ON SECULARISM SHOOTING ITSELF IN THE FOOT



JUNE 15th 2004


Last month's AT was about the ongoing phenomenon of Christianity shooting itself in the foot.

''Philosophy' is a Greek based word meaning 'love of wisdom' : we need a word 'phobosophy' meaning an aversion to wisdom - a preference for shoddy thinking. Such things as stating as fact what is actually only belief as to fact, catchall statements that are inherently unfalsifiable, sheer incoherence and the like are part of the daily phobosophy of populist religion. Examples abound.

The notions that "I KNOW that God exists": that "God is good and when He appears to cause or condone the suffering of the unoffending He is, nonetheless, being good but in a way that defies our limited understanding" : that "God always answers our prayers and if things happen precisely oppositely to what we have prayed for then that is because He knows best". (We have to ask what is the point of praying for some desired outcome when God knows best. If He knows best then, obviously, He does not stand in need of our advice and indeed He knows our wishes often to be misguided more clearly than we ever can). As to incoherence, I met a serious educated man who, when confronted by an incredible religious thesis, said "I need to believe the unbelievable". You cannot get much more incoherent than that!

But enough of that - the purpose of this article is to expose secularist phobosophy by reference to three well attested examples.

The first is quoted from Margaret Knight's historic book 'Honest to Man'. The late Mrs Knight was a respected academic at Aberdeen University and she raised a storm in 1955 in BBC broadcasts in which she argued very lucidly that morality is not dependent upon belief in the existence of God.

In 1974, 'Honest to Man', was published and remains a valued work on - to quote its sub-tile - 'Christian Ethics Re-examined'. But the book has its faults. On page seven Margaret Knight writes - of the argument that our morality has to be anchored in God otherwise it is mere convention - "But this argument will not stand up to logical criticism. The sceptic may reasonably ask why we should be guided by God's preferences - to which the believer can only reply that it is because what God prefers is good. But what exactly does this statement mean? Does God prefer certain things because they are good? Or are certain things good because God prefers them?. If he opts for the first alternative, the believer implies that he has knowledge of good that is not dependent on his knowledge of God's preferences. If he opts for the second, he is saying in effect that the word 'good' means 'preferred by God' - so the statement that God prefers what is good amounts to no more than that God prefers what he prefers, which is a tautology".

Obviously the second option is, as Margaret Knight demonstrates, worthless but the first option is not so simple.

There could be a free-standing cosmic good (a platonic notion believed by many - presumably Plato for a start) which God alone can understand and He adopts it and accepts His responsibility for imparting it to the human race - who might otherwise be ignorant of its implications. A believer could hold such a view without incoherence. Indeed some do just that. On such a basis it might be argued that our notion of morality must come to us via God, its indispensable divine interpreter. The first option includes a possible role for a god which, if accepted, could make that god into God. This possibility can only be ruled out by denying the existence of any god anyway. That prior denial would be a clear instance of a seductive form of phobosophy, disregarding the logical possibilities of one's position

My second instance of secularist phobosophy is to be found in a deservedly popular account of the secular humanist position. The book is called 'The Cosmic Fairy' by Arthur Atkinson. The writer claims to prove the non-existence of God (see circa page five).

The gist of Atkinson's argument is that since a creator would necessarily require both intelligence and consciousness in abundance, and since these attributes emerged only very late in the evolutionary scheme of things, therefore there must have been no creator. Circularity rears its seductive head. It is precisely the assumption that intelligence and consciousness exist ONLY by virtue of the evolutionary process that implies that there is no antecedent creator. It is all very well to say (as I myself say) that "I find the idea of an antecedent creator unconvincing" : it is quite another to say that my being unconvinced that such a being exists proves that being's non-existence. Absence of evidence does not count as conclusive evidence of absence - although very often we practically must take bets on inconclusive evidence.

My third example of secularist phobosophy concerns the recent controversy between the National Secular Society and the BBC on the broadcast feature 'Thought For The Day'. This is aired at approximately 7.40 am daily Monday to Saturday. The NSS argued rightly that serious thought is not to be equated with religious thought - religious thought varies from the quietly valuable to the stridently banal and secular thought exhibits a similar heterogeneity. So, said the NSS, the BBC ought to include secularist thinkers among its daily contributors to TFTD.

A British fudge was agreed upon. Richard Dawkins was given an equivalent air time - but not at the usual hour - in addition to the routine religious TFTD. His piece is in the public domain - on the BBC web site in fact - and it has been published in the secularist press. Here it is -



Dawkins said, on the radio, "When a terrible disaster happens - an air crash, a flood, or an earthquake - people thank God that it wasn't worse. (But then why did he let the earthquake happen at all?)

Or, even more childish and self-indulgent: "Thank you God for the traffic jam that made me miss that plane." (But what about all the unfortunate people who didn't miss the plane?)

The same kind of infantile regression tempts us when we try to understand the natural world.

"Poems are made by fools like me . . . But only God can make a tree."

A pretty song, but an infantile explanation. It's too easy. Lazy. The moment we put a little effort into thinking about it, we realise that God the creator is no explanation at all. He constitutes a bigger question than he answers.

Once, we couldn't do any better. Humanity was still an infant. But now we understand what makes earthquakes; we understand what made trees. Not just trees like oaks and redwoods, with their underground root system like a huge, upside-down tree.

The arteries that leave the heart branch and branch again like a tree. There are about 50 miles of blood vessels in a human body.

Nerve cells, too, branch like trees. They are so numerous in the teeming forest of your brain that, if you stretched them end to end they would reach right round the world 25 times.

In the face of such wonders, do you fall back, like a child, on God? "It's so wonderful, so complicated, only God could have done it."

It's tempting, isn't it. But it's not a real explanation. Not the kind of explanation that actually explains anything. And it's nowhere near as poetic as the true explanation.

Because the beauty is that humanity has grown up. We now know the true explanation. It's gloriously simple once you get it, and more wonderful than our forefathers could ever have imagined. It makes use of yet another tree. The family tree of life. It began with something smaller than a bacterium, and it branched and branched to give all the species that have ever lived, whether extinct like the dinosaurs, or still hanging on like our own. Evolution really explains all of life, and it needs no supernatural intervention of any kind.

The adult response is to rejoice in the amazing privilege we enjoy. We have been born, and we are going to die. But before we die we have time to understand why we were ever born in the first place. Time to understand the universe into which we have been born. And with that understanding, we finally grow up and realise that there is no help for us outside our own efforts. Humanity can leave the cry-baby phase, and finally come of age.

Now there's a thought for more than just a day!"



I claim that this piece calls for a secular equivalent of "God save us from our friends ...." or as the Duke of Wellington is thought to have said in face of bunch of very unpromising recruits "I don't know what this lot will do to the enemy but, by God, they frighten me".

My aversion to the piece rests upon several points.

1) to make a case to good effect one has to steer a very tricky course between coming over as dreary banality and being needlessly abrasive thus causing offence and so diverting attention from the content of your output. Avoid generating gradual nod-off and avoid generating instant switch-off.

I cannot expect the uncommitted listener or the honest adult doubter, to be other than irritated by such phrases as "childish and self-indulgent" : "infantile regression" : "Humanity can leave the cry-baby phase".

A consequence of such a strident presentation is that wise words such as "God the creator is no explanation at all. He constitutes a bigger question than he answers" are easily lost in the noise of the propagandist overkill that would likely cause offence to mature puzzled adults - the very people to whom TFTD ought to be addressed.

2) An exposition of science that rests upon "Gee whizz, whatcha know?" is simply not good enough particularly from a man whose job is to explain science to the lay public and indeed to scientists themselves (who are usually laymen in specialities other than their own).

What is needed is quite another response "That's interesting; it has activated my sense of wonder and urges me to find out more". All this 'astronomical' sensationalism about miles of blood vessels and thousands of miles of nerve fibre come into the gee whizz category and seem to assert the supposed superiority of scientists over lay persons. It is good to repeat that an expert in one area of science may well be a layman in other areas.

"It began with something smaller than a bacterium" is a pretty lame attempt to explain the origin of life - always supposing that the origin of life can be explained in a sentence or two in a few minutes of radio time.

I think that Dawkins has 'blown it' in this broadcast. It reminds me of the story of the Tory who said proudly that Margaret Thatcher was our first woman Prime Minister and the Old Labour woman who said "Aye and probably the last".

As I wrote in AT No.1, I reject the grim doctrine of Original Sin - but I am coming round to believe in the debilitating doctrine of Original Phobosophy.

E.S..

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