The Mental Schism of Michael Ruse

Michael Ruse, who repeatedly calls himself a professional philosopher, wants to answer, in the UK Guardian, the question, “Is there an atheist schism?”. He seems to mean a schism about what it is to be an atheist, and the schism he refers to is that between himself and most other atheists. Put that way, the answer is easy. Yes, there is a schism between Ruse and most other atheists because Ruse seems to be an atheist who has open yearnings for a god. Is that possible? Most other atheists think not, and that is the schism, and he says he is “rather proud” of it.

He says that, as a professional philosopher, his first question is naturally “What or who is an atheist?”. He gives a choice of two answers:

1. someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning
2. someone who agrees that logically there could be a god, but who doesn’t think that the logical possibility is terribly likely, or at least not something that should keep us awake at night

He infers there are “not many” in the first group, but there are “a lot of us” in the second. The literal meaning of atheist, its definition, is clear enough. From the Greek (a theos, “without God”) it means someone who does not believe in a God or gods. So both of Ruse’s categories are atheists. If someone does not believe in any god, whatever the reason for the disbelief, or whatever the strength of the conviction, that person is an atheist. So, there can be no schism over that. So what is the schism, if there is one?

There are several reasons why we atheists are squabbling—I will speak only for myself but I doubt I am atypical.

Here is a confession of the reality. Ruse will only speak for himself but thinks he is typical because he is in a category by himself. In short, the schism is between him and the more critical atheists he calls the “new” atheists, people like Dawkins, Coyne, Myers, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and so on. The difference is not over whether God exists or not, but whether religions are evil or not. The so called new atheists think religions have a preponderantly bad influence, while Ruse says it is not true that “all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting”. He implies that is the view of his second, larger category of atheists. So the schism is not about atheism but about religion.

For a professional philosopher, Ruse is fond of being imprecise when it suits him, and excessively precise when that suits him too. Note, for example that, in his first definition of an atheist, he does not restrict the definition to disbelief in gods but also disbelief in “meaning”! That is a curiously careless mistake for a professional philosopher to make, but allows a hole for his respect for theologians and their scams—religions.

Then he slips in the little word “all” when denying that religion is necessarily evil and corrupting, which allows him a get out if even one person claims allegiance to a religion which has done no evil or corruption. As far as I am aware, the Adelphiasophist religion has done no such wickedness, so Ruse’s little trick ensures he is sure to be right. That, though, is not the point.

Religions generally lead to terrible deeds being done in their name, and the perpetrators are always convinced that whatever they are doing is not wicked because they have God on their side. That is the wickedness that men do in the name of religion, and that is the wickedness that the atheists, new or geriatric, argue and have often argued. Ruse seems unable to comprehend it. He says to argue that religions generally have terrible consequences, is like the Mormons claiming to find “golden plates in upstate New York”. He must mean it is a grotesque lie.

Besides that he observes that Quakers and the Evangelicals opposed slavery for religious reasons, and that was a good thing. Of course, it was a good thing that anyone opposed slavery, but he chose to name Quakers and Evangelists, because the traditional mainstream Christian churches had an abysmal record in that respect which lasted for 1800 years from the time of Christ, and abolition of slavery was opposed by most Christian bishops sitting in the House of Lords of the British Parliament. Moreover, many of the men who got rich on the back of shackled and ill treated slaves were themselves observant Christians able to cite chapter and verse from the bible in their defense. Their religion might have driven some Christians in minor sects to oppose slavery while others exploited slaves while receiving honors, but right from the time of Paul, the greatest apostle for most Christian sects, slaves were told by Christians to suffer their burdens and to pray for their oppressors.

Evil Never Religion’s Fault

Ruse thinks that even when religions are obviously acting evilly, they are not to blame—socio economic issues, alienation, despair, poverty, inequality all played their part, Ruse thinks, often a dominant part. It leaves you thinking, though, why these terribly good religions did not stop or seek to stop the terrible cause outlined, but instead, apparently got caught up, through no fault of their own, in provoking and perpetuating the fierce hatred that erupted. Whatever the socio economic issues, the Irish fought over a sectarian divide, and the divide was, and still is, perpetuated by faith schooling in a largely segregated system. The professional philosopher is not immune to blindness over such matters, but it is puzzling nevertheless. He seems to be apologizing for religions, even though, as he claims to be an atheist, he can hardly think that anyone following any of them is thinking at all clearly.

Yet, he boasts that he is unlike his new atheistic critics in taking scholarship seriously. For example, Dawkins’ The God Delusion made him ashamed to be an atheist, he said. It seems, then that Dawkins is not a scholar, despite his distinguished career as a professor of biology, the public understanding of science, and as an author of popular science books, as well as scholarly papers, all from the deserved place he held in a most distinguished university. Could it be that even a professional philosopher cannot honestly draw the proper conclusions from empirical investigations? Once something is established, is it proper to continue humoring those who simply refuse to accept it, while believing incredible things merely because their parents, priests, and best friends believed it.

Ruse thinks he is a more serious scholar because he makes the effort to understand what these obtuse people understand by their beliefs, an endeavor that ought not to require a great deal of effort. Why do people throw salt over their shoulder when they spill it, say “bless you” when you sneeze, and touch wood for good luck? Understand those and you understand belief in God, and religion. It is superstition, an old and outmoded belief still held. Why should anyone want to perpetuate false and outmoded beliefs? Who else, but those who gain by it.

Surely these reasons are not too difficult to comprehend for a professional philosopher, especially one who still claims to be an atheist, yet Ruse is surprised that less compromised atheists are contemptuous of religious beliefs, and those who try to give them an undeserved credence, men like Ruse.

It is apparently wrong to ask any believer, “What caused God?”, but it is all right for a philosopher, Mary Midgley, to criticize the metaphor of a “selfish gene” on the obvious grounds that genes cannot have emotions. It must be that God is a metaphor, but what then is God a metaphor of? And are the priests and prelates telling their flocks that God is a metaphor and not some all powerful being with a human personality dutifully looking after everyone who prays, except those whom are overlooked and die or get maimed? If Ruse is an atheistic scholar, as he claims, and has discovered that somehow the clever theologians he admires have found a truth we have all missed, then why not share it with us. Maybe it would be too embarrassing for him.

He says it wouldn’t be, because he doesn’t have faith, he really doesn’t, yet he is not condescending to believers even though he thinks they are wrong:

I think they are wrong. They think I am wrong. But they are not stupid or bad or whatever. If I needed advice about everyday matters, I would turn without hesitation to these men.

He will! He will! Perhaps he is correct about the ones he specifies, people like Rowan Williams, but men can be misguided when young and led into a bad life in spite of themselves. Williams might be the nicest and most sincere Archbishop of Canterbury you could wish to meet, but the argument is not about how nice or sincere these men are.

They have reached high positions in their religions, Williams the highest there is, but who pays them? They are living off the sweat of others—much poorer people. Their privileged position is from exploitation no different in principle from the robbery effected by the bankers recently. And they are doing it while supposedly espousing the principles of a man who emphasized the virtues of poverty to such an extent, that it is impossible to be a Christian and be richer than their neighbor. It proves their insincerity or their unintelligence.

Theology cannot argue them out of it because the man whose principles they ignore in practice while holding to them in theory was actually God, according to their own belief. They are bold enough to say God was wrong, and every greedy Christian breathes a sigh of relief while the poor ones continue in their blessed state of poverty. It sounds very much like hypocrisy, and their God, Christ, speaking from his own divine lips also told them not to be hypocrites.

“You May Be Mistaken”

Ruse thinks he can explain faith in terms of psychology. Can’t we all, but that explains it, it does not excuse it. Psychology cannot excuse hypocrisy, especially if the hypocrites are intelligent. They know they are hypocrites and the psychology is incidental. The same is true of robbers. Indeed, using psychology to help to keep a large proportion of humanity poor and shackled by erroneous belief is disgusting in itself, and that is what these Christian shepherds have always done.

Ruse says he hears Cromwell writing in his letter to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

But the analogy is a poor one. Squabbles between two varieties of unfounded Christian belief surely cannot be compared with the reasoned arguments of science with the perpetuated unreason of the believers. Ruse is evidently impressed by what he calls the “integrity of so many believers” which makes him modest in his unbelief. It is more evidence that Ruse is actually moving towards the believers. There can be no integrity in believing contrary to the evidence, and to continue spreading the false notion of faith, which it amounts to, cannot be commendable. Science has to be disdained to do it, and that is what Ruse tries to do by making disparaging remarks about men who are far superior in most respects than he is, and certainly more honest. Ruse seems to be like Paul of Tarsus, he is kicking against the pricks, but will succumb to his passion for Christ!

He wants evolution taught in the schools, but sees criticism of religion as stopping it, in the US southern state where he lives. He must think science has to be attenuated in some way so that it becomes acceptable to believers. That is quite impossible. It is yielding firm ground to false belief, and it is the utter opposite of science. Ruse says “we cannot make unsubstantiated arguments that science refutes religion”. But we can, it seems, make unsubstantiated arguments that religion refutes science. Unquestioning faith is diametrically opposed to the central principle of scientific inquiry—skepticism.

It is certainly possible for some Christians, like F S Collins, to be good scientists, but it is by being mentally double jointed. What is shown to be true by observation and experiment cannot in the next minute be compromised by saying something like, “but you needn’t believe it”, or “it might not be so”. If you are going to teach evolution in schools, the believers are the ones who have to suspend their beliefs. But that is what Ruse calls political stupidity. He finally shows his own complete confusion, professional philosopher or not:

If, as the new atheists think, Darwinian evolutionary biology is incompatible with Christianity, then will they give me a good argument as to why the science should be taught in schools if it implies the falsity of religion? The first amendment to the constitution of the United States of America separates church and state. Why are their beliefs exempt?

Is he saying that science is a religion itself? That is all it can mean surely. Science, which has no concern at all per se in religion, yields up information incompatible with the unfounded religious belief that God exists. So science suddenly becomes a religion, as far as the US Constitution is concerned. Sadly, he seems to be going bananas. Does he want a constitutional ban on counting too, because:

1 + 1 + 1 = 3

but Christians think:

1 + 1 + 1 = 1 ?

His parting shot is to compare The God Delusion with Christian fundamentalist ideas spread in the 1960s that forthcoming nuclear annihilation was the equivalent of Noah’s Flood, a dispensationalist message. Never mind that God promised, in his diaries, not to do anything like that again, it is God’s plan, and needless to say, the fundamentalists promise themselves a grandstand seat in heaven to view the fireworks. Such comparisons seem to suggest a fading mind, comical but sad.

Ruse has written well on atheism and on evolution in the past, but now is cozying up to IDers while finding reasons to think religion and belief in God are at least partially respectable. The schism seems to be in his own thinking or mentality.

A Catholic Liberal Education? Eh? Say that Again

The London Catholic Herald explains to us in the words of one Marc Sidwell, an Anglo Catholic, that California has its own “College of Light”. Would you believe it, it is called Thomas Aquinas College? It seems that this rather plainly Catholic College offers “a liberal education as if truth mattered”, and “an escape from skepticism”.

The author sees no contradiction in all this. What I mean is that liberal inquiry has found that truth can only be approached through skepticism, that Catholicism is the trunk of Christianity, and Christianity not only requires belief to be credulously accepted, it is far from being liberal in any sense close to any truth.

Sidwell, seemingly a master of liberal education himself, considers TAC as a “Great Books school” whose students “engage” with thinkers that define Western civilization like St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Euclid, Plato and Shakespeare, and whose teachers use the Socratic method. Certain that truth exists, and unsaid but obviously true itself, that they have it, TAC rejects the relativism denounced by no less than the pope himself! It all defies analysis unless one is ready to admit that it is bollocks.

The TAC scholars have obviously never heard of begging the question, and cannot comprehend that believing one knows the truth is not the same as knowing it. But that’s Christianity for you. They assure each other that it is so, and take heart that all these clever people cannot be wrong.

Dr Sidwell assures his Catholic readers that liberal education even precedes Catholicism, thus proving he is not bigoted. It began in fifth century Athens as the right of a free man. It did not, then have anything to do with the God of the Hebrews who at that time was too busy helping the Jews to build a “temple, God, for the adoration of…” The church became involved only when Greek tradition and Jewish tradition met and mingled in the creative maelstrom of Pagan Rome. The Romans, culturally influenced by these Greeks, though they considered them effeminate, began to make tentative moves away from the slavery that engulfed them all, towards freedom, but then were engulfed instead by the backwards, conservative, massive intolerance of the religion of the Hebrew God in its new manifestation of Christianity.

Preserved in the Benedictine orders, transmitted by schoolmaster-priests, it was the Christian liberal educators who kept the life of the mind alive through centuries of uncertainty and civil strife.

Eh? Is this sleight of word and history, the liberal education these Catholics mean? Who were responsible for the centuries of uncertainty and civil strife? The Christians destroyed classical civilization after little more than a century of power in Rome, launching Europe into a ten century long dark age. The original sixth century formation of the Benedictine order had no influence on the collapse of civilization. The monks were as corrupt and ignorant as clerics generally. It was the reaction against the wealth and corruption of traditional monastic orders like the Benedictines that signified the beginning of the end of the Christian hegemony called Christendom, and the start of the Renaissance, with the twelfth century foundation of orders like the Franciscans. As for schoolmaster priests, even a rough military prince, Charlemagne, at the height of Christian power was appalled by the ignorance of the supposedly educated clergy.

Anyone who has had a liberal education will see Sidwell’s travesty of an account as an unmitigated lie, but that is what Christians are truly good at. They have had a lot of practice over the centuries. But Dr Sidwell takes as his evidence of the educational calling of the church, the doctor angelicus, Thomas Aquinas himself.

St Thomas Aquinas, is proof of the high value Catholicism has always placed upon reasoned enquiry into creation. Yet the sceptics like Richard Dawkins continue to sneer at Christianity as an intellectual vacancy. They misquote Tertullian as “I believe because it is absurd” and do not know St Anselm of Canterbury’s Credo ut intelligam. (“I believe so as to understand”).

Our guru of the modern Catholic liberal education says critics of Christianity misquote Tertullian when Catholics have long accepted “I believe because it is absurd” as a summary of Tertullian’s:

Born is the Son of God, shamelessly, because it is shameful. And dead is the Son of God, believably, because it is absurd. And, buried, He rose again, assuredly, because impossible.

De Carne Christi

A Christian educator is lying to make a feeble case against his critics, but Anselm’s (1033-1109) citation goes completely against any sort of liberal education, notably because it harks back to the middle of the Christian dark age when belief was compulsory. To base understanding on belief with no evidence that it is well founded other than the belief that it is so is utterly illiberal. It is the teaching of confidence tricksters and mountebanks, but still fools billions of naïve and ignorant Catholics, and not a few intelligent ones.

Anyway, to return to Aquinas (1225-1274), son of a wealthy nobleman, a corpulent monk at a time when peasants were dropping dead in the fields, sick and malnourished, Aquinas was less liberal a thinker than his teacher Albertus Magnus, and the Schoolmen that he founded became increasingly less liberal and increasingly bogged down in irrelevant dogma over the next couple of centuries. Though Aquinas was a great thinker for his time, he was an early Rennaissance Man, his thought triggered by the newly discovered Aristotle, but channelled into nothing productive, just as all thought for the previous eight Christian centuries had been drained away.

If “the human mind is ordered to truth”, as Sidwell quotes college president, Dr Thomas E Dillon, as saying, then the whole Christian endeavour has been set against truth not for it, and this eulogy of TAC is part of the continuing scam, given a modicum of truth by the shocking neglect of education in the public sector.

Sidwell perpetuates the transparent lie that Christianity has tried to perpetuate learning. It is sophistry, true in a minor sense only. Christianity did maintain some clever men and some education throughout the dark ages, but purely for devotional reasons. Rudimentary Latin was taught so that priests could theoretically know what the mass meant. Many did not, and never got to understand the Latin either. For this reason, some Latin books were preserved, but far more were allowed to decay, and have been lost forever. Greek was worse off. Greek and Greek books were effectively lost, and only rediscovered by contact with the eastern Church and the Moslems during the crusades making Aquinas possible. Art and architecture, science and engineering, perfected in classical times were lost for over half a millennium. Towns decayed, trade collapsed, slavery was maintained under the guise of serfdom. The world regressed into little short of barbarity, yet the argument persists that Christianity preserved classical culture. Christianity destroyed it almost completely, and the sophistry is not an outright lie only because a tiny fraction was preserved in an utterly haphazard way for the education of clergymen.

Sidwell is either self deluded or a typical Christian sociopath. He fantasizes about what wonders the Catholic Church might have come up with, had it not been for the puritan revolution, but seems incapable of thinking about what it did come up with when left to its own devices. Maybe it is because it is too horrible to think about. Nevertheless, Catholicism deliberately hounded and murdered millions, and mostly cruelly and unjustly. Today, it is fashionable for popes to apologise for matters that cannot be apologized for. Only Catholics are impressed. What can any apology mean to someone you have slowly roasted to death? The record of the Churches, and of patriarchal religion as a whole is disgusting, and no odour of sanctity is miraculous enough to cover the smell of it.

So Atheists aim for heaven on earth, do they?

I read in a right wing blog atheists believe that without religion there would be no war, no Irish troubles, no 9/11, no Arab/Israeli conflict, no invasion of Iraq—no troubles at all. Apparently, atheists want to abolish religion to get heaven on earth. He cites Richard Dawkins. It is an argument you could use against anything. You object to corporate fraud then you are just trying to get heaven on earth. Campaign to stop people trafficking—the same. Want to stop our youth from murdering each other by making the carrying of a weapon a serious crime with serious consequences, there you go, lefties always wanting heaven on earth. Inasmuch as we live in a civilized society it is because people have campaigned for it and against primitive and barbaric customs over the course of history. Are the right wing wanting us to return to hell on earth, to savage society? Presumably not, though the argument is the equal of their own idiotic one. Ideas like paradise are religious ideas anyway, so how could an atheist be planning to achieve them? Atheists like Dawkins bring a lot of evidence, 9/11 and so on included, to show that religion is the cause of a great deal of avoidable trouble in the world. Idiotic conservative rants do not refute the case. It just makes the right wing look typically boorish and brainless.

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The Meaning of the Spiritual

Mark Vernon is a journalist with an interesting website about science, religion and human sociabilility, which has in it a test called the “spiritual intelligence test”, bizarrely called the SQ test, not the SIQ test, leaving you wondering where the “intelligence”, the “I”, went! IQ is the abbreviation for intelligence quotient, because it is the mental age divided by the actual age, and so shows whether anyone is ahead or behind the average in mental or intellectual development. It was meant as an educational aid, for testing people as they developed, and so becomes a fixed value in adults simply showing whether they are above or below average intelligence. The SQ or SIQ test is not a quotient, and so there is no need for the Q at all, and it seems to be meant simply to draw attention to the supposed parallel with IQ. When you have done the test, you discover that it is really a test of humility, the scores of 0-100 apparently being on a scale from humble to overweening arrogance. My own score, answered as honestly as possible, which meant several answers could not be given because none of the three choices were adequate, was 45. Answering them all in what I thought was an obsessively scientific way gave me a score of 52, and answering in the way I thought religious believers would answer gave me a score of 72. Doubtless, it is all meant as a bit of fun, and not seriously, but such bits of fun have a way of being taken seriously by half the population, probably the half with IQs below 100. Whether that is so or not, it is true that a large number of people think that spiritual is a meaningful word, and Mark Vernon seems to be among them. It is a word that everyone wants to use, largely to show their anti-reductionist credentials, but few can agree upon when it comes to discussing meaning. A definition from a dictionary has it that spiritual means pertaining to the human spirit as opposed to the material or physical. So, it seems to be equivalent to imaginary, for what is not material or physical other than thoughts in the mind? It is a certain bet that most religious people would not count spiritual as meaning imaginary. No, religious people, think spiritual things are somehow real, even though they are not physical or material. In other words what is spiritual is somehow supernatural. Spirituality, to the believer, is supernaturality. Those who claim not to be religious but nevertheless believe that spiritual things are real in some such supernatural way are secretly religious. There is a feeling, often described as awe, not meaning pure fear as it once meant, but a frightening sense of wonder, that people sometimes get and often when they see something entirely wonderful in nature, such as a stunning vista or spectacle, or a wonderful event, such as the birth of a child, a ferocious storm, and so on. The same feeling can come about unexpectedly, when it is called mystical, and is attributed, for no sound reason, as signifying the nearness of God. The feeling is utterly natural, and most people have had it in its milder form. According to surveys, even about a third of people have had the mystical experience itself. There is absolutely no reason why God or spirituality should be associated with this feeling. It merits attention, certainly, but is much more likely to be the sense of unity suddenly felt of ourselves with the world we live in. Usually, we think purely selfishly. Self is a characteristic which has evolved to help us survive. If we did not have it, we would be much more altruistic if simply because we would realize how unimportant each of us individually is in the vast scheme of things. Self makes us seem more important than anything else, and therefore worth preserving. That is what spirituality is. It is a moment in which the sense of self dissolves leaving us knowing how wonderful the totality of Nature is. It is related in a sense to schizophrenia, when the self breaks down pathologically leaving us unable to even function as ourselves! In a temporary, or better still, if it is possibile, in a controlled, way it is a marvellous feeling that makes us appreciate God in the purely Einsteinian sense of the wonder of Nature. We are truly humbled before this purely natural interpretation of the divine. The opposite is to put yourself, or your beliefs, which are simply part of yourself, before it. Spirituality, then is the sense humans have of kinunity. The whole world is kin. That being so, the spiritual person is the one who does least to harm the world we live in. It is the basis of Adelphiasophism. To harm it is to harm ourselves.

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