The good, the bad and the combination

Here I am, lifelong atheist, going out to bat for religion once again - actually, not for religion, since I do not think there are valid grounds for religious belief, but against unbalanced forms of rejection of all that religion stands for and some of the values it may embody for its adherents. On this occasion I'm batting against my friend Ophelia, who's pretty handy with the argumentative resources of the fast-medium bowler, but I will not flinch all the same.

Ophelia takes as her starting point the question from Keith Ward that I posted here the other day - as to why Richard Dawkins sees only 'the bad in religion' - and she goes on to explain why she for her part 'concentrate[s] on the bad rather than offering a more mixed or "balanced" view'. Ophelia gives two kinds of reason: a contextual reason and a more substantive one. The first is this:

[T]here are thousands of voices yapping about 'the good' in religion right now and not all that many insisting on the other thing, so it seems not unreasonable for opponents to go ahead and be opponents, rather than scrupulously giving the religious side its putative due (especially since the religious side so often gives remarkably inaccurate and badtempered accounts of atheism and atheists).

I'll discount the parenthetical aside: that there are religious believers who give distorted and impoverishing accounts of what it means to be an atheist - and there are - is a reason for responding to them in a robust way when they do that; it isn't a good reason for not being scrupulous ourselves, or for not giving credit if that is indeed due. Ophelia's main argument here, however, is that religion is getting too much of a good press already, there isn't enough criticism of it, and so opponents should just oppose. Ophelia and I are differently situated geographically, but I don't find this account of the current intellectual climate at all persuasive. There is plenty of criticism of the various kinds of madness about right now that are due to religious belief: whether this be Christian fundamentalism in parts of the US, the 'God-given' rights to the whole land of Israel claimed by some ultra-religious Jews, or the beliefs of radical Islamists and what they have shown themselves ready to do for those beliefs. What criticisms you hear will differ depending on where you are and on the company you keep; and it has been noticeable that some secular liberals are more free with their criticisms of Christianity and Judaism when they find the effects of these politically disagreeable, than they are in their criticisms of Islam in the same circumstances. Nonetheless, 'not all that many insisting on the other thing' seems to me to be a considerable understatement, at least within the Western democracies. In any event, I see no reason why opposition to religion, forthright, outspoken opposition to it, cannot, as with anything else, recognize the virtues in what it opposes if there are any.

This brings me to Ophelia's more substantive argument which is that there aren't any - when all is said and done. She writes:

The reason I... am not much inclined to talk about 'the good in religion' is because it comes at a price, and the price is too high. The good is inseparable from that price, you can't get the good without the price, so if you think the good is not worth the price - then for you it is not a good. It can't be a good because it's so tangled up with the price - with the bad.

It's not as if you can make two lists, good, bad, and judge each in isolation. Because the basic problem with religion, the thing that makes people like me adopt a fighting stance, is that it's not true. That's not just some minor or detachable problem that one can compartmentalize or bracket - it's right smack in the middle.

It's a corruption, a surrender, an abdication, and we don't make it because - we don't want to endorse a lie. That's why.

In other words, yes, we can see that religion has some useful and beneficial aspects sometimes - consolation, solidarity, inspiration, motivation - but they depend on a supernatural belief system, on a systematic illusion, and we don't consider and don't want to consider that a good thing.

Three things are happening here. (1) Ophelia allows, provisionally, that there are some beneficial aspects of religion. (2) But this is only provisionally; in the end, for her, they don't count as what they appear to be, because they are inseparable from, tangled up with, the bad in religion - as she says later, 'It's all one fabric'. (3) What the apparently beneficial aspects are tangled up with is very bad indeed: religion isn't true, it's an illusion; it involves 'a corruption, a surrender, an abdication'.

But Ophelia's basic strategy of argument is flawed. In a quasi-Hegelian move, she disallows application of the usual resources of analysis - of analytical discrimination - where religion is concerned. It's all just a unity, and because something very bad is at the heart of this unity, everything else in it must be bad too, as if poisoned, transmuted, by the badness.

Joe is a good friend: generous, loyal, funny, a great conversationalist. But he has a ferocious temper, is dishonest in business and in his sexual relationships, is vain and neglectful of his old mother. Must we say that he is all bad, then, because he has these bad qualities, and his other, better qualities, are all mixed in with the worse ones as part of the single personality? In fact, we don't do that - even when the bad qualities significantly outweigh the good ones. There are radicals of one kind and another who can see some of the insights in conservative thought, anti-socialist liberals and/or Weberians who recognize some theoretical strengths within Marxism, Marxists who identify moral and political resources as well as grave deficiencies in classical liberalism.

All this is just par for the course. But by her quasi-Hegelian, anti-analytical move, Ophelia would forbid us to approach religious belief in the same way. The move is artificial and arbitrary. You can't show that religion is all bad simply by focusing on what is bad about it.

Here is a simple, and for me decisive, example. In Warsaw in 1943, a Polish Catholic risks her life to save an endangered Jew. She does so because she has been taught from childhood that all people are the children of God and it is a sin to take innocent life. How, in the face of that - which has happened plenty, and in many other historical variants as well - can one say there has been no good in religion, or that this good is merely apparent because of what it is mixed together with? I could give more than this, but it is enough. Just two things: that religious believers have often been motivated by their beliefs to act in beneficent, caring, selfless, heroic ways; and that there are universalist variants of religious belief which, in historical context, have marked a significant progress for humankind - that is quite enough empirically, against the notion that the bad in religion undoes the good.

Someone in Ophelia's comments box - Kate - writes in this regard:

[T]he 'good' usually ascribed to religion is readily available outside of religion, while the 'bad' of religion is something that can only take place when large numbers of people are convinced that abandoning reason and abdicating personal responsibility is a virtue.

But this obviously fails. Indeed, religious belief is not a necessary condition of any practical good; it is also not a sufficient condition. But the same can be said of any competing secular outlook. It is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of such goods. And as for bads, 'only take place when large numbers of people are convinced that abandoning reason etc'... Well, other outlooks than religion have proved capable of leading large numbers of people to behave in irrational ways.

None of the above means that I think that religious belief is true. I don't. None of the above means that I am unaware of the immense harm that religion has done, and continues to do, in the world. It is, though, a matter of balance.