I don’t know the Irish Times, but I am surprised that an anti-accommodationist editorial has appeared in such a religious country. It’s “On the meaning of life,” by Paul O’Donoghue, founder of the Irish Skeptics and a clinical psychologist. Perhaps some of you met him at the atheist meetings in Dublin.
He doesn’t pull any punches, either. He starts by describing Martin Rees (unfortunately misspelled “Reese”) and his Templeton Prize, and winds up like this:
It is often implied that without belief in a God there can be no moral compass. Having attended the World Atheist Convention in Dublin in June, I certainly saw no evidence of this. Many moral issues were thoroughly discussed and debated and at the end of the congress, the Dublin Declaration on Secularism and the Place of Religion in Public Life was launched. It is an optimistic and enlightening document.
It is short, and well worth reading and debating. It promotes tolerance and respect for people of all religions and none, so long as respect is shown for the rights and freedoms of others. It argues for a secular, democratic State with no privileges for any religion and a reliance on reason and evidence in decision making and policy formation.
It argues that children should be educated in critical thinking and that science should be taught free from religious interference. The former seems eminently sensible, as credulity constitutes the default mode in human beings.
Thinking about why it is that so many scientists are non-believers, it seems to me that there is great difficulty in maintaining a materialist scientific viewpoint that has explained so much in such a short time, while simultaneously accepting the revelatory and supernatural nature of religious beliefs.
Scientists are trained sceptics and critical thinkers, and perhaps the only way to cope with these opposing world views is never to marry them. To apply scientific thinking to the claims and practices of religion is to open up to rational enquiry dictates and revelations that by definition must be totally accepted on blind trust – the essence of faith. Scientists obviously don’t do faith very well compared to the rest of the population.
I certainly find it difficult to understand what we mean by ‘moral’. I don’t think we’ve adequately defined a moral theory yet, and so we’re pretty much making assumptions about our moral status.
I think atheists are as moral as anyone else in society, perhaps even slightly more moral, as some evidence suggests, but it’s not really a conscious action. Perhaps our morality would disappear once we start forming as a collective.
And I certainly didn’t like the idea of a declaration of secularism, as if it were handed down to me by fellow atheists. It was actually an undemocratic thing to do. No one seemed to question or discuss them, they were simply declared and handed out for fellow atheists to follow.
I think I agree.
Now there’s a T-shirt motto:
“I don’t do faith”
I think I prefer “You got to have faith…why?”
It is surprising that the Irish Times would publish such a piece. Both main papers in Ireland (the Irish Independent is the other one) are pretty conservative in terms of religion (treating atheism as a weird abnormality that only affects a tiny proportion of the population). Both papers have regular columns from very conservative catholic apologists advocating for the churches position and decrying measures promoting secularism, which in the current Irish context means the question of religious control of education.
Something like 95% of Irish schools are under church control and the catholic church is extremely reluctant to give an inch on this issue despite the fact that there are almost no clerical teachers remaining. When I was growing up there the schools had about half their teachers from the religious orders (nuns and christian brothers). Now its rare that a comparable school would have even one yet the overall control of each school board still rests with the local catholic church.
They use this control to insist on religious education, which means being taught that the Catholic religion is the only true religion. To be a primary school teacher in Ireland you have to have a certificate in religious instruction – teacher training involves about four or five times as much (exclusively Catholic) religion classes compared to science classes!
“It is often implied that without belief in a God there can be no moral compass. Having attended the World Atheist Convention in Dublin in June, I certainly saw no evidence of this.”
I guess we can rule him out as Elevator Guy!
I have to say that “the incident that must be analysed forevermore” did cross my mind.
Are you serious? How? Why? Why mention it? Especially if you mention it only in order to make a silly remark. Nothing about that event or the result was even hinted at in the article.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for discussing that issue, but bringing it up as a presumably disparaging remark for no better reason (as far as I can tell) than that the town some of this happened in happens to be mentionedis wearisome. If you’re going to bring it up, especially while complaining that people keep bringing it up, then at least make a worthwhile point.
Because it did cross my mind. Didn’t it occur to you?
Not only has it been discussed and argued on atheist and sceptic blogs for thousands of posts for days on end, but it’s been in mainstream magazines.
The theists, of course, take no pleasure in our infighting and paralysis. I doubt they’ve even noticed.
Are we ‘infighting’? Are we ‘paralysed’? I think talking about this issue is good and entirely proper unless we spring disparaging remarks out of articles that have nothing to do with it.
I thought the incident was one of lack of awareness and perhaps privilege, rather that some moral outrage.
Sadly, the Irish Times also published this inconsequential babble, also with a vague reference to the event in Dublin: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0712/1224300557484.html
from that article:
Quantum physics, therefore Christianity. Who knew?
from the bio:
And this, my friends, is why we must join Dr. Coyne in studying theology, the queen of the sciences, and not mere zoology or such, which has impoverished poor Prof Dawkins. How else are we to grasp the full implications of quantum physics or indeed any science?
It is astoundingly weak, isn’t it? I can’t imagine how a newspaper could bear to publish anything so childish. He (presumably deliberately) misrepresents Dawkins’ position and then he completely fails to address the misrepresented position anyway.
Generally speaking, if you’re going to create a strawman, you should probably know how to deal it the death blow.
This character doesn’t even seem to know what argument he himself is making.
Desperate stances call for desperate arguments. All of these quantum-physics babblers need a strong dose of Victor Stegner.
I hope that writing something positive about an accommodationist won’t brand me one myself, but I’m honestly not–but I heard Rees on NPR’s “On Being” a few weeks back, and I liked the guy and found him a pretty powerful voice for secularism and scientific rationality. Now, maybe the bar had just been lowered into the abyss by his having appeared on that odious radio show and in a different context I would have been appalled, but I found myself being unexpectedly delighted by most of what he said.
Heh, accommodationists don’t necessarily have horns or eat babies, I guess. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any babies left for we gnus. And we do get hungry…
I met Rees briefly a few years ago. I think he thought I was a caretaker or something, but he was a thoroughly nice chap, engaging and charasmatic. I like the bits of him that don’t accomodate and I don’t care who knows it 🙂
Most Irish in Ireland are probably agnostic/atheist like British & Europeans.
No they really aren’t.
Let me clarify that. They aren’t all the genuflecting superstitious clichés that perhaps characterised Ireland once upon a time; most of them lead fairly secular lives, but Catholicism is a dominant feature of Irish culture (we’re talking the Republic of Ireland here) and most Irish self-identify as Catholic and go along with all the accompanying Catholic traditions. Baptism, First Communion etc. are all major social family events that few people would even think of ignoring for fear of social ostracism of their kids.
It is true that the churches are far from full on a Sunday morning; but not many people would deny that they regard themselves as Catholic on that basis. They still support the Church, allow the Church to run over 90% of their schools and tolerate the intrusion of this religion in multiple areas that are purportedly secular such as oaths sworn by judges & state leaders, the constitution and the daily broadcast of the Angelus on national television.
That’s how I see it as well. The history of emigration in Ireland meant that those most likely to be skeptical of authority of any sort (religious or political) tended to leave Ireland with the result that Ireland remains much more religiously conservative compared to neighboring countries. There is a sizeable group of Irish people, mainly the old, that are religiously VERY conservative compared to almost any other population in Europe. They are, however, dying off – hence the slow progress being made, even in my lifetime. When I was a teenager, in the mid 80s, condoms were illegal in Ireland. Divorce was illegal until the late 1990s. Abortion is still technically illegal but, well, everyone knows how to book a Ryanair flight to the UK, don’t they?
There’s still a long way to go but religious skepticism is much higher in younger generations and if emigration doesn’t take them I can see the country approaching the UK level of non religiousness in decades to come.
I don’t know. I have a bit of a problem with continuing to push Ireland as ‘deeply religious’, it’s the sort of thing the RCC wants us to think. Yes our media gives too much time and respect to religion. Yes we have a Catholic-flavoured infrastructure that is a hangover from when we were a cryptotheocracy but we also have a secular law system. Apart from the weird anomaly of the blasphemy law that no one seems to be able explain the point of, the direction of change is away from religion eg. civil partnerships recognise gay couples now.
The older generation is still conservative Catholic, but the middle-aged generation – much much less so and as for the young, the Church is arguably irrelevant for most.
We have an inertia in our society against change (cf. lack of widespread public anger/demonstrations at our fiscal situation, whatever about the religion). Politicians won’t invest energy/votes in changing oaths of office because nobody cares about them. If the oaths weren’t there, nobody would be campaigning for them to be put in place.
We have a lot of religious people in our country and Catholic-flavoured establishments that are slowly being modernised, but as a society are we really deeply religious? I don’t think we are. Say ‘deeply religious country’ to me and I am more likely to think of the US than Ireland…
Who said they were “deeply religious”? The point that I was making was that Ireland is not largely agnostic or atheist by any stretch of the imagination. The minority in Ireland who genuinely do fall into the atheist / agnostic / pro-secularist category get quite uncomfortable when people point out the level of religiosity still in Ireland as they feel that this ignores the changes that have occurred over the last few decades. However, that does nothing to change the fact that Ireland is still steeped in religious influences that affect our political, judicial and educational systems as well as our social lives. Irish people vary to the degree to which they would say these religious influences are important to retain, indeed many of them probably aren’t even that aware of these influences either thorough indifference or simply becoming inured to them. However, many of them still don’t feel the need to challenge any of this and as a result governments often don’t push to reform things that no longer belong on the law books of a truly secular nation.
The middle-aged generation is also a good deal more conservative than you give them credit for. Sure, you will find many of them in bed sleeping on a Sunday morning. But they will still all fork out wads of cash to the RCC for the honour of getting their kids baptised, and more again when those kids get to First Communion age and will rationalise it all with a “Sure our parish priest is a lovely fellow, you can’t tar them all with same brush” [child abuse scandal is accommodated thusly]. This may not be deeply religious behaviour, however for the sake of social convention they continue to support the Church financially and endorse it. Whatever label you may want to assign to Ireland, it is not a nation that is largely agnostic or atheist.
Oops, my misquote. I parsed Jerry’s “such a religious country’ as ‘deeply religious’ (though I took that as what he meant…)
I think we are agreeing on many points but taking a different conclusion from them. Ireland is religious (and like most places, has a corps of hardcore religion-heads) but I think it is outdated to routinely describe Ireland as deeply or whatever religious, which seems to be the starting point for many discussions on religion in Ireland. It was true up to maybe as late as the 90’s but now?
Yes we have an establishment that is steeped in Catholic influences; they have patronage of our schools and are a strong lobby group in the media. But in general our laws are moving and have moved in a secular not religious direction. There is a genuine move to reduce the number of schools the Church controls etc.
The kind of middle generation people you describe are more cultural Catholics than anything else. ‘Plastic Catholics’ to adapt the phrase. They may act out the Catholic rituals but to what degree do they think like Catholics the pope would approve of? I think they will not necessarily vote for reforms that reduce religion in the public sphere but neither will they necessarily oppose them.
There is a long way to go in creating a truely secular state and the Church will do its upmost to confuse the issue by identifying what is effectively cultural behaviour as religious behaviour to bolster its lobbying strength. The slow constant pushing back of religion in public areas is probably the best we can hope for.
A really pernicious legacy of the RCC in Ireland (apart from the obvious!) is the supine relationship of the Irish to authority. We see this in the lack of response to the abuse scandal, the Magdalene laundries, the banking crisis… You have to wonder what would actually get us on the streets in anger en masse!
So he thinks we should never marry scientists?
Ha!
Actually that sentence was one that I noticed too. James Randi argued the exact opposite: that scientists were not trained sceptics and could be easily fooled under certain conditions. That was a point he demonstrated rather well in Project Alpha.
http://www.banachek.org/nonflash/project_alpha.htm
Randi is not immune to these sorts of mistakes himself. About a year or so ago he was here in Stockholm and gave a talk on behalf of the local skeptical group, held in the technological university campus. I’ve never seen him live before but he seemed to spend a large part of his talk mocking “people with PhDs” for not being wise to various tricks that might fool them (that’s OK, we took it with good humor!). However Randi himself had, at that time, just written an embarrassing article on his site that was very skeptical of global warming. The worst part of that article was his contention that the amount of energy produced by human activity was unlikely to warm the earth – he’d seemingly entirely missed the actual scientific argument that it was not human energy that was causing warming, but the release of greenhouse gases that then caused the atmosphere to trap more of the suns energy – hence more warming. I think he dropped this line soon after when he was contacted by a deluge of skeptics and told to desist making such a silly argument.
We scientists certainly are trained skeptics and trained critical thinkers. And we can certainly nevertheless be fooled.
Obviously. And so what?
Randi doesn’t argue the opposite at all. He sometimes argues that scientists are quite easy to fool because we tend to have certain expectations. Magicians can manipulate those expectations.
That doesn’t mean that scientists are necessarily unskeptical, it says nothing about our training and doesn’t even say very much about our gullibility.
Most scientists, are by nature, trusting characters.
“Most scientists, are by nature, trusting characters.”
I’ll take your word for it 🙂
I don’t know whether scientists are more trusting than other people, although we do work in an environment of specialists and have to trust to some extent that our colleagues know what they’re talking about.
But I think Randi’s point is plausible. I know that whenever someone starts describing a problem, I’m already thinking about how to solve it. I’ve built up a mental toolkit over the years which usually leads me in useful directions for efficient problem solving. It’s easy to see that this could potentially be manipulated.
Magicians use some simple psychological tricks to fool us. For example, if there are two possible ways a trick could be done, they might add a control that shows one of these methods isn’t being used, then repeat the trick with a different control showing that the second method isn’t being used. We assume that the trick is being done the same way both times, when of course there’s no reason at all to think that. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if scientists are generally quite easy to fool with tricks like that. We’re building models of the ticks according to the rules that have always helped us when people aren’t actively trying to fool us.
We are not as religious as you might think.
Those Irish people who don’t go to mass likely identify themselves as Lapsed Catholic rather than Roman Catholic.
The idea that the Pope could tell us what to do or think was dead at least as far back as the ’70s.
Most of our schools are religious, but that’s inertia and cowardice in the face of perceived (not actual) religiousity.
An Irish adult who took catholicism seriously would be a bit of an oddity. A kind of modern two headed calf or talking pig.
“Those Irish people who don’t go to mass likely identify themselves as Lapsed Catholic rather than Roman Catholic.”
Doesn’t that demonstrate that religion has a grasp on Irish society? Why wouldn’t they say they were atheists? Why does religion get the top billing even when people are in the very act of denying it?
@grania @sigmund Many of my friends/colleagues/acquaintances in Latin America strongly identify with Catholicism, but call themselves “social Catholics”; this term originated in the “liberation theology” movement, many of whose members, including nuns & priests, were agnostic/ateist but “social Catholics”, nonetheless. I am only speculating that this type of psychology/posture applies, as well, to many Ireland-Irish. For what it is worth, I know nuns & priests in the NE-USA (NJ) who, also, are agnostic/atheist (including convent nuns).
Off topic but related:
I’ve sent this email to Yahoo after a comment that I made was deleted, regarding the humor of a call for prayers for rain and stating that they could have at least called on the American Indians for help, along with a sentence that noted that christian gods don’t help:
“A comment that I posted under the story “Another blast of heat to hit the U.S” appears to have been deleted. My comment was in reference to the call for rain prayers by a U.S. governor. There is a problem when people think that something besides natural laws can alter anything. I am offended by the governor’s statement and I am offended that Yahoo would print that while deleting my comment.
I hope Yahoo will act more sensibly in the future. Please be a little considerate.”