Gender ideology IS a religious belief. Queer Theory is an aggressively proselytizing religion with totalitarian ambitions. Among other things, it denies the existence of any objective reality, though it tends to focus on denying the existence of biological sex.
To better understand why human rationality is NOT sufficient to allow all of us to see through The God Delusion deeply enough to be able to maintain one's sense of meaning without the false comfort of religion, please try Ralph Lewis MD's lovely book Finding Purpose in a Godless Universe. Dr. Lewis is a GP and Psychiatrist and he is very clear on the central position in their emotional self-experience that the god-projection holds for a great many people.
His practical humility shows through in the statement:
"Although I need to help people correct their distortions of reality, I have to be cautious about just how much reality I impart to my more vulnerable patients. For many, I need to reinforce their distorted beiefs (including religious beliefs if these are important to them) in the service of helping them to be functional, which is ultimately a more important goal of my work than instilling realism".
As much as I esteem and value Richard and his tireless and valiant work in explaining and attempting to enchant the scientific (in Lewis' terms "realisic") ways of viewing the world, the proportion of humans able to rest comfortably in that worldview is regretably small.
As neurological and psychological research has shown (viz Damassio and Schore as examples), rationality arises from affective processes. Without a sound affective foundation of selfhood, we humans grasp at wishful thinking that, for all their unreality and perils, allow us to function in our social worlds.
Scientific dogmatism is basically organized religion - this is the major irony here. Neuroscience has no idea how consciousness is formed, physics has no idea how a quantum universe functions.
String theory posits the existence of multiple dimensions, which lines up "coincidentally" with spiritual texts describing the structure of reality dating back thousands of years.
I used to be a huge skeptic and believer in rigid scientific thinking limited to the material universe until I had some personal experiences that are IMPOSSIBLE to ignore, including an encounter with a UAP entity.
An ant on the ground doesn't have evidence that an airplane exists - yet he feels the vibrations as it takes off, and feels the shadow fall over him as it comes from above. This is how infantile humankind's understanding of the universe is. Arrogance, dogmatism - basically all the tenants of "organized religion" permeate the ivory tower. Organized religion is also a joke.
But spirituality and metaphysics... that's another ballpark separate to both.
I can't blame everyone, though... It's easier to believe we know everything, than admit we know nothing at all 😉
Joseph, it seems to me that you have it backwards. Science is the only major collection of human disciplines ("magisteria" in SJ Gould's usage) that presumes it is WRONG. Now, being a human institution/discipline it is also subject to the egoism of individual humans who believe they are right and the mass of practitioners can take a long-ish time to correct a strongly and authoritatively held but wrong idea. As examples, plate tectonics, the more recent expansion of evolutionary thinking from Dawkins' "selfish gene", the refinement of Newtonian & Maxwellian mechanics by Einsteinian mechanics and then by quantum mechanics.
Science is the only set of disciplines which embodies a (humane) methodology for overturning ideas which may be held by the wise old heads but have been demonstrated to be inadequate in some ways. The humanities and those disciplines in which it's less easy to formulate empirically testable ideas are themselves little better than religions in basing what is currently held to be true on authority and precedent.
There is no reason that preferring science needs to take the form of "believing in" rigid scientism. Rigidity of thought is a human characteristic, and particularly a characteristic of human institutions, which is challenged by societies and disciplines to the extent that they are free.
Again, as I implied to Annie300, we certainly do not know nothing at all or we could not be using laptops, phones, networks, storage media to be having this conversation. What we know is undoubtedly tiny compared to what we don't know, but it's a long, long way from nothing.
Alright... All excellent points. I concur. But science does need to bridge it's understanding of the universe with metaphysical principles now that we have a basic understanding of the quantum world. The evidence is becoming impossible to ignore.
Quantum mechanics, consciousness, string theory - these all fall outside our understanding of a simplistic material world only governed by physical laws.
The principles that govern the universe supersede the confines of a limited materialistic world view.
Perhaps, but what are the metaphysical principles that you are referring to? It's quite brave to assert that you know enough about the principles that govern the universe to say what the exceed.
I'm asking for your descriptions of them or at least how you know they exceed your understanding of a materialist worldview.
I don't know enough about the subject to have a view on 'God-shaped-holes' but I found this piece disappointingly sophistical and not at all enlightening on the question. The conclusion in particular:
"How patronizing, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole."
Since when did characterizing a claim as 'patronising' or 'insulting' tell us anything about whether it's true? Depressing that someone as rational as Dawkins appears to have forgotten that 'facts don't care about your feelings' as the kids say. Also notice the sleight of hand involved in treating a claim about a particular group of individual human beings to a claim about 'humanity'.
I'm a big fan of Dawkins' work on evolution but haven't read any of his work on God/Religion so don't know if he addresses the claim more robustly there. If so it would have been nice to have a hint of how he has formed this view, rather than just 'I find this offensive'
This is very dangerous position to take. I am a physician and I also occasionally practice what Dr. Lewis does. I call myself hypocrite for doing so. But, yes, I did it for compassion, albeit hypocritical. The danger is, who gets to decide to delude the sick patients for compassion reasons? Only physicians? Or should we extend them to include the family members? I wish my patients had never been exposed to religions at all. That would have spared me from being a hypocrite.
I have a theory, about which I'm modestly confident, explaining the Great Christian Revival. People seem to be responding to several different aspects of the left's lunacy. Some of them, as you mentioned, are turning back from the mistake of taking up gender ideology. Many others see Christianity as a bulwark against the advancement of Islamism into Western society. Polite secular society seems ill-equipped to battle extreme religious ideologies. It's not opposite enough in the ways that matter. People want reasons for opposing a particular religious faith that don't feel arbitrary and prejudicial. Christians have a great reason (really, just a reason that feels like it makes sense), which is that Islam is not Christianity. Though the two are similarly monotheistic and some people see them as worshipping the same god, they are incompatible. One can oppose Islam without fear of being branded an Islamophobe if she is Christian. In my view, this explains Ayaan Hirsi-Ali's "conversion" to cultural Christianity.
I don't really think the left is crazy. They've just been convinced that anyone in a minority position (race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc.) is oppressed, and that oppressed people should never be criticized. I say this as someone formerly left-leaning who never quite felt comfortable with those ideas, but couldn't understand why for many years. I was made to feel like a bigot of some sort for believing it should be OK to criticize bad ideas. That is crazy-making self-flagellation.
The only Gød-shaped hole that there is is ignorance. That ignorance-shaped hole can be filled with knowledge. Knowledge is based upon reality, not superstition and faith.
This epistemology (way of knowing) has been found effective: reason/empiricism.
And these supposed "ways of knowing" have been found to be severely, if not fatally, flawed: Revelation, tradition, custom, authority, faith, dogma, sacred text, charisma, augury, prophesy, intuition, clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, the appeal of subjective certainty, and relativism.
While I agree that there is no god-shaped hole, there is a human rights-shaped hole that science cannot fill. Those rights might feel self evident, but they're more accurately described as conjecture on how best to organize society. It can be tempting for these people to alter the list of human rights so that favoured groups get preferential treatment. Unequal treatment doesn't work in the long run, but long-term thinking has never been the revolutionary's strong point.
Is there another way to look at this? If self and sentience are useful illusions and even the brain’s projection of the body in all its layers and complexities is a best guess and summary, one might realise that selfhood is deeply deeply cultural and fundamentally relational.
This way of looking at really fundamental stabilities in the zone of identity includes the sense of a God, it’s so hard to resist when there is a part of self that notices self in an affective reflective loop. The idea of essences is so alluring and natural while all the time an illusion. One finally has to wonder why these illusions are helpful and think about how we make our culture around it all - it’s such an important and sensitive topic this idea of the essence of me (because it is not real, but it feels so important).
This is very timely. Recently I was recalling an argument some decades ago with my spouse regarding going to mass. I was pushing for continuing on with our churchgoing while he was opposed. Eventually, we did stop going. Some years later, in writing about it, I did describe it as a kind of hole. In retrospect, it did feel that way, and I did feel like I needed to "fill" it. I think "hole" is not an unreasonable metaphor. The Catholic Church, and my practice, took my time and my thought. When that time spent attending, thinking about, praying on and reading about was gone, there was an empty feeling. What else is an empty space but a hole? It is not unsimilar to a loss of a loved one.
It is not irrational to want something to believe in, either. In time, the education of my children filled that hole. They attended a Waldorf school. As any private-school parent knows, this type of education requires an all-in approach. We read about Rudolf Steiner, learned about the curriculum, and considered the merits of its pedagogy. Like the Catholic church's liturgical year, there were annual events, and opportunities to delve deeper into the Waldorf philosophy.
This is all to say that a hole may not be scientifically accurate, but it can be an appropriate description for the loss of a belief system. Emotions are not scientific. The need to belong, the need to believe, to have something that gives you higher purpose cannot (yet, anyway) be explained by biology. The Church, however, can offer all of those things and, figuratively, fill a place in our "heart" and "mind" (however science wants to define those organs).
Beautifully articulated as always Richard. I do agree with you, and as an agnostic myself, I was struck by the way you once said that all of us should be agnostic by default, because none of us can truly know. I wonder if you still hold that position or if you are strongly atheistic?
Mr Dawkins, I look forward to reading The Genetic Book of the Dead. It's my planned next read.
I'm so sorry you have to be drawn into such ludicrous debates as this. It seems the world truly has lost all sense. I wonder what someone like Einstein would think of the current discourse that scientists find themselves in. I'm guessing he simply would not participate. Maybe consider that approach and just do the good work that you do in science and education.
A religion is anything that provides meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual. Beliefs about God is theology, not religion. There are many secular religions. Human beings have a basic need for religion and will turn anything into a religion until the need for religion is sated. Human beings without any religion tend to collapse into crippling depression and anxiety fairly quickly.
Many people have found that the available secular religions didn't meet their needs, or those secular religions only functioned for 1-2 generations. They've gone looking for meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual, and found it in traditional forms of Christianity.
It's not that complicated. Humans have needs. Humans seek a way to satisfy those needs. It's not that different from people raised on wonderbread and canned peas deciding to take up baking and gardening.
Metanoun – a noun that encapsulates both the essence of an object or concept and its relational context within a sentence. It transcends the traditional subject-predicate structure, binding the subject, predicate, and object into a unified whole, reflecting the interconnectedness of existence and the fluidity of meaning.
Can we get back to talking about gender as a cultural concept, as distinct from sex as a biological one? That is all.
The article is about religious belief, not gender ideology.
Gender ideology IS a religious belief. Queer Theory is an aggressively proselytizing religion with totalitarian ambitions. Among other things, it denies the existence of any objective reality, though it tends to focus on denying the existence of biological sex.
To better understand why human rationality is NOT sufficient to allow all of us to see through The God Delusion deeply enough to be able to maintain one's sense of meaning without the false comfort of religion, please try Ralph Lewis MD's lovely book Finding Purpose in a Godless Universe. Dr. Lewis is a GP and Psychiatrist and he is very clear on the central position in their emotional self-experience that the god-projection holds for a great many people.
His practical humility shows through in the statement:
"Although I need to help people correct their distortions of reality, I have to be cautious about just how much reality I impart to my more vulnerable patients. For many, I need to reinforce their distorted beiefs (including religious beliefs if these are important to them) in the service of helping them to be functional, which is ultimately a more important goal of my work than instilling realism".
As much as I esteem and value Richard and his tireless and valiant work in explaining and attempting to enchant the scientific (in Lewis' terms "realisic") ways of viewing the world, the proportion of humans able to rest comfortably in that worldview is regretably small.
As neurological and psychological research has shown (viz Damassio and Schore as examples), rationality arises from affective processes. Without a sound affective foundation of selfhood, we humans grasp at wishful thinking that, for all their unreality and perils, allow us to function in our social worlds.
Scientific dogmatism is basically organized religion - this is the major irony here. Neuroscience has no idea how consciousness is formed, physics has no idea how a quantum universe functions.
String theory posits the existence of multiple dimensions, which lines up "coincidentally" with spiritual texts describing the structure of reality dating back thousands of years.
I used to be a huge skeptic and believer in rigid scientific thinking limited to the material universe until I had some personal experiences that are IMPOSSIBLE to ignore, including an encounter with a UAP entity.
An ant on the ground doesn't have evidence that an airplane exists - yet he feels the vibrations as it takes off, and feels the shadow fall over him as it comes from above. This is how infantile humankind's understanding of the universe is. Arrogance, dogmatism - basically all the tenants of "organized religion" permeate the ivory tower. Organized religion is also a joke.
But spirituality and metaphysics... that's another ballpark separate to both.
I can't blame everyone, though... It's easier to believe we know everything, than admit we know nothing at all 😉
Joseph, it seems to me that you have it backwards. Science is the only major collection of human disciplines ("magisteria" in SJ Gould's usage) that presumes it is WRONG. Now, being a human institution/discipline it is also subject to the egoism of individual humans who believe they are right and the mass of practitioners can take a long-ish time to correct a strongly and authoritatively held but wrong idea. As examples, plate tectonics, the more recent expansion of evolutionary thinking from Dawkins' "selfish gene", the refinement of Newtonian & Maxwellian mechanics by Einsteinian mechanics and then by quantum mechanics.
Science is the only set of disciplines which embodies a (humane) methodology for overturning ideas which may be held by the wise old heads but have been demonstrated to be inadequate in some ways. The humanities and those disciplines in which it's less easy to formulate empirically testable ideas are themselves little better than religions in basing what is currently held to be true on authority and precedent.
There is no reason that preferring science needs to take the form of "believing in" rigid scientism. Rigidity of thought is a human characteristic, and particularly a characteristic of human institutions, which is challenged by societies and disciplines to the extent that they are free.
Again, as I implied to Annie300, we certainly do not know nothing at all or we could not be using laptops, phones, networks, storage media to be having this conversation. What we know is undoubtedly tiny compared to what we don't know, but it's a long, long way from nothing.
Simon, I thought you might appreciate this article after your last comment. Credit where it's due: https://excalibur.guide/ideas/the-universes-masterpiece/
Alright... All excellent points. I concur. But science does need to bridge it's understanding of the universe with metaphysical principles now that we have a basic understanding of the quantum world. The evidence is becoming impossible to ignore.
Hi Joseph, What are the "metaphysical principles" that you're looking to science to bridge to?
Quantum mechanics, consciousness, string theory - these all fall outside our understanding of a simplistic material world only governed by physical laws.
The principles that govern the universe supersede the confines of a limited materialistic world view.
Perhaps, but what are the metaphysical principles that you are referring to? It's quite brave to assert that you know enough about the principles that govern the universe to say what the exceed.
I'm asking for your descriptions of them or at least how you know they exceed your understanding of a materialist worldview.
Well said.
I don't know enough about the subject to have a view on 'God-shaped-holes' but I found this piece disappointingly sophistical and not at all enlightening on the question. The conclusion in particular:
"How patronizing, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole."
Since when did characterizing a claim as 'patronising' or 'insulting' tell us anything about whether it's true? Depressing that someone as rational as Dawkins appears to have forgotten that 'facts don't care about your feelings' as the kids say. Also notice the sleight of hand involved in treating a claim about a particular group of individual human beings to a claim about 'humanity'.
I'm a big fan of Dawkins' work on evolution but haven't read any of his work on God/Religion so don't know if he addresses the claim more robustly there. If so it would have been nice to have a hint of how he has formed this view, rather than just 'I find this offensive'
Remember it's an opinion piece.
This is very dangerous position to take. I am a physician and I also occasionally practice what Dr. Lewis does. I call myself hypocrite for doing so. But, yes, I did it for compassion, albeit hypocritical. The danger is, who gets to decide to delude the sick patients for compassion reasons? Only physicians? Or should we extend them to include the family members? I wish my patients had never been exposed to religions at all. That would have spared me from being a hypocrite.
I have a theory, about which I'm modestly confident, explaining the Great Christian Revival. People seem to be responding to several different aspects of the left's lunacy. Some of them, as you mentioned, are turning back from the mistake of taking up gender ideology. Many others see Christianity as a bulwark against the advancement of Islamism into Western society. Polite secular society seems ill-equipped to battle extreme religious ideologies. It's not opposite enough in the ways that matter. People want reasons for opposing a particular religious faith that don't feel arbitrary and prejudicial. Christians have a great reason (really, just a reason that feels like it makes sense), which is that Islam is not Christianity. Though the two are similarly monotheistic and some people see them as worshipping the same god, they are incompatible. One can oppose Islam without fear of being branded an Islamophobe if she is Christian. In my view, this explains Ayaan Hirsi-Ali's "conversion" to cultural Christianity.
So in short, "the left is crazy".
Your theory is silly; that very sentence above derives all of it on account of something existing to call it "crazy".
I don't really think the left is crazy. They've just been convinced that anyone in a minority position (race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc.) is oppressed, and that oppressed people should never be criticized. I say this as someone formerly left-leaning who never quite felt comfortable with those ideas, but couldn't understand why for many years. I was made to feel like a bigot of some sort for believing it should be OK to criticize bad ideas. That is crazy-making self-flagellation.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to observe the left as crazy.
Naturally, coalitions will be produced or resurge in response to "crazy".
Your theory isn't a theory it's just a somewhat convoluted rephrasing of that word, in the form of who says it.
The left isn't crazy, it's been taken over by religious fanatics. Queer is an aggressively proselytizing religion with totalitarian ambitions.
The only Gød-shaped hole that there is is ignorance. That ignorance-shaped hole can be filled with knowledge. Knowledge is based upon reality, not superstition and faith.
This epistemology (way of knowing) has been found effective: reason/empiricism.
And these supposed "ways of knowing" have been found to be severely, if not fatally, flawed: Revelation, tradition, custom, authority, faith, dogma, sacred text, charisma, augury, prophesy, intuition, clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, the appeal of subjective certainty, and relativism.
While I agree that there is no god-shaped hole, there is a human rights-shaped hole that science cannot fill. Those rights might feel self evident, but they're more accurately described as conjecture on how best to organize society. It can be tempting for these people to alter the list of human rights so that favoured groups get preferential treatment. Unequal treatment doesn't work in the long run, but long-term thinking has never been the revolutionary's strong point.
Is there another way to look at this? If self and sentience are useful illusions and even the brain’s projection of the body in all its layers and complexities is a best guess and summary, one might realise that selfhood is deeply deeply cultural and fundamentally relational.
This way of looking at really fundamental stabilities in the zone of identity includes the sense of a God, it’s so hard to resist when there is a part of self that notices self in an affective reflective loop. The idea of essences is so alluring and natural while all the time an illusion. One finally has to wonder why these illusions are helpful and think about how we make our culture around it all - it’s such an important and sensitive topic this idea of the essence of me (because it is not real, but it feels so important).
This is very timely. Recently I was recalling an argument some decades ago with my spouse regarding going to mass. I was pushing for continuing on with our churchgoing while he was opposed. Eventually, we did stop going. Some years later, in writing about it, I did describe it as a kind of hole. In retrospect, it did feel that way, and I did feel like I needed to "fill" it. I think "hole" is not an unreasonable metaphor. The Catholic Church, and my practice, took my time and my thought. When that time spent attending, thinking about, praying on and reading about was gone, there was an empty feeling. What else is an empty space but a hole? It is not unsimilar to a loss of a loved one.
It is not irrational to want something to believe in, either. In time, the education of my children filled that hole. They attended a Waldorf school. As any private-school parent knows, this type of education requires an all-in approach. We read about Rudolf Steiner, learned about the curriculum, and considered the merits of its pedagogy. Like the Catholic church's liturgical year, there were annual events, and opportunities to delve deeper into the Waldorf philosophy.
This is all to say that a hole may not be scientifically accurate, but it can be an appropriate description for the loss of a belief system. Emotions are not scientific. The need to belong, the need to believe, to have something that gives you higher purpose cannot (yet, anyway) be explained by biology. The Church, however, can offer all of those things and, figuratively, fill a place in our "heart" and "mind" (however science wants to define those organs).
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Patronising elites like Dr Peterson telling us the proletariat we are too dumb to make decisions based on logic.
Any God that Richard does not believe in ought not to be believed.
All belief (and non-belief) is founded upon a set of ideas… but ideas only reference other ideas!
No idea can ever grasp reality, as reality is not an idea.
https://michael-haines.medium.com/so-what-is-the-ground-of-being-e3e6e30099cc
Beautifully articulated as always Richard. I do agree with you, and as an agnostic myself, I was struck by the way you once said that all of us should be agnostic by default, because none of us can truly know. I wonder if you still hold that position or if you are strongly atheistic?
Mr Dawkins, I look forward to reading The Genetic Book of the Dead. It's my planned next read.
I'm so sorry you have to be drawn into such ludicrous debates as this. It seems the world truly has lost all sense. I wonder what someone like Einstein would think of the current discourse that scientists find themselves in. I'm guessing he simply would not participate. Maybe consider that approach and just do the good work that you do in science and education.
A religion is anything that provides meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual. Beliefs about God is theology, not religion. There are many secular religions. Human beings have a basic need for religion and will turn anything into a religion until the need for religion is sated. Human beings without any religion tend to collapse into crippling depression and anxiety fairly quickly.
Many people have found that the available secular religions didn't meet their needs, or those secular religions only functioned for 1-2 generations. They've gone looking for meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual, and found it in traditional forms of Christianity.
It's not that complicated. Humans have needs. Humans seek a way to satisfy those needs. It's not that different from people raised on wonderbread and canned peas deciding to take up baking and gardening.
Keep writing -
The trillions of humans before you must’ve been wrong. Someone out there is bound to listen to your insight eventually
Really disheartening to see one of our greatest evolutionary biologists conflating gender and sex.
Metanoun – a noun that encapsulates both the essence of an object or concept and its relational context within a sentence. It transcends the traditional subject-predicate structure, binding the subject, predicate, and object into a unified whole, reflecting the interconnectedness of existence and the fluidity of meaning.