Religion, agnostics, and the cure for baldness
And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”
I’m always on the lookout for religion’s latest counter-arguments, the new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn’t an inherently irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to wasting as much of the world’s time and energy as this particular one. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a baldness cure: you just never stop being surprised at how many different ways men can find to fail at growing hair.
This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children. The esteemed professor’s new book is called Reason, Faith and Revolution, and it’s sort of an answer to the popular atheist literature of people like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens. If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class.
Like almost all great defenders of religion, Eagleton specializes in putting bunches of words together in ways that sound like linear arguments, but actually make no sense whatsoever. In one speech he takes issue with what he calls the “Yeti” view of faith as espoused by atheists, i.e. the idea that religion is based upon the belief in an object whose existence, like that of the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy, cannot be verified by observation “in the reasonably straightforward way that we can demonstrate the existence of necrophilia or Michael Jackson” (one of a disturbingly high number of Eagleton jokes that nonsensically reference pop culture figures of at best semi-recent vintage). Eagleton’s response to what he calls this “travesty” of illogic:
For one thing, of course, God differs from Unidentified Flying Objects or the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy in not being even a possible object of cognition… it’s not just we cannot see Him, it is as it were that our not seeing him is inherent to God Himself, which is presumably not true of the Yeti.
Got that? It’s not that we can’t see God — it’s that God is inherently unseen! Take that, atheists! He goes on:
For another thing, faith of course is traditionally regarded as a question of certainty… not as a question of probability or speculation or guesswork, but actually as a question of certainty, which is not to say that it’s not also traditionally regarded as being inferior to knowledge. But only fully paid-up rationalists think that nothing is certain but knowledge. Faith, as the author of the epistle to Hebrews writes, is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” Whatever else may define the science of theology, or religion, it is from a theological view certainly not the question of certainty. I don’t think Ditchkins [this is what Eagleton gleefully and repeatedly calls Hitchens/Dawkins] understands that.
I listened to this argument at least five times and at the end still had absolutely no idea what the hell Eagleton was talking about. I thought at first he might be saying that faith does not require certainty, but then again nobody who wanted to say that would bother with all that extra verbiage. Anyway this is the kind of stuff that permeates Eagleton’s work: a lot of masturbatory semantics and naked goalpost-moving buried in great gnarled masses of old-world sneering and unnecessary syllables.
Eagelton’s main idea, the one trumpeted by Fish in the Times, is an even sillier piece of syllogistic sophistry than his “God isn’t like the Yeti! We’d be able to see a Yeti!” trick. The basic premise goes something like this:
Reason dismisses faith because faith lacks the certainty of knowledge.
But, reason alone has been proven to be completely inadequate to solve the problems of the world, and has proven especially feeble at providing man with the answers to his questions about the nature of existence.
Therefore, reason was wrong about faith.
The whole premise recalls Woody Allen’s famous syllogism: “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.” And…well, I’m not going to get into this too much, because taking an axe to some soggy old Catholic academic is beginning to feel wrong somehow. But something tells me we’re going to be hearing more of this rhetoric, if for no other reason that whenever money gets tight and the times get nervous even intellectuals will suddenly start talking about God. You see this same phenomenon played out on a more crude level in Southern fundamentalism, where the megachurches are smart enough to send their missionaries to rehab centers and prisons and everywhere else you find people stumbling, confused, and vulnerable to a soul-snatching out of their various existential car wrecks — and now that 21st century capitalism has hit the wall and yuppies everywhere are flying through the windshield into debt and foreclosure, the God-hawkers will show up here, too, to argue that where materialism and science have let your postmodern liberal self down, religion comes ready with answers.
Fish/Eagleton spell out the failures of science and materialism as follows:
Science, says Eagleton, “does not start far back enough”; it can run its operations, but it can’t tell you what they ultimately mean or provide a corrective to its own excesses. Likewise, reason is “too skin deep a creed to tackle what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and evidence — cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the absence of an a priori specification of what is real and important, and where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.
First of all, why is that no professor alive can make it ten feet from his front door without sticking an a priori into a sentence? Is there some kind of subterranean lair where academics are beaten with whips and clubs until they learn to write alliterative book titles (“Pus, Primates, and Pessimism: Jane Goodall’s Descent into Septic Shock”) and lard up perfectly good sentences with epistemological catch-phrases? Weird. As for the actual argument, it’s the same old stuff religious apologists have been croaking out since the days of Bertrand Russell — namely that because science is inadequate to explain the mysteries of existence, faith must be necessary. Life would be meaningless without religion, therefore we must have religion.
But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find ridiculous about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of belief system. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto itself. But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers we have inspires such verbose indignation in people like Eagleton and Fish. They seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death. They’ll tie themselves into knots arguing this, and they’ll probably never stop. It’s really strange.
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They are waiting for the friggin rapture dude!! How does anyone apply logic to a discussion with ‘those people’?
They will blindly recite scripture, they will tell you they will pray for your soul..but they will never admit they are wrong or prejudiced.
it is an absolute certainty that we definately need more religious commentary from matt taibbi. i am dogmatic as hell about that. as for me, i am currently trying to connect the dots between marriage, weight gain/childbearing and female religiosity. WTF is up with that? I believe at the bottom of all of this is the female urge for thought control. we need a name for this kind of pattern behavior like the mid-life crisis. Mid-wife crisis, maybe? nah. anyone have any ideas?
“it is an absolute certainty that we definitely need more religious commentary from matt taibbi. i am dogmatic as hell about that.”
Really, Eric? I think I’d rather rather see a book-length version of Matt Taibbi mocking the inextendability of Thomas Friedman metaphors
Did you see that Lewis Black has an atheist book coming out? I can’t believe those bandwagon tracks are still discernible. (I wonder if he will bulk out the second side of his next LP by including a comedy rap.) If you are Daniel Dennett (or, hell, Richard Dawkins for that matter) and your last book tour caused you to be introduced more than thrice as a peer of Sam Harris’s, mayhaps your investigations have gone astray.
Good trueslant post, Mr T (um, what is trueslant exactly? And what about it makes me suspect the business model is journalism meets Amway?), but the next book goes after the dysfunction of populism, I say. (What, in their quietest moments, are tea-baggers *really* angry about? They pretend to be angry at the robber barons they have every sane right to be angry at, but they aren’t, are they? As you point out, not a measurable peep about no-bid Iraqi logistical consulting robber baron rape. Can you robber baron rape if you are caucasian? If you love Jesus and hate gays? How do they have they faculty to know that robber baron rape is a sound thing to *pretend* to be angry about and yet lack the faculty to be genuinely angry about it? Or are they genuinely angry about it and befuddled by the origins? That’s your next beat, I say. Yep.)
In response to another comment. See in context »Whoa, what a nutty bag of ideas you’ve got there. As a woman who is a life-long atheist I am not sure how to even begin to respond to it. It is so plain to me that your comment says FAR more about the women in your life than it does about women in general and I’m wondering how on earth you can be so insulated that you can’t see it. It’s very sad but I think you are probably caught in it forever, too, since the only sort of woman who would ever have anything to do with a guy like you is precisely the sort of marriage-obsessed shrew who you claim to hate.
In response to another comment. See in context »eagleton used to be “our” douchebag when he was writing some sort of inscrutable marxist dogma in re pop culture. now i’m happy to trade him to “their” team, perhaps for arlen specter and a transubstantiation to be named later.
i hear eagleton is a real sponge when it comes to regurgitating empty rhetoric FWIW.
Your moving-the-goal-posts comment sums it up rather nicely.
The only God that has ever existed is a God-of-the-gaps. Every theist to have ever existed has worshiped Him/It… for if man/science/reason can’t explain it, then God did it!
Before the cure for polio — God was killing those people because they were wicked. Sun/Moon rising and setting — God did it! etc. etc.
Thankfully, those of the religious bent are starting to die off. No, we won’t see their disappearance during our lifetime (not even close), but some day…. some f’ing day… that I won’t be alive to see.
Damn you science for not progressing to the point to where I can expect to live for 1000 years!!!
But then again, damn you religious people for forcing your made-up moral code on the rest of the planet — retarding scientific progress and insight at every turn!!!
Exactly. “god-of-the-gaps” is all they have. And even though the gaps get smaller every day – it will never be enough for the zombies of gaptown.
Look at evolution. Scientists say, “Look! We’ve found species 2, and it looks like it is an ancestor of species 4.” The deluded say, “Oh really? Where, then, is species 3?” Scientists then find species 3, and the deluded ask for species 2.5 and 3.5! These two are found and they scream for 2.25, 2.75, 3.25, and 3.75! And on, and on it goes!
Theirs is the god of infinitely small gaps, to be believed in by those with infinitely small minds.
In response to another comment. See in context »I greatly enjoyed the Snopes II section of Smells Like Dead Elephants, and enjoyed this as well. More writing on religion from Taibbi, please.
This did a good job of nailing the faith aspect of the arguments made by the Eagleton/Fish crowd. It sort of half slips into quasi-validating another aspect of their argument in a very peculiar way.
A chunk of their writing is about how people like Dawkins simply don’t understand modern Christianity, what they actually believe, etc. When critics make points like “You have faith that this book is the word of God and is true. So, you think that gay people should be beaten to death by the jawbone of a jackass?” it’s easy for them to shake their heads and say that you must just not understand modern Christianity. Modern Christianity is all about selectively embracing Old Testament moralist idiocy and selectively ignoring New Testament brotherly love. If you’re trying to apply logic to it in the first place, you must just not get it. Or you’re obsessed with your ivory tower thinkin’ skills. Or some such.
Not that tearing things down like that is really validating that argument…it just falls into another rhetorical black hole, devoid of meaning.
By the by, in reference to the book title bit, you can half-blame Shakespeare, and half-blame modern public speaking and rhetoric coaches for overemphasizing silly little tricks like triples and alliteration. Though, in fairness, if Shakespeare was looking to move some serious paper these days he would have gone with something more like “Friends, Fellows, and Funeral-goers: Caesar Rules and Brutus Drools.” Shit, that’s actually kind of a fun game to play. I doubt I’ll beat the Goodall example, but still.
“Modern Christianity is all about selectively embracing Old Testament moralist idiocy and selectively ignoring New Testament brotherly love.”
Can I just say argh. I am not an apologist for Christianity or religion in general, but you can’t characterize a religion that claims a billion adherents merely by looking at the ridiculous, airy, and very white theology of evangelical Americans. The non-violence of the Civil Rights Movement was based on Christian principles. A real politically revolutionary call for justice is found in Latin American liberation theologies. Much of the way Christianity is practiced globally isn’t about moralizing, or even faith, but about ritual, tradition, and community. Religion can provide a foundation for ethics and an impetus for social and political action. Seen as a sociological phenomenon and not a metaphysical description of reality, religion has no less validity than concepts like nation or race or anything else that arbitrarily groups people together and gives them a sense of identity. I don’t believe in an active god, or in anything ’supernatural’, but I still practice Christianity for those other reasons.
In response to another comment. See in context »I see your point in that not all modern Christianity has leaned toward the darker side, but I think Matt hits on a greater point in general. Using Christianity to validate moral principles is always selective – those Christians who joined the civil rights movement were ignoring the portions of the bible that clearly support slavery and racial superiority, just as those who rely on the bible’s anti-gay or anti-women portions may be ignoring some of the more liberal messages.
The point is – people are moral or they’re not. Why look to the bible or religion when it can be just selectively interpreted depending on what the person in question instinctively values?
In response to another comment. See in context »Shakespeare was one of the sharpest critics of tawdry uses of poetic novelties like alliteration, metaphor mismatching, self-indulgent bloviating, etc. He was aware and sensitive of how easy it was to mishandle such rhetorical flourishes. I don’t want to get on a Harold Bloomian level of Shakespeare apologism, but it’s no fault of his great legacy that people are thoughtless, inarticulate retards. Of course, many of them (mis)use metaphors, worn-out phrases, and clichés to intentionally obfuscate the lack of original ideas in their writing. When it comes to Fish/Eagleton, some of it may be intellectual laziness, but there’s probably a more cynical motive to their shitty writing.
Of course, it’s also possible that after years of exposure to the unforgiving conclusions science has made of the natural world, their traumatized brains have collapsed into an atrophied mush left with barely enough functionality to incorporate collegiate bombast, logical fallacies, circular reasoning, and myopic observations into an endless feedback loop of obnoxiousness.
I wish many of the aforementioned artless stylizations were a more modern thing, but it’s been around for a while. The kind of awful and misleading prose that Matt has criticized (especially anything by Thomas Friedman) was thoroughly dissected by Orwell in his still-prescient essay “Politics and the English Language” some 44 years ago.
In response to another comment. See in context »Matt I love ya, but in all candor I think after reading this post you might want to be careful of accusing others of excessive use of verbiage.
http://www.irreligion.org/2008/03/10/50-people-go-blind-after-staring-at-the-sun-trying-to-see-the-virgin-mary/
The existence of this eternal bickering between God-people and no-God-people is proof that the Devil exists and is trying to bore everyone to death. Great minds are wasted on this pointless argument. The day that someone actually comes up with an argument that convinces the other side that they are wrong, is the day that I stop believing in the all-mighty power of the self-affirming Ego.
Graham- you said it better than anyone. Nice.
In response to another comment. See in context »“But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers.”
True dat, and I’m one of them. For the inquiring mind, new knowledge sparks new questions. We will never know or have an answer for everything. Our DNA will unravel before we unravel the mysteries of existence. But mysteries are good, because they create wonder, and we dwell in a wondrous universe.
Great post, but you should have gleefully referred to Fish/Eagleton as Eaglefish or Feagleton.
[...] I liked your piece on Eagleton/Fish and the mushiness of the desperation of intellectual justifications for “faith” beyond [...]
Here’s the thing: Theists love to say tht Science answers questions like “what” and “how”, whereas religion goes after the spiritually relevant “why”, as in “why are we here?” I hate to break it to them, but there’s nothing about the universe that indicates the question “why are we here?” has any meaning whatsoever. The question itself is loaded with hair-brained assumptions.
This is perhaps my favorite defense of religion ever. “God isn’t like a yeti. He’s like an *invisible* yeti!”
I’d refer you to my post below, but you hit on the point I’d most like to counter Matt on.
A yeti is merely an evolutionary curio. It would never answer the desires for wholeness, centrality and immortality that religious believers call for. So there is no comparison, either intellectually or (most importantly for religion) emotionally.
Only an agnostic could mistake the claims of reason with the calls from the heart. But as an atheist I don’t have this problem. I understand what theists are looking for in terms of solace and significance, and know it is illusory.
An agnostic has no idea of the emotional subtext.
Only an agnostic could write (as recently posted on London buses) “There probably is no God. So relax…”
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] I Like Reading May 8, 2009 — Jon One of the better sentences I’ve read today — and also a reason you should read Matt Taibbi. Fish was mostly [...]
[...] Posted in Atheism, Worldview tagged apologetics, Atheism, Matt Taibbi, Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton at 12:48 pm by Andrew If you’ve already read my take on the ultimate implications of Terry Eagleton’s work, and you’ve migrated on to PZ’s take, then you’re probably ready to check out Matt Taibbi’s. [...]
[...] site with a sort of morbid fascination. I managed to click to the website off of the Matt Taibbi blog post about religious apologist Terry Eagleton. It was sort of a non-sequitur from religion to drugs [...]
Richard Feynman quote:
“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here…
I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It dosn’t frighten me”.
from The Life & Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.
Well put, I sincerely hope Mr Taibbi continues to weigh in on the religious debate, as we need more prose like this to combat the obscurantist drivel that is the ultimate
defensive crouch of the religious apologist.
I mean, “But, reason alone…has proven especially feeble at providing man with the answers to his questions about the nature of existence.” Are you shitting me? If “reason alone” has “proven especially feeble” at providing answers about the nature of existance, what’s proven effective? The Bible?
Voodoo? Tarot card reading? Or has mankind not found any answers about the nature of existance since the stone age? How little oxygen is there way up at the top of the ivory tower?
I do wonder why Matt identifies as an agnostic rather than atheist, if he were another writer I would probably think he was afraid of the scarlet letter, but he’s never struck me as the shrinking violet type. I imagine probably an issue with definition and perception, Sam Harris spoke rather well on the liabilities of the atheist label at the 07 AAI lecture.
I’m also curious at the charge levelled against Dawkins, especially since this “turning atheism into a religion” taunt is a “I know you are by what am I” argument often hurled at atheists by religious apologists, and I find it ridiculous. I haven’t detected dogmatism is the speech or writing of Dawkins that I’ve been exposed to, it would be helpful if Mr Taibbi would expand and flesh out why he thinks this about Dawkins.
Matt, you are definitely one of my favorite contrarians, but when you write like this you’re taking the easy way out. You spend your energy minutely describing the glaring inadequacies of some lousy argument for belief in God.
However, you yourself admit to being an agnostic. The more difficult essay to write (and probably the less amusing one) would be your description of why you can’t just call yourself an atheist. And no fair just saying ‘Dawkins is too dogmatic’ and calling it a day. Why is it that in the face of all the compelling arguments for atheism, you cling to your agnosticism?
It depends on how you define atheism.
As Bill Maher once said on The Daily Show:
“But I heard you in the introduction say ‘Bill Maher would say there is no God’. I don’t say ‘there is no God’. I’m not an atheist because I find atheism to be a mirror of the certainty of religion, and I don’t like certainty about the next world because we can’t know. What I say is ‘I don’t know’”.
In response to another comment. See in context »To the people who bring up the agnostic/atheist distinction: in my opinion, being an atheist is just as ridiculously dogmatic as saying you are sure there IS a God. Don’t get me wrong, I find the whole concept of an old man who is at the same time his own son, watching over us, not exactly a likely scenario.
And I cringe everytime a new scientific discovery is made that does not comply with the Bible, the religious crowd simply tries to encorporate said scientific discovery into their religion (like evolution-creationism/Intelligent Design).
But I am not sure. There are very few things I’m sure of in life. Having to pay taxes, and dying someday. Those two are pretty much it. And to say, without any kind of reservation, “I KNOW there is no God, and I am 100% certain of it” is just the same kind of pig-headed stubbornness, only at the other end of the spectrum.
What’s wrong with just saying: “I dunno…”?
I know this is probably splitting hairs, but I don’t think “atheist” has to mean “absolutely sure there is not god” – many take it to mean “does not affirmatively believe there is a god.” This does not deny the possibility as a certitude, but puts it in the same category of other things that we can’t disprove but generally don’t think about (say, that we’re all the dream of a giant beetle, or we’re in some sort of Truman Show-style television show). I think if you look at it this way, there’s probably not as much disagreement. I take “agnostic” to mean more “legitimately on the fence about the question.”
In response to another comment. See in context »It was not surprising at all that Fish would come down on this side of that particular debate. If anyone doesn’t know the Fish-inspired character in David Lodge’s novels by the way, worth a look.
Trading Places, Small World, Nice Work, a trilogy that has the Fish character heavily in the first two especially.
What Eagleton’s main argument boils down to is that you can’t criticize religion at the level of what it looks like now, you have to approach it like a theologist. Or historian.
Which is like saying that you have to be a scholar in the field of mythologies to declare that Zeuss may not actually exist.
Eagleton calls anything less than full-frontal debate at the intricate level of scholarship of the history of religion “school yard taunts” (while using the juvenile “Ditchkins” himself, oddly).
I’ve thought in the past that it might be because he’s naive about the American version of the horrors of religion, unlike Dawkins say who’s lived here. However the horrors of religion on the other side of the pond not all that long ago put ours to shame, can’t be that hard to remember, can it?
Matt Taibbi writes:
“They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto itself.”
Voltaire’s rebuttal of this was: “When you tell me that a monster is devouring my family, will I ask “yes, but what will we get to replace it?”
Re Dawkins being on a humorless campaign, I don’t know about that. He’s got a pretty impressive history starting long before any of these books about religion. Chomsky called him “an important scientist” and others seem to agree. Were it all coming from someone less than that (cough Hitchens) I’d tend to dislike it, but Dawkins could easily have rested on his laurels and left it alone. And didn’t.
“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” – Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
[...] established. This is completely unmoving to observers outside the practice, a point made by Matt Taibbi, who goes on to describe Eagleton as a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny [...]
Nice piece, Matt. But I wish you wouldn’t resort to the “atheism as religion” cliche. Dawkins certainly wouldn’t agree with you!
So, ummm… when Eagleton says “our not seeing [God] is inherent to God Himself”, whose God is he talking about?
Probably not the God of the Old Testament — never viewed directly, but made manifest through direct conversations with everyone from Adam to Noah to Job. And some types of Christian have a notion of divinity that’s even more tangible than that (particularly if you take a literal view of the doctrine of transubstantiation).
Then again, I’m having a hard time coming up with an example of a major religion which has a notion of a personal divinity — but a divinity which hasn’t just *chosen* to withdraw from overt presence in the world (as many Jews and Christians would have it), but is rather *inherently* *imperceptible*. Islam? Nope — he certainly talked to Muhammed. Zoroastrainism? Wicca? Well, you see how it goes…
The best I can do is either Deism, with its clockmaker God (apparently influential among the American founding fathers, but marginal then and more so now), or perhaps some form of esoteric Buddhism. And either seems pretty far from the sorts of mainstream American religious belief that Eagleton seems to want to defend…
For those who think Matt should come out of the agnostic closet and declare his atheism…
“One of us, one of us. Gooble gobble, gooble gobble.”
South Park — Butters’ Very Own Episode
[...] Matt Taibbi shoots the eaglefish out of their barrels. But something tells me we’re going to be hearing more of this rhetoric, if for no other reason [...]
Matt, you’re a writer whom I respect and admire as a reporter and humorist, but this is just lazy. For all your vaunting of rigorous linear arguments and decrying of “syllogistic sophistry,” your post is littered with examples of sloppy argumentation.
I don’t have time to go into everything, but the last paragraph is especially painful. For example, you write that Eagleton and Fish “seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death.”
This is a straw man, plain and simple. Eagelton and Fish certainly don’t think it’s dogmatic not to believe in burning bushes and talking snakes (any more than it wouldn’t be dogmatic to deny the tooth fairy). Rather, they’re out to expose and dismantle the type of smug atheistic quasi-religion promulgated by people like Richard Dawkins — the very same quasi-religion that you yourself decried just a few sentences prior!
My guess is that Fish and Eagelton would both classify themselves as, like you, agnostic on these matters (Eagelton is not a Catholic, btw, but a Marxist). The difference is between those who think it’s worthwhile to spell out what this agnosticism means in terms of our traditional philosophical vocabulary, and those who, like you apparently, consider such exercises “semantic masturbation.”
On more thing: It may be Fish’s fault for making this unclear, but his point in the passage you quote is not that “because science is inadequate to explain the mysteries of existence, [religious] faith must be necessary.” His point, rather, is that logic and natural science can only proceed on a set of assumptions that cannot themselves be captured in the language of either logic or science. Call this faith if you want, but it can also be considered a mere truism — one which, again, you yourself freely subscribe to when you admit that you’re “cool” not knowing the answers.
“Not wanting to know explanations is cool!”
Someday there will be a cure for male pattern baldness, but not with that attitude.
[...] Peace With Agnosticism Contra Stanley Fish, Matt Taibbi takes a stand for agnostics everywhere: As for the actual argument, it’s the same old stuff religious [...]
I don’t see why many people think evolution means “anti-religion” — it seems logical to me that someone could believe God created the process. In the same way I don’t see why people would have trouble with considering atheism a matter of faith.
I struggled with that for years myself, but I think the strict definition of “atheism” gets in the way (“I can’t say for sure that God doesn’t exist, so I must be agnostic”). But otherwise logical people who understand the near impossibility of proving a negative, somehow get hung up on this distinction.
Christians don’t have this problem, right? I mean, they can’t prove God exists, but they don’t consider themselves agnostic (“I don’t know if God exists or not, but I think he does”). No, they just have faith that he’s there. It’s our insistence on keeping to a certain logic framework that requires us to make the distinction.
Belief is an absence of proof, right? And I know there is no way I can prove the negative of God’s existence in the whole of the universe. So it’s my belief that God does not exist, which to me, means I’m an atheist.
But most Atheists, are not merely expressing that they don’t hold a belief in God. They are making an ontological statement about the nature of the universe, that it is accidental, random, and that there is no higher power. There’s a huge difference between that belief and what agnostics believe — which is that there may be there is a higher intelligence and maybe there is not — I cannot know.
The question isn’t over whether or not you believe in God. The question is over what is the Universe. Is it just random matter or is there something higher than ourselves. If you believe in random matter, you are an Atheist. If you believe in something higher, you are a believer in God. If you’re not sure, you are an agnostic.
In response to another comment. See in context »Yeah. I’m not saying “I don’t believe in God”, I’m saying “I believe there is no God”. Which, in my opinion, is the closest you can get to knowing God’s nonexistence without being God yourself.
I mean, I know there are thousands of years of monk arguments ahead of me on this, so likely nothing I’m saying is new. I’m just not sure that “agnostic” and “atheist” could really both exist at the same time. A Christian believes in God without proof; an atheist believes in the nonexistence of God without proof. “Agnostic” at that point just means, someone who hasn’t bothered working it out, really. It’s not really a position as much as acknowledging you lack a position.
In response to another comment. See in context »Excellent conclusion from that conversation
In response to another comment. See in context »More signs of the indispensable!
Eagelton’s Panglossian mash is reason enough for abiding by the rule, “Of that with which we cannot say, so we shall not speak.” When intelligent people of a more sympathetic romanticism try, with good intentions, to bridge the gap between believers and atheists it always amounts to gibberish.
Thank you Matt! I think that the intelligent majority simply don’t feel the need to argue either side of the God/No God point out of a sense of the REASONABLE.
Ditchkins? Hmm, not bad, I guess. But not as good as Eaglefish. It’s so much more…mutative.
Eagleton and Fish are not criticizing Agnosticism. They are criticizing Atheism.
It’s not the lack of belief in God that they are taking on — as Taibbi implies in his last paragraph — but the certain belief that there is no God, that there is no higher power, which is really the same thing as saying you are certain that the universe is just a dumb machine. In other words, they believe in the machine God.
There’s a huge difference between being an Agnostic, who says he doesn’t know, and being an Atheist who claims to know.
The difference is apparent in the comments of the Atheists above, who want to convert you from your agnosticism.
Given the obvious evangelizing of Atheists I would love it if in your next post on the subject you would take them on. Because at least religious people admit to having faith and believing in things that cannot be proven.
What’s so obnoxious about Atheism is that many of them seem so convinced they are right, they are blind to the fact that what they hold is an unprovable belief and that they are not that different than those they criticize.
The only truly rational position is not Atheism, but Agnosticism.
Henry
I love your comment about dumb machine Gods, and certainly believe that, if you’re a real scientific sceptic then ‘you have to doubt your own doubt’…
But I’d much rather spend my time with atheists or believers. Agnostics are just so lily livered, hedging their bets, as if they support two soccer teams in the premier league, or say ‘wave or particle – it doesn’t matter to me’ in quantum physics.
It bloody well does matter, in the short term. Only by these passionate engagements do we really get into the mindset of a believer or a complete disbeliever. It seems to me that Atheists and Theists, as well as worshipping some kind of God, actually live in some profound human sense because they risk commitment, passion, disappointment.
Agnostics don’t really care as far as I can see, and throughout history, like 60 per cent of the population, have basically said ‘Yes, whatever you think best. Now why don’t you and he go fight…’
I like Eagleton’s passion, and that of Dawkins and Hitchens. Call me old fashioned, but agnosticism is like an irreligious sunday. Without church, but also without class.
In response to another comment. See in context »…religious people seem incapable of looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of belief system…
“Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system – a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth – does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many ‘religious’ people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don’t realize the limitations of thought.” – Eckhart Tolle
[...] Matt Taibbi, on the other hand, steps outside the terms of the argument: [...]
I’ve sat through a lot of Eagleton lectures — requirement of my profession. And I’ve watched him huff and pump his stumpy legs to catch up with the religious turn in literary criticism of the past ten years. It’s disheartening (the turn and Eagleton).
When I got to “I listened to this argument at least five times,” I just had to shrug because that’s part of the game. But then when Eagleton said “Reason dismisses faith because faith lacks the certainty of knowledge,” I honest to goodness threw up in my mouth a little bit. It even caught me by surprise. Eagleton of all people ought to know that faith lacks certainty in evidence, not knowledge. Those are different games, and Eagleton is usually at least half-aware of the language game he’s playing.
I’d just like to see a cultural theorist from his era admit that science is about gathering, testing, and measuring evidence, and it really cares nothing about religion except when religion claims it can do the same science does, but without evidence. You can’t play hockey in the middle of a soccer match and claim you’re playing soccer.
Eagleton will probably return to faith lacking certainty in evidence when he’s finally cornered and has to write another book to justify his endowed chair. That’s what sophists do.
Oh, great; thousands of years of thinking, argument and struggle and some moron decides it’s all so simple: we should just say ‘Fuck it’ and move on.
What pisses me off is the way you make a virtue of your ignorance. It’s the worst kind of anti-intellectualism to attack someone for using words or arguments that are beyond your comprehension. Terry Eagleton isn’t a great thinker, nor a great speaker, but I would assume what he says has sense to it unless I could show otherwise. That’s the philosophical game – where you pick holes in arguments using reason. You are guilty of the sophistry you accuse Eagleton of because you use ad hominem attacks, reminiscent of anti-semitic propaganda, in describing him and his manner. The form of this article seems to be: ‘Eagleton is ugly and hateful; what he says is impossible to understand therefore stupid and wrong; fuck it all.’
Hardly inspiring stuff.
When I do not understand something I either research it until I do or I pass over it in silence, knowing that I cannot add intelligent comment from a position of ignorance. Unfortunately, everybody thinks they can weigh in on this debate without so much as reading a book; thus I feel indignant because I do study this area and can understand these arguments and don’t care if someone uses simple language like ‘a priori’.
There are a whole galaxy of views out there from the last three thousand years just waiting for you if you’re interested in this stuff. If not; accept that your ignorance is no virtue and write about something closer to your heart.
Or is it that your ignorance is close to your heart? That seems to be what you end up saying.
First of all, the socrates syllogism comes from Aristotle, not Woody Allen. Second, although scholars do have an annoying tendency to borrow latin phrases where an english phrase would do just as well, “a priori” actually is a pretty concise way of saying something that is difficult to say as concisely in English. Among people who like to talk about religion and philosophy (not just fancy pants academics but lay people too) “a priori” is a regular part of the vernacular no matter how hoity toity it feels on the tongue. Finally, the author of this blog has obviously not read Eagleton’s book. Eagleton has no problem with atheists, or with people who are “simply comfortable not knowing the answers.” In fact, he has elsewhere expressed admiration for such people. Eagleton’s point is that for those who ARE searching for answers, religion is one of many useful resources in that search (as is science), and that the Dawkins-type arguments against religion really have nothing to do with what ordinary people are using religion for. He doesn’t spend any time arguing against atheism itself; his point is to discredit one particular argument against religion, one that is itself as ignorant, self-righteous and “fundamentalist” as the fanaticism it attacks. Eagleton is also quite dismayed about the way that religion has been perverted throughout history, and anxious about fundamentalism as it manifests today. He urges that the religious impulse is at heart an impulse towards service, and that piety is in part a craving for justice. His writing is quite beautiful, measured, informed, humorous, and easy-to-read. I don’t know how the author of this blog could find it deserving of such vitriol.
Base–
You’re wrong about the syllogism. The Aristotle version had the correct ending: “Socrates is mortal.” This one, the one that ends, “All men are Socrates,” comes from the movie “Love and Death.” That’s unless I’m missing Aristotle’s unpublished book of one-liners written for standup.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] 11, 2009 · No Comments Not long ago, The Missus turned me on to Matt Taibbi’s blog. I’ve read his stuff on stolen copies of Rolling Stone Magazine, and, of course, I’ve [...]
[...] Matt Taibbi in a post titled Religion, Agnostics, and the Cure for Baldness. [...]
Religion is always making something out of nothing.
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My attitude to the religious, is “Yes, you have your belief, faith, experiences, epithany etc, but that don’t prove any more than you have had an idea or experience, however special they are.”
If I have an insight on acid it’s nothing, if I get that same idea in church it’s a vision.
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The problem is that religion claims it’s opinions and feelings are ‘real’ and have an existence outside the believer and they have the right to bother the rest of us.
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Sure you may find your mystical illumination important for your life, etc, etc. But you haven’t proved anything to me
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Let’s accept the existential experience of religion in the individual, who am I to say you didn’t or shouldn’t have your faith. But make it clear that personal faith does not produce an ontological existence. (Sorry for the philosophy). All you proved is that you can have the experience
Matt. If we’re talking sneering and unnecessary syllables, let’s be clear: if you’re going to critique Eagleton for ebullience, you’re pretty good at it yourself.
Syllables should be spent regularly and wasted. One day soon the blogosphere might actually turn them into productive material.
I’m basically on your side, but your dismissive arguments make me want to defend Eagleton. Why? Because you’re missing the crucial emotional element that he expresses, and which Miguel de Unamuno expressed so pithily in his book The Tragic Sense of Life…
Reason tells us that we live blindingly short lives on a speck of dust on the edge of an insignificant galaxy. But emotionally we’re the centre of our worlds and want to live forever.
No amount of science or fact or argument will overcome that tragic division. Though I know my cells are slow committing suicide through cell apoptosis, everything I do, everything I write, rebels against that fact.
It isn’t cool, it isn’t rational, but it’s what we have to deal with as humans. So when Eagleton says that the idea of God is not the same as the Yeti, he means it. The Yeti either is, or is not, as with UFOs, a scientifically provable example of species survival or extraterrestrial life. Both examples are science fiction. They are science turned into transcendence by bizarre visitations from the past, or from an unknown future.
But they are of a different order from that desire for transcendence and the unknown, which religious people describe as God.
I no longer have this desire, but I once knew it well, and let me tell you the idea of ET or the Yeti is in a completely different category. The latter might have satisfied curiosity or fascination, but not the desire for transcendence.
Peter,
I think that was very well stated. I agree with you, but I think the ire (at least on my part) is directed at using reasoned arguments for the existence or non-existence of God. It’s an epistemologically untenable argument. Your defense of Eagleton’s thinking is fine by me, but I want to stress that I think it’s fine because you are examining a phenomena of Being and how the Idea of God corresponds with that phenomena. This is very different from the tiresome and pointless acrobatics people suffer over the existence/non-existence of something that can never be discerned in truth. It’s the certainty clause in the religious and atheist arguments that I find irrelevant and quixotic.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] made by Matt Taibbi, who goes on to describe Eagleton as a pudgily superior type, physically [...]
Two quick points in response to all of this:
Regarding the atheism/agnosticism question, I think this is just a situation where the words we have in English are simply not very good ones. Do I think there’s a God? No. Do I believe the God as described in Christianity exists? No way — I’d bet my life on that without a thought. But feeling quite certain and knowing for sure are two different things. I think I can say I know for sure that the Christian God doesn’t exist because the doctrine is filled with so many contradictions and absurdities that, logically speaking, it couldn’t possibly be. But how and when and why and by what means the world was created, I think those questions aren’t knowable, and what’s funny about people is that they keep trying to answer them anyway. I believe human beings have a blind spot when it comes to the nature of their own existence, and to me the word “agnostic” comes closer to describing the state of having and accepting such a blind spot than “atheist” does.
As for Dawkins, I’m probably being unfair there. I haven’t read a whole lot of his work, just a few articles here and there. I might have been picking up on a vaguely messianic tone to his writing. But I can see how you could get a bit of an attitude tangling with religious people all day long. So, my bad there, I’ll edit that at some point.
The position you describe seems similar to what James Carse calls “higher ignorance” in his book The Religious Case Against Belief. Higher ignorance is the realization that one does not have the capacity to know all, through either religion or science, or as you write, “But how and when and why and by what means the world was created, I think those questions aren’t knowable.”
Part of Carse’s argument is that the dysfunctions, hypocrisies and cruelties commonly pointed at by critics of religion are not the results of belief in the possibility of something outside of science. They are the product of codified belief systems, no different than political ideologies, that attempt to explain the world in its entirety without room for question. In this view, danger lies in certainty.
In response to another comment. See in context »“Regarding the atheism/agnosticism question, I think this is just a situation where the words we have in English are simply not very good ones.”
Very true. Our vocabulary can indicate whether one believes x, y, or z, but not the degree to which one is invested in that belief.
It was certainly reasonable and necessary for most of human history to invest (heavily) in metaphysical explanations for everyday phenomena. But once the microscope and telescope started to unravel these mysteries, such explanations became less and less reasonable and necessary — and more and more dangerous and irresponsible.
I find the term “agnostic” to be rhetorically wishy-washy, as it implies a tolerance for a type of “belief” which is in fact profoundly immoral and destructive — not just “by-The-Book” fundamentalism, but any type of religionism which grounds morality in metaphysics. To counter such belief, we need all the rhetorical weapons at our disposal, and I don’t find “agnosticism” very potent in this regard.
OK, back to my Bible-burning…
Jason the anti-theist
“I don’t think we’re here for anything, we’re just products of evolution. You can say, ‘Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose,’ but I’m anticipating a good lunch.” –James Watson
In response to another comment. See in context »lol – now better makes sense the ‘virginal purity’ of your atheism when you blessed Bush during your stint as a Hagee supplicant…
Einstein said it best, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveales himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.”
In response to another comment. See in context »My ideas about all the big questions are just that – ideas, and nothing more. They can’t be verified, and I don’t go around telling others that they’re the ultimate truth, or that they’re doomed if they don’t buy into them. I have no book for others to read, or buy, and I have no verses of wisdom to quote. And I realize that I could be totally wrong about everything.
I think that everything in the universe that can be seen, or heard, or felt, or smelled, or tasted can be understood, even if we don’t understand those things right now.
But the big questions, like Why are we here? What is the origin of matter? Why does anything exist? might be forever beyond our grasp.
And that’s okay. I don’t need to know those things.
[...] Matt Taibbi, on the other hand, steps outside the terms of the argument: [...]
[...] 2009 May 12 tags: Religion, Atheism by curiousatheist Matt Tabbi’s recent column Religion, agnostics, and the cure for baldness is probably the best response to Stanley Fish’s blog on the NYT about Terry Eagleton’s [...]
[...] by UnrealI don’t know if this is whoop-ass – as some blogger called Matt Taibbi’s rant – But it’s a helpful nudge in the right direction. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, [...]