The ruminations of John Gray, Part I

In a Point of View (accessed 23.09.11, available as a podcast) called “Believing in belief” (16.09.11), John Gray argues that the scientific and rationalist attack on religion is misguided. Apparently, atheist critics overrate the importance of belief to religious believers. (If he’s right, shouldn’t they then be called religious experiencers or religious practitioners?) He begins with Graham Greene’s conversion, in which the author was more impressed by his priest talking about “the challenge of an inexplicable goodness” than by any arguments for the existence of God.

Gray conveniently passes over the word “inexplicable”, which for the religious is almost as useful as the word “mystery” in their efforts to avoid stretching themselves intellectually. Is it reasonable, however, to claim that goodness is “inexplicable”? While no sensible person would attempt to give an all-purpose explanation relevant to all situations, surely, if we are so inclined, we can explain good behaviour in all sorts of ways, without reference to the supernatural? For example, Dennett (1995, p. 403) cites John Dewey, who thought Darwinism should be the foundation of any naturalistic theory of meaning:

“I only insist that the whole story be told, that the character of the mechanism be noted—namely, that it is such as to produce and sustain good in a multiplicity of forms.”

Priests, of course, aren’t known for their digressions into Darwinian thinking while preaching about the good.

Greene admitted to not being that bothered about the arguments for religion: he simply accepted the truth of the propositions on offer (why those propositions, the Christian ones, and not some other set, such as those belonging to Islam?). Should we admire him for this? I certainly don’t, although Gray seems to think that we should. For me Greene is like the shipowner in W. K. Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief” (Clifford 1999, pp. 70–96). He too couldn’t be bothered to check the facts, and simply accepted that his ship was seaworthy without taking reasonable measures to ensure that it was. The consequences for those on board when the ship sank were immediate and devastating. The consequences of Greene’s epistemic complacency were not as obviously grievous (though how do we count the lives lost to superstition through the ages?), although, as Clifford argues, he is as morally culpable, for “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”.

(It’s interesting that Clifford’s spiritual journey was in the opposite direction to that of Greene. In the introduction (ibid., p. xii), Timothy Madigan writes that, deep in the study of Aquinas, Clifford at first revelled in supporting Catholic doctrines, but the impact of evolutionary theory altered his views. Greene, if he couldn’t be bothered with arguments for God, could hardly be expected to read On the Origin of Species.)

Gray moves on to the “dull debate on atheism”, in which religion is mistakenly reduced to a set of beliefs, or propositions about the world the truth or otherwise of which can be decided by appeal to the evidence. Ignoring his personal judgement on what counts as “dull”, two points can be made.

First, I don’t recognize the debate: the atheists I read all understand perfectly well that religious experience and practice are both important, in addition to belief. For example, the long historical perspective of Lewis-Williams (2010, p. 115) accepts that “science developed in the cocoon of religion” and that humans in a range of cultures were “struggling with a rickety structure of interlocking religious experience, belief and practice”.

Gray must have listened to some very ill-informed atheists if he thinks that we regard science and religion as making equivalent bids to describe the world. He is rather conveniently overlooking the crucial difference between the “two different ways of knowing about the world and life – science and supposedly revealed knowledge”. Even if religion were just a set of beliefs, it would still be fundamentally opposed to the scientific project, which places revealed knowledge in the category of psychological experience. (This is not a dogmatic refusal to “see the light”, of course, since there are plenty of ways in which a rational person might be persuaded that such knowledge was indeed of divine origin.)

Second, on the importance of beliefs within religion, Gray mistakenly generalizes a conclusion when in fact there is a fascinating variation: it may come as a surprise to him that not all religions are the same. Here is Bart Ehrman (2011, pp. 6–7):

Most people today don’t realize that ancient religions were almost never interested in “true beliefs.” Pagan religions—by which I mean the polytheistic religions of the vast majority of people in the ancient world, who were neither Jewish nor Christian—did not have creeds. . . Truth was of interest to philosophers, but not to practitioners of religion. . . Religion was all about the proper practices: sacrifices to the gods, for example, and set prayers. . . .

He contrasts this aspect of pagan religion with the predominant view of many Christians, which is that “if Free-will Baptists are right, Roman Catholics are wrong”, to take two sects at random. Erhman continues:

Christians insisted that it did matter what you believed, that believing the correct things could make you “right” and believing the incorrect things could make you “wrong,” and that if you were wrong, you would be punished eternally in the fires of hell. Christianity, unlike the other religions, was exclusivistic. It insisted that it held the Truth, and that every other religion was in Error. . . . The Christian religion came to be firmly rooted in truth claims, which were eventually embedded in highly ritualized formulations, such as the Nicene Creed. As a result, Christians from the very beginning needed to appeal to authorities for what they believed.

Note the description of the Nicene Creed as a “highly ritualized formulation”: here, belief becomes part of ritual, and cannot be separated in the naive way Gray imagines.

We are only two minutes into a ten-minute broadcast, and Gray has already notched up an impressive list of misrepresentations and misconstruals. He then refers to “the confident assertions of the New Atheists” (a dog whistle phrase no doubt interpreted by some as “the arrogance of the New Atheists”), which is a bit rich, since in any argument it is the religious who rely on unsupported statements of belief (the epistemic dimension of faith): the New Atheists have an annoying habit of actually backing up their claims with reasoned argument and evidence. As for confidence, this comes through beliefs being grounded in fact, rather than being plucked from fantasy. It is also a highly contingent confidence: again, all the New Atheists I have read know that they might be wrong, that they might be proved to be wrong. What is so provoking to the priestly caste and to their strange bedfellows such as Gray is that we are unlikely to be convinced by a couple of verses in a two-thousand-year-old book, or by any amount of ritualistic moaning and eye-rolling.

Two and a half minutes in and Gray aligns himself alongside Wittgenstein (the philosopher’s equivalent to Einstein). He reiterates the view – certainly mistaken with respect to Christianity – that religion is not really about beliefs.

What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all. The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion.

Gray concedes that there are areas of life where “having good reasons for what we believe is very important”, but if rigorous procedures are useful for establishing the facts in laboratories and courts of law and hospitals, and so on, why is that epistemic discipline suddenly dispensable when investigating, for example, the existence and activities of deities? Surely, on such important matters (and don’t the religious love to talk about the “big questions”?), we ought to take more care over establishing the facts of the matter? Indeed, if pressed, a Christian must discriminate between the voice of God heard as supposedly by Abraham and the voice of God as supposedly heard by Peter Sutcliffe, and how is this to be done except by appeal to some standard of reasoning that does not get bogged down in question-begging circles? Of course, as an atheist I don’t believe it can be done, and presumably Gray agrees, so why this limiting of the scope of reason?

Four and a half minutes in and we are told that art and poetry are not about establishing facts. Goodness, I was convinced that Twombly painting I saw last week was an actual representation of Bassano, the village in Teverina! Scientific inquiry “is the best method we have for finding out how the world works”. Goodness, a second true belief emerges from the oracle! As if to make up for this sudden lapse into truth telling, Gray quickly soils the airwaves with a hackneyed claim:

If we know one thing, it’s that we know our current scientific theories will turn out to be riddled with errors.

Error is always a possibility in many areas of science, but this is a crude characterization that ignores the certainty of much of our hard-won knowledge. For example, if we survive for a million years, it is unlikely that the number 92 will ever be discovered to be the wrong number of naturally occurring elements. This is, as Larry might say, pretty, pretty, pretty certain. We are never going to come up with a “better” estimate.

Five and a half minutes in and we are told that religion is a collection of myths or stories that captures something science can’t. Has he ever spoken to a Christian? Did he get the impression that the historical veracity of the gospels was an optional extra? Were heretics burned at the stake because they didn’t like a story?

That Gray is confused by the concept of truth is illustrated by the use of the word in his reference to the “truth of scientific theories”: theories, like arguments, are collections of linked propositions, and in themselves cannot be either true or false. Only propositions can describe facts about the world.

Myths can’t be verified or falsified in the way that theories can be.

Again, this is loose talk. There is a sense in which you can prove a theory right or wrong, but really you are finding weaknesses or strengths in chains of argument. Again, truth is a property that resides in premises and conclusions, not in arguments.

Symptomatic of this muddled thinking is the following vague claim:

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.

An example of one of these “silly modern stories” is that science enables us to live without myths. Well, I try to live myth-free, and there’s nothing silly about that at all. The fact that I try to live without myth doesn’t mean I live without stories. Moreover, I resent the implication that a respect for science and reason necessarily devalues storytelling. Quite the contrary, in fact, since once you ditch worn-out myths you can get on with some real creative business.

Six minutes in:

There’s nothing in science that says the world can be finally understood by the human mind. If Darwin’s theory of evolution is even roughly right, humans aren’t built to understand how the universe works. The human brain evolved under the pressures of the struggle for life.

Again, from someone who has just accused the New Atheists of making “confident assertions”, this takes the biscuit. In summarizing chapter thirteen of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, one of those New Atheists shows why Gray is probably wrong:

When generate-and-test, the basic move in any Darwinian algorithm, moves into the brains of individual organisms, it builds a series of ever more powerful systems, culminating in the deliberate, foresightful generation and testing of hypotheses and theories by human beings. This process creates minds that show no signs of “cognitive closure,” thanks to their capacity to generate and comprehend language.

(Dennett 1995, p. 400)

Gray continues:

Darwin’s theory is unlikely to be the final truth. . . we’ll always be surrounded by the unknowable. . . science has become a vehicle for myths, chief among them the myth of salvation through science. . .

Excuse me? Salvation? Apparently, some of us are deluded into thinking that science may help “humanity march onwards to a better world”. Now, Raymond Tallis may have gone off the rails in large parts of Aping Mankind (2011), but he’s spot on with this remark, aimed at Gray and his ilk:

Contempt for the idea of progress has always been attractive to some because it justifies sparing yourself the effort of trying to leave the world a better place than you found it. (p. 4)

Gray continues:

Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst. They think human life would be vastly improved if only everyone believed as they do, when a little history shows that trying to get everyone to believe the same thing is a recipe for unending conflict.

Passing over the egregious slur (evangelical, conversion, dogmatic – and the worst of it is to imply that at the heart of every atheist is the void of unbelief), take the example of scientists trying “to get everyone to believe the same thing” when that same thing is atomic theory. Far from “unending conflict” the scientific project brings together people of all nationalities and backgrounds, regardless of class or gender or sexual orientation, in ways unimaginable to any religion, and it generates harmony out of disagreement (as opposed to fatwas and hatred).

What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.

And doesn’t what we believe influence how we live? The beliefs of religious parents who prefer prayer to proven medical treatment, and whose child has appendicitis, may destroy that child’s life with their false beliefs.

It is not that we atheists want everyone to share the same beliefs. Far more important is that we examine how we arrive at those beliefs, what prejudices and assumptions were present at their formation, what biases were at work, and whether they are backed by reason and evidence or held in conflict with reason and evidence.

Of course it matters how we live. But, strange as it may seem, it is non-believers who take belief more seriously than believers.