Click here if you have 7 spare minutes or so to listen to an excerpt from an ABC Local Radio panel show I usually do on Friday mornings.
Update - Roger from Values Australia has also milked the McKillop cow (though rather less light-heartedly than yours truly) as has Adele Horin in The Age.
This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week, orgainsed by the Muslim Students’ Association.
The official question for debate was ‘Should God have a place in the 21st Century?’, and the format was pretty standard for this kind of thing: two speakers on each side, a fifteen minute opening speech, rebuttals, cross-examination, and a Q&A session to round off. The arguments were pretty standard, too, for anyone who has seen a few of these debates (there are scores on YouTube). For some fairly partisan accounts, see here and here.
Wassim Doureihi spoke first for the affirmative and got the evening off to a bad-tempered start by announcing that he had very low expectations of his opponents. This was ironic as he was easily the weakest of the four, with little to offer except the observation that without God there would be no objective morality — more wishful thinking than an argument — and some unsubstantiated hyperbole about ‘atheism’s two embarrassing children — totalitarianism and liberalism’. Continue reading
Alex Stewart has had his 15 minutes of fame, but may live to regret it. Earlier this week he posted a video on Youtube. It showed him smoking lawn-clipping cigarettes that were fashioned out of pages torn from the Bible and the Koran. He compared the taste “scientifically” and was statistically astute enough to regret not having smoked a page of Bertrand Russell’s complete works as a control.
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So asks Don of Ed. It’s sufficiently off-topic to warrant its own thread. Here’s my own first stab at the question, but it’s doubtless very unsophisticated, and sure to be substantially revised after a robust discussion.
Belief has a wide variety of meanings connected by family resemblance.
1. A deeply held conviction, such that finding the contrary to be true would be a disturbing experience — like finding out that your father isn’t your real father. Or it might be something quite trivial — I remember discovering that a fellow student at uni, who had told me she was 26, was really 22, and it quite shook me. Children’s belief in Santa is in this category.
2. A hunch we hold on a factual question that we know is not settled one way or the other. I might claim to ‘believe’ that there is life on Mars or that the Hindenburg was sabotaged, but I wouldn’t be unsettled if the balance of evidence tipped the other way.
3. A hunch on a question that is unsettled and we know is unlikely to be settled in our lifetime, such as whether there is extraterrestrial life, or whether God or gods exist.
4. An official position we declare on some issue — factual or metaphysical — that we don’t have a firm conviction or opinion about, but on which an opinion is expected. Don’s opinion poll responses are in this category, but some people enjoy expressing such ‘beliefs’, like fashion statements.
5. A cultural identity statement: If someone raised as a Catholic says ‘We believe that in the Eucharist bread is transformed into the body of Christ’, they may be combining two factual statements — (i) here is a piece of Catholic doctrine and (ii) I am, due to circumstances of history, identified as a Catholic. The speaker’s personal convctions may remain uninterrogated and are irrelevant to the point being made.
Religious belief could be any of these. For children and extremely naive adults it most closely resembles (1). People who have deconversion experiences when they are very young usually find them very truamatic. In modern societies reflective people who remain religious progesss from (1) to (3), which is essentially optimistic agnosticism. Less reflective people progress to (4), and non-reflective people stay at (5).
There are intermediate cases between the above, but have I missed any important forms of believing, at least insofar as they relate to the question of religiosity?
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Evolutionary psychologists have been busy proposing explanations for religiosity. Belief in transcendent conscious beings might promote survival, they argue, by instilling hope and optimism. Or it might be a by-product of other naturally selected susceptibilities, such as infant credulity, pattern seeking, or the tendency to attribute strange events to agency.
But last year a certain Gregory Paul announced in Evolutionary Psychology that this project is a false trail. According to Paul, the rapid decline in religious belief in the West shows that it can’t be a hard-wired psychological propensity.
Paul first ignited controversy in 2005 with an article in the Journal of Religion and Society arguing that religiosity was highly correlated with high rates of homicide, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and other social disorders. Despite his explicit protestations to the contrary, critics initially inferred that Paul was blaming religion for social problems. In fact his aim was merely to refute the conventional wisdom that religion is socially beneficial, and the best way to achieve this was by showing that the relationship is if anything negative.
In the 2009 article, Paul went on to propose a causal relationship, but with the direction of causation running the other way: that is, religion is a response to social dysfunction and anxiety. This is evident, he argues, from the observation that religiosity has retreated in response to three pressures: (1) the march of science and rational thought; (2) increased economic security including employment protection and free medical care; and (3) the ascendancy of materialism as a legitimate outlook. These factors neatly explain why religiosity has declined so much in Europe, Japan and Australia, and why the USA is such an outlier. Continue reading
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I have long viewed sporadically gifted journalist Christopher Hitchens as a caricatured bullying buffoon, but until quite recently I admired Richard Dawkins. Years ago I read The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker with fascination, along with the works of fellow biological sciences populariser Stephen Jay Gould. They seemed to me to epitomise scientific rigor and rationalism.
However Dawkins seems to have gone completely off the rails over his atheism obsession. His gratuitously offensive and silly reference to Benedict XVI as “Pope Nazi” at a recent atheists’ conference in Melbourne was bad enough. But now he and Hitchens claim they want to arrest the Pope for ‘crimes against humanity’ for ’the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church’.
Leaving aside the fact that it’s highly unlikely that Benedict’s alleged actions (he wrote a letter as a Cardinal in 1985 indicating that moves to defrock a paedophile priest required “very careful review” and more time for investigation) could be classified as a crime against humanity within the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court even if he had ‘covered up’ child abuse, the known facts don’t actually point to the commission of any crime at all by Benedict:
Evelyn De Morgan, The Worship of Mammon (1909) |
An embarrassingly bad story on PM about economics versus Christianity spoiled my drive home on Good Friday. I suppose they need to present something about religion at Easter, but can’t they do better than this?
The hook for the story was Glenn Stevens’ revelations at some ‘charity breakfast’ and on Sunrise that he’s a practising Baptist. If you go along with the PM story this is supposed to raise the issue of whether you can reconcile Christian faith with neo-classical economic doctrines.
But if this summary of the Chairman’s comments is anything to go by, then, as far as Stevens himself is concerned, PM’s take is a total beat-up. He chats pleasantly about the influence of religion on his personal life; all the rational reader wants to know, however, is whether his religious convictions affect his decisions. And on this he has two things to say. The first is exactly what we want to hear, namely, that for all practical purposes his religion doesn’t influence his analysis:
Well I don’t think that I would draw those interpretations about the judgment of God and so forth as a result of economic downturns. I think what we’ve learnt is something that we knew or should have known all along which is that market economies are characterised by cycles, that human behaviour is driven by alternately greed and fear and that therefore economic systems are occasionally prone to this kind of instability.
Whew. He’s a just a healthy Keynesian, it seems. The second thing he has to say is as innocuous as one could come up with:
I think if you are a Christian God has given you certain capabilities to do a job, to earn a living and the Bible teaches that you should do that as if you are doing it for Him, because you are, and that’s my attitude.
So it turns out that Stevens’ comments don’t point to any tension whatsoever between religious belief and public service. What, then, do we learn from the rest of the PM story? Continue reading
From the State Government that brings car racing to our most idyllic park, turns nature reserves over to shooters, refuses to cap political donations, reneges on public transport promises faster than it makes them, and philanders while its health system burns, it’s nice to see a sensible decision once in a blue moon, even if it’s a no-brainer.
Despite very recent accusations that she was ‘stalling’ on the decision, the NSW Education Minister Verity Firth has approved a pilot ethics course for children in state primary schools.
In the existing arrangement, forty minutes of class time is allocated weekly to Special Religious Education (known to everyone as `scripture’), conducted by volunteers from various denominations. Currently children who opt out attend `non-scripture’, which involves reading, catching up with homework or watching a film.
The Federation of Parents and Citizens’ Associations of NSW proposed that these children instead participate in an ethics course, commissioned by the Association and developed by the Saint James Ethics Centre and UNSW philosophy professor Philip Cam. The first step would be a pilot, beginning `as a 10-part discussion-based program for students in years 5 and 6, covering issues such as truth and fairness.’ Continue reading