Criticism of Religion

The other day I was struck by a cartoon on Facebook lampooning Christian doctrine. It was witty, I liked it, but the picture of the faith that it started from was hopelessly wrong. I tried to frame a response along the lines of it being necessary to understand your opponent and attack his real weak points. But time and space were short, I probably did not express myself well and I doubt I was understood.

So let's come at it from a less contentious starting point. One of the things that gets my goat these days is the misuse of statistics. From what I read by people in a position to know, the human race is incredibly bad at assessing risk. Advertisers, campaigners and others with an axe to grind can take advantage of this by manipulating statistics to make their sophistical point, and most of us fall for it over and over again. I feel the urge to correct such misuses as I see. There is only one problem: I am no statistician. Mathematics is to me as Ancient Greek is to most people. I have a friend who is a mathematician, who is comfortingly normal in other ways. But a few sentences with him quickly reveals the vast empty space in my understanding where maths ought to be. At work, some of my friends were Actuaries, people incredibly knowledgeable about risk and probability, and most of them were normal in other ways. One had a gift for putting such things into easy language liberally peppered with great, simple, examples, littered with humour. But I see these people no more. Instead I rely on things like More Or Less on Radio 4 to let me know when something less than statistically reliable is being promoted and to help me understand why there is a problem and why I should think twice.

There was quite a good example recently – there was something in the news about there being more people alive now than have ever lived. The point that was being made was about the present population explosion. More Or Less did a programme on it, which you can still download as a podcast. There are some assumptions to be made (where do you start counting people, for example – Homo sapiens only, or do H neanderthalis or H floriensis or H habilis get in too?) And there being no records till quite recently there are other problems to solve. While the adult population might be something that can be agreed on, what about the high proportion of infant deaths? They surely have to be counted as people who lived, if only briefly. Some American experts on population statistics went to work on it and it turns out that for everyone living now there are about 30 human persons who have died, taking the starting point as the rise of modern man 50,000 years ago. So the original statement, used to promote alarm, is simply rubbish.

I am aware of my mathematical incompetence. So when I suspect the presence of an odoriferous rodent I do not rush into print, I do some research. Then, armed with the facts, I can go to war against a real opponent. Sadly, although almost all of the people I know are aware of at least some, and sometimes significant, mathematical shortcomings, most of us think we can assess risk correctly. But we can't, we get it terribly wrong, and the blind are led into a ditch. A further example comes from a course I was on recently where we were asked to assess which class of road produces the greatest number of fatal accidents, motorways, urban roads, or rural roads. One of the group was a professional driver, whose considered opinion was that the only possible answer was motorways. The rest of us deferred to his judgement, which seemed reasonable enough. We were wrong. Motorways are far and away the safest roads with the lowest number of fatalities. It's urban roads, where pedestrians come into direct conflict with cars, that are markedly the worst for fatalities.

The point I am making here is that there are three factors to consider: expert knowledge, awareness of ignorance, and false confidence. It seems to me (I have no reliable statistics, but I do have quite a few examples from recent years experience) false confidence is common among those who are critical of religion. They often think they have grasped what the subject is about, but they have not, and go tilting at windmills. Sometimes they manage to do this in such a way that they bring ridicule on their own heads. At other times the misunderstanding is so crude and the attack so violent that religious persons who might otherwise be supportive of the point being made feel compelled to go to the aid of those under attack. Crude and inaccurate attacks are frequently self-defeating, in this subject as in others.

Alain de Botton, in his book Religion For Atheists, says “Tough-minded critics of religion have found much pleasure in laying bare the idiocy of believers in remorseless detail, finishing only when they felt they had shown up their enemies as thorough-going simpletons or maniacs”. (I'm working on the book at the moment and generally find most of his arguments unsatisfactory, but this comment seems well aimed.) No doubt there are believers who qualify under both those headings, but I have found most to be reasonable, good-natured people. Insulting them is not the way to make progress. What seems to me to be happening is that some of religion's critics are more interested in that feeling of triumph which Alain de Botton describes than anything else. I happen to think that religion is an emotional response at bottom, not an intellectual one. But rational argument, grounded in the realities of belief, not a caricature of it, might make some progress in undermining that emotional commitment, if that is desirable. Rational argument has nothing to do with the erection of an Aunt Sally or a Straw Man to shy at, nor with ad hominem attacks, but with reasoned criticism of the opponent's actual views, his real arguments, not ones we imagine he might have expressed.

In the same book I quoted above, Alain de Botton writes that “The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true” (emphasis in the original). I too find that question boring. Religion is evidently a human creation, but one which satisfies some human needs – that's the only reason it survives. How and why it does that are the proper subjects of academic study, by Social Scientists, Philosophers, Psychologists and so on. The important question concerning religion is how do we take the discussion forward from there?

Each of us will be grabbed by different things. Writing just for myself, here are some issues involving religion that motivate me strongly.

1. I am in favour of education, of the development of curiosity and understanding, especially but not solely in the young. And education must include the achievements of science, and indeed criticism of science, because that is that way that scientific progress is made. What must be resisted is the replacement of science with myth, and the silencing of questioning. That is what is happening in the expansion of the teaching of Creationism in schools as a valid alternative to Evolution. All such things should be resisted, if only because they substitute unquestionable dogma for a proper search for the truth.

2. Like most people I am horrified both by the extent of child abuse by the clergy, and by the cover-up by church authorities. Both the perpetrators and all (whatever rank and prominence they have since attained) those who protected them should be prosecuted by the appropriate jurisdiction and steps taken to ensure that such a thing can never happen again.

3. I am politically a liberal in the style and tradition of John Stuart Mill. Properly representative government is therefore close to my heart. At present we have a House of Lords that is subject to reform. And about time too. Some are arguing that Church of England Bishops should retain their seats in the Lords as of right. No-one should have a right to sit in government, in any role whatsoever. Every government official, especially members of both the houses of our legislature, should be elected. If a Bishop campaigns and gets elected, that's fine by me. But he (or she) should not have a seat by any other means, and nor should anyone else. 

4. There is an increasing (I think, I don't have access to any research to show it) number of believers in forms of religion that trade on people's fears of spirits, devils, and the like. We have just seen the termination of a trial, and the conviction of two of a child's family, who murdered him because of their belief that he was a witch. Such beliefs come straight from the Stone Age. What is to be done about their prevalence defeats me. It's very worrying.

5. Some forms of religion are extremely sexist – in India (those dreaded statistics seem to show) there is a large gap between the expected number of female births and the actual number. The implication is that female children are being killed. We have all heard of Honour Killings where a female family member has, for behaviour fully acceptable to the majority in our society, been murdered other family members. Cases have come to court which seem to be the tip of an iceberg. But this is not limited to people from India – and some have suggested that it is a cultural, not a religious, problem. I cannot judge. But I have heard people in good standing as spokesmen for a number of religions (Christianity included) denigrating women in general and denying them equal standing with men, in defiance of UK law. How best to resist this is not clear to me, but it must be resisted and reversed.

6. The idea has gained credence that “Faith” should be protected and respected. For myself, I don't care what people believe. I'm happy to allow them to take up Bertrand Russell's suggestion and believe that there is a china teapot in orbit round the moon. I absolutely respect everyone's right to believe whatever they want. I do NOT thereby respect the beliefs themselves. Some beliefs I do not share are arguable. I happen to think that it is frequently possible to make a strong case on both sides of a question. Some beliefs are ridiculous, like the china teapot example. Someone I know has fun by propagating one such and is an ordained minister in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Most religious beliefs seem to me to either be short of evidence or to fly in the face of what evidence there is. There is a world of difference between respecting the right to believe and respecting the belief itself. I do not respect nonsense no matter who believes it, and nor should anyone else.

I could go on, but I won't. There are tremendous issues raised by religion in a wide variety of areas. They need to be considered carefully, and where necessary challenged rationally, but challenged for what they are, not for what they are not.

In two areas (at least) I have reservations. Some like to claim that religion has done terrible harm through suppression of the truth, violence and war. They have a strong case. But exactly the same crimes have been committed by non-believers. This is shaky ground to start an argument on.

Christian doctrine (the only one I am competent to talk about) is extremely complex. It might be hard to find two believers with exactly the same doctrinal stance. At the simplistic end their dogma is usually evidently self-contradictory, but at the other end, there is a mire. I suspect much the same is true of most of the major religions. Similarly it is easy to lampoon the bible which contains many things that fall under the headings of barbarism, self-contradiction, or meaninglessness. But anyone with a more than a nodding acquaintance with the text will know that things are not as they seem on the surface. You might be able to tie a fundamentalist in knots, but the vast majority are not in that camp, so I am reluctant to go there. It is fun to ask a Jehovah's Witness in, get out my Greek text, and embarrass them with the issues between it and the Authorised Version. But it is largely also a pointless waste of time. Often they don't understand the argument anyway.

I hope that in the foregoing I have made a clearer statement of the position I tried to make in brief on Facebook. In short, I am concerned about the false confidence exhibited by some of my fellow critics of religion who I think sometimes undermine our cause. But I think that religion does raise some important issues for our 21st Century democracy which need to be faced head on with properly thought out rational argument that deals effectively with the arguments put forward by the other side.