Ignorance, Part III

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This is the final post in my series on Roger Scruton’s essay for Axess, “The Return of Religion.” In the essay, Scruton targets seasonal quarry: atheists who profess that religion persists as a way of explaining the world due to ignorance of the facts, an ignorance that stokes dangerous fanaticism.

In my first post, I concentrated on how Scruton picks his fight by provocatively accusing atheists of intellectual fraudulence. In my second post, I showed how Scruton effectively shifts the creation debate out of an empirical realm – one of scientific enlightenment versus religious ignorance – to an emotional realm of moribundity versus astonishment. Whether or not it is true, Scruton’s paradigm certainly feels better than the odiously knowable world of the atheists.

And so we have at length arrived at an opportune moment for Scruton to deliver what I take to be his most powerful point in the essay:

The evangelical atheists are subliminally aware that their abdication in the face of science does not make the universe more intelligible, nor does it provide an alternative answer to our metaphysical enquiries. It simply brings enquiry to a stop. And the religious person will feel that this stop is premature: that reason has more questions to ask, and perhaps more answers to obtain, than the atheists will allow us. So who, in this subliminal contest, is the truly reasonable one? The atheists beg the question in their own favour, by assuming that science has all the answers. But science can have all the answers only if it has all the questions; and that assumption is false. There are questions addressed to reason which are not addressed to science, since they are not asking for a causal explanation.

Sure, there are problems in this passage. For one thing, it’s not clear where the boundaries are between “reason,” “atheism” and “science.” Scruton oddly pits the first against the second, and misleadingly uses the latter two interchangeably. Also, notice that Scruton is ironically charging science with the same obnoxious qualities of which religion is often itself accused – shutting down inquiry, hogging more than its fair share of big questions, protecting dogma rather than accepting fresh points of view.

In spite of these deficits, Scruton has successfully brought our attention to the issue of how questions ought to be framed, and this has probably been persuasive to both the philosophical professional and the lay reader, because it is precisely on this epistemological score that his interlocutors lack sophisticated replies. Scruton is asking why it is that scientists deserve to believe that there are scientific answers to all questions; this is a problem for which science does not have an internally-generated answer.

But if Scruton is going to be really successful, he is going to have to find a case study, something that shows a big question to which the scientists do not deserve the proprietary rights that they assert. Scruton thinks he’s got one, and its a humdinger:

One of these is the question of consciousness. This strange universe of black holes and time warps, of event horizons and non-localities, somehow becomes conscious of itself. And it becomes conscious of itself in us. This fact conditions the very structure of science [...]The great tapestry of waves and particles, of fields and forces, of matter and energy, is pinned down only at the edges, where events are crystallised in the observing mind.

Consciousness [...] is the route by which anything at all becomes familiar. But this is what makes consciousness so hard to pinpoint. Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects – a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them. Trying to grasp it is like trying to observe your own observing, as though you were to look with your own eyes at your own eyes without using a mirror. Not surprisingly, therefore, the thought of consciousness gives rise to peculiar metaphysical anxieties, which we try to allay with images of the soul, the mind, the self, the ‘subject of consciousness’, the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside. But these traditional ‘solutions’ merely duplicate the problem. We cast no light on the consciousness of a human being simply by re-describing it as the consciousness of some inner homunculus – be it a soul, a mind or a self. On the contrary, by placing that homunculus in some private, inaccessible and possibly immaterial realm, we merely compound the mystery.

It is this mystery which brings people back to religion …

It should be clear how important it was to take away the knowledge-ignorance axis earlier on in the essay, and to replace it with wonder-mystery stuff. Notice that Scruton is not actually presenting any proof that consciousness is beyond the ken of science to explain. Does neuroscience “merely reduplicate the problem” and “cast no light on the consciousness of a human being?” We don’t know, because Scruton has not given us a definition of what he means by “consciousness. ” As a result he has trapped us in a tautology, and merely proven that an undefined thing called consciousness is terribly undefined.

And both the prosodic quality and argumentative soundness only goes downhill from here.

We have humorless cliche’s:

Modern people are drawn to religion by their consciousness of consciousness, by their awareness of a light shining in the centre of their being.

There are confusing extended metaphors:

People continue to look for the places where they can stand, as it were, at the window of our empirical world and gaze out towards the transcendental – the places from which breezes from that other sphere waft over them. Not so long ago, God was in residence. You could open a door and discover him, and join with those who sang and prayed in his presence. Now he, like us, has no fixed abode. But from this experience a new kind of religious consciousness is being born: a turning of the inner eye towards the transcendental and a constant invocation of ‘we know not what’.

And, at last, Scruton returns to his favorite sport, insulting atheists and presumptuously diagnosing the psychological illnesses that must lie behind their reluctance to agree with him:

We are distressed by the evangelical atheists, who are stamping on the coffin in which they imagine God’s corpse to lie and telling us to bury it quickly before it begins to smell. These characters have a violent and untidy air: it is very obvious that something is missing from their lives, something which would bring order and completeness in the place of random disgust. And yet we are uncertain how to answer them. Nowhere in our world is the door that we might open, so as to stand again in the breath of God.

Again, with the doors and the breath.

Finally, the biggest downturn in the second half of this essay is the fact that Scruton abandons his careful argumentation for simple assertions of fact.

Yet human beings have an innate need to conceptualise their world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane. This need is rooted in self-consciousness and in the experiences that remind us of our shared and momentous destiny as members of Kant’s ‘Kingdom of Ends’. Those experiences are the root of human as opposed to merely animal society, and we need to affirm them, self-knowingly to possess them, if we are to be at ease with our kind. Religions satisfy this need.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with making declarations – it’s a way to be forthright with your reader and get peripheral questions out of the way. The trouble is that Scruton led us to believe that he was doing something more. Throughout this entire essay, he has intelligently exposed epistemological problems that atheists have rarely been successful at solving. But none of that has been necessary if all he wanted to do is tell us profound truths that he holds to be self-evident. That’s why it is best to assert facts at the outset of an essay, before you get into your argument. At the end of the essay, many readers expect a conclusion that arises from the preceding discussion, but while Scruton’s sentences are thematically linked to his foregoing paper, they are logically decoupled from the claims that have been made thus far. It’s a little like Scruton has prepared a five course meal, then left it steaming on the counter and ordered Chinese.

Paragraph after paragraph, he dismantled the atheists and raised questions as if he was going to tell us why religion should return. As it turns out, he has done so just to say that religion should return, as if it was his job to inform us of the state of the world of which he imagines us to be unaware. It’s not just the assertion that’s the problem, it’s the patronizing self-designation of superior knowledge that is prior to it.

Although this is bad news for Scruton’s rhetorical enterprise, it tells us something important about debates fastened to the science v. religion conflict. It seems that claimants in this fray are liable to misidentify arguments for statements, conclusions for beliefs. As a result, the dispute can turn into a scene of simultaneous monologues rather than a true debate, a situation in which readers are condescended to and underestimated.  This actually handicaps both evangelical atheists and evangelists. By ignoring the most basic characteristics of their claims, these writers both create frustration and suffer from it inordinately.

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Filed under Language, Teaching

Tags: Atheism, Consciousness, Humdingers, Inner Homunculi, Religion, Roger Scruton