The attack on the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has raised yet again the issue of freedom of speech, and what is needed to justify and protect it. People whose principal reaction to the attack on Westergaard is to blame those who supposedly provoked the attacker by offending against his religious beliefs have been rightly excoriated for this, partly at least on the grounds that no-one, including deeply committed religious believers, has the right not to be offended. And those of us who used to think, back in the late 20th century, that in the West at least the battle for free speech had been won, can now see with embarrassment how naïve we were, and how complacent about the extent and durability of that freedom.
It's no longer possible to indulge such complacency; at least, not about the freedom to speak our minds. It's obvious to everyone now that the battle has resumed, and that the old arguments will have to be dusted off and fought for all over again. But as we do this we'll have to look carefully at some of the assumptions which we may be inclined to make, sometimes without fully thinking them through. One which unnecessarily divides supporters of free speech derives from the fact that some of its current defences are driven by a really profound hostility to the religious beliefs which are often found at the heart of contemporary attacks on freedom. It's frequently (and correctly) pointed out that terrible things have been done in the name of religion, both in the past and right now in the present; and it's also often claimed that the religious beliefs in whose name these horrors were and are committed are just false - that they're a crude and primitive attempt to deal with the pains and uncertainties of the human condition, and that once we develop the personal courage and intellectual sophistication to dispense with such simple-minded props we'll have no further need of the God hypothesis. In the meantime, so this argument goes, the preservation of our freedom of speech, with its power to shock and offend religious believers, is desperately important in order to combat those false beliefs, and the oppression and cruelties which they've generated.
Attractive though this argument is to some non-believers, it's not a safe basis for a defence of freedom of speech. There are (at least) three things wrong with it. Suppose the claims about religion made in this argument are correct – that religion is false and crude and primitive and bound to produce cruelty and repression: still, if this is used as the basis for a defence of freedom of speech then paradoxically it will have, as I hope to show, an implication which is actually hostile to that freedom. Alternatively, suppose those claims about religion are false: then they certainly can't provide an adequate basis for the defence of freedom of speech, since falsehoods can't be an adequate basis for any position. Finally, there's an important argument in favour of freedom of speech which is especially amenable to religious thought – at least, to that influenced by the Abrahamic religions, and probably to other forms of religion as well. Religious believers have good reason to endorse freedom of speech, just as non-believers do, and our defence of free speech shouldn't suppose otherwise, or exclude the religious from supporting it.
I'll take these three problems in order. Firstly, let's run with the supposition that the claims about religion made in the argument above are correct – let's suppose that religious beliefs are indeed false, and likely to lead to oppressive cruelties. If we make this the basis of our right to speak freely about religion, to criticize its failings, then we are effectively saying that the purpose of free speech is to defend truth against falsity. This sounds attractive, but as a basis for the defence of freedom of speech it contains a deadly flaw. We often, perhaps generally, don't know for certain which views are the true ones and which are the false ones. Part of the point of having free speech is to help us find out which are which. If we base our commitment to free speech solely on the need to defend truth against falsity, then all those people who are certain that they and they alone have the truth will demand that others - the ones who have (supposedly) false beliefs - shouldn't have the right to speak their minds, because their beliefs are (supposedly) false. If we value free speech purely as a means to defend truth against falsehood then we're effectively saying that beliefs which we're sure are false don't need the protection of freedom of speech – we don't need to allow anyone to voice them. But this will have the result of restricting freedom to those who are sure they know the truth. Such people are very often mistaken, and furthermore, they generally include just those fanatical religious believers whom we most need to be able to criticize freely. This can't be the right way to defend freedom to criticize religion, or anything else.
Secondly, are the claims about religion made in the argument we're considering actually true? Is it really the case that religious beliefs are all crude and stupid and primitive falsehoods? No doubt in some cases they are, but to suppose that all religious beliefs are like the worst ones is to ignore the immense variety and complexity of views which people can hold about God and the supernatural. Philosophers of religion have developed defences of religious belief of an incomparable sophistication and intellectual elegance; and the assumption that all such religious thinkers, from Plato through Aquinas to (for example) Alvin Plantinga and Robert Adams today, are more stupid and unsophisticated than your average atheist, is a crude and primitive supposition which a moment's glance at the evidence would dismiss.
It might be said that most religious people don't hold their beliefs on any such complex intellectual basis, and that would certainly be true. Most religious beliefs are not fully supported, and they're often incoherent. But then, most atheists don't hold their views in a way which would withstand much intellectual pressure either, and by and large their views aren't fully supported, and are often incoherent. This isn't anything special about religious belief or unbelief; it's the human epistemic condition. Most of our views are pretty confused a great deal of the time, because life is short and the human capacity to think clearly is limited and fallible. It takes a lot of effort and constant attention to make our views properly answerable to evidence and reason, and most of the time we manage this very poorly, believers and unbelievers alike. Many religious beliefs are poorly grounded, but so are many irreligious ones; and if we want to dismiss religion, we ought to attack it in its intellectually strongest versions, not its weakest ones. To assimilate all religious beliefs to those of the most vicious and violent and irrational believers is roughly comparable to saying that because Stalin was a socialist, all socialism is Stalinist.
Is it true that religion has led to hideous cruelty and oppression? Yes, it certainly is – this is something which should never be overlooked, and certainly can't be excused just because the perpetrators acted in the name of their God. However it's also true that religious believers have produced a great deal of good in the world, and it's even more true that irreligious systems have also produced hideous cruelty and oppression. The terrible death toll in Stalin's Russia, or in the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, was not produced in the name of religion. The nightmare state of North Korea is right now, right this minute, engaged in murderous oppression of its people in the name of an avowedly atheist political ideology. Again, it seems likely that what we're looking at is the dark human potential for evil, which can be expressed throughout a very wide range of social and ideological arrangements. This is not to say that all political arrangements and ideologies are equally apt for evil - they certainly aren't, and we should seek out and defend those which are less prone to commit horrors. But religion is by no means the only culprit here, and that shouldn't be overlooked either. The North Korean regime defers to no one, and certainly not to any of the great religions, in the extent of its tyrannical suppression of freedom of speech.
Religion, to its shame, has often produced, and still produces, cruelty and oppression. But to say that it's the essence of religion to do so, because it sometimes does, is no better than saying that it's of the essence of a political concern for equality to produce cruelty and oppression, just because the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China did. Both claims are hopelessly oversimplified. A similarly unjustified simplification takes place when we suppose that the view of the world which religious believers have is the same as the view of the world which the irreligious have, except that for believers the world contains an extra Person, one of unlimited power, who'll conveniently make everything come out all right in the end. Belief in a divine presence, for those who have it, changes everything in the world, in particular the meaning of death, but also the meaning of all our relations with each other, and with that divine Person. For a religious believer, the whole universe is filled with meaning and significance of a kind which simply isn't available to unbelievers (though of course other kinds are). To reduce all this richness and complexity and depth of meaning to a childish belief in a Sky Fairy is just a travesty of religion, and no intellectually decent atheism should have anything to do with so distorted a picture of what it is they reject.
Now, a set of beliefs can be rich and complex and meaningful, and at the same time just be false. This is indeed what I myself believe about religion - the problem of evil (how can there be so much suffering in a world ruled by a benevolent and all-powerful God?) just seems to me to be an insuperable one, and so I can't accept the whole religious picture in which it arises. But the attempts which have been made by philosophers of religion to deal with this problem have been of exemplary moral and intellectual penetration and depth, and though I don't myself think they're successful, I don't have to pretend that they're the result of crass stupidity either. And let's not deceive ourselves – although unbelievers don't have to deal with the problem of evil, they do have a comparable issue to deal with, namely the problem of good: how can there be objective good in a purely material world? Here I think that the philosophers do manage to provide some adequate answers to this question, but they don't amount to knock-down arguments, and I can see why some people find them unsatisfactory. Neither religion nor atheism has a perfectly self-evident set of views which all intelligent people would at once accept if they would just pay attention to it. On the contrary, this part of our thinking about the world is just as complicated, and as open to doubt, as all the rest of it.
The falsehood of religion isn't a good basis for demanding the right to criticize it - if that's the only basis we've got, then the demand will simply be rejected by those who think that religion (or at least their version of it) is true. And nor is its supposed crudeness and primitiveness and outstanding cruelty a good basis either – these things aren't true of all forms of religion, and anyway they're also true of many irreligious beliefs. So on what basis should we demand freedom of speech with respect to religion? There are two main grounds for this: firstly, as we've seen, we need to be able to speak freely, not because we know the truth and hence must be able to denounce lies, but because we don't know the truth, and need to be able to criticize all comers in order to try and find it. Only if we can subject all opinions to our best attempts at criticism can we find out which ones survive this, and thereby give us reason to think they may be true.
But it's the second ground for freedom of speech which is the more relevant one to the issue with which we started, the attack on Kurt Westergaard and the current attempt to silence criticism of religion. Consider the argument for democracy which was once given by a noted Christian apologist, a man whose commitment to reason was as great as his commitment to religion, since for him reason came from God. He said that he was a democrat precisely because he was a Christian: his Christianity taught him that human beings were fallible and corruptible, and that none could be trusted to have the lives and well-being of others fully within their power. Only democracy, he thought, could protect people from oppressive tyranny – he was a democrat because he believed in sin. This is a line of thought which can be applied to freedom of speech too: we need to protect free speech because we can't trust other people to determine what we should and shouldn't be able to say and to hear. People who want to decide this for us, including our democratic rulers, including our priests and our press and our intellectuals, including believers in every religion and in none, are one and all weak and fallible and corruptible: they're too likely to abuse their power, for them to be allowed to decide what others should be permitted to say. (This is especially true of those who proclaim that the mere fact that they've been offended is sufficient reason to silence others – in such people the desire to control and oppress their fellows is already beginning to flower.) We need freedom of speech because none of us is morally good enough to choose for others what to say and think. And that's a basis for free speech which believers and unbelievers alike can accept. (Eve Garrard)