John N. Gray (b. 1948) is an English political philosopher  who is an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics.  According to Wikipedia, he “contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplementand the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.”

For a philosopher, Gray shows a curious tendency to denigrate reason and praise faith. We’ve met him before on this website (here and here), and in both cases he pointed out the limitations of science and argued that religion is a way of knowing that yields truths inaccessible to science.

We’re used to that view from faitheists and believers, but not from secular philosophers. It’s doubly curious because, in the article I’ll discuss today, Gray avers that he’s an atheist. (He’s also espoused another atheist-bashing trope: the notion that atheists are deficient because we don’t hold “the tragic view of life” taken by Nietzsche, whom Gray called “the pivotal modern critic of religion,” one who “will continue to be the ghost at the atheist feast.”)

Here’s some of Gray’s religion-osculation and science-bashing from a 2011 BBC piece, “A point of view: can religion tell us more than science“:

Unbelievers in religion who think science can save the world are possessed by a fantasy that’s far more childish than any myth. The idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible, but no more so than the notion that “humanity” can use science to remake the world.

. . . Myths aren’t relics of childish thinking that humanity leaves behind as it marches towards a more grown-up view of things. They’re stories that tell us something about ourselves that can’t be captured in scientific theories.

Just as you don’t have to believe that a scientific theory is true in order to use it, you don’t have to believe a story for it to give meaning to your life.

Myths can’t be verified or falsified in the way theories can be. But they can be more or less truthful to human experience, and I’ve no doubt that some of the ancient myths we inherit from religion are far more truthful than the stories the modern world tells about itself.

By all means, Dr. Gray, let us hear some of the ancient myths that are more truthful than what modern science accepts. By truths, he means “truths about human experience,” some of which can indeed be verified empirically (i.e., “I got depressed when I was diagnosed with cancer:). But as is usual with critics of “scientism,” Gray neglects to mention any of these truths. He just bashes science, perhaps because he resents its advances. What one cannot doubt, unless one is completely blinkered with faith, is that science has saved the world far more than any myth. Two examples: antibiotics and the Green Revolution.

What is is about atheists that makes them so ready to criticize other atheists rather than the religious, whose beliefs they not only find wrong, but sometimes admit are harmful? What comparable harms does atheism do? This kind of atheist-bashing fascinates me; after all, we all disbelieve in the same God!

I suppose the atheist-bashing of arrogant pundits like Gray derives from their claim that we’re disbelieving for the wrong reasons. But I suggest that “not enough evidence” is a reason that’s perfectly sufficient. As for the “value of myth” in helping humanity, I’d like to see some examples. As an atheist who nevertheless promotes religious belief, Gray is simply advancing the condescending Little People Argument. If we need myth, how about simple but clearly fictional stories that espouse racial and sexual equality and note the horrible consequences of prejudice. Why do we need to accrete those stories around scripture that is not only claimed to be true, but has a lot of bad side effects? Why the Bible instead of, say, Maus? (Actually, Maus is a graphic novel—a very wonderful one—based on real events.)

At any rate, Gray continues his attacks in another piece in BBC Magazine published 3 days ago: “The child-like faith in reason.” What a strange title for a philosopher to use! And the piece is every bit as critical of reason as Gray’s religious predecessors, like Martin Luther:

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard religion being described as childish. It’s one of those uncritically accepted ideas – perhaps I should say memes – that have been floating around for generations. Even many religious people seem to accept that there’s something at least child-like about their faith. Believing in God, they sometimes say, is a bond between human beings and an infinitely wiser power – we should trust in God just as we would a loving parent. When they hear this, our evangelical atheists feel vindicated in their crusade. In their view, nothing could be more childish than a relationship in which human beings are utterly dependent on a supernatural power. For these atheists, putting your trust in such an imaginary being is the essence of childishness.

Oh, Lord, there’s the “evangelical atheists” again, by which Gray really means “passionate and outspoken atheists.” He’s just saying that to slip the “evangelical” word in, as if somehow outspoken atheism was a religion. By those lights, I suppose we could call Gray an “evangelical philosopher.”

Gray continues, and I have bolded a very striking (and completely idiotic) statement:

Speaking as an atheist myself, I can’t help smiling when I hear religion being mocked in this way. Looking at the world as it has been and continues to be at the present time, it’s belief in human reason that’s childish. Religious faith is based on accepting that we know very little of God. But we know a great deal about human beings, and one of the things we know for sure is that we’re not rational animals. Believing in the power of human reason requires a greater leap of faith than believing in God.

Such a statement borders on insanity. For we have ample demonstration that using reason has told us truths about the universe. How do we know? Because reason works. If you want to cure infectious diseases, you do it by reason: making hypotheses, doing tests of whether diseases are caused by transmitted microorganisms, devising antibiotics or antivirals, testing them scientifically, and so on. It is through reason that we’ve found everything we know about the universe. If reason was as fallacious as Gray avows, the material human condition, as well as our ability to predict eclipses and send men to the Moon, wouldn’t have improved.

In contrast, believing in God hasn’t told us one thing about the universe, including whether said god exists, whether there is more than one god, what said god wants us to do, whether there’s an afterlife, and so on. Religion, in other words, simply makes stuff up and has no way to determine whether what it makes up bears any correspondence to reality. Why on earth, then, would you trust revelation and dogma more than reason? You wouldn’t trust revelation and dogma to fix your car, cure your disease, or purify your water. Why would you trust your entire life, now and hereafter, to it? There is no “leap of faith” involved in believing in reason.  We don’t have “faith” in reason, we use reason, as does Gray in his article. And we use it because it gives us results.  The true leap of faith is believing in supernatural beings and the dictates of religions.

In fact, in his whole article Gray says nothing in favor of reason, which he sees as hopelessly inadequate for solving human problems. Humans, he says, are not reasoning animals, for we have an annoying propensity to believe in the palpably untrue:

If human beings were potentially capable of applying reason in their lives they would show some sign of learning from what they had done wrong in the past, but history and everyday practice show them committing the same follies over and over again. They would alter their beliefs in accordance with facts, but clinging to beliefs in the face of contrary evidence is one of the most powerful and enduring human traits.

Umm. . . we no longer believe that disease or drought are signs of God’s displeasure (Rick Perry excepted), nor mental illness a sign of affliction by demons. We have used reason to show that lightning has physical causes rather than divine anger. Most of us use reason in our jobs, and we’d be unemployed if we didn’t. Why doesn’t Gray realize that?

Really, one would have to be blind to claim that every rejection of reason of humanity’s ancient days remains with us, and has kept us from advancing, both scientifically and morally. Morally because, as Steve Pinker showed in The Better Angels of Our Nature, it is reason that has led to the decline of violence on Earth, as well as other salubrious (and probably inexorable) changes in attitudes. For what is it but reason that has led us to recognize that heterosexual adult white European males hold no special moral privilege over gays, people of other ethnicities, or women? Or that children should be not be worked to death and animals mistreated? Those advances did not come from religion, although some churches promoted more liberal attitudes. Had equality been inherent in Christianity (or Judaism or Islam) from the outset, and had scripture been a myth that promoted good behavior, most of those improvements in morality would have taken place by the Middle Ages, not in the last two centuries.

Nevertheless, Gray sees religion as some kind of palliative to human problems (my emphasis):

Outside of some areas of science, human beings rarely give up their convictions just because they can be shown to be false. No doubt we can become a little more reasonable, at least for a time, in some parts of our lives, but being reasonable means accepting that many human problems aren’t actually soluble, and our persistent irrationality is one of these problems. At its best, religion is an antidote against the prevailing type of credulity – in our day, a naive faith in the boundless capacities of the human mind.

The belief in reason that is being promoted today rests on a number of childishly simple ideas. One of the commonest is that history’s crimes are mistakes that can be avoided in future as we acquire greater knowledge. But human evil isn’t a type of error that can be discarded like an obsolete scientific theory. If history teaches us anything it’s that hatred and cruelty are permanent human flaws, which find expression whatever beliefs people may profess.

Note that he says, “at its best”.  Really, though, which religions are “at their best”?  Which ones have been antidotes against the “prevailing credulity” of faith in the “capacities of the human mind”? Gray is triply wrong here. First, even the “best” religions expand the credulity of the human mind by asking us to believe the unbelievable: prophets flying to heaven on horses, saviors coming back to life after being crucified, or the existence of an afterlife in which we get either wings or fire. Are those things not conceived in the human mind and a product of irrationality—religion? Nor, as we know, are these beliefs always salubrious, even if they’re wrong.

Further, it is precisely our faith in reason that has improved humanity. How much has theology, or religion itself, improved the human lot (especially compared to science) over the last 400 years?

Finally, Gray is wrong that humans cannot become markedly better. Yes, cruelty and avarice will always be with us, partly because some of that was instilled in us by evolution. But, as Pinker showed, we’re capable of using our reason to overcome these tendencies.  I would maintain that the average person, at least in the West  (the area I know most about) is markedly more empathic now than, say, three hundred years ago.  Do we laugh at cats being tortured, as they did in medieval France? Do we not care about children laboring in coal mines, something that was acceptable  in England not all that long ago? Do we not recognize that women have moral and political equality, something laughed at only a few centuries ago? Do remember that it was only in in the 1970s that women in Switzerland got the right to vote! And they still can’t drive in Saudi Arabia—all because of the wondrous power of myth.

Gray, then, is simply wrong when he says this:

If human beings were potentially capable of applying reason in their lives they would show some sign of learning from what they had done wrong in the past, but history and everyday practice show them committing the same follies over and over again. They would alter their beliefs in accordance with facts, but clinging to beliefs in the face of contrary evidence is one of the most powerful and enduring human traits.

Oh really? Yes, we still have wars, but, as I said, we are on a moral arc that makes us significantly more empathic than our ancestors. Does that come from reason or from religion? (Indeed, science can potentially feed into this kind of reason, for it can show us, for instance, that a society that treats women or minorites as equals is a better society in which to live than one sanctioning inequality.) And science itself is a product of learning: the discovery that using reason observation gives us useful truths about the universe. Does Gray really think that the adoption of science instead of superstition doesn’t represent any kind of “learning from what we’d done wrong in the past”?

And, in the end, Gray can’t help but get in the obligatory licks against science:

In Europe before and during World War Two, persecution and genocide were supported by racial and eugenic theories, which allowed some groups to be demonised. These theories were pseudo-science of the worst kind, but it wasn’t this that discredited them. They were exposed for what they were by the defeat of Nazism, which revealed the horrors to which they had led. Subsequent investigation has since demonstrated that such theories are scientifically worthless. But the habit of demonising other human beings hasn’t gone away. The same minorities that were targeted in the past – Jews, Roma, immigrants and gay people, for example – are being targeted in many countries today.

Racism and eugenics did not come from science and reason, but simply used science to prop up the endemic unreason and xenophobia that Gray already indicted our species for. “Pseudo-science” is correct, for those “theories” didn’t rest on real science: the kind supported by reason and empirical investigation.  The extermination of the Jews, for instance, rested purely on religiously-based prejudice. Chalk up another good effect of “myth” that is “true to human experience.”

Frankly, if I didn’t know Gray was a serious philosopher, I’d think that this piece was meant as a joke, or a Sokal-style hoax. Really, a philosopher writing repeatedly that reason is overrated? (Why the BBC would publish a piece denigrating reason is beyond my ken.)

But he’s not joking, for he’s been cranking out this kind of stuff for years. No, the man is simply doing bad philosophy—if you can call that philosophy. (I’d call it an academic version of The Daily Mail.) The reasons for this bad philosophy, and for the denigration of the very values that underlie Gray’s discipline, are beyond me; they lie deep in the murky waters of psychology and upbringing. And I’m surprised that the BBC would publish this sort of stuff. Do they consider this a deeply thoughtful piece? Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s my impression that the quality of British journalism has declined steeply in the last few decades.

And if you don’t believe that Gray’s article is totally worthless, consider this: his essay uses reason to try to convince people that reason doesn’t work well for convincing people!

h/t: Michael