THE EMOTIONAL ATHEIST
November15th 1997
The next issue, Number 19, will appear on December15th 1997.
Islam (which means literally submission to god's will) is in many ways a
very attractive religion; it is attractively simple in doctrine. There is
Allah, the creator who has made all things and whose will is binding upon
all things including us, indeed especially upon us. The divine will has been
made known to us by way of the Koran - a book in which God's will is set out
as revealed to His Messenger, The Prophet.
According to Islam, the scriptures of preceding religions and the prophets
associated with those religions are, in general, to be respected as
legitimate precursors of the finally and definitively true Prophet and the
one true (Islamic) faith. Subsequent alleged scriptures and alleged prophets
associated therewith (such as those associated with the Bahai religion) are,
with perfect logic, held by faithful followers of the Prophet to be simply
redundant or false - if not actually fraudulent and subversive.
If, in the preceding paragraph, we delete 'Islam' and 'Islamic' and replace
those words by 'Christian' and if we replace 'associated with the Bahai
religion' by 'associated with the Islamic and Bahai religions' .... making
those amendments ..... the paragraph, as so amended, would be essentially
acceptable to many Christians.
The attractive simplicity of Islam is in sharp contrast with the remarkable
complexities of Christianity - complexities with which liberal minded people
are increasingly disenchanted even if they remain theists and indeed nominal
Christians. What theological purpose is served by having a
three-in-one-but-one-is-really-three god when simple monotheism is on offer?
Why make the extraordinary claim that Jesus was both authentically human and
authentically divine when god could as easily have entrusted his message to
a mere human person and could have given us salvation if we simply submit to
the discipline implicit in that message? Why need the founder of the
religion need to be born of a virgin - whatever that may mean - and why
would normal conception not do? Why need god have inspired the long,
tortuous and complicated collection of books that is the Christian Bible
when a much shorter book can say all that is essential without any
contradictions and superfluous side-tracking?
It seems reasonable to say that, on a strictly doctrinal basis, Islam is
much more satisfactory than Christianity. I have to say that, had I any
stomach whatever for religion, I would far more likely be a Muslim than a
Christian. Why then is there so much 'Islamophobia' - often more evident
among liberal secularists than among liberal Christians? What is
'Islamophobia' all about and what proper basis does it have, if any?
Islamophobia (a strong aversion to Islam) is not primarily a religious
phenomenon - although adherents to other religions often display it. It is
primarily a philosophical matter and that is where secularism comes in.
In passing, it is perhaps scarcely necessary to note that the evil minority
offence of 'Paki-bashing' has nothing to do with it either in religious or
in philosophical terms; those who descend to that horrible violence do not,
we may assume, see themselves as defenders of the thirty-nine articles or of
the doctrine of transubstantiation; neither are they defending some
philosophical aversion to the doctrine of unconditional submission.
It is this submission thing which sticks in the liberal gullet, the secular
liberal gullet especially.
The liberal theist is offered so many barely intelligible, and seemingly
contradictory, notions to submit to that 'what actually ought I to submit
to?' is a baffling question indeed. So 'let us be ambivalent about all of
them' is now the option of first choice among many such people.
Liberal secularists are, or ought in my opinion, to understand that they
are, on much firmer ground in rejecting 'submission' as, strictly speaking,
categorically unacceptable. The objection to submission is not simply based
on a yen for indiscipline. On the contrary, it is based upon a reasoned
analysis of what submission entails logically speaking. It entails arrogance
- and that is simply not acceptable.
To say that 'I submit absolutely to xyz', whatever xyz may be - and assuming
that the admitted submission is not under intimidation or by force of habit
engendered by indoctrination during one's most formative years - is
contingent upon its opposite, namely arrogance.
Of course there are cases of submission by intimidation - 'death or the
Koran' was a Muslim battle cry when the soldiers of The Prophet were
conquering huge areas of North Africa and the Middle East in the seventh and
eight centuries CE. Equally most Muslims are what they are by upbringing -
as are most Christians, and other religionists.
It is submission by choice that is simply the flip side of arrogance but,
before demonstrating that this is so, a BBC broadcast of some years ago
springs to mind as illustrating the point. It was in one of those 'phone-in'
programmes that a young man - quite obviously English by name, by speech and
by ready acknowledgment - was asked "What made you convert to Islam?"
His answer was abrupt to the point of rudeness - "I did not convert to
Islam; we are, every one of us, all born Muslims but only a fortunate
minority are born into families in which this fact is understood without
doubt. I had no such good fortune; I had to discover, for myself and against
some social pressure, that I am a life-long Muslim."
For sheer brazen arrogance this statement (which I have reported from memory
but which I believe to be a true account of what the young man said) simply
cannot be beaten. It exemplifies the submission/arrogance tie-up although,
of course, it does not prove it rigorously as a generally necessary
conclusion.
I claim that such proof runs as follows:
One cannot, freely and conscientiously, say 'I submit absolutely to xyz'
without making, effectively if not consciously, an important prior
assumption. That assumption is that 'I have absolutely certain knowledge of
how to recognise that which is worthy of my submission'. In so far as
absolute certainty in this prior assumption is in doubt ..... just so far is
the absolute submission short on full justification.
Can anyone be truly certain that they can recognise 'worthiness to be
submitted to' without the possibility of error?
Two grounds for such a feeling of true certainty can be offered; both, in my
opinion are fatally flawed.
One is the simplistic religious ground that 'God has told me by direct
revelation'. It is scarcely possible to believe in god in such a simple way
without also believing, equally simplistically, in the devil. If the devil
is held to be a master of disguise and deception then how does the recipient
of presumed special revelation know that it isn't the devil who is doing it
- tempting the simplistic believer into the sin of pride, the sin of
believing that he, the recipient, is so important that god talks to him
directly while other people have to make do with revelation merely reported
to them by others?
The other ground for asserting that 'I know for certain that xyz is worthy
of my submission' is simplistically pseudo-scientific.
The pseudo-scientific argument might run 'I am an experienced person and on
many occasions my judgment as to what is truly the case has been confirmed
by experience ..... therefore my judgment that xyz is indeed worthy of my
submission is fully justified and it is not arrogance on my part to say so
uncompromisingly'.
Now it is true that 'experience is the best teacher' - that is the basis
upon which we take practical decisions and that is the basis upon which we
can claim to have identified 'laws of nature'. But it is simply not the case
that generalisations can be established as absolutely certainly true by the
accumulation of particular instances. Such accumulation does indeed give a
ground for taking a chance on the generalisation being true but it does not
guarantee that truth beyond doubt. Let us examine the unreliability - in
absolute terms - of establishing conclusions with certainty from even large
numbers of particular instances. Let us, in short, inquire whether induction
is absolutely dependable.
I could truly have said, this time yesterday, 'I shall be alive this time
tomorrow' and considering that I am well into my seventies, I could have
said the same thing with equal truth on upwards of twenty thousand preceding
days. That is a lot of instances of the statement proving to be true. Can we
generalise and say that on every future day I shall always be able truly to
make that statement - can I infer that am I immortal?
The practice of making generalisations from instances in the hope of
arriving at absolutely certain results is not dependable; by that procedure
I might expect both never to die when, by accepted common sense, (also based
upon the empirical facts that people in numerous instances have died ) I am
surely going to die sometime.
No claim as to establishing absolute certainty by this process of induction
can be entertained. Induction is practically indispensable but, in absolute
terms, fallacious. As the philosopher, C D Broad once said 'induction is the
glory of science but the bane of philosophy' ... or words to that effect.
So the fact that the person who judges with certainty that xyz is worthy of
his absolute submission is, even if he has been proved right in many past
judgments, not able to be absolutely sure that he is bound to be right every
time. Experience is the best teacher but it is not an infallible teacher -
'there can always be a first time' is another wise old saying.
The notion of the rightness of absolute submission is therefore an arrogant
one - one that quite falsely attributes infallibility either to perceived
revelation or to the logic of induction.
The danger from Islam is precisely that ..... absolute submission (and hence
absolute arrogance) is, at its very centre .... is far more explicit than is
the case with many other .... more liberatable ..... more questioning .....
more many-faceted, religions. That is why other religionists are vaguely
into Islamophobia while secularists are, quite explicitly, very anxious
about the perceived re-invigoration of Islam that seems now to be happening.
A virulent but, in its perverse way, authentic form of Islam bids fair to be
the totalitarianism of the 21st century. Reasonable people, not least
reasonable Muslims, should beware.
CORRESPONDENCE RECEIVED
November 14th 1997
Dear sir,
Do you think that believers, who question their religious practices and yet
still want to maintain their faith, can learn from atheism? If so, what can
they learn from them in order to strengthen their faith, or at least to
prevent themselves from being self-righteous and downright hypocritical?
thank you,
jimmy guevara, clajpg@dlsu.edu.ph
From ES to JG
If an atheist says that he KNOWS there is no god and if a theist says that
he KNOWS the contrary to be the case ... then there can be no dialogue
between them - other than agreeing to be polite to each other.
If the atheist says that he does not believe in god because he thinks that
the grounds for belief are insufficient then the theist might reply that the
grounds are good enough for him and that, in any case, the god-idea is
practically valuable - "if God did not exist we would have to invent Him".
Between two such thinkers there is the possibility of constructive dialogue;
each can help the other to be more critical and to eliminate loose thinking
on both sides
If you care to visit the Lady Godivs site (see below for the URL) then, in
Number 106 you can find an article of mine called 'Atheism Without Tears'.
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