Skip to content

Religion

Civil Partnership, Religion and the BNP

The government is making plans to lift the ban on gay partnership ceremonies in religious buildings. Among the first to apply to perform such ceremonies are expected to be Quakers, and Liberal Jews. However, it is apparently “not clear whether the proposals will suggest that civil ceremonies in religious surroundings could incorporate elements such as hymns or Bible readings”. What justification could there be for preventing the incorporation of such elements?

Read More »Civil Partnership, Religion and the BNP

On Forgiveness

by Charles L. Griswold

(This piece was originally published in “The Stone” series of the New York Times (on-line), on Dec. 26, 2010, and is also available here along with responses by readers.   Thanks to Roger Crisp for inviting me to post it here, and to the NYT for permission. Copyright held by the NYT.)

We are in a season traditionally devoted to good will among people and to the renewal of hope in the face of hard times.  As we seek to realize these lofty ideals, one of our greatest challenges is overcoming bitterness and divisiveness.  We all struggle with the wrongs others have done to us as well as those we have done to others, and we recoil at the vast extent of injury humankind seems determined to inflict on itself.  How to keep hope alive?  Without a constructive answer to toxic anger, addictive cycles of revenge, and immobilizing guilt, we seem doomed to despair about chances for renewal.  One answer to this despair lies in forgiveness.

Read More »On Forgiveness

Reframing Sacred Values and Making Political Compromises

Steve Clarke 

Scott Atran’s Talking to The Enemy (HarperCollins: New York, 2010) has recently been published. This is a big, sprawling and very readable book which has much that is important to say about religious behaviour and the role of religion in inspiring, and also in preventing, terrorism and conflict in general. I recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about religious conflict ‘on the ground’. One of the many intriguing issues that is discussed in the book is the issue of compromising over sacred values. When a religious group asserts that a particular city, or geographical feature which they control is sacred or holy, they are typically also asserting that they are not prepared to give up control of that site, regardless of the costs to them. And if they do not control it then they are prepared to do whatever is necessary to regain control of it, regardless of costs. The same can be said for possession of sacred artifacts and the right to practice sacred rituals.

 

Read More »Reframing Sacred Values and Making Political Compromises

Why god isn’t really a teapot.

by Lisa Furberg

Russell’s teapot is an analogy intended to refute the idea that the burden of proof lies upon the sceptic to disprove the existence of god. The argument roughly goes something like this: If I were to claim that there is a teapot revolving about the sun and then further suggest that because my claim cannot be disproved there is no reason to doubt it, then I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
In line with Russell’s analogy, some atheists have “invented” more things in which belief seems just as ridiculous as that in a an orbiting teapot: a flying spaghetti monster, an invisible pink unicorn -to mention a few. This kind of criticism, often coming from people who are self purportedly “scientifically minded” seem to use variants of the original analogy into an argument that seem to have little resemblance to Russell’s original one. This new argument has considerably more “bite” to it, suggesting that belief in god is something of an absolute “no-no”: If you are a rational person who believes in the methods of science, the critics seem to say, you simply ought not believe in the existence of god (or gods) any more than you should believe in an orbiting teapot. So, does a belief in god transgress any of the principles of (good) science?

Read More »Why god isn’t really a teapot.

Is the Rescue of the Chilean Miners a Miracle?

A number of clerics of various Christian denominations are claiming that the recent rescue of 33 Chilean miners was a miracle and, therefore, evidence in favour of the particular version of Christianity that they respectively represent. How are we to decide if this, or any other event is a miracle? The first issue to be cleared up is what we mean when we speak of miracles. Some talk of miracle is not meant to be taken literally. When enthusiastic cricket commentators reported that ‘Warne dismissed Gatting with a miracle ball’ they meant nothing more than that they were extremely impressed by a particular instance of Warne’s bowling. No religious connotations were intended. Other talk of miracles does involve religious connotations, however. Miracles are typically invoked in religious contexts as reasons to believe that God exists.

 

Read More »Is the Rescue of the Chilean Miners a Miracle?

Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”

This post is about the main argument of Sam Harris’s new book The Moral Landscape. Harris argues that there are objective truths about what’s morally right and wrong, and that science can in principle determine what they are, all by itself. As I’ll try to demonstrate here, Harris’s argument cannot succeed. I call the argument “scientistic” because those who take (a variation of) its first two premises to be obvious are led to exaggerate the importance of scientific measurement for determining what’s morally right, and correspondingly to underestimate the importance of moral reasoning and moral philosophy.

Read More »Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”

Religion and Virtue: The Pope’s Truncated Vision

The Pope arrived in Britain today, held out his “hand of friendship” and called on all the British people to remember:

Your forefathers’ respect for truth and justice, for mercy and charity come to you from a faith that remains a mighty force for good in your kingdom, to the great benefit of Christians and non-Christians alike.

So far, so respectable. Many (though by no means all) historical British leaders were of course Christians, and Christianity does teach respect for truth and justice, mercy and charity, in broad terms at least. (Some will disagree that the Pope’s faith teaches justice or respect for truth when it comes to contraception, HIV, gay rights, and women’s rights, and some may point out that historically this faith was neither particularly merciful nor just – but let us put these quibbles aside.) It is not unreasonable to think that historical Britons drew their morals from their faith, and that this benefitted us in the present day, even if it is debatable whether faith was or remains a “mighty force for good”.

My problem is with what the Pope then went on to say:

Read More »Religion and Virtue: The Pope’s Truncated Vision

Is it easy to debunk religious belief?

The rapid development of the cognitive science of religion over the last 20 years has led to a renewed enthusiasm for anti-religious debunking arguments. The typical form of these is that w thinks that she/he is motivated to believe the tenets of religion x because of y, but w’s real motive for believing the tenets of religion x is z, which is not sufficient to warrant acceptance of x; therefore w is unwarranted in accepting x. For example w may think that she/he has a sound argument for the claim that God probably exists and is motivated to believe in God in virtue of accepting this sound argument. But Pascal Boyer and others tell us that humans are predisposed to believe in the existence of supernatural beings (minimally counterintuitive agents) and are inclined to do so, on the basis of less evidence than they would ordinarily accept to warrant belief in an agent, therefore w is unwarranted in believing that God exists. 

Read More »Is it easy to debunk religious belief?

Religion, Tolerance and Intolerance Conference resources available online

The AHRC-Funded 'Science and Religious Conflict' Project team here at Oxford (www.src.ox.ac.uk) is pleased to announce that resources from our recent conference on 'Religion, Tolerance and Intolerance', held at Oxford  17-19 May are now available online at http://www.bep.ox.ac.uk/archive_events_data/religion_and_tolerance_conference_may_2010 This includes audio files of all talks, and several PowerPoint presentations.The audio files are also available as podcasts from… Read More »Religion, Tolerance and Intolerance Conference resources available online

Is “playing God” just a meaningless phrase?

In a
recent piece for Prospect magazine, Philip Ball denounces the “playing God” objection, often made
against some proposed uses of biotechnology, as a “meaningless, dangerous
cliché”. More specifically, Ball mentions the objection in relation to Craig
Venter’s creation – already discussed on this blog – of the first microorganism
with a wholly synthetic genome. Though many people from the press have raised
the “playing God” issue in their coverage of Venter’s achievement, “no one”,
Ball writes, “seems in the least concerned to enquire what this phrase means or
why it is being used”. 

Read More »Is “playing God” just a meaningless phrase?