The Vatican is reaching out to atheists. They are creating a foundation called “The Courtyard of Gentiles” to encourage discussion between Catholics and the godly — I can hardly wait. Except, alas, it turns out their invitations are only going to a select few.

But in an interview with the National Catholic Register, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, made it clear he would not be willing to give a platform to certain prominent atheists.

The foundation, he said, would only be interested in “noble atheism or agnosticism, not the polemical kind – so not those atheists such as [Piergiorgio] Odifreddi in Italy, [Michel] Onfray in France, [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins”.

Such atheists, he added, only view the truth with “irony and sarcasm” and tend to “read religious texts like fundamentalists”.

There has got to be a cabal of atheists working within the church — I can’t imagine them being this incompetent by accident. So apparently they only want faitheists in their little clubhouse, because as we all know, the primary weapon of the atheists is irony and sarcasm…the two weapons of the atheists are irony, sarcasm, and ridicule…wait. Man, we are so danged vicious. We actually mock Catholics, so we’re just too mean to come to their party.

Except me, right? They didn’t mention that little guy in Minnesota as being on their blacklist, so there’s still hope…

What is it with some English professors and their contempt for science? Some of the noisiest, most obnoxious, most self-indulgently prolix and goofy critics of the New Atheism are full-of-themselves pomposities like Eagleton and Fish, and now we can apparently add another, Marilynne Robinson. She’s a novelist — I have not read any of her books, but they have received quite a bit of critical acclaim — and she recently gave a series of lectures, now published as a book, Absence of Mind, in which she is going to give the godless a piece of her mind. Unfortunately for her, it seems to be a small sliver, very spongy and soft, and it bounces off like a bullet from a nerf gun. This review starts off promisingly:

“Absence of Mind” derives from the Dwight Harrington Terry lectures on “religion, in the light of science and philosophy.” [uh-oh, bad sign already: Eagleton’s awful book was also a product of the Terry lectures] As Robinson tells us in her introduction, her book aims to “examine one side in the venerable controversy called the conflict between science and religion.” In particular, she wants to question the kind of authority claimed by certain modern scientists and to raise questions about the quality of their thinking. In her first chapter she focuses on what one might loosely call the sociobiologists, thinkers like E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who assert that our lives are ordered by overt or unconscious self-interest, that our minds are unreliable and constantly trick us, and that traditional religious belief is a primordial hold-over, certainly childish, sometimes deluded and generally embarrassing.

Yes, actually, I think she’s got it right. At least that’s how I feel about the matter. Charges accepted, officer. Now all she has to do is show that she can criticize the anti-religionists without demonstrating that her position actually is rather embarrassing.

Robinson argues strenuously that such thinkers grossly simplify religious thought and testimony — and they ooze condescension. “The characterization of religion by those who dismiss it tends to reduce it to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death, and this makes its persistence very annoying to them.” She notes that these same crusading debunkers consistently portray those who dare to disagree with them as intellectually dishonest, as naifs who refuse to face facts.

Ooooh, I don’t think she like us. But OK, show us that she can face the facts. Show us that religion is something more than the delusion we say it is.

In particular, Robinson says, these “parascientists” deliberately slight “the wealth of insight into human nature that might come from attending to the record humankind has left.” At the very least, “an honest inquirer” into the nature of religion “might spend an afternoon listening to Bach or Palestrina, reading Sophocles or the Book of Job.” We are not, she maintains, simply the instrument of selfish genes. Indeed, she suspects that the “modern malaise,” our sense of emptiness and alienation, can be attributed not to the “death of God” but rather to the widely promulgated, and reductionist, view of the self as wholly biological.

Bad start. Criticizing legitimate scientists by coining a new label for them, parascientist, while incapable of demonstrating that she has any grasp of science herself is a very bad idea. See this article on scientific impotence: what she’s doing is trying to pretend that the scientists who disagree with her aren’t doing science. But then, she’s no scientist herself, so if thinking scientifically is a virtue and unscientific ideas are grounds for insulting people, where does that leave her?

Scientists know about and appreciate art. Seriously, does she think we’ve never listened to Bach, and all we have to do is hear the Magnificat and presto, we’ll believe in God? We admire and respect the accomplishments of our fellow human beings — people of flesh and bone and nerve and sinew — and it is no surprise that they can create beauty. This is no argument against us.

If we are not the product of our genes (and many other natural and material influences, as any biologist will tell you), then what else? Does Dr Robinson have any component to add, other than supernatural, magical stuff for which she has no evidence?

And what modern malaise? I don’t feel empty and alienated, do you? Almost all the atheists I know seem to be enthusiastic and cheerful, with a real sense of optimism about the future. If it’s just the miserable god-botherers who don’t understand science who are moping along under the cloud of this imaginary malaise, I don’t think you can logically blame their psychological problems on being depressed about the conclusions of biology.

Sure, God is dead. But we aren’t at all sad about it — we’re dancing on his grave. Viewing the self as biological is a wonderfully liberating way to see the world, too, since it means we don’t have to rely on the whims of uncommunicative ghosts to find fulfillment in life.

As it is, she’s just a blustering babbler with a lot of resentment towards those darned scientists who keep on shaking up her comfortable illusions about her soul. She takes another step, though, and this is where she does embarrass herself — she uses her ignorance about a significant medical case in the history of science to bash away at “parascientists” some more, and she gets it all wrong.

Robinson assails Wilson and company most powerfully by accusing them of faulty, narrow-minded thinking. Take their frequent use of the story of Phineas Gage, the railway worker famous for surviving an accident in which a large iron rod was driven through his skull. Afterwards, according to contemporary accounts, his behavior changed dramatically and he was “fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane.” For the parascientists, this proves that personality and character “are localized in a specific region of the brain,” a fact, adds Robinson, “that, by their lights, somehow compromises the idea of individual character and undermines the notion that our amiable traits are intrinsic to our nature.”

But Robinson asks us to actually think about Phineas Gage. How would you feel and react if you had had your upper jaw shattered, lost an eye and suffered severe disfigurement? Gage “was twenty-five at the time of the accident. Did he have dependents? Did he have hopes? These questions seem to me of more than novelistic interest in understanding the rage and confusion that emerged in him as he recovered.” In the parascientific writings about Gage, she asserts, “there is no sense at all that he was a human being who thought and felt, a man with a singular and terrible fate.” In essence, these scholars “participate in the absence of compassionate imagination, of benevolence, that they posit for their kind.”

Why, yes, Phineas Gage did have a very serious accident that almost killed him, and seriously damaged his brain, resulting in changes in personality and behavior. That’s a well-documented fact. But Robinson’s claims about the interpretations of this event are bizarre and wrong.

No one claims that “personality and character ‘are localized in a specific region of the brain'”. In the 19th century, phrenologists were all over the Gage story, but their claims are no longer accepted. Personality and character are diffuse in the brain, with different regions contributing different, interacting influences. The forebrain, for example, has (in very broad terms) a restraining effect on impulses — it’s a region involved in thinking ahead and recognizing possible consequences, and damage to this area, as in the case of Gage, can lead to the kinds of behavior he exhibited.

I don’t even know what she means by “compromises the idea of individual character”. Does she think scientists reject the idea that individuals have different personalities? Our minds are complicated ensembles of modules that generate our thoughts and behaviors; we’re all different.

As for “undermines the notion that our amiable traits are intrinsic to our nature”…no, that makes no sense. Actually listen to what those New Atheist scientists are saying, and you discover that they’re actually arguing that our ‘amiable traits’, like empathy, cooperation, morality, actually do have a biological foundation, as do some of our more hostile traits, like competition and aggression. She’s arguing that we hold a view that is the exact opposite of the one we actually endorse!

The rest of her account is equally fantastic. She seems to be implying that maybe there wasn’t a discrete change to the functioning of his brain, but that he was just rightfully upset about a devastating accident. This is absurd. The doctor who treated him happily reported that his recovery went well and that he seemed to have full return of his mental faculties — it was Gage’s friends and family who reported that his personality had changed to the point of unrecognizability. This is the report Dr Harlow published on the changes:

His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinent, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.”

In the “parascientific” writings about Gage, by which Robinson actually means the genuinely scientific writings, there certainly is a focus on fact and observation. Read Harlow’s account of the accident, for instance: what you will see is a dispassionate account by a doctor who was doing everything in his power to keep a seriously injured man alive. I’m not sure what Robinson expected in these writings; that they do not indulge in hysterics, that Harlow did not treat the patient with prayer or literary readings from the Book of Job, may disappoint her, but do not indicate that the doctor had a lack of feeling for Gage as a human being. That Harlow followed the case of his patient for at least twenty years suggests that perhaps there was more to it than Robinson can believe.

You can also read an account of the Gage accident here on Scienceblogs, and I can tell you that it is also a common entry in introductory biology textbooks — but the interest is precisely because this was a human being with hopes and fears and a unique personality who was tragically changed by a sudden accident. To claim, as Robinson does, that scientists have no sense of Gage as a person, that they lack a “compassionate imagination” is simply rank defamation and dehumanization. It is the vile bigotry of a provincial mind that substitutes prejudice and stereotype for actual knowledge of what scientists think.

It was a good review of her book, though. It convinced me that I needn’t bother reading anything she’s written.

There are no atheists allowed in Catholic schools.

A teacher at a Catholic HS in Iowa was fired because she answered a poll about personal beliefs in a way her employer didn’t like. Apparently, Abby Nurre was surfing around Facebook last summer (before she started her job at the Catholic school) and decided to answer a poll question she found. The poll asked whether she believed in God, angels or miracles – she answered “no”.

Now she’s out of a job because, as the school board put it, she violated “a policy that prohibits employees from advocating principles contrary to the dogmatic and moral teaching of the church.”

That’s a rather low threshold they’ve got — clicking on a poll is now “advocating”? I wonder if pharyngulating is a venial or a mortal sin…

A Muslim cleric thought he’d discovered a loophole in Islamic religious law that would allow the restrictions on Muslim women in the workplace to be loosened.

He said that if a woman fed a male colleague “directly from her breast” at least five times they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work.

“Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” he ruled.

“A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breastfed.”

Just when you think the Abrahamic attitude towards women couldn’t get weirder or more demeaning…

To their credit, nobody seems to have taken this fatwa at all seriously, and it has been decreed a bad interpretation of Islamic law. Now they just have to take the next step:

Egypt’s minister of religious affairs, Mahmoud Zaqzouq, has called for future fatwas to “be compatible with logic and human nature”.

I guess that’s an end to all fatwas, then.

A couple of years ago, I sat down one morning, bemused by yet another bit of empty apologetics from god’s sycophants, and banged out a short bit of amusement called The Courtier’s Reply. It got picked up everywhere, to my surprise. I mean, seriously, I have to confess that I whipped that out in 20 minutes, no edits or rewrites, just shazam, it’s done. I’m really peeved at myself for anguishing over this book I’m working on, because apparently, all I’ve got to do is get a big glass of root beer, pop some bubblegum in my mouth, put something bubbly and light on the stereo, and once I enter a zen trance, the book will be done tomorrow. I’m going to try that right after this.^*

Another apologist is quoting it now. One of the most amusing consequences of its popularity is that so many theists get it completely wrong: they see the Courtier’s Reply as an attempt to excuse atheists from bothering with theology at all, when it’s quite the opposite: it’s a rebuke to theologians, pointing out that going on at length about rarefied epiphenomena and delicate points of dogma is a waste of time when you haven’t even established the central point of the matter, a reasonable justification for believing in a god or gods, period. I’ll give credit to Eric Reitan for seeing that point, dimly, although he ultimately decides that it’s all about avoiding intellectual responsibility.

It is, of course, but he’s picked the wrong target. It’s not the atheists who are shirking that responsibility, it’s the blind theologians who spin elaborate fables out of air.

What Reitan does in his essay is an interesting sidestep. He acknowledges that there are two kinds of theologies — “apologetic theology”, which attempts to address the reality of god’s existence, and the misleadingly named “substantive theology”, which he claims is about the operational consequences once we’ve assumed god’s existence — and he simply waves away apologetic theology for now. He still claims there’s good reason to believe, but it’s not the topic here — it’s exclusively about whether we can dismiss “substantive theology”, which is what the Courtier’s Reply argues.

His mission, then, should be to justify that word “substantive” and show us exactly how this kind of theology can be useful and worth pursuing, even if the existence of a deity is unverifiable and unevidenced. He fails. He falls into the same waffly, weebly, worthless noise that all the modern excuse-makers do, whether it’s Karen Armstrong or the Dalai Lama.

But belief in God isn’t primarily a belief about the contents of the empirical world. It is, rather, a certain holistic interpretation of our experience, one that offers an account of the meaning and significance of the empirical world and the lives we lead within it. To believe in God is to understand the world of ordinary experience in terms of an interpretive worldview that posits the existence of “something more.”

Let me clarify that for you, Dr Reitan. You are saying that religion is a nice fairy tale that makes you feel good.

That’s not enough for me. I stand with millions of unbelievers everywhere who demand something a little more, who expect that the ideas that we will use to guide our lives will also be true. Theologians seem to have decided that truth is optional and irrelevant.

That abandonment of the truth is the heart of his argument, and he goes on at some length to justify parity between supernatural and natural worldviews. He tries to claim that theology is just like naturalism, equally unjustifiable and ultimately arbitrary, and simply a matter of convenience and compatibility with our personal philosophies. We have to “try on” different philosophies about the universe in order to determine which one fits, as if the universe is a rack of clothes with different sizes for different folks, and we have to each pick and choose to determine which universe is best for us.

How can we even begin to answer such a question without seriously “trying on” the alternatives? In its broadest terms, theology is the intellectual project of developing and exploring a range of alternative worldviews that all have something in common–namely, they include belief in a transcendent reality that is in some way both fundamental and good. As such, theology falls within a much broader intellectual project, one that develops and explores not only theistic worldviews, but other worldviews as well, such as the naturalistic one endorsed by Dawkins, Myers, and Sanderson.

Of course, an interpretive worldview has to fit with our experience, including what science teaches us about the world. And not every theistic worldview meets this criterion (Young Earth Creationism comes to mind). But while a specific formulation of theism might have to give way before scientific evidence in just the way that a specific version of Darwinian theory might need to give way to a more nuanced and comprehensive version, the overall theological project–to shape a theistic worldview consistent with experience–remains viable regardless of what science teaches us. What this means is that in a broad sense a theistic worldview is empirically unfalsifiable…just like a naturalistic one.

Stark raving naked bullshit. This is what you get when you try to pretend that reality is a “worldview”.

The views of theologians are obviously unfalsifiable — they’ve been tedious exercises in futility for millennia, always going in circles and spitting out ever more bizarre and arcane dogmas that lead to a constant splintering of interpretations. The big difference between science and religion here is that science is a tool focused on assessing the validity of its propositions. Religion has absolutely no way to test any of its ideas, and its proponents seem to like it that way — it gives them free rein to promote imagination over evidence and revelation over experiment.

So, tell me, Dr Reitan: are theologians working on a grand project to reconcile Christianity and Islam? Even Protestantism vs. Catholicism? Is that too much, should we narrow our goals to resolving smaller sectarian differences, like the Wisconsin vs. Missouri synods of the Lutheran church? Which particular sect has the worldview most consistent with experience?

Reitan’s “substantive theology” seems to be particularly unsubstantive — it relies entirely on avoiding any kind of grounding in reality in order to excuse this idea that an objective, unyielding external reality is irrelevant.

And so we must struggle to assess the relative merits of the alternatives available to us–something that we simply cannot responsibly do by ignoring those thinkers who, as part of a rich traditional of rigorous inquiry, attempt to construct plausible theistic world views and uncover the explanatory power of theism in relation to the full breadth of our human experience.

And there’s the problem: constructing “plausible theistic world views”. How does one determine that a particular theistic world view is plausible? Are virgin births and resurrecting rabbis plausible, while dwarfs forging magic rings or galactic overlords throwing criminals into volcanoes are implausible? They only seem plausible if you uncritically except the “apologetic theology” of a Jehovah or Niflheim or Xenu, and Reitan is right back to his original attempt to separate these into two different domains of theology. One cannot exist without the other.

Furthermore, he misses the other failure of theology. Scientists construct “plausible world views” all the time: we call them hypotheses. The difference is that we then commit ourselves to trying to disprove our hypotheses, and we revise them as we test them. Reitan wrote his little essay in reply to a piece by Terry Sanderson, and unsurprisingly completely neglects this telling and relevant point:

I look at it this way. If science disappeared from human memory, we would soon be living in caves again. If theology disappeared from human memory, no one would notice. Theology is a completely and utterly useless pursuit. It is self-indulgence of the first order. It grieves me that public money is spent on theological colleges while real education struggles to gain the funds it needs to maintain itself.

Science provides tangible evidence of its accuracy and importance. Religion makes excuses for its absence of the same. There is no “rich tradition of rigorous inquiry” in religion, as we can see from its lack of progress, and the apologists are deluding themselves when they claim there is.

You want intellectual irresponsibility? Turn to the fools who build elaborate claims of fashionable nonsense. Reitan does understand what I was saying with the Courtier’s Reply:

Myers’ satire has as its backdrop a story in which a pair of con men have pretended to make a new set of clothes for the emperor but present him instead with nothing but thin air, along with a cockamamie story to the effect that those who are stupid or unfit for their positions can’t see these fine clothes at all.

Exactly. When the worldview fits, wear it, Eric Reitan.

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^*Look for the critics to quote that comment once the book is out, too.