But this, in a Guardian-hosted discussion – Is religion a force for good or would we be happier without God, struck me as new and insightful.

“But a liberal, secular democracy is the best protector of religious freedom, because it says that we need to guarantee the absolute freedom of belief. There is no theocracy that has ever provided for religious freedom, let alone emancipation of women and equal rights for gay people.”

The whole discussion was enjoyable and Harris and Grayling made some good points – even if they have been made a thousand times before.

Grayling:

“What we think of as distinctive of western morality has its roots in the non-religious secular tradition of ethics that comes from classical antiquity.”

Fortunately it is excellent.

Even shamans who got no fees or gifts might benefit from their work. Among the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, payment for service was rare, but, as one anthropologist observed, “one abstains from anything and everything” that might put the shaman “out of sorts or irritate him.” Moreover, in pre-agricultural societies, as in modern societies, high social status, however intangible, can ultimately bring tangible benefits. Ojibwa shamans, one anthropologist reports, received “minimal remuneration,” working for “prestige, not pay. One of the symbols of religious leadership prestige was polygyny.… Male leaders took more than one wife.” In his classic study The Law of Primitive Man, E. Adamson Hoebel observed that, among some Eskimo, “a forceful shaman of established reputation may denounce a member of his group as guilty of an act repulsive to animals or spirits, and on his own authority he may command penance.… An apparently common atonement is for the shaman to direct an allegedly erring woman to have intercourse with him (his supernatural power counteracts the effects of her sinning).”
So here is the pattern: in pre-agricultural societies around the world, people have profited, in one sense or another, by cultivating a reputation for special access to the supernatural. It’s enough to make you wonder: Might they, in the course of establishing their bona fides, sometimes resort to deceit? Was the average shaman a fraud—or, as one anthropologist put it, a “pious fraud”? …

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

From The Times via Secular Right.

When the guru’s initial efforts failed, he accused Mr Edamaruku of praying to gods to protect him. “No, I’m an atheist,” came the response. The holy man then said he needed to conduct a ritual that could only be done at night, outdoors, and after he had slept with a woman, drunk alcohol and rubbed himself in ash.

This is the first video of thirteen. Everyone one of them is a masterpiece. Listen to it with your children.

To judge from the extracts — and of course, if this is the kind of thing that interests you, you should read the whole book — D’Souza seems to lean heavily on arguments of the type:

• Science currently has no explanation for X. (In the extracts, X = moral behavior).
• Therefore we must go to religion for explanations.

The overall schema there is contrary to an empirical style of thinking, which would prefer:

• Science currently has no explanation for X.
• Therefore we must press on with our investigations in hope of finding an explanation.

The empirical style is, though, a minority taste.

Quoting from his own book

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. Just as religious thinking emerges naturally and effortlessly from the everyday workings of the human brain, so scientific thinking has to struggle against the grain of our mental natures.

From what I can gather, the gist of the argument was that Coyne claimed that the fact of evolution debunks religion’s claim of intelligent design. Manzi said “no it doesn’t”. Coyne said “yes it does” etc before they spiralled off into a discussion of what the world ‘random’ means.

Anyway, the whole tedious debate was worth it to read the round-up in The American Scene. It turns out that the whole thing turns on whether religion is making factual claims or hermeneutical claims (yep. new one for me too).

We have to distinguish between factual and hermeneutical claims. Factual claims are claims about the nature and operation of reality: “how” things work, not “why.” Darwin’s theory, which is the basis of all modern biology, makes factual claims: that the various forms of life we observe on earth today came to be via the operation of natural selection on populations of organisms that experience random variation. The question, “does life have a purpose” or “are we put here for a reason” is not really a factual question; it’s a hermeneutical one, an interpretive one. The same factual claims could, potentially, sustain different hermeneutical claims. Scientists do, sometimes, noodle about with hermeneutical claims because they turn out to have factual claims buried in them, in which case they may be investigated scientifically. But if there are no such claims buried in them, then the questions aren’t really scientific.

So, if I understood that right, if religion makes factual claims, they can be debunked by science. But religion’s hermeneutical claims can only be debunked if they are in conflict with science’s claims.  The claim the universe is designed is a hermeneutical claim and cannot be debunked by science. Any particular claim that attempts to describe how the universe was designed is a factual claim and collides with science.

Stephen Gould coined a phrase for this.

Non-overlapping magisteria.

Because science and religion answer different questions, there can be no conflict.

I am sensing that one of our viewers has a torn meniscus but God says it’s gonna be fine.

and

The viewer with a mass in your stomach that you think might be cancerous…you just need to pray some more and God will make it right.

I don’t know what that’s about but I just got through reading a huge thread in which two communities of atheists are arguing whether Richard Dawkins is intellectually lazy because he attacks a strawman version of religion, the hypothetical adherents of which believe in a personal God who intervenes in our lives. Apparently no one believes in that kind of God any more and Dawkins should address more sophisticated conceptions of the divine.

The accommodationist atheists also say it’s rude to point out that people like Pat Robertson might not be telling the truth.

[The argument happens way down in the comments of a post claiming that the New Atheists are right-wing, foreign policy hawks. I read it so you don't need to. ]

More often though, I’ll run across someone else who did  better tear down than I could ever write.

Read Taibblog’s – more than half crazy himself – tear down of Stanley Fish’s nonsense review of Terry Eagleton’s new book. He captured both the points that annoyed me so – and then some.

First, Fish’s/Eagleton’s claim that God is not a knowable thing:

Eagleton:

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.

Taibblog:

Got that? It’s not that we can’t see God — it’s that God is inherently unseen! Take that, atheists!

Second is the claim that science doesn’t have all the answers therefor we need religion.

Eagleton:

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.

Taibblog:

The whole premise recalls Woody Allen’s famous syllogism: “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”

When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Is it really true that Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything? A great deal of recent apologetics in response to atheist criticism has taken the form those atheists are missing the point. No true Christian believes in <idea>. Where <idea> is, variously,

• a personal God
• a God who intervenes in the world
• biblical claims about actual events and truths about the world

I suspect that if Eagleton were correct and Christians have stopped believing what the bible says, there would be less calls for atheists to assert themselves.

But I suspect that Eagleton is wrong and, outside a handful of Christians in academia, the vast majority believe in exactly those things.

I gave up listening to atheist vs believer debates a while back as they never seem to move the argument forward in any meaningful way – there are only so many times you can hear that religion gave us the Inquisition and that morality without God is not possible. I decided to risk one more encounter because I thought the Bloggingheads format might lead to a more enlightening discussion and because I enjoy reading both Ross Douthat’s and Heather MacDonald’s writings.

I was not disappointed.

Heather MacDonald was magnificent. I wish she were getting Ross’s spot on the NYT Op-ed page. It’s great that Kristol is gone and it’s great that a non-crazy, non-partisan conservative is getting his spot – but it would be sooo much more fantastic to have smart, secular conservative who does not argue in ALL CAPS in such a prominent seat.

I have never seen such polite passion as Heather’s in a debate and she has the BEST debate winning technique – if I ever go on BlogggingHeads, I am so gonna get me one of those web cams that will hyper-zoom at the most intense moments so I can go all googley-eyed on my opponent. I don’t know how Ross was able to withstand the pressure.

Ross seemed to be on his best behavior and didn’t fling any of the wild accusations that believers usually fling at non-believers.

Heather made fantastic point after fantastic point – so many I lost track. I don’t know if she had prepared notes but her soundbites could not have been better had she rehearsed them in the mirror beforehand.

Here are a few I remember:

The sermon on the mount is not necessarily a defence of unfettered capitalism.

I don’t think many of us would want to have lived during a time when the church was at the peak of its power.

Humans are endowing Christianity with values that comes from ourselves. not from God.

If you want to posit “God” as a placeholder for ignorance of the first cause, fine, but I will not grant you the Christian version of God as loving and just.

Ross did an admirable job under the googley-eyed circumstances but didn’t quite hold his own. His best defence was to fling non sequiturs whenever Heather landed a particularly powerful shot.

Ross v Heather was worth a thousand  Hitchens v Mad Creationist debates. Bloggingheads FTW!