Peter Higgs, the Boson Man, takes out after Richard Dawkins for the usual reasons

December 27, 2012 • 1:28 pm

Peter Higgs, the Man who Predicted the Boson, may be a crack physicist, but he’s a rank amateur when it comes to the issue of science and faith.

According to yesterday’s Guardian, Higgs is using his new burst of fame to diss—who else?—fellow scientist Richard Dawkins.

Higgs has chosen to cap his remarkable 2012 with another bang by criticising the “fundamentalist” approach taken by Dawkins in dealing with religious believers.

“What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists,” Higgs said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind.”

And exactly what kind of “fundamentalism” is that? Can you really equate blind adherence to ancient, man-made texts with doubt that those texts prove anything about a divine being? Why is it “fundamentalist” to ask for evidence, and decry those who adhere to dogma in the face of evidence?  Why is it “fundamentalist” to have a scientific, evidence-based attitude toward the claims of religion, but not to the claims of ancient goatherds?

The sad thing is that Higgs has proclaimed himself an atheist. He pays lip service to religion’s inimical effects (“unfortunate consequences,” he calls them, as if the faith itself and not believers were involved), but aims most of his opprobrium at atheists:

He agreed with some of Dawkins’ thoughts on the unfortunate consequences that have resulted from religious belief, but he was unhappy with the evolutionary biologist’s approach to dealing with believers and said he agreed with those who found Dawkins’ approach “embarrassing”.

So tell us, Dr. Higgs, what is “embarrassing”, exactly? I bet I can tell you: it’s “embarrassing” to have a prominent scientist questioning a ubiquitous delusion. We must by all means never exhibit disrepect for the odious claims of faith.

The Guardian continues:

In the El Mundo interview, Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible. “The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that’s not the same thing as saying they’re incompatible. It’s just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

“But that doesn’t end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past.”

He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. “I don’t happen to be one myself, but maybe that’s just more a matter of my family background than that there’s any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two.”

It’s not just some of the traditional reasons for belief that are undermined by science—it’s all of them. Bit by bit, as we understand more about our universe, we find no room for—no evidence of—a God.  What reasons for belief remain? Only wish-thinking, revelation, and tutelage—which are reasons, but not good ones. And if Higgs imputes his atheism to “family background” rather than rationality, he’s making the same mistake that those fundamentalists do: going along with what you were taught instead of thinking for yourself.

I’m calling out Higgs as an intellectually dishonest man. He is a great physicist, and yes, deserves his Nobel Prize, but he doesn’t know squat about accommodationism.  He is going along to get along, knowing that it’s always safer in the eyes of a religious world to coddle the godly.

And here’s another bit of evidence for intellectual dishonesty:

Many scientist believe that the discovery means that Higgs is odds on for a future Nobel prize. He was relieved, however, that the Nobel committee had skipped over the discovery for the physics award this year. “I was relieved, simply because since the beginning of July I’ve been so busy dealing with requests to do this and that, that I was glad not to have that on my schedule as well, so I have described it as a reprieve.”

Now you tell me, what scientist is glad that he didn’t get the Nobel Prize this year?  Come off it, Dr. Higgs!

Pittsburgh creationist identifies mysterious animals from the Bible

December 27, 2012 • 10:15 am

Well, I knew the examiner.com is a pretty trashy news source, though I don’t know much about it, but this time it’s reached a new low.  In a piece called “What are the Biblical cryptids of cryptozoology?“, writer Dale Stuckwish (an appropriate name!), susses out what the creatures mentioned in scripture actually were. He obviously has a God-given ability (perhaps conferred through revelation) to help us make zoological sense of God’s Word.

First, his background (from The Examiner):

Dale Stuckwish is a born-again Biblical Creationist in the Lord Jesus Christ. He loves to study the Word of God(Holy Bible). He loves also to study biology, astronomy, and zoology and how it relates to the bible. Dale resides in Pennsylvania and works in Pittsburgh as a security consultant.
Stuckwish
Stuckwish
Stuckwish has published a number of creationist pieces on the site, including “Evidences of a Biblical worldwide flood,” “Coelacanth: a creationist’s dream fish, but an evolutionist’s nightmare,” and “The Bible and science facts for Pittsburgh creationists.” He’s also written a book on Biblical cryptozoology (the hidden animals of the Bible).
What is a creationist doing polluting a public forum like this, misleading readers with his Biblical pishposh? Only the Examiner knows for sure.
At any rate, through his arduous researches Stuckwish has managed to identify many of the mysterious creatures in the Bible—the Biblical “cryptids”—that have long mystified the faithful and provided amusement for atheists.
Here’s what he’s found (I’ve added illustrations):
Behemoth (Job 40:15-24). Stuckwish has concluded that ” a sauropod dinosaur such as Diplodocus would fit this description nicely.”
Leviathan (Job 41: 1-34). According to Stuckwish, “One marine reptile that fits leviathan to a tee is the Kronosaurus. Kronosaurus which means ‘lizard of Kronos’. It was among the largest pliosaurs with a total length of 43 feet.”
kronosaurus
Fiery flying serpents  (Isaiah 30:6). It’s another dinosaur: a pterosaur: “Herodotus, a Greek explorer described this creature also that fits a Rhamphorhynchus to a tee.”
Rhamphorynchus
Rhamphorhynchus (from Carnivora)
Unicorns (Job 39:9-12). “There is a dinosaur that fits the unicorn to a tee. It is the Styracosaurus.”
Styracosaurus_BW
Styracosaurus
Satyrs (Isaiah 13:21). Here Stuckwish isn’t so sure: “Many cultures describe hairy apelike creatures in their legends.We know and heard about the Yeti and Bigfoot legends.But could these creatures actually be satyrs that are mentioned in the Bible.”
Smalfut
Dragons (Old Testament). Probably another dinosaur.  Stuckwish notes (he apparently doesn’t like question marks):
But could the dragon be a dinosaur. The Bible that was translated into English in 1611 did not have the word dinosaur in it because this word was not coined until 1841. Sir Richard Owens came up with this for the huge terrible reptile fossil skeletons being unearthed. Dinosaur means “terrible lizard“. Many dragon legends around the world talk of huge reptilian creatures. China even incorporated the dragon into its calendar along with 11 other animals.
Stuckwithawish doesn’t mention what the “big fish” was that swallowed up Jonah—I presume it’s a whale—but remember that Jonah lived three day’s in the fish’s stomach before he was vomited out on dry land.  I doubt anyone can stand gastric juices (much less the lack of oxygen) for that long.
I hope Stuckwish keeps his day job, because this kind of craziness can’t be all that lucrative. And it’s certainly craziness—or wish-thinking—since it presumes, in the face of all evidence, that dinosaurs (which died out about 65 million years ago, except for those that evolved into birds) were contemporaries of humans.
Well, maybe there’s one exception:
PZ%20Myers%20Riding%20a%20Dino%20at%20the%20Creation%20Museum
If you want to protest this insanity masquerading as science, you can contact the Examiner at this site. It takes only a minute to write a short complaint.

h/t: Tom Holland via Matthew Cobb

Sophisticated Theology: a graphic demonstration

December 27, 2012 • 8:34 am

Ridicule is a great weapon against Sophisticated Theology™. Today’s SMBC (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal), by Zach Weiner, takes up the nagging problem of theodicy, and offers a solution to evil that’s not much dumber than what I’ve seen in the theology books.

20121227

The last two panels are fantastic.

h/t: James A.

Joint post: Chicago’s Field Museum endangered by unwise budget cuts

December 27, 2012 • 5:31 am

I’ve lived in Chicago for more than 25 years, and have watched the Field Museum’s public exhibits degenerate from an educational experience to an entertainment experience. This isn’t unique to that museum: it’s happening everywhere as natural history museums seek to make more money by displaying dinosaur skeletons and offering ‘hands-on’ experiences and animated exhibits for  kids weaned on video games.

The mantra here is “user friendly.” And I deplore this trend.  And I deplore this trend.  Steve Gould wrote an essay on this topic, also bemoaning the dumbing-down of museums (see also Gould’s essay in Natural History, January 1994, and here and here on WEIT for moar):

As a symbol of our dilemma, consider the plight of natural history museums in the light of commercial dinomania. In the past decade, nearly every major or minor natural history museum has succumbed (not always unwisely) to two great commercial temptations: to sell many scientifically worthless, and often frivolous, or even degrading, dinosaur products in their gift shops; and to mount, at high and separate admissions charges, special exhibits of colorful robotic dinosaurs that move and growl but (so far as I have ever been able to judge) teach nothing of scientific value about these animals. Such exhibits could be wonderful educational aids, if properly labeled and integrated with more traditional material; but I have never seen these robots presented for much more than their colors and sound effects (the two aspects of dinosaurs that must, for obvious reasons, remain most in the realm of speculation). If you ask my colleagues in museum administration why they have permitted such incursions into their precious and limited spaces, they will reply that these robotic displays bring large crowds into the museum, mostly of people who otherwise would never come. These folks can then be led or cajoled into viewing the regular exhibits, and the museum’s primary mission of science education receives a giant boost. I cannot fault the logic of this argument, but I fear that my colleagues are expressing a wish or a hope, not an actual result, and not even an outcome actively pursued by most museums. If the glitzy displays were dispersed among teaching exhibits, if they were used as a springboard for educational programs (sometimes they are), then a proper balance of mammon and learning might be reached. But, too often, the glitz occupies a separate wing (where the higher admission charges can be monitored), and the real result gets measured in increased body counts and profits.

Well, perhaps fiscal constraints mandate such changes. But what is more serious for Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History is that budget cuts are now about to seriously degrade its scientific mission, eliminating much of the behind-the-scenes research that is the soul of any good natural history museum. Public exhibits are merely the frosting on the cake, for not visible to casual visitor are the research collections and laboratories of the scientists that lie behind closed doors.

Museum-based research has been essential in studies of ecology, evolution, and natural history, and this kind of downsizing is a serious danger to work on organismal biology.  Alarmed, Greg Mayer and I co-wrote the following plea for the Field Museum to reconsider its rash decision. And we’re asking readers to help by writing a brief protest.

_________________

Field Museum: Don’t savage your science!

by Jerry Coyne and Greg Mayer

According to the Chicago Tribune, the Field Museum of Natural History is about to engage in a budget-slashing reorganization that will all but eliminate science at that institution (our emphasis added):

Staff reductions would be aimed at curators and scientists, according to museum officials.

“This may turn out to involve shrinking certain areas of inquiry,” said John Rowe, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees.

The Field Museum is both an international research institution and a vital cultural attraction for residents and tourists, drawing about 1.3 million visitors in 2011.

The natural history museum is home to Sue, the best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex in the world and a Chicago icon. In the bowels of the museum and all around the world, Field scientists also are discovering new plants and animals—more than 200 last year alone—along with preserving rain forests and studying artifacts. …

[New Museum President Richard] Lariviere, who started in October, said he wants to use the cost-cutting measures as an opportunity to refocus the museum’s mission. …

Museum officials said they also expect to cut research staff as they seek to narrow the scope of its mission…

Currently the museum is organized much like a university, with researchers divided into academic departments. Under Lariviere’s plan, that structure would be simplified into four broad areas: science and education, programming, fundraising and operations.

“Narrowing the scope of its mission” apparently means “deep-sixing most of the science.”

Lariviere, dismissed last year as president of the University of Oregon, said the Field’s future is “rosy” if they carry out this plan out, but in reality its future would be bleak indeed.

There are only a handful of great natural history museums in the U.S., and the Field is one of them. (Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, where both of us received our doctorates, is another.) These museums have always had a dual mission of research and education, and in fact the research mission has usually occupied the lion’s share of the museums’ efforts. The public doesn’t realize that the research collections of the Field Museum hold a vastly greater number of specimens than those on public display.

Indeed, the Field Museum—like many others of its kind—uses “behind-the-scenes” access to its collections and its scientists as principal attractions for members and donors. It is these collections that scientists, both in-house and from other institutions, use to advance biology, geology, and anthropology. What are to become of these tremendously important, and literally irreplaceable, collections?

The research of natural history museums has been crucial for the development of evolutionary biology. Ernst Mayr, the “Darwin of the 20th century” who pioneered studies of speciation, did so at natural history museums (successively, the British Museum, American Museum, and Museum of Comparative Zoology), using the collections to formulate and test his ideas. The Field’s scientists continue this tradition, and have been enormously productive.

Jim Hanken, Director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, had this to say to Nature and Scientific American:

It’s one of the great research institutions in comparative zoology, biodiversity and natural history, and it has been one of the leading centres of research for more than 100 years. There’s no way the Field Museum will be able to maintain its position of prominence under those circumstances.

As the Chicago Sun-Times noted, the Field is a “treasure [and] a responsibility”, and the current management can’t be allowed to savage what must be a resource for future generations. There’s a change.org petition to oppose this:

https://www.change.org/petitions/protect-research-at-field-museum-of-natural-history-chicago

and you can contact the management through info here (Dr. Lariviere’s email address is rlariviere@fieldmuseum.org ; remember-be respectful!) and Board Chair John Rowe and other Board members through info here (no emails; postal address is The Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605-2496.) We ask readers to do this, and let the Museum and its Board know that you support science. Outcry by the scientific community and public can work— it saved the Smithsonian’s Conservation and Research Center a decade ago from a similarly ill-advised cost-saving refocusing of mission.

If you are in favor of research in organismal biology (and I hope that most of our readers are!), we ask you to sign the petition (which takes all of one minute) and write a short note to the management opposing these changes.

Thanks!

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Guest post: Is the Pope a Catholic?

December 27, 2012 • 4:44 am

The redoubtable commenter (and occasional guest poster) Sigmund has returned after a long hiatus. I’m glad he’s returned to grace us with his wry commentary. This week he’s found some LOLz in the Vatican.

____________

Is the Pope a Catholic?

by Sigmund

The website http://www.atheistcensus.com/, run by Atheist Alliance International, is currently collecting demographic data about atheists from around the world (religious background, educational levels, age, gender, etc.). It is all self-reported, so you need to take that into account when judging the results, but the survey does, at least, try to verify the data via validation of your email address.

The website, usefully, has a search feature that allows one to see the report for any country you choose.

A few common features are seen among atheists in almost every country. These include a high level of education, with generally over 50% of atheist respondents being university educated (e.g., USA, 59.7%; Australia, 50.5%). Curiously, there also seems to be a strong gender bias: most of the countries I’ve checked show over 65% of respondents being male (e.g., USA, 67.2%; UK, 79.7%; Sweden, 85.6%).

The number of respondents, naturally, varies between countries. Some nations, particularly those in the developing world, have no atheist respondents at all, while others, mainly English-speaking Western nations, show the greatest participation.

But you’ll find one amusing result when you generate the report for Vatican City.

Apparently there’s a single atheist there!

popecatholic

He’s male, university educated, and over 65 years of age. And he had a Catholic background!

It couldn’t be. . . could it? Is the Pope really a Catholic?

What are the chances that this is Benedict? According to Wikipedia, in July this year the Vatican City had a population of 836—so the chances of it being the Pope are 1/836.

Also, the Pope has started tweeting, a known gateway drug to the online atheist community. If he’s changed his mind about this whole religion thing, it should be no surprise that he’s moved onto the next stage: filling in online surveys about atheists. Let’s just hope he never finds out about the atheist messageboard scene—can you imagine the carnage if he turned up and Godwinned a thread?

Why science and faith are incompatible: my talk in Edinburgh

December 26, 2012 • 12:00 pm

For your delectation (or revulsion), I present my talk to the Edinburgh University Humanists Society (also sponsored by the Glasgow Skeptics). Now online, it’s called “The Odd Couple: Why Science and Religion Shouldn’t Cohabit.” The video was professionally taped and they interpolated my Powerpoint slides, so it came out, at least technically, pretty well.

Thanks to all who sponsored me and the video people who did such a great job.

I’m told it’s also been posted on AtheismTV.

The world’s cutest rodent

December 26, 2012 • 10:02 am

Okay, someone sent me this photo, and I fell in love.  It’s got to be in the pantheon of World’s Cutest Mammals, along with the giant panda and Pallas’s cat. It’s certainly the world’s cutest rodent.

Dwarf flying sqrlSource: tinadot.files.wordpress.com via reddit.com

It’s the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel, (Pteromys momonga), a threatened species that lives in subalpine areas in Japan. You can tell it’s nocturnal from the size of its eyes.

Of course Buzzfeed has a page: “35 photos of Momonga dwarf flying squirrels“, and I’ve chosen four to put up:

enhanced-buzz-14653-1333301027-21

via iheartmomonga
Source of two photos above: iheartmomonga
Source: i.imgur.com via reddit.com
Source: i.imgur.com via reddit.com

And of course we must see it gliding (if you’re evolutionarily inclined, think about the incipient steps of this adaptation, since gliding squirrels evolved from non-gliding ones):

From http://www.tougewo-koete.jp/animal/momonga/momonga02.html
From http://www.tougewo-koete.jp/animal/momonga/momonga02.html

And as a special second-day-of-Koynezaa treat, here are two videos of the animal.  It’s adorable.

Moar: momonga:

Finally, if you wish to pursue the cuteness further, there’s a reddit subsection devoted to the momonga, as well as a tumblr. God bless the internet!

Feel free to add your candidate for “world’s cutest mammal” in the comments.  Links are okay, but please don’t embed videos!

The Christmas NYT: faith everywhere

December 26, 2012 • 7:39 am

If you read the New York Times yesterday and happened to glance at the op-ed section, you would have seen a surfeit of articles on religion and the power of faith. I don’t think this is due entirely to yesterday’s holiday; rather, the Times seems really soft on religion these days, publishing dozens of goddy op-eds for every secular one. Two of yesterday’s articles were particularly unctuous.

Maureen Dowd, who can’t seem to shake her Catholicism, asks the question, “Why, God?”, a question that the faithful raise again after America’s two sets of Christmas murders. (This is, of course, a question that atheists needn’t ask, since there’s nobody to answer.) But seeking answers, Dowd calls upon a family friend, Father Kevin O’Neil, who has spent his life consoling the downcast and dying. O’Neil apparently wrote the rest of the column.

After a column of agonized pondering, the good father admits he doesn’t know the answer:

The truest answer is: I don’t know. I have theological training to help me to offer some way to account for the unexplainable. But the questions linger. I remember visiting a dear friend hours before her death and reminding her that death is not the end, that we believe in the Resurrection. I asked her, “Are you there yet?” She replied, “I go back and forth.” There was nothing I wanted more than to bring out a bag of proof and say, “See? You can be absolutely confident now.” But there is no absolute bag of proof. I just stayed with her. A life of faith is often lived “back and forth” by believers and those who minister to them

. . . I will never satisfactorily answer the question “Why?” because no matter what response I give, it will always fall short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily.

There is one response, though, that won’t fall short, although it’s inappropriate for dying believers: if you’re a nonbeliever, this stuff just happens. And yes, love can soothe broken or grieving hearts—as with the “love” that mandates lying for the dying—but what evidence is there that that love comes from God? Indeed, it doesn’t—it’s pure human love (of which O’Neil has an admirable surfeit). And if there is “no absolute bag of proof,” then where are Father O’Neil’s doubts?

Theodicy is the Achilles Heel of faith. There is no reasonable answer to the problem of gratuitous evil (i.e., the slaughter of children or mass killings by natural phenomena like tsunamis), and the will to continue believing in the face of such things truly shows the folly of faith. For those evils prove absolutely either that God is not benevolent and omnipotent, or that there is no god. (Special pleading like “we don’t know God’s mind” doesn’t wash, for the same people who say such things also claim to know that God is benevolent and omnipotent). Both nonbelief or belief in malicious or uncaring God are unacceptable to the goddy.  Ergo, any rational person who contemplates gratuitous evil must become an agnostic, an atheist, or someone who rejects the Abrahamic God. It is a touchstone of rationality.

****

Writer Ann Hood, in “A prayer at Christmas,” offers a piece whose only point seems to be that, after a lifetime of rejecting the church, she is drawn back in again. It’s a completely pointless essay—unless it’s there to show believers that others also share their silly conversations with God:

As I turned to walk to the subway, a sign caught my eye: ST. PATRICK’S IS OPEN. I read it again. ST. PATRICK’S IS OPEN. Although I quickly realized the sign was there because of all the scaffolding around the church, I still couldn’t help but feel that it was also there just for me.

A church that was open! I crossed the street and went inside. The grandeur of St. Patrick’s is nothing like the little stucco church of my childhood in West Warwick, R.I. And even on a Tuesday afternoon, it was crowded with tourists. But the candles flickered, and the smell of wax and incense filled me. I dipped my fingers in the holy water, and walked slowly up the long center aisle to the altar. Around me, people snapped pictures of the manger with their phones. A woman holding a baby in a Santa suit rushed past me. When I got to the front pew, I lowered the kneeler, and I knelt. I bowed my head and I prayed.

In the years since I’d done this simple act in church, I have prayed at home and in hospital waiting rooms. I have prayed for my daughter to live, for the bad news to not be true, for strength in the face of adversity. I have prayed with more desperation than a person should feel. I have prayed in vain.

This prayer, though, was different. It was a prayer from my girlhood, a prayer for peace and comfort and guidance. It was a prayer of gratitude. It was a prayer that needed to be done in church, in a place where candles flicker and statues of saints look down from on high; where sometimes, out of nowhere, the spiritually confused can still come inside and kneel and feel their words might rise up and be heard.

Hood doesn’t seem to care if anybody up there is listening.

***

At the Time‘s site The Stone, there’s a confused piece by British philosopher Simon Critchley called “The Freedom of Faith: A Christmas Sermon.” Critchley is the moderator of The Stone site, which presents the lucubrations of philosophers and is only occasionally good.  His essay doesn’t improve it.

Critchley poses a Christmas Dilemma: do we accept the “freedom” of faith or the security of obedience authority? (Actually, it’s not clear, as you’ll see below, whether the security comes from obedience to state/church authority or simply the ability to pursue material comforts.) At any rate, Critchley begins by recounting how Jesus rejected the threefold temptations of Satan, and then segues to the famous tale of “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov. In that tale, you’ll recall, Dostoevsky presents a fable about Christ returning during the Spanish Inquisition.  After working a few miracles, Jesus is promptly clapped in jail, since the “freedom” he offers will disturb the authority and peace established by the Catholic Church.

. . . for the Grand Inquisitor, “Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature of born.” Give people the miracle of bread, and they will worship you. Remove their freedom with submission to a mystery that passeth all understanding, and they will obey your authority. They will be happy. Lord knows, they may even believe themselves to be free in such happiness.

Freedom as expressed here is not the rigorous freedom of faith, but the multiplication of desires whose rapid satisfaction equals happiness. Freedom is debased and governed by a completely instrumental, means-end rationality. Yet, to what does it lead? In the rich, it leads to the isolation of hard hedonism and spiritual suicide.

Okay, so freedom represents the satisfaction of “base” desires, the production of “hard hedonism and spiritual suicide”.  It’s not clear, of course, whether satisfying non-goddy desires equals spiritual suicide. That’s an unjustified conclusion that Doestoevsky makes and Critchley apparently endorses.  But then Critchley reconceives freedom so that, in the mind of the Grand Inquisitor, it’s also freedom of faith:

For the Grand Inquisitor, what Jesus brought into the world was freedom, specifically the freedom of faith: the truth that will free.

Which is it: freedom to get bread or to go to heaven? But what kind of “freedom” is the freedom to believe in God and Jesus—or be damned if you don’t? Critchley says that this is the “freedom of conscience”:

Jesus rejected bread for the sake of freedom, for the bread of heaven. Jesus refuses miracle, mystery and authority in the name of a radical freedom of conscience. The problem is that this freedom places an excessive burden on human beings. It is too demanding; infinitely demanding,

But Jesus wrought miracles, and adumbrated mystery and proclaimed his own authority (remember his admonition: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the Father, but by me.”). Jesus doesn’t refuse that stuff!

But what about the freedom to reject faith—to abnegate those things that aren’t supported by evidence—the only course a rational person should take? Critchley ignores that kind of freedom. His essay then degenerates into a mush of tortured navel-gazing, winding up with Critchley punting completely and wishing us all a happy holiday. Such is the vocation of philosophers with too much time on their hands.

. . . And this choice conceals another, deeper one: truth or falsehood? The truth that sets free is not, as we saw, the freedom of inclination and passing desire. It is the freedom of faith. It is the acceptance — submission, even — to a demand that both places a perhaps intolerable burden on the self, but which also energizes a movement of subjective conversion, to begin again. In disobeying ourselves and obeying this hard command, we may put on new selves. Faith hopes for grace. . .

To be clear, such an experience of faith is not certainty, but is only gained by going into the proverbial desert and undergoing diabolical temptation and radical doubt. On this view, doubt is not the enemy of faith. On the contrary, it is certainty. If faith becomes certainty, then we have become seduced by the temptations of miracle, mystery and authority. We have become diabolical. There are no guarantees in faith. It is defined by an essential insecurity, tempered by doubt and defined by a radical experience of freedom.

. . . .The Grand Inquisitor’s dilemma is, finally, tragic: he knows that the truth which sets us free is too demanding for us, and that the lie that grants happiness permits the greatest good of the greatest number.  But he also knows that happiness is a deception that leads ineluctably to our damnation. Is the Grand Inquisitor’s lie not a noble one?

. . . To be perfectly (or imperfectly) honest, I don’t know the answer to this question. Which should we choose: diabolical happiness or unendurable freedom? Perhaps we should spend some days and nights fasting in the desert and see what we might do. Admittedly, this is quite a difficult thing to sustain during the holiday period.

Happy Holidays!

Oy vey!  Who can be happy after such a dog’s breakfast of confusing ideas? (Perhaps I’m not savvy enough to understand Sophisticated Philosophy™.) The freedom of faith is the freedom of lunacy: the ability to believe whatever makes you feel good, no matter how silly those beliefs.  The only freedom to be found there is the freedom from rationality, from having good reasons for what you believe.

To Critchley, nonbelief is not an option. But then again, it’s Christmas, folks! To be sure, he does mention doubt, but only in a confusing way: in effect praising doubt as a “God-like position”:

To be clear, such an experience of faith is not certainty, but is only gained by going into the proverbial desert and undergoing diabolical temptation and radical doubt. On this view, doubt is not the enemy of faith. On the contrary, it is certainty. If faith becomes certainty, then we have become seduced by the temptations of miracle, mystery and authority. We have become diabolical. There are no guarantees in faith. It is defined by an essential insecurity, tempered by doubt and defined by a radical experience of freedom.

This is a noble and, indeed, God-like position. It is also what Jesus demands of us elsewhere in his teaching, in the Sermon on the Mount, when he says, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you or persecute you.”

Certainty the enemy of faith? Shades of 1984! Here Critchley is acting more like a theologian than a philosopher, for theologians are good at turning necessities into spiritual virtues.

******

The only palliative in this lineup of faith-soaked newsprint is, surprisingly, found in an article by the ever-tedious Stanley Fish: “Religious exemptions and the liberal state: a Christmas column.” Actually, Fish doesn’t give his own opinion in the column (an uncharacteristic stance), but merely rehashes the thesis of a new book, Why Tolerate Religion? by Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago’s law school. But in the Fish stew there is one toothsome morsel:

Indeed, if there is anything special about religion, Leiter contends, it is the special danger it poses by virtue of its other chief characteristics, the categorical insistence on the obedience of believers and a declared independence of evidence and rationality as defined by common-sense and science. (Needless to say, this list of religion’s characteristics is controversial, and has often been critiqued by theologians and philosophers.) If existential consolation is what you’re looking for, you might better find it, Leiter declares, in “philosophical reflection … meditation … therapeutic treatment,” all relatively harmless compared to the “potentially harmful brew of categorical commands and insulation from evidence.”

The conclusion is inevitable: “[T]here is no apparent moral reason why states should carve out special protections that encourage individuals to structure their lives around categorical demands that are insulated from the standards of evidence and reasoning we everywhere else expect to constitute constraints on judgment and action.”

I’ve always thought this to be the greatest danger of trying to accommodate science and faith. It’s the toxic combination of absolute certainty about God’s will, combined with the willingness to believe things without evidence, that makes religion much more than just “another way of knowing.”  We don’t turn scientific findings into law (except for things that help us all, like mandatory vaccination), nor do scientists have the absolute certainty of the believer. If we think that faster-than-light neutrinos exist, we look for them. and if we don’t find them we reject them. But if we believe that God exists, and, after looking for evidence, we fail to find any, we continue to accept him. Further, thinking that we know his will, many faiths try enforce it on everyone else.

Religion is not just the enemy of rationality, but the enemy of democracy.