Jerry Coyne, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, disagrees with President Obama and others who’ve claimed that ISIS isn’t truly Islamic. Though many conservatives hold the same view as Coyne, in his case it derives from a broad anti-religion agenda that he expressed this past Saturday in an online New Republic piece headlined “If ISIS Is Not Islamic, then the Inquisition Was Not Catholic.”
Coyne declared in the piece that religions are “man-made” and that faith is “simply irrational.” Moreover, the headline -- a direct quotation from the article itself -- wasn’t the only instance of his lumping of Islamic and Catholic beliefs. Here’s another: “ISIS has an extreme and fundamentalist interpretation of Muslim doctrine. But in exactly the same way, dogma about the immorality of abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, and divorce have become part of Catholicism. They are theological interpretations of scripture that appeal to some people’s sense of morality.”
From Coyne’s piece (emphasis added):
As ISIS slaughters its way though Syria and Iraq, it became inevitable that we’d hear from apologists who claim that ISIS is not in fact “true Islam”…
These apologists, of course, which now include President Obama, are motivated by a desire to avoid criticizing religion at all costs…
…[H]ere’s what [Obama] said in response to the beheading of journalist James Foley:
ISIL speaks for no religion … and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day.
Well, the beheading did happen, meaning either that God is not just, or there is no God—a possibility that Obama clearly can’t mention. (We’ll ignore for the moment that both the Qur’an and the Bible do indeed teach people to massacre innocents.)…
…[I]f ISIS is not Islamic, then the Inquisition was not Catholic. The fact is that there are no defensible criteria for whether a faith is “true,” since all faiths are man-made and accrete doctrine—said to come from God, but itself man-made—that becomes integral to those faiths. Whatever “true faith” means, it doesn’t mean “the right religion: the one whose God exists and whose doctrines are correct.” If that were so, we wouldn’t see Westerners trying to tell us what “true Islam” is.
No, if “true” means anything, it must mean “true to some principles.” As far as I can see, there are only two such principles: true to scripture or true to some code of conduct that the writer approves. But these definitions often contradict each other, so no “true” religion can be specified...
You can cherry-pick the Qur’an as easily as you can the Bible, for both are filled with calls for violence and genocide…
Actually, what people like Obama…consider “true” faith is this: “faith that promotes the kind of behavior that I like.” So, as do all believers, the apologists pick and choose from scripture the dictates that they find congenial, ignoring the bad ones…
…ISIS has an extreme and fundamentalist interpretation of Muslim doctrine. But in exactly the same way, dogma about the immorality of abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, and divorce have become part of Catholicism. They are theological interpretations of scripture that appeal to some people’s sense of morality. Others disagree. Whose faith is “truer”?
In the end, there is no “true” religion in the factual sense, for there is no good evidence supporting their claims to truth. Nor are there “true” religions in the moral sense. Every faith justifies itself and its practices by appeal to authority, revelation, and dogma. There are just some religions we like better than others because of their practical consequences. If that’s what we mean by “true,” we should just admit it…
By all means let us say that ISIS is a strain of Islam that is barbaric and dysfunctional, but let us not hear any nonsense that it’s a “false religion.” ISIS, like all religious movements, is based on faith; and faith, which is belief in the absence of convincing evidence, isn’t true or false, but simply irrational.
