[SL: G is a lurker and occasional commenter on this blog who describes himself as an 'amateur theologian'. I'm not sure what he means by that, because he seems pretty knowledgeable to me. His home blog is here.
In this piece, he turns his mind to Richard Dawkins's popular piece of God-bashing, The God Delusion. For those who found Terry Eagleton's review of this book a mite bitchy (there's interesting discussion at LP here and at Troppo here on this issue), G makes some of the points that Eagleton made, but without the pomposity and arrogance, and from a genuine believer's perspective, not from the perspective of a Marxist moonlighting as a believer.
When I finally got around to reading Dawkins' book, I do remember being shocked at his assertion that there have never been mass killings in the name of atheism. Of course, the argument that Hitler was an atheist has always been silly, but Stalin clearly was, and much of the persecution visited upon the churches and their adherents in the old Soviet Union was given real animus by atheism. I'm an atheist and skeptic, but I really don't like the thought of atheists sweeping their ugly bits under the rug.
G's focus isn't empirical, though, but philosophical. Enjoy].
The book aims to put the ‘scientific’ boot into ‘religion’. In this respect, its author knows he is doing nothing new. Since the 1800s, popular works have been written which have described how ‘science’ should render ‘religious’ beliefs and practices obsolete. Dawkins is in some ways a sophisticated contributor to this discourse – though this can be explained for the most part in terms of the competence of his rhetorical sleights of hand, whether intentional or not – and in a number of ways disappointing.
For a start, his thesis is not that science ‘disproves’ religion. That would be – according to his own criteria of judgement – something he could only show by publishing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal evidence to that effect. And Dawkins does not claim to possess such evidence. So, the author is careful throughout to avoid using scientific jargon to describe the project he’s engaged in. Herein lies the book’s rhetorical sophistication. It presents itself as the argument of a scientistic rationalist. But it does not attempt to root its assertions concerning the non-existence of God (it is 99.99% that he does not exist, we are told) in scientific proofs.
That leads to an interesting fact about the book. You’re not reading science; you’re reading philosophy (and, dare I say it, theology). Dawkins knows these aren’t his fields. He’s curiously damning about one of them (‘theology’) and doesn’t really mention the other (‘philosophy’). This is an important fact I’ve discussed elsewhere. Interestingly, all of the God Delusion’s ‘philosophers’ are atheists or agnostics, whereas all of its ‘theologians’ are theists. This rhetorical tactic of separating people into ‘philosophers’ and ‘non-philosophers’ on the basis of their belief in God is hardly charitable. Especially when you consider how many of the greatest ‘philosophers’ the world’s ever seen have been theists: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and, amongst modern day philosophers, e.g. Plantinga. The failure to explore the relationship between philosophy and theism in the book is baffling.
Now it’s true that there are lots of atheistic philosophers too. Everyone knows about Bertrand Russell and David Hume. But the God question didn’t just disappear when their arguments appeared – at least, not in the minds of very many of the world’s best philosophers. Is this important fact considered by Dawkins?
No, not really … he’s more interested in pursuing the unsophisticated arguments of unsophisticated theists (his highly questionable claim to have refuted the cosmological and ontological arguments for the existence of God apart). And that, for most people (including perhaps himself) will be satisfactory. Fundamentalist believers make easy targets for many people, and it hardly takes an Oxford professor to take a swipe at them for most people to believe they’re pretty nuts. What you might expect from an Oxford professor, though, is a little more respect for and awareness of the nature and history of philosophical argumentation, especially if that’s what he’s engaging in.
Many very eminent scientists are theists – contrary to what Dawkins implies in his book – and he doesn’t confront in the God Delusion the kinds of ideas they might seek to offer in opposition to his. Check out John Barrow, John Polkinghorne, Freeman Dyson or Arthur Peacocke. And as for the philosophers, you’ll hardly hear a peep from Dawkins about Plato, Hume, Aquinas or Kant. And that seems rather a shame, because these are the guys many of the philosophical academy would turn to if they want to get serious about the history of theism and philosophical arguments for or against it.
Philosophy, however, can’t and doesn’t work like science. Atheism and ‘Reason’ won’t be true bedfellows until it can. And it’s worth emphasising that very many philosophers – including very many atheists – see no reason to believe the harmonisation of ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ will ever happen. But why?
Philosophical ideas constitute ‘evidence’ (one of Dawkins’ favourite words) of a very peculiar kind. It’s not easy to twist them into irrefutable proofs about the external world, as centuries of logicians have found out (often to their dismay). Words and ideas are very tricky customers. It’s very difficult to know what they can and can’t tell us about what’s true, what’s real. How good a job can they do? To take a simple example: if there were a God (and how would we know for sure that he was there?), how much could words and arguments do to describe ‘him’ and how much would it be beyond their power to describe? Any answer to such a question relies on the individual insights of the person who answers. If a person makes the decision beforehand that ‘God’ cannot possibly be describable in language, then it’s no surprise if the person doesn’t end up believing in a God knowable only through words and arguments. If, on the other hand, one begins with the premise that a certain combination of words and arguments could ‘prove’ God’s existence or character, then investigation into the presence of such a God could proceed. But the ground rules have to be established. That’s what Dawkins (writing in his new role as a philosopher) fails to understand and it’s one reason why his academic reviewers have been so unimpressed by his book.
Consider the following: someone decides that ‘God’ must be the character described with complete accuracy in the pages of the Bible OR just a big fantasy. You choose either one or the other, if those are the only options, don’t you…But should these be the only two options? For centuries, Christians (and Jews) have opposed simple minded interpretations of the Bible and have fully admitted that it’s riddled with problematic statements and self contradictory claims. It doesn’t stop them believing in God. God is more than the Bible. The Bible is first and foremost an important historical record. Only once it is interpreted as history can it be used for the purposes of philosophy or theology. But these sensible, considered positions aren’t addressed by modern anti-religion polemicists such as Dawkins. And the failure to address them makes the God Delusion inadequate as a work of philosophy. And since it is not ‘science’ either, what is it?
Well, it’s certainly a crowd pleaser. Witness the statements of applause in the dustjacket of the book. But is ‘truth’ being conveyed to the crowd in a ‘reasonable’ way which handles the ‘evidence’ fairly? Hardly. If it were, the book would be in a top scientific journal. Whole areas of philosophy would have become no-go areas. The great religious institutions (all of which pay attention to the findings of science, at least in their modern incarnations, despite Dawkins’ suspicions) would have closed down. And yet none of this has happened.
The best conclusion to draw is that the God Delusion fails in its most basic ambitions – to show that all ideas of ‘God’ should be considered as species of ‘delusion’ – but nevertheless succeeds as an entertaining but extended rant, whose chief value is in undermining naive kinds of theism (the kinds, the author insists, which persist amongst almost all ‘religious’ people). For those who continue to seek God, however, the ‘God Delusion’ will not offer an insurmountable barrier. Dawkins himself sees the attractions of Jesus. ‘Atheists for Jesus’, he advocates. Well, if Jesus was God or the son of God (whatever we take these words to mean), he’s clearly not far away from ‘getting God’ after all. His real truck is with unthinking, dishonest fundamentalism. This is something he has in common with many of the world’s most religious people. The real ‘delusion’ is that of the insufficiently thoughtful.
86 Comments
Besides the famous ‘black swans’ my favourite is a Douglas Adams classic…
“It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination.”
DeusExMacintosh,
Not all infinites are equivalent. For instance whilst there are an infinite number of cardinal numbers, an infinite number of rational numbers and an infinite number of real numbers it can be shown that whilst the number of cardinal numbers is equal to the number of rational numbers there is in fact a greater number of real numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncountable_set
As such there are some serious pitfalls in making deductive statements along the lines that Douglas Adams does.
Having said that I love the way Adams forces us to think whilst being entertaining.
I didn’t read “The God Delusion” as a super serious piece of theology. However I thought it made some useful points about not giving religious people an easy time merely out of respect for religion. In any argument religion should pay its way.
Ooo, maths. Careful Terje or I’ll explain why 42 is the meaning of life…
What Dawkins doesn’t understand and Eagleton does is that underlying or implicit in all kinds of religion, particularly the religion of direct experience of the spiritual, is the subjective condition necessary for active radical will which can be used for good or ill. There are plenty of examples of its effective use in politics, from fascism to nationalism to communism. But if the spiritual impulse merely replicates domination, hierarchy, exploitation, it is bogus, a pseudospirituality, because it is fuelled by the egoic impulse to splitting which is counter to what spirit knows or feels or desires to transcend in the first place.
However if spirit, as experienced on an individual level, is necessarily a transcending of ego and a consciouness of something greater and larger than self to which it is connected, then it must be potentially an essential element of emancipatory politics, a politics based on a sense of unity with the world, a desire to alleviate suffering in others, social solidarity, justice, non-violence, love. Spirit cannot be subsumed into any existing system of domination, rather it seeks to transcend dominance.
Hence the superlative Marxist Terry Eagleton’s interest in and defence of an integral component of all religions.
G, very nice review. I liked it.
Posey, I’ve always enjoyed reading Eagleton’s stuff.
As I’ve said in another post, I don’t have a problem with religion generally, as long as it doesn’t prevent people from questioning why things are.
Religion gives those with an inflexible mind a schedule to which they can adhere, but I wonder whether religion is to blame. I suspect that if they didn’t have religion, they’d find some other doctrine to which they had to adhere (political or otherwise). I am reminded of a friend who was brought up in a very strict religious household. He rejected his upbringing, but kept seeking substitutes. At one point he was an evangelical scuba diver, and tried to convince me to become a scuba diver too. I think he was just evangelical in general, regardless of religion.
Dawkins comes mighty close to being a fundamentalist atheist – his prejudice limits his view. Therefore, I really can’t be comfortable with his arguments. (Caveat: I haven’t read the book, but I have watched a bit of his series, and read all the reviews of the book).
I quite like Eagleton’s description in his “The Meaning of LIfe” of “religious fundamentalism [as being] the neurotic anxiety that without a Meaning of meanings, there is no meaning at all. It is simply the flip side of nihilism. Underlying this assumption is the house-of-cards view of life: flick away the one at the bottom and the whole fragile structure comes fluttering down. Someone who thinks this way is simply the prisoner of a metaphor.”
G wrote:
Ain’t that the truth. And to compound matters we are privy to three worlds that inform our views: the world of abstractions and concepts, the world of immediate experience and observation and the world of spiritual insight. How to bring these together in expository language is the difficult bit. Everyone is capable of a mystical experience whether they recognise or define it as such or not. But how to describe that experience? It would take a language that allows us to describe this personal experience in terms of philosophical concepts, biochemistry and theology – three different universes of discourse.
I’ve sorted out the comment, Posey, so it should read correctly now. I’d also ask for a bit of patience before G gets a chance to comment — he’s on the other side of the planet and unlike me actually keeps relatively normal hours
Thanks SL. I really liked G’s piece and his blog in general. And, courtesy of your intro and links, I’ve now caught up with past Oz blog discussions of this.
Interesting post G. But I disagree in some respects. Firstly:
Dawkins knows these aren’t his fields.
They’re everyone’s fields. And his targetting of fundamentalists is not simply a matter of picking easy targets. The book is a public polemic not a scholarly work. He’s partaking of a war in the general culture. On the other side are ‘fundamerntalists’ amongst whom I include Ann Coulter, who I suspect is deploying the lawyer’s art in furtherance of an argument in order to accomplish an non-explicit goal: that is the continued erosion of quality public education.
I have a certain frustration with Dawkins and other anti-theists because they fail to realize that religion gives meaning to lives that have no other source of them.
As Khalil Gibran wrote: Faith is an oasis in the heart that cannot be reached by the caravan of thought.
But religion is also a means to power. One aspect of the use of that power is to impede the teaching of Darwin in schools thus retarding the field that Dawkins is qualified in. And the sheer intensity of nasty flak that he’s received goes a long way to explaining his equally hostile position.
Well perhaps but the God question did fade somewhat after Hume did it not?
If you look over the history of religion, as I do, not from the perspective of theology but of history, archaeology and paleo-anthropology an obvious pattern emerges.
The economic and ecological circumstances in which humans are located will determine their theology. For example consider that ancient Egyptians did not have a storm god until the trade system reached the northern Europeans. The northern Europeans did have a storm god of course and eventually he made his way down the Rhein, the Danube and finally the Nile.
By this time there’d already been at least one religious revolution, that of the shift from Earth Gods to Sky Gods. And then after humans had acquired enough knowledge and sophistication to realize that sacrificing goats to Aries was a lot less important than strategy, weapons technology, training and supply to winning wars; that how snakes reacted to a teenage girl on some Spirng morning had nothing to do with a good harvest, after this, the Sky Gods began to become more literary and less literal.
And then came monotheism. One God, behind the whole lot. Literal again and clearly inhibiting scientific progress. For example there’s a 1500 year gap in European astronomical discoveries. Between the 4th and the 15th centuries Europeans stopped studying the sky scientifically. Wonder why?
Monotheism made sense – then. But since Copernicus, since Darwin, since Hubble we realize that the notion that planet Earth is the mortal battleground between God and his former favourite protege and that all of us are embroiled in this conflict, well, let’s just say it makes good literature. If there’s a God S/he’s a lot bigger than we thought.
Still: Faith is an oasis in the heart that cannot be reached by the Caravan of Thought.
One thing that strikes me about atheists is that they’re usually pretty happy in their lives. Life is fulfilling. It’s a little harder to do without God if your life consists of abattoir work, alcoholism, a shitty caravan for a house and worse food.
And as Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out: God is unfalsifiable. You can’t prove the existence or otherwise of God and Khalil Gibran would say that if you try you’re missing the point. Still religion is a means of control. The control of thought most important of all. It’s also a good way to acquire money and power. I suspect also that many fanatical adherents of religion have no actual oasis in their hearts; that they go about forcing their rigid views on others because they’re actually insecure in their own beliefs.
This is a generalisation that doesn’t describe all believers. And as Skeptic’s pointed out atheists are capable of deploying very similar systems of control and persecution. In fact Atheists do it better. Isabella and Ferdinand, John Calvin, Elazar ben Ya’ir all had to answer to a higher authority. Stalin had no such.
I suspect given global interconnection, the revolutions in science, better techniques for the management of sexuality and fertility and explosions of knowledge in addition to human nature we’ll probably see another watershed in theological history. Hopefully this time it will led by someone a little less intolerant than Paul of Tarsus.
Or perhaps not led at all.
Excellent observation. I think the reason that Nietzsche called JS MIll a flathead was that Mill couldn’t see that the presumptions of humanist ideologies like liberalism were firmly grounded in certain Christian truisms and that when these latter go so does the former – potentially.
Or, as in Germany and Russia actually. Nietzsche saw it coming.
Still experience of actual religious practice leads me to be very skeptical about buying the idea that it makes us better. I’d like to see an objective and extensive study into the sociology of religion with certain new notions from neurobiology applied. Some of the coldest, nastiest people I’ve met were pious theists. As Robert Graves catalogued: Virtuous but with a heart of stone.
I’d rather be like Herod Agrippa: A scoundrel with a heart of gold.
(1) DEM@4 on “42″ and Meaning of Life.
(a) 6×9=42 is correct in base 13.
(b) Superstition considers 13 incredibly unlucky.
ergo (c) life’s a bitch.
On the general position of the post (which is thoughtful and well worth contemplation by atheists):
(2) Thanks for recognizing atheism as a theological position. It is a assertion about the nature (the null nature) of deity. Therefore atheists should receive all the benefits under regulations (including tax) that organizations making other assertions about the nature of deity.
(3) I’ve got a detailed discussion about Dawkins’ flawed approach (from my atheist position and empiricism about the social outcomes of religious types, the fundies v progressive) in Dawkins v God 1 (which is how he should have approached the “Rowan Williams” types) and Dawkins v God 2 (which shows how he should have highlighted the hypocrisy of the fundies). I’d be very interested in G’s thoughts, and while those articles are directly related to this post, I won’t hog this thread.
(4) G makes the assertion that the Xtian bible is an important historical record. I agree that it is important, but about as useful to determining a sequence of events as Homer. The core phenomenal and verifiable statement about Easter (“darkness covered the Earth”) bit is countered (I was careful and didn’t say contradicted) by the lack of any support from astronomical and meteorological observations that would be expected across the Roman Empire, particularly in nearby Alexandria. That raises questions on absence of evidence and proof that are easier to grapple with than the wider problem.
(5) If you want to highlight the problems of authenticity of texts (not just interpretation), the translation of the bible into LoLcat is a apposite giggle.
(6) The best attacks on theological positions use theological premises and demonstrate internal inconsistency. Again, I’ve got an example so as not to hog a thread here, on which I’d think G’s response would be valuable.
Forget about neurobiology, only arm wavers can go there on this subject. That’s too harsh but we need to be very careful about the results of Persinger etc. We still do not have a clue about what brains do, and thanks to Dawkins a great many people have very stupid ideas about how genes work. It is odd that his Selfish Gene and Delusion both demonstrate an absolutism that he rails against. Dawkins enjoys being a prophet and that is a dangerous quality in a scientist. Perhaps he should have read “The Undiscovered Self” by CJ Jung.
Human Nature being what it is Dennett’s much more balanced text, “Breaking the Spell”, has been almost completely ignored.
Dawkins still suffers from the delusion that human beings have little logic machines in their heads and religion short circuits this. Dawkins’ Delusion is that he believes Science is sufficient for understanding and enjoying life. If Mr. Dawkins believes that rationality and science are sufficient then he has my deepest sympathy. What he will not admit is that most of our life is regulated by cognition and behavior that has no origins in science. It is amazing that culture works at all.
These irrational religious people live longer, are generally happier, are more productive, have stronger social ties, and in Western cultures at least religious people are generally nice to have around. There are distinct benefits that can be approached by some simple ideas about human behavior. For example, pain can be alleviated in Catholics by viewing the Virgin Mary icon but this won’t happen in non-Catholics. Religion may be an opiate for the masses but so is Mammon and Status. If it makes you happy it can’t be that bad.
Long ago I recall an interview with the Australian historian Manning Clark. He was asked if he believed in life after death. He was an atheist. He replied to the effect that No but there was still this faint small hope. Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops.” With religion we can have our cake and eat it too: we can live beyond Death and have meaning in this life.
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OK I’m sorry it’s Sunday arvo with clearing showers a nice day to relax. My old friend HR Puffin Stuff rolled up and I forget where this leading …. .
Well it can add an extra disincentive to negative behaviours. You can be a thief if you want, but if you believe that God is watching everything you do and that you will be held spiritually accountable at some stage, it’s discouraging. Non-deists like Buddhists put it slightly differently – you do bad things and karma comes round to bite you on the ass.
Most of the negative behaviours I’ve seen associated with organised religion tend to be based on its use as an ‘in-group’ vs ‘out-group’ defining term, where the ‘out-group’ isn’t considered deserving of equal treatment and discrimination or other mistreatment is thus sanctioned. That kind of sociological dynamic is just as likely to emerge based on nation (National Socialism), class (Communism), race (Armenia) or tribe (Rwanda) so I think religion often gets a bum rap for something that’s not actually its fault.
DEM@16: said “You can be a thief if you want, but if you believe that God is watching everything”
Loopholes: Deathbed confession, “born again”, or, perhaps the most stylish, deathbed baptism of Constantine 1 when he knew he didn’t have the time to kill anyone else.
Thank you all for your thoughtful comments and thank you skepticlawyer for posting up my ramblings! I’ve read with interest what’s been written so far and I’ve been heartened that so many interesting issues have been raised. I’ll try to respond to each poster in something like a satisfactory way but I’ll have to organise my post in a list-like format, since I do not have the competence required to use the very elegant quotation boxes some other posts have worked out how to use! Thank you all again!
1. DeusExMacintosh re: post 16
I fully agree with your point about the problematic tendency of religious groups to use an ‘‘in-group’ vs ‘out-group’ defining term, where the ‘out-group’ isn’t considered deserving of equal treatment and discrimination or other mistreatment is thus sanctioned’. I also agree to some extent that ‘religion often gets a bum rap for something that’s not actually its fault’. I’d want to press you further here, though, viz. what you mean by ‘religion’ and what you think constitutes a criterion of blameworthiness (‘not actually its fault’). Christians are told to ‘love their enemies’. Surely they are in a sense blameworthy when they don’t do this very well (or at all), as is the corporate group (or, if you like, ‘religion’) which they purport to adhere to?
2. TerjeP: ‘However I thought it made some useful points about not giving religious people an easy time merely out of respect for religion. In any argument religion should pay its way’.
I agree with you with one significant qualification. A key problem is that we’re often not in fact very good (whether we care to admit it or not) at evaluating – or for that matter, stating – arguments with one another. This should lead us to be wary that even if the person we’re arguing with is not very good at stating their case, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re standing for a bad cause. Some of us just aren’t capable of expressing ourselves very well. I wouldn’t want to see people of low iq (or with no educational qualifications) excluded from my church on the basis that they hadn’t read much or that they couldn’t argue very well. It’s necessary to set persons against the background of the personal and institutional affiliations they have and against the background of the lifestyles they lead. To evaluate their statements about God/faith in isolation from these is to miss what is in my opinion an important fact: that moral utterances are only ever likely to be misunderstood or misportrayed when considered in very narrow perspective. Another small point that perhaps I should have mentioned in my review: how helpful/potentially misleading is ‘religion’ as a descriptive term? On one level, we know that ‘religions’ do indeed receive tax breaks and such (though this tends to be defensible practice insofar as they give back a great deal to local communities); on another, and it’s something which sociologists of religion have so often failed really to take into account (and a trap which Dawkins himself does not heed), there’s a case for portraying all men as species of homo religiosus…something which many post-enlightenment thinkers – whether atheists or not – have attempted to do. ‘Religion’, in this view, is not some weird thing which only some of us partake in. It’s something which we all participate in in our different ways: we are all devotees of certain gods, if you like. The battle which Christianity faces and has faced throughout its history, is one in which an attempt is made to deliver people from false gods (false religions) – whether they are already Christians or not…false gods trouble Christians as much as anyone else. This is a difficult and thankless task. Humans are very inherently idolatrous (from a Christian point of view). The ‘worship’ of individual lives is so often directed to false gods such as mammon, physical beauty or the disinterested cultivation of self without regard for the cultivation in love of others.
3. Posey re: post 5.
This strikes me as a very helpful piece of comment. Thank you.
4. Legal Eagle, Thank you for your comments. One of the things which attracts me about Christianity is its (in its good forms) extremely open outlook on ‘questioning how/why things are’! This, I suppose, we might call its ‘Greek’ inheritance…regarding your friend, you’ll know of course that he’s not uncommon (!) in this respect: some social forms/experiences, alas, simply demand of their those who have partaken of them that they adopt a pretty manic, pressurising, socially exclusive approach to making disciples of others. (And if we’re honest, we all like to be around people with whom we share a good deal of our feelings and experiences, I think: so discipleship in this sense need not refer to ‘religious’ practices but to peer pressure of any sort, as you mention re: scuba diving!). If, however, ‘truth’ really does and has existed among us (and I accept here the vagaries of making any such claim) as we find it in the Gospels, it’s interesting that we’re directed to ‘the kingdom within’ and invited to make sense of the truth for ourselves in the context of stories, images and social situations. It’s not, then, about pressurising. It’s about telling stories and inviting people into a common discourse of moral reflection regarding those stories. The fundies so often miss this and make the Christian story of truth ‘crypto-scientific’, resting on de-facto judgements and deductive arguments from foundationalist epistemic premises about scripture. This is all very well but it was not the approach of Jesus himself. He told stories and warned against ‘hardness of heart’ – which, I suspect, is best interpreted as originating in a failure of *self*-reflectiveness. Self reflectiveness need not become esoteric: it can simply be an ability – as common in the very clever as in the not very clever – to see oneself for the moral being one truly is (warts and all). This translates into the capacity to repent and to seek repentance: those of us for whom ‘morality matters’ and have a sense of the problems we so often experience when we try to be ‘good’, I think, are naturally drawn in this direction. Why? I think it’s that we’re in search of a good shepherd.
5. Posey re: post 8 and post 10 (glad you enjoyed the blog!)
To describe mystical experiences? Well, see my above comments re: stories. My own feeling is that there are good reasons why beautiful poetry and music is not conceived by its composer in terms of mathematical or scientific formulae. There is certainly beauty and mystery in mathematics and science (cf. Dawkins himself but also a long line of others stretching all the way back to Pythagoras)…but in my view mystical experience is most palpable, real and immediate in the context of moral actions and stories about people as decision makers: these latter can take the form of myths, fables or historical narratives. My opinion is that true mystical experience a) gives rise to goodness/good works, b) is an ongoing experience which takes over individual lives, and is not one that just visits us briefly before going away. If this is something you’re interested in, I’d highly recommend Denys Turner’s The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism.
Ok…I need a break! Sorry if any of that was unclear or unhelpful, I wrote it all very quickly!
I promise to get back to Adrien and Dave Bath (in particular) soon about what they have written…in the meantime, thank you all!
In terms of blameworthiness, I just think that a lot of the bad behaviour that ‘religion’ is criticised for (by people like Dawkins) is a function of the in-group/out-group sociological dynamic rather than being something inherent to religion itself. Religion can be the ‘excuse’ given to justify this social mechanism, but so can a lot of other things as I highlighted.
Historically, Christianity has managed to incorporate everything from “Love thy neighbour as thyself” to “Go forth sons of Assisi, war is beautiful!”. A religion we consider peaceful these days, is the same one that was the basis of numerous violent crusades in the middle east in the middle ages. I can’t say whether they were wrong or right to do this from my vantage point in the 21st century. It’s too complex, I don’t know enough about it and my opinion doesn’t really matter.
As to what is ‘religion’? Wow, ask me a hard one why don’t you?
Very generally, I’d say religion is any belief in a higher power beyond human agency (this may or may not include an anthropomorphic deity or pantheon). The archaeological evidence suggests that religion is so old it may have a biological basis — why else do you find stone age graves with the bodies tucked up in the fetal position buried with perfectly good tools and food that would be better used by the living? Dawkins I’m sure would decry this as ‘magical thinking’ but that seems to be norm for the human race. Atheism seems more pathological than religion.
When I read the Eagleton review I got the distrinct feeling that certain difficult parts of this debate were being defined as irrelevant. Namely, the difficult bit about there not actually being a god. Doubtless you can find a heap of motes in Dawkins’ polemic, but that beam is kinda hard to dislodge.
John:
“These irrational religious people live longer, are generally happier, are more productive, have stronger social ties, and in Western cultures at least religious people are generally nice to have around. ”
Surely you’re not going to mistake a correlation and a causation? But, even if we accept a causation, is a lie that promotes happiness one that should remain unexposed?
By the way SL, are there really any atheists who have mass-murdered to promote their atheistic beliefs? You can’t really cite Stalin and co. They did not kill priests because of a fanatical belief that there is no god. I’m happy to accept that someone at some time must have killed a bunch of priests because of beliefs about the harm done by priests, but that’s not quite the same thing as conversion or the sword.
I think there are two main kinds of religion. There is the religion of direct experience of “the divine” in the world. And there is the religion of symbols and knowledge of the divine. I think these two types of religion have always existed and always will. I think G is talking about the second kind, the stories, such as gospels, the myths or parables of the Bible, for example, which express profound feelings about the nature of the world and of our experience in it. Dance, chant, meditation or other ritualised spiritual exercises fit into this category too, I think.
I think mysticism, which every individual is capable of without resort to external texts or performances or spiritual practices, is intimately related to our relationship to and consciousness of nature, including human nature, of course. And one just needs to think of the nature mysticism of Wordsworth, Blake, Beethoven or the nature mysticism wielded by Hitler or Stalin to get an inkling of the connections mysticism makes and its power.
I think of the mystical experience as essentially being aware of, and while the experience lasts, of being identified with a form of pure consciousness different from the ordinary discursive consciousness of everyday. It is non-egoistic consciousness, formless and timeless, but yet necessarily physiologically connected to our “normal” separate ego and bodily consciousness in time. I do think of it as episodic, discontinuous and transitory, for most people, most of the time. It resists naming or explanation. The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao. The Taoist scholar John Clark wrote that the “Tao Te Ching” is the most advanced and systematic critique of domination ever written; the first and greatest of anarchist classics. It channels a spirit, which we all share, which is “potentially irreducibly critical of the entire existing social order”. I think you could say the same about many great works of art and how we feel when we experience them fully.
I prefer the term spirituality to religion as I think it gets closer to the heart of things. I think the work of people like Nietzsche, Kafka and so many other modernists in Western culture was defined by an effort to address spirituality outside of a formal or normal religious framework, as was the work of Ovid, Sun Tzu, or Homer, etc., in earlier history. Importantly, disengaging spirit from religion allows us to see spiritual possibilities in every sphere of existence, including politics and everyday “mundane” activities.
The fundamental notion about the unity of the world is an insight integral to mystical spirituality which I think was my initial point when I linked it to radical will and emancipatory politics.
Finally, I think the experience of it is not just mental or cognitive, but has full or whole body aspects too. Our senses are the conduit.
Pedro – I think your point is a good one.
Building on Posey’s point above, as far as I’m concerned, Stalin & Co swapped one religion for another – Marxism is both evangelical and messianic. One reaches the perfect existence (aka “heaven”, “nirvana”, “the promised land”, call it what you will) once one throws off the shackles of class and capitalism. So Lenin, Stalin and Co may have been atheist (just as Buddhists are) but in another way, their beliefs were just another religious code, with a promised path to happiness. One need not believe in God in order to be religious/mystical.
G, interestingly, my friend was Jewish; one of the evangelical sects. There are some questioning strands of Judaism as well, but not the way his family practiced it. I think you’re right – whenever he did something he enjoyed, he really wanted all his friends to experience, and would try to “convert” them to whatever it was – political activities, sport, a particular author or musician.
Funnily enough, I always have an adverse reaction to people trying to convert me – it’s the way to make me run the other way. As I would constantly tell my friend, “I’m a contrarian from way back, don’t try and convert me to [insert activity here].”
Personally, I wasn’t brought up as any religion, but I had had to attend Anglican RE classes at primary school. Most of the time I tuned out, I’m afraid (particularly after my Grade 2 teacher told me my parents were going to Hell), and my knowledge of Christianity was limited in the extreme until adulthood, when I studied religious history (on the basis that it’s best to know what you’re rejecting). One thing which really surprised me when I read the Bible as an adult was how much Jesus seemed to encourage self-reflectiveness, and was tough on both himself and those around him.
As to whether one’s actions or good or bad, and whether one is a moral being – it’s so hard to tell. Getting back into the Jewish tradition again, a rabbi told me a great story (I call it “The Horse Story“) which shows that we never quite know whether a particular action is good or bad. There can always be unexpected ramifications stemming from a particular action, and we should always be self-critical, as well as “waiting and seeing” (like the man in the story).
DEM –
Indeed a lot of what we call morality is simply group regulation where, for the sake of the body politic, anti-social behaviour within the group is prohibited. Outsiders are fair game tho’. The Old Testament is full of horrible stuff the Hebrews do to other people.
Further to this I reckon Dawkins should take into account that the World Religions have managed to extend this zone of the ‘in-group’. However as the behaviour of religious groups from the treatment of unwed mothers in Ireland to The Brethren to suicide cults like Jim Jones shows; sometimes the in-group cops it too.
A lot of the bad stuff comes from the nasty bits of the human animal. But theology whether religious or secular (eg Stalinism) exacerbates it. Or can.
The history of early 20c Russian Art is, oddly enough, illustrative.
Pre-revolutionary Russia had the most avant-garde art in the world. After the revolution these artists started applying the techniques in a way that would create a socialist consciousness. This was not government policy. In fact there’s an anecdote where the principle of a Russian art and design school is arguing with Lenin himself over whether Art and Politics can be joined together. It is Lenin who thinks this undesirable and impossible.
It was undesirable but not impossible.
By 1930 or thereabouts the avant-gardists were marginalized. The new aesthetic was a kitsch neo-classicalism called sociailist realism. You saw this creeping in as the Cult of Personality started requiring more and more images featuring a huge Stalin or Lenin and lots of literally little people with wild smiles of happiness.
Hitler and in fact most dictators like this kind of thing. And we’ve seen it before. It’s endemic in God-Kingdoms like Pharaonic Egypt.
Some of these marginalized artists like Gustav Klutsis were declared ‘Enemies of Soviet Photography’ and won a trip downstairs to the vodka-soaked executioner for their efforts.
Anyway there’s certain similarities of feature. There’s an organization capable of making authoritative proclamations about moral behaviour and thought, a cult around a superhuman figure, a sacred text, and a ruthless treatment of dissidents.
I reckon that the anti-theists’d be better off attacking these specific things and not religion entirely. The more moderate believers’d be likely to agree.
Why not? I’d cite both Stalin AND Mao, both of whom were tough on perceived ‘counter-revolutionaries’.
It’s quite likely you could draft Mao for this stuff, but I’m more familiar with Soviet history, and indeed have seen plenty of source documents where executions were ordered explicitly because the persons in question were religious, or refused to give up their religion. There were some variations on this — eg killings because someone failed to destroy a Bible or Koran on command, or refused to abandon Church (and occasionally Synagogue) property leading to both destruction of religious buildings and the death of the Priest/Rabbi/Imam. Of course, the land itself was nationalised.
There was also the deliberate conversion of religious buildings into ‘Revolutionary Museums’ and and the like — and, occasionally — when the cadres were feeling particularly persecutory, military brothels.
I think to consider this as something other than persecution in the name of atheism is to draw too long a bow, as well as to deny Soviet leaders real agency in their beliefs. Muslim hoards and Christian Crusaders may have conquered partly for reasons other than religion — for plunder, say — but religion was an important part of their rationale. Pope John Paul II famously quipped that the end of Communism was naked power, with all else subordinated to this end, but atheism was an important means to that end.
Ah, but communism & marxism DID NOT acknowledge a power higher than human agency – therefore, not a religion.
DEM, the higher power was the God-King dictator, he who could truly see what was best for the people. I think it could be said that Marxism and its offshots results in worship of the leader. What is it they called Kim Jong-il – Beloved Leader?
But that is still within human agency, LE. Even national socialism didn’t attempt to deify the wise-dictator in Hitler … though they did encourage the personality cult around him (one of the most effective of all the 20th century dictators, thank you Herr Goebbels). That wasn’t the point of the wider movement though and no-one tried to sell the idea that he had anything but human origins or that he had supernatural powers.
DEM, I tried to explain my question about mass-murder for atheism. Stalin killed heaps of people, including priests, but he did that to promote/consolidate the revolution (his power) and not for the primary goal of promoting atheism. Sure, atheism was a part of USSR style communism (at least until the war), but it was not the primary goal.
I think Dawkins’ criticism is fair to the extent he says religions kill people to promote their religion and atheists do not kill people to promote atheism (but they may do so for other goals).
I reckon that theists tend to say communism is not a religion but atheists are more likely to see the parallel. I wonder why?
I think people are capable of deeply held faiths and that many people can be worked up to killing for their faiths.
Sorry, but this is the same tired old ‘get out of jail free card’, i.e. God is unknowable/unprovable/undisprovable, therefore atheists are wrong, therefore religion is probably right, QED. It simply does not stack up.
Why would a god be indescribable? It’s just an assumption you are making based upon an arbitrary belief you happen to hold. It is neither logical nor empirically supportable. In fact, I go further and put it to you that the only surviving religions feature an indescribable and unknowable God precisely because they happened to choose such a god – religions based on humans-as-gods, totems-as-gods and so on have not survived because they are observably false. Religions promising tangible miracles and divine intervention have likewised perished in the face of reason. Like any good virus, religion evolved into something which could survive rational attack by defining its ‘gods’ as things which are inherently not susceptible to the application of reason and which conveniently have no direct, observable physical interaction with reality whatsoever.
This whole debate boils down to rationality to me. The scientific method and rationality do not depend on absolute proofs alone. Although it’s nice to be able to prove things conclusively, the scientific method actually gets a lot more mileage out of empirical observation and developing the ability to predict consequences based on past observations, even if those predictions do not give absolute accuracy. Newton may not have been totally right about the way physical objects move and interact, but he was close enough that his work was tangibly useful.
Empiricism and rationality is demonstrably effective in my view. Faith is not. Let’s say two people are locked in a room, apparently forever. On one side of the room is a ladder, on the other side of the room is a very high shelf with food and drink on it. There is also a book on the floor of the room, of unknown origin, which tells the story of a third person (never seen by either of the two in the room) who comes and helps those in need if they pray to him. The two people get very hungry. They both read the book and think about what’s in it. The both look at the ladder. Person 1 (the believer) declares that if they just pray to Person 3 (‘God’) then their hunger worries will be over – after all, the book said this would happen. Person 2 (the rationalist) decides he doesn’t know what to think about the book, but he might as well see what he can do with the ladder. After a bit of experimentation, Person 2 works out how to climb the ladder to get the food. Person 1 meanwhile, persists in furiously praying. In due course, Person 1 starves to death, while Person 2 lives a long (if boring) life.
The only way Person 1 is ever going to live in the above scenario is by applying reason. Faith will never help him/her get the food. Instead, Person 1 will eventually have to observe Person 2′s behaviour, note the consequences, and then apply those observations to replicate the behaviour in order to achieve similar consequences. I.e., apply empirical observation and rationality.
I have a huge problem with devoutly religious people who happily use cars, hospitals, aeroplanes, electricity, milled flour, clean water and anything else that comes directly from the scientific method. Science is apparently good enough in these situations (people don’t just drink whatever water they find lying around and pray to God to make it clean) but somehow not good enough in others. I have facetiously proposed a “reason licence” before now… sure, you can have some antibiotics, you just have to agree that rational thought and observation are the most effective ways of living first. Otherwise I’m sure the priests at your local church will sort you out.
I would go one further too: rationality is hardwired into each of us on a much more basic level than faith. Many animals would solve the ladder problem in due course. Even people of faith don’t continually stick their hands in the fire or walk off cliffs. We wake up every morning assuming that fire is still hot and gravity still applies because our ‘lower’ consciousness is smart enough to know that this is how reality works (testing and observation are good predictors of the future), even if our ‘higher’ consciousness does a good job at convincing many of us that this is not, in fact, the case.
What I like about Dawkins is his expression of the view that religion should not get a free pass simply because it holds itself out as ‘sacred’. His attack on fundamentalism is also valuable in my view. After all, rationally I don’t really care what you believe so long as it doesn’t affect me in any way (although being a caring person I would obviously like to free others from the shackles of irrationality).
I have never met a religious person who can explain to me, using an explanation not based upon racial, social and geographical factors, why English and American people tend to be Christian, Indians tend to be Hindu, Iranians tend to be Muslim, and so on.
But nor did it set out with the sole purpose of imposing atheism per se. Atheism was a part of the belief system, but it wasn’t the sole purpose of the numerous crimes committed by communist regimes. You could say that the USSR, for instance, was interested in imposing a political ideology and that a particular theological ideology was also imposed as a consequence. In contrast, Christians, Muslims and most other religions have set out with the sole objective of killing or converting those who did not subscribe to their version of theology, which sometimes means a particular political system is imposed as a result.
And yet, if you look at the statistics, religious adherence is substantially lower amongst scientists than it is amongst the general population. It is also trite to observe that faith is on the whole less widespread in more scientifically advanced societies than it is in less advanced ones.
The Bible is a ‘historical record’ only of the fact that some unknown persons wrote down a range of things in a book at some point in time around 2000ish years ago. It is no more a historical record of what actually happened back then than Harry Potter is a record of what is happening how, however.
You would no doubt point to the correlations in the Bible with other known records of certain events and persons. So perhaps a better example are the writings of Homer – the Iliad, for example, includes many references to historical events of which we have other evidence, but also includes numerous gods, magic and seemingly impossible physical feats.
I think this misses the point somewhat – the issue is not whether the Bible is absolutely accurate or absolutely false – it’s why you think it represents any sort of valid starting point for discussion whatsoever. To go back to Harry Potter, it’s like saying, “does Harry Potter have to be absolutely true or absolutely false? Can’t the truth be somewhere in between Harry Potter and reality?”
Question: if you had grown up alone in the forest to the age of 21, would you believe in the Judeo-Christian God or any variant of the same? If so, why? And if not, why not?
PS – sorry for the length of my rantings…
PPS – I trust that the tone of the above conveys passion and an attack on ideas, not anger or personal disrespect.
Paul, you sound like a lapsed catholic. Only person more passionate is the former smoker.
True to my word, I’ll pick up where I left off and try to respond to the comments of Adrien and Dave Bath. If the intellectual energy hasn’t deserted me, I’ll try to get round to addressing subsequent posts…but I suspect it will have done so they’ll have to wait! I should also say that I have a sense that some of the issues being discussed here would benefit from some conceptual unpacking: I’ve already indicated that there’s a need to dig deeper into concepts of ‘religion’ but I think that will deserve a post of its own at some point in the future (and if it’s commissioned by the blog’s managers!)…
6. Adrien (re: posts 11, 12, 13).
Thank you for your comments! I agree fully with what you write in post 11 and have little there to add. Regarding post 12, and what we might call the ‘natural history of religion’, I wouldn’t for a minute attempt to deny that there are a number of valuable and valid ways to approach, explore and understand the history of religion. Indeed, I am strongly inclined to the idea that methodological pluralism in the study of culture can only be a good thing. The sociologist will explain in different ways from the neo-Darwinist, who will in turn differ from the cultural anthropologist, the theologian, the philosopher of history, the economist and the Marxist historian. All of these practitioners bring *something* to the table and that something is likely to be judged differently in accordance with the kinds of questions they are ask. In such an interdisciplinary conversation, sometimes the same questions will be asked and disagreements of method and fact will come into view (for example, the Marxist historian, the cultural anthropologist, the economist and the philosopher of history will no doubt disagree in any number of ways on all kinds of things). We should also remember of course that within each discipline a number of different voices clamour to be heard and that no single voice holds the intellectual fort in any one discipline. All this is just another way of my saying that in each discipline *good* illuminating work which has something to say of value can and (in my opinion) has emerged. This is true, as in other respects, where the study of religion is concerned. What I’d say, though, is that the natural history of religion (as pursued by, for example, someone like Daniel Dennett) is a) just one way to go and b) an internally contested discourse (contrary to what some of its most outspoken practitioners would have you believe). You are familiar with Stephen Jay Gould – and you will no doubt be aware that (atheistic) colleagues of his in the field of evolutionary biology were not completely in thrall with everything he had to say on the subject. To give one example of how an evolutionary biologist who looks at the history of religion from the perspective of her scientific naturalism (though not in this way alone), check out the writing of the Stanford professor Joan Roughgarden.
Regarding your point about unfalsifiability, I’m afraid I have to say that if everything in life depended on our being able to falsify it or not, we wouldn’t and couldn’t get very far at all. Philosophers know well how difficult it is (and continues to be) to try to develop a scheme were we could falsify proposals concerning central questions in epistemology, ethics and metaphysics. Try falsifying the proposition that your life as you experience it might be a dream or that you *shouldn’t* sell all your goods, give to the poor, and up sticks to begin a life of running homeless shelters in sub-Saharan Africa! A satisfactory scheme of reference to settle such questions is very far from being developed by people of philosophical competence (I speak not as an expert in the field myself but as someone with many philosopher friends!). Indeed, from their perspectives – and from mine – there seems little reason to be optimistic that the criterion of falsifiability will ever be a useful one for all kinds of ethical, epistemological and metaphysical questions. This isn’t an attack on falsifiability or on scientific method, just a comment about its limitedness and incapacity to answer certain questions.
Judging from what you write, though, your central issue seems to be that ‘religion is a means of control’. Disregarding the vagaries I’ve already alluded to above about what we might mean when we speak of ‘religion’, I’d want to offer the following comment on this: yes, you’re right, in many lives and for many people over the centuries, what we might call ‘religious’ beliefs and lifestyles have enabled a social order to persist and exist and have performed a regulatory function in ‘controlling’ people’s attitudes and outlooks. This has often happened with extremely negative consequences. People have suffered and died as a result of the pernicious and unfair strictures which authoritarian ‘religious’ overlords have imposed on them. There’s no getting round any of that. It would be utterly foolish to deny it or to try to explain it away. I wonder, though, whether systems of social order will ever be any different. Means of social control exist in all societies, no matter how signed up their inhabitants are to beliefs (or non-beliefs) about divine entities. (This is a point which has already been raised by other contributors to this thread when the question of communism and Marxist sovereign states has come up). The fantasy – and I have to say that I am convinced it is a fantasy – that we will one day devise a socio-political system where ‘means of control’ are not present seems to me a bizarre one. If we accept that humans are social creatures – that we cannot exist except in communities, however we define ‘community’ – then there will always be forms of control in operation. These will take any number of forms: they will be exercised by environmental factors, cultural inheritance, socio-political organisation and division of tasks and military and physical capacities. One of the most percipient observations of the late Michel Foucault was that power functions (and control is maintained) in different ways in different cultures – and in accordance with different structures – but that always within the system there exist questions about where power lies, how it functions, and what that implies.
Like you, I feel that this question about social control is an important one and one which strikes at the heart of some of my central concerns. In calling myself a Christian and positioning myself in the tradition of Christian socio-political thought (a contested discourse like any other), I note two important things: first, that all kinds of harms and wrongs have been and continue to be done in the name of the faith which I adhere to. I cannot but deplore this. But I am commanded by my saviour to love my enemies – and that involves me in the project of trying to talk with them, to heal them and to work to remove the hatred I encounter in the world around me. Yes, I am complicit in a ‘system of control’ (aren’t we all?). And yes, the system of control to which I claim affiliation has done its share of very wretched things (the same could be said, though, of the United Kingdom, another social body to which I ‘belong’). But in the Christian ‘system’, however badly I find those who claim allegiance to it behaving, I nonetheless find the most sublime ideals about socio-political existence which undercut the claim to any authority, power and control which does not have its origin in true love and humility and relies rather on force, diktat and hatred. I am told in the clearest possible terms where I read that ‘the greatest amongst you shall become like the youngest, and the leader like a servant’ (Lk. 22:26 and para.). Yes, all too many Christian leaders have failed to heed this example. What we do have, however, is the image of Christ himself and the examples of those who have most likened themselves to him in love, service and humility: ‘saints’. I know this begs a lot of questions, but it at least gives a starting point: in the Christian system of social control to which I subscribe, there at least exists an ideal of greatness I can truly revere and have no reason to fear…for it will not try to control and manipulate me, but – in its ideal form – will seek solely to serve me…in this, I think, lies true love (the kind which I myself am so terribly often culpable of failing to exhibit). I find myself believing more fully in a system which places this love at its centre – regardless of how badly it often goes about living up to its principles – than in other systems which don’t (e.g. liberal democracy, most secular ethics) which take their cues for social control and manipulation without reference to the idea that the least are the greatest. I hope this goes at least somewhere to engaging with what you wrote.
Right, that was longer than expected and I think I’ll defer getting back to Dave Bath for another time…Sorry!
Haha, hardly! I had the rare privilege of an a-theistic upbringing (note the dash… not capital ‘A’ Atheist) and parents who respected my intelligence enough to encourage me to use my brain to come to my own conclusions. I would say I was agnostic until age 10, atheist from that point forwards.
I have had some massive debates/arguments with Catholics, both lapsed and current… there’s some fire in their bellies, that’s for sure. Fire and wine.
Oh, and due to my highly addictive personality I’ve never smoked a cigarette!
Ha, yeah that addictive personality thing is a problem. It’s why I don’t often gamble. I did once smoke about 5 cigarettes just to know what it was like (at age 25). They made me sick, and I had to take my asthma spray. I didn’t go back there again, just in case.
Paul, it’s important to distinguish between the nonrational and the irrational. The religious impulse, faith, or whatever you want to call it, is more properly described as nonrational. It involves an openness to the “more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy” [Hamlet] approach. This is referring to an acceptance of at least the possibility of the existence of a part of the universe which is real, but beyond the power of the human intellect to grasp, fully understand, or scientifically prove.
The irrational, by contrast, comprises that which is made violent and incoherent by human agency, i.e., what is actually destructive. There is nothing in nature as such which is irrational, except it be made so by the human mind. To call anything in nature outside of ourselves, irrational, is a subjective judgement and category mistake. For example, people may reject the unconscious as irrational but that rejection is not based on reason and hence it’s a rejection that is nothing more than a rationalisation. Rationalisation occurs when you convert the nonrational into the irrational which is what you have done in describing religion as irrational.
A true rationality, however, accepts the existence of the nonrational, whether it be the unconscious, or spirit-power, God, divine spark, or whatever you want to call the numinous, and is open to it and seeks to understand it. And it has more in common with true science, which should always be based on open-mindedness and working hypotheses, than does your “scientific” rejection of religion.
Actually, rather than a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card I think THAT one is a direct result of the incorporation of scientific thinking. In the ancient world you had the Greek and Roman Pantheons, who had immense powers over the world but shagged and squabbled among themselves as badly as any human. Once we linked a ‘scientific’ understanding of the environmental systems surrounding us and realised what we were up against (the sheer scale vs. inadequate analysis technologies) theists began to consider that ‘God’ may well be unknowable – that doesn’t mean we’ve all stopped trying, just an appreciation that there might not be an ‘ultimate’ answer and that our perceptions may be limited by our expectations.
For example though I am a human being, my dog thinks that I’m a dog. He also thinks my CAT is a small (and very grumpy) kind of dog and tries to sniffs Mewsley’s butt. He is not stupid, he knows the three of us are different but his perception is dog-shaped.
Is it any more logical or empirically supportable to claim that the universe in which we live is entirely understandable or describable? (The last I heard it was infinite.) Do you embrace the empiricist theology that science can and will eventually know everything?
Another favourite of pro-religious reasoning.
Nothing in embracing rationality precludes the existence of things which current science cannot explain, or indeed of “more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Science does not presume to know the answers to everything. Indeed, there are observable phenomena which we do not fully understand at this point. Consciousness is a good example – is it just an accumulation of enough processing power in one unit, or something more transcendent than that? And there are doubtless innumerable things that we are yet to encounter at all, let alone understand.
But your argument invites an obvious response. I put it to you that there are invisible unicorns in space. If it helps, I can write about them and bury the book in the desert for a few years. For the same reason that you cannot “prove” that there are no space unicorns, I cannot “prove” that there is no Christian or other god. But it is still irrational to believe in the existence of something for which there is no positive evidence. So I am agnostic about god in the same way you are agnostic about invisible space unicorns, i.e. not at all.
I appreciate the distinction you are making between non-rational and irrational. I just don’t see any great distinction between acting in a manner which is directly contradicted by evidence and acting in a manner which is unsupported by evidence.
Why can’t humans strive for a spirituality which is rational in nature? Surely there is enough transient beauty and arbitrary absurdity in the world without having to superimpose a system on top of it? There is a great deal for a human to confront without heaven and hell to confuse the issues – it can take a lifetime to merely grasp the fact of existence and the concept of non-existence without adding angels and demons into the mix.
Isn’t this just the “god of the gaps”, i.e. everything I haven’t yet worked out is God? I don’t really understand the reasoning.
Functionally (and rationally, as far as a dog can be rational) you are both dogs as far as he’s concerned. On the level he interacts with you, there is no need for a distinction between you and he. I’m sure Mewsley sees it differently, but that’s cats for you.
Can: in principle, yes. So far there is objective evidence that we have eventually figured out almost everything we have come across, and the few things we have not we seem to be making tangible progress towards understanding. Will: I’m not sure. I query whether our simian minds are capable of grasping everything there is to grasp about the universe, but I do not automatically assume that if we are incapable of understanding it that it has no objective, underlying system which is theoretically capable of understanding.
In addition there is the problem that to describe the whole universe would basically mean to recreate the whole universe, which may be logically impossible.
But again this is the god of the gaps – even if we never can grasp the whole universe, I don’t see any reason to presume that god exists, and I definitely don’t see any reason to subscribe to a set of dogma contrived by my fellow naked apes. Many people will never understand calculus, but last time I checked it still works pretty effectively.
Why do we even contemplate Otherness? There is an old Sufi saying: Thirst is good evidence for the existence of water. There is no rational reason to be interested in Otherness. If anything, current evolutionary psychology suggests we should be all be very busy procreating and status climbing rather than engaging in idle chit chat with total strangers about religion. Perhaps it is possible to argue that human behavior is evidence for the existence of god.
Ah, but communism & marxism DID NOT acknowledge a power higher than human agency – therefore, not a religion.
Well an atheist can acknowledge the power of Nature yeah?
Religion can’t simply be characterized as belief in a higher power. There is that sense of religion which will put animism, sky-cults, monotheism and a non-deist type practice like Buddhism together. But religion, as we’ve known it for a long time, is also an institution of psychological control which legitimizes the standing power relationship and provides people who have no hope of improving their lot in this life with rewards in the next. It also supplies and unassailable doctrine.
Of course Communism didn’t preach any kind of afterlife. But it did deploy all sorts of techniques which would be familiar to Catholics and Calvinists. And ‘a better tomorrow’ was a driving force behind it. In fact the disillusion widespread in the Soviet Union from Brezhnev on is probably at least partially attributable to the apparence of things getting worse.
Totalitarian systems cannot entirely be attributed to Dawkins-type atheism even if they were officially atheist. An infallible dogma, a system of de-facto worship, an all-encompassing worldview that explains everything – these features are common to religion and political ideology. It’s this aspect of religion (and political ideology) I personally object to.
I’ve got too much of what might be called ‘a sense of God’ to declare myself an atheist. I’m also aware that we actually can’t know either way. But I tend to dismiss just about every claim to moral authority based on God and [insert sacred text] because I’m too familiar with the modes of control deployed by human political systems. So I tend to talk of, and regard God the way Einstein did. Karma, Heaven, Hell – it’s just another way of saying Santa will give you presents if you’ve been good. I’m with the Stoics – virtue for its own sake. I do realize this tends to rationalize all sorts of amoralism tho’.
G – I brought unfalsifiability merely to demonstrate that a scientific attitude would not lead to atheism but agnosticism. In furtherance to Paul’s question viz ‘why we can’t develop a rational sprituality’ the answer is we’ve tried. Or rather, the Jacobians tried with the inevitable mass executions and fear. The cold light of reason illuminates only so far. Beyond that it’s dark and we have to use our imaginations.
For me ‘true faith’ is a Khalil Gibran said. You can’t think your way there and being brought up inside a dogmatic tradition doesn’t count either. it’s a sublime conviction. I’d wager that those hysterics who endevour to sabotage evolutionary biology do not possess this sublime conviction. If they did science wouldn’t be a threat.
Viz systems of control. Politically I’m what I call a pragmatic anarchist. This is deliciously oxymoronic I know. I’m also a stubborn contrarian. But underneath the glib label there’s a serious point.
Behind all modern (ie post 1800) politicial ideology sans fascism lies a dream of a society of free association. Yes even socialism. The ever fragmenting arguments lie in how to get there. I’m skeptical of it but I think it’s still worth having every now and then. The key to it, and democratic theory from Perecles onward confirms this, is self-control. One controls one’s self and therefore no-one else has to do it for you.
Naturally we’re not quite there. Being a pragmatic anarchists means asking yourself whether waking up to a world without cops and armies in morning would mean walking down the street in a better world. For the time being – no.
Still I think it might be possible some time in a more technologically, and perhaps genetically, advanced era.
For the time being democracy is the best we can do. Yes society has systems of control. But in a democracy there are options. That’s the key to it. We are free to say as we wish, expose charlatans and demagogues and more importantly to hold those at the apex of social power to account.
Again I reckon the Dawkins stance is probably not wise. It’s too zero sum game. The better strategy is, rather than attempt to convince everyone of this or that position viz the existence or otherwise of God, it’s better to simply agree that such affairs are the private business of individuals and their maker. And that such private business is not, and should not, be public business. People are entitled to be atheist. If they’re wrong, as the Rowan Atkinson sketch demonstrates, they’ll pretty stupid when the get to Hell.
Paul – Why can’t humans strive for a spirituality which is rational in nature?
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because we’re not entirely rational. And reason tells us that we’re a virus with shoes on a tiny ball of rock in a vast galaxiy one a zillion other vast galaxies that will all fall apart one day.
Doesn’t exactly fill you with enthusiasm gettin’ up in the morning and going to the lousy job.
Surely there is enough transient beauty and arbitrary absurdity in the world without having to superimpose a system on top of it?
Yeah if you can appreciate it.
Paul wrote: “Why can’t humans strive for a spirituality which is rational in nature? Surely there is enough transient beauty and arbitrary absurdity in the world without having to superimpose a system on top of it? There is a great deal for a human to confront without heaven and hell to confuse the issues – it can take a lifetime to merely grasp the fact of existence and the concept of non-existence without adding angels and demons into the mix.”
This is a non-sequitur and strawman. Nothing I have written supports or even vaguely suggests the existence of heaven or hell, angels or demons. I certainly don’t believe in or care about any of these or believe them to be literal entities. Nor do I believe in any God or deity or adhere to any religious belief system whatsoever. Yet I resile not one iota from what I have said about the religious impulse, spirituality and the reasons for faith which I fully understand and support in principle, if not in specific content. And yet I do have a strong spiritual sense and sensibility which does not fit into your narrow definition of religion but which yes I would have to say is a form of religion. And I see no contradiction in this and the aforesaid.
Paul: “Indeed, there are observable phenomena which we do not fully understand at this point. ”
Wow. That is a gobsmacking understatement!
Doesn’t exactly fill you with enthusiasm gettin’ up in the morning and going to the lousy job.
Hence religion, politics, ideology, economics, psychology, and social control.
“A man at peace with the world is an instrument of limited utility but frustrate him enough and you can bend him to society’s ends.”
Parable of the Tribes, Schmookler.
Hell exists alright.
Sunshine, yeah. What a god-awful misnomer and rather reminiscent of the north Wolllongong suburb of Fairy Meadow. Choke.
G: It may be more convenient to comment on my individuals posts at my “home” (see the linkback) and point to that comment from here. I can see us having a long conversation.
Paul@31 said
I was chatting with someone sharia-trained who thought I may have followed Islam because I obviously knew something about it. I put the following to him, which he thought was valid.
“You should only follow a religion if you can think of good reasons why you would convert if brought up in a different religion. This should be easy to figure out if you are Abrahamic and imagine swapping from another Abrahamic faith”.
The same logic would also apply to which sect inside Christianity you hold to.
He was obviously well trained, because he started reeling off good reasons for becoming a Moslem from Christianity… the ugliness of Trinitarianism among them. From Judaism, the key was the need to make large chunks of the “Old Testament” obsolete because it had so many nasty racist bits in it.
While I’m very godless, I’m certain that comparative religion should be compulsory in all schools getting government funding: kids should have the ability to make an informed choice, and understand what the others are on about. (For example, how many Christians realize that Jesus is extremely important in Islam, and there is even a “Christmas Story” in the Koran – the Book of Mary – with the “Sermon from the Bunny-Rug”, and Mary having really bad labor pains?)
Oh, and most of the Iranians I know are Zoroastrian – not Abrahamic, but well-respected by Moslems.
You should only follow a religion if you can think of good reasons why you would convert if brought up in a different religion.
1. This religion won;t kill me if I convert?
Anyway this is obviously the One True Faith.
“However if spirit, as experienced on an individual level, is necessarily a transcending of ego and a consciouness of something greater and larger than self to which it is connected, then it must be potentially an essential element of emancipatory politics, a politics based on a sense of unity with the world, a desire to alleviate suffering in others, social solidarity, justice, non-violence, love. Spirit cannot be subsumed into any existing system of domination, rather it seeks to transcend dominance.”
This is just a long-winded way of saying if you are a nice and caring person you are spiritual. Sounds like a new justification for leftist twaddle to me.
This is just a long-winded way of saying if you are a nice and caring person you are spiritual. Sounds like a new justification for leftist twaddle to me.
It can be something else. Many people, including those without religious convictions, undergo experiences which radically change their philosophy of life. In Mayahana and Zen Buddhism in particular and mysticism in general, the experience of self dissolution can have profound effects on a person’s behavior.
What is closer to Truth? The abstractions I employ to guide me through the world or my direct personal experience of the world? Is there a set of yardsticks to address this problem? It is at times like this I need people like Dover Beach to comment.
Sounds like a new justification for leftist twaddle to me
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It’s leftist twaddle to give a shit about other people?
It’s leftist twaddle to give a shit about other people?
Of course it is you doofus. It is just so obvious: leave everyone to persue their selfish interests and life will be beautiful. I mean come on, what would those anthropologists know when their concept of emergent intelligence arising from “social chess theory”. ie. That it was the increasing need for helpless individual hominids to find ways to work co-operatively that enabled us to conquer the world. A single human being is amongst the most helpless of creatures. Even at the the most basic cellular level, the emergence of an entirely new life form, co-operation played a fundamental role. I am referring to mitochondria. Look up Lynn Marquilis. From a neurobiological perspective it is just a pure co-incidence that some of key areas that underwent significant encephalisation are those believed to play very important roles in modulating our impulsive behavior and facilitating greater understanding of those around us.
But all this is leftist scientific twaddle. Just be selfish and everything will work out just dandy.
It’s a wonderful question, John (yr 2nd para).
It’s curious, too, the relationship between our individual private lives, which co-exist with an unfolding “history” we can see objectively, but which we often don’t really experience in any definable or lasting way. How much thought or care do most people give to the historical times in which they live, the great public affairs taking place, when we are enmeshed, for most of the time, in subjective, private, physiological experiences that lie outside (if parallel to) history and which are not even communicable to others? This is particularly so in infancy, childhood, extreme old age, when sick, when asleep, i.e., for most of our lives. Even if we’re interested, what goes on outside this private world doesn’t engage us nearly as much, does it? It doesn’t take up as much mental space because for the most part we live intensely private lives fixated on relatively limited individual concerns.
And if we don’t feel the historical world subjectively most of the time, even if aware of it intellectually and objectively, then to what extent do historically and socially framed and determined abstract concepts influence our beings?
Aldous Huxley described us as “multiple amphibians, living in many double worlds and leading many double lives”; and the Elizabethan poet, Lord Brooke Fulke Greville ruminated thusly in Mustapha
Hah! I knew it. Sly devil. She hardwired us. Trees and rocks too, I bet. They are the prototype Stoics, and they revere, yessum.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126941.700-born-believers-how-your-brain-creates-god.html?full=true
“It’s leftist twaddle to give a shit about other people?”
So you think that’s what I mean? Or do you not want to seriously discuss the point?
Perhaps this bit of the quote:
“then it must be potentially an essential element of emancipatory politics, a politics based on a sense of unity with the world, a desire to alleviate suffering in others, social solidarity, justice, non-violence, love”
will help you see my point.
Caring about others can occur outside of politics. I think that you cannot create a moral state by compelling others to do good.
Pedro – You could’ve been a little more specific and said: Well I think we have an obligation to give a shit about other people but politics isn’t the way to do it.
Caring about others can occur outside of politics. I think that you cannot create a moral state by compelling others to do good.
I agree.
I should add that I don’t think you can create a moral state at all. You can be moral.
This is an interesting point. For many people this holds true, but then for some generations, history sticks a gigantic spanner in the works and forces a society-wide acknowledgment that something big is happening – e.g. WWI, WWII, moments of the Cold War and possibly in the not too distant future global warming and widespread ecological breakdown.
I repost here a comment (sorry, it’s again rather long) I have made in response to Dave Bath over at his blog in case anyone who has been following this discussion is interested in reading it:
Hi Dave and thanks for taking the time to comment on my scribblings…I’m flattered by what you write and I’m glad I got away without seeming like a ‘theological nincompoop’! I’ve had a good time having a quick look round your blog – and thanks for directing to me to some of your previous thoughts on the issues I mentioned in my review. I’ll try to offer an idea of where I think we’d part company concerning the first issue you’ve mentioned here…the most I can hope to suggest, I think, is that alternative points of view might have something valuable to offer…and maybe that will lead somewhere interesting.
Let me take first your claim that Dawkins would ‘drive home his case against religion’ most effectively by saying that ‘the stature of religion in society, its aura of respectability, renders too many people vulnerable to the ideas of extremists, and this inevitably causes much needless suffering’ and that ‘we could rid ourselves of the idea that we might already know the truth, grow out of unthinking faith, we can have a better world, and can discuss at leisure whether our universe is governed by the laws of Nature and an invisible god, or the more elegant solution that needs simply Nature’.
I’ll try to encapsulate here some of the things I tried not very eloquently to say in responding to some of the comments on my post with skepticlawyer. In the first instance, I agree with the unstated premise that it’s bad when people are left vulnerable through naivety or ignorance to pernicious and false claims (whether ‘religious’ or not). This, I’d go on to say, is our human situation and we ought all to recognise that the task of combatting it is really rather a difficult one. Now, regarding the issue of ‘the ideas of [religious] extremists’, here again I think we’d both agree that these can often be a Very Bad Thing indeed. I need to qualify myself here just a little because I think that a lot of people I truly admire might qualify as extremists of some sort (or might have done in their time): but let’s narrow our focus to a group like young earth creationists, whom I think we could both agree do and say things we’d rather they didn’t. When people such as these are permitted ’stature’ in society, yes, it’s a problem – a problem, I would add, which is very difficult to address. How best to do it? Do we need to root out or devalue ‘religion’ or grow out of ‘unthinking faith’ so that a ‘better world’ in which leisurely discussions about ‘elegant solution[s!] that need simply Nature’ (your capital N here alarms me)?
This, I think, is the key question you raise and so I’d like to ask you to elaborate a little. I note that for you ‘faith’ (in God?) is ‘unthinking’ (always?) and seems not to leave room for ‘elegant solutions’. You’ll need to clear this up for me…what sort of ‘faith’ are we talking about here and what are we supposing its link with other key concepts (e.g. ‘God’/’science’/’understanding’/’proof’/’evidence’/’love’/reason’ etc.) to be? Perhaps here you’ll follow Dawkins and say something along the lines of faith is ‘belief in the absence of evidence’ or some other such thing? The trouble is a) that’s not how someone like me – and, I’m afraid, the ardent fundies, see their ‘faith’…b) you’ll need a pretty impressive definition of ‘evidence’ here to make this definition work. To pursue this latter point just a little, what appears to be the Dawkinsian conception of ‘evidence’ may work ok for a lot of scientists (though here it must be emphasised that he’s been very strongly and roundly criticised by a host of top physicists for *not getting* the sorts of developments which have occurred in C20 physics and philosophy of science which have rendered his views pretty unsustainable in those contexts). And it works particularly badly, for example, in the context of some attempts to interpret/evaluate beliefs about past events. Imagine an American scientist who wakes up in the morning and brushes his teeth. No one else witnesses this event – and there exists only the merest traces of evidence to the effect that he did, definitely, brush his teeth that morning. He remembers doing so very vividly, let us say, and says he is 99% sure that it happened. Now imagine that a friend of his asks him this: are you more certain in your *belief* that you brushed your teeth this morning (for which, let us remember, we have only the ‘mere’ evidence of his memory of the event) or in your *belief* in the proposition that the emperor Nero began his reign in the year 54?
Let us stand back from this question for just a moment. Many, many people and lots and lots of evidence would confirm to us – and, if they looked for it, to the scientist and his friend – that the emperor Nero had indeed become sovereign of Rome in the year 54. Meanwhile, by contrast a vanishingly small amount of testimony and strength of opinion – by contrast – would attest to the scientist’s claim that he did indeed brush his teeth. And yet, I’d wager that the scientist would in all likelihood be prepared to be more confident in his 99% certainty that he’d brushed his teeth rather than in his (let us say) 75% certainty that Nero had acceded to the emperorship in 54 (he *thinks* he remembers from his pub quiz the week before but isn’t certain). From one point of view, this sort of example shouldn’t surprise us at all. It is the stuff of our everyday experience. But what the example brings to light is the sort of profound problem that surrounds how we think about ‘evidence’ and the way we formulate our beliefs in the context of our lives, rather than in our scientific laboratories where controlled conditions can give us a chance to make more clinical judgements. The problem is that we don’t live our lives in science laboratories, nor do we evaluate the evidence we have concerning questions which pose themselves of us in the way most scientists do. This doesn’t necessarily come down to a lack of will-power to ‘be scientific’ on our part: most of us like to *think* we’re being as ‘rational’ as possible and making as good sense of ‘the available evidence’ which presents itself in the world around us as we can. It so often comes down instead to a failure adequately to identify, evaluate and resolve problematic questions which present themselves…but it also faulters because of the deeply problematic nature of the ‘evidence’ we encounter in our lives when it comes to making decisions – if we are even prepared to think particularly reflectively here – on what we should think about certain things.
Let me finish by drawing your attention to the difficulties which our lawcourts have in settling difficult questions concerning individual persons and the criminal acts they are claimed to have performed. Evidence certainly matters here, as does a very thinking ‘faith’ in the system being used to sought things out and in the capacities of the people assessing the claims made to make correct decisions. Sure, some people might a) not think very hard about the system or b) have big reservations about the way the system works. But there is nonetheless here very clearly the need for ‘thinking’ faculties and for ‘faith’ in the system’s ability to perform a useful and necessary function, however badly. This is sort of how I feel about the Christian church, in all its imperfections. The lawcourts were there before the church came to be, and it may well be that they will outlive the church. They’ve made all kinds of mistakes, but still exist and perform an extremely important role in our society today – a society which they’ve helped to shape. The same is true too of the church, in my opinion. And I guess it just is the case that in my life, through the ‘evidence’ I’ve been exposed to, I’ve seen enough in the Christian church to tell me that there is a God, that he lives in the hearts of people, and that the church conveys something of his character to us here in our world. If I have to place at the centre of my life any word with a capital letter, and here I believe that in spite of the best postmodern attempts to convince people that they don’t have to I believe I do, then that word – or, rather words, will be Jesus Christ – my Saviour, Martyr, Lord, Messiah. I fully accept that that all comes with a lot of conceptual unpacking of its own but I hope it at least gives you an idea of my position and at least some background to why I am certainly not a Dawkinsian.
Adrien, I don’t think you have an obligation to give a shit about others, but I do think it is sensible and I kinda can’t help the fact that I generally do anyway. Still there are some people I don’t give a shit about and others I actively wish harm on.
In each case I think I’m acting morally, but then I would think that wouldn’t I?
Caring about others is not a moral question it is a practical one. Two people together who don’t give a shit about each other are likely to come to blows. It is that simple, we need to care about others because without such care society is not possible.
Some might argue the opposite is true.
Sure John, I’m constantly getting into fights with strangers.
Morals exist, by agreement.
It matters not how much anyone likes or dislikes Dawkins’ position and the way he pushes his particular barrow.
At the end of this post and the comments engendered, there still isn’t a god.
Hitler was Catholic. Just sayin’.
It matters not how much anyone likes or dislikes Dawkins’ position and the way he pushes his particular barrow.
Unfortunately Dawkins has a bad habit over stating his. He also fails to appreciate how his language distorts. Thus after The Selfish Gene he stated<
I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals… My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live… Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish (Dawkins, 1989, p. 2-3).
Dawkins, R. (1989). The selfish gene (New ed.). Oxford; New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press.
Sadly, there are enough silly people in the world who think that because selfishness is hard wired we can do nothing about it. Of course these people don’t even realise how problematic the concept “hard wired” is so they are pretty much a lost cause.
The British philosopher Jonathan Glover identified three possible bulwarks against human cruelty, violence and atrocity and condensed these into 1) sympathy 2) concern for human dignity and 3) moral identity (the least dependable). External, socially-imposed rules and laws will never suffice in regulating human behaviour and relationships between people that are mediated by rules alone are definitely prone to relapse into a more dehumanising type of brutality in times of conflict, he says.
It’s true the broader literature on all this shows again and again that the personality deficient in empathy is a danger to others. If one is standardly empathetic towards another person, or groups of people, then one is much less likely to be brutal towards them, or sanction their ill-treatment, exploitation or abuse, or seek revenge upon them.
Empathy is linked to imagination, too, in a fundamental way. Unfortunately, some people are so damaged by class society they are incapable of housing within their imagination the living reality and beauty of others’ being. And some political ideologies, those of the right in general, explicitly try to erode that imaginative connectivity. We see the tragic repercussions and acting out of this every day in the class divided societies in which we all live.
“Empathy is linked to imagination, too, in a fundamental way. Unfortunately, some people are so damaged by class society they are incapable of housing within their imagination the living reality and beauty of others’ being.”
With a few substitutions, this is accurate.
“Unfortunately, some people are so damaged by class society they are incapable of housing within their imagination the living reality and beauty of others’ being. And some political ideologies, those of the right in general, explicitly try to erode that imaginative connectivity. ”
Tosh! Give an example and try not to say nazi. Tell me, what do the stasi, for instance, do for imaginative connectivity? Talk about pap.
Klaus & Pedro: I’ve made it a rule that if I have to re-read a couple of sentences more than twice to try and work out what the author means it’s neither worth the effort nor warrants a response.
Work on your communication skills, both of you, is my advice.
Tosh! Give an example and try not to say nazi. Tell me, what do the stasi, for instance, do for imaginative connectivity? Talk about pap.
Too easy, look at the way the Howard Govt treated those on disabilities. For example, one 16 year old boy in Perth with potentially lethal leukemia was required to find work even though it is well established that stress can seriously impede recovery from such conditions. Or schizophrenics required to look for work when they are drooling, a common side effect of medication. Or Tony Abbot’s demonising of single mothers when he abandoned a child that arose during his time training to be a priest.
The Howard Govt got ousted because of Workchoices, most of those doofi never had to put up with some of the horrendous working conditions that can be imposed on people. The Howard govt introduced legislation requiring anyone dissatisfied with a HRC ruling to take the matter to the Federal Court. Sure, people with disabilities can afford that.
Those on the dole: treated like criminals, always having to prove their innocence with endless documentation and checking. Made to engage in useless work for the dole schemes that were soul destroying.
A lot of people are talking a fair bit of bunk on this thread.
Posey, if you continue to make content-free allegations about an entire system of political philosophy, you’ll be placed on permanent moderation. I’m having to put legal fires out generated entirely by people on your side of the aisle right now; not for a moment would I attribute their behaviour to everyone on the political left. Think about that before you descend to this sort of foolishness:
Sorry, LE, it was a bit OTT.
I meant it as more of an ascent, than a descent, seeking clarity, rather than affirming some bottomless philosophical truth.
I meant ” SL”.
It’s been a long day at the coalface – sorry.
Ain’t that the truth? Was going to do more thesis tonight, but just can’t face it.
Caring about others is not a moral question it is a practical one.
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Morality is practical. Or it should be. Trouble is what is a practical moral principle at the time it’s introduced becomes entrenched and is adhered to long after it’s become meaningless.
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Like the Qu’ran on the lower shelf thing. It makes sense if you live in a desert to make a big deal out of where you put the holy book. A dirty book is harder to revere. But when you’ve got a sealed environment that keeps the dirt off then – sheesh.
Pedro – Morals exist, by agreement.
No they don’t. Not really. Morality is two things: herd instinct and reflection on what that herd instinct should be. The reflection part of it engenders some discussion and agreement but there’s also revolution and struggle as well. Check out Constantine or Diocletian. Or the history of the Roman Church. There was agreement on points of morality amongst the theological elite that were then imposed on others.
Same with Protestantism, staring with illegitimate disagreements and leading to the imposition of its own moral authority. Hell think of child-rearing. We don’t ask l’il Johnny if he agrees that whacking his sister one is immoral do we?
John – sorry for prolonged delay in responding, totally forgot that I had commented on this thread.
You’re quite right, Dawkins does have a habit of over-reaching, which is a disservice to himself and the rest of us.
I have an unread copy of the selfish gene on my shelves, I’ll get to it some day.
Based on the quote you provided, Dawkins is outright wrong. There is an oddle of evidence that humans are NOT first and foremost, nor in an unfettered manner, selfish. Much evidence is to the contrary.
Only today (or yesterday), there was a piece in the NYTs about the inherent sociability, sharing and trust that goes with human babies. It gave the example of chimps breeding about six years apart, because the parent has to spend its time protecting just one baby, that is, protecting it from its own kind, not just predators. Contrast that with humans, who breed quite rapidly, safe in the knowledge that they can pass babies around to all & sundry, with total trust. Human babies illicit protective and kindly feelings in everyone. Etc, etc.
There are also very strong selfless human inclinations that support and cohere the group, or the herd, if you like, that inherently engender altruistic behaviors. Etc, etc.
All the same, there is benefit in people like Dawkins drawing hard and fast cases that don’t necessarily stand up to full scrutiny, it provokes others to think more deeply and thoroughly. I suppose that in itself is a great service.
Adrien, I can’t quite see how you’ve refuted my contention that morals exist by agreement. I didn’t say everyone agrees all the time, but whatever society you want to examine you will find that there is a common moral code and that exists because people support it.
Theft is generally agreed to be wrong. Homosexuality was generally agreed to be wrong 50 years ago. Now it isn’t.
Adrien
When you say ‘morality is/should be practical’ do you mean as in utilitarian or pragmatic, for example? I actually disagree. I have now come around t6o the conclusion that morality can only be sourced from religion.
Eagleton is a Marxist, so we should hope his handle on religion is superior to adding machines like Dawkins!
John – There is increasing scientific evidence to support moral codes as inherent in humans.
Gosh, even animals have social mores and socially constructed behaviors and boundaries for deviance. Don’t see many animals going to church or reading the bible.
It’s trite to suggest that morality comes from religion. Organized religion is quite recent in human history.
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[...] by Dave Bath on 2009-02-22 There is a great post over at Skepticlawyer ("The Dawkins Delusion – Guest Post by ‘G’" 2009-02-22) which is well worth reading. I’ve already written quite a few posts [...]
[...] linked to by Skepticlawyer, states… “He’s curiously damning about one of them (’theology’) and [...]