them. As concepts they are vastly different. One is a supernatural agent, considered real and of ultimate importance (above and beyond this life if Hell is part of the deal) despite a complete and utter lack of evidence of the divine origins of the dogma associated with whichever god. The other is a collective identification for the purposes of large scale organisation with no claims to the supernatural and no burden of proof in that regard. We can debate till the cows come home about the pros and cons of nationhood but it's a completely different beast to the 'divinity of dogma'.
*sigh* I'm done, this post is so damn long.....
Wow, Theo, wow ... never have I read a nonsensical rambling that comes close to yours ...
Morgz said, Theo, Theo, Theo…
That's from Shakespeare, right? Don't you just love it, where Macbeth says, "Had I three ears, I'd hear thee."
He was actually pretty good, old Bill. But me? Defending religion? Oh for God's sake.
Not much of a defence though, to just point back to where I think we all come from. Don't know about you, of course.
Yes, I got that, the flushing toilet cannot be attributed to any specific religious doctrine. Did I really say that?
Trouble is, whatever lunacy our forebears privately believed and publicly professed or not, they did sort of get some things right, or should I say, good enough to be getting on with.
Is it too much of a stretch, for you, to say that if the Pilgrim Fathers had not been driven by religious persecution to sail to Plymouth, Neil Armstrong would not have taken any steps either, giant or small.
I mean, if none of the foolishness had happened, we wouldn't be here, would we. We'd be someplace else. Would we have been any better off without all that dividing the Red Sea and walking on water stuff? Well, let's see, if my parents had not survived the war, I would not be writing this. Merciful heaven.
Sorry to keep you. Would we have got to the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, I wonder, if Martin Luther had not been quite the notorious, superstitious, compulsive-obsessive, constipated anti-semite we are now sort of permanently stuck with? Yeah, I know, don't come the raw teleological prawn with me, son. Fun, though.
Like it or not, I think dragging all that religious crap along, actually got us exactly to here. Not a pretty sight, I know. And it's only going to get worse, with you lot ready to lynch the Pope and all. But, take any of it away, and what do you have? A different story, I think.
My point was, I think, that gods exist in books, like all the other stuff. I can only exist for you in what you see here. But, cheer up, we've only been living together for, what, 10,000 years? God, we're only just getting to know each other.
Still, it should be pretty obvious by now, even to really intelligent people like you, what with the Crusades and the Middle East Peace Process and all, that rational persuasion by pure reason, without any legal backing, always ends in tears at bedtime.
The socialist ideal of mutual consensus has always looked deceptively attractive and is exactly that. But what do you care what people say about their precious gods? OK! There is no supernatural being! So? Stop shouting.
In the end, the best thing we ever did was to establish social contracts under the hegemony of law. It's not perfect by any stretch, but anyone who believes their religion gives them the right to break the law, can always, or at least eventually, be dealt with under the law. I think I did actually said that too.
Why, without the principle of law, wherever we got it, you couldn't even say you were an atheist. Let alone be one.
And here's wow to you, Stephen. Welcome, grab a hymnbook and take a pew.
Thanks anyway, but I've already taken my wows.
Two wows even! You want nonsensical? Always be careful what you ask for, my son. Amen.
Got any loose change? Today's collection goes towards everybody's flight out. Melbourne's not bad, mind you. Wouldn't live there, though. Not for quids. They'd have to give me more than that. Wasn't what's his name funny though? Talk about laugh. A the ism of it all. Just like Mardi Gras really. Only, more is definitely less. Wouldn't you say, darling?
Oh, and no one comes close to mine, OK?
Or I'll burn 'em.