Today at 8:50 pm London time (rebroadcast Sunday at 8:50 am), BBC Radio 4 (FM) will broadcast what looks to be an accommodationist show taking the line Brother Blackford decries in the post below: who cares whether God exists—religion is a good thing.
The show, “Believing in belief,” by John Gray, can be heard here (but probably only for those in the UK), and it sounds dire. If there’s a podcast available thereafter, especially for those outside Old Blighty, I’ll let you know—if you really want to listen to stuff like this:
John Gray argues that the scientific and rationalist attack on religion is misguided. Extreme atheists do not realise that for most people across the globe, religion is not generally about personal belief. Instead, “Practice – ritual, meditation, a way of life – is what counts.” Central to religion is the power of myth, which still speaks to the contemporary mind. “The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories.” In fact, he argues, science has created its own myth, “chief among them the myth of salvation through science….The idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible” he says, “but no more so than the notion that humanity can use science to remake the world”
Whoever said that science will enable us to live without “myths” (he probably means “issues of purpose, value, and meaning”) is absurd. Humans need those things, but they don’t need religion to get them. Note also the implicit slur on the truth claims of religion (“the idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible”), but the concomitant claim that religions based on falsehoods are essential for humanity’s well-being.
And as for the stupidity of the notion that science can remake the world, compare the world of 1700 with the world of today. Note the differences. How many of those are due to science, and how many to religion? Let’s see: on the one side we have antibiotics and all other medicine, airplanes, computers, Moon landings, our understanding of evolution, lasers, and all the knowledge garnered by biology, chemistry, and physics. On the other side we have . . . a few new cathedrals.
UK readers: report how it went.
UPDATE: Commenter Sigmund says this: You should be able to hear it live in other countries by clicking on the “listen” link on the top right of this page.
Sounds like he’s been reading to much SciFi, Peter F. Hamilton springs to mind.
I quite liked “Fallen Dragon” but I haven’t been able to get into the other much.
Pandora’s Star is a good Hamilton. Nothing compared to an Iain M. Banks of course.
I have only “The Algebraist” and I thought it poorly structured. And all too interested in sadism and violence.
But some of the ideas where good. (Other were, how should I say, childish? But that goes for Hamilton too. Even Heinlein put all too much round-eyed fascination of his creations into his stories.)
So I’ll probably read another one, but it will take some time.
Hamilton reads much as an accommodationist in his “Reality Dysfunction” series. He criticizes religion, but not without elevating it to sort-of-fact and sort-of-authority.
It is a pity, because I liked that world construct much more than the “Pandora’s Star” one that he now runs with. I am rereading it for details, then I am going to chuck the RD series. For some reason accommodationism has started to irritate me. =D
I love the RD books, mostly because it goes into the idea of: what if souls really exist?
And then you get into stuff like some entities have souls, others don’t (anymore?).
Basically the result is that the hypothesis is internally inconsistent.
Still a very good book. Starts off as hard SF, and it’s better if you know beforehand that halfway into the first book you get something of a return of the living dead event.
Who thinks that? Seriously, who? As far as I can see, atheists love stories and myths. Go to any comic or sci-fi convention and you’ll find atheists left, right and center.
Religion isn’t just the idea that myths and stories are important. It’s the idea that specific myths and stories are more important than all others. Atheists just don’t think that the Christian myths are any more special than Star Trek, Star Wars or Superman.
Finally, I don’t think many Christians really buy the argument that they are no more than people who enjoy a particular brand of fiction. They don’t behave as if their theology is no more important than the Kirk vs. Picard debate. I think atheists would be more than happy to leave them alone if they did. You won’t see Trekkies arguing for policies based on their favorite stories. You won’t see Star Wars fan-clubs trying to get “May the Force be with you” on any dollar bills.
+1
The difference between atheists and theists is that atheists recognise that myths are just that, myths. Theists think they are true.
You should be able to hear it live in other countries by clicking on the “listen” link on the top right of the following page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/
They’ve been trailing this all week on R4. I expect it to be awful.
Yes –
🙁
+1
Thanks for the offer but I think I’ll pass, life’s too short to listen to much of that crap. Brother Blackford I will make time for.
Gray wrote a book called Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia four years ago. At the time, in a surgical & extremely well written article, A.C. Grayling found “that in the work of leading philosopher John Gray, everything is the wrong way round and upside down”: Through the looking glass
A sample paragraph, by no means the best one, gives a flavour of Gray’s muddled mind:
The only philosophers that makes sense to me are Singer & some of Dennett ~ outside of those guys I end up wanting to break stuff
… and Grayling?
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Well ~ I’ve not read him, but I’ve heard him on YouTube & no doubt that’s the ‘Grayling lite’ shall we say
I thought he was charming, clear, witty & he exhibited a light touch. Must see if he writes well too ~ I’ve got The Meaning of Things in the queue as my starter Grayling [trainer wheels]
I’m cautious about these philosophers ~ I loved Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, but his free will stuff is difficult to read, illogical & he pulls some infuriating semantic tricks
Yes, I love Dennett but when it comes to free will I just don’t follow what he’s trying to say. Glad it’s not just me.
Grayling’s Ideals that Matter is excellent, with his clarity and wit well in evidence.
I’ve read only Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, which I found very cogent.
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I’d like to think that Grayling can write as well as he extemporaneously speaks (which he does well, in my opinion).
Ah! The Hair! Just jealous AC…
🙂
Are myths good things?
I used to think that believing in a talking donkey was ridiculous, but listening to John Gray has totally opened my mind.
The word is “ass.” Never compromise a good joke with needless modern delicacy! Always go with the King James version in all its color and force.
For example: “Biblical myth tells us Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. John Gray hopes to take out a few atheists with the same implement.”
+1
+1 2.
Yes, “ass” is a word which can be brayed from the pulpit but not from the public school classroom lectern.
You’ll have a hard time finding a better response to those who espouse belief in belief than Seneca’s famous quote on the matter:
It’s also worth noting that Seneca was born about the same time as Jesus is said to have been born and died a few decades after Jesus is said to have been crucified, yet he never gave any indication that he had heard of Jesus, any of the remarkable events surrounding him, or even of the Roman Christians Paul addressed his epistles to.
Cheers,
Does anyone know to what Christian apologists attribute Seneca’s silence?
The usual. Either they’ll trot out the popular lie that he was baptized by Paul or they’ll pretend that he couldn’t be expected to have noticed the inconsequential and petty political and religious antics of a backwater Roman outpost on the fringes of the Empire. Or both.
Cheers,
b&
“Whoever said that science will enable us to live without “myths” (he probably means “issues of purpose, value, and meaning”) is absurd.”
I think he means stories which illustrate those issues.
As everyone here knows, atheists don’t want humanity to live without myths. What new atheists want is for people to recognize the difference between a myth and a story handed down from on high.
Philosopher Stephen Law uses the phrase “going nuclear” to refer to the tactic of defending an unjustified belief by trying to undermine the possibility of any sort of justification for any sort of knowledge whatsoever. “Okay, my belief is mostly based on faith — but all beliefs are based on faith! Science is a faith, too! Empiricism can’t provide evidence for itself. For all we know we are in the Matrix and nothing we see exists at all!” Ka-boom! Everything is reduced to an undifferentiated level of mush and thus we only “choose” what to believe based on nonrational factors. God wins.
There should be a similar term for the tactic John Gray is apparently using here. I will suggest “committing theological suicide.”
“You know what’s wrong about atheism? They think theists really believe the shit we spout. But we don’t! It’s all just poetic metaphor and myth! We’re playacting and going through the motions! God? Who the hell knows or cares what it is or even if it is? Atheists are missing the point. It’s a story. It’s not factually true, it’s psychologically true. It speaks to us and the human condition. Atheists just don’t understand stories.”
Oh, look. The apologist just committed theological suicide. God is a myth. People just like the pretty music and candles and ceremonies and food. Hm. The apologist doesn’t appear to be moving. Oh, ok. Looks like there’s nothing to see here. We atheists will have to slink off now… move along, move along.
And then they spring up for a different audience. Ta-da! God lives! Another miracle!
Sheesh…
From whack-a-mole to whack-an-asshole.
I think you distilled the lunacy of what Gray, and people before him, is doing. The comfort lies in that they have been forced into this last resort-
There should be a similar term for the tactic John Gray is apparently using here.
I thought we agreed long ago that this was really just, in essence, nothing more than projection.
Projectile cogitating?
b&
Really looking forward to reading Stephen Law’s new book. It’s on my shelf, it’s just a matter of digging through all the other books there I haven’t read in order to read it. His BHA talk sold me.
Gray presented a series of straw men and non-sequiturs. He constantly makes a false equivalence between science and religion, and tells us how “evangelical atheists” want to do things that only exist in *his* imagination, as far as I can tell. He loves myths and thinks they’re useful, but not necessarily true, like science is useful, but not necessarily true.
The mistake he makes is that myths can only tell us truths about human story telling and our mindsets, whereas science tells us truths about reality. Until he grasps this simple truth he will wallow in a miasma of his own febrile imaginings.
In short, hopeless!
It is simply a nonsense to suggest that for most people religion is not about personal belief. It’s not just about living in the myths. Most people have very specific beliefs. You can tell as soon as you contradict one, or say something that is out of tune with what they believe. Gray must provide evidence for the claim he is making. Most religious rituals do not make sense without the beliefs, although it is just possible for people to use them without the accompanying beliefs. People like members of the Sea of Faith. But, in general, I believe, most religious people do share the fundamental beliefs of their religions, as beliefs. The claim that Gray is making — and many other religious apologists make it too — needs empirical support, and I’m not sure that anyone’s got that. It’s a convenient way of saying nothing by appearing to say something, and Gray is past master at this particular art.
There may be truth in saying that it’s not so much about the belief itself. But if that were the case, then shouldn’t the attacks by the “new atheists” be taken as irrelevant? Surely if it’s not what religion is then most people can get on board and agree with Dawkins et al. about the God question. Yet that doesn’t happen…
+1!
I’d put cathedrals on the science side, too, along with bridges, and houses, and macadam, and other feats of engineering.
Well said.
yes, science has give us many things but also the possibility to kill 50.000 people in one second, and the chemical industry has created numerous cancers. Take attention for Gray, he is not only a accomodationist, he has also choose the side of religion, now that he is aware of it’s power and the rising star of teaparty clowns like perry. It’s the infection of the virus he can’t get rid of.
Every bit as dreadful as I feared – garbage in fact. Listened to it as I was about to get off the train up to Norfolk so was not able to make notes, but he presents Darwinian evolution as a sort of working hypothesis until something better comes along. It is a fact, evolution happens, no better ‘idea’ is going to come along. Its simplicity is why it applies so widely. I really wanted to cry listening to him – a supposedly educated man.
Bracket him with Eagleton.
In the quote, Gray is doing the weird “X is a religion too” thing, when it comes to “myths”. On the one hand, people have a spiritual need for “myths” and the atheists are meanies by belittling those myths as falsehoods. On the other hand (put on a sneer when you read this) science has its myths too!
Well, which is it? Are myths bad because they are false (which is presumably what is meant by referring to “myths” in science), or are they spiritual necessities regardless of their accuracy? Why not consider the possibility that I have a spritual necessicity to see myself as biological kin to chimpanzees and daffodils, or to see all the amazing achievements of humanity as the result of a dance of molecules? Why is it okay to sneer at my “myths”?
As it happens, I personally don’t have much use for “sprituality”, but that’s a side issue. My real point is that these weird sneers of “myth too” and “religion too” show how parochial the religous side is here. A story about a global flood is allowed to live in the real of warm, fuzzy, good, spiritual stuff, but scientific ideas can never earn that privlege, despite what ought to be the considerable advantage of being actually true (which is what I try to value in place of “spirituality”).
Oops — “real” = “realm”