I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the school of thought of Lévi-Strauss and his intellectual progenitor Ferdinand de Saussure. I think the briefest introduction into this thinking is provided by literary critic Terry Eagleton. Indecently, if anyone wants to donate a copy of his Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate for review on Concrete Academic, by all means contact the editors. He writes:

“If I say to you in certain circumstances, ‘Close the door!’ and when you have done so impatiently add, ‘I meant of course open the window’, you would be quite entitled to point out that the English words ‘Close the door’ mean what they mean whatever I might have intended them to mean. This is not to say that one could not imagine contexts in which ‘Close the door’ meant something entirely different from its usual meaning: it could be a metaphorical way of saying, ‘Don’t negotiate any further’. The meaning of the sentence, like any other, is by no means immutably fixed: with enough ingenuity one could probably invent contexts in which it could mean a thousand different things. But if a gale is ripping through the room and I’m wearing only a swimming costume, the meaning of the words would probably be situationally clear; and unless I had made a slip of the tongue or suffered some unaccountable lapse of attention it would be futile for me to claim that I had ‘really’ meant ‘Open the window’. This is one evident sense in which the meaning of my words is not determined by my private intentions—in which I cannot just choose to make my words mean anything at all, as Humpty-Dumpty in Alice mistakenly thought he could. The meaning of language is a social matter: there is a real sense in which language belongs to my society before it belongs to me.” (Literary Theory: An Introduction, 61)

It’s easy to make the mistake, going back to Hall, of thinking that the solution is simply to understand the cultural context of “Close the door.” But Eagleton is pointing out a deeper problem. There are rules that govern how language works—to use the wording of Chomskyan linguistics , a universal grammar—and those do not belong to us, but to society as a whole. In fact not even society can change those rules, which is why, according to the structuralist school of Saussure, we should look at that structure to find meaning, not at the superstructure.

Claude Lévi-Strauss took this insight and applied it to culture directly, particularly religious mythos.  He found that there is a underlying language to myths, particular relationships of primary symbols, or mythemes (a concept remarkably similar to memes). It is beyond me to go into the details of his analysis, but let me just give an indication of his findings. Not only did Lévi-Strauss find connections between disparate mythologies, but he was also able to find a common root of religious inquiry, even in ‘primitive’ religious languages (myths, rites, etc.).

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind,” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ” (New York Times, November 4, 2009)

This we now take for granted, but what a significant contribution to culture in itself. Surely more than the moonwalk.

Why did this article generate so much heat? I think a couple of things played a role. Although Jeff wrote more of a personal reflection on a particular pet peeve (he himself seemed incredulous at the response), there is a grassroots visceral reaction to consumerism, waste, and artificiality, heightened by the economic recession, of which the now ubiquitous “Organic” labels are only symptomatic. He clearly hit a nerve, and this is a discussion that I hope to see tackled here soon. Although it seems prosaic, it touches on big ideological and even existential questions—notice that the title of the piece starts, “The Industrial Revolution….” Along with that are issues of economic philosophy with their concomitant political overtones, which are no less of a catalyst for argument.

Yet there was another, outside factor. Nurturing the growth of ConcreteAcademic.com, the editors often use “social-media” to help spread the word about the project. As an experiment, it was decided that this article should be “seeded” on Newsvine with a different, more catchy title, to see what would happen. Jeff’s title was fine for Concrete Academic. We had already hit rock-bottom on boring titles with Numerical Veracity and the Media. But it certainly wasn’t eye candy, and we thought we could come up with something better. So “The Industrial Revolution and the Death of Craftsmanship” was morphed into “Why IKEA Sucks and Is Destroying the World.” Pretty good, no? The Newsvine community ate it up and it went nearly viral by our modest standards, whereas my article the day before on Jazz—which I thought exceedingly interesting—got no play at all from them.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this kind of creative and even brazen wording, and I like to have fun with what I write; I certainly meant the title of this post to be cheeky. But I can’t help but think this says something about our culture, and it surely isn’t flattering. The more vitriolic or asinine the bait, the harder people will go for it. It turns out that advertisers, tabloids, and TV editors really do know what they’re doing when they aim for our basest instincts. This is one of the reasons I stopped watching television years ago.

Let me quickly add that, though a number of comments had to be deleted, and I don’t know how many were filtered out automatically, we got thoughtful comments, too. It’s always good to see solid criticism, whether we agree with it or not. Jeff got called on a couple of points, and I personally would like to see further discussion, though a more irenic tone would be nice.

So, then. Out there it’s local news banter, award shows, gossip blogs, and celebrity sightings. We’re glad you’re here.

As a teenager I was ‘played’ by music like everyone else, allowing it to heighten my exuberance and deepen my moodiness. But this was all unconscious. Music fits in seamlessly with our hormonal and social cycles and phases in our youth, blending in with the background subcultures we attach ourselves to and the pensive and philosophical modes we discover reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles for English class. Like everyone else, I was listening to Pearl Jam and Nirvana. Good tunes. Lots of fist-shaking and irreverence.

An older friend of mine, now touring with his bass, took pity on my lost soul, thinking I might like to broaden my artistic horizons. He himself had been turned on to Jazz Fusion by a couple of his music instructors, the very ones I would soon be listening to, and he in turn graced me with a handed-down cassette tape, even then a well-outdated format. I did not find it terribly interesting. It lacked a consistent melodic pattern and thump, thus failing to fire my synapses. And if this really was Jazz, why wasn’t it more, you know…“smooth”? The guitar seemed to be talking too much, and I wanted it to straighten itself out and sing. There was so much confusion, as if the musicians didn’t know the proper roles of each instrument, or weren’t sure where the song was going.

I had listened to the whole tape, absentmindedly, a couple of times. Then, as I was driving, I heard a random tapping I couldn’t locate. I knew I had heard this tapping before, perhaps even on this same stretch of highway. What in the world would make the car do that? Bingo. I rewound the tape and there it was: Tap. Tap-Tap…Tap. Ok, the drummer was hitting the side of the drum or a piece of wood, but why would it be so random? And why did it fade in so oddly over a guitar solo that it had nothing to do with? This music was not blending in with the background and rhythms of my world, but rather pulling me into its world. Rather than leaning back, tapping my foot, and bobbing my head, this made me sit up and lean in.

The tune was “Renegade,” on Tribal Tech’s Nomad. And through it, I discovered Jazz. But I found the learning curve steep, particularly on a tape already deteriorated though repeated play, and I was perhaps more than ordinarily dense musically. High school band had not prepared me for this. It was like straining to eavesdrop on a conversation, trying to recognize words I was anticipating based on the few un-muffled bits I could hear. As I played the tape again, this time with attention and a determination to listen to the music on its own terms, it opened up for me a three-dimensional world of color and movement.

I found Jazz to be unlike anything I had listened to before. It had such an inner complexity that I would try to tune into a single instrument throughout each piece. I could listen to each track four or five times, and feel like each one was different. Each instrument was utterly independent of the others, and yet I could see one building toward another, then intertwining and bouncing off each another. The drums could not be held to predictable fills, and the bass insisted on speaking for itself. It was exhilarating.

I won’t bother with the zeal of my conversion as I developed an ear for the music, or the heartrending tales of searching for unobtainable albums before iTunes. The important part is the bliss of listening and really hearing it. Unlike pop music, which can quite easily stir the emotions, Jazz also stirs the mind. It cannot be listened to passively.

One of my favorite quotations is something Igor Stravinsky wrote when discussing the process of writing music. He says:

“I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. . . .Will I then have to lose myself in this abyss of freedom? To what shall I cling in order to escape the dizziness that seizes me before the virtuality of this infinitude? . . . I shall overcome my terror and shall be reassured by the thought that I have the seven notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal, that strong and weak accents are within my reach, and that in all of these I possess solid and concrete elements which offer me a field of experience just as vast as the upsetting and dizzy infinitude that had just frightened me. It is into this field that I shall sink my roots, fully convinced that combinations which have at their disposal twelve sounds in each octave and all possible rhythmic varieties promise me riches that all the activity of human genius will never exhaust.” (Poetics of Music, 63-65.)

For me, Stravinsky here reaches beyond even music, but that’s different story. In context, he’s talking about the liberties and constraints of music, and the liberties in the constraints. He goes on to discuss even ‘surrounding himself with obstacles.’ Jazz is just that. It is exploring the multi-dimensional shape and topography of musical space. Truly dizzying.

Awkward humor aside, McGrath explains the concept lucidly. More often, though, he gives insufficient background for his discussion. He writes helpful summaries, but he doesn’t preview his material to give the uninitiated reader a helping hand although, at about one hundred pages, he was not pressed for space. Ostensibly he does not want to bore his fellow scholars, but these sections would be easy skimmed and would not detract from the work at all.

Perhaps McGrath was picking his spots. At the beginning he does take his time trying to disabuse the reader of his modern monotheistic sensibility. He tells us that when we contrast Judaic “monotheism” with the “polytheism” of the ancient world, we’re imposing our current lexis anachronistically. His coverage of the nature of monotheism (he’s able to stay with the language after no little caveat) as seen from the relevant Jewish literature is excellent, though at times it looks as if he muddies the waters unnecessarily, only to clear them up for us later.

McGrath is not as careful discussing the terms “god” and “worship.” The modern denotations are very hard to shake, and we read those words differently than the ancients read elohim and proskunesis. No doubt he was avoiding working in the biblical languages, but it would have been helpful here, even though he does cover the breadth of usage of the words. There’s no introduction into the rabbinic material or his brief detour into textual criticism, which remains opaque in his hurried coverage. It’s this kind of oversight that makes McGrath only moderately successful at writing to the lay audience.

But that’s about as much bad as I can come up with. The book is otherwise a much needed 100-page punch to the gut. McGrath, with others, agrees that liturgical practice is an important defining factor of monotheism, but he goes a step further in specifying sacrificial worship. This is a key insight. He plays on it later on, but I wish he had drawn out the idea at this earlier point. Following the first two chapters, which focus on Judaic background, McGrath discusses monotheism in Paul’s letters, John’s Gospel, and the Book of Revelation. His treatment of those commonly-cited texts is informative and iconoclastic, a must-read on the issue of early Christian worship. Chapter six covers the “Two Powers Heresy,” though I found it unnecessary and would have preferred to see him use the space to develop his other ideas.

Good scholarship is not just about laying out the evidence and questioning preponderant opinions, but coming up with explanations. McGrath does not leave us wanting. Here’s a line of thinking that comes up in a few places scattered throughout the book. Speaking of John’s logos and its close relation to God, he says:

It was only after significant changes in world view had taken place, probably connected with the development of a clear doctrine of creation out of nothing, that it became urgent to sort out exactly where the dividing line between God and creation should be drawn. And so it was that Arius and other non-Nicenes said “between God and the Logos,” while Athanasius and the Nicenes said, “between the Logos and creation”[....] As I have noted, however, to expect John to answer a question that was only raised later is rather unfair. Yet it was this very question which led to the (re)definition of monotheism by Christians in the trinitarian terms we are familiar with today and by others in monistic terms. Prior to this, there apparently was no problem. (McGrath, 69)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I know it would make more of an impact than it does had the author published with a firm with wider and deeper roots than the University of Illinois Press. I’m happy to recommend it here and hope that it gets the readership it deserves.

The ID movement is officially agnostic about the identity of the D/designer, but that’s a bit disingenuous. None of them are working under the assumption that the designing mind will turn out to be just another biological life-form. As it puts us in an endless regression of designers, I’m going to speak to the capital-D theory. Much of the work done under the Intelligent Design label is scientific in some sense. A small handful of scientists have written books and papers that are at least academic enough that I don’t understand them, so I admit that investigating the question under ID does involve doing science. What I claim is that the hypothesis itself is not really scientific. Let me explain.

Criteria for scientific viability

There are three really good criteria for evaluating a potential science such as memetics, psychoanalysis, or Intelligent Design: explanatory power, experimental success, and fecundity.  Explanatory power is the ability of a theory to explain a breadth of phenomena. The atomic theory of magnetism has greater explanatory power than the tiny-invisible-purple-rope theory of magnetism (TIPR-theory, for short) because the latter is obviously ad hoc and unconnected to the rest of the world. It might explain why two pieces of metal are attracted to each other, but not much else. A scientific hypothesis should do more than answer a single question. It should provide an interpretive model of the world, even if only a small piece of it.

Experimental success as a criterion is obvious, and it goes without saying that a theory must be testable to be evaluated at all. Even though I made it up, I’m at a loss as to what kind of experiment would be a fitting test for TIPR-theory, particularly if I further qualified the tiny invisible purple rope as undetectable by modern means and not causally related to anything detectable. If it were testable, it would need to succeed in predicting the results of multiple experiments, or at least explain why it didn’t do so; and we’re back to explanatory power.

Fecundity is related to the first two criteria, and it has to do with the ability of a theory to generate new questions and experiments. The atom hypothesis leads both up and down the chain of hard sciences, to physics and chemistry, provoking questions and suggesting experiments. A classic example is the prescient ‘discovery’ of non-extant elements, filling in the periodic table with the identity and properties of materials known only through the model. TIPR-theory, in contrast, wishes simply to end the questioning. It suggests no new directions. Here’s the important part: This is because of the kind of thesis that it is, not because it’s wrong. And if it turns out to be right, remember that I came up with it. © Todor 2009.

So what about Intelligent Design? I think it’s a fantastic answer, of far-reaching explanatory power; but by its very nature it’s a poor question. Science thrives on questions, accepts answers only provisionally, and digs for deeper ones. If an ultimate answer is reached, science comes to an end, for there is no where else for it to go. This is precisely what finding Design, or the Designer, means. The capitals indicate an ultimate explanation, not a provisional one. This is not analogous to finding a watch and inferring a designer, because that answer to the question, Why is this as it is?, provokes the question, Where did the watchmaker come from? ID theorists stop at Design. It’s simply the nature of their thesis. Science may lead a researcher to the question, Is this Design?, but it cannot adjudicate an affirmative answer.

Here I have to revise an earlier statement. I’ve not yet seen ID people really investigate questions so much as debunk certain answers. They have done an excellent job at exposing the problems of the consensus view of the origin and diversity of life, but little has been done to build a rival hypothesis, a different interpretive model that makes better sense of the data. The explanatory power of ID is breathtaking, but there are no forthcoming experiments for it, and it doesn’t seem to be spawning other scientific work. This is not because there is no Designer, but because ID ends the scientific process.

Full-fledged ID science?

This is all a bit abstract, but I think it can be cleared up looking at it practically. What would we expect to see if ID were a science? Rather than just exposing holes in other theories, which itself is a big part of the process, there would be measurable work done in building rival models. I would think there is enough money in the social movement to set up think tanks, institutions (The Discovery Institute is more of  a public relations arm for the movement), or endowed fellowships (at a sufficiently conservative school), and a peer-reviewed journal where ID scientists would publish papers working out precisely where the Design is, how we know it when we see it, what experiments should be performed, and how the results of other experiments should be reinterpreted. Is Design at the level of species? phylum? DNA? Can there be multiple levels of Design? There are a lot of questions, and nothing resembling a consensus in the literature available to me. What is more, an emerging consensus should start to show greater experimental success than rival theories—it should simply work better.

Don’t get me wrong, what they’re doing now is ok. I’m happy to see anyone throw stones at Goliath—it’s better for everyone in the long run—and if the Discovery Institute and others can get him to fall, all the better. Maybe there’s an Einsteinian revolution in the offing for biology. But right now the Intelligent Design movement is pouting about being disrespected in the scientific community. If you’re doing good science the work speaks for itself, and you don’t need to be in the good graces of the National Academy of Sciences. So either do the science better than everybody else, or start playing a different game.

At least that’s my take on everyday usage. Thanks to the miracle of language, a fascination of mine since I was first learning English at six years of age, we understand each other just fine. This common usage, though, can let us down when discussions take us into higher levels of critical thinking. Failing to discern that we’re using the hard ’scientific’ or ‘technical’ language instead of the plastic ‘everyday’ language can lead to misunderstanding. Words such as argument and criticism have a negative connotation in everyday-speak because most people don’t want to be criticized or get into arguments, but as we flip that mental switch to higher thinking we realize that they are emotively neutral. They’re just part of the parlance of intellectual engagement.

Let’s take a closer look at this language, starting with facts. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC/BCE. Fact. I just checked on Wikipedia. But how does the Great Wiki know? Probably out of a standard encyclopedia or a survey of Roman history, but then where did they get if from? Ok, so at some point down the bibliographic chain a classicist actually read Remus Suitonicus Romanus Historicus, and he said so. But that’s not right either, because whatever he said, it was not “49 BC.” Someone had to ‘exegete’ the date based on whatever was written in the text. How was that interpretation carried out? What were the assumptions it was based on? Did it immediately correspond to other information? What is the weakest link in the limiting data? And remember that “crossing the Rubicon” is not a plain statement of an event, but is rich in significance. Did the reader get the significance right? What role does that part have in understanding the whole?

It turns out that facts are not non-debatables, they’re just the bits and pieces of the historical, philosophical, or scientific models we build. In the latter case those are sometimes literal models. You can crank on the cogs of a heliocentric model of the solar system and see why it works better at explaining the retrograde motion of celestial bodies than the geocentric model does. Most of the time, though, models are conceptual or mathematical. Meteorologists program computers with a model—their systematic body of knowledge of how weather systems respond to heat, wind, moisture, and so on—and the computer uses that information to answer their questions (What’s going to happen to these clouds when the sun rises in the morning?). Their forecasting success depends on how well their model corresponds to reality.

Note that it isn’t a right or wrong situation: they may at times, using the same model, make better predictions than other times. Those successes and failures tell them where the model works well, and where it doesn’t. Note, too, that as the scientist reads incoming data, the ‘facts,’ he understands them based on his over-arching understanding of the whole system.That understanding is a theory, a coherent bundle of propositions that attempt to explain something and which, when unfolded, becomes a model that can be applied to interpret data or make predictions.

How do you prove it? Or if there are multiple competing theories, how do you know which one is right? We have to get beyond the popular conception of simply lining up our non-debatables against a measuring stick. Those facts, the data, have to be interpreted against the model. The better theory is the one that best explains the data.

In biblical studies there are multiple theories about the “historical Jesus”—itself a phrase that juxtaposes the Jesus of history with the Jesus of the Gospels—ranging from God Incarnate to Jewish philosopher. The data is the same, more or less. The question is which understanding of Jesus makes the best sense of the evidence. If one hypothesizes that Jesus was a Jewish philosopher who merely encouraged high ethical standards, then the problem becomes explaining the rise of Christian martyrdom. If one hypothesizes that Jesus was God and encouraged his own worship, then the problem becomes explaining the late split of Christianity from Judaism. And, of course, I’m simplifying: there are many more problems and many other approaches (I picked the two extremes, but I believe neither of them). There is no theory, in science or the humanities, that is without its problems, that has no holes to fill, that needs no further thinking or articulation. There is nothing that is completely settled. There is only the illusion of this at a popular level.

Understanding the rules of the road is the only way to get anywhere, to have a sincere and open exchange of ideas. Purposefully or accidentally we can throw up roadblocks. When the creationist says, “Evolution is just a theory,” or the atheist says, “Religion is a about faith, science is about facts,” they’re both playing a language game, and playing it badly. The arguments fail catastrophically, imploding by their own circularity. Words can and should be tools for dialog and persuasion rather than simply clubs for bludgeoning, and it starts with a neutral vocabulary.

I touched on another example a moment ago: the Copernican and Ptolemaic models of what we now know of as the solar system. The most interesting part of the story is that at first the Ptolemaic model, although it had built complication upon complication to make sense of the apparent motion of the planets, actually did the math better than Copernicus’ conceptually superior system. The Ptolemaic model was complex and ingenious, the Copernican simple and profound. A priori, which would you have chosen?

At stake are questions of religious hypocrisy, religio-economic and -educational stereotypes, and even the very morality of religion, Christianity in particular. Science does a far better job at insulating itself from politics than religion does. Religion wallows in it. Nevertheless, even when someone is speaking from the hallowed halls of science, we still have to think carefully about what we read and watch for agendas just as closely. The “democratization” of news in the age of the Internet, and more recently “Web 2.0,” has increased our awareness of effect of mediation: the news is most certainly filtered, it’s only the degree that’s in question. With the plurality of sources available we can even filter it ourselves, pumping only the sources that agree with our point of view.

But in this case there is further complicating factor beyond the media. Those involved in higher levels of study in the sciences or the humanities know that there generally is a significant disparity between the state-of-the-art in the academy and the state of public understanding. This is a fitting subject for Concrete Academic, I should think. Scientific findings have to be interpreted, and when they are not contextualized responsibly—forgive me this cliché—a little knowledge can become a dangerous thing.

So much for the preface. The study, “Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States,” is only fourteen pages long, so it is worth reading. The authors begin by noting the influence of religiosity in the debate over sex education in school, and the importance of such education along with contraception, as opposed to teaching “abstinence only,” for lowering the birth rate. Given this, the relationship between religiosity and birth rate should be examined. After reviewing a few previous studies, which did not speak univocally, they explained their own research.

So far so good, but now a couple of things give me pause. First, they did not do their own field work but rather mined existing data. Sometimes this is necessary, and it’s certainly easier logistically, but it’s harder to get fix on what you’re looking for. The data they worked with came from two separate banks: birth rates from the Center for Disease Control, and a poll on religious feelings by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (plus another, negligible, to control for income). Both were done at the state level. Using one study they compiled a ‘religiosity score’ for each state, and then using the other they looked at birth rates for teens. The hard statistical work came in correlating the numbers. They no doubt did good work with what they had. But this is not a very close look at the issue. Certainly it is not close enough to account for a plurality of sociological factors, such as the propensity for the religious to marry younger than the irreligious.

The authors admirably warn against over-interpretation of their statistics at the end of the paper, so much so that one wonders about the usefulness of the work. I think it is suggestive, but far from impressive. The media’s coverage of it wasn’t either. It’s hard to fault the AP and others for reporting the ‘facts,’ which they did, but they lacked sufficiant context. The professionals reading the journal know how to weigh the article, and they speak the language well enough to understand what the authors can and can’t do with it; the general public does not. This requires us as readers to be aware of our own ignorance and to be modest in drawing conclusions.

The first thing to say about Ruse’s embarrassment is that when you’re used to navigating the labyrinths of philosophical argument nearly every statement that isn’t written in logical notation just isn’t quite good enough. Let’s remember that very intelligent people are being swayed by Dawkins’ apologetic. But it’s quite true that in the trade, or among those who have cut their teeth on philosophy of religion, Dawkins isn’t a worthy standard bearer to follow Bertrand Russell or Antony Flew. Keep in mind, too, that the spokesmen for “New Atheism” are not interested in debating within the University, but without, appealing to a broader public that have otherwise been ignored by the atheist intelligentsia. Their works are, naturally, on a much more accessable level. Four hundred pages of The God Delusion takes as long as reading one hundred pages of Flew.

Nonetheless, even accounting for a different audience, why are Dawkins’ arguments so shallow by comparison? One’s ability to speak intelligently, learnedly, about a subject is directly proportional to the amount of time spent thinking deeply about it. Dawkins is exceptionally good at talking about evolution—he’s spent a lifetime at the cutting edge of theoretical biology. But he has not thought much on religion, despite writing such a popular book about it. His only deliberation has been about how evil religion is and how unscientific. That’s simply not enough. Serious thinking involves working the problem from multiple sides, questioning your own work, and taking others’ arguments at their best. I have no doubt that when he published his many other critically-acclaimed books Professor Dawkins sent proofs to the smartest people he knew that disagreed with him. I don’t think he did so with his atheist manifesto. Even since its publication it seems he has not listened to the criticisms of Oxford colleagues Alister McGrath and John Lennox, nor strictures from within his own camp (see “godless ilk” above).

The upside for those on the side of the angels is that popular atheism has absorbed, as one would expect, only the easiest bits of Dawkins, and the “religion is stupid” argument need not bother them. The downside is that “religion is stupid” is so easy it’s ubiquitous, and this intellectual crutch for those who are atheist irrespective of the arguments can lock the theists into a similarly infantile response. The atheist position can seem so poor, relying on sheer loudness, that the believer comes to think that there is no argument.

The theist can make the same mistake that stumbles Dawkins: not taking the other side seriously. So committed is the believer to his worldview (no more or less than Dawkins) that no credit can be given the opposition without feeling one’s knees buckle, as if every argument not immediately dismissed brings one closer to the precipice of unbelief. This can make for an impoverished faith. There is no weakness in admitting a good argument, and doing so doesn’t mean accepting it as entirely convincing. Instead of stones for stumbling, they can be steps to a more introspective and ultimately more robust theism.

Dawkins’ problem is assuming that there can’t possibly be a reason for thinking any differently than he does. Easy mistake to make.

There is a strain of theology that is little more than humanism trying to be transcendent. There are no texts to be burdened with, no propositions to be understood, and few absolute moral imperatives. This makes it wonderfully ecumenical since any religion properly thinned out can affirm it. From the standpoint of this existentialist theology, all religions are talking about the same thing, just using different metaphors. Even God is thinned out, removed of personhood, and completely inoffensive. He is not a “he,” because that implies a personal, sexed, limited being, whereas God could be nothing less than Being itself, so ineffable that the best thing a theologian can do is sit in silence.

What’s particularly interesting about this book is that it looks like a bit of offense from a rather defensive religious position. The appeal of this kind of thinking is that it sidesteps the charging bull of criticism leveled at all religious traditions, but particularly Christianity, since the Enlightenment. All of the nice parts of a religion, such as “do unto others…”, are kept, and all of the less easily defensible parts are disavowed. The difficulty then becomes the fact that once you so rob religion of its content, there is not much to talk about: you can’t refute it, but you can hardly recommend it either. Armstrong is trying to do just that. She wants to say that there really is a role for religion in this scientific age, even though what she offers is so unspecified that it’s manifest equally in ancient cave paintings and opera.

In and of itself, not so bad. But it looks like she rewrites a bit of history in her image to get there. I’ll return to that if I get a closer look at the book.