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True Religion?

August 17, 2010 – 8:46 pm

Many a religious person defending her own religious beliefs will argue that a given politically, morally, or intellectually unflattering interpretation of her faith is simply not a true representation of her faith.  While the question of who has the right or the adequate means to decisively determine with any rational clarity which competing interpretation of any given faith is the “true” one is itself quite fraught, I can certainly understand what is going through such an apologist’s mind.  She thinks her religion contains truth when understood properly and she obviously thinks that her understanding is the proper one (otherwise it wouldn’t be her understanding of the religion–no one holds an opinion consciously aware that it is wrong).  Therefore, like she would with any other truth about a familiar but commonly misunderstood matter, she tries to correct what she takes to be other people’s misconceptions about this supposed truth.

The fact that most people disagree with her or that even the majority of her fellow religious adherents say things that she thinks are flat out wrong are irrelevant.  The truth is the truth and the fact of confused people within her religion does not change the correctness of her own interpretation.  In allegedly divinely revealed and divinely guided religious traditions, there is a serious philosophical question about why the divine guidance does such a miserable job of getting everyone to agree and to think clearly, etc.  But, nonetheless, if she ignores these sorts of extra implications of her religious beliefs and just treats her perceived truths like any others, she can think that she is correct while others in her religious community are just mistaken in any of a number of ways, just as she would with any other beliefs about which she differed with others in a shared community.

But there is another kind of apologist for religions whom I find harder to understand and whose logic I want to understand.  This other kind of apologist defends a “true” interpretation of a religion to which he or she does not belong.  Either he is an outright irreligious person himself or he simply belongs to a different religion.  In either case this apologist defends a religion to which he does not belong as having a true meaning or a range of possible true meanings or a true practice or a range of possible true practices.  And this type of apologist generally thinks of all religions as having true meanings and true practices on the one hand and being threatened by corrupt interpretations and corrupt practices on the other hand.

Since these apologists are not adherents to either some or all of the religions for which they defend “correct” interpretations against “corrupt” ones, the sense of “correctness” and “corruption” they see at stake here cannot be judged by the literal truth of the propositional claims of the religions they defend or to the literal necessity of the practices which the various religions take to be non-negotiable for their adherents.  The Christian or the atheist who defends “correct” interpretations of Islam from “corrupt” ones does not herself think Mohammed is God’s prophet or that she must fast during Ramadan to be faithful to God’s will.  In terms of the essential particulars of belief and practice that are quintessentially and uniquely Islamic, she sees no literal truth and feels no necessity to participate as a Muslim would.

This distinction means that, at least at first glance, the notion of true religion differs dramatically from the notion of true science.  There are two ways that a theory or a fact claim could be called “truly scientific” and neither appears to apply to the phrase “true religion”—at least as it is meant by liberal apologists.

A theory or lesser claim can first off be called truly scientific if it is generated by methods which are ideally conducive and proven for generating reliable empirical knowledge capable in principle of compelling the agreement of all informed, honest, and rational people.  A given theory or hypothesis or fact claim may turn out to be false and yet if it had been developed, defended, and believed based on proper applications of proven scientific methodologies it could still be said to have been a scientific theory or hypothesis or fact claim that simply turned out to be false.  In this way insofar as a proposition functions within a properly scientific discourse, it has the character of a scientific proposition, even if turns out to be a false proposition.  The question, therefore, of what makes a proposition scientific is not simply settled by truth but by the manner of its derivation.  Some scientific propositions are false and some true propositions are not scientific (in the familiar, restricted modern English sense).

Scientific truth requires more than that a proposition be derived and developed in sophisticated ways through the proper use of scientific methodologies.  It requires that the proposition also be vindicated by scientific methodologies.  So while we can say that various refuted, abandoned, and superseded propositions were scientific in character, they are not scientific truths and that true science no longer accepts them.  If one still adheres to a once popular (or at least plausible) but since debunked scientific claim only by ignoring or rationalizing away the subsequent evidence that has decisively refuted it, one’s arguments become pseudo-scientific for deviating from strict adherence to the scientific methods that arbitrate beliefs in science.

So the same proposition can be held and advanced either genuinely scientifically or pseudo-scientifically depending on the current state of knowledge.  If your belief was never developed or defended by properly applying scientific methods in the first place, it cannot even be scientific.  If your belief is based on outdated science it moves from being scientific to pseud0scientific even though we can say that others in a previous era were being scientific for believing it while it was the most scientifically plausible and compelling explanation.

So retrospectively we can say that a given debunked theory, hypothesis, fact claim, or other proposition was validly scientific for being derived through proper applications of scientific methods and being a scientifically defensible, or even the most scientifically defensible, way of understanding the reality under investigation.  And yet, we could say that that theory, hypothesis, fact claim, or other proposition is no longer scientific.  This does not make it retroactively pseudoscience and the proposition’s earlier defenders practitioners of merely pseudoscience.  But it does mean that those in the present who support an outmoded proposition without fresh evidence and without being able to debunk or at least challenge with scientific credibility the ideas which have superseded and displaced it are no longer doing science but either pseudoscience at worst or, at best, consciously shifting their focus to other related philosophical issues not solved by the superseding science but which the old scientific accounts at least took into account.

This account, if correct, makes clear that to say that a proposition is, in our present state of knowledge, “truly scientific” is also to say that the proposition is true or, at least, a plausible candidate for true which has been vindicated by proper applications of scientific methods.  We can refer to certain false propositions as having been scientific at one time in the past but not presently being scientific.  Some of them may even make a scientific comeback if new evidence comes to light.  But what is decisive is that, speaking within the present tense, to be scientific is to be true and the better supported the belief is by scientific means the more scientific it is and the less supported the less scientific it is.

What can we learn about what is meant by “true” religion from this analogy to discussions of true science?  Our pluralist apologist for religion denies the importance of literal truth for a religion to be true in her sense.  This is necessary because if she believes that there is both a true Christianity and a true Islam, then she cannot believe that whether or not there really is a Trinity determines whether or not Christianity or Islam is true.  God may not be a Trinity (contra-traditionally understood orthodox Christian belief) and yet there could still be a true Christianity which could be defended against a corrupt one.  And God may be a Trinity making traditional Islamic beliefs about God flawed in a major way, and yet our pluralist apologist would defend a true Islam against corruptions.

So the defender of true religions must not think that correct religion is determined by the literal truth of the religion’s propositional claims.  A religion’s ability to describe reality in literally correct terms cannot be what makes it true.  The adherent to a specific religion who nonetheless supports the idea that other religions have correct and corrupt interpretations may think that her own religion’s truth happens to be literal but not that other religions have to be literally correct too.  So, perhaps a relatively liberal and open-minded Christian thinks that true Christianity is true by virtue of being literally correct and that nonetheless true Islam is true by being nonetheless metaphorically correct (despite its literal errors) about matters that Christianity nonetheless gets literally right.  Or this relatively pluralistic Christian might think that while Christianity is literally true in its metaphysical and soteriological dimensions, that true Islam is just Islam that gets some other kinds of questions right even if it is completely wrong about theological mysteries.

The irreligious apologist for religions is more interesting however since presumably she thinks that all the religions’ theologies are literally false and so none of them are true by virtue of their ability to give literal knowledge about the world.  So in what sense could they be true or correct and be clearly distinguished from interpretations which are “false” or, even, outright “corruptions” if they are not about literal truths?  There are several intriguing, mutually non-exclusive, hypotheses about what different irreligious apologists for “true religions” really mean when they defend certain interpretations of religions and denouncing others.

Correct Religion As Politically Correct Religion. Let me start with the least interesting and puzzling irreligious apologist for “true religions”, the political pragmatist who aims to co-opt religions to political ends.  Essentially the political pragmatist means by “true religion” whatever interpretation conforms to her political ends.  Whether deviously or sincerely, the proper interpretation of Christianity, of Islam, of Judaism, of Hinduism, of Buddhism, will be whatever one advances the causes, ideals, or institutional structures which she takes to be either just or in her self-interest or both (depending on what kinds of priorities motivate her politically).

For the (small d) democratic political pragmatist, true Islam, true Hinduism, true Buddhism, true Judaism, true Christianity, etc. are ones that support democratic principles.  For egalitarians, true versions of these religions are whatever support egalitarian relationships.  And true versions of these religions approve only of the military tactics, the wars, the economic and social relationships, and the political institutions that the political pragmatist doing the assessing of their truth does.  And of course true versions of these religions condemn all the military tactics, wars, economic and social relationships, and political institutions that she herself does.

Now some people may  just engage religious people in their tradition’s terms as the only way to persuade them while personally thinking that their religion is utterly false.  The idea would be to figure that if the only way to persuade them is on their own terms then one does whatever one can to defend the interpretation of their beliefs that would make their beliefs the same as one’s own.  Practically the same as translating one’s ideas into another’s language so they will understand, implicitly the irreligious political pragmatist apologist for “true religion” may be just translating the logic of their views of moral/social/political/economic justice into the metaphors and traditional moral/social/political/economic frameworks of the religious believer.

While it may be disingenuous, condescending, historically specious, or, to interpret her behavior more charitably, wishful, for the irreligious political pragmatist who translates her views into religious metaphors and theological frameworks to christen only those agreeable uses of that religion’s metaphors and frameworks the religion’s true meaning, she is admirably enough trying to coax people who are attached to a given set of phrases and frameworks to get closer to truth and justice in what might be the only possible way to get them there—by convincing them they can keep those phrases and frameworks and still accept these modern ideas.

Now, some irreligious apologists may be rather uncynical in this whole endeavor of translating liberal, modern ideas into religious idioms and conceptual networks.  They may argue that they are not being at all careless with the truth about the religions in whose terms they couch their ideas for religious audiences.  They may argue that these religions do truly support modern, liberal ideas, and they may make this case that they are not mere revisionists in one of two interesting ways.

1.  They can point to histories of progressive liberalization of a given religion as evidence that the religion at hand, understood as a historical entity and not as an artificially fixed set of dogmas as  fundamentalists want, actually by its own nature evolves morally, socially, politically, economically, etc.  over time and in ways that develop nascent truths in their own traditions.

The political pragmatist irreligious apologist for “true religion” could say that just as true science is the science which most successfully progresses in its knowledge through time and through adherence to its best methodologies, so a “true religion” is any religion which successfully progresses in the justice of its practices and the spiritual enhancement of its adherents through its methods of preserving and developing whatever are the best parts of its culture’s shared myths, rituals, and traditions.  Just as progressive Western legal traditions allow perpetual advance and refinement towards greater justice in a way that simultaneously grounds its authority in its fundamental continuity with tradition, so the most admirable and successful forms of religion might be argued are those which do the same with a culture’s received moral, ritual, and mythological heritage.

Ronald Dworkin brilliantly compared just interpretation of law to continuing to tell a story already begun by others.  Say we were playing a game where one person spent five minutes telling a story and then each of the rest of us took a turn adding another 5 minutes of the story.  Assuming people did not radically change the story and use the exercise in multiple narrators to emphasize the drastic ways each of our imaginations can diverge but instead tried to show how a genuinely cohesive story could be developed from our shared imagination and understanding of reality, we could tell a unified and interesting story that nonetheless reflects the creative insights of each player.

Dworkin sees legal interpretation as being like trying to continue a story with multiple other tellers and having to stay consistent with what has already been laid down while telling the best story possible.   If in the story I am continuing from others I already know that the protagonist had only one sister and that she died in events discussed earlier in the story, then I cannot say that the protagonist grew up with three sisters and that they are all still alive.  I have limitations on what I can add to the story.  But as long as my telling of the story stays consistent with the facts and the basic narrative directions of the story I inherit, I can creatively invent other narrative turns and introduce other characters not already ruled out by the established story or inconsistent with its general themes, characterization, plot, etc.

In the case of legal interpretation, Dworkin thinks that the goal should be the most just outcome consistent with the received tradition.  One cannot outright contradict the tradition, one must find the precedence for one’s novel argument for a just advance in legal interpretation from within the resources of the tradition itself and show how it is fundamentally consistent with that tradition.  But one still should aim for the most just interpretation of the tradition possible, rather than necessarily the most literalistic.

And, similarly, the Judaic, Islamic, and Christian religious traditions (just to name the Western ones) have long, rich histories of developing comparable traditions of debate.  Each in the past cultivated traditions in which the views of multiple scholars across multiple generations and even across multiple continents debated and evolved their traditional understandings of their morality, theology, politics, society, and economy.

These traditions were relatively vital and allowed for traditions in which there was room for numerous viewpoints, meticulous argumentation, vigorous disagreement in the context of a continuity of evolving consensus and settled agreements, and, most importantly, a situation in which there were multiple authoritative and respected voices rather than merely one autocratic arbiter of the truth—be it a prophet or a sacred text.

The rise of fundamentalism in the major monotheisms in the 19th and 20th Centuries are an ahistorical attempt to obliterate the centuries of progressive interpretation and multiplicity of interpreters and insist on a mythical pure, literal truth from God in a textual form, plainly understandable with no help from the centuries of tradition developed since.

Whereas for centuries religious people have read (and in fact, continue to read) their defining sacred texts through the mediation of an evolving tradition of interpretation, the fundamentalists blind themselves to their own acts of interpretation and create an authoritarian ideology that equates their peculiar, contemporary understandings of the texts with the texts’ true, clear, and eternally plain and authoritative message from God.

Even though in prior eras Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scholars always accredited special authority to the Bible or the Koran, just as they do now, unlike today’s fundamentalists they were not always revisionists who tried to efface the role that the tradition was playing in providing invaluable interpretive guidance to understanding sacred texts.  Even after Martin Luther successfully started the Protestant revolution in approach to the biblical texts, Protestantism went on developing dominant interpretive frameworks, many of which function implicitly today all throughout the thinking of hypocritical fundamentalist evangelicals who think they’re just reading the plain truth of the Bible but are really just finding in it what Calvin or Luther or Wesley told their congregations was in there.

There is an eerie and unnerving parallel in the myth of what I like to call Constitutional fundamentalism whereby right wing Americans delude themselves into thinking they are simply reading the Constitution in its plain meaning when they conveniently omit as irrelevant or explain away things they don’t like and show reflexive contempt for the role of the courts in interpreting the meaning of the Constitution.  Just like religious fundamentalists (which, in many cases these political fundamentalists actually are too) who seek to jettison the wisdom of centuries of debate and acknowledgement of the multiplicity of authoritative voices in their tradition, these political fundamentalists dismiss the validity of two hundred years of the American legal tradition (and centuries of the larger Anglo-American legal tradition).

The guiding arrogant assumption of these idolators of the Bible and the Constitution is that their (supposedly literal) literal interpretations of their (supposedly sacred and inviolable) texts are plainly based on the obvious meanings of the words in the authoritative documents.  And these sacred unambiguously agree with their extremely peculiar 21st-Century fundamentalist ideas which actually originated in many more sources than just the Bible and the Constitution (and often in wholly different sources).

But reading precisely what they desire into the Bible and the Constitution, they treat all progressive theological and legal traditions as fallible judgment compared to the documents that they treat as as infallible (whether explicitly as in the case of the Bible or only implicitly as in the case of the Constitution).  All evolutions of understanding, all the rational arguments developed by the great minds of our theological and legal traditions over the course of centuries are heretical deviations from the holy word of the inspired biblical authors and founding fathers.

Mistrusting all rational debate as inherently subjective and corruptive of the pure and unimprovable Word of the Bible and the Constitution, they reject traditions of discourse that inherently introduce complexity and uncertainty, and assert a rational authoritarianism wherein there can be no debates about the meaning of justice or virtue or law or truth, etc., but only slavish obedience to the literal words of the biblical authors and the Founding Fathers, from whom we (supposedly) learn decisively what each crucial political or moral word means.  And never mind that numerous of these ideas meant to be authoritatively imposed upon us from the Founding Fathers of the Church and of America are scarcely to be found in any unambiguous way in those texts themselves.

So, this brings us back to the main point.  One can argue that just as a “true” justice system is one that progressively becomes more just and functions through methods which inherently (rather than just haphazardly or coincidentally) generate  that increased justice, and just as a “true” science is the one that will progressively and methodically increase knowledge of the empirical world, that “true” religion is whatever interpretation of a culture’s received mythological, ritual, moral, and spiritual practices can most aid that culture’s overall intellectual, moral, economic, social, political, and spiritual development.

And, historically, even though religious superstitions and irrationalistic deference to religious authorities in speculative matters slowed down and sometimes reversed intellectual progress, nonetheless the dominant religious traditions were not always or even usually the sort of explicitly anti-intellectual and primitivistic, literalistic idolaters of texts who we see leading fundamentalist movements in our own time.

So, the implicit way of thinking of the irreligious apologist for “true religion” combines two senses of “true religion” to defend religions against their regressive, illiberal, and intellectually refuted interpretations:  On the one hand the apologist argues that religions, despite various authoritarian dogmas and claimed sources of authority, were normally functionally progressive and pluralistic in how they went about interpreting their traditions and modifying them.

While religious thinkers were always setting, and working within, overly restrictive intellectual boundaries, they were not always or even primarily fetishizing literalists who had dangerously disregarded the wisdom of traditions and thought themselves capable of direct lines from God or able to make up wildly speculative new interpretations of their sacred texts and just judge them to be “plainly there”.  They had to work within what were functionally communities of numerous authorities across centuries and continents and to make their innovations consistent with those other ideas.

In the 21st Century it can be argued that any religion that is worth calling “true” must fully accept and incorporate all the secular advancements in understanding of morality, sociology, psychology, the hard sciences, politics, economics, etc. and reinterpret the myths and rituals in ways that progressively advance the goals of justice and a new philosophically and scientifically informed non-superstitious spirituality and morality.

The irreligious apologist for “true religion” can argue that if religion is an inevitable part of human life (at least for the present) that it should be called true and correct to the extent that it harmonizes with all else that we know is true and correct (morally, socially, intellectually, economically, and politically).

The irreligious apologist for true religion can argue that historically even though religion’s superstition and excessive deference towards tradition inhibited its intellectual and moral progress–and often even caused outright regresses–that, nonetheless, religions were neither always nor usually what fundamentalists claim they are, were, or should be.

Religions were often one of the many ways that humans structured debate that sought to move understanding forward while not losing sight of received wisdom.  Just as the history of politics has been checkered with frequent injustice and cruelty, so has the history of religion.  Just as the history of science was extraordinarily slow by contemporary standards for centuries until the scientific revolution, so the progress of religion has at times been remarkably slow.  But the apologist for true religion thinks it can nonetheless itself undergo progressive revolution (with the aid of the vast  improvements that recent centuries have brought in science and politics, actually).

But then the final question becomes—if we can attain to a more just politics and greater philosophical and scientific knowledge and advance morality secularly faster without religion than with it (as it appears these days during which it is religion which most arrogantly and ideologically stands in the way of moral treatment of gays and women, for example), then why would we need a “true” religion at all?  What will it add that truth, justice, and morality, all developed on rational, non-superstitious foundations cannot?

Even if we concede that there is strategic political value in translating modern knowledge about science, morality, and justice into the traditional religious metaphors and rituals so as to get stubbornly religiously believing people to re-understand their religions in modern ways—isn’t this just a concession to a necessity and not an ideal scenario?  In other words, why think that talk of “true religion” should be a goal in itself and not just a tactic for improving religion from within since too many people will never abandon it and psychologically must be engaged within its own terms?

I think the irreligious apologist for “true religion” must at this point either admit that the talk of true religion is still ultimately a tactic for making religious people conform their religion to other goods which will actually define their religion’s real goodness or the irreligious apologist for “true religion” must come up with an explanation of what religion ideally adds to life that our other institutions do not or cannot without, essentially, becoming religious themselves.

And here we reach a somewhat semantic debate.  What makes something religion at all?  If there is some good traditionally called a “religious” one, must it always be called that?  People have historically benefited mightily from meditations and from feelings of mystical wonder and connection to the universe and called that religion.  People have often called their feeling of dependency on something much greater than themselves, their humble recognition of their place in the universe, their heart-firing sense of an ineffable mysteriousness to existence, etc. all religious feelings.

I don’t personally mind so much, for linguistic purposes, that we still call these various modes of “spiritual” engagement with the world “religious” as long as we explicitly and thoroughly dispatch with the lie that literal understandings of traditional religious superstitions, myths, concepts, texts, and institutional authorities are necessary for ideal forms of spiritual realization.

In other words, there are a number of features of human practice, feeling, and relation to the world that are called “religious” and which are psychologically and rationally appropriate.  We should delight in reverence for that which is magnificent and nothing is more magnificent for us than the very universe and mystery of existence upon which our very being depends.  We should meditate for whatever psychological benefits and intrinsic pleasures this brings us.  We should engage in rituals which serve any number of valuable psychological purposes, given the sorts of creatures we are.  We should activate our mythical imaginations for relating to the world in richer ways, we should have holidays and feasts and festivals, and we should have cross-generational traditions which unite us to our forebears and our future descendants.

But none of this should be hinged on superstition, none of it should be tied to lies, bad philosophy, and pseudoscience.  None of these good and necessary things called “religious” should be confused with a justification to give a religious priest or prophet the slightest benefit of doubt that he or she knows anything special about the mysteries of the universe or supernatural realms, etc.  While religious scholars developed rich traditions of speculation and debate about theological ideas, all their good ideas either are or should be secularized in the rationalistic academy of today and all the strictly “theological” dimensions of their thought should be relegated to the history and literature textbooks because they have nothing to do with literal truth.

But, with these insistences upon a separation of religion from any right to claim truth, maybe there is room for a purified version of religion worth calling “true” and “correct”—religious feelings, rituals, traditions, and myths all strictly responsive to, and explicitly interpreted only in terms of, philosophically and scientifically grounded ideas, and always required to harmonize with the most inclusive and ennobling morality and politics.

I’d call that ideal religion and if ideal means true, then that would be “true religion”.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Featured, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, History, Judaism, Law, Law, Law & Politics, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Pseudoscience, Rationalism, Religion, Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Science, Science, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Theocrats, Theocrats | Tagged , , , | Comments (6)

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

July 25, 2010 – 2:15 pm

A consequentialist assesses the ultimate worth of all the various features of our ethical lives according to whether or not they bring about some specific intrinsic good or goods that the consequentialist judges to be of primary value. All the various valuable features of our lives have their ultimate value with respect to how they contribute in the end to this primary good or goods.

For example, if the consequentialist is a hedonist who thinks that pleasure is the one intrinsically good thing towards which we should aim, then all the other aspects of being a moral person—adhering dutifully to moral principles, having virtuous character traits and dispositions, genuinely caring about others’ well being for their own sakes—derive their morally praiseworthiness from the ways that they eventually, or in general, contribute to increases in pleasure. Utilitarianism is a form of hedonistic consequentialism.

The hedonistic consequentialist judges that if dutifully adhering to moral principles or having various dispositions and traits we consider virtuous or genuinely caring about others for their own sakes led to net losses of pleasure or to net increases in displeasure (pain), then we would not think of dutifulness, virtue, or other-directed motivation as good and desirable things the way we presently do. The only reason why we think so highly of these behaviors, dispositions, and attitudes in the first place, the hedonistic consequentialist argues, is that they contribute to pleasure.

Hedonistic consequentialism, which treats pleasure as the primary good to be maximized, is the most generally known and discussed form of consequentialism, but there is another major kind of consequentialism which I want to advance and that is what we can call perfectionist consequentialism. The perfectionist consequentialist thinks that the intrinsic good that all of our motivations, behaviors, dispositions, calculations, social institutions, formal codes, etc. should maximize is excellence rather than simply pleasure. Creating excellent people is more important than creating maximally pleased people.

Of course, quite often no choice is necessary between excellence and pleasure as being excellent is intrinsically pleasant itself (at least to an extent, even if in some cases, it is manifestly less pleasant overall in someone’s particular situation than being base would be) and often an excellence is an excellence at all to some particular extent because of its contribution to making life more pleasant. So, for a simple example, excellence at preparing delicious meals means excellence at creating pleasurable taste sensations with the food you make.

Consequentialists do not only differ from each other in terms of what good they take to be of primary importance but they also can differ in terms of their views on moral decision-making. There are three more key distinctions worth familiarizing ourselves with and on which I want to stake out clear positions.
The second, and, after the choice of primary good to pursue, the most general of the distinctions between consequentialisms to make is between egoistic consequentialism and universalistic consequentialism.

The egoistic consequentialist assesses all aspects of the moral and non-moral life in terms of how they contribute to his or her own achievement of the primary good towards which his consequentialism aims. So an egoistic hedonistic consequentialist would consider all proposed actions, virtues, proximate goals, etc. according to how well they promise to maximize his personal pleasure. And an egoistic perfectionist consequentialist would consider all proposed actions, virtues, proximate goals, etc. according to how well they promise to maximize her own attainment to excellence.

The universalistic consequentialist, by contrast, judges the value of proposed courses of actions, behaviors, dispositions, proximate goals, etc. by their expected contribution to the greatest number of morally relevant beings’ ability to have the primary, intrinsic good towards which her consequentialism aims. Thus, the universalistic hedonistic consequentialist judges the most moral actions, virtues, proximate goals, etc, to be those which maximize pleasure for the greatest number of morally relevant beings, whereas the universalistic perfectionistic consequentialist judges the most moral actions, virtues, proximate goals, etc. to be those which maximize the excellent thriving of the greatest number of morally relevant beings.

The third key distinction between consequentialists to make is between direct and indirect consequentialists.

A direct consequentialist thinks that not only should all the ethically relevant features of our lives be oriented towards maximizing the intrinsic good, but also that we should conceive of moral decision-making as primarily consisting of calculations by which we determine which courses of actions, which virtues, which proximate goals, etc. can be expected to produce the primary intrinsic good in the most quantities.

In other words, the direct consequentialist thinks that moral thinking requires explicitly thinking like a consequentialist and judging each option for action, virtue, proximate goal to pursue, etc. strictly in terms of how it will create the maximum amount of the primary intrinsic good. So, for the direct consequentialist, the most morally conscientious thinking about ethically relevant actions is explicitly calculative and specifically aims towards the greatest possible creation of the most important good for oneself (if one is an egoist) or everyone (if one is a universalist).

The indirect consequentialist, on the other hand, does not think that it is always ethically best for each individual to explicitly aim for the greatest quantity of the greatest good for himself or for everyone. The indirect consequentialist reasons that wherever the greatest good can be most successfully maximized by individuals not taking on a calculative, explicitly consequentialist attitude, but rather acting out of abstract concerns for duty itself or based on more partial emotions like love or from a devotion to particular intrinsically good things distinct from the primary intrinsic good, people should adopt these other sorts of motivations and means of forming moral decisions instead.

The indirect consequentialist is, therefore, concerned that the primary good is attained as much as possible, but not always that people directly aim for it in those cases in which aiming at it would somehow undermine their ability to actually attain the most successfully.

The fourth major distinction is between act consequentialism and rule consequentialism.

An act consequentist, in the most extreme possible formulation of the type, is one who thinks that we should make each choice based on a consideration of its immediate consequences for creating the intrinsic good. Taking the case of act utilitarianism, which concerns itself with maximizing pleasure, the extreme act utilitarian would always choose actions based on their actual expected pleasure return and based on no further concern for general duties or principles. So, if I were an extreme act utilitarian and I were working for a very wealthy person and I realized that I could steal $2000 from without either she or her dependents ever knowing the money is gone, ever missing it, or ever experiencing any other pain over its loss, I should then steal this money if it would make my life more pleasurable.

Of course, were I simply an egoistic, hedonistic consequentialist, only concerned with my own pleasure in the first place, I would make this choice regardless of whether it would eventually pain the woman from whom I stole, as long as it increased my personal pleasure.

But even were I a universalistic, hedonistic utilitarian who was concerned with creating the maximum pleasure for the maximum number of people, being an extreme act utilitarian would require me to judge stealing the money as morally necessary because it would create the outcome that would maximally increase the pleasure in the world (assuming all things were equal). If I am more pleased to have this $2,000 than the woman who does not even notice it is gone was to have it, say because it substantially improves my life for a month whereas it made no difference to hers, then the total collective pleasure among all the relevant moral beings has gone up and the intrinsically best outcome has, therefore, been achieved.

One might object that the extreme act utilitarian should still not steal the money because her guilty conscience would cause her more pain than the pleasures she can buy with $2,000 can compensate for. But that assumes that the extreme act utilitarian thinks what she does is wrong. But, as long as she considers the matter rationally and applies her extreme act utilitarian moral reasoning properly, she soothes her conscience when she realizes that she is actually doing the best thing for creating the greatest pleasure of the most people (or, if she is an egoist, she has done the best thing for her own pleasure) and that is, ultimately, all that morally matters.

Foreseeing the potential misery that such an ethics would repeatedly lead to, rule utilitarians (and some more reasonable shades of act utilitarians) judge that at least some rules of thumbs or nearly always unwavering principles must guide most of our ethically relevant actions, even when adhering to those rules of thumb or principles leads to short term dissatisfactions. The rule utilitarian reasons that a world in which people generally did not have general principles in place that forbade generally pain-inducing behavior like lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, etc., would be a less pleasurable world in which to live.

The rule utilitarian judges that even though there might be some cases in which one could get away with lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, etc. and both on the short and long term, one’s pleasure or the total pleasure in the world would increase, the principles which rule out these behaviors are themselves more important since were they to deteriorate, the result would be increases in general misery. So, the rule utilitarian upholds the principle and foregoes participating in what are usually harmful actions even when in those cases when refraining from them results in actual reductions in (both short and long term) total pleasure in the world and, even, increases the actual total pain in the world. So, for the sake of the general rule, the rule utilitarian sacrifices the actual achievement of what he takes to be the primary intrinsic good (pleasure). The rule utilitarian judges that overall more achievement of pleasure is possible in a world in which certain kinds of actions are nearly always forbidden and so refuses those actions on principle.

Where do I stand?

I am a consequentialist because I think that the ultimate determinant of the potential ethical value which anything whatsoever has for us, as humans, is the extent to which it will maximize human flourishing. Everything, from our virtues to our governments to our moral rules to our athletic achievements to our reason to our emotions to our interpersonal relationships to our professional relationships to our sexual relationships to our diets to our genes, ultimately contributes in any given instance to increasing or decreasing our total flourishing in power and is ethically assessable as relatively good to the extent to which it provides an increase and relatively bad to the extent to which it provides a decrease.

I am an indirect consequentialist though in that I think that there are many other intrinsically valuable things which it is better to focus on attaining for their own sakes if we are to attain maximal overall power. In other words, I think that in many cases, psychological reality dictates that we will function more excellently by focusing our explicit attention away from our own excellence, abstractly conceived, and towards the various intrinsically good projects in such a way as to treat them as of intrinsic value and primary importance to us.

While in general our maximal individual and collective thriving in power is our good, to attain this, in most situations we must be focused on more proximate ends as desirable in themselves in order to care enough about them that we indirectly make ourselves excellent. Our total power can only grow through the specific powers which embody it and these can only exercise themselves through the pursuit of particular goals which we take to be important enough and desirable enough for themselves that we can have adequate psychological motivation to invest ourselves in them.

I am a rule consequentialist insofar as I think that well-formed moral and legal codes of general conduct in matters of potentially severe interpersonal or civil conflict are both psychologically and socially stabilizing. And I think that the ultimate justification for moral and legal rules is their ultimate contribution to actual human flourishing. Even should adherence to such rules on some occasions lead to net detriments to human flourishing if the consequences of abandoning such rules (or a particular rule) altogether would be more detrimental to general human thriving, it is worth it to us to take the lesser hit and accept some avoidable actual failures.

Yet, even though I accept some degree of rule consequentialism in moral and legal decision-making and, therefore, acknowledge as a basic fact that much of our explicit moral and legal reasoning does concern judgments about greatest consequences (be they for pleasure or for excellence or other intrinsic goods), I also see a great deal of wisdom in incorporating into my moral thinking more Kantian-styled formalistic concerns about avoiding acting in practically contradictory ways.

While Kant would argue that we should never act in ways that involve formal contradictions, even when such actions would increase pleasure or decrease pain, I think that certain practically irrational actions are permissible when they are ultimately, in the total tallying of matters, justified by their contribution to our fundamental human thriving itself. I take it to be a practical and existential contradiction to act in ways that, ultimately, go against our own most fundamental conditions of thriving. That particular formal practical contradiction is the essential one to avoid, even if it means committing other practical contradictions to do it.

Other formally and practically contradictory actions (such as lying, bribery, theft, loan forgiveness, bank bailouts, etc.) are always on their own terms, strictly speaking, irrational actions and unworthy of us insofar as we are rational beings. But insofar as we are more than merely rational beings, sometimes our total functioning in the sum total of all our powers combined, and not just our flourishing functioning as rational, entails that we bite the bullet and do these things for the greater thriving.

Finally, we come to the question of whether I am an egoistic or a universalistic consequentialist. Whose thriving must we maximize and why? Do I only have ethical reason to pursue my own thriving such that it is irrational, even a practical contradiction, to pursue others’ well-being at my own expense? Or do I have a reason to subordinate my own thriving to the general thriving of a larger group of morally relevant beings—be they my community, humanity, other species, etc.?

Ultimately, I think that justifying my interest in a good is going to require, on the most fundamental level, reference to my own egoistic good. My own thriving is the most fundamental, instrinsic, and unavoidably objective good I have. If I do not at least minimally exist in the powers that constitute my being itself, then I literally am no good and can have no goods since I cannot be at all. And I fail to fully be, to fully realize myself precisely to the extent that I fail to thrive in my various powerful functional possibilities and, especially, in my potential for total power maximization with all my particular powers coordinating and amplifying for the greatest possible sum functioning.

So, I think that in the first instance we must be egoistic consequentialists. But I think that examination of the nature of our human powers, and what thriving in them substantively entails, indicates at least two key reasons why maximally fulfilling our egoistic ends of individual thriving necessarily involves contributing to the maximal thriving of others beyond ourselves.

There are two reasons for this. On the purely egoistic level, the development of our own powerful functioning depends to an incalculable extent on others’ flourishing. To maximally realize our potential, we need the conditions of stability and prosperity which others’ thriving creates and sustains for us and we need the cultivation of our powers by those already powerful who can advance us far beyond where we would ever have been in isolation and make it so that our own efforts can attain to even greater extents than would otherwise have been possible.

But not only does our thriving happen to benefit from the powers of others’ nurturing it but our thriving itself in innumerable areas happens in others’ thriving. The doctor has intrinsic powers to manipulate the body in numerous ways as she desires. But her most powerful functioning as a doctor is not to be able to simply manipulate a patient’s body for whatever ends she can but rather to maximally increase the unencumbered bodily flourishing of her patients. Her power functions in the body which is stronger and more capable as a result of her medicinal practice. Every leg she heals walks through her power, every life she saves lives on powered by her interventions in an indispensable way.

Great rulers are only great and only intrinsically powerful through the thriving of those they rule. Comedians can only be powerful if they can increase others’ laughter. Teachers’ powers to inform and engage students are limited compared to their powers to effect the world through their students’ eventual uses of the skills and information they teach.

And, finally, the ways in which we more powerfully thrive remotely, through others, and “outside” of our own bodies and minds when we empower others could be so great as even to justify sacrifice of our own bodies and minds altogether in tremendous deeds of self-sacrifice.  This is because, ultimately, I judge our intrinsic good and intrinsic interest in terms of our powerful functioning, not necessarily in terms of our own experiences of pleasure or our direct experience of our powerful effective functioning as it exerts effects we will never ourselves even know about.

For the above reasons, therefore, I am a perfectionistic, egoistic and universalistic, indirect consequentialist who sees a place for rule consequentialism and stricter, deontological moral formalism and virtue-based thinking in his moral judgments. I take the perfectionist excellence to maximize to be power and our intrinsic incentive to realize it to be the avoidance of the practical and existential contradiction according to our most fundamental nature that occurs whenever and to whatever extent we do not.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Ethical Pluralism, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Towards Atheistic Religions (Or Away From Them, Depending On How You Define “Religions”)

July 13, 2010 – 10:24 am

In a rare occurrence, I am being taken to task for giving religion too much credit and atheists too little!  Here are the offending paragraphs I wrote on Friday:

I would say that various practices called religious, if stripped of all their dogmatism, traditionalism, literalism, and authoritarianism, can and do certainly coexist with and complement science in the overall scope of human lives.  There is a place for ritual, for myth, for shared community, for groupings oriented around concern for charity and ethical formation, for meditation, for metaphysical speculation, for rites of passage, for wonder and gratitude at nature, for solemnity, for pageantry, for ecstatic experiences, and for strong identification with previous generations of members of various institutions and one’s culture itself.

An atheism that abandons all those life-enhancing parts of the human experience and the human possibility because of their cultural and institutional associations with personal-God theism, faith, superstition, authoritarianism, and excessive traditionalism is one that would throw out a truly vital baby because it is presently drowning in some truly disgusting bathwater.  It is an easy mistake to make, but still a mistake

These paragraphs received this provocative retort from Jeff D:

The first paragraph of this quote from blogger Daniel Fincke is beautifully worded and offers some valid (perhaps even profound) insights, despite a fundamental bit of dishonesty that I’ll get to later on.

The second paragraph of the quote is just more of the same ol’, same ol’ piffle. I don’t know any atheists who “abandon” or denigrate “myth,” “shared community,” “charity,” “ethical formation,” “meditation,” “metaphysical speculation,” “rights of passage,” “wonder and gratitude at nature,” “solemnity,” “ecstatic experiences,” OR “strong identification with previous generations.” (I know quite a few atheists and even more theists who criticize some “ritual” as empty or silly and who criticize some “pageantry” as kitsch or phony.)

I don’t really know what it means to say that there is an “atheism” that denies anything other than a belief in the existence of deities.

It’s really interesting that the first paragraph in the quote refers to “various practices called religious,” and goes on to speak of stripping away “dogmatism, traditionalism, literalism, and authoritarianism.” All of these have been and can be aspects of religion, or of “various practices called religious.” But what about “superstition”? What about “irrational belief”? What about fierce determination to maintain and perpetuate such belief and to discourage or prohibit doubt, investigation, or inquiry? From where I sit, those are just as fundamental aspects of “religion” as “dogmatisim, traditionalism, literalism, and authoritarianism.” In fact, without superstitious belief, I’d say that a system of cultural ideas and relationships isn’t a religion at all.

I think this is the dishonest aspect of the quotation. And I think it’s odd that Daniel Fincke would do this, even by mistake, because judging from other posts on his blog site, I suspect that Mr. Fincke and I would agree about many, many things on the subject of religion, the nature of “faith,” etc. Maybe those two paragraphs only seem dishonest when removed from the context of the rest of Mr. Fincke’s post.

Superstition, and the reflexive favoring of belief (usually primitive, ignorant belief) over empiricism — consistently preferring the “will to believe” over the “desire to find out” — is what makes religion incompatible with science.

Fincke (in his blog review of Ms. Robinson’s appearance on the Daily Show) says that “religion knows nothing” but “does things.” Correct, as far as it goes, but I wish it were as easy as that. Religion also pretends to know, with great certitude, all sorts of things, many of them demonstrably untrue. Even Fincke would concede that.

What is the opposite of “guilt by assocation”? Virtue by association? Organized religion has been associated for so long with ethics, morality, and charity that it is extremely difficult for most human beings — at least in the part of the world in which I live — to imagine that ethics, morality, and charity could exist without religion. It’s been a standard argument of religious apologists for centuries. I don’t think it’s a valid argument. And I’m sick unto death of hearing it and reading it, even when it is twisted slightly and dressed up in eloquent prose, as in the second paragraph of that quotation.

In context, my goal in the criticized second paragraph which Jeff D quoted was to address the fact that many people hear atheists attack religion as incompatible with their rational understanding of the world. And yet because viscerally and emotionally to them “religion” means the various social, imaginative, ethical, and “spiritual” things I listed above, they reflexively balk at the opposition between religion and science/knowledge/rationality. To many people saying that you cannot be scientific and religious is like saying you cannot be a scientist and go swimming or you cannot be a scientist and go to your grandmother’s house.

Because in their minds, all these other good things are part of the religion package and, from a cultural standpoint, they are not specifically part of either a scientific or an atheist package. I think many people who do not really need the superstitious or authoritarian dimensions of religion and who either explicitly or implicitly eschew much of that, still see and define religion as an overall package of valuable parts of life. And so you have Catholics who are on the pill, who get abortions, who don’t attend confession or mass all that regularly and yet hang on to their Catholicism, even passionately.

They show up to hand over their babies for baptism and keep them in the church through first communion and confirmation, they will go to priests for advice about spiritual matters, they will sign up to have their wedding and their funeral with all the powerfully symbolic and moving ritual and pageantry of the Roman Catholic tradition for such ceremonies. There’s nothing kitsch or phony in most people’s minds about a Roman Catholic wedding, it’s the freaking gold standard in the West. And when they have old clothes to donate or are feeling charitable and want an infrastructure for finding charitable activities to get involved with, they go to the Church to get involved.

And when they are in the hospital, the priest is seen as a spiritual person, a wise and compassionate counselor, devoted to people and ethical principle, who just maybe might be able to help with his prayers. I mean, what could it hurt to have him pray for you? At least it calms the nerves and in playing along you might convince yourself you have a shot and hope is a good thing in life. And God is a word for their awe at the universe and sense of gratitude for it and hope within it.  It connects with their sense that something about the universe is grand and mysterious and beyond what they will ever fully comprehend.  It connects with both their sense that there are forces in reality that could obliterate them without their control and also their wonder that they exist nonetheless.

And all of this ties people to grandma and grandpa. And in America it is part of maintaining their identity as coming from Italian immigrants or Irish Catholic immigrants or Latin American immigrants, etc. Religious myths are casually engaged.  Religious ethics are adopted as they are useful.  The myths make for a shared imagination in the community and the rituals make for a shared life in the community. In certain contexts, everyone fantasizes along in the same only half-believed way that is not really clarified and in talking as though they believe, they sort of do. “Is this true? is it false? are there reasons to believe this stuff?” A whole lot of people either do not ask those questions or do not let themselves take them seriously.

And their superstitions still have serious serious limits. They indulge ghost fantasies (even those completely at odds with their actual faith’s beliefs because logical consistency just is not the issue—solace through whatever rationalization will calm their subconscious mind is all that matters really) and they carry lucky relics, but at the end of the day, they still mourn their dead as bitterly and hopelessly as anyone else.

Now, to most people all of this is just in a completely different universe from science and knowledge. They do not think that religiously based superstitious beliefs affect the law of gravity or can be used to get them out of having to pay their taxes or will fix their leaking roof. And most of them go to the doctor and not to faith healers.

So, the point is that they live an entire life that uses religion for what they can gain from it emotionally, socially, and ethically, etc., and they use science for what they can get out of it practically and, in some cases, intellectually.

They live this life of compartmentalized complementarity between religion and scientific modern living. When we skeptical atheists say they cannot they say, “but we do”.

Their cognitive dissonance either causes them no trouble or practical implications for most of their activities which require strict reasoning skills or they judge that the trouble it does cause is much less bad than the pain that would be involved in severing from religious communities or beliefs.  Fundamentalists, be they Evangelicals or Muslims, are religious propositionalists, by which I mean that they believe the Bible or the Koran is filled with true statements about the world primarily and so they have a harder time with this compartmentalization than Jews or Catholics do.  But for many religious people, the compartmentalization gives them the best of both worlds whereas they (wrongly) infer that atheism would demand they only get the best of one world.

Now, since what people mean by religion are all these things with all these practical benefits, when atheists speak broadly about having to choose between science and religion, I think people assume the choice is supposed to be between science and all the stuff they are getting out of religion because it’s all knotted up together.

So, what I was trying to say to such people is most of this good stuff you like about your religious experience is indeed good and can be made compatible with modernity and science if you give up on the notion that religion is teaching you truth. Religion has little to nothing to do with truth. The only truths in religion are mythic and even many of the myths are bad myths that should be abandoned or radically reunderstood.

My point was also not that that religion actually has been on the side of ethical progress or a better source of ethics than secular investigations into philosophical ethics which are based on reason and progressive responsiveness to evidence and growing knowledge. I am adamantly against religious authorities being taken as ethical authorities simply out of customary habit of seeing them as such. That’s what I lambast as authoritarian, traditionalistic, regressive, ignorant, etc.

What I am saying, in essence is that what is called “religion”—all these practical dimensions of life can be retained and reconciled with science if, or only to the extent that, people reject religion as a source of intellectual and moral authority. I am not trying to deny the plain reality that religion has historically also purported to know things. I am not trying to deny in the least that it has been dogmatic and superstitious. Religious institutions have used religious techniques and practices to cultivate pretty much all of humanity’s cognitive biases so that they could exploit those biases for their power over people. This is the depressingly undeniable history of religious institutions.

But we have this set of practices and parts of life which people love that for centuries have been most efficiently controlled and manipulated by false intellectual and moral authorities. They have exploited people’s natural cognitive errors, including their superstitiousness and their poor skills at discerning justified authorities from unjustified ones, exploited people’s fears, needs for community, ritualistic natures, etc., and used a range of practices for reinforcing their control over people.

Now, my point is this, we must insist that religious authorities and institutions be granted no special intellectual or moral authority beyond what they can justify according to reason. Unless they can show the truth of their beliefs, they must be abandoned as sources of knowledge.  Unless they can philosophically persuade that their view on a moral issue is correct, they must be morally rejected on that issue. Unless they dismantle their authoritarian structures of belief and institutional organization, they should be judged ethically as harshly as any other attempted tyrannies.

But we atheists need to be abundantly clear with religious people that we do not oppose ritual itself, traditional identities themselves, ethical community itself, meditation itself, hope itself, metaphysics itself, ecstatic experiences themselves, myth-making itself (as long as it is not confused for truth telling, but is understood as literature), etc.

Now, you can say, “Of course we don’t, atheists aren’t inhuman idiots!” Well, the point is that whether or not they should, many religious people do reflexively and prejudicially see an either/or between religion which contains all these sorts of non-cognitive, emotional, social, moral, and indeterminately speculative and imaginative parts of life on the one hand and rationality which is scientific and impersonal on the other.

For most religious people this either/or does not force a choice though.  They just think there are two different compartments that fit together in a whole human life. When they hear people say religion and science are incompatible, they hear us atheists saying we can only have cold impersonal logic and must reject all the rest of these parts of life. Of course they should not think we mean that and of course we should not mean that. There is nothing inherently irrational about the non-cognitive, emotional, spiritual, moral, social, and speculative parts of life. But they think that anyone attacking religion is attacking whatever cannot be produced in a laboratory or whatever is experientially known rather than mathematically formulated.

Now, I agree completely with Jeff D that all the goods people are equating with institutional religions are generally parts of human psychology and culture, each of which individually needs no necessary tie to those religions to be developed. In a great many cases people get ethical community, metaphysical speculation, meditation, ritual, ecstatic experiences, ties to past generations, hope, identity formation, philosophy, etc., from non-religious cultural and psychological sources.  And not only that, but in a great many cases, they get better versions of these things without religious institutions than they do with them.

But we atheists need to do several things. We need to affirm people that in the cases in which their religiosity is giving them all of these things well in practice that that’s great that they get those benefits and go on to clearly distinguish that what we are challenging is not their traditional identity that binds them to grandma but just the beliefs which are false. We need to affirm that we appreciate that they associate their religion with all the charity they do (or receive) through their church, but that that does not give them their religion the moral authority to claim that homosexuals should be forced into either celibacy or heterosexual relationships morally.

We need to affirm that we appreciate their correct point that science does not know everything but we need to remind them that that does not mean their priest knows anything that a scientist or a philosopher or they themselves could not know. We need to make clear that if they want metaphysics they can do philosophy, but they cannot just make stuff up or believe what ancient peoples just made up without evidence. We need to say we appreciate that their rituals or mediations or prayers calm their nerves and orient their minds, but that it is important that they not superstitiously make any choices which depend on those practices having magic power and that they not encourage their children and others to abandon proven methods of inference for false ones long surpassed.

In other words, people cling to religion for the good parts and accept the bad parts because of them, because in their minds they’re a total package that has to come together. So rather than target “religion” which for many people connotes all sorts of redeemable parts of life and turn people off, we need to relentlessly target faith (belief in what is either insufficiently proven or belief which ignores clear counter-evidence), dogmatism, literalism, traditionalism, ethical authoritarianism, intellectual authoritarianism, political authoritarianism, superstition, anti-intellectualism, irrationalism, wishful thinking, and all the other cognitive biases which religious institutions exploit.

And, secondly, I understand that atheism logically speaking is just the lack of belief in deities (though I would more specifically put it as “living without deities, usually because one lacks belief in them”) and, as such, has no other necessary implications for whether one adopts or neglects to adopt any of those other good (or bad!) things that are part of religions.

But atheists would do well to not only point out that you can personally have all the beneficial emotional, spiritual, ritualistic, speculative, traditional, identity-forming, etc., benefits people presently turn to religion for without actually having religion.  We atheists would also do well to recognize that part of what people love about their religions is their integration of all these things into a whole way of thinking, living, and having an identity.  What they think they need religion in specific to do is to unite all these things in life.

Powerful religions give people’s lives a sense of coherence because they interconnect their views of everything and tie them to their practices. It is because people associate their ethics, their personal identity, their familial identity, their meditative practices, their social network, etc. in deep ways with their religions that when forced to choose between religion and science they either punt the question and just compartmentalize or, when push comes to shove, they twist what they think science is so that it does not disrupt everything else that is balled up together.

So this is what is uncomfortable for atheists. As atheists, all that most of us are really worried about is that people be rationally scrupulous and morally good for moral goodness’s sake. And we see long legacies of people deliberately instituting religious practices—group understandings of ethics, group-based rituals, group-defining myths, group-shared meditations, etc. as tools for controlling and manipulating people through irrational means. There is nothing rationally necessary about not eating meat on Fridays. To make it a rule for the sake of making everyone share a common ritual is needlessly suffocating. It’s so arbitrary.

But if you do not lay down arbitrary rules, you lose the bonding effect it has on people. There is no rational reason to not eat meat on Fridays that has anything to do with the nature of meat and the nature of Fridays. But there are rational reasons to get everyone in a group to do the same ritual (or in this case the same ritual abstention) on the same day. It creates identity, community, loyalty, discipline, etc.

There are relatively rational ways though for atheists to establish rituals and a liturgical calendar, etc. The way to do that is to acknowledge that valuable things rationally deserve celebration and that it both trains and satisfies us emotionally to set up specific days of celebration for them. So, celebrating days in which we honor the earth, honor evolution, honor the solar system, etc. all as ways of reminding ourselves and future generations of our dependency on them is possibly a good thing to do. Maybe a rite of passage where 13 year olds have to have a pet monkey for a month so that they can learn to appreciate our shared ancestry.

Are you rolling your eyes yet, my fellow atheists? The challenge here is that human minds learn through rituals, symbolic rites of passages, holy days, etc. Religious institutions have no real reason on their side so they exploit whatever irrational messaging system they can get their hands on. If atheists want to compete with that, it might benefit us to develop our own irrational messaging systems that point people towards primary allegiances to scientific and philosophical truths and to scrupulously rational practices. We may just need to use the tools for irrationally persuading people to lead them to explicitly embrace reason and rational truths lest those same tools be used against reason and rational truths.

We do not need noble lies (myths which tell uncomprehending people a genuine philosophical truth, that is simply above their heads, in symbolic form which they are encouraged to think of as literal). That method of inculcating the truth in irrational people has failed for centuries since people have fetishized the symbols and let them resist reformulations as new truths were discovered.

But what we might need are noble atheist rituals, noble atheist communities, noble atheist meditative practices, etc. that train people through non-rational means to have explicitly, self-consciously, and truly rational practices and habits of thought and belief. This means, though, convincing atheists to work together and form an alternative community (or communities) to as a competing choice to religious institutions.

Some may call this religious atheism and others might say it’s an alternative to religion. This is semantics.

What matters is that an atheist community be defined by its scrupulous and unqualified rejection of faith (belief in what is either insufficiently proven or belief which ignores clear counter-evidence), dogmatism, literalism, traditionalism, ethical authoritarianism, intellectual authoritarianism, political authoritarianism, superstition, anti-intellectualism, irrationalism, wishful thinking, and all other cognitive biases. To the extent that religion means any of those things, atheists can have no religion.

But to the extent that religion means to people a community for ethics, meditation, philosophy, ritual, rites of passage, pageantry, hope, traditional identity, group-identity, solemnity, ecstatic experiences, gratitude and wonder at the universe, psychological support, charitable coordination, etc., then atheists should not be embarrassed to openly build such a “religious” community that provides atheists in common all these things in organized ways, but without any of the abusive irrationalism or authoritarianism of faith-based, theistic religions.

A lot of atheists will be squeamish about this. Some associate any group organizations with the worst possibilities for group-think and so refuse to join other atheists in this task because they think it can only lead bad places. Other atheists just do not care about community along atheist lines since they have other avenues for community in life. And other atheists will think since they personally can get all those other goods in life in an individualistic way, they have no need to associate with other atheists for them.

But if we as atheists do not imaginatively and rationalistically construct positive alternatives to religion for the numerous people who do turn to religion for its “full package” of beliefs, practices, ethics, and community, then we will lose those people to the inferior beliefs, practices, ethics, and community that authoritarian forms of religion offer.

So, what is it atheists? Do we only want to harp on the ways that we are skeptical, scientific, and a default negative with no other specific content necessary or do we want to risk adding to our atheism all the constructive stuff that would make for an “atheist religion” for those convinced that “religion” in some sense is a necessary good? Can we persuade them that they can have most or all of what they really want to DO with religion without any of the superstition, dogmatism, fideism, or authoritarianism? Should we even try?

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Authority, Authority, Christianity, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Secularism | Comments (8)

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

July 11, 2010 – 7:21 pm

In a previous post, I discussed the intrinsic connection between being and goodness and between functional activity and being.  I argued, for example that the various components of a heart need to function as a heart to be a heart and similarly that a human being must act morally to realize her humanity.  Specifically, I claimed that she does not realize her humanity to the extent that she fails to be moral (not, however, that she does not realize her humanity at all in such cases.) Eli raises the most immediately pressing question such an analogy raises:

This is a really thought provoking post. I would certainly agree that something can be considered to be x when it fulfills the function of x (a heart is only a heart when it pumps blood.) This idea of function becomes a little more problematic when you move outside the material realm and make the assertion that not acting morally makes you less of a human being. How is being moral so central to the purpose of being human?

I distinguish between ethics and morality, so let me first address the broader ethical framework in which I think morality fits.  And I will stick to humans since we’re all humans here.  Presumably.

Human ethics, as I see it, is simply about how to maximally thrive as a human being.  I think what a human being is is a specific set of highly complex, interrelated, mutually coordinating and amplifying functional powers, all of whose rudiments stem essentially from our specifically human genetics and which can take a great variety of different forms when they interact with a range of different cultures and other environmental variables.

We exist as a function of all our various powers as they are configured and coordinated in any number of ways at any given time.  Right now I am existing as a sitting, typing, breathing, philosophizing, writing, language-using human being.  And that’s not even the whole list, there are all sorts of powers at work in me at any given time and their total contributions constitute my existence at any given time.

I am whatever I am doing at the moment.  This is the existentialist dimension of my thought.  Where I am a Nietzschean existentialist rather than a Sartrean sort, is that I interpret what “I am doing” to essentially mean “what my component powers are doing”.  Whatever my emotions are doing, whatever the numerous cognitive faculties in my brain are doing, whatever the rest of my body is doing, etc., all function together to make me “occur”.  I am the resultant function of all of those more basic functions.  They are wholly constitutive of me.  There is no remainder left of “me” (except conceptually) if you take them all away.

Now to apply the heart analogy, just as the heart has a characteristic function which it needs to carry out in order to be a heart in the doing of heart activities, so all of our cognitive and emotional powers have characteristic functions through which alone they are realized.  My memory is not a memory to the extent that it cannot remember, my love is not a love to the extent that it does not love, my computational skills are not computational skills to the extent that I cannot compute, etc.  To the extent that my brain functions to remember, to love, and to compute, I am a remembering, loving, and computing being.  And to the extent that it does not do those things, I am not those things.

If I am not born with a specific functional capability or do not have much of a particular kind of ability there is not much I can do by way of actualizing my humanity in that specific way or to an extent that someone else might (assuming there are no technological fixes by which I can remedy my deficiency).

But to the extent that I have a functional capability at all and to the extent that through a combination of its “natural” strength and my exercise of it in practice I can make it more powerful.  I have a power with potential which can be realized.

But what if I do not want to realize my potential?  Why must I do that?  What does this have to do with ethics?  Ethics is, presumably about norms for how we should function: how we should realize our potential for action in particular circumstances and in the broader projects of our lives.  How do these insights answer those questions?

The first thing I would point out is that since my being is constituted by its very powers, to outright destroy all of them would be to destroy myself.  To be myself, I must exist through my functional powers.  They are my existential precondition.  They must function for me to function and therefore, I have an intrinsic interest as me, that they function.  I take this to mean that I have a norm, a guiding principle, which comes from this existential precondition.

But that does not mean I need all of them to function.  For one thing, I have more functional possibilities than I could ever realize.  I can, for example, theoretically develop any of a long list of possible skills but in practice must choose to devote my energies to some rather than others because time and resources are limited.  I might opt to develop 18,250 skills to the level possible from one full day’s training if I do nothing every day for the next 50 years but train in a new skill each day the whole day.   But I could never that way realize any one of those skills the way that someone with a more modest handful of skills and hundreds or thousands of days of training will realize them.  So, for this reason, among others, there must be choices made and trade offs accepted with respect to our powers, we cannot maximally realize all our powers simultaneously.

But are there any norms to guide us in choosing which functionalities to focus on developing and which ones to either moderately or minimally attend to, neglect altogether, or, even, outright expunge from ourselves to whatever extent possible?

Let’s start with the easiest one, functional tendencies we should eradicate from ourselves as much as possible.  These are things we could do, or are inclined to do, which harm ourselves or others with not enough benefit to other functional powers of ourselves or others to net an overall increase in human flourishing and/or pleasure in the world.  If I have a tick that makes me scratch my eyeballs until I bleed, I should want to extirpate that functional tendency as best and as fast as I can.  It only damages my other functions in which I am embodied and through which I express and increase my overall power.

I can neglect other functional possibilities.  I might be able to develop into a highly skilled backgammon player or rock climber or musician and, yet, find that the energy and effort involved in these pursuits might take away from other projects which could function on so greater a level with my full attention as to make my life an overall more powerful one.  If redirecting my focus to backgammon, rock climbing, and musicianship significantly diminished primary powerful pursuits without sufficient compensation for them in replacement power realized, it’s not worth it.  For other people those functional possibilities might be more central to their own most powerful lives than they are to mine.

How do I go about deciding which functional powers to maximize and in what ways?  My natural talents give me clues about how I might function relatively powerfully in a way that draws on what is already “well-working” within me.  My interests also give me a clue as to what parts of myself I will enjoy developing enough that I will put in the necessary dedication to make myself powerful with respect to them.

I take it to be that since being is inherently good, maximally being is inherently greatest. My ideal is to become as powerful as I can, as highly functioning overall–with the combination of all my distinct functionalities taken together functioning with as many “units” of power (however this might be informally measured) as possible.

But whither morality?  Why is being a moral human being a necessary and centrally constitutive part of being a fully powerful human being?  There are several reasons.

1. I am an Aristotelian in the sense that I think that our various moral virtues are moral powers.  Like Aristotle I think we have various inclinations, which I call functional possibilities, which we naturally find ourselves experiencing.  I am inclined towards anger, I have the functional possibility of realizing myself through the emotion of anger. So in order to figure out the extent to which I should do this I must ask myself, “If I function at full anger what will this do to my other functional powers?  What will it do to my overall sum functional power?

Well if I am so seething with anger that I destroy relationships that are beneficial to my pursuits of my various powers, then I have harmed my own ability to fully actualize.  If I am so consumed with anger and let it function at full blast such that all I am is a seething manifestation of unbridled rage, then I can hardly concentrate on a game of chess or on a paying job or on love of friendship or, even, on the cognitive tasks involved in acting upon my anger in ways that satisfy my ends (be they merely selfish ones or just ones).

So, anger needs to be dialed back, usually quite a bit and always at least somewhat, so that there is room for parts of me to flourish too.  Anger is good for helping motivate my desire for justice when it functions as a response to injustice.  Anger is good for helping me change my own course when I do something that should make me angry with myself.  In those cases I become angry and express myself through, and am embodied in, my anger.

But I should only function as angrily as is productive to the development of the more directly productive powers within me, those functionalities which produce results which reflect greater power in me and extend my power further out beyond myself.  And, quite often, anger tends to be counter-productive to my larger purposes in life and to thwart my other powers.  So, it must be a power used with precision so that it only enhances and never diminishes my overall power.

And a similar account of the rightful feeling and expression of all the emotions can be made.  Each moral virtue involves a well calibrated emotion which ably functions to make me feel towards any given thing an emotion that rightly corresponds to the thing’s objective value (or values) to me, to my associates, and to humanity (and animals and valuable things) at large.  To respond to the world with emotions which lead to the proper orientation towards action is a power humans are capable of.  When we respond with the most productive emotions, this is, therefore, intrinsically good for us as an intrinsic expression of one of our functional powers through which we can manifest ourselves as human.

So, morally appropriate emotions, properly calibrated to objective value in the world, express a functional power and, therein, realize my humanity and so are intrinsically good for me.

2. My functional power extends beyond the limits of my body.  When I help build a building, my powers as a builder continue to function for as long as the building stands.  And for as long as another building I constructed in a shoddy way wreaks havoc on its occupants, I continue to function poorly.  This is why, out of a proper desire to express myself through excellent outward manifestations (an emotion we call pride), we should take pride in our work.  It is our outward expression through which we function, sometimes long after we are gone even.

When I teach you a skill, I function through your skill every time you use it.  If I teach you ideas my mind functions outside my body through your mind every time you think those thoughts.  And when they are true thoughts which you accept and which, based on their truth, lead you to more truths and to more powerful effects in the world based on those truer understandings of the world, my mind functions through that whole process.  My power plays a role in all those further developments insofar as I was an indispensable link in that chain of causation.

For me to empower people is to multiply my own power by infusing them with my power (metaphorically—nothing New Agey and mystical going on here, there is no bullshit Secret) such that forever more (or at least for a while more) it functions with their power and becomes a part of their power.

The greatest rulers are the greatest sources of empowerment for their peoples.  We take a crude, weakling’s and tyrant’s view of power when we imagine power as the destruction and debilitating subordination of one’s rivals or of one’s people (or of another people). To have real “world power” means to really power the world.  Thomas Edison is the master of the modern universe.  His inventive powers function throughout the world every night.  Everything we ever do which requires light bulbs has a contribution from a man long dead.  That’s power.

And rulers whose laws lead to fertile grounds, sound infrastructure, and flourishing people find themselves efficacious in all the food and institutions and thriving, powerful human lives which are all traceable to their shrewd lawmaking.  Every time you express your freedom of speech to your own benefit as a human being, feel the power of the authors of the First Amendment flow through you.

So, no matter what our capacity, be we builders, teachers, writers, rulers, parents, humanitarians, doctors, citizens, lovers, friends, plumbers, inventors, computer programmers, sanitation workers, chefs, cooks, etc., performing our tasks well in the ways that our roles are best able to aid and empower other people, allows us to function powerfully through their further successes.

And, of course, a great part of morality obviously entails our contributions to other people’s lives and empowering them as we would have them empower us (to suggest a slight modification of the Golden Rule).  So, in performing these sorts of actions to the best of our ability too, there is often a great deal of morality through which we realize our humanity as maximally as we can.

3.  Morality requires of us in many cases a commitment to principles which are inconvenient and on the short run do not aid our direct, maximal, individual flourishing according to our most prized powers.  Sometimes, principles of fairness or generally beneficial codes for behavior would thwart our immediate purposes.  Such overriding moral principles are justifiable to us because as human beings, it is our empirically observable nature to be materially, emotionally, culturally, politically, intellectually, and socially utterly dependent on a well-functioning social order if we are ever to maximally realize a great number of our powers.  And this should make us properly humble and appreciative of the enormous extent to which we not only function in and through others but also others also function in and through us.

Our fundamental dependence on such orders gives us a rational reason to prioritize principles which uphold that order even to our immediate detriment.  It is usually irrational in practice to undermine that foundation.  In these cases, strong powers of reason and commitment to moral principle are crucial human powers through which we can flourish even as we preclude ourselves from other forms of flourishing we might prefer in that instance.   The net result, I think, actually usually increases our total functional power in these cases, after all, insofar as our self-restraint helps to keep a thriving social order thriving.  Moral citizens can take pride in this contribution to society.

So, this is a third way in which to function morally is to function powerfully humanly.

And, as a “bonus”, when we temperately uphold the principles which uphold the social order, in the long run, those benefits again have the potential to make us more powerful than had we played a role in unraveling of the social fabric (or a crucial piece of it) for short term gains, only to find it not there for us later on when we needed it next.

4.  So far, I have focused on motivations for morality that refer eventually back to the conditions of our own flourishing according to our own powers.  We can also, of course, be motivated morally (I think) by love and investment in others for their own sake.  Sometimes (and probably usually morally ideally) we should empower others not out of explicit thought for how our own power can flourish through theirs as a result, but we should (and do) empower out of intrinsic love of those we empower for their own sakes.  In such a case, I think we realize certain powerful and powerfully efficacious social virtues and, through them, our humanity.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Duty, Duty, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Historical Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Love, Love, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (8)

On God As The Source Of Being But Not Of Evil

July 9, 2010 – 11:15 am

Introduction

This post is a long one but an important one for understanding what sophisticated Roman Catholic philosophers have traditionally meant when they have said that “God is good” and that the existence of evil is not to be taken as counter-evidence to their belief in God’s goodness.  Very often we atheists are dismissed as ignorant of serious theology and theistic metaphysics or as picking on theologically unsophisticated versions of Christianity because it’s simply an easier target than trying to refute the more profound religious philosophers.   In what follows, I will cut to the core of what traditional Roman Catholicism since Thomas Aquinas genuinely thinks is going on philosophically, and not merely metaphorically, when they talk about God’s goodness.  What follows is the basic outline of what God supposedly really is and my arguments as to why this philosophical interpretation of the concept fails to solve the problem of the evil in any meaningful way.  I have demarcated major section breaks to help you read it in parts if it is too long for you to read all in one sitting.  I could have made each of the parts into its own post but I wanted to present all the ideas together in a unified context which explained and critiqued interrelated ideas all together in a cohesive presentation.

In this post, I am going to criticize a general form of the historically common ” “evil as privation” arguments meant to absolve a supposed good God of responsibility for creating evil.  I am going to argue that the main flaw in “evil as privation” theodicy is that its potential persuasiveness hinges on our willingness to accept a patently misleading equivocation between unrelated senses of the word “good”.  And, worse, I will argue that the philosophers who endorse these arguments while also permitting average believers to understand God with the traditional metaphor that he is a loving father are guilty of a fundamentally misleading bait and switch.

Being As Intrinsically Good

The first premise of this argument is that being is inherently good and desirable for all existent beings. I just yesterday defended this particular idea (with calls for serious contemporary modifications), so if you do not accept or understand the proposition, please catch up by reading and commenting on that post first.

Defining God, For Argument’s Sake, As “Whatever Explains Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing”

The next premise of the argument is that God is whatever that thing is which explains why there is something rather than nothing. Now, there are reasons for and against calling this principle “God”. The reasons for using the term is that the word “God” has a long legacy of being used this way in philosophy and that, as the idea of a being which is our source, it is consistent with even the layman’s notion of what a “God” would be.

The reason to be hesitant about calling whatever this thing that explains why there is something rather than nothing “God”, whether it is in some way an aspect of known realities or a distinct entity outside of known nature, is that the word “God” for most people also has very specific and immediate associations with the gods of religions and, more specifically in the West, the monotheistic personal, interventionist god of the Abrahamic faiths. Using the same word for the metaphysical principle that explains why there is something rather than nothing that people as a matter of first connotation associate with the god of Judaism, Christianity, and/or Islam, is to prejudice them to think that saying there must be a principle which explains why there is something rather than nothing also means saying there must be the god of the Abrahamic faiths (or at least of the god they are most familiar with or enculturated to believe in).

On the strictly metaphysical level, when we posit the reality (or aspect of reality) which explains why there is something rather than nothing, this principle could be anything from a single feature of the world to a feature of all its most basic components to a being somehow totally separate from the known universe which nonetheless causes it, etc. So, if we say that there must be something that causes known reality to exist we say there must be a “God”, according to one linguistically traditional definition, but we have no reason that I know of to think that that being is the same as any of the anthropomorphically imagined deities who have personalities and interact with humans and nature.

And if we restrict what we say we know about this entity, or class of entities, to what is strictly necessary to say about it or them in order to square how there is something rather than nothing, we really cannot say very much about it or them. We certainly cannot say, based only on the bare inference that there must be something that accounts for why there are things rather than no things, that this something or somethings must be personal or interested in humanity in a conscious way or that it has any interest whatsoever in people going to church or mosque or temple. We have no reason to think it hates gays or premarital sex or abortion or pork or war or working on Saturdays.

But digressing, for the sake of argument, let’s call this cause (or these causes) of all known being “God” or “gods”. And for simplicity’s sake, let’s just call it or them a singular “God” for the rest of this analysis. Let’s just posit that there is a unified source of all known reality. It may be a feature of reality itself or external to it. It makes no difference. Let’s say this being somehow is responsible for all the realities we know such that ultimately their very existence is traceable to its being as their source, regardless of how that works.  We’ll just call that being, whatever it is and however it operates to create beings, “God”.

Separating Philosophical Arguments About God’s Nature From Theological Ones

Now, thinking this way, we can understand what Thomas Aquinas was doing in his strictly philosophical attempts to solve the problem of evil and to found the source of morality. Aquinas was a brilliant philosopher who respected the difference between philosophy and theology by segregating much of his discussion of the two subjects. He made philosophical arguments that appealed only to general reason and evidence so that non-believers who did not accept the Bible or Christian tradition could be persuaded by argumentation and not forced to believe by faith what could not be proven by reason.  By contrast, in his theological arguments, he tried to reconcile his philosophical conclusions with Christian authorities, including the Bible of course, and there did unfortunately embrace dogmatic authoritarian sources on faith. But at least he did not pretend those were rationally derivable truths that did not require faith.

So, what does Aquinas conclude philosophically about God and goodness. We can ignore his theologically based views because they are rooted in assumptions that the Christian tradition and its traditional sources of authority are inherently true.  And there’s no good reason to assume that.  But can he persuade us with arguments made purely on philosophical grounds that at least the Christian myths refer to actual philosophical truths—even if we do not buy all the fantastic superstitious faith-based beliefs?  Might Christianity still be metaphorically true if not literally?

The Literal, Non-Metaphorical, Philosophical Implications Of The God-Concept

Aquinas argues that if God is the source of all contingent beings, it itself is not a limited finite being itself but a necessarily eternal and unlimited being. It has no definition as merely one temporary combination of matter and form within reality but must be pure being itself to be the source of all other being. Lacking no being, it can lack no goodness since to be is simply to be good. For God to be the “creator” simply means, in philosophical non-metaphorical terms, that the source of all being is the reason all observable realities have being at all.

God’s love of “humanity” is just a function of being’s love of being as intrinsically good.  Assuming Aquinas is right and God is personal (though I see no reason to think this could be true), God, as the fullness of being, would love being because it is intrinsically good.  God would love the intrinsic desirableness of our being itself.

God As Creator Of Morality By Being Creator Of The Human Form

God creates morality, on this conception, by being the source of forms. All beings take essential forms in that they are specific things. There’s no free floating “being” that is not taking some particular form which makes it a specific kind of actually existing being. If all beings come from the source of all being, ultimately all the forms which beings take are also traceable back to the necessary being who gives all things their existence.  As Aquinas has personalized God, he can interpret the forms that beings take as not merely issuing out of the source of all being in a blind and purposeless way but rather as being deliberately designed.  God, in a personal, intelligent, and deliberate way designates all the ideal natural possibilities in which beings can exist.

At this point, I would diverge, not thinking there is any reason to think that the ground of all being is itself personal or that it deliberately chooses the formal patterns that natural things take. Since many of these formal patterns emerge through the apparently contingent process of natural selection, they do not seem to go back to a designing personal God who bequeathed to the universe fixed forms from the start.  So, Aquinas is already losing me philosophically here despite might weakness for “form” language, my sympathies with his tendency to associate being and goodness, and my theoretical openness to a basic principle which accounts for why there is something rather than nothing.

But, for the sake of understanding the logic of the Thomist (and, therefore, of official Catholic philosophy), let’s grant that the personal God created the forms for living things on purpose and with purpose. Having a form gives a thing an essential nature to realize. One realizes one’s essential nature by functioning according to that form. So, for an uncontroversial example, if I hire a painter, I can set out the essence of the job of painting in terms of functions which the painter has to perform. If the painter performs them, in performing them the painter becomes an actual painter and not just someone with the title. If I hire a painter and he never paints anything, he never really is a painter as he never does what painters do—he never paints.

So, if God gives us a form as human beings, “He” gives us a set of characteristic functions. To the extent that we perform them excellently, we fulfill our humanity, to the extent that we poorly function or damage our own abilities to function according to our characteristic functions, we fail to fully actualize our humanity. I think there is a lot of truth in this conception of human good and so am sympathetic to Aquinas, who was an influence on me when I read him. Only I think that our formal possibilities and characteristic functions are not at all God given and I do not think they are strictly constrained by an abstract formal essence determined in advance.  Forms clearly evolve and are fluid.  Form is conceived much more accurately, I think, as a heuristic category than as a distinct “causal principle” functioning in nature.

I think that evolutionary theory makes clear that our formal powers, our characteristic possibilities for excellent functioning arose contingently and I think that we can recombine our powers and restructure our social order in order to maximize them in ways that involve not looking at the basic hardware bequeathed to us by natural selection but imagining and creating richer, new ways to become more powerful, more effective human beings. And I think that the connection between the source of all being (whether it comes from within reality or from outside of it) is remote in its effects that create the particular forms we see.  They emerge through natural interactions not straight from the “will” of the source of nature itself (whatever that is). Those forms do not reflect any conscious or direct will of that source of being, even though they somehow flow out from it as its ultimate actual consequences. These may be determined, necessary consequences and expressions of the nature of that source of all being as Spinoza thought or they may be the open ended chance results of that being.

Natural And Moral Evils As Ways To Lack Of Being, Ways To Fail To Realize Forms

But, for the sake of understanding the Thomist reply to evil, let’s hypothetically posit that our forms come from a personal God. Then the argument about evil goes like this. God is inherently a necessary, complete, and simple being. Evil is defined as the lack of being or the disorder of good being. By a “lack of being” we can mean the lack of complete fulfillment of a being’s formal essence. So, to the extent that I do not fully actualize my human essence, I suffer an evil because I lack some of the possible goodness my form made possible for me. When a tooth has a cavity, it is an incomplete tooth, missing some of the tooth “being”, so to speak, which would make it a complete tooth, i.e.. a fully actualizing tooth according to the “form of the tooth” (if we can speak of teeth having forms, at least for illustration purposes). Similarly, eyes’ characteristic function is, obviously, to see. When an eye is blind it suffers an evil for lacking its proper functionality according to its inherent form.

Evil is not only present when a thing’s part, required by its form, is missing but also when the parts that are there function in a disordered way. As Plato had realized, for example, it does not take specifically “evil” traits to make people behave badly. All that was necessary was that our good traits, such as our reason, our “spirited” part which was concerned with honor and willing to defend ourselves, and our appetitive desires (our desires for the pleasures of food, drink, sex, comfort, money etc.) get prioritized wrongly. The desire for sex is good, but it should not overwhelm your reason and lead you into unjust sexual acts or harmful ones, etc. Your desire to defend your honor is good, but it should not lead you to defend yourself when you are actually in the wrong and deserving of shame, etc.

So, we do not need an “evil” trait in order to do evil. Our inherently good traits, dispositions, and powers can all easily contribute to our living well. And they can all be badly used if we act on them at the wrong times, in the wrong places, in the wrong ways, according to the wrong priorities (and wrong balance between them), etc.

Now, there are two kinds of evil, natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil occurs wherever we suffer a deficiency that makes us unable to live a fully good life. Going blind, getting sick, naturally lacking skills with intelligence, having one’s house destroyed by a hurricane, getting killed, etc., are all natural evils. They involve no moral failure, but involve suffering evil, i.e., lacking good things important to our abilities to fully flourish in life.

Moral evils come from having our inherently good powers disordered such that we deliberately choose to follow our inclinations in ways that express poor moral judgment or either an excess or a deficiency an inclination that would be more excellently realized, according to its proper form, if expressed moderately.

God As Creator Only Of Beings (Which Are Good) But Not Of Non-Beings (Which Are Evil)

So, how do these helpful, illuminating, and essentially true distinctions about evil relate to the problem of evil? What do they have to do with the paradox of positing an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God despite the fact of evident suffering? The problem of evil, as you know, is the idea that since an omnipotent God could prevent evil if he so chose and an all-good or all-loving God would prevent evil if he could, the observable fact of evil in the world proves that God is either not omnipotent, not all-good or all-loving, or non-existent altogether.

The Thomistic solution to this paradox hinges on the sense in which God is good and the sense in which evil exists only as a negation. The sense in which God is said to be good, philosophically speaking, is strictly the sense in which God is the source of all being. Since being is inherently good and since the only thing we can infer with certainty about God is that it is necessary being, God is good and the source of all and only good things. “But,” you object, “God is the source of evil things if he created everything and some things are evil!”  But no, God is the source of actual beings and there are no intrinsically evil beings. There are only good beings which miss some of their possible goodness and so are not as good as they could be. But insofar as they are at all, i.e., to the extent that they have being, as such they are good.

God is the source of good beings, like us, with good traits and powers and dispositions, and all that God, as the source of being, can be said to give us is those traits and powers and dispositions. When I let my desire for honor override my rational understanding of justice and get into a fight for immoral reasons, that’s evil. And it happens without God “creating” any evil “thing”. It happens because I use the good things given to me by God, which are all in themselves good, in a way that is harmful to both my flourishing (and/or others’) and an obstacle to my (and/or their) fulfillment of the natural, formal ideal God laid out for me (and/or them).

So, God, on this conception, is just the giver of being. Wherever there is a lack of being it is not because God made a “lack” since a lack is not some thing that can be made. Wherever there is a disorder of being it is not because the being which God gave is inherently disordered. “When you ask, but if God is all good and all loving why would He create beings which were deficient? Why would he give someone all the human properties except eyesight? Or why would He give human beings all these good traits but then make it so easy and natural for us to be so demonstrably bad at managing them the best way possible?” And this is where the philosophical Thomistic defense of God gets callous.

The argument is that God, as the free giver of being is under no compulsion to create any particular kind of being. It is nonsensical to say, “Why didn’t God create a two-headed elephant!” Why would God have to? God is no less good, in the sense of a being with no lack of being in Him, if He opts not to create every possible good being. God’s being good is simply a function of God’s being pure, necessary being that lacks nothing by way of being. God is good whether or not He opts to create a world, whether He opts to create a world of billions of species or of just 5, and whether or not he opts to give you eyesight or whether or not he gives you an instinctual harmony between all your dispositions and powers that automatically leads to your flourishing.

The Metaphorical Bait And Philosophical Switch

But that, in my view, makes God callous and indifferent and that’s not moral.  So God is not, morally speaking, good.  And the response from the Thomist is that morality does not apply to God. Morality is a human thing. It is a human way of living up to the human form. We have to fulfill our essences to be fully what we are and morality is a way of living well according to practical decisions with respect to action. God, though, is not a finite being and has no form, but is just pure, simple being. He has no moral obligations. He just creates or does not create at arbitrary whim. Morality is binding on us because He gave us a nature which requires adherence to morality in order to completely fulfill itself. But morality is not a cosmic law that even God must obey.

Therefore, when stripped of all the misleading metaphors about God being “loving” and “morally good” and a “father”, the real, non-metaphorical understanding of God in Thomistic, i.e., official Roman Catholic philosophy, is that God’s goodness is only His “fullness of being” and has nothing whatsoever to do with the respect and care for people or for moral principles which we think of as the praiseworthy and morally lovable kind of goodness.  God’s only concern for our morality is as its designer, not as one subject to it.  God is as unconstrained in action by the morality he made necessary for us as, say, a computer programmer is unconstrained by the program she makes vital for her programs to perform their functions.  Her own actions away from the computer are not run by the program she writes and she does not have to make any particular program do any particular thing she is not inclined to make it do.

Saying God is a “father” non-metaphorically just means “God is the source of your being”, analogous to the way your father is, but it does not mean that He will go out of His way to do anything for you whatsoever to make sure you prosper, as a paradigmatic actual loving father would. This source of being “father” we have might just not bother to give you all the healthily working body parts or all the mental powers or all the necessary material resources to even minimally, let alone maximally, flourish according to the nature He gave you.

So, this is philosophically, in sophisticated, abstract terms, what educated Catholics understand all the Christian mythology to literally mean. All the metaphors which invite people to feel an interpersonal bond with God rely on a fundamental bait and switch, as I see it. What lay person would feel tempted to feel any special affection for an indifferent source of all being which generates us with no necessary concern to make sure that we have all the physical, mental, emotional, and material resources necessary to flourish? What lay person would feel satisfied with the cold, barren abstraction that God is all good because He lacks no being but not all good in the sense of giving a single damn about preventing you from being raped or your kid from dying of leukemia or your billions of fellow humans from starving everyday.

Philosophically, this route to washing God’s hands of responsibility for evil, strips God of all that moral goodness which alone could make a personal being lovable to other moral beings and upon which alone people hope when they pray and worship God.

Casting My Atheism In Catholic Philosophy’s Terms

Philosophically speaking, we had might as well just interpret this source of all being atheistically as an ultimately indifferent and accidental benefactor to us which had no conscious intentions to create us.  We can posit that it just emanated all reality into being as an expression of its eternal essence.  Or conceive that it is reality itself, taken under one of its aspects, which expresses itself in all the observable modes of being (including ourselves) as we experience them. In either case, its creation of us is a remote effect of its essential nature and it is less than indifferent to whether we exist or thrive (not even having any feelings, not even indifference).  Insofar as the laws of its nature ultimately led to the laws of our natures, and to the naturally valuable moral precepts upon which we rely, it is a source of morality but it is only so in that remote way that leaves moral understanding open-ended as we learn more.

We can feel a sense of wondrous gratitude for the source of all being, whatever it might be, in that it is the precondition of our existing and existing for us is truly an intrinsic good and, therefore, one which only rightly should cause us incredible delight. But we would not be directing that gratitude to any being that cared in the least to make us come about, but towards one which just happened to do so by its own blind, indifferent processes.  We should feel towards it however we should feel about gravity or electromagnetism or the sun or any other impersonal dynamic which constitutes an irreplaceable condition of our existence.

And we can certainly judge that the same processes emanating from the source of all being could just as indifferently destroy us as they created us.  Ironically, this sober, realistic, naturalistic, functionally teleological, existentialistic, atheistic picture of the world and our place in it is essentially consonant with the philosophically Thomistic picture of the world—just as long as one removes the anthropomorphic imputation of personhood to an abstract metaphysical postulate and the propagandistic myths designed to look at the fundamental reality which makes things exist at all as though it (a) were itself morally good, (b) loved us in any literally meaningful sense, (c) gave special revelations about its will to people in the Bible, (d) mysteriously became a human being and was murdered as part of a ritual sacrifice, and (e) demanded complete submission of mind and body to the authority of the Vatican.

But for all that stuff, I had might as well be a Catholic.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Atheism, Christianity, Christianity, Ethics, Featured, God, God, Historical Philosophy, Historical Philosophy, Metaethics, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Benedict XVI, Problem of Evil, Problem of Evil, Religion, Religion, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues | Tagged | Comments (16)

On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

July 8, 2010 – 11:00 am

All things, insofar as they are, have goodness.  This is because, for any existent thing whatsoever, to be is necessarily better than not being (regardless of whether a given existent thing consciously acknowledges this or is even capable of thinking about it at all).  This goodness is partly a function of the fact that every existent thing inherently depends upon its having being in order to have any other good things.

Existing is, in the first place, the most foundational good.  It is the good in which all other goods can even occur.  All actual good things are existent things and we can only enjoy them if they exist and if we exist.  Even our own personal excellences all require our own existences as their precondition and, furthermore, fulfilling our potential for an excellence essentially consists of existing in certain greater ways rather than in other lesser ways.   All that is either intrinsically excellent or delightful to others about any existent thing is also a function of its way of existing, the form its existence takes.

I borrow Plato and Aristotle’s term “form” only with the proviso that it needs always to be read in ways that are consistent with modern biology.  If you think it is impossible or unwise to retain form or essence language given the facts known by modern biology, leave your objection in the comments and I will happily explore my reasons for thinking they can be compatible and complementary ways of understanding the natural world and how philosophical recourse to this metaphysical language need not lead to any confusions about the proper biological nomenclature or be inconsistent with recognition of biological processes.

As my first preemptive defenses against foreseeable objections: I only see biological “forms” as the contingent results of natural selection, not as in any way immaterial essences given directly to beings by a divine agency.  By forms I also do not mean to imply that any non-biologically-based, distinguishable metaphysical, non-physical thing is at work in natural entities making them take the shapes they have.  The “forms” things have are purely functions of physical, chemical, and biological processes. There are also no strict formal constraints that prevent evolution by which one species splits into two.

By the term “form” in general, I only refer to recurrent, scientifically specifiable patterns of organization that make different entities classifiable as belonging to common groups, as essentially the same kinds of things.

In other words, I refer to the fact that, for whatever physical, chemical, or biological reasons are explanatory in any given case, there are patterns of being which occur the same in more than one entity, such that each of those entities can be rightly and accurately referred to as the same “kinds” or “forms” of things and expected as such to have either identical properties and behaviors or to have characteristically similar ones, which can be, or already are, scientifically specifiable.

Every ”form” is a way to exist and, therefore, if what I said at the beginning is correct, a possible way to be good.  Now a given being may or may not completely fulfill its formal possibility for existing excellently according to its kind. Every being, essentially, might more or less fully realize the potential which its nature gives it.  It may become a more or less excellent instance of its kind.  The more that a thing fulfills its potential, the more it actualizes its nature, and the more it becomes that thing.

For a simple example, all humans have some musicality which gives us each at least some potential to be musicians.  The more that one of us fulfills the excellences of music performance, the more one becomes an excellent musician.  In Aristotelian language (while not endorsing the superseded physics with which he interpreted the terms), to turn a potentiality into an actuality is to realize a form.

The more a thing does the characteristic things of its kind, the more it becomes in actuality, and not just potentially, a thing of that kind.  The more excellently you do those characteristic things which are fit for your kind of being, the more closely, ideally, and powerfully you embody its formal ideal.  And, in some significant sense, this makes you more that sort of thing.

In a certain real sense, the degree to which a musician plays according to ideals of perfect musicianship, the more she is a musician and the less adequately she approaches the ideal of perfect musicianship, the less she is a musician.  This intuition is captured when we praise a good musician by saying “she is quite a musician” or criticize a bad musician by saying, “she isn’t much of a musician”.

What we are saying in the latter example is that what she does functions less as musicianship the further it gets from being an instance of ideal musicianship and she herself is less of a musician to that extent.  And vice versa in the former case.

So, we fulfill a potential to do something not only by doing the formal motions involved in doing that thing but, more importantly, by doing that thing in ideal ways.  We actualize ourselves as musicians not just by plucking on strings or blowing into horns but by effectively expressing musical skills and by effectively creating instances of music which excellently do whatever music characteristically does.

And this does not go just for being a musician of course but it goes for being a whole human being.  The more we actualize our potentials the more we fully realize our human nature by more closely approaching an ideal of human perfection and existing more fully as human.

While we are all, of course, minimally human by virtue of belonging to the species and doing human activity to at least some minimums of characteristic human excellence, we can more fully realize our humanity and more fully exist as humans to the extent that we realize our characteristic excellences.  These excellences are our virtues, be they moral, intellectual, or technical.

In some real way, having only the crudest and most rudimentary musical abilities, as I do for example, and rarely expressing any of them, means I am less fully existing as a human being than, say, an alternate version of me who had all my own cultivated powers and expressions of them but also added to them the fulfillment of the ideal of musicality.

In this sort of picture we see how being can be equated with goodness. The extent that I do something excellent is the extent to which I am a certain kind of being and the extent to which I lack an excellence is the extent to which I am not a certain kind of being.

There are some excellences which I can never have because of constraints I get from being human.  I can only be excellent in terms of the powers germane to my kind of being and in terms of the possible complex recombinations of power permitted within the constraints of my kind of being. The degree to which I fail to excellently realize those powers is the extent to which I fail to ideally be my kind of being.

Just as when a heart fails to pump blood, it fails to realize the very functionality which biologically defines it as a heart and so fails any longer to, in effect, be a heart, we can say that:

When I fail to philosophize well, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not a philosopher.

When I fail to act morally well, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not a moral human being.

When I fail to be a moral human being, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not excellent according to central human powers.

When I fail to be excellent according to central human powers, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not an ideal human being.

When I fail to be an ideal human being, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not a human being.

Of course, the qualifiers “functionally speaking” and “to that extent” are crucial to all of the above distinctions.  Fortunately, by our very nature, before we die we never fail completely to fulfill our powers that make us human and until we die we can have the structures that, even when temporarily not functional, make for formal humanity.  Only once dead, when we completely stop functioning as human beings do and we lose all our human structures, do we completely stop being human.

Of course there are many questions my account raises. I already have a first follow up in the post How Our Morality Realizes Humanity and I hope to answer what I expect to be numerous questions, challenges and objections in posts which find their inspiration, shape, and focus from your thoughts.

Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Ethics, Featured, Metaethics, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues | Tagged , | Comments (6)

Do New Atheists Unjustifiably Shirk Their Burden For Evidence?

July 7, 2010 – 2:16 pm

Michael Antony has an interesting but problematic article in Philosophy Now exploring whether “New Atheism” holds itself to a double standard when it comes to rules of evidence. He argues that New Atheists dismiss religious belief explicitly on “evidentialist” epistemic criteria whereby we must always proportion our belief to evidence, but at the same time, they do not hold their own atheism up to that same standard of evidential warrant for belief.  Of course, here at Camels With Hammers, I have argued countless time for the evidentialist standard for belief, making it the central refrain of the blog’s centerpiece, the on-going “Disambiguating Faith” series.  So, I am implicated in Antony’s charge of hypocrisy and failure according to my own standards of evidence.  So can I, and others like me, refute this charge?  Let’s start with Antony’s specious formulation of the charge:

But what of the New Atheists’ atheism – their belief that there is no god or other divine reality? According to evidentialism, that belief (with whatever degree of confidence it is held) also requires evidence in order to be rational. However, the New Atheists tend not to worry much about providing evidence. Although they sometimes offer arguments – ‘the problem of evil’, Dawkins’ ‘Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit’ in The God Delusion, and a few others – overall, those arguments play a minor role in their attacks. Far more central is their repeated insistence that because religious belief lacks evidence, it is irrational and so should be abandoned.

We are clearly off to a bizarre start to the article when Antony dismisses the actual arguments that “New Atheists” offer as not counting as evidence simply because the focus in atheist attacks is usually on (a) the paucity of evidence for religious positions and (b) the irrational means of forming religious beliefs which make them, if not untrue, at least unjustified in principle.  Just because one’s argumentative emphasis is on pointing out the flaws in your opponent’s arguments does not mean that the constructive evidence you offer for your own position is not sufficient to warrant belief in it.  Waving away the evidence against an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god that comes from the problem of evil as not evidence for atheism (at least atheism towards that particular god possibility) is to trivialize what there is plenty of reason to think is a conclusive argument in favor of at least a limited kind of atheism.

But, moving on, Antony isolates 5 key ways in which he thinks that New Atheists try to avoid holding their atheism to the evidentialist standards to which they hold religious beliefs, according to which they would have to proportion their beliefs to evidence.  The first position New Atheists advance which he takes to be a dodge is the idea that “lack of belief is not a belief” and, so, “atheism is not a belief”.  Antony rejects this argument in the following way:

It is often said by atheists that atheism is not a positive position at all – a belief or worldview – but merely a disbelief in theism, a refusal to accept what the theist believes, and as such, there is no belief or position for there to be evidence for. Evidence is not needed for ‘non-positions’.

While the word ‘atheism’ has been used in something like this sense (see for example Antony Flew’s article ‘The Presumption of Atheism’), it is a highly non-standard use.

So what if this is a traditionally non-standard use?  This is no argument at all against delimiting our understanding of atheism going forward so that it is more cautious and consistent with the evidentialism with which Antony is saying atheism cannot reconcile itself.  If he wants to attack the New Atheists, then he cannot ignore their relatively new emphases and redefinitions of atheism as though these are irrelevant for being traditionally non-standard!  He has to explore what the implications of what this New Atheism would be and not hold it to the shortcomings of the traditional understanding of the word.

And to say the “lack of belief” characterization of atheism is non-standard is to ignore how pervasively influential this New Atheist emphasis has been among what we might call “movement atheists” all over the internet (including me) who regularly repeat this meme, from major YouTubers like Qualia Soup and NonStampCollector to high profile bloggers like Greta Christina and PZ Myers.  These may not be traditional philosophers but they are clearly representative of the New Atheist movement and the movement, in all media in which I have encountered it, is redefining its understanding of what atheism is and is not.

Further, it is important to point out that the emphasis on atheism not entailing any other specific “worldview” conclusions is crucial to avoid confused arguments that somehow make the truth or falsity of the atheistic position hinge on other positions, to which only particular atheists or atheistic movements might ascribe, which are not actually either logically dependent upon atheism or whose truth or falsity makes no difference to the truth or falsity of atheism.  The simple rejection of all beliefs in gods does not necessarily entail any particular view of politics, ethics, science, etc.  Too many times the falsehood of beliefs which are neither necessary premises for concluding that there is no God nor necessary entailments of that belief are wrongly taken to somehow refute atheism.

Communists may be atheists with an atrociously stupid and immoral political history but their communism is neither a necessary premise for becoming an atheist nor at all an inevitable entailment of one.  By emphasizing that atheism simpliciter is a “non-worldview” and a “non-position” on a range of issues, New Atheists usually are not attempting to deny that atheism has any content whatsoever, but rather an attempt to emphasize that it is a viewpoint that is compatible with a range of other perspectives and, unlike the religions which it opposes, does not have any inherent pretensions to give people a comprehensive picture of the world.  There can be such constructive, deliberately atheistic conceptions of things, but the particular standpoint of atheism itself does not automatically commit oneself to any such conceptions such that if they turn out to be false atheism too is necessarily undermined.

But back to Antony’s main point of attack in dismissing the insistence that atheism is simply a “lack of belief” and not a robust world view:  It is my view that the New Atheist movement must be refuted on their own terms if they are going to be refuted by reference to an internal contradiction as Antony wants.  And anyway, what would be wrong with defining atheism as a lack of belief in gods rather than as a positive belief there are no gods?  Antony’s answer is that

So understood, atheism would include agnosticism, since agnostics are also not theists.

But what is wrong with including agnostics among atheists?  I think agnostics are forms of atheists (unless they are agnostic theists) since by default lacking any belief in gods leads them to opt out of religious commitments to gods, and be, from a religious point of view, atheists, people who live without all gods and, so, decline from worshiping them.  Belief and non-belief in gods is not some purely abstract issue.  It has direct bearing on one’s relationship to theistic religion.

The real defining characteristic of atheism, as far as I’m concerned, is one’s rejection of, or abstention from, religious devotion to a god or gods and to religious institutions and practices which define such devotion.  This is why atheists have long adopted figures like Spinoza, Voltaire, and Jefferson as essentially our own in the most important matters.

We have rarely cared to vehemently oppose people’s metaphysical speculations on whether or not there is some unitary eternal causal principle (whether within or outside of the perceivable universe) which causes the observable features of our experience to exist.  Yes, some atheists are concerned to oppose the philosophers’ “God” concepts as ultimately not explanatory or as dismissable unless it can acquire a verified scientific formulation or as being too vaguely conceived to be meaningful or as requiring positive evidence to be at all believable.

But atheists’ primary concern has seemingly always been on the sorts of personal gods whom people worship, from whom people claim to take orders, and on whose behalf people presume to impose questionable codes of moral or legal conduct with severe emotional, physical, and/or even legal consequences for disbelief, dissent, and disobedience.

And a principled agnostic is not someone whose mind is simply not made up about religion, but rather someone who opposes religious belief on principle as presumptuous, unfounded speculations, and who rejects positive assertions both that there evidently is a God and that there is evidently no God of some metaphysically sophisticated stripe.  But even as that agnostic leaves open the possibility of some metaphysically plausible God principle, she almost has to positively reject religious claims of divine intervention, miracles, prophetic inspiration, sacred texts, efficacious rituals for divine appeasement, etc., as all clearly matters about which to positively reject belief and to hold an explicit position of disbelief.  Unless the agnostic is going to abandon all standards of evidence whatsoever and hold no god-related propositions, however fanciful, as likely enough false to explicitly reject as probably false, the agnostic’s own high standards of evidence will almost certainly preclude belief in any of the fantastic claims which make beliefs at all  characteristically religious.

The traditionally conceived agnostic, defined by Huxley himself, is simply far too skeptical to be anything but a de facto atheist about everything that characterizes religion except the small sliver of metaphysical abstraction that is of conceivable philosophical merit and not merely a legacy of primeval superstition.

Finally, as I have argued before at length, atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive because they are positions about different issues.  Agnosticism is a position about the epistemic status of the question of the possible existence of a god or gods.  Atheism is just the lack of belief in a god or gods.  The agnostic’s viewpoint of the epistemic status of the god question is that, for some specific god proposal or set of god proposals, the evidence is too inconclusive to make a knowledge claim either way.

The agnostic essentially argues that there is neither sufficient evidence to warrant saying, with implicit presumption of knowledge, that “There is a God (or gods) of specifiable type X”, nor adequate warrant for saying, with the implicit presumption of knowledge, that “There is no God or gods (as conceived of under some plausible formulations).”  Just because the agnostic thinks that some god hypothesis or hypotheses cannot be ruled out with sufficient warrant to constitute knowledge that such a god or gods do not exist does not mean that the evidences for all god hypotheses are plausible enough that no possible gods can be ruled out with justification.

Put simply, traditional agnostics can be revealed to be in fact only qualified atheists who think we cannot know one way or another whether some particular god conceptions might not be true but who nonetheless think there are justified reasons to say we know that others are not true.  So, in this way, the agnostic–even on the confused, traditional conception wherein agnosticism and atheism are mutually exclusive positions–may be both agnostic with respect to some gods and atheistic with respect to others.  Yet Antony goes on:

However, on the common understanding of atheism – no divine reality of any kind exists – atheism and agnosticism are mutually exclusive. Some insist that this non-standard sense of ‘atheism’ is the only possible sense, because a-theism means without theism. But if that were a good argument, the Space Shuttle would be an automobile, since it moves on its own (mobile=move, auto=by itself). Ditto for dogs and cats.

Again appeal to “common understanding” is an illegitimate way to dismiss your specific opponent who is introducing a key distinction to avoid the very internal contradiction of which you are accusing him.  The “New Atheists” are conscientious about proportioning belief to evidence and so they weaken the claim that there is no god or gods to a claim that they simply lack belief in a god or gods.  They do this so that they do not commit themselves to a stronger belief claim than the evidence warrants with respect to particular plausible god conceptions.  But they often, I think, have a positive belief that Yahweh is as fictional as Zeus and so are “gnostic” atheists who think they have knowledge on that point (and why shouldn’t they?  why is Yahweh any less obviously a projection of ancient, superstitious, mythic human minds than Zeus is?)

But when it comes to a thus far hopelessly irresolvable mystery like where being comes from, they are essentially agnostics (or at least I am) and say that without sufficient positive evidence to posit an entity (or to say anything more determinate and clear about such an entity than “whatever it is and whether or not it is a feature of known reality, it somehow causes known existence to be”), that one’s default position should be to lack a knowledge belief in such a divine being.

The analogy to space shuttles is silly.  Under a certain conception space shuttles are automobiles if we define the word as referring to any machines that move by themselves. There is nothing inherently ridiculous about using the same broad word to describe both cars and space shuttles if they share some essential and contextually relevant feature in common (and they do share numerous features in common).  We can call them both “vehicles” and “inventions” and “pieces of technology” and “means of transportation”.  We could even call them both “automobiles” if we really wanted to, but we just have a convention that makes that sound silly.  We have equated the “automobile” with only one type of thing that could be called an “automobile” but that does not mean there is any a priori way to rule out space shuttles as unfit for having the word apply to them were our conventions just different.

So, language is helpfully flexible in that it allows us to have both broad terms for referring to large classes of things which all share a distinguishable, contextually relevant feature, and narrow terms for referring to very specific species of things.  I have always like the coined term “Weapons of Mass Destruction” to cover a wide range of threatening devices that might be deployed.  Nuclear weapons and biochemical weapons and “dirty bombs”, etc. all fit a common umbrella of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.  And the debate about whether or not Saddam Hussein was a significant threat revolved not around whether he necessarily had or was making nuclear weapons specifically but whether or not he had or was making any of a range of sufficiently threatening weapons.  So, the term, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was the most relevantly descriptive for defining what the debate was about.

And if we were talking about transport devices in general then a category that includes space shuttles and cars alike, “vehicles”, is wholly a propos. If we want to talk about something more specific we can narrow our terms.

And in the case of atheism, the catch-all use of atheism to cover all who are “without theism” is the most relevant distinction because it covers all who will not be worshipping gods or submitting to god-based religious institutions, authorities, and arguments in their thinking and behavior.  This makes them all people living without gods, which is the relevant contrast to theistic religious people.  ”New Atheists” are opposing religion, not really the barest metaphysical abstractions that have no impact on science, morality, culture, or politics. It is because theism is uniquely culturally relevant among metaphysical positions due to its tight connection with theistic religion, that living without gods is the most salient feature that unites atheists.  This is more important than where they stand on the technical question of whether or not the metaphysical arguments reasons for not being a theist also convincingly prove there can be no gods at all.

The agnostic and atheist difference on whether the God question should be abandoned as unsolvable or answered in the negative is an abstract epistemic debate between de facto metaphysical atheists and simple atheists by religious standards since they have no god-based religion. The defining criteria for defining atheism then is the implicit or explicit rejection of, or abstention from, all god-worship and from all other commitments to deity-based religion, belief, and practice.

Antony’s final argument against the case that “atheism is not a belief” is that regardless of whether or not this is true it does not even matter because the New Atheists actually do not just lack a belief in God but in fact positively think there is no God or gods and so they must meet the standards of their own putatively evidentialist epistemology in order to hold this positive belief.  They are, in my terminology at least, “gnostic atheists”—atheists who do think they can have justified reasons for affirming the proposition “there is no god or gods”.    As Antony puts the point in his own words:

Yet none of that really matters, for even the non-standard sense of ‘atheism’ does nothing to neutralize evidentialism’s demand for evidence. As we saw, evidentialism applies to all ‘doxastic’ attitudes toward a proposition P: believing P, believing not-P, suspending judgment about P, etc. Therefore evidentialism says, with respect to the proposition God exists, that any attitude toward it will be rational or justified if and only if it fits one’s evidence. Now it is true that if one had no position whatever regarding the proposition God exists (perhaps because one has never entertained the thought), no evidence would be required for that non-position. But the New Atheists all believe that (probably) no God or other divine reality exists. Andthat belief must be evidence-based if it is to be rationally held, according to evidentialism. So insisting that atheism isn’t a belief doesn’t help.

In what follows I will use ‘atheism’ in its standard sense.

First of all the qualification that there is probably no God or other divine realities is a statement according to which the New Atheists at least attempt to  proportion their beliefs to the evidence. This means that they are not shirking evidence standards for themselves.  Antony can challenge whether the New Atheists’ standards of evidence are adequate or whether they have sufficient evidence according to those standards.  He will partially go on to argue thusly in his last 4 charges that the New Atheists avoid evidence.

But the fact that they appeal to the probability that there is no God or other divine realities indicates that they do not presume to believe any more than they think evidential justification allows.  Maybe in practice they fail to live up to this standard of evidence-constrained belief, but they do not willfully shirk the standard as Antony seems to be saying they do.

So, the subsequent grounds on which Antony thinks that the atheists are shirking evidence (by putting the burden of proof on believers, by saying that you cannot prove a negative, by employing Ockham’s Razor, and by taking an absence of evidence to be an evidence of absence) are each ways of attaining a probable conclusion that there is no God, which means, ways of finding out what the lion share of the evidence points towards and proportioning one’s belief to match the preponderance of the evidence with a relative degree of certainty which only matches its relative degree of conclusiveness.

Finally, it is worth making a distinction that Antony does not allow and which possibly the New Atheists do not develop clearly enough.  In saying that there is “probably no God (or other ‘divine realities’)”, I take the New Atheists primarily to be referring to the God of religious belief and, again, not necessarily some very abstract, impersonal, and limited notion of a principle as to why something exists rather than nothing.  It is quite possible that most atheists are like me and are merely agnostic atheists who “lack a belief” (or at least lack a confident enough, justified belief) either way about what such a principle might be and therefore are agnostic atheists, atheists by default, on that particular kind of “divine reality”.

It is consistent for these atheists to “lack belief” in that God, while simultaneously being gnostic atheists who are willing to positively say, “there probably are no personal, intelligently designing, divinely intervening, incarnating, avatar-producing, book-writing, moral-code-giving, worship demanding, prayer answering, loving and/or damning gods as inferred through either superstitious or inadequate scientific means and conceived of in traditional religious categories, within traditionally structured religious institutions.  That whole pantheon of mythic and scientifically undermined god conceptions is counter-indicated by enough evidence that a proportional belief can conclude they do not exist as a matter of knowledge.

And, remember, the evidentialist burden of proof is not certainty, but rather proportion of belief to evidence.  Gnostic atheists, atheists who think they know that particular god conceptions are false, only need to have enough evidence for a justified belief to be entitled to make their knowledge claims.  As long as they temper their belief statements in accord with the proportion of their evidence and say there probably are no gods of the religiously imagined types, based on the numerous reasons to doubt there are such beings, they are entitled to their knowledge claims on the terms of their own evidentialist epistemological standards.  They may yet be wrong, but they are not holding themselves to a double standard in principle.

But I have already written more than I hoped I would have to on Antony’s first charge of evidence shirking among the New Atheists and so I will have to save replies to the other 4 charges for another post or two.

In the meantime, Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Evidence, Evidence, Featured, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, PZ Myers, PZ Myers, Philosophy, Religion, Religion, Secularism | Comments (7)

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

July 5, 2010 – 8:56 pm

Previously I have argued that pride is the proper identification of the self with whatever excellently expresses, manifests, reflects, results from, or causes one’s own excellence. It is only fitting that we feel that we love and admire that which is good and love and admire it more the better it is and less the worse it is.  In judging our association with excellent things properly, rather than arrogantly too much or self-disparagingly too little, we recognize ourselves as something admirable and worthy of love to the extent to which we are genuinely associable with excellences.

In this post, I want to explore the virtue of humility, which is often seen to be in tension with pride, maybe even to oppose it as a virtue opposes a vice or as a vice opposes a virtue, depending on one’s view of which is more important.  As should be clear by the end of this post, I think neither is more or less important than the other and I think that when properly understood and realized in people, there is no genuine conflict between proper pride and proper humility.  Rather they harmonize and balance each other so that we can live both as truthfully and affirmatively as possible, respecting and loving both ourselves and others as much as we and they deserve.

Humility is the virtue of properly recognizing not one’s excellences but rather one’s limitations, one’s deficiencies, and, most importantly, one’s dependencies, whether they are material or spiritual.  Where humility is clearly a valuable virtue is where it serves as a constructive power of caution, honesty, gratitude, and compassion.

We should feel humble when we objectively are humble, i.e., when we are objectively lacking in an excellence to a relevant degree for dealing with a situation in which we find ourselves.  I should be humble and recognize that if I am not an experienced mountain climber, Mount Everest is too much of a challenge for me and not something I should attempt.  When I engage someone far more knowledgeable about a certain topic than I myself am, being aware of my comparative ignorance contributes to my ability to properly respect my interlocutor.  This means that if I am going to debate her, I will pay proper attention to the fact that if I challenge her in certain ways her far more impressive degree of learning will inevitably overwhelm me.  This humility warns me to humbly home in on what I am most competent to address so that I can hold my own.

But, less antagonistically, both in debate settings and outside of them, non-debate settings, humility should suppress any arrogant desires to believe I know more than I do, and instead remind me to listen to those who know more than I do, to make my first assumption when we disagree that I am more likely to be wrong or to be misunderstanding them than vice versa.  Properly assessing my comparable excellence to someone else’s and being willing to concede when it is significantly inferior, is a valuable aid to submitting properly and the most successfully myself to vital training.

Humble recognition of my own limitations should also help me honestly assess and empathize with others’ comparable imperfections. When I do not overestimate my own abilities, either those I have in the present or those I had or likely will have in other circumstances, I am able to empathize much more honestly and fairly with the limitations of others and calibrate my expectations from them to standards I would myself think fair were my limitations the ones under the microscope.

Humility is also valuable insofar as it aids the development of certain key forms of gratitude.  When I recognize the full extent to which my own excellence is a function of others’, I can properly respect my own limitations, properly delimit the amount of credit I take for my flourishing, and develop proper gratitude and sense of debt to those others.  In this way, humility helps me also understand my obligations and responsibilities to those in whose debt I am.

Partially this realization is vital because of the way that it contributes to my own personal well-being and flourishing.  When I humbly take stock of how much I depend upon a well-functioning society in order to pursue my own flourishing, I realize that it is unwise to carelessly, recklessly, arrogantly, and/or selfishly do things that undermine that functional order which is my own success’s precondition.

Humbly recognizing my dependence on other people’s skill teaches me to respect both those skills and their possessors.  There are many abilities that I do not have, and in many cases either could not have or would not want to need to have.  Many of these abilities contribute also to the well-functioning society which is the precondition of both my minimal well being and my maximal flourishing.  Numerous of my pleasures and successes depend on the contributions of the talents of other people which I do not possess.  And so I should humbly respect my relative dependence on those people and their contributions and treat my fellow human beings with respect based, at least in part, on a keen realization of the role that they play in making my successful, thriving life possible at all.  And even where I am not respecting the exercises of excellences as much as the simple contribution of others’ labor to my well-being and flourishing, I should here too show a proper degree of humility and respect and treat them well.  My full realization of my power in life depends on more people’s activity than I can ever count and proper humility means remembering that.

I should humbly respect the universe upon which my very existence and my every excellence utterly depends.  I should humbly respect the planet, environmental conditions, and biological processes upon which I depend.  When I respect my utter dependence on my physical body, my environment, my planet, etc., for my very existence, I may humbly recognize the limitations on what I can do with them or to them before I will damage myself irreparably.

Always to the precise extent that my personal excellences, successes, pleasures, and other sources of happiness, well-being, and flourishing objectively depend on particular people or types of people, things or types of things, social arrangements or types of social arrangements, etc., I should respect the fact of this dependence by not damaging those specific people or types of people, those things or types of things, those social arrangements or types of social arrangements, etc.

I should protect them not only as the necessary preconditions for my own good (and therefore, to some extent, for self-interested reasons) but also out of feelings of both gratitude for and obligation to one’s benefactors.  I owe them for what I have, regardless of what they can yet give me.  Humility is the ability to properly assess these debts and to properly respect the fact of one’s dependence and to act to discharge one’s obligations to repay debts and to prudentially look after those people, things, orders, values, and institutions, etc. which one vitally needs going forward.  In short, humility is a form of gratitude which gives one a proper appreciation of one’s obligations to one’s benefactors.

To those who have shared their power with us and replicated their power in us such that our strength now compares with theirs, we can be both proud of their power to the extent that we realize their power is now also ours, and also humble to the extent that we recognize our dependency for this power.  Pride is possible for us insofar as we objectively have an excellence.  Properly identifying this fact of excellence within ourselves is sufficient to justify pride in it, regardless of how it came to be ours.  But simultaneously humility is indispensably necessary once we recognize that this objective excellence, of which we may be rightfully proud, is simultaneously not something we could have created for ourselves without help.  Our pride, therefore, should not be in our ability to be the cause of our own excellence but rather should be related to the excellence’s own desirability itself, independently of how we acquired it.

Our excellences are in certain fundamental respects natural and social gifts.  Even where we develop our excellences for ourselves, we do so only using talents and virtues given to us by nature and culture in the first place.  We can delight in them and rightfully identify with them as bound up with us.  Our powers are those things through which we best express ourselves, manifest ourselves, and have excellent effects upon the world.  We are natural and cultural marvels and our excellences are intrinsically loveable as intrinsically good things and we should love them for their intrinsic goodness and ourselves for being so tightly bound up with them for their existence our existence.

We can be proud of ourselves, even though our own excellences are understandable as part of a larger causal chain which makes no room for any cosmically, metaphysically free choices which are unconstrained by any other influences.  We can recognize that to the extent that we manifest various objective excellences, we simply are those excellences and that is from there that our value derives and it is that in which we can take great pride.  While on one level we may be an instrument of other causal factors in effectually bringing about certain good and admirable things, we can take pride that we are precisely that sort of instrument that brings about good and admirable things instead of bad and despicable ones.  If what we produce is good, we are good for producing it, even if our ability to produce it is a function of other processes too.

Ultimately, we owe the universe our very being.  We cannot control this.  No matter how much effort we put into developing our human powers, we owe the universe (and, more proximately, evolution and our parents’ genes) the very fact that we have basic human powers at all that we could even perform characteristic human functions excellently and therein be excellent qua human.

We should show proper humility by admixing into all our self-love and pride, gratitude for all the contributors to our excellence.  But humility does not mean denigrating ourselves as though we are not truly excellent in whatever ways we actually are and it does not mean refusing to feel joy in ourselves as excellent beings when we are just that.  Humility should not be the pretension to seeing ourselves as of low station, no matter whether we deserve to.  Humility should not be the false modesty that underestimates our own worth and denies our own moral rights before either a tyrannical oppressor or, even, a personification of the universe or its source which we imagine has the moral right to destroy us or make us suffer at whim simply because it created us.

We should be proud of all excellence with which we are properly identifiable, whether in ourselves or in those to whose excellence we contributed, those whose excellences mirror our own, or those whose excellence is replicated in us.  And simultaneously we should be humbly grateful to every social and natural network which constitutes the conditions of our very being as we are and, on some levels, even creates the admirable things about us.  We should be as frank in acknowledging our lowness of rank when it is true as we are of acknowledging our high status when it is just.  We should neither overestimate, nor underestimate ourselves or what we produce.  We should neither pretend not to see our excellences, nor deceive ourselves that we alone are ourselves responsible for them.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Autonomy, Autonomy, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Love, Love, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Virtues, Virtues | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Disambiguating Faith: Implicit Faith

July 5, 2010 – 12:58 pm

In last night’s installment of the “Disambiguating Faith” series, I talked about the difference between, on the one hand, volitionally choosing to believe something that is either not rationally warranted or which is positively refuted by the available evidence, and, on the other hand, simply thinking one has rational warrant for one’s belief and yet nonetheless being wrong about the adequacy of one’s actual justification.

I made the distinction that often religious believers, for example, may simply believe things which are wrong, but which they think they have sufficient reasons for accepting.  In these cases, being wrong about criteria for justification is not sufficient to make the belief a “faith belief”.

I argued that a volitional component that willfully refuses to let go of, or even genuinely suspend, a belief that is under supported or undermined is necessary for the belief to be a faith belief.  Or there must be a volitional commitment to believe and commit one’s life more strongly than one’s evidence warrants.

Nonetheless, there are circumstances in which I do think we should say that even without an explicit, admitted will that openly embraces belief that goes either beyond or against rational warrant, some people still manifest a faith-based attitude nonetheless.

People do not need an explicit theory of epistemology that belief without sufficient warrant is good in order implicitly to operate according to such a principle. People do not need to explicitly admit that they put loyalty or group conformity and group acceptance over truth in deciding what to believe.  They do not need to admit that they choose beliefs in a given matter based on what strikes them as comforting more than based on what is true.

If functionally, their behavior reveals these attitudes then we can ascribe to them an implicit vice of faith by which their will automatically and with no conscious deliberation necessary defers to considerations of tradition, loyalty, conformity, insufficiently questioning trust, and/or pursuit of comfort and hope when coming to beliefs.  This kind of habitual form of volitional faith is not deliberate, explicit, or maybe in some cases even at all conscious or even something that the person who has it would confess to if accused of it.

Nonetheless, it is functionally as much a form of faith as any other.  Sometimes it may be the real motivation of an apparent rationalist religious person who is outwardly offering reasons for her belief, but for whom, ultimately, there is no real, honest debate happening because of implicit allegiances which have thoroughly prejudiced her.

And even in the cases of many relatively rationalist religious people who are persuaded of their arguments, there may be either an explicit or merely implicit willingness within to maintain those beliefs even if they become dissuaded in the future.  In other words, there might be people who are implicitly faithful and who just happen to be convinced of evidence that makes them think faith is not entirely necessary.

But, nonetheless, should the evidence (or their perception of what it indicates) change, they would still not hesitate to remain faithful.  Such a structure of allegiances and priorities in the will, whether explicit or implicit, indicates, I think, that despite the fact that they presently think they have rational evidence for their beliefs, such people are not really principally committed to rationalistic principles.  Their evidence is just a bonus to them, they would believe in either case, since they do not have a primary loyalty to truth or to an ethics of belief that requires proportioning belief to evidence.

Of course, there can be another brand of implicitly faithful person.  This could be someone who implicitly mixes allegiances, hopes, habits of deference to claimed religious authorities, etc. in their processes of belief formation, but who, if made aware that this was what she was doing, would stop doing it.  In other words, sometimes implicit faith stems from unstated value priorities and sometimes it stems from unreflective habits inconsistent with one’s actual value priorities.

So, even though faith is most characteristically volitional in nature, this volition can be only implicitly operative and not embraced consciously.  And certain habits can function in such a way as to combine all the other aspects of faith-based thinking without the volition even subconsciously and be a de facto, functional form of faithfulness as a result.

In some cases, if these implicit attitudes and behaviors came to consciousness it would cause a cognitive dissonance with one’s more important value priorities and self-understanding.  In those cases someone may abandon implicit faith for a more rationalistic kind (at least to her mind, a more successfully rationalistic one) and in others it may lead her to abandon faith altogether.  In yet other cases, there may be no cognitive dissonance but happy, principled embrace of the implicit faith behaviors as explicitly good and worth doing on purpose.

When rationalistic atheists are accused of having faith it is at least wrong in all cases I have seen that the atheist in question is explicitly endorsing choosing to believe what is not rationally warranted or what is counter-indicated by evidence.  In other words, atheists seemingly unilaterally reject principled faith and, usually, explicitly endorse an opposite principle that one only ever believe proportionate to one’s evidence for a proposition’s truth.

If these atheists have faith at all, it is only implicit, accidental, unavowed faith which if the atheist was convinced was present would cause her cognitive dissonance and, likely, to abandon that faith belief.

This means that even if atheists are susceptible to the same moral and cognitive habits of faith that religious people are, that at least those atheists do not explicitly endorse such habits as good and praiseworthy (as the religious routinelydo) but instead only do so by accident and would be forced to correct their faith-based believing behavior if they only they could be convinced that they are indeed guilty of it.

Your Thoughts?

To catch up with any previous installments of this “Disambiguating Faith” series which you may have missed, follow the links listed below. Each post can be understood without reference to the others, even though many develop interrelated theses.

Disambiguating Faith: Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Tradition

Disambiguating Faith: Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

Disambiguating Faith: The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Guessing

Disambiguating Faith: Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Disambiguating Faith: Faith In The Sub-, Pre, Or Un-Conscious

Disambiguating Faith: Can Rationality Overcome It?

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Disambiguating Faith: Heart Over Reason

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Disambiguating Faith By Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Disambiguating Faith: Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

Disambiguating Faith: Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Disambiguating Faith, Disambiguating Faith, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Faith, Faith, Featured, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Philosophy, Religion, Religion | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Disambiguating Faith: Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

July 5, 2010 – 12:32 am

Last week I responded to David Crowther’s argument that we should equally consider all beliefs that are not 100% certain to be “faith beliefs”.  I argued that the word “belief” already covers the fact that we are fallible human beings and as such even our most nearly 100% certain propositions about the world are always going to have some possibility, however infinitesimal, of being wrong.  I also argued though that if we do not go on to further discriminate between kinds of beliefs, however fallible, such that we referred to justified beliefs with a different name (“knowledge”) from unjustified ones (“not knowledge”) then our language will be far less successful at both giving us the world and helping us navigate it.

So, having hopefully made clear that faith beliefs must be a distinguishable subset of the larger class of assents to propositions we call “beliefs”, in this post I want to clarify and defend my longstanding definition of faith specifically as “beliefs beyond rational warrant”.  Some might think that we could distinguish faith beliefs from beliefs in general without equating faith beliefs with a belief that actually goes beyond rational warrant.  Some might argue that defining them in that way is a sophistic attempt to make religious beliefs, the ones most often identified as specifically “faith” beliefs, irrational by definition.  In this way, some might charge that I am begging the question and assuming religious faith beliefs are irrational and defining them as irrational when they might not be, according to less prejudicial criteria.   In short, is my argument just tautological?

Similarly, what justification do I have to characterize “faithful” forms of trusting as specifically those instances of trust that trust beyond rational warrant?  In other words, why do I ultimately equate all instances of “faith as trust” with “trust as blind faith”?  Is this a way of defining religious trust as inherently unwarranted trust and, again, question-begging?

The first thing to clarify in answering this question, is that whatever we want to call it, believing more strongly than your rational evidence and logical inferences justify is a specific way of believing.  And believing something despite the presence of countervailing counter-evidence is also a specific way of believing.  Whatever we want to call these things, they are distinguishable subsets of belief that are important enough, which have enough actual consequences in reality, that there really should be a simple word to identify them and distinguish them completely from beliefs that are adopted more scrupulously by reference to standards of evidence.  The same goes for excessive trust.  There are instances of “blind faith” wherein people trust beyond reasonable proportion to evidence of the objective trustworthiness of those they trust.

In fact, all the various senses of the word faith I have distinguished in my “Disambiguating Faith” series are distinguishable cognitive and volitional phenomena.  They are all specific ways of believing, trusting, and being loyal to others which are important to identify and analyze for their worth.  Even if you do not like my choice to call them all instances of faith, you can still judge whether the phenomena I am calling faith are good ones or bad ones without necessarily accepting my terminology.

Another key thing to note is that by using the word faith for these usually problematic ways of believing, trusting and being loyal, I am neither saying that all instances of religious belief, religious loyalty, or religious trust are unjustified.  If you trust your minister to give you good advice because she has training as a counselor and because in all of your experience with her, you have judged her to be humane, compassionate, an astute judge of morality and psychology, etc., then you do not have an unwarranted trust in her but a rationally defensible one.

Similarly, many religious people believe much more according to what they think are good reasons than anyone, either religious or irreligious, usually implies.  Regardless of whether given religious people have reasoned well or open-mindedly and thoroughly about counter-arguments to their beliefs, many simply think belief in God is more than 50% warranted, even 90-100% warranted based on various metaphysical inferences.  Many are under the impression, however false, that their holy books have solid historical evidence that corroborates their claims, etc.

In short, enough religious people have developed enough apologetics routines that it is easy to see that they at least think they are believing in accord with rational warrant and not deliberately believing despite countervailing counter-evidence or deliberately believing more strongly than their warrant permits.

So, I am not saying that all religious beliefs, religious trust, or religious loyalty, are instances of faith, which would be the deliberate decision to believe beyond the degree of one’s evidence permits or against strong counter-evidence to what one wants to believe or is committed to believe out of loyalty to a group, etc.

Often by “faith” religious people mean rational trust or mean belief in what is not 100% known.  In those cases, they are selling their conscientiousness in belief short.  By stressing that they have faith, sometimes all they are doing is overselling their humble recognition that they don’t know 100% but still not claiming that they are going against evidence deliberately.  They might only be copping to committing to the belief with 100% of what they have even though they think their warrant for the belief is actually only, say, 75%.  In that way, they have a criticizable over-commitment for what is rationally warranted.  But this is not nearly as bad as committing to a 1% or 33% belief as though it was 100% warranted.

Now in fact some of their beliefs might really be >1% justified even though they think of them as 75% warranted.  On those issues they would clearly be awful reasoners, but not necessarily faith-based ones.

So, not all religious beliefs or forms of trust are faith-based.  And, there is nothing which precludes an atheist from also willfully over-committing to a belief beyond what she sees the evidence rationally warranting and nothing which precludes an atheist, on any matter whatsoever from religion to politics to sports, from refusing to abandon a pet idea when all the evidence is against it.  Atheists could have faith.  But I’ve yet to meet or read the atheist who is deliberately claiming to believe more than the evidence warrants about God.  Even if some believe more than their evidence permits on some point or another, they do not make it a matter of principle to believe beyond evidence.

So, finally, why call this deliberate act of believing beyond rational warrant specifically “Faith” and not something else?  Why saddle faith with all the blame for all the bad things that go with belief beyond warrant?

The reason faith is the chief candidate for a word to describe deliberate belief beyond warrant is that faith’s three connotations are not mutually exclusive but mutually informing.  Unlike the general word for assenting to propositions in general, “belief”, faith has connotations of loyalty, volitional choice, traditionalism, and specifically religious deference in it.  And while both belief and faith are often used to signify trust and hope, usually when belief is used to refer to trust and hope it is actually just being used as a (confusing) interchangeable synonym for faith or it is referring to a more carefully rationally calibrating form of trust and hope.

Since faiths are traditions of shared beliefs which serve as bases for common group membership, it is more likely that one will make group conformity a criterion for belief assent when involved in a faith tradition than when one is not.  Since people are most often admonished to “have faith” when they are specifically doubting either a tradition (usually religious) or a person for rational reasons, we can interpret “faith’s” volitional component as specifically the choice to believe when the evidence is weak or too strongly against one’s tradition or friend.

The undeniable commonness of religious exhortations to have faith when one doubts, rather than to simply find better evidence or to temporarily suspend judgment or to abandon refuted beliefs, indicates to me that most people recognize the deliberate choice to stick with an unsupported belief is most characteristically (and accurately) called “faith”.

And that’s not even to judge it as a bad thing.  Of course, I think it is a bad thing.  But the point is that good or bad, it is a common thing for people to will themselves to believe against counter-evidence or to commit beyond what evidence warrants.  And it is indisputable that religious people the world over encourage this.  Not all religious people do, but it is too common to say that I am creating a straw man to say that faith for many people is a deliberate and religiously praiseworthy commitment to believe more than evidence allows or against strong counter-evidence and to refuse to suspend judgment in the face of doubt.

Similarly the connotation of faith that involves loyalty also implicates in faith a motive to willfully believe in conformity with one’s group rather than doubt and risk alienation from it.  And so when we consider faith’s connotations of (a) loyalties that are deeper than one’s commitment to truth, (b) volitional willingness to suppress doubts for the sake of staying within a desired belief or community, and (c) allegiance to faith traditions in which it is routine for people to believe in conformity with traditional opinions and poorly substantiated texts claimed to be authorities, the sense of faith as “trust” we get is one that is likely to volitionally commit oneself to loyally trust one’s tradition and its institutions and specific authority figures beyond what might be strictly rationally warranted.

It is precisely because faith has these numerous connotations which I have been meticulously disambiguating that faith is the best candidate for describing deliberate belief beyond or against rational warrant.  It is because the term’s various senses bleed into each other and compromise each other.  When one is a religiously faithful person, one’s faith beliefs are inherently influenced by deeply ingrained traditional loyalties, habits of (at least) acknowledging and (usually) deferring to religious authorities, and habits of trusting that precede one’s age of suspicion.

So all these factors are going to affect the resultant belief propositions one makes on matters related to one’s religion.  These faith beliefs will not just be any ordinary kinds of beliefs that do not have a full 100% warrant.  They will be the sort entangled with other loyalties and the ones most likely to flagrantly and in good conscience involve willful rejection of normal standards of evidence.

So, in short, for being the most explicitly willful forms of belief, the most tradition-deferent forms of belief, the beliefs that are bound up with loyalty and group trust, the beliefs that involve connotations of life commitments and religious devotion, faith beliefs are the most specifically evidence disregarding kind.  They need not occur only within the confines of religion.  Political loyalties and life commitments can form huge incentives to faith-based believing (which often barely admits that it really is so volitional and evidence-resistant).  Personal attachments to specific individuals might lead us to entanglements of allegiance and belief which compromise our commitments to rational warrant.

So, no matter how it happens, as long as there is volition which operates to second guess rational degrees of warrants and as long as there are loyalties that give motive to do so, belief is most likely to be compromised.  And these conditions are most clearly met in cases of faith.

Your Thoughts?

To catch up with any previous installments of this “Disambiguating Faith” series which you may have missed, follow the links listed below. Each post can be understood without reference to the others, even though many develop interrelated theses.

Disambiguating Faith: Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Tradition

Disambiguating Faith: Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

Disambiguating Faith: The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Guessing

Disambiguating Faith: Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Disambiguating Faith: Faith In The Sub-, Pre, Or Un-Conscious

Disambiguating Faith: Can Rationality Overcome It?

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Disambiguating Faith: Heart Over Reason

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Disambiguating Faith By Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Disambiguating Faith: Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Authority, Authority, Disambiguating Faith, Disambiguating Faith, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Faith, Faith, Featured, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (3)