Liberal belief is not harmless

In general atheists only actively disbelieve in the existence of deities that are purported to have influence in the material world or that are presumed to have opinions and preferences about the way human beings conduct their affairs. As a result we are often accused of having an overly simplistic concept of God; merely attacking an old bearded strawman in the sky rather than dealing with Anselm’s unmoved mover or the Ground of Being that Thomas Aquinas and later “sophisticated” theologians like Paul Tillich, Alvin Plantinga and my latest buddy David Bentley Hart envisage. But there are reasons why most atheists ignore or are agnostic about abstract concepts of God not least because they really are un-falsifiable from a scientific point of view so having a strong opinion one way or the other would be irrational but more importantly the believer in the street is not concerned with abstract gods and neither, I suggest, is organised religion.
The gods that most religions present to their faithful are not abstract but quasi-human. They have opinions on dress, diet, sexuality and morality. They expect to be worshipped in specific ways on specific days with special words and rituals or prayed to while facing a particular direction. Some of them publish verbose and internally contradictory manuals with a limited first run distribution around a small area of the middle-east that make historical and factual claims we now know to be false and moral claims many now find abhorrent.
To me it is self-evident that these gods don’t exist in external reality nevertheless they do exist in the minds of many people and the ontological presumptions of many cultures. That is where my real beef with religion really starts.
American philosopher Peter Boghossian likes to define faith as “pretending to know things you don’t know”. Religion makes truth claims about God’s desires on the basis of very flimsy evidence yet these claims are frequently put into the service of enforcing cultural norms that have very real detrimental effects on people. They have been used to defend slavery, they are used to perpetuate misogyny and the subjugation of women, and they are used to justify the hanging of homosexuals, the stoning of rape victims and apostates. They are used to restrict access to contraception and abortion and to deny proper medical care to women hospitalised due to miscarriages. “People pretending to know things they don’t know” are preventing the education of women, opposing the teaching of science, trying to deny same sex couples access to the civil institution of marriage and stop them from adopting children. People pretending to know things they don’t know want the rest of us to pretend we know these things too.
Now if you’re a believer you may be saying to yourself  “I don’t recognise the god this atheist is complaining about, my god doesn’t advocate stoning women or discrimination on the basis of gender or sexuality. My god is a loving inclusive nurturing sort of god”. Well if so congratulations on choosing a better behaved god and pretending to know nicer things about yours than some other people pretend to know about theirs but all believers, wittingly or not, are involved in the same conspiracy to pretend to know something they don’t know.
Liberal belief in a beneficent deity is, I concede, the source of much good in society. Apart from the comfort if gives to individuals, a selective reading of scripture encourages some religious communities to charity and social welfare, education programs and the like. Churches, Mosques and Synagogues offer sanctuary and community and for some that may be a necessary social lifeline. Yes, some religion in some aspects for some people is a good thing for some of the time.
But, one would have to be blind not to notice that much harm is being done in religion’s name and this is not, I believe, just because the extremists are doing it wrong. The bible that inspires the affable Rev Colin Still is the same bible that motivated Fred Phelps and the Southern Baptists. The Qur’an of “the religion of peace” is also the handbook for Boko Haram. The Jihadists and the moderates, the bigots and the liberals are just pretending to know different things about the nature of God and there is no objective way to prove who if anyone is ‘correct’ since God is unavailable for comment.
Liberal belief is not benign: it is the foundation for extremism. It renders truth claims about the nature of God socially and intellectually respectable despite having no objective measure of their worth. Even liberal belief protects itself against criticism by insisting ridicule of religion is at best impolite and at worst blasphemous giving cover to extremists who will kill over religious satire. The very premise that there exists a God that has attitudes, rules, regulations, likes and dislikes is the root of much more suffering and injustice than can be justified by the good it sometimes engenders and besides as humanists have proved again and again God really is unnecessary for human flourishing.
If theists only believed in the apophatic, un-moved mover god of sophisticated theologians I doubt I would even bother to write this blog. I have no problem with that sort of belief since; for one thing, they may be right but more to the point no-one ever got killed by arguing over the foibles of a Ground of Being.

Anne Atkins invokes the devil

It’s been a while since I caught Radio 4’s Thought Sermon for the Day segment on the Today program, but travelling to work this morning I was treated to some delightful drivel from Anne Atkins who to be fair I always find good value if only for the amusing lack of rational content in her contributions.

Anne Atkins

Her latest missive was inspired by the Church of England’s re-working of the Christening ceremony to eliminate the phrase asking godparents if they “reject the devil and all rebellion against God” and substituting it with “reject evil, and all its many forms, and all its empty promises”. Atkins opened her piece with the “good news” that the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby had “cast out the Devil” but then went on to query why, if absolute good was personified in the existence of the Christian God, should absolute evil not be similarly personified in the form of the Devil? This is of course a very good question that goes straight to the heart of the problem of evil, Christianity’s greatest philosophical nemesis, for if an omnibenevolent and omnipotent god exists there should be no place for evil.
Zoroastrianism, which predates Christianity by some seven centuries and second temple Judaism by two, resolved the apparent disparity by having opposing deities representing good (Ahura Mazda) and evil (Angra Mainyu) in eternal battle and it is likely that the character of Angra Mainyu became superimposed on Satan during the Babylonian exile demonising a character that in earlier Jewish tradition was considered a loyal agent of Yahweh’s and merely doing his bidding. Mutated by Christian mythology, medieval iconography and Dante’s Divine Comedy we have ended up with the cartoonish Horned Devil so beloved of fire and brimstone Southern Baptist types but seen as an embarrassment to liberal Christians who well understand the theological difficulties such an entity poses.
Anne Atkins reaches out to C.S Lewis to point out that the absurdity of this image has long been recognised.

In every era the Church faces the challenge of presenting eternal truths in the vulgar tongue, and unchanging beliefs in the familiar media of the day. And the devil has been out of fashion as far as memory goes back. “If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in the patient’s mind,” Screwtape advises his diabolical pupil Wormwood, “suggest to him a picture of something in red tights.” As he observes, nobody could believe in that, so it will throw him off the scent. “An old text book method,” he says dismissively.

But the lurking implication is that there really is a demonic personality behind the temptation to do evil even if it doesn’t fit the stereotype…and that’s exactly where Atkins takes us

Plato taught that behind every material reality is a greater spiritual reality: his definition of God is the ἰδεα, the form, of the good. Thus good itself has the attributes of personality: mind; affection; and volition. God thinks: He speaks, and argues. He feels: He and loves and hates. He wills: deciding on action and carrying it out. If this is so, it is at least a rational supposition that the same could be true of evil. Indeed, otherwise it’s hard to see how evil ultimately exists. The difference between a wicked crime and an unfortunate accident is intent: one is wilful, the other fortuitous. If there is no evil objective behind the sorrows of the world, then they are not wrong but random. If there is morality, there must surely be evil as well as good.

So either she is a born again Zoroastrian or she has totally missed the theological implications of an evil being that her all loving god must necessarily be allowing to exist. But, like all good theists her angst is really all about the necessity of there being some divinely ordained objective morality as without that we are all doomed to nihilism.

 If there is no intelligent force of evil then we live in a neutral universe, I can make choices like a consumer in a supermarket, and ultimately nothing matters.

Nothing matters? Really! Her family, her health, world peace, poverty, the environment, human suffering none it matters unless there is an existential god and his evil twin to make it all meaningful. In order to make this work Atkins has to believe not only in her god but also in a nagging demon on her shoulder tempting her from the straight and narrow.
When new atheists ridicule the superannuated Santa Claus in the sky version of the Christian god we are told that we are fighting a straw man nobody believes in. Sophisticated theologians talk of God as the ground of being or some such blather that we are all too dim to appreciate. But Anne Atkins is not stupid or naïve. I’m sure she is as capable of understanding Alvin Plantinga or Paul Tillich as I am
yet here she is an intelligent woman, the wife of a clergyman no less, arguing against current Anglican doctrine and for the existence of an actual intelligent force for evil, or The Devil by any other name.

HuffPo mangles moral philosophy to argue against atheism

The Huffington Post has an article by Pastor Rick Henderson titled Why There Is No Such Thing as a Good Atheist in which he makes a superficially coherent argument that given naturalism, the default assumption of atheism, it is impossible for atheists to have objective morals and stay consistent to their world view

"Every expression of atheism necessitates at least three additional affirmations: 1. The universe is purely material. It is strictly natural, and there is no such thing as the supernatural (e.g., gods or spiritual forces). 2. The universe is scientific. It is observable, knowable and governed strictly by the laws of physics. 3. The universe is impersonal. It does not a have consciousness or a will, nor is it guided by a consciousness or a will. Denial of any one of those three affirmations will strike a mortal blow to atheism. Anything and everything that happens in such a universe is meaningless. A tree falls. A young girl is rescued from sexual slavery. A dog barks. A man is killed for not espousing the national religion. These are all actions that can be known and explained but never given any meaning or value. "

This is all true as far as it goes but is also question begging. Henderson is assuming that only an external conscious agent can give meaning to events and also that meaning requires objectivity, neither of which is self-evident.

"A good atheist -- that is, a consistent atheist -- recognizes this dilemma. His only reasonable conclusion is to reject objective meaning and morality. Thus, calling him "good" in the moral sense is nonsensical."

Again the conclusion is already in the premise that to be morally good requires moral objectivity and moral realism. He’s also equivocating as he is allowing “good” to serve as “consistent” and also “moral” which is how he arrives at his contention that there are no good atheists, either an atheist is moral (by objective standards) and therefor is not really an atheist or is consistent in which case not objectively moral.
O.K! In the first place it is true that many atheists live as if morality is objective, even if we know philosophically that it isn’t. Henderson correctly points out that one argument for the existence of our moral sense is evolutionary but denies this confers moral objectivity, which of course it doesn’t, but it doesn’t have to. Most atheists also behave as if they have free will despite there being good philosophical reasons and increasing neurophysiological evidence to suggest we don’t. But evolution doesn’t work that way; our sense of agency and our sense of moral objectivity are probably innate as stopping to philosophise about either would have no survival advantage in the environments where they evolved. It is not being a bad atheist to appear to hold objective moral values.
Secondly, “meaning” is a human construct. It is incoherent to talk about the meaning of events without a conscious meaning making observer but there is no reason why that observer has to be an omnipotent creator god. The benchmark for moral objectivity is as true for gods as it is for us as the Euthyphro dilemma points out. If gods are responsible for morality the subjectivism is theirs not ours but still says nothing about moral realism. We are perfectly entitled to be the arbiters of meaning since, as far as we know, we are the only entity that finds things meaningful. If we ever meet another meaning making sentient species no doubt we will have to negotiate
Thirdly, moral subjectivity does not entail moral relativism as Henderson contends.

[assuming]"…morality was developed to ensure the success of societies, which are necessary for human survival and thriving. Like the rules of a board game, morality is contrived to bring us together for productivity and happiness. If this were true, there is nothing to which we can appeal when we find the behavior of other societies repugnant and reprehensible. Because morality is the construct of a social group, it cannot extend further than a society's borders or endure longer than a society's existence."

“Society’s borders” are porous and flexible. Just as we would have to negotiate with an alien species, should we encounter one, we must also negotiate with neighboring cultures. Even if the moral basis of a behavior is subjective outcomes aren’t, which is why utilitarianism is the go to meta-ethic of choice for resolving these conflicts. In fact the only situation where ethical dilemmas cannot be approached this way is when the contentious behavior is religiously motivated.
Lastly, at least for the purposes of this post, the other bit of question begging in Henderson’s argument implies theism fares better than atheism in this respect. But the religious are just as subjective as they have to explain why the moral examples in their scriptures are correct, especially in circumstances where they patently aren’t. The Bible for instance condones rape, genocide, stoning, slavery, polygamy, and infanticide to name a few which would not pass most people's moral intuition. In fact a holy scripture that was morally consistent for all people at all times and under all circumstances would be the strongest physical evidence that such a religion was true, which is probably why there isn’t one.

Christian to BHA: “When are you going to campaign for polyamorous marriages to be legal?”

This Sunday I was at the monthly meeting of the East Kent Humanists in Canterbury to hear a presentation from Pavan Dhaliwal who is the Head of Public Affairs at the BHA. The subject matter was recent BHA campaigns including humanist marriages, school fair admissions policy and assisted dying all of which would have made for an interesting afternoon on their own. However also at the meeting was a first time attendee who quickly identified himself as a Christian, nice enough chap but with an obvious agenda…
His first contribution came during the discussion on the successful campaign to allow humanist celebrants to perform legal marriages in the UK. Pavan had explained that for technical reasons our best chance of success in the campaign was to present amendments to some suitable primary legislation which in this case was the Marriage Equality Bill which has finally legalised gay marriage. Although humanists support gay marriage on principle, the subject under discussion was humanist weddings but our Christian guest’s question to Pavan was “when are you going to campaign for polyamorous marriages to be legal?” Although phrased politely enough it was obviously his assumption that humanists would like to embark on a slippery slope of increasing marriage liberalisation as a matter of policy. Well maybe, but it is clear that somewhere he has lost the point about equality and as many Christians do focussed only on the immorality of sex outside of the conventional.
So let’s be clear… The point about marriage equality is that there exists a civil institution that for historical (and yes, religious) reasons confers upon a couple who are traditionally a man and a woman, legal, financial and fiscal rights and obligations. The structures are in place to automatically infer parental rights, property in common and, at some times under certain governments, tax benefits. There are also well worn legal mechanisms for dissolving this partnership and ensuring that property and parental obligations are separated appropriately. Marriage equality recognises that access to these rights and benefits need not be constrained by the sex or gender of the partners involved as gay and lesbian couples can be just as easily accommodated as heterosexuals. However people in polyamorous relationships do not have a pre-existing legal structure from which they are unfairly excluded. It’s not as though they are being discriminated against (at least not in this respect) as there is no institution from which to discriminate.
This is not to say that there is anything intrinsically morally wrong with polyamory. Assuming all partners within the relationship are informed and consenting it is as valid as any other personal arrangement between adults, but as a lifestyle it is not that straightforward to define. Relationships can be between two or more otherwise monogamous couples or open marriages where one or both partners separately form bonds outside the core relationship to true cohabiting ‘communes’ of individuals in a mutually sustaining relationship. The permutations are almost endless and It is difficult to imagine what any one-size-fits-all legal institution comparable to marriage would have to look like to accommodate them all. Neither does there seem to be an overwhelming clamour from the polyamorous for marriage although I am sure that should such an option be available there would be some at least who would participate in it.
In any event it is not for the BHA, or any humanist organisation, to spearhead a campaign for such a change. If it is to come then as with same sex marriage it needs to be from the people directly affected by it. The polyamorous community would need to define what constitutes such a relationship and make a claim for the rights and obligations a marriage would confer, at which point we would all have the opportunity to consider it on its merits. Now, I can see myself personally supporting such a move and could see humanists generally as fellow travellers on a well-defined campaign for recognition of polyamory but we’re not there yet and it is not an obvious next step for humanists in particular.
But going back to our Christian friend, I suspect what he was really trying to do was confirm his assumption that as atheists and humanists we were all out to destroy the moral fabric of his supposed Christian society by twisting his sacred definition of marriage even further out of shape and in that he may have been successful. Not one other person in the room suggested that polyamorous marriage would be undesirable:  merely difficult and, for the moment, not our fight.

Christianity's shallow morality

I recently finished reading A.C.Grayling’s latest book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism which is a pretty good read and an excellent primer on the standard apologetics of religion and the Humanist alternatives. However it is one, almost throw away, observation that he makes about the New Testament that I want to focus on here. He points out that because early Christianity was actually an apocalyptic and eschatological movement there is very little practical depth to the morality espoused within it.
Even I raised an eyebrow at this, because I’ve read a fair bit of the Bible (The cover to cover project is still a work in progress, finished the O.T and into the new as far as Paul’s Epistles) and I’m as likely as anyone to admit there is some real moral content. But actually, giving it some thought, I suspected I may have become a victim of the cultural hype surrounding Christianity and seeing something that isn’t there. So I did a little Bible dipping to refresh my memory and now I see his point.
Although the Gospels are strong on narrative, the specific exhortations to living a good life are sparse and in reality impractical for most people to follow. In effect they boil down to; give all your possessions to the poor, abandon your family to follow Jesus and love everybody. Paul in various epistles, but mainly to the Romans, adds “stoppit with the gay already” (that might not be a direct quotation) as like modern evangelicals it seems to be the only bit of Leviticus he still cared about post conversion. But he offered very little extra in the way of moral guidance.
The Pauline epistles are clear in the expectation that Christ is expected to return imminently, and it’s worth bearing in mind that all of Paul’s writing was done without the benefit of the synoptic gospels which all postdate him by various degrees, and say the same. Consequently his advice to his churches that members should only marry if they really really couldn’t keep it in their togas makes sense if you think that celibacy is going to be fairly short term and a brownie point come doomsday.
However, in the event that your messiah is going to be at least two millennia late (like that would happen?) celibacy seems less attractive and likely to supress the number of new Christians in the future. Similarly the thought of all Christians giving away their possessions and leaving their loved ones for a life of sandal shod evangelising today seems ridiculous, which is why they don’t do it for the most part.
Given that Paul also said that obeying the O.T laws was not a requisite for salvation (except the ‘don’t be gay’ one of course, what is it with that?) as it was all down to grace and faith in Jesus he seemed to rely on the same assumptions that some do today, that to be a Christian was to be intrinsically good, without any other moral input. This means that, as any Humanist would point out, Christians have to get their true morals from somewhere external to the Bible, in fact the same place we all do; from our common humanity and evolved pro-sociality. But if the early Church and indeed Jesus had really intended Christianity to be around for two thousand years we would expect the Bible to be much richer in moral guidance and be more relevant to the complex lives that we live today.

Catholic Archbishop says abusing Priests are not criminally responsible

The Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, has said in an interview that paedophilia is a psychological illness and not "a criminal condition". The claim was made on BBC Radio 5 Live where he went on to say…

"Don't tell me that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that. I don't think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished when he was himself damaged."

…referring to Priests he was aware of that had themselves been abused as children.
Now, I’m going to choose my words carefully as any defense of paedophilia can be seen as abhorrent by some people but in a limited sense I agree with him. Paedophilia is a paraphilia which may have its roots in early childhood abuse or it may simply be part of a range of human sexuality that includes all sorts of deviation (not meant pejoratively) from the heterosexual, age appropriate norms of modern society. However paedophiles have, in common with compulsive rapists, an insurmountable problem when it comes to satisfying their sexuality in that they have no potential consensual partners.
Our society, for good reason, does not consider minors to be emotionally capable of consenting to sex, even with each other let alone with an adult so any paedophile who acts on their desires immediately becomes an abuser. This must be so and must carry the full weight of the law, because there is no way to know how many paedophiles are actually in the general population who need to be deterred from abusing.
Risking making an argument from personal incredulity, I cannot believe there are any paedophiles who do not understand the profound wrongness of grooming and enticing children into sex. Our culture is explicit about this and transgressors get high profile coverage and stiff sentences not to mention the disgust of the population at large. So whilst Cardinal Napier maybe correct that abusers need counseling and therapy or whatever, he is totally off the mark when he suggests it is inappropriate to punish as well.
On one hand the Cardinal is actually espousing a progressive and liberal view of a subset of people many of whom are undoubtedly living their lives in emotional turmoil. On the other hand he appears to be doing so in an effort to exculpate abusive Priests from their moral responsibility for their actions and excuse the Church for aiding and abetting them. This cannot be allowable, and in some respects is precisely the attitude that got the Church into this position in the first place. A celibate priesthood must seem like a godsend (pun intended) to someone whose sexuality will never be socially acceptable, but then he finds himself not only with unfettered access to young children but in an institution that will shield him from the worst consequences of his actions. To suggest that these priests are not morally and criminally responsible on the basis that they couldn’t help it is wrong and dangerous in the extreme.

Thoughts on my own moral philosophy.

Well I blame ‘D’ over at She Who Chatters. It’s been a long while since I tried to unravel my own position on moral philosophy, but good old ‘D’ had to open that convoluted can of worms with her latest post (go read it, and all her others too).
So! The first thing I can say with some degree of certainty is that I am a moral anti-realist. I know this for two reasons: 1, someone cleverer than me told me I was and 2, I read up on anti-realism and wiki-walked my way through a few related definitions and found it corresponds with my belief that there are no moral absolutes, no eternal moral truths we can pluck from the ether to be a yardstick (meterstick?) to measure our own morality by and definitely no god given rule book.
Having decided there is no Platonic perfect morality to draw on, another problem presents itself: Does any moral position have a basis in reality? This is essentially a choice between Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism. Cognitivism holds that moral statements (propositions) can be demonstrably true or false, for example “stealing is wrong” carries the same veritas as “London buses are red”. At first glance this might look as though Cognitivism requires moral realism, but it would in fact be just as correct to say that “stealing is wrong” is a false statement. (The anti-realist position known as Error Theory states that all moral propositions are false). Nevertheless, my own position is that of Non-Cognitivism, which says that moral propositions are neither true nor false but are expressions of opinion (“stealing is wrong” is equivalent to “I believe stealing is wrong” or “Boo to stealing”).
However, many moral propositions while not what a proper philosopher would call ‘truth apt’ do have a high degree of ‘truthiness’ that endows them with a visceral certainty that makes them feel like the basis of an objective morality. This is particularly so of those moral positions that are often considered universals such as murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, cheating is wrong and the like. One would be hard pushed to find anyone in any society that would disagree with those statements (even if they do in fact kill, steal and cheat), possibly because either cultural or biological evolution has encouraged our internalisation of these ethics as a consequence of being a social species. But there is nothing obvious on deeper dispassionate reflection that makes any of these normative ethics intrinsically true. These same gut instincts also tend to inform (or misinform) our beliefs about more contentious moral statements such as; “homosexuality is wrong”, “sex outside of marriage is wrong”, or “recreational drugs are bad”. These are deontological ethics handed down to us by society or (more usually) religion that are even more transparently subjective when actually thought about although often presented as moral givens.
If all morals are subjective, as I believe them to be, we are then left with the thorny issue of moral relativism. I am not a moral relativist and to be honest I don’t think I have ever met anyone who is. It is one thing to acknowledge that different societies and different times hold differing moral standards (descriptive moral relativism) and entirely another to state that it is inappropriate or impossible to judge one against the other (meta-ethical moral relativism). If the latter were true we would not be in a position to agree that slavery, which used to be morally acceptable, is a moral evil and always has been. We don’t tend to say of slave owning cultures “oh, they were just the product of their time”; rather, we judge them as barbarous and backward. In the same way I am not prepared to defend female genital mutilation in Somalia just because it is a cultural norm there. But in my anti-realist, non-cognitive subjectively moral world what basis do I have to deem such practices as immoral?
My answer, for what it’s worth, is that although morals are not objective, outcomes of actions often are. I am a consequentialist and a utilitarian who believes that it is possible to apply reason to moral dilemmas and point to a rational system of ethics which in principle could be agreed on by everyone, ascertaining the costs and benefits of a particular action to the actors involved and devising a course that causes the least aggregate harm or even the most possible good (by harm and good I am limiting these to the measurable, economic and corporeal). However this becomes problematic if a society sanctifies cultural and religious norms to the extent that a critical examination of the assumptions behind them is impossible, requiring reconciling a putative infinite “spiritual” harm against a limited physical good, which is why such societies are able to justify honour killings and the mutilation of children. By rejecting deontological morality I believe I am justified in condemning such actions and rejecting cultural relativism on rational and scientific grounds.
There is not enough space here to explore all the ramifications of this, but Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism whose philosophy of universal utilitarianism can be read >here< and in his book has articulated similar ideas. Also Sam Harris’ book The Moral Landscape offers a scientific route to a moral society.
The links on this page all point to reliable sources of information about moral philosophy, so dive in if you dare…