As religious objections to the embryology bill mark the latest skirmish between faith and reason, Simon Jenkins and Richard Harries confront their differences head-on.
By Simon Jenkins and Richard Harries
Dear Richard,
Your people have been having a good month. The Catholic church has staged a spectacular assault on Big Science over the embryology bill. Tony Blair has declared that, for him, religion must be more closely integrated with politics. And the Richard Dawkins mob has taken a pasting from John Gray's "the world is so complicated" school of theology. Does none of this disconcert you?
If these assaults have a common thread, it is that rationalism and science have gone too far and must be reined in. As a result, important and sensible research is under attack for using animal eggs as embryo containers. Since the metaphysical status of egg-casing is not one on which the church has yet pronounced, opposition appears based on "yuck" and nothing else. But yuck has become diktat, with Catholic MPs up to cabinet level being given a three-line whip by their bishops. We are back to Galileo and the Inquisition.
As for Tony Blair's demand that religion be rescued from becoming an "irrelevance, an interesting part of our history, but not of our future," it leaves me bemused. Past references to his wars being conducted under "God's guidance" and "left to God's judgment" leave cabinet government in a fix. It suggests bad decisions can somehow be sanitised and rendered unaccountable through appeals not to the electorate but to faith, an echo of the theocracy that we so deplore in some Muslim states. All appearances by God on the political stage tend, de facto, to be claims that he is "on our side".
As for Gray's assault on Dawkins and the militant atheists, it is rooted in antagonism to social Darwinism and what he calls Dawkins's "catastrophic optimism". Gray argues that Dawkins ignores the revival of global theism and the widespread awareness of "the incomprehensibility of the divine". Gray accuses scientific atheism of believing that "the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics". Whether or not Gray regards this pessimism as a sign of the existence of God, there is no doubt that this concept of the divine draws strength from ignorance of science and takes comfort in incomprehensibility
Atheists are often accused of being "believers" of another sort. This is a matter of words. Anything unknown about the world demands a degree of trust so that it can be handled. But this unknown is being revealed by reason, delegated in part to science. It is perfectly plausible that the wonder I find in art, beauty and the universe might one day be explained by genetics, optics and neurology - and to an extent already is. This does not diminish my wonder, but has no bearing on the existence of God.
Whenever we abandon reason and balk at the advance of knowledge, reaction and chaos ensue. Religion is sometimes referred to as "a necessary brake on science", but such a brake can be supplied by a moral society without incurring a deity.
I am bothered when I see the ghosts of irrationality rise up and claim some grip on public affairs. Are you not bothered too?
Yours ever, Simon
Dear Simon,
Religion is indeed in the news, again. But how should it be interpreted?
For, as Pascal put it, there is enough light for those who want to see and enough darkness for those who don't want to see. The news you recount can feed the minds of those who want to see in religion only reactionary obscurantism. But it can also make all of us think more deeply about the source of our values, in particular whether the values we most cherish go with the grain of the universe or are a brave cry against it. But there is more than rationality involved here. Very clever people can be gravely wrong. There is also judgment, and sometimes intelligent people can go wildly off course because they reason on the basis of false presuppositions, and our assumptions involve the moral and spiritual side of our nature, not just our capacity for consistent thought.
I am sure the Roman Catholic bishops are intelligent, rational people, but their starting point on embryo research is mistaken. They believe that the newly fertilised egg, the tiny bundle of multiplying cells smaller than a pin head, has the same right to life as an adult. But more than two-thirds of fertilised eggs are lost in nature anyway. If each of these really is a person, that is, an eternal soul, it would lead to the absurd conclusion that heaven is mainly populated by people who have never been born. For two decades the main boards and councils of the Church of England have fully supported fertility treatment (which always involves the loss of fertilised eggs) and embryo research.
Tony Blair is an intelligent, rational man but, as I argued at the time and as you did, his decision to invade Iraq was a misjudgment of tragic proportions. So, here again, rationality is not enough. But I do think Blair has been unfairly treated in relation to his religious faith and the war. I sincerely hope that all members of the cabinet who prayed at all, prayed over the decision about whether or not to go to war. It would have been scandalous if they had not. I hope that all members of the cabinet, whether or not they were religious believers, had a sense that they could have been mistaken. For non-believers history must be the ultimate judge.
But over what time span? As a Chinese sage said, when asked whether or not the French revolution was a good thing, "It is too early to say". For a Christian it is always too early to give a final verdict, for only at the end of time will all be known, or as Tony Blair put it, it must be "left to God's judgment". It is strange how this standard piece of Christian orthodoxy should arouse such ire amongst the cultured despisers of religion just because it came from a Christian prime minister. They should have been worried if it hadn't.
I can well understand why the new atheists, principally Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, with their aggressive hostility to religion, are so rattled by John Gray's intelligent analysis of their lack of historical judgment and blindness as to the religious roots of their own atheism. They do of course have an absurdly optimistic view of human behaviour. I agree with you that, in many important areas of life, science and technology have improved the conditions under which we live hugely. But the last time evolutionary optimism rode high it was smashed to pieces by the first world war. There is no automatic progress. Such optimism fails to take into account what Pascal called the misère et grandeur of we fallible, frail and sinful human beings. Rationality, a capacity for coherent thought, is indeed fundamental to public life, as to all life. But what matter no less are the assumptions on the basis of which we mount our arguments. The whole person makes a judgment, not just the top of our mind. The attack dogs of the new atheism like to describe themselves as "brights", but to many of us they come across as angry people throwing any argument they can find, however poor, against what they hate.
Dear Richard,
I wonder if we are using the same language. I am sure religion can "make us think more deeply about the roots of our values", but as Chesterton said, so can a sharp blow over the head. I have never doubted that Christians can be good people and atheists wrong people. Where we disagree is over the status of religion as a lodestar of political, ethical and aesthetic judgments. You demand respect for "the moral and spiritual side of our nature, not just our capacity for coherent thought". I am not sure what that physiological metaphor means, and am fearful when a religious person pleads it against "our capacity for coherent thought". It is this demoting of rationalism that I find the unacceptable face of religion.
Turning to Blair and the war, you say it would be "scandalous" if members of the cabinet did not pray before deciding on "a misjudgment of tragic proportions"
No member of a Christian culture can be blind to the religious roots of anything. But atheism is not a religion. It denies not what is sensible - Bishop Berkeley's unseen tree in the quad - but what is insensible and inconceivable. When you and others leap up and cry "But that is the whole point of a God that passes all understanding" I find the words meaningless.
We are able, with great argument and difficulty, to formulate and strive to obey rules by which society should be governed, so-called ethical rules. Unlike Gray and perhaps yourself, I think we do get better at it over time. We improve, act more kindly, show greater concern for others' welfare, and in that sense grow more moral. I think this belief in progress, which is observable, is likely to be more robust if rooted in a "capacity for coherent thought", rather than smothered by the judgment of eternity. I prefer to rely on reason.
Do you not?
Dear Simon,
You ask a straight question and you will get a straight answer. Yes, I prefer to rely on reason rather than eternity, if that is how you insist on putting it. I yield to no one, not even you, in looking to rational criteria for truth. But earlier you wonder if we are using the same language. We are, but let us clarify what we mean by rational. Rational thinking rules out what is self-contradictory. It builds on observed realities to make testable predictions. It weighs evidence. But this is not all the mind does. When you and I read art critics we are looking for more than an ability to argue rationally. We want discernment and discrimination. If you like, we want sensibility as well as sense. This involves the mind to the full but not the mind alone. It is the same when we are thinking about moral or spiritual matters: the whole person is involved.
I am not suggesting that when we reflect on life and wonder whether it has any meaning other than what we attribute to it, we can come up with an answer; or that the answer has to be a religious one. There may be no answer or, as CS Lewis was tempted to believe when his wife died, it may be the work of a cosmic sadist. All I am arguing is that this process is a rational one and it is the height of blindness and hubris for the new atheists to think that they are the only rational people around.
AN Whitehead and Bertrand Russell together wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica, considered by many to be one of the great intellectual achievements of all time. One was a religious believer, the other was not. Whatever it was that divided them did not lie in their ability to think rationally.
Dear Richard,
If you leave the "new atheists" out of it, I will not mention the militant creationists. But your alliterative appeal to sensibility as well as sense implies our old friend, the "ghost in the machine", that in your case proves or at least validates the existence of God. Your aspects of the "whole person" may be unexplained, but they are not inexplicable. With each year science gets nearer to unravelling, for instance, our capacity for kindness and our sense of beauty.
I accept that religious people are also rational. It would be absurd not to do so. I cannot accept that they are rational in their religious belief, nor, I sense, do you. I am left with a vaguely agnostic bishop, lost in wonder at the cosmos and infuriated that his opponents can be so bad-tempered.
Dear Simon,
I am afraid it is you who have slipped into the "ghost in the machine" fallacy. The rationality in which you take such comfort does not exist in a neurologically free zone. It arises out of your brain which exists in and is shaped by the culture you have inherited. Our thinking is in exactly the same situation as our aesthetic, moral and spiritual discernments (our sensibility)
Your description of me as "a vaguely agnostic bishop" gets it wrong on both counts. I am a definite agnostic in the sense of St John of Damascus, who said that what God is "in his essence and nature is absolutely incomprehensible and totally unknowable". And a definite believer in that the only faith I can live with in a world of such anguish is in a God who is at once crucified and risen.
But thank you for this exchange.
Richard
· Richard Harries, now Lord Harries of Pentregarth, was Bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006.
Published: The Guardian, Saturday April 12 2008
http://www.guardian
Also, comments from the readers published:
Spot the atheist
http://www.guardian
[This is neither propaganda nor comments, from me. By forwarding this I am not supporting or against anyone and I have no intention to upset anyone. My main intention is sharing this with you, as if - look what I have found or what they are saying, etc., and to hear neutral comments from you on this subject only. If you are interested please place your comments on the contents of this article or on the author / group/s or please just keep watching. Please no attack or cuss.
- Arif Bhuiyan
Yahoo! for Good helps you make a difference
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
__,_._,___
