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Tag Archives: William James

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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This Planet and All the Stars Were Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion, Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Aristotle, belief, Freeman Dyson, G.K. Chesterton, God, Jim Holt, John Updike, Karl Barth, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, natural theology, Oscar Wilde, Rabbit Run, Roger's Version, Søren Kierkegaard, the big bang, the universe, Thomas Aquinas, Why Does the World Exist?, William James

John Updike

I began by asking [John] Updike whether the theology of Karl Barth had really sustained him through a difficult time in his life.

“I’ve certainly said that and it did seem to be true,” he said. “I fell upon Barth having exhausted Kierkegaard as a consoler, and having previously resorted to Chesterton. I discovered Barth through a series of addresses and lectures called The Word of God and the Word of Man. He didn’t attempt to play anybody’s game as far as looking at the Gospels as historic documents or anything. He just said, essentially, that this is a faith—take it or leave it. So yes, I did find Barth comforting, and a couple of my early novels—not so early, actually—are sort of Barthian. Rabbit Run certainly presents a Barthian point of view, from the standpoint of a Lutheran minister. And in Roger’s Version, Barthianism is about the only refuge for Roger from all the besieging elements that would deprive one of one’s faith—both science, which Dale tries to use on behalf of the theist point of view, and the watering down of theology with liberal values.”

“It’s interesting,” I said, “that some philosophers are so astonished and awed that anything at all should exist—like Wittgenstein, who said in the Tractatus that it’s not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is. And Heidegger, of course, made heavy weather of this too. He claimed that even people who never thought about why there is something rather than nothing were still ‘grazed’ by the question whether they realized it or not—say, in moments of boredom, when they’d just as soon that nothing at all existed, or in states of joy when everything is transfigured and they see the world anew, as if for the first time. Yet I’ve run into philosophers who don’t see anything very astonishing about existence. And in some moods I agree with them. The question Why is there something rather than nothing? sometimes seems vacuous to me. But in other moods it seems very very profound. How does it strike you? Have you ever spent much time brooding over it?”

“Well, to call it ‘brooding’ would be to dignify it,” Updike said. “But I am of the party that thinks that the existence of the world is a kind of miracle. It’s the last resort, really, of naturalistic theology. So many other props have been knocked out from under naturalistic theology—the first principle argument that Aristotle set forth, Aquinas’s prime mover … they’re all gone, but the riddle does remain: why is there something instead of nothing?”

I told Updike that I admired the way he had a character in Roger’s Version explain how the universe might have arisen from nothingness via a quantum-mechanical fluctuation. In the decades since he wrote the book, I added, physicists had come up with some very neat scenarios that would allow something to emerge spontaneously out of nothing in accordance with quantum laws. But then, of course, you’re faced with the mystery: Where are these laws written? And what gives them the power to command the void?

“Also, the laws amount to a funny way of saying, ‘Nothing equals something,’ ” Updike said, bursting into laughter. “QED! One opinion I’ve encountered is that, since getting from nothing to something involves time, and time didn’t exist before there was something, the whole question is a meaningless one that we should stop asking ourselves. It’s beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal-combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we’re dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding. I’m not sure I buy that view, but it is a way of saying that the mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain. I have trouble even believing—and this will offend you—the standard scientific explanation of how the universe rapidly grew from nearly nothing. Just think of it. The notion that this planet and all the stars we see, and many thousands of times more than those we see—that all this was once bounded in a point with the size of, what, a period or a grape? How, I ask myself, could that possibly be? And, that said, I sort of move on.”

Updike chuckled softly. His mood appeared to lighten.

“When you think about it,” he continued, “we rationalists—and we’re all, to an extent, rationalist—we accept propositions about the early universe which boggle the mind more than any of the biblical miracles do. Your mind can intuitively grasp the notion of a dead man coming back again to life, as people in deep comas do, and as we do when we wake up every morning out of a sound sleep. But to believe that the universe, immeasurably vast as it appears to be, was once compressed into a tiny space—into a tiny point—is in truth very hard to believe. I’m not saying I can disprove the equations that back it up. I’m just saying that it’s as much a matter of faith to accept that.”

Here I was moved to demur. The theories that imply this picture of the early universe—general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and so forth—work beautifully at predicting our present-day observations. Even the theory of cosmic inflation, which admittedly is a bit conjectural, has been confirmed by the shape of the cosmic background radiation, as measured by the Hubble space telescope. If these theories are so good at accounting for the evidence we see at present, why shouldn’t we trust them as we extrapolate backward in time toward the beginning of the universe?

“I’m just saying I can’t trust them,” Updike replied. “My reptile brain won’t let me. It’s impossible to imagine that even the Earth was once compressed to the size of a pea, let alone the whole universe.”

Some things that are impossible to imagine, I pointed out, are quite easy to describe mathematically.

“Still,” Updike said, warming to the argument, “there have been other intricate systems in the history of mankind. The scholastics in the Middle Ages had a lot of intricacy in their intellectual constructions, and even the Ptolemaic epicycles or whatever were … Well, all of this showed a lot of intelligence, and theoretical consistency even, but in the end they collapsed. But, as you say, the evidence piles up. It’s been decades and decades since the standard model of physics was proposed, and it checks out to the twelfth decimal point. But this whole string theory business … There’s never any evidence, just mathematical formulas, right? There are men spending their whole careers working on a theory of something that might not even exist.”

Even so, I said, they’re doing some beautiful pure mathematics in the process.

“Beautiful in a vacuum!” Updike exclaimed. “What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.”

I asked Updike if his own attitude toward natural theology was as contemptuous as Barth’s was. Some people think there’s a God because they have a religious experience. Some think there’s a God because they believe the priest. But others want evidence, evidence that will appeal to reason. And those are the people that natural theology, by showing how observations of the world around us might support the conclusion that there is a God, has the power to reach. Is Updike really willing to leave those people out in the cold just because he doesn’t like the idea of a God who lets himself be “intellectually trapped”?

Updike paused for a moment or two, then said, “I was once asked to be on a radio program called This I Believe. As a fiction writer, I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly. On this radio program I conceded that ruling out natural theology does leave too much of humanity and human experience behind. I suppose even a hardened Barthian might cling to at least one piece of natural theology, Christ’s saying, ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’—that so much of what we construe as virtue and heroism seems to come from faith. But to make faith into an abstract scientific proposition is to please no one, least of all the believers. There’s no intellectual exertion in accepting it. Faith is like being in love. As Barth put it, God is reached by the shortest ladder, not by the longest ladder. Barth’s constant point was that it is God’s movement that bridges the distance, not human effort.”

And why should God make that movement? Why should he have created a universe at all? I remembered Updike saying somewhere that God may have brought the world into being out of spiritual fatigue—that reality was a product of “divine acedia.” What, I asked him, could this possibly mean?

“Did I say that? God created the world out of boredom? Well, Aquinas said that God made the world ‘in play.’ In play. In a playful spirit he made the world. That, to me, seems closer to the truth.”

He was silent again for a moment, then continued. “Some scientists who are believers, like Freeman Dyson, have actually tackled the ultimate end of the universe. They’ve tried to describe a universe where entropy is almost total and individual particles are separated by distances that are greater than the dimensions of the present observable universe … an unthinkably dreary and pointless vacuum. I admire their scientific imagination, but I just can’t make myself go there. And a space like that is the space in which God existed and nothing else. Could God then have suffered boredom to the point that he made the universe? That makes reality seem almost a piece of light verse.”

What a lovely conceit! Reality is not a “blot on nothingness,” as Updike’s character Henry Bech had once, in a bilious moment, decided. It is a piece of light verse.

__________

From the chapter “The World as a Bit of Light Verse” in Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

To anyone with an interest in this stuff, I’d urge you go pick up a copy of Holt’s book. As a complete scientific and philosophic diletente, I found it to be as readable and as luminous as any comparable text I’ve encountered.

In the book, Holt talks with philosophers, cosmologists, physicists, novelists, and other thinkers, confronting each with the question of Why? and receiving a slew of compelling conjectures in return. The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn, however, is that there is no discrete answer to that question; rational inquiry can run the gambit of inquiring words — Who, What, When, Where, How — but can do very little to demystify that monolithic query Why. We can lower our scientific and philosophical shoulders into that word all we want, but the universe doesn’t even bother to whisper back to us Why not?

Yet this fact is a great intellectual equalizer and the reason a book like this is intelligible to people like me. It’s also the reason why the conjectures of laymen like us are not that far off from the suppositions of esteemed intellectuals. As Holt says in one chapter:

“When you listen to such thinkers feel their way around the question of why there is a world at all, you begin to realize that your own thoughts on the matter are not quite so nugatory as you had imagined. No one can confidently claim intellectual superiority in the face of the mystery of existence. For, as William James observed, ‘All of us are beggars here.’”

To James’s observation I’d add the one enshrined as Oscar Wilde’s epitaph, “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” a favorite quote of mine and an uncharacteristically tentative utterance from a man so noted for his florid, grandiose phrase-making.

Furthermore, to Updike’s analogy of the dog, I would add the more elegant image proposed by Einstein:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

This metaphor is at once superior and inferior to that of Updike. It’s superior because a dog — like everything else we know of in the universe — does not possess reflexive self-awareness, at least not in any robust sense.

However, as Holt’s book lays out, the universe is not arranged like a library wherein we effortlessly extract particular quantities to isolate and examine. Instead, the scientific method approaches the universe at its corners and wrinkles, gleaning what limited information we can from a cosmos shrouded in shady Higgs bosons, almost-invisible neutrinos, and inconsistent classes of elementary particles.

In this sense, we are more like canines ogling at an internal combustion engine, given that the object we are investigating (the universe) is not laid out to be reverse-engineered. It is not designed, as a book is, to easily reveal its secrets to us.

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