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Friday, October 13, 2006
Terry Eagleton’s traditional theology; and a new version of Pascal’s Wager
Clearly a believer in the idea that a book’s title should not veil in obscurity the message of the book, Richard Dawkins has called his latest The God Delusion. There’s been a deal of fuss about the vehemence and single-mindedness of Dawkins’ anti-God position, in this book and his earlier writing, and some of it has come from perhaps-unexpected quarters.
For instance: Terry Eagleton (a ‘philosopher’ according to Wikipedia) joins the slinging of the mud, giving the book one of the least temperate and, I must say, least effective thrashings I can recall the London Review of Books ever publishing. Eagleton’s main point is a reasonable one, although it is expressed with a rather hysterically insistent and unreasoned manner (without, for instance, particular reference to the specifics of Dawkins case, and without making allowance for the fact that Dawkins is writing polemic rather than metaphysics). Dawkins, Eagleton says, takes religion to be a sort of malign unity, finding examples of the worst in religious thought and practice and then unfairly extrapolating them into religion as a whole. In fact, of course, the varieties of religious discourse are very great. Not all religious thinkers are Ian Paisley or Oral Roberts; a lot of very clever people have been theologians.
Take creation. Dawkins pitches his argument against a narrowly mechanistic view of what calling God ‘creator of the universe’ might mean, something along the lines of ‘God is an entity that caused the universe to come into being’. This, says Eagleton, is wrong! wrong! wrong! Creation is not some form of ‘super-manufacturing’. Making reference, several times, to what he calls ‘traditional theology’ he elaborates the following belief-position:
[God] is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even in the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. … God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificent rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.
But we’re entitled to say, here: ‘his research grant body? What are you on about Terry?’ Dawkins doesn’t pretend there’s a panel of super-Gods who will judge the effectiveness of Jehovah’s work as a creator and award funding accordingly. Eagleton inveigles-in the concept by way of discrediting the work of ‘scientists’ (who?) and bigging-up his terribly Romantic and untraditional notion of God the Artist. To say that God brought the world into being ex nihilo may indeed be a way of stressing his freedom-to-act as uncaused-causer; but it is also a way of saying that he’s very clever, if that word is used in its full sense, and without the sneer that Eagleton here intends. How could it be anything else?
Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines …
Suggesting that God is an artist, bringing in notional grants-awarding straw-bodies and denying that God is clever: none of this is ‘traditional doctrine’, whatever Eagleton says. This appeal to ‘tradition’ as an attempt to discredit Dawkins is a pretty rum manoeuvre by Eagleton, I’d say.
[Dawkins] asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.
‘Is rather like’, here, is rather stupid. The inference, I suppose, is that asking Dawkins’ question is rather like asking a clearly insane question. But nobody believes that Blair is an octopus; where well over half the world’s population do believe that God speaks, or at least can speak, to them. This thing claimed here to be ‘rather like’ another thing is not like at all. What Eagleton seems to be getting at here, though he’s making a poor fist of it, is the accusation that Dawkins is making a category error in thinking that God is ‘existent’; or more exactly (since Dawkins clearly doesn’t believe that God is existent) in thinking that anybody in the world is so stupid as to consider God to be existent.
For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist.
Personally I don’t see that there is more than ‘one sense of that word’, but of course this may be a failing in my own imagination. What is surely true, however, is that the world’s four billion or so believers-in-God don’t have recourse to any supersubtlety on the question. Surely for the large majority of them God exists in a straightforward way. And when Eagleton says ‘for Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore is’ he surely means ‘for a certain kind of theologian, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is.’ There are of course currents of twentieth-century theology that develop this point. But in both the Judaic tradition (where, say what you like about God in the Torah, he’s a pretty lively character, with a face, backparts, a temper, and the kinds of interpersonal relationships that even Al Gore can manage) and most especially in the Christian tradition Eagleton’s position is spectacularly wrongheaded. The point about Christ is that, though still God, he was indeed a person; and moreover a person in pretty-much the sense that Al Gore is a person. It is this ‘personification’, in a strict sense, that enables the faith of many Christians. If a Christian thinks of God as ‘Father’, and relates themselves conceptually to that Father-figure as a child might to their actual father, then God shares that aspect of personhood with Al Gore, who is himself a father. But Eagleton’s biggest argumentative muddle comes next:
[God] is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
I don’t see that Eagleton’s ‘rather’ is warranted in the first sentence there; although an ‘also’ might usefully be replaced without removing the sentiment from the context of most believers’ beliefs. But that last sentence is just weird, really amazingly clumsily un-thought-through. So, like, the universe is to Eagleton’s foot as God is to envy? In the sense that the foot and the universe are made out of atoms, and God and human envy is sort-of immaterial? What has Eagleton’s envy to do with the ultimate ground of the possibility of existence? Like his sly importation into Dawkins’s argument of a tedious-dull scientist, whose efforts are aimed at satisfying his grant-awarding-body (tch! we all know what those scientist-types are like!), this envy, by a process of transference, stains Dawkins’ own argumentative motivation. Or else Eagleton is hinting at his trampling Dawkins’ position with an I refute it, thus! and a slamming of his left foot hard down.
I have no idea why Dawkins book gets Eagleton, by the evidence of his review, so worked-up and cross (‘would make first-year theology student wince … ill-informed … shoddy old travesty …not even the dim-witted cleric who knocked me about at grammar school thought that … grotesquely false’ and so on). He’s certainly entitled to disagree; that goes without saying. But he doesn’t address one key question that is central to Dawkins’ polemic. In a nutshell it’s the question whether religion is true. Is the assertion that there is a God true or false?
This is, itself, a clumsy way of putting it, of course; and religious friends of mine get uncomfortable when discussing this matter with me in those terms, as if I’m somehow missing the point. But one of Dawkins’ strongest arguments, it seems to me, is that disbelief in gods is the great point of human commonality. I am, to speak personally for a moment, an atheist, but I certainly don’t see that this atheism disqualifies me from talking about religion. Without exception, every intelligent Christian and Muslim I have ever met has been emphatically atheist with respect to almost all the forty-thousand gods humanity has worshipped at one time or another. Atheism – a refusal to be credulous, a proper intellectual scepticism and dialectical open-mindedness – seems to me the default position of the healthy, sapient psyche. My intelligent Christian friend and I concur in our atheism concerning animistic tree-spirits, the river Scamandar, the divine Emperor Augustus, Wotan, Quezocoatl, Cthulu, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Of course, we disagree on one specific example: the Christian trinity, which my friend believes divine and which I do not. But to worship the Christian trinity and not to worship the divine Emperor Augustus is, in part, to believe that the Christian trinity embodies a truth that the divine Emperor Augustus does not.
The closest Eagleton comes to this key matter in his review is to say near the end, (rather surprisingly, I think, given the tenor of the rest of the piece):
Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy.
Rhetorically this gives the impression that a ‘but’ is just around the corner; but there’s no but. It’s left hanging. But, Dawkins might say, if belief in God really is on a par with believing in the tooth fairy, then pretty much everything Eagleton says falls at the very first hurdle: which is to say the tooth fairy does not exist.
Belief in the existence of the tooth fairy would be a sign not of ‘faith’ but credulity; and insistent belief would not be ‘strong faith’ but a stubborn credulity. Eagleton’s review fails the test set by proposed by the estimable Skeptico (I think it was he): that when American politicians talk about ‘faith schools’ and ‘faith-based initiatives’ in glowing terms, replace the word ‘faith’ with the word ‘credulity’ and see what the argument sounds like.
Actually I’m being unfair to Eagleton in at least one regard, and this brings me to the Pascal’s Wager part of my post. Eagleton dislikes the way Dawkins is so snippy and dismissive of religious faith and the many things it has achieved. He’s right, although it could be said that polemic (which Dawkins’s God Delusion clearly is) has no duty to be respectful. Religion is, as Eagleton says, ‘the richest, most enduring forms of popular culture in human history’; and a de haut en bas attitude of contemptuous dismissal is, to put it kindly, ill-judged and unkind. Religious people have done terrible things in the name of religion; but then atheists in the Soviet Union and its satellites did terrible things in the name of atheist dialectical materialism in the twentieth-century. Clearly religion has no exclusive right on inhumanity.
And this, as an atheist, is my personal stumbling block. This is the place where I begin to doubt my own atheism. Bear with me here.
To stay with the truth-claim question for a moment, as it relates to religion. There are at least three sense in which religion can be assessed as true or false.
1. Religion does make some claims that can be tested to determine whether they are true or false. For example, one of the tenets of Christian worship is that the communion bread becomes the body of Christ, and the communion wine becomes the blood of Christ. This matter of transubstantiation was something literally believed in by generations of Christians; wars were fought and purges enacted. But as a claim it is easily falsified; the bread does not become flesh.
2. But religion of course makes a number of other claims that are not falsifiable in this way. It’s not possible to prove or disprove, for instance, that God exists, that he is responsible for creating the world, that when we die we go to heaven (or hell). These are claims that, by their nature, cannot be subjected to experimental testing. Now it seems to me that they are all claims inherently implausible. In fact I’d go further and say that they are enormously implausible, much less convincing than the descriptions of the universe and human life that the material sciences provide. But this is not the same thing as saying that they have been, or indeed that they could be disproved.
3. And finally, the tricky one. What of the claim that an individual who has religious belief is mentally better placed than one who has not? To set individual counterexamples aside for a moment (‘I know an atheist and he’s extremely well adjusted; I know a religious believer and he’s a manic-depressive’) might it be the case that, in the main, religion enables people to cope with life better than no-religion does? Is there evidence that it provides explanatory structures and purpose that helps people get through their days; it ameliorates the fear of death and the pointlessness of suffering; it gives them mental and emotional strength. Clearly, here, I’m making an empirical not a metaphysical claim. If religion does these things – and it’s a big if, of course, but if it does – then it does so regardless of whether the belief itself is true or false. If this is the case (and I’m being extremely speculative here) it might explain, by pinpointing an evolutionary advantage to the believer, why religion is so widespread amongst humanity. So the question I don’t have an answer to: is this true?
This leads, it seems to me, to a new spin on Pascal’s Wager. Wikipedia has a rather good account of this famous bet. I especially like the nifty little diagrams they reproduce representing the way the Pascal considered the possibilities of belief and unbelief so heavily weighted towards the former.
In it’s original form, of course, it’s pretty easily refutable; and the wikipedia link above runs through the objections, from Voltaire onwards, to good effect. But what if we consider religion not as metaphysical truth/falsity, but as social practice, as an empirical feature of human life? What if believing, for all its challenges and difficulties, for all the duties it imposes upon you and the sacrifices it requires of you (or, perhaps, because of those things) tends to make you a more deeply contented and better-functioning person? What if it frames you as a social animal in a more fulfilling manner? And what if adhering to one’s atheism condemns one to a nihilist and pointless sort of existence? In that case wouldn’t it make sense for your own wellbeing here and now, to believe?
My problem, or stumbling block, is that I can’t get past my belief that religious belief is just not true. Specifically; that since it seems to me [1] and [2] above are untrue, [3], however notionally desirable, would be unworkable for me. But, unlike Dawkins, I’m prepared to accept that this might be my loss, and nobody’s gain. I honestly don’t know.
Comments
Eagleton is dismissive because Dawkins is implicitly challenging his faith in the Zizekian messianic-Leninist future, which is why he’s pitching all of his objections as though Dawkins was arguing against continental philosophy. That’s why the sneers at science, the scornful “you’re taking things too literally” combined with the appeals to a traditional body of text, the inflated Romanticism. When you mangle Catholicism and Marxism together, they each look even more incoherent.
As for your second part, well, I’ve written a good deal about the strategy of addressing God even when you don’t really believe. It becomes a particular form of relationship to ideas within society that you can’t help but have been affected by. That permits you to direct objections to “God” rather than on insisting that people give up what may be for them a life-enhancing belief in God. There should be something in your Email at the moment, unless it’s gotten lost.
I’m surprised that people are still talking about “God” any more. I disproved his existence a couple of weeks ago.
Eagleton and others (Zizek?) seem to be moving to a theology which renounces the “first cause” definitions / explanations of God, and apparently even the personhood and agency of God. It seems to me like a desperate, decadent post-Leftist ploy, but it’s not like I have anything better to offer.
St Augustine did something like that “God is not an old man with a long beard up in the sky, but a spiritual substance”. That’s a pretty close paraphrase of what he actually said.
"Religion” is not a useful category.
Adam K. Empirically it is a category, though, isn’t it? It describes the social and personal praxis of billions. What sort of terminology do you prefer?
Rich; yes, it’s in my inbox. Gotta give my daughter and bath and put her to bed now, but will reply soon after. (Looks v. interesting).
John. There’s no doubt in my mind that the world is lagging sadly behind you. But in time they’ll catch up.
Adam, “Religion” is a term with no agreed-upon definition—hell, we can’t even figure out its etymology. More specifically, our use of the term “religion” is polemical in origin, and usually in intent as well. ("Religion" is set in opposition to “reason” or something—or else “religion” is set in opposition to “godless nihilism.") I prefer terminology that does not stack the deck in advance.
I propose a moratorium on the use of the term “religion,” and we can use other categories to talk about the phenomena grouped under the term “religion.” (So, for instance, we could discuss Al Qaeda as a “political” movement, which it in fact is.)
Why does its etymology matter? Religion is a very broad term, I agree, and religious practices and beliefs come in an enormous variety of forms; but they all share belief in God or gods, belief in ‘spirit’, which is to say belief a non-material component to human life and/or the cosmos; in a survival after death. It’s an umbrella term for a range of a type of beliefs.
‘“Religion" is set in opposition to “reason”.’ By whom? Not by me. Many religious people are highly rational. The anti-rational or mystical variety of religious belief has a lot of adherents, but isn’t the dominant strand I’d say.
‘I propose a moratorium on the use of the term “religion,” and we can use other categories to talk about the phenomena grouped under the term “religion.” (So, for instance, we could discuss Al Qaeda as a “political” movement, which it in fact is.)‘
Are you really suggesting that ‘politics’ can in any sense at all be separated out from ‘religion’? That they are somehow cleanly differentiated terms? But of course not. And besides, what makes ‘politics’ a term with an ‘agreed-upon definition’ in a way ‘religion’ isn’t?
I’m not trying to pick a fight here, by the way. I mean, I can see an argument that goes ‘Dawkins attacks religion. But religion isn’t a meaningful category, so we can disregard his attack.’ Which would be sloppy thinking. But I’m not suggesting that’s what you’re doing.
I can also imagine a religious person objecting that describing them as ‘religious’ lumps them in with Scientologists, Creationists, New Age crystal nutters and schizophrenics, and they’d rather not be lumped in with those people. But a better way of not being confused with people who believe bizarre and improbable things, it seems to me, would be not to believe bizarre and improbable things.
In actual fact, not all things commonly called “religions” share the beliefs you name. You are also falsely determining it according to “beliefs,” when in fact many things commonly called “religions” are better described in terms of practices—take, for instance, non-believing Jews or Catholics who nonetheless participate more or less devoutly in Jewish or Catholic liturgical life. When it becomes a matter of “belief,” then it’s easy to dismiss this thing called “religion” as “like knowledge, except without evidence.” And don’t pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about with defining religion in opposition to reason—plenty of atheist critics of religion do that, and you’d have to be completely illiterate not to know that.
I am not suggesting that religion can be cleanly separated from politics—just the opposite, namely that “religion” falsely groups together phenomena, some of which would be more productively analyzed under the rubric of politics. What is analytically important about Al Qaeda, for instance, isn’t that they pray facing the east five times a day instead of taking communion every Sunday.
Adam Roberts,
Dude, I think you need to do a bit more reading before you try this shit. It’s just bad. Like, really, really bad scholarship. God as artist is very much a part of traditional theology. I’ll point you toward Von Balthussar for the history and as an example. If you’re trying to explicate some kind of ‘traditional theology’ with your explication of God’s personhood, well, you really, really need to read more.
Now, that doesn’t mean his review wasn’t shit, I just can’t deal with your really bad scholarship. I don’t have any real dog in this fight. Dawkins has never much impressed me and neither has Terry Eagleton, so I’m not picking sides here.
Piety may be a better category from which to act, but I don’t think from prior conversations it would be worth my time to engage in that discussion with you. Just, please, stick to science fiction.
Yes, I see what you mean; and there’s a great deal in what you say. On the other hand, you start by separating ‘belief’ from ‘practice’; then end by suggesting that the important thing about Al Qaeda is not that their religious practice differs from the religious practice of Anglicans. Which, when you put it like that is obviously true. But it’s not the particulars of their religious practice that is salient here; it’s precisely their beliefs; beliefs which, in many instances, they do indeed share with Anglicans: that this world is not the ‘real’ world (the world of ‘spirit’, behind the veil of matter, trumps it in importance). That there is a God and they know what He wants. That by doing what He wants they’ll go to heaven when they die. This is the sort of belief that enables for instance suicide bombing, recklessness in battle, disregard for the lives of non-fellow-believers and so on. That determines, in part, Al Qaeda strategy.
Dawkins’s point is that once a person premises their world-view on a set of beliefs without evidence, or indeed (as he would argue) on beliefs that fly directly in the fact of the evidence, it’s then very easy for them them to accept all sorts of crazy shit without evidence, like ‘yes, blowing up myself, these London underground trains and dozens of ordinary commuters, mostly cleaners and office grunts, is a good idea‘, when, you know. It isn’t. Actually.
"And don’t pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about with defining religion in opposition to reason—plenty of atheist critics of religion do that, and you’d have to be completely illiterate not to know that.“
Busted! I am completely illiterate. I mean, completely. Not partially, or ‘only with respect to atheistical critiques of religion’, but completely. Yes.
Adam, Plenty of people hold beliefs like you describe without engaging in suicide bombing. Suicide is a particular political strategy for which various religious or non-religious belief systems could provide support. If you’ll note, suicide bombers do not suicide-bomb just at random, specifically in order to go to heaven, but rather in service of specific political goals. If we were to take al Qaeda as a strictly “belief"-oriented issue, how could we even counter it? By converting them to Christianity? But then they’d still believe in God, heaven, etc.!
You are also ignoring the fact that there have been plenty of terrorist acts in the name of secular ideologies such as nationalism that don’t fall neatly into the category of “beliefs that fly in the face of evidence.” Using “religion” in order to explain terrorism just doesn’t work (not that I think “terrorism” is a great term either). Also, it’s not the case that terrorism is always “a bad idea,” considered in terms of political goals—empirically, it mostly hasn’t worked well, but radical Zionist groups, for instance, had a great deal of success with it.
In short, using “religion” as a determining category obscures much, much more than it clarifies. I would even go so far as to say that it clarifies precisely nothing.
"But it’s not the particulars of their religious practice that is salient here; it’s precisely their beliefs; beliefs which, in many instances, they do indeed share with Anglicans: that this world is not the ‘real’ world (the world of ‘spirit’, behind the veil of matter, trumps it in importance).”
Again, what the hell are you talking about? I’m sorry you’re illiterate, but are you aware of your ignorance as well? You’re talking about Gnosticism, not Christianity, and that’s a really skewed view of Islam, nearly racist. As if the London bombers actions weren’t more directly related to politics than other-worldly beliefs.
Now, the thing is we all believe things without ‘evidence’ of the kind you mean all the time. Maybe when people start believing all sorts of things uncritically they do even crazier shit, like sit back at the deaths of 650,000 or kill in the name of the state.
"In short, using “religion” as a determining category obscures much, much more than it clarifies. I would even go so far as to say that it clarifies precisely nothing.“
Sounds rather like you’re saying ‘let’s not talk about religion ... pay no attention to that man behind the curtain ... look! over there! Talk about something else!’
But there are a billion and a half Christians on the planet; a billion Muslims; a billion people from other (let’s put the word in inverted commas since you don’t like it) ‘religions’. This, whatever it is, is what most human beings do. It inflects their behaviour and preconceptions in a thousand ways, on a massive scale. We’re going through a phase of increasing religiosity. Religions are powerful: the two largest landowners in my country are the Church of England and the Queen, who is head of the Church of England. For reasons not unconnected to this, the two best State schools in my local area are Church schools, and my daughter (who’s just toddled off to primary school) was forbidden from going to either of them because her parents (not her, but us) don’t go to church. I can’t imagine this working with, let’s say, race (’you’re daughter can’t come to our school; her skin’s the wrong colour’) without their being a national outcry, but religion, religious practice, belief and tradition have a special, protected status in the UK. As they do in most countries around the world. So my daughter’s been parcelled off to the third-best school in Staines because of the stranglehold religion has on children’s education. No you’re right, religion clarifies precisely nothing.
What chances would an atheist Presidental candidate have of being elected in the USA? None, obviously. But that’s only to say that democracy works, because the majority of people in the USA not only have religious beliefs but wouldn’t really trust a leader who didn’t have them. But let’s not talk about religion, you’re right.
Is it the category of “religion” as such that’s really at play in the situation in the UK, or is it specific institutional arrangements and matters of national identity (tied, to be sure, to certain forms of piety)? The category of “religion” doesn’t seem to do you much good in this specific instance—power relations might work better.
I’m proposing a more materialist analysis here. You’re just begging the question by saying that things normally called “religious” have an effect in the world—well, yeah, obviously. My question is whether the concept of “religion” helps us to analyze those things. My answer is still “no,” despite the fact that people in the US tend to trust people who adhere to forms of piety that are familiar to them, and despite the fact that church membership carries with it certain benefits in the UK. Just saying that both those things are about “religion” gives us nothing to work with, at all.
(And why the hell not just go to church if the school thing is so important to you?)
(My intent here is not to do some kind of back-handed apologetics for religious belief—this is strictly an intellectual matter for me. I do not currently practice any “religion,” though I do study the history of Christian theology.)
Adam K’s resistance to the term “religion” is appropriate. I am reminded of the old comment that the only thing the world’s religions have in common is that they all use candles.
Re: “I can’t get past my belief that religious belief is just not true.”
Dude. There is scriptural warrant for thinking that the Christian God doesn’t care whether you believe in him or not. At least in Matthew 25:31 ff, the important thing is not to believe in God but rather to follow the injunction of the Learned Theologians Bill and Ted: “Be excellent to each other!”
Adam K. “(And why the hell not just go to church if the school thing is so important to you?)” Would you, I wonder, suggest the opposite to believer? ‘Dude, my friends make fun of me for believing in Christ.’ ‘Well, renounce Christ then, if having “friends” is so important to you.’ Or is the implication that ‘atheists, not believing in God, clearly don’t really believe in anything, and must have no qualms about for instance lying.’
The school example is a trivial one in many ways; the school my daughter is going to is fine and I have no long-term worries about her education. But I’m puzzled by your idea that ‘power relations’ exist in some ideal form outside the actual structures of human interaction. And religion is certainly one of these latter: one of the world’s major ones. Terry has a point when he says that being flip and dismissive of ‘religion’ means being flip and dismissive of most of humanity, since religion is one of the things most of humanity ‘do’. Which would be deplorable. But at the same time: this very diverse group of religious believers also concentrate most of the world’s wealth, power and influence into their hands. I don’t see how any systematic analysis of power relations could procede without considering that.
Parallels: aflfuent white people telling poor black ones that ‘race’ is not a useful category. Male power figures telling female subordinates that ‘gender’ is not a useful category. The world’s privileged telling the world’s poor that ‘class’ and ‘money’ are not useful categories.
Though having said that, I should add that I endorse Adam K. when he says: “... religious belief—this is strictly an intellectual matter for me.” For me too. And I can’t pretend that my atheism has placed any real barriers in the way of me being, eg, successful at work, doing mostly what I want in my private life etc.
None of that was really the point of my post. I am actually intrigued by the Pascal’s wager wrinkle.
Alan: “I am reminded of the old comment that the only thing the world’s religions have in common is that they all use candles.”
I really really don’t see this. Not at all. I listed the things, very broadly conceived, that religion covers: belief in God; belief that God created the cosmos; belief in a soul or spirit; belief in a life after death. Adam K. replied that “in actual fact, not all things commonly called ‘religions’ share the beliefs you name.” He’s right; not all religions share all these. But most do; and all share at least some.
So, all these beliefs, and/or practices orientated towards the ritual acknowledgment of these beliefs, and codes of living that are predicated upon these beliefs, are shared by: one and a quarter billion Catholic Christians of various sorts; one billion Protestant Christians of various sorts and one billion Muslims of various sorts. That the majority of people on the planet. Of the remaining billion-or-so people who are adherents of other religions, many of them share many or all these beliefs.
Anthony: “It’s just bad. Like, really, really bad scholarship ... I just can’t deal with your really bad scholarship”
That’s pretty insulting. I’m abashed.
“I don’t think from prior conversations it would be worth my time to engage in that discussion with you. Just, please, stick to science fiction.”
Abusive and dismissive. I’m doubly abashed.
What a compelling and convincing argumentative strategy you’ve lighted upon, sir.
Adam R.
It’s misleading to say, of a religious believer, that they’re an “atheist with respect to” all the other gods they don’t believe in. It may be effective polemic, but it’s misleading and false nevertheless.
If I really, really like beef and dislike all the other kinds of meat, is it reasonable to describe me as a “meat-hater with respect to” all those other kinds? No; I may be a veal-hater, a pork-hater, etc., but I’m definitely not a meat-hater. Is it misleading for a vegetarian to describe me as such in order to bolster their rhetoric on how natural vegetarianism is?
People who like to read Anthony Paul Smith’s self-described “animal fighting for a small scrap of ground” style, plus many more ruminations on theology not about religion because that’s not a useful category studied intellectually without belief, might want to go to The Weblog, where such comments naturally belong. Why they’re showing up here, I’m not sure.
In the meantime, people should realize that Dawkins tosses his greatest criticisms at the Abrahamic religions (primarily Christianity, Islam, Judaism), and that when Adam Roberts writes about the conflict between Dawkins and Eagleton, a lot of the traditional atheist arguments have to be referenced. People can either deal with this, or they can pretend that they are the first ones to discover that not all religions are focussed on belief in God, and that Dawkins’ criticism of what he sees as the ideological effects of the dominant religions (dominant in a power relationships sense) is invalidated because he didn’t address Buddhism.
Rich,
Your comments have no connection with what Anthony or I have said.
People generally seem to be misunderstanding the stakes of my rejection of the category “religion.” If Christianity is your problem, talk about Christianity. If Christianity *and* Islam *and* Judaism are your problem, talk about the “three great monotheisms” or even “abrahamic religions.” Introduce some historical specificity! Dawkins isn’t *really* arguing against an abstract timeless concept—he’s primarily arguing against Christianity.
The term “religion” is also problematic because it is almost always modelled on Protestant Christianity, where the big deal is taken to be “faith,” meaning “beliefs.” (Adam R. continues to insist that religion is about having certain beliefs, although he’s making token gestures toward “practices.") Thus, again, if you want to talk about Christianity, talk about Christianity.
Adam K., you could show some argumentative charity by writing that as your introductory paragraph rather than as your concluding one. When Eagleton writes “[God] is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even in the universe had no beginning” or “For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is”, he’s not really talking about an abstract timeless concept either. Nor is Pascal’s Wager especially contextless. So put in the boilerplate objection and go on—preferably without bits like asking why the hell Adam R doesn’t just pretend to be Christian so that his daughter can go to a good school.
Rich Puchalsky,
The problem is not that Dawkins ignores Buddhism (or Unitarianism, for that matter); it’s that he ignores non-Abrahamic religions in too convenient a manner. It is convenient for Dawkins to pretend that non-belief in a personal God equals atheism (in particular, that allows him to trot out the old “Einstein was an atheist” line, which used to infuriate Einstein so much). In the real world, non-belief in a personal God may equal atheism, or it may equal Buddhism, transcendetalisms of various kinds, Unitarianism etc. etc. - and most of those creeds are not only explicitly anti-atheistic, but actually religious in the pejorative sense according to Dawkins - they insist on faith without scientific evidence etc.
If Dawkins were to focus on the Abrahamic religions in an honest manner, he would bash the personal God idea as he does without pretending that someone who doesn’t subscribe to that idea (like, oh say Einstein) is thereby automatically in his camp. But of course, then he wouldn’t be Dawkins.
Rich and Adam R.,
You are falsely quoting me. I told Adam he should go to church, not to pretend to. I do not understand how going to church would be a lie—whether or not he was in the church during a particular service would be a simple empirical fact. I told him to actually go, not to sit at home and claim to be going. Does the school have some kind of clause where the parents have to go to church “sincerely” or something? (Maybe they do, but Adam didn’t mention it.)
Anatoly, I see a lot of this conversation as being similar to what always happens when feminists in an Internet forum try to discuss rape; some concern troll pops up to say that women commit rape as well as men, and that they don’t understand why feminists are always focussing on men when they discuss rape. Since 99+% of rapes are committed by men, the “women commit rape too” trope is theoretically true, but beside the point if you actually want to discuss the prevailing violence in our society.
Dawkins is speaking out of a particular tradition. You can either focus on whether he’s representing Einstein correctly, or you can address whether he has a point. It’s up to you.
OK, Adam K., I’ll modify my last sentence to read “preferably without bits like asking why the hell Adam R doesn’t just regularly sit through a boring and meaningless (to him) Christian service so that his daughter can go to a good school.”
Rich,
Plenty of parents sit through boring and meaningless jobs so that their children can eat—and that’s for forty hours or more per week! This school thing only requires one hour. In any case, it’s an academic question, since Adam R. seems to be quite content with his daughter’s education.
Also, this was not a “concern troll.” I have a couple hard and fast rules when it comes to reading blogs—one, I always point it out when someone puts the word “argument” in italics, and two, I always point out that “religion” is not a useful category for analysis. Neither is parallel to trying to explain away racism or rape.
As for whether Dawkins “has a point,” I happen to think that doctrinaire atheist polemics such as Dawkins’—while undoubtedly very satisfying for the author and for those already convinced of his opinion—are unlikely to prove persuasive. I also find them to be incredibly boring. An internal critique of certain Christian groups, from the point of view of resources in the Christian tradition, seems like it has a better chance of succeeding in getting people to act in a more humane manner.
Yet it does remain the case that some people are beyond persuasion, and one must not underestimate the importance of “venting.” And of course he “has a point” insofar as certain Christian groups do, or promote the doing of, awful things.
Rich,
If you just recall the book for a moment: the (mis-)representation of Einstein’s views is not just some aside, it forms a substantial part of the argument (one from authority, in this case). It’s very much a part of his point. He goes on and on about it. It’s not like I blew a footnote out of proportion.
There is no ‘tradition’ he’s following while doing that. Let me try to explain again: you are right in that it would be legitimate for Dawkins to limit himself to criticising a particular very widespread religious tradition, without getting hung up on the fact that “not all religions are like that”. If that were his strategy, whining about that would indeed be similar to the rape-discussion-trolls you’re describing. But he’s doing more than that: instead of quietly ignoring the kinds of religion he’s not interested in criticising, he falsely mislabels them as atheism and enlists them to the aid of his cause.
Arguments? My point was that you have no argument except for one based on poor understanding. You, frankly, don’t know what traditional theology is. If I point this out to you are you going to admit it? No, because you’re pretty sure that you’re right. So what would be the point in arguing with you or even trying to point to resources? What is the point to calling you to be a smarter atheist (since self-describing yourself as an atheist shows concern with some local religious practice around you)? Whatever, I’ve wasted enough time.
And, yes, if someone who believed in Jesus thought that having friends was more important I would say to get over Jesus. If banging chicks is more important to you than Allah, get over Allah. It sucks that you’ve been mistreated and that your daughter apparently could have a better education by people you think are idiots, but the world is rarely fair or just.
Rich,
You’re still an ass. I like commitment. Though, for the record, Buddhists are guilty of violence as well. Do you want a book reference or are you familiar?
Adam K.: “Also, this was not a “concern troll.” I have a couple hard and fast rules when it comes to reading blogs”—one of which could analogously be that whenever you see feminists discussing rape, you point out that women rape people too. Yes, I get that. That is, after all, a fact, and it’s important to point that out whenever you see it.
And why should people care about that one hour a week? Like what’s the big deal about telling women to dress conservatively if they don’t want to get harassed when they go out in the evening; it’s only a small amount of time, and some people have to dress conservatively for 40 hours a week for work.
For the rest, no, you don’t get Dawkins’ point. He’s not a meliorist, and while “An internal critique of certain Christian groups, from the point of view of resources in the Christian tradition” would indeed be more likely to accomplish something—and would be less tiresome to hear—that’s not what he wants. It’s like telling a Marxist that they really should be concentrating on getting more progressive taxation within a liberal system.
Next, Anthony Paul Smith. Only Anthony could take a statement about Buddhists being “beside the point if you actually want to discuss the prevailing violence in our society” and come back with “Buddhists are guilty of violence as well”. I’ve rarely seen a more perfect example of the quintessential APS. I dub this the “unconcern troll”.
Next, Anatoly. Anatoly, Dawkins’ misrepresentation of Einstein is really not what Adam R. seemed to be basing this post around. Sure, you can talk about that if that’s what you want to talk about, but I’m not sure if it has much to do with what Adam R., as opposed to Dawkins, was saying. Nor does it have much to do with what I’m saying. I’m certainly not claiming that Dawkins is correct to attack “religion” in the way that he does. I can see why he does so as an argumentative strategy; respect for any religion tends to add to overall respect for “the religious” as a social category, which is what he’s trying to diminish. In order to attack the Abrahamic religions, he pretends that all religion shares certain characteristics with them—I’m not sure if he just doesn’t know otherwise, or whether he thinks that carefully saying otherwise would detract from his polemic. He may be wrong in terms of effect, as well as analytically. But so what?
Now, you do respond to Adam R. directly with:
“It’s misleading to say, of a religious believer, that they’re an “atheist with respect to” all the other gods they don’t believe in. It may be effective polemic, but it’s misleading and false nevertheless.
If I really, really like beef and dislike all the other kinds of meat, is it reasonable to describe me as a “meat-hater with respect to” all those other kinds?”
That would only work as an analogy if most Abrahamic religious believers thought that all the gods existed, but that their religious system was better. I don’t think that this is actually the case. A Christian doesn’t generally say that we can’t be sure whether Shiva exists or not, but that God is better—he or she most often flatly thinks that Shiva doesn’t exist.
Adam Roberts, I’ve been thinking about the central problem that you present for the last half of your post:
“My problem, or stumbling block, is that I can’t get past my belief that religious belief is just not true. Specifically; that since it seems to me [1] and [2] above are untrue, [3], however notionally desirable, would be unworkable for me.”
Perhaps a more useful way for you to approach thinking about this would be through the existential concept of bad faith. What’s so bad about bad faith? It’s always seemed clear to me that it would be more comforting to be able delude yourself about your inherent freedom, and that most people are happier doing so (the waiter who thinks “I am a waiter” is happier than the one who thinks that he’s presently doing a boring and servile job). I think that there is a fairly exact analogy between this and most of the types of religious belief that are current in our society.
So the question is, why do you think that bad faith is bad? If you could encourage it in yourself, would it be wrong to do so?
Rich,
Ah, yes, I see what you’re saying now. You got me, I didn’t catch the meaning of your Buddhist line until this second read. My bad.
That said, I still think you and Adam are horribly misguided on this religion thing and could use a bit of reading. Hell, maybe even talk to a few people, but do it at different times and really start to figure out where their piety lies. My guess is that you’ll find most religious people not to be as unified in their identity as you’re both assuming. And, just to correct Adam’s views of traditional theology, maybe grab a text on that as well. In the end, I am unconcerned about what either of you do, so you got me there too.
The “bad faith” thing is actually kind of the point I was making with “why not just go to church to fulfill the technicality and get your daughter in the school.” Why this bourgeois moralism? I understand that atheists can be just as moralistic as anyone—but why do *you in specific* need to be so moralistic about this one issue?
Or if you think being “religious” would benefit you in some way, why not just get involved with church and see how it goes? We’re not talking about Southern Baptists or something here—we’re talking about Anglicans. No one’s going to corner you and demand a notorized signature on a document affirming the Nicene Creed.
(So in short, Rich and I are in complete agreement on this issue, which I thought of first.)
I do think that there’s a large difference between taking an action dictated by others and between changing your own belief. What’s more, I don’t think that Adam should necessarily answer that he thinks that there’s nothing bad about bad faith. If he decides that he thinks that bad faith is inherently bad because it’s better to be truthful than happy, then that value judgement would probably also make him uncomfortable going to church even as a technicality.
adam r,
The notion of ‘falsifiable’ that you’re using in (2) seems a little strange to me. I mean, the geocentric model of the solar system was falsified (in every important sense) by at least the time of Kepler, wasn’t it? That’s not because it was strictly inconsistent with any particular observation. It just didn’t explain the total body of observations as well as the heliocentric model did. Things seem pretty much the same to me concerning the claim that we have immortal souls, and the claim that the universe was created by a personal God of the kind most people believe in.
Humans interested in the utility and origin of the category “religion” should read J. Z. Smith’s essay “Religion, Religions, Religious”, and probably some of the other stuff in Relating Religion.
APS: “In the end, I am unconcerned about what either of you do, so you got me there too.”
Yes, you’re unconcerned about what we think or do, yet you continue to comment. In other words, you want to yell at people. I think that the phrase unconcern troll was well chosen.
But, you know, I care about whether other people understand or not, so I’ll actually go on for a bit; the complaint that atheists are over-unifying the religious identity of those they disagree with is quite common. And it should be common, because atheists tend to value a certain kind of truth which owes a good deal to analytical coherence. Thus, when an atheist thinks “how would I think if I believed?”—which is, if you were paying attention, what the second half of Adam R.’s post was largely about—they tend to assume that they would have a coherent, analytical religious belief.
And there’s really nothing wrong with this. If someone wants to write about Foucault without reading Foucault, you can blame them for not reading Foucault. But if someone is forced to confront the overwhelming social reality that our society is dominated by certain religious traditions that it is not easy to escape, you don’t demand that they be expert in those traditions before they can say anything. That’s like saying that no one should write about their working conditions without a thorough understanding of neoclassical economics.
Now, in actual fact, I think that Adam R. probably has a better understanding of traditional Christian theology than you do, APS. Von Balthasar, however influential, was a 20th century theologian, and probably not “traditional” in the casual sense that Adam R. was using. But I admit that I may be biased by my belief, based on your previous comments, that you don’t really take the time to understand anything that anyone writes.
Rich,
That argument that Adam R. knows theology better than Anthony is similar in form to trotted out in the infamous debate about whether John H. is a “continental philosopher.” I’d be willing to bet that your claim about Adam R. will end up far outrunning what Adam R. wants to say, similar to what happened in that other debate.
And just to piss you off, I’ll point out *again* that this is one of the problems that comes up when you are constantly trying to speak on behalf of someone else.
I will thank you for restraining yourself from claiming that Adam R. knows traditional theology better than me as well, although you are of course free to do so if that suits your rhetorical purposes.
And I’ll once again reply that I’m not trying to speak on behalf of someone else. I’m presenting my views, and what Adam R. wants to say will be said by him. Just as, in that other debate, I think it’s clear that my opinion is that John H. has in fact done more continental philosophy than any of the people arguing against him, even though he doesn’t agree. It’s a matter of genre analysis of a particular essay, and it’s actually possible for me to disagree with John H. about it.
In the current case, I fully expect Adam R. to weigh in with an “oh, I don’t know anything about theology really”, but that still leaves him knowing more than APS, whose method of response appears to leave him effectively knowing less than nothing.
Part of the problem may be the ambivalence of the word “theology.” Does one mean academic theologians? The official catechism of a given church body? What it seems like most Christians believe? If it’s the latter, then one is leaving oneself wide open to a whole range of legitimate attacks, because it provides no guardrail against simple projection and straw-mannery.
Also, defining “theology” as “what it seems like most Christians believe” is dangerous because it allows one to expose one’s biases—certain ideas are held to be impossible objects of lay belief, basically because they’re too complicated or sophistocated. (As though it’s “easy” to understand God becoming man or the resurrection of the dead, but God-as-artist is “hard.” For example.) The variety and sophistocation of lay belief is very surprising—for instance, I recently had a conversation with my grandmother about these issues that was like a revelation.
"Yes, you’re unconcerned about what we think or do, yet you continue to comment. In other words, you want to yell at people. I think that the phrase unconcern troll was well chosen.”
Dude, it’s the internet. In real life I’d probably not like you or Adam R all that much (and I doubt you’d like me either) but I wouldn’t yell at you. The most I’d do is mumble about you two needing to read more about stuff you know little about. But I hardly think my saying ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about regarding theology’ is yelling. I do get annoyed by Adam R’s pendantic atheism, but commenting on his post of a review of a book I’ve not read was probably not the place to voice - especially knowing you’d be around.
I recommended Von Balthasar, who I’m sure you Wiki’d right away (but be careful, Wikipedia describes Eagleton as a ‘philosopher’), not because he is a figure from way back in the history, but because his project is essentially the construction of a theological aesthetics that draws on the entire history of Christian theology. It would allow one who doesn’t much know about theology to ‘catch up’ as it were. Considering the standing Von Balthasar is held in with the Roman hierarchy I’d think it could count as ‘traditional’ in most senses.
As to my knowledge of these things - what are you talking about?
Adam R,
The distinction you make between (1) and (2) seems strained to me. Is the claim that there is a person-like God who created the universe a priori implausible? How about the claim that we are immortal? I would have thought that they are rather a posteriori implausible, given the evidence we have about what the world is like. If the world were different, then it might seem plausible that there is a God and that we are immortal. Maybe your point is just that the stuff in (1) has been disconfirmed to a greater degree than the stuff in (2)? But I disagree with that too--at least in the case of our having immortal souls.
I guess the issue boils down to the way you’re using the word ‘falsifiable’. I don’t know your background, but in case you’re interested, that’s a term that got popularized by Karl Popper. Since Popper, my sense is that the following two views have been pretty widely accepted by philosophers of science: First, defeated hypotheses are usually defeated incrementally--they are rarely strictly inconsistent with observation. Second, when a new observation incrementally disconfirms a hypothesis, it does so only given substantial background hypotheses. The upshot, as I understand it, is that there is no ‘falsification’, in the sense of a single observation which implies that a hypothesis is false.
My point is just that, even if the claims in (2) aren’t falsified in the Popperian sense, that doesn’t mean much, since hardly anything ever has been.
But I guess the main question is whether it’s ok to believe in God for reasons other than those supporting the truth of that belief (like the fact that it would make you happy, etc.) I agree with other people here that, if you knowingly tried to do that, the state you’d be in wouldn’t really be one of genuine belief.