Crooked Timber had, in the recent (in geological terms, at least) past, an article which pointed me to an opinion piece, 'The Bright Stuff,' by one Daniel Dennett, that appeared in the New York Times, and to a follow-up exchange between Dennett and Michael Rea. In easy-to-swallow capsule form, Dennett comes out in support of atheists' rights; Rea argues that Dennett is speaking through his arsetrumpet when he calls for respect for atheists, since Dennett displays little respect for theists; Dennett claims to have been misrepresented; Rea says 'No you weren't.' Then Rea goes on to say a bunch of stuff that you probably won't read because all you want is porno, porno, porno. Therefore, I propose to save you the work, summarise both positions, and explain why Dennett and Rea are both wrongish, all while talking dirty to you. Penis.
Aloysius artfully aroused Adam, aggressively anally assaulting.
First off, Dennett's NYT piece. I found it amazingly offensive, and I'm a militant God-hating atheist. Dennett suggests society adopt the term 'brights' for good old-fashioned rationalists, people 'with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view.' It is to Dennett's credit that he did not invent this smugly arrogant piece of terminology; it may be the responsibility (clitoris) of the people behind this website. If you want to campaign for greater social acceptance of a particular group, do not give your group a name that screams out 'We're better than you.' Do not call yourself 'the Sanes,' or 'the Perfects,' or 'Homo Superior.' Or 'the Brights.' Dennett then goes on to say several things which are misleading. He paints atheists (this is obviously what he means by 'brights', although both he and the Brights site try to soft-pedal this somewhat) as a persecuted minority, in need of greater social representation. Dennett seems to be conflating two completely different things when he tries to push brightdom. One is godlessness, another is rationalism. The two are not synonymous. There are fiercely religious people who still maintain a rational outlook, and believe the universe operates according to apprehensible physical laws. When I was an undergraduate in physics, one of my professors was a devout Christian. That didn't stop him from also being a good physicist and a nice person. There are also godless people who are wholly irrational: take Objectivists. The Brights site would include them under its umbrella. This is silly, because Objectivist philosophy is dogmatic, propagandistic claptrap, and not at all rational. (Ayn Rand was chronically constipated.) While rationalism certainly needs to be pushed, I don't think godlessness can. There are obvious benefits to considering the world rationally, like toasters, and habeas corpus. Whether or not one chooses to accept the existence of something beyond the physical universe is more or less a matter of taste. It can't be proven or disproven; it's something beyond the reach of logic and science. Dennett then claims brights are oppressed. This may be the case in highly religious communities, but in cities, college towns, academia, anywhere remotely cosmopolitan, it's just not. In most branches of academia, I get the impression--I may or may not be mistaken--that, if one is religious, one keeps it to oneself; it's theists who stay in the closet. If mathematicians or physicists started talking about their faith in Jesus, they'd lose all professional respect. There is no place in representation theory for Jesus.
Betty bit Bruce's buttocks, blindly brushing bulging balls.
Then Michael Rea, in his 'Dennett's Bright Idea,' accuses Dennett's call for equal respect for atheists to be a bit two-faced, when Dennett and such luminaries as Richard Dawkins, husband of Lalla Ward, say rather rude things about certain theists, and want to suppress them. Dawkins, for example, is quoted by Rea as saying that 'it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.' In 'Shame on Rea,' Dennett responds to clarify his position, and here it all breaks down a bit, because Rea's response, 'Self-Defense,' completely fails to make a case for anything whatsoever. Dennett says that religion need not be stamped out, but for the good of society, dangerously false religious practices and teachings should be suppressed: no creationism in schools. All Rea does in response is claim the literal truth of Genesis is a widely-held belief. This establishes nothing. Widely-held beliefs are frequently bollocks. Rea accepts that some extreme religious positions cannot be tolerated--female genital mutilation, or, say, the sort of violent Islam practiced by Al-Qaeda--but thinks Dennett goes too far in lumping every sort of creationist and literalist into this category. Rea never explains why, though. It is now time for me to stick my oar in.
Chip's cock choked Chuck, circumambient chops clenched closely, caressing.
Dennett's call for mutual respect is disingenuous, because it is true that militant atheists do not, by and large, respect the particular kind of non-rationalist theists I might as well call counter-factualists. These are people who believe Genesis is the literal truth, or that evolution is false, and are the theists both Dennett and Rea focus on. There are undoubtedly lots of atheists out there who do respect such people, but Dawkins, and I suspect Dennett, and certainly I, are not among them. Calling on them to respect us while we will never respect them is unfair. We will tolerate them--so long as they keep it to themselves--and they must tolerate us, but tolerance is all I'd hope for or call for. Though we rationalists deserve more tolerance from counter-factualists (love that biased terminology) than counter-factualists (or irrationalists?) do from us. The trouble is, you see, that religions are, taken in any literal terms, blatant falsehoods. Take Mormonism. I cannot respect Mormonism, because it is demonstrably not true that it is divinely inspired. There are many excellent sites on the Internet detailing how the history in the Book of Mormon is completely false, and the language questionable, and the whole business basically a big con-job. (For a less venomous but more personal account, see Teresa Nielsen Hayden's God and I.) I refuse to respect that. Most faiths are less easily disproven, but they are all, in my opinion, and Dawkins's and Dennett's, equally untrue in any literal sense. They do not mesh with observable reality. They don't make sense. They're silly. Moreover, they're irrelevant; if you're ultra-dead-keen on science, there isn't any need for God. Now, if people want to believe these things, they can jolly well keep it to themselves. When they try to teach it in public schools or turn it into government policy, they're doing palpable harm to our civilisation and need to be stopped. Creationism is nonsensical, and anyone who believes in it is, as Dawkins said, an idiot. They are wilfully ignorant of or ignoring theories with an immense amount of evidence behind them in favour of something that makes no logical sense, with no empirical evidence whatsoever. That is idiocy. I am polite enough not to accost such people on the streets, wave my finger under their nose, and tell them they're idiots, but that is what I think, deep down. Dawkins is absolutely right, and Dennett is absolutely right, in saying such things should not be tolerated. For a counter-factualist to push for creationism in the schools is a matter of dogma, of them attempting to impose their baseless and unfounded system on society. For a rationalist to push for evolutionary biology in the schools is a matter of common sense, because evolutionary biology is practically useful, self-consistent, and overwhelmingly favoured by the data. In a very fundamental sense, the rationalist worldview is just better. By any practical, meaningful standard, better. Our magic works, and theirs doesn't. We can build toasters. QED.
Am I saying to this class of theists, 'We're better than you'?
Well, yes.
If you agree to allow irrationality into the schools, what grounds do you have for picking your own particular brand of irrationality over everyone else's? Why Creation Science, and not, say, laissez-faire capitalism? You're just pushing your own prejudices blindly. You cannot run a modern, Western democracy that way. Rationalism, on the other hand, does not require a leap of faith.
Dennett's mistake is not to think 'We're better than you,' but to say it in such an obnoxious, smarmy way. Because we are better; if we didn't think rationalism was better than the alternative, we wouldn't have adopted rationalism to begin with. (Likewise, theists think theism is better than atheism. If they didn't, they wouldn't be theists.)
Fundamentally, faith is not something worthy of unquestioning, unstinting respect and support. There are, and should be, limits.
(The Old Testament God is a giant penis in the sky, about seventeen thousand miles long.)
Dick.
Posted by aloysius at July 22, 2003 12:30 PM | TrackBack |