Meaning
I’ve been thinking about religion and the arguments people use to defend it, again. Or more likely I’ve never stopped. It’s a line of thought that shrinks or expands, that takes up a position in the middle of the living room or creeps into the back of a closet, depending on what I’ve heard or read lately, but it probably never goes away entirely, never actually packs the wheely suitcase and marches away into the sunset (which would be inadvisable from here, actually, because you would drown). Anyway I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about the idea that religion has something to do with humans’ desire for meaning – that religion does something about that desire. Satisfies it, answers it, solves it in some way. We see that general idea (and it is general) expressed a lot in these disagreements over religion. It’s always (at least in my experience) expressed in a very vague, hand-waving fashion. I’m tempted to say (so I will) a carefully vague, hand-waving fashion – because it can’t really be expressed in any other way, because there’s not really anything non-vague to say. At least so it seems to me.
I was browsing and I found this old Comment on the subject, prompted by a review (now subscription, unfortunately) of Richard Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain by Allen Orr and the similarity of something he said to something Michael Ruse said about the same book. Orr:
You might argue that what conflicts did occur between science and religion were due to misunderstandings of one or the other. Indeed you might argue that Dawkins’s belief that science and religion can conflict reflects a misconstrual of the nature of religious belief: while scientific beliefs are propositions about the state of the world, religious beliefs are something else—an attempt to attach meaning or value to the world. Religion and science thus move in different dimensions, as Gould and many others have argued.
Ruse:
People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it.
In that old Comment I focused on the truth-claim aspect, but now I want to take a look at the ‘meaning’ question. One obvious question is, what does it mean to give a meaning, to attach meaning to the world? Give or attach meaning how? How does religion do that? By making factual claims, that’s how. By saying there is a god of a certain kind, and that that god is what makes the world meaningful. Well – factual claims are factual claims, and anyone and everyone can query them, emphatically including scientists; therefore that sharp separation is completely bogus.
And then, what does that phrase even mean? Give a meaning? Surely it’s obvious that that’s simply a very human idea, a human want, reflecting human thoughts and feelings. Yes of course, we want to think our lives (hence the world they take place in) matter, have significance and importance, ‘mean’ something – something more than what they mean to us. And we suspect that actually sub specie aeternitatis they don’t. So we want something – something non-factual, anti-factual, non-empirical, counter-empirical – to ‘give’ the world meaning for us. For the something to ‘give’ meaning it has to be anti-factual because we already know the facts aren’t going to do it for us – that’s the problem, that’s why we talk about ‘giving’ meaning in the first place. The facts are that we live brief lives and in three or four generations at most are as forgotten as if we’d never lived. We might as well give meaning to the life of the chicken we just ate for dinner or the ants we stepped on as we crossed the street. The meaning doesn’t seem to be in the brute facts; we want meaning; so we invent a non-factual magical Something that gives meaning for us. Very well. That’s consoling for many. But the fact remains that the trick only seems to work if this supposed extra-factual transcendent magical Something is after all quite mixed up with The Facts – with factual claims, that is, as opposed to real facts. It has to be there and to have certain attributes for the meaning to stick. So we decide it is and does.
There are other ways of ‘giving’ meaning, that don’t rely on a special external supernatural Something to ratify the meaning – but of course they are so much the less consoling. They make smaller humbler claims, they don’t deny death and extinction, they settle for human versions of meaning.
But that’s the nature of the enterprise. Either ‘meaning’ is a limited, temporal, human creation and interpretation – the world has meaning because of love, or art, or progress, or hope, or beauty, or all those – or it’s a timeless transcendent non-human creation ratified by a supernatural being – in which case it is making factual claims that are entirely open to dispute and investigation.
It’s a dishonest form of sleight of hand to try to blur the two and then pretend the whole thing is off-limits to inquiry.
The meaning of life is 42.
Look it up :-)
Oh I know that! It’s all these other people who keep getting the numbers wrong. :- )
I’ve benn thinking lately that one of the things going on here is that we try to reinterpret our own actions in the best possible light. Say I find myself driving to the grocery store instead of the post office, as I had planned. I might say to myself, “Of course, that’s because we ran out of coffee. Gee, I’m smart!” In the same way, when folks find themselves praying to a god, they figure that [1] there’s a god, and [2] they believe in that god. Both of these conclusions are demonstrably false — the praying is a memetic effect, and the belief doesn’t exist — but realizing this would be mighty inconvenient if your whole social circle (where the memes come from) is in favor of them.
Inconvenient indeed. Furthermore, the fact that your whole social circle is in favor of them makes it all the more difficult for you even to conceive the idea that it could all be an invention.
Interesting post! Strangely enough, I was just discussing the very same matter on my blog a couple of days ago – along with other silly claims religious people like to make about how God explains things like morality & ultimate origins.
The problem with such “explanations” (as I argued on my blog) is that they never explain anything at all… they just shift the problem one step back. (Brushing it under the carpet, in other words.) Whatever we previously didn’t understand about the natural universe, we now don’t understand about ‘God’!
I’ve been thinking about this question in the context of the intelligent design/evolution hassles of late. I tried this out on a group at a Congregationalist church recently and it seemed to resonate. I suggested that the rabid opposition of fundamentalist religionists to teaching evolution in public schools derived from two related sources.
One is the desire — need? — for certainty in an uncertain world. People in general don’t deal well with uncertainty and for some people it’s downright threatening, and religion provides certainty. Follow the right rituals, express the right beliefs (and convince yourself to believe them), and salvation is certain. Regardless of the uncertainties of day to day life, in the end is certain salvation.
Science introduces uncertainty into that benign picture. Science says things aren’t as they appear and that our understanding of the world is not etched in stone; as we learn, scientific views can change. Science’s acceptance of uncertainty, in contrast to religion’s rejection of it, is therefore threatening to the religionist.
Because science is felt as an attack on the certainty of salvation offered by religion, it is perceived to be an attack on religion. In particular, if science is seen as a wedge for the entrance of atheism, as it is by fundamentalists, then it is a potentially lethal attack (literally lethal, in the believer’s eyes) on the believer and even worse, on the believer’s children: teaching evolution in school is tantamount to putting children’s salvation at risk. What believing parent wouldn’t resist that?
RBH
Me muddlehead tink dat belong too much confusion hea.
Confusion say:
There is meaning because there is language. Among the effects of language are: 1) self-consciousness, 2) “internal” time-sense, 3) awareness of death, 4) the encounter with others or with the (non-appearing) “horizon” of otherness, (otherwise known as a tendency to paranoia), 5) volitional agency, 6) a simultaneous awareness or sense of one’s deictic particularity and of one’s existence in the world as an environing aroundness that exceeds or transcends one, (which philosophy traditionally mistranscribed as a transcendental/empirical split), 7) an orientation to the world through meaning, as well as, brute survival or adaption, and 8) a need to bind the foregoing in a snese of personal identity. Granted, it took long eons of cultural evolution to differentiate these matters and permit of their distinct “perception”. But religion, as well as, philosophy, science, literature, etc, are products of this evolution/differentiation.
Meaning and truth are intrinsically cross-implicated notions. A meaningless claim is neither true, nor false, but nonsensical. Conversely, a claim can not be held true, if it is meaningless. So meaning is uneliminatable. But, though truth and reality are also cross-implicated notions, meaning is not reducible to “truth-functional” considerations and truth and reality are not on the same level. So an appeal to the primacy of the “facts” or to the immediate “dictates” of evidence won’t do.
Meaning is not a function of subjective attributions, nor is it a subjective creation or invention. If one insists on retaining the concept of “subject”- (and why bother?- unless one thinks that consciousness = knowledge = the distinctively human-), then it is more like subjectivity is a function of the attributions of meaning. Or better, “subjectivity” is a modal function of the mutual interaction of attributions of meaning.
These are intended as grammatical remarks. They are not “metaphysically” dispositive.
Truth-claims: how would one go about proving, or disproving, the existence of divinity?
But what *is* meaning, anyway?? Can anyone here come up with a definition of that, and is it the same as what the dictionary has [which I haven’t checked yet]? Those po-mo types talk about meaning all the time and they never defined it either. Which is one of the many reasons they tick me off bigtime.
My 1st guess is it has something to do with connections, but I haven’t gotten much farther than that. Before I drag out the old dict., I’d be interested to hear some others take a shot at it–no, I don’t expect anyone to define every word they use, but I have run onto so much talk of meaning in so many places, yet no one has yet come clean on what meaning is [when I was around, anyway.]
If we know what it is, will that help us find out better ways to get hold of it besides religion?
Yeah, what indeed. That question was part of my point in saying that meaning is something humans apply or attach to the world as opposed to something that’s in it. That’s as much as to say it’s a pretty woolly term to begin with – and furthermore that that’s part of the point, part of the reason people use it, especially when making woolly defenses of religion. And when I say woolly there I don’t mean just a general vague (woolly) criticism, I mean something specific: choosing words whose meaning is highly imprecise. [The meaning of ‘meaning’ is clear in that sentence, but that’s the more straightforward meaning of ‘meaning’. If you follow me.]
In fact, what do you know, here we are back again with the importance of precise language. Woolly emotive words do function as a kind of defensive device, and they’re illegitimate in rational discussion for that very reason.
As for defining every word we use – well, if the words we use are vague ones, then we do have to define them! If we want to be understood, at least.
As for actually trying to define it – I’m not going to, because I think it means too many things in different contexts. But what I take Orr to mean by it in that review is, roughly, something that gives humans a sense of purpose and/or significance, that allows them to think their lives are not ulitmately futile and forgotten.
Richard,
Why so you were.
“They say that without God, our lives have no (ultimate) meaning or purpose, and that God provides that purpose. But how exactly is that supposed to work? After all, what is the meaning of God’s existence?”
Just so. Same thing with the argument from design, of course. “Look at it all – someone must have designed it.” “Okay, but then who designed the someone? And who designed that someone? And etc”
God of the gaps meets god of the infinite regress.
RBH,
I think I saw your post on that at Panda’s Thumb – I even think I commented on it – but I can’t confirm that at the moment, because PT seems to be inaccessible. Anyway – my comment had partly to do with the fact that if one could disabuse believers of the whole salvation-damnation idea one would actually be doing them a favour rather than otherwise – because the damnation option is so damn terrifying, and they do take it seriously. Lucretius’ main point in De rerum natura is that doing away with the gods and the afterlife actually relieves people of fear.