The fundamental question of the truth
Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse have doubts about Mary Warnock’s way of defending the social value of religious belief.
According to religious believers, their beliefs are not merely useful social instruments or efficient means for instilling good moral habits. They are rather commitments to very particular metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological views. These views provide the basis for the moral and communal practices among religious believers that Warnock finds socially valuable. But the social value of the practices provides no defense for the underlying views, all of which are, we contend, false. No discussion of the merits of religious practices and institutions should be permitted to evade the fundamental question of the truth of distinctively religious claims.
That is what I too think also likewise. I think that is one of the things that separate me and other gnus from the “be nice to religion” crowd. They are very concerned with political, instrumental matters like unity, cohesion, community, universal affection, sensitivity, solidarity, outreach, mutual understanding, and avoiding the remotest possibility of offending anyone by disputing an idea. We are more concerned with trying to think clearly and honestly about particular metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological views. Their concerns are more social or political, ours are more epistemological. This makes a difference.
To repurpose a fine old feminist slogan: The epistemological IS political!
Or, to borrow a not as old, but no less fine turn of phrase that has some connection to this blog: Truth matters!
I honestly don’t feel any need to explain either slogan, and I find those who dismiss the fundamental importance of the message underlying both slogans both baffling and infuriating.
Yeah.
They’re all “Can’t we all just get along?” and we’re all “It’s not about whether we can all get along” and so we don’t get along.
It seems to me that a lot of social and political problems fall quite naturally out of a lack of concern for the epistemological problems. If they don’t burn witches anymore, it’s only because they stopped believing in them. I just don’t feel comfortable not being able to use “there are no witches” as part of a social and political case against burning witches.
Yes, truth matters (that might even make a great title for a book!)
Actually, I suspect a fair number of religionists are, in fact, about the good moral habits, and if asked either wouldn’t know or much care about creedal matters (a lot of my former United Church brethren seem to be of this type). That’s one thing that strikes me about this gnu/accommodationist argument: for any type of religion you care to name — vicious fundamentalism, squishy-cuddly liberalism, smells & bells ceremonialism, etc, etc — you can probably find some group of adherents that fits it. Which makes it difficult to talk about sometimes, because most statements of the form “Religion is X” turn out to have significant exceptions.
None which means we shouldn’t be asking: “Yes, but is it true?”. Just be aware that that’s going to get you blank looks from a certain subset of believers (because strictly speaking, they aren’t).
Also doesn’t mean we can’t get along with people with whom we may otherwise share a good number of practical goals. Adults are aware that disagreements range on a spectrum from “Fight to the death” to “Friendly argument over a pint or three”.
Those criticisms are on the mark. What struck me on reading Warnock’s in many ways good and interesting book was the acquiescence in the importance of religion at the end, and, since it is the arts that interest me, her giving – or at the time it seemed to me (I read my sister’s copy while in England) – an importance to devotional art that was greater than that she gave to art that was not overtly religious or religious at all. I’ve been meaning to get the book, and write about her attititude to religious art, because it epitomises a broader belief in the special value of religious art.
Exacly right. There is only one question that matters:
“But it is true?”
Answer that, and then we can talk about tone.
I think most Gnu Atheists apply this standard to not just religion, but to every single topic ever.
Yahzi said:
That is why I am reluctant to describe gnu atheism as a specific category onto itself. To me it has always been a subsection of the larger scientific skepticism movement.
By the way, once one allows that truth claims are only minor aspects, compared to the overall benefits of religious practice to society as a whole, one is heading down a dangerous path. You have essentially admitted that the ends justify the means – and when dealing with religion you are dealing with individuals who believe that the ends are never going to be apparent in the natural world. The means, no matter how terrible, can never compare to eternity in hell and thus literally anything may be justifiable in their worldview (just read William Lane Craig). Without the safety net of truth and evidence we have no protection against these dangers.
Accommodationists seem to identify more with the culture they’ve grown up in, rather than having a sense of separation from that culture. I think that is the difference. Those who withdraw into the world of knowledge are discontented in some way, they have grown tired of the myths and fictions of the culture they’ve grown in, and turn instead to something better. They look for answers, and that sometimes becomes a meaning in of itself, a reason to live.
And I think for those of us atheists who now have many answers, we want to build a better culture, one which is healthier, more ethical, more truthful, one where we belong. And so we’re reaching out to fellow atheists as friends and associates, as possible material for the culture we really want.
Some atheists have been brought up in a culture of academic privilege, which they feel is also threatened by our more populist and egalitarian attitudes. They’d rather we were high brow or elitists, because they have never felt the discontent of ordinary life.
I do think it is a matter of identity rather than reason, hence why the arguments between gnus and accommodationists are a matter of which team do you support. Gnus see accommodationists as hindering their own goals of building a new culture, while accommodationists see gnus as hindering their goals of building bridges within the same culture.
The goals are similar, but more nuanced. Accommodationists don’t see the discontent, they don’t see what’s wrong with our cultures, they’re not interested in fixing it, rather they want to belong in it. And as such, our goals go beyond theirs.
It takes a lot of intellectual effort to get at the truth of things, where that is even possible. Rationality and scepticism are also required in heaping helpings. Life experience also helps to distinguish likelihood of truth from the ever-present probability of BS. And above all the ability to live with uncertainty. A lot of people aren’t going to have the tools or make the effort. As such I don’t want to build a better general culture because I don’t think we could do it. I can change my own culture and that’s about it. But I do want other people to respect my rights as they demand I respect theirs. That means, among other things, keep your dopey religion out of the public square and no discrimination against people who disagree with you. That’s about all we can hope for I think while a very gradual change takes place in broader society.
From my viewpoint, it’s also that manifestly, we can’t all just get along: expecting people who viciously attack fellow believers for believing differently (or being of a different club, perhaps) to be “okay, he’s a heretic because he thinks the Holy Ghost proceeds only from the Father, but you don’t believe in Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, and that’s fine” seems unrealistic. I can get along with some religious people, yes, but it’s not because of “interfaith” efforts, it’s because I do share some important values with those specific religious people.
Nor am I happy with being asked to “just get along” with people whose idea of interfaith outreach includes welcoming people who are actively trying to get people like me killed. An accommodationist atheist may not sit down with the Christians who are advocating murdering gay Ugandans; but are they checking that the people they do want to work with aren’t in turn sitting down with those murderers? I realize relationships aren’t transitive, but I’m not going out with someone who thinks it’s fine to go out with a rapist or murderer, even if their own hands are clean.
I would actually make that a slightly different question – slightly but significantly.
“But is there any good reason to think it’s true?”
That makes the question about our own care in drawing conclusions, which is up to us, as opposed to the truth of X, which isn’t always knowable, to put it mildly.
We don’t always know whether X is true or not. Broadly speaking, we usually don’t. We know most of what we know short of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and that itself is of course short of certainty.
Sometimes “but is that even true?” is the right question, for instance when it’s pretty obvious that it isn’t. But other times the right question is “do you know that?” or “how do you know that?” or “is there any good reason to think that’s true?”
I think Sigmund is dead right that this habit of mind is far from exclusive to atheism. On the other hand it is more of a gnu atheist question than an anti-gnu but atheist question – it’s not an accommodationist question. It’s where the accommodationists bid us farewell and get off the train. It’s what separates Us from Them. They’re pragmatists and we’re not; they’re instrumentalists and we’re not – not about epistemology we’re not.
I was thinking of JR’s reply in the comments to Coyne’s NCSE letter over at TFK. He claims there are theological arguments against creationism and, since they exist, it is fine for the NCSE to employ them. He mentions John Haught’s testimony at the Dover trial. Haught claimed at the trial that he could imagine a god who didn’t need to intervene in the world and this god was better than a god who did. Really, that was his argument.
As you say Ophelia, why didn’t anyone ask “But is there any good reason to think it’s true?”
I can imagine all kinds of things, but what good should that do me in court? If I were trying to prosecute someone for murder and I said I can imagine a scenario whereby the defendant committed the crime. You don’t think the defense attorney would ask for evidence backing that scenario? And if I replied that there is not only no evidence, but it is impossible to obtain the evidence….
This is an argument?
I don’t think you can separate the social and political from the epistemological. Once someone decides that revelation or tradition are more important than reason, there are going to be social and political consequences.
Michael – just so. People don’t develop a habit of asking if there’s any good reason to believe X. This needs to change.
Deen – you can distinguish though. The two interact, but that doesn’t mean they’re not different.
Ophelia,
I suspect Deen is thinking what I’m thinking—your original post is making a bit of a false contrast, with gnus caring about truth and accommodationists caring about politics. (The final paragraph sounds that way.)
Gnus vary significantly with respect to the weighting of those factors, but it seems pretty clear to me that most gnus care very much about both—we care whether things are true largely because we think that truth generally matters (in a positive way) socially and politically. The epistemological is political.
I don’t think that our primary differences with accommodationists are epistemological—I think they’re mainly matters of political strategy. (Overton vs. going along to get along.)
That said, those differences are often supported by differences of opinion about other issues—e.g., how confident we can be in telling the religious that their foundational views are wrong, how effective we can be in getting them to think more clearly, and so on.
But even there, there’s a big difference between the leading accommodationists and accommodationists generally, or their supporters—many of whom are politically liberal “moderate” theists, or muddled “agnostics” who think that “atheists” are mistaken to be “atheists” and arrogant to criticize religious people about mere “matters of opinion” about things that are “unknowable.”
The leading accommodationists don’t think that at all. They just promote that conveniently false view for their supporters.
For the leading accommodationists, the epistemological is entirely political.
I’m skeptical that any of the leading accommodationists disagree with us much about God and souls and supernaturalist morality, or even about how confident we are justified in being about those issues. I doubt Mooney, Nisbet, Scott, Ruse, Rosenau thinks substance dualism is at all tenable in light of modern science and basic philosophy, and I’m pretty sure they know that all popular religion is a house of cards built on that. (I’m even surer that philosophers like Kurtz, Baggini, Stangroom, and Pigluicci entirely agree.) I’d wager they’re all about as sure as most of us that there’s no God, no souls, no mystical ESP for Deep Truth, and no divine or supernatural basis for morality whatsoever—and about as sure as we are that that’s the rational view, and that distinctively religious views about such things are all irrational and false. Like gnus, the leading accommodationists generally range from 6.7 to 7.0 on the Dawkins scale. (And that conceals even greater agreement—like us, they’re all 6.9 or 7.0 about the sorts of “God” and “souls” and mystical “truth” that most “moderate” religious people believe in.)
Their main difference with us is that they very much don’t want to talk about that. They don’t want to admit that they not only agree with the New Atheists that supernaturalism is bunk, and that all popular religion is built on that basic falsity, but entirely agree that we can know that to a fair degree of certainty, and explain how we know it in a way that should prompt assent from thoughtful, rational people.
They prefer to systematically misrepresent those things, usually implicitly, by refusing to address the basic first-order substantive issues, and calling New Atheists arrogant and naive and philosophically and theologically unqualified and so forth, in a way that many other people will reliably misconstrue—they’ll wrongly think that the New Atheists don’t know what they’re talking about, and that reason does not threaten “reasonable” “moderate” religion, and that the New Atheists are militant kooks who’ve gone off the rational rails.
They know we haven’t gone off the rational rails, and that we’ve stayed on them in a politically inconvenient way, and gone off the reservation. (I think that’s a metaphor worth exploring… hmm… “the only good New Atheists is a discredited New Atheist”?)
They don’t disagree with us about science undermining all popular religion because they actually think it’s false—they disagree with us about it precisely because they know it’s true. They know full well that it’s the elephant in the room, which is not going to go away because it’s demonstrably true. That is why they are so dead-set on distracting and distorting, and smearing the New Atheists, rather than addressing what they’re actually saying and why they’re actually saying it.
Their political strategy knowingly depends on shooting the epistemological messenger.
Paul,
I mostly agree with you, but I feel I have to point out that Rosenau does not claim to be an atheist at all, and so might actually disagree with your points re: substance dualism, for example.
By the way, does anyone else find it hilarious that he describes himself “apathetic agnostic”? He’s so apathetic that he’s written millions of words on the subject over the past few years…
themann1086,
Rosenau might actually disagree, I admit, but if he claimed to disagree, I wouldn’t believe him. It’s just too obvious why he’d find “apathetic agnostic” a convenient stance, politically. (He makes no secret of the fact that having politically defensible stances is overwhelmingly important to his projects.)
Rosenau might have been an apathetic agnostic at some point in the past, and publicly stuck to that position, but it’s very hard for me to believe that he’s one now. Presumably he knows better by now.
If he actually thought there were good reasons for being an apathetic agnostic, and that he could refute the seemingly good reasons for being a scientific materialist atheist like the rest of us—gnus and leading accommodationists alike—I’d expect him to share them. They’d be too politically valuable to him to go unsaid.
I don’t think he has such reasons, and I think he’s smart enough and informed enough to know it. He’s obviously not actually apathetic about the subject—even if he doesn’t have a personal interest in whether there’s a god or not, he has a clear professional interest in whether there are actually any good arguments why belief in God is reasonable in light of science.
Given the obvious importance of such arguments to things he says all the time, for years on end, it’s a real stretch to imagine he simply doesn’t know or care. (Hilarious, even.)
—
(The following is a somewhat OT ramble, but what the heck…)
I can imagine that he’s “really” an “apathetic agnostic” in a certain funny sense—which would put him in agreement with many if not most gnu atheists.
Many of us can imagine that there’s some sort of distant, deistic thing that somebody might call God, say a very alien being of some sort that maybe created our universe, but evidently takes no interest in us. That could be true, but would not be interesting in the particular ways that most people mean when they say that they think God exists.
It would certainly be interesting in a general sense if we had evidence for it, but it wouldn’t come close to making religion work. It wouldn’t give us a basis for morality, and it wouldn’t be the God (or any of the gods) that religious people actually believe in, which they think that people have actually encountered, by incarnation, revelation, or supernaturalish spiritual intuition.
“God,” as people normally use the term, is not a name for something that’s merely logically possible. It’s a name for some particular (purported) thing that (allegedly) has made itself noticed and been named God by people who’ve experienced God’s presence in some direct or not-too-indirect sense, and passed the resulting knowledge of God’s existence along.
(God’s like Bigfoot. Bigfoot is purportedly something that has actually been observed and given the name Bigfoot. It’s implicitly not some purely hypothetical, merely possible hairy anthropoid. If by sheer farfetched coincidence we happen to discover some roughly Bigfoot-like hairy anthropoid, which nobody ever observed and reported on, it wouldn’t be Bigfoot. It wouldn’t be the same hairy anthropoid people named Bigfoot. It’d just be an amusing coincidence, like a stopped clock being right, and it would still be true that Bigfoot doesn’t exist.)
Technically speaking, I’m invoking the Causal Theory of Reference here—names of things typically don’t refer to whatever precisely fits some abstract description, but to actual things that people have directly or indirectly observed and given a rough description, which may be largely wrong. Given such presuppositions, terms can fail to refer to anything real, even if something else real does technically meet the description, but doesn’t have the right causal connection to the name, and the naming of that thing. The referent of a term is largely a matter of its causal history, not so much of necessary or sufficient conditions of descriptions.
That’s the kind of linguistic subtlety that makes it all too easy to claim to be “agnostic” while being an atheist in any reasonable sense of the word—and to make it seem like the “reasonable” view. Until you make clear what the usual unexamined presuppositions about “God” are, it’s harder to see why you should disbelieve it, and be presumptious enough to say so.
Disbelieving in God is like disbelieving in Bigfoot, not like ruling out the possibility of hairy anthropoids.
Sastra:
I must remember to steal this line, especially when talking about actual consequences of actual belief in souls.
Paul –
Well, not really, not in my case anyway. That too, but not “largely.” I just plain care about whether things are true; truth for truth’s sake. I know this among other reasons because any time I try to imagine myself signing up to religion for the side benefits (the music; community; a way to organize charitable projects; things of that kind), what always prevents even the attempt from getting started is an inner revolt – and the revolt is because it isn’t true.
This may be just temperament; just a preference. I don’t really know. I find it hard to argue for it in any but a Bushesque sort of way (my gut tells me so, Joe). It’s not just a careless correctable temporary mistake; it’s a systematic centuries-old fraud. I dislike it. I dislike it for its own sake.
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Well, I could have a certain degree of sympathy for an argument from utility, the social/political as you put it. That something (like religion) is useful even if false, but in my opinion the problem as far as religion is concerned is that this argument still has two requirements that religion fails to address. First off you have to show that whatever positive impact it is having is uniquely religious, that it can’t come from somewhere else. You can say that it brings people together socially but so do sports and without the “thou shall stone thy children” provisions. All of the supposedly good qualities of religion can be provided for by other means that 1) more truthful and 2) lack much of religions negative baggage.
Secondly even if you did come up with some impact that could only be provided from religion you would still have to weigh the religions positive impacts against its negatives and conclude that the gains outweigh the costs. So I could be open to such an argument IF it was actually there to be made, but apologists haven’t even left first base with trying to make such a case, they just throw out rather vague claims to social goodness and call it an argument.
Holy crap! My post was mutated by hidden Microsoft gobbley-gook. Damn, cut & paste. Sorry about that. lol can someone fix that?
I think that these are different questions: “is religion a social good” and “is religion true”. However, I maintain the answer to both of those questions is a resounding “no”. Of course, as a queer person who does not get taken for a cis hetero too often, people have a hard time playing the religion-is-good card when facing me, as religion is so clearly and obviously a major (or more like the primary) reason for denying me legal and social equality. They then have to fall back on the religion-is-fixable card, which folds pretty easily.