John Gray’s egregious errors
By Roy Brown former president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union
In a letter to Newsline last week, Ricard Giner asks us to look at John Gray’s arguments as expressed in a recent article in the Guardian. Having read the article I am happy to take up the challenge even though I see that AC Grayling among others has already done so.
Gray writes persuasively with an engaging style. But he uses his gifts in the service of distortion, confusion and ambiguity. Like all good polemicists, there is often a grain of truth in Gray’s theses. Here are a few comments on the more egregious errors and distortions in his article.
“The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.”
Gray is “holding a mirror up to reality” here, and seeing the world in reverse. As can be seen from survey after survey, far from being in retreat, secularism is gaining ground and is becoming more widely recognised as the only reasonable antidote to the ever more shrill demands of the fundamentalists, Christian and Islamic alike.
And just to clarify one point, Dr Gray, you seem to use the words atheism and secularism interchangeably. But as you well know, they are not at all the same thing. The atheism of Soviet Russia and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution sought to impose atheism as the state creed, whereas secularism promotes the idea of state neutrality in matters of religion or belief – favouring none and discriminating against none.
“The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity.”
The fact that both Christianity and modern scientific discoveries both point to the reality of free will does not make the modern understanding of free will a legacy of faith.
“It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.”
Here, Gray is confusing hostility to beliefs that can lead people astray with hostility towards the believers. A nice trick this, and one Gray shares with the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, an organisation that has embarked on a world-wide campaign of vilification against those who have concerns about Islam by equating their concern with hostility towards Muslims. They label any criticism of Islamic faith or practice “Islamophobia”.
“"The proposition that God exists," [Daniel Dennett] writes severely, "is not even a theory." But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories. The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory.”
The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart not just of Eastern Christianity and the rest but of virtually all religion. Just see the reaction when you ask a Southern Baptist why God permits evil to exist. The fact that religions do not consist of “propositions struggling to become theories” is not to their credit, Dr Gray. They all appeal to faith rather than reason. They have given up any struggle to prove the existence of God – although I notice that it is still an article of Catholic faith that it is possible to prove the existence of God. (Apparently the illogicality of this idea still eludes them).
In an interview that appears on the website of the Edge Foundation (www.edge.org) under the title “The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion”, he [Daniel Dennett] predicts that "in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe that it does today”. He is confident that this will come about, he tells us, mainly because of "the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television)”. The philosopher has evidently not reflected on the ubiquity of mobile phones among the Taliban, or the emergence of a virtual al-Qaida on the web. This is a good point. It is possible that Dennett has not taken fully on board the need to “follow the money”. With the Americans and Saudis each promoting their particular brands of fundamentalism they are bound to win some converts. Religion will not be easily defeated with so much money being poured into the promotion of ignorance.
“Yet Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out. This is a view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist theology than with Darwinian theory, and I cannot help being reminded of the evangelical Christian who assured me that children reared in a chaste environment would grow up without illicit sexual impulses.”
But remember the Jesuit who said “give me the child until the age of seven (was it?) and I will give you the man”.
“Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors”.
Certainly the idea of the meme is a metaphor, but hardly ill-judged. It serves a useful purpose by drawing the analogy between genetic and cultural evolution. Any self-reinforcing set of ideas – such as “do this or you will burn in hell for ever”; “leave this religion and we will kill you”; “die for us and you will have heavenly rewards” etc., will prosper at the expense of ideas without either menace or promise. Apparently the fact that self-reinforcing sets of ideas can prosper is of less importance to Gray than the coinage of the term “meme”.
And I was surprised to see Gray raising again that old canard of Nazism and Soviet communism being — well not atheist — but based upon “scientific racism”. There is little that is scientific about racism, Dr Gray, even though the Nazis preached otherwise. But what relevance has the Nazis use of the term to science, or atheism for that matter? Unless perhaps you believe that there is some scientific basis for racism.
“Science is as liable to be used for inhumane purposes as any other human institution. Indeed, given the enormous authority science enjoys, the risk of it being used in this way is greater.”
I started writing this review before I read Gray’s piece to the end. It was when I got to this ridiculous statement that I wondered why I had bothered. The only reasonable response to this stupidity is “so what?” All human knowledge can be used for either good or evil. Should we therefore — as many religious fundamentalists would have us do — suppress knowledge?
Stalin and Mao, secular despots? I am sure this confusion of militant atheism with secularism is deliberate word play on Gray’s part. “But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history.” Come now, “opened the way?” It was rather Hitler’s belief in racial superiority coupled with the preaching of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church that he absorbed as a young man that “opened the way”.
The rest of Gray’s tedious article is mainly nit-picking about one or another atheist writer’s belief that history is moving in the right direction, or that ethics needs religion (it does not). Gray’s meanderings have nothing to do with the need for tolerance as exemplified by the secular Humanist outlook; a tolerance singularly absent from the ever more vocal demands of the religious.
Surely the greatest need of the day is to oppose tyranny wherever we find it – from the inherent inequality and brutal punishments of the Sharia, to the insidious evil of the caste system in India, to the Greed-is-Godly Christianity of much of the United States.
One final thought. It will, I am sure, come as news to many, both secularists and jihadists alike, that the Islamic fundamentalism the jihadists are promoting is essentially secular. Tell that to bin Laden, Dr Gray. Oh, and “secular faith is ebbing”? Tell that to the pollsters.
28 March 2008