A C Grayling: An antidote to the prevailing superstition
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Independent Minds
The launch of a national federation of atheist, humanist and secular student societies is one of the brightest things to happen this winter.
It is a good augury for the future that some of tomorrow's leaders are making a commitment to rational and ethical outlooks free of superstition. It promises hope of a world where faith – ultimately the opposite of reason – and dogma will not distort public debate in the interests of sectarian prejudice but where everything from public policy to the personal making of good lives will be the work of free and open minds.
Among the notable things about the launch at London's Conway Hall, attended by students from all over the country, were these: that a high proportion of those attending were science students, and a main reason why atheist, humanist and secularist groups are springing up in our universities is that they are a response to assertively proselytising religious groups, many of them externally funded and encouraged.
Why so many of the new activists among non-religious students should be scientists is obvious. Science is as much a mindset as a body of knowledge; its premise is that thought is to be guided by publicly testable and rationally consistent evidence. The discipline of this approach makes short work of the foundation of today's religions, which lie in the ignorance of people living several millennia ago. This critical, evidence-based, enquiring mindset also thinks afresh about the good for human lives and societies; it is this responsible motivation which most naturally accords with science at its best.
The other reason – the response to aggressive proselytising by religious groups – is prompted by a typical scenario: religious groups at freshers' fairs fastening on new students who are, perhaps, away from home for the first time, overwhelmed and nervous in the scary environment of university, surrounded by people making loud efforts to appear sophisticated, and in need of a friendly hand. The hand ceases to be friendly when the fresher wakes up to the limitations accepted in the moment of vulnerability. The non-religious groups aim to give a cheerful welcome and support without the baggage of having to think someone else's thoughts and follow someone else's rules as the price of fellowship.
The author is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, London
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Comments
Well of course we do. It's obvious.
Thing is we do know of at least one mechanism the application of which can come up with better explanations. They are better because they really explain things in a testable, falsifiable way, and can produce predictions which can then go on to be tested. These explanations will never be perfect and we have to continually work at them but surely they will get better and better if we stick at it.
On the other hand there are going to be things that are unexplainable. Some things just happen at random.
What we know for sure is that saying 'The Gods Did It', is not any kind of explanation at all.
That humans are superstitious by nature is evident from the prevalence of religion. The rise of science is an attempt to replace superstition with rational belief. The development of liberal societies are an attempt to overcome the restrictions of superstition-based dogma, and in particular to allow the individual the freedom to think.
The fact that no human being is able to be entirely rational, if indeed it is a fact, is not a counter-argument. Rather, it is a challenge to be more rigorous in combating superstition and in challenging religious dogma.
It is sad these men are not given the status they deserve, but my fear is that an outright commitment to atheistic thinking will blind us to those aspects of our being that so far have been given little investigation by both scientists and philosophers, and even priests who the latter should take it as the basis for thought.
I talk about the psychic aspects of our being. those things that stem from mind and I should say MIND.
Until the distinction between mind and brain, between minds expression and the laws of the material world are seen as interwoven but distinct, we will reduce ourselves to little more than biological automaton. this is not true.......
I rejoice that much silly superstitious thinking is being shouldered out of the common mindset, that people are maturing mentally and emotionally, enough to put religion to one side as some remnant of past childish thought.
To reject our psychic aspects, those parts of us that survive so called death, is to reject the very essence of our being. we lose a whole universe of experience, and it is sad these things are not taught by schools and priests, and philosophers .
instead we go along with the supposition we are just epiphenomenon when all the experience and research of such men as Arthur Findlay, Edward Randal, Leslie Flint, and other investigators of this subject tell us otherwise.
We would do better to look at the literature on all this, not with a superstitious mind but one schooled in rational thought. the universe will then be seen to be a far far bigger place than science has so far discovered. But still completely rational. there never has been, and never will be miracles, all Nature works according to its own laws, but these are far more than science has yet determined .
We need no construct of mans superstitious mind to posit the existence of some divine entity both personal to each of us yet transcendent. a whole thesis could be written on the contradictions of this.
one further thought, as Arthur Findlay astutely observes in his books, e.g. 'the Psychic Stream', all religion has its roots in psychic experience, from where mans predisposition to mythologizing and theology, take over and form superstitious religions such as Christianity, Islam or Judaism..
The new-age anti-materialist stance is just another form of crypto-religious hyperbole - insert the word God in there a few times in amongst all the 'psychic transcendence' and, hey presto, you're back to being just another religious nutter.
I and, I suspect,many other atheists have no time or need in our lives for unreasoned fantasy. If it can't withstand philosophical deconstruction at the hands of Grayling et al, it's just a load of b*ll*cks I'm afraid. Sounds a bit tough but, well, we all have to grow up some time. Welcome to the real world!
A scientific theory in layman's terms is a fact. Theory of gravity is a fact. Theory of evolution is a fact of the same magnitude. Same for theory of quantum mechanics. Theory of special and general relativity. And any other scientific theory one would care to name.
Too often the everyday use of theory, which really mean hypothesis, is confused with the scientific use of theory which really means an explanation which is overwhelmingly supported by all the facts. The theory of evolution is supported by so many facts from so many branches of science, without any one fact disproving it, that it is as near to a fact as a theory can get in science.
God can't be given as a rational argument because there is no proof. God requires belief. Belief without facts is irrational.
Have a look at Chapter 3 of Dawkins' "The God Delusion" for a discussion of many of these "proofs".
"listen up Anthony (sorry, AC) evolution is a THEORY - that's right. Some would say, theory is little better than faith"
Science produces theories which aim to explain the physical world and to make testable predictions about it, not to offer logical proofs. The theory of evolution is a remarkable example. It explains how life evolved from simple beginnings, by means of natural selection, without having to appeal to an unexplained designer. The evidence that supports the theory (especially recent evidence from the study of genetics) is such as to convince most rational open-minded people of its truth. It may turn out to be false, or to need revision. But it is the best explanation that we currently have for the existence of advanced life forms on this planet.
so being rational at heart we have to give a name to the great unknown, and 'god' in all its variations meets that need; the problems all arise from whether that naming of the unknown inspires or eases fear; and thats the really great division, which is very well illustrated by the deep unease felt by so many of the godly about death?
i like master grayling, but i wish that he had made a more critical analysis of the difficulties any federation of atheist, humanist and secular will encounter: to me atheists, and especially humanists, are almost as blinkered as the god followers!
Anyway most people do not think of god in that way. Islamic fundamentalists, and people who go to church on Sundays think there really is a god out there.
Thing is, people that believe in god and have dogmas attached to that start to make laws and try to control others behaviours according to their beliefs/dogmas. That is, they form groups and lobby until they get what they want. Think abortion time limits, stem cell research, euthanasia, ...
Maybe the only way to counter these things, religious people imposing their will on everyone, is for the rest to form a group to gently resist them.
I don't think they are the same. It is a non-symmetrical problem.
Say the religious ban abortion for all, then that affects everyone whether they like it or not. If abortion is legal, then the religious don't have to partake and everyone should be happy.
Probably the only way is to form a group to oppose these increasingly sophisticated religious groups.
Yours sincerely, Humphrey Graham, MA, C.Eng
I attended Birbeck College London and the class of degree I was awarded did not follow their own rules!
Janine Smith, BSc
The statement that the foundation of today's religious ..... lie in the ignorance of people living several millennia ago. This is a very disparaging remark which is an insult to the intellectuals of religious groups.
I am not an intellectual, but I find this article sloppily written which I am surprised at for a philosopher. If this is the proselytising language of A C Grayling's religion, then this reader is entirely unconvinced to join it.
Janine Smith, Oxford, UK
"The statement that the foundation of today's religious ..... lie in the ignorance of people living several millennia ago."
This viewpoint is entirely accurate.
"This is a very disparaging remark which is an insult to the intellectuals of religious groups."
The truth is never 'disparaging'; it is simply the TRUTH. IF you find the truth offensive, then it is a problem with your own mindset, and your inability or unwillingness to recognize the truth, to respect it and to make it the basis of your own worldview.
And I don't think I am alone in having smirked at the oxymoronic phrase 'intellectuals of religious groups'; show me one, and I'll show you an intellectual fraud!
The point is that as Godel demonstrated, in a sense updating the thinking of the Greeks, there are definite limits to rationality. The irrational world is "infinitely" larger than the rational world and the young scientists flocking, if we are to believe it, to Richard Dawkin's banner of hedonism should know this. If not a brief course in say Perturbation Theory, Kolmogorov etc should introduce them to the difficulties they are going to experience in nailing their "rational" models to the intransigencies of "reality".
I have been saddened to see Richard Dawkings, most of whose work I admire, stray so far from the bioscience in which he excels, not least as a communicator, into proselytising atheism. And while nearly all of us will have much sympathy for his self selected crusade to take on American creationists it is a shame that neither he nor other British intellectuals seem to want to attack the Muslim "verses of the sword" - Koran Suma 9 (or NuLabours gagging of non British non intellectuals that do seek to do so) with anything like the same vigour. Sir Alfred Ayer, an Oxford Professor at the same Oxford college as Richard Dawkins and I believe a significant influence on him, would not have been such a coward. The simple truth is that there is good and evil in each and every one of us. The mission of spirituality is to try bring out the good and repress the evil, that is both to inspire us and to give us a stop button. This is why Roman Catholics wear crucifixes, or so my Roman Catholic wife tells me, as in moments of fear and stress they touch their crucifixes to give themselves the reflex to find the courage to resist evil. The Nuremberg rallies and the subsequent death camps horrify us and horrify us deep down in a way that will not go away not because we can rationalise that it was all the work of those evil Germans, oops sorry, I meant just the few German bastards that misled the rest, but because we all know that deep down in the horror of our own secret corners we could easily have fallen ourselves. The Nazi horror made perfectly rational sense: breeding from the best and the brightest, gassing the handicapped that were holding up progress, ploughing back the money saved back into public works providing employment. The counter to Nazism was essentially irrational, a belief in the sacred, that sacrifices including the ultimate sacrifice, ie the ultimate irrationality, were needed to resist such an evil. Some Germans, more that we currently choose to admit, found the necessary faith.
I had the privilege years ago of employing as a young programmer one of the most brilliant mathematicians I have ever met. He had abandoned his doctorate studies at Cambridge to take up theology at Oxford and was to train to become an Anglo Catholic priest. It was my luck to get hold of him in-between. Our little group had many animated lunch time discussions, was there a good, was there a purpose or were we all just electrochemical impulses sliding randomly down the slopes of entropy etc. His essential point was that the big step is believing that their is a difference between good and evil, the rest is just cultural superstructure. You do not have to believe in the three card trick with bones (quoting the then Bishop of Durham) but you do have to take a stand against Mein Kampf or Suma 9. Since then I have stopped arguing about words. If doing the work of God makes your skin creep but you firmly believe you should come out on the side of good, then have it your way and call it Good.
This seems to be a version of the argument: Hitler was an atheist, Hitler did evil things, therefore atheism is evil. Dawkins discusses this in the final section of Chapter 7 of "The God Delusion". In sum it is debatable whether Hitler was an atheist; indeed there is compelling evidence that he remained a "good" Catholic, or pretended to do so in order to influence German Christians. But even if Hitler became an atheist in later life, this of itself did not prompt him to do evil things. As Dawkins puts it, "Hitler did extremely evil things ... in the name of ... an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings".
Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state which denied individual human rights and freedom of expression. It was thus the very opposite of an enlightened rational society.
At last a student support and discussion organisation which is based on a non-theistic foundation. For far too long have the churchly organisations had it their own way, well funded and organised and oh - so evangelical.
Maybe man could not have developed to his present state of social organisation without toying with the idea of a supernatural god but it doesn't mean that we have to continue to nurture such thoughts.
A big stick wielded by God has been useful in the past for bringing non civilized practices to an end but it is now becoming an embarrassment and introducing more problems than it solves. Time to wean ourselves of these childish thoughts and accept reality as it is.
Mankind is but a biological life form, the only minds to think we are special are ourselves, which is perfectly normal for primitive creatures. The chances that mankind is the peak of intelligent life (I sometimes wonder about the use of the word intelligent in this context) in the universe is very close to zero. Every creature has an intelligence - it is just different from ours.
I am alarmed at how intolerant the atheists are fast becoming. Undergraduate freshers' fairs can accommodate a range of proselytisng groups, surely, otherwise what price freedom of speech? And a student who feels compelled to 'think someone else's thoughts' ought not to have got into university in the first place.
Pat Wheeler
he had obviously drunk a little too hastily
atheist, humanist and secular he said
such a good augury for the future - for explanation.
but rational and ethical free of what - she said
when natures ultimate secrets remain a mystery.
is melancholia not the uplift of art -
and if comfort is sought in a life lived well -
and if that is considered virtually coterminous
with creativity in the broadest sense -
a language without grammar, without rules
a spiritual sense free of organised religion
does this not reveal reason in a space
of ordinary goodness and monstrous acts
a modernist tyranny terrifyingly insensitive
to a very human fallibility - an oscillatory disequilibrium
whose constant may be a failure to cohere
instinct moving toward maturity - civilisation perhaps
and us waking to the fact there are no either ors
only as if - and so many beguiling storylines -
people speaking with no longer to or at
unbroken as our curious refreshment
no matter how forlorn to those seeking certainty.
they tidy away the dishes
he remained silent for a long time.
Quantum physics dictates that our Newtonian notion of our universe is defunct, thus leaving science once again treading water at the deep end of the pool of understanding.
My point is that without spiritual enlightenment and understanding the scientific route is baseless. If science is unable to explain base concepts definitively then let us not be so eager to call it reason based. Let us class science at yet another belief system, however impirical it may be.
Holding science as a vehicle to find truth is as foolish for a student as some monotheistic doctrine. The beauty of spirituality is that it does not have to be pursued in contradiction to other teachings. With Einstein as an example, spiritual and philosophical whimsy is a great force for truth by any path.
You ought to learn more about physics before dismissing it in such a glib, cavalier fashion.
'science once again treading water at the deep end of the pool'?
FYI, quantum theory agrees with experimental data with a staggering degree of accuracy - up to 15 decimal places in one famous case. And General Relativity is even more accurate - up to 18 decimal places. Granted, physics is still a work in progress, and we may not yet have the final Theory of Everything. But you cannot deny (at least, if you knew anything about it) that its accomplishments to date have been impressive. Can you claim the same for any worldview based on 'spiritual englightenment'? Perhaps you are one of these deluded New Age types who think the deepest secrets of the universe can be revealed to anyone by the simple expedient of lighting incense and meditating...?
It is utterly fatuous to suggest - as the religious and 'spiritual' often do - that just because science's understanding of the universe is not yet complete, this means that all other worldviews are equally valid. They are not, and only an idiot or a person with a religious agenda could ever make such a fatal mistake in basic reasoning.
One thing is to say that religious traditions are the result of cultural evolution and include many fairy tales; quite another thing is to mistake the ultimate religious question (why and what for are we here?) with whatever form the answer to that question may have taken in different cultural settings. Because we can't really know, society should be organized around secular principles, certainly. But I totally fail to see how on earth can scientific thought be reconciled with atheism, which surely is an example of accepting lack of evidence as solid proof of abscence.
For me, science is agnostic: the more we know, the more we know we may never get the full picture. Believers and atheists are in a totally different category from science: they both desperately need to 'believe' they know much more than they can possibly know. Some believers are more sincere than some atheists, in the sense that they accept they are where they are because of a leap in reason they call faith. The troubling thing about most atheists is that they would pretend their position is based on scientific reason, which is a travesty of science.
Very possibly - but disbelievers are atheists. Not the same thing at all. Disbelief is not a 'belief' of any kind - despite your misrepresentation.
By its nature atheism is non-belief. As such, there is little commonality as compared with the various religions.
I really can't see students (or anyone else) joining together to proclaim their non-belief.
But notwithstanding, you can hardly proselytise for non-religion. Rather one is reacting to religion - particularly all the in-your-face religiosity we presently see.
Ah, yes, lefalcon. Here we see one of the main - but usually unspoken - motivations that the religious have for despising atheists, 'atheistic science' and atheist intellectuals; it is a fear - and perhaps a grudging jealousy - of people they (usually correctly) perceive to be more intelligent and educated than themselves, and who can therefore access and exercise forms of knowledge and thinking that they - religious people - will never understand (or so they believe). These religious anti-intellectuals frequently do themselves a disservice, of course, because many of them COULD understand the atheist worldview, and 'atheistic science' (such as evolution, or cosmology), if only (a) they were not intellectually lazy, and were prepared to apply themselves to scientific learning and independent thinking to the degree that many atheists have, and (b) they didn't let their religious dogmatism get in the way, and shut their minds down to any knowledge and ideas that conflicted with it.
"Being normally from more privileged backgrounds, they frown upon and fear universal laws as vehicles through which humble individuals could ascend a staircase to the heavens."
Did I mention, lefalcon, that religious anti-intellectualism also has a component of good old-fashioned class-war envy; it portrays 'intellectuals' to be people who come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, and who can therefore afford a good education. This is one more reason to despise them and reject everything they believe, apparently - and to believe that only the 'poor and meek' will get to Heaven, of course; the age-old compensation offered by the RELIGIOUS ELITE (and the POLITICAL ELITE they were in bed with) to the poor, oppressed and disenfranchised of the world - and which, apparently, many people still want to believe. Why do you think that Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions preach that rich, powerful people are selfish and evil, while poor, wretched people are God's own chosen, and will enjoy rewards in Heaven for their lifetime of suffering and servitude on Earth? Because that is the BRIBE, the promise of DELAYED GRATIFICATION, by which the ruling elite could exercise control over the masses and keep them in their place. A brilliant - if deeply cynical - piece of mind-control, don't you think (or you would, if only you hadn't already swallowed it hook, line and sinker....)
"Their doctrine is that universal laws should only be used by those who have the power- the elitists, to bend physical matter, and others, to their will."
Hmmm... Einstein had this to say about those who wish to wield power of others (my capitals): "The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, USUALLY THE CHURCH AS WELL, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."
More quotations from Einstein to follow in my next post...
"It is not so much that they do not believe in God, as they are passionately jealous of him/her. They wish to say "why worship that which may not exist when you can worship me?" This was the prime motivation of David Hume, and it remains the prime motivation of all so called atheistic intellectualls today. "
Yes another hugely sweeping statement, condemning all atheist intellectuals as raging egotists who want to be worshipped! I mean, seriously - does ANYONE on here know any atheist intellectuals who exhibit a need to be revered, venerated and deferred to as much as - say - the average Pope, archbishop, imam or televangelist preacher does? Point not at the splinter in your neighbour's eye, but at the plank in your own (or that of your religion's leaders), lefalcon!
"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts."
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
Okay? Do you actually, finally GET IT now? Einstein did NOT believe in your god or anyone else's. His references to God were in the Deist sense only - a disembodied organizing principle of Nature, not a guy in a white robe somewhere who listens to prayers and cares about human concerns.
These quotes are taken from an excellent site, featuring many quotations about religion from famous atheists (some of whose names might surprise believers...). Can I recommend that believers please go to this site and read every single quote? They might give you some - badly needed - food for thought.
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quo