The Pragmatic Assessment of Religious Belief

A couple of months ago, John Shook expressed his frustration with the tactics used by religious believers to immunize their beliefs from rational criticism. One of his concerns had to do with the pragmatic assessment of religion, especially Christianity. The idea behind pragmatic assessment is, roughly, that one way to evaluate a belief system is to look at how it affects behavior. If these effects are positive, then that speaks in favor of the belief system. If the effects are negative, then that speaks against it.

Now there are a range of difficulties here that I could get into, having to do with how we arrive at the value system that we then make use of for the sake of doing pragmatic assessments of beliefs. But I will set that issue aside for now (perhaps taking it up in a future post), and assume that we at least have a general consensus on basic values that we can appeal to when assessing the pragmatic effects of beliefs and belief systems.

Shook clearly thinks that there is considerable bad behavior that can be directly linked to Christianity—such things, I suppose, as crusades and witch burnings and Inquisitions; although I would also add the heterosexist marginalization of gays and lesbians and the patriarchal subordination of women. Shook’s first complaint is that, when confronted with this sordid history, Christians will say that “it’s the bad Christians doing the bad things (or they really weren’t Christians at all).”

His second complaint focuses on the use of the Christian doctrine of original sin. “Very convenient,” Shook complains, “how Christianity ensures that we are already such bad sinners that no bad behavior at all need ever be attributed to a Christian belief.”

Now I think there is some merit to both of Shook’s complaints. And any reader of my book will know that I take pragmatic assessment of belief very seriously. In fact, it is one of the main aims of my book to distinguish between ways of being religious that are pragmatically pernicious, and ways of being religious that are pragmatically benign. In a recent post on this blog, I attacked the doctrine of hell on essentially pragmatic grounds, arguing that the doctrine tends to promote and perpetuate ideological in-group/out-group dichotomies.

Although I think Shook is right that some Christians throw up smoke screens to block pragmatic assessments of their beliefs, I think we need to make some distinctions so as not to cast blame where it isn’t deserved.

First, there’s a difference between, on the one hand, resisting pragmatic criticism of your faith by blaming all the bad things done in its name on “bad” Christians or pretenders to the faith, and, on the other hand, pointing out that there are different versions of Christianity, and that not every version has the same pragmatic effects. The former is an attempt to avoid pragmatic assessment. The latter is an insistence that such pragmatic assessment be conducted with care so as to avoid false generalizations. Furthermore, with any complex belief system, it is never adequate to simply blame the belief system as a whole for specific negative pragmatic consequences. The diagnostic challenge is to identify more specifically where the problem lies. If we don’t take this diagnostic challenge seriously, we risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In my book, I make extensive appeal to Plutarch’s distinction between what he calls religion and what he calls superstition. The former is about living in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness. The latter is about trying to appease a supernatural tyrant in the sky. I maintain that these two phenomena could not be more different, especially on a pragmatic level. And I argue, furthermore, that both the divine command theory of ethics and scriptural fundamentalism, when embraced by Christians, tend to move them away from religion (in Plutarch’s sense) and into the dangerous domain of superstition. Also, in my book, I distinguish religion from what I call religionism, which is a kind of bifurcating ideology that designates in-groups and out-groups according to religious allegiances. Religionism, like racism and ethnocentrism, is a dangerous belief system that foments violence and oppression. But religious worldviews, experiences, and ways of life needn’t be paired with religionism in this sense.

My point, of course, is that there can be very good reasons why a Christian might want to say that Christianity in some broad sense should not be blamed for the evils that have historically been done in Christianity’s name. It may be that a careful investigation will reveal that the source of the negative behaviors can be traced to specific doctrines or patterns of thinking that are not essential to Christianity, even if they have often been embraced by Christians at various times and in various places. What the pragmatic criticism therefore warrants is not a blanket criticism of Christianity, but rather the rejection of those versions of Christianity that embrace these troublesome elements.

To me, however, the more interesting of Shook’s complaints is the one that implicitly gestures to the doctrine of original sin. His thinking seems to be this: Christianity has built into its worldview a picture of human depravity that essentially immunizes it from pragmatic criticism. Since any evils done by Christians can be chalked up to the effects of original sin, the proverbial chickens can be neatly kept from ever coming home to roost. It will never be Christianity’s fault that these evils are done. The blame will lie with our sinful human nature, a nature that prevents even the most sincere Christians from behaving in the praiseworthy ways that Christianity should inspire—and would inspire in the absence of sin’s corrupting influence.

I think that Shook is absolutely right on track here, in terms of how the doctrine of original sin is too often invoked. And what is so pernicious, in my judgment, about this use of the doctrine, is that it is fundamentally at odds with where a careful theological understanding of the doctrine should take us.

For Christianity, sin is the Problem (with a capital “P”). It names what’s wrong with the world and with our lives. At heart, sin refers to the state of alienation from God and from one another. Specific behaviors referred to as “sins” are merely by-products of this condition of alienation, which cuts us off from the source of all good and all value. It’s this state of alienation that is our “original” human predicament—our starting point, if you will. And until we move past this starting point, until our alienation from the divine is overcome, we will continue to be in bondage to affective states that render us too cowardly to stand up for what is right, too superficial to attend to what really matters, too fixated on earthly security or immediate appetites to care for our neighbors in need.

Christianity professes to offer a pathway out of this original predicament. It tells us that we can find salvation from the ravages of sin. Here, “salvation” is taken to mean something far more profound than getting into heaven when we die. Salvation isn’t something that needs to wait until death, nor is it about enjoying some paradise realm of endless pleasures. It is, instead, about overcoming the state of alienation that traps us in our narrow egos, that cuts us off from one another and from the source of all value. It is, in other words, about becoming connected to the whole of reality through bonds of love. And while the “beloved community” may require a level or reciprocity we are unlikely to enjoy in this life, we come closer to salvation even in this life when our love extends around us in such a way that we become catalysts for the promulgation of loving community. When Christianity speaks of salvation from sin, this is what is most profoundly meant.

But if this is right, if in some way Christianity offers the cure for sin, then shouldn’t Christianity be uniquely susceptible to pragmatic assessment?

I think, in fact, that it should. But let me be careful about something up front. If we are to speak precisely, it would be a mistake to say that Christianity claims to be the cure for sin. Rather, it claims to teach us about the cure.

Of course, there are complications galore, some of the most theologically difficult pertaining to the relationship between justification and sanctification (two important elements in the Christian understanding of salvation). But I want to sidestep these complications to make a general point, which is this: There are different ways of developing and interpreting Christian teachings, including teachings about sin and grace. And these alternatives need to be assessed on their own terms.

Some, for example, think that salvation comes from accepting the truth of certain doctrines about Jesus, or from accepting the inerrancy of the Bible. I’m suspicious of all such views for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are pragmatic. If salvation comes from accepting the truth of particular religious teachings, then we should expect that those who strive diligently to believe the relevant teachings will lead lives that are discernibly better, in a moral sense, than are the lives of those who do not. But in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, this isn’t what I observe. Instead, it seems to me that there are people from a diversity of religions who exhibit what I would call “saintliness,” and that across religions there are doctrinal devotees who are as far from saintliness as one could imagine. And this constitutes a pragmatic reason to be skeptical of the idea that doctrinal commitment as such offers any kind of real salvation from the power of sin.

My own understanding of Christian theology is a roughly Lutheran one: salvation comes, not from anything that I do or believe, but from what a benevolent God does on the basis of unconditional love. In Luther’s language, our salvation comes from divine grace (mediated through Christ's work on the cross--but addressing that issue is something I will need to explore in a later post). On this view, our salvation is not something that is in our power. What is in our power is whether we block the influence of divine grace or open ourselves up to it. And one of the chief ways that we block its influence is by insisting on earning salvation for ourselves—or, stated in more secular terms, by clinging to the idea that our happiness can and should be earned by our own efforts. The idea here is that we have a right to be happy only if we’re good enough, and the responsibility for being “good enough” must rest with us.

According to Lutheran theology, this “works righteousness” is a recipe for beating ourselves up for our inevitable failures and shortcomings—or worse, for hiding from and denying our failures and shortcomings, since we can’t face them honestly without believing that we deserve only misery. In other words, works righteousness is a pathway either to false self-righteousness or to self-loathing. But more profoundly, it stands in the way of the only real pathway to salvation from the effects of sin: opening ourselves to the transforming power of a transcendent benevolence.

So, how do we pragmatically assess this version of Christian theology, which I will call the theology of grace? The difficulty here is that, while some Christians interpret their faith in this way and internalize it, others in the very same congregations are mouthing platitudes from the pews without giving them any real thought, while still others are so deeply habituated into works righteousness that they twist and distort the theology of grace even as they espouse it, turning it into another species of works righteousness.

So how do we make sure, when we try to pragmatically assess the value of a theology of grace, that we adequately distinguish those who really embrace such a theology from those who embrace something that resembles it only in the most superficial way?

Put simply, how do we make sure that our pragmatic assessment is focused on those who really are striving to put their trust in a benevolent higher power that can work through us and in us to help us overcome bad habits and impulses we just can’t seem to resist by ourselves?

My suggestion is this: we should look, not at the church down the road, but at our local meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But for a detailed discussion of the religious significance of AA, I must hold off for a later post.

Objectivity and the Longings of the Soul

A commentator on my last post, Tom Clark, nicely expresses in his own words the same “ethical view” about our epistemic duties expressed by Charles Taylor (a view that Taylor, by the way, does not share). The view is roughly this: Since Christians (and, I presume, other religious believers) are forming beliefs about the way reality is, it is imperative that they do so with a dedication to making sure that they aren’t influenced by anything but the evidence—and certainly not by their desires.

In Clark’s words, “If you’re interested in getting a maximally unbiased, objective view on reality, then you should take all possible steps to insulate your knowledge claims from the influence of your hopes, longings, etc. Since Christianity presents itself as an objective worldview, one that makes claims about what really exists (e.g., god), its followers should…seek to ‘avoid at all cost the risk of being duped by an alluring illusion.’”

This is a compelling view, one to which many are drawn. It is one of the two basic schemes of thinking that William James identifies as vying for our allegiance. But there are complicating factors.

One such complicating factor has to do with the distinction between knowledge claims and other sorts of affirmations of belief. It is always dangerous to claim knowledge where what one has is something else. This is what happens, I think, in the case of fanatical religion. But not all religion is fanatical. Religious belief needn’t adopt false pretensions of knowledge where one’s belief is really a kind of pragmatic decision to live one’s life as if a hoped-for possibility is true (which is what I and many others mean by “faith”). And there is a real question about whether the demand for “a maximally unbiased, objective view” that precludes being moved by your longings and hopes should prevail in every sphere of belief, even at the level of one’s meaning-bestowing worldview, even when it comes to belief that is explicitly identified as a matter of “faith,” not knowledge.

Another factor that complicates any simple picture of our epistemic responsibilities is concisely expressed by Taylor himself when he considers the two stances William James identifies as vying for our allegiance. In Taylor’s words: “Each stance creates in a sense a total environment, in the sense that whatever considerations occur in one appear transformed in the other. They can’t be appealed to in order to decide the issue, because as they pass from one stance to the other they bear a changed meaning that robs them of their force in the new environment.”

From the one stance, the deepest longings of the soul are treated as a dangerous temptation away from one’s “Cliffordian” epistemic duty (to believe only in accord with the evidence), whereas from the other stance they are treated as (again in Taylor’s words) “the hint that there is something important here which we need to explore further, that this exploration can lead us to something of vital significance, which would otherwise be closed to us.”

This religious-leaning stance is routinely viewed by those on the other side as displaying an unacceptable indifference to truth. But that is a mischaracterization on several levels. As James points out, there are two broadly epistemic goals that have to be in view when one is forming beliefs about the nature of reality: connecting with the truth, and avoiding error. And these two goals are to an important degree in tension with one another. An epistemic practice that tries to maximize the number of truths to which one gives one’s intellectual assent may also increase the number of falsehoods to which one assents. And an epistemic practice that tries to minimize assent to falsehood may also, in the process, shut off the possibility of assenting to whole classes of truth.

Every philosopher recognizes this trade off, and few are prepared to give the goal of error-avoidance absolute dominion in the epistemic sphere. After all, the consequence of doing so is a radical skepticism which we cannot really sustain when we get on with the business of living our lives. Likewise, few are willing to open the floodgates of complete credulity.

So the real question isn’t whether one or the other of these epistemic goals should rule the day. The question is really about what kind of balance we should pursue, and what belief-forming strategies are acceptable in the attempt to find that balance. James sees passion as playing an inevitable role in this decision, even for those who choose the strict regimen of pursuing “maximally unbiased” thinking by taking “all possible steps to insulate your knowledge claims from the influence of your hopes, longings, etc.” Ironically, what motivates this decision may be nothing more than a deep longing to avoid error, to escape the risk of living under a false picture of the world. All other longings are sacrificed to this singular one.

My own view is that there isn’t one belief-forming strategy that should be required of all of us on the basis of some a priori considerations. My own inclination here is more democratic and experimental. We should afford space for people to live out different alternatives to see how well they work.

Now in the sphere of scientific inquiry, it seems pretty obvious that a certain strategy of inquiry, one that is error-averse and seeks to insulate the process of inquiry from the inquirer’s desires, has proved extremely effective in advancing human understanding of the empirical world. In fact, the success of science is so obvious to any who aren’t blinkered by ideology that within its sphere of inquiry we can rightly say that it has proved itself.

But it doesn’t follow that this same scientific strategy should be transferred to spheres of human belief formation which in principle lie outside the limits of science. When it comes to meaning-bestowing beliefs about the transcendent, or what might be more simply called “religious beliefs,” the scientific approach would dictate a kind of silence, that is, a refusal to form any beliefs at all (which for practical purposes would amount to disbelief).

And it is here that James’ thinking once again becomes salient. As James puts it, “I… cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules of truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for the plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”

The conclusion here is a wholly negative one: the rules of belief formation exemplified by science should not be relied upon when it comes to religious beliefs. What this negative conclusion opens up is a question: What rules, then, should we follow?

Some strategies have been tried and, in my judgment, have proven themselves to be abject failures in the field of human experience. One such failed strategy is the idea that religious questions are best settled by blind allegiance to the literal meaning of some purported revelatory text or central authority. That some still cling to this strategy is, in my view, more troublesome than the fact that some cling in the religious sphere to what James calls “the agnostic rules of truth-seeking.”

So what are we to do? I don’t think we will arrive at the best strategy through some a priori principles. Instead, I think we will do so through a spirit of democratic experimentation. People should be free to live out alternative strategies for forming their religious beliefs. That is, we should establish a secular society in which freedom of religion is guaranteed within certain parameters (parameters that have themselves been arrived at through social experimentation, and have been found to keep the more dangerous experiments from getting out of hand).

In my own life, I’ve found a roughly Hegelian approach to be the most compelling. It is an approach that might be called “critical traditionalism”: live out an inherited worldview to see how well it works, and revise it when it crashes up against lived experience; then live out the revised worldview to see how well it works, etc.

And when deciding which worldview to adopt in this critical way, I don’t think you can do better than to choose the one that sings to you, that resonates most with who you are and with the deepest longings of your soul. Only such a worldview will hold your interest and passion enough to enable you to really live it out, and hence really discover the merits and limitations of doing so.

While this line of thinking is all I want to develop for the moment, I do want to stress that I haven’t developed in the above reflections a stream of argument beautifully advanced by Hermann Lotze, and powerfully summarized in the introduction to his magnum opus, the Microcosmus. Lotze challenges with distinctive eloquence the view that, in the overarching business of living a human life (as opposed to, say, the more narrow business of scientific or academic inquiry) we should set aside our deepest longings in favor of a strict regimen of avoiding being duped. To do so amounts to sacrificing all that is most important in one’s life to the altar of objectivity—and while objectivity is an important value that needs to be afforded its place, it is hardly the only value. The question of how these diverse values should play out in the business of shaping our view of life, and hence how we live, is one that cannot and should not be answered too hastily, or without due attention to the many voices—including religious ones—that have something of significance to say.

Naturalist vs. Supernaturalist: Identifying the Chief Points of Contention

Last week I posted John Shook’s reply to my “Evaluating the Unfalsifiable” post, along with a few general comments about it. But it seems to me that for the sake of a more careful discussion, it might help to lay out the core of Shook’s argument more formally. What I present in this post is, first, my attempt to lay out his main line of argument as fairly and accurately as I can; second, an identification and brief discussion of the premises with which I (and, I suspect, other religiously inclined philosophers) disagree; and third, a reflection on what I ultimately suspect will be the most likely outcome of serious philosophical reflection on the choice between naturalism and supernaturalism. I begin, then, with a kind of formalization of Shook’s argument:

1. Supernaturalism will either be a vague assertion that there is “something more,” or it will involve specific beliefs about the supernatural, that is, endorsement of a particular religious creed.
2. Supernaturalism that is a vague assertion that there is “something more” is what Shook calls “Theology in the Dark,” and such supernaturalism is vacuous and hence unacceptable.
3. So, a substantive supernaturalism will have to involve specific beliefs about the supernatural—that is, endorsement of a particular religious creed.
4. Endorsement of a particular religious creed will require the supernaturalist to “explain away” the religious experiences of all those people (inevitably millions) who ascribe to a different religious creed.
5. If the supernaturalist is forced to explain away the religious experiences of all those who ascribe to a different religious creed, then the supernaturalist’s worldview has no real advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining religious experience.
6. So, supernaturalism has no real advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining religious experience.
7. While some species of naturalism have difficulty explaining the apparent objectivity of value experiences, Dewey’s pragmatic version of naturalism explains (rather than explains away) this apparent objectivity of values as well as any version of supernaturalism does (without smuggling in any assumptions about transcendent values).
8. If (7), then supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining human value experiences.
9. So, supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining human value experiences.
10. If supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of explaining either religious experience or value experiences, then it has no advantage in its capacity to explain human experience (hereafter, its explanatory power).
11. So, supernaturalism has no advantage over naturalism in terms of its explanatory power.
12. If the supernaturalist’s worldview has no advantage over naturalism in terms of its explanatory power, then the simpler worldview (the worldview that posits fewer theoretic entities) should be preferred.
13. Naturalism is simpler than supernaturalism.
14. Therefore, naturalism is preferable to supernaturalism

As a way of helping to isolate key points of contention between myself (and supernaturalists like me) and Shook (and naturalists like him), let me briefly identify the premises with which I disagree in this argument, along with what amounts to a very cursory sketch of the strategy I would pursue in challenging these premises.

First, I disagree with premise 2. While my own theology is more substantive that the vague supernaturalism of, say, many Unitarians, I do not think that this vague supernaturalism is wholly vacuous. Here, I would gesture to R.M. Hare’s idea of a “blik,” a kind of way of seeing or experiencing one’s life. I think that a vague supernaturalism constitutes a different blik than does naturalism, one that has an impact on the overall character of one’s lived experience. It grounds a way of life characterized by spiritual practices that seek to open the individual to a relational connection with this vague “something more.” These practices frequently culminate in “mystical” experiences (of varying degrees of intensity) that feel like the attainment of such a relational connection—and these experiences in turn have impact on the life of the individual, especially in terms of mood (they tend to elevate mood), outlook (they tend to promote optimism), and character (they tend to lead to less self-centeredness).

Second, I disagree with premise 4, for reasons along the same general lines as those mentioned by John Kronen in his posted comments to Shook’s argument. Basically, there is a difference between experience and its interpretation. Much of the disagreement among the great world religions occurs at the level of interpretation (and to a great extent, also, at the level of doctrinal teachings that have little connection with experience). Admittedly, the distinction here is muddier than it sounds, and some careful philosophical work needs to be done to fully develop this line of thought. There are many good thinkers who have done some of that work. Schleiermacher is one. William James is another. And there’s Walter Stace and R.C. Zaehner. More recently, we have John Hick. While these great thinkers have important differences and disagreements, they are all provocative, and their ideas and arguments are worth meditating on.

Third, there is premise 7. Now Shook has devoted a large portion of his career to interpreting and defending Dewey’s thought. And so if Shook says there’s something here worth examining carefully, we should take him seriously. And so, the other day, I tracked down my copy of Shook’s book, Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, and started looking through it. A few things became quickly clear to me. First, it will take a great deal of effort to figure out exactly what Dewey means, even with Shook’s guidance. Second, Dewey’s thought is both provocative and controversial. I am grateful that Dewey has devotees such as John Shook willing to devote their careers to advancing Dewey’s thought, just as I am grateful that Aquinas and Kant and Hegel have such devotees. I’m a bit saddened that some other truly great philosophers (such as Hermann Lotze) do not. But it also seems to me, in the case of all of these great thinkers, that there is both much to admire and much to criticize. What these philosophers are tackling is just too difficult to expect any one of them to have the final word. While I am grateful for John Shook’s devotion to Dewey, I don’t share it.

Finally, there is premise 12, which says that the simpler worldview should be preferred over the more complex one if the more complex one lacks any advantage in terms of explanatory power. Formulated in this way, the premise leaves out something that I’m sure Shook would not want to leave out—namely, pragmatic value. What should really be said here is that the simpler theory should be preferred all other things being equal, where “all other things” is taken to include both explanatory power and pragmatic value. But I also think that both explanatory power and pragmatic value should take precedence over simplicity. We turn to the question of simplicity only once explanatory power and pragmatic value have both been assessed and found to be comparable.

And this leads me to my final thoughts. My own view is that, in terms of explanatory power, we’re likely to find something of a standoff between the strongest species of supernaturalism and the best formulations of naturalism. In other words, the advantages of one will be offset by the advantages of the other in such a way that we are left with a kind of existential choice. This will be true not only when all is said and done (which will never happen), but also at whatever stage of personal or collective inquiry we find ourselves at.

What I mean is this: we are faced with a choice that ultimately cannot be made on the grounds that one worldview is clearly preferable to the other in terms of its rational fit with experience. All surviving contenders will require us to make sacrifices (in terms of “explaining away” elements of experience) to roughly the same degree. And so we will have to decide which sacrifices we can live with, and which we can’t.

Some will likely view this existential choice in the manner expressed by Hermann Lotze in a passage which follows his efforts to show that there cannot be “any real speculative proof for the correctness of the religious feeling upon which rests our faith in a good and holy God, and in the destination of the world to the attainment of a blessed end.” Lotze, in considering what to do on the basis of this conclusion, says the following:

“He who does not share this religious conviction may…very easily from a speculative point of view reach that Pessimism, which is just now the order of the day, and for which there will be on speculative grounds no refutation. But this Pessimism, which reverts to the thought of an original energy without will, that produces the Good and the Bad alike without design, is not a profound view but is just that cheap and superficial kind of view, by which all enigmas are conveniently disposed of—by simply sacrificing all that is most essential and supreme to the unprejudiced mind.”

Others will likely view the same existential choice in terms of the distinctive ethical perspective nicely summarized by Charles Taylor in his masterful (and masterfully brief) discussion of James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book called Varieties of Religion Today. Taylor describes the ethical perspective as follows:

“…it is wrong, uncourageous, unmanly, a kind of self-indulgent cheating, to have recourse to this kind of interpretation (a supernatural or religious interpretation of one’s experience), which we know appeals to something in us, offers comfort, or meaning, and which we therefore should fend off, unless absolutely driven to them by the evidence, which is manifestly not the case.”

This is the kind of ethical standpoint so powerfully voiced by Walter Stace in “Man Against Darkness,” and by Bertrand Russell when he said, in reply to someone who asked how to face mortality given his philosophy, that we should face it “with confident despair.”

In short, we are faced with an essentially pragmatic choice. Do we choose to be the kind of people who avoid at all cost the risk of being duped by an alluring illusion, and who forge ahead in life like those mountain men of old to test their mettle against an indifferent world? Or do we choose to be the kind of people who live in the hope that there is truth in the religious inkling, the feeling that something greater and more wonderful lies beyond the horizons of experience, making itself felt most clearly in the deepest longings of our souls?

On a fundamental level, I think this is the perspective sketched out by William James in his works on religion. And so I consider myself, at least in this respect, a Jamesian. The process for evaluating worldviews which I’ve sketched out is a necessary first step towards settling on a worldview, but its function is this: to identify the viable contenders.

I think it unlikely that this process will ever winnow down the contenders to just one. And I also think it unlikely that it will winnow down the contenders to just one kind (natural or supernatural). But when faced with this general choice between natural and supernatural worldviews, I don’t think the choice will ever be judged to be a pragmatically neutral one. And so deciding between naturalism and supernaturalism on the basis of simplicity doesn’t strike me as the appropriate move—unless simplicity has first been invested with pragmatic significance, and in a Jamesian way allegiance to the ideal of simplicity has been adopted over against alternative ideals.

In the end, the choice between naturalism and supernaturalism will be a Jamesian one. If Shook and others want to call this step “faith,” I have no objection. But I would resist having it called blind or irrational.

Pragmatic Implications of Belief in Hell

I have on my office door a Dilbert cartoon in which one character asks another, “What happens to the four billion people who don’t know that God loves all his children?”

The answer, of course, is this: “Eternal hell.”

The cartoon always makes me chuckle, but the joke has a bitter taste to it. My laughter isn't of a happy kind. In large part this is because there is so much truth to the cartoon's take-home message.

In most conservative expressions of the Christian view of God, we are told that God’s love is a perfect love that is unconditional, that does not wait on worth but wills the good of creatures for their own sakes…and in almost the same breath we’re informed that the most astonishing horror imaginable is an inextricable part of God’s ultimate plan: those who do not place their trust in this God of unconditional love are fated for the abyss, where they endure a degree of horror that trivializes the suffering of the mother who is raped by a host of enemy soldiers and then forced to watch as her children are killed. While her horror is incalculable for those of us who have not endured its like, it is also finite. But the sufferings of hell, in addition to being the very worst that our souls are capable of containing, also have no end. It is as if we are caught in that moment of utmost horror and never released. This is what God either inflicts (on the older view of hell) or permits (according to the more modern view).

Much ink has been spilled attempting to reconcile this doctrine of hell with a God of unconditional love and boundless mercy. Some very great minds have argued that some kind of doctrine of limited salvation is an unavoidable implication of taking human freedom seriously. It is argued that part of what characterizes divine love is a deep respect for human free agency that does not only extend to our ability to make choices for ourselves, but extends also to our potential to really have what we have chosen to have and achieve what we have chosen to achieve—even when the fruits of our choices are bitter indeed.

Defenders of hell argue that since some persons freely choose to exist in alienation from God, God leaves them to the abominable fruits of that choice. He does so out of respect for their autonomy, which is a dimension of his love. And he does so even though this choice amounts to alienation from what (given Christian theology) is the source of all that is good, all that can give satisfaction to life, and all that can make continued existence anything but utter darkness and despair.

Other defenders of eternal hell argue that it is in some sense impossible for God to interfere with our free choices on this matter, since our freedom is constitutive of who we are in such a deep way that to override our freedom with respect to something so fundamental amounts to our annihilation. God must, in effect, choose between annihilating the damned or allowing them to suffer utmost anguish for all eternity. The only choice unavailable to him is to save them.

I have written extensively against the doctrine of eternal hell, and most of my thinking has focused on the attempts to defend hell by appeal to human freedom. My basic view, in its most oversimplified form, is that no free creature would persist for eternity in rejecting the source of all that is good and satisfying, especially not after experiencing what such a choice is like and thereby coming to see the foolishness of such a choice in its most vivid possible terms. And so, even if God is committed to respecting our freedom, everyone will experience salvation in the end, even if some may have to go through hell to get there.

But recently, I’ve been thinking about the doctrine of hell in a different way. Instead of challenging the arguments in favor of this doctrine, I’ve been thinking about its pragmatic implications for this life.

Any doctrine of eternal damnation, no matter how defensible from an abstract theoretical standpoint, draws as sharp a line between human beings as it is possible to draw—human souls divided by an unbridgeable gulf, on one side the beatific vision, on the other the outer darkness. And even if that divide is held to exist in some eternal realm beyond the strictures of space and time and physical law, it nevertheless cannot help but press its stamp on this mortal existence.

And so this doctrine of separation and division infects the perspective from which its adherents see the human world. How can I embrace this teaching without seeing in each of my fellow human beings their prospects for damnation or salvation? Given that their eternal destiny has a significance in the arc of their existence far more profound than anything that might define their mortal life, how can I refrain from seeing them in terms of that destiny?

The mortal world, then, cannot help but become divided by the imprint of that eternal gulf. And this will be true even if we are reminded about our own inability to judge on which side those around us will fall. We cannot say with confidence who will be saved and who will be damned. But that doesn’t stop us from having our guesses, even our private certainties. Few of us will be so brazen as Fred Phelps—who, with his congregation of relatives, pickets the funerals of gays and lesbians with signs celebrating the fact that another fag is burning in hell. But how easy is it to avoid more quiet acts of pigeon-holing, in which we separate out those whom we just know are doomed from those we’re sure will join us in paradise? As we quietly think of us-the-saved and them-the-damned, and even more quietly locate human beings into one group or the other, it may become impossible to keep the ultimate in-group/out-group division from creating its shadow divisions in this world and this life.

If we believe in eternal damnation, it may be that the psychological costs of resisting such terrestrial divisions are too great to bear. As Schleiermacher argued some two hundred years ago, compassion for the damned is a recipe for pain. To love those who suffer requires attention and empathy—and to pay attention to the sufferings of the damned, and to empathize, is to experience in one’s own soul the most extreme horror that it is possible to endure. To love the damned is therefore to court vicarious torment.

As a father I love my children, and I know the ache I feel when they’re hurt. In recent articles, Thomas Talbott has invited us to imagine what such parental love would feel at the prospect—or the certainty—of one’s child’s damnation. He argues—and I have defended his argument on this point—that no parent who truly loves a damned child can ever experience the unvarnished joy of salvation.

The doctrine of limited salvation therefore cannot help but serve as an impediment to compassion. To truly love those who are doomed, to love them as a good parent loves his or her child (or as Christ was said to love every person), is to forsake the prospect of perfect happiness. It is to put one foot deliberately into hell. And so we create in-groups and out-groups as a form of self-protection, and limit the fullness of our love and compassion to those within our carefully demarcated circle.

The doctrine of hell thus quite naturally gives rise to limitations on the scope of our love. Out of self-protection, we are afraid to get too close, to feel too much compassion and empathy, for those who are slated for unending agony of the very worst conceivable kind.

And the very doctrine of uncertainty that is supposed to guard against this tendency actually worsens it. Since we cannot know the inner hearts of our neighbors and thereby see what fate they court, we are tempted to base our judgment instead on visible markers that we then invest with artificial significance. We protect ourselves from the fear of losing those we love to the abyss by identifying the damned with those who are already outside our circle of loves: the alien, the foreigner, the man or woman who is divided from us by existing social discrimination and stratification.

Instead of breaking down barriers, instead of creating a world in which there is neither male nor female, rich nor poor, slave nor free, the doctrine of hell threatens to reinforce all the conventional barriers that are already in place. Because of existing social realities that divide us, we grow up in a world where our circle of intimacy leaves out those who are not of our class, our race, our nationality or ethnicity or religion. And so it becomes safe to adopt a worldview according to which these outsiders are the ones who are damned.

After all, if its those OTHER people who are damned, the ones we don’t know and love, we needn’t worry about our compassion fundamentally compromising our own salvation.

In short, I think that the doctrine of hell, from a pragmatic point of view, narrows the scope of human love and reinforces patterns of compassion that are artificially narrowed. And so this doctrine is pragmatically at odds with any ethic that calls us to love every rational creature here below.

Food for Thought from a Philosopher with a Contrasting Perspective

My previous post, “Sniffing Around Amidst the Soccer Match,” was inspired by a recent e-mail exchange with my good friend John Shook, who is a Vice President at the Center for Inquiry (a kind of secular humanist think tank). John expresses his frustration with much contemporary Christian theology in the following message, which I share in its entirety with his permission:

Good luck Eric on your new blog! And have some sympathy for the atheist.
Christianity is nowadays so diffuse theologically that an atheist feels like
he's darting arrows into fog. Christian theology was supposed to elevate
personal religious conviction to the level of rationally defendable knowledge.
The Enlightenment severely challenged traditional theology, and provoked a
counter-enlightenment. That's actually the story behind the eruption of
non-rational "theologies" in the 1800s. Natural theology was going nowhere,
metaphysics was out-philosophizing the theologians, and science was displaying
incredible promise. Dodging strategies (amounting to a retreat) back to
emotion/mystery/dogma seemed the only option. Christianity theology has now
mutated into two kinds of "Fideism" (just believe, baby!) -- fundamentalism and
mysterianism. Fundamentalists cling to their scriptural dogmas and accuse the
atheists of clinging to their own scientific dogmas. Mysterians ensure that
their conception of god is so vague and non-intellectual that no actual evidence
could ever be used against it. For example, "My God always has a great reason
for killing people in horrible ways, but we just can't tell what it is." As
another example, "My God is the ultimate formless ground of all being in and for
itself (or "My God is pure Love", or "My God is this big presence with me all
the time", etc), so the atheist's worries can't ever count against my God's
existence."

Fideism was highly convenient for Christians, since
their next tactic was to depict the atheist as dogmatically trying to prove that
their God doesn't exist. The atheist's prompt failure (since God is now safe
behind a bluff of dogma or hidden in a fog of mystery) was declared
supernaturalism's victory. As soon as "agnosticism" was invented, fideists
promply agreed -- human reason cannot reach their God! In other words, once
agnosticism seemed more reasonable than dogmatic atheism, fideism followed suit
and upped the ante -- since you can't prove that my god doesn't exist, then my
belief is just fine and leave me alone. That's all I ever extracted from William
Lane Craig in the end (see my debate with him on Youtube). Quite forgotten in
this debate is the atheist's real position of skepticism towards religion, not
because the atheist can prove that God doesn't exist, but simply because there's
insufficient good reason to believe that God does exist. When fideism replies by
pointing out that the essence of Christianity all along was faith without
reason, the atheist and the fideist reach one thing that they can agree
on.

Alternatively, there's always the pragmatic approach for
atheism: look at what Christians actually do, and critique their religious
beliefs accordingly. Unfortunately, that tactic is going to fail too. Try
confronting a Christian with that problem. It turns out that it is always the
bad Christians doing the bad things (or they really weren't Christians at all).
"My Christianity only leads to good behavior, while my sinning side does the bad
deed." Very convenient how Christianity ensures that we are already such bad
sinners that no bad behavior at all need ever be attributed to a Christian
belief. And criticism of God's bad behavior and immoral commands is just
irrelevant for the typical Christian, who doesn't take the irritable and
murderous bearded guy in the Old Testament too seriously
anyways.

Maybe skeptical atheism can help purify the Christian's
religion, back into a purely personal conviction. Current Christian theologies
spin the fideistic dodges as positively as possible, of course. That's the
biggest problem the skeptical atheist has with such theologies: they abandon
reason and encourage anti-intellectualism among their followers, who can't
understand what the new theologies are saying anyways. Who among the laypeople
can understand Schopenhauer or Heidegger or Tillich?? Seems to me that
theologians with their heads in the clouds should take more responsibility for
the fact that a majority of Americans can't believe Darwinian evolution. Who is
holding this country back from progress? It is NOT the atheists!

Obviously, my previous post only begins to touch on the issues John raises here, many of which deserve careful and serious attention (for those interested in a deeper look at John’s thinking, his website is http://shook.pragmatism.org). Among other things, I think John is right about the (ab)use to which the doctrine of original sin has been put, as a strategy for fending off pragmatic criticisms of Christianity. As my “Angry Atheism and True Faith” post makes clear, I strongly believe in the idea that religion should be subjected to pragmatic tests and evaluated in terms of such tests. Any way of formulating the doctrine of original sin which seeks to immunize someone’s religious beliefs from such tests should be viewed with skepticism.

This will be a topic for a future post, as will a discussion of the kind of responsibility theologians have for the anti-intellectualism of many religious people today (and what can be done about it). But first, I must get to that stack of papers I need to grade…