The other day, Cliff Martin over at OutsideTheBox offered an interesting blog post about atheists who take the high moral ground and argue that it takes more courage to be an atheist than it does to be a theist. Martin invokes William James to suggest that, at least for many theists, it would be easier and less courageous for them to give up their faith.
The original post and the ensuing exchange not only touches on elements of William James’ philosophy that have been explored earlier on this blog and in my philosophy of religion class, but raises an interesting and important question: Who, if anyone, can claim the moral high ground of courage in the ongoing debates about theism?
My own view is that no one can. Or, perhaps more accurately, my view is that the answer depends on contextual factors—both in terms of the environment in which the individual atheist or theist takes their stand, and in terms of the individual’s own intellectual and religious journey. And since it’s hard to be sure of these things when talking about someone else, we should be hesitant about judging another person’s courage, whether they’re theists or atheists.
One belligerent critic on Martin’s post, Larry “The Barefoot Bum,” quickly shot back that “publicly denying the trivial, infantile superstitions of a large majority of the population — especially when those people tend to react with extreme and brutal violence when their infantile superstitions are denied — does require a bit of physical courage.” While I have little sympathy for Larry’s quick dismissal of theism as trivial nonsense—and while he clearly exaggerates the danger of overt violence faced by atheists (at least in the US and Europe)—there is, it seems to me, a germ of truth in his remarks.
The other day I had a conversation with a student of mine, clearly from a conservative Christian background; and as we talked it became clear that she was struggling with the ways in which my introductory philosophy class was challenging beliefs that were strongly normative in her community. She found some of the arguments we’d been looking at in the class quite convincing, but if she followed her intellect on these matters she’d have to make a choice. Should she be quiet about her disagreement with her community on fundamental matters, at the cost of undermining the authenticity of her relationships? Or should she be honest and public about her disagreement, at the cost of risking more overt rejection and alienation? That the issues raised in the class forced such a dilemma created a kind of meta-level dilemma—a conflict between intellectual integrity and loyalty to her community of origin.
At least some atheists have gone through a personal intellectual journey along these lines. That is, they have encountered arguments that not only challenge what they’ve been taught, but that cut to the very center of their community’s organizing worldview. It takes courage to face such arguments, since they might put one in a dilemma like the one my student confronts. And at least some atheists come to their atheism because they have honestly wrestled with these challenges to their faith—at which point it takes courage to be true to their beliefs at the risk of being alienated from their community.
Of course, atheists are not alone in confronting these sorts of challenges. In the former Soviet Union, devout theists faced serious costs for seeking to live out their faith openly. To a lesser extent, theistic academics in secular universities often face—if they are public in their profession of faith—the risk of being quietly judged as an adherent to “infantile superstition.” But certainly in the U.S. today, you are more likely to face this challenge growing up in a religious home and courting atheism.
But there is another issue here—and this is the real issue at stake in Martin’s post. The courage which Martin’s atheist friend touts as being a hallmark of atheism can be usefully understood in relation to Walter Stace’s his famous essay, “Man Against Darkness.” At least at the time that he wrote the essay, Stace believed that the weight of the evidence, especially the evidence coming from the sciences, clearly supported the view that the universe is at root a place without purpose or intelligence, a reality governed fundamentally by blind mechanism and chance.
Stace took this to be a growing realization of the modern era, an irreversible trend in our intellectual understanding of the world that forces us to confront a dilemma that earlier generations didn’t need to face. The question, for Stace, was what we should do in the face of this intellectual realization that we exist in an essentially blind and meaningless universe that cares not a whit for our endeavors or values. While he doesn’t frame this question in terms of courage, I think it’s fair to interpret his view as follows: It takes more courage to face what you think is the truth, even if it’s a truth that makes the reality you face far bleaker than you wish it were, than to retreat into comforting illusions that, on an intellectual level, you think are false.
Now I agree with Stace about this. Furthermore, I believe that many atheists have gone through a spiritual/intellectual journey that looks just like this. They have found themselves faced with the dilemma Stace describes, and have decided to do away with what they’re convinced are just comforting illusions. The problem, as I see it, is that many of these atheists universalize their own spiritual/intellectual journey and so presume that intelligent theists have faced the same dilemma, conceived in the same terms, but made the opposite choice.
What William James does, in “The Will to Believe,” is present the fruits of his own spiritual and intellectual journey. Just like Stace’s journey, it leads to a dilemma, a forced choice—but a different one than the one Stace confronted. For James the nature of reality is far more ambiguous, far less clear in its implications, than what Stace (at the time) took it to be.(I say “at the time” because, later in his career, Stace became interested in approaching mystical experience empirically, and the conclusions he reached on the basis of that work are not quite the same as those he embraced in “Man Against Darkness”).
Stace looks at the empirical world and is convinced that a materialist worldview is the only kind that maps well onto the facts. James, by contrast, is convinced that a range of worldviews map onto the empirical facts—and what distinguishes a materialist worldview from others that map onto the facts is that the materialist worldview posits no facts beyond what can be ascertained empirically. Other worldviews, while just as consistent with the facts, posit realms or domains of reality beyond what is empirically knowable.
James thinks that refusing to embrace what is empirically unknowable amounts, for practically purposes, to disbelief. Here, it is important to remember that James is a pragmatist about belief, in the sense that the meaning of your belief is given by the impact it has on what you DO. If you actively pursue some kind of spiritual alignment with a supposed transcendent level of reality, then you are a believer in practice. And given this pragmatic perspective, the one who withholds belief withholds this practice every bit as much as the one who actively disbelieves.
In short, there is a pragmatic attunement, James thinks, between the person who endorses a materialist worldview and a person who simply holds that we shouldn’t believe any empirically unknowable propositions. Pragmatically speaking, both are materialists—and so both are pragmatically rejecting worldviews that map onto the facts but add new levels of meaning to the facts by reference to realities that transcend them. (By the way, I am not at all convinced that James is right to wholly collapse agnosticism into atheism in the way he seems to—but for his purposes I think a complete pragmatic alignment isn’t necessary in any event).
James’ question is whether we have an epistemic duty to refuse to believe in the transcendent and so (pragmatically speaking) be materialists. It is from this standpoint that we must understand his comment to the effect that “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truths if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.” James thinks that the rule to refuse to believe beyond the empirical evidence is just such a rule, and hence irrational.
For James, the wellspring of religion is a distinctive kind of experience that seems to put one in touch with a transcendent good but which might just be a non-veridical product of psychological and neurological forces. Empirical evidence, he thinks, cannot tell us how to interpret these mystical states of consciousness. So do we trust these experiences, given that they cannot be verified? Or do we adopt a skeptical stance?
James doesn’t answer this question. Instead, he rejects the view that we are required to adopt the skeptical stance in the absence of sufficient evidence. Instead of being required by some rule of proper thinking to never believe beyond the empirical evidence, James thinks that when we confront alternatives that are equally consistent with the evidence, one of which goes beyond it and the other not, we are led to a position in which reason cannot guide us. Hence, we are ultimately forced to choose among rival passions: the fear of being duped, or the hope aligning ourselves with a truth that makes the universe more meaningful than empirical investigation alone can support.
This is the dilemma that my spiritual/intellectual journey has taken me to—and it is, I think, the journey that Cliff Martin’s journey has taken him to as well. And for those on such a journey, the decision to believe is a decision to resist a very real fear in order to live in hope.
Showing posts with label William James. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William James. Show all posts
Monday, November 22, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
From the Archives: The Parable of the Spaceship
Last week, my philosophy of religion class considered pragmatic arguments for religious belief--including the arguments articulated by William James (especially in The Will to Believe). It so happens that the view of "faith" that I defend in Is God a Delusion? is very influenced by James's pragmatic approach. At one point, as I was writing the chapter on faith for the book, I wrote up a kind of parable that was intended to capture the Jamesian picture of our human predicament as it relates to religious belief (slightly modified to include, as part of the pragmatic dilemma humans confront, an important thematic distinction in my book, namely Plutarch's distinction between "religion" and "superstition"--or what might be better called the religion of hope and the religion of fear). The parable ended up not making it into the final book, but I did post it on the blog back in 2008, before the book even came out. Since many current readers of this blog have likely never seen it, and since it has bearing on what we've been doing recently in my class, I reprint it now:
Imagine that you abruptly wake up to find yourself on an enormous spaceship. Earth appears through one of the viewports as a diminishing globe—only less blue than it looks in the photos you’ve seen, as if you’re looking at it through a brownish film. You have no idea how you got here. You begin to explore, opening doors at random. You find a kitchen, an exercise room, several bedrooms, and other rooms with strange equipment. Some doors are locked.
As you explore, you begin to meet others who, like yourself, have no memory of how they got here. The first people you meet are a middle-aged woman named Jane, who reminds you of your favorite aunt, and a young man named Paul. Together you follow the sound of voices to what looks almost like a classroom. A dozen people have gathered there. You join them. More people trickle in, until your numbers swell to about fifty.
Eventually, several groups of intrepid explorers head off to see if they can learn more. Your own explorations are interrupted by a scream. Following the sound, you find a smashed-in door leading to a deep shaft. At the bottom is Paul, his neck obviously broken.
Having no way to reach him, you gather in the classroom with others who were close enough to hear the scream, and you await the return of the rest. After a time, one of them—whom you’ve learned is a college student named Joe—returns. He says he’s done a complete circuit of every level and found nobody else, certainly nothing like a crew. “If there are space aliens flying this thing, they’re hiding behind the locked doors.”
But then, a few minutes later, Jane returns, full of excitement. “I’ve met them!” she announces. People gather around. “Well, I didn’t actually see them. It’s like they exist in another dimension. But they were able to…talk to me…sort of. What they did was make pictures in my head. From what I could gather, there’s been some kind of catastrophe. A nuclear war, maybe. I think the aliens were studying Earth when it happened and decided to save as many of us as they could. There are dozens of ships, and they…beamed us up. I guess the process is disorienting. Wipes your short-term memory. Anyway, we’re being transported to a new home. They’ve used their technology to make the ship as comfortable as they could. But some doors are locked for our safety. We shouldn’t try to go in them.” Jane pauses and shrugs. “That’s it. And I’m not sure I got it all right. It was weird, all these pictures in my head.”
Her story elicits considerable heated discussion. Jane is shocked to hear about Paul’s fate, but takes it as evidence that her visions were honest. Someone points out that her experience sounds suspiciously like hallucinating. Someone else asks if she’s ever taken LSD, which elicits a few chuckles. Jane looks away, turning red, but doesn’t answer.
More explorers return without much to report. And then a frazzled young man, Chris, stumbles in. His story is similar to Jane’s, but with important differences. “They were getting in my head, man. Putting pictures there. Forcing me to see stuff I didn’t want to see. It’s like, I saw explosions, all over the planet. And then their ships were swooping down and suckin’ people up with beams of light. They destroyed the planet, man. Alien invasion! And now they’ve snagged a few of us and they’re taking us to some other place. We’re gonna be zoo exhibits.”
Jane shakes her head. “No, no. You’ve misunderstood.”
“This is nuts,” says Steve, a chemistry professor. “Space aliens? I doubt it. This is some kind of experiment. Someone perfectly human has built this thing to test our psychological reactions or something. These…visions…are probably some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”
As hours stretch into days, people stake out bedrooms and establish routines. Steve leads a cadre of “investigators” in a systematic exploration of the ship. They map and describe it, and eventually call a meeting where they report their discoveries. One significant discovery is a room where they can regulate the ship’s temperature, humidity, and light levels. They also note that some of the unlocked rooms contain dangerous machines. “Joe nearly got electrocuted,” Steve explains. “And the nearest kitchen is running low on food. We’re gonna need to find some other food source pretty soon.”
“But what does it mean?” you ask. “Why are we here? Are we zoo specimens taken by hostile aliens, or refugees rescued by friendly ones? Or lab rats in some experiment?”
Joe shrugs. “Who knows? All we can do is describe what this place is like. If you want to know what it all means, ask the mystics over there.” He points to Jane and Chris.
“The mystics are idiots,” Steve snaps. “If we’re gonna survive we need to figure this out.”
“Maybe we can’t,” says Jane.
“Yes, we can. There’s a perfectly…human explanation for all this. We just need more information. We need to break down those locked doors.’”
“No way, man!” Chris rises to his feet, looking fierce.
“Chris is right,” says Jane. “They’re locked for our safety.”
“So says mystic Jane.”
“But remember what happened the first day. That young man who broke his neck.”
“Paul was a reckless idiot. We’ll be careful. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what’s going on. They talked to me.”
“Convenient that they only talked to you.”
“Chris, too. Maybe only some minds are receptive.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “Let’s suppose they did communicate with you. Some kind of woo-woo ESP. Why should we trust them? They sucked us from our homes.”
“To save our lives.”
“So says mystic Jane. Mystic Chris has a different interpretation, as I recall.”
“If we need more information,” Jane says, “let’s try to communicate with them again. I was in that room with all the pillows—the meditation room—when they first contacted me. Let’s go back there, try talking to them.”
“A waste of time,” Steve huffs. “If they exist at all, they obviously can’t or won’t do more than put pictures in the heads of a couple of screwballs.”
Jane sighs in frustration. “It’s hard to understand them, but I think they exhausted their ability to affect our dimension when they altered the ship to make it suitable for us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping. They can still get the ship to its destination. The drive systems operate in both their dimension and ours.”
“How convenient.” Joe shakes his head. “If you’re right, they might as well not exist as far as life on this ship is concerned. If we’re going to deal with that, we need to help ourselves. Let’s figure out how the ship works, what the dangers are, how to control them. I’m with Steve. We gotta start breaking down doors.”
“They’ll kill us, man,” Chris says. “Just like they took out Paul. You start going where they don’t want us to go, they’ll get mad. They’ll blast us. Not just you. These bastards are nasty. They’ll take it out on all of us.”
“Yeah, right,” says Steve.
“I’m serious, man. We gotta keep these buggers happy. We’re in their power. You start opening doors, I’m gonna have to stop you, man.”
“Just try it.” Steve looks around the room. “Who’s with me?” he says again.
And now, finally, the moment is here. You have to decide what to do. Do you join Steve and start breaking down doors? Do you join Jane in the meditation room? Do you join Chris in trying to stop Steve? Do you decide to ignore all of them and head to the kitchen for some soup?
Let’s suppose you like Jane. She seems a decent person, and her story of what is happening is certainly more attractive than Chris’s. If she’s right, then going to the meditation room with her might uncover some new insight. And so you decide to go, in the hope that her story is on the right track, that there are benevolent aliens guiding the ship, aliens you can trust.
Suppose you go with Jane. Suppose that while you’re sitting in the meditation room, silently asking for the aliens to speak to you, you experience a momentary glimmer of something. It feels like someone is there, except that you can’t see or hear anything. Jane, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “They’re talking!” she says. “They’re worried about Steve and Chris. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
The feeling you have might just be the power of suggestion. Jane might be hallucinating. For all you know, Steve might be right about things, or Chris. There’s no evidence that clearly speaks one way or the other. But you’ve sensed something. You trusted Jane enough to follow her to the meditation room, and it produced what felt like contact with someone. You could shrug and walk away. Go get soup. Maybe Jane’s delusion is just rubbing off on you. But you hope otherwise.
You turn to Jane. “What’s it like? Talking to them?”
“Wonderful,” she says. “They want to know us, to be our friends. And it makes it so much better, knowing they’re there and mean us well. You know? It’s all so frightening, otherwise.” She sighs. “Do you hear them at all?”
“I thought, maybe, a little.”
She smiles. “It’s a start. Keep listening for them. In the meantime, just know you can trust them.”
Let’s suppose you do just as she says. Suppose that you orient your life aboard ship in terms of Jane’s teachings, in the hope that she’s right. You decide, out of hope, to live as if her teachings are true. But since her teachings are about benevolent aliens who are looking out for the denizens of the ship, orienting your life in terms of those teachings means trusting the aliens Jane says are there.
And this means rejecting Chris’ claims about nasty aliens that need to be appeased on pain of retaliation. While it doesn’t mean blocking Steve and his group from finding out what they can about the ship, and while it certainly doesn't mean rejecting their findings, it might mean taking seriously the idea that the locked doors are locked for a good reason. But mostly, it means two things: continuing the practice of listening for their voices in the hope that a relationship with them will be possible, and finding some comfort in the promise that the ship is taking you, in the end, to a safe harbor.
And here is the question: Could a morally decent, reasonable person follow this path? If you apply the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to this parable, the answer would seem to be no. After all, Jane is training people to believe beyond the evidence, and therefore priming them to become followers of Chris and his extremism. Right?
Or have Dawkins and Harris missed something important?
Imagine that you abruptly wake up to find yourself on an enormous spaceship. Earth appears through one of the viewports as a diminishing globe—only less blue than it looks in the photos you’ve seen, as if you’re looking at it through a brownish film. You have no idea how you got here. You begin to explore, opening doors at random. You find a kitchen, an exercise room, several bedrooms, and other rooms with strange equipment. Some doors are locked.
As you explore, you begin to meet others who, like yourself, have no memory of how they got here. The first people you meet are a middle-aged woman named Jane, who reminds you of your favorite aunt, and a young man named Paul. Together you follow the sound of voices to what looks almost like a classroom. A dozen people have gathered there. You join them. More people trickle in, until your numbers swell to about fifty.
Eventually, several groups of intrepid explorers head off to see if they can learn more. Your own explorations are interrupted by a scream. Following the sound, you find a smashed-in door leading to a deep shaft. At the bottom is Paul, his neck obviously broken.
Having no way to reach him, you gather in the classroom with others who were close enough to hear the scream, and you await the return of the rest. After a time, one of them—whom you’ve learned is a college student named Joe—returns. He says he’s done a complete circuit of every level and found nobody else, certainly nothing like a crew. “If there are space aliens flying this thing, they’re hiding behind the locked doors.”
But then, a few minutes later, Jane returns, full of excitement. “I’ve met them!” she announces. People gather around. “Well, I didn’t actually see them. It’s like they exist in another dimension. But they were able to…talk to me…sort of. What they did was make pictures in my head. From what I could gather, there’s been some kind of catastrophe. A nuclear war, maybe. I think the aliens were studying Earth when it happened and decided to save as many of us as they could. There are dozens of ships, and they…beamed us up. I guess the process is disorienting. Wipes your short-term memory. Anyway, we’re being transported to a new home. They’ve used their technology to make the ship as comfortable as they could. But some doors are locked for our safety. We shouldn’t try to go in them.” Jane pauses and shrugs. “That’s it. And I’m not sure I got it all right. It was weird, all these pictures in my head.”
Her story elicits considerable heated discussion. Jane is shocked to hear about Paul’s fate, but takes it as evidence that her visions were honest. Someone points out that her experience sounds suspiciously like hallucinating. Someone else asks if she’s ever taken LSD, which elicits a few chuckles. Jane looks away, turning red, but doesn’t answer.
More explorers return without much to report. And then a frazzled young man, Chris, stumbles in. His story is similar to Jane’s, but with important differences. “They were getting in my head, man. Putting pictures there. Forcing me to see stuff I didn’t want to see. It’s like, I saw explosions, all over the planet. And then their ships were swooping down and suckin’ people up with beams of light. They destroyed the planet, man. Alien invasion! And now they’ve snagged a few of us and they’re taking us to some other place. We’re gonna be zoo exhibits.”
Jane shakes her head. “No, no. You’ve misunderstood.”
“This is nuts,” says Steve, a chemistry professor. “Space aliens? I doubt it. This is some kind of experiment. Someone perfectly human has built this thing to test our psychological reactions or something. These…visions…are probably some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”
As hours stretch into days, people stake out bedrooms and establish routines. Steve leads a cadre of “investigators” in a systematic exploration of the ship. They map and describe it, and eventually call a meeting where they report their discoveries. One significant discovery is a room where they can regulate the ship’s temperature, humidity, and light levels. They also note that some of the unlocked rooms contain dangerous machines. “Joe nearly got electrocuted,” Steve explains. “And the nearest kitchen is running low on food. We’re gonna need to find some other food source pretty soon.”
“But what does it mean?” you ask. “Why are we here? Are we zoo specimens taken by hostile aliens, or refugees rescued by friendly ones? Or lab rats in some experiment?”
Joe shrugs. “Who knows? All we can do is describe what this place is like. If you want to know what it all means, ask the mystics over there.” He points to Jane and Chris.
“The mystics are idiots,” Steve snaps. “If we’re gonna survive we need to figure this out.”
“Maybe we can’t,” says Jane.
“Yes, we can. There’s a perfectly…human explanation for all this. We just need more information. We need to break down those locked doors.’”
“No way, man!” Chris rises to his feet, looking fierce.
“Chris is right,” says Jane. “They’re locked for our safety.”
“So says mystic Jane.”
“But remember what happened the first day. That young man who broke his neck.”
“Paul was a reckless idiot. We’ll be careful. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what’s going on. They talked to me.”
“Convenient that they only talked to you.”
“Chris, too. Maybe only some minds are receptive.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “Let’s suppose they did communicate with you. Some kind of woo-woo ESP. Why should we trust them? They sucked us from our homes.”
“To save our lives.”
“So says mystic Jane. Mystic Chris has a different interpretation, as I recall.”
“If we need more information,” Jane says, “let’s try to communicate with them again. I was in that room with all the pillows—the meditation room—when they first contacted me. Let’s go back there, try talking to them.”
“A waste of time,” Steve huffs. “If they exist at all, they obviously can’t or won’t do more than put pictures in the heads of a couple of screwballs.”
Jane sighs in frustration. “It’s hard to understand them, but I think they exhausted their ability to affect our dimension when they altered the ship to make it suitable for us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping. They can still get the ship to its destination. The drive systems operate in both their dimension and ours.”
“How convenient.” Joe shakes his head. “If you’re right, they might as well not exist as far as life on this ship is concerned. If we’re going to deal with that, we need to help ourselves. Let’s figure out how the ship works, what the dangers are, how to control them. I’m with Steve. We gotta start breaking down doors.”
“They’ll kill us, man,” Chris says. “Just like they took out Paul. You start going where they don’t want us to go, they’ll get mad. They’ll blast us. Not just you. These bastards are nasty. They’ll take it out on all of us.”
“Yeah, right,” says Steve.
“I’m serious, man. We gotta keep these buggers happy. We’re in their power. You start opening doors, I’m gonna have to stop you, man.”
“Just try it.” Steve looks around the room. “Who’s with me?” he says again.
And now, finally, the moment is here. You have to decide what to do. Do you join Steve and start breaking down doors? Do you join Jane in the meditation room? Do you join Chris in trying to stop Steve? Do you decide to ignore all of them and head to the kitchen for some soup?
Let’s suppose you like Jane. She seems a decent person, and her story of what is happening is certainly more attractive than Chris’s. If she’s right, then going to the meditation room with her might uncover some new insight. And so you decide to go, in the hope that her story is on the right track, that there are benevolent aliens guiding the ship, aliens you can trust.
Suppose you go with Jane. Suppose that while you’re sitting in the meditation room, silently asking for the aliens to speak to you, you experience a momentary glimmer of something. It feels like someone is there, except that you can’t see or hear anything. Jane, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “They’re talking!” she says. “They’re worried about Steve and Chris. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
The feeling you have might just be the power of suggestion. Jane might be hallucinating. For all you know, Steve might be right about things, or Chris. There’s no evidence that clearly speaks one way or the other. But you’ve sensed something. You trusted Jane enough to follow her to the meditation room, and it produced what felt like contact with someone. You could shrug and walk away. Go get soup. Maybe Jane’s delusion is just rubbing off on you. But you hope otherwise.
You turn to Jane. “What’s it like? Talking to them?”
“Wonderful,” she says. “They want to know us, to be our friends. And it makes it so much better, knowing they’re there and mean us well. You know? It’s all so frightening, otherwise.” She sighs. “Do you hear them at all?”
“I thought, maybe, a little.”
She smiles. “It’s a start. Keep listening for them. In the meantime, just know you can trust them.”
Let’s suppose you do just as she says. Suppose that you orient your life aboard ship in terms of Jane’s teachings, in the hope that she’s right. You decide, out of hope, to live as if her teachings are true. But since her teachings are about benevolent aliens who are looking out for the denizens of the ship, orienting your life in terms of those teachings means trusting the aliens Jane says are there.
And this means rejecting Chris’ claims about nasty aliens that need to be appeased on pain of retaliation. While it doesn’t mean blocking Steve and his group from finding out what they can about the ship, and while it certainly doesn't mean rejecting their findings, it might mean taking seriously the idea that the locked doors are locked for a good reason. But mostly, it means two things: continuing the practice of listening for their voices in the hope that a relationship with them will be possible, and finding some comfort in the promise that the ship is taking you, in the end, to a safe harbor.
And here is the question: Could a morally decent, reasonable person follow this path? If you apply the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to this parable, the answer would seem to be no. After all, Jane is training people to believe beyond the evidence, and therefore priming them to become followers of Chris and his extremism. Right?
Or have Dawkins and Harris missed something important?
Friday, October 15, 2010
Disputing the Authority of Religious Experience
At the conclusion of his discussion on mystical experiences in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James turns to the question of what kind of authority we should attach to these experiences. Of course, to give them authority is to lend credibility or evidentiary value to what they "say," that is, what lessons they appear to teach us. And that raises the question of what mystical experiences actually do say, if anything.
On this matter, James stresses that "the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies." Even so, it is clear that James thinks they do say something--just nothing that justifies invoking them "in favor of any special belief." They are "only relatively in favor" of a range of vaguely supernaturalistic and optimistic understandings of reality.
But do they lend any support to the truth of even this very vague message, a message, in effect, that there is more to reality than what we encounter in ordinary experience, and that this something more is a reason for hope or joy?
On this question, James sums up his position in the following way:
But while we can all agree that for most mystics, their experiences have this kind of de facto authority, it is arguably more controversial whether they should have it. And it is likewise controversial to insist, as James does, that "the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretensions of nonmystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe." Here we see the link between James' fascination with mystical experiences and his arguments in his essay, "The Will to Believe," in which he endorses a kind of pragmatic faith, a right of the individual to decide to embrace what goes beyond the ordinary evidence, to pursue practices and make decisions that would make no sense if the material world exhausts what is real, out of the hope of connecting thereby with something of deep value. It is clear that, for James, part of the impetus for favoring such pragmatic faith is that "the pretensions of nonmystical states" have been shattered by the reality of mystical consciousness.
As far as the former issue goes--whether mystics really have a right to believe what their mystical experiences are telling them--James offers a sketch of an argument that has been developed in various ways by other philosophers interested in the epistemology of religious belief (among them William Alston). Here is how I laid out that argument to my philosophy of religion class earlier this week:
While some would argue that the problem of evil poses a defeater of type (i) for D experiences, this is hardly an unproblematic claim. The problem of evil clearly is a problem (whether or not it can be overcome) for belief in the "omni-God" who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. But the belief that flows from a typical D experience is far vaguer than that. At best, the problem of evil might dictate against interpreting the D experience in terms of the existence of a God conceived in this particular way.
In fact, James thinks mystical experiences are generally immune to defeaters of type (i). As he puts it, with respect to the facts given to us in ordinary experience, typical mystical experiences "do not contradict these facts, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized." Rather, they "merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness." And he thinks "there can never be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view."
But even if we accept what James has to say on this point, there is still the question of defeaters of type (ii). Michael Scriven has challenged the authority of religious experience in a manner that might be viewed as positing a defeater for religious experiences of type (ii). Here is a key excerpt from his argument:
On this matter, James stresses that "the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies." Even so, it is clear that James thinks they do say something--just nothing that justifies invoking them "in favor of any special belief." They are "only relatively in favor" of a range of vaguely supernaturalistic and optimistic understandings of reality.
But do they lend any support to the truth of even this very vague message, a message, in effect, that there is more to reality than what we encounter in ordinary experience, and that this something more is a reason for hope or joy?
On this question, James sums up his position in the following way:
1. Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.That mystical states are usually authoritative for those who experience them can hardly be challenged. With few exceptions, those who have had these kinds of experiences are transformed by them, both in terms of outlook and behavior. And the basis of that transformation is a sense of having encountered orders of reality that make a difference for how we should live and relate to our world. Mystics see the world in a new light, in terms of a sense of promise that what lies hidden from our ordinary conscious experience infuses all of reality with a value it would not otherwise have, and gives us reason for far more confident joy than the empirical surface of the world can provide.
2. No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
3. The break down the authority of the nonmystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding of the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other order of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.
But while we can all agree that for most mystics, their experiences have this kind of de facto authority, it is arguably more controversial whether they should have it. And it is likewise controversial to insist, as James does, that "the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretensions of nonmystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe." Here we see the link between James' fascination with mystical experiences and his arguments in his essay, "The Will to Believe," in which he endorses a kind of pragmatic faith, a right of the individual to decide to embrace what goes beyond the ordinary evidence, to pursue practices and make decisions that would make no sense if the material world exhausts what is real, out of the hope of connecting thereby with something of deep value. It is clear that, for James, part of the impetus for favoring such pragmatic faith is that "the pretensions of nonmystical states" have been shattered by the reality of mystical consciousness.
As far as the former issue goes--whether mystics really have a right to believe what their mystical experiences are telling them--James offers a sketch of an argument that has been developed in various ways by other philosophers interested in the epistemology of religious belief (among them William Alston). Here is how I laid out that argument to my philosophy of religion class earlier this week:
1. If a person has an experience (EX) that seems to be an experience of X (some object, event, etc.), then, in the absence of a defeater, it is reasonable to believe PX (the proposition “X exists/ happened/etc.”). (This is one way of formulating what is often called the Principle of Credulity)Premise 2 may need som clarification. So, imagine I am looking out my window and see, in the courtyard below, what appears to be my wife passionately kissing my least favorite student. This experience would, based on the Principle of Credulity, justify the belief that my wife is kissing my least favorite student in the absence of defeaters. But suppose that my wife happens to be standing next to me in my office at the time of this experience. In that case, I have a defeater of type (i). Or suppose that (against my better judgment) I just ingested a strange mushroom given to me by my least favorite student, that I'm feeling a little funny, and that in addition to seeing my wife in a passionate embrace, I also see in the courtyard Sarah Palin waving at me from astride a huge elephant. In that case, I have a defeater of type (ii).
2. An experience EX can admit of either of two kinds of defeaters which would block the legitimacy of inferring PX: (i) reason(s) to disbelieve PX more compelling than the reasons, given by EX, for believing PX; (ii) reason(s) for believing that the conditions under which EX occurs render EX a poor indicator of PX’s truth.
3. People have experiences that seem to be of a divine reality, that is, a transcendent and fundamental good (D experiences)
4. Sometimes, the people who have D experiences do not have defeaters of either type (i) or type (ii).
5. At least sometimes, it is reasonable for people who have D experiences to believe that a divine reality exists
While some would argue that the problem of evil poses a defeater of type (i) for D experiences, this is hardly an unproblematic claim. The problem of evil clearly is a problem (whether or not it can be overcome) for belief in the "omni-God" who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. But the belief that flows from a typical D experience is far vaguer than that. At best, the problem of evil might dictate against interpreting the D experience in terms of the existence of a God conceived in this particular way.
In fact, James thinks mystical experiences are generally immune to defeaters of type (i). As he puts it, with respect to the facts given to us in ordinary experience, typical mystical experiences "do not contradict these facts, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized." Rather, they "merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness." And he thinks "there can never be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view."
But even if we accept what James has to say on this point, there is still the question of defeaters of type (ii). Michael Scriven has challenged the authority of religious experience in a manner that might be viewed as positing a defeater for religious experiences of type (ii). Here is a key excerpt from his argument:
It is easy for someone to imagine that he saw something he did not see; it is even easier for him to "sense that some presence is nigh," to use a common description of the religious experience, for the sense that gives him this report is not one with the built-in training of our usual senses and is all the easier for the emotions to use as a projection screen.Since I've been in the habit recently of ending my discussion with a theistic argument and asking what skeptical critics think of it, I will end this post with Scriven's skeptical argument, and ask how those prone to lend some wieght to religious experiences might respond to the idea that the existence of religious experiences has no evidentiary value, since the conditions under which they occur are such that we'd expect them to occur whether or not there is more to reality than meets the empirical eye.
That the millions who are brought up in a nervous and stress-provoking world and taught the tradition of religious experience and symbolism should produce thousands who claim to have had religious experiences is not surprising but entirely to be expected.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
The Concept of "Religion"
In my philosophy of religion class yesterday I gave everyone in the class a chance to give their own concise answer to the following question: “What is religion?” (To be more precise, I asked them to imagine they were being interrogated by space aliens, and that the fate of the Earth depended on their answer).
Not surprisingly, there were many diverse responses—some emphasizing social and institutional phenomena, some emphasizing beliefs or ways of looking at the world, some emphasizing practices or ways of life, and some stressing inner spiritual experience. Some definitions were, I’d say, quite gilded—that is, they used language aimed at highlighting the beauty or value of the thing being defined. Other definitions were quite the opposite. For example, one student defined religion as a system for justifying the exclusion or marginalization of people from a community.
Once I had the chalkboard covered with these various accounts, I pointed out how this diversity is also represented among scholars—with understandings of religion ranging from the more private, personal, “feeling”-oriented understanding (favored by theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and philosopher/psychologist William James), to more sociological understandings (promulgated by, for example, Emile Durkheim).
I then spent a few minutes considering the idea I advanced in my book—namely, that “religion” is what Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance” term (see p. 15 of Is God a Delusion? for an account of this idea). Then, in the last few minutes of the class, I turned to another approach—one that, based on some further reflection I’ve done since writing my book, I’m becoming increasingly convinced is the right one. According to this approach, “religion” is best understood as what philosopher W. B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept”—but with a twist.
Since I didn’t have time to fully explain this idea in class, I want to do so in this post. In fact, I’ve already done so on this blog—here and here. But since it’s always helpful to try to explain ideas in different ways, let me have another go at it here.
What Gallie noticed was that there are some terms whose proper use, rather than being determined by an established definition (one that sets out the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall within the term’s scope), is instead determined by a shared set of complex exemplars or paradigms along with a shared appraisive meaning. So for example, there isn’t a common definition of “rape.” Instead, there are a bunch of exemplars—sexual acts that we all agree count as rape—together with general agreement that when an act is labeled “rape” there’s a strongly negative appraisal that goes along with that.
Here’s the thing about “rape.” It just isn’t and never will be a neutral, purely descriptive term. To call something rape is (among other things) to condemn it in a particular way. That condemnation is part of the meaning of the term. And so it matters a lot whether or not a particular act qualifies as rape. Acts of rape are morally worse than other classes of sexual acts (such as seduction, say, or aggressive lovemaking, or adultery).
The paradigms of “rape” exist because there are a bunch of things that we all agree deserve to be condemned in this distinctive way. But these paradigms are complex. They have lots of different features. And we don't all agree on what it is about these paradigms that makes them deserving of the negative appraisal. And this means that there are controversial cases.
Consider: A guy keeps pressuring his high school girlfriend to have sex. She doesn’t want to. He threatens to break up with her. She closes in on herself. He backs off for a few minutes, then begins groping her again. She doesn’t resist. He undresses her. She remains totally passive and unresponsive. He puts on a condom and penetrates her.
Is it rape? More people would be inclined to say “yes” today than twenty years ago—but there are still many who’d say it isn’t, that the guy is being insensitive but isn’t a rapist.
The reason for the dispute is that there isn’t agreement about whether the boys behavior in this case deserves the negative implications of the “rape” label. In other words, this is a moral dispute about what warrants a certain kind of negative appraisal.
And moral disputes can’t be resolved through definitional fiat. Suppose someone says, “From now on, rape will mean an act in which someone uses physical force to overcome a woman who is actively resisting sexual penetration. As such, the case at hand isn’t rape.” Such a move isn’t going to just be accepted. Why? Because to call something “rape” is to say that there's a certain kind of “badness” to it—more precisely, the same kind of badness that the agreed paradigms of rape possess. And so, to define rape as “an act in which someone uses physical force to overcome a woman who is actively resisting sexual penetration” is to say, in effect, that only acts which meet these conditions are bad in the relevant way. Put another way, to define “rape” is to take a stand in a moral dispute.
And as long as there is moral dispute, to impose a uniform definition of “rape” on a community of speakers is to impose one disputed answer to a moral question on everyone in the community. This wouldn’t be merely an act of establishing a linguistic convention. It would be an act of using language to truncate debate and to effectively delegitimize certain moral views.
And this is why some concepts become essentially contested. Their being essentially contested is a good thing—a way to keep some voices in a moral debate from being illegitimately silenced through definitional fiat.
My claim is that this idea of essential contestability is useful for understanding religion—but not if we accept Gallie’s idea without modification. Religion, I think, is an essentially contested concept with a twist. And what’s the twist? Here’s how I explain it in a forthcoming article (“Moving the Goal Posts?” to be published in Philo: A Journal of Philosophy):
Of course, what I defend in my book has a great deal to do with actual religions—but when I look at those real-world phenomena, I’m trying to identify the features which might justify a positive appraisal (what I call the germ of a true religion that might be salvaged from the crud of “superstition” and “fundamentalism” and “religionism”). My critics, meanwhile, are sifting through the same phenomena in an attempt to identify what makes religion so bad. And what do they pinpoint? What, from my standpoint, is the crud from which true religion needs to be salvaged. And so they’re holding up the crud and calling it religion, while I’m holding up the gem that was buried in the crud. And they protest, “That’s not religion at all!”
Not surprisingly, there were many diverse responses—some emphasizing social and institutional phenomena, some emphasizing beliefs or ways of looking at the world, some emphasizing practices or ways of life, and some stressing inner spiritual experience. Some definitions were, I’d say, quite gilded—that is, they used language aimed at highlighting the beauty or value of the thing being defined. Other definitions were quite the opposite. For example, one student defined religion as a system for justifying the exclusion or marginalization of people from a community.
Once I had the chalkboard covered with these various accounts, I pointed out how this diversity is also represented among scholars—with understandings of religion ranging from the more private, personal, “feeling”-oriented understanding (favored by theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and philosopher/psychologist William James), to more sociological understandings (promulgated by, for example, Emile Durkheim).
I then spent a few minutes considering the idea I advanced in my book—namely, that “religion” is what Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance” term (see p. 15 of Is God a Delusion? for an account of this idea). Then, in the last few minutes of the class, I turned to another approach—one that, based on some further reflection I’ve done since writing my book, I’m becoming increasingly convinced is the right one. According to this approach, “religion” is best understood as what philosopher W. B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept”—but with a twist.
Since I didn’t have time to fully explain this idea in class, I want to do so in this post. In fact, I’ve already done so on this blog—here and here. But since it’s always helpful to try to explain ideas in different ways, let me have another go at it here.
What Gallie noticed was that there are some terms whose proper use, rather than being determined by an established definition (one that sets out the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall within the term’s scope), is instead determined by a shared set of complex exemplars or paradigms along with a shared appraisive meaning. So for example, there isn’t a common definition of “rape.” Instead, there are a bunch of exemplars—sexual acts that we all agree count as rape—together with general agreement that when an act is labeled “rape” there’s a strongly negative appraisal that goes along with that.
Here’s the thing about “rape.” It just isn’t and never will be a neutral, purely descriptive term. To call something rape is (among other things) to condemn it in a particular way. That condemnation is part of the meaning of the term. And so it matters a lot whether or not a particular act qualifies as rape. Acts of rape are morally worse than other classes of sexual acts (such as seduction, say, or aggressive lovemaking, or adultery).
The paradigms of “rape” exist because there are a bunch of things that we all agree deserve to be condemned in this distinctive way. But these paradigms are complex. They have lots of different features. And we don't all agree on what it is about these paradigms that makes them deserving of the negative appraisal. And this means that there are controversial cases.
Consider: A guy keeps pressuring his high school girlfriend to have sex. She doesn’t want to. He threatens to break up with her. She closes in on herself. He backs off for a few minutes, then begins groping her again. She doesn’t resist. He undresses her. She remains totally passive and unresponsive. He puts on a condom and penetrates her.
Is it rape? More people would be inclined to say “yes” today than twenty years ago—but there are still many who’d say it isn’t, that the guy is being insensitive but isn’t a rapist.
The reason for the dispute is that there isn’t agreement about whether the boys behavior in this case deserves the negative implications of the “rape” label. In other words, this is a moral dispute about what warrants a certain kind of negative appraisal.
And moral disputes can’t be resolved through definitional fiat. Suppose someone says, “From now on, rape will mean an act in which someone uses physical force to overcome a woman who is actively resisting sexual penetration. As such, the case at hand isn’t rape.” Such a move isn’t going to just be accepted. Why? Because to call something “rape” is to say that there's a certain kind of “badness” to it—more precisely, the same kind of badness that the agreed paradigms of rape possess. And so, to define rape as “an act in which someone uses physical force to overcome a woman who is actively resisting sexual penetration” is to say, in effect, that only acts which meet these conditions are bad in the relevant way. Put another way, to define “rape” is to take a stand in a moral dispute.
And as long as there is moral dispute, to impose a uniform definition of “rape” on a community of speakers is to impose one disputed answer to a moral question on everyone in the community. This wouldn’t be merely an act of establishing a linguistic convention. It would be an act of using language to truncate debate and to effectively delegitimize certain moral views.
And this is why some concepts become essentially contested. Their being essentially contested is a good thing—a way to keep some voices in a moral debate from being illegitimately silenced through definitional fiat.
My claim is that this idea of essential contestability is useful for understanding religion—but not if we accept Gallie’s idea without modification. Religion, I think, is an essentially contested concept with a twist. And what’s the twist? Here’s how I explain it in a forthcoming article (“Moving the Goal Posts?” to be published in Philo: A Journal of Philosophy):
But unlike “art,” whose appraisive meaning is positive, or “terrorism,” whose appraisive meaning is negative, “religion” has come to be used such that there are two competing communities of discourse, each using the term in an essentially contested way. But whereas one community of discourse treats “religion” as a positive appraisive concept and seeks to gauge which features of the paradigms warrant the positive appraisal, the other treats it as a negative one and seeks to judge which features warrant the negative appraisal. When a concept comes to be used in this way, we might call it a “bifurcated essentially contested concept.”Unlike essentially contested concepts as Gallie understood them, I’m not at all convinced that bifurcated essentially contested concepts serve a useful function. When an essentially contested concept becomes “bifurcated,” what happens? On the one hand, you have those who attach a positive appraisive meaning to the paradigms of religion. They will be formulating their definition of religion by looking for what it is about the paradigms of religion that justifies the positive appraisal (and so will sift out of their understanding of religion anything in the paradigms that warrants a negative appraisal). On the other hand, those who attach a negative appraisive meaning to "religion" will be doing to opposite. The result may be that you have two parties with virtually identical value systems, who therefore make the same appraisive judgments about the various features of the religious paradigms—but who appear to be utterly at odds. An analogy—again from my forthcoming article—can be helpful:
It’s as if one community of discourse attaches to the term “sex” the appraisive meaning that typically attaches to “rape,” while another attaches to it the appraisive sense of “making love.” The former group looks at the range of phenomena that go by the label “sex” (ignoring, of course, those phenomena which no one would ever call rape) and tries to identify what justifies the negative appraisal. The latter does the same (ignoring the phenomena, such as rape paradigms, which no one would ever call “making love”), in the attempt to identify the parameters within which the positive appraisal is warranted. The latter holds up its results, saying, “This is the kind of sex (by which we mean making love) that deserves label!” The former protests, “That’s not sex (by which we mean rape) at all!”This, I think, is what’s going on in the conversation between Christopher Hitchens and Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell, whose unusual debate inspired one of my recent Religion Dispatches articles. It may also help to explain some of the common charges leveled against my book—charges to the effect that I respond to the new atheists by coming up with this definition of religion that has nothing to do with real religion as it exists in the real world.
Of course, what I defend in my book has a great deal to do with actual religions—but when I look at those real-world phenomena, I’m trying to identify the features which might justify a positive appraisal (what I call the germ of a true religion that might be salvaged from the crud of “superstition” and “fundamentalism” and “religionism”). My critics, meanwhile, are sifting through the same phenomena in an attempt to identify what makes religion so bad. And what do they pinpoint? What, from my standpoint, is the crud from which true religion needs to be salvaged. And so they’re holding up the crud and calling it religion, while I’m holding up the gem that was buried in the crud. And they protest, “That’s not religion at all!”
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