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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: reason

A Secular Scientist’s Argument against the New Atheists

19 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion, Science

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Astronomy, Atheism, Christian, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, David Berlinski, debate, Faith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, interview, Judaism, M Theory, Naturalism, physics, reason, religion, Richard Dawkins, science, Secularism, Skepticism, Stephen Hawking

David Berlinski and Christopher Hitchens

Moderator: Dr. Berlisnki, you’re not a Christian, and indeed, you’re not religious as I understand it. Why do you argue for a Judeo-Christian influence in society?

David Berlisnki: I presume you are not asking me in the hopes of a personal declaration. And I won’t say that this secular Jew has a remarkable degree of authority when it comes to these moral events: after all, I have lived my own life under the impress of having a good time, all the time. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to hear these words from someone such as myself, because at least you are hearing them from someone with no conceivable bias in their favor.

In its largest aspect, Western science is of course an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian tradition, especially to the extent, perhaps only to the extent, that it is committed to the principle that the manifest universe contains a latent structure that can be discovered by the intellect of man. I think this is true. I don’t think this is very far from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ declaration that, ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ […]

You know, Stephen Hawking just published a book, one explaining, again, how everything began — why it’s there, why we shouldn’t worry about God, et cetera. And to paraphrase the claim that he now makes: having given up on “A” through “L”, he now champions something called “M-theory” to explain how the universe popped into existence. I respect Hawking as a reputable physicist. But I can tell you this: What is lamentably lacking in every one of these discussions is that coruscating spirit of skepticism which a Christopher Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins would bring to religious claims, and then lapses absurdly when it comes to naturalistic and scientific claims about the cosmos.

Surely, we should have the sophistication to wonder at any asseveration of the form that the universe just blasted itself into existence following the laws of M-theory — a theory no one can understand, whose mathematical formulism hasn’t been completed, which has never once been tested in any laboratory on the face of the earth…

Finally, the fact that the earth, our home, is a small part of the physical universe does not mean it is not the center of the universe. That is a non sequitur. After all, no one would argue, least of all Mr. Hitchens, that the doctrine that home is where the heart lies is rendered false by distance. We should be very careful about making these claims. I agree that the universe is very big; there are lots of galaxies and amazing things. And there is certainly some biological continuity between humans and the animals that came before us. But as for the central religious claim that this particular place is blessed and important, that’s different. No doctrine about physical size rebuts it…

And as to why should a secular Jew open his mouth to questions pertaining to the Christian religion? It’s a big tent. I’m presuming I would be welcomed.

__________

An excerpt from Berlinski’s 2010 debate with Christopher Hitchens. Berlinski’s erudition reaches almost comical heights in this debate, which is, in my opinion, one of the more compelling Hitch ever did. I like the whole thing, but you can watch the pulled section below.

Continue onward:

  • C.S. Lewis: how to spot a truly humble person
  • “For me, it’s a part of being human”: Updike justifies his Christianity
  • A slight change of pace: Hitchens reflects and his mother

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Two Things Fill the Mind with Awe

01 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

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biology, cosmology, Critique of Pure Reason, David Edmonds, Einstein Forum, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Moral Law, morality, neurology, Nigel Warburton, Philosophy, Philosophy Bites, reason, Susan Neiman, Susan Nieman, thought

Immanuel Kant

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance.

The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe). The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite.”

__________

The first paragraphs of the conclusion to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

On their Philosophy Bites podcast, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton asked an impressive array of scientists and philosophers the question “Who’s Your Favorite Philosopher?”. All of the brief responses are worth hearing, though one of my favorites comes from Susan Nieman, protégé of John Rawls and lecturer at the Einstein Forum, who riffs:

If I could only pick one, I’d pick Kant — and I’d pick him because I think he’s actually the bravest of any philosopher.

Kant’s most important insight was that there’s a huge gap between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be, and both of those have equal value. One needs to keep both of them constantly in mind.

It’s an extremely hard stance to take. It’s very modern. It means a certain amount of living on the edge. It means a certain amount of permanent frustration.

People tend to go in one direction or the other. Either they say, ‘well, the way the world is, is all there is, and any ideal is just an illusion that you ought to grow out of.’ Or they project some kind of illusion — this is where you get Stalinism and other ideologies — the way the world ought to be is the way the world is.

Living with both is extremely hard, and it means that you know you’ll never realize entirely the ideals you believe in, but I think it’s only way of being both honest and hopeful at the same time.

I apologize for the extended hiatus. Your regularly scheduled programming resumes now.

  • A classic anecdote about the great wit Sidney Morgenbesser, who once got arrested for mispronouncing “Kant”…
  • Jim Holt dissects what we mean when we say the universe arose from nothing
  • Kierkegaard’s brief, definitive statement on how tragedy and comedy arise due to the nature of time

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What John Updike Thought about the Afterlife

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Afterlife, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, comedy, Faith, John Updike, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, On Being a Self Forever, Philosophy, reason, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, tragedy, William Shakespeare

John Updike

“Karl Barth, another Reformed clergyman, responding in an interview late in his life to a question about the afterlife, said he imagined it as somehow this life in review, viewed in a new light. I had not been as comforted as I wanted to be. For is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and-doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance…

In church this morning, as I half-listened to the Christmas hymns and the reading of the very unlikely, much-illustrated passage from Luke telling how Gabriel came to Mary and told her that the Holy Ghost would come upon her and the power of the Highest would ‘overshadow’ her and make her pregnant with the Son of God, it appeared to me that when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning.”

__________

Excerpted from the impeccable final chapter “On Being a Self Forever” in John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this multifaceted, beautifully written book. Among modern American writers, Updike is perhaps the best known for his prolific output: in looking at his CV, it seems he published a book every month — and a poem every morning along with two essays and a review each afternoon. This unsurpassable fluency and energy come through in the superb writing and versatility of Self-Consciousness. It’s a memoir that covers a lot of ground, effortlessly.

Though I like the biographical narrative of Self-Consciousness, it’s these ruminative asides — profound and deeply personal — that make the book so special. You can read more below.

  • JU eloquently touches on how to make peace with your past self
  • My favorite of Updike’s many good poems: “Petty Lutz, Fred Muth”
  • In two paragraphs, Updike outlines his political and personal philosophy

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W. H. Auden: When Pity Replaces Justice

23 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ Comments Off on W. H. Auden: When Pity Replaces Justice

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A Christmas Oratorio, C.K. Williams, Christianity, Ethan Canin, For the Time Being, Greed, Jesus, King Herod, reason, religion, Superstition, The Palace Thief, W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden

“Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions… Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces. Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are 20 years old… Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish… The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.”

__________

A highly prophetic section pulled from W.H. Auden’s “For the Time Being”. You’ll find it in his Collected Poems.

If you’re reading this and not seeing some parallels to today — some Consumptive Whores and generous bandits elevated in our society; some daubs supplanting masterpieces and an ethos of pity and therapy thickening around us — I think you’re reading it wrong. It doesn’t matter that it’s actually King Herod who delivers this judgement in the poem.

“For The Time Being” is a poem about the incarnation (“A Christmas Oratorio”, as the subtitle says), but this bit concerns what happened after Jesus’s birth, when Herod massacred the Innocents. Herod’s fear, it turns out, is not just that a new king will replace him, but that this successor will bring on an age of unreason.

Herod is conflicted about the action he is taking, because he’s a liberal at heart. Yet he can justify the means with the ends, and can contemplate doing evil so long as the word “lesser” is in front of it.

I think this section of the poem is wonderful because it piles on details like the excesses of the described scenario. The excerpt’s diction is absolutely superb and its loose, run-on punctuation adds to its frantic energy. (I’m reminded of C.K. Williams, who passed away last week, and his ability to string together one-sentence poems that pulse with kinetic, frenetic force.)

Returning to the present, I’m also reminded of an apropos line. It comes from the film adaptation of Ethan Canin’s imperishable short story “The Palace Thief”. In it, the protagonist, a classics teacher at an elite New England prep school, lives to witness one of his star students grow into a hungry and corrupt politician. Towards the end of the story, he reflects on the student: “I was wrong about him. But as a student of history, I could be shocked neither by his audacity nor by his success.” Without growing complacent, I often think of this nowadays when I look out the window or into the TV at what seems like cultural or moral entropy.

Read on:

  • Steven Pinker: the problem with political correctness (Martin Amis also comments)
  • The Christian worldview vs. the Greek worldview
  • Another section from the poem, which is written on a card posted above my desk

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Galileo Squares Faith and Reason

06 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion, Science

≈ Comments Off on Galileo Squares Faith and Reason

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Astronomy, Faith, Galileo, Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, letter, reason, religion, science, Stillman Drake, The Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo

Galileo

“I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth — whenever its true meaning is understood.  But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies…

It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible…

It follows as a necessary consequence that, since the Holy Ghost did not intend to teach us whether heaven moves or stands still, whether its shape is spherical or like a discus or extended in a plane, nor whether the earth is located at its center or off to one side, then so much the less was it intended to settle for us any other conclusion of the same kind. And the motion or rest of the earth and the sun is so closely linked with the things just named, that without a determination of the one, neither side can be taken in the other matters. Now if the Holy Spirit has purposely neglected to teach us propositions of this sort as irrelevant to the highest goal (that is, to our salvation), how can anyone affirm that it is obligatory to take sides on them, that one belief is required by faith, while the other side is erroneous? Can an opinion be heretical and yet have no concern with the salvation of souls? Can the Holy Ghost be asserted not to have intended teaching us something that does concern our salvation?

I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.'”

__________

Excerpted from Galileo Galilei’s letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, sent in 1615 and collected in Stillman Drake’s The Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo.

It’s astounding the burden this logic can lift from the shoulders of literalists.

More science and faith:

  • Neil deGrasse Tyson is asked, “If you could meet any scientist, who’d it be?”
  • Updike celebrates science and faith as necessary components of being human
  • Einstein and the God that doesn’t play dice

Galileo 2

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A Part of Being Human: John Updike Explains His Christianity

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

belief, C-Span, Christianity, evolution, Faith, Fiction, Fideism, God, Ian McEwan, Intelligent Design, interview, Jeremy Paxman, John Updike, Karl Barth, Life, literature, Naturalism, Novels, reason, religion, Religious Doubt, science, Scientific American, Seek My Face

John Updike

Questioner: Why do you think the theme of religion has played such a role in your writing?

John Updike: I was raised, without terrific ardor, as a Lutheran, and I’ve retained a grip on religion through several changes of denomination since. To me it is part of being human, and my own life would be the poorer if I believed nothing, or nothing of religious content. It also ties in – in a way – with the practice of fiction. Since, ultimately, why are we describing these unreal, imaginary lives, except to say that human life is important — it has a dimension to it that is beyond the animal and the mechanical…

Anyways, for all this, and being aware that there are some mysteries to the organic sciences, I don’t think the attempt to rest religious faith upon scientific observations is going to work. Scientific knowledge keeps shifting, as we learn more and more, and there’s less and less ground for religious belief, so that in the end those of us who are Christians have to believe as an act of faith and an act of will.

Questioner: I also remember reading that you saw that other belief-systems were religions of No, and you chose a religion of Yes.

John Updike: Yes, I did. And that terminology I got from Karl Barth, who I found of the twentieth century theologians to be the most comforting as well as the most uncompromising. He does dismiss all attempts to make theism naturalistic… He’s very definite that it’s Scripture and nothing else. I find this hard to swallow, but I like to see Barth’s swallowing it, and I like his tone of voice. He talks about the Yes and No of life, and says he loves Mozart more than Bach because Mozart expresses the Yes of life.

__________

John Updike, appearing on C-SPAN’s In Depth in 2005.

I recently read Updike’s twentieth novel Seek My Face, in which there is a winding paragraph about a Quaker service that is infused with the same tone and substance as the initial remarks from Updike above. It reads:

My mother, though, was quite Episcopalian, typically lukewarm, but she would never have called herself irreligious. We all went to meeting together a few times… I remember mostly the light, and the silence, all these grown-ups waiting for God to speak through one of them—suppressed coughs, shuffling feet, the creak of a bench. It upset me at first, you know how children are always getting embarrassed on behalf of adults. Then the quality of the silence changed, it turned a corner, like an angel passing, and I realized it was a benign sort of game.

As with the interview above, here his Updike’s mind at serious play. Although he penned these words as a septuagenarian, Updike not only remembered the restlessness of childhood churchgoing, he retained that benevolent and bemused sense of wonder well into adulthood. Filtered through his reading, experience, and intellect, it solidifies into his signature rich and dense storytelling.

In a recent interview, Ian McEwan said, among other things, “[Updike] was rather courtly, reticent; not an easy man to get to know. There was something of a polite mask there… I think he was the greatest novelist writing in English at the time of his death,” and “He could turn a sentence… He was very good on religious belief… and he understood about religious doubt. I mean he wrote beautifully on religious doubt.”

Watch the rest of the interview with McEwan, the novelist I’d nominate to be Updike’s successor as the strongest living prose writer in English, right here:

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The Christian Worldview Versus the Greek

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Ancient Greece, Andromache, Christians, Faith, fate, Fideism, God, Greek, Greek History, Greek philosophy, Hector, history, hope, Jews, New Testament, reason, Roman History, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, Scripture, the Bible, The Roman empire, Thomas Cahill, Worldview

Raphael's School of Athens

“The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God, a lifetime journey in which a human being was invited to unite himself to God by imitating God’s justice and mercy. It was far more individualized than anything the Greeks had ever come up with and stressed the experience of a call, a personal vocation, a unique destiny for each human being. The one God of the Jews had created the world and everyone in it, and God would bring the world to its end. There was no eternal cosmos, circling round and round. Time is real, not cyclical; it does not repeat itself but proceeds forward inexorably, which makes each moment—and the decisions I make each moment—precious. I am not merely an instance of Man, I am this particular, unrepeatable man, who never existed before and will never exist again. I create a real future in the present by what I do now. Whereas fate was central to Greeks and Romans, hope is central to Jews and Christians. Anyone who doubts the great gulf between these two worldviews has only to reread the speeches Hector makes to Andromache (in Chapter I) and to realize the impossibility of putting such speeches on the lips of any believing Jew or Christian:

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

__________

From chapter 7 of Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.

Any loyal visitor to this blog will be aware that much of my reading over the past year has orbited around the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem. Fideism, which has been the most compelling idea I have encountered in that time, explicitly locates itself in the murky terrain between — or above — faith and reason. I’ve not forgotten that I’m past deadline on some paragraphs about this subject and the other central themes of the past year, and I can only excuse my laziness by saying that part of my distraction has come in the form of Cahill’s incredible book.

I find this particular section pretty intriguing, and though I’ve been mulling it over for the past few days, am not exactly sure what to make of it. In the context of Cahill’s entire narrative it takes on some added shadows and contours, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll merely supplement it with a selection from Arthur Schlesinger’s biography of Robert Kennedy, in which he writes the following about Robert’s spiritual response to his brother’s death:

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy…

The fact that [Robert] found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.’

Hence, the Greek emphasis on fate, which was the foundation of Robert’s reflexive view of the world, absorbed tragedy as an unavoidable consequence of the unchangeable cards one is dealt in life. On the contrary, the Christian perspective, with its emphasis on hope (and its cousin possibility), assessed negative events with an eye to past decisions and potential future choices: not only could it have been different, but I now can choose how to react.

Read another fragment from Cahill’s book:

Greek SymposiaPartying with the Greeks

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Alvin Plantinga on Evolutionary Psychology and Christian Belief

10 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alvin Plantinga, Apologetics, Christianity, David Sloan, David Sloan Wilson, E. O. Wilson, Faith, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Michael Ruse, reason, religion, Rodney Stark, Sigmund Freud, William James

Alvin Plantinga Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

“On Freud’s view, religion (and here we are thinking especially of theistic religions) is an illusion, in his technical sense. This sense is not such as to entail the falsehood of religious belief, although in fact Freud thinks there is no such person as God. Still, illusions have their uses and indeed their functions. The function or purpose of religious belief is really to enable believers to carry on in this cold and hostile or at any rate indiðerent world in which we find ourselves. The idea is that theistic belief arises from a psychological mechanism Freud calls ‘wish-fulfillment’; the wish in this case is father, not to the deed, but to the belief. Nature rises up against us, cold, pitiless, implacable, blind to our needs and desires. She delivers hurt, fear, pain; and in the end she demands our death. Paralyzed and appalled, we invent (unconsciously, of course) a Father in heaven who exceeds our earthly fathers as much in power and knowledge as in goodness and benevolence. The alternative would be to sink into depression, stupor, paralysis; and finally death.

This illusion enables us to carry on and survive: perhaps we could put it by saying that it contributes to our fitness. Is this Freudian claim incompatible with Christian belief? Could I accept Christian belief and also accept Freud’s explanation or account of it? Well, maybe. For it is at least possible that God gets us to be aware of him by way of a mechanism like wish-fulfillment. According to Augustine, ‘Our hearts are restless till they rest in you, O God.’ But then it might be that the way God induces awareness of himself in us is through a process of wish-fulfillment: we want so much to be in God’s presence, we want so very much to feel his love, to know that we are loved by the first being of the universe, that we simply come to believe this. I don’t say that is in fact the way things go; I say only that it is possible and not incompatible with Christian belief.

But there is more to Freud’s account than just that we come to believe in God by way of wish-fulfillment. If that were all he thinks there would be no reason to call theistic belief an illusion. What more does Freud say here? The more he says, and that which makes Christian belief an illusion, is that wish-fulfillment isn’t reality oriented, as we might say. We human beings display a large number of belief-producing processes or faculties or mechanisms. There is perception, memory, a priori intuition, credulity, induction, and much else. We ordinarily think these faculties or processes are aimed at the production of true belief: that is what they are for, and that is their purpose or function. There are some cognitive processes, however, that are not aimed at the production of true belief, but at some other desideratum. Someone may remember a painful experience as less painful than it actually was. According to John 16:21, ‘A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.’ You may continue to believe in your friend’s honesty long after evidence and cool, objective judgment would have dictated a reluctant change of mind. I may believe that I will recover from a dread disease much more strongly than is warranted by the statistics of which I am aware. William James’ climber in the Alps, faced with a life or death situation, believed more strongly than his evidence warranted that he could leap the crevasse.

In all of these cases, there is no cognitive dysfunction or failure to function properly; but the processes in question don’t seem to have as their functions the production of true beliefs. Rather, they produce beliefs that are useful in the context in one way or another. And exactly this is the way things stand with Freud’s explanation: an essential part of his account of theistic belief is that it is not produced by truth-aimed cognitive processes, but by a process with a different sort of function. At this point the Christian or any serious theist will disagree with him: the serious theist will think that God has created us in such a way that we come to know him; and the function of the cognitive processes, whatever they are, that produce belief in God in us is to provide us with true belief. So, even if she agrees with Freud that theistic belief arises from wish-fulfillment, she will think that this particular instance of wish-fulfillment is truth-aimed; it is God’s way of getting us to see that he is in fact present and in fact cares for us. At this point she will have to disagree with Freud.

Something similar goes for [David Sloan] Wilson. He holds that the purpose or function of Christianity generally is to enhance fitness; a group with a religion of that sort will do well in competition with groups without any such religion (or anything similar). And, specifically religious belief plays a particular role here. The role of such belief is not to reflect reality, he says, but to play a part in the production of what religion produces. As he says: ‘our challenge is to interpret the concept of God and his relationship with people as an elaborate belief system designed to motivate the behaviors listed… ’ In a very interesting passage he proposes that religious belief isn’t reality oriented but, unlike Freud, goes on to defend it. The passage is worth quoting in full:

In the first place, much religious belief is not detached from reality… Rather, it is intimately connected to reality by motivating behaviors that are adaptive in the real world—an awesome achievement when we appreciate the com- plexity that is required to become connected in this practical sense. It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal description of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism: a factual realism based on literal correspondence and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness.

In the second place, much religious belief does not represent a form of mental weakness but rather the healthy functioning of the biologically and culturally well-adapted mind… Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought. Evolutionary biologists should be especially quick to grasp this point because they appreciate that the well-adapted mind is ultimately an organ of survival and reproduction…factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors.

This account of religion, then, is like Freud’s in that, like Freud, Wilson sees the cognitive processes that produce religious belief as not aimed at the production of true belief, but at belief that is adaptive by way of motivating those behaviors. Religious belief in general and Christian belief in particular is produced by belief-producing processes that are aimed, not at the production of true belief, but at the production of belief that will motivate those adaptive behaviors. And here someone who accepts Christian belief will be forced to demur, just as with Freud. For, if Christian belief is in fact true as, naturally enough, the Christian will think, it will be produced in us by cognitive processes that God has designed with the end in view of enabling us to see the truth of ‘the great things of the Gospel’ (as Jonathan Edwards calls them). She will no doubt think that these processes essentially involve what Calvin calls ‘the internal witness (or testimony) of the Holy Spirit’ and what Aquinas calls ‘the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit’. And, of course, these processes will then be truth-aimed: they are aimed at enabling us to form these true beliefs about what God has done and about the way of salvation. So there is indeed a conflict between Wilson’s theory of religion and Christian belief.”

__________

From philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s essay “Games Scientists Play,” as published in the book The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion. Given its density and complexity, it’s tough to find a self-contained passage from this essay that’s small enough to post here. The one above is about as simple — though still as good — as it gets.

Some of the modes of reasoning developed by Plantinga here were cited by Anthony Flew in his stunning book There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. And it’s not surprising; Plantinga’s control of language is unmatched, his reasoning and writing of the utmost quality and clarity. This chapter, while heavy, is an extremely rewarding read, particularly for people with interests in evolutionary psychology, philosophy of religion, or both.

If you normally dispense with a page of reading in about a minute, prepare to devote three times that amount per page of “Games Scientists Play”. It’s incredibly dense — a marsh of layered philosophies clouded by a fog of facts — but once you’ve slogged through, you will not only have surfaced to a higher perspective, but will also have thoroughly exercised your mind.

I began reading this during my lunch break this afternoon, and got through about four pages by the time I had finished my sandwich. I took up parsing the rest on the bus home tonight, and am about finished now, as I plan to continue reading into the early morning.

This stuff is about as arcane and complex as I can go into religious philosophy, and it has taken me a good amount of work to even reach this point. Early on I learned from my Dad that one’s understanding of a thing may be measured by how well you can explain that thing to others; and while I probably couldn’t condense Plantinga’s thesis here, I think I’d probably get close in a ten minute conversation.

Buy the book. But I’ve uploaded a PDF of this chapter in case you’d rather read more before picking up your own copy.

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The Only Conversation Worth Having

10 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, Christopher Hitchens, Faith, God, reason, Shakespeare, Socrates, William Dembski

Christopher Hitchens

“I’ll close on the implied question that Bill asked me earlier.

Why don’t you accept this wonderful offer? Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example?

I don’t know if you really think that when you die you can be corporeally reassembled, and have conversations with authors from previous epochs. It’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology, and I have to say that it sounds like a complete fairy tale to me. The only reason I’d want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him, any time, because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment.

But when Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy for challenging the gods of the city — and he accepted his death — he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too. In other words, the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on.

Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know. But I do know that that’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive. Which means that to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And I’d urge you to look at those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead ’til you believe as they do — what a terrible thing to be telling to children. And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way. Thank you.”

__________

Christopher Hitchens’s improvised closing remarks at one of his final debates on faith and reason. This debate was against the very erudite and convincing William Dembski of Baylor University, and the entire contest is worth watching (and is on Youtube), but this particular segment is below.

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