The Problem of Theistic Philosophers of Religion

Roman Catholic Dr Tim Stanley has written a paranoid piece attacking Richard Dawkins and 'atheist trolls' who constantly mock his beliefs. He writes:

When you insult my faith you go right to the heart of what makes me me. When you're trying to convince me in 140 characters of sub-GCSE philosophical abuse that God doesn't exist, you're trying to take away the faith that gets me up in the morning, gets me through the day and helps me sleep at night. You're ridiculing a God without whom I suspect I might not even be alive, and a God that I prayed to when my mother was going through cancer therapy. You're knocking a Church that provides me with compassion and friendship without asking for anything in return – perhaps the greatest, most wonderful discovery of my adult life. You see, people don't generally believe in God for reasons of convenience or intellectual laziness. It's usually fulfilling a deep need – filling a soul with love that might otherwise be quite empty and alone. In short, when you try to destroy someone's faith you're not being a brilliant logician. You're being a jerk.

Well, maybe not so paranoid. He has a point, does he not? If Stanley is typical of theists, and I suspect he may be, then they invest much more emotionally in their faith than non-believers do in their belief systems. Attacking their beliefs is an attack on them, if they identify so closely and emotionally with them. This is not to say that non-believers are not passionate about science, or truth, or rationality, or even humanism, but they appear to be typically less emotionally invested in them. They might 'pray' to science to help their mother get through cancer therapy, but that prayer would lack the personal element that marks out theism.

Stephen Law has written in his book Believing Bullshit about the emotional factor in forging people's beliefs:

...you might harness the emotional power of iconic music and imagery. Ensure people are regularly confronted by portraits of Our Leader accompanied by smiling children and sunbeams emanating from his head (those Baghdad murals of Saddam Hussein spring to mind). Ensure your opponents and critics are always portrayed accompanied by images of catastrophe and suffering, or even Hieronymus-Bosch-like visions of hell. Make people emotional dependent on your own belief system. Ensure that what self-esteem and sense of meaning, purpose and belonging they have is derived as far as possible from their belonging to your system of belief. Make sure they recognise that abandoning that belief system will involve the loss of things about which they care deeply.

Such practices have been part of atheistic ideologies, of course, but they are the bread and butter of religion.

So it seems obvious to me that theists operating in philosophy are going to struggle to do philosophy when it touches on their faith beliefs. If such a philosopher ring-fences their faith beliefs, and has a heavy emotional investment in them, this automatically biases their work, and the less bias a philosopher can bring to their analysis, the better the philosophy. I questioned the coherence of 'Christian Philosophy' here, whilst accepting it as a term for philosophy conducted by Christians. This does not mean that I think Christians, or theists, cannot be good philosophers. Clearly they can. But just as scientists use the scientific method to counteract the problems even the best of them have investigating reality, so it would benefit philosophers to adopt practices that counteract their biases. This also applies to non-believers, but more so to believers.

Paul Draper and Ryan Nichols have a piece in the latest issue of The Monist, called Diagnosing Bias in Philosophy of Religion. Ryan Nichols writes about it here, for those who want to read some more about it. The abstract says philosophy of religion is:

... too partisan, too polemical, too narrow in its focus, and too often evaluated using criteria that are theological or religious instead of philosophical. Our diagnosis is that, because of the emotional and psychosocial aspects of religion, many philosophers of religion suffer from cognitive biases and group influence.

The piece investigates some evidence that supports my intuitions about theistic philosophers. I don't think it's an open and shut case, but it is suggestive, I think. As per the abstract, they discuss four symptoms of poor health in philosophy of religion:

[I]t is too partisan, too polemical, too narrow in its focus, and too often evaluated using criteria that are theological or religious instead of philosophical.

Partisanship seems obvious, on both sides. The polemicism they worry about includes the sort of language that is often used: the language of conflict and opposition. On focus, they write:

Typically, religion is unreflectively equated with some form of theism or even classical theism, and atheism is equated with naturalism or even physicalism, ignoring the broad and plausible territory between those extremes. Alternatives like "generic theism" (that is, theism combined with a rejection of all alleged special revelations), pantheism, ietsism, and deism are rarely mentioned, and when they are mentioned they are usually dismissed as positions that very few people hold, which is not only spectacularly false, but hardly an appropriate constraint on philosophical inquiry. Even worse, it is often just assumed that the only viable forms of theism are Muslim, Christian, or Jewish.

This is very true. William James dismissed Islam as a live option for belief and, of course, in a similar way most religious believers do not take other religious beliefs as seriously as those they have faith in. I mean, they do not invest the time and emotional energy in the many religious beliefs from around the world that theists in those countries take as seriously as their own. This means that many possible philosophical positions are dismissed out of hand because of pre-existing beliefs. This is a problem for everyone, not just believers, of course, but one would expect a religious believer's emotional investment to make it a bigger problem for them.

Then they point out that too often positions are criticised based on religious beliefs, such as incompatibility with scripture:

Reinforcing such behavior is the fact that the motto of one of the premier journals in the field is "faith seeking understanding." This motto echoes the belief of some of the most influential philosophers of religion (e.g. Plantinga 1984) that philosophers who happen to be Christians should take the truth of Christian doctrines (as they happen to interpret them) as a starting point for philosophical inquiry.

They look at psychological studies to see if they support these contentions. They note that for confirmation bias:

...the strongest effects were among sophisticated, smart participants, and participants with strong prior commitments about the issues.

So if stronger prior commitments are reflected in those with more emotional investment in a belief, they would suffer the strongest confirmation bias:

We have several reasons to think that similar results are sure to be found when the above experiments are replicated with arguments about religion, especially when using philosophers of religion as participants. First, philosophers are emotional creatures like other humans. Second, professional philosophers of religion would score high on tests of sophistication about arguments in philosophy of religion as opposed to control participants. Third, many religious philosophers of religion, having committed their whole lives to a body of religious doctrine, have strong emotions about their religious beliefs. The last two observations set religious philosophers of religion apart from other groups of  philosophers —from, say, four-dimensionalist metaphysicians.

I think there is some truth to this, although there seem to be many controversies in philosophy that raise high emotions and are not exclusively religious. Consider the existence of objective morals, the free will debate and the hard problem of consciousness, for example. But many theists, like Stanley, make a point of highlighting the importance of their faith, suggesting it is more deeply held than non-belief. I'm inclined to agree with them. If a theist holds this position then they would have to agree, if they accept the studies cited, that they are more prone to certain biases. Draper and Nichols continue:

There are good reasons to believe that the emotional attachments that many religious philosophers have to their religious groups are exceptionally strong. 

Among the group memberships a professional philosopher might have, few if any compete with religion for social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive importance.

If religious philosophers of religion have social and psychological tendencies at all similar to those found in religious people in general, then symptoms like excessive partisanship and narrowness of focus, and perhaps even the blurring of religious and philosophical criteria of evaluation, are to be expected.

Echoing Stanley's sentiments, they point out:

The attachment system operates in Christianity, for example, by making Jesus, God, or Mary functional attachment figures and fictive kin.

For religious persons, including religious philosophers of religion, who are attached to God the Father and who have an emotional conviction that their Father loves them, reading an argument that their Father does not exist primes negative emotional responses (whether above or below levels of conscious awareness).

They caution:

Bias is no doubt a problem in all areas of philosophy, but given the large percentage of religious believers in philosophy of religion, the emotional depth of religious attachments, and the strong connection between bias and the emotions, there is good reason to believe that it is much more damaging to inquiry in philosophy of religion than to inquiry in most other areas of philosophy. 

I think that most theists would agree that they have a more emotional attachment to their beliefs than non-believers, so I think they should agree with this diagnosis. Draper and Nichols make some strong recommendations to counteract any bias:

Our first recommendation is for philosophers of religion to distance themselves in every way possible from apologetics, whether theistic or atheistic.

This seems sensible, and may be why I sense that quite a few non-believing philosophers of religion are antipathetic to 'new atheism'. They may consider it too polemical, too atheistically apologetic.

Second, we recommend that philosophers of religion use argument construction less often as a method for making cases for the positions they hold, and more often as a method of testing those positions.

This is a fascinating recommendation, and a difficult one to pull off; but when a philosopher puts forward a really good argument against their own position, you know that good philosophy is occurring. I know I'm not very good at it! But I admire those who are.

A third recommendation is to make a conscious effort to allow, as J.L. Schellenberg puts it, the voice of authority to grow dim.

Indeed. Argue the case; don't defer to Aquinas or Descartes. I realise I say this in a blog citing Draper and Nichols, but then, I am no philosopher!

Finally, our fourth recommendation, which is the hardest of all to follow, is to make a conscious decision to accept genuine risk.

I really think that this is where many with faith would draw the line. The point of faith, I think, is to separate doctrine and dogma, to put them beyond risk. This is counter to this recommendation.

Even if a scientist is sure of some cherished hypothesis, testing that hypothesis by experiment is (in many though admittedly not all cases) inherently risky. Apologetics by comparison is very safe insofar as pursuing it is very unlikely to result in the apologist rejecting any of the central doctrines of the religious community he or she serves. Philosophy should be riskier - the philosopher of religion must be prepared to abandon cherished beliefs.

Theists can risk their beliefs, however, or none would ever lose their faith. Draper and Nichols compare the contrasting attitudes of Rudolf Otto and Gary DeWeese.

Otto says, "The earth disappeared from under my feet. That was the result of my studies at Erlangen. I went there not so much to quest for truth, but more to vindicate belief. I left with the resolve to seek nothing but the truth, even at the risk of not finding it in Christ" (Almond 1984, 12). Although Otto remained throughout his career a theologian by title, he was an exemplary philosopher of religion in many ways. He is famous, of course, because he wrote one of the greatest works in the history of the philosophy of religion, namely. The Idea of the Holy. It is abundantly clear that, had Otto not rejected apologetics in favor of a more philosophical approach to religious inquiry, he would not and could not have written this masterpiece.

DeWeese:

As Christian scholars we are of course free to entertain all manner of "what if" questions, some heterodox, some heretical.... While we're free to entertain such thoughts, I believe we are constrained by our faith to answer them in certain ways. If it seems to me that if a particular claim is well-argued but it contradicts a significant tenet of the faith . . . , then I should seek to refute rather than defend it.

I think theistic philosophers might argue that non-believers are as susceptible to the problems outlined by Draper and Nichols. In this piece, for example, Christian philosopher Randal Rauser considers the naturalist response to Thomas Nagel's recent book as indicative of something:

What happens if you violate naturalism? Here I’ll be brief because the fallout from Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos has been well documented elsewhere. Just consider Andrew Ferguson’s fascinating article “The Heretic: Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?” It is no surprise that scholars are heaping insults on Nagel, a worldclass philosopher and atheist, for daring to challenge philosophical naturalism. After all, this ain’t just mere epiphenomenalism. This is a theory that goes to the very foundations for many of these folk. Kind of like challenging the incarnation at a Christian school, eh?

I'm not sure this is a true analog with religious belief, but it may be. And if it is, then the religious will have to give up any claim to special respect for their beliefs, à la Stanley. Either they claim they have a more emotional connection to their beliefs than non-believers, and accept the psychological consequences of that, whatever they turn out to be, or they agree that non-believers can treat their religious beliefs as any other non-religious belief; Dawkins and 'atheist trolls' are free to attack them without believers claiming a 'special' identity with their beliefs.

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William Lane Craig, Agony Uncle

In a remarkable question of the week, William Lane Craig responds to a common conundrum for theists: what to do when you fall in love with a non-believer, and in marrying them thereby go to hell!?

Yes, really; this chap (I assume) is worried that he will go to hell if he marries a non-believer. Rather than celebrating the joyous confluence in the lives of two human beings, and revelling in it for what it is, he seems pre-occupied with just his own well-being. This does not sound like the sort of selfless behaviour that characterises a healthy loving relationship. Whatever happened to true altruism?

His lover has said, sure, I'll convert to any religion to be with you (pretty selfless for a non-believer!):

So my question is this: if she does convert, how could I be sure that she really believes in Christianity? 

One might ask: how can one be sure anyone believes in any religion? The differences between religions are largely a result of arbitrary cultural currents, since their beliefs occupy that territory beyond the universally verifiable, so on the plus side it's pretty easy for someone to commit to something that might be as true as the next belief system; but on the minus side, theists are typically not impressed by people who treat their specific belief as a happy accidental one.

Craig's initial thoughts seem to hint at the difficulty of determining another's beliefs:

When I first read your question, Shane, I thought, “He’s got nothing to worry about! She’s ready to become a Christian, and the sincerity of her commitment is between her and God.”

But, he's worried:

But the more I thought about it, the more I came to think that you do, indeed, face a rather difficult situation.

Is he concerned about this couple's well-being? Well, not so much:

Forget about going to hell. What you should worry about, rather, is ruining your life by marrying someone who is a nonbeliever and therefore not God's will for your life. You don’t want to wander off the trajectory that God has in mind for you and so miss all that He has in store for you.

Craig agrees that this guy should be worrying about himself first of all. Apparently God has some trajectory in mind for him that, despite his omnipotence, could be diverted by this heathen-ess.

Well, the problem is that in this case her motives for becoming a Christian seem not to be that she has fallen in love with Christ but that she has fallen in love with you!

How could she have made such a schoolgirl error?!

A person who says that “she would convert to any religion” to be with you reveals that she has not understood that Christianity makes objective truth claims about reality.

Sure, but by saying that she would convert to any religion to be with the guy, she may have noticed that the objective truth claims of various religions are not objectively verifiable.

She seems to think of embracing a religion as akin to following fashion: you can change fashions without concern for truth. Such a woman has not yet arrived at the point that she can be trusted. For she seems willing to say or do whatever it takes to get the object of her desire.

And a Christian is doing what, exactly? Should not a Christian say or do whatever it takes to get the object of their desire, Jesus Christ?

You need to wait until you have proof-positive that she has fallen in love with Christ for his own sake, not for yours, and wants her whole life to be lived in obedience to him as Lord.

Despite homophobic Christian talk on the sanctity of marriage as one man, one woman, here Craig seems to be insisting that there be three people in every marriage: a husband, wife and Jesus Christ.

The difficulty, Shane, is that meanwhile you are in danger of getting inextricably bound up emotionally with her, so that your love of her will seduce you to do something that your mind tells you not to do. So you need to create some emotional space between you and her while you wait to see if her commitment to Christ is genuine.

Nice. Much better to eschew the possibility of a lifelong relationship with a potential soul mate than to risk the wrath of an imaginary god.

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Andrew Brown Struggles to Contain his Contempt!

The writing of Andrew Brown often comes across as contemptuous, airily dismissive and lacking in nuance. To be charitable, I assumed this was a fault in his writing; after all, being contemptuous, airily dismissive and lacking in nuance is the sort of criticism he regularly levels at Richard Dawkins and any other 'new atheists' who offend him.

I have to take this back, however; his writing is not at fault. It turns out that his articles brilliantly capture his entire aspect:




Brown looks like someone has left a turd in the seat across from him, but it's only the mild-mannered moderate wing of new atheism, Daniel Dennett. Imagine if it were Dawkins himself! All four horsemen might make him faint; a photo of Hitchens could stand in for the great man and no doubt out-think Brown.

To be fair, upon seeing this video Brown realised what it showed:

It's strange that someone does not see the problem of contemptuously condemning contempt. Among many other things that upset him about Dawkins, it is his contempt for religious beliefs that he finds troubling:

The really extraordinary thing is ... that he supposes that displays of naked contempt are the way to win over agnostics.

Not for the first time, Andrew Brown is guilty of hypocrisy.

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The Problem of Non-God Objects and the Evil God

Justin Schieber has a post up that formalises one reason I have always found belief in the Christian God untenable. He calls it The Problem of Non-God Objects, and it's really another problem of evil issue.

For me, I have always wondered why a god, if he's sitting in his reality, which is, by the Christian God's definition, maximally perfect, would degrade it by introducing suffering beings. Theodicies suggest we are not in a position to know that our suffering will result in a greater good, but that cannot be why he did it, since his reality is already maximally good so a greater good can only arise once he has introduced a situation which is not optimal. Or they suggest that beings with free will were necessary to allow them to choose him to worship, and beings with free will necessarily introduce suffering, but of course any omniscient god would know this already so, again, why would he do it? At best I could imagine that evil introduced was balanced out by goods greater than the most perfect good, and so the equation balances out to be maximally perfect. But goods greater than the most perfect good is surely a contradiction in terms.

Schieber sets the argument out thus:

P1: If the Christian God exists, then GodWorld is the unique best possible world.
P2: If Godworld is the unique BPW, then the Christian God would maintain GodWorld.
P3: GodWorld is false because the Universe (or any non-God object) exists.
-Therefore, the Christian God, as so defined, does not exist.
(
Note: The term ‘GodWorld’ refers to that possible world where God never actually creates anything.  This argument takes for granted that God’s initial act of creating the universe (or any non-God object) was a free act and not born out of necessity.)

Christian philosopher Randal Rauser responded to the argument with two objections by analogy. He thinks there is something intuitively wrong with the argument, although he does not explicitly deny its validity or attack the premises. First:

...what if you should hear an argument to the end that it is impossible for mental states to affect the physical world? (Perhaps the argument seeks to establish the truth of epiphenomenalism.) Do you think it would be more reasonable to accept the conclusion that mental states cannot affect the physical world? Or would it be more reasonable to conclude that there is likely something wrong with the argument?

I think demonstrating invalidity and attacking the premises would be better, but I understand what he is getting at here. In fact, it is often a feeling I have about ontological, cosmological and fine-tuning arguments for God. I can see valid arguments but they are obviously wrong (to me), so one wonders what is wrong with the premises? I think that is what Rauser is getting at here, and I think it's a pretty normal philosophical gambit; it is reasonable, in the first place, to go with our intuitions, and we need good reasons to go against them. They are often shown to be wrong, of course, but in those cases we have good reasons to go against them.

Second, he says:

....imagine two automobile museums devoted to the muscle car. Each museum has a perfect model of every muscle car ever built from the 1964 GTO straight up to the 2013 Shelby Mustang. However, the second muscle car museum also has an unrestored, rusty 1970 Camaro in the backlot. Which is the greater muscle car museum?
Frankly, my intuitions would suggest neither. Both museums are perfect and the addition of one unrestored, rusty 1970 Camaro on the backlot of one of those museums is not sufficient to change that.

Both museums are perfect? So Rauser appears to see the world around us as perfect (he doesn't recognise that a degradation reduces the perfection in the second museum, so, by extension, he would not in the rest of the world?), which, I have to admit, should be the conclusion of a believer in an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent god, so hats off to him for that, if that is what he thinks. Voltaire had great fun with that notion.

In true Stephen Law stylee, then, I wondered how the argument would look if we switched the Christian God for the God of Eth:

P1: If the Evil God exists, then GodWorld is the unique worst possible world.
P2: If Godworld is the unique WPW, then the Evil God would maintain GodWorld.
P3: GodWorld is false because the Universe (or any non-God object) exists.
-Therefore, the Evil God, as so defined, does not exist.

Does Rauser think it is reasonable to conclude that there is 'likely something wrong' with this argument, and so Evil God exists? (Well, no, obviously! But I suppose he may still conclude that the argument is 'likely something wrong' and there are other reasons for not believing in the evil god). Imagine two automobile museums devoted to the muscle car. Each museum has the worst possible model of every muscle car ever built from the 1964 GTO straight up to the 2013 Shelby Mustang. However, the second muscle car museum also has a restored, shiny 1970 Camaro in the backlot. Which is the worse muscle car museum? Would his intuitions suggest neither? Well, perhaps, to be consistent, they would, but this strikes me as a hopelessly sceptical view of the world. Not only can he not recognise when something is worse than something else, he cannot recognise when something is better than something else.

I think we would all, theists and atheists alike, agree that Rauser's arguments here do not work any better against the good god argument than they do the evil god argument, and we both agree the evil god does not exist, but one set of us believes the good god exists. A believer would presumably conclude that the argument against the evil god does not work, and would have to look for different arguments to dismiss the existence of Evil God. I'm sure such arguments exist, of course.

But I think the exercise shows that we can still run the evil god argument against Rauser's objections and conclude something from that exercise. The atheist would be confirmed in his belief that the objections do not work well; the theist would have some work to do to figure out why they themselves do rule out an evil god, because it is not because of all the good in the world.

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More Wealth Inequality in the UK

Following on from my previous post on the subject, I'm adding a further graphic to illustrate the wealth imbalance in the UK (click graphic to enlarge):

The data is drawn from the same source as before. The figures above the percentages represent individual wealth at those points in the spectrum, so readers can gauge their own position (for shadenfreude or covetousness!).

Apart from the occasional half-hearted condemnations of bankers and executive culture, the press in the UK obsesses on welfare claimants and immigrants. The data shows that wealth inequality is the major driver of dysfunction in developed societies:

People in more equal societies live longer, have better mental health and have better chances for a good education regardless of their background. Community life is stronger where the income gap is narrower, children do better at school and they are less likely to become teenage parents. When inequality is reduced people trust each other more, there is less violence and rates of imprisonment are lower.

Rather than restricting welfare for the poorest in society and returning vast sums to the richest, then, we should be voting for politicians who look to redress the imbalance so apparent in the graphic above.

h/t again to Mother Jones for the original article.

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What Does it Matter What One Believes?

As a 'new atheist', Richard Dawkins has been subjected recently to a campaign by right-on lefties who want to stifle criticism of Islam. Their unfortunate modus operandi is to devalue the notion of Islamophobia; the reprehensible practice of unfair discrimination against Muslims.

Maybe first was Nathan Lean on Salon.com, who said, with nothing to support it other than new atheist criticism of Islam:

The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.

He even immediately followed this crass accusation with an example proving himself wrong:

"Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death,” writes Harris, whose nonprofit foundation Project Reason ironically aims to “erode the influence of bigotry in our world.”

Go figure. Murtaza Hussain produced a febrile piece on the usually more temperate Al-Jazeera website sensitively titled Scientific racism, militarism, and the new atheists that included this on Dawkins's fellow horseman Sam Harris:

Harris engages in a nuanced version of the same racism which his predecessors in scientific racism practiced in their discussion of the blanket characteristics of "Negroes". 

New atheists, of course, are the nasty and militant ones for objecting to the baleful influence of Islam, not Hussain for accusing of racism Harris and everyone who has been tarred with the new atheist brush. Go figure.

Then liberal commentator Glenn Greenwald tweeted this nonsensical article approvingly and got into a spat with Harris himself, who understandably thought that someone of a liberal persuasion would object to Hussain's wild speculations and mistaken inferences:

I’ve had pleasant exchanges with Greenwald in the past, so I wrote to him privately to express my concern. As you will see, I came right to the point. I was simply outraged that he would amplify this pernicious charge of racism so thoughtlessly. However, I am even more appalled by his response. The man actually has thought about it. And thinking hasn’t helped.

Other faitheists and theists have taken the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon: the laughable Theo Hobson, a mythicist called Neil Godfrey, and, one of the usual culprits, Andrew Brown, suggests Dawkins should stop pouring scorn on the Muslim belief in creationism:

However, this is where Dawkins' scorn does some real damage, even among people who have never otherwise heard of him. Because there is a self-consciously oppositional culture among young poor Muslims, who feel themselves stigmatised and disadvantaged, they can tend to embrace creationism simply because they know it's wrong by the lights of the majority. Dawkins' dismissal of Muslim creationism as "alien rubbish" was not only found as a YouTube clip on the EDL website for a while, but also used in the propaganda of Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist and self-publicist. The emotional logic is clear: if this rich, sneering white man is against it, it must be good for disaffected young Muslims who feel that they are themselves treated as "alien rubbish".

The logic here is stunningly thoughtless; presumably Brown thinks Dawkins should continue to ridicule Christian creationism (Brown did, after all, call creationists in Northern Ireland a 'crank group' and compared them to saucer-cultists and leprechaunists), but refuse to ridicule Islamic creationism? But that would indeed be discriminating against Muslims unfairly. To pull one's punches against one religion would be simply unfair on its congregation, who deserve, and should expect, to have their beliefs exposed to the same ridicule and scorn as everyone else's.

Today Dawkins tweeted about Mehdi Hasan who, apart from being a pretty good journalist in other respects, I understand, also believes in a winged horse. This is a belief worthy of ridicule; and scientific ridicule at that, since evolution shows that mammals have four limbs and such a horse is usually depicted as having six limbs. Oh, but of course it's a magic horse from heaven, so evolution is irrelevant, believers would say, which just increases the risibility of the belief for anyone who doesn't believe in magic horses from heaven.

So far, so Dawkins. But then Labour MP Tom Watson, stalwart of the anti-Murdoch campaign, replied:

On the face of it, Watson thinks that pointing out someone's silly belief makes one a 'gratuitously unpleasant man'. Watson, a man not known for his tenderness, thinks Dawkins could 'try a little tenderness'! Well, that certainly made me laugh. However, I guess Watson saw what a daft thing this was to say, so he changed his focus to Dawkins's second sentence:

His first complaint was clearly about Dawkins's tone, but now he straw-mans Dawkins by translating "And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist" to "people with faith cannot contribute to civic society with their journalism".

This is dishonest, but does show something important; the reason Watson feels free to defend the winged horse belief is because it's a religious belief. And, possibly more importantly given the recent hysteria, a Muslim belief. If Dawkins was ridiculing saucerists or leprechaunists, I doubt Watson would intervene. This is supported by a later tweet:

@formertheist "Religious observer can't write for the New Statesman." Does that strike you as measured? "Really?" back to you, sir.
— tom_watson (@tom_watson) April 21, 2013

This is not what Dawkins said, of course, but it does raise interesting questions of how much one's beliefs might discredit one. Plainly in society today, religious beliefs that are worthy of ridicule are nevertheless protected from ridicule because they are religious. Religious beliefs, particularly Christian ones, are given credibility by society's attitudes to them. They are still afforded platforms in the press and television media, including the BBC; religious leaders bypass democracy and are allowed a central role in law-making; the Church of England is central to the UK's constitution. Given this, it would bring the entire establishment into disrepute if Dawkins's attitude became the norm, in Parliament, the press and the broadcast media. But that is really the aim of the so-called new atheism; to strip religion of its privileged position, and let its ideas swim in the free marketplace of ideas.

Add to this the unfortunate conflation by left-wingers of Islamophobia with valid criticism of Islam, and we can see why Watson felt the need to intervene. He is a political animal, and prioritises protection of Muslim individuals because he sees politics as more important than religion. On this he may be right, and his aims are laudable. It seems plausible that some racists do adopt the pose of Islamic criticism as a route to the othering of Muslims. Sadly, these recent articles are attacking the wrong target, so they will make the task of combating genuine Islamophobia more difficult.

Interestingly, Watson actually thinks that what one believes should disqualify one from the public forum; this is what he said about shock jock Glenn Beck:

The Glenn Beck show in no way achieves those vitally important aims. That type of journalism is dangerous and can have wide-ranging negative effects on society. The kind of material broadcast by Glenn Beck is not unique; a number of other "shock jocks" operate in the States. However, none has displayed intolerance on such a frequent and irresponsible scale as Glenn Beck. It is vital that that kind of "news" is not made or broadcast in the UK. However, the proposed acquisition of BSkyB by News Corp means that there is an increased threat of its becoming a reality. (my emphasis)

Now to be fair, Watson is attacking the content of Beck's journalism here, not his beliefs directly. But the content is informed by Beck's beliefs, and I think Hasan's recent interview with Dawkins shows that his beliefs clearly influence his contributions to the public forum (negatively). My feeling is that it is fair to point out when someone believes something ridiculous; Bill Maher has curious ideas about vaccines, Michael Shermer is way too libertarian for my liking, and Sam Harris is just plain wrong on gun law and, probably, moral objectivity. Does this discredit their other pronouncements? Yes, I think it does to a degree, but not necessarily fatally; it depends on the belief. Some beliefs are just sillier than others. Creationism is sillier than the (still silly) theistic evolution. Winged horses are sillier than golden plates, even.

Given that, I think it's fair to wonder aloud if a reputable organ like the New Statesman should publish Hasan as if he were a serious thinker, which I think a serious journalist should be.

Look at it this way; Dawkins is suggesting that if Mehdi Hasan believed in alien lizards, like David Icke, the New Statesman would not continue to publish his journalism without comment. Does Hasan's credibility suffer by his beliefs? I think, like Beck's, and Icke's, it does.

UPDATE:

Blimey, true to form Andrew Brown writes another incoherent piece with the Islamophobic slur in the URL, in which he says "On Sunday afternoon [Dawkins] was at it again, wondering why the New Statesman employs an imaginative and believing Muslim". Dawkins did not wonder that, of course, as anyone who reads the tweet can see. Brown's attack is confused - he wants to call Dawkins Islamophobic but admits:

Anyone who follows him knows he is an equal opportunities bigot who is opposed to Christians of every colour as well.

So a person is a bigot now even if they don't discriminate in their opprobrium! Someone contact the OED. As I say above, the insidious effect of this sort of nonsense is that language becomes debased and we cannot identify genuine bigots for what they are.

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Walk in the Dark with a Mystery, or Walk in the Daylight Alone?

Friendly Atheist has this video up in a post by Paul Fidalgo. As Paul says, it's quite heartbreaking, especially given the recent news. In it Kay Warren, wife of Rick, says:

I would rather be in relationship with a god who in many ways remains a mystery. And walk in the darkness with a god who in some ways remains a mystery, than to try to walk in complete daylight without him.

That seems to me to be such a sad thing to say, although maybe many people identify with it; who wants to be alone in the universe? But wanting something does not make it so, although we are excellent at conjuring beings out of thin air.

I remember as a kid growing up on an estate with dark, rather forbidding woods behind the houses. I used to gather the kids together and we would go down into the wooded valley where the foundations of an old hut remained, and play in the mud and the streams and the trees. The foundations of the hut had the look of a footstep. A large one, obviously, so I used to regularly scare the other kids by telling them how it was a giant's footstep, and that I had seen the giant once. In fact, I would say, looking nervously about, I think I can hear him coming now. With not much more than that, I would put the heebie-jeebies up the gang and a rushing, stumbling, all out retreat from the woods would ensue.

And here's the odd thing; I would get caught up in the panicky evacuation too, just as frightened as the others! I was excellent at invoking beings with completely bogus emotional manipulation, and I don't doubt that everyone else is too. There we were running in the dark with a mystery (and quite thrilling it was too), and we have at least one believer who would rather remain in those woods than escape to the daylight.

But what we prefer does not determine what is true. We would prefer the universe to be one of innate justice and goodness, but as Kay Warren appears to have noticed, sadly, that does not appear to be the one we live in.

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