I don’t mind atheists – we all have a right to moral and intellectual aberrations. Such as eschewing revealed religion for a silly superstition based on neither revelation nor scientific evidence.
What’s less acceptable is people spouting hostile, militant nonsense at the top of their lungs, especially if they try to pass harangues for a serious argument.
This brings me to Philip Collins’s article Ignore the Slippery Critics of Assisted Dying. Obviously to Collins and other haters of religion, anyone unwilling to knock out every cornerstone of our civilisation only deserves pejorative designations, of which ‘slippery’ is one. Hence the title is par for the course.
As is the half-witted ‘philosophy’ Collins uses to justify his support for the cull of the crumblies. “Life is the capacity to realise certain capacities,” he writes, and it’s good to see that his style is in harmony with his crepuscular thinking.
Any sentence that starts with the words ‘life is…’ is suspect. Whatever follows is almost guaranteed to be gibberish. For example, one could say that life is a cucumber: today’s it’s in your hands, tomorrow up your rectum. Or else life is a hotel: we arrive, stay for a while and then check out.
However, these and a million other silly possibilities one could think of would still be preferable to what passes for the meat of Collins’s argument:
When a person no longer has the capacity to mobilise his capacities in realising the full range of certain capacities he would otherwise have the capacity of realising, doctors should kill him with his consent.
The rest is Collins’s attempt to couch his visceral hatred of religion in quasi-intellectual terms, and he lets his febrile emotions overrun his already modest intellectual ‘capacities’.
Thus he takes issue with Archbishop Welby’s objections to assisted suicide being merely “pastoral”, as opposed to “religious”. In the next sentence the confused reader realises that by pastoral Collins means secular, but then one doesn’t expect terminological precision from the likes of him.
One is almost led to believe that, had His Grace expressed his objections in more theological terms, Collins would jump up and salute. Yet considering that he lists God among “some implausible things”, it’s rather unlikely that a theological argument would sway Collins’s ideological hatred of the founding tenets of our civilisation.
One also gets the impression that Collins sees the line of demarcation between philosophy and theology as being sharper than it actually is. The bill to legalise assisted dying, he says, “should attract the support of philosophers just as it is drawing the opposition of theologians.”
Knowing something about the subject on which one pontificates is clearly no longer a professional requirement at The Times. If it were, his editors would have pointed out to Collins that an atheist philosopher is very close to being an oxymoron.
A real philosopher, whatever his immediate interests, can’t avoid asking himself ontological questions about the nature and origin of being, as distinct from existence. Such philosophical questions can only have two types of answers: theological or unsound.
For the theologian the existence of God is the beginning of the argument; for the philosopher, the end. But sooner or later they’ll always converge, at least partly.
The theologian will maintain that, outside of God, questions of being can be neither answered nor indeed asked. The philosopher will try to do both and will only agree with the theologian after many a futile attempt. But agree he will, out of professional integrity if nothing else.
A philosopher, even if he himself doesn’t espouse the Judaeo-Christian understanding of life and the attendant ethics, will know that in the West the only alternative to Judaeo-Christian morality isn’t some other morality. It’s none.
That’s why a philosopher will begrudgingly agree with the theologian that, when society sees a man as the sole sovereign of his life, such a society will start by endorsing suicide and will end up countenancing murder.
The eternal barrier to murder is the same as to suicide: the realisation that human life is sacred. Remove the barrier, and assisted suicide will become first advisable, then legal and then compulsory. The already tenuous difference between assisted suicide and murder will disappear.
Collins mocks “some mysteriously redemptive purpose for which suffering is a surrogate”. This purpose is only mysterious to ignoramuses like him. Even educated atheists know that redemptive suffering was the starting point of our civilisation – and treat it with the same reverential respect they feel for the civilisation.
Collins feels no such respect, partly because he knows little about our civilisation and its heritage, including rhetoric. Hence instead of a coherent argument he treats us to a soppy story about his father, whose suffering at the end of his life could have been prevented by a lethal injection.
“Unlike religion,” clamours Collins, pressing his atheist credentials, “[assisted suicide] will actually ease suffering.” Quite. So will murder. And the similarity between the two dwarfs the trivial differences.