Philip Kitcher is interviewed about his new book, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism. It sounds interesting, and I’ll probably pick it up…but two things annoyed me about the interview: the misrepresentation of the position of some New Atheists, and the religious apologetics. It’s nothing personal about Kitcher, but they’re just two things I bump into all the time, and it’s exasperating.
I think that the “New Atheist” critique has a very narrow view of religion. For people like Dawkins, religion is all about people having false beliefs—and they think that when people have false beliefs, it’s better to correct their beliefs. I think in general that’s right, though having a misguided belief isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person. But you can’t just leave things with “Well, we’ve now shown you why your traditional beliefs are false, enjoy yourselves and get on with it!”
It always surprises me when people are chastised for telling others that they’re wrong about something — it’s an attitude that civility and getting along are more important than making the best possible effort to honestly address the truth. Of course there are worse things than having false beliefs — like being run over by a bus — but when we’re talking about differences in perspective on the world, the matter on the table is the truth value of our ideas, and it’s important to be forthright about your position at all times. There is no god. Let’s not dance around that point in order to be polite.
But further, this is a deeper difference than simply finding certain religious beliefs silly. It’s a question of epistemology. The New Atheists (and most atheists) differ from theists not just in details, but in how we answer the question of how we know what we know. We kick the props right out from under theism by rejecting the validity of faith, and presenting evidence for why faith fails. Kitcher mischaracterizes the fundamental message. It’s actually, “Your traditional beliefs are empirically unsupportable, but here’s a better, stronger, more intellectually robust way to think.” We do replace faith with something better, and it’s also something central to the humanist view. While some atheists do seem to push new dogmas, the best of them are giving people tools to think about how to live their lives.
Dawkins would also rightly say that the forms of religion he attacks are the ones that cause the most violence and suffering in the contemporary world. But there are many people who practice less problematic—even socially valuable—forms of religion. It isn’t the end of the story to wipe out religious doctrine and say that’s the end of it. One must come to terms not only with religion’s history of problems, pain, and suffering, but also with its achievements.
Different atheists have different views. I don’t target particular religions for bad conclusions — I detest them all for having bad methodologies. As far as the verifiable validity of their philosophies go, Episcopalians are as bad as Wahhabi Islamists. If all you do is criticize based on the immediate outcomes of their beliefs, sure, radical Islamists are far worse…but if you just look at their epistemological basis, they’re equally awful.
I’d also ask, “what achievements?” That question never seems to get answered, except with vague statements about how it makes some people feel better (atheism makes some people feel better, too, so what?) or that scientific and social advances were often made in a religious framework — to which I can only say, that those human accomplishments were made in spite of a stranglehold that superstition has had on society for centuries.
My perspective aims to widen the critique of religion, be more sympathetic to religion at its best, and strive towards finding a positive position that could replace religion. Some suggest that people never give up a perspective, however bad it may be, until they’ve got something to replace it. My fundamental difficulty with the “New Atheism” is that I don’t think it has supplied anything to replace religion. Secular humanism tries to fill that gap. I wrote Life After Faith because I wanted to put the focus back on the positive: on secular humanism as a positive perspective on life.
What parts of religion do we need to replace? Dogma? I’d like to see that gone. Ritual? Some people find that comforting, but even entirely secular people are capable of finding satisfaction in their own patterns, without some guy trying to tell them what they should be doing. Values? It seems to me that the churches have always been far behind the enlightened members of society, changing only in response to fairly intense pressure to accommodate — see anything to do with race or sex for examples of religion failing and humanist ideals having to first flatten the religious bullshit to get through to people.
I agree that secular humanism is a positive contribution. I don’t see it replacing religion, though, because it’s providing something religion never had in the first place.
PK: For some religious people, religion is really all about values and not about specific doctrines. By values I mean that they are genuinely concerned with human wellbeing and make great sacrifices to try to promote it. That’s a very important part of religion at its best. I grew up in Britain with a church that was much less interested in doctrine and dogma, and much more interested in social reform—in trying to help people live valuable lives. I respect that.
Again, I disagree. Religion is all about other people’s values — providing an institution from which one can snipe at other people’s values and reassure your co-religionists that you’re all perfectly correct. If religion were really about human wellbeing, than the churches would be at the forefront of the struggle for LGBTQ rights, for instance; they’d all be citing the scriptures that say that all human beings are equally deserving of happiness, and that you shouldn’t oppress or harm people for not behaving in private the way you want them to.
The problem is that there are no scriptures like that.
Yes, Kitcher doesn’t understand scientific epistemology, and has been trying for more than 30 years to justify Christian faith as compatible with evolution. In his book Abusing Science (and I still hold that he does a good job of doing just that) he makes it clear that, although accepting evolution may mean there are other intelligent species in the universe, that this “need not diminish God’s concern for us,” and our kinship with all of life on earth “does not interfere with the central Judaeo-Christian message that we are objects of special concern to the Creator.”
Kitcher is adamant that God’s Will can be slipped into biology, since it is essentially chemistry, and chemistry, unlike physics, is deterministic. As a biologist, I contend that that is just incredible. I know there are a lot of people who say this (Jerry Coyne among them) but I have never seen how that could work. Quantum chemistry is not a factor in the binding of DNA bases? I got banned from Coyne’s WEIT site over two years ago for quoting Kitcher (Jerry’s favorite philosopher) on this subject and asking that exact question.
Like you said, PZ, this just follows the bog standard accomodationist line that GNUs are big old meanies who only ever harp about creationists and literalists, never promote any meaningful or positive social causes/institutions like the UUs are doing, teach their children to spit on Easter bunnies, conduct debates about the cosmological argument at funerals, etc. It’s not even a fair description of Dawkins’ brand of entitled shithead atheism, for fuck’s sake, and that’s saying something. In any case, the “new atheists” are just a work of fiction, apparently created to make themselves look better by comparison. And I thought we had all agreed that imaginary beings aren’t needed to work out our differences.
I’m curious about this gap too. Never mind that we’re all “trying” to fill it, not just the pompous fucking Stedmanites of the world…. What exactly is this about? (Buying his book?)
It’s obviously a work in progress and will stay that way for the foreseeable future, if this is about ethics, establishing secular institutions, creating an environment in which atheists will be treated fairly by religious people in their communities, and so forth. But putting all of the burden on us, to change the shitty attitudes and behaviors of religious people, is asking for too much. To get back to the point, though, it’s a work in progress, as it should be. Nothing has “replaced” certain religious beliefs, and many of those beliefs should be disappearing, not popping up in a new form that looks vaguely naturalistic and rational if you don’t dig under the surface. We won’t have a concept of “ultimate justice,” for instance, and we won’t have “all of the answers” for any conceivable moral question, like some religious people promise (but never actually provide). If you just won’t be satisfied until we replace all of that sort of garbage, then you’re asking for trouble, and nobody has any reason to satisfy you. If you really think all of your dreams should come true, then maybe you should sleep on it and see how that sounds whenever you finally wake up. Or just give it a fucking rest.
Kitcher seems to be treating Richard Dawkins as representative of atheists (or New Athiests, for all that that distinction has any meaning). He may represent some, but far from all. His beliefs and opinions may influence others, but there’s no central dogma that atheists follow nor a leader that we all rally behind.
There is a veritable tag cloud of issues and contradictions in any conversation about religion, cult, god(s), belief and so on.
A particularly difficult nut to break, in my view, is the way in which after “dealing with” religious delusions, we find ourselves still pinned as ever by all the rest of our insidious delusions! We might discover, by way of hypothetical example, that the Jesus of our former cult adherence was a fetish stand in for “daddy” (or “mommy”) issues or a desire for “pure leadership” or whatever. What dogmas do we now pretend to have a seeming, but not really rational basis for? What social rituals do we continue to follow “religiously” even though they waste time, resources, and might (again, hypothetically) isolate us from others?
It isn’t even that “atheism” is the beginning of a process or that “atheism” is, as Harris has repeated, “a clearing of the table of bad ideas”, it is rather that the table full of bad ideas doesn’t actually ever get cleared. We are kidding ourselves if we think that belief in gods is the worst of those bad ideas.
…or, as consciousness razor wrote, more perfectly and concisely (no.2) than in my disconnected ramblings:
Which digging requires philosophy — that is, just thinking, inward looking, critical, deliberately self-doubting, etc.
Arts and sciences too. We’ll need to toss a little bit of everything into the mix, I would say, if the goal is supposed to be eudaemonia, or good people having good lives, or whatever it ought to be. But I think we’re basically in agreement.
Anyway, the word for that, however we should put it, is not “ethical humanism.” It’s simply ridiculous to stamp that label on practically everything, jamming it into all sorts of little holes in our souls where it just isn’t going to fit.
maybe we can replace religion with these little things that are called brains.
Less flippantly: I’m completely in favor of making it easier for people to get the things in life that are actually good. I want churches to face stiff competition not just from intellectual argument, but from visible and structured secular providers of community, support, teaching, and ALL the things that people say they like about church. Only way better. I want churches to look pathetic in comparison, or at least redundant.
Sorry, I meant to write it’s not “secular humanism” but I guess it’s true either way. You also don’t need to be a humanist in the sense of a humanities scholar, or a certain sort of classicist who lived during the Renaissance, or a person who only values human beings, etc. Pick as many of those meanings as you want, and it’s still not going to work.
Amateur @4:
If the discussion we want to hold at that table is about what we ought to do (ethics), I have always thought that we’re never going to get anywhere on that without first getting a handle on what we think we know to be true and how we think we know it (epistemology); and that question turns around and bites the tail of ethics. How ought we to act so that what is true might come to be known to be true?
What we’re left with are the ultimate questions of values: Authority vs. liberty; Tradition vs. innovation; Certainty vs. probability; TRUTH vs. truth. And the balance there will always be a work in progress. Those of us who value liberty, innovation, and the merely probable truth can’t give absolute answers. But that must not stop us from giving voice to the truths that we do think we can see (and make it as clear as possible why we see them that way). We don’t advance the cause of truth and civilization by pretending that the core “Truths” of religion have to be maintained in spite of all progress in human knowledge.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s more like “if we remove slavery, what will we replace it with”- from the slave’s point of view. Because while the slave yearns for freedom. they still have the problem of making enough to live on in the short term. Where does the food come from when the owner doesn’t provide it? How about a place to live? If fear of God kept people from randomly killing and robbing each other in the traditional AllAmericanAplePiesville, what happens if we stop believing? Of course it didn’t, it was more fear of what the neighbours might think of- and do to- those who failed to conform and weren’t powerful enough to shrug off the consequences. (I get my American social history from Lehrer’s My Old Town).
No, but it can be the worst thing which can happen to those whose lives are affected by that person acting on misguided beliefs.
I don’t get what the weight of this argument is supposed to be anyway. If I’m misguided by a belief that I can cure cancer with my magic powers, it’s pretty hard to imagine things that are worse in that situation. Yeah, sure, zombie Hitler could come back from the grave and give me cancer in his plot to take over the world in a fascist zombie apocalypse, and that would be worse than merely having my misguided belief. But fuck, it doesn’t matter if you want to do the wrong thing or the right thing or something in the middle, nor does it matter how much worse anything else is compared to this outcome, it’s still the case what you expect just plain won’t happen if you’re wrong about the way nature actually works, because there’s nothing in it which will out of its way to bend to your will or meet your expectations. The moral of the story should be fucking obvious to everyone and their dog: believing false stuff is no way to go through life. The end.
Just take a more benign and more common example than magical beliefs about cancer: I think I’ve got X dollars in my bank account to cover an expense, but that belief is false because I have less. There are certainly a boatload of things that are worse than bouncing a check … but what the fuck does that have to do with my problem? What good is this sophistry supposed to do for me? Will it pay my bills? Or is this just a stupid, irrelevant talking-point?
PK wrote:
Really, PZ? You know, all the arts and architecture and poems and music, inspired by [their religion]. yada, yada, yada.
Does this argument ever go away? And there’s also their charities that go feed the poor and oppressed (while doing the same to others). All of the real “advantages” of being religious is a double edged sword. It can lead people to do good things while also misleading them to believe “bad” things; and to take inaction to address real issues [whispering: global climate change]. So I agree: it is futile to try to dull the “bad” edge, of that two-edged-sword; best, is to just throw away that sword and start over, without the sword.
consciousness razor #12:
Hah! I like bank-account arguments. Just recently, I applied the ontological argument to my own account, and what d'ya know? It turns out I'm a multi-gazzilionaire.
Eeeps, what the hell did I do there↑?
Why should it? Please note that some of the most celebrated art in many cultures has exactly fuck-all to do with religious sentiments. At best, this argument is saying “but religion can make art too“. Color me unimpressed.
Unless you’re willing to say that the world of art would have suffered in the absence of religious inspiration? I tend to believe that the musicians, poets, and architects would have happily put their talents to use in other ways; more, I believe that religious inspiration was detrimental to allowing artistic impulses to flourish outside some really, really narrow bounds.
Hell, think of the useful architecture we could have had if people didn’t spend all their time building churches. Also, having recently visited the Louvre, did the Italian Masters really enjoy painting the same damn baby over and over and over? But that’s what we got when the Church “patronized” the arts. What a waste of talent.
So, nothing good about religion? Nothing to save? No tenets, no ideas?
Is there anyone here who left religion but considers at least some of the teachings worth keeping?
F.O.: Can you give me a tenet, an idea, or a teaching of a religion that can’t easily be separated from the backdrop of divine/religious “inspiration”? Just because a (particular) religion claims unique right to any particular idea doesn’t mean they’re right.
People have been nice to each other and awful to each other for thousands and thousands of years. Religion just provides a really handy way to be authoritatively mean Because gawd! Or maybe the spirit in that rock over there.
You put the line about the misguided belief in a <q> tag, and the paragraph after it in a <blockquote> tag.
@PatrickG: I don’t care too much about whether the idea is original or not, I’m just curious to know if there’s anyone that found an idea learned as religious doctrine that was still useful after leaving the religion.
Scientologists’ “Be competent” and the Sikh’s focus on discipline come to mind.
Useful for what? As a matter of historical or sociological interest, just about anything people say or do is useful somehow. And when you add to that the “use” of having bad examples to learn from, it’s trivial to find a use for literally anything whatsoever. But that’s not useful stuff that’s “worth keeping” in the sense that “Nazism is worth keeping.”
There are plenty of non-religious beliefs, claims, philosophies, practices, traditions, etc., which aren’t worth keeping either, so you shouldn’t be especially concerned about stuff that originated from religious groups unless you take their supernatural claims seriously. The claim isn’t that supernatural nonsense infects every thing a religious person ever says or does, but that as religious teachings or concepts they are useless, while many if not most are useless (in a non-trivial sense) even after taking them out of their original religious context.
For real? Nope, not worth keeping. Somehow it manages to have even less use to me as “be excellent to each other.” And at least that work of fiction isn’t taking itself too seriously.
F.O. @20:
I think it is relevant to consider whether the ideas or tenets are unique to a particular religion or not. If they are, then something might indeed be lost if the whole thing is discarded. OTOH, if the ideas are not unique to a religion and can be found elsewhere, nothing is lost if you discard the religion.
@ F.O.:
I just have to say, if you need Scientology to “be competent”, then I really don’t care if you lose something by dumping the whole thing. Yuck, what a terrible example.
@ consciousness razor:
You better not be profaning the Holy Word of our Dudes and Saviors Bill & Ted!
F.O.
There are some truly wondrous examples of architecture, and some of the ancient sacred music is pretty amazing. Christmas eve candlelight services (no sermon, just singing) is one of the few things I miss.
@ F.O.: More to the point, Scientology is hardly an original source for the idea of “Being Competent”, nor are the Sikhs unique in stressing discipline. These ideas predate religion, exist outside of religion, and will happily continue to exist past leaving religion behind.
Of course not! I implied that it does have some non-zero use. Specifically, it is more than a commandment from St. L. Ron to “be competent,” which don’t even register a blip on my Use-O-Meter. I checked again, just to be sure: this thing is set at rock bottom, quantum mechanical levels already, had everything pointed the right way, etc., etc. I’m just not going to be keeping it.
I’m asking because I am designing my own religion (and I want the govt to recognize it together with all the others, with all the benefits that this entails) so since I was at that I thought to put some good ideas in it.
I’ve come up with a hypothesis, ever-so-modestly named Azuma’s Law, that “all Christianity degenerates into Calvinism if you push its premises to their logical conclusions,” developed in tandem with (Dave) Foda’s Law “all apologia reduces to van Tillian presuppositionalism.”
When you get right down to it, this is all about right and wrong. Deconversion happened not when I realized that Christian theism was incoherent, but that Yahweh was a complete moral monster…and encountering the van Tillian camp, while a hideous shock (seriously, I goddamn HATE humanity now…), only made that conviction stronger.
Something makes me think the apologists somehow get this, too, as so very much of their fight against the problem of evil (fatal to theism in my opinion) is desperate attempts to either dodge the problem or render it a non-issue. I know we’ve got some really good counter-apologists here; has anyone found a foolproof defeater for presup? Half its effectiveness comes from its sheer craziness IMO…
Don’t know how effective, but I know it drives them nuts, re evidence (not argument) for their imaginary deity:
I hold their feet to that fire. No evidence to date. YMMV
I’m not an expert counter-apologist, but I agree that sheer craziness is difficult to argue with. I had a fun run-in with one (in person, no less!) who was less than amused by the typical “if it’s all prearranged, why do you care if I believe in your god” response. That’s really just snark, though; we know perfectly well why they care. :P
Also, I think Hazuki’s Law trips off the tongue a bit better. :)
That’s just not right. They don’t get a claim to the “correct” interpretation of Christian doctrines. There is no method for any such thing; and they refuse, on the bedrock principle of protecting their religion at all costs, to come up with a reasonable one.
Besides, they often have illogical conclusions. You could get Calvinism and anti-Calvinism out of that. And purple five-dimensional unicorns.
They want you to go circle-dancing with them and Jebus, but you don’t have to. An assertion that their god grounds all rational thought (or similar) is not convincing to anyone thinking rationally about it who doesn’t already believe. As an argument which is meant to convince someone of something which they didn’t already believe, it fails. As yet another “statement of faith,” well, that’s all it is. I believe because I believe because I believe because I believe … until you’re dead and you wasted your life listening to their crap. The only winning move is not to play. This, if anything, really does have to count as the nuclear option. It’s a last ditch effort to keep talking and talking and talking, to avoid any real substantive issue. Talking loud and saying nothing
I think the question of “what do we replace religion with?” is pointing at a genuine issue, if not phrasing it well.
To work with the cancer analogy. My husband had a 10-lb tumor removed earlier this year (along with the attached kidney and adrenal gland). While removing the tumor was an unequivocally good and necessary thing, the loss of that internal mass did cause some problems that needed to be addressed. His body had gotten used to having a giant lump of tissue there, and it’s sudden absence meant that various other organs needed to shift over to fill in the space (which he could feel, and which was apparently very unsettling). His middle back muscles were very prone to spasming for quite a while, and his diaphragm was pretty unhappy about the sudden lack of support.
Religion occupies a pretty damn big space in our society. If it were to go away, that would need to be addressed, and there would almost certainly be a lot of shifting around, some of it pretty uncomfortable. Doesn’t mean we’d want it back anymore than my husband would want his tumor back, but ignoring the issue could mean a lot of unnecessary upheaval.
Tapetum #32
That is a really good analogy.
and yay for your husband’s recovery
@28, Azuma Hazuki
Well I don’t know how convincing it is to presups themselves, but to the rest of us, something like this link here is what completely deflates presup. The core of presup is confusion about epistemology. They want to declare something as their most basic assumption, but they are wrong, the correct epistemology is much more basic than theirs. From the link:
And this “bottom” is a literally undeniable fact: there is some sort of present experience your mind is having. Kind of like “I think, therefore I am”. Amusingly, presups say this is “deniable”. I had one seriously ask me if I was sure I exist.
Also here is a great set of videos that is specifically made to debunk the Sye version of presup apologetics
Disclaimer: I’m only really familiar with the Sye version of presup. I’ve heard Van Till is different somehow. But I tried reading some Van Till and it still seems to come down to the same confusion over epistemology.
Tapetum @32,
That analogy really made me understand some of my own thoughts on this topic. When a person has the “religion tumor” removed, there is a period of adjustment, and sometimes things like social activities and community support do need to be replaced (this probably depends on how big the figurative religion tumor is. I didn’t get those things from religion, so it was relatively easy for me to adjust to being irreligious). I’ve also known a lot of people who use god as a crutch or an internal person that alleviates feelings of lonliness. I’d imagine those people might have some trauma at realizing they truly are alone and no one is there to hear all of their thoughts and completely understand them.
As far as tenants of religion goes, I’d be skeptical of the usefulness of a particular piece of dogma if I can’t think of any reason to follow it that is separate from any religious authority.
Tapetum @32:
This sounds like an interesting angle for a sci-fi/fantasy movie, tv show or book. If religion and religious beliefs were removed from society (the how of that I leave up to someone else), how would that huge hole be filled?
Tapetum @ 32:
A very interesting analogy. In light of my comments above, makes me think that some people consider religious art to occupy a space that non-religious art can’t enter. In other words, that the tumor cannot be replaced.
Also, hope your husband continues recovering well. The organ shifting sounds … very disturbing.
Tony @ 36:
Chaos and anarchy, of course. Haven’t you read Left Behind?
I was thinking of that too, but all the Fake Christians™ and other religionists are still around, no?
So that’s obviously all on them, not us sweet innocent atheists.
PatrickG @37:
That’s on my “To be read once I die and go to hell for being queer” list.
cr @38:
That gives me a thought (and not a good). If such a thing happened, where would that leave Richard Dawkins? Without religion to criticize, what would he do? ::Gulp::
Will there be Twitter in Hell?
Tony! @39
Bahahaha! That’s a thread winning comment in my book!
Azuma Hazuki @28:
It pulls the rug out from under itself. In other words, it’s self-de-feeting.
PatrickG @16:
I’m willing to consider it’s possible. Hard to say, until we’ve had an atheist culture for a few centuries.
Rob Grigjanis is the Punninator ladies and gentlemen.
Nah, it’s not that hard. There is no “religious inspiration.” People don’t see angels or demons or ghosts or get revelations direct from the big guy himself. Because those aren’t real. They see and hear things around them in the real world, tell stories to each other, etc. If that’s “inspiration” for an artist, then we lose nothing when religion goes. A sci-fi or fantasy writer doesn’t have “sci-fi inspiration” or “fantasy inspiration,” do they? If there were no real fantasy to have experiences of, or if no one even believed the fantasy despite their lack of any actual experience, then how exactly did you think that stuff gets written? And why wouldn’t people enjoy it, as they seem to be doing as far as I can tell?
“It’s like asking, ‘if we remove the cancer, what will we replace it with?'”
Has anyone pointed out yet how woefully inapt an analogy this is? I don’t know anyone with cancer who has ever credited the disease with making her feel better, giving her more hope, or providing a raison d’etre. People with cancer, unless stricken with some kind of strange mental malady, never want to have cancer.
On the other hand, whatever the sum of religion’s objective role in the world, the fact remains that there are millions upon millions of people who take great pleasure and comfort in having religious faith. Yes, it’s a load of horseshit, it’s rooted in false promises and lies and pitifully inadequate explanations for, and denials of, plain reality. But the author of this book has a point in stating that the overwhelming majority of today’s believers are not simply going to accept being talked out of their whole shoddy belief system if one simply asserts, “it’s time to give up this mess because it’s wrong.”
So, if PZ Myers finds such interviews “exasperating,” it’s probably because he wishes he had the power to just make stupidity and ignorance disappear by dint of force and conversation. And he can’t. No one can. I sure wish I could.
As an aside, I absolutely abhor the term “New Atheist,” as a proper noun or an ordinary one. Seems to serve no purpose other than giving the creationists and fundies ammo with which to slur those whose arguments they cannot engage. It also seems to be synonymous now with “atheists who are famous or have sold a lot of books, and are increasingly disliked by other atheists for some reason or another” (e.g., Dawkins, Krauss, Maher, Hitchens).
poultrystrangler @46:
First off, your nym is cracking me up.
I’d have gone with “atheists who are famous or have sold a lot of books, and are increasingly disliked by other atheists for being sexist, misogynistic, or warmongers”
cr @45:
But the question is whether a belief in those things can have a profound effect on how they see and hear things in the real world, and their creative process. Lacking the ability to read minds (especially those of dead composers), and lacking those beliefs my entire thinking life, I prefer to reserve judgment. A nice long chat with Antonio Vivaldi or Rabindranath Tagore might shed some light, but I doubt it.
not a goddamn single unique thing.
not one.
all ethics taught in bible classes are the ones you would learn from utilizing simple empathy anyway. nothing unique, nothing new, nothing. I keep asking people who are still religious what unique thing their religion gives them they could not get anywhere else. nothing is what. they always give answers that amount to them showing their own ignorance of what life is like OUTSIDE of their religion.
it probably also needs something link Munchausens syndrome added on top.
but then, I have always felt the religious actually DO suffer from something like that. I mean, how often do you hear them claiming victim status for attention?
it’s near a constant bleat at this point in time.
bah, you know what defeated the presup argument?
turtles.
Turtles…? How so?
But that’s one of my favorite movies!
Azuma Hazuki: Turtles all the way down
chigau (違う) @41
Twitter is Hell…
Seriously, folks, does anyone have a good response to the presup argument? I’ve been at it with a friend for over twenty years. He died two weeks ago. My boots caked with the mud from the edge of his grave are in the kitchen waiting to be cleaned. Can’t bring myself to do it.
@poultrystrangler
Read Brightsided by Barbara Ehrenreich. She also has some articles on the experience if you don’t feel up to a whole book.
It’s not so much that she felt good about having cancer, than that lots of people told her she should feel good about it, and lots of her compatriots did buy into it.
I second the recommendation of Brightsided. The positive-thinking woo-industry she describes when talking of her experience of cancer is very much akin to religion.
What argument? Presuppositionalism is just: “There is too God, and atheists are smellybums, and no returns!”
One thing I see many people arguing we need to replace is the material support churches give some people. To me, this is a fantastically ridiculous contention because we’ve already come up with that structure: the development of secular democracies in the West (I’m not versed enough in the histories of other areas to speak to them) has often been a process of replacing social support structures run by the church with secular structures operated by elected representatives and public servants. We already have “secular churches”, the problem is that they’re just as badly broken/corrupt as actual chuches in too many cases. I actually see the neoliberal, extragovernmental project of the secular humanists who are trying to institute atheist churches, charities, etc. as actively anti-social, enabling* a deeply problematic neoliberal status quo: they’re trying to set up tribal systems that (re)distribute resources on the basis of religious identity instead of supporting everyone. We don’t need secular churches, we need revolution, or at least massive reformation. It’s not a coincidence that countries with more pro-social public policy tend to be less religious: in those places, the government is doing its job better and makes material support of church-operated social systems unnecessary, as it should be. As PZ notes, ritual/tradition can be entirely secular (and already is for many people) and we can and do form communities based on shared identities (or shared lack of differences) that have nothing to do with religious/epistemological outlook. I see many secular humanists trying to reconstruct religious systems of privilege for the not-religious; I object to that.
*I’m aware of the counter-argument that unless/until we have functional public-sector support in place, we need to operate in the private sector to fill the gap in order to not simply leave people without support; I’m continuously conflicted on this point, whether the enabling effect is on the balance more harmful than the direct harm of lack of material access to necessities, in part because we’re comparing immediate direct need apples to social discursive effect oranges, so my only definitive conclusion is that I’m very much opposed to people advancing secular charities who are also opposed to a socialist public sector
Sure, I don’t doubt that beliefs have some kind of significant effect, one which is probably relevant to their creative process. However, being “different” in some hard to define way (which also varies from one person to the next) and the art world “suffering” because of it are not the same. Like I said, people clearly do make great art without that.
Tolkien (and his readers) didn’t need to believe in wizards or elves to spin a good yarn about them. If he were having hallucinations about such things and believed they’re veridical, for example, then I think he’d be less inclined to do artistic work on the content, modifying or developing it to fit the overall form or purpose of the work. He’s presumably going to take it seriously to the extent his beliefs have some such effect, like he would an observation of anything else in reality about which he has a similar belief. So, it’ll be a sort of “realistic” representation (of elves, let’s say) without embellishments, augmentations, distortions, rearrangements, editing the first drafts of the bits and pieces, etc., which are often meant to express something other than the most literal and accurate account of the experience itself. But you could obviously adopt this sort of “realistic” practice without religion, so it’s not any kind of method that non-religious people are lacking.
And if you really needed to get the content to match as well, because it’s so very precious to the art world, then take some hallucinogens or have a brain disorder or something like that. Non-religious people can do that too. Or non-religious people can be influenced by a general culture which tells all kinds of stories and makes all kinds of false claims, which don’t correspond to things as they really are, and believe those are true. That sort of stuff (folk psychological theories, urban myths, incorrect accounts of history, prejudices about people or other things/events, vague intuitions about the world, etc.) isn’t religion if it doesn’t contain supernatural elements, so we don’t lose that either.
I see religious people claiming victim status who actually believe that they are victims. But this has nothing to do with my point, which is that comparing religious to belief to cancer in terms of how “victims” of each “malady” view it is senseless.
Go find me someone with metastatic breast cancer who can go on, sanely and at length, at how the disease has made her life better.
I’ll find you millions of religious people who can claim that their belief and its trappings make their lives better.
The fact that religious people are childishly deluded about this isn’t the point. PZ is taking the author to task for suggesting that if you simply eject a believer’s religious beliefs from her mind, it leaves a gap that needs to be filled somehow. To fail to acknowledge this is the height of shitty reasoning.
I mean really, what if you grew up believing on what seemed like good evidence that your birth father was a wealthy philanthropic Hollywood actor and that he was going to leave you millions of dollars someday, and that you’d get to meet him when the time was right. Then your dad dies when you’re 20, and it turns out that he was actually just a very ordinary childless alcoholic who died penniless and alone. You can’t suggest that you suggesting that you would just immediately snap to and say, “Well, sucks that I was wrong on THAT score. Moving on to the real world…” And it’s actually worse than this because religious delusions are shared and reach into people’s social and community and even occupational lives.
And if secular support is available, why do they need imaginary deities? That is the point of many people here.
All religion teaches them is how to lie and bullshit, and rationalize the unsupported presuppositional ideas by evidence into dogma, that oppress others. Look at the rethugs. They have it down pat.
poultrystrangler:
I don’t think he’s taking him to task for that. Or I wouldn’t, at least. The author did imply “new atheists” aren’t doing that or doing anything to make it better, while only “secular humanists” are working on the problem (as if they’re a group which is somehow distinct from the “new atheists”). It’s not annoying that the author says we should care about that, but that he wrongly claims that we don’t. Kitcher (and Stedman, implicitly, here and elsewhere) also says some vague set of genuinely religious beliefs and practices are needed in an atheistic, secular humanist worldview. What exactly that’s supposed to be, I have no idea. But unless it’s especially cooked up to amount to the same thing or they are just terrible at communicating their actual point clearly, that seems to be different from the claim that many people can have negative experiences when losing their religions, and it’s different from the claim that they can have positive experiences because of their religions. As far as I can tell, nobody is disputing that. But something like “ethics” for example, or “art” or “social bonding/welfare” or whatever it may be, isn’t something that religious people can coherently claim as their own. They get gods and ghosts and afterlives, and that’s about it. There is certainly a lot left to do to fulfill that project for atheists, but there is no deep fundamental inconsistency involved in doing it in a non-religious setting because we’d have to adopt something religious in the process.
@28: Azuma Hazuki
Yes. The best defeater is to meet craziness with craziness.
Ultimately the presup argument is an argument from necessity. To complete the argument, according to van Till’s plan, the arguer must show that Christianity is not just a satisfactory explanation, but is in fact the only possible satisfactory explanation. That is part of the roadmap that Van Till laid out; and the fact that nobody has ever been able to complete that particular step explains why Van Till considered the presuppositional argument a roadmap for an argument rather than an actual proof.
Fortunately, there is an explanation that provides all the explanatory power that Christianity provides, plus more. I call it the “Infinite Monkeys Did It” theory. Unsurprisingly, the core of the theory is that infinite monkeys did it.
The most important part of the argument is that there is no observed phenomenon for which “Infinite Monkeys Did It” is in any way an inferior explanation to the explanation that “God Did It”.
Infinite monkeys are omnipotent, at least by the Oxford English Dictionary definition.
(In passing, this definition is probably the finest known example of Dictionarian humor). Should your victims balk at that definition, you can point out that the Christian god’s omnipotence is also constrained by “anything that is doable” restriction, because it provides an escape clause to avoid the “create a rock that is so heavy that god can’t lift it” paradox. One of the peculiar properties of infinite monkeys is that not only are they capable doing anything that is doable, they will also do it with probability that approaches 1.0 as a limit. (The formal proof of this is left as an exercise for the reader). The same argument applies to omniscience, with trivial modifications.
Infinite Monkeys are, of course, not omnibenevolent. But this seems to be an advantage to the theory, since it is compatible with the observed existence of evil. And, technically, the Christian god claims responsibility for evil as well. So at worst, Infinite Monkeys score a draw on the basis of omnibenevolence.
Even more interesting: Infinite Monkeys have been observed! As finite beings, we are only capable of observing finite monkeys, at any given time, of course. However, if you were to set out to count all the monkeys, it would take you some time to do it. And when you were finished, you would find that new uncounted monkeys would have mysteriously appeared. So, having completed your initial count, you would have to go back to the beginning, and start counting again. This process repeats endlessly, and the number of monkeys counted (barring a major catastrophe) is formally infinite (as the time required to count them approaches infinity).
Sooner or later, somebody will object on the basis that “nobody seriously believes that”. But I, for one, do seriously believe that. Unstated, of course, is the assumption that humans are infinite monkeys. Biologists among us will complain that humans are actually infinite great apes, not infinite monkeys, to which objection I can only reply that the “Infinite Great Apes Did It” theory doesn’t seem to be nearly as effective as the “Infinite Monkeys Did It” theory as a counter to presuppositionalism in practical experience.
This argument has been tested in the field with great success. This argument provided under Creative Commons license With Attribution. I’d be grateful if you could refer to it as the “Rowland Infinite Monkey Theory”. :-P
F.O. #17
There are some good things which are also taught by religions. But why would they need to be linked to religion if we know better?
The only reason to link them to religion would be if you’re superstitious and really believe the stuff.
P.S.
A tip on strategy: the “infinite great apes” part of the argument should be carefully saved until somewhere near the end of the debate. The best point at which to drop it is somewhere between the point at which statements get repeated over and over, and the “I know you are but what am I?” phase of the argument. In practical application, the “Infinite Moneys Did It” theory gets a little more complicated once it has been revealed that Infinite Monkeys are human. For example, it becomes a little more difficult to seriously claim that the existence of universes are explained by “Infinite Monkeys Did It”. On the balancing side, “Infinite Monkeys Did It” provides an excellent explanation of where gods came from (a problem that “God Did It” completely fails to address). If you run into serious problems, you can always claim that “Infinite Monkeys Did Do It”, except for creation of universes, which is explained by the “Infinite White Mice Did It” theory. (See Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy for a more detailed explanation of the “Infinite White Mice Did It” theory).
Sorry. Refining the argument as I go. I’d like to recommend the following form.
Rowland’s Law of Infinite Monkeys
There is no observed phenomenon for which “Infinite Monkeys Did It” is in any way an inferior explanation to the explanation that “God Did It”. But Infinite Monkeys have been observed.
(Why is it a Law? (1) because there’s no formal distinction between a Law and a Theory; and (2) our victims find Laws much more difficult to deal with than Theories).
Religion, the one delusion where you are not supposed to let that on that is in fact just a delusion.
Is 45:5 I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:
45:6 That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else.
45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
(…Right. That’s the Bible denying that there’s a devil, right in front of your eyes. But I digress. :-) )