Of babies and bathwater, Part II
God is like the shepherd seeking the sheep, He is like the woman seeking the coin, and He is like the father seeking the son.
— from some websiteGod is love. Love is blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.
— Immanuel KantAtheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
— James Randi, or someone else
How we do love analogies, especially when they get us where we wanted to go anyway. But we’re often so blinded by the cleverness or beauty — or by its confirmation of our opinions — that we forget to wonder whether a given analogy makes a lick of sense.
Is life really helpfully analogous to a box of chocolates? Is love really like oxygen? or a heatwave? or a red, red rose? Does a given analogy actually shed light on its subject, helping us to understand it better — like Sagan’s Calendar — or does it obscure, by doing an amazing impersonation of reason without actually bothering to be reasonable?
Once in a while, poor analogies cross over from merely lame to destructively seductive. Not invading Iraq would be just like appeasing Hitler. Ooh, wouldn’t want to do that again.
If you let gays marry, people will start marrying their appliances. Yikes. I don’t even support civil unions between humans and toaster-ovens. I’m sorry, some things are just wrong. Thanks for the tip.
Destructively seductive in a different but no less insidous way is theologian William Paley’s “watchmaker” analogy, offered in 1802 as proof of the existence of God. If you look at a watch, goes the, uh, reasoning, you can easily tell that it was designed and created by a watchmaker. Similarly, if you look at a given natural phenomenon, you can easily tell that it was made by an intelligent designer.
For five full seconds, this analogy has the force of an inspired illumination of fact. It’s in the sixth and seventh seconds, thanks to Darwin, that it begins to fall apart. Fortunately for “Intelligent Design,” six continuous seconds of thinking is a lot to ask of monkeys.
I forgive Paley for his bad analogy. I’m sure I too would have nodded vigorously in 1802, fully 57 years before Darwin issued his resounding nuh-uhhhh. Less forgivable are those who, having failed to notice advances in knowledge since 1802, continue propagating this vacuous meme today under the banner of “intelligent design.” The analogy, it turns out, is a bad one. It illuminates nothing but the wishes of some that it actually accomplish what it sets out to do.
The stamp collecting analogy, on the other hand — ZING! — actually captures something worth thinking about. I would say that though, wouldn’t I.
There’s one bad analogy that got me started on this tangent, one I hear too often when I’m offering this or that critique of religious belief or practice. I’ve even developed the ability to see it coming, to see it making its way from the neocortex of my conversational partner, through Broca’s area, down to the larynx and up the pie-shaft. As I finish whatever I’m droning on about, I can see it balanced eagerly on the tip of the other person’s tongue, like a diver standing with toes curled over the edge of an analogy.
And then, at last, the moment we’ve been waiting for.
Well, s/he will intone, one must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Before I continue, let me make clear my sober opposition to throwing babies out with bathwater.
This useful phrase first popped up in a 1512 satire by a German monk named Thomas Murner. To “throw the baby out with the bath water” (or “Das kind mit dem badwasser schitten,” as Murner put it, for some reason) is to rid one’s self of a bad thing while destroying in the process whatever good there was as well.
I stare first at the diving board protruding from my friend’s face, still juddering, then at the surface of our conversation, still rippling from the impact of the analogy (which had rudely pulled its knees up into a cannonball just before entering the water). I am abashed. That poor baby. How could I even have considered doing so wretched a thing?
It always takes me a moment to realize that I hadn’t.
The baby, in the current analogy, is all that is good and noble and life-affirming in religion, like frequent instructions to not kill or lie or hate. The bathwater is all that is ignoble and life-destroying in religion — like frequent instructions to kill and lie and hate. My conversational partner rarely offers a middle path, because religious sytems lack procedures for compromise. Real change is accomplished only by calving off denominations (which is why the current estimate of Christian denominations on Earth is 33,000). Within a given church, it is silently implied that one must take the bad with the good, all or nothing, or risk losing the good entirely.
Hogwash.
There is something between throwing out the baby and letting it marinate endlessly in the cold and filthy water. My intention is to do what any parent does: discern which is the baby and which the bathwater, then lift the baby gently from the water, dry her off, dress her in warm jimmies, feed her, nuzzle her, and sing her to sleep.
My single greatest complaint with religion is not that it contains both good and bad, but that it has no procedure for separating one from the other. My highest praise for science is not that it is devoid of bad consequences but that it comes complete with ways to discern, that it is founded on a method for separating wheat from chaff — that it tries, however haltingly and imperfectly, to perfect itself.
The next time someone invokes babies and bathwater, stop the conversation, define the baby — and reach for a clean, dry towel.
(No babies were harmed in the writing of this blog.)