Territory
Stewart notes that a phrase in that Boston Globe article stands out.
Provocatively, Ruse argues that evolutionism has often constituted a ”religion” itself by offering ”a world picture, a story of origins, and a special place for humans,” while its proponents have been ”trying deliberately to do better than Christianity.”
Okay – and why not? Why not try to do better than Christianity? What does Christianity do well? What does it do better than anything else can? Is it even possible to decide or know that? On what grounds?
The one possibility I can think of is consolation. Religion – or Christianity, if you prefer – can do that better of its nature (as opposed to contingently, sociologically, because people already think it can, assume it can, have been told it can) because it is based on consoling fictions. That is the point – it is the fiction that is consoling. Without the fiction, there is no consolation, or it is much less effective. Personal immortality, heaven and reunion, a god who takes care of us. Other kinds of fictions on the whole don’t work that way because they’re not believed in the same way – they are recognized as fictions (except in the case of e.g. New Age, Wicca and the like, but in that case they are functioning as religions). There are two essential ingredients: belief (so novels don’t do it) and fictions (so philosophy and reflection don’t console in this particular way). Religion can console for those who believe it.
But what else? Motivation and commitment are often mentioned – and religion can work that way – but it has no monopoly there. Ideals, political hopes, loyalties, aspirations, dreams – many things can provide and strengthen motivation and commitment.
And there is nothing else. This gets to that overlapping magisteria nonsense that Steve Gould (in Ruseian vein) talked about – that ‘all is well if each sticks to its own territory’ idea. But religion doesn’t have a territory. It has no expertise – no expertise that is unique to religion rather than being held in common with other fields, as when bishops talk about ethics in ways that are obviously thoroughly influenced by contemporary, changing, secular ideas. There is no ‘special’ religious morality that’s different from secular morality. There are some ‘special’ religious rules and taboos, but they either find secular justification, or get widely and rightly ignored.
Some people like to claim that religion has a monopoly on ‘meaning.’ Well…there are two choices. Either that meaning relies on the same fictions that consolation relies on (the loving god, the afterlife), in which case religion does have a monopoly on that, but, again, on condition of believing fictions; or it doesn’t, it just relies on what we all rely on by way of meaning, in which case there is no monopoly.
We ought to draw up a little map of religious monopoly. There would be a blue patch for consolation and a purple patch for fiction-derived ‘meaning’ – and all the rest is open country.
In short the only territory religion gets to fence off and declare its own and off-limits is the fiction-illusion-supernatural-metaphysical area. If that aspect is not in play, then it has no special ‘religious’ expertise or authority or right to say hands off go away get out, at all.
YES! Couldn’t agree more. Religion is only seen to have a monopoly on meaning because it is based on the fiction that the meaning is OUT THERE, in the universe, built-in as it were. The hard work of MAKING meaning of our lives and our world is too much for those who prefer pleasant fictions. Carl Sagan said it especially well: “It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
For my part, though, I don’t really think religion deserves a monopoly on consolation either. After all, when I look around at the universe as it really is, at “Nature, red in tooth and claw” as it were, I’m really quite consoled to realize that there is no malevolent intellect behind all the suffering. That’s just the way it is. No one’s doing this deliberately – which is really far too horrible to contemplate.
I saw Ruse give a talk yesterday. I was going to blog about it, and funnily enough I was almost coming the other way – that he came across as too kneejerk Darwinian, too uncomfortable with non-selectionist explanations. Interesting that he can end up shot by both sides! I’ll let you know if I post anything substantive (it won’t really be speaking to the religion issue, so just idle interest).
BTW MacDonald is damnably good. I had to force myself to stop reading so I could read some actual culture – he got me in the mood so. Problem is, the actual culture I picked isn’t as entertaining as he is…
“I’m really quite consoled to realize that there is no malevolent intellect behind all the suffering.”
Yes, that’s true. That we’re not living in a cosmic North Korea, as Hitchens likes to put it. That was the point Dawkins tried to make about the tsunami – only to get jumped on for being adolescently hostile to religion.
But, still – I think religion does have a monopoly on a certain kind of consolation, for those people for whom it works. At least, it’s not a consolation that naturalists can offer. That’s why one really doesn’t want to give atheist lectures at funerals.
That is interesting, Alex. (Did I know you had a blog?? Have you told me forty times? If so I forgot.)
Yeah isn’t Macdonald good! Really glad you like him.
Not that it really helps us a lot, but it may not hurt to be aware of the possibility that one of the reasons atheism and its bedfellows (easier than making a list of secularism, rationalism, humanism etc.) garners so much hostility, rather than dismissal, from those outwardly secure in their faith is that we threaten to rob them of perhaps their most cherished possession: the belief that death is not really, really, really the absolute end. I’m looking at it not from the standpoint of organised religions whose dogma may state that unbelievers are evil or Satanic or what have you, but from the very human perspective of a frightened individual whose fear is kept in check by grasping at the straw of extinction never being quite total. It may well be easier to just hate someone who says it ain’t so (or points out the lack of evidence for it being so) than to dare entertain the possibility that it really is as simple as “nothing is on its way and when it arrives it’s here to stay.”
Alex,
If you do blog on Ruse, please do let us know. Thanks.
The blog is at http://farmerversusfox.blogspot.com/
If you take hyperlinks it’s here.
The front page post is currently on the first speaker at the symposium I attended Wednesday, the distinguished philosopher of biology David Hull. Further downstream are links to cartoons about creationism and atheism.
I (almost) promise that by the weekend I will have a post up on Ruse – it won’t be the most systematic, as I’m currently swamped, but it will be something. I’ll say so here when I do
Ruseblogging as promised.
Ruse’s book “Can a Darwinian Be a Christian” gives some insight into his views. Part of the problem is that he’s a little slippery on the definition of religion. The closest he comes to defining it is his statement, on page 33, that “Christianity is a religion, something which claims to explain ultimate reality and the role of humans therein. It is something with a social structure, and it lays moral prescriptions upon its members, with offers of reward and (particularly in the past) threats of punishment.”
That’s a bit vague, to say the least. But for me, the key issue is Ruse’s statement that religion “claims to explain ultimate reality.” It seems that Ruse feels an obligation to take this claim seriously, and tries to show that the model of reality presented by Christian religion is essentially compatible with the world presented by modern science. But anyone can make a claim about anything, and then “confirm” it by selectively hunting for the right kinds of evidence. Ruse simply picks and chooses his evidence to fit the pre-ordained conclusion that religion is a viable way of viewing the world.
To really take the claims of religion seriously, Ruse would need to subject them to the kinds of scrutiny warranted by other truth claims. He’s need to do what Taner Edis does in “Ghost in the Universe” – ask what kind of evidence would specifically support the idea that a benevolent God created the world, and then do his best job reviewing the evidence. He needs to honestly confront the fact that Darwinism, the Copernican revolution, cosmology, cognitive neuroscience, geology and many other branches of science have cumulatively overthrown every important tenet of the theistic worldview. Ruse never really addresses the issue, and never addresses the question of how non-Christian religions square with modern science, or how to choose among the competing truth claims of different religions. For these reasons, Ruse’s book is just an exercise in wishful thinking.
Phil
‘But for me, the key issue is Ruse’s statement that religion “claims to explain ultimate reality.”…But anyone can make a claim about anything,’
Exactly. I made exactly that argument against exactly that phrase – he must have repeated it in an article or interview, because I haven’t read that book either – when I first started this nagging argument with Ruse, a longish time ago. Of course religion ‘claims’ to explain – so does Sylvia Browne. It’s like (as I probably said in that other argument) what Hal says to Hotspur’s announcement that he can call spirits from the vasty deep – ‘why so can I, so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?’
In fact religion’s ‘claim’ to explain is not deserving of more respect than other claims, but much less, because it doesn’t do the work of inquiry.