Robert Price taught me nothing new
Aug 10th, 2008 by Butter
Religion can fuck up your brain in subtle ways. Even when you grow up and choose reason over superstition, little islands of irrationality and special pleading can linger and come up at odd moments. As evidence, take Robert M. Price. I first learned of him when Freethought Fort Wayne announced they were bringing him to town for a special lecture at the public library. (PZ was nice enough to advertise the event to the world on Pharyngula, prompting an unexpected online coming-out of Hoosier Pharyngulites.) Price was giving the lecture in his role as a new entrant into the tradition of outspoken public skeptics and myth debunkers, joining authors and entertainers such as Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer, Penn and Teller, Phil Plait, PZ, Julia Sweeney, and, naturally, the Amazing Randi. I’ve seen the first two in that list at public lectures before (I saw Sagan when he was in Fort Wayne around ‘93, and Shermer a couple years ago at Fermilab), so I was eager to hear a new guy in the category, especially one whose works I wasn’t already familiar with.
Price, a theology and scriptural studies prof (yes, really) at a seminary in Florida, had apparently already made a name for himself with books critical of religion when he his latest book, released this April, took on a broader set of targets—those publishing phenomena that he rightly calls “pop mysticisms”: Deepak Chopra’s quantum woo, Madonna’s Kaballah, Joel Osteen’s Prosperity Gospel, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, and so on. Since I wasn’t familiar with the guy before the group invited him to town for the lecture, I’m assuming what we heard there is fairly representative of what’s in the book and his attitudes toward these doctrines in general.
His speech meandered through them haphazardly, giving no particular insight into any of them. He made no clear condemnations of those mysticisms or of their purveyors. As he rambled, the only hint of a framework connecting his thoughts was a lame, muddled moderation that could earn him a job editing South Park scripts for Trey Parker and Matt Stone, whose social-issue episodes usually descend into that same can’t-we-all-get-along milquetoastishness. Price seems to view most of the pop mysticisms as perversions both of the scientific fields that they purport to involve (quantum mechanics in the case of Chopra, or EM waves in the case of Byrne’s vibrational weirdness) and of any religious traditions they spring from. The latter he invariably portrays as estimable and culturally valuable in their true or pure forms, which of course he is privy to.
Unfortunately, he was infuriatingly evasive in identifying precisely what it is about those religious traditions that makes them so desirable. Early in his talk he accused unnamed outspoken atheists (usually code for “Dawkins and Hitchens” in this context) of not grasping what impulses drive people to embrace religion and spirituality. Now, any special pleading for religion on this front invites some immediate questions: besides identifying what precisely those impulses or needs are that drive people into the arms of religion, it would be nice to have a demonstration that religion is especially—or at all—able to satisfy them in a nonfraudulent way. Price never even started down this road. He had to be pressed on the point of what it is about religion that he thinks Dawkins and other vocal atheists miss; in response, he blathered about Dawkins and others asserting that the end of religion would usher in an era of peace and happiness on Earth (a strawman, though even if it weren’t it wouldn’t answer the question) and about them focusing on only the grotesque and barbaric parts of religion, and ignoring the good.
As you can imagine, it was teeth-pulling time, since what that “good” is is precisely what I was honestly curious about, and what half of his thesis was built on. I provisionally assumed, in order to even have a foundation on which to continue the discussion, that he was talking about such things as social cohesion, charity, civil society, art, literature, music, and wonder at the natural world, since those are the things that are commonly imputed to religion, and demolished the idea that vocal atheists denigrate or abjure them. Even Dawkins has said he loves Bach’s Mass in B-minor, and I added my own love of some sacred music, especially earlier Renaissance chorales. And beyond that, it’s wonder at the natural world that drives many of us to scientific careers in the first damn place—anyone with even a cursory familiarity with Sagan’s or Dawkins’ science-popularizing works knows that. Dawkins’ professorship is in the public understanding of science, for fuck’s sake. (A later questioner asserted that he does personally know vehement atheists who won’t touch any religiously inspired music with a ten-foot pole—an irrelevancy, of course, since whether you like churchy music is a matter of taste, and presumably his angry friends haven’t foresworn music and art entirely, which still belies religion’s claim to be a necessary stepping-stone to those things.)
Price’s reply to this didn’t demonstrate an understanding of what had just been said to him, and he reiterated how great much of the art and drama that religion has inspired has been. Oddly, he agreed that freethought organizations (like the one that was standing in front of) can serve to fulfill some of those social functions, but he seemed willfully blind to the contradiction between that demonstrated fact and the unspecified unique virtues of religion and spirituality that he, like a child, clung to. When asked by a later questioner why, if he denied belief in the core tenets of Christianity and felt secular civil society could at least in part replace it, he continued to get up every day and go to his damn theology-professor job (I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it), he brazenly admitted “biographical inertia”—i.e., I paid for a degree in this crap, and I’m gonna keep milking it as long as people keep buying it. It was a sorry end to a sorry evening.
So there it is: another demonstration of the self-defensive capacity of the religion meme once it gets good and lodged in the brain. It’ll deny every substantive thing about itself in an effort to survive, and ultimately it’ll whine and plead pitifully when faced with extraction. It’s a sad thing to see in a grown man.
Your commentary is WIN. An appropriate and sharp critique that leaves little to quarrel with and much to question of this speaker. You should send it to him and see if he dodges as much in written correspondence.
Srsly, this was PZ-level evisceration.
That early conditioning lasts a lifetime for a lot of people. They find a way to rationalize it one way or another.
Best thing I read on the proreligion or pro spirituality side in a long time is Original Faith by Paul Martin. I’m an atheist but a friend talked me into reading it. I’d always thought of faith and belief as the same but this book doesn’t see it that way. He’s a grad of the University of Chicago divinity school but his position is rational instead of rationalistic.
I’m sure he’s fantastic at playing word games, but the book’s description on Amazon doesn’t lead me to expect much in the way of logical clarity. “In evocative and moving language, the book references direct experience, not doctrine.” So the author has discovered that people have emotions and gut feelings, and can be encouraged to act on them. Well, yeah. “Original Faith’s perspective is that we are not here to search for meaning, but to help create it,” it says. Well, fuckin’ duh. That’s what atheists and humanists have been trying to say!
I’d be interested to know what properties of it make it the “best” defense of spirituality you’ve read. Does it honestly present a clear and distinct set of premises, and then defend them nonfallaciously with evidence? Does he clearly define this spiritual impetus he feels, and does he demonstrate that without it he’d abstain from being the good, charitable person that he presumably is? Or is he just talented at tugging on your heartstrings with anecdotes and flowery language? If it’s the latter, then it isn’t actually a defense of spirituality at all: it’s emotion-based special pleading, and if that’s the best your friend can come up with, your friend’s defense of his or her faith is pathetic.
Further, what’s the difference between being “rational” and being “rationalistic”? Is the former meant to refer to the thing itself, and the latter to the advocating of it? If so, the position you seem to be agreeing with is that it’s okay to use reason in your day-to-day life, and to apply it in actually interacting with the world and in building ideological and political opinions, but we dursen’t—we dursen’t!—take our own side in this argument and say that it’s better than any other harebrained way of living your life. Which is oddly hypocritical, given that Martin is apparently showing no such restraint in advancing his fantasy-based side. Is it really your position that it’s good to be “spiritualistic”—to “believe in belief”, to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase—regardless of whether being “spiritual” has a basis in reality, yet being “rationalistic” is some kind of breach of protocol, even though you’re “rational” in how you go about your day? Cause if so, then damn, you might want to rethink the shenanigans you’re willing to let the other side get away with.