A strange problem is bedevilling attempts by atheists to state their case. Not all that long ago atheists could have simply pointed out that people no longer believe in the resurrection or the incarnation (of Jesus), or no longer believe that there is a god who meddles in human affairs, and we’d be sure to gather some people into the net, and no one would have returned fire with, “Well, really, that’s not what religious “belief” is all about,” as John Gray does in his latest piece of postmodernist chicanery over at the BBC. (Hasn’t he heard? Postmodernism is dead!) Now, whenever an atheist wants to talk about religion they will be given a thousand and one reasons why he or she simply hasn’t managed to characterise theism in a way that theists themselves will acknowledge as even coming close to what they (claim to) believe. Indeed, like Gray, they may say that religion is not really about belief at all. It’s much more important, as Gray says, how you live.
Only Gray has tried to go a bit further than people like Eagleton et co., and asks the question: Can religion tell us more than science? More about what? – one is just burning to ask. Since, as he says at the end of the piece, “What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live,” the title of his piece is almost entirely misleading. He doesn’t think religion tells us anything. He tells the peculiar story of Graham Greene “converting” to Catholicism, but Greene, by his own admission, didn’t really “convert” to anything at all. He simply joined a gang for some inexplicable reason, perhaps having to do with the baroque worship of the Catholic Church, or perhaps because, like Somerset Maugham, as Maugham imagined, in his cranky heart, Greene thought he was returning to the religion of his ancestors, forgetting perhaps that Heraclitus’ saying about not being able to step into the same river twice applies especially to things like cultures and churches.
But the really strange thing is the idea that, by simply denying that religions like Christianity are comprised at least partly by collections, or even, as in the case of the Catholic Church, systems of belief, one has escaped criticism. If it’s not about belief, but about how you live, what are the beliefs for? As Stephen Fry pointed out emphatically at the Intelligence Squared debate on the motion, “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world” (which was lost hands down), if the Catholic Church claims to provide some kind of assured ground for morality, how come its morality simply mirrored the values of the societies it passed through? “What is it for?” Fry asked, with some impatience, if it can’t do better than that at discerning right from wrong.
And John Gray, to be brutally frank, seems to have spent twenty minutes or so making an ass of himself on the BBC, meanwhile obviously thinking that he was saying something profound. Religion is all about myths, he suggests, and then he points out, rather obliquely, to the claim that:
The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories. There’s nothing in science that says the world can be finally understood by the human mind.
It’s not at all clear what he thinks the connexion is between the two sentences in that short paragraph. I am myself one, who, every other day, has the sense that religion perhaps contributes a kind of weight to life that science cannot provide, but whether or not it is a silly modern story that science can help us live without myths says nothing at all about whether ”the world can be finally understood by the human mind.” After all, science is the critical application of reason, so that whatever conclusions it comes to will be held tentatively, until a more complete understanding, if that is possible, is discovered, and perhaps, in the absence of myths, this open-ended story is perhaps the best place for most of us to begin the project of living, knowing that myths are just stories, and that science, while it doesn’t know everything, is an ongoing search for knowledge, and that knowledge is probably the best basis upon which to live a life, if it is to be lived well. Besides, what does he mean by the idea that myths “enable us to live”? What can this possibly mean? I sometimes have the concern that, without the mythological, without that sense of something beyond, ordinary people will find life shallow and uninteresting. As Marx says about religion, it is the spirit of the spiritless situation, and sometimes it seems to me that the illusions of religion are necessary for some people to see their lives as somehow valuable or deeper than the daily routine of going to work, coming home, buying stuff, and living lives of quiet desperation can provide. I’m not at all sure that’s true, but it is not at all clear what Gray means by myths enabling us to live either.
I do think, though, that the one thing that atheists do have to get a hold of, so that they have something to offer to people, is death, and what death means for living our individual lives fully, and how best to live our lives in the knowledge that we will die. That seems to me to be a vital issue that disbelievers need to contend with. For myself, as I have said before, it was a transformative relationship with a remarkable woman that made my life meaningful and purposeful at all, much more meaningful and purposeful than myths could ever have made it, and that, in itself, gave such weight to my life that death itself seems to be a pretty small concern. And that may, indeed, be how it is for others, and that the chief meaning is to be found in some kind of vivifying relationship.
Perhaps, after all, that’s what Gray means when he talks about myth:
Myths aren’t relics of childish thinking that humanity leaves behind as it marches towards a more grown-up view of things. They’re stories that tell us something about ourselves that can’t be captured in scientific theories.
Just as you don’t have to believe that a scientific theory is true in order to use it, you don’t have to believe a story for it to give meaning to your life.
Myths can’t be verified or falsified in the way theories can be. But they can be more or less truthful to human experience, and I’ve no doubt that some of the ancient myths we inherit from religion are far more truthful than the stories the modern world tells about itself.
But this is simply confusion. Believing that love is true is necessary if that love is going to transform your life. If you thought that the love wasn’t truly real, it couldn’t transform life, because the uncertainty would eat away at the foundations of the relationship. The same thing, I think, applies to myths. People may not have to believe them, in one sense, in order for them to be transformative. For example, it may not be necessary to believe, as a matter of historical fact, that Jesus rose from the dead, in order for the story of the resurrection to play a transformative role in one’s life; but if the myth is not true in some sense, then it is just a story. Myths function because at some level they are held to be true. Fundamentalists, because they can’t see how the myths can be true in a world in which we know too much, tend to suppress what they really do know (or at least might know) in order to retain the truth of the myth, so that it can do its work of transformation in their lives.
Take the recent shenanigans over Adam and Eve. Now, from some points of view, the Adam and Eve story can be just a myth, simply a way of showing how men and women will always fail in their moral lives and fall short of the good. And, against the backdrop of this story, it is still possible for people to live through the story of Jesus’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, in such a way that it is spiritually transformative. Eastern Orthodox Christians, who never made as much as Augustine did of the idea of “original sin” (as a specific historical moment, when human life was transformed from its god-given beauty and wholeness, to a state of sin and death, deserving only condemnation), can still think of the story as a mythical retelling of the essential nature of being human which requires some kind of intervention by God in order to provide the basis for the godlikeness of which we are capable. On this understanding of the story as myth, we were created as we are, and need the incarnation, resurrection, and apotheosis of Jesus to underwrite the theosis (the becoming godlike) of which we are inherently capable, and the only thing that can’t be only myth, on this account, has to do with incarnation and resurrection. At some point the myth has to touch down in reality, or it simply can’t perform its transforming — or in this case, redeeming — work. Myth alone can’t do this. And no matter how much Gray thinks he has provided a buffer between myth and science, he can’t keep the characters of the myth from striding out of the story right into everyday reality without emptying myth of is power.
Of course, some people will here advert to ”believers” like Jack Spong or Don Cupitt as examples of believers who have managed to keep the faith in spite of their conviction that none of the myths touch down in reality. But if the believer takes comfort in this then he has already given up any claim that he might have had to the title of believer. Cupitt knows this. As he says in one of his later books, The Old Creed and the New, he no longer calls himself a Christian, because he is simply not prepared to get bogged down in the game of trying to prove that he is orthodox, which he considers a completely pointless exercise.
That the details of belief are still important was recently revealed, rather humourously, though not, I suspect, for the government adjudicator involved, in the case of an immigrant from China to Canada who claimed refugee status on the grounds that, as a convert to Catholicism, he would be in some danger were he to be deported to China. But “Ms. Andrachuk, an Immigration & Refugee Board adjudicator,” as the National Post reports, was not convinced, so she put the new Catholic through his paces by asking him a number of questions about his Catholic beliefs, and, when he failed to answer a crucial question — one about what becomes of the bread and wine in the Eucharist when consecrated by the priest — she concluded that he was just using his claimed conversion as a ruse to allow him to stay in Canada. Mirabile dictu, the would-be refugee thought the bread and wine represented the symbolic presence of Jesus. He did not know that Catholics believe that the substance of the bread and wine are actually, and miraculously, transformed into the real body and blood of Christ. Ms Andrachuk’s conclusion?
“I find, on a balance of probabilities, that the claimant is not and never was a genuine practicing Roman Catholic,” she wrote.
“I find that the claimant’s level of knowledge of the Catholic faith is not commensurate with someone who has been a Roman Catholic for three years.”
Alas for Ms. Andrachuk, however. Many lifetime Catholics make the same mistake. According to the National Post report on the story:
A poll conducted last year by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a secular firm, found 45% of U.S. Catholics believed the bread and wine were mere symbols.
Father Tom Rosica, a Toronto-based Catholic educator, was not surprised by the results.
“It is an indication of terrible education and confusion among our people,” he said at the time.
“… an indication of terrible education and confusion among our people.” That they didn’t know that every time the Eucharist is celebrated an actual miracle is performed before their very eyes!
Does this show that Roman Catholics in the United States are the victims of a poor religious education? It might seem so, but it could just as easily be that it is simply impossible to convince people that a veritable miracle takes place at every mass. But what it does not show, despite John Gray’s rather dismissive comments about science, is that myth doesn’t need to be true in order to be effective in transforming people’s lives. Belief is still important. In fact, it is central to the religious project — and certainly to the religious projects of the great monotheisms. It’s difficult to keep large numbers of people up to date on what the churches teach. Like most people, when it comes to reading and study, religious people are just as lazy as their disbelieving cousins (although the latter tend to know more about religion than believers), but this doesn’t mean that belief isn’t important. The truth is that most people take their beliefs on authority, and think that accepting that the church knows what their beliefs are is enough to qualify them as believers if they adhere to the church and its teachings (whatever these are). I cannot count the times when parishioners have asked me, “What do we believe?” If they didn’t know that the bread and wine were believed actually to become flesh and blood, that’s not because that belief is not important, but because they simply accept the beliefs of the church, as the church teaches them, but may not know, in specific cases, what those beliefs actually are.
John Gray thinks that, if belief were important to religious believers, believers would be able to give a detailed explication of the beliefs that they hold. But religious belief doesn’t function this way. Amongst fundamentalists, for example, it is of the greatest importance that they believe what the Bible teaches, since the Bible is the inerrant word of God. But the Bible teaches practically anything, if you’re inventive enough with your interpretation. So, at any given moment, the beliefs of fundamentalists will be all over the map. But this doesn’t show that beliefs are unimportant to them. It just means that their beliefs are sometimes wrong. If they are corrected by someone whom they regard as an authority, they will change their beliefs in a trice. And while this seems to make belief a fairly unstable stew of beliefs, half-beliefs, mistaken beliefs, and uncertain beliefs, nothing about the way the beliefs are held makes them unimportant for believers. The archbishop of Canterbury, in an interview with Richard Dawkins, found it almost impossible to express what he believed about the resurrection of Jesus, but this didn’t make belief in the resurrection any the less important for him. It just made the belief less determinate than one might have expected from so highly placed a leader in the church, one who had actually taught theology at Oxford. And this is just what one would expect, given that religious beliefs are about things that are not confirmable either by empirical evidence, or by their unequivocal expression in some authoritative source. What has happened, despite people like Gray and Eagleton, who, though apparently unbelievers themselves, want to buffer religion from its cultured despisers, is that religious belief simply has become more uncertain as science has invaded territory once the exclusive possession of theologians. But this hasn’t, as Gray claims, made belief less important, it has actually made it much more important, even as it makes it less certain and explicit. For, without the beliefs, the myths become simply stories, and stories are not enough for religions to be going on with, otherwise reading a novel would be sufficient to make a believer.
I am actually impressed with some of what John Gray is saying, although I have yet to read him in depth. I too no longer believe that religion is based on beliefs. That is part of the rationalist perspective, but once you see things from a psychological point of view, that humans are driven by non-rational forces, it makes sense that religion falls outside of reason altogether, into the subconscious.
Father Tom Rosica, a Toronto-based Catholic educator, was not surprised by the results.
“It is an indication of terrible education and confusion among our people,” he said at the time.
What he meant to say is that “his” people are becoming increasingly better educated and less willing to accept the dogma of the church as simple assertion. Note the sense of ownership of the flock by the church.
These could be the same Catholics that use birth control and abortion, reject church dogma on gay rights and are pretty much in line with mainstream liberals on most social policy issues.
Now if they would just stop giving moral and financial support to that evil organization then Tom Rosica would really have something to complain about.
Steve, that’s precisely what beliefs are for — to distinguish “our” people from others. In one sense, Egbert is right, religion is not based on beliefs. If you go back before the time of the Emperor Theodosius, who overturned Constantine’s edict of toleration, you find that people lived together, for the most part, with different religious practices, and the beliefs that were associated with them, in relative peace. It was the Christians (and the Jews) who introduced a monkey wrench into this convenient relationship, by making claims to possess the sole truth on matters having to do with gods and the regard that is due to them. And ever since Christianity has been trying to nail people down, to keep them from believing heretical things. It’s a lost cause, because there’s simply no way to nail down religious beliefs, for the simple reason that there’s no evidence. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Christian project is finished, because that is in fact how we normally think of religion, as systems of belief. Think of Hinudism, which is really simply a culture and the enormous numbers of different religious beliefs and practices which comprise it. Trying to reduce Hinduism to a set or a system of beliefs is like trying to nail down a piece of jello. However, that doesn’t mean that religion has nothing to do with beliefs. Of course it does. It just means that you can’t fix religious beliefs like you can beliefs in the empirical world, because religious beliefs will inevitably respond to religious experience. This was William James’ conclusion in his Gifford Lectures. Religious belief is coordinate with religious experience. And religious experience now is being explained more and more in terms of the way that our cognitive abilities leave room for minimally counterintuitive beliefs about the world. But belief is still at the heart of it. Some people, like Don Cupitt, think that we can have our religious cake and eat it too, but I think he’s wrong. Any relativism — which is what this kind of religion amounts to — is going to be simply too diverse to make a social recognition of its contents possible. That’s why religion and morality are two entirely different things. Religion doesn’t need social recognition. There are all sorts of people who have their own private religious beliefs. Morality does require social recognition, because it concerns how we are to live together. But this is why John Gray is just wrong, because he thinks that religion, morality and science are all simply mythological. Gray’s position (if he can be said to have one, since his beliefs seem to be self-subverting) is essentially that we are animals like any other, and all that we consider knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is no better grounded than any of our other beliefs. As Grayling asks somewhere: if you’re going to think of yourself as no more able than a monkey or a spider to find out the truth about things, why would you write a book attempting to tell people this? Wouldn’t that be self-defeating? Well, yes, of course it would, which is why Gray keeps on making an ass of himself. He simply can’t help trying to tell people that what the truth is, namely, that we are no better off than monkeys, and cannot really know the truth at all.
I have to admit to a fair bit of frustration when faith-based beliefs are equated with myths without any serious complaint that the association is an outrage.
For example, the Genesis creation myths have been back-dated to present the absurd notion that Jesus died and was resurrected for original sin revealed by them. The christian interpretation of the myths assumes this original sin from its interpretation but is this what the myths actually present?
Genesis presents creation stories filled with symbols. That’s the first clue that we’re dealing not with some historical event but a myth. How we infuse these symbols with meaning matters a very great deal in order for the myths to speak to us – to teach us through symbols – in an enlightening, life-affirming way about human truths, and the christian version fails spectacularly because it fails to encapsulate this meaning derived from reading the symbols within the myth itself. That’s why we know – or at least should know – that the christian interpretation is way off base… it has to import a later event to try to make sense of its interpretation. This is clearly and unequivocally bass-ackwards on how to interpret the symbols of a a myth and make its central teaching personally relevant, which is a pretty good hint to even the most obtuse myth readers that the christian interpretation is flat out wrong. Any understanding then built on this faulty interpretation must be badly misguided if not purely delusional.
That the christian interpretation is wrong is not the fault of the Genesis myths; it’s the fault of people who assume an interpretation is true in spite of glaring contrary evidence. In other words, from the christian side of the equation we are being sold a bill of goods regarding an interpretation of these myths without appreciating that the goods – the myths themselves and the powerful symbols contained in them – are not as advertised. Go the source and re-read the myths without any reference to something outside of the myths. That’s where the teaching occurs: if we want to live in the real world fully, we have to leave these childish notions of maintaining some reliance on god and living by his rules behind. We have to grow up, become responsible for ourselves and the choices we make, and leave the parental nest. Sound familiar?
The faith-based beliefs people attribute to such moronic interpretations of myths should not be confused with the myths themselves, nor be linked to the value of myths to be personally transformative. Faith has nothing to do with it. Religions abuse myths and attempt to transfer – to steal, like everything else that makes religious faith-based beliefs appear beneficial – the power of myths to be transformative unto themselves as the meaning-maker, the purpose-maker, the door to a value-laden life through which each of us must enter to achieve these goals. Religions steal the value to be had from experiencing an enlightening myth and assign it to their set of peculiar faith-based beliefs. This is a perversion carried out by religions that is generally allowed to go unchallenged by those of us who should know better. This thievery needs to be criticized.
The Genesis creations myths are wonderful teaching tools perverted with very little complaint to serve the faith-based belief that we need christianity in order to make meaning, find purpose, and build value for our lives. In fact, this perversion by religions has done more to rob us of a timeless method to teach ourselves exactly how to live a meaningful, purposeful, and valuable life than any other single ‘achievement’ attributed to them. It’s high time we took back our human legacy of myths from the thieving hands of religious apologists and faith-based believers and reclaimed them as our public inheritance.
When talking about how important myth can be to our lives, Gray really needs to take a step back and see how students learn and treat Greco-Roman myths, or Norse myths, verses Christian ones, or those of other current religions. When I learned the Greek and Norse myths in the 5th grade (and later in the 9th), they were fun, violent stories that we learned as a unit in our literature classes. Sure, we could see some morals, but we were not *commanded* to find the morals like we were with the stories in Sunday school, where it was always made clear that
1) There *were* morals to be found in these stories.
2) That there were *particular* morals which were the correct interpretation of those stories, which were used to build aspects of the Church.
3) All of these morals and interpretations were required to fit a certain view of God and Jesus, and that view was supported in turn by those interpretations.
We never had a discussion of how, say, the Book of Job makes God look arbitrary and evil, or why Adam and Eve were helpless dupes. I was lucky enough to actually discuss the Book of Job in my high school literature class (and never in church), and the sort of free discussion was a lot more interesting without your opinion being shackled by authority. So when Gray complains that myths do have things to teach us, he’s not incorrect, but religion is the wrong teacher for myths, because they only want to teach you one way of looking at them.
I’m glad Eric chooses to separate ethics and religion. I also say that we need to separate politics from ethics and religion. I think part of the misunderstandings that we all have since the enlightenment is mixing up these values. In fact, these values have been mixed since ancient times, where myth was used for political control in the ‘noble lie’.
In a sense, the NOMA problem is because values and facts do get mixed up, but also values get mixed up, confusing religion with ethics. In fact, what drives our enemies is not religion at all, but politics. The evangelical movement, the Catholic church and Islamism are all authoritarian political movements, not religions after all.
Science is about explanation, but not about truth, which is in the realm of logic or mathematics, and we often forget about the sceptical origins of modern science. But it’s not a myth either, because that is once again mixing up values. Myths are stories and stories provide meaning. But politics is about power, and priests and imams have become political entities not spiritual entities.
New Atheists are justified in their criticisms, but only because these boundaries of values have been crossed–politics dressed as religion or religion dressed as ethics or religion dressed as science. However, New Atheists have moved beyond the rational realm into the political and ethical, and that too is a mixing and confusing. That is why they sound like fundamentalists, because they’re applying the realm of logic into the realm of ethical or political values. That is their weakness and failing.
If only we could break out of that narrow rational methodology and stop applying them to values, but instead understood those values as falling outside of reason, and in human subjective experience, then religion can be disarmed from politics as much as science or logic.
I don’t see how people like Gray think that it does religion a favor to call it a myth. I think religion is a myth and that’s why I’m an atheist. Anyone who believes that religion is a myth is a fortiori an atheist. Lots of people find wonde and meaning in Harry Potter books, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings. You only have to surf the internet for an hour to appreciate that Star Wars is a more meaningful myth to under 45s than the Bible. But no Star Wars fanatic thinks that Star Wars is true, that Han Solo is out there somewhere. If they did, even other Star Wars fans would consider them crazy. Gray wants us to believe that religion is like Star Wars and it’s not. Most religious people believe at least some tenets of their religion and believe that at least some of the characters really exist in a supernatural way. If they didn’t, they would be atheists. As much as I would like to believe that the religious are all secretly atheists, I find no evidence that that is the case
Oh dear, Egbert. Do you really think that morality falls outside of reason? I don’t think so. I think morality comes within the realm of reason, and if it doesn’t we’re in trouble, because then, unlike the Greeks, we will be unable to think reasonably about what we ought to do and how we ought to live. The problem with Christianity and other monotheistic religions is that they put morality within the divine realm, a bit like Plato and his world of Forms. But morality is about how we live together, and what is necessary to make this human project flourish. And how we ought to live has a lot to do with making the most of what we have, whatever that is in each individual case, but using our talents, our intelligence, our skill, to make our lives better, and so make better the lives of those around us, first, those who are close to us, and then others for whom we have a duty to care.
That is why, perhaps, Aristotle has the most helpful kind of ethics, which is centred on virtue, on those things which not only make life happy, but which also make it noble. That is where Nietzsche, often misrepresented, really shines; he found the utilitarianism of his day repugnant, because it had a tendency to flatten out human life, and instead of enhancing human abilities and capacity for joy and achievement, seemed to want to minimise the importance of what Aristotle would have called the great soul, and was content instead with shallow pleasures. The Nietzschean Overman or Übermensch is the person who lives exuberantly. He pictured the Übernmesnch in terms of the warrior, who is full of the triumph of living, but that is just a trope for the person who lives with intensity, and the bright edge of his or her abilities. And while you can’t “reason” about this, in a purely logical sense — which is perhaps why Hume thought of morality as driven by the passions — it is not because it is not so much reasonable as fully alive. But to place morality beyond reason is really to subvert the whole project of being human, which is, as well as to live fully, and to be fully alive in a Nietzschean sense, also to live as rational beings, able to give an explanation for the way we live, and what it contributes in human good.
” the one thing that atheists do have to get a hold of, so that they have something to offer to people, is death, and what death means for living our individual lives fully, and how best to live our lives in the knowledge that we will die”
Don’t atheists offer the knowledge that we have one special chance at life and that we should make our own way and make it as rich as possible? Surely those offering the delusion of an afterlife, the false reward for lives half-lived, for lives lived subject to authoritarian controls are the ones who offer nothing…
Yes, Daniel (#7), I’m inclined to agree. I think that if religious people were to recognise that their religions are based on stories that are not true, did not really happen, they would cease to believe. If Muslims came to think that Gabriel had not dictated the Qu’ran to Mohammed, they would cease to be Muslims. You can’t submit to a fiction. And Christians cannot be saved by a myth. I do, however, believe that it is possible to have a religious form of life which has no substantive beliefs, and it might be possible to turn some religions into such a form of life. I don’t know whether this would be possible for large numbers of people, or whether it would be possible for anyone who did not have some sense of the intellectual background of the form of life. So I think liberal Christianity, for example, which can do very nicely without beliefs, is an elite pursuit for those who know better than their fellow Christians that the creeds and other statements of faith, the liturgy and other forms of devotion, are really a kind of elaborate charade. For the most part, religion depends on belief, and I don’t think it can function, at least as a large scale social movement, without it.
Yes, Mike (#9), that’s precisely what disbelief has to offer. I have just been watching Jonathan Miller’s A Brief History of Disbelief and I agree with him that keeping to the word ‘atheism’ dignifies theism too much, and we need to use a different word. But yes, indeed, this is precisely what disbelief has to offer — this life, and this life only, so make the most of it. But that means we have to start doing the kind of thing that Plato and Aristotle, Epicurus and Zeno (the Stoic) were doing, actually contributing to the philosophy of the good life, trying to explicate what that would look like, something like Nietzsche tried to do with his Dionysian Übermenschen. But that takes a lot more than most people think. Still running in the background is the religious idea that this is only the first crack at life; we’ll get another chance. The recognition that this is the only life will be a real eye-opener, I think, once it has really sunk in. That means that we need to start thinking seriously about the fact that we die, as the Stoics and the Epicureans did in such detail, so that the importance of living intensely here and now is emphasised.
Eric, Since I’m a sceptic, I’m open to change my mind, but for now I can’t help but take Hume’s problem seriously. Also, in a sense, I’m trying to save values but by separating them properly, and we can disarm religion from politics.
Reason compels me to throw away all values as subjective products of a brain which is ultimately a bag of atoms and molecules of insignificant importance, and that would not only be throwing myths and religion away, but everything about what it means to be human and experience life.
Hopefully you can see what I’m trying to do–I’m trying to work through nihilism while also retaining values. I can see that we all have meanings in our lives, however irrational, it is of fundamental importance, but it’s still private. Public life or politics is a balance of power, and ethics and religion are pawns in that game.
As for being in trouble, I understand that. I think our ethics come from our culture, which is fortunately liberal and sophisticated, but ultimately not universal, ideal or rational. I know this is problematic, especially for the idea of universal human rights and other ideals, and I understand why you would reject that. But for me, it’s the only way of resolving facts and values, and I see that as ultimately positive and optimistic.
Half Egbert and half Eric perhaps? I propose that our moral sense is powered by our unconscious motivations but refined by our rationality. One without the other would make us very different organisms.
No rationality would mean that our responses to moral situations were bound by reflex and short term aims. No motivation would lead us to think beautiful thoughts but not actually do anything… Some people with particular cases of brain injury/tumor have shown behaviours like these.
I have to throw in with Egbert. I can identify no property that can keep a moral system from being subjective. I can use reason to identify when the rules are achieving the intended ends, but the ends always seem to be subjectively chosen. Even with values that are widely instinctual in humans, like minimizing suffering, it is difficult to decide when other values, like personal freedom, take precedence. Perhaps it is too much to expect a deterministic moral calculus, but without it I am still stuck in the subjective.
I follow this blog mainly in the hopes that Eric will change my mind. The implications of my views on morality are troubling in many ways. I don’t want moral goals to be axiomatic, but I cannot make sense of them in any other way.
DiscoveredJ, I think you’re probably closer to the truth. We understand reality using reason, I don’t see why we can’t understand our values the same way. But the problem comes when we try and impose our understanding on reality or values, if you see what I mean.
Philosopher John Wilkins has an interesting post on naturalism up today that I think is worth reading. I don’t see much sense in trying to divide the world into religion, science, politics or whatever. It all leads to the mindless “other ways of knowing” nonsense where the methodology of science is described narrowly and in great detail, but nothing else is.
According to Greene’s autobiography he converted for the perfectly explicable reason of getting laid. The object of his desire would only marry a catholic and I suppose for someone that pious a quickie was out of the question.
John K, I don’t see your problem. Sure, these things are objective values, the value of minimising suffering, the value of personal freedom, and they can conflict. That’s what’s so very difficult about morality. It’s not that there are no objective values, but that they do, very often, conflict. We are finite. We have to choose. If we were infinite there would be no problem. We would get to that later, and it’s not clear that suffering would make a lot of sense. What would it mean in a world in which we were eternal? (Unless, as in the Makropoulos Case, eternity itself is the problem.) So, choosing creates the problem of the conflict of values. That doesn’t mean that they are not values, after all, but that they cannot all be honoured all of the time. So, the question is not really about the values, but about how we shall act. Which things are more important, which less? Which values must be respected in situation A, which in situation B. And we won’t always get it right. That’s why there will be regrets, even remorse, and guilt.
I cannot count the times when parishioners have asked me, “What do we believe?”
Should I laugh or cry about this? How can somebody so openly and self-awarely abdicate independent thought? I thought this would happen automatically, in a subconscious way, but a question like that indicates that they know exactly what they are doing at that moment and simply don’t care.
Here is the part that stuck in my craw: “you don’t have to believe that a scientific theory is true in order to use it”. It makes me want to echo Pilate and ask “What is truth?”
It’s roughly my understanding that the utility of science is its entire offer. It may be an affront to common sense to consider the orderly geometry of our world as a curved space-time continuum and its tiniest details as a froth of particles popping in and out of existence, but we rely on gadgets exploiting these phenomena.
Sounds like what is important about belief, for the tribe, is believing in belief (details not so important, unless one is rocking the boat).
If the priority of moral values is just a choice, a personal preference, what basis can I have for condemning the different choices of someone else? Things quickly fall apart from here, since one can just choose individual well being over the community’s, becoming what most people consider as immoral as possible. Going back though, how can a moral priority be distinguished from a preferential choice? The entire idea of morality seems to have an irreconcilable contradiction.
I realize this tends to be an apologist line of reasoning, don’t think that I will present a god as the solution to this problem. Nor am I advocating an abandonment of attempting to behave morally. Right now I am stuck in a “sad but true” opinion.
But, John K. (#22), it isn’t. It isn’t just a personal preference. Suppose, for example, that without much risk to yourself, you could rescue a child who has fallen into the swimming pool, but you consider your freedom to go on reading your book more important. That your personal preference in this case is a breach of morality is clear. You stand condemned, and I can’t think of one person who would not condemn you for lack of moral perspective. It’s not just a matter of personal preference. There may be marginal cases where we would find it hard to make up our minds which action was morally right, but that is because the weights we would give to different choices to be so close, not because it is simply a matter of preference.
Bad Jim:
I don’t think “the utility of science is its entire offer”. I find great aesthetic pleasure in the way in which curved space time (and, for another example, evolution by natural selection) explains so much so simply. Common sense was never going to be enough to understand this huge and various world.
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