Article 7 - Grayling's Inconsistent Humanism
14.8.14
Dear Professor Grayling,
THE GOD ARGUMENT
I read your book “The God Argument” with great interest. I was surprised at several points in it which seemed either anti-liberal or anti-scientific:-
Elitism – you say every person must seek his/her own values and goals; but insights and conclusions about life and morality reached by “herdsmen” and “unlettered peasants” are dismissed contemptuously. Ethics is to be decided by elite “psychologists, anthropologists, historians, novelists, dramatists and all other kinds of artists” (oddly not including scientists, the elite Dawkins wants to make these decisions for us). Clearly manual workers and the ordinary “man in the street” are excluded from this process. How we should live must be decided by “the most educated and reflective minds in the history of thought”. This elitism is underlined in the patronising tone on the penultimate page to those who do not share humanist ideas - “These are fellow human beings and humanists profoundly wish them well.” Some are more equal than others it seems.
Intolerance – humanism “says each individual is responsible for choosing his or her values and goals…” (p139) and imposes “no obligations on people other than to think for themselves” (p149). If you truly believed that you would stop there – there would be nothing further to say. But a hundred pages then follow of your beliefs on various issues arguing that everyone should believe as you do. It is like Dawkins in “The God Delusion”, saying everyone must be free to make their own Ten Commandments, while he makes it clear that they must comply with the Dawkins Ten Commandments. You say “We must accept and tolerate variety [among human beings], and be open-minded.”193 and decry “monolithic ideologies claiming the one right answer and the one correct way of life” (137). But you then use highly dogmatic and prescriptive language – “a battle to be won” (clearly the Chinese are excluded from moral autonomy in your view!) 182, “obligation” 193, “wrong” 193, “acts not to be tolerated anywhere at any time” 194 and “frankly a disgrace”220. This is anomalous and illiberal. In a world of morally autonomous beings how can you speak of “a correct answer”(162) to the question “what is the meaning of life?”.
Caricature – Your treatment of history and religion is highly selective. There is occasional grudging acceptance of good done by religion but it is always done “at a cost” and exceeded by the good done by atheists. You make no attempt to understand religion (or God) from the inside but deal with your own stereotyped caricature. You knock down many straw men and repeatedly rely on analogy, e.g. comparing belief in God to belief in fairies. No one believes in fairies, therefore fairies do not exist; God is like fairies; therefore God does not exist. There is no acknowledgement that the belief in God of maybe more than half the human race should lead to an open minded dialogue between atheists and believers, nor that many highly educated, influential and good people in modern society have religious faith.
A priori assumptions - Non defined terms abound – “humane”, “positive”, “good”, “best”, “noblest”, “correct”, “dignity”, “rights”, “free”, “equal” , “wrong”, “mercy”, “immoral”. What do they mean? What is the scale of negative and positive, good and bad, you refer to? Who set it up? Why should anyone else comply with it? Is it just “what Grayling wants to happen”? You do not say. The science on which you base your views tells us clearly that we are just animals (albeit intelligent) and that there is no good or bad – things just are.
Mythology – Part 2 of your book parts company with science altogether in favour of a humanist mythology of an imminent utopia achieved by humans thinking harder. It seems that “history is moving in the right direction” which is when “the human mind is liberated from religion and superstition”. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China spring to mind as examples of that but your easy “with one bound he was free” dismissal of these secular atheistic disasters is reminiscent of Tolstoy’s character Novodorov challenged with the excesses of the atheistic French Revolution – “the fact that they went wrong does not prove that I have too …”. Humanity has “a destination further along”, “forward motion” and a hope of “one day arrival” - and “perhaps that day is no longer distant”. Your approving quote of “faith in human rights” (179) gives the game away. Your imminent humanist utopia is based on faith not science and is as unbelievable as fairies or a dragon in the garage. You ignore the repeated relapses of Enlightenment society into the atheistic wars and dictatorships of the last 300 years because they do not fit your mythology. You ignore the fundamental tenets of science that all life is hardwired to a ruthless struggle for survival; and that human beings, indeed the whole universe, have no meaning, importance or significance at all – they just are. The values you argue for are biologically just survival strategies and chemically just random reactions of atoms in our brains. Astronomically in a universe of billions of years and untold light years’ extent the idea of humans being of any significance is ludicrous. Morality is just a shifting fleeting artificial construct of no ultimate importance. Religion does not produce an egocentric view of humanity (another caricature) but humility. In contrast humanism’s view of humanity as set out in your book is of a busy, strutting, self-important, pompous little species, doomed to extinction, but with delusions of grandeur.
If your arguments are “completely persuasive” 175 why do you need to tell us that (“I would be surprised to find [anyone] disagreeing with me”) 189? I enjoyed your book but found it unpersuasive for the reasons above. If I were to become an atheist I would follow not the mythology of humanism but the rigorous intellectual honesty of non humanist atheists like John Gray who have seen through the humanist myth.
Yours sincerely,
Alastair Bates