The Shameless Claptrap of Robert Sibley

Bloc Raisonneur reader StanB directed my attention to two pieces from the Ottawa Citizen that I think are very important. One is a full-length article, another a short response.

The main article is by Robert Sibley who inspired another post by me only a couple of days ago. I did not realize the degree of revulsion Sibley feels for the New Atheists and atheism in general, but his December 26 essay is brimming with resentment that reveals itself in absurd acts of psychological speculation and rhetorical foul play. What follows are just a few examples. First, my jaw dropped when I read this (my own emphasis added):

Modern philosophy, natural science and psychology are, more often than not, atheistic in outlook. So, too, are many of our social and political institutions. It is a virtual taboo for a Canadian politician to refer to his or her religious faith in public life. The school system teaches students about sex and drugs, but classroom prayers have largely been cancelled.

[continued after the flip...]

I don't know enough about Canadian politics to venture a guess as to whether Sibley is correct about the aversion of its electorate to expressions of supernatural belief, but I would certainly hope that if there is a taboo that it stems from a national skepticism, not from some kind of resentment toward believers. But look at the sentence in bold. First, Sibley is constructing an utterly false contrast, setting up prayer as a logical opposite to "sex and drugs," which is just silly. Worse still, he throws the terms "sex and drugs" into the sentence without explaining at all what he means. Does he mean that Canadian schools are teaching the vurtues of illegal drug use and rampant casual sex? Or, more likely, does it mean that students are being educated about the dangers of drugs and the realities and biology of sex? We don't get to know from this sentence, because Sibley wants you to read it and assume that bad things are allowed (sex and drugs!) while the good thing is not (prayer). Really quite shameless.

Then Sibley gets into what he thinks is a fascinating deconstruction of the arguments and personalities of the New Atheists. Sibley relies, in part, on the thoughts of one particular scholar to make his point about the alleged shoddiness of the New Atheist arguments:

Regardless of their differences, the new atheists share certain tenets, according to John Haught, a widely recognized scholar in the field of theology and science.

[ . . . ]

"The treatment of religion in these tracts consists mostly of breezy overgeneralizations that leave out almost everything that theologians would want to highlight in their own contemporary discussion of God," says John Haught, a professor at Georgetown University. "Rather, the new atheism is so theologically unchallenging. Its engagement with theology lies at about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature."

To begin with, John Haught is a theologian who has written a book specifically attacking Dawkins and company, God and the New Atheism, and his quote in this article is essentially a paraphrasing of his usual point of dispute with the New Atheists. In his book, Haught writes:

Clearly the New Atheists are not familiar with these religious thinkers [theologians like himself] [. . .] Their strategy is to suppress in effect any significant theological voices that might wish to join in conversation with them. (pp. xii-xiii)

So Haught's biggest beef is his Achilles heel: he is upset that the New Atheists don't take his own field seriously. Sibley goes even further than Haught, though, and makes the common false comparison of the New Atheism with murderous fanaticism:

In other words, the militant atheists are no better than the religious fundamentalists they attack in terms of theological substance.

No, not "in other words." If one rejects the supernatural assumptions that one must embrace in order to take Haught’s theology seriously, there is no need to deal with “theological substance.” If we all accept that there are no such things as dragons and elves, we need not waste our time debating the substance of the “theology” of The Hobbit. If we don't think the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is actually coming to attack New York City, we need not concern ourselves with Ghostbusters' theology, either. The onus is on Haught and Sibley and other believers to prove their case as to why we should believe in something for which there is no evidence.

Oh, but it gets worse. Sibley, upset that atheists do not take theology seriously, then himself trivializes psychology by making ham-fisted attempts to "understand" the New Atheists by looking at what little he knows about their backgrounds and extracting absurd "conclusions."

Here's where we come to our second piece, the response from the Citizen's Dan Gardner. It's quite short, and to make my point, I really need to reprint the whole thing. I hope Mr. Gardner doesn't mind.

Roughly nine in ten Americans believe in the existence of God. A slightly higher percentage of members of the United States National Academy of Sciences do not.

That's the sort of correlation worth exploring.

A correlation not worth exploring would be one such as -- let's choose something that appeared in a certain newspaper recently -- the fact that several atheist writers had weak or absent fathers. This correlation would be particularly worthless if the atheist writers in question were chosen for examination by a hostile author who views atheism as a defect to be explained by resort to Freudian pseudo-science. That's off-the-meter selection bias.

Personally, I've always been struck by the fact that fully 25 per cent of the best-selling atheist authors -- all four of them -- has a bushy, white beard. This suggests an early childhood trauma may be at work. Did Daniel Dennet always get the Christmas presents he asked for? No? Well, then, his atheism is clearly repressed anger at Santa Claus.

Not impressed? Neither am I.

Oh, and for the record, my dear old dad is neither weak nor absent. So it ain't his fault.

Extremely well put, I say.

Sibley's nonsense aside, I think it's pretty sad that the Ottawa Citizen would choose to print his work, as modest analysis shows it to be full of holes, and not worthy of the newspaper of a nation's capital. I can see something like this posted at Townhall or WorldNetDaily, publications in which reason and intellectual honesty are not valued, and would therefore not trouble Sibley's work.

But more to the point, Sibley's article shows once again that the culture at large still sees atheism as a condition. Last night, I wrote about how an atheist is not really something that one becomes, but something as which one begins. It is the starting point.

But even if they share this view, Sibley and his ilk believe that it is the atheists that are failing to grasp some fundamental truth so obvious to the majority of the world. When most people think atheists are "sick" or the way they are because of some despair or trauma, real equality and political and social relevance is a long way away. Work like that of Sibley's is dangerous in that it reinforces negative stereotypes and false impressions, and does so using cheap rhetorical tricks and biased guesswork disguised as scientific, scholarly analysis. It serves nothing but to stoke the fires of ignorance at the expense of an already unfairly maligned minority.

[Cross-post at Bloc Raisonneur]