In the two days since my post on the topic of Siegel’s prejudiced essay, more (plenty more) has been said. So, i’m going to try and keep this brief and just touch on one thing that i feel hasn’t been said; which is excruciatingly difficult, every single sentence that tries to contain a fact is wrong! There is so much in his critique of imagination that is stupid and insulting that i almost don’t know where to begin. So i’ll start at the beginning :
In their contempt for any belief that cannot be scientifically or empirically proved, the anti-God books are attacking our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves.
No. Hasn’t he ever heard of existentialism? It’s been pretty big for over a century, and one of its core contributions to human self-understanding is the idea that all meaning is created by us, individually as parts of a collective whole. Take god out of the picture and all of a sudden meaning is not some thing thrust upon us by an angry father-figure, it is something we create for ourselves. It’s specifically ironic that he phrases it the way he does: it’s not that we “are attacking our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves”, we’re showing that it has always been us making value and meaning, and that if we would just recognize that fact then maye we could make progress towards people leading lives filled with meaning and happiness, instead of fear and anger.
…When our anti-religionists attack the mechanism of religious faith by demanding that our beliefs be underpinned by science, statistics and cold logic, they are, in effect, attacking our right to believe in unseen, unprovable things at all. Their assault on religious faith amounts to an attack on the human imagination. For the imagination is what embodies concepts, ideas and values that cannot be scientifically verified and that have no practical usefulness. Because the existence of God is undemonstrable, unverifiable and the object of an impractical leap of faith, religion, it seems to me, is one of imagination’s last strongholds.
Once again this is just wrong. First of all the only thing that we’re attacking is your right to lie to (through ID creationism etc.) or kill (through holy wars fought by our army) our children. And second of all imagination is the single most important attribute in the modern world. Information technology has de-valued mindless labor while increasing the wealth that imaginative people can accrue. And science is just pure imagination:
Imagination is not that which “embodies concepts, ideas and values that cannot be scientifically verified and that have no practical usefulness,” it is the human capacity for exploring the unknown and the desire for a better world. It is our ability to think of anything that has not been thought before. It is our ability to use words to represent thoughts and things. It is not our ability to believe things that are not true. To suggest that attacking the truth of bronze age myths is an attack on one of the most fundamental human faculties is insulting and idiotic.
…The more difficult it is to believe, the stronger the faith that flies in the face of absurdity. Your willingness to stake your life on the possibility of an impossibility makes a fact out of a fantasy.
That’s just stupid. Jumping off a cliff believing that pegasus will save me won’t make him save me.
You don’t have to be a religious person to cherish the idea of faith in the absurd. When artists have an unverifiable, unprovable inspiration, and then seek to convey it in words or images, they take a leap of faith every bit as vertiginous as that of the religious person.
No, they don’t. They–taking a simple view of art for the purpose of this conversation–try to express an underlying truth or experience. They hope you understand what they’re trying to say, and they try to say it as well as they can. There is no faith involved. This is as stupid as saying “when [speakers] have an unverifieable, unproven [thought], and then seek to convey it in words…, they take a leap of faith every bit as vertiginous as that of the religious person.”
…After all, you cannot prove the existence of truth, beauty, goodness and decency; you cannot prove the dignity of being human, or your obligation to treat people as ends and not just as means. You take a gamble on the existence of these inestimable things. For that reason, when you lay scientific, logical and empirical siege to the leap of faith at the core of the religious impulse, you are not just attacking faith in God. You are attacking the act of faith itself, faith in anything that can’t be proved. But it just so happens that the qualities that make life rich, joyful and humane cannot be proved.
You only need to prove controversial things, everything obvious is taken as true unless it is disproved. How silly would i sound if i tried to prove the existence of a rock? If i tried to prove that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line? If i tried to prove that humans have, or at least want to have, dignity? These things all had to be said, and proofs have been attempted, but in the end all these things are just fundamental parts of reality and proofs of them are just matters of ostension. And their nature as part of reality and not some superphysical spirit-layer is what makes rational people see them, and what makes it so easy for religious fundamentalists to ignore them in favor of their non-physical beliefs. If you don’t believe in anything except reality then there is no way of getting out of the fact that people have dignity without being a lier or a hypocrite. But if your entire worldview is based on deluding yourself it is easy to convince yourself that your opponents are joyless, inhumane, and undignified.
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