I so hope we've given up on the idea that there's a robust reality apart from the subject our our empirical inquiry.*
Would you count Teh Normative as one of those non-trivial exceptions? Because "the universe has a purpose" seems to be a normative claim as much as a metaphysical one.
Clever, Weiner, but not sufficient to undermine my point about dependence. Most normative claims aren't fully autonomous.
One reason I wanted to avoid getting into the "purpose" talk in the abstract is that I have no idea what it means. (That's a euphemism for "surely this is full of crap.")
As for teh normative, ask me in five years.
I don't think that "not fully autonomous" gets you to "science shows us there's no God." Someone could say "If the world were chaos and disorder then it would be meaningless, but look at all these wondrous patterns that we discover by SCIENCE! That makes me think the world has meaning." And, though that might or might not be a crappy argument, I think it would make the metaphysical claim about as dependent on the empirical as most normative claims.
(It's important to distinguish this from the claim, which I've seen made in print, that maybe a sufficient amount of evil would provide evidence against God's existence, but maybe we just haven't experienced that much evil yet. It's like, how many more genocides would it take to convince you?)
I also think, yeah, science gives us reason not to believe in an interventionist God, and so sucks to traditional theism, but the non-interventionist God isn't exactly a hack that some people came up with in response to science either.
I've always agreed that the ontological and truth claims of religion are invalid in the face of science and reason. So the problem is to explain why religion, with its absence of truth, survives at all.
The fact/value distinction is somewhat out of fashion, I hear, but I think that that's where the problem is. Science is somewhat normative in that it requires or assumes certain normative principles ("knowledge is good", "fraud is bad", "Scientific research is really a better thing to do than smoking dope and jerking off", etc). Science doesn't produce or ground any normative principles, though. To the extent that norms are scientifically studied, the outcome is usually to deny their truth-value and leave their validity in doubt.
So our surviving normative discourse is mostly still embedded in its traditional religious forms, or sometimes an attempt to substitute art (also without truth-value) for religion.
The Marxo-Freudian response is to say that many people's lives are so unpleasant and mistaken in various ways that there's no way for them to face the truth. If the factual, objective truth is something like "You're doomed to a lifetime of poverty, grinding hard work, swarms of upwelling fantasies and desires which can't possibly be satisfied, a bad marriage, and loniliness" -- science can't help that individual. Maybe fantasy will make him or her feel a little better, or at least confuse him / her enough to keep him / her from doing harm to others. (Note careful avoidance of sexist language).
Most people aren't quite that miserable. But they're still faced with weighty choices and ethical imperatives which just can't be grounded entirely in scientific truth. Scientific fact limits choices at best, it doesn't usually decide them.
So there's this big gap between the weightiness and significance of the choices we are forced to make, and the lack of certainty and grounding for the principles on the basis of which we make these choices. Religion is like a fudge or fiction pretending to be a grounding for choices which are actually not completely grounded.
I think that religionists are correct that science and reason just plain can't give certain, unequivocal grounds for any normativity, and also that in practice human life requires some degree of shared norms in order to continue.
And by and large, I think that atheists more militant than myself don't quite understand this.
Doesn't all this take us right back to Hume? As in: if there is a God, we have no evidence that it exists, and have no basis for thinking that we could know anything about it, so we should restrict our enquiries to those problems we can hope to solve (although you're free to believe irrationally in any unfounded concept you like).
Was FL trying to argue that if the claims of science really do provide sufficient explanation, then, rationally, you're not so free to believe irrationally in any unfounded concept you like? Or maybe you could be free but deluded?
JM: mostly I was trying to say what's wrong with the Orr line (which I've seen a lot of other places). I read Orr as saying "ah, Science can't undermine religion because religion makes metaphysical claims, and metaphysical claims have a special kind of teflon that renders them immune from science." To which I say, "not so, because, on the theist's own picture, many of the big metaphysical claims ('universe has a purpose') rest on claims that *are* vulnerable to actual or possible empirical results, such as 'there a exists a God who does things such as...'"
MW, I wasn't offering any claim about autonomy to show that science shows that there's no deity. My argument was, as I said above in this comment, that it might turn out that empirical enquiry undermines some main religious claims ('god exists' being the big one), and once those claims are undermined, the *religionist's* claims about purposes fall apart, because they're justified by appeal to God. Hence Orr is wrong to say that the "metaphysical" claims are immune from empirical results.
Or, on second thought, I should have said that *certain popular justifications* for the big metaphysical claims are vulnerable. One is free to say "I've dropped God from my ontology, but now the awesomeness of science convinces me that the universe is purpose-filled." I'm not sure that counts as a religious claim, though.
This conversation is largely over my head, but isn't it possible to construct a religion in which God is insulated from empirical inquiry? That is, a universe which is internally self-consistent without God, such that any emiprical inquiry devisable will produce explanations for observable phenomena without God, but which is nonetheless created, observed, and interacted with by an external God?
A trickster god throws this entire argument on its head.
methodological let's-get-high-ism. MN works.
I can't speak to methodological, but methodical let's-get-high-ism has always worked for me.
8. What is that Kleist line? Something like: "I can only hope that it is not an evil demon in charge of this world."
7. Purposiveness without purpose, eh?
8: Yes, it seems possible that God, in His wisdom, constructed the world to be exactly as it would be were there no God.
Observations that seem true:
(a) Surely this God would admit that it would be unreasonable to believe in Him, given our evidence;
(b) this isn't the God of traditional theism;
(c) it's hard to see how this God would underwrite any claims about higher meaning or purpose, given His absenteeism. It could be that this God really cares about us, but he won't show it in any way, at least while we're alive. So no observable plan or anything like that.
I think the religious might respond that god left us lots of words to underwrite claims about higher meaning or purpose.
Tia, are you making fun of me in some subtle way that I don't quite understand? (11 is talking about LB's suggestion of the sort-of-deist god.)
LB-
I've heard from some Quakers(SE PA- the California/Nixon cluster has some sectarian differences that I've never really bothered to pin down) that they practice pretty much that- it's sorta Golden-Rule based agnosticism, the implication being that if there is a God, he'd like us to be nice to people. If God wants more than that, he's probably not worth the time, and if he doesn't exist, then we should at least make things nice for each other.
Kinda hedging their bets, but Quakers aren't exactly the most structured of religions- the closest thing to mass they do is "sit in a room and wait for somebody to say something."
No, I was just trying to participate in your thread, since you felt so neglected, but I guess my comment was so inapt you're looking for a way it was making fun of you in order to rescue it. I know what 11 was responding to. I don't know if LB's description is quite deist--do deists believe in divine intervention? What do I know; maybe they do. I just meant to point out that you could both embrace LB's description of god and still think that God could underwrite claims about meaning and purpose: he made his presence known through words, and even though human beings could have produced those words, you believe they didn't, that the words are meaningful, and thus claims about meaning and purpose are underwritten, and it's not important for there to be empirical evidence of god.
None of this is what I believe, obvs.
No, I was just trying to participate in your thread, since you felt so neglected, but I guess my comment was so inapt you're looking for a way it was making fun of you in order to rescue it.
By the way, this was supposed to be funny and self-deprecating, but it came out sort of farberesque. I shall go lash myself now.
Why do the work yourself when you can outsource it?
I once invited Ogged, since I figured he needed work, as a Mexican, but he said he was looking for the same service.
Oh, right, we're supposed to be highminded in this thread.
he made his presence known through words, and even though human beings could have produced those words, you believe they didn't, that the words are meaningful, and thus claims about meaning and purpose are underwritten, and it's not important for there to be empirical evidence of god.
Wellll, just to quibble, if LB's God is scrupulous, he'll make sure that nothing about the words favors the hypothesis "God inspired it" over the hypothesis "product of various social forces, etc."
My irritation with arguments like this one is that by and large people fail to think about the importance of metaphor, and they get all hung up on the goddamn intentional fallacy. Does the universe have a purpose in the sense of a blueprint and a pre-laid plan? No. Does that mean we can't attribute meaning to it? No. Is god a guy who lives in the clouds and has a beard? No. Does saying that god is a human creation mean that he, as a concept, does not exist? No.
It's like teaching college freshmen that just because you can't prove that Conrad *intended* to put trinity symbols into Heart of Darkness doesn't mean they're not there.
Dude, this is exactly the thought I had while in line at the grocery store, only not.
B, who are you aiming that thing at? IN particular, "Does saying that god is a human creation mean that he, as a concept, does not exist? No" is tricky. I mean, if religious practice is best explained without reference to the actual Being, then we think that God as traditional religions understand Him doesn't exist, right? I mean, we have a *concept* of God, but nothing *falls under* that concept.
This is the same Bitch were no, not long ago, was saying that if there were no people, there would be no evolution, because evolution is a human concept.
And, of course, we have to adopt the idea of God as a regulative ideal in practice anyway.
No, I'm an entirely new Bitch.
I'm very seldom aiming any of my arguments at anyone; I lay them out there to be picked up or not. I'm just externalizing my own thought process/rationalization re. religion. I do think, though, that if more people thought of it that way (Kotsko recommended some theologian to me once, I forget who, but someone bought me the book which I haven't yet received), the whole religion v. science, religious fundamentalism, etc. etc. set of issues would be less of a dealio.
When were the same Bitch no saying that?
Without knowing what Kotsko was recommending, I make the following bold prediction: if that theologian's vision of religious practice were laid before many theists, including but far from limited to some working philosophers of religion I know, they would respond by saying, perhaps more politely: fuck that! That's not what we're about!
So, while granting there are ways of thinking about religion that make the conflict go away, or make it less serious, I want to insist that (a) those ways are at odds with many traditional practitioners and (b) it's at least an open question whether that way of thinking about religion is interesting, plausible, helpful, or whatever.
A lot of the arguments over the existence of God pass over the evidence for the fact that, if he exists, he's sort of a shit. Proving his existence, though difficult, is the easy part of the job.
Though as I said at Pharyngula, if we're still arguing about the very existence of some very important X after 2500 years or more, it seems unlikely that X exists. If God were as big a deal as people claim, wouldn't we know by now?
25: One other point I was thinking of making regarding the paragraphs Labs is picking apart is that they may be doing useful cultural work apart from their truth value; sometimes it's less damaging to resolve a conflict with a false compromise than to insist on winning.
All those living in bad faith will be flogged.
They should start a blog or something.
Wellll, just to quibble, if LB's God is scrupulous, he'll make sure that nothing about the words favors the hypothesis "God inspired it" over the hypothesis "product of various social forces, etc."
Right, my only small point is that conclusive evidence of manifestation is not the only source of meaning to religious people, so it is not "hard to see how this God would underwrite any claims about higher meaning or purpose, given His absenteeism." He left a (supposedly) inspirational message.
Wait, I think maybe I'm misunderstanding your use of "underwrite."
it's hard to see how this God would underwrite any claims about higher meaning or purpose, given His absenteeism. It could be that this God really cares about us, but he won't show it in any way, at least while we're alive. So no observable plan or anything like that.
Isn't this a bit strong? I don't have a background in philosophy, psychology, or biology, so I may be missing the obvious. But what undermines Becks's (and my similar) belief in a God that doesn't interact physically, but enlightens us? Is the biology of ... I don't even know - meaning? thinking? inspiration?...that far along?
I want to engage with 27 but I must now go off and do other things. Back much later tonight.
I want to engage with 27 but I must now go off and do other things. Back much later tonight.
No, if there's a miscommunication it's about what sort of evidence is enough evidence. I was thinking of *any* god-favoring evidence as ruled out by LB's stipulations.
Tim, I guess my initial reaction would be that, if you believe that there exists a supernatural agent whose only causal job is to inspire people, I'm going to undermine your belief by arguing that the inspirations are explicable in god-free ways. Then I will play "ask" on my stereo and you will be in trouble.
Marcus Aurelius has a God who apparently is identical with the impersonal ordering principle of the universe, which basically works mechanistically. He also has "gods" whch are apparently the Roman gods, honored for patriotic reasons whether or not they "exist".
Spinoza's God is similiar, and the Calvinist God equally distant, though more personal and much angrier.
Marcus's acceptance of fate and of the divine order is rather compromised by the fact that he spent his whole adult life as Roman Emperor or heir-apparent. The things he had to suffer were as few as anyone of that time had to suffer.
His philosophy, however, did make him a disciplined, temperate, thoughtful and reasonably humane person, as many Roman Emperors were not.
He also believed in a kind of providence, in the sense that "all things work together for good". He seemed willing to assume this providence as a given.
I think FL is starting from the wrong end. It is actually one of the strengtsh of Dennett's book that he avoids this trap (as Dawkins doesn't) and sees that religious statements are not often in intention propositional.
If people claim the universe has a benevolent purpose that reaches from its creation down to the falling sparrow, they are usually doing two things -- trying to express an intuition, and trying to demonstrate membership of a group.
They are _not_ asserting this as a result of rational enquiry. Even the people who seem to be, and I am thinking here of the rather smug English tradition running up towards Paley, are often doing so quite self-consciously in the teeth of the evidence.
But it really is wrong to start from the position that a philosophically literate believer's beliefs have much in common with those of a stupid and ignorant co-religionist. The question needs to be examined in every case.
I've got gobs of religious feeling, which only seems to increase as I grow older, while at the same time able less and less to believe in God outside of a human construct.
The piece by the English guy linked to on Pharangula last fall, the one that talked about "Respect Creep" more or less convinced me.
"Religion has put its faith in the fact, the supposed fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for Poetry the idea is everything."
I'm going to undermine your belief by arguing that the inspirations are explicable in god-free ways.
No, I can see that. But, as one not versed in the philosophy of science, it seems that much of the respect we grant to scientific explanations is respect granted to rigorous scientific explanations. I'm not sure, for example, if you're saying that I'm supposed to treat evolutionary psychology as a science in the same way that I treat quantum physics (which a couple of the physicists I know never tire of telling me is the most tested theory EVAR!) as a science. If not, which grouping do your explanations of inspiration fall into?
How did I get pulled into 35? Was it my "god or someone drops hints for us" comment the other day?
43: Yeah. I may have expressed it badly, or misunderstood what you were saying. Sorry.
I think I'm confused about whether FL believes that there are perceived boundaries to the set of things we consider physical phenomena, whether those boundaries move over time, and how those boundaries are determined.
11, 38:
I would say that I've left room for more than a completely non-interventionist, Deist God. Assume a self contained universe created by a God, and capable of fully self-consistent internal workings without the interference of that God. Further assume that God is an intelligent actor with goals and purposes, one of which, for the sake of argument, is to avoid creating unambiguous widespread proof of its existence.
There's room for all sorts of deliberately evasive interference in the universe, then, that is witnessed only by one or a few people, and isn't subject to replication under laboratory conditions. Now, I don't see why God should want to be evasive in this regard, but I don't see the hypothesis that he might be as logically out of the question.
Does the argument about the relation between theism and science ever actually occur in good faith? Most of the time it looks a lot like a shell game, in which if Science's Straw Man can't Prove Everything, then (i) there is a god and (ii) if there is a god it must be the god of the Southern Baptists, so teh gheys can't marry.
Or anyway, that's the US version. The UK version is, if I don't want jellyfish genes in my pork and I like singing "Jerusalem" in small stone churches on spring mornings, then (i) there must be a god; (ii) if there is a god it must be a mildly damp deity whose weight in worldly affairs extends no further than keeping the lark on the wing and the snail on the thorn.
#46:
That's beautiful. The respect-creep guy admitted his love for the stone churches and was still pretty convincing.
I believe in a God of the gaps. At the Mineshaft.
46: I read the post to be describing people saying "there might be a God," and others denying it.
Well, I'm confused. Insofar as I follow Science! (thank you, Labs, for sticking me with a Thomas Dolby soundtrack for the morning) I understand the state of play to be, "there might be a god, but under no circumstances could it possibly be the god of Abraham, Isaac, etc." But theists willing to go this far can't easily be found on the airwaves in America.
I understood Labs's post to be saying, Andrew Dickson White was right: there is a war between science and theology, and no part of theology is immune to science's assault, pace the attempts of accommodationists who want to say, well, Science can have all that over there, but it can't touch my Magick over here.
Or have I missed something?
I understood Labs's post to be saying, Andrew Dickson White was right: there is a war between science and theology, and no part of theology is immune to science's assault, pace the attempts of accommodationists who want to say, well, Science can have all that over there, but it can't touch my Magick over here.
That's what I'm understanding, and I'm arguing for the accomodationists.
I think you can do that, but I think you have to recognize that
(i) it serves no real political purpose, arguing for the accommodationists—the theists in this scenario are not to be accommodated, you know;
(ii) Magick is shrinking every day, such that
(iii) Someday you're only going to be left with the god who made you a brain in a vat and left stimuli equivalent to bricks under hats just to mess with you, i.e., apo's trickster, who doesn't really satisfy in the way the stone-church lark/snail god does.
44 - No problem, Tim, I was just kind of perplexed.
None of which is to say that you're not a beautiful person, and indeed, Idealist should buy you a pony today.
I don't pay, I think this is your man:
It is hard to confess, but I can enjoy religious music, and even religious poetry. I think the Book of Common Prayer, or the King James Bible, are great glories of the English language, and I am grateful for an education that did something to immerse me in their vocabulary and rhythms. I suppose I regard the Church of England as an old family pet: a bit moth-eaten, prone to scratch at its own fleas (gay marriages, women bishops) but familiar and somehow comforting, best when it is not making too much noise.
It's Simon Blackburn on "Religion and Respect".
Re: (iii)
What's the argument against my deliberately evasive god described in 45; intervening in the cosmos all over the place, but in such a way so as not to leave certain sorts of unambiguous evidence of that interference? (One argument that springs to mind is "That's an awfully odd way for a god to act," but I don't think that arguments based on the psychology of a hypothetical god are strong ones.)
Such a god could be doing all sorts of damp-church related lark/snail management -- just inconspicuously.
I think I'm roughly with LB in #51. Part of what I'm reacting to is Magick is shrinking every day. I have found that some scientists heap scorn on what the lay public thinks it knows about science. Sometimes they are scorning lay people for their doubt of well-established scientific theories, but a fair bit of the time it's because lay people have accepted as "scientifically true" things that the scientists don't. (These are roughly the same type of people as doctors who can't watch ER, etc.) FL seems to be positing the existence of scientific explanations that I'm not sure currently exist.
Maybe that's not problematic to his argument. I admit that I'm probably missing something, and it's not precisely clear to me what questions are being asked and answered.
The argument for an inconspicuously interventionist god isn't all that different, that I see, from the trickster / brain-in-the-vat god. (But I am not a philosopher, so I don't know.)
Such a god could be doing a lot of lark / snail management, but there's a deal of evidence is that any inconspicuously interventionist deity is probably also inconsiderate of, or ineffectual on behalf of, what we would call "good", isn't there? Which tends to mitigate one's temptation to fly off into Browningish rhapsodies.
55:thank-you, yes that's it. I spend a lot of time in services, and learning and practicing religious music, both Christian and Jewish. I believe it has great value, and to me, yet I don't believe in god in any ordinary sense.
"Doctors who can't watch ER...."
My bartender brother bitterly hated "Cheers".
SCMTim, I was just in the midst of writing a clarification on this point.
Orr claims, and I dispute, that religion makes some non-trivial 'metaphysical' claims that are immune to empirical evidence. I claim with some confidence that religion's interesting claims are *vulnerable to possible empirical results*.
I am not claiming that the final results are in. I do, however, think that things are pretty clearly trending in that direction, but that's a layperson's guess about where our best theories will end up.
Now, it's the nature of scientific reasoning that it won't *definitively and with certainty* rule out some kind of divinity, in something like the way we can't definitively rule out unicorns. But, I'm betting, it will, eventually, bring us to the point where the existence of such a thing is immensely implausible.
61: OK. I think I buy that. But what I wonder is whether you see any sorts of claims, in any field, that aren't vulnerable empirical results - either of the "you're wrong" type or of the "you're think you're saying something, but you're not" type.
Philosophy of As-If Vahinger and Kelly
Hey, Let's pretend there is a God for the purpose of normative construction! K's "Knight of Resignation" who can't believe but must believe.
8: If "transcendance" has any meaning, science can't touch it. K wasn't fooling around, the distance between God and Man is infinite. This is a feature, not a bug. An interventionist observable God makes faith impossible. The Christian ethic is derived from this transcendance, the gap between individual subjects is equally infinite, and so commands ("Thou Shalt Love..." caritas, a disinterested and unconditional love.
Where's Kotsko? I fear I have fallen into Gnosticism.
Such a god could be doing a lot of lark / snail management, but there's a deal of evidence is that any inconspicuously interventionist deity is probably also inconsiderate of, or ineffectual on behalf of, what we would call "good", isn't there?
Here, can't one appeal to the possibility that god is vastly more intelligent than we are, and so that things that appear 'evil' in the world would either be good or at least necessary if we had full information?
But, I'm betting, it will, eventually, bring us to the point where the existence of such a thing is immensely implausible.
I'm having trouble with the concept of 'plausibility' in this context. What does it mean to say that given a certain set of empirical facts, the existence of god is implausible? In nine out of ten universes with similar facts, there is no god?
64: Does a concept of "good" that's incomprehensible to human beings have any meaning?
65: It means, four out of five dentists surveyed say there is no god.
But I am really here to flamewar Emerson, who maybe thinks I didn't notice last night's comment at TAPPED about the unproductiveness of cracker bashing. Comment #4 may not stand.
"him/her" as a so-called attempt to avoid sexist language. Why not her/him? Hmmm? Looks like reinforcing the patriarchy to me.
"Scientific research is really a better thing to do than smoking dope and jerking off" ...I demand Emerson be banned. This shows such a complete lack of civilized values as to be a clear and present danger to youth of America. Besides, I suspect, a personal attack on my chosen lifestyle of the 70s.
Just that the best evidence supports the claim that there is no such Being. I think we can talk epistemic probability talk with necessary truths. Maybe Weiner will make fun of this.
I guess the puzzlement on my part is like this. People make judgments all the time based on less-than-conclusive evidence. I think there's no Loch Ness monster, I think cigarettes cause cancer, and so on. But I also think this is roughly the position we're in w/r/t God: we have better evidence against His existence than we have for it. Someone will say-- aha, but you haven't *proven* that there is no such entity! I think this reply manifests confusion about the rules of the game, since deductive inference isn't what we're looking for.
Sure, it *could* be that the world is governed by a divine plan so complex that things appear, from our limited vantage point, to be completely awful. I think there's a simpler explanation.
I don't know, but I don't think I need to postulate such a concept. I'm thinking of something more like an animal at the vet's suffering and resisting getting stitched up. Healing faster and more completely is 'good' in the mind of the animal, if the animal can conceive of anything at all, but the animal doesn't have the knowledge to know that the current evil will produce the later good.
(I should say that I'm a complete atheist myself -- I'm arguing for a position I don't hold.)
And bitchphd supplied much wisdom in 20 and 27.
71: Okay, I could buy the idea of a god for whom, e.g., FDR's polio made him a better person with greater empathy for his fellow persons, and thus led to an America that was a nicer place for Americans to live in, even though it surely sucked for FDR to have polio.
What I have trouble with is any explanation that disasters like the Holocaust have some higher undiscernible good purpose. Those people are dead, you know, and difficult on that basis to improve. Ask a marine; there's an important qualifier in the macho credo -- that suffering which does not kill me only makes me stronger.
Also, in 73, for "a god" read, "concept of 'the good'". I think.
72: is it part of the joke that I wrote 27 and that it criticizes 20? Or did you mean 25?
I can't remember which crackerbashing comment it was.
People make judgments all the time based on less-than-conclusive evidence. I think there's no Loch Ness monster
But isn't part of it that you don't care very much whether there is a Loch Ness monster or not? Not that your caring affects existence, but that it affects the speed at which you accept a claim. No "for what value of 'monster'"-ing necessary.
Are we just fighting another in the long battles over the a priori? Let's run the same "what can science prove/disprove" game on ethics. I think murder is wrong, but it is hard for me to imagine the experiment that is going to either support or undermine this belief. Some religious claims just seem to be ethical claims, and so get the same exemption (if any) to methological naturalism.
Are there any elements of religion that differentiate it from ethics? Well, surely there are some empirical claims made by some religions (Cthluhu is sleeping in R'lyeh) that science can prove or disprove. I am less interested in these types of claims: if someone is looking to their faith tradition for definitive answers on geology, astronomy, or biology that's not a very profitable debate to have.
There do seem to be claims that do not fit either the moral or scientific mold (all proceeds according to the Lord's will, God loves us), and which seem resistant to empirical proof or disproof. It is often difficult to understand what the implications of these types of claims should be on our actions. Stipulate that the Lord created the heavens and the earth in a first mover fashion: how do we incorporate that fact into our behavior?
Kierkegaard is one great place to go for ruminations on this topic.
Wandering back to this thread
You could, if you wanted, say that religious claims aren't the kind of thing that can be undermined by any empirical inquiry, but this (I think) comes with a cost: you have to accept any possible outcome of empirical enquiry as equally compatible with your religious claims. If there's no explanatory work at all done by God, and you still want to believe, well, that's between you and your epistemologist. But this involves giving up a lot of traditional theism-- including any claims about purpose or meaning that rest on, say, an intervening, causally potent God.
What I think is maybe wrong in here is that you have to give up a claim to purpose or meaning just because God doesn't explain observable phenomena.
The problem with many central religious propositions, it seems to me, is that they can't serve the role they're supposed to serve unless they're subject to empirical criticism.
I think this is taking a very narrow view of the role they're supposed to serve. Once, the point of religion was to provide an explanation for the origin of the universe, etc. I think there are at least possible other purposes now.
I think a coherent theology could be made out of the ideas: (1) God asks (demands?) your belief in spite of the lack of evidence; you're meant to sacrifice reason and doubt on the alter of something greater than what you can arrive at through direct perception or ratiocination. (2) God hasn't abandoned you in spite of the lack of physical evidence for his existence; he left behind word of his love, a moral code, etc. Neither of those things are falsifiable. They may be unlikely from the point of view of observed evidence, but that's irrelevant to the believer.
It's not that you're wrong that religion, esp. traditional theology, has truth claims that can be cast in doubt by evidence, but I think you're totalizing the importance of those truth claims, and overestimating the catastrophe of doubt to people who accept them.
I do agree with slolernr et al. that a just and omnipotent god is pretty inconceivable.
Or whatever. I'm very shy of participating in these threads, especially since FL examined my first comment quizzically for evidence of a cock joke.
FL, Have you done any further work on your "gravity + demons pushing" theory? I think it would be wonderful for philosophers to begin probing the depths of demonology, which is nowadays a neglected topic even in religion departments.
Tim, not really. Place a lot of money on it, and I'll look at the facts more carefully, but my point was simply about the nature of the inference.
Baa, you're killing me. Surely we can develop well-confirmed moral theories that include "murder is wrong." They might even have empirical consequences. In fact, we have such a theory: preference-satisfaction utilitarianism.
Tia, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way.
My point is sort of that without the God-as-creator, the other functions don't work. One kind of theist needs the Divine Agent to get the other needs met. If the world fails to live up to these needs...feh.
Kotsko, I have a bleg written with you in mind, but I don't want to post it yet, for fear that it distracts from this thread. In fact I have some publications coming out called "Is goodness identical to H2O?" and "Why 'that is an empirical question' is a response to every objection."
Argh, I'm still not trying to be Farber.
No, FL. Actually the only way for us to figure out that murder is wrong is for a supernatural being to reveal that fact to us.
I actually had a revelatory moment in high school while listening to Dr. Dobson rant about the "biblical evidence" for how gambling is bad. I thought to myself, "Did God really need to give us divinely inspired texts to tell us that gambling is a dangerous activity? For that matter, did we really need God to tell us to be nice to people, not to kill, to be faithful to our spouses, etc.? Seems like we could probably work out that stuff for ourselves." Thus I felt that if there is a God, he has bigger fish to fry than our damn personal morality or our sense of some kind of numinous "meaning" or our "spirituality" or whatever.
God fries fish, of course, because today is a Friday during Lent.
75: 72 to 20 and 25, not 20 and 27. Sorry.
Unless the numbers are moving
1. Whether "that is an empirical question" is a response to every objection is, by its own lights, an empirical question.
2. If all that the claim meant were that one can proffer "that is an empirical question" as a response to every objection, the claim would be uninteresting.
3. We can empirically observe that many people will not accept "that is an empirical question" as satisfying their objections.
Yeah, moral propositions have empirical consequences, but the confirmation of moral principles isn't achieved via MN methods, is it? (or at least, this seems in principle disputable and in fact disputed). So the empery of MN knows some boundaries. The question seems to me to be: what exactly, if anything, is the content of religion that is a) not a claim within the sphere of MN, b) not ethics. And should there be such content, how should it (can it?) influence us.
I guess I don't understand your point. Religion makes metaphysical claims based on empirically dubious but unfalsifiable factual claims. You say, those factual claims are dubious. The religious people say, we know, but unfalsifiable, and so still possible, so science can't fuck with our metaphysical claims. It can only cast doubt, which we've been living with since before the scientific method was invented.
Where's the problem with that position?
I thought to myself, "Did God really need to give us divinely inspired texts to tell us that gambling is a dangerous activity? For that matter, did we really need God to tell us to be nice to people, not to kill, to be faithful to our spouses, etc.? Seems like we could probably work out that stuff for ourselves."
Let's be fair, though. We probably did need a god to tell us not to make graven images, to remember the sabbath day and keep it holy, and a whole bunch of other crazy stuff.
In fact, we have such a theory: preference-satisfaction utilitarianism.
Yeah, but do we have a wizard cocksucker such theory?
FL:
I think my areas of confusion are:
1. What sort of God are you positing? You say that there is or will be empirical explanations for all explanations now ceded to God, is that right? But I'm not sure what is now ceded to your God. Maybe this is a notion of God that is always in retreat, I guess.
2. At what point does a "just so" story become science? I think I'm doubting that science presently offers as rigorous and well-tested a set of explanations for things as you seem to be suggesting.
Yes. This is exactly what I was groping toward.
Sorry, in 93 I meant to quote this:
Religion makes metaphysical claims based on empirically dubious but unfalsifiable factual claims. You say, those factual claims are dubious. The religious people say, we know, but unfalsifiable, and so still possible, so science can't fuck with our metaphysical claims. It can only cast doubt, which we've been living with since before the scientific method was invented.
I must have screwed up the tags.
I didn't read all the comments before posting my first one (which I assumed, apparently correctly, would not already have come up).
If you want the real Christian answer to this, it's that "the form of this world is passing away." And not in the mechanistic Left Behind way in which certain predictions are fulfilled, setting in motion the apocalypse machine. God's revelation is not a set of facts, about this world or the next, but first of all a judgment on this world. Within an apocalyptic horizon, the "debate" between something called "science" and something called "religion" strikes me as empty chatter.
In point of fact, I would tend to side with the most "nihilistic" scientific viewpoint -- no meaning, no purpose, no providence, just a few accidents leading to "consciousness," with all of it culminating in heat death. If "there is" a God, it is not the one who guarantees this order of being nor the God who fills in the gaps in our explanatory power, but the God who redeems -- this is the meaning of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, which is another thing altogether from personal immortality or "the afterlife."
Tia-- you say
Religion makes metaphysical claims based on empirically dubious but unfalsifiable factual claims. You say, those factual claims are dubious. The religious people say, we know, but unfalsifiable, and so still possible, so science can't fuck with our metaphysical claims. It can only cast doubt, which we've been living with since before the scientific method was invented.Where's the problem with that position?
This is a helpful way of putting it. Let's use, as our sample metaphysical claim, "the universe has purpose." Call this claim M. The traditional Christian says that this claim is true *because* there exists an all-knowing, all powerful God with a plan for my life. I've been arguing that, as we learn more and more about the world, we have better and better reason to get rid of the God hypothesis. I take it you'd call the claim that God exists a *factual* claim, call it F, and you're pointing out that since we can't have some very high degree of certainty that F is false, M is still safe. The traditional theist can believe M because F hasn't been conclusively disproved.
I agree with most of that: the theist's reasons for believing M do rest on his belief that F; and what's more, we don't have knock-down, drag-out, completely compelling evidence that F is false.
I then go on to say: oh come on. By demanding that level of evidence for F, or for not-F, you're changing the rules in the middle of the game. If our empirical theories help to make F *extremely unlikely*-- as I think they do, because we have pretty good naturalistic accounts of various phenomena that otherwise would be support for F-- then I think belief that F is unreasonable. Thus our scientific enquiry has undermined F. We've also undermined the theist's commitment to M, because, at least for this person, M depends on F.
I could have saved all these words by saying it this way, maybe: doubt comes in degrees. If you cast a whole lot of it, you're providing some pretty good reason to reject F. If only a little, not so much. The better our god-free theories are, the worse off F looks.
Analogy: I can imagine someone holding out on the link between cigarettes and cancer for some time, but when the evidence reaches a certain point, this stops being charming and starts being pathological.
Random comments:
According to the Euthyphro paradox, what God thinks about morals/ethics isn't relevant; God plays no part in any rational enquiry into that issue. As far as I can tell, any ethics is just the working out of some axiomatic classification of behaviors and hence not anything like an absolute unrelative truth - i.e., at the end of the day it's a set of orders arising from historical accidents or designed to maximize metrics which are themselves historical accidents. Which I think means they don't do what people would like, even if they are better than nothing to some ways of thinking.
I suspect a lot of religion comes from a sense that the human experience of life can't be explained and that particular experiences of the numinous are privileged. I suspect that when AIs arise and are acknowleded as such the former will evaporate. I think when there's a full explanation of what's happening during religious experiences - i.e., via brainscans, via drugs or other stimulations that can turn such feelings on or off - the latter will fade. However, I would guess that as superhuman machine intelligences evolve, although some people will stop worshipping the old gods, some will start worshipping the new.
From the point of view of a physicist, I would guess that there will never be an argument that the beginning of the universe is better or worse explained by a deist deity than otherwise.
I should have lumped "purpose" in above with morals/ethics. I guess.
"The university has a purpose" might be a metaphysical claim but it's not a religious claim, or if it is it's only by proxy. The key religious claim is "If you behave you go to Heaven, if you don't you go to Hell" (with local variants), i.e. your conduct in life will determine your fate in afterlife. This is the ultimate unverifiable/unfalsifiable question, which puts it strictly in the realm of religion. FL's objection that science can put supporting arguments in doubt is true to the extent that religions appeal to science in building a case for their authorativeness (just as they appeal to explicit anti-science, commonly known as miracles), but it does not get us anywhere closer to answering the question itself. (Or even the preceding question if there is an afterlife at all.)
If our empirical theories help to make F *extremely unlikely*-- as I think they do, because we have pretty good naturalistic accounts of various phenomena that otherwise would be support for F-- then I think belief that F is unreasonable.
Here, I'm not following you. What empirical evidence was there ever for F that the advance of science has contradicted? As far as I've ben aware, there's never been any 'evidence' of F except for eyewitness accounts of miracles, and those are unaffected by the advance of science.
(I agree with you that there is no evidence for F that I find convincing, and in the absence of such evidence, I, personally, do not believe in F. But I don't see where the advance of science comes into it.)
I think #100 is the nub of the problem. You say that our empirical theories make F extremely unlikely - how? I suppose I'm looking for you to set out a series of conditions for belief in F. "No one could believe in F unless you believe that man was made of clay," etc. Or, "No one can believe in F unless they have external evidence that can be readily aprehended by anyone." Or something like that.
It's more that our theories undermine god-based explanations. Go back far enough, and biological complexity really did pose a serious challenge to not-F. Now, not so much. My point is that things that purported to be evidence for F are no longer evidence for F, since we have naturalistic explanations for them.
Other examples: widespread religious belief is sometimes taken to be prima facie evidence for F, but if we can account for it in a way that doesn't invoke God, so much the better.
: widespread religious belief is sometimes taken to be prima facie evidence for F, but if we can account for it in a way that doesn't invoke God, so much the better
I am leary of drawing the wrath of that Irishman, but how rigorous are those explanations? If we can think up any plausible alternative to an F-based belief, are we obliged to treat that alternative as superior to the F-based explanation? I don't know enough (anything) about the rigorousness of various social sciences, but by tradition, aren't they often treated differently than "hard sciences."
No, Tim, I just mean that believing F makes less sense once we have simpler, better-supported explanation for various phenomena. If I didn't have good reason to think that biological complexity could be explained in naturalistic terms, I might be a theist, for example.
So, I guess, it comes down to this. People who believe that F is true believe in some *very* odd things. An eternal, nonphysical conscious being with unlimited power? For me to buy it, there had better be some serious theoretical advantages. As the explanatory edge diminishes, the cost of putting F in your belief box goes up, it seems to me.
Were such things ever (i.e., the watchmaker argument) ever all that strong a support for the case for theism, though? Appealing in the Enlightenment, but surely the bulk of theists throughout history have relied on testimonial evidence of the miraculous, or on direct personal experience (either internal and psychological, or otherwise) that they believe to be evidence of the divine. Darwin killed the watchmaker argument, but I'm not sure that the loss of that argument is a significant event.
Err...I'm not committed to the "widespread belief" thesis; I was just using it as an example.
Those direct experiences are subject to debunking explanations as well. I mean, I believe believers who say they feel the presence of God, but I don't believe that God is what they're feeling. (Is nothing sacred!?)
I'm so embarassed to be playing village atheist.
I mean, I believe believers who say they feel the presence of God, but I don't believe that God is what they're feeling.
Sure, I don't believe it is either. That doesn't put you or me in a different position from a 13th century atheist, though.
One reason reducing the evidence for F to zero makes it unlikely is that is is trivial to produce distinct F', F'', etc. Given an infinity of equally unsupported theories, the likelihood that any particular one is true falls to zero. The major religions currently can claim that N billion fans can't be wrong, or we can explain your intuition that blah, or we can explain your feeling that day that foo, or we saw a miracle so...; and can note that nobody claims belief in the Swimming Martini Megagod has the same properties. When science can explain all of the above (e.g., can show people in the condition of our ancestors will produce fake miracles at rate X and will be believed at rate Y and produce religions based on this at rate Z), there's no reason at all to distinguish between worshippers of mainstream god G and SMM, and belief in any particular non-interventionist god will be unreasonable.
I mean, I believe believers who say they feel the presence of God.
I think this is pretty much me. And I admit that there are other, natural, explanations that can be offered - "the side-effects of habitual, large-scale misuse of horse tranqs," etc. But I don't see how those claims are, as made, simpler or more efficient explanations of the feeling. My claims about the nature of God are really, really limited - He exists, and I don't know much about him, except that He seems to peek in from time to time.
We have better theories, LB.
With respect to explaining events that people perceive as direct experience of the divine? I did not know that.
So was 95 incomprehensible, or just irrelevant?
Incomprehensible, at least to me. But I haven't got any background in this stuff, I'm just babbling.
When science can explain all of the above (e.g., can show people in the condition of our ancestors will produce fake miracles at rate X and will be believed at rate Y and produce religions based on this at rate Z), there's no reason at all to distinguish between worshippers of mainstream god G and SMM, and belief in any particular non-interventionist god will be unreasonable.
That's good. Totally willing to accept this, I think. I just don't think that we have anything like the science for this (though I'm not a big believer in miracles). Also, it seems unfair that we can have new theories of science in the face of evidence, but not new theories (or understandings) of God.
Finally, you are all heathens, and the Almighty has granted me the right to damn you all to eternal hell! Enjoy President George W. Bush...for eternity!
111- SCMT, if I could poke a particular neuron in your brain and make that "Somebody's up there's checking me out" arise, and if I could show you a scan of your brain activity as the feeling turned on and off, would that change your viewpoint?
"I just don't think that we have anything like the science for this"
For the other stuff, I think we're close (e.g., in our lifetimes), for the miracles expt I proposed we just don't have the requisite ethics boards and willpower to raise a few dozen generations of people in complete isolation from a 1k BCE cultural level.
I don't see why it should.
If, for example, I saw the clouds part and a radiant dove gliding down a beam of light toward me while angelic voices sang and a compelling voice said "Bless you, my daughter," (Or whatever, pick your miracle) I would probably reconsider my atheism. That isn't because natural causes couldn't produce the same appearance, just that the chances that someone is setting up hidden projectors and speakers, etc., just to screw with me seems awfully low.
Likewise, just because SCMT's experience of the divine can be simulated by natural methods does not seem to me evidence for the proposition that it is not supernaturally caused.
#116: Maybe, if it were reproduceable. I'd also want an explanation for why that neuron fires, even if it was just something like "the brain cycles through this all the time." And assuming well-tested, etc. But a fair bit of my belief is a function of upbringing and culture, so probably not. I'd like to think that I'd get as far as admitting that I should change my mind, but couldn't.
It would deeply shake my faith in my ability to damn people to hell, though.
Is it possible to teach science without the narrative of overcoming previous ignorant ideas? The problem of continued reference to old-time beliefs might not simply be a matter of the persistence of religion -- everyone always wants to keep remembering the morons he or she has defeated, and the scientific method by its very nature presupposes a "progress" of knowledge, which makes no sense if you don't know where you progressed from.
114: Maybe it's incomprehensible to me, too.
LB, we're at an even more highly speculative point in the conversation, but still, I think we have better non-theistic explanations for all sorts of physical and psychological phenomena now than we did seven centuries ago. The 13th century atheist didn't have biological or cosmological theories; he also didn't have even half-assed ideas about mental illness-- if St Theresa made similar claims now, I have a guess as to what your reaction would be.
I should also note that I have no idea what the best religious epistemology was like pre-renaissance, either. It's an interesting question, but I don't think it affects our discussion here.
Also, keep in mind that I am not claiming, and don't need to claim, that we've got the unified theory of everything. That would be silly. I'm just saying that, from where we stand on the timeline, things are looking pretty good for non-theological explanations. My bold prediction is that things will drift more or less this way in the future.
118: but what if SCMTim read an explanation of religious belief that invoked our hyperactive Agency Detection Device* and came to believe that his religious feelings were sort of like an evolutionary spandrel?
I mean, he *could* say, "well, that's the correct explanation, AND there is also a divine agent doing all the causation." But it wouldn't be the most parsimonious explanation available-- sort of like learning that the evidence for Santa's existence has been faked, and thinking that while Dad ate the cookies left out for Santa, there really *is* a guy who makes toys at the North Pole.
*seriously, people talk about this stuff in the literature.
"Is it possible to teach science without the narrative of overcoming previous ignorant ideas?"
In physics anyway one can discuss the overcoming (if you will) of previous extremely smart ideas. One can teach Newton's physics, then point out how that framework led later people (well, Newton too, because he was wizard cocksucking smart) to wonder about problems in it and come up with new ways of looking at things.
I think it's more typical for science to say"here's new data, fix your theory" than to say, "couldn't you numbskulls realize that Africa and S. America would fit together too perfectly"? The guy down the hall with his crazy pet theory that disagrees with your grand explanation of the data is a moron, not the people whose pictures hang on the walls.
The 13th century atheist didn't have biological or cosmological theories; he also didn't have even half-assed ideas about mental illness-- if St Theresa made similar claims now, I have a guess as to what your reaction would be.
I think this is simply untrue. 'Crazy' isn't a new concept -- the idea that someone making unlikely claims about something bizarre having happened to them was doing so because of some mental disfunction would be perfectly familiar to a 13th C atheist. He might be less predisposed to such an explanation than you are, but it's not that he wouldn't have the concept of mental illness.
1. To repeat my point from #99, "Does God exist?", "Does the universe have a purpose?", "Can I feel the presence of God?" are only ancillary questions to the original question that spawned the religious industry: "What will happen to me when I die?"
2. The answer that fuels the religious industry ("RI") is not as much "You'll go to Heaven or to Hell, depend on how you did on earth" than "You'll go to Heaven if you did good, but if you didn't you can still pay up $$$ and sneak in through the side door."
3. Of course there's no money to be made for RI if everybody can determine for themselves if they done good or not.
4. Hence the invention of the unimpeachable good behavior certification device, for short: GOD.
5. The problem with 4 is that good behavior certificates cost nothing to produce, so barriers to entry are low and GOD has to fear a lot of low-cost competition.
6. This triggers the need for barriers to entry, in the form of Our GOD Is Better Than Yours.
7. But if the performance metric is unobservable a priori (i.e. "If GOD-1 tells me I go to Heaven but GOD-2 says I go to Hell, which one is right?"), how can GOD-1 industry gain an advantage over low cost GOD-2 industry?
8. Enter miracles.
9. Miracles are free to produce, which means GOD-2 industry can easily replicate them.
10. Enter prophesy.
11. Now we're on to something. If GOD-1 industry can tell me more reliably that I should sow my emmer tomorrow than GOD-2 industry, I might be more inclined to pay the higher price for GOD-1 certificate.
12. Shit. How do we figure out when peasant O. should sow his emmer?
13. Enter science.
I think the question of whether he had the concept [mental illness] is a really tricky one, actually, and I'd have to know more about what sorts of judgments he made to say anything either way.
At least our ideas about the range and manifestation of mental dysfunction are a lot different, no? Cases that come to mind: Hildegaard von Bingen, the Salem trials. Again, pure speculation ahead: both were understood in theological terms even though the real story (says I) wasn't theological at all.
There's also an important point about the *status* of our 13c atheist's explanation: suppose he *did* explain some mystical experience in terms of natural causes. Yet
(a) he lacks, yet we have, a moderately well-developed and confirmed body of beliefs about what's going on in cases of various forms of "craziness," and this weakens his epistemic position;
(b) he lacks, yet we have, a fairly well-developed set of theories explaining all sorts of *other* things in non-theological terms. This is relevant because what matters is the *best explanation*. Richard Dawkins remarks somewhere that, even with Hume's work available, it wasn't possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist before Darwin. Suppose it's so: this means that our hypothetical medieval atheist doesn't have a plausible alternative to the theistic hypothesis even if he *did* have the full story about various psychological phenomena. SO he's stumped, but we aren't, by the eye.
on that note, I have to get out of the office.
113,95 I almost always find Kotsko incomprehensible, but absolutely relevant, even necessary. If he didn't exist, I would have to invent him.
118: but what if SCMTim read an explanation of religious belief that invoked our hyperactive Agency Detection Device* and came to believe that his religious feelings were sort of like an evolutionary spandrel?
This seems stronger to me. What rilkefan was saying sounds like disproving free will by putting an electrode on the nerves controling my arm, and saying "See, I can make your arm move with an electric current. Therefore, 'you' don't really control your arm, you only think you do." An explanation showing that a properly functioning brain throws off feelings like that at intervals for some evolutionary reason does look like some kind of counter-evidence. But as far as I know, that's not current science, that's speculative possible future science.
And even if that science comes through, this:
But it wouldn't be the most parsimonious explanation available-- sort of like learning that the evidence for Santa's existence has been faked, and thinking that while Dad ate the cookies left out for Santa, there really *is* a guy who makes toys at the North Pole.
seems to suffer from a problem relating to the relative statuses of Santa and an omnipotent creator God. That is, Santa has limited powers -- if someone else did something (eat the cookies) then Santa didn't. Just because someone else did something, on the other hand, does not mean God didn't -- God could have created the universe from the beginning so that whatever it was happened naturally.
one last thing, then home...
God could have created the universe from the beginning so that whatever it was happened naturally
Right, could have. But, I insist, more likely that it's nature all the way down. I'm not suggesting the probability of F is zero, just that it's quite low. So, sure, you can buy the whole naturalistic story and add on God. But that last step is a big commitment, and undersupported.
126: Claim #1 is highly questionable. To use an example familiar to me, it is not at all clear that ancient Judaism (i.e., that practiced before and even during the "Babylonian exile") had any real conception of the "afterlife" as you describe it, yet I doubt anyone would deny that people in the time of David, Solomon, etc., practiced something that we would call "religion."
In fact, there is one psalm where the author asks God to save his life specifically because the dead do not praise God -- an idea that is clearly contrary to the idea of some kind of reward after death. They had an idea of "Sheol" as a "place of the dead," but it was nothing at all like what we would think of as "heaven" -- or "hell," for that matter. It's where you go when you die; and you want to avoid dying as long as possible. The vast majority of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible give no evidence that something like "the afterlife" was of any concern to the characters -- it's more like national survival. The closest you get to immortality is the idea of being remembered by future generations (viz., the many genealogies).
The idea of personal immortality (or of "salvation," which is not simply identical to immortality of the soul) only becomes a widespread concern under particular social circumstances -- and those circumstances are not co-extensive with the history of what we would call "religion" (which, if you can't tell, I do not find to be a very helpful or even definable concept).
Even in the history of Christianity, which is what most people are really talking about when they're talking about "religion," concern with the afterlife has not been uniform. For instance, I don't think that the Reformers were doing what they were doing because they felt people would "go to hell" if the correct ideas about God were not promulgated -- there was a definite attempt to change the way Christianity was practiced in this life, as an end in itself, stemming in large part from the recognition that overly focussing on the afterlife was seriously corrupting Christian practice.
But those Christian practices that were focussed most on anxiety about the afterlife (prayers and masses for souls in purgatory, leading eventually to indulgences) arose out of a situation in which people were dying in droves from the Black Death; in such circumstances, it's hard to blame people for being concerned about such matters, even though church leaders at the time were opportunistic in the ways they capitalized on people's concerns.
In short, I do not find your theory of how religion arises to be at all satisfactory. Even though I think Feuerbach, for instance, is a little bit unsophistocated, his account of religion is much better and much more reflective of actual reality. This whole "people are worried about where they go when they die" can best be generated by watching televangelists, then locking yourself in a room to develop a theory of why those religious people are so weird.
Let me add that even though I have no love for American evangelicals/fundamentalists, who seem to be most in people's minds in the "science vs. religion wars!," I think it's reductive to think that concerns about the afterlife are the final explanatory principle even for them. That is to say, there seems to be a genuine (even if horribly misguided) attempt to rearrange the social order along particular lines that are thought to be "better" in a way that cannot be reduced simply to getting "more souls into heaven."
For instance, abolishing the practice of abortion is taken to be a good in itself, apart from the question of whether the individuals who may or may not want to get abortions may or may not get to heaven. More generally, there is an attempt to produce a social order that is taken to be distinctly "Christian," independent of the attempt to get every single person to be a confessing Christian or to get them "saved." For many evangelicals in the US, this attempt to change social practices stems from a desire for God to continue to bless "America" precisely in this life, even though it is obvious that blessings that accrue to "America" will necessarily be enjoyed by people other than Christians. Thus even in the form of religion that is most explicitly opposed to "science," there is more going on than simply guaranteeing the truth of certain propositions about "the afterlife."
"What rilkefan was saying sounds like disproving free will by putting an electrode on the nerves controling my arm [...]"
But moving one's arm and having a religious experience are, to most people's way of looking at things, very different. That is, it doesn't feel like something simply inducible. Of course I would want to follow up with something about random noise or cross-talk from other nearby neurons to complete the argument, as SCMT noted.
Free will goes away with FL's argument too, of course - in my opinion, we're already there if we accept nothing supernatural is poking at our neurons.
131 - if one asked a Jew from the time of David what would happen to him when he died, don't you think he would have likely answered, "God will take care of that". If one asked him, "will your essence survive your body's death", don't you think he would have said "Yes, see above"?
I'm a bit clearer on classical Greek/Roman religion, with its hell for a few folks the gods don't like, its ghostlike limbo for most, and its maybe-a-blessed-isle-for-dead-heroes and the off-chance of getting turned into a demigod a la Ganymede. This system doesn't seem driven by afterlife concerns. Maybe the afterlife-based religions have dominated due to greater fitness.
AK, my 126 is clearly a "lock yourself in a room" kind of theory, although it's not particularly fueled by an interest in televangelists. It was more triggered by thinking about Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and the two questions he poses of religious movements. And I'm also not talking about religion per se but of religious industry, i.e. the establishment of rent-seeking enterprises that are bound to survive the earthly life of their founders. Televangelism might be an extreme form of this kind of enterprise, but it's not the kind I'm interested in. To ones I'm thinking of are older and bigger.
More generally, there is an attempt to produce a social order that is taken to be distinctly "Christian," independent of the attempt to get every single person to be a confessing Christian or to get them "saved."
I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly but if I'm a fundamental Christian and try to establish a social order concordant with my religious beliefs, why should I not primarily be concerned with my own salvation for this particular act of religious entrepreneurship? If I save a couple more souls this way then even for the better. On the other extreme, if I blow myself up next to a bus stop, am I trying to save the riders or am I trying to take the short cut to paradise?
I forget how the analogy goes exactly, but it's something like the following: the inference that religious feelings can be induced proves there is no God is like the inference that pianos can be induced to make a sound when keys are pressed proves there are no pianists. In other words, these experiments, which I find fascinating, to one so inclined might simply be the discovery of the interface God uses to talk to man. The fact that the interface can be used even when God is not speaking doesn't prove much.
Also, whenever American or European philosophers talk about "religion" they're almost always talking about monotheistic religions that are also cosmologies. Get rid of the traces of Neo-Platonism and most of the problems for empiricism go away. Is a de-supernaturalized animism or pantheism any more disprovable than that other people have consciousness or sentience?
It has in fact been a damp and English spring here, such that there are rather more snails on the thorns than I would like. But the larks, or facsimile thereof, are on the wing; hummingbirds too. The daffodils are out and bending under the rain; the roses have long since been pushing buds and will probably bloom in a couple weeks. Je cultiverais mon jardin; it is my version of what William James called the oceanic feeling.
Because I am essentially a Jamesian, I find it difficult to believe that we will one day find a single neuron that will, when pushed, produce this sensation; I am confident that the feeling is essentially a social one, such that neurons need to be pushed in particular circumstances. The lark by itself won't do it; the lark needs to be on the wing. Snails, of themselves, won't do it either; they need to be on the thorn while larks etc. The garden is not a singular stimulus but a collection of textures, sounds, smells that exists in experience, memory, and hope.
But my belief about that sensation, that it consists not in a single button-push but in an experience of immersion in a sea of sensibility, is falsifiable, and I fully expect someone to try falsifying it someday, and if they do, then Magick will have shrunk.
That's really beautifully put, slol.
Now, given that the not very live threads are "Does religion suck?" and "How 'bout those tobacco companies?" would someone mind posting a picture of a kitten?
I'm trying to finish a brief that I should have gotten done ages ago through a pounding headache, so don't look at me for anything clever. Perhaps you could convince your cat to pose in front of your monitor?
The local lark-snail forecast was as close as I could get to kittens. What, you didn't like my Gravity's Rainbow exegesis?
137 - One might find that (w/apologies to 139) the neuron in question is missing in some (many) people, which would have serious consequences for some kinds of religion. One might also wonder if the amount of information which could go through the interface of a neuron (or, for 139, a group of neurons) not leading to say the speech processing center is sufficient to be consistent with some kinds of religion. And the interface might be present in animals, which would I suspect have consequences for religious carnivores.
The idea that we were designed with a god-detection circuit that fires at random or due to natural cross-talk is rather scary. It's the kind of thing one would do in sloppily building a slave race.
142: I hadn't seen it, blush. 141, she was just off to the side, but she went around the corner. Now she's back. Yay, she just went inside so I don't have to carry her in myself.
134, and previous: it's been my understanding that pre-occupation with the afterlife is a (relatively) recent religious innovation, and one that we can probably attribute to Christianity. The paucity of writings we have about the Israelite conception of the afterlife seems to indicate that it simply wasn't a pressing concern. An Israelite from the time of David ("Jew" isn't really appropriate for such an individual) primarily looked to his God for agricultural bounty and national defense.
136: There's no direct connection between the quest for a "Christian society" and personal salvation -- salvation is independent of "works." Somewhat in line with Max Weber's theory, the contemporary evangelical might be trying to signal that he or she is in the "in-group" of people going to heaven, but again, that is a good that is enjoyed in this world and is not identical with the concern for going to heaven "as such." And the point of creating the Christian society is not so that all of those people out there will become Christians and be saved (nor that the person pursuing that will be saved -- that is taken care of independently) -- it is taken to be a good in itself.
134: The Hebrew view was more of a limbo type of thing -- apparently no heaven or hell, just an indifferent mass of the dead. The idea of punishment and reward doesn't enter the picture, and in fact, precisely because those weren't considered live possibilities, the question of theodicy had a certain pull -- it never occurs to Job that he's going to go to heaven, so everything's cool. Or if you read the book of Proverbs, that's a very optimistic account of life where the righteous are rewarded and the unjust receive their comeuppance in this life -- it's just that the empirical facts don't bear that out, so a better theory has to be found, one that still preserves the basic conviction that God is just in all his ways.
145, Do you mean afterlife or the heaven/hell dichotomy? It seems to me that any number of pre-Christian religions had clear concepts of the afterlife, even though they did not necessarily make the connection between earthly conduct and postmortal fate.
143: Genes contribute to religious inclination
h/t One of the Blowhards, I think, tho I couldn't find the post
That's really beautifully put, slol.
Hear, hear.
would someone mind posting a picture of a kitten?
Not a kitten, but teh cute follows teh self-flagellatory here.
religion's interesting claims are *vulnerable to possible empirical results*.
Yes--if you take those claims at literal face value. However, why not step back one degree? "Ok, most people treat religious claims/rules/myths *as if* they were literal, and this is fine in many ways, but that doesn't mean that they *are* or *must be* literal. So disproving them on a literal level is all well and good, but it doesn't necessarily prove that religion is false--it merely shows that the truth of religion, if there is any truth at all (and I would argue that the experience of many, many people for many, many years is that there is both truth and value in religion) doesn't lie in what is or isn't empirically provable."
That is, it's a felt truth; it functions metaphorically, the way we say that a novel or a poem "feels" true or right.
Maybe I'm being radically unconventional here, but I seriously doubt it; I've got zero theological training and I doubt I'm coming up with anything that those who think about these things didn't come up with a long time ago. I think all I'm doing is translating the whole Catholic "faith" thing into language that is less metaphorical. To me, anyway.
Bitch, We've discussed this before, but whenever you bring out this metaphor stuff, I always wonder, "Metaphor for what?" Deep ontological truths? The existential constitution of Dasein?
Is "I'll go to heaven when I die" really a very effective metaphor for, say, "I will be remembered fondly by my family"? Seems like a pretty shitty metaphor in that case. Or is "I'll go to heaven when I die" a metaphor for "I'm afraid of death"?
I agree with you that the "science vs. religion" debate is wrong-headed, but obviously from a completely different perspective.... Or is it?!
148: Yeah, I guess I'm conflating those things a bit. Pre-Christian religions certainly had a conception of an afterlife, but without the heaven/hell dichotomy it wasn't something necessarily to get worked up about?
Well, I use metaphor probably very sloppily. I don't know that it has to be a metaphor *for* something, but ok, why is it sloppy to say that the religious sense of an afterlife that is both individual and conscious can function as a metaphor, not only for "I will be remembered fondly by my family" but also things like the survival of one's DNA, the impact one makes (known and unknown) on the world, even the physical rotting of the body and its releasing of its energy, etc. etc.?
I think my sense is that religious metaphor works because it combines a LOT of things, some of which we can express other ways, some of which people used not to understand at all in any other way, and some of which resonate as "true" in ways that, say, "my family will remember me fondly" just doesn't quite capture.
And I really just don't see why this is a problem, or why we have to buy the fundamentalist line that religion must be *literally* true in exactly the same way that science is in order to be true at all.
I wouldn't say it's exactly true that no pre-Christian religions had detailed conceptions of the afterlife--the Egyptians certainly did, for instance--but most ancient religions about which we have reliable knowledge seem to have conceived of it as a vaguely unpleasant, gray kind of place, at least for most people. This is true of the Greeks (Asphodel), the Hebrews (Sheol), the Mesopotamians (I don't know the name, but the characterization was similar), etc. It's more a matter of emphasis, and it's here that Christianity (possibly along with the other mystery cults of late antiquity) was especially influential. Most pre-Christian religions placed much more emphasis on ritual and community than on dogma and faith, and Judaism, which arose in this environment, has maintained this orientation right up to this day. Kotsko's 131 is a decent description of most varieties of modern Judaism.
In discussions like this, of course, people generally use "religion" to mean "Christianity," so they often seem surprised to learn that the characteristics of Christianity are not shared by all religions, even within the European/Western Asiatic context whence it came.
In my case, the word I'm having trouble with is 'true'. For what you're talking about, I could see 'comforting' or 'helpful' or 'psychologically healthy', but I have trouble with a non-literal sense of 'true'. If you can say that the individual, conscious afterlife is 'true' because of 'the survival of one's DNA, the impact one makes (known and unknown) on the world, even the physical rotting of the body and its releasing of its energy, etc. etc.', despite the fact that one will not be a conscious individual after death, how do you distinguish truth from falsity?
I use the word "literal" when I mean true in that sense. But I think it's way too narrow to limit "true" to simply that meaning.
These conversations always make me feel simple-minded. What I want to do is press with "but what does non-literally 'true' mean?" but I have the feeling that that would both be annoying, and wouldn't get me anything I understood.
I don't think that "literal" is a very helpful idea either -- the fundamentalists have destroyed it as a concept, since in their hands it means "whatever is the stupidest thing to believe about the text."
Not annoying, though I'm tired. I dunno if I can explain what it means to me, though, other than what I said in the other thread: like, sometimes you read something really great and it feels real in a sense. And I think reducing it to "comforting" or "psychologically healthy" is a little oversimplistic, somehow. It's kind of like love, maybe: sure, we can scientifically explain all sorts of things about how it happens, why it produces certain feelings, how pair-bonding operates, but none of that really adequately explains it, does it?
The quote I used in 41,
"Religion has put its faith in the fact, the supposed bact, and now the fact is failing it. But for Poetry the idea is everything"
Expresses the conception B has. It's from Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time."
Arnold wrote a whole book on this essentially poetic conception of religious meaning, very close to what B means if I read her aright. It's called "Literature and Dogma." Also very close to what I believe, and have for years.
Pre-Christian religions certainly had a conception of an afterlife, but without the heaven/hell dichotomy it wasn't something necessarily to get worked up about?
I'm depending on Wiki here, but Valhalla, Elysion, Aaru? They seem to differ quite a bit from the Christian (Dantean?) view of Heaven, but the concept of ascendance through merit seems to precede Christian thought.
Most of those are reserved for a very few people, though, and like I said in 157, it's a matter of emphasis: even though some religions contained concepts similar to Christian Heaven, they didn't concentrate on them nearly as much.
the concept of ascendance through merit seems to precede Christian thought
Yeah, which is why generalization gets me into trouble. I admit I know very little about the practice of Norse, Greek, or Egyption religion, so I don't know how their conceptions of the afterlife impacted their theology, but I'm guessing it's less than the way Heaven and Hell impact Christianity.
(Or, on preview, what teofilo said.)
One could perhaps say that Christianity is the first place where you get the combination of a merit-based afterlife reward system and the idea that God gives a fuck what private individuals are doing (as opposed to heroes or something).
One could, and it's an interesting angle, but I would rather say that Christianity brings a radical change in emphasis from this life ("leave a model ear for Hermes and he'll cure your earache") to the next ("be nice to people and you'll get eternal happiness"). I think it shares this with some of the other mystery religions that were floating around the Roman Empire at the same time. Its appeal may have come from the fact that people were realizing that the old stuff wasn't necessarily working ("but my ear still hurts! Why, Hermes, why?"), although I bet its triumph owed more to political factors.
I see 169 as more of an AND to 168, rather than a BUT.
Yeah, that's probably a better way to see it.
sometimes you read something really great and it feels real in a sense. And I think reducing it to "comforting" or "psychologically healthy" is a little oversimplistic, somehow. It's kind of like love, maybe: sure, we can scientifically explain all sorts of things about how it happens, why it produces certain feelings, how pair-bonding operates, but none of that really adequately explains it, does it?
I think it does, in fact, which you might well think encapsulates what's wrong with me.
Anyway, this sounds just like "comforting" in a non-pejorative sense. If Christianity is true in the sense that, say, Of Human Bondage is true, we're saying (just) that traditional Christian teachings have a lot of insight into the human condition, maybe some nice moral lessons, and so on. Suddenly, I'm a Christian!
But I don't buy it, because almost every time I've been in a church someone's been going on about this guy rising from the dead, etc. And this hasn't been presented as an insightful parable ("don't we all sort of have holes in our sides that people stick their hands in?") but as a real pillar of the whole endeavor.
Okay, sure, but I doubt the other people in that church are thinking, "This is certainly an intellectually satisfying account of how the world works, much superior to the others I have considered and rejected. I'm so glad I decided to be a Christian."
That is to say, I think (and I could well be wrong) you're saying, "Look, 300 years ago if you were a curious, philosophically-oriented fellow and you wanted an explanation of the world, religion was pretty much the only one out there. You could have been an atheist, but you couldn't have found any alternative worldview that would be as satisfying as religion, so you would be more likely to accept religion as an explanation. But today we have much better accounts of various phenomena that don't depend on religious explanations, so a curious, philosophically-oriented fellow is much less likely to choose to be religious rather than secular and partial to scientific explanations. Ergo, religion no longer has the relevance it once did and there's no reason to believe in God." Fair enough. But other people can respond, "But that's not why most people are religious! It's often a more emotional thing (i.e., comforting) and a matter of culture and tradition. So while your explanation is accurate for a certain segment of the population that is looking for believable explanations of how the world works, and those people have largely abandoned religion for science, there are all these other people who still go to church for other reasons. Ergo, religion still has value and there are still reasons to try to believe in God even if it isn't the God of traditional Christianity."
Apologies if I've misunderstood anyone's position.
Ergo, religion still has value and there are still reasons to try to believe in God even if it isn't the God of traditional Christianity.
Doesn't this go back to FL's question in the later post (or at least my understanding of that question), which no one has really addressed squarely -- if religion is something other than a set of claims of literal fact about the nature of reality (I mean somthing not including a set of such claims; clearly most religions are going to include more than just claims of fact) (A) what is it, and (b) what value does it have?
(A) It's what we've been doing for x number of years.
(b) It has a value that varies for each of us depending on how much we value doing what we've been doing for x number of years.
teofilo, you're right about my claim. There's one thing I would quibble with, though, in your hypothetical response. If people are taking that stance toward religion-- that is, they think it's a cultural/traditional thing-- they can either get those goods without a straightforward belief in God's existence, or they can't.
If they can get the good results without believing in God, then religion does, in fact, provide a useful service independent of any scientific scrutiny, but I'm not sure that religion establishes some metaphysical claim in Orr's sense. It's just that we have a comforting set of rituals.
If you need the belief in God (understood in a straightforward way), then I still think that empirical theorizing can undermine this belief, and thus can undermine the dependent claims about "meaningfulness," whatever this is.
Bernard Williams has a nice line somewhere about how customs and traditions stop soon after people practice them *as* customs and rituals. Seems right.
Basically, I'm arguing that yes, people can get the advantages of religion without belief in God, and yes, this does essentially reduce religion to a comforting set of rituals. But I'm also sort of arguing that knowing this leads people to come up with ideas like a non-interventionist God, to attempt to square their religious practice with their knowledge that much of the content of religion can't be true according to scientific understanding. That is, there could be a God out there who doesn't really do anything, and there's no way to know for sure, but if there is one, that's who we're praying to. And it's the act of praying that really matters, not whether there is a God you're praying to or whether it can hear your prayers.
This is all a very Jewish approach to the issue, and may not be applicable to Christianity (although B's position seems very similar).
Yes, I'm all for ritual.
GA Cohen mentions somewhere that being Jewish in his sense (doing some of the rituals, not believing in God, really) is parasitic on there being other Jews who are more robustly Jewish (doing the rituals because they believe in God). This seems plausible to me. It's an interesting question whether the goods are possible once you give up the big claims about what exists.
GA Cohen mentions somewhere that being Jewish in his sense (doing some of the rituals, not believing in God, really) is parasitic on there being other Jews who are more robustly Jewish (doing the rituals because they believe in God).
If this is true then the number of parasitic Jews dwarfs the number of robust ones. I'm not so sure it's true, though. Why do rituals only have value if someone else believes they're real?
Sorry, "parasitic" would have been better put as "dependent on."
This could be a point of psychological difference, but if I didn't believe in God I would start to wonder why I bothered to go through the trouble of keeping kosher, etc. Some of those rituals can be pretty demanding, and most of the "keep up the practice" atheist Jews I know do it for the sake of family who really believe.
A lot of people do it just because that's how it's always been done, and they don't feel comfortable breaking the tradition. Also, it's nice to belong to a community, and the ritual strengthens that. It could be true that most atheist-but-moderately-practicing Jews (among whom I count myself) do it for the sake of family, but I doubt the deciding factor is that other family members believe in God. I certainly don't know or care if any of my family members believe, although I'm sure some of the older ones do; it's more a matter of "not letting the light go out." I concede that as level of observance goes up, theism probably becomes a more important factor.
And again, this is probably not as relevant in Christianity or other religions.
Also, it's nice to belong to a community, and the ritual strengthens that.
That's something. My aunt and uncle are weekly churchgoers, but I think pretty much atheists -- they're in it for the coffee, doughnuts, charity work and general social activism. (Mainline Protestants, but this would include a big chunk of Unitarians as well.)
"Garfinkel goes to shul to talk to God. I go to shul to talk to Garfinkel."
FL, if your model of religion were largely correct, the Unitarian Universalist Church wouldn't even exist. It's a creedless faith. No creed, only ritual. How do you explain it?
A lot of the stakes of arguments I'm skimming here are still unclear to me, so just two quick points:
1. Rilkefan, as I recall, a neurobiologist at UCSD made some fairly startling claims for the "feeling of God's presence" being located in the front temporal lobe. His data-set was very small, though, since he could locate only a few people with permanent damage in that part of their brains. I don't know what's happened with that research; the guy's name is VS Ramachandran.
2. Kotsko, FL, I would love to hear more about demonology's relevance to this debate. Any links for basic resources?
I'm just coming back to this thread, and I guess I now understand FL's argument w/r/t the two paragraphs he was arguing with, and think it's right: from the point of view of the empiricist, science does undermine religion's metaphysical claims. My confusion, I think, was that I was envisioning FL responding to the believer, and not that one argument; he effectively responds to that argument, but not the believer, who does not need her truth claims about god to be empirically likely to keep believing. Religions with cosmologies may have arisen because they were, at time of origin, the best explanation; it doesn't mean that in the mind of every practitioner, they still need to be to function. Empiricism and the scientific method are definitely the best way to get plastic and airplanes, and to evaluate the effectiveness of government programs, but I don't feel that I'm in the position to say I think they should be incontrovertible ordering principles of everyone's value system (well, I might, in point of fact, suggest it if you asked what I thought, but I'd be making an argument about value, not about fact, and not one I felt righteously confident of). A willing and measured and appropriately cordoned off suspension of rationality seems different to me than insanity. Now, a sizeable number of contemporary monotheists are neither willing nor measured, and while "crazy" might not be a good word for them because they're functioning well within the norms of their culture, I'd make a stronger argument in their case that their values are anathema to pluralism, tolerance, and science, and if they can be stamped out (their values, not them) so much the better.
sizeable number of contemporary monotheists are neither willing nor measured/i>
This is unclear. I mean that their suspension of rationality is not willing, because they don't recognize it as such, and claim that belief is in fact the most reasonable course.