There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
– Sam Harris, rebutting the daft charge that a denial of belief in the afterlife or a supreme being must open the doors to hell on earth.
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Samizdata quote of the dayNovember 7th, 2007 |
 57 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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How about a society which just becomes accepting of everything?
Reasonable, as in uses reason? Or reasonable as in being accepting of everything and not arguing?
The latter is a recipe for suicide, as we are seeing.
Given the multiple meanings of ‘reasonable’ can we substitute ‘rational’ instead?
How does he know ? It was never tried.
Hmmm. Define *reasonable* in non-partisan terms. Then we’ll talk.
While I do not have any faith myself, I reject utterly Harris’ contention that Christianity is rationally indefensible. “Reason” and “atheism” are not synonyms.
Meanwhile, read this:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html
The danger of atheism is not specifically a lack of belief in God but a lack of belief in anything except the world; you see this in some theist groups which beocme obsessed with power. For example, Al Qaeda uses the promise of the afterlife for its minions, but the leaders naturally throw away their subordinates lives like trash. They care only for power and the ability to obliterate whatever displeases them.
In order to improve the world, you have to care about something more than it. This need not be a divine concept, but often includes it. Al Qaeda talks about God but all it wants is to domainte the world. Meanwhile, those who care about something outside themselves, even if it something is so small as a few orphans, a friend, or even people enjoying art, have the chance to improve the world. The related danger, of course, are those whose concern is so narrowly focused on their own personal concept of “good” that they obliterate everything else. You see, for example, lefitists deciding they know absolutely what the goal must be and estroying anything which even temporarily inconveniences. Once value is gone, nothing is left but madness. Reason alone is not reasonable, because it has no reason to be.
Interesting point, CC. “Reasonable” is a very tricky word to pin down. Can a society be too rational though? I think so. A rational society based upon shoddy axioms would be a nightmare – the Taliban took Islam to it’s logical conclusion didn’t they? I think ultimately my preference for freedom is irrational in the same way that my preference for Bach is. Axioms are ultimately always irrational (or if you prefer, inscrutable – “We take these truths to be self-evident”). You can of course examine what you get from these axioms (after all the rational teasing out of consequences has been worked through) but that is an empirical test, not an a priori one.
Ultimately a liberal* society produces, by any measure, a better society but that is a justification for those axioms after the fact and quite irrelevant to whether the principles are right or wrong. Socio-Economic-Political axioms, principles, meta-context or whatever are ultimately a matter of taste.
I am not being relativist here. I just know that J S Bach was light years ahead of Robbie Williams** as a musician (different galaxy – different supercluster more like). That’s of course a matter of taste and the fact I’m right doesn’t make it any less so. People who disagree aren’t wrong for any demonstrable a priori reason*** they’re just sadly misguided. Not everything which is true or right or good is logically provable.
*In my sense of the word – ask Mid. Where is Mid?
**With his “personal demons” on backing vocals.
***A posteriori – they will have more piss taken out of them than if all the world’s kidney machines were hooked up to their veins in parallel.
“Can a society be too rational though? I think so. A rational society based upon shoddy axioms would be a nightmare…”
Would someone please explain to me how proceeding on defective premises is being “too rational”?
I approve of the sentiment, but it’s demonstrably incorrect, even allowing for the ambiguity of the word “reasonable”. After all, isn’t that why the Islamists are busy trying (and occasionally succeeding) to blow us sky high? They hate us for being more rational than them, and take advantage of our “reasonable” principles to engage in their plots.
A society may become less oppressive within itself by being more reasonable, but it can’t be said not to suffer if other, less reasonable, societies take exception to it. I’m not arguing against reason, reasonability, or rationality (not necessarily the same things), far from it: one of the most dangerous aspects of the current threat is the undermining of our “reasonable” society from within on the pretext of combating it. I’m simply saying that the statement isn’t true.
Wasn’t the basis of the USSR a scientific society based on the rejection of faith? Wasn’t it truly paradise on earth?
Billy Beck,
I think I did. A rational process with faulty initial axioms is still a rational process regardless of how unpleasant the result. The logic of Mohammed Atta was flawless. His axioms were unpleasant, nasty and just plain evil but you can’t fault his logic in following the concept of jihad to it’s logical conclusion.
Thomas,
Yes, and that’s my point. I’m sure some very bright folks in Russia worked through dialectic materialism with great diligence and accuracy… Result: a nightmare. But this wasn’t a fault of logic or rationality, it was a because it was based upon shonky assumptions.
Also, aren’t the modern nanny state policies — and the far more extreme ones that await us in the near future — just another case people being “reasonable” in the usual sense of the word and wanting everyone else to be “reasonable” too? Because ultimately, it’s not “reasonable” to smoke, drink, gamble, drive without a seatbelt, or do anything else that might harm your physical well-being. My personal attitude is that life without the freedom to be “unreasonable” and suffer the consequences is hardly worth living, but as most people here probably know, it’s getting increasingly hard to defend such an attitude in today’s world. After all, they just want to make sure that everyone behaves “reasonably”.
Nick M. is correct – one can be an athiest without being a socialist.
So “athiest = Soviet Union” (or any other socialist nightmare) does not follow.
Indeed one can be “religious” in the sense of being an active member of a Church (perhaps even a Bishop or Archbishop) and still be a socialist – at least if one defines “God” as not a being, but as “society” or “the people” (as in the “Social Gospel” which holds “social justice” to be the true undertaking of religion).
However, athiesm is not a positive belief – it is simply a negative belief “God does not exist”.
So people (or at least some people) seek belief systems (at least in a loose sense) and Marxism has been a popular one – something to believe in.
More normally the decline of one religion leaves things open to the rise of another religion.
For example, the decline of Christianity in the West (partly due to the rise of “liberal”, i.e. Godless, “Christianity”) leaves things upon for Islam.
“But philosophy is not just a matter of politics – philosphers can provide day to day ethical guidence as well, without any need for God”.
Perhaps they can – but very few people have ever followed such philosophers.
The athiest philosophers who have been popular are not the good ones (who explain why it is wrong to rob others even if they are much richer than oneself), they have been people like Karl Marx – who allow people to believe that their most base instincts (to rob and destroy) are justified.
Uh… Examples please Mr. Harris.
Ivan, you say “Because ultimately, it’s not “reasonable” to smoke, drink, gamble, drive without a seatbelt, or do anything else that might harm your physical well-being.”
If one of your axioms is that pleasure is good, then it’s entirely reasonable to do things which increase your pleasure. Where reason comes into it is in your risk analysis, weighing the positive benefit against the possibility of something bad happening. The values you place on those things is up to you.
You’re assuming reason and emotion are mutually exclusive. They’re not. Nobody’s proposing we all turn into Vulcans.
“The danger of atheism is not specifically a lack of belief in God but a lack of belief in anything except the world”.
Patrick, you must be a theist, or a very confused atheist. Assuming by “world” you mean “universe”, then I fail to see what’s wrong with believing in reality. The fact that this life is all I have, and that I know that about other people gives me tremendous respect for the lives of everybody. That this planet is possibly the only one in the universe that has life, and is definitely unique, makes me keen to respect it. Knowledge that I’m not going to get forgiveness from some deity makes me want to not wrong people in the first place, and to try to right any wrongs I’ve done in this life.
Google “penn jillette this i believe” for a better worded similar perspective.
Defining “reasonable” as “agrees with me” isn’t much of an argument, although it is better than the people who define “mean-spirited” as “doesn’t agree with me.”
“Can a society be too rational though? I think so. A rational society based upon shoddy axioms would be a nightmare – the Taliban took Islam to it’s logical conclusion didn’t they?”
That’s silly. Bad axioms are not rational, nor arrived at rationally, and any conclusion derived from them cannot be rational. Yes, it does follow logically that if all heavenly bodies are made of cheese then the moon is made of cheese, but you cannot arrive at that premise through empirical investigation, which I think is essential for rationality.
Look at it this way: would you say that someone who believes that an invisible unmeasurable pink leprechaun lives on his head (because that is, after all, where unmeasurable pink leprechauns live) is being too rational?
What about the Soviet Union strikes you as “reasonable?”
The quotation above only says that no society ever suffered from its people becoming more reasonable than they were before. It does not say “abandoning faith will instantly solve all your problems.”
The trouble with the Soviet Union owes in large part to the fact that it was a religion all its own. People were asked to report data that fit political wishful thinking, not actual reality. It’s not terribly different from the way the Catholics killed Galileo for reporting what he saw rather than what they thought their favorite bestseller said.
How is ‘reasonable’ in any way ambiguous? Seems to me that ‘reasonable’ in the context of a ‘society’ is rational tolerance. So how can being ‘reasonable’ be anything but good? When is being ‘unreasonable’ a good thing? Also as societies are not states, talking about ‘state’ behaviour strikes me as irrelevant.
Huh? What does that actually mean? You really need to explain as I would say being concerned with (say) ‘liberty’ is very much an issue ‘of the world’ but it is also based on all sorts of epistemological and meta-physical notions. Does that make it ‘super-worldly’ in your books? ‘Spiritual’? If that works for you, fine, but why? Why complicate something with supernatural psychological constructs?
From the context, it sounds like Sam means reasonable in the sense of rational. But reason is just a means to an end, it doesn’t supply the end. Hence Hitler solved the “Jewish” problem in a most reasonable manner, he eliminated the Jews. Likewise Stalin collectivised the Ukrainian peasants and avoided the predicted civil war by starving all opposition; no peasants, no civil war. A most rational conclusion supplemented by the most rational observation that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. In some labor intensive fields slavery makes good economic sense, prostitution for instance, and thus human trafficking flourishes in the newly enlightened Europe and hardly a Wilberforce in sight. Reason, tolerance, and charity are not the same thing, they are independent. And the latter depend on temperament and training, not reason.
That statement makes no sense to me at all. Surely, if I want to improve the state of the world – however you want to define that – I care about it, I care about its condition. The idea that I must care about something else (what?) makes no sense. To figure out improvements requires imagination and creative thought, but none of that requires a belief in an unseeable and ineffable god-figure or suchlike.
“Thinking atheist” – yes, I read the City Journal article by Theodore Dalrymple. It is eloquent but Dalrymple misses the key point by a mile when he asserts that a pure insistence on reason gives one no sense of life’s purpose. But that presupposes that one must believe in something above this world, some sort of god, to have a purpose. He utterly fails to back up that argument. A person can have a sense of purpose, a set of ambitions, derived entirely from his own imagination, by drawing inspiration from other people, philosophy, etc. (Of course, religion, at least in certain respects, is a form of philosophy).
Ah, the old “get rid of religion and you will get a new form of tyranny” line; the former Soviet Union was run by people who, it is true, thought (wrongly as it turned out) that they were rational, but there is, of course, nothing remotely rational about Marxism-Leninism, or the various strands of that body of doctrine, such as the labour theory of value, or the inevitable clash between certain “classes”, or the immiseration of the proletariat, etc, etc. And in fact Marxism is a sort of religion of its own; its idea of some utopian end-state draws from Millenarian ideas of European history. The idea of there being a chosen body of intellectuals who have a unique power to understand the proletariat’s true needs, or can divine the General Will (a la Rousseau), closely resembles the idea of a priesthood.
Of course, one reason why some people dislike Dawkins, Harris and the rest is these men’s supposed arrogance, or whatever. Well, if it is arrogant to say that X or Y is nonsense and give reasons why, so be it.
I’m quite happy with my fellow unbelievers, but I can’t stand atheists. They are even worse than evangelicals.
I’d suggest that anyone who uses the Taliban as an example of what can go wrong with RATIONALITY wouldn’t actually recognise rationality, even if it buried into their arse and laid eggs.
“It’s not terribly different from the way the Catholics killed Galileo for reporting what he saw rather than what they thought their favorite bestseller said. ”
WTF? A couple of things – firstly, the Catholics didn’t kill Galileo (he lived until he was 76 and died of nothing other than plain old age) and secondly he wasn’t put on trial for reporting what he saw but for writing a book on Copernican theory in which the Pope was portrayed as a village idiot, which was especially crass as the Pope in question was a supporter of Galileo and had urged him to write the book! (This treatment was apparently in response to the Pope’s request that the book in question be a neutral examination of the heliocentricity controversy and not a polemic in favour of one side only.)
Galileo didn’t get treated the way he did because he was right but because he was an arrogant SOB with a particular gift for making enemies. It should be noted that other, equally important figures like Kepler who stuck to science never got into any trouble with the church.
Seriously, if you guys are going to portray yourselves as the rational, evidence based ones then at a minimum it surely behoves you to get your facts right.
I was speaking metaphorically, though I concede that that was probably not obvious from the way I worded my post.
It’s true that Galileo was prosecuted in large part for offending the Pope Urban VIII – but that well illustrates the point I’m making. Galileo was forced to recant his theories not because anyone had proven them wrong – but rather because they offended members of the church heirarchy. And before he published the book in question his ideas were controversial not because anyone had given a reasoned scientific argument against them, but because they ran afoul of lines in Psalms and Chronicles. And the only reason he needed Urban VIII as a defender in the first place was because he lived in a situation where the Church could never be wrong about anything – could and did have works banned that they found inconvenient and their authors executed for failing to recant. This bears a striking similarity to the Soviet Union, in which official Marxist dogma was taken as truth whether or not verified by reality, the party could never be wrong about anything, and offending members of the party got people publicly denounced and sometimes carted off to Siberia. I think my analogy with the Catholic Church works.
lupin.
Either re-read my comments or just go fuck yourself. Either is peachy with me. I despise people (other than me) trying to make cheap points.
Nasikabatrachus,
I agree, bad axioms are not rational. Neither are good ones. Axioms aren’t rational. They’re a starting point for the development, through logic, of a system. In themselves they’re not logical. You can’t prove an axiom. Axioms are assumed. Now some axioms are “back selected” to fit in with what we know such as the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom system in set theory but even that is an assumption. It’s an assumption that serves as a basis for pretty much all mathematics (certainly it works for natural numbers, not sure about uncountably infinite sets and therefore real numbers and analysis).
Joshua,
The Catholic Church didn’t kill Galileo. They did burn Giordano Bruno at the stake but Galileo Galilei got off with house arrest. And this wasn’t so much for espousing heliocentrism. He was fiery bugger and there was something of an animus between him and a number of cardinals. You do know what the original impetus towards using a telescope was for the divine Italian don’t you? Hint: nothing to do with astronomy.
In general:
Axioms are a prime example of GIGO.
Gib,
Well said. I was going to take on Patrick but to be honest I had no idea where to start. The problem is that I do believe in the world and nothing else.
RPW,
Many apologies. I didn’t see your comment on Galileo. You scooped me. My understanding was that essentially he got pissed at a dinner and started spouting Copernicus. He was sufficiently arrogant that when he sobered-up he still had to shill for Copernicus. The Ptolomaic system was obviously a farrago but original heliocentric system worked out by Copernicus had even more epicycles! Glad you mentioned Kepler – a very curious and likeable character.
Joshua.
The Roman Catholic church has indeed done some very bad things at times – but their general attitude to science was actually favourable (because of the postive view of human reason generally taken by this church).
Indeed it is unlikely that there would have been much science at all without the generally supportive position of the Roman Catholic church. For example, there would have been no universities without this church – and no scientific scholarship in monastries either.
Of course the view that faith and reason were enemies was always held by some in the Roman Catholic church – but it was not the main view over the centuries.
I should stress that I am NOT a Roman Catholic.
So on the fair assumption that by “unbelievers” you mean ‘people with an unbelief in God’ … and as an atheist is by definition someone who does not believe in the objective existence of God, you appear to be saying “I’m quite happy with my fellow unbelievers, but I can’t stand unbelievers”. Hmmm.
By unbelievers I mean people who do not care about the ridiculous mumbo jumbo, or even think about it much. By athiests I mean these people who have a set of beliefs they feel a need to give a name to, and who, like Dawkins, Hitchens, the tiresome prick in the office who is always picking on the Christians but wouldn’t dare say a thing to the Muslims, who chunder on about it all the time like tiresome 13 year olds who have just discovered Nietzche.
Dawkins has had fairly harsh things to say about Islam, as has Harris and Hitchens. They do not just “pick on Christians”.
Atheism is not a “set of beliefs”; it is a description for people who do not believe in religion for the fairly sensible reason that evidence is non-existent, cannot be scientifically validated, etc.
Whether the likes of Harris or Hitchens are agreeable persons or not is immaterial.
Maybe I’m not deep enough, but I am an athiest.
To me, all the word means is someone who does not believe in the existence of God.
I dont go shouting round the door of Canterbury Cathederal in the middle of a service “You’re all wasting your time and money!” though I have been known to walk past a Mosque eating a bacon buttie.
Back in May I spent a delightful week in the company of two Jehovahs Witnesses, on holiday in Ischia. They didn’t bother me with their belief and I didn’t bother them with my lack of it. That’s the way I like it.
The Beards however, I have a problem with. They wont let me ignore their fairy tale and demand I respect it. I will never do that as I cannot reasonably respect stupidity.
I am quite aware that atheist describes someone who doesn’t believe in god. In practice however, people who just don’t believe are quite happy not believing and people who call themselves atheists are stating their adherence to a set of beliefs. For example that religion is always evil and destructive. It is often part of set of other beliefs that are far from rational. A very large number of people that I have met or heard in the media who call themselves atheists are socialists of one kind or another for example.
Calling oneself an atheist also means that one has some kind of opinion on the god matter, which I don’t. Why would I spend time thinking about such a thing? I’m not an atheist for the same reason that not believing in flibbergoggles does not make me an aflibbergogglist.
.
That may be the case, and it may have coloured your view of atheists; one might as well say that a disproportionate number of fundemantalists are X or Y in their political views. So what? Correlation is not the same as causation, and in any event, there is no logical link between asserting belief in a god and supporting free enterprise or the opposite.
There are plenty of agnostics/atheists of my acquaintance who are anything but collectivists. It is one of the peculiarities of current political discourse that to be an atheist is to draw a leftwing tag, but if one thinks about how, for example, the left has rushed to embrace environmentalism and post-modernism (which is a degradation of the rational core of the Enlightenment) it makes sense to see atheism as part of a pro-technology, pro-science, pro materialism/capitalist set of views rather than a collectivist/tribalist set.
Yes I do have an opinion. Why does that seem to bother you so much?
Jeez! God help us from having opinions!
jb. Atheist is the word that describes me. Much the same as pedestrian does. It’s not a philosophy, it’s just putting one foot in front of the other.
I agree with Paul. Just because Christianity has done bad things, doesn’t mean that there were no benefits from it. All those schools and Universities he mentioned.
I only argue religion with those who wish to do so.I let the Mormons in by accident once and we all had a lot of fun (no really! Well me anyway).
Wild over generalisation. That is a bit like describing baldness as a hairstyle rather than an absence of hair. It CAN be a ‘hair syle’ if you choose to shave your head. Or it can just mean you have lost your hair. If you had said ‘militant intolerant atheists’ then I would understand your point, because unreasonable militant intolerant anythings are a pain in the arse.
I am a functional atheist and I do not think all religions are evil and destructive. I just think they are all fundamentally mistaken. If the subject comes up, I am quite happy to tell a practising believer why I think they are wrong and that their god is just a psychological artifice. However if the topic is inappropriate in the context of the moment, I am quite happy to not discuss the subject and thus have practising Christians and Jews amongst my friends. That is what tolerating the views of others involves. I am confident their religious views have not let them into the more bonkers places such things sometimes can, but then bonkers views come in secular varieties as well.
Samizdata’s contributors are about evenly split between believers and non-believers and I am fine with that because it is an issue I really do not care all that much about.
Hell, I live with a believer and we get on just fine. That is where the ‘reasonable’ thing comes in: we do not agree on that issue, we both understand the other’s position perfectly and we leave it at that.
Atheism is not a “belief”. Neither is agnosticism (If you want to be truly bored ask me about my specifically nuanced take on agnosticism.
jb,
Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with Jonathan’s comment I would just like to add that while I frequently slag off the Koranimals (I suspect I’m noted for it around this blog) I have no animus against Christianity, have Christian friends and indeed work for sort-of Christians (sort-of).
RAB,
I would pay good money to see you accosting Dr Williams and ranting at him, “You’re wasting your time!”
In my final year at Nottingham I lived in a house with a (relatively) secluded back garden. I recall two of my (female) housemates sunbathing topless out back. Nothing untoward and they were lying on their fronts when I returned from the lab. I pointed out to them the only building that did overlook the gaff was a mosque and… Well, it kinda put the kybosh on their afternoon.
In general:
Ah, “respect”… I don’t respect the Islamic “faith” and not just because it’s “fairy tales”*. I don’t respect it because it is vicious, intolerant, deeply sexist and was founded by someone who is by almost any standards a really nasty piece of work. Compare Muhammed with Christ, Buddha or even L Ron Hubbard and he’s a total, unmitigated bastard. But hey, don’t rely on my account… Pope Benedict XVI said it better when he quoted Manuel II Paleologos.
I recently saw Inayat Bungit Din on the telly defending the fact that 25% of UK mosques had “hate material” by saying you could find similarly offensive stuff in Christian or Jewish (always with the Jews…) bookstores. Yeah, right, whatever… Apart from presumably never being told as a kid that two wrongs don’t make a right** his big beef was that some of these Christian bookstores had books which said that Muhammed was a kiddy fiddler. He seemed to be drawing an equivalence between libeling the dead (not a crime) and exhorting believers to throw homosexuals from mountain-tops (certainly a crime, if carried out).
Muhammed, of course, was not a peadophile under sharia law (his invention – how convenient) which has a female age of consent of nine. It’s perfectly logical and the syllogism goes like this…
Muhammed was the most perfect human being ever.
Muhammed fucked a nine year old (Aisha).
Fucking nine year old girls is therefore fine.
The logic is impeccable… Yet, are you not repulsed? It isn’t the lack of logic that is repellent it’s the dismal, appalling premises that are repellent. And the whole sordid tale is indeed in the hadith including the gob-smacking detail that at the time of consumation the kid was told to quit playing because The Messenger was “ready for her”. And this from people that think having friends of the other sex is immoral! I have seen muslim men refuse to shake hands with my wife on a deal (embarassing because she offered) yet they think screwing a nine year old girl is just dandy.
There is of course debate as to the historical accuracy of this particular skellington in big Mo’s closet but that’s irrelevant to me. What is relevant is what they actually put into practice. Guess what the female age of consent is in the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2007? Hint: you’ll only need a single decimal numeral.
Muhammed was 53 at the time. The twisted fuck. I’ll respect their “deeply held beliefs” about the same time I register the domain name: “josephstalinwasaniceman.com”.
Why is it that the muslims almost uniquely demand force to protect the sanctity of their prophet? Is it perhaps because there is truth in the allegations that, unlike, say, Christ***, he was an oath-breaker, murderer, warlord, peadophile, pervert and generalized scumbag with a truly delinquent take on the Bible? The worst I seem to recall anyone getting anyone to believe about Christ was that he knocked up Mary Magdalene. If true then that’s the biggest “whatever” moment of my life.
*I know that (especially in the original) many fairy tales are rather violent. Perhaps Tippa Gore should start a campaign?
**But two Wrights did make a ‘plane.
***And I’m talking very much about the historical Christ.
“Calling oneself an atheist also means that one has some kind of opinion on the god matter, which I don’t. Why would I spend time thinking about such a thing? I’m not an atheist for the same reason that not believing in flibbergoggles does not make me an aflibbergogglist. ”
Sounds like the word you’re looking for is apatheist – a useful word, if anybody needs another one. Personally speaking, I don’t know what the fuss is about – the point you were making about the difference between non-believers and atheists struck me as a blindingly obvious one. IMHO evangelical atheist also works for the likes of Dawkins, et al., but in my experience tends to annoy the ones I meet. Which is either a positive or negative depending on the circumstances…
I don’t see the point of this statment. The Catholic Church may have helped science along the way 500 years ago, but that does very little to convince me that it is still necessary for this reason or indeed that it is still even effective in this sphere.
Whatever the Catholics may have done to help science in the past, the end result that we hope for is NOT a situation where a superstitious cabal of the self-deluded gets to decide what is real and what is not completely divorced from real tests and real evidence. But that is the situation you find yourself in when, among other things, (a) you have a society run by a religion or (b) you have a society run by the CPSU.
It is progress that people are turning away from religion. Just as it is progress that they are turning away from Communism. Whatever good things either Communism or Catholicism may have done in the past are things that can be better achieved some other way without them. I am pleased that humanity seems to be slowly outgrowing both religion and Communism; as the quoted passage says, it cannot be a bad thing for people to become more reasonable.
Joshua,
The Catholic Church right now actively funds scientific research. A few years ago (the atheist) Steven Hawking was amongst many leading lights who attended a Vatican paid for beanie in Rome to discuss cosmology. The Pope (JP-II) described evolution as being “more than a theory” (which is probably further than I would go). I shared a house with the vice-president of my university Catholic Society and he was (aside from his chemical engineering degree) doing independent research on the possible biological basis of homosexuality.
I utterly fail to see how (apart from it’s bizarre stance on embryonic/fetal life) the Catholic Church isn’t deeply involved in science. They even have as a doctrine the idea that Catholic dogma must be re-interpreted in the light of new scientific discoveries…
In anycase, even if the Catholics are currently doing bugger all in the name of science the fact they helped out 500 years ago is I would hazard quite important. You know, scientific revolution and all that? It didn’t happen in the middle-east, it didn’t happen in China, or Japan. It happened here, in Europe.
Now you could argue that that was because of the emergence of Protestantism. You could argue that and I think you’d be wrong. The whole flowering of Western culture was impeded by the wars of religion – Guttenberg was greatly inconvenienced by it, Kepler at one point had to up stakes and go back home to defend his mother on a capital charge of witchcraft and Martin Luther openly mocked Copernicus. Science and the protestants emerged in parallel. One was not the cause of the other because they were both products of Europe becoming more literate and starting to ask questions.
If you want an example of religion impeding science then I think you ought to look at the ID-freaks who are overwhelmingly protestant, though increasingly muslim.
Alright, the Catholic Church funds scientific research. I would say “I stand corrected,” but as nothing in my statement claims that they do not, I don’t really feel the need.
What I said was:
And indeed, it is not. The Catholic Church is no longer necessary to fund universities and scientific inquiry, and I consider that a Very Good Thing. Back when they were necessary to its funding and support, they exercised a lot of undue control over what people published and what was officially accepted as true. Trumping evidence on the basis of what it says in the Bible is NOT a scientific attitude, and it can only be progress that we have moved away from that.
Nothing I have said was meant to single out the Catholics in particular. I happened to choose an example (Galileo) where it was them doing the truth-suppressing for dogmatic reasons, but we could just as easily have found Muslim or Buddhist or Protestant examples. In fact, to the extent that you’re saying that Catholics are more tolerant and scientific than some other religions, I completely agree with you. I would much rather live in a Vatican-dominated world than a Mecca-dominated world, for example. But if it’s all the same to you, I would rather live in neither. I think it is a good thing that we’re moving away from religion-dominated societies. Catholicism may be better than Islam or the more fundamentalist strains of Protestantism, but it’s still irrational and therefore best forgotten.
This –
– is an inappropriate example. I have nowhere suggested that individual Catholics cannot be scientists. Sorry to disappoint you, but I completely fail to be shocked by the idea that a religious person might somewhere be involved in science. To the extent that he is successful at scientific work, it will be because he has learned to compartmentalize – i.e. not to think to much about his religion when doing his work. Indeed, I am unaware of any modern scientists whose theories were inspired by his religion. What most people do these days is define their religion in such a careful way that it does not overlap with their professional life. Few, if any, serious scientists these days call up the Vatican, ask them what is True, and then go out looking to verify it. That is a good thing.
Joshua:
Which side of the Atlantic are you on?
Here, there are plenty of people who claim to be scientists studying either evolutionary biology or cosmology.
Naturally, a share of them have to call their churches’ back offices before publishing, since they’re trying to shove creation and “intelligent design” down kids’ gullets. It wouldn’t do to go against the party line.[1]
They concentrate in Colorado Springs, for some reason. I don’t get it. It could be such a lovely town if it weren’t for the Focus on the Family assclowns and the like.
[1] Yeah, I know, they can try and claim that real scientists have a “party line” as well. The difference is, a legitimate scientist will use evidence other than the Bible.
Believing and suspecting something are different. When used in the same conversation,
Agnostic = has no beliefs either in the negative or the affirmative regarding the existence of God.
Atheist = believes there is no God.
Theist = believes there is a God.
“Evangelical Atheist” is a very good term, and (by virtue of having been repeatedly attacked for refusing to agree with them) I can assure you that they believe there is no God. That is not even remotely “non-believers”. We should all make sure we are self identifying correctly, it will save a lot of confusion. Many agnostics are inclined towards one form of belief or another, but by admitting the answer is unknown (not to mention refraining from evangelizing) they are in fact agnostics.
If AGW and the Greens are a religion, then I suspect there is far more scientists invoking Green sacred knowledge than Biblical sacred knowledge. The Greens are certainly evangelical.
Mid,
Last time I checked God wasn’t giving out research grants but even under “climate criminal Bush” US federal funding alone for climate change studies has ramped up from $200 million to $8 billion. per anum. Or in lay man’s terms it has gone up by a factor of 40 up the arse.
Are the Greens a religion? Well, yes, in many ways but I tend to respect religions and whilst the canonisation of, say, Maximillian Kolbe by the Catholics is extremely diffcicult to argue with the Green cannonisation of Rachel Carson is something that gives me the Duke Ellington’s.
Joshua,
You seem to have completely missed my point.BG undertook that research purely because of his faith. He felt that if he could prove at least to himself that homosexuals were born that way then he took it that the Catholic Church was wrong to condemn them. The fact that he was a chem-eng student is largely irrelevant to the point except that his studies had equipped him in the way that a study of medieval literature wouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t have undertook such research. I would have merely concluded at the start that there existed rear-admirals and made no further speculation because it simply doesn’t interest me. It interested BG because he specifically wanted to find a reason why his gay friends weren’t going to roast in hell for all eternity. It was a magnificent obsession and BTW BG was not gay at all. Last I heard he was dating a really fit Polish bird. I would have and I suspect so would you. She probably wouldn’t (except with me, natch) but that’s Catholics for ya. You know they actually believe in stuff.
There is an atheist religion – it used to be called “secular humanism” but it is rather unhumanistic.
A better name would be “Progressivism” but some religous people (or at least Bishops and Archbishops and so on – which may not be the same thing) are also Progressives (but deny being athiests) so the term “Secular Progressive” will have to do for the atheist religion.
Richard Dawkins is a very strong, indeed fanatical, believer in this religion.
Broadly speaking they worship “society” or “the people” and believe that traditional reactionary morality (such as personal responsiblity) should be destroyed and that health, education, welfare (and so on) should be a collective responsibilty.
Again I fully accept that not all atheists support this religion (and it is a religion – it is a matter of FAITH – DOGMA), but the ones who get the nice treatment.
“But not all athiests are Progressives” – quite so, but the ones who get the nice jobs in universities and who write the strongly supported books and get invited to broadcast their opinions…..
Watching the system work is interesting:
For example the “God Delusion” is badly argued (in terms of reasoning), contains errors of fact, and is badly written. Yet it is a wild best seller.
This is because it was plugged on radio, television and the newspapers – and was put on special offer at the supermarkets (as well as being pushed by the bookstores).
A similar case is being played out now with a “humourous” “history” book.
I noticed it in the local supermarket a couple of weeks ago and had a look at it.
Errors of fact, poor quality snearing “humour” (for example comparing Mrs Thatcher to King John and Ethelred), the same tedious nonsense one gets in the Guardian newspaper.
For example, this island always a land of waves of immigrants (actually till the last few decades the vast majority of people on this island came from a line of people who had been here for at least one and half thousand years – nothing special about that, but it happens to be the truth), the National Health Service the first in the world (lie – governments started to pay for general health care for most people in the time of Bismark and first ran the whole thing as well in the Soviet Union) and is the greatest achievment …….. (pass the sick bag). And so on and so on.
Boring, error filled, leftist propaganda – and deeply unfunny.
But it is in the supermarkets and it is being read out on the B.B.C. every day (and in good positions in the book stores – of course).
So another best seller in the making.
This is how the system works. Private business enterprises as well as government organizations work to promote the Progressive agenda (because the people who run them were taught to do so in school and university).
I would like to believe that people who run business enterprises like this eventually go bankrupt, that the public can not be forever manipulated – but I just do not know.
Joshua, The (sad?) truth is, that someone has to fund scientific research. If it’s not the church, then it’s the government, if it’s not the government, than it’s corporations. And, whoever holds the purse strings, has at least some say over the matter.
I agree that “apatheist” is useful, and so is “evangelical atheist” (I think Mid helped jb make his point much better).
Nick, re axioms: axioms cannot be proved (by definition), but the difference between good and bad axioms is that a bad axiom can be disproved. A doctrine/theorem that happens to be based on a bad axiom can still be considered rational, provided at the time of its construction the disproof of the bad axiom on which it is based was still unavailable. For example, people who lived before Copernicus cannot be considered irrational because they built their entire world view on the assumption that Earth is the center of the universe. That was a bad axiom, but at the time they had no way of knowing this. The same cannot be said about many of the modern Islamonuts. Both ObL and Ahmadinejad are engineers by training, and al Zwahiri is a physician, IIRC. They know their axioms are bad, and they pretend they are not, for reasons that have nothing to do with rationality, and have everything to do with emotions (none of which, I suspect, are of admirable kind).
Nick M –
Yes, I think I missed your point. Apologies.
All the same – I think research into the chemical nature of homosexuality will get done regardless of whether or not someone’s faith is pushing them to do it. I would still rather live in a world where people undertake scientific research out of purely scientific curiosity (and/or the desire to invent something useful to make money off of) rather than trying to win an argument with a superstitious cabal of dogma dispensers.
Sunfish –
Point taken.
Alisa –
Point taken. All the same, I feel better when it’s big business funding it than when it’s the government or the church. Better than the government for the obvious reason that their money is their own. Better than the church because business at least has the virtue of not having a centralized dogma. True – if you publish research your company doesn’t like you may be out of a job. That’s better than banned or executed, and in any case what one company doesn’t like their competitor is often willing to pay for.
Hhmmm… When was the last time a drug company pursued and published research discrediting one of their own products. The truth is, they are the worst offenders for abusing the scientific method. Forgetting about all of the studies they kill before definitive results can be scientifically documented, read a stack of drug company funded research and you soon get the feeling that the summaries are written by entirely different authors for entirely different studies than the one you’ve just read.
I agree about opposing government funding, but churches are no different than corporate funding. Some is good, some is bad, but all is voluntarily funded.
Lately, whenever some lay person like myself mentions some scientific research cited by the media, in support of an argument on whatever subject, I ask them do they know who funded that particular research. Normally I get a blank stare.
Paul,
I have read Dawkins Magnum Opus, The God Delusion and I was wryly amused by the amount of effort the good professor put into slagging off something he clearly didn’t believe existed in the first place. There’s a couple of really fascinating bits of zoology stuck in en passant though which makes me think Dawkins is probably a very good writer within his field. He alas lost me when he said he got The Independent delivered. I would pay someone to take it away.
Joshua,
My real point was that BG was persuing his Catholicism rationally and scientifically. He was no dogma dispenser and as such probably (without trying) a fine recruiting sergeant for his faith. He was enormously, genuinely sympathetic when I got dumped once. Sympathy for a fornicator? He provided it.
Alisa,
In the technical, mathematical sense in which I used “axiom” they can’t be disproved. I stretched my use so it is my fault that we got into a mess. Practically the basis of faith can be criticized as you say. Would a Catholic Priest run into a burning girls school to drag ’em from the wreckage? Would a Baptist minister? Would a Rabbi? Yes, obviously. Would an Imam? Depends on whether they were properly clad. This happened a few years ago in a girls school in Saudi Arabia and the religious police prevented the firemen from entering the dorm because the girls would be in night attire. People died because of that.
Obviously, even the most conservative Christian or Jew would have gone in even if the girls were starkers because whatever their thoughts are on nudity they are utterly trumped by the necessity of preserving life. And what utter loon goes into a burning building thinking of sex anyway?
I dunno. I suspect at root is Islamic fatalism, inshallah and all that.
Engineers are not scientists. Scientists desire truth, Engineers (& physicians) desire utility. In UK medical argot there is the acronym TEETH (tried everything else, try homeopathy). No scientist would ever countenance such a shoddy approach – a treatment without any conceivable mechanism but a physician would. The engineer and the physician care about results, not about reasons. They always ask “how?” whilst the scientist asks “why?” I don’t know ObL, al Zawahari or that polyester-clad Iranian gnome well enough to know if their faith is genuine or not but I suspect they really believe. Put yourself in ObL’s sandals for a moment (I know, sweaty aren’t they?) You’re minted, you can be a playboy and drink the finest wines known to humanity in the company of the finest hookers known to BAE Systems or you can live in a cave in the shitty-end of Pakistan. It takes some level of commitment to an ideal (even an evil one) to choose the later over the former.
They believe. I am sure they do. Have you noted that callous on the forehead of al-Zawahari? He got that from zealous prayer, apparently. They bought the whole thing and they see it as the mechanism to create utopia – the ultimate goal of the engineer in the way that knowing the ultimate truth is the goal of the scientist. ObL probably sees bringing about the Islamic utopia the same way he used to think about building bridges. Amineedofadinnerjacket is only vaguely an engineer. He is a traffic engineer and I know a few of those. They are preoccupied by means to slow down the flow of traffic. They are indoctrinated by the mantra “cars are bad” and are generally unmitigated bastards. But still he is an engineer of sorts and believes his tinkering can make the world a better place / drag the Mahdi out of the well.
The sooner the IAF’s F-16I Sufas and F-15I Raams bomb his (pyroaccelerant) polyester-clad ass back to the C7th the better. I suspect the RAF and USAF will experience some unscheduled down-time in Iraq for the duration.
When I was a kid and we played soldiers I always wanted (uniquely) to be the Israeli. My Grandad tried to tell me about Spitfires but they had a bloody prop on the front and tales of the IAF in their Mirages kicking the Egyptians to buggeration in ’67 always had more Mach 2 appeal. I think I was the only seven year old in UK history who knew what a Durandal was! Oh, and my mother had a crush on Moshe Dayan.
I have the greatest respect, BTW, for engineers. I grew up just down the road from where Stephenson did and he’s rather a hero of mine. But, as I said to Paul, terrible shite gets produced when people start to believe that expertise in one field is universally applicable. It’s like Al Gore. Suddenly he’s the greatest climatologist of all time. I’d bet he can’t even do elementary calculus. Why does nobody call him on that? Just ask him what a Fourier transform is or ask him to do integration by parts.
Churches are different from corporate funding in two important ways. First – churches do a lot less funding than corporations, having other priorities. For this reason, they are insignificant to the pursuit of scientific knowledge these days. Second – churches are founded on an unscientific approach to reality, whereas corporations are not. Corporations are indifferent to the scientific method, etc. They exist to make money and are not concerned about larger matters of truth. Churches are concerned with larger matters of truth, but they go about discovering the truth in completely inappropriate ways that are hostile to reason and science. They may throw some money at science here and there and actually thereby contribute to the pool of scientific knowledge at some point – but ultimately they all stand for encouraging people to doubt their senses and trust in something that they have neither seen nor whose existence they can verify for no other reason than … your local priest/minister/imam said so. This is NOT a healthy, rational attitude. Corporations harm scientific findings for profit reasons, but for each corp doing this there is another one out there willing to call them on their data fudging. Churches, however, all agree on their superstitious, nonsensical approach to reality. Corporations may suppress inconvenient evidence on particular issues, but churches encourage people to behave as though evidence didn’t matter – to behave, in some cases, as though evidence for one conclusion were a test to see how willing you were to disbelieve it by sheer force of will alone to prove your devotion to the opposite conclusion. A step away from religion is a step in the right direction. I don’t, however, mind keeping corporations around.
Joshua,
So every church, synagogue and mosque is involved in some satanic conspiracy? I very much doubt it. My personal experience is that because religious folk tend to be interested in big questions they’re actually more interested in science. I also think you have a rosy view of the corporations. Because a number of drug companies were making a lot of cash selling SSRIs such as Lustral they did suppress research that suggested that the whole basis of those types of drugs was possibly faulty. Religious groups have done a great deal for science and frequently in less than obvious ways. I have gone on record here as saying Joe Smith, founder of Mormonism, was a a complete charlatan but the Mormon genealogical database is a very useful resource. While it may exist specifically so Mormons can baptise the dead (which I think is a bit bonkers, and so do you probably) but it doesn’t mean it isn’t handy.
What bothers me more people who have never considered the existence of God because a great many of them have never really asked any deep questions, ever.
Per the original quote:
“Reasonableness” is the language of compromise, which, in dealing with the expansion of the state, is slow-motion surrender.
Whatever happened to “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. … Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”?
Nick, of course I should have added that a good axiom cannot be disproved either, and that a bad axiom is not really an axiom: once an axiom has been disproved, it by definition ceases being an axiom. I think that with this clarification we don’t have to confine my argument to mathematics.
I am certainly aware of the difference between engineering and science, but I also think that a really good engineer has to have a good scientific foundation in his education. As to islamists: it does not really matter whether ObL and his ilk are real engineers or not, etc. Also, I did not mean to imply they don’t believe their crap – they do. What I meant was that they, or at least the specific people I mentioned, have been, or have had plenty of opportunities to have been exposed to the good axioms. What makes their belief really inexcusable in their case is that they chose, albeit maybe unconsciously, (yes, I do think that people can choose their beliefs, at least in this day and age, and even in the so called Third World), to ignore those good axioms, and to stick to the bad ones. Simply put, what I am saying is that maybe Mohammad did not know any better, but these people should.
Alisa,
Clarification taken. I think we have a great deal of common ground because there does appear something wilfull in ObL’s hatred of the West which on the face of it could have been so good to a young lad with a few riyals in his pocket… It all comes down to the point you cut off sympathy for someone.
Ever seen the Michael Mann film “Manhunter”? The CIA profiler Will Graham admits to his kid that he feels enormous sympathy for what his quarry, a serial killer called the Tooth Fairy went through as a kid (Graham’s guess) but as an adult he feels no sympathy for him and just wants him stopped.
Now, if bin Laden had used his fame as a hero of the Afghan war against the Soviets and allied that to his family billions in setting up an Islamic charity he’d be up there with Bono and Sir Bob. But bin Laden had to twist when he could’ve stuck and thousands upon thousands of people are dead because of it.
But back to axioms… I still don’t believe they can be disproved but this is how I think they can and should be changed… Imagine that like the Islamic Republic of Iran or Fred Phelps your system singles out homosexuality as a crime deserving death. It isn’t logic that would prevent me hanging that queer. It is humanity and mercy and that whatever system you have, whether it be based upon centuries old tradition or the unalloyed word of God then hanging that gay or lesbian is just not something that happens on my watch. And God and tradition can take a hike because sometimes they’re wrong too.
Now the big question is are my actions compassionate here or they the result of a deep, ingrained axiom system within me that utterly rejects the concept of a victimless crime. I suspect the later.
I believe that the biggest take home message any of us can gather from the New Testament is the actions of Pilate. The “crimes” of Christ made no sense under Roman law. How wrong was Pilate to go along with the findings of the theocracy? As a kid I thought he did the right thing – one dead preacher and tens of thousands of placated minions looked like a good deal but as an adult I have developed principles. I hope if I am ever called upon to make a decision like the one Pilate had to I will make the right one. Unfortunately, I doubt I would. I would find a wriggle out somewhere and I would condemn an innocent man to death to appease the peanut-munching crowd. my life would go on but I would pay for it at 4:30am every day. Forget Christ, Judas or the rest of ’em, for me Pilate has always spoken loudest. I just understood where he was coming from.
Having said all that I (despite reading it twice) don’t understand “The Master & Margueritta”.
Well, we are really in no disagreement, except maybe for some semantics. Pilate’s case is a different one, though. He did not have a conflict of two axioms (such as “homosexuality is a sin punishable by death” and “thou shalt not kill”). His was a much more common and modern conflict, that between an axiom, i.e. principle, and convenience. If Mid were here, he would surely point out that Pilate sacrificed Jesus on the altar of collectivism, and he would be correct, although this does not mean that Pilate himself was a collectivist.
I read Master and Margarita many years ago, and although I enjoyed it very much, I don’t remember much “taking home” from it. There are clear parallels between the Pilate theme in Margarita, and that in Brothers Karamazov (and it is conventional wisdom that Bulgakov was indeed influenced by the Grand Inquisitor parable). Now if you have not read that book, you are in for an earth shaking experience. It’s time I re-read it too, as it has been some 20 years.
No disrespect intended to the other interesting comments here – but Nick M.s comment about Richard Dawkins has improved my mood (no small achievement when dealing with a grim minded creature like me).