Atheists: not clubbable
The estimable Graham Linehan on the hounding of Michael Reiss:
I think it’s a bad moment for atheists. We don’t come out of this one smelling good at all.
I don’t think Reiss should have lost his job either but who’s this ‘we‘? I come out of this one smelling perfectly fine thanks. It was nowt to do with me after all.
Since when were atheists a gang anyway? Are there meetings? A big reason I’m an atheist is because I don’t want to be in a club of people who all think the sodding same. I’m not swapping one hive mind for another, thanks. I didn’t realise escaping Catholicism meant signing up to another cult. The rapidly-becoming-an-annoying-tool Richard Dawkins doesn’t speak for me. He’s not the messiah…
It’s like when they tried to kick off that bloody ‘brights‘ meme a few years back. It all smacks of lemonade and Kum Ba Ya – just what most of us ran from.
Posted on September 18th, 2008 at 5:29pm under Religion and theology
| Related posts... • Meme: 10 Nevers • Yes, we’re all individuals • The Magnificent Seven |
• Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe |
|
|
|
• 29 Comments |
That “brights” stuff left a bad taste in my mouth: unnecessarily insulting, since it implied that anyone who wasn’t “bright” is.. “dim”.
The religious language some lazy journos use, when writing about atheists, is really annoying. Just because I agree with a lot of what Prof. Dawkins says does not make me a “disciple”, or an “acolyte”, or any other kind of “follower”. Still, if they’ve been reporting on religion for years, that’s how people must look to them: like shepherds and sheep.
And the Reiss issue tells us that being an atheist, even atheist who is a Nobel Prize winning scientist, does not make you a defender of the Enlightenment, no matter how they dress their witchhunt. The people calling for his sacking clearly did not read his paper, his book, or even his Guardian article (if they did then they must have won ’special’ Nobel Prizes), and they seem to think that their cultural power as eminent scientists means that they can utter judgements – based on no study and no evidence – that not only override the judgement of experts in other academic disciplines, but override them to a degree that these other experts lose their posts.
As far as I can see, the small gang of scientists who lined up to demand the sacking of Reiss behaved like secular bishops – using the bully pulpit of afforded to the practitioners of science to wade into, and win, an argument against one of the most respected academics in the field of science education.
Andrew Bartlett’s latest blog post… In/credible
The rapidly-becoming-an-annoying-tool Richard Dawkins
Ah come on – if you typed your name into Google and found hundreds of frothing politicised idiots misrepresenting everything you’ve written, might you not come out all guns blazing?
That’s a fair enough point but I think he needs to pick his battles a lot more careffully. This one? Peter Kay? He’s rising to the bait too often and his hectoring, humourless style is turning people off. He starts to look like a bit of dick – the reverse of the Vatican whining about Harry Potter. Like I said, I left religion behind to escape that kind of shit.
“might you not come out all guns blazing?”
I’d expect someone who holds a chair in Public Understanding of Science to have some idea other than playing to the gallery of his supporters or denigrating, sometimes in the worst terms, people he disagrees with. I’m an atheist, and have a postgraduate degree in genetics, and every time I see him or read him I think him more a tool. Now, that can’t be good, can it?
I read Reiss’ article and it was meandering, woolly-minded guff. He could have just come right out and said teachers need to be prepared to deal with queries about creationism, in the context of the scientific method and evolution – but no, Reiss went off on a tangential, academiate loop which ended up making it sound as if he wanted creationism given equal billing. What a duffer – you`d have thought that a director of education at the Royal Society would have been one of the sharper tools in the toolbox.
Yes, but he was “Director of Education at the Royal Society”, not its Director of Public Relations of its Director or Public Understanding. He wasn’t there to make documentaries, produce press packs, or anything like that. He was there so that the RS had a conduit into the latest studies of pedagogical theory and practices, and through his own research, had an input into this field of academia. If his writing for a newspaper reads like a meandering, tangential, academiate loop to you, we should remember that he is an academic, not a propagandist or journalist. His professional writing is for a very different audience, and will be entirely different in form and content.
But if you think that his article made “it sound as if he wanted creationism given equal billing”, then… I’m baffled.
Given that the letter from the Nobel Prize winners does not mention the content of Reiss’ paper, book or article, but does mention his post as a reverend, which he held when he was appointed, I can’t help but think that some people have been out to knock him down for some time, and that some very (willfully?) poor journalism has presented them with the pretext to do so.
The villians in this are the journalists, and the defenders of reason and the Enlightenment who, it appears, can neither read, nor do they respect academic disciplines outside their own, instead assuming the authority to pronounce, with real, material consequences, on fields of knowledge of which they are (proudly) ignorant. That they all come out of this not only as material winners, but in some circles as moral victors too, is a disgrace.
I know it’s probably not the best formed analogy in the world, but it seems to me that in this area of science vs religion; Science is winning the battles but losing the war.
If this is war, it appears to be the case of either; the generous explanation, in which generals driven mad by war end up shooting up the soldiers of an ally because they looked a bit funny, or; the ungenerous explanation, in which unscrupulous generals use the fog of war to dispose of someone on their side who they personally dislike.
Andrew Bartlett’s latest blog post… In/credible
Very well said. Sums up my thoughts and experience exactly.
I think I’d ultimately defend Dawkins if for no other reason than that he’s enabled us to have something I can’t remember ever happening in my lifetime: a largescale public debate about atheism and the existence of god. That’s not necessarily a debate about good guys and bad guys, nor about right and wrong in the ethical or moral sense: but it is a debate about reason and science and it is a debate about an enormous question and yet one people previously found it convenient to ignore. If you wait for entirely the right person to conduct entirely the right discussion in entirely the right way – it’ll never happen. So he can be criticised for this and that, and rightly – but overall, in general, he’s a good thing.
ejh’s latest blog post… When did you last see your mother?
I first encountered Dawkins some years ago, at a lecture he gave on fundamentalism. I came away thinking he had a lot of good ideas but that his manner of communicating them was ultimately counter-productive and self-defeating. Ever since then he has done nothing but reinforce this view, to the point that his good ideas are lost in the fog of confrontational politics he’s generated around the issue. So much so, that I have given (semi-serious) consideration to the idea that he may well be a religious fundamentalist himself, because frankly his attitude clearly invites religious people to take a more entrenched position.
If he really is seeking to promote atheism, then — I fear — he’s an utter fool.
Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist, psychotherapist and systems-theorist (he’s also my current intellectual hero, I should point out). He developed a theory of schizophrenia known as the ‘double bind’ theory. It’s a hideously complex idea (as befits a hideously complex subject) that identifies “disruptions” to normal mental functioning due to an inability to process logical paradoxes that are created when we receive contradictory or inconsistent information on two differeing levels of communication.
Double binds end up severely disrupting, among other things, the very ability to learn. So when a person (or group) has learnt that something is true, they are also at the same time learning a whole host of other things… about who to believe, about the nature of validity and truth, and about the nature of authority and fact. So if you then tell that person that “the truth” (as they have already processed it) is a lie, or is “superstition” then you run a serious risk of “disrupting a more abstract pattern that may be essential to future learning”. The natural response therefore, from the healthy mind let me stress, is to reject the new information lest it undermine that ability to learn.
So, to quote Mary Bateson (who carried on her father’s work to some extent),
As such, the primary effect of the Dawkins attitude (not the information he wishes to convey, but the language and tone in which he conveys it) will not be to weaken the religious faith of believers, but instead to strenghten it — for the perfectly valid reason that doing so protects the believer from the double bind situation.
Dawkins needs to read some Bateson.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Head around the door
the fog of confrontational politics he’s generated around the issue
Well, firstly, I think it’s not wholly reasonable to describe that fog as if he generated it himself: I think many (or most) of the responses to Dawkins may fairly be considered to have done as as much as he has. But secondly, the point he is making is at root a confrontational one: there is a limit to how non-confrontationally it can be put.
The reason is that he is asking “where is the evidence for this?” to people who have none and do not wish to face up to that. Indeed, the responses I refer to have very largely relied on evading the question, or pretending that Dawkins is asking something other than he is asking, or both. I’m far from sure that this is Dawkins’ fault.
ejh’s latest blog post… When did you last see your mother?
We’ll have to agree to disagree here, ejh.
I do not believe that the point he’s making needs to be confrontational. So the fact that he’s going about it in such an arrogant and aggressive manner is his choice, and he is largely setting the tone for the atheism Vs. religion debate. It could have been done in a very different manner (see the Mary Bateson quote, above).
I agree that those who seek to have creationism taught as a science need to be resisted. And in such cases a certain confrontational aspect may need to be adopted. I’m not suggesting that every single thing the man says is incorrect. But to describe creationism as “superstitious nonsense”, as he has done on numerous occasions, is utterly counter-productive and unnecessarily confrontational.
Beyond that, it’s plain wrong.
I’m aware that plenty of people see mythology as nothing more than fiction and/or lies. And perhaps you are one of them. Perhaps you’d be happy (as would Dawkins, I presume) to dismiss the creation myths of aboriginal Australians as “lies” or “superstitious nonsense”. Or the myths of the Iatmul people of New Guinea (who have my personal favourite creation myth) or the myriad others that we know about.
To me these are not lies, though they are clearly incompatible — both with each other, and with the scientific story of creation. To me they are poetic versions of the same truth, and are huge storehouses of knowledge and wisdom. Dawkins appears unwilling to accept this position and insists that there is only One Truth. And it’s His Truth.
I can’t get behind that sort of blinkered fundamentalism.
Then, when he dismissed pantheism as “nothing more than sexed-up atheism” it was, for me, the final nail in his coffin. To attack the very notion of sacredness being a vital part of human existence is about as anti-human as any religious fundamentalism (in my opinion). It’s one thing to sneer at my opinion; plenty of poeple do; but to simply dismiss the deeply felt beliefs of the likes of Spinoza or Einstein in such an offensive and patronising manner makes him seem like something of an oaf to me. He’s an intellectual midget compared to some of those whose views he is willing to sneer at and pass over with hardly a glance.
But my biggest issue with Dawkins, to return to my initial comment, is that he quite clearly doesn’t know the first thing about human psychology; in particular group psychology. Which in turn suggests he knows little about the very thing he’s attacking.
As I have explained above, there are well-understood reasons why Dawkins’ approach is guaranteed to fail (i.e. it will make religious radicals more radical and not less so). That he ignores, or has failed to research, these reasons suggests to me that he should be treated with deep scepticism.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Head around the door
When I write: “To me these are not lies, though they are clearly incompatible”, I should have added “in a literal sense” in parenthesis after it.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Head around the door
Perhaps you’d be happy (as would Dawkins, I presume) to dismiss the creation myths of aboriginal Australians as “lies” or “superstitious nonsense”. Or the myths of the Iatmul people of New Guinea (who have my personal favourite creation myth) or the myriad others that we know about.
This is a very strange passage. It ascribes an opinion to Dawkins on the basis solely of presumption and attaches me to the same without presenting any evidence to suggest I share it.
As I have explained above, there are well-understood reasons why Dawkins’ approach is guaranteed to fail (i.e. it will make religious radicals more radical and not less so).
I don’t think this is so, because I think it mistakes the nature of debate and particularly of debate about religion. Mutual polemics rarely end in the way they do in Plato, or in old religious pamphlets, with one side admitting their error and joining up with the other side. That’s not often what happens and even more rarely when we are dealing with the phenomenon of people choosing to belief something without having any evidential basis for it: we’re already to some degree outside the realms of the purely rational and one virtue of Dawkins is that he insists that this is both true and important.
However, often in debate we are performing not for the benefit of our opponent so much as for the audience: and we are not necessarily seeking to immediately persuade (although naturally we are obliged to debate as if we were) so much as to sow doubts, or to say things which even if rejected now may be recollected and viewed with favour later.
Dawkins has done this: moreover he has done it without allowing the religious debate to be dominated by the question of the utility of religious belief but insisting on the question of its truth. Hurrah for that. Of course it is an incomplete approach, but on the other hand it is so because it is including the thing that had previously been left out.
All my life it has been assumed that religious belief was fundamentally good, that priests were (with exceptions) basically good and wise people because they possessed and dispensed moral guidance from a better source than man, that religious disbelief was basically an absence of something rather than the presence of reason. (Thought for the Day comes to mind.) Now this has been challenged. If you don’t like how it has been challenged, fair play – but it will be challenged by other people in the future and some will do it in a better way. But it will have been Dawkins who knocked the door down so that others could follow.
ejh’s latest blog post… When did you last see your mother?
This is a very strange passage. It ascribes an opinion to Dawkins on the basis solely of presumption and attaches me to the same without presenting any evidence to suggest I share it.
No it doesn’t. I prefaced it with the word “perhaps” to indicate quite clearly that I was making a supposition based upon the evidence available to me. Academia has made me very deliberate in my choice of words.
Dawkins has in the past described the Christian creation myth both as superstitious nonsense and as a lie. The basis of his opinion is that the myth does not tally with the current scientific view of creation / human evolution. Given that the other creation myths I mentioned share the same property that Dawkins objects to in the Christian myth (that of failing to tally with the literal scientific version), it is a safe assumption that he would also need to charecterise them as superstitious nonsense and/or lies in order to remain consistent.
I suggested that you may share that opinion (again, the word “perhaps” indicates suggestion and indeed invites correction) because you are defending the confrontational attitude he has taken, which I assumed meant you were defending his characterisation of those myths as superstitious nonsense (given that is precisely what I am declaring is confrontational about his attitude).
If I am mistaken, then as mentioned, I invite correction. I would be particularly intrigued by any coherent argument that can describe the christian creation myth as superstitious nonsense yet at the same time avoid making the same statement about — for example — the Iatmul creation myth. I would be intrigued because, as of now, I cannot imagine such an argument.
I don’t think this is so, because I think it mistakes the nature of debate and particularly of debate about religion. Mutual polemics rarely end in the way they do in Plato, or in old religious pamphlets, with one side admitting their error and joining up with the other side. That’s not often what happens and even more rarely when we are dealing with the phenomenon of people choosing to belief something without having any evidential basis for it: we’re already to some degree outside the realms of the purely rational and one virtue of Dawkins is that he insists that this is both true and important.
With the greatest respect, this paragraph suggests that you may not have understood the point I was trying to make about the double bind and the mechanisms by which the human mind processes and learns new information (i.e. that inherent in learning is a pattern of interacting mechanisms or systems which contains information about the nature of authority, validity, truth and fact, and that disruptions to that pattern can be extremely destructive to the future ability of the mind to learn. As such we have in-built mechanisms that resist such disturbance). So when you talk about “the phenomenon of people choosing to belief something without having any evidential basis for it”, you are missing the crucial point that for a christian creationist, the bible provides exactly that evidential basis. A person or group who views the world in this manner must resist any direct attack upon the bible by becoming evermore entrenched in its defence. To do otherwise is to invite precisely that disruption which — in extreme cases — the double bind theory states will lead to psychosis.
Instead of stating that the bible is a lie, which will encourage fundamentalism, one needs to find a way of communicating a more complex view; that creationism is a version of the truth, just as the evolution is a version of the truth. One is mytho-poetic truth, the other scientific truth. One needs to communicate the fact that both versions have appropriate uses and fulfill different social needs. That by attempting to teach creationism as “science” one is not disseminating of a lie, but simply making an error of categorisation.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Head around the door
So when you talk about “the phenomenon of people choosing to belief something without having any evidential basis for it”, you are missing the crucial point that for a christian creationist, the bible provides exactly that evidential basis.
Yes, but it isn’t. It is not evidence. And there is a limit to how reasonable or wise it is to refrain from saying so, merely because it would be tactful. To say so isn’t to dismiss the power of myths or their purpose or indeed their relationship to the truth: but it is to say something that is true. Why do people expect Dawkins not to say what is true? Might he not have a problem with that?
ejh’s latest blog post… When did you last see your mother?
As I suspected, we won’t find common ground here. Which is to be expected; I find it an increasingly rare occurrence for anyone to agree with me.
One last thing, ejh. It’s taken me the best part of two years to get my head around Bateson’s ideas, and my worldview has shifted significantly as a result. I do not expect to convince anyone that this worldview is “correct” in a short discussion in the comments of a blog (even a blog as good as this one!) though I do believe it to be so.
However, I would respectfully suggest that — at a minimum — you might re-evaluate your statement regarding the bible as “evidence” (i.e. that it’s not). I think you may be confusing the meaning of the word “evidence” with that of the phrase “scientific proof”. A fact that actually illustrates my point in a roundabout way.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Me and Gregory
Nope, I’m happy with the use of the term “evidence”. I’m aware that it could have some realtionship to the truth in a number of different ways but in the absence of anything to back it up, ant corroboration it’s not evidence.
To be honest, I think you may be confusing the terms “evidence” with “scientific proof”. Information that may or may not support a certain thesis (or hypothesis) is evidence. It’s not proof.
Proof consists of either an huge weight of individual pieces of evidence pointing incontrovertibly in the same direction, or even of one piece of evidence of such enormous significance and unquestionable meaning. But evidence isn’t “anything that somebody says has meaning”. It has to have some status.
Beowulf is not evidence of the existence of monsters. It is evidence of the existence of belief in monsters, but not of monsters themselves. And the Bible doesn’t reach the status of evidence for the contentions that it makes. It’s not evidence for God. It makes contentions but in and of itself it provides nothing to back up those contentions. That’s important. A contention is not evidence.
Now one could produce evidence to back up some of its contentions. This is so, for instance, when it comes to the existence of Jesus. I don’t believe there was such a figure, but there is evidence for the contention that there was. But this, too, is an impotant distinction to grasp, that there can be evidence for a thesis that turns out in the end. not to be true. A lot of people don’t see this – in practice they don’t see the middle ground between proof and nothing. But that middle ground is where evidence resides. The Bible isn’t in it, though. That’s just “something somebody reckons”.
ejh’s latest blog post… When did you last see your mother?
Fair enough, ejh. Perhaps I am wrong on this. But it’s worth pointing out that one of the definitions of the word “evidence” (indeed the primary definition in The American Heritage Dictionary) is: “A thing or things helpful in forming a conclusion or judgment”.
Any individual, group or culture which bases its epistemology on the belief that the bible is the literal word of God could not help but view the bible as being “helpful in forming a conclusion of judgment”.
Similarly, any individual, group or culture which bases its epistemology on the belief that sense-data provide an accurate picture of the objective world (also a tenuous assumption, though for different reasons) would have to disagree. As you are doing now.
Unfortunately, by aggressively insisting that someone’s basic epistemology is a “lie”, or “superstitious nonsense”, one is forcing them into a double bind; the outcome of which may be psychosis (the double bind is endemic to human life, as they say, but some are more susceptible to its disruptive effects than others). All minds have natural inbuilt defences against psychosis (the self-correcting nature of the mental system) which will tend to produce a more extreme adherence to the epistemology under threat in many.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Me and Gregory
In the above citation, dieal = ideal
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Head around the door
I thought Dawkins was a lot more mellow in his Darwin series, much politer to his opponents, and even quite moving when he spoke about Darwin. As for some biology teachers he interviewed, they were pretty shifty about confronting kids from religious backgrounds, didn’t think it was quite their place etc.
KB Player’s latest blog post… An old fear
A few reasons why I find Dawkins a fool.
The ‘child abuse’ claim is deeply stupid. We all must know some people who are bringing their children up as X or Y. Are we really comfortable saying that they are abusing their children?
Memes. One, the idea of memetics, if rigorously applied, would be the most relativistic explation of knowledge possible. But it isn’t rigorously applied, for the most part, it is used to ‘explain’ beliefs and cultural practices etc. that the writer ‘knows’ to be false/disapproves of. And, it betrays his arrogance; a complete (and proud) ignorance of the sociology of culture and knowledge.
The Enemies of Reason. Dowsers are a threat to the Enlightenment and reason? Nor the ad men? Or PR people? Or the Daily Mail and the rest? Or government propagandists. Or the distortions of science that result from its increasing incorporation into the machinery of capitalism. All this, and you have a go at dowsers and the like. Get real. Oh, and disgnosing the threat to reason so willfully badly is itself an affront to reason and Enlightenment.
His ‘naturalistic’ explanation of religion. As far as I can see, the man has completely ignored all the sociology of religion, in favour of developing a new set of ideas from whole cloth. Fine, you might say, if you have a proplem with sociology. But it betrays a willful ignorance of the academic and scholary work of other fields that is ill-fitting for a defender of reason. And ‘delusion’? I seem to remember him having a go at people who incorrectly use scientific terminology in other fields of academia. Does he really think that religious belief fits the definition of delusion used in psychology? Does he really think that the majority of the world is mentally ill? See above; child abuse – the man simply cannot communicate (anymore) except to the gallery.
Brights. Fuck, I know plenty of dim atheists. And I know plenty of clever religious people. What an arrogant label to slap on yourself.
His style seems designed to wind people up. If he was just a media personality, that is an excellent thing. But he claims that he is taking part in some great intellectual struggle, but goes about it like he isn’t actually interested in winning it, only in having his new documentary series green-lit. He is a chair of science communication, but if he really wants to win people to his side, he has chosen his style of presentation so badly, over and over again.
Again, I have a undergraduate degree in genetics, a postgraduate degree in genetics, and I am an atheist – but I haven’t been his sort of wanker about it since I was 18. If I think that he’s a tool…
While I broadly share some of Andrew’s frustration with Dawkins’ more foolish gestures — although I think in some cases he may have been misrepresented, or naive — hasn’t he himself said sheepishly after The Selfish Gene that memes aren’t a particularly useful or robust concept? The only person I’ve come across who seems to use the term enthusiastically in supposedly scientific discourse is Susan Blackmore, and with any luck the word and the notion will go the way of phlogiston.
Since I haven’t read any of Dawkins’ book since the (excellent) Blind Watchmaker, I’m never sure whether he’s dumbing himself down in his comment articles and public lectures, or whether he really is slipping into self-caricature. There’s a really nice line in Andrew Brown’s old book “The Darwin Wars”, where he says something like `thoughtful Dawkins is the best antidote to vulgar Dawkins, but the latter is more in evidence increasingly’.
Andrew’s list of reasons why he dislikes Dawkins contains only one which is actually related to something substantial that Dawkins has actually said. Regarding “The Enemies of Reason” – if I say that fred is a liar, does it automatically follow that I believe that everyone who is not fred is telling the truth?
- Richard Dawkins
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Me and Gregory
“Andrew’s list of reasons why he dislikes Dawkins contains only one which is actually related to something substantial that Dawkins has actually said.”
Religion = child abuse? He’s said that. Repeatedly.
Memes? They were his idea. Though he has sworn off memes as an explanation of culture, he nevertheless said it.
His ‘naturalistic’ explanation of religion, without reference, not even a dismissive one, of the existing body of work that attempts to understand religion without reference to its ‘truth’? He wrote the bloody book.
And ‘brights’? He gave his backing to that label.
Which one were you referring to?
“If I say that fred is a liar, does it automatically follow that I believe that everyone who is not fred is telling the truth?”
No, but if you make a TV programme that says that it is Fred who, though his lies, is ‘the’ enemy of truth, then we should expect Fred to be the main, or at least a major enemy of truth. If it turns out to be the case that there are far, far bigger enemies of truth that remain unmentioned, and if it turns out that Fred is a nutter who no-one listens to, then the TV programme is a major act of misdirection. If we rail against the threat to reason, and attempt to animate people to defend reason, but we identify enemies who, as a consequence of their relative power, do not threated reason, while ignoring the very real threats to reason, then this is either misdirection or a demonstration of fundamental unreason. And misdirection and unreason are enemies of the truth just as much as a lie.