The God Argument: the Case Against Religion and For Humanism by AC Grayling – review

[cbayer]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/07/god-argument-humanism-grayling-review

As a militant atheist, the philosopher AC Grayling has much in common with the literal fundamentalists he derides

Jonathan Rée
The Guardian, Thursday 7 March 2013 05.00 EST


Breezy homilies: AC Grayling’s argument is not for the morally distressed. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

AC Grayling is a top-ranking professional philosopher – fellow of an Oxford college, and for many years a professor at Birkbeck – but he does not rest on his laurels. He believes that "philosophy should take an active role in society", and he is a tireless propagandist for "Enlightenment Values". Over the decades he has made plenty of enemies by wrapping himself in the flag of New Atheism: "There is no God," he tells us, "so stop worrying about it." Recently he has lost friends by starting an exclusive "New College of the Humanities" in Bloomsbury, and he will lose still more if he succeeds in opening a free school on the same lines. But he is unfazed by hostility. He sees himself as encouraging teachers to become proud missionaries of the Enlightenment, at a time when the government wants to turn them into servile cheerleaders for empire. He wants young people to study a core course in logic, ethics and science, get fired up by rationalism rather than nationalism, and then go out and destroy the last strongholds of ignorance and prejudice. In due course, he thinks, his educational entrepreneurship will be recognised as brave, progressive and egalitarian.

Grayling is not the kind of writer who finds writing difficult, and in his latest book – his 33rd, according to his website – he gives an easy outline of the creed he leads his life by. Like his hero Bertrand Russell, he wants to be a moralist as well as an atheist, and he likes to call himself a "humanist", though he must know that humanism is a rather dodgy brand. It goes back to the first half of the 19th century, when the delirious French atheist Auguste Comte plotted to replace theistic religion with a "Cult of Humanity", in which he himself would serve as high priest. Critics soon exposed Comte's humanism as "Catholicism without God", and the versions that established themselves in Britain and America could well be described as "Protestantism without God". In the eyes of many nonbelievers, humanism has always seemed like a misbegotten compromise – atheism tainted by religious nostalgia and Pollyanna piety – and Russell himself always deplored it. "I regard human beings as a trivial accident, which would be regrettable if it were not so unimportant," he said, and he would never consent to being called a humanist.

Grayling is happy to rush in where Russell feared to tread, and if you want to learn how to be a good humanist, then The God Argument might be the place to start. Humanism turns out to be "beautiful and life-enhancing", and as easy as pie. "It requires only clear eyes, reason, and kindness," according to Grayling. If you think that moral choices should be grounded in "the responsible use of reason" and "human experience in the real world" then you are already a humanist, though you may not know it. As a humanist you will like "human rights", and dislike "war, injustice, and poverty", but you will allow everyone to choose their own "values and goals" just as you have chosen your own. Best of all, as a humanist you will be frightfully jolly about sex: you will consider it a "deeply valuable thing", provided, of course, that it is practised in a fair-minded, hygienic and respectful manner.

To those of us who have experienced moral distress, Grayling's homilies will seem breezy, superficial and banal; but they were not really meant for us. His humanist manifesto is designed not as guidance for the perplexed, but as a demonstration that religious believers have no business staking a claim to the moral high ground. Religion, he argues, is immoral in itself and in its consequences: a set of life-threatening delusions that no one would succumb to unless they had been debauched by the forces of unreason.

more at link

[edhopper]

1. Grayling and his book sound interesting

The reviewer on the other hand is a snarky, ill-informed, condescending twit.

[cbayer]

3. Lol!

[edhopper]

6. I was

holding back.

[struggle4progress]

2. I rather dislike this review for its superficial attack on humanism, which I regard

as an important ingredient in my own religious views. I don't find Grayling's stance particularly interesting or useful, but the following review is more to my taste:

Reviewed: The God Argument by A C Grayling
Apocalypse now.
By Bryan Appleyard Published 28 February 2013 13:09

... First, to take the book on its own terms, this is a lucid, informative and admirably accessible account of the atheist-secular- humanist position. Grayling writes with pace and purpose and provides powerful – though non-lethal – ammunition for anybody wishing to shoot down intelligent theists such as Alvin Plantinga or to dispatch even the most sophisticated theological arguments, such as the ontological proof of the existence of God. That said, the first half, which is in essence analytical, is much better than the second half, which is rather discursive and feels almost tract-like in its evocation of shiny, happy people having fun in a humanist paradise. Nevertheless, this is rhetorically justifiable to the extent that it is an attempt to answer the question necessarily posed by any attempt to eliminate religion – what would be put in its place? Even the most rabid followers of the horsemen cannot seriously deny that religion does serve some useful purposes: providing a sense of community, consoling the bereaved and the suffering, telling a story to make sense of the world, and so on. Grayling tells a humanist story in the belief that it is perfectly capable of answering all these needs ...

... He writes that the “respect agenda” – the tolerance of religious beliefs – is at an end. Is that really where atheists want to go?

At this point, the book needs discussing in a wider context. Western humanism in its present incarnation is a very small sect in the context of global beliefs and world views. The idea, advanced in this book, that it could and should become a world ideology is both wildly improbable and extremely dubious. Like it or not, religions are here to stay. Grayling sort of gets round this by ignoring the primary argument for their continued existence – that religion is a beneficial adaptation. He argues that religion is kept in place by, in essence, political power. This is altogether too weak and too inconsistent to explain the prevalence of religion and most thinkers accept some sort of evolutionary explanation. If you do accept at least some version of the adaptive argument – or, indeed, if you are a believer – then the study of religion becomes an obligation. Religious faith is not remotely like the belief in fairies; it is a series of stories of immense political, poetic and historical power that are – again, like it or not – deeply embedded in human nature. Seen in that light, to dismiss all religious discourse as immature or meaningless is to embrace ignorance or, more alarmingly, to advocate suppression. It will also make it impossible for you to understand the St Matthew Passion, Chartres Cathedral and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

The broad point is that Grayling, like the other horsemen, goes too far. He narrowly defines religion as a system of physical beliefs and then says such a system has nothing to offer the world. When another atheist, Alain de Botton, gently suggested that non-believers might have something to learn from religion, he was immediately trampled on by the horsemen. But what religion has to offer is a great mountain of insights into the human realm. Belief, in this context, is beside the point. Reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, the Fire Sermon or the Sermon on the Mount will teach you more about the human condition than anything written by the horsemen ...

[cbayer]

4. Interesting that the reviews seem so reflective of the person's personal POV.

[edhopper]

5. Sounds like he has an ax to grind

with those called "The New Atheist" and simply wants to expound his own view of religion without seriously considering Grayling's.
Not a review but an argument.

[Jim__]

7. Grayling's book sounds pretty shallow.

I tend to be much more in agreement with the review and all that the human intellect has to be modest about:

The distinction between believers and unbelievers may be far less important than Grayling and the New Atheists like to think. At any rate it cuts right across the rather interesting difference between the grim absolutists, such as Grayling and the religious fundamentalists, who think that knowledge must involve perfect communion with literal truth, and the sceptical ironists – both believers and unbelievers – who observe with a shrug that we are all liable to get things wrong, and the human intellect has a lot to be modest about. We live our lives in the midst of ambiguities we will never resolve. When we die our heads will still be filled with a few stupid certitudes mixed in with some more or less good ideas, and we are never going to know which are which. There is no certainty, we might say: so stop worrying about it.

[edhopper]

8. A bunch a drivel

Those who claim that atheist, who say there is zero evidence for a deity and therefore do not accept it's existence and fundamentalist are of the same ilk is hogwash.
Furthermore this bs that since we don't know with absolute certitude that there is nothing, we must accept that there is something is one of the weakest arguments around.
The correct position is that until any evidence presents itself, disregarding the existence of a deity or "spiritual realm" is the proper course.

[Jim__]

14. You call the argument drivel, but your post indicates that you can't even follow it.

For instance,

Furthermore this bs that since we don't know with absolute certitude that there is nothing, we must accept that there is something is one of the weakest arguments around.

Where does the argument in post #7 make any such claim? Please be specific.

[edhopper]

15. You are right

I read it too fast.
He actually said this inanity:
"We live our lives in the midst of ambiguities we will never resolve. When we die our heads will still be filled with a few stupid certitudes mixed in with some more or less good ideas, and we are never going to know which are which. There is no certainty, we might say: so stop worrying about it."
Why try to resolve anything, especially using the one course of ivestigation, science, which has shown to be the best tool we have found to discern what is real.
Since nothing can be known "for sure" how can we possible know what things we think are true are right and "good ideas" and which are horrible wrong. Since we can't possible figure out the difference (except maybe using that science thingy) why try? Just go to our graves stupid.
Like I said, drivel.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. If the story of Jesus being resurrected is just a parable, is there a religion of Christianity left?

If the story of the Koran being the word of Allah relayed through Muhammed is just a parable, is there a religion of Islam left?

By saying that scriptures are just many-layered parables, Rée seems to be agreeing about the case against some of the major religions.

[cbayer]

10. I can't make the claim that the scriptures are just many layered parables.

It's always been my belief that many of the stories are based on real events, but have been exaggerated or expanded upon in order to make a point.

To me, the major religions represent the living out of what they stories were intended to convey.

So I would say that they don't eliminate the religions at all - quite the contrary.

It doesn't have to be black and white.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. But it is what Rée claims

Militant atheism makes the strangest bedfellows. Grayling sees himself as a champion of the Enlightenment, but in the old battle over the interpretation of religious texts he is on the side of conservative literalist fundamentalists rather than progressive critical liberals. He believes that the scriptures must be taken at their word, rather than being allowed to flourish as many-layered parables, teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes. Resistance is, of course, futile. If you suggest that his vaunted "clarifications" annihilate the poetry of religious experience or the nuance of theological reflection, he will mark you down for obstructive irrationalism. He is, after all, a professional philosopher, and his training tells him that what cannot be translated into plain words is nothing but sophistry and illusion.

That was the paragraph in which he tried to show why Grayling is similar to fundamentalists - because he doesn't think that religions see scripture as just "many-layered parables".

[cbayer]

12. I read that as his saying that the literalists have it wrong, whether they

are believers or not.

And I still don't see it as arguing against religions in general.

[trotsky]

13. *Every* Christian takes at least some parts of the bible literally.

And no Christian takes EVERY part of the bible literally, even the fundies.

They all pick and choose, so for any Christian to call someone else (whether that "someone else" be a fellow Christian or a non-believer) a "literalist" is ridiculously hypocritical.

[skepticscott]

18. +1

It in a nutshell.

An Excellent Thoughtful Intelligent Insightful Legitimate Post (r)

[Humanist_Activist]

16. What is the point of posting such ignorant drivel?

This reviewer obviously doesn't know what he's talking about, particularly about atheism and humanism, so why post such ignorance?

[cbayer]

17. I posted it because I thought it was interesting.

If you find it to be ignorant drivel, feel free just to skip right over it.

See you around.

[Humanist_Activist]

19. I guess this just goes to prove that religious people are more interested in...

character assassination than in the truth.

[cbayer]

20. What religious people are you talking about? The author of the article?

[Humanist_Activist]

21. You.

All I see from you are bullshit strawmen about beliefs of atheists, unproven assertions about the universe and human nature to try to prop up your own beliefs in what can only be a desperate attempt at getting legitimacy. Even worse is doing it in a passive aggressive way by posting "interesting" articles others wrote.

[cbayer]

22. Lol. Does that mean that humanists are more interested in making unsubstantiated

assumptions about what others believe or don't believe based on no information other than that they don't agree with them?

You know nothing about my beliefs my beliefs or lack of beliefs, but you certainly are quick to personally attack me.

Which doesn't say much about humanism, if that is what you are representing.