wearestardust
24th November 2009, 08:56 AM
I’ve been dipping into Alistair McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism. As I have mentioned before, I have the view that to criticise theists for not being across atheist thinking is unfair if I’m not myself across theist reponses to atheism. Now, before anyone thinks I’m being elitist and critical of other atheists, I should point out that this springs largely from my Catholic upbringing and need to feel guilty about anything and everything. I wish it were otherwise, but it is not; thus I torture myself.
And torture it is. I’ve only dipped into the book for the moment because every few sentences I have to put the book down while I resist the urge to bang my head repeatedly against something hard. McGrath, I should add, is supposed to be The Business, intellectually, in the theist crushing of atheism. Well, one could have lots of things to say about this. Lots and lots. But I want to focus on two points which really leapt out at me – there is a fuller review linked at the bottom of the post which tells you about the shape of the story overall. The first point is, even if we take a theist rejection of reason on its own terms, what does this mean for the place of religion in society? The second one, which I’ll put into a separate post and which is McGrath’s real target, is about his characterisation of the godless society.
McGrath is deliberately antirationalist. He makes the common move of equating science with belief by saying that not everything that scientists think is true is yet proven, or was always proven while thought true by scientists (eg many of Einstein’s predictions took decades to confirm). Leaving aside the disingenuous abuse of the idea of what is or isn’t thought true by scientists and what that means (I should add at this point that McGrath has credentials in philosophy of science which, he says, opened up the door for him from atheism to belief), what he says in summary is this: religious propositions, which are in principle untestable and beyond reason, are exactly as worthwhile as potential beliefs as contingent statements of science that are testable, in the process of being tested, and while being tested have the support of being predicted by or being consistent with other statements that have been tested and are strongly supported by evidence (remember what I said about his credentials in philosophy of science? Oh dear). Just to be clear I’m not putting words into McGrath’s mouth about the status of religious beliefs; he explicitly says that they are untestable and beyond reason (presumably thinking it is safe to say so, having disposed of mere science).
So far, nothing much new. We had our own version of this in the Digitalos Affair. It occurred to me, though, that this has interesting implications for religion and its place in secular society. If theists are going to insist that their beliefs just are, and can’t be challenged in any way by reason, well that’s sort of the end of that conversation. This does, however, it seems to me, rather undermine claims of theism to a voice in the public square.
My view of secularism – which I am aware is quite weaker than that of some people who post here – is that theists are perfectly entitled to have their say in public matters, but they don’t get any special consideration of their views just because they are theists, and – and this is the punchline – if all they have to back up what they say is “the sky fairy said so” (or some coded variant, such as “it’s unnatural”), then we all say “thank you” and ignore everything they have to say on the issue. Not because I have anything against the sky fairy in this particular regard, but because it is unpersuasive, unreasonable (literally!), unfair, and just plain time-wasting to give airtime to such views.
And here we have McGrath. As I’ve mentioned to, his key interest is the godless society and why it would be a Bad Thing. He seems, by the above reasoning, though, to have put himself and theism generally out of bounds as far as social conversations go because, by his own insistence, there is nothing reasonable or persuasive that theism has to say – it just is and you just think it is so. Or not.
Views?
and the review:
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/religion/mcgratha.htm
And torture it is. I’ve only dipped into the book for the moment because every few sentences I have to put the book down while I resist the urge to bang my head repeatedly against something hard. McGrath, I should add, is supposed to be The Business, intellectually, in the theist crushing of atheism. Well, one could have lots of things to say about this. Lots and lots. But I want to focus on two points which really leapt out at me – there is a fuller review linked at the bottom of the post which tells you about the shape of the story overall. The first point is, even if we take a theist rejection of reason on its own terms, what does this mean for the place of religion in society? The second one, which I’ll put into a separate post and which is McGrath’s real target, is about his characterisation of the godless society.
McGrath is deliberately antirationalist. He makes the common move of equating science with belief by saying that not everything that scientists think is true is yet proven, or was always proven while thought true by scientists (eg many of Einstein’s predictions took decades to confirm). Leaving aside the disingenuous abuse of the idea of what is or isn’t thought true by scientists and what that means (I should add at this point that McGrath has credentials in philosophy of science which, he says, opened up the door for him from atheism to belief), what he says in summary is this: religious propositions, which are in principle untestable and beyond reason, are exactly as worthwhile as potential beliefs as contingent statements of science that are testable, in the process of being tested, and while being tested have the support of being predicted by or being consistent with other statements that have been tested and are strongly supported by evidence (remember what I said about his credentials in philosophy of science? Oh dear). Just to be clear I’m not putting words into McGrath’s mouth about the status of religious beliefs; he explicitly says that they are untestable and beyond reason (presumably thinking it is safe to say so, having disposed of mere science).
So far, nothing much new. We had our own version of this in the Digitalos Affair. It occurred to me, though, that this has interesting implications for religion and its place in secular society. If theists are going to insist that their beliefs just are, and can’t be challenged in any way by reason, well that’s sort of the end of that conversation. This does, however, it seems to me, rather undermine claims of theism to a voice in the public square.
My view of secularism – which I am aware is quite weaker than that of some people who post here – is that theists are perfectly entitled to have their say in public matters, but they don’t get any special consideration of their views just because they are theists, and – and this is the punchline – if all they have to back up what they say is “the sky fairy said so” (or some coded variant, such as “it’s unnatural”), then we all say “thank you” and ignore everything they have to say on the issue. Not because I have anything against the sky fairy in this particular regard, but because it is unpersuasive, unreasonable (literally!), unfair, and just plain time-wasting to give airtime to such views.
And here we have McGrath. As I’ve mentioned to, his key interest is the godless society and why it would be a Bad Thing. He seems, by the above reasoning, though, to have put himself and theism generally out of bounds as far as social conversations go because, by his own insistence, there is nothing reasonable or persuasive that theism has to say – it just is and you just think it is so. Or not.
Views?
and the review:
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/religion/mcgratha.htm