Atheism & Religious Art

Yesterday, I had the great fortune to visit the last day of an inspirational exhibition at the British Museum. This rather imperialistic and imposing landmark has, for the last few months, housed a very special selection of Renaissance drawings and sketches including works from the hand of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. Many of the pieces in this moving collection were on religious topics, which raises an interesting question. It is a simple empirical fact that I, an atheist, enjoyed these religious works of art. Without a doubt, the vast majority of all atheists would have too. So how can non-believers enjoy such things, whilst finding their very subject matter and even their creator’s intentions, very misguided indeed?

French for “rebirth”, the Renaissance was largely a return to classical Greco-Roman styles rather than a completely new occurrence (though the debate rages) that took place in Florence, and later all over Europe from the late 14th century onwards. The prominence of the Church meant that all intellectual and artistic endeavours required papal approval, implicitly or explicitly. Naturally, many great men of the period were, in all likelihood, believers. So when a sceptic views a beautiful Renaissance drawing of Moses receiving the ten commandments on Mount Sinai, whilst the Israelites below are devoured by fire-breathing serpents, how are they to feel about such nonsensical rubbish?

The obvioius option would be to look for something else not of a religious slant. To take an example, this is a sketch by da Vinci of the Virgin Mary on the knees of St. Anne (that’s Mary’s mother, for those of you not wised-up with your New Testament genealogy), with the baby Jesus on her lap and a young St. John the Baptist by their side. On one level, we could take a secular view of this quite incredible drawing and focus on the relationship between three generations of a family and the tender expressions on each of their faces. But clearly, we are missing something. If you believe the child sitting on the lap of this woman is God incarnate, then it changes your entire viewpoint. Whether it changes it for better or for worse is a matter of debate, but that it changes it is what should be noted. Aside from the skill of the technique and the mastery of human emotion shown, this work of art cannot be enjoyed in a religious vacuum. But how then, can I or any other non-believer be astounded by the sight of something like this?

I think the answer lies in another Renaissance invention: perspective. Filippo Brunelleschi first put into practise mathematical perspective in painting, allowing artists to convincingly portray objects at varying distances on a two dimensional canvas. Fascinating this is, but I mean to use the word in a different manner. A work of art can be viewed in many different ways. Anyone who has studied literary theory will know about the endless ways to interpret texts as a structuralist, post-structualist, Marxist, post-modernist, existentialist and so on. I’m of the opinion that in order to appreciate the subject matter of religious art, atheists must imagine what it is like to be a sincere believer for but a moment. This way, the piece is taken on its own terms. But equally, I exclaim, the believer should put themselves in the position of the sceptic and view the art in purely human terms. Art, needless to say, is not science, and it can be appreciated in all manner of ways. By trying our best to view art in this light, we will continue to uncover its never-ending richness.

A. J. Ayer - A Logical Positivist Unlike The Rest?

Another interesting and rewarding philosophical post from Laura Cooper here on a masterpiece of 20th century philosophy - A. J. "Freddy" Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. For those of you unfamiliar with it, this excellent Wikipedia entry should help. Ayer wrote his most famous work in his early twenties and it continues to stimulate young thinkers today...

I was expecting something slightly different from A.J. Ayer when I started reading Language, Truth and Logic. It was once both easy and fun for me to rashly accuse all linguistic analysts of taking the easy way out – “A word, if it refers to something that is not empirically definable, is unusable”. But Ayer makes a more cohesive explanation for his rejection of metaphysics, which I will present in five points. Keep in mind that Chapter 1 (The Elimination of Metaphysics) is dedicated not to disproving the facts previous philosophers have set forth in favour of a metaphysical realm, but to disproving the belief that their statements could have any factual significance:

1. “A statement is factually significant iff [‘iff’ is philosophical shorthand for ‘if and only if’] he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express—that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such a character that the assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is, if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition.”

2. A distinction must be made between “practical verifiability” and “verifiability in principle”. Many propositions have been made which could have been conceivably proven, but for some reason or another, the right conditions were not in place, making the arrangement of all possible variables impossible. However, this does not disprove the significance of the proposition because it is theoretically conceivable. This is in direct opposition to those propositions made which have no probability one way or the other, or would remain equally unprovable under all conditions. Therefore, we cannot count on a series of observations to conclusively support or confute our position, lest we be barred from the ability to make any kinds of purposeful statements at all.

3. The question we must ask of putative statements is simply: “Would any observations be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood?” Ayer seems to add a new portion to his principle of verifiability rather than elaborating on it here, as he goes on to explain the example that “sense-experience is altogether unreal” cannot be sensible because although there is evidence against the claim, there can be no verifiable evidence for it (think Kant here; as Ayer goes on to use the same example against the debate of realism versus idealism). He gives us the fact that we “rely on our senses to substantiate or confute the judgments which are based on our sensations” as his own evidence for the side of “sense-experience is real”. The reason I say that it seems like he is adding a new feature to his previous argument is that it seems to no longer take into account the sole criterion of the consistency of conditions in evaluating factual significance. Instead, he is stating that in order for a statement to be significant, it must have shown supporting evidence one way or another. Let’s look at his original proposition again:

“…if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. If [the assumption of a proposition's truth or falsehood] is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then it is…a mere pseudo-proposition.”

Although the question he proposes seems to align with his original, the examples do not. I interpret the propositions to state that a statement may contain factual significance to a given person if he can conceive of conditions in which it may theoretically exist, and conditions in which it may not. If there is a factual statement made in which it holds true regardless under any conditions, it is nonsensical and false. This seems to me to be a much more interesting proposition than “a statement contains no significance if there is no empirical evidence for it (and is therefore irrelevant)”, which is exactly the sort of statement for which I had been so ready to scorn pragmatism and other linguistically analytic philosophies.

4. Ayer makes an interesting reformulation of the preceding question, which is that a statement has factual significance if experiential propositions can be derived from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deduced by those other premises alone. This actually seems to be the example he uses to argue against the idea that “sense-experience is altogether unreal”, since he can use a fact-statement (“Sense-experience is real”) in conjunction with the idea that we use our sense-experience to evaluate judgments previously made with our sense-experience. This, to Ayer, now allows his argument more weight than “sense-experience is unreal” is allowed, for the latter argument really has no empirical evidence in its court. This, again, is dependent on previous propositions and experiential evidence, rather than the consistency of conditions.

5. [Therefore] because metaphysical conclusions are neither tautologies nor empirical sense-data, they are nonsensical.

"So, how do metaphysical mistakes come to be made?"

The use of the term “substance” is to blame. Those who make the mistake of arguing that the metaphysical realm is indeed logical do so simply because they have been “infected by the primitive superstition” that by naming a thing, a corresponding “substance” of it must exist. Ayer states that we are wrong in our compulsion to think of things having a separate existence apart from its appearances, and doing so is just a result from an “accident of linguistic usage”. What makes these things’ appearances is not the corresponding entity of each, but of their relationship to one another. A way to prove this can be done using an example from Immanuel “Existence Is Not An Attribute” Kant. Take the following statements:

1) Martyrs suffer
2) Martyrs exist

Because they are grammatically similar, the mistake could easily be made to assume that they are sentences of the same type. However, the reason “existence is not an attribute” is that in order to attribute something to the subject, we already assume that it exists. Because martyrs suffer, we assume that they must exist in order to suffer. If “existence” is then included within the subject (for without existence, there would be no subject), the sentence becomes “A = A”, and adds nothing to the subject. Then, all positive statements of existence (A = A) become tautologies and all negative statements (A = ~A) of existence become illogical. The only way this can be overcome, as Kant states, is by discarding the original subject. Take another of Ayer’s examples:

1) Dogs are faithful.
2) Unicorns are fictitious.


We see here the same grammatical resemblance, but because dogs must exist in order to be faithful, can it also be held that unicorns must exist in order to be fictitious? Unless, as Ayer says, there is a way that unicorns may exist and still be fictitious, this sentence is illogical. However, since there is no way to prove that there is some non-empirical way that unicorns may be fictitious and still exist, the statement that unicorns exist non-empirically and separately is nonsensical. Metaphysical errors, according to Ayer, come not from errors of fact, but in errors of linguistic presentation.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and don't necessarily reflect the views of Young Freethought's editors.

Astrology... Over To You Sagan & Dawkins...

Astrology is the most pervasive pseudo-scientific populist sham in history. Its vagaries and baseless generalisations can be found in every trashy magazine and even in respectable journals and newspapers. As an early attempt to place ourselves within the cosmos, it commands respect and investigation. But if posing as a serious attempt to guide and aid personal deliberation over the details of all our equally cosmically insignificant lives, it should be challenged and ridiculed.

I began writing on this topic, but found these two clips from first Sagan and then Dawkins, together cover everything that need be said. Please watch, enjoy and the next time someone tries to read you your horoscope, you'll have all the argumentative ammunition you'll need...







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Christianity Is Nothing But Atheistic Hedonism - Slavoj Zizek's Back!

Slavoj Zizek has rightly earned his reputation as an original and exciting thinker. I’ve written very briefly about him once before for this blog, but on Monday night, I was lucky enough to attend a talk by the man himself, alongside esteemed fellow philosopher AC Grayling at London’s Royal Festival Hall. You should already be struck by the simple fact that a philosopher is able to sell out a 2,900 capacity venue and one which is the home of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I can imagine no other philosophers able to achieve the same impressive feat. In person, the Slovenian Communist comes across quite sincere though his wit and staggering intellectual insights into pop culture may seem somewhat novel at first sight. Like all Zizek talks, it will be on YouTube in no time at all I am sure, and when it is, I’ll post it here. Trying to keep up with Zizek’s engaging accent and fast pace can be tricky, but I’ll try my best to explain two particularly interesting points he made, relevant to a site like this.

Zizek’s first exciting argument was classic counter-intuitive reversal of previously held common ignorance. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan follows a line of argument now commonly summarised by the phrase ‘If God is dead, then anything is permitted’ (Ivan never actually utters these words directly). In fact, argues Zizek, exactly the opposite is true. If God is not dead, then anything is permitted. Consider the common non-religious human being. Each one imposes all sorts of limitations on their own freedom. Atheists, whether thoughtful or not, simply do not behave is if there were no rules to existence. Zizek asked Grayling, as a ‘British Empiricist’, to take this as a fact. However, when any ‘Absolute’ is imposed upon human existence, God being a clear example, anything is permitted within the realm or cover of this Absolute. A similar idea was struck upon by the Christian author GK Chesterton when he said "The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden."

Of course, Chesterton saw this as a wonderful aspect of religion. Zizek sees it very differently. As long as one acts within the realms of the institution that upholds the ‘Absolute’ then to act in between the rules is not only permitted, but even encouraged. Zizek himself used the example of paedophilia in the Catholic Church, where an institution clearly did and continues not regard child rape to be a serious issue as it was performed within the confines of the Church. It is from the non-religious, God-killers, that most of the criticism has come. Quoting Steven Weinberg, Zizek explained how "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Thus, says Zizek, Christianity is nothing more than a facade for paganism. But more than this, it is a disguise for atheistic hedonism! And what does Zizek use to demonstrate this theory? Why, a scene from The Sound of Music of course! This one to be precise...

[If you are reading this in an e-mail update, you will need to go to http://www.youngfreethought.com/ to see the video]

It was a privilege to see such an original mind in action. Any philosopher who can sell out large venues deserves listening to at least, but Zizek is more than just a populist. He is a charismatic but quite serious human being. Let’s hope there will be more philosophers with similar profiles in the not too distant future.

Christian Science? Well, neither really...

The denomination of Christian Science is an oddball. The name is misleading as it appears to have little to do with either Christianity or science. It was founded by an equally peculiar lady who went by the name of Mary Baker Eddy. She believed her system to be conclusively and demonstrably fact. With a focus on healing and a slippery concept of god, this is perhaps one of the most benign and agreeable, yet potentially dangerous forms of faith.

It’s tempting to say the god of Christian Science does not really exist. Mrs Eddy wrote this rather evasive nonetheless pretty description of Christian Science’s genderless deity:

God. The great I am; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence.

These seven synonyms create a wriggly and adaptable god that can fit into almost every gap you wish. The main problem with this emotional pantheism is that god is either superfluous or meaningless. For example, life, truth and love are all qualities we would accept as plainly real (some relativists might argue there is no such thing as ‘Truth’, but even this statement must either be true or false). For each one of the items just listed, there is no need for god to explain either why they exist or to explain how they occur. This is a simple example of seeing and adding in a deity where one is not needed.

The second way in which the Christian Science formulation goes wrong is in its lack of meaningful language. The other four synonyms left are principle, mind, soul and spirit and they go awry in a different way. There is an implicit assumption that all four exist in the first place. Mind of course, does exist in some sense, but it appears Christian Science uses this to mean something more akin to ‘Divine Mind’. Even if this existence is granted, the definitions themselves are messy and lacking content. Take, for example, Eddy’s definition of the aforementioned synonym:

Mind. The only I, or Us; the only Spirit, Soul, divine Principle, substance, Life, Truth, Love; the one God; not that which is in man, but the divine Principle, or God, of whom man is the full and perfect expression; Deity, which outlines but is not outlined.

I’m at a loss to detect anything but dainty prosody. But this typical kind of wishy-washy language is more than just a way of wriggling out of tricky arguments. It is a shame that the universe is reduced to such piffle. It cannot be described with any number of synonyms but only through difficult argument and heaps of cumulative failure and study. In this and many other similar cases, religion, not science, takes on the cold reductionist standpoint.

The Science side of Christian Science supposedly comes in its main claim to fame – healing. Eddy carefully studied the miracles of the New Testament and believed she had uncovered some kind of secret about the way in which Jesus healed. The hospitable and kind-hearted believers I met appeared to all be convinced because of personal miraculous healings that they had experienced. Anecdote after anecdote were piled up. A talk by full-time healer Robert Ennemoser entitled Sustaining the Infinite (‘Infinite’ is another buzz-word exploited and consequently degraded by the movement) followed this general trend. Ennemoser had previously practised homeopathy and his ‘healings’ can likewise be explained by placebos and other bias’s.

The incredible surprises of the placebo are simply astounding. Two sugars pills make people feel better than one sugar pill, injections better still. Even fake operations where the incision is made but nothing is actually operated on also markedly improve a patient’s health. The care, time and energy devoted by a healer to their patient is often admirable. Once a patient begins to see things within a particular framework, they are likely to commit what is technically known as the post hoc fallacy. This is when two events are connected in the someone’s mind that are unrelated, but because of a set of beliefs for example, they identify an actually non-existent causal relation between the two. Combine this with the placebo and the sincerity of belief and you have an explanation for all apparent healings. In no way is this science.

But faith healing clearly has a darker side. When this nonsense is freely chosen as a substitute to real medicine by a consenting adult, then fair game. But what of the young and vulnerable? What if a child is denied a life-saving operation because their parents are wrapped up in poor religious poetry and dummy cures? Hopefully the common sense of the parent will kick in and they would take their child to a hospital, subconsciously acknowledging the failings of their beliefs. This is why all claims of healing should be combated. The danger is apparent, no matter how kind the believer is.

Christian Science? It appears to be just a benign strain of the virus, but one teetering on the edge of danger. It fails in stimulating and interesting ways. I’d encourage anyone to engage with this subtly slippery faith and tackle it head on with a good dollop of reason. There’s certainly no harm in that.

Education, Business and Freethought

In this insightful post, YFT regular John Kubinski offers his view on freethought and the degredation of education.

We have reached a point in Western culture where education is more or less universally lauded as a good thing. While this certainly is to be regarded as progress, upon further inquiry into why education receives the praise and promotion it does, the resulting answers are lack-luster. Though rarely bluntly stated, the relationship between plain and simple capitalist ambition and education is painfully obvious to me. And to see my most valued passion - the pursuit of knowledge - reduced to a mere means in the vain quest for wealth and glory is, well, disheartening to say the least.

As far as I can tell, it’s nearly impossible to find someone who won’t readily declare that the purpose of education is to get a good job. There’s a rather toxic aspect of capitalism which pervades post-industrial culture and hits education the hardest and most repugnantly. Notions of money-making and technocratic efficiency have been elevated to the status of sacred principles, and these ends can really corrupt the means employed in their pursuit. I almost feel inspired to make an allusion to Christopher Hitchens and declare that the capitalist cult of efficiency poisons everything. And in a way I really mean it, because instrumentalising human projects - such as intellectual enrichment - in the pursuit of wealth disfigures them in fundamental ways. But this is not a critique of capitalism in any way, this is a cultural critique.

Our problem is not with our economic system, it’s simply a problem with what people think about education. Young students are often told that education will help them on their way to a “successful life.” It’s a phrase I hear so often, and which I hate more and more with each repetition, because to me “success” is nothing but a transparent euphemism for financial well-being. What we really mean to say is that education is the path towards securing a favourable position in the hierarchy of capitalism, which is certainly true, but somewhat lacking in the nobility area.

The value of education goes completely missed in our market-driven culture. Contrary to what seems like a mainstream, albeit hidden, assumption that living a life of safety and stability in the Western middle class is the pinnacle of human existence, I would argue Socrates’ proclamation that, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” still rings true. Insofar as careerism and the unceasing quest for material wealth rule the day, these notions will dominate our educational system, and the nurturing of human intellect will remain neglected in ways which I find unforgivable.

My argument essentially comes down to this: education is not just job training. Education is the way that the mantle of the Enlightenment is handed down to future generations, it is the way the individual is empowered and privileged to contemplate the magnificence of both the natural world and the world us humans have built, it is our most important method for ensuring our democracies are comprised of thoughtful and informed citizens, and rather essentially, education is the way in which human beings separate themselves from every other species on the planet. Imagine if you were a feral human with no education, roaming the African savannah without a single verbal construction in your mind, enacting behaviours largely indistinguishable from that of other primate species. The very fact that such an existence was a possible path for your life, as opposed to the one you’re on, should be enough to bring you to tears of infinite appreciation for the educational process. Could there be a more beautiful narrative than the edification of Man over the centuries through the gradual transmission and accumulation of knowledge? We owe everything to education, absolutely everything. If we were unable to profit from the inquiries and epistemic acquisitions of our ancestors, we would just be another animal. There could not be a more ungrateful statement in the entire English language than: “education is to make money.”

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and don't necessarily reflect the views of YFT's editors.

Nonsense on Stilts - An Exclusive

Today’s post is a link to a chapter from Massimo Pigliucci new book ‘Nonsense On Stilts: How to Tell Scence from Bunk’. Massimo is known to many as the creator of Rationally Speaking, an excellent blog that contains much necessary reading for any freethinker. If you haven’t been there before, I urge you to take a good look around.

The chapter is named ‘Science in the Courtroom – The Case against Intelligent Design’ and it can be found by following this link.

Enjoy!