Shades of Gray

An interesting piece of utter nonsense on the Beeb's website at the moment. This is one of the more bizarre treatises on the theological/atheological question that I've ever seen, if indeed that's what he's trying to do. It's difficult to tell what his reasons for writing it were, because it's an oddly-structured thing, which bounces from one idea to another a bit, so you'll forgive me if my response to it necessarily does the same.

If you can be bothered to read the whole thing, you'll see that he uses Graham Greene's apparently unusual conversion to Catholicism as his starting point, saying that Greene could not be particularly bothered to remember why he converted, but continued to accept Catholicism anyway. He says that this was partly brought about by 'the challenge of an inexplicable goodness' Greene found in a priest he'd got to know. He doesn't mention if Greene had anything to say on the goodness he encountered in atheists he met, but anyway, we'll leave that for now.

Gray's piece, perhaps in an effort to understand Greene's seemingly odd position, rather meanders on to how it's in fact science, not religion, that's full of myth (on which I'll respond in a mo) and then, bizarrely, this:

"In most religions – polytheism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Daoism and Shinto, many strands of Judaism and some Christian and Muslim traditions – belief has never been particularly important. Practice – ritual, meditation, a way of life – is what counts. What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all."

If it matters at all??! What a piece of complete tripe that is, and it's roundly contradicted in many of the 400-plus responses to his piece, by people to whom belief is a fundamental and extremely important part of their theism. And try telling this to the 'martyrs' who kill themselves and others in the name of Islamic fundamentalism, for example. His next paragraph is also alarming:

"The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn't come from religion. It's an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of western Christianity and led to practitioners trying to defend their way of life as an expression of what they believe."

Writing as an atheist myself, only an atheist could produce such a piece of tosh as this. Of the countless billions of people all over the world who practise a religion, how many of them would even be aware of this 'inheritance'? I rather suspect that most people's religion comes from within themselves, an innate feeling of what's right, or is passed on from believing parents, without the slightest knowledge of the history of scholarly input into the belief system itself. They simply believe, because it feels right to them. It fits. I strongly suspect, for example, that if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced that the existence of God was merely a 'proposition you have to accept', his Church and its followers would be utterly startled at the suggestion that it was anything other than a fundamental truth.

Gray then goes on to basically turn his guns on science. He says that it's a 'vehicle for myths', that humans 'can't overcome the fact that they remain animals', and that 'however rapidly our knowledge increases, we'll always be surrounded by the unknowable'. Well that's the bloody difference between science, and religion, isn't it? How many religious tracts did you ever read which accept that we're animals? Contrast the idea that we're made in God's image with Desmond Morris's work The Naked Ape, for example, which very vividly and readily accepts that we are animals. I have often said during discussions with friends on this stuff that I think we're just 'apes with big brains'. I think he's completely mistaken to believe that humans can't accept this – plenty of us do.

And what kind of 'vehicle for myths' would adopt the fundamental standpoint of 'we don't know, so let's study it and see if we can become any more enlightened one way or the other', which is how I view science? Surely any 'vehicle for myth' would adopt the starting point of certainty and work backwards from there, filling in the back story as it went?

Anyway - Gray is not finished yet. His most bonkers statement, 'humanity doesn't exist, there are only human beings, each of them ruled by passions and illusions that conflict with one another and within themselves', is startlingly odd. Of course we're all filled with such conflicts, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as 'humanity'. If that were so, nobody would bother with scientific endeavour, or with religion for that matter. We'd all be living solipsistic lives where nobody ever did anything for anybody else, regardless of motive, unless it also directly benefitted them to do so. What a bleak world that would be. Fortunately we don't live in such a place. One thing I do know is that, regardless of whether it's driven by religious belief, innate goodness or whatever, there's plenty of 'humanity' in most people – it's just difficult to define it simplistically. That does not mean it doesn't exist. You see it readily enough when people rally to help strangers in times of crisis, natural disaster etc, where empathy for the suffering of others is felt by atheist and believer alike. What is that if not humanity?

Last point on what he's written.

"Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst. They think human life would be vastly improved if only everyone believed as they do, when a little history shows that trying to get everyone to believe the same thing is a recipe for unending conflict."

Quite so. But most of us are not doing that. I certainly don't go around knocking on people's doors trying to 'unconvert' them, or whatever you'd call it, in stark contrast to Jehovah's Witnesses, for example. I merely seek to live my life free of the influence and direction of the Church, be it Christian or any other, and have all children left free to decide for themselves rather than be taught any set of religious beliefs as fact during their education. That's not the same as some kind of atheist imperialism.

And Graham Greene? His Catholicism which John Gray finds so difficult to comprehend, and on which he misses the likely reason so completely? I rather suspect that his desire to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Catholic convert herself, was behind it. An all too human exigency which he himself acknowledged when he said he, "…ought to at least learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held." But that's clearly too difficult for John Gray to comprehend, so he comes up with this piece of negative drivel in which he both dismisses religious belief and scientific endeavour at the same time. Some achievement, that, Mr Gray.