Letters

Thank God
I’m an Atheist?

SIR: I was interested to read the various opinions in Robert McLaughlin’s review of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (September 2010), but being a believer myself, I was not interested enough to purchase the book.

One view that particularly caught my attention was that of the philosopher Adèle Mercier, who apparently considers that most people who believe in God do not really believe, but only believe that they believe. This she calls “second-order belief”.

That struck me, because I had come to feel that many people who say they are atheists are not really atheists, but have only convinced themselves that they are, and are thus “second-order atheists”.

I got this feeling particularly strongly some months ago when listening to a radio broadcast of a talk by Richard Dawkins. Professor Dawkins was quite angry, and as I listened it seemed that his anger was directed not so much at religion or at believers, but at God himself. I thought to myself: “Mon Dieu! This man believes in God.”

Perhaps I misinterpreted him, but it really did appear that such fury as he was expressing could not be aimed at some amorphous mass of people, but rather at one individual in particular. And that individual was surely the Almighty.

Lance Eccles,

Goulburn, NSW.

SIR: Robert McLaughlin approvingly reviews a work by some fifty wise men who are atheists and interpret religion as a virtually totally negative thing. This Christian theist would pose to them the following questions.

First, the wise men of materialism evidently believe in nothing but the material universe. Then our minds become nothing but molecules going through motions. We have no free will. Therefore there is no basis for moral choice, or for rational choice. Whatever we or bin Laden do, our molecules make us do it, and that is that. This is the unavoidable bitter fruit of excessive rationalism and scientism.

Second, the wise men see atheism as politically benign, in contrast to religion which is radically toxic if it acquires any political influence. True enough for bin Laden or Torquemada. But this theory does not work for William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, Rev. Martin Luther King, or Archbishop Tutu. Nor does it work for the form of atheism known as Marxism which has probably killed more people than any ideology we know.

Third, the wise men object to Creationism. Fair enough. But Creationism has not caused anything remotely comparable to the harm done by Social Darwinism, one of the historical roots of Nazism.

Fourth, McLaughlin approvingly quotes Kitcher to the effect that religious faith in general is morally equivalent to Mein Kampf. McLaughlin also says amen to Tamas Pataki’s enthusiastic exploration of the notion that religion stems from “obsessional, hysterical and narcissistic dispositions”. If this sort of writing expresses an atheism that is a kindly tolerant humanism as advertised by McLaughlin, what would an intolerant version look like?

Finally, McLaughlin rests particular emphasis on the thinking of Peter Singer and Marc Hauser (their joint effort receives one of the lengthiest treatments in the article). This no doubt is the Marc Hauser of Harvard who was recently disciplined for serious charges of scientific misconduct in his research on monkey behaviour. And this is certainly the Peter Singer who argued that it was permissible to commit infanticide on “abnormal” babies, a category into which I happened to fall. These fruits of militant anti-theism therefore give me scant reason intellectually or morally to dispel my scepticism of it.

McLaughlin enthuses that a third of the contributors, including Singer and the awe-inspiring “pull-no-punches” sage Grayling, are philosophers. It sounds like it. Give me the Salvos any day.

David Elder,

Grange, SA.

Those Lovable Old Communists

SIR: While driving on September 8, I caught a conversation on ABC radio between Jon Faine and a couple of Frank Hardy’s descendants. The consensus (in the tradition established on the ABC by the likes of Phillip Adams that former communists are all lovable idealists) was that Hardy was a jolly old eccentric and capable writer, who had been given a rough time by paranoid philistines. The fact that Hardy had for many years been a passionate supporter of Stalin, history’s second-worst mass murderer after Mao, was discreetly ignored.

Three comments in the Communism section of September’s Quadrant bear directly on this episode.

First, Hal Colebatch, in his review of Peter Hruby’s Dangerous Dreamers: The Australian Anti-Democratic Left and Czechoslovak Agents, draws attention to the way in which insouciant “charm” on the part of communist sympathisers is regarded as somehow obviating their adulation of psychopathic totalitarian dictators.

Second, Colebatch reminds us that “communist associations often carry none of the career and other punishments of Nazi associations”. How conceivable is it that Faine would fail to highlight and interrogate the longtime political allegiance of an erstwhile admirer of Hitler, who liquidated fewer victims than Stalin, let alone Mao?

Third, Patrick Morgan, in his review of Mark Aarons’s The Family File, exposes the tired old stratagem of dismissing any criticism of communism as McCarthyism, a phenomenon which, it is implied, is not only morally equivalent to communism, but worse. Colebatch refers to the same sophistry when he talks about the portrayal of figures such as Wilfred Burchett as “heroes”.

McCarthyism undoubtedly involved widespread and deplorable dishonesty, victimisation and hysteria before the American army brought it to an end, but its main effect was to disrupt the careers of various Hollywood film stars. The only innocent (probably) individual to die as a result of McCarthyism was Ethel Rosenberg. Communism, on the other hand, not only slaughtered tens of millions of innocent victims, but imprisoned, enslaved, starved and tortured millions more.

As the Americans say, go figure.

Bill James,

Bayswater, Vic.

We Mustn’t
Talk About It

SIR: I found the essay “Death by Silence” by Shelley Gare (July-August 2010) fascinating and illuminating. I wasn’t aware of the term “totsching”, nor that the practice is so pervasive. It is much more than mere professional jealousy, and exposes an attempt at active suppression of some ideas and opinions which are out of step with either political or scholarly correctness.

My own experience, in an unrelated matter, offers one further example, I feel, of “totsching”. For some time I’ve been attempting to generate some public discussion on the archaic practice of religious slaughter. All abattoirs in Australia are required by law to pre-stun animals before killing them, by a knife cut to the neck, thus eliminating all pain and most of the stress involved. An exception is made though, to people of the Islamic and Jewish faiths, allowing them to kill animals without prior stunning, a practice that is undeniably cruel and has no place in an enlightened society.

Letters to newspaper editors and journalists are met with stony silence. At federal government ministerial level there is acknowledgment of the issues raised, but despite two scientific reports commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (“A Scientific Comment on the Welfare of Sheep Slaughtered without Stunning”, July 2009, and “Specifying the Risks to Animal Welfare Associated with Livestock Slaughter without Induced Insensibility”, November 2008) which conclusively demonstrate the suffering caused by religious slaughter, and in the face of condemnation by all animal welfare groups including the RSPCA, the Primary Industries Ministerial Council (PIMC) continues to allow Halal and Kosher slaughter practices in some Australian abattoirs.

The PIMC justifies its decision on the right of people of various faiths to practical expression of their beliefs and associated cultural mores, without sufficient concern for the suffering it imposes. It seems that, since we are dealing with the civil and political rights of people versus the rights of animals, their decision is without question. Ethical considerations and just plain decency don’t count at PIMC meetings.

Even cowardly politicians respond to public opinion, and newspaper editors and journalists have enormous power to inform and influence the attitudes of the public. That they don’t in this case is either because they are bereft of any empathy for these unfortunate creatures or, more likely, because they haven’t the courage to confront the religious groups concerned. It is much easier and safer to remain silent.

Peter Gerard,

Guyra, NSW.

Christianity and Science

SIR: I think I would relish an extended conversation with Peter Barclay. His rejoinder (September 2010) to the debate over Christianity and science that we have been having in the pages of Quadrant is, once again, a pleasure to read and clearly the work of a thoughtful scholar. It prompts what I hope your readers will agree is an equally thoughtful and scholarly response.

Dr Barclay opens by disavowing, as he expresses it, any claim that the Bible “attempts to represent a scientific understanding of the universe, that all truth is to be found within its pages, or that Christianity’s commitment to truth is unusual”. These are significant concessions to the point I was seeking to make and are refreshing to see. Let me, therefore, make a concession of my own, which I think is warranted in the light of the arguments he has made. Science did not spring solely from Greek roots and did not go wholly into eclipse with the rise of Christianity. Rather, if I may rephrase my central claim: science as we understand it now made a beginning in the Greek world and then went into eclipse for many centuries. Had Christianity been sufficient on its own to summon forth the scientific spirit, of course, it would surely have emerged in the fifth and sixth centuries. Instead, it took between 600 and 1200 years, depending on whether you take Grosseteste and Albert the Great or Descartes and Newton as your point of reference, for science to even emerge in a robust form in Christian Europe.

I’ll come back to this point, but let me first address a second point that Dr Barclay makes in his opening paragraph. He states that, “While there is much disagreement about what the truth is, Christians share with every honest man, woman and child on the planet a commitment to it.” I think this is somewhat misleading, unless one takes the term “commitment to truth” in a very loose sense. I would suggest that being “honest” is a sufficient but by no means a necessary condition for exhibiting a commitment to the truth. Many an honest person finds apparently good reasons for believing things that are erroneous and for not very closely examining what they prefer to believe. These characteristics are all but universal and they are the chief reason why human beings have come only late, partially and often reluctantly to a scientific understanding of the natural world, to say nothing of a revision of their theological (or ideological) faiths.

That said, let us turn to the central issue of the relationship between Christianity and the rise of science. It is true enough, as Dr Barclay points out, that the Muslims had Greek books for some centuries while the Latin West languished and yet the scientific revolution did not take place in the Islamic world—indeed, it still has not done so, culturally speaking. Nor did it occur in Tang or Song China, despite many of the apparent prerequisites for it being present as early as the eighth and ninth centuries. The correlation between the existence of Christianity and the rise of modern science therefore suggests to Dr Barclay and others, like sociologist Rodney Stark, that there was a causal relationship. A little reflection surely suggests that it cannot be quite as simple as this, since the gap of many centuries between the rise of Christianity and the emergence of science as we know it points to the necessity of other catalysts playing a crucial role. What might they have been?

Conversely, the absence of the Christian theological component from the Hellenistic or pre-Socratic setting, in which science as we know it first emerged, suggests that science can emerge without the presence of or impulse from Christianity. Might we not, then, infer that something is required to spark scientific thinking and that a belief that natural laws might be discerned by the disciplined inquirer seems to be that something? That, in turn, the more refined and less dogmatic souls in Christendom developed such a belief, perhaps in part because of their Christian theological beliefs, but perhaps also without direct regard to them? Might we not then allow that, once it started to gain a hold on the imaginations of the very small circle of scientific explorers, this belief took a form very similar to that of Aristotle’s famous remark, “I love Plato, but I love truth more”?

And since Plato was the single biggest philosophical influence on the intellectual development of Christian theology before the twelfth century, are we not therefore led to discern in the rekindling of the scientific spirit something of Aristotle’s cast of mind? Is it pure coincidence that the rediscovery of Aristotle was followed by the revitalisation of first theological, then more generally philosophical and finally empirical and scientific thinking in Christian Europe? Naturally, once this process gained a sufficient purchase that independence of mind became emboldened, thinkers like Galileo, Copernicus and Spinoza emulated Aristotle’s attitude to Plato by declaring, quite correctly, that they loved Aristotle, but loved truth more.

Dr Barclay adduces as evidence, against my claim that the advances of modern science have led to steady diminution in the credibility of Christian orthodoxy and the authority of the Bible, the fact that there are more Christians than ever in the world at large and that in the United States, that fountainhead of scientific research, Christianity flourishes. I do not dispute the numbers he cites; only the conclusion he draws from them. This is on two grounds: the first that the numbers of those who believe something is no argument to its truth, only to its popularity; the second that, overwhelmingly, those who profess Christian belief do not do so on intellectual grounds of any respectability, but on the basis of a preference for myths, symbols, rituals and moral traditions for which secular society has, in their judgment, yet to offer satisfactory substitutes. In the continents of Africa and Latin America to which Dr Barclay draws such statistical attention, the alternatives on offer are often especially rebarbative, and Christianity, at least in part and in some of its forms, might reasonably be seen a benign offering.

The point I was making was that the advances of modern science, in cosmology, geology, biology and many other fields (not least among them archaeology) have removed by degrees any scientific warrant for the dogmas of organised religion, including specifically those of Christianity. Like many an apologist for the Christian faith, Dr Barclay asserts that the truth of such Christian beliefs as the crucifixion and the resurrection can neither be proven nor disproven. But he is quite mistaken in this regard. The crucifixion of Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth is quite unproblematic, even if the direct evidence for it is problematic. Crucifixion was a deplorably common form of capital punishment in the Roman world and there is no barrier to believing that a Jewish visionary deemed to be a subversive may have been subjected to it. But the resurrection is an event patently at odds with every known reality of biology and there can be no scientific warrant for it.

Here Dr Barclay and his co-religionists must choose between their Christian theological belief and the natural law actually made plain by modern science. Most of them, so far as I can discern, either fall back on the claim that the resurrection was a “spiritual” event, not to be interpreted in a “physical” sense, which leaves hopelessly vague what exactly it was supposed to have been; or an assertion of “faith” which clutches at the specious claim that the fact of the resurrection as a literal event cannot be disproved. I would be rather interested to know which of these alternatives Dr Barclay espouses, or whether he believes there is a third possibility.

Let me conclude by making it clear that I am in no sense nihilistic or cynical in disavowing Christian belief, or in declaring that it needs to be replaced. I simply cannot find any basis for believing the creed which so many millions profess to believe and have not, in the better part of a lifetime of questioning, been able to elicit from any believer in person or any scholarly tome a convincing reason for doing so. I acknowledge the consolation that belief brings to hundreds of millions, though I do not regret the lack of it. What troubles me is that, on the one hand, there is an evident need for the kinds of existential and cultural anchor that religions have provided for millennia and that, on the other hand, the epistemological chasm between our own culture’s chief religion (Christianity)—to say nothing of Hinduism, Islam or Orthodox Judaism—has become ever wider in the era of modern science. I believe there is a great deal of creative and constructive work to be done in this space. The mere defence of Christian orthodoxy is, at best, a stop-gap measure. We need to and, I believe, can do much better.

Patrick Linehan’s memories (September 2010) are touching. I confess that I cannot remember our conversation about Nietzsche, but I am delighted by his letter. Let me say very briefly that, as I think my own essay on history made clear, I believe very much in the process of questioning. We appear to differ slightly in our assessment of two things: the attitude of Thucydides to the questioning Patrick urges and the nature of objectivity in historical inquiry. It seems plain to me that Thucydides actually pioneered the asking of critical questions about sources, methods and the reliability of tradition. And objectivity, as I endeavoured to point out, consists not in a single point of view held to be unalterably correct, but in the openness to making one’s arguments explicit and testable on the basis of evidence—hence my withering remarks about Christopher Andrew.

Paul Monk,

Melbourne, Vic.

Military Funerals

SIR: The excellent article by Peter Ryan, “The Funeral Should Honour the Soldier” (September 2010), contains a slight error. The Australian forces did repatriate the bodies of dead servicemen from Vietnam. In the early days of the conflict, the deceased were interred at Terendak in Malaysia but the policy was changed to send the bodies directly to Australia.

The change came about around the time that US servicemen in Vietnam were permitted to spend their leave in Sydney and it became known that the US services repatriated their dead. The political cause-and-effect considerations between these events are obvious.

We live in a time when exaggerated and public outpourings of sentimentality are commonplace. The reactions to the deaths of Princess Diana and more recently Michael Jackson are the two most egregious examples. Mr Ryan is right to ask whether we are handling the funerals of servicemen correctly. Of course this is a sensitive and delicate matter and clearly a tragic and difficult time for family and friends.

The presence of the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition at every military funeral is problematic and it is difficult not to see their attendance as little more than a photo opportunity, as Peter Ryan suggests. However, it is the response of the service chiefs which also seems excessive. At the announcement of the death of the seventeenth serviceman there was, as usual, a lugubrious Chief of the Defence Forces, flanked by a teary Minister of Defence and one or two hand-wringing military subordinates to deliver the unhappy news that a private soldier had been killed in action.

The Chief of Army was present at a later funeral and shown giving consoling hugs to grieving mourners. It’s difficult to imagine a General Monash or Blamey embracing the loved ones of the dead from the two world wars, or even Sir Tom Daly behaving similarly during the Vietnam conflict. The Chief of Army was also reported as saying that the deaths only strengthened resolve, although whose resolve wasn’t made clear.

While their actions are undoubtedly well-intentioned, what might they do if there is a “Long Tan” type battle or some incident which produces multiple deaths? The response from the top level of the defence forces to every individual fatality should perhaps be scaled back to a more appropriate rank level, and possibly a more muted approach adopted generally. The politicians will naturally behave like, well, politicians, but the top brass doesn’t have to emulate the less restrained and mawkish reactions to grief which are common elsewhere.

Owen Richards,

Lower Templestowe, Vic.

The Pique of
Gregory Melleuish

SIR: In a chapter in The Howard Era (Quadrant Books), Gregory Melleuish makes two references to my contribution to the 2006 History Summit on the place and content of Australian history in our schools. The first reference noted that “two members of the Summit had submitted written documents to the members of the Summit. They were Peter Stanley and Geoffrey Partington … Just why they felt the need to do so is unclear.” Peter Stanley must speak for himself, but I believe that my preliminary paper was of help to those who actually read it.

My purpose was certainly unclear to Professor Melleuish. He had been commissioned to construct a suitable Australian history syllabus for Years 7 to 9. What he produced had much merit but, unfortunately, it was far too extensive and detailed for its purpose. Melleuish says he “had been concerned that the government was obsessed with Australian history, an obsession I thought reflected an excessively parochial approach”. Unfortunately, his own proposed Australian history syllabus would leave little time for any other studies in history. If comparable detail of content were required in non-Australian historical studies as well, history would leave little time and space for the rest of the curriculum.

In the second reference, Melleuish wrote that “Geoffrey Partington complained that the real problem was that we were deciding what students had to learn rather than letting them discover things for themselves. What he was saying was that the Summit should not be engaged in what it had been summoned to do.” Greg Melleuish must have heard a different contribution from the one I made.

Melleuish also had a swipe at John Hirst: “For some reason John Hirst had been made chair” of one of the sessions. In the chair John Hirst asked us how the Melleuish offerings might be refined. In a later article on the Summit, Hirst generously wrote, “The clue came from Geoffrey Partington, an old campaigner against the excesses of progressive education, but unlike many of that ilk an educationalist himself.” Hirst added:

The summit proceeded to consider the large questions which could be the bedrock of the curriculum. These are the open-ended questions mentioned in the summit’s communiqué. The summit was rushed and the list was not completed. We reached 11. They were shaped to encompass a good deal of what Melleuish had included in his paper, but of course not everything.

I can understand that Greg Melleuish felt some resentment at the lack of enthusiasm at the Summit for a document to which he must have devoted considerable time and energy, but his reaction to criticism by one who esteems him as an author and as a historian was excessive.

Geoffrey Partington,

Elsternwick, Vic.

Postmodern Nursing

SIR: I read the article “The Postmodern Turn in Medical Education” (September 2010) with recognition and amusement. For a start, I have been one of those patients in a teaching hospital being poked and prodded and spoken about as though I weren’t there.

But the article reminded me most strongly of an anecdote told me by a friend, a nursing sister in a large hospital. She asked a new employee, a recently graduated registered nurse, to give an injection of insulin to a diabetic patient, and moments later found the young woman injecting the insulin into an orange. Puzzled, my friend queried this procedure. The nurse replied that she knew how to inject an orange but had never given an injection to a patient; so she was instead going to give the orange to the patient.

Sarah Fanning,

Tarlo, NSW.